bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Swinburne on Atonement
Authors: Aspenson Steven S.
Published: October 2008

I criticize Richard Swinburne's account of the need for and means of atonement in his Responsibility and Atonement. I offer objections to his understanding and use of the notion of ‘the gift of life’ in his account of the need for atonement; and closely related to that, I show that his conclusions about duties to God as a benefactor do not follow from his reasons. Furthermore, when examined closely, these conclusions seem false. In relation to his account of the means of atonement, I argue that the mechanism he provides to explain how Christ's actions benefit sinners does not work.
The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions
Authors: D'Costa Gavin
Published: October 2008

In the debate about Christian attitudes to other religions, a threefold typology has emerged depicting differing Christian responses: pluralism, inclusivism and exclusivism. (This typology is not restricted to the Christian debate alone.) Traditionally, pluralism is opposed to exclusivism, the former claiming that it is arrogant and untenable to make exclusive truth claims, and that all religions are potentially equal paths to salvation and truth. In contrast, I argue that pluralism must always logically be a form of exclusivism and that nothing called pluralism really exists. The main purpose of my paper is to show that there is no high-ground in the pluralist position, for in principle its logic is no different from the exclusivist position. If this is established, then the debate can proceed with more substantial issues regarding the justification and clarification of truth claims.
Are Beliefs About God Theoretical Beliefs? Reflections on Aquinas and Kant
Authors: O'Leary-Hawthorne John , Howard-Snyder Daniel
Published: October 2008

The need to address our question arises from two sources, one in Kant and the other in a certain type of response to so-called Reformed epistemology. The first source consists in a tendency to distinguish theoretical beliefs from practical beliefs (commitments to the world's being a certain way versus commitments to certain pictures to live by), and to treat theistic belief as mere practical belief. We trace this tendency in Kant's corpus, and compare and contrast it with Aquinas's view and a more conservative Kantian view. We reject the theistic-belief-as-mere-practical-belief view: it is bad descriptive anthropology, it embraces a misguided ideal of a fragmented self unattainable by human beings, and it will deter people from the most desirable sort of faith. The second source consists in the idea that since theistic beliefs function as answers to why-questions, their epistemic status hangs on whether they meet certain distinctively explanatory standards, whatever support they might receive from other sources. We argue that this is a non-sequitur and suggest questions for further research.
The Dalai Lama and the World Religions: a False Friend?
Authors: Compson Jane
Published: October 2008

The Dalai Lama is well known for his tolerance of other religious traditions, actively encouraging people to celebrate their own faiths rather than convert to Buddhism. However, far from being a pluralist as this attitude suggests, he believes that ultimate liberation is obtained only through the practice of Buddhist teachings. This apparent contradiction is resolved when one examines some of the teachings that he follows, such as the notions of emptiness (sūnyatā), skilful means (upāya), karma and rebirth. On such examination it becomes apparent that it is precisely through the prioritising of these Buddhist teachings that his tolerance is rendered possible.
Scientific Explanations of Mystical Experiences
Authors: Fales Evan
Published: October 2008

In Part I of this paper, I took up a challenge posed by Alston (1991), Wainwright (1981), Yandell (1993), and other theists who hold the rather natural view that mystical experiences provide perceptual contact with God, roughly on a par with the access sense experience affords to the natural world. These theists recognize, at the same time, that the plausibility of this view would be significantly compromised by the possibility of scientifically explaining mystical experiences – especially if a scientific explanation were incompatible with, ruled out, or made unlikely the supposition that God has anything special to do with the occurrences of these experiences.
Creation and Evolution
Authors: Devine Philip E.
Published: October 2008

Despite the bad reputation of the legal profession, law remains king in America. A highly diverse society relies on the laws (and especially the Constitution) to maintain a working sense of the dignity and inviability of each individual. And a persistent element in contemporary debates is the fear that naturalistic theories of the human person will erode our belief that we have a dignity greater than that of other natural objects. Thus the endurance of the creation vs. evolution debate is due less to the arguments of creationists, or to the continued influence of the book of Genesis, than to the reading of the evidence provided by Phillip E. Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley, Law School.
A Reductio Ad Absurdum of Divine Temporality
Authors: Cowan Steven B.
Published: October 2008

Theists believe that God is eternal, but they differ as to just what God's eternality means. The traditional, historic view of most Christian philosophers is that eternality means that God is timeless. He is ‘outside’ of time and not subject to any kind of temporal change. Indeed, God is the creator of time. Lets call this view divine timelessness.
From World to God: Resemblance and Complementarity
Authors: Wynn Mark
Published: October 2008

In this paper, I shall consider four approaches to the idea that the world points towards or represents God. I shall argue that the relation of resemblance may not offer the best initial way of expounding this idea, and that the relation of necessary complement may provide the basis of a more useful model. I begin by examining three accounts which draw primarily upon the notion of resemblance in order to explain the sense in which the world represents God. I shall then survey a further approach, which seeks to interpret the idea of resemblance in terms of the more fundamental idea of complementarity.
Stump and Swinburne on Revelation
Authors: Lamont John
Published: October 2008

