Native Writers Research Articles

Michael Field's Wordsworth

Michael Field's Wordsworth Alex Murray (bio) In 1894 Edith Wingate Rinder's anthology Poems and Lyrics of Nature was published as part of the Canterbury Poets series edited by William Sharp. Rinder, now most often remembered as an English translator of Maeterlinck, muse of Sharp, and member of Patrick Geddes's Edinburgh circle, had collected verse by a wide-ranging and surprising group of contemporary poets; while many were recognized nature writers, such as Roden Noel, William Canton, Charles Armstrong Fox, and Norman Gale, the volume is more noteworthy for collecting the urbane, cosmopolitan poets of Decadence and Aestheticism, including lyrics by John Davidson, Lionel Johnson, John Gray, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds, Ernest Rhys, and W. B. Yeats. Just as, if not more, significant was the prominent place accorded to female writers in the anthology. As Rinder explained in her introduction, "[n]ot the least remarkable feature of the evolution of Victorian poetry is the high place occupied by women, from Mrs. Browning onwards; and by women, let me add, not the least noteworthy nature poetry of our time is written."1 The female aesthetes and Decadents whose poetry featured in the anthology included Mathilde Blind, Edith Nesbit, Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson), Alice Meynell, Katharine Tynan, and A. Mary F. Robinson. While Rinder had assembled a motley crew of poets, she claimed that they all shared an important context that shaped their nature lyrics in significant ways: It is from Wordsworth that our later poets accepted the suggestion to throw away the note-book and to trust to the impression; he has taught us that it is better to record a true impression of a transient aspect or a commonplace detail keenly observed and emotionally recollected, than to describe categorically a whole landscape. It is in this sense that Wordsworth is called the father of modern poetry. He taught us to feel with nature as well as to observe her, and thus helped to free us from the lingering conventions of the academic school. (p. xxxvii) Rinder's version of Wordsworth here is clearly inspired by Walter Pater's two essays (1874 and 1889) on the Lake Poet, but her attempts to frame him as a nascent impressionist are somewhat questionable (since impressionism is [End Page 427] predicated on trying to capture sensory experience), as is her suggestion that Wordsworth taught his reader to "feel" nature (philosophical reflection being a peculiar mode of feeling).2 Rinder's celebration of the post-Wordsworthian nature writing fell on hollow ears when Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (who wrote as Michael Field) received their copy of Rinder's anthology on June 1st. The two women were dissatisfied with the six Michael Field poems chosen by Rinder from the first edition of Underneath the Bough (1893), and in their journal Cooper declared that "we don't touch nature yet in a truly personal way." Those poems—" Winds To-day," "Noon," "O Wind," "Great Violets," "I will Sing," and "Sunshine"—are hardly uniform, yet there is a sense in them all of a disconnect between the speaker and the natural world. Take, for instance, "Noon" in which the speaker laments that "Of all that beauty by the light defined / None shares my vision! Sharply on my mind / Presses the sorrow: fern and flower are blind" (Rinder, p. 98). The irreconcilable difference between speaker and nature is repeated in "Great Violets" where a bee is "thwarted" by a flower in "early youth / Shut still from desire" (Rinder, p. 101). In "Sunshine," the sun's significance is solely related to its role in providing Bacchus with the liquor necessary for his intoxication: "we can only be drunk with that / Kindling the wine that brims the autumn vat!" (Rinder, p. 103). The lack of harmony with nature in these poems and their reliance on stock pastoral motifs led Cooper to declare, on receipt of Rinder's anthology, that their poetry was "a little stiff before the world—not as yet warm and atmospheric as it should be." While Cooper conceded that Bradley had "done much better in the genre," she thought it was her own prose "Croquis" that had...

