Moral Didacticism Research Articles

Character is Destiny: The Political Implications of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars

The absence of moral didacticism in the Lives of the Caesars is one of the most notable features of Suetonius’ biographies. If Suetonius believes that an emperor who acts virtuously secures himself and the body politic, why does he not actively encourage the imitation of virtue? Suetonius does not offer moral exhortation because his account of the role an emperor’s character or nature plays in their political and private actions suggests that the potential for moral instruction and improvement is severely circumscribed. Therefore, this article explores the political implications of Suetonius’ account of the relationship between an emperor’s character and their political fate to illustrate the potential limitations of the mirror-for-princes genre.

Habit, Artificial Intelligence and the Ontological Performance of Trust

The rapid growth of AI technologies has led to increased concerns around their perceived trustworthiness. In response, many authors have turned to the predictable rituals and routines of habit as a crucial resource for enhancing trust in these new technologies. This paper revisits the relationship between habit and trust, but from the perspective of the more ontological and dynamic understanding developed on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. We argue that Deleuze's concept of habit challenges the cognitivist emphases of writings on trust and AI, providing a means instead of accounting for trust in terms of an ontological performance that no longer assumes a pre-existing subject. We unpack the implications of such an approach in three main ways. First, we highlight how the originality of Deleuze's approach to habit lies in its insistence that the material contractions of habit enjoy an ontological primacy in relation to the human subject, thus entailing a radically materialist gesture that refuses conventional metaphysical distinctions between the human and the differential forces of matter. Second, we explore how the material contractions of habit, for Deleuze, engender a simultaneous contemplation of an ecology of affects that sit beneath the level of conscious thought. This offers a sense of trust in human–technology relations as being as much an affective capacity as it is a cognitive attitude, being shaped by the performance of unconscious forces and intensities. And finally, we argue that Deleuze's understanding of habit as a fundamentally dynamic process spotlights how trust is itself a creative achievement predicated on an openness to an unknown future. This is important ethically because it pushes understanding of trust in AI beyond a moral didacticism of whether such systems are 'Good' or 'Bad', towards more immanent modes of evaluation sensitive to their capacities to incite new possibilities of thinking and relating.

Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's Mirour de l'Omme

Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's <i>Mirour de l'Omme</i>

Confusing Boundaries in The Lovebus: Constructing Consent in Dutch YA Fiction

Confusing Boundaries in The Lovebus:Constructing Consent in Dutch YA Fiction Vera N. Veldhuizen (bio) After World War II, the German-inspired pedagogical foundations of Dutch children's literature, in which the world and childhood were presented as idealized and perfect, also known as the idealized children's world, or Heile Kinderwelt, came to a devastating end (Joosen and Vloeberghs 111–12). Children's literature became obligated to demystify life and to represent the gritty realities of the world and growing up. Although there is still a place for fantasy and idealized versions of reality within specific genres, like the fairy tale or highly popular gnome-stories, these genres moved to the periphery of the children's literature field as idealized visions of the world became outdated, and the psychological youth novel rose to prominence. In modern Dutch children's literature, it is neither rare nor shocking to encounter open discussions of themes ranging from eating disorders to mass murder, or from suicide to sex. This has particular implications for the responsibility placed on children and adolescents through their literature by society, as well as the moral didacticism of novels for young readers in the Netherlands. Youth literature has been an established part of the literary landscape in the Netherlands since the eighteenth century, strongly influenced by the German philanthropic approach to education which held that youth literature should be an integral part of any educational system (Ghesquière 15). The particular purpose of this integration was the teaching of moral lessons, which were deemed less abstract if a literary example were given. Modern approaches to YA are still indebted to this philanthropic approach, as both in scholarship and education YA is considered "a form of societal self-preservation: desirable mores are written down to be taught to future generations in attempts to socialise them within these moral framework" (Veldhuizen 8). Analyzing a piece of YA literature can therefore reveal the norms and values deemed important to communicate to the future. [End Page 201] However, literature is not just a mirror of society; it also has a cognitive impact on its readers. One factor that plays into this, is that literature is a safe zone in which readers can train their emotional and cognitive skills (Keen 350–51), empathic abilities (Stockwell and Mahlberg 132), and play with ethical choices without the risk of real-life consequences (Vermeule 6–7). This is because we react to fiction and reality in the same way (Stockwell 152); we treat fictional people, cognitively if not intellectually, as if they are real. What this means is that cognitive skills and an understanding of behavioral patterns are both necessary for and trained through our engagement with fictional texts. Both long and short-term studies demonstrate that fiction has an important, albeit potential impact on cognitive (particularly empathic) ability (Oatley 621). Because of this our moral framework, too, is shaped in part by our reading (Hoffman 63–93). This also includes adolescents, who, like younger readers, are also still developing their mind-modeling skills, empathy, and moral frameworks (Moshman 80). For the topic of sex, this means that YA literature has the potential to influence the way readers consider sexual mores, including consent specifically, throughout their adolescent as well as adult lives. Sexual development and exploration are currently seen as defining and critical features of normative adolescence in the Netherlands (Krebbekx 1326). Statistics Netherlands (CBS), a Dutch governmental institution that gathers statistical data about the Netherlands, and the Ministry for Health, Wellbeing and Sports even track sexual behaviors among adolescents starting from age twelve (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek). This information, which is open source and covers a range of topics from sexual behaviors (e.g., have you had sexual encounters?), to contraception (e.g., types used and how often), is often used to inform local and national legislation and spark further scientific research. However, although the government clearly considers tracking the sexual behaviors of adolescents important for public health, the idea of teenagers having sex is not always a comfortable one for adults (Kokkola 227), particularly parents, who often do not know how to approach adolescent sexuality. This is reflected in, among other places, legislation regarding...

Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch

Reviewed by: Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch Hoyt Long (bio) Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel. By Daniel Poch. Columbia University Press, 2020. xii, 290 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. "Novels are like morphine," says the narrator of Tsubouchi Shōyō's Shinmigaki: Imotose kagami (1885–86): "one must love them, but also fear them." They are loved as a window onto the highs and lows of human emotion, but [End Page 234] also feared for exposing these very depths and arousing our basest desires. This idea of fiction as a potent drug—a source of self-realization and blinding addiction—is the animating metaphor of Daniel Poch's Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel. The book adds to a growing body of research by Jonathan Zwicker, Atsuko Ueda, Robert Tuck, Brian Dowdle, and others that has revolutionized how we read across Japan's long nineteenth century by emphasizing continuities in cultural ideas and aesthetic forms rather than sharp epistemological breaks centered at the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. Poch's contribution to this revisionist history is to interrogate a dichotomy that has structured literary periodization across this divide—one between moral didacticism and enlightened reason on the one hand, and emotional realism and uncontrolled passion on the other. He reframes this dichotomy as the beating heart of Japanese prose fiction throughout the "continuous literary space" (p. 9) of the nineteenth century, and indeed as constitutive of this space. Licentious Fictions shows how major writers working in this space similarly wrestled with fiction's capacity to educate and titillate, and Poch uses this struggle to overturn normative characterizations of their stories as merely licentious or merely didactic. The imperatives to entertain and inform, it turns out, are complexly woven through them. The analogy of novels and fiction to morphine relies on a double vision that sees them as capable of civilizing and degrading social mores. Licentious Fictions sets out to sketch the discursive contours of this double vision, one that forced many nineteenth-century authors to "negotiate a fundamental ambivalence" between the intention to represent emotion for didactic purposes and the fear that doing so would backfire, disrupting the social order by exposing readers to base emotions and desires (p. 4). How does one administer the drug of literature without turning one's patients (readers) into addicts? Poch seeks to show how narrative strategies developed in response to this ambivalence, whose antecedents are found in Genji monogatari and Neoconfucian views of poetry, evolved with the rise and fall of popular genres and with Japan's shifting position in the world republic of letters. The result is a series of careful and deeply contextualized readings of both canonical and lesser-known works, from Tamenaga Shunsui's Shunshoku ume goyomi (1832–33) to Natsume Sōseki's Kusamakura (1906). In-between he examines Kyokutei Bakin's epic Hakkenden (1814–42), Niwa Jun'ichirō's translation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Ernest Maltravers (Karyū shunwa, 1878–79), and a number of Shōyō's early translations and works of original fiction from the 1880s. Each work is meticulously situated within larger conversations about literature's value as either didactic instrument or degrading entertainment. Poch is especially interested in how these conversations contend with the representation of ninjō, which he narrowly defines as "male-female love and desire," including sexual desire (p. 15). These conversations generate a fundamental [End Page 235] ambivalence that each author negotiates in his own way (the writers analyzed are all male), and through which Poch reads their narratives against the dominant generic grain. For Shunsui's Ume g oyomi, a masterwork of the ninjōbon genre known for its depictions of erotic encounters in the pleasure quarters, this means reframing it as a work that, at its ideological core, harbored a clear didactic intent. Specifically, it characterized a shift toward a "scholar and beauty paradigm" influenced by licentious fiction from China such as the Jingpingmei and newly invested in plots "dramatizing the chastity, faithfulness, and sincerity, often against adverse circumstances, of morally exemplary male and female protagonists in love" (p. 49). Umegoyomi naturally depicts the...

