Posthumous Publication Research Articles

The Collected Poems of Anna Seward by Anna Seward

Reviewed by: The Collected Poems of Anna Seward by Anna Seward Claudia Thomas Kairoff Anna Seward, The Collected Poems of Anna Seward. Ed. Lisa L. Moore. 2 vols. The Pickering Masters (London: Routledge, 2016). Pp. 688. $385.00. More than a century after Walter Scott published his seriously flawed, three-volume edition of The Poetical Works of Anna Seward in 1810, Lisa L. Moore has produced a much-needed collection of Seward’s poems that should be welcomed by all students and scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era writing. Moore has corrected many of Scott’s editorial offenses, and while hers is not the complete, critical edition that Seward devotees might wish for, this collection makes possible the kind of critical discussions previously almost impossible due to the scarcity of Scott’s publication and Seward’s disappearance from many recent anthologies. Moore has gathered over 370 poems, including a previously unpublished three-book manuscript, Telemachus, the only completed portion of Seward’s intended versification of Fenelon’s prose epic. Known at present chiefly through sparse reprintings in anthologies, or discussions of her work in scholarly books and articles, Seward’s canon resembles the elephant described by three blind men stationed at different parts of his body. Was she an early advocate of environmentalism? A celebrator of women’s domestic crafts? Did she write lesbian verse, or did the passionate poems about her foster sister reflect a deep familial, even quasi-maternal, love? Was Seward’s verse more Augustan or more Romantic? The broad scope of the poems arrayed here presents evidence for multiple critical assessments. Seward’s incomplete Telemachus represents one pole of a career that encompassed every type of verse popular throughout her lifetime, including occasional tributes, songs, elegies, a verse-novel, and odes. Seward may be best known today for her role in the late-century “sonnet revival,” and here we find all one hundred of her Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), as well as other sonnets published elsewhere. Their inclusion among so many other poems confirms the basis of Seward’s claim to preeminence among sonnet-writers, her mastery of English poetic form and technique. [End Page 127] Among Moore’s most valuable contributions is her concise but informative introduction. In just over twenty pages, she narrates the chief facts of Seward’s life and discusses numerous critical issues, such as the poet’s chief influences, her American reception, her sonnet revival role, her poetics, and her relationships with other contemporary writers. Each of these topics not only points the way toward further exploration but also suggests scholarly opportunities. Among the main virtues of Moore’s introduction is an absence: the omission of Scott’s patronizing tone and ambivalence, which apparently locked following biographers and critics into a pose of condescension—or, at best, a kind of aporia—for over a century. Building instead on Teresa Barnard’s recent biography and on less biased recent scholarship, Moore may have definitively released Seward from her “Sleeping Beauty”–like critical swoon. Moore describes her discovery of the surprising extent to which Scott interfered with Seward’s poems during their publishing. Two years before her death in 1809, Seward mailed Scott her poems, already prepared for posthumous publication. Seward believed she was honoring Scott by entrusting him with the task. Instead, the harassed young editor-writer disparaged Seward’s verse in his correspondence and omitted publication of Telemachus, which Seward considered her masterpiece although she never published the epic fragment. Moore found the Telemachus manuscript at the National Library of Scotland (another copy remains at the Johnson Birthplace Museum in Lichfield), where it was likely preserved while the rest of Seward’s poems were discarded after printing. Scott’s decision not to print a poem so highly esteemed by Seward is puzzling, but more discouraging is Moore’s revelation of the extent to which he tampered with her other poems. Moore discovered one surviving poem from the vanished manuscript, a previously published “Elegy Addressed to the Rev. Thomas Sedgewick Whalley” that Seward had retitled “Last Lay of the Lichfield Minstrel” in playful allusion to Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Scott restored the poem’s original...

Dante in the Hands of a Modernist Glutton. Notes on C.E. Gadda’s Narrative Deformations of the Comedy