In his important book Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy, Richard Swinburne has proposed a comprehensive account of the nature of Christian revelation. This account has been criticized by Eleonore Stump. Stump has raised objections to Swinburne's views on biblical interpretation, and to his deistic view of revelation. I will argue that her objections to his views on biblical interpretation are ill-founded. Her criticism of a deistic conception of revelation is justified, but the alternative that she offers to such a conception is unsatisfactory. I will suggest a different alternative, and argue that Swinburne's general account would be improved if he incorported it.
Saving Casa Guidi
Authors: Hope Emily Blanchard
Published: October 2008

“Casa Guidi,” as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning affectionately called their apartment in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Guidi, was their home for nearly all of their married life, from 9 May 1848 until Elizabeth's death on 29 June 1861. They took the apartment furnished for three months in the summer of 1847 and found life there so pleasant that when in the following year it became available, they established themselves in Casa Guidi on a permanent basis and furnished the apartment themselves. Their only child, Pen, was born in Casa Guidi. Elizabeth wrote Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh there and Robert, many of the poems in Men and Women. It was to Casa Guidi that Robert brought home “the square old yellow Book” which, metamorphosed by him, became The Ring and the Book. These were years of great happiness for the poets, and it is appropriate that Casa Guidi should be preserved as their memorial.
The Influence of Robert Browning on the Art of William Wetmore Story
Authors: DiFederico Frank R. , Markus Julia
Published: October 2008

William Wetmore Story(Fig. 1), lawyer, poet, and sculptor, was born in Salem, Mass., in 1819. As one of America's most prominent nineteenth-century expatriate sculptors, he lived and worked in Rome, and he died in Vallombrosa in Tuscany in 1895. Story's friendship with Robert Browning was a crucial factor in his development as an artist; and during the 1850's, under the influence of the then still relatively unknown Browning, Story altered his approach to both poetry and sculpture.
Browning's Final Revisions
Authors: Kelley Philip , Peterson William S.
Published: October 2008

Which is the proper text for an authoritative modern edition of Robert Browning's poems?

An analysis of Browning editions published during the past twenty-five years reveals that there has been a variety of answers to this question. The basis of many inexpensive reprints has been the sixteen-volume 1888-89 collection revised by Browning just before his death. More recently, at least two important editions–the Oxford Standard Authors volume, edited by Ian Jack, and the Ohio University Press variorum edition, edited by Roma A. King, Jr.–have adopted as their text the 1889 “reprint” of Browning's poems (though in the latter case the text is emended), which was issued after his death but incorporated many authorial revisions and corrections. A few editions have also reprinted earlier versions of the poems.
Letters from Robert Browning to the Rev. J. D. Williams, 1874–1889
Authors: Collins Thomas J. , Pickering Walter J.
Published: October 2008

When, in 1884, Thomas J. Wise viewed with consternation Browning's unselective destruction of his correspondence and early writings, his eye may well have noticed the signature of the Rev. J. D. Williams. At the same time Williams, like Mrs. Thomas Fitzgerald, was giving and mailing away pages and whole letters bearing Browning's autograph. As a result, only a fraction of the Williams-Browning correspondence is now extant. The letters in this collection comprise, to the best of our knowledge, the complete remains of this correspondence. Thirty-three of these letters have not been published previously, with the exception of a part of Letter 23, published in William S. Peterson's Interrogating the Oracle. Their texts have been taken from holographs in the University of Texas Miriam Lutcher Stark Library. Letter 36 is from a holograph owned by the Yale University Library, and was previously published in New Letters of Robert Browning, edited by W. C. DeVane and K. L. Knickerbocker (1950). The four additional letters (9, 17, 18, and 32) were published in 1933 in Thurman L. Hood's edition of the Letters of Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J. Wise. In the absence of the holographs, these letters have been transcribed directly from that edition. Irregularities in the Hood text—for example, the unusual letterhead in Letter 17–have been incorporated into this edition for lack of corrective evidence.
Browning Without Words: D. W. Griffith and the Filming of Pippa Passes
Authors: Guiliano Edward , Keenan Richard C.
Published: October 2008

D. W. Griffith, the most revered and influential movie creator of his day, is now universally acknowledged as the most significant figure in the history of American film. A one-time stage actor and playwright, and before that a Kentucky farmboy and high school dropout, David Wark Griffith became a movie director in 1908. By 1915, the year he released his monumental film The Birth of a Nation, he had completely revolutionized the motion picture industry. Appropriately, it was this innovative pioneer of the cinema who first brought the work of Robert Browning to the screen. In 1909 Griffith made a version of Pippa Passes and, apparently encouraged by the favorable response it received, made a version of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon in 1912.
A Few Reminiscences of Robert Browning
Authors: Corson Hiram
Published: October 2008

