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The Hardy brothers embark on a freighter trip under mysterious circrcumstances and find themselves involved with a smuggling ring.

Arthur Miller is mostly known as a playwright, but he also wrote fiction, even a children’s book, and radio plays. During the 1930s and 1940s, radio plays were a popular form of entertainment. The productions were lavish, and the actors among the most famous in the theater of the time. The salary was lucrative for Miller, who was yet to write his most famous plays. Miller’s first radio play, William Ireland’s Confession, was broadcast on 19 October 1939 on Columbia Workshop. Miller displays great familiarity with William Henry Ireland (1775–1835) and his project to present his own writing under Shakespeare’s name and to collect memorabilia allegedly belonging to the great bard. This article reviews William Henry Ireland’s story and ultimate exposure and suggests that Miller’s radio play goes beyond retelling the story to making a statement about authorship and, in an uncanny way, foreshadowing his own experiences as a playwright.

Claire Clairmont (1798–1879), her journals and letters brilliantly edited, is in no danger of being lost to history. However, a significant quantity of her writing remains only partially published, autobiographical memoranda and (apparently) copies of letters that she prepared in the 1870s at the urging of E. J. Trelawny. These manuscripts, 159 pages in total, are catalogued as Cl Cl 26 in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library. Extracts, with warnings to readers not to trust these papers, have appeared in biographies and editions; they narrate some of the most dramatic and painful episodes of Clairmont’s life: her 1814 elopement with Mary Godwin and P. B. Shelley; the suicides of Harriet Shelley and Frances Imlay Godwin; the life and death of Allegra, her daughter by Byron, who died aged five. In the aggregate they are repetitive, incoherent, untruthful, and deeply informed by anger at Byron and Shelley. Perhaps the most mysterious component of Cl Cl 26 is a series of letters purporting to be from Clairmont’s mother, Mary Jane Godwin, to Margaret Moore, Lady Mount Cashell, in childhood Mary Wollstonecraft’s pupil and in adulthood a friend of the Shelleys and Clairmont’s special protector. Like Clairmont, both these women gave birth to daughters out of wedlock. The letters, concerned with the 1814 elopement and its aftermath, contain details found nowhere else. Clairmont tells Trelawny that she was given them by Lady Mount Cashell on Clairmont’s last visit to her in Pisa in 1832. Comprised of two sets of drafts, they survive only in the copies in Clairmont’s hand and contain errors pointing to composition much later than 1814. Nonetheless, most editors have accepted that Mary Jane Godwin did indeed write the letters and that her daughter then doctored them. Andrew Stott has suggested in an unpublished essay that Clairmont simply wrote them herself. In this article I follow the implications of this idea, first by reviewing Claire Clairmont’s life to understand why, in its evening, she might have impersonated her mother and by proxy her mother’s supposed correspondent, in writing this version of the decisive events of her youth; and second, to explore where this, her most fully realized work of fiction, might have come from. If we accept her as the sole author, we gain a new view of her: Clairmont as a writer. We know from her journals and letters that she tried intermittently to write fiction; she did publish one short story. She was keenly aware that writing was the family business and that she had not come up to scratch. We may see, then, in these letters, a final effort to tell her story. Much of the work of this article will be to attend to her inflections as she writes and rewrites, and to learn from the physical evidence offered by the manuscripts. With or without originals, in her work on this project Claire Clairmont would have felt herself, aged seventy-seven, sheltered again by the only two women whom she had ever experienced as protectors.

Significantly, according to Rowley's legend, Canynge had donated the money acquired from his slave trade and merchant empire to artistic enterprises of various kinds, but especially to the rebuilding of St. Mary Redcliffe church, where Chatterton's father had discovered the parchments. [...]Rowley (as Chatterton's poetic voice) gave Chatterton a leverage on the past and enabled him to engage a number of different needs and interests at once. [...]in the texts of both Chatterton and Ackroyd there is no relation of reproduction or equivalence between the narrative and the course of events that is being historically documented, but rather a metaphorical one. Historiographic narrative as translation marks a move from what Walter Benjamin calls \"Messianic time\" to a culture-wide acceptance of \"homogeneous, empty time,\" which Benedict Anderson associates with the process of imagining and writing the concept of the nation in the eighteenth century.47 Translation is central to that process of nation formation, as Homi Bhabha discusses in The Location of Culture.48 Because of its doubleness--presenting itself as an act of repetition and at the same time as an act of interpretation that inscribes linguistic, cultural, and temporal difference-translation serves as a paradigm for the nation's constant negotiation between the particular and the universal. Because national identity is constructed, and there is no essential link between the individual's daily life and the perceived timelessness of the nation, national discourse always translates between the two. According to Bhabha, \"the sign of translation continually tells, or 'tolls' the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices.

\"The X Factor\" is open to solo singers and vocal groups age 12 and up, and one of the nice things about the British version is when a kid or some forty-, fifty- or sixty-something comes out of nowhere to stun the judges (Susan Boyle, by the way, came out of \"Britain's Got Talent,\" not \"X Factor\").

The Search for the Codex Cardona seems in many respects to emulate the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. Indeed, at times one almost expects the Codex to become The Name of the Rose's \"book that kills.\" However, as [Arnold J. Bauer] says, \"I don't do fiction\" (59). Instead, it was Bauer's own life that took on the characteristics of a bibliocentric mystery novel. Bauer then completed the circle by writing his own nonfiction but highly novelesque narrative. The story ends with a very Borgesian moment when Bauer realizes that the Codex Cardona is probably lost forever (\"like Hemingway's big fish torn apart by the sharks\") and that all that remains of it is the book he himself has written (170). It hardly seems necessary (or fair) to point out that as a writer Bauer is no Borges. A lifetime of historical writing is probably not the best preparation for trying one's hand at something like this. However, the account is engaging and thought-provoking. It may not be great literature, but historians of all stripes will read it with both pleasure and profit. In particular, Bauer leads the reader to reflect on issues of textual authenticity and forgery that tend not to receive sufficient attention from historians. The poststructuralist undermining of concepts of authorship and authenticity can make questions about forgery seem quaint and outdated. But recognizing that all texts (especially the \"false\" ones) are historical sources and that all texts are part of extensive webs of textual relationships does not detract from the importance of answering the \"wh-\" questions (who, when, where, why, etc.) as precisely as possible. Historians need to be open to the possibility of misrepresentation in this regard, not in order to throw out the \"fakes,\" but because the \"wh-\" questions matter, and because misrepresentation itself is an interesting and historically significant act.