Webster's Work Research Articles

Proximity, wholeness, and animality: The case of Little Sorrel's repatriation

AbstractFrederic Webster, chief preparator at the Carnegie Museum (CM) from 1897 to 1907, is credited by some for “rescuing” Lion Attacking a Dromedary (LAD) from destruction by the American Museum of Natural History. Webster's work on LAD was not his only involvement with the preparation and display of controversial bones, however. Webster mounted the hide and bones of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson's war horse, Little Sorrel and displayed the skeleton at CM. In 1949, Little Sorrel's skeleton were returned to Virginia, where it was eventually cremated and interred under a statue of Jackson in a public ceremony in 1997. This article compares the return and reburial of the bones of a Confederate horse to the continued display of the remains of a person of unknown origin in LAD to highlight the very differing treatment of these human and equine individuals. By considering the return of Little Sorrel's remains to be a repatriation, I argue that the horse was transformed from a museum specimen into a monument, leveling him as a symbol of the Lost Cause and further cementing the status of the individual contained within LAD as a specimen. Through a displayed proximity to animals, Jackson (and his horse) become more human, while the person whose remains remain on display in LAD is treated as less than human.

The Meaning of Written English: A Place to Dream as One Pleases

I examine Rey Chow's assertion that the process of racialization parallels the challenge of coming to terms with language. In 2011, Anthony Webster coedited the American Indian Culture and Research Journal special issue “American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places” and called for an extension of his work on Blackhorse Mitchell's novel Miracle Hill: The Story of a Navajo Boy. My argument looks at writing as a matter of choices the writer makes (following William L. Leap's work in American Indian English) and the requirements expected of readers. Moving away from the error analyses and ethnographic readings that afflict racialized readings, I place Webster's work on Navajo poetics and intimate grammars into conversation with postcolonial theory and language revitalization work concerned with similar questions: what does it mean to write, and what does it mean to write in English? I argue that Mitchell resists the subjugation required of a colonial education through his refusal to write like a native speaker. He figures writing as a place to dream as one pleases; writing is the miracle on Miracle Hill. Readers can locate his choices throughout the text, particularly in his poem, “The Drifting Lonely Seed,” his chapter on creative writing, and his speech at his grandmother's graveside.

Introduction

Introduction Patricia Rigg (bio) While the "recovery" of poetry by Victorian women is no longer a new activity, the scholarly debates and revisionary activities concerned with this body of work have only just begun. For many scholars of my generation, the only Victorian women poets anthologized were Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti; however, we teach a very different curriculum in our classrooms today. In fact, it is difficult for contemporary students to imagine a canon of primarily male poets, since publishers of modern anthologies have been responsive to our cries for equity. The increased number of scholarly anthologies available and the different ways in which these texts are organized to highlight the cultural context of Victorian literature enable us to include poets such as Augusta Webster on our syllabi as a matter of course, and web resources of primary and secondary materials allow us to expand on the texts in ways unimagined when I was an undergraduate. In our scholarly pursuits as well, we have witnessed a healthy expansion of the Victorian repertoire in conferences that focus on both scholarship and pedagogy, and our understanding of the Victorian age has become more inclusive, more accurate, and more interesting as we acknowledge the diversity of the work produced and employ a range of critical lenses to read it. In the past few years, the momentum has continued with studies of women writers in a number of genres, as well as studies of the cultural contexts in which women worked, such as the middle-class Victorian household, the salon, the private library, the public library, and the periodical press. We have benefited from projects focused on identifying the anonymous contributions of women writers, such as the work of Eileen Curran and Patrick Leary on the Curran Index and that of Marysa Demoor on the Athenaeum. Journals such as Victorian Poetry have contributed to the democratization of nineteenth-century scholarship with invitations such as this one to highlight a single female author. Nevertheless, we need to be vigilant and focus not only on preserving what we have gained but also on ensuring that we use it wisely to generate new ideas about and insight into the literature of the Victorian age. It is disturbing that on both sides of the Atlantic, scholars face increasing difficulty in obtaining significant grant-agency funding for literary studies, especially for single-author studies. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, there is great value in [End Page 1] rethinking, reconsidering, and reshaping the critical discourse attached to an author and to a literary period. As several contributors to this volume point out, Webster has served us well as a means of gaining insight into nineteenth-century women's writing in its rich cultural context, for she was indeed a sociopolitical activist whose interests in suffrage and education for women inform and are reflected in much of her literary work. My own work on Webster has had a biographical emphasis, and, like others, I came to Webster first through her dramatic poetry, Dramatic Studies and Portraits, and developed my interest in Webster through the thematic development in these volumes of the lives of men and women in conjunction with the social mores of the time. Scholars have pressed forward with a number of studies of Mother and Daughter, as well as essays focusing on Webster's other lyrics and the lyrical dramas, not only to examine the development of these themes but also to look closely at elements relating to genre and technique. In a relatively short time, we have begun in earnest revisionist readings of Webster's work, considering it from an aesthetic perspective as well as social criticism, a trend we can see unfolding in recent issues of Victorian Poetry and other journals. In the context of this broadening out of our reading of Webster, contributors to this volume represent what we might call a second wave of Webster criticism, as they consider not only works that have received less attention to date, specifically the lyrical dramas and the lyrical narrative Yu-Pe-Ya's Lute, but also Webster's more frequently anthologized dramatic poetry. Both analytical patterns offer insights into Webster's complex poetic...

