'She travels alone and unattended’: the visit to the Eastern Cape of the botanical artist, Marianne North
- Authors: Beard, Margot
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147759 , vital:38668 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.2007.11877077
- Description: The visit of the botanical artist, Marianne North, to South Africa during 1882 to 1883, although frequently referred to, has not received much close attention; nor has her account of the visit, in her ‘Recollections of a happy’ life, been set against the actual conditions she would have encountered. This paper attempts to flesh out at least part of that visit, specifically the weeks she spent in the Eastern Cape Colony and, more particularly, her visits to Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown and Port Alfred. What were these three centres like at the time? Who were the people she mentions? Where did she stay? How do her observations tally with other accounts of the period?.
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- Date Issued: 2017
From Baudelaire to Beardsley: some thoughts on Poe's beast as an indicator of the tastes and fears of nineteenth-century Europe
- Authors: Beard, Margot
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147781 , vital:38672 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.2001.11876980
- Description: Charles Baudelaire (1821 1867) was one of the major influences on the French Decadent poets of the late nineteenth century whose aesthetic principles were shared, to a large extent, by a group of English poets and artists, among whom was Aubrey Beardsley (1872 1898). One of the major influences on Baude laire had been the American, Edgar Allan Poe (1809 1849), in whose short stories and poems Baudelaire had recognised a kindred spirit. Some intriguing aspects of changing nine teenth century attitudes emerge from a study of Baudelaire's 1856 translation of Poe's `The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and Beardsley's 1893 illustration to this story.
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- Date Issued: 2017
Parallel visions: Byron, Géricault and the Medusa
- Authors: Beard, Margot
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147792 , vital:38673 , https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.1999.11761285
- Description: Martin Meisel has noted that Delacroix's 1841 painting A Shipwreck was recognised as uniting Gericault and Byron. for not only does the painting illustrate that moment in Don Juan when lots are drawn for the human sacrifice {2, 75) but it also invokes comparison with Gericault' s 1819 painting entitled Raft of the Medusa(Meisel1988:601).1 would like to argue in this paper that Gericault' s famous painting and Byron's shipwreck stanzas in the second canto of Don Juan have other points of comparison. Gericault used the Savigny and Correard Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal ( 1817) as the primary source of information for his treatment of the Medusa incident (Eitner 1971: 117). Byron used multiple sources when he researched material for his shipwreck stanzas but it is highly probable that the Savigny and Correard text was one of them. Thus, the cause celebre of the wreck of the Medusa is directly treated by Gericault and indirectly by Byron - two artists temperamentally and artistically attuned.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Dog Latin, Norman Morrissey : book review
- Authors: Beard, Margot
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6115 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003828
- Description: I have only seen one earlier collection of Morrissey's - his slim volume Seasons (1999). Therein he revealed his enjoyment and interest in haiku. Even the two longer poems in that volume were haiku-like, being brief self-contained stanzas grouped under a single title. His new volume, Dog Latin, consists of sixty short poems primarily concerned with man and nature. A number of these are haiku-like in their brevity ("Edgar on Inclusive Fitness," "Setting Ratbane," "Adam Again"), although they too often do not amount to more than post-it like notes. ("This habit / of holding habits to the wind / -me" is the sum total of the poem "Adam Again.") The epigraph to the whole collection is the final stanza of Robert Frost's "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," which suggests both Morrissey's interest in the apparently unconsidered minutiae of natural objects and beings, and, it would seem, an admiration of Frost's deceptively plain, unmannered style.
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- Date Issued: 2007
Lessons from the dead masters: Wordsworth and Byron in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace
- Authors: Beard, Margot
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6114 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003827
- Description: As one whose research interests lie in the field of Romanticism, most specifically Wordsworth and Byron, I was obviously intrigued by J. M. Coetzee's use of these poets in Disgrace. Subsequent readings of the work have convinced me that more attention needs to be paid to the deeper implications of their presence in the text. Certainly many scholars have explored the significance of David Lurie's professional interest in the Romantic poets and the novel's imbeddedness in what Jane Taylor has referred to as "the European Enlightenment's legacy of the autonomy of the individual" as well as a specifically "eighteenth century model of philosophical sympathy" (1999, 25). Yet I feel that insufficient attention has been paid to the significance of Romanticism, the Wordsworthian and the Byronic in the novel. Generally, the commentary ranges from seeing Lurie's academic interests as symptomatic of his white colonialist mentality to a more nuanced but insufficiently developed focus on the possibilities lying behind Coetzee's startling juxtaposition of two of the most famed and yet most overtly antagonistic of the Romantic poets. Zoë Wicomb is representative of the first approach. In her estimation, Lurie may be rejected since he "looks to Europe as the centre of reference" and "our feelings and experiences of nature need not be structured by poetic discourses from the metropolis".
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- Date Issued: 2007