Sixth Book Research Articles

Virgil and Heaney: “Route 110”

Virgil and Heaney: “Route 110” MICHAEL C. J. PUTNAM —for Matthew Santirocco The epic tradition, including the rich self-referentiality of Wordsworth’s great contribution to it, The Prelude, remains a prominent part of the heritage of “Route 110,” Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary autobiographical poem central to Human Chain.1 But it is Virgil’s Aeneid that serves as its prime model, one against which the Irish poet is continually matching himself. It is to the modern epigone’s strong relationship to the earlier genius that I devote the following pages.2 The profile of Heaney’s poem echoes the normal division of epic into variations of twelve parts, with each segment also twelve lines in length.3 Every section is self-contained but there is a careful meshing between the divisions so as to form a closely linked whole. Nevertheless we are dealing with an extraordinary difference in scale as we exchange the grand sweep of Milton, say, and Wordsworth for Heaney’s focused intensity, as we move from epic’s wide range through histories impersonal and personal to an individual’s private curriculum projected through the subjective immediacy of lyric’s first-person warmth. Meter urges us toward an interpretation of meaning by suggesting the complementary relationship of one genre with another. Equally relevant in this case, as we pursue interpretation , is what T. S. Eliot defines as the “mythic method.” He coined the phrase in a brilliant critique of James Joyce’s newlycompleted novel, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” first published in 1923.4 Joyce’s use of Homer’s Odyssey, in Eliot’s words, illustrates a way of “manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.” “It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance arion 19.3 winter 2012 to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” In other words, by having imaginative recourse to his literary inheritance, a poet can also bring structure and meaning to his own work of the present. Such a project enables an author , by careful reference to a parallel, earlier text, to offer his readers, through the very patterning and meaning of words from the past that put forward a standard against which the present moment of creativity can be measured, a time for contemplative pleasure that puts them, in Frost’s words, “beyond confusion.” In the case of both Joyce and Heaney, texts from the Greco-Roman world serve to bring order as both models and stimuli. For Joyce, it is Homer’s grand narrative that offers a means of shaping his groundbreaking novel as he idiosyncratically draws past into present, and we will examine Joyce’s particular role in the genesis of “Route 110” at the conclusion of this essay. For Heaney, it is Virgil’s Aeneid that plays a role similar to that of the Odyssey for Joyce. At the very start of “Route 110,” he immediately puts forward the great Roman author and his final masterpiece, one of the ancient world’s most extraordinary accomplishments in any branch of poetry , as a major influence on his own imagination.5 The purchase of a used copy of the epic’s sixth book is the salient event of the poem’s initial segment, and the Roman master is mentioned directly in part ii and at the opening of part x. As we read “Route 110,” we are witnessing simultaneously an act of creation that is also one of recreation. Heaney is Virgil redivivus, the poet of our time following the example of a superlative ancient predecessor to mold his own idiosyncratic artifact. In the case of the Irish poet, to read Virgil is to become Virgil. Specifically, as we would expect from the opening segment where to buy implies to absorb intellectually and for a crafter of words to emulate, it is Aeneid 6 which serves both as general model and, in its particulars, as a crucial background for the understanding of the modern saga of which the poem tells. virgil and heaney: route 110 80 But Heaney is not just one great poet following in the tradition of another whom he admires. He is also a...

Late Horatian Lyric and the Virgilian Golden Age

Recent scholarship has focused on the way in which Horace avoids speaking of a returning golden age in his later lyric poetry, despite the fact that Virgil had done precisely this in the sixth book of his epic. I argue that Horace realized that the concept was a problematic one. Many of the golden ages constructed by earlier poets were marked with characteristics that could never be achieved in reality. Horace therefore avoids the terminology, instead defining the new age on his own terms.

