Journal articles on the topic 'French symbolist literature'

In the 1910s in the Georgian literary area the first Symbolist group TsisperiQantsebi (The Blue Horns) comes into being, with a clearly defined purpose and aesthetic position, which implied renewing the Georgian literature and including it into the Western context. Desiring to expand the thought area and to modernize Georgian literature, Georgian Symbolists rested on the philosophical and worldview principles of French Symbolism. Georgian Symbolism appears as an original invariant generated from the French Symbolist aesthetics, which is unequivocally national.

To talk of Symbolism in French literature may be ambiguous, as two different categories of writers have been grouped under this generic term: the symbolists stricto sensu, such as Moréas or Viélé-Griffin, who were mostly minor poets, and some great figures of French literature. The aim of this article is to show that, although Symbolism as an organized movement did not produce any important contribution, the nineteenth century witnessed indeed the emergence of a new trend, common to several poets who were inclined to do away with the heritage of the classical school. These poets - of whom Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé are the most renowned, although they did not really associate with the symbolist school, created individualistic poetry of the foremost rank.

‘Synesthesia and Literary Symbolism’ broadens the well-established relationship between synesthesia and French Symbolist poetry to include Marinetti's experimentation with sensory blurring. Synesthesia was a recognized medical condition that came to public awareness by the end of the nineteenth-century both because of work made available to the public as well as there being a general sense associated with modernity of nervousness. The Symbolist poets beginning with Baudelaire applied the scientific concept of synesthesia as a metaphor to describe the modern condition. The feeling of the interconnectedness of the body and the city was picked up on most notably by Jules Romains, the founder of Unanimism and by Gustave Kahn and Gian Pietro Lucini, who helped to breathe new life into poetry by freeing verse of its traditional meter. Marinetti followed the example of his predecessors with the invention of the parole in libertà, which allowed for the representation of sensory overload.

When one studies the influence of French Symbolism on contemporary Western poetry it is necessary to define both Symbolism and influence. The first term is problematic not only because it is difficult to delimitate the reality it designates but because of the nature of the movement itself Rather than defining from the outside we will try to understand the genesis of the work of the four great 'symbolist’ poets in France, namely Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarme. We do not consider the notion of influence as causal but as a confrontation from one poet’s work with that of another, the presence of poets of the past in the thinking of later poets. The structural genesis of the poetics of the four poets shows a marked resemblance in as far as they' all overestimate the creative capabilities of imagination and language. Their poetry is not so much a meditation about the essence of poetry as an interrogation about its power to change reality. Modem poetry develops thus inside a tension between dream and action, but it is only now, in the work of the most lucid contemporary' poets, and after the sometimes draconian claims of theory in the human sciences, that attention has focused on a possible solution of poetry's dilemma which was already present in the French poet's work: this solution can be indicated with the word caritas in the strong sense of the word namely the acceptation of contingency, the need of incarnation and the pursuit of universality through poetic language.

Alfred Jarry, best known for his scandalous 1896 play Ubu Roi, wrote an equally scandalous work in 1898: L'Amour en visites (Visits of Love). This hybrid novel/play dramatizes several of Alfred Jarry's battles with the Symbolist movement, literary form, and inherited traditions. It is a work about rupture on all levels. In this article Kimberly Jannarone investigates the text and its backstory to give a greater understanding of Jarry's work and the last days of the Symbolist movement. Tracing the life of a central character, Lucien, who plays different roles as he travels through naturalistic and fantastic realms in a deviant coming-of-age story, L'Amour en visites condenses Jarry's formal and personal rejection of the worlds around him, especially that of the Symbolist literary scene. Culminating in a sensational coup de théâtre – a pair of lovers being flushed down the toilet – L'Amour en visites marked the closure of one part of Jarry's work and a chapter of his life. Kimberly Jannarone is the author of Artaud and His Doubles (University of Michigan Press, 2010). As well as two earlier essays on Jarry in New Theatre Quarterly – in NTQ 98 (May 2009) and NTQ 67 (August 2001) – she has published essays on avant-garde literature and performance in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, French Forum, TDR, Modernism/Modernity, and a book chapter on The Exquisite Corpse. Jannarone is Associate Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The symbol, as an archetype with inexhaustible meanings, remains a relevant object of scientific research. Especially when it comes to symbols used by different national cultures. One of such symbols, an image of the tragic fool, is quite favoured by the writers of romanticism and the turn of the twentieth century. A general interest in their artistic and aesthetic systems, the multiplicity of interpretations of archsymbols, and the specifics of their authorial and national manifestations in literature determine the relevance of this study. The subject of the study is the specifics of the image of the tragic fool in the works the French writers iconic for romanticism (Victor Hugo) and symbolism (Paul Verlaine). Historical and literary, comparative and typological, archetypal scientific methods are used in the work. Their potential made it possible to consider the functioning peculiarities of the image of a tragic fool through the prism of identity. The broad context of this problem made it possible to solve several objectives: to outline the origins of the image; determine the factors of its actualization in the romanticism and modernism works; and analyze the authors’ versions of interpretation. Herein is the novelty of the study. The results of the study are as follows: in French literature of romanticism and symbolism — given such a common ideological and artistic basis for their aesthetics as individualism — in Hugo’s romance the tragic fool is a grotesque mark of the era, a symbol of unresolved complex social problems. In contrast, the symbolist Verlaine perceives the tragic fool an alter ego of the contemporary artist in particular and a man of the era in general, giving preference to aesthetic and philosophical priorities over social. The high potential of the autobiographical content of the image of the tragic fool is a peculiar feature of the modernist interpretation. He functions both as a lyrical hero and a mask of an autolyrical character. In literary mystifications, it is a character under a double mask. In the artist’s chosen strategy of realization of the life scenario, this symbol is expressed in the form of feigned asociality, épater le bourgeois, primitivism as an imitation of creativity, self-parody. Further studies are promising; the image of the tragic fool in various national literatures is a common tool for writers to mockingly demonstrate the “interior” of the social and world order. At the same time, the tragic accent of this image lies in the tradition to perceive one’s work as a manifesto of “hateful love” for one’s time, homeland, and the world.

Much of the literature on neoclassicism in music focuses on Stravinsky or on the Stravinsky-Schoenberg polemic that emerged in the mid-1920s. Yet both approaches to neoclassicism bypass a crucial moment in its early formation: the former neglects Stravinsky's engagement with the musical priorities of postwar Paris, while the latter ignores the fact that many of the themes that would later crystallize under the banner of neoclassicism were first developed in opposition not to Schoenberg's music but to Debussy's. As described by Jacques Rivière in a letter to Stravinsky of 1919, the postwar musical climate was “anti-impressionist, anti-symbolist, and anti-Debussyist.” This article revisits the debates that appeared in the Parisian musical press between 1919 and 1923, a period in which the term “neoclassicism” had not yet been coined but in which a new, anti-Debussyist aesthetic was nevertheless emerging. Recognizing the role of anti-Debussyism in the formation of neoclassicism is necessary if we are to understand the motivation behind the movement, a motivation that was responsible for establishing its compositional priorities, instrumentation, and aesthetic. Regardless of what neoclassicism later came to represent—be it a return to counterpoint, to Bach, or to the eighteenth century—its initial impetus was much more straightforward. Rather than looking to pre-Romantic traditions, its beginnings were to be found closer to home, going no further back than the reaction against Debussy, Debussyism, and the prewar generation.

Various forms of transition in literature and art of the turn of 19th and 20th centuries havent been explored enough. The use of the concept of neo allows to clarify the ideas of neo-romanticism that have developed in modern science. The article analyzes the novel heritage of the Belgian writer Rodenbach as a transitional phenomenon that brings together the writer's tetralogy with romanticism, Parnassus and symbolist French poetry; as well as phenomenon that organically includes Belgian literature in the European space of intertextuality. It is proved that addressing the problems of art, the artist-creator, the beautiful soul, connects Rodenbach with the traditions of Yens romanticism, at a new stage of development of literature generates a transformation of the myth of romanticism. The ideal of art is not subject to devaluation, but the artist, who lives in society, always fails. Indulging in earthly passion, coming into conflict with society and himself, he doesnt keep faith in his beliefs. Real life creates illusions and self-deception, leading the character to disaster. Rodenbach uses a romantic model of mythologization, saturating it with symbolic allusions and signs, on the eve of modernism creates a neo-romantic novel synthesis.

The works of Richard Wagner have been celebrated for their impact on progressive elements in European culture, as a bridge from romanticism to modernism. In France the influence of Wagner on symbolist writers and artists, and musicians sympathetic to them, has emerged as particularly significant. But there was also a conservative response to Wagner that has received much less attention in the scholarly literature. This filiation is exemplified in the figure of Albéric Magnard and his opera Bérénice (1911), which he claimed was influenced by a “classical” Wagner. This article considers the classicism of Bérénice and its composer from several perspectives: portrayals of temperament that demonstrate consonance with classical precepts, political readings that emphasize classical values, the legacy of the French theater of the seventeenth century, and strategies of tonal organization and motivic development related to the German symphony extending back to Beethoven.

Towards the end of a life spent meditating on music, philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote that ‘music is the silence of words, just as poetry is the silence of prose’. With this lapidary remark, he bottled up essences of French symbolist musical doctrines, their elevation of music above language, their impulse to urge poetry towards the condition of musical sound, and their sense that music is ineffable. ‘And the ineffable’, Jankélévitch wrote, ‘cannot be expressed because there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it’. Denying that music was inarticulate – that what it invokes isindicible, unable to be said – he saw instead a hall of sonorous mirrors, saturated with implications and suggestions diat draw the mind on to a vanishing point that can never be reached. Music has the perfect apparitional quality that others would deem characteristic of symbolsper se, as that which materialises in the distance and cannot be caught when we journey towards its meaning: it will always recede, leaving us with our glowing trail of assumed connotations. Thus symbolist literature, with its rhapsodies to musical mystery, dealt profitably in poetic images of suggestive but unimaginable sound. Such sounds have their most famous incarnation in the melody of Mallarmé's faun's flute, repository for all that cannot be thought, said or remembered. Mallarme created a poetic symbol, verbally couched, which as symbolper seborrows the ineffability of music. It is a mirage, which we approach and lose even as we imagine its meaning. By choosing amusicalobject (a flute melody), Mallarmé drew doubly on music's apparitional quality — as if to say: even if the impossible could occur and we were to grasp the symbol and its single luminous meaning, hearing what the flute plays, that sound, like all music, would merely send us wandering onwards again.

Opperman’s poetry is firmly rooted in reality. This theme is explored in the first part of the paper, showing that while the poet is committed to visual and historical facts together with data of experience, he is, as a poet constantly attempting in various ways to discover universal values in a visual reality which may be of transient importance. After drawing a distinction between the particular French school of symbolism (Simbolisme) of the last quarter of the 19th century and the more general idea of symbolism (simboliek) where objects and facts are invested with symbolic meaning, the second part of the paper is devoted to the various methods and techniques employed by the poet to “release the angel from the rock”, whereas the third part of the paper concentrates on various poems illustrating these methods while tracing the symbolic process.