#Ledatoo: The morality of Leda and the Swan in teaching stylistics

The article discusses the morality of W. B. Yeats’ sonnet Leda and the Swan in the context of a widening gap between the sexual mores of earlier times and our own, and whether the poem remains a suitable choice for the teaching of stylistics. I begin by examining stylistics treatments of the poem, and its political, social and artistic context, then move on to consider charges of misogyny against the poem for eroticising and failing to condemn the rape it depicts. To assess these charges I examine other literary uses of the Leda myth both before and after Yeats, including earlier poems which romanticise the rape, and later ones which vilify it. I also consider the implications of my discussion for the teaching of other canonical poems on similar themes. The last part of the paper discusses more generally the place of morality in literature and literature teaching, including stylistics: whether teachers and analysts should promote a moral world view and moral behaviour through their choice of texts and comments on them, or whether there are other valid criteria for selecting and describing a text such as Leda and the Swan. To elucidate current views, I draw parallels with the moral didacticism of the highly influential literary critic F. R. Leavis in the mid twentieth century, and ask whether aspects of his patrician view have undergone a surreptitious revival in some contemporary pedagogy and criticism at the beginning of the twenty first.

Kārlis Hūgenbergers 19. gadsimta sākumā latviešu literārās kultūras vēsturē

In the article, the literary works of Baltic German writer Carl Hugenberger have been explored. Anthology of his poetry translations, “Derrigs laika kaweklis” (Useful Pastime, I–II, 1826–1827), has been analysed. The anthology was significant in the emancipation of Latvian literary culture and liberation from moral didacticism as well as the development of the self-sufficient aesthetic value of literature. Thus, the anthology prepared the way for the formation of Latvian national literature in the mid-19th century. Special attention has been turned towards Hugenberger’s translations of poems by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. Besides, the evaluation and reception of Hugenberger’s works have been explored. The article concludes that despite the innovative role and poetic achievements of Hugenberger’s poetry, it did not gain popularity among wider circles of the Latvian reading public and met criticism regarding the shortcomings in the translation techniques that can be explained by the limits of the underdeveloped Latvian language at the time. The most important episodes in Hugenberger’s biography have been outlined as well as his religious hymns and works of popular enlightenment, including translations of “Schillings-Bücher des Rauhen Hauses”, a book series of German Inner mission, works by Jeremias Gotthelf, August Kotzebue, Gottfried August Bürger et al. Special attention has been paid to previously unidentified originals of Hugenberger’s translations – works by Matthias Claudius, Johann Hinrich Wichern, Heinrich Alexander Seidel, and Adolph Krüger as well as previously underexamined partial translation of Johann Peter Hebel’s “Allemanische Gedichte”. The literary works of Hugenberger have been interpreted within the context of the literary praxis of the late popular enlightenment in the Baltics.