Gynaecomastia and scrotal rhacosis: Two aesthetic surgical operations for men in Byzantine times

Nowadays, as in the past, much attention is paid to aesthetic operations in women, while only infrequently have such operations been referred to in males. Generally, male aesthetic surgery was introduced to surgical practise during the 19th century. In this study, we analysed the practise of such operations in Byzantine times and in other ancient cultures with surgical knowledge, i.e. ancient India and China The sixth book of Paul of Aegina's "Epitome of Medicine" was studied for description of aesthetic operations in males in the Byzantine period, since this book is completely devoted to surgery and is generally considered to be the most important reference for surgery in Byzantine times. The original text and its excellent translation by Francis Adams were used. References concerning aesthetic operations for males were identified. Accordingly, historical work and reviews on plastic surgery in ancient India and China were studied. Mainly, two aesthetic surgical procedures for males in the Byzantine period were identified. These two procedures comprise gynaecomastia and rhacosis (scrotal relaxation). Two different techniques were reported for the surgical management of gynaecomastia, through sub-mammary or supra-mammary access. Two procedures were noted for rhacosis, for which Paul of Aegina reproduced the respective chapters from Leonides' and Antyllus' works. Evidence supporting male aesthetic surgery in ancient India and China or elsewhere was not found. Despite the dubious aesthetic result, the existence of different aesthetic surgical techniques in males substantiate the advanced level of surgery achieved by physicians in the Byzantine period.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Cicero’s De oratore

Cicero’s De oratore has generally not been recognized as a significant influence on The Faerie Queene. Yet connections between this dialogue by the great republican orator and Spenser’s first, second, and sixth books indicate that it is. Cicero’s widely known treatment of rhetoric bears suggestively on Spenser’s thinking about poetic rhetoric, society, and their relationship.

Ghosts of Optimism: Virgil’s Parade of Heroes in Joyce’s “Circe”

This article identifies and traces a systematic correspondence between the "Circe" episode of Joyce's Ulysses and the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid. The allusion culminates in a parallel between the appearance of the ghost of Bloom's son Rudy at the end of "Circe" and the appearance of the ghost of Augustus' heir Marcellus at the end of Aeneid 6. Both Rudy and Marcellus, while alive, represented great hope for the future, but both tragically died young and their ghosts serve as reminders of disappointed optimism. The correspondence between Rudy and Marcellus politicizes the ghost of Bloom's son, aligning him with the dead heir to the Roman Empire. By making Rudy not only a dead son, but also a dead heir, "Circe" uses the politics of Roman imperial succession as represented in the Aeneid to address the problem of succession following the Irish war of independence. In the midst of the optimism of the anti-colonial revolution, the ghosts of Rudy and Marcellus haunt Ireland with the uncertainty of succession and the specter of future violence.

Horatian Lyric and the Vergilian Golden Age

Recent scholarship has focused on the way in which Horace avoids speaking of a returning golden age in his later poetry, even though Vergil had done precisely this in the sixth book of his epic. I argue that Horace realized that the concept was a problematic one; the golden ages constructed by the earlier tradition had been marked by characteristics that could never be achieved in reality. Horace therefore avoids the problematic terminology, instead defining the Augustan new age on his own terms.

