bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Andromache and Euripidean Tragedy
Authors: Allan William
Published: November 2023

The Andromache has long been disparaged despite being a brilliant piece of theatre. In this book Dr Allan draws attention to the neglected artistry of this very impressive and intriguing text. Through careful analysis the Andromache emerges as a play that poses fundamental questions, especially about the polarity of Greek and barbarian, and the morality of the gods. Dr Allan shows how the play also challenges revenge as a motive for action, and explores the role of women as wives, mothers, and victims of war, be they Greek or Trojan, victorious or defeated. These are among the central concerns that make the Andromache a moving and thought-provoking tragedy, full of suffering, suspense, and moral interest. This book contributes both to an appreciation of the Andromache in its own right, and to a wider understanding of the variety and quality of Euripides' oeuvre.
Structure, Stagecraft, Unity
Authors: Allan William
Published: November 2023

A fuller understanding of the unusual (but effective, deliberate, and artful) structure of Andromache is sorely needed. In the scholarly literature on the play one of the most frequently repeated criticisms concerns its apparent lack of unity.
Characterization
Authors: Allan William
Published: November 2023

Goethe’s praise of the dramatic art of Shakespeare appeals to a standard of characterization which once influenced many readers of Euripidean tragedy. We are now aware that to demand that the tragic poet should create people with a past, with a depth and textured reality, is to show the influence of an alien aesthetic, one embodied most strikingly in the nineteenth-century novel, which is eminently interested in the development of character in terms of moral progress and decline.
Rhetoric
Authors: Allan William
Published: November 2023

The peculiar tenor of Euripidean rhetoric, more specifically its overt and self-conscious technicality, has excited great suspicion among critics both ancient and modern. Behind this uneasiness there often lurks an ill-examined prejudice which automatically links such a style to sophistic cleverness and, therefore (it is assumed), theatrical frigidity.
Philo of Larissa
Authors: Brittain Charles
Published: November 2023

This is the first book-length study of Philo of Larissa. Philo (159-84 BC) was the leader of the Platonic Academy in its final period as an Athenian institution, and also the principal philosophical teacher of Cicero. Dr Brittain charts Philo's gradual rejection of the radical scepticism of Carneades (concluding with his notorious 'Roman Books' of 89 BC), and offers philosophical justifications for his initial position of modified scepticism and final advocacy of a fallibilist empiricism. Philo's controversial epistemological views are constructed through their historical context in the late Hellenistic Academy, his wider thought on the history of philosophy, ethics and rhetoric, and his controversies with his pupils Antiochus and Aenesidemus. The appendix contains full testimonia and 'fragments' of Philo.
The Unity of the Academy: Platonist Views after the Roman Books
Authors: Brittain Charles
Published: November 2023

Philo’s historical thesis in the Roman Books identified the unity of the Academy in its shared acceptance of (at least) two epistemological views: (1) the rejection of catalepsis as it was conceived by the Stoics, and, (2) the recognition of a weak form of catalepsis.
Ethics
Authors: Brittain Charles
Published: November 2023

Stobaeus, Eclogue 2. 7 (pp. 39-41 Wachsmuth) contains a lengthy passage presented as a ‘division of philosophical doctrine’ by Philo:Philo was a Larissan by birth, an Academic philosopher, a student of Clitomachus, and someone who made reasonable progress † in his ⟨works ⟩ †. Philo showed acuity in his other writings as well as his division of philosophical doctrine,1 2 3 which I append [since it is relevant to my work]. He says that the philosopher is like a doctor.
And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Kings’: Greek Tragic Drama as Narrative
Authors: Gould John
Published: November 2023

Anyone acquainted with the critical literature of ‘Narratology’ is likely already to have raised an eyebrow at my title, since for the doyen of narratologists, Gerard Genette, as for Aristotle, drama is by definition a non-narrative mode of representation, tout court. Genette indeed has recently written of the ‘truly insurmountable opposition between dramatic representation and narrative’ .1 For the time being, my reply to this fairly comprehensive objection to what I am about to argue here must be a ‘commonsense’ one-and thus, no doubt, naive.
Herodotus and Religion
Authors: Gould John
Published: November 2023

‘Herodotus and religion’ is a big subject and one that has provoked much discussion.1 That is hardly surprising: religion bulks large in Herodotus, both in what he records of other cultures and in his narrative of the events that concern him. In his accounts of each of the major cultures that fall within his chosen historical horizon (those of the Persians, the Egyptians, the Scythians, and the Thracians) he offers an extended and comprehensive description of their religious traditions and practices and even in his cultural references to populations of more fleeting importance to his narrative, peoples such as the Taurians, the Libyans, the Babylonians, the Geloni, or the Issedones, there are, more often than not, passing references at least to matters of religion. Furthermore, in his primary narrative, from first to last, there are very frequent discussions of divine or supernatural strands in the causation or the prefiguring of the events narrated. Religion, it would appear beyond doubt, was important in Herodotus’ perception of things.
Roman Constructions
Authors: Fowler Don
Published: November 2023

