Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957. By Helen Smith

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Hans-Georg Gadamer: His Philosophical Hermeneutics and Its Importance for Evangelical Biblical Hermeneutics

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s influence on hermeneutics can hardly be understated. This article offers an evangelical perspective on the importance of his work and how it can be used to interpret the biblical text more faithfully. It discusses his influences and some of the major aspects of his work and offers suggestions for applying his work to biblical hermeneutics. The article concludes that his work is vitally important and should be utilized by the biblical interpreter, though not without caution

A new class of matrices with positive inverses

It is well known that irreducibly diagonally- dominant matrices with positive diagonal and non-positive off-diagonal elements have positive inverses. A whole class of symmetric circulant and symmetric quindiagonal Toeplitz matrices with positive inverses which do not satisfy the above conditions is found

‘O, what a sympathy of woe is this' : passionate sympathy in Titus Andronicus

Various critics have considered Titus Andronicus in relation to questions of language, grief, and violence. In this paper I want to explore a more specific aspect of the play's interest in the passions: its preoccupation with the concept of sympathy. In 3.1 Titus appears to propose a physiological model of sympathy as he compares the exchange of grief between himself and Lavinia to the processes of the natural world: ‘When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'erflow?' (3.1.222). Yet Titus' powerful meteorological metaphors coexist with a cognitive and imaginative conception of sympathy. Earlier in the same scene, Titus attempts to imagine Lavinia's thoughts, and what she would say if she still had the facility of speech, prompting him to exclaim: ‘O, what a sympathy of woe is this, / As far from help as limbo is from bliss' (149-50). This is an important moment in the history of the term sympathy; Shakespeare not only uses the term to describe an exchange of grief but also suggests that emotional exchange is bound up with communication, understanding, and the imagination. By considering Titus in relation to other early modern usages of the term, this paper argues that Shakespeare's treatment of sympathy is more complex - and indeed more optimistic - than some critics have suggested. Shakespeare's early dramatic and poetic works, I suggest, dramatise the shift away from the earlier conception of sympathy as occult attraction or affinity, and facilitate the term's redeployment as a means of expressing a complex emotional and cognitive process. The paper thus seeks to raise larger questions about emotion in the Renaissance, and the relationship between physiological, rhetorical, literary, and imaginative conceptions of the passions