Dante in the Hands of a Modernist Glutton. Notes on C.E. Gadda’s Narrative Deformations of the Comedy Mathijs Duyck Of all Italian modernist writers, Carlo Emilio Gadda is without doubt the one who most painstakingly dialogues with, and radically deforms, canonical models of Italian literature.1 In his writings, be they fictional or non-fictional, he skillfully blends centuries of Italian literature and arts (and the most savory bits of European culture) into a broth, a brodaglia, which he then uses as a basis for his own innovative haute cuisine.2 In this paper, I would like to reflect on one of the main ingredients preferred by the voracious author, Dante’s Comedy, and its important function in the creation of the peculiar texture and flavor of Gadda’s works. The inter-textual connections between Gadda and Dante have hitherto mainly been examined within the boundaries of the traditional critical frame of “plurilinguism” (plurilinguismo) shaped by Gianfranco Contini, which has dominated Gadda studies from the 1940s to the end of the century. This perspective situates both authors on the chronological extremities of a “plurilinguistic line” that runs through Italian literary history and thus develops an alternative tradition with regard to Petrarch’s “monolinguism.”3 The prevailing [End Page 353] interest in the formal and stylistic qualities of the prose, inherent in this approach, has brought to the surface an enormous quantity of Dantesque nutrients in Gadda’s broth, certainly not limited to those texts employing archaic “Tuscanizing” dialects (such as Eros e Priapo or the Primo libro delle favole), as is shown by the long lists of luoghi danteschi established by scholars such as Scorrano and Bertolini.4 However, the focus on language and style does not fully cover this entangled inter-textual “muddle” (gnommero), to put it in Gadda’s own terms. Since the 1990s, a growing insight in the author’s laboratory of notes, manuscripts, and unpublished works has fostered scholarly interest in Gadda as narrator, and in particular in the relation between his research on narrative, his interaction with precedent models of storytelling, and his own narrative experiments.5 This “narrative turn,” as one could describe it, re-frames the relations between the modernist author and the literary tradition and leads to ask what specific function Dante’s masterpiece has in Gadda’s reflection on storytelling. In the following pages, I aim to demonstrate how Gadda’s readings of Dante can help to understand the intricate connections between his early theoretic texts and experimental narratives such as Il castello di Udine and La cognizione del dolore. It is no exaggeration to state that the posthumous publication of two unfinished works, written in the 1920s and brought to light in the final decades of the 20th century, has led to a revolutionary revision of the interpretive frames applied to Gadda’s writings. On the one hand, the Meditazione Milanese (1928), a philosophical treatise sui generis, offers an invaluable insight into Gadda’s symbiotic perspective on gnoseology, metaphysics and ethics, which constitutes the basis for the construction of his fictional world(s) and his way of writing and storytelling. On the other hand, one finds the Racconto italiano di ignoto del Novecento (1924–25), Gadda’s first big novel project, which progressively transforms into a reflection on narrative, also referred to as the Cahier d’études, and which will be the starting point of my discussion. The Cahier heavily draws on Aristotle’s Poetics, and in particular on the distinction between epic poetry and tragedy, on which Gadda models his own [End Page 354] distinction between two types of narrative discourse, i.e. the “direct play” of the author (or gioco ‘ab exteriore’) and the “indirect play” (also gioco ‘ab interiore’). This opposition is basically described as a choice between different kinds of poetic expression, or, better, different ways of transmitting the “poeticized substance” (materia poetizzata) to the reader (474).6 Although the term “lyricism” (lirismo), with which Gadda continually refers to this poetic expression, may sound misleading, the essential criterion of distinction between these types, as in Aristotle, is the mode of focalization: whereas in the first case the discourse is directly enunciated by...

Faut-il revoir l’histoire du CICR durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale ?

This article is a posthumous publication of the conference led by Swiss historian Jean-Claude Favez at the Yad Vashem in October 1997. Not only is it a contribution to the historiography of the Jewish Holocaust that took place during the Second World War, it is also a significant source for the understanding of the debates concerning the attitude and lack of involvement of the ICRC during this disaster. As the ICRC was highly criticized for its inactiveness regarding the policy of genocide of the Third Reich, it mandated Professor Favez to publish a piece entitled: Une mission impossible ? Le CICR, les deportations et les camps de concentration nazis (1988, ed. and transl. by John and Beryl Fletcher, The Red Cross and the Holocaust, London, 1999). Professor Favez addresses three complimentary questions during this conference at the Yad Vashem: “What did the ICRC know of the ‘Final Solution’? Did it have any intention of intervening? With what tools?” In addition to these questions, J.-C. Favez underlines alternative pathways to understand the relationship between Switzerland and the ICRC. This is an essential aspect of his analysis of the actions of the ICRC.

The Introjective Function of Dreaming and Its Impact on the Theory of Technique.

The author proposes for debate the thesis that the main function of the process of "dreaming" (Träumen) is a daily reactivation of the process of introjection. He itemizes and discusses the epistemological obstacles that apparently prevented Freud from taking this hypothesis under consideration. He goes on to examine the arguments and assumptions supporting the hypothesis that he discerns in Freud's development of the theory of the dream and in the posthumous publications of Ferenczi. After demonstrating the affinities between his own conception of the introjective function of dreaming and Jean Laplanche's "general theory of seduction," he evokes a few of the effects of his thesis on the practice and metapsychology of analytic technique.

DeShazer, M.K.Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 2013. 239 pp £28.50 ISBN 978–0472118823 (hbk)