Roman Constructions collects together twelve published and unpublished papers on Latin literature and literary theory from the decade 1989 to 1999. The papers share a common 'postmodern' emphasis on the role of the modern scholar and critic in the construction, rather than recreation, of meaning, and attempt to show how this approach works in detailed readings of a number of Latin authors, above all Vergil. The papers deal with such topics as point of view and focalization, intertextuality, historical contextualization, and closure, and each section is introduced by reflections on recent work in these areas subsequent to the original papers. The work makes a plea for classical scholars to accept their historical situatedness and to give up the pretence of scientific objectivity so that they can play a fuller part in the cultural dialogues of the present.
Even Better than the Real Thing: A Tale of Two Cities
Authors: Fowler Don
Published: November 2023

Words and images seem inevitably to become implicated in a ‘war of signs’ (what Leonardo called a paragone) in which the stakes are things like nature, truth, reality, and the human spirit. Each art, each type of sign or medium, lays claim to certain things that it is best equipped to mediate, and each grounds its claim in a certain characterisation of its ‘self’, its own proper essence.
Pyramus, Thisbe, King Kong: Ovid and the Presence of Poetry
Authors: Fowler Don
Published: November 2023

The story of Pyramus and This be as told by the Minyeides in book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (4. 55-166) is one of his most famous tales, above all perhaps because of its performance by the rustics in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare produced a more tragic version of the underlying story in Romeo and Juliet, and its reception in European literature, art, and music has inspired more than one book-length study.
Opening the Gates of War: Aeneid 7. 601-640
Authors: Fowler Don
Published: November 2023

‘VERGIL and the monuments’ has become as popular a rubric for contemporary Vergilian scholarship as ‘Homer and the monuments’ was for an earlier generation of Homerists. Art historians are as varied as literary scholars, as can be seen from the very different ways that a monument like the Ara Pacis has been handled by Jaś Elsner and Karl Galinsky.
Italian Futurist Theatre 1909-1944
Authors: Berghaus Günter
Published: November 2023

Italian Futurist Theatre provides an overview of the theatrical activities of the Italian Futurist movement, headed by F. T. Marinetti. It analyses the theory and practice of Futurist performance, covers the theatre work of all leading artists and writers of the movement, and discusses the principal aims and achievements of their theatrical experiments. The main focus of the study is directed towards reconstructing the performance history of Futurist theatre. But it also incorporates aspects of dramatic writing, stage and costume design and theatre architecture, and is heavily illustrated. Although the significance of Futurism for the art and culture of this century is universally acknowledged today, relatively little research has been undertaken with regard to the form of expression that was dearest to the Futurists: theatre. No other art could better demonstrate the movement's concept of 'art as action', propagate its anti-traditionalist stance and demonstrate its modernist aims and aesthetics. Yet the myriads of Futurist experiments in the performing arts have been neglected by scholars, partly because documentation is not easily available, partly because of the inherent problems of reconstructing performances of the past. This volume is the first comprehensive study of Italian Futurist theatre in the English language. It is the result of a major research project, supported by the British Academy, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. This highly original book is predominantly based on documents discovered in the course of ten years of extensive investigations in Italian archives, libraries, and private collections.
Tonal Organization in the Opera Buffa of Mozart’s Time
Authors: Platoff John
Published: November 2023

‘Tonal organization’, ‘tonal planning’, and ‘high-level tonal structure’ are terms referring to the relationships between the tonic keys of the separate musical numbers of a work. Underlying the use of these terms, which are prevalent in many recent analyses of Mozart opera, is the assumption that these relationships contribute significantly to the structure and meaning of Mozart’s operatic works. Yet neither the extent nor the importance of such high-level tonal relationships has ever been systematically examined. Claims abound that, for instance, an act or an entire opera is ‘in’ a key, or that the relationships between the tonic keys of successive numbers constitute a ‘progression’; but neither the perceptual status nor the fundamental value of such claims are assessed. Frequently cited, for example, is the fact that in each of Mozart’s mature operas the overture and final number share the same key. Or, to take a specific example from Le nozze di Figaro, critics point out that Figaro’s aria ‘Non più andrai’, the final number of Act I, is in C, a fifth lower than the preceding musical number, and thus the act is supposedly closed by a V-I progression.
The ‘Candy-Colored Clown’: Reading Early Modern Dreams
Authors: Mcluskie Kathleen
Published: November 2023

As every devotee of Sixties retro knows, the ‘candy-colored clown’ is the sandman who, in Roy Orbison’s song ‘In Dreams’, ‘comes to my window every night’. He brings the dreams which compensate for romantic loss but which are sadly insubstantial: The song gets its sentimental effect partly from the throb of the music and the powerful range of Orbison’s wailing voice; it also plays on a familiar opposition between the worlds of dreams and reality which is a standard metaphor for emotional loss, the leitmotif of the genre.
Jonson’s Magic Houses
Authors: Donaldson Ian
Published: November 2023

