Personal Love Research Articles

The Rise and Fall of Royal Alexandria: From Mohammed Ali to Farouk

The exceptional growth of Alexandria in the nineteenth century stemmed from the desire of the Ottoman governor, Mohammed Ali Pasha, for a great trading port to link Egypt and Europe; his ambition to create an Egyptian navy in order to conquer other Ottoman provinces; and his personal love of the city, where his doctors encouraged him to bathe in the sea. Thereafter Alexandria remained the summer capital of Egypt. In order to escape the heat of Cairo, the court, the government and foreign diplomats moved there every June for three or four months. In July 1882, the presence in Alexandria of the Khedive Tewfik facilitated his alliance with Britain against an Egyptian nationalist movement, legitimising the British occupation of Egypt which would last until 1956. In July 1952, the presence of King Farouk and his ministers in Alexandria facilitated Nasser’s coup in Cairo. King Farouk departed for exile from Ras el-tine, the palace built by Mohammed Ali Pasha, the founder of his dynasty. It was the end of Alexandria’s role as the second capital of Egypt.

Outside the Paint: When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground (review)

Reviewed by: Outside the Paint: When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground Jason C. Chang (bio) Outside the Paint: When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground, by Kathleen S. Yep. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. xiv + 199 pp. $27 cloth. ISBN 978-1-59213-942-2 Long before the summer of 2010, when Jeremy Lin became the first Chinese American of full East Asian ancestry to sign a contract with the National Basketball Association (NBA), Chinese played professional basketball in the United States, barnstorming across the country as members of the Hong Wah Kues, playing with the likes of the famed Harlem Globetrotters. This is just one of several little-known stories Kathleen S. Yep has excavated in her eminently readable and tidy book, Outside the Paint: When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground. The book argues that during the interwar years working class Chinese American boys and girls in San Francisco's segregated Chinatown found freedom and space for creative expression on the basketball court, especially Chinatown's famed "Chinese Playground." Despite—or perhaps because of—their lack of access to resources (like uniforms) and their often smaller physical build (especially relative to their white opponents), these Chinese youths developed innovative ways of playing basketball that were not only ahead of their time but led them to multiple local and regional championships. For William Woo Wong (the subject of chapter 4), it even paved the way for play in New York's famed Madison Square Garden. Yep's larger argument is that in the face of racial oppression and enforced segregation, many of San Francisco's Chinese American youth were able to use sports to forge solidarities with their neighbors and find racial, gender, and class empowerment through excellence in the game of basketball. She subscribes to a theoretical approach to the sociology of sport that is cognizant of sports' dynamic social influence but eschews the more rigidly ideological approach to the field that casts sports as wholly reproductive of social inequality. Yep is centrally concerned with "highlight[ing] how sports are used to strengthen and, at the same time, challenge inequalities" (9). [End Page 233] Although Yep is a sociologist, her work "document[s] a hidden cultural history" through the use of a five chapter historical narrative that focuses on the various ways in which working class Chinese American boys and girls in San Francisco's Chinatown used basketball to "carve out space for themselves within the context of poverty, patriarchy, and racial segregation" (2, 3). Yep has chosen to focus on basketball both out of a personal love for the game, and because she believes "it reveals—more than any other sport—analytical nuances about socioeconomic class" (11). While I applaud the possibilities that might inhere in such a claim, I believe they are not thoroughly fleshed out in the book. The arguments Yep makes about resistance and social mobility afforded by success in basketball within a segregated racial and patriarchal community appear as though they would apply just as well to boxing and baseball, among other sports. I would like to have been persuaded by her argument about basketball's exceptionalism, but such a claim requires a more comparative approach, which the book does not offer. Yep's work straddles several disciplines, particularly sociology, ethnic studies, and history, and consequently she has put together an impressive methodology and unique set of primary sources to make her argument. In addition to conducting thirty-four interviews with people who participated in the vibrant basketball culture of San Francisco's Chinatown in the interwar years, Yep relies on publications in both the mainstream and ethnic press, government documents, personal papers, and various basketball ephemera dating to the time of her study—including many vivid broadsides reproduced in the book. Yep is clearly an assiduous researcher, and the book's footnotes thorough, but some historians may find the amount of evidence used to make larger claims a little thin. For instance, chapter 3, "The Mei Wahs Knew How to Use Their Elbows and Push," is unconvincing in its suggestion that there existed a causal relation between the Mei Wahs' working class background and their scrappy style of play. It is...

