Savage Beasts Research Articles

Savage beasts or affectionate parents?

Savage beasts or affectionate parents?

고려시기 개경 일대 야생동물의 출몰과 그 의미

It is highly important to figure out the ecological environments of Gaegyeong to understand the lives of Gaegyeong residents during Goryeo. The ecological environment around Gaegyeong was comprised of diverse elements, and this study focused on the investigation of wild animals based on Ohaengji of Goryeosa. Of wild animals that appeared around Gaegyeong, representative examples of mammals include the tiger, roe deer, fox, and deer. There were also savage beasts including the leopard, bear, boar, wolf, and wildcat and herbivores including the antelope, goat, and hare. In the birds family, the owl, night owl, pheasant, and crow appeared most frequently. In addition, there were the magpie, sparrow, meadow bunting, crane, stork, red-crowned crane, and quail. The eight species of wild animals including the tiger, roe deer, fox, deer, owl, night owl, pheasant, and crow made the most contacts with the people of Gaegyeong those days, thus having the biggest influences on them. The mammals appeared a lot in spring and summer, and the birds appeared frequently in autumn and winter. The combined number of mammals and birds was the biggest during the reign of Kings Chungryeol, Gongmin, and Woo. There were many different factors behind the appearance of wild animals in Gaegyeong, and the deterioration of the ecological environment around the capital city must have been a very important one. When it became difficult to get preys in the wild, wild animals would take a risk and enter into a capital where the human population was dense. It must have been especially true with mammals. Having a high mobility level, birds must have received relatively less impact by the ecological environment around the city, but it was not true that they had nothing to do with changes to the ecological environment. When wild animals appeared in Gaegyeong, they afflicted direct harm on people, who rather accepted their appearance seriously as they were ill omens. In the case of wild animals appearing in the city, they would hold events to prevent future ill fortunes. They would hold Beopseok and Doryang in the Buddhist style, and even government officials themselves supervised events to prevent misfortune. There were, however, no efforts to find the causes of wild animals appearing in the capital city. It was difficult to find the awareness of protecting and preserving wild animals like the modern society in the people of Gaegyeong those days. Based on these findings, the study proposes future research tasks including the reality of the entire ecological environment not limited to wild animals, its impacts on people, the impacts of people on it, and human cognition, ideas, and attitude toward it.

“Accustomed to Female Domination”: Women, Mass Media, and Animal Intimacy in Interwar Britain

This essay analyzes four visual sources that shed light on the relationship between gender and animal intimacy in interwar Britain. They are all photographs that appeared in print media, and all relate to the production of wildlife films. The first is a montage of six photographs showing a woman’s friendship with the “strange savage beasts” of the London Zoo; the second is an advertisement for a popular remedy; the third shows a director shooting a zoo film; the fourth contains shots from a documentary made in 1938. The essay focuses on three women—Gladys Callow, Mary Field, and Evelyn Spice—all former schoolteachers who became involved in the production of zoo films. By analyzing this series of images, connections between contemporary ideas about gender, animal tameness, and colonial domination are established, reflecting shifts in the depiction of animal intimacy in early twentieth-century Britain.