Ben Jonson was commonly regarded during his lifetime and the century following his death as a writer whose powers were equal, if not superior, to those of Shakespeare. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, his reputation had sharply declined: while Shakespeare was increasingly venerated as a type of original genius, Jonson was contrastingly seen as a writer of patchy and derivative talents, excessively devoted to the authors of antiquity and to the social minutiae of his age, anxiously resentful of his great and 'gentle' rival. This popular, formalized contrast of the two men's characters and abilities profoundly affected the subsequent reputations of both Shakespeare and Jonson. In this new collection of biographical, critical and historical essays, Ian Donaldson challenges many long-held and recent assumptions about the nature of Jonson's personality and creative achievement, offering fresh readings of his life and art.
Metonymy, Montage, and Death in Franfois Villons Testament
Authors: Taylor Jane H M
Published: November 2023

Mo Dern readers who have appreciated, say, the Ballade des pendus or the Ballade des dames du temps jadis, and who are imbued with the romantic notion that poetry should pack every line, every symagm, every lexeme with the maximum lyric charge, are taken aback when they meet Villon’s major work, the Testament, and are confronted with inconsequential, random, confused jottings which seem not only deeply In the year of my thirtieth age, when I had drunk down all my shame, neither entirely foolish nor entirely wise, in spite of so many torments endured ...
Maytime in Late Medieval Courts
Authors: Crane Susan
Published: November 2023

In the Maytimes of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England and France, courtiers dressed up in plants, celebrated women for being daisies, and allied themselves with the parties of Leaf and Flower. Their behaviour, which has left few traces in chronicles and wardrobe ac counts but quite a bit of poetry in its wake, raises intriguing questions in relation to ritual. How are courtiers who wear garlands of flowers or leaves modifying their self-presentation and what do they think to accomplish by doing so? What relation with nature are they asserting? I will argue that, as ritual, elite Maying works to shape participants’ sexuality. This transformation of sexuality contributes in turn to the ritual’s enactment of privileged social status.
In the Begining Was Cock: Animal Farms and the Plain Sense of Things
Authors: Boitani Piero
Published: November 2023

Animal farms, pace Orwell, are very ancient literary inventions. There may be none in the Hebrew Bible, which postulates man’s likeness to God, but they abound in Greek and Latin literature, where the names of Aesop, Babrius, and Phaedrus, the greatest writers of animal fables, are enough to conjure up a whole world of lions, wolves, foxes, lambs, cocks, and asses.
Joyce’s Revenge
Authors: Gibson Andrew
Published: November 2023

The Ireland of Ulysses was still a part of Britain. This book is the first comprehensive, historical study of Joyce's great novel in the context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. The first forty years of Joyce's life also witnessed the emergence of what historians now call English cultural nationalism. This formation was perceptible in a wide range of different discourses. Ulysses engages with many of them. In doing so, it resists, transforms and works to transcend the effects of British rule in Ireland. The novel was written in the years leading up to Irish independence. It is powered by both a will to freedom and a will to justice. But the two do not always coincide, and Joyce does not place his art in the service of any extant political cause. His struggle for independence has its own distinctive mode. The result is a unique work of liberation - and revenge. This eminently learned but lucidly written book transforms our understanding of Joyce's Ulysses. It does so by placing the novel firmly in the historical context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. Gibson argues that Ulysses is a great work of liberation that also takes a complex form of revenge on the colonizer's culture.
The Rape of the Lock: From Miscellany Endpiece to Illustrated Independence
Authors: McLaverty James
Published: November 2023

The Rape of the Lock was Pope’s first major experiment in textual revision and showed his power to utilize the resources of print to transform his materials. The poem was published in 1712 and 1714 in two quite different forms. In 1712 it appeared at the end of Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, a collection of pieces by Pope and his friends, as a twenty-four-page semi-independent afterthought; in 1714, expanded to forty-eight pages, it was issued as a separate octavo volume with six engraved plates, and engraved headpieces and initials, partly as a trial run for the subscription Iliad.
The Works of 1735–1736: Pope’s Notes
Authors: McLaverty James
Published: November 2023

Pope always liked notes, and he used them even in the early manuscripts that have come down to us, but in 1735 and 1736 they started to assume a much greater importance. They became an expression of his direct engagement for the first time with the general public, in an edition that was cheap, elegant, and readily available. They conveyed Pope’s evaluation of his poetry, related it to his own life and the work of his predecessors, and invited the public to read him as a historical figure in a historical context. Pope became not just a classic but a popular classic, and he laid down lines of interpretation that have persisted to the present day.
Schooldays: 1860-1867
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