My personal acquaintance with Robert Browning began in July, 1881, when I first visited him in his London house, 19 Warwick Crescent, W., having received a note from him, inviting me to visit him on a Sunday morning, “the crowded end of the London season pressing heavily on us all,” he said.
Browning's Career to 1841: The Theme of Time and the Problem of Form
Authors: Poston Lawrence
Published: October 2008

In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats describes how, in the moment of contemplation, the poet is conscious of his limitations as an earthbound creature, one of a generation which “old age shall … waste,” one who has felt the moment of “human passion … / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” By contrast, the urn suggests the power of art to prolong the moment, to render permanent what is transitory, to recreate endlessly for one generation after the next the passion of human love. But the urn itself may not last forever; it is a “sylvan historian” which is itself the product of the “slow time” of human history, an artifact which commemorates a moment in the life of its creator and emulates eternity without itself being eternal (“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity …”). It is a “still unravish'd bride of quietness,” but if we dwell on the ambiguous “still,” we sense that like the Elgin marbles, the urn may be subject to “the rude / Wasting of old Time,” a hint at the “magnitude of eternity” which impresses on the poet a sense of his mortality.
Facts and Fancies
Authors: Drew Philip
Published: October 2008

William Irvine and Park Honan, whose biography of Browning is the weightier of the books before me, have the first qualification for those who venture into this field—an unquestioning confidence that an extended account of Browning's life will be of interest and value. Before I examine the grounds for this confidence, it is right to acknowledge that there will be very many readers, especially of this publication, who share the authors' initial assumption, and to give for the benefit of these readers an account of what they will find in the book.
Mysticism, Meaning, and Structure in Browning's “Saul”
Authors: Waters D. Douglas
Published: October 2008

Controversies about the meaning and structure of “Saul” have largely ignored its mystical elements. Although there is still no general consensus on the poem's theological meaning, few critics can acceptin totothe views of Roma A. King, Jr., inThe Bow and the Lyre(1957) that Browning's artistic purpose is confused, his theological system vague, and thus the poetic structure a failure as a “lyrical-mystical communication….” The two most effective answers to King's criticism are by W. David Shaw in “The Analogical Argument of Browning's ‘Saul’” (1964) and Victor A. Neufeldt in “Browning's ‘Saul’ in the Context of the Age” (1974). Assuming that the poem's thought is self-consistent, intellectually respectable, and essentially didactic, they both correctly disagree with King as to the alleged offensiveness of its message. Yet, in partial agreement with King, they mistakenly, I think, find the structure of “Saul” to be flawed; they also slight its emphasis on mystical experience.
A Reprint of the Sotheby Moulton-Barrett Catalogue
Authors: Kelley Philip
Published: October 2008

The papers of Lt.-Col. Harry Peyton Moulton-Barrett, sold by Sotheby & Co. on 7 June 1937, do not approach in quantity the collection of his first cousin, Pen Browning, dispersed by the same auction house on 1–8 May 1913. In quality, however, the Moulton-Barrett manuscripts are as important. And, as predicted at the time, no comparable collection has since been discovered. By reprinting the catalogue of this sale, the Browning Institute makes a worthy contribution for students of the Brownings. A similar contribution was made in 1972 when the 1913 catalogue, The Browning Collections, was reissued by Mansell. Unlike the latter, it is possible to introduce the present reprint with an early history, and, for the most part, to identify the present location of the collection.
The Ring, the Rescue, & the Risorgimento: Reunifying the Brownings' Italy
Authors: Alaya Flavia
Published: October 2008

I can't bear to think of any part of the whole mass of lies & intrigues, —I like no one man engaged in the matter, the King & the Emperor not a bit more than Garibaldi: well, it seems ordained that if you believe in heroes you will be sorry for it, sooner or later. I have of course heard other versions of the thing, different from yours,—don't know & hardly carewhatis the true, so bad is the best.
“Old Pictures in Florence” Through Casa Guidi Windows
Authors: Markus Julia
Published: October 2008

In the Introduction to my recent edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows, I present Mrs. Browning as an astute and knowledgeable witness to the early events of the Italian Risorgimento in Florence during the years 1847–1851.* In that essay I concur with the Florentine critic Giuliana Artom Treves, who wrote that “‘Casa Guidi Windows’ is the poetic cry which rises from Tuscany to the world in praise of the desire for liberty,” and that the poem in which Mrs. Browning “describes the upheaval in Tuscany deserves the perennial gratitude of Italians for the way she frankly assumes the rôle of poet of the Italian Risorgimento.”
Emblems of Temporality in Browning's “Cleon”
Authors: Munich Adrienne
Published: October 2008