The term mammographies signifies both the technology of imaging by which most Western women learn that they have contracted breast cancer and the documentary imperative that drives their written and visual mappings of the breast cancer experience. Key to this explanation and the development of the book is the concept of the post-millennial shift in breast cancer narratives. The book investigates the change in narratives (and subsequent tensions) around breast cancer before and after 2000. These narratives are constructed through DeShazer's analysis of the written and photographic diaries, blogs and newspaper serialisations of breast cancer memoirists. The book as whole can be described as being literary critical, feminist and interdisciplinary. In terms of the representation of breast cancer, one of the primary tensions that the author deals with is between the buoyant pink and the elegiac anti-pink iconography, and between the visceral and sanitised representations of breast cancer. Similarly, throughout the book, remembering those who have died from the condition is preferred to the discourse on cancer survivors as heroes. The use of warlike metaphors for beating cancer is also confronted. The book is both highly absorbing and very readable. I covered 30 pages with hardly a pause in reading, a clear sign that the author is very experienced and competent. The publication is also a good introduction to the literary category and medical narrative known as autothanatography. An autothanatography gives a written account of a person's journey with a terminal illness and constitutes the terminal counterpart to writing about ones' own life in an autobiography. The second chapter entitled ‘Breast cancer narratives as feminist theory’ contrasts two diagnostic trends in breast cancer: the familial (genetic) and the environmental (carcinogenic). The narrative of inevitability, of being part of a lineage of breast cancer suffers, is intertwined with the issue that many substances in our environment (such as our food, cosmetics and the air we breathe) contain carcinogens and cancer caused by such means is preventable. The later theme constitutes an intersection between breast cancer and green and anti-capitalist theories, something which Audre Lorde (one of the autothanatographers in the book) terms Cancer Inc. Many sections of the book analyse the queering of breast cancer narratives, citing authors who challenge the dominant heterosexism of the social representation of breast cancer as well as the manner in which treatment schemes are designed almost solely for heterosexual women. All this, DeShazer argues, is part of the post-millennial shift away from traditionally feminine depictions of breast cancer. Chapter six, ‘Cancer narratives and the ethics of commemoration’ helps to shift the analysis from the literary to a visual perspective and introduces the concept of photo-diaries of breast cancer patients such as those by Charlee Brodsky, as depicted on the book cover. This is connected in part with Susan Sontag's (1979) ideas of photos as memento mori, and Sontag's work features prominently in this book. Chapter six also touches on the carnivalesque nature of mammographies, the posthumous issues of consent and the ethics of breast cancer. Indeed, Roland Barthes’ concepts of punctum and stadium are also invoked at various points in the text as a means of theorising the medical narrative. Furthermore, the photographic diaries of breast cancer patients help the reader to engage with the dichotomy between public grief and private illness by showing images of breast cancer patients that would only be witnessed in a closed family circle, highlighting the pre-millennial tendency to avoid graphic representations of post-mastectomy bodies. The penultimate chapter ‘Bodies, witness, mourning: reading breast cancer autothanatography’ addresses the ethics of the posthumous publication of diaries and photographs. The chapter casts light upon the tensions between family members, for example. DeShazer suggests that one must address questions such as who has rights to the material (diaries and images) left by the deceased and whether there is a moral obligation to publish the departed person's work in the same narrative (feminist, queer, for instance) that it was written. This chapter is a poignant reminder that memory outlasts the physical form of a person, as do the perceived obligations that come with remaining true to a loved ones' legacy. For those interested in medical narratives, medical semiotics, photographic diaries, the ethics of posthumous publication and feminist and anti-capitalist literature, I highly recommend this thought-provoking publication. For those who are not, I recommend it still as it functions as a wonderful introduction into autothanatography and all the other topics touched on above.

Becoming Heinrich Schenker: Music Theory and Ideology. By Robert P. Morgan

‘Music and Music’s laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Schenker be! and all was light.’ No one at all familiar with the writings and opinions of Heinrich Schenker—the eightieth anniversary of whose death (13 January) as well as the posthumous publication of his final theoretical text, Der freie Satz, falls in 2015—would be much surprised were such a self-penned reworking of Alexander Pope’s epitaph for Isaac Newton to be found among his unpublished papers. The thought is prompted by Robert P. Morgan’s comparison, towards the end of this book, of the scientist and the music theorist, though Morgan is quick to point out that ‘Schenker’s musical universe did not, like Newton’s physical one, achieve instantaneous equilibrium, nor did it then maintain a perpetual steady state’ (p. 224). The comparison arises within a discussion of the ‘scientific orientation’ of Schenker’s work, part of the concluding chapter of the volume. This, together with a ‘critical assessment’ of Schenker’s ‘final theory’ and a similar assessment of his ideology, makes up Part III (‘Reconsideration’: pp. 183–229). The book begins with an Introduction and an ‘overview of Schenker’s mature theory’ (Part I: ‘Theory’, pp. 3–37 at p. 14) and proceeds (Part II: ‘Development’, pp. 41–180) to a chapter-by-chapter exposition of the publications through which his development as a music theorist can be charted: the 1895 essay ‘Der Geist der musikalischen Technik’; Harmonielehre (published in 1906 without the definite article that Morgan’s chapter heading erroneously supplies); the two chronologically separated volumes of Kontrapunkt; the ‘monographs’, from the early study (1903) of C. P. E. Bach through to the Erläuterungsausgabe of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A, Op. 101 (1921); then Der Tonwille and Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, and finally back to Der freie Satz. Extensive quotation from Schenker’s writings is conspicuous in these and the chapters of the flanking parts (the German-language original texts are collected together on pp. 230–63), and several graphs are reproduced, in whole or in part, along with other music examples.

