bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Falstaff and the Renewal of Windsor
Authors: Bryant J. A.
Published: February 2007

The neglect of The Merry Wives of Windsor among scholars and critics results from a failure to appreciate the special nature of the play. Although superficially structured like Roman comedy, the play is really built upon the succession of Falstaff episodes, which give meaning to the Fenton-Anne plot and provide a resolution for it. In this play Falstaff is no lecher but a discredited old adventurer, down on his luck, who becomes the scapegoat for a community afflicted generally by the lust and greed that some of its members seek to make him solely responsible for. The humiliations that they impose upon him are similar to those traditionally inflicted upon the scapegoat figures of European folk custom, and at the end of the play he has become the horned scapegoat indeed, the visible bearer of punishment, and the means whereby innocent love may triumph in Windsor in spite of parental vanity and economic interests. Thus, with the punishment of Falstaff, death is once more temporarily defeated, and the renewal, appropriately celebrated in comedy, is presented for the approval of sympathetic audiences.
Charles Maurras and Eliot's “New Life”
Authors: Torrens James
Published: February 2007

In the late 1920's, when T. S. Eliot was haunted by Dante's Vita nuova and by the Earthly Paradise cantos of the “Purgatorio,” he was also very much under the influence of Charles Maurras, the French monarchist and anti-Romantic. He found in Maurras the “criterion” he was searching for—a sense of “order” that would save the poetic sensibility from mere emotional self-indulgence. In 1928, Eliot himself translated an old essay on criticism by Maurras which argued that readiness for impression must be matched by a capacity for selection. Eliot had Maurras very much in mind when he sat down to write his own essay on Dante, and, by a special dedication, he tied the essay very tightly to Maurras, whose treatise on Dante he knew. “Ash Wednesday,” too, with its interplay between the yearning, regretting sensibility, and the expiatory frame that controls it, is a mirror of both Eliot's Dante essay and the esthetics of Maurras. In the long run, however, the tutelage of Dante began to move Eliot away from Maurras.
Unity Identity Text Self
Authors: Holland Norman N.
Published: February 2007

Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.
The Moral Paradox of Webster's Tragedy
Authors: Whitman Robert F.
Published: February 2007

Over the years, Webster criticism has been haunted by a tendency to see the essential conflict in the tragedies as a struggle between the forces of good and evil. In recent years, critics have scarcely approached the possibility that his vision may be a paradox in which both sides of an apparent contradiction are equally “true.” The antitheses in Webster may not be good and evil so much as two irreconcilably opposed impulses of human nature that can be identified with the Nietzschean terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” From this perspective Francisco, Monticelso, Ferdinand, or the Cardinal is not so much representative of evil as of the Apollonian obsession with obedience, responsibility, sexual restraint, and punishment. Vittoria and the Duchess, freed from moralistic quibbles, are Dionysian rebels. Flamineo and Bosola, like the rest of us, are caught between the demands of equally imperative but mutually exclusive ways of seeing reality.
The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking
Authors: Bruns Gerald L.
Published: February 2007

The notion that the meaning of an idea is inseparable from its history is reflected in the way that Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin took recourse to historical categories of thought in their creations of meaning. Sartor Resartus, Culture and Anarchy, portions of The Stones of Venice, and the later volumes of Modern Painters are analyzed to suggest that the distinctive feature of the Victorian mind is not to be found in any of its diverse contents but rather in the way that history is made to function as a formal property of thought. Indeed, whereas Enlightenment and Romantic writers were inclined to locate the ground of intelligibility in forms of transcendence, the Victorians were forced by their sense of the historicity of things to derive their meanings from the world of processes and events, sequences and developments.
Styles of Cognition as Moral Options in La Nouvelle Hélïse and Les Liaisons dangereuses
Authors: Blum Carol
Published: February 2007

Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed the distinctive style of thought presented in La Nouvelle Héloïse in order to reconcile conflicting needs for erotic pleasure, innocence, and transparency. The cognitive style thus evolved and put forth as a moral imperative, emphasizing both the subject's ability to lose himself in an emotional fusion with others and the overwhelming power of the passions, found favor with the generation coming of age in 1761. Choderlos de Laclos, a member of that generation, although apparently much impressed by some aspects of Rousseau, presents in Les Liaisons dangereuses a cognitive style which is the antithesis and refutation of the one in La Nouvelle Héloïse. The “sentiment involontaire,” so frequently invoked in La Nouvelle Héloïse as an excuse for the inadmissible impulse or action, is subject to a scornful analysis by Laclos. Whereas Rousseau attempted to seduce the reader into accepting the morality of his novel, Laclos, on the contrary, sets up a trap by which the reader is made to recognize his own complicity, motivated by curiosity, in the maneuvers of the rapacious protagonists.
Zuckmayer, Hilpert, and Hemingway
Authors: Kvam Wayne
Published: February 2007

