Every line between a corporation and the outside is simultaneously a link of cooperation and getting things done for mutual benefit and a possible location for accusations and perpetration of various kinds of illegality. This lets us ask several questions: How are accusation stories, enacted through stripping, leveling, and attributing, distributed along market-based lines? Which accusations appear on which market routes with a high degree of frequency?

Several steps follow the public accusation, reflecting the concern of executives over the tarnishing of personal corporate reputations. First, the media enlarge the story, interpreting it by assimilating it to one of a few standard scenarios, which puts blame in one place or another. Second, this keeps it in the public eye, producing outrage and provoking damage control by executives. Third, the standard stories (whose elaboration will be part of our description and analysis) all tend to stick to one of a handful of templates and are variations on the theme of executives breaking promises due to their self-interest, self-dealing, and greed on the one hand, and their need to protect, defend, and justify the actions of their corporation on the other.

Market-Based Tie Number 1: Accusations of Wrongdoing In and Around the Corporation

Many intermediate accusations originate in formal and complex organizations. These may include abuses of power, abuse of trust, and business misconduct (Wheeler and Rothman 1982; Vaughan 1999, 287).

The study of accusations is a process of sniffing and finding. There is “hard latent value” to be found in the art of the intermediate, between weak informal complaints and strong criminal charges and sanctions. Allegations in this intermediary or “goldilocks” position help reveal the moral order of the market in which violations of the code of business conduct evoke reactions that tend to publicly announce, and thereby reinforce, the norms.

Accusations pervade our news headlines and public affairs, but how should we evaluate these when they occur in economic transactions? All established markets operate with institutional rules governing the roles and responsibilities of market actors and the rules of exchange. Here we see that something has gone afoul in business and uncover the rules and understandings governing economic exchange by finding where and how people take umbrage and complain about the behavior of their exchange partners. Taking umbrage directs us to situations in which people complain that things are not as they should be, thereby revealing the rules of exchange, their interests, and their ideas about misrepresentation and misdirection.

FitzGerald effectively created a new poetic form in his translations from Omar Khayyám. In Persian poetry a rubá'i (pl. rubáiyát) is a four line epigrammatic poem which stands as an independent quatrain. FitzGerald's Rubáiyát, on the other hand, presents a single, extended poem made up of various thoughts and images mostly taken from Khayyám's individual quatrains. It is the form FitzGerald created which concerns us here.

FitzGerald's poem was, in the words of Ezra Pound, effectively ‘stillborn’ until its discovery by the Pre-Raphaelites, whose enthusiasm was instrumental in popularising it. The establishment of the Omar Khayyám Club in 1892 gave further impetus and led to what has come to be known as the Cult of the Rubáiyát towards the end of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. It has been a phenomenon rarely seen in any other literary culture. Since the publication of Swinburne's ‘Laus Veneris’ in 1866, there have been thousands of poems whose existence would have been impossible without the example of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát. For convenience of discussion (and, of course, only a small proportion of this material can be examined), these poetic materials are considered under three headings: parodies, imitations and dedicatory poems. The first two of these categories cannot, in this context, be absolutely distinguished; the differences between them are ones of emphasis rather than kind.

Anniversary Year

The anniversaries of literary figures are enjoyable and useful occasions. They bring renewed emphasis on a writer's work, inviting celebration, serious discussion, fresh insights and new publications. They also provide an opportunity to assess or reconfirm a writer's reputation and value. In 2009 there was a three-fold anniversary opportunity for one of our poets, Edward FitzGerald, who, until quite recently, was so popular that almost everyone could quote from his work with a mixture of admiration, amusement and affection. The year 2009 marked the bicentenary of his birth on 31 March 1809, the sesquicentenary of his most important work, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) and the centenary of Sir Granville Bantock's vast and splendid oratorio, Omar Khayyam (completed in 1909).

It is St Valentine's Day 1981. A slight young woman wearing red lipstick and cradling a Sten gun leads a gang of men into the village of Behmai in India's Uttar Pradesh state. She demands that the villagers bring out the brothers Sing, a couple of rival dacoits, or bandits. The young woman is implacably angry, and becomes more so when the terrified villagers will not or cannot comply. She orders her gang to line up all the young men, then walks along the line, spitting on the men, insulting them and jabbing the butt of her weapon into their testicles. Still no-one has seen the bandit brothers. The women cry and scream. An order is given – perhaps by the girl, a low-caste outlaw named Phoolan Devi – perhaps by another of her gang. The young men are made to walk single file towards the river where they are forced to kneel as they beg for mercy.

Twenty-three years later, a white-masked French electrical worker fumbles through the fuse box of a rundown apartment block in the predawn darkness of St Denis, near Paris. Eventually he finds the right connections and electricity returns to the squalid suburban flat whose occupants have been unable to pay their bills. ‘I give power back to the poor’ the disguised man claims.

In our book, The Art of Omar Khayyam (2007), we suggested that ‘the extensive publication of illustrated editions of the Rubáiyát may also have contributed to its continuing popularity’. We also proposed that ‘the prime explanation for the continuous publication of illustrated editions seems most likely to be the commercial instincts of publishers… Opportunities were also created by the developing interest that people in the West had in the Orient. At the same time… technical improvements in colour printing were encouraging publishers to make greater use of illustrations.’

