Unseen World Research Articles

Heaven and Hell on Earth: Visualizing the Unseen World of American Realism

Heaven and Hell on Earth: Visualizing the Unseen World of American Realism Robert E. Brown (bio) Gregory S. Jackson. The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xiv + 409 pp. Reproductions, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.00. American literary realism has traditionally been understood as an attempt to identify with the relentlessly unsentimental elements of life, an approach to writing impelled by the notion that literature is authentic only to the degree that it inhabits the unvarnished truth of human existence. Gregory Jackson’s The Word and Its Witness offers a bold and ambitious revision of the historical and conceptual parameters of American realism, expanding the term so as to include literary precursors found principally in the American Protestant homiletic tradition, as well as the religious literature of the late nineteenth century, particularly religious fiction. Thus it draws on a broad range of materials, including sermons, primers, pamphlets, catechisms, grave iconography, novels, and photography—material not typically incorporated in the genre of realism—while drawing parallels between these materials and contemporary forms of religious communication, such as video games and dramatic reenactments. What is the “real” in American realism? In a sense, this is the underlying question that animates Jackson’s study. Is it, as it is often portrayed, a literary genre informed by an ideological quest for an empirical, materialist, and ultimately secularized understanding of the world in the face of the grim nature of life in post–Civil War, industrialized, urban America? Or can it rightly be defined more broadly as an epistemological search for the world as it really is, that world that really exists, even if portions of that world lie beyond the apprehension of the physical senses? Jackson opts for the latter, and in doing so extends the notion of realism beyond its narrowly contextualized understanding as a formal period of critical American literature. What justifies such an expansion of categories for Jackson is the claim that secular and religious forms of realism are closely linked in their quest to discover the nature of the world that human beings inhabit: “spiritual and secular forms [End Page 17] thus share a genealogy that produced the formal and thematic conventions that we have come to associate with . . . the postbellum emergence of literary realism” (p. 6). This expansive consideration of a spiritualized realism begins with colonial and antebellum anxieties over changes in the epistemological and theological landscape. In response to the emphasis on experience as the primary mediator of knowledge and on individual agency as the path to self-realization, the proprietors of religious knowledge sought to develop a Protestant pedagogy that took into account these new assumptions about the way human beings gained and retained an understanding of their religious faith. They augmented their homiletic discourse with more visual forms of language aimed at increasing audience participation, creating a virtual form of experience by way of the imagination, and thus offering experiences through which spiritual reality could be encountered, contemplated, and finally resolved in the reader/listener’s moral responses to them. What makes the literature of this period “realistic” in Jackson’s estimation is its shared concern to call attention to the stark realities of the unseen world and its tangible connection to the visible world, particularly to the spiritual, moral, and psychological dynamics of lived religious life. This work is bound to provoke considerable discussion among specialists in the many subject areas and disciplines on which the author weighs in; nonetheless it is a compelling read for scholars in the fields of, among others, American literature, religion, and history. What historical context provoked the early American turn to religious realism? In a word, hell. Or more properly, the loss of hell as a closely felt reality for colonial Americans, and more generally, the lightening of the religious mood—a loss of anxiety over quintessential Puritan doctrines concerning the severity of God. Growing colonial economic prosperity, political security, and religious pluralism, combined with a moral optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment, undermined the force of a theological system that emphasized God’s inscrutable grace and wrath, manifest in the Calvinist doctrine of election. In its place was a...

Robertson Davies and Music

Robertson Davies once described himself as a ‘Failed Musician,’ but the musical education that Davies received, the role that music played in his life, and the use he made of music and musicians in his novels show that this is true only in the narrow sense that he did not earn a living from music. A proficient melopoetic artist, weaving music and musicians into his literary works with consummate skill and artistry, he was also professionally active as a music critic and a librettist. The German composer E.T.A. Hoffmann is the only historical musician to be given his real name and appear as a speaking character in any of the novels, but many of the author's fictional musicians are based on real-life models, and despite his great love of music, Davies often portrayed musicians as uncouth reprobates. Music, which sometimes provides structural foundations for Davies' literary works and other times serves as a leitmotif, is often a portal to unseen worlds, including the realm of the dead and of supernatural phenomena, or the domains of religious experience or creativity.

