Articles de revues sur le sujet « Jewish authors – biography – history and criticism »

Background. This study discusses one of the last Vygotsky`s works — the fourth chapter in «Fascism in Psychoneurology» bulletin (1934). Motivation of the author to write this text is analyzed in the broad context of sociopolitical and personal aspects of his life: general growth of sociopsychological tension, repressions that touched Vygotsky`s family in 1930s, personally significant Jewish question and antisemitism in nazi Germany. In addition, joint letter from R.N. Vygodskaya and L.S. Vygotsky to D.I. Vygodsky published for the first time. This letter mentioned the arrest of Vygotsky`s cousin L.I. Vygodsky. Objective. The aim of the study was to reconstruct personal meanings and circumstances of L.S. Vygotsky in writing a chapter for «Fascism in Psychoneurology» bulletin. Methods. Elements of source analysis, search and analysis of archival documents, theoretical analysis of literature on L.S. Vygotsky`s biography. Results. The analysis showed that Vygotsky and Luria`s criticism of Fascism in psychology is built around several topics: criticism of the basic anthropological idea of the Third Reich about the predestination of human development depending on «blood and race»; an analysis of the process of politicization and ideologization of science, exemplified by the concept of «Integrationstypologie» introduced by E.R. Jaensch, which Vygotsky criticizes; political self-defense of Soviet scientists against possible persecution; the issue of national self-determination of Soviet Jewish scientists. Conclusion. Authors of this article suggested that this work may be seen not only as a scientific criticism and assertion of humanistic values in psychology but also as an act of political self-defense from sanctions and persecution that took place during the second half of the 1930s.

Abstract The paper explores the limiting and detrimental effects of biographical criticism and exceptionalism in the efforts of reinstating women authors into the Renaissance canon, by looking into the literary merits of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry and The History of The Life, Reign and Death of Edward II. Whereas the conflation of biography and fiction is a successful recipe for canonization and for the production of feminist icons, it renders the text impotent because of its resulting inability to compete with or to be seen in correlation and interplay with other contemporary texts.

Russian Academy of Sciences presents a number of books published by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research competition “Sources and Methods in the Study of the Legacy of F. M. Dostoevsky in Russian and World Culture.” They are Viktorovich V. A., Zakharova O. V. “F. M. Dostoevsky in Russian Criticism. 1845–1881”; “Dostoevsky’s Darovoe. Materials and Research” (edited by A. S. Bessonova); “Unknown and Little-Known Sources of the Biography of F. M. Dostoevsky in the Collection of the State Museum of the History of Russian Literature Named After V. I. Dahl: A Collective Monograph” (P. E. Fokin, A. V. Petrova, E. M. Varentsova and others); “New Archival and Printed Sources of the Scientific Biography of F. M. Dostoevsky. Collective Monograph” (edited by B. N. Tikhomirov); and “The Handwritten Legacy of F. M. Dostoevsky” (edited by I. S. Andrianova). The review presents the main topics and problems raised by the researchers, indicates the new archival documents and sources used by the researchers, the significance of the research undertaken by the authors for studying the biography and creative work of F. M. Dostoevsky and creating his new scientific biography.

Questions of the history of the struggle against the Jewish national tradition were considered in many works of the Soviet authors of the 20-ies of the twentieth century. Among them, first of all, are those who studied various problems of the theory and practice of anti-religious propaganda in Soviet Ukraine, the history of the development of atheism. This is a monograph by Boris Zavadovsky "Moses or Darwin" and M. Sheynman "On Rabbis and Synagogues". In the late 20's and early 1930's, collections entitled "Antireligiozer Lerwukh", "Komsomolisha Agada" appeared, in which issues of the history of Judaism were considered, its main sources, criticism of its main elements from the point of view of materialistic approaches was carried out. One of the main tasks formulated by the authors of these studies was the opposition of the Jewish tradition to the new communist ideology, the hegemony of which at that time was an important part of the realities of the sociopolitical life of Ukraine.

The article discusses the main approaches and discourses that are used in writing the history of Jewish communities in the Mamlūk Sultanate (1250–1517). The review on the topic includes the classics of the Jewish history, studies of contemporary authors in English, Arabic and Hebrew. Two main approaches are distinguished. There are two approaches. The first is the “theory of decline,” which characterizes the reign of the Mamluks as a period of systematic decline of the entire Mamluk society, which subsequently influenced the state of the Jewish community itself. approach that describes the period as time of oppression and isolation of the community. The second approach defines the period as a time of oppression, discrimination and isolation of the community.The criticism of A. Mazor and N. Hofer on the “theory of decline” and oppression of the community is considered there. That historical approaches are placed in certain discourses. Among them, might be highlighted the Jewish national, Zionist, orientalist, Islamic discourses, M. Cohen's «neo-lacrimous concept», as well as the reaction on them among Arab historians. The conclusions identify problems associated with the historical period under study, and also discuss issues related to expanding the methodological base in historical research. The works of modern researchers who apply methods from other social sciences, for example, discourse analysis, narrative analysis and case study, are presented. The identification of typical approaches, theoretical and ideological frameworks will allow to reconsider the period under study in the history of Jewish communities.

Edmund de Waal‘s widely acclaimed family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) is a hybrid text that fuses biography, autobiography and the biography of objects and interlaces these with critical reflections on art, transnationality, cross-cultural communication and the development of cosmopolitan identities. This article examines the central role of the collection of netsuke synecdochally evoked in the book’s title that not only provides the pivotal structural element but also the major conceptual focus of the text. I argue that this idiosyncratic gravitational centre effects the permeability of generic boundaries by establishing an intricate relationality between the narrative’s different protagonists, who continuously decentre and reconfigure each other. Moreover, the art objects’ own history of migration and multiple belonging becomes a blueprint for de Waal’s construction of his Jewish ancestors’ highly mobile and cosmopolitan selves, which sidesteps the narrowly circumscribed vision of national or religious identities. The full extent of these connections is revealed through an examination of the author’s artistic vision, his ceramic art and art criticism. Finally, I will read The Hare with Amber Eyes as an act of restitution in a two-fold sense: as an attempt to undo the politically motivated erasure of some of his ancestors’ traces and as a historical reminder of lived forms of cosmopolitanism that can speak to contemporary debates around globalisation and migration.

Revoking boundaries (Jerzy Ficowski’s biographical and poetic transcension) The article describes the phenomenon of “revoking” or transcending boundaries, present both in the family tradition and biography of Jerzy Ficowski and in his artistic choices. The biographical reflection focuses especially on the figure of the poet’s father, a bearer of the multicultural experiences of Polish communities in pre-revolutionary Russia, the post-war contacts Ficowski had with emigrant authors and the Jewish diaspora, as well as on the poet’s transcending the boundaries of state-censored works in the mid 1970s. At the same time, the article is looking for a iunctim between the openness encoded in Ficowski’s biography and his poetic language. In doing so, it describes the latter’s qualities, such as meaning inconstancy, semantic opalization of words, homonyms and antonyms incessantly destabilizing the boundaries of word and verse, that seem to be an equivalent of the discussed openness. In particular, attention is drawn to the influence the 1970s had on boosting the semantic potential of Ficowski’s poetry.Key words: Jerzy Ficowski; Tadeusz Ficowski; multiculturalism; hieroglyph; history in poetry; immigration literature;

Introduction. The article analyzes the biography and diplomatic activities of Nikolai Vasilievich Novikov (1903–1989), a Soviet diplomat who represented the USSR in Cairo and in Washington during World War II and took part in the efforts to establish a new system of international relations at the beginning of the Cold War. Methods and materials. The article is based on published texts by Nikolai Novikov himself, diplomatic documents, periodicals, and materials from his personal archive, deposited in the Archive of the European University at St. Petersburg by the diplomat’s family. Analysis. The authors examine Novikov’s biography, the reasons for his rapid career in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, his relations with Soviet foreign policy managers, and the circumstances of his resignation at a relatively young age. Special attention is paid to Novikov’s activities in the United States in the context of the emerging Cold War, the place of Novikov’s note (cable) in the process of shaping Soviet approaches to relations with the United States, and his own attitude to these approaches. Results. Novikov’s contribution to the shaping of the postwar world is underappreciated, as are his attempts to resist the changes that were breaking Soviet-American cooperation in the international arena. In fact, the strategic concepts formulated by Novikov in a memo to Molotov were the basis of the official Soviet interpretation of the causes and nature of the Cold War and were included in Soviet school and university textbooks on universal history and the history of international relations. Authors’ contributions. A.I. Kubyshkin analyzed the most important stages of Nikolai Novikov’s diplomatic activity and the general situation in relations between the USSR and the USA during the Second World War. He assessed Novikov’s activities from the political leadership of the USSR and foreign countries in which the Soviet diplomat worked. He also examined the most important aspects of the activities of Soviet diplomacy reflected in Novikov’s memoirs and carried out their internal criticism as a historical source. I.I. Kurilla processed the archive of Nikolai Novikov and identified and analyzed the corpus of sources of personal origin. He also analyzed the contents of Nikolai Novikov’s personal diaries, reviewed the personal contribution of N.V. Novikov in developing a strategy in relations with the United States in the initial period of the Cold War, and compared the contents of the “long telegram” of J. Kennan and the “Novikov telegram”.

The discussion about Abu Hurairah seemed to never end, no doubt negative things were thrown at him because his achievements were so great that he even won the first position in the narration of the Prophet's hadith in certain disciplines compared to other prominent companions. A total of 5,374 (five thousand three hundred and seventy four) hadiths were recorded in Abu Hurairah's memory and memory. In this paper review, the authors conducted a qualitative research method using a literature and literature research approach. This paper will present a biography of the figure of Abu Hurairah, how his role in the transmission of hadith as well as a critical analysis of the controversies of criticism and praise addressed to him. The results of the author's analysis are the opinions put forward by various groups, both friends and great scholars, about Abu Hurairah as a friend who has extensive knowledge and the most history of hadiths and that Abu Hurairah is no longer doubted by Muslims as a hadith leader, this is more convincing than accusations criticism directed at him.

This article discusses the biographies of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the Rebbe) within the broader context of Chabad historiographic lore, in particular the quasi-historical writings of Yosef Yiẓḥak Schneersohn from the 1930s and 1940s. Described by Ada Rapoport-Albert as “hagiography with footnotes,” these seemingly scholarly and modern texts constituted an alternative narrative to that of academic Jewish history. From this vantage point, I consider how biographies published by academics and by hasidic authors have mutually influenced each other, particularly in their scope, form, and method. To that end, I examine the controversy that surrounded the 2010 publication of the first academic biography of Schneerson, Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman'sThe Rebbe, and analyze the strategies undertaken by subsequent authors that have allowed them to present the Rebbe's life in a form that was no longer “hagiography with footnotes” (which would have alienated a secular readership) but as seemingly impartial biographies (without alienating the hasidic readership).

AbstractAs a response to the tradition of scholarship that focused on questions of LXX origins, translation techniques and textual criticism, this article looks at how the LXX translations in antiquity were already in certain respects marked as Greek texts at their production, constructed as Greek literary texts in their origins, and subsequently employed in the same ways as compositional Greek texts by those who engaged them. It shows how the author of Aristeas constructs the LXX as a Greek text, how it functioned as such for Aristobulos and Philo. Already the translators demonstrate in their use of poetic language that they could produce literary Greek. Subsequently, Jewish Hellenistic authors employed the LXX alongside other Greek texts, and treated it with the methods of Hellenistic scholarship.

The article analyzes the structural and textual changes made by Lev Kassil in the reprinting of the story “Conduit and Shvambraniya”. The material for this study is the 1935 and 1937 editions of the story, two editions in 1957, and the last lifetime edition in 1965. An analysis of the published editions shows the formation of the story “The Conduit and Shvambrania” as a single novel, a single narrative and structural whole, which was not yet the case in the 1935 edition. The author reveals the changes made by Lev Kassil in later versions of the story and offers a classification of authorial corrections: 1) deletions of ideological and political nature; 2) deletions and changes caused by attacks of pedagogical critics; 3) corrections and changes of artistic nature. Lev Kassil was forced to respond to the ideological campaigns that were unfolding both on the national scale and in the professional literary environment (the anti-Semitic campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, the deportation of the Volga Germans in the 1940s, discussions of “pseudo-romanticism and formalism” in criticism, etc.). Another reason for changing the text of the story was the circumstances of the writer’s family biography: the repression of his brother Iosif Kassil, who was the prototype of one of the main characters in the story — Os’ka. Nevertheless, The Conduit and Shvambrania was the only book in Kassil’s work in which a Jewish theme was expressed.

This article review Michael Cook’s thoughts on the early history of the use of isnad. Michael Cook disagrees with the opinions of the hadith scholars who said that the system of isnad only exists in Islam and is not found in other religions. Michael Cook believes that Islam is not the only sole owner of the isnad system. Long before Islam came the system of isnad had been used by previous religions, that is, it had been used by Jews in transmitting Mishnah. Even Michael Cook concluded that Islam had plagiarized the Jewish isnad system. The Islamic isnad system is very closely related to the Jewish isnad system which both have similarities and similarities in many ways. Therefore, Michael Cook believes that the Islamic isnad is a plagiarism of the Jewish isnad system. In this paper, the author explores Cook’s idea which generates two problems, namely what and how are the fundamental ideas (main points) of Michael Cook related to the initial use of isnad? And the second, how is the methodological foundation of Jews in carrying out criticism of isnad? In this study, the authors used a type of qualitative research, or what is known as library research. By using two data sources, namely primary data and secondary data.

The article is to analyze an unknown and previously unintroduced into scientific use photographic document concerning front-line activities of Admiral A. V. Kolchak during the Civil War. The relevance of the work springs from the fact that scholars quite rarely provide source analysis of film and photo documents as independent sources on the history of the Civil War in Russia within the framework of interdisciplinary practices. At the same time, there is a significant interest of national scientific community in this historical figure and it has been causing sharp polemical discussions for a century already, including, at times, contradictory judgemental statements. The photograph we are introducing into scientific use was discovered in 2020; it is in permanent storage in the fonds of the Center for Historical Heritage of River Workers and Patriotic Education, which is a part of the Omsk Institute of Water Transport structure. It should be emphasized that most distinctive feature of the photograph is its everyday and non-staged nature, whereas the overwhelming majority of A. V. Kolchak’s known images are official. The authors have used comprehensive methodological approach based on a combination of anthropological approach to source, use of biographical and problem-chronological methods with its source study criticism (both external and internal). This theoretical set of methods has allowed the authors to interpret the revealed visual document as well as possible, linking its appearance with concrete historical situation and state activities of Admiral A. V. Kolchak at his post of the Supreme Ruler in the final stage of the Omsk period of his biography. This publication may be of interest to researchers of the Civil War and the White Army in Eastern Russia, of Admiral A.V. Kolchak’ biography in his time as the Supreme Ruler, as well as to specialists in source studies, study of visual documents, and history of everyday life.

The publication of the catalog of publications with dedicatory inscriptions is of great importance for the research of various aspects of the personality, biography and work of Mikhail Bakhtin. It provides new opportunities for clarifying and even revising certain facts of his biography. The authors note that despite all the efforts of Bakhtin’s studies, his biography in many respects remains a mixture of real facts and various legends, and the task of creating a complete biography of the thinker is still far from being solved. The review highly appreciates the new publication, which reveals the potential of the collection of Bakhtin’s library and especially books with dedicatory inscriptions as a source of historical and biographical information. It values any facts that can shed light on Bakhtin’s daily life, his relationship with official academia, academic and research institutions, the degree of his recognition in the academic environment, the impact of his ideas on his contemporaries and younger generations of scholars. The first book in the list of donations to Bakhtin is dated 1943, and the most recent was given to him shortly before his death on February 1, 1975. The review introduces new documents, such as the inscriptions of Nikolai Lyubimov, a translator of the novel by Francois Rabelais, and Gennady Pospelov, a theorist and historian of literature. To a great extent, the history of the inscriptions becomes the story of the reception of Bakhtin’s ideas, the attitude to his works and personality during several decades. This allows a researcher not only to clarify the specific facts of Bakhtin’s biography, but also to understand some features of various periods of his life. The catalog contains 234 inscriptions on 227 books and 5 journals, each of which is valuable for researchers. It includes the illustrations and photographs of the books and journals containing these inscriptions, which increases the value of this book. So, if needed, a reader can compare the existing inscriptions and the proposed decryption. Each of the inscriptions given in the book deserves to be studied and considered in the context of Bakhtin’s biography and works. Bakhtin’s full biography has not yet been created, and the catalog allows not only clarifying certain facts of his biography and surrounding, but also clarifying certain scenarios of Bakhtin’s relationship with formalists (Viktor Shklovsky, Lydia Ginzburg), with the scholars of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School (Yuri Lotman, Vyacheslav Ivanov), and with the representatives of official Soviet literary criticism (Leonid Timofeev, Alexander Revyakin). The review examines the inscriptions of Bakhtin’s colleagues and students, Bakhtin’s inner circle and their acquaintances (Ivan Kanaev, Judith Kagan, Mikhail Alpatov), and Bakhtin’s “younger circle” (Vadim Kozhinov, Sergey Bocharov, Georgy Gachev). The authors draw the reader’s attention to a remarkable detail of the digital era – the electronic version of the publication which has been available on the website of the National Library of the Republic of Mordovia named after A.S. Pushkin since 2020.

The 16th century to the end of the 19th century, storytelling and praise of the sultan became the idea of authorship. This storytelling and praise are conveyed by making poetry his platform. The last poem to record the history of this Royal group was the Syair Riwayat Yang Amat Mulia Tengku Ampuan Besar Pahang (1953). However, such influence is less used when modern literature develops. Western powers bring a new diversity of forms and genres in creation. After 56 years, two works have emerged, Syair Sultan Azlan Shah Berjiwa Rakyat (2009), Mohd Ibrahim bin Said and Syair DYMM Sultan Ibrahim Ibni Almarhum Sultan Iskandar (2018) by Maskiah binti Masrom in this contemporary era. Kings and sultans became objects of storytelling in both works. The question is, what are the scopes or criteria that are the ideas of their authorship? The scope or criterion that became the idea of authorship used by both authors in presenting storytelling about their rulers. Both texts of the Royal poetry were sampled. Comparative methods are applied to examine their influence in presenting the idea of Royal history recordings in the contemporary era. Intrinsically research methods on study samples were also used. The findings found that the king's biography became the scope or criterion that became the idea of authorship for both authors in praise and upholding his king. Keywords: Literary criticism; Peering; Authorship; Royal syair; Contemporary syair

The author of this article researches the historical personality of Lieutenant-General Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872–1947) – a unique, tragic figure in the history of the Russian power, a military leader, a politician, a writer, – during thirty years of his scientific and pedagogical activity. The scientific results obtained by the researcher are reflected in his doctoral dissertation, four monographs. The biography of the combat Russian general was written, which was published twice (in 2000 and 2006) by the publishing house “Young Guard” in the series “Life of wonderful people”. Documentary-fiction narration about the personality and the fate of Anton Ivanovich has been performed, a large number of articles in scientific periodicals and reports in the materials of various scientific forums were published. An anthology about him is also published in the format “pro et contra”. It is clear that such a vast and diverse body of work could not but reflect the topic that is indicated in the title of this article. Was Lieutenant General Anton Ivanovich Denikin an anti-Semite? If he was, how was it reflected in his deeds? The search for answers to such burning questions, questions that are exclusively debatable and sometimes polemical in nature (both in domestic and foreign historiography), was carried out through the analysis of a number of business documents and materials deposited both in federal state archives and published in various collections and separately. It was necessary to study a number of historiographical sources created by researchers in the Soviet, post-Soviet, modern periods of domestic historical science development, as well as abroad. At the same time, the author of this article tried to ensure a careful and correct attitude to the historiographic developments of the predecessors. However, such a research algorithm does not exclude a critical aspect (do not confuse with ill-natured criticism!). Naturally, the article doesn’t have any claim to represent a complete coverage of the problem. It has some elements of sketchiness and appeals to the author’s early works, which comprehensively research the historical personality of Anton Ivanovich Denikin, including the problem of the «Jewish issue”.

The question of the formation of a new type of creator-demiurge in the conditions of culture at the turn of the 19th—20th centuries is considered. Particular attention is paid to the personality of the Czech artist Josef Váchal. The relevance of the study is determined by several factors: firstly, the recent increased interest in Czech literature in Russia and, at the same time, its insufficient representation both in the book market and in the scientific community; secondly, the lack of Russian-language criticism directly devoted to the work and the author’s figure of J. Váchal. Describing the cultural and historical environment in which the creative personality of the artist was formed, the authors of the article refer both to the general European context and directly to the Czech language. It has been established that the work of J. Váchal has a deep connection with the history of his country. In particular, the artist’s reaction to certain moods prevailing in Czech society at that time explains his passion for baroque aesthetics, the cornerstone of his poetics. In addition, Váchal’s biography largely determined the themes and form of his works, so understanding him as a specific personality of the 19th-20th centuries contributes to a more detailed analysis of his work.

The paper revisits a popular trope of the anglophone reception of the work and figure of Bruno Schulz, offering an overview of its history based on examples from literary criticism and paratextual framing since the first edition of Celina Wieniewska’s translation in 1963 to the present. It is argued that although in the beginning the mentions of Kafka naturally had a marketing potential, helping to introduce a then unknown author to Englishspeaking readers, the analogy was not used in a cynical or superficial way, nor was Schulz ever presented as Kafka’s poor relative. Its early proponents (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cyntha Ozick, and Philip Roth) genuinely believed in Schulz’s affinity with Kafka and the Central European Jewish tradition at large. At least since the early 1990s, Schulz has been listed on a par with Kafka, other high modernists, and other eminent authors from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, often becoming a point of reference for reviewers of translated fiction. If the phrase “Polish Kafka” still sometimes appears in this shorthand form, it is usually presented as a cliché and/or critically elaborated. In contrast to the contemporary understanding of “Polish Kafka” in Poland as almost an evocation of an inferiority complex, in the anglophone realm the comparison to Kafka has been an expression of bona fide admiration for Schulz.

The article is devoted to the discussion of the problem of periodization and the study of the features of the late stage of the work of the outstanding American prose writer Francis Bret Hart (1836—1902). The relevance of the article is due to the need to build a coherent and consistent history of the development of American literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, an important part of which is the writer’s prose heritage. The authors comprehend Western (J. Stewart, G. Scharnhorst, A. Nissen and others) and domestic (A. V. Vaschenko, L. P. Grossman, P. E. Schegolev, A. I. Startsev, V. A. Libman, E. Yu. Rogonova, A. B. Tanaseichuk) studies on biography and various aspects of the prose writer. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in American studies a gap in the reception of F. Bret Hart's work was filled (the absence of clear criteria for periodization); the tradition of a disdainful attitude to the European period of his work, established in American literary criticism, is refuted, in particular, it is proved that in the stories and novels of the 1880s and 1890s Bret Hart boldly goes beyond the usual themes and images: the “Californian theme”, traditional for his early prose, takes on a new dimension — in the aspect of understanding national and gender psychology (“Maruga”); amorous and melodramatic collisions are combined with an appeal to science fiction (“The Secret of the Hacienda”).

Western scholars have been interested in the origins and historical reliability of ḥadīth literature since roughly the third quarter of the XIX. century. There have been scholars whose works stand out because of their significance for further Hadīth scholarship and originality. They all claimed crucial problems regarding the origins and transmission of Hadīth and its literature, then struggled to solve them through the modern methods of literary and historical criticism. In this context, John Burton’s (d. 2014) work seems to be highly influenced by his predecessors. Yet, his idea about the role of the Qur’ān in the development of Hadīth literature has still been considered original. Hence, Burton could be considered one of the authors whose ideas on Hadīth scholarship have proven to be influential enough to raise discussions. Burton’s views on the Qur’ān and its history have been studied from different angles by Turkish researchers. But little is known about his theses on the Hadīth literature. This article will focus on how his theory and method on the Qur’ān manuscripts shaped his arguments in An Introduction to the Hadīth. First, there will be a brief introduction to John Burton’s intellectual biography followed by an examination of his main theses regarding the classical Hadīth scholarship. Second, an evaluation and summary of Burton’s ideas on the origins of Hadīth will be presented. Finally, his conclusions will be compared with the views of prominent Western Hadīth scholars such as Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921) and Joseph Schacht (d. 1969) and will be reviewed from the Islamic perspective.