고려시기 사냥의 성행(盛行)과 대책

In Goryeo, hunting was not just military training or a hobby activity. It was a very important occupation. Livestock farming began early, but it had a difficult time spreading broadly due to its need for agricultural byproducts. Wildlife provided various resources that human beings needed along with livestock. People would hunt savage beasts such as the tiger, leopard, bear, and wolf. They would also hunt the roe deer, deer, hare, and boar. The hawk and the pheasant were the most important birds to hunt. It is estimated that the hare, pheasant, deer, roe deer, and fox were captured most. Once captured, wildlife served various uses. The tiger, leopard, bear, marten, otter, deer, and roe deer provided previous skins, and the marten and fox supplied clothes materials. The deer, hare, and wild goose were used as offerings at important sacrificial ceremonies at the national level. The most important use of wildlife was food. Good examples of wildlife that provided food materials include the deer, roe deer, hare, boar, and pheasant. Wildlife was traded in the market or used as a gift or bribe. Being recognized for their international value, the hawk, tiger, bear, leopard, marten, and otter skins served very important purposes in diplomatic relations. Almost all the social classes engaged in hunting. Local officials and military commanders would mobilize many people on their hunting trips. Yangsucheok and Hwacheok engaged in hunting as their full-time job. Hunting was very dangerous and hindered farming often, which made the government put restrictions on hunting. An emphasis on livestock farming was deeply related to hunting as the spread of livestock farming led to a lower need for hunting. It was very important how the government would deal with Yangsucheok that was fully devoted to hunting as a job while serving no compulsory labor. Between late Goryeo and early Joseon, there were active efforts to reduce discrimination against them including providing them with farming land, helping them settle down in an agricultural village, encouraging them to marry common people, and changing their title to Baekjeong. The strong martial nature of the Goryeo society is deeply connected to the prevalence of hunting as hunting required archery and horse riding skills along with bravery and agility.

“Savage Beasts,” “Great Companions”: The First Dogs to Winter on the Antarctic Continent

Abstract By investigating the nature of the social interactions between “sledge dogs” and explorers in the first land-based exploration in Antarctica, this research contributes to an animal-human perspective in Antarctic historical studies. Consideration of the interspecies interactions provide further insight into attitudes to nonhuman animal welfare, including towards wildlife, at the turn of the twentieth century. The companionship of favored animals appeared to have alleviated some of the stresses of isolation and confinement in the inhospitable Antarctic environment.

The Canadian horror film: terror of the soul

From the cheaply made “tax-shelter” films of the 1970s to the latest wave of contemporary “eco-horror,” Canadian horror cinema has rarely received much critical attention. Gina Freitag and Andre Loiselle rectify that situation in The Canadian Horror Film with a series of thought-provoking reflections on Canada’s “terror of the soul,” a wasteland of docile damnation and prosaic pestilence where savage beasts and mad scientists rub elbows with pasty suburbanites, grumpy seamen, and baby-faced porn stars. Featuring chapters on Pontypool, Ginger Snaps, 1970s slasher films, Quebec horror, and the work of David Cronenberg, among many others, The Canadian Horror Film unearths the terrors hidden in the recesses of the Canadian psyche. It examines the highlights of more than a century of Canadian horror filmmaking and includes an extensive filmography to guide both scholars and enthusiasts alike through this treacherous terrain.

Shirt Stained Ochre, and: Civilization and Its Discontents

Shirt Stained Ochre, and: Civilization and Its Discontents Lisa Sewell (bio) Shirt Stained Ochre When I returned like the travelerbelonging no more to one placethan to the next and finally arrived at the station that marks the endand beginning of where one of us was from,the border guard intoned: one citizen, one alien pulling us aside to unfold our money beltsand open our trunk, unscrewing the prayer wheelsto flatten out the scrolls of secret writingand secret code within. “Ohm Mane Padme Ohm?” I saidin response to his question. Under a light as white as the unsheltered skyin Fez or Marrakesh, his dogs sniffedamong the ten thousand small paper packagesand unset semiprecious stones I had carried home from Rajasthantranslating us backto the country of my birth. [End Page 155] Civilization and Its Discontents The voices on the radio have nothingto do with weeping for those young menfrom rural areas in the Midwest and the Westwho have access to firearms and drugstores, who fellinto the high-risk categories and throughthe cracks and safety nets, the detailed protocolsof warrior resiliency as those forceswhich ordinarily inhibit ceased to operate. Anyone who isn’t color-blind could seethe red flags: when stateside is a combatzone of sleeping trouble and shortness of breath,when the bullet catcher cannot drivehis Ford Escape along the ordinaryMichigan highway unraveling before himor unmake the jumpiness and rapid heartbeator get those boots off fast enough the first timehe saw the light go out in a good man’s eyes. Troubled by headaches. Troubled by memoriesand checking off “more than half the time”on the mental-health questionnaire(revealing men as savage beasts to whomthe thought of sparing their own kind is alien)every soldier at home and over there is fully versedin suicide prevention trainingin civilization and its discontents. The one who does all the talking says,“you don’t go ask for help because you’d losesecurity clearance, be looked down on, and underminea whole career” and anyway, by then the superhighwayis taking him—the red flags all falling and arriving. [End Page 156] Lisa Sewell Lisa Sewell is the author of several books, including Impossible Object, which won the 2014 Tenth Gate Prize from Word Words Press. She is also co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan 2007) and Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America (Wesleyan 2012). She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Villanova University. Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press

