Crime, Sensation, and Empire

<p><b>The 1857 criminal trial of Madeleine Smith for the murder of Pierre Emile L’Angelier became a cause célèbre throughout the British world. Enmeshed with scandal and speculation, it involved a secret affair between a young upper middle-class Glasgow woman and her older foreign lover of lower social standing; accusations of arsenic poisoning that led to his demise; erotic love letters that were read out in court; and an inconclusive—and uniquely Scottish—verdict of ‘not proven’. In 1866, a butcher under the name of Thomas Castro from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, claimed to be the heir to an ancient English baronetcy: the Tichborne estates. Similarly described as its own cause célèbre, the Tichborne baronetcy case spanned two long-running civil and criminal trials and led to a political movement in Britain that continued to take aim at political, legal, and religious institutions long after the trials had ended, in 1874.</b></p> <p>Although the crimes at the centre of the two cases were incongruous, both Madeleine Smith and the Tichborne Claimant ignited significant public debate over criminal procedures, class, gender, and identity. Smith’s case played a key role in the development of ‘sensation’ journalism and literature centred on the violent propensities that lurked beneath the seemingly respectable and repressive Victorian social code, while the Tichborne Claimant’s case confronted Britons with anxieties around the definition of ‘respectability’ and the homecoming of expatriates from the colonies.</p> <p>While coverage of the cases has been well-documented within Britain, less scholarly attention has been paid to their pervasive coverage in the colony of Australia. Both cases were major news items in the colonial press, as updates on the trials were sourced from British media outlets and published in local newspapers almost daily. So pervasive was the coverage that gossip and misinformation surrounding the two cases spread throughout Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand, as speculation surrounded Smith’s later whereabouts over the late nineteenth century and questions about the Tichborne Claimant’s identity lingered.</p> <p>By examining the widespread coverage of the cases in Australia, this work explores how the cases harnessed the communicative powers of the press and stirred sensation in and outside of Britain. Both cases played a role in forging British-Australian transnational identities in the colonies, as Australian newspapers lent their unique voices to associated British metropolitan discussions and weighed in on the respective trial verdicts. With Smith embodying the perceived exodus of undesirable migrants to Australia and the Tichborne Claimant representing colonial life being brought back to the British metropole, Australian newspapers also used the cases to confront the way British metropolitan newspapers wrote about the colony. Fixation on the appearances, manners, and movements of Smith and the Tichborne Claimant, and the crimes with which they were implicated, meant that the Australian newspaper press became an arena for long-standing and far-reaching debate about class, social respectability, gender, sexuality, criminality, and colonial justice.</p>

Crime, Sensation, and Empire

<p><b>The 1857 criminal trial of Madeleine Smith for the murder of Pierre Emile L’Angelier became a cause célèbre throughout the British world. Enmeshed with scandal and speculation, it involved a secret affair between a young upper middle-class Glasgow woman and her older foreign lover of lower social standing; accusations of arsenic poisoning that led to his demise; erotic love letters that were read out in court; and an inconclusive—and uniquely Scottish—verdict of ‘not proven’. In 1866, a butcher under the name of Thomas Castro from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, claimed to be the heir to an ancient English baronetcy: the Tichborne estates. Similarly described as its own cause célèbre, the Tichborne baronetcy case spanned two long-running civil and criminal trials and led to a political movement in Britain that continued to take aim at political, legal, and religious institutions long after the trials had ended, in 1874.</b></p> <p>Although the crimes at the centre of the two cases were incongruous, both Madeleine Smith and the Tichborne Claimant ignited significant public debate over criminal procedures, class, gender, and identity. Smith’s case played a key role in the development of ‘sensation’ journalism and literature centred on the violent propensities that lurked beneath the seemingly respectable and repressive Victorian social code, while the Tichborne Claimant’s case confronted Britons with anxieties around the definition of ‘respectability’ and the homecoming of expatriates from the colonies.</p> <p>While coverage of the cases has been well-documented within Britain, less scholarly attention has been paid to their pervasive coverage in the colony of Australia. Both cases were major news items in the colonial press, as updates on the trials were sourced from British media outlets and published in local newspapers almost daily. So pervasive was the coverage that gossip and misinformation surrounding the two cases spread throughout Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand, as speculation surrounded Smith’s later whereabouts over the late nineteenth century and questions about the Tichborne Claimant’s identity lingered.</p> <p>By examining the widespread coverage of the cases in Australia, this work explores how the cases harnessed the communicative powers of the press and stirred sensation in and outside of Britain. Both cases played a role in forging British-Australian transnational identities in the colonies, as Australian newspapers lent their unique voices to associated British metropolitan discussions and weighed in on the respective trial verdicts. With Smith embodying the perceived exodus of undesirable migrants to Australia and the Tichborne Claimant representing colonial life being brought back to the British metropole, Australian newspapers also used the cases to confront the way British metropolitan newspapers wrote about the colony. Fixation on the appearances, manners, and movements of Smith and the Tichborne Claimant, and the crimes with which they were implicated, meant that the Australian newspaper press became an arena for long-standing and far-reaching debate about class, social respectability, gender, sexuality, criminality, and colonial justice.</p>

