Biographies

Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington

This chapter examines Penelope Fitzgerald’s career as a writer of biography. Between 1975 and 1984, Fitzgerald published three group biographies – Edward Burne-Jones, The Knox Brothers, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends – and she began, but eventually gave up, a life of the novelist L. P. Hartley. She also reviewed and wrote introductions for numerous writers’ lives, ranging from canonical figures such as S. T. Coleridge, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to less well-remembered novelists, poets and artists such as Margaret Oliphant, John Lehmann and C. R. Ashbee. The chapter shows how Fitzgerald’s biographies (and especially The Knox Brothers) provide important clues to the distinctive sensibility of her novels. Craftsmanship, skill and labour are rated far above hollow intellectualism or politicking. Fascination with the inner life is handled with restraint, yet underwrites the most poignant moments of characterization. Sorrow at love’s futility in the face of time and fate is treated as comedy, ‘for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?’

Author(s):  
Patrick O’Callaghan ◽  
Bethany Shiner

Abstract This paper examines the right to freedom of thought in the European Convention on Human Rights against the background of technological developments in neuroscience and algorithmic processes. Article 9 echr provides an absolute right to freedom of thought when the integrity of our inner life or forum internum is at stake. In all other cases, where thoughts have been manifested in some way in the forum externum, the right to freedom of thought is treated as a qualified right. While Article 9 echr is a core focus of this paper, we argue that freedom of thought is further supported by Articles 8, 10 and 11 echr. This complex of rights carves out breathing space for the individual’s personal development and therefore supports the enjoyment of freedom of thought in its fullest sense. Charged with ‘maintaining and promoting the ideals and values of a democratic society’ as well as ensuring that individual human rights are given ‘practical and effective protection’, this paper predicts that the ECtHR will make greater use of the right to freedom of thought in the face of the emerging challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.


Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora

Both Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein confront the need for belonging with a certain American ambivalence, one that can also be found in the novelistic tradition, but their complicated attitudes toward the land of their birth puts the English attitude that we find in George Eliot in sharp relief. The English novel after George Eliot turns increasingly to what has been called questions of agro-romantic values. The chapter looks specifically at such values in Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d’Urbervilles); Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim); D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow and The Plumed Serpent); E. M. Forster (Howards End and A Passage to India); and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts).


2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanja Bahun

Writing in a Paris rife with war-anxieties, refugees and political plots, a stateless individual by the name of Walter Benjamin recorded on 11 January 1940: “Every line that we succeed in publishing today - given the uncertainty of the future to which we consign it - is a victory wrested from the power of darkness.” The fusion of desperation and mystical activism in the face of historical horror, expressed in Benjamin's last letter to Gershom Scholem, was echoed across the Channel. Only ten days later, Virginia Woolf - assailed by a mixture of historical, financial, creative and publishing worries - responded to a commission to write about peace by stating that the “views on peace […] spring from views on war.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 43 (08) ◽  
pp. 43-4506-43-4506
Keyword(s):  

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