Terence’s Eunuchus

Suetonius (Vita Terenti 3) asserts that Eunuchus was Terence’s most commercially successful play. While we cannot confirm this claim, Eunuchus (as all Terence’s plays) enjoyed continuous readership after performances of it ceased in antiquity, was often cited by ancient writers and grammarians, and received a commentary in the 4th century ce. While Eunuchus is not without its critics—some have found fault with its dramatic structure and the ethics of its finale, to say nothing of its unique (in New Comedy) foregrounding of violent rape—it has generated enormous interest in both medieval and modern cultures, including numerous commentaries and translations. Eunuch’s unusual deception-plot, that is, the impulsive Chaerea’s costuming as a eunuch to sexually overpower Pamphila, no doubt accounts for much of the attention the play has attracted. For scholars of gender and sexuality, Eunuch invites interrogation of Roman attitudes toward sexual violence, norms of masculinity, and constructions of gender, as well as of the sexually ambiguous figure of the eunuch in this dramatic and cultural context. Eunuch’s prologue has also captivated scholars of Roman comedy and literary history more generally, as it so clearly articulates recurring concerns of Terence’s characteristically metadramatic prologues: Terence’s adaptation of both his Greek and Latin sources, including charges of “contamination” and “plagiarism,” and the broader challenges of finding novelty within circumscribed comic tradition (for Terence’s “anxiety of influence” see esp. Eun. 35–43). Some scholarship has been conducted on linguistic differentiation among Eunuch’s characters, and it is hoped that burgeoning sociolinguistic work on Plautine Latin will continue to be extended to Terence. Recent criticism has largely focused on aspects of Eunuch’s performance, both on the micro-level of costumes, stage movements, and musicality, and more broadly on the play’s pervasive metatheatricality.

An Insight for Cursive Context-Specific Printed Script Recognition

The greatest challenge of machine learning problems is to select suitable techniques and resources such as tools and datasets. Despite the existence of millions of speakers around the globe and the rich literary history of more than a thousand years, it is expensive to find the computational linguistic work related to Punjabi Shahmukhi script, a member of the Perso-Arabic context-specific script low-resource language family. This paper presents a deep insight into the related work with summary statistics, advocating the popularity and success of artificial neural networks and related techniques. The paper includes support from recent trends from the authentic sources based on the top-level researchers' feedback including the machine learning frameworks. A comprehensive comparison of the most popular deep learning techniques convolutional neural network and the recursive neural network has been presented for the cursive context-specific scripts of Perso-Arabic nature. The overview of the available benchmark datasets for machine learning problems, especially for the Perso-Arabic group, is added. This paper incorporates essential knowledge contents for the researchers in machine learning and natural language processing disciplines on the selection of algorithms, architectures, and resources.

Fashions of Snæfellsness

The sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) are an important part of European literary history. Both the sagas’ historical background and their literary techniques were studied intensely in the last century, but dress and fashion in Old Norse–Icelandic literature received comparatively little attention in this period. Moreover, the literary corpus and textile history have rarely been used to illuminate one another; however, as this article will demonstrate, synthesising data and methodological approaches from both fields can yield new knowledge about both historical textiles and the sagas. This article focuses on four of the sagas of Icelanders that are set on the Snæfellsnes peninsula: Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa, Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, Eyrbyggja saga, and Víglundar saga. The central question the article poses is, how are social norms and cultural ideas reflected in clothing and textiles in these sagas? This study presents a comprehensive and multifaceted view of the textile and clothing imagery by combining qualitative and quantitative textual analysis showing how the imagery is an integral part of the narrative rather than an embellishment. The article reveals that clothing and textiles serve an array of functions in the sagas which are linked to the societal order. Several themes — such as masculinity, social rank, and the practice of magic — are shown to have a close connection with clothing as well as other textiles.

Ghost Writers: Radcliffiana and the Russian Gothic Wave

Ann Radcliffe’s novels were extremely popular in early nineteenth-century Russia. Publication of her work in Russian translation propelled the so-called gothic wave of 1800-10. Yet, many of the works Radcliffe was known for in Russia were not written by her; rather, they were works by others that were attributed to Radcliffe. This article traces the publication and translation histories of Radcliffiana on the Russian book market of 1800-20. Building on JoEllen DeLucia’s concept of a “corporate Radcliffe” in the anglophone world, this article proposes a Russian corporate Radcliffe. Identifying, classifying, and analysing the provenance of Russian corporate Radcliffe works reveals insight into the transnational circulation of texts and the role of copyright law within it, the nature of the early nineteenth-century Russian book market, the rise of popular reading and advertising in Russia, and the gendered nature of critical discourse at this time. The Russian corporate Radcliffe assures the legacy and influence of Radcliffe in later Russian literature and culture, although a Radcliffe that represents much more than just the English author. Exploring the Russian corporate Radcliffe expands our understanding of early nineteenth-century Russian literary history through specific case studies that demonstrate the significant role played by both women writers and translation, an aspect of this history that is often overlooked.