Review of three monographs on eighteenth century literary forms

Review of Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 by Ellen Malenas Ledoux, Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861 by Siân Silyn Roberts, Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution by Matthew Garret Scholarly review of three recent monographs on late eighteenth century literary forms, namely the Gothic novel and the narrative episode. All three studies examine these forms in their historical context, focusing on the cultural and political work performed by each. Ledoux looks at the social issues explored by the Gothic novel and Gothic drama, Roberts looks at the work of Charles Brockden Brown in relation to individualism and the formation of a national subject in the post-Revolutionary era, and Garrett examines the importance and ideological work of the 'episode' in the same period. Although two of the studies focus on the United States, all three show the influence of transatlantic approaches in recent years

A model of homogeneous semicoherent interphase boundary for heterophase precipitates in substitution alloys under irradiation

The model of homogeneous semicoherent interphase boundary describes the processes of absorption and thermoactivated migration of irradiation-produced inequilibrium point defects at a semicoherent boundary between a heterophase precipitate and a substitution solid solution. Within this model the kinetics of evolution of the sizes of precipitates of constant chemical composition under irradiation is investigated. The results obtained are compared to the experimental data [I. Monnet et al., J. Nucl. Mater. 335 (2004) 311] for the ferritic ODS steel EM10+MgO under electron irradiation.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

VLT Diffraction Limited Imaging and Spectroscopy in the NIR: Weighing the black hole in Centaurus A with NACO

We present high spatial resolution near-infrared spectra and images of the nucleus of Centaurus A (NGC 5128) obtained with NAOS-CONICA at the VLT. The adaptive optics corrected data have a spatial resolution of 0.06" (FWHM) in K- and 0.11" in H-band, four times higher than previous studies. The observed gas motions suggest a kinematically hot disk which is orbiting a central object and is oriented nearly perpendicular to the nuclear jet. We model the central rotation and velocity dispersion curves of the [FeII] gas orbiting in the combined potential of the stellar mass and the (dominant) black hole. Our physically most plausible model, a dynamically hot and geometrically thin gas disk, yields a black hole mass of M_bh = (6.1 +0.6/-0.8) 10^7 M_sun. As the physical state of the gas is not well understood, we also consider two limiting cases: first a cold disk model, which completely neglects the velocity dispersion; it yields an M_bh estimate that is almost two times lower. The other extreme case is to model a spherical gas distribution in hydrostatic equilibrium through Jeans equation. Compared to the hot disk model the best-fit black hole mass increases by a factor of 1.5. This wide mass range spanned by the limiting cases shows how important the gas physics is even for high resolution data. Our overall best-fitting black hole mass is a factor of 2-4 lower than previous measurements. With our revised M_bh estimate, Cen A's offset from the M_bh-sigma relation is significantly reduced; it falls above this relation by a factor of ~2, which is close to the intrinsic scatter of this relation. (Abridged)Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures, including minor changes following the referee report; accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Assessment of the microbial diversity at the surface of Livarot cheese using culture-dependent and independent approaches

International audienceThe microbial diversity of the surface of a commercial red-smear cheese, Livarot cheese, sold on the retail market was studied using culture-dependent and independent approaches. Forty yeasts and 40 bacteria from the cheese surface were collected, dereplicated using single-strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) analysis and identified using rRNA gene sequencing for the culture-dependent approach. The cultureindependent approach involved cloning and sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene and SSCP analysis from total DNA extracted from the cheese. The most dominant bacteria were Microbacterium gubbeenense, Leucobacter komagatae and Gram-negative bacteria from the Gamma-Proteobacteria class. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analysis was also used to study the cheese microbial diversity with class-level and specific rRNAtargeted probes for bacteria and yeasts, respectively. FISH analysis confirmed that Gamma-Proteobacteria were important microorganisms in this cheese. Four specific FISH probes targeting the dominant yeasts present in the cheese, Candida catenulata, Candida intermedia, Geotrichum spp. and Yarrowia lipolytica, were also designed and evaluated. These probes allowed the detection of these yeasts directly in cheese. The use of the rRNA gene-based approach combined with FISH analysis was useful to investigate the diversity of a surface microbial consortium from cheese