Book review: The Making of a Biogeographer: the life of Jack Briggs

ISSN 1948-6596 news and update family. With new sequence data and new tech- nologies becoming available, some parts of the presented phylogenies will certainly change. Some of the open questions will hopefully be solved soon, but I strongly believe that it will take a long time before this book is outdated. The book can be ordered for 110 US$ from http://www.compositae.org/, and by e-mail to compositaebook@gmail.com. All profits go to the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) (http://www.botanik.univie.ac.at/iapt/). Kadereit, J.W., & Jeffrey, C. (2007) Asteraceae. In The families and genera of vascular plants, vol. 8 (ed by K. Kubitzki). Springer, Berlin. References Edited by Joaquin Hortal Hanno Schaefer Division of Biology, Imperial College London, UK e-mail: hanno.schaefer@imperial.ac.uk http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/ hanno.schaefer Bremer, K. (1994) Asteraceae: Cladistics & Classifica- tion. Timber Press, Portland. book review The Making of a Biogeographer: the life of Jack Briggs A Professorial Life. An Autobiographical Account, by John C. Briggs Xlibris Corporation, 2009, 272 pp. ISBN 13 (TP): 978-1-4415-8881-4 http://academicautobiography.com/ With “A Professorial Life” John (Jack) Briggs, an icon in the field of Biogeography, follows the ad- vice of Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who suggested that every person should write their autobiography. At the outset Briggs defines his autobiography as an interlace between profes- sional and personal life that feed on each other and can’t be separated. Since he is turning 90 this year, Briggs has experienced enough changes both in the discipline and in society to have material for an insightful book. His book broadly covers three main areas: his personal life, a career in academia, and his main scientific contributions. His personal life is entertaining. I found his accounts of early fishing and hunting in wild California to be full of nostalgic charm. His short foray in the Air Force during WWII, followed by some hairy flights and landings in people’s fields in his personal airplane soon after the war, brought back a long lost sense of adventure. Jack Briggs married four times (his first wife married fifteen times!) and has nine chil- dren and many grandchildren. Thus his diatribes denouncing the poor state of education in the US, and his writing of a scientific children’s book (A Mesozoic Adventure, which incidentally my kids thoroughly enjoyed) clearly come from personal experience and frustration. A recurrent theme in the book is his interest in real estate. I quickly lost count of the number of houses that the Briggs household moved in and out of, bought and sold, I am wondering if Jack Briggs knows this number himself. The autobiography then moves into the sci- entific aspect of Briggs’ life. It is very interesting to try to figure out how Briggs’ career choices shaped his biogeographic thinking. As a child and young man, Briggs extensively camped and fished in Yosemite National Park, California, and later worked as a ranger at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. His personal love of the wild streams of the Western US translated in graduate work on the ecology of trout and salmon rivers. As a graduate student at Stanford, which was then still in the intellectual footsteps of David Starr Jordan, he learned to know fishes in the best possible place to do so. As was common then, while being a broad systematist, he also specialized in a par- ticular group of fishes. He focused his attention on gobiesocids, or clingfishes, a group of unique fishes with a sucking disk on their underside that, frontiers of biogeography 2.1, 2010 — © 2010 the authors; journal compilation © 2010 The International Biogeography Society

Overcoming a Euthyphro problem in personal love: Imagination and personal identity

In this paper I address a Euthyphro problem associated with personal love. Do we love someone because we have reasons for loving that person or do we have reasons for loving that person because we love her? I argue that a relational view of identity will help us move some distance towards resolving this dilemma. But the relational view itself needs to be further supplemented by examining the role that imagination plays both in personal identity and in our experience of love.

