Tale Set Research Articles

God's Patients: Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws

God's Patients: Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws

Koszmar władzy. Potworność we „Wrońcu” Jacka Dukaja

Wroniec by Jacek Dukaj is a dark fairy tale set during the martial law in Poland (1981–1983). The protagonist of the story, a young boy named Adaś, has witnessed a kidnapping of his father by a monstrous bird — Wroniec. Adaś is set to find and rescue his father, but before he is able to do that, he has to fight many monsters who serve Wroniec. The only weapon that Adaś can use against them is the power of his own imagination. The purpose of this article is to analyse how the authorities of the martial law are seen as monsters by a young boy, changed into grotesque beings by his imagination. The article shows how Dukaj created the monsters based on the real authorities from the ’80. The names, behaviour, and appearance of the monsters have been examined in order to do that. It is also noted how important in the creation of both monster and reality child’s imagination is.

The Iceman Cometh: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

<i>The Iceman Cometh</i>: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

On 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition by Ulrich Marzolph

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2021), pp. 167–169. Copyright © 2022 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 B O O K R E V I E W On 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition by Ulrich Marzolph Mostafa Abedinifard 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition, by Ulrich Marzolph. Wayne State University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780814347744. Hardback, Paperback, and ebook. Encompassing the results of several decades of painstaking study, and building on his numerous pertinent works in the past, Ulrich Marzolph’s 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition is erudite, rigorously researched, and reveals a wealth of intriguing and insightful information. This book is a highly welcome contribution to the field of comparative folk narrative studies. Using the category “Middle East” as a shorthand for Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Marzolph undertakes to show—primarily via exploring sources in Arabic, Persian, and the Ottoman Turkish—the significant narrative contributions of the “Muslim world” (4), as manifested in the cultures of the MENA region, to Western folk narrative traditions. While unmistakably providing a rich, encyclopedic source of information, Marzolph also puts forward an overarching argument: “The Middle Ages and early modernity were periods of intensive cultural exchange during which On 101 Middle Eastern Tales Abedinifard 168 n On 101 Middle Eastern Tales Western authors time and again had recourse to ‘Oriental’ narratives that they adopted to the specific requirements of their own culture” (10). The “Orient,” and here the “Muslim world” cultures—or “Islamicate,” as Marshall Hodgson calls it—in particular, not only comprised a significant “Other” vis-à-vis which European cultures often defined themselves, but they also served, as Marzolph shows throughout his book, as a “constant source of attraction, fascination, and inspiration” for the Europeans (1). Marzolph argues that “the West is not only indebted to the Muslim world, but rather shares common features with Muslim narrative tradition” (3). This argument comes at a timely moment. Due to the rise of political racism and nationalist politics globally, yet especially in Western Europe and the United States, we need, perhaps more than any time in modern history, arguments that work toward reconciliation. This yearning for reconciliation is seen in many of Marzolph’s comparisons and conclusions that feature shared commonalities based on interfaith relations (e.g., chapter 21), universal messages (e.g., chapter 20), or just “the unifying potential of humor” (see, e.g., chapters 45 and 46). The book contains a fairly detailed and documented introduction, followed by 101 chapters on the origins, circulation, and the contribution to Western folklore of the promised, titular “Middle Eastern tales.” While readers could start from anywhere they desire, I would recommend beginning with the introduction , where Marzolph touches on many important topics, including the extant literature, the gaps, the necessity of his own study, his methodology, and his primary resources, mainly constituting Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish— yet also in cases, Indian. I admit I initially approached the book with prejudice: that it would be a huge compilation of dry research on a set of tales. After starting to read, however , I could barely put it down. The chapters—despite being replete with references and new information for most if not all readers—are written lucidly, each resembling a tale itself, turning Marzolph’s book into an example of what Horace called dulce et utile. Given the immense amount of information contained in it, the book certainly yields itself to the extra pleasure of rereadings. What makes each chapter doubly rewarding are the masterfully written plot synopses, which, despite their terseness, do not fail to trigger one’s imagination . Further, in the concluding paragraphs of each chapter, Marzolph renders important insights on why we should care about his observations, including on how his debate helps advance pertinent disciplinary conversations. Most Abedinifard n 169 chapters also reveal Marzolph’s sharp comparisons and contrasts between various versions of a tale in diverse traditions, all of which convene to advance the chapter toward the overall argument of the book. The cross-references throughout (via bolded titles) and the separate reference lists at the end of each...

