Style articles from June 1994

Style archives from June 1994

Fanny's fantasies: class, gender and the unreliable narrator in Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. (character in 'Memoirs of a Woman in Pleasure' by author John Cleland)
June 22, 1994... John Cleland's chosen narrative voice in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, that of Fanny Hill, obviously invites the charge that he is constructing a female subjectivity which suits a male agenda.(1) Although this reading of the work is possible,...

Direct addresses, narrative authority, and gender in Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills."
June 22, 1994... When Rebecca Harding Davis died in 1910, eulogies recounted how her most famous work, "Life in the Iron Mills," published in the Atlantic Monthly nearly fifty years earlier, defied nineteenth-century assumptions about women's writing. According...

Reading readers in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography.
June 22, 1994... Reading Orlando: A Biography or, for that matter, any of Virginia Woolf's novels becomes a venture into uncertain terrain where the reader must sign on with the writer to discover the text's construction and thus a path, not necessarily an easy...

Final curtain on the war: figure and ground in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. (World War II)
June 22, 1994... "X I make this mark to show the point at which a bomb shook the window so violently that the pen jumped out of my hand. There's an air raid going on--" (Virginia Woolf, Letter to Hugh Walpole, 29 Sept. 1940, Letters 6:435) Virginia Woolf...

Handing over power in James's What Maisie Knew. (author Henry James)
June 22, 1994... Henry James's What Maisie Knew is, in Paul Theroux's felicitous phrase, "a novel of thrusting hands" (7). Many critics have observed the importance of the novel's extensive hand imagery, yet no one has done a systematic study of that imagery. The...

The Mutt and Jute dialogue in Joyce's Finnegans Wake: Some Gricean Perspectives. (author James Joyce; philosopher H.P. Grice)
June 22, 1994... Let us swop hats and excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather yapyazzard abast the blooty creeks. (Finnegans Wake 16.8-9) 1. PERSPECTIVES ON GRICE It has been nearly twenty years since Mary Louise Pratt, in Toward a Speech Act Theory...

Milton's missing rhymes. (poet John Milton)
June 22, 1994... In his prefatory note on "The Verse," attached to the second edition of Paradise Lost, Milton first explains "why the Poem Rimes not" by an appeal to cultural authority, aligning himself with a Classical and epic tradition--"that of Homer in...

Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind.
June 22, 1994... Possessing no word for "lying or falsehood," Houyhnhnms might qualify as ideal readers of Wolfgang Iser's challenging new study, either as a suitably unformed audience or possibly, locked into a static world, as thinkers sorely in need of dynamic...

The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol.
June 22, 1994... In The Pragmatics of Insignificance, Cathy Popkin explores the fiction of Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Nikolai Gogol in an effort to reveal their motives for obfuscating conventional notions of plot and narrative to produce instead...

American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique.
June 22, 1994... The avant-garde, popular, and working-class texts that Walter Kalaidjian discusses in his new work attempt to revise episodes in American culture that together constitute what he calls "a neglected cultural history" (8). Concentrating on such...

The Architext: An Introduction.
June 22, 1994... Among Anglo-American theorists of criticism, Gerard Genette is no doubt chiefly known as a narratologist: his Narrative Discourse (1972) has become the standard reference in the field, synthesizing as it does virtually all work on formal theories...