A Sogdian Drinking Game at Panjikent

This article reconsiders the religio-ritualistic interpretations of the use of the rhyton within eighth-century CE Sogdiana. Through a close art-historical analysis, it argues that three eighth-century wall paintings from Panjikent illustrate a drinking game. This proposal expands the current breadth of meaning attributed to the imagery decorating Sogdian homes. Not only could the paintings illustrate epic narratives, religious veneration, or moral didacticism, but they could also celebrate conviviality, fun, and humor.

Rederijkers, Kannenkijkers

This article discusses drinking practices and conceptions of drunkenness in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Low Countries from the perspective of the rederijkers or guildsmen who would regularly gather together to practice the vernacular art of rhetoric. The essay surveys the regulations and accounts of the chambers of rhetoric in which these gatherings took place, as well as the literary texts the rederijkers produced (including poetry, songs and theatre plays). It also examines the intersections with contemporary genre painting. The central argument of this paper is that drinking, and even drunkenness, was an essential aspect of rederijker culture and the urban middling groups represented by this culture. This argument nuances the influential thesis of the pervasiveness of a Dutch burgermoraal or bourgeois morality. Even though they created comical caricatures of drunkards, rederijkers indulged in heavy drinking themselves. These guildsmen were well aware of the need for moderation, but their regulations and literary texts go beyond moral didacticism and often reveal double layers and self-parody.

“Marietza”: An Example of Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Depiction of the “Other” in her Books for Children

ABSTRACTCatherine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867), one of the most significant masterminds of nineteenth-century American literature, was regarded by her national and international contemporaries as a prominent and influential writer. Her first novel, A New-England Tale was published in 1822 and was followed by five other books including her most popular work, Hope Leslie (1827). In addition to two biographies, she wrote numerous short stories some of which were aimed at children, and Sedgwick was keen to ensure they were rich in moral, religious and social didacticism. This essay concentrates on one of those short stories, “Marietza” which is the story of a Greek girl who witnessed the Greek uprising on the island of Scio/Chios in 1822. The tale does not merely delineate the conspicuous social, cultural and religious contrasts between the East and West, it occasionally defines the center and verge of Western civilization by comparing Greece to England. Hence the essay does not only provide a transnational view of the image of the Turkish/Eastern “other” in the United States/Western hemisphere, but it also displays the dissimilarities between the hegemonic focal point of civilization (the Anglo-American world) in the writer’s mind, and its mediocre periphery (Greece).

Shaping the Verisimilitude: Moral Didacticism and Neoclassical Principles Responsible for the Rise of the English Novel?

The rise of the novel is a major aspect of the eighteenth century British literature having a remarkable typology: picaresque, adventure, epistolary, sentimental, of manners, moral, comic, anti-novel. The comic (including satirical) attitude, social concern, moral didacticism, and other thematically textualized aspects – emerging from both picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – and together with picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – are responsible for the emergence of verisimilitude as the forming element responsible in turn for the rise of the literary system of the novel.

Sade’s Ethics of Emotional Restraint: Aline et Valcour Midway between Sentimentality and Apathy

Why would Sade, a staunch enemy of the moral didacticism that characterized late eighteenth-century French literature, write the sentimental novel Aline et Valcour, which is ostensibly foreign to the rest of his thought? A philosophical interpretation of this work allows us to bring to light how, in his novel, Sade skillfully reconstructs the conception of sentimentalist emotion—encapsulated in Rousseau’s thought—and counterposes it with a new analysis of passions that is no longer based on empathy but rather on interpersonal domination. Through peculiar physiological and philosophical premises, Sade succeeds in delineating a paradoxical ethics of emotional restraint.