Baba Jaga, Kościej Nieśmiertelny i inne postacie władające magią w rosyjskich baśniach magicznych a wiedźmy i czarownicy Grimmowscy

The article is an analysis of the images of magic-wielding characters in Russian magic fairy tales. The basis of this analysis is a set of fairy tales collected by Alexander Afanasyev. The author focuses primarily on the characters of Baba Yaga and Koschei the Immortal, pointing in particular to the ambiguity of the former. She can be seen as a witch, a demon and deity, as an antagonist — just like other fairy tale witches — but also as a donor, tester, and catalyst of the protagonist’s evolution. In the case of Koschei, although he always turns out to be an antagonist, what deserves attention is the level of his power — much higher than in the case of “lower-order” sorcerers — and the motif of the seven-stage soul hiding as the source of immortality. Also considered is the image of dragons, characteristic of Slavic fairy tales — perceived in this cultural circle as chthonic beings, related to snakes and in opposition to birds, i.e. uranic beings. In the course of the analysis, the author also compares the images of magic-wielding characters in Afanasyev’s collection with those gathered by the Brothers Grimm.

Wars and heroes: the romantic representation of Spain in "Don Juan; or the Battle of Tolosa" (1816)

This paper examines “Don Juan; or the Battle of Tolosa”, an anonymous poem published inLondonin 1816. This metrical tale set in medievalIberiaat the time of the so-called “reconquista” recreates the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), in which the Muslim forces were defeated by a Christian coalition near Sierra Morena. The poet clearly sides with the Christians, who are depicted as brave warriors struggling to recover their land and their freedom. The emphasis on their patriotic heroism against foreign usurpation creates an implicit analogy between the medieval battle and the recent events of the Peninsular War (1808-1814). The representation ofSpainas a land of war and romance echoes the Romantic figurations of this country appearing in British print culture in the early nineteenth century.

Inferring patterns of folktale diffusion using genomic data

Observable patterns of cultural variation are consistently intertwined with demic movements, cultural diffusion, and adaptation to different ecological contexts [Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach; Boyd and Richerson (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process]. The quantitative study of gene-culture coevolution has focused in particular on the mechanisms responsible for change in frequency and attributes of cultural traits, the spread of cultural information through demic and cultural diffusion, and detecting relationships between genetic and cultural lineages. Here, we make use of worldwide whole-genome sequences [Pagani et al. (2016) Nature 538:238-242] to assess the impact of processes involving population movement and replacement on cultural diversity, focusing on the variability observed in folktale traditions (n = 596) [Uther (2004) The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson] in Eurasia. We find that a model of cultural diffusion predicted by isolation-by-distance alone is not sufficient to explain the observed patterns, especially at small spatial scales (up to [Formula: see text]4,000 km). We also provide an empirical approach to infer presence and impact of ethnolinguistic barriers preventing the unbiased transmission of both genetic and cultural information. After correcting for the effect of ethnolinguistic boundaries, we show that, of the alternative models that we propose, the one entailing cultural diffusion biased by linguistic differences is the most plausible. Additionally, we identify 15 tales that are more likely to be predominantly transmitted through population movement and replacement and locate putative focal areas for a set of tales that are spread worldwide.

