Self-made Man Research Articles

Dickens, Hard Times, and the Erasure of Female Origins

Dickens, Hard Times, and the Erasure of Female Origins Galia Benziman (bio) Among the host of neglected, unloved, and underfed Dickensian children shines out one impostor: Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, the thriving banker and industrialist in Dickens's 1854 novel Hard Times. Bounderby keeps bragging about his humble origins, and he is so loud and emphatic about it that the narrator nicknames him "the Bully of humility" (15, 196). He flaunts his success as someone who, against all odds, climbed up straight from the gutter to a position of wealth and influence. The reiteration of this story and its hyperbolic details provide a recurrent comic interlude in this otherwise not very comic novel. If not for Bounderby and a few other minor characters, Hard Times, a dystopia of the totalitarian regime of Fact, would probably be considered Dickens's grimmest work of fiction. Perhaps due to its status as a comic interlude, Bounderby's discourse of early suffering has not received the sustained and careful critical attention it deserves. Critics usually refer to his story as a caricature of the Victorian ethos of the self-made man and a parody of the rags-to-riches plot, which is in this case taken to extremes. Too little has been said about the deeper and broader implications, and potential sources, of Bounderby's narrative, which are all the more significant because, as revealed only towards the end of the novel, his self-narrated biography is no more than a heap of lies. Hard Times is a satirical novel whose main target of attack is the utilitarian regime of Fact, starting with the famous opening speech "Now, what [End Page 179] I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else" (5). In such a novel, anything that deviates from Fact is bound to be valuable. Under Hard Times' tyranny of Fact, lying should be aligned with the imagination, fancy, fantasy, and storytelling. Deceit, like any other fiction, provides a glimpse into whatever it is that the regime of Fact is trying so hard to suppress. We may condemn Bounderby as a fraud, yet at the same time it would be worthwhile to regard his lies as a work of fiction, or complex fantasy, that carries intriguing layers of meaning. Since Plato's Republic, volumes have been written about the thin line between deception and artistic creativity. It should suffice to say that according to Dickens's moral schema in Hard Times, much value lies in the ability to invent fictions as an outlet for suppressed emotional needs. Bounderby's invented childhood trauma, which he passes off as true, allows Dickens to explore and satirize a new kind of subjectivity that mixes components of real and artificial identity. The mix of true and false ingredients that compose Bounderby's life story is related to his characterization as a hybrid, partly mechanical subject, which, eschewing its biological origins and marketing itself as self-manufactured, prefigures the modern anxiety about the posthuman. Bounderby's invented story of horrible neglect touches something deep in Dickens. Through this loquacious character who flaunts his early suffering to the degree of self-indulgence, the author parodies his own artistic and autobiographical sentimental attachment to the figure of the neglected child, and his recurrent depictions of dysfunctional or cruel mother figures. Hard Times, as so many Dickens novels, features negative representations of mothers. Yet beyond that, this work levels an attack on the principle of maternity itself, embodied in Bounderby's myth of self-creation, which concerns not only social climbing but also a male attempt to erase the mother altogether. Bounderby's false resume is related to several collective issues that lie at the core of those hard times about which Dickens writes. This character's life story captures and challenges some of the major ideas of his age, issues that concern gender, science, identity, and social mobility. In what follows I propose a close reading of several of the key images Bounderby uses, to suggest that these images rework major undercurrents of the Victorian masculine and industrialist ideal of economic success. These...

George Sand by Martine Reid

Reviewed by: George Sand by Martine Reid S. Pascale Dewey Reid, Martine. George Sand. Trans. and foreword by Gretchen van Slyke. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Pp. [i]-xxi; 258. ISBN 978-0-08106-9. $29.95 (cloth). $13.99 (eBook). This award-winning biography of the free-spirited George Sand, hailed and reviled romantic novelist, playwright, outspoken feminist, socialist, anticlerical and idealist, draws the most complete and vivid portrait of an exceptional woman, eager to make literary space for moral and political commitment in the polarized and misogynistic nineteenth-century French society. Sand, in spite of the repressive Napoleonic code, exercised great influence over the intellectual and political life of her time, at home and abroad. Posterity, however, failed to recognize the great woman of letters she was and is. Reid, thus, places her amongst Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert who were her friends and correspondents. She uncovers Sand's aspirations, convictions and innovations within the literary and musical sphere and in the political arena from her debut as a budding author in 1830 until her painful death of intestinal cancer, in 1876. To do Sand justice, Reid examines novels, plays, volumes of autobiographical texts and correspondence, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. Drawing from the most recent French and English biographies as well as just published texts by and about Sand, Reid aims to redress Sand's distorted legacy faulting a misguided French canon for its failure to appreciate this genius and pioneer of a new genre. Sand's novels once labeled sentimental and or "rustic novels" are too easily dismissed. Reid debunks entrenched prejudices and die-hard clichés still clinging to Sand's famous/infamous legend (smoking cigars and collecting lovers) to emphasize contextualized testimonies of those who knew her well and understood her true motives. Reid carefully analyzes the multi-layered significance of Sand's chosen nom de plume, a result of particularly complex personal experiences by which this fiercely independent, self-made woman forged for herself a public image by which she lived as she saw fit: husband, lovers, children, the books and plays she wrote, the expressions of her political commitment, her wide-ranging artistic and scientific interests and the ways she organized her days and nights in a busy household, are carefully reviewed and converge to breathe life back into "the phenomenon Sand." Reid depicts the saga of a fascinating, magnetic, resilient woman writer, mother, mentor, estate manager, generous in friendship and passionate in her constant quest for love, while remaining honest and true to herself. Sand understood, cannily, that literature was one of the few domains where women [End Page 148] could get ahead in the world. She seized the opportunity offered by the advent of journalism and "industrial literature" and used her pen to educate her readership calling for social justice and equality for the powerless. She pursued knowledge with scientific curiosity (botany, mineralogy), artistic expressions and interests (music and puppetry) besides literature and philosophy that brought her fame, freedom and a renewed identity. If she attracted public attention by wearing masculine attire and comfortable shoes, it was more for practical convenience and economic reasons than to scandalize the bourgeois. She began selling articles and short stories to newspapers, lived like a man, made money, had love affairs without giving up any of what the world deemed traditional feminine attributes (make jam, be a good housekeeper and mother, manage the Nohant estate) but let her emotions run her life when the right lover came along. Not quite as radical as she sounded to the horrified conservatives of her day, she did not denounce marriage, only the institution of marriage as a commercial contract that translated as a life of servitude for women. She wanted a wife to have equal rights with her husband, something radically new in literature. As a child of the Romantic Age, the love she dreamed of had to involve the complete "embrace of twin souls." With such high standards, her love life was marked by a series of severe disillusionments (Musset, Chopin, Mérimée). Her maternal instinct was shaken by her difficult daughter (of dubious paternity). Notwithstanding, Sand's warm and generous heart made...

