Search

The bicentennial of Jane Austen’s death, 2017 was a banner year for scholarly writing about and popular interest in the novelist’s life and work. Even the Bank of England commemorated the occasion,...

In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a defining feature of Bath is the absence of stable neighbors, and neighborhoods: like its historical counterpart, Northanger Abbey’s Bath is a city of visitors. At the same time, Austen’s novel alludes to a network of texts and spatial practices usefully understood in terms of Henri Lefebvre’s “codes of space,” which aim to orient new arrivals within the urban environment as well as within a constantly shifting social order. Austen herself shows the breakdown of such attempts at regulation, which creates dangerous misunderstandings regarding Catherine Morland’s status even as it affords her unexpected romantic opportunities. The other principle setting of the novel, Northanger Abbey, operates in opposition to Bath insofar as General Tilney aims at exercising ironclad control over not only his estate, but the neighborhood in which it is embedded. The novel’s principal locations of Bath and Northanger thus serve as two spatial extremes, one lacking altogether in “neighbors” and the other suffocated by the dominating patriarch who conflates his estate with its surroundings.

Adam Potkay's Wordsworth's Ethics and Quentin Bailey's Wordsworth's Vagrants both participate in the recent ethical turn in criticism and theory. The poet at the center of these studies is deeply i...

RAFF, SARAH. Jane Austen's Erotic Advice. Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 2014. RAW, LAURENCE, and ROBERT G. DRYDEN, eds. Global Jane Austen: Pleasure, Passion and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DUQUETTE, NATASHA, and ELISABETH LENCKOS, eds. Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety and Harmony. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014. Taken together, Jane Austen's Erotic Advice, Global Jane Austen, and Jane Austen and the Arts provide a snapshot of some current preoccupations of scholars of Austen and her contemporaries. Following on studies ranging from Janeites (2000), edited by Deidre Lynch, to Claudia Johnson's Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures (2012), in different ways Raff, Raw, and Dryden all engage with the Austen fandom. Sarah Raff's monograph explains the devotion of the Janeite as only the latest demonstration of the rhetorical power Austen consciously experimented with from her youth; Laurence Raw and Robert Dryden's contributors analyze Austen's popular reception and adaptation across mediums throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Natasha Duquette and Elisabeth Lenckos's interdisciplinary anthology likewise situates Austen's work within a wide-ranging frame, though in this case centered around eighteenth-century aesthetic theory as well as musical and other cultural practices. Sarah Raff's Jane Austen's Erotic Advice is a scholarly gem: beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated, erudite, and in command of its subject from the eighteenth through to the twenty-first centuries. This monograph draws connections between diverse texts and phenomena, in and of themselves familiar, but given new importance when considered together. Raff's opening insight is that the modern-day Austen devotee, longing for an Austen to script her life and loves, is a recasting of that familiar eighteenth-century literary type, the female Quixote. Raff contends that the conviction that today's fans possess, that Austen somehow understands their problems and that her novels are coded guides directing them to happiness and romantic fulfillment, taps into a deep truth: Austen the novelist did in fact write advice manuals, though of a peculiar, groundbreaking sort. Austen's plots disable critiques of Quixotism by showing that what poses as its opposite, sober didacticism, is in fact its double, since both depend on forms of literary seduction. In Raff's reading, Austen's signal achievement is her extension, particularly in her later novels, to include the reader her or himself in this process. Austen thus achieves unparalleled success in creating a state of "happy erotic anticipation" (164). Raff reaches this conclusion through the deployment of comprehensive literary references, rhetorical analysis, and biographical episodes. The argument closely examines the logic and linguistic structure of the generalization--such as the famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice--to show how such pronouncements are essential to both didactic novels and Quixote-inducing narratives. And precisely through its claim as "a truth universally acknowledged," the generalization punctures the wall between the fictional world and the world of the reader, promising that, if applied in the real world, it will facilitate the same satisfying outcomes at which the courtship plot aims. After presenting the history of the study's key terms, Raff provides detailed scrutiny of Austen's last four published novels. At first glance, what Raff calls the "vanishing narrator" of Pride and Prejudice seems to obviate her initial claims about the erotic relation between Austen as author and her readership. Raff's discussion shows, however, that this particular text anticipates Austen's subsequent narrative choices by casting a character--Darcy--as the master of the generalization. Elizabeth Bennet's dawning attraction to the hero is concomitant with her realization that he, not those in her neighborhood or her father, knows in the broadest sense the views and expectations of polite society. …

