The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from January 1995

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from January 1995

'Queen Mab', the Law of Libel and the forms of Shelley's Politics. (poet Percy Bysshe Shelley)
January 1, 1995... Much recent scholarly work on Shelley - and on the romantics in general - has emphasized the complexity of romantic poetic language viewed in the context of a socially oriented semiotics. To cite just two examples: In The Supplement of Reading...

'The Seafarer' 97-102: 'Dives' and the burial of treasure. (Old English poem)
January 1, 1995... Set forth as in the manuscript but without internal punctuation, lines 97-102 of the Old English poem The Seafarer appear as follows: theah the graef wille golde stregan brothor his geborenum byrgan be deadum mathmum mislicum thaet hine mid...

Contraception and the Pear Tree Episode of Chaucer's 'Merchant's Tale.' (poet Geoffrey Chaucer)
January 1, 1995... Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, one of several Canterbury Tales containing a woman beloved of two men, is generally thought to be one of the poet's harshest stories.(1) Certainly contributing to the tale's cruel overall tone is the gap in age between...

Catechism, 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' and the pilgrim's progress.
January 1, 1995... Q. What is the chief end of man? A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.(1) For perhaps many modern readers of English literature, this famous first question and answer from the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1648...

No girls, no boys, no families: on the construction of childhood in texts of the German Middle Ages.
January 1, 1995... "One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt." Michel Foucault(1) Two paradigms have haunted the study of childhood in the Middle Ages. The first, older but still powerful, assumes that childhood is primarily a natural phenomenon and that it must...

Sigurdar Saga Pogla: The Shorter Redaction.
January 1, 1995... Matthew Driscoll's Sigurdhar saga pogla: The Shorter Redaction is a welcome addition to the growing collection of scholarly editions of medieval Icelandic romances. Popular in their own time, as the large number of surviving manuscripts attests...

Methoden und Probleme der Edition Mittelalterlicher Deutscher Texte: Bamberger Fachtagung 26.-29. Juni 1991, Plenumsreferate.
January 1, 1995... As indicated in the title, this volume includes the plenary lectures delivered at a conference of specialists in editing medieval German texts held in Bamberg in June, 1991. The conference, organized by the "Kommission fur Edition...

Notker der Deutsche: Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols.
January 1, 1995... The new Altdeutsche Textbibliothek (ATB) edition of Notker Labeo's complete works by Petrus W. Tax and James C. King has been in the making for over twenty years now. With the publication of the second and third parts of De consolatione...

Walther von der Vogelweide: Hofische Idealitat und Konkrete Erfahrung.
January 1, 1995... Theodor Nolte here investigates two groups of Lieder and Sangspruche within the Walther-corpus, drawing from them deeper relationships to the singer's audience and its values as well as the close and frequently overlooked connections between...

Textual Poetics of Germanic Manuscripts: 1300-1500.
January 1, 1995... As Westphal states in her introduction, "medieval literature is no 'arbitrary sum of its parts"' (pp. 7-8). The fifty odd manuscripts considered in this book bear witness to a medieval sense of order, according to Westphal, to the textual poetics...

Sebastian Brant's "The Ship of Fools" in Critical Perspective: 1800-1991.
January 1, 1995... Like other German works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but more spectacularly so, Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools has risen and fallen with the ebb and flow of literary taste, its mast now touching the stars above, its keel now...

"Dare to be Happy!": A Study of Goethe's Ethics.
January 1, 1995... If the title reads as though happiness is at the center of Goethe's ethics, that would be misleading. The book deals with happiness and resignation, that is, with one aspect among many of Goethe's ethics - if you equate, as Julie Prandi does,...

Goethe's Other Faust: The Drama, Part II.
January 1, 1995... The other Faust to which allusion is made in the clever and felicitous title of this book is, of course, Goethe's Faust. Der Tragodie zweiter Teil, a work so strange indeed and - unlike the more accessible and popular Part One - so unfamiliar,...

A Path for Freedom: The Liberal Project of the Swabian School in Wurttemberg, 1806-1848.
January 1, 1995... In the peroration of Deutschland. Ein Wintermarchen, Heinrich Heine, with reference to Dante, warned Friedrich Wilhelm IV of the poet's power to condemn kings to eternal damnation. Whether Heine actually succeeded in sealing into the inferno the...

Sprache Als Organismus: Metaphern - Ein Schlussel zu Jacob Grimms Sprachauffassung.
January 1, 1995... The best brief elucidation of the theme of Veronika Krapf's 1992 Munich dissertation is the following passage (pp. 4-5) from the "Einleitung: Organologische Metaphern bei Jacob Grimm" (pp. 1-7): Ganz besonders leben die Texte Jacob Grimms von...

Arthur Schnitzler - Richard Beer-Hofmann: Briefwechsel, 1891-1931.
January 1, 1995... Arthur Schnitzler was an inveterate correspondent. Letters he exchanged with Hermann Bahr, Elisabeth Bergner, Otto Brahm, Georg Brandes, Max Burckhard, Samuel Fischer, Gerhart Hauptmann, Theodor Herzl, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Alfred Kerr, Heinrich...

