You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
You have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
You have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
And my fear is great that you have taken God from me! ¹⁵

This is, of course, a very rich poem; it should be added that in the Gaelic original the richness is also of a formal quality, because the text adheres to a very elaborate rhyme-scheme, involving a multitude of vowel assonances and consonant alliterations, unreproducible in English but close to something from Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet for all its individual richness, the poem is hard to place or to contextualize. The most recent anthology of Irish literature classes it with an amorphous group, without date or authorship, called "folk poetry"--yet the editors comment that the poem may well be from before 1600, given its great dissemination and popularity all over Ireland and Gaelic Scotland.

For one, thing, then, what we have here is a disembodied text without fixed provenance. Its author's name is not provided; neither is the date of its incipience. One thing that it certain is that it is not an official "bardic" poem, since it avoids the prosody of that lofty genre and sticks to the formal conventions known as amhrán or "song." The references indicate an agricultural background--peasantry, possibly minor tenants rather than day laborers--and the speaking persona is, of course, a lovesick woman. Ironically, the femininity of the central persona dovetails with the anonymity of the poem. In all these aspects--folkish collectivity, anonymity, femininity--this poem lacks the individuation of a known, named subject who "authors" or authorizes the text; and it also lacks the historical datability that would place its genesis in a precise moment in historical time. There are therefore numerous interpretations that place such poetical activity, despite its obvious lyrical and formal refinement, in the context of household activity: work songs or walking songs, chanted rhythmically to give scansion to repetitive chores.

There have been, to be sure, critics who have attempted to penetrate this miasma of imprecision and lyrical vagueness. Seán Ó Tuama, for instance, has traced a number of topoi from this type of poem back to the stylistic register of French amour courtois poetry; he [End Page 237] has suggested that such amorous lyricism entered Ireland with the Hiberno-Norman nobility of the Middle Ages, and that in the intervening centuries it percolated into folk culture. ¹⁶

It should be added that women poets were by no means unknown in eighteenth-century Gaelic Ireland. ¹⁷ On the other hand, we cannot infer, automatically, from the fact that this poem is spoken by the lyrical persona of a woman, that it was therefore written by a woman: there are poems on record that voice the frustration and longing of women but are known to have been written by men. Still, such evidence as we have argues overwhelmingly for female authorship from a peasant background. A recent critic has phrased it like this:

The majority were composed by women and transmitted in a predominantly female environment: more than one strain in the tradition seems to derive from an exclusively female sub-culture not necessarily connected with work--accompaniment to dance is a possibility. Indeed, their strong, almost hypnotic rhythms give the impression of belonging to an ecstatic ceremony. Their poetry unfolds, not in a smooth linear movement, but unevenly, with quite unpredictable changes in focus. But however disconcerting this may at times be, it is precisely these abrupt transitions from image to image, governed only by the nature of the situation expressed in the poem, that release the creative energy. These songs use language according to a principle which is at the farthest extreme from that of a logical, ordered sequence of prose. ¹⁸

The accumulation of irrationality and femininity is perhaps overstated. If one of the arresting features of poems like Domhnall Óg is their sudden shift of mood and diction from stanza to stanza, this is not exclusively to be explained by the dionysian, wild, Celtic earth-goddess character of their authors. On the contrary, such a view seems merely to perpetuate a sentimental, romantic, or Victorian attitude that constructs the Celtic soul as feminine, pagan, and emotional. It is not surprising that Domhnall Óg was among the poems cherished by William Butler Yeats, because it was a native Irish justification [End Page 238] for his own symbolism: its exaggerated imagery (golden ships, gloves made of the leather of tanned fishskins) would have appealed to his phantasmagoric imagination; and its final stanza, reaching in its lovesickness to a startling atheism, would have bolstered his fond notion that his own fin de siècle post-Christian paganism was a natural extension of the persistence of pre-Christian paganism in Irish folk culture.

