The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from April 1993

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from April 1993

Tormenting the devil with boiling drops: an apotropaic motif in the Old English 'Solomon and Saturn I' and Old Norse-Icelandic literature.
April 1, 1993... The Old English Solomon and Saturn I is a fascinating and very difficult poem which hovers on the borderline between magic and religion. It might best be described as a work of Christian magic concerned with the powers of the Pater Noster...

Metrical resolution in Old English.
April 1, 1993... The metrical equivalency between a pair of syllables of a limited dimension and a single long syllable is a fundamental, ubiquitous, and strictly regulated feature of Old English alliterative verse. Since Eduard Sievers's analysis of the verse...

God's spies: the knower in 'The Waves.' (1931 novel by Virginia Woolf)
April 1, 1993... From this I Teach what I might call a philosophy . . . that the whole world is a work of art. . . . Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven;...

Sheep, goats, and the 'figura etymologica' in 'Finnegans Wake.'
April 1, 1993... At the bottom of a page in one of the pocket notebooks into which he crammed material potentially useful for the composition of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce made the following entry: shave & haircut shape of hegoat ...

Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius.
April 1, 1993... By Jack Stillinger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991 Pp. vii + 259. $29-95. On 3 May i992 the New York Times Sunday color supplement ran an article on Stanley Fish. The tone of the piece seemed to have been inspired by the TV...

Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature.
April 1, 1993... By Seth Lerer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Pp. xii+ 268. $35. The anxieties that characterize the postmodern age in academia are reflected in the title of Seth Lerer's new book. "Literacy" and "power" have become...

The Lyric Speakers of Old English Poetry.
April 1, 1993... By Lois Bragg. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991. Pp. 159. $28-50. In her preface, Lois Bragg states that what she is "attempting here is to establish the reader's privilege to define for herself a literary...

The Metrical Grammar of Beowulf.
April 1, 1993... By Calvin B. Kendall. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xvi + 318. $50-50. Midway through his new book, Calvin Kendall confronts one of the unique half-lines of Beowulf that...

Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman.
April 1, 1993... By Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 256. $49.50. This book's thesis is that Langland's prophetic self-awareness is defined by his indebtedness to "Latin religious prophecy" (p. 2), sources that...

Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney.
April 1, 1993... By Alan Hager. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991. Pp. 222; 2 illustrations. $36-50. Alan Hager's Philip Sidney is protean--an artist whose personae, perspective, and presentation...

Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision.
April 1, 1993... By Theresa M. Krier. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Pp. I + 257. $31-50. In undertaking a book-length study of Spenser's treatment of (predominantly) erotic visions in The Faerie Queene, Theresa M. Krier radically narrows what...

Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition.
April 1, 1993... By John N. King. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 271; 21 illustrations. $39-50. In The Allegory of Love C. S. Lewis playfully characterized Spenser's eclecticism by piling up, in Rabelaisian style, two lists of...

Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World.
April 1, 1993... By Stephen Greenblatt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. XXIV + 202. $24.95. Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions, an analysis of the function of wonder in the European discovery and appropriation of the New World, is a...

Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History.
April 1, 1993... By Annabel Patterson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. pp. 177. $29-95 (cloth); 12-95 (paper). Narrower in scope than her previous two books, Censorship and Interpretation and Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Annabel Patterson's...

Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance.
April 1, 1993... By F. David Hoeniger. Delaware: Delaware University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992. pp. 404. $50. Narrower in scope than her previous two books, Censorship and Interpretation and Shakespeare and the Popular...

Analyzing Shakespeare's Action: Scene Versus Sequence.
April 1, 1993... By Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 230. $39.50. The goal of performance criticism, as I understand the genre, is to enhance the ways that playscripts are interpreted in the...

John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse.
April 1, 1993... By James S. Baumlin. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Pp. xvi + 333. $42.50. In his final chapter, James S. Baumlin writes, "The textual play between incarnationism and transcendence, transcendence and skepticism, skepticism...

Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England.
April 1, 1993... Edited by James Holt McGavran, Jr. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1991. Pp. vi + 265. $35. Although the contemptuous dismissal of "kiddie literature" has certainly abated in the last decade, the segregation of children's...

The Practical Ruskin: Economics and Audience in the Late Work.
April 1, 1993... By Linda M. Austin. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 233. $29.95. What critical task could be more difficult than the effort to delineate the shifting confines of an author's sense of audience? If...

The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life.
April 1, 1993... By Lauren Berlant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 Pp. 269. $32.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Of the eight critical studies on Hawthorne published in 1991, Lauren Berlant's is the smartest and, in my view, the most valuable, which...

Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality.
April 1, 1993... The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality. By Lynda Zwinger. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Pp vii + 174. $37.50 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). Lynda Zwinger's book argues that the father-daughter romance, paradigmatic tale of...

Meaning in Henry James.
April 1, 1993... By Millicent Bell. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Pp- xiii + 384. $42.50. In the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James urges that the novel has power "positively to appear more true to its character in...

Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting.
April 1, 1993... By Richard C. Moreland. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Pp. vii + 259. $37.50 (cloth); $14.75 (paper). This difficult, jargon-jammed book is deeply political. Although the word "liberal" may appear only once (p. 68), it is...

Faulkner and the Thoroughly Modern Novel.
April 1, 1993... By Virginia V. James Hlavsa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. Pp. 228. $25. Virginia Hlavsa's study of Light in August, the thoroughly modern novel of her title, is the culmination of arguments she has been making since...

The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren.
April 1, 1993... By William Bedford Clark. Lexington: The University Presses of Kentucky, 1991. Pp. xiii + 161.$19. Much of the persuasive development in William Bedford Clark's book evolves from the background of Warren's early career. An integral part of...

My Father's Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men's Autobiography.
April 1, 1993... By David L. Dudley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Pp. 218. $24-95 As the author of My Father's Shadow acknowledges, the theme of "intergenerational conflict in African American men's autobiography" is not...

Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing.
April 1, 1993... By Houston A. Baker, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. xvi + 239. $24-95 (cloth); $12-95 (paper). Workings of the Spirit is a sometimes brilliant and frequently infuriating book that may well mark the end of a historically...

The Structure of German.
April 1, 1993... By Anthony Fox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. x + 326. $74. In a market flooded with books on linguistic theory on the one hand and foreign language grammar books on the other, Anthony Fox endeavors to fill the gap between the two...

The Rhythms of Drottkvaett and Other Icelandic Metres.
April 1, 1993... By Kristjan Arnason. Reykjavik: Institute of Linguistics, University of Iceland, 1991. Pp. iv + 182. As stated in the Preface (p. 1), the purpose of the present work is to look at Nordic meters, in particular the drottkvaett meter, and to...

Society and Politics in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla.
April 1, 1993... By Sverre Bagge, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Pres, 1991. Pp. ix + 339. $45. A full-scale book about Snorri Sturluson is in itself a major event, not least of all a broad treatment of Heimskringla. The latter task has...

Reinmar-Studien: Ein Kommentar zu den "unechten" Liedern Reinmars des Alten.
April 1, 1993... Von Helmut Tervooren. Stuttgart: S. Hirzel Verlag, 1991. Pp. 277. DM 78. A few pages into the final section of this book ("IV. Folgerungen, Ausblicke") one sees the glimmers of a new day in the scholarship on Reinmar's poetry and on the...

The German Nachspiel in the Eighteenth Century.(Brief Article)
April 1, 1993... By David G. John. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 411 $65. The title promises a thorough study of the afterpiece, and that is what David G. John delivers. He begins by examining modern and eighteenth-century...

Aufklarung, Sturm und Drang, Fruhe Klassik: 1740-1789.
April 1, 1993... 1789. Von Sven Aage Jorgensen, Klaus Bohnen und Per Ohrgaard. (Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart. Begundet von Helmut de Boor und Richard Newald. Sechster Band.) Munchen: C. H. Beck, 1990. Pp. xiii + 665. DM...

Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman.
April 1, 1993... Edited by James Hardin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Pp. xxvii + 504. $50. In his knowledgeable introduction, James Hardin complains with pardonable exaggeration that "American literary criticism has in general...

The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism.
April 1, 1993... By Judith Ryan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. 267-$29-95. During the last decades of the nineteenth century a new school established itself in the field of psychology. Its adherents called themselves "empiricists"...

The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism: The Literary and Artistic German War Colony in Belgium, 1914-1918.
April 1, 1993... Edited by Rainer Rumold and O. K. Werckmeister. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture, Volume 51) Columbia: Camden House, 1990. Pp. x + 299; 15 illustrations. $49-50-) The articles collected in this admirable volume were...

The Brecht Memoir.
April 1, 1993... By Eric Bentley. With a Foreword by Martin Esslin. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991, Pp. 121. $19-95. To appreciate the expanded version of this informative, insightful account of Eric Bentley's long-term association and...

Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film.
April 1, 1993... By Richard W. McCormick. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Pp. 262. $45. Richard McCormick's study promises to offer a comprehensive presentation and interpretation of sociopolitical developments, theoretical discourses, and...

Shakespeare's Dramatic Transactions.
April 1, 1993... By Michael E. Mooney. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 226. $29.95. The goal of performance criticism, as I understand the genre, is to enhance the ways that playscripts are interpreted in the theater. I had always doubted...