Journal articles on the topic 'Anglo Irish truce'

Conspiracy theories have always accompanied the shadowy and ambiguous interventions of British intelligence in Irish affairs. Commentators in Ireland often accuse British intelligence and security agencies of being stubbornly hostile to Irish nationalist aspirations and inclined to oppose, and even sabotage, official British peace initiatives This attitude has a long heritage and can be traced back to the Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations in 1921. There was a widespread belief in Irish nationalist circles that intelligence officers were exercising a baleful influence on British politicians: at one point during the negotiations Michael Collins angrily brandished a warlike British military intelligence document that had fallen into his hands and claimed that the army was working to destroy the truce.

The year 2022 marks the centenary of the formation of the modern, independent Irish state. The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed in December 1921 was crucial to its creation and political destiny, setting the direction of Irish state policy for a century and laying the foundations of modern Irish statehood. The treaty was signed after two years of Anglo-Irish war, in which the Republic of Ireland, proclaimed in 1919, had to defend its independence, when both sides found the will to declare a truce and agree to a five-month-long period of negotiations. The author examines the events that influenced the terms of the treaty, including the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which provided for the creation of two Irish parliaments, for the South and the North, effectively dividing the country, and the complex and dramatic events between the truce and the signing of the treaty. Special attention is given to the positions of British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and Irish republican leader Éamon de Valera on key issues of Irish sovereignty and territorial integrity, as reflected in their months-long correspondence. The peace treaty signed by Britain with the unrecognised Republic of Ireland was the starting point of its move towards genuine independence.

AbstractWriting in Nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland, 1858–1928, Tom Garvin observed that ‘well over 40 per cent, perhaps 50 per cent, had lived outside Ireland for considerable periods … foreign experience was very important in the development of the leaders’. The impact of ‘foreign experience’ on leading nationalist revolutionaries, this article submits, pace Garvin, could have proved influential in the development of the Irish Revolution more widely. Between June 1919 and December 1920, Éamon de Valera toured the United States. From New York City to Salt Lake City, Alabama to Montana, the self-proclaimed president of the Irish republic addressed ‘Ireland’ in hundreds of interviews and speeches. Of these myriad public statements, his Cuban missive, notably, crossed national boundaries. Comparing Ireland's geo-strategic relationship with Great Britain to that of Cuba and the United States, de Valera's argument for an independent Irish republic was made in the Americas. How did de Valera's movement across the U.S. alter his political views of Ireland? How were presentations of de Valera's ‘Cuban policy’ mediated across the ‘Irish world’? How did discourse on the Monroe Doctrine inform Anglo-Irish negotiations between Truce and Treaty? Exploring de Valera's ‘Cuban policy’ as global case study, this article concludes, ultimately, can shift the historiographical significance of ‘foreign experience’ from nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland to the flows and circulation of transnational revolution.

The six months following the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 saw an appalling level of violence in Belfast and on the border, which threatened the stability of the newly formed Northern Ireland government. Official figures for the period between 6 December 1921 and 31 May 1922 listed seventy-three protestants and 147 catholics killed in Belfast and eight protestants and twenty-two catholics killed in the six counties outside Belfast. In that period two wide-ranging agreements aimed to reform the northern government and security system: they became known, somewhat inaccurately, as the Craig-Collins pacts, of 21 January and 30 March 1922. This article discusses the motivation behind the pacts and the reasons for their failure in a wide context, by giving equal weight to the attitudes of the British government and to opinion on both sides of the Irish border.The Northern Ireland government was established in 1920–21. It was unrecognised by the dáil government in the south and by much of the northern catholic minority. The province developed against a background of violence and upheaval, including the expulsion of catholic shipyard workers from their work in the summer of 1920; the dáil retaliated by boycotting Belfast goods. The period also saw increasing I.R.A. activity in the north during the latter stages of the Anglo-Irish war, and the five-month truce that followed it. Though the northern government was not a party to the treaty negotiations, only reluctantly accepting the granting of dominion status to the south, the months before and after the settlement greatly increased tensions in the north-east.

It is a commonplace to observe that the life of the Anglo-Irish community was profoundly altered by the Act of Union in 1800, but this was particularly true in its ecclesiastical effects. Whereas in the eighteenth century the antipathy between Protestant and Roman Catholic had diminished and even as late as 1824 the possibility of a union of the Church of Ireland with the Roman Church was seriously being discussed by older churchmen, the effect of the Act of Union was to isolate the Anglo-Irish. Reluctantly they had accepted the Act and now, dependent upon it for their survival, many of them took refuge in a ‘garrison mentality’ which invested their ascendancy with almost sacred connotations by which their community was transformed into a ‘faithful remnant’ with a mission to bring light and truth to Ireland.

AbstractIn a ninth-century manuscript now in St Gallen (Stiftsbibliothek, 254) are found three Latin poems in three different metres dedicated by a poet who names himself as Lutting, in memory of his master Bede who, according to the first of the poems, died in AD 681 (and cannot, therefore, have been the much better known Bede of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow). In the St Gallen manuscript the poems are transmitted alongside Cuthbert's Epistola de obitu Bedae; judging from the language of Bede's ‘Death Song’ which it contains, the Epistola was copied from a Northumbrian exemplar, and the same is apparently true of the three Latin poems. The fact that the names of Lutting and his master Bede are found near to each other in the Durham Liber Vitae raises the possibility that they were together at Lindisfarne; and detailed metrical analysis indicates that two of the poems follow Hiberno-Latin metrical practice in significant ways, which also points to the Irish cultural milieu of Lindisfarne. In an Appendix, the poems are edited for the first time, with translation and commentary.

Recently, it was suggested that the anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibody bevacizumab could be used in the treatment of rubeosis iridis. Therefore, we aimed to trace the penetration of bevacizumab into the anterior chamber after intravitreal injection of the drug. We found that intravitreally injected bevacizumab penetrates well and quickly into the anterior chamber angle, iris and ciliary body. The highest concentration of bevacizumab is present on days one to four after injection, with penetration into the iris appearing to be faster than that into the anterior chamber angle and ciliary body. These findings are consistent with the clinically described regression of iris neovascularisation one to three days after injection. Furthermore, we demonstrated progressive penetration through the tissues of the anterior chamber towards the sclera. Our study showed that the intravitreal application mode is suitable for obtaining an accumulation of bevacizumab throughout the vascularised tissues of the anterior segment. Intravitreal bevacizumab may be used as a supplementary treatment for rubeosis iridis and neovascular glaucoma.