Visions of an unseen world. Ghost beliefs and ghost stories in eighteenth-century England. By Sasha Handley. (Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World.) Pp. ix+287 incl. 4 figs. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007. £60. 978 185 19688 86

Visions of an unseen world. Ghost beliefs and ghost stories in eighteenth-century England. By Sasha Handley. (Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World.) Pp. ix+287 incl. 4 figs. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007. £60. 978 185 19688 86 - Volume 60 Issue 3

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism Lisi Schoenbach Robert Richardson. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 622 pp. $17.95 (paper). Robert Richardson introduces his excellent William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism as “an intellectual biography” (xiii). “As with my previous books on Thoreau and Emerson,” he explains, “I have tried to read what James read and to show how his reading is reflected in his writing.” Yet despite Richardson’s claim that the book “is primarily narrative, aiming more to present his life than to analyze or explain it,” his analysis of William James’s intellectual background, what he was reading and thinking, is itself an argument about the determining factors in James’s life. Like all worthwhile biographies, this one offers its own implicit answer to the question, “What made this man or woman great?” Such a question is never simple, and in the case of William James it is particularly difficult. A biographer could easily choose, as so many previous biographers of both Henry and William James have done, to focus on the James family as the determining factor in William’s greatness. Indeed, an entire biography might well be organized around his relationships with each member of that family, especially with its idiosyncratic and tyrannical patriarch, or with brother Henry, whose own genius was both William’s driving inspiration and his chief aggravation. Or, like more recent biographers, one might focus on William’s epic battles with depression and indecision; on the extraordinarily generative intellectual circles in which he moved; or on the epochal political shifts that marked the United States between the Civil War and World War I.1 Richardson’s methodological choice to focus his attention upon William’s intellectual life does not of course eclipse these other issues. On the contrary, it emphasizes the extent to which all these aspects of William’s life contributed to the rich intellectual atmosphere in which he moved. Richardson thus brings together the strengths of a number of previous books about William James. Like Kim Townsend in Manhood at Harvard, Richardson emphasizes the central role played by the university that furnished an institutional and an intellectual home for William James throughout his life. Like Louis Menand in The Metaphysical Club, he discusses two formative moments of William’s early life: his trip to the Amazon with Louis Agassiz, and his perspective on the Civil War. Like Leon Edel in his great biography of Henry James, Richardson examines the intense rivalries and productive agonistic struggles between brother and brother, and between father and son, that helped define William James’s familial relationships. And like William’s first biographer, Ralph Barton Perry, Richardson offers extended discussions of William’s friendships with the other leading philosophers of his time, excerpting generously from his correspondence to bring those relationships vividly to life. [End Page 95] One effect of these multiple vectors of argument is that they reveal the contradictions that defined William James both personally and intellectually. Here was a man who railed ceaselessly against the evils of all institutional forms (which he lumped together under the umbrella pejorative “bigness” [Letters 90]), yet remained thoroughly devoted to the particular institution of Harvard University throughout his career. His systematic and thoroughgoing skepticism was coupled with an almost unimaginably open mind. Indeed William, whose education was centered in the sciences, was actively curious about the possibility of supernatural events, spiritualism, and the periodic merging of seen and unseen worlds. Further, he gave the impression of boundless energy and physical vitality, yet he struggled throughout his life with a variety of physical and emotional ailments that sometimes left him in almost complete paralysis. And he shared with many other great men that most banal and tiresome of contradictions: he was a devoted husband and father and also an inveterate flirt, possibly even an adulterer.2 The book is primarily devoted to detailing and examining William’s reading and thinking, and thus to charting his influences and inspirations. Some of these influences will be familiar: his early readings of Darwin and responses to the influential anti-Darwinist Agassiz; his father’s own...