It has been rightly pointed out that the danger of stereotypes is not so much that they are all necessarily wrong, but rather that they prevent us from seeing different possible truths. So it is here. An interpretation of Domhnall Óg in terms of the Victorian stereotypes concerning female and Celtic sensibility (and the Celts were considered "an especially feminine race," as Matthew Arnold phrased it) ¹⁹ may not be completely wrong, but in its familiarity it is limiting. I would like to offer some alternative interpretations, in order to demonstrate that the stereotype is not the whole possible truth. In these counterinterpretations I will also attempt to give a more historical contextualization of the text and of the attitudes it voices, as opposed to the timelessness that the accepted reading appears to impose--the timeless passion of the eternal Celt, the unchanging ways of the folk, the perennial story of girls who love not wisely but too well . . . Most importantly, my aim is to indicate that the meaning that such interpretations locate within the text, in originating spirit and the mentality that gave rise to it (in other words: the text's genesis or genotype), should perhaps rather be sought in the text's wider social or discursive context, or in its historical transmission.

Take, for instance, that famous last stanza, which seems to imply a pitch of passion that blots out even the most forceful ideology in all of European history: Christianity. This stanza has often been compared to other Gaelic poems that hark back to pre-Christian traditions (one poet speaks ca. 1700 of his patron as one "whose forefathers were served by my forefathers before the birth of Christ"); ²⁰ in this context, it has been argued that it indicates a persistence of archaic pagan attitudes in the Christian Middle Ages, which would make for a most powerful closure to this remarkable text. Indeed, there are reasons to assume the existence of folk belief, as attested by eighteenth-century poetry, definitely outside the pale of what was [End Page 239] condoned by Roman Catholicism. But I fear that such an interpretation by itself is limiting, and that one has to take into account a parallel, more innocuous meaning, which is, at least on the surface, wholly compatible with post-Tridentine Catholic doctrine. If the woman in the poem has had sex with Young Donal, she has committed a mortal sin: she may no longer participate in the sacraments of the Catholic church, having placed herself outside the community of those who can worship and earn their salvation through their observance of rites and duties--and in this sense, too, Young Donal has taken God away from the lovelorn girl. It is not that either of these interpretations invalidates the other, but that neither should be allowed to push the other under the carpet. In order to assess their relative merits, a further investigation would be required: we would have to research the extent to which Catholic doctrine was being taught to, and was interiorized by, the peasantry of eighteenth-century Ireland; we would have to take into account the status of Catholic education in a society dominated by an intolerant Protestant system; and, in short, we would have to delve far deeper into the historical context and mentalité than the stereotype alone would allow us to do.

Moreover, the poem need not be completely and exclusively centered on the lovesickness of a young woman: there is at least a connotative intertext of political symbolism. Jacobite poetry of the later eighteenth century (which is by political necessity coded and indirect in its political allusions) is suffused with references to the absent true prince across the water, ²¹ and the bereft misery of his people who are pining for his return is very often couched in the terminology of amour courtois: lovesickness as a pining, wasting disease. Keats's La belle dame sans merci was prefigured hundreds of times throughout the eighteenth century in Gaelic poetry, both in Ireland and in Scotland, but always with a definite political allegory implied. Frequently, the judgment as to whether a given poem was meant as a political, Jacobite allegory or as a straightforward love song was hair-triggered and would depend on subtle markers within the text of a contextual or intertextual nature. A poem that was to be sung to the tune of An cnóta bán or "The White Cockade" would by that marker alone announce its Jacobite symbolism. A poem in praise of women with names such as Roisín Dubh ("dark Rosaleen") or Caitlín Ní Uallachaín would be immediately recognizable as a subversive anti-English allegory, while other dedicatees with similar-sounding [End Page 240] names like Móirin Ní Luineacháin would play on the connection. Worse still, one and the same poem could, by minute shifts in diction, shift its status and meaning--as in the case of a seventeenth-century love poem to a woman called Caitlín Tiriall (Kathleen Tyrrell) that has come down to us in later manuscripts (and even a printed broadsheet) as addressing Caitlín Tráill (Kathleen the Thrall, or Kathleen the Slave), obviously a personification of Ireland.

