The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from April 1997

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from April 1997

Was finite verb placement in Germanic prosodically conditioned?: evidence from 'Beowulf' and 'Heliand.'
April 1, 1997... 1. INTRODUCTION One of the more frequently discussed characteristics which underlie the modern Germanic languages is the universality of so-called Verb-Second (V2) word order. With the exception of Gothic, which is too poorly attested to...

Of the manner in which Anne Askew "noised it." (Askew's rhetoric in her interrogations)
April 1, 1997... Anne Askew was twice arrested and interrogated by Henry VIII's government concerning her religious views, and at the end of her second interrogation, only one year before Henry died, she was racked and then executed as an heretic.(1) While in...

Ariadne, Venus, and the labyrinth: classical sources and the thread of instruction in Mary Wroth's works.
April 1, 1997... Much has been written about Mary Wroth's use of genres as forms of identification with her famous uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, and her aunt, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Scholarship has begun to examine the ways in which she subverted...

The common reader: social class in Romantic poetics.
April 1, 1997... The British Romantic writers pose a troubling dilemma for modern readers. On one hand, we wish to associate them with revolutionary optimism and populist aspirations. Many scholars follow E. P. Thompson in holding aloft the banner of unskeptical...

The Art of Literary Biography.
April 1, 1997... Edited by John Batchelor, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 289. $29.95. John Batchelor's edited collection of essays on life writing, The Art of Literary Biography, gathers contributions from two conferences on literary biography held...

Thinking About Beowulf.
April 1, 1997... By James W. Earl. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 204. $35. "This book does not deliver a postmodern Beowulf," the author declares on p. 169, adding that its Freudian theme of "the origins of civilization" is "distinctly...

Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society.
April 1, 1997... Edited by Robert R. Edwards and Vickie Ziegler. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, N.Y.: The Boydell Press, 1995. Pp xi + 127. $53. There are reasons to interrogate the currently fashionable term "marginality," for it is far from being...

Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts of Writing in Philosophy, Politics, and Poetry.
April 1, 1997... By Jesse M. Gellrich. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp xiv + 304; $39.50. Jesse Gellrich's new book investigates orality in three fields of medieval studies and attempts to assess its political significance in fourteenth-century...

Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of the Faerie Queene.
April 1, 1997... By Lauren Silberman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. x + 189. $42. For those who like their Spenser scholarship witty and wise, who have been accustomed to the elegant prose and critical finesse of Thomas Roche and Anne...

John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance.
April 1, 1997... By William H. Sherman. Amerherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 291; 9 illustrations. $35. William Sherman successfully demonstrates that John Dee is more accurately characterized as a polymath rather than as a magus or...

Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages.
April 1, 1997... By Michael Shapiro. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994: Pp. viii + 282. $34.50. Michael Shapiro's Children of of the Revels has rightly become the standard scholarly work on boy actors in the age of Shakespeare. With his new book he...

Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time.
April 1, 1997... By Lars Engle. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Pp. x + 266. $32.50. The version of pragmatism that Lars Engle claims as Shakespeare's philosophy he characterizes as "a kind of generalization of economism" (p. 3). Bringing...

Shakespeare Reshaped: 1606-1623.
April 1, 1997... By Gary Taylor and John Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 333. $60. In many ways, this is Gary Taylor's best book. Essentially a postlegomenon to the Oxford Shakespeare, it is a summing up of what he (and John Jowett) have...

Ben Jonson: A Literary Life.
April 1, 1997... By W. David Kay. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 237. $35. Ben Johnson has been well served by his biographers and critics. He intended this to be so and made provision for it. He was, all his life, a character to be reckoned...

Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship.
April 1, 1997... By Micheal C. Schoenfeldt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. xxi + 345; 6 illustrations. $49.95. (cloth) $18.95 (paper). Michael C. Schoenfeldt's Prayer and Power is proving to be the decade's most influential study of George...