Like the ‘Tory in clogs’ of Edwardian Britain, the Unionist working man has generally eluded the historian of modern Ireland. Indeed, to some extent, the image of Irish Unionism, whether popular or scholarly, has been supplied by the apologetic biographers of the ‘great men’ of loyalism, and by the rhetoric of political opponents like Michael Farrell: at any rate the historiography of the movement is peopled with irredentist squires and Anglo-Irish peers, bowler-hatted Orange artisans – Engel's ‘Protestant brag-garts’ – and cynical industrial barons. The existence of a more popular Unionism is acknowledged, though only in a context (the militancy of 1912, the bravura of 12 July marches) when it may not be ignored: even so, as with an older scholarly attitude towards popular British toryism, there has been a tendency among historians to treat mass Unionism as a freak of progress, demanding apologetic explanation rather than sustained illumination. With the institutions of popular Conservatism now, after thirty years of historical research, a firm feature of the British historical landscape, the need to reveal something of the electoral base of Ulster Unionism is all the more apparent. This is particularly true of the rural hinterland of the loyalist movement which, even more than Belfast, has been the victim of neglect.

John Locke and many others noted the vibrant political commentary emanating from the pulpit during the Glorious Revolution. Preachers from the full confessional spectrum in England, and especially in Scotland, Ireland, and the colonies, used occasional or state sermons to explain contemporary upheavals from the perspective of God's law, Natural law, and Civil law. Most surprising is the latter, clerical reference to civil history and ancient origins, which preachers used to answer contemporary questions of conquest and allegiance. Clergy revisited the origins and constitutional roots of the Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Scots, and Irish, and deployed histories of legendary kings and imaginary conquests to explain and justify the revolutionary events of 1688–1692. Sermons of this revolutionary era focused as much on civil as on sacred history, and sought their true origins in antiquity and the mists of myth. Episcopalian preachers, whether Church of Ireland, Scottish Episcopalian, or Church of England, seem to have been especially inspired by thanksgiving or fast days memorialized in the liturgical calendar to ponder the meaning of a deep historical narrative. Scots, Irish, and Massachusetts clergy claimed their respective immemorialism, as much as the English did theirs. But, as they re-stated competing Britannic constitutions and origin myths explicitly, they exposed imperial rifts and contradictions within the seemingly united claim of antiquity. By the beginning of the next reign and century, state sermons depended more upon reason and less upon a historicized mythic antiquity.

Abstract This article examines the manner in which early Anglo‐Saxon episcopal sanctity was shaped by the writings of Venantius Fortunatus, the prolific, and yet sometimes neglected, Italian hagiographer and poet who was to end his days as bishop of Poitiers. Firstly, the manner in which Fortunatus's works shaped the literary form of Anglo‐Saxon episcopal hagiography is examined. Secondly, the debt which the various Vitae of Cuthbert owed to Fortunatus is explored. Here it is emphasized that Bede's two Vitae differed from the earlier anonymous Life by their heavier use of Fortunatus's writings promoting the cult of St. Martin of Tours. It is also shown how Fortunatus's re‐shaping of the Martinian cult in the light of his own classical background as a hagiographer bears marked similarities to the manner in which Bede reshaped the Cuthbert cult in line with his own concerns. The article then turns to the much more developed use of Fortunatus's writings as a guide to the construction of episcopal sanctity which was made by Alcuin. It shows how Alcuin's strong emphasis on the urban background of the bishops of York was derived from the Gallic tradition. The article concludes by stressing that although knowledge of Fortunatus's works in early Anglo‐Saxon England is difficult to trace, they could have been known from Ireland where Fortunatus in particular had helped to shape the hymnody of the early Irish Church. However, given Alcuin's more extensive knowledge of the works, it is more likely that his own time on the continent ensured his richer knowledge of Fortunatus's works.

Although a relatively young subject, the historiography of Irish architecture has had a remarkably significant impact on the manner in which particular styles have been interpreted and valued. Since the genesis of the topic in the mid-eighteenth century, specific styles of architecture have been inextricably connected with the political history of the country, and each has been associated with the political and religious affiliations of its patrons. From the mid-nineteenth century, the focus on identifying an Irish ‘national’ architecture became particularly strong, with Early Christian and Romanesque architecture firmly believed to imbue ‘the spirit of native genius’, while Gothic, viewed as the introduction of the Anglo-Norman invader, was seen as marking the end of ‘Irish’ art. Inevitably, with such a strong motivation behind them, early texts were keen to find structures that were untouched by the hand of the colonizer as exemplars of the ‘national architecture’. Scholars, including the pioneering George Petrie (1790–1866) in works such as his 1845 study of the round towers of Ireland, believed that through historical research he and others were the first to understand the ‘true value’ of these buildings and that any former interest in them had been purely in their destruction, rather than in their restoration or reconstruction. It was believed that such examples of early medieval architecture and sculpture as had survived had done so despite, rather than because of, the efforts of former ages, and, although often in ruins, the remains could be interpreted purely in terms of the date of their original, medieval, creation.Informed by such studies, from the mid-nineteenth century a movement grew to preserve and consolidate a number of threatened Romanesque buildings with the guiding philosophy of preserving the monuments as close to their original ‘pre-colonial’ form as possible. Consolidation of the ruins of the Nuns’ Church at Clonmacnoise (Co. Offaly) is traditionally amongst the earliest and most celebrated of these endeavours, undertaken by the Kilkenny and Southeast Ireland Archaeological Society in the 1860s, setting a precedent for both the type of monument and method of preservation that was to become the focus of activity from the 1870s, and thus for the first State initiatives in architectural conservation.

