In his interpretation of the biblical theme of divine royalty, Hobbes assigns a key role to the concept of omnipotence. Basing his argument on two texts from Psalms which state that 'God is king', he specifically asserts that, 'Whether men will or not, they must be subject always to the divine power'. The link between omnipotence and necessity, alluded to here, is nevertheless to be distinguished from the proper meaning of kingdom, for it is by way of metaphor only that some have called this 'power of God (which extendeth itself not only to man, but also to beasts, and plants, and bodies inanimate) by the name of kingdom'. In the strict sense of the term, kingdom describes government by one alone, by means of speech, and upheld by punishments and rewards. The subjects of this kingdom are those 'that believe that there is a God that governeth the world' - which excludes atheists - and those that believe that God 'hath given precepts, and propounded rewards and punishments to mankind' - which excludes Epicureans. Indirect as it is, the common reference to divine omnipotence and necessity of actions clearly points to the fact that, in the cosmo-theological order, divine omnipotence circumscribes men's actions in the network of causal series, which is itself governed by the principle of necessity.

Many readers of Leviathan will be surprised by the suggestion that in that work Hobbes might have been - in intention and in act - a friend of religious toleration. Who could be further removed, on this issue, from that 'saint of liberalism', John Locke? Locke's Letter on Toleration sought a kind of separation of church and state, arguing that each of these institutions has its own areas of legitimate concern, that the state exists to protect our temporal interests, and is entitled to use force to do so, but that it cannot use coercion to advance our spiritual interests. These are the province of the churches, which also cannot use force to achieve their ends. Since a saving faith must be uncoerced, they must rely on persuasion. Hobbes is certainly not a saint of liberalism in that sense. He advocates, not a separation of church and state, but a subordination of the church to the state.

On Hobbes's view it is an essential prerogative of the sovereign to determine what books may be published and what doctrines may be taught, in public gatherings generally, but especially in the universities and the churches. He thinks the sovereign must not only see that doctrines harmful to peace are not taught but also ensure that doctrines promoting his absolute authority are taught.

PICTURE WARS

The conflicts of the last five years have been waged at least in part as a war of images. From the destruction of the Buddha statues of Bamijan, the attack on New York's Twin Towers, the toppling of the statues of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the videos of torturing and beheadings, to the caricature conflict of early 2006, the phrase 'shock and awe', which rhetorically announced the military campaign in Iraq of 2003, was deeply embedded. While 'shock' is a central concept of the avant-garde aesthetic, the term 'awe' is a product of the linguistic power of the antirhetorician Thomas Hobbes. According to a seminal phrase from his Leviathan, contracts are constantly in danger of being broken by the contracting parties 'when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe'. Whether Hobbes would in 2003 have rightly used the term 'awe', or have simply found this a case of usurpation, the fact remains that the present war of images shows that theories that ignore the power of images as hypothesized by Hobbes miss an essential if not a decisive political-historical moment. But the examples provided by recent history are distinctly different from Hobbes's picture-theory of politics, in seeking to fulfill their mission of awe through destruction. For Hobbes, images achieve their political function not through acts of iconoclasm or image-producing human sacrifice but rather by deterring destruction. Through the 'terror' of their pictorial power, they support those authorities that are in a position to punish destruction.

HOBBES’S CRITIQUE OF ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS

In the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan published in 1668, Hobbes undertook a laborious interpretation of the Nicene Creed to show that his philosophy was not contrary to the 'orthodox' doctrine of the Church as defined by the first four Ecumenical Councils. He also tried to demonstrate that, while meeting the criteria for proper rationality, it also corresponded more closely to the literal meaning of Holy Scripture. In what amounted to an exegetical and philosophical tour de force, Hobbes confronted a series of terms that had served to define theological doctrine but that also had a specific philosophical emphasis: the concepts hypostasis, essence, substance and entity. In order to define the meanings of these terms and the reciprocal relationships between them he was obliged to take a strong position on their thousand year history in metaphysics and theology; we must therefore admire the courage with which he tackled this problem. The passage in question concerns in particular the doctrine of essences and the presumed 'separate' existence of essences. Hobbes argues that the problem of abstraction is a semantic problem: 'abstracts are the problem of abstractions when they are thought of separately from the other names of the same object'.

