Criticism articles from September 1996

Criticism archives from September 1996

John Donne and Elizabethan economic theory.
September 22, 1996... Few poets of Donne's time -- or for that matter any time -- show his understanding of contemporary economic theory and use it as a body of metaphor in their poetry. It has of course been argued that there was in fact no such thing as...

"The unequal sovereigns of a slaveholding land": the North as subject in Whittier's "The Panorama."(John Greenleaf Whittier)
September 22, 1996... Although it is probably unprofitable to draw too sharp a distinction between Whittier's anti-slavery poetry and his political poetry, one basic criterion for isolating the latter may be that Northern compromisers stand out as the primary...

Demystifying (with) the repugnant female body: Mary Leapor and feminist history.
September 22, 1996... Corydon: 'Tis true, her Linen may be something soil'd. Phillario: Her Linen, Corydon! -- Herself, you mean. Are such the Dryads of thy smiling Plain? Why, I could swear it, if it were no Sin, That...

The matter with mind: violence and 'The Silence of the Lambs.'(depictions of women among male structures)
September 22, 1996... The many articles on The Silence of the Lambs reveal its significance for exploring rather than confirming competing interpretive theories. That is, the film teases viewers into questioning the adequacy of the film against the adequacy of...

Repossessing the body: transgressive desire in "Carmilla" and Dracula.(vampire story retold with masculine themes added)
September 22, 1996... Of the vampire tales to date, Bram Stoker's Dracula has unquestionably become the most popular and the most critically examined. It constitutes, however, the culmination of a series of nineteenth-century vampire tales that have been...

Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic.
September 22, 1996... In Art of Darkness, Anne Williams sets out to discover a "poetics" of Gothic, as her subtitle informs us -- a set of underlying principles associated not only with the literature conventionally grouped under the "Gothic" rubric but also with...

The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall.
September 22, 1996... John Thelwall occupies a peculiar position in British political and literary history. One of the most versatile and inventive writers and speakers of that most turbulent and momentous period, the 1970s, Thelwall was at once a far-sighted...

A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing.
September 22, 1996... As Paul Fry's title shows, a point of departure for his intricate and welcome reflections on "writing" is Shelley's famous essay, A Defence of Poetry. Fry rightly praises this essay as "the strongest defense of poetry ever written," seeing it...

Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism.
September 22, 1996... Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, edited by Devoney Looser, is a collection of original essays designed to take the measure of current feminist thinking about Austen and to establish, as it were, a kind of feminist context for that...

Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art.
September 22, 1996... In his study of poetry as both otium and negotium (play and work), Willard Spiegelman defends aesthetics against a Marxist new historicism that attempts "to appropriate literature to sociology and politics at the end of the twentieth century,...

Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction.
September 22, 1996... After I had agreed to review this book, it sat unopened on my desk for several months while I tried to work up the courage to read it. People who came into my office would see it lying there, its glossy black cover broken by a gaping,...