Subversive Ideas Research Articles

Religious Redaction in Qohelet in Light of Mesopotamian Vanity Literature

A popular critical theory suggests that the epilogue of Qohelet, which recommends discipline and piety, is a later addition aimed at reconciling the unorthodox ideas of the book with conservative views. While this hypothesis is well-established on the basis of the text’s style and content, no external evidence to support it has ever been suggested. This paper seeks to present an empirical model for this redactional theory from a comparative point of view. It examines the development of the vanity theme in Mesopotamian literature, and shows that the subversive ideas of vanity literature gave rise, from the very beginning, to redactional activity focused on re-interpreting it in light of traditional values. Several examples of this process of conservative redaction are discussed, including Sumerian, Akkadian, and Akkadian-Biblical cases. The theory that the final verses of Qohelet are a later interpolation thus gains credibility in light of similar phenomena in Mesopotamian literature.

Winifred Ward: Progressively Queer

This article examines Winifred Ward's life and her writing to illustrate that Ward was both a progressive and a Queer author who used the language of the historical moment to advance her often subversive and revolutionary ideas. Scholars have often referred to Winifred Ward as the “mother” of the field of creative dramatics. This article locates Winifred Ward's writing in the progressive education movement and acknowledges the connection between Ward and other progressive-era educators, namely John Dewey, William Kirkpatrick, Francis Parker, and Hughes Mearns, all of whom promoted the education of what they termed the whole child. However, the article goes a step further, considering the influence of Ward's intimate relationship with Hazel Easton on her professional work and her writing. Furthermore, the article examines the ways that children and childhood, and the women who taught them, were constructed in the United States at the turn of the century. Ultimately, the article analyzes Ward's writing through a Queer lens and suggests that a Queer sensibility may have influenced Ward's notion that some children need to explore various means of gender representation to arrive at one that is satisfactory to their sense of self.

Cervantes Lands a Left Hook: Baiting the Inquisition with Ekphrastic Subversion

Este estudio utiliza el concepto de of (teoria de la mente) y toma en cuenta el contexto historico de Cervantes para considerar algunas posibles intenciones autoriales en la composicion del Quijote y reflexionar sobre las repercusiones que podrian haber resultado como consecuencia de esos propositos. En particular, se enfoca en las prohibiciones contra la Biblia en lengua vulgar como posible motivacion para algunos aspectos visuales de la primera novela moderna, y examina el uso potencial de la ecfrasis como referencia cifrada a varios simbolos cristianos. En especifico, el simbolo de Cristo llamado Ichthus (el pez) se pone bajo la lupa de la investigacion para indagar la posibilidad de que hubiera sido una fuente de inspiracion para el nombre Quixote, tomando en cuenta citas de la novela y las imagenes que podrian sugerir. Estos elementos visuales son considerados a la luz de recientes avances en el campo de la percepcion visual en cuanto a su impacto inicial en Cervantes, el proceso cognitivo en la imaginacion del autor, y la manera en la cual dichas impresiones podrian haberse manifestado en el consiguiente producto literario. ********** No MATTER HOW MANY advances there are in world of cognitive science, it is highly doubtful that totality of true intentions of any writer will ever be extrapolated purely from words of their texts. What was in (embodied) mind of human being of flesh and blood who authored novel when it was written will always be inaccessible to reader removed in time and place from author. However, the potential empirical difficulties of elucidating fact of matter--the executive intentions of creator--do not negate that there is a fact of matter (Swirski 139). Therefore, arriving at some level of incontrovertible knowledge about artist's thought cannot be only (or even primary) goal of using approaches informed by such research. Rather, taking into consideration of new information gathered by cognitive sciences (which examine how human perception functions and interacts with language) can be impetus for posing new questions that allow for fresh and original interpretations of texts, even those that have been examined and investigated for centuries. With any luck, these new lines of inquiry may bring us closer to understanding authorial objectives. For, as Umberto Eco argues, it is a dangerous critical heresy to read whatever we may want into a text, and it is paramount that reader always be moved by a profound respect for the intention of (5). This study takes as a starting point suggestion of several scholars that certain anti-Inquisitorial critiques (as well as possibly subversive ideas) are present in Don Quixote, written between lines of novel by its author Miguel de Cervantes. By constructing and adapting a working theory of mind of Cervantes, this investigation attempts to uncover ways in which he may have attempted to communicate messages that were decipherable by his intended audience, but which were capable of eluding censors and, thus, possible Inquisitorial retribution. Further, substantial research done on use of ekphrasis by Cervantes to allude to imagery from visual arts within text of his novel is employed to show how author may have utilized similar techniques to refer to images connected to proscribed texts of subversive themes. All of this is subjected to examination through lens of recent findings in cognitive science, with a particular focus placed on how humans process visual information, both as a percept and in imagination. In her groundbreaking study Why We Read Fiction, Lisa Zunshine asserts that detective novel exercises theory of mind of reader in a particularly focused way. If this is indeed case, then perhaps reverse is also true: that investigation of creative mind behind a work of fiction--as if it were deliberately manipulating metarepresentational abilities of reader in order to conceal an esoteric subtext comprehensible only to a select audience attuned to deciphering all of textual clues--could empower analyst to unmask a hermetic intention hidden below surface of a novel. …

