Volume 56, Issue 1

In late eighteenth-century Europe, attempts at defining the human and differentiating it from other species were closely linked to inquiries after its historical origins, and these again were related by a number of writers to the genealogy of language. Among those writers was the Scottish lawyer and philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, whose theories, especially those on the similarities of man and orang-utan, alienated most of his contemporaries. This essay investigates the consequences of Monboddo’s use of language as a defining trait of the human by first looking at his treatment of the orang-utan on the one hand and of Marie-Angélique Leblanc, the “wild girl of Champagne,” on the other. Both serve as examples where the blurry boundaries of humanity are reached, albeit from two different directions. The orang-utan provoked controversy among his contemporaries and inspired fictional treatments of the “cultivated ape,” the most striking example being Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt. The last part of the essay therefore studies Peacock’s novel as a fictional embodiment of Monboddo’s most controversial theory in a satirical framework, where the romantic author employs the enlightenment anthropologist for testing once again the boundaries of humanity

This article analyses two British post-heritage films, Richard Eyre’s Stage Beauty (2004) and Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (2005). Both films are set in the seventeenth century and use the theatre as a central metaphor to describe and capture the cultural sensibilities of Restoration England. Both are based on stage plays in which theatre also functions as a site of resistance to cultural and social norms of gender and sexual politics. However, both films end by reinscribing and reaffirming the norms they set out to question, as transgressive desire is preempted and contained by an aesthetics of spectacle. Approaching the films in the light of gender performativity and queer theory, as well as examining their depiction of historical figures like Edward Kynaston and Elizabeth Barry, King Charles II and the earl of Rochester, this essay tries to find out why Restoration England appears to be so difficult to present cinematically

This article is concerned with the interlaced themes of visual and supernatural ‘evidence’ in Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur & George (2005), which rewrites an episode from the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, concerned with a real-life criminal case. Briefly analysing how epistemological questions and modes of detection were represented in Victorian precursors of the genre (Doyle, Poe, Dickens, Collins), the article proceeds to establish the generic conventions of the ‘postmodern’ neo-Victorian detective novel, differentiating it from High Postmodernism’s ‘metaphysical detective story’ and looking, apart from Barnes’s novel, at Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), and Louis Bayard’s Mr Timothy (2003). In order to make visible the invisible, not only former ophthal-mologist Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes but also other Victorian and neo-Victorian detec-tives - including the Doyle figure in Arthur & George - are relying on the latest visual aids such as photography, X-rays, microscopes and binoculars as well as on ‘pseudo’-scientific investigative techniques such as mesmerism or séances. Especially in Arthur & George the two seemingly antagonistic discourses of rationalism and spiritualism are closely intertwined

The Chinese American writer Frank Chin owes his current status as a margin-alized figure in Asian American Studies not only to his anti-feminist vitriolics, but also to his writing style. Judged by common contemporary standards, Chin’s novels appear dis-jointed and crude: He routinely puts blunt, didactic statements from his essays into his characters’ mouths without even trying to give them any literary embellishment; yet at the same time all these doctrine-like, straightforward, and obviously instructional passages are infused with complex hints at ancient myths, and his competently lecturing pro-tagonists are prone to irritating sudden irrational outbursts of emotion. This article pro-poses that these peculiarities of Chin’s style - a combination of passion, plainness, and allegory - do not necessarily have to be seen as literary weaknesses; they can also be interpreted as a radical employment of strategies that helped form an important strain within the American literary tradition: the strategies that the first distinctly American writers (the plain, passionate, and allegorical Puritans) used. Viewed in this light, Frank Chin seems much less of an ‘outsider’ than before

In the wake of massive trauma, the purpose of literature is to constantly work against a smoothing-over of the painfully disruptive character of the event. With his latest novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer has ventured to represent the traumatic events of September 11 and to interlace them with those of the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945. Combining linguistic virtuosity with typo-graphical and other visual elements, Foer attempts to come as close to the disruptive nature of trauma (representation) as possible, and achieves what Ulrich Baer has described as “mock[ing] the black and white simplicity of printing paper” (Baer 2002, 2). In this contribution I argue that, contrary to what certain critics have maintained, Foer’s use of visual interludes betrays no inability on his part to adequately convey his story by means of language. Instead of treating these elements as a meagre and unconvincing surrogate for language, they should be seen as complementary to the narrative. Some-times the visualisation of trauma in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close even goes beyond what language can convey