Wheel Of Fortune Research Articles

Arthurnet: You say Briton, I say Breton....

Arthurnet: You say Briton, I say Breton.... Judy Shoaf Twelve years ago—or is it thirteen now?—I wrote a fateful post on Medtextl, the email discussion list for Medieval Texts, Philology, and Codicology. Someone had asked whether the intimacy between Lancelot and Guinevere in Chrétien de Troyes’s Knight of the Cart qualified under the description of ‘amor purus’ by Andreas Capellanus in his De arte honeste amandi. I pointed out that ‘amor purus’ was basically heavy petting and that Lancelot did seem to have gone all the way with Guinevere (though Chrétien leaves the details to our imaginations). Bonnie Wheeler liked this post and, on the basis of it, asked me to start a discussion on Arthurian Sexualities on the Arthurnet list, and then to take over moderating Arthurnet. The Arthurnet email discussion list and its archives go back to October 1993.1 At its inception, Deborah Everhart of Georgetown was the moderator. It is interesting to look at the first week of the archives: there are test messages from the administrator at Memorial University Newfoundland (MUN), whose servers house the list and its archives, and a discussion of ‘Arthur’s historicity’ with posts from four different people, all with .edu at the end of their email addresses. By the following week there were at least 8 different threads, but those postings were still, all but one, from university faculty. Mostly the discussion involved approaches to teaching an Arthurian literature course, or matters of texts, philology, and codicology. The very first thread, on Arthur’s historicity, focused on the question, ‘why do our students want Arthur to have been historical?’ Deborah was evidently ready to move on in 1995 and handed the list over to me with no qualms. Since then I have occasionally heard reports that some quirky strangers—Society for Creative Anachronism enthusiasts, people who thought they had known King Arthur in previous lives, and so on—had intruded on the list before I came along. Looking through the archives, I can see a few cranky people—a poster who is delighted to find that Arthur must have known the Tarot, since he dreams about a Wheel of Fortune…another who is hoping to write a thesis about how Morgan le Fay represents the characteristics of Irish goddesses…but most of the hobbyhorses seem to have been made of respectable ivy-covered bricks and mortar. I am not sure what Bonnie Wheeler was hoping for when she asked me to become the list moderator. On the one hand, the professional members may have been asking her for a moderator who could keep the intruders under control; if so, they must have been disappointed. I have sometimes omitted to post something sent to me, but it has oftener been a sharp aside from an .edu address than a silly proposal from an esoteric newbie. On the other hand, I do have a high tolerance for silly proposals, and [End Page 94] perhaps Bonnie wanted someone who could be patient with—interested in—those that were cropping up on the list. And, in fact, there was a sense in which I needed Arthurnet—I had a lot to learn and also a need to teach. My background is mostly in French literature, though I had taught writing-intensive courses in English departments for many years. At the time I took over Arthurnet, however, I was settling into what has become my job at the University of Florida: running the language labs. (I was surprised, a few years later, to find at a convention of language lab directors that quite a few of them were medievalists—that list of languages we study is impressive, I guess, and the job is so peculiar that there is rarely a trained person applying for it.) However, in the early 90s I did give a spate of papers on different medieval topics at various conferences, and I was working on a translation of Marie de France’s Lais. Arthurnet came along at a good time for me, an opportunity to learn and teach which I really needed. Last summer for the first time in many years I got into the classroom...

Neural substrates of reward magnitude, probability, and risk during a wheel of fortune decision-making task