Browning's melancholy epistle from the polymorphous artist Cleon to the Greek tyrant Protus is a poem about immortality, not only in a religious realm but in an artistic dimension as well. In fact, the emblems in the poem illustrate, at least on one level, that Browning subordinated the religious aspect of the theme to concerns about his art. Thus, one can read many of the religious references as having as much relevance to Browning's wish to attract an audience to his own message as to the efforts of “Paulus” to convert the Gentiles.
The Brownings' Correspondence: Supplement No. 1 to the Checklist
Authors: Kelley Philip , Hudson Ronald
Published: October 2008

In the Introduction to The Brownings' Correspondence: A Checklist we noted that “a checklist is not, and cannot be, complete, definitive and static; letters change hands, new letters come to light constantly, and previously unpublished correspondence appears regularly in new books and magazines.” To maintain the usefulness to scholars of our work, we undertook to make periodic revisions through the medium of Browning Institute Studies. This is the first such amendment.
Browning and the Prince of Publishers
Authors: Meredith Michael
Published: October 2008

Just after midnight on the 13th December 1889, George Murray Smith, London publisher and businessman, received the telegram from Venice telling him of the death of his friend Robert Browning. The night was bitterly cold and the streets deep in snow, but he decided to take the news to the editor ofThe Times. A cab was hard to find and he had to walk to Hyde Park Corner from his house in Queen's Gate Gardens before he hailed one, and when he arrived at Printing House Square his reception was as cold as the weather:

I found the Editor ofThe Timesafter midnight as difficult of approach as a cabinet minister. I was shown first into one room, then into another, and after being duly inspected in each room I was then invited to take a seat and wait. The time went on; at length I rang a bell and sent in a message to Mr. Buckle that if he didn't see me soon I must be gone. This produced the great man. He thanked me for the news which was quite exclusive, and there was more than a column about Browning inThe Timesof that morning.
Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan
Authors: Cohen Morton N.
Published: October 2008

In 1865, an unknown author calling himself Lewis Carroll compelled a leading publishing house, Macmillan & Company, to suppress the first edition of a children's book entitled Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1886, the same author, better established, instructed the same publisher to dispose of the first edition of The Game of Logic, also meant for children, as not up to his standards of book production. In 1889, Carroll condemned the entire first run often thousand copies of The Nursery “Alice”; and in 1893, when he found that a later run (the sixtieth thousand) of Through the Looking-Glass had come from the presses with the illustrations not well printed, he ordered Macmillan to scuttle those copies as well.
The Fiction Earning Patterns of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot and Trollope
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: October 2008

In this paper the aim is to examine the first-form earnings of the novels of four major mid-Victorian novelists and to draw some preliminary deductions from the patterns and figures which emerge. Underlying a mechanical exercise is the contention that how a novelist is rewarded has a significant relationship to how he writes and the quality of what he writes. Without going much beyond tabular representation of these novelists' production and income one can elaborate four distinct career strategies. And these strategies conform usefully (though not entirely congruently) with the literary–critical judgements which are commonly made about the achievements in fiction of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Trollope.
Sources for the Study of Victorian Writers and Their Publishers
Authors: Shattock Joanne
Published: October 2008

In a recent study which is central to the theme of this volume, Robert L. Patten has remarked that despite all the scholarly activity in the Victorian period over the past fifteen years, there is still no “magisterial work” on Victorian publishing. In the introduction to his Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978) Patten emphasizes the difficulty of assessing the extent to which the transactions and the relationship between Dickens and his various publishers were typical of the period and to what degree they were due to the force of Dickens' personality and to the position he occupied in the literary world. Even more pertinent are his reflections on the problems of separating an author's professional life from his total life, of extracting a picture of the writer qua writer from the rich and complex portrait of the whole man, without limiting or distorting his character.
Robert Browning and the Hunts of South Kensington
Authors: Secor Robert
Published: October 2008

Sir John Squire, in his review of Mr. Osbert Burdett's book on Robert Browning, is right in suggesting that there must be “someone alive,” besides Mr. Thomas Wise, “who has broken bread at the poet's table.” I did so, but it was at histea-table, and it was cake we broke. The table was round and of the old pivotal kind, that lurched dangerously when anyone pragmatic, say Mr. Kenyon, made his points—leaning heavily, threatening to upset Miss Sarianna's silver teapot, which she would wave occasionally so as to get her word in. The conversation was sometimes interesting and sometimes not, to the listening pitcher of schoolgirl that I was.
A Mill for Editing
Authors: Robson John M.
Published: October 2008

The Happy Dreams of editors – the nightmares are privileged communications—feature banners with the strange device,“Definitive!” And sometimes incautious and over-generous reviewers make those dreams an apparent reality. But the irony has entered the soul, and cannot be long forgotten. Those of us engaged in editing John Stuart Mill's Collected Works have always known that, quite apart from our failings, it is impossible to produce an edition that will stand up for all time. Even more important is the realization that no editor of an author such as Mill can fully satisfy any one generation of actual, let alone potential, readers.
Of Poets and of Rivers: Five Letters of Matthew Arnold to George Stovin Venables
Authors: Waller John O.
Published: October 2008

