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A history of high-power laser research and development in the United Kingdom
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- Colin N. Danson, Malcolm White, John R. M. Barr, Thomas Bett, Peter Blyth, David Bowley, Ceri Brenner, Robert J. Collins, Neal Croxford, A. E. Bucker Dangor, Laurence Devereux, Peter E. Dyer, Anthony Dymoke-Bradshaw, Christopher B. Edwards, Paul Ewart, Allister I. Ferguson, John M. Girkin, Denis R. Hall, David C. Hanna, Wayne Harris, David I. Hillier, Christopher J. Hooker, Simon M. Hooker, Nicholas Hopps, Janet Hull, David Hunt, Dino A. Jaroszynski, Mark Kempenaars, Helmut Kessler, Sir Peter L. Knight, Steve Knight, Adrian Knowles, Ciaran L. S. Lewis, Ken S. Lipton, Abby Littlechild, John Littlechild, Peter Maggs, Graeme P. A. Malcolm, OBE, Stuart P. D. Mangles, William Martin, Paul McKenna, Richard O. Moore, Clive Morrison, Zulfikar Najmudin, David Neely, Geoff H. C. New, Michael J. Norman, Ted Paine, Anthony W. Parker, Rory R. Penman, Geoff J. Pert, Chris Pietraszewski, Andrew Randewich, Nadeem H. Rizvi, Nigel Seddon, MBE, Zheng-Ming Sheng, David Slater, Roland A. Smith, Christopher Spindloe, Roy Taylor, Gary Thomas, John W. G. Tisch, Justin S. Wark, Colin Webb, S. Mark Wiggins, Dave Willford, Trevor Winstone
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- High Power Laser Science and Engineering / Volume 9 / 2021
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- 27 April 2021, e18
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The first demonstration of laser action in ruby was made in 1960 by T. H. Maiman of Hughes Research Laboratories, USA. Many laboratories worldwide began the search for lasers using different materials, operating at different wavelengths. In the UK, academia, industry and the central laboratories took up the challenge from the earliest days to develop these systems for a broad range of applications. This historical review looks at the contribution the UK has made to the advancement of the technology, the development of systems and components and their exploitation over the last 60 years.
Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
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2 - Domesticating the Flâneur: Coleridge, De Quincey and the Forms of Metropolitanism
- Simon P. Hull
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- Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine
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Summary
Not all men have the gift of enjoying a crowd-bath. Luxuriating in the throng is an art of its own, and the only man who can embark on an invigorating trip at the expense of the rest of mankind is he whose good fairy endowed him, in his cot, with a bent for disguises and masking, hatred of domestic humdrum, and wanderlust.
Charles Baudelaire, Poemes en Prose (1862)Lamb's metropolitanism emerges in this chapter through dialogue with two kinds of Romantic pedestrian, Coleridge's countryside rambler and De Quincey's opium-induced wanderer of the London streets. The sentimentality of Coleridge's representation of Lamb in 1800, as a pathetic figure incarcerated in and by the ‘great city’ in ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’, provokes an uncharacteristically angry response from Lamb, which in turn informs an ebullient rejection of the Lakes for the metropolis in several letters and an early essay eulogizing life in the city. Thus is the seed of Elia sown, a London-loving figure for whom the dual motifs of lameness and enclosure are seemingly predicated against the Lake School's liberalist association of freedom with walking in the country. Elia finally arrives in 1820, sometime after the demise of the Lake School and just as an urban version of the supposedly emancipated pedestrian is about to emerge. A concurrent persona in the London Magazine, the compulsive night-time wanderings of De Quincey's opium-eater suggest a prototype of the strolling, idling observer of city life, the flâneur, a metropolitan figure to which Elia bears a more complex relationship than he does to the demonized Cockney in Chapter 1. Whereas Lamb is defined more or less by a sense of difference from the Cockney author, his relationship with the flâneur seems to embody at the same time the antithesis of its most obvious characteristics, and an affinity with its emancipatory spirit. A paradoxically domesticated mode of flâneur ensues.
