Philological Quarterly articles from March 2005

Philological Quarterly archives from March 2005

Bocstafas: a literal reading of Exeter Book Riddle 57.
March 22, 2005... A folk riddle collected early last century in Adams County, Illinois challenges the solver: Riddle me, riddle me, rin-e-go, My father gave me some seed to sow. The seed was black, the ground was white, If you are a good...

Interiors, exteriors, and the veiling of Cupid's martyrs: gendered space in The Assembly of Ladies.
March 22, 2005... The Assembly of Ladies is an anonymous fifteenth-century secular love poem. (1) It adheres closely to conventional poetic structures but throws these conventions into relief as it presents its narrative from a woman's point of view, a rare...

The origins of Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638).
March 22, 2005... INTRODUCTION Francis Godwin (1562-1633), bishop successively of Llandaff and Hereford, wrote what was later regarded as the first piece of English science-fiction, The Man in the Moone, published posthumously in 1638. This pseudonymous...

Gulliver, Gulliveriana, and the problem of Swiftian satire.
March 22, 2005... Readers have wrangled over the "meaning" of Gulliver's Travels since it was first published in 1726. No critical consensus has ever been reached even on some very fundamental issues of interpretation. What can be done to extricate us from what...

Individual development and the American autobiography: Franklin, Thoreau, Adams.
March 22, 2005... Much critical commentary on the American autobiography has concentrated on the ways in which American autobiographers have made use of their presentations of an individual's growth and development. One of these uses, we find, was to remind...