George Mortimer Pullman, nineteenth century marketer

PurposeGeorge Mortimer Pullman (1831-1897), nineteenth century US luxury rail car entrepreneur, divides opinion. Some commemorate Pullman as a brilliant industrialist, innovator and self-made man. Others view him as a loathsome robber baron, union buster, racist and affront to democracy. This paper aims to demonstrate Pullman’s significant contribution to marketing.Design/methodology/approachHistorical accounts of Pullman are re-examined to highlight his company’s unique adaptation of numerous marketing techniques (consumer research, brand strategy, public relations, product launch, fashion cycle, advertising, product placement and customer service marketing).FindingsPullman’s distinct flair for understanding his market enabled him to develop marketing strategies intertwined with broader cultural changes in ideals and practices. Pullman’s construction of destination tourism met an expanding white middle class desire for recreation and escape from the economic and racial inequality of the city. Pullman’s creed that beauty acted as a civilizing agent spoke to the social norms of leisure class femininity. Constant release of ever-grander rail cars shaped a fashion cycle around which wealthy men’s status competition turned. Pullman pioneered the leasing of luxury to control his best asset: the service of black Porters’.Originality/valueFirst, this paper provides a new perspective on George Pullman, a significant figure in US history. Second, it addresses a common bias in nineteenth century historical accounts that privilege the contribution of men, industrial labor and production and shadow the role of consumption, women and leisure. Third, it challenges the idea of a clean divide between industrial and post-industrial economies by tracing contemporary consumer culture practices to their nineteenth century roots (marketing, destination tourism, brand stories, democratization of fashion, tipping and service with a smile).

How families shape women’s entrepreneurial success in Morocco: an intersectional study

PurposeStudies on women’s entrepreneurship in Morocco are scarce, despite the potential of women for the country’s economy. This research takes place in a socio-cultural environment searching for a compromise between tradition and modernity. Families occupy a prominent place in Morocco, directly influencing women’s activities. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of family in Moroccan women’s entrepreneurial success.Design/methodology/approachThe qualitative research is based on 60 interviews with women entrepreneurs in Morocco, including women business owners, women professionals and also women co-operators who have not been documented until now, due to data accessibility. It is diversified in terms of personal, family and professional characteristics. The analysis uses an intersectionality framework taking gender and social class into consideration.FindingsThe results highlight three categories of women entrepreneur: the “elite”, the “self-made women” and the “co-operators”. Each category is characterised by specific familial and professional realities, underpinned by differentiated dynamics in terms of gender and social class.Practical implicationsThe study, from a practical point of view, contributes to a better understanding of the differentiated realities encountered in terms of women’s entrepreneurship, in the Moroccan context.Originality/valueStudies in developing countries tend to consider women entrepreneurs as a homogeneous group. This research highlights the fact that family support, women entrepreneurs’ practices and their role in entrepreneurial success depend on the background situations in terms of gender and social class. It also contributes to the entrepreneurial success field, revealing different definitions and perceptions of success among women entrepreneurs.

Contextualizing twentieth century business life histories: The cases of Papastratos and Katsambas

In this article the main goal is to contextualize the case of two major Greek industrialists, who both published their personal memoirs in the 1960s, written in an earlier period. Both invested in the Greek national economy and differentiated themselves from the “interlopers” of private wealth. In the mid-1960s they shared with the Greek speaking public their personal thoughts on the Greek self-made business man; Evangelos Papastratos (1884-1973) with Work and Its Toil, and Christoforos Katsambas (1893-1984) with Putting faith in the Future. They shed light in their lives, their sacrifices and labour. The term “self-made man” was used in the first decades of the 19th century American politics, while defending and praising manufacturers who deserved the nation’s honours and favours because they had acquired wealth by hard-working devotion to business. Businessmen’s lives as individuals or as groups have illuminated economic success in national and international context and have given food for thought about their perception in wider audiences. Yet the intention of a businessman’s biography to teach by example is closely related to other biographical examples

Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America. By Douglas A. Guerra (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 264 pp. $69.95)

