The Rhetoric of the Civil War: Literary Devices of the North and South

While both Northern and Southern antebellum writers employed religious imagery for their persuasive purposes, their specific rhetoric differed: Timrod pictured the South romantically, as the revival of Camelot even after the Confederacy’s death; Stowe, heavily influenced by her personal background, enacted emotion accompanied by an appeal to ethics in her fictional apologetic for the end of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Although history handed both authors the opportunity to affect the nation’s trajectory, only Stowe achieved this feat, and she owes her triumph over Timrod, the victory of the North over the South, to her emotional rhetoric concerning slavery. This victory manifests itself in the comparison between Timrod’s underwhelming influence on Southern literature and Stowe’s indisputable effect on American history

I am the Captain Now An Investigation of Somali Piracy

What is the thread that connects all the various actors and events that contributed to the rise of piracy in Somalia? The paper addresses the evolution of Somali piracy, focusing on its emergence, since it is that transformational aspect that provides the most richly insightful perspectives. Working from Thomas, Kiser, and Casebeer’s Warlords Rising: Confronting Violent Non-State Actors, an excellent foil for understanding how violent non-state actors (VNSAs) can arise into power in various situations and circumstances, connections are made to actual events and circumstances that contributed to a rise in piracy in Somalia. Among the various sources, another inspiration for linking events, actions, and actors is Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism, with its thorough information on how piracy is actually carried out and on how the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea created opportunities for piracy to flourish in incapacitated states. The main ambition of the paper is to integrate the different understandings, since they are currently generated for different purposes, of these various aspects of Somali piracy, as well as to illuminate the factors that led to this phenomenon, in addition to exploring what we can learn from these explanations and outcomes. How various states have reacted, and whether, and how, or to what extent, those responses have different impacts on the evolution of Somali piracy, will be followed by proposals to address the contributing factors of Somali piracy. This will round off the discussion

Canon before Canon, Literature before Literature: Thomas Pope Blount and the Scope of Early Modern Learning

Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649–1697), an English essayist and country gentleman, published two major literary biobibliographies, Censura celebriorum authorum (1690) and De re poetica (1694). In this essay, Kelsey Jackson Williams discusses the texts within the genre of historia literaria and contemporary understandings of literature. In doing so, he engages with current debates surrounding canon formation and the shifts in disciplinary boundaries that followed in the wake of the Battle of the Books. Early modern canons and definitions of “literature” differed radically from their modern equivalents, and a close reading of Blount’s work offers a window onto this forgotten literary landscape.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Training the virtuoso: John Aubrey’s education and early life

John Aubrey's contributions to antiquarianism and archaeology helped to shape the development of several disciplines in English scholarship. This paper looks at the educational milieu that produced his pioneering work, following him from his Wiltshire gentry background through school at Blandford Forum, Dorset, to Trinity College, Oxford, the Middle Temple, and beyond as a young gentleman with a scientific turn of mind in Commonwealth London. It substantially clarifies and revises previous estimates of the extent and nature of his education and offers a case study in the early training of a Restoration "virtuoso".PostprintPeer reviewe

Thomas Gray and the Goths: philology, poetry, and the uses of the Norse past in eighteenth-century England

In 1761 Thomas Gray composed two loose translations of Old Norse poems: The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin. This article reconstructs Gray’s complex engagement with the world of seventeenth-century Scandinavian scholarship: recovering the texts he used, the ideologies contained within them, and the ways in which he naturalized those ideologies into his own vision of the history of English literature. Gray became aware of Old Norse poetry in the course of composing a never-completed history of English poetry in the 1750s, but this article argues that it was not until the publication of James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) that Gray became inspired to engage poetically with the Scandinavian past. Imitating Macpherson, he created his own ‘translations’ of what he understood to be the British literary heritage and, in doing so, composed a vivid and surprising variation on the grand myths of early modern Scandinavian nationalism.PostprintPeer reviewe

The network of James Garden of Aberdeen and north-eastern Scottish culture in the seventeenth century

PostprintPeer reviewe

A Genealogy of the Grand Komnenoi of Trebizond

The empire of Trebizond, founded by a grandson of emperor Andronikos I Komnenos in the chaos following the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the last Byzantine state to fall to the Ottoman Turks (in 1461), occupied a unique position in the later middle ages as a focus for transcontinental commerce and as a state which had close ties with the Georgian and Turkomen polities to its east as well as the Byzantine, French and Italian states to its west. These ties were solidified by a series of astute dynastic marriages that make the Grand Komnenoi, the ruling dynasty of Trebizond for the period of its history as an empire, of particular interest to the genealogist and prosopographer. The present paper corrects the accreted errors of past generations and sets out, for the first time, a scholarly account of the genealogy of the Grand Komnenoi.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The Antiquities at Stonehenge

Short piece on Stonehenge in the eighteenth century

Canon before Canon, Literature before Literature: Thomas Pope Blount and the Scope of Early Modern Learning

Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649–1697), an English essayist and country gentleman, published two major literary biobibliographies, Censura celebriorum authorum (1690) and De re poetica (1694). In this essay, Kelsey Jackson Williams discusses the texts within the genre of historia literaria and contemporary understandings of literature. In doing so, he engages with current debates surrounding canon formation and the shifts in disciplinary boundaries that followed in the wake of the Battle of the Books. Early modern canons and definitions of “literature” differed radically from their modern equivalents, and a close reading of Blount’s work offers a window onto this forgotten literary landscape