Philological Quarterly articles from September 1994

Philological Quarterly archives from September 1994

The Archpoet as poet, persona and self: the problem of individuality in the Confession.
September 22, 1994... The twelfth century witnessed renewed interest in the Delphic injunction "Know yourself": literature of the period shows a conspicuous increase in concern regarding the inner workings and motives of the mind. As might be expected, twelfth-century...

Flesh and food: the function of female asceticism in the Digby 'Mary Magdalene.'
September 22, 1994... Traditionally the subject of studies concerned with staging and provenance, the Digby Mary Magdalene has, in recent years, become the focus of arguments over its unity of character, plot, and theme.(1) Not surprisingly, this shift in the play's...

Cunning elements: water, fire, and sacramental poetics in "I am a little world." (sonnet by John Donne)
September 22, 1994... In John Donne's sonnet "I am a little world," the speaker combats a nearly desperate fear of damnation with a desire to be purged, either by water or by fire. He declares himself "a little world made cunningly/Of Elements, and an Angelike...

Preaching pastor versus custodian of order: Donne, Andrewes, and the Jacobean church.
September 22, 1994... While many books have been written about puritans, the so-called Anglicans of the early seventeenth century have received much less historical attention until recently. It has often been assumed, by literary people especially, that those in the...

Matthew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult": greater significance than love and death.
September 22, 1994... "Tristram and Iseult" (1852) is Matthew Arnold's only Arthurian work, and Arnold employed the ancient narrative as a veneer for social criticism in much the same manner as did his contemporaries Alfred Tennyson, William Morris, and Algernon...

Dickensian disciple: Anglo-Jewish identity in the Christmas Tales of Benjamin Farjeon.
September 22, 1994... "Benjamin Leopold Farjeon [1838-1903] was of English birth but of the Jewish race."(1) Perhaps this is the casually anti-Semitic remark of one of Farjeon's Victorian contemporaries? It is not. The comment was penned by a biographer of his...

Writing Women's Literary History.
September 22, 1994... This book marks a coming-of-age of the practice of women's literary history. The persistence of academic feminists during the past two decades has allowed literature by women to re-enter the tradition of literature in English. Women writers are...