Marysa Demoor

On the Use of Case Based Reasoning Techniques in Flexible Querying

Case based reasoning (CBR) is a methodology where new problems are solved by investigating, adapting and reusing solutions to a previously solved, similar problem. Hereby knowledge is deduced from the characteristics of a collection of past cases, rather than induced from a set of knowledge rules that are stored in a knowledge base. In this paper we describe how fuzzy CBR techniques can be used to enhance the accessibility of relational databases, more specifically, flexible querying of regular relational databases. Two approaches are discussed: an approach where a database system is extended with a standalone instance- based prediction facility and an approach where such a prediction facility is embedded as an extension of the relational algebra. In both approaches, fuzzy set theory is used for the gradual modelling of similarity. Furthermore, its related possibility theory is used for the modelling of query satisfaction and for the handling of the inevitable uncertainty that occurs when predictions are made.

From epitaph to obituary: The death politics of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

This essay explores how modernist writers adopted and adapted the epitaph, the obituary, and the memoir. In particular, posthumous homages by Eliot and Pound to Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and James Joyce show the two modernist poets reworking traditional memorial genres for their own purposes, by using such age-old salutes to dead colleagues to position themselves and their generation within literary history and the canon.

‘And the winner is?’ Researching the relationship between gender and literary awards in Flanders, 1981–20001

This article focuses on the correlation between the gender of authors and the winners of literary awards in Flanders in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The hypothesis is that the chances of winning such an award are different for male and female writers. The article will investigate the reasons for this imbalance. The authors look at the impact the gender of the authors seems to have and at the gender of the judges. The article will answer questions such as: Are female authors treated unfairly by the Flemish literary system? Does an all-male jury favour male candidates? Do men write ‘better’ books? Yet the article will also consider the professionalism of female authors: are they somehow to blame for the imbalance? Do they enter competitions as fervently as male authors? Are they willing to promote themselves and create the necessary networks? Finally, the article will investigate whether there is a difference between the literary genres: are female writers of childrens books more likely to win an award than their female colleagues writing for adults?

His way is thro' chaos and the bottomless and pathless: The gender of madness in Alfred Tennyson's poetry.

This article deals with the theme of madness in Lord Alfred Tennysons poetry. It is well-known that several of Tennysons relatives suffered from bouts of insanity. Indeed, Tennyson himself at one time feared he would succumb to one or other mental disease. The subject has already drawn the attention of several Tennysonian specialists and Ann Colley devoted an entire book to it in 1985, but this essay focuses on the hitherto unnoticed importance of gender to the madness issue. It contends that Tennysons early poems, featuring melancholy, medieval young women as protagonists, gave him the opportunity of describing the disease in people who were far removed from his own situation and person. Only when he was happily married and the father of two sons did he create a male character who might be said to mirror some of his own experiences.

The Roots of RSVP: An Interview with Founding RSVP President Michael Wolff

This interview retraces the origins of RSVP so as to be able to reconstruct the growth and expansion of a new and exciting research area.

Mutual (In)Comprehensions: France and Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century

is leading. This is not to the unified, pyramidal Comédie humaine of earlier critics such as André Allemand and Per Nykrog but to a dynamic œuvre-monde where Balzac’s own categories, such as the Études de mœurs and the Études philosophiques, are open and porous— witness the shuttling between each grouping of the same recurring characters and the temporal and epistemological dislocations caused by these characters’ shifts from protagonist to bit-part at different moments and in different texts. Time in Balzac is, therefore, neither linear nor teleological but haphazard and constructed, a ‘sérialité infinie’ (360). What characterises Balzac’s œuvre-monde is thus (its) incompleteness, where even Balzac himself becomes the chameleon ‘auteur-reparaissant’, surrounded by a myriad (other) reappearing characters (316). Equally open is, as Massonnaud shows in a fourth section, Balzac’s transposition of biological and botanical models to La Comédie humaine. Whilst never disavowing the ‘fixism’ of Cuvier, Balzac uses the ‘transformism’ of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the portrayal of ever-developing ‘species’ as in the metamorphoses of Vautrin and in the mobility of the Comédie humaine’s classificatory categories—both of which need the time and the space of the long work. After a final chapter examining Balzac’s remodelling of the memoir form with his/its mixture of history and story, Massonnaud concludes this dense, ambitious and impressively researched volume with a reminder that the œuvre-monde of Balzac’s numerous successors—from Zola to Verne and Romain Rolland to Proust—tends, however subtle or ground-breaking, to be narrower in remit or focus than La Comédie humaine.

Sibling Collaboration and Literary After-life: The Case of the Brontës

Abstract This article argues that Charlotte Brontë effected a thorough mediation of Emily Brontë’s authorial image after her death by becoming her sister’s editor. For the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte extensively edited Emily’s poetry and wrote an influential ‘Biographical Notice’ and ‘Preface’. She also composed new lines for some of the poems, establishing herself as a true co-author of her sister’s work. Her purpose, as this article argues, was to soften the ‘coarse’, masculine image that the critics’ reviews had attributed to the writer of Wuthering Heights. Thus, Charlotte created the image of a more innocent, female poet, in a deliberate (?) attempt to replace the existing view of Emily as a rough, unfeminine writer.

Laurence Binyon and the Modernists: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and F. T. Marinetti

This article will claim that Laurence Binyon deserves a reassessment for two reasons: his critical work has echoes in the poetic theory of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and, secondly, he was a pivotal figure for the avant-garde in Britain. Although Binyon started his career in the late Victorian period and his work may not appear to diverge from that of his direct predecessors, he was susceptible to some of the most innovative artistic movements of the early twentieth century. His early texts on Chinese and Japanese art show that Binyon was much more modern than Pounds biographers claim, and his work needs to be assessed in that light. Binyons use of the term “make it new” long before Pound first mentioned it and his progressive poetics in “Poetry and Modern Life” are particularly interesting for our thesis.

When the King Becomes your Personal Enemy: W. T. Stead, King Leopold II, and the Congo Free State

This paper highlights an unknown but important episode in the life of the journalist W. T. Stead, which, intriguingly, remained unmentioned in Belgian, British, and colonial historiography. It concerns a face-to-face meeting between Stead and Leopold II, King of the Belgians, which certainly did not leave Stead the ‘friend of all Kings’, as the posthumous article published by the Daily Mirror contended. Based on Stead’s own Character Sketches in the Review of Reviews, the paper will show how Stead’s perceptions of the scandalous government of the Congo Free State result to a large extent from his own meeting (probably towards the end of 1884) with King Leopold II, and the King’s refusal to cooperate with Britain in an improvised rescue of General Gordon in Sudan.

George Eliot, European Novelist, JOHN RIGNALL 2011, Aldershot, Ashgate, 184 pp., 978 1-409-42234-1, hb. £49.50.

poet, Fallon contends, has made the proud Samson out of elements of his own self-conception. In that the mature Milton comes nearest to the Augustinian narrative of conviction and regeneration. Another commendable feature of Fallon’s achievement is that he spares us another jolly good trip through Milton criticism. Though some of his footnotes, especially in the latter part, are very elaborate and occasionally contain ideas that would deserve to be incorporated into the text, he keeps his references to a minimum, concentrating instead on his argument and Milton’s words. And his writing reads well, which is not very common in English studies these days. A must for any Milton scholar or enthusiast.