Douglas Guerra positions his study of nineteenth-century American board games within a broader account of the history of the book. Like the “semantic vectors” arrayed across the printed page of modern novels, the sequences of rules governing leisure-time amusements functioned as a medium for the “circulation of ideas through the arteries of culture” (197), the most important idea of which was the sovereignty of the self. Any skepticism regarding this ambitious argument is convincingly offset by Guerra’s close reading of Milton Bradley’s Checkered Game of Life, which sold more than forty thousand copies soon after its invention in 1860. Play was organized around an opportunistic grid of “wealth,” “matrimony,” “school,” “fame,” “idleness,” “poverty,” “disgrace,” and “jail,” supplemented with behavioral norms that included “truth,” “honor,” and “ambition” and which together encompassed most of the human condition. Navigating this checkerboard of personal prospects required “a frequent choice of moves involving the exercise of judgment,” as Bradley himself exclaimed upon applying for a patent (20). The game of life was accordingly designed as a trial run for life off the board, synopsized by Guerra with an epigraph from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855) that presents a similarly robust vision of the individual’s newly open field of play. As such, Milton Bradley and Walt Whitman each promoted “life” into the exclusive subject of those who lived it, a creed that inverted America’s traditional moral economy by re-constituting public order on the basis of private prerogative. The subsequent destruction of fixed hierarchies meant that “I” became the singular expression of my own talent and tenacity, a distinctly modern ethic which gave birth to a distinctly modern cultural hero in these same years, the self-made man. Or, as Guerra quotes Emerson’s pithy characterization of this self-centered gestalt: “You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances” (47).

Useless Joyce: Textual Functions, Cultural Appropriations by Tim Conley

Reviewed by: Useless Joyce: Textual Functions, Cultural Appropriations by Tim Conley Eleni Loukopoulou (bio) USELESS JOYCE: TEXTUAL FUNCTIONS, CULTURAL APPROPRIATIONS, by Tim Conley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. viii + 189 pp. $55.00 cloth, $54.95 ebook. Despite the provocative characterization “useless Joyce” in the title of his book, Tim Conley sets out to explore the usefulness of Joyce’s texts. As he argues, Joyce is “a most ‘useful’ writer to examine in a discussion of what it means to assert that a text is useful or that a reader ‘uses’ a text” (6). Thus, he approaches the question of use in Joyce’s work through diverse ways and offers a coherent narrative. The first part of the book, titled “Textual Functions,” engages with the genre of self-help guides and the processes and challenges of editing, translating, and annotating Joyce’s works. The second part investigates how Joyce can be viewed as a “‘self-help’ author” (139) who guides us through multifarious aspects of our lives ranging from public speaking to diet and dating. In fact, Conley stresses the parallels between the rise in exegetical Joyce studies, that is, the so-called Joyce industry, and the popularity of self-help publications. He has even compiled a list cataloguing indicative and often best-selling books from these two ostensibly incongruent genres (147–52). Presented in the appendix, this list offers fascinating reading itself and illuminates further Conley’s arguments in the first chapter of the book, which begins by exploring how the difficult modernist texts of the first part of the twentieth century should not be considered as mere reactions to the “self-improvement creed of Victorianism”; on the contrary, Conley argues, modernism as a movement should be regarded as a “remodelling of this impulse,” and he notes the preoccupation of a number of modernist texts with guidance, mapping, annotating, and historicizing (31). Conley links the element of guidance in modernist texts, and in Joyce’s work in particular, with that of usefulness and observes that “Bloom’s heroism in Ulysses lies in his wish to be of use to others” (34). He also draws attention to the fact that the “Aeolus” episode indicates that Bloom’s dream role in a newspaper would be that of the advice columnist. In “Ithaca,” Bloom uses the term “selfhelp,” and Conley contextualizes this in relation to the emerging ethic of self and mutual improvement through a variety of guides, the most popular of which was Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance.1 The proliferation of such guides coincided with the growing need for democratization of education in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Conley outlines the history of the self-help movement in England and notes its difference from the subsequent commercial versions that promoted the image of the self-made man (39–40). By the 1920s, the industry of advice literature had become as popular as that of films (40). Strikingly, as Conley observes, guides to the ostensibly difficult [End Page 461] modernist texts started to emerge in that decade. Joyce responded to such concurrent cultural phenomena—that is, to the publications that offered critical interpretations of his work and the popularity of self-help guides—in Finnegans Wake.2 Conley closely reads passages from the Wake but also from A Portrait and Ulysses, which he analyses by skillfully bringing into the discussion the views of both Joyce critics and cultural theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, among others.3 The second chapter deals with the way readers use Joyce’s texts when they quote or misquote from them, but Conley notes that misquotations saturate Joyce’s own books, too (48–53). Bloom’s mis-remembering of songs and other instances offers Conley the opportunity to interpret a number of puzzling extracts from Ulysses, while his analysis of the references to Euclidean geometry in Finnegans Wake prompts him to conclude that “[a] misquotation is a sort of eclipse, in which a form is repeated while it is simultaneously obscured” (52). Further focus is on the quotations that are used out of context and those whose authenticity has been questioned, including...

Monsieur Göthé: Goethes unbekannter Großvater by Heiner Boehncke, Hans Sarkowicz, and Joachim Seng