The journey and movement, repetition and time: Drawing within my visual practice

ABSTRACTCatrin Webster is a painter who, over the past 25 years, has consistently used drawing processes as a fundamental part of her practice. In this article, she describes the significance of drawing within her work and its potential as a means of exploration and experimentation. An investigation of place and movement in or around a landscape is central to Webster's work, where she refers to the research of geographers such as Peter Merriman and anthropologists, especially Marc Augé. This has led to the exploration of movement through the development of drawing practices, which have included the study of television and film, tracking the process of looking, drawing while travelling and the development of the Free Drawing system in reference to Henri Lefebvre. Webster's exploration of space includes notions of time and presence, and considers ideas such as the ‘unquestioned continuities’ explored by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge. For Webster a journey through a particular place, such as a repeated motorcycle circuit, is in itself a form of drawn line.

Picturesque ruin and geological antiquity: Thomas Webster and Sir Henry Englefield on the Isle of Wight

Abstract Thomas Webster published his earliest geological observations by commission in Sir Henry Englefield's Description of the Isle of Wight (1816), a work concerned as much with historic architecture and picturesque landscape as with geology. This paper shows how Englefield's broad three-part agenda fostered the development of Webster's specifically geological competence and sensibility. As a professional draftsman and architect, Webster was especially well equipped to translate Englefield's architectural and picturesque idiom into a more geological register. Their collaboration also illustrates how well the style and content of local history – a traditional literary and learned genre – could be applied to geology. For Webster in particular, the image of ruins was essential for representing the historicity of geological phenomena. This paper adduces close readings of numerous passages from Englefield and Webster's work to show how strongly the traditional language and research questions of antiquarianism continued to shape geology even as it became a professional specialization.

