bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Crusoe in Exile
Authors: Seidel Michael
Published: February 2007

Defoe calls Robinson Crusoe a “fugitive” fable, an “allegorical” narrative history that records on many levels the strains of displacement and the powers of reconstitution. Crusoe's experience offers Defoe the fictional opportunity to represent different sequences of narrative action that resemble and sometimes duplicate one another. Island exile for Crusoe substitutes for structurally comparable events—imaginative, psychological, religious, and, in the carefully worked out timing of the adventure, political. The politics of exile are especially significant for Crusoe's several transformative conversions, not merely his turning from place to place but his turning of one place into another. The classical exile, displaced abroad and replaced at home, becomes in Robinson Crusoe doubly situated—Crusoe's island home is literally remote but allegorically familiar. This paradox has narrative, historical, and national implications.
Assertion and Assumption: Fictional Patterns and the External World
Authors: Rabinowitz Peter J.
Published: February 2007

Although representational art does not reflect an empirically verifiable world, novels are nevertheless useful as historical documents, because they can reveal the views that authors expect readers to hold. Extracting those views, however, requires distinguishing the beliefs that authors expect in their readers from beliefs that readers pretend to take on for the sake of the fiction (the belief that a person can turn into a bug, in Metamorphosis). Such an analysis is possible because of a basic rule of reading: all fiction, even the most fantastic, is realistic except where it signals its readers to the contrary. This rule implies that what is not said in a text (a text's assumptions) is a surer guide to readers' views than what is (its assertions). The “sudden-reward” pattern (familiar from Cinderella) and its unmasking by Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson are analyzed to demonstrate how readers' beliefs can be extracted from an apparently unrealistic convention.
Literary and Historical Context in Ronsard's Sonnets pour Hélène
Authors: Nagel Alan F.
Published: February 2007

Through her name and position at court Hélène de Surgères brings to Ronsard’s last collection of sonnets two conflicting referential systems: a literary tradition in which, beginning with the Iliad, Helen is a figure of love and war and a more or less realistic imitation of events in French society and the court of Charles ix. Ronsard adopts a local court convention in which love for Hélène allows successful evasion of the miseries of the civil wars, but he criticizes the convention by displacing its allegorical intent—transcendence of mundane and temporal difference—with an irony that internalizes and preserves that difference. Thus the irony, in aiming to avoid the referential contexts, actually marks them as ineradicable. Instead of presenting a platonizing view of the lady, the Sonnets pour Hélène reveal in her an inescapable contradiction that also is within the poems’ je and its constructions.
“How to load and… bend”: Syntax and Interpretation in Keats's To Autumn
Authors: Patterson Annabel M.
Published: February 2007

Keats’s To Autumn is now generally accepted as a stable poem in praise of maturity, process, and the natural condition. Can new techniques of interpretation ever be objectively applied to such a poem, when its meaning is so well “known”? This question is germane to two recent attempts to apply syntactical analysis to To Autumn. Donald Freeman uses Chomskyan transformational procedures on the first stanza and endorses the conventional reading; Geoffrey Hartman discovers in the poem’s grammar signs of its status as a poem of the antisublime, or “Hesperian,” mood. Both readings are shown to depend on preunderstanding of the poem. Its grammar can equally be shown to support a quite opposite reading, one that undermines the traditional ideology of Autumn and presents the analogy between Autumn and human maturing as a cruel delusion.
Notes toward a Theory of the Referent
Authors: Lewis Thomas E.
Published: February 2007

Questions concerning textual referentiality figure among the most controversial in literary theory. The complementarity of semiotic and marxist notions of the literary referent suggests a new understanding of the referent based on the concept of “cultural unit.” The similarity in the relations that marxist epistemology (as defined by Althusser) posits between thought and the real and that semiotics (as defined by Eco) posits between language and the real warrants this reformulation. A discussion of the semiotic and marxist concepts necessary for a theory of the literary referent leads to its definition as a cultural ideological unit that, by virtue of its necessary but unrepresented relation to other, nonidentical cultural units, furnishes in the mode of a dialectical absence the materials requisite for an understanding both of certain textual properties and of the structure of the historical reality to which the text alludes.
I Love You. Who Are You? The Strategy of Drama in Recognition Scenes
Authors: Keyssar Helene
Published: February 2007

Audience participation in theater often obscures or confuses the magical nature of the activity of theater. The uniqueness of this activity is centered in the separateness of the world of the play from the world of the audience, as Stanley Cavell remarks. The importance of such separateness becomes vivid in recognition scenes which are the structural core of most drama. Aristotle perceives the importance of recognition scenes, but does not show adequately what such scenes do to the spectator. The recognition scenes in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear reveal drama’s special ability to allow the spectator to acknowledge another while himself remaining private. The critical process involved in coming to such an understanding of drama, while similar to some elements of structuralistic analysis, focuses more directly on a concern with the patterns of relationship between play and audience. My methodology corresponds to Stanley Fish’s “affective” stylistics.
The Dialectics of Movement in Keats's “To Autumn”
Authors: Nemoianu Virgil
Published: February 2007