Nietzsche: Storia di un processo politico: Dal nazismo alla globalizzazione

Nietzsche: Storia di un processo politico: Dal nazismo alla globalizzazione

(038–039) Two proposals to deal with reprints and translations of publications first printed before the relevant nomenclatural starting–point date, and with recent posthumous publications of pre–Linnaean authors

Recent discussions about the nomenclatural impact of the German translation of a work by Vaillant, posthumously published after the nomenclatural starting-point date for valid publication of Spermatophyta (see Greuter & al. in Taxon 54: 149–174. 2005; Brummitt in Taxon 57: 663. 2008; Greuter in Taxon 57: 1015–1016. 2008), had clearly shown that the problem is greater than protection of a few currently accepted names against those featured in the translation. First of all, this concerns consistency of treatment of old publications. Among the works of “pre-Linnaean” character but published after 1753, which are listed among opera utique oppressa, there is already a work of Feuillee (Journal des observations ...) that is a post-Linnaean translation of the pre-Linnaean publication. Developing a common policy instead of dealing with singular cases one by one when they come to light is, I believe, more consistent and productive. Then, there is the second part of the problem which has been completely overlooked. Since different editions of the same book, with or without alterations, are treated as effectively published (simply because there is no such restriction in the rules), this means that any subsequent reproduction of a historical book is effectively published. By now we have a number of “classical” reprints ranging from Sprengel’s edition of Dioscoridis (1829), through the Ray Society classics of the mid-20th century, to the magnificient quarto-sized Dover’s Gerard (1975) and Stanford’s Fuchs (1999), and, after all, cheap contemporary facsimiles of scanned historical books with mostly electronic circulation. Note that the very recent flow of routine facsimile editions is accompanied with paper versions printed on demand, and also with International Standard Book Numbers assigned, thus satisfying all provisions of effective publication. Several of these books were originally published before the first edition of the Species plantarum, and potentially they may be searched for plant names, at least at the level of genus, which have not been accepted in other post-1753 publications. My original proposal to exclude reprinted and translated pre-1753 books from the nomenclature (Sennikov in Taxon 59: 307–308. 2010) was not accepted in Melbourne; one reason for rejection was probably because the extent of the problem had been underestimated. Hereby I propose this change to the rules again, in a belief that cutting this Gordian knot with a single strike is an efficient action that is free of possible side effects. (038) Proposal to discard the nomenclatural value of reprints and translations of publications first printed before the relevant nomenclatural starting-point date by adding a new Art. 13.5 with a new Note and a new Example: “13.5. For nomenclatural purposes, all reprints and translations, published after the relevant nomenclatural starting-point date, of original works first published before that date are regarded as having been published only on the original date, with none of the names included therein being validly published.” “Note 2. Exempt from the provisions of Art. 13.5 is one part of Linnaeus’s Amoenitates academicae (vol. 3, 1756).” “Ex. 4bis. “Helminthotheca” was not validly published in Steinwehr’s translation of Vaillant’s work (in Konigl. Akad. Wiss. Paris Anat. Abh. 5: 731. 1754) that was originally published before 1753 (Vaillant in Hist. Acad. Roy. Sci. Mem. Math. Phys. (Amsterdam, 8°) 1721: 267. 1725). The generic name Helminthotheca is to be correctly attributed to Zinn (1757), who was the first to fulfill conditions of its valid publication after the starting-point date.” The only exception from this new rule is allowed for the Linnaean Amoenitates academicae that is an authorized reprint which was published with due corrections and additions when the text was viewed as outdated by the author. Other exceptions may be added if and when found desirable. A few generic names are currently treated as validly published from the pirated reprint of early Linnaean works, Opera varia (1758). Such names were not accepted by Linnaeus in 1758, and ascribing their valid publication to him may be correct under the formal rules but is historically illogical. Besides, one may doubt that the “Linnaean” Opera varia may be considered as a place of valid publication at all. According to Art. 36.1, in order to be validly published names are to be “accepted by the author in the original publication”. Linnaeus definitely accepted the relevant names in the original publications which had been published before 1753, but he cancelled those names by revising their nomenclature in his subsequent works. Fortunately, removing Opera varia from the market of botanical nomenclature will have very little practical impact, just changing the dates of valid publication of a few generic names. Should this proposal be accepted, six entries in Appendix III, which were changed in the Vienna Code (McNeill & al. in Regnum PR O P OSAL S TO A M EN D T H E CO D E

Reappraising Winnicott's The Piggle: A Critical Commentary

The Piggle is one of only two substantial psychoanalytic case histories to be published under Winnicott's name. Winnicott felt that the case and the associated notes and reflections provided important material for discussion. Claire Winnicott – his wife and literary executor – wanted to bring these to an audience, and did so by overseeing the posthumous publication of the work in 1977. The nature and purpose of the work's message is explored in an extended paper published in two parts, in this and the next issue of the Journal. In Part I, published here, the author discusses the work in its historical context alongside other contemporary child analyses (notably Klein's Narrative of a Child Analysis and McDougall's Dialogue with Sammy) and its ambivalent reception by its contemporary audience. The author identifies theoretical issues raised by the material; the use of commotional and conjunctional interpretations; the use of time, and analysis on demand; the place of play in therapy and the role of the parents. He reviews the dialogue between analyst and child as set out in the text, identifying emerging themes. He attempts to understand what the child, Gabrielle, was trying to communicate. He then reviews Winnicott's interpretation of those sessions, identifying areas in which the interpretations may be at odds with what the child was experiencing. At the end the author encourages the reader to re‐read Winnicott's original text before reading the discussion and critical evaluation that forms the basis of the second part of the paper, ‘Discussion and Critique’.