Augusta Webster and the Lyric Muse: The Athenaeum and Webster's Poetics

DURING THE LAST DECADE SCHOLARS HAVE SHOWN INTEREST IN NINETEENTH-century women who wrote in the dramatic form masculinized by such poets as Browning and Tennyson. (1) In her own day, Augusta Webster was compared favorably to Robert Browning, and she herself pays tribute to Browning in Transcript and a Transcription, a for Examiner of Browning's The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, a later collected in A Housewife's Opinions. However, Webster published in every genre, actually producing proportionately little in the way of dramatic monologue. In fact, in the last twenty-four years of her life, the prolific Augusta Webster published no dramatic poetry at all; consequently, we cannot assume that she defined herself as a writer of dramatic poetry. We need to take a more comprehensive look at a woman who promises to figure prominently in contemporary Victorian studies. Gaining insight into just how Augusta Webster did define herself as a writer has been complicated, I think, by her high profile socio-political life and by her feminist interests. Indeed, because Webster worked for the London branch of the National Committee for Women's Suffrage in the 1870s and served on the London School Board in the 1880s, we have naturally been interested in literary work that seems to us to reflect her feminist concerns. However, Webster had another profession from 1884 until her untimely death from cancer in 1894: she worked for the Athenaeum, primarily as a poetry reviewer. In this position she was able to articulate a fair[y complex system of poetics based on a balance of technical ability, innovation, and self-discipline. Significantly, this system pertains mainly to lyric rather than to dramatic poetry. In keeping with convention, her contributions to the Athenaeum were anonymous, but the marked editor's file, housed at City University London, provides an important context for a discussion of Webster's work. (2) These review essays are frequently comprehensive enough to allow Webster to situate poetic composition within a fairly extensive theoretical context. In 1881, three years before she joined the Athenaeum, Webster published A Book of Rhyme, included in which is a sequence of metrically ordered, inter-rhyming poems that she originally called English Stornelli, and later, in the 1893 reprint, English Rispetti. In 1881 as well, Webster wrote the earliest dated fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet in her unfinished sonnet sequence that was published posthumously in 1895 as Mother and Daughter. Therefore, throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Webster's poetic leanings were decidedly lyric, and the few dated sonnets suggest a continuity between the rispetti, the sonnets, and the critical reviews in the Athenaeum. I intend in this paper to study the English Rispetti, a controlled form with conventions of its own, within the context of some of the poetics Webster articulates so eloquently in the Athenaeum. While Webster's principles of poetic construction obviously evolved during her years as poetry critic, the pre-Athenaeum rispetti seem to apply all the important theoretical points relating to the balance of creative innovation and conformity to convention that she uses to measure excellence in the Athenaeum. Hence, Webster theorizes in her Athenaeum reviews the precision in language and attention to form that she demonstrates in the rispetti. In substance, as well as in language and form, the Rispetti mark an important phase in Webster's creative life, for the sequence is an ironic presentation of the complexity of human existence in its temporal and temporary state. One might argue that the human preoccupation with the brevity of life and the inexorable march of time has been a sustained preoccupation in literature, but the Victorian sense of time, drastically transformed into an understanding of the implications of deep time by the publications of Darwin and his predecessors, finds its way into a great deal of nineteenth-century literature) Webster's presentation of human life and human love, as much as her facility with the dramatic, connects her to Browning, for the rispetti underscore the irony of a human existence that is limited and finite even as they celebrate the power and mutability of human love. …

Alchimie, philosophie corpusculaire et minéralogie dans la Metallographia de John Webster/Alchemy, corpuscular philosophy and mineralogy in the John Webster's "Metallographia"

SUMMARY. — The Metallographia (1671) of John Webster (1611-1682) is a valuable contribution to seventeenth-century science of metals. It is based on an impressive number of texts of mineralogy and alchemy and is aimed at stimulating mineralogical research and the exploitation of English mines. In Webster's Metallographia metallurgy and mineralogy are strictly linked to alchemical theories of the generation and transmutation of metals. Webster's work contains a synthesis of alchemical theories, Helmontian chemistry and Boyle's corpuscular philosophy.

Breeding Status of the Mountain Plover

The Mountain Plover (Charadrius montanus) is an endemic species of North America, nesting on the shortgrass prairie mainly east of the Rocky Mountains and wintering from California and Texas to northern Mexico. Information on the of this species on the wintering ground is noticeably lacking. Jurek (1973), however, has found that in California these birds are now absent or rare in many areas where they were previously numerous, although flocks of hundreds still winter in some California valleys. Several researchers have commented on the breeding of this species. Bent (1929) described the main breeding range as extending along the eastern edge of the Rockies, from New Mexico into Canada, and eastward into North Dakota and Texas (fig. 1). Within this area the Mountain Plover was initially described as a common breeding resident (Coues 1874, Knight 1902). In fact, prior to 1900 it was abundant enough to be considered an important game bird by market hunters (Grinnell et al. 1918, Sandoz 1954). Cooke (1915), however, noted that this species seemed to be decreasing in numbers. He acknowledged that market hunting may have been partly to blame for the decrease, but he felt that the major problem was the reduction of the breeding range due to cultivation and dairying activities. Later, Abbot (1939) reported that it was becoming still rarer in the 1930's; he felt that one reason for many fatalities was that they were absurdly dumb. More recently Laun (1957) concluded that the Mountain Plover population had diminished markedly with the majority now breeding in southern Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Apparently in response to these reports, this species was included on the status undetermined list of the U.S. Department of the Interior (1973). Aware of the above trend, Webster began a study of the Mountain Plover in 1967 and Graul began work on the species in 1969. We have been hitherto reluctant to estimate the total number of Mountain Plovers because of the limited nature of our data, but it now seems that even a highly tentative estimate is badly needed. We present here our information on the breeding of this plover, and suggestions for preserving the species. Webster studied the Mountain Plover in 1967 and 1968 to determine its current Colorado breeding range. Her study included personal correspondence, organized group field surveys, and much personal travel throughout the bird's known historic Colorado range. Graul (1973a, 1973b, 1974, 1975) conducted field work in 1969-72 and 1974 in Weld County, northeastern Colorado and he corresponded with many people residing in the shortgrass prairie region. In May, 1975, he traveled through 11 eastern Colorado counties in an effort to supplement Webster's work. Our data support Laun's (1957) contention that most Mountain Plovers now breed in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Stewart (1971) listed this species as accidental for North Dakota and, indeed, Graul found no evidence of recent nesting in North Dakota, South Dakota r Kansas. Ross Lock found an adult with one young 6 mi W of Bushnell, Kimball County, Nebraska on 7 June 1975, but this is the only Nebraska record in several years. George M. Sutton (pers. comm.) informed us that in some years they nest in northwestern Oklahoma. Kenneth Seyffert (pers. comm.) in June, 1974, found them nesting in Union County, northeastern New Mexico and saw two birds in Hartley County, northwestern Texas. Hubbard (1970) reported that some nest in central and southwestern New Mexico, but we have not found any recent nesting records for these areas. Duane Tolle