About Jahaz-bhais and Jahazbahens: The Politics of a Transnational Family in Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies

Primarily concerned with the South Asian diaspora in the different regions of the world, Amitav Ghosh has set himself the task of narrating an anti-Hegelian history of the world, incorporating hitherto left-out narratives of ordinary people and their attempts to resist the hegemony of the nation through their own stories and search for identity. Interestingly, it is because of this preoccupation with individuals and his postcolonial instinct to foreground their stories that the family has assumed such a central position in all of Ghosh's narratives. For Ghosh, family stories are always important because it is through them that history is experienced. The familial space in Ghosh, however, is not a passive site. Rather, it offers the individual a space that situates his identity away from the confines of the 'restrictively imagined collectivity' of the nation. It is an imagined space where bonds of personal love replace the troubled terrain of the nation with all its discontents. At the same time, this familial space is in no way unproblematic since it too involves power. It is a space to create, expand and protect subjectivities. But most importantly, in the fictional world of Ghosh, it is this nature of home that enables it to be relocated transnationally, beyond the 'shadow lines' of the borders of the home country, in different foreign physical spaces. Ghosh's basic point seems to be that home is everywhere; it only needs to be reinvented. Ghosh's characters are able to combat the diasporic angst through their successful engagement in an irresistible quest for the family in transnational locations. My paper aims to explore Ghosh's latest novel Sea of Poppies from this perspective.

Nehamas on Beauty and Love

In Only a Promise of Happiness Alexander Nehamas holds that beauty is the object of love. I raise three objections to this claim when formulated in terms of personal love: love is too narrow in scope to be the attitude whose formal object is beauty; one can experience a person's beauty but have no love for her; and love is of particulars, not of attributes, however specific, such as beauty. A second kind of love, hedonic love, is too broad in scope to be the attitude whose formal object is beauty. I also argue, contra Nehamas, that inner beauty exists.

Love as a Problem of Knowledge in Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Plato's Symposium

At the end of the essay “Silhouettes” in Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes, “only the person who has been bitten by snakes knows what one who has been bitten by snakes must suffer.” I interpret this as an allusion to Alcibiades' speech in Plato's Symposium. Kierkegaard invites the reader to compare Socrates with Don Giovanni, and Alcibiades with the seducer's women. Socrates' philosophical method, in this light, is a deceptive seduction: just as Don Giovanni's seduction leads his conquests to unhappy love—what Kierkegaard terms “reflective sorrow”—so the elenctic method leads Socrates' interlocutors to aporia, not to knowledge. I offer a critique of Socrates' ironic stance as a philosopher, which stance is reflected in the theory of love he presents in the Symposium, and suggest that philosophy should be modeled on the romantic love of persons—a love that can be reciprocated—not the love of an impersonal Form, a one-sided love.

Plato: White and Non-white Love

lato’s dialogues, the Symposium, and Phaedrus, provide a reasonable explanation of love. G. Vlastos and M. Nussbaum do not share such an opinion. The former contends that Plato’s view of love is about loving only a person’s beauty, but not the entire person; thus, it falls short of an appropriate explanation of love. The latter holds that a theory of love should be complete, and that Plato’s one is incomplete on the grounds that it does not account for personal love. These criticisms will be re-evaluated in light of the duality of love (the white and non-white horses—in Phaedrus) as well as participants’ views in the Symposium; a re-assessment will weaken the mentioned objections. This paper contends that from the Symposium and Phaedrus, one can have a fruitful understanding of being in love, being out of love, falling in love, loving for its own sake and being erotically in love. In order to account for these related issues of love it is important to consider Plato’s works in terms of his “official” and “unofficial” views. The former is construed as the doctrine of the lover or loving for its own sake: this is associates with Diotima’s views which are repeated by Socrates. With reference to the latter, it is possible to explain what personal love or being in love, being out of love, falling in love, and being erotically in love involve. Erotic love will be interpreted as an extension of our philosophical conception of love, related to views of love that are mentioned in the Symposium other than Socrates’ report of Diotima’s conceptions. This paper is divided into two parts: the first one will show views of love in the Symposium. That is, being in love, being out of love, falling in love and loving for its own sake will be discussed. In addition, the forementioned criticisms will be re-evaluated. In the second section, we will show that Aristophanes’ speech expresses erotic love, and then Kant’s objections will be explained and discussed. Part One: Unofficial notion of love and the concept of being in love In the Symposium, Agathon invited Socrates and others to his banquet. Including the host, there were eleven of them, and the twelfth being drunk entered when the banquet was nearly finished. On that particular occasion, P