Reviewed by: Monsieur Göthé: Goethes unbekannter Großvater by Heiner Boehncke, Hans Sarkowicz, and Joachim Seng Elizabeth Powers Heiner Boehncke, Hans Sarkowicz, and Joachim Seng. Monsieur Göthé: Goethes unbekannter Großvater. Berlin: Die Andere Bibliothek, 2017. 478 pp. Monsieur Göthé makes evident the aptness of the phrase "born with a silver spoon in his mouth" in the case of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In view of the interest in recent years in the poet's financial affairs and his knowledge of economic matters, it is not surprising that the authors would wish to throw light on the source of Goethe's wealth and on his own acknowledgment to Eckermann of the great sums of money that had been spent, "um das zu lernen, was ich weiß." The inheritance of Johann Caspar, Goethe's father, in 1730 from his father, Friedrich Georg, victualer at the "Weidenhof" on the Zeil in Frankfurt, is concretely enumerated (sacks and sacks full of louis d'ors, ducats, "Vikariatstaler," and other gold coins, but also approximately 12,000 liters of wine). Goethe came into the world with an immense "Weinvorrat, . . . der gepflegt, umgefüllt, mit Kennerschaft und in ziemlich großen Mengen getrunken wurde," especially of the premier Mosel wines of the years 1706, 1719, and 1726, which his mother affectionately referred to as "die alten Herren" (31). The title of this text alludes to the four years Friedrich Georg (b. 1657) spent as a tailor apprentice in the "silk city" of Lyon, France, from 1681 to 1685, when the accent was apparently added to prevent shortening of the family name. (A second alteration occurred when Johann Caspar matriculated at the Casimirianum in Coburg in 1725; the Latin document did not recognize an umlaut.) Lyon was part of the twelve-year "Wanderschaft" of the Thuringia-born apprentice tailor, who left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and moved to Frankfurt, married a tailor's daughter, and became a sought-after dressmaker ("eine Art Karl Lagerfeld von Frankfurt. . . . Unter den Damenschneidern der Stadt war er einer der ersten," 264). Between 1686 and 1704 this self-made man (259) went from the lowest tax category to the highest. In 1705, as a widower, he married [End Page 306] the widow of the proprietor of the Weidenhof and ran that business until his death in 1730. One indication of his wealth can be seen in the 2,700 guilders that Johann Caspar earned in interest income in 1770, the year he married Catharina Elisabeth Textor. In contrast, his new father-in-law, Johann Wolfgang Textor, the highest city official, earned 1,700 guilders a year. Friedrich Georg and the Thuringian Göthes are not exactly unknown. Biographical research in the late nineteenth century produced several studies of the family tree. The earliest documented Göthe was Hans, born about 1500 in Sonderhausen, who, it is reckoned (from a variety of contemporary sources), was a stone carver. It is with his grandson Hans Christian Göthe the Younger (b. 1604), a blacksmith, that a genealogical record begins to emerge. Unfortunately, the documentary record for Friedrich Georg is scant. The archives in Artern, where he lived from the age of two, were destroyed in a great fire in 1683. There is no record of his apprenticeship in Germany, only a later account of his having spent eight years of it in Saxon lands and in the Reich. There is not a single scrap of paper of his residence in Lyon; like most Protestants working in France, he kept his head down: "Er blieb unsichtbar, hinterliess keine Spuren" (145). The first documented piece of his existence in Frankfurt was his citizenship petition (signed as "Fredericus Georg Göthé") in 1687. The authors have been assiduous in their "Spurensuche." For those like myself who love reading the results of archival research, Monsieur Göthé has many delights, and the introduction, discussing the surviving original sources, presents a good picture of what archivists do. In the end, however, this study is perforce about the changing world in which an ambitious individual could rise from lowly origins to wealth and reputation. Alongside surveying late seventeenth-century apprenticeship customs and...

In-Between Proust and Neuroscience

In his autobiography allusive of Marcel Proust’s literary autobiography À la recherche du temps perdu, Kandel describes and explores his own development as a molecular scientist who started out as a student of history and psychoanalysis with more than just a penchant for literature. Despite his conversion to neuroscience, which is told in great detail, Kandel’s motives in studying the brain are informed mainly by humanist ideals and episodes from his personal past. The author creates an image of himself as a scientist who is guided in his molecular research by both his good intuitions and received theories from the humanities. Hence, the aim of the present paper is to show how the author succeeds in modelling his scientific ethos at the interface of the humanities and the natural sciences and in what ways he generates a public image of himself as a ‘self-made man’ or, rather, scientist.

Dois «sonhadores práticos» no campo de reformas sociais de medicina: Tomás Judym e José Tomás de Sousa Martins

After Romanticism, the mythical-legendary past was questioned by Positivist Science and the spirit of social reforms, gaining new literary contours in patriotically and politically committed works that were sensitive to the problems of society. The work of Stefan Żeromski (1864-1925), who in the first decades of the twentieth century was considered the greatest Polish novelist, caused the purely aesthetic function of Literature to lose ground, instigating the emotional side and social consciousness of its readers, their compassion and willingness to act. The protagonist of the novel Ludzie bezdomni (1900) (Homeless Men), Doctor Tomás (Tomasz) Judym, is a self-made man who, assuming responsibility for the misery of the masses of the proletariat (first in Paris, then in Warsaw, in Cisy and Silesia), renounces his own happiness and the love of Joaninha, and dedicates his life as a doctor to the poor and to the fight against social injustice. The nonconformity and commitment of Dr. Judym as the first «practical dreamer» of the social cause became proverbial in Polish, characterizing the romantic attitude free of financial gain in the time of capitalism’s unbridled progress. José Tomás de Sousa Martins (1843-1897) was a real «practical dreamer», an unparalleled figure in Portuguese Science, a physician and professor at the Medical-Surgical School of Lisbon, who fought tuberculosis free of charge. In 1910, Jaime Cortesão outlined the profile of Sousa Martins, emphasizing that in Philosophy he was positivist, materialist and determinist-fatalist, going far beyond the scientific superstition that took those who prized Science beyond the limits of reasonable, beyond the limit of mankind. In fact, Sousa Martins was a committed pasteurian and shared the scientific ideas of the French master. For Sousa Martins, Pasteur was one of the saints to be worshiped in the vast religion of Science. Dr. Tomás Judym and Sousa Martins entered, respectively, in Polish Literature and in the History of Public Health in Portugal as «lay saints», paradigmatic figures of action in the field of social reforms, physicians at the service of Man, who did not see in religion the way to their salvation, but rather in Science. And so the figures of the two «practical dreamers» become even more fascinating and recommendable to the presentation of the debate over the spirit of reforms and the (re)construction of modernity.

