Personal Antipathy Research Articles

Social restitution: tools and actions to rehumanise and transform injustice

Restitution has predominantly been described as a legal rather than a social action in international law, as well as in South Africa’s history of truth, reconciliation and redress policies after the end of apartheid. Introducing the concept of ‘social restitution’ this paper argues for a reimagined and wider understanding of restitution to address the need for social justice in the spaces between the law court and individual acts of charity, and between policies for redress and personal antipathy against these. Social restitution can be defined as intentional voluntary actions and attitudes developed through dialogue based on a sense of moral obligation aimed at addressing the damage done to individuals and communities by unjust actions and legacies of the past. Drawing on international debates about and understandings of the meaning of restitution, social restitution is shown to be both continuous with legal restitution and distinguished from it through its voluntary nature, its potential to be forward-looking rather than punitive, generative rather than accusatory, and offering everyday opportunities to bridge the gap between ‘knowing’ about injustice and ‘acting’ to repair it. Following this discussion, the latter part of the paper outlines the need for new categories of actors in contexts of injustice beyond those of victim, perpetrator and bystander (the Hilberg triangle of actors), introducing the ideas of beneficiaries and resisters; argues for the potential social restitution has as a mechanism for rehumanising all actors; and offers recommendations for how engaged action-oriented dialogues might contribute to achieving this aim, while noting the limits and dangers of dialogue. It draws on an empirical study on the meaning and actions of restitution conducted with black and white adult South Africans in making some of its arguments.

Strains in US–Turkiye relations

Turkiye cancelled a 9 May trip by its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to Washington, responding to domestic political concerns related to the United States’ support for Israel in its war against Hamas. The US–Turkiye alliance, seen by Ankara as vital during the Cold War, is now more variegated and transactional. But while Erdoğan has a deep-rooted personal antipathy to Washington, uniquely among the leaders of NATO member countries, he is also wary of US strength and the ability of any crisis in bilateral relations to negatively affect his grip on power or worsen the country’s already difficult economic situation.

N. N. Strakhov and Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin Speech”

The article considered three versions of N. N. Strakhov’s essay on the Pushkin Celebration of June 6–8, 1880 and Dostoevsky’s Speech delivered there. A comparative analysis of the texts published in 1880, 1883 and 1888 reveals the evolution of their author’s consciousness and fills in the existing gap in the history of his attitude to Dostoevsky, which has led to the infamous letter to Tolstoy dated November 28, 1883. According to Strakhov, the artistic flair manifested in Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin speech”, originates directly in God, whose mouthpiece the artist becomes aside from his own earthly personality, which does not only lack a connection with the meanings being transmitted, but may also directly contradict them. This is the ideological ground (combined with personal antipathy) on which the “aversion” to Dostoevsky ripens. As he revises his essay, Strakhov arrives increasingly closer to explaining the triumph of “Pushkin’s speech” solely as a victory of the “party,” and ultimately explains it by the insignificance of the event itself. The article draws a conclusion on the ambivalent nature of Strakhov’s thinking. One and the same phenomenon — in this case, Dostoevsky’s “conciliatory attitude” — is “exaggerated” by the critic alternately in a positive and in a negative sense. In regard to the significance of “Pushkin’s speech” in the history of Russian culture, Strakhov moves from unconditional approval to destructive doubt (from I. Aksakov to K. Leontiev).

The Shortest Way with Defoe: “Robinson Crusoe,” Deism, and the Novel

The Shortest Way with Defoe: “Robinson Crusoe,” Deism, and the Novel

Compulsory vaccination against COVID-19: a legal and ethical perspective on public good versus personal reticence

Coercive measures to protect public health are controversial, eliciting questions regarding state-patient relationships and conflicts between individual autonomy and public good. This is challenging in a time when respect for patient autonomy has become elevated yet society faces an increasing number of public health challenges, the most recent being the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19). In that context, there is emphasis on increasing vaccination rates internationally in order to achieve “herd immunity”, raising the possibility of compulsory vaccination of populations in the future. Here, we explore current rights of individuals to decline vaccination, utilising prior learning from other viral pathogens internationally (specifically, measles, mumps and rubella), and related public health outcomes. Further, we consider freedom of choice versus mandatory treatment necessitated to avoid contagion during disease outbreaks (such as COVID-19). In doing so, we utilise rhetorical reasoning in the form of casuistry focusing on the core challenges regarding public good versus personal antipathy towards vaccination.