Given this extreme ambiguity between lovesickness and political messianism, we must be open to the possibility that at least some of the stanzas of Domhnall Óg either are political or else draw on the rhetorical force of political symbolism--making an implicit connection between Young Donal, who has forsaken his woman, and the Stuart Pretender, who has forsaken his realm, and likewise making a connection between the personal plight of a grieving individual and the collective plight of an oppressed society.

The final point I want to make here is the most complex. It moves from the problem of historical authorship and origin to the problem of textual integrity--or not. The above-cited critic, John MacInnes, has drawn attention to a remarkable feature of poems like these--namely, their unexpected shifts in diction and mood from stanza to stanza. The effect is certainly very powerful and, in a very literal and fundamental sense of the term, moving. The shifting modes of entreaty, despair, and reproach, the images that are developed and then suddenly dropped in favor of description or different imagery, make for a reading experience resembling an emotional rollercoaster. However, it is perhaps too easy to see here some wild, ecstatic, feminine or Celtic trespass beyond the bounds of linearity and prosaic regularity. One of the reasons for this moving effect may indeed be quite mundane: that the poem as it stands is a rather haphazard collection of individual stanzas--some of which also form part of other poems, some of which may have drifted into this particular poem from other sources that vary in wording, numbers of stanzas, and order of stanzas. There is, for instance, a poem called Dá dtéinnse siar (If I traveled West), which includes the penultimate stanza of Domhnall Óg and which is considered by some to be part of what we might call "Domhnall Óg--the director's cut"--an outtake, to put it into cinematographic parlance.

In other words: Domhnall Óg is not a well-circumscribed text at all, it is variable; it can be encountered in different shapes, formats, and forms. This is a condition that is, of course, central to a manuscript literature. It means that each text, as a variable, cumulative encrustation of variants upon a core substance, is undatable as to its "genesis"--certainly if we want to see that genesis in romantic [End Page 241] terms. For our historical understanding, texts emerge almost as if in a Big Bang, are delivered in definitive form by the author to the public. To be sure, the simplistic nature of that view is revealed upon closer scrutiny: the various versions of Goethe's Faust and of Wordsworth's Prelude are obvious cases in point, and the recent furore over a chimerical "definitive" edition of Joyce's Ulysses is another. But these are only pale shadows of the complexity that we encounter in nonprint culture; at least Goethe, Wordsworth, and Joyce stopped tampering with their work (their work) at some point, which provides a closure to textual variability. In manuscript traditions, the variants and variations do not stop on the death of the author: every transcription provides a fresh occasion for new changes.

Philologists have long seen this as a problem. These academic practitioners of print culture have felt the urge to bring these different redactions into discrete form, into focus, and to distill the Urtext--the core substance of the text in its canonical identity, cleansed from corruptions and impurities. This has led to the diplomatic editions of opera omnia, to textual criticism, and to the intractable problems facing the "definitive" edition of Ulysses. Such activity takes its origin, of course, in biblical scholarship: the word of God, of all texts, needed to be given in its pure, original, authentic form, which in turn had to be reconstructed from different manuscript redactions. The printed book par excellence in Western culture, the Bible, marks the transition to an overriding concern with authentic textual identity, the pure and certain text. It is a development that runs concurrently with the invention of the "author" as the ultimate, genetic anchoring point of the text, the central validating point of origin. To reconstruct the real text means to reconstruct it as it would have left the hands of the author. These two developments coincide with the rise of print culture and the rise of individualism. ²²

These deep-seated presuppositions concerning texts and their very ontology are uncongenial to a manuscript culture. In manuscript traditions, texts have what the Celtologist Hildegard Tristram has called Zeittiefe, depth-in-time: they continue to change shape, status, and meaning from generation to generation, and each successive transcription testifies to a new reception of the text at the hands of a new readership. ²³ For that reason, scholars have recently begun to query the philologist's endeavor to distill an ideal-typical [End Page 242] text from various manuscript forms; this, they feel, is imposing false print-culture presuppositions on a different cultural praxis, and they plead therefore for a positive appreciation of manuscript divergences and differences. ²⁴

