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Abstracts and keywords

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360600703492

1470-1308

Political Theory and Influence

Peter Holbrook Peter Holbrook Shakespeare, ‘The Cause of the People’, and The Chartist Circular 1839–1842 Left political critics such as Cultural Materialists are now often rather hostile towards Shakespeare, apparently agreeing with William Hazlitt that great poetry such as Shakespeare's tends to be inimical to ‘the cause of the people’, i.e., democracy. This is a changed situation from that when the Communist Arnold Kettle, writing in the 1960s, could take it for granted that Shakespeare was an indispensable author for a radical working-class culture in Britain. This article explores the politics of Shakespeare through an analysis of how he and a selection of his plays are represented in a Chartist newspaper of the early 1840s. It argues that the Chartists saw Shakespeare as, in broad terms, an ally – they are closer to Kettle's position than Hazlitt's, let alone that of contemporary radical Bard-bashers. Nevertheless, their enthusiasm for Shakespeare did not prevent the Chartists dissenting from what they took to be conservative implications in texts such as Coriolanus and Othello – and in ways that seem to anticipate recent ideological critiques of these plays. (Hamlet the Chartists find a vastly more sympathetic text.) Overall, the explicit political bias of the Chartists' reading of Shakespeare was valuable, alerting them to political implications of the plays, including democratic or progressive ones, that less or differently biased approaches are likely to miss. Sean M. Quinlan Medicine in the Boudoir: Sade and moral hygiene in post-Thermidorean France Readers have long associated medicine with the Marquis de Sade, although this association is rarely placed in historical context. Focusing upon La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) this essay shows that Sade appropriated medical ideas about hygiene and regeneration to create an intellectual defense of libertinism. In this apologia, Sade used medicine on three fronts. First, on a personal level, medicine gave libertines the power to master their corporeal experiences and intensify pleasure and pain. Second, on a philosophic level, it allowed libertines to counter theological or scientific systems that upheld conventional morality. Finally, on a political level, medicine allowed libertines to challenge government attitudes towards family structure and reproduction, providing them with a highly anarchic and violent social vision of their own. In this manner, Sade was responding to both authoritarian and utopian visions of moral hygiene, attempting to counter medical authority on its own terms. Anne Jamison Passing strange: Christina Rossetti's unusual dead ‘Passing Strange’ contends that Christina Rossetti's 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems introduces a transgressive, innovative poetics in England nearly simultaneously with Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. In poems like ‘After Death’, ‘At Home’, and ‘Song (When I am dead my dearest)’, Rossetti departs from Victorian male- and female-authored ‘female corpse’ traditions to insist on the emotional continence and detachment of both the dead and the poem – in contrast to the period's watery metaphors for female death and women's poetry alike. The topos of female death enables Rossetti to ‘pass’ through the strictly gendered system of Victorian poetics that declared formal creation the provenance of male poets while constraining women to weep into borrowed poetic vessels. Subverting this familiar image, Rossetti quietly allegorizes female death to advance a depersonalized, formally-attuned poetics. This poetics of stealth constitutes a crucial and under-recognized counterpart to the ‘shock of the new’ we know from Baudelaire and Benjamin. Chris Danta Two versions of death: the transformation of the literary corpse in Kafka and Stevenson This essay makes the claim for Robert Louis Stevenson being a precursor of Franz Kafka in order to offer a new reading of Stevenson's 1886 ‘shilling shocker’, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Drawing on a well-known letter Kafka wrote to Max Brod in 1922 about the writer's relation to his own death and an important entry from Stevenson's notebooks on the same subject, it argues that Jekyll's transformation into Hyde represents not the splitting of his (moral) personality but rather the paradoxical appearance of his death. In presenting death as a paradoxical form of transformation, Jekyll and Hyde can be read as the allegorical foreshadowing of Stevenson's own death by stroke on Samoa in 1894. When read in conjunction with Kafka's Metamorphosis, it also demands that we reconsider the theoretically vexing relation of literature to the body. Peter Boxall Since Beckett Throughout the first four decades of Samuel Beckett's reception, his writing was widely understood as an extended performance of exhaustion. He was seen as a writer in whose work the possibilities of the modernist project finally withered and dried up. He was the apolitical, nihilistic writer par excellence, a writer for whom everything is already finished, for whom there is nothing more to be done. In more recent years, however, this sense of Beckettian finality has entered into a contradiction with an opposite sense of Beckettian persistence. For a number of contemporary writers, Beckett is not an end point or a last gasp, but a well spring from which a entire range of new aesthetic possibilities emerges. This essay explores this contradiction, and asks what it means to inherit Beckett's legacy, a legacy which delivers us, in Moran's phrase, to an ‘atmosphere’ of ‘finality without end’. Tania Ørum Georges Perec and the avant-garde in the visual arts The work of the French writer Georges Perec belongs in the 1960s avant-garde is rooted to a very large extent in the visual arts. Like other avant-garde artists from the 1960s and 1970s, Perec tends to work across genres and art forms. He shares the fascinated interest in mass culture as well as the critique of the traditional concept of the artist, just as he shares the attempt to cross the boundaries between life and art and reach what Perec calls the ‘infra-ordinary’. Like many visual artist of this period, Perec is interested in systems and serial production. Several model characteristics of the 1960s avant-garde artist can be seen in Perec's own model of a visual artist, the character Bartlebooth in Life A User's Manual. Bartlebooth's project may seem like a parody of the 1960s avant-garde, but is not far from Perec's own descriptive project Lieux. Sarah Brouillette Struggle tourism and Northern Ireland's culture industries: the case of Robert McLiam Wilson This essay considers some of the cultural implications of the acceleration of transnational capitalization in Northern Ireland, arguing that the culture industries have been implicated in the marketing of regional violence to international consumers. The career of Belfast writer Robert McLiam Wilson is explored in this context, and it is suggested that he has used his work to position himself in relation to the marketing of political violence as cultural content. The essay shows that Wilson's concern is to elaborate a critique of the region's nationalism that emphasizes the way it can be made to serve the interests of transnational capital. Keywords: ShakespeareChartismradical criticism Hamlet Othello Coriolanus Keywords: Sademedicinemoral hygienereproductive politicsregenerationsensibilityKeywords: RossettiChristina Georgina‘After Death’‘At Home’poeticstransgressionfemale deathKeywords: StevensonKafkaNabokovBlanchotRancière Jekyll and Hyde Metamorphosis corpsedeathliteraturethe bodyKeywords: Samuel BeckettJames JoyceDon DeLillo Company Hamlet legacyinheritancemodernismKeywords: Georges Perecavant-gardeliteraturevisual art Life A User's Manual FluxusKeywords: Transnationalismculture industriesNorthern Irelandtourismprint cultureRobert McLiam WilsonSeamus Heaney