When Charles Baudelaire, at the dawn of the French modernist period, wrote that music sometimes overwhelmed him like an ocean, he was heralding what would happen in France throughout the twentieth century. A musical map of France at the beginning of the period would have shown all sorts of geographical divisions and class hierarchies, with high art music the purview of a happy and wealthy urban few, regional musics retracting into provincial backwaters, and 'popular' forms of musical expression subject to the vagaries of the growing commercialisation of the music-halls. By the century's end, democratisation and technological advances had led to the breaking of all barriers. With the advent of radio, recording, cinema, television and the Internet, music of all kinds is simultaneously everywhere, giving individuals exponentially increasing choice in what they want to hear and when. For music-makers, too, the parameters have been infinitely extended: conventions of composition and harmony have dissolved; the potentials of sound production have been multiplied by the possibilities of electronic synthesis as well as by the recovery of ancient instruments; the spaces in which music can occur have become unlimited. France has not, of course, been alone in experiencing this revolution, and what it means in the French context is one measure - a significantly sensitive one - of the great changes that have swept the world in the modernist era.

It can be no surprise that Jonathan Swift wrote throughout his life on matters relating to the Anglican church, religion, worship, and discipline. He lived in a kingdom the overwhelming majority of whose inhabitants were believing, observing Christians. In England, much the greater part were baptized and practicing members of the Anglican church, the church established by law (the case in Ireland, as we shall see, was both demographically and politically rather different). Works of theology, divinity, and biblical commentary constituted, in the seventeenth century and through most of the eighteenth century, the most numerous of any class of writings published in Britain. And Swift of course, for virtually all his adult life, was an ordained member of the Anglican priesthood, engaged in its daily duties and its high political interests, and for three decades Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

Swift's relationships with women have been subject to comment since his own day, and have evoked speculation and (sometimes) derision among his critics since the days of Lord Orrery. Swift's connections with women are sufficiently complex, and women were his associates in some of the most important ventures of his career.

Comparative in scope, this volume in the Cambridge Companion series presents the development of the modern Spanish novel from the seventeenth century to the present. Drawing on the legacies of Don Quijote and the traditions of the picaresque novel, the collected essays focus on the questions of invention and experiment, of what constitutes the singular features, formal and cultural, theoretical and philosophical, of the novel in Spain, and how the emergence of new fictional forms articulates the relationships between history and fiction, high and popular culture, art and ideology, gender and society, literature and film.

Three major concepts have guided the theme and structure of the volume: the role played by historical events and cultural contexts in the elaboration of the novel; the development of a reflexive, and at times parodic, stance toward writing and literary tradition; and the conviction, either expressed or implied, that ambiguity and the lived experience of time, filtered through memory, have defined human lives in transition, as scene and setting, characters and events become recreated through the diverse, dialogical modalities of the Spanish novel.

In the Preface to A Tale of a Tub (1704), Swift finds a classic way to define the kind of writing that is not classic and the kind of reading that should properly accompany it. Shadowing this passage is Cicero's declaration in De Re Publica (The Republic) of the unchanging and everlasting law of right reason. In place of law, Swift gives us modern wit which, we are told, does not travel well. Even “the smallest Transposal or Misapplication” can annihilate it (PW i: 26). Some jests are only comprehensible at Covent-Garden, some at Hyde-Park Corner. All the universal truths about modernity are sourced in its provinciality.

Introduction

France's contribution to the visual arts is arguably her outstanding achievement in the twentieth century. Paris became the world centre of modernism: the greatest non-French artists such as Pablo Picasso from Spain and Piet Mondrian from Holland would make Paris their home before the Second World War. The far-reaching impact of Cubism on architecture, from Le Corbusier onwards, changed the face of cities across the world. The Ecole de Paris saw artists from Russia, subsequently the Soviet Union, such as Chaim Soutine or Jacques Lipchitz come to live or stay for long periods in Paris, together with artists from Poland and Eastern Europe such as Jules Pascin, from Italy (Amadeo Modigliani), from Switzerland (Meret Oppenheim, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Tinguely), from Denmark (Asger Jorn) and of course from America, from the Synchronist painters before the First World War to photographers such as Man Ray and Lee Miller in the 1920s or William Klein in the 1960s.

