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As Samuel Richardson's 'exemplar to her sex,' Clarissa in the eponymous novel published in 1748 is the paradigmatic female victim. In Clarissa's Ciphers, Terry Castle delineates the ways in which, in a world where only voice carries authority, Clarissa is repeatedly silenced, both metaphorically and literally. A victim of rape, she is first a victim of hermeneutic abuse. Drawing on feminist criticism and hermeneutic theory, Castle examines the question of authority in the novel. By tracing the patterns of abuse and exploitation that occur when meanings are arbitrarily and violently imposed, she explores the sexual politics of reading.

For nearly four decades, Ian Keen has been an important, challenging, and engaging presence in Australian anthropology. Beginning with his PhD research in the mid-1970s and through to the present, he has been a leading scholar of Yolngu society and culture, and has made lasting contributions to a range of debates. His scholarly productivity, however, has never been limited to the Yolngu, and he has conducted research and published widely on many other facets of Australian Aboriginal society: on Aboriginal culture in ‘settled’ Australia; comparative historical work on Aboriginal societies at the threshold of colonisation; a continuing interest in kinship; ongoing writing on language and society; and a set of significant land claims across the continent. In this volume of essays in his honour, a group of Keen’s former students and current colleagues celebrate the diversity of his scholarly interests and his inspiring influence as a mentor and a friend, with contributions ranging across language structure, meaning, and use; the post-colonial engagement of Aboriginal Australians with the ideas and structures of ‘mainstream’ society; ambiguity and indeterminacy in Aboriginal symbolic systems and ritual practices; and many other interconnected themes, each of which represents a string that he has woven into the rich tapestry of his scholarly work.