Caryl Phillips’s Rewriting of the Canonical Romance as a Genre

The paper considers Phillips’s rewriting of the canonical nineteenth-century romances in three of his novels – A State of Independence (1986), The Lost Child (2015), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). The three texts resettle the romance genre through the postcolonial concept of ‘home’. In A State of Independence, Phillips rearranges the role of one of Jane Austen’s most orthodox characters, the landowner Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park (1814), by transposing the Austenian character’s features to his protagonist Bertram Francis, a Caribbean man who comes back to his ancestral homeland after twenty years in Britain. In The Lost Child, chronicling literary-historical events in the present tense by transferring the life of the Brontë family into the protagonists of Wuthering Heights (1847) is for the author one way of calling into question the real sense of literature. It is for this reason that Phillips constructs a cyclic narration around the figure of Branwell Brontë, fictionalised by his sister Emily in the romance protagonist Heathcliff, and mirrored in The Lost Child in the character of Tommy Wilson. In A View of the Empire at Sunset, Phillips definitely overturns the colonial and genre categories by reassessing the in-between life of the Dominican-born writer Jean Rhys through her personal return journey to Dominica: as a result, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (an intense rewriting of Jane Eyre) becomes a fictional character, and the literary events of her life sum up the vicissitudes both of the two ‘Bertrams’ – of Mansfield Park and A State of Independence – and the protagonists of Wuthering Heights and The Lost Child.

Two-year Journey under the Arrows of the Black Death

The penultimate part of the Riḥla by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa recounts his return journey to Morocco from the Middle East through North Africa—and another short tour in al-Andalus—between January 1348 and March 1350. At that time, in all these territories the plague pandemic known as the Black Death was raging and references to it punctuate this part of the work like a tired refrain. As numerous studies have shown borrowings and adaptations from other sources in the Riḥla, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may not have made all the journeys he claims, but to date no one has questioned his journey through the Arabian area in those years. On the contrary, historians of the Black Death regard the Riḥla as an important document for the study of the scourge in the Middle East and North Africa. In this paper I aim to reconstruct the narrative of the pandemic in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Riḥla by taking from the text the passages in which it is mentioned, in order to answer some questions: to which places do these passages refer? What information does the Riḥla give about the disease, its effects and people’s reaction? Does it correspond to that provided by the Arab chronicles? Does it fit with current microbiology, genetics and palaeogenetics research? Since the Riḥla is a narrative work, how does it describe the scourge? Does its description differ from that of the chroniclers? The concluding paragraph seeks an answer to two more questions: does the Riḥla report Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s experience or might he and/or the editor of the work, Ibn Ǧuzayy, have taken information from other sources? And if Ibn Baṭṭūṭa did make this journey, thus probably being the only traveller who left an account of a “two-year journey under the arrows of the Black Death,” how could he return home unscathed?

"You Know Very Well You're Not Real": Victorian Children's Fantasy Literature and the Problem of Writing the Child

<p>This thesis examines eight "Golden Age"children's fantasy narratives and uncovers their engagement with the "impossibility" of writing the child. Only recently has children's literature criticism recognised that the child in the text and the implied child reader cannot stand in for the "real" child reader. This is an issue which other literary criticism has been at pains to acknowledge, but which children's literature critics have neglected. I have based my reading on critics such as Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Jacqueline Rose and Perry Nodelman, all of whom are concerned to expose the term "child" as an adult cultural construction, one which becomes problematic when it is made to stand in for real children. I read the child in the text as an entity which contains and is tainted by the trace of the adult who writes it; it is therefore impossible for a pure, innocent child to exist in language, the province of the adult. Using Derrida's conception of the trace and his famous statement that "there is nothing outside of the text," I demonstrate that the idea of the innocent child, which was central to Rousseau's Emile and the Romantic Child which is supposed to have been authored by Wordsworth and inherited wholesale by his Victorian audience, is possible only as a theory beyond language. The Victorian texts I read, which include Lewis Carroll's Alice texts, George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind and the Princess texts, Kingsley's The Water Babies and Mrs. Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room, all explore different ways in which the child might be successfully articulated: in language, in death, and through the return journey into fantasy. While all the texts attempt to reach the child, all ultimately foreground the failure of this enterprise. When a language is created which is child-authored, it fails as communication and meaning breaks down; when the adult ceases to write the narrative, the child within it ceases to exist.</p>

"You Know Very Well You're Not Real": Victorian Children's Fantasy Literature and the Problem of Writing the Child