Writing Suicide in the Early Nineteenth Century: Carl von Hohenhausen’s ‘Nachlaß’

Focusing on the case of Carl von Hohenhausen (1816–1834), this article examines the socio-cultural, literary, and educational contexts of writing ego-documents in extremis in the early nineteenth century. The diaries and suicide notes which form the core of Carl’s ‘Nachlaß’ (the personal writings and documents he left behind) reveal how his upbringing and private reading practice, his school training — especially in the art of letter writing — and the model presented by his paternal grandmother’s final farewell messages shaped his approach to writing before suicide. To contextualize the ‘Nachlaß’ and to throw into relief some of the trends in public discourse about suicide in the period, the posthumous publication and reception of Carl’s texts is also considered.

A vueltas con la inédita «Piedra del parangón político»

The third part of Ragguagli di Parnaso by Traiano Boccalini, a posthumous publication that was issued at the end of 1614 with the title Pietra del paragone politico , became in a few years an out-and-out European best-seller. However, it was not by chance that the book was never published in Spain, the country that had been the favourite target of Boccalini’s satires. Nonetheless, it aroused deep interest there, as attested by several Spanish versions, even if they had a manuscript and clandestine circulation in the 17th-18th century. Through a detailed study of the witnesses, this article defines for the first time all the surviving translations, and gives the background to the forthcoming publication of one of them.

Three Songs for Les Illuminations by Benjamin Britten, and: Six Early Songs (1929–31) for medium voice and piano by Benjamin Britten, and: Two Pieces for violin, viola and piano (1929) by Benjamin Britten, and: Two Psalms: Out of the deep, Praise ye the Lord, for SATB chorus and orchestra by Benjamin Britten, and: Variations for piano (1965) by Benjamin Britten

NEWLY PUBLISHED MUSIC BY BENJAMIN BRITTENBenjamin Britten. Three Songs for Les Illuminations. Orchestration for high voice & strings by Colin Matthews. Words by Arthur Rimbaud. Full score. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2012. [Pref. in Eng., Fr., and Ger.; texts in Fr., Eng., and Ger.; score, p. 1-22. ISMN 979-0-060-12030-5; ISBN 978-0-85162-767-0; pub. plate no. 15072. $26.95.]Benjamin Britten. Six Early Songs (1929-31) for medium voice and pi- ano. London: Faber Music, 2013. [Texts in Eng.; pref. in Eng.; score, p. 2-14. ISBN10 0-571-51190-2; EAN13 978-0-571-51190-7. £10.99.]Benjamin Britten. Two Pieces for violin, viola and piano (1929). London: Faber Music, 2013. [Introd. in Eng.; editorial notes in Eng.; score, p. 1-25 and 2 parts (violin and viola). ISBN10 0-571-52361-7; EAN13 978- 0-571-52361-0. £24.99.]Benjamin Britten. Two Psalms: Out of the deep, Praise ye the Lord, for SATB chorus and orchestra. Full score. London: Chester Music, 2012. [Score, p. 1-67. Pub. no. CH79750. £21.95.]Benjamin Britten. Variations for piano (1965). London: Faber Music, 2013. [Introd., editorial note, and performance note in Eng.; 1 facsimile; score, p. 1-7; appendices. ISBN10 0-571-52057-X; EAN13 978-0-571- 52057-2. £9.99]Since Britten's death in 1976, and in particular since the opening to researchers a few years later of the extraordinarily comprehensive archival collections of the Britten-Pears Library at his home in the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh, keen interest has constantly been aroused by the steady stream of posthumous publications of unknown works which, for various reasons, he had kept firmly under wraps during his lifetime. While all such publications, no matter how slight, will inevitably be of con- siderable interest to scholars and die-hard Britten enthusiasts-and it might be ar- gued that this alone is a compelling reason for their public dissemination-it is rather less certain whether every morsel of this rediscovered music deserves a strong foothold in the concert hall; and, at times, some listeners have feared that the com- poser's reputation might become a shade tarnished by the realization that he did not always attain his customary level of genius. Nevertheless, the level-headed can always find consolation in the equally important realization that he himself, unlike some other prodigiously prolific writers, well knew which of his pieces warranted a place in his official canon, and which didn't. Whatever one's personal view, Britten en- thusiasts owe an enormous and ongoing debt of gratitude to Colin Matthews, chair of The Britten Estate, who has for several decades overseen the preparation and pub- lication of projects of this kind in a skillful and sensitive way.Britten's posthumous publications fall into three broad categories, each well rep- resented by the batch of five new scores re- viewed here (all of which appeared in the run-up to, and during, the composer's cen- tenary year in 2013). Arguably the most im- portant category, and one in which indis- putably impressive compositional standards are virtually assured, is the small but fasci- nating body of mature songs that Britten wrote for his well-known song cycles, but chose not to include in their definitive for- mats. Just how brilliant some of this dis- carded music could be was first demon- strated in 1983 by the performance of two songs jettisoned from Winter Words (1953), and even more spectacularly in 1987 by the discovery of the haunting Tennyson setting Now sleeps the crimson petal, which had been composed for inclusion in the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943). Self-evidently, then, Britten some- times consigned pieces to his bottom drawer not because they were substandard, but simply because he had too many of them for his specific needs. The second, and largest, category is the huge body of ju- venilia composed by Britten when he was a precociously gifted schoolboy, which is in- evitably of variable quality, though the best of it is truly astonishing in its technical as- surance. …

