Non-invasive survey in the Stonehenge ‘Triangle’, Amesbury, Wiltshire, has highlighted a number of features that have a significant bearing on the interpretation of the site. Geophysical anomalies may signal the position of buried stones adding to the possibility of former stone arrangements, while laser scanning has provided detail on the manner in which the stones have been dressed; some subsequently carved with axe and dagger symbols. The probability that a lintelled bluestone trilithon formed an entrance in the north-east is signposted. This work has added detail that allows discussion on the question of whether the sarsen circle was a completed structure, although it is by no means conclusive in this respect. Instead, it is suggested that it was built as a façade, with other parts of the circuit added and with an entrance in the south.

I don't do much public writing, but each month I persuade others to do it in my role as the fiction editor in chief of public Books, a twice-monthly online review that I cofounded with Caitlin Zaloom in 2012. On the first and fifteenth of each month, Public Books publishes six to eight essays about books, nonprint works, the media, the arts, and ideas, written mostly by academics but also by journalists, novelists, activists, and artists. In addition to traditional reviews, we publish roundtables, interviews, visual essays, and Public Picks, our annual lists of best books and films.

Integrated non-invasive survey in the Stonehenge ‘triangle’, Amesbury, Wiltshire, has highlighted a number of features that have a significant bearing on the interpretation of the site. Among them are periglacial and natural topographical structures, including a chalk mound that may have influenced site development. Some geophysical anomalies are similar to the post-holes in the car park of known Mesolithic date, while others beneath the barrows to the west may point to activity contemporary with Stonehenge itself. Evidence that the ‘North Barrow’ may be earlier in the accepted sequence is presented and the difference between the eastern and western parts of the enclosure ditch highlighted, while new data relating to the Y and Z Holes and to the presence of internal banks that mirror their respective circuits is also outlined.

Librarian's nightmare or researcher's dream? Theatre historians frequently use and librarians happily acquire the rare theatrical scrapbook related to a single famous individual, but many undervalue and overlook ordinary theatrical albums, and with good cause: the ordinary theatrical scrapbook's provenance is often unclear, its compilers are usually unknown, and its contents are typically heterogeneous, commonplace, and decaying. The cracked bindings and flaking newsprint characteristic of such scrapbooks frustrate conservation, while their clippings, programs, and images pose serious cataloging challenges, shorn as they often are of identifying information. Finally, at least some of the material in these albums (such as newspaper clippings) is often duplicated elsewhere, making their contents easily seem redundant.

Oscar Wilde's Salome, composed in French in 1891, represents both an episode in the history of celebrity and a dramatization of celebrity's theatrical structure. The play first entered the orbit of stardom when Sarah Bernhardt, internationally hailed as the world's greatest actress, agreed to play the title role in 1892; its author had long been a celebrity, known as much for his artfully crafted persona as for his published writings. Bernhardt, Wilde, and Salome, a play in which almost every character is both fan and idol, were all defined by the volatile conjunctions shared by theatricality and celebrity: the asymmetrical interdependence of actors and audiences, stars and acolytes, exhibition and attention, distance and proximity, absolutism and democracy, exemplarity and impudence, worship and desecration, and presence and representation.

For feminist criticism today it is, as perhaps it has always been, the best of times and the worst of times. When a critical school becomes the topic of a PMLA roundtable, it is safe to say that scholars currently consider it both solidly entrenched and dangerously diminished. Indeed, many would say that feminist criticism's success is the very sign of its failure, an indication that it has lost the renegade dynamism of its early days as an upstart outsider in the academy and declined into yet another stale paradigm on the verge of obsolescence, fit only to be recycled in anthologies or assessed in essays such as this one.

Through the concept of abstraction I examine the relation between female subjectivity and writing in Jane Eyre. In the novel abstraction means a lack of attention or a lapse of will, conditions that permit Jane to realize her wishes. Three other meanings of the term shed light on Jane Eyre and on Charlotte Brontë's career. Through abstraction as a degree of relative disembodiment, both Jane and Brontë avoid becoming female spectacles, Jane by shifting from corporeal rebelliousness to an anonymous advertisement, Brontë by adopting an ungendered pseudonym. Abstraction also involves the alienation of the self into objects and texts, as when Jane and Brontë project themselves into their written products. Finally, abstraction entails the synthesis of the particular into the general: Jane rhetorically enters a professional body of governesses, and Brontë participates in the commercial literary marketplace.