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Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
Reading
the Past
Across Space
and Time
Receptions and
World Literature
Edited by Brenda Deen Schildgen

and Ralph Hexter
Series Editor
Robert T. Tally Jr.

Texas State University
San Marcos, Texas, USA
Aim of the Series
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing
on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial
turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of
innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism,
broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in
spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography,
cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally,
geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation
of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where
fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and
collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often
in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical
and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary
Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place,
and mapping in literature and in the world.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15002
Brenda Deen Schildgen • Ralph Hexter
Editors
Reading the Past

Across Space
and Time
Receptions and World Literature
Editors
Brenda Deen Schildgen Ralph Hexter
Comparative Literature Classics and Comparative Literature
University of California, Davis University of California, Davis
Davis, California, USA Davis, California, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-56543-3 ISBN 978-1-137-55885-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55885-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957888
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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Acknowledgments
A collaborative project, this collection of essays emerged from a conference

at UC Davis in 2013 titled “Receptions: Reading the Past Across Space
and Time.” The conference was the culmination of a two-year UC Davis
Academic Senate Research funded initiative focused on “Receptions.”
In keeping with the National Endowment for the Humanities’ call for
interdisciplinary transcultural projects, this initiative chose “intercultural
receptions” as its focus. Our particular interest was reception of liter-
ary works from earlier periods into later ones, and it included (1) tran-
shistorical receptions, (2) transpatial receptions, (3) translation, and (4)
post-“orientalism.”
Reception studies confront us with the changing intellectual and
cultural roles of sacred and profane canons of art and literature in the
broadest sense. Indeed, tracking receptions requires an examination of
the cultural setting of the reception in which the new work appears; the
authority of learned environments and educational systems in general; and
the relationship of culture and politics where canons and their reception
are created, translated, promulgated, and preserved. Avoiding the conten-
tious discussions about the “western” literary canon and its collusion with
power elites that have permeated educational establishments in the United
States in the last forty years, this initiative chose to examine how the vari-
ous appropriations of earlier texts and cultural forms have responded to
them as prompts, imitated or echoed them, inspired new cultural and
artistic forms, deliberately swerved from them, misread them, selectively
read or edited them, undermined them, or otherwise used them, all of
which constitute their reception history.
v
vi Acknowledgments
Professor Ralph Hexter, Professor Wai Chee Dimock, and Professor

Arturo Arias gave the keynote talks, all three discussing recycled epics.
These talks are revised for this volume. The steering committee that
supported the receptions initiative at UC Davis comprised Emily Albu
and Rex Stem, Classics; Xiaomei Chen, East Asian Languages and
Literature; Joseph Sorensen, East Asian Languages and Literature; Jan
Szaif, Philosophy; and Archana Venkatesan, Comparative Literature and
Religious Studies, who organized the conference. All participated in
the selection of the original papers, of which nine (the three mentioned
above and those by Professor Zina Giannopoulou (Classics, University
of California, Irvine), Kevin Batton (Classics, University of California,
Irvine), Professor Jan Szaif (Philosophy, University of California,
Davis), Michael Griffin (Philosophy, University of British Columbia),
Adam Siegel (Reference Librarian, University of California, Davis), and
Professor Michelle Yeh, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Davis)
are included in this volume. The remainder of the essays were delivered
as part of either the receptions initiative at UC Davis—Professor Zhang
Longxi (Comparative Literature, City University of Hong Kong) and Uwe
Vagelpohl (Cambridge University)—or invitations to contribute as Kristen
Bergman (Assistant Professor, Grove City College), Professor Chunjie
Zhang (German and Comparative Literature, UC Davis), Robert Borgen
(Professor Emeritus of Japanese History and Literature, UC Davis), and
Professor Gisèle Sapiro (Gisèle Sapiro (Directrice de recherche au CNRS
et directrice d’études à l’EHESS, Université Paris1-Panthéon-Sorbonne).
The general and final editing was the work of Brenda Deen Schildgen
and Ralph Hexter, whereas primary editing of individual essays was divided
among the steering committee. Thus, Joseph Sorensen edited the essays of
Robert Borgen, Kristen Bergman, Chunjie Zhang, and Michelle Yeh; Rex
Stem edited those of Zina Giannopoulou, Kevin Batton, and Adam Siegel;
and Jan Szaif edited those of Uwe Vagelpohl and Michael Griffin. We
thank Dr. Laura Pfuntner for her able assistance in compiling the index.
Contents
Reading the Past Across Space and Time: Receptions

and World Literature1
Brenda Deen Schildgen and Ralph Hexter
Part I Epic Receptions21
Epic Worlds23
Ralph Hexter
Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents39

Wai Chee Dimock
“Wheels Working Together: The Popol Wuj

and Time Commences in Xibalbá as Markers
of a Maya Cosmovision”59
Arturo Arias
Reception Configurations: The Case of European

Epic in India83
Brenda Deen Schildgen
vii
viii Contents
Formal Experiments in Margaret Atwood’s

The Penelopiad103
Zina Giannopoulou
Part II Greek Philosophical Receptions119
Disagreement and Reception: Peripatetics Responding

to the Stoic Challenge121
Jan Szaif
“Now We Must Consider That Some of the Ancients

Discovered the Truth”: Reception and Antiquity
in Ancient Neoplatonism149
Michael Griffin
Reading and Commenting on Aristotle’s

Rhetoric in Arabic165
Uwe Vagelpohl
Part III Drama and Receptions185
A Third Antike: Hans Henny Jahnn’s Medea

and the Introduction of the “Sumerian”
to Modern German Literature187
Adam Siegel
American Bushido: A Kabuki Play Transplanted203

Robert Borgen
Tamil “Translation,” French Orientalism,

and Indian Dramatic Traditions in Louis Jacolliot’s
La Devadassi (1868)223
Kristen Bergman Waha
Contents ix
Part IV Lyric Receptions243
Goethe’s Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten:

Vernacular Universal, Erotica Sinica, and the Temporality
of Nachträglichkeit245
Chunjie Zhang
The Mediterranean Metaphor265

Kevin Batton
Inventing China: The American Tradition

of Translating Chinese Poetry285
Michelle Yeh
Part V Politics and Sociology of Reception297
Meaning, Reception, and the Use of Classics:

Theoretical Considerations in a Chinese Context299
Zhang Longxi
The Sociology of Reception321

Gisèle Sapiro
Afterword341
Notes on Contributors349
Selected Bibliography355
Index381
Reading the Past Across Space and Time:
Receptions and World Literature
Introduction
Our philological home is the earth. It can no longer be the nation.
~ Erich Auerbach, Philology and Weltliteratur (1952)
This collection of essays examines receptions of ancient to early modern

literary works from around the world that have circulated globally, that
is, across time and space. Thus, in one sense, the collection starts with the
premise of an enduring and revered cultural past, whether in the East, West,
North, or South. The second premise is that the circulation of literature
through translation and other forms of reception long predates modern
global society. It is hardly a new phenomenon. If anything is new, it is the
idea of national literary canons, which have existed just over a 100 years.
The idea of national literature was born alongside the development
of national ideologies beginning in the eighteenth century, and most
prominently argued by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), whose
B.D. Schildgen (*)

Comparative Literature, UC Davis, Davis, CA, USA
e-mail: bdschildgen@ucdavis.edu
R. Hexter
Classics/Comparative Literature, UC Davis, Davis, CA, USA
© The Author(s) 2016 1

B.D. Schildgen, R. Hexter (eds.), Reading the Past Across
Space and Time, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55885-5_1
2 B.D. SCHILDGEN AND R. HEXTER
encounter with James Macpherson’s Fingal, Ancient Epic Poem in Six

Books, Composed by Ossian (published in 1760), prompted his engagement
with the idea of German literature. This led to his anonymous publication
Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767–68). The Scottish writer
Macpherson (1736–1796), while thwarting the idea of British national
unity by his supposed turn to “authentic” Gaelic oral sources, nonetheless
stimulated a trans-European search for national origins because Ossian
was soon translated into several European languages. One of the main
elements of nineteenth-century European cultural activity, this quest for
national origins accompanied the individual European vernacular lan-
guages’ and literatures’ assertion of national identity over the legacy of
classical Greece and Rome,1 and Europe’s simultaneous explorations into
the literary and cultural legacies beyond Europe’s borders.
Prior to the existence of powerful institutions like national or interna-
tional presses, and before nationally and language-defined literary canons
and school curricula were adopted into universities as the basis for most
national literature departments, literary works crossed language and cul-
tural boundaries in a tributary system of circulation that was, to some
degree, independent and autonomous. A widely disseminated phenom-
enon, inter-language literary circulation occurs across space and time.
It would be hard to imagine Chaucer, “father of English literature,”
for example, without French, Italian, Latin, and even Arabic resources;
Shakespeare without his continental and ancient sources; Cervantes with-
out Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Arabic, and other literary resources; not
to mention Virgil and Ovid without Homer; the Tamil Kampan without
the Sanskrit Valmiki; Japanese writer Lady Murasaki without Chinese clas-
sical poetry, or Goethe without an entire set of global literary resources,
including those of Chinese, Persian, and Sanskrit origin. The receptions
of these authors demonstrate the circulation of literary texts “beyond
their culture of origin”; indeed, they represent circulatory patterns within
networks or relationships that are often the creation of an autonomous
author or reader.2 This is not to deny that, in the cases cited above, the
choices were from a select list of established works that in themselves often
possessed enormous cultural power partly because of their ancient status
but also because of their long-standing appeal.
The essays in this volume explore this kind of circulation of letters as
the study of receptions, in other words, receptions—note the plural—study.
Focusing on receptions that are invariably multiple kinds of “translation” of
literary works into other literary contexts and genres is a way to understand
READING THE PAST ACROSS SPACE AND TIME: RECEPTIONS AND WORLD... 3
how literature belongs to a continuum of related forms and subjects con-

