scholarly journals A.2. The book-bound scholar

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Mary Beagon

This paper takes as its starting point Geoffrey Lloyd's comment that the sources for Pliny's Natural History are 'overwhelmingly literary'. While the encyclopaedic nature of his project might seem to make this inevitable, it is suggested that there are deeper‐seated reasons for Pliny's approach to be found in the attitudes of Rome's cultural élite in the late Republic and early Empire. For this élite, literary culture reflected the socio‐political dynamics of their society, while practical investigations of nature, on the other hand, may for the most part have been associated with the negation of these values. The contrast should not be over‐emphasised: texts on practical subjects could use and exploit empirical evidence and one or two individual enthusiasts may be tentatively posited. However, the breadth and depth of the literary tradition gave the text an authority denied to the particularities of personal experience.

Author(s):  
Virtudes Serrano García

<span class="subtitulo">This paper pays attention to an aspect in the drama of Miguel Hernández that has so far not been the subject of much analysis. Here the dramaturgical analysis of his female characters is made bearing in mind the world view of the poetplaywright in two aspects: one based on his personal experience, and the other deriving from the literary tradition he assimilated. This double vision leads him to the building of a feminine typology of archetypal behaviours determined by a canonically patriarchal world view, and qualified by the characters of the literary heroines stemming from the playwright's reading. The result is the fiancées/wives, sisters an mothers, women defending the honour that would be taken from them by force, or beloved women whose resistance makes their ardent lovers suffer. However, in En Labrador de más aire there is a feminine character that is spontaneous and authentic in her emotions, and whom the author hes endowed with an outspoken vehement nature.</span>


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Tzu-Hui Chen

This narrative aims to explore the meaning and lived experiences of marriage that a unique immigrant population—“foreign brides” in Taiwan—possesses. This convergence narrative illustrates the dynamics and complexity of mail-order marriage and women's perseverance in a cross-cultural context. The relationship between marriage, race, and migration is analyzed. This narrative is comprised of and intertwined by two story lines. One is the story of two “foreign brides” in Taiwan. The other is my story about my cross-cultural relationship. All the dialogues are generated by 25 interviews of “foreign brides” in Taiwan and my personal experience.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Marie Ackerman

Until now, there has been little experimental work investigating the processing and formal properties of the singular they suite of pronouns. As scientific and popular attention to singular they increases, it will be critical for research to acknowledge theoretical and ethical issues regarding discussion of this phenomenon. This commentary uses the recent paper by Doherty &amp; Conklin (2017) as a starting point to discuss issues surrounding work on the various forms of singular they. It concludes that there is sufficient theoretical and empirical evidence to claim they has a grammatically singular form (at least in colloquial English). It also recommends care be taken in academic discussions of the grammaticality and acceptability of terms which are associated with marginalised communities.


Journeys ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Andrew A. Gentes

My visit to Moscow's Maiakovskii Museum serves as starting point for an exploration, informed by Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, of the influence of the Russian avant-garde and poet Vladimir Maiakovskii's role within this movement. It also queries the essentialism and functionality of the museum dedicated to him, as well as the personal experience of my visit.


Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman

Reading and writing were cornerstones of the lives of self-educated rough diamonds like Hutton. He is a perfect example of the dreaded rising author, who wrote for money, without education or status. His writings reveal new modes of authorship and the literary culture of an industrial town. Chapter 6 appraises his work by examining 70 periodical reviews of Hutton’s 15 books. Based on personal experience, they mixed history, travelogues, and life writing. Though they suited the nation’s thirst for entertainment and useful knowledge, Hutton has not been recognized as a new kind of writer, who produced unlearned books for a commercial age. His blunt style and breach of polite norms horrified the literary establishment. But his accessible prose satisfied new audiences and led to alternative yardsticks of literary taste. Hutton thus had an impact on two contrasting groups of readers, and helped put the English Midlands on the national literary map.


2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-58
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Galko ◽  

The ontological question of what there is, from the perspective of common sense, is intricately bound to what can be perceived. The above observation, when combined with the fact that nouns within language can be divided between nouns that admit counting, such as ‘pen’ or ‘human’, and those that do not, such as ‘water’ or ‘gold’, provides the starting point for the following investigation into the foundations of our linguistic and conceptual phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to claim that such phenomena are facilitated by, on the one hand, an intricate cognitive capacity, and on the other by the complex environment within which we live. We are, in a sense, cognitively equipped to perceive discrete instances of matter such as bodies of water. This equipment is related to, but also differs from, that devoted to the perception of objects such as this computer. Behind this difference in cognitive equipment underlies a rich ontology, the beginnings of which lies in the distinction between matter and objects. The following paper is an attempt to make explicit the relationship between matter and objects and also provide a window to our cognition of such entities.