Notes on the Text
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Index
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Works Cited
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Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine
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- Simon P. Hull
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The inherent 'metropolitanism' of writing for a Romantic-era periodical is here explored through the Elia articles that Charles Lamb wrote for the London Magazine. A large number of Lamb's essays are here discussed in their historical context but also, crucially, within the context of the periodical as an integral part of Lamb's construction of self. Hull argues that Lamb's persona of Elia is a pivotal figure in the London Magazine – an embodiment of what London is and what it stands for. Lamb is an author who has proved particularly problematic for literary criticism. Here Hull is able to provide a balanced treatment, interpreting Elia as simultaneously an aspect of Lamb's humour and his political sensibility.
CONTENTS
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Notes
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Acknowledgements
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Introduction
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In a study that is very much about the essay and its formal effects, I begin with a particularly rich example of the most pertinent of those effects – the power of suggestion. Here is Hazlitt's description of Lamb's most successful literary persona, Elia, from the Spirit of the Age essays:
Mr Lamb has succeeded not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways. When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.
The first thing to notice is the image of the epochal spirit as the modern metropolis. This indicates that the only recently challenged association of British Romanticism with nature and rural life is linked to a bias towards poetry and against prose such as Hazlitt's and Lamb's. Yet even the alternative focus on the city and urban culture which has gathered momentum over the last ten years, through research into spectacle, theatrical culture and consumerism, as well as projects that more directly discuss the theme of literature and the city, is lacking in the figure especially of Lamb. If Hazlitt himself does not appear to see Lamb as part of the metropolis, he still perceives him in urban terms. Lamb's contrariness to the metropolitan spirit is presented as an alternative sense of the city. The powerful and dominant spirit equates to a metropolis defined by the relentless dynamic of fashion and modernity, a circus of spectacular attraction and mass consumption.
Frontmatter
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5 - Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool
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Did any of our readers ever notice the class of people, who hang about the stage-doors of our minor theatres in the daytime? You will rarely pass one of these entrances without seeing a group of three or four men conversing on the pavement, with an indescribable public-house-parlour swagger, and a kind of conscious air, peculiar to people of this description. They always seem to think they are exhibiting; the lamps are ever before them.
Charles Dickens, ‘Astleys’, in Sketches by Boz (1836)Through a proliferation of theatre in a range of cultural forms, the London of Elia's time represents a bona fide example, or historical actualization, of what has perhaps become a clichéd and over-abstracted association between the city and the theatre. Attempts at evoking the quintessential urban experience through the image of theatre can be easily undermined by the argument, deriving from the Freudian idea of the ego, that all human interaction involves performance of some description. The difference with early nineteenth-century London, however, is that beyond hypotheses on the historical prevalence of theatre in the city, a behavioural cult of ‘theatricality’ has been identified. Not only did theatre in this period arguably spawn the prototype for modern celebrity in the shape of Edmund Kean – a larger-than-life actor the fame (and infamy) of whose performances and personality alike rivalled that of those other subjects of the town's talk, Beau Brummel and Lord Byron – but it seems to have permeated metropolitan society as social discourse.
In the last chapter Elia was read in the context of a stylistic and abstract concept of theatre, as a literary mode of representing the city distinct from and unrelated to the actuality of the theatre in 1820s London. Some more broadly cultural studies, however, have described theatricality in terms of social behaviour and political activity derived from precisely that actuality, as instinctually appropriated from the model of stage and audience specific to early nineteenth-century London. Theatricality in the present study combines both notions, in proposing a cultural discourse emanating from the contemporary stage and articulated in the periodical text.
4 - Utility and Pity: Wordsworth, Blake and Egan, and the Act of Charity
- Simon P. Hull
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- 05 December 2014, pp 121-148
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Our readers, we fear, will require some apology for being asked to look at any thing upon the Poor-Laws. No subject, we admit, can be more disagreeable, or more trite: But, unfortunately, it is the most important of all the important subjects which the distressed state of the country is now crowding upon our notice.
