The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from January 1998

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from January 1998

The power of knowledge and the location of the reader in 'Christ and Satan.' (Old English narrative poem)
January 1, 1998... Christ and Satan consists of three narratives taken from salvation history, the Fall of Satan, the Harrowing of Hell, and the Temptation, in that order.(1) Interspersed between the narratives are homiletic exhortations to the reader to...

Unguarded hearts: transgression and epistolary form in Aphra Behn's 'Love-Letters' and the 'Portuguese Letters.'
January 1, 1998... I The forsaken maiden has long been a staple of literature. By its nature, the lover's complaint, whether spoken by a man or a woman, must be unrequired and, in a real sense, unheard: it is a message that fails to reach its...

Stephen Crane, Ripley Hitchcock, and 'Maggie': a reconsideration.
January 1, 1998... On 10 February 1896, Stephen Crane wrote to Ripley Hitchcock of Appleton and Company regarding revisions he was then making in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets: "I have carefully plugged at the words which hurt. Seems to me the book wears...

'Hyperion' and 'Darkness at Noon': resemblance with a difference. (German novelists Friedrich Holderlin and Arthur Koestler)
January 1, 1998... The two works of the political imagination named in my title could not seem further apart, and they could not be much closer. At one stage of the ripening of their love, Diotima tells Hyperion: "dein Nahmensbruder, der herrliche Hyperion...

Mittlehochdeutsch: Eine Einfuhrung.
January 1, 1998... Dr. Weddige's introduction to Middle High German is expressly intended for the learner whose interest is to understand and translate medieval German literature (pp. xi-xii). Its six sections are: 1) a brief historical introduction and...

Nordisk og Nedertysk: Sprakkontakt og Sprakutvilking i Seinmellomalderen.
January 1, 1998... Low German and Scandinavian language contact during the late Middle Ages is, as the editor points out in the preface to the present volume, "et gammelt forskningsomrade" (p. 5). So old, in fact, that not very long ago it was a...

Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur von den Anfangen bis zum Beginn der Neuzeit, vol 3.
January 1, 1998... Since 1984 three of the projected six volumes of the history of premodern German literature edited by Joachim Heinzle have appeared. The most recent, Wolfgang Haubrichs's account of Die Anfange: Versuche volkssprachiger Schriftlichkeit...

The Dream of an Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary Culture.
January 1, 1998... This book is a welcome addition to the literature that has been accumulating on intellectual and cultural history in nineteenth-century France. In examining the theories of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and their impact on French...

Der Briefwechsel Zwischen Goethe un Zelter: Lebenskunst und Literarisches Projekt.
January 1, 1998... Dem Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter aus den Jahren 1799 bis 1832 hat die Forschung im Vergleich zu Goethes Korrespondenz mit Schiller und den Gesprachen mit Eckermann deutlich weniger Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet. Sieht man von...

Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff.
January 1, 1998... The editors of the new series "C. H. Beck: Wissen" could not have selected a better scholar than Gerhard Schulz to provide a clear and comprehensive overview of the origins, facets, and continuing fascination of European Romanticism. In...

Mythisches Denken Zwischen Romantik und Realismus: Zur Erfahrung Kultureller Fremdheit im Werk Heinrich Heines.
January 1, 1998... With this major study of myth and mythology in the work of Heinrich Heine, Markus Winkler establishes himself firmly as a significant scholar on the international Heine scene. Winkler presents a comprehensive and largely convincing...

Die Auferlegte Heimat: Else Lasker-Schulers Emigration in Palastina.
January 1, 1998... Trotz der schon uber mehrere Jahrzehnte anhaltenden Exilforschung ist das Exilwerk Else Lasker-Schulers bis vor kurzem nur vereinzelt berucksichtigt worden. Erst die Lasker-Schuler-Renaissance der letzten Jahre und die geplante...

The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche.
January 1, 1998... This volume of specially commissioned essays on Friedrich Nietzsche joins the others in the Cambridge series of companions to major Western philosophers, and like the others is intended for students and nonspecialists alike, a reference...

Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke.
January 1, 1998... Ralph Freedman's massive Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke is obviously a labor of love -- and determination. But as we read, the book's initially intimidating length becomes an anticipated joy. This critical biography contains an...

Being and Meaning in Thomas Mann's Joseph Novels.
January 1, 1998... For starters, the weaknesses of this study seem to emanate from the two series in which it appears: it is, in fact, both volume 22 of the Bithell Series of Dissertations and volume 44 of the Texts and Dissertations Series of the...

Die Bereinigte Moderne: Heinrich Manns 'Untertan' und Politische Publizistik in der Kontinuitat der Deutschen Geschichte Zwischen Kaiserreich und Drittem Reich.
January 1, 1998... The two-fold thesis of this slim volume is, first, that Heinrich Mann's novel of 1914, Der Untertan, successfully portrays unresolved contradictions of the Kaiserreich, which survived into the Weimar era and were among the seeds of the...

The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka's Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion.
January 1, 1998... The reader of this book is reminded immediately of the complexity of the Kafka world and of the enormity of potential influences leading to the creation of figures such as K., Gregor Samsa, the hunger artist, and the country doctor. Even...

The Captured Horizon: Heidegger and the "Nachtwachen von Bonaventura."
January 1, 1998... The highly probable identification of its author as the theaterman Klingemann some twenty years ago by Schillemeit and Fleig did not cap, but rekindled fascination with this perennially controversial book (henceforth abbreviated NW)....

Bibliographie der Sekundarliteratur zu Christa Wolf.
January 1, 1998... Die vorliegende Bibliographie verzeichnet auf 654 Seiten 3565 Titel aus der zwischen 1959 und 1991 erschienenen Sekundarliteratur zu Christa Wolf. Primarliteratur bleibt unberucksichtigt, doch sind neben literaturwissenschaftlichen...

The Dear Purchase: A Theme in German Modernism.
January 1, 1998... The late J. P. Stern's theme is concerned with representations of despair and secular redemption in twentieth-century German literature. He finds a family relationship in selective texts by Spengler, Ernst Junger, Thomas Mann, Hesse,...

Lexikon Literaturtheoretischer Werke.
January 1, 1998... It is hard to review a book for which one is clearly not the intended reader. This is a very "German" product, an attempt to compress a whole field (literary theory through the centuries) into encyclopedic form for the benefit of (German)...

Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon.
January 1, 1998... "Revenge tragedy" was a scholarly coinage of the early twentieth century, used of a specific run of English Renaissance plays from Kyd to Shirley. The conventions that set those plays apart are so conspicuous and self-conscious that they...

Harmful Eloquence: Ovid's 'Amores' from Antiquity to Shakespeare.
January 1, 1998... Stapleton offers ambitiously to trace the influence of Ovid's Amores on a long history of literature: from medieval scholastic writings, through the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, and into the English Renaissance. Two aspects of the Amores...

Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages.
January 1, 1998... Gender and Text is prefaced by a quotation from Helene Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1976), which exhorts women to write through their bodies" and go beyond a discourse that "laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word...

Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England.
January 1, 1998... This invaluable anthology of medieval popular science in the form of Middle English texts often translated from Latin originals offers in one convenient place for beginners as well as advanced students reliably edited samplings of...

The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book.
January 1, 1998... Intertextuality is a difficult discipline to master. Practiced conservatively -- acknowledging a conversation between or among texts only at points of indisputable verbal echo -- it differs little from the traditional philological study...

Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems.
January 1, 1998... This volume complements valuable existing Oxford Guides to The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, and among other things does the great service of presenting Chaucer's shorter poems as something other than "minor" works. Most...

Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration.
January 1, 1998... Stanton Linden's Darke Hieroglyphicks, a volume in the "Studies in the English Renaissance" series under the general editorship of John T. Shawcross, investigates the influence of alchemy on English literature of the late Middle Ages and...

Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance.
January 1, 1998... As Katharine Maus makes clear in the introduction to Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, recent studies of early modern English literature and culture have been much exercised by notions of privacy, invisibility, seclusion,...