POSITIVE IMPACTS OF LOVE IN WILLIAM A. WELLMAN’S AND ROBERT CARSON’S MOVIE SCRIPT A STAR IS BORN

This study aims to determine the positive impacts of love in the movie script A Star Is Born. This study is concerned with the types of love which imply the positive impacts. This study uses Fromm’s theory of love. The types of love analyzed in this study are brotherly love, erotic love, and self-love. Next, the positive impacts of love found in this study are for health, for personal ties, and for relationship. This study uses descriptive qualitative method to explain the types of love that imply positive impact, and positive impact of love from the quotations in the script. This film tells the story of an ordinary woman with great talent who accidentally meets a male celebrity who is addicted to alcohol. The man is attracted to the woman who has a dream to conquer Hollywood. He pushes her become a star. The results of this study show that love can have a positive impact for health that triggers Jack to be released from drugs and alcohol. Besides, the self-love in this movie is presented when Jack helps Ally to be more confident and love herself; consequently, she can be a successful songwriter and singer. Jack always loves her as she is. Ally always supports his health. Both of them strengthen and heal each other.

Fictions of Difficult Love in García Márquez

Following Denis de Rougemont’s pithy assertion at the beginning of his influential Love in the Western World: “Happy love has no history,” Gabriel García Márquez explores through much of his work what he calls “difficult loves” and the artistic as well as ethical paradoxes they entail. As De Rougemont suggests, the first and most obvious way in which love can be “difficult” is the unhappiness and pain caused by love as eros, or amorous passion. The Swiss thinker then contrasts eros with the Christian concept of agape, or brotherly love, which he views as a remedy to the often-destructive effects of passion. This article argues, however, that García Márquez’s concept of “difficult loves” encompasses both forms of love, and with regard to agape, underscores that the search for empathy in a world ruled by violence and power can be just as fraught as the passion of erotic love to those who seek it out. Can literature give rise to empathy, or is fiction condemned to merely repeat violence even while denouncing it? Through a succinct commentary on the love theme in works from García Márquez’s middle and late periods, from One Hundred Years of Solitude and Innocent Eréndira to Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, and News of a Kidnapping, this article traces the Colombian Nobel Prize winner’s implicit reflections about literature’s possible role in fostering social harmony and human empathy in the face of violence, political oppression, and selfishness.

THE EMOTIONS OF MEDEA: AN INTRODUCTION

Ancient Greek and Roman emotions have become a field of increasing academic interest over the last few decades. We can particularly refer to such formative scholars in the field as David Konstan, Douglas Cairns, Robert Kaster, and more recently Angelos Chaniotis – though the cast list goes much wider. Early interest in emotions prevalent across classical genres, such as shame, anger, pity, envy/jealousy, and erôs (erotic love, desire), has more recently expanded to include more peripheral emotions such as forgiveness, remorse, and disgust. A number of studies, too, have focused on specific genres. This research has been conducted against a background of much wider interest in emotion studies in fields as diverse as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, anthropology, medicine, philosophy, jurisprudence, history, literary studies, and the performing arts. Many publications by Classicists have demonstrated awareness of this wider body of research, and some of them directly incorporate theoretical findings – particularly from cognitive psychology, but from other disciplines too – into exploration of classical texts and other media.

LOVE, GRIEF, FEAR, AND SHAME: MEDEA'S INTERCONNECTING EMOTIONS IN BOOK 3 OF APOLLONIUS’ ARGONAUTICA

In its justly celebrated Book 3, the fast pace of action elsewhere in Apollonius’ Argonautica slows dramatically, such that Medea's erotic infatuation with Jason, and the consequent effects of this infatuation, become the central episode of the entire epic. Indeed, the role that Medea's erôs (erotic love, desire) plays in Book 3 is so great that one scholar has opined that ‘It is not the heroic as such but rather the erotic that becomes the real theme.’ However, it is not just erôs that shapes this book, but also Medea's internal battle with a number of other emotions that erôs engenders: principally grief, fear, and shame. Assessing the impact of each and understanding their interplay is complicated, however, because the text frequently presents them as occurring multifariously, or in quick succession – for example switching from erôs to grief, back to erôs, to fear, back to grief, to pity, and to grief again, all within a few lines (443–71). Accordingly I propose to disaggregate her emotions, looking at each in turn wherever it occurs, before considering how Apollonius presents them as interconnecting, and what such interconnections add to his overall presentation of Medea – especially by contrast to that of Euripides, from an emotional perspective the most important precursor.