Early Modern Anger Management: Seneca, Ovid, and Lieven De Meyere’s De ira libri tres (Antwerp, 1694)

Anger’s power to reduce men to the level of beasts is a familiar theme in Western thought and literature. The notion that music and poetry can mitigate irrational rage is exemplified in the myth of Orpheus, who tames the savage beasts and the powers of Hell with his song. But can poetry really be a remedy or preventative against anger? And what if that poetry is read, rather than sung? This paper explores both explicit and implicit responses to those questions in an unjustly forgotten Latin poem ‘On Anger’ by Louvain Jesuit, theologian, and controversialist, Lieven de Meyere (1655–1730).

Teddy's Bear and the Sociocultural Transfiguration of Savage Beasts Into Innocent Children, 1890–1920

November 14, 2002, marked the centenary of President Theodore Roosevelt's Mississippi hunt during which he declined to shoot an adult bear that had been brutalized by dogs and man. He ordered member of the hunt party to kill it, which was done by knife; it was then skinned and eaten at camp meals. Despite this outcome, the myth arose that the president released young bear on humanitarian grounds resulting in the creation of soft cloth child's toy that became known as the teddy bear in reference to the president's public moniker. Over the first two decades of the twentieth century the teddy itself underwent transformation from being representative of childhood to being symbolic of childhood innocence. Although the teddy was fad of adults during the first decade of its creation, including its use as good-luck token for World War I soldiers, it was not until the mid-1950s that its relationship to adults expanded when the rising popularity of psychoanalysis made notable the reference to the teddy bear as transitional object as the child learns she is separate from her mother (Winnicott 89-97). The teddy became an adult fetish with self-styled arctophiles (lovers of teddy bears) speaking of it as a leavening influence amid the trials and tribulations of life (qtd. in Maniera 144). By the end of the twentieth century the teddy bear's iconic status as innocent child imbued it with sacramental powers to heal, protect, and commemorate children and adults: There's just something about Bear that's impossible to explain. When you hold one in your arms, you get feeling of love, comfort and security. It's almost supernatural (Ownby Teddy for Hope). The donation of teddy bears in the aftermath of accidents and disasters has become for many form of charitable aid that displaces the giving of food, clothing, or money, and for which Web site solicitations are rhetorically patterned after televangelist ministries. Through analysis of the discursive merging of wilderness ideologies and human developmental theory during late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in scientific and popular culture this article explains the sociocultural possibility of Roosevelt's transmutation from Great White Hunter into mythical humanitarian, and of his battered and slaughtered bear victim into childhood innocent capable of redeeming adult life. you go down to the woods today You're sure of big surprise1 On November 13, 1902, Roosevelt and companions disembarked train at Smedes, Mississippi, for week-long bear hunt. They traveled on horseback to wilderness camp where they met up with Holt Collier, an esteemed African-American guide credited with having been at the death of 1,809 bears. [...] nearly 150 in single season, who was in charge of the dogs (In Haunt of Bruin 1). While black bear hunting was familiar pastime for Roosevelt, the canebrake terrain of Mississippi held new attractions for this populizer of the strenuous life. The hunt dogs, bred and whipped to locate, pursue, and harass bear to its death, or their own, commonly ran distance of twelve miles in such environ (Wily Mississippi Bears 25). If the bear was not chased into an opening where it would be shot by waiting hunters, the dogs would trap it and attack: Sometimes huge bear will be entirely hidden from sight beneath an avalanche of dogs [...] but it will be but moment before he has sent enough of them flying through the air to uncover himself as target for the hunters' guns (Wily Mississippi Bears 25). The hunt started the next day with its progress reported by Associated Press newsmen allowed to visit the camp, in identical stories printed on the front pages of the November 15 Washington Post and New York Times (One Bear Bagged 1; One Bear Falls Prey 1). The party set out on horseback with only eleven dogs, as half the pack had taken off the previous day in pursuit of deer. …

