Hlaðborð: Bókmenntir, lagakrókar og leikhús

Glettniskáldið Kristján Níels Jónsson Júlíus (1860-1936), sem gekk undir skáldanafninu Káinn, varð eitt ástsælasta skáld Íslendinga á tuttugustu öld, enda taldi dr. Guðmundur Finnbogason að hann hefði brotið blað í hefð gamansams kveðskapar á íslensku. Guðmundur taldi gamanið hafa verið frekar grátt og kaldranalegt í íslenskum kveðskap þar til kvað við annan, græskulausan, hljóm í vísum Káins, sem oft bregður á málbundinn leik. Víða snýst gamanið um merkingu eða hljóðan enskra orða sem falla saumlaust í hrynjandi og rím vísu sem er að öllu leyti í samræmi við íslenska kveðskaparhefð. Þau kvæði nutu þó minnstrar hylli og skilnings á meðan enskukunnátta Íslendinga var ekki almenn, en nú þegar vesturíslenskt tungutak er orðið aðgengilegt og jafnvel ráðandi geta allir haft gaman af. Í erindinu bregð ég upp nokkrum um mismunandi dæmum um það hvernig Káinn yrkir til tvítyngdra samlanda sinna um tilveru þar sem ensk innskot og aðlaganir eru eðlilegur þáttur í daglegu tali og talar því beint til nútíma Íslendinga.

Both legal and cultural discourses of the Revolutionary to Reconstruction periods in the U.S. imagined a biopolitical ideal populace that incorporated the labor of Black bodies while exiling any clear recognition of black personhood, which I term a form of decorporation. This paper argues that we must understand the ways in which these early court decisions, notably in Virginia and North Carolina, bifurcated Black personhood from Black embodiment in order to fully understand how all forms of personhood took shape in early U.S. law and culture. This paper makes this argument through a close examination of early Virginia state court decisions that preserve full personhood, in Enlightenment terms, for white persons while instituting a logic of decorporation for Black persons.

Significantly, this examination also provides a new frame for considering how race and personhood figure in literary and cultural voices of this period. I put Phillis Wheatley’s writings on imagination in conversation with Thomas Jefferson’s racial hierarchies and other descriptions of embodied experience – particularly under the condition of systemic slavery – to demonstrate how the logic of decorporation worked in legal and cultural terms. I argue that we must examine the nexus of law and public discourse in this period, and show that such an undertaking will force modern thinkers to reframe our understanding of law, race, and personhood in this period while raising crucial questions about how U.S. law and culture inherited and adapted Enlightenment principles of rights and citizenship.

Ashley Byock is a Fulbright Iceland scholar.

Financially independent, young, previously unmarried, and in possession of monetary wealth and/or an estate, the heiress is desirable character on the seventeenth and eighteenth-century stage in contrast to the more sexually experienced and often slightly older widow. While a widow was entitled to only a third of her husband’s estate under the Statute of Distribution Act (1670), an heiress had entire possession of her fortune, which could easily be transferred to her husband upon marriage. The heiress´ financial independence and ability to alter or disrupt inheritance practice, makes her an influential character in the comic marriage plot. This paper presents a literary-historical analysis of the changing representation and function of the heiress in seventeenth and eighteenth-century comedy, to argue that the evolvement of the heiress in the marriage plot reveals emergent and shifting discourses about money, family and sentiment in the long-eighteenth century. The paper shows how the treatment of the heiress on the eighteenth-century stage reflects a sentimental response to the role of money in marriage in line with the ideology of companionate marriage and serves as a contrast to the depiction of the heiress as economic manager, who must wittily protect her financial interest on the Restoration stage.