In this paper, we look again at these conclusions, with the aim of shedding some further light on how it is that Edward FitzGerald's short poem became one of the most widely illustrated books of all time. We consider the social and economic framework within which publication of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát reached its zenith and the critical role played by technical change in this important period. We examine in more detail the role of certain key actors, notably individual publishers and their illustrators, in the process of Rubáiyát publishing. And, by looking at the longer term evolution of Rubáiyát publishing through the twentieth century, we try to reach a clearer view of the importance of illustration to the enduring popularity of the poem.

Most of the political aspirations and real or imagined machinations of outlaw heroes are related to fundamental notions of equity. The right – assumed where it does not exist – of all members of a society to a reasonable share of its riches and access to its resources, is integral to the rationale of outlaw heroism. Robin Hood's levelling of the wealth disparities of medieval England echoes again and again through the lives, deaths, legends and literature of bandit after bandit. Underlying this are the folkloric conceptions of the commons and of limited good – the common good.

The common good is sometimes found enshrined in legislation (whether observed or not) and sometimes in custom and precedent. It usually consists of a series of obligations and expectations between those who have most and those who have least in a particular society. We see the physical manifestation of these important assumptions in the long and bitter struggles over the enclosure of common lands that were a feature of European societies from the early modern era. Sometimes these tensions are articulated in episodes of social banditry. During the early nineteenth century, the Apulian outlaw hero Vardarelli wrote to the mayors of Atella and Foggia demanding that the traditional peoples' perquisite of gleaning the fields be restored, and that this means of subsistence not be fed to the cattle.

1852

Events

• Louis Napoleon becomes President following coup d'état of 2 December 1851.

• Press regime decreed.

• Paris-Strasbourg and Paris-Creil railway lines inaugurated.

• Gare de Lyon and Gare de Montparnasse completed.

• Work begins on the ‘New Louvre’.

• Le Bon Marché founded.

• Plebiscite approves restoration of the Empire.

• Proclamation of Second Empire; on 2 December 1852 Louis Napoleon becomes Napoleon III.

In the early decades of the twentieth century anyone with even the most modest education would have known of Edward FitzGerald and his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. As Bradford Torrey summarised the situation in his article on FitzGerald in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900: ‘All the world reads Omar Khayyám and praises FitzGerald.’

Copies of the poem were readily available from publishers both large and small, as were a substantial number of parodies and a wide range of Omariana, including calendars, cigarettes, figurines, china, silverware, jewelry, watches and flour. Not since the appearance of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) had a literary work found such broad-ranging interest beyond the boundaries of literature. By 1900 a cult of sorts with Omar and FitzGerald as the focus existed on both sides of the Atlantic, but what has yet to be clarified is the seminal role that American reprint publishers played as they first responded to the public's interest in the Rubáiyát and then contributed to the spread of the cult. These enterprising publishers offered the public a range of inexpensive reprint editions of FitzGerald's poem and in the process developed clever marketing strategies that continue to this day. The impact which they had on the cultural acceptance of the Rubáiyát cannot be overestimated, and the purpose of this essay is to shed light on how this happened.

This is a book about exile. It is also a book about some figures within a cohort of individuals in a particular time and place to whom the term exile has been variously applied—persons active in one or another sphere of public space who were displaced by Nazi rule in Germany between 1933 and 1945—and whose historical experiences and achievements have been found sufficiently important to serve as a point of departure for an interdisciplinary field of studies. While there can be no prohibition against simply postulating a plausible definition of exile as a preliminary to biographical, historical, or critical studies of the individuals or groups subsequently classed under that dramatic label, as is often done in exile studies, such a proceeding entails costs. Exile has a rich and contested history as a concept in political, literary, and religious reflection—a history that enters as well into the recognition of self and others among those involved in the instances under study. The aim of the present study is to take some chapters in the historical inquiry into the 1930s exile as the locus for an investigation of the phenomena and issues at stake in the contested uses of exile in social inquiry.

The Concept of Exile

What work does the term exile do in the contemporary language of cultural and political self-reflection, so that interpreters find it worthwhile to quarrel about its scope and application? Well, exiles in that context are always special.

In a frequently quoted essay, to which we now return in a revised and diagnostic methodological context, Edward Said asks how it is that the fatal condition of exile has turned “so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture.” Said quickly rejects the idea that exile somehow serves humanism, as some sort of school for virtue along the lines, perhaps, of the consolatory philosophizing conventionalized in the Roman literature of exile. “Is it not true,” he objects, “that the views of exile in literature and, moreover, in religion obscure what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death but without death's ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography?” He shrugs past “the modest refuge provided by subjectivity” to the literary exiles of Paris and New York, and he assimilates exile rather to the condition of the hopeless refugee in Cairo, Beirut, or Mexico City. After developing numerous insights into the tortured condition of exile, however, Said returns to his initial question: “How is it that the literature of exile has taken its place as a topos of human experience alongside the literature of adventure, education, or discovery?” His answer, following Simone Weil and Theodore Adorno on the atrocious costs of alternatives to exile in their age, circles back to exile as an emblem of subjectivity.