Indeed, a more germane approach would deal with such variable texts by applying the typological structuralism of folktale research rather than the typocentric presuppositions of print culture. I am thinking here in particular of the departure made by Roman Jakobson and Pyotr Bogatyrev when they analyzed, in a structuralist langue-parole mode, folktales and their tellings and retelling. ²⁵ They argued that the various concrete forms in which a story is encountered in the field may be seen as the speech acts, the paroles, from which it may be possible to infer an ideal-typical narrative matrix, the langue, the story-in-the-abstract. Something similar might usefully be said of the different redactions of a given text in manuscript transmission: the text-as-such, the ideal-typical Urtext, can be seen only as an abstract extrapolation from its various concrete actualizations. That would allow us a more sympathetic and less reductive appreciation of the variants we encounter. What is more, as opposed to folktales, these variants are encountered in a diachronic filiation, stretch over time and history, each redaction being datable according to the manuscript in which it occurs and open to historical contextualization from case to case.

III

The sample case of Domhnall Óg presents a text whose anonymity, whose lack of a properly demarcated author-function, has presented [End Page 243] an ongoing provocation to its Western, modern readers. The many actualizations and reception-instances of this text in the anthologizing process and the critical commentary it has attracted, have invariably been motivated by the attempt to fill the black void of its anonymity by ersatz provenance: to make sense of the text by explaining it in terms of "where it came from," what its genesis or genotype was, which shaping sensibility or character made it what it is. In criticizing some earlier interpretations, I have tried to show instead that the factors that have made Domhnall Óg "what it is" are not matters of sensibility and shaping genius, matters of origin or genesis, but factors of transmission and ongoing reception, the track record of a variable text on its wayward path across centuries and manuscripts.

Taking for my starting point the case of the long-standing and well-documented Gaelic manuscript tradition, I would further suggest that the accumulated redactions and transcriptions are in fact so many samples of texts as they are moving through a centuries-long process of reception--almost as if one could witness all the theatrical productions and stagings of a play by Shakespeare in the four centuries since its first night. Irish manuscripts, interestingly, are not often grouped by author. Many of the more important medieval manuscripts are family albums, including poems in praise of a given family produced by many different passing poets; the primary organizing criterion is that of destinataire rather than author. Indeed, one poem can be attributed to widely different authors, and, owing to the great conservatism of Gaelic poetical form, such attributions often differ by centuries. That is not just a problem for the philologist: it may be our ingrained desire to find out "Who wrote this? Was it fourteenth-century Tadhg Óg Ó hUiginn or sixteenth-century Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn? Was it a man or a woman?" Instead, however, it might be more useful to inquire why such-and-such a manuscript form should choose to include this poem, at this point in the collection, attributed to this or that author, or associated to such-and-such a melody; and, what variations occur in the text in this given setting vis-à-vis other redactions.

This might be a useful thought experiment at least, which would bring us one step closer to a literary history that is concerned at least as importantly with the reception of texts as with their production. One immediate side effect would be that we recognize in its true historical importance the ongoing literary praxis of anthologizing. From the Greek anthology to Johann Gottfried Herder's Stimmen der Völker in Liedern and present-day feminist anthologies, the collecting and reordering and updating of older texts in a new selection has been [End Page 244] one of the prime mechanisms of literary perpetuation and dissemination. It has played a major (but largely unrecognized) role alongside the history of authors' development, rise to fame, and canonicity. ²⁶ It is also the most important literary practice to have survived from manuscript culture into print culture.

A reception-oriented literary history would shed light on many unwarranted presuppositions about the identity of literary texts, enabling us to see those texts in their historical variability and social context. This would allow, more generally, for a productive cross-fertilization between literary history and what I feel to be its most congenial neighboring discipline, cultural history. To have literature, and even the verbal substance of literary texts, recognized as a uniquely valuable corpus for cultural historians would be (I feel) a fitting way to conduct cultural history after Foucault.