Abstract. Compartmentalisation, the subdivision of an aquifer into discrete and relatively isolated units, may be of critical importance for the protection of groundwater although it has been largely ignored in the groundwater literature. The Lower Triassic Sherwood Sandstone, in north west of England, UK, may be a good example of an aquifer that has been compartmentalised by numerous high angle faults with displacements of up to 300 m. The study was initiated to assess the local groundwater flow, the extent of seawater invasion and the controls on recharge in the aquifer and to try to understand whether the aquifer is broken into discrete compartments. Maps and schematic cross-sections of groundwater heads for the years 1993, and 2002 were prepared to trace any structural controls on the groundwater heads across the area. Studying the contour maps and cross sections revealed that: 1) there are substantial differences in groundwater head across some of the NNW-SSE trending faults implying that groundwater flow is strongly limited by faults, 2) an anticline in the east of the area acts as a groundwater divide and 3) the groundwater head seems to follow the topography in some places, although steep changes in groundwater head occur across faults showing that they locally control the groundwater head. The aquifer was thus provisionally subdivided into several hydrogeological sub-basins based on groundwater head patterns and the occurrence of major structural features (faults and a fold). Using groundwater geochemistry data, contour maps of chloride and sulphate concentration largely support the structural sub-division of the area into hydrogeological sub-basins. Scrutiny of groundwater geochemical data, averaged for each sub-basin, confirmed the degree of compartmentalisation and the occurrence of sealed faults. The variation of the geochemical composition of the groundwater not only relates to the different, localised geochemical processes and seawater intrusion but also relates to compartmentalisation due to faulting. Faults have limited the degree of mixing between the groundwater types thus retaining the specific characteristics of each sub-basin. Highly localised seawater intrusion is mainly controlled by low permeability fault close to the Irish Sea and Mersey estuary. There is effectively no invasion of seawater beyond the faults that lie closest to the coastline. Freshwater recharge to the aquifer seems to be highly localised and mainly occurs by vertical percolation of rain and surface water rather than whole aquifer-scale groundwater flow. This study provides a detailed understanding of the groundwater flow processes in Liverpool as an example of methods can be applied to groundwater management elsewhere.

