Geoffrey Hartmann, Scars of the Spirit: the struggle against inauthenticity (Palgrave, November 2002)

Launched at the Institute of English Studies, 5 November 2002

Geoffrey Hartman is a noted literary critic, Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Holocaust video testimony project at Yale.  He left Germany as a child as part of the kindertransport.

In this fascinating collection of essays, Geoffrey Hartman raises the essential question of where we can find the real or authentic in today's world, and how this affects the way we can understand our human predicament. Hartman explores such issues as the fantasy of total and perfect information available on the internet, the biographical excesses of tell-all daytime talk shows, and how we can understand what is "true" in biographical and testimonial writing. And, what, he asks, is the ethical point of all this personal testimony? What has it really taught us? Underlying the entire book is a question of how the Holocaust has shaped the possibilities for truth and for the writing of an authentic life story in today's world, and how we can approach the world in a meaningful way. Hartman produces a meditation on how an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of art and writing may help us to answer these questions of meaning. His idea is that the form of contemplation produced by the aesthetic, and particularly by poetry resists both the fantasy of data delivering up its own final meaning and of ideology delivering us from literature and life.

Ben Levitas, The Theatre of the Nation - Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism, 1860-1916 (Oxford University Press, 2002)

Ben Levitas is a Lecturer in Drama, Goldsmiths' College, University of London. The Theatre of Nation is a study of the development of the theatre movement and its relationship to political change in Ireland during the pre-revolutionary period. Ben Levitas traces the connections between Irish drama and Irish politics, and concludes that Ireland's theatre had a pivotal role to play in the controversies of its time and in the coming revolution.

Paulina Kewes, Plagiarism in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2002)

Launched at the Institute of English Studies, 16 January 2003

Paulina Kewes is Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her publications include Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710 (Clarendon Press, 1998) and articles on Shakespeare, Dryden, and the drama from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. She is completing a book on theatrical representations of history in early modern England.

What is plagiarism? How was it understood and judged in early modern England? This interdisciplinary study sets out at once to theorize and historicise plagiarism. The first part launches a vigorous debate about the ethical, philosophical, artistic, and legal implications of plagiarism. Individual essays in part two provide historical case studies. Variously centred on translations of the Bible, historiography, drama, poetry, dance treatises, sermons, and colonial grammars, the essays show how a nexus of concepts developed between the Renaissance and the early nineteenth century - plagiarism, imitation, forgery, copyright, and intellectual property - and how they have been defined and contested.