Françoise Sagan’s (1935–2004) work is popular in France and Latvia for two reasons: the world of her characters that draws the reader into a vortex of life cravings and love surprises, and her writing which is classic, clear and seemingly light, but saturated with cultural references and quotes. If the plot and characters appear to be self-sufficient, the translator has a problem with the titles of Sagan’s novels. When comparing the original to a translation, the writer’s style setting (for example, “Bonjour tristesse” in the Latvian translation “Esiet sveicinātas, skumjas”) or symbolism (for example, “La laisse” in the Latvian translation “Akordi”) is often lost. Sagan’s novels include references to literature, cinema, art, popular in the French society of her time, that make up the intertextuality of the literary works and give an additional dimension and, at the same time, economises on means of artistic expression. A transfer into a cultural environment risks losing some multicoloured layers of the source text. Sagan’s language’s relatively rare findings also lose their originality in translation, turning them into standard phrases. Thus, it should be concluded that the apparently well-formed, seemingly easily-written works of the French author remain within the so-called “women’s literature” or “French novel” without any indication of the sharpness with which Sagan has seen the brilliance and misery of her environment.

AbstractThe sparse literature on Dutch collectors around 1900 makes no mention of Hendrik Spaan (1851-1915; ill. I), a rather unfair omission. A baker of the Hague who lived at Korte Beestenmarkt 2, Spaan concentrated almost exclusively on the work of contemporary artists of The Hague, whether established or not. He was on good and even friendly terms with many of them. The younger ones regarded him as a kind of patron, not only because he purchased work at a time when it was extremely hard to find buyers, but also because he quite literally provided their daily bread when times were hard. One of his closest and longest contacts was undoubtedly with Jozef IsraelS. Interesting evidence of their relationship takes the form of a number of drawings, now scattered, which Israels dedicated to Spaan in gratitude for the pastries which the baker sent to Israels on St. Nicholas' Day for seventeen years (ills. 3a-f). Spaan owned some 1 14 paintings and watercolours, all described in detail in the 19 12 sale calalogue - the only source at our disposal, incidentally. No correspondence pertaining to his purchases exists, nor have any photographs or detailed visitors' descriptions surfaced which might hav e told us something about the hanging of the pictures and the growth of the collection. We do know that Spaan started to collect relatively late, in the early eighteen-eighties. He tended to buy fairly recent work, meaning early work by young artists and late work by such established masters as Israels, Bosboom or Weissenbruch. Judging by his personal contacts and undoubtedly limited funds - certainly in comparison with well-known collectors like Mesdag or Hidde Nijland - we may assume that he often bought pictures directly from artists' studios, avoiding accredited art-dealers whenever possible. Perhaps this accounts for the relatively large number of watercolours in his collection, and for the modest formats of many paintings, especially those by more established artists. Another reason for the latter circumstance may well have been the size of his house, which had to accommodate not only the bakery but his family of five children too. Since the much of the work cannot be traced with any certainty, it is difficult to assess the quality of the collection. Spaan exhibited a marked preference, though, for more or less 'impressionistic' work by representatives of the Hague School and younger artists closely connected with it: Arntzenius, for instance, and notably Willem de Zwart, with eighteen works by far the most generously represented artist in the collection. A striking feature of Spaan's collection, in comparison with others that focused on the Hague School, is the absence of its French precursors, the like-minded artists of the Barbizon School. Spaan was interested solely in Dutch art, preferably from his home-town of The Hague. In this, his collection is 'narrow' rather than specialized: work by younger artists who pursued a different, more audacious or more experimental path - figures such as Breitner, Witsen, Verster or Suze Robertson, not to mention the symbolist movement - is almost totally absent. Although his collection displayed a great variety of themes, he was not concerned with representative surveys either. Nor was he interested in medium or technique: his collection does not contain any drawings or the etchings that were so popular in his day. What remained was nonetheless a good and certainly representative cross-section of Hague, or Hague-oriented, art of the period of the Marises and Israels, pictures which fetched enormous prices on Spaan's death. Willem Maris' 'Morgenstond' ('Daybreak', ill. 12), which went for 12,000 guilders, beat them all. 'Together with portraits of Spaan and his wife (ill. 2), it was bequeathed in 1977 to the Haags Cemeentemuseum.

This paper reads The Monk by M. G. Lewis in the context of the literary and visual responses to the French Revolution, suggesting that its digestion of the horrors across the Channel is exhibited especially in its depictions of women. Lewis plays with public and domestic representations of femininity, steeped in social expectation and a rich cultural and religious imaginary. The novel’s ambivalence in the representation of femininity draws on the one hand on Catholic symbolism, especially its depictions of the Madonna and the virgin saints, and on the other, on the way the revolutionaries used the body of the queen, Marie Antoinette, to portray the corruption of the royal family. The Monk fictionalizes the ways in which the female body was exposed, both by the Church and by the Revolution, and appropriated to become a highly politicized entity, a tool in ideological argumentation.

In the period before Claude Paradin's Devises Héroïques (1551) and Paolo Giovio's Dialogo dell'Imprese (1555), our knowledge of the theory and use of devices is somewhat fragmentary. There are some well known cases: Maurice Scève's use of devices as a framework for his Délie, though he called them “emblesmes“; Rabelais’ device for Gargantua consisting of the Platonic androgyne with the motto “Charity seeketh not her own“; Erasmus's figure of Terminus and “Concedo nulli”. The author of the little known French version of the Penitencia de amor was probably concerned mainly with the religious and moral ideas which he develops at some length in his adaptation, but his second interest is clearly the fashion for devices, which he introduces and uses, together with some extensive colour symbolism, apparently to enhance the impact of his didactic additions.

With “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard,” of 1897 (“Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance”)—a meditation on how to set up a mental dice game that would visually inscribe the fatal play of human thought shipwrecked against unbeatable chance—Stéphane Mallarmé announced modernism. As his celebrated white sonnet about a swan stuck in the glacier of the blank page (“The new, lively, and lovely today”) had established the image of writing as a near-to-death experience, his equally celebrated understatement about how the ultimate presence of the rose depends on its absence “from any bouquet” had set up symbolism as the art of suggestion. Had any French poet ever had such influence on writers to come? such resonance for readers and artists? With Mallarmé modern poetry begins.

AbstractAlthough royal entries have long been studied by scholars, those undertaken by nobles and other political figures have generally attracted less attention. This is particularly true in musicological literature, a fact undoubtedly attributable to the paucity of surviving documentation on this topic. Yet music often played an important part in these spectacles, both by underlining the dignitary’s status and by enhancing key components of the symbolism deployed. Rather than concentrating on one particular event, this article brings together information about as many entries as possible made by such figures into French cities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This enables us to make general observations about the types of music used in these events (such as fanfares, Te Deums and dance music) in order to draw possible connections with extant musical sources, and also to ponder why certain musical elements mattered more than others to the contemporaries describing these occasions.

In this paper, the author presents the final period of the French Revolution as interpretated by Andrzej Wajda. The screenplay was prepared by Jean-Claude Carrière based on Stanisława Przybyszewska’s drama (also used by Wajda as a screenplay in many dramas). It helped the director to describe the reality of the intense time of Robespierre’s terror and Jacobin efforts to guillotine Danton and his allies. Wajda reveals the same mechanisms of crime, manipulation and lies which became the backdrop for political events in Poland between 1981-1983 (especially with the introduction of martial law in Poland in 1981). The model of Danton’s fall and the strengthening of totalitarian rule are considered the current model of history, which is based on cruelty and the struggle for power. The film forms the basis for a broader view of history as the tragic entanglement of events, which is the result of hubris and the desire for material goods, and is the origin of totalitarian rule. References to the emblems of the revolution, allegories, and the symbolism of art (paintings of David) are the fundamental ekphrasis of meanings set by the film. Wajda’s analysis of Danton shows some typical ways of understanding and interpreting the signs of culture and history.

The article examines the reception of the poetry by a French poet Henri de Regnier in the works of Maximilian Voloshin and Igor Severyanin. Voloshin was a passionate promoter of Regnier in Russia; he appealed to him in criticism, translated his poems and prose, and considered him to be a forerunner of “neo-realism,” a new stage of development in European and Russian literature. The interest of Severyanin in the work of Regnier develops under the influence of Voloshin’s 1910 article “Henri de Regnier.” The young Severyanin was influenced by this article and used accurate translations of Regner’s two poems included in the article for his own translation experiments: he even made the same mistake as Voloshin when translating one of these poems. Compared to Voloshin’s, Severyanin’s versions are less accurate; they have stylistic shifts and ironic tones absent in the original. Thus, the example of Voloshin’s and Severyanin’s different attitudes to Regnier’s poetry allows me to trace two different tendencies in the reception of Western authors within the culture of the so-called Russian Silver age: enthusiastic discipleship, more typical for Russian symbolists, and stylistic play and ironic distancing, more typical for Russian futurists.

The philosopher of Mathematics Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944) plays an important role in Claude Imbert's thought. His published work had a significant impact after the war. It is largely a reflection on debates on the foundation of mathematics and on two opposed models of axiomatics, foundationalist and constructionist. The philosophy he announced (cut short by his death during World War II) was to be a study of the generativity of conceptual structures, as opposed to a phenomenology of knowledge. He derived from his reflection on invention in mathematics a great scepticism on the ideas of the separateness and unity of consciousness and a criticism of the teleologies inherent in philosophies of consciousness. In that, his work, according to Claude Imbert, made possible the reflections on structures and symbolisms which were to dominate the French context in the following decades.

The paper considers Igor Severyanin’s approaches to the retransmission of Charles Baude-laire’s creative heritage in his lyrics. In the late 19th – early 20th century, there was a surge of interest in the works of French symbolists and their predecessors, especially to the fate and literary heritage of the author of “Flowers of evil.” Severyanin addressed Baudelaire’s poetry later, at the turn of the 1910s, referring both to his original texts, and translations and critical articles by his older contemporaries (V. Bryusov, F. Sologub, Viach. Ivanov, Ellis, Andrej Belyj, etc.). The analysis covers the peculiarities of this second-wave “Baudelairianism,” its differences from senior and junior symbolists’ apprenticeship, namely, the ironic game in-volving both the image of the “pariah poet” and some of the key themes and motifs of his poetry. In 1909, Severyanin begins mastering Baudelaire’s style by translating his sonnets, but later these, not being entirely successful, are ironically reinterpreted and published in the col-lection “Poesoantract” as purposeful parodies. Another version of the reception is presented in the poem “Sextina” (1910). Weaving a web of verbal puns, the Russian poet inscribes himself in the Pantheon of the famous rulers of doom, while destroying Baudelaire’s tragic aura and placing himself in the vacant place of the poet persecuted by public opinion. Thus, the Severyanin’s reception is seen to reveal the evolution of pre-modernist and modernist cultural codes being a part of the mass discourse, ironic distancing from them, and their loss of philo-sophical and ideological foundations. A conclusion is drawn that the deferential attitude to Baudelaire’s legacy is due both to the change in the readers’ perception in general and to the Severyanin’s aspiration for new avant-garde poetics.