Winter Fruit: English Drama; 1642-1660.
April 1, 1997... By Dale B. J. Randall. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Pp. xiv + 454; 46 illustrations. $39.95. Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642-1660 has been ripening for picking for some years. Dale B. J. Randall has harvested the steadily...

Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland.
April 1, 1997... By Murray G. H. Pittock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 254. $59.95. This is in many respects an impressive and learned volume, full of interest. It traces the vigor and variety of the Jacobite literary response to...

The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny.
April 1, 1997... By Terry Castle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. 278; 42 illustrations. $35 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). Terry Castle, who continues to be a driving force in the ongoing reconsideration of eighteenth-century studies, has collected some...

Samuel Johnson's Critical Opinions: A Reexamination.
April 1, 1997... In 1926, Joseph Epes Brown published a handsomely printed volume of three hundred and fifty-one pages entitled The Critical C)pinions of Samuel Johnson (Princeton University Press). Brown's book, which was reviewed by R. W. Chapman, R. S. Crane,...

Keats and History.
April 1, 1997... Edited by Nicholas Roe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xviii + 320; 7 illustrations. $59.95. Keats and History is a collection of thirteen essays concerned in various ways with Keats's relationship to contemporary events and...

George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography.
April 1, 1997... By Frederick R. Karl. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995. Pp. xxi + 708. $30. George Eliot was a hero to her contemporaries, but not to her biographers. Gordon Haight's mighty synthesis (1968) accepted the diagnosis of her phrenologist that...

Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing.
April 1, 1997... By Dierdre David. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 234;7 illustrations. $15.95 (paper). Nineteenth-century imperialism and urbanization went hand in hand. As the empire expanded, supplying raw materials for Britain's...

Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City.
April 1, 1997... By Deborah Epstein Nord. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 270; 18 illustrations. $16.95 (paper) Nineteenth-century imperialism and urbanization went hand in hand. As the empire expanded, supplying raw materials for Britain's...

Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria.
April 1, 1997... By Evelyne Ender: Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xi + 307. $17.95 (paper) We live in the age of the new hysteria! "True" stories of abductions by aliens and their probing of their victims' bodies litter the newspapers! Scientific...

James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference.
April 1, 1997... By Joseph Valente. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 282. $49.95. Because needs and desires are put right when they are met, they may be thought of as wrongs. Justice is the idea that wrongs must be righted, that the...

Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise.
April 1, 1997... By Alan Warren Friedman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 339, illustrated. $54.95. In the wake of the "Great War," the "big words," as Ford Madox Ford called them, took cover under the shadow of modernism. But while the...

The Structure of Old Norse Drottkvaett Poetry.
April 1, 1997... By Kari Ellen Gade. (Islandica, 49.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xx + 290. $45. Gade's research towards this book consisted of two parts, one visible in the present monograph and the other virtually invisible. The latter, which...

Litterature et Spiritualite en Scandinavie Medievale: La Traduction Nordoise du 'De Arrha Animae' de Hughes de Saint-Victor.
April 1, 1997... LA TRADUCTION NORROISE DU DE ARRHA ANIMAE DE HUGUES DE SAINT-VICTOR. Etude historique et edition critique. Par Gunnar Har??arson. (Bibliotheca Victorina, 5.) Paris-Turnhout: Brepols, 1995. Pp. x + 275; 3 maps, 6 facsimiles. Scholarly...

The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia.
April 1, 1997... By Terry Gunnell. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Rochester, New York: Boydell and Brewer Inc., 1995. Pp. xxvi + 414; 3 tables, 94 illustrations. $89. Terry Gunnell offers a fascinating and thorough study of the evidence concerning early dramatic...

Sprachgeschichte des Neuhochdeutschen: Gegenstande, Methoden, Theorien.
April 1, 1997... Herausgegeben von Andreas Gardt, Klaus J. Mattheier, Oskar Reichmann. (Reihe Germanistiche Linguistik, 156.) Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1995. Pp. x + 468. DM 168. This book represents the revised proceedings of a conference held in...