Among the surviving papers of the indefatigable journalist, parliamentary barrister, and Cambridge “Apostle” George Stovin Venables (1810–88) recently deposited at the National Library of Wales are five delightful letters to Venables from Matthew Arnold – two written in 1879 and 1880 and three during the last full year of his life in 1887. The first two, being concerned with Arnold's 1879 book of selections from Wordsworth and with Venables' review of it in the Saturday Review, give us Arnold's reaction to published criticisms of his Wordsworth book and its well-known introductory essay. The three 1887 letters anticipate a visit by Arnold to the Venables family seat, Llysdinam, at Newbridge-on-Wye, in Radnorshire, Wales, hoping to include fishing in the river.
The Brownings' Correspondence: Supplement No. 4 to the Checklist
Authors: Kelley Philip , Hudson Ronald
Published: October 2008

Another year has passed, and once again we take this opportunity of updating our Checklist. It has been another fruitful year, thanks in large part to the very gratifying help we are receiving from Browning scholars. This supplement contains 277 entries–less than in previous supplements, but still containing an impressive proportion of totally new entries: 173. In addition to these new-found letters, we now know the present location of 35 letters whose whereabouts we had not previously established, and new locations for 17 letters that have changed hands. Quotations from catalogue sources have been added to 13 letters, and 9 have been redated as a result of further research in the course of editorial work on the early volumes of the Brownings' correspondence.
Victorian Modernism: The Arnold-Hardy Succession
Authors: Buckler William E.
Published: October 2008

The Thesis that I shall maintain in this essay is suggestive rather than probative. The poetry of both Arnold and Hardy is in a state of critical flux at the present time, interest in the former just beginning to emerge from a long period of critical drabness, and acclaim for the latter finally beginning to erase the autobiographical and ideological structures in which it has been too long imprisoned. Thus our critical premises about both their poetic canons are simply too volatile and variable to admit of critical conclusiveness. Moreover, Hardy was both the least imitative and the most cryptically allusive of poets, and even when he rewrote an earlier poet's work, in the sense that “While Drawing in a Churchyard” is a rewriting of “A slumber did my spirit seal,” the attachment ot the original was extremely delicate and the fiction, idiom, and angle of vision of the new rendering distinctly idiosyncratic.
Browning's Modernism: The Infinite Moment as Epiphany
Authors: Nichols Ashton
Published: October 2008

Browning's modernism has most often been seen as originating in his use of the dramatic monologue. Blending traditional poetic genres and emphasizing powerfully realized psychological states, the monologues have been described as a source of literary technique in authors as diverse as Conrad, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce. This strain of criticism suggests that Browning's sense of character is his primary strength and that it combines with his dramatic ability to place a fictional consciousness in accurately circumscribed historical time. These arguments leave one essential question unanswered – “to what extent is Browning sympathizing with his characters and to what extent is he passing judgment on them from some objective viewpoint outside the poem?” This question has become an increasingly important focus of critical discussion in recent years. The notion of sympathy is affirmed by defenders of Browning's moral relativism, while the idea of an absolute standard is advanced by those who defend his ability to identify with characters with whom he is actually in disagreement.
The Modernist Narrator on the Victorian Sailing Ship
Authors: Levenson Michael
Published: October 2008

In 1913 Ezra Pound vowed “to sweep out the last century the way Attila swept across Europe.” From our present standpoint, we can recognize in such a remark, not only the familiar antipathy toward things Victorian, but the impulse, everywhere apparent in the early modernist movement, to lay claim to historical autonomy, to suppress origins, to revise history in the light of present inclinations. A remark of Nietzsche's is apposite: “We try to give ourselves a new past from which we should have liked to descend instead of the past from which we actually descended.” But Europe, after all, survived Attila, and the Victorians have survived Pound to enjoy, we may imagine, the satisfactions of neglected precendents returned to claim priority. Now it remains for us to continue the long task of restoring connection where the moderns saw rupture. This essay will approach the problem of literary transition in Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, a work which provides the greatest challenge to those who live by fixed period categories, and which appears to fall as happily within the early modern as the late Victorian. And it is no easy matter to determine whether it lies closer to the spirit of Carlyle or Ford Madox Ford, closer to Samuel Smiles or Mister Kurtz. It raises, I hope to show, the problem of Victorian modernism in austere form, and I will attempt to measure those austerities by taking Culture and Anarchy as my touchstone.
The Inn Album: Browning's Marginal Poem
Authors: Kendrick Walter
Published: October 2008

“The said poem is quite finished,” Browning wrote to his publisher, George Smith, on 22 April 1875, “– is on so very modern a subject that it concerns last Whitsuntide – and English country life, – and moreover means to be abundantly passionate and pathetic: I did it with a will in two months exactly: it is some 3,500 lines in length, and, in fact, is a tragedy in a new style. What do you say to this?”
Emerson's Italian Journey
Authors: Richardson Robert D.
Published: October 2008