Objective: To assess the relationship between Helicobacter pylori (Hp) infection and primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG); and meantime, to explore the possible mechanism of POAG induced by Hp. Methods: 30 consecutive POAG patients, 30 primary angle-closure glaucoma (PACG) and cataract patients were recruited and divided into three groups according to different diseases. The sera and aqueous humor samples were collected and used to detect Hp-specific IgG antibody (Hp-Ab) with dot immunogold filtration assay (DIGFA). 14C-urea breath test (14C-UBT) was carried out to detect Hp infection of all participants. Results: The Hp-Ab positive rate respectively was 76.7% (23/30) and 66.7% in sera samples and aqueous humor samples for POAG group, which was significantly higher than the corresponding data of the other two groups (all P<0.05). In 14C-UBT, the Hp-Ab positive rate was 63.3% in POAG group and it was close to that of serological result detected by DIGFA (P>0.05). There were little numbers of positive ANA and ENA in the three groups and no meaning to make statistically analysis. Conclusions: There is positive association between Hp infection and POAG, and the autoimmune is suggested as one of the key mechanisms in our opinions. Introduction Glaucoma is one of the commonest causes for blindness in the world. Generally, glaucoma is divided into primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) and primary angle-closure glaucoma (PACG).1 As a leading causes for blindness, the study of POAG causes more and more attention.2,3To our understand, POAG is a chronic optic neuropathy characterized by atrophy and increased cupping of optic disk. To date, many aspects of its pathogenesis remain unknown but some significant risk factors are advanced age, African origin, familial history of glaucoma and elevated intraocular pressure.4,5 Helicobacter pylori (Hp) is a Gram-negative and microaerophilic bacterium which plays an important role in the development of various upper gastrointestinal diseases. With the development of studies, some researchers reported that Hp was also associated with some extragastric diseases, such as ischemic heart disease,6 iron-deficient anemia,7 diabetes mellitus,8 and so on. In 2001, Kountouras et al9 established a higher prevalence of Hp infection in the sera of patients with POAG in a Greek population, and suggested a possible causal link between Hp and glaucoma. Subsequently, this finding was evidenced by some scholars in their own studies.10 But the significance of such an association remains uncertain because of the conflicting findings reported by various studies.11-13 Aiming to such a discrepancy, further studies are necessary.14 In this study, we just do detect Hp-specific IgG antibodies (Hp-Ab) in the sera and aqueous humor of patients with different ocular diseases, including POAG, PACG and cataract, and attempt to further determine the relationship between Hp infection and POAG and to analyze the possible mechanism of POAG induced by Hp. Abbreviations ANA, antinuclear antibody; ENA, Extractable nuclear antigen; DIGFA, dot immunogold filtration assay; Hp, Helicobacter pylori; Hp-Ab, Hp-specific IgG antibodies; PACG, primary angle-closure glaucoma; POAG, primary open-angle glaucoma; 14C-UBT: 14C-urea breath test. Subjectsand methods Subjects 30 consecutive POAG patients were enrolled with the average age of 68±7.3 y (ranged from 47 to 78 y). The ratio of the male and the female was 11: 19. Meantime, 30 PACG patients and 30 cataract patients were also recruited, and who were matched by age and sex with the POAG patients. According to different diseases, the participants were divided into POAG, PACG and cataract groups, respectively. All of them were excluded from tumor, immunodeficiency, autoimmune and infectious diseases in clinic, and also had no antibiotics and other medicines related to immunopotentiator or immunosuppressive agents in the six months before the experiment. Written informed consents were obtained from all the participants. The study was approved by the local ethics committee. Hp-Ab detection of sera samples 2 ml venous blood was collected from each of the participants. The serum was obtained after centrifugation and used to detect Hp-Ab with dot immunogold filtration assay (DIGFA) according to the manufacturer’s instruction of the reagent kit (MP Biomedicals Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd., Singapore). Hp-Ab detection of aqueous humor samples About 50 μl aqueous humor sample was aspirated at the beginning of glaucoma surgery from the each of the patients in the three groups, respectively. Hp-Ab was assayed with DIGFA as same as the detection process of venous blood samples. Detection of Hp infection with 14C-urea breath test Referring to Tang’s report,1514C-urea breath test (14C-UBT) was carried out in POAG group with Hp detection instrument-YH04 (Yanghe Medical Equipment Co. Ltd., China). Sera auto-antibodies detection Serum antinuclear antibody (ANA) was detected with the indirect immunofluorescence assay by a commercialized ANA kit. Extractable nuclear antigen (ENA) was assayed with line immunoassay. All reagents were bought from Jiangsu HOB Biotech Group, China. Statistic analysis Using T-test and Chi-square test, all analyses were performed with SPSS 13.0 software. P value less than 0.05 were considered significant. Results 3.1 Hp infection detection in sera and aqueous humor Of the sera samples, there were 23 cases exhibited Hp-Ab-positive in POAG group, and the positive rate was 76.7% which was significantly higher than those of PACG and cataract group (43.3% and 36.6% respectively). In the aqueous humor samples, there were 18 patients with positive Hp-Ab in POAG group, and the positive rate was 66.7%. Compared to each data of the other two groups, the difference was statistically significant (Table 1). In POAG group, the mean positive rate of sera samples was similar to that of aqueous humor and no difference existed between them (P = 0.287). Table 1. The serum and aqueous humor qualitative test results of the patients with glaucoma Hp infection detection with 14C-UBTAH: aqueous humor; a: POAG group vs cataract group; b: POAG group vs PACG group; c: PACG group vs cataract group. In 14C-UBT, there were 19 patients with Hp-Ab-positive, and the positive rate was 63.3%. Compared to the data detected with DIGFA, the difference was not significant (Table 2). Table 2. Comparison of DIGFA and 14C-UBT for diagnosis of Hp infection in POAG group ANA and ENA detection* represents comparison of the positive rate detected with the two methods. There were 4, 2 and 1 patients with ANA-positive in POAG, PACG and cataract group, respectively. The positive ENA in POAG group were SSA, SSB and Ro-52, and the corresponding numbers were 2, 2 and 1. Only Ro-52 showedpositive in PACG group while there was no positive ENA in cataract group (Table 3). Table 3. The results for sera ANA, ENA of the patients of each group Discussion In Greece, a very active research group led by J. Kountouras published several original contributions as well as the reviews concerning the connection between Hp infection and POAG.14,16 In other counties, there were also several papers containing the similar arguments issued, such as India,17 Turkey,18 Korea19 and so on. In China, Hong et al20 detected Hp infection and POAG through 13C-UBT, and also found the positive correlation between them. Since then, there was no relative article issued by Chinese could be found in PubMed and other well-known scientific database. In this study, referring to other researchers’ reports, we designed and carried out the experiments. In the results, we found that the positive rate of sera Hp-Ab was high to 76.7% in POAG patients, which was significantly higher than those of the other two groups. This finding was close to the data of the previous reports2,21 and further verified that there was a positive relation between Hp infection and POAG. In the present study, we also assayed Hp infection with 14C-UBT. Encouragingly, the positive rate of Hp infection was 63.3%, which was very close to 76.7% detected with DIGFA. This result further indicated the existence of the relation between Hp infection and POAG. However, Bagnis et al22 thought that the studies based on Hp serological assessment might be misleading, since serum antibodies were not the sensitive markers of active Hp infection; while 13C-UBT could clarify the actual prevalence of POAG among patients infected by Hp. In fact, there were still deficiencies for 13C- or 14C -UBT, because it was more suitable for the detection of gastrointestinal Hp infection, and to an extent, there were false-negatives in the test.23 This probably was the just reason for what the positive rate in DIGFA was little higher than that in 14C-UBT in this study. As to the cresyl fast violet staining on the histology preparations of tissue samples of trabeculum and iris introduced by Zavos et al,24 although it could provide the direct and strong evidence for Hp infection in the pathophysiology of POAG, the difficult harvest of the sample limited its application. Therefore, in our opinions, the serological assay is suitable to detect Hp infectionand used to assess the relationship between Hp prevalence and POAG. Except for detecting sera Hp-Ab, we also detected Hp-Ab in the aqueous humor collected from the majority of participants. As the results shown, the positive rate of the POAG group was statistically higher than each of the other groups, respectively. This result was consistent with that of the serological assessment and again showed the positive relation between Hp infection and POAG. However, in another similar study, Deshpande et al17 also found a statistically significant difference between the POAG patients and the controls in the concentration of serum Hp-Ab, but they did not find any significant correlations between the Hp concentrations of the aqueous humor of the different patient groups. This disagreement probably associated with the damage degree of blood-brain barrier (BBB), because the sera Hp-Ab could reach the trabeculum and iris under the condition of the BBB disruption.25 According to the results of the present study, we supported the hypothesis related to POAG onset that Hp-Ab in circulation might get through the blood-aqueous humor barrier, further condensed in aqueous humor and finally induced or aggravated glaucomatous damage.2 As to the occurrence of POAG, we thought another autoimmune mechanism was most probable and should not be ignored: Hp infection initiated autoimmune response because of the common genetic components shared in Hp and human nerve tissue; and then, cell destruction which mediated by apoptosis direct caused glaucoma.26 Just based on the theory, we designed and detected sera ANA and ENA of the POAG patients and the control participants, and hoped to find any evidences related to autoimmune. As a result, we found that the positive rate of every group was rather low and there was no difference between them. However, this seronegative result can’t deny the hypothesis of autoimmune mechanism in POAG; and the auto-antibodies specific to eyes, such as trabeculum and iris, were suggested to be detected in future study in our opinions. Conclusion The positive association between Hp infection and POAG not only using serum sample but also aqueous humor sample is found in this study. And further, through the experimental data, it is suggested that the autoimmune induced by Hp infection probably is the key mechanism for POAG onset, and Hp detection should be taken as a routinized index applied to the prevention and therapy of POAG in clinic. However, we can not sufficiently investigate the possible mechanism of POAG relates to Hp infection. Is it true that Hp infection only relative to POAG but not a causative factor for POAG?18 What are the initial mechanisms of Hp in POAG if the pathogen takes part in the onset of the disease? Such questions will be the study topics to the medical researchers worldwide in future. Funding This work is supported by the Research Fund for Lin He’s Academician Workstation of New Medicine and Clinical Translation in Jining Medical University(JYHL2018FMS08), and the Project of scientific research support fund for teachers of Jining Medical University (JYFC2018FKJ023). Conflicts of interest There is no any conflict of interest between all of the authors. References: Chan H. H.; Ng Y.F.; Chu P. H. Clin Exp Optom. 2011, 94, 247. Kountouras J.; Mylopoulos N.; Konstas A. G.; Zavos C.; Chatzopoulos D.; Boukla A. Graefe’s Arch Clin Exp Ophthalmo. 2003, l241, 884. Kim E. C.; Park S. H.; Kim M. S. A. J. Pharmacol. Ther. 2010, 26, 563. Cantor L.; Fechtner R. D.; Michael A. J. San Francisco: Foundation of American Academy of Ophthalmology. 2005, 8. Bron A.; Chaine G.; Villain M.; Colin J.; Nordmann J. P.; Renard, J.P.; et al. Fr. Ophtalmol. 2008, 31, 435. Suzuki H.; Franceschi F.; Nishizawa T.; Gasbarini A. Helicobacter. 2011, 16, 65. Xia W.; Zhang X.; Wang J.; Sun C.; Wu L. Br. J. Nutr. 2011, 18, 1. Schimke K.; Chubb S. A.; Davis W. A.; Davis T. M. Atherosclerosis. 2010, 212, 321. Kountouras J.; Mylopoulos N.; Boura P.; Bessas C.; Chatzopoulos D.; Venizelos J.; et al. Opthalmology. 2001, 108, 599. Zaidi M.; Jilani A.; Gupta Y.; Umair S.; Gupta M. Nep. J. Oph. 2009, 1, 129. Galloway P. H.; Warner S. J.; Morshed M. G.; Mikelberg F. S. Ophthalmology. 2003, 110, 922. Abdollahi A.; Zarei R.; Zare M.; Kazemi A.Iran J. Opththalmol. 2005, 18, 15. Kurtz S.; Regenbogen M.; Goldiner I.; Horowitz N.; Moshkowitz M. Glaucoma. 2008, 17, 223. Tsolakin F.; Gogaki E.; Sakkias F.; Skatharoudi C.; Lopatatzidi C.; Tsoulopoulos V.; et al. Ophthalmol. 2012, 6, 45. Tang H. R.; Fan Y. J.; Liu S. Sichuan Da Xue Xue Bao Yi Xue Bao. 2014, 45, 823. Zavous, C.; Kountouras, J. Ophthalmol. 2012, 6, 243. Deshpande N.; Lalitha P.; Krishna das S. R.; Jethani J.; Pillai R. M.; Robin A.; et al. Glaucoma. 2008, 17, 605. Öztürk F.; Kurt E.; Inan U. U.; Erm S. S.; Çetinkaya Z.; Altýndi M. African J. Res. 2009, 3, 560. Kim J. M.; Kim S. H.; Park K. H.; Han S. Y.; Shim H. S. Invest Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 2011, 52, 665. Hong Y.; Zhang C. H.; Duan L.; Wang E. Asian J. Ophthalmol. 2007, 9, 205. Samarai V.; Shrif N.; Nateghi S. Glob. J. Health Sci. 2014, 6, 13. Bagnis A.; Izzotti A.; Saccàn S. C. Diagestive and Liver Disease. 2012, 44, 962. Gao F.; Li W. X. Chin. J. Gastroenterol. 2015, 20, 151. Zavos C.; Kountouras J.; Sakkias G.; Venizelos L.; Deretzi G.; Arapoglou, S. Res. 2012, 47, 150. Kountouras J.Br. J. 2009, 93, 1413. Kountouras J.; Gavalas E.; Zavos C.; Stergiopoulos C.; Chatzopoulos D.; Kapetanakis N.; et al. . Hypotheses. 2007, 68, 378.