This article examines the cycle by Isaac Babel “Red Cavalry in the context of literary trends of the 1920s. I. Babel avoided various literary organizations and loud manifestos; therefore, his role within the post-revolutionary literary system remains somewhat isolated: he had a reputation of a realist writer (although with some reservations) mostly due to specifically historical backstory of his military cycle. In this regard, his literary style is rarely viewed as a phenomenon of modernist literature – metareflective, intertextual, centered on the experiments with literary form. However, the works of I. Babel can be viewed as a characteristic to modernism phenomenon of “synthesis of arts” – not only painting and cinematography, but music as well. His musicality is traced both on the semantic level and particular recurring images, an on the level of rhythmic structure of the text. The article demonstrates “pretexts” (genre and stylistic models) that underlie the cycle “Red Cavalry”: folk songs, revolutionary marches, poetry of French symbolism (namely A. Rimbaud), which targeted to substitute versification with a rhythmic prose. Thus, some elements of I. Babel's prose are interpreted as variations of a free verse, which corresponds to the draft genre definitions given by the author to his stories, as well as to his writing style testified by some of his contemporaries.

The relevance of the article is determined by the appeal to the debatable issues of stylistic differentiation of the works by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel as the French musical culture leading representatives of the late 19th and the first third of the 20th centuries. The research reflections about the connections betwen Debussy and Ravel on the principle “for / against” have not subsided for more than a hundred years. This testifies to the special urgency of this problem and the need to search for modern approaches to understanding the artistic identity of two brilliant contemporaries.Scientific novelty. For the first time, the multidirectionality of the composing strategies by Debussy and Ravel is indicated through the the concept of style in its interdisciplinary philosophicalcategorical status and the explanationof its functions of identification and communication in the general cultural understanding (O. Ustyugova). For the first time the difference between the cultural phenomena processes integration in the era of modernism into the new artistic wholes, with unique properties, which is appropriate to define as “Debussy’s style” and “Ravel’s style”, is revealed.The purpose of the article is to reveal the multidirectionality of the composing strategies of Debussy and Ravel through an appeal to the main stylistic functions of identification and communication in general cultural understanding (O. Ustyugova); to designate the non-coincidence of channels of integration of cultural phenomena in the era of modernism into new artistic wholes, which have unique properties such as “Debussy’s style” and “Ravel’s style”.The research methodology includes the use of historical, stylistic, comparative methods.Main results and conclusions. The existing musicological literature emphasizes the influence of romanticism, post-romanticism, impressionism, symbolism, neoclassicism, Art Nouveau, moderne style on the formation of the individual style of Debussy and Ravel. Each of these directions had a certain reflection in the work of composers. However, let us try to highlight in the conceptual space of the many-sided “isms” of the cultural context of the era of modernism the hidden sources of the deployment of the creative intentions of the both brilliant contemporaries. We will choose the fundamental work of E. Ustyugova “Style and Culture: Experience of Building a General Theory of Style” (2003) as a methodological basis for this. E. Ustyugova proposes to go beyond the understanding style as a “migratory structure” (term by J. Rebane) and a convenient “classification tool” (J. Burnham) in structural and typological studies of art and move on to a comprehensive study of the essence of this phenomenon. For this, according to the researcher, it is necessary to carry out two analytical procedures. The first is based on the awareness of the experience of the mismatch between the object and the subject. The second involves considering the style in the aspect of intersubjective communication.With this view on the problem of identifying the patterns of formation and development of cultural phenomena, it is not the nominative parameters and the “herbarization” of genrelinguistic units that come to the fore, but the comprehension of the multilevel subject-object relations that formed these phenomena; “live reproduction” of the matrix of the world perception as channels of communication between the “I” and everything that appears as “not-I”.The creative paths of Debussy and Ravel represent diferent creative strategies. The “pure meaning”, unspeakable by words and free from all earthly, to which Debussy aspired, creates parallels with the texts of symbolist poets and destroy the boundaries between “I” and “not-I”. In the fundamental monographs of French researchers dedicated to the composer an idea has long been entrenched: the composer’s creative laboratory was poetry, and Debussy’s address to the poetic word throughout all his creative decades constantly expanding the semantic horizons of his “artistic realities”.Debussy’s spiritual intentions merged into a single sound-glow in the indivisible space of being. The word in all its dimensions (from literal to metaphysical) indicated the stages of the process of dissolving the personal “I” and going beyond (au-délà) the established forms of artistic expression. Therefore, various kinds of the names (or “afterwords”, as in the Preludes), epigraphs, numerous super-detailed directions remained an integral part of an integral sound structure. His musical language, destroying the connections in time between the past and the future (rejection of the system of functional gravities that should be “stretched” in musical memory), created a certain correspondence (“here and now”) with the phenomenon of being.Hence the following characteristics of the composer’s musical works: 1) the impeccable construction of the whole, which is “thought out to the smallest detail” (E. Denisov), subtle multilevel “correspondences” and symmetries; 2) total thematization of texture (K. Zenkin); 3) selfsufficient semantic expressiveness of the “pure sound forms” (K. Zenkin), which became the embodiment of “an agonizing thirst for undeniably pure” (S. Velikovsky).These properties of Debussy’s style open up the possibility to get into the spiritual dimensions filled with pure beauty, which so attracted the followers of Baudelaire. Using the typology of teh subject-object relations proposed by E. Ustyugova, Debussy’s style can be attributed throughout the paradigm of hidden subjectivity. Debussy was well aware of his “non-romantic” position.The artistic aspirations of Maurice Ravel more clearly resonate with the creative attitudes of Art Nouveau artists, who were looking for new forms of plastic expressiveness mainly in spatial forms of art. It seems that it is with this direction that a special feeling of the plasticity of the musical material and the entire musical composition as a unique phenomenon is associated, which determines the composer’s creative credo.The concept of “plasticity” indicates such a connection between coordinated phenomena, which appears through the reincarnation (transformation) of a certain material substance, when we keep in memory its output characteristics. Ballet works and the reliance on dance genres (and more broadly, various types of plasticity of gesture and movement) reveal the hidden basis of the composer’s thinking. This approach allows one to re-evaluate Ravel’s connections with the ancient heritage (it is symptomatic that the composer called his first “adult” work, devoted to the press, “Antique Minuet”) and to understand the meanings of constant antique reminiscences with which he filled his life.Like a real dandy who lets the vibrations of the world pass through himself, Ravel is sensitive to them and “cuts off” random, “ugly”, “unnecessary” ones. Hence — the special beauty of the artistic structures created by the composer. They are built not in a “filtered” ideal-beautiful dimension, but in the space of shimmering opposites (the corporeal — free from the corporeal, the familiar — the unknown). Ravel’s inherent tendency towards the graphic relief of the melodic line creates parallels with the “famous lines of Art Nouveau” (Fahr-Becker Gabriele) and is especially distinct, characterizes the composer’s later works.The non-everyday register of semantic reverberations of what is happening in the process of metamorphosis in the composer’s music (his plastic questioning about the existential nature of the source material) demanded a special listener’s responsiveness. Mistifications, hiding behind a mask, playing with the listener are Ravel’s usual communication strategies. Therefore, according to the typology of the subject-object relations proposed by E. Ustyugova, we can speak here of the paradigm of “open subjectivity”, which is characterized by the direct orientation of the subject towards himself. Hence — the principle of auto-citation characteristic of Ravel. The quintessence of its use are the composer’s later works — the opera Child and Magic, as well as the Piano Concerto in G major — the Dandy summa summarum of the composer’s previous career.The game of “correspondences” (Baudelaire) was manifested by composers in various ways and conditioned various channels of communication. Debussy makes the semantics of sound education a semantic unit, appeals to the listener with the expressiveness of the structure itself. Therefore he always emphasizes, appeals to the elite listener. Ravel, on the other hand, hides behind masks and theatrical illusions. He needs a listener who has a culture of distance (who owns wide meaning contextual fields). The contextual layers associated with musical texts express that “degree of distance” from the object of attention, which the composer himself chooses and whose parameters are constantly changing. Therefore, Ravel never turns twice in the genre, style or stylistic model he has already used.So, if the works by Debussy can be perceived “from scratch” because of their structural completeness and semantic tightness, then the works by Ravel require the listener to know the musical context and readiness to lay it out “fold by fold” (J. Deleuze) in new semantic projections.At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, French culture was looking for a means of creating a “state of resonance” (G. Bachelard) as an extraordinary impression, “awakening”, without which a person cannot take place. Debussy and Ravel moved in this direction. Therefore, only through the identification of all the “correspondences” of the era of a total change of creative guidelines and a departure from unambiguous stylistic “avatars” can one feel its essential discoveries. The study of the lines of intersection of the Debussy music and the Ravel music with various artistic phenomena of the past and the present illuminates certain reflections of the “style of the era”. However understanding the deep patterns of the creative manner of the two contemporaries requires differentiating the definitions of “Debussy’s style” and “Ravel’s style” and their further studying.

César Vallejo, con la obra poética Los heraldos negros, marca un nuevo rumbo en la literatura latinoamericana que hasta ese entonces estaba influenciada por la ascendencia de simbolistas y parnasianos; además, de la influencia del coloquialismo de Walt Whitman y la marca modernista de Rubén Darío; pero desde su primer libro se hace notar la intención de acceder a una visión localista y, por lo tanto, la simbología de origen francesa proveniente de escritores galos es desplazada por elementos andinos cercanos al autor. El sincretismo vallejiano propone desde el comienzo unir varias culturas: la influencia europea del modernismo predominante, los ecos de un indigenismo cercano y el mestizaje que le era propio como parte de un continente que buscaba una voz que lo representara. El presente artículo tiene como finalidad analizar estas propuestas literarias planteadas en una de las obras más importantes que ha dado el pensamiento humano, así como los vínculos contextuales y biográficos que llevaron a su publicación. Palabras clave: César Vallejo; Walt Whitman; Rubén Darío; Los heraldos negros; simbolismo; modernismo; indigenismo; mestizaje. Abstract César Vallejo, with his poetic work Los heraldos negros (The Black Heralds), marks a new direction in Latin American literature that until then had been influenced by the ancestry of Symbolists and Parnasians, besides the influence of Walt Whitman’s colloquialism and Rubén Darío’s modernist style. However, since his first book, the intention of accessing a localist vision has been noted and, therefore, the symbology of French origin coming from Gallic writers is displaced by Andean elements close to the author. The Vallejian syncretism proposes from the very beginning to unite several cultures: The European influence of the predominant modernism, the echoes of a nearby indigenism and the miscegenation that was proper to him as part of a continent that looked for a voice that represented him. The aim of this article is to analyse the literary proposals put forward in one of the most important works of human thought, as well as the contextual and biographical links that led to their publication. Keywords: César Vallejo; Walt Whitman; Rubén Darío; The black heralds; simbolism; modernism; indigenism; miscegenation.

