Review of Eighth Habitation: New Poems by Adam Aitken

Review of Eighth Habitation: New Poems by Adam Aitke

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Catherian Cathedral: Gothic Cathedral Iconography in Willa Cather\u27s Fiction\u3c/i\u3e by Christine E. Kephart

Christine Kephart\u27s book is published in a series dedicated to the late Merrill Maguire Skaggs, one of the leading Cather scholars. It honors Skaggs\u27s memory with an original, sprightly, and captivating illumination of the motif of the cathedral throughout Cather\u27s writing. We all know about Death Comes to the Archbishop and, to a lesser extent, Shadows on the Rock with their overt engagement of New World Catholicism and the presence within them of churches, cathedrals, and bishops. But Kephart looks for the cathedral motif throughout Cather\u27s oeuvre, beginning with her failed first novel, Alexander\u27s Bridge, where Kephart sees the gothic, curvilinear aspects of the bridge (built, after all, in Quebec) as presaging the architectural aspects of the cathedral. In other words, transmuting the bridge into the cathedral is a correlate for Cather\u27s artistic maturation

Tribute to Geoff Davis

A tribute to Geoff Davis

The Inner Consistency of Reality : Intermediacy in \u3ci\u3eThe Hobbit\u3c/i\u3e

Especially concerned with Bilbo’s characterization, unusual in children’s literature, as middle-aged, but also addresses other issues of world-building and story structure that reinforce this motif of “starting in the middle”: maps, the sense of the past, racial characteristics and relations. Birns draws interesting contrasts with the Alice in Wonderland and Oz books

Eotenas and Hobbits: Finn and Hengest, and Tolkien’s Speculation About Origins

This essay examines Tolkien’s Finn and Hengest, particularly concentrating on Tolkien’s interpretation of the word eotenas as meaning Jutes rather than ‘monsters’. As opposed to “Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics,” where Tolkien emphasizes supernatural elements at the expense of history, Tolkien’s lecture on the Finnsburg episode in Beowulf and the Finnsburg fragment seems to present Hengest as an English national hero, despite the bloodiness and vengeance of his reprisals against Hnaef and the Frisian court. The use of the word \u27eotenas,\u27 which can be constructed as either \u27monsters\u27 or \u27Jutes,\u27 is at the nub of the conflict here, I argue that Alan Bliss, who edited and provided commentary on Tolkien’s Hengest work, actually performs a revisionary move on Tolkien by suggesting Hengest was an Anglian, not a Jute. This is significant as it creates further distance between the English and the continental Goths—often said to be connections of the Geats, who, as Michael Drout pointed out, Tolkien at times wished to identify with the Jutes. The essay concludes by looking at the origin-stories of the Hobbits and the Rohirrim in Tolkien’s legendarium and examining what light Tolkien’s work on the Hengest material sheds on the relation of these two origin stories

A Registering of Transformations: Alex Miller’s The Passage Of Love

This essay discusses Alex Miller’s most recent novel, The passage of Love, (2017) in the light of the conspectus on Miller’s work offered by Robert Dixon’s 2014 study of Miller, The Ruin of Time. Despite Miller and Dixon having relatively different intellectual stances, Dixon has brought to bear both theoretical platforms and a deep immersion in Australian literary and cultural history to analyze Miller's work. This essay tries to continue in that tradition, analyzing Miller’s practice of the originally French genre of autofiction and the way this practice is tied in with a set of ethical dilemmas related to the registering of post-Holocaust and post-Mabo trauma as well as his own experience and those of his friends and lovers. In discussing how Miller’s surrogate, Robert Crofts, tries as a migrant from Britain to make a life for himself on an Australian continent with its own tragic history, the essay analyzes how Miller's practice of autofiction speaks to the particular circumstances of Australian literature within world literary space.

From the Editor

En este artículo, analizaré unas breves críticas que Kant le hace al Ensayo sobre el principio del derecho natural, de Gottlieb Hufeland (1760-1817), en su reseña de 1786. Mi objetivo sistemático es el de echar un poco de luz sobre el modo enque Kant entiende un aspecto central del iusnaturalismo racional moderno, al que su crítica apunta directa y certeramente: su capacidad para ubicar correctamente a la filosofía jurídica dentro de la filosofía práctica, sin convertirla por ello en ética. El artículo tiene tres partes. En la primera, presentaré mi traducción al castellano del texto de Kant "Recensión del Ensayo sobre el principio del derecho natural, de Gottlieb Hufeland", que apareció en la Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung el 18 de abril de 1786 y que hasta el momento no estaba disponible en castellano. Antes, me referiré brevemente a las críticas a Hufeland que aparecen en otras reseñas. En la segunda, comentaré algunos puntos salientes de la comprensión de Hufeland del pensamiento kantiano, tal como puede apreciarse en el Versuch, y en la medida en que se relacionan con los aspectos de esta obra que Kant elige resaltar. Por último,estudiaré el significado del interés de Kant por el ensayo de Hufeland y de su crítica en el marco de la evolución de su pensamiento jurídico-político. La reseña de Kant a Hufeland resulta un texto importante, sostendré, en el marco más amplio de las críticas de Kant a los "profesores del derecho natural", tales como aparecen, por ejemplo, en la "Introducción" a las lecciones de derecho natural anotadas por Feyerabend y, por sobre todo, en el marco conceptual de la contrapropuesta kantiana de desligar al derecho natural de justificaciones teleológicas y a su principio de fines (sea la perfección, sea la felicidad), para fundarlo en la libertad externa, desasociada de fines determinados