De Nardi, M, Pizzigalli, L, Benis, R, Caffaro, F, and Cremasco, MM. Acute effects of partial-body cryotherapy on isometric strength: maximum handgrip strength evaluation. J Strength Cond Res 31(12): 3497-3502, 2017-The aim of the study was to evaluate the influence of a single partial-body cryotherapy (PBC) session on the maximum handgrip strength (JAMAR Hydraulic Hand dynamometer). Two hundred healthy adults were randomized into a PBC group and a control group (50 men and 50 women in each group). After the initial handgrip strength test (T0), the experimental group performed a 150-second session of PBC (temperature range between -130 and -160° C), whereas the control group stayed in a thermo neutral room (22.0 ± 0.5° C). Immediately after, both groups performed another handgrip strength test (T1). Data underlined that both groups showed an increase in handgrip strength values, especially the experimental group (Control: T0 = 39.48 kg, T1 = 40.01 kg; PBC: T0 = 39.61 kg, T1 = 41.34 kg). The analysis also reported a statistical effect related to gender (F = 491.99, P ≤ 0.05), with women showing lower handgrip strength values compared with men (women = 30.43 kg, men = 52.27 kg). Findings provide the first evidence that a single session of PBC leads to the improvement of muscle strength in healthy people. The results of the study imply that PBC could be performed also before a training session or a sport competition, to increase hand isometric strength.

Context: Neuromuscular training enhances unconscious motor responses by stimulating both the afferent signals and central mechanisms responsible for dynamic joint control. Dynamic joint-control training is a vital component of injury-prevention programs. Objective: To investigate the effects of body-weight neuromuscular training on Y-Balance Test (YBT) performance and postural control in female basketball players. Design: Randomized controlled clinical trial. Setting: Basketball practice sessions. Patients or Other Participants: A total of 28 healthy elite female basketball players were randomly assigned to an experimental (n = 14) or a control group (n = 14). Intervention(s): Before their regular practice sessions, the experimental group warmed up with body-weight neuromuscular exercises and the control group with standard tactical-technical exercises twice weekly for 8 weeks. Main Outcome Measure(s): Anterior-, posteromedial-, and posterolateral-reach and composite YBT scores were measured before and after 8 weeks of training. Results: Improvement over baseline scores was noted in the posteromedial (right = 86.5 ± 4.5 cm versus 89.6 ± 2.2 cm, +3.5%, P = .049; left = 85.5 ± 4.3 cm versus 90.2 ± 2.7 cm, +5.5%, P = .038)- and posterolateral (right = 90.7 ± 3.6 cm versus 94.0 ± 2.7 cm, +3.6%, P = .016; left = 90.9 ± 3.5 cm versus 94.2 ± 2.6 cm, +3.6%, P = .011)-reach directions and in the composite YBT scores (right = 88.6% ± 3.2% versus 94.0% ± 1.8%, +5.4%, P = .0004; left = 89.2% ± 3.2% versus 94.5% ± 3.0%, +5.8%, P = .001) of the experimental group. No differences in anterior reach were detected in either group. Differences were noted in postintervention scores for posteromedial reach (right = 89.6 ± 2.2 cm versus 84.3 ± 4.4 cm, +4.1%, P = .005; left = 94.2 ± 2.6 cm versus 84.8 ± 4.4 cm, +10%, P = .003) and composite scores (right = 94.0% ± 1.8% versus 87.3% ± 2.0%, +7.1%, P = .003; left = 94.8% ± 3.0% versus 87.9% ± 3.4%, +7.3%, P < .0001) between the experimental and control groups. Conclusions: Body-weight neuromuscular training improved postural control and lower limb stability in female basketball players as assessed with the YBT. Incorporating neuromuscular training into the workout routines for basketball players may enhance joint awareness and reduce the risk of lower extremity injury.

Background The aim of this study was to assess how anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures with subsequent surgery reconstruction impact on the professional career of A1-A2 Italian women's volleyball league players. Methods Using an observational study with a retrospective case-series design for ACL ruptures, 125 teams with 1488 players were monitored. Subjects had to report level, role, injury modality, lower limb injured, laterality, period of the season and age. Results A total of 34 ACL ruptures were reported. Thirty-three (97%) were non-contact and 1 (3%) with contact. Twenty-one (61.7%) occurred in landing from a jump attack, 3 (8.8%) in landing from wall jump, 1 (3%) with apparent contact and 9 (26.5%) in other landing conditions. The most injured knee was the left limb (22, 64.7%) respect to the right limb (12, 35.3%). Fourteen (41.2%) ruptures occurred in spikers, 10 (29.4%) in middle blockers, 6 (17.6%) in setters, 3 (8.8%) in liberos and 1 (3%) in opposite hitters. Nine (26.5%) occurred in pre-season period, 16 (47%) in the first round, 4 (11.8%) in the second round, and 5 (14.7%) during play-off. The average age of the first ACL rupture was 23±3 years. Conclusions We observed that female volleyball players of A1-A2 Italian volleyball league occurred mostly in a left non-contact ACL rupture during a landing condition and the spikers were the players most at risk. Therefore, it is desirable that coaches teach players variations of landing in order to avoid possible chronic overloading of ACL.

