North American Literature Research Articles

Editor's Note

This issue of the Edith Wharton Review is my last as editor, so I wish to recognize the work and collegiality of the journal's associate editors Myrto Drizou, Shannon Brennan, and Sharon Kim. Due to their scholarly acumen and commitment to the EWR, the journal has continued to publish innovative work on Wharton and her circle and expanded its readership. I am grateful to the members of the remarkable brain trust that is the EWR editorial board for their support and guidance.I have the pleasure of announcing that beginning with issue 37.2 Rita Bode will be the new editor. Rita is professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her main area of research is in nineteenth- and early twentieth- century North American and British literature with a special interest in transnational studies as seen in her chapter, “'My beloved Romola,'” in Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, edited by Meredith Goldsmith and Emily Orlando (UP of Florida, 2015). She is also a contributor to Ferdâ Asya's Teaching Edith Wharton's Major Novels and Short Fiction with a project she undertook with Sirpa Salenius (University of Eastern Finland): “Students Abroad – In the Classroom: A Transatlantic Assignment on Edith Wharton's “Roman Fever” and is part of Oxford University Press's The Complete Works of Edith Wharton (general editor, Carol Singley), responsible for Volume 7, The Novellas. She has co-edited two volumes of essays on Canadian author, L. M. Montgomery: L. M. Montgomery's Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911–42 (MQUP [McGill-Queen's UP], 2015), with Lesley D. Clement, and L. M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s) (MQUP, 2018), with anthropologist Jean Mitchell. The latter work was awarded ACQL's (Association of Canadian and Québec Literatures) 2018 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English) for the best book-length study in Canadian and Québec literary criticism. She recently co-edited, with Monika Elbert, American Women's Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic (Palgrave, 2021). Other publications include work on George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Prescott Spofford, among others. We are fortunate to have Rita as our new editor.First in this issue is Mary Carney's “Improvised Chase: Notes on Wharton Studies,” a bibliographical article that “provides an overview of significant events, archival findings, major books, and select journal articles” in Wharton studies published since the 2014 thirtieth anniversary issue of the EWR. The article promises to be an important resource for anyone interested in recent Wharton scholarship. Next is Emily J. Orlando's “Edith Wharton and the Architect: The Olney-Beecher version of ‘The Keys of Heaven.’” This archival article remedies the fact that “the only scholarly attention paid to the two abandoned Wharton novels called ‘The Keys of Heaven’ has focused on the ‘Praslin version,’ a retelling of a murder-suicide from 1840s Paris.” Orlando finds that the Olney-Beecher version depicts previously undocumented aspects of Wharton's relationship with Ogden Codman, with whom she worked on The Decoration of Houses (1897). The third article is Emma Aylor's “‘Nay, rather Lord, between’: The Unification of Body and Spirit in Wharton's Deathbed Dramatic Monologues,” which won the 2021 Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning Scholar. The article examines “The Leper's Funeral and Death,” unpublished in Wharton's lifetime, and “Margaret of Cortona,” published in 1901. In her analysis of these poems, Aylor argues that Wharton “draws attention to the simultaneous fragility and persistence of the human: between and beyond traditional Christian divisions of body and soul.” Following the article is a roundtable review of Arielle Zibrak's engaging consideration in Guilty Pleasures of “the specifically pleasurable forms of feminine guilt and desire stimulated by supposedly ‘lowbrow’ aesthetic tendencies.” This is followed by reviews of three other notable books: Melanie V. Dawson's Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age, Laura Rattray's Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction, and Emily Coit's American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition.