The relationship between spiritual experiences, transpersonal trust, social support, and sense of coherence and mental distress—a comparison of spiritually practising and non-practising samples

We compared the pathways from exceptional experiences (measured with the Exceptional Experiences Questionnaire, EEQ), transpersonal trust (TPV), social support (F-SoZu) and sense of coherence (SOC) scales towards mental distress within a spiritually practising (SP) and a non-practising sample (NSP), using structural equation modelling. We found a high amount of variance explained for SOC (SP: R 2 = 0.50; NSP: R 2 = 0.61), a moderate amount for F-SoZU (SP: R 2 = 0.17; NSP: R 2 = 0.20) and for TPV a very small amount only in the SP sample (SP: R 2 = 0.04; NSP: R 2 = 0.00). In contrast, for the EEQ, which grasps positive and negative spiritual, psychopathological, and visionary dream experiences, a strong relationship was found for the NSP sample (R 2 = 0.53) but only a moderate relationship for the SP sample (R 2 = 0.28). Further analysis revealed that the path coefficients from positive, negative spiritual, and psychopathological experiences to distress were significantly lower in the SP sample. Thus, as regular spiritual practice seems to alter the pathways to distress derived from positive and negative spiritual and psychopathological experiences, unidimensional questionnaires only grasping positive spiritual experiences seem to be inappropriate for explaining the intrapersonal mechanisms associated with regular spiritual practice. [The] unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative charge. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophical excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal. (James, 1904, p. 516)

Robertson Davies and Music

Abstract Robertson Davies once described himself as a ‘Failed Musician,’ but the musical education that Davies received, the role that music played in his life, and the use he made of music and musicians in his novels show that this is true only in the narrow sense that he did not earn a living from music. A proficient melopoetic artist, weaving music and musicians into his literary works with consummate skill and artistry, he was also professionally active as a music critic and a librettist. The German composer E.T.A. Hoffmann is the only historical musician to be given his real name and appear as a speaking character in any of the novels, but many of the author's fictional musicians are based on real-life models, and despite his great love of music, Davies often portrayed musicians as uncouth reprobates. Music, which sometimes provides structural foundations for Davies' literary works and other times serves as a leitmotif, is often a portal to unseen worlds, including the realm of the dead and of supern...

Visions of an Unseen World Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England by Sasha Handley