English

Animals have held an important place in written literature for thousands of years; hence animal fiction comes to mean a fictional work where an animal plays an integral part of the story to make it complete. In most works of literature throughout the ages, animals function only in service to humans. They represent their human counterpart symbolically in order to teach lessons or correct human weakness. This tendency of moral didacticism could be exemplified in Aesop&rsquo;s Fables composed around the sixth century. With the Victorian era animals become more central in the human thoughts because of Darwin&rsquo;s Origin of Species. During the twentieth century especially in the later part literal and figurative animals become particularly important in gender studies and women&rsquo;s literature. In these works, however, the animals do not reflect the animals in themselves, but they are used to demonstrate some aspect of humanity.&nbsp; All of these texts are not animal-centric, since these texts are not interested in the animals in themselves but as subservient to the human master. Key words: Fiction, posthumanism, &lsquo;animal turn&rsquo;, animals.

A lightness of vision: the poetics of Relation in Malian art photography

“Art photography” is a recent phenomenon in Bamako, Mali, home of renowned studio portraitists Seydou Keïta (1921/3–2001) and Malick Sidibé (b.1936). These photographers inspired the founding of the Bamako Photography Biennale in 1994, which sparked the rise of a local art photography movement. The potentialities offered by the Biennale ignited the imaginations of a small cohort of Malian photographers. Yet, instead of following global trends introduced by the presence of international art, the Bamakois art photographers have remained close to the values of studio portraiture. Their practices emphasise photography’s social aspect by focusing on the human body and appreciating its beauty, while allowing individual creativity to flourish in ways previously unimaginable. Malian photographers thus have retained a relatively autonomous local identity, while creating art photography stemming from a history of portraiture that itself was repositioned as art on the global stage. This dialectic between local identity and global reception gives contemporary Malian photographs the potential to embody Relation, from Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990) and Philosophie de la Relation (2009). Relation acknowledges differences and diversity within wholeness or totality, and de-hierarchises power relations. Works by Alioune Bâ, Fatoumata Diabaté, Alimata dite Diop Traoré, Seydou Camara, Mohamed Camara, Emannual Daou and Youssouf Sogodogo exhibit a diversity of aesthetic approaches toward the theme of the body as a nexus of social networks, as a locus of memory, as marked by difference and as a site not only of desire, but of moral instruction. While Mali struggles with the violent after-effects of a military coup that ended two decades of peaceful democracy, these photographs commemorate that period of peace through their varied emphases on social interactions, the tolerance and celebration of difference, the importance given to personal and national memory and the traditional values of moral didacticism.