Wheat: a powerful crop in US-American culture: Between politics andplant agency

Intertwined in processes of ideological meaning-making, wheat has been particularly successful in pairing its genetic assets with a powerful symbolic charge in US-American culture. The sense of agency that US culture attaches to wheat is subsumed under paradigms of organized personhood such as the nation and the corporation. Artists and writers have merged the idea of “wheat power” with the fears and hopes of their specific historical moment.Wheat is not only genetically complex but has also been exceptionally culturally defined. Interestingly, some cultural representations of wheat emphasize what may be referred to asplant agency. This is particularly striking in North American art and literature. There is often a certain wildness, independence, and power to wheat that are lacking in other cultivated crops. Focusing on the 19thand early 20thcenturies, this article examines the active role of wheat in shaping US-American history and society. Starting from the assumption that cultural artefacts help societies to understand and negotiate their norms and values, I take a look at a painting (Emanuel Leutze’sMrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields on the Approach of the Britishfrom 1852) and a novel (Frank Norris’sThe Octopusfrom 1901) to analyze their representation of the human-wheat relationship. Using a historicizing, philological approach, this case study contributes to a debate in the environmental humanities that seeks to redefine the human-crop relationship in times of climate change, diminishing biodiversity, and human population growth. Can the American legacy of wheat help us to reframe the human-wheat relationship? Are there potential pitfalls of crop agency as it is depicted in American representations of wheat?

A Foundation of Serial Murder and Appreciation of the Male Voice: Historical and Feminist Considerations in The Handmaid's Tale

Violent crime, and the impulse to temper it, fuel cycles of utopian and dystopian discourse in North American literature. Dystopian fiction operates as a social document that highlight the anxieties of the time in which authoring takes place, and in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, America's violent history/(his)story is legalized and gendered. The principal narrator, Offred, manages her perspective—the only thing she can claim personal ownership over—under the pressure of a strict monotheocracy. This paper examines Atwood's novel with a historical-critical lens and posits that groundwork for Gilead was seeded during a spike of lurid serial murders in the 1970s/1980s—a discourse established, perhaps hyperbolically, by the pre-digital press combined with the resurgence of conservative values during the Reagan administration; these conditions fertilized the neo-patriarchal legislation of the fictional Gilead—text born of context. Both historical and feminist criticism discover examples of gendered assault, contemporary to the time of the novel's authoring, bleeding into the nebulously timed present-day Gilead—for time, the narrator notes, has not been of enumerable value since the mid-1980s. The Handmaid's Tale repurposes the history of sexual violence and femicide; here, horror is systematically present within the Puritan womb which seeks to shield an infantilized population—women from the monsters in dark alleys to the proliferation of Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper doppelgangers in mass media.

Gaps in Hospice and Palliative Care Research: A Scoping Review of the North American Literature.

Background The demand for hospice and palliative care is growing as a result of the increase of an aging population, which is most prominent in North America. Despite the importance of the topic and an increase in hospice and palliative care utilization, there still are gaps in research and evidence within the field. Aim To determine what gaps currently exist in hospice and palliative/end-of-life care research within the context of a North American setting to ensure that future directions are grounded in appropriate evidence. Methods Using Arksey and O'Malley's scoping review framework, six peer-reviewed, and four grey electronic literature databases in healthcare and the social sciences were searched in mid-2019. 111 full-text articles were retrieved, with 25 articles and reports meeting the inclusion criteria. Major themes were identified through thematic context analysis: (1) clinical, (2) system access to care, (3) research methodology, and (4) caregiving-related research gaps. Results Findings include strategies for engaging stakeholder organizations and funding agencies, implications for other stakeholder groups such as clinicians and researchers, and highlight implications for policy (e.g., national framework discussion) and practice (e.g., healthcare provider education and training and public awareness). Conclusion Reviewing and addressing targeted research gaps is essential to inform future directions in Canada and beyond.

Ghostly Consciousness in The Book of Margery Kempe

Abstract Jill Carter has spearheaded the interpretive practice of “red reading,” wherein a canonical text is read through an Indigenous perspective, and has proven the validity of approaching traditional texts or problems through a decolonized or non-European method. To date, the red reading methodology has been most noticeably used to decentralize a Eurocentric reading of Indigeneity in North American literature, though as this article illustrates, the concepts of red reading can be expanded to analyze texts from across temporal and cultural periodization, which allows us to approach texts from a new perspective. In red reading a text like The Book of Margery Kempe, with its emphasis on holism and fluid consciousness, we can reach past the orality and textuality at the forefront of the text to interrogate and explore the liminality of a third (ghostly) consciousness.