Conrad's Erotic Women

Conrad's Erotic Women Joyce Wexler (bio) It is time to correct Joseph Conrad's reputation as a writer who falls short when the subject is women or sex. Praised for his ethical, political, and psychological insight, he is pitied for his love scenes. Writing about The Rescue in 1945, Walter F. Wright generalized, "Conrad usually had trouble with his women characters when they came into the foreground of a story. The themes which he best understood could be illustrated very well through the lives of men" (1945, 216). In 1956 Thomas Moser reinforced Wright's judgment, arguing that the quality of Conrad's later work declined because he tried to write about women and sex (1956, 345). Discussing The Rescue, he claimed that the dialogue "between the lovers is wooden, and there is the same insistence upon emotions that Conrad seems unable to dramatize" (344).1 Thirty years later, Lloyd Fernando observed that "no major novel of his has received in recent years more adverse criticism than this one. Conrad has been accused of treating immaturely the portrayal of Lingard and Mrs. Travers, the two principal characters in the novel, and of evading the sexual consequences of their encounter" (1976, 86); Fernando agreed that "such strictures may be warranted" (86).2 In addition to disparaging The Rescue, this consensus diminishes Conrad's oeuvre because his stories about political intrigues and ethical dilemmas often hinge on erotic desire. In The Rescue, the political implications of Lingard's decisions depend on [End Page 424] Conrad's ability to make the erotic attraction between Lingard and Edith Travers convincing. Looking for descriptions of sexual acts, critics have ignored Conrad's representation of erotic feelings. Despite contemporary limits on what could be said explicitly, Conrad wrote about erotic feelings throughout his career. Although he usually focused on the dire consequences of passion, he also probed the sources of desire and found ways to represent the experience itself. In "Conrad and the Erotic" Jeremy Hawthorn argues that this dimension of Conrad's work has not been recognized because the common critical view is that "moments of passion or sexual excitement are rare, and often presented in such a way as to minimize or remove any evocation of the erotic in the reader" (2003, 112). In contrast, Hawthorn calls attention to the "flashes of erotic excitement [that] are depicted and enacted in several works" (112). If we pay attention to these flashes, we can see how Conrad portrays the sources and sensations of desire. As my examples demonstrate, he regards imagination and individual agency as essential components of passion, and he creates female characters who possess both qualities.3 Since The Rescue is the standard example of Conrad's ineptitude, it must be the starting point for any critical reassessment. When he finished the novel in 1920, Conrad was at the height of his career.4 Nevertheless, The Rescue is so widely dismissed and so rarely read that a plot summary is in order. Captain Tom Lingard is a self-made man who takes risks more respectable men avoid. He has made his fortune in the Malay Archipelago selling arms to warring villages. After Hassim, one of the local princes, saves his life, Lingard puts aside his commercial interest in supplying all factions and pledges to protect Hassim and his sister, the princess Immada. This alliance is tested when a yacht runs aground in the vicinity of battle. The yacht carries three wealthy European tourists, Edith and Martin Travers and a Spanish acquaintance named d'Alcacer. They need Lingard's help to tow the yacht to safety, but Travers refuses to be obligated to an "adventurer." Lingard parries this insult defiantly: "'I am an adventurer,' he burst out, 'and if I hadn't been an adventurer, I would have had to starve or work at home for such people as you'" (Conrad 1925, 134). Mrs. Travers intercedes, and Lingard is smitten by her beauty and elegance. He agrees to aid the Europeans, but when Travers and d'Alcacer are captured by Hassim's enemy, Lingard is torn between his duty to rescue his fellow Europeans and his loyalty to his Malay friends. The personal dimension...

The Russian-Jewish New York, the Balfour Declaration and the Revolution in Russia in Leon Kobrin's Play Back to Your People!

The article analyzes Kobrin’s play Back to Your People! and the Yiddish press reviews of its performances in New York at Boris Thomashevsky’s Peoples Theater in December 1917 by A. Cahan, I. Vartsman, B. Gorin and others. Critics defined the genre of Kobrin’s play variously as “national drama”, “sentimental melodrama”, “modern sketch” and “tendentious drama” but unanimously noted that it was a direct response to the landmark events of 1917, including the Russian Revolution and the Balfour Declaration. These events triggered nationalist feelings and had a significant impact on Jewish socialists like Kobrin, whose writing and political views were strongly influenced by Russian populism. The play depicted a dramatic clash between two cultural models: an American banker as a “self-made man” and the Russian-Jewish intellectual and Zionist leader. It reflected the issues of inter-generational conflicts, Jewish assimilation and anti-Semitism in America. Kobrin portrayed representatives of conservative and liberal circles in American society and demonstrated different attitudes towards the tragedy experienced by European Jewry during the First World War. The depiction of the younger generation allowed Kobrin to show the American university milieu, the work of the settlement house movement and the educational institutions for the Jewish immigrants. The play touched upon the social, intellectual and political life on the Lower East Side.

The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning by Christopher S. Celenza