The Internet, the Perpetual Beta, and the State: The Long View of the New Medium

Though fecund as a medium across which subversive ideas can be propagated, the Internet is also hazardous to these ideas. By virtue of the perpetual beta and the increasing under-dominance of Internet content, which effectively means there is no last edit on the Internet, all ideas, including militant ones, are subject to the scrutiny of Internet users. The hazard of the perpetual beta and the new plasticity of information is atomizing the violent militant memes associated with Al Qaeda.

Engineers or Artists? Toys, Class and Technology in Wilhelmine Germany

Ganaway argues that toys allowed millions of comfortably situated Germans to participate in a debate in Imperial Germany about the role modern technology would play in shaping the ideal middle-class citizen. Germany's nascent consumer culture easily facilitated this argument. Entrepreneurs envisioned the ideal German as a masculine engineer controlling human and natural environments. They marketed accurately miniaturized toys designed to turn boys into manipulators of technology and girls into domestic managers. Artists, intellectuals and maternal feminists demanded humanistically-trained individuals who could unite Germany's fractious society. They called for hand-crafted miniatures that emphasized imagination and creativity and blurred gender boundaries. Neither side wanted to entirely destroy the other, but both felt compelled to argue that only their vision could ensure a strong Germany. In the end, the engineers and entrepreneurs won this debate, but only at the cost of assimilating the most appealing aspects of reform toys into the factory process. Artists and intellectuals carved out a space for themselves and their vision of the middle-class via the market which outlived the Kaiserreich. This shows that consumer culture permits personal self-fashioning; while it tends to reinforce the power of dominant social groups it is remarkably permeable to subversive ideas.

Flesh made word: saints' stories and the Western imagination

In the fourth century a new narrative genre captured the imagination of the faithful - the moving accounts of the lives of Christian saints. Willing to die gruesome deaths or endure constant suffering, saints conveyed a powerful message: God was still present in the world. He continues to manifest His powers and communicate His messages through His special friends - the saints. What kind of Christianity do we find in these stories? In this original and provocative work, Aviad Kleinberg argues that the saints' stories of medieval Europe were more than edifying entertainment; they retain an alternative theology, often quite different from the formal theology of the Church. By telling and retelling the story of virtue and salvation, by expanding the religious imagination of the West, they were shaping and reshaping Christianity itself.In this study of stories from the fourth through the fourteenth centuries, we meet the tender Perpetua bidding farewell to her infant son, Simeon Stylites turning himself into a rotting corpse, Francis of Assisi finding joy in suffering, and Fra Ginepro playing the fool, for Christ. We meet holy anchorites, headstrong virgins, fearless dragon slayers, and scheming politicians. Kleinberg unveils the inner contradictions, the subversive ideas, and the deadly power games that lay behind the making of the Western imagination. People, ideas, and passions - often relegated to the back pews - take center stage in this daring book. This is a story of how stories change lives.