Exploring how a genetic attribution to disease relates to stigma experiences of Xhosa patients with schizophrenia in South Africa.

Over the past three decades, a range of international stakeholders have highlighted the possibility that genomic research may impact stigma associated with psychiatric disorders. Limited research has been conducted in Africa to investigate this relation. In the present study, using focus group discussions, we explored the relation between genetic attribution and stigma among 36 Xhosa people with schizophrenia. We addressed three main questions: (1) What causal beliefs do Xhosa people with schizophrenia use to explain their illness and to what extent do genetic explanations play a role in these beliefs? (2) What are the internalised stigma experiences of Xhosa people with schizophrenia? (3) How do genetic explanations relate to stigma experiences, if at all? Most participants were able to define genetics and some linked genetics to disease causation. Despite adequate knowledge of genetics and an emphasis on genetic explanations of schizophrenia in the study, most participants held a multitude of causal explanations including: psychosocial, environmental, and cultural. Moreover, participants rarely mentioned disease cause when describing their stigma experiences. For this population group, there was no straight-forward relation between a genetic attribution and stigma. Therefore, we did not find evidence that genetic attribution may significantly increase stigma. Although North American and European literature provides conflicting evidence regarding this relation, there is increased consensus that biomedical explanations for psychiatric disorders may reduce blame. This study found evidence supporting that consensus. This study provides an empirical foundation to inform ongoing work on the psychosocial implications of psychiatric genomics research in non-Western contexts.

Status Dynamics

Status among peers has been one of the central themes of peer relations research for decades. While the topic has been extensively researched in the Western European and North American literature, less is known about such dynamics in ‘non-Western’ contexts. The paper intends to address this gap by analyzing the status dynamics related to the two most frequently investigated dimensions of status – popularity and acceptance – in a Hungarian, ethnically diverse, longitudinal primary school database. Additionally, we apply a novel multilevel regression model, the within-between random effects model (Bell et al., 2019), which combines the strengths of fixed- and random-effects models and makes the decomposition of within-individual and between-individual effects possible. The paper analyses the first four waves of the panel dataset (N of observations = 4441, N of individuals = 1313). Most of our results are in line with the Western European literature, highlighting the important role of being good at sports, verbal aggression, being considered smart, and physical appearance. With regard to ethnic differences, our results show ethnicized patterns in the relationship between aggression and popularity.

Wrong side of the leaf: assigning some Lithocolletinae species(Lepidoptera: Gracillariidae) to their proper genera.

Cameraria Chapman and Phyllonorycter Hübner (Gracillariidae: Lithocolletinae) are two speciose genera of leaf-mining moths that were once treated as belonging to a single genus, Lithocolletis Hübner. Typically, species of Cameraria form flat mines on the upper leaf surface, whereas most Phyllonorycter species form underside tentiform mines. We reviewed North American literature records and found 15 exceptions to this generalization, with two Cameraria species reported to form underside mines and 13 Phyllonorycter species reported to form upper-surface mines. For each of these species we summarize the published data on larval biology, hostplants, and distribution, which we supplement with internet records and our own observations. Both purported Cameraria species making underside mines were misplaced in this genus by Davis (1983); we affirm the combinations Phyllonorycter affinis (Frey Boll) and P. leucothorax (Walsingham), each of which has been published once before but not formally proposed as a new combination, and thus has been ignored by subsequent authors. We have further determined P. affinis to be a junior synonym of P. mariaeella (Chambers). Three of the purported Phyllonorycter species making upper-surface mines were similarly misplaced. One of these, Anarsioses aberrans (Braun), has recently been transferred to a new genus, and we propose the new combinations Cameraria arizonella (Braun) and C. cretaceella (Braun) for the other two. Genitalia and forewing patterns are illustrated for all species whose generic placement is corrected in this paper.

Definitions of Physician Certification Used in the North American Literature: A Scoping Review.