Carl Zuckmayer and Heinz Hilpert adapted Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) for the Berlin stage in 1931. The unpublished manuscript of the play “Kat” reveals that the German adaptors, while making several original contributions, relied heavily upon Annemarie Horschitz' translation of A Farewell to Arms (In einem andern Land, 1930). By participating in the dramatization, playwright Zuckmayer sought to win a wider audience for Hemingway; at the same time, he was responding to current trends in the Berlin theater and to the political situation facing the Weimar Republic. Zuckmayer's political consciousness, manifest in the earliest of his successful plays, reached a new level of seriousness in “Kat.” Stepping out from behind his own humorous satire, he permitted Hemingway's endorsement of individual freedom to come to life in the Deutsches Theater at a time when the cause of freedom was being threatened as never before in Germany's history.
Mrs. Dalloway: Literary Allusion as Structural Metaphor
Authors: Wyatt Jean M.
Published: February 2007

Virginia Woolf interweaves allusion and image to construct character, define theme, and structure Mrs. Dalloway. Shakespearean allusions combined with mineral and flower imagery identify Lady Bruton and Sally Seton as representatives of the dying aristocracy and the flourishing industrial class. They also embody the alternatives open to Clarissa: sterile aristocratic society or life-giving passion. An allusion to the dirge from Cymbeline sounds the theme of death and rebirth echoed in Peter's dream, the beggarwoman's song, and Septimus' and Clarissa's experiences. Quotations from the dirge and a complex of symbols originating in its heat and cold imagery link Septimus' and Clarissa's successive deaths and rebirths. A modern incarnation of the dying god archetype, Septimus ultimately gives Clarissa new life through his death.
The Middle English Judas: An Interpretation
Authors: Schueler Donald G.
Published: February 2007

The Middle English Judas seems to pose more narrative problems than it solves. The sympathetic characterization of Judas; the shift in dramatic focus from Judas to Peter's denial of Christ; the implausible bargain Judas strikes with Pilate—all are perplexing elements. They can be resolved, however, once it is understood that Judas explains a biblical scene not presented in the work itself: the moment when Christ asks the apostles to share bread and wine, his body and blood. The sympathetic portrayal of Judas and the final emphasis on Peter's denial diminish the moral range between the two disciples and imply the universality of human sinfulness. But Judas' transaction, in which Christ is sold for the money to buy food for Passover, gives an even more specific and ironic meaning to the offstage lines “This is my body” since the bread and wine will cost Christ's body and blood.
Form, Tradition, and Consolation in Hardy's “Poems of 1912–13”
Authors: Morgan William W.
Published: February 2007

Hardy's “Poems of 1912-13” constitute a formal elegy over his first wife, Emma. The twenty-one lyrics are thematically unified, and the sequence is given overall form and structure by the persona's organized perception of time. Within the sequence the narrator focuses upon time periods in the following order: recent past, present; then distant past, recent past, present. This five-part temporal model serves as the form of the elegy, a form that it is likely Hardy worked consciously to achieve. It is also likely that he wrote this sequence in full consciousness of the great elegies preceding his, for he adapted many of the conventions of the elegiac tradition to his own artistic needs. The traditional consolation of perpetuity outside time and space, however, he denied, and for it he substituted the consolation of full emotional and intellectual comprehension of the couple's experience together. This limited consolation, based upon the persona's organized perception of time, is the logic of grief for Hardy's godless universe.
Circumscription of Space and the Form of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym
Authors: Carringer Robert L.
Published: February 2007

Circumscription of space is a fundamental and necessary feature of Poe's fictional universe of negative possibility. That his characters are almost always narrowly circumscribed suggests their severely limited prospects and interests. Diminished space also represents withdrawal into self, and Poe's centers of diminished space often contain symbols of that destructive core of the inner self which continually threatens the moral and rational being of the Poe protagonist. In undertaking The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe was committing himself uncharacteristically not only to the representation of movement in space but also to an objective mode of development, outward and ongoing testing and discovery of self in the infinite possibilities of space. The curious form of Arthur Gordon Pym is the result not so much of careless incompetence (as recent scholarship has suggested) as of a fundamental conflict between psychological inclination and the formal requirements of an unfamiliar genre. But this work is of special interest, since Arthur Gordon Pym is a first effort in an important line of experimentation in American fiction, the transformation of an undistinguished form, the sea narrative, into a vehicle of major literature.
The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English Poems
Authors: Wright George T.
Published: February 2007