American Youth and the Presidential Election -2020

The peak for the last 100 years voter turnout became one of the peculiarities of the 2020 presidential election. It revealed itself among every voter age cohort, among them traditionally absentee youth. Its electoral process participation growth can be linked with both its generational features and electoral campaign tactics of Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. A number of factors that helped democrats include personal antipathy of many young Americans towards D.Trump, mail voting expansion and sympathy of youth to J.Biden’s program social safety items.

Pound Notes in German Markets: Paul Celan, Usury, and the Postwar Currency of Ezra Pound

Pound Notes in German Markets: Paul Celan, Usury, and the Postwar Currency of Ezra Pound Philip Gerard (bio) Beginning in the early 1960s, the name Ezra Pound begins to surface in Paul Celan’s notebooks. Pound is one of the few living poets that Celan mentions in the draft materials to his Büchner Prize Speech, The Meridian, and the American’s name is a returning figure in several poetological aphorisms that Celan wrote around the same time. At first sight, it is not obvious what would prompt Celan to take note of Pound. Poetically and politically, the two lie poles apart. Writing in the shadow of the Nazi genocide, Celan is known for pushing German poetry to the edge of silence in an effort to sound the abysses of personal and collective loss. Nothing resembles the austere minimalism of such work less than the noisy babel of the Cantos, which by 1960 had exceeded 750 pages. Celan was also bitterly conscious of Pound’s anti-Semitism and his defense of Italian fascism, and one can imagine Celan finding such complicities insupportable. But even so, the aged modernist, newly released from a hospital for the criminally insane, made for an unlikely foil. Celan was only thirty-nine years old when he received the Büchner Prize, modern German literature’s most prestigious honor; in 1960 Pound was seventy-four and had never in his life shown much interest in German verse, old or new. Taking this yawning poetic, political, and generational divide into account, one can only wonder, why bother with Pound at all? If we read the notebooks carefully, we see that what provokes Celan’s references to Pound has little to do with his personal antipathy for the American poet, or even with a considered engagement [End Page 125] with Pound’s work. Instead, the notes have to do with the historical conjuncture that threw Pound and Celan together. Despite their differences, the two shared the same world, even if this “world” was no bigger than the global literary market that Goethe called “Weltliteratur.” Still incipient in Goethe’s day, the “epoch of world literature” had become increasingly concrete by Pound and Celan’s.1 In the 1950s, translations of Pound and books by Celan competed for shelf space in West German bookstores and libraries. For a time, the two men even shared a publisher.2 It is doubtful that Celan welcomed the fact that Eva Hesse’s German translations of the Cantos sold alongside his own poetry. Worse than suffering Pound’s company in publishers’ catalogues and display windows, however, was the danger that such proximity might prompt readers to measure his German against the Cantos’s cacophony of Greek and Chinese. Such comparisons, after all, are precisely what Goethe had imagined and the contemporary market for world literature actively encouraged. For a range of literary-historical and ethical-political reasons, a poem by Celan and a canto by Pound really do have nothing to say to one another. Nevertheless, in the globalized literary marketplace of the 1950s and 1960s, the two had a kind of commerce. The most consequential of Celan’s reflections on the scene of exchange where he and Pound competed for readers takes the form of an aphorism written either during or shortly after the writing of The Meridian. Since the kind of value produced by translation is important to Celan’s point, I will give his aphorism first in the original before offering an English “equivalent.” Celan writes, Wenn sie Pound lesen, verstehen sie sogar Chinesisch. Mit diesem Pfunde wuchern sie gerne – nicht zuletzt auch deshalb, weil sie Shylock als Klischee am Leben erhalten wollen3 In its original wording, Celan’s aphorism already engages the problem of translation on many levels. First among these is Celan’s interlingual pun on Pound’s family name. Because this pun trades on linguistic difference, it poses a special challenge for the aphorism’s would-be translator. Nonetheless, the punning exchange can be analyzed as a series of transactions. Thus, in the aphorism’s first sentence, “Pound” is a proper name, a metonym for Pound’s epic poem, the Cantos. By the time we reach...

