Boydell & Brewer

Summary

The patchwork quilt of intensively cultivated fields, an impressive array of cultivars, chemically fertilized soils and marketed food and flower production that characterized Ethiopia's lake region's agro-environment at the dawn of the third millennia contrasted sharply with the situation that had prevailed on the ground nearly a century ago. At the close of the nineteenth century, this region was in fact a predominantly pastoral landscape. In addition, it was a fiercely contested territory. Its major protagonists included an increasingly diverse group of populations – both pastoralists and cultivators – residing in the lake region and its coterminous highlands and lowlands on a permanent or seasonal basis. Also active in that race for territory and resources was the Ethiopian state, whose advent after 1889 marked an important turning point in that region's history. This was mainly because of the state's voracious appetite for land and for food, which it wanted to enclose and to exact by one means or another. Despite its efforts, the Ethiopian state nonetheless had difficulty accomplishing its goals in that region in with any speed. Conversely, subject populations were in a position to quickly develop the mechanisms that helped them to co-opt, subvert and appropriate to their advantage some of the rules and practices that the state was trying to promote in the lake region after that year. This is an important point because, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, their success, rather than the sheer power of the micro-environment, was what contributed to the retrenchment and propagation of a pastoral landscape in the lake region in the contemporary period.

POPULATIONS, PLACES AND INSTITUTIONS OF SOCIAL CONTROL

A person travelling in the lake region sometime in the mid- to latenineteenth century would have encountered a predominantly grassland environment that was home to diverse groups of populations that spoke different languages and different dialects of the same language. Two or more dialects of the Oromo language were what the populations residing north of the Modjo River, portions of the Maqi River Valley, and in the triangular area that stretched from Mito (a village south of present-day Zway town) to Arsi Nagelle and Aje spoke in that period. Likewise, the Sidama language was likely the most dominant in the highlands that straddled Lake Awasa and Daddaba, the river that marks the southern limits of present-day Arsi Nagelle town.

No country has managed to develop beyond a subsistence economy without ensuring at least minimum access to electricity for the majority of its population. Yet many sub-Saharan African countries struggle to meet demand. Why is this, and what can be done to reduce energy poverty and further Africa's development? Examining the politics and processes surrounding electricity infrastructure, provision and reform, the author provides an overview of historical and contemporary debates about access in the sub-continent, and explores the shifting role and influence of national governments and of multilateral agencies in energy reform decisions. He describes a challenging political environment for electricity supply, with African governments becoming increasingly frustrated with the rules and the processes of multilateral donors. Civil society also began to question reform choices, and governments in turn looked to new development partners, such as China, to chart a fresh path of energy transformation.Drawing on over fifteen years of research on Uganda, which has one of the lowest levels of access to electricity in Africa and has struggled to construct several, large hydroelectric dams on the Nile, Gore argues that there is a critical need to recognize how the changing political and social context in African countries, and globally, has affected the capacity to fulfil national energy goals, minimize energy poverty and transform economies.Christopher Gore is Associate Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