Poets writing in English frequently use the simple present form of action verbs where the progressive form would be more natural in speech. Probably they do so in order to take advantage of overtones resident in the simple form, overtones that permit a physical action to seem timeless yet permanent, pastlike yet edging toward the future, repeatable yet provisional, urgent yet distant, ceremonious and archaic. Never quite a stage direction, and different in feeling even from temporally unlocated past tense verbs, the action verb cast in the lyric present tense serves every epoch of English literary history differently but is always expressive of the poets' deepest perceptions and fears. An appendix reports and comments on an extensive survey of the frequency with which British and American poets have used progressive forms.
Personal Identity and Literary Personae: A Study in Historical Psychology
Authors: Richmond Hugh M.
Published: February 2007

In the Renaissance, religious and political confrontations generated an intensified awareness of the self which marks a decisive phase in the evolution of human personality, whose study may be entitled Historical Psychology. Alienation from religious and political strife turned the interests of Petrarch and Montaigne toward their own minds, Marot's persecution for heresy developed his self-awareness in L'Enfer, followed by Ronsard's self-defensive autobiography in his Reply to Insults. Such models prefigure Milton's authorial intrusions of Paradise Lost. Shakespeare illustrates the creative impact of religious controversy by enriching the hints of Lollardry in Falstaff with a wide variety of Puritan affectations in the Elizabethan period. The Protestant attacks on Machiavelli also help in developing the character of Richard III and similar introverted creations, as T. S. Eliot notes. By the time of Marvell, personality is considered essentially artificial and willed—an inheritance from which Swift, the Romantics, and many modern authors have profited. Historical Psychology is thus a necessary tool if we are to handle the development of literary tradition.
The Dancer and the Dance
Authors: Fisher John H.
Published: February 2007

Reality is communication. Culture is a complex form of communication. Language is the most important medium in this abstruse level of communication. Literature is the richest and most effective use of language. The membership of the MLA, as symbolic of the institutionalized, academic interest in language and literature in the United States, is no longer representative of the concerns of the population as a whole. Its interest pre-ponderately in English and European literature and languages does not accord with the increasing national interest in the literature and languages of this hemisphere, in the varieties of English used in this country, in pedagogy, and in the modified expectations of literacy today. As teachers of language and literature, MLA members live and move in the world of symbols. They cannot expect to be absolved from the practical effects of these symbols. In their responsibility or irresponsibility, they and their Association are these symbols.
A Hero of Conscience: Samson Agonistes and Casuistry
Authors: Slights Camille W.
Published: February 2007

Renaissance English casuistry, the branch of moral philosophy that applies general principles to particular cases, supplies a significant context for Milton’s Samson Agonistes. In subject matter, structure, and language, Milton’s tragedy resembles the prose cases of conscience in which casuists showed how to overcome doubt and despair and gain peaceful consciences by resolving difficult moral problems. Such casuistical concepts as the supremacy of the individual conscience, the relevance of circumstances to moral law, and the role of reason in resolving doubt illuminate the conflicting moral judgments that form the dramatic texture of Samson Agonistes. Samson learns how to judge his own actions in particular circumstances, and by doing so, learns to repent of his past sin, overcome his sense of powerlessness, and act with a clear conscience. The drama goes beyond conventional casuistry in its uncompromising assertion of the supremacy of the individual conscience and its unflinching recognition of the tragic limits of human power.
The Irony of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea: Its Form and Function
Authors: Ryder Frank G. , Bennett Benjamin
Published: February 2007

Part of Goethe’s intention in Hermann und Dorothea is to awaken in the reader a disturbing sense of discrepancy between form and content. Systematic, statistically controlled analysis of the poem’s meter, along with a treatment of specific Homeric allusions in the text, leads to this conclusion, also supported by less rigorous but no less valid interpretive arguments. This discrepancy, moreover, is left unresolved, creating a feeling of pervasive irony, but not in the sense of satire or mockery. The reader is encouraged to adopt a superior critical perspective toward the bourgeois values in the poem, but, in that this perspective itself becomes an object of irony, he is also invited to affirm such values. Although this contradiction, like the tension between form and content, is never resolved, it can be understood as expressing an idea of the historical need for bourgeois stability, however banal, in the period depicted.
The Divided Self in the Fiction of Henry James
Authors: Schneider Daniel J.
Published: February 2007

The divided self in James’s fiction may be regarded as an inevitable structural consequence of James’s desire to dramatize the problem of the free spirit in an enslaving world. But the divided self required by art is not essentially different from the divided self known to psychology, and an understanding of the anxieties of that self, particularly of the “obsessive imagery” James uses to depict those anxieties, enriches our understanding of James’s work. The fear of a world that threatens one’s being issues in an elaborate development of an escape motif; of imagery of seizure by the eye and by the world of appearances; and of imagery of petrification, reflecting a dread of being turned into a mere tool or machine. James’s vision of “the great trap of life” permits him to come to terms with his own limitations and culminates in a searching philosophic examination of the problem of free will and determinism.
“But it Appears She Lives”: Iteration in The Winters Tale
Authors: Siemon James Edward
Published: February 2007