Book Write Ups

Book Write Ups George Brosi Kevin T. Barksdale. The Lost State of Franklin: America's First Secession. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. 283 pages with map, notes, index, and bibliography. Hardback with dust jacket, $50.00. The state of Franklin was formed in what is now East Tennessee in 1784, in effect seceeding from North Carolina. It functioned as the primary government for the scattered pioneer settlements in the area until 1788, Barksdale, a history professor at Marshall University, addresses not only the historical phenomenon but also the romantic myths about it. Marie Bartlett. The Frontier Nursing Service: America's First Rural Nurse Midwife Service and School. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009. 250 pages with index, bibliography, photos, and notes. Trade paperback, $39.95. The Frontier Nursing Service, centered in Leslie County in the Eastern Kentucky coalfields, was established by Mary Breckinridge not only to serve its territory but also to be an example to the rest of the nation of the efficacy of midwifery. This is the story of this on-going organization's first forty years, from 1925-1965. The author lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina. This is her fourth non-fiction book. Rebecca J. Bailey. Matewan before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2008. 224 pages. Trade paperback, $27.50. Rebecca Bailey first became interested in Matewan as a child listening to her grandfather, a coal miner, tell about being a witness to the murder of Mayor Sid Hatfield in Matewan during the coal wars there in 1920. She was able to begin researching the town as a graduate student at West Virginia University. She now teaches history at Northern Kentucky University. [End Page 73] Jefferson Bass. Bones of Betrayal: A Body Farm Novel. New York: William Morrow, 2009. 356 pages with diagrams. Hardback with dust jacket, $24.99. This is the fourth novel and the sixth book by this Knoxville author team of Dr. Bill Bass, a forensic anthropologist, and Jon Jefferson. The University of Tennessee's "Body Farm," created in 1981 by Dr. Bass, is a secure two-and-a-half acre site near the university where forensic scientists can study body decomposition in various conditions. Other similar research sites exist elsewhere, including Western Carolina University, but this is the most famous. John R. Burch, Jr. The Bibliography of Appalachia. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009. 222 pages with indexes. Trade paperback, $55.00. This book provides bibliographic citations for more than 4,700 books, articles, monographs and dissertations separated into twenty-four subject topics. Spot checks, of course, can quickly establish that it is not exhaustive. The fact that none of the entries are annotated limits its usefulness, as does the breadth of the topics. For example, "Ethnicity, Race, and Identity" could constructively be divided so that those interested in native peoples wouldn't have to scan through the other listings. Nevertheless, it certainly deserves to be consulted by scholars and other research enthusiasts exploring any regional topic, and it needs to be in every regional library. Thomas Rain Crowe. The End of Eden: Writings of an Environmental Activist. Nicholasville, Ky.: Wind Publications, 2008. 171 pages with illustrations by Robert Johnson. Trade paperback, $15.00. In his "Preface" to this book, Crowe explains that ever since the University of Georgia Press published Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, folks have inquired what he has done subsequently. This book is his answer. He has moved two counties west to Jackson County, North Carolina, and has been running a small publishing house and writing prolifically for local newspapers and other periodicals. [End Page 74] Robert Johnson, who lives in the Celo community northeast of Asheville, provides striking illustrations for the book. William C. Davis and James I. Robertson, Jr., eds. Virginia at War, 1863. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. 218 pages with index, bibliography, and notes. Hardback with dust jacket, $35.00. Two of the most eminent experts on the Civil War in Virginia have here collaborated to create a book of readings that dramatically broadens discourse on what was going on during this...

CONMEMORACIÓN E INTERCESIÓN EN LA GALATEA DE CERVANTES: LIBRO VI

This paper examines the moral didactic framework of the sacred Valley of Cypresses, as described in Cervantes’ sixth book, La Galatea. A scrupulous analysis of the form, style and content of this episode reveals the hermeneutic significance of one of the most inspiring episodes of pastoral literature.

The “Orphic-Pythagorean” Eschatology of the Gold Tablets from Thurii and the Sixth Book of Virgil's Aeneid

Among the many different sources and traditions Virgil drew upon when he described the topography and eschatology of the Underworld in the sixth book of the Aeneid it is the influence of the “Orphic-Pythagorean” tradition which is the most problematic. A reccurring category of texts often used in this connection has been the “Orphic-Pythagorean” gold tablets which, it has been argued, show us glimpses of the same eschatology which influenced Virgil. This paper seeks to show how most of the alleged similarities between these short texts and Virgil's eschatology are superficial. Rather than seeing Virgil as being influenced by a vague and ill-defined religious movement called “Orphic-Pythagorean”, this paper will further argue that his description of Aeneas’ descent is better understood as a product of both ancient literary and mythological texts such as Homer and Plato combined with elements from Virgil's own religious and political context.