Economic decision-making involves the weighting of magnitude and probability of potential gains/losses. While previous work has examined the neural systems involved in decision-making, there is a need to understand how the parameters associated with decision-making (e.g., magnitude of expected reward, probability of expected reward and risk) modulate activation within these neural systems. In the current fMRI study, we modified the monetary wheel of fortune (WOF) task [Ernst, M., Nelson, E.E., McClure, E.B., Monk, C.S., Munson, S., Eshel, N., et al. (2004). Choice selection and reward anticipation: an fMRI study. Neuropsychologia 42(12), 1585–1597.] to examine in 25 healthy young adults the neural responses to selections of different reward magnitudes, probabilities, or risks. Selection of high, relative to low, reward magnitude increased activity in insula, amygdala, middle and posterior cingulate cortex, and basal ganglia. Selection of low-probability, as opposed to high-probability reward, increased activity in anterior cingulate cortex, as did selection of risky, relative to safe reward. In summary, decision-making that did not involve conflict, as in the magnitude contrast, recruited structures known to support the coding of reward values, and those that integrate motivational and perceptual information for behavioral responses. In contrast, decision-making under conflict, as in the probability and risk contrasts, engaged the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex whose role in conflict monitoring is well established. However, decision-making under conflict failed to activate the structures that track reward values per se. Thus, the presence of conflict in decision-making seemed to significantly alter the pattern of neural responses to simple rewards. In addition, this paradigm further clarifies the functional specialization of the cingulate cortex in processes of decision-making.

Courtois d’Arras et le Jeu de la Feuillée

The thirteenth-century secular theatre is particularly interesting insofar as it is a true literary laboratory based on texts with all kinds of plays whose purpose is not always easy to grasp. The introductory masterpiece of this tradition is Jean Bodel’s Jeu de saint Nicolas, written and performed around 1200. In its wake, two works appeared which represent two generations of plays within the thirteenth century : one, Courtois d’Arras, dating from the first quarter of the century, is a subtle variation on the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32); in the other, Jeu de la Feuillée, performed on June 3, 1276, Adam de la Halle incorporates his own persona and his entire work, which he uses as subtext. But the two plays have most likely been modeled on the Jeu de St Nicolas, to which they make many allusions. From the start it should be pointed out that the Jeu de la Feuillée is based on the Jeu de St Nicolas, reworked and completed with Courtois d’Arras. In addition, if the latter text is given over to an up-dating of the prodigal son parable and a humanizing of religion as well as to an ironic use of courtoisie, the parody becomes generalized in the Jeu de la Feuillée and ends up totally subverting and destroying all hopes and dreams in a universe where God no longer appears, but where the all-powerful Fortune reigns in irrational and arbitrary triumph. The wheel of Fortune, which never stops turning, has influence over the powerful men of Arras, over the fairies (fées) and finally, more generally, over all the other characters, who come back one by one on the turning wheel which becomes more and more frenetic, each turn bringing a character to the front of the stage, to point out his decline and defeat.

Fortune and the Sinner: Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and Malory's Morte Darthur

Criticism has debated the causes of the fall of the Round Table in Malory's Morte Darthur. While Malory's protagonists have been blamed for some of the disasters that befall them, other factors have been implicated as well. Arthur's dream of Fortune's Wheel on the eve of his climactic battle with Mordred has been thought to show that metaphysical forces over which human beings have no control bear some blame in the king's destruction. This interpretation makes the Morte discrepant with other canonical late-medieval English texts that contemplate Fortune's role in men's suffering. As is well known, in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale, Chaucer undermines the tendency of his pagan characters to blame what happens to them on Fortune. Both texts suggest that their protagonists determine their own fates, an idea that was impressed on Chaucer when he translated Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae. In Chaucer's Monk's Tale, Fortune is often (if not always) the agent of a fate that her victim has determined through sinfulness. In the prologue of the roughly contemporary Confessio Amantis, John Gower also claims that Fortune serves the fate that people have earned through the moral qualities of their deeds. The same idea is propounded in John Lydgate's Fall of Princes, although recent criticism has argued that certain narratives in this text contradict the claims that Lydgate makes for them. The article argues that we might, in fact, see a continuity between Fortune's role in the Morte and the role that is ascribed to her in the writings of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate. Malory's work is usually said to have little in common with these writings, but future research might probe ways in which it does share their concerns and ideas.

