‘So that my soul may have time to grow’: Joy and Happiness in Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Solitary Summer

Abstract

This article discusses the Romantic and Transcendentalist roots of Elizabeth von Arnim’s joyful retreat from the world in The Solitary Summer (1899). By exploring how von Arnim incorporates themes and ideas from William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau, it situates von Arnim’s concepts of joy and happiness in the Aristotelian tradition of eudaemonia and shows how the practice of mindfulness turns Elizabeth’s garden into an ongoing project of self-cultivation.     

A Life in Pictures: Looking for Elizabeth Senior

This essay follows the author’s search for forgotten art historian Elizabeth Senior (1910–41). Using a quest narrative, it traces the process undertaken to piece together the life story of a remarkable young woman, including Internet research, visits to archives and correspondence with family members. Killed at just aged 30 by a bomb during the Blitz in 1941, Senior left a quite substantial body of editorial work and writing. Editress for the inaugural volumes in Allen Lane’s King Penguin series, Senior also wrote multiple reviews for the Burlington Magazine and the British Museum Quarterly, as well as her own art historical books on portraits of Henry VIII and his wives, and on portraits of Christ (co-authored with Ernst Kitzinger). A collaborator and friend to many Jewish émigré art historians, including The Story of Art author Ernst Gombrich, Senior played an important role in facilitating the safe passage of many fleeing the Nazis for England in the 1930s and 1940s. Unmarried at the time of her death, Senior was survived by a 10-week-old baby, whom she had stashed under a table for safety when a bomb landed on her flat.     

Against epistemic totalitarianism: the insurrectional politics of Bessie Head

This paper argues that South African writer, Bessie Head, crafted art that refuses discursive closure, or epistemic totalitarianism. The essay demonstrates this by examining Head's commitment to analysing power in the context of people's daily lives and her attention to the insurrectionary role of imagination in intervening in established dynamics of power. The first section draws connections between Head's practice of writing about ordinary people to her own experience and observations of living under South African apartheid. The second section focuses on the analytical links that Head makes between poverty, white privilege and institutional economic structures in order to demonstrate how her analysis of the rigidity of the system yielded an attentiveness to the need to be able to imagine other possibilities. The third section depicts Head's insurrectionary writing as part of a moral force that is, in part, a function of her analysis of the problem as an absence of imaginative possibilities. This, I suggest, indicates that – as with much critical African anti-colonial writing – Head's approach presents contemporary social theory with a challenge to epistemic totalitarianism that can be useful for addressing current issues.     

城市居民生活垃圾分类政策何以从引导转向强制?——基于政策工具的视角

生活垃圾分类是我国城市治理的热点议题。近年来我国各大城市在推进生活垃圾分类政策的过程中,地方政府的政策工具体现了从自愿性和混合性过渡到强制性的显著特征。这一政策工具的转变是由政治、财政、管理和技术四个维度的因素驱动的。城市生活垃圾分类政策执行模式的转变并不意味着“全能型政府”的重现,而是突出表现为参与主体的多元性和政民关系的平等性这两大特征,凸显了强制性工具在中国场景的适用性和不断优化的政策执行模式。     

电子票据行为的正当性研究

电子票据是新兴的金融工具,尽管实务中对电子票据有着强烈的需求,电子票据本身也在迅猛发展,但既有的以纸质票据为调整对象的票据法并未规定电子票据。电子票据能不能纳入现行票据法调整,理论上还有很大的争议。如果能把电子票据的规则纳入到票据法的框架内,无论从立法资源还是从法律适用上都是很经济的。类比《票据法》与《电子商业承兑汇票管理办法》关于票据行为的相关规定,从票据法理论的角度分析电子票据行为与传统票据行为的契合性,大胆尝试以契约说解释电子票据行为,合理解说电子票据行为的正当性,可以为今后电子票据法的未来走向做些基础性的工作。     

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.     

闺媛与国事:戊戌六君子遗孀的生命际遇

戊戌六君子死难以后,身后未亡人的故事,长期以来只是模糊的身影,少有研究者集中关注。在慷慨壮烈的志士书写背后,她们不同的人生际遇和命运抉择,集中体现了新旧道德之间的角力以及变局时代"贤媛"角色的艰难转型。借助报刊、文集、日记、年谱、地方志、回忆录等材料返回历史现场,在公众目光和新闻舆论之外,钩沉六君子遗孀们的个体生命历程,梳理这些湮没在百年时光中的女性故事,能够发掘清季闺媛与国事之间的历史张力,展现文本背后的创伤书写与历史记忆。     

‘A sort of Rathmines version of a Dior design’: Maeve Brennan,Self-Fashioning and the Uses of Style

This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennan's concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennan's interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.     

The Behavioral Effects of Environmental Regimes: Collective-Action vs. Social-Practice Models

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - Most observers agree that institutions play significant roles both in causing and in confronting large scale environmental...     

Understanding Co-Production as a Policy Tool: Integrating New Public Governance and Comparative Policy Theory

Co-production is an area of policy making in many countries which has received little treatment in the policy studies literature. It has been studied in the field of public administration and public management however, albeit mainly in the case of education-related activities in Scandinavian countries. Using the cases of co-production of support services for the disabled and the elderly in the little-studied programs found in Croatia and Thailand as illustrative examples, this article examines how the concept of co-production can be viewed as an example of the use of a new policy tool, bringing together the insights of both policy and management theory in order to understand its origins and evolution. The article highlights the importance of viewing co-production using an integrated lens if studies of co-production are to advance.