AT nine-and-a-half, Mary Arnold was transferred to a more serious boarding establishment: the Rock Terrace School for Young Ladies at Shifnal, Shrop¬shire. It was now an understood thing that she was not to return home for eight years. Understood, but not welcomed. In March 1861 she wrote to her mother, ‘Oh! how I wish I was seventeen that I might go home and stay.’1 Why she was thus exiled—unlike her three sisters—is mysterious.
Soldier in Skirts: 1916-1917
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

NOT surprisingly, the Wards who did most to help Britain win the war were Mary and her eldest daughter. The ever-willing Dorothy buckled to, and organized a force of land girls for the Hertfordshire Agricultural Committee. They pulled on trousers and tilled the land at Stocks. The Wards’ work in London was no less vital to their country.
Scottish Bards and English Epigraphs: Robert Burns’s A Winter Night’
Authors: Stafford Fiona
Published: November 2023

collection was published in Kilmarnock, a small town in Ayr­shire, in July 1786, but news of its extraordinary quality spread rapidly. Within weeks, the first edition had more or less sold out and plans for a second were under way. Instead of Jamaica, which had been the destination of a rather desperately planned escape from financial ruin and very messy emotional entangle­ments, Burns found himself heading for Edinburgh to dazzle, and be feted by, literary high society. It was a remarkable turn of fortune, but one so swift that its effect seems to have been as much unsettling as uplifting. In the capital city, Burns may not have been faced with a failing farm or lovers carrying his children, but there were new, and unexpected pressures. A second edition of the poems would require more material, but for the first time in his life Burns was writing at the demand of others.
Evidence-Based and Evidence-Free Generalizations: A Tale of Two Cultures
Authors: Tallis Ray Mono
Published: November 2023

To an outsider, it seems that, since the study of literature was first established as an academic discipline, there has been almost continuous disagreement over the best or most appropriate approach to criticism. Recently, the very legitimacy of appreciation, evaluation, and interpretation of individual works and individual authors has been questioned. Dissent within literary studies has acquired a bitter edge and there are deep divisions amongst academic critics.
Writing Autobiography
Authors: Lessing Doris
Published: November 2023

At the very end of his life Goethe said that he had only just learned how to read. He was the most distinguished man of letters in Europe, one of a galaxy of literary eminences, so he wasn’t talking about his ABC. So what was this very old man talking about, when he said he had only just learned how to read? I have put this at the beginning of my essay because it illustrates what a long time it sometimes takes to learn things. Writing volume T of my autobiography I learned a good deal I didn’t expect, and I was amazed at myself because it had taken so long. You always learn when writing a book. It is a fact as yet unknown to science that when you tackle a new subject then suddenly it is everywhere, on the television, in the newspapers, on the radio, people start talking about it, an overheard conversation on a bus-there it is again, and a book falls open at just that relevant place. This is a quite astonishing phenomenon, but, like many others, we take it for granted. I am not however talking about that kind of learning, but what happens when you say, ‘Good God, how was it I didn’t see that before! It’s perfectly obvious!’ I have been reading biographies and autobiographies all my life, yet I have never actually sat down to think about the differences between them, nor the differences between them and novels. Yet the very moment I began to think seriously, the problem began to bristle with difficulties.
Literature and the Crisis in the Concept of the University
Authors: Clark Timothy
Published: November 2023

In the summer of 199 5 an article in the TLS by Daniel Dennett opened with an observation he had made during a recent visit to Oxford: that when he was there in the 1960s he felt that it was a university whose ethos and sense of purpose came from academics and they employed others to administer them. Now, his impression was that, in conformity to a model already long apparent in the USA, they were working for the administration. Yet, he adds, where can any idea of the university reside if not in its academics? This is part of the situation the late Bill Readings has in mind in his polemical book The University in Ruins. This claim is not novel. A. H. Halsey’s The Decline of Donnish Dominion argues that academics are in the process of becoming a new form of proletariat: that is, workers whose labour is owned by others.
Dryden and the Staging of Popular Politics
Authors: Kewes Paulina
Published: November 2023

My theme in this chapter is Dryden’s distinctive contribution to the theatrical representation of popular politics, in particular of the mechanisms by which public opinion is swayed and controlled. By ‘popular politics’ I mean the role played in political conflict by people outside those elites of power which centred on the king, court, and Parliament: that is, by people who would not normally have had a say in policy-making, but whose opinions had none the less to be taken into account, especially in times of political crisis. To define ‘popular politics’ in this way may seem an oversimplification. First, as Tim Harris and others have shown, late seventeenth-century lower orders played a prominent part in government, even if only at the local level. For example, they participated in law enforcement in the city (and in rural parishes) in their capacity as constables and members of the militia.
Dryden And Congreve’S Collaboration in The Double Dealer
Authors: Brady Jennifer
Published: November 2023