In medieval Islamic civilization, poetry was widely acknowledged to be themost intimate vessel for conveying Sufism’s hidden truths. The spiritualstates and stations traversed by adepts along an ascending path to the realityof God’s unity largely defies simple descriptions into ordinary prose oreveryday language. The subtleties necessary to evocatively describe a spiritualjourney that is, by its very essence, ineffable, necessitates a linguisticmedium that could at once reveal secrets of inner contemplation and mysticalperception while simultaneously concealing such information from the“uninitiated” behind the exoteric understanding of the same work of literature.Persian poetry, with its unique capacity for metaphorical symbolism,puns, and paradoxes, thus emerged by the seventh/thirteenth century as anunparalleled vehicle for expressing the mystical experience.The most dramatic expression in all of Persian mystical literature of thisspiritual journey is the allegorical poem Mantiq al-Tair (best translated as“The Speech of the Birds”) by Farid al-Din `Attar (d. 627/1229), whichrecounts the initiatory voyage of a group of birds through seven valleys tothe palace of the mythical king-bird Simurgh, symbol of the Divine,enthroned atop the cosmic mountain Qaf.In addition to the book currently under review, `Attar’s masterpieceinspired other renditions into English, including an abbreviated and freelyreworked edition by Edward FitzGerald, The Bird-parliament (1903); R. P.Masani’s prose translation of half the original poem’s 4,600 lines, TheConference of the Birds (1924); the incomplete prose version by C. S. Nott,The Conference of the Birds (1954), which was prepared from Garcin deTassy’s nineteenth-century French translation, Le Langage des oiseaux, and,as such, is obscured by an intervening third language; Afkham Darbandi andDick Davis’ Penguin Classics edition The Conference of the Birds (1984),which represents the poem’s first complete English translation (minus theinvocation and epilogue), is based on the oldest extant manuscripts, and isskillfully rendered into heroic couplets pleasingly faithful to the letter andspirit of `Attar’s allegory; and Peter Avery’s determinedly literal translation,The Speech of the Birds (1998), whose 560-page opus includes 120 pages ofenriching endnotes on `Attar’s use of Qur’anic imagery and the hadith ...

Background. In 2018, the 170th anniversary of the death of Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) was commemorated. G. Donizetti created 74 operas of various genres and themes. He was the head of the Italian opera school in the second half of the 1830s, picking up the baton from G. Rossini and V. Bellini and anticipating G. Verdi’s searching. Having an apparent melodic gift, excellent skills of composing, knowledge of musical theatre, he created his works extremely quickly and easily – up to 3–4 operas per year, which caused repeated critical attacks. Opera works by G. Donizetti got a hard futurity. This music laid hold of audience in the 1830s–40s, but practically got out of the repertoire by the end of the 19th century, giving way to the masterpieces by G. Verdi and R. Wagner. Its revival began in the 50s of the 20th century, thanks to remarkable interpretations of great performers, in particular Maria Callas, Joan Alston Sutherland, Montserrat Caballé (since 1965), and others. A new success of opera masterpieces arose due to the fact that performing concepts restored the original author’s conception. Among the researchers and listeners, G. Donizetti’s operatic works eclipsed other spheres of his creativity, such as instrumental and chamber vocal music. But at the same time, G. Donizetti lived in the times of the widespread distribution of the romance, and the rapid growth of its popularity in the amateur and professional performing environment. He was an outstanding expert of vocal music and could not ignore this genre. Naturally there is a need for a more attentive approach to such a little-studied topic, as the composer’s chamber vocal music. Objectives. Gaetano Donizetti’s chamber-vocal creativity is the object of this study. The subject is the song cycle “Summer Nights in Posillipo” (“Nuits d’été à Pausilippe”) in terms of individual composer style. The objectives of offered article are not so much fi ll existing gaps on this issue, as taking a closer look at the romance genre, which is eclipsed by the composer’s opera compositions. The author of this work uses classical methods of analysis of historical and theoretical musicology. Results. Studies on the composer style of G. Donizetti in the Russian and Ukrainian languages are very limited in both quantitative and thematic terms. Most sources, including in other languages, consider opera works by the composer. The exact number of Donizetti’s romances is still unknown (from 250 to 270). The song cycle “Nuits d’été à Pausilippe” / “Summer Nights in Posillipo” (1836), consisting of 12 songs, is also not considered in the scientifi c literature. Typical for the fi rst third of the 19th century is the chronotope of this cycle, in which the poetics of the geographical toponym and the symbolism of the night are combined. Posillipo is a distinctive place in the northern part of the Gulf of Naples, with its unusually picturesque landscape and artifacts of ancient culture. The name of the song collection by G. Donizetti corresponds to the popular literature formula of the 1830s – “Florentine Nights” (1833) by H. Heine, “Egyptian Nights” (1835) by A. S. Pushkin, and others, in which the genre of the “night” novelistic cycle embodied. The musical implementations are “Night Pieces” op. 23 (1839) by R. Schumann, song cycle “Summer Nights” op. 7 (1841) by G. Berlioz, which were created in the period of composition writing (1836) by G. Donizetti. The novella-like character of “Summer Nights in Posillipo” is represented by incompleteness of lyric utterance, free alternation of fragments within the boundaries of a given topic, the variability of timbre solutions, varied choice of authors of poetic texts. Six solo numbers (Nos. 1–6) are supplemented by six duets for various timbre sets (Nos. 7–12, for 2 sopranos, soprano and mezzo-soprano, soprano and tenor, tenor and bass). The poems by four poets of Romanticism are involved: Leopoldo Tarantini (Nos. 1, 8, 10, 12), Carlo Guaita (No. 2), Michele Palazzolo (Nos. 7, 11), Francesco Puoti (No. 9), Victor Hugo (No. 6). Also the poems of the anonymous poet (No. 3) and the folklore text (No. 5) are used here. The cycle is “multilingual”, the Italian language coexists with the Neapolitan and French. The love theme prevails. We can talk about creation of a poetic-collective image entitled Homo amore. Solo songs (Nos. 1–6) form conditional self-contained cycle, which is distinguished by genre diversity. This is evidenced by both the designations of the composer himself (Barcarolle – No. 1, Romance – No. 2, Arietta – No. 3, Ballade – No. 4, Neapolitan song – No. 5), and signs of other genres (opera monologue – No. 1, Chivalric romance – No. 2, Serenade – No. 3, Alba – No. 6). The second little cycle is formed by the duets Nos. 7–12. The composer designates Nos. 7–11 as nocturne, while Nos. 12 as brindisi, or drinking song. G. Donizetti’s nocturnes are glad and lyrical, motile, virtuosic, theatrically spectacular. Life and earthly pleasures are glorifi ed in sounding. The atmosphere of a brilliant ball evening is felt here. The unifying factor in duets are the principles of the texture organization of vocal parts. The fi rst one is associated with the interaction of voices-parts with each other according to the principle of anti-phoning singing (Nos. 7, 9, 11). The second principle is associated with the simultaneous sounding of two voices (Nos. 8, 10, 12). The role of intonation relatedness at the songs is signifi cant. The thematism of twelve songs can be divided by the type of melodic core. As a result, there are three groups: I – themes Nos. 1, 2, 5, 8, 10; II – Nos. 3, 6; III – duets Nos. 7, 9. Conclusions. The applying of the “intonation vocabulary” of the epoch is refl ected in numerous allusions between the melodies of the romances by G. Donizetti and the works of his contemporaries (M. Glinka, F. Schubert) and successors (R. Hahn). The biggest interest is the composer work with the form. Acting within the framework of the repeatability (melodic and structural) and stanza form, G. Donizetti seeks to overcome this necessity in every possible way by various means. The structure of his romances “lives”, naturally unfolds in time, obeying the laws of vocal music. The results of “Summer Nights in Posillipo” analysis allow us to conclude about the originality of G. Donizetti’s creative decisions in the genre of romance.

Background. The XIX century presented the world with many wonderful musicians, among them there is Wanda Landowska (1879–1959), a researcher of the musical culture of the past. She is considered as one of the founders of the authentic movement in academic musical art, a representative of the first generation of “historical performers” who returned long-forgotten ancient music to their contemporaries. Landowska’s creativity, whose concerts with historical programs in the early XX century enjoyed extreme popularity, was covered in the press of that time, and, after, in special literature, although, given the world fame of the artist, clearly not enough. The name of W. Landowska is mentioned in passing by her contemporary A. Schweitzer in his famous monograph “J. S. Bach” (Schweitzer, 1965, transl. from German Ya. Druskin, p. 259); the review articles by famous Russian musicians and scientists A. V. Ossovsky (1971) and A. Maikapar (1991) are devoted to her. However, the fundamental studies of all aspects of W. Landowska’s activity are still lacking both in foreign and in domestic musicology. Ukrainian scientists have already taken certain steps in the study of the work of an outstanding Polish artist. G. Kurkovsky (1983) highlights the performances of a harpsichordist in Kiev, analyzing her repertoire. As a participant in concerts of the Imperial Russian Music Society, between 1907 and 1911 W. Landowska performed with constant success in Ukraine, not only in Kiev, but also in Odessa and Kharkiv. The researches by N. Svyrydenko, which appeared in the last decade (2010a, 2010b, 2017), gives a due assessment of the activity of the outstanding Polish musician in promoting ancient music. However, in general, in publications devoted to the artist, an analysis of the features of her performing style was not given enough attention, as well as her research works and notes. Objectives. This article aims to identify features of the concepts of W. Landowska regarding the performance of ancient music. The research material was, first of all, the notes of the outstanding harpsichordist collected by her student D. Restout; Russian translation by A. Maikapar (Landowska, W., 1991). The results of the study. Landowska is one of the firsts who was involved in the formation of the phenomenon of “early music”. She draws attention to the fact that few of her contemporaries carefully studied the music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque. Meanwhile, the musical practice of these eras lays the foundation for the formation of styles and Viennese classicism, and Romanticism, and new music. Working on the interpretation of ancient works, Landowska, first of all, proceeded from the historical context of the era and the general musical meaning. She emphasized the importance of playing music on the instruments of the exact era for which they were written. In her works, Landowska focused on the problems of reproducing ancient music on the harpsichord, namely, on such performance parameters as tempo, dynamics, registration, phrasing, ornamentation. In particular, Landowska presents and parses the tables of F. Couperin, J. Ph. Rameau and J. S. Bach with decipherments of ornamentations, touching in this connection also to issues of improvisation. Landowska laid the foundations of historically informed performing, emphasizing the need for musicians to study the treatises of Р. F. Tosi-J. F.Agricola, J.J. Quantz, F. Couperin, J. Ph. Rameau, L. Mozart, G. Frescobaldi, F. W. Marpurg, С. Ph. E. Bach. Relying on the old treatises, she sought to find a practical solution to the problems of interpreting ancient music precisely on authentic instruments, since the technique and character of the performance largely depend on the construction of the latter. Landowska studied in detail the clavier works of the outstanding harpsichordists F. Couperin and J. Ph. Rameau, and also paid great attention to the issue of the influence of French music on German music. Landowska believed that in order to find the right tempo, high-quality sound, it is necessary to thoroughly study the mechanism of the instrument. We can talk about the “sense of rhythm”, “accuracy and articulation of sound” about “spatial representations” only from the position of the harpsichordist, since the latter can have just different principles of intonation on the instrument and completely different decisions for fingering, than the pianist, due to the different construction of the harpsichord and piano (for example, without the passing of one finger under another). Landowska deals with the main key to ancient music – rhetoric. Increased attention in interpretation should be given to phrasing and breathing, which plays a major role, since each pause, caesura logically share a melodic line. At the same time, rhythmic freedom should not become synonymous with arbitrariness – Landowska’s playing was always distinguished by rhythmic accuracy, with which it conveyed the duration of sounds. “Some phrases within the play require rhythmic changes, while others – do not,” notes the artist (1991, p. 373). Thus, Landowska insisted on a completely different approach to the interpretation of music of past eras compared to what reigned in her time. She believed that turning to the music of masters of the past gives the musician the opportunity to develop a good musical taste and aesthetic feeling, and studying of the theoretical sources of ancient eras – to create a full-fledged idea of ancient music. In order to embody his vision of music in sounds, the performer should have good taste, Landowska insists on this, but it must be connected with knowledge of the material, styles of the past and historical context. Studying old treatises, Landowska made certain conclusions: the technology of playing an instrument is more complex and multifaceted than simply polishing “complex passages”, as it is considered today, and “coordination of thought and fingers” was called “technology” in that time (ibid., p. 150). In general, the artist puts “ears” and “consciousness” above just good finger coordination. The task of an authenticist is more difficult – it’s not enough to have good technique, you need to be able to combine all other performance components: touché, rhythm, breath, agogics, ornamentation, rhetoric, symbolism, sound, timbre, etc. Conclusions. W. Landowska positioned herself primarily as a harpsichordist, popularizing this instrument, although the sound of her harpsichord is still quite far from the sound of a “historical harpsichord”, for example, G. Leonhardt. Nevertheless, the sound of the harpsichord recreated by Landowska made a stunning impression on his contemporaries. As a result, it completely changed the then performer’s and listener’s ideas about ancient music, giving a powerful impetus to a complete revision and rethinking of generally accepted manners of performing and romantic cliché of hearing. Fifty-year-old practical experience of Landowska-harpsichordist is very important for modern performers of ancient music, who strive for its most accurate reproduction, that open the perspectives for further in-depth study of the creative heritage of an outstanding artist.

