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Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury offers an early exploration of racial and cultural identity within the wider context of a nascent colonial expansion. He and his brother, the poet George Herbert, question dominant notions of race, culture, and color. Their poems bring color associations from abstract theological and philosophical levels to present the intimacy of human contact in intercultural and interracial contexts. The result is a view of human connectedness that affirms equality and commonality over dominant views of European superiority and priority.
June 2005: William Over teaches English and speech at St. John’s University, Queens, New York. His latest book is World Peace, National Policies, and Mass Culture (Praeger, 2004). His first book, Human Rights in the International Public Sphere, won the Best Book Award for 1999 from the National Communication Association, division of International and Intercultural Communication. His second book, Social Justice in World Cinema and Theatre (2001) was also published by Greenwood/Ablex.
This essay investigates the concept, experience, and autobiographical rendering of recognition. The first two sections consider and elaborate upon two philosophical accounts of recognition: those by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charles Taylor. The essay then reads a contemporary work of Australian life-writing, Peter Rose’s award winning Rose Boys, as an autobiographical exploration of recognition. The essay argues that recognition is a many-faceted concept and phenomenon with a range of important moral, political, logical and perceptual implications, and that it is central to the genre of autobiography.
Professor of English and Director of the Unit for Studies in Biography and Autobiography at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and is currently Tong Tin Sun Chair Professor and Head, Department of English, at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He has published books on the English and American novel, relations between literary theory and philosophy, ethics and life-writing. His books include Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will (Chicago, 2001); a memoir, Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself (Bystander, 2003), and This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography (University of Western Australia Press, 2007).
The paper locates Svengali, the Jewish villain of the novel Trilby (1894), within historical and literary contexts that informed the culture of his creator, George Du Maurier. It argues that Svengali emblematizes the figure of the Jew that is seen by late nineteenth-century European culture as troubling the cultural categories invoked for purposes of national self-definition; additionally Svengali reflexively troubles the generic categories that work to contain and define the novel in which he appears. In doing so, Svengali re-enacts the situation of the transgressive Wandering Jew, escaping the confines of his text to wander textually homeless in the popular imagination.
June 2005: Ruth Bienstock Anolik received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and teaches at Villanova University. Most of her work focuses on the Gothic with a special interest in the interplay between Gothic literature and social and cultural structures. Her publications include: “The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic” and “Appropriating the Golem, Possessing the Dybbuk: Female Retellings of Jewish Folktales” in Modern Language Studies”; “Horrors of Possession: The Gothic Struggle with the Law” in Legal Studies Forum; “‘All Words, Words, about Words:’ Linguistic Journey and Transformation in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers” in Studies in American Jewish Literature. She has recently completed editing a collection of essays, The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination published by McFarland, and is currently at work on two projects: a companion collection on the sexual other in the Gothic, also to be published by McFarland, and a book on the concept of possession in the Gothic mode.
This article analyses some seminal novels by Dickens, Disraeli, Gaskell, and Kingsley in their relation to developments in society and welfare of the early Victorian period, inferring from them a social discourse that challenged some but not all aspects of classical political economics. It argues that they reveal a view of society as “trisected,” that is as one in which the realms of production, distribution and reproduction are barely regarded as occupying the same conceptual space. So while some aspects of social policy are deplored, e.g. the workhouse, some of the assumptions and values upon which they were based are upheld. Rather than extensive institutional reform these books demand a new set of ethical coordinates which reflect a growing awareness of the interdependencies of individuals.
June 2005: Tony Fitzpatrick is a Reader in the School of Sociology & Social Policy, Nottingham University UK. He is the Treasurer of the Social Policy Association. His most recent books are After the New Social Democracy (2003) and New Theories of Welfare (2005). He is also chief editor of the 3-volume International Encyclopedia of Social Policy, forthcoming from Routledge.
