The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from January 1994

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from January 1994

Wordsworth, Hunt, and romantic understanding of meter. (William Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt)
January 1, 1994... "Why, professing these opinions have I written in verse?" Wordsworth asks himself in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballady.(1) At no other time have poets harbored opinions that raise this question. The difficulty was that meter contradicted...

The bullfinch and the brother: marriage and family in Frances Burney's 'Camilla.'
January 1, 1994... Camilla is Frances Burney's most puzzling novel, and its eponymous protagonist her most puzzling heroine. While feminist and antifeminist, radical and reactionary alike can find something to like in Burney's first two heroines (and seem to have...

Topographic disaffection in Dickens's 'American Notes' and 'Martin Chuzzlewit.'
January 1, 1994... Experts in colonial discourse have made a great deal of the fact that subjects bring their own conditioning to foreign landscapes, and, by a cultural extension of the Whorf hypothesis, project their native categories and responses upon it....

The politics of Snorri Sturluson.
January 1, 1994... Despite Snorri Sturluson's predominant position in the classical saga writing of medieval Iceland, there has been surprisingly little analysis of his great history of the Norwegian kings (Heimskringla) since the publication of Gustav Storm's...

'Leben' und 'Seele' in den altgermanischen Sprachen: Studien zum Einfluss christlich-lateinischer Vorstellungen auf die Volkssprachen.
January 1, 1994... The North and West Germanic dialects share an a-stem noun (Old English feorh, Old Saxon and Old High German ferah, Middle High German verch, Old Norse fjor) referring to "life" that has disappeared from modern Germanic languages except for...

Performing Definitions: Two Genres of Insult in Old Norse Literature.
January 1, 1994... By Karen Swenson. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1991. Pp. iii + 149. Oral literature and folklore have become a potent source of inspiration for scholars of ancient poetry, as they attempt to organize their materials and replace abstract...

Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Hattatal.
January 1, 1994... Edited by Anthony Faulkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xxviii + 169. $52. The study of medieval Icelandic poetry, poetics, and mythology in the English-speaking world has been greatly favoured by the editorial and...

Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet.
January 1, 1994... By Ruth Tatlow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. ix + 186. $39-50. In Western civilisation, music interpretations have traditionally been based on verbal or mathematical approaches. The mathematical line runs from...

Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature.
January 1, 1994... By Dorothea E. von Mucke. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 331. $32-50. Though von Mucke uses semiotic theory and Freudian theory, and even cites Jacques Lacan, her approach depends largely on ideas of "discipline" and...

Entzweiung und Selbstaufklarung: Christoph Martin Wieland's Agathon-Projekt.
January 1, 1994... Von Walter Erhart. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991. Pp. 460. DM 138. This is a big volume, bursting with information and scholarship: theoretical foundations, argumentation against previous scholarship, decided views on previous secondary...

The Problem of Christ in the Work of Friedrich Holderlin. (R
January 1, 1994... By Mark Ogden. (MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 33; Bithell Series of Dissertations, 16.) London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, for the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, 1991. Pp. viii + 185. On an important...

Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism.
January 1, 1994... By Azade Seyhan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Pp. ix+ 187. $35. Much of the groundwork for twentieth-century deconstructionist criticism was laid by the Jena Romantics, a fact frequently overlooked by critics in the...

Zwischen Alltag und Utopie: Arbeiterliteratur als Diskurs des 19. Jahrhunderts.
January 1, 1994... Von Klaus-Michael Bogdal. Opladal: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1991. Pp. 275. DM 44. The review copy of this book was accompanied by two publisher's advertisements for it. According to the first, a flyer, "Der Autor . . . untersucht, in welcher...

Laughter Unlimited: Essays on Humor, Satire, and the Comic.
January 1, 1994... Edited by Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand. (Monatshefte, Occasional Volume, 11.) Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991 (pp. vii + 135. $19.25. Gelachter ohne Grenzen? Das Vorwort zu den hier gedruckten sieben Vortragen uber Humor,...

Irony and the Discourse of Modernity.
January 1, 1994... By Ernst Behler. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990. Pp. xiii + 154. $20. One can read Behler's admirably concise book in a couple of ways, both of them productive: on the one hand it is a carefully considered reply to Jurgen...

The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study.
January 1, 1994... By Anne L,. Klinck. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992. Pp. lxviii + 469; 28 plates. $90. In Old English studies the genre of elegy is perhaps the, classic example of the way nineteenth- and twentieth-century...

The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature.
January 1, 1994... By Richard K.Emmerson and Ronald B. Herzman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Pp. Xi + 244; 7 illustrations. $27.95. From an analysis of some of Joachim of Fiore's exegetical writing, particularly his figura of the...

Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception.
January 1, 1994... Description and the Act of Perception. By Sarah Stanbury. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Pp. x+ 155; 3 illustrations. $22.95. Sarah Stanbury has taken up, in the light of the Gawain-poet, one of the new and...