Key contributors: Ernst von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism

This article reviews the significance of the contributions of Ernst von Glasersfeld to research in science education, especially through his theoretical contributions on radical constructivism. As a field shaper, Glasersfeld’s subversive ideas catalyzed debate in the science education community and fuelled transformation of many facets including research methods, ways of thinking about teaching and learning, curriculum, and science teacher education. Perturbations emanating from the debates on constructivism forged new pathways that led to the development and use of many of the sociocultural frameworks employed by authors in Cultural Studies of Science Education.

Liberated jokes: Sexual humor in all-female groups

AbstractFemales have formerly been under-represented in jokes. Many scholars have claimed that joke making is primarily a male activity, particularly in the domain of sexual jokes. In this paper, I discuss sexual jokes that women share with each other both in all-female groups and by e-mail. After reviewing some widely held assumptions about women and jokes, I explore liberated women's jokes, including their structure, use of stereotypes, and subversive ideas. Finally, I discuss why humor theory is incomplete without the inclusion of a female perspective and suggest that women should tell more jokes.

Schwebe der Körper, Stammeln der Sprache. Strategien literarischer und sexueller Subversion bei Julia Kristeva und Gilles Deleuze

Abstract Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze, two key figures of French post-structuralism, developed paradigms of literary theory that revolve around a certain idea of subversion. Interestingly, both authors illustrate the subversive impact of modern literature with a view to a psychoanalytic reading of sexual “perversions”: Whereas Kristeva stresses the paradigm of fetishism, Deleuze underscores the subversive core of masochism. Kristeva's position is elucidated by way of James Joyce and Georges Bataille, that of Deleuze with Elias Canetti and Franz Kafka.

Clerks All! Or, Slaves with Cash

Clerks All! Or, Slaves with Cash Walter Johnson (bio) Douglas Egerton's fascinating article begins with an image of slave rebels in Charleston in 1822 planning to rob a bank. And, indeed, it speaks volumes that such an image should be interesting in and of itself, as it surely is. We have focused intensively in the literature on slavery and slave revolts to discern underlying tendencies and long-term transformations, but there is much about the everyday life of slavery (and especially of enslaved resistance) about which we know next to nothing. And apparently when slave rebels thought about revolt one of the practical steps they considered was to take over banks and steal the money inside (if, of course, taking that money from those banks could be called stealing given that it represented, in congealed form, labor that had been wrung from their bodies). Egerton asks why they began with the banks. Ranging widely and comparatively in time and space, Egerton proposes a big answer composed of several smaller arguments. To wit: Urban environments that hosted banks were shaped by structures and practices that both suggested and supported collective revolt as a solution to the problem of slavery. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cities, Egerton points out, were geographically complex: They provided a lot of places to hide and a lot of places to encounter subversive ideas and discontented people. And they provided enslaved people with a lot of ways to make money. The urban economy was sufficiently complex that it required flexible terms of employment even for slave labor. The skilled labor of a cabinet-maker would never be needed all the time by one [End Page 641] owner, but through hiring out, it might be useful to any number of clients and transformed into an income stream. Likewise, a man trying to set up a tavern in his front room might not have had the money to invest in buying a slave, but hiring a slave for a year at a time might have been a way to begin to make that money. And, finally, there were all the petty bribes and small cash incentives through which notionally unpropertied slaves were daily and regularly coaxed into labor everywhere in the Americas.1 And this money, Egerton argues, was meaningful. It was the lubricant that offered slaves an entrée to the treating and drinking of the multiracial tavern life of the docks, a world that Egerton's wonderful books on the revolts in Richmond in 1800 and Charleston in 1822 demonstrates was full of the subversive ideas and rough characters that made the idea of revolution believable. But there was more to money than that, for money, Egerton suggests, shaped the aspirational structure of revolt. The experience of having had money in their hands, Egerton argues, was, for slaves an experience of freedom: of possibilities that were otherwise foreclosed, of crossing boundaries that were in principle defined by race, but in practice, it turned out, defined by the cash nexus. Of buying fine clothes, or standing for a round of drinks, of experiencing the tonic power of [End Page 642] being able to choose, to evaluate, consider, compare, linger. Of behaving like a clerk. For Egerton, this experience was one of "psychological independence" of the very sort that made it possible to imagine revolution and freedom. I must admit that it took me a while to get used to this idea, but after my initial skepticism, I did so, and it is, of course, a really bright and interesting idea. Enslaved people lived in a society where power and beauty and sanctity and all sorts of other virtues were experienced and expressed as control over commodities. And the only irony in the fact that some of them—many of them?—might have joined their owners in imagining that the achievement of human freedom could be indexed by the possession of things is the most obvious one. It seems utterly sensible to try to imagine a world in which enslaved people could care for themselves and express their love for one another by pursuing money and purchasing goods. And, indeed, it seems utterly sensible to try to imagine a...

