Volume 142, Issue 2

The Old English poem Andreas has long been considered to be indebted both to the signed works of Cynewulf and to Beowulf . Recent studies have demonstrated Andreas ’s debt to a number of other ‘Cynewulfian’ poems. This paper argues that the poet of Andreas likewise borrowed from Christ III (an earlier poem concerned with the Second Coming of Christ at Doomsday). The influence of the latter on the former is apparent on the basis of a large number of unique or almost unique verbal parallels listed in an appendix to this paper. The later poet does not just parrot his hypothesised source, but originally and artistically recasts his borrowings with various kinds of embellishment. The influence of Christ III on Andreas is also apparent on a thematic level. This paper demonstrates that the Andreas -poet was attracted to the twin themes of ignorance and judgement in Christ III , creating a miniature Doomsday narrative out of the conversion of the Mermedonians. In doing so, the Andreas -poet reveals himself as a sophisticated consumer of earlier poetry and an original artist, turning his Latin prose source into a novel, theologically imaginative narrative.

A print of Siliceus’s Arithmetica (Paris 1526), once preserved in the Landesbibliothek in Kassel, but now lost, contained a fragment of one parchment leaf until it was removed in 1904. The text, vaguely identified by Wiedemann (1994) as a “Vita Thomae Beket”, is here more precisely identified as part of the “Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury” from an early South English Legendary . I describe fragment and text in detail, and the text is analysed with respect to dialect and to its position in the transmission history. A diplomatic edition of the text preserved in this fragment makes this early witness of an important Middle English legendary available for the first time.

Relying on information contained in Prosper Claeys’ Histoire du théâtre à Gand (1892) and in notes bynineteenth-century German theatre historians, the present essay seeks to partially reconstruct the repertory of William Durham, the (largely forgotten) manager of a troupe of wandering actors, who performed at Ghent in 1713 and in various German cities between 1724 or 1725 and 1728. No particulars are available about his performances at Ghent, which appear to have been a combination of acting and rope-dancing. Contemporary play-bills, on the other hand, reveal the diverse nature of three pieces which Durham produced in German-speaking areas: (1) Das durchlauchtigste Müllermädchen , possibly an adaptation of aseventeenth-century English comedy by John Fletcher and William Rowley; (2) Genovefa , a play about the legendary eponymous character, whose story had been widely circulated in Europe; and (3) Der transmetamorphosirte Arlequin , a Harlequin-Faustus Hauptaktion , which may have taken its cue from a spate of popular harlequinades on the contemporary London stage. Although the scanty available evidence does not allow of any firm conclusions about his international standing, Durham may have been the exponent of a ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ theatre bridging the gap between various dramatic traditions.

The Victorians were notorious for their preoccupation with the posture and carriage of men and women, by which they outlined the contours of their refinement and moral characters. Drawing on Victorian etiquette manuals and modern social psychological studies regarding sitting postures, this article addresses scenes and melodramas featuring seats in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend so as to reveal how Dickens has created a scathing satire on the respectable pretension and deep moral vices of Victorian society through his seemingly exaggerated description of characters’ sitting manners. It argues that seat performance is not only a crucial means for Victorians’ self-representation but also a shrewd strategy for domination. While Dickens’s caricatured depictions of Lammle’s and Fledgeby’s abominable sitting manners manifests his biting attacks on Victorian predatory fortune-hunters’ thirst for power and money, his rendition of Jenny’s and Bella’s questionable sitting poses lays bare the miseries and imprisonment of women in that era.

This article examines the representation of the Irish Asylum system – known as Direct Provision – by an artist and a writer who have experienced it first-hand. Vukašin Nedeljković’s art project Asylum Archive (2007 –) and Melatu Okorie’s short stories “Shackles” (2010) and “This Hostel Life” (2017) respectively engage in the visual and literary representation of unlivable life in this carceral system, both articulating a compelling critique of the necropolitical violence exerted in and through its operations. Their work foregrounds the spatial and time dimensions of detention, highlighting the vulnerability of international protection applicants whose lives are not only bounded by confinement but also deferred in indefinite waiting. Besides, this article contends that these works go far beyond critique, offering very powerful critical insights into the inmates’ affective responses to the injustices of the asylum regime, and how these can potentially open spaces of dissent and resistance.

In 1985 American author Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian , a novel that is set against the backdrop of the conquest of the West, a momentous and still relevant process that has acquired quasi-mythical dimensions throughout history and that is undoubtedly embedded in the United States’ national consciousness. In this article I will show the different mechanisms employed by Cormac McCarthy to deconstruct conventional Western narratives that glorify and sanction the Westward expansion as a courageous endeavour that shaped the American nation, hence underplaying the more devastating and pernicious side of this chapter of America’s imperialistic undertakings. To that end, I will argue that McCarthy contests the main tenets of the crucial 1893 Frontier Thesis proposed by Frederick Jackson Turner, in particular the depiction of American colonial expansion as a source of progress and democratic development; likewise I will contend that, in Blood Meridian , McCarthy aligns himself with the ideas of New Western Historians that offer a revisionist perspective of the country’s past, revealing such brutality and wickedness exerted in the appropriation of the western territories that seemed to deprive the process of any hope of God’s mercy.