An historical Homeric society?

I begin with two modern texts, both as it happens printed on the first page of earlier issues of this journal, and each, I think, expressive of a strong body of opinion in Homeric scholarship, at least in the English-speaking countries, at the time of their writing. First, Miss Dorothea Gray in 1954: ‘Belief in an historical Homeric society dies hard’. Secondly, Professor Adkins in 1971: ‘I find it impossible to believe … that the bards of the oral tradition invented out of their own imaginations a society with institutions, values, beliefs and attitudes all so coherent and mutually appropriate as I believe myself to discern in the Homeric poems. This aspect of the poems is based upon some society's experience’. Miss Gray's prophecy, whether or not one shares the misgivings that it embodied, was thus soundly-based: the seventeen years between these two quotations have indeed witnessed a powerful revival of the belief that the social system portrayed in the Homeric poems, and with it such attendant features as the ethical code and the political structure, are in large measure both unitary and historical. One good reason for the vitality of this belief is the simple fact that it has been alive since Classical times. Another is that it has received support from several influential recent works: if pride of place should be given to M. I. Finley's The World of Odysseus, on whose conclusions Professor Adkins expressely says that he takes his stand, a number of others should be acknowledged also. Whereas Finley located the social system of the Odyssey most probably in the tenth and ninth centuries B.C., A. Andrewes in his book The Greeks extends this type of inference when he argues for an historical origin in the ‘migration period’ of the twelfth and eleventh centuries for the Homeric political system. As influences on the other side, one may mention T. B. L. Webster's work in isolating Mycenaean practices and features, whose divisive effect on the social pattern is apparent; while G. S. Kirk has a significantly entitled chapter in his The Songs of Homer, ‘The cultural and linguistic amalgam’ (my italics). Most recently, the early chapters in the German Archaeologia Homerica have shown a certain tendency to discern a consistent and historical pattern in the allied area of the material and technological practices of the poems. It is true that in one chapter the author is led to conclude that the metallurgical picture of the Iliad is substantially earlier than that of the Odyssey, and that the date of composition of the former poem must accordingly be very much earlier. But this is only because he is pressing the arguments for the ‘historical’ case one step further: the historical consistency of the metallurgical pictures in each of the two poems is, for him, so apparent and so precise that each can and must be given an historical setting, even if the two are separated by a long period.

The Potency of Anti-Rabic Vaccines

Abstract In recent studies Webster (1) has shown that only a limited number of the anti-rabic vaccines made in this country are capable of immunizing mice against rabies. Since it is comparatively easy to protect these animals with a sufficiently potent vaccine we must infer from Webster's work that much of the available vaccine is of a doubtful usefulness. The problem of providing more satisfactory vaccines is a complicated one involving both scientific and manufacturing questions; as such, a satisfactory solution will be reached slowly. Nevertheless it is feasible now to introduce practical tests that would eliminate the demontrably weak and worthless vaccines. The complete assay of existing products that this implies falls under two heads: (1) a study of the ability of vaccines to immunize against the virus from which they are made and (2) an investigation of the protective values of vaccines which are potent against such homologous virus when tested against other strains of rabies virus.