In 1913, eccentric French composer Erik Satie wrote a fragmentary, diary-like essay where he depicted a strikingly rigid diet consisting solely of white foods: eggs, sugar, coconuts, rice, cream cheese, fuchsia juice and so on. Satie’s brief essay has later been used as one of many puzzle pieces in attempts to retrospectively diagnose him with autism spectrum disorder. With Satie’s white meal as a starting point, this paper explores colour-based food preferences and selective eating in clinical and non-clinical populations, with a special focus on autism spectrum disorder and avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID). General colour preferences and their causes as well as the impact of colour on taste and food identification are also explored. Selective eating during childhood is immensely common and does not generally lead to disordered eating in the long run, although subgroups may experience rigidity around food of a more enduring nature. Problems related to eating were repeatedly described in Kanner’s original 1943 autism case series and continue to be common in autism. Most studies on eating and sensory sensitivity in autism show that the texture and consistency of the food are the most common factors behind selective eating. In contrast, colour-based food preferences appear to be relatively rare, although numerous anecdotal reports exist. Foods that are white or colourless may be particularly appealing or tolerable for individuals with sensory hypersensitivity, which can occur in autism or ARFID. Ultimately, in the case of Erik Satie, this paper concludes that his description of a strictly white diet should not be read as an autobiographical account but rather as an ironic take on contemporary symbolist literature, with the famously decadent all-black dinner party in French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours (1884; also known as Against Nature) as an obvious source of inspiration.

The article focuses on the poetics of the short story “Ballet Libretto” (1917) by M. Kuzmin. Researchers practically do not study the poetics of his short stories “from modern life” (preferring stylized prose), which is due to the generally accepted opinion of them as second-rate literature. Nevertheless, such a characterization of these works does not seem to be entirely correct with a deeper analysis of M. Kuzmin’s unstylized short stories, in which the peculiarities of poetics are found that are inherent in more artistic, at first glance, short stories. Thus, in the “Ballet Libretto” the extensive intertext, the abundance of references to various cultural phenomena and works of art are of particular interest. The text contains mentions the names and works of famous French writers (“The Rules of the Thirteen” by O. Balzac, articles and libretto by T. Gauthier, “The Devil in Love” by J. Cazot). At the same time, the novel also encrypts subtle, but important references to famous works of art (“Shagreen leather” and “Gobshek” by O. Balzak, “Crime and Punishment” by F. Dostoevsky), personalities (J.-B. Lully, Moliere) and cultural phenomena (Russian ballet, musical theater, French national opera). Irony, as a permanent feature of the poetics of M. Kuzmin’s works is also manifested in the short story “Ballet Libretto”, which is facilitated by playing on characters’ names, subtle allusions to the symbolism philosophy and replicas of the heroes themselves. Despite the fact that the short story can be interpreted as a story with a fascinating plot, the work has another, “hidden” plan, manifested in the references and allusions, which indicates an elegant author’s game with the reader, which does not allow to characterize the work as template. Identified poetics’ features (the presence of irony, rich intertext, many references to the phenomena of world culture and art) are also characteristic of some other short stories “from modern life” by M. Kuzmin (“Platonic Charlotte”, “The Same Eyes”, “A Kindred Visit” etc.) To what extent these features are characteristic of other similar M. Kuzmin’s works, which have not been the subject of analysis by literary critics yet, is an actual question for further research.

Ursula Bethell left a number of unpublished poems and fragments in her papers when she died which are now contained in her archive. They include an early work, extant in two copies, in which she translates ‘Les feuilles d’or’, a poem by a little-known Swiss poet, Henry Spiess. The translation was intended for a competition in The Westminster Gazette in 1904, but Bethell never submitted her entry. Spiess’s poem is clearly influenced by the French Symbolists; Bethell’s strikingly effective translation is sensitive to that influence and shows remarkable technical sophistication. In addition, it anticipates in many ways the major concerns of her first volume of poetry. The poem is published here for the first time, and its connections with Bethell’s mature work explored.Peter Whiteford is a Professor of English Literature at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.Correspondence about this article may be directed to the author at peter.whiteford@vuw.ac.nz