The authors sought to identify how physician specialty certification is defined in the North American literature. A rigorous, established six-stage scoping review framework was used to identify the North American certification literature published between January 2006 and May 2016 relating to physician specialty certification. Data were abstracted using a charting form developed by the study team. Quantitative summary data and qualitative thematic analysis of the purpose of certification were derived from the extracted data. A two stage screening process identified 88 articles that met predefined criteria. Only 14 of the 88 articles (16%) contained a referenced purpose of certification. Eighteen definitions were identified from these articles. Definitional concepts included lifelong learning and continuous professional development, assessment of competence and performance, performance improvement, public accountability, and professional standing. Most articles identified in this scoping review did not define certification or describe its purpose or intent. Future studies should provide a definition of certification to further scholarly examination of its intent and effects and inform its further evolution.

Literary Recordings: Modernism, Media, and Acoustic Modernity

Literary Recordings: Modernism, Media, and Acoustic Modernity Tyler Whitney Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel. Angela Frattarola. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018. Pp. 204. $85.00 (cloth). Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Jason Camlot. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. Pp. 248. $55.00 (cloth); $55.00 (eBook). Fifteen years ago the media historian Michele Hilmes identified a “growing bibliography of work on sound” and speculated about the emergence of a new subfield she termed “sound culture studies.”1 Two excellent new titles by Jason Camlot (Concordia University) and Angela Frattarola (Nanyang Technological University) demonstrate the extent to which, in the intervening years, the once “hypothetical field” of which Hilmes caught a glimpse has been codified and transformed. We can now say definitively that the field of sound studies exists. Frattarola’s Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel takes up questions of sound and its histories from a distinctly literary perspective. She argues that turn-of-the-century European and North American literature “became increasingly concerned with and influenced by the developing auditory technologies of the time”; specifically, literary works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett served as a means for “educating readers and familiarizing them with a new auditory technology” (3). Formal and linguistic innovations, along with growing skepticism about vision and human ability to know the world, “are in part a result of a growing awareness of and shift toward sound perception made possible through new auditory technologies” (4). Modernist writers were “shaped” by these new listening practices in Frattarola’s account, giving rise to texts characterized by “noisy onomatopoeia” and an extensive use of linguistic repetition—which might be thought productively as samples and loops (15, 147). [End Page 847] Frattarola impressively fleshes out the concrete links between modernist authors and the specific auditory technologies of radio, tape, and the gramophone: Richardson, for example, wrote a column for a film magazine, in which she lamented the death of silent film. Woolf owned a gramophone, subscribed to the National Gramophonic Society, and listened with attentive dismay to the voice of Hitler in radio broadcasts. Joyce was also an avid radio listener, while Rhys spoke of being “haunted by popular songs” captured on gramophone records (quoted in Frattarola, 8). Finally, Beckett experimented formally with radio, tape, television, and film. These authors were not just shaped by auditory technologies and related listening practices: they were dedicated users of these devices, skilled in handling and operating them, familiar with their sensuous, material forms, and conceiving of language and their own literary projects with direct reference to the unique affordances of modern acoustic media. Frattarola’s first chapter offers an overview of existing literature and further theoretical observations on the relationship between sound and vision. Writing against dominant narratives of crisis and modernist disorientation, and drawing on Martin Jay’s influential history of ocularcentrism and the denigration of vision, Frattarola argues that, “we can just as easily tell a story of modernism in which writers revel in the destabilization of vision” (23, emphasis added). Modernists in this account did not necessarily feel themselves to be in a state of crisis as their faith in vision was shaken, experiencing instead (or at least simultaneously) “a sense of liberation from an ocularcentrist orientation” through their encounters and engagement with sound and its mediating technologies (23). Frattarola thus draws a compelling connection between modernism’s oft-cited “crisis of vision” and the surge of literary interest in sound around 1900, suggesting that they are in fact two sides of the same coin. According to this understanding, the disorientation of vision was counterbalanced by a newfound auditory orientation—visual crisis offset by auditory discovery and invention. Frattarola avoids a troubling tendency in sound studies to discuss sound in isolation from the other senses, offering instead a truly audio-visual approach. At the same time, some readers may be left wondering whether Frattarola’s move away from the narrative of crisis is simply a matter of preferring one kind of historical narrative about modernity to another, of focusing on what has been gained rather than lost. As the author herself makes clear, both narratives hold true...