That The Winter's Tale has a double plot has long been noted, but no one has yet fully explored the nature and extent of iteration in the two parts of the play. Structural parallels between Acts i-iii and Acts iv-v are reinforced by repeated statements of motifs common to both parts of the play and by the variation in the second half of motifs important to the first. The dramatic evidence of Hermione's death is substantial, particularly in m.ii and nr.iii, and later details (those in v.ii and v.iii) come too late to qualify the dramatic as well as thematic import of Hermione's loss. These later details must, therefore, stand as alternatives rather than as explanations. The second half of the play thus forms an alternative to the first, with Hermione's fate of central importance in pointing up their contrasting natures. Each part of the play makes a statement of the possibilities for gain and for loss within society, and the statement of neither is complete without the other. Together, they suggest limits as well as possibilities.
“Home at Grasmere”: Ecological Holiness
Authors: Kroeber Karl
Published: February 2007

Wordsworth's “Home at Grasmere,” the one completed book of The Recluse, expresses a conception of home as a territorial sanctuary. The holiness of Grasmere Vale as a dwelling place consists in the possibility for ecological wholeness which it provides. The enclosure of the valley liberates the poet's psychic potency, because there he is encouraged to be receptive to multiple dimensions of experience. Through such openness he is consciously able to reintegrate his being into the enduring rhythms of natural existence, thereby articulating his unique individuality. “Home at Grasmere,” then, embodies Wordsworth's ideal of what poetry should be, namely, the realization through language of the intrinsic poeticalness of commonplace actuality. This true poetry, which is characterized by interplay between physical “fact” and mental “fancy,” liberates man from the prison of mere perception, revealing how individuals'—by fitting themselves to nature and fitting nature to themselves—can give unique expression to the unified, interdependent wholeness which is life, the expression being a fulfillment rather than a negation of fundamental inherent tendencies of natural process. In so celebrating such interaction of art and nature, Wordsworth raises questions about some current presuppositions of what constitutes basic interrelations among literature, civilization, and the physical environment.
The Waste Land and the Aeneid
Authors: Donker Marjorie
Published: February 2007

The Waste Land has important connections with the Aeneid beyond those of a shared mythic configuration. These connections are primarily literary and we receive them as Gilbert Highet describes the allusions of symbolist poets—in hints, nuances, phrases repeated in a dream. So Eliot evokes the concatenation of events in the first six books of the Aeneid, and like Virgil he reformulates the literary monuments of the past as a comment upon the present age. Episodes in the Aeneid that have become part of the literary tradition, that have been reformulated by Dante, Spenser, and Milton, are echoed in Eliot's poem. Images of The Waste Land—the drowned Phoenician sailor, the lady of situations, the man with three staves, the Wheel, the card that is blank, Mrs. Equitone—have conspicuous analogues in the Aeneid. Significantly, Anchises' great sermon in the sixth book of Virgil's poem is not only a recapitulation of Aeneas' own purgatorial experiences as quester but also suggests the movement of The Waste Land as a series of trials by water, wind, and fire. In sum, The Waste Land assumes the central importance of Virgil; Virgil is for Eliot, as he was for Dante, a guide and an inspiration.
The House of the Seven Gables and “The Daughters of Dr. Byles“: A Probable Source
Authors: Byers John R.
Published: February 2007

The House of the Seven Gables may owe a considerable debt to Eliza Leslie's “The Daughters of Dr. Byles,” a sketch of the two spinster great-granddaughters of Increase Mather in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine (Jan., Feb., 1842). Both Hepzibah Pyncheon and the Misses Mary and Catherine Byles reside in black ancestral homes shaded by giant trees and furnished with portraits, chairs, and tables from another age. Hepzibah, who physically resembles Catherine, lives, like the aged sisters, under the imprint of the past, seldom venturing into the world; she simply awaits the return of her brother, whose miniature she cherishes and whose prison sentence has kept him away for thirty years, as the Misses Byles await the return of their nephew, whose portrait hangs prominently in the parlor and whose self-imposed exile has lasted forty years. Hawthorne closes his romance as Leslie closes her essay, with the exchange of a temporal home for one of eternity.
Pleberio's World
Authors: Dunn Peter N.
Published: February 2007

Much contemporary criticism presents the final speech of Pleberio in Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina as authorial philosophical pessimism. This view, based upon residual nineteenth-century critical habits, assumes what it claims to demonstrate. Pleberio and his dramatic world appear differently if we begin with the beginning, where other characters create roles for him in their private dramas, in contrast to his ineffective personal role. All the principal characters, Pleberio included, create their world and are created by it. They are united also by their common substitution of metaphors of commerce and exchange for the language of feelings and values. Pleberio the merchant and Celestina the bawd necessarily coexist in the system of La Celestina, as analysis of language and events makes clear. His final protest is an entrepreneur’s confused desperation on facing the world he has made. The last words allude to a context (“Salve Regina”) that reverses this world’s reversals.
Wordsworth and the Problem of Imaginative Story: The Case of “Simon Lee”
Authors: Griffin Andrew L.
Published: February 2007