»… zu direkt neutestamentlich«!? Bonhoeffer, das Alte Testament und die Frage einer biblischen Christologie

In prison, Bonhoeffer reads the Old Testament over and over again. Implicitly, by doing that, he struggles for a new theological evaluation of Judaism of whose present fate he is well aware. In view of this, it is questionable whether Bonhoeffer's new theological insights can really be read from a dogmatically fixed Christology oriented solely on the New Testament. The examples of erotic love and blessing rather show that Bonhoeffer's idea of »all earthly life being utilized to testify« for God is entirely based on the diverse spectre of the Old Testament voices. When Bonhoeffer focuses on »who Christ actually is for us today«, or how central concepts of Christian soteriology such as »repentance, faith, justification, rebirth, sanctification« are to be interpreted »in a worldly sense« - and that means to him: »in the Old Testament sense« - then he does not read the Old Testament any longer with the lenses of a fixed Christology, as he has done for long in the shadow of Barth. Rather, he anticipates the basic insight of the later Jewish-Christian dialogue that the New Testament is essentially related to the Old Testament and Christianity thus stays dependent on Judaism and its truth.

The Lives of Women in Plutarch’s Lives

Plutarch’s works often serve as a starting point for feminist criticism – the writer is called both a feminist who surpassed his times and a spokesperson for the traditional patriarchal society who sees women as passive and inferior to men. Others are certain that Plutarch hates women and atributes all possible character flaws to them. According to some, Plutarch despises educated women, yet others, contrarily, state that he enjoyed the company of educated women no less than that of educated men. Such a vast range of different expert opinions may be due to Plutarch’s vast literary legacy as well as the peculiarity of his way of thinking and his “generic sensibility”: the tendency to change his approach in consideration of different generic demands. Nevertheless, it is impossible to disagree that Plutarch did write the lives of men, and not of women. However, in the remaining Lives of famous Greeks and Romans, we meet plenty of women whose acts and moral principles may serve as examples not only for women, but also for men. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that Plutarch, despite of sometimes relying on stereotypes, regards women according to the same ethical principles as he applies to men. Plutarch depicts women not as passive and submissive, but as autonomous and mature characters who are active not only in their private world, but in the political world too. They overstep the traditional social boundaries of the stereotype “feminine matrix.” He accentuates two of women’s social roles that, according to his judgement, are of the greatest importance: motherhood and partnership. In Plutarch’s narrative, women are associated with love – the selfless motherly love, or marital love based on the community of thoughts and feelings. Plutarch draws attention not to the physical beauty of women, which is traditionally related to feminine sexuality in masculine psychology, but to the integrity of their characters. Love between a husband and wife, based not only on eros, but on devotion and friendship, is the primary representation of erotic love in his Lives.

Martyrs and Life-Writing in Late Antiquity

This chapter explores martyr accounts. Scholars traditionally divide these texts into two types: narrative representations of the suffering and death of martyrs (the so-called passiones) on the one hand, and dramatic representations of the trial preceding this (the so-called acta or praxeis), on the other. The exact semantic range of both labels is debated, but in any case the distinction does not capture the textual reality in its full complexity: even the predominantly narrative texts often contain an interrogation scene, whereas most so-called acta always have a narrative frame, however minimal it may be. In addition, there is no formal unity across the board. This chapter first addresses some of the intellectual premisses that in traditional scholarship on martyr acts were for a long time conducive of historical questions, much to the detriment of the study of these texts as narratives in their own right. The chapter then observes that many martyr acts recount not only the deaths of their protagonists but also cover (parts of) their preceding lives, and it explores how these texts adopt and adapt narrative and rhetorical protocols from traditional life-writing to shape the lives of their protagonists. Finally, attention is paid briefly to the thematic cluster of erotic love, desire, marriage, and the preservation of chastity that drives many such narrative elaborations. It is concluded that whereas research on these texts has long been driven by historical interests, they are also treasure-troves for scholars interested in narrative in general and life-writing in particular.