The 2009 release of Bright Star, Jane Campion's film about John Keats's last years and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, engendered a range of reactions. Writing for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw contended, "The movie is vulnerable to mockery or irony from pundits who might feel that ... their appreciation of the poet exceeds that of the director. Nonetheless, I think it is a deeply felt and intelligent film, one of those that has grown in my mind on a second viewing; it is almost certainly the best of Campion's career." A. O. Scott of The New York Times and Frances Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement likewise praised Campion's focus on the end of Keats's life through the lens of his love for Brawne. As Bradshaw anticipated, however, the response from academics was considerably more circumspect. One of the most vocal critics of Bright Star was Christopher Ricks, who took issue with both the actors' voicing of Keats's poems and with Jane Campion's more general approach to dramatizing Keats's lyricism. In The New York Review of Books, Ricks singles out Campion's literal-minded approach of providing concrete visual analogs for the images invoked in Keats's poems; a film should, above all, never offer simple "pictures of the very things that a great writer has superbly--by means of the chosen medium of words alone--enabled us to imagine, to picture. A film that proceeds to furnish competing pictures of its own will render pointless the previous acts of imagination that it purports to respect or to honor. For among the accomplishments of the poet is that he or she brings it about that we see with the mind's eye, as against the eye of flesh" (46). Ricks is not saying that poetry in general, or Keats's poetry in particular, is hostile to the cinematic imagination; rather, he finds fault with Campion's use of literal visual analogs for Keats's poetic images. For her part, Campion has identified her primary source material as Keats's correspondence, rather than his poetry: "I read all the letters. I didn't read all the poems. Then I worked out a storyline" (Sullivan 87). Accordingly, during a voiceover sequence in Bright Star in which Keats (Ben Whishaw) reads from a letter he wrote to Fanny about a walk on seashore, the audience sees a shot of Whishaw standing on a beach looking at the ocean. Similarly, when Whishaw's Keats recites the sonnet "Bright Star" to Abbie Cornish's Brawne, he utters the speaker's sensation of being "pillowed on my fair love's breast" as he is, literally, resting his head on Cornish's bosom. The shortcomings Ricks describes are perhaps difficult to avoid in a film with some extremely ambitious aims. In the panel discussion on the film at the New York Public Library in September, 2009, Timothy Corrigan interpreted Campion's focus on Brawne as a "feminist intervention" even as the director also sought to introduce Keats's achievement to a mainstream, contemporary audience. Campion's dual goal of entertaining and educating reflects the ideological legacy of its producers, which were public service broadcasters from Australia (Screen Australia) and the UK (BBC films). The goal of education and entertainment has been an established part of public service broadcasting, particularly in the British commonwealth, since the earliest days (the 1920s) of the BBC under its first general director, Lord John Reith; a film about Keats would certainly seem to fall within the remit of organizations like the BBC, charged with cultivating a collective appreciation of British cultural traditions. Part of making Keats's life story and work accessible to a wide public means, for Campion, situating that work within a visual formula that straightforwardly translates imaginative transformation into concrete images. Rather than attempting to defamiliarize our experience, Campion aims to make Keats's language familiar by presenting tactile and visually knowable origins for his linguistic processing of reality. …

