The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from April 1995

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from April 1995

'Give is us this day our daily rad.'
April 1, 1995... The Heliand, composed in the first decades of the 800s for an audience on what is now north German territory roughly between the Weser and Rhine Rivers, is a retelling in Old Saxon of the story of Christ. The Biblical story as presented in 5983...

The problem of monsters and universals in 'The Owl and the Nightingale' and John of Salisbury's 'Metalogicon.'
April 1, 1995... For decades, "The Owl and the Nightingale" has generated a good deal of contention on topics philological, historical, and literary. In a splendid effort to investigate head-on the hermeneutical interplay between literary analysis and the...

A loophole in the law: the case of Black George and the purse in 'Tom Jones.'
April 1, 1995... Amid Mrs. Waters's revelations to the astonished Squire Allworthy of Tom Jones's parentage and the circumstances of his birth, lawyer Dowling abruptly arrives to give Allworthy the results of his research on "the Case which he had before told...

Exploiting the 'Poor Man': the genesis of Hardy's 'Desperate Remedies.' (Thomas Hardy)
April 1, 1995... The four-year period 1865-68, when Hardy in the midst of his architectural assistant's duties effectively began his writing career, has long held a particular fascination for Hardy critics and biographers, the familiar interest in literary...

Traditional Oral Epic: The 'Odyssey,' 'Beowulf,' and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song.
April 1, 1995... As the title indicates, this work discusses three different epic traditions - Classical Greek, Old English, and Serbo-Croatian - and the underlying framework of the discussion is Oral Theory. However, Foley's present approach represents a...

Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies.
April 1, 1995... The nine interesting and in some cases even inspiring essays brought together by Allen Frantzen in this volume address the question that has been at the center of the crisis in medieval studies for almost twenty years now: to theory or not to...

Women and Literature in Britain: 1150-1500.
April 1, 1995... Although at first view the title of this book may seem noncommittal in its generalized way of linking the words "women" and "literature" over a period of three and a half centuries, the conjunction of these two topics, in imaginative combinations...

The Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities.
April 1, 1995... In locating the genesis of this collection of essays in a seminar of the Shakespeare Association of America, Thomas Clayton opens his preface by declaring that "This is not The Division of the Kingdoms nor was meant to be." In the ten years that...

Feminine Engendered Faith: The Poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw.
April 1, 1995... Maureen Sabine's study of feminine influences on Donne and Crashaw is a book with a mission, the principal elements of which are revealed early on: (1) to assess the lives and writings of Donne and Crashaw with an eye on their likenesses and to...

Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton.
April 1, 1995... Dividing the world of heroic poetry into winners' and losers' epics, David Quint in Epic and Empire proposes that western literary epics since the Aeneid - his prototype of the winners' epic - have either modeled themselves on Virgil's epic of...

The Imperial Dryden: The Poetics of Appropriation in Seventeenth-Century England.
April 1, 1995... In The Imperial Dryden, David Kramer accuses the poet John Dryden of a "literary imperialism" that amounts to the forcible "appropriation of others' writing openly and without apology" (p. 63). Indeed, he charges him with invading and plundering...

Rochester: The Poems in Context.
April 1, 1995... This doubly curious book - inquisitive in range and often odd in emphasis - aspires to consider Rochester's poetry "in the light of Restoration events, developments and personalities in the fields of national and international politics, religion,...

Romantic Revisions.
April 1, 1995... For those who believe that textual studies are the wave of the future, a new theoretical frontier supplanting (or at least supplementing) historicist approaches to writing, Romantic Revisions offers welcome support. Robert Brinkley and Keith...

The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism.
April 1, 1995... Criticism works by phases. For this reason it seems only natural that, after a period of preoccupation with the "visionary" aspect of Romantic poetry, English Romantic studies should now be experiencing a reaction. In contrast to its earlier...

Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory.
April 1, 1995... David Simpson has been a key voice in Romantic studies for the last decade, and his most recent work, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory, is another impressive contribution. Simpson argues that present-day resistance to...

Byron's Historical Dramas.
April 1, 1995... As late as 1985, in the newest edition of The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism (New York: Modern Language Association), John Clubbe could write that "[e]ven today little consensus exists regarding the position of Byron's...

The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol 1.
April 1, 1995... Shelley scholarship has always had to contend with notoriously difficult works and texts, anvils that have continued to test (and break) editorial hammers. The best known example may be the ill-fated Complete Poetical Works (Clarendon Press)...

Romantic Affinities: German Authors and Carlyle: A Study in the History of Ideas.
April 1, 1995... According to its preface, this book was written under enormous difficulties. First, the author's work "found little furtherance at the University of Saskatchewan, geared to promoting more tangible endeavours, with immediate practical results."...

Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture.
April 1, 1995... Victorian representations of the "fallen woman" are richly evocative of anxieties about sexuality and its social regulation, and they have been widely studied as such. But contemporary reception of the motif suggests that many more, and more...

The Excluded and Collaborative Stories.
April 1, 1995... Possibly the only factors that unify the stories in this collection are firstly that they were all written (in part at least) by Thomas Hardy, and secondly that he did not consider it worthwhile collecting them for volume publication himself....

Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling.
April 1, 1995... Kipling's position has always remained just a bit unclear. How many even of those who admire him will teach him? He falls into the cracks of the canon, first as a short-story writer in an age of novelists, then as a children's writer, and finally...

Running to Paradise: Yeats's Poetic Art.
April 1, 1995... In "A General Introduction to My Work" (1937), William Butler Yeats said a poet "is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; instead he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete." In this study of...

Wilfred Owen's Voices: Language and Community.
April 1, 1995... In the last installment of his three-volume memoir, Journey From Obscurity, Harold Owen reveals why his family, in September 1914, found the prospect of his older brother's participation in the month-old war so improbable: "Thinking of [Wilfred]...

Women in Samuel Beckett's Prose and Drama: Her Own Other.
April 1, 1995... This book explores the representation of gender in Beckett's prose and drama. Bryden argues that Beckett's early fiction depicts women as sexual predators seeking to appropriate the lives of the males who are vulnerable to them, while his plays...

Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work.
April 1, 1995... Readers have long recognized an affinity between Emerson's writings and pragmatic philosophy, but in the last ten years there have been a number of efforts to make the connection explicit. Richard Poirier's recent book, Poetry and Pragmatism...

Fictions of Form in American Poetry.
April 1, 1995... "American poets tend to overvalue the formal aspects of their art," writes Stephen Cushman in his second critical study of form. Introducing Fictions of Form in American Poetry with a cursory discussion of Tocqueville's prophecy that American...

Elizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of Language.
April 1, 1995... C. K. Doreski has written a good, scrappy, intelligent book on Elizabeth Bishop, who after many years of respectful but comparatively sparse notice, has suddenly received an avalanche of attentions. An avalanche clearly bound to stream onwards,...

The Icelandic Homily Book, Perg. 15 4 in the Royal Library, Stockholm.
April 1, 1995... The following review is based on an offprint of the introduction to the edition with a specimen of plates and text. The Icelandic or Stockholm Homily Book occupies a central place in the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic literature as being among...

Worterbuch der Mittelhochdeutschen Urkundensprache.
April 1, 1995... The first two fascicles of this dictionary were reviewed in JEGP, 88 (1989), 69-64. At the rate of one per year, six more fascicles of 96 pages each have now appeared, covering the vocabulary bereitschaft-gunnen. Fascicle 9, which we may...

Churer Weltgerichtsspiel. Nach der Handscrift des Staatsarchivs Graubunden Chur Ms. B 1521.
April 1, 1995... Eleven manuscripts and two imprints attest the tradition of late medieval German plays about the Last Judgment, among them the Churer Weltgerichtsspiel. Internal and external evidence suggests that both the text and the manuscript originated in...

Die Betrubte Pegnesis.
April 1, 1995... Die folgenschwerste Misskonzeption der Barockpoesie war wohl die im neunzehnten Jahrhundert aufgekommene Idee, dass es sich dabei durchweg um nicht-subjektive "Gesellschaftsdichtung" gehandelt habe. Das Gegenteil war bekanntlich der Fall. Sogar...

The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater.
April 1, 1995... One of the most enduring events of the Storm and Stress decade (1770-80) is Lavater's engagement of the art of reading faces, an act of ordinary life that he tried to formalize into principles of physiognomy and legitimate with teleological...

Ludwig Tieck: An Annotated Guide to Research.
April 1, 1995... Scholars of Tieck have repeatedly lamented the lack of a reliable critical edition of his works as well as the absence of a bibliography sufficient for research. In the last two decades there has, however, been some progress in filling these...

Eichendorff's Scholarly Reception: A Survey.
April 1, 1995... In this book Goebel offers a concise, well-organized, and comprehensive survey of the scholarly Eichendorff reception from the beginning to the present, and discusses critical themes and issues in chronological presentation. The author focuses on...

Grimm's Fairy Tales: A History of Criticism on a Popular Classic.
April 1, 1995... How old are fairy tales? Did they emerge from caves along with our neolithic ancestors, or did they appear first among the tenements of Venetian craftsmen or the hotels de ville of French countesses? Are they oral or are they literary? Where did...

Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication.
April 1, 1995... The interpretation of Kierkegaard has often taken the form: "Kierkegaard from the perspective of X." The value of this variable has generally been determined - and rightly so - by the theological, philosophical, and critical currents of the...

Sinnenwelt und Weltseele: Der Psychophysische Monismus in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende.
April 1, 1995... Monika Ficks Studie uber die Literatur der Jahrhundertwende ist eine kaleidoskopartige Representation der Moderne, deren Epochenansatz auf der Leib-Seele-Fragestellung des 19. Jahrhunderts beruht und mit der philosophischen Denkrichtung des...

Gottfried Benn's Static Poetry: Aesthetic and Intellectual-Historical Interpretations.
April 1, 1995... Fur Mark William Roche, der durch literar-philosophische Untersuchungen fiber den Begriff der Ruhe in der deutschen klassischen und nachklassischen Literatur hervorgetreten ist, scheint es naheliegend, seine umfangreichen Sachkenntnisse auch fur...

Coping with the Past: Germany and Austria after 1945.
April 1, 1995... This book, another in the successful series "Monatshefte Occasional Volumes," combines fourteen essays and an introduction by Volker Durr exploring the moral and political legacy the Third Reich left to its three successor states, Austria, the...