The article examines the practice of communication between the population and G. E. Zinoviev, the first chairman of the Petrograd Soviet after the October Revolution, during the Civil War (1918-1921). Based on the material of written appeals to the leader ("letters to the authorities") the problematic components of the public image of the head of the local government and their solutions within the framework of Zinoviev's campaigning activities. Researchers had previously used this type of source mainly to reconstruct public sentiment in subsequent eras of New Economic Policy and Industrialization, without focusing on the importance of this form of dialogue with the population for the authorities themselves during the period of war communism, especially at the regional level. The article describes three types of written appeals: letters and notes received at meetings. Analyses of both type based on the peculiarities of the communicative situation in which the appeals were written: the possibility of establishing authorship, the proximity of the authors to the addressee at the time of creation, the format of the appeal and its goals. The study analyzed 349 records (142 letters and 207 notes) from G. E. Zinoviev's personal funds stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI); in the funds of the departments headed by him during the specified period, in the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg (CGA SPb). For letters, the most common motives for their appearance are identified: the plight of the author and his family; dissatisfaction with the work of Soviet, party and military bodies; the desire to acquire a certain position in society (a place in the service, in the Red Army); the reaction to Zinoviev's speech or publication of employees–intellectuals. As an important underlying motive, the desire of the authors of the letters to establish personal contact with the leader through a meeting or to emphasize a previous acquaintance was revealed, which may illustrate a crisis of trust in society to the authorities or the lack of a culture of written appeal. The popular aspects of criticism of the head of the Petrograd Soviet contained in letters and notes are highlighted: privileges in the supply of food, the use of personal vehicles, Jewish origin and the discrepancy of statements with policy. In the final part of the article, Zinoviev's self-presentation techniques are analyzed in the context of the above-mentioned criticism. Such a characteristic feature is noted as the use of the letters received by the leader to demonstrate solidarity with the population, as well as the consonance of the claims made to him with his own criticism of the "attached" communists.

The article is devoted to the Russian historiography of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century. Its purpose is to study the main methodological approaches to research of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century in pre-revolutionary, Soviet and modern historiography by identifying the main approaches and characteristic features of research on this topic in different historiographic periods, identifying the most prominent representatives and the most popular problematic issues of Russian historiography, identifying key research methods at different stages. The relevance of the article is determined by the coverage of different points of view on the problems of the development of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries, concerning the financing of large infrastructure projects, modernization, the use of new financial instruments to increase government revenues, stabilize adverse macroeconomic problems context. This information can be used to solve modern strategic tasks of the state and rational use of financial resources. The novelty of the research is determined by the fact that to study the historiography of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries was first applied to institutional evolutionary theory. The publication identifies the main features of pre-revolutionary historiography (empiricism, a reflection of the ideology of its social group, pluralism of opinions, deep erudition of the authors), Soviet (conducting research in the framework of the formation approach, officially approved methodological principles, criticism and repression of dissidents), modern (rejection of the formation approach, the use of information technologies, the use of economic research methods, the study of the object in the context of new directions). The author covers research methods (general scientific, historical, economic), characteristic for different periods of Russian historiography, the most popular problems, and areas of study of the credit and financial system (gender history, biography, everyday history, etc.). The article shows the pluralism of opinions of pre-revolutionary researchers, the results of the application of the formation approach by Soviet researchers, expressed in the harsh criticism of predecessors, one-sided coverage of events, the use of various research methods by modern researchers, and the development of new directions.

Introduction. In this article issues, are considered, that are connected with the change of smenovekhovtsy in scientific and political publications of Russian authors in the historical retrospective. The article snows that the initial assessments were greatly defendant on the political environment at the beginning of the XX century when of the articles criticism the entire intellectual class but this tendency gradually evolved in to a more detailed and conscious analysis of the smenovekhovtsy ideas through the lens of the Russian post-revolutionary thought.Materials and Methods. The material of the research is the publications of various authors devoted to the problems of changeover as a philosophical and political trend. To solve the set tasks, the methods of philosophical analysis, interpretation, comparison, generalization are used.Results. The result of the conducted research is the systematization of the history of consideration of the phenomenon of changeover from political criticism to understanding the originality of the originality of the thought of the creators of this movement, including the personality characteristics of N.V. Ustryalov, a description and assessment of his political, scientific, managerial and other activities directly related to the process of the origin and development of the project of change. In general, it can be stated that the philosophical studies of the works and biography of N.V. Ustryalova are devoted to a limited range of topics: an assessment of his activities as a political figure of the white movement, an analysis of his ties with the Bolsheviks, a study of the reasons that served as the basis for the formation of the idea of national bolshevism and a conceptual comparison of this trend with Smenovekhovtsy. Currently, this thematic circle has expanded due to the study of the philosophical and political views of N.V. Ustryalov from the point of view of the influence of Smenovekhovtsy on other trends of Russian social thought in emigration, the originality and patriotism of his works.Discussion and Conclusion. Within the framework of this article, a scientific discussion of well-known experts on the history of changeover is presented and makes it possible to characterize the main ideas of the representatives of this trend. One of the most important issues discussed in the works devoted to the changeover and directly by N.V. Ustryalov, is the question of the originality of smenovekhovtsy as a political and philosophical direction of Russian thought. An important role in the study of N.V. Ustryalov plays the fact of the influence of his ideas on other currents of emigration, Soviet and philosophical thought, understanding of the origins and foundations that served to create smenovekhovtsy and National Bolshevism. Therefore, it can be argued that a deep meaningful analysis of domestic ideas is needed, a study of the history of interpenetration and the influence of the teachings of the smenovekhovtsy on post-revolutionary socio-political and philosophical thought, both inRussia and abroad.Thus, the author was able to form a full-fledged political and philosophical analysis of journalism devoted to the changeover and demonstrate the importance of the ideas of its creators in the history of Russian philosophy.

Abstract: Mechanisms, strategies and taboo topics of Soviet censorship in Estonian theatre Since theatre in the Soviet Union had to be first of all a propaganda and educational institution, the activity, repertoire and every single production of the theatre was subject to certain ideological and artistic prescriptions. Theatre artists were not subject to any official regulations regarding forbidden topics or ways of representation, thus the nature of censorship manifested itself to them in practice. Lists of forbidden authors and works greatly affected politics related to repertoire until the mid-1950s but much less afterwards. Research on censorship is hampered by the fact that it was predominately oral, based on phone or face-to-face conversations, and corresponding documentation has been systematically destroyed. This article is primarily based on memoirs and research conducted by people who were active in the Soviet theatre system. It systematises the empirical material into four parts: 1) mechanisms of censorship, 2) forms and strategies, 3) counter-strategies against censorship and 4) taboo topics. Despite the attempt to map theatre censorship in Estonia after the Second World War (1945–1990), most of the material concerns the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. This can be explained by the age of the respondents, but it can also be related to the fact that the Soviet control system became more liberal or ambiguous after the Khrushchev thaw encouraged theatre artists and officials to test the limits of freedom. The mechanisms of theatre censorship were multifaceted. Ideological correctness and the artistic maturity of repertoire and single productions were officially controlled by the Arts Administration (1940–1975) and afterwards by the Theatre Administration (1975–1990) under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture. Performing rights for new texts were allocated by the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs (Glavlit): texts by foreign authors were approved by the central office in Moscow, and texts by local authors were approved by local offices. The third censorship agency was the artistic committee that operated in every single theatre. Nevertheless, the most powerful institution was the Department of Culture of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia, whose influence on artistic issues had to be kept confidential by the parties involved. On top of all this, there was the hidden power and omnipresent network of agents of the Committee for State Security (KGB). Some audience members also acted as self-appointed censors. The network and system of censorship made the control system almost total and permanent, also enforcing self-censorship. Forms of censorship can be divided into preventive and punitive censorship, and strategies into direct and indirect censorship. Soviet censorship institutions mostly applied preventive censorship to plays or parts of productions, but hardly any production was cancelled before its premiere because that would have had undesirable financial consequences. Punitive censorship after the premiere was meant for correcting mistakes when the political climate changed or if a censor had been too reckless/lenient/clever, or if actors/audiences had started emphasising implicit meanings. Preventive censorship was predominantly direct and punitive censorship indirect (compelling directors to change mise en scènes or prescribing the number of performances). Indirect censorship can be characterised by ambiguity and allusions. A distinction can be made between preventive and punitive censorship in the context of single productions, but when forbidden authors, works or topics were involved, these two forms often merged. The plurality of censorship institutions or mechanisms, and shared responsibility led to a playful situation where parties on both sides of the front line were constantly changing, enabling theatre artists to use different counter-strategies against censorship. Two main battlefields were the mass media and meetings of the artistic committees, where new productions were introduced. The most common counter-strategies were the empowerment of productions and directors with opinions from experts and public figures (used also as a tool of censorship), providing ideologically correct interpretations of productions, overstated/insincere self-criticism on the part of theatre artists, concealing dangerous information (names of authors, original titles of texts, etc.), establishing relationships based on mutual trust with representatives of censorship institutions for greater artistic freedom, applying for help from central institutions of the Soviet Union against local authorities, and delating on censors. At the same time, a censor could fight for freedom of expression or a critic could work ambivalently as support or protection. In addition to forbidden authors whose biography, world view or works were unacceptable to Soviet authorities, there was an implicit list of dangerous topics: criticism of the Soviet Union as a state and a representative of the socialist way of life, positive representations of capitalist countries and their lifestyles, national independence and symbols of the independent Republic of Estonia (incl. blue-black-white colour combinations), idealisation of the past and the bourgeoisie, derogation of the Russian language and nation, violence and harassment by Soviet authorities, pessimism and lack of positive character, religious propaganda, sexuality and intimacy. When comparing the list of forbidden topics with analogous ones in other countries, for example in the United Kingdom where censorship was abolished in 1968, it appears that at a general level the topics are quite similar, but priorities are reversed: Western censorship was dealing with moral issues while its Eastern counterpart was engaged with political issues. It can be concluded that all censorship systems are somehow similar, embracing both the areas of restrictions and the areas of freedom and role play, providing individuals on both sides of the front line with opportunities to interpret and embody their roles according their world view and ethics. Censorship of arts is still an issue nowadays, even when it is hidden or neglected.

The main content of the monograph by O.E. Puchnina (Sorokopudova) «Political Outlook of V.V. Rozanov» which makes up the main and largest section of the book «Russian socio-political thought in the 19th and early 20th century: V.V. Rozanov» is examined in detail. It is noted that the authors of the serial edition and above all the author-compiler of its monographic section, O.E. Puchnina, managed to bring out in a detailed study of the work of one of the most original Russian thinkers of culture in the Silver Age a whole layer of conceptually related socio-political ideas giving them the status of a political worldview. The methodological basis of the review rests on the methods of analysis and evaluation of the results of the research conducted by the author that are typical of this type of scientific criticism. The assessment of the quality and completeness of the bibliographic description of the sources used in the monograph rests on the resut of the analysis. The degree of influence of biographical themes taken from the biography of V.V. Rozanov on the character of his ideological formation is presented. The features of Rozanov's creative style and method of analysis of socio-political reality highlighted by the author of the monograph are considered and critically evaluated. The political processes and phenomena in relation to which the philosopher formulated his original political ideas are listed. The role and place of V.V. Rozanov's political outlook in the Russian historiography and the history of the Russian socio-political tradition are shown. The argument of the thesis about the typicality of Rozanov's unique creativity for the Russian consciousness in the late 19th‒ early 20th century is partially supported. It is concluded that despite the critical remarks that were expressed in the article, O.E. Puchnina's innovative experiment of an ideological reconstruction of Rozanov’s socio-political ideas should be recognized as very successful.

<p>In recent decades, ethnopoetics has become one of the new philological disciplines. Its idea first appeared in the treatise of Nicolas Boileau &ldquo;The Art of Poetry&rdquo; (1674), in which the classicist theorist formulated the requirement of local and historical color in art. His rule was followed by many poets, playwrights and novelists of Modern history. In Anglo-American criticism, the term ethnopoetics was introduced in 1968. Jerome Rotenberg, who, along with Dennis Tedlock and Dell Himes, founded the principles and methods of studying American Indian poetry. In the 2000s. this concept has entered encyclopedic dictionaries in English and other European languages, but this word is still not in Russian terminological dictionaries. So far, the concept of poetics, which restricts the semantics of words forming a term, has received recognition. Already in the process of formation of ethnopoetics, its subject was expanded at the expense of middle Eastern and Jewish folklore, and later the oral creativity of other peoples. The word formation model (ἔ&theta;&nu;&omicron;&sigmaf;/ ethnos&nbsp;+&nbsp;&pi;&omicron;&iota;&eta;&tau;&iota;&kappa;ή/poetics) cancels limited interpretations of the term. In modern usage, the term ethnopoetics is used in a wide range of meanings that have not yet been marked by lexicographers, but convey the full semantics of the words forming the term. The idea of ethnopoetics gave rise to not one, but several of its concepts. The author of the article develops his earlier understanding of ethnopoetics as a discipline that should study the national identity of the oral and written text, describe in the categories of poetics the specific things that make national literature national. It is characterized by concepts and conceptospheres, they form the mentality, reveal the cultural code of national literatures. The analysis of ethnopoetics opens up great opportunities in the comparative analysis of thesauri of different authors and their works.</p>

AbstractGershom Scholem, the most predominant scholar of Jewish Mysticism in our times, is highly known for his contribution to the field of Jewish history. But his intellectual origins lay in his adolescence, and in his heretical-philosophical criticism of the Judeo-Christian morality and the ideology of the German bourgeoisie. These early impressions and thoughts appeared in one of his first Hebrew articles, “Redemption Through Sin”, published in Palestine in 1937. Scholem’s discussion analyzed the “nihilistic revolution” of the Sabbataeans and Frankists in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe, whose main feature was the rejection of the normative ethics of rabbinic Judaism. The hidden core of the young Scholem, his revolutionary thought, was followed by an early encounter with the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. The dream of young Scholem, as revealed by his diary, to write “Zarathustra for the Jews”, eventually came into being in an original adaptation. His great book Sabbatai Sevi (1957), can be read as a Nietzschean re-reading of “Redemption Through Sin”. The biography of Sabbatai Sevi as a Jewish Zarathustra may provide refreshing insights into the development of Scholem’s thought and an opportunity to challenge him through an analogical perspective.

The article analyzes discussions around the documentary film Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann, conducted in the uncensored press in communist Poland. In the literature on the subject, a popular thesis claims that the democratic opposition in Poland, like the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic, subjected this film to explicit criticism. The authors’ research into discussions about the Holocaust in the Polish independent press leads to the opposite conclusion. Ours analysis shows that authors publishing in the underground press had varied reactions to Lanzmann’s film. Voices opposing the official campaign against the director and his film predominate (which did not mean a complete lack of criticism vis-à-vis some of the movie’s features). We found only two opinions that can be considered clearly negative. The debate about Lanzmann’s film is important because it shows the complexity of the democratic opposition’s attitude of toward Polish-Jewish history and memory. In the opposition elite’s view of history, two currents ran in parallel, often in statements authored by the same people. On the one hand, the trend was primarily affirmative, as a reaction to the communist propaganda that bypassed or completely distorted some aspects of Polish history. On the other hand, there was also a tendency to include more controversial or even clearly shameful aspects of the history of Poland.

Abstract Within half a century, there were two Unitarian authors who created rhymed Hungarian translations of the Book of Psalms – Miklós Fazakas Bogáti at the end of the 16th century and János Thordai in 1627. There are still unanswered questions regarding these translations: why did Bogáti's translation not spread among Unitarian congregations? Was Thordai acquainted with Bogáti's translation? This paper explores the circle of possible answers to these questions from various perspectives. It also examines Bogáti's biography and the subsequent legacy of his Psalterium, taking into account the context of Church history and the history of publishing Unitarian songbooks. In addition, the poetics of the two translations are analysed. Based on these it transpires that there were several circumstances that made the spreading of the Psalterium difficult. However, Thordai's work should not be viewed solely as depending on Bogáti's translation, since it is not certain that Thordai was trying to fill a gap with his translation. The Transylvanian Unitarians did not necessarily intend to publish a complete Unitarian translation of the Book of Psalms in their songbooks.

This article reviews Svyatopolk-Mirsky, a book by M. V. Efimov and G. Smith published by Molodaya gvardiya in the Lives of Remarkable People series (2021). It was written by the oldest English specialist in Russian literature Professor G. S. Smith and a well-known Russian researcher of the literature and culture of Russia abroad M. V. Efimov. Both have studied the life and literary legacy of the character of their book for many years. For the first time in Russia, using the Russian and European tradition of biographical studies and historical-literary, cultural, and textual practices, the authors have carried out a full-scale reconstruction of the biography of one of the most striking and enigmatic figures of the first wave of the Russian emigration. The authors of the book introduce a significant scope of archival materials and memories of contemporaries, hard-to-access English and émigré periodicals, and other sources into scholarly circulation. It makes it possible to create a detailed account of the main events of prince D. P. Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s life – from his childhood to his tragic death in the Magadan camp, dramatic twists of fate and the reasons behind them, his close circle and distant environment, the political, historical, cultural, and literary context of the events described. The biographers’ interest in the inner world and the psychology of Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s actions is combined with a subtle philological analysis of his literary criticism and studies. According to the reviewers, the book is a major event in the Russian literary, political, and cultural history of the 1920s–1930s.

The present paper studies the antitotalitarian pathos in Christoph Ransmayr’s «The Last World» («Die letzte Welt», 1988). The problem is relatively fresh in literary criticism. The main objective of this paper is to reveal the peculiarities of the characters’ narrative being. In reading Christoph Ransmayr’s novel, the Ovid’s personality arises in recipient’s mind like an old movie. Its scenes remotely resemble the reality. The reason why the writers, the literary critics or just readers become inquiring about the ancient poet is an opportunity to find the answers to the key questions of the human existence in his biography. In addition, even at present no one has the true facts about Ovid’s life. The only proofs we have are the biographical inclusions in his poetry. Therefore the authors have recourse to inexhaustible resources of a myth to fill the numerous gaps in this part of history. The perceptual unity of the poet’s image depends on the reader’s capacity to bring together «the textual puzzles». In the postmodern space of «The Last World» Ovid became the hostage of the absurd world that lives under the law of total control, where fear, inventions, and deformations in social morals dominate. The originality of our scientific solution based on the concepts of literary anthropology. It means that the poetological measurements of the postmodern narrative are not considered separately, but in the context of the fiction being of the main characters and antagonists – the emperor Caesar Augustus and the poet Ovid. Finally the article interprets the conflict between them as an allegory of the voice of free art’s subordination by the totalitarian system.

Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum on olnud teerajajaid digihumanitaaria valdkonnas juba 1990. aastatest, alates arvutikultuuri laiemast levikust. Väärtuslike andmekogude haldamisel on olnud missiooniks nende kättesaadavaks tegemine avalikkusele. Kultuuripärand avati laiemale kasutajale kahes suunas: sisupõhised otsitavad andmebaasid ning suhtepõhised andmekeskkonnad. Siinse artikli eesmärgiks on näidata arvutusliku kirjandusteaduse tänapäevaseid võimalusi ja nendega seotud kirjanduslike keeleressursside loomist koostöös korpuslingvistidega. Artiklis analüüsin kultuuripärandi sisukeskkondade ja andmekoguside kasutusvõimalusi masinloetava keeleressursina. Esimeste selliste katsetena on valminud kirjavahetuse ja kriitika märgendatud keelekorpused päringusüsteemis KORP. Käesolev uurimus toob on 20. sajandi alguse mõjukriitika probleemi näitel välja kirjanduslike keelekorpuste potentsiaali kultuuripärandi uurimisel. Estonia can soon expect an explosive growth in digital heritage and text resources due to the current project of mass digitisation of national cultural heritage (printed books, archival documents, photos, art, audiovisual, and ethnographic artifacts) (2019–2023). This will give new opportunities for different fields of digital humanities and make digitised heritage accessible to everyone in the form of open data. The project will focus on the usage of the heritage, on the needs of education, e-learning, and the creative industry, including digital creative arts. The aim of this article is to examine some research possibilities that opened up for literary history due to the digitisation of literary works and archival sources and to put them in the general context of digital humanities. Although the field of digital humanities is broad, the meaning of DH is often reduced to methods of computational language-centered analyses, mainly based on using different tools and software languages (R, Stylo, Phyton, Gephy, Top Modelling etc.). While the corpus-based research is already a professional standard in linguistics, literary scholars are still more used to working with traditional methods. This article introduces two digital literary history projects belonging to the field of digital humanities and analyses them as language resources for creating texts corpora, and introduces some results of the case study of Estonian criticism from the Young Estonia movement up to the 1920s, carried out using the literary texts corpora in the corpus query system KORP (https://korp.keeleressursid.ee) by the Centre of Estonian Language Resources. During the past twenty years, I have mainly focussed on developing large-scale implementation projects for digital representation of Estonian literary history. The objective of these experimental projects has been to develop principally new non-linear models of Estonian literary history for the digital environment. These activities were based on my research of the intertextual relations between authors, literary works, and critical texts using traditional methods. The first content-based literary history project “ERNI. Estonian Literary History in Texts 1924–1925” (www2.kirmus.ee/erni) was based on a hypertextual network of literary source texts and reviews. We re-conceptualised literary history as a non-linear narrative and a gallery with many entrances. The task of the project was also to ensure its usability in education: a significant number of study materials has been added in cooperation with schoolteachers. In 2004, we initiated our long-term and still running project “Kreutzwald’s Century: the Estonian Cultural History Web” (http://kreutzwald.kirmus.ee) at the Estonian Literary Museum. The objective of this project was to make literary sources of the period accessible as the dynamic, interactive information environment. This was a hybrid project which synthesised the classical study of Estonian literary history, the needs of the digital media user, and the expanding digital resources from different memory institutions; its underlying idea was to link together all the works of fiction of an author, as well as their biography, manuscripts, and photos and to make them visible for the user on five interactive time axes. The project uses a specially created platform. Today, this platform is extensively used by schoolteachers: in 2020 (Jan.–Dec.) it had about 8, 986.555 million clicks and during seven years (2013 Dec.–2020 Dec.) it has collected 64, 627.380 million clicks. To find out how we can fit such content-based models of literary heritage into the context of Digital Humanities we need to compare the previous modelling practices with our current experimental project in the corpus query system KORP. Our interdisciplinary project “Literary Studies Meet Corpus Linguistics” (2017–2020) concentrated on studying literary history sources with linguistic methods. As the result of the project two literary text corpora were created: “Epistolary text corpus of Estonian writers Johannes Semper and Johannes Vares-Barbarus” and “Corpus of the Estonian literary criticism, Noor-Eesti and the 1920s”. Both of them were pilot projects in the field, started with converting the digitalised archival and printed sources into machine-readable format before text and data mining for corpus creation. Query system KORP allows us to organise the language data by all the categories used in the corpus, for example, to learn who and in what context mentioned the name of the French writer André Gide. The second currently running project is the morphologically annotated corpus of literary criticism. This corpus contains texts of literary reviews and criticism in different genres, drawn from the projects ERNI and “Kreutzwald’s Century”. The first results in studying the dynamics of literary values can already be seen. A query in KORP about the word ‘mõju’ (‘influence’) revealed that the manifesto “More of European culture!”of the group Young Estonia, voiced in 1905, was during the independent Estonian Republic replaced by the valuing of a specific national character. Corpus query showed a change in the meaning of the word: in the criticism contemporary to Young Estonia, the word ‘mõju’ was only associated with the historical pressure from Russian and German cultures. The foundation for modern comparative linguistics at the University of Tartu was laid in the 1920s by the professorship in Estonian literature.

