Edward FitzGerald

Edward FitzGerald (b. 1809–d. 1883) was an English poet and translator, best remembered today for a single work, his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859). FitzGerald was born into an extremely wealthy family in Suffolk. After graduating from Cambridge, where he had spent perhaps the happiest years of his life and formed a number of lifelong friendships, FitzGerald returned to Suffolk. There he lived very modestly, either in a cottage on the outskirts of his family’s estate or in rented lodgings in a nearby town, occupying himself with reading and writing. In the early 1850s he began to translate from Spanish, publishing Six Dramas of Calderon in 1853. The very free and unliteral method of translation he used in this work would mark all of his later translations as well, which included works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the Persian poet Jámí. But it was his translation, or adaptation, of certain rubáiyát (quatrains) attributed to the 12th-century Persian polymath Omar Khayyám that caused a worldwide sensation. The first edition of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which FitzGerald published anonymously (like his other works), in 1859, consisted of seventy-five quatrains. At first no one noticed or purchased the small, pamphlet-like book, but a few years later it was discovered by chance by members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, who became passionately devoted to it. A second edition of 110 quatrains was published in 1868 and began to draw attention in North America as well as in Britain. Two more editions followed, each varying fairly significantly from the others, before FitzGerald’s death in 1883, by which time the poem was known throughout the world. It was translated into numerous languages, and Omar Khayyám clubs were founded in many cities. Critics have attributed this popularity to the poem’s frank embrace of a skeptical, resigned, epicurean view of life, which caught the spirit of a doubting, world-weary age. Its very success—by 1900 the Rubáiyát was the most popular and most frequently reprinted poem in English—led to its being dismissed and ignored by literary critics for much of the 20th century. But a critical revival began in the late 1990s, as scholars started to reappraise the poem’s cultural significance as well as its literary achievement.

Cheryl Wall, In Memoriam

The distinguished critic Professor Cheryl A. Wall (1948–2020) was the Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her path-breaking scholarship in two highly influential monographs, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995) and Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005), helped to ensure that twentieth-century Black women writers were recognized and valued for their power, genius, and complexity. Her most recent book, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay (2018), places the essay form at the center of African American literary achievement. Throughout her long career she supported and enabled Black students, and championed racial diversity and gender equality at every level of the university. An Associate Editor of James Baldwin Review, she was the most generous and astute of readers, as well as a wise editor. In this memorial section, fifteen colleagues, former students, and interlocutors share their remembrances and honor her legacy.

Perceptions of Children's Literature in the Writings of Sheikh Abi Al-Hassan Ali Al-Nadwi

India is one of the most famous non-Arab countries in the world where the Arabic language and Arabic literature has grown, developed and flourished on a large scale. During the period of Arab rule in the Indian lands, Arabic was an official language of government and a means of learning about Arab-Islamic heritage and literary achievement. Moreover, many Arab schools and cultural institutions of higher education were established that produced a large number of poets, writers, Islamic thinkers, and interpreters of the Qur’an and Hadees scholars. Among those great writers was Allama Abul-Hassan Ali Al-Hasani Al-Nadawi, who was an outstanding imam whom the twentieth century saw and one of the great personalities of India, served Islam and Muslims. This study concerns the problem of Arabic teachers in Sri Lanka and India, who do not follow an appropriate methodology for teaching Arabic children and tries to make sure that children’s literature writers take into account the psychology of children in their compositions. To achieve these goals, the researcher has followed the descriptive and analytical approach to complete this study and reach the required results. This study concluded that Allama Abul-Hasan Ali al-Hasani al-Nadawi, may God have mercy on him, had a huge role in contemporary Arabic literature. Especially in children's literature, where he showed his value theory while following wonderful methods in his literacy works, concerning the psychology of children and their childhood, which helps students to read and understand through a very easy way.

Thoughts on the Recent Past and the Future of Byzantine Literary Studies

This brief postscript evaluates the place of Byzantine literature in the academy, and evaluates its current strengths. It looks back at a period when professors of Byzantine literature disparaged their subject matter, and it contrasts that era (c. 1970) with the position fifty years later, as large numbers of young scholars enter the field and are employed to do so, and to whom major research grants are awarded. The chapter locates itself in relation to other position papers written by the author in 1990, 2003, and 2010, and surveys the past twenty years in terms of conferences, publications, and other infrastructure, emphasizing the growth of texts, translations, and studies, and work on processes of literary production. It notes the confident place of rhetoric as the foundation of literary achievement in every genre and the arrival at a more nuanced periodization. Research has been informed by affective and cognitive neuroscience as well as by new philology, new historicism, post-classical narratology, and comparative approaches; it applauds the way that texts in Syriac, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, and Latin are regarded as having a claim to be considered as Byzantine. It proposes a history of Byzantine literature.

Leonid Dolgopolov’s Unpublished PhD Thesis on Alexander Blok’s Narrative Poems ‘Retribution’ and ‘The Twelve’

Russian Modernism scholar Leonid Konstantinovich Dolgolopov (1928 –1995), known for his studies on Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, completed his PhD thesis on Blok’s narrative poems “Retribution” and “The Twelve” in 1960, received his degree in 1962, but never published the text (now in the author’s possession). Its major parts were published as papers, its principal propositions and conclusions were developed in Dolgopolov’s later research works, but the thesis was never printed as a whole, and, from the author’s point of view, is worth being published as a valuable source for history of literary studies on Russian Symbolism as well as an original work useful and readable even now. The article presents Dolgopolov’s unpublished PhD thesis. Chapter One deals with “Retribution” and presents a comprehensive study of the poem’s plan, plot, and literary history, its genre peculiarities and historical scenes. Chapter Two analyzes evolution of Blok’s political views during the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 and also its reflection in Blok’s lyric poems of this period. Chapter Three is the first of Dolgopolov’s numerous studies on “The Twelve”, the work he considered to be Blok’s highest literary achievement. Dolgopolov analyzed the poem’s ideas and images (especially Jesus Christ), its formal and rythmic novelty, its place among other contempopary poetical works on Russian revolution.