Reviewed by: The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning by Christopher S. Celenza Margaret L. King The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning. By Christopher S. Celenza. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2018. Pp. xvi, 438. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-107-00362-0.) In The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance, Christopher Celenza provides a priceless vademecum for the study of Italian humanism. It rolls up in a delectable ball all that has come before: Garin and Kristeller; Burckhardt, Baron, and Martines; Fubini and Vasoli; Hankins, Allen, and the others. It presents in depth and with exquisite clarity the major works of nine leading humanists from Petrarch to Poliziano (plus many others introduced in discursive "parentheses"), culminating with the writer and critic Pietro Bembo, who translates the humanist heritage into a new language of art, a Latinized Tuscan. The lucidity of the explication [End Page 544] de textes is matched by the precision with which Celenza profiles his cast of characters, who are presented with full dimensionality in their psychological, social, and cultural contexts: the careerist Poggio, the brawler Valla, the self-made man and Medici servitor Poliziano. Celenza's work offers more than a series of text summaries and intellectual portraits, although these would be sufficient. It unravels a complex of interlocking themes, with three in particular rising to prominence. The first is the nature of philosophy as it is transformed by the humanists, who energize its study with new translations from the Greek of Aristotle and Plato, reject the metaphysical preoccupations of the university-based professionals, and, as philologists rather than as logicians, crossing disciplinary and cultural boundaries, seek a mode of living more than a theory of being. The second is the humanist understanding of Christianity, which is not slighted but affirmed, most notably by Petrarch, Ficino, and Valla, by its integration with the classical tradition on the one hand and philosophy on the other, even as doctrinal technicalities are avoided. The third and predominant theme is that of language, also central to Celenza's earlier volume The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy (2004). Celenza explores the departure from the vernacular stream initiated by the "three crowns," Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio (all three of whom wrote also in Latin), through the honing of Latin prose by the Ciceronian whetstone, to the eventual triumph of a reinvented Italian vernacular, disciplined and polished by humanist Latinity, and equipped to reach a national and even international audience for whom the specialized Latin of the humanists was inaccessible. Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Galileo, the inheritors of this language revolution, employed the Latinized Tuscan Bembo crafted, the gift of humanism to the early modern era. But does the title work? Celenza gives a nod to "vernacular classicism" and the "polyphony" of Florentine culture, which featured a rambunctious Pulci alongside a complaisant Poliziano. But many corners of "the intellectual world of the Italian Renaissance" do not register here: Florence massively dominates, and while some scope is given to Rome, virtually none is given to Venice, Milan, and Naples, let alone Ferrara, Mantua, or Urbino, in which centers humanism thrived; learned women are mentioned, but not one makes it to the index; devotional works, memoirs, and private letters, all vigorous and important genres, are invisible. But though the title overreaches, we may let it pass. It is in the sub-title that we find a better key to Celenza's objective: he is concerned with the "language, philosophy, and the search for meaning." He has searched for the meaning of the humanist episode—the Latin "parenthesis" in Italian history, the long fifteenth century in which intellectuals captivated by classical texts devoured, circulated, and imitated them—and presents it in this volume. Five generations of humanists achieved, in effect, Rome's final conquest of Europe, synthesizing and structuring that continent's civilization as it was about to leap forward on the next five hundred years of unparalleled productivity; and they achieved, as well, the final conquest of Rome by the barbarians, completing the advance begun in the first five centuries of the Christian era, absorbing, appropriating, and exploiting...

Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unit by Susannah J. Ural

Reviewed by: Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unit by Susannah J. Ural Daniel E. Sutherland (bio) Hood's Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy's Most Celebrated Unit. By Susannah J. Ural. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 384. Cloth, $48.00.) Civil War unit histories have been around for a long time. Veterans created them to preserve their wartime memories, and historians have since found them useful in explaining important campaigns and battles. True, some people regard the genre as old-fashioned and restrictive, but a new type of unit history has recently emerged that may spark a revival. The revival began in 2014, with Lesley J. Gordon's innovative A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut's Civil War. As much social as military history, Gordon's book tells the story of a regiment of "cowards" against the backdrop of both home front and battlefield. Notably, too, Gordon carries the saga of her regiment into the postwar years. Susannah J. Ural has done much the same thing, even as she flips the script. Rather than a Union regiment, Ural writes about a Confederate brigade. Far from being known as the unit that ran away, her rebels are portrayed as among the bravest and most loyal soldiers in the war. That said, Ural mirrors Gordon in having written a splendid bit of history. Ural's Texas Brigade may be defined, she says, by its steadfast devotion to the Confederate cause. Despite the rigors of campaigning, the slaughter of the battlefield, and the plight of loved ones at home, the brigade rarely flinched or faltered. Its men embodied the spirit of their longtime commander, John Bell Hood, who, despite suffering a crippling wound to one arm and losing a leg, remained in the field and stubbornly refused to admit defeat. Anyone who doubts the strength of Confederate nationalism, Ural insists, need only consider the history of this elite unit. [End Page 710] Equally important, the vast majority of these men had quite ordinary backgrounds. Indeed, Ural tells us, much of the brigade's cohesiveness and aggressiveness may be explained by the middle-class status of its recruits, their belief in the Jacksonian notion of the self-made man, and, despite having few slaveholders in their ranks, a conviction that Republican political policies would destroy their way of life. Geography also helped. So certain were these men that neither the destructiveness of war nor the dangers of emancipation would ever reach Texas that they evidenced an almost rabid desire, even against the Confederate government's wishes, to rush to Virginia and join the fight. Not that they were all Texans. In fact, at no time did the brigade consist solely of Lone Star volunteers. Originally it included three Texas infantry regiments (the First, Fourth, and Fifth), the Eighteenth Georgia, and Wade Hampton's legion from South Carolina. When the latter two units were reassigned in late 1862, the void was filled by the Third Arkansas. That would be the final composition of the brigade. Yet individual regiments are almost irrelevant to Ural's narrative, so strongly is it anchored in the experiences of individuals. Such men as Andrew Erskine, James R. Loughridge, and Thomas J. Goree are the focus of their brigade's story, or at least part of it. Also to be heard are Ann Erskine, Felicia Loughridge, and Sarah K. Goree, for the families and friends of these men are an essential part of what motivated the brigade. The men remained steadfast to the Confederate cause, Ural submits, because their devotion was matched by that of their communities. As letters flowed back and forth between home front and battlefield, this shared faith in the Confederate nation became mutually reinforcing. Of course, there is some good, old-fashioned military history embedded in all this discussion of motivation, loyalty, and the will to fight. Ural offers meticulous tactical accounts of the brigade's combat experience, most notably at Gaines's Mill (its first significant action), Second Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and the Wilderness. The names alone suggest how battle-tested the brigade became and why it earned the...