On Christmas day 1832 the twenty-nine-year-old Emerson, then a young Boston clergyman in ill health and low spirits, went aboard the brig “Jasper” and set off into the wintry north Atlantic just ahead of a storm. He was bound for the Mediterranean, for Italy, then Switzerland, France, and England. The trip would change his life. Emerson left home with his ministerial career broken off, uncertain of himself, and without an aim in life. He came back from Europe with a changed outlook, sure of himself, and with a new vocation. His six months in Italy prepared him for and led him toward a culminating moment in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, to a dramatic, decisive, career-changing moment of insight into the connection, not between man and God, but between the mind and the natural order of things, directing him away from theology, preaching, and scholarship, and providing a new imperative to become a naturalist and a teacher. Home again after the trip, he observed: “the teacher of the coming age must occupy himself in the study and explanation of the moral constitution of man more than in the elucidation of difficult texts.” When he left he was a minister without a church. When he returned he took up a new career as a public lecturer, and his first set of lectures would be on science, on natural history.
“The Glove” and the Poets
Authors: Katz Richard A.
Published: October 2008

Anyone familiar with the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard must, upon reading Browning's “The Glove,” be struck by the inappropriateness of the French poet as “loquitor.” Indeed, one is forced to the conclusion that Browning must have known very little about this prince des poètes of the French Renaissance, nor could he have been acquainted with much of Ronsard's verse, which amounts to a huge corpus. In “The Glove,” Ronsard is depicted as a wry and amused observer of, and commentator on, court life under Francis I; in reality, however, he was totally unknown as a poet during Francis's reign (1515–47). He published virtually nothing until 1550, which date begins, when Ronsard was twenty-six, the period of his great renown. Further, during that period he enjoyed a place at court far more lofty than that suggested by Browning:
Love Among the Ruins
Authors: Lang Cecil Y.
Published: October 2008

According to an ancient Persian legend, quoted by E. F. Benson in The Challoners, a lover knocked one day at the door of his beloved and the beloved said, “Who is that?” He replied, “It is I,” and the one on the inside said, “There is not room for two.” So he went away, came back after a year, and knocked again. And again from the inside the voice said, “Who is that?” But this time he said, “It is thou.” So the door was opened and he went in.
Revising Old Scripts: The Fusion of Independence and Intimacy in Aurora Leigh
Authors: Sutphin Christine
Published: October 2008

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is an unusual Victorian heroine because she ultimately combines career and marriage. Although Aurora's story has been recognized as an important revision of a traditional woman's story by such famous readers as Virginia Woolf (182–92) and Ellen Moers (60–62), some feminist critics have been disturbed by the ending, even as they describe its compelling feminist vision. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, while acknowledging that the story is a “rescripting,” argues that “being an artist is, at the end, reinterpreted as self-sacrifice for the woman, and thus is aligned with feminine ideology” (87). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that Aurora has to learn “not to be herself,” that is, she must learn sympathy and service (576–77). Deirdre David goes even further in asserting Barrett Browning's conservatism when she argues that Aurora's art does not subvert Romney's authority; instead, feminine art serves “male socialist politics” and “a woman's voice [speaks] patriarchal discourse – boldly, passionately, and without rancor” (134).
Robert Browning's Poetics of Appropriation
Authors: Munich Adrienne Auslander
Published: October 2008

So compelling has been Robert Browning's voice in the literary canon that it has almost drowned out the Other voice of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. One of the most impressive pleas to reevaluate the influence between this formidable and formidably married couple came from Flavia Alaya, who documented the mutuality of their political opinions and their shared fascination with the rescue theme. More recently, responding to the feminist wave of reevaluations of all poetic relations, of silences as well as voices, U. C. Knoepflmacher and Nina Auerbach presented some ways we might read the two poets in tandem, considering the manner in which one appropriated the other, for example, or the way their stories created a difference.
Browning's First Letter to Rossetti: A Discovery
Authors: Lasner Mark Samuels
Published: October 2008

In the summer of 1847, the nineteen-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti came across a copy of Robert Browning's anonymous first book in the library of the British Museum. This discovery of Pauline (published in 1833) by a young poet already enthusiastic about Browning has long been justly famous. Not being able to obtain the book from the publisher – it had long since been removed from sale – Rossetti was forced to transcribe the entire text into a notebook. While doing so, he noticed a similarity between certain passages of Pauline and one of Browning's acknowledged early works, Paracelsus (1835). Several months later, on 17 October 1847, Rossetti wrote to Browning to ask if he were the author of Pauline. Browning's reply – the beginning of an important literary friendship – is presented here for the first time.
Epic and Anti-Epic in The Ring and the Book
Authors: Dooley Allan C.
Published: October 2008