Two Birdwatchers Talk about America over Zoom and Tequila

Two Birdwatchers Talk about America over Zoom and Tequila David Gessner Until June 2020 J. Drew Lanham was arguably the most famous Black birder in the United States. That title, if you want to call it that, was wrested from him temporarily by Christian Cooper, the man who on Memorial Day was profiled and threatened in Central Park by a stranger with the same last name, Amy Cooper, after Christian asked her to keep her dog on a leash. That incident held the nation’s fickle attention for a few moments before it was overwhelmed by larger, more deadly events that led to the protests that rocked the country. In 2013 Drew published a piece called “9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher” in Orion magazine. The rules included “Be prepared to be confused with the other black birder,” “Don’t bird in a hoodie,” and “Blackbirds—any black birds—are your birds.” While the article, one of Orion’s most popular, vaulted him into the status of the country’s best-known Black birdwatcher, it wasn’t as if there was a lot of competition. Drew was, as he has written, a rare bird. Drew and I got to know each other because we were both so-called nature writers, a term neither of us were comfortable with at the time. But it is true that we both have, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes enthusiastically, followed in the footsteps of that grand-daddy of the genre, Henry David Thoreau. Drew’s first book, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, takes Thoreau’s old genre and shakes it out. I can’t help but think Henry would approve. While the Concord hermit gets a lot of flack these days (for having had Mom do his laundry, among other things), one thing Thoreau taught was not to respect our elders. That is, not to over-respect them. Take the old and make it new. Soon after the Central Park incident Drew and I drank tequila together—on Zoom of course. “Water is the only drink for a wise man,” said Thoreau. We thought otherwise. The plan was to talk about race, and for me to interview Drew about the issues that were tearing our country apart, but for most of the three hours it was a social call. Maybe that’s what we needed. In the weeks before our talk Drew had been interviewed constantly. He said, “One interviewer started by asking [End Page 7] me: ‘How are you?’ and I thought, but didn’t say, ‘I’m just fucking tired. I’m exhausted.’” He paused, then added: “But I have to keep at it.” In a turn Thoreau would have appreciated, we ended up talking as much about the writing shacks we had built as about racial strife. A couple years before, Drew had gone to look at an acre of land in Tamassee, South Carolina, telling his realtor that he would drive up to take a look but would turn around if he saw any Confederate flags in the immediate area. He ended up buying the land with money he had received from winning a conservation award and building a tiny house there where he could retreat and work. “I never had my own space before,” he said. I knew this already, having just reread The Home Place, in which he describes spending his childhood and early teens sleeping in a too-small cot in the same bedroom as his grandmother. I mentioned how I wouldn’t have wanted to have my sexual awakening with my grandma ten feet away. “Yeah,” he agreed. “My wife says I now hoard spaces. My office at school. The converted storage space behind our house. And now my Tamassee retreat.” We talked for a while about how neither of us built to code, but how building our shacks was a lot like writing: the problem-solving and the way you can get absorbed in it. We both kept bone-yards of odd materials, knowing we would have a use for them later. “I never throw anything away,” said Drew. The cabin had become his increasingly necessary retreat from...

Artistic evocation of historical past of the ethnos on lyrics of the Kabardian poet Aflik Orazaev

The subject of this research is the theme of historical past of the nation and its transformation in artistic consciousness of the Kabardian poet Aflik Orazaev, The object of this research is the diversity of variations of notional imagery in Orzaev’s poetic texts. The goal of this article consists in determination of the ideological-thematic evolutionary changes in Adyghe literature on the example of A. Orzaev’s poetry. The authors meticulously examine the peculiarities of lyrics of the poet. Special attention is given to the poetic theme and problematic of poems, as well as their composition and artistic mastery of the poet. He has a special style, without moralizing escapades, tedious oversight, and patronizing pathos, and patronizing tone. One of the main tasks of the modern literary studies lies in determining interrelation between the national and panhuman within the general cultural tradition. This leads to the need for examination of the main trends in works of the leading national writers. Therefore, studying the poetic work of one of the talented Kabardian poets is relevant. It would increase the level of literary and critical research of North Caucasian literatures, and their correspondence with the quality criteria of leading trends in the modern Russian and foreign literary studies. The main conclusion consists in identification of peculiarities in the worldview of modern artist, as well as diversity of variation of notional imagery of his lyrics.

Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene ed. by Jessica Cory

Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene ed. by Jessica Cory

Interactional Metadiscourse in Editorials : A Cross-Cultural Analysis

This study explored potential cross-cultural differences between English newspaper editorials written by Korean writers and those by native writers of English in the distribution of interactional metadiscourse. Two elite newspapers, The Korea Herald (n=60) and The New York Times (n=70), were adopted as corpora, using Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse to compare them in the writers

ПОЭТИКА РОМАНА АНДРЕЯ КРИВОШАПКИНА

The article examines the contribution of the national writer of Yakutia A. V. Krivoshapkin to the development of the Even prose and the Northern peoples’ literatures on the whole. A. Krivoshapkin is a prominent prose writer, author of historical, social-psychological and philosophical novels. The writer aims to describe the life of his compatriots and to reconstruct their history. Ethnographism, folklorism and historicism of his works constitute the originality of the Even novel. It is shown that the novelist reconstructs the Even national character, psychologically convincingly reveals the image of a modern human.

Conserving Crop Diversity: Connecting Agriculture, Public Gardens, and Science

Conserving Crop Diversity: Connecting Agriculture, Public Gardens, and Science

British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects, by Sheshalatha Reddy

Reviewed by: British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects by Sheshalatha Reddy Mukti Lakhi Mangharam (bio) British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects, by Sheshalatha Reddy; pp. xl + 271. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, £79.99, $109.99. Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects examines the ways in which British colonial ideologies constructed colonial populations as repellent and revolting, thereby justifying rule over them. Reddy argues that colonized populations actively and collectively resisted—revolted—against imperial control over their labor and land. The word revolting thus describes not only the colonial view of the colonized but also the latter’s active rebellion against British authority. Reddy illustrates this revolt through three critical “flashpoints,” the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India, the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, and the 1867 Fenian Rebellion in Ireland (xiii). For Reddy, these rebellions were a response to the colonial disciplining of populations into a labor force suited to extracting surplus value. This disciplining was done through what Reddy, drawing on Michel Foucault, calls biopolitics, the disciplinary tools deployed by states and corporations to manage and regulate populations in an attempt to transform the varied subjugated peoples of India, Jamaica, and Ireland into a modern laboring force. Reddy argues that the revolts demonstrate that, at the height of industrial capitalism, the revolting body of early colonial rule was figured incompletely as a laboring subject. The oppressed colonized worker never could be transformed into someone whose identity was created and limited by labor. The last chapter of the book turns to the postcolonial nation state to show, through Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Harvest (1997), how the figure of the woman, occluded from both colonialist and nationalist discourses on the rebellions, is repurposed within our contemporary neoliberal state as the consummate disposable but laboring subject. The book presents a valuable archive of primary and secondary texts surrounding key colonial revolts. Each chapter reads on average five or six main texts surrounding the rebellion in question drawn from a wide variety of genres. These include plays, poetry, novels, novellas, photographs, broadsheets, periodical essays, and political economic tracts, produced by both the colonizers and colonized. In this respect, it is a well-researched and thorough collection of readings of texts surrounding the rebellions, encompassing primary source material written since the 1850s. Reddy brings to our attention fascinating but lesser-known figures such as the Jamaican nationalist writer and artist Roger Mais (1905–55), who was the product of a middle-class creole family but evinced a commitment to black working-class politics and resistance, was imprisoned for his political activism, and wrote at least thirty plays and three novels. The book also excels in its [End Page 657] readings of better-known texts such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie (1936). Reddy argues that workers’ efforts to value themselves in this text depend on their reintegrating minds and bodies that have been dichotomized by industrial capitalism. Reddy shines at portraying the complexity of resistance to colonialism, which took psychological, physical, and spiritual forms. She is less successful when it comes to arguing that the rebellions were reactions to the colonial disciplining of populations into a labor force suited to extracting surplus value. This is largely due to an incomplete and only tenuous focus on the concept of labor. Different colonial theorizations of labor, whether John Locke’s concept of “property in the person” or his ideas of labor’s property constituting capacity, or even Karl Marx’s concept of alienated labor, are not adequately developed or explained in relation to the literary texts examined (Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett [Cambridge University Press, 2013] 31). Nor are colonized people’s own views of their labor explored. Other historical arguments made about the transformation of colonial populations into labor, such as Andrew Sartori’s well-known Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (2014), are only briefly mentioned. The texts themselves are not consistently mined for passages focusing on ideas and experiences of colonial labor. This is because Reddy’s argument is less about the coercive transition to waged labor in the...