“To Autumn” should not be read merely as a static poem expressive of perfection and sadness. All kinds of mutation can be recognized in it: temporal changes (within the season, within the day), changes in space and angle of view, in the kind of biology and sociology alluded to, in syntax and rhyme patterns. These can be recorded as a series of curves, each of which differs from the others in direction or shape. Critical interpretations of the poem result from the combination of several of these curves. However, most interpretations ignore the background of the curves, the solid and encompassing, if inarticulate, “nature in process” on which the curves are superposed. Although still more interpretations, such as a sociopolitical one, could be devised by combining individual curves, none of them will be fully significant unless it takes into account the deep, vast, indifferent voice of nature itself slowly passing, which Keats managed to summon to a background presence.
Penance and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales
Authors: Delasanta Rodney
Published: February 2007

Despite the efforts of recent scholars who have argued for an ironic reading of Fragment x of the Canterbury Tales (the Parson’s Tale and Retraction), dramatic and symbolic propriety both dictate that at this penultimate moment in the pilgrimage “earnest” should emerge from “game.” Dramatically, the imminence of the approach to the Holy City urges—as with all pilgrimages—certain penitential expectations, the sacramental obligations of which require the ministrations of the Parson. Thus, his tale—a confessional manual appropriate to the penitential occasion in both length and oral device—serves the pilgrims with an examination of conscience indispensable to the aural rubric of the sacrament. Symbolically, the earnestness of the ending is prepared by the promise of the supper (with its manifold biblical implications), by the eschatological haste of Harry Bailly in urging completion of the tales, and by his unwitting use of Pauline imagery relating to doomsday drunkenness and nocturnal thieves in the Prologue to the Manciple’s Tale (Fragment ix).
Marlowe's Tamburlaine and the Language of Romance
Authors: Martin Richard A.
Published: February 2007

The tone of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Parts I and II, has long troubled critics who have approached the plays as either tragedies or romances. This article argues, on the basis of our responses to Marlowe’s language, that each play attempts to define itself as a romance by asserting the mastery of the imagination over the material world and thus denying the effects of tragic realism. Marlowe creates a language that invites us to indulge in the glorification of worldly achievement in spite of the questionable morality of worldliness. In Part I, Marlowe demonstrates that the world of romance is a world of the imagination and, as such, free from the tragic concerns of a problematic humanity. In Part II, Marlowe moves closer to tragedy by exploring the possibilities of romance within a world where the imagination does not triumph and where the attitude toward the romantic hero is left ambiguous.
Tasso's Epic of Deliverance
Authors: Fichter Andrew
Published: February 2007

Tasso states his objections to Ariostan chivalric romance in terms of neo-Aristotelian epic theory in the Discorsi: romance, with its disunity, multiplicity, and irreality, violates the classical canons requiring epic to be unified, whole, and verisimilar. Analogous to and implicit in these objections are those stemming from Tasso’s Counter-Reformation Christianity, which holds romance confusion and disorder to be morally as well as esthetically repugnant. But it is Tasso’s aim in La Gerusalemme liberata to redeem romance by converting it to the service of both classical and Christian imperatives. The apparent conflict between romance and epic proves to be illusory when the dialectic of Tasso’s Christian humanism has run its course. The Liberata asks us to see romance diversity completed in epic unity, romance magic fulfilled in Christian mystery, and to see chivalric romance, therefore, as a vehicle for Christian epic.
The Exile's Defense: DuBellay's La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse
Authors: Ferguson Margaret W.
Published: February 2007

Although critics have found La Deffence full of contradictions, they have not seen its conceptual and tonal shifts as defensive strategies reflecting Du Bellay’s ambivalence toward ancient literature. His filial piety conflicts with his desire to rival the ancients by achieving poetic greatness in the vernacular. His ambiguous theory of imitation shows the conflict between reverence and rivalry in its portrayal of imitation both as an organic process and as a violent power struggle in which the French poet devours or rapes ancient models. A similarly equivocal stance toward classical literary power appears in Du Bellay’s Roman sonnets, which illuminate La Deffence by defining a state of exile in which the Renaissance poet is torn between past and future, Rome and France. In La Deffence, the exile’s voice emerges as a dialogue that expresses the paradoxical desire to be both like and unlike the great classical originals.
Sequence and Theme in Victor Hugo's Les Orientales
Authors: Grant Richard B.
Published: February 2007

Critics have traditionally viewed the individual poems of Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) primarily as exercises in innovative versification and exotic local color. But if the poems are read sequentially, a significant pattern emerges. The apocalyptic cataclysm of “Le Feu du ciel” introduces the theme of sudden death and destruction that emerges as central to the entire volume. Hugo’s preoccupation with sudden violence needs to be understood in the light of his attitude toward the French Revolution. Attracted by the freedom that it brought but repelled by its excesses, Hugo could not decide during this period whether the Revolution was morally good or evil, with the result that at the end of Les Orientales he avoided taking a political stance and found refuge in art for art’s sake. It was only many years later that he was able to resolve his political doubts and complete his vision of human destiny.
Mortgaging One's Work to the World: Publication and the Structure of Montaigne's Essais
Authors: Lydgate Barry
Published: February 2007

