AbstractWhen Jules Massenet began work on Hérodiade in the late 1870s, he likely expected to see his work premiered at the Paris Opéra. But the coveted Parisian premiere was not to be. Based on a liberal reworking of the infamous tale of Herod, Salome and John the Baptist, Hérodiade undoubtedly challenges traditional Catholic doctrine. Yet Massenet's opera was not as ‘secular’ as it may seem. I argue here that it draws instead on a Republican-friendly brand of Catholicism that encouraged individual religiosity as an anticlerical strategy. Herein, I argue, lay the reasons why Hérodiade was outlawed. It was not so much the libretto's liberal transformations of biblical characters as what those transformations represented both to the Catholic Church and to the French state: in the end the representation of a simultaneously Republican and Catholic Christ presented a dangerous analogue to the country's strained political situation.
This article examines a recent amendment to Ontario's mental health legislation that was named "in memory" of Brian Smith, a local television personality killed by Jeffrey Arenburg, a person diagnosed with a mental illness. Rather than evaluating the socio-legal validity of "Brian's Law", it critically attends to the emergent "narrative of commemoration" that helped consolidate collective memory of the event. The genesis of the legislation is traced through public documents that support the "storying" of the murder, inquest, and legislative debate, including the "mythologizing" of Smith and the derisive story of Arenburg. Both representations are essential to the social and political efficacy of this "double-narrative" and the formal process of commemoration. The "legacy" of Brian Smith as exemplar of moral and social responsibility depends upon the alternative public conception of Arenburg, as mentally ill and morally ambiguous. Essentially, this narrative reaches beyond individual experience, and even social memory, and becomes enshrined in law as institutional memory.
Elizabeth von Arnim is usually remembered as a novelist whose comic writing immortalised a leisurely life of privilege among flowers. Her first book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Enchanted April (1922) are probably still her best known works. But to know only this is to belie the complexity of her writing and of her place as an author during the first forty years of the twentieth century. Born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, Australia, on 31 August 1866, she was the youngest of six children. In 1870, when she was three years old, the family left Sydney and went to live in London. Here she developed keen interests in history, literature, art and music. Her musical gifts were nourished at the Royal College of Music, where her principal study was the organ. Soon she was considering a career as a professional musician. Inspired by the beauty of this place, her best-selling novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, was published anonymously by Macmillan two years later.
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