Iridocorneal endothelial (ICE) syndrome is a rare ophthalmic disorder, wherein the basic pathology is an abnormal corneal endothelium that leads to varying degrees of corneal oedema, iris atrophy, and secondary angle closure glaucoma.[1] This syndrome typically affects young women unilaterally with no family history.[2] The true aetiology of ICE syndrome is unclear. Viral cause for the disease has been proposed, based on a history of inflammation in certain cases and on the presence of inflammatory cells on histological analysis.[3] The abnormal endothelial cells may migrate posteriorly, forming a membrane that covers the adjacent structures, iris and trabecular meshwork.[4] The contraction of this membrane leads to characteristic iris changes, iridotrabecular synechiae, and corectopia with the pupil being drawn towards the area where the synechiae are most prevalent and to secondary angle-closure glaucoma.[5]

Background/aimsTo identify biometric parameters that explain misclassifications by a deep learning classifier for detecting gonioscopic angle closure in anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT) images.MethodsChinese American Eye Study (CHES) participants underwent gonioscopy and AS-OCT of each angle quadrant. A subset of CHES AS-OCT images were analysed using a deep learning classifier to detect positive angle closure based on manual gonioscopy by a reference human examiner. Parameter measurements were compared between four prediction classes: true positives (TPs), true negatives (TNs), false positives (FPs) and false negatives (FN). Logistic regression models were developed to differentiate between true and false predictions. Performance was assessed using area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) and classifier accuracy metrics.Results584 images from 127 participants were analysed, yielding 271 TPs, 224 TNs, 77 FPs and 12 FNs. Parameter measurements differed (p<0.001) between prediction classes among anterior segment parameters, including iris curvature (IC) and lens vault (LV), and angle parameters, including angle opening distance (AOD). FP resembled TP more than FN and TN in terms of anterior segment parameters (steeper IC and higher LV), but resembled TN more than TP and FN in terms of angle parameters (wider AOD). Models for detecting FP (AUC=0.752) and FN (AUC=0.838) improved classifier accuracy from 84.8% to 89.0%.ConclusionsMisclassifications by an OCT-based deep learning classifier for detecting gonioscopic angle closure are explained by disagreement between anterior segment and angle parameters. This finding could be used to improve classifier performance and highlights differences between gonioscopic and AS-OCT definitions of angle closure.

Purpose To report a case of bilateral iatrogenic pigmentary glaucoma secondary to cosmetic iris-lightening laser treatment. Case report A 39-year-old patient presented with bilateral iatrogenic pigmentary glaucoma. She had elevated intraocular pressures (IOPs), scattered iris pitting, and intense angle pigmentation secondary to the cosmetic laser treatment she underwent 4 weeks prior to presentation. Her IOPs were refractory to maximal medical treatment and she subsequently underwent trabeculectomy. Conclusion The true scale of complications related to cosmetic laser treatments is as yet unknown. Robust clinical investigations into its safety profile, including long-term data, are required. Prospective patients should consider this with great care. Clinicians should be aware of the potential risks of this procedure, as early recognition of cosmetic laser-induced pigmentary glaucoma may avert further sequelae.

