Allegory and animals in Olive Schreiner’s Undine : A Queer Little Child (1929)

Written and abandoned in the 1870s, and published posthumously in 1929, Undine: A Queer Little Child has remained on the margins of Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) studies, repeatedly dismissed as a juvenile and poor antecedent to The Story of An African Farm (1883), or deemed valuable primarily for its autobiographical content. This article redresses these schematic readings by analysing how Schreiner draws on allegorical forms in order to explore aspects of her burgeoning radicalism. Focusing on one of the main allegorical thrusts of the novel, provided by the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic animal characters that descend from mythical, fairytale, and Ancient Greek philosophical origins, it investigates how the protagonist’s metaphorically significant associations with animals relate to freethinking, feminist, and anti-imperialist ideas introduced by the novel. Undine thus undermines dominant nineteenth-century models of the “primitive” human or animal as less evolutionarily developed and without political platform, which can be seen to be a liberating move when the novel is read in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s lectures on animals, and with other recent work in postcolonial ecocriticism

Neutralization of non-vaccine human papillomavirus pseudoviruses from the A7 and A9 species groups by bivalent HPV vaccine sera

► We examined neutralizing antibody in girls immunized with bivalent HPV vaccine. ► Antibody cross-reactivity dependent on response to vaccine types. ► Significant cross-reactivity against HPV31, HPV33, HPV45. ► Cross-reactive levels are low at <1% of vaccine type antibody responses. ► Potential role for cross-reactive antibodies as surrogate of protection

Three Approaches toward Historiography: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Possession, and Waterland

Critics have widely explored John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Graham Swift’s Waterland, and A. S. Byatt’s Possession. These novels are generally treated as outstanding historiographic metafictions since they self-consciously adopt the notion of history and simultaneously problematize historical understanding. For Hayden White, the historian is inevitably impositional and every narrativized history is relative. Following White, Linda Hutcheon defines postmodern historical fiction as the type of fiction that self-reflexively and paradoxically makes use of the notion of history and simultaneously denies its truthfulness. The present article attempts to analyze, compare, and contrast John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Graham Swift’s Waterland and A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance in light of the theories of White and Hutcheon to show that in spite of problematization of the possibility of recovering the past as it actually was, these novels treat the concept of history differently