In seeking to distill into a public image a consciousness that changes over time, Montaigne faced moral and rhetorical dilemmas that confront all autobiographers. Unlike most literary self-portraitists, however, he gives evidence of having consciously tailored his project to the powers and limitations of his medium, the printed word. Montaigne's solution to the problem of imagining and addressing the reader reflects his perception of a new audience for printed books in the sixteenth century. Acknowledging that his public self-image has clarified and defined his private one, he reconciles the conflicting demands of a self in process and a book in print by making successive additions that temper the lapidary finality of the text. The deepest truth of Montaigne's claim to have written a book “consubstantial with its author” lies in the dynamic equilibration of past and current consciousness manifested both in the labile self and on the printed page.
The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach
Authors: Brown Marshall
Published: February 2007

The many facets of the realism debate reflect the complexity of the subject. Realism was an accepted standard of value only during the romantic period; it became more prominent later as it became more problematic. Major senses of “real” in the nineteenth century are (1) universal essence, (2) irregular minute particular, and (3) causal regularity. Realist plotting typically juxtaposes background tableau and foreground coup de theatre; realist style typically consists of multiple silhouettings. Realism is a semiosis by silhouetting. Hegel's analysis of reality in the Science of Logic explains the association of realism with silhouetting, shows the systematic and historical relationships among the various critical positions and the nineteenth-century senses of “real,” and finally locates them with respect to the trope of inversion. The realist or silhouetting style falls between the relational style of the eighteenth century and the dispersive style of the twentieth.
Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound
Authors: Sperry Stuart M.
Published: February 2007

Critics generally have assumed that the millennial fulfillment Shelley's masterpiece dramatizes takes its origin from the hero's moral recognition and repentence at the opening of the play. Apparent shortcomings in Shelley's dramatization of that realization suggest, however, that the traditional view is an oversimplification. Instead of viewing Prometheus' change of heart as the determining cause of universal regeneration, we can better see it as the first manifestation of a greater change with which the hero sympathizes but that nevertheless exists beyond him and his control, the power of universal Necessity. The distinction, although difficult, is crucial to the metaphysical subtlety of the drama and of Shelley's insight into the tenuousness of humankind's existential situation. Despite the frequent contention that Shelley rejected the doctrine of Necessity early in his career, Prometheus Unbound evolves directly from the poet's long and unresolved deliberation on the rival claims of free will and determinism in human affairs.
Rich Text/Poor Text: A Kafkan Confusion
Authors: Gross Ruth V.
Published: February 2007

Franz Kafka’s “Eine alltägliche Verwirrung” ‘An Everyday Confusion’ is a skeletal, or “poor,” text in that one code of reading—the referential—dominates it, while other codes present in a classic, or “rich,” text are almost absent. Using a method freely adapted from Roland Barthes’s S/Z, my article closely examines the referentiality of Kafka’s text, juxtaposing the proverbial (or common-language) response evoked by the text with the personal reactions of a single reader. Kafka’s theme, the inability of common, proverbial language to make real communication possible, is allegorized in the brief tale of A and B, whose comings and goings are mirrored, and at times interfered with, by the language in which these events occur.
Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: February 2007

Samuel Beckett, early in his career and on James Joyce’s advice, read Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache ‘Contributions toward a Critique of Language,’ the three-volume, 2,200-page work written between 1903 and 1923 by the Austrian philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner. Significantly influenced by the work, Beckett gave literary shape to several of Mauthner’s ideas: the correlation between thinking and speaking; the denial of any certainties outside language, even certainty about the existence of self; and the impossibility of overcoming the limits of language. Both authors place language at the center of their works, subsume all knowledge under it, and then systematically deny its basic efficacy, thus using language to indict itself.
The Empirical and the Ideal in Mark Twain
Authors: Duncan Jeffrey L.
Published: February 2007

As a literary realist Twain was a practicing empiricist; as a humorist he was a practicing philosophical idealist. Often the two intellectual postures existed side by side within the same work—in A Tramp Abroad, for instance—but they did not enjoy a peaceful coexistence. As a consequence his career took on a pattern of great significance. In Huckleberry Finn he carried commonsense empiricism as far as it could go. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a genuinely pivotal work, he discovered, and contended with, not only empiricism’s radical limits but its inherent contradictions as well. Hence he evolved his peculiar (and perverse) form of idealism, of which The Mysterious Stranger is the (unfinished) consummation.
Storytelling and the Figure of the Father in Little Dorrit
Authors: Sadoff Dianne F.
Published: February 2007