I want to thank my colleagues at Rhodes, Gail Murray, Sandra McEntire, and Brian Shaffer, for their steadfast support and intellectual help during the writing of this essay, and the editors of this volume for their painstaking reading of it at a later stage. I want also to thank my dear friends Earl Miner, for giving me my first break in Dryden studies, and Andy Silber, who sparked my interest in Dryden some thirty years ago.
‘According to my Genius’: Dryden‘S Translation of ’The First Book of Homer‘s Ilias’
Authors: Winn James A
Published: November 2023

The most important English classical translations of the long eighteenth century are John Dryden‘s Aeneis (1697) and Alexander Pope‘s Iliad (1715-20). Successful at the time of publication and virtually unchallenged for the next 150 years, these renderings of epic poetry into heroic couplets are important poems in their own right, and revealing documents in the history of the reception of classical epic. A nearly forgotten part of that history is Dryden‘s version of the first book of the Iliad, published a few months before his death in 1700, but intended as a trial balloon for a complete translation. Until very recently, scholars have either ignored or devalued this vigorous and lively work; according to one respected expert, it ‘represents not only a change in tactics but a falling off in skill from his Virgil‘. Yet I shall contend here that Dryden‘s ‘First Book‘ is more Homeric than Pope‘s-indeed, more Homeric than any translation into a European language before the twentieth century. Pope files the rough edges off Homer, producing not only a smoother and more
Streetwalking the Metropolis
Authors: Parsons Deborah L
Published: November 2023

Can there be a flaneuse, and what form might she take? This is the central question of Streetwalking the Metropolis, an important contribution to ongoing debates on the city and modernity in which Deborah Parsons re-draws the gendered map of urban modernism. Assessing the cultural and literary history of the concept of the flaneur, the urban observer/writer traditionally gendered as masculine, the author advances critical space for the discussion of a female 'flaneuse', focused around a range of women writers from the 1880's to World War Two. Cutting across period boundaries, this wide-ranging study offers stimulating accounts of works by writers including Amy Levy, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, Elizabeth Bowen and Doris Lessing, highlighting women's changing relationship with the social and psychic spaces of the city, and drawing attention to the ways in which the perceptions and experiences of the street are translated into the dynamics of literary texts.
The Woman of the Crowd
Authors: Parsons Deborah L
Published: November 2023

By the late nineteenth century, women’s access to the metropolis was expanding, both in terms of leisure and employment. The New Woman, the working girl, and the female shopper are all types of female presence associated with the city of modernity. They are significant as images of urban women within the city as well as metaphors for female perceptions of the city. Although this new freedom was limited, and subject to the manipulations of employers and the commodity industry, its importance for emancipation should not be overlooked. Women’s legitimate participation in city life was an extremely significant divergence from Victorian conventional belief and acquired a great deal of anxious attention from contemporary social commentators, who tended to regard women as becoming overwhelmingly present.
On the Margins of the City
Authors: Parsons Deborah L
Published: November 2023

The modernist literary climate of the 1920s has customarily been defined as both urban and dislocated, influentially described by Raymond Williams as ‘the practices and ideas of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century and the specific conditions and relationships of the twentieth-century metropolis’.1 Nineteenth-century and pre-war period ‘modernity’ was linked to the increased urbanism of the industrializing West, and can be characterized by the new experiences, psychologies, and social groups that resulted. By contrast, ‘modernism’, despite its seemingly indeterminate expansiveness, is, in its original form, far more historically, socially, and geographically specific-defined retrospectively by its own (predominantly male) proponents into a selfperpetuating myth of an Anglo-American expatriate, avant-garde community,
Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century
Authors: Richardson Angelique
Published: November 2023

The idea of eugenics - human selective breeding - originated in Victorian Britain in response to the urban poor. Darwin's evolutionary theory had laid the foundations for eugenics, replacing paradise with primordial slime. Man had not fallen from Grace, but risen from the swamps. And, as architect of his own destiny, he might rise still further. Eugenics was developed by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in the 1860s. Embracing the idea of evolution, eugenists argued that through the judicious control of human reproduction, and the numerical increase of the middle class, Britain's supremacy in the world could be maintained. Born and bred among the competitive Victorian middle class, eugenics was a biologistic discourse on class. Aiming at 'racial improvement' by altering the balance of class in society, it was, Galton argued, 'practical Darwinism'. Eugenics found its most sustained expression in fiction and the periodical press, and was central to late nineteenth-century ideas on social progress, forming part of the debate between hereditarians and environmentalists that peaked in the closing years of the century. Even Gladstone had his vital statistics measured in Galton's eugenic laboratory. Among the champions of eugenics were social purity feminists and New Women, writers such as George Egerton, Ellice Hopkins, and Sarah Grand, who argued that women were naturally - biologically - moral, and that through rational reproduction middle-class women could regenerate the British imperial race. The New Woman has been the subject of numerous recent critical works. However, the oppressive ideas that coexisted with the mancipatory theories of some New Women - ideas that were supremely class conscious - remain largely unexamined, as the focus remains on her more progressive aspects. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century recontextualizes New Woman writers, demonstrating that they were as concerned with the questions of poverty, sickness and health as they were with the changing role of women, the issue for which they are currently generally known and celebrated. Focusing on fiction and the press, and drawing on the papers and published work of Galton and other eugenists, Angelique Richardson reveals the cultural pervasiveness of eugenics and explores, for the first time, the intimate relations between early feminism and eugenics, and making a radical contribution to nineteenth-century studies.
Women and Nature
Authors: Richardson Angelique
Published: November 2023