Factors associated with public knowledge of and attitudes to dementia: A cross-sectional study.

IntroductionDementia is a major public health concern but one that continues to be stigmatised. We examine lay knowledge of dementia and attitudes to people with dementia as potential precursors of public anxiety, focusing on the social characteristics associated with (a) the formation of these attitudes, and (b) the perception of the need for restriction and control for people with dementia.MethodsAnalysis of the 2014 Northern Ireland Life and Times survey, which included questions on knowledge of, attitudes to and personal experience with dementia. We used (a) latent class analysis and (b) logistic regression to examine factors associated with respondent attitudes towards dementia.ResultsRespondents (n = 1211) had relatively good general knowledge of dementia, but limited knowledge of specific risk factors. Negative perceptions of dementia were mitigated somewhat by personal contact. A high proportion of respondents felt that high levels of control were appropriate for people diagnosed with dementia, even at early stages of the disease.ConclusionPersonal antipathy to dementia was highly prevalent despite ongoing public campaigns to increase public awareness of developments in its prevention, treatment and consequent care pathways and hampering efforts to widen social inclusion. Fresh thinking and more resources may be needed to challenge persisting common misapprehension of the condition and the formation of entrenched stigma.

The Complementarity of Frost and Stevens

The Complementarity of Frost and Stevens Steven Gould Axelrod and Natalie Gerber ONE OF THE well-worn ironies of epoch-fashioning in literature is its tendency to position literary oeuvres in ways that serve the need for distinction and contrast without attesting to the surprising overlaps and conjunctions that exist in the lives and careers of the era’s foremost practitioners. This, in a sentence, is the story of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, two modernist American poets who have emerged—more so than most of their peers—at opposite ends of the modernist spectrum. As we have come to believe, Frost’s ostensible simplicity and directness stand against Stevens’ avowed complexity and abstraction; Frost’s apparent quickness to assume political and ideological stances counterpoints Stevens’ gingerly response to politics and war; Frost’s adherence to inherited metrical forms (whose range is, in memory, reduced to intricately rhymed verse or to a conversational blank verse) casts in relief Stevens’ nonchalant experiments with blank verse and free verse; Frost’s actual places with their sparse human communities forge a literalist simulacrum as against Stevens’ whimsical cognitive structures and his versified geography beyond the human or at least beyond our lifetimes. Even the emphasis of much contemporary Frost scholarship on the annotation and contextualization of primary materials as opposed to the focus of current Stevens scholarship on theoretical analysis could be taken as indicative of an enduring divide between the two poets. With Frost, whose literal style inclines scholarship in one direction, we may assume a fundamental understanding that must be unsettled, whereas for Stevens, whose abstract style inclines scholarship in another, there are still theoretical and critical apparatuses that must be brought to bear to secure our understanding of the work. Perhaps we are transfixed by Frost’s anecdote of their meeting, recounted here in essays by Barron, Kosc, and Hass. According to the story, Stevens remarked that the problem with Frost’s poetry was that it concerns “subjects” (or “things”), and Frost replied that the problem with Stevens’ poetry was that it concerns “bric-a-brac.”1 The message the story transmits is that although Frost’s poetry may err in being too direct, Stevens’ poetry [End Page 1] errs in being flashy or trivial. Frost thinks, whereas Stevens only muses. Frost is at the masculine pole of a gendered conception of discourse, whereas Stevens is at the effeminate pole (implicitly understood to be the less desirable one). Frost is the architect, Stevens the decorator. This binary, of course, mostly reflects Frost’s take on their relationship, and his anxieties about it. As memorable as it is, the story simplifies and distorts the quite complex relations between the two poets and their texts. Under the spell of Frost’s story, we seem to have lost sight of the poets’ mutual fondness for a bevy of actual and symbolic subjects (e.g., birds and New England landscapes and weather) as well as their shared tendency to fashion variegated narratives that depart from the real to include language play, the dreamlike, and the nightmarish. Both poets innovated within the context of prior verse practice; both explored philosophical and psychological dilemmas with subtlety and wit. As much as some biographers, we have bought into their myths, turning a single legendary encounter into the basis of a creative and personal antipathy that may not, in fact, be supported by factual inquiry. Beyond its divisive nature, the reception history of Frost and Stevens includes a unitary, if perhaps melancholy, implication: neither poet still plays a central role in debates about modernism. Frost, for his part, has seen his dissident modernist legacy dismantled, thus erasing our memory that he was, in fact, the first poet to be identified as modern. Stevens’ modernist credentials remain beyond reproach but also, perhaps, beyond widespread engagement: his status has seemed to diminish to a niche in recent years. Returning, then, to explore the two poets’ complementarities via their works, influences, and legacies is an intriguing twenty-first-century exercise for testing narratives of American poetry. And it is important to note the role played by contemporary poets in these reassessments. Many of the recent talks and publications that take Stevens...

