Gender, Greatness, and the “Third Generation”

This chapter argue that Virginia Woolf's Night and Day marks an effort as a third-generation daughter to represent and work through the literary and personal legacy of her antecedents. It elaborates how Woolf excised significant parts of a late-Victorian legacy from the literary-historical narrative that Night and Day shaped for its readers. It also analyses Woolf's deliberate framing of her own relation to a dominant strand of the English novelistic tradition in “maternal generation.” The chapter discusses the view of late-Victorian literary production that Woolf helped to construct that became more homogeneous than what Ann Ardis, Sally Ledger, Lyn Pykett, Talia Schaffer, and Margaret D. Stet created. It highlights Woolf's essays, reviews, and novels that created a gulf between the Georgians and their immediate predecessors, the Edwardian materialists.

Considering Contemporaneity: Woolf and “the Maternal Generation”

Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion that contests between generations structure the literary field, this essay looks closely at Virginia Woolf’s attitudes to her older female contemporaries during the early part of her career, when as a newcomer she adopted a primarily agonistic relation to them. Her repudiation of such writers as Alice Meynell and Vernon Lee helped her to secure her own exceptional status. Yet once Woolf had achieved that status, she was more able to recognize her own implication in the competitive and hierarchical structures that constitute the literary field. By juxtaposing her public and private comments on Meynell and Lee from earlier and later in her career, we can register her subsequent re-valuation of at least some of the work of “the maternal generation.” As Woolf herself aged into an older generation, that is, she revisited her earlier judgments in a new spirit.

Genetic Structure of a Loblolly Pine Breeding Population at Brazil

The genetic structure of a Brazilian loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) breeding population, represented by 120 open-pollinated families, was determined using Bayesian inference and genotypes of 15 microsatellite (simple sequence repeat (SSR)) loci in 1,130 seedling progeny. The 120 maternal parents had been phenotypically selected about 15 years ago for wood volume in five different forestry plantations (FPs) in the south of Brazil. Additional selection for wood volume, based on a previous progeny test, was applied to the first best (i) and second best (ii) tree per block within each family. We adopted a procedure of “learning samples” to find the most likely number of inferred genetic clusters (K) or ancestral populations. The first hypothesis that was rejected was that the most probable value of K=5 was coincident with the five FPs, since the FPs were, a priori, assumed to be from 5 different backgrounds or origins. It was used the familiar structure of the population to infer the genotypes of maternal ancestors. It was concluded that the maternal generation is the most likely to have been planted by the mixture of three different seed sources or origins, that there are five genetic groups (K=5) in the population of progeny, and that they have been formed from the occurrence of assortative mating and also from a strong pressure in the selection within families. The trees with the best genetic value (i) maintained a higher genetic variability when compared to the trees of second best performance (ii), with higher values of heterozygosity and of numbers of maternal alleles that were kept the same. The migration model that best explains the results is the contact zone model. The population differentiation (FST) was 2-3 times higher in offspring than in relation to the maternal generation. The relevancy of the results and the way they were explored may be of value both for studies of population genetics, as for plant breeding programs, since they help monitoring the population's genetic variability during generations of selection.

Effects of photoperiod on body size and hormone titres relating to diapause regulation in Cotesia vestalis (Hymenoptera: Braconidae)

Photoperiods influence diapause beyond the maternal generation in Cotesia vestalis (Haliday) (Hymenoptera: Braconidae). The sizes, 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E), and juvenile hormone III (JH III) contents in the G1 diapausing prepupae, G0 nondiapausing prepupae, adults, and G1 eggs from C. vestalis cultures reared under three photoperiods (8:16 hours light:dark, 12:12 hours light:dark, and 16:8 hours light:dark) were measured to investigate the hormones’ roles on maternal information transmission and diapause regulation. Results showed that the body size of G1 diapausing prepupae was significantly larger than that of G0 nondiapausing prepupae. The sizes of G0 prepupae, female abdomens, and G1 eggs under eight-hour light were significantly larger than those under 16-hour light. The 20E content in diapausing prepupae was significantly lower than that in nondiapausing prepupae, whereas JH III content did not show significantly difference under the same photoperiod. The 20E content in maternal prepupae, mated females and G1 eggs decreased as the light period was reduced. Juvenile hormone III contents in G0-mated females and G1 eggs (after oviposition) under three photoperiods showed no significant differences. These findings suggest that 20E may play a critical role in diapause regulation of C. vestalis, and be used as a maternal environmental message to be transmitted to the next generation.