93 opean owners gives way to a careful appeasement of those owners’ concerns that evangelism among their slaves would lead to their freedom. As practiced in Caribbean colonies and the southern US, Anglican theology comes to argue that conversion makes the slaves’ souls equal to their masters’ while their persons must remain enslaved : slavery is justified as an opportunity for conversion to Christianity. Despite some uneasiness about slavery itself voiced by some Anglicans as early as the 1740s, the church largely continued to preach a policy of amelioration of the slaves’ condition—not abolition —and considered that the slaves themselves ‘‘lacked an ethical awareness ’’ even while the Anglican Church’s plantation possessions failed to become models of benevolent Christian rule. Mr. Strong logically, if implicitly, concludes that missionary experience in the New World shaped imperial practice and moved Anglican theology away from the Enlightenment principles with which it began. Shannon Hartling University of Waterloo SASHA HANDLEY. Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England. London : Pickering & Chatto, 2007. Pp. ix ⫹ 287. £60; $99. Like Rabelais’s ‘‘Lantern’’ guiding we mere faggots ‘‘with legs of wood,’’ Ms. Handley lights the reader’s way through a maze of ghost stories from the Restoration to the year 1750. Methodically and painstakingly, she examines their evolution from a predominant oral tradition to print formats, concluding that ‘‘ghost stories’’ were the collective expression of beliefs and practices in Georgian England. Whereas she could have investigated ways in which her eighteenth-century ‘‘hierarchy of the supernatural’’ had been modeled after earlier celestial hierarchies—a welldeveloped topic—Ms. Handley observes simply that this ‘‘strictly ordered hierarchy . . . emerged by the close of the eighteenth century.’’ She appropriates the ‘‘supernatural’’ vocabulary of the era, clothing her ghosts, specters, and souls in such terms as ‘‘preternatural’’ and ‘‘apparition.’’ In Chapter 1, tantalizingly entitled ‘‘Restoration Hauntings,’’ Ms. Handley continues to employ mystifying wordimages such as ‘‘spirit world,’’ ‘‘wishes of the dead,’’ ‘‘the wandering dead,’’ ‘‘a guiding spiritual light within,’’ ‘‘visions of the dead,’’ and ‘‘ghostly appearances .’’ Readers of the Scriblerian might have an ear for the aura of mystery surrounding eighteenth-century esoteric studies. Ms. Handley’s terminology certainly captures it. Chapter 1 investigates the Restoration ’s radical reaction to Calvinist psychological torment. Theologian Henry More, a Calvinist by upbringing, ‘‘was plagued by fears of damnation as a young boy.’’ In the Calvinist scheme of salvation, the doctrine of double predestination mandated that no good works or faith could change the fate God had ordained for the individual, resulting in severe emotional anxiety. Fierce antiCalvinist controversies over the nature of life after death fueled promotion of ghost stories by Anglican clergy, polemicists , and natural philosophers. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, Ms. Handley details popular culture’s truck with ghosts in socially stratified forms of print, some more fashionable or acceptable in polite company, and clothes her 94 arguments of the permeability between spoken and written ghost stories in plausible garb. Virtually every form of written and enacted production was employed during the eighteenth century for distributing ghost stories. Ms. Handley discusses, for example, ballads, chapbooks , almanacs, jestbooks, rumor and gossip, oral and musical performance, theatrical enactments, letters, interactive periodicals, essay periodicals, and general magazines. Written ghost stories, clothed in dialogue , image, and circumstantial detail dramatized not only real events, but also the emotions and interior worlds of people —much like ourselves I point out— both skeptical of and intensely curious about the existence of their own souls after death. Ms. Handley attributes the shift in ghost imagery—evolving from the more concrete winding-sheet, faggot -bearing ghosts into the more poetic, ethereal visions—to technological advances in the sciences of optics and astronomy , whereby people could see within and beyond what had before been impermeable. Given that currentday readers will hang expectantly on each of her wordily retold stories, their expectancy of visual rewards that illustrate or portray these ‘‘visions’’ is left as unfinished business, since the stories are accompanied by a mere four illustrations . Nonetheless, Ms. Handley convinces us that Georgian England is the time and place when marvelous ghost stories happened and were told, stories worthy of studying and rereading. Kathryn LaFevers...

WebWatch

BioTechniquesVol. 42, No. 5 WebWatchOpen AccessWebWatchKevin Ahern†Kevin Ahern††Kevin Ahern - Please send web site recommendations to ahernk@orst.eduSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:16 May 2018https://doi.org/10.2144/000112468AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInReddit Shiver Me TimbersThink coral reefs, and you'll probably envision a tropical locale with warm, clear water. It may come as a surprise then that in the deep, cold floors of the ocean, far below the level that light penetrates, one can find ancient coral ecosystems. Brrr! How do they survive? That's only one of the dozens of questions answered at the informative and wide-ranging Lophelia.org site. With beautiful pictures of an otherwise unseen world and descriptions of the reproductive biology of corals, Lophelia has much to delight scientists and nonscientists alike. Visitors will also learn about threats to this watery world and the importance of preserving it. An inside look at an out-of-this-world site.@ www.lophelia.orgMissing LinkThe coelacanth, a fish thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago, was “rediscovered” in 1938, and since that time it has been described both as a “fish out of time” and a missing link, the latter tag arising from unique “proto-leg” structures it possesses. The fish's strange appearance and disappearing acts aren't the only mysteries surrounding these living fossils. For example, there is the unusual behavior they have been observed to exhibit of standing on their heads, their method of locating prey fish by a rostral organ that acts as an electric field receptor, and the whereabouts of juvenile fish, which are almost never seen or caught. If you're awed by the odd, you'll enjoy the offerings at Dinofish.com.@ www.dinofish.comThe Bugs of SummerOutside of the entomological sphere, insects really aren't seen as objects of beauty, but the dragonfly is one notable exception. Perhaps the reason is at least partly because they conjure up memories of summertime picnics around lakes and, besides looking great, they don't really bother humans. These guys are more than just a bunch of pretty faces, though. If you consider the things dragonflies eat, a list that includes mosquitoes, gnats, flies, flying ants, and swarming termites, you may want to invite a few to your next picnic. At the Digital Dragonflies site, visitors will find not only pages overflowing with outstanding photos (this was the original mission of the site back in 1996), but also enough information about the four-winged fliers to satisfy a demanding entomologist.@ stephenville.tamu.edu/%7efmitchel/dragonfly/index.htmlAussie GenomicsHome to some of the most exotic animals on earth, due to its isolation from the Pangaean supercontinent in the mid-Cenozoic era (about 35 million years ago), Australia would seem to be a natural location to base genomic sequencing projects. So goes the argument from the Australian Genome Alliance (AGA), which recognizes that the country largely “missed the boat” on human genome sequencing and aims to correct that with several efforts to capture the genetic uniqueness of the continent. Proposed projects include the Coral Genome Project, the Eucalypt Genome Project, and the Wallaby Genome Project, among others. With support from the Australian Federal Government and the efforts of the AGA, you'll probably be hearing a lot about genomics from down under in the near future.@ www.genomealliance.org.auCancer AnswersFor the patient who has just heard that six letter word no one wants coming from their doctor's lips, information is crucial. Cancer is terrifying not only because there are no cures, but also because the average person has virtually no understanding what all the disease entails. Aiming to fill the information void about this important problem is Insidecancer.org, with its multimedia online content that tackles the fear factor with well-written text, informative graphics, and video animations. Arming its users with information, as Insidecancer does, not only helps patients to conquer fear, it also gives hope to those who need it most.@ insidecancer.orgFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Vol. 42, No. 5 Follow us on social media for the latest updates Metrics History Published online 16 May 2018 Published in print May 2007 Information© 2007 Author(s)PDF download