In several ways, The Ring and the Book presents itself as an epic. It is long, and long in the epic way: twelve books. It gives the impression of moving from place to place and from incident to incident, and it contains plenty of conflict, harrowing episodes, and violent struggles. And yet upon reflection, The Ring and the Book quickly loses its savor of the epic. Its length derives not from the sequential narration of causally-related, Fate-driven events of historical importance, but rather from a series of competing analyses of just one relatively brief and decidedly unheroic set of events. Very little in the way of incident is presented to the reader directly; instead, almost all of the events in the central story are recollected and accounted for in different ways by different speakers. The Ring and the Book seems to be more an epic of words than of deeds. As critics we speak of Browning's psychologizing, of his probing of motives, of the potential indeterminacy of the very truth he tells us he seeks to reveal. The arguments and structures of the poem thus aspire to the condition of irony, as may be confirmed by the poet's own doubts about his achievement at the end of Book 12. On this reading, Browning prompts us to a relativist, modernist, or even post-modernist stance, a view of considerable attractiveness.
Virtual and Ideal Readers of Browning's “Pan and Luna”: the Drama in the Dramatic Idyl
Authors: Flowers Betty S.
Published: October 2008

Most of “Pan and Luna” is addressed not to an internal auditor but to what Gerald Prince calls the “virtual reader,” the reader the author imagines himself or herself to be writing to – in the case of “Pan and Luna,” the Victorian reading public. Prince observes:

Every author, provided he is writing for someone other than himself, develops his narrative as a function of a certain type of reader whom he bestows with certain qualities, faculties, and inclinations according to his opinion of men in general (or in particular) and according to the obligations he feels should be respected. This virtual reader is different from the real reader: writers frequently have a public they don't deserve. (9)

In addition to the distinction between the virtual reader and the real reader, Prince makes a further distinction between the real reader and the ideal reader. From the writer's point of view, “an ideal reader would be one who would understand perfectly and would approve entirely the least of his words, the most subtle of his intentions” (9).
Browning's Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: October 2008

Familiarity must never lead us to overlook the strangeness of Browning's work. “That it is Mr. Browning's pleasure to be enigmatical, may now, we suppose, be considered as an accepted condition of his literary dealings with the public,” wrote the reviewer of the pamphlet entitled Dramatic Lyrics, in the Athenaeum for 22 April 1843. He went on to complain that the “general designation, ‘Bells and Pomegranates,’ as yet remains a mystery. Which of these poems are Bells, and which Pomegranates – or why any one of them is either – is one of those secrets which we may suppose ‘shall be unriddled by and bye.’ In the meantime, it is equally difficult to understand how the disjecta membra which compose No. III. should have found their way into a professed collection of ‘Dramatical Pieces.’…In any case … they are mere fragments, varying in length from half a dozen lines upwards – apparently thoughts jotted down for after use – or rejected from their places in longer pieces, and denoting foregone conclusions – but scarcely important enough to have formed the materials of an independent publication” (385).
“The Grammarian's Funeral” and the Erotics of Grammar
Authors: Boyd Zelda
Published: October 2008

In the November 1888 issue of Modern Language Notes, there is an item entitled, appropriately enough, “Should a Poet Be a Philologist?” The poet in question is Robert Browning and the problem at hand is the line, “Cowls and Twats” from Pippa Passes.
Schoolboy Latin and the Mid-Victorian Novelist: A Study in Reader Competence
Authors: Skilton David
Published: October 2008

It is possible to approach the question of novelists' use of classical references and quotations from the point of view of the authors themselves, examining their reading and education, and the private as well as public implications of this learning; or we can take the point of view of the texts and their intertextual connections, to enrich our reading of the novels concerned by showing how they reach out to other works, ancient and modern. In contrast, this article discusses what we can deduce about novelists' expectations as to their readers' competence in the classics by examining references in some of the great, widely-read novels of the middle years of Victoria's reign. Most of the examples to be cited which require any linguistic competence rely on Latin, and most of this Latin was familiar and learnt by rote by people of a certain background, gender, and education, and so I shall call it “schoolboy Latin.” The novelists referred to are Thackeray, Trollope, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Dickens, George Eliot, and G.J. Whyte Melville, who are divided in their respect for the Victorian habit of Latin quotation and are correspondingly lavish or parsimonious in their use of it.
Myth, Exorcism, and Maggie Tulliver
Authors: da Vinci Nichols M.
Published: October 2008