The Preaching Fox: Festive Subversion in the Plays of the Wakefield Master (review)

118Comparative Drama Warren Edminster. The Preaching Fox: Festive Subversion in the Plays of the Wakefìeld Master. New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xüi + 230. $75.00. Thelatest contributiontothestudyofworks generallyattributedto the fifteenthcentury British playwright known as the Wakefield Master, Professor Warren Edminster's The Preaching Fox offers a new and challenging examination of the many ways in which the famous"play-doctor" transforms the conventional biblical subject matter of his Corpus Christi drama into caustic satires of the corruption plaguing the Church and secular authority in contemporary latemedieval England. This book's eight chapters, followed by a speculative conclusion about the Wakefield Master's ideological leaning (the reader is kept guessing whether Edminster believes the Master was a Lollard until the very last page),convincingly establish the Master's subversive intent by considering each of the Master's plays within the critical context of festive culture. While that context is constructed by a creatively imaginative combination ofinsights from such notable figures as E. K. Chambers, C. L. Barber, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Edminster does not, in his first chapter ("Subversion and the Festive Instinct"), serve the reader old wine in a new bottle. Rather, by demonstrating how the festive functions as the principal means ofsubversion,he provides himselfwith an informative and practical means ofaddressing the particular thematic effect of the "dialogue" between the opposing world views of official and unofficial culture present in each of the Master's plays. To guarantee that consideration of this "dialogue conflict" reveals what is latent and sophisticated in the Master's dramatic art, Edminster clarifies the dialogic or interactive relationship between official and unofficial culture by reviewing in the second chapter ("Typical Festive Elements in the Plays") the "vocabulary" or "principal forms" of festive culture itself (27). This review includes identification and examination of two fundamental kinds of festive elements. The first of these has to do with character. Under this heading, the functions of the Mock King and the Fool are discussed. The second kind of defined festive element turns attention to a variety ofactions. Under this heading , Edminster explains the function ofsuch "forms" as invocation, usurpation of authority, reversal, burlesque, images of feasting, and two kinds of abuse— physical violence, in the form of actual beatings, and verbal violence, in the form of threats, profanity, etc. What is made clear by these discussions is that not all ofthese"forms"are included in each ofthe Master's plays,but the combination of elements of one or more in each helps to develop a dialogue between official and unofficial culture that is unique to that particular work. What is more, these "forms," as Edminster emphasizes, do not erase traditional meaning Reviews119 in the plays. In fact, it is through the interplay generated by their relation to traditional meaning that the subversive ideas the Master intends to convey have their greatest impact (22). In the first of the Master's plays, Mactatio Abel, the subject of the third chapter ("The Overthrow of Religious Obligation"), numerous festive forms are readilydiscernable and carefullyintegrated in the workto achieve the greatest dramatic and thematic effect. Garcio,for example, plays the role offool,turning the world of the play upside down. Cain, too, introduces an important festive element—that of the Lord of Misrule. His physical as well as verbal violence introduces a distinct contrast to Abel, who, through his insistence upon observing obligations and his occupation as a shepherd, functions as a representative of officialdom. The eventual killing of Abel, seen as it is "through the prism of [these and other] festive forms" (71), offers the audience an uncrowning—a usurpation that directs "festive hostility and scorn towards orthodox obligation" while drawing "empathy towards Cain's complaints even if the audience does not fully embrace Cain as Lord of Misrule" (67). While the conventional didactic meaning of the play is "muted" by these and related emphases , a festive reversal that is also included by the Master reveals his true genius as a playwright. Cain's shift from initiator to object ofparody and festive abuse, especially in his final exchanges with Garcio as he assumes the role of officialdom's spokesperson, provides the audience with the opportunity to experience a true...