A short history of probability theory and its applications

It is remarkable that a science (Probability) which began with consideration of games of chance, should have become the most important object of human knowledge.Probability has reference partly to our ignorance, partly to our knowledge. … The Theory of chances consists in reducing all events of the same kind to a certain number of cases equally possible, that is, such that we are equally undecided as to their existence; and determining the number of these cases which are favourable to the event sought. The ratio of that number to the number of all the possible cases is the measure of the probability . …P.S. LaplaceThe true logic of this world is to be found in theory of probability.James Clark MaxwellThis paper deals with a brief history of probability theory and its applications to Jacob Bernoulli's famous law of large numbers and theory of errors in observations or measurements. Included are the major contributions of Jacob Bernoulli and Laplace. It is written to pay the tricentennial tribute to Jacob Bernoulli, since the year 2013 marks the tricentennial anniversary of Bernoulli's law of large numbers since its posthumous publication in 1713. Special attention is given to Bayes’ celebrated theorem and the famous controversy between the Bayesian and frequentism approaches to probability and statistics. This paper is also written to pay a special tribute to Thomas Bayes since the year 2013 marks the 250th anniversary of Bayes’ celebrated work in probability and statistics, since its posthumous publication in 1763. This is followed by a short review of the modern axiomatic theory of probability first created by A.N. Kolmogorov in 1933.

Messiaen’s Musical Techniques: The Composer’s View and Beyond by Gareth Healey (review)

Messiaen's Musical Techniques: The Composer's View and Beyond. By Gareth Healey. Farnham, Surrey, Eng.: Ashgate, 2013. [xiv, 205 p. ISBN 9781409448259 (hardcover); ISBN 9781409473091, 9781409448266 (ebook). $109.95.] Music examples, figures, tables, companion Web site, note on the translations, appendices, bibliography, index. Gareth Healey undertakes a daunting task in his book, Messiaen's Musical Techniques: The Composer's View and Beyond. He poses the thesis that in order to understand the music of Olivier Messiaen clearly, one must thoroughly grasp his compositional techniques (no argument here). Healey navigates a challenging labyrinth in his book. He interprets Messiaen's writings, primarily the Technique de man Uingage musical (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1944) and the Traite de rythme, de couleur, el d'omithologie (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1994-2002), and music in order to plot the of his ideas. Healey contends that being overly dependent on the composer's does not serve the goal of acquiring insights into the music, due to the fact that the often contain individual analyses, explanations, and observations not bound together by any contextual glue. To remedy this, Healey takes great pains to note how Messiaen's evolving ideas can be integrated, a subject that the composer or scholars of his music seldom broach. Building upon his earlier work on form in Messiaen (Gareth Healey, Form: Messiaen's 'Downfall'? Twentieth-Century Music 4, no. 2 [September 2007]: 163-87), Healey relates his reading of the composer's techniques to broader organizational structures, concluding his book with an analytical methodology that purports to produce substantive analyses of Messiaen's music. In Messiaen's Musical Techniques, Healey considers the composer's musical language in three phases. After an introductory chapter 1 (pp. 1-3), Healey devotes the first phase of his examination to looking at Messiaen's and the influence of music theorists and other composers (p. 1). Chapter 2 (The Theoretical and Analytical Writings of pp. 5-12) surveys Messiaen's treatises, analyses of the music of other composers, and lectures in chronological order, beginning with the Technique and ending with the posthumous publication, Ravel: Analyses des oeuvres pour piano tie Maurice Ravel (Paris: Durand, 2003). The next chapter (Theoretical and Written Sources, pp. 13-26) charts those theories that influenced Messiaen, as well as those from which he borrowed. For these reasons, Healey focuses on how Messiaen approached plainchant, accentuation in Mozart, and ancient rhythms and modes. Chapter 4 (Extra-Musical Influences, pp. 27-44) explores the influences outside of music that shaped Messiaen's compositional aesthetic, primarily birdsong, theology, philosophy, and literature, whereas chapter 5 (The Influence of Debussy and Stravinsky, pp. 45-66) looks at the pivotal influences of Debussy and Stravinsky on Messiaen. Chapter 6 (Rhythmic Evolution, pp. 67-81) initiates the next stage of Healey's examination, that of investigating the development of the techniques discussed in these writings (p. 1). This chapter explores the progressive expansion of Messiaen's approach to rhythm by discussing different rhythmic techniques. Chapter 7 (Harmonic Evolution, pp. 8395) serves as the pitch counterpart to the preceding chapter. It deals with Messiaen's modal and non-modal harmonic vocabularies, along with various techniques applied to the pitch domain. The last three chapters are concerned with Healey's alternative analytical methodology that he uses to interpret works not covered by Messiaen in detail (p. 1). In chapter 8 (Harmony: An Alternative Perspective, pp. 97-109), Healey employs pitch-class set labels and inclusion relations, combined with an understanding of Messiaen's music, to account for the composer's highly varied harmonic vocabulary. After providing ten hypothetical models of form to which Messiaen's music can be related in chapter 9 (Form, pp. …

Toland and Adam Smith's posthumous work

In this paper I offer a speculative answer to the question why Adam Smith, who burned nearly all of his papers, arranged for posthumous publication for a number of his essays. I rely on a number of hints in those essays and put them in the context of eighteenth century natural philosophy. I argue that those hints trace back to John Toland and Spinozism.

