The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from January 1993

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from January 1993

Organizing and staging carnival plays in late medieval Lubeck: a new look at the archival record.
January 1, 1993... What we know about the Carnival plays in pre-Reformation Lubeck is based on research done a century ago by Carl Friedrich Wehrmann and Christoph Walther. Wehrmann, then director of the Lubeck city archive, published the titles of the...

Prey tell: how heroes perceive monsters in Beowulf.
January 1, 1993... Since ancient times, the bestiality of man has been a topic of such resonance in the discourse of high culture as to suggest that it strikes upon deep tensions in the human psyche. While certain features of this problematic relationship between...

A history of Donne's "Canonization" from Izaak Walton to Cleanth Brooks.
January 1, 1993... The history of reading will have to take account of the ways that texts constrain readers as well as the ways that readers take liberties with texts. The tension between those tendencies has existed wherever men confronted ...

Spiritual capitalism: Wordsworth and usury.
January 1, 1993... "How is it that you live, and what is it you do?" "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," complains a famous sonnet Wordsworth wrote between the springs of 1802 and 1804. Other sonnets of the same period denounce money-grubbing in...

Entwicklungstendenzen in der deutschen Gegenwartssprache.
January 1, 1993... In the light of the epoch-making happenings of the past two years in Europe, this book takes on a curious air. It seems almost like a text from another planet, and indeed, it is a work from a different world. As with so many publications from...

Die Weser-Runenknochen, Neue Untersuchungen zur Problematik: Original oder Falschung.
January 1, 1993... This intriguing study of rune-inscribed bones, reportedly found along the Weser River near Brake/Oldenburg in Lower Saxony in the late 1920s and later widely held to be forgeries, is a tour-de-force of physical scientific investigation that to...

Althochdeutsch: Eine Einfuhrung in Dialekte und Vorgeschichte.
January 1, 1993... A well-conceived and systematic introduction to the structure and history of the earliest recorded German, namely Old High German (hereafter OHG), this book consists of some fifteen main sections: (i) the "Einleitung" (pp. 15-26), which locates...

Studies in Ragnars Saga Lodbrokar and Its Major Scandinavian Analogues.
January 1, 1993... Studies in Ragnars saga loobrokar would be accessible to a much wider audience if it had been equipped with an introduction. Although potentially of interest to scholars of medieval Scandinavian literature, ballads, folklore, Germanic religion,...

Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland.
January 1, 1993... Da[beta] die unter dem Begriff Riddarasogur bekannten, altnordischen Bearbeitungen franzosischer hofischer Romane aus dem 13.,14. und 15. Jahrhundert in jungster Zeit vermehrt dic Aufmerksamkeit der Sagaforschung gefunden haben und mittlerweile...

Die Schweizer Minnesanger.
January 1, 1993... Die Schweizer Minnesanger, a collected edition made by Karl Bartsch in 1886, has entered our library histories under the abbreviation "SMS." Bartsch created a so-called regional edition, gathering the verses of thirty-two (German) Swiss poets...

Das Pferd und seine Epische Funktion im mittelhochdeutschen 'Prosa-Lancelot.'
January 1, 1993... Das Pferd und seine epische Funktion im mittelhochdeutschen |Prosa-Lancelot.' Von Beate Ackermann-Arlt. (Arbeiten zur Fruhmittelalterforschung, 19.) Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990. Pp. 375. DM 180. The domestic horse is older than history, and...

Das Leben Augustins im 'Niederrheinischen Augustinusbuch' des 15. Jahrhunderts: Uberlieferungs- und Textgeschichte, Teiledition.
January 1, 1993... Das Leben Augustinsim |Niederrheinischen Augustinusbuch'des 15. Jahrhunderts. Uberlieferungs- und Textgeschichte. Teiledition. Von Ute Obhof. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1991. Pp. 211 + 7 Abb. DM 65. The tentative character...

Pastoral Conventions: Poetry, Language, and Thought in Seventeenth-Century Nuremberg.
January 1, 1993... Pastoral Conventions: Poetry, Language, and Thought in Seventeenth-Century Nuremberg. By Jane O. Newman. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv + 313. $42.50. With her study Pastoral Conventions, Jane Newman...

Affekt und Ausdruck: Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert.
January 1, 1993... Affekt und Ausdruck: Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Von Rudiger Campe. (Studien zur deutschen Literatur, Bd. 107.) Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1990. Pp. xxiv + 586. DM 160. Rudiger Campe's book is a...

Bildpublizistik der fruhen Neuzeit: Aufgaben und Leistungen des illustrierten Flugblatts in Deutschland bis um 1700.
January 1, 1993... Bildpublizistik der fruhen Neuzeit: Aufgaben und Leistungen des illustrierten Flugblatts in Deutschland bis um 1700. Von Michael Schilling. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1990. Pp. viii + 503. DM 138. Professor Schilling is a key member of...

Kant als Schriftsteller.
January 1, 1993... Kant als Schriftsteller. Von Willi Goetschel. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1990. Pp. 208. DM 56. Willi Goetschel offers a broad survey of Kant's works and presents his writings as an essentially unified, literary production. He seeks to...

Untersuchungen zum Roman von Frauen um 1800.
January 1, 1993... Although this volume is the result of a symposium it does not harbor the usual shortcomings of conference proceedings. The fourteen contributions are of high quality; most contributors can draw on their significant earlier research in the field...

Kleist's Aristocratic Heritage and 'Das Kathchen von Heilbronn.'
January 1, 1993... Inclined as we have been - at least until recently - to think of great literary masters as spiritually immortal, we have not tended to look so closely at the extent to which their artistry was influenced by, much less was a product of, their...