A Corpus-Based Comparative Study on Lexical Bundles in Native and Chinese Scholars’ English Abstracts—Taking Linguistics and Chemistry as an Example

AbstractBased on self-established corpora, the study systematically explores structural and functional similarities and differences of four-word lexical bundles in native and Chinese writers’ English abstracts both in chemistry and linguistics from the interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary viewpoint. The results show that disciplinary features are found in the use of lexical bundles. Besides, most bundle differences found in abstracts by English native writers are also found in those written by Chinese scholars, indicating that Chinese scholars have developed an awareness of their discipline. In addition, both structurally and functionally, the lexical bundles in Chinese writers’ abstracts are similar to those of native writers in linguistics while divergent in chemistry.

“My Sweet Mother…”: Empathetic Interpretation of Olena Pchilka’s Epistolary Portrait

The paper deals with empathetic characteristics of Olena Pchilka’s personality in the family letters. The correspondence of the writer’s children, in particular Mychailo and Lesia, contains a number of details for the psychological portrait of Olena Pchilka; it captures her various emotional states and reactions, allows dening the communicative frames that dominated in the family. The researcher traces the formation of a specic Olena Pchilka’s cult, which concerned her roles of a writer, public person, and mother. It is conrmed by numerous enthusiastic and thankful words in the letters of her children. However, the main attention is paid to the synthesis of self-sacrice and authoritarianism in Olena Pchilka’s family pedagogy. Communication at distance between Lesia Ukraiinka and her mother turned into an experiment of modeling the image of a national writer. At the same time, the letters testify to the fact that Olena Pchilka recognised the unique gift and powerful intelligence of her daughter Lesia Ukraiinka. The mother managed to establish quite friendly relations with her elder children, but Pchilka’s desire to control the emotional world of young Kosaches, her insistent interpretation of it, and the fear of other people’s excessive influence on her children caused long-lasting conflicts, accompanied by ‘tactics of silence’. These destructive tactics resulted in emotional traumas, which, in particular, were sublimated in the literary world of Lesia Ukraiinka as a discourse of communicative rupture (“Advocate Martian”, “Johanna, Chusa’s Wife”, “Aisha and Mohammed”, “Babylonian Captivity”, etc.). It should be noted that children tried to tolerate their mother’s dependence on her psychological complexes and insistent self-isolation, understanding the unique role of Olena Pchilka in their personal development.

The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic

The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic

Comparing Rhetorical Structure of Research Article Abstracts Written by Native English Writers and Chinese Writers

Comparing Rhetorical Structure of Research Article Abstracts Written by Native English Writers and Chinese Writers

The inter-Indigenous encounter

There exists an extensive amount of research in the fields of anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy driven by settler-oriented comparisons between Indigenous nations that verified the representation of Indigenous peoples as Other. Meanwhile, the amount of scholarly works on comparative Indigenous literary encounters in the last decade is worthy of note as indicative of the emergence of a planetary decolonial consciousness. To present an argument as to the need to think of the planetary agency of Indigenous writers, I will closely examine the variety of poetic strategies utilized by Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann of South Australia, and Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty of Southern Queensland, in their writing towards other Indigenous peoples from Gaelic Ireland, and the Pacific. This serves two crucial interventions, puncturing through the deficit discourse that essentializes the poethical contribution of Aboriginal writers, and developing comparative strategies for future Indigenous-to-Indigenous encounters.