The boundaries of sensibility: 1790s french translations of Mary Wollstonecraft

In this article on the 1790s French translations of Mary Wollstonecraft'sA Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) andThe Wrongs of Woman: or Maria. A Fragment(1798), changes in the translation of the vocabulary of sensibility in major eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century bilingual dictionaries are examined and provide the background to a discussion of the translation choices of Basile-Joseph Ducos (who was involved with several Jacobin periodicals) and the anonymous translator of theVindication. While both are remarkably anxious to do justice to Wollstonecraft's subversive ideas, Ducos's work shows greater awareness of the theoretical intricacies involved in translating the language of sensibility, and seems to reflect the increased vulnerability of the discourse of sensibility in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

The Taming of the Illicit: Bounded Rebellion in South Africa, 1986

The South African state at the height of apartheid depended upon two kinds of borders. Firstly, there were the boundaries between South Africa and what was tellingly referred to then as “the outside world.” These were, like all such borders, highly porous when it came to the movement of migrant laborers from poorer adjoining countries. But in most other respects, they were impermeable. Indeed, the South Africa of the 1960s and 1970s must have been one of the least “globalized” states of the time. Economically it had pursued a protectionist policy. Flows of even mildly controversial or subversive ideas, of illegal commodities, and of people deemed “undesirable,” were strictly forbidden, and their entry from outside made difficult. Television was banned; books were subjected to rigorous censorship, and radio broadcasts were regulated and often manipulated by the state-controlled broadcasting corporation. The opposition African National Congress (ANC) and a variety of other movements were in exile and their members harassed, jailed, or worse. Physical and cultural borders were well-patrolled by censors, state bureaucracies, customs officers, immigration officers, spies, and police.

Estado, iglesia y sociedad en la Monarquía Hispana de Carlos IV. Las apreciaciones de un embajador austríaco en Madrid

This writing deals with an historiographical analysis of the contents of the diplomatic dispatches sent to Vienna by the imperial ambassador, John Frederick count of Kageneck, accredited at the Court of Charles IV. They concern to the first seven years of that reign (1789-1795). Provide issues, appreciations, and commentaries about the conditions of the contemporaneous Hispanic kingdom in the matter of institutional, administrative, political, economic, social, religious, military affairs, international relations and geostrategical interests. The Austrian diplomat pays much attention to the consequences of the French revolution in Spain; to the measures adopted by the Spanish authorities against the spread of the subversive ideas, as much in the metropolis, as in the overseas dominions, with special reference to the outstanding role played by the clergy, as the ideological and moral bulwark against the impetuous attacks of the French revolutionary activity; to the attitude of Spain with regard to the purpose of forming an international coalition against the revolutionary France; and to the later access of Spain in the war against the France of the Convention (1793-1795).