Little Dorrit is both a narrative about authority and an examination of the authority of narrative. The novel links vocation with sonhood and storytelling with fatherhood and self-generation. Little Dorrit, however, tells a double story, of a daughter as well as of a son. If the son’s story relates the search to replace the father and to discover paternal authority, the daughter’s story details the horrors and consolations of incestuous desire and generational collapse. Storytelling that seeks the father as origin reveals paternal deception and inauthenticity; incestuous structures of desire attempt to collapse genealogy on the hero and heroine, making paternal origin unknowable and creating an overdetermined narrative ending. Dickens’ double story, then, identifies yet questions genealogy and the patriarchal family as metaphors for narrative structure.
“Errours Endlesse Traine”: On Turning Points and the Dialectical Imagination
Authors: Hartman Geoffrey , Brown Marshall
Published: February 2007

As turning points occur, they are always moments of confusion, not moments of clarification. There is no “great temptation” in Eliot's Mill on the Floss, no “balance” in Zola's Une Page d'amour. “Revolution” means aporia, or disoriented turning, and it is intrinsic to Plato's dialectic, as to Kant's and Nietzsche's. Dancing in Renaissance texts such as Davies' Orchestra implies vertigo, not cosmic harmony. Spenser's Mutability Cantos and poems of Keats, Yeats, and Stevens attempt responses to this universal turning; they suggest that we aim not at discovering the truth of outcomes but at comprehending historical processes in movement.
Pearl, Inexpressibility, and Poems of Human Loss
Authors: Watts Ann Chalmers
Published: February 2007

Inexpressibility is an ancient and still lively topos that proclaims language inadequate to reality. Whatever the definition of reality, inexpressibility proclaims “no tongue can tell,” “no words can say.” In consideringPearl‘s four inexpressibilities, its reiterated loss, and the way the poem ends, the essay alludes to historically relevant works and to other English poems of inexpressible human loss that help to distinguish the quiet, sad wayPearlends. WhateverPearl‘s inexpressibilities owe to historical tradition, they participate also in the larger literary and experiential domain of worded poem for unutterable grief and in the more precise domain of poems whose speakers endure the grief of losing what they most desire and of losing too their visions of comfort, fed by that desire.
The Tame in Pursuit of the Savage: The Posthumous Fiction of E. M. Forster
Authors: Levine June Perry
Published: February 2007

The posthumous homosexual fiction of E. M. Forster indicates a marked impulse in all his work: the tame in pursuit of the savage. The connection is to be, in part, emotional but will have political meaning as well. In Forster's situations, power—which resides in the world of the tame—is suspect because it rests on institutionalized force; in contrast, the sexual potency of the savage arises out of his being a “natural” man in the Rousseauean sense. This tension parallels the dynamics of Forster's private life, but its manifestation in his art does not simply reflect a personal preoccupation: the literature of attempted liaison with the savage serves a public position—egalitarian, anti-imperialistic, and internationalist—as well as a romantic ideal. In Maurice, in “The Life to Come” and “The Other Boat,” and even in his first three novels, the sexual and political ideas reflect the intention, albeit somewhat disguised, to subvert the prevailing ethos.
Theatrical Legitimation: Forms of French Patronage and Portraiture
Authors: Murray Timothy
Published: February 2007

Seventeenth-century French patronage of the theater was an ideal means of political legitimation. While Louis xm sporadically exercised patronage through royal decrees and attendance at comedies, the Cardinal de Richelieu, who better understood the theater's political benefits, actively influenced its technical aspects: the acting companies, the scripts, and the dramatic conventions and mechanics. The goal of Richelieu's patronage was the beholders' symbolic identification of the elements of refined theater with the genius of the cardinal underwriting them. The lansenists' tracts against the theater scorned this sort of symbolic transference as a commonplace of dramatic “portraiture.” Pierre Nicole's theory of spectatorship criticized the beholder's tendency to accept theatrical images as models of imitation, which gave life to a world of simulacra advantageous to political representation. The phantasmic force of the illusion of legitimacy fueled the system of art and politics in seventeenth-century France.
Blake's Laocoon: A Degree Zero of Literary Production
Authors: James David E.
Published: February 2007

Blake's late engraving, erroneously known as The Laocoön, presents an unusually direct relation between the content of a literary work and the way the work is produced and consumed as an artifact. By restoring the statue's correct meaning (“Jah & his two Sons Satan & Adam”), Blake arrested its fall into materiality and application to “Natural Fact” and, in doing so, redeemed for spiritual purposes the engraving that he had begun as a commercial undertaking. In his commentary on the plate, he clarified for the first time the mutual exclusivity of art and commerce, not by making a materialist analysis, but by associating art with religion's traditional antipathy to money. He formulated a view of art as devotional practice rather than as the production of commodities, and this logic allowed the plate only the barest form of material existence.
Uncaging Musil's Amsel
Authors: Nutting Peter West
Published: February 2007