The liberal contest for double-entry bookkeeping in British Government

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to contest Edwardset al.’s (2002) findings that resistance to the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping and the form that it took when implemented by the British Government in the mid-nineteenth century was the result of ideological conflict between the privileged landed aristocracy and the rising merchant middle class.Design/methodology/approach– The study draws upon a collection of documents preserved as part of the Grigg Family Papers located in London and the Thomson Papers held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. It also draws on evidence contained within the British National Archive, the National Maritime Museum and British Parliamentary Papers which has been overlooked by previous studies of the introduction of DEB.Findings– Conflict and delays in the adoption of double-entry bookkeeping were not primarily the product of “ideological” differences between the influential classes. Instead, this study finds that conflict was the result of a complex amalgam of class interests, ideology, personal antipathy, professional intolerance and ambition. Newly discovered evidence recognises the critical, largely forgotten, work of John Deas Thomson in developing a double-entry bookkeeping system for the Royal Navy and the importance of Sir James Graham’s determination that matters of economy would be emphasised in the Navy’s accounting.Originality/value– This study establishes that crucial to the ultimate implementation of double-entry bookkeeping was the passionate, determined support of influential champions with strong liberal beliefs, most especially John Deas Thomson and Sir James Graham. Prominence was given to economy in government.

The Great Recession: Some Niebuhrian Reflections

The Great Recession: Some Niebuhrian Reflections

Difficult Partners: Indo‐Australian Relations at the Height of the Cold War, 1949–1964

This article aims to make a long overdue re‐examination of Indo‐Australian relations in the early Cold War years. By drawing on available secondary sources, it reassesses the existing literature on Australian engagement with Asia. In so doing, it seeks to understand the reasons why the Menzies government found it so difficult to forge a close partnership with India. Canberra's rather frosty relations with New Delhi during the Menzies‐Nehru years had little to do with Menzies' alleged condescension towards the Asians or his personal antipathy towards Nehru. Rather, it had to do with the two leaders' different readings of Cold War politics as well as their responses to the structural changes taking place at the international level following the end of the Second World War.

