{"title":"Waiting for the Rainbow: Poems","authors":"Terence Davies","doi":"10.1111/criq.12765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12765","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"18-23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140808193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Atheism in the Grand Scheme of Things","authors":"Bruce Robbins","doi":"10.1111/criq.12759","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12759","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"54-63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140487102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"T.S. Eliot, Post-War Geopolitics and ‘Eastern Europe’","authors":"Juliette Bretan","doi":"10.1111/criq.12766","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12766","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Digressing from decidedly prosaic themes in a letter to his mother in December 1919 – a lingering cold, Christmas plans and a vague New Year's resolution of writing ‘a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time’ – to include a rousing, two-pronged critique against American apathy towards global peacemaking, and the complicated reconstruction of new nation-states, T.S. Eliot pulls no punches at the state of post-war Europe:</p><p>Eliot was commenting on American isolationism and neutrality following the First World War, with Woodrow Wilson's failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and limited American support for the League of Nations. He was also referring to the slow burn and enduringly complex effort to establish the boundaries of the newly appearing nation states of Europe, especially in its east.<sup>2</sup> This is a passage, we might argue, which reveals Eliot's interest in the east of Europe – an interest particularly manifesting as a recurrent anxiety about affairs in Vienna, which he pedestals as a site of inarticulable human suffering, reflecting the widespread popularity of support for the city at the time in British cultural and political circles.<sup>3</sup> However, the letter also suggests a certain tension within Eliot's perspective. For whilst he specifies Viennese sympathy, this is counterpointed against a stigmatisation of the wider political difficulties in the region post-war, which were contributing to civic breakdown. Central Europe and Vienna are to be supported, but the wider politics is a ‘fiasco’; a word which imagines not only disaster but also sheer ludicrousness, as if it is unreasonable to even think of the possibility of a ‘reorganisation of nationalities’ in that area in the first place. For Eliot, concepts of national structure, curation and control have limited scope within what was a multi-ethnic and transforming space.</p><p>Eliot's interest in the region remained; for, three years later, a note he provided within the first edition of <i>The Waste Land</i> – that ‘long poem’ he mentions in his letter – claimed the masterpiece (or, at least, one of its sections) was similarly inspired by what he described as ‘the present decay of Eastern Europe’.<sup>4</sup> Similarly, but not quite: for this time Eliot does not redeem the region with tales of victims of Vienna but simply inflates the appalling conditions in the region to a broad-sweep devastation. His description, as many critics have noted, reflects common stereotypes about the region following the First World War: the collapse of the Russian, Habsburg and German Empires, cultural heterogeneity, rising nationalism and lack of legal-political authority in the area meant it was often seen as unstable and volatile within western-inspired and universally applied models of nationality and statehood.<sup>5</sup> In 1919, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Lloyd George, suggested the region's ‘nations were going straight to perdition’; ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"51-71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12766","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139585533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Witch Hunt","authors":"Peter Womack","doi":"10.1111/criq.12768","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12768","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Although almost nobody has been prosecuted for witchcraft since the eighteenth century, people are often accused of it today if we can believe Daniel Barenboim, John Bercow, Jair Bolsonaro, Novak Djokovic, Paul Gambaccini, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Luis Rubiales, Alex Salmond, Donald Trump, Jacob Zuma or the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford.<sup>1</sup> Over the last three or four years, all these people have complained (or the complaint has been made on their behalf) that they are the victims of a ‘witch hunt’. What do they mean by it?</p><p>One thing they mean, clearly, is that they are innocent of whatever it is they are being accused of. In England, witchcraft ceased to be a crime in 1735 because by then there was an emergent consensus, at least among the parliamentary class, that it does not really exist. After that date, alleged witches might still be prosecuted, but only for fraud.<sup>2</sup> Within this consensus, calling my accusers ‘witch hunters’ implies that they cannot possibly be right because my alleged crime is illusory. The tactical usefulness of the term is therefore obvious: it saves going into a lot of tiresome and perhaps contestable detail. Considered as a simple defensive move, however, it pays for its logical conclusiveness by its lack of referential force. If it is indeed universally acknowledged that witchcraft is non-existent, then for just that reason counter-accusations of witch hunting are universally understood to be metaphorical. So the bare naming is not enough: I must also convince my audience that the metaphor is applicable and appropriate. To see how that is done, we need to consider the other half of the phrase.</p><p>As far as I can tell, nobody talked about witch <i>hunting</i> until long after it had stopped happening. The expression appears very rarely before the nineteenth century, and when it does, it means something else. For example, a religious tract of 1618 denounced ‘witch hunters’, and a sermon published in 1657 was severe on ‘witch-hunting Atheists’, but a quick inspection of the contexts makes it clear that both these writers were referring to people who seek out witches not in order to punish them but in order to commission them to cast spells.<sup>3</sup> The fact that the expression was intelligible in that sense suggests that in seventeenth-century English the meaning it has today is not merely unattested but impossible: ‘witch hunters’ could hardly be applied to the witch's persecutors if it was already understood to denote her clients. It is striking, then, that academic studies now routinely use it to refer to the former. Even historians who are careful to define and subdivide the term ‘witch’ in the light of early modern usage nevertheless deploy the modern concept of a witch <i>hunt</i> without introduction or qualification.<sup>4</sup> It seems that although the expression was unknown to the hunters themselves, its meaning is obvious to everyone now.</p><p>In other words, the ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 2","pages":"121-125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12768","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139557497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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