As the nineteenth century progressed, confusion over the social and political role of women was fermenting on both sides of the Atlantic and biology was increasingly looked to for clarity and certainties.
Mona Caird: Individual Liberty and the Challenge to Eugenics
Authors: Richardson Angelique
Published: November 2023

When Mona Caird declared in 1888 in the Westminster Review that marriage in its present form was ‘a vexatious failure’, she sparked the most famous newspaper controversy of the nineteenth century. She was not opposed to marriage per se, but urged its development along lines which paid greater respect to the freedom of the individual.
Jane Barker, Exile
Authors: King Kathryn R
Published: November 2023

Jane Barker (1652-1732), English poet and novelist, is one of the most important women writers to enter the early modern literary marketplace. This book, the first full-length study of her writing career, draws upon archival sources to reconstruct Barker's beginnings as a manuscript poet, expose the Catholic-Jacobite underpinnings of her best-known fiction, trace her passage into print, and explore connections between her literary imaginings and the national life. It will be valuable to students of manuscript culture, the early marketplace, and the interplay of politics, religion, literature, and gender in the Augustan period. The study also makes a significant contribution to feminist literary historiography, showing how women writers can be approached not only through feminist models of difference but also through more inclusive models of women's involvement in early modern culture.
Introduction
Authors: King Kathryn R
Published: November 2023

By any reckoning Jane Barker (1652-1732) was a remarkable figure. A devoted Jacobite who followed the Stuarts into exile, a learned spinster who dabbled in commercial medicine, a novelist who wrote one of very few accounts of female same-sex desire in early modern Britain, she was also one of the most important women writers to enter the literary market-place during the Augustan period. Barker published occasional verse, satires on affairs of state, a heroic romance, a translation of a French devotional manual, and the increasingly admired novels that compose the innovative, autobiographically based Galesia trilogy. Her writing life spanned a crucial half-century, from the mid-167os to the mid-172os.
A Writer for Pay
Authors: King Kathryn R
Published: November 2023

In an oft-cited passage Galesia, asked whether she prefers Philips or Behn, replies with “blunt Indignation” that “they ought not to be nam”d together” (PWS rn8). This emphatic repudiation is usually read as an effort on Barker’s part to dissociate herself from Aphra Behn or, more precisely, to dodge the ill-repute that pursued the scandalous Behn after her death and indeed into our own century. I Perhaps this is so. But to stress the distance between these two writers is to risk obscuring the extent to which Barker, by the end of her writing life, had come to embrace an authorial identity suggestive less of Orinda’s genteel amateurism than of Behn’s market-place professionalism.
H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913–1946
Authors: Taylor Georgina
Published: November 2023

This book locates H.D. within an Anglo-American ‘public sphere’ of women writers, a discursive arena in which individuals come together in debate and discussion. The theoretical framework used is that outlined in Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, modified in order to consider this group as a ‘counter-public sphere’, a non-dominant group whose interests were non-identical to those of the dominant public sphere. From 1913 a network of little magazines enabled women writers to come together in unprecedented numbers in public exchange. The ethos of this public sphere was a challenge to all convention, including challenges to the perceived sentimentality of earlier women’s writing; H.D.’s Imagism was crucial in this. Initially this public sphere avoided engagement with the wider socio-political world, focusing instead on psychic reality. Writing became increasingly experimental in a new wave of avant-garde activity, fuelling heated debate in the magazines around the nature of ‘literature’. By the mid 1920s this particular literary sphere had lost direction, but continued to experiment and seek new ways forward. New discussions around cinematic forms (in which H.D. participated) kept critical discussion very much alive. In the 1930s the work emerging from this network was increasingly politically aware. This was a period of highly disturbed writing such as H.D.’s Nights and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, internalizations of the sadomasochism enacted on the world stage. After the war, this public sphere declined into personal exchanges in letters and private circulation of manuscripts.
Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

Plantation pornography is now a huge business and has infiltrated literature, fine art, popular publishing, film video, and BDSM cultures on the Web.2 There are plantation pornographies devoted to each of the major Atlantic slave colonies. Edgar Mittelholzer’s Kaywanatrilogy attempted to make a pornographic epic out of Dutch slavery in Guyana; it sold internationally in millions. Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil have all been the settings for formulaic exploitation, ranging from hard-core bondage materials to plantation erotica.3
William Cobbett, John Thelwall: Radicalism, Racism, and Slavery
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