The Transformation of Cyavana: A Case Study in Narrative Evolution

The Transformation of Cyavana:A Case Study in Narrative Evolution Emily West (bio) Ongoing Issues in Comparative Work Few will argue with the proposition that stories are fluid and continuously evolving; nor are many likely to deny that a successful narrative can spread like wildfire across time and space. Yet in spite of these two well-documented truths, attempts at the identification of borrowings and parallels (though a venerable scholarly pursuit) can be tricky. Few other common scholarly undertakings generate the level of resistance that the proposal of a set of parallels can, and perhaps with some valid reasons. Shared features that make an enormous impression on one scholar will strike others as insignificant or coincidental, and most comparativists have come to accept that many of our colleagues are completely uninterested in the endeavor, particularly when engaging with a borrowed narrative requires transporting their focus beyond the boundaries of their field. Normally at this point in an academic paper, with the introductory salvo concluded, one would begin grounding the issue within academic debate by quoting from the relevant literature. The state of the methodology for evaluating parallels is, however, such that there is scant literature on it to invoke. Tigay describes the situation facing scholars who work on literary parallels between the Hebrew Bible and other Near Eastern Literature (1993:250-51): That we have still not reached agreement on how to distinguish borrowed from original elements is clear from two recent statements about the relationship between Biblical and Mesopotamian parallels. Theodore Gaster, Frazer's modern editor, writes in the introduction to his revision of Frazer's Folklore in the Old Testament that the Hebrew compiler of Genesis "had . . . a cuneiform original before him." [Gaster 1969:xxvii.] On the other hand, the Assyriologist A. R. Millard says of the flood story, which most consider the outstanding example of a borrowed story in the Bible, that ". . . it has yet to be shown that there was borrowing, even indirectly" [Millard 1967:17]. Recent years have witnessed a new interest in pursuing the study of the genetic relationships between narratives through more scientific methods (for example, Witzel 2012 and Tehrani 2013), primarily in the service of tracing tales back to a common ancestor. The current work seeks to augment those large-scale efforts with a small-scale, close examination of the sorts of tiny incremental changes that cumulatively transformed the myths and folktales of earliest cultures into the rich diversity of traditional narratives scholars have documented across the globe. There is no official list of tested criteria for gauging the likelihood of a relationship between a pair of proposed parallel narratives that may be appealed to as the basis for acceptance or rejection of a claim.1 Instead there exists a sort of commonsensical conventional wisdom on how a set of parallels should look. The following list summarizes a number of these commonly accepted precepts (Tigay 1993): 1. The tales should have multiple shared motifs. 2. The shared motifs should occur in the same sequence. 3. The tales should have specific, peculiar, and significant shared details. 4. Similarities should be heterogeneous, unpredictable, and non-trivial. 5. The two tales should have comparable characters. 6. The two tales should have comparable settings. 7. The two tales should have comparable themes. 8. Alterations must be culturally explicable. 9. There must be a feasible path of transmission between the two tales. Nothing about these principles is self-evidently unsound, and all of them must surely have their place in the evaluation of parallel narratives. As with all pieces of common knowledge, however, they should be employed with the understanding that they have been assembled largely by perceptions of what narrative evolution "should" look like, rather than formulated by means of systematic testing and observation. I have included them here because they are the closest thing to a starting point we have; below we shall be applying these criteria to our case (a set of tales whose genetic relationship is known), after the other elements of the project have been introduced. For the sake of comparison, let us transport the discussion into a different arena: diachronic linguistics, for example, would be a very different field if decisions...

Vernon Lee’s Composition of ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’: Historic Emotion and the Aesthetic Life

This article examines Vernon Lee’s personal impressions of the people, landscapes, architecture, and religious art she encountered while travelling in Tangier and Southern Spain in the winter of 1888 and 1889 as recorded in her Commonplace Book iv . In doing so, it contextualizes the composition of Lee’s only supernatural tale set in Spain, ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, written in the summer of 1889, and in the wake of a painful period for Lee — intimacy with her companion of eight years, A. Mary F. Robinson, abruptly ended between 1887 and 1888 after Robinson’s unexpected marriage. With an eye to biographical context, this article also marks a return to Lee’s aesthetic theories of the 1880s, usually overshadowed by critical interest in her later theory of ‘aesthetic empathy’ informed by her study of psychological aesthetics. By tracing Lee’s views of the mind in the 1880s as inherently rooted in sympathetic impulses of association — what Lee terms the ‘faculty of association’ — this piece explicates her early aesthetic theories of the ‘aesthetic life’ and ‘historic emotion’, and demonstrates how she used her period of exposure to foreign, and at times unsettling climes and cultures, to experiment with the benefits and limitations of (aesthetic) sympathy in encounters with difference.

