The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from April 1996

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from April 1996

The 'Passio Lutheri': parody as hagiography.
April 1, 1996... The Passio Lutheri, an imprint of 1521,(1) is a parodical gospel that imitates the language of the gospels and casts Luther in the role of the suffering Christ at the Diet of Worms. The text is one of many polemical fliers written in the...

The ritualized presentation of weapons and the ideology of nobility in 'Beowulf.'
April 1, 1996... Weapons are a central, and in certain passages, a dominant feature on the symbolic terrain of Beowulf: Not only do we find weapons being wielded in battle by the heroes of the poem, but we discover them employed in many other circumstances as...

The struggle over Mary's body: theological and dramatic resolution in the N-Town Assumption play.
April 1, 1996... The importance of the Virgin Mary in the N-Town cycle has long been recognized. The play cycle incorporates the "abuse-of-power" theory of salvation and so privileges Mary's role in theological terms, while the East Anglian cult of the Virgin,...

The "paradise of the mothersons": 'Frankenstein' and 'The Empire of the Nairs.'
April 1, 1996... Free from each domestic chain, Ready to devote their lives, Nothing can the Nairs detain From the glory-yielding plain, They've no children, they no wives. --James H. Lawrence(1) Western science evolved only half human, in a world without...

The Old English Lives of St. Margaret.
April 1, 1996... By Mary Clayton and Hugh Magennis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 239; 2 plates. $59.95. This is an admirable book with any shortcomings outweighed by its impressive scope. The authors have not contented themselves with...

Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
April 1, 1996... By Susan Crane. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. viii + 233. $35 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Professor Crane's closely argued and illuminating analyses of Chaucerian romances from the viewpoint of gender deal in particular with...

Chaucer's Ovidian Arts of Love.
April 1, 1996... By Michael A. Calabrese. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Pp. x + 170. $29.95. Chaucer's Ovidian Arts of Love investigates how Chaucer uses Ovid's poetry in order to reflect on his own arts of love in Troilus and Criseyde, the...

The House of Fame.
April 1, 1996... Edited by Nicholas R. Havely. Durham Medieval Texts 11. Durham: Durham Medieval Texts, 1994. Pp. 216. (paper). Chaucer's dream visions have only recently begun to receive, in published form, the sustained editorial commentary possible in a...

Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England.
April 1, 1996... By Siegfried Wenzel. Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Pp. ix + 361. $52.50. For at least a century now, students of the medieval sermon have clung more or less blithely to the notion...

Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend.
April 1, 1996... Edited by Martin B. Schictman and James P. Carley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. vi + 324. $19.95. These seventeen Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio intend to "re-vise" the legend of Arthur (p. 1). That is, each...

Book Production and Publishing in Britain: 1375-1475.
April 1, 1996... Edited by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xix + 463; 66 illustrations. $69.50. The title of this excellent collection of essays may require some clarification: the editors of course mean...

Reading Holinshed's "Chronicles."
April 1, 1996... By Annabel Patterson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 339. $43 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). No one ever looks at anything just for what it is. But the regard that has been focused on Holinshed's Ckronicles has been more...

Configurations: A Topomorphical Approach to Renaissance Poetry.
April 1, 1996... By Maren-Sofie R[phi]stvig. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. xx + 582. $55. Some years ago, confronted with one of the first examples of arithmetical criticism, Douglas Bush allowed as how the time had come for him to retire. Not...

The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton.
April 1, 1996... By Anthony Low. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 258. $44.95. In the conclusion to an earlier book, Anthony Low remarked that "the great variety of style and spirit. . .of seventeenth-century English poetry has always...

Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820.
April 1, 1996... By Catherine Gallagher. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. xxiv + 340; 1 illustration. $38. As the title suggests, Catherine Gallagher's study tells a story, not simply of the five women writers around which the volume is...

Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian.
April 1, 1996... By Howard D. Weinbrot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii + 625. $49.95. The dustjacket promises a work that will "chronicle Britain's growing confidence in native achievement from the 1660s to the 1760s," and delineate "the...

Radical Satire and Print Culture: 1790-1822.
April 1, 1996... By Marcus Wood. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 318; 50 illustrations. $49.95. In December of 1817 an impecunious publisher and parodist, William Hone, defended himself on three successive days against charges of issuing...

Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction.
April 1, 1996... By Fiona Robertson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 322. $52. Legitimate Histories makes a welcome contribution to our knowledge of the involvement of Scott's novels with Gothic fiction. It's difficult to read very far in Scott...

Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment.
April 1, 1996... By. David Collings. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 287. $39.95. Almost twenty-five years ago, in his introduction to a collection of critical essays on Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams wrote of two "persistent alternate...

Shelley's Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority.
April 1, 1996... By Steven E. Jones. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 215; 5 illustrations. $30. The P. B. Shelley of received critical opinion is usually flapping luminous wings--either in the void and in vain (for Matthew Arnold and...

Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer.
April 1, 1996... By Elsie B. Michie. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 190. $34.95 (cloth); $13 95 (paper) Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian [England (1988) set a fairly specific, if daunting,...

Kangaroo.
April 1, 1996... By D. H. Lawrence. Edited by Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. Ixvi + 493. $89.50. A critical edition of a work assumes its unquestioned importance if not its classic status. Kangaroo is not a classic, but together...

The Visionary D.H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art.
April 1, 1996... By Robert E. Montgomery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. viii + 248. $49 95 The subtitle of this book is "Beyond Philosophy and Art." Although "visionary" is a vague and here, I think, inaccurate term, it is true that Lawrence...

Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on "Penelope" and Cultural Studies.
April 1, 1996... Edited by Richard Pearce. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Pp. ix + 291; 6 illustrations. $45 (cloth); $24.75 (paper). Molly Bloom has been getting out and about a lot more lately. As a dynamic cultural construct in this volume,...

No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3, Letters from the Front.
April 1, 1996... By Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xvii + 476. 20 illustrations. $35. After reviewing the prior two volumes of No Man's Land the reviewer reaches number three, impressed but tired after close to...

A New World of Words: Redefining Early American Literature.
April 1, 1996... By William C. Spengemann. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 254. $28.50. A New World of Words represents William Spengemann's lengthiest installation in his roughly fifteen-year project to "redefine early American literature."...

Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric and Humor in the American Renaissance.
April 1, 1996... By. John Bryant. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. xviii + 312. $45. What John Bryant undertakes in this fine book (he calls his method "pluralistic historicism") is analysis that focuses on the point where the autonymous...

Walt Whitman's Native Representations.
April 1, 1996... By Ed Folsom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xvi + 194. $54.95. These two books have broadly similar purposes. They place Whitman in his time and emphasize current issues in Whitman criticism such as sexuality, gender, race,...

Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays.
April 1, 1996... Edited by Ed Folsom. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Pp. xxiii + 262. $32.95 (cloth); $177.95 (paper). These two books have broadly similar purposes. They place Whitman in his time and emphasize current issues in Whitman criticism...

Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline.
April 1, 1996... By David R. Shumway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 407. This history of American Literature in the academy is published in the Minnesota series in American Culture, a series advertised as addressing "the...

Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life.
April 1, 1996... By Jerry Gafio Watts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 156. $34.95 (cloth); $ 14.95 (paper). In this study of Ralph Ellison's nonfiction writings, Jerry Gafio Watts raises an issue of fundamental importance in...

Both One and Many: Essays on Change and Variety in Late Norse Heathenism.
April 1, 1996... By John McKinnell with an Appendix by Maria Elena Ruggerini. philologia. saggi-ricerche-edizioni a cure di Teresa Paroli, I. Rome: Editrice `il Calamo' s.n.c, 1994. Pp. 216 + 17 figures. This thoughtful book brings together several lectures and...