Before the mid-eighteenth century there had not been very much visual art, or very many printed texts, produced on the subjects of Atlantic slavery, or the treatment of Afro-Caribbean slaves in Britain and the British sugar colonies.1 From the late 1780s until 1807, when the bill abolishing the British slave trade was finally passed, there was an explosion of material on the subject. Race theory, the English conception of Africans and the English perception of Atlantic slavery, was suddenly transformed by propaganda in irreversible ways.2
‘Born to be a destroyer of slavery’: Harriet Martineau Fixing Slavery and Slavery as a Fix
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

Nightingale’s jumpy testimony reveals several things, first that slavery, in her opinion, was, for Martineau, ubiquitous, global, and comparative. Slavery emerges at home as well as abroad, and is understood to be as much the product of domestic, economic, and political theory as the result of individual actions by planters in the colonies. More weirdly, it is the fertile progeny of sin ‘the fruits of an abuse’, and even exists as a source of inspiration. In those troubling words ‘wherever she saw, or thought she saw it.
Canons to the Right of them, Canons to the Left of them: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and Memorial Subversions of Slavery
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

The debates concerning how nineteenth-century England responded to the inheritance of slavery have penetrated the orthodox literary canon. Nowhere is this more forcefully in evidence than in the numerous recent readings of Mansfield Parkand Jane Eyrewhich focus on colonial reference. The two novels have emerged as critical foci for the discussion of nineteenth-century imaginative engagement with Atlantic slavery. There are also arguments that both works set up various parallels between the exploitation of colonial labour and that of women within England. There are enormous difficulties involved in advancing the latter position.
The Political Sciences of Life: From American Pantisocracy to British Romanticism
Authors: Johnston Kenneth R
Published: November 2023

The Pantisocracy episode-or ‘fiasco’, to use what seems to have become its normative descriptive term-must be tied with the ‘Spy Nozy’ incident for poll position in the list of ‘Ludicrous Events’ associated with Coleridge’s wayward genius.
Coleridge and ‘the Ouran utang Hypothesis’: Romantic Theories of Race
Authors: Kitson Peter J
Published: November 2023

Romantic studies have moved beyond domestic and political contexts to the larger historical processes of exploration, colonialism, and imperialism. In this broader picture, the relation between colonialism and the culture of the period has been shown to be problematic and vexed.
Coleridge’s ‘Abstruse Researches’
Authors: Vickers Neil
Published: November 2023

At Wordsworth’s advice or rather fervent intreaty I have intermitted the pursuit-the intensity of thought, & the multitude of minute experiments with Light & Figure, have made me so nervous & feverish, that I cannot sleep as long as I ought & have been used to do... (Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 16 March 1801, CL,ii. 707)
Space for Speculation: Coleridge, Barbauld, and the Poetics of Priestley
Authors: Stabler Jane
Published: November 2023

In a mournful notebook entry of December 1801, Coleridge sketched out the rest of his life: A lively picture of a man, disappointed in marriage, & endeavoring to make a compensation to himself by virtuous & tender & brotherly friendship with an amiable Woman-the obstacles-the jealousies-the impossibility of it.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Frankenstein
Authors: Lau Beth
Published: November 2023

Readers of Frankenstein know that Mary Shelley was familiar with Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, since she quotes the work twice in her novel. Early in the I 8 I 8 edition Robert Walton tells his sister that he is ‘going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow”; but I shall kill no albatross, there fore do not be alarmed for my safety’ (p. n).1 In the I83I text, the passage is expanded as Walton explains, ‘or if I should come back to you as worn and woful as the “Ancient Mariner?” You will smile at my allusion; but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets’ (p. 2I).
Coleridge and the End of Autonomy
Authors: Perry Seamus
Published: November 2023

A persistent theorist of ‘Life’, and gifted with rather more than the smack of Hamlet he admitted (TT, ii. 61), Coleridge could hardly fail to be stirred by Hamlet’s inconclusive assessment of the pros and cons. ‘To be, or not to be’: the shape of the phrase stuck with him, articulating, in variously transmuted forms, quite different moods of indecision.
How shall we write the Life of Coleridge?
Authors: Beer John
Published: November 2023

The immediate occasion of this chapter was an invitation to contribute the new entry for Coleridge in the revised Dictionary of National Biography. It was an invitation I felt bound to accept, but one that I then mulled over with apprehension, since it was an observable fact that since his death attempts to write the whole life of Coleridge had been notably doomed.
‘Salvage Knight’
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

There is no documentary evidence for Spenser’s presence in Ireland prior to his arrival with Lord Grey in August 1580, but there is much to indicate an association with the Sidney circle. The Shepheardes Calender is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney and the Familiar Letters suggest that both Spenser and Harvey were anxious to cultivate his acquaintance, and to be seen to do so.1 Sir Henry Sidney had greater experience of lrish politics than any of his contemporaries and Spenser’s relationship with his son may well have impelled him into the Irish service. In response to Grey’s request for advice, Sir Henry penned a long and detailed letter supplying an overview of the conditions in Ireland and of the difficulties incident to the office of Lord Deputy — an office in which, he claims, his son has ‘ernestlie and often’ expressed an interest.
Poetic justice
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

