Elspeth Graham

'Geraniums (red) and Delphiniums (blue)': Trauma, Ethics, and Medical Communications

More official complaints about medical treatment in the UK relate to poor communications than to wrong diagnoses. This article, in considering the importance of communications training for clinicians, is structured into three sections. From use of a story that introduces the idea of miscommunication and trauma in the first section, the article moves, in the second, to a theorisation of trauma as a concept, addressing issues of intersubjectivity, the relationship between embodied and psychological being, and ethics. From this, the third section engages directly with medical communications training, exemplifying a particular literary-studies approach to matters of communication.

The Duke of Newcastle’s ‘Love [. . .] For Good Horses’: An Exploration of Meanings

The essay here focuses mainly on this version, which makes accessible an English written text, along with the original illustrations, since both written and visual elements of the text are crucial. The aim is to unpick the meanings of the aesthetic that shapes Newcastles horsemanship books. In doing this, some emotional and psychic structures that inhere in a series of forms and cultural trends are explored. At the same time, in considering ways in which Newcastles life trajectory may have produced his particular investment in such aesthetics, suggesting ways in which Newcastles particular negotiations of royalist values might be seen to be produced and reproduced through the informing aesthetic of his practices of, and writings on, horsemanship. But, although an ultimate concern of this essay is similarly with systems of ideas, values and political meanings, where the want is to start with the simple proposition that Newcastle loved horses. Keywords:emotional and psychic structures; horsemanship; Newcastle; political meanings

Researching Memory in Early Modern Studies

This essay pursues the study of early modern memory across a chronologically, conceptually and thematically broad canvas in order to address key questions about the historicity of memory and the methodologies of memory studies. First, what is the value for our understanding of early modern memory practices of transporting the methodologies of contemporary memory studies backwards, using them to study the memorial culture of a time before living memory? Second, what happens to the cross-disciplinary project of memory studies when it is taken to a distant period, one that had its own highly self-conscious and much debated cultures of remembering? Drawing on evidence and debates from a range of disciplinary locations, but primarily focusing on literary and historical studies, the essay interrogates crucial differences and commonalities between memory studies and early modern studies.

Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature

Troubling an opposition between private and public realms has proved a fruitful strategy for the examination of early-modern English society and gender roles over the past two decades. A juxtaposition, for instance, of Gill Perry’s work, showing how portraiture, as an apparently private form, becomes crucially performative in the case of late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century portraits of actresses, with Susan Wiseman’s analysis, in her Conspiracy and Virtue, of women’s relationship to politics might suggest something of the range of ways that the public/private distinction has been creatively blurred in recent analyses of the period.1 The opening sentences of Mary E. Trull’s Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature, picking up on her title, promise a similarly stimulating intervention into debates about the complex negotiations that early-modern women made of different spheres:

Being Human and Being Animal in Twentieth-Century Horse-Whispering Writings

What does it mean to be human? Although this question has, self-evidently, always been central to thought in the humanities, it has been asked in new ways and with increasing frequency over the past few decades. In particular, what is variously referred to as late-modernity, high-modernity or postmodernity has raised questions about modernity’s predication on human-centred positivism. Postmodern and posthuman thought, with an emphasis on the systemic, has not only queried the absolute centrality of the human to the operations and significance of the world, replacing ideas of humanity as the crucial source of agency and meaning with a notion of the human as a generative intersection in a system, but has de-integrated the human itself. The human becomes the product of an accidental and temporary coalescence of forces, a site which is affected by, as well as affecting, larger systems, and which even in its existence as a temporary stasis is fundamentally riven, only ever occupying a position of provisional integration.

The Horse as Cultural Icon

In spite of the importance of horses to Western society until comparatively recent times, scholars have paid very little attention to them. This volume helps to redress the balance, emphasizing their iconic appeal as well as their utilitarian functions.