Book Review: Dixon, R.M.W. (2019) Australia’s Original Languages

This is a short book, but that does not prevent it having multiple parts and arguments. In the main it is a linguistic study of several traditional Australian Aboriginal, or indigenous, languages. There have been specialised exhaustive and scholarly studies in the same vein - however this book is selective in examples of grammar, terms of address, lexicons, pronunciation and poetic forms, resulting in a short (182 pages ) readable volume well suited to a popular audience. As such the volume fills a need for a general interest work of its kind. The author is an accomplished senior Australian academic and researcher, who has embedded himself with speakers of old languages to record and restore their legacy. He expertise, developed over decades, informs the authentic, lively and authoritative style of the volume as a whole. It is a good read.

Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

The Undoing Project examines the relationship between two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose work altered how we understand the functioning of the mind. In this book, Lewis embarks on a journey to understand and explain psychological research to a popular audience. Lewis is an expert writer who knows what sells books. The Undoing Project is an informative, entertaining, and quick read. Lewis has produced a well-researched book that is accessible to a broad audience.

Jacobin Allegory in Thelwall's The Rock of Modrec

This essay seeks to show that The Rock of Modrec occupies an important place in Thelwall's oeuvre and in the early development of Jacobin ‘seditious allegory’. While scholarship has thus far ignored The Rock of Modrec on account of its apparent juvenilia and ostensible apoliticism, I argue that Thelwall's chivalric romance allegorizes the British spirit as a champion of liberty and universal emancipation, and that it does so for a popular audience. Furthermore, its protagonist serves as a model for Jacobin allegorical reading practices: Sir Eltram begins as a passive receiver of ‘politico-sentimental’ appeals but eventually becomes an active allegorical interpreter, capable of reading into texts the universal truth of democratic liberty for which the British Jacobins strove. The Rock of Modrec thus serves as both an early example of Thelwall's use of ‘seditious allegory’ and a meta-textual commentary on the importance of allegorical reading as Jacobin radical praxis.

Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk

This chapter examines Strauß’s restatement of his biblical criticism. It is argued that Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volke bearbeitet is not simply a popular version of Das Leben Jesu but that it contains a completely new method of exposition. Rather than simplifying his work for a popular audience, Strauß rewrote it and replied to the latest scholarly objections against it. This work also contains Strauß’s final formulation of his theory of myth and his response to the Tübingen school of theologians. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the major similarities and differences between the 1864 version of Das Leben Jesu and the 1835 version.

Grain Crisis at Prusa

This contribution examines an assembly speech that was pronounced by Dio of Prusa in the context of a grain crisis (Or. 46) in order to provide new insights into the politics of the Greek polis under Rome. Whereas inscriptions highlight the eagerness and zeal displayed by elite citizens in helping out their fatherlands, this speech points to the existence of tensions and conflict in the resolution of food crises. The oration’s rhetorical strategies oscillate between the expectations of a popular audience and an elite politician’s desire to shape and control those expectations. A rhetorical analysis of these strategies indicates that Prusan politics was grounded in a civic discourse that provided the people with the ideological means to assert real influence in the local political process. The 46th oration thus attests to the persistence of a democratic tradition of popular political participation in a time when elites had become increasingly powerful.

O teatro e a censura. A censura ao teatro. Desafios

Regarding scenic art, the Portuguese censorship of the XVIII century was divorced from the possible authors and the public, trying to promote a form of spectacle and morals unintelligible to the eyes of both parties. This, when an idea was already certain — the usefulness of dramatic art as a mean of instruction and reaching the theater as a space of expression for a large popular audience. Between the most fragile of the social scale, only the most affluent, with average resources and even those obliged to make specific sacrifices, had the opportunity to attend a performance

“Can You Kill”

Black women’s cultural production in the 1970s gained popular audience and critical acclaim for its frank disclosure of violence and inequity within black communities and by championing black feminist agency. This chapter situates black women’s literature and art in response to three intersecting sociopolitical movements roiling the nation: Black Power and Black Arts Movements, the emergence of second-wave feminism, and American involvement in Vietnam. The works in this chapter overturned long-standing expectations and stereotypes of respectability politics in depicting graphic, militarized violence; sexual openness; and skepticism about motherhood. In doing so, these works explored the attractions and shortcomings of militancy as a defense against domestic and national violence and promoted mutual respect between genders, sexual freedom, and the possibility of collaborative protest.

Medical Aesthetics in the Twilight of Empire: Lungrik Tendar and The Stainless Vaiḍūrya Mirror

This article introduces the life and medical histories of the luminary Khalkha Mongolian monk, Lungrik Tendar (Tib. Lung rigs bstan dar; Mon. Lungrigdandar, c. 1842–1915). Well known for his exegesis of received medical works from Central Tibet, Lungrik Tendar was also a historian of the Four Tantras (Tib. Rgyud bzhi; Mon. Dörben ündüsü). In 1911, just as Khalkha Mongolia began separating from a flailing Qing Empire, Lungrik Tendar set out to append the story of Mongolia and of Mongolian medicine, political formation, and religious life to the Four Tantra’s well-known global histories. In addition, he provided an illuminating summary of how to present the Four Tantras to a popular audience in the twilight of the imperial period. This article introduces the life of Lungrik Tendar and analyzes his previously unstudied medical history from 1911, The Stainless Vaiḍūrya Mirror. On the basis of this understudied text, this article explores ways that monastic medicine in the frontier scholastic worlds of the late-Qing Empire were dependent upon aesthetic representations of space and time and of knowledge acquisition and practice, and how such medical aesthetics helped connect the religious, political, legal, economic, and social worlds of Asia’s heartland on the eve of nationalist and socialist revolution and state-directed erasure.

The Trinitarian Thinking of John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress

In John Bunyan’s day trinitarian debate was raging from Oxford to Bedfordshire. In spite of Bunyan’s rough upbringing, he is often considered a literary genius in Britain’s early-modern period, which tends to distract scholars from the fact that he was also a brilliant theologian-apologist. While Bunyan may have been deprived of the traditional tools of scholasticism, he is nevertheless more than capable as a trinitarian apologist. The early formation of Bunyan’s trinitarian thoughts providentially occurred prior to conversion and are evident in his earlier theological writings which prepared him to engage in the trinitarian conversation of the seventeenth century. The two trinitarian instances in the Pilgrim’s Progress which are analyzed in this article not only show Bunyan’s ability to bridge theology for a popular audience but also demonstrate a skillful ability to address the Ranters and Quakers who wandered through Bedfordshire terrorizing the flock with strange doctrine.