Jerry

Jerry is a personal essay in which the author examines his relationship with a friend of the past 11 years. The author draws parallels between their outwardly very different lives and suggests how personal love and spiritual grace have unexpectedly crept in to influence both of them.

Erotic Emissions in Greek Poetry: A Common Link Between Generalized Integration Networks

I use the network model of Blending Theory to present a conceptual generalization over several case studies of imagery, belonging to three different periods of Greek love poetry: ancient Greek lyric, medieval folksongs, and two 20th century poets, Ritsos and Elytis. All these linguistic expressions intend to convey a rather immediate emotional response to an erotic stimulus. In order to enhance the cause-effect vital relation, they prompt for the construction of a number of conceptual blends, all sharing a generic common link of erotic emission. Variation in the realization of the pattern crucially relies on assigning the role of the emitter to the loved person or to an external agent, and on selecting a specification for the EMISSION image schema, like light, wind, or an object. Culture and communicative context impose further constraints that can be studied systematically.

The Utopian Function of Affect in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café

Despite the prevalence of social themes in her fiction, Carson McCullers has not acquired a reputation as a writer with a progressive social vision. One reason for this view of McCullers's work is that her oblique approach to political matters of race, gender, and class has led many readers to view her work symbolically. A survey of McCullers criticism in the decades following the publication of her final novel would indicate that she exposes unhappiness that is spiritually, not historically, derived; that her works are allegorical depictions of loneliness and longing belonging to everyone; that her interest in socially and politically marginalized characters serves primarily to illustrate a universally tragic human condition. Changes to this critical approach to McCullers have been a long time coming. Since the 1970s, feminist critics like Elaine Ginsberg and Louise Westling have worked to recover the historical dimension of her work by foregrounding its exposure of gender roles, and now McCullers's cast of oddballs and freaks is often taken as a model of diversity and heterogeneity that is at least quasi-political in nature. The pall of tragedy, however, has for the most part remained. Only recently, with the 2003 publication of Sarah Gleeson-White's Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers, has a critic attempted to introduce a more affirmative view of McCullers, celebrating her menacing and ultimately transgressive vision, and its emancipatory and empowering (10). Given the heavy emotional tones of suffering and frustration that surround most of McCullers's characters, the relative lateness of this kind of appraisal is not surprising. Yet there are other elements in her work that suggest that tragedy is not her only mode of operation. True, her characters almost invariably suffer, and the worlds they inhabit are dim. But they are also frequently dreamers whose most consistent trait is the capacity to project themselves into some anticipated and variously imagined state of incipient togetherness. It matters little that the content of their respective visions often leaves them isolated or at odds with each other (as evinced in the explosive meeting between Jake Blount and Benedict Mady Copeland, Marxist visionaries both, at the end of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter). The presence of so many dreamers under one sky is a sign of untapped utopian potential which the failure of each individual only seems to emphasize. If McCullers's work traditionally has not been identified with hopeful affirmation it is only because the personal tragedies of her characters have clouded readers' perceptions of the utopian nature of her vision, a vision that is attuned to the social potential inherent in the collective, even while it seems to insist on the tragedy that besets individuals. The key to recognizing the utopian dimension of McCullers's fiction is to consider the conditions that impose limits and create possibilities in her characters' lives. In her fiction as well as in her expository writing, McCullers identifies these conditions with affective states. In a passage from her 1949 essay Loneliness... An American Malady, for example, she emphasizes how affect (in this case love) has the capacity to engender social as well as personal possibilities: Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the lyon, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going?--and having cast out fear, can be honest and charitable. (Mortgaged 260) In what follows I am going explore the social extension of the we to which McCullers refers, especially in light of her comments about love opening new relations between the personality and the world. …

Towards an Ontology of Fetishes

Alphonso Lingis (1933– ) is an American continental philosopher and translator who is currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.1 Associated with the phenomenology, existentialism, and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lingis’s philosophical influences also encompass the literary works of Pierre Klossowski and Yukio Mishima, Michel Tournier, and the postpsychoanalytic theory of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Lingis’s philosophical concerns are thus similar to those of major continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault, and with whom he often engages in sustained dialogues on everything from sensuality and anthropology to travelogue, the human body, inanimate objects, the elements, and perception.