IntroductionAs both a historical and cultural entity, the city of New Orleans has long-maintained a reputation as a centre for hedonistic and carnivaleque pleasures. Historically, images of mardi gras, jazz, and parties on the shores of the Mississippi have pervaded the cultural vision of the city as a “mecca” for “social life” (Marina 2), and successfully fed its tourism narratives. Simultaneously, however, a different kind of narrative also exists in the historical folds of the city’s urban mythology. Many tales of vampire sightings and supernatural accounts surround the area, and have contributed, over the years, to the establishment and mystification of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’. This has produced, in turn, its own brand of vampire tourism (Murphy 2015). Mixed with historical rumours and Gothic folklore, the recent narratives of popular culture lie at the centre of the re-imagination of New Orleans as a vampire hub. Taking this idea as a point of departure, this article provides culturally- and historically-informed critical considerations of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’, especially as portrayed in The Originals (2013-2017), a contemporary television series where vampires are the main protagonists. In the series, the historical narratives of New Orleans become entangled with – and are, at times, almost inseparable from – the fictional chronicles of the vampire in both aesthetic and conceptual terms.The critical connection between urban narratives and vampires representation, as far as New Orleans is concerned, is profoundly entangled with notions of both tourism and fictionalised popular accounts of folklore (Piatti-Farnell 172). In approaching the conceptual relationship between New Orleans as a cultural and historical entity and the vampire — in its folkloristic and imaginative context — the analysis will take a three-pronged approach: firstly, it will consider the historical narrative of tourism for the city of New Orleans; secondly, the city’s connection to vampires and other Gothicised entities will be considered, both historically and narratively; and finally, the analysis will focus on how the connection between New Orleans and Gothic folklore of the vampire is represented in The Originals, with the issue of cultural authenticity being brought into the foreground. A critical footnote must be given to the understanding of the term ‘New Orleans’ in this article as meaning primarily the French Quarter – or, the Vieux Carre – and its various representations. This geographical focus principally owes its existence to the profound cultural significance that the French Quarter has occupied in the history of New Orleans as a city, and, in particular, in its connection to narratives of magic and Gothic folklore, as well as the broader historical and contemporary tourism structures. A History of TourismSocial historian Kevin Fox Gotham agues that New Orleans as a city has been particularly successful in fabricating a sellable image of itself; tourism, Gotham reminds us, is about “the production of local difference, local cultures, and different local histories that appeal to visitors’ tastes for the exotic and the unique” (“Gentrification” 1100). In these terms, both the history and the socio-cultural ‘feel’ of the city cannot be separated from the visual constructs that accompany it. Over the decades, New Orleans has fabricated a distinct network of representational patterns for the Vieux Carre in particular, where the deployment of specific images, themes and motifs – which are, in truth, only peripherally tied to the city’ actual social and political history, and owe their creation and realisation more to the success of fictional narratives from film and literature – is employed to “stimulate tourist demands to buy and consume” (Gotham, “Gentrification” 1102). This image of the city as hedonistic site is well-acknowledged, has to be understood, at least partially, as a conscious construct aimed at the production an identity for itself, which the city can in turn sell to visitors, both domestically and internationally. New Orleans, Gotham suggests, is a ‘complex and constantly mutating city’, in which “meanings of place and community” are “inexorably intertwined with tourism” (Authentic 5). The view of New Orleans as a site of hedonistic pleasure is something that has been heavily capitalised upon by the tourism industry of the city for decades, if not centuries. A keen look at advertising pamphlets for the city, dating form the late Nineteenth century onwards, provides an overview of thematic selling points, that primarily focus on notions of jazz, endless parties and, in particular, nostalgic and distinctly rose-tinted views of the Old South and its glorious plantations (Thomas 7). The decadent view of New Orleans as a centre of carnal pleasures has often been recalled by scholars and lay observers alike; this vision of he city indeed holds deep historical roots, and is entangled with the city’s own economic structures, as well as its acculturated tourism ones. In the late 19th and early 20th century one of the things that New Orleans was very famous for was actually Storyville, the city’s red-light district, sanctioned in 1897 by municipal ordinance. Storyville quickly became a centralized attraction in the heart of New Orleans, so much so that it began being heavily advertised, especially through the publication of the ‘Blue Book’, a resource created for tourists. The Blue Book contained, in alphabetical order, information on all the prostitutes of Storyville. Storyville remained very popular and the most famous attraction in New Orleans until its demolition in 1919 Anthony Stanonis suggests that, in its ability to promote a sellable image for the city, “Storyville meshed with the intersts of business men in the age before mass tourism” (105).Even after the disappearance of Storyville, New Orleans continued to foster its image a site of hedonism, a narrative aided by a favourable administration, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The French Quarter, in particular, “became a tawdry mélange of brothers and gambling dens operating with impunity under lax law enforcement” (Souther 16). The image of the city as a site for pleasures of worldly nature continued to be deeply rooted, and even survives in the following decades today, as visible in the numerous exotic dance parlours located on the famous Bourbon Street.Vampire TourismSimultaneously, however, a different kind of narrative also exists in the recent historical folds of the city’s urban mythology, where vampires, magic, and voodoo are an unavoidable presence. Many tales of vampire sightings and supernatural accounts surround the area, and have contributed, over the years, to the establishment and mystification of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’. Kenneth Holditch contends that ‘”New Orleans is a city in love with its myths, mysteries and fantasies” (quoted in McKinney 8). In the contemporary era, these qualities are profoundly reflected in the city’s urban tourism image, where the vampire narrative is pushed into the foreground. When in the city, one might be lucky enough to take one of the many ‘vampire tours’ — often coupled with narratives of haunted locations — or visit the vampire bookshop, or even take part in the annual vampire ball. Indeed, the presence of vampires in New Orleans’s contemporary tourism narrative is so pervasive that one might be tempted to assume that it has always occupied a prominent place in the city’s cultural fabric. Nonetheless, this perception is not accurate: the historical evidence from tourism pamphlets for the city do not make any mentions of vampire tourism before the 1990s, and even then, the focus on the occult side of new Orleans tended to privilege stories of voodoo and hoodoo — a presence that still survives strongly in the cultural narrative city itself (Murphy 91). While the connection between vampires and New Orleans is a undoubtedly recent one, the development and establishment of New Orleans as vampire city cannot be thought of as a straight line. A number of cultural and historical currents appear to converge in the creation of the city’s vampire mystique. The history and geography of the city here could be an important factor, and a useful starting point; as the site of extreme immigration and ethnic and racial mingling New Orleans holds a reputation for mystery. The city was, of course, the regrettable site of a huge marketplace for the slave trade, so discussions of political economy could also be important here, although I’ll leave them for another time. As a city, New Orleans has often been described – by novelists, poets, and historians alike – as being somewhat ‘peculiar’. Simone de Behaviour was known to have remarked that that the city is surrounded by a “pearl grey” and ‘luminous’ air” (McKinney 1). In similar fashion, Oliver Evans claims the city carries “opalescent hints” (quoted in McKinney 1). New Orleans is famous for having a quite thick mist, the result of a high humidity levels in the air. To an observing eye, New Orleans seems immersed in an almost otherworldly ‘glow’, which bestows upon its limits an ethereal and mysterious quality (Piatti-Farnell 173). While this intention here is not to suggest that New Orleans is the only city to have mist – especially in the Southern States – one might venture to say that this physical phenomenon, joined with other occurrences and legends, has certainly contributed to the city’s Gothicised image. The geography of the city also makes it sadly famous for floods and their subsequent devastation, which over centuries have wrecked parts of the city irrevocably. New Orleans sits at a less than desirable geographical position, is no more than 17 feet above sea level, and much of it is at least five feet below (McKinney 5). In spite of its lamentable fame, hurricane Katrina was not the first devastating geo-meteorological phenomenon to hit and destroy most of New Orleans; one can trace similar hurricane occurrences in 1812 and 1915, which at the time significantly damaged parts of the French Quarter. The geographical position of New Orleans also owes to the city’s well-known history of disease such as the plague and tuberculosis – often associated, in previous centuries, with the miasma proper to reclaimed river lands. In similar terms, one must not forget New Orleans’s history of devastating fires – primarily in the years 1788, 1794, 1816, 1866 and 1919 – which slowly destroyed the main historical parts of the city, particularly in the Vieux Carre, and to some extent opened the way for regeneration and later gentrification as well. As a result of its troubled and destructive history, Louise McKinnon claims that the city ‒ perhaps unlike any others in the United States ‒ hinges on perpetual cycles of destruction and regeneration, continuously showing “the wear and tear of human life” (McKinney 6).It is indeed in this extremely important element that New Orleans finds a conceptual source in its connection to notions of the undead, and the vampire in particular. Historically, one can identify the pervasive use of Gothic terminology to describe New Orleans, even if, the descriptions themselves were more attuned to perceptions of the city’s architecture and metrological conditions, rather than the recollection of any folklore-inspired narratives of unread creatures. Because of its mutating, and often ill-maintained historical architecture – especially in the French Quarter - New Orleans has steadily maintained a reputation as a city of “splendid decay” (McKinney, 6). This highly lyrical and metaphorical approach plays an important part in building the city as a site of mystery and enchantment. Its decaying outlook functions as an unavoidable sign of how New Orleans continues to absorb, and simultaneously repel, as McKinney puts it, “the effects of its own history” (6).Nonetheless, the history of New Orleans as a cultural entity, especially in terms of tourism, has not been tied to vampires for centuries, as many imagine, and the city itself insists in its contemporary tourism narratives. Although a lot of folklore has survived around the city in connection to magic and mysticism, for a number of reasons, vampires have not always been in the foreground of its publicised cultural narratives. Mixed with historical rumours and Gothic folklore, the recent narratives of popular culture lie at the centre of the re-imagination of New Orleans as a vampire spot: most scholars claim that it all started with the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), but actually evidence shows that the vampire narrative for the city of New Orleans did not fully explode until the release of Neil Jordan’s cinematic adaptation of Interview with the Vampire (1994). This film really put New Orleans at the centre of the vampire narrative, indulging in the use of many iconic locations in the city as tied to vampire, and cementing the idea of New Orleans as a vampiric city (Piatti-Farnell 175). The impact of Rice’s work, and its adaptations, has also been picked up by numerous other examples of popular culture, including Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire mystery series, and its well-known television adaptation True Blood. Harris herself states in one of her novels: “New Orleans had been the place to go for vampires and those who wanted to be around them ever since Anne Rice had been proven right about their existence” (2). In spite of the fact that popular culture, rather than actual historical evidence, lies at the heart of the city’s cultural relationship with vampires, this does not detract from the fact that vampires themselves – as fabricated figures lying somewhere between folklore, history, and fiction – represent an influential part of New Orleans’s contemporary tourism narrative, building a bridge between historical storytelling, mythologised identities, and consumerism. The Originals: Vampires in the CityIndeed, the impact of popular culture in establishing and re-establishing the success of the vampire tourism narrative in New Orleans is undeniable. Contemporary examples continue to capitalise on the visual, cultural, and suggestively historical connection between the city’s landmarks and vampire tales, cementing the notion of New Orleans as a solid entity within the Gothic tourism narrative. One such successful example is The Originals. This television show is actually a spin-off of the Vampires Diaries, and begins with three vampires, the Mikaelson siblings (Niklaus, Elijah, and Rebekkah) returning to the city of New Orleans for the first time since 1919, when they were forced to flee by their vengeful father. In their absence, Niklaus's protégé, Marcel, took charge of the city. The storyline of The Originals focuses on battles within the vampire factions to regain control of the city, and eliminate the hold of other mystical creatures such as werewolves and witches (Anyiwo 175). The central narrative here is that the city belongs to the vampire, and there can be no other real Gothic presence in the Quarter. One can only wonder, even at this embryonic level, how this connects functions in a multifaceted way, extending the critique of the vampire’s relationship to New Orleans from the textual dimension of the TV show to the real life cultural narrative of the city itself. A large number of the narrative strands in The Originals are tied to city and its festivals, its celebrations, and its visions of the past, whether historically recorded, or living in the pages of its Gothic folklore. Vampires are actually claimed to have made New Orleans what it is today, and they undoubtedly rule it. As Marcel puts it: “The blood never stops flowing, and the party never ends” (Episode 1, “Always and Forever”). Even the vampiric mantra for New Orleans in The Originals is tied to the city’s existing and long-standing tourism narrative, as “the party never ends” is a reference to one of Bourbon Street’s famous slogans. Indeed, the pictorial influence of the city’s primary landmarks in The Originals is undeniable. In spite of the fact the inside scenes for The Originals were filmed in a studio, the outside shots in the series reveal a strong connections to the city itself, as viewers are left with no doubt as to the show’s setting. New Orleans is continuously mentioned and put on show – and pervasively referred to as “our city”, by the vampires. So much so, that New Orleans becomes the centre of the feud between supernatural forces, as the vampires fight witches and werewolves – among others- to maintain control over the city’s historical heart. The French Quarter, in particular, is given renewed life from the ashes of history into the beating heart of the vampire narrative, so much so that it almost becomes its own character in its own right, instrumental in constructing the vampire mystique. The impact of the vampire on