The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from January 1996

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from January 1996

Literacy and orality in Anglo-Saxon poetry: horizontal displacement in 'Andreas.'
January 1, 1996... How and in what ways habits of literacy acquired in the schoolroom may have influenced or altered the ancient arts of oral poetry in the composition of those poems that were committed to writing in Anglo-Saxon England are difficult questions. I...

The death of a silent woman: voice and power in Chaucer's Manciple's tale.
January 1, 1996... Women in The Canterbury Tales generally come out well. The situations in which they are placed are often difficult, but with only a handful of exceptions women characters in the tales overcome their disadvantaged positions to emerge with...

Milton's Eve and the cult of Elizabeth I.
January 1, 1996... "Was shee thy God. . . " Paradise Lost, X. 145 ". . . thou wert a fleshly deity." In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory, by Anne Bradstreet (l. 12) When he inspires her dream in Book IV and as he...

Die deutsch Literatur des Mittelaters, Verfasserlexikon.
January 1, 1996... The average reader consults a literary lexicon to seek information concerning a particular text or author, but hardly ever explores an entire volume to tap its wealth. That pleasure is left to the reviewer who may be surprised at the new world...

A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry.
January 1, 1996... A comparative study of some Old Norse and Old English wisdom poetry, this book is based on the literary method of the close reading. Along the way we also encounter gnomes, and the last three chapters set out to examine the role gnomes play in...

Consonant Strength in Upper German Dialects.
January 1, 1996... It is agreed that Upper German dialects, Alemannic and Austro-Bavarian, have two series of obstruents. They are commonly termed fortis and lenis, hart/weich, tendu/lache, but there is no universal agreement on the designations. There is also no...

Priest Konrad's Song of Roland.
January 1, 1996... To my knowledge, this is the first English translation of the German Rolandslied, and we are indebted to J. Wesley Thomas for making it available, as we are for so many other Middle High German works. It seems to be increasingly necessary in...

Willeham: Nach der Handschrift 857 der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen.
January 1, 1996... This edition of Wolfram's Willehalm supplants the earlier one by Albert Leitzmann (1905, 1906;(5) 1963) in the Altdeutsche Textbibliothek series, but it is much more than a revision of the earlier text; it is a completely new one. Having said...

Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany.
January 1, 1996... Broadsheets and street songs of the Early Modern Era have recently been turned into a pool of evidence for studying a period of great turmoil and change. From Robert Darnton's examination of bizarre social and political phenomena to New...

The Impatient Muse: Germany and the Sturm und Drang.
January 1, 1996... In this concise, provocative study, Alan C. Leidner suggests that we turn away from the question of whether or not the Sturm und Drang was an integral part of the European Enlightenment to focus on its role in the particular context of...

The Problematic Bourgeois: Twentieth Century Criticism on Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and the Magic Mountain.
January 1, 1996... In his "Preface" Hugh Ridley assures his readers that the book does not present a "survey of research," but rather "it aims to show the pleasures and insights afforded by literary criticism, and to convey a sense of . . . evolution changing...

A History of Old English Meter.
January 1, 1996... This book will be an essential reference for all who study either metrics or the history of the English language during the Old English period. It is massive in its detail, complex in its arguments, and occasionally difficult to follow; but it...

Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth.
January 1, 1996... Since at least 1908, when W. P. Ker published his highly influential Epic and Romance, it has been common critical assumption that the tradition of the classical epic vanishes in the Middle Ages and re-emerges only in the Renaissance. In this...

Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections.
January 1, 1996... This interesting new anthology on Old and Middle English literature contends that the categories of class and gender are interdependent and mutually productive within medieval texts. Its editors and authors examine other intersections as well:...

Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts.
January 1, 1996... Tim Machan's book is a splendid study of textual theory and practice before the advent of printing. I have not read elsewhere such a thoughtful discussion of the principles underlying medieval and Renaissance text production. Much of this...

Pencils Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting.
January 1, 1996... Few students of the English Renaissance can fail to have been fascinated and perhaps ultimately frustrated with the struggle to understand the relationship, as perceived in the Renaissance, between poetry and painting. Judith Dundas, whose...

The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England.
January 1, 1996... After reading Jean Howard's newest book, I am prepared to say that we have entered a new period of "normal criticism" in Renaissance studies and that Howard's study, a synthesis of feminist and Marxist practices informed by new-historicist...

Spenser's Secret Career.
January 1, 1996... We have always known that Edmund Spenser was a secretary, first to John Young, Bishop of Rochester, and then to Lord Grey during his tenure as Lord Deputy of Ireland. Equally familiar is the record following Grey's recall in 1582, which shows...

Engaging with Shakespeare: Responses of George Eliot and Other Women Writers.
January 1, 1996... This is a sympathetic volume. It treats responses to Shakespeare of women writers in a four-century span, with the greatest depth on Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and, above all, George Eliot. Women authors stepped forth into greatness...

Renaissance Discourses of Desire.
January 1, 1996... Readers of late English Renaissance literature have been indebted through the last two decades to the volumes edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. These volumes have been not only showplaces for new and original scholarship but...