Carlyle, Mill, Bodington and the Case of 19th Century Imperialized Science

latter half of nineteenth-century England was rife with the evolution question. As English imperialism also reached its pinnacle during this time, racial gradations in the newly formed human chain loomed large culturally. In 1849, Thomas Carlyle anonymously published his notorious anti-emancipationist perspective in The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, followed by John Stuart Mill's divergent response to him in 1850 titled, The Negro Question. In 1878, Westminster Review also published woman's perspective, The Importance of Race and Its Bearing on the Negro Question by Alice Bodington, which resembled the Carlyle essay in various ways. This paper first compares the three essays to show the underlying racial discourse and then presents the imperialist subtext that underlies Mill's views. In this, I argue that it is crucial to read these three essays within the scientific discourse of the era, to see how 19th century science, especially phrenology and contemporary researches of evolution became hegemonic systems (1) which seeped into the normative racial ideologies of the period as seen through these writers. Brian Regal in Race and the Search for Origins of Man mentions that even before the advent of Darwin's theories about evolution there were comparisons between human beings and apes. Regal points out: systematizers ranked groups as superior and inferior using their own faces as the measure. (2) As Regal states 'Savage' races were equated with savage beasts in the growing tide of racial stereotypes. Ape imagery dealt with race, class, the spread of empire and even gender issues, as well as evolution and human origins. ape became metaphor of everything dark and troubling in European minds.... (3) In the same vein, Patrick Brantlinger also notes: The theory that man evolved through distinct social stages--from savagery to barbarism to civilization-led to self-congratulatory anthropology that actively promoted belief in the inferiority, indeed the bestiality, of the African. (4) Researches into the question of human evolution and racial were large part of the discourse of Carlyle's epoch and he shares certain assumptions from such scientific discourses. Although Carlyle doesn't directly depict Africans as apes, he does relegate them to bestial, animal status, since he views them as two-legged cattle (5) with excellent horse-jaws. (6) In addition, Carlyle leaves no hope that Africans would have been capable of making any improvements to the putrefied lands of West Indies; he argues that the Black man knows whether ever he could have introduced an improvement. (7) As he states, Am I gratified in my mind by the ill usage of any two--or four legged thing; of any horse or any dog? Not so, I assure you. (8) While attempting to argue against the exploitations of slavery, his associations still operate amidst the animalistic images of horse, dog or any four-legged thing compared to the negro. In the amended version of the essay, Carlyle also depicts Africans as, a swift, supple fellow, merry hearted, grinning, dancing, singing, affectionate kind of creature, with great deal of melody and amenability in his composition (italics mine). (9) Here, Carlyle strips the African man of his humanity and relegates him to the status of singing, dancing creature. Edward Said discusses Carlyle's works in Culture and Imperialism and observes that ... Carlyle's energetic animadversions on revitalizing Britain, awakening it to work, organic connections, love of unrestricted industrial and capitalist development, and the like do nothing to animate Quashee, the emblematic Black whose 'ugliness, idleness, rebellion' are doomed forever to subhuman status. (10) This kind of othering dominates all spheres, and as Said says, No area of experience was spared the unrelenting application of these hierarchies [and] quasi-scientific concepts of barbarism, primitivism, etc. …