Few modernist short narratives achieve the richness of Robert Musil's novella “Die Amsel” (1928). The work's autobiographical elements fragment into different narrative voices whose origins remain undetermined, thus giving the writing subject latitude to participate in the ironic spectacle that he is creating. After years of silence about three decisive experiences in his life, A2, a wise fool, tells his childhood stories to his childhood friend A1 in such a way that the truth of the stories cannot be fixed and their meaning is suspended in the ongoing process of the telling. Like Ulrich, Musil's “man without qualities,” A2 has a basic need for openness and spontaneity, and his stories, with their sardonic and selfparodic accents, are playful exercises in fluid, hypothetical discourse. The blackbird that reappears in A2's third tale is the product of A2's verbal jesting at the expense of the all too serious and literal-minded A1.
The Interpenetrating Metaphor: Nature and Myth in Lady Chatterley's Lover
Authors: Humma John B.
Published: February 2007

Critics generally dismiss Lady Chatterley's Lover as a polemic, preferring to consider its content and ignore its form. Yet Lawrence meticulously shaped his strategy to reinforce his meanings. When we compare Lady Chatterley with earlier Lawrence novels and with the second of the novel's three versions, we discover the novelist using imagery in a way that is new for him. Similes and metaphors from plant, animal, mineral, and human sexual realms blend, or interpenetrate, to give depth and add texture to the novel's central action, Mellors' sexual awakening of Connie. Moreover, Lawrence strategically reshapes scenes from the second version, published as John Thomas and Lady Jane, to enrich the mythic dimensions of the novel. Lawrence's careful orchestrations of the novel's images and of the details of Mellors' character as Green Man produce, finally, a satisfying organic unity.
Milk, Mud, and Mountain Cottages: Ruskin's Poetry of Architecture
Authors: Stein Richard L.
Published: February 2007

The Poetry of Architecture, Ruskin's first collection of essays, is even more “deformed by assumption” than his autobiography admits. Architecture is defined as poetic for genteel tourists, who forget that the buildings whose beauty they admire required human labor and embody distinctions of class. Indeed, architectural poetry expresses a myth of class harmony: buildings blending into the landscape, landowners welcomed by loving tenants. Yet this vision, though apparently sanctified by nature, is threatened—by industrial landscapes, cities, and less appealing aspects of nature itself. Without poetry, architecture might seem little more than the sort of instinctive shelter building we observe in the lower animals, hence suggestive of biological kinship between human beings and “brutes.” At the heart of Ruskin's architectural dreams is a feared disappearance of all distinctions, biological as well as social—a pre-Darwinian nightmare.
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the Re-Formation of the Self: A New Direction for Reader-Response Theory
Authors: Alcorn Marshall W. , Bracher Mark
Published: February 2007

An examination of the similarities between the experience of reading and the transference process of psychoanalysis demonstrates that, by activating the mechanisms of projection and identification, reading literature can function to re-form the self. After outlining the general workings of the self, we look at those elements that are called into play by engaged reading, showing how reading can serve to alter both cognitive structures and the deep structures of the self. Like successful psychoanalysis, a literary text often evokes grandiose aspiration and later frustrates the most unrealistic avenues of that aspiration, thereby decommissioning those routes of desire and behavior. And just as psychoanalysis develops more fulfilling patterns of desire and action through the patient's identification with new ego ideals offered by the analyst, so reading can promote such structural changes through identification with characters and personae of literary texts.
Seeing through Macbeth
Authors: Carr Stephen Leo , Knapp Peggy A.
Published: February 2007

When we create or interpret a text's meaning and genre, numerous and often conflicting historical concerns mediate our insights. Because of its historical situation, Macbeth imperfectly articulates its tragic dimensions and thus empowers later interpreters to draw on their historical situations to imagine Macbeth's motives. Two eighteenth-century illustrations of Macbeth II.ii radically reconceive Macbeth's troubling choice of action: both designs invite contemporary critics to define his inchoate yearnings, to identify the play's tragic vision. John Zoffany playfully appropriates the “Choice of Hercules” topos to represent Macbeth's predicament satirically, allowing us to see Macbeth's appalling regicide as a tragic product of now common entrepreneurial schemes. The melodramatic confusion of motive and motion in Henry Fuseli's watercolor reveals another kinship with Macbeth, a psychoanalytic linkage between our desires and his deed. Interpreting these interpretive illustrations enables us to see through the problematic surface of Macbeth to its tragic richness.
Readers in Texts
Authors: Wilson W. Daniel
Published: February 2007

The failure to distinguish between Iser's “implied” reader (analogous to Booth's implied author and referring to the reading behavior a text demands of us) and the “characterized” reader (referred to directly or indirectly in the text) has promoted a good deal of critical confusion. Although the work of Wolff, Iser, Ong, Link, and Prince, among others, is crucial to our understanding of how fictional readers function in texts, it generates certain misleading conceptual categories. In part this confusion is due to a gap between continental and American reader-response theory. The “implied reader” is not a philosopher's stone that will objectify criticism, but it can be a useful concept to the newer communicationoriented theories of criticism.
The Poem as Place: Three Modes of Scenic Rendering in the Lyric
Authors: Peucker Brigitte
Published: February 2007

