Philological Quarterly articles from March 1995

Philological Quarterly archives from March 1995

'Paradise Lost': a poem in twelve books, or ten?
March 22, 1995... In 1667, when Paradise Lost first reached print, its title page proclaimed it "a poem written in ten books." In 1674, however, Milton brought out a revised edition, now in twelve books. This twelve-book version became canonical; and yet his...

Ephelia's voice: the authorship of 'Female Poems' (1679).
March 22, 1995... In 1679 an enigmatic collection of poems was published under the title Female Poems on Several Occasions, with the author identified only as "Ephelia." Most of the poems in the volume make up a loose sequence, narrating the progress of an...

Pope, Petrarch, and Shakespeare: Renaissance influences in 'Eloisa to Abelard.'
March 22, 1995... Many critics acknowledge Pope's indebtedness in Eloisa to Abelard (1717) to the Ovidian heroic epistle, and indeed the poem does owe much to the earlier poet's style and imagery.(1) However, as others have not, I see in Eloisa to Abelard a...

Dicken's pathology of time in 'Hard Times.'
March 22, 1995... Most criticism of Hard Times probes the historical accuracy of the novel -- investigating, as Coles observes, "those correspondences between Dickens' fictional world and the world he lived in..."(1) Inevitably, this tendency to evaluate the...

Taking a stand while lacking a center: Rushdie's postmodern politics. (author Salman Rushdie)
March 22, 1995... Through Shame (1983) Rushdie's three novels seemed virtually unconnected to one another, each featuring a new subject and a new authorial viewpoint. The uproar following the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988 was such that few critics...