Volume 127, Issue 1

Ælfric's Life of St. Sebastian is in many ways typical of the saints' lives in his whole collection concerning a male, secular, military saint. Saints such as these were likely appealing models of behavior for Ælfric's secular, military patrons for the Lives of Saints collection. Nevertheless, a close comparison of the source for this particular saint's life and the life that Ælfric produced reveals a disjunction between the concerns of the anonymous early Christian writer and that of the Anglo-Saxon monk especially in regards to Sebastian's military role and attendant imagery. The Latin Passio rhetorically highlights the contradictions of Sebastian's life: that he is a soldier and Christian; that he fights the arrows of the devil but is famed for being shot full of arrows at his martyrdom; and the fact that he hides his religion and participates in the machinery of Roman persecution. Ælfric shifts the rhetorical focus away from these themes in his translation and goes out of his way to minimize and even neutralize those very aspects the Latin author exalts. The result is a life which seems to be about a soldier, but most trappings of his soldiery have been removed.

This paper investigates the strategies of language-use in James Joyce's “The Dead” and the relationship between these strategies and the prominent themes of the story, such as subjectivity, nationalism and literature. Using a Heideggerian approach, it understands the story as a series of linguistic incidents and encounters, in which Gabriel Conroy is made to think upon the relations among himself, others and the nation, as an abstraction to which both he and others are supposed to belong. The narrative quest in the story is to have an authentic experience of language that indeed occurs at the end of the story in the form of epiphany, with all the force and suggestivity of Heideggerian event ( Ereignis ), when Joyce's writing opens up a world in the Heideggerian sense: Ireland covered in snow. But the ending does not provide a resolution to the questions of subjectivity and its relation to the nation; rather it suggests a ground, i. e. literature , with respect to which such questions become secondary and relative. The story may then be viewed as an ode to the powers of literature to affect, to encompass, to resonate.

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy begins with an act of conception. But what is conceived in the first chapter is not so much the result of a sexual but that of a performative act. Drawing on a (long-neglected) systematization of narrative speech acts (or ‘modes’), the present article shows how Tristram-the-narrator, in reporting speech and thereby surreptitiously including the very act of his creation, textually (and paradoxically) self-begets a Tristram-as-character, which serves Sterne as a source of (potentially) endless textual play before it is brought to a halt again by an arbitrary act of (self-)annihilation.

A hitherto unknown exchange of letters between the Frisian stadholder Willem Frederik of Nassau-Dietz and the English dramatist and courtier Thomas Killigrew adds considerably to our knowledge of the latter's diverse preoccupations in the years before and immediately after the Restoration. It establishes Killigrew as a thriving liaison officer, protecting the interests of his King, ensuring the good relations between the House of Stuart and that of Nassau, while at the same time furthering his own career. The letters, written between 20 March 1657 and 25 June 1663, give a valuable glimpse of the realities royalist exiles faced on the continent as they tried to carve out sustainable livelihoods, as well as in England where after 1660 they had to disentangle themselves from the obligations and responsibilities imposed by their continental careers. The same documents also illustrate the system of public and private patronage at Willem Frederik's court and shed an interesting though indirect light on the broader context of the Stuart – Nassau relationships.