Overshadowed by “The Thorn” and “The Idiot Boy,” Wordsworth's “Simon Lee” has attracted little attention. It is, however, a complex and ambitious poem, the product of a collision between narrative form and the demands of the imagination. “Simon Lee” does three things: it seeks to wean the reader from his low taste for stories; it displays a dramatic speaker learning to exchange narrative for lyric poetry; and, surprisingly, it undermines the whole proceeding, mourning for the very tales in verse that it abandons. Analysis of the poem from these three points of view sheds light on Wordsworth's ambivalence toward narrative. At the same time it helps us reassemble and relate three competing views of Wordsworth: as evangelist or moral teacher; as dramatist; and as the elegiac poet of the “Ode” and “Tintern Abbey,” whose tendency toward self-involution underlies and influences even his attitudes toward audience and genre.
“Les Mithologies Pantagruelicques”: Introduction to a Study of Rabelais's Quart livre
Authors: Berry Alice Fiola
Published: February 2007

The Quart livre is Rabelais's Inferno. To project his vision of universal catastrophe, Rabelais borrowed from all the voyage literature he knew, from Homer through Cartier, but he drew most from two Old Testament myths. Like the story of Jonah, the Quart livre is a voyage down the digestive tract into the sick belly of the whale, of self, of the world—a voyage forecast in Chapter xxxii of the Pantagruel, where Alcofribas enters the giant's mouth, and in Chapter xxxiii, where he descends into Pantagruel's belly to cure him. Rabelais transforms Jonah's story into an account of death and regeneration. He also confers medical value on the story of Moses, who healed the world with the Word of God. As a writer-physician, Rabelais is also a “logotherapist,” and his characters strive to emulate Moses' achievement. They too seek the therapeutic word, “le mot de la dive Bouteille.”
Letters to the Self: The Cloistered Writer in Nonretrospective Fiction
Authors: Abbott H. Porter
Published: February 2007

My field consists of those works of diary or epistolary fiction in which the author has limited the narrative voice to one diarist or letter writer. The strategy allows the author to focus on a drama of self-perception involving two main participants: the diarist and the text. The outcome of the drama basically depends on how the diarists write and how they read what they write. In the first part of my essay, I treat the drama of successful self-discovery through representative works by Tennyson, Mauriac, Bernanos, Sartre, and Gide. In the second part, I treat Werther, Lermontov’s Pechorin, and Mariane of the Lettres portugaises as writers who use their literary mode in essentially the opposite way: to maintain an existing idea of themselves.
Romantic Expressive Theory and Blake's Idea of the Audience
Authors: Eaves Morris
Published: February 2007

Most literary historians have found that the romantic shift from mimetic to expressive theories of art was “fatal to the audience”—leaving the poet a soliloquist, the audience an unnecessary appendage. Blake's idea of the audience helps show that, while artistic withdrawal certainly defines a polar phase of the theory, the logic of the theory does provide a complementary phase of fulfillment characterized by union between artist and audience. Since theories of art are often latent social theories, we can extend the logic of romantic aesthetics to outline a society of imagination.
Dice Games and Other Games in Le Jeu de saint Nicolas
Authors: Dinshaw Carolyn L.
Published: February 2007

Scholars have attempted to determine the precise details of the dice games played in the tavern in Le Jeu de saint Nicolas but have not connected these particular games to the play's larger structural and thematic design. Jean Bodel's alterations of the Iconia Sancti Nicolai legend are governed by the concept of game as an activity defined and delimited by rules, set off from events of the “real world,” yet intently pursued. His modifications are appropriate to a dramatic representation, for drama itself in the Middle Ages was considered “play,” a game. The idea of game was deeply rooted in the medieval imagination: all human history was seen as a contest between God and Satan that is controlled and determined by God. Bodel contrasts the rule-governed realm of the pagans with the Christian realm of belief and celebrates God's supreme control of the game of history.
Portrait of the Marxist as a Young Hegelian: Lukács' Theory of the Novel
Authors: Miles David H.
Published: February 2007

Composed in the tradition of German idealist aesthetics, Lukács' Theory of the Novel (1916) establishes him not only as an heir to Hegel but, more important, as a forerunner of Benjamin, Adorno, Goldmann, and Auerbach. Lukács begins by constructing a phenomenology of narrative mind in which modern consciousness is played otf against its Other, against the epic vision of earlier poets. Whereas the Homeric epic is characterized by a wholeness of sensibility and vision, novelistic consciousness is ironic, alienated and self-divided. Thus the novelistic hero's journey becomes a Hegelian one into the problematic realms of inwardness, memory, and imagination: from Cervantes to Flaubert we witness a retreat from participation in the world to interpretation of it. Lukács' philosophical meditations prefigure much in recent novel theory: Benjamin's and Adorno's commentaries on alienation in narrative, Goldmann's notion of the problematic hero, and Auerbach's concept, in Mimesis, of Homeric realism.
“The Parish Boy's Progress”: The Evolving Form of Oliver Twist
Authors: Lankford William T.
Published: February 2007