Comments on Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture

ABSTRACTHazony's insightful book advances three theses: (1) The Tanakh, the canonical Hebrew Scripture, is coherent, by virtue of its distinctive vision of the Whole and of the Israelite People's special place in it. (2) The Tanakh is a philosophic as well as a religious text. (3) The study of the Tanakh should find a home in departments of philosophy and political science as well as religion or religious studies. Granting the first and third points, we may raise questions about the second: Does philosophy require a concept of Nature qua Necessity, which is at odds with the Scriptural God's radical freedom? Does Hazony, to present the Tanakh as philosophic, overrationalize it, and therewith offer interpretations that, although fruitful and inspiring, fall wide of the mark? Of particular interest are his translation of the Hebrew word lev, literally “heart,” as “mind”; his sketches of five of the Patriarch Jacob's sons as politically relevant character types; and especially his take on the Patriarch Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac, which understates this text's poignancy and wonder. An alternative reading reveals the Book of Genesis as a set of cautionary tales about the hazards of unaided human reason, for which the Mosaic Law provides a needed corrective. On the other hand, Hazony should not be judged too harshly for his critical comments on a dogmatic strand (but only a strand) of Christian thinking that he associates with the early Church Father Tertullian.

Maurice Wood: an appreciation.

Maurice Wood, BS, MB, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1941–1945, attended his 70th class reunion last year, traversing the Atlantic from his home in Stoney Creek at Wintergreen, Virginia, US. Dr Wood died at home on 11 March 2016, leaving a stunning legacy of friendship, doctoring, leadership, investigation, mentoring, and inspiration for generations of health professionals. His career was a tale set in both the UK and the US. In the UK he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1946–1949 as major and senior medical officer in the Middle East and as a GP from 1950–1971 in South Shields, England. During these years in practice he was Vice Chairman of the North East Faculty, Royal College of General Practitioners. He was a generalist full of curiosity about his patients and the community in which they dwelled, with particular …

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Not only does Highway justify forgery, he also happily engages in plagiarism— in other words, intertextuality. He often quotes his “uncles,” including Juan Sánchez Baudrillard, Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, and other famous figures. These quotations shift the atmosphere of the text depending on the reader’s degree of familiarity with these authors, but they are playful enough for us not to get confused even if we don’t get the erudite allusions. Luiselli’s novel is not only for those initiated into postmodern theory. It is the result of meaningful engagement not only with literary giants but with the real world as well, an engagement that connects this otherwise lighthearted and elusive little book to the ground, injecting fresh blood into postmodern techniques. As Luiselli explains in her afterword, she was originally commissioned to write a work of fiction for the exhibition catalog of an art gallery that is funded by a juice factory. Instead, she decided to write a novel in installments , in collaboration with the workers of the factory, located in Ecatepec, outside Mexico City. The exposure of collaborative efforts involved in making this book would not be complete without making the translator ’s presence explicit. Luiselli’s translator , Christina MacSweeney, contributed a delightful timeline that is just as helpful as it is disorienting: besides giving signposts (political and literary events that took place during Highway’s lifetime), MacSweeney also added some random, insignificant events. Other insertions in the book include mottos by philosophers of language, aphorisms taken from Chinese fortune cookies, and a collection of photos of artwork as well as buildings and scenes in Ecatepec taken by factory workers. A fundamental openness and curiosity make Luiselli’s work fresh and exciting. She is serious in her engagement with art, literature, and society without being arrogant or sententious—she is part of all those games, and is happy to acknowledge it. The topic she explores—fiction enhancing the value of an object—is quite pertinent in an age when the fate of so many people depends on hyperbolic personal statements, résumés, or news items. Ágnes Orzóy Budapest Anthony Marra. The Tsar of Love and Techno. New York. Hogarth. 2015. 332 pages. After the signal achievement of Anthony Marra’s first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), one returns with pleasure to Chechnya and Russia for more memorable characters, conflicts, and absurdity. This time, from the Russian perspective, there is less fatality in the air than individual deaths and disappearances, understood well enough so that those who adapt quickly might survive. If one is clever , one can even maintain certain constancies behind a chameleon exterior. One functionary has “ascended to the rank of commissar by welcoming the lunacy the world so graciously handed him.” There is a deputy curator whose art museum has been destroyed, with its best paintings sent to Moscow, who keeps damaged paintings in his apartment. In his new position as tourist director, he restores Grozny, rated the most devastated in the world, by painting word-pictures of buildings that were once standing for Chinese tourists. Or the former art student, now a leading censor of photographs, carefully airbrushing out disgraced persons from historic pictures, sometimes extending background, sometimes replacing the face with an unknown or anonymous person. His constancy consists in the face he repeatedly inserts, his brother at various ages, an unknown man who was executed, supposedly for being too religious. Naïm Kattan Farida Norman Cornett & Antonio D’Alfonso, tr. Guernica Editions Naïm Kattan places his sensual and passionate love story in a situation rife with conflict in Iraq before the advent of World War II. Religious, political, and cultural clashes are juxtaposed with intense matters of the heart as Farida, a Jewish cabernet singer, embarks on an ardent, tortured romance complicated by jealousy and ambitions. Kattan’s simple yet lush prose, ably rendered by Norman Cornett and Antonio D’Alfonso, draws the reader into this compelling tale set in a unique environment. Philippe Jaccottet The Pilgrim’s Bowl (Giorgio Morandi) John Taylor, tr. Seagull Books Words, though imperfect and imprecise, allow Philippe Jaccottet to develop and explore his reactions to the artwork of Giorgio Morandi...

