Out of my country and myself I go : a critical examination of the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson

The idea we have of a literary tradition is not a matter of fixity. In a living language the canon is continually being added to and therefore, to the extent that the tradition is present to us and simultaneous with us, liable to be changed by new work. Fresh contributions, innovative of necessity, realign our picture of the past and, above all, redefine it. Writers, to paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges, create their own ancestors. So it is that a hitherto peripheral writer or a form considered "low" may be reassessed and enlisted in the perpetual struggle with narrative forms. Just this is the case of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) whose experimental transformations of a number of genres of fiction have an almost exemplary status at the present time. Meanwhile, Vladimir Nabokov's lectures on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Borges' ubiquitous remarks on the Scots writers illuminate both his work and theirs. ' He is now an ancestor and requires the consideration of all who are interested in the continuing life of storytelling. From the point of view of literary criticism, the shifting tradition consists first and foremost only of literary works and not of a philosophy of literary form or of any ideas originating outside the realm of literature itself. The language which criticism uses to speak about the novel, for example, will derive from specific novels. At the same time it is engaged in selecting those very novels which will constitute its values. The language the critic uses to describe some kinds of fiction can seem absolute, when in actual fact it is simply the case that his language is suitable for describing one kind and is inappropriate to another

Cellular Models of Aggregation-Dependent Template-Directed Proteolysis to Characterize Tau Aggregation Inhibitors for Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease

Copyright © 2015, The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Acknowledgements-We thank Drs Timo Rager and Rolf Hilfiker (Solvias, Switzerland) for polymorph analyses.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Materiality in the future of history: things, practices, and politics

Frank Trentmann is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London. From 2002 to 2007, he was director of the £5 million Cultures of Consumption research program, cofunded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He is working on a book for Penguin, The Consuming Passion: How Things Came to Seduce, Enrich, and Define Our Lives, from the Seventeenth Century to the Twenty‐First. This article is one of a pair seeking to facilitate greater exchange between history and the social sciences. Its twin—“Crossing Divides: Globalization and Consumption in History” (forthcoming in the Handbook of Globalization Studies, ed. Bryan Turner)—shows what social scientists (and contemporary historians) might learn from earlier histories. The piece here follows the flow in the other direction. Many thanks to the ESRC for grant number RES‐052‐27‐002 and, for their comments, to Heather Chappells, Steve Pincus, Elizabeth Shove, and the editor and the reviewer

Private trade and monopoly structures : the East India Companies and the commodity trade to Europe in the eighteenth century

Our research is about the trade in material goods from Asia to Europe over this period, and its impact on Europe’s consumer and industrial cultures. It entails a comparative study of Europe’s East India Companies and the private trade from Asia over the period. The commodities trade was heavily dependent on private trade. The historiography to date has left a blind spot in this area, concentrating instead on corruption and malfeasance. Taking a global history approach we investigate the trade in specific consumer goods in many qualities and varieties that linked merchant communities and stimulated information flows. We set out how private trade functioned alongside and in connection with the various European East India companies; we investigate how this changed over time, how it drew on the Company infrastructure, and how it took the risks and developed new and niche markets for specific Asian commodities that the Companies could not sustain

Clothing, race and identity : sumptuary laws in colonial Spanish America

On holidays and other festive occasions, Andean peoples in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru liked to dress up. According to sixteenth - century documents, wealthy Amerindians in Lima, Quito and other colonial cities enjoyed wearing a combination of European and Andean garments, sometimes made of silk and other expensive, imported fabrics. Their sartorial exuberance annoyed local Spaniards, who issued repeated orders prohibiting Amerindians from wearing a range of garments containing silk, velvet, Holland cloth, lace and other embellishments. The indigenous elite did not accept these prohibitions without protest. In 1593, members of the Amerindian community in Quito wrote to Emperor Philip II to complain that ‘as conquered people it sometimes happens that officials and other people undress them and take their clothing, saying that they can wear only cotton, which causes them much trouble and vexation