Search Results (5)

This paper examines secondary rock art practices in southern Africa and how they served as mechanisms for expressing and negotiating identity through iterative engagement with existing artistic traditions. Often dismissed as mere ’graffiti’ or vandalism, these practices of modifying, adding to, or reinterpreting historic rock art represent sophisticated forms of engagement with inherited cultural landscapes. Through detailed analysis of mode, placement, and technique, this article demonstrates how secondary artists used existing imagery as both physical and symbolic resources, selectively mobilising earlier artforms to articulate their own positions within changing social worlds. With their technical choices encoding specific attitudes towards inherited traditions, secondary artists appear as one of many audiences—a range which includes contemporary researchers—engaging with these artistic traditions as subjects of common interest, their modifications creating material epistolaries that capture how different communities understood and positioned themselves relative to their own imaginations of the past. By reconceptualising these practices as meaningful interpretive acts rather than degradation, this paper contributes to broader discussions about how African identities have been articulated, contested, and preserved through active engagement with cultural heritage across time. Full article

In contemporary New Testament studies, the question of whether Paul employed Greco-Roman rhetoric in his writings and preaching remains contentious. A prominent critic of Paul’s rhetorical usage is Duane Litfin, whose works, St. Paul’s Theology of Proclamation: 1 Corinthians 1–4 and Greco-Roman Rhetoric (1994) and Paul’s Theology of Preaching: The Apostle’s Challenge to the Art of Persuasion in Ancient Corinth (2015), argue that Paul outright rejected rhetoric in favor of a straightforward proclamation of the gospel. Litfin asserts that Paul viewed himself as a herald rather than a rhetorician, that his preaching was devoid of rhetorical adornment, and that 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:5 represents a universal theology of preaching. Litfin further suggests that Paul did not employ rhetoric in his Acts sermons, thereby aligning his epistolary and Acts portrayals of Paul. This article critically evaluates Litfin’s position by addressing five key issues. First, it challenges Litfin’s claim that Paul rejected rhetoric generally, arguing instead that Paul likely repudiated sophistic rhetoric or ornate styles rather than rhetoric per se. Second, it disputes Litfin’s dichotomy between heralds and orators, contending that Paul, identified as an apostle rather than a herald, was not bound by such a false binary. Third, it critiques Litfin’s assumption that 1 Corinthians 1–4 serves as Paul’s comprehensive theology of preaching, arguing instead that the passage is context-specific and not indicative of a universal preaching methodology. Fourth, it rejects Litfin’s view of 1 Corinthians as an apology for Paul’s ministry and style, suggesting instead that it addresses Corinthian divisions and promotes unity. Lastly, the article refutes Litfin’s claim that Paul did not use rhetoric in Acts, highlighting that the rhetorical nature of Acts’ speeches suggests otherwise. Ultimately, this article argues that Paul did not categorically reject rhetoric but utilized it in various forms to effectively communicate the gospel. Full article

The final decades of the eighteenth century saw the significant expansion of botanical propagation and collections across the globe, both as an aesthetic corollary and to provide the underpinning resources for imperialism. The focus of this article is the development of the network between botanists in India and England in the 1790s through the correspondence between William Roxburgh (1751–1815), superintendent of the Botanical Garden in Calcutta from 1793, and Sir James Edward Smith (1759–1820), who as Sarah Law notes, was ‘a focus of correspondence with every serious botanist in the world’ (Law, 2007, 184). Such networks were sustained by letters describing the plants and the treatment they needed, the habitat from which they had been taken, and details of how they had been collected and packed. Epistolary writing between plant hunters and British collectors can be understood, I suggest, as a form of travel writing. This is a form in which correspondence builds connections and relationships between fellow scientists and enthusiasts and the fragmentary focus on place, and the mobility of humans is replaced by close attention to the aesthetic and biological details of plants and the best ways of securing their successful transport across the globe. Using an ecocritical frame, this article explores the position of plants and biological specimens themselves as travellers and considers the ways in which their care and preservation have been articulated through sociable correspondence. Full article

In this article, I explore performances of letter writing within the archives of the London-based theatre company Clean Break, who work with justice-experienced women and women at risk. Clean Break’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute in London contains an extensive collection of production ephemera and letters. Charting the company’s development across forty years of theatre productions, public advocacy, and work in prisons and community settings, these materials of the archive—strategic documents, annotated playscripts and rehearsal notes, production photography and correspondence—reveal the acute importance of the letter to people living on the immediate borderlands of the prison. Despite these generative resonances, however, the epistolary form is very rarely used in Clean Break’s theatre: as the archive reveals, since the company was founded by two women in HM Prison Askham Grange in 1979, stagings of letters have occurred in only a handful of instances. In this archival exploration of the epistolary in three works by Clean Break—a film broadcast by the BBC, a play staged at the Royal Court, and a circular chain-play written by women in three prisons—I investigate what lifeworlds beyond prison epistolary forms in performance propose. Full article

Scholarship on letters in modern Japanese literature typically describes their discursive transformation from objects of practical import to texts of literary significance in the late Meiji 30s and 40s, a transformation contemporaneous to and engendered by the sudden explosion of interest in autobiographical literary texts. Such an approach, however, unintentionally denigrates the complexity of late-Meiji era fiction’s negotiation with the epistolary discourse that flourished in this era. Seeking a broader engagement with this hitherto underexamined discourse, I take Tayama Katai’s (1872–1930) famous I-novel, The Quilt (1907), as a test case, arguing that the letters embedded there engage with the contemporary conversation on letters on four levels: content, linguistic style, subjectivity, and hermeneutics. I argue that, far from reaffirming the overlap between letters and literature, Katai’s text evinces a consistently oppositional stance toward contemporary epistolary dogma, problematizing, interrogating, and subverting it at every turn. I conclude by proposing that this defiant stance toward typical conceptualizations of the letter is common to other I-novels of the period, suggesting that the I-novel was only born through a conspicuous disavowal of the letter form. Full article