IF THE WORLD WERE RULED BY WOMEN...: EXPLORING THE RISE OF SELF-MADE CHINESE WOMEN CAPITALIZING ON THE TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP STYLE THAT HAS SO FAR ELUDED THEIR AMERICAN COUNTERPARTS

ABSTRACT Chinese female entrepreneurs are proportionately the most successful self-made women in the world today while American women struggle to keep up with their Chinese counterparts. This is astonishing considering that Chinese women inherited generations of societal discrimination against women, and US women are the beneficiaries of feminist revolution. Multi-generational families provide Chinese women with built-in support for child rearing and household responsibilities, while in America, policies supporting work/life balance are slow to pass or be implemented. In this paper we explore the historical, economic and societal reasons for this reality and offer transformational leadership as the path to bridging this gap. Keywords Transformational Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Cultural Differences, Female Business Success

The “Franco-Russian Marseillaise”: International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France

The “Franco-Russian Marseillaise”: International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France

The Hole by Sora Kim-Russell

that Ebola provokes and leaves one at times shivering, wanting a scrub-down in a chlorine bath. Recalling Ken Bugul’s Le Baobab fou (1982), Baobab affirms the essential role of trees in the history and future of the world. As arbre à palabres, he listens to the contemporary voices and remembers the elders’ confidences and discussions of matters of justice and survival under its branches. As arbre à paroles, the symbolic tree expresses the hope that lessons have been learned to prevent another deadly Ebola outbreak. Ancestrally wise like Tadjo’s urban Mask in Le Seigneur de la danse (1993), the sacred tree draws on the Congolese researcher’s understanding of the universe and Bat’s advice to accept the world’s biodiversity to suggest a pact of mutual goodwill between humans and nature in order to preserve the planet’s well-being. Using Ebola as exemplum, and refuting simplistic explanations about the dire epidemic’s source with Baobab’s wise and cautionary storytelling, with En compagnie des hommes Véronique Tadjo draws up a polyphonic ecological fable for the twenty-first century. Sarah Davies Cordova University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Andrée A. Michaud. Boundary: The Last Summer. Trans. Donald Winkler. Windsor, Canada. Biblioasis. 2017. 331 pages. Crime novels are commonly praised as “page-turners,” but there is a different kind of excellence in which each page invites savoring. To hurry through such a book misses the point of its art. Boundary is one of those rare novels, rich in character and detail, evoking a place made as iconic as Yoknapatawpha by the author’s sensitive depiction. The story takes place in an area just inside Québec near the US border, where outsiders keep summer cabins and locals struggle through the winter. Three prepubescent girls are enjoying what is likely their last summer of childhood when one of them is murdered gruesomely in the woods with a bear trap. Told in multiple points of view, with little dialogue, the novel is mostly about the effect this horror has on the people in the area. The architecture of the murder mystery unifies this story, with the usual elements of crime, investigation, and revelation ; however, the novel becomes much more than a “whodunit” by using the mystery as a metaphor for the passage from innocence to experience, between knowing the world as a place of wondrous summer days and learning how dark is the night. The girls, for example, discover the miracle of their first kiss but are soon confronted with the sexual implications suggested by the murder. One of the boys seems instantly to become a man after seeing the body of his murdered friend. The loss of innocence, or perhaps of illusion, is just as profound in the adults. A serpent invades their wooded Eden, and the inhabitants are forever cursed from the Tree of Knowledge. The local constable carries on out of a sense of duty, but the evil that has been revealed makes him know he cannot face anything like these crimes again. Boundary is a haunting novel, rich with the details of the families’ daily lives and brilliant internal monologue, but the translation doesn’t draw attention to itself, a common flaw in translators too conscious of the masterful prose they are rendering . This is particularly appropriate here as Michaud’s remarkable writing seems entirely relaxed, belying what can only be very meticulously composed. Boundary has been recognized by a number of prizes in Canada, including the author’s second Governor General’s Award for Fiction. She deserves to be better known as one of the best writers in North America. J. Madison Davis Palmyra, Virginia Hye-young Pyun. The Hole. Trans. Sora Kim-Russell. New York. Arcade. 2017. 208 pages. The Hole, by Hye-young Pyun, one of South Korea’s most notable writers, embarks on an intriguing premise. What happens when a successful life is destroyed after a terrible accident? And if the responsibility for this accident lies with the sole survivor: the dead woman’s husband? These complex moral questions drive the novel to its dark, fearless end. Oghi is a tenured professor, a self-made man who has married well. He is also...

Fault Lines: Life and Landscape in Saskatchewan’s Oil Economy by Emily Eaton, Valarie Zink