White Shame

If we should watch a city coming into being in speech, I said, we also see its justice coming into being, and its injustice? Probably, he said. When this has been done, can we hope to see what we're looking for more easily? Far more easily. Is it resolved that we must try to carry this out? I suppose it's no small job, so consider Plato, Republic1 The Problem is under consideration here: the problem of those children of history who created the situation of and therefore bear responsibility for it. Joel Kavel White Racism: A Psychohistory2 Shame is directly about the self. In guilt, however, it is not the self but the act that is the central focus of negative evaluation.3 Discourse about race and in the United States includes a concept of white guilt but no concept of white shame. This reveals much about white moral psychologies and problems of race in America.4 In this essay I argue that whiteness operates with an impoverished concept of responsibility that overemphasizes guilt and underemphasizes moral shame.5 In contrast, I argue for a concept of responsibiUty that values both guilt and shame. I explore some of the impUcations of my analysis for race relations in America. I would like it to be clear from the start that I am not asking white people to feel more shame. Moral shame, in itself, is not especially praiseworthy. However shame can motivate us to try to reconnect, to work for forgiveness and reconciliation. It can arouse justified anger, which works to correct injustices, or to see them corrected. Appropriate moral shame, and a desire to avoid this negative emotion, can therefore motivate us in valuable ways. Typically, it is this motivation and the action it produces that are valuable, not the emotion itself. In other words, we need not waUow in moral shame. But of course shame, even moral shame, can have bad results. It can drive us apart. It can lead to dissociation. It can engender vicious anger. It can evoke narcissistic rage. AU of this is more likely for people with poorly integrated psychologies. I do think that better integrated moral psychologies could lead to better integrated communities, and conversely. But my primary aim in this paper is to advance our understanding of aspects of mainstream white moral psychology, the preoccupation with guUt, and how this bears on race relations in America. Political Philosophy and Moral Psychology Tommie Shelby argues that philosophical analyses of should focus on the political reality. For Shelby, ideology - not individual morality - should be primary in our thinking about racism.6 Lawrence Blum disagrees. According to Blum, in order to preserve the strong condemnatory force of racism we must consider it primarily as a matter of individual immoraUty. Blum defines racism as personal antipathy toward people who are perceived to be of other races. He worries that if we insist on using the term more broadly to refer to an ideology, then racism may devolve into amorally neutral concept of poUtical discourse and lose its meaning as a form of personal immorality.7 Both of these current approaches are flawed. Shelby's view leaves no room for emotion. He conceives of ideology in exclusively cognitive terms, as distortion of belief. As such, his conception of is insensitive to moral psychology. The deficiency in Blum's view is twofold: he makes no room for ideology in his account of and he restricts his account of the role of emotions to the moral psychologies of individual racists - personal antipathy. I explore how ideology and moral psychologies are co-constitutive, and how certain aspects of whiteness are the result. My focus is not on per se, but on aspects of whiteness that reinforce and perpetuate the unsatisfactory state of race in America. I argue that American liberalism and individuaUsm (ideology) form and are formed by moral psychologies that overemphasize guilt, and thus conceive of the responsibility of white people exclusively in terms of their voluntary acts. …

The Case for Fr. Charles Dominic Ffrench (1775-1851) (review)

Canadian The Case for Fr. Charles Dominic Ffrench (1775-1851). By Lawrence A. Desmond and Donna M. Norell. (Yorkton, Saskatchewan: Laverdure & Associates, Historians & Publishers. 2004. Pp. 207. Cdn$14.95 paperback.) Charles Ffrench, a Dominican priest of Irish origin, was a rather controversial character for at least half of his adult life. Father Dominic in religion, he lived in Ireland, Portugal, New Brunswick, New York, and Massachusetts in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Before moving to United States for good in 1826, Ffrench could not refrain from enmeshing himself in controversy. He was accused of sorts of misdeeds-defrauding old widows, abandoning and robbing his parishioners, staggering in streets due to heavy drinking, enjoying company of women and impregnating young servants, and inciting popular violence against episcopal and sacerdotal authority. In short, whenever contemporaries-and historians after them-needed to show quintessential misbehaving Irish priest in North America, they selected Ffrench and picked at random among his long list of misdeeds. Now Lawrence Desmond, a medievalist historian, and Donna Norell, a French literature specialist, attempt to redress balance by showing that, in spite of an irksome character, Ffrench was a good missionary who was unjustly accused for most of his life. Indeed, throughout a short book written in sharp, dry, and cogent prose of a court case (well reflected in book title), authors argue that accusations were all false (p. 14); that there is an absence of firm against Ffrench than malicious rumours, confessed lies, and suspect testimony (p. 127); and that his reputation is due to baseless charges (p. 159). As any good defense lawyer would do, on one hand Desmond and Norell describe context that made such a hostile environment possible and identify causes of this unfair treatment, thereby providing customary circumstantial evidence. On other hand, they take apart direct evidence on which case against Ffrench was built and provide new evidence in Ffrench's favor. With regard to context, Desmond and Norell maintain that Ffrench suffered from personal antipathy of several ecclesiastics who made up accusations or publicized unwarranted rumors until these reached his highest territorial superior. In fact, archbishop of Quebec, Joseph-Octave Plessis, who had disliked him right from their first meeting (1812), in end revoked his spiritual powers, except that of celebrating Mass (1817). This generalized aversion (p. 141) toward Ffrench was bred in a conflict of an ethnic nature, in which Ffrench suffered on account of his Irish origin, his English language, and his belonging to a conquering nation. Indeed, Ffrench case is, according to two authors, the most glaring example of negative results of FrenchIrish tensions in early nineteenth-century Canadian (p. 17). In depicting this context of personal antipathy and ethnic bias, Desmond and Norell are convincing. Ethnicity was a major factor in history of Catholic Church in North America during Ffrench's lifetime. Admittedly, most of evidence against Ffrench is provided by francophone sources, whereas most of evidence in his favor comes either from Ffrench himself or from priests of Irish origin. (It should be pointed out, however, that Ffrench's earliest accuser was Nicholas Murphy, an Irishman, and that several Catholic English-speaking personalities sided against him, such as Andrew Morris, Thomas Stoughton, Lewis Willcocks, and priests Paul McQuade and William Taylor.) Circumstantial evidence cannot stand alone in a courtroom, as it needs direct evidence. On this, however, Desmond and Norell's case is rather shaky, in spite of fact that book is replete with archival references. The two main documents on which they base their defense, A Short Memoir (1822) and Conversion (1840), were authored by Ffrench himself. …

