Abstract: This annotation explores an unremarked upon provenance feature of the Paris Apocalypse (Paris, BnF Ms. fr 403), a mid-thirteenth-century illustrated Anglo-Norman Book of Revelation. While early scholars, such as Delisle, Meyer, and James, concerned their scholarship primarily with establishing a stemma to relate the Apocalypse manuscripts to each other, modern scholarship on the Apocalypses, such as that of Lewis, Emmerson, and Morgan, interests itself in using the Apocalypses to better understand reading habits and the culture surrounding them. This annotation offers an examination of a short ownership rhyme included on the back coverboard of the Paris Apocalypse which reads "Christus homo factus; W(illel)m prosperet actus." This rhyme appears in Oxford Bodl. Ms 110, an early fifteenth-century English composite manuscript of 184 leaves containing a collection of medieval Latin works of Christian instruction and preaching. After a comparison of the paleographic features, I fit the owner, William Cleve, into the known provenance narrative of the Paris Apocalypse and find that his brief ownership of the book was in fact likely.

Résumé:  Conservé au Royaume-Uni, à la John Rylands Library de Manchester (cote 17252), le bloc d’imprimerie xylographique que nous étudions dans cet article est de datation incertaine. Pour certains il remonterait au xve siècle et il serait par conséquent le plus ancien outil d’imprimeur en bois que nous conservions. Pour d’autres il aurait été fabriqué siècle xviiie et imiterait l’iconographie médiévale. Faute d’investigations scientifiques plus poussées, la date exacte du bloc de bois ne peut pas être établie. Notre article envisage donc les deux hypothèses de datation au regard la tradition iconographique (l’image gravée sur ce bloc représente une scène de la vie de saint Jean largement inspirée des Apocalypses figurées des xiiie et xive siècles) et de nos connaissances sur l’histoire de ce bloc. Nous examinons ainsi le statut cet objet selon qu’il est un authentique artefact du siècle xve siècle , ou selon qu’il est une imitation du xviiie siècle.

Abstract: Housed in the United Kingdom, at the John Rylands Library in Manchester (item number 17252), the xylographic printing block that we study in this article has an uncertain date. Some scholars believe that it dates to the fifteenth century and that it is, consequently, the oldest extant woodblock printing apparatus. Other scholars believe that it was made in the eighteenth century and it imitates the medieval iconography. Lacking more scientific investigations, the exact date of the woodblock cannot be established. Our article investigates both possibilities of dating in regard to the iconographic tradition (the carved image on the block represents a scene from the life of St. John, largely inspired by the illustrated Apocalypses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) and of our understanding of the block. We examine, therefore, the status of the block as an object that is an authentic fifteenth-century object and as an eighteenth-century imitation. 

Abstract: In The Witch in the Wood, T. H. White's depiction of the Orkney clan becomes a manifestation of his own grappling with tensions between England and Ireland and his persional relationship with these nations through references to Brian Merriman's Cúirt An Mheán Oiche and the works of Malory, among others.  

Abstract: In the wake of his (now lost) thesis on Thomas Malory at Queen's College of Cambridge University in the late 1920s, Terence Hanbury White was poised to remark upin the different representations of chivalry in historical literatures. White'stetralogy, The Once and Future King (1958), demonstrates his knowledge of the Arthurian tradition and related elements of medieval culture. I propose that through the precursor texts figured in White's work we can discern his responses to various pressing political (and, for White, personal) concerns of early twentieth century England; chief among these interests was the imminence of World War II. I focus on two Lancelot related examples to suggest that White's aggregate of precursor texts is not a superficial pastiche of textual and cultural references, but a calculated selection of allusions to critique this and other contemporary issues in a sophisticated way.

Abstract:

 This paper compares and analyses the differences between Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) and filmic versions by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and Adrian Lyne (1994), focusing on the respective characterisations of Clare Quilty, as mediated through his encounter with Humbert Humbert at a pivotal scene at the Enchanted Hunter’s Lodge. Following an in-depth analysis of the scene in question, the article then examines Kubrick’s Lolita, exploring the homosocial undertones of Peter Sellers’s Quilty, and the attendant commentary on heteronormative culture of late 1950s/early 1960s America. Finally, Lyne’s interpretation of this encounter will be analysed to discern how a menacing Quilty alters the narrative and deviates from the previous representations, updating the social commentary to incorporate a distinctly 1990s milieu in the process. Treating the two films as iterations and/or 

mutations of the original literature, the article proposes a comparatist-driven analysis to discern each artist’s intentions toward the narrative as exemplified by this crucial meeting of minds.

Abstract: A translation from French into English of a passage from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, wherein Axel dreams he is seeing the geological creation of the world. 

This translation was part of a larger project I did in Professor Paul Losensky’s translation theory course in the Spring of 2014 at Indiana University. I also wrote an analytical paper considering the development and cultural contexts of the Spanish and German translations of Voyage.