The Sudan Sensation of 1898

In early September 1898, after a two-year campaign reported in detail by some of the most famous war correspondents in the late Victorian period, an Anglo-Egyptian force under Lord Herbert H. Kitchener smashed the army of the Khalifa at his capital of Omdurman in the Sudan. Initially the event led to the usual spate of merchandising common during the time, but for weeks, then months after the battle the event and the participants stayed squarely in the public consciousness. This paper explores the breadth and depth of the public’s mania for all things Omdurman for the remainder of 1898, and speculates why a public that showed no great personal love for the regular army (at least, as enlistees) went on a binge of regular army hero worship.

Persons as Objects of Love

AbstractRecent attempts to view personal love as a response to value fail to capture the lover's distinctive compulsion to intimacy with the beloved. Their common mistake is to hold that the grounding value of love must be other than the beloved person herself. This view condemns theorists to describe an attachment comparatively impersonal and undiscerning. The present paper argues that the beloved person is the object of love, particularly when she is regarded in light of her virtues. Virtues are aspects of character that embody the unique value of the person they help constitute and cannot be valued appreciably apart from her. One person can love another for her virtues, indeed for the goodness that lies within them without loving her for something that someone else could instantiate.

Was the Personal Political? Reading the Autobiography of American Communism

Taking the communist memoir as a sub-genre of working-class autobiography, the article analyzes, first, the characteristics of the communist autobiography, the conditions under which such works were produced, and their intended functions. Second, the article considers some personal dimensions of American communist history and how this more subjective side of the history relates to the more familiar political narrative of the movement. Recent feminist and other theory of autobiography are employed to analyze approximately forty communist autobiographies and other personal narrative material to analyze personal love and marriage, child rearing and family life, and self-identity within the party.

Almost all the Survivors

Almost all the Survivors Mairi MacInnes (bio) Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the Creative Process edited by Richard M. Berlin, M.D. (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xiv + 182 pages. $21.95) “Almost all the survivors [of concentration camps], verbally or in their written memoirs, remember a dream which frequently recurred during the nights of imprisonment. . . . They had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to.” These are the words of Primo Levi in his preface to The Drowned and the Saved (1988); his motive in writing that marvelous book was to set down an inescapable truth in the words of a witness and survivor. I remembered them while reading Poets on Prozac, for the mad also fear they will not be believed or listened to. And aren’t their fears often borne out? In common forms of therapy, a therapist may not be permitted in theory to respond in any way to the patient’s description of his or her torments, but simply sits and listens—a wounding and even vitiating form of disbelief. Often, very often, a psychiatrist will scribble a prescription before asking why the self-harm or why the attempt at suicide, and sometimes won’t bother to ask at all, since apparently the words of these mistaken people, these liars (the mad), may seem to the doctor less important than those of normal people. And what of the inescapable truth of what the witnesses to madness and its survivors have experienced? The [End Page liv] sixteen essays that make up this book are not quantifiable evidence of such truth, of course, and they amount to little more than case histories; their value as evidence comes from the poets who wrote them. I don’t know that poets necessarily tell the truth about themselves; Plato of course said poets were liars, and wanted them banished from his Republic. What we can be sure of is that they will make good cases for themselves, which is something different from the case for each a doctor might present. In poetry, after all, our human freedom finds its supreme expression. So will these poets say what it’s like to be mad and what sort of poetry comes out of their condition? Is madness the divine engine of great poetry, as inconsistent Plato proposes in the Phaedrus, or is that hokum? And what about modern drugs that can ease the burden of madness but often turn a madman into a zombie: Do they kill poetry too? Do they make poetry boring? Or, mirabile dictu, do they bring poems into being? Listen to Gwyneth Lewis: her account is the first in the book, as well as the best written and the most clear, honest, and convincing one. She thanks Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky as instructors for helping her “pick a way of truth telling in words that would allow me to sidestep my own dishonesties. I consider myself fortunate to have a craft and an artistic tradition that show me how best to embark on such difficult discoveries and allow me to travel in the company of other poets. While we are using language, we are never speaking alone.” She has struggled to come clean; she’s not smothering us with words; she dismisses the solipsism present in less hardworking writers and the narcissism in the bad poems that dot the book. Jack Coulehan is another person who writes clearly and honestly of his experiences, especially about the transformations that can occur in common life along with the sudden understanding that occurs through the labor of making a poem. He’s also witty, thank God. And so is Thomas Krampf, a seriously ill schizophrenic who jumped out of a fourth-floor window and lived to tell how it was and how he writes now. And so too is Andrew Hudgins, like many of the contributors to this book, a writer who endears himself to the reader as one ashamed of his rotten, obsessive, selfish behavior and the tics that went with it until, lo...