From Darwin and Wallace to the discovery of Invar

Charles Darwin conceived his theory of the origin of species by natural selection following his voyage as naturalist on HMS Beagle . Among the many things he observed and pondered upon was the fact that in the Galapagos islands most of the animal species were found nowhere else in the world, and

A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean (review)

Reviewed by: A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 by Laurent Dubois Dwain Pruitt A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. By Laurent Dubois. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Laurent Dubois’ provocative new monograph examines revolutionary- and post-revolutionary era debates about race, citizenship and freedom. Although his scholarship is focused on Guadeloupe, Dubois moves beyond a simple micro-history to connect events in Guadeloupe with larger forces at work in the French Atlantic. As he correctly notes, “[n]either histories that focus narrowly on the ‘contagion’ of French revolutionary ideas into the region nor that deny the importance of such ideas to the actions of the enslaved can tell the full story of this Caribbean revolution (28).” He challenges historians of eighteenth-century French political culture to incorporate the colonies into the political work of the revolutionary decade: “This work focuses to a large extent on, and therefore risks privileging, struggles surrounding political forms—citizenship, rights, the Republic—that are still powerfully associated in the minds of many with European political and intellectual history. Like other scholars who have worked on the Caribbean in this period, I hope to help make it impossible in the future to screen out the profound contribution made by events in the Caribbean to the development of these political forms (6).” Dubois’ focus on Guadeloupe is significant. Moving attention away from Paris and Saint-Domingue, he argues, “highlights the dramatic possibilities opened up in the 1790s—when France and the Caribbean were united in a Republican colonial project based on granting rights to people of all colors—and the contradictions at the heart of this project, which led to its brutal demolition in 1802 (8).” His emphasis throughout is on black agency. The slaves’ political activism paralleled that of contemporary French women: “[B]oth groups sought to deploy and expand the universalist language of rights wielded by those who excluded them (7).” This black activism featured both the appropriation of the “ideologies and symbols of republicanism (89)” and violence first against “monarchical” forces and later against the Republic itself as self-proclaimed “new citizens” when it threatened their liberties (121). Gens de couleur demands for freedom and meaningful citizenship were countered by “Republican racism,” which Dubois characterizes as an ironic appropriation of French gradual abolitionism to argue that the freedmen were unprepared for freedom and still in need of the civilizing discipline of the plantations. To appropriate the title of Eric Foner’s classic study of American Reconstruction, “Republican racism” worked to assure that blacks received nothing but freedom and then, over time, took even that away. Dubois’ reading of events leading to 1802 seeks to nuance Yves Benot’s La démence coloniale sous Napoléon, which insisted on the Emperor’s personal antipathy towards blacks as being central to the reinstitution of slavery. Dubois argues that implicating Bonaparte as the sole responsible party in the backlash obscures larger sociocultural forces: “Rather than see Bonaparte as the motor of the reversals of the early 1800s, I argue that his policies in fact emerged from a general consensus that emancipation had led to chaos and barbarism and that the metropole needed to assert firmer control over the ex-slaves in their colonies (323).” Dubois’ tour de force opens up intriguing new possibilities for studies of democracy, Diasporan identity construction and black agency. Although A Colony of Citizens features impressive original scholarship, perhaps its most immediate contribution for non-specialists will be its succinct presentation of current scholarship. Dubois deftly braids together a broad range of secondary sources. Specialists will, of course, be able to find omitted works with which Dubois might have engaged or note ways in which areas of historiographical contention have been simplified, but none is so egregious as to undermine his credibility. For example, this reviewer did not see mention of Claude Wanquet’s La France et la première abolition de l’esclavage, 1794–1802: Le cas des colonies orientales, Ile de France (Maurice) et la Réunion, a work that assesses Republican France’s effective failure to emancipate those slaves in...