Viking Poems on War and Peace: A Study in Skaldic Narrative.
April 1, 1996... By Russell G. Poole. (Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations, 8.) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 217. $45. Das Problem der Etablierung von Gattungen innerhalb der Skaldik ist bisher noch wenig bearbeitet worden. Man...

Forty Old Icelandic Tales.
April 1, 1996... Translatedd with an introduction by W. Bryant Bachman, Jr. New York: University Press of America, 1992. Pp. xxi + 301. $46.50. The Old Icelandic paettir constitute an important minor genre of Old Norse-Icelandic narrative prose, if one...

The Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400.
April 1, 1996... By Margaret Cormack. Preface by Peter Foote. (Subsidia Hagiographica, 78.) Bruxelles: Societe des Bollandistes, 1994. Pp. xvi + 296. BEF 2900. When pagan Icelanders addressed a heathen god as fulltrui (trusted friend, or patron) they revealed a...

Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception on Edda and Saga.
April 1, 1996... Edited by Andrew Wawn. Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, 1994. Pp. ix + 342. In the first half of this century the reception of ancient and medieval nordic literature by Romantic thinkers was the focus of interest among European and Scandinavian...

Poetic Realism in Scandinavia and Central Europe: 1820-1875.
April 1, 1996... By Clifford Albrecht Bernd. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. Pp. xvi + 243. $59.95 What a pity that such a notable book, original in many ways and marking advances in the history of Scandinavian--especially Danish--literary history, is so...

Briefe: 1783-1794.
April 1, 1996... Herausgegeben von Helmut Riege. Band I: Text. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994. Pp. ii + 336. DM 248. The newest volume of Klopstock's letters has three centers of concern, in sequence: metrics, German orthography, and the French Revolution. In...

Idioms and Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay.
April 1, 1996... University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Pp. 250. $35. In the published version of his 1988 dissertation, Peter Burgard offers a close reading and perceptive analysis of some intriguing texts (in particular, Goethe's...

Eine Art Wahnsinn: Dichtung im Horizont Kants, Studien zu Goethe und Kleist.
April 1, 1996... (Philologische Studien und Quellen, 131). Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1994. Pp. 200. DM 84. Most "Goethezeit" scholars have tended to assert that Heinrich von Kleist and Goethe himself resisted the influence of Kantian philosophy. According...

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer Bibliographie.
April 1, 1996... Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994. Pp. 319. DM 162. For those among us in the profession who have taken note at all, with a certain sadness, that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer has not been much read or written about in recent years, U. Henry...

Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Thought.
April 1, 1996... By A. J. Hoover. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1994. Pp. xiii + 211. $49.95. According to Hoover's own words in the Preface, this book arises out of a lifelong confrontation with Friedrich Nietzsche on the part of a philosophically trained...

Rainer Maria Rilke und die Duse: Mit Rilkes 'Die Weisse Furstin' und zahlreichen Abbildungen.
April 1, 1996... Von Ilsedore B. Jonas. Frankfurt/M.: Insel Verlag, 1993. Pp. 161; 38 Abbildungen. DM 14,80. Jonas's title is doubtless intended to capture the attention of a reading audience who has encountered numerous depictions of the relationship between...

Rainer Maria Rilke - Ellen Key: Briefwechsel, Mit Briefen non und an Clara Rilke-Westhoff.
April 1, 1996... Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1993. Pp. xviii + 436. DM 98. Die Herausgabe von Rainer Maria Rilkes Briefwechsel mit Ellen Key ist ein erfrischendes, wenngleich gewagtes Unterfangen fur die traditionelle deutsche Rilkeforschung....

Hans Carossa: Dreizehn Versuche zu seinem Werk.
April 1, 1996... Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1991. Pp. viii + 304. DM 92. Der vorliegende Band ist aus einem im Herbst 1989 an der Universitat Passau veranstalteten Symposium hervorgewachsen, das der Korrektur des in den letzten funfundzwanzigJahren in der...