Följande böcker recenseras: Aasgaard, Reidar, Ona Maria Cojocaru och Cornelia B. Horn (red), Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient Medieval Worlds (Mikael Larsson) Ben Zvi, Ehud and Diana Vikander Edemann, Imagining the Other and Constructing Israelite Identity in the Early Second Temple Period (Karin Tillberg) Biblica, nuBibeln (Per-Olof Hermansson) Brodersen, Alma, The End of the Psalter: Psalms 146–150 in the Masoretic Text, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Septuagint (David Willgren) Dodson Joseph R. and David E. Briones (eds.), Paul and Seneca in Dialogue (Adam Sabir) Dodson, Joseph R. and Andrew W. Pitts (eds.), Paul and the Greco-Roman Philosophical Tradition (Adam Sabir) Eidsvåg, Gunnar Magnus, The Old Greek Translation of Zechariah (Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer) Fredriksen, Paula, Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle (Lukas Hagel) Frevel, Christian, Gottesbilder und Menschenbilder: Studien zu Anthropologie und Theologie im Alten Testament, samt Wagner, Andreas, Menschenverständnis und Gottesverständnis im Alten Testament: Gesammelte Aufsätze 2 (Richard Pleijel) Gertz, Jan C., Bernhard M. Levinson, Dalit Rom-Shiloni och Konrad Schmid (red.), The Formation of the Pentateuch: Bridging the Academic Cultures of Europe, Israel, and North America (Josef Forsling) Graybill, Rhiannon, Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Mikael Larsson) Gundry, Robert H., Peter – False Disciple and Apostate according to Saint Matthew (John-Christian Eurell) Hays, Richard B., Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (James Starr) Heilig, Christoph, Paul’s Triumph: Reassessing 2 Corinthians 2:14 in Its Literary and Historical Context (Ludvig Svensson) Himmelfarb, Martha, Between Temple and Torah: Essays on Priests, Scribes, and Visionaries in the Second Temple Period and Beyond (Stefan Green) Hurtado, Larry W., Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Mikael Tellbe) Keener, Craig S., Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost (Bo Krister Ljungberg) Keener, Craig S. and John H. Walton (gen. eds.), NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture (Bo Krister Ljungberg) Kok, Michael J., The Gospel on the Margins: The Reception of Mark in the Second Century (Joel Kuhlin) Licona, Michael R., Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (Tobias Ålöw) Lin, Yii-Jan, The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Criticism and the Biological Sciences (Joel Kuhlin) Lied, Liv Ingeborg och Hugo Lundhaug (red.), Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity and New Philology (Kamilla Skarström Hinojosa) Mermelstein, Ari and Shalom E. Holtz (eds.), The Divine Courtroom in Comparative Perspective (Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer) Miller, Stuart S., At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds: Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and Ritual Purity Among Jews of Roman Galilee (Cecilia Wassén) Moxon, John R. L., Peter’s Halakhic Nightmare: The “Animal” Vision of Acts 10:9–16 in Jewish and Graeco-Roman Perspective (Carl Johan Berglund) Neudecker, Reinhard, Moses Interpreted by the Pharisees and Jesus: Matthew’s Antitheses in the Light of Early Rabbinic Literature (Tobias Ålöw) Penner, Todd and Davina C. Lopez, De-Introducing the New Testament: Texts, Worlds, Methods, Stories (Martin Wessbrandt) Schellenberg, Ryan S., Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education: Comparative Rhetoric and 2 Corinthians 10–13 (Johannes Leckström) Schreiner, Patrick, The Body of Jesus: A Spatial Analysis of the Kingdom in Matthew (Tobias Ålöw) Sprinkle, Preston (red.), Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church (Bo Krister Ljungberg) Stökl, Jonathan and Caroline Waerzeggers (eds.), Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context (Karin Tillberg) Thurén, Lauri, Parables Unplugged: Reading the Lukan Parables in Their Rhetorical Context (Lennart Thörn) Thörn, Lennart, Ordets tillblivelse. Lukasevangeliet (Magnus Evertsson) Weima, Jeffrey A. D., Paul the Ancient Letter Writer: An Introduction to Epistolary Analysis (Adam Sabir) Winninge, Mikael (red.), Dödahavsrullarna – i svensk översättning (Søren Holst)

Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Castro, Fidel. “Speech Given by Fidel Castro, at the Ceremony Marking the Birthday of Elian Gonzalez and the Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of Ideas, Held at ‘Marcello Salado’ Primary School in Cardenas, Matanzas on December 5, 2003.” 15 Aug. 2004 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org.uk/fidel_castro3.htm>. Cuban American National Foundation. Official Website. 2004. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.canf.org/2004/principal-ingles.htm>. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha For Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Elian Jokes.” Hypercenter.com 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.hypercenter.com/jokes/elian/index.shtml>. “Elian’s Home Page.” 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://elian.8k.com>. Everard, Jerry. Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State. London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Fernández, Damián J. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Hernández, Camilo. “Cronología de Elián.” E-mail. 2000. Received 6 May 2000. “If Elian Gonzalez Was Jewish.” Lori’s Mishmash Humor Page. 2000. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6174/jokes/if-elian-was-jewish.htm>. John, Michael. Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez. MaxGo, 2000. “Liberty for Elián.” Official Save Elián Website 2000. June 2003 http://www.libertyforelian.org>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Ramos, Jorge. La otra cara de América: Historias de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos que están cambiando a Estados Unidos. México, DF: Grijalbo, 2000. Rodden, Lois. “Elian Gonzalez.” Astrodatabank 2000. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.astrodatabank.com/NM/GonzalezElian.htm>. Rowe, John Carlos. 2002. The New American Studies. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. “The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez.” July 2004. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.revlu.com/Elian.html>. Senauth, Frank. A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or willpower” (Sebald, Vertigo 34). Moser writes how “the hidden order that lies behind the peripatetic movement becomes visible retroactively – only after the walker has consulted a map. It is the map that allows Sebald to decode the ‘writing’ of his steps” (48). Wandering in place enables digressions and preoccupations, which then constitute the landscape ultimately represented. Wandering and reading the map of one’s steps afterwards form part of the same process: the attempt to piece together—to create a landscape—that uncovers lost or hidden histories. Sebald’s Vertigo, divided into four parts, layers the narrator’s personal wandering through Italy, Austria, and Germany, with the stories of those who were there before him, including the writers Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova. An opposing factor to memory is a landscape’s capacity to forget; or rather, since landscape conceived here is a construction of our own minds, to reflect our own amnesia. Lewis observes that Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo “is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape”. Sebald’s narrator describes Henri Beyle (the writer Stendhal) and his experience visiting the location of the Battle of Marengo as such:The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion […] In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom. (17-18)The “vertiginous sense of confusion” signals a preoccupation with attempting to interpret sites of memory and, importantly, what Nora calls a “consciousness of a break with the past” (Nora 7) that characterises an interest in lieux de memoire. The confusion and feeling of unknowing is, I suggest, a characteristic of a wandering narrator. They do not quite know what they are looking for, nor what would constitute a finished wandering experience. This lack of resolution is a hallmark of the wandering narrative. A parallel can be drawn here with trauma fiction theory, which categorises a particular kind of literature that aims to recognise and represent the ethical and psychological impediments to representing trauma (Whitehead). Baumgarten describes the affective response to Sebald’s works:Here there are neither answers nor questions but a haunted presence. Unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed. (272)Sebald’s narrators are illustrative literary wanderers. They demonstrate a conception of landscape that theorists such as Polster, Baer, and Ingold articulate: landscapes tell stories for those who investigate them, and are constituted by a synthesis of personal experience, the historical record, and the present condition of a place. This way of encountering a place is necessarily fragmented and can be informed by the tenets of trauma fiction, which seeks ways of representing traumatic histories by resisting linear narratives and conclusive resolutions. Modiano: Wandering in Place in ParisModiano’s The Search Warrant is another literary example of wandering in place. This autobiographical novel similarly illustrates the notion of landscape as a construction of a narrator who wanders through cities and forms landscape through an amalgamation of perception, knowledge, and memory.Although Modiano’s wandering narrator appears to be searching the Paris of the 1990s for traces of a Jewish girl, missing since the Second World War, he is also conducting an “aimless” wandering in search of traces of his own past in Paris. The novel opens with the narrator reading an old newspaper article, dated 1942, and reporting a missing fourteen-year-old girl in Paris. The narrator becomes consumed with a need to learn the fate of the girl. The search also becomes a search for his own past, as the streets of Paris from which Dora Bruder disappeared are also the streets his father worked among during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. They are also the same streets along which the narrator walked as an angst-ridden youth in the 1960s.Throughout the novel, the narrator uses a combination of facts uncovered by research, documentary evidence, and imagination, which combine with his own memories of walking in Paris. Although the fragmentation of sources creates a sense of uncertainty, together there is an affective weight, akin to Sebald’s “haunted presence”, in the layers Modiano’s narrator compiles. One chapter opens with an entry from the Clignancourt police station logbook, which records the disappearance of Dora Bruder:27 December 1941. Bruder, Dora, born Paris.12, 25/2/26, living at 41 Boulevard Ornano.Interview with Bruder, Ernest, age 42, father. (Modiano 69)However, the written record is ambiguous. “The following figures”, the narrator continues, “are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12” (Modiano 69). Moreover, the physical record of the interview with Dora’s father is missing from the police archives. All he knows is that Dora’s father waited thirteen days before reporting her disappearance, likely wary of drawing attention to her: a Jewish girl in Occupied Paris. Confronted by uncertainty, the narrator recalls his own experience of running away as a youth in Paris: “I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 – an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke […] Running away – it seems – is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide” (Modiano 71). The narrator’s construction of landscape is multi-layered: his past, Dora’s past, his present. Overhanging this is the history of Nazi-occupied Paris and the cultural memory of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.With the aid of other police documents, the narrator traces Dora’s return home, and then her arrest and detainment in the Tourelles barracks in Paris. From Tourelles, detainees were deported to Drancy concentration camp. However, the narrator cannot confirm whether Dora was deported to Drancy. In the absence of evidence, the narrator supplies other documents: profiles of those known to be deported, in an attempt to construct a story.Hena: I shall call her by her forename. She was nineteen … What I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at no. 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed. (111)Unable to make conclusions about Dora’s story, the narrator is drawn back to a physical location: the Tourelles barracks. He describes a walk he took there in 1996: “Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des-Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the uphill slope of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived” (Modiano 124). The narrator combines what he experiences in the city with the documentary evidence left behind, to create a landscape. He reaches the Tourelles barracks: “the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep I could hear the rustling of the planes”. When he sees a sign that says “MILITARY ZONE. FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED”, the cumulative effect of his solitary and uncertain wandering results in despair at the difficulty of preserving the past: “I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond that wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion” (Modiano 124). The wandering process here, including the narrator’s layering of his own experience with Hena’s life, the lack of resolution, and the wandering narrator’s disbelief at the seemingly incongruous appearance of a place today in relation to its past, mirrors the feeling of Sebald’s narrator at the site of the Battle of Marengo, quoted above.Earlier in the novel, after frustrated attempts to find information about Dora’s mother and father, the narrator reflects that “they are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous” (Modiano 23). He remarks that Dora’s parents are “inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived” (Modiano 23). There is a disjunction between knowledge and something deeper, the undefined impetus that drives the narrator to walk, to search, and therefore to write: “often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown” (Modiano 23). This contrast of topographical precision and the “unknown” echoes the feeling of Sebald’s narrator when contemplating sites of memory. One may wander “in place” yet still feel a sense of confusion and gaps in knowledge: this is, I suggest, an intended aesthetic effect by both authors. Reader and narrator alike feel a sense of yearning and melancholy as a result of the narrator’s wandering. Wandering out of Place in Moscow and St PetersburgWhen I travelled to Russia in 2015, I sought to document, with a Sebaldian wandering methodology, processes of finding memory both in and out of place. Like Sebald and Modiano, I was invested in hidden histories and the relationship between the physical environment and memory. Yet unlike those authors, I focused my wandering mostly on places that reflected or referenced events that occurred elsewhere rather than events that happened in that specific place. As such, I was wandering out of place.The importance of memory, both in and out of place, is a central concept in my novel The Memory Artist. The narrator, Pasha, reflects the concerns of current and past members of Russia’s civic organisation named Memorial, which seeks to document and preserve the memory of victims of Communism. Contemporary activists lament that in modern Russia the traumas of the Gulag labour camps, collectivisation, and the “Terror” of executions under Joseph Stalin, are inadequately commemorated. In a 2012 interview, Irina Flige, co-founder of the civic body Memorial Society in St Petersburg, encapsulated activists’ disappointment at seeing burial sites of Terror victims fall into oblivion:By the beginning of 2000s these newly-found sites of mass burials had been lost. Even those that had been marked by signs were lost for a second time! Just imagine: a place was found [...] people came and held vigils in memory of those who were buried there. But then this generation passed on and a new generation forgot the way to these sites – both literally and metaphorically. (Flige quoted in Karp)A shift in generation, and a culture of secrecy or inaction surrounding efforts to preserve the locations of graves or former labour camps, perpetuate a “structural deficit of knowledge”, whereby knowledge of the physical locations of memory is lost (Anstett 2). This, in turn, affects the way people and societies construct their memories. When sites of past trauma are not documented or acknowledged as such, it is more difficult to construct a narrative about those places, particularly those that confront and document a violent past. Physical absence in the landscape permits a deficit of storytelling.This “structural deficit of knowledge” is exacerbated when sites of memory are located in distant locations. The former Soviet labour camps and locations of some mass graves are scattered across vast locations far from Russia’s main cities. Yet for some, those cities now act as holding environments for the memory of lost camp locations, mass graves, and histories. For example, a monument in Moscow may commemorate victims of an overseas labour camp. Lieux de memoire shift from being “in place” to existing “out of place”, in monuments and memorials. As I walked through Moscow and St Petersburg, I had the sensation I was wandering both in and out of place, as I encountered the histories of memories physically close but also geographically distant.For example, I arrived early one morning at the Lubyanka building in central Moscow, a pre-revolutionary building with yellow walls and terracotta borders, the longstanding headquarters of the Soviet and now Russian secret police (image 1). Many victims of the worst repressive years under Stalin were either shot here or awaited deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia and other remote areas. The place is both a site of memory and one that gestures to traumatic pasts inflicted elsewhere.Image 1: The Lubyanka, in Central MoscowA monument to victims of political repression was erected near the Lubyanka Building in 1990. The monument takes the form of a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the far north, on the White Sea, and the location of the Solovetsky Monastery that Lenin turned into a prison camp in 1921 (image 2). The Solovetsky Stone rests in view of the Lubyanka. In the 1980s, the stone was taken by boat to Arkhangelsk and then by train to Moscow. The wanderer encounters memory in place, in the stone and building, and also out of place, in the signified trauma that occurred elsewhere. Wandering out of place thus has the potential to connect a wanderer, and a reader, to geographically remote histories, not unlike war memorials that commemorate overseas battles. This has important implications for the preservation of stories. The narrator of The Memory Artist reflects that “the act of taking a stone all the way from Solovetsky to Moscow … was surely a sign that we give things and objects and matter a little of our own minds … in a way I understood that [the stone’s] presence would be a kind of return for those who did not, that somehow the stone had already been there, in Moscow” (Brabon 177).Image 2: The Monument to Victims of Political Repression, Near the LubyankaIn some ways, wandering out of place is similar to the examples of wandering in place considered here: in both instances the person wandering constructs a landscape that is a synthesis of their present perception, their individual history, and their knowledge of the history of a place. Yet wandering out of place offers a nuanced understanding of wandering by revealing the ways one can encounter the history, trauma, and memory that occur in distant places, highlighting the importance of symbols, memorials, and preserved knowledge. Image 3: Reflectons of the LubyankaConclusionThe ways a writer encounters and represents the stories that constitute a landscape, including traumatic histories that took place there, are varied and well-suited to a wandering methodology. There are notable traits of a wandering narrator: the digressive, associative form of thinking and writing, the unmapped journeys that are, despite themselves, full of compulsive purpose, and the lack of finality or answers inherent in a wanderer’s narrative. Wandering permits an encounter with memory out of place. The Solovetsky Islands remain a place I have never been, yet my encounter with the symbolic stone at the Lubyanka in Moscow lingers as a historical reminder. This sense of never arriving, of not reaching answers, echoes the narrators of Sebald and Modiano. Continued narrative uncertainty generates a sense of perpetual wandering, symbolic of the writer’s shadowy task of representing the past.ReferencesAnstett, Elisabeth. “Memory of Political Repression in Post-Soviet Russia: The Example of the Gulag.” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 13 Sep. 2011. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/memory-political-repression-post-soviet-russia-example-gulag>.Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” Representations 69 (2000): 38–62.Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267–87.Brabon, Katherine. The Memory Artist. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2016.Gussow, Mel. “W.G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57.” The New York Times 15 Dec. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html>.Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25.2 (1993): 152–174.Jaggi, Maya. “The Last Word: An Interview with WG Sebald.” The Guardian 22 Sep. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation>.Karp, Masha. “An Interview with Irina Flige.” RightsinRussia.com 11 Apr. 2012. 2 Aug. 2019 <http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/interviews-1/irina-flige/masha-karp>.Lewis, Tess. “WG Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” New Criterion 20 (2001).MacDonald, Anna. “‘Pictures in a Rebus’: Puzzling Out W.G. Sebald’s Monstrous Geographies.” In Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier. Eds. Niculae Liviu Gheran and Ken Monteith. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2013. 115–25.Modiano, Patrick. The Search Warrant. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin. London: Harvill Secker, 2014.Moser, Christian. “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” In The Undiscover’d Country: W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Ed. Markus Zisselsberger. Rochester New York: Camden House, 2010. 37–62. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26: (Spring 1989): 7–24.Polster, Heike. The Aesthetics of Passage: The Imag(in)ed Experience of Time in Thomas Lehr, W.G. Sebald, and Peter Handke. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2009.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. ———. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002.Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

As the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations about them” (Smith 537). Even fiction writers can stray into difficult ethical and artistic territory when they disclose the private facts of real lives—that is, recognisably biographical information—in their work, with autoethnographic fiction where authors base their fiction on their own lives (Davis and Ellis) not immune as this often discloses others’ stories (Ellis) as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously counselled writers to take their subjects from life and, moreover, to look to the singular, specific life, although this then had to be abstracted: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (139). One of the problems when assessing fiction through this lens, however, is that, although many writers are inspired in their work by an actual life, event or historical period, the resulting work is usually ultimately guided by literary concerns—what writers often term the quest for aesthetic truth—rather than historical accuracy (Owen et al. 2008). In contrast, a biography is, and continues to be, by definition, an accurate account of a real persons’ life. Despite postmodern assertions regarding the relativity of truth and decades of investigation into the incorporation of fiction into biography, other non-fiction texts and research narratives (see, for instance: Wyatt), many biographers attest to still feeling irrevocably tied to the factual evidence in a way that novelists and the scriptors of biographically-based fictional television drama, movies and theatrical pieces do not (Wolpert; Murphy; Inglis). To cite a recent example, Louis Nowra’s Ice takes the life of nineteenth-century self-made entrepreneur and politician Malcolm McEacharn as its base, but never aspires to be classified as creative nonfiction, history or biography. The history in a historical novel is thus often, and legitimately, skewed or sidelined in order to achieve the most satisfying work of art, although some have argued that fiction may uniquely represent the real, as it is able to “play […] in the gap between the narratives of history and the actualities of the past” (Nelson n.p.). Fiction and non-fictional forms are, moreover, increasingly intermingling and intertwining in content and intent. The ugly word “faction” was an attempt to suggest that the two could simply be elided but, acknowledging wide-ranging debates about whether literature can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy and post-structuralist assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors play with, and across, these boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure, but which publishers, critics and readers continue to define firmly as either fiction or biography. This dancing between forms is not particularly new. A striking example was Marion Halligan’s 2001 novel The Fog Garden which opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-loved husband. This had been previously published as an autobiographical memoir, “Cathedral of Love,” and again in an essay collection as “Lapping.” The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed writer named Clare, but the inclusion of Halligan’s essay, together with the book’s marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages readers to read the novel as a disclosure of the author’s own personal experience. This is despite Halligan’s attempt to keep the two separate: “Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t” (Fog Garden 9). In such acts of disclosure and denial, fiction and non-fiction can interrogate, test and even create each other, however quite vicious criticism can result when readers feel the boundaries demarking the two are breached. This is most common when authors admit to some dishonesty in terms of self-disclosure as can be seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding highly inflated and even wholly fabricated memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca’s A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Related problems and anxieties arise when authors move beyond incorporating and disclosing the facts of their own lives in memoir or (autobiographical) fiction, to using the lives of others in this way. Daphne Patai sums up the difference: “A person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and her listener’s scrutiny […] Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this way becomes a legitimate question” (24–5). While this is difficult but seemingly manageable for non-fiction writers because of their foundational reliance on evidence, this anxiety escalates for fiction writers. This seems particularly extreme in relation to how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events are changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction. I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, the difficult terrain of crafting fiction from well-known criminal cases (Brien, “Based on a True Story”). The reception of such work shows how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how distant that finished product may be from the original facts.As the field of biography continues to evolve for writers, critics and theorists, a study of one key text at a moment in that evolution—Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe for its content and dramatic power—reveals not only some of the challenges and opportunities this close relationship offers to the writers and readers of life stories, but also the pitfalls of attempting to dissemble regarding artistic intention. This award-winning play has been staged a number of times in the past decade but has attracted little critical attention. Yet, when I attended a performance of Georgia at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane in 1999, I was moved by the production and admiring of Shearer’s writing which was, I told anyone who would listen, a powerfully dramatic interpretation of O’Keeffe’s life, one of my favourite artists. A full decade on, aspects of the work and its performance still resonate through my thinking. Author of more than twenty plays performed throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as on Broadway, Shearer was then (and is) one of Australia’s leading playwrights, and I judged Georgia to be a major, mature work: clear, challenging and confident. Reading the Currency Press script a year or so after seeing the play reinforced for me how distinctive and successful a piece of theatre Shearer had created utilising a literary technique which has been described elsewhere as fictionalised biography—biography which utilises fictional forms in its presentation but stays as close to the historical record as conventional biography (Brien, The Case of Mary Dean).The published version of the script indeed acknowledges on its title page that Georgia is “inspired by the later life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe” (Shearer). The back cover blurb begins with a quote attributed to O’Keeffe and then describes the content of the play entirely in terms of biographical detail: The great American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is physically, emotionally and artistically debilitated by her failing eyesight. Living amidst the Navajo spiritual landscape in her desert home in New Mexico, she becomes prey to the ghosts of her past. Her solitude is broken by Juan, a young potter, whose curious influence on her life remains until her death at 98 (Georgia back cover). This short text ends by unequivocally reinforcing the relation between the play and the artist’s life: “Georgia is a passionate play that explores with sensitivity and wry humour the contradictions and the paradoxes of the life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (Georgia back cover). These few lines of plot synopsis actually contain a surprisingly large number of facts regarding O’Keeffe’s later life. After the death of her husband (the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Steiglitz whose ghost is a central character in the play), O’Keeffe did indeed relocate permanently to Abiquiú in New Mexico. In 1971, aged 84, she was suffering from an irreversible degenerative disease, had lost her central vision and stopped painting. One autumn day in 1973, Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her adobe house looking for work. She hired him and he became her lover, closest confidante and business manager until her death at 98. These facts form not only the background story but also much of the riveting content for Georgia which, as the published script’s introduction states, takes as its central themes: “the dilemma of the artist as a an older woman; her yearning to create against the fear of failing artistic powers; her mental strength and vulnerability; her sexuality in the face of physical deterioration; her need for companionship and the paradoxical love of solitude” (Rider vii). These issues are not only those which art historians identify as animating the O’Keeffe’s later life and painting, but ones which are discussed at length in many of the biographies of the artist published from 1980 to 2007 (see, for instance: Arrowsmith and West; Berry; Calloway and Bry; Castro; Drohojowska-Philp; Eisler; Eldredge; Harris; Hogrefe; Lisle; Peters; Reily; Robinson).Despite this clear focus on disclosing aspects of O’Keeffe’s life, both the director’s and playwright’s notes prefacing the published script declare firmly that Georgia is fiction, not biography. While accepting that these statements may be related to copyright and privacy concerns, the stridency of the denials of the biography label with its implied intention of disclosing the facts of a life, are worthy of analysis. Although noting that Georgia is “about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe”, director of the La Boite production Sue Rider asserts that not only that the play moves “beyond the biographical” (vii) but, a few pages later, that it is “thankfully not biography” (xii). This is despite Rider’s own underscoring of the connection to O’Keeffe by setting up an exhibition of the artist’s work adjacent to the theatre. Shearer, whose research acknowledgments include a number of works about O’Keeffe, is even more overtly strident in her denial of any biographical links stating that her characters, “this Juan, Anna Marie and Dorothy Norman are a work of dramatic fiction, as is the play, and should be taken as such” (xiii).Yet, set against a reading of the biographies of the artist, including those written in the intervening decade, Georgia clearly and remarkably accurately discloses the tensions and contradictions of O’Keeffe’s life. It also draws on a significant amount of documented biographical data to enhance the dramatic power of what is disclosed by the play for audiences with this knowledge. The play does work as a coherent narrative for a viewer without any prior knowledge of O’Keeffe’s life, but the meaning of the dramatic action is enhanced by any biographical knowledge the audience possesses. In this way, the play’s act of disclosure is reinforced by this externally held knowledge. Although O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is less well known and much anecdotal detail about her life is not as familiar for Australian viewers as for those in the artist’s homeland, Shearer writes for an international as well as an Australian audience, and the program and adjacent exhibition for the Brisbane performance included biographical information. It is also worth noting that large slabs of biographical detail are also omitted from the play. These omissions to disclosure include O’Keeffe’s early life from her birth in 1887 in Wisconsin to her studies in Chicago and New York from 1904 to 1908, as well as her work as a commercial artist and art teacher in Texas and other Southern American states from 1912 to 1916. It is from this moment in 1916, however, that the play (although opening in 1946) constructs O’Keeffe’s life right through to her death in 1986 by utilising such literary devices as flashbacks, dream sequences and verbal and visual references.An indication of the level of accuracy of the play as biographical disclosure can be ascertained by unpacking the few lines of opening stage directions, “The Steiglitz’s suite in the old mid-range Shelton Hotel, New York, 1946 ... Georgia, 59, in black, enters, dragging a coffin” (1). In 1946, when O’Keeffe was indeed aged 59, Steiglitz died. The couple had lived part of every year at the Shelton Towers Hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue (now the New York Marriott East Side), a moderately priced hotel made famous by its depiction in O’Keeffe’s paintings and Steiglitz’s photographs. When Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis, O’Keeffe was spending the summer in New Mexico, but she returned to New York where her husband died on 13 July. This level of biographical accuracy continues throughout Georgia. Halfway through the first page “Anita, 52” enters. This character represents Anita Pollitzer, artist, critic and O’Keeffe’s lifelong friend. The publication of her biography of O’Keeffe, A Woman on Paper, and Georgia’s disapproval of this, is discussed in the play, as are their letters, which were collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia (Gibiore). Anita’s first lines in the play after greeting her friend refer to this substantial correspondence: “You write beautifully. I always tell people: “I have a friend who writes the most beautiful letters” (1). In the play, as in life, it is Anita who introduces O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz who is, in turn, accurately described as: “Gallery owner. Two Nine One, Fifth Avenue. Leader of the New York avant-garde, the first to bring in the European moderns” (6). The play also chronicles how (unknown to O’Keeffe) Steiglitz exhibited the drawings Pollitzer gave him under the incorrect name, a scene which continues with Steiglitz persuading Georgia to allow her drawings to remain in his gallery (as he did in life) and ends with a reference to his famous photographs of her hands and nude form. Although the action of a substantial amount of real time is collapsed into a few dramatic minutes and, without doubt, the dialogue is invented, this invention achieves the level of aesthetic truth aimed for by many contemporary biographers (Jones)—as can be assessed when referring back to the accepted biographical account. What actually appears to have happened was that, in the autumn 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O’Keeffe was working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognised as among the most innovative in American art of that time. She mailed some of these drawings to Pollitzer, who showed them Steiglitz, who exhibited ten of them in April 1916, O’Keeffe only learning of this through an acquaintance. O’Keeffe, who had first visited 291 in 1908 but never spoken to Stieglitz, held his critical opinion in high regard, and although confronting him over not seeking her permission and citing her name incorrectly, eventually agreed to let her drawings hang (Harris). Despite Shearer’s denial, the other characters in Georgia are also largely biographical sketches. Her “Anna Marie”, who never appears in the play but is spoken of, is Juan’s wife (in real life Anna Marie Hamilton), and “Dorothy Norman” is the character who has an affair with Steiglitz—the discovery of which leads to Georgia’s nervous breakdown in the play. In life, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz became involved with the much younger Norman who was, he claimed, only his gallery assistant. When O’Keeffe discovered Norman posing nude for her husband (this is vividly imagined in Georgia), O’Keeffe moved out of the Shelton and suffered from the depression that led to her nervous breakdown. “ Juan,” who ages from 26 to 39 in the play, represents the potter Juan Hamilton who encouraged the nearly blind O’Keeffe to paint again. In the biographical record there is much conjecture about Hamilton’s motives, and Shearer sensitively portrays her interpretation of this liaison and the difficult territory of sexual desire between a man and a much older woman, as she also too discloses the complex relationship between O’Keeffe and the much older Steiglitz.This complexity is described through the action of the play, but its disclosure is best appreciated if the biographical data is known. There are also a number of moments of biographical disclosure in the play that can only be fully understood with biographical knowledge in hand. For instance, Juan refers to Georgia’s paintings as “Beautiful, sexy flowers [... especially] the calla lilies” (24). All attending the play are aware (from the exhibition, program and technical aspects of the production) that, in life, O’Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings. However, knowing that these had brought her fame and fortune early in her career with, in 1928, a work titled Calla Lily selling for U.S. $25,000, then an enormous sum for any living American artist, adds to the meaning of this line in the play. Conversely, the significant level of biographical disclosure throughout Georgia does not diminish, in any way, the power or integrity of Shearer’s play as a literary work. Universal literary (and biographical) themes—love, desire and betrayal—animate Georgia; Steiglitz’s spirit haunts Georgia years after his death and much of the play’s dramatic energy is generated by her passion for both her dead husband and her younger lover, with some of her hopeless desire sublimated through her relationship with Juan. Nadia Wheatley reads such a relationship between invention and disclosure in terms of myth—relating how, in the process of writing her biography of Charmain Clift, she came to see Clift and her husband George Johnson take on a larger significance than their individual lives: “They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously” (5). In this, Wheatley finds that “while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric” (5). In contrast with both Rider and Shearer’s insistence that Georgia was “not biography”, it could be posited that (at least part of) Georgia’s power arises from the creation of such mythic value, and expressly through its nuanced disclosure of the relevant factual (biographical) elements in parallel to the development of its dramatic (invented) elements. Alongside this, accepting Georgia as such a form of biographical disclosure would mean that as well as a superbly inventive creative work, the highly original insights Shearer offers to the mass of O’Keeffe biography—something of an American industry—could be celebrated, rather than excused or denied. ReferencesArrowsmith, Alexandra, and Thomas West, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives—A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs. Washington DC: HarperCollins and Calloway Editions, and The Phillips Collection, 1992.Berry, Michael. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Brien, Donna Lee. The Case of Mary Dean: Sex, Poisoning and Gender Relations in Australia. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Queensland University of Technology, 2004. –––. “‘Based on a True Story’: The Problem of the Perception of Biographical Truth in Narratives Based on Real Lives”. TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Programs 13.2 (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au >.Calloway, Nicholas, and Doris Bry, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe in the West. New York: Knopf, 1989.Castro, Jan G. The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Crown Publishing, Random House, 1985.Davis, Christine S., and Carolyn Ellis. “Autoethnographic Introspection in Ethnographic Fiction: A Method of Inquiry.” In Pranee Liamputtong and Jean Rumbold, eds. Knowing Differently: Arts-Based and Collaborative Research. New York: Nova Science, 2008. 99–117.Defonseca, Misha. Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Bluebell, PA: Mt. Ivy Press, 1997.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: WW Norton, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others.” Qualitative Inquiry 13.1 (2007): 3–29. Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962.Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.Gibiore, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.Halligan, Marion. “Lapping.” In Peter Craven, ed. Best Australian Essays. Melbourne: Bookman P, 1999. 208–13.Halligan, Marion. The Fog Garden. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001.Halligan, Marion. “The Cathedral of Love.” The Age 27 Nov. 1999: Saturday Extra 1.Harris, J. C. “Georgia O’Keeffe at 291”. Archives of General Psychiatry 64.2 (Feb. 2007): 135–37.Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. New York: Bantam, 1994.Inglis, Ian. “Popular Music History on Screen: The Pop/Rock Biopic.” Popular Music History 2.1 (2007): 77–93.Jones, Kip. “A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The Use of Arts-Based (Re)presentations in “Performative” Dissemination of Life Stories”. Qualitative Sociology Review 2.1 (Apr. 2006): 66–85. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.Murphy, Mary. “Limited Lives: The Problem of the Literary Biopic”. Kinema 17 (Spr. 2002): 67–74. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (Oct. 2007). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm >.Nowra, Louis. Ice. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2008.Owen, Jillian A. Tullis, Chris McRae, Tony E. Adams, and Alisha Vitale. “Truth Troubles.” Qualitative Inquiry 15.1 (2008): 178–200.Patai, Daphne. “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake.” International Journal of Oral History 8 (1987): 5–27.Peters, Sarah W. Becoming O’Keeffe. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.Reily, Nancy Hopkins. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Private Friendship, Part II. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2009.Rider, Sue. “Director’s Note.” Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000. vii–xii.Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990. Shearer, Jill. Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000.Smith, Thomas R. “How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves [review]”. Biography 23.3 (2000): 534–38.Wheatley, Nadia. The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001.Wolpert, Stanley. “Biography as History: A Personal Reflection”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (2010): 399–412. Pub. online (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jinh/40/3 >.Wyatt, Jonathan. “Research, Narrative and Fiction: Conference Story”. The Qualitative Report 12.2 (Jun. 2007): 318–31.