Paris, meanwhile, reciprocated, not only as a place of freedom, bohemian lifestyles, purpose-built artists' accommodation, and the café conversation that was so essential a complement to long hours in the studio, but with a structure of annual and varied Salons, a growing, professional and internationally orientated dealer system and, in terms of both spectacle and artistic information, the great exhibitions that marked the first half of the century: the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in 1925, the Exposition Coloniale in 1931, and the Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques de la Vie Moderne in 1937.

A critical approach to the nineteenth-century folletín must begin with an examination of this widely used term and with a revision of some of the prevalent ideas that frame our understanding of the literary and cultural nature of this novelistic production. The term folletín is not without problems. Based upon well-established critical notions, it has become a kind of critical steamroller that, while stressing some generally defined common traits, effectively cancels out all aesthetic differentiation among the texts included in this category. As we will see, some of these deep-rooted critical notions have to do with the poetics of the novel; others, with the Romantic understanding of literature as the highest expression of a nation's unique identity. Finally, the problematic nature of the term folletín is directly related to the highly influential distinction between High and Low forms of culture.

Folletín refers first of all to the form of publication of a novel. It describesthe market-induced fragmentation a novel underwent when published in thefolletín section of a newspaper. This section used to occupy the bottom partof one or more pages, or the last one, of a newspaper or journal, and was generallyused to publish a miscellany of social news and recreational items. Thepractice was first introduced in France in 1836 by the editors of the newspapersLa Presse and Le Siècle as a means to increase sales and, due to its greatsuccess, it was immediately adopted by most major newspapers and journalsall around Europe and America: in Spain it was already a well-establishedpractice in the 1840s.

Fifteenth-century Hispanic Jewish philosophy has been condemned as lacking originality and creativity. According to many, the last century of Jewish philosophical activity on Iberian soil represents the swan song of the rich and illustrious history of Spanish Jewish philosophy. Scholars generally attribute this supposed intellectual sterility to the persecution that Jews suffered during this period. Speaking for many, Julius Guttmann argues, “The frightful pressure under which Spanish Jewry, the foremost bearers of Jewish philosophy, lived during the fifteenth century precluded any productive or original philosophical work.”

Although this criticism of fifteenth-century Hispanic Jewish philosophy does capture an element of its intellectual orientation, in other respects Jewish philosophy in Spain flourished in the final century before the expulsion. Relatively few philosophical works were written by Spanish Jews in the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth century. By contrast, Hispanic Jewish thinkers in the following century composed a host of philosophical commentaries on scriptural and rabbinic texts, commentaries on Islamic and Jewish philosophers, philosophical sermons, and independent philosophical and theological treatises.

Moshe ben Maimon, better known in the West as Maimonides, falls temporally at the midpoint of the six-hundred-year history of medieval Jewish philosophy. But from the vantage point of the present he is a central figure in a much more significant way. Maimonides is a Janus-faced figure, looking both forward and backward. He is the culmination of the Judeo-Arabic philosophical tradition, which includes Saadya, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and Judah Halevi. But Maimonides also establishes the Jewish philosophical agenda in Christian lands from the thirteenth century on with the (posthumous) translation of his controversial Guide of the Perplexed into Hebrew. His influence in fact extends beyond Jewish philosophy, for his effect upon Christian thinkers such as Aquinas and Meister Eckhart is palpable. Even beyond the medieval period Maimonides is a pivotal figure, who provides a starting point for philosophical speculation. Spinoza has Maimonides in mind throughout his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously in 1670. And it is Maimonides to whom Hermann Cohen in the twentieth century turned in developing his own conception of Judaism as ethical monotheism. More than any other Jewish thinker before or after, Maimonides, known among his own people by the acronym Rambam, can reasonably lay claim to a place on any short list of great philosophers. This chapter will attempt to ground this bald claim.

Introduction

Cultural history has little regard for landmarks suggested by the calendar, and, though the twentieth century was an active and highly distinctive epoch in French theatre, it did not begin neatly in 1900. Traditionally, French theatre performances were heralded by 'les trois coups' (three strokes of a broomstick against the boards behind the curtain). Likewise, twentieth-century theatre was heralded by three late nineteenth-century events: the opening of the experimental 'Théâtre libre' by André Antoine in the Passage de l'Elysée-Montmartre in 1887; the first public projection of moving pictures from a strip of celluloid in the Grand Cafe, Boulevard des Capucines, in 1895; and the opening - possibly just the opening line, 'Merdre!' - of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (King Ubu) in Lugné-Poë's Nouveau Théâtre in the rue Blanche in 1896.