Dickens progressively transforms the controlling conventions of Oliver Twist during the course of the novel to explore deeply rooted moral tensions involving innocence, evil, and the law. The opening satire degenerates into moralistic melodrama as Oliver changes from a typical parish boy to “the principle of Good.” But this sentimental Providentialism breaks down at the country funeral, and in the city the narrative form evolves to discover a more complex and humane morality. Although the plot remains occupied with the triumph of good, the symbolic pattern of the action suggests a hidden resemblance between Oliver and the thieves. The point of view moves toward closer identification with the harried, but increasingly humanized, criminals. The life of the novel resists repression even as the ending enforces the law. “The Parish Boy’s Progress” ends at the gallows, but Fagin takes Oliver’s place there.
Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel
Authors: Wolfley Lawrence C.
Published: February 2007

In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon shows his indebtedness to the school of psychoanalytic culture criticism best exhibited in the two major works of Norman O. Brown—Life against Death and Love's Body. Brown's neo-Freudian view of repression as the source of man's uniqueness in nature is mirrored in virtually every thematic aspect of Gravity's Rainbow. In one sense, the physical gravity of the title is a metaphor for the human repression that engages Pynchon on the psychological level. Pynchon's understanding of history, like Brown's, reflects “the slow return of the repressed.” Other themes include the hypertrophy of the death instinct as manifested in weapons of destruction, the pernicious influence of Calvinist dualism opposing true dialectics, the interdependent abuses of sexuality and power, and the need for an antirational conception of art based in transcendental symbolism. The novel enacts the struggle of life against death, and its style affirms man's freedom.
Blake and the Artistic Machine: An Essay in Decorum and Technology
Authors: Eaves Morris
Published: February 2007

By describing arts as technologies we gain a new perspective on the shift from classic to Romantic esthetics that clarifies Blake's term “machine” in relation to art. Printing drove visual arts to systemize picture reproduction on a principle Blake called “intermeasurability,” essentially atomism, by which art was adjusted to commercial technology. While efficient production requires division between conception and execution, in art conception is execution. Blake saw neoclassical artists divide them, then disguise the incoherent results with classical doctrines of generalization, harmony, and high finish adapted to the needs of systemization. Because the machine is execution and does not change, mechanical order becomes artistic order.
Old Testament Poetry: The Translatable Structure
Authors: apRoberts Ruth
Published: February 2007

Translation is notoriously impossible, and yet people persist in doing it, perhaps nowhere so much as in the case of the Bible. And, while prose is generally more translatable than poetry, it is Old Testament poetry that survives the process with peculiar success, by reason of the peculiar poetic form of the original: a system of parallelism, or “rhyming” of ideas rather than sounds. The remarkable degree of overlap of form and content ensures a remarkable degree of accuracy, or transfer of meaning. The field is rich for structuralist studies, in that it offers an exemplary combinatoire, and the psalm structure is a model of totality, transformability, and self-regulation, an “instrument of coherence,” which may in turn constitute a subunit of a larger structure.
Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness
Authors: Stewart Garrett
Published: February 2007

As thematic actions, dying and lying divide up Conrad’s narrative in Heart of Darkness between main story and controversial coda. Steeped in the formulas of literary fatality, including the symmetries of ironic reprisal and the summarizing retrospect of last words, Kurtz’s death is modeled on fictional expectations so as to secure its dark transmissible import, only for that import to be betrayed by the supposedly beneficent mendacity of Marlow’s lie in the final interview with Kurtz’s Intended. Marlow as reader or interpreter of tragic meaning degenerates to Marlow as false author of a euphemizing fiction. The essay traces the complex preparation for Kurtz’s death, including the suicide and murder of earlier surrogates for Marlow, as these scenes establish an interpretive framework by which to assess a coda that becomes, for a narrator repulsed by the “flavour of mortality in lies,” yet another indirect but self-indicting death scene.
My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism
Authors: Poovey Mary
Published: February 2007