Journeymen in Murder: The Assassin in English Renaissance Drama.
January 1, 1994... By Martin Wiggins. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Pp. viii+ 248. $55. This book is a study of the evolution of a stock dramatic character from his first appearance in the 1560s through the early years of the Restoration. The focus is primarily...

Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve.
January 1, 1994... By John Leonard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. pp. x + 304. $49-95. Considering how long and how energetically western thought and literature have struggled with issues of naming, one is perhaps surprised to discover how hard it is to...

Milton's Wisdom: Nature and Scripture in Paradise Lost.
January 1, 1994... By John Reichert Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Pp. (unnumbered) + 296; 3 illustrations. $39-50. Reichert's "Introduction" piques curiosity and whets appetite; it serves well also as a port to follow the book's arrangement...

The Intelligencer.
January 1, 1994... By Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan. Edited by James Woolley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. xv + 363; 4 illustrations. $98. In 1728, Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan developed a fancy to write a weekly paper. Before their...

The Mysteries of Paris and London.
January 1, 1994... By Richard Maxwell. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1992. Pp. xx + 435; 23 illustrations. $37.50. Richard Maxwell has written an original, exciting, intriguing, and infuriating book. He has discovered an engrossing method...

Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel.
January 1, 1994... By Hilary M. Schor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. viii + 236. $29.95. If Elizabeth Gaskell had not existed, it would have been necessary for feminist criticism to invent her. She is a perfect justification for a feminist...

The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs. Gaskell's Demon.
January 1, 1994... By Felicia Bonaparte. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Pp. x + 310; $37.50. One tendency of feminist literary criticism in recent years has been the uncovering of the feminine unconscious mind. Thus Bertha Rochester...

The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice.
January 1, 1994... By Dominic Head. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xii + 241 $49.95. According to Dominic Head, short-story theory has become sufficiently established and defined in the last ten years that he can now argue for an...

The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time, and Tradition in Ulysses.
January 1, 1994... By Udaya Kumar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Pp. 184. $55. Udaya Kumar's theoretical treatise on Joyce's composition and structure of Ulysses starts with such staples as nineteenth-century philosophy and contemporary post-structural and...

Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel.
January 1, 1994... By A. D. Nuttall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. Xi + 255. $55. One evaluative matrix tacitly employed by every reader but never mentioned by reviewers may be formulated as follows: is the book (likely to be) worth the money? Not only...

Narrativity: Theory and Practice.
January 1, 1994... By Philip J. M. Sturgess. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. x+322. $75. One evaluative matrix tacitly employed by every reader but never mentioned by reviewers may be formulated as follows: is the book (likely to be) worth the money? Not...

Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines.
January 1, 1994... By J. Hillis Miller. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. Xviii + 280. $30. Deconstruction is no longer the latest, or even the second-latest fashion in literary theory and criticism, and as its most eminent exponent J. Hillis...

Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography.
January 1, 1994... By Paul John Eakin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp. ix + 249. $29.95. No recent study of autobiography demonstrates a more sophisticated knowledge of the genre, and of the complex critical problems and theoretical debates...

Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives.
January 1, 1994... Edited by James Robert Payne. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Pp. xxxiii + 338. $39.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). This excellent anthology of essays provides further evidence that James Olney's classic anthology Autobiography:...

Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright.
January 1, 1994... By Robert K. Wallace. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Pp. xv + 643; 162 illustrations. $75. Robert K. Wallace's interdisciplinary study examines affinities between the work of the British painter J. M. W. Turner and Herman...

Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century.
January 1, 1994... By Claudia Tate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. 302; illustrations. $35. Towards the end of my graduate education nearly twenty years ago, I took a course in Black-American literature from a now-prominent black male critic....

The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound's The Cantos.
January 1, 1994... By Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992. Pp. xviii + 214. $35. In his study of Pound's occultism, which the author says is essential for a proper understanding of the mythos of The Cantos,...

Marginal Forces, Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon.
January 1, 1994... By Michael Berube. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Pp. X + 352. $43-50 (cloth); $14-95 (paper). In Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon, Michael Berube has succeeded not only in offering...

The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures, 2d ed.
January 1, 1994... Edited by Braj. B. Kachru. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. xxv + 384. 44-95 (cloth); $19-95 (paper). Braj Kachru has been a prophet of the use of English internationally as an "other" rather than a "mother" language. When...

Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41.
January 1, 1994... By J. H. Willis, Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 1992. Pp. xvi + 451. $29-95. Leonard and Virginia Woolf taught themselves to set type and print on a hand press in 1917; by the early 1920s their hobby had grown into a...

Opuscula, vol. 9.
January 1, 1994... Edited by Peter Springborg. Bibliotheca Arnamagnaeana, 39. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1991. pp. 311; 8 plates. Kr. 250. This volume represents an unfortunate turning point in the history of the Bibliotheca Arnamagnaeana in that it...