Type specimens of Tamarix (Tamaricaceae) described by Josef Franz Freyn in 1903

Five Tamarix taxa were described in Freyn’s posthumous publication (Freyn 1903): Tamarix askabadensis Freyn (1903: 1059), Tamarix karakalensis Freyn (1903: 1060), T. karakalensis var. scoparia Freyn (1903: 1062), T. karakalensis var. verrucifera Freyn (1903: 1062), and T. karakalensis var. myriantha Freyn (1903: 1062). This publication comprised an enumeration of the plants collected by Paul Sintenis in “Tauria, 1900–1901” (in the Sintenis’s voucher labels as “Iter transcaspico-persicum 1900–1901”), by Ove Paulsen in “regione caspica, transcaspica, praesertium in altiplanitie Pamir, 1898–1899”, and by Victor Ferdinand Brotherus “in Turkestania, 1896”. However, all Tamarix taxa treated in that work belong to those collected by Sintenis. It is important to point out that Sintenis was mostly a plant collector who sold his vouchers to many different herbaria: ANK, BHUPM, BREM, G, GH, HAC, JE, LD, PAL, PR, TUB, VT, W, WAG, and WU (acronyms according to Thiers 2014). However, his personal herbarium (ca. 80000 vouchers of 18000 species) was acquired by the Herbarium of the Botanical Museum of Lund (LD) in 1921–1922 (Patrik Frödén pers. comm.).

BÖLL'S WAR: CATHOLIC INNER EMIGRATION, APOCALYPTIC DYSTOPIA, AND ‘STUNDE NULL’

ABSTRACTHeinrich Böll's stature in the canon of West German postwar literature grew out of his association with the so‐called cultural ‘Stunde Null’. Recent scholarship has questioned this commonplace paradigm, which suggests problematic distinctions between literature written before and after 1945 and inside and outside of the Third Reich. The posthumous publication of Böll's prewar juvenilia and wartime correspondence allows for new perspectives on his literary formation. This article demonstrates Böll's intellectual dependence on pan‐European interwar Catholic culture, in particular key German writers who became Christian ‘inner emigrants’ in the Third Reich. The motifs of this body of thought course through his wartime correspondence, so much so that his early postwar work deserves classification both as ‘Trümmerliteratur’ and as a continuation of the inner emigration. This continuity between Böll's pre‐ and post‐1945 thought contributes not just to our re‐reading of his oeuvre but also to a revision in inner emigration studies. The term deserves extension to include both writers who wrote against the grain of Nazi literary politics and their readers, with whom they formed a coherent interpretive community. Out of this shared discourse, Böll crafts a narrative of survival, foreseeing a kind of perpetual inner emigration in a dystopian and apostate postwar Germany.

A Sucker’s Punch

A Sucker’s Punch Jermome Klinkowitz (bio) Sucker’s Portfolio Kurt Vonnegut Amazon Publishing www.apub.com 178 Pages; Print, $7.99 Sucker’s Portfolio is the print version of Kurt Vonnegut’s fifth volume of posthumously published fiction. First serialized in a Kindle edition in the last two months of 2012, it gathers six previously unpublished short stories written in the 1950s but rejected by the weekly family magazines that had been this author’s venue before gaining fame as a novelist in the 1960s. Also included is an uncompleted story with a futuristic setting, the type of work Vonnegut’s agents usually had to place in the less remunerative pulp market. Adding bulk to the volume, and also illustrating the more adept author Kurt Vonnegut would become, is his unpublished essay from 1992, The Last Talisman. Of the posthumous collections published so far, Sucker’s Portfolio presents the most typical examples of what he was doing in the 1950s—which is to say examples of what he had to change in his repertory of effects to succeed in subsequent decades. At its best, Vonnegut’s fifties fiction takes the structure by which a culture professes to understand itself—such as unwarranted riches being a curse rather than a blessing, or undue cleverness turning back on its practitioner—and twists them in a special way that brings forth an unexpected truth. At its worst, it panders to those structures without asking the questions about presumed beliefs that would characterize such mature work as Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The finest of this writer’s fifties work was reprinted in 1968 as Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), while the worst—rejected by the magazines, or his agents, or in some cases never circulated himself—waited until after Vonnegut’s death to be published. Sucker’s Portfolio is the best of the worst. Earlier volumes in the Vonnegut Estate’s posthumous publication program gathered stories pertinent respectively to war or social manners. This latest collection chooses pieces treating relationships between men and women—husbands and wives, lovers, and brothers and sisters—with an emphasis on how the women remain inscrutable. For a writer gifted with insights into a woman’s character, this subject could have been a gold mine. But even at the peak of his success, Vonnegut would admit that he was better with language and incident than character, and a total failure when it came to realizing women on the page. Once he’d found his voice with a vernacular control of language and incident, character would take care of itself, both female and male. Without that voice, weak characterization stands out like the stereotypification it is. And Sucker’s Portfolio is rife with stereotypes. Do you want a woman to assert herself? The simple, old-fashioned way is to make her a tough type, hard as nails and with a male name such as Marty or Jackie. That happens here in “Rome” and “Sucker’s Punch,” where one woman is a hash-house waitress (with a broken nose), the other a hat-check girl (who works a prostitution scam with her boyfriend). Is there an alternative? In “Rome” it’s an innocent young thing named Melody portrayed as an airhead, while in “Miss Snow, You’re Fired” the woman is an object of beauty, no more and no less, and is fired because her boss cannot perceive anything else. Some narrative dynamics exist in Paris, France, where three couples at distinct stages of life ponder their relationships. The middle-aged pair even generate some comic insight on the author’s part, to the effect that their otherwise jaded co-existence is made easier when there’s money to spend or couples much older than themselves for invidious comparison. But only rarely do incidents in Sucker’s Portfolio support such comic stretches. Too often points made rest on entirely typical evidence. At his best, Kurt Vonnegut could seize the typical and use it for something entirely new. The volume’s first story, “Between Timid and Timbuktu,” has enough affinities with material in the Vonnegut canon to make it a significant piece of early work. The...