Summary

CHRISTA WOLF's KEIN ORT. NIRGENDS (1979) was influenced by the November 1976 expatriation of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann. Whereas Heiduczek's Tod am Meer was written before the Biermann affair took place (and published two months after the affair), Wolf's novel was written after the affair, an event that had a profound effect on Wolf. She had signed a petition against the decision to expatriate Biermann and consequently faced restrictions and later dismissal from her leadership position in the Schriftstellerverband (Writers Union). Wolf purportedly felt as though she had her back against the wall, a statement she made during an interview with Frauke Meyer-Gosau for the West German periodical alternative in the winter of 1982, implying that Wolf felt that her political and literary possibilities had become limited in the GDR. But neither Biermann nor Wolf wanted out of the country, at least not permanently. In November 1976, Biermann gave a concert in Cologne and wanted to return to the GDR, but he was forced to remain outside the country. Like Biermann, Wolf had some freedom to travel, visiting Greece in 1980, for example, but she always willingly returned to the GDR. For Wolf, being in the GDR and being a writer were intertwined. She made a pact with Franz Fühmann that if one of them became incapable of writing, that person would leave the GDR. She continued to write and remained in the country. As David Bathrick describes, writers such as Wolf understood that leaving the GDR would only strengthen the rhetorical binaries of the Cold War, in particular the literary historiographical binary of ill, irrational, capitalist literature versus healthy, rational, communist literature. If her literary works are any indicator, Wolf wanted to reevaluate the literary heritage of the GDR, rather than merely run from it. Indeed, Kein Ort. Nirgends, written after the Biermann affair, is the first major instance in Wolf's oeuvre of such reevaluation. Others were to follow. The impact of the Biermann affair on Kein Ort. Nirgends has long been acknowledged. Ann Stamp Miller, for example, writes:

After Biermann's expatriation, the writers had to find other ways of expressing their voices, either by coding their literature or writing as voices from a more distant past.

Summary

HELEN Cooper's observation that the Charlemagne romances in England ‘barely made the transition’ from the Middle Ages into post-medieval culture is, as far as can be judged from the extant evidence, an accurate diagnosis for the Middle English verse texts. Unlike Guy of Warwick or Sir Isumbras, both also notable warriors on behalf of Christendom, Roland and Oliver did not have their heroic victories over Saracen opponents perpetuated in print, either as romance narratives or in chapbook retellings. Even the protagonists of Caxton's prose romance The Four Sons of Aymon, which was well known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and frequently reprinted, did not thereafter join King Arthur's knights and Robin Hood's men in the repertoire of popular heroes in English culture, although the lost play The Four Sons of Aymon (c. 1581) was apparently still being performed in 1624.

Stories of Charlemagne and Roland were re-presented to insular audiences in the form of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, translated by Sir John Harington (1591). The first stanza sets the familiar scene, ‘when the Moores transported all their might | On Affrick seas the force of France to breake’, seeking revenge against ‘the Romane Emperour Charlemaine’ (I, 3–4, 8). Harington's annotations on ‘The Historie’ of each book explain and comment on the connections to the ‘historical’ Charlemagne he discerns in Ariosto's highly complex romance, but the favourite insular stories of Roland and Otuel and of Oliver and Ferumbras do not feature (though there is a recollection of Roland's fight with Vernagu in the story of Orlando's protracted single combat against the almost-invincible Spanish knight Ferraw). Orlando Furioso, dramatized by Robert Greene (c. 1590), was possibly also one of the influences on Charlemagne, or The Distracted Emperor, an anonymous drama (c. 1604) preserved only in a seventeenth-century manuscript collection of plays (BL MS Egerton 1994), but which was apparently performed more than once. The play's prominent theme of corruption and treachery is staged through the actions of Ganelon, paralleling his heightened role in the Middle English retellings of the story of Roncevaux, while his ambition to supplant Charlemagne as king of France reflects the similar desire of Ganelon in the insular Fierabras tradition, though it is impossible to know how far, if at all, these insular developments influenced the play's adaptation of the Charlemagne legend.

Summary

For boating people August is the height of the season, and the day after Blyth's triumphant return [6 August, 1971], in Cowes Road … hundreds of men and a number of women plunged to windward at the start of the Fastnet race … For many others that Saturday was the start of an annual summer holiday when the family would be off on some cruise … For dinghy men, it was another weekend in a points series … But suddenly everyone in Britain, who looked at a newspaper or a television screen, knew a bit about sailing. For five years, a procession of men alone against the sea had passed before their eyes: Chichester, Rose, Knox-Johnston, Blyth.

The key phrase here is ‘suddenly everyone … knew about a bit about sailing’. In the 1970s, yachting events, such as single-handed circumnavigations, became headline news. An atmosphere was created whereby yacht sailing became an important statement of a person's values and social position – in short, this was yachting's third golden period.