The article attempts to trace the genesis of conservative thought with the help of historical and legal analysis. If earlier researchers spoke in the context of the forerunners of conservative political and legal thought only about the Anglo-Irish parliamentarian Edmund Burke and the Sardinian Joseph de Maistre, sometimes mentioning the historical school of law, the researcher, on the contrary, insists on the need to study the original ideas of such conservative lawyers of the XVIII century as Justus Mezer, Gustaf von Hugo and Johann Putter. According to the author, these scientists pushed, including Burke and de Maistre, to the idea of the supremacy of national law and the political and cultural traditions of a particular nation in a particular state. It is noted that the conservative doctrine was born and developed synchronously in Germany, France and England, and as a result, it absorbed certain features: rationalism, a religious picture of the world, a tendency to hierarchy and reliance on traditions, as well as some impulsiveness in the form of a reactionary response to events happening in the country. Following the law professors, the author analyzes the ideological origins of the doctrines, reconstructs conservative ideas and forms the political and legal values of conservatism into a coherent system of attributes. For the purpose of a detailed study of the phenomenon of conservatism and its forerunners, the article identifies three bases, within which eight types of conservatism are revealed: static; dynamic; utopian; realistic; utopian, but with some reservations embodied in reality; realistic, supplemented with elements of utopia; liberal conservatism; true conservatism. The derived system of types of conservatism can be used in further research.

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.