John Woolman's Path to the Peaceful Kingdom: A Quaker In the British Empire. By Geoffrey Plank. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. viii + 296 pp. $39.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)John Woolman's Path to the Peaceful Kingdom: A Quaker In the British Empire . By Geoffrey Plank . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2012. viii + 296 pp. $39.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesSince his death in 1772, the life and work of John Woolman (1720-1772) has been interpreted and defined by subsequent writers in the context of abolitionists, social reformers, peace activists, mystics, and great spiritual thinkers; his on-going influence is part of the lasting power of a carefully crafted life story by both friends and admirers. Yet during his lifetime, Woolman's actions and message often confused and bewildered many of his contemporaries, in spite of his apparent sensitivities to the attitudes of his listeners. His life was his message and he carefully (and prayerfully) ordered it both to reflect his values and to provide object lessons. From refusing to wear dyed clothes, which he saw as a symbol of exploitation, luxury, and waste, through to avoiding sugar, manner of speech, and careful oversight of his diet, Woolman sought to make practical statements about implicit evils. Unfortunately much of his life proved incomprehensible to distant observers who did not have access to the inner thoughts that motivated him. Only with the posthumous publication (and editing on both sides of the Atlantic) of his journal were the two brought together. Even then, many American Friends initially admired his piety rather than his stance against slave holding, though both were clearly noted in his journal.As with many reformers and visionaries, Woolman was as much a product of his age as a transformer of it. As Geoffrey Plank asserts in his introduction we cannot understand Woolman's career without examining the community he was born into and the religious society that shaped (9). Working within the administrative structures of the Society of Friends, Woolman along with other reformers coordinated pastoral responses to the wider needs and perceived evils of both North American and Colonial society. Previous works on Woolman have sought to identify the uniqueness of his contribution, but Plank in a well referenced and clearly written narrative has placed him back in the context of his contemporaries, giving the reader a perceptive insight into the historical figure. He is able to do this by a careful revisiting of primary sources ranging from the journal, the extensive correspondence of Woolman and his acquaintances, and the records of local Friends Meetings. Through this mass of material (meticulously referenced) the reader is carefully guided into a very intimate encounter with Woolman the man and introduced afresh to the sheer humanity and visionary character of this inspirational, if singular, Quaker.The volume works extremely well, because instead of marshalling the sources into a standard biography they are arranged thematically, introducing the reader in a loose chronological framework to the significant influences and the contemporary issues that animated Woolman. Each theme takes up a chapter and they include, Woolman's analysis of the course of history, his understanding of discernment, his lifelong fidelity to Quaker discipline, and chapters on his views on work, slavery, and warfare. …

Translation and rewriting of sibylline prophecies: The case of Jane Seager

The tradition of evoking the prophecies of the Sibyls was not uncommon in late medieval Europe: their prediction of the birth of Christ turned them into uncompromising figures of a pre-Christian mythical tradition that was not at odds with any aspect of the Catholic mentality. Their iconographic representa- tion had been established earlier on through Raphaels and Botticelli's mytho- graphic approaches, as well as by the work of the humanist scholars at Cardi- nal Giordano Orsini's court in Rome, where around the 1430s the classical set of ten sibylline figures was increased to twelve. The Sibyl's verses also appeared in the mystery plays at Chester in the early fifteenth century, and as captions to Baccio Baldini's engravings of the twelve prophetesses in the 1470s, where they were richly adorned as dignified figures. More than a century later, and in a totally different environment, the English Tudor court, the sibylline imagery might have lost its intriguing cult to the vernacular or its strong Neo-platonic foundation, but poets such as Thomas Wyatt, and Philip Sidney in particular in his The Defence of Poesy (1579), invoked the Sybils as muses and patronesses of the arts. Within the post-Petrarchan appropriation and translation of Italian verse by some of the best practitioners of Elizabethan poetry, there was a discreet and feminine current of translatio to which some women (daughters, sisters or wives of humanist scholars) would eagerly subscribe. Such was the case of Jane Seager, the sister of William Segar (note the vowel change in the surname) who was a herald and portrait-painter of repute. The only known work by Jane Seager is a manuscript entitled The Divine Prophesies of the Ten Sibills which is held in the British Library (MS 10037) and dated in 1589. The timing coincides with Sidney's writing and circulation of his Defence prior to his posthumous publication in 1595. As we shall see, Seager's appropriation of the meaning and the image of the Sibyl is closer to its Italian Quattrocento leanings for its emphasis on visual representation and reverence to