Our discussion of the early modern commentaries of the Poetics, which opened this book with the first Italian texts published during the Renaissance, now leads us to a final excursus on French theorisations of a poetics of dance. While there may not be a direct textual exchange between Spanish and French dance poetics during the seventeenth century – in contrast to the frequent Spanish references to Italian or Flemish texts, French poetics’ theorisations of dance are very particular within a European context, and this particularity helps us to draw up a comparison with other national traditions. With regards to Spain, the difference is especially palpable, particularly with respect to the role of the fable, a mimetic tool that signals a certain degree of poetisation of dance, which in turn tends to transform it into narrative. Completely foreign to Spanish conceptualisations of dance in López Pinciano and González de Salas, the concept of ‘fable’ is a cornerstone in the theory of dance in French poetics. However, the divergence between French and Spanish approaches is not the result of purely aesthetic or formal matters. It is the consequence of certain political stakes which, in France, led to an institutionalisation of dance unprecedented in seventeenth-century Spain. By way of a counterpoint, the following pages will focus on the discourse of dance in French neo-Aristotelianism. This final exercise in comparison will attempt to account for how and why the corpus of commentaries on a single text, Aristotle's Poetics, could lead to such differing interpretations over such a short timespan.

Syr, You are better known to me, than I can be to you; And I congratulate unto myself as well as unto the World, the fælicity of your Succession in the Office of Secretary, to the Royal Society. But in order to a mutual Better Knowledge, I owe you, & must now give you, some very short Account of myself; more particularly, with relation to that Illustrious Body, whereof, I hoped, I had the Honour of being esteemed a Member.

Having the Pleasure of some Correspondence with your excellent Predecessor, Mr. Waller, I did communicate unto him (and unto my valuable Dr. Woodward) a great Number of American, and philosophical, Curiosities; with an Intimation of my Purpose to continue the Communications. These Gentlemen putt the, as unexpected as undeserved Respect upon me, of proposing me for a Member of the Royal Society; and they both wrote unto me, That I was chosen accordingly both by the Council and Body of the Society, on the Anniversary Day for such Elections, in the Year 1713. – Adding, that the only Reason of my not having my Name in the Printed List of the Society, was, because of my being beyond-Sea, and yett a Natural Born Subject, & so not capable of being inserted among the Gentlemen of other Nations. Your Secretary also, Dr. Halley, in the Philosophical Transactions of 1714. printed my Name, with an F.R.S. annexed unto it. Mr. Petiver did the Like, in his Naturæ Collectanea; And in his Letters to me, he had these Words, “Your Election succeeded without Opposition, and you was elected after the usual Method of Balloting.

Robert of Torigni's rewriting of the chronicles of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert occupies a considerable portion of the Chronography. However, with the exception of David Bates's seminal article, Robert's interpolations have attracted limited attention, with scholars generally stressing their derivativeness. While acknowledging Robert's purpose of continuing Sigebert as a ‘grand design’, Thomas Bisson similarly dismissed the interpolations and emphasised the value of the Chronography only for the period after 1147. What was Robert's design? To answer this question, it is necessary to turn to Robert's writing practices and the political context that prompted them. Robert conceived the Chronography following the rise of Henry Plantagenet as duke of Normandy in 1150, his recognition as heir and successor of King Stephen in 1153 and his coronation as king of England in 1154. By interpolating Eusebius–Jerome's and Sigebert's chronicles, Robert proceeded with a thorough rewriting of universal history, which reveals his strategies in elaborating a specific politics of time.

Robert of Torigni's interpolations in context (1139–54)

Robert completed the GND with the addition of book VIII shortly before 1139.4 Only afterwards did he embark on the Chronography, having acquired the two books which were to be the pillars of his work: Sigebert's chronicle, as extant in the Beauvais manuscript, and Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum. Robert requested Sigebert's Chronographia from Beauvais and, possibly, had a copy produced for the Bec library in the late 1140s when he still was a resident monk. While it is possible that Robert had already considered universal history-writing before the Beauvais manuscript came into his hands, the Chronographia was available at Bec only in the 1140s.

The fundamental problem in studying medieval revolt is the nature of the available sources, which, as Claude Gauvard notes, ‘come to us almost exclusively from authorities and […] give us only the point of view of those holding power and the dominant social classes’. Juridical and narrative sources alike generally frame revolt activity as criminal or outside the proper conduct of political life: as a threat to, or an interruption of, the harmonious society of orders. For this reason, oblique or passing references to revolt in literature or other sorts of texts, in which the marginalising agenda found in most conventional political sources is secondary or absent, can help uncover a new side of these historical phenomena.

