Reconfiguring the national canon: The Edinburgh edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield

This paper looks at how the new two volume edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan, helps us to reassess the creativity of Katherine Mansfield. Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson’s essay on the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield makes clear how in recent years Mansfield has been ‘brought home’ to New Zealand by way of establishing her reputation as a writer of world significance. Those mid twentieth-century years of cultural nationalism, when Frank Sargeson could write that ‘Mansfield imposed this feminine thing on New Zealand’, and Allen Curnow in the Introduction to his milestone Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse could suggest that Mansfield has ‘something like shame for her country’, have long gone. Mansfield has been (re)instated as the country’s foremost writer; her proto-feminism is seen as one of her many qualities, and her in-between location as both a New Zealand writer and an Anglo-European modernist as a defining strength. Mansfield was a diasporic writer; so too for a number of years was Janet Frame. Both Mansfield and Frame are the most innovative and experimental writers New Zealand has produced. And both, of course, were women. The relation between these elements common to both writers, and their significance for New Zealand literary history, is something that still remains to be fully explored

Unintegrated parton distributions and inclusive jet production at HERA

We describe how unintegrated parton distributions can be calculated from conventional integrated distributions. We extend and improve the 'last-step' evolution approach, and explain why doubly-unintegrated parton distributions are necessary. We generalise k_t-factorisation to (z,k_t)-factorisation. We apply the formalism to inclusive jet production in deep-inelastic scattering, mainly at leading-order, but we also study the extension to next-to-leading order. We compare the predictions with recent HERA data.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figures. Version to appear in Eur. Phys. J.

Preparation of Monolithic Carbon Fiber Composite Material

A process for preparing an activated carbon fiber composite material includes the steps of mixing carbon fibers, binder and water to form a slurry, molding the slurry to produce a green monolithic body, curing the monolithic body, carbonizing the cured monolith to produce a carbon fiber composite with an open, permeable structure and activating the composite. If pre-activated carbon fibers are utilized in the mixing step the carbonizing and activating steps are eliminated

Barthold Heinrich Brockes, a transmitter of germinal ideas in his Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott

INTRODUCTION What we read about Barthold Heinrich Brookes leaves us with a confusing and contradictory picture.CHAPTER I The sources of Brookes' Irdisches Vergniigen have not been adequately investigated, therefore conclusions drawn from his work about his religion and his attitude to nature are suspect, especially since he sometimes used foreign material without acknowledgment.CHAPTER II Brookes' scientific poems read like versified paraphrases of the work of some of the scientists of the Royal Society and of the Boyle lecturers who preached sermons based on their investigations. Their aim, the glorification of God through the study of his creation, is also Brookes' aim, and their theological interpolations are similar to his.CHAPTER III The theological and philosophical ideas of this group of writers go back to the great philosophers and theologians of the past. Cicero and Galen transmitted much of this material. Brookes uses it as motifs in his poetry. The topoi of the book of nature and the artisan God express the relationship of the Creator to creation. By contemplating God's handiwork man can raise himself to a knowledge of God. Sometimes he is optimistic about this quest, but sometimes he feels that knowledge is restricted to the afterlife. God is active in creation. A passive God would be the God of "atheism." Newton's theory of gravity and other suitable evidence is given for God's continuous presence in creation.CHAPTER IV Most of these ideas are also expressed in the writings of Brockes, Du Bartas, Blackmore, Thomson and several others. The literary tradition goes back to Genesis and the hexaemera of the Church Fathers. Motifs are also taken from Lucretius and Virgil.CHAPTER V In several of his poems Brockes clearly opposes the tendency to deify nature, yet he often writes about a Natura figure or spirit of nature who is responsible for plant growth, the changing seasons, instinct in the animal world and many other mysterious processes. These ideas are found in the work of the Cambridge Platonists and those who were influenced by them. Contemplation of space and the thought of God's infinity produce a kind of religious ecstasy. This is also in the work of Norris, Traherne and More. Brockes writes in the hymnic manner of Theocles' apostrophes to various natural phenomena in Shaftesbury's Moralists.CHAPTER VI Certain aspects of Longinus' theory of the sublime are transformed in the writings of Dennis, Addison, Shaftesbury and Brockes into an experience in which the imagination (or reason) capitulates in the presence of something beyond its capacity. In this state man is raised to thoughts of God. Vast expanses (sky, sea, mountains, forests), wild natural forces (storms and earthquakes) produce a pleasing kind of horror. Brockes finds material of this kind in Burnet's Sacred Theory of the EarthCHAPTER VII Brookes' sources are unexplored. Pope's influence has been exaggerated. Brockes translated or adapted material from many other writers such as Genest, La Motte, Voltaire, Shaftesbury, Sarasa and others.CHAPTER VIII Brockes is considered as an unimaginative descriptive poet. He is said to depict the quiet idyllic landscape. But Brockes' best poems are the products of his imagination in conformity with Addison's theories of the imagination. He perceives nature by means of his senses but his knowledge of scientific theories (Locke, Newton and the Royal Society) makes hirn see things in a certain way. His imagination carries him beyond the actual object of description to a higher kind of artistic reality.CHAPTER IX The Irdisches Vergniigen is full of hymns and hymnic passages. Brockes also translated hymns by other writers. The traditional hymn form is used, but is enriched by the motifs which we have been studying. The transformation of Psalm 148 into Hilton's "Morning hymn" and Thomson's "Hymn to the Seasons" illustrates this. The pagan hymn to the sun develops in the same way. Brookes and Thomson gather together material from widely differing sources in their hymns.CHAPTER X Brookes' Irdisches Vergniigen is a mystery as it has no artistic unity. Banalities alternate with poems of near genius. His successes could "be ascribed to the way in which his imagination adapts and varies material gathered from a wide variety of sources

Expression of connexins in human preimplantation embryos in vitro

Intercellular communication via gap junctions is required to coordinate developmental processes in the mammalian embryo. We have investigated if the connexin (Cx) isoforms known to form gap junctions in rodent preimplantation embryos are also expressed in human embryos, with the aim of identifying species differences in communication patterns in early development. Using a combination of polyA PCR and immunocytochemistry we have assessed the expression of Cx26, Cx31, Cx32, Cx40, Cx43 and Cx45 which are thought to be important in early rodent embryos. The results demonstrate that Cx31 and Cx43 are the main connexin isoforms expressed in human preimplantation embryos and that these isoforms are co-expressed in the blastocyst. Cx45 protein is expressed in the blastocyst but the protein may be translated from a generally low level of transcripts: which could only be detected in the PN to 4-cell embryos. Interestingly, Cx40, which is expressed by the extravillous trophoblast in the early human placenta, was not found to be expressed in the blastocyst trophectoderm from which this tissue develops. All of the connexin isoforms in human preimplantation embryos are also found in rodents pointing to a common regulation of these connexins in development of rodent and human early embryos and perhaps other species