Edinburgh Review (1820)By the 1820s the Poor Law had become as unavoidable an issue as it was undesirable for the literary magazine. Like Elia's comfortable middle-class type, who resents the importuning visits made by his ‘poor relation’, the Edinburgh grudgingly plays host to the vexing, recurring topic of the Poor Law and its protracted, controversial process of reform. For Elia himself, however, there appears to be no such reluctance or awkwardness, as periodical writing in this case embraces the disconcerting ‘poor subject’ through the familiar, essayistic figure. In consecutive essays in May and June 1822 – respectively, ‘The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers’ and ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’ – Lamb involves himself in the separate and collective social debates surrounding these iconic figures with an implied reader who is, like the Edinburgh's imagined reader, disaffected by such discussion. In these essays Elia reactivates the jaded metropolitan reader's sense of charity by a form of inverse argument, in which a traditional but contemptuous attitude of pity is negated by emphasis on the poor subject's importance to art and popular culture. Thus redeemed, the metropolitan reader reasserts the residual power of individual agency to, as it were, ‘make a difference’ against the dominant discourse of institutional reform.
In the process, Elia enters into dialogue with various other historical and contemporary representations of the sweep and the beggar. The theoretical basis for the mode of metropolitanism that emerges is established primarily through an interrogation of literary and cultural assumptions about how ‘low’ society in early nineteenth-century London is portrayed, specifically the identifying of a morally ambivalent feature of theatricality or ‘comic grotesquery’.
Conclusion
- Simon P. Hull
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- 05 December 2014, pp 179-186
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Anxiety and Romantic Metropolitanism
The manifold irony of the essayistic figure confirms Riehl's assessment of Lamb as the ‘ultimate eiron’. Condemned as a primary cause of superficial, extensive reading, as a sign of creeping metropolitanism, the metropolitan periodical text is appropriated to a cultural ideal of intensive or ‘deep’ reading; emancipation is espoused not through the open spaces coveted by the flâneur, but the domestic enclosure cherished by the hypochondriac; altruism is enacted through detachment; theatricality opposes the superficiality of spectacle. But implementing all the above is the irony of Lamb's melodramatic self-belittlement and its critical implications. This key characteristic of Elia amounts to a contrived marginality, an art of the peripheral which – ironically – situates Lamb at the centre of a Romantic metropolitan genre. Lamb curiously comes into being as the definitive metropolitan author not through outright opposition, as suggested by Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age portrayal, but through instances of appropriation and adaptation which represent subtle ontological expressions of the marginal Elian figure. Hunt induces anxiety from within periodical writing, an anxiety to which Hazlitt ambivalently responds, but it is Lamb's unique exploitation of that crucial distance between himself and his persona which diffuses that anxiety. De Quincey's opium-eater initiates the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the flâneur, but in Elia's converse domesticity Lamb removes from such detachment the tendency to isolation and alienation. Egan's amoral swells typify city-as-theatre hedonism, whilst Elia assimilates this aesthetic to a notion of social responsibility.
The grist to the mill of Lamb's eiron, however, lies not in the simple arrogance of the alazon but more complexly in the anxiety inherent in the concept of the metropolis in the Romantic period. If anxiety is defined as a crisis of identity ensuing from an indeterminate or transitory position, then Lamb forges his own identity out of the anxiety of the Romantic metropolis. This is a growing and changing city caught between the conflicting ideologies of a residual paternalism and an emergent utilitarianism, between the interests of commerce and community as a consequence of the general urbanization of society, and between the claims of escapism and conscience in its art.
3 - The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic
- Simon P. Hull
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- 05 December 2014, pp 87-120
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It should seem to me, from my (trivial) observations, that noblemen and gentlemen have almost abandon'd the country … and that dowagers have gone away … and that as that encreasing Wen, the metropolis, must be fed the body will gradually decay … Many landowners, especially among the politically active magnates, spend only a modest amount of time on their estates, and in this respect were much more urban in character … than is commonly allowed.
John Byng, Torrington Diaries (1789)The MP John Byng's reference to the metropolis as ‘that encreasing Wen’ occurs over thirty years before the more famous ‘Great Wen’ of Cobbett's Political Register essays of 1822–6, which were collected as Rural Rides in 1830. This chronology reminds us that writers of Lamb's generation grew up and lived at a time of intense debate over London's growing socio-economic and cultural influence, over the country as a whole and rural life in particular. Raymond Williams traces usage of the term ‘wen’ for describing London's phenomenal growth as far back as 1783, and, moreover, proposes that it was a politically expedient term, rather than an accurate reflection of the capital's relationship to the country. Williams argues that, far from being aberrant,
what the expansion of London actually indicated was the true condition and development of the country as a whole. If it was seen as monstrous, or as a diseased growth, this had logically to be traced back to the whole social order. But of course it was easier to denounce the consequences and ignore, or go on idealizing, the general condition.