University of Amsterdam

Joep Leerssen (Leiden, 1955) studied Comparative Literature at Aachen University and Anglo-Irish Studies at University College Dublin. He is Professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam and currently also serves as director of the Huizinga-Instituut (Dutch National Research Institute for Cultural History). He specializes in the history of nationalism and national stereotyping in literature. His most recent books are Remembrance and Imagination (Cork University Press, 1996) and Nationaal denken: Een cultuurhistorische schets (National thought: an essay in cultural history; Amsterdam University Press, 1999).

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?", in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. J. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 148.

2. Michel Foucault, L'archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 32-33, my translation. (In the original: "Peut-on admettre, telles quelles, la distinction des grands types de discours, ou celle des formes ou des genres qui opposent les unes aux autres science, littérature, philosophie, religion, histoire, fiction, etc., et qui en font des sortes de grandes individualités historiques? Nous ne sommes pas sûrs nous-mêmes de l'usage de ces distinctions dans le monde de discours qui est le nôtre. A plus forte raison lorsqu'il s'agit d'analyser des ensembles d'énoncés qui étaient, à l'époque de leur formulation, distribués, répartis et caractérisés d'une toute autre manière . . . ni la littérature, ni la politique, ni non plus la philosophie et les sciences n'articulaient le champ du discours, au XVIIe ou au XVIIIe siècle, comme elles l'ont articulé au XIXe siècle.")

3. Felix Vodická, Die Struktur der literarischen Entwicklung (Munich: Fink, 1976), esp. "Die Literaturgeschichte, ihre Probleme und Aufgaben" (1942), pp. 30-86.

4. A similar "delayed impact" can be traced with regard to the publication of Snorri Sturlusson's Heimskringla (written ca. 1225, first printed in 1697), with its effect on the Enlightenment taste for primitivism and "original genius"; or indeed Tacitus's De origine et situ germanorum, which was discovered and printed in 1477 and triggered the North European Renaissance cult of love of liberty. But such cases are less egregious, in that literary historians have always allowed the chronology of reception to stand alongside the chronology of production.

5. Foucault, "What Is an Author" (above, n. 1), p. 147-148.

6. Ibid., p. 147-148.

7. Ibid., p. 147-148.

8. Ibid., p. 147-148.

9. Interesting light on this development is thrown by Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-identity in England, 1591-1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).

10. Yuri Lotman has made an influential distinction between the (conventional) poetics of identity and the (innovation-oriented) poetics of opposition (in Die Struktur literarischer Texte (Munich: Fink, 1972). The latter is dominant in written European literature since the onset of Romanticism; the former, in Classicism and folklore. As I hope to show in the later parts of this article, the "poetics of identity" also governs most of pre-1850 Gaelic literature. See Wolfgang Zach, "Das Stereotyp als literarische Norm: Zum dominanten Denkmodell des Klassizismus," in Erstarrtes Denken: Studien zu Klischee, Stereotyp und Vorurteil in englischsprachiger Literatur, ed. G. Blaicher (Tübingen: Narr, 1987), pp. 97-113; Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 14.

11. Jorge Luis Borges, "La busca de Averroes," in idem, Prosa Completa (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 303-310; my translation. (In the original: "Recordé a Averroes, que encerrado en el ámbito del Islam, nunca pudo saber el significado de las voces tragedia y comedia. . . . Sentí que Averroes, queriendo imaginar lo que es un drama sin haber sospechado lo que es un teatro, no era más absurdo que yo, queriendo imaginar a Averroes, sin otro material que unos adarmes de Renan, de Lane y de Asín Palacios.")

12. In what follows I make use of some points raised in Joep Leerssen, "Faoi thuairim na deorantachta," in Nua-Léamha: Gnéithe de chultúr, stair agus polaitíocht na hÉireann c.1600-c.1900, ed. M. Ní Dhonnchadha (Dublin: Clóchomhar, 1996), pp. 41-56.