From Servius to Frazer: The Golden Bough and its Transformations

For the past 2,000 years, no work of secular Western literature has been so widely read, studied and interpreted as Vergil’s Aeneid. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, exegetes of the poem have focused on its sixth book as the source of ancient pagan wisdom; one of the central images in this book is that of the Golden Bough, which Aeneas plucks in order to gain entry into the underworld. This paper discusses the entire history of the Bough’s interpretation, beginning with Servius and culminating with James Frazer; the Bough is used as an index of the rise and decline of allegorical interpretation, and further hermeneutic developments are studied in some detail. Attention is also given to literary reworkings of the Bough, from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. I conclude with a discussion of modern attitudes towards mediaeval interpretations, and an analysis of the continuity of exegetical methods, as reflected in twentieth-century accounts of the Bough’s meaning.

Nausicaa the Comedienne: The Odyssey and the Pirates of Penzance

Although it has not been noted before, the scene in The Pirates of Penzance where Fred eric, the apprentice pirate, first meets Mabel is closely patterned on the meeting of Odysseus and Nausicaa in the sixth book of the Odyssey. The scene as such is not a parody?in no place does it offer any verbal hint or echo of its original?but a varia tion on a theme, where Gilbert, having read the Odyssey with a comedian's eye, has de rived virtually all the humor from problematic aspects of the Nausicaa scene. By avoiding direct quotation, he prevents the scene from descending into burlesque, but rather preserves the delicate romance of the original despite the change from epic to comic opera.

Treatment of nasal fractures by Paul of Aegina

The most exact description of the management of nasal fractures given by any physician of ancient times belongs to Paul of Aegina (AD 625-690). The goal of this article is to describe the therapeutic methods and surgical techniques used by Paul of Aegina in the treatment of nasal injuries. We studied the original Greek texts and the translation published in Venice, titled "The seven books of excellent doctor Paul of Aegina." The sixth book of his medical compendium is devoted to surgery. We identified the treatments and techniques applied to the restoration of injured noses. In this historical article we present the management of nasal fractures by Paul of Aegina. Paul of Aegina's conservative and surgical management for each form of injury was adopted by later physicians and influenced European medicine, a management surprisingly identical with the way nasal fractures are managed nowadays.

Rediscovering Monteverdi, sacred and secular

Monteverdi, more than most composers, has enjoyed fame-even notoriety-practically since his dying day. Thanks in part to his public spat with the conservative theorist Artusi, Monteverdi has often been a poster-boy for the forces of musical modernism and progressiveness, even at times when little of his music was known. As a result, the inventively pragmatic and opportunistic reality of his achievement has often been unappreciated. Less reflective undergraduate essays continue to cast him as a self-consciously ‘transitional’ composer, who was aware of himself as a revolutionary methodically working out a new musical language. Three new recordings each present a single published collection complete: the Vespers of 1610, the Sixth book of madrigals (1614) and the Selva morale e spirituale (1641). They reveal afresh the extent of Monteverdi's achievement; the way he drew deeply upon tradition and blended it with the latest cultural developments in order to make his new strides. Some of the music recorded here is little known and deserves a wider audience; other works (such as the Vespers, or Beatus vir from the 1641 collection) are so utterly familiar that they are easily underestimated.

Dove non arriva la legge. Dottrine della censura nella prima età moderna (review)