Attitudes change. Since 1912 Greenlaw’s ‘charming romance’ has occasioned more controversy than any of Spenser’s other works. As confidence in the empire declined it came to seem more than a ‘trifle hard’ that ‘a poet should advise the extermination of brother poets’ and, in the wake of the Second World War, the term ‘extermination’ appeared particularly unfortunate. Yet modern disquiet on this account is less anachronistic than is sometimes claimed. It is well to remember that the age of Pizarro was also the age of Las Casas.
Pleading, Pragmatism, and Permissible Hypocrisy: The ‘Colours’ of Legal Discourse in Late Medieval England
Authors: Landman James H
Published: November 2023

With these words, Sir John Fortescue voices his reluctance to reverse, at Edward IV’s request, arguments he had earlier made for Henry VI against Edward’s title to the English throne. Such a patent reversal of opinion (a reversal that was a condition of Fortescue’s removal from the attaint of treason and restoration to his estate of Ebrington) could only seem hypocritical, a disreputable doubleness that would condemn Fortescue in the opinion of’simple men’. But with the help of a ‘lernid man in the lawe of [England]’, Fortescue finds a way to evade ‘infame of dowblenesse’. His arguments against Edward were made as a lawyer for his client, Henry VI, and as this client is now dead, Fortescue is free to follow the practice of lawyers and argue the contrary position for his new client, Edward. Edward’s request, like the request of any client, demands from Fortescue ‘no doublenesse, but argument and proof of conynge and vertue’.
Analytical Survey 4: Middle English Manuscripts and the Study of Literature
Authors: Hanna Ralph
Published: November 2023

It’s appropriate to be writing this overview of the last decade or so of Middle English manuscript study at the turn of the millennium, for the final months of the twentieth century closed a circle and marked the end of a generation in medieval English manuscript study.
Career Development: William Godwin, Wilkie Collins, and the Psychopathies of Expertise
Authors: Trotter David
Published: November 2023

The subject of my first two chapters was the discovery or fabrication, during the nineteenth century, of an ‘ecological niche’, in Ian Hacking’s phrase, within which the disease entity we now call paranoia might take shape, and within which it has survived, more or less intact, despite significant changes of emphasis, to this day. Early psychiatry’s symptomatologics and case-histories constituted a way to think about and to represent a certain kind of behaviour, a certain attitude: a kind of behaviour and an attitude, familiar enough in society at large, the extreme version of which the asylums were built to contain (and perhaps in some sense to preserve). In the chapters which follow, I shall explore a sample of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction: a different way to define, and significantly redefine, the same kind of behaviour, the same attitude.
Memories of a Lost War
Authors: Chattarji Subarno
Published: November 2023

IN the Fall of 1977, two years after the fall of Saigon, I was teaching a course on War Poetry at Cornell University in up-state New York. I had led an articulate and lively company of English majors from the plains of Troy to the ford at Maldon, from Waterloo to Spionkip, from the Western Front in the First World War to the Western Desert in the Second.

‘So far, I’ve done most of the talking’, I told them, ‘but today it’s your turn to tell me about Vietnam.’ They looked at me blankly and no one spoke.
Ireland and Scotland
Authors: Ryan Ray
Published: November 2023

While political connections between Ireland and Scotland have been vigorously promoted in recent years, Ray Ryan presents the first sustained, comparative study of literature and culture from both sites. Ryan’s focus is on the Irish state and the Scottish nation. How does literature from the Republic create the cultural shape and personality of the Irish state? Through comparison with Scotland, a stateless nation, Ryan argues that crucial themes in Irish culture emerge with new force and clarity: themes such as Republicanism and colonialism, the city and rural divide, and the partition of the island into separate ‘southern’ and ‘northern’ spheres. Analysing a broad range of Irish and Scottish literary texts, Ryan shifts attention from the traditionally defined canon of Irish culture, and establishes the relevance of Scotland for any future discussion of Irish cultural contexts. Offering a radical intervention across a range of disciplines, this book is essential reading for all those working on Ireland, on Scotland, and on contemporary English and British culture.
Between the Falls Road and Kildare Street: Thomas McCarthy and the Location of Memory
Authors: Ryan Ray
Published: November 2023

In One Key episode from Thomas McCarthy’s 1991 novel Without Power, rival Fianna Fail and Coalition workers, campaigning in the presidential election of 19 81, wander lost in thick fog in their west-Waterford constituency. The Coalition workers have destroyed Fianna Fail election posters, but retribution is suspended as a swirling mist envelops both factions. The Fianna Fail workers become ‘one eye, one ear … as if the cold ghosts of the mountain’s memory had taken over, and were now directing the progress of their minibus’ (WP, n7).