There are essentially three orientations toward landscape description in the lyric: the kind that describes an external place that serves as a backdrop, ornament, or illustration for the poet's thinking; the kind that transforms an external scene into a region of the poet's mind; and the kind that claims to be a habitable region in its own right. Each type has its own mode of assertiveness. In the first, the poetry of distance, description is made possible by claiming that it is impossible to enter the scene. The second features the topography of the inner eye, which results when the poet claims to absorb and become a space. The rhetoric of the third makes the text itself a “place.” All three imply a staking out of poetic territory and the rhetorical domination of the scene. Since these modes transcend literary periodization, they furnish a loosely drawn typology of descriptive poetry.
The Carnivalization of Eighteenth-Century English Narrative
Authors: Castle Terry
Published: February 2007

Following the institutionalization of the public masquerade in England in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the masquerade set piece becomes a standard, though problematic, topos in English fiction, figuring prominently in novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Inchbald, and others. Though characteristically considered an allegory for the corrupt “Town,” the masquerade “diversion” also serves crucial narrative and thematic functions. As a place of unexpected meetings and surprising assignations, it precipitates imbroglio and intrigue, the elaboration of plot itself; and its transgressive social and sexual reversals and exchanges intimate the collapse of ideological and didactic lucidity. Leaving in its wake a world upside down, it coincides with an incursion of mutability and ambiguity into the static world of eighteenth-century representation. Just as the real masquerade represented a carnivalesque disruption of the eighteenth-century symbolic order, the masquerade episode disturbs the prevailing decorum of eighteenthcentury English fiction.
Pantagruel's Genealogy and the Redemptive Design of Rabelais's Pantagruel
Authors: Duval Edwin M.
Published: February 2007

Pantagruel is composed according to an overarching typological design that lends to the work both coherence and a profound meaning. Pantagruel's genealogy and other biblical elements in the first chapter establish Rabelais's hero as a type of Christ whose specific messianic mission is to reverse the effects of Cain's murder of Abel. The telos toward which the entire work moves is the climactic duel in which Pantagruel fulfills his promise by killing Loup Garou, a type of Cain, and bringing peace to the besieged Amaurotes. Pantagruel is thus a Christian humanist epic of redemption in which the original crime of brother against brother (Cain's fratricide) is obliterated, and the evangelical reign of brotherly love (Christ's caritas) is restored.
The Critic as Witness for the Prosecution: Making the Case against Lazaro de Tormes
Authors: Shipley George A.
Published: February 2007

La vida de Lazarillo de Tonnes is a coherent and fully realized fiction. Its eccentric shape is craftily designed by its autobiographical narrator to serve his current needs by swelling the narration of his early years while masking the recent “Toledo Years” with wit, expedient renaming, and ellipses. By this apparently generous and certainly amusing “recontextualization” of his current involvement in a scandalous ménage-à-trois the narrator seeks to attenuate his culpability: his corruption merely represents Toledo's and his society's generally. The puzzling short chapters (iv-vii) are coded allusively to deceive innocent readers and amuse malicious readers in Lázaro's Toledo; these chapters are as detailed as they can and need be. The narrator exercises a freer hand in setting down his version of long-ago and far-away Salamanca; Lázaro exploits this advantage in the four fifths of the narrative that comprises Chapters i-iii.
Centennial Presidential Address 1983: Realizing Fictions
Authors: Caws Mary Ann
Published: February 2007

The proceedings somehow opened. The talking and laughing and shuffling suddenly subsided … a figure rose; she took her way from among us; she mounted a platform; she spoke for precisely five minutes; she descended. Directly she sat down another rose; mounted the platform; spoke for precisely five minutes and descended; then a third rose; then a fourth—and so it went on, speaker following speaker, one from the right, one from the left, one from the middle, one from the background—each took her way to the stand, said what she had to say, and gave place to her successor. … They were like marksmen, I thought, standing up in turn with rifle raised to aim at a target. Sometimes they missed, and there was a roar of laughter; sometimes they hit, and there was a roar of applause. (Woolf 229)
Remembrance and Reflection: PMLA 1884–1982
Authors: Fisher John H.
Published: February 2007

What follows is a personal essay. When I was invited to compose it, I looked back over “A Mirror for the Lamp,” the impressive evaluation conducted by Maynard Mack, George Winchester Stone, and others for the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of PMLA (73.5.2 [1958]: 45–71), and could not find it in my heart to mount a similar enterprise. It seemed to me that in this era of self-expression, an individual statement would be more useful. I was intimately involved with PMLA for some seventeen years, beginning in 1947, with William Parker and Donna Walsh, as junior proofreader and copyeditor, seeing to its manufacture and paying the bills from 1952 to 1955, and eventually handing over as editor to William Schaefer in 1971 (with seven years off for good behavior between 1955 and 1962). I will characterize the journal we inherited in 1947, what we thought we were accomplishing between 1950 and 1968, and what has happened since 1971. I shall try to keep my prejudices in check, but they will no doubt become evident soon enough. One advantage in proceeding in this fashion is that no one else need be held responsible for the errors of either omission or commission.
Society and the Profession, 1958–83
Authors: Lauter Paul
Published: February 2007

