Pearl and the medieval dream vision

Based on Classical and Biblical authorities, many medieval writers used the dream vision, either as a literary device, political subversion or as a way of conveying a mystical experience. In some ways the dream vision negated responsibility from the material they were conveying. This paper considers some uses of the medieval dream vision, with particular reference to the devotional, elegiac poem, Pear

Wayland: smith of the gods

This paper considers the origins of the legend of Wayland, the Anglo-Saxon mythological smith. The origins of the Wayland legend come from Scandinavia but have roots in classic literature. Almost all literary references to Wayland have been lost and it is believed that a feast day dedicated to Wayland has been Christianised; however, it is possible to trace his legend through some lines of poetry and through objects such as the Franks Casket. A Neolithic burial site in Berkshire was appropriated as the place where travellers would leave their horses to be shod by the supernatural smit

A Sleeping Giant Awakes? The Rise of the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) in Policy Research

This is the final version. Available on open access from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordThe institutional grammar tool (IGT) is an important and relatively recent innovation in policy theory and analysis. It is conceptualized to empirically operationalize the insights of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. In the last decade, political scientists have offered a number of applications of the IGT, mainly focused on disclosing and scrutinizing in-depth the textual configurations of policy documents. These efforts, involving micro-level analyses of syntax as well as more general classifications of institutional statements according to rule types, have underpinned empirical projects mainly in the area of environmental and common-pool resources. Applications of IGT are still in their infancy, yet the growing momentum is sufficient for us to review what has been learned so far. We take stock of this recent, fast-growing literature, analysing a corpus of 26 empirical articles employing IGTs published between 2008 and 2017. We examine these in terms of their empirical domain, hypotheses, and methods of selection and analysis of institutional statements. We find that the empirical applications do not add much to explanation, unless they are supported by research questions and hypotheses grounded in theory. We offer three conclusions. First, to exploit the IGT researchers need to go beyond the descriptive, computational approach that has dominated the field until now. Second, IGT studies grounded in explicit hypotheses have more explanatory leverage, and therefore should be encouraged when adopting the IGT outside the Western world. Third, the domain of rules is where researchers can capture findings that are more explanatory and less microscopic.European Commissio

Political Songsters for the Presidential Campaign of 1860.

Songsters, collections of song texts usually containing no music, proliferated in the nineteenth century for various purposes. They provided a quick and inexpensive means of disseminating popular song texts, not only for pure musical entertainment, but also for political purposes, such as temperance, abolition, and campaigns for national office. This study explores how texts contained in 1860 presidential campaign songsters were used as a means of getting political messages across, the popular tunes of the time that were used as vehicles for the lyrics, and the role of songsters in the activities leading up to the election. Songsters were produced for three of the four candidates for president in 1860 (Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and John Bell). The texts contained within these songsters presented most of the volatile and complex issues of the time, such as slavery and popular sovereignty, in a way more easily understood by the public at large. In addition to addressing issues such as these, texts often contained political rhetoric upholding one candidate while maligning opponents. Songsters were disseminated in a number of ways. Campaign groups such as the Wide-Awakes (Lincoln) and the Bell-Ringers (Douglas) were responsible for providing songsters and music at political gatherings such as campaign rallies and ratification conventions. Advertisements for songsters appeared in newspapers such as the New York Times and the Campaign Plain Dealer and Popular Sovereignty Advocate, published for the Douglas campaign. Most songsters did not contain music, but names of tunes were given or implied by the meter of the text. Much of the music was from minstrelsy, Irish/Scottish balladry, or patriotic music of the time. Dan Emmett and Stephen Collins Foster contributed the majority of the minstrel music, while such compilers as Robert Burns (Scots Musical Museum) provided Scottish tunes such as Auld Lang Syne. Groups such as the Hutchinson Family Singers provided a means of making songs familiar to the populace through their performances. Patriotic tunes named included Yankee Doodle, America , and the Star-Spangled Banner.

Witnesses to Trauma: Kakfa\u27s Trauma Victims and the Working Through Process

In The Metamorphosis and The Hunger Artist, Kafka has gifted us with two characters who, in Kafkaesque fashion, pay a terrible price when, willingly or not, [they go] against \u27nature, \u27 as Joachim Neugroschel writes in the introduction to his translation of The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories (Kafka xix). Gregor awakes one morning to discover that he has been turned into a giant vermin, and the hunger artist attempts to cope with his tragedy of not enjoying the taste of food by putting himself on public display, likening his role in society to that of a common zoo animal. Willingly or not, these two characters find themselves in situations that lie outside of the natural human experience, and for decades, literary critics have attempted to explain why neither Gregor nor the hunger artist are able to rise above their circumstances and rejoin their societies

‘Savage times come again’ : Morel, Wells, and the African Soldier, c.1885-1920

The African soldier trained in western combat was a figure of fear and revulsion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My article examines representations of African soldiers in nonfictional writings by E.D. Morel about the Congo Free State (1885-1908), the same author’s reportage on African troops in post-First World War Germany, and H.G. Wells’s speculative fiction When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, 1910). In each text racist and anti-colonialist discourses converge in representing the African soldier as the henchman of corrupt imperialism. His alleged propensity for taboo crimes of cannibalism and rape are conceived as threats to white safety and indeed supremacy. By tracing Wells’s connections to the Congo reform campaign and situating his novel between two phases of Morel’s writing career, I interpret When the Sleeper Wakes as neither simply a reflection of past events in Africa or as a prediction of future ones in Europe. It is rather a transcultural text which reveals the impact of European culture upon the ‘Congo atrocities’, and the inscription of this controversy upon European popular cultural forms and social debates