Life and Background

This foundational chapter presents Mitchell’s writing as a barometer of the times that he inhabited. It sets out the book’s biographical and critical aims to examine the precise nature of the author’s literary achievement against the dramatic geopolitical background of the early decades of the twentieth century. Drawing authoritatively upon original sources, Mitchell’s short life is summarised as a triumph of innate talent over the social hardship and cultural poverty of his upbringing, from his origins in peasant society to service in the army and the airforce, thereafter moving to city life in Scotland and London, before finally settling in Welwyn Garden City. Mitchell’s personal experience of many of the key developments of the modern world, in country and city, at home and abroad, in wartime and peacetime, is shown to have shaped his personal ideology – particularly his left-wing radicalisation. The two central planks of his greatest writing, his love of nature and his fierce social commitment, are traced to his peasant upbringing as son to a poor Aberdeenshire crofter. His literary corpus is presented as a knowing response to the zeitgeist of the inter-war years, as a renunciation of outmoded Victorian modes and an embracing of the new.

Health, well-being, and material-ideal hybrid spaces in Yeats’s writing

Traditionally regarded as high-art, poetry is often seen as a superior form of literary achievement consecrating in verse worldviews and lives connected to ideal, transcendental realms, the pursuance of which supposedly leads to some kind of ideal health and spiritual well-being. The poet WB Yeats (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923), who believed in the power of poetry to reveal realities and states of such perfection, thereby giving purpose to mundane life, likened this effect of poetry to the fashioning of statues as monuments of unageing intellect. However, contradictorily, he also questioned the value of poetry thus conceived by questioning whether it is healthy to aspire to embody poetically consecrated ideals in real life. Yeats’s dilemmatic negotiation between these two positions suggests that better personal well-being can be achieved in living an enlightening life by being mindful of the body’s sensuality and materiality. In poetic explorations of the ways in which idealism and sensuality can affect how we live our lives, Yeats used real-life examples of people he knew, often important public figures in Irish social and political history.The present paper frames these explorations in terms of Yeats’s concepts of living stream and stone/statuary, augmented with Bruno Latour’s concepts of traditional subject and articulated body, discussed in relation to purpose in life and closeness and empathy, proposing that an overly idealistic ‘poetic’ lifestyle can have adverse effects, whereas poetry that increases one’s awareness of oneself as articulated body is conducive to better health and well-being.

The House for the Students of the Empire (CEI), African women poets from the 1950s, and Sarah Maldoror’s films

In the 1950s, in Lisbon, several students coming from different Portuguese colonies in Africa met at “CEI - Casa dos Estudantes do Império” - a cultural and leisure centre for college students and other scholars from Africa or Asia. I would highlight names such as Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973), Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928-1990) and Agostinho Neto (1922-1979), famous activists that, at the time, invested in cultural forms of resistance against colonialism, being literature a means to raise political awareness among students. The high-profile women writers in this millieu were Noémia de Sousa (1926-2002), Alda Lara (1930-1962) and Alda do Espírito Santo (1926-2010). My research will assess the role of these three women in the cultural front of a collective political awakening, which later led to the independence struggles of the Portuguese colonies. These three women were also the first canonised women writers in their own national literary systems, thus being founding figures in a women’s genealogy of literary achievement. However, their works also the represent a particular generation, framed by the atmosphere lived at CEI. As a consequence of the political activism developed by the CEI millieu, some of the involved young scholars had to leave Portugal going into exile in Paris, where they gathered around the magazine Présence Africaine. This paper also explores CEI’s “Paris connection”, via Mário Pinto de Andrade and his wife, the film director Sarah Maldoror (1938-), who eventually adapted Luandino Vieira’s texts to cinema (Monangambé, 1968 and Sambizanga, 1972). At the time, Maldoror’s work was conceived as a means to promote international awareness of the regime Angolan people were fighting against. The final aim of the research is to explore the articulation among the works by these four women in relation to CEI’s activism.

Knowledge, Emotion, and Imagination: Negotiating Cultural Boundaries in The Eunuch Sanbao's Voyage to the Western Ocean

The Eunuch Sanbao's Voyage to the Western Ocean, a late sixteenth-century novel loosely based on the historical expeditions commanded by Zheng He (1371–1433), is a peculiar mixture of factual accounts of foreign lands and fantastic narrative. While previous studies have confirmed its historical value, evaluated its literary achievement as fantastic literature, or criticized its plagiarism, this article situates the novel within the context of the late-Ming publishing boom and expanding world knowledge and examines how its author negotiates cultural boundaries through refashioning historical accounts and classical allusions. The key questions explored are whether the broadened knowledge of the world beyond China brings about new ways to conceptualize and imagine cultural others, and how the novelist maneuvers between an enlarged understanding of the world and a long-standing Sinocentric discourse. The article demonstrates that the novel reveals much of the curiosity, ambivalence, and conflict at work during the early stages of global contact. Throughout the novel, its author oscillates between conflicting urges to differentiate or assimilate, to antagonize or empathize, and to emphasize Ming superiority or identify a common humanity. These oscillations give us a glimpse into the complex responses to a changing world and propel us to reflect more deeply on the conflicts and struggles experienced in the early stages of global contact.