Catherine Sinclair, Domestic Community, and the Catholic Imagination

Visitors to Edinburgh who have gone slightly astray might find themselves walking past a surprisingly large monument to the writer and philanthropist Catherine Sinclair at the corner of Queen Street and North Charlotte Street, originally erected in the late 1860s. Should they stop to read it, they will discover: She was the friend of all children and through her book speaks to them still. Beside success through her books many and popular, she endeared herself first in her philanthropic work. Her Volunteer Brigade for the boys of the Leith was the first of its kind. She initiated cooking depots for working men and erected the first drinking fountain in Edinburgh. Her hall for lectures and her work amongst the cabmen endeared her name to different sections of her fellow citizens. Curiously, this was not the only monument to Sinclair in the city center. The Sinclair Fountain stood at the intersection of Lothian Road and Princes Street from 1859-1926, when it was pulled down at the behest of the Tramway subcommittee. The fountain was reinstalled, half-buried, at Steadfastgate in Leith in 1983 to mark the centenary of the Boys' Brigade. For the monument-makers, Sinclair's fame rests on a combination of civic and literary achievement; curiously, however, her widely successful novels for adults are nowhere mentioned. Sinclair's literary fame has lasted about as well as her monuments. She is mentioned briefly in several surveys of Scottish literature: in J. H. Millar's Literary History of (1903), for instance, she is accorded five sentences. Millar praises the ability of her early novels Modern Accomplishments (1836) and Modern Flirtations (1841) to rally the fashions of their hour with a great deal of vivacity, and terms Holiday House (1839) one of the very best children's books ever written, although he laments her tendency to moralise and preach (619). Douglas Gifford's volume of the Aberdeen History of Scottish Literature (1988) limits discussion of her work as improver-satirist to five words (237). While Holiday House continues to be an object of critical attention, Sinclair's other work, comprising fiction for children and adults as well as works of history, travel writing, and theology, is considered almost nowhere else. (1) Moira Burgess's contribution to A History of Scottish Women's Writing (1997), discussing two of the adult novels as well as Holiday House, is at three pages the only modern critical evaluation available. Sinclair's work deserves further reconsideration on several fronts, however. Sinclair is notable firstly for writing in a period between the death of Walter Scott and the first publications of Margaret Oliphant when the novel is assumed to have almost no practitioners in Scotland, and secondly for her novels' emphasis on the conversation of educated women. Sinclair stands in sharp contrast to what Ian Duncan, among others, notes as the relative weakness of the feminine tradition of domestic fiction in Scotland (43), wherein the net rise in novel production in the decade up to 1825 is accompanied by a corresponding decline in female authorship. Sinclair makes full use of a Scottish domestic literary tradition; her novels are often heavily indebted to Susan Ferrier, Mary Brunton, Grace Kennedy, Charlotte Bury, and others. Like many of these authors, and often to a greater extent, Sinclair emphasises the civic and religious responsibility of the novelist. Sinclair's early novels combine a relatively rigorous approach to realism with moral didacticism; the balance she attempts to achieve between these is uncommon among her contemporaries. In both the prefaces to her adult novels and the fiction itself, Sinclair charts a complicated set of arguments concerning the moral and religious value of education generally and fiction more specifically. In this respect, she is indebted to her predecessors Elizabeth Hamilton and Hannah More, but she also deviates from them in her occasional praise for novels as entertainment. …

Children’s Susceptible Minds: Alicia Lefanu and the “Reasoned Imagination” in Georgian Children’s Literature