The Wheels of Watermills and the Wheel of Fortune

Along with two well rehearsed quaestiones disputatae, Bartolus de Saxoferrato’s repetitio ad l. Quominus constitutes the cornerstone of the medieval elaboration of legal issues relating to rivers. Ranging from the construction of watermills to protective embankments, and from the maintenance of water canals to the reconstruction of run-down structures, the eighteen questions of the repetitio prepared students for situations they would likely encounter when practising law. A legal opinion (consilium) penned by one of Bartolus’ disciples, Donato Aldighieri, in response to the doubts the Abbot of Vallombrosa had concerning damage inflicted on his monastic estate by the Arno river, illustrates the legal fertility of Bartolus’ seminal discussion. In addition, the consilium also attests to the complexity of the efforts of a medieval commune, Florence in this specific case, to gain control of a resource like the Arno, essential for the economic development of the city. Unable to shoulder alone the financial burden of preventing floods, the commune had no other option than to enlist the help and know-how of a monastic institution. Though the whole city benefited from the preventive work of the monks, the new embankment engendered an unexpected conflict with other adjacent land owners. The politically prominent Donato was called in to negotiate the abbot’s rights against the claims of the adjacent owners and the policy of the city. Recommended citation: Cavallar, Osvaldo, The Wheels of Watermills and the Wheel of Fortune. A consilium of Donatus Ricchi de Aldighieris, in: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 13 (2008) 80-116, online: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/rg13/080-116

The Fortunes of King Arthur

This collection has a dual focus, on the figure of Fortune in Arthurian romance, and on the varying fortunes of Arthur as a protean figure, reinterpreted in different cultures and periods. The majority of the contributors address the second of these aspects; indeed, only Siân Echard makes Fortune her principal subject, arguing that the downfall of Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth is not the work of a Christianized Fortuna, but of blind fate. Neil Thomas, in a complex study, shows how later German romances confront and reconfigure concepts such as Fortune's wheel and Fortune's kingdom, and assert the pre-eminence of human action and courage. Fortune's wheel is also the theme in the opening paragraphs of Alison Stones's study of Arthurian iconography in French MSS; Stones goes on, however, to show how various were the episodes of the Arthuriad chosen for illustration. Among the other essays which cover the changing interpretations of Arthur, Christopher Snyder argues in favour of Nennius's authorship of the Historia brittonum, and has persuasive linguistic evidence for his case that Nennius's Arthur should be understood as a high king. The late W. R. J. Barron examines the evolution of English and Scots Arthurian material, and the ways in which it reflects shifting socio-political values. Lacy engagingly treats Arthur as if he were a real person, traduced by writers who fail to give insights into his emotional life. Joan Grimbert shows that, in the Tavola ritonda, Tristano and Isotta are seen as superior to Lancilotto and Ginevara, because their love is not the result of a freely willed choice. Jane Taylor argues that the late prose romances Perceforest and the Le Chevalier du Papegau are travel narratives rather than quests. A recurring preoccupation is the perception of Arthur as either a historical or a legendary figure. Dennis Green shows how Geoffrey of Monmouth's Arthur was at first received as historical, but progressively fictionalized by vernacular writers in the twelfth century. Edward Kennedy links the de-historicization of Arthur to nationalist concerns, arguing that it was the work of French writers, who also introduced the theme of Arthur's incest with his sister — a topic ignored by English authors. (Unfortunately, as with Alison Stones's essay, the editor has failed to check his contributors' mistranslation of some of the Old French passages cited.) Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, in an interesting account of the sixteenth-century Welsh chronicle by Elis Gruffydd, shows how Gruffydd himself engaged in the debate over Arthur's historicity, and maintained a judiciously balanced view. The diachronic perspective concludes with essays by Alan Lupack and Caroline Eckhardt on reworkings of the Arthurian theme, or of Malory in particular, into the twentieth century. The index is particularly detailed and helpful. This is a varied collection, but one which responds to the dual perspective of the volume's title, and which yields many rewarding insights.