It is somewhat surprising that Hobbes's theory of the right to punish - in contrast to his theory of the state of nature and his concept of sovereignty - has been so ignored, especially given how important his doctrine of punishment was for all further discussion of this question in early modern theories of natural law. In what follows I will show that Hobbes's doctrine of punishment - having reached its conceptual and theoretical zenith in Leviathan - contains some conclusions that are also important elements of modern Rechtsstaat; and that to some extent Hobbes can even be seen as the philosophical founder of this concept. In the first part of the article, I will consider some aspects of Hobbes's concept of the limits of legal coercion. In the second part, I will analyze his theory of the right to punish (jus puniendi); and finally I will discuss Pufendorf's critique of this theory.

THE LIMITS OF LEGAL COERCION

Hobbes's doctrine of punishment has had a great impact on the subsequent development of criminal law in the natural law tradition. Hobbes himself made an important contribution to replacing the theological foundation of law and the state with a completely secular theory. In the same way modern natural law theorists attempted to found the power to punish on secular reason, without regress to theological arguments. Hobbes's systematic distinction between divine and earthly justice has been fundamental for the secularization of penal law in particular.

Hobbes offers his most extended analysis of the linked concepts of authorisation and representation in chapter xvi of Leviathan, the chapter in which he rounds off Part I, 'Of Man', and paves the way for his discussion 'Of Commonwealth' in Part II. This pivotal chapter, 'Of persons, authors, and things Personated', has no counterpart in either of the earlier recensions of his civil philosophy. Nothing like it can be found in The Elements of Law, which he had circulated in manuscript in 1640, nor in De Cive, which he had published in 1642. Hobbes never speaks in these texts of representation or representatives, nor of the underlying suggestion that it is possible to serve as an 'author' who can authorise the performance of an action by someone else. By contrast, in Leviathan these concepts form the bedrock of Hobbes's theory of the legitimate state, and in the Latin version of 1668 he was content to offer a simplified version of essentially the same argument.

Deploying his preferred method of beginning with definitions, Hobbes opens his analysis in chapter xvi without preamble as follows:

INTRODUCTION: PLACING THE 1668 APPENDIX IN CONTEXT

The possibility of a translation into Latin or French of Leviathan, his masterpiece of political philosophy, had engaged the attention of Thomas Hobbes not long after its appearance in English in 1651. Du Verdus gave various, and not necessarily consistent, reports of such an undertaking. Writing in 1654 to say he was making an interlinear translation and again in 1655 to express his hope of translating Leviathan into French, in 1656 and again in 1657 Du Verdus wrote with a promise of an exact translation. In 1657 De Martel wrote seeking a translation, followed by du Bosc in 1659, the latter noting, 'All ye learned men I know desire that Leviathan were in French or Latine'. Similar requests followed.

This expression of interest from non-Anglophone admirers might suggest that the eventual volume of 1668 would be aimed at a readership significantly different from that addressed in 1651, and to an extent this is true, as Hobbes himself indicated in later noting that he had omitted from the 1668 volume 'some such passages as strangers are not concerned in'.

In England after 1640 the study of Christian theology and the Scriptures whose chief aim was the bringing of religion to bear on political issues exploded in an astonishing number of directions. The theological and political catalyst for this new departure was the bewilderment of those Christians for whom, after the Reformation, judging what was required for gaining access to the kingdom of God had become a private matter. Salvation became the key concept in a new strain in the polemical literature ensuing from the civil wars, especially among divinity students, and 'the tidings of salvation' became in England the focus of a mounting tide of words in print. Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher whom an influential strain of scholarship has charged of having instrumental views on religion, did his share in this common attempt to develop new ways of addressing the issue of salvation. 'Salvation' to Hobbes is not just an aspiration or right, or 'eternall deliverance', or 'inheritance', that people happen to have. Rather, Hobbes's 'Christian State' seems designed to accommodate people's desire to be saved and neutralize the politically destabilizing thrust of this desire.