Introduction IN HIS ENQUIRY CONCERNING POLITICAL JUSTICE (1793), WILLIAM GODWIN argued that characters of men are determined in all their most essential circumstances by education. (1) This centrality of education to man's fundamental political and ethical character went largely uncontested in the era in which Godwin was writing, but the practical and moral application of children's education was arguably one of the most fervently disputed issues of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Janet Bottoms highlights the unprecedented nature of this debate in terms of the public ramifications it had on national educational policies, as well as the concerns it raised over the population's reading habits: importance of reading in the formation of character had taken on national as well as an individual importance it had never been accorded before. (2) The role of literature as didactic tool for the ethical tuition of children, both at home and at school, thus became thorny topic within this public context and fuelled what has been traditionally perceived as dichotomous argument between adherents of fairy tale and fantasy as educative media, and those that championed much more rationalist approach. These two divided camps have been generally categorized as the romantics and the educationists, the former adhering to modern correlation between the active exercise of the imagination and mental and spiritual health, and the latter remaining loyal to an eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy that favored rational thought and heavily didactic instructional practices. Current scholarship, however, has suggested that the rigidity of this conflict is critical fallacy, an erroneous bipolar that Tess Cosslett insists has been unfairly imposed (by critics from the nineteenth century onwards) on the of early children's books. (3) Cosslett's thinking reinforces and significantly builds upon current critical attempts to initiate much more subtle and balanced approach to the fairy tale and fantasy genre in the early nineteenth century, as well as to expose the extent to which such hardened critical rhetoric is in need of revision. Drawing on the seminal work of Mitzi Myers, one of the first scholars to significantly challenge the critical binaries of children's literature historiography, William McCarthy argues that the binary model is almost Manichean in its need to dichotomize. (4) Alan Richardson has further argued that the opposition between moral didacticism and the imaginative fairy tale is hardly absolute, and Caroline Sumpter demonstrates that a more complicated history of the fairy tale in the Romantic period is ever more warranted. (5) This essay takes this body of criticism as its starting point and additionally takes heed of Richardson's suggestion that in order to challenge successfully the dualistic critical framework that has largely presided over literary history's understanding of the educational debates of the Romantic period, more concentrated focus on the children's literature of that period (as opposed to the polemic in reviews and prefaces) is necessary. (6) It further takes as its central focus the poetic works for children by Irish novelist, poet, and biographer, Alicia Lefanu (1791-1867), which were published with John Harris and William and Mary Jane Godwin's Juvenile Library respectively: The Flowers; Or, the Sylphid Queen: A Fairy Tale in Verse (1809), and Rosara's Chain: or, the Choice of Life. A Poem, etc. (1812). These two long narrative verse works for children were Lefanu's debut publications in the literary world of the early nineteenth century, and her overall publishing career spanned short but fruitful period between 1809 and 1826. Alongside her poetic narratives for children, Lefanu published an array of multi-volume novels encompassing broad range of genres, including historical fiction and romance, several of which ran into multiple editions. …

Anna Barbauld on Fictional Form in The British Novelists (1810)

Anna Barbauld has been recognized as advancing the critical study of the novel in her edition of The British Novelists. This article considers closely the attention Barbauld pays to novelistic form in the preface and critical essays in that work. She prioritizes carefully-conceived plot above aspirations to realism and to moral didacticism, and places considerable emphasis on narrative closure. This attention to closure is examined in light of both contemporary and later critical debate on the importance and value of novelistic ending. There is some irony in Barbauld's disparagement of disrupted narrative forms considering her reputation as the author of the Gothic fragment “Sir Bertrand.” While this was firmly attributed to her brother John in the 1820s, there is some correlation between the expository essay to “Sir Bertrand” and Barbauld's later writing on Gothic works in The British Novelists. In both “Objects of Terror” and in The British Novelists more generally there is an interest in the construction of readerly curiosity and the power exerted over the reader by a work's end.

Anna Barbauld on Fictional Form in The British Novelists (1810)

Anna Barbauld has been recognized as advancing the critical study of the novel in her edition of The British Novelists . This article considers closely the attention Barbauld pays to novelistic form in the preface and critical essays in that work. She prioritizes carefully-conceived plot above aspirations to realism and to moral didacticism, and places considerable emphasis on narrative closure. This attention to closure is examined in light of both contemporary and later critical debate on the importance and value of novelistic ending. There is some irony in Barbauld’s disparagement of disrupted narrative forms considering her reputation as the author of the Gothic fragment “Sir Bertrand.” While this was firmly attributed to her brother John in the 1820s, there is some correlation between the expository essay to “Sir Bertrand” and Barbauld’s later writing on Gothic works in The British Novelists . In both “Objects of Terror” and in The British Novelists more generally there is an interest in the construction of readerly curiosity and the power exerted over the reader by a work’s end.

Children and Young Adult Readers in Morocco

The development of the publishing industry for children and young adults is very recent in Morocco. Indeed it was in the 1980s that people became aware of its importance for future generations. The first national publications were mainly in Arabic language, stories were very short, books were of paperback format and the subjects were very much dominated by moral, social and religious didacticism. In the late 1990s, publishers started being more and more concerned with the appearance of the book (size, cover, illustrations, topic, etc.) and there are nowadays two publishers specialized only in children’s books—Yanbow al Kitab and Yomad—who produce books that respond to international norms. They are both very active in promoting reading and especially allowing children from disadvantaged social backgrounds to have access to books, price being a main constraint for those children. But there is still a lack of publishers specialized in children’s books in Morocco (two publishers for the whole country), not enough pleasant reading spaces and no real government policy to allow mass access by making books cheaper.