'MANLY COWARDYSE': THOMAS HOCCLEVE'S PEACE STRATEGY

Critics have often noted the unsure boundaries of political discourse in Hoccleve's work. Charles Blyth says of The Regiment of Princes: 'the Prologue is just as didactic as the Regiment proper, and the latter just as subjective', so that 'the entire work needs to be seen as a series of interactions ... between private and public'.1 This mixed quality is even more evident in the Series itself, an alternation of personal and didactic pieces which Roger Ellis, James Simpson, and others argue has strong structural parallels to the Regiment? Yet despite continuing interest in Hoccleve's poetry of identity, many have seen him as a tame political counsellor. In a recent book, Nicholas Perkins refers to 'the (relatively few) critics who find elements of resistance or threat in [the] Regimenf'.3 Since the Regiment is not an open critique of Lancastrian policy, as Hoccleve himself admits,4 it has often been thought to offer little significant political counsel. In Paul Strohm's words, Hoccleve 'altogether abandons the stance of admonitory critic, assuming instead that of wholehearted ally determined in no respect to offend'.5If the personal and the political are agreed to mix freely in Hoccleve's work, it is mainly because, in one way or another, he has a 'practice of using his own predicaments to illuminate general issues'.6 His self-presentation as poet, especially in relation to Chaucer, has been understood to his discredit as an independently minded writer. Strohm writes:The place of the Lancastrian king was one of profound doubt and unease, marked by guilty concealment and by fitful hope of definitive self-legitimation. And do not these terms also describe the place of the Lancastrian poet? ... beset by doubts about legitimacy and mandate, and bedeviled by the need for secure insertion in a legitimate and legitimizing literary succession.7Similarly, Hoccleve's comparisons, intended or unconscious, of his own state to that of the country or the new monarchy have been frequently read as anxious attempts to ally himself uncritically with the Crown, or to abase himself as an embodiment of how riot and rebellion should be dealt with.8 Derek Pearsall suggests that Hoccleve's frank admissions about his own misrule, taken to be true confessions, constructed him as a plain speaker, the kind of counsellor a good prince would have, and so formed part of an act of prince-pleasing for reward.9 The strongest defences of Hoccleve as a political poet have come from James Simpson and Nicholas Perkins, who find a more valuable contractual relationship between the impoverished writer and his interpreting addressee.10 In Simpson's view, the likeness of the poet's situation to his prince's exercises some restraint on the ruler, despite their unequal power, precisely because through it 'the bodily presence of the articulate subject, along with the needs of the larger body politic, loom unpredictably large'.11 Simpson's contractual interpretation rests mainly on Hoccleve's holding of the king to financial accountability, and to the keeping of his coronation oaths, rather as parliaments tried to do:Hoccleve's psychic and economic straits are made to resonate throughout the whole public sphere. Hoccleve seeks to win payment from the future king, but the Prince is also taught how he might win 'the peples voice' (1. 2885) by attending to the needs of the body politic.12Whilst I agree with this reading, I shall argue here for another kind of positive link between Hoccleve's critical self-constructions and his political poetry. I suggest that the unusually active personality effect maintained over several poems (the 'Male regle', the Regiment, and the Series) strengthens Hoccleve's hand as counsellor by helping to set up a clerkly counter-discourse to the norms of chivalric masculinity, and so to redefine the kind of political behaviour suitable to those rulers he addresses. In particular, I shall suggest that the often comic 'confessional' strain in his poetry outlines a sustained personal antipathy to violence which is transformed within the Regiment into a strategic persuasion against war. …

George Herbert: A Literary Life (review)