Sowing “Seeds of Goodness” in Depression-Era Chile: Politics, the “Social Question,” and the Labor Ministry's Cultural Extension Department

A contributor to La Lei, the journalistic mouthpiece of Chile's reformist Radical Party, attended a peculiar cultural event on a mild spring evening in 1909 that evidently made quite an impression. Workers with their spouses and children, all donning their best suits and dresses, had gathered in one of the capital's dance halls to enjoy what the onlooker grasped as an evening of “aesthetic enjoyment without ostentation.” As the writer noted, “For three hours I was enchanted by the order, by the discretion, by the culture of the dancers. [The cultured worker] is a natural friend of order, he does not let himself be convinced by high-sounding words, nor does he accept subversive ideas; the revolutionary preaching of the Utopians and those without spirits repulse him. He loves tranquillity and has a profound respect for republican laws. A man of this nature is not only a pillar of our democracy but also an unceasing producer of wealth and social well being.” What the writer recognized as “culture” evidently was conducive to the perpetuation of liberal democracy, the defense of the economic order, and the preservation of social peace during the so-called Parliamentary Republic (1891-1925). Indeed, if workers were culturally educated, if they properly understood, imitated, and enjoyed a “mainstream” culture, they would be less apt to engage in disruptive political endeavors, or so it was suggested in La Lei.

Radical Times: Brisbane in the Sixties and Seventies

This conference organised by the fledgling Brisbane Labour History Association with the assistance of the Queensland Council of Unions was long overdue. If its organisers were inspired by the apparent success of the earlier Sydney Labour History Conference, which traversed similar themes and issues, the Brisbane show emphasised how different its historical context and political experiences were. The conference participants did not engage in amnesiac nostalgia for radical times past. Instead, they offered analyses and testimonies of how radical their social movements were within the confines of the big country town of Brisbane where racism, political repression, and social conservatism held sway. Only Dan O'Neill spoke briefly but incisively about the roots of Brisbane's sunny oppressiveness and its reaction to the first stirrings of political engagement by a moderate minority of university students to the American war in Vietnam, military conscription, institutional and casual racism, South African apartheid, sexism and women's liberation. The jack-boot tradition of Bjelke-Petersen's police force to any manifestation of a student political rally, march or demonstration deepened their political radicalism and swelled their numbers. Unlike Sydney or Melbourne during the same period, there were few Queensland trade union leaders and rank-and-file unionists who actively supported the student struggles. This point was emphasised by the 'southerner,' Alan Anderson who was a Plumber's Union delegate to the Brisbane Trades and Labour Council. 'Ando' stressed that most ALP union officials were either indifferent or openly hostile to the emerging civil liberties movement, led by the St Lucia students. The few Communist Party union leaders may have been personally sympathetic to the students, but never attempted to agitate for these causes as Jack Mundey and Norm Gallagher had done on Sydney and Melbourne BLF building sites. Nevertheless, Left trade union leaders, through Anderson's encouragement, allowed the student radicals to establish 'Foco' within the portals of Brisbane's Trade Hall. 'Foco' became, for a time, a weekly gathering for the alienated young. Rock music, underground posters, and the subversive ideas of the New Left found a willing 'Foco' audience. If some of Australia's best rock bands played their first gig at the Brisbane Trades Hall, many 'Focoists' became radical activists against war, racism and poverty. Only when 'Foco' was forced to vacate its union bastion because of exaggerated complaints about noise and refuse did the police raid and close down every other venue in Brisbane hired by the 'Foco' organisers.

It's a Small-Minded World After All: International Perspectives on Children's Literature and Censorship