As the daughter of two notorious Romantic rebels and as the wife of a third, Mary Shelley was encouraged from her youth to “enrol [herself] on the page of fame,” to prove herself by her pen and her imagination. But since Shelley also wanted to conform to the more conventional feminine model—to be modest, self-effacing, and devoted to a family rather than to a career—she developed a prevalent ambivalence toward self-assertion. In the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, this ambivalence surfaces in her criticism of the egotistic imagination and in the grotesque but sympathetic monster that symbolizes its essence; the 1831 revision applies this judgment more forcefully to her own youthful “transgression.” Nevertheless, by characterizing the artist as the victim of an uncontrollable destiny, Shelley also sanctions the very self-expression she professes to regret and elevates the dilemma of the female artist to the status of myth.
The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions
Authors: Carruthers Mary
Published: February 2007

In order to appreciate fully the Wife of Bath’s correccioun of clerical teaching concerning marriage, it is necessary to understand what her bourgeois experience was. The legal customs of the bourgeoisie allowed widows and married women rights of contract and property denied to women of other classes. The Wife of Bath was a clothier, not an artisan weaver, whose cloth making was organized in accordance with the entreprenurial practice of the industry in the west country during the late fourteenth century. The economic context that this bourgeois setting gives to Alisoun’s experience makes her opinions concerning marital power less eccentric than has heretofore been believed. Her prologue recounts her growth in practical wisdom, culminating in her marriage with the inexperienced Jankyn. Her tale is a parodic rejection of the ideal pictures of genteel marriage painted by the aristocratic, or would-be aristocratic, writers of medieval deportment books.
Order and Disorder in Rousseau's Social Thought
Authors: Crocker Lester G.
Published: February 2007

The problem of order is central to Rousseau’s political and social thought. Nature’s order has been ruptured by man’s unique ability to conceive of order and cannot be restored; only a properly conceived artificial order can be “natural” and remedy the defects introduced by the original violation. This article examines Rousseau’s analysis of disorder in society (inequality, injustice, a “state of war”) and in the self (three modes of alienation); the philosophical bases of his theory about an artificial order being “natural” and remedying the designated defects; and the rationale of the means of doing so. The discussion involves two paradigms (the body, Julie’s garden) and four paradoxes (completing alienation, remaking nature, “losing” the self to restore it, using inequality to establish equality). Rousseau’s vocabulary and rhetoric are shown to support this analysis. In his argument, liberty and submission, self-fulfillment and the authoritarian state, nature and culture cease being antitheses.
The Meaning of “Grace” in Pope's Aesthetic
Authors: Bogue Ronald L.
Published: February 2007

Pope’s “Grace beyond the Reach of Art” is not an irrational, inexplicable poetic effect, as critics often assume, but an essential, vitalizing illusion: a seemingly incomprehensible deviation from a norm of expectation that proves harmonious and coherent in the context of a work’s overall design. Poetry imitates Nature, and rules are “Nature methodiz’d,” but rules are incomplete formalizations of Nature’s order that gain systematic coherence only in relation to the ends of specific poems. Thus, grace breaks rules yet conforms to Nature; its aberrance is a function of the limitations that readers necessarily have before they arrive at aesthetic comprehension. Analyses of Pope’s “Preface to the Iliad,” Epistle to Burlington, and Essay on Man show that the movement from initial confusion to final understanding that informs grace is also central to his perception of Homer’s art, his theory of landscape design, and his conception of cosmic order.
Medieval and Modern in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
Authors: Wimsatt James I.
Published: February 2007

While recent scholarly attention to the medieval aspects of Troilus and Criseyde has overshadowed the older custom of critics to associate it with modern fiction, its kinship with such later literature is authentic. The poem’s plentiful medieval materials—for which Chaucer draws extensively on Dante, Machaut, and Boethius—invite interpretation of it in terms of traditional modes: the epic, the romance, and the philosophical demonstration. Chaucer, however, completely undercuts the usual effects of these modes with irony, at the same time employing the elements and techniques of realism. The irony cooperates with the realism to make a work that finally is like modern fiction in identifying the essentially human through the particularity of its presentation.
Defoe and the Disordered City
Authors: Novak Maximillian E.
Published: February 2007

During 1721, when a violent plague raged around Marseilles, concern in England focused not so much on the nature of the disease as on problems of civil order, particularly among the London poor. But in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722), an account of the plague of 1665, Defoe’s compassion for the poor extended to a sympathetic account of their spirit of rebellion. Defoe’s work compares the sufferings of the past and the potential agonies of a new plague, but reflects also the mental despair caused by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble during 1721. Yet Defoe’s fictional account celebrates the past and future triumph of London through the compassion of its citizens. In making history as much prophecy as a reflection of the past, Defoe also created the first realistic fiction with a narrator sympathetic to both victim and survivor, common sufferers trapped by forces beyond human control.
Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth's Later Style
Authors: Hartman Geoffrey H.
Published: February 2007