British authorities established a penal colony in Australia in 1788 to resume a practice that had shaped the nation's justice for a century: banishment. Be fore it was interrupted by the American Revolution, transportation had be come a cornerstone of criminal sentencing, enabling the development of a legal code whose hundreds of capital crimes were in practice frequently pun ished by the less severe judgment of exile.1 The British knew little about Aus tralia beyond the sketchy reports produced by Captain James Cook's voyage some 17 years previously. Such ignorance finally did not stop the government from establishing a penal colony there, so desperate were authorities to dis pose of a growing backlog of convicts who were sentenced to transportation during the 1780s. During this decade the many convicts who formerly would have been shipped to America had nowhere to go; typhus epidemics caused by overcrowding in jails and prison ships along the Thames meant death sen tences for many who supposedly had eluded capital punishment.2 In reinstituting transportation, the Pitt ministry believed it had taken a key step in stabilizing the legal and social status quo. But the birth of the Bot any Bay colony would coincide with new challenges to British institutions brought on by the struggles of domestic political reformers, the French Revo lution, and the ensuing continental war. These developments led to a popular revision of transportation's significance, a revision given added force by the new penal settlement's location at the opposite end of the world. In particular, representations of seditionaries bound for Botany Bay, of their passage to Aus tralia, and of life in the colony were colored by social and political develop ments in Britain. On one hand, early British accounts of Botany Bay emphasized its utter strangeness. Robert Hughes notes that new arrivals saw the continent as "a land of inversions," where the seasons and even the stars displayed themselves in reversed or unfamiliar forms.3 However, the wide spread sense that everything in Australia was symbolically, as well as geo graphically, upside down enabled observers to use British conventions to

Michael Scrivener, Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) vii + 270 $85. Michael Scrivener's Jewish Representation in British Literature is the most encyclopedic study to date depicting Jews and Judaism during the Romantic period. Although it was once "routine" (12) to overlook representations of Jews and works by Jewish writers in literary studies, scholarship on this subject in the last twenty years has created a much different critical terrain. Yet, as Scrivener demonstrates, much work remains to be done. The sheer volume of primary texts discussed here that have been little explored, or entirely overlooked, is remarkable. In this way, Jewish Representation in British Literature will be an invaluable sourcebook for further research. Following Freudian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, Scrivener's principle analytic rubric revolves around the notion of "ambivalence." The loci for this ambivalence in this context are stereotypes about Jews; the most influential example of this phenomenon, Shakespeare's Shylock, thus expresses "Europe's conflicted views on commerce, banking, trade, usury, and capitalism" (3). Accordingly, Scrivener devotes much of his argument to discussions of common Jewish character types, with separate chapters on "the Pedlar," "the Moneylender," and "the Jew's Daughter" as these types are explored by writers of both genders across a spectrum of religious and political affiliation. Hoe these figures are deployed and interrogated during the Romantic period ultimately reflects British anxieties about the fact that "the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the era of Jewish emancipation" (208), a development which in turn necessitates far-reaching changes in the understanding of Britishness itself. The focus on stereotypes here looks back to earlier work such as Frank Felsenstein's Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 16601830 (1995) and Michael Ragussis's more recent Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (2010). Scrivener takes this emphasis in new directions by underscoring the inevitably conflicted nature of such representations, whether they are produced by Jewish or non Jewish writers. The dates indicated in the title, 1780-1840, are somewhat misleading insofar as, after a summary of recent criticism in the first chapter, chapter 2 reviews the 17th century debates over the readmission of Jews to England during Cromwell's commonwealth. This starting point helpfully allows Scrivener to outline three responses to these debates--support for readmission by a Jewish author and by a Christian one, and open hostility to readmission by another Christian --that set up the analytical parameters at work through the chapters that follow. The view that Menasseh ben Isreal is "the first Anglo-Jewish writer" is, as Scrivener himself observes, debatable, predicated as it is on Menasseh's two-year stay in London and the fact that three publications on readmission in English--two of uncertain provenance--bear his name. Menasseh spells out his reasons for seeking English residence in practical as well as spiritual terms; as Scrivener summarizes, the writer seeks "To worship freely in synagogue; (2) to advance the messianic agenda by inserting Jews where there were none; (3) to pursue commerce; (4) to join as the biblical Stranger the already existing learned and pious community of Christians" (31). But even as he counters historic slanders against Jews such as the practice of ritual murder, Menasseh ambivalently depends on other aspects of the Jewish stereotype in order to argue for readmission. Christian assumptions about predatory Jewish lending are reshaped into a useful knowledge about business; fears of Jewish violence against Christians are recast into a desire for Christian camaraderie. Unfortunately, as Scrivener's analysis demonstrates, this approach did not preclude rhetorical violence in return by the anti-readmission pamphleteer William Prynne, whose A Short Demurrer to the Jewes Long Discontinued Remitter into England (1655) buttresses virulent Anti-Semitism with meticulous, supposedly historical detail as to specific Jewish crimes. …

Flexibility is an intrinsic property of body tissues, which among other factors determines the range of motion (ROM). A decrease in neural activation of the muscle has been linked with greater ROM. Cryotherapy is an effective technique to reduces neural activation. Hence, the aim of the present study was to evaluate if a single session of whole-body cryotherapy (WBC) affects ROM. 60 women and 60 men were divided into two groups (control and experimental). After the initial sit-and-reach test, experimental group performed a 150 s session of WBC, whereas the control group stayed in thermo-neutral environment. Immediately after, both groups performed another sit-and-reach test. A 3-way analysis of variance revealed statistically significant time×group and time × gender interaction. Experimental groups improved sit-and-reach amplitude to a greater extend than the control group. Our results support the hypothesis that ROM is increased immediately after a single session of WBC.