The deed of conveyance of 1722, by which Sir Hans Sloane gave the Society of Apothecaries control of their ‘Physick Garden at Chelsey’ in perpetuity, forged an important link between the Apothecaries and the Royal Society, one that has lasted to the present day. For the next 75 years the Apothecaries paid an annual tribute of dried plant specimens to the Royal Society as proof that they were continuing to use the garden for its proper purpose. These specimens, which have survived the centuries with remarkably little damage, now provide important evidence of what was being grown in the garden at the time and may also be nomenclaturally important as representing plants given botanical names by Philip Miller in 1768. A careful search in the herbarium collections of the Department of Botany in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, where the Royal Society specimens are now held, has resulted in the location of all but a small number of the 3750 specimens that were sent. Tracing them has not been easy for a number of reasons, not least because they are now dispersed among the several million specimens in the Museum’s collections. The names of the plants used by the Apothecaries in the lists that were the starting point for the search were those current at the time, hence of pre-Linnaean character, and had first to be linked to present-day names before the work could begin. Some lists of names were found to be inaccurate and some were entirely misleading.


1859 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 381-457 ◽  

The necessity of discussing so great a subject as the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull in the small space of time allotted by custom to a lecture, has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. As, on the present occasion, I shall suffer greatly from the disadvantages of the limitation, I will, with your permission, avail myself to the uttermost of its benefits. It will be necessary for me to assume much that I would rather demonstrate, to suppose known much that I would rather set forth and explain at length; but on the other hand, I may consider myself excused from entering largely either into the history of the subject, or into lengthy and controversial criticisms upon the views which are, or have been, held by others. The biological science of the last half-century is honourably distinguished from that of preceding epochs, by the constantly increasing prominence of the idea, that a community of plan is discernible amidst the manifold diversities of organic structure. That there is nothing really aberrant in nature; that the most widely different organisms are connected by a hidden bond; that an apparently new and isolated structure will prove, when its characters are thoroughly sifted, to be only a modification of something which existed before,—are propositions which are gradually assuming the position of articles of faith in the mind of the investigators of animated nature, and are directly, or by implication, admitted among the axioms of natural history.


1866 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 444-449
Author(s):  
Wm. Turner

1st, Scaphocephalus.—After making reference to his previous papers, more especially to that in which he had described several specimens of the scaphocephalic skull, in which he had discussed the influence exercised on the production of deformities of the cranium, by a premature closure or obliteration of the sutures, and to the recent memoirs of Professor von Düben of Stockholm,† and Dr John Thurnam, the author proceeded to relate two additional cases of scaphocephalus to those he had already recorded. He had met with one of these in the head of a living person, the other in a skull in the Natural History Museum of the University of Edinburgh.


1910 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 602-777 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. H. Peters

The following observations upon the Natural History of Epidemic Diarrhoea were made in Mansfield during the summer and autumn of 1908. The fact that at the time the writer was engaged in preparing a paper—to which the present paper is to some extent complementary—upon the epidemiological relations of season and disease, lent special interest to the enquiries regularly made from the Health Department of this town into the circumstances attending fatal attacks of diarrhoea. Early in the season a more than usually extensive enquiry was made into one of these fatal attacks in an area where an outbreak of diarrhoea appeared to be spreading outwards from a group of old privy-middens. To test how far the condemnation of the latter was justifiable another area was taken on the other side of the town, where the houses were newly built and provided exclusively with water-closets; and records, collected by house-to-house visitation, were obtained of all cases of epidemic diarrhoea, whether non-fatal or otherwise, occurring in these localities. The enquiries thus begun were afterwards extended so as to embrace two fairly large districts, a chance of doing this being provided by the opportune postponement of the addition to the department of certain work of inspection which had been impending at the beginning of the summer. These districts were several times revisited and scattered observations were also made throughout the other parts of the town. During 1909, while there was no opportunity of making extended observations, there were valuable opportunities during the course of the routine inspections of the summer of testing and re-testing the principal results obtained during 1908.


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