Abstract Aims Since the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in 1923 to FG Banting and JJR Macleod, many voices have been raised against this decision. The bitterest protest was that of the Romanian scientist Nicolae C. Paulescu. In 2002, The Romanian Academy of Sciences, the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) and the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) planned to hold a series of academic events the following year in Paris to acknowledge Paulescu's scientific merits in the discovery of the antidiabetic hormone. However, the initiative was cancelled in August 2003, when the European Center of the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation (SWC) accused Paulescu of being antisemitic. The authors of this manuscript have decided to approach "the Paulescu case" from its double aspect, scientific and sociopolitical, to analyze the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the antidiabetic hormone, and Paulescu's alleged antisemitic past in the historical context of the Romanian nation in the interwar period. Methods We contacted the SWC and people related to the 2003 events in Paris. We performed a comparative review of the documents published by the Toronto group and by Paulescu and analyzed the correspondence and articles generated by international experts from the scientific community interested in the controversy. We carried out an exhaustive bibliographic search through several online catalogs (INDEXCAT, NLM Gateway, EUREKA, MEDHIST). We travelled to Bucharest, where we visited Paulescu's house-museum, interviewed a former student of the Romanian professor, and a prominent medical historian who was knowledgeable about Paulescu's scientific and political biography. Dan Angelescu†, son of Dr. Constantin Angelescu (1904–1990), Paulescu's nephew and collaborator, provided us with a copy of all the available documentation from Paulescu's personal archive. It constitutes an essential source for understanding Paulescu's personal, political and academic biography. Archives consulted: Românǎ Academy (Bucharest). Personal Archive of Paulescu, House -Museum (Bucharest)*. Romanian Jewish Heritage (Bucharest). http://romanianjewish.org/ **. Simon Wiesenthal Center (Los Angeles, CA) http://www.wiesenthal.com **. Romanian Patent Office. Oficiul de Stat pentru Invenții şi Mǎrci (OSIM) (Bucharest)***. Nobel Archives (Stockholm) https://www.nobelprize.org. Internet Archive (San Francisco, CA) https://archive.org **. Wellcome Library (London) https://wellcomelibrary.org **. The European Library https://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/ **. US National Library of Medicine, NLM historical collections http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/index.html **. US. Holocaust Memorial Museum http://www.ushmm.org/ (*: archive consulted on site; **: material found in the online catalog of the archive; ***: archivists sent us digitized copies of archival material). Books consulted for information on the history of Romania and antisemitism: “Nationalist ideology and antisemitism. The case of Romanian intellectuals in the 1930s”, by Leon Volovici; “The mystique of ultranationalism: History of the Iron Guard, Romania, 1919–1941” by Francisco Vega; “Romania 1866–1947”, by Keith Hitchins; “History of Romania. Compendium”, by Ioan-Aurel Pop and Joan Bolovan; “The Holocaust in Romania. The destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu regime, 1940–1944”, by Radu Ioanid; “The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars”, by Ezra Mendelson; “Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930”, by Irina Livezeanu, and “Judeophobia. How and when it is born, where and why it survives”, by Gustavo Daniel Perednik. Articles are referenced in the bibliography section at the end of the manuscript. Results A-Nicolae Paulescu developed an intense long-term research activity, which included complete pancreatectomy and preparation of a pancreatic extract (PE) containing the antidiabetic hormone he called pancreina. Parenteral administration of the PE achieved excellent results in the treatment of experimental diabetes in dogs and induction of hypoglycemia in the healthy animal. This work was initiated before 1916 and published at least eight months antedating the publication of the first article by Banting and Best (February 1922), who were acquainted with Paulescu's results, but misinterpreted them. The pancreatic extract of the two Canadian researchers, -iletin/insulin-, only achieved similar results to that of the Romanian scientist once they abandoned the use of the "degenerated pancreas" extract (ligation of the ductal system), replacing it with the pancreas of adult or fetal bovine. Pancreina and insulin were very similar. The award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to FG Banting and JJR Macleod in October 1923 honored the successful clinical use of insulin in patients with diabetes mellitus. Paulescu's achievements were ignored. B-Nicolae Paulescu publicly manifested his Judeophobic ideology on multiple occasions in academic and political interventions and in publications and participated with other figures from the Romanian intellectual sphere in the founding of the Uniunea Național Crestinǎ (UNC, National Christian Union) in 1922 and of the Liga Apǎrǎrii Național Cresține (LANC, League for Christian National Defense) in 1923, antisemitic far-right political parties, associated with an irrational Christian orthodoxy and hatred of Jews. Paulescu played a pivotal role in the spread of antisemitism. Conclusions A-The Romanian scientist NC Paulescu started an intense research program aimed at the isolation of the antidiabetic hormone before 1916, including an original procedure of pancreatectomy in the dog and the elaboration of a pancreatic extract that achieved excellent results in the treatment of experimental diabetes, demonstrating its beneficial effects on the metabolism of carbohydrates, proteins and fats and reducing both glycosuria and glycemia and the urinary excretion of ketone bodies of depancreatized dogs toward normality. The results of these investigations were published in 1920 and 1921, predating the first report published by FG ​​Banting and CH Best in February 1922. It has been sufficiently demonstrated that Canadian researchers were aware of Paulescu's excellent results, mentioning them only in passing, albeit erroneously misrepresenting key results of the Romanian scientist's publication in the aforementioned seminal Canadian article. Expert historians and international scientists have recognized that the pancreatic extract that Paulescu called pancreina and that obtained by Banting and Best, insulin, were very similar. The October 1923 award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to FG Banting and JJR Macleod ignored Paulescu's scientific achievements in the treatment of experimental diabetes and rewarded the extraordinary advance of insulin treatment in human diabetes. B-At the end of August 2003, a few days before the date of the celebration at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris of the scheduled program of tribute to the scientific merits of NC Paulescu and his important contribution to the discovery of the antidiabetic hormone, convened by the Romanian Academy and the International Diabetes Federation, the Wiesenthal Foundation publicly accused the Romanian scientist of being an antisemite, an act that determined the cancellation of the announced events. The exhaustive investigation of the personal convictions and antisemitic behavior of Nicolae C. Paulescu has undoubtedly documented the Judeophobic ideology of the Romanian scientist, linked to his orthodox religious radicalism, manifested in multiple documents (mostly pamphlets) and interventions in collaboration with other relevant personalities of the Romanian intelligentsia of his time. Furthermore, Paulescu participated in the creation of political organizations of the most radical extreme right that played a fundamental role in the spread of antisemitism amongst the Romanian population and the university community.

Historians have often been compared with detectives; searching for clues as evidence of a mystery they are seeking to solve. I would prefer an association with food, making history like a trained cook who blends particular ingredients, some fresh, some traditional, using specific methods to create an object that is consumed. There are primary sources, fresh and raw ingredients that you often have to go to great lengths to procure, and secondary sources, prepared initially by someone else. The same recipe may yield different meals, the same meal may provoke different responses. On a continuum of approaches to history and food, there are those who approach both as a scientific endeavour and, at the other end of the spectrum, those who make history and food as art. Brought together, it is possible to see cookbooks as history in at least two important ways; they give meaning to the past by representing culinary heritage and they are in themselves sources of history as documents and blueprints for experiences that can be interpreted to represent the past. Many people read cookbooks and histories with no intention of preparing the meal or becoming a historian. I do a little of both. I enjoy reading history and cookbooks for pleasure but, as a historian, I also read them interchangeably; histories to understand cookbooks and cookbooks to find out more about the past. History and the past are different of course, despite their use in the English language. It is not possible to relive the past, we can only interpret it through the traces that remain. Even if a reader had an exact recipe and an antique stove, vegetables grown from heritage seeds in similar conditions, eggs and grains from the same region and employed the techniques his or her grandparents used, they could not replicate their experience of a meal. Undertaking those activities though would give a reader a sense of that experience. Active examination of the past is possible through the processes of research and writing, but it will always be an interpretation and not a reproduction of the past itself. Nevertheless, like other histories, cookbooks can convey a sense of what was important in a culture, and what contemporaries might draw on that can resonate a cultural past and make the food palatable. The way people eat relates to how they apply ideas and influences to the material resources and knowledge they have. Used in this way, cookbooks provide a rich and valuable way to look at the past. Histories, like cookbooks, are written in the present, inspired and conditioned by contemporary issues and attitudes and values. Major shifts in interpretation or new directions in historical studies have more often arisen from changes in political or theoretical preoccupations, generated by contemporary social events, rather than the recovery of new information. Likewise, the introduction of new ingredients or methods rely on contemporary acceptance, as well as familiarity. How particular versions of history and new recipes promote both the past and present is the concern of this paper. My focus below will be on the nineteenth century, although a much larger study would reveal the circumstances that separated that period from the changes that followed. Until the late nineteenth century Australians largely relied on cookbooks that were brought with them from England and on their own private recipe collection, and that influenced to a large extent the sort of food that they ate, although of course they had to improvise by supplementing with local ingredients. In the first book of recipes that was published in Australia, The English and Australian Cookery Book that appeared in 1864, Edward Abbott evoked the ‘roast beef of old England Oh’ (Bannerman, Dictionary). The use of such a potent symbol of English identity in the nineteenth century may seem inevitable, and colonists who could afford them tended to use their English cookbooks and the ingredients for many years, even after Abbott’s publication. New ingredients, however, were often adapted to fit in with familiar culinary expectations in the new setting. Abbott often drew on native and exotic ingredients to produce very familiar dishes that used English methods and principles: things like kangaroo stuffed with beef suet, breadcrumbs, parsley, shallots, marjoram, thyme, nutmeg, pepper, salt, cayenne, and egg. It was not until the 1890s that a much larger body of Australian cookbooks became available, but by this time the food supply was widely held to be secure and abundant and the cultivation of exotic foods in Australia like wheat and sheep and cattle had established a long and familiar food supply for English colonists. Abbott’s cookbook provides a record of the culinary heritage settlers brought with them to Australia and the contemporary circumstances they had to adapt to. Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book and Household Guide is an example of the popularity of British cookbooks in Australia. Beeton’s Kangaroo Tail Curry was included in the Australian cooking section of her household management (2860). In terms of structure it is important for historians as one of the first times, because Beeton started writing in the 1860s, that ingredients were clearly distinguished from the method. This actually still presents considerable problems for publishers. There is debate about whether that should necessarily be the case, because it takes up so much space on the page. Kangaroo Tail CurryIngredients:1 tail2 oz. Butter1 tablespoon of flour1 tablespoon of curry2 onions sliced1 sour apple cut into dice1 desert spoon of lemon juice3/4 pint of stocksaltMethod:Wash, blanch and dry the tail thoroughly and divide it at the joints. Fry the tail in hot butter, take it up, put it in the sliced onions, and fry them for 3 or 4 minutes without browning. Sprinkle in the flour and curry powder, and cook gently for at least 20 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the stock, apple, salt to taste, bring to the boil, stirring meanwhile, and replace the tail in the stew pan. Cover closely, and cook gently until tender, then add the lemon juice and more seasoning if necessary. Arrange the pieces of tail on a hot dish, strain the sauce over, and serve with boiled rice.Time: 2-3 hoursSufficient for 1 large dish. Although the steps are not clearly distinguished from each other the method is more systematic than earlier recipes. Within the one sentence, however, there are still two or three different sorts of tasks. The recipe also requires to some extent a degree of discretion, knowledge and experience of cooking. Beeton suggests adding things to taste, cooking something until it is tender, so experience or knowledge is necessary to fulfil the recipe. The meal also takes between two and three hours, which would be quite prohibitive for a lot of contemporary cooks. New recipes, like those produced in Delicious have recipes that you can do in ten minutes or half an hour. Historically, that is a new development that reveals a lot about contemporary conditions. By 1900, Australian interest in native food had pretty much dissolved from the record of cookbooks, although this would remain a feature of books for the English public who did not need to distinguish themselves from Indigenous people. Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book and Household Guide gave a selection of Australian recipes but they were primarily for the British public rather than the assumption that they were being cooked in Australia: kangaroo tail soup was cooked in the same way as ox tail soup; roast wallaby was compared to hare. The ingredients were wallaby, veal, milk and butter; and parrot pie was said to be not unlike one made of pigeons. The novelty value of such ingredients may have been of interest, rather than their practical use. However, they are all prepared in ways that would make them fairly familiar to European tastes. Introducing something new with the same sorts of ingredients could therefore proliferate the spread of other foods. The means by which ingredients were introduced to different regions reflects cultural exchanges, historical processes and the local environment. The adaptation of recipes to incorporate local ingredients likewise provides information about local traditions and contemporary conditions. Starting to see those ingredients as a two-way movement between looking at what might have been familiar to people and what might have been something that they had to do make do with because of what was necessarily available to them at that time tells us about their past as well as the times they are living in. Differences in the level of practical cooking knowledge also have a vital role to play in cookbook literature. Colin Bannerman has suggested that the shortage of domestic labour in Australia an important factor in supporting the growth of the cookbook industry in the late nineteenth century. The poor quality of Australian cooking was also an occasional theme in the press during the same time. The message was generally the same: bad food affected Australians’ physical, domestic, social and moral well-being and impeded progress towards civilisation and higher culture. The idea was really that Australians had to learn how to cook. Colin Bannerman (Acquired Tastes 19) explains the rise of domestic science in Australia as a product of growing interest in Australian cultural development and the curse of bad cookery, which encouraged support for teaching girls and women how to cook. Domestic Economy was integrated into the Victorian and New South Wales curriculum by the end of the nineteenth century. Australian women have faced constant criticism of their cooking skills but the decision to teach cooking shouldn’t necessarily be used to support that judgement. Placed in a broader framework is possible to see the support for a modern, scientific approach to food preparation as part of both the elevation of science and systematic knowledge in society more generally, and a transnational movement to raise the status of women’s role in society. It would also be misleading not to consider the transnational context. Australia’s first cookery teachers were from Britain. The domestic-science movement there can be traced to the congress on domestic economy held in Manchester in 1878, at roughly the same time as the movement was gaining strength in Australia. By the 1890s domestic economy was widely taught in both British and Australian schools, without British women facing the same denigration of their cooking skills. Other comparisons with Britain also resulted from Australia’s colonial heritage. People often commented on the quality of the ingredients in Australia and said they were more widely available than they were in England but much poorer in quality. Cookbooks emerged as a way of teaching people. Among the first to teach cookery skills was Mina Rawson, author of The Antipodean Cookery Book and the Kitchen Companion first published in 1885. The book was a compilation of her own recipes and remedies, and it organised and simplified food preparation for the ordinary housewife. But the book also included directions and guidance on things like household tasks and how to cure diseases. Cookbooks therefore were not completely distinct from other aspects of everyday life. They offered much more than culinary advice on how to cook a particular meal and can similarly be used by historians to comment on more than food. Mrs Rawson also knew that people had to make do. She included a lot of bush foods that you still do not get in a lot of Australian meals, ingredients that people could substitute for the English ones they were used to like pig weed. By the end of the nineteenth century cooking had become a recognised classroom subject, providing early training in domestic service, and textbooks teaching Australians how to cook also flourished. Measurements became much more uniform, the layout of cookbooks became more standardised and the procedure was clearly spelled out. This allowed companies to be able to sell their foods because it also meant that you could duplicate the recipes and they could potentially taste the same. It made cookbooks easier to use. The audience for these cookbooks were mostly young women directed to cooking as a way of encouraging social harmony. Cooking was elevated in lots of ways at this stage as a social responsibility. Cookbooks can also be seen as a representation of domestic life, and historically this prescribed the activities of men and women as being distinct The dominance of women in cookbooks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attested to the strength of that idea of separate spheres. The consequences of this though has been debated by historians: whether having that particular kind of market and the identification that women were making with each other also provided a forum for women’s voices and so became quite significant in women’s politics at a later date. Cookbooks have been a strategic marketing device for products and appliances. By the beginning of the twentieth century food companies began to print recipes on their packets and to release their own cookbooks to promote their products. Davis Gelatine produced its first free booklet in 1904 and other companies followed suit (1937). The largest gelatine factory was in New South Wales and according to Davis: ‘It bathed in sunshine and freshened with the light breezes of Botany all year round.’ These were the first lavishly illustrated Australian cookbooks. Such books were an attempt to promote new foods and also to sell local foods, many of which were overproduced – such as milk, and dried fruits – which provides insights into the supply chain. Cookbooks in some ways reflected the changing tastes of the public, their ideas, what they were doing and their own lifestyle. But they also helped to promote some of those sorts of changes too. Explaining the reason for cooking, Isabella Beeton put forward an historical account of the shift towards increasing enjoyment of it. She wrote: "In the past, only to live has been the greatest object of mankind, but by and by comforts are multiplied and accumulating riches create new wants. The object then is to not only live but to live economically, agreeably, tastefully and well. Accordingly the art of cookery commences and although the fruits of the earth, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field and the fish of the sea are still the only food of mankind, yet these are so prepared, improved and dressed by skill and ingenuity that they are the means of immeasurably extending the boundaries of human enjoyment. Everything that is edible and passes under the hands of cooks is more or less changed and assumes new forms, hence the influence of that functionary is immense upon the happiness of the household" (1249). Beeton anticipates a growing trend not just towards cooking and eating but an interest in what sustains cooking as a form of recreation. The history of cookbook publishing provides a glimpse into some of those things. The points that I have raised provide a means for historians to use cookbooks. Cookbooks can be considered in terms of what was eaten, by whom and how: who prepared the food, so to whom the books were actually directed? Clever books like Isabella Beeton’s were directed at both domestic servants and at wives, which gave them quite a big market. There are also changes in the inclusion of themes. Economy and frugality becomes quite significant, as do organisation and management at different times. Changes in the extent of detail, changes in authorship, whether it is women, men, doctors, health professionals, home economists and so on all reflect contemporary concerns. Many books had particular purposes as well, used to fund raise or promote a particular perspective, relate food reform and civic life which gives them a political agenda. Promotional literature produced by food and kitchen equipment companies were a form of advertising and quite significant to the history of cookbook publishing in Australia. Other themes include the influence of cookery school and home economics movements; advice on etiquette and entertaining; the influence of immigration and travel; the creation of culinary stars and authors of which we are all fairly familiar. Further themes include changes in ingredients, changes in advice about health and domestic medicine, and the impact of changes in social consciousness. It is necessary to place those changes in a more general historical context, but for a long time cookbooks have been ignored as a source of information in their own right about the period in which they were published and the kinds of social and political changes that we can see coming through. More than this active process of cooking with the books as well becomes a way of imagining the past in quite different ways than historians are often used to. Cookbooks are not just sources for historians, they are histories in themselves. The privileging of written and visual texts in postcolonial studies has meant other senses, taste and smell, are frequently neglected; and yet the cooking from historical cookbooks can provide an embodied, sensorial image of the past. From nineteenth century cookbooks it is possible to see that British foods were central to the colonial identity project in Australia, but the fact that “British” culinary culture was locally produced, challenges the idea of an “authentic” British cuisine which the colonies tried to replicate. By the time Abbot was advocating rabbit curry as an Australian family meal, back “at home” in England, it was not authentic Indian food but the British invention of curry power that was being incorporated into English cuisine culture. More than cooks, cookbook authors told a narrative that forged connections and disconnections with the past. They reflected the contemporary period and resonated with the culinary heritage of their readers. Cookbooks make history in multiple ways; by producing change, as the raw materials for making history and as historical narratives. References Abbott, Edward. The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as well as the Upper Ten Thousand. London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1864. Bannerman, Colin. Acquired Tastes: Celebrating Australia’s Culinary History. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1998. Bannerman, Colin. "Abbott, Edward (1801–1869)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. 21 May 2013. . Beeton, Isabella. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. New Ed. London and Melbourne: Ward, Lock and Co. Ltd., n.d. (c. 1909). Davis Gelatine. Davis Dainty Dishes. Rev ed. Sydney: Davis Gelatine Organization, 1937. Rawson, Lance Mrs. The Antipodean Cookery Book and Kitchen Companion. Melbourne: George Robertson & Co., 1897.