The late 1960s and 1970s are often characterised as a period of ‘flower power’, ‘hippies’, and taking psychedelic drugs – relatively trivial fashion and lifestyle phenomena. Economically, the key event of this era was Britain joining the European Common Market in 1973, and the key social change concerned the radical improvement in the position of women, due to a number of important medical and legal changes, namely:

Summary

There is a huge amount of research and study still needed into yachting history, which should be rewarding, because, as I hope I have shown, yachting holds up a mirror to its society and has been an important part of this nation's social history for centuries.

I am all too aware of the many unanswered questions in this text, unanswered because the data was not there. There is an additional urgency for two reasons. Many of the original shipwrights who built wooden yachts, and many of the sailors who cruised and raced in them, are now getting on in years. A second, more recent, overlapping watershed concerns those who sailed by compass, log and sextant, before the advent of Global Positioning Systems, that started coming into civilian use in the late eighties. There is so much yachting history that urgently requires recording and researching.

In a book of this length, covering such a long period of time and so many types of sailing, there are bound to be factual errors, misunderstandings and misinterpretations. If you spot one, please contact the publisher who will pass your comments on to me. Thank you.

Mike Bender

Summary

THESE TWO WORKS SEEM, on the surface, to counter my claim that suicide in East German literature of the 1970s and 1980s is primarily fictional and imaginative; both of them, however, are wildly transtextual. Moreover, they are an unlikely pair. Heiner Müller's play Hamletmaschine (1977/78) and Sibylle Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken (1981) are both inspired, in part, by real suicides. Although each of these two works is extraordinarily rich on its own, they also become even more interesting when they are placed alongside the other literary representations of suicide in the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s. Both works also employ a large number of hypotexts that at times run counter to one another, and both use some combination of hypertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, and Kristevan intertextuality. Indeed, Genette's taxonomy of transtextuality, as useful as it is, is not entirely equipped to describe these two works. The wealth of transtextuality functions in both works to resist interpretation and simplification, constituting what Jeff Todd Titon calls “intertextual overload” or what Georgina Paul, writing specifically about Hamletmaschine, calls “cultural overload.” Whereas Plenzdorf 's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. and Wolf 's Kein Ort. Nirgends, for example, employ the trope of suicide to instigate a shift in literary historiography, causing literary heritage to be rewired, Hamletmaschine and Flucht in die Wolken shortcircuit the idea of literary heritage altogether. Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken uses literary history primarily to cope with the loss of a loved one through suicide. And while Müller's Hamletmaschine alludes to real suicides, among many other things, it does not constitute a comingto- terms with suicide. Instead, it is a dramatic, comparative exploration of suicidal voices and various intellectual strands of self-destruction. In short, in Hamletmaschine Müller uses the theme of suicide in an attempt to explore the failures and impossibilities of co-opting literary heritage in the GDR, and in Flucht in die Wolken Muthesius uses allusions to literature in an attempt to make some sense of the author's daughter's suicide and the GDR context in which it happened.

Although no character in Hamletmaschine explicitly commits suicide during the action of the play, suicide and self-destruction are the primary themes in the work. Indeed, the play consists largely of a polyphony of suicidal voices. Scholarship on Hamletmaschine tends to fall into one of two categories.