It's a Small-Minded World After All: International Perspectives on Children's Literature and Censorship Carolyn Sigler (bio) Censorship in Children's Literature, ed. Alleen Pace Nilsen and Hamida Bosmajian. Para•Doxa: Studies in World Literature2, nos. 3-4 (1996). Censorship in Children's Literatureis as complex and significant as the issue of censorship. "[B]ecause the concept hovers around the ragged edges of cultural values," writes co-editor Alleen Pace Nilsen in her comprehensive introductory essay, "Focus on Censorship," censorship itself can be difficult to define: "If we didn't have boundaries, we might have to create them just so there would be something to let us know when we had gone beyond them. The problem is that different people want different boundaries" (308). Censorship and Children's Literaturecovers a wide range of issues and perspectives and will provide an invaluable resource for those interested in questions of academic and artistic freedom, children's rights, and the production and consumption of children's and young adult literatures. One of its many strengths is its examination of censorship from many points of view, bringing together articles that address the concerns of authors, publishers, teachers, librarians, and academics, written by an international collection of scholars analyzing censorship issues in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, the United States, Bulgaria, Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, and Greece. Though the essays contained in this double issue of Para•Doxaare occasionally uneven—and at times provide frustratingly brief discussions of complicated cultural, pedagogical, and literary situations—they offer important introductions to a variety of censorship issues and invaluable starting points for further study, including a list of resources on censorship compiled by Hamida Bosmajian and Ken Donelson. In her own essay, Nilsen organizes the issues addressed by the collection into four interrelated categories of censorship: "political, pedagogical (or educational), economic (or marketplace), and internal (or private)" (308). The articles in the first three categories [End Page 233]examine censorship as an assertion of hegemonic, institutional authority that "does not protect the individuality of the child; rather, it protects the power of the system itself" (Batycki 325). The collection makes clear, however, that the same patriarchal ideologies that motivate censorship by institutions such as governments, schools, and churches can also inform "private" acts of censorship by parents and other individuals. "If we look at censorship not as a conflict of values but as a way to assert power," writes Sara Fine, "then censorship, particularly when it comes to children, is notabout their moral development; it is about the fear of losing control over them. Authoritarian parents are more often outraged by books that portray young people defying their parents' values than by the language the book contains. . . . Dirty language is still cleaner—and easier to control—than rebellion" (quoted in Apseloff 481). Essays such as Christa Kamenetsky's "Censorship in Totalitarian States," Meni Kanatsouli's "Censorship in Greece: 1974 to the Present," Midori Todayama's "Censorship in Japan," and Maria Nikolajeva's "The 'Serendipity' of Censorship" each study governments' political control over and use of children's literature as a tool for disseminating official ideologies and thus influencing behaviors and beliefs. Nikolajeva's insightful essay looks at censorship in the Soviet Union, where she grew up, describing "how children's literature functions under abnormal social conditions, what strategies it establishes in order to survive and how oppression can, paradoxically enough, influence the literary evolution in a positive way" (379). Alexandra Zervou, in her fine essay on Walter Benjamin's Nazi-era radio play for children, "Walks in Berlin," calls this paradoxical relationship "the game of rules and infractions": strategies by which writers may "pretend to conform to some of [an oppressive government's] rules in order to deal with them more effectively, thus creating for themselves a secret means of resistance" (452). Nikolajeva suggests that fairy tales and fantasy are a major form through which children's writers, in "the cat-and-mouse play between the writer and censorship," have best been able to express subversive ideas (382). Indeed, in her analysis of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Millicent Lenz argues that the fantasy genre can enable...

:The Movement towards Subversion: The English History Play from Skelton to Shakespeare

The Movement Towards Subversion explores the theme of power in the Renaissance English history play. It analyzes the growing subversion of the sociopolitical hierarchy in Renaissance drama from Skelton's Magnificence to Shakespeare's King Lear. Unlike most scholarship, this book studies the lesser-known, often neglected dramas plus some familiar 'canonical' works. These plays tell us a lot about political and religious attitudes in sixteenth-century England. Instead of discussing the plays in regard to their relationships with and influences upon Shakespearean drama, the author analyzes the plays on their own terms. This book also shows how dramatists employ medieval history in their plays to express subversive ideas about Tudor political situations.

The Criminal Law of Ancient Rome.