The Healing Forest Metaphor Revisited: The Seen and “Unseen World” of Drug Use

There is one world we live in. Its geographical and spatial boundaries tell us this. We see it on maps, we see it on television, and we see it when we walk out of the door. Children, adults, and people of all races and creeds live in this one world. The world we live in is viewed differently by these many individuals. Some see it as hostile, some see it as peaceful, and some go about their daily business and do not see it at all. This is the seen world. The one we can see with our eyes. The seen world is not the only one that exists, however, because there is also another world behind our eyes. When we close our eyes, it is in there. We have an imagination to tell us what it could be like, we have thoughts to tell us what we want it to be like, and we have dreams to tell us what we want it to be. Where is this unseen world? We carry it around with us every nanosecond of every day that we are alive. While we live in the seen world, the unseen world is alive in us. What could the unseen world be like for substance users? This is the topic of the current article.

René Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth: Microbiologist, Medical Scientist, Environmentalist

René Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth: Microbiologist, Medical Scientist, Environmentalist

Technology and the Unseen World of Gifted Students

The social and emotional development of gifted students can be influenced by many factors. Genetics, experiences, learning, family values, perceptions, and interactions all contribute to the development of gifted children. Under the heading of experiences is students' use of computers.

Preface

The pueblo’s elders called a council to decide what to do about the federal government’s proposal for a land trade involving mineral rights. A fire burned at the center of the kiva’s dirt floor, around which the twelve elders gathered. A traditional reflection stone sat on the open side of the fire, opposite the sipapu, which signified the opening in the earth through which the first people arrived from the unseen worlds. A ledge cut into the curved adobe wall held pots, drums, and bundles of dried corn.