Dove non arriva la legge. Dottrine della censura nella prima eta moderna. By Lucia Bianchin. [Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento: Monografie, 41.] (Bologna: Societa editrice il Mulino. 2005. Pp. 389. euro25.50 paperback.) The book analyzes the ideas about censorship expressed by Jean Bodin, Pierre Gregoire, Justus Iipsius, Johannes Althusius, and Johann Angelius Werdenhagen. The views of these authors on a subject crucial to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe were not influenced by the actual organization of the papal control system on culture and book circulation, but relied mostly on a reappraisal of ancient Roman censorship. The moral and political censorship implemented by the Roman republic was generally described, in the texts here examined, as a powerful means to enforce social discipline and to prevent conflicts and dissent fatal to the state. Bianchin outlines first the historiographical background of her research, discussing some recent contributions concerning the processes of confessionalization and social-disciplining in both Catholic and Protestant areas, between the Peace of Augsburg and the Thirty Years' War. She then compares the Catholic censorship system-intended to prevent printing and reading of books dangerous to the faithful-and the Protestant one, instrumental in enforcing strict religious obedience through the control of moral and social behavior. The third chapter turns upon the ancient Roman magistrate called censura, charged with maintaining the census-a list of the citizens and of their properties compiled for fiscal and military purposes-and supervising public morality. Neglected in medieval legal tradition, the ancients' model met with a revival during the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the earlymodern period, Bianchin points out, legal literature testifies to a new interest in the indicium censorium, a sort of judgment founded on equity, sanctioning vices, bad habits, and moral infringements not subject to the law: But only in the first chapter of the sixth book of Bodin's Republique (De la censure) does the account of the establishment and development of the Roman censura lead to a doctrine of censorship that entrusts to the state the task of imposing moral discipline and restraining offenses like gambling, idleness, drunkenness, vagrancy, and licentiousness. The Bodinian idea of moral control-easy to connect to the rigorous concept of state sovereignty asserted in the Republique-provided a basic reference to later writers dealing with the role of censorship in the organization of the state. In his Syntagma juris universi (1582), then in the De Republica libri sex et viginti (1596) the French canonist Pierre Gregoire follows faithfully Bodin's argument, claiming moreover for the government a wider control over private life and marriage. He, nevertheless, warns against the excesses of censores, the cause, in his opinion, of the ruin and disuse of the Roman magistrate. …

Voice and Vision in The Poetry of Eavan Boland

Boland's poetry seeks to reconcile political and personal, the moment and duration, selfknowledge -seen as an exteriorisation of the self- and narration. It is therefore fundamentally concerned with aesthetics, especially in visual art, which however it views as a form of division and hypostatization of the moment, while it also seeks to place the intense moment of vision in the processes of time by recurrent images of transformation, anticipation, memory and loss; it is essentially elegiac, celebrating and lamenting the past and reflecting the constant presence of death within the everyday consciousness; hence the model of Vergil, and especially of the sixth book of the Aeneid, and of Irish song.

Worldless Affairs

Worldless Affairs Michael Wood (bio) The term "worldless" echoes in Edward Said's literary criticism like the worst of reproaches: as if scholarship in the West had the chance of a world and lost it or threw it away, willfully opted for the habitation of some kind of quietist void. Did anyone have the chance of such a world? Would the chance necessarily be an advantage? What about those scholars, eloquently attacked by Said, whom he thought had too much of a world, or at least too much of a say in the world's political affairs? When he spoke of the virtues of "distance" from the world, what did he mean?1 This essay is an attempt to track some of the meanings of the word world in Said's work and in so doing to approach an answer to the above questions. My suggestion is that Said's thought on this subject is entirely coherent but more complicated than it may look—and perhaps more complicated than he himself entirely wanted it to be. An obvious place to start, but none the worse for that, is the title of Said's sixth book, The World, the Text, and the Critic, published in 1981, two years after Orientalism. The echo from the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer is no accident and sets an interesting agenda. In the old Protestant litany we are invited to pray for release from "all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil." The world is not exclusively deceptive, even in this stern theology, but much of it is. The flesh is mostly deception, above all outside of wedlock, and the devil is deception personified. The trio represents a downward slope, three stages in one unmistakable direction, and that's what the antiphonal prayer is about: "Good Lord, deliver us." Said wants us to hear this plea, or perhaps just catch a subliminal aftertaste of it, and then turn the whole story inside out, and indeed unravel it still further than that. The introduction to the book is titled "Secular Criticism," and not for nothing. [End Page 43] Said doesn't want us to be delivered from the world, the text, or the critic, but he doesn't want sheer surrender either. He invites us to contemplate constantly shifting relations among these terms and to find new work for ourselves, as critics and readers. More important, his terms are far from forming a single unit and do not all progress in the same direction. The world is what, Said suggests, a certain theory of the text is determined to reject, and the critic has to choose one way or another, to go along with this rejection or go against it. The text, we might say, is in this polemical view a version of the liturgical prayer. It says, with intricate philosophical backing, deliver us from worldliness, give us a world without world. There is an interesting shift in Said's thought between the argument in Beginnings (1975) and the general claims of The World, the Text and the Critic. In the earlier book, particularly in the chapter called "Beginning with a Text," Said insists firmly on the worldliness of the text, but he is not really expecting anyone but genuinely old-fashioned academic conservatives—old-fashioned by the American standards of the later 1970s—to argue with him. He invites us to consider writing not as "the solitary act of the individual, nor the imprisonment of sense in graphological inscription, but rather as an act that constitutes participation in various cultural processes." "To put pen to paper" is already to enter a world of circulation and combat, and publication of a text is a repetition of this act that is already not original but an instance of "the text-as-beginning as copy." "A text is an actuality," and "there are no innocent texts."2 Said refers to this chapter in an endnote in The World, the Text, and the Critic, where he says he has "discussed this" earlier (296), but the "this" in fact has become substantially different, a considerably more embattled claim. What has happened in the (rather few) intervening...