A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America

A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 283. Illustrations. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.) A Centre of Wonders looks at the human body from the perspective of several overlapping disciplinary fields: literary studies, feminist theory, religious studies, and history. The book's fifteen provocative essays focus on various aspects of the early modem body, ranging widely from symbolic to material interpretations of corporeality. The book is organized around four themes: correspondence (between bodies and the outside world); fixity (the regulation of bodies and the categorization of difference); fluidity (culturally mediated views of the body); and metaphor (how bodies can represent something else). Individual authors have read each other's essays and refer frequently to them; thus readers can almost hear a conversation emerging among early American scholars. All of the essays in A Centre of Wonders stimulate us to think about the human body in novel and original ways, and by so doing, to gain deeper insight into the early modern mind. Robert Blair St. George examines the relationship between witchcraft, the body, and domestic space by focusing on the seventeenth-century analogy between the dwelling and the human body. Accompanied by St. George's beautifully precise pen and ink drawings, this opening essay challenges us to think of the body expansively and metaphorically as a building and, vice versa, to consider houses as representations of bodies. Houses, like bodies, were supposed to protect their interiors, but during witchcraft outbreaks, their inner sanctums were susceptible to attack. Women's spaces, like women's bodies, were particularly vulnerable. Mentally mapping the body onto a structure allowed seventeenth-century people to consider the relationship between their own lives and their social world and its politics. Many of the essays examine the ways in which ideas about the body and its functions served to explain the broader world. Trudy Eden shows, for example, how one of the body's simplest necessities was imbued with cultural meaning. English colonists believed that eating English foods kept them English, while those who accepted American (Indian) food, such as corn, risked losing their Englishness and degenerating into something other, less refined. Martha Finch's essay also examines the relationship between the civilized body of the colonists and the landscape they inhabited, which threatened to turn their human bodies into those of savage beasts if nature's wildness was allowed to seep in. We get the sense that colonists envisioned the body as porous and borderless, with the capacity to melt into its environment or to be invaded by it. Several authors, especially those dealing with race, examine the process by which ideas about bodily mutability became fixed when it came to determining racial identities. Nancy Shoemaker focuses on skin color as the marker of difference between Native Americans and Europeans in the seventeenth century. While other parts of the body seemed similar among all peoples, the skin struck colonists and Indians as unalterably different and laden with meaning. Jennifer Spear and Joanne Pope Melish focus on the escalating distress about the definition and fixity of racial categories in eighteenth-century Spanish Louisiana and Revolutionary and early national New England. Spear argues that certain characteristics-honor, faith, and respectability-became racialized as the categories of mestizo, mulatto, and white became formalized and codified. Raced bodies became linked to inheritable personality traits as well as to notions of blood purity. Melish traces the anxieties felt by whites, afraid that bodies lacked such fixity. Unease grew as stories circulated of blacks becoming white, and whites worried that under certain circumstances they could become black, compromising their independence, perhaps even their freedom. …

Study-Abroad and Cultural Exchange Programs to Africa: America’s Image of a Continent

America’s understanding, or perhaps more appropriately its misunderstanding, of Africa is based on a long history of explorer, traveler, and missionary experience recounted in travelogue and the popular press. For the most part, images of Africa expressed in these accounts portray a world of barbarous, uncivilized peoples living in the unbearable climes of torrid deserts and tropical swelter. Today, there is little evidence to suggest any fundamental change in these earlier perceptions. As Michael McCarthy comments, “[the] ‘dark continent’ image of Africa as a mixture of desert and jungle, savage beasts and beastly savages, has persisted to such an extent that it has become over time the essential way in which most Americans have come to understand African realities.”

Bibliography of Defoe Studies in the Far East: China and Taiwan, Japan, and Korea