Foreword

Foreword Raymond P. Scheindlin Most of this issue of Prooftexts is devoted to a single Hebrew poem, a work that is probably the most ambitious literary endeavor undertaken by a Hebrew poet in the Middle Ages, Miqdash meʿat by Moses da Rieti (1388-c. 1460). Begun in 1416 and stretching over more than 130 pages in the only printed edition (edited by Jacob Goldenthal, Vienna, 1851), the work is loosely modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy, being written in terza rima, divided into three parts made up of cantos (the third part is missing and may never have been composed), and including glimpses of unseen worlds as well as digests of philosophical, scientific, and religious lore. It may be described as an attempt to provide a broad view of the nature of the Jewish religion in a philosophical and kabbalistic vein, through visions, prayers, surveys of Jewish literary history, and epitomes of philosophical systems. Although it is often referred to in scholarly writing on medieval Hebrew literature, intellectual history, and philosophy, Miqdash meʿat is virtually unknown and practically inaccessible. Yet its importance and literary quality have been recognized in the past, as is attested by the numerous manuscripts in which it has been transmitted and by the fact that one of its cantos was used as a prayer in Italian synagogues and was early translated into Italian. Its importance has occasionally been recognized by moderns as well: two selections were included in T. Carmi's Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, and Dan Pagis, in private conversation, is said to have called Rieti a "poetic genius." Yet until the appearance of the article "Mosheh de Rieti (xive-xve siècle): Philosophe, scientifique et poète," by Alessandro Guetta in the Revue des études juives 158 (1999), not a single study had been devoted to it since the nineteenth century. This neglect may be due to the somewhat forbidding character of the work, arising from: the unfamiliarity of Rieti's Hebrew idiom (a combination of Tibbonide Hebrew and Italian-Hebrew diction); his innovative use of a difficult rhyme scheme that was completely new in Hebrew and that necessitated a certain amount of syntactic distortion; the complicated subject [End Page 1] matter; and the fact that the text published in the nineteenth century is unvocalized and provides no commentary to guide the reader. During the past several years, Alessandro Guetta (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), Devora Bregman (Ben-Gurion University), and the undersigned, despite living and working on three different continents, have been finding opportunities to study Miqdash meʿat together. Professor Bregman is a specialist in medieval Hebrew literature, especially of Italy; Professor Guetta is a specialist in Jewish intellectual history in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, with a particular interest in Rieti and with a specialist's familiarity with Rieti's Italian writings; and the undersigned is a specialist in Hebrew literature of the Judeo-Arabic world with a strong interest in literary translation. Our collaboration began at the Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, where the three of us participated in a yearlong seminar (1998-99) devoted to medieval Hebrew poetry. During the summer of 2000, we put in a month of intensive work on the project together in Jerusalem. Since then, we have worked by correspondence, both electronic and conventional. Our hope was to produce an edition that would include a new and fully vocalized Hebrew text based on a complete survey of the many manuscripts, together with a commentary and a translation into English. In this issue of Prooftexts, we are presenting the first two cantos of Miqdash meʿat as a sample of our work. The division of labor was as follows: Professor Bregman took responsibility for the Hebrew text. I took notes during our deliberations in Philadelphia and Jerusalem and drafted a commentary in Hebrew, based on our discussions. This draft, as critiqued and revised by my colleagues, became the basis of the English commentary presented here. As part of the work on the commentary, I also prepared a line-by-line prose translation, which I later converted into the metrical, unrhymed translation published here...

Unveiling prokaryotic diversity

Microscopic life is overwhelmingly important, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but has, until recently, been largely invisible. Molecular technology is now revealing this unseen world to us. A combination of novel theory and empirical research by Tom Curtis and his colleagues provides us with new estimates of prokaryotic diversity and reveals that this can range over four orders of magnitude among habitats.

Reading “Suluk Wayang”: Javanese Shadow Puppets, “Nala”-Vision, Private Self, Bodily Self

AbstractWayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre; henceforth “wayang”) as practiced in Java (Indonesia) has been recognized by exegetes – European and Indonesian alike – for its centrality as both a performative vehicle for and a symbolic figuration of understandings of the human developmental cycle, the variety of character models available to individuals, the precarious balance of chaos and stability in society, and kinship dialectics of conflict and complementariness. It is Java's most complex art form, in terms of dramaturgy, music, and repertoire, and also one of its most highly mediated. The beginning of what I would like to discuss is located at the end of Ward Keeler's exemplary ethnography of Central Javanese wayang and the dialogical play of selves and others in relations of hierarchy. Keeler concludes his evocative account of Javanese selves and theatre (and here I paraphrase) with the statement that “the peculiar fascination” of the dhalang in Javanese culture stems from his ability to dissimulate his self in performance. The puppeteer's voice is splintered, his presence veiled by a screen and mediated by puppets and the constraints of tradition, and his authority derived from indirect relations to a ritual sponsor, the Javanese autarchy, the ancestors, and the unseen world. “He is at once a dissembled authority, one whose power is great, non-coercive, and unworldly, and a dissembled interpreter, one who mediates between an unreal but persuasive and distracting world, and our own”.