Nevertheless, at the end of the nineteenth century the fact of London's accelerated expansion in the early decades could still be imaged in terms of monstrosity, as Conan Doyle's novel Beyond the City indicates: ‘When the Metropolis was still quite a distant thing … in the days when the century was young’, recalls the narrator, there were cottages scattered amongst ‘rolling country-side’ before ‘the City had thrown out a long brick-feeler here and there, curving, extending, and coalescing, until at last the little cottages had been gripped round by these red tentacles, and had been absorbed …’.
1 - Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism
- Simon P. Hull
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Summary
Cockney [is a] nick name given to the citizens of London, or persons born within the sound of Bow bell … The king of the cockneys is mentioned among the regulations for the sports and shows formerly held on Childermass Day, where he had his officers, a marshall, constable, butler, &c.
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811)The Cockney School attacks, as Jeffrey Cox has observed, cleverly invert the elaborate mock court of the Cockney king in order to identify literary affectation and presumption. The burlesque pomp and ceremony of the Cockney ritual is generally appropriated to the provincial mindset and egoistic character of the Cockney author. Lamb's ludic and self-denigrating persona appears closer in spirit to the carnivalesque festival described in the Dictionary than to the derogatory term that appropriates it. The periodical conditions of commodification and the anonymous, corporate identity simultaneously seem to inspire the Elian self, and cause the magazine in which Elia appears to be damagingly embroiled within the Cockney dispute, as an expression of anxiety over metropolitan culture. Both of Lamb's metropolitan peers in this chapter, Hunt and Hazlitt, identify what are essentially Elian characteristics in their respective attempts to find a mode of periodical writing which is not synonymous with the all-pervasive, demonizing Cockney label. Because Lamb's former editor and fellow periodical-writing Londoner Hunt is derided as the archetypal Cockney author he represents the prime agent of this anxiety, yet this is a position from which he offers a perceptive analysis of Lamb's timely qualities as an antidote to Cockneyism. Responding in more ambivalent fashion to the rise of periodicals than the protagonists of the Cockney dispute and complicating the demonized figure of the Cockney itself, the foremost critic of the age, Hazlitt, tentatively gestures towards the irony-based defusion of metropolitan anxiety uniquely engineered by Lamb. Lamb writes not against Cockneyism or Hunt, therefore, but the virulent anxiety that gathers around the Cockney figure.
Experimental Taphonomy of Foraminifera
- Emma R. Locatelli, Simon A.F. Darroch, Victoria E. McCoy, Ross P. Anderson, Elizabeth G. Clark, Pincelli M. Hull
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- Journal:
- The Paleontological Society Special Publications / Volume 13 / 2014
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 26 July 2017, pp. 122-123
- Print publication:
- 2014
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Aphids of sub-Antarctic Îles Crozet and Kerguelen: species diversity, host range and spatial distribution
- MAURICE HULLÉ, D. PANNETIER, J.-C SIMON, P. VERNON, Y. FRENOT
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- Journal:
- Antarctic Science / Volume 15 / Issue 2 / June 2003
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 20 May 2003, pp. 203-209
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The native terrestrial food web of sub-Antarctic islands is dominated by decomposers with rare herbivores and almost no predators. As a consequence of increasing human activities, the number of alien plants and invertebrates species, including phytophagous species, has been dramatically rising on these islands. These repeated introductions seem likely to have a great impact on the ecosystem functioning. This is the first detailed study on species diversity, host range and spatial distribution of aphids on French sub-Antarctic islands. Six cosmopolitan and polyphagous aphid species have been recorded on these islands. Five species have been found in the wild where they colonized native and introduced plants, and one species was confined to a glasshouse. Aphids colonized a littoral band and were limited to below 200 m a.s.l. Their spatial distribution is constrained by host plant distribution and temperature. The two dominant species, Myzus ascalonicus and Rhopalosiphum padi, are obligately parthenogenetic in these islands and have been observed to be active on plants during winter. The other species are also presumably obligate parthenogens because of the absence of host plants where sexual reproduction can occur. We suggest that polyphagy and parthenogenesis are major biological traits that influence colonization success by aphids in a sub-Antarctic environment.