The difficulty of reading Allen Ginsberg's poetry is a recurring theme in criticism of his work and that of other post-WWII "Beat Generation" writers. "Even when a concerted effort is made to illuminate [Beat] literature," laments Nancy M. Grace, "doing so is difficult: the romance of the Beat life threatens to subsume the project" (812). Of course, the Beat life is romantic to the extent that it is romantically regaled. Continual romantic portrayals, such as that of Ginsberg in the recent movie Howl (2010), rekindle the Beat romance for new audiences with chicken-and-egg circularity. I explore this difficulty of reading Ginsberg that Grace and other critics identify by articulating it with respect to "Kaddish"—"Ginsberg's most highly praised and his least typical poem" (Perloff 213)—as a difficulty of interpreting Ginsberg suspiciously. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theories of interpretation—or "hermeneutics"—provide the theoretical foundation here. Ricoeur distinguishes between a romantic or "restorative" mode of interpretation, where meaning is reverently reconciled to a text assumed to be trustworthy, and a "suspicious" approach, where meaning is aggressively extrapolated from a text held as unreliable. In order to bring these theories to bear on "Kaddish" and its criticism, I draw on Rita Felski's pioneering work in relating Ricoeur's concept of "suspicious reading" to the field of literature. Is it possible to read "Kaddish" suspiciously? Or is there nothing left for suspicious readers to expose in texts such as "Kaddish" that are already self-exposing? In "Kaddish," Ginsberg tells the story of his mother Naomi Ginsberg, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who died in a mental hospital in 1956. It is a lengthy prose poem and spans a remarkable 19 pages in Ginsberg's Collected Poems (1984). In the words of Maeera Y. Shreiber, "Kaddish" "is a massive achievement, comprised of five numbered parts, and an interpellated 'Hymmnn' between parts two and three" (84). I focus on the second narrative part, which forms the bulk of the poem, where the speaker—I shall refer to him henceforth as "Allen" in order to differentiate between Ginsberg's poetic self-representation and Ginsberg-the-author—recounts the nervous breakdowns and hospital movements of his mother, whom he calls by her first name, Naomi. I begin by illustrating the ways in which Allen focalises Naomi in the text, and suggest that his attempts to "read" her suspicious mind alternate between restorative and suspicious impulses. I then take up the issue of reading "Kaddish" suspiciously. Acknowledging Ricoeur's assertion that psychoanalysis is an unequivocal "school of suspicion" (32), I consider James Breslin's psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish," in particular, his reading of what is easily the most contentious passage in the poem: the scene where Naomi solicits Allen for sex. I regard this passage as a microcosm of the issues that beset a suspicious reading of "Kaddish"—such as the problem posed by the self-exposing poem and poet—and I find that Breslin's response to it raises interesting questions on the politics of psychoanalysis and the nature of suspicious interpretation. Finally, I identify an unpublished thesis on Ginsberg's poetry by Sarah Macfarlane and classify her interpretation of "Kaddish" as unambiguously suspicious. My purpose is not to advance my own suspicious reading of "Kaddish" but to highlight the difficulties of reading "Kaddish" suspiciously. I argue that while it is difficult to read "Kaddish" suspiciously, to do so offers a fruitful counterbalance to the dominant restorative criticism on the poem. There are as yet unexplored hermeneutical territories in and around this poem, indeed in and around Ginsberg's work in general, which have radical implications for the future direction of Beat studies. Picking her tooth with her nail, lips formed an O, suspicion—thought's old worn vagina— (Ginsberg, "Kaddish" 218)Ginsberg constructs Naomi's suspicion in "Kaddish" via Allen's communication of her visions and descriptions of her behaviour. Allen relates, for example, that Naomi once suspected that Hitler was "in her room" and that "she saw his mustache in the sink" ("Kaddish" 220). Subsequently, Allen depicts Naomi "listening to the radio for spies—or searching the windowsill," and, in an attempt to "read" her suspicious mind, suggests that she envisages "an old man creep[ing] with his bag stuffing packages of garbage in his hanging black overcoat" ("Kaddish" 220). Allen's gaze thus filters Naomi's; he watches her as she watches for spies, and he animates her visions. He recalls as a child "watching over" Naomi in order to anticipate her "next move" ("Kaddish" 212). On one fateful day, Naomi "stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner"; Allen interprets that she "spied a mystical assassin from Newark" ("Kaddish" 212). He likewise observes and interprets Naomi's body language and facial expressions. When she "covered [her] nose with [a] motheaten fur collar" and "shuddered at [the] face" of a bus driver, he deduces that, for Naomi, the collar must have been a "gas mask against poison" and the driver "a member of the gang" ("Kaddish" 212). On the one hand, Allen's impetus to recover "the lost Naomi" ("Kaddish" 216)—first lost to mental illness and then to death—may be likened to Ricoeur's concept of a restorative hermeneutic, "which is driven by a sense of reverence and goes deeper into the text in search of revelation" (Felski 216). As if Naomi's mind constitutes a text, Allen strives to reveal it in order to make it intelligible. What drives him is the cathartic impulse to revivify his mother's memory, to rebuild her story, and to exalt her as "magnificent" and "mourned no more" ("Kaddish" 212), so that he may mourn no more. Like a restorative reader "driven by a sense of reverence" (Felski 216), he lauds Naomi as the "glorious muse that bore [him] from the womb [...] from whose pained head [he] first took Vision" ("Kaddish" 223). Critics of "Kaddish" also observe the poem's restorative impulse. In "Strange Prophecies Anew," Tony Trigilio reads the recovery of Naomi as "the recovery of a female principle of divinity" (773). Diverging from Ginsberg's earlier poem "Howl" (1956), which "represses signs of women in order to forge male prophetic comradeship," "Kaddish" "constructs maternity as a source of vision, an influence that precedes and sustains prophetic language. In 'Kaddish', Ginsberg attempts to recover the voice of his mother Naomi, which is muted in 'Howl'" (776). Shreiber also acknowledges Ginsberg's redemption of "the feminine, figured specifically as the lost mother," but for her it "is central to both of the long poems that make his reputation," namely "Kaddish" and "Howl" (81). She cites Ginsberg's retrospective confession that "Howl" was actually about Naomi to argue that, "it is in the course of writing 'Howl' that Ginsberg discovers his obligation to the elided (Jewish) mother—whose restoration is the central project of 'Kaddish'" (81). On the other hand, Allen's compulsion to "cut through" to Naomi, to talk to her as he "didn't when [she] had a mouth" ("Kaddish" 211), suggests the brutality of a suspicious hermeneutic where meanings "must be wrestled rather than gleaned from the page, derived not from what the text says, but in spite of what it says" (Felski 223). When Naomi was alive and "had a mouth," Allen aggressively "pushed her against the door and shouted 'DON'T KICK ELANOR!'" in spite of her message: "Elanor is the worst spy! She's taking orders!" ("Kaddish" 221). As a suspicious reader wrestles with a resistant text, Allen wrestles with Naomi, "yelling at her" in exasperation, and even "banging against her head which saw Radios, Sticks, Hitlers—the whole gamut of Hallucinations—for real—her own universe" ("Kaddish" 221).Allen may be also seen as approaching Naomi with a suspicious reader's "adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings" (Felski 216). This is most visible in his facetiously professed "good idea to try [to] know the Monster of the Beginning Womb"—to penetrate Naomi's body in order to access her mind "that way" ("Kaddish" 219). Accordingly, in his psychoanalytic reading of "Kaddish," James Breslin understands Allen's "incestuous desires as expressing [his] wish to get inside his mother and see things as she does" (424). Breslin's interpretation invokes the Freudian concept of "epistemophilia," which Bran Nicol defines as the "desire to know" (48).Freud is one of "three masters" of suspicion according to Ricoeur (32). Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx "present the most radically contrary stance to the phenomenology of the sacred and to any hermeneutics understood as the recollection of meaning" (Ricoeur 35). They "begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering" (Ricoeur 34). Freud deciphers the language of the conscious mind in order to access the "unconscious"—that "part of the mind beyond consciousness which nevertheless has a strong influence upon our actions" (Barry 96). Like their therapeutic counterparts, psychoanalytic critics distinguish "between the conscious and the unconscious mind," associating a text's "'overt' content with the former" and "'covert' content with the latter, privileging the latter as being what the work is 'really' about" (Barry 105). In seeking to expose a text's unconscious, they subscribe to a hermeneutic of suspicion's "conviction that appearances are deceptive, that texts do not gracefully relinquish their meanings" (Felski 216). To force texts to relinquish their meanings suspicious readers bear "distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact" (Felski 222).For the most part, these qualities fail to characterise Breslin's psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish" and "Howl." Far from aggressive or superior, Breslin is a highly sympathetic reader of Ginsberg. "Many readers," he complains, are "still not sympathetic to the kind [sic] of form found in these poems" (403). His words echo Trigilio's endorsement of Marjorie Perloff's opinion that critics are too often "unwilling to engage the experimental scope of Ginsberg's poems" (Trigilio 774). Sympathetic reading, however, clashes with suspicious reading, which "involves a sense of vigilant preparedness for attack" (Shand in Felski 220). Breslin is sympathetic not only to the experimental forms of "Kaddish" and "Howl," but also to their attestation to "deep, long-standing private conflicts in Ginsberg—conflicts that ultimately stem from his ambivalent attachment to his mother" (403). In "Kaddish," Allen's ambivalent feelings toward his mother are conspicuous in his revolted and revolting reaction to her exposed body, combined with his blasé deliberation on whether to respond to her apparent sexual provocation: One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover. ("Kaddish" 219)In "Confessing the Body," Elizabeth Gregory observes that "Naomi's ordinary body becomes monstrous in this description—not only in its details but in the undiscriminating desire her son attributes to it ('Would she care?')" (47). In exposing Naomi thus, Allen also exposes himself and his own indiscriminate sexual responsiveness. Such textual exposés pose challenges for those who would practice a hermeneutic of suspicion by "reading texts against the grain to expose their repressed or hidden meanings" (Felski 215). It appears that there is little that is hidden or repressed in "Kaddish" for a suspicious reader to expose. As Perloff notes, "the Ginsberg of 'Kaddish' is writing somewhat against the grain" (213). In writing against the grain, Ginsberg inhibits reading against the grain. A hermeneutic of suspicion holds "that manifest content shrouds darker, more unpalatable truths" (Felski 216). "Kaddish," however, parades its unpalatable truths. Although Ginsberg as a Beat poet is not technically included among the group of poets known as the "confessionals," "Kaddish" is typical of a "confessional poem" in that it "dwells on experiences generally prohibited expression by social convention: mental illness, intra-familial conflicts and resentments, childhood traumas, sexual transgressions and intimate feelings about one's body" (Gregory 34). There is a sense in which "we do not need to be suspicious" of such subversive texts because they are "already doing the work of suspicion for us" (Felski 217). It is also difficult to read "Kaddish" suspiciously because it presents itself as an autobiographical history of Ginsberg's relationship with his mother. "Kaddish" once again accords with Gregory's definition of "confessional poetry" as that which "draws on the poet's autobiography and is usually set in the first person. It makes a claim to forego personae and to represent an account of the poet's own feelings and circumstances" (34). These defining features of "Kaddish" make it not particularly conducive to a "suspicious hermeneutic [that] often professes a lack of interest in the category of authorship as a means of explaining the ideological workings of texts" (Felski 222). It requires considerable effort to distinguish Allen, speaker and character in "Kaddish," from Ginsberg, celebrity Beat poet and author of "Kaddish," and to suspend knowledge of Ginsberg's public-private life in order to pry ideologies from the text. This difficulty of resisting biographical interpretation of "Kaddish" translates to a difficulty of reading the poem suspiciously. In his psychoanalytic reading, Breslin's lack of suspicion for the poem's confession of autobiography dilutes his practice of an inherently suspicious mode of interpretation—that of psychoanalysis. His psychoanalysis of Ginsberg shows that he trusts "Kaddish" to confess its author's intimate feelings—"'It's my fault,' he must have felt, 'if I had loved my mother more, this wouldn't have happened to her—and to me'" (Breslin 422)—whereas a hermeneutic of suspicion "adopts a distrustful attitude toward texts" (Felski 216). That said, Breslin's differentiation between the conscious and unconscious, or surface and underlying levels of meaning in "Kaddish" is more clearly characteristic of a hermeneutic of suspicion's theory that texts withhold "meanings or implications that are not intended and that remain inaccessible to their authors as well as to ordinary readers" (Felski 216). Hence, Breslin speculates that, "on an unconscious level the writing of the poem may have been an act of private communication between the poet" and his mother (430). His response to the previously quoted passage of the poem suggests that while a cursory glance will restore its conscious meaning, a more attentive or suspicious gaze will uncover its unconscious: At first glance this passage seems a daring revelation of an incest wish and a shockingly realistic description of the mother's body. But what we really see here is how one post-Freudian writer, pretending to be open and at ease about incestuous desire, affects sophisticated awareness as a defense [sic] against intense longings and anxieties. The lines are charged with feelings that the poet, far from "confessing out," appears eager to deny. (Breslin 422; my emphasis)Breslin's temporary suspicious gaze in an otherwise trusting and sympathetic reading accuses the poet of revealing incestuous desire paradoxically in order to conceal incestuous desire. It exposes the exposé as an ironic guise, an attempt at subterfuge that the poet fails to conceal from the suspicious reader, evoking a hermeneutic of suspicion's conviction that in spite of itself "the text is not fully in control of its own discourse" (Felski 223). Breslin's view of Ginsberg's denial through the veil of his confession illuminates two possible ways of sustaining a suspicious reading of "Kaddish." One is to distrust its claim to confess Ginsberg, to recognise that "confession's reality claim is an extremely artful manipulation of the materials of poetry, not a departure from them" (Gregory 34). It is worth mentioning that in response to his interviewer's perception of the "absolute honesty" in his poem "Ego Confession," Ginsberg commented: "they're all poems, ultimately" (Spontaneous 404–05). Another way is to resist the double seduction operative in the text: Naomi's attempted seduction of Allen, and, in narrating it, Allen's attempted seduction of the psychoanalytic critic.Sarah Macfarlane's effort to unmask the gender politics that psychoanalytic critics arguably protect characterises her "socio-cultural analysis" (5) of "Kaddish" as unmistakably suspicious. While psychoanalytic critics "identify a 'psychic' context for the literary work, at the expense of social or historical context" (Barry 105), Macfarlane in her thesis "Masculinity and the Politics of Gender Construction in Allen Ginsberg" locates Allen's "perception of Naomi as the 'Monster of the Beginning Womb'" in the social and historical context of the 1950s "concept of the overbearing, dominating wife and mother who, although confined to the domestic space, looms large and threatening within that space" (48). In so doing, she draws attention to the Cold War discourse of "momism," which "envisioned American society as a matriarchy in which dominant mothers disrupted the Oedipal structure of the middle-class nuclear family" (Macfarlane 33). In other words, momism engaged Freudian explanations of male homosexuality as arising from a son's failure to resolve unconscious sexual desire for his mother, and blamed mothers for this failure and its socio-political ramifications, which, via the Cold War cultural association of homosexuality with communism, included "the weakening of masculine resolve against Communism" (Edelman 567). Since psychoanalysis effectively colludes with momism, psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish" is unable to expose its perpetuation in the poem. Macfarlane's suspicious reading of "Kaddish" as perpetuating momism radically departs from the dominant restorative criticism on the poem. Trigilio, for example, argues that "Kaddish" revises the Cold War "discourse of containment—'momism'—in which the exposure of communists was equated to the exposure of homosexuals" (781). "Kaddish," he claims, (which exposes both Allen's homosexuality and Naomi's communism), "does not portray internal collapse—as nationalist equations of homosexual and communist 'threats' would predict—but instead produces […] a 'Blessed' poet who 'builds Heaven in Darkness'" (782). Nonetheless, this blessed poet wails, "I am unmarried, I'm hymnless, I'm Heavenless" ("Kaddish" 212), and confesses his homosexuality as an overwhelming burden: "a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole—weight on my melancholy head"("Kaddish" 214). In "Confessing the Body," Gregory asks whether confessional poetry "disclose[s] secrets in order to repent of them, thus reinforcing the initial negative judgement that kept them secret," or "to decathect that judgement" (35). While Allen's confession of homosexuality exudes exhilaration and depression, not guilt—Ginsberg critic Anne Hartman is surely right that "in the context of [the 1950s] public rituals of confession and repentance engendered by McCarthyism, […] poetic confession would carry a very different set of implications for a gay poet" (47)—it is pertinent to question his confession of Naomi. Does he expose Naomi in order to applaud or condemn her maternal transgressions? According to the logic of the Cold War "urge to unveil, [which] produces greater containment" (Trigilio 794), Allen's unveiling of Naomi veils his desire to contain her, unable as she is "to be contained within the 1950's [sic] domestic ideal of womanhood" (Macfarlane 44). "Ginsberg has become such a public issue that it's difficult now to read him naturally; you ask yourself after every line, am I for him or against him. And by and large that's the criticism he has gotten—votes on a public issue. (I see this has been one of those reviews.)" (Shapiro 90). Harvey Shapiro's review of Kaddish and Other Poems (1961) in which "Kaddish" first appeared illuminates the polarising effect of Ginsberg's celebrity on interpretations of his poetry. While sympathetic readings and romantic portrayals are themselves reactions to the "hostility to Ginsberg" that prevails (Perloff 223), often they do not sprout the intellectual vigour and fresh perspectives that a hermeneutic of suspicion has the capacity to sow. Yet it is difficult to read confessional texts such as "Kaddish" suspiciously; they appear to expose themselves without need of a suspicious reader. Readers of "Kaddish" such as Breslin are seduced into sympathetic biographical-psychoanalytical interpretations due to the poem's purported confession of Ginsberg's autobiography. As John Osborne argues, "the canon of Beat literature has been falsely founded on biographical rather than literary criteria" (4). The result is that "we are for the immediate future obliged to adopt adversarial reading strategies if we are to avoid entrenching an already stale orthodoxy" (Osborne 4). Macfarlane obliges in her thesis; she succeeds in reading "Kaddish" suspiciously by resisting its self-inscribed psychoanalysis to expose the gender politics of Allen's exposés. While Allen's confession of his homosexuality suggests that "Kaddish" subverts a heterosexist model of masculinity, a suspicious reading of his exposure of Naomi's maternal transgressions suggests that the poem contributes to momism and perpetuates a sexist model of femininity. Even so, a suspicious reading of a text such as "Kaddish" "contains a tacit tribute to its object, an admission that it contains more than meets the eye" (Felski 230). Ginsberg's own prophetic words bespeak as much:The worst I fear, considering the shallowness of opinion, is that some of the poetry and prose may be taken too familiarly, […] and be given the same shallow treatment, this time sympathetic, as, until recently, they were given shallow unsympathy. That would be the very we of fame. (Ginsberg, Deliberate 252)ReferencesBarry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Breslin, James. "The Origins of 'Howl' and 'Kaddish.'" On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed. Lewis Hyde. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 401–33.Edelman, Lee. "Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 553–74.Felski, Rita. "Suspicious Minds." Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34. Ginsberg, Allen. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. London: Penguin, 2000.---. "Kaddish." Collected Poems 1947–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 209–27. ---. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958–1996. Ed. David Carter. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Grace, Nancy M. "Seeking the Spirit of Beat: The Call for Interdisciplinary Scholarship." Rev. of Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester, by Ben Giamo, and The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, by John Lardas. Contemporary Literature 43.4 (2002): 811–21.Gregory, Elizabeth. "Confessing the Body: Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Lowell, Ginsberg and the Gendered Poetics of the 'Real.'" Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. Ed. Jo Gill. London: Routledge, 2006. 22–49. Hartman, Anne. "Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg." Journal of Modern Literature 28.4 (2005): 40–56. Howl. Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Perf. James Franco. Oscilloscope Pictures, 2010.Macfarlane, Sarah. "Masculinity and the Politics of Gender Construction in Allen Ginsberg." MA thesis. Brown U, 1999.Nicol, Bran. "Reading Paranoia: Paranoia, Epistemophilia and the Postmodern Crisis of Interpretation." Literature and Psychology 45.1/2 (1999): 44–62.Osborne, John. "The Beats." A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry. Blackwell Reference Online. Ed. Neil Roberts. 2003. 16 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/uid=1205/tocnode?id=g9781405113618_chunk_g978140511361815&authstatuscode=202›.Perloff, Marjorie. "A Lion in Our Living Room: Reading Allen Ginsberg in the Eighties." Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990. 199–230.Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Shapiro, Harvey. "Exalted Lament." Rev. of Kaddish and Other Poems 1958-1960, by Allen Ginsberg. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed. Lewis Hyde. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 86–91. Shreiber, Maeera Y. "'You Still Haven't Finished with Your Mother': The Gendered Poetics of Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg." Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 46–97.Trigilio, Tony. "'Strange Prophecies Anew': Rethinking the Politics of Matter and Spirit in Ginsberg's Kaddish." American Literature 71.4 (1999): 773–95.

Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, is best known to most modern readers as the woman John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, abducted and later wed. As Samuel Pepys memorably records in his diary entry for 28 May 1665:Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the Tower. (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)Here Pepys provides an anecdote that offers what Helen Deutsch has described in another context as “the elusive possibility of truth embodied by ‘things in themselves,’ by the things, that is, preserved in anecdotal form” (28). Pepys’s diary entry yields up an “elusive possibility” of embodied truth; his version of Wilmot’s abduction solidifies what he perceives to be the most notable features of her identity: her beauty, her wealth, and her sexual trajectory.Pepys’s conclusion that “the lady is not yet heard of” complicates this idea of anecdotal preservation, for he neatly ties up his story of Wilmot’s body by erasing her from it: she is removed, voiceless and disembodied, from even this anecdote of her own abduction. Pepys’s double maneuver demonstrates the complex set of interactions surrounding the preservation of early modern women’s sexual and textual selves. Written into Pepys’s diary and writing in conversation with her husband, Wilmot has generally been treated as a subordinate historical and literary figure—a character rather than an agent or an author. The richness of Wilmot’s own writing has been largely ignored; her manuscript poetry has been treated as an artefact and a source of autobiographical material, whereas Rochester’s poetry—itself teeming with autobiographical details, references to material culture, and ephemera—is recognised and esteemed as literary. Rochester’s work provides a tremendous resource, a window through which we can read and re-read his wife’s work in ways that enlighten and open up readings rather than closing them down, and her works similarly complicate his writings.By looking at Wilmot as a case study, I would like to draw attention to some of the continued dilemmas that scholars face when we attempt to recover early modern women’s writing. With this study, I will focus on distinct features of Wilmot’s sexual and textual identity. I will consider assumptions about female docility; the politics and poetics of erotic espionage; and Wilmot’s construction of fugitive desires in her poetry. Like the writings of many early modern women, Wilmot’s manuscript poetry challenges assumptions about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and authorship. Early Modern Women’s Docile Bodies?As the entry from Pepys’s diary suggests, Wilmot has been constructed as a docile female body—she is rendered “ideal” according to a set of gendered practices by which “inferior status has been inscribed” on her body (Bartky 139). Contrasting Pepys’s references to Wilmot’s beauty and marriageability with Wilmot’s own vivid descriptions of sexual desire highlights Wilmot’s tactical awareness and deployment of her inscribed form. In one of her manuscript poems, she writes:Nothing ades to Loves fond fireMore than scorn and cold disdainI to cherish your desirekindness used but twas in vainyou insulted on your SlaveTo be mine you soon refusedHope hope not then the power to haveWhich ingloriously you used. (230)This poem yields up a wealth of autobiographical information and provides glimpses into Wilmot’s psychology. Rochester spent much of his married life having affairs with women and men, and Wilmot represents herself as embodying her devotion to her husband even as he rejects her. In a recent blog entry about Wilmot’s poetry, Ellen Moody suggests that Wilmot “must maintain her invulnerable guard or will be hurt; the mores damn her whatever she does.” Interpretations of Wilmot’s verse typically overlay such sentiments on her words: she is damned by social mores, forced to configure her body and desire according to rigorous social codes that expect women to be pure and inviolable yet also accessible to their lovers and “invulnerable” to the pain produced by infidelity. Such interpretations, however, deny Wilmot the textual and sexual agency accorded to Rochester, begging the question of whether or not we have moved beyond reading women’s writing as essential, natural, and embodied. Thus while these lines might in fact yield up insights into Wilmot’s psychosocial and sexual identities, we continue to marginalise her writing and by extension her author-self if we insist on taking her words at face value. Compare, for example, Wilmot’s verse to the following song by her contemporary Aphra Behn:Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d,For whom Fresh paines he did Create,And strange Tyranick power he show’d;From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,Which round about, in sports he hurl’d;But ’twas from mine, he took desire,Enough to undo the Amorous World. (53) This poem, which first appeared in Behn’s tragedy Abdelazer (1677) and was later printed in Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), was one of Behn’s most popular lyric verses. In the 1920s and 1930s Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Edmund Gosse, and others mined Behn’s works for autobiographical details and suggested that such historical details were all that her works offered—a trend that continued, disturbingly, into the later half of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Paula R. Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Markley, Paul Salzman, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd have shown that Behn’s works are not simple autobiographical documents; they are the carefully crafted productions of a literary professional. Even though Behn’s song evokes a masochistic relationship between lover and beloved much like Wilmot’s song, critics treat “Love Arm’d” as a literary work rather than a literal transcription of female desire. Of course there are material differences between Wilmot’s song and Behn’s “Love Arm’d,” the most notable of which involves Behn’s self-conscious professionalism and her poem’s entrenchment in the structures of performance and print culture. But as scholars including Kathryn King and Margaret J. M. Ezell have begun to suggest, print publication was not the only way for writers to produce and circulate literary texts. King has demonstrated the ways in which female authors of manuscripts were producing social texts (563), and Ezell has shown that “collapsing ‘public’ into ‘publication’” leads modern readers to “overlook the importance of the social function of literature for women as well as men” (39). Wilmot’s poems did not go through the same material, ideological, and commercial processes as Behn’s poems did, but they participated in a social and cultural network of exchange that operated according to its own rules and that, significantly, was the same network that Rochester himself used for the circulation of his verses. Wilmot’s writings constitute about half of the manuscript Portland PwV 31, held by Hallward Library, University of Nottingham—a manuscript catalogued in the Perdita Project but lacking a description and biographical note. Teresa D. Kemp has discussed the impact of the Perdita Project on the study of early modern women’s writing in Feminist Teacher, and Jill Seal Millman and Elizabeth Clarke (both of whom are involved with the project) have also written articles about the usability of the database. Like many of the women writers catalogued by the Perdita Project, Wilmot lacks her own entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and is instead relegated to the periphery in Rochester’s entry.The nineteen-page folio includes poems by both Rochester and Wilmot. The first eight poems are autograph manuscript poems by Rochester, and a scene from a manuscript play ‘Scaene 1st, Mr. Daynty’s chamber’ is also included. The remaining poems, excluding one without attribution, are by Wilmot and are identified on the finding aid as follows:Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotMS poem, untitled, not ascribed Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth Wilmot Autograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotTwo of the songs (including the lyric quoted above) have been published in Kissing the Rod with the disclaimer that marks of revision reveal that “Lady Rochester was not serving as an amanuensis for her husband” yet the editors maintain that “some sort of literary collaboration cannot be ruled out” (230), implying that Rochester helped his wife write her poetry. Establishing a non-hierarchical strategy for reading women’s collaborative manuscript writing here seems necessary. Unlike Behn, who produced works in manuscript and in print and whose maximization of the slippages between these modes has recently been analyzed by Anne Russell, Wilmot and Rochester both wrote primarily in manuscript. Yet only Rochester’s writings have been accorded literary status by historians of the book and of manuscript theory such as Harold Love and Arthur Marotti. Even though John Wilders notes that Rochester’s earliest poems were dialogues written with his wife, the literariness of her contributions is often undercut. Wilders offers a helpful suggestion that the dialogues set up by these poems helps “hint … at further complexities in the other” (51), but the complexities are identified as sexual rather than textual. Further, the poems are treated as responses to Rochester rather than conversations with him. Readers like Moody, moreover, draw reflections of marital psychology from Wilmot’s poems instead of considering their polysemic qualities and other literary traits. Instead of approaching the lines quoted above from Wilmot’s song as indications of her erotic and conjugal desire for her husband, we can consider her confident deployment of metaphysical conceits, her careful rhymes, and her visceral imagery. Furthermore, we can locate ways in which Wilmot and Rochester use the device of the answer poem to build a complex dialogue rather than a hierarchical relationship in which one voice dominates the other. The poems comprising Portland PwV 31 are written in two hands and two voices; they complement one another, but neither contains or controls the other. Despite the fact that David Farley-Hills dismissively calls this an “‘answer’ to this poem written in Lady Rochester’s handwriting” (29), the verses coexist in playful exchange textually as well as sexually. Erotic Exchange, Erotic EspionageBut does a reorientation of literary criticism away from Wilmot’s body and towards her body of verse necessarily entail a loss of her sexual and artefactual identity? Along with the account from Pepys’s diary mentioned at the outset of this study, letters from Rochester to his wife survive that provide a prosaic account of the couple’s married life. For instance, Rochester writes to her: “I love not myself as much as you do” (quoted in Green 159). Letters from Rochester to his wife typically showcase his playfulness, wit, and ribaldry (in one letter, he berates the artist responsible for two miniatures of Wilmot in strokes that are humorous yet also charged with a satire that borders on invective). The couple’s relationship was beleaguered by the doubts, infidelities, and sexual double standards that an autobiographical reading of Wilmot’s songs yields up, therefore it seems as counterproductive for feminist literary theory, criticism, and recovery work to entirely dispense with the autobiographical readings as it seems reductive to entirely rely on them. When approaching works like these manuscript poems, then, I propose using a model of erotic exchange and erotic espionage in tandem with more text-bound modes of literary criticism. To make this maneuver, we might begin by considering Gayle Rubin’s proposition that “If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (398). Wilmot’s poetry relentlessly unsettles the binary set up between partner and present, thereby demanding a more pluralistic identification of sexual and textual economies. Wilmot constructs Rochester as absent (“Thats caused by absence norished by despaire”), which is an explicit inversion of the gendered terms stereotypically deployed in poetry (the absent woman in works by Rochester as well as later satirists like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope often catalyzes sexual desire) that also registers Wilmot’s autobiographical contexts. She was, during most of her married life, living with his mother, her own mother, and Rochester’s nieces in his house at Adderbury while he stayed in London. The desire in Wilmot’s poetry is textualised as much as it is sexualised; weaving this doublebraid of desires and designs together ultimately provides the most complete interpretation of the verses. I read the verses as offering a literary form of erotic espionage in which Wilmot serves simultaneously as erotic object and author. That is, she both is and is not the Cloris of her (and Rochester’s) poetry, capable of looking on and authorizing her desired and desiring body. The lyric in which Wilmot writes “He would return the fugitive with Shame” provides the clearest example of the interpretive tactic that I am proposing. The line, from Wilmot’s song “Cloris misfortunes that can be exprest,” refers to the deity of Love in its complete context:Such conquering charmes contribute to my chainAnd ade fresh torments to my lingering painThat could blind Love juge of my faithful flameHe would return the fugitive with ShameFor having bin insenceable to loveThat does by constancy it merritt prove. (232)The speaker of the poem invokes Cupid and calls on “blind Love” to judge “my faithful flame.” The beloved would then be returned “fugitive with Shame” because “blind Love” would have weighed the lover’s passion and the beloved’s insensibility. Interestingly, the gender of the beloved and the lover are not marked in this poem. Only Cupid is marked as male. Although the lover is hypothetically associated with femaleness in the final stanza (“She that calls not reason to her aid / Deserves the punishmentt”), the ascription could as easily be gendering the trait of irrationality as gendering the subject/author of the poem. Desire, complaint, and power circulate in the song in a manner that lacks clear reference; the reader receives glimpses into an erotic world that is far more ornately literary than it is material. That is, reading the poem makes one aware of tropes of power and desire, whereas actual bodies recede into the margins of the text—identifiable because of the author’s handwriting, not a uniquely female perspective on sexuality or (contrary to Moody’s interpretation) a specifically feminine acquiescence to gender norms. Strategies for Reading a Body of VerseWilmot’s poetry participates in what might be described as two distinct poetic and political modes. On one hand, her writing reproduces textual expectations about Restoration answer poems, songs and lyrics, and romantic verses. She crafts poetry that corresponds to the same textual conventions that men like Rochester, John Dryden, Abraham Cowley, and William Cavendish utilised when they wrote in manuscript. For Wilmot, as for her male contemporaries, such manuscript writing would have been socially circulated; at the same time, the manuscript documents had a fluidity that was less common in print texts. Dryden and Behn’s published writings, for instance, often had a more literary context (“Love Arm’d” refers to Abdelazer, not to Behn’s sexual identity), whereas manuscript writing often referred to coteries of readers and writers, friends and lovers.As part of the volatile world of manuscript writing, Wilmot’s poetry also highlights her embodied erotic relationships. But over-reading—or only reading—the poetry as depicting a conjugal erotics limits our ability to recover Wilmot as an author and an agent. Feminist recovery work has opened many new tactics for incorporating women’s writing into existing literary canons; it has also helped us imagine ways of including female domestic work, sexuality, and other embodied forms into our understanding of early modern culture. By drawing together literary recovery work with a more material interest in recuperating women’s sexual bodies, we should begin to recuperate women like Wilmot not simply as authors or bodies but as both. The oscillations between the sexual and textual body in Wilmot’s poetry, and in our assessments of her life and writings, should help us approach her works (like the works of Rochester) as possessing a three-dimensionality that they have long been denied. ReferencesBartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 129-54.Behn, Aphra. “Song. Love Arm’d.” The Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 1: Poetry. Ed. Janet Todd. London: William Pickering, 1992. 53.Clarke, Elizabeth. “Introducing Hester Pulter and the Perdita Project.” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005). ‹http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/article_view?article_id=lico_articles_bsl159›. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Doctor Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Diamond, Irene, Ed. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.Farley-Hill, David. Rochester’s Poetry. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. Greene, Graham. Lord Rochester’s Monkey. New York: Penguin, 1974. Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, Ed. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse. New York: Noonday Press, 1988. Kemp, Theresa D. “Early Women Writers.” Feminist Teacher 18.3 (2008): 234-39.King, Kathryn. “Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text.” ELH 61 (1994): 551-70.Love, Harold, and Arthur F. Marotti. "Manuscript Transmission and Circulation." The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 55-80. Love, Harold. "Systemizing Sigla." English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700. 11 (2002): 217-230. Marotti, Arthur F. "Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England." A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 185-203.McNay, Lois. Foucault And Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self. Boston: Northeastern, 1992.Moody, Ellen. “Elizabeth Wilmot (neé Mallet), Countess of Rochester, Another Woman Poet.” Blog entry 16 March 2006. 11 Nov. 2008 ‹http://server4.moody.cx/index.php?id=400›. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 23 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/05/28/index.php›. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 392-413. New York: Norton, 2007.Russell, Anne. “Aphra Behn, Textual Communities, and Pastoral Sobriquets.” English Language Notes 40.4 (June 2003): 41-50.———. “'Public' and 'Private' in Aphra Behn's Miscellanies: Women Writers, Print, and Manuscript.” Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 29-48. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.Seal, Jill. "The Perdita Project—A Winter's Report." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January, 2001): 10.1-14. ‹http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-3/perdita.htm›.Wilders, John. “Rochester and the Metaphysicals.” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Hamden: Archon, 1982. 42-57.Wilmot, Elizabeth, Countess of Rochester. “Song” (“Nothing Ades to Love's Fond Fire”) and “Song” (“Cloris Misfortunes That Can Be Exprest”) in Kissing the Rod. 230-32.

Ever since I tripped over Tiddles while I was carrying a pile of discs into the studio, I’ve known it was possible to get a laugh out of gramophone records!Max Bygraves In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies.” Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller’s self-titled album or Rick Dees’ The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history’s silliest, it stands to reason “that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies,” that abominations should be the best of our time (Bangs, 1978). This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida’s definition of the “post” condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving (Derrida 1987, 29). Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs’ greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all. (Bangs 1978) The album was entitled The Best of Marcel Marceao. Produced by Michael Viner the album contained four tracks, with two identical on both sides: “Silence,” which is nineteen minutes long and “Applause,” one minute. To underline how extraordinary this gramophone record is, John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959) is cacophonous by comparison. While Bangs agrees with popular opinion that The Best of Marcel Marceao the “ultimate concept album,” he concluded that this is “one of those rare records that never dates” (Bangs, 1978). This tacet album is a good way to start thinking about the Classical Gas project, and the ironic semiotics at work in it (Tofts & Gye 2011). It too is about records that are silent and that never date. First, the album’s cover art, featuring a theatrically posed Marceau, implies the invitation to speak in the absence of speech; or, in our terms, it is asking to be re-written. Secondly, the French mime’s surname is spelled incorrectly, with an “o” rather than “u” as the final letter. As well as the caprice of an actual album by Marcel Marceau, the implicit presence and absence of the letters o and u is appropriately in excess of expectations, weird and unexpected like an early title in the Classical Gas catalogue, Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (classical-gas.com) Like a zootrope animation, it is impossible not to see the o and u flickering at one at the same time on the cover. In this duplicity it performs the conventional and logical permutation of English grammar. Silence invites difference, variation within a finite lexical set and the opportunity to choose individual items from it. Here is album cover art that speaks of presence and absence, of that which is anticipated and unexpected: a gramophone recoding without sound. In this the Marceau cover is one of Roland Barthes’ mythologies, something larger than life, structured like a language and structured out of language (Barthes 1982). This ambiguity is the perfidious grammar that underwrites Classical Gas. Images, we learned from structuralism, are codified, or rather, are code. Visual remix is a rhetorical gesture of recoding that interferes with the semiotic DNA of an image. The juxtaposition of text and image is interchangeable and requires our imagination of what we are looking at and what it might sound like. This persistent interplay of metaphor and metonymy has enabled us to take more than forty easy listening albums and republish them as mild-mannered recordings from the maverick history of ideas, from Marxism and psychoanalysis, to reception theory, poststructuralism and the writings of critical auteurs. Foucault à gogo, for instance, takes a 1965 James Last dance album and recodes it as the second volume of The History of Sexuality. In saying this, we are mindful of the ambivalence of the very possibility of this connection, to how and when the eureka moment of remix recognition occurs, if at all. Mix and remix are, after Jean Baudrillard, both precession and procession of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1983). The nature of remix is that it is always already elusive and anachronistic. Not everyone can be guaranteed to see the shadow of one text in dialogue with another, like a hi-fi palimpsest. Or another way of saying this, such an epiphany of déjà vu, of having seen this before, may happen after the fact of encounter. This anachrony is central to remix practices, from the films of Quentin Tarrantino and the “séance fictions” of Soda_Jerk, to obscure Flintstones/Goodfellas mashups on YouTube. It is also implicit in critical understandings of an improbable familiarity with the superabundance of cultural archives, the dizzying excess of an infinite record library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges’ ever-expanding imagination. Drifting through the stacks of such a repository over an entire lifetime any title found, for librarian and reader alike, is either original and remix, sometime. Metalanguages that seek to counter this ambivalence are forms of bad faith, like film spoilers Brodie’s Notes. Accordingly, this essay sets out to explain some of the generic conventions of Classical Gas, as a remix project in which an image’s semiotic DNA is rewired and recontextualised. While a fake, it is also completely real (Faith in fakes, as it happens, may well be a forthcoming Umberto Eco title in the series). While these album covers are hyperreal, realistic in excess of being real, the project does take some inspiration from an actual, rather than imaginary archive of album covers. In 2005, Jewish artist Dani Gal happened upon a 1968 LP that documented the events surrounding the Six Day War in Israel in 1967. To his surprise, he found a considerable number of similar LPs to do with significant twentieth century historical events, speeches and political debates. In the artist’s own words, the LPs collected in his Historical Record Archive (2005-ongoing) are in fact silent, since it is only their covers that are exhibited in installations of this work, signifying a potential sound that visitors must try to audition. As Gal has observed, the interactive contract of the work is derived from the audience’s instinct to “try to imagine the sounds” even though they cannot listen to them (Gal 2011, 182). Classical Gas deliberately plays with this potential yearning that Gal astutely instils in his viewer and aspiring auditor. While they can never be listened to, they can entice, after Gilles Deleuze, a “virtual co-existence” of imaginary sound that manifests itself as a contract between viewer and LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). The writer Jeffrey Sconce condensed this embrace of the virtual as something plausibly real when he pithily observed of the Classical Gas project that it is “the thrift-bin in my fantasy world. I want to play S/Z at 78 rpm” (Sconce 2011). In terms of Sconce’s spectral media interests the LPs are haunted by the trace of potential “other” sounds that have taken possession of and appropriated the covers for another use (Sconce 2000).Mimetic While most albums are elusive and metaphoric (such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo, or Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference), some titles do make a concession to a tantalizing, mimetic literalness (such as Das Institut fur Sozialforschung). They display a trace of the haunting subject in terms of a tantalizing echo of fact or suggestion of verifiable biography. The motivation here is the recognition of a potential similarity, since most Classical Gas titles work by contrast. As with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the erotics of the fashion system, so with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty: it is “where the garment gapes” that the tease begins. (Barthes 1994, 9) Or, in this instance, where the cigarette smokes. (classical-gas.com) A casual Max Bygraves, paused in mid-thought, looks askance while lighting up. Despite the temptation to read even more into this, a smoking related illness did not contribute to Bygraves’ death in 2012. However, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, his dementia is suggestive of the album’s intrinsic capacity to be a palimpsest of the co-presence of different memories, of confused identities, obscure realities that are virtual and real. Beginning with the album cover itself, it has to become an LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). First, it is a cardboard, planar sleeve measuring 310mm squared, that can be imprinted with a myriad of different images. Secondly, it is conventionally identified in terms of a title, such as Organ Highlights or Classics Up to Date. Thirdly it is inscribed by genre, which may be song, drama, spoken word, or novelty albums of industrial or instrumental sounds, such as Memories of Steam and Accelerated Accordians. A case in point is John Woodhouse And His Magic Accordion from 1969. (classical-gas.com) All aspects of its generic attributes as benign and wholesome accordion tunes are warped and re-interpreted in Classical Gas. Springtime for Kittler appeared not long after the death of its eponymous philosopher in 2011. Directed by Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin, it is a homage album to Friedrich Kittler by the PostProducers, a fictitious remix collective inspired by Mel Brooks whose personnel include Mark Amerika and Darren Tofts. The single from this album, yet to be released, is a paean to Kittler’s last words, “Alle Apparate auschalten.” Foucault à gogo (vol. 2), the first album remixed for this series, is also typical of this archaeological approach to the found object. (classical-gas.com) The erasure and replacement of pre-existing text in a similar font re-writes an iconic image of wooing that is indicative of romantic album covers of this period. This album is reflective of the overall project in that the actual James Last album (1968) preceded the publication of the Foucault text (1976) that haunts it. This is suggestive of how coding and recoding are in the eye of the beholder and the specific time in which the remixed album is encountered. It doesn’t take James Last, Michel Foucault or Theodor Holm Nelson to tell you that there is no such thing as a collective memory with linear recall. As the record producer Milt Gabler observes in the liner notes to this album, “whatever the title with this artist, the tune remains the same, that distinct and unique Foucault à gogo.” “This artist” in this instance is Last or Foucault, as well as Last and Foucault. Similarly Milt Gabler is an actual author of liner notes (though not on the James Last album) whose words from another album, another context and another time, are appropriated and deftly re-written with Last’s Hammond à gogo volume 2 and The History of Sexuality in mind as a palimpsest (this approach to sampling liner notes and re-writing them as if they speak for the new album is a trope at work in all the titles in the series). And after all is said and done with the real or remixed title, both artists, after Umberto Eco, will have spoken once more of love (Eco 1985, 68). Ambivalence Foucault à gogo is suggestive of the semiotic rewiring that underwrites Classical Gas as a whole. What is at stake in this is something that poststructuralism learned from its predecessor. Taking the tenuous conventionality of Ferdinand de Saussure’s signifier and signified as a starting point, Lacan, Derrida and others embraced the freedom of this arbitrariness as the convention or social contract that brings together a thing and a word that denotes it. This insight of liberation, or what Hélène Cixous and others, after Jacques Lacan, called jouissance (Lacan 1992), meant that texts were bristling with ambiguity and ambivalence, free play, promiscuity and, with a nod to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival (Bakhtin 1984). A picture of a pipe was, after Foucault after Magritte, not a pipe (Foucault 1983). This po-faced sophistry is expressed in René Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” of 1948, which screamed out that the word pipe could mean anything. Foucault’s reprise of Magritte in “This is Not a Pipe” also speaks of Classical Gas’ embrace of the elasticity of sign and signifier, his “plastic elements” an inadvertent suggestion of vinyl (Foucault 1983, 53). (classical-gas.com) This uncanny association of structuralism and remixed vinyl LPs is intimated in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Its original cover art is straight out of a structuralist text-book, with its paired icons and words of love, rain, honey, rose, etc. But this text as performed by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians in New York in 1956 is no less plausible than Saussure’s lectures in Geneva in 1906. Cultural memory and cultural amnesia are one and the same thing. Out of all of the Classical Gas catalogue, this album is arguably the most suggestive of what Jeffrey Sconce would call “haunting” (Sconce, 2000), an ambivalent mixing of the “memory and desire” that T.S. Eliot wrote of in the allusive pages of The Waste Land (Eliot 1975, 27). Here we encounter the memory of a bookish study of signs from the early twentieth century and the desire for its vinyl equivalent on World Record Club in the 1960s. Memory and desire, either or, or both. This ambivalence was deftly articulated by Roland Barthes in his last book, Camera Lucida, as a kind of spectral haunting, a vision or act of double seeing in the perception of the photographic image. This flickering of perception is never static, predictable or repeatable. It is a way of seeing contingent upon who is doing the looking and when. Barthes famously conceptualised this interplay in perception of an between the conventions that culture has mandated, its studium, and the unexpected, idiosyncratic double vision that is unique to the observer, its punctum (Barthes 1982, 26-27). Accordingly, the Cours de linguistique générale is a record by Saussure as well as the posthumous publication in Paris and Lausanne of notes from his lectures in 1916. (Barthes 1982, 51) With the caption “Idiot children in an institution, New Jersey, 1924,” American photographer Lewis Hine’s anthropological study declares that this is a clinical image of pathological notions of monstrosity and aberration at the time. Barthes though, writing in a post-1968 Paris, only sees an outrageous Danton collar and a banal finger bandage (Barthes 1982, 51). With the radical, protestant cries of the fallout of the Paris riots in mind, as well as a nod to music writer Greil Marcus (1989), it is tempting to see Hine’s image as the warped cover of a Dead Kennedys album, perhaps Plastic Surgery Disasters. In terms of the Classical Gas approach to recoding, though, this would be far too predictable; for a start there is neither a pipe, a tan cardigan nor a chenille scarf to be seen. A more heart-warming, suitable title might be Ray Conniff’s 1965 Christmas Album: Here We Come A-Caroling. Irony (secretprehistory.net) Like our Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices project (Tofts & Gye), Classical Gas approaches the idea of recoding and remixing with a relentless irony. The kind of records we collect and the covers which we use for this project are what you would expect to find in the hutch of an old gramophone player, rather than “what’s hot” in iTunes. The process of recoding the album covers seeks to realign expectations of what is being looked at, such that it becomes difficult to see it in any other way. In this an album’s recoded signification implies the recognition of the already seen, of album covers like this, that signal something other than what we are seeing; colours, fonts etc., belonging to a historical period, to its genres and its demographic. One of the more bucolic and duplicitous forms of rhetoric, irony wants it both ways, to be totally lounge and theoretically too-cool-for school, as in Rencontre Terrestre by Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet. (classical-gas.com) This image persuades through the subtle alteration of typography that it belongs to a style, a period and a vibe that would seem to be at odds with the title and content of the album, but as a totality of image and text is entirely plausible. The same is true of Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The radical semiologist invites us into his comfortable sitting room for a cup of coffee. A traditional Times font reinforces the image of Barthes as an avuncular, Sunday afternoon story-teller or crooner, more Alistair Cooke/Perry Como than French Marxist. (classical-gas.com) In some instances, like Histoire de Tel Quel, there is no text at all on the cover and the image has to do its signifying work iconographically. (classical-gas.com) Here a sixties collage of French-ness on the original Victor Sylvester album from 1963 precedes and anticipates the re-written album it has been waiting for. That said, the original title In France is rather bland compared to Histoire de Tel Quel. A chic blond, the Eiffel Tower and intellectual obscurity vamp synaesthetically, conjuring the smell of Gauloises, espresso and agitated discussions of Communism on the Boulevard St. Germain. With Marcel Marceao with an “o” in mind, this example of a cover without text ironically demonstrates how Classical Gas, like The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices, is ostensibly a writing project. Just as the images are taken hostage from other contexts, text from the liner notes is sampled from other records and re-written in an act of ghost-writing to complete the remixed album. Without the liner notes, Classical Gas would make a capable Photoshop project, but lacks any force as critical remix. The redesigned and re-titled covers certainly re-code the album, transform it into something else; something else that obviously or obliquely reflects the theme, ideas or content of the title, whether it’s Louis Althusser’s Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon or Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference. If you don’t hear the ruggedness of Leslie Fiedler’s essays in No! In Thunder then the writing hasn’t worked. The liner notes are the albums’ conscience, the rubric that speaks the tunes, the words and elusive ideas that are implied but can never be heard. The Histoire de Tel Quel notes illustrate this suggestiveness: You may well think as is. Philippe Forest doesn’t, not in this Éditions du Seuil classic. The titles included on this recording have been chosen with a dual purpose: for those who wish to think and those who wish to listen. What Forest captures in this album is distinctive, fresh and daring. For what country has said it like it is, has produced more robustesse than France? Here is some of that country’s most famous talent swinging from silk stockings, the can-can, to amour, presented with the full spectrum of stereo sound. (classical-gas.com) The writing accurately imitates the inflection and rhythm of liner notes of the period, so on the one hand it sounds plausibly like a toe-tapping dance album. On the other, and at the same time, it gestures knowingly to the written texts upon which it is based, invoking its rigours as a philosophical text. The dithering suggestiveness of both – is it music or text – is like a scrambled moving image always coming into focus, never quite resolving into one or the other. But either is plausible. The Tel Quel theorists were interested in popular culture like the can-can, they were fascinated with the topic of love and if instead of books they produced albums, their thinking would be auditioned in full stereo sound. With irony in mind, then, it’s hardly surprising to know that the implicit title of the project, that is neither seen nor heard but always imminent, is Classical Gasbags. (classical-gas.com) Liner notes elaborate and complete an implicit narrative in the title and image, making something compellingly realistic that is a composite of reality and fabulation. Consider Adrian Martin’s Surrealism (A Quite Special Frivolity): France is the undeniable capital of today’s contemporary sound. For Adrian Martin, this is home ground. His French soul glows and expands in the lovely Mediterranean warmth of this old favourite, released for the first time on Project 3 Total Sound Stereo. But don’t be deceived by the tonal and melodic caprices that carry you along in flutter-free sound. As Martin hits his groove, there will be revolution by night. Watch out for new Adrian Martin releases soon, including La nuit expérimentale and, his first title in English in many years, One more Bullet in the Head (produced by Bucky Pizzarelli). (classical-gas.com) Referring to Martin’s famous essay of the same name, these notes allusively skirt around his actual biography (he regularly spends time in France), his professional writing on surrealism (“revolution by night” was the sub-title of a catalogue for the Surrealism exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993 to which he contributed an essay) (Martin 1993), as well as “One more bullet in the head,” the rejected title of an essay that was published in World Art magazine in New York in the mid-1990s. While the cover evokes the cool vibe of nouvelle vague Paris, it is actually from a 1968 album, Roma Oggi by the American guitarist Tony Mottola (a real person who actually sounds like a fictional character from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America, a film on which Martin has written a book for the British Film Institute). Plausibility, in terms of Martin’s Surrealism album, has to be as compellingly real as the sincerity of Sandy Scott’s Here’s Sandy. And it should be no surprise to see the cover art of Scott’s album return as Georges Bataille’s Erotism. Gramophone The history of the gramophone represents the technological desire to write sound. In this the gramophone record is a ligature of sound and text, a form of phonographic writing. With this history in mind it’s hardly surprising that theorists such as Derrida and Kittler included the gramophone under the conceptual framework of a general grammatology (Derrida 1992, 253 & Kittler 1997, 28). (classical-gas.com) Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology is the avatar of Classical Gas in its re-writing of a previous writing. Re-inscribing the picaresque Pal Joey soundtrack as a foundation text of post-structuralism is appropriate in terms of the gramme or literate principle of Western metaphysics as well as the echolalia of remix. As Derrida observes in Of Grammatology, history and knowledge “have always been determined (and not only etymologically or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence” (Derrida 1976, 10). A gas way to finish, you might say. But in retrospect the ur-text that drives the poetics of Classical Gas is not Of Grammatology but the errant Marcel Marceau album described previously. Far from being an oddity, an aberration or a “novelty” album, it is a classic gramophone recording, the quintessential writing of an absent speech, offbeat and untimely. References Bahktin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Bangs, Lester. “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies”. Phonograph Record Magazine, March, 1978. Reproduced at http://rateyourmusic.com/list/dacapo/the_ten_most_ridiculous_records_of_the_seventies__by_lester_bangs. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Flamingo, 1982. ---. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Granada, 1982. ---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ---. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. ---. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ---. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. Gal, Dani. Interview with Jens Hoffmann, Istanbul Biennale Companion. Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts, 2011. Kittler, Friedrich. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” in Surrealism: Revolution by Night. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ---. Online communication with authors, June 2011. Tofts, Darren and Lisa Gye. The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices. 2010-ongoing. http://www.secretprehistory.net/. ---. Classical Gas. 2011-ongoing. http://www.classical-gas.com/.