<p>This thesis examines eight "Golden Age"children's fantasy narratives and uncovers their engagement with the "impossibility" of writing the child. Only recently has children's literature criticism recognised that the child in the text and the implied child reader cannot stand in for the "real" child reader. This is an issue which other literary criticism has been at pains to acknowledge, but which children's literature critics have neglected. I have based my reading on critics such as Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Jacqueline Rose and Perry Nodelman, all of whom are concerned to expose the term "child" as an adult cultural construction, one which becomes problematic when it is made to stand in for real children. I read the child in the text as an entity which contains and is tainted by the trace of the adult who writes it; it is therefore impossible for a pure, innocent child to exist in language, the province of the adult. Using Derrida's conception of the trace and his famous statement that "there is nothing outside of the text," I demonstrate that the idea of the innocent child, which was central to Rousseau's Emile and the Romantic Child which is supposed to have been authored by Wordsworth and inherited wholesale by his Victorian audience, is possible only as a theory beyond language. The Victorian texts I read, which include Lewis Carroll's Alice texts, George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind and the Princess texts, Kingsley's The Water Babies and Mrs. Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room, all explore different ways in which the child might be successfully articulated: in language, in death, and through the return journey into fantasy. While all the texts attempt to reach the child, all ultimately foreground the failure of this enterprise. When a language is created which is child-authored, it fails as communication and meaning breaks down; when the adult ceases to write the narrative, the child within it ceases to exist.</p>

Narratives of Nostos by Italian-Canadian Women

We are privileged to read and write and share narratives of nostos that are inspired by our (grand)parents’ decision to emigrate. The return journey “home” shows a need to look to the past, towards one’s roots, in an attempt to better understand the present. This essay looks at representations of nostos in the Italian-Canadian literary community, with an emphasis on narratives by women who were born in Italy as well as those whose (grand)parents emigrated to Canada. To varying degrees, the discussion will touch on the works of established and emerging authors from Ontario, Quebec and Alberta.

Anastasis: Return Journey from Cell Death

For over 20 years, it has been a dogma that once the integrity of mitochondria is disrupted and proapoptotic proteins that are normally located in the intermembrane space of mitochondria appeared in the cytoplasm, the process of cell death becomes inevitable. However, it has been recently shown that upon removal of the death signal, even at the stage of disturbance in the mitochondria, cells can recover and continue to grow. This phenomenon was named anastasis. Here, we will critically discuss the present knowledge concerning the mechanisms of cell death reversal, or development of anastasis, methods for its detection, and what role signaling from different intracellular compartments plays in anastasis stimulation.

A Founding Penalty: Evidence from an Audit Study on Gender, Entrepreneurship, and Future Employment

There is both widespread interest in encouraging entrepreneurship and universal recognition that the vast majority of these founders will fail, which raises an important unanswered question: What happens to ex-founders when they apply for jobs? Whereas existing research has identified many factors that facilitate movement out of an established organization and into entrepreneurship, far less attention has been devoted to understanding what transpires during the return journey—most notably, how employers evaluate entrepreneurial experience at the point of hire. We propose that employers penalize job candidates with a history of founding a new venture because they believe them to be worse fits and less committed employees than comparable candidates without founding experience. We further predict that the discount for having been an entrepreneur will diminish when other stereotypes about the candidate, particularly those based on gender, will contradict the negative beliefs about ex-founders. We test our proposition using a résumé-based audit and an experimental survey. The audit reveals that founding significantly reduces the likelihood that an employer interviews a male candidate, but there is no comparable penalty for female ex-founders. The experimental survey confirms the gendered nature of the founding penalty and provides evidence that it results from employers’ concerns that founders are less committed and worse organizational fits than nonfounders. Critically, the survey also indicates that these concerns are mitigated for women, helping to explain why they suffer no equivalent founding penalty.

The payload-range performance of a multirole tanker transporter aircraft accounting for towline (on-station refuelling) and trail (strategic deployment) missions

This article has arisen from a general investigation into the payload-range envelope of a multirole-tanker transport aircraft and how this envelope is modified as a result of the tanker’s refuelling activities. To this end, the Breguet range equation is used in conjunction with a simple fuel budget to model different scenarios in which the tanker aircraft can perform towline or trail missions. For the common radius of action case, a closed-form solution is obtained for the payload-range variation; for instances where the outbound journey and the return journey are of unequal lengths, the governing equation is found to require a numerical solution. The act of dispensing a significant quantity of fuel whilst some distance into a flight can have a dramatic impact on the tanker’s overall range and payload capability. An assessment of this payload-range modification needs to be made prior to commencing the flight to ensure the mission can safely be accomplished, which provides the motivation for the current work. Three case studies are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the method, and comparisons with published data show strong agreement. This model will be of use to planners wishing to investigate typical ‘ what if?’ scenarios on the overall mission.