It is natural to reflect on human nature and the nature of political society by speculating about how humans were or would be outside of such society. In writing the first part of his Leviathan, 'Of Man', and looking forward to the second, 'Of Commonwealth', Hobbes includes a chapter 'Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery'. He famously determines that in such a condition there is much misery, and precious little felicity. The first part of Leviathan is devoted to the question of human nature, and although there are scattered references to people's reactions to one another, it is not until chapter xiii that Hobbes systematically reflects on how the human beings he has been describing would interact. Although it is generally regarded as the starting point of his political theory, Hobbes places his account of the natural condition (along with his analyses of the law of nature and personation, both of which have some place in the natural condition) squarely in his theory of man. This is brought out by Hobbes’s reference in Leviathan to ‘the natural condition of mankind’ rather than ‘the state of nature’.

Readers of a book on modernist poetry may be surprised to find in it an essay on the English-language poetry of the so-called developing world. W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Jean Toomer - yes, no doubt. But the Jamaican Louise Bennett, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, the Kashmiri Agha Shahid Ali? Surely to call these poets 'modernists' would be to commit what philosophers call 'a category mistake', to misattribute properties, to confuse classifications? Or perhaps, as Monsieur Jourdain in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme didn't realise he had been speaking prose all his life, have these 'Third World' poets been modernists all along without being noticed?

Geography helps explain this appearance of a category mistake. Anglophone modernism - conceived as a literary response to the anonymity, stress and speed of modern life - is usually attributed to 'First World' cities from London and Dublin to New York and Chicago. Way off the canonical map of English-speaking modernism are the colonial outposts of European empires, except as sites from which adventurous poets and artists are seen as importing primitive or exotic materials to shore against their ruins.

A second reason for the seeming oddity of critically conjoining modernism and postcolonialism is historical. Most period-based conceptions of literary modernism locate it in the first half of the twentieth century, and postcolonial poetry, so called because of its emergence during and in the aftermath of European colonialism, flourished for the most part in the second half, post the post-Second World War decolonisation of these regions.

Temporal and spatial relationships are essential to our understanding of narratives and go beyond the specification of a date and a location. Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the illustrative narrative that I shall focus on in this chapter, is set in the mid nineteenth century in Normandy, France. While this information concerning the when and where of the novel is important to our cultural understanding of the novel and to our response to Emma's actions and emotions, it is only part of a much wider network of temporal and spatial structures. Narratives unfold in time, and the past, present, and future of a given event or action affect our interpretation of that action, while the characters who populate narrative texts move around, inhabit and experience different spaces and locations, allowing readers to construct complex worlds in their minds.

To read a narrative is to engage with an alternative world that has its own temporal and spatial structures. The rules that govern these structures may or may not resemble those of the readers' world. And while readers do not, on the whole, try to map out hierarchical relations between world levels in the way narratologists do, they nevertheless have a sense that narratives can be divided into different temporal and spatial zones.

According to some accounts, the path-breaking work in American modernist poetry was done by expatriates like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, Americans who abandoned their relentlessly materialist and artistically unformed homeland to root themselves in the rich cultural humus of Europe. Just as significant, however, are the achievements of the 'nativist' poets whose work reflects both the cosmopolitan 'tradition' that Pound and Eliot sought in Europe and the immediate realities of the American scene. From New Jersey,William Carlos Williams forged a recognisably modernist poetry which is also irreducibly local and American. In Williams's wake, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson continued the experiments of this 'homegrown' modernism, in the process pushing American poetry into a mode that Olson would name 'post-modern'.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a distant suburb of New York City. His father was English, his mother Puerto Rican: 'Of mixed ancestry', he wrote Horace Gregory in 1939, 'I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever possibly call my own. I felt that it was expressly founded for me, personally, and that it must be my first business in life to possess it.' Pound teased Williams about his immigrant forebears, even as he figured Williams's 'foreignness' as an advantage amid the derivative sentimentality of early twentieth-century American letters: 'And America. What the hell do you a blooming foreigner know about the place[?] . . . The thing that saves your work is opacity, and don't forget it. Opacity is NOT an American quality. Fizz, swish, gabble and verbiage, these are echt americanisch.'