Reviewed by: Fault Lines: Life and Landscape in Saskatchewan’s Oil Economy by Emily Eaton, Valarie Zink Andrew Watson Eaton, Emily, and Valarie Zink – Fault Lines: Life and Landscape in Saskatchewan’s Oil Economy. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016. Pp. 128. In twenty-first-century Saskatchewan, oil “looks like freedom, but feels like death” (p. 98). These lyrics from Leonard Cohen’s 1992 song “Closing Time,” sprawled across an oil tanker railcar in Stoughton, Saskatchewan, serve as both a fitting description of our society’s troubled relationship with oil and a rather succinct conclusion for Emily Eaton’s and Valerie Zink’s book, Fault Lines: Life and Landscape in Saskatchewan’s Oil Economy. The image of the tanker is one of 77 photos by Zink that accompany 29 pages of text by Eaton, which together attempt to capture the contradictions and complexities of oil development in rural Saskatchewan between 2011 and 2015. Despite its short length, Fault Lines provides a compelling and insightful overview of the difficult choices, short-and long-term consequences, and myriad injustices that oil development has introduced to Saskatchewan. Eaton and Zink are careful not to reduce the issue of oil development to simplistic arguments for or against, but rather weave together alternative, conflicting, and overlapping perspectives that serve to illustrate the complexities. The oil economy has brought jobs and prosperity, while at the same time introducing new health risks, causing environmental damage, and increasing social inequalities. Through interviews with oil workers, landowners, politicians, Indigenous protestors, temporary foreign workers, and social service providers, Eaton conveys the illusion of choice that permeates the oil economy. In the broadest sense, people living in rural Saskatchewan made (and continue to make) choices about oil development in their communities and on their land. But within the context of factors out of their control, such as unstable agricultural commodity prices and rural out-migration, people’s choices are largely constrained by a need “to make the most of their situation” (p. 35). The benefits of oil development—regardless of its potential negative consequences—therefore present themselves as opportunities that communities and individuals cannot afford to miss. In this more narrow sense, not developing oil resources is really no choice at all. As Eaton’s text and Zink’s photos make clear, these choices almost always result in a tension between short-term and long-term consequences. Farmers are enticed by short-term royalties or lease incomes, but are confronted with long-term health or environmental costs; oil workers are vulnerable to short-term seasonal or economic cycles in the industry, but desire and behave as though they have the long-term stability necessary for expensive lifestyles or families; communities experience short-term economic growth and high employment, but are left with the long-term burdens of infrastructure and populations unable to support themselves when the wells run dry. Western Canada’s culture of “the self-made man” (p. 51) contributes to a pattern of consumption in which, as one faith leader told Eaton, “everybody’s got to drive a $60,000 truck” (p. 65). When “It is either feast of famine in the oil industry,” long-term choices often lose out to short-term choices (p. 51). [End Page 197] Zink’s photographs comprise nearly three-quarters of the book and beautifully illustrate the juxtaposition between the vulnerability and nostalgia felt for a “traditional” rural way of life and the disruptive material realities of rapid economic growth. While the photos provide a tangible sense of the places and people in this story, they do not always align with Eaton’s narrative, and most of the images are not explained at all. Eaton refers to just 18 of the 77 photos, and the images referenced are often placed in a different section of the book. Instead of serving as a documentary companion to Eaton’s text, Zink’s photos function almost as a separate artistic testimony to the changes wrought by oil development. Eaton does a nice job of articulating the injustices that oil development imposes on many different social groups who are largely powerless to oppose the industry. For example, approximately one-quarter of the province’s mineral...

The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel by Karen Bourrier

BOURRIER, KAREN. The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in Mid-Victorian Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. 184 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $35.00 paperback. Over a decade ago. Martha Stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction called for disability studies interventions in Victorian Studies, which has long been invested since work of Bruce Haley in role of health and embodiment. The Measure of Manliness contributes to this developing subfield of Victorian disability studies by putting into conversation long-standing Victorian scholarship on invalidism and illness with more recent disability theory and its investments in social model of disability, where sickness and disability are not fixed biological states but part of a culturally constructed continuum of ideas about fit body (16). Drawing explicitly on Holmes's work. Bourrier focuses on relationship between affect and disability, and how it shapes a normative Victorian masculinity characterized by taciturn strength. Methodologically, her study hinges upon a central dyad: the affective of masculine and disability and impact it has on narrative form of midcentury (16). In a move similar to Georges Canguilhem in The Normal and Pathological and Lennard Davis in Enforcing Normalcy, Bourrier argues for mutual dependence and co-constituency of disability and normative health as key concepts animating Victorian fiction. The archive to which Bourrier turns is mid-century domestic novel, which persistently features what she describes as pairing of strong man and weak man, in which latter serves as an alternative and complementary Victorian mode of masculinity, supplementing masculine strength with his emotional self-consciousness and verbal effusiveness (3). The narrowing of scope to middle-class masculinity enables her to 1 ) connect figure of Victorian disabled man to earlier eighteenth-century man of feeling, and 2) trace strong-weak dualism as a narrative pattern within a particular generic form. Bourrier begins with novels of muscular Christianity: Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857). The contrast between taciturn suffering of characters like Guy Morville or Tom Thurnall and their vulnerable, disabled counterparts valorizes an active masculinity that is physically capable and spiritually sound. It is this model of intimate friendship that underpins Bourrier's second paradigmatic example. Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). where Christian masculinity gives way to self-discipline and self-consciousness of self-made man. While represented as individually self-made, John Halifax's social climbing and industry is quietly enabled by Phineas Fletcher's invalidism and influence. Bourrier turns then to Eliot's The Mill on Floss (1860) and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) as revisions of this originary strong man-weak man with which both authors were deeply familiar. Eliot's Tom Tulliver and Philip Wakem and James's Caspar Goodwood and Ralph Touchett represent markedly different duos than their predecessors in that disabled weak man does not exist purely to support able strong man; in fact, these men begin to diverge from one another entirely. Measure of Manliness thus traces a trajectory from an uncomplicated and improving friendship between strong man and a weak man to a rivalry to almost no relationship at all (123). …

“[A] glowing gold tinge on the waters of the Pantai”: Conrad’s challenge to the narrative of economic success in Almayer’s Folly

The exotic setting of Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly suggests the novel’s affinity to the adventure romance, a genre popular in the final decades of the nineteenth century. However, readers expecting a story of dangerous exploits in the remote lands (or seas) must be disappointed. As Andrea White showed in Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition, Conrad challenges the romance convention by contrasting a life full of adventures, which can only be glimpsed from afar, with the protagonist’s mundane existence. The aim of my paper is to take White’s argument further, and to present Conrad’s first novel not only as a challenge to the late-Victorian romance tradition but also to any narrative of (economic) success which accompanied colonial ventures. Conrad exposes both the myth of the adventurer, whose luck coupled with daring enables him to find a treasure, and the myth of a self-made man, whose perseverance and hard work in the colonies ensure his financial success.