The Environmental Season: Seasonal and Environmental Discourse in the Work of Hal Borland

Literary critics and environmental historians focusing on American culture after World War Two note—mostly in passing—the conspicuous role played by seasonal discourse in American nonfiction nature writing. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring attracts the most attention, but as is typical for Carson and her contemporaries who also employ seasonal discourse, that attention is tangential; critics acknowledge the seasonal, pastoral fable behind Carson’s title, but they focus more on what comes after that introduction: Carson’s specific critique of pesticides and in particular the ecological paradigm shift in her analysis, a shift that is seen as emblematic of the nascent environmental movement.1 The seasonal fable that titles and opens her book is not seen as central to the key points of her environmental argument but rather as an example to make her larger point. This separation of seasonal discourse from post-World War Two environmentalism happens in other key criticism of seasonal texts. Michael Kammen’s A Time for Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (2004) provides a more direct and detailed overview of seasonal literature and art—and in particular the burgeoning focus on the seasons after 1949. “From the 1940s until the later 1970s a notable generation of nature writers produced an astonishing number and variety of four seasons books. Most of them reached a remarkably wide and enthusiastic readership,” Kammen notes (175). This surge in the number of writers and readers connected through seasonal discourse provides one general measure of the cultural significance of the seasons during this era. Kammen identifies as causes of this trend nationalism and post-World War Two nostalgia for a past imagined as more connected to nature and to agricultural rhythms (6–7). And while acknowledging the “ecological and conservationist messages” in the work of Carson and her contemporary season writers (32), he does not connect such discourse to the specific ideological and political issues of that era’s environmentalism. Silent Spring, for example, gets scant attention compared to Carson’s earlier, more detailed seasonal work about the ocean.

A Corpus-Based Study of Reformulation Markers: The Case of Native versus Non-Native Research Articles

This study presents a corpus-based study of reformulation markers as a common metadiscourse device in research articles of applied linguistics by native and Iranian non-native writers. Toward this end, qualitative and quantitative analyses of reformulation devices were conducted. The corpora were compiled by downloading articles from academic journals which were selected via convenience sampling. Each corpus included approximately one million words. All the analyses were conducted through employing Murillo’s (2004, 2007) classification which consists of three broad categories: explicit meaning functions (identification, specification, and explanation), conceptual meaning functions (definition and denomination), and implicit meaning functions (conclusion and mathematical operation). After analyzing the data, Chi-square tests were performed to determine whether the results found in the analysis were statistically significant. The results revealed that there were differences between the functions of reformulation markers (RMs) across research articles written by native and non-native writers. In particular, they differ in terms of their types and functions, where non-native writers of applied linguistics research articles (RAs) use RMs much more frequently than native writers of applied linguistics. In light of the findings, recommendations are made for EAP classes as well.

Guilt and Redemption : A Critical Study of the Kite Runner by Khalid Housseini

The literature of Afghanistan speaks the voice of every violated soul either it is male or female. Specially, it speaks the voice of violence, taking place towards every male, female and child. Violence is not only a harsh threat to our life but it blocks our happiness. Violence totally kills our ambition, and simultaneously our every future positivity by which we can face the bold incidents coming in front of us. Actually violence has no clear cut definition and explanation. A process of creative fiction has always been a segment of the creative evolution of the society itself. Afghan fiction has also the same segment and immersed in the social and political milieu. In the tumultuous era of past three or more decades and especially after 1979, there is change of patterns and subjectivity of Afghan writers. These writers have almost created a body of a literature that is homeless in every respect and the almost literature is produced largely by the diasporas creative souls of Afghanistan. These writers due to the miserable condition left the country and now living in foreign lands. The phases of different type of war and violence have affected Afghanistan and inflicted so much harm on the country. This harm was to such extent that the social life of common people along with their customs and traditions are completely in disorder and a state of disarray. So Afghan writers worked for the improvements and every Afghan artist became so much conscious and keen to preserve and worked for the recreation of Afghanistan’s post. It is quite natural Afghan writers blend their fiction in their memory of time they lived in the country to and their highly emotional and experiences in Afghanistan. Afghan writers, haunted strongly by memories, and they prefer talking about only Afghanistan. They rarely talks about their plight as exiled and refuge in the host country like U.S.A and France. The diverse area of study finds its face in the faithful exploration of day to day life exclusively from the perspective of the common victimized Afghan. This study presents a sequence and execution of violence as well as guilt and redemption in the novel the Kite Runner by Khalid Housseini. 