A Single-Center Retrospective Study on the Initiation of Peritoneal Dialysis in Patients With Cardiorenal Syndrome and Subsequent Hospitalizations.

Background:Inotropic dependence and diuretic resistance in patients with cardiorenal syndrome (CRS) lead to frequent hospitalizations and are associated with high mortality. Starting peritoneal dialysis (PD) acutely (within 2 weeks of a heart failure hospitalization) offers effective volume removal without hemodynamic compromise in this population. There is little data on this approach in the North American literature.Objective:To determine whether volume-overloaded patients with CRS on maximal doses of diuretic therapy had reduced hospitalization for heart failure following PD initiation.Design:Retrospective cohort study.Setting:Academic hospital network (University Health Network, Toronto, Ontario).Patients:Patients with CRS receiving a bedside catheter and starting PD within 2 weeks of insertion at the University Health Network from January 1, 2013, to December 31, 2018.Methods and measurements:Data for heart failure–related hospitalizations and length of stay 6 months before and after PD initiation were collected. Patients who died, switched to hemodialysis, or were transferred to another facility within 6 months of starting PD were excluded from the analysis.Results:We identified 31 patients with CRS who had a bedside PD catheter inserted. The average age of patients was 66.0 ± 13.0 years. There were 7 (22.6%) deaths and 4 (12.9%) transfers to other programs or hemodialysis within 6 months of catheter insertion. After exclusion, we analyzed hospitalization and length of stay data for 20 patients. The hospitalization rate 6 months before PD initiation was 6.9 admissions per 1000 patient-days. This decreased to 2.5 admissions per 1000 patient-days after PD initiation. In addition, there was also a significant reduction in the average length of stay per hospitalization (24.1-3.9 days; P = .001).Limitations:Our study did not assess the severity of heart failure symptoms using a standardized functional classification system. We did not assess quality of life and illness intrusiveness scores before and after starting dialysis, nor did we capture non–heart-failure-related hospitalizations or external admissions at other hospital sites. We limited eligibility to clinically stable patients with no prior major abdominal surgical history in a single Canadian PD program using bedside ultrasound approach for catheter insertions by experienced nephrologists and included a small number of patients.Conclusions:Volume-overloaded patients with CRS receiving maximal diuretic therapy have lower hospitalization rates and shorter stays after initiation of PD. The development of a bedside PD catheter insertion program and close collaboration between nephrology and cardiology services may facilitate acute start dialysis in this population.

Anaesthesia and World War II:  When the Battlefield Becomes a Research Field - A Bibliometric Analysis

At the outbreak of World War II, anaesthesiology was struggling to establish itself as a medical specialty. The battlefield abruptly exposed this young specialty to mass-casualty treatment, with an urgent need to provide proper fluid resuscitation, airway management, mechanical ventilation, and analgesia to thousands. But while Europe suffered under the Nazi boot, anaesthesia was ready to rise to the challenge. To measure and throw light on this evolution, we designed a bibliometric study, involving quantitative and statistical analysis of publications. Therefore, seven journals were selected, covering North American, British and German anaesthesiology literature, the surgical field, French medical practice and the military domain. Attention was focused on journal volumes published between 1920 and 1965. After reviewing the literature, we selected 12 keywords representing important advances in anaesthesiology since 1920. Titles of original articles from all selected journals editions were screened for the occurrence of any of these keywords. The results were expressed as ratios (number of titles in which these keywords occurred divided by the number of journal articles screened), per period of time. This defined what we named the “Keyword-Impact” on publications. By means of a comprehensive and extensive review of the literature, this study demonstrates statistically that WWII has accelerated progress in anaesthesiology. It also offers an objective record of the chronology of the major advances in anaesthesiology before and after the conflict. Whereas the war arguably helped to conceive anaesthesiology as a specialty, in return anaesthesiology helped to heal the wounds of war. Funding Statement: The authors received no financial support for the research and authorship of this article. Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