Friesische Studien II: Beitrage des Fohrer Symposiums zur Friesischen Philologie vom 7.-8. April 1994.
April 1, 1997... Herausgegeben von Volkert Faltings, Alistair G. H. Walker und Ommo Wilts. (North-Western European Language Evolution, Supplement vol. 12.) Odense: University Press, 1995. Pp. vi + 221. Dkr. 225. The present work, as the title suggests, is a...

Heldensage und Epos: Zur Konstituierung einer mittelalterlichen volkssprachlichen Gattung im Spannungsfeld von Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit.
April 1, 1997... Von Alois Wolf. (ScriptOralia 68.) Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1995. Pp. 463. DM 136. As a participant in the long tradition of philological examinations of the genre of medieval European epic, this book is concerned primarily with origins....

Christian Brehme: Allerhandt Lustige, Trawrige, und nach Gelegenheit der Zeit Vorgekommene Gedichte.
April 1, 1997... Herausgegeben von Anthony J. Harper. (Deutsche Neudrucke, Reihe Barock: Weltliche Liederdichter des 17. Jahrhunderts.) Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994. Pp. [4] + 146 + *147. DM 112. This is the first reprint of a work by Brehme in modern...

The Ambiguity of Taste: Freedom and Food in European Romanticism.
April 1, 1997... By Joceyne Kolb. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 346. $49.50. Of all the aesthetic vocabulary developed in the eighteenth century perhaps no single concept is more important than "taste." Hundreds of essays and...

Die Entstehung der Poesie.
April 1, 1997... Von Karl Eibl. Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1995. 327. DM 44. Eibl pursues a most ambitious goal: to explain how "Poesie" rose to its role in modern society, actually only in modern German society. By "Poesie" the author means...

Schillers Dramen: Idealismus und Skepsis.
April 1, 1997... Von Karl S. Guthke. (Edition Orpheus: Beitrage zur deutschen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 11.) Tubingen und Basel: Francke, 1994. Pp. 312. DM 96. With his acclaimed books on Haller, Lessing, and domestic tragedy, Karl S. Guthke...

Schiller's Aesthetic Essays: Two Centuries of Criticism.
April 1, 1997... By Lesley Sharpe. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. Pp. xiii + 137. $55.95. In this compact volume Lesley Sharpe traces the reception of Schiller's major aesthetic treatises from the time of their appearance to the early 1990s. The work is...

Novalis: Signs of Revolution.
April 1, 1997... By Wm. Arctander O'Brien. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. 347. $49.95. In the prologue to this provocative and well-written reassessment of the life and writings of a major figure in European Romanticism O'Brien explains the familial...

Franz Grillparzer: A Century of Criticism.
April 1, 1997... By Ian F. Roe. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. Pp. xix + 172. $54.95. The General Editor of the series Literary Criticism in Perspective, James Hardin, made an excellent choice in selecting Ian E Roe to author this account of Grillparzer...

Nietzsche in American Literature and Thought.
April 1, 1997... Edited by Manfred Putz. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. Pp. vi + 381. $59.95. Nietzsche's fate in America (United States) is the intriguing topic for this collection of nineteen essays by German and American authors known and unknown. Putz...

Gesprache und Interviews mit Gerhart Hauptmann: 1849-1946.
April 1, 1997... Herausgegeben von Heinz-Dieter Tschortner, in Zusammenarbeit mit Sigfrid Hoefert. (Veroffentlichungen der Gerhart Hauptmann-Gesellschaft, Band 6.) Berlin/Bielefeld/Munchen: Erich Schmidt Verlag 1994. Pp. 190. DM 78. In his very brief...

New Critical Perspectives on Martin Walser.
April 1, 1997... Edited by Frank Philipp. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. Pp. xii + 196. $59. The goal of this collection of eleven essays is not only to provide a forum for new Martin Walser scholarship, but also to present his work in a way that makes it...

Contemporary German Editorial Theory.
April 1, 1997... Edited by Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 278. $ 49.50. This book is intended to acquaint English-speaking scholars who have no reading knowledge of...