It seems clear that people who are deaf ... struggle continually against the meanings that others impose on their experience, and the way that this separates them from others. They struggle for acknowledgement of the way they see their lives and wish to live them, and aspire to connection?with other people, to share and belong. (David Moorhead. Knowing Who I Am. 1995. 85.) Nga Tapuwae and Before I am deaf but, before that part of my life started, I was hearing and worked for many years as a librarian in New Zealand. My first job was in a public library located within a secondary school Nga Tapuwae Secondary College in South Auckland. Its placement was a 1970’s social experiment to see if a public library could work within the grounds of a community college (and the answer was no, it could not). The experience was a great introduction for me to the Maori and Polynesian cultures that I had not previously encountered. Until then, I was wary of both groups, and so it was a revelation to realise that although there were many social problems in the area including low literacy, many of the children and teenagers were bright, talented individuals. They simply did not connect to the Anglo-Saxon reading materials we offered. Years later, my interest in the social dynamics of literacy led to my enrolment in a post-graduate literacy degree in Melbourne. This action may have saved my life because at the end of this course, a minor ailment resulted in a visit to the university doctor who diagnosed me with the life-threatening medical condition, Neurofibromatosis Type 2 (NF 2). NF2 is a late onset genetic condition in which one’s body grows tumours, always on both hearing nerves, sometimes elsewhere as well. The tumours usually cause deafness and can cause death. I was told I needed to have my tumours removed and would probably become fully deaf as a result. This is how my life as I knew it changed direction and I started the long journey towards becoming deaf. Diagnosis and Change Predictably, once diagnosed, friends and colleagues rallied to comfort me. I was told things probably weren’t as bad as they sounded. Helen Keller was mentioned several times as an example of someone who had succeeded despite being deaf and blind. ‘Really,’ my friends asked, ‘how bad can it be? ‘Inside myself however, it couldn’t have been worse. A day later the enormity of it all hit me and I became inconsolable. A friend drove me back to the doctor and she did two things that were to change my life. She referred me to the University’s counselling services where, happily, I was counselled by Elizabeth Hastings who later went on to become Australia’s first Disability Services Commissioner. Secondly, the doctor organised for me to visit the HEAR Service at the Victorian Deaf Society (VDS). Again by happy accident, my friend and I stumbled into the ‘wrong building’ where I ended up meeting John Lovett, who was Deaf and the CEO there, via an interpreter. When I met John Lovett I was distraught but, unlike other people, he made no attempt to stop me crying. He simply listened carefully until I realised he understood what I was saying and stopped crying myself. He said my fears that I could end up alone and lonely were valid and he suggested the best thing I could do for myself was to join the ‘Deaf community’; a community. I had never heard of. He explained it was made up of people like him who used Australian sign language (Auslan) to communicate. He was so engaging and supportive that this plan sounded fine to me. By the time we finished talking and he walked me over to the HEAR Service, I was so in his thrall that I had enrolled for a Deaf awareness workshop, an Auslan class, and had plans to join the Deaf community. Had I stayed on and learned Auslan, my life may well have followed a different path, but this was not to be at that time. Becoming Hearing Impaired (HI) Across at the HEAR service, an alternate view of my potential future was put to me. Instead of moving away from everything familiar and joining the Deaf community, I could learn to lip-read and hopefully use it to stay in the workforce and amongst my hearing friends. I had a cousin and aunt who were late deafened; my cousin in particular was doing well communicating with lip-reading. I discussed this with friends and the idea of staying with the people I already knew sounded far less confronting than joining the Deaf community and so I chose this path. My surgeon was also optimistic. He was confident he could save some of my hearing. Suddenly learning Auslan seemed superfluous. I phoned John Lovett to explain, and his response was that I should do what suited me, but he asked me to remember one thing: that it was me who decided to leave the Deaf Community, not that the Deaf community had not wanted me. He told me that, if I changed my mind, I could always go back because the door to the Deaf community would always be open and he would be still be there. It would be a decade before I decided that I wanted to go back through that door, and around that time this great man passed away, but I never forgot my promise to remember our conversation. It, and a few other exchanges I had with him in the following years, stayed at the back of my mind, especially as my residual hearing sank over the years, and the prospect of total deafness hung over me. When I had the surgery, my surgeon’s optimism proved unfounded. He could not save any hearing on my left side and my facial and balance nerves were damaged as well. The hospital then decided not to operate again, and would only attempt to remove the second tumour if it grew and threatened my health again. Consequently, for close to a decade, my life was on hold in many ways. I feared deafness—for me it signalled that my life as I knew it would end and I would be isolated. Every hearing test was a tense time for me as I watched my remaining hearing decline in a slow, relentless downward path on the graph. It was like watching the tide go out knowing it was never going to come in as fully again. My thinking started to change too. Within a week of my diagnosis I experienced discrimination for the first time. A library school that had offered me a place in its post graduate librarianship course the following year made it clear that they no longer wanted me. In the end it did not matter as I was accepted at another institution but it was my first experience of being treated less favourably in the community and it was a shock. After the surgery my life settled down again. I found work in public libraries again, rekindled an old relationship and in 1994 had a baby boy. However, living with a hearing loss is hard work. Everything seemed tiring, especially lip-reading. My ears rejected my hearing aid and became itchy and inflamed. I became aware that my continual hearing problems were sometimes seen as a nuisance in work situations. Socialising lost a lot of its appeal so my social world also contracted. Around this time something else started happening. Outside work, people started expressing admiration for me—words like ‘role model’ and ‘inspiring’ started entering the conversation. Any other time I might have enjoyed it but for me, struggling to adapt to my new situation, it felt odd. The whole thing reminded me of being encouraged to be like Helen Keller; as if there is a right way to behave when one is deaf in which you are an inspiration, and a wrong way in which one is seen as being in need of a role model. I discussed this with Elizabeth Hastings who had helped me prepare mentally for the surgery and afterwards. I explained I felt vulnerable and needy in my new situation and she gave me some useful advice. She thought feeling needy was a good thing as realising one needs people keeps one humble. She observed that, after years of intellectualising, educated people sometimes started believing they could use intellectualisation as a way to avoid painful emotions such as sadness. This behaviour then cut them off from support and from understanding that none of us can do it alone. She believed that, in always having to ask for help, people with disabilities are kept aware of the simple truth that all people depend on others to survive. She said I could regard becoming deaf as a disability, or I could choose to regard it as a privilege. Over the years the truth of her words became increasingly more evident to me as I waded through all the jargon and intellectualisation that surrounds discussion of both deafness and the disability arena, compared to the often raw emotion expressed by those on the receiving end of it. At a personal level I have found that talking about emotions helps especially in the face of the ubiquitous ‘positive thinking’ brigade who would have us all believe that successful people do not feel negative emotions regardless of what is happening. The Lie Elizabeth had initially sympathised with my sadness about my impending deafness. One day however she asked why, having expressed positive sentiments both about deaf people and people with disabilities, I was saying I would probably be better off dead than deaf? Up until that conversation I was unaware of the contradictions between what I felt and what I was saying. I came to realise I was living a lie because I did not believe what I was telling myself; namely, that deaf people and people with disabilities are as good as other people. Far from believing this, what I really thought was that being deaf, or having a disability, did lessen one’s worth. It was an uncomfortable admission, particularly sharing it with someone sitting in a wheelchair, and especially as up until then I had always seen myself as a liberal thinker. Now, faced with the reality of becoming deaf, I had been hoist by my own petard, as I could not come to terms with the idea of myself as a deaf person. The Christian idea of looking after the ‘less fortunate’ was one I had been exposed to, but I had not realised the flip side of it, which is that the ‘less fortunate’ are also perceived as a ‘burden’ for those looking after them. It reminded me of my initial experiences years earlier at Nga Tapuwae when I came face to face with cultures I thought I had understood but did not. In both cases it was only when I got to know people that I began to question my own attitudes and assumptions and broadened my thinking. Unfortunately for deaf people, and people with disabilities, I have not been the only person lying to myself. These days it is not common for people to express their fears about deaf people or people with disabilities. People just press on without fully communicating or understanding the other person’s attitude or perspectives. When things then do not work out, these failures reinforce the misconceptions and these attitudes persist. I believe it is one of the main reasons why true community inclusion for deaf and people with disabilities is moving so slowly. Paying for access is another manifestation of this. Everyone is supportive of access in principle but there is continuous complaint about paying for things such as interpreting. The never-ending discussions between deaf people and the wealthy movie industry about providing more than token access to captioned cinema demonstrate that the inclusion lie is alive and well. Until it can be effectively addressed through