Reviewed by: George Herbert: A Literary Life Daniel W. Doerksen Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. xxv + 175 pp. $55 cloth; $19 paper. Cristina Malcolmson's George Herbert: A Literary Life – not to be confused with her previous Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (1999) – is a timely and welcome updating of Herbert's biography. It is one in a series of Literary Lives that "follow the outline of the writers' working lives, . . . aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing" (p. i). For that reason, perhaps, it begins with George Herbert's first writings, rather than dwelling on his childhood and family. It also features a substantial and useful "Chronology of Herbert's Life," with relevant contextual events given on facing pages. This book is timely because in the almost three decades since the publication of Amy M. Charles's Life of George Herbert (1977), significant new information and viewpoints have come to the fore. While Malcolmson admits that exactly why Herbert became first University of Cambridge Orator and then the parson of Bemerton may always remain a mystery, she proposes in this book to counter the long-standing view of Herbert as retreating from the world, and show him instead as "publicly engaged, active within an important social circle, and [to the end of his life] directly concerned with the future of world Protestantism" (p. ix). Malcolmson keeps this goal in mind as she relates Herbert's writings to their contexts, literary and historical. Her first chapter examines the Sidney-Herbert coterie (which she also dealt with in Heart-Work), showing why and how his family and religious ties influenced George's "formation as a poet" (p. 2). Thus Herbert's "answer" poems involve relationships, as she shows, to verse by Sidney, Sidney's nephew and "cultural heir" (p. 8) William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke), Benjamin Rudyerd, and Shakespeare, among others. William Herbert, the central [End Page 119] figure of this coterie and one of George Herbert's patrons, was also the "leading spokesperson" for the Protestant cause in the England of his time (p. 22). Herbert's writings while at the University of Cambridge (1612-23), Malcolmson claims, "signaled his dedication to international Protestantism, as well as his interest in high office in church or state" (p. 21). She reads his Latin poems in defense of English church ritual, Musae Responsoriae (which she dates 1620-21), as "an ambitious effort by . . . Herbert to become a spokesperson for King James and the established church" (p. 30). In keeping with the king's views to this date, he presented Puritanism in these poems not as a theological issue, but one of obedience to authority. Further, Malcolmson suggests that Herbert's Latin pacifist writings may have reflected not only a personal antipathy to war but also a "politic deference" to the views of King James (p. 39), "perhaps an opportunity to play Virgil to James's Augustus" (p. 51). At the same time these writings, and the poems to the Queen of Bohemia (recently proven to be by Herbert) show the poet's continuing commitment to international Protestantism (p. 37). However, Malcolmson can find no evidence that Herbert actually received patronage from James. Malcolmson singles out 1624 and 1627 as important dates for Herbert and his writings. In the first of these years Herbert cut off his chances of secular employment by seeking permission to be ordained deacon immediately. His reason, Malcolmson suggests, is that he wanted to avoid voting against James in Parliament, as his political relationship to the Earl of Pembroke would have required (p. 56). She goes on to claim that the poetry of The Temple reflects "issues significant to Herbert" during that year: "the problems of Arminianism and Puritanism, the importance and difficulties of a Protestant empire, and his own pursuit of patronage and employment" (pp. 56-57). Here as in Heart-Work Malcolmson notes signs of the Protestant work ethic, or doctrine of vocation, in "The Church-porch." In her view, throughout "The Church" itself Herbert "comments on contemporary controversies about theology and liturgy" (p. 60), emphasizing the Calvinist view that salvation...

Understanding Ian McEwan

This is a discussion of the work of one of Britain's most highly regarded novelists and the winner of the 1998 Booker Prize. David Malcolm places Ian McEwan's work in the context of British literature's particular dynamism in the last decades of the 20th century. He also examines McEwan's relationship to feminism, concern with rationalism and science, use of moral perspective, and proclivity toward fragmentation. Malcolm offers close readings of McEwan's early short stories, which he recognizes as traditional and conservative in technique despite their shocking subject matter, and all of McEwan's novels. Employing the third novel, The Child in Time, as the fulcrum for his discussion, Malcolm explores the themes of incest, espionage, moral self-flagellation, sexual fixation, political dysfunction, and personal antipathy evident in the other fiction. He illuminates the continuities obscured by the conventional approach to McEwan's fiction and raises the question whether McEwan is a novelist of brilliant fragments or of overall coherence.

Losing liberties

The Government's vendetta against community health councils (CHCs) has distorted their public involvement policy. Oddly ministers have failed to justify the decision in July 2000 to abolish CHCs, and it is widely believed that Alan Milburn's personal antipathy towards CHCs has overcome rational argument.