Finale

In “The Future City and The Female Marine,” I set Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography against The Female Marine, a pamphlet narrative written in three overlapping installments and published in nineteen different editions between 1815 and 1818 by Boston publisher Nathaniel Coverly. I contrast the Autobiography’s version of US urban space as a replicable franchise city to the transgressive city constructed in The Female Marine. The Female Marine’s protagonist, Lucy Brewer, seduced, abandoned, and working as a prostitute in Boston, disguises herself as a young male sailor to serve on the USS Constitution during the War of 1812. Easily read as political allegory for Boston’s shifting wartime loyalties, The Female Marine also marks a critical transition in US urban literature. Coverly rewrites the seduction tale to allow for female urban success, foreshadowing the racy female libertines of the 1840s sporting press. Virtually untouched by literary critics, The Female Marine is a remarkably rich text. Coverly quotes from and revises Charlotte, offers us a newly graphic version of the city’s geography that evokes the phantasmic cities of Edgar Allen Poe and George Lippard, previews the rise of urban serials in the penny press, and delivers a more triumphant outcome than the equivocal endings of Kelroy or Ormond. As it picks up on earlier urban forms, The Female Marine operates as a fantastic, subversive, and funny precursor to the urban genre fiction that would become immensely popular in the second half of the century.

There’s Something about Murray: Victorian Literary Societies and Alfred Forman’s Translation of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen

Alfred Forman’s translations of Richard Wagner’s operas are often derided for their weird diction and minute imitation of German poetic devices. Forman has seemed to represent a zealous and uncritical approach to Wagner that was typical of the early London Wagner Society. But London’s literary societies were important preprofessional gatherings for the appreciation and research of vernacular literature at a time when universities restricted who could study and what could be studied. Forman contributed to other London societies and organized for them dramatic readings of Wagner’s poetry featuring Forman’s wife, Alma Murray. In making Wagner legible and audible for these societies, Forman aligned Wagner with contemporary radical poets and promoted the Ring as a political allegory. Forman’s translations, far from cranky or cultish, show how Victorian society culture affected translation practices, renewed study of poetic alliteration, and inaugurated the political interpretation of Wagner’s works.

The Gigantomachy

Heracles was enlisted as the token mortal, necessary for victory, in the Olympian gods’ battle against the Giants. This chapter concentrates on the surviving ancient portrayals of Heracles’ participation in the battle, in which he fights paired with Zeus, his father, or Athena, his mentor, and employing his iconic bow, although some compositions require that he wield his characteristic club as well. It is asked what actions he performed and why he deserved immortality for the task. The manner in which hero’s actions were valorized in particular pieces of literature or art is also explored. The myth seems to be used as political allegory, the gigantic enemies referencing Persians, Galatians, or political adversaries to fit the times.

Gulliver's Travels is written by Seventeenth century Anglo-Irish prose writer Jonathan Swift. Jonathan swift employed literary device called invective, satire in his writing to cure social malaise of seventeenth century society. Gulliver's travels are a p

Gulliver's Travels is written by Seventeenth century Anglo-Irish prose writer Jonathan Swift. Jonathan swift employed literary device called invective, satire in his writing to cure social malaise of seventeenth century society. Gulliver's travels are a political allegory in which seventeenth century society is highlighted in many aspects. There is a character called Lemuel Gulliver which is enterprising and adventurous underwent a voyage to Lilliput. The author gives some account of himself and family. His first inducement to travel. He is shipwrecked and swims for his life gets safe on shore in the country of Lilliput is made prisoner and carried up the country. The emperor of Lilliput attended by several of the nobility, come to see the author in his confinement. The Emperor's person and habit described. Learned men appointed to teach the author the language. He gains favor by his mild disposition. His pockets are searched and his sword & pistols taken from him.

Elsewhere and Otherwise

This text introduces the symposium on Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019), the second volume in his six-part The Poetics of Social Forms. It frames the debate with a brief exploration of some of the figures and problems of allegory that appear across Jameson’s œuvre, and surveys some of the Marxist conceptualisations of allegory that have shaped Jameson’s approach, as it straddles allegories of the commodity and allegories of utopia. The musical investigation of the nexus of allegory and affect, and the presentation of political allegory as primarily concerned with the disjunction between (national and international) levels are also touched upon as salient dimensions of Jameson’s theorising.

THE CULEX’S METAPOETIC FUNERARY GARDEN

The Culex is now widely recognized as a piece of post-Ovidian, possibly Tiberian, pseudo-juvenilia written by an author impersonating the young Virgil, although it was attached to Virgil's name already in the first century c.e., being identified as Virgilian by Statius, Suetonius and Martial. Dedicated to the young Octavian (Octaui in line 1), the poem seems to fill a biographical gap in Virgil's career before his composition of the Eclogues. It is introduced as a ludus, which Irene Peirano suggests may openly refer to ‘the act of impersonating Virgil’, and, like many of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, it seems to have a parodic intent. The Culex has been interpreted as a parody of neoteric style and the epyllion, as mock-epic, as Virgil parody (John Henderson called it a ‘spoof Aeneid in bucolic drag’), as pointed Augustan satire, as mock Ovidian ‘Weltgedicht’ and as just very bad poetry (Housman's ‘stutterer’). Glenn Most has observed that the poem's three ‘acts’ structurally recapitulate Virgil's three major works in chronological succession. Little attention, however, has been paid to the Culex's final lines, which contain a catalogue of flowers the pastor places on the gnat's tomb. Recent scholarship has reintroduced an older interpretation of the gnat's tomb as a political allegory of Augustus’ Mausoleum; in this paper I suggest instead that the tomb and its flowers serve a closural and metapoetic function at the end of the poem.

Politika istine u Izvanbrodskom dnevniku Slobodana Novaka

This paper analyzes the novel Three Journeys (Izvanbrodski dnevnik) by Slobodan Novak, in terms of its narrative structure and literary devices that are being used to disfigure the speech produced by centres of power in both everyday and official communication. As opposed to political allegory, to which the novel has been linked so far, it is argued that a complex narrative structure and stylistically carefully crafted storytelling point to self-referentiality of the novel. The story of Magistar is framed by Magistar’s writing of manipulative techniques used by other characters against him. Writing is a successful resistance practice to manipulation of perception because it exposes the unspoken assumptions of the latter, as well as it reveals mechanisms of emotional abuse. The novel is read as a place of freedom from a one-sided interpretation referencing the political state in former Yugoslavia, demonstrating by its structure that freedom in literature is in fact entitlement of literature to be free of any type of instrumentalization.