genuine dialogue, deaf people, hard of hearing people and people with disabilities will always be largely relegated to life outside the mainstream. Collectively we will also continue to have to endure this double message that we are of equal value to the community while simultaneously being considered a financial burden if we try to access it in ways that are meaningful to us. Becoming Deaf In 2002 however all this thinking still lay ahead of me. I still had some hearing and was back living in New Zealand to be close to my family. My relationship had ended and I was a solo mother. My workplace had approved leave of absence, and so I still had my job to go back to in Melbourne if I wanted it. However, I suspected that I would soon need the second tumour removed because I was getting shooting pains down my face. When my fears were confirmed I could not decide whether to move back to Melbourne or let the job go, and risk having trouble finding one if I went back later. I initially chose to stay longer as my father was sick but eventually I decided Melbourne was where I wanted to be especially if I was deaf. I returned, found temporary employment, and right up to the second surgery I was able to work as I could make good use of the small amount of hearing I still had. I thought that I would still be able to cope when I was made fully deaf as a result of the surgery. It was, after all, only one notch down on the audiogram and I was already ‘profoundly deaf’ and still working. When I woke up after the surgery completely deaf, it felt anti-climactic. The world seemed exactly the same, just silent. At home where I was surrounded by my close family and friends everything initially seemed possible. However, when my family left, it was just my seven-year-old son and myself again, and on venturing back into the community, it quickly became clear to me that at some level my status had changed. Without any cues, I struggled to follow speech and few people wanted to write things down. Although my son was only seven, people communicated with him in preference to me. I felt as if we had changed roles: I was now the child and he was the adult. Worse was soon to follow when I tried to re-enter the workforce. When I had the surgery, the hospital had installed a gadget called an auditory brainstem implant, (ABI) which they said would help me hear. An ABI is similar to a cochlear implant but it is attached to the brainstem instead of the cochlear nerve. My cochlear nerve was removed. I hoped my ABI would enable me to hear enough to find work but, aside from clinical conditions in which there was no background noise and the staff knew how to assist, it did not work. My most humiliating moment with it came when it broke down mid job interview and I spent half the time left trying to get it going again in full view of the embarrassed interview panel, and the other half trying to maintain my composure whilst trying to lip-read the questions. The most crushing blow came from the library where I had happily worked for seven years at middle management level. This library was collaborating with another institution to set up a new library and they needed new staff. I hopefully applied for a job at the same level I had worked at prior to becoming deaf but was unsuccessful. When I asked for feedback, I was told that I was not seen as having the skills to work at that level. My lowest point came when I was refused a job unpacking boxes of books. I was told I did not have experience in this area even though, as any librarian will attest, unpacking boxes is part of any librarian’s work. When I could not find unskilled work, it occurred to me that possibly I would never work again. While this was unfolding, my young son and I went from being comfortable financially to impoverished. My ex-partner also decided he would now make childcare arrangements directly with my son as he was annoyed at being expected to write things down for me. My relationship with him, some family members, and my friends were all under strain at that time. I was lost. It also became clear that my son was not coping. Although he knew the rudiments of Auslan, it was not enough for us to communicate sufficiently. His behaviour at school deteriorated and one night he became so frustrated trying to talk to me that he started to pull out his own hair. I calmed him and asked him to write down for me what he was feeling and he wrote down ‘It is like you died. It is like I don’t have a Mum now’. It was now clear to me that although I still had my friends, nobody including myself knew what to do. I realised I had to find someone who could understand my situation and I knew now it had to be a Deaf person. Fortunately, by this stage I was back learning Auslan again at La Trobe University. The week after the conversation with my son, I told my Auslan teacher what had happened. To my relief she understood my situation immediately. She told me to bring my son to class, at no cost, and she would teach him herself. I did and my life started to turn around. My son took to Auslan with such speed and application that he was able to not only converse with her in one month but immediately started using Auslan with me at home to get the things he wanted. We were able to re-establish the mother/son relationship that we both needed. I was also able to help my son talk through and deal with all the changes that me becoming deaf had foisted upon him. He still uses Auslan to talk to me and supplements it using speech, copious finger spelling, notes and diagrams. More than anything else, this relationship has kept me anchored to my long-term goal of becoming a clear signer. Encouraged by my son’s success, I put all my energy into learning Auslan and enrolled in a full time TAFE Auslan course. I also joined a chat group called ‘Here to Hear’ (H2H). The perspectives in the group ranged from strongly oral to strongly Deaf but for me, trying to find a place to fit in any of it, it was invaluable. Almost daily I chatted with the group, asking questions and invariably someone responded. The group acted as a safety net and sounding board for me as I worked out the practicalities of living life deaf. The day of my fateful interview and the ABI humiliation, I came home so shaken that I used the Irish remedy of a couple of swigs of whisky, and then went online and posted an account of it all. I can still remember the collective indignation of the group and, as I read the responses, beginning to see the funny side of it . . . something I could not have done alone. I also made use of easy access to Deaf teachers at TAFE and used that to listen to them and ask advice on situations. I found out for example, that if I instructed my son to stand behind me when people in shops insisted on addressing him, they had no alternative but to talk to me; it was a good clear message to all concerned that my son was the child in this relationship. About this time, I discovered the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) that Elizabeth Hastings had worked so hard on, filed my first DDA complaint, and received my first apology at the mediation session that followed. My personal life also improved, relationship by relationship as everyone adjusted. Slowly the ice melted in most of my relationships; some relationships faded and were replaced with new ones with signing people, and eventually hearing people again. My life moved forward. Through a member of ‘Here to Hear’, I was invited to apply for my first post deaf job—covering holiday leave at a Deaf sports organisation. I practically finger-spelt my way through the interview but not only did they offer me the job, they were delighted to have me. I was able to buy a few things with the money I earned, and suddenly it felt as if everything was possible again. This acceptance of me by Deaf people had a profound impact on me. I mixed with people more, and it was not too long before I was able to use my basic signing skills to use Auslan interpreters and re-enter the workplace. I have discovered over time that living in silence also has advantages—no more noisy parties or rubbish trucks clanging at dawn and in its place a vastly heightened visual awareness that I enjoy. Before I was deaf I thought it would be lonely in the silence but in fact many of life’s best moments—watching rain hit and then run down a window, swimming in the sea, cooking and being with good friends—do not rely upon sound at all; they feel the same way they always did. Sometimes I have felt somewhat of an outsider in the Deaf community. I have sometimes been taken aback by people’s abruptness but I have learned over time that being succinct is valued in Auslan, and some people like to come straight to the point. At crisis points, such as when I asked for help at the Victorian Deaf Society and my Auslan class, it has been a huge relief to talk to Deaf people and know immediately that they understand just from reading their eyes. Having access to an additional world of deaf people has made my life more enjoyable. I feel privileged to be associated with the Deaf community. I can recall a couple of Christmases ago making dinner for some signing friends and suddenly realising that, without noticing, everything had become alright in my world again. Everyone was signing really fast – something I still struggle with; but every now and then someone would stop and summarise so I felt included. It was really relaxed and simply felt like old times, just old times without the sound thrown in. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, two ethnographers, have this to say about why people communicate the ways they do: The individual ... creates for himself the patterns of his linguistic behaviour so as to resemble those of the group or groups with which from time to time he wishes to be identified, or so as to be unlike those from whom he wishes to be distinguished ... . We see speech acts as acts of projection; the speaker is projecting his inner universe, implicitly with the invitation to others to share it ... he is seeking to reinforce his models of the world, and hopes for solidarity from those with whom he wishes to identify. (181) This quote neatly sums up why I choose to communicate the ways I do. I use Auslan and speech in different situations because I am connected to people in both groups and I want them in my life. I do not feel hugely different from anyone these days. If it is accepted that I have as much to contribute to the community as anyone else, becoming deaf has also meant for me that I expect to see other people treated well and accepted. For me that means contributing my time and thoughts, and advocating. It also means expecting a good level of access to interpreters, to some thought provoking captioned movies in English, and affordable assistive technologies so I can participate. I see this right to participate and engage in genuine dialogue with the rest of the community as central to the aspirations and identity of us all, regardless of who we are or where others think we belong. References Le Page, R.B., and Andree Tabouret-Keller. Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Moorhead, D. “Knowing Who I Am.” In S. Gregory, ed., Deaf Futures Revisited. Block 3, Unit 10, D251 Issues in Deafness. Open University, 1995.