Several features of these events are worthy of note. First, they took place in, or just across the road from a single Paris arrondissement (the 10th) within an 800-metre radius of the corner of the Rue Montmartre and the Boulevard Poissonnière, a circle that also encompassed, at the time, a large proportion of Parisian theatres and private schools of art.

THE FIRST HEBREW TRANSLATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC WORKS

The translation into Hebrew of Arabic scientific and philosophic works in the thirteenth century and the first third of the fourteenth century made possible the flowering of science and philosophy among Jews in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages. The first scientific work to be translated from Arabic into Hebrew was an Arabic version of Aristotle's Meteorology. Samuel ibn Tibbon, the translator of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, translated this work in 1210. This translation would be one of only three works of Aristotle to be translated into Hebrew directly from the Arabic translations, but it did not get the translation movement of scientific texts off to a running start. Ibn Tibbon himself, whose son Moses would become one of the most prolific and proficient of the Arabicto- Hebrew translators of scientific texts, showed surprisingly little interest in the translation of scientific texts. In fact, he claimed that he consented to translate the Meteorology only after the persistent entreaties of a learned scholar and dear friend, who had originally asked him to translate all Aristotle’s physical works, and when Ibn Tibbon refused, begged him to translate at least the Meteorology. But this was a poor choice. Unlike many of the Arabic translations of Aristotle’s works of the time, which could be found in fine copies of competent or even impressive translations, this text was available in seemingly corrupt copies of a poor Arabic paraphrase. To make sense of it Ibn Tibbon had to translate creatively, constantly comparing and relying on testimonia such as the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes.

The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion, better known as The Kuzari, is one of the last and most popular works of medieval Judaism's premier poet, Judah Halevi (c. 1075-1141). While originally undertaken to respond to the queries of a Karaite scholar, it was reworked and expanded over nearly two decades into the artful and multifaceted dialogue we now possess. Halevi crafted it to address a broad array of religious, philosophical, and cultural issues that concerned him and his contemporaries in the wake of bloody conflicts generated by the Reconquista and the First Crusade. These reflected ongoing quarrels between belief and unbelief and between belief and belief, both within and among the cultures and communities of Andalusia, which continue in important ways to this day. While the work is generally regarded as apologetic in character, it is no mere polemic. Rather, its theological defense of Judaism is deeply informed by philosophy and respectful of both its integrity and methods. In what follows, my goal is to analyze and explain a number of Halevi’s key ideas and arguments, to show how he uses them and also revises them, to raise a number of salient questions about them, and to identify the trajectory of their reappearance later in the dialogue.

Consumption is a heading so all-embracing as to be potentially infinite in its scope. We have chosen to concentrate on the fields of cuisine and fashion for a number of reasons. They are, as this chapter will show, to a large extent related ('show what me what you eat and drink and I will tell you what you wear' is perhaps an exaggeration, but not much of one); they have perhaps unsuspected political and ideological resonances; they are probably the two areas of French popular culture most significantly ignored by Anglophone academics, as the dearth of articles on them in major journals suggests; and yet their presence not only 'on the ground' in mainland France but in French literary and cinematic texts is an often vitally important one. Much more important work remains to be done in exploring the resonance and significance of these two most inescapable of areas. The French all eat, drink and dress themselves, but until now little has been done, in English at any rate, to investigate how and why.

Food and drink France's cuisine is among her major cultural and economic assets. Indeed, it could be argued that it is the area more than any other in which she clearly leads the world. German philosophy, Italian art and architecture, the American cinema, the British theatre are worthy rivals and sometimes more to their French counterparts, but nobody would question France's position as the cradle of gastronomy and the world's leading producer of top-quality wine.