It is in this context that I turn to an odd little story in the form of a parable, found in the Mesnagier de Paris. This story, which I will call the parable of the Bourgeois Rebel's Wife, comes from the section on wifely obedience in Chapter 6 of the first of three ‘distinctions’. Most of this chapter's instruction on a wife's obligation to be obedient is delivered in the form of parables, or exempla, drawn from sources both popular and learned: biblical stories, didactic Bible commentaries, conduct books and folklore, as well as the author's personal experience. Unlike the more famous stories in this section of the Mesnagier (such as the Griselda tale), this parable has received little direct attention from scholars.

Duringhis school years in Meißen, Lessing received the classical education prevalent in his time, with its heavy emphasis on Latin, ancient Greek, and related studies. He once wrote that at St. Afra, Theophrastus, Plautus, and Terence were his world, and he would have agreed with his brother Karl's statement that at that institution, which Karl later attended himself, pupils talked more about ancient Greece and Rome than about Saxony and spoke more Latin than French.1 Not surprisingly, Lessing's favorite subjects at the university in Leipzig were classical studies, archaeology, and philosophy. Works like his fables and treatises on the fable, Philotas, Emilia Galotti, and the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, to mention only a few, reflect different aspects of his lifelong devotion to the cultural heritage of Greek and Roman antiquity.

Indeed, Lessing long pursued antiquarian studies per se, from his unfinished “Abhandlung über die Pantomimen der Alten” (Treatise on the Pantomimes of the Ancients) of 1749 to his two volumes of Briefe antiquarischen Inhalts (Antiquarian Letters) of 1768 and 1769 and his plans for a third volume of 1777. Laokoon emerged from his preoccupation with art-historical and -critical/theoretical issues, particularly from his disagreement with the interpretation of the Laocoön-group advanced by famed contemporary art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). Central among his interests was the question of the comparability of verbal and visual art.

The critical reaction to Laokoon in nineteenth-century America should be seen against the background of American thinking on art during the period. This, however, is far easier said than done.

Book IV takes to task the regular clergy, who indulge in a gluttonous lifestyle, acquisition of wealth, and sexual misconduct, all in flagrant violation of the precepts of poverty and chastity to which they have vowed obedience. Gower's first topic is monks and canons; his concern, the disparity between the requirements of the way of life they’ve sworn to live and their behavior. He sees extraordinary misbehavior among the members of the cloistered orders, the most of whom live hypocritically worldly lives while professing an ascetic rejection of the world's delights. Their commitment to gastronomic excess in food and drink is richly described within a harsh account of a monastic life characterized by ambition, backstabbing, angry misbehavior, and a general disregard of moral values. Remarking the notorious sensual excesses of many religious houses, Gower condemns especially the presence of women and advises monks to keep “she-wolves” far from the cloister (ll. 431–68).

Women who live in cloistered communities come in for somewhat different judgment, based upon an assumed lesser intelligence and a fragile nature, both to be taken into account when critiquing their weaknesses. Incapable of understanding Scripture properly and naturally weak, they can't be held to the same standard as men, but those among them who uphold chastity will nevertheless be rewarded with a special status in paradise because of the high valuation God places upon virginity.

In the modern African novel, traditional narrative forms such as anecdotes, epigrams, parables, proverbs, folktales, etc. usually have three-pronged significations: they are didactic being the mechanism through which traditional societies pass moral lessons; and ornamental: the ‘palm oil with which words are eaten’; thirdly, traditional narratives embed African tradition and world view in the modern novel. But what is hardly explored in criticism is the way traditional narratives function as the core structure of the novel and as such become the wellspring of meaning, disseminating sense through the length and breadth of the novel.

Such is the significance of the folktale which Papa Nnukwu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus shared with Ifeoma's household at Nsukka. Whereas the story is ostensibly about the world of animals (fable), the animal characters and their actions typify the politicians and the malpractices that are recognizable in postcolonial Nigerian politics. The folktale is a story-within-story that becomes the nerve center of the novel as it allegorizes the excessive egoism; the simplistic solutions to complex social problems as well as overindulgence of the political class, issues that are the central problematic of the macro story of Purple Hibiscus. Also, the folktale highlights Adichie's concern about environmental preservation as it seems to equate careless consumerism with relentless environmental degradation.