The Fortunes of King Arthur by Norris J. Lacy (review)

256 Reviews romances constructed a national identitybased on the claim that ithad been a legal GoldenAge. Most Middle English rewritings of French romances have been undervalued as abridged versions adapted to less cultured audiences. Phillipa Hardman engages in a reappraisal of Sir Tristrem, whose importance she reassesseswithin the tradition.As she convincingly argues, it isa skilfulinstance of abbreviatio, meant foran English audience familiarwith both legend and genre. Not only does itsdiptych structure before and after the love drink -allow Hardman to suggest themore relevant name Tristrem and rsoude, it also makes sense of some alleged weaknesses and rearrangements. The question raised by Elizabeth Archibald 'Did Knights Have Baths?' tentatively considers the issue of medieval bathing and recalls thepaucity of themotif in Middle English romances. Derek Brewer relieson his own reviewofJaeger's Ennobling Love (I999) toexplore the transformationsof 'fin'amor'.After reiterating that thenew development of heterosexual love isnot due to the collapse of a long tradition of homosexual love between males of the nobility,he testshis own view, based on C. S. Lewis, in a wide surveyofMedieval English romances. Neil Cartlidge and Nancy Mason Bradbury both address gender. Cartlidge draws on a well-documented corpus to explore SirGowther'sscandalous storyofwomen's impreg nation by the devil, and the frictionbetween clerical culture and vernacular audience; and Bradbury successfully examines female roles in the late fourteenth century (shift from private to public, queenly intercession, and promotion of 'common profit') in Athelston. Roger Dalrymple discusses symbolic functions of the renditions of giant slaying inTorrent of Portyngale, and observes themovement away from that topos toother cultural encounters. The finalessay,byHelen Cooper, deals with the legend of Thomas of Erceldoune and his prophecies, and highlights thesignificanceof itsnumerous rewrit ings, most notably in The FaerieQueene. Corinne Saunders's selection demonstrates that the vitality of medieval England's romances (Middle English and Anglo-Norman) is rooted in itsexceptional variety of cultural encounter; and that the intricacy of many layers classical, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, French, Celtic; lay and clerical generated a highly complex situation that affectedmany aspects of the genre. Her own expertise inmedieval English romances and thehistoryof ideas isjustifiably matched by thequality of contributions evident in this volume, which emerged from the Eighth Biennial Conference on Romance in MedievalEngland(Durham 2002). UNIVERSITY OF LIEGE JULIETTEDOR The Fortunes of KingArthur.Ed. byNoRRisJ. LAcy. Arthurian Studies, 64. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 2005. XVi+ 23I PP. ?45. ISBN:978-I-84384-06i-9. The Goddess Fortuna dominates thisbook. Her influenceonArthur's career is revisited inmedieval narratives inLatin, Welsh, French, English, Norse, Italian, and German, and his literaryfate is traced from theearliest records to the twenty-first century inboth written and pictorial form.Some parts of thiscollective volume of thirteenessays, nine originally delivered at a conference at Pennsylvania State University in 2002, cover YES, 38.I & 2, 2008 257 ground familiar to scholars but very cogently summarized here. Undergraduate and postgraduate students will find these resume's helpful, while for those experiencing Arthurian overload theyformawelcome aide memoire. But new light isalso cast on the familiar,while entire chapters offer new research or information valuable to those working in a differentarea of Arthurian studies. The three sections of thebook deal with Arthur as a historical and literaryconstruct; the effectof events mainly unfortunate on Arthur and his court; and hismodifi cation in later medieval and modern imagination. Fortune isa topic inall threesections: Sian Echard examines the topic in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia in the Latin original, and theFirstVariant andWelsh versions by focusingon theLeir episode; Norris J.Lacy's chapter considers Fortune injudgemental treatmentsofArthur's behaviour in a range of textsincluding Icelandic; Neil Thomas analysesArthur's continuing fortunes in laterGerman romances. In the second section,Alison Stones's long essay 'Illustration and theFortunes ofArthur' includes among many illustrationsfour images of Fortune's wheel thoughwithout explaining why in twoof these thewheel seems tobe turning anticlockwise; it isa pity that thepoor black-and-white reproduction of coloured origi nals makes the illustrations indistinct in thischapter. Romance and itsrelation to chronicle form another strand in the collection, which begins with Christopher Snyder's clear exposition of kingship in theHistoria Brittonum. W R.J. Barron's posthumous chapter explores cultural change in theEnglish Arthurian tradition fromLa3amon toSir Gawain...