The Early Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Fascicles 9 & 10 by Nicolás Estévez Fuertes, Francisca González Arias and Paul S. Derrick

Reviewed by: The Early Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Fascicles 9 & 10 by Nicolás Estévez Fuertes, Francisca González Arias and Paul S. Derrick Nicolás Estévez Fuertes (bio), Francisca González Arias (bio), and Paul S. Derrick (bio) Fuertes, Nicolás Estévez, Francisca González Arias, Paul S. Derrick. La poesía temprana de Emily Dickinson: cuadernillos 9 & 10 (The Early Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Fascicles 9 & 10). València, Bibliotica Javier Coy d'estudis nord-americans, 2018. 162 pp. This is the fifth volume in a project that began in 2006 with the publication of La poesía temprana de Emily Dickinson: el primer cuadernillo, a translation and critical study of Dickinson's first fascicle. Two very positive reviews of that volume in Spanish academic journals encouraged us to continue working on the fascicles. Although there have been numerous Spanish translations of Dickinson's work, as far as we know, this is the only attempt to make the early fascicles available to Spanish and Spanish-speaking readers. In recent years, many Dickinson scholars (Sharon Cameron, Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, Dorothy Huff Oberhaus, Martha O'Keefe, and Alexandra Socarides, among others) have focused on these forty short poem sequences that pose a number of fascinating questions concerning the intentions as well as the poetic accomplishment of this enigmatic American poet. Our translation of the fascicles [End Page 136] in bilingual format is accompanied by a critical commentary which provides a reading of each poem and establishes its thematic role within both the fascicle structure and the overall work of the poet. Fascicles nine and ten include a total of fifty-one poems written between 1860 and 1862. In them, we can observe how Dickinson continues to develop her most important themes: the paradoxical logic of renunciation, the tension between faith and doubt, death as an unbridgeable epistemological borderline, and the metaphor of resurrection. At the same time, in these fascicles Dickinson perfects her poetic technique and refines her handling of these motifs. In this volume, then, we witness Dickinson's definitive steps toward her full intellectual and artistic maturity. The work in this book was carried out as follows: the two chapters entitled "Cuadernillo 9: en el umbral de la madurez" ("Fascicle 9: On the Threshold of Maturity") and "Cuadernillo 10: acomodar la ambigüedad" ("Fascicle 10: Accommodating Ambiguity"), which offer critical readings, were originally written in English by Paul Sco Derrick and then translated into Spanish by Nicolás Estévez. The fascicles themselves were translated by Francisca González Arias in collaboration with Derrick. Over the course of thirty-four years, Derrick has published many essays on Dickinson's poetry, including a critical introduction to a translation of a selection of Dickinson's letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He is also co-translator of a selection of Dickinson's poems into Catalan. This work, along with the extensive bibliography of critical books and essays that inform it, provide the main foundation for the readings offered here. And those readings provide the background against which most of our translation choices were taken. Translation of the critical commentary was challenging. Dickinson's poetry is extremely complex, and her use of words and terms highly ambiguous. Any valid discussion of these complexities requires a corresponding delicacy and precision of expression. Finding comparable phrasing in Spanish was at least as demanding as translating the poems themselves. As can be expected, our final conclusions are far from definitive. But in brief, we propose that any thematic unity in the first ten fascicles arises from the natural occurrence of the various themes that repeatedly occupied her poems because they constantly occupied her mind. Dickinson cleverly wove complex parallels and metaphorical associations among her central themes in order to cultivate her need for the "cloaking device" of ambiguity. [End Page 137] Nicolás Estévez Fuertes Nicolás Estévez Fuertes is a retired Senior Lecturer of Academic Writing in the Department of English and German Philology at the Universitat de València. His research interests lie mainly in English for Science, Linguistics, and the reception of North American literature in Spain (Hemingway, Miller, O'Neill, and Tennessee Williams). He has published...