constructing an image for the city of New Orleans is made explicit in The Originals, as the series explicitly shows vampires at the centre of the city’s history. Indeed, the show’s narrative goes as far as justifying the French Quarter’s history and even legends through the vampire metaphor. For instance, the series explains the devastating fire that destroyed the French Opera House in 1919 as the result of a Mikaelson vampire family feud. In similar terms, the vampires of the French Quarter are shown at the heart of the Casquette Girls narrative, a well-known tale from Eighteenth-century colonial New Orleans, where young women were shipped from France to the new Louisiana colony, in order to marry. The young women were said to bring small chests – or casquettes – containing their clothes (Crandle 47). The Originals, however, capitalises on the folkloristic interpretation that perceives the girls’ luggage as coffins potentially containing the undead, a popular version of the tale that can often be heard if taking part in one of the many vampire tours in New Orleans. One can see here how the chronicles of the French Quarter in New Orleans and the presumed narratives of the vampire in the city merge to become one and the same, blurring the lines between history and fiction, and presenting the notion of folklore as a verifiable entity of the everyday (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 25) It is essential to remember, en passant, that, as far as giving the undead their own historical chronicles in connection to New Orleans, The Originals is not alone in doing this. Other TV series like American Horror Story have provided Gothicised histories for the city, although in this case more connected to witchcraft, hoodoo, and voodoo, rather than vampires.What one can see taking place in The Originals is a form of alternate and revisionist history that is reminiscent of several instances of pulp and science fiction from the early 20th century, where the Gothic element lies at the centre of not only the fictional narrative, but also of the re-conceptualisation of historical time and space, as not absolute entities, but as narratives open to interpretation (Singles 103). The re-interpretation here is of course connected to the cultural anxieties that are intrinsic to the Gothic – of changes, shifts, and unwanted returns - and the vampire as a figure of intersections, signalling the shift between stages of existence. If it is true that, to paraphrase Paul Ricoeur’s famous contention, the past returns to “haunt” us (105), then the history of New Orleans in The Originals is both established and haunted by vampires, a pervasive shadow that provides the city itself with an almost tangible Gothic afterlife. This connection, of course, extends beyond the fictional world of the television series, and finds fertile ground in the cultural narratives that the city constructs for itself. The tourism narrative of New Orleans also lies at the heart of the reconstructive historical imagination, which purposefully re-invents the city as a constructed entity that is, in itself, extremely sellable. The Originals mentions on multiple occasions that certain bars — owned, of course, by vampires — host regular ‘vampire themed events’, to “keep the tourists happy”. The importance of maintaining a steady influx of vampire tourism into the Quarter is made very clear throughout, and the vampires are complicit in fostering it for a number of reasons: not only because it provides them and the city with a constant revenue, but also because it brings a continuous source of fresh blood for the vampires to feed on. As Marcel puts it: “Something's gotta draw in the out-of-towners. Otherwise we'd all go hungry” (Episode 1, “Always and Forever”). New Orleans, it is made clear, is not only portrayed as a vampire hub, but also as a hot spot for vampire tourism; as part of the tourism narratives, the vampires themselves — who commonly feign humanity — actually further ‘pretend’ to be vampires for the tourists, who expect to find vampires in the city. It is made clear in The Originals that vampires often put on a show – and bear in mind, these are vampires who pretend to be human, who pretend to be vampires for the tourists. They channel stereotypes that belong in Gothic novels and films, and that are, as far as the ‘real’ vampires of the series, are concerned, mostly fictional. The vampires that are presented to the tourists in The Originals are, inevitably, inauthentic, for the real vampires themselves purposefully portray the vision of vampires put forward by popular culture, together with its own motifs and stereotypes. The vampires happily perform their popular culture role, in order to meet the expectations of the tourist. This interaction — which sociologist Dean MacCannell would refer to, when discussing the dynamics of tourism, as “staged authenticity” (591) — is the basis of the appeal, and what continues to bring tourists back, generating profits for vampires and humans alike. Nina Auerbach has persuasively argued that the vampire is often eroticised through its connections to the “self-obsessed’ glamour of consumerism that ‘subordinates history to seductive object” (57).With the issue of authenticity brought into sharp relief, The Originals also foregrounds questions of authenticity in relation to New Orleans’s own vampire tourism narrative, which ostensibly bases into historical narratives of magic, horror, and folklore, and constructs a fictionalised urban tale, suitable to the tourism trade. The vampires of the French Quarter in The Originals act as the embodiment of the constructed image of New Orleans as the epitome of a vampire tourist destination. ConclusionThere is a clear suggestion in The Originals that vampires have evolved from simple creatures of old folklore, to ‘products’ that can be sold to expectant tourists. This evolution, as far as popular culture is concerned, is also inevitably tied to the conceptualisation of certain locations as ‘vampiric’, a notion that, in the contemporary era, hinges on intersecting narratives of culture, history, and identity. Within this, New Orleans has successfully constructed an image for itself as a vampire city, exploiting, in a number ways, the popular and purposefully historicised connection to the undead. In both tourism narratives and popular culture, of which The Originals is an ideal example, New Orleans’s urban image — often sited in constructions and re-constructions, re-birth and decay — is presented as a result of the vampire’s own existence, and thrives in the Gothicised afterlife of imagery, symbolism, and cultural persuasion. In these terms, the ‘inauthentic’ vampires of The Originals are an ideal allegory that provides a channelling ground for the issues surrounding the ‘inauthentic’ state of New Orleans a sellable tourism entity. As both hinge on images of popular representation and desirable symbols, the historical narratives of New Orleans become entangled with — and are, at times, almost inseparable from — the fictional chronicles of the vampire in both aesthetic and conceptual terms. ReferencesAnyiwo, U. Melissa. “The Female Vampire in Popular Culture.” Gender in the Vampire Narrative. Eds. Amanda Hobson and U. Melissa Anyiwo. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016. 173-192. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.Crandle, Marita Woywod. New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend. Stroud: The History Press, 2017.Gotham, Kevin Fox. Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy. New York: New York University Press, 2007.———. “Tourism Gentrification: The Case of New Orleans’ Vieux Carre’.” Urban Studies 42.7 (2005): 1099-1121. Harris, Charlaine. All Together Dead. London: Gollancz, 2008.Interview with the Vampire. Dir. Neil Jordan. Geffen Pictures, 1994. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Mistaken Dichotomies.” Public Folklore. Eds. Robert Baron and Nick Spitzer. Oxford: University of Missisippi Press, 2007. 28-48.Marina, Peter J. Down and Out in New Orleans: Trangressive Living in the Informal Economy. New York: Columia University Press, 2017. McKinney, Louise. New Orleans: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.Murphy, Michael. Fear Dat New Orleans: A Guide to the Voodoo, Vampires, Graveyards & Ghosts of the Crescent City. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature. London: Routledge, 2014. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Singles, Kathleen. Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Boston: de Gruyter, 2013.Souther, Mark. New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 2006. Stanonis, Anthony J. Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.The Originals. Seasons 1-4. CBS/Warner Bros Television. 2013-2017.Thomas, Lynell. Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Introduction Cookbooks are an exceptional written record of what is largely an oral tradition. They have been described as “magician’s hats” due to their ability to reveal much more than they seem to contain (Wheaton, “Finding”). The first book printed in Germany was the Guttenberg Bible in 1456 but, by 1490, printing was introduced into almost every European country (Tierney). The spread of literacy between 1500 and 1800, and the rise in silent reading, helped to create a new private sphere into which the individual could retreat, seeking refuge from the community (Chartier). This new technology had its effects in the world of cookery as in so many spheres of culture (Mennell, All Manners). Trubek notes that cookbooks are the texts most often used by culinary historians, since they usually contain all the requisite materials for analysing a cuisine: ingredients, method, technique, and presentation. Printed cookbooks, beginning in the early modern period, provide culinary historians with sources of evidence of the culinary past. Historians have argued that social differences can be expressed by the way and type of food we consume. Cookbooks are now widely accepted as valid socio-cultural and historic documents (Folch, Sherman), and indeed the link between literacy levels and the protestant tradition has been expressed through the study of Danish cookbooks (Gold). From Apicius, Taillevent, La Varenne, and Menon to Bradley, Smith, Raffald, Acton, and Beeton, how can both manuscript and printed cookbooks be analysed as historic documents? What is the difference between a manuscript and a printed cookbook? Barbara Ketchum Wheaton, who has been studying cookbooks for over half a century and is honorary curator of the culinary collection in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, has developed a methodology to read historic cookbooks using a structured approach. For a number of years she has been giving seminars to scholars from multidisciplinary fields on how to read historic cookbooks. This paper draws on the author’s experiences attending Wheaton’s seminar in Harvard, and on supervising the use of this methodology at both Masters and Doctoral level (Cashman; Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Manuscripts versus Printed Cookbooks A fundamental difference exists between manuscript and printed cookbooks in their relationship with the public and private domain. Manuscript cookbooks are by their very essence intimate, relatively unedited and written with an eye to private circulation. Culinary manuscripts follow the diurnal and annual tasks of the household. They contain recipes for cures and restoratives, recipes for cleansing products for the house and the body, as well as the expected recipes for cooking and preserving all manners of food. Whether manuscript or printed cookbook, the recipes contained within often act as a reminder of how laborious the production of food could be in the pre-industrialised world (White). Printed cookbooks draw oxygen from the very fact of being public. They assume a “literate population with sufficient discretionary income to invest in texts that commodify knowledge” (Folch). This process of commoditisation brings knowledge from the private to the public sphere. There exists a subset of cookbooks that straddle this divide, for example, Mrs. Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806), which brought to the public domain her distillation of a lifetime of domestic experience. Originally intended for her daughters alone, Rundell’s book was reprinted regularly during the nineteenth century with the last edition printed in 1893, when Mrs. Beeton had been enormously popular for over thirty years (Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s Structured Approach Cookbooks can be rewarding, surprising and illuminating when read carefully with due effort in understanding them as cultural artefacts. However, Wheaton notes that: “One may read a single old cookbook and find it immensely entertaining. One may read two and begin to find intriguing similarities and differences. When the third cookbook is read, one’s mind begins to blur, and one begins to sense the need for some sort of method in approaching these documents” (“Finding”). Following decades of studying cookbooks from both sides of the Atlantic and writing a seminal text on the French at table from 1300-1789 (Wheaton, Savouring the Past), this combined experience negotiating cookbooks as historical documents was codified, and a structured approach gradually articulated and shared within a week long seminar format. In studying any cookbook, regardless of era or country of origin, the text is broken down into five different groupings, to wit: ingredients; equipment or facilities; the meal; the book as a whole; and, finally, the worldview. A particular strength of Wheaton’s seminars is the multidisciplinary nature of the approaches of students who attend, which throws the study of cookbooks open to wide ranging techniques. Students with a purely scientific training unearth interesting patterns by developing databases of the frequency of ingredients or techniques, and cross referencing them with other books from similar or different timelines or geographical regions. Patterns are displayed in graphs or charts. Linguists offer their own unique lens to study cookbooks, whereas anthropologists and historians ask what these objects can tell us about how our ancestors lived and drew meaning from life. This process is continuously refined, and each grouping is discussed below. Ingredients The geographic origins of the ingredients are of interest, as is the seasonality and the cost of the foodstuffs within the scope of each cookbook, as well as the sensory quality both separately and combined within different recipes. In the medieval period, the use of spices and large joints of butchers meat and game were symbols of wealth and status. However, when the discovery of sea routes to the New World and to the Far East made spices more available and affordable to the middle classes, the upper classes spurned them. Evidence from culinary manuscripts in Georgian Ireland, for example, suggests that galangal was more easily available in Dublin during the eighteenth century than in the mid-twentieth century. A new aesthetic, articulated by La Varenne in his Le Cuisinier Francois (1651), heralded that food should taste of itself, and so exotic ingredients such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger were replaced by the local bouquet garni, and stocks and sauces became the foundations of French haute cuisine (Mac Con Iomaire). Some combinations of flavours and ingredients were based on humoral physiology, a long held belief system based on the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, now discredited by modern scientific understanding. The four humors are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. It was believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. Galen (131-201 AD) believed that warm food produced yellow bile and that cold food produced phlegm. It is difficult to fathom some combinations of ingredients or the manner of service without comprehending the contemporary context within they were consumeSome ingredients found in Roman cookbooks, such as “garum” or “silphium” are no longer available. It is suggested that the nearest substitute for garum also known as “liquamen”—a fermented fish sauce—would be Naam Plaa, or Thai fish sauce (Grainger). Ingredients such as tea and white bread, moved from the prerogative of the wealthy over time to become the staple of the urban poor. These ingredients, therefore, symbolise radically differing contexts during the seventeenth century than in the early twentieth century. Indeed, there are other ingredients such as hominy (dried maize kernel treated with alkali) or grahams (crackers made from graham flour) found in American cookbooks that require translation to the unacquainted non-American reader. There has been a growing number of food encyclopaedias published in recent years that assist scholars in identifying