Specific airway resistance (sRaw) measured by body plethysmography without conditioning of the inspired air to BTPS exhibits a strong frequency dependence related to the fact that the warming and wetting of the gas in the airways is not instantaneous (R. Peslin, C. Duvivier, M. Vassiliou, and C. Gallina. J. Appl. Physiol. 79: 1958-1965, 1995). We have tested three methods in 21 healthy subjects to correct for that artifact by using a simple model, assuming a first-order thermal process characterized by a single time constant. The corrections required entering an assumed constant value for (methods 1 and 2) and/or for airway inertance (methods 1 and 3) and/or measuring the inspired gas temperature and water vapor saturation (methods 2 and 3). The frequency dependence of sRaw was measured from 0.5 to 3 Hz both with (sRawETPS) and without (sRawam) gas conditioning. With optimal values for and/or airway inertance, the mean difference between sRawam and sRawETPS was close to zero with all three methods, but the root mean square difference was significantly lower with method 2 (0.83 +/- 0.35 hPa.s compared with 1.21 +/- 0.54 and 1.20 +/- 0.49 hPa.s with methods 1 and 2, respectively). We conclude that the thermal artifact of sRaw measurements may be best corrected by using temperature measurements and an assumed time constant (0.152 s with our equipment).

Kristy Carpenter summarizes one play about the Emigration written by an actual exile as follows: the heroine’s father, a French noble, is secretly married to an English woman. When she dies, he marries again, while the child is from the first marriage entrusted to the dead wife’s brother, who puts her in a convent. During the revolution the child emigrates, comes to London, and after she succeeds in asserting her true identity, she claims her fortune and marries her English cousin. Carpenter explains that “this was a very typical plot” (Refugees 151). Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac conforms to significant contours of this outline; while de Sevrac is married only once, it is clear that he consummates his relationship with Adelaide and intends to marry her before his father thwarts him.1 Adelaide subsequently has a baby girl whose paternity is an open question: is she de Sevrac’s, or does she belong to the count who rapes Adelaide? De Sevrac later marries an Englishwoman, while Adelaide is herself placed in a convent from which she never emerges. In this plot, it is the legitimate daughter, Sabina, who marries the English St. Clair, and who claims her fortune (on her British mother’s side) at the novel’s conclusion.

The earliest literary representations of emigres followed hard on the high tide of the Emigration to England, during the years 1792 and 1793. It was during this time that events in France became more chaotic, and that the actions that would culminate in the Terror were set in motion. The resulting tide of French subjects who were washed up on British shores prompted charity, sharpened the ongoing debate about the revolution’s benefits, and drew the attention of women writers, particularly. In this chapter, I will explore in detail how the works of two of the most prominent writers of the day, Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, confront this state of affairs. Smith and Robinson wrote both poems and novels drawing attention to the emigrant plight, and Smith actually became related by marriage to an aristocratic emigre during these years.

Dispelled from their homel and scattered across Europe for over a thousand years, the Jews were the paradigmatic diaspora for Europeans during the Romantic era. Some Britons with millenarian yearnings, identifying a Jewish return to Palestine with the end of days and religious apocalypse, dreamed of the creation of a Jewish state. But unlike French emigres or transported convicts, the Jews had no extant nation to which they might return. Perceptions of Jews’ religious and racial difference were compounded by the highly sedimented nature of Jewish cultural identity. Expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I, Jews were readmitted beginning in the midseventeenth century. By contrast, Jewish communities had existed for centuries in other European nations. These groups possessed different subcultures tinged by the national identities of their hosts.1 As a legacy of living secret lives amid the Inquisition, Sephardic Jews in particular had absorbed many traits of their Christian, Spanish neighbors. Todd Endelman explains, “In matters of dress, speech, manners, and the like, bourgeois Sephardim were indistinguishable from their non-Jewish counterparts” (Jews of Georgian England 120). The differences in culture, as well as religious traditions, between Jews of Spanish or Portuguese origin (Sephardim) and those of Central and Eastern Europe (Ashkenazim) could be vast.