Domesticating the Western format on Russian TV: Subversive glocalisation in the game show Pole Chudes (The field of Miracles)

Combining semiotic strategies and audience research, this contribution focuses on Pole chudes (Field of Miracles), the Russian adaptation of the popular television format Wheel of Fortune, to analyse the specific case of subversive glocalisation. A comparison of Pole chudes with other adaptations reveals the tensions characteristic uniquely of post-Soviet space, such as those between the national and the local under the influence of the global, between the centre and the periphery; between commercial/capitalist and traditional/folk practices, and between the collective and the individual. Focus group research shows that Pole chudes splits viewers by class, location and age, with the metropolitan intelligentsia at one end of the spectrum and the narod in the provinces at the other. In addition, it is argued that Pole chudes represents a case of post-Soviet identity construction in which top-to-bottom tendencies, in particular nation building, merge with bottom-to-top ones, such as local and folk practices.

A new spin on the Wheel of Fortune: Priming of action-authorship judgements and relation to psychosis-like experiences

The proposal that there is an illusion of conscious will has been supported by findings that priming of stimulus location in a task requiring judgements of action-authorship can enhance participants’ experience of agency. We attempted to replicate findings from the ‘Wheel of Fortune’ task [Aarts, H., Custers, R., & Wegner, D. M. (2005). On the inference of personal authorship: enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 439–458]. We also examined participants’ performance on this task in relation to self-reported passivity experiences and hallucination-proneness. We found a significant effect of priming, with primes being found to increase the experience of agency. An interaction between gender and priming was also found, with priming enhancing feelings of agency in women but not in men. There were no significant correlations between levels of self-reported passivity experiences or hallucination-proneness and participants’ susceptibility to the priming effect on ratings of agency. Implications of these findings are discussed with regard to a prominent model of passivity experiences.

School Transitions: Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune?

(2007). School Transitions: Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune? Middle School Journal: Vol. 39, Organizing Teachers & Classrooms for Student Growth, pp. 60-67.

King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition by Carolyne Larrington (review)