The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing. Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird” When your women are ready and rich in their wish for the world destroy the leaden heart, we've a new race to start. Muriel Rukeyser, “More of a Corpse Than a Woman”

When I was asked to write about the impact of society on our profession over the last twenty-five years, it occurred to me that the period also measures my own lifetime as a professional. I took up full-time teaching in 1957, the year before I received my doctorate. I gave my first paper at a Modern Language Association convention around that time, participated in producing two sons, and published my first article. I left one job, joined in antinuke, anti-ROTC, and prounion activities, and got fired from the second job. I remember complaining to my graduate school director, en route to a third job, how painfully remote upstate New York seemed from everything I valued. Said he, flatly, “You can publish your way out of any place.” Perhaps that was so, then; certainly I acted on that instruction. But I never really put it to the test, for somehow my career swerved that splinter and never returned quite to the groove.
The Novel and the Guillotine; or, Fathers and Sons in Le Rouge et le noir
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: February 2007

The end of Le Rouge et le noir constitutes a chronic critical scandal, raising a host of problems concerning the novel's plot and its legitimating authority that may be approached through the question of paternity in the career of Julien Sorel. Paternity becomes a key issue in a novel structured by a conflict between legitimacy and usurpation, a conflict that has political, historical, and narratological implications. Politics versus manners, the hypothesis of Julien's illegitimate noble birth versus his career of monstrous usurpation, the role of the narrator as a father figure who subverts paternalistic control–these and related questions may provide a context for reading the end of the novel, for determining the relation of what Julien calls his novel to Stendhal's, and for understanding the uses of the guillotine.
Middlemarch: The Language of Art
Authors: Wiesenfarth Joseph
Published: February 2007

The aesthetic theory pervading Middlemarch provides a context for interpreting the novel and understanding its references to the arts; consequently a language of art is important to the novel's (1) imagery, (2) aesthetic theory, and (3) iconography. (1) Although Dorothea Brooke is characterized in images of music and poetry, her Puritanic sensibility has hampered her aesthetic development, and the classical and Catholic artifacts of Rome oppress her senses as marriage to Casaubon oppresses her spirit. (2) To help her, Will Ladislaw teaches Dorothea the language of art, with the aid of Ruskin, Lessing, and Goethe—all champions of realism. (3) Eliot further dramatizes the relations of Casaubon, Dorothea, and Ladislaw by invoking the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus —a myth surrounded and amplified by allusions to literature and art. Guiding Eliot's use of the language of art in Middlemarch is Ruskin's aesthetic of Naturalist Idealism.
The Ideology of Restoration Poetic Form: John Dryden
Authors: Brown Laura
Published: February 2007

Although intellectual historians have rejected the notion that Dryden was a skeptic, recent readings of his specific works have increasingly emphasized irony and absurdity. This critical contradiction can serve as an interpretive tool: a full account of Dryden's poems must explain their tendency to attract the imputation of skepticism. In their images, extended analogies, dramatic actions, and structural premises, Dryden's poetic works share a formal core characterized by disjunction, incommensurability, or the failure of congruence. This unreconciled disjunction reflects a continual struggle to override a contradiction. It represents the aesthetic codification of anxiety, the literary elaboration of an ideology at odds with itself. Dryden's poetry manifests the contradictions in his grasp of the realities of his age. In its disjunctivity, it reveals the anxieties of the Restoration settlement, and in its blind advocacy of a conservative and static ideal, it sees the realities of a progressive and dynamic historical process.
Death, Loss, and Marvell's Nymph
Authors: Spinrad Phoebe S.
Published: February 2007

Paradoxically, the key to Marvell's “Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun” is the controversy the poem has inspired. Each critical interpretation is both true and false: none can stand alone; each must be combined with all the others, no matter how seemingly antithetical, to form an overall pattern that is “traditional” in the broadest sense of the word. The “Complaint” is not solely for a fawn, nor is it a lament only for the passing of an old world order, pastoral simplicity, Christ, love, or innocence; it is an elegy for all things that must die and an accurate portrait of the mind's attempt to deal with the inevitability of pain and loss.
To Move without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison's Trueblood Episode
Authors: Baker Houston A.
Published: February 2007

Ralph Ellison's critical formulations often suggest a radical dichotomy between lived experience and artistic representation. This dichotomy entails such antinomies in his critical canon as social and artistic, folklore and literature. Yet in the Trueblood episode of his novel Invisible Man literary art does not comprehensively transcend folklore. This episode, in fact, provides a metaexpressive commentary in which an agrarian folk storyteller par excellence inversively parodies Freudian and Christian myths and Anglo-American economic, philanthropic, and psychosocial practices. Trueblood emerges as a mediating blues site reconciling seemingly fixed distinctions between commercial and creative dimensions of Afro-American expression. The folk character's crafty realization reveals Ellison's Afro-American genius in brilliantly reflexive ways.
The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse
Authors: Gilbert Elliot L.
Published: February 2007