nected across time, often the ancient past with the modern, and across space,
often spaces constituted as colonial and post-colonial, East and West, North
and South, politically subjugated and culturally independent or dependent,
from centers of “symbolic capital” to peripheries and vice versa. While rec-
ognizing the realities of political and social pressures on cultural products,
the approach to literary history adopted here stands apart from assump-
tions about asymmetrical relationships ruling the creation and reception of
literary works. The focus here is on how writers or readers explore and use
the reservoir of literary texts that constitute, because of the choice of these
receivers, a world republic of letters, to invoke a term of Pascale Casanova’s
in her book The World Republic of Letters.3 In other words, fundamental
here is the idea that writers and readers, reading, receiving, “translating,”
and rewriting, are creating and responding in a semi-autonomous “repub-
lic” of letters.
The volume sets out to define a new way of conceptualizing world
literature by examining the ways in which literary works cross arbitrary
national boundaries, which are themselves subject to change, and cir-
cumvent cultural and language barriers as though in an autonomous
zone of circulation, in liberated territories (figuratively speaking). The
essays—and in this case, we are only discussing literary circulation—
argue for an understanding of literary production and circulation as
separate from national traditions and from conventional zones of literary
interaction and reception (as area study formulations, for example, such
as “the western tradition,” Latin American Literature, Middle Eastern
Literature, or South Asian Literature), and for reception that breaks
from spatial and temporal limitations. The case studies examined here
demonstrate how literary works are received across national, language,
and cultural boundaries according to the choices of writers who them-
selves are readers. This is a phenomenon easily recognized (though often
ignored) in the visual arts, which although restricted by the conventions
of the media of expression, are not confined by language or national
traditions. Just as Philosophy or Art is not examined as a product of
linguistic or geographical regions, we want to show that literature too
belongs to interconnected tributaries of cultural relationships. Looking
at literary circulation in this way, even while recognizing the significance
of the language in which a literary work might be written, highlights the
limitation and artificiality of examining literature according to narrowly
defined national canons.
Goethe’s remark that “world literature is now at hand” came just as

Germany was poised to enter the international literary domain, Casanova
notes in The World Republic of Letters.4 She argues that a “literature-world”
exists as a literary universe relatively independent of the everyday world
and its political divisions, whose “boundaries and operational laws are not
reducible to those of ordinary political space.”5 Thus, Casanova’s book,
which addresses literature from the sixteenth century on in Europe and
then in colonial and post-colonial settings, programmatically examines
the circulation of texts in a “literary” as opposed to a “political” world.
(Undeniably, making such a distinction, today as in the periods discussed,
could itself be interpreted in “political” terms, but that is not our argu-
ment here.) Casanova writes in a summary sentence occurring toward the
end of the book: “The cleavages characteristic of literary space that are the
furthest removed from the center and the pattern of their multiple depen-
dencies furnish perhaps the surest sign of the incongruence of literary space
and the political nation, which is to say of the relative autonomy of world lit-
erary space”6 (emphasis ours), an argument already made by Karl Marx in
Grundrisse in 1858, although this remained unpublished until 1939.7 This
position profoundly modifies and complicates arguments that literary cul-
ture, meaning the literary works themselves as opposed to their reception
by readers, is complicit with nationalism and imperialism and supports
their modes of domination.8 That is not to deny that in the modern era in
Europe and elsewhere, that is, since the Enlightenment, state systems have
empowered cultural engineers, including academies, boards of education
(national, local, and peripheral), national and colonial educational plan-
ners, literary prize boards, publishers and editors, literary salons, literary
magazines, and other kinds of communities of readers and cultural czars,
to determine the shape and scope of canons, the designation of major
works, and literary programs to educate national or colonial subjects,9
aspects of which will be discussed in this volume by Gisèle Sapiro. But it is
to argue that writers, as autonomous subjects, have participated in a global
literary exchange that operates seemingly free of national boundaries, lan-
guage limitations, and temporal and spatial distance.
Casanova’s initial inspiration comes from Valéry Larbaud, who,
in 1925 in Ce vice impuni, la lecture: Domaine anglais (Reading, This
Unpunished Vice: English Domain), argued that “the politics of litera-
ture” has its own ways and its own reasons, which transcend the politics
of nations. He remarked on the great difference between the political map
and the intellectual map of the world, a reality made only too current in
the wake of the First World War: “The one changes its look every fifty
years; it is covered with arbitrary and uncertain divisions, and its major
centers are constantly shifting. The intellectual map, by contrast changes
slowly, and its boundaries display great stability … Whence an intellectual
politics that has almost no relation to economic politics.”10 Casanova also
turns to Fernand Braudel who “noted a relative independence of artistic
space with respect to economic (and therefore political) space.” Reviewing
the major urban culture centers of Europe, he generalizes, whether cor-
rectly or not, when Amsterdam became the center of European commerce
in the seventeenth century, Rome and Madrid were the core of creativ-
ity in the arts and literature. Culturally Paris, in the eighteenth century,
surpassed London, the hub of the world economy. “Similarly,” Braudel
remarked, “in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, France,
though lagging behind the rest of Europe economically, was the undis-
puted center of Western painting and literature; the times when Italy or
Germany dominated the world of music were not times when Italy or
Germany dominated Europe economically or politically; and even today,
the formidable economic lead [enjoyed] by the United States has not
made it the literary and artistic leader of the world.”11 One of the most
impressive examples might be Ireland, that once impoverished colonized
island, which managed to produce some of the greatest English writers of
the twentieth century despite its poverty, massive emigration, and rela-
tively small population. Braudel’s premise, while adopting the geographi-
cal area of Europe as the case study, posits that the literary world possesses
its own boundaries, capitals, and exchange systems that may not coincide
with those of the political and economic powers.
Casanova further argues, again thinking in terms of literary circulation
over the last 400 years, that “Over time, owing to the work of a number
of pioneering figures remarkable for their freedom from nationalist preju-
dice, an international literary law came to be created, a specific form of
recognition that owes nothing to political fiat, interest, or prejudice. The
world of letters is in fact something quite different from the received view
of literature as a peaceful domain. Its history is one of incessant struggle
and competition over the very nature of literature itself—an endless suc-
cession of literary manifestos, movements, assaults, revolutions. These
rivalries are what have created world literature.”12 In other words, creative
activity and new forms of expression emerge from the push and pull of
cultural, social, political, and technological exchange and contest, conver-
gence, divergence, and reception.
One of Casanova’s most prominent examples of the world republic of

letters as against the political domination of letters that demonstrates the lit-
erary power of the periphery to rise up is in fact the Irish writer James Joyce.
Arguably one of the greatest English novels of the twentieth century, Joyce’s
Ulysses adopted the canonical Greek epic as its precursor model, deferred
to the language of the colonial power, and to the revered ancient classical
tradition, but as a product of an author from the colonized and perenni-
ally subjugated Ireland, it presented a richly detailed picture of Dublin and
Dubliners while using the English language to expose Irish abjection.
From the perspective of a world republic of letters, then, this volume
provides examples of a way to read literary works as belonging to a space–
time continuum of related forms and subjects. The essays seek to over-
come cultural notions of core and periphery, concepts that put certain
nations (usually the former colonial powers or their shared consecrated
and revered–and constructed–ancient heritage of Greek and Latin classics)
at the core and the rest of the world as periphery. Similar patterns of cul-
tural hegemony and proliferation exist in other areas of the world: China,
whose culture was spread abroad as superior, or pre-Moghul India, where
Sanskrit classics from northern India held a prestige that asserted cultural
power over other regions of India.
But, this collection does not define reception as the means whereby
literary models proliferated or as the mode in which symbolic capital
(i.e., European culture) arrived in the colonial states as an instrument
of cultural colonialism. Neither does it focus on reception as a critical
reading strategy, as provocatively stated by William Batstone, rephras-
ing Martindale, “All meaning is constituted or actualized at the point
of reception,”13 even though several essays do address reader reception.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others, has discussed this destabilizing
aspect of reception and hermeneutical practice, which will be examined in
this volume in Zhang Longxi’s essay on the reception of European clas-
sics in a Chinese context. Gadamer’s term “fusion of horizons” (the com-
ing together of reader and text) has been vital for interpretive reception
studies.14 Frank Kermode,15 Hans Robert Jauss,16 and Wolfgang Iser17
also stimulated discussion of readers and reception, but the primary focus
here is on how writers explore and draw upon reservoirs of literary texts
that come to define a world republic of letters, paradoxically filling rather
than emptying the “reservoirs” by such usage.
An overriding theme of the arguments in this collection is that although
the relationship between the author and his or her reservoir of models
may be both politically and culturally asymmetrical (with the models and
languages in which they are written often having hegemonic cultural–and
sometimes political–power, as for example, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit let-
ters), authors set out to position themselves in a symmetrical cultural rela-
tionship to their repository of literary precursors. Thus, although peripheral
in relationship to works that might occupy the hub of cultural power or
powers, the writer nonetheless sets out to diverge from the established
models, possibly in terms of style and genre, topic, and language, while also
converging with an established literary form or canon of letters.18 Clearly,
works like Dante’s Commedia or Milton’s Paradise Lost, and even a prose
work like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, with their simultaneous convergence
with the classical epic tradition and divergence from it in terms of language
(vernacular), style (mixture of low and high), subject, and a host of other
innovations, offer superb examples of this phenomenon. This quasi-sacred
canon of literary forbearers,19 absorbed into the current context, provides
very important spurs for the contemporary work.
Still, the argument posed here limits itself to a rather unique commu-
nity, because it addresses the interests of writers, those cultural innovators,
who are almost always eccentric to social, political, and economic power,
wherever they are located, and whose audience(s) may even be far in the
future. They stand in contrast with the cultural engineers, what Casanova
calls the “consecrating authorities,”20 an “aristocracy” with “the consider-
able authority … to decide what is literary, and lastingly to recognize, or
to consecrate, all those whom it designates as great writers.”21 This might
be a national academy, an academic community, a government agency,
or even a publishing house—whatever entity or entities have the power
to design school curricula, regulate languages, create canons, banish and
or promote books, and set up normative reading and study programs,
as Gisèle Sapiro’s essay will argue. In the context of colonialism, these
authorities exercised considerable power over school and university cur-
ricula in the colonized societies.22
Discussions of literary receptions, whether of authors in a transcultural
setting or within their own linguistic or national traditions have undergone
extensive theoretical elaboration over the last 40 years. Reception as a prac-
tice, of course, predates the earliest texts incorporated into what would
two millennia later be called “the western canon.” The Hebrew Bible, for
example, itself a product of multiple authors over more than a 1000-year
time span, is a collection of recycled and reinterpreted texts with interlaced
rephrasings and quotations that together create a web of relationships that
constitute the very interpretive—and interpretable—unity of this text. This

intertextuality has been labeled a kind of “inner biblical exegesis,” a type of
reception in which subsequent passages quote or allude to prior ones (in
terms of canonical or redacted order rather than an authorially chronologi-
cal one), in a move that is intended to transform the original text but not
to undermine or degrade it. This is distinct from Christian “supersession”
of the Hebrew Bible, discussed immediately below. Here, wholly within the
Hebrew tradition, these rephrasings, allusions, or reworkings bespeak some
crisis or effort to reinterpret the original while retaining continuity with it,
with the emphasis on continuity.23 One could see the formation of the bibli-
cal canon, whether the koine Greek Septuagint in the third century BCE, or
the Hebrew Masoretic text of the second century CE, or the Latin Christian
Bible in the fourth century CE, as the conscious selection of a set of redac-
tors and translators involved in an effort to reorganize, rearrange, and lin-
guistically and culturally transform the collection of texts that are redacted
into their new arrangement to create continuity with the past even while
the new version appears in a new language for dramatically new social and
cultural circumstances (including exilic, post-exilic, diasporic, and imperial).
The Christian biblical exegetical tradition, both as reading, plastic arts,
and writing strategies, sought to tie the texts of the New Testament to
the sacred texts of Israel by imagining typological patterns, and as with
the Hebrew Bible, rephrasing or quoting from the earlier texts. In this
case, both the writing and reading practices set out to demonstrate how
the later texts were tied to the earlier ones and were a fulfillment of the
promises of Hebrew Scriptures. This notion of “fulfillment” is the other
side of the coin of the nineteenth-century philological approach to track-
ing sources, another variety of reception studies. In the case of fulfillment,
the later text in a radical rereading supersedes the earlier, while for source
criticism, the most recent text is denigrated because it lacks originality
or “authenticity,” often a substitute word for an essentializing notion of
ethnic or national origins. The Christian teleological approach to literary
reception would privilege the new as a fulfillment of the past. This led
Harold Bloom, for example, to lament that this notion of “fulfillment”
had made the Hebrew Bible, the “captive prize of the Christians,”24 him-
self alluding to a tradition in which Christian exegetes themselves justified
the use of pagan rhetoric by citing the example of the captive woman of
Deuteronomy 21:11–13 (Jerome Letter 70.2). Nonetheless, while adopt-
ing the past as its own, and thus putting the past in an asymmetrical oppo-
sition to the present, where ultimate power (or revelation) resides, even if
dependent on the longue durée of the original texts, this approach at least
offers a way of seeing reception as a conscious assertion of creativity on the
part of the writer and reader.
The formulations of Harold Bloom, whose 1973 book The Anxiety
of Influence challenged the reigning approaches to reception, went
beyond erstwhile philological notions of influence and “source” studies
that sought to attribute parts of works or an entire corpus to numerous
precursor texts and their authors. Sometimes this was merely to identify
the sources and sometimes more perversely, because of the romantic idea
about originality, to condemn the new text because it had merely rewritten
an earlier one. Bloom’s systematic argument classified types of allusions
to show how writers struggle against their literary forebears as they create
their own literary work.25
Brian Stock and others have suggested yet another notion of textual
and by implication authorial relationship in the idea of “textual commu-
nities,” which are constituted as a “community of texts.” This approach
advances the notion that certain texts may be in continuity or collabora-
tion with each other, most clearly a characteristic of medieval European lit-
erature in Latin and then later into the emerging European vernaculars.26
One could make the same argument about the catena of texts redacted as
a collection into what became the Vulgata, Jerome’s Latin Bible, com-
posed of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, in an effort to
create continuity with the revered texts of the past, while privileging the
new, as discussed above. Thus looking at the ancient Mediterranean and
Europe as literary case studies, in the period before the advent of nations
and long before European colonialism,27 we see that ancient and medieval
letters involve a flourishing borrow-and-exchange literary economy, a kind
of tributary system, while territorial, cultural, and linguistic specifics are
overcome in favor of literary adaptation.
In these cases, while clearly translation and transformation take place in
the reception process, the emphasis falls on continuity rather than disjunc-
tion.28 German literary scholars, writing in the wake of the Second World
War, whose anti-nationalism led to the founding of many departments
of Comparative Literature after the war,29 have been especially insightful
in this regard. Examining the “repertoire of a literary text,” Wolfgang
Iser (1926–2007) wrote that this repertoire “does not consist solely of
social and cultural norms; it also incorporates elements and, indeed, whole
traditions of past literature that are mixed together with these norms.”30
Iser’s approach recognizes the syncretic quality of literary allusion and the
freedom of the writer to incorporate from diverse sources, thus remaking

the original in the terms of the individual aesthetic product. Jauss
(1921–1997), arguably the most important reception theorist writing in
the wake of the Second World War, deliberately confronted ideas about
literature that had dominated the nineteenth century, thereby fundamen-
tally challenging the very notions of national literary traditions. For him,
“a literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the
same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument that mono-
logically reveals its timeless essence. It is much more like an orchestration
that strikes ever new resonance among its readers …”31 Jauss focuses on
the historical implication of a literary text, the understanding of the first
reader and a chain of receptions from generation to generation, proposing
an awareness of the global existence of the understanding and rewriting
of a literary text that challenges a nation-based model of literary history.
The consequence of such an understanding of creative reception unfolds
how “the horizon of expectations” across the world might lead to endless
dialogues and diverse reformulations of the original inspirational text.
Wai Chee Dimock’s essay on Osip Mandelstam, who had a copy
of Dante’s Commedia in his pocket when he was condemned to the
Russian Gulag, added to the reception debate with her argument about
Mandelstam and Dante, “Mandelstam’s love of Dante—the physical pres-
ence of the poetry inside his pocket—suggests that there is much to be
said for literature as a continuum.”32 Dimock’s idea of writers creating this
cultural continuum has more in common with the argument presented
here. In other words, when we look at how writers, not academic authori-
ties, book reviewers, or book publishers, that is, the self-appointed author-
ities in the literary domain, determine a literary repertoire, we witness a
pattern of circulation that both exploits diverse archives and simultane-
ously undermines the idea of national literary traditions. In fact, reception
as simultaneous convergence and divergence in form, citation, and even
theme, resulting from a shift in language and the cultural and historical
circumstances of the receiving autonomous writer, constitutes a central
feature of how literature circulates across national and cultural divisions.
****
Reading the Past Across Space and Time comprises 16 essays, the vast
majority of which examine specific cases of authorial reception of ancient or
early modern literary works. While these essays could have been arranged
in many different ways, the final arrangement reflects the editors’ desire
to organize according to time and space while remaining attentive to the

category of literary genre, itself construed with conscious simplicity as
narrative (specifically epic), lyric, and drama. (Genre itself is an effect of
reception.)33 Thus, the arrangement features the longue durée of epic as
a genre and as an inspiration for later works in new genres and new geo-
graphical contexts; rereading of a Greek philosophical corpus for wholly
new cultural and temporal environments; the transnational reception of
ancient and medieval drama, again from diverse origins; and the trans-
formation of lyric in new environments when inspired by encounter with
totally different forms of lyric expression.
The essays probe how writers (even if also readers) have received ancient
and early modern classics and the contexts for this reception. The first sec-
tion examines how ancient epics through translation, transformation, and
revision have been and continue to be recycled into new forms and for
new audiences. Ralph Hexter’s “Epic Worlds” explores the ancient epic,
a source of long-past story and history that seems to define a people, but
the essay shows that, contrary to common assumptions, it was nonetheless
never monolithic. The essay addresses what epic might be today, when
people are in constant motion with hand-held devices that constantly flash
before us not ancient memories, but the latest developments.
An answer to this question follows in Wai Chee Dimock’s essay on the
Gilgamesh epic. Epic, the genre that narrated the deeds of the social elite,
leaders, warriors, and kings, has traveled around to address a popular audi-
ence thousands of miles and thousands of years from its place and time of
origin. In actual fact, the Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest literary text
in the world, has only been known for 140 years, since the nineteenth-
century discovery of ancient Nineveh, which was destroyed in 612 BCE
as the Assyrian Empire fell. The archeological dig in Nineveh, the famed
city of the biblical novella Jonah, the text that recounts the eponymous
main character’s encounter with a whale, led to the discovery of the cune-
iform Gilgamesh tablets. Henry Layard and his archeological compan-
ions, as David Damrosch writes, “confronted a newly deepened antiquity
beneath a shifting political landscape,”34 this time as the Ottoman Empire
was slowly declining. In this vignette alone, we have a remarkable case of
ancient cross-temporal and spatial textual interconnections: ancient Israel,
ancient Assyria, ancient Sumeria and Babylon, with nineteenth-century
Turkey, Syria, and Britain. More recently, in fact, in 2011, 20 new lines
of the epic have been recovered, which itself refutes some assumptions
about the most dramatic encounter in the epic, that between Gilgamesh,
Enkidu, and Humbaba, the guardian of the forest. The Sulaymaniyah

Museum in the territory of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq
has had a policy (since the mass looting that followed the US invasion
and bombardment of Iraq in 2003) to purchase all artifacts (no questions
asked) to prevent them from leaving the country. Among this loot, the
Gilgamesh fragment appeared.35
The nineteenth-century discovery of the Gilgamesh tablets, translated
and turned into The Epic of Gilgamesh, while deepening biblical study,36
expanded the “great books of the west curriculum” to include ancient
Sumeria (present-day Iraq) as the “west,” and because of the epic’s binary
of civilization versus wilderness, it has played a role in the expansion of
environmental discourse since the 1970s.37 This new fragment, while
deepening scholarly knowledge of ancient Sumeria and its premier text,
will also produce a spate of new receptions in the form of translations that
include the new fragment, which itself will encourage new interpretations,
this time showing Enkidu and Gilgamesh’s remorse over their transgres-
sive defeat of Humbaba and his forest. The epic has also spurred the pro-
duction of anime, videos, comics, and even tattoos. In this volume, Wai
Chee Dimock’s essay examines the epic’s spiraling down to vernacular
settings where grassroots organizations produce plays in which Humbaba,
the forest nemesis of the heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu, emerges as “the
emotional focus.” Locating a lapse in Mikhail Bakhtin’s dismissal of the
epic as a dead-end genre,38 Dimock’s essay explores how specific instances
of translation, citation, and stage adaptation and instances of recycling,
particularly of the world’s oldest known literary work, restore the epic,
bring it back, break it up, and redistribute it across a variety of places and
genres, and as a consequence complicate our understanding of this par-
ticular genre and of “genre” as a planetary phenomenon, an evolving field
spread across temporal as well as geographical coordinates.
In the following essay, Schildgen examines similar divergences in the Indian
epics produced under the British Raj in India (1858–1947). In Michael
Madhusudan Datta’s Bengali epic, The Slaying of Meghanada,39 based on
the war between the god Rama and the demon king Ravana from Valmiki’s
Ramayana, Ravana not Rama, like Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost, becomes
the hero. Sri Aurobindo’s English epic, Savitri (inspired by Valmiki, Vyasa,
Milton, Dante, and Virgil) and written when the author was in self-chosen
exile in French South India (Pondicherry), in the tradition of southern Indian
epic (as in Merchant-Prince Shattan’s Manimekhalaï and Ilanko Atikal’s
Cilappatikaram), 40 makes a woman, not a male, the epic hero.
As an indirect consequence of colonialism, different and unrelated

literary and religious traditions have intertwined to create startling syn-
cretic new works as in the Gilgamesh drama or in the two Indian epics
examined in Schildgen’s essay. In another example of the legacy of colo-
nialism, Arturo Arias’ essay, “Wheels Working Together: The Popol Wuj
and Time Commences in Xibalbá as Markers of a Maya Cosmovision”
demonstrates how the cosmology of the Maya Popol Vuh informs Luis
de Lión’s foundational contemporary Maya novel Time Commences in
Xibalbá, written in Spanish. Mayan civilization can be traced back to the
Olmecs, who inhabited the Gulf coastal plain of Veracruz and Tabasco
about 1200 BCE, in other words, contemporary with the putative his-
torical date of the Trojan War, central to the Homeric epics, and likely
with “The Song of Deborah,” one of the oldest texts in the Bible (Judges
5:2–31). Thus, like the Homeric poems that are historically linked to
Mycenaean civilization, the Popol Vuh, the “Bible” of the Mayas, written
in Quiché, goes back to pre-writing times. But like the Sanskrit epics,
Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Popol Vuh has both oral and written
forms. Although its transmission was radically altered by the arrival of the
Spanish colonial power, who undertook the destruction of thousands of
Mayan books, the hieroglyphic version that pre-dated the conquest in the
sixteenth century continued to be in use up to the eighteenth century in
some areas of Guatemala. Four hieroglyphic books are still extant, three in
European libraries (Madrid, Paris, and Dresden), and the fourth discov-
ered in Chiapas in 1966. An alphabeticized Popol Vuh, the only survival of
the Quiché text, was translated into Spanish by the friar Francisco Ximénez
in the early eighteenth century, and it is this dual-language version that
found its way to the Newberry Library in Chicago and in English transla-
tion to classrooms in North America. An oral version, however, continues
to be performed to this day even if in a syncretic form that combines
Christian prayers with Mayan rituals.41 Maya cosmology is cyclical, in con-
trast to the linear teleological cosmic vision of Christian theology. Arias’
essay examines how Luis de Lión’s contemporary Guatemalan novel, the
genre itself a received form, adheres to a Maya cosmovision to present a
view of Central American subjectivity that transcends the subaltern status
that resulted from colonialism.
In yet another reworking of epic that likewise turns the tables on the
genre, Zina Gianoppoulou’s essay looks at Margaret Atwood’s “The
Penelopiad,” the most recent feminist recasting of Homer’s Odyssey.
Introducing topics of gender, class, and female subjectivity into what has
generally been considered a male genre, the essay argues that Atwood
challenges and critiques the authority of Homer and of Odysseus. In an
Underworld setting appropriate to dramatize the act of reception, argues
Giannopoulou, Atwood has Penelope regain her voice to offer a corrective
to her husband’s story, while the former maids of the household, executed
by Odysseus, seek revenge for his injustice in the form of feminist and
revisionist mythmaking.
Turning from receptions of ancient epics, in yet another example of
recasting the ancient canon, the following section “Greek Philosophical
Receptions,” explores the ways in which two canonical figures in the
history of Western philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, have been recast
over two millennia. In “Disagreement and Reception: Peripatetics
Responding to the Stoic Challenge,” Jan Szaif identifies and describes
certain scenarios of philosophical reception stimulated by disagreement
and school rivalry and applies the results of this analysis to developments
that took place in the school of Aristotle (the so-called Peripatos) dur-
ing the late Hellenistic period. Next, Michael Griffin’s essay, “‘Now we
must consider that some of the ancients discovered the truth’: Reception
and Antiquity in Ancient Neoplatonism,” examines two pivotal figures
in the reception of Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Simplicius, whose
role in receptions of the revered ancient philosophers cannot be under-
estimated. These public intellectuals, writing at the end of the Roman
Empire, both summarize and hand over to the forthcoming millen-
nium-and-a-half the Mediterranean philosophical movement now called
Neoplatonism. Regarding their intellectual project as a recovery of the
authentic philosophy of Plato, at that point nearly a millennium earlier,
their “neo-Platonism” simply was Platonism into the eighteenth century
and beyond: this was the Plato of Dante and Schiller, Wordsworth and
Coleridge, Blake and Emerson. Thus, as linking figures in the work of
recuperation and rethinking, they tie together more than two millennia
of receptions. The final essay in the section, Uwe Vagelpohl’s “Reading
and Commenting on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Arabic,” asks what happens
when a “revered” ancient Greek and pagan author, in this case, Aristotle,
whose work is deeply rooted in Greek culture, migrates via translation
into a context where rhetoric, drama, tragedy, and comedy do not exist
as either generic categories or systems of expression. A vigorous effort to
decode it followed as Aristotle’s Rhetoric became firmly planted within
Muslim philosophical tradition and Aristotle’s rhetorical thought was
adopted into a wide range of different fields.
The third section examines specific cases of modern works that respond
to classical or early modern drama. The first, Adam Siegel’s “A Third
Antike,” articulates how Hans Henny Jahnn sought to widen the clas-
sical canon by incorporating elements from the (relatively recently avail-
able) Gilgamesh epic into his adaptation of Medea for the German stage
in 1926. Against various sets of oppositions (the biblical and the Greek,
the baroque and the classical, the Apollonian and the Dionysian), Siegel
contends that Jahnn sought to incorporate the “Sumerian” as a new,
third way that could resolve the tensions and lead to a greater enlight-
enment, all in the context of rising German nationalism and search for
ancient roots. Robert Borgen’s essay on the “transplanting” of a kabuki
play for American audiences, like Dimock’s examination of the recycling
of the Gilgamesh epic into contemporary drama, engages popular audi-
ence reception of ostensibly eastern cultural elements on the stage. Again,
anxiety and authenticity are key concerns as both the creators and con-
sumers of these productions grappled with diachronically shifting and
heavily laden concepts—in this case “bushido,” or “the way of the war-
rior.” Kristen Bergman Waha’s essay, an analysis of Louis Jacolliot’s 1869
play La Devadassi, itself a recycling of Kalidasa’s classical Sanskrit play,
Śakuntalā, is a revealing case study of the differences between manifesta-
tions of nineteenth-century French “orientalist” fantasy and the British
“orientalist” ideals of local understanding and just colonial administration.
The final section of essays centers on the reception, transformation, and
adaptation of Chinese and Japanese lyric, and how those borrowed materi-
als and concepts came to have a life of their own as they were deployed for
specific purposes by Western poets. These essays move beyond traditional
“orientalist” critiques that focus on unilateral cultural appropriation in a
post-colonial context to expose a more dynamic anxiety and ambivalence
among the cultural “borrowers” as they sought foreign inspiration, as well
as a degree of authenticity in their works.
Chunjie Zhang’s essay on a famous poem cycle by Goethe shows
both sides of this spectrum: the fashion for chinoiserie and “orientalist”
fantasy that can be seen in the first part of the cycle, on the one hand,
and the assimilation of English translations of famous Chinese love sto-
ries and poems to create a new vernacular universal, on the other. Kevin
Batton’s “Pan in the West: California and the Mediterranean Metaphor,”
explores how California, although facing away from an Atlantic Europe,
was nevertheless conceived of poetically within a classically Mediterranean
metaphor that rendered it beautiful but belated. Batton identifies the
twentieth-century poets Robinson Jeffers and, to a degree, Gary Snyder

as the writers who transcended the old metaphor and invented a classi-
cal California that comprised both the Mediterranean and medieval Asia
through their own independent engagement with a California sublime.
Just as eighteenth-century chinoiserie was both imitative and interpreta-
tive, so was the Japonisme movement of the nineteenth century—both
of which had wide-ranging effects on the reception of visual, verbal, and
performance arts. Many of the above dynamics are nicely summarized in
Michelle Yeh’s description of the “invention” of China through American
translations of classical Chinese poems.
The two contributions that conclude the volume both look at how
official reception, the purview of governments, publishers, book prize
competitions, school boards, and so on, functions sociologically and
politically. Zhang Longxi’s essay, “Meaning, Reception, and the Use of
Classics: Theoretical Considerations in a Chinese Context,” examines
how China’s reception of Greco-Roman classics, which began as early as
the Ming dynasty in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries,
changes as the social and historical conditions alter. The essay scrutinizes
the role of “authority” in official reception and looks at the vexed recep-
tions of ancient Mediterranean classics in China in the twentieth century.
The essay with which the volume concludes, Gisèle Sapiro’s “Reception
Processes from a Sociological Perspective,” looks to contemporary global
practices in the literary field as it draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of
the literary field and from Raymond Williams’ program for cultural stud-
ies to review different aspects of the reception process based on empirical
research done in sociology and history. Sapiro’s essay addresses aspects
of literary reception in modern times (since the printing press and the
commercialization of book publication) that take into account the sociol-
ogy of literary culture. Thus, she examines the material and intellectual
aspects of a literary text’s production, circulation, and capital value, to
explore how books are selected, categorized, and evaluated; how critical
reception assesses and grades with literary prizes, institutional consecra-
tion, sales, and lists of bestsellers. These developments in terms of recep-
tion began of course with the printing press and state institutions. Today,
official cultural powers possess almost coercive power over the reception
of literary works by the reading public. These include, for example, cre-
ative writing departments, as well as publications like the New York Times
Book Review, The New York Review of Books, or The London Review of
Books, various prestigious book prizes like the Booker Prize, National
Book Award, and so on, not to mention the role some governments, like
Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China, among others, are still playing in
censoring books. Indeed, because the essay examines how these powers
operate in controlling and directing reception, this contemporary kind
of reception may appear to abrogate all the kinds of authorial literary
receptions discussed in the previous essays, and therefore it functions as a
provocative conclusion to the consideration of literary receptions across
time and space.
Notes
1. For the connection between national identity creation and national litera-
tures, see Anne-Marie Thiesse, La Créátion des identités nationales: Europe
XVIIIe–XIX sièclee (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999).
2. See, for example, David Damrosch, “Introduction,” in What is World
Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3–5.
3. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
4. Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur has become critical for a number of theo-
rists of world literary receptions besides Casanova, The World Republic of
Letters, 9–44. See, for example, Damrosch, “Goethe coins a phrase,” in
What is World Literature?, 1–36; Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World
Literature,” an essay in Distant Reading (London and New York: Verso,
2013), 43–62.
5. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, xii.
6. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 207; Karl Marx, Grundrisse, in
Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 399.
7. Marx, Grundrisse, 359.
8. See, for example, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York:
Vintage, 1993) and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
9. See Gisèle Sapiro, La sociologie de la littérature (Paris: La Découverte,
2014).
10. Valery Larbaud, Ce Vice impuni, la lecture: Domaine anglais (Paris:
Gallimard, 1925), 33–34; Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 10–11.
11. Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and capitalism: 15th–18th century, vol. 3:
The Perspective of the World, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: UC Press,
1992), 68; Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 10–11.
12. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 12.
13. William W. Batstone, “Provocation: The Point of Reception Theory,” in
Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale and Richard
F. Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 14.
14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1986),
273, f.
15. Frank Kermode, History and Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, l988); also
Forms of Attention (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press,
l985).
16. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
17. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
(Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
18. Basically, the argument of Moretti in the essays, “Conjectures on World
Literature” and “More Conjectures,” in Distant Reading, 43–62;
107–119; he writes, “Four continents, two hundred years, over twenty
independent critical studies, and they all agreed; when a culture starts
moving towards the modern novel, it’s always as a compromise between
foreign form and local materials,” Distant Reading, 52.
19. See Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1994).
20. World Republic of Letters, 354.
21. World Republic of Letters, 21–22.
22. See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule
in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
23. See Michel Fishbane, The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1989), 3–18. See also
Schildgen, “Mark’s Retrieval of Esther,” Poetics Today 15:1 (1994),
115–31, which discusses all of these approaches to intertextuality.
24. Harold Bloom asserts that Christians like Northrup Frye have made the
Hebrew Bible the “captive prize of the Gentiles.” The Book of J, trans.
David Rosenberg and interpreted Harold Bloom (New York: Grove &
Weidenfeld, l990), 14.
25. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973).
26. See Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models
of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983), 522–31; Jacob Neusner, Canon and
Connection: Intertextuality in Judaism (Lanham, Maryland: University
Press of America, 1987), 147–59.
27. See Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System
A.D.1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University press, 1989); Samir Amin,
Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989).
28. See Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116:1 (2001),
173–88.
29. See, David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, eds. Princeton Sourcebook in
Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global
Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); for the current
trends in the discipline, see Haun Saussy, Comparative Literature in an

Age of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)
and César Dominguez and Haun Saussy, Introduction to Comparative
Literature: New Trends and Applications (London: Routledge, 2014).
30. See Iser, The Act of Reading, 79.
31. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 21.
32. Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 174.
33. Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” in his Toward an
Aesthetic of Reception, 76–109; Mikko Lehtonen, The Cultural Analysis of
Texts, trans. Aija-Leena Ahonen and Kris Clarke (London: Sage
Publications, 2000); Michael Garner, Romanticism and Gothic. Genre,
Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: CUP, 2000); Mathilde
Skoie, “Passing on the Panpipes: Genre and Reception,” in Charles
Martindale and Richard F. Thomas, eds., Classics and the Uses of Reception,
92–103.
34. Damrosch, “Gilgamesh’s Quest,” What Is World Literature? 40.
35. See www.openculture.com2015/10/20-new-lines-from-the epic-of-
gilgamesh [sourced 10/1/2015]; also, see F.N.H. Al-Rawi and
A.R. George, “Back to the Cedar Forest: The Beginning and End of
Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh,” Journal
Cuneiform Studies 66 (2014), 69–90.
36. See Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), a translation and interpreta-
tion of the Gilgamesh epic and related Babylonian and Assyrian docu-
ments; see also The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. and intro. Maureen Gallery
Kovacs, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), which takes into
account discoveries since Heidel’s edition.
37. In terms of animals alone, Charles Magel’s bibliography on animals cites
only 94 books treating the moral status of animals up to 1970, with thou-
sands of books having appeared since that time. See Charles Magel,
Keyguide to Information Sources in Animal Rights (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1989).
38. M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981),
3–40.
39. Clinton B. Seely, trans. Michael Madhusudan Datta, The Slaying of
Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
40. Merchant-Prince Shattan, Manimekhalaï, trans. Alain Daniélou (New
York: New Directions, 1989); Ilanko Atikal, The Cilappatikaram, trans.
R. Parthasarathy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
41. For the history of the Maya and the transmission of the Popol Vuh, see
“Introduction,” Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, trans.
Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 21–60.
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became ridiculous when it persisted in grumbling at a system which,
beginning with a hazardous reduction of taxes, brought in a single
year an immense increase in revenue. The details of Gallatin’s
finance fretted the Federalists without helping them.
The Federalists were equally unlucky in finding other domestic
grievances. The removals from office did not shock the majority. The
Judiciary was not again molested. The overwhelming superiority of
the democrats was increased by the admission of Ohio, Nov. 29,
1802. No man of sense could deny that the people were better
satisfied with their new Administration than they ever had been with
the old. Loudly as New England grumbled, the Federalists even
there steadily declined in relative strength; while elsewhere an
organized body of opposition to the national government hardly
existed. From New York to Savannah, no one complained of being
forced to work for national objects; South Carolina as well as Virginia
was pleased with the power she helped to sway.
Here and there might be found districts in which Federalism tried
to hold its own; but the Federalism of Delaware and Maryland was
not dangerous, and even in Delaware the Federalist champion
Bayard was beaten by Cæsar A. Rodney in his contest for the
House, and was driven to take refuge in the Senate. Pennsylvania,
New York, Virginia, and North Carolina were nearly unanimous; and
beyond the mountains democracy had its own way without the
trouble of a discussion. Federalism was already an old-fashioned
thing; a subject of ridicule to people who had no faith in forms; a half-
way house between the European past and the American future. The
mass of Americans had become democratic in thought as well as
act; not even another political revolution could undo what had been
done. As a democrat, Jefferson’s social success was sweeping and
final; but he was more than a democrat,—and in his other character,
as a Virginia republican of the State-rights school, he was not
equally successful.
In the short session of 1802–1803 many signs proved that the
revolution of 1800 had spent its force, and that a reaction was at
hand. Congress showed no eagerness to adopt the President’s new
economies, and dismissed, with silence almost contemptuous, his
scheme for building at Washington a large dry-dock in which the
navy should be stored for safety and saving. The mint was continued
by law for another five years, and twenty thousand dollars were
quietly appropriated for its support. Instead of reducing the navy,
Congress decided to build four sixteen-gun brigs and fifteen
gunboats, and appropriated ninety-six thousand dollars for the brigs
alone. The appropriation of two millions as a first instalment toward
paying for New Orleans and Florida was another and a longer stride
in the old Federalist path of confidence in the Executive and liberality
for national objects. The expenditure for 1802, excluding interest on
debt, was $3,737,000. Never afterward in United States history did
the annual expenditure fall below four millions. The navy, in 1802,
cost $915,000; never afterward did it cost less than a million.
The reaction toward Federalist practices was more marked in the
attitude of the Executive than in that of Congress. If Jefferson’s
favorite phrase was true,—that the Federalist differed from the
Republican only in the shade more or less of power to be given the
Executive,—it was hard to see how any President could be more
Federalist than Jefferson himself. A resolution to commit the nation
without its knowledge to an indissoluble British alliance, was more
than Washington would have dared take; yet this step was taken by
the President, and was sustained by Madison, Gallatin, and Robert
Smith as fairly within the limits of the Constitution. In regard to
another stretch of the treaty-making power, they felt with reason the
gravest doubts. When the President and Cabinet decided early in
January, 1803, to send Monroe with two million dollars to buy New
Orleans and Florida, a question was instantly raised as to the form in
which such a purchase could be constitutionally made. Attorney-
General Lincoln wished to frame the treaty or convention in such
language as to make France appear not as adding new territory to
the United States, but as extending already existing territory by an
alteration of its boundary. He urged this idea upon the President in a
letter written the day of Monroe’s nomination to the Senate.[64]
“If the opinion is correct,” said he, “that the general government
when formed was predicated on the then existing United States, and
such as could grow out of them, and out of them only; and that its
authority is constitutionally limited to the people composing the
several political State societies in that Union, and such as might be
formed out of them,—would not a direct independent purchase be
extending the executive power farther, and be more alarming, and
improvable by the opposition and the Eastern States, than the
proposed indirect mode?”
Jefferson sent this letter to Gallatin, who treated it without favor.
[65]
“If the acquisition of territory is not warranted by the Constitution,”

said he, “it is not more legal to acquire for one State than for the
United States.... What could, on his construction, prevent the
President and Senate, by treaty, annexing Cuba to Massachusetts, or
Bengal to Rhode Island, if ever the acquirement of colonies should
become a favorite object with governments, and colonies should be
acquired? But does any constitutional objection really exist?... To me it
would appear, (1) that the United States, as a nation, have an inherent
right to acquire territory; (2) that whenever that acquisition is by treaty,
the same constituted authorities in whom the treaty-making power is
vested have a constitutional right to sanction the acquisition.”
Gallatin not only advanced Federal doctrine, but used also what
the Virginians always denounced as Federalist play on words. “The
United States as a nation” had an inherent right to do whatever the
States in union cared to do; but the Republican party, with Jefferson,
Madison, and Gallatin at their head, had again and again maintained
that the United States government had the inherent right to do no act
whatever, but was the creature of the States in union; and its acts, if
not resulting from an expressly granted power, were no acts at all,
but void, and not to be obeyed or regarded by the States. No
foreigner, not even Gallatin, could master the theory of Virginia and
New England, or distinguish between the nation of States in union
which granted certain powers, and the creature at Washington to
which these powers were granted, and which might be strengthened,
weakened, or abolished without necessarily affecting the nation.
Whether the inability to grasp this distinction was a result of clearer
insight or of coarser intelligence, the fact was the same; and on this
point, in spite of his speech on the Alien and Sedition Acts, Gallatin
belonged to the school of Hamilton, while both were of one mind with
Dallas. The chief avowed object of Jefferson’s election had been to
overthrow the reign of this school. No Virginian could be expected
within two short years to adopt the opinions of opponents who had
been so often branded as “monocrats,” because of acting on these
opinions. Although the Attorney-General’s advice was not followed,
the negotiation for New Orleans was begun on the understanding
that the purchase, if made, would be an inchoate act which would
need express sanction from the States in the shape of an
amendment to the Constitution.
There the matter rested. At the moment of Monroe’s
appointment, the President, according to his letters, had little hope of
quick success in the purchase of territory. His plan was to “palliate
and endure,” unless France should force a war upon him; the
constitutional question could wait, and it was accordingly laid aside.
Yet the chief ambition of Southern statesmen in foreign affairs was to
obtain the Floridas and New Orleans; and in effecting this object they
could hardly escape establishing a serious precedent. Already
Jefferson had ordered his ministers at Paris to buy this territory,
although he thought the Constitution gave him no power to do so; he
was willing to increase the national debt for this purpose, even
though a national debt was a “mortal canker;” and he ordered his
minister, in case Bonaparte should close the Mississippi, to make a
permanent alliance with England, or in his own words to “marry
ourselves to the British fleet and nation,” as the price of New Orleans
and Florida. Jefferson foresaw and accepted the consequences of
the necessity; he repeatedly referred to them and deprecated them
in his letters; but the territory was a vital object, and success there
would, as he pointed out, secure forever the triumph of his party
even in New England.
“I believe we may consider the mass of the States south and
west of Connecticut and Massachusetts as now a consolidated body
of Republicanism,”—he wrote to Governor McKean in the midst of
the Mississippi excitement.[66] “In Connecticut, Massachusetts, and
New Hampshire there is still a Federal ascendency; but it is near its
last. If we can settle happily the difficulties of the Mississippi, I think
we may promise ourselves smooth seas during our time.” What he
rightly feared more than any other political disaster was the risk of
falling back to the feelings of 1798 and 1799, “when a final
dissolution of all bonds, civil and social, appeared imminent.”[67] With
zeal which never flagged, Jefferson kept up his struggle with the
New England oligarchy, whose last move alarmed him. So sensitive
was the President, that he joined personally in the fray that
distracted New England; and while waiting for news from Monroe, he
wrote a defence of his own use of patronage, showing, under the
assumed character of a Massachusetts man, that a proportionate
division of offices between the two parties would, since the
Federalists had so much declined in numbers, leave to them even a
smaller share of Federal offices than they still possessed. This paper
he sent to Attorney-General Lincoln,[68] to be published in the
Boston “Chronicle;” and there, although never recognized, it
appeared.
Had the Federalists suspected the authorship, they would have
fallen without mercy upon its arguments and its modest compliment
to “the tried ability and patriotism of the present Executive;” but the
essay was no sooner published than it was forgotten. The
“Chronicle” of June 27, 1803, contained Jefferson’s argument
founded on the rapid disappearance of the Federalist party; the next
issue of the “Chronicle,” June 30, contained a single headline, which
sounded the death-knell of Federalism altogether: “Louisiana ceded
to the United States!” The great news had arrived; and the Federalist
orators of July 4, 1803, set about their annual task of foreboding the
ruin of society amid the cheers and congratulations of the happiest
society the world then knew.
The President’s first thought was of the Constitution. Without
delay he drew up an amendment, which he sent at once to his
Cabinet.[69] “The province of Louisiana is incorporated with the
United States and made part thereof,” began this curious paper; “the
rights of occupancy in the soil and of self-government are confirmed
to the Indian inhabitants as they now exist.” Then, after creating a
special Constitution for the territory north of the 32d parallel,
reserving it for the Indians until a new amendment to the Constitution
should give authority for white ownership, the draft provided for
erecting the portion south of latitude 32° into a territorial government,
and vesting the inhabitants with the rights of other territorial citizens.
Gallatin took no notice of this paper, except to acknowledge
receiving it.[70] Robert Smith wrote at some length, July 9,
dissuading Jefferson from grafting so strange a shoot upon the
Constitution.[71]
“Your great object is to prevent emigrations,” said he, “excepting to
a certain portion of the ceded territory. This could be effectually
accomplished by a constitutional prohibition that Congress should not
erect or establish in that portion of the ceded territory situated north of
latitude 32° any new state or territorial government, and that they
should not grant to any people excepting Indians any right or title
whatever to any part of the said portion of the said territory.”
Of any jealousy between North and South which could be
sharpened by such a restriction of northern and extension of
southern territory, Jefferson was unaware. He proposed his
amendment in good faith as a means of holding the Union together
by stopping its too rapid extension into the wilderness.
Coldly as his ideas were received in the Cabinet, Jefferson did
not abandon them. Another month passed, and a call was issued for
a special meeting of Congress October 17 to provide the necessary
legislation for carrying the treaty into effect. As the summer wore
away, Jefferson imparted his opinions to persons outside the
Cabinet. He wrote, August 12, to Breckenridge of Kentucky a long
and genial letter. Congress, he supposed,[72] after ratifying the treaty
and paying for the country, “must then appeal to the nation for an
additional article to the Constitution approving and confirming an act
which the nation had not previously authorized. The Constitution has
made no provision for our holding foreign territory, still less for
incorporating foreign nations into our Union. The Executive, in
seizing the fugitive occurrence which so much advances the good of
their country, have done an act beyond the Constitution. The
Legislature, in casting behind them metaphysical subtleties and
risking themselves like faithful servants, must ratify and pay for it,
and throw themselves on their country for doing for them
unauthorized what we know they would have done for themselves
had they been in a situation to do it.”
Breckenridge—whose Kentucky Resolutions, hardly five years
before, declared that unconstitutional assumptions of power were the
surrender of the form of government the people had chosen, and the
replacing it by a government which derived its powers from its own
will—might be annoyed at finding his principles abandoned by the
man who had led him to father them; and surely no leader who had
sent to his follower in one year the draft of the Kentucky Resolutions
could have expected to send in another the draft of the Louisiana
treaty. “I suppose they must then appeal to the nation” were the
President’s words; and he underscored this ominous phrase. “We
shall not be disavowed by the nation, and their act of indemnity will
confirm and not weaken the Constitution by more strongly marking
out its lines.” The Constitution, in dealing with the matter of
amendments, made no reference to the nation; the word itself was
unknown to the Constitution, which invariably spoke of the Union
wherever such an expression was needed; and on the Virginia
theory Congress had no right to appeal to the nation at all, except as
a nation of States, for an amendment. The language used by
Jefferson was the language of centralization, and would have been
rejected by him and his party in 1798 or in 1820.
On the day of writing to Breckenridge the President wrote in a like
sense to Paine; but in the course of a week despatches arrived from
Paris which alarmed him. Livingston had reason to fear a sudden
change of mind in the First Consul, and was willing to hasten the
movements of President and Congress. Jefferson took the alarm,
and wrote instantly to warn Breckenridge and Paine that no whisper
of constitutional difficulties must be heard:[73]—
“I wrote you on the 12th instant on the subject of Louisiana and the
constitutional provision which might be necessary for it. A letter
received yesterday shows that nothing must be said on that subject
which may give a pretext for retracting, but that we should do sub
silentio what shall be found necessary. Be so good, therefore, as to
consider that part of my letter as confidential.”
He gave the same warning to his Cabinet:[74] “I infer that the less
we say about constitutional difficulties the better; and that what is
necessary for surmounting them must be done sub silentio.”
He then drew up a new amendment, which he sent to the
members of his Cabinet.[75] The July draft was long, elaborate, and
almost a new Constitution in itself; the August draft was
comparatively brief. “Louisiana as ceded by France to the United
States is made a part of the United States. Its white inhabitants shall
be citizens, and stand, as to their rights and obligations, on the same
footing with other citizens of the United States in analogous
situations.” The whole country north of the Arkansas River was
reserved for Indians until another amendment should be made; and
as an afterthought Florida was to be admitted as a part of the United
States “whenever it may be rightfully obtained.”
These persistent attempts to preserve his own consistency and
that of his party were coldly received. Jefferson found himself alone.
Wilson Cary Nicholas, a prominent supporter of the Virginia
Resolutions in 1798 and a senator of the United States in 1803, had
a long conversation with the President, and in the early days of
September wrote him a letter which might have come from Theodore
Sedgwick or Roger Griswold in the days of Jay’s treaty, when
Federalist notions of prerogative ran highest.
“Upon an examination of the Constitution,” wrote Nicholas,[76] “I
find the power as broad as it could well be made (Sect. 3, Art. IV.),
except that new States cannot be formed out of the old ones without
the consent of the State to be dismembered; and the exception is a
proof to my mind that it was not intended to confine the Congress in
the admission of new States to what was then the territory of the
United States. Nor do I see anything in the Constitution that limits the
treaty-making power, except the general limitations of the other
powers given to the government, and the evident objects for which the
government was instituted.”
Had Nicholas reasoned thus in 1798 he would have been a
Federalist, as he seemed conscious, for he went on to say: “I am
aware that this is to us delicate ground, and perhaps my opinions
may clash with the opinions given by our friends during the
discussion of the British treaty.” Nevertheless he argued that if this
treaty was unconstitutional, all other treaties were open to the same
objection, and the United States government in such a case could
make no treaty at all. Finally, he begged the President to avoid giving
an opinion on the subject: “I should think it very probable if the treaty
should be declared by you to exceed the constitutional authority of
the treaty-making power, it would be rejected by the Senate, and if
that should not happen, that great use would be made with the
people of a wilful breach of the Constitution.”
Such reasoning in the mouths of Virginia Republicans, who had
asked and gained office by pledging themselves to their people
against the use of implied powers, marked a new epoch. From them
the most dangerous of all arguments, the reductio ad absurdum, was
ominous. What right had they to ask whether any constitutional grant
was less complete than the people might have wished or intended?
If the Constitution were incomplete or absurd, not the government,
but the people of the States who had made it were the only proper
authority to correct it. Otherwise, as Nicholas had so often pointed
out, their creature would become their tyrant, as had been the law of
politics from the beginning.
Jefferson was distressed to find himself thus deserted by his
closest friends on an issue which he felt to be vital. The principle of
strict construction was the breath of his political life. The Pope could
as safely trifle with the doctrine of apostolic succession as Jefferson
with the limits of Executive power. If he and his friends were to
interpret the treaty-making power as they liked, the time was sure to
come when their successors would put so broad an interpretation on
other powers of the government as to lead from step to step, until at
last Virginia might cower in blood and flames before the shadowy
terror called the war-power. With what face could Jefferson then
appear before the tribunal of history, and what position could he
expect to receive?
All this he felt in his kindly way; and with this weight on his mind
he wrote his reply to Nicholas.[77] Beginning with the warning that
Bonaparte could not be trusted, and that Congress must act with as
little debate as possible, particularly as respected the constitutional
difficulty, he went on:—
“I am aware of the force of the observations you make on the
power given by the Constitution to Congress to admit new States into
the Union without restraining the subject to the territory then
constituting the United States. But when I consider that the limits of
the United States are precisely fixed by the treaty of 1783, that the
Constitution expressly declares itself to be made for the United States,
... I do not believe it was meant that [Congress] might receive
England, Ireland, Holland, etc., into it,—which would be the case on
your construction.... I had rather ask an enlargement of power from
the nation, where it is found necessary, than to assume it by a
construction which would make our powers boundless. Our peculiar
security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make
it a blank paper by construction. I say the same as to the opinion of
those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as
boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution.”
From the Virginia standpoint nothing could be better said.
Jefferson in this letter made two points clear: the first was that the
admission of Louisiana into the Union without express authority from
the States made blank paper of the Constitution; the second was
that if the treaty-making power was equal to this act, it superseded
the Constitution. He entertained no doubts on either point, and time
sustained his view; for whether he was right or wrong in law, the
Louisiana treaty gave a fatal wound to “strict construction,” and the
Jeffersonian theories never again received general support. In thus
giving them up, Jefferson did not lead the way, but he allowed his
friends to drag him in the path they chose. The leadership he sought
was one of sympathy and love, not of command; and there was
never a time when he thought that resistance to the will of his party
would serve the great ends he had in view. The evils which he
foresaw were remote: in the hands of true Republicans the
Constitution, even though violated, was on the whole safe; the
precedent, though alarming, was exceptional. So it happened that
after declaring in one sentence the Constitution at an end if Nicholas
had his way, Jefferson in the next breath offered his acquiescence in
advance:—
“I confess I think it important in the present case to set an example
against broad construction by appealing for new power to the people.
If, however, our friends shall think differently, certainly I shall
acquiesce with satisfaction, confiding that the good sense of our
country will correct the evil of construction when it shall produce ill
effects.”
With these words Jefferson closed his mouth on this subject
forever. Although his future silence led many of his friends to think
that he ended by altering his opinion, and by admitting that his
purchase of Louisiana was constitutional, no evidence showed the
change; but rather one is led to believe that when in later life he saw
what he called the evils of construction grow until he cried against
them with violence almost as shrill as in 1798, he felt most strongly
the fatal error which his friends had forced him to commit, and which
he could neither repudiate nor defend. He had declared that he
would acquiesce with satisfaction in making blank paper of the
Constitution.
A few weeks later, Oct. 17, 1803, Congress met. The President’s
Message had little to say of domestic affairs. The Kaskaskia Indians
had sold their territory to the United States, the revenue had again
exceeded the estimate, more than three millions of debt had been
paid within the year. Much was said about war in Europe and the
rights and duties of neutrals, about gunboats which were no longer
needed, and about the unsettled boundary in Maine and at the Lake
of the Woods, but not a word about the constitutional difficulties
raised by the Louisiana treaty. “With the wisdom of Congress it will
rest,” said Jefferson, “to take those ulterior measures which may be
necessary for the immediate occupation and temporary government
of the country, for its incorporation into our Union, for rendering the
change of government a blessing to our newly adopted brethren, for
securing to them the rights of conscience and of property, for
confirming to the Indian inhabitants their occupancy and self-
government.” These were the points of his proposed amendment;
but he gave no sign of his opinion that Congress was incompetent to
deal with them, and that the Senate was equally incompetent to
make the treaty valid.
There were good reasons for silence. Not only were Livingston’s
letters alarming, but the Marquis of Casa Yrujo, the friend and
benefactor of the Administration, sent to Madison one protest after
another against the sale of Louisiana.[78] He quoted St.-Cyr’s letter
of July, 1802, which bound France not to alienate the province, and
he declared that France had never carried out the conditions of
contract in regard to Tuscany, and therefore could not rightfully treat
Louisiana as her own. A probable war with Spain stared Jefferson in
the face, even if Bonaparte should raise no new difficulties. The
responsibility for a mistake was great, and no one could blame
Jefferson if he threw his burden on Congress.
CHAPTER V.
If President Jefferson and Secretary Madison, who wrote the
Resolutions of 1798, acquiesced, in 1803, in a course of conduct
which as Jefferson believed made blank paper of the Constitution,
and which, whether it did so or not, certainly made waste paper of
the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, no one could expect that their
followers would be more consistent or more rigid than themselves.
Fortunately, all the more prominent Republicans of 1798 had been
placed in office by the people as a result of popular approval, and
were ready to explain their own views. In the Senate sat John
Breckenridge of Kentucky, supposed to be the author of the
Kentucky Resolutions, and known as their champion in the Kentucky
legislature. From Virginia came John Taylor of Caroline, the reputed
father of the Virginia Resolutions, and the soundest of strict
constructionists. Twenty years later, his “Construction Construed”
and “New Views of the Constitution” became the text-books of the
State-rights school. His colleague was Wilson Cary Nicholas, who
had also taken a prominent part in supporting the Virginia
Resolutions, and whose devotion to the principles of strict
construction was beyond doubt. One of the South Carolina senators
was Pierce Butler; one of those from North Carolina was David
Stone; Georgia was represented by Abraham Baldwin and James
Jackson,—stanch State-rights Republicans all. In the House a small
coterie of State-rights Republicans controlled legislation. Speaker
Macon was at their head; John Randolph, chairman of the Ways and
Means Committee, was their mouthpiece. Joseph H. Nicholson of
Maryland, and Cæsar A. Rodney of Delaware, supported Randolph
on the committee; while two of President Jefferson’s sons-in-law,
Thomas Mann Randolph and John W. Eppes, sat in the Virginia
delegation. Both in Senate and House the Southern Republicans of
the Virginia school held supremacy; their power was so absolute as
to admit no contest; they were at the flood of that tide which had set
in three years before. In the Senate they controlled twenty-five votes
against nine; in the House, one hundred and two against thirty-nine.
Virginia ruled the United States, and the Republicans of 1798 ruled
Virginia. The ideal moment of Republican principles had arrived.
This moment was big with the fate of theories. Other debates of
more practical importance may have frequently occurred,—for in
truth whatever the decision of Congress might have been, it would in
no case have affected the result that Louisiana was to enter the
Union: and this inevitable result overshadowed all theory,—but no
debate ever took place in the Capitol which better deserved
recollection.
Of extraordinary ability Congress contained but little, and owing
to the meagre character of the reports, appeared to contain even
less than it actually possessed; but if no one rose to excellence
either of logic or rhetoric, the speakers still dealt with the whole
subject, and rounded the precedent with all the argument and
illustration that a future nation could need. Both actions and words
spoke with decision and distinctness till that time unknown in
American politics.
The debate began first in the House, where Gaylord Griswold of
New York, Oct. 24, 1803, moved for such papers as the Government
might possess tending to show the value of the title to Louisiana as
against Spain. Under the lead of John Randolph the House refused
the call. That this decision clashed with the traditions of the
Republican party was proved by the vote. With a majority of three to
one, Randolph succeeded in defeating Griswold only by fifty-nine to
fifty-seven; while Nicholson, Rodney, Varnum of Massachusetts, and
many other stanch Republicans voted with the Federalists.
The next day the House took up the motion for carrying the treaty
into effect. Griswold began again, and without knowing it repeated
Jefferson’s reasoning. The framers of the Constitution, he said,
“carried their ideas to the time when there might be an extended
population; but they did not carry them forward to the time when an
addition might be made to the Union of a territory equal to the whole
United States, which additional territory might overbalance the
existing territory, and thereby the rights of the present citizens of the
United States be swallowed up and lost.” The power to admit new
States referred only to the territory existing when the Constitution
was framed; but this right, whatever it might be, was vested in
Congress, not in the Executive. In promising to admit Louisiana as a
State into the Union, the treaty assumed for the President power
which in any case could not have been his. Finally, the treaty gave to
French and Spanish ships special privileges for twelve years in the
port of New Orleans; while the Constitution forbade any preference
to be given, by any regulation of commerce or revenue, to the ports
of one State over those of another.
John Randolph next rose. Just thirty years old, with a sarcasm of
tone and manner that overbore remonstrance, and with an authority
in the House that no one contested, Randolph spoke the voice of
Virginia with autocratic distinctness. His past history was chiefly
marked by the ardor with which, from 1798 to 1800, he had
supported the principles of his party and encouraged resistance to
the national government. He had gone beyond Jefferson and
Madison in willingness to back their theories by force, and to fix by a
display of Virginia power the limit beyond which neither Executive,
Congress, nor Judiciary should pass. Even then he probably cared
little for what he called the “parchment barriers” of the Constitution:
in his mind force was the real balance,—force of State against force
of Union; and any measure which threatened to increase the power
of the national government beyond that of the State, was sure of his
enmity. A feather might turn the balance, so nice was the
adjustment; and Randolph again and again cried with violence
against feathers.
In the Louisiana debate, Randolph spoke in a different tone. The
Constitution, he said, could not restrict the country to particular limits,
because at the time of its adoption the boundary was unsettled on
the northeastern, northwestern, and southern frontiers. The power to
settle disputes as to limits was indispensable; it existed in the
Constitution, had been repeatedly exercised, and involved the power
of extending boundaries.
This argument was startling in the mouth of one who had helped
to arm the State of Virginia against a moderate exercise of implied
powers. Randolph asserted that the right to annex Louisiana, Texas,
Mexico, South America, if need be, was involved in the right to run a
doubtful boundary line between the Georgia territory and Florida. If
this power existed in the government, it necessarily devolved on the
Executive as the organ for dealing with foreign States. Thus
Griswold’s first objection was answered.
Griswold objected in the second place that the treaty made New
Orleans a favored port. “I regard this stipulation,” replied Randolph,
“as a part of the price of the territory. It was a condition which the
party ceding had a right to require, and to which we had a right to
assent. The right to acquire involves the right to give the equivalent
demanded.” Randolph did not further illustrate this sweeping
principle of implied power.
After the subject had been treated by speakers of less weight,
Roger Griswold of Connecticut took the floor. So long as his party
had been in office, the vigor of the Constitution had found no warmer
friend than he; but believing New England to have fallen at the mercy
of Virginia, he was earnest to save her from the complete extinction
which he thought near at hand. Griswold could not deny that the
Constitution gave the power to acquire territory: his Federalist
principles were too fresh to dispute such an inherent right; and
Gouverneur Morris, as extreme a Federalist as himself, whose words
had been used in the Constitution, averred that he knew in 1788 as
well as he knew in 1803, that all North America must at length be
annexed, and that it would have been Utopian to restrain the
movement.[79] This was old Federalist doctrine, resting on “inherent
rights,” on nationality and broad construction,—the Federalism of
President Washington, which the Republican party from the
beginning denounced as monarchical. Griswold would not turn his
back on it; he still took a liberal view of the power, and even
stretched it beyond reasonable shape to accord with Morris’s idea.
“A new territory and new subjects,” said he, “may undoubtedly be
obtained by conquest and by purchase; but neither the conquest nor
the purchase can incorporate them into the Union. They must remain
in the condition of colonies, and be governed accordingly.” This claim
gave the central government despotic power over its new purchase;
but it declared that a treaty which pledged the nation to admit the
people of Louisiana into the Union must be invalid, because it
assumed that “the President and Senate may admit at will any
foreign nation into this copartnership without the consent of the
States,”—a power directly repugnant to the principles of the
compact. In substance, Griswold maintained that either under the
war power or under the treaty-making power the government could
acquire territory, and as a matter of course could hold and govern
that territory as it pleased,—despotically if necessary, or for selfish
objects; but that the President and Senate could not admit a foreign
people into the Union, as a State. Yet to this, the treaty bound them.
To meet this attack the Republicans put forward their two best
men,—Joseph H. Nicholson of Maryland, and Cæsar A. Rodney of
Delaware. The task was difficult, and Nicholson showed his
embarrassment at the outset. “Whether the United States,” said he,
“as a sovereign and independent empire, has a right to acquire
territory is one thing; but whether they can admit that territory into the
Union upon an equal footing with the other States is a question of a
very different nature.” He refused to discuss this latter issue; in his
opinion it was not before the House.
This flinching was neither candid nor courageous; but it was
within the fair limits of a lawyer’s if not of a statesman’s practice, and
Nicholson at least saved his consistency. On the simpler question,
whether “a sovereign nation,” as he next said, “had a right to acquire
new territory,” he spoke with as much emphasis as Roger Griswold
and Gouverneur Morris, and he took the same ground. The separate
States had surrendered their sovereignty by adopting the
Constitution; “the right to declare war was given to Congress; the
right to make treaties, to the President and Senate. Conquest and
purchase alone are the means by which nations acquire territory.”
Griswold was right, then, in the ground he had taken; but Nicholson,
not satisfied with gaining his point through the treaty-making power,
which was at least express, added: “The right must exist
somewhere: it is essential to independent sovereignty.” As it was
prohibited to the States, the power was necessarily vested in the
United States.
This general implication, that powers inherent in sovereignty
which had not been expressly reserved to the States were vested in
the national government, was not more radical centralization than
Nicholson’s next point. The treaty gave to the port of New Orleans a
decided preference over all other ports of the United States,
although the Constitution said that no preference should be given to
the ports of one State over those of another. To this objection
Nicholson replied that Louisiana was not a State. “It is a territory
purchased by the United States in their confederate capacity, and
may be disposed of by them at pleasure. It is in the nature of a
colony whose commerce may be regulated without any reference to
the Constitution.” The new territory, therefore, was in the nature of a
European colony; the United States government might regulate its
commerce without regard to the Constitution, give its population
whatever advantages Congress might see fit, and use it to break
down New England—or slavery.
With the fecund avowal that Louisiana must be governed by
Congress at pleasure without reference to the Constitution,
Nicholson sat down; and Cæsar Rodney took the floor,—an able and
ingenious lawyer, who came to the House with the prestige of
defeating the Federalist champion Bayard. If Randolph and
Nicholson, like the mouse in the fable nibbling at the cords which
bound the lion of Power, had left one strand still unsevered, the lion
stood wholly free before Rodney ended. He began by appealing to
the “general welfare” clause,—a device which the Republican party
and all State-rights advocates once regarded as little short of
treason. “I cannot perceive,” said he, “why within the fair meaning of
this general provision is not included the power of increasing our
territory, if necessary for the general welfare or common defence.”
This argument in such a mouth might well have sent a chill to the
marrow of every Republican of 1798; but this was not the whole. He
next invoked the “necessary and proper” clause, even at that early
time familiar to every strict constructionist as one of the most
dangerous instruments of centralization. “Have we not also vested in
us every power necessary for carrying such a treaty into effect, in the
words of the Constitution which give Congress the authority to ‘make
all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into
execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this
Constitution in the government of the United States or in any
department or officer thereof’?”
One more point was affirmed by Rodney. Gaylord Griswold had
maintained that the territory mentioned in the Constitution was the
territory existing in 1789. Rodney denied it. Congress, he said, had
express power to “make all needful rules and regulations” respecting
any and all territory; it had no need to infer this power from other
grants. As for the special privilege of trade accorded to New Orleans,
it violated in no way the Constitution; it was indirectly a benefit to all
the States, and a preference to none.
The Northern democrats also supported these views; but the
opinions of Northern democrats on constitutional questions carried
little weight. Neither among them nor among Southern Republicans
did any member question what Randolph, Nicholson, and Rodney
had said. Macon sat silent in his chair, while John Randolph closed
the debate. As though he could not satisfy himself with leaving a
doubt as to the right of Government to assume what powers it
wanted, Randolph took this moment to meet Roger Griswold’s
assertion that the United States government could not lawfully
incorporate Great Britain or France into the Union. Randolph
affirmed that, so far as the Constitution was concerned, this might be
done. “We cannot because we cannot.”
The reply was disingenuous, but decisive. The question was not
whether the States in union could lawfully admit England or France
into the Union, for no one denied that the States could do what they
pleased. Griswold only affirmed that the people of the States had
never delegated to John Randolph or Thomas Jefferson, or to a
majority of the United States Senate, the right to make a political
revolution by annexing a foreign State. Jefferson agreed with
Griswold that they had not; if they had, “then we have no
Constitution” was his comment. Yet not a voice was raised in the
Administration party against Randolph’s views. After one day’s
debate, ninety Republicans supported Randolph with their votes, and
twenty-five Federalists alone protested. Of these twenty-five, not less
than seventeen were from New England.

