Style articles from March 2001

Style archives from March 2001

Critical thumbprints in Arcadia: Renaissance pastoral and the process of critique.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... It seems that all we can do is compose introductions to the pastoral, although recently these introductions have begun to grow longer and longer and their vocabulary larger and more disparate. We now require words like power to aid our...

The source of "dramatized consciousness": Richardson, Austen, and stylistic influence.(Samuel Richardson Jane Austen)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... To his observation that Henry James was, like George Eliot, "a great admirer of Jane Austen," F. R. Leavis adds the following footnote: "He can't have failed to note with interest that Emma fulfills, by anticipation, a prescription of his own:...

Frantic forensic oratory: Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... I have no idea what Ezra Pound meant when he complained that Poe is "A dam'd bad rhetorician half the time" (qtd. in Hubbell 20). Perhaps he was referring to Poe's literary criticism, but what concerns me here is the rhetoric of one of Poe's...

"They but reflect the things": style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale".
March 22, 2001... That Herman Melville found a locus of generative power in language's multiple possibilities--uses, meanings, and expressions--is unquestioned. Curiously absent, however, among the major studies of Melville's short fiction is discussion of just...

The light continent: on melancholia and masculinity in Maupassant's "Lui?" and "Une famille".
March 22, 2001... In an essay titled "Femininity," Sigmund Freud is noted for having observed that "[t]hroughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity" (22:113). Yet Freud was certainly not the first to have...

Upright man/fallen woman: identification and desire in James Joyce's "A Painful Case".(racial studies)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... In her stimulating reading of Frantz Fanon's anti-colonialist book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Diana Fuss analyses the strategies through which colonialism pathologizes the colonized subject. By excluding that subject from the fruitful...

The occidental tourist: the counter-orientalist gaze in Fitzgerald's last novels.
March 22, 2001... In a recent reappraisal of Edward Said's Orientalism, Timothy Brennan deems this immeasurably influential study "a profoundly American book" that "could not have been written anywhere else" (560). "Its legacy," Brennan continues, "is fused, or...

Revisiting the deconstruction of narratology: master tropes of narrative embedding and symmetry.
March 22, 2001... When William Nelles begins his 1992 article "Stories Within Stories" with a string of synonyms customary for his title's infamous effect, ones including "Chinese box" and "Russian doll," he imaginatively champions the effect of narrative...

Historicizing unreliable narration: unreliability and cultural discourse in narrative fiction.
March 22, 2001... I. Introduction It seems hardly necessary to emphasize how important the concept of the unreliable narrator has been in literary studies since it was introduced by Wayne C. Booth in 1961. Booth's classic definition of the unreliable...

Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative.(Book Review)
March 22, 2001... William Nelles. Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 208 pp. /$42.95 cloth. In mapping out the geography of embedded narrative theory, William Nelles has provided us with a scholarly and yet...

Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning. .(Book Review)
March 22, 2001... Martin Bidney. Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning. Carbondale: Southern illinois University Press, 1997. 235 pp./$34.95 cloth Martin Bidney is ambitious in choosing to write a book about...