In the public domain of end, what is the real impact of endism on our cultural and political lives? Are the proponents of apocalypse and armageddon correct to assume that there is an impending divine climax to the system of human affairs on this planet? Researching in the world of endism, it is usually the extreme, often dangerous forms of endist belief which the media popularly exploit to define 'other' forms of 'endist' fundamentalism. Reading about the apocacidal (suicides for the apocalypse) tendencies of various cults and sects horrifies us in their acts of forcible manipulation. Yet apocaholicism (a mental state of intoxication on the endtimes) can not be limited to the extra-societal gathering in the outer suburbs that awaits an end with grim but enthusiastic anticipation and which makes the occasional evening news headline or Sixty Minutes exposure. Nor can a keen sense of apocalypse be situated as being primarily a characteristic of religious fundamentalism. Secular society itself, as suggested by this collection of essays, is drunk on different meditations of the 'end'. In film alone, from Deep Impact through Armageddon to The End of Days, a mainstream space exists for courting the end in public forms of spectacularisation and profit-making. In this use, the end creates revenue. But there are other senses of the end too in secular society. Within the broader scope of the public exist those individuals who comprise this mass, and who also experience an ultimate more personal end, death. Yet death is only regarded literally by the physical professions. In the more social sphere, this phenomenon is as highly constructed as any other cultural entity. For instance, death functions as closure to the individual narrative of life. In this place, it is greeted with wails of sorrow and remorse for the deceased, and it is for this reason that death is also constructed as a beginning for a transformed body and other world in some belief systems. This latter view of death minimises the importance of death by subscribing to a perspective, which postulates life as an ongoing series of endings - of childhood, education, career, hearing and physical existence. However, death manifests itself in many other forms, as this issue of M/C demonstrates. In this collection, twelve authors wrestle with the question of 'end' and interrogate the links between the character of 'end' and the crisis of definition in what exactly is an 'end'? Refusing to offer superficial solutions to defining 'end', participants from America, Australia, New Zealand and England maintain that the 'end' is never neutral, but that the totality of a given time, of individual personalities reading 'signs of the endtimes', and the question of narrative -- not just the benefits of charting an 'end' from a supposed 'beginning' -- must be taken into account. The two streams of public and private senses of the end have directed the flow and organisation of content within this issue of M/C. How we engage with private, often personal treatments of 'end' is as important as how we deal with 'endism' in the public domain. Yet, as became apparent in shaping this engagement for publication, these two spheres of interrogation are not similar and sometimes mutually inconsistent. In order to not favour public over private, we decided to arrange the collection into two sections: 'critiques' and 'perspectives', with the addition of two guided internet tours by the editors. Six writers examine the domain of end as public narrative: The critiques section feature article asks, 'the end of the world is near, or is it?' It can be suggested that endtime expectants are tied to doctrines of theology that define the 'end' in very specialised terms. The terms can be contradictory across theologica -- one religious organisation may understand Sunday worship to mark a sign of the end whereas another perceives something more immediate and apocalyptic in the ascendancy of smart cards -- but for endtimes believers their interpretative home resides along a single intellectual path: the 'end' is theological. With the layperson in mind, David Bennett marks out this theological landscape used to represent and define the apocalypse in Australia. He introduces us to an often hidden character of the armageddon script, the Endtimer, and reminds us that prophecy popularisation in Australia, if less visible than in our western counterparts, remains alive and well in 1999. How well received is the Endtimer within society? Nick Caldwell takes on another type of Endtimer, the 'spoilers and cheaters' -- those democratisers of access and evaluation to the 'end' of a film or game. He argues that since we cannot have an 'end' without narrative, we need to think about the textual strategies used when we try to locate the 'end' in a particular textual place and the reading strategies used to avoid this 'end' until its appointed time of authorial revelation. Nick re-evaluates the place of the spoiler or cheater in contemporary reading practices, though not without a strategically placed spoiler of his own... Extending narrative to medium, 'Bandwidth' is clearly a term whose time is here. But what would the reconceptualisation of 'bandwidth' suggest for its future? Axel Bruns interrogates the ways in which 'bandwidth' is created and defined by its users and controllers. In 'The End of Bandwidth', he considers the tactical implications of 'non-bandwidth' activity upon the media environment and suggests the migration of the term 'bandwidth' to the periphery in favour of a less commercially framed interpretation -- the intersubjective 'infinite' -- is more suited to a contemporary and workable understanding of the Net. 'Apocacides, Apocaholics and Apocalists' takes a selective tour through the landscape of endism that permeates the Internet. One must ask, 'why contemporary apocalypticism'? Certainly not because visions of extinction dominate private, popular and scientific imaginations today? Nor because the apocalypse is an interesting anecdote from scriptures past, a tale of postponed divine re-creation to be told from generation to generation of what might have been had Friedrich Nietzsche not spoken up? Too many expect an imminent literal end to the world as we know it for the detractors of endism to dismiss it so easily. The reasons for apocalyptism are often hidden, slippery in definition -- sometimes for the complex history of the endtimes narrative, other times for the less than enthusiastic responses it evokes in the non-Christianised world. Geoff Hoyte offers one explanation regarding the endurance of endism: hope. In a common-sense approach to the 'end', he relates a humble perspective of dignified courtship with apocalypticism and suggests a key to an even greater 'beginning'. Can there be a context for intellectual legitimacy of the apocalypse? Henry Lawton outlines a variety of approaches to endism and in the process positions as a central concern questions to do with representations of the 'end' in popular and intellectual work. From the discipline of psychohistory, Henry argues that it is possible to chart the development of endist perspectives. From a listener's perspective, Alex Burns examines the cycles of alien discontinuity, fragmentation and post-millennium foreboding within a gritty meditation on 'end', the album The Fragile. As a reflexive index of social-political realities, Alex argues that certain styles of music can be embraced within a space for Sadeian aesthetics and that the 'dynamic synthesis' Nine Inch Nails embodies within its music has wider implications for the nature and direction of contemporary global cultural shift. A unique subjectivity, 'The Machine is Obsolete' invokes a rarely-used, if sometimes impossible language of review: the description of musical form, an aural projection, via written text, the visual projection. Six writers examine the domain of death as a private narrative: The perspectives section's feature article comes from a New Zealand Funeral Director, Michael Wolffram. From this profession, he examines the manner in which the bereaved construct death through religious and secular belief systems. According to Wolffram, these views on death actually affirm notions of beginnings rather than the presumed endings -- religious frameworks discuss death in terms of an afterlife whilst secular paradigms present the advent of an altered state of life after death via the impact of the deceased's works in a community. However, Wolffram believes that the focus of death has shifted from the community to the individual more recently, with society marginalising the experience of dying by discarding traditional systems of support. He suggests that contemporary society has yet to produce a new system of support, which has, perhaps positively, empowered the individual to choose and own a framework of death -- be it already existing, individually patented or indeed non-existent. Philip Nitschke's article continues this theme of the individual's empowerment of death. Nitschke is an Australian medical doctor best known for his strong advocacy of euthanasia and its legalisation. He begins with a story of an encounter with an 85-year-old German woman who had survived a Nazi concentration camp. She was in good health, but was requesting the power to end her life. This is a common situation, along with the requests received from terminally-ill patients, according to Nitschke, and he further claims that statistics are beginning to indicate that individuals who are empowered with their own deaths achieve an improved quality of life -- be they terminally ill or well in health. He provides these statistics as continuing evidence in his crusade to encourage medical doctors to relinquish their potential sovereignty over the timing of death in these cases and empower the individual in this matter. Pain and suffering are relative -- or so Donna Lee Brien suggests in an excerpt from her fictionalised biography of Edith and John Power. As standards of life deteriorate under war conditions, Edith Power becomes aware of the value of life itself rather than life values, by which she once judged her existence. But as she begins to appreciate living, she learns of the immanent death of her husband, John. Once again what is held dear and valued in her life shifts when all she is left with is memories. "The virtual is dead! Long live online!" cries Lelia Green in her manifesto-like article, which calls for the end of the phrase "virtual community". Green revisits some of the negative criticism of online communication and communities, addressing these by presenting some negative attributes of 'real' life and the benefits of online. As we move into the next millennium, Green believes that the notion of 'virtual' with respect to online activity should die its rightful death, and that the term "online community", in its better reflection of the its environment, should be adopted. Philosophy has long held that one cannot experience death directly or first hand, but can only hope to gain a semblance of understanding through representation. Using Levinas and Heidegger, Laurie Johnson challenges this premise, proposing that personal death can be 'experienced' through Other's death. Johnson recounts his own dream of death to explore the narrative and character of death within this dream. The character of death is identified as himself and the death dream is equated with personal experience. The author leaves the reader with the question of the extent to which dreams can potentially be related to experience. Physical, individual end can be discussed as 'death', or less obviously as the rear-end, as Simon Astley-Scholfield has done in his article on Allen Ginsberg's 1986 poem, "Sphincter". Scholfield suggests that Ginsberg's poem indicates a significant point in his writing by marking a transition in this poet's construction of sexual pleasure. As Scholfield notes, "Sphincter" incorporates an awareness of wider social issues, for instance AIDS and age, and transforms anal-erotic joy from an act involving flesh contact to that of "safe sex". This transition and maturing of the poet is observed by Scholfield in the context of his larger body of work. Endism is in a constant state of creation and intense negotiation. The 'end' derives its power from the contestation over its senses and uses: Is the 'end' as understood within an apocalyptic framework imminent? What are the signs of its approach? Is the death of self ultimate and final? What experience, if any, lies beyond that final curtain each of us will one day face? Within public and private domains, the competition for meaning over 'end' is diverse and complex but one thing is certain: the 'end' is never here nor there -- it is always nigh! Jason Ensor, Felicity Meakins-- 'End' Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jason Ensor, Felicity Meakins. "Editorial: 'End'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/edit.php>. Chicago style: Jason Ensor, Felicity Meakins, "Editorial: 'End'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jason Ensor, Felicity Meakins. (1999) Editorial: 'end'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture v(n). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Special occasion cookery has been a staple of the cookbook writing in the English speaking Western world for decades. This includes providing catering for personal milestones as well as religious and secular festivals. Yet, in an era when the culinary publishing sector is undergoing considerable expansion and market segmentation, narratives of foods marking of one of life’s central and inescapable rites—death—are extremely rare. This discussion investigates examples of food writing related to death and funeral rites in contemporary cookbooks. Funeral feasts held in honour of the dead date back beyond recorded history (Luby and Gruber), and religious, ceremonial and community group meals as a component of funeral rites are now ubiquitous around the world. In earlier times, the dead were believed to derive both pleasure and advantage from these offerings (LeClercq), and contemporary practice still reflects this to some extent, with foods favoured by the deceased sometimes included in such meals (see, for instance, Varidel). In the past, offering some sustenance as a component of a funeral was often necessary, as mourners might have travelled considerable distances to attend the ceremony, and eateries outside the home were not as commonplace or convenient to access as they are today. The abundance and/or lavishness of the foods provided may also have reflected the high esteem in which the dead was held, and offered as a mark of community respect (Smith and Bird). Following longstanding tradition, it is still common for Western funeral attendees to gather after the formal parts of the event—the funeral service and burial or cremation —in a more informal atmosphere to share memories of the deceased and refreshments (Simplicity Funerals 31). Thursby notes that these events, which are ostensibly about the dead, often develop into a celebration of the ties between living family members and friends, “times of reunions and renewed relationships” (94). Sharing food is central to this celebration as “foods affirm identity, strengthen kinship bonds, provide comfortable and familiar emotional support during periods of stress” (79), while familiar dishes evoke both memories and promising signals of the continued celebration of life” (94). While in the southern states and some other parts of the USA, it is customary to gather at the church premises after the funeral for a meal made up of items contributed by members of the congregation, and with leftovers sent home with the bereaved family (Siegfried), it is more common in Australasia and the UK to gather either in the home of the principal mourners, someone else’s home or a local hotel, club or restaurant (Jalland). Church halls are a less common option in Australasia, and an increasing trend is the utilisation of facilities attached to the funeral home and supplied as a component of a funeral package (Australian Heritage Funerals). The provision of this catering largely depends on the venue chosen, with the cookery either done by family and/or friends, the hotel, club, restaurant or professional catering companies, although this does not usually affect the style of the food, which in Australia and New Zealand is often based on a morning or afternoon tea style meal (Jalland). Despite widespread culinary innovation in other contexts, funeral catering bears little evidence of experimentation. Ash likens this to as being “fed by grandmothers”, and describes “scones, pastries, sandwiches, biscuits, lamingtons—food from a fifties afternoon party with the taste of Country Women’s Association about it”, noting that funerals “require humble food. A sandwich is not an affront to the dead” (online). Numerous other memoirists note this reliance on familiar foods. In “S is for Sad” in her An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949), food writer M.F.K. Fisher writes of mourners’s deep need for sustenance at this time as a “mysterious appetite that often surges in us when our hearts seem breaking and our lives too bleakly empty” (135). In line with Probyn’s argument that food foregrounds the viscerality of life (7), Fisher notes that “most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak. […] It is as if our bodies, wiser than we who wear them, call out for encouragement and strength and […] compel us […] to eat” (135, 136). Yet, while funerals are a recurring theme in food memoirs (see, for example, West, Consuming), only a small number of Western cookbooks address this form of special occasion food provision. Feast by Nigella Lawson Nigella Lawson’s Feast: Food that Celebrates Life (2004) is one of the very few popular contemporary cookbooks in English that includes an entire named section on cookery for funerals. Following twenty-one chapters that range from the expected (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and wedding) to more original (children’s and midnight) feasts, Lawson frames her discussion with an anthropological understanding of the meaning of special occasion eating. She notes that we use food “to mark occasions that are important to us in life” (vii) and how eating together “is the vital way we celebrate anything that matters […] how we mark the connections between us, how we celebrate life” (vii). Such meals embody both personal and group identities because both how and what is eaten “lies at the heart of who we are-as individuals, families, communities” (vii). This is consistent with her overall aims as a food writer—to explore foods’ meanings—as she states in the book’s introduction “the recipes matter […] but it is what the food says that really counts” (vii). She reiterates this near the end of the book, adding, almost as an afterthought, “and, of course, what it tastes like” (318). Lawson’s food writing also reveals considerable detail about herself. In common with many other celebrity chefs and food writers, Lawson continuously draws on, elaborates upon, and ultimately constructs her own life as a major theme of her works (Brien, Rutherford, and Williamson). In doing so, she, like these other chefs and food writers, draws upon revelations of her private life to lend authenticity to her cooking, to the point where her cookbooks could be described as “memoir-illustrated-with-recipes” (Brien and Williamson). The privileging of autobiographical information in Lawson’s work extends beyond the use of her own home and children in her television programs and books, to the revelation of personal details about her life, with the result that these have become well known. Her readers thus know that her mother, sister and first and much-loved husband all died of cancer in a relatively brief space of time, and how these tragedies affected her life. Her first book, How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food (1998), opened with the following dedication: “In memory of my mother, Vanessa (1936–1985) and my sister Thomasina (1961–1993)” (dedication page). Her husband, BBC broadcaster and The Times (London) journalist John Diamond, who died of throat cancer in 2001, furthered this public knowledge, writing about both his illness and at length about Lawson in his column and his book C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too (1999). In Feast, Lawson discusses her personal tragedies in the introduction of the ‘Funeral Foods’ chapter, writing about a friend's kind act of leaving bags of shopping from the supermarket for her when she was grieving (451). Her first recipe in this section, for a potato topped fish pie, is highly personalised in that it is described as “what I made on the evening following my mother’s funeral” (451). Following this, she again uses her own personal experience when she notes that “I don’t think anyone wants to cook in the immediate shock of bereavement […] but a few days on cooking can be a calming act, and since the mind knows no rest and has no focus, the body may as well be busy” (451). Similarly, her recipe for the slowly hard-boiled, dark-stained Hamine Eggs are described as “sans bouche”, which she explains means “without mouths to express sorrow and anguish.” She adds, drawing on her own memories of feelings at such times, “I find that appropriate: there is nothing to be said, or nothing that helps” (455). Despite these examples of raw emotion, Lawson’s chapter is not all about grief. She also comments on both the aesthetics of dishes suitable for such times and their meanings, as well as the assistance that can be offered to others through the preparation and sharing of food. In her recipe for a lamb tagine that includes prunes, she notes, for example, that the dried plums are “traditionally part of the funeral fare of many cultures […] since their black colour is thought to be appropriate to the solemnity of the occasion” (452). Lawson then suggests this as a suitable dish to offer to someone in mourning, someone who needs to “be taken care of by you” (452). This is followed by a lentil soup, the lentils again “because of their dark colour … considered fitting food for funerals” (453), but also practical, as the dish is “both comforting and sustaining and, importantly, easy to transport and reheat” (453). Her next recipe for a meatloaf containing a line of hard-boiled eggs continues this rhetorical framing—as it is “always comfort food […] perfect for having sliced on a plate at a funeral tea or for sending round to someone’s house” (453). She adds the observation that there is “something hopeful and cheering about the golden yolk showing through in each slice” (453), noting that the egg “is a recurring feature in funeral food, symbolising as it does, the cycle of life, the end and the beginning in one” (453). The next recipe, Heavenly Potatoes, is Lawson’s version of the dish known as Mormon or Utah Funeral potatoes (Jensen), which are so iconic in Utah that they were featured on one of the Salt Lake City Olympic Games souvenir pins (Spackman). This tray of potatoes baked in milk and sour cream and then topped with crushed cornflakes are, she notes, although they sound exotic, quite familiar, and “perfect alongside the British traditional baked ham” (454), and reference given to an earlier ham recipe. These savoury recipes are followed by those for three substantial cakes: an orange cake marbled with chocolate-coffee swirls, a fruit tea loaf, and a rosemary flavoured butter cake, each to be served sliced to mourners. She suggests making the marble cake (which Lawson advises she includes in memory of the deceased mother of one of her friends) in a ring mould, “as the circle is always significant. There is a cycle that continues but—after all, the cake is sliced and the circle broken—another that has ended” (456). Of the fruitcake, she writes “I think you need a fruit cake for a funeral: there’s something both comforting and bolstering (and traditional) about it” (457). This tripartite concern—with comfort, sustenance and tradition—is common to much writing about funeral foods. Cookbooks from the American South Despite this English example, a large proportion of cookbook writing about funeral foods is in American publications, and especially those by southern American authors, reflecting the bountiful spreads regularly offered to mourners in these states. This is chronicled in novels, short stories, folk songs and food memoirs as well as some cookery books (Purvis). West’s memoir Consuming Passions: A Food Obsessed Life (2000) has a chapter devoted to funeral food, complete with recipes (132–44). West notes that it is traditional in southern small towns to bring covered dishes of food to the bereaved, and that these foods have a powerful, and singular, expressive mode: “Sometimes we say all the wrong things, but food […] says, ‘I know you are inconsolable. I know you are fragile right now. And I am so sorry for your loss’” (139). Suggesting that these foods are “concern and sympathy in a Pyrex bowl” (139), West includes recipes for Chess pie (a lemon tart), with the information that this is known in the South as “funeral pie” (135) and a lemon-flavoured slice that, with a cup of tea, will “revive the spirit” (136). Like Lawson, West finds significance in the colours of funeral foods, continuing that the sunny lemon in this slice “reminds us that life continues, that we must sustain and nourish it” (139). Gaydon Metcalf and Charlotte Hays’s Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral (2005), is one of the few volumes available dedicated to funeral planning and also offers a significant cookery-focused section on food to offer at, and take to, funeral events. Jessica Bemis Ward’s To Die For: A Book of Funeral Food, Tips, and Tales from the Old City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia (2004) not only contains more than 100 recipes, but also information about funeral customs, practical advice in writing obituaries and condolence notes, and a series of very atmospheric photographs of this historic cemetery. The recipes in the book are explicitly noted to be traditional comfort foods from Central Virginia, as Ward agrees with the other writers identified that “simplicity is the by-word when talking about funeral food” (20). Unlike the other examples cited here, however, Ward also promotes purchasing commercially-prepared local specialties to supplement home-cooked items. There is certainly significantly more general recognition of the specialist nature of catering for funerals in the USA than in Australasia. American food is notable in stressing how different ethnic groups and regions have specific dishes that are associated with post-funeral meals. From this, readers learn that the Amish commonly prepare a funeral pie with raisins, and Chinese-American funerals include symbolic foods taken to the graveside as an offering—including piles of oranges for good luck and entire roast pigs. Jewish, Italian and Greek culinary customs in America also receive attention in both scholarly studies and popular American food writing (see, for example, Rogak, Purvis). This is beginning to be acknowledged in Australia with some recent investigation into the cultural importance of food in contemporary Chinese, Jewish, Greek, and Anglo-Australian funerals (Keys), but is yet to be translated into local mainstream cookery publication. Possible Publishing Futures As home funerals are a growing trend in the USA (Wilson 2009), green funerals increase in popularity in the UK (West, Natural Burial), and the multi-million dollar funeral industry is beginning to be questioned in Australia (FCDC), a more family or community-centered “response to death and after-death care” (NHFA) is beginning to re-emerge. This is a process whereby family and community members play a key role in various parts of the funeral, including in planning and carrying out after-death rituals or ceremonies, preparing the body, transporting it to the place of burial or cremation, and facilitating its final disposition in such activities as digging the grave (Gonzalez and Hereira, NHFA). Westrate, director of the documentary A Family Undertaking (2004), believes this challenges us to “re-examine our attitudes toward death […] it’s one of life’s most defining moments, yet it’s the one we typically prepare for least […] [and an indication of our] culture of denial” (PBS). With an emphasis on holding meaningful re-personalised after-disposal events as well as minimal, non-invasive and environmentally friendly treatment of the body (Harris), such developments would also seem to indicate that the catering involved in funeral occasions, and the cookbooks that focus on the provision of such food, may well become more prominent in the future. References [AHF] Australian Heritage Funerals. “After the Funeral.” Australian Heritage Funerals, 2013. 10 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.ahfunerals.com.au/services.php?arid=31›. Ash, Romy. “The Taste of Sad: Funeral Feasts, Loss and Mourning.” Voracious: Best New Australian Food Writing. Ed. Paul McNally. Richmond, Vic.: Hardie Grant, 2011. 3 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.romyash.com/non-fiction/the-taste-of-sad-funeral-feasts-loss-and-mourning›. Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. "Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 28 Apr. 2013 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php›. Brien, Donna Lee, and Rosemary Williamson. “‘Angels of the Home’ in Cyberspace: New Technologies and Biographies of Domestic Production”. Biography and New Technologies. Australian National University. Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, ACT. 12-14 Sep. 2006. Conference Presentation. Diamond, John. C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too… . London: Vermilion, 1998. Fisher, M.F.K. “S is for Sad.” An Alphabet for Gourmets. New York, North Point P, 1989. 1st. pub. New York, Viking: 1949. Gonzalez, Faustino, and Mildreys Hereira. “Home-Based Viewing (El Velorio) After Death: A Cost-Effective Alternative for Some Families.” American Journal of Hospice & Pallative Medicine 25.5 (2008): 419–20. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. New York: Scribner, 2007. Jalland, Patricia. Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2002. Jensen, Julie Badger. The Essential Mormon Cookbook: Green Jell-O, Funeral Potatoes, and Other Secret Combinations. Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2004. Keys, Laura. “Undertaking a Jelly Feast in Williamstown.” Hobsons Bay Leader 28 Mar. 2011. 2 Apr. 2013 ‹http://hobsons-bay-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/undertaking-a-jelly-feast-in-williamstown›. Lawson, Nigella. How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. ---. Feast: Food that Celebrates Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2004. LeClercq, H. “The Agape Feast.” The Catholic Encyclopedia I, New York: Robert Appleton, 1907. 3 Apr. 2013. ‹http://www.piney.com/AgapeCE.html›. Luby, Edward M., and Mark F. Gruber. “The Dead Must Be Fed: Symbolic Meanings of the Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 9.1 (1999): 95–108. Metcalf, Gaydon, and Charlotte Hays. Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. New York: Miramax, 2005. [NHFA] National Home Funeral Alliance. “What is a Home Funeral?” National Home Funeral Alliance, 2012. 3 Apr. 2013. ‹http://homefuneralalliance.org›. PBS. “A Family Undertaking.” POV: Documentaries with a Point of View. PBS, 2004. 3 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.pbs.org/pov/afamilyundertaking/film_description.php#.UYHI2PFquRY›. Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Food/Sex/Identities. London: Routledge, 2000. Purvis, Kathleen. “Funeral Food.” The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. Ed. Andrew F. Smith. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 247–48. Rogak, Lisa. Death Warmed Over: Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World. Berkeley: Ten Speed P, 2004. Siegfried, Susie. Church Potluck Carry-Ins and Casseroles: Homestyle Recipes for Church Suppers, Gatherings, and Community Celebrations. Avon, MA.: Adams Media, 2006. Simplicity Funerals. Things You Need To Know About Funerals. Sydney: Simplicity Funerals, 1990. Smith, Eric Alden, and Rebecca L. Bliege Bird. “Turtle Hunting and Tombstone Opening: Public Generosity as Costly Signaling.” Evolution and Human Behavior 21.4 (2000): 245–61.Spackman, Christy. “Mormonism’s Jell-O Mold: Why Do We Associate the Religion With the Gelatin Dessert?” Slate Magazine 17 Aug. (2012). 3 Apr. 2013.Thursby, Jacqueline S. Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006. Varidel, Rebecca. “Bompas and Parr: Funerals and Food at Nelson Bros.” Inside Cuisine 12 Mar. (2011). 3 Apr. 2013 ‹http://insidecuisine.com/2011/03/12/bompas-and-parr-funerals-and-food-at-nelson-bros›. Ward, Jessica Bemis. Food To Die for: A Book of Funeral Food, Tips, and Tales from the Old City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia. Lynchburg: Southern Memorial Association, 2004. West, Ken. A Guide to Natural Burial. Andover UK: Sweet & Maxwell, 2010. West, Michael Lee. Consuming Passions: A Food Obsessed Life. New York: Perennial, 2000. Wilson, M.T. “The Home Funeral as the Final Act of Caring: A Qualitative Study.” Master in Nursing thesis. Livonia, Michigan: Madonna University, 2009.