The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre.
January 1, 1998... The long-awaited first book of Louis Montrose's maturity has finally appeared. It is not a large work, its scope is quite delimited, and its subject matter familiar. But it is for all that a triumph. Whereas the criticism of some...

Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context.
January 1, 1998... Patricia Parker' sample, four-hundred page Shakespeare from the Margins is one of the most distinctive scholarly books I have read in a long time. It opens door after door on undisclosed worlds of meaning. To read it is to experience...

Design by Motley.
January 1, 1998... Shakespearean scholars have recently started to treat the physical means of staging Shakespeare's plays as an index of how those works were perceived and appreciated at different times and in different places. They have also discovered...

Jonson and the Contexts of His Time.
January 1, 1998... These two volumes read Jonson's works in light of contemporary intellectual, social, or political contexts. Anthony Johnson's study of the masques, epitaphs, and epigrams of praise argues that their design is frequently influenced by a...

Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture.
January 1, 1998... These two volumes read Jonson's works in light of contemporary intellectual, social, or political contexts. Anthony Johnson's study of the masques, epitaphs, and epigrams of praise argues that their design is frequently influenced by a...

Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation.
January 1, 1998... The Romantic legacy of literary rebellion against orthodoxy is perhaps nowhere played out with greater regularity than in critical debates over the poet who inspired that legacy, John Milton. Playing Shelley to Milton's Prometheus, John...

Milton's Imperial Epic: "Paradise Lost" and the Discourse of Colonialism.
January 1, 1998... When it comes to placing Paradise Lost in the context of early modern colonialism, Martin Evans can legitimately claim to have been first in the field. As early ai 1973, long before the current preoccupation with colonialism in literary...

English Drama, 1660-1700.
January 1, 1998... In his impressive study, Derek Hughes warns against looking for an organic development of form or philosophy in the English drama between 1660-1700. Instead, Hughes traces "patterns of diversity" that characterize the drama of those...

Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624.
January 1, 1998... Mary Fuller's book is an invigorating addition to the current discussion of travel writing and its relationship to colonial theory which has captivated the critical community of late. What is so refreshing about Fuller's argument is her...

Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas.
January 1, 1998... A 1777 engraving titled "A Young Woman of Otaheite, Dancing" furnishes the visual interest for the cover of Far-Fetched Facts: a Europeanized woman, hair dressed around her cars, body arrayed in heavy silks and tassels, arms swaying,...

Reading Blake's Designs.
January 1, 1998... Although Christopher Heppner almost certainly did not set out to lower our spirits when he wrote Reading Blake's Designs, this book is unsettling, even depressing. That is not because the author's case is weak but because so much of it...

Sexual Power in British Romantic Poetry.
January 1, 1998... I was looking forward to reading this book, for, apart from Jean Hagstrum's delightful The Romantic Body: Love and Sexuality in Keats, Wordsworth and Blake (i 985), amazingly little has been written about 'sexual power' as we encounter...

Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel.
January 1, 1998... The subject of Bryan Shelley's Shelley and Scripture might strike some as curious, given that Percy Bysshe Shelley was prone, especially in his youth, to impassioned attacks against Christianity. Indeed, the Shelley who authored the...

Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction.
January 1, 1998... An increasingly graphocentric nineteenth-century culture enforces as much writing about orality as an increasingly countersensualist culture enforces discourse about sexuality, and for the same reason -- the attempt to establish...

Humor and Revelation in American Literature: The Puritan Connection.
January 1, 1998... When Pascal Covici, Jr. died suddenly in February of 1997, he had achieved decisive contributions to American literary studies. His 1962 volume, Mark Twain's Humor: The Image of a World, pioneered the reading of this nation's comic...

T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form.
January 1, 1998... Will the work of T.S. Eliot stand the test of time? It is something of a paradox that this writer who obsessed so much about tradition and the classics enjoyed such immediate fame and stature. It should not surprise us that Eliot's star...

Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives.
January 1, 1998... Until recently, narrative theory has seldom included research on lesbian stories, and lesbian literary criticism has had relatively little to say about formalistic or generic concerns. The resulting state of silence and ignorance...