13. See Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, An Eoraip agus litríocht na Gaeilge 1600-1650: Gnéithe den bharóchas Eorpach i litríocht na Gaeilge (Dublin: Clóchomhar, 1987).

14. See Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling ghéar: Na Stíobhartaigh agus an taos léinn (Dublin: Clóchomhar, 1997); Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael. Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996).

15. I quote Gregory's much-anthologized version ("Donall Oge: Grief of a Girl's Heart") from Kathleen Hoagland, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1947), pp. 238-240. The original Gaelic version, with an alternative translation, can be found in Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella, eds., An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (Dublin: Dolmen, 1981), pp. 288-292.

16. Seán Ó Tuama, An grá in amhráin na ndaoine (Dublin: Clóchomhar, 1960). See also Mícheál Mac Craith, Lorg na hiasachta ar na Dánta Grá (Dublin: Clóchomhar, 1989).

17. Witness Máire Bhuí Ní Laoghaire--or, more importantly, Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chónaill, author of one of the most important poems of late Gaelic literature, the lament for her husband, Art O'Leary. On women poets in the Irish tradition, see the excellent recent book by Máirín Nic Eoin, B'ait leo bean: Gnéithe den idé-eolaíocht inscne i dtraidisiún liteartha na Gaeilge (Dublin: Clóchomhar, 1998). The sizable body of feminist criticism dealing with women's complaint poetry, or, more generally, with women in Gaelic culture and literature, is well represented in Nic Eoin's bibliography.

18. John MacInnes in a 1986 article quoted by Nic Eoin, B'ait leo bean, p. 282.

19. Matthew Arnold, "On the Study of Celtic Literature" (1867). Disucssed extensively in David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Culture (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988), pp. 42-58.

20. From a poem by Aogán Ó Rathaile, beginning "Cabhair ní ghairfead" (ca. 1729); to be found in Tuama and Kinsella (note 15), pp. 164-167.

21. See Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

22. See Aron Gurevic, The Origins of European Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

23. Hildegard J. C .Tristram, ed., Text und Zeittiefe (Tübingen: Narr, 1994). The MS transmission of texts is here studied on the basis of older material, both classical and Indian; the general problematics are placed in the polarity between "Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit": see Tristram's "Einleitung," pp. 15-28.

24. A succinct but eloquent case has been made by Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

25. Roman Jakobson and Pyotr Bogatyrev, "Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens," in Donum natalicium Schrijnen: Verzameling van opstellen door oud-leerlingen en bevriende vakgenooten opgedragen aan mgr. prof. dr. Jos. Schrijnen bij gelegenheid van zijn zestigsten verjaardag 3 mei 1929 (Nijmegen/Utrecht: Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1929), pp. 900-913. For a brilliant elaboration of this insight, see Gossman Between History (above, n. 10), chap. 1, "Literary Education and Democracy," pp. 9-54. The value of Gossman's comment lies in the fact that he extends the case, and argues that Bogatyrev/Jakobson's model is not restricted to oral, anonymous folklore material: "even the fixity of the written work, which is usually contrasted with the unstable oral tradition, cannot be simply taken for granted" (pp. 17-18). Without going as far as structuralists like Mukarovsky (who would see every reading act as an actualization of the text-as-nexus-of-potential-readings, and thus place each reading act in a parole/langue-relation to the text), it is obvious that in the case of a MS transmission, each written version, in all its textual variability vis-à-vis other versions, is a separate enactment or actualization of the text-in-abstracto. As Gossman himself points out, such a structural parole/langue-relationship excludes the possibility of a fixed, author-based, and definitive textual identity.

26. See Joep Leerssen, "Women Authors and Literary History," paper presented at a workshop held by the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences, September 1998 (in press). Also, as I have argued elsewhere, the rediscovery of Gaelic texts in the modern Irish literary system has crucially depended on an ongoing, centuries-long practice of recycling and anthologizing: see Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), pp. 173-178.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v007/7.2leerssen.html