The Winter War

Phillip Teir Serpents Tail, 2015, PB, 304pp, £7.99, 978-1781254899 Philip Teir’s first novel, translated by Tiina Nunnally, is a winter’s tale set in a mild Finland and an even more temperate England. The novel describes a family struggling with identity during the winter of 2011–2012 at the time of the Occupy London protests at St Paul’s Cathedral. The story revolves around the family members, their needs, interactions, and relationships. Max is a sociology professor turning 60 …

Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic. By Audrey Horning (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2013) 496 pp. $49.95

As any historian can attest, dead men do indeed tell tales. Crafting stories through extant documents of the “very dead” is, after all, what historians do for a living. Things often tell tales as well, and, as Horning’s Ireland in the Virginian Sea suggests, one set of tales can be at odds with the other. In this book, she surveys a heretofore conventionally accepted story—that English colonization of Ireland preceded and served as a model for English colonization of the Chesapeake—to make her point. Employing Renaissance humanist ideals of cultural difference that demonized the Irish, English adventurers planted themselves in Ireland. Their task, as they saw it, was to reduce the barbarous Irish unto civility. Many of the projectors of Irish plantation schemes also, or so we have been told, planned American colonization projects, and the ideology that they employed in Ireland to horrifying effect served them well in Virginia in reducing its savages unto civility. Conquest led to conquest. For historians studying the documentary record, this is an axiomatic tale.Horning views the matter differently. “Ireland,” she argues, “did not serve as a model for early Virginia” (277). Relying on archaeological discoveries at sites in Ireland and the Chesapeake, she maintains that the evidence for acculturation and co-existence is equally as strong as that for conquest and exclusivity. Even in forts, places explicitly meant to exclude, unearthed artifacts point toward cooperation or, as she puts it, “mutual accommodation and negotiation” (363). Horning argues that the established narrative of conquest in Ireland has been fueled by presentist concerns, serving only to escalate animosity.In the American case, although the traumas of colonization have in some ways been underplayed, the idea of two mutually exclusive communities perpetually at war with one another is another mythic conception that obscures more than it enlightens. She reports that material evidence, particularly in Jamestown, seems to contradict the documentary record. Evidences of “syncretic practices undermine the stark narratives of planter-versus-Gael, just as they complicate understandings of the relationship between English settlers and New World Native” (vii). In this regard, Horning is following on the heels of a number of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic who have softened the conquest motif for early modern Ireland or who have argued that colonists and Indians in some parts of America were able to construct a “middle ground” of understanding.This is a provocative argument. The question is whether Horning places too much stress on the tale of material “accommodation and negotiation” in the face of a great deal of documentary evidence to the contrary. But she challenges us to revisit or qualify the stark model currently entrenched. As she argues throughout the book, we have to tell tales that make room for “ambiguities.” At its best, her book usefully encourages us to add complexity to often-simplified understandings of cultural conflict. In fact, neither conquest nor co-existence was always a straightforward business. Negotiation and accommodation frequently transpired against a backdrop of hate and appalling violence, on the one hand, and mutual understanding rooted in cooperation, on the other. After all, the past, whether we find it in excavations or in archives, has a penchant for confounding the tales that we tell.

Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2009): Irishness between Myth And Brand

Ondine (written and directed by Neil Jordan) is a modern fairy tale set and shot in Ireland on a low budget. Although the film is set in the present and makes reference to current issues, it is strongly influenced by cliched and revivalist discourses, such as were nurtured by Irish romantic and cultural nationalism. Consequently, the film frequently lapses into stereotypically romanticised representations of Irishness and obsolete gender constructs, reminiscent of those popularised by Irish-American film productions of the first half of the twentieth century. These filmic versions of Ireland are part of an ongoing and global process, the commodification of all things Irish. From this vantage point, Ondine can be seen as one more label in the branding of an always already marketed Irish identity and culture.

Moving in and Out of Borders: Othello, Caliban, and Conrad in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North

Borders can be lines on a map, marked with flags, fences, or barbed wire, or they can be boundaries and limit conditions, as much a part of mental baggage as to do with zones of geographical and political demarcation. In postcolonial experience, a border is a cultural barrier more often breached than respected. This paper examines the kind of breaking through boundaries represented in the novel Season of Migration to the North (1966) by the Sudanese novelist Tayib Salih. In his narrative, the protagonist is characterized in a manner that hovers and moves to-andfro across boundaries such as that between realism and allegory, between autobiography and intertexuality, and between literal and figurative acts of translation. The protagonist crosses the literal border from his colonized South to the North where the colonizer lives. He also breaks down the barriers that separate civility and being civilized from rapacity and barbarism. Salih`s novel crosses over into the mode of a fable, which negotiates a crossing between a tale set in England and the Sudan and a fable in which a North African assumes and inverts the typologies and stereotypes associated with Shakespeare`s Othello and Caliban. Salih`s fiction provides a fascinating reflection on a singular aspect of the postcolonial condition which the paper attempts to explicate: the compulsion to create psychic borders, and the equally strong compulsion to break through such borders and boundaries.

Toward Transpacific Ecopoetics: Three Indigenous Texts

In this article, I employ "the Pacific" as a contact zone, method, and concept with which to examine the dynamic, shifting relationship between land and sea that allows indigenous literature in the transpacific context to engage all of its ecopoetic complexity. The Pacific is the largest oceanic divide on earth. In recent years, issues around global capitalism, national identity, community, and the ecology of the Pacific region have sparked intriguing and provoca- tive discussions. Research along these lines celebrates the networking and coalition activities of various groups of people in the Pacific, and highlights the circulation of ideas and cultures that I believe to be crucial to contem- porary ecological scholarship. It offers an oceanic perspective that serves as a counterweight to continental ways of thinking, and it supplements or challenges transnational approaches to imperialism, postcolonialism, indi- geneity, globalization, and ecology. 1 A recent special issue of the Contemporary Pacific titled "Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge" examines uncharted spaces of the Pacific Islands and historicizes indigenous discourses about making landfall, showing how they have contested the production of new transoceanic environments. The articles in this special issue "explore notions of Pacific indigeneity as they circulate through geographical, cultural, political, and historical flows of people(s), things, knowledge, power—between islands and continents." 2 As the United States and China battle over this geographical space, the message from the indigenous Pacific can be inspiring: neighboring communities have always exchanged ideas and products, often across vast oceanic distances. It was a large world in which indigenous people intermingled along numerous interconnecting routes, unhindered by the boundaries erected much later by imperial powers. Indeed, the recent wave of research on transnational

Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation (review)