Summary

Luis de Góngora y Argote and Lope de Vega y Carpio, príncipe de las tinieblas and monstruo de la naturaleza, respectively, are infrequently invoked together outside the realm of poetic belligerence. As the cultural landscape they inhabit bends and shapes to their gravity, these two literary forces collide in violent counteraction. This at least has been the prevailing view of criticism, bolstered by Emilio Orozco Díaz's seminal work Lope y Góngora frente a frente (1973), in which he illuminates the poets’ divergent poetic methodologies and ethos. Although Orozco admits a grudging admiration between Góngora and Lope, my goal is to temper undeniable opposition with a methodology that allows the latent correlations in their poetic methods to emerge. It is at their most evident point of convergence that I conduct this study, a point which is also one of culmination: late parodic poetry. Perhaps the continued relevance of these parodic works lies in the perennial nature of their ethos, that which is projected out of the text, if not necessarily explicitly expounded by it. Parody is that meta ‘rhétorique “noir”’ of which Barthes speaks, the ludic accompaniment and deconstructor of ‘repressive’ institutionalised rhetoric whose real power lies in the playful space between signifier and signified. The atomic structure of these works and the processes instituted by certain combinations of elements are governed by the paradoxical laws of parody: at once authority and transgression. Robert Phiddian's conception of parody as a self-referential, deconstructive, absurd and supplementary entity broadly describes many of the conditions of Lope's and Góngora's parody. This late poetry is a supplément in the Derridean sense, ‘it adds only to replace’; it replicates, it modifies and it amplifies its own generic code to a variety of ends and beginnings. It bears witness, particularly as regards Lope and Góngora, to the struggle between logos and mythos:

Logos had never been able to provide human beings with the sense of significance that they seemed to require. It had been myth that had given structure and meaning to life, but as modernisation progressed and logos achieved such spectacular results, mythology was increasingly discredited. As early as the sixteenth century, we see more evidence of a numbing despair, a creeping mental paralysis, and a sense of impotence and rage as the old mythological way of thought crumbled and nothing new appeared to take its place.

Summary

THIS series of volumes examining the reception of the Charlemagne myth in different linguistic cultures of medieval Europe springs from ‘Charlemagne in England’, a project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to study the literary presence of the emperor in medieval England, an area where the historical Charlemagne never set foot, let alone reigned.

The spread of Charlemagne's myth after his death was even more extensive than was his empire during his life. This larger enterprise, therefore, an investigation of the appropriation of the matter of Charlemagne across Europe, required a network of specialists working on texts written in different languages and different geographical areas. Yet these languages were culturally interdependent: it was largely through the medium of French, with its cultural hegemony, that the legend of Charlemagne spread widely, though Latin was also an important vehicle for texts perceived as historical truth. Furthermore, the same geographical area could also be the ‘host’ for more than one language, the literatures of which would draw upon each other.

One particular challenge for the project was thus the question of overlap between geographic areas and cultural or linguistic zones. This is exemplified by the original project focused on Charlemagne in England, a multilingual land of overlapping cultural zones in one geographic area, with Latin, French and English literary cultures and other languages operating in particular areas or social groups. The solution was to allow some overlap in coverage, with, for example, French texts written in England covered from different perspectives in both Charlemagne in England and Charlemagne in Medieval Francophonia, and with awareness that texts in Latin were circulating at the same time and in the same geographic areas as the vernacular narratives. Given the variety of material in different languages and the varying amounts of research that have been produced, the volumes do not all follow the same pattern. Some areas, notably France, have been the object of more than a century of study. Others, such as the Celtic narratives, have received far less critical attention; indeed, one of the aims of the project has been to stimulate research in these under-studied areas.

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Index

1 - Landscape Pastoral: The making and remaking of a grassland environment, 1886–1916

Summary

Bibliography

List of Acronyms

Frontmatter

Bibliography

Electricity in Africa

4 - Suicide and the Reevaluation of Classicism: Christa Wolf's Kein Ort. Nirgends

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Bibliography

Contents

Contents

Conclusion: The Insular Afterlife of the Matter of France

Summary

Dedication

14 - Yachting's Third ‘Golden Period’: Of Heroes and Heroines; Of Families and Marinas, 1965–1990

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Epilogue: Fair Winds

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5 - Suicidal Voices: Heiner Müller's Hamletmaschine and Sibylle Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken

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Frontmatter

Dedication

Introduction

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General Preface Charlemagne: A European Icon

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