What happened last night in Sweden?: To preach without fear in a Scandinavian Folk Church, in a situation when populist nationalism rises in the context of migration

This article focuses on the situation in the Church of Sweden, one of the largest Lutheran churches in the world. The links between the state and the church in Sweden were only recently cut. Political parties still engage with church policy and form the majority of the Church Assembly as well as many local Church councils. When nationalistic parties also are involved in church policy this becomes a challenge. Homiletics is taught at the Church of Sweden Institute for Pastoral Education as part of the final, ministerial year. At the Institute we make use of North American literature by authors like Brueggemann, Lose, Tubbs Tisdale and Troeger. There are many differences between the Scandinavian and the North American contexts. This paper seeks to investigate how homiletical training in one context is carried out with the use of textbooks from another, different context. How can homiletics based on North American theologies fit into a Folk Church context? How does a North American homiletic approach encourage Swedish students to preach a prophetic word of God, without fear, in a situation when populist nationalism rises in the context of migration? How can prophetic preaching, as described by for instance Brueggemann and Tisdale, be contextualised in this situation? This article discusses when and how prophetic preaching inspired from the Biblical example, with its narratives and with metaphors and poetic language, should be used and when a more confrontational, head-on witness is needed.

Literatura eletrônica e suas origens. Um panorama

O objetivo deste artigo é esboçar as origens da literatura eletrônica e destacar alguns momentos importantes para traçar sua história. Ao fazê-lo, consideramos a variedade de idiomas, origens culturais, heranças culturais e contextos nos quais a literatura digital foi criada. O artigo está dividido em cinco seções: uma breve história da literatura eletrônica em geral (no entanto, devemos admitir que esta seção tem um ponto de vista muito etnocêntrico) e depois quatro outras seções divididas em norte-americana, latino-americana, européia (Rússia incluída), e Literatura Eletrônica Árabe. Devido à falta de informações, não há seção dedicada à Literatura Eletrônica na Ásia, embora alguns textos sejam mencionados. Estamos cientes dos limites dessa divisão e dos problemas que ela pode criar, no entanto, achamos que era a maneira mais fácil de mapear rapidamente as origens da literatura eletrônica e seu desenvolvimento em diferentes países e continentes. O artigo mostra como alguns países desenvolveram seu interesse e criação de literatura eletrônica quase simultaneamente, enquanto outros, apenas por causa de sua própria formação cultural e / ou contextos (também políticos e econômicos), só recentemente descobriram a literatura eletrônica, ou aceitaram-na como uma nova forma de gênero literário.

Polystoechotes punctata (Fabricius, 1793) (Neuroptera: Ithonidae) in North America: A Changing Distribution Over Time

Using label data from 1,448 specimens of the giant lacewing Polystoechotes punctata (Fabricius 1793) (Neuroptera: Ithonidae) representing 849 individual occurrences from North American insect collections, literature, and online sources, we examined capture rates over time, phenology and historic and current distribution for Polystoechotes punctata. Captures spanned 1800 through 2018. They rose between the 1860s to a peak in the 1930s and declined thereafter with an increase since 2000 due to photographs posted online. Captures in the United States and Canada occurred April through November peaking in July and August with 47.6% of the records from August. There are no verified records of P. punctata from east of the Rocky Mountains for over 60 years. The loss rate from eastern North America was not uniform but appears to have occurred in three waves.

Analysis of the attrition phenomenon through the lens of university dropouts in the United Arab Emirates