The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726–1749: History, Literature and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II. By M.C. Ricklefs. Southeast Asian Publications Series of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998. xxiv, 391 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726–1749: History, Literature and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II. By M.C. Ricklefs. Southeast Asian Publications Series of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998. xxiv, 391 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

Casting Doubt in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

It will come as news to no one that Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus can be and has been deemed a skeptical play. 1 More than a century ago, the Victorian scholar J. R. Green characterized Marlowe's outlook as a "daring scepticism" and claimed that Faustus was "the first dramatic attempt to touch the great problem of the relations of man to the unseen world, to paint the power of doubt in a temper leavened with superstition." 2 Fifty years later, Una Ellis-Fermor called Doctor Faustus "perhaps the most notable Satanic play in literature." 3 And the varied testimony of Marlowe's contemporaries--Robert Greene, Richard Baines, Thomas Kyd, and Richard Cholmeley among them--strongly suggests that both the man and his writings could be considered iconoclastic and profoundly irreverent: both susceptible to charges of "monstruous opinions," "vile hereticall conceipts," even "diabolical atheism." 4 True, the circumstances in which these allegations were sometimes made force us to question their accuracy; yet, there still exists an extraordinary congruence of contemporary attitude about Marlowe--about what we might call his skepticism. But what in fact are we saying when we say an early modern writer is skeptical? In what senses does this word carry meaning with respect to the dramatic compositions of [End Page 257] Marlowe or his contemporaries? How can we allege, without being utterly vapid, that Doctor Faustus exhibits a pervasive skepticism? How, if at all, may we infer skeptical tenets from dramatic texts? What, if any, are the skeptical paradigms inherent in Marlowe's great tragedy?

The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726-1749: History, Literature, and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II (review)

In reconstructing the court life and Javanese worldview of the second quarter of the eighteenth century, Merle Ricklefs in The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java uses Javanese literature of the period as well as earlier works that underwent editing and reinterpretation at the time. This is not a simple or easy task, for Javanese literature is filled with obscurities and hidden meanings. Yet Ricklefs leads his readers through the complexities of the major works of the time with consummate skill and care. This reviewer has never seen Javanese literature employed more skillfully to reconstruct the spiritual structure and mental outlook of a bygone time and place for which few other records exist. The "unseen" world of cosmic forces, made manifest through literature, assumed a primary place in defining the nature of kingship. In itself, Ricklefs's unique methodology is a significant contribution to the historian's craft in discovering the religious and mystical forces shaping the Javanese past. Historians with a specialty in Javanese history will want to follow every intricate detail of this historical masterpiece.

The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726-1749: History, Literature and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II

The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726-1749: History, Literature and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II

The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726-1749: History, Literature, and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II

MapsIllustrationsPrefaceTranscription, orthography and personal namesAbbreviationsIntroduction1.Seen and unseen worlds at the start of Pakubuwana II's reign, 1726-82.Ratu Pakubuwana's three magic books from the time of Sultan Agung, 1729-303.Ratu Pakubuwana's minor texts and Sultan Agung's Suluk Garwa Kancan, 17304.The tales of Cabolek and Prince Mangkubumi, c.17315.The younger generation takes charge, 1731-66.Belief, power and literature, 1737-87.The failure of the mystic king, 1739-408.Holy War and catastrophe, 1741-29.Winners, losers and the supernatural, 1742-410.Last acts: The abandonment of Kartasura and the final years of Pakubuwana II, 1744-9Conclusion: Religion and the reign of Pakubuwana IIAppendix I: Raffles Java 14: Caritanira Askandar Dulkarnen Appendix II: Principal members of the Mataram dynasty in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesGlossaryBibliographyIndex