Editors' Note

We are pleased to present a selection of articles that focus on a wide range of innovative topics relevant to contemporary discourses. We are especially excited to include two articles on medieval themes. The first analyzes three female characters in the medieval French romance Partonopeu de Blois to show female empowerment through the subversion of courtly and patriarchal conventions; the second focuses on the English Abbot Ælfric, the author of hagiographies, homilies, and biblical commentaries. "Continuums, Simultaneity and Politics in Contemporary Latin American Authors" and "The Sensorial, Biocentric Philosophy of Michel Serres and Michel Onfray: Rehabilitating the Human Body" explore the intersection of science and literature, while "Lyric Subversions: The Case of James Merrill" and "Defying Death: Stigmas and Rewards of Immortality in Taoist and Gothic Literature Traditions" pursue intertextual connections, ambiguous representations of female characters, and possibilities for transgression and transcendence. Although the articles are diverse in their topics and approaches, they share common ground in that they force the readers to re-examine perspectives and perceptions of time and space, the human body, gendered narratives, reception theories, and other dominant tropes in our cultural and political discourse. Such inquiries point the way to the forthcoming special issue, "Ways of Seeing: Visuality, Visibility, and Vision" to be edited by Andrea Gogrof, which will include her 2017 presidential PAMLA address "Visibility Is a Trap? Dimensions of Surveillance and Its Effects on Culture Today."

In the present issue, Melanie McBride's "Covert Ops: Female Empowerment in the Twelfth-Century French Partonopeu de Blois" examines the romance Partonopeu de Blois, drawing on Olivier Collet and Pierre-Marie Joris's edition of this text, while also "using MS. B (Bern, Burgerbibliothek 113, fols 203-36r) to fill in lacunas." McBride's careful and detailed reading of this text concentrates on three female characters: Lucrece, Melior, and Urake. After first showing their awareness of social conventions in courtly society, McBride expands on their manipulation of these conventions through guile, highlighting the agency of Melior in particular: "As she plays the role of the obedient maiden and tractable young empress, she is orchestrating events behind the scene to secure her choice of husband." Melior's deceit is but one example of the private and public empowerment of female characters in a medieval romance ostensibly devoted to the glorification of masculine virtue. McBride further supports her argument by showing that the hero of this romance, Partonopeu, is fully the product of female education and cultivation.

Although Derek Updegraff 's study "Ælfric, Alliterative Linking, and the Idea of a Vernacular Verse Line" is a meticulous analysis of alliteration, it also addresses changes in vernacular writings from a standard prose mode to an alliterative, rhythmical mode. Switching to a more aesthetically pleasing form of narration, Ælfric's project was an experiment with a genre and tradition to express "his own idea of an aesthetic combination of words and their sounds." Since Ælfric consciously chose an emergent rhythmical form that is different from classical Old English verse, he avoided "a tie to the native heroic tradition so strongly embedded within the structures of classical verse" that was more effective for didactic purposes. By introducing flexibility and artistry into the genre, he expanded his audience from monastic to secular readers who would share phonological pleasures as well as doctrinal instruction.

Claudia Ingram's "Lyric Subversions: The Case of James Merrill" situates its analysis of Merrill's "shifting, ambiguous maternal images"—connoting, among other things, the mother tongue and matricide—in scholarly discussions of the lyric mode. For Ingram, Mutlu Konuk Blasing's Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words with its stress on polysemy is particularly conducive to an analysis of Merrill's poems. "Lyric Subversions" discusses intertextual echoes of Shakespeare's The Tempest in the poem "To My Greek" and distinguishes Merrill's speaker from Prospero insofar as the former does not seek autonomy and authority over language but rather the "ongoing sounding" of the maternal, which suggests his refusal to sever himself from the maternal (which Ingram, implicitly, likens to Kristeva's sonic "chora"). In "Elektra: A Translation," Merrill's engagement with matricide is similarly unfinished, as...