Slaves to Rome: The Rhetoric of Mastery in Titus' Speech to the Jews (Bellum Judaicum 6.328-50)

(BJ6.350)Those who discard their weapons and surrender their persons, I will let live. Like a lenient master in a household, I will punish the incorrigible but preserve the rest for myself.So ends Titus' address to the embattled defenders of Jerusalem in the sixth book of Josephus'Jewish War(6.328-50). It is the most substantial instance of communication between Romans and Jews in the work. Titus compares himself to the master of a household and the Jewish rebels to his slaves. Is this how we expect a Roman to describe empire? If not, what does it mean for our understanding of the politics of Josephus' history? The question is particularly acute given that this is not just any Roman but Titus himself: heir apparent and, if we believe Josephus, the man who read and approved this historical account. It is thus surprising that, while the speeches of Jewish advocates of submission to Rome such as Agrippa II (2.345-401) and Josephus himself (5.362-419) have long fascinated readers, Titus' speech has received little or no attention. Remarkably, it is not mentioned in any of three recent collections of essays on Josephus. This paper aims to highlight the rhetorical choices that Josephus has made in constructing this voice for Titus—particularly his self-presentation as master—and the interpretive questions these raise for his readers. It should go without saying that the relationship of this text to anything that Titus may have said during the siege is highly problematic. (Potentially more significant, but unfortunately no less speculative, is the question of how it might relate to any speech recorded in the commentaries of Vespasian and Titus that Josephus appears to have used as a source.) What we have is a Josephan composition that is embedded in the broader narrative of theJewish War.

Eagles Mating with Doves: Troilus and Criseyde, II, 925–931, Inferno v and Purgatorio ix*

CHAUCER's use of Dante was subtle and complex. Recent critical positions have called into question Chaucer's reception of Dante's fictional afterlife but there can be no doubt that the poetry of the Commedia had a vitalizing effect on Chaucer's own poetic development. One small example of such complex textual interaction comes with the figure of Criseyde's dream of the eagle at the end of Book II of Troilus and Criseyde. Book II of Troilus and Criseyde opens with Pandarus awakening to the birdsong of the swallow. Her lamentations (described as a ‘sorowful lay’ and ‘waymentynge’) are almost pointed at Pandarus, as if they were a frustrated attempt to tell him of her metamorphosis and its gruesome cause: ‘Til she so neigh hym made hire cheterynge/How Tereus gan forth hire suster take’ (lines 68–9).1 Pandarus gets up and prepares his errand of the day, to tell Criseyde of Troilus’ feelings for her. The ambiguity of Ovid's account of Procne and Philomena in the sixth book of Metamorphoses has led to two literary traditions in which Procne is transformed into either a swallow or a nightingale. Chaucer has interpreted Procne as the swallow and Philomena as the nightingale, and included the tale in the Legend of Good Women (F 2228–2393). This is the tradition of the Roman poets, and it is the tradition Petrarch follows, for example in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 310. Dante, on the other hand, follows a second tradition where Procne is transformed into a nightingale, and Philomena a swallow, a tradition that dates back to Aristotle's Rhetorica (III.3.1406b15–19). Despite these differing traditions, the unmistakable Dantean echo in the ‘sorowful lay’ brings us to Dante's Purgatorio: Ne l’ora che comincia i tristi lai la rondinella presso a la mattina, forse a memoria de’ suo’ primi guai (Purg. ix, 13–15) [‘At the hour near morning when the swallow begins her plaintive songs, in remembrance, perhaps, of her ancient woes’]2

A Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a scientific and philosophical revolution that discarded the closed cosmos determined by a hierarchy of values and saturated by a dense web of meanings for the rationalist and scientific embrace of a devalued world of facts. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald rediscovers those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists, thinkers, and authors such as Albrecht Dürer, Thomas Browne, and Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, who tease the older saturation of meaning out of new rationalist or theoretical approaches, thereby pointing to the lack and insufficiency of mere reason, or who, as Stanley Fish suggests for Thomas Browne's case, artfully employ the "machinery of reason" as "the vehicle of its own abandonment."1 In his attempt to likewise eclipse the bleak light that rationalism has cast on reality, dissecting the anatomy of a world reduced to the schema and the grid, and to tone down the narrative of progress embraced by those who believed they left the age of darkness for enlightened analysis, Sebald reexamines the baroque awareness of human infirmity and transience in a world changing according to unknown designs and rediscovers allegorical indirection as perhaps the more appropriate, if also more fantastic and more fallible approach to the labyrinthine truths of reality.2 Realism, Sebald stated in [End Page 563] an interview, can only function when it "points beyond itself—that is, when it envelops mysterious facets." He continued, "the realistic text has to venture into allegorical narrative."3 The Rings of Saturn explores such allegorical realism with a continual reference to the codes and numbers that for pre-rationalist thought could offer direct access to a hidden reality. Thus, an exhaustive discussion of Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus and Hydriotaphia: or Urn-Burial—treatises that were jointly published in 1658 and, akin to Sebald's own technique of digressive association, set up the contrast between life and death, stability and volatility as nexus,4 forging oddities, rarities, and the mutually exclusive into unexpected links sustained by a highly digressive and involved rhetoric—provides the frame for the apparently incidental reference to an episode from the sixth book of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's picaro novel Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668). In the sixth book or the so-called Continuatio, Simplicius encounters Baldanders, an imaginary figure whom Sebald's narrator professes to have come across in Borges Libro de los seres imaginarios. The figure's complex allegorical and poetological nature, however, secured Baldanders a fame in Grimmelshausen criticism that the critic Sebald must have been aware of. Personifying the mutability of all worldly concerns, Baldanders can assume just about any form and shape, be it that of a writer, a pig, dung, a flower, a mulberry tree, or a silken rug. Simplicius first encounters him as a life-size statue with the air of an old German hero and clad like a soldier. The military appearance points to the fact that the vicissitudes of Simplicius' turbulent life are set during the Thirty Years War, that he himself serves as a soldier, and that Grimmelshausen's novel reconsiders the general contemporary concern with transience specifically for times of war. In fact, Simplicissimus Teutsch can also be read as a war novel5 and Sebald's many references to warfare and strife in the Rings of Saturn take up this thread: the airwar (52, 232), the atrocities during World War II [End Page 564] (80, 121–122), the Anglo-Dutch navel wars of the seventeenth century (94–96), the disastrous destructions of World War I (116–119), the battle of Waterloo (150–152), the fights for Irish liberation (159 and 256–257), the uprising of the Taiping and the opium war in China (169–176), and the Cold War (276). Just as the remnants of Cold War military institutions strike Sebald's first-person narrator as if they were an ancient temple or pagoda (282...