Pater speaks here for a perception shared, differently, by George Eliot and Matthew Arnold. Deep respect for Greek learning as the font of humanism led Arnold to suspect that myth held more truth than did mere philosophy. As if in agreement, Eliot's novel,The Mill on the Floss, asks what that more might be. Is myth a religious expression? an illustration of fate? a model of nature? or of some irreducible essence within the grain and texture of reality eluding definition? All may apply. The gross sum of rural life in the novel, a “grovelling existence which even calamity does not elevate” (238; bk. 4, ch. 1), nevertheless possesses an obscure power that Eliot both dignifies and parodies through sustained allusions to the Ariadne myth. In addition and more particularly, Ariadne expresses Maggie Tulliver's otherwise mute impulses and suppressed motives, the same function it performs for Eliot's later heroines in conflict. This evidence of the myth's extended hold on Eliot's imagination strongly suggests that it spoke for personal as well as fictional experience. Here in herbildungsroman, myth begins to provide her with a vocabulary to express antagonism between nature and culture – to put this roughly – or between passion and idea that Eliot herself confronted and returned to time and again in her novels.
The Social Construction of Public Locations
Authors: Davis Lennard J.
Published: October 2008

Locations, particularly public, popular locations, are constructed ideologically. By that I mean that places, like other artifacts in culture, accrete meaning and are in effect created by that meaning. The Haussmanization of Paris provides a particularly good instance of the way that the nineteenth-century city was newly conceived of as an organized, ideological system with a shape – a logic and a uniformity. When Baron Haussman attempted to impose the boulevard and sweeping avenues over the crazy quilt of the old quartiers, he was investing public place with public meaning. The nineteenth century particularly saw the rise of the concept of the public place. As the Goncourts noted in 1860, “The interior is passing away. Life turns back to become public” (Clark 34).
Children's Reading and the Culture of Girlhood: The Case of L.T. Meade
Authors: Mitchell Sally
Published: October 2008

By the beginning of World War I, a separate culture of girlhood had taken shape in Britain. “Girlhood” had its own interests, values, and (perhaps) ethics; its own language, customs, and literature. Fifty years earlier, when publishers first began to identify readers in a category which they differentiated from the adult audience on the one hand and the general children's audience on the other, they were not quite sure who girls were and what they might be interested in. Publishers' advertisements used terms such as “the girl from 8 to 18” and “those who have left the schoolroom but not yet entered society.” The earliest girls' magazines, which appeared in the last quarter of the century, opened their readers' contribution pages to “girls” up to the age of twenty-five. Mid-nineteenth-century fiction about girls generally emphasized home life and home duties, but by 1900 many books dwelt on the values and interactions of girls themselves, with hardly any mention of adults. As a first step in discussing the creation of girlhood – and the values, attitudes, and understandings which this creation encoded – the case of L.T. Meade is instructive.
Browning and How He Worked in Good Temper: A Study of the Revisions ofPacchiarotto
Authors: Crowder Ashby Bland
Published: October 2008

In 1876 Robert Browning publishedPacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper: with Other Poems. In the title poem of this volume Browning answers the critics who had been nipping at him for decades, and at the end of it Browning threatens that his housemaid (his muse) might toss the slops from askoramis(chamber pot) upon their heads. The image of a chamber pot so used is generally thought to be humorous, as it is in Candide's encounter with a Dutch religious zealot or in a similar scene inJoseph Andrewsby Henry Fielding.
Performing Suffering: From Dickens to David
Authors: Auerbach Nina
Published: October 2008

“That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell” (Forster 1: 25 and Dickens 218). Charles Dickens's description of the anguish of his childhood is wreathed in paradoxes the author savors but does not acknowledge. Like his scandalous successor Oscar Wilde, Dickens luxuriates in the spectacle of his own martyrdom. His commendation “exquisitely” turns a lament into a boast, undermining the sincerity that assures us his suffering has no language. Yet despite their half-concealed pleasure at his own pain, these sentences pleased Dickens so much that, after writing them to John Forster in his secret confession of his childhood humiliation, he gave them to his abused, beloved David Copperfield and thereby to the world. David, however, subdues the pride in emotional virtuosity his creator could not suppress.
“Development” and Browning's Philosophy of Inadequacy
Authors: Ryals Clyde de L.
Published: October 2008

Robert Browning died in Venice on 12 December 1889. On the same day Asolando: Fancies and Facts was published in London. During this centennial year I should like to look at the poet's last publication and take note of his valedictory remarks particularly as they touch on his well-known “philosophy of the imperfect,” which I believe can be better understood as a philosophy of inadequacy. To that end I shall focus on the poem “Development,” which gives a general idea of what Browning had to say not only in Asolando but in much of his earlier work as well.
Ruskin's Rage and Ours: The Dramatic Style
Authors: Caws Mary Ann
Published: October 2008

Dramatic, even melodramatic, Ruskin's preferred style is often—and deliberately—given over to the passionate; in the middle of a lecture, he will stop to announce that he has found by his side a “violent little fragment of an undelivered lecture” (QA, 157) which he then delivers, subsequently pointing out his return to “cool English” (QA, 160). Such a self-conscious examination and description of his own mood and tone characterizes Ruskin's odd discursive stance, as he is at once involved and distant, choosing his drama in his written text, and then orally exposing it.