Bibliography of Defoe Studies in the Far East: China and Taiwan, Japan, and Korea Spiro Peterson, Sungkyu Cho, Hope Cotton, Minoru Oda, Huang Xian-fang, and Sung-Kyoon Kim China and Taiwan The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is the first extensive Western fiction about China; Crusoe sees me Great Wall and travels across the country; the Farther Adventures is the first of Defoe's novels in which characters cross vast continents. Actual contact between China and Western nations is a fraught and not especially pretty story. Beginning around 2000 B.C., a uniform, identifiable "Chinese" culture was established and, through a succession of dynasties, preserved and developed. Although European trade began in the middle of the sixteenth century, China maintained a largely anti-foreign and isolationist policy until 1834, when China opened Canton to Western trade. This isolation makes the Chinese episode in Farther Adventures especially notable. Characteristic of the nineteenth century was relentless external pressure, including the Opium War (1839-42) perpetrated by Great Britain to gain wider trade concessions, and some internal discontent and unrest stemming from dissatisfaction with me policies of me ruling Ch'ing dynasty. China was compelled to cede Hong Kong at the end of the Opium War, and soon France, Germany, and Russia forced trade advantages. Upheaval within China continued, and a brief republican rule (1912-16) ended in decades of civil wars and unrest. Ultimately , in October 1949, Chinese communists defeated the nationalists. While EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 1, October 1995 96 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION the communists rose to power under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung and created the People's Republic of China on the mainland, the nationalists fled to Taiwan. Read in light of the domination of the communist government, the Chinese entries of this bibliography become additional cultural indicators of the nation's socio-political landscape. Out of the early twentieth-century events came the birth of the country's interest in Western literature. The first translation of Robinson Crusoe into Chinese appeared in 1905. Significantly, though, this translation reflects Chinese epistemologies as much as it does Western ones. This flirtation with, yet hesitancy to embrace, Western culture and its values seems indicative of China's twentiethcentury political history and its struggle to re-create itself as a nation independent of dynastic rule. The political climate of this ancient land has made a great impact on literature and art in the past half century. Defoe studies in China have gone through three historical periods since the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. During the ten years between 1949 and 1959, the policy "letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend"—a policy set forth by chairman Mao Tse-tung for promoting the progress of literature, the arts, and the sciences—brought about for the first time a flourishing of foreign, especially English, literary studies. Many major authors—Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, Shaw, among others—and introductions to, comments on, and criticism of their works were published. This stream of translations included Defoe's The Wanderings ofRobinson and Moll Flanders. The glamour of Robinson Crusoe not only made Defoe one of me English writers most familiar to Chinese readers, but also made Robinson a hero in me hearts of children who were greatly impressed by his adventurous and diligent spirit. The impact of Robinson's spirit upon youth was encouraged and advocated, for the diligence, perseverance, courage, and patience of his spirit have much in common with Confucian philosophy and embody the highest virtues in Chinese culture. During the 1960s "left-deviationist thinking" began to dominate ideological and political fronts in China. Accordingly, foreign literary works were divided into three categories: revolutionary ones represented mainly by Shelley and Byron; classical bourgeois literary works represented mainly by Shakespeare, Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway; and counter-revolutionary ones represented mainly by Pearl S. Buck and T.S. Eliot. Defoe's work fell into the second category. The left-deviationists required that works in this category be passed down and assimilated with discrimination. They were criticized and regarded as "savage beasts and fierce floods." The study of Defoe and foreign literature was...

Cardiovascular Reactivity Among Surgeons: Not Music to Everyone's Ears

To the Editor. —In nearly half a century spent in operating rooms, most of it as director of surgery in a large teaching hospital, I was convinced that music of any kind in the operating room detracted from the intensity of purpose and attentiveness mandatory in that setting. During my frequent operating room rounds, I would hear all types of music, ranging from rock to Bach. At times, the noise level emanating from the anesthetist's boom box was loud enough to drown out any meaningful communication between surgeon and scrub nurse. I forbade the playing of music during resident teaching, not only because I felt that it taught a bad habit, but also because it diluted the teaching experience. Music hath charms, but there should be no savage beasts in the operating rooms. I hope the article by Drs Allen and Blascovich, 1 whose tests were performed far from the