Kleist on Stage: 1804-1987.
January 1, 1995... In the Introduction to his study Kleist on Stage, 1804-1987, William C. Reeve cites some cogent reasons to justify his line of investigation: Kleist's inherent grasp of the stage, the lack of reference works dealing with the history of Kleist's...

Thomas Mann-Bibliographie: Das Werk.
January 1, 1995... On the occasion of Mann's fiftieth anniversary, Gerhard Jacob (author of Thomas Mann und Nietzsche: Zum Problem der Dekadenz) privately published the first Thomas Mann bibliography. The following year, an enlarged edition appeared in S. Fischer...

Stefan Heym: The Perpetual Dissident.
January 1, 1995... In this book, Peter Hutchinson intends "to trace the development of Heym up to his most recent publications, giving more attention than usual to his earliest and practically unknown pieces of poetry, prose, and drama" (pp. 5-6). He correctly...

Spatmoderne und Postmoderne: Beitrage zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur.
January 1, 1995... This volume states as its goal to introduce a new chapter in German literary history: to proclaim via German literary works of the eighties the arrival of postmodernity in German writing. This is at least the editorial intention of Michael...

Kirchen ohne Dichter?: Zum Verhaltnis von Literatur und Institutionalisierter Religion.
January 1, 1995... As the subtitle of Hans Banziger's study indicates, this book aims, like many other current ones, to connect literature with the larger world. In particular, Banziger's subtitle echoes the title of Theodore Ziolkowski's recent study, German...

Nordisk Litteraturvidenskab - Handbog Til Informationssogning.
January 1, 1995... Erland Munch-Petersen is the leading bibliographer of Scandinavia - a Dane who holds a Swedish professorship and whose latest book has been printed in Finland. His name is a guarantee of thorough, comprehensive, and dependable scholarship....

'Piers Plowman' and the Problem of Belief.
January 1, 1995... Britton Harwood's new book argues that the dreamer's goal in Piers Plowman is faith in Christ. Will's quest begins with the plea to Lady Holy Church, "kenne me kyndely on crist to beleue" (B.1.81), which here is taken to mean that though the...

The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives.
January 1, 1995... The coy title of this book hints at just how much the study will deliver, and what it will withhold. On the one hand, as the title promises, the book has a large range: the medieval poet in general, putting on a hat, the poet poseur as voyeur....

English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscripts and Print, 1475-1525.
January 1, 1995... David Carlson's book, as described in the introduction, is "a series of case studies, of particular English publications... [1475-1595] in manuscript or print or both" (p. 19). It explores the role these publications played in the economic...

Pen for a Party: Dryden's Tory Propaganda in its Contexts.
January 1, 1995... This excellent, original account of "Dryden's literary activity on behalf of Charles II and his policies" during 1681-1685 fulfills at last, and with good measure, the expectations raised by Harth's essay of 1975. "Legends No Histories" exposed...

Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in a Social Context.
January 1, 1995... Although this work may be regarded as a survey of theories of sensibility for the eighteenth century, its real contribution lies in a highly original reading of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa in terms of the readers's responses to the suffering...

William Wordsworth and the Mind of Man: The Poet as Thinker.
January 1, 1995... In this critical study, John Hayden argues that Wordsworth's general and persistent concern with "the Mind of Man" ("My haunt; and the main region of my song," Wordsworth wrote in the Prospectus to The Recluse) was a preoccupation with...

Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society.
January 1, 1995... Lord Byron's Strength has been long awaited by students of romanticism and, in many ways, it has been well worth the wait. For despite the achievements of critics such as Jerome McGann, Byron, unlike say Wordsworth, has been the subject of...

Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century.
January 1, 1995... Peripatetic, Wallace claims, is an "unrecognized literary mode," which she defines as a Wordsworthian "extension of georgic with excursive walking as the concrete term of its metaphors of cultivation." It is not often that a reviewer gets a book...

The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization.
January 1, 1995... Ezra Pound, for one, was sure that those who died in the First World War had done so for "an old bitch gone in the teeth," a civilization already "botched." While many championed Western civilization in whose name, after all, most European...

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.
January 1, 1995... Carlyle has fallen on the best and worst of times. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, he was the most influential writer in the English-speaking world. "There is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation," George Eliot...

Das Leben als Geschichte: Poetische Reflexion in Dickens' 'David Copperfield.'
January 1, 1995... In Das Leben als Geschichte, Matthias Bauer reads David Copperfield as a novel about novel-writing - or, rather, a novel that by viewing "life" both as lived experience ("Leben") and as the story of that experience ("Lebensgeschichte") enables...

The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne's Provincial Tales.
January 1, 1995... G. R. Thompson's Hawthorne is dialogical. When I say "Hawthorne," I mean this in the textual sense, for the psychobiographical, source of some recent challenging analysis, is firmly eschewed. Schlegel and recent narratology come together here to...

Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance.
January 1, 1995... In this ambitious book, Jerome Loving means to redefine the American Renaissance, extending the territory charted by F. O. Matthiessen in his monumental work of 1941. Matthiessen used the term, in Loving's words, to describe "the rebirth on...

Nobody's Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo.
January 1, 1995... Arnold Weinstein announces at the outset of Nobody's Home that this is "a very personal book" and one that "goes rather breezily against the grain of most critical work being done today" (pp. vii, viii). Indeed, Weinstein's prefatory statement of...