“Her cruell hands”: Love as Predation in Amoretti

Although Edmund Spenser's Amoretti has long been considered the poet's personal love song for his second wife to be, Elizabeth Boyle, it is quite difficult to accept that she is the only lady in the poem. Especially, when we accept the fact that Spenser actually has in mind three women who bear the name Elizabeth as he declares in Sonnet 74, it becomes more probable that there are more than one lady presented in the sequence. Among the three ladies that the poet mentions, Queen Elizabeth I plays particularly an important role in the sequence when we consider Spener's relationship with the queen and the publication date of the poem. And it is my contention that a significant part of the work deals with the poet's struggle to acquire her love or her favour. It is not difficult to find in Amoretti the elements that can be interpreted as a manifestation of the poet's bitterness for not having been received in the queen's court as he thought he deserved. The most interesting thing is that the queen is presented mostly as a scornful fighter, cruel warrior, and often greedy predator, while the poet is an ineffectual wooer, peace-seeking hostage, and helpless prey. The pain of unrequited love or of a scorned lover lies at the heart of the sequence. To the poet, love is a game that is extremely lopsided and unfair. But he has to play this game because he cannot survive without his lady's love, which is seen as essential nourishment to him. Thus, predation becomes an important metaphor that illustrates the peculiar relationship between the poet and the lady he loves. Closely related to the dramatic development of the sequence, the poet's struggle to deal with the lady's cruelty constitutes a central part of our experience of the poem. Spenser's longing for royal favour is reflected in the relationship between the poet and the lady in Amoretti, and it is probably the poet's attempt to present himself as a scorned lover to the queen and/or to those that hold power in Elizabeth's court that makes the sonnet sequence such an extravagant complaint, rather than a personal love song.