In the summer of 1305, Rabbi Solomon ibn Adret and his court in Barcelona prohibited the study of Greco-Arabic philosophy and science to Catalonian Jews below the age of twenty-five. In order to protect their community from any potential effects of this decree, a group of prominent Jewish scholars in the city of Montpellier prohibited the placement of any obstacle in the way of southern French Jews, of any age, wishing to pursue Greco-Arabic learning. The transgression of either injunction by Jews within its jurisdiction carried the severe penalty of excommunication or communal banishment. The leader of a more conservative philosophic group in Montpellier, frustrated by the brazen action of his southern French adversaries, declared their proclamation on behalf of Greco-Arabic learning “illegitimate ” and excommunicated its promulgators. At the time of this flurry of conflicting excommunications, philosophic perspectives were well incorporated into southern French Jewish culture; yet some more conservative Jewish thinkers felt that the character of philosophic interpretation in the South of France had become so extreme that it endangered the historical and normative fabric of Judaism. Abba Mari of Montpellier, the philosophically oriented thinker who sounded the alarm, cited the influence of the Muslim philosopher Averroes as critical to this treacherous exegetical turn that he hoped to reverse by encouraging the scholars of neighboring Catalonia to prohibit access to Greco-Arabic learning until an age at which aspiring philosophers generally would have achieved a traditional religious commitment. Abba Mari ultimately failed to achieve his goal of steering Jewish culture in the South of France along safer paths, but his efforts opened the window wide upon a whole world of Jewish intellectual and spiritual ferment.

Accounts of the evolution of narrative forms in Spanish literature often hinge on an unacknowledged notion of progress in which expressions of pride accompany resentment at the world's failure to recognize national achievements. A glorious start (Cervantes, the picaresque novel) was followed by a period of decline (the unpatriotic eighteenth century, the underdeveloped local-color piece, the contemptible serialized novel), then a reawakening (to use Menéndez Pelayo's term) during the nineteenth century with the emergence of the great masters of realism, notably Pérez Galdós. As Alda Blanco has argued, this trajectory is often narrated as a sexualized competition, in which “feminine” forms, linked with mass culture, are despised or ignored, while more “virile” forms are held up to compete with the work of celebrities such as Balzac or Zola. In describing this narrative trajectory as a response to anxiety over legitimacy, both sexual and national, feminists today are engaged in a healthy critique of literary standards and the evaluative rhetoric of evolution that implies literary perfectibility.

The process of reassessing a feminine tradition begins with a search, discovery,reediting and reevaluation of what has been excluded from the predominantlymale canon. In the case of Spain this process is still in its initialphase, although considerable impetus has come recently from the collectionof women writers edited by Castalia in conjunction with the Instituto de laMujer (‘Institute for Women’s Affairs’).

In a classic article, Shlomo Pines argued that post-Thomistic Scholasticism, most notably Duns Scotus and the school of Parisian physics (e.g., Jean Buridan, Nicole Oresme), had a strong impact upon fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Jewish philosophy. Pines pointed in this article to the “interest displayed by contemporary Jewish thinkers in the new problems under discussion, or in the old problems in a new formulation unfamiliar to the Arabic-Jewish tradition.”In what follows I shall explore Pines' thesis against the backdrop of specific issues in Jewish philosophy. More specifically, I shall claim that Scholastic influences upon fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Jewish philosophy can be seen in the increased attention paid to Scholastic logic, in increased analysis of the logical and theological status of future contingents, in metaphysical concerns having to do with identity and individuation, and in the development of non-Aristotelian physics. Before turning to the issues themselves, however, I would like to situate this study by briefly examining important developments within the world of Christian Scholasticism.

INTRODUCTION: FAITH, BELIEF, AND HERESY IN SCHOLASTIC AND JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

In order to appreciate the content of Scholastic discussions during this period, we must say more about the importance of the condemnation of philosophy of 1277. The condemnation of 1277 represents the culmination of a series of earlier condemnations in the Christian universities, and raised the thorny issue of heresy.

Are great works of imaginative literature, such as Gulliver's Travels, made out of life, or are they made out of other books? In 1919, T. S. Eliot published a landmark essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”arguing that the true worth of a writer was not to be found in “those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else,”but rather that “the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Eliot's anti-romantic account minimizes originality and foregrounds hard work. Artistic achievement results from consciousness of the past, of cultural history. Literature is made of other literature, Eliot contends, more surely than it is made out of life experience. Readers of Swift might feel, perhaps should feel, that the antithesis is a false one. Nevertheless, Eliot's argument is persuasive enough to suggest that investigating the way in which a major writer modifies, and is modified by, pre-existing literary traditions, can be a valuable approach to the creative work. Our most direct source of knowledge here must derive from what Swift himself read. Accordingly, the first section of this chapter will be concerned with the books that Swift read, and with his way of reading them. The second section will focus more generally on what he made of what he read.