From Domus to Polis: hybrid identities in Southey’s letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s letters from Spain (1822)

Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters – the “familiar stranger” – at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as “home-interpreter” calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay, “Domus and Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus

Romantic Palingenesis, or History from the Ashes

Palingenesis, or regeneration from decay, is variously invoked by eighteenth to early-nineteenth-century natural philosophy, psychology, mythography, and literature. Its currency derives from the Swiss-French scientist Charles Bonnet’s Palingénésie philosophique (1769), which conceives of natural history as repeated renewal after epochal catastrophes. Herder’s Über die seelenwanderung (1782) develops an idea of “natural palingenesis” as the internal “rebirth” of selfhood within memory despite physiological decay. Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s fragmentary magnum opus Essais de palingénésie sociale (1827-29) turned to political upheaval, locating the French Revolution within a process by which expiatory suffering gives birth to a new social order. Other writers looked back to alchemical experiments. Robert Southey reviewed these experiments in Omniana (1812) under the heading, “Spectral Flowers,” and still other writers explored the palingenetic properties of resurrected bodies and ghosts. In the light of this not altogether unified discourse, this paper will consider the more discontented, sceptical, at times satiric, strain within Shelley’s poetry, where beautiful idealisms of progressivist transformation do not entirely overcome the fact of death, decay, degeneration, and loss that is their substrata

British women’s travel writing, 1780-1840: Bibliographical reflections

Launched online in 2014, the Women’s Travel Writing database provides full and accurate bibliographical records for all the known books of travel published in Britain and Ireland by women between 1780 and 1840. This article critically and statistically reflects on these 204 titles, the authors who wrote them, and the patterns and trends that they suggest when considered together during the period in which women first gained a firm foothold in a genre traditionally considered men’s territory. The database reveals patterns of women writing on the generic borders between scribal and print culture, conforming to and manipulating rhetorical conventions in prefaces and advertisements (the “modesty topos”), while striking a balance between assertions of authorial independence and expressions of gendered reticence. Overall, the database reveals a sharp upward trend in the rate at which women published travel writings during the census dates, with 74 titles appearing in the 1830s compared to 5 in the 1780s. In considering the bibliographical nuances of women’s increasing presence in the travel writing marketplace, this article also poses questions about the insights and limitations of statistical approaches to cultural analysis

Critical questions for WOLF: an evaluation of the use of a VLE in the teaching and assessment of English Studies

Centre of Excellence in Learning and Teachin

AEGIS: Demographics of X-ray and Optically Selected AGNs

We develop a new diagnostic method to classify galaxies into AGN hosts, star-forming galaxies, and absorption-dominated galaxies by combining the [O III]/Hbeta ratio with rest-frame U-B color. This can be used to robustly select AGNs in galaxy samples at intermediate redshifts (z<1). We compare the result of this optical AGN selection with X-ray selection using a sample of 3150 galaxies with 0.3<z<0.8 and I_AB<22, selected from the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey and the All-wavelength Extended Groth Strip International Survey (AEGIS). Among the 146 X-ray sources in this sample, 58% are classified optically as emission-line AGNs, the rest as star-forming galaxies or absorption-dominated galaxies. The latter are also known as "X-ray bright, optically normal galaxies" (XBONGs). Analysis of the relationship between optical emission lines and X-ray properties shows that the completeness of optical AGN selection suffers from dependence on the star formation rate and the quality of observed spectra. It also shows that XBONGs do not appear to be a physically distinct population from other X-ray detected, emission-line AGNs. On the other hand, X-ray AGN selection also has strong bias. About 2/3 of all emission-line AGNs at L_bol>10^44 erg/s in our sample are not detected in our 200 ks Chandra images, most likely due to moderate or heavy absorption by gas near the AGN. The 2--7 keV detection rate of Seyfert 2s at z~0.6 suggests that their column density distribution and Compton-thick fraction are similar to that of local Seyferts. Multiple sample selection techniques are needed to obtain as complete a sample as possible.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures, submitted to ApJ. Version 2 matches the ApJ accepted version. Sec 3 was reorganized and partly rewritten with one additional figure (Fig.3

Celtic censure: representing Wales in eighteenth-century Germany

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of regionalist discourse as the performative legitimation of specific frontiers, this article examines how the English traveller Samuel Jackson Pratt mediated a picture of the Welsh to late eighteenth-century readers in his Gleanings Through Wales, Holland and Westphalia (1795). This process of mediation was further complicated by the translation of this work into German as the Aehrenlese auf einer Reise durch Wallis, which appeared with the Leipzig publisher Lincke in 1798. While this work made an important contribution to German Celtophilia in the Romantic period, the German translator was careful to omit its more Sternean passages, in favour of factual narrative. Pratt's account of his travel through Wales, mediated in turn to a German audience through its Leipzig translator, therefore embodies several layers of cultural transfer that generate a complex and multifaceted image of Wales at the close of the eighteenth century

Can cognitive insight predict symptom remission in a first episode psychosis cohort?

BACKGROUND: The outcome of first episode psychosis (FEP) is highly variable and difficult to predict. Cognitive insight measured at illness onset has previously been found to predict psychopathology 12-months later. The aims of this study were to examine whether the prospective relationship between cognitive insight and symptom severity is evident at four-years following FEP and to examine some psychological correlates of cognitive insight. METHODS: FEP participants (n = 90) completed the Beck Cognitive Insight Scale (BCIS) at illness onset, and associations between BCIS scores with symptom severity outcomes (4-years after FEP) were assessed. The BCIS scales (self-reflectiveness and self-certainty) were examined as a composite score, and individually compared to other cognitive measures (IQ and jumping to conclusions (JTC) bias). RESULTS: Regression analyses revealed that the cognitive insight composite did not predict 4-year symptom remission in this study while the self-reflection subscale of the BCIS predicted severity of symptoms at 4-years. Self-certainty items of the BCIS were not associated with symptom severity. Significant correlations between the JTC bias, self-certainty and IQ were found, but self-reflection did not correlate with these other cognitive measures. CONCLUSIONS: Self-reflective capacity is a more relevant and independent cognitive construct than self-certainty for predicting prospective symptom severity in psychosis. Improving self-reflection may be a useful target for early intervention research