such commodities (Smith, Katz, Davidson). The Cook’s Workplace, Techniques, and Equipment It is important to be aware of the type of kitchen equipment used, the management of heat and cold within the kitchen, and also the gradual spread of the industrial revolution into the domestic sphere. Visits to historic castles such as Hampton Court Palace where nowadays archaeologists re-enact life below stairs in Tudor times give a glimpse as to how difficult and labour intensive food production was. Meat was spit-roasted in front of huge fires by spit boys. Forcemeats and purees were manually pulped using mortar and pestles. Various technological developments including spit-dogs, and mechanised pulleys, replaced the spit boys, the most up to date being the mechanised rotisserie. The technological advancements of two hundred years can be seen in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton where Marie-Antoinin Carême worked for the Prince Regent in 1816 (Brighton Pavilion), but despite the gleaming copper pans and high ceilings for ventilation, the work was still back breaking. Carême died aged forty-nine, “burnt out by the flame of his genius and the fumes of his ovens” (Ackerman 90). Mennell points out that his fame outlived him, resting on his books: Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien (1815); Le Pâtissier Pittoresque (1815); Le Maître d’Hôtel Français (1822); Le Cuisinier Parisien (1828); and, finally, L’Art de la Cuisine Française au Dix-Neuvième Siècle (1833–5), which was finished posthumously by his student Pluméry (All Manners). Mennell suggests that these books embody the first paradigm of professional French cuisine (in Kuhn’s terminology), pointing out that “no previous work had so comprehensively codified the field nor established its dominance as a point of reference for the whole profession in the way that Carême did” (All Manners 149). The most dramatic technological changes came after the industrial revolution. Although there were built up ovens available in bakeries and in large Norman households, the period of general acceptance of new cooking equipment that enclosed fire (such as the Aga stove) is from c.1860 to 1910, with gas ovens following in c.1910 to the 1920s) and Electricity from c.1930. New food processing techniques dates are as follows: canning (1860s), cooling and freezing (1880s), freeze drying (1950s), and motorised delivery vans with cooking (1920s–1950s) (den Hartog). It must also be noted that the supply of fresh food, and fish particularly, radically improved following the birth, and expansion of, the railways. To understand the context of the cookbook, one needs to be aware of the limits of the technology available to the users of those cookbooks. For many lower to middle class families during the twentieth century, the first cookbook they would possess came with their gas or electrical oven. Meals One can follow cooked dishes from the kitchen to the eating place, observing food presentation, carving, sequencing, and serving of the meal and table etiquette. Meal times and structure changed over time. During the Middle Ages, people usually ate two meals a day: a substantial dinner around noon and a light supper in the evening (Adamson). Some of the most important factors to consider are the manner in which meals were served: either à la française or à la russe. One of the main changes that occurred during the nineteenth century was the slow but gradual transfer from service à la française to service à la russe. From medieval times to the middle of the nineteenth century the structure of a formal meal was not by “courses”—as the term is now understood—but by “services”. Each service could comprise of a choice of dishes—both sweet and savoury—from which each guest could select what appealed to him or her most (Davidson). The philosophy behind this form of service was the forementioned humoral physiology— where each diner chose food based on the four humours of blood, yellow bile, black bile, or phlegm. Also known as le grand couvert, the à la française method made it impossible for the diners to eat anything that was beyond arm’s length (Blake, and Crewe). Smooth service, however, was the key to an effective à la russe dinner since servants controlled the flow of food (Eatwell). The taste and temperature of food took centre stage with the à la russe dinner as each course came in sequence. Many historic cookbooks offer table plans illustrating the suggested arrangement of dishes on a table for the à la française style of service. Many of these dishes might be re-used in later meals, and some dishes such as hashes and rissoles often utilised left over components of previous meals. There is a whole genre of cookbooks informing the middle class cooks how to be frugal and also how to emulate haute cuisine using cheaper or ersatz ingredients. The number dining and the manner in which they dined also changed dramatically over time. From medieval to Tudor times, there might be hundreds dining in large banqueting halls. By the Elizabethan age, a small intimate room where master and family dined alone replaced the old dining hall where master, servants, guests, and travellers had previously dined together (Spencer). Dining tables remained portable until the 1780s when tables with removable leaves were devised. By this time, the bread trencher had been replaced by one made of wood, or plate of pewter or precious metal in wealthier houses. Hosts began providing knives and spoons for their guests by the seventeenth century, with forks also appearing but not fully accepted until the eighteenth century (Mason). These silver utensils were usually marked with the owner’s initials to prevent their theft (Flandrin). Cookbooks as Objects and the World of Publishing A thorough examination of the manuscript or printed cookbook can reveal their physical qualities, including indications of post-publication history, the recipes and other matter in them, as well as the language, organization, and other individual qualities. What can the quality of the paper tell us about the book? Is there a frontispiece? Is the book dedicated to an employer or a patron? Does the author note previous employment history in the introduction? In his Court Cookery, Robert Smith, for example, not only mentions a number of his previous employers, but also outlines that he was eight years working with Patrick Lamb in the Court of King William, before revealing that several dishes published in Lamb’s Royal Cookery (1710) “were never made or practis’d (sic) by him and others are extreme defective and imperfect and made up of dishes unknown to him; and several of them more calculated at the purses than the Gôut of the guests”. Both Lamb and Smith worked for the English monarchy, nobility, and gentry, but produced French cuisine. Not all Britons were enamoured with France, however, with, for example Hannah Glasse asserting “if gentlemen will have French cooks, they must pay for French tricks” (4), and “So much is the blind folly of this age, that they would rather be imposed on by a French Booby, than give encouragement to an good English cook” (ctd. in Trubek 60). Spencer contextualises Glasse’s culinary Francophobia, explaining that whilst she was writing the book, the Jacobite army were only a few days march from London, threatening to cut short the Hanoverian lineage. However, Lehmann points out that whilst Glasse was overtly hostile to French cuisine, she simultaneously plagiarised its receipts. Based on this trickling down of French influences, Mennell argues that “there is really no such thing as a pure-bred English cookery book” (All Manners 98), but that within the assimilation and simplification, a recognisable English style was discernable. Mennell also asserts that Glasse and her fellow women writers had an enormous role in the social history of cooking despite their lack of technical originality (“Plagiarism”). It is also important to consider the place of cookbooks within the history of publishing. Albala provides an overview of the immense outpouring of dietary literature from the printing presses from the 1470s. He divides the Renaissance into three periods: Period I Courtly Dietaries (1470–1530)—targeted at the courtiers with advice to those attending banquets with many courses and lots of wine; Period II The Galenic Revival (1530–1570)—with a deeper appreciation, and sometimes adulation, of Galen, and when scholarship took centre stage over practical use. Finally Period III The Breakdown of Orthodoxy (1570–1650)—when, due to the ambiguities and disagreements within and between authoritative texts, authors were freer to pick the ideas that best suited their own. Nutrition guides were consistent bestsellers, and ranged from small handbooks written in the vernacular for lay audiences, to massive Latin tomes intended for practicing physicians. Albala adds that “anyone with an interest in food appears to have felt qualified to pen his own nutritional guide” (1). Would we have heard about Mrs. Beeton if her husband had not been a publisher? How could a twenty-five year old amass such a wealth of experience in household management? What role has plagiarism played in the history of cookbooks? It is interesting to note that a well worn copy of her book (Beeton) was found in the studio of Francis Bacon and it is suggested that he drew inspiration for a number of his paintings from the colour plates of animal carcasses and butcher’s meat (Dawson). Analysing the post-publication usage of cookbooks is valuable to see the most popular recipes, the annotations left by the owner(s) or user(s), and also if any letters, handwritten recipes, or newspaper clippings are stored within the leaves of the cookbook. The Reader, the Cook, the Eater The physical and inner lives and needs and skills of the individuals who used cookbooks and who ate their meals merit consideration. Books by their nature imply literacy. Who is the book’s audience? Is it the cook or is it the lady of the house who will dictate instructions to the cook? Numeracy and measurement is also important. Where clocks or pocket watches were not widely available, authors such as seventeenth century recipe writer Sir Kenelm Digby would time his cooking by the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Literacy amongst protestant women to enable them to read the Bible, also enabled them to read cookbooks (Gold). How did the reader or eater’s religion affect the food practices? Were there fast days? Were there substitute foods for fast days? What about special occasions? Do historic cookbooks only tell us about the food of the middle and upper classes? It is widely accepted today that certain cookbook authors appeal to confident cooks, while others appeal to competent cooks, and others still to more cautious cooks (Bilton). This has always been the case, as has the differentiation between the cookbook aimed at the professional cook rather than the amateur. Historically, male cookbook authors such as Patrick Lamb (1650–1709) and Robert Smith targeted the professional cook market and the nobility and gentry, whereas female authors such as Eliza Acton (1799–1859) and Isabella Beeton (1836–1865) often targeted the middle class market that aspired to emulate their superiors’ fashions in food and dining. How about Tavern or Restaurant cooks? When did they start to put pen to paper, and did what they wrote reflect the food they produced in public eateries? Conclusions This paper has offered an overview of Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s methodology for reading historic cookbooks using a structured approach. It has highlighted some of the questions scholars and researchers might ask when faced with an old cookbook, regardless of era or geographical location. By systematically examining the book under the headings of ingredients; the cook’s workplace, techniques and equipment; the meals; cookbooks as objects and the world of publishing; and reader, cook and eater, the scholar can perform magic and extract much more from the cookbook than seems to be there on first appearance. References Ackerman, Roy. The Chef's Apprentice. London: Headline, 1988. Adamson, Melitta Weiss. Food in Medieval Times. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P, 2004. Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Ed. Darra Goldstein. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Beeton, Isabella. Beeton's Book of Household Management. London: S. Beeton, 1861. Bilton, Samantha. “The Influence of Cookbooks on Domestic Cooks, 1900-2010.” Petit Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 30–7. Blake, Anthony, and Quentin Crewe. Great Chefs of France. London: Mitchell Beazley/ Artists House, 1978. Brighton Pavilion. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2011/sep/09/brighton-pavilion-360-interactive-panoramic›. Cashman, Dorothy. “An Exploratory Study of Irish Cookbooks.” Unpublished Master's Thesis. M.Sc. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. Chartier, Roger. “The Practical Impact of Writing.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. A History of Private Lives: Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1989. 111-59. Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. New York: Oxford U P, 1999. Dawson, Barbara. “Francis Bacon and the Art of Food.” The Irish Times 6 April 2013. den Hartog, Adel P. “Technological Innovations and Eating out as a Mass Phenomenon in Europe: A Preamble.” Eating out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks since the Late Eighteenth Century. Eds. Mark Jacobs and Peter Scholliers. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 263–80. Eatwell, Ann. “Á La Française to À La Russe, 1680-1930.” Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style. Eds. Philippa Glanville and Hilary Young. London: V&A, 2002. 48–52. Flandrin, Jean-Louis. “Distinction through Taste.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. A History of Private Lives: Volume III : Passions of the Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1989. 265–307. Folch, Christine. “Fine Dining: Race in Pre-revolution Cuban Cookbooks.” Latin American Research Review 43.2 (2008): 205–23. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy; Which Far Exceeds Anything of the Kind Ever Published. 4th Ed. London: The Author, 1745. Gold, Carol. Danish Cookbooks: Domesticity and National Identity, 1616-1901. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007. Grainger, Sally. Cooking Apicius: Roman Recipes for Today. Totnes, Devon: Prospect, 2006. Hampton Court Palace. “The Tudor Kitchens.” 12 Jun 2013 ‹http://www.hrp.org.uk/HamptonCourtPalace/stories/thetudorkitchens› Katz, Solomon H. Ed. Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (3 Vols). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003. Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962. Lamb, Patrick. Royal Cookery:Or. The Complete Court-Cook. London: Abel Roper, 1710. Lehmann, Gilly. “English Cookery Books in the 18th Century.” The Oxford Companion to Food. Ed. Alan Davidson. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1999. 277–9. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Changing Geography and Fortunes of Dublin’s Haute Cuisine Restaurants 1958–2008.” Food, Culture & Society 14.4 (2011): 525–45. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín, and Dorothy Cashman. “Irish Culinary Manuscripts and Printed Cookbooks: A Discussion.” Petit Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 81–101. Mason, Laura. Food Culture in Great Britain. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport CT.: Greenwood P, 2004. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1996. ---. “Plagiarism and Originality: Diffusionism in the Study of the History of Cookery.” Petits Propos Culinaires 68 (2001): 29–38. Sherman, Sandra. “‘The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking’: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth Century Life 28.1 (2004): 115–35. Smith, Andrew F. Ed. The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. New York: Oxford U P, 2007. Spencer, Colin. British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. London: Grub Street, 2004. Tierney, Mark. Europe and the World 1300-1763. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970. Trubek, Amy B. Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Wheaton, Barbara. “Finding Real Life in Cookbooks: The Adventures of a Culinary Historian”. 2006. Humanities Research Group Working Paper. 9 Sep. 2009 ‹http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/HRG/article/view/22/27›. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983. White, Eileen, ed. The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays. Proceedings of the 16th Leeds Symposium on Food History 2001. Devon: Prospect, 2001.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. 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