The unprecedented influx of French emigrants into Britain during the 1790s was the mirror image of another forced migration: the groups of convicts transported to Botany Bay, Britain’s first imperial venture instituted solely as a means of containing and punishing its criminal classes. After American independence ended transatlantic transportation, a backlog of convicts in the 1780s overcrowded gaols where disease and alarms over prisoner uprisings were endemic. This problem assumed even greater urgency in the 1790s, when authorities came to see the lower orders in general as poised to move against their betters and duplicate the French revolutionary experiment at home. The solution for disposing of the criminals created by economic and political crisis in the later eighteenth century became Australia; as historian Frank McLynn notes, “The fleet that sailed for Botany Bay in 1788 took with it the prisoners who had been in limbo since 1784, men not dangerous enough to hang but too much of a social menace to pardon. Some were veterans of the Woolwich hulks like George Barrington, who had fulfilled the direst prophecies about future recidivism by graduating from petty pickpocketing to the more skilled variety at racetracks” (293).

During Barrington’s passage to Botany Bay, the tainted, mutinous prisoner is relegated, literally and metaphorically, to an area below deck and out of sight; he or she is available to the reader only through the narrator’s fragmentary observations and abbreviated comments. The “cured” convict, Barrington himself, alone merits a continuous story focusing on his sensibility, his courage, and ultimately his triumph as a valued British subject. This aesthetic choice is in keeping with how other famous convicts of the 1790s would present their own experiences of conviction and exile. Four of the five Scottish Martyrs—Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, and Maurice Margarot—experienced transportation through the prism of mutiny.1 All four men sailed for Australia together, aboard the royal transport the HMS Surprize. While Barrington sided with the authorities against potential mutineers, however, the Surprize’s captain became convinced that Palmer and Skirving in particular were collaborating with other convicts to seize control of the ship. Margarot and Muir were drawn into the volley of accusations during the long voyage, the former as an accuser and the latter as a defender of their fellow reformers.

In the opening stanzas of “The Thorn,” the narrator offers a puzzling description of three natural objects: a thorn, a pond, and a hill of moss. The speaker intrigues us by emphasizing how these items partake of multiple, and at times opposing, intangible qualities or physical properties. The thorn is associated both with infancy – it is “Not higher than a two-years’ child” – and advanced age – it “looks so old and grey” (5, 4).1 The small, muddy pool nearby, never completely dry, is neither a proper pond nor dry land. And the adjacent moss heap’s resemblance to “an infant’s grave in size” is qualified, since no grave was ever “half so fair” (52, 55). Finally, the speaker explains what distinguishes these three items

Calling them “juvenile productions, inflated and obscure,” in a letter of 1801 Wordsworth nevertheless offers Anne Taylor An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches as examples of his independent thinking, referring specifically to their “new images, and vigorous lines” (Early Years, 327–8). Wordsworth’s choice of texts emphasizes his belief that their artistic characteristics have an intellectual as well as ideological basis. In choosing productions for publication that would in effect introduce him to the public in 1793, Wordsworth fixed on poems that from their inception acknowledge and interrogate law, culture and literature’s assumptions about wandering and respectability. Both poems depart from conventional topographical writing by introducing speakers who identify with traditionally ornamental homeless people, even as that identification arouses anxiety and physical danger. The 1793 version of An Evening Walk explores similarities between poet and vagrant only, in the end, to prefer a life of directed wandering to the aimless rambles of the text’s opening lines. More than an exploration of a place, An Evening Walk presents the Lake District through the eyes of an observer familiar with the terrain yet estranged from the people and settings he describes. In its tentative exploration of the possibilities of the topographical genre and the rewards and perils of a vagrant aesthetic, the poem is an instructive baseline against which to measure Wordsworth’s subsequent compositions.