Most readers of theIdylls of the Kingwonder how the traditionally virile and manly King Arthur of legend and romance evolved into the restrained, almost maidenly Victorian monarch of Alfred Lord Tennyson's most ambitious work. Many of the earliest readers of theIdyllssaw the change as disquieting evidence of the growing domestication and even feminization of the age, and later critics, however they may have moderated the emotionalism of that first response, still see in Arthur's striking metamorphosis a key element in any analysis of the poem. I argue that such a metamorphosis was inevitable, given the nineteenthcentury confluence of what Foucault calls “the history of sexuality” with what we may call the history of history, and that Tennyson's Arthurian retelling, far from being weakened by its revolutionary premise, is stronger and more resonant for depicting its hero as a species of female king.
Hidden Depths: Dialogue and Characterization in Chaucer and Malory
Authors: Schroeder Peter R.
Published: February 2007

Although we know that medieval writers were not novelists, we can still succumb to the illusion that the characters in their works occasionally exhibit a degree of psychological complexity and “depth” out of keeping with our historical expectations. Chaucer's Criseyde and Malory's Guinevere are such characters; in both, the illusion results largely from a technique of using dialogue to suggest responses, thoughts, or feelings that are otherwise hidden. To achieve such suggestiveness, Chaucer and Malory employ a device that theorists of speech acts call “implicature.” As we overhear the words of Criseyde and Guinevere, we must constantly fill in gaps, supply missing relations, and guess at some “real” meaning that the surface meaning seems to conceal. Through this process we participate in the construction of two characters whose elusiveness, opacity, and apparent inconsistency are surprisingly verisimilar.
The Father's Word/Satan's Wrath
Authors: Nyquist Mary
Published: February 2007

Milton's two epic beginnings are interrelated by a network of structural parallels and verbal echoes and by the articulation of the Father's Word with Satan's wrath. An important if unacknowledged intertext for Satan's temptations against the Word, which occur in both epics, is the Reformed reading of the Genesis exchange between the serpent and Eve. Granting it status as an intertext permits a fresh exploration of the intertextual relations ofParadise LostandParadise Regained.Under a poststructuralist and Lacanian analysis, the distinctive logocentric structures and operations at work in these two epics reveal the authority and self-presence of the Father's Word systematically yet progressively being caught up in or displaced by Satan's plotting, by history, and by writing.
Never-Ending Story: Carmen Martín Gaite's The Back Room
Authors: Castillo Debra A.
Published: February 2007

It would be deceptively easy for a critic defining the central conflict of The Back Room, Carmen Martín Gaite's first post-Franco novel, to sort out a series of polar forces—chaos and order, memory and memoir, fantasy and reality, “loose” woman and Falangist supporter. While the narrator recognizes the impossibility of emancipation from these necessary structures of thought, she nevertheless insists on her freedom to question such dualisms and to collapse apparent polarities in a radically ambiguous manner, rendering undecidable many issues of limits and transgression. The resulting story is both untellable and never-ending, and its most significant allegorical representation in the text is a sewing basket full of miscellaneous items tangled in colored thread.
Borges in Action: A Narrative Homage
Authors: Fuentes Carlos
Published: February 2007

A neighborhood in Mexico City called Colonia Juárez has given all its streets the names of foreign, mainly European, cities. It is an old neighborhood, extensive and populous, formally caught between the boundaries of the two greatest metropolitan avenues, Insurgentes and Reforma.
No Defense: Defoe in 1703
Authors: Backscheider Paula R.
Published: February 2007

Previously unpublished archival material and recent scholarship in legal history provide new information and allow a coherent account of Daniel Defoe's arrest, interrogations, conviction, and release for the seditious libel The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Details about Nottingham's questioning of Defoe, the costs of the prosecution, and the final decision to send him to the pillory emerge. More significantly, it is now clear that Defoe's case came before the justices at five (not two) Old Bailey sessions, and the full records have come to light. These records and those in the Lowndes papers provide a full account of Defoe's release from Newgate Prison.
“A Poet Ther Was”: Chaucer's Voices in the General Prologue toThe Canterbury Tales
Authors: Nolan Barbara
Published: February 2007

In his General Prologue toThe Canterbury Tales, Chaucer presents three major attempts at authorial voicing. Through the voices of his “clerk,” his pilgrim, and Harry Bailly, he explores the poet's roles and the limits of poetry. A clerkly voice, assuming the authority of a philosopher, speaks the opening eighteen lines. The pilgrim, who occupies a privileged position among the three voices, guides the central section of the Prologue, as he defines a complex, tenuous, dialogic relationship with his materials—the other pilgrims and the mortal world. The last of the voices—Harry Bailly's—introduces a theory of poetry as mirthful distraction, unmoored in the quest for truth. Chaucer's multivoiced exploration of poetic authority dramatizes a wide range of medieval attitudes toward poetry. The poet's purpose is not to arrive at a “correct” notion but to raise questions about what fiction and language can and cannot do.