The Challenge of Belatedness: Goethe, Kleist, Hofmannsthal.
January 1, 1993... Those of us who prefer an illumination of particular literary works to arabesques of literary theory will not be too disappointed on discovering that Jean Wilson's book, The Challenge of Belatedness, which highlights and enumerates various...

Theodor Storm, Klaus Groth: Briefwechsel.
January 1, 1993... Fontane, as we read in an annotation to this correspondence, held Klaus Groth to be "ein famoser Dichter" (p. 98). In another note we are told that Fontane once said to Theodor Storm: "Sie sind und bleiben nun mal mein Lieblingsdichter" (p....

Der Erzahler in der Kurzgeschichte.
January 1, 1993... Es entspricht der geschichtlichen Entwicklung der deutschen Kurzgeschichte, da[beta] literaturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten auf ihrem Gebiet vielfach den Blickpunkt punkt auf theoretische Fragen verbunden mit didaktischen Zielen richten....

Studies in the Vernon Manuscript.
January 1, 1993... Publishing a collection of essays by scholars of some eminence to complement the 1987 facsimile of the Vernon manuscript (Bodleian Library, Eng.poet.a.1) was a fine idea, for it should encourage further study of the most comprehensive and...

An Ars Legendi for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: A Re-Constructive Reading.
January 1, 1993... Accepting the Ellesmere order of the compilation as Chaucerian, Dolores Frese analyzes the Canterbury Tates and discovers hidden markers throughout that point toward the Ellesmere order. These deliberately veiled markers are accessible only...

Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models.
January 1, 1993... This book assembles about one hundred writings on women from England, France, and Italy, ca. 1520 to 1620, with a few items earlier or later. Previous studies on this topic seldom cross national lines; such a cross-cultural study is useful....

The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital.
January 1, 1993... The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. By Richard Halpern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. vii + 321. $47.50 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). It would be a pity if this book...

Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle.
January 1, 1993... Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. By Mary Ellen Lamb. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Pp. X+297. $37-50 (cloth); $14-95 (paper). Mary Elien Lamb's Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle is a major contribution...

Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare.
January 1, 1993... Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare. By Jonathan Crewe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Pp. vii+196. $ 25 For those who are not committed...

Shakespeare's Political Animal: Schema and Schemata in the Canon.
January 1, 1993... Shakespeare's Political Animal: Schema and Schemata in the Canon. By Alan Hager. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990. Pp. 164. $29.50. Alan Hager opens his study with an analysis of...

Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos.
January 1, 1993... Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos. By Thomas McAlindon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xvii+306. $44-50. Since "cosmos" usually implies order, harmony, and wholeness, Shakespeareans nurtured on Theodore Spencer or E. M. W....

Literature and the English Civil War.
January 1, 1993... This is the first book of its sort: a wide-ranging collection of literary critical essays focusing on the English Revolution, the most neglected period in the literary history of early modern Britain. This collection is particularly welcome for...

Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England.
January 1, 1993... For some interpreters, Christine Doctrine, certain other prose treatises, and his religious poetry certify Milton as a Protestant post-Reformation theologian. Until Stephen M. Fallon's Milton among the Philosophers, there was no comparable...

Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime.
January 1, 1993... Vincent Arthur De Luca's Words of Eternity is a marvelous book. Students of Blake are advised to buy it; returning a borrowed copy to the library will be excessively painful. Readers will want to advert to the book again and again, for the...

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale.
January 1, 1993... It seems somehow appropriate that the publication history of The Secret Agent, a novel which has as its theme private and public deception, and which was inspired by a grotesquely unsuccessful act of anarchy, should be as convoluted as its...

Frank O'Connor at Work.
January 1, 1993... Michael Steinman "examines Frank O'Connor, at work on his short stories, over a thirty-year period." While other critics have compared published versions of a story, Steinman also draws on much unpublished manuscript and typescript material....

Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography.
January 1, 1993... In the wake of poststructuralisms and new historicisms, autobiography has become a particularly contested genre - and here, in G. Thomas Couser's second book, theory of autobiography has become a vexed and deeply engaging enterprise. Although...

Cooper's Leather-Stocking Novels: A Secular Reading.
January 1, 1993... At least the first half of this book could be read with benefit by everyone interested in the collective cost paid on this continent for the nineteenth-century idea of the Progress of Civilization. In a forthright and usually fairminded way,...

Contexts for Hawthorne: The Marble Faun and the Politics of Openness and Closure in American Literature.
January 1, 1993... I have had a fair amount of trouble in dealing with Stern's study of Hawthorne but I believe that the fault is not wholly my own. First, as the somewhat enigmatic title indicates, Stern has a number of themes which he is determined to pursue,...

Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing.
January 1, 1993... One of Edith Wharton's ghost stories is called "Pomegranate Seed," and in a couple of other stories by her a fictional writer is the author of a work with the same title. Otherwise there are few direct references to Persephone in her writing....

Lyric Contingencies: Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens.
January 1, 1993... Margaret Dickie's stimulating book provides a cogent analysis of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, pairing them in order to show the challenge that their related lyric projects pose to the Emersonian Romantic tradition. The overarching...

The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry.
January 1, 1993... These two books provide a new approach to Wallace Stevens's poetry by joining the lawyer and twentieth-century man to the poet of the imagination. The point would not seem to be a large one except for the fact that more than half a century of...

Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things.
January 1, 1993... These two books provide a new approach to Wallace Stevens's poetry by joining the lawyer and twentieth-century man to the poet of the imagination. The point would not seem to be a large one except for the fact that more than half a century of...