Reviewed by: Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation Doug Slaymaker (bio) Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation. Edited by Roman Rosenbaum and Yasuko Claremont. Routledge, London, 2011. xiii, 251 pages. $140.00. Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation taps into the sense of high-stakes and scramble, and of the limited resources, possibilities, and confusion of the postwar years. The collection sets out to investigate the experience of “the yakeato generation.” It promises importance: [End Page 386] a focused interaction by a range of scholars on the generation that came of age in the burnt-out ruins after the Asia-Pacific War and their contributions to, and interactions with, wider areas of culture and art. As coeditor Roman Rosenbaum states in the introduction, The presence of members of what is known as the yakeato sedai or the generation of people who experienced the fire-bombings of the Asia Pacific War is conspicuous in all areas of contemporary Japan and is usually referred to as a distinct group. From literature to the visual arts, from music to theatre, from architecture to politics, their influence and in many cases guiding principles is evident everywhere and in many cases forms the keystone of modern Japanese society and culture. (p. 4) And continues: Upon close inspection, the pretermitted influence of this generation has been touched upon by many researchers, yet arguably never before has a single study connected all the strands of influence from this generation which transcend all aspects of post-war Japanese artistic production—from drama, theatre, movies, literature, poetry, women’s studies and manga. (p. 5) I provide this long quote to show both the broad ambition of the volume and its stylistic features. Rosenbaum’s introduction first solidly outlines issues and concerns of postwar society and then shows how the essays highlight the plights and contributions of the disenfranchised and underrepresented. The volume has a number of compelling essays. The lead article by Suzuki Sadami, translated by coeditor Rosenbaum, is strong in its details. Suzuki approaches the postwar era from three vantage points: “the continuity between the pre-war and post-war eras; how the defeat and the occupation were narrated; and how Japan’s fresh start has been narrated” (p. 25). Suzuki’s scholarly contributions are enormous, and he is a logical and welcome choice to introduce a volume on the postwar years. Suzuki draws from a wide range of secondary sources, leaning especially heavily on John Dower’s and Michael Molasky’s work in English. But a stronger editorial hand would have been welcome. For example, the first of these sections begins “First off, the problem of Class A war criminals will be considered,” leaving Suzuki sounding like one of our undergraduates. His discussion connects a wide group of politicians, intellectuals, and artists to outline how many of their concerns and strategies remained unchanged from pre- to postwar. The short third section reminds us of the canonical writers narrating the postwar moment. The result is a collection of interesting incidents that conforms to a style of Japanese critical discourse that most readers of this journal will well know; those readers will also know that Suzuki is usually much more cogent and concise. Among other essays deserving mention is Barbara Hartley’s chapter on Ariyoshi Sawako and Sono Ayako. As young women writing after the [End Page 387] war, they gained critical acclaim while remaining somewhat outside the main currents of literary production. Hartley offers nuanced readings of two important early stories that have not received the treatment they deserve.1 Sono remains a complicated figure, not least because of the increasingly conservative politics of her later years; by pairing Sono with Ariyoshi’s very different sort of narrative—a historical tale set prior to the Meiji Restoration—Hartley enriches the achievement of both, namely, that of young women writing about the changed relationships of women in society, and that society’s relationship with the West. Leith Morton’s considered essay on war and postwar poetry is a sophisticated discussion of “the poetics of war” and also deserving of note. Morton wades straight into the thorny problem of wartime poetry...

Michel de Ghelderode, the Wooster Group, and postmodernist revisions of La tentation de saint Antoine

La tentation de saint Antoine initially recalls Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Renaissance painting or Flaubert’s onieric work‐in‐progress. A closer look at more recent adaptations of the story of Saint Anthony the Great, however, reveals that such transformations of the myth addressed shifting aesthetics in the twentieth century by combining genres and texts, designed to cast what Foucault considered Flaubert’s most modernist ideas in an entirely postmodern light. This paper examines two of these adaptations: first, Michel de Ghelderode’s multiple versions of the tale set in Flanders, published separately from 1919 to 1932, but not performed until 1957 as a radio play and marionette show; and, second, the Wooster Group’s provocative stage adaptation, which transplanted the hermit Anthony to an excess‐filled New York of the eighties in Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Antony.What Flaubert created as a self‐reflexive commentary on the dangers of books, twentieth‐century adaptors turned into a postmodern statement about other contemporary media forms, including stage, radio, cinema, and television. More importantly, by strategically appropriating not only Flaubert’s subject matter, but also his composition technique and passages from his texts, these artists draw attention to the perils of a culture‐saturated twentieth century in which art had become adaptation.