INVESTIGATING LEXICAL DIVERSITY OF ONLINE ENGLISH NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS ACROSS COUNTRIES

Online media or digital media is an internet based communication technology to share and to exchange the latest information throughout the world. This study aims to investigate the lexical diversity of editorials section published in English online media from across ten countries; Egypt, UK, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, USA, Pakistan, Singapore and Nigeria. By using a batch mode of web-based interface to the lexical calculation proposed by Laufer and Nation (1995), namely Second Language Lexical Frequency Profile (L2LFP), this paper focused on the production of tokens, types, type-token ratio (TTR) and academic words of ten online English newspaper editorials from two native English countries and eight non-native English countries. The results show that an editorial published in The Today Online newspaper from Singapore consists the highest score of tokens (987), types (431) and academic words (52), but the least score of TTR (0.44). Nevertheless, the highest score of TTR is not produced by The Today Online. The highest score of TTR (0.60) is gained by The Pakistan Today, even though The Pakistan Today only consists 273 tokens, 223 types and 38 academic words. Despite of Laufer and Nation’s (1995) argumentation that native writer has higher TTR’s score than non-native writer, this paper showed different results. The native online newspaper: The Guardian from U.K and The New York Times from USA has TTR’s score of 0.48 and 0.47. Meanwhile, most of non-native online newspapers has higher TTR’s scores.

Dark Peripatetic Walking as Radical Wandering in Cheryl Strayed’s Memoir <em>Wild</em>

Dark Peripatetic Walking as Radical Wandering in Cheryl Strayed’s Memoir <em>Wild</em>

Panteleimon Kulish as “the First Truly National Ukrainian Writer”

The essay develops I. Franko’s statement about P. Kulish as the first truly national Ukrainian writer who aimed at working totally for the sake of his people’s needs. The author underlines that such a desire was Kulish’s natural urge, as the mentioned goal arose for him back in the first half of the 1840s. In particular, he planned to publish everything that vividly refl ected the life of the Ukrainians throughout centuries.
 In the early period of his activity Kulish worked mainly as a folklorist. He recorded and studied Ukrainian folklore in its natural environment. This work resulted in a unique ethnological edition “The Notes on Southern Rus” as well as his widely known ‘farmstead philosophy’. Kulish’s writing activity evolved from his desire to provide a complex picture of his people’s centuries-long heroic history in the poetic epopee “Ukraine” to creating his fi rst Ukrainian historical novel “The Commoners’ Council.
 A Chronicle of 1863”. The pan-Ukrainian level of “The Notes on Southern Rus” and “The Commoners’ Council” was supported with Kulish’s own phonetic spelling system, i.e. ‘kulishivka’ which laid the foundation of the modern orthography. Kulish’s writing and ethnological activity was also based on his urge to raise the contemporary Ukrainian language to the literary level. With such a purpose he published the almanac “Khata” (“The House”) and did a lot for the full-scale functioning of the first Ukrainian literary magazine “Osnova” (“The Foundation”). Kulish’s translation activity became another important part of his work as the first national writer. His translations of the Bible, works by W. Shakespeare, G. G. Byron, J. W. Goethe, F. Schiller and other outstanding classics of the world culture were signifi cant for all Ukraine.

Provenancing Rune Carvers on Bornholm through 3D-Scanning and Multivariate Statistics of the Carving Technique

In 2017, eight runestones on Bornholm were scanned in 3D and the microtopography of the grooves was analysed by multivariate statistical methods. One of the stones was previously not known to runological research. The aim of this paper is to compare the carving technique of the Bornholm runestones with runestones from Swedish regions to shed light on old issues concerning Bornholm's links with other regions in and around the Baltic Sea. The rune carvers are important agents in this, as the runestones are often related to issues including landholding, Christianization, possible Swedish influences, and the inclusion of Bornholm into the Danish realm. In addition, rune carvers as native writers were intimately connected to the introduction of literacy. The results of this study indicate that the rune carvers did not cooperate much with carvers from the islands of Öland and Gotland, whereas Södermanland, among the Swedish mainland provinces, was their first choice.