Although the Romans lived in a society very different from ours, they were like us in fearing crime and in hoping to control it by means of the law. Ordinary citizens wanted protection from muggers in the streets or thieves at the public baths. They demanded laws to punish officials who abused power or embezzled public monies. Even emperors, who feared plotters and wanted to repress subversive ideas and doctrines, looked to the law for protection. In the first book in English to focus on the substantive criminal law of ancient Rome, O. F. Robinson offers a lively study of an essential aspect of Roman life and identity. Robinson begins with a discussion of the framework within which the law operated and the nature of criminal responsibility. She looks at the criminal law of Rome as it was established in the late Republic under Sulla's system of standing jury-courts. Grouping offenses functionally into five chapters, she examines crimes committed for gain, crimes involving violence, sexual offenses, offenses against the state, and offenses against the due ordering of society.

Obvious Subversions

Obvious Subversions Lois R. Kuznets (bio) Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature, by Alison Lurie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. I always enjoy reading Alison Lurie's prose, fiction or nonfiction. The pieces collected in this volume, most of which I had read in the seventies in Children's Literature, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, reveal her usual self-confident erudition, wit, and determination to treat the writers and writing of children's literature seriously while taking her role as critic and scholar with the proverbial grain of salt. These qualities are not always found in the rather ponderous American critics and scholars (among whom I include myself) of children's literature. The British are better practitioners of belle-lettres, and Lurie reveals her transatlantic affinities admirably. Ties with the British literary tradition can be seen not only in Lurie's style but also in her subject matter and theoretical approach. With few exceptions, the authors and works Lurie considers are British of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like many British critics who write about children's literature (Humphrey Carpenter, for instance), Lurie likes to link authors and works through telling biographical detail while generally shunning Freudian analysis of the texts. As Lurie notes in her foreword, in her childhood she discovered that there were: two sorts of books on [the library] shelves. . . . The first kind, the great majority, told me what grown-ups had decided I ought to know or believe about the world. . . . But there was another sort of children's literature. . . . These books . . . recommended—even celebrated—daydreaming, disobedience, answering back, running away from home, and concealing one's private thoughts and feelings from unsympathetic grown-ups. They overturned adult pretensions and made fun of adult [End Page 189] institutions, including school and family. In a word, they were subversive, just like many of the rhymes and jokes and games I learned on the school playground. [ix-x] And in her first chapter, Lurie attempts to tie together the wideranging subjects in the volume under the rubric of "subversive literature," dubbing as subversive all those works that seem to challenge the didactic mode of many children's books from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. As she loosely defines it, the subversive may be discovered in the scatological sexuality of skiprope rhymes as well as in texts that portray relatively powerless characters—like the children and the protagonists of fairy tales—who subtly challenge or evade prevailing adult authority. She also includes in her idea of subversion a somewhat stronger anti-establishment stance, rarer in children's literature: such politically challenging tendencies as T. H. White's pacifism in the face of World War II or E. Nesbit's late nineteenth-century Fabianism. Only the foreword—in which Lurie expresses her own childhood preference for such subversive literature—seems to have been written especially for this volume, which is made up of diverse works, including book reviews. The subsequent chapters seem not to have undergone much change from their original presentation, although she has occasionally combined two pieces. The short studies that follow Lurie's initial thematic linking chapter meander into many areas and consider the following: folktales as liberating for female and male protagonists; American novelists of the twentieth century ("Fitzgerald to Updike") who employ fairytale motifs; books about elves that have become "Fashionable Folklore for Adults"; the literary and personal effects of Kate Greenaway's relationship with John Ruskin; Lucy Clifford's "Tales of Terror"; the fairy tales of Ford Madox Ford; Beatrix Potter's struggle, expressed in her animal stories, to emerge from her suffocating family; the "Modern Magic" of E. Nesbit; J.M. Barrie's Peter Panism; Frances Hodgson Burnett's need for happy endings; A. A. Milne's retreat to "Pooh Corner"; J. R. R. Tolkien and T. H. White as producing "Heroes for Our Time"; the godlike bear in Richard Adams's Shardik; William Mayne's Games of Dark; and finally, the rhymes, games, jokes, riddles, and superstitions that belong to the "Folklore of Childhood." [End Page 190] Don't Tell the Grown-Ups also includes an extensive bibliography of...