In this part-memoir, part-theory-essay, 1 the author meditates on the delicate nexus between the tragic loss of his mother, and the manner in which this experience has permeated his poetic voice and understanding of the Mediterranean over the decades. The impulse to respond to her elsewheres, he comes to realise, is at once bound to the need to write his own Mediterranean decolonially, as well as to recognise it as a geography of poetically suggestive spaces. Taking his reader on a creative-critical journey from the beaches of his childhood to Sicily, Rome, and Delphi, across the ocean to Buenos Aires and then back to Malta’s megalithic structures, Bugeja embarks on a quest for a Mediterranean poetics that reaches into those other openings which address or affect us today as a voicing-unto-ourselves. The author reflects on insights raised by Massimo Cacciari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Barbara Cassin, Iain Chambers, George Seferis, Stephanos Stephanides, and others in order to elicit perspectives towards ‘poetic intuition’ (E. Glissant) as an indispensable means for re-visiting and re-writing the region today. To attest to the Mediterranean now would entail deciding towards which facets of its burgeoning palimpsest we should feel compelled to direct our answerability – as well as to sustain a heightened rapport with the quality, tenor, nuances and fissures within the sea’s voices clamouring our way.
Taking my cue from a neglected play – Robert Hitchcock's The Macaroni. A Comedy (1773) – I explore the compelling and contradictory nuances of its titular figure, both as a particular dramatic character and as a sweeping cultural phenomenon at the latter end of the long eighteenth century. As a cultural icon, the macaronis were young men who turned themselves, through their language, mannerisms, and ludicrous fashion, into a counter-image of British self-perceptions. At a particularly volatile period in history when the Empire was invested in consolidating Britishness, the macaronis threatened to wash it all away by importing a distinctly Mediterranean perspective to bear on various facets of British identity. The macaronis’ attack-by-parody took to task, especially, contemporaneous imaginaries around masculinity, and they were in turn derided, even dehumanised, for their flamboyant play with gender. Considering their provocation as one which takes the form of clashing conceptual borders (geographical, political, temporal, gendered), this article undertakes a queer-historical perspective in examining eighteenth-century British relations with the Mediterranean region, its sea, and its linguistic landscape. Ultimately, this essay examines how this relation's visual-semiotic framework foregrounds a poetics of fluidity upon which any constructed solidity is mere display. As a character, Hitchcock's macaroni, pointedly named Epicene, is an unhappy one, trapped between the demands of conventional masculinity and the appealing liquification of gender binaries. He, too, will have his say occasionally, if we can hear him against what his author intended.
This essay reads Percy B. Shelley’s poetic fragment ‘Ginevra’ through the Mediterranean as a compositional and countertextual space. Drawing on manuscript materials from Shelley’s Pisan notebooks and on the poem’s editorial afterlife, it argues that the sea offers a logic for reading the organisation of creativity and writing. By situating ‘Ginevra’ within a wider constellation of contemporaneous works, particularly Adonais, the essay shows how poetic composition unfolds within a fluid continuum of textual possibilities, where agency is distributed across authors, editors, environments, and acts of transmission. From this perspective, ‘Ginevra’ becomes a case study in how sea-thinking can productively converge with modern manuscript studies, foregrounding writing as a practice shaped by drift and permeability.