Shakespearean and Pirandellian: Hamlet and Six Characters in Search of an Author

Shakespearean and Pirandellian: Hamlet and Six Characters in Search of an Author MAURICE CHARNEY Since there has been so much "throwing about of brains" (II.ii. 366-67)I in Hamlet, it is not amiss that we should pose some difficult questions about the relation of Pirandello and Shakespeare. We are not primarily interested in how Shakespearean was Pirandello, but rather in the opposite side of the equation: how Pirandellian was Shakespeare? This historical question forces Shakespeare into a fortuitous and willy-nilly relationship with Pirandello, which is the best way to study how the later writer could have influenced the earlier one. In a literal sense he could not possibly have influenced him at all, yet there is an affinity ofmind and temperament that cannot be overlooked. Ifwe put aside for the moment the obstacle of historical relation, the Shakespearean and the Pirandellian are two analogous modes of a theatrical probing ofreality, and the plays of Shakespeare and Pirandello can be made to comment on each other. Most obviously, Pirandello's Henry IV relates to Shakespeare's Hamlet,2 yet the masculine-feminine games of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and its illusionistic frame play resemble Pirandello's self-conscious theatrical experiments . In A Midsummer Night's Dream the imaginative displacements of the forest world are very much in the Pirandellian mode. But let us narrow our focus to Hamlet and Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which there is a remarkable similarity in the central experience. Both plays are speculative, rationalizing, passionate, and self-conscious. Their characters are great self-explainers and self-justifiers, but not necessarily sympathetic. The central idea in both works is that one cannot separate real life from the histrionic events of a play - the two are equally plotted and unpredictable. But the play world reveals truths that would otherwise remain hidden. Truth is passionately conceived; it is not an abstraction. The characters press on to their doom despite their own relentless awareness of selfdestruction . It is no coincidence that the actors in Six Characters are rehearsing Pirandello's Rules ofthe Game when they are suddenly interrupted by the six MAURICE CHARNEY characters. Leone Gala in Rules of the Game is Pirandello's exemplar of the stoical man, who nevertheless suffers intensely from his forcibly willed separation from his wife. Like Hamlet, Leone values "the play of the intellect that clarifies the chaos of your passions, that outlines clearly and precisely all that moves within you so tumultuously."3 But the intellect does not operate in some higher intellectual sphere. The chaos of the passions is its natural arena, the mysterious inner world "that moves within you so tumultuously." This prepares us for Leone's brilliant image ofthe passions as wild beasts, an image colored by the classical topos of Actaeon being tom apart by his own hounds: Do you think I have no feelings, no emotions? Of course I do. But I never let them get away from me. I seize them, I dominate them and I nail them up. Have you ever seen a trainer at work in a cage full of wild beasts? That's what I am, Silia: a lion tamer. But even as I play this part, I can stand aside and laugh at myself in my chosen role. And I confess that sometimes I have a terrible temptation to give in, to let myself be tom apart by one of these savage beasts. (p. 128) It is typical ofPirandello to derogate the powers of the reason and the intellect. They are not powerful enough to rule the passions or to give a meaningful direction to one's life. Pirandello's raisonneurs, like Laudisi in/tIs So! (IfYou Think So), are always seen to be men of ironically limited vision, because their rationality insulates them from the events they pretend to understand and, by not taking sides, they seem smug and complacent. Rules ofthe Game lays the basis for understanding Six Characters, which is in a sense an extension of the earlier play. Now the six characters and not just Leone's wife demand their right of self-expression, which is tantamount to the right to...

The Sexual Revolution in the Kiangsi Soviet

One of the most effective weapons used by the Kuomintang in its struggle against the Chinese Communist Party during the Kiangsi period was probably the allegation that the revolutionaries had completely destroyed morals, collectivized women and contributed to sexual chaos. In 1931, a Kuomintang newspaper went so far as to affirm that units of the Red Army had revolted against Mao Tse-tung at Fut'ien in December 1930 because they were opposed to the partition of land and the practice of sexual liberty in the Kiangsi Soviet. In 1934, among the 42 anti-communist slogans adopted by the nationalist authorities, five had to do with the theme of sexual morality. Thus, in the “white areas” of Kiangsi, wall posters appeared bearing the words, “The red bandits wish to destroy virtue: they practise free sex. They are savage beasts who abandon themselves to debauchery!” Or, “If women wish to preserve their chastity and enjoy familial happiness, they must take up arms to exterminate the red bandits!“

