Volume 143, Issue 2

John Marston depicts in his play Sophonisba, or The Wonder of Women (1606) an ideal female ruler. In a very powerful image Sophonisba is compared to Carthage’s Palladium, a miraculous guardian statue. The first performance season of Sophonisba may have been the last, too, because there is no record of its revival. In spite of this it may have influenced later playwrights like Philip Massinger and John Ford. In this article I try to examine whether that is plausible. The female protagonists in Philip Massinger’s The Emperor of the East (1631) and John Ford’s The Broken Heart (1633) can be described as ideal women rulers and they have certain characteristics in common with Sophonisba. In addition, I take a look at Massinger’s The Bondman (1623) and its heroine Cleora. In the beginning of that play, she displays a similar valiant spirit to Sophonisba, although the play as a whole is very different from Sophonisba . All in all, these female characters are described as exemplary women whose virtues are beyond the reach of ordinary women. We can only wonder at the wonder of women.

This article is dedicated to the Journal of the Plague Year , in which Daniel Defoe dealt with the so-called Great Plague of London in 1665. At the centre of the analysis are the constitutive and innovative potentials of plague for literary-aesthetic discourse. These poetological potentials, according to the thesis put forward here, manifest themselves in that the epidemic, in its form decidedly horrified by Defoe, locates the Journal on the threshold of intellectual and literary history between the Enlightenment and Gothic fiction. In addition to a ‘Gothic’ word field, episodes about delirious and zombie-like wandering plague sufferers and the metaphorical superimposition of the plague with neurological diseases laden with relevant associations, the Journal ’s Gothic affinity is evident in the macabre curiosity of the narrator H. F. This curiosity is to be profiled through a comparison with another scene of curiosity that is revolutionary in terms of intellectual and literary history, namely Petrarch’s De ascensu montis Ventosi ( Ascent of Mont Ventoux ).

The present paper explores the political implications of Anglo-Indian language contact as represented in British women’s travel writing on colonial India. It draws on travel accounts from the first half of the nineteenth century by Mary Martha Sherwood, Maria Graham, Emily and Frances Eden as well as Madeline and Rosalind Wallace-Dunlop. This paper examines how these authors engage with the languages of India and how their individual approaches to these languages reveal their respective colonial agendas although they avoid explicit political statements. My analysis reveals two forms of engaging with the languages of India. Firstly, all authors introduce native vocabulary to their British readers via transcription, translation, explanation, and – with the exception of Sherwood – visual illustration. Secondly, they all explicitly comment on individual languages and – by implication – their speakers. Combining postcolonial theory and gender studies with a sociolinguistic approach that highlights the symbolic power of language and its relevance to identity construction, the paper illustrates how the linguistic attitudes of these female authors shed light on their entanglement in colonial discourses and power structures and render their travelogues deeply political.

This research examines the representation of museums in Victorian children’s literature, focusing on how these works reflect the scientific and ideological institutionalization of museums and their use as tools for shaping children’s ethical choices. Museums, in these narratives, are depicted not only as venues for the collection and display of objects but also as spaces for scientific and ideological education. Moreover, they serve as critical sites for children’s ethical decision-making. The study also explores how writers like Charles Kingsley, Edith Nesbit, and Rudyard Kipling critique values such as scientism and colonialism in their museum writing, highlighting the ethical role of literature in guiding children towards moral development. 1

This article examines the relationship between debris and memory in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (2001; originally published in 1995 as Die Ringe des Saturn ) to argue that mnemonic practices, including acts of autobiographical anamnesis, are shaped by material forms of decay and their textual presence. A corporeal entanglement with debris – either through modes of traveling in and a corresponding literary ethnography of damaged topographies – generates an excremental poetics in which claims to epistemic coherence and univocity are undermined by the twinned assertion of the fragmentary metaphysics of detritus, on the one hand, and the contingent structure of private retrospection and public memorialization, on the other. Material indices of destruction constitute an extensive reliquary in the text. They serve as a primary trope through which multiple sites of violence in their varied but interrelated geological, climatic, cultural, and geopolitical registers are brought into overlapping intertextual and intermedial encounters. Memory, especially in its close conjunction with place, becomes a tool of narrative cartography that deviates (from) the path of linear history and brings other worlds and times into potential cosmopolitical exchanges. This article analyzes Sebald’s articulation of such memorial cosmopolitics through his charting of an extinction imaginary. By focusing on the specific configurations of memory afforded by ruination, and the engendering of historical records through spectral and speculative modalities of absence, amnesia, illness, and disability, I argue that The Rings of Saturn destabilizes both the sanitized notion of bounded personhood as the epistemic center of historical knowledge, as well as the anthropocentric lens through which narrative production is predominantly construed. Correspondingly, focusing on the status of ruination as material phenomena, and epistemological and narrative resource, I read Sebald’s textual politics of ruins as a productive conceptual intervention into the terrain of private and public memory in the context of the Anthropocene’s multiple entanglements with trajectories of extraction, depletion, and extinction. 1

Popular romance novels taking place on Caribbean cruise ships work through the two main elements characterizing the cruise industry: ever bigger ships and their movement across the Caribbean sea’s paradise locations. Size and mobility matter for romances such as Caribbean Cruising, Santa Cruise and Onboard for Love , which offer a unique vista to the Caribbean seascape from the deck and the cabin of the luxury cruise liner sailing usually from the US to places like the Cayman Islands, Puerto Rico and St Kitts. Popular romance is produced for readers’ escapist pleasure needs, not to preach or politicize. But it is clear, that they must contain elements that readers want from their books, such as value consistency. Beyond the paradise discourse lies the industry’s sustainability dilemma: factors like climate change and overtourism force sustainability front and centre. There is every reason to believe that these values might also seep into romance literature, as the texts suggest that the environment matters for romance. This scrutiny into the conjuncture of the literary and cruise industries, through a consideration of cultural sustainability, suggests multimodal and mobile readers with their value-needs could ultimately influence industries across the board for more sustainable literary futures.