REVIEWS1Ol in the field. With such a focused approach, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan offers a fascinating analysis of Elis Gruffydd's chronicle, in light of the sources available to that Welshman serving at Calais and steeped in the sixteenth-century debate about Arthur's historicity. In an equally fascinating argument on hybridism in late romances, focusing on the Chevalier du Papegau ('The Knight ofthe Parrot'), Jane H.M. Taylor traces a shift from the quest's emphasis on self-testing to the travel narrative's inclusion ofa narrator who participates in marvelous discoveries. Edward Donald Kennedy cogently demonstrates why Robert de Boron's Christianized version of the grail story had so little influence on English chroniclers other than Hardyng, while Christopher A. Snyder challenges the assumption that the Arthur of the Nennian Historia Brittonum is not a king. Two careful essays reach more tentative conclusions: NorrisJ. Lacy ties the king's lack ofemotion in Lancelot-Grail to his public role and veiled private life, while Siân Echard suggests that Geoffrey of Monmouth's cyclic view ofhistory owes more to the discomforting spin ofFortune's wheel than to God. Despite an eclectic sense of audience within the volume, each essay achieves its purpose. TheFortunes is balanced by treatment ofthe Latin, Welsh, French, German, and English traditions, with scholars deftly handling the crossovers, as does Dennis Green when he surveys how British and French romancers mimic the truth claims of eyewitnesses before examining Hartman and Gottfried's use of such parodie techniques to blur the lines of historia andfabuh. The volume is rounded out by Joan Tasker Grimbert's contribution, which compares Lancelot and Guinevere's passion to that ofTristan and Yseut, in the French prose romances and the Italian TavolaRhonda. Alison Stones begins her essaywith manuscript illustrations ofArthur on Fortune's wheel, but as these are few, she moves to a too general treatment of the ways the king is depicted in the Lancelot-Grailcycle. In contrast, the best essays directly treat Fortune or mimic her wheel's turn in their cyclic structure. She and Arthur are lucky in having their fate handled by an editor as deft as Lacy. KAREN CHEREWATUK St. OlafCollege carolyne larrington, King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition. London: LB. Tauris, 2006. Pp. viii, 264. isbn: 978-1-84511113 -7. $35. £18.99. In King Arthur's Enchantresses, Carolyne Larrington surveys representations of Morgan Ie Fay, the Lady of the Lake, the Viviane/Niviene figure, and Morgause in medieval literature, Victorian re-imaginings, and modern popular culture. The introduction points out that in medieval texts the enchantresses are not witches but aristocratic women who have learned magic and whose actions defy traditional concepts of feminine behavior. Chapter one defines natural and demonic magic; identifies several magical elements appearing with one or more ofthe enchantresses, such as herbs, rings, enclosure, and shape-shifting; and concludes with the insightful claim that governs the remaining chapters: the magic performed by these Arthurian enchantresses 'cannot escape from central and contemporary questions about gender 102ARTHURIANA and power' (28). The next three chapters focus on Morgan, while the fifth concentrates on Viviane, the huntress/Niviene-figure, and the Lady of the Lake. Chapter 6 is devoted to Morgause, for although she is not an enchantress in medieval works, she becomes one in some modern media. Chapter 7 takes up Victorian literary and pictorial treatments of 'Vivien.' The final chapter turns to representations of the enchantresses from Twain's 1889 Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court to the wicker 'Nine Morgens' carried in the procession at the 2003 Glastonbury Goddess Festival. In developing the chapters on the medieval texts, Larrington summarizes episodes involving the enchantresses and weaves in interpretations based on selected scholarship as she emphasizes gendered aspects. For instance, in chapter three, we hear about women's words, such as Morgan's 'magically enhanced words of enchantment' keeping unfaithful knights in coerced fidelity in the VaIsans Retour (55), but Enide's cousin speaking only in the 'powerless sphere of female conversation' when her lover, Maboagrain, is liberated in Chretien's Erec (53). The second chapter's topic of Morgan and Arthur's sibling relationship is a welcome...

Wheels of Fortune

Wheels of Fortune

Simulacre et modernité : l’illusion d’optique dans On the Western Circuit de Thomas Hardy

This paper focuses on various visual devices which Thomas Hardy chooses to include in his short stories in order to question the Victorian cult of progress, such as photographs, the Crystal Palace or more unexpectedly the phenakistiscope, which clearly lies behind the obsessional description of the « steam circus » in the short story entitled On the Western Circuit. Although Hardy was forced to bowdlerize his text, removing allusions to sexual intercourse and subsequent pregnancy, the real shock lies less in the hackneyed sentimentality of the illegitimate baby theme than in the depiction of modernity and modern exchanges — or systems of communication through trains, letters, or judicial rounds — as vicious circles breeding spurious desires and fantasies. The novel displays the enticing flickering sparks of desire created by the new wheel of fortune, turning the steam circus into a metaphor of ruthless mutations and hopelessly warped human relationships.

Scheduling search procedures: The wheel of fortune

Suppose that a player can make progress on n jobs, and her goal is to complete a target job among them, as soon as possible. Unfortunately she does not know what the target job is, perhaps not even if the target exists. This is a typical situation in searching and testing. Depending on the player’s prior knowledge and optimization goals, this gives rise to various optimization problems in the framework of game theory and, sometimes, competitive analysis. Continuing earlier work on this topic, we study another two versions. In the first game, the player knows only the job lengths and wants to minimize the completion time. A simple strategy that we call wheel-of-fortune (WOF) is optimal for this objective. A slight and natural modification, however makes this game considerably more difficult: If the player can be sure that the target is present, WOF fails. However, we can still construct in polynomial time an optimal strategy based on WOF. We also prove that the tight absolute bounds on the expected search time. In the final part, we study two competitive-ratio minimization problems where either the job lengths or the target probabilities are known. We show their equivalence, describe the structure of optimal strategies, and give a heuristic solution.