Writing-Mediated Interaction Face-to-Face: Sinitic Brushtalk in the Japanese Missions’ Transnational Encounters with Foreigners During the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Drawing on Chinese-Japanese transnational and transcultural interaction in the mid-nineteenth century, this article illustrates how Sinitic brushtalk functioned as an effective modality of communication between Chinese and Japanese literati who did not have a shared spoken language. The illustrations are adapted from personal diary-like travelogues of Japanese travelers to Shanghai on board the Senzaimaru in 1862 and participants in the Japanese mission to the United States in 1860. The recollection of the brushtalkers with their Chinese interlocutors whom they met on the way, including those during their return journey from the US while calling at trading ports like Batavia and Hong Kong, provides elaborate details on how writing-mediated improvisation using brush, ink, and paper allowed Japanese travelers with literacy in Sinitic to engage in “silent conversation” with their literate Chinese counterparts. A third historical context where Sinitic brushtalk was put to meaningful use was US–Japanese negotiations during Commodore Perry’s naval expedition to Edo Bay in 1854, where Luo Sen, bilingual in Chinese (spoken Cantonese) and English, was hired to perform the role of secretary. Throughout the negotiations, Luo was able to perform his duties admirably in part by impressing the Japanese side with his fine brushtalk improvisations. While misunderstanding and miscommunication could not be entirely avoided, the article concludes that until the early 1900s writing-mediated interaction through Sinitic brushtalk in face-to-face encounters functioned adequately and effectively as a scripta franca between literate Japanese and their Chinese “silent conversation” partners both within and beyond Sinographic East Asia. Such a unique modality of communication remained vibrant until the advent of nationalism and the vernacularization of East Asian national languages at the turn of the century.

The Tijaniyya Sufi Brotherhood Amongst the Idaw ‘Ali of the Western Sahara

ORIGINS OF THE IDAW ALIThe Idaw ‘Ali are one of the two most prominent and influentialzuwaya groups in Mauritania, the other being the Kunta, disseminatorsof the Qadiriyya tariqa in West Africa who claim to be descendants ofthe great Arab hero and conqueror of North Africa, Uqba b. Nafi. Thebasis of the prestige of the Idaw ‘Ali rested in part on their widelyrecognized sharifian origin. Another basis of their prestige was theirintroduction of the Tijaniyya tariqa in Mauritania As descendants ofProphet Muhammed, the Idaw ‘Ali occupied a noble and privilegedposition in the society that placed them above the other zawaya and laygroups in Mauritania.The Idaw ‘Ali traditions, as reported by Sidi Abd-allah b. al-HajjIbrahim al-‘Alawi (d. 1818) in his treatise, “Sahihat al-Naql fi AlawiyatIdaw ‘Ali wa Bakriyat Muhammed Ghull” (The Authenticity of theDescee Idaw ‘Ali from Caliph ‘Ali and that of Muhammed Ghull fromCaliph ‘Abu Bakr al-Siddiq), state unequivocally that the Idaw ‘Alidescended from ‘Ali b. ‘Abu Talib (d. 661), son-in-law of the Prophet andfourth Caliph, through an eponymous ancestor ‘Ali b. Yahya. SidiAbdallah maintains that:. . .the Idawa ‘Ali are the descendants of ‘Ali b. Yahya and to bereckoned the progeny of ‘Ali b. ‘Abu Talib (May God bepleased with him). We know of no disagreement between thosewho are learned in that which has been handed down, bothwritten and spoken, and those who have been favored withspiritual illumination regarding it.This genealogy is said to have been examined and declared sound by SidiMukhtar al-Kunti, the founding father of the Qadiriyya-Mukhtariyyabrotherhood in West Africa. Furthermore, the author of “Sahihat al-Naql” adduced numerous quotations which he related to genealogistsand scholars of Mauritania and the Orient to prove the validity of theIdaw ‘Ali’s claim to shar(fian ancestry.Sidi Abdallah relates in “Sahihat al-Naql” that he was informed bySidi Ahmed al-Daymani, the famed scholar of the Awlad Daymanzawaya group, that the Idaw ‘Ali descended from the house of theProphet. According to al-Daymani, the Idaw ‘Ali. . .are the progeny of ‘Ali and.. . both their young and their oldcontinue to trace their lineage to him in spite of the paucity ofthat which God has allotted to them in support of their claim.Sidi Abdallah also relates that a member of the Idaw ‘Ali made thepilgrimage to Mecca where he met Sidi Ahmed al-Habib of the Idaw‘Ali. Sidi Ahmed is said to have told the pilgrim:If you are in straightened circumstances, then say-ohforefather, oh Messenger of God-for in truth you are hisdescendant.The pilgrim asked Sidi Ahmed how he acquired this informationconcerning the lineage of the Idaw ‘Ali, and Sidi Ahmed replied:I saw that in a book in Cairo, but if you return there, askSheikh al-Murtada about the lineage of the people of Shinqit.Sheikh al-Murtada is the saint of Egypt and its sun . . .On the pilgrim’s return journey he passed through Cairo and asked ...