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.

What is nature? It is a question that evokes an answer that is both theoretical and practical. The early nineteenth century took up this question by investing time and human energy into unlocking the world of the unseen, which to many held the fullness of all knowledge, whether it be defined deep within the Earth or far into the sky. For example, the relatively new scientific profession of geology was taken up throughout Europe as a way to engage the on-going debates on the formation of the Earth. The debate began in the eighteenth century between the so-called ‘plutonists’, who believed that the rock bed of the Earth was formed by the deposit of lava from volcanoes, and the so-called ‘neptunists’, who believed that the land was formed by sediment from one enormous flood. The discussion became even more pronounced with the ability to carve paths deeper into the Earth, which allowed for a more adventurous and entrepreneurial group of individuals to discover the riches of such depths and force the debate to enter the industrial and economic realms. The mining industry thus became for the nineteenth century a fascination of wonder, commerce and scientific research, so much so that German philosophers would often use the mine as a metaphor to define the depths of the human soul and the progress of industrial society.

Equally far reaching, the celestial experiments of William Herschel (1738– 1822) and his sister Caroline (1750–1848) in the early 1800s brought increased attention to light rays that lie outside the visual spectrum, namely infrared radiation. By placing a mercury thermometer outside the red band of sunlight refracted from a prism in a dark room, William came to understand the existence of ‘invisible light’ and the possibility of ‘seeing’ beyond our own world.

Part I of this study was dedicated to the Musenhof as a site of polite sociability, republic of letters, and dynastic and reform patriotism. This chapter will continue the exploration of Musenhofe in the conglomerate state of Denmark. Eutin and Emkendorf, the case studies in this chapter, were significant centres of enlightenment and literary patronage in the Danish Schleswig and Holstein.

Eutin – one of the two ‘Weimars of the North’ was the summer residence of Friedrich August von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf (1711–85) and Peter Friedrich Ludwig von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf (1755–1829) in the eastern part of Holstein. These princely bishops, or Furstenbischofe, were descended from the old dynasty Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, with territories that belonged to both Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire. Linked by marriage to Russia, the dynasty produced Tsar Peter III Fjodorowitsch (Karl Peter Ulrich von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, 1728–62) and his son Paul I (1754–1801), who governed the Gottorf territories in personal union with Russia until 1773. The treaty of Tsarkoye Selo granted Denmark the Gottorf territories, which therefore governed the whole of Holstein as part of its conglomerate state. Both Friedrich August and Peter Ludwig were prominent patrons of the arts. They attracted writers and philosophers to the court, many of whom had close connections to the Danish court and public sphere, but also to other German circles. The dramatist Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg (1737–1823), for instance, lived in Copenhagen between 1765 and 1775 and was part of the German circle around Klopstock. Gerstenberg and his fellow editors Christian Fleischer and Peter Kleen published Soroske Samling, a periodical that signified a true symbiosis of Danish-German culture in the conglomerate state.

In the past decade, new subfields of German-language comics have been growing. This includes comics by German artists that attempt to capture the trauma of migrant experiences in Germany. Recent examples include works such as Paula Bulling's Im Land der Frühaufsteher (In the Country of Early Risers, 2012) and Reinhard Kleist's Der Traum von Olympia: Die Geschichte von Samia Yusuf Omar (2015; An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar, 2016) and Geschichten aus dem Grandhotel: Comic-Reportagen von Augsburger Design-Studierenden (Stories from the Grand Hotel: Comic Reports by Augsburg Design Students, 2016). These comics are often rendered in documentary style and portray the artist's experiences with displaced persons. In addition, in line with the international rise of the field of Graphic Medicine, health-related comics, often about lived experiences of illness and disability, have emerged in Germany, ranging from Daniela Schreiter's Schattenspringer series (2014, 2015, 2018; The World Beyond My Shadow, 2016), which deals with autism, to Regina Hofer's Blad (2018; Fat, 2021), which portrays experiences related to eating disorders and body image. In the last decade, fictional comics about nature and climate crisis have gained prominence in the national and international comics scene and include works such as Frauke Berger's Grün (Green, 2018).