Drawing allegorical significations from the folktale, this article argues that Purple Hibiscus represents Nigerian politicians as ogres unconscionably consuming the future of the next generations. In sum, the argument demonstrates the symbolic parallels between the world of the fable and the political domain of postcolonial Nigeria, and shows that the macro narrative of Purple Hibiscus is, in fact, an expansion of the folktale.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Menzer Forest was in the red. As Theodor Fontane tells it in Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Wanderings through the March Brandenburg, 1862–89), the forest, located around Lake Stechlin in the County of Ruppin north of Berlin, had become a problem for the Prussian government because the cost of managing it was greater than the value it produced in the form of timber and game. One solution was to make the forest a site of glass production, and Fontane writes that at one point curls of smoke were to be seen above the trees by day and the glow of fires by night. Finally, though, the government mulled the idea of using the trees as wood to heat the buildings in Berlin. Tasked with determining how long the forest would last if it were to be cut for firewood, the forestry office confidently asserted, “die Menzer Forst hält alles aus” (the Menzer Forest can withstand anything). What happened next was painfully predictable.

Incipit

In two manuscripts, a prose incipit – “Incipit Cronica que Vox Clamantis dicitur” – appears ahead of the Prologue to the first Book. Evidently a later addition, but clearly authorial, it evidences Gower's attempt to smooth the integration of the freshly composed Visio Anglie into the extant six-Book VC as a new Book I.

Prologue

The Vox Clamantis has the clear purpose of teaching the lessons of the past as a guide to the present, an intention it makes clear in this first of three prologues (Books II and III will have theirs too) and in frequent observations throughout the poem. That intention will be certified by an interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Book VII, and retrospectively recertified in the poem's final form with a reading of the Great Rising of 1381, added late as Book I. In Gower's view, everything that is and happens must be read and interpreted for the guidance God provides, for the Divine knows and governs everything that is and happens. (Doubtless, Gower would have subscribed to George Santayana's dictum about history, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while perhaps rephrasing it to say that those who fail to read correctly the lessons of the past are not only condemned to repeat them, but condemned simpliciter.) Gower sets out to instruct the newly crowned boy-king in what can be learned from history and experience.

Locating Faust

Mention the name “Faust” and a host of received iconography is likely to come to mind. The familiar picture begins with a medieval scholar alone in his gothic cell, its ponderous arches and high vaulted ceiling cloistering a laboratory-study crammed with dusty old tomes and alchemical paraphernalia like retort and alembic, mortar and pestle, flask and spirit lamp. Poring over an enormous book, its open pages inscribed with occult signs and mystic formulae, the professor-magician sits wrapped in the draping folds of his voluminous robe. On his head rests a floppy, velvet-lined hat, not unlike, perhaps, the one worn by Erasmus in the famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. An hourglass and skull can be glimpsed somewhere in the scene, perched precariously in the back on a slanting shelf, or tossed into the foreground amongst the general clutter that fills his desk and spills out onto the stone-tiled floor. Perhaps he is not alone; a devilish Mephistopheles may be skulking nearby, wearing tights and feathered cap no doubt, frozen in some prancing pose and sporting a villainous smirk. Somewhere above or below this image that recalls the etchings of Albrecht Dürer, or the billowy scenery of Murnau's classic silent film, hangs the name “FAUST,” ornately lettered in the old gothic typeface known as Fraktur. The entire scene breathes German-ness. One can almost smell the heaviness and the dark. Lurking right below the surface or just beyond the frame are presentiments of necromancy, of invisible, hovering specters urging Faust on to the ruthless pursuit of power, fabulous riches, concupiscent pleasures—evil, in other words, in all its shapes and forms. It is a story leading to the conclusion we all know in which Faust, that familiar emblem of riotous overreach, is ultimately damned by God for all eternity.

Speculative fiction! Science fiction! Afrofuturism! African Futurism! Africanfuturism! Afrifuturism! Afrojujuism! Africanjujuism! Africannearfutures! These are all specifically black appropriations of the now global futurist movement popularized in 1909 by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in The Manifesto of Futurism. Sankofalike, these African or Afro versions of futurism look forward while remaining, intentionally or not, firmly grounded in a present that looks back toward a potentially usable black past. In Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L’Aventure ambiguë, we do not see phenomena like ‘how the tortoise or spider travelled to heaven to encounter God’ as portrayed in African speculative fiction (Egbunike & Nwankwo 1) or the hyperrealistic decors and gadgets associated with Afrofuturistic or Africanfuturistic science fiction. The novel is not set in the future or in some free-flowing speculative space located far, far away. Far from it; it is firmly rooted and happening in the ever-changing present that bogs us down in its muck, myopia, and hubris that diminish humanity.

What the novel does is take us back to the fundamentals as it helps us imagine the possibilities of a new and salutary planetary coexistence. In this sense, therefore, and given the central role of identity-formation and agency in the poiesis and praxis of futurism, L’Aventure ambiguë is a thoroughly futuristic novel, making Cheikh Hamidou Kane an African precursor of the genre.