Allen Ginsberg’s fastidiousness about retroactively dating three decades of his own photographs in the 1980s is a significant part of a historiographical project. Ginsberg strives to document his role in the creation of a movement that enables viewers to perceive self-portraits and individual portraits of other key Beat figures such as Kerouac as communal objects. Ginsberg’s inscriptions couple the author’s penchant for mythmaking with his interest in narrating events that are made significant through their incorporation into a composition that suggests a heightened meaning for each individual image. Collecting the ninety-one portraits in Allen Ginsberg: Photographs, placing them in a roughly chronological order, and providing information about each image through captions that feature the date of composition, the place in which the image was taken, and how each subject contributed to the Beat movement or to subsequent countercultural movements such as hippie and punk that Ginsberg regards as part of the Beat legacy, the poet displays his interest in what Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory regards as the creation of “collective memory.”

Ginsberg was famous for chronicling every facet of his life, and his last poems in the mid 1990s frequently reflect an intense self-consciousness about his final illnesses. While earlier in his career, the body was an important site for Ginsberg’s poetics of candor, confrontation, and erotic epiphanies, he remained equally adamant as his health faltered in ascertaining his physical deterioration in poems such as “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” and “Sphincter.” Even during his final period, however, Ginsberg’s level of literary fame provided him access to figures in popular music that amplified his cultural prominence and enabled him to retain a sense of artistic relevance. Simultaneously with his meditations on death, Ginsberg’s culminating poems maintained his renowned sly humor about his social status as a writer whose expansive cultural reputation included the continuity of radical political critique. This chapter on his posthumous volume Death and Fame: Last Poems 1993–1997 (1999) explores Ginsberg’s attempts to reconcile the problematic contexts of fame’s durability while struggling to find succor, in both Buddhist and poetic terms, with his accelerating disability and terminal departure.

After the death of their brother, Ann Walker and her sister Elizabeth had inherited the large and sprawling Crow Nest estate. The division of their property was always going to be complex. Especially when Captain Sutherland, Elizabeth’s husband, grew suspicious of Anne Lister’s motives in dividing the estate. Luckily, the transactions were handled by smooth-talking lawyers. September ended with a public stone-laying ceremony at Anne’s Northgate Casino in Halifax. Given the recent newspaper lampooning, this was a brave move. It went off without incident, and helped establish a public respectability for Anne and Ann’s relationship. But of course, behind some of the smiles, real tensions remained.

Alejo Carpentier combines history and literature to compose his novel El arpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow). On the one hand, he uses historical facts to create a fictional story that reveals a human Christopher Columbus, far removed from stereotypes, myths and ideological designs. On the other hand, he draws on a vast wealth of literary works and authors from the Hispanic world to complement, through intertextualities and cultured references, the image he wishes to present of the Admiral. Relevant examples include quotations from Cervantes’ interlude Retablo de las maravillas (The Stage of Wonders) and Federico García Lorca’s poem “La casada infiel” (“The Unfaithful Wife”), as well as other more general texts such as Juan de Mandavila’s Libro de las maravillas del mundo (Book of the Wonders of the World) and various passages from the Bible. All of this is made possible, despite the anachronisms that appear in the text, thanks to the integration of the novel into the realm of freedoms of the postmodern historical novel.

Kristeva takes literary interpretation for granted: her argument is that the female perspective must be included into the interpretive perspective. She sees three stages of feminism: 1) In section 1, I examine “Mad Men” and “Spooks” to show the first stage of feminism. Women have achieved certain legal rights and equality in the work place, but these television programmes show that, as Kristeva predicted, this advancement does not mean that the feminine interpretive perspective is accepted by the male establishment. 2) In the second phase, women develop a language of their own because treated as mute by the male world. “The Iron Lady’”and “Spanglish” illustrate feminine language. In the final section, the ideal, a combination of male and female within what Kristeva calls the “nuclei” of men and women is seen in “Philomena” and “The One Hundred Foot Journey”.

This chapter explores the range of philosophical, literary, and religious ideas about the rational-discursive faculty and species identity that medieval audiences inherited from ancient Greece and the Hellenizing poetry of ancient Rome. It argues that this inheritance was profoundly ambivalent. In both the medieval Ovide moralisé and Plato’s Timaeus, any cognitive differences between species become relativized by the assertion that souls continually transmigrate from one body to another; additionally, under certain circumstances, it seems as though the rational-discursive faculty can be located beyond the limits of the human being. Aristotle advanced a comparatively hardline position: Humans are the only rational animals (although certain creatures like parrots raise potential difficulties). On the level of literary fantasy, the “Philomena” tale of the Ovide moralisé and the Old Occitan Novas del papagay probed at the limits of the same questions investigated by ancient authorities and their medieval translators, the ambivalent details of their diction condensing some of the thorniest dilemmas hidden at the intersection of speech and species.

Anne Lister returned to Shibden, and her relationship with Ann Walker was reignited. By February 1834, their ‘marriage’ did seem settled. Rings were symbolically exchanged; and Anne wrote in code of Ann’s ‘being under no authority but mine’. On Easter day, at Goodramgate church in York, ‘our union’ was solemnized by taking the sacrament together. Then, after travelling for three months in France and Switzerland, they returned together to Shibden.

This chapter argues that the influence of Carpentier on Cuban literature of his time and after is not clear, given that there was some animosity towards him. It cites as reasons the fact of Carpentier’s absence from Cuba in the 1970s. It also acknowledges that the teachers who taught the Novísimo generation of Cuban writers with whom the author identifies most closely all emphasized the mastery of Carpentier’s prose and admired what they called Carpentier’s carnivalization of language or baroque language. The chapter concludes that understanding how Carpentier’s lifelong journalism had served as a foundation of his literary writing was an important lesson for him and others, and he ends by calling Carpentier a classic.

This essay details how the author’s vocation as a writer and reader was awakened by the admiration he felt in his youth for Alejo Carpentier’s literature. That same admiration led to discovering Carpentier’s alienation from the Cuban regime, his role as a censor and a censored individual, and his tendency to adapt what he wrote to fit the ideological demands of the moment. Even though the political environment ended up conditioning readings of Carpentier, the author of this essay describes how he learned to strike a balance between admiration and criticism, acknowledging Carpentier’s complexity as a literary figure.