The Witch Figure: The Witch of Edmonton

IntroductionIn 1621, Elizabeth Sawyer was hanged for the of Agnes Ratcleife, following a well-publicised court case held at the Old Bailey. Immediately after Sawyer's execution Henry Goodcole, the chaplain of Newgate prison, published a pamphlet recounting in detail the trial and confession of Elizabeth Sawyer. Goodcole refers in the introduction to a number of ballads that describe Sawyer's supernatural orchestration of Agnes Ratcleife's suicide. While Goodcole refutes these claims as groundless rumours, the playwrights William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford include these accusations in their staging of The Witch of Edmonton. Using The Witch of Edmonton as a case study, I will argue that self-murder is a dramatic tool that definitively stigmatises the staged-witch.In studying the relationship between the play and its contextual material, this article is shaped by a number of studies on early modern pamphlets. Sandra Clarke in The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets 1580-1640, for example, has examined moralistic pamphlets at length, while Alexandra Walsham has explored prodigies and providential pamphlets in her book Providence in Early Modern England.1 Tessa Watt has also conducted research into Protestant literature in Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640. In expounding the relationship between providential readings within pamphlet material and the public stage, Peter Lake's The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England has proved especially valuable to this research.2 While suicide pamphlets differ significantly from pamphlets, Peter Lake's work provides a template for the study of early modern suicide material.3 Highlighting important aspects of the relationship between pamphlet and play, Lake argues that: 'The more convoluted accounts of the workings of divine providence reach their apogee in some of the plays where a providential reading of the events portrayed sometimes far transcends the confirmation of the soundbite moral message murder will out so prevalent in the pamphlets. On the contrary, in many of the plays a providential reading of the text becomes, in effect, a legitimating underpinning for the plotting of the play or the telling of the tale.'4 In my study of the Elizabeth Sawyer narratives, this facet of the relationship between source materials and the play proves significant. However, in contrast to Peter Lake's observation, my primary thesis challenges the notion that the dramatisations transcend the moral didacticism of the source pamphlet. Indeed, it is the contention of this article that The Witch of Edmonton wholly inverts Lake's theorisation of the morally soundbiting pamphlet. Instead, I suggest that in the case of Dekker, Ford and Rowley's play The Witch of Edmonton, the nuanced and morally ambiguous narrative of Goodcole's confession pamphlet is reduced to a simplistic morality tale that draws on contemporary fears and superstitions.As originally outlined by St Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologicae , the sin of self-murder is threefold. Firstly, suicide is denounced as an act against nature, secondly as a crime against the state, and thirdly as a sin against God.5 From the seventh century onwards, the law against self-murder was rooted in Christianity. But while medieval and early modern ecclesiastical writers cite biblical examples, such as the hanging of Judas, in arguments against suicide, the prohibition of suicide has little scriptural basis; in denunciations of self-murder, the majority of theologians do little more than cite the sixth commandment, 'Thou shault not kill'.6 Nevertheless, in the late Middle Ages, Christian condemnation of suicide was heralded by Augustine in Of the Cities of God:This we say, this we affirme, this wee vniuersally approoue, that no man ought to procure his owne death for feare of temporall miseries; because in doing this hee falleth into eternall: Neither may hee doe it to avoide the sinnes of others, for in this hee maketh himselfe guilty of a deadly guilt, whome others wickednesse could not make guilty: nor for his owne sinnes past, for which hee had more neede to wish for life, that hee might repent himselfe of them: nor for any desire of a better life to bee hoped for after death: Because such as are guiltie of the losse of their owne life, neuer enioye any better life after their death. …