Write-Ups

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Write-Ups George Brosi Kevin Adams. North Carolina Waterfalls: A Hiking and Photography Guide. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, Publisher, 2005. 590 pages with index, maps, color photos, notes. Paperback. $19.95. What a wonderful guide book! Every entry includes not only excellent directions and descriptions, and notes designed to be helpful to photographers, but also rates the location. Fabulous! This is Kevin Adams' sixth book. He lives in High Point, North Carolina. Darlene Applegate and Robert C. Mainfort, Jr., Editors. Woodland Period Systematics In the Middle Ohio Valley. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2005. 288 pages with preface, maps, photos, tables, references, contributors notes, and index. Paperback. $32.95. This book is a collection of scholarly articles that came out of archeological symposia in 2002 and 2003. The time period illuminated is between 1000 BC and 1000 AD, and the Middle Ohio Valley includes northeastern Kentucky and northwestern West Virginia as well as southern Ohio and extreme Southeastern Indiana. Darlene Applegate teaches at Western Kentucky University, and Robert Mainfort teaches at the University of Arkansas. Darnell Arnoult. What Travels With Us: Poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. 56 pages. Paperback. $16.95. "Edgar Lee Masters would be proud. In the . . . style of Spoon River Anthology, Arnoult's moving collection presents a whole village full of people brought to three-dimensional life in spare, conversational poems ." - Patricia Monaghan in Booklist. The town is Fieldale, Virginia, in the foothills, populated by transplanted Appalachian mountain folk, the community where the poet was raised. Darnell Arnoult currently lives on a small farm outside Nashville, Tennessee. Sandra L. Ballard and Haeja K. Chung, Editors. The Collected Short Stories of Harriette Simpson Arnow. East Lansing, MI: Michigan 106 State University Press, 2005. 259 pages with works cited and notes. Paperback. $24.95. Harriette Simpson Arnow (1908-1986), is, of course, one of the greatest writers ever to come out of the Appalachian region, best known as the author of The Dollmaker (1954), and five other novels as well as three important non-fiction works. This volume collects her stories in book form for the first time, marking an important milestone in regional literature. "Her collected short stories are not only a valuable literary document, but also a wonderfully readable book . . . readers will be swept along; scholars will be fascinated." - Fred Chappell. "Ballard and Chung's introductory essay is a model of literary scholarship and criticism—intelligent, lucid, and measured in its appraisal of Arnow's too long neglected short fiction." - Ron Rash. Sandy Ballard is the editor of Appalachian Journal published by Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She is working on an authorized biography of Arnow. Wendell Berry. BlessedAre the Peacemakers: Christ's Teachings About Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. 68 pages. Paperback. $8.00. In this little book, Wendell Berry selects the sayings of Jesus, separated into the four gospels of the Bible from which they were taken, which he believes to be most worthy not just of study but emulation. It begins and closes with essays by Wendell Berry to introduce and contextualize the quotations. The author and his wife, Tanya, farm organically with horses on the Kentucky River near where he was raised. Berry is a widely respected advocate of living in harmony with the land. A former professor, he is the author of more than forty books, including poetry, fiction and essays. Jeff Biggers. The United States ofAppalachia: How Southern Mountaineers BroughtIndependence, Culture, andEnlightenmenttoAmerica. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers, 2006. 238 pages with index, bibliographic notes, map, preface, prologue, and epilogue . Hardback in dustjacket. $26.00. As co-editor, with George Brosi, of No Lonesome Road: The Prose and Poetry of Don West (2004), Jeff Biggers immersed himself in the perspective of Don West, including West's conviction that Southern Mountaineers have a strong tradition of fighting for freedom. This book is the result of the further study which Biggers did to flesh out West's vision. It presents quite readable vignettes of a wide variety 107 of individuals and groups of people from the mountains who have made a tremendous difference to the nation as a whole...