The political situation in Britain during the 1790s receives scant attention in any version of The Prelude, especially when we consider the thousands of lines devoted in the 1805 and 1850 versions of the text to events occurring at the same time across the Channel. The one brief commentary on the conservatives who dominated British government during this decade attributes this omission not to indifference to domestic conditions but rather to the poet’s still almost uncontrollable rage over them. In the 1805 Prelude, the narrator claims “this is passion over near ourselves, / Reality too close and too intense” (X.640–1). He adds

To the contemporary reader, the 200 years separating us from the Romantic period may appear a formidable barrier; like the speaker of Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” perhaps we only indistinctly perceive in its poetry and prose “old, unhappy, far-off things, /And battles long ago” (19–20). To scholars seeking a more profound understanding of the culture of the era, this gap may seem wider still. Typically recipients rather than providers of charity, the homeless nevertheless offer this gift to us: a particular and immediate opportunity to reduce this distance. Unlike the poor who have housing, however inadequate, the homeless in today’s cities and towns are unique in their visibility. If the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars seem remote, many Americans have become all too familiar with one of the most common occurrences in the tumultuous Romantic era generally and in Wordsworth’s poetry in particular – an encounter with the homeless. Then, as now, these encounters engendered the twin responses of pity and fear, of relief and repression. Then, as now, the homeless were perceived both as broken people in need of help – as victims of economic and social forces beyond their control – and as willfully idle, as dangers to life, as threats to the value of homes and property. Their poverty elicits pity, even as their social alienation evokes the frightening specter of disorder and crime.

In a comment particularly pertinent to Wordsworth (and indeed to most Romantic writers), Foucault explains the central role that biography played in an important innovation in nineteenth-century police: the development of the concept of delinquency. This rubric replaced the amateur constable’s mission of apprehending criminals, guilty of a discrete offense, with the professional policeman’s diagnosis of delinquents, individuals whose predilection toward crime – whether they actually had violated a law or not – was verified by a “slow formation … shown in a biographical investigation,” carried out from the “triple viewpoint of psychology, social position, and upbringing” (Foucault, D&P, 252). Investigators policing delinquency associated details about an individual’s life seemingly irrelevant to a particular offense with a tendency to commit crime – a practice that in our own time has been rationalized in the profession of the criminal profiler. The twentieth-century identification of certain types of crime with social isolation, regularly disseminated through the newcast cliche for murder suspects, “s/he was a loner,” is one obvious example of the kind of link legal professionals make between crimes and character traits with no obvious, causal connection. Delinquency enters British policing practice not through a desire to circumvent the actions of violent criminals, for example, but in response to the vagrancy problem in London during the 1790s and early 1800s.

When Wordsworth returned to Britain in 1792, the marginality embodied by the homeless had come under unique and extreme pressure. Throughout the volatile 1790s, the crown would work to polarize all political discourse into the categories of radical or conservative – traitorous or loyalist. The Pitt ministry struggled to define virtually all government opposition as sedition or treason. Yet the government’s many critics advocated various shadings of change, ranging from parliamentary reform to revolution, that strained against the authorities’ simplifying agenda, and in key trials English juries defended the right to disagree with aspects of government policy or structure. Representations of the homeless in Wordsworth’s “Salisbury Plain” explore the polyvalent social and legal status, not only of vagrancy itself, but also of the varieties of political expression under attack during the poem’s composition. The female vagrant’s history underscores the injustice of laws labeling her a criminal vagabond by casting her as a victim of powerful political and economic forces. The vagrant and her male companion also indirectly defend an embattled political middle ground, criticizing a conservative government that would lump all reform with revolution. Ultimately the poem views radical and reactionary rhetoric alike with subtle skepticism, implying that these two agendas can be equally restrictive and dogmatic.1 The female vagrant’s homelessness further enables her to evade another kind of tyranny, identified through Burke with the Tory political program: the destructive submersion of individual identity in inflexible, gender-based roles that Wordsworth associates with domestic life.

Specific airway resistance (sRaw) measured by body plethysmography has been shown to decrease markedly with decreasing breathing frequency when the inspired air is not conditioned to body temperature, atmospheric pressure and saturation with water vapour (BTPS). The phenomenon has been attributed to noninstantaneous gas warming and wetting in the airways. The aim of this investigation was to assess whether the phenomenon was also present in a commercialized plethysmograph featuring an "electronic BTPS correction". Airway resistance (Raw) and sRaw were measured in 15 healthy subjects at six breathing frequencies ranging 0.25-3 Hz, using a constant volume plethysmograph in which a correction for non-BTPS gas conditions was applied by electronically flattening the box pressure-airway flow loop (Jaeger Masterscreen Body, version 4.0). The temperature and water vapour saturations in the box averaged 26.5 +/- 1.3 degrees C and 59 +/- 6%, respectively. Raw and sRaw exhibited a clear positive frequency dependence in all but one subject. From 0.25 to 3 Hz Raw increased from (mean+/-SD) 0.62 +/- 0.55 to 1.71 +/- 0.76 hPa x s x L-1 (p

