«Nunca representados», siempre sobre las tablas: los Entremeses de Cervantes y la escena contemporánea

Throughout the twentieth century and until these days, a revival of the short theatre occurred, concerning textual studies and adaptations to the scene. The case of Cervantes’s Entremeses offers an unparalleled example of this resurgence. This study will approach the details of this recovery through scenic examples that will help illustrate the reasons that make today’s playwrights look back at Cervantes’s minor works.

Heteronomi som forutsetning for autonomi

In his major works in ethics, Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) does not pay much attention to the question how humans become moral. The main tasks for Kant in these works are to establish the moral law and discuss its application. However, in his minor works in ethics and pedagogy he draws our attention to the question mentioned and claims that humans first become moral when they get 16 years old. Before we reach this age, our will (Willkür) is able to choose, that means prioritize, between rationality (the moral law) and sensitivity (inclinations), but our will (Wille) lacks the capacity to impose the moral law on ourselves. To evolve in this regard so that our will becomes fully moral and autonomous, we need moral restrictions from other people with more moral experience. The relevant Kantian distinction in this regard is the distinction Kant draws between persons and moral actors in the wake of his formula of the categorical imperative called the formula of humanity. According to this distinction, a person needs to be educated heteronomously in order to reach the level of moral actor and become autonomous. Constraint is therefore a necessary condition for self-constraint.

‘A different kind of ghetto’

Today’s Marais is perhaps best known as the gay hub of Paris, though this is a comparatively recent phenomenon; the first gay bar opened in 1978. Jewish texts, notably by Jacques Lanzmann, do figure in this chapter, along with a couple of minor works set in the Marais which allude to it as neither a Jewish nor a gay quartier, but the stress is predominantly on the neighbourhood’s now all-but-universal reputation as the centre of today’s ‘gay Paris.’ The extravagantly hedonistic autofictions of Guillaume Dustan and the graphic novels Le Mariage de Roberto and Bienvenue dans la Marais offer a highly-seasoned view of the area, replete with nostalgie de la boue, while literary and cinematic evocations (not invariably gay-focused) likewise figure.

An “Ingenious Moralist”: Bernard Mandeville as a Precursor of Bentham

This article argues that Bernard Mandeville's ideas were more likely to have influenced Jeremy Bentham's writings than previously believed. The conventional interpretation of Mandeville as a forerunner of the Hayekian “theory of spontaneous order” has obscured Mandeville and Bentham's shared emphasis on legal and interventionist solutions for the issues of prostitution and prisoners. This influence is evinced by focusing on some of Mandeville's minor works, which anticipated some of Bentham's arguments. It is unlikely that Bentham directly knew of Mandeville's minor works, but his reformist and interventionist bent was consistent and discernible in the Fable, which Jeremy Bentham read in his youth.

Selected Settings from “Auerbachs Keller”

The chapter examines settings of two witty songs from the tavern scene of Goethe’s Faust. Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, Mussorgsky, and Stravinsky are only the most famous among the composers who devoted their attention to “Es war eine Ratt’ ” (“Song of the Rat”) and “Es war einmal ein König” (“Song of the Flea”). While many of these artists set Goethe’s lines in minor works, two of them did not. Berlioz made his “Song of the Rat” the fourth of his Huit scènes de Faust (Eight Scenes from Faust), composed in 1828 29. Similarly, another translation is the basis for the most remarkable achievement in the group: Mussorgsky’s “Song of the Flea,” a striking concert-scene composed for a famous singer in 1879.

Francesco Guicciardini

Francesco Guicciardini (b. 1483–d. 1540) was a Florentine patrician and papal administrator who wrote numerous works on the history and government of his native city and recorded the era of the Italian Wars in his monumental Storia d’Italia. His writing was inspired not by abstract principles but by his own practical experience, whether as Florentine orator in Spain from 1512, or in the service of the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII, as governor of Modena and Reggio from 1516, as commissary general of the papal army (1521), as president of the Romagna (1524), and as a lieutenant general (1526). The sack of Rome by imperial forces in 1527 destroyed the political system in which he was so prominent a player. He was too close to the Medici to be trusted by the leaders of Florence’s “Last Republic,” from which he was exiled in 1530. His career never fully recovered and he devoted his final years to writing the Storia d’Italia. None of his works were published during his lifetime, meaning that his literary reputation has been an entirely posthumous creation, but his place in the pantheon of Italian Renaissance literary figures is now so secure that his name is readily linked with that of his friend and neighbor in Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli. How and when Guicciardini’s works were published, together with their subsequent impact, is the unifying theme running through this bibliography, which aims to guide the student through the maze of texts and toward the most appropriate editions, commentaries, and analyses. Reference Works acts as a prelude to the main biographical section, Lives and Letters. Guicciardini’s oeuvre is introduced in Collected Works, and then explored in the order in which it became available to the reading public, beginning with the Storia d’Italia, the Ricordi, and works on Florentine History and Politics, all three sections being subdivided into “Texts” and “Analysis.” Minor Works and Correspondence reflect an apparently insatiable desire to publish every word Guicciardini wrote, down to his marginal notes. The resulting body of work is so extensive as to put it well beyond the needs of most students, for whose convenience volumes of Extracts have been identified. Thereafter, the reader is guided through those Journals and Collections of Papers (whether Single-authored or Multi-authored) of greatest relevance for this subject. Guicciardini’s Reputation and Impact is apparent throughout the bibliography, but is nevertheless highlighted in its concluding section.

“Postscript: 1976”: E. P. Thompson and the River of Fire

This new section of Victorian Literature and Culture focuses on apparently minor works of criticism, works that have fallen out of view but that might deserve another look. I want to talk about an almost aggressively minor instance of very Victorian scholarship, minor not only because it isn't often read but also because minorness is built into its very design: E. P. Thompson's “Postscript: 1976,” a longish essay that followed the second and revised edition of his 1955 biography, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. When seen in the reciprocal contexts of Thompson's career and the story of the British left (when, in other words, theory is seen not as opposed to but rather as a part of history), the apparently minor and belated qualities of Thompson's postscript emerge as a source of critical and even utopian promise. I want to argue that Thompson's lifelong engagement with the life of William Morris and with Morris's late conversion to socialism led him to a powerful and counterintuitive account of the lived threshold (what he and Morris call the “river of fire”) as essential to the methods of history and historical materialism.