PurposeTheoretical models of attrition have failed to address the interwoven factors from the perspective of undergraduate students that influence their decision to drop out. The purpose of this paper is to unravel these complexities using a qualitative phenomenological approach to gain systematic descriptions of the experience of non-completion.Design/methodology/approachTinto’s (2004) and Bean and Metzner’s (1985) models serve as the theoretical construct for the study’s design and analysis. In-depth interviews were conducted with 41 students who discontinued studies at universities in the United Arab Emirates, to understand the situations that led them to drop out of university and how they experienced this event in their lives.FindingsSeveral issues were identified as contributing factors for dropping out that are consistent with those found in the international literature. Additional issues were more gender or culture specific and, to some extent, represented the differences that signal a social development that is in a transitional stage. The findings revealed that institutional factors, poor pre-college preparation, environmental factors (work-education conflict), early marriage responsibilities, well-paid job opportunities and financial concerns were most influential.Research limitations/implicationsDespite the limitations of relying on a small sample to generalize findings, the rich detail of this inductive study has added to the understanding of the dropout phenomenon in a new context.Practical implicationsThe paper recommends both remedial and early intervention strategies to be undertaken by the Ministry of Education and universities. Remedial strategies include re-examining the desired standard of English as a condition for admission and adjusting the grading system. Early intervention measures that accommodate the needs of at-risk students are also proposed. At local, regional and international levels, higher education should be freed from commodification and inflated fees.Originality/valueThe paper presents a significant departure from the largely North American and European literature on the university dropout, by offering a broader knowledge of this phenomenon in another regional and national context.

Em busca de uma teleologia para a educação científica CTS: da consolidação do campo às unidades de ensino

No presente ensaio pretendemos apresentar a consolidação dos Estudos em Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (ECTS) como campo de estudos, articulando tal compreensão às origens da interface entre educação e CTS para, finalmente, relacionar elementos concernentes aos objetivos, conteúdos, estrutura e organização curricular de unidades de ensino CTS. Para alcançar tal objetivo foi realizado um estudo de natureza bibliográfica, no qual nos ancoramos, principalmente, em uma reconstrução histórico-analítica elaborada a partir de Aikenhead (2005, 2003, 1994), Auler (2011), Millar (1996), Santos (2007), Strieder e Kawamura (2017, 2010, 2009) e Waks (1989a, 1989b). Foi possível arrolar os desdobramentos históricos em proveito da compreensão acerca da orientação político-pedagógica decorrente dos ECTS, delimitando, a partir da pesquisa empírica e sem a pretensão de normatizar, as sistematizações oferecidas pela literatura norte-americana para unidades CTS que subsidiaram a entrada desta discussão em âmbito nacional.

Edgar Allan Poe: A Source for Miriam Allen Deford

The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on North American culture and literature is still a subject of debate in contemporary literary theory. However, Poe’s creative legacy regarding the writings of Miriam Allen Deford remains neglected by the literary critics. Deford’s fiction explored a set of literary genres, such as biography, science fiction, crime and detective short stories. Taking these premises as a point of departure, this article aims to identify similarities between “A Death in the Family” and some of Poe’s works. Drawing on studies by J. T. Irwin, James M. Hutchisson and others, the objective of this paper is to analyze passages from Deford’s tale in comparison with the poetry and fictional prose of Poe. The analysis suggests that Deford’s horror short story “A Death in the Family,” published in 1961, was mostly inspired by Poe’s gothic tales, detective stories, and poems.

Overlooked diversity in exotic Taraxacum in British Columbia, Canada

In almost all North American literature, including in British Columbia, weedy Taraxacum species have been named as Taraxacum officinale F.H.Wigg and Taraxacum erythrospermum Andrz. ex Besser (or Taraxacum laevigatum DC.). This coarse taxonomic approach ignores great diversity in morphology, ecology, and geographical distributions among the exotic established species. Taxonomic refinement would facilitate floristics and ecological studies when exotic Taraxacum species are involved, and the taxonomy of native Taraxacum must first determine which are and which are not native species, which in turn requires knowledge of sectional identity of any specimen. Exotic Taraxacum specimens were identified to species and taxonomic sections using refined species and sectional concepts that align with taxonomic standards used in the native ranges of the species in Europe. Seven exotic sections and one informally named group are found to be present in British Columbia (Borea, Boreigena, Celtica, Erythrosperma, Hamata, Naevosa, Taraxacum, and the Taraxacum fulvicarpum group). The number of exotic Taraxacum species known to occur in British Columbia to date exceeds 100. A key to the exotic sections of British Columbia Taraxacum is presented and the sections are characterized. Species known to date are listed by their sectional placement. Notes are also presented on distinguishing native from exotic Taraxacum in British Columbia.