Hours of Idleness

No person is exposed to ridicule till he has deserved it, and if the noble lord had not published his Hours of Idleness, no human being would have guessed the quantity of time he had spent doing nothing. (The Satirist, 1807) At first sight life would appear to have been very pleasant for middle- and upper-class young people around 1800 - so long as the proceeds from tenants, trade, investment and slavery kept flowing in.1 But boredom was an ever-present enemy, and the popularity with both sexes of the craze for decorating furniture, print rooms, albums and screens is hardly surprising. Printsellers such as Rudolph Ackermann were kept busy supplying everything from decorative borders to caricature prints. In Pride and Prejudice Mr Bingley exclaims: 'It is amazing to me [...] how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished [...]. They all paint tables, cover skreens, and net purses.'2 Beau Brummell whiled away his exile in France making a six-panel screen (now lost). His biographer, Captain Jesse, describes how the picture of Byron on the screen, surrounded by flowers, had a wasp at his throat. As Jesse comments, this 'was base ingratitude on the part of Brummell, for the noble lord spoke of and would have pasted him with more charitable feeling'.3 And Byron himself, of course, owned a four-panel screen celebrating pugilism and the theatre, which was rescued by John Murray when Byron's effects were being sold in 1816, and can now be seen at Newstead Abbey. For the past two years I have been studying a small, double-sided firescreen (in a private collection) displaying a collection of scraps, poems, songs and riddles. It was made by Elizabeth Pigot who, as Byronists will know, lived in Southwell, near Nottingham, with her three brothers and their widowed mother. The family was related to several comfortably-off neighbouring families including the Bechers, Lowes and Leacrofts. In 1803 the life of this small market town was suddenly enlivened by the arrival of new neighbours, renting the recently built Burgage Manor - Mrs Catherine Byron, the fifteen-year-old Byron and their pet dogs. Readers of this journal will recall that Byron's relations with his mother were so stormy that he often sought refuge across Burgage Green at the Pigot home. Although Elizabeth was six years older, there is evidence in Byron's letters of a blossoming friendship. In August 1804 he wrote to thank her for copying bookplates with his family coat of arms and urged her to knit a watch ribbon and purse for him. In 1805 John Pigot and Byron took leading parts in the Southwell amateur theatrical productions of Richard Cumberland's The Wheel of Fortune and John Allingham's The Weathercock. Byron wrote a witty prologue and flirted with Miss Pigot's cousin, Julia Leacroft. Elizabeth had quickly discovered Byron's talent for writing poetry. They exchanged verses. She made fair copies of his poems, correcting his spelling and punctuation and encouraged him to publish them during summer 1806 as Fugitive Pieces. Elizabeth was proud of this friendship and happy to share her memories in later life with Thomas Moore and John Murray. Megan Boyes, in her invaluable book Love Without Wings, says Elizabeth regretted having 'cut up original manuscripts in Byron's own handwriting' and sending off the fragments to collectors.4 She never married and stayed in Southwell until her death in 1866. The screen consists of two double-sided, glazed panels, each 24 inches square. It is in remarkably good condition, despite water and light damage. At first sight it presents a random collection of poetry, riddles, music manuscript, quirky caricatures and watercolour sketches. Hand-coloured shells, moths and butterflies are scattered around. In the centre of one panel there is a pastoral scene. The other three each feature a 'fancy' picture by Francis Wheatley: The Rustic Lovers, The Industrious Cottager Mending Cabbage Nets and an untitled one showing a boy stealing washing from a sleeping laundress. …

Wheels of Fortune: Self-Funding Infrastructure and the Free Market Case for a Land Tax

It is often assumed that government intervention is required to bring to fruition large scale infrastructure projects because the large initial capital outlays such projects require must be funded from the public purse. In Wheels of Fortune, Fred Harrison shows that large scale infrastructure projects can be made self-funding. Infrastructure projects almost always bring about a large increase in the value of adjoining land. For example, it is estimated that the London Underground Jubilee Line extension increased adjoining land values by close to GBP3 billion. When such infrastructure projects are funded by government, they therefore involve a substantial transfer of wealth from a large number of taxpayers to a small number of property owners. Harrison argues that a fairer and more efficient means to fund infrastructure projects is to capture and use the increases in land values that they bring.