Leather-Stocking Redux; Or, Old Tales, New Essays (review)

Reviewed by: Leather-Stocking Redux; Or, Old Tales, New Essays Jason Berger Walker, Jeffrey, ed. Leather-Stocking Redux; Or, Old Tales, New Essays. Brooklyn: AMS Press, 2011. 284 pp. $97.50. Cloth. Despite the fact that undergraduates’ knowledge of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales often begins and ends with Daniel Day Lewis’s romantic tagline “I will find you,” the series of five novels (The Pioneers [1823], The Last of the Mohicans [1826], The Prairie [1827], The Pathfinder [1840], and The Deerslayer [1841]) remains an important part of American literary and cultural history. Much like Georg Lukács’s observation in The Historical Novel that the characters and struggles within Walter Scott’s historical novels exemplify “historical social types” and “social trends and historical forces” (34–35), the famed Natty Bumppo and his relationships with various historical and fictionalized characters in Cooper’s novels provides a rich flashpoint for considering social antagonisms and contradictions of the age. Moreover, Cooper, himself, makes an interesting case study for any number of historical and political inquiries. Of course, not everyone would agree with this perspective. Cooper has been under attack since at least the 1830s, when Whig reviewers leveled their pens against his early work. After Cooper’s death, Mark Twain sarcastically reduced The Deerslayer to a “literary delirium tremens” and D. H. Lawrence dismissed Cooper’s portrayal of Native Americans as simple “wish-fulfillment.” Perhaps more importantly, Cooper’s texts have been largely either ignored or censured by contemporary scholars working in critical paradigms of race and empire. For these reasons, Leather-Stocking Redux is a welcome collection, offering a variety of perspectives on why, in Jeffrey Walker’s terms, “Cooper’s best-known works are...not only important guides to issues and attitudes in the early Republic, but also address concerns still very troubling in our collective experience as Americans” (“Introduction” 2). That is to say, the collection sets itself up as a series of arguments for Cooper’s tales’ relevance in today’s classroom and critical landscape. As I will [End Page 122] discuss below, in this reviewer’s opinion, the collection succeeds on many fronts, but it also includes significant critical shortcomings. Among the ten essays included in the collection, three stand out as particularly rich offerings. Wayne Franklin’s “‘One More Scene’: The Marketing Context of Cooper’s ‘Sixth’ Leather-Stocking Tale” provides perhaps the most nuanced historical consideration of Cooper’s work. Examining the shifting literary-market forces and demands that shaped the coalescence of the Leather-Stocking series, Franklin presents a provocative materialist argument as to why Cooper may have abandoned the idea of writing a sixth Leather-Stocking Tale set during the American Revolution. Franklin traces painstakingly the complex relationships Cooper had with the presses Lea and Blanchard, Stringer and Townsend (formerly Burgess, Stringer, and Co.), and Putnam in the 1840s and early 1850s, allowing him to reframe previous speculation that Cooper’s political views halted composition of the last novel (which, presumably, would have necessitated presenting Natty as a Loyalist). Two other essays that are particularly useful in furthering the collection’s aim are Lance Schachterle’s “On The Prairie” and William Decker’s “The Africanist Presence in The Pioneers.” Schachterle teases out the socio-political conflicts that appear in The Prairie, which is set in 1805 and, according to Schachterle, represents “Cooper’s deepest conflicts concerning the successful achievement of...stability in the early Republic” (124). Although his discussions of space (the desolate prairie) and specific characters yield valuable insight, his consideration of the troubled and anxious place of law in the novel is perhaps most interesting. Decker’s essay also addresses topics that are relevant to contemporary students and scholars, examining the presence of two “Africanist” figures in The Pioneers: the slave Agamemnon and the freeman Abraham Freeborn. The essay does include elements that scholars might question—such as the exclusive use of Morrison’s rather dated critical paradigm and a distinct strain of pro-Cooper overstatements. Yet, Decker’s analysis of these two characters is lucid and productive, particularly his consideration of Cooper’s footnote in the 1832 edition of the novel that includes a “willful distortion” (20) of...