IntroductionThis paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts (Genette Paratexts; Gray; Hills) reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. This interpretation leverages Matt Hills’ argument that certain kinds of “quality” screened drama are discursively framed as possessing the cultural capital associated with auterist cinema, despite their participation in the marketing logics of media franchising (Johnson). Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon proposes that when audiences receive literary adaptations, their pleasure inheres in a mixture of “repetition and difference”, “familiarity and novelty” (114). The difference can take many forms, but may be framed as guaranteed by the “distinction”, or—in Bourdieu’s terms—the cultural capital, of talented individuals and companies. Gerard Genette (Palimpsests) argued that “proximations” or updatings of classic literature involve acknowledging historical shifts in ideological norms as well as aesthetic techniques and tastes. When literary brands are made over using different media, there are economic lures to participation in currently fashionable technologies, as well as current political values. Linda Hutcheon also underlines the pragmatic constraints on the re-imagining of literary brands. “Expensive collaborative art forms” (87) such as films and large stage productions look for safe bets, seeking properties that have the potential to increase the audience for their franchise. Thus the marketplace influences both production and the experience of audiences. While this paper does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of audience reception appropriate to a fan studies approach, it borrows concepts from Matt Hills’s theorisation of marketing communication associated with screen “makeovers”. It shows that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. Strategies include marketing “reveals” of transformed content (Hills 319). Transformed content is presented not only as demonstrating originality and novelty; these promotional paratexts also perform displays of cultural capital on the part of production teams or of auteurist creatives (321). Case Study 1: Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is itself an adaptation of a literary brand that reimagines earlier transmedia genres. According to Spielberg’s biographer, the Tintin series of bandes dessinée (comics or graphic novels) by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), has affinities with “boys’ adventure yarns” referencing and paying homage to the “silent filmmaking and the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s” (McBride 530). The three comics adapted by Spielberg belong to the more escapist and less “political” phase of Hergé’s career (531). As a fast-paced action movie, building to a dramatic and spectacular closure, the major plot lines of Spielberg’s film centre on Tintin’s search for clues to the secret of a model ship he buys at a street market. Teaming up with an alcoholic sea captain, Tintin solves the mystery while bullying Captain Haddock into regaining his sobriety, his family seat, and his eagerness to partner in further heroic adventures. Spielberg’s industry stature allowed him the autonomy to combine the commercial motivations of contemporary “tentpole” cinema adaptations with aspirations towards personal reputation as an auteurist director. Many of the promotional paratexts associated with the film stress the aesthetic distinction of the director’s practice alongside the blockbuster spectacle of an action film. Reinventing the Literary Brand as FranchiseComic books constitute the “mother lode of franchises” (Balio 26) in a industry that has become increasingly global and risk-adverse (see also Burke). The fan base for comic book movies is substantial and studios pre-promote their investments at events such as the four-day Comic-Con festival held annually in San Diego (Balio 26). Described as “tentpole” films, these adaptations—often of superhero genres—are considered conservative investments by the Hollywood studios because they “constitute media events; […] lend themselves to promotional tie-ins”; are “easy sells in world markets and […] have the ability to spin off sequels to create a franchise” (Balio 26). However, Spielberg chose to adapt a brand little known in the primary market (the US), thus lacking the huge fan-based to which pre-release promotional paratexts might normally be targeted. While this might seem a risky undertaking, it does reflect “changed industry realities” that seek to leverage important international markets (McBride 531). As a producer Spielberg pursued his own strategies to minimise economic risk while allowing him creative choices. This facilitated the pursuit of professional reputation alongside commercial success. The dual release of both War Horse and Tintin exemplify the director-producer’s career practice of bracketing an “entertainment” film with a “more serious work” (McBride 530). The Adventures of Tintin was promoted largely as technical tour de force and spectacle. Conversely War Horse—also adapted from a children’s text—was conceived as a heritage/nostalgia film, marked with the attention to period detail and lyric cinematography of what Matt Hills describes as “aestheticized fiction”. Nevertheless, promotional paratexts stress the discourse of auteurist transformation even in the case of the designedly more commercial Tintin film, as I discuss further below. These pre-release promotions emphasise Spielberg’s “painterly” directorial hand, as well as the professional partnership with Peter Jackson that enabled cutting edge innovation in animation. As McBride explains, the “dual release of the two films in the US was an unusual marketing move” seemingly designed to “showcase Spielberg’s artistic versatility” (McBride 530).Promotional Paratexts and Pre-Recruitment of FansAs Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have explained, marketing paratexts predate screen adaptations (Gray; Mittell). As part of the commercial logic of franchise development, selective release of information about a literary brand’s transformation are designed to bring fans of the “original,” or of genre communities such as fantasy or comics audiences, on board with the adaptation. Analysing Steven Moffat’s revelations about the process of adapting and creating a modern TV series from Conan Doyle’s canon (Sherlock), Matt Hills draws attention to the focus on the literary, rather than the many screen reinventions. Moffat’s focus on his childhood passion for the Holmes stories thus grounds the team’s adaptation in a period prior to any “knowledge of rival adaptations […] and any detailed awareness of canon” (326). Spielberg (unlike Jackson) denied any such childhood affective investment, claiming to have been unaware of the similarities between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the Tintin series until alerted by a French reviewer of Raiders (McBride 530). In discussing the paradoxical fidelity of his and Jackson’s reimagining of Tintin, Spielberg performed homage to the literary brand while emphasising the aesthetic limitations within the canon of prior adaptations:‘We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film’, Spielberg explained during preproduction, ‘and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.’ (McBride 531)In these “reveals”, the discourse positions Spielberg and Jackson as both fans and auteurs, demonstrating affective investment in Hergé’s concepts and world-building while displaying the ingenuity of the partners as cinematic innovators.The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentAccording to Hills, “quality TV drama” no less than “makeover TV,” is subject to branding practices such as the “reveal” of innovations attributed to creative professionals. Marketing paratexts discursively frame the “professional and creative distinction” of the teams that share and expand the narrative universe of the show’s screen or literary precursors (319–20). Distinction here refers to the cultural capital of the creative teams, as well as to the essential differences between what adaptation theorists refer to as the “hypotext” (source/original) and “hypertext” (adaptation) (Genette Paratexts; Hutcheon). The adaptation’s individualism is fore-grounded, as are the rights of creative teams to inherit, transform, and add richness to the textual universe of the precursor texts. Spielberg denied the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) linking Tintin and Raiders, though he is reported to have enthusiastically acknowledged the similarities once alerted to them. Nevertheless, Spielberg first optioned Hergé’s series only two years later (1983). Paratexts “reveal” Hergé’s passing of the mantle from author to director, quoting his: “ ‘Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin’” (McBride 531).Promotional reveals in preproduction show both Spielberg and Jackson performing mutually admiring displays of distinction. Much of this is focused on the choice of motion capture animation, involving attachment of motion sensors to an actor’s body during performance, permitting mapping of realistic motion onto the animated figure. While Spielberg paid tribute to Jackson’s industry pre-eminence in this technical field, the discourse also underlines Spielberg’s own status as auteur. He claimed that Tintin allowed him to feel more like a painter than any prior film. Jackson also underlines the theme of direct imaginative control:The process of operating the small motion-capture virtual camera […] enabled Spielberg to return to the simplicity and fluidity of his 8mm amateur films […] [The small motion-capture camera] enabled Spielberg to put himself literally in the spaces occupied by the actors […] He could walk around with them […] and improvise movements for a film Jackson said they decided should have a handheld feel as much as possible […] All the production was from the imagination right to the computer. (McBride 532)Along with cinematic innovation, pre-release promotions thus rehearse the imaginative pre-eminence of Spielberg’s vision, alongside Jackson and his WETA company’s fantasy credentials, their reputation for meticulous detail, and their innovation in the use of performance capture in live-action features. This rehearsal of professional capital showcases the difference and superiority of The Adventures of Tintin to previous animated adaptations.Case Study 2: Andrew Motion: Silver, Return to Treasure Island (2012)At first glance, literary fiction would seem to be a far-cry from the commercial logics of tentpole cinema. The first work of pure fiction by a former Poet Laureate of Great Britain, updating a children’s classic, Silver: Return to Treasure Island signals itself as an exemplar of quality fiction. Yet the commercial logics of the publishing industry, no less than other media franchises, routinise practices such as author interviews at bookshop visits and festivals, generating paratexts that serve its promotional cycle. Motion’s choice of this classic for adaptation is a step further towards a popular readership than his poetry—or the memoirs, literary criticism, or creative non-fiction (“fabricated” or speculative biographies) (see Mars-Jones)—that constitute his earlier prose output. Treasure Island’s cultural status as boy’s adventure, its exotic setting, its dramatic characters long available in the public domain through earlier screen adaptations, make it a shrewd choice for appropriation in the niche market of literary fiction. Michael Cathcart’s introduction to his ABC Radio National interview with the author hones in on this:Treasure Island is one of those books that you feel as if you’ve read, event if you haven’t. Long John Silver, young Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, Israel Hands […], these are people who stalk our collective unconscious, and they’re back. (Cathcart)Motion agrees with Cathcart that Treasure Island constitutes literary and common cultural heritage. In both interviews I analyse in the discussion here, Motion states that he “absorbed” the book, “almost by osmosis” as a child, yet returned to it with the mature, critical, evaluative appreciation of the young adult and budding poet (Darragh 27). Stevenson’s original is a “bloody good book”; the implication is that it would not otherwise have met the standards of a literary doyen, possessing a deep knowledge of, and affect for, the canon of English literature. Commercial Logic and Cultural UpdatingSilver is an unauthorised sequel—in Genette’s taxonomy, a “continuation”. However, in promotional interviews on the book and broadcast circuit, Motion claimed a kind of license from the practice of Stevenson, a fellow writer. Stevenson himself notes that a significant portion of the “bar silver” remained on the island, leaving room for a sequel to be generated. In Silver, Jim, the son of Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins, and Natty, daughter of Long John Silver and the “woman of colour”, take off to complete and confront the consequences of their parents’ adventures. In interviews, Motion identifies structural gaps in the precursor text that are discursively positioned to demand completion from, in effect, Stevenson’s literary heir: [Stevenson] was a person who was interested in sequels himself, indeed he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped [which is] proof he was interested in these things. (Cathcart)He does leave lots of doors and windows open at the end of Treasure Island […] perhaps most bewitchingly for me, as the Hispaniola sails away, they leave behind three maroons. So what happened to them? (Darragh)These promotional paratexts drop references to Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Wild Sargasso Sea, the plays of Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, the poetry of Auden and John Clare, and Stevenson’s own “self-conscious” sources: Defoe, Marryat. Discursively, they evidence “double coding” (Hills) as both homage for the canon and the literary “brand” of Stevenson’s popular original, while implicated in the commercial logic of the book industry’s marketing practices.Displays of DistinctionMotion’s interview with Sarah Darragh, for the National Association of Teachers of English, performs the role of man of letters; Motion “professes” and embodies the expertise to speak authoritatively on literature, its criticism, and its teaching. Literature in general, and Silver in particular, he claims, is not “just polemic”, that is “not how it works”, but it does has the ability to recruit readers to moral perspectives, to convey “ new ideas[s] of the self.” Silver’s distinction from Treasure Island lies in its ability to position “deep” readers to develop what is often labelled “theory of mind” (Wolf and Barzillai): “what good literature does, whether you know it or not, is to allow you to be someone else for a bit,” giving us “imaginative projection into another person’s experience” (Darragh 29). A discourse of difference and superiority is also associated with the transformed “brand.” Motion is emphatic that Silver is not a children’s book—“I wouldn’t know how to do that” (Darragh 28)—a “lesser” genre in canonical hierarchies. It is a writerly and morally purposeful fiction, “haunted” by greats of the canon and grounded in expertise in philosophical and literary heritage. In addition, he stresses the embedded seriousness of his reinvention: it is “about how to be a modern person and about greed and imperialism” (Darragh 27), as well as a deliberatively transformed artefact:The road to literary damnation is […] paved with bad sequels and prequels, and the reason that they fail […] is that they take the original on at its own game too precisely […] so I thought, casting my mind around those that work [such as] Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead […] or Jean Rhys’ wonderful novel Wide Sargasso Sea which is about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre […] that if I took a big step away from the original book I would solve this problem of competing with something I was likely to lose in competition with and to create something that was a sort of homage […] towards it, but that stood at a significant distance from it […]. (Cathcart) Motion thus rehearses homage and humility, while implicitly defending the transformative imagination of his “sequel” against the practice of lesser, failed, clonings.Motion’s narrative expansion of Stevenson’s fictional universe is an example of “overwriting continuity” established by his predecessor, and thus allowing him to make “meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction” while demonstrating his own “creative viewpoint” (Hills 320). The novel boldly recapitulates incidental details, settings, and dramatic embedded character-narrations from Treasure Island. Distinctively, though, its opening sequence is a paean to romantic sensibility in the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850).The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentSilver’s paratexts discursively construct its transformation and, by implication, improvement, from Stevenson’s original. Motion reveals the sequel’s change of zeitgeist, its ideological complexity and proximity to contemporary environmental and postcolonial values. These are represented through the superior perspective of romanticism and the scientific lens on the natural world:Treasure Island is a pre-Enlightenment story, it is pre-French Revolution, it’s the bad old world […] where people have a different ideas of democracy […] Also […] Jim is beginning to be aware of nature in a new way […] [The romantic poet, John Clare] was publishing in the 1820s but a child in the early 1800s, I rather had him in mind for Jim as somebody who was seeing the world in the same sort of way […] paying attention to the little things in nature, and feeling a sort of kinship with the natural world that we of course want to put an environmental spin on these days, but [at] the beginning of the 1800s was a new and important thing, a romantic preoccupation. (Cathcart)Motion’s allusion to Wild Sargasso Sea discursively appropriates Rhys’s feminist and postcolonial reimagination of Rochester’s creole wife, to validate his portrayal of Long John Silver’s wife, the “woman of colour.” As Christian Moraru has shown, this rewriting of race is part of a book industry trend in contemporary American adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. Interviews position readers of Silver to receive the novel in terms of increased moral complexity, sharing its awareness of the evils of slavery and violence silenced in prior adaptations.Two streams of influence [come] out of Treasure Island […] one is Pirates of the Caribbean and all that jolly jape type stuff, pirates who are essentially comic [or pantomime] characters […] And the other stream, which is the other face of Long John Silver in the original is a real menace […] What we are talking about is Somalia. Piracy is essentially a profoundly serious and repellent thing […]. (Cathcart)Motion’s transformation of Treasure Island, thus, improves on Stevenson by taking some of the menace that is “latent in the original”, yet downplayed by the genre reinvented as “jolly jape” or “gorefest.” In contrast, Silver is “a book about serious things” (Cathcart), about “greed and imperialism” and “how to be a modern person,” ideologically reconstructed as “philosophical history” by a consummate man of letters (Darragh).ConclusionWhen iconic literary brands are reimagined across media, genres and modes, creative professionals frequently need to balance various affective and commercial investments in the precursor text or property. Updatings of classic texts require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the “original.” Producers in risk-averse industries such as screen and publishing media practice a certain pragmatism to ensure that fans’ nostalgia for a popular brand is not too violently scandalised, while taking care to reproduce currently popular technologies and generic conventions in the interest of maximising audience. As my analysis shows, promotional circuits associated with “quality” fiction and cinema mirror the commercial logics associated with less valorised genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Paying lip-service the sophisticated reading practices of contemporary fans of both cinema and literary fiction, their discourse shows the conflicting impulses to homage, critique, originality, and recruitment of audiences.ReferencesBalio, Tino. Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2013.Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Cathcart, Michael (Interviewer). Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island. 2013. Transcript of Radio Interview. Prod. Kate Evans. 26 Jan. 2013. 10 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/booksplus/silver/4293244#transcript›.Darragh, Sarah. "In Conversation with Andrew Motion." 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