Dr. SpongeBob

A developmental pediatrician I know likes to joke that I probably have an undiagnosed case of autism. I am not autistic — I don't walk on tippy-toes or get hypnotized by Wheel of Fortune , and I do make eye contact — but it's a nearer thing than you might think. I went to graduate school to

Fortune's Wheel: Dickens and the Iconography of Women's Time (review)

Reviewed by: Fortune's Wheel: Dickens and the Iconography of Women's Time George J. Worth (bio) Elizabeth A. Campbell , Fortune's Wheel: Dickens and the Iconography of Women's Time (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. xxiii+253, $42.95 cloth. Copiously documented and agreeably written, Elizabeth Campbell's study traces the uses to which Dickens puts the figure of the Wheel of Fortune and related verbal and pictorial concepts throughout his fiction, giving special emphasis to his three "'women's' novels" (xxi): Dombey and Son, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit. She sees "Dickens's representation of Fortune and his wheel imagery" as revealing "an actual revolution in his thinking about historical time: from faith in a linear, progressive, 'masculine' time to a belief in a more fatalistic, cyclical time that could be construed ... as 'feminine'" (3), a change that culminates in Great Expectations. Campbell devotes most of her long introductory chapter to a historical survey of how Fortune was viewed from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, incorporating in her account the contributions of a number of authors and artists and of emblem books and popular literature to what had become by Dickens's time a widely disseminated tradition on which nineteenth-century imaginative writers were able to draw freely. In keeping with her thesis, Campbell organizes the rest of her book in a "cyclical," seasonal pattern, from "Spring 1840–1849," through "Summer 1850–1853" and "Fall 1854–1859," to "Winter 1860." (What happens in Dickens's oeuvre after that, with Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is left unresolved.) The periodicals Dickens edited, in which a number of his novels first appeared, play only tangential roles in Campbell's account, but there is a sense in which serialization forms a central part of her argument. That frequent Victorian mode of publication "affected the patterns of writerly production and readerly expectation and consumption in ways that integrated congenially with the rhythm of at least middle-class, literate women's lives"; "it was," therefore, "especially adaptable to the sympathetic treatment of women's time in its various manifestations" (87). Dualities loom large in Fortune's Wheel – not only between masculine time and feminine time, but also between clashing perceptions of Fortune herself. Campbell does not shy away from pointing out that such easy dichotomies have a way of breaking down, just as the wheels of that early-Victorian icon the railway revolve on their axles and move trains forward. In these days of slipshod writing and copy-editing, it is a pleasure to come across a book as well produced as Fortune's Wheel. The errors it contains are few and trivial. Some of the illustrations displayed between pp. 155 and 157 are difficult to make out, but it is better to have them that [End Page 119] way than not at all. In short, Elizabeth Campbell and her publisher are to be congratulated on what they have achieved in this valuable study. George J. Worth University of Kansas, Emeritus George J. Worth George J. Worth is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas. His publications include books on James Hannay, W. Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hughes. His latest, Macmillan's Magazine, 1859–1907: “No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed” (Ashgate), appeared in 2003. Copyright © 2005 Victorian Periodicals Review

La rueda de la fortuna y los necios en un soneto burlesco de Quevedo

The image of the wheel of fortune, with its moral implications, was very common from the Middle Ages. This was also true for its grotesque counterpart which had at its top a king in the shape of a donkey representing the vanity of human aspirations. Francisco de Quevedo followed this iconographical typology in one of his burlesque sonnets, where he used different visual and literary sources. Quevedo's text is an open critique of the negative effect that power has on mankind.

Fortune's wheel: Dickens and the iconography of women's time

This volume explores the ways that Charles Dickens appropriated and made central to his novels the dominant symbol of his age. The author argues that Dickens' contribution to the iconographic and narrative traditions was to fuse the classical image of the wheel - fortune - with the industrial one.