Wordsworth is forcibly reminded in Wales of Alpine impressions dating back thirty-four years. The resulting sonnet is of interest because of its neartraumatic conflation of times and places, and because this kind of experience, associated with feelings of sublimity, is conveyed in a style alternating between the grand opening and such clichés as “in life’s mom.” Wordsworth questions the possibility of localizing the sublime by means of referential language (names or place names). “Devil’s Bridge” and “Viamala,” the conflated places, connect naming with speech-acts of blessing and cursing, while “How art thou named?” is ultimately addressed to a “luciferic” imagination that reveals “the sad incompetence of human speech.” Wordsworth’s later style is, correspondingly, sad and sublime, subdued yet charged.
The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda
Authors: Chase Cynthia
Published: February 2007

A letter to the hero in Daniel Deronda offers an interpretation of George Eliot’s novel, an account of its rhetorical principles: the Deronda plot discloses not the “effects of causes” but the “present causes of past effects.” This metaleptic plot structure contradicts the linking of origin, cause, and identity affirmed in the story of Deronda’s Jewish birth. The story must shift between constative and performative conceptions of language and must finally invoke the notion of an actual, nonlinguistic fact or act. The relevant referent is Deronda’s circumcision, which the novel must occlude; otherwise the story of discovering identity could not unfold. The scandal of this referent is its status as an exemplary signifier, alluding to the divine pact with Abraham, a story of the institution of signification. Circumcision is an emblem of the novel’s allusive or citational mode: the narrative makes its starting point, not a subject, but a rhetorical operation.
Trollope and the Fixity of the Self
Authors: Herbert Christopher
Published: February 2007

At the heart of much Victorian fiction is a moral ideology based on the assumption that human nature is essentially flexible, always at least potentially capable of change and renewal. Anthony Trollope devotes much of his own fiction to a systematic critique of such an assumption, arguing that individual character is at bottom irrevocably fixed. Three important novels in particular are built around progressive discoveries by major characters that they are, by their natures, incapable of change: Orley Farm, He Knew He Was Right, and The Duke’s Children. In books like these we discover a skeptical and somber vein in Trollope’s imagination that critics of his work have typically failed to recognize.
Renaissance Poverty and Lazarillo's Family : The Birth of the Picaresque Genre
Authors: Herrero Javier
Published: February 2007

In the history of literature the change from the idealized worlds of the shepherd and the knight to the world of the pícaro; from arcadia and chivalry to the desolate urban landscape of misery and hunger; from romance to irony—in fact, the Copernican revolution that produced a new genre—could only have been born of an upheaval that affected men’s lives and forced educated writers to see conditions they had so far ignored. This change stemmed from an increased awareness of human misery, which the urban growth of the Renaissance had made highly visible. The genius of the Spanish author of the Lazarillo consists in his having found the literary voice for such a profound transformation of European society. The Lazarillo, of course, did not annihilate the past, but it gave artistic form to the all-pervading crisis that was destroying the basis of the traditional order.
Melville's Quarrel with Fiction
Authors: Baym Nina
Published: February 2007

Herman Melville began his literary career as the author of popular, presumably ephemeral works. He employed fiction for its entertainment value and, though he was a storyteller of genius, had no respect for the fictional mode. His view of authorship changed and his ambitions expanded over time, but his basic distrust of, and lack of interest in, fiction remained constant—may even have grown stronger—in his works. He accepted an Emersonian view of fiction as an impediment to the direct utterance of truth and found the requirements of fiction—story, character, point of view—a limitation and a distortion of the absolute expression for which he strove. Melville’s impatience with, and lack of regard for, the mode of fiction can be traced through his works from 1846 to 1857, after which he ceased to write for a large public.
Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf
Authors: Niles John D.
Published: February 2007

One type of organization favored by the Beowulf poet is an ABC … X … CBA design capable of indefinite expansion. Ring composition of this type serves as a way of building up short verse paragraphs, as in Homer. It also underlies the composition of whole episodes. In addition, the entire narrative of Beowulf is knit together by an elaborate set of thematic parallels and verbal echoes ranged in pairs about a midpoint of mythic intensity, the fight with Grendel’s dam on the floor of the monsters’ pool. The consistency with which thesis is answered by antithesis in the design of Beowulf seems to be a special characteristic of the poet’s style and way of viewing the world. Seldom are events seen as isolated, without antecedents or consequences. Often joy is answered by sorrow in a network of reversals that undercuts any confidence in the permanence of earthly success.
The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel
Authors: Sedgwick Eve Kosofsky
Published: February 2007

Traditional criticism of the Gothic novel, following a topography of the self derived from Freud, has linked sexuality with depth, repression with surface. Gothic convention, however, especially as Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis use it, links surfaces with sexuality and contagion. The Gothic view of character is a social one, and it is concerned with writing and reference. The tracing and retracing of quasi-linguistic markings on surfaces establish personal identity, but only from outside, ex post facto, and through a draining tension between the code and its material support. The repetitious, fixating process of ocular confrontation by which characters recognize themselves and one another is like the process by which readers recognize thematic conventions.