Taxol inhibits the basal and ACTH-stimulated steroidogenesis of cultured mouse adrenocortical tumor cells, presumably by preventing the arrival of cholesterol in mitochondria. In these cells, taxol polymerizes and rearranges microtubules, disperses SER masses, disrupts the Golgi, and impedes the formation of cholesterol-containing lysosomes. However, taxol's alterations in ultrastructure appear likely to permit both a microtubule-based organelle transport proposed to bring mitochondria of unstimulated cells close to alternate sources of cholesterol--the SER and lipid droplets--and postulated ACTH-caused increases in these encounters. Conceivably, taxol may prevent the transfer of cholesterol from the SER and lipid droplets to mitochondria, once the meetings are achieved. To investigate this possibility, we determined the reversibility of taxol's ultrastructural effects and inhibition of steroidogenesis. Primary cultured adrenal tumor cells were incubated for 4 hr with and without ACTH (10 mU/ml). with taxol (50 micrograms/ml), and with ACTH and taxol 50 simultaneously. Some cultures from each set were washed with fresh medium and re-incubated for 1.5 hr. with and without ACTH. Media taken from cultures at the ends of pre- and post-washout incubations were analyzed for the presence of secreted steroids. Sample cultures were fixed for electron microscopy at the ends of both incubations. Data derived from pre-washout incubations confirmed previous reports of taxol's ultrastructural changes and inhibition of steroidogenesis. When cells recovered from taxol in the absence of ACTH, the inhibition of steroidogenesis was completely reversed. In the presence of ACTH, ex-taxol-treated cells demonstrated a "rounding up' and an increased steroid production that are characteristic responses to the hormone. However, in all cases, there was a persistence of taxol's alterations in organelle numbers and arrangements. Our findings establish that the ultrastructural effects of taxol which we recorded cannot prevent mitochondria of unstimulated and ACTH-stimulated adrenal tumor cells from gaining cholesterol. They strengthened the possibility that in pre-washout incubations, taxol allowed organelle motility to bring mitochondria adjacent to cholesterol-containing SER tubules and lipid droplets, but inhibited steroidogenesis by preventing the cholesterol transfer. Taxol might limit the availability of a protein required for the transfer, an effect not visible in our electron micrographs.

In adrenocortical cells, the first step in the enzymatic processing of cholesterol to steroid end products occurs in the mitochondria. ACTH increases mitochondrial cholesterol and steroidogenesis. In cultured mouse adrenocortical tumor cells, microtubule-based organelle motility may increase the proximity of mitochondria to the SER, lipid droplets and endoscome-derived lysosomes, thereby facilitating the transfer of cholesterol from these organelles to the mitochondrial outer membrane. ACTH may increase opportunities for the transfer by promoting organelle motility and by increasing the number of lysosomes. Taxol, a microtubule polymerizer, inhibits basal and ACTH-induced steroidogenesis in these cells, presumably at the step where mitochondria obtain cholesterol. We examined the ultrastructure of taxol-treated, unstimulated and ACTH-stimulated cells, seeking alterations which conceivably could interefer with the proposed organelle transport and encounters, and thus correlate with taxol's inhibition of steroidogenesis. Primary cultured cells were incubated in serum-containing medium for 4 hr with and without ACTH (10 mU/ml), with 10 micrograms/ml and 50 micrograms/ml of taxol, and with ACTH and taxol 10 or taxol 50 simultaneously. Culture media were analyzed for the presence of secreted steroids at the end of 1, 2, and 4 hr of incubation. At the end of the fourth hour, unstimulated cells and cells treated with ACTH, taxol 50, and both agents simultaneously, were fixed and processed for EM. Taxol inhibited basal and ACTH-induced steroidogenesis in a dose-dependent fashion. In both unstimulated and ACTH-stimulated cells, taxol 50 formed numerous microtubule bundles, but did not markedly change the distribution of mitochondria and lipid droplets. SER tubules, and clusters of Golgi fragments, endosomes, and lysosomes appeared to be translocated towards the cell periphery along some of the microtubules. Taxol permitted an ACTH-induced cell rounding and microfilament rearrangement considered to facilitate organelle motility. Our data indicate that taxol disrupts the formation of lysosomes by these adrenal cells, but it seemed unlikely that taxol's ultrastructural effects could prevent organelle transport proposed to cause meetings between mitochondria and the SER or lipid droplets, or prevent ACTH-caused increases in these encounters. Taxol may instead prevent the transfer of lipid droplet or SER-contained cholesterol to adjacent mitochondria, by a means not detectable in our electron micrographs.