George Herbert's Christian Narrative.
January 1, 1996... The claim that George Herbert is one of the greatest English lyrical poets does not sit well with Harold Toliver, unless the term "lyrical" is radically redefined. Toliver is second to no one in his admiration for Herbert's achievement: he places...

Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740.
January 1, 1996... Conscious of the outcry that his study may well provoke among scientists, internalist historians of science, and other apologists for the discourse, Robert Markley closes Fallen Languages with an epilogue that attempts in part to contextualize,...

Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England.
January 1, 1996... Spectacular Politics is an impressive book, utilizing wide reading in primary documents of Backscheider's period, in traditional literary studies, and, especially, in the newer theoretical criticism of Jameson, Habermas, Gramsci, Geertz, and...

Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and Society from Defoe to Austen.
January 1, 1996... Eighteenth-century women are more marginalized now than they were in their own time, according to Mona Scheuermann. She argues against interpretive models which foreground patriarchy and stereotype women as passive victims of family structures...

Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827.
January 1, 1996... With Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827, Gary Kelly extends his previous work on the fiction of the Romantic period to deal centrally with three women writers of the day, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton, whose...

Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach.
January 1, 1996... Gothic fiction has become the object of increasing critical attention. Its popularity, even disreputability, as well as its fantastic elements and its preoccupation with terror and oppression, have especially attracted interpreters intent on...

Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse.
January 1, 1996... The dialogical theories of Mikhail Bakhtin have received a great deal of attention in the West over the last decade or so, particularly in nineteenth-century studies. In studies ranging from the interlocutive Wordsworth of Don Bialostosky's...

In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women.
January 1, 1996... This intelligent, sharp, and wide-ranging study of Romantic theater provides a new and important understanding of a literary genre much maligned during the Romantic period. Focusing primarily on Coleridge, the study tracks that writer's...

Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems.
January 1, 1996... Jack Stillinger is not coy or opaque in his choice of titles. Just as his last book, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), wore its ideological colors bravely ("solitary genius" is a "myth" and authorship...

John Clare in Context.
January 1, 1996... "Clare was in the first generation of poets to know . . . that human beings are part of an ecosystem. . . . Clare understood the definitive value of environment, context" (pp. 290, 291). So Marilyn Gaull in the final essay in this collection, and...

Ruskin: The Genesis of Invention.
January 1, 1996... Sheila Emerson's Ruskin: The Genesis of Invention is an eye-opening account of John Ruskin's prose and verse produced in childhood and of the continuity between these writings and those Ruskin produced in adulthood. With a daunting expanse of...

The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill.
January 1, 1996... The sickroom is as familiar and central a feature of Victorian literature and culture as the schoolroom, but while studies of the thematics of education in nineteenth-century novels abound, the literary representation of illness has been a...

Erzahler und Perspektive bei Robert Louis Stevenson.
January 1, 1996... The centennial of Robert Louis Stevenson's death, 1994, prompted increased critical attention, both to the man and his works, though not nearly as much attention as devoted Stevenson readers might have wished. Nineteen ninety-four saw the...

Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney.
January 1, 1996... This is an ambitious book that attempts to substantiate several claims set out in the introduction, primarily that poets of the twentieth century "self-consciously depart from generic norms by writing nonconsolatory elegies" (p. 9). Specifically,...

Herman Bangs Regiekunst in "Hendes Hojhed."
January 1, 1996... Herman Bangs Theaterleidenschaft, die sein erzahlerisches Werk wesentlich gepragt hat, auBert sich bekanutlich seit dem Debutroman Haablose Slaegter (1880) in thematisch-motivischer Behandlung verschiedener Aspekte aus der Welt des Theaters. Ihre...

Die Ubersetzungsliteratur als Unterhaltung des Romantischen Lesers: Ein Beitrag zur Rezeptionsforschung.
January 1, 1996... Von Erland Munch-Petersen. (Buchwissenschaftliche Beitrage aus dem Deutschen Bucharchiv Munchen, Bd. 36.) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991. Pp. 321. DM 118. Diese Untersuchung befaBt sich mit den in Massenauflagen verbreiteten, ins Danische...

The Fin-De-Siecle Culture of Adolescence.
January 1, 1996... By John Neubauer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 288; 17 illustrations. $30. DaB Kultur "Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit" (P. L. Berger) ist, gilt heute als ausgemachte Sache. Dennoch konnte diese Definition leicht...

Erwin Piscator und die Schicksale der Berliner Dramaturgie: Nachtrage zu einem Kapitel Deutscher Theatergeschichte.
January 1, 1996... Von Hermann Haarmann. Munchen: Fink, 1991. Pp. 191. Piscator war als Intendant und Autor des Politischen Theaters (1929) einer der wegweisenden Personlichkeiten der Theaterlandschaft der Weimarer Republik. Die "Berliner Dramaturgie" sieht...

Max Frisch: "Stiller," "Homo faber" und "Mein Name sei Gantenbein."
January 1, 1996... Von Frederick Alfred Lubich. (Text und Geschichte: Modellanalysen zur deutschen Literatur, 23.) Munchen: Fink, 1990. Pp. 151. Die Fachliteratur uber die drei o.a. Romane, die der Autor in bezug auf Gunter Grass' Danziger Trilogie auf Grund...