The Late-Victorian Romance Revival: A Generic Excursus

The Late-Victorian Romance Revival:A Generic Excursus Anna Vaninskaya Attempting to define romance is like attempting to define genre itself: an immensely revelatory but ultimately futile exercise.1 At the very least it is doomed to circularity and tautology, for it starts out already knowing what the definition is—enough, at least, to specify or to extend it. Taxonomies build on and link up with previously existing taxonomies, along a chain that disappears into the remote past of Western literary history. To abstract a set of romance characteristics from a group of texts one has to use some criteria to identify that group in the first place, and any such criteria will be a version of the very romance characteristics one is looking for. But though they may be methodologically problematic, there is no shortage of ideal formal definitions which attempt to conscript everything from medieval tales of aristocratic love and supernatural adventure to modern-day "genre fiction," and Northrop Frye's mythos of summer is only the most famous. These models can hardly do justice to the complex cultural background of an individual work, let alone a period phenomenon like the "romance revival" of the 1880s and 90s. Derek Brewer's canonical characterisation will serve to illustrate the difficulty. Like Northrop Frye and Gillian Beer,2 Brewer is interested in romance as a "mode" in continuous metamorphosis from Greek antiquity, through the medieval and early modern cycles, to Morris, MacDonald, Wells, and finally Tolkien. The romance is "a fantasy story about an individual's personal love and adventure, in which quest and conflict culminate in a happy ending. The story is told in a natural sequence with rhetorical art, local realism, and humour. The subject-matter is secular, but there are symbolic implications. Romance may be said to be the antithesis of tragedy.…" It is a late-cultural form, sophisticated and aesthetically self-aware, told "by well-educated men to upper-class audiences."3 But it also shares many of the formal characteristics of folktale narratives and makes extensive use of convention and repetition, [End Page 57] of the marvellous, supernatural, and improbable. Unlike the epic, the romance is concerned with the individual, though public and private are usually reconciled in the happy ending and social responsibility is restored. Although Brewer's representative sample is mainly medieval, his definition is meant to be general enough to apply to a variety of contexts: "Romance is a mode … and examples are found from Classical Antiquity to the present day."4 Indeed, in the critical debates of the fin de siècle many of its elements—idealism, optimism, improbability, adventure—were commonplace. But just as many were conspicuous by their absence, or were altered beyond recognition. The target audience was assumed to be significantly lower on the social scale; the relative prominence of individual or society was fiercely contested; fantasy and humour were by no means always welcome guests. The romance itself appeared younger: the earliest (and most juvenile) of literary modes. For its detractors it was, if anything, the very opposite of its aristocratic predecessor, a mass commercial genre produced by hacks for the edification of lower-class boys. Those more charitably disposed talked of Scott and Stevenson and the literature of the youth of mankind. None of this undermines Brewer's definition in its entirety, for there is no doubt that it holds well for certain times, places, and individual texts. But neither it nor any other summation can be expected to distil the essence of more than a thousand years of literary development. A genre is not an abstract entity, but one which manifests itself in concrete works and at specific historical moments: it is, in the end, what contemporaries (and future generations) make of it, and what they make of it alters over time. When one recalls that even during a given period different interpretative communities approach the same object with very different agendas, the possibility of a unifying definition dissipates like the mirage it is. So what made the late-Victorian romance revival a new and period-specific departure? After all, romance had been defining itself against realism ever since the rise of the novel, and...

War for Welfare

What is the origin of Management leading towards national Welfare planning, development and optimisation all over the World? This question opens a Pandora's Box. It is significant that it is a key question to open up the knowledge of a world of ignorance, with some believing that strategic management is initiated by science and some as economics. The answer is the WAR that gave birth to the concepts of Management. [Note - In Greek mythology, God Zeus - God of intelligence, like the Roman Jupiter - gave a box to Pandora (the first intelligent greek woman ever created), with the instructions that she should not open it. By her curiosity she opened it. All the miseries and evils (boxed for the good of the world) flew out to afflict mankind by asking questions, questions and questions]. First of all, the word STRATEGY itself is a proprietary property of the mongers. Any peace loving person will continue his living by synchronizing his mind and body with the environment, the surroundings (including people, geography and the nature) and the nature. But people in conflict do not live in peace at any point of time. They always try to guess the probable movement of the enemies, always plan and innovative ways to over come their enemies. This motivated innovation is the Strategic approach. The strategies are optimised target hitting experiences and these tactics could be applied to any peace time techno-commercial problems. Hence, they took shape as Management Models. The best contributors are from the Mahabharatha war (3,102 BC), Artha Sasthra enunciated by Kautilya (4th Century BC), the First world (1914-1918) and the Second world (1939-1945). This paper expalins this contributions in detail

Case of the deputy ward manager who broke patient confidentiality

Mrs A was a well known figure in her local community. She had not only been the local headmistress, but had led the town council and had been awarded an honour in the Queen's birthday honours. There was no doubt that she was a much loved person whose family strove to enable her to continue living her life as independently as possible. Now, at the age of 85years, the effects of her chronic illness were starting to take their toll and Mrs A was admitted to a medical assessment ward to determine her future care and treatment.