The following bibliographies consist of (1) anthologies containing modernist texts and related materials; (2) general works on modernism (with an emphasis on studies in whole or in part devoted to modernist poetry); and (3) suggested further reading for each chapter of this Companion. To avoid unnecessary duplication, anthologies and critical works cited in the Introduction and the individual chapters have not been included here.

Representing the voices of characters in a story is an effective way of enlivening a narrative. A vital aspect of how we remember and grow close to fictional characters is the way they speak: their accents and dialects place them geographically and socially, while their verbal idiosyncrasies and catchphrases help to make them memorable, even endearing. In an oral narrative, a change in intonation and/or pace may be sufficient to indicate to the listener where the narrator is quoting from another. The process is more complicated when it comes to written narratives, as the writer has to deal with the transition between one channel of communication and another. Nevertheless, the conventions for representing speech have become well established whether the context is a news story, a biography, or a novel, and readers rarely stop to question why speech is laid out as it is. As well as adding variety to a narrative, representing the speech of those who take part in a narrated event, or who are somehow qualified to comment on what takes place, may also contribute importantly to the authenticity and authority of the story, as we appear to be told what happened from “the horse's mouth.” It is difficult to imagine a narrative that does not include some kind of representation of speech, but the extent to which this is foregrounded varies considerably. The degree of directness of the report may also vary, but in this chapter I am concerned primarily with what has been termed direct or free direct speech, where the words of the characters appear to be reproduced verbatim and contribute significantly to the central action or plot.

Over the last twenty years, the role that gender might play in the analysis of narratives has emerged as an important area of consideration. Feminist narratology is the umbrella term which covers the many different ways in which gender-related aspects of narratives and the models used to analyze them may be interrogated from a feminist point of view. The integration of insights derived from gender studies incorporates a range of distinctive approaches including feminist perspectives along with neighboring areas of inquiry, such as queer theory.

Warhol characterizes feminist narratology in useful, broad terms as “the study of narrative structures and strategies in the context of cultural constructions of gender.” These cultural constructions of gender are significant because narrative analysis does not take place in a context-free vacuum. Rather, the models of narrative theory have been derived from the study of actual texts. Feminists would argue that the telling as well as the analysis of narratives are human activities - activities that necessarily entail gendered assumptions and practices.

Critics working within feminist narratology have asked questions about gender and narrative that cover a range of topics and embrace a variety of perspectives. These critics take both narrative texts and narrative theory as their object of study and reflect different stages and debates in feminist theorizing.

Introduction

Conversation is the natural home of narrative, and the most familiar context of storytelling for most of us. Storytelling is a common part of conversation between friends and family members. We tell stories to make a point, to catch up on each other's lives, to report news, and to entertain each other. And one story opens the floor to other participants for stories of their own. Our conversational stories are embedded in their local contexts, their forms and functions developing from and reflecting these contexts.

Conversational storytelling is not simply oral storytelling. Much of the research on oral narrative is based on stories from non-conversational contexts. Research on oral storytelling began with monologic stories explicitly elicited in interviews, and much recent work maintains this tradition, while other scholars have investigated narratives produced as retellings of films, picture stories, or stories previously read. Stories in everyday conversational contexts share some but clearly not all characteristics with these other oral genres. Genuine conversational storytelling is always interactive, negotiated, and not simply designed for a particular audience by a single teller; indeed, it is often hard to determine even who is the primary teller, especially when the events were jointly experienced or the basic story is already familiar. Conversational stories may be deeply contextualized, diffuse, and not easily detachable from the local conditions that occasion them or understandable outside of them.