Listen, My Children, and You Shall Read....

ready alert for their latest offspring, upon whom they could expend winter evenings reading aloud in Victorian leisure by flickering firelight. No, I believe it was in elementary school that I first heard stories and first fell in love with literature. Though I now have only kaleidoscopic impressions of my first few years in the parochial school I attended and can no longer remember which good and gentle nun taught me what in which grade, I do recall the quiet times, the periods after sweaty recesses when, shirt tails hanging and hair rumpled, we would be required to put our heads down on the desks and listen until a story or poem had performed its magic, and the savage beasts were once again soothed. It was during such periods that I first rambled with slow-witted Little Red Riding Hood to her grandmother's, that I first discovered that someone had been sleeping in our bed, that I first clambered the bean stalk with Jack and bested a giant. Enroute I learned some valuable moral lessons-

Considerations on the change of animal life in Japan (I)

This is to explain the change of animal life of our country which has taken place since old times up to the present.Before the Meiji era our country was small, and there were only a few savage beasts and venomous snakes. We may give as savage beasts, the Japanese Black Bear, the Japanese Wolf (died out at the end of the Meiji era), and as for the large-sized mammal, though they can not be called savage beasts, the Whit-moustached Boar, the Japanese Serow, the Japanese Deer may be mentioned. As to the venomous snakes, there was only the Japanese Pit-viper. Therefore, if the birds and beasts of large size and of splendid colour came over from foreign countries, they were enough to give a surprise to the Japanese; and animals and birds of that kind had been coming actually since very old times. But the coming of those animals and birds never threw the Japanese fauna into confusion.As one of the remarkable instances that men gave to the fauna a change artificially, there was in the Edo period the slaying of the Wild Boar of Tsushima. During the eras of Genroku and Hoei, the Wild Boar did men so much harm in Tsushima that Mr. Suyama, magistrate of Tsushima feudatory made a great resolution to slay them out, and succeeded after ten years' hard effort-from the 13th year of Genroku down to the 6th year of Hoei (1700-1709).During the Edo period, some birds and animals came over from foreign contreies or were brought into Japan from Korea, and they have been settled in our country. For example, the Korean Ringnecked Pheasant, the Korean Magpie, the Rik Kiu Grey Musk Shrew and the Bed-bug are remarkable among them.As stated above, the curious birds and beasts which had not been found in Japan came over frequently from abroad since old times. Especially, since the intercourse between Japan and Holland, and other countries was commenced during the Edo period, curious animals began to come over in succession from India and Malay. The Asiatic Elephant which came over in the 13th year of Kyoho (in 1728) and the One Humped Camel in the 4th year of Bunsei (in 1821) were most famous and had a great influence on Japanese culture.The great change Restoration, however, caused the Japanese fauna a remarkable change for forty or fifty years thereafter. In extreme cases, the tribes which spread to a great extent, such as the Yezo Wolf Canis lupus hattai in Hokkaido and the Japanese Wolf Canis lupus hodopylax in Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, met with the misfortune of being slayed out completely.Among the birds which suddenly disappeared from Japan proper after the Meiji period were large-sized ones. There are only two places now in Japan where Cranes always come over in winter. Their kinds, too, are only the Hooded Crane and the White-naped Crane. Siberian White Crane Grus leucogeranus which once came over to Japan together with those two and was not rare in Kyushu has somehow never been seen since the Meiji period. There is only one mounted specimen in Japan, but the very one does not seem to be Japanese-bred. Japanese Stork Ciconia ciconia boyciana and Japanese Crested Ibis Nipponia nippon are all but being extinct in Japan.

The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden

Written as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, this is the author's story of Reconstruction in post-Civil War South in which the Ku Klux is considered heroic and blacks are depicted as savage beasts, a threat to white women and American civilization. The Leopard's Spots is the first novel in Dixon's Klan trilogy which became the source for W.D. Griffith's film 1915, Birth of a Nation.