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Reading the Past Across Space and

Time: Receptions and World Literature

Translation across Time and Space 1st Edition Wafa Abu

Social Ecology Society Nature Relations across Time and

Liminality, Transgression and Space Across the World :

World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of

Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture 1st

Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum MLA Update

The broken voice. Reading post-Holocaust literature 1st

Jameson and Literature The Novel History and

Edited by Brenda Deen Schildgen

Robert T. Tally Jr.

More information about this series at

Reading the Past

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957888

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover illustration: Fra Mauro Mappa Mundi (1450) www.bing.com/images/search

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

A collaborative project, this collection of essays emerged from a conference

Professor Ralph Hexter, Professor Wai Chee Dimock, and Professor

Reading the Past Across Space and Time: Receptions

Part I Epic Receptions21

Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents39

“Wheels Working Together: The Popol Wuj

Reception Configurations: The Case of European

Formal Experiments in Margaret Atwood’s

Part II Greek Philosophical Receptions119

Disagreement and Reception: Peripatetics Responding

“Now We Must Consider That Some of the Ancients

Reading and Commenting on Aristotle’s

Part III Drama and Receptions185

A Third Antike: Hans Henny Jahnn’s Medea

American Bushido: A Kabuki Play Transplanted203

Tamil “Translation,” French Orientalism,

Part IV Lyric Receptions243

Goethe’s Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten:

The Mediterranean Metaphor265

Inventing China: The American Tradition

Part V Politics and Sociology of Reception297

Meaning, Reception, and the Use of Classics:

The Sociology of Reception321

Brenda Deen Schildgen and Ralph Hexter

This collection of essays examines receptions of ancient to early modern

B.D. Schildgen (*)

© The Author(s) 2016 1

e­ncounter with James Macpherson’s Fingal, Ancient Epic Poem in Six

how literature belongs to a continuum of related forms and ­subjects con-

Goethe’s remark that “world literature is now at hand” came just as

One of Casanova’s most prominent examples of the world republic of

constitute the very interpretive—and interpretable—unity of this text. This

freedom of the writer to incorporate from diverse sources, thus ­remaking

to organize according to time and space while remaining attentive to the

Enkidu, and Humbaba, the guardian of the forest. The Sulaymaniyah

As an indirect consequence of colonialism, different and unrelated

twentieth-­century poets Robinson Jeffers and, to a degree, Gary Snyder

trends in the discipline, see Haun Saussy, Comparative Literature in an

Part I Epic Receptions21

Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents39

Part II Greek Philosophical Receptions119

Part III Drama and Receptions185

American Bushido: A Kabuki Play Transplanted203

Part IV Lyric Receptions243

The Mediterranean Metaphor265

Part V Politics and Sociology of Reception297

The Sociology of Reception321

encounter with James Macpherson’s Fingal, Ancient Epic Poem in Six

how literature belongs to a continuum of related forms and subjects con-

freedom of the writer to incorporate from diverse sources, thus remaking

twentieth-century poets Robinson Jeffers and, to a degree, Gary Snyder