The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from July 1993

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from July 1993

Katalog der deutschprachigen illustrierten Handschriften des Mittelalters.
July 1, 1993... With the publication of the fifth fascicle in 1991, volume 1 of the catalogue of illustrated medieval manuscripts in the German language - despite the title, the catalogue also includes illustrated imprints of works that have been transmitted...

Fruhe deutsche Novellenkunst.
July 1, 1993... A heretofore unpublished doctoral dissertation (Heidelberg, 1950) of Professor Stutz, who died in 1989, this study appears now both as a personal homage on the part of the editors (see the memorial by Schwab, pp. i-v) and because it is...

Literatur zwischen Horen und Lesen: Wandel von Funktion und Rezeption im spaten Mittelalter, Fallstudien zu Beheim, Folz und Sachs.
July 1, 1993... In these richly suggestive accounts of the lives and works of three late-medieval poets, Ingeborg Spriewald traces the evolution of a literary profession through a period of massive cultural and technological transformation. Individually, each...

Reimpaarspruche und Lieder.
July 1, 1993... The nineteenth century's summary rejection of much of the vernacular literature of the later Middle Ages seems today little more than a curious footnote to the history of literary scholarship. What our intellectual forebears took as the excess...

The Heroism of Love in Hoffmannswaldau's 'Heldenbriefe.'(Brief Article)
July 1, 1993... The best words to describe this study of the Heldenbriefe of Christian Hofmann von Hoffmannswaldau is "thorough," "exhaustive," and "comprehensive." This expanded version of the author's dissertation gives an overview of the reception of...

Christian Weise: Samtliche Werke.
July 1, 1993... It has been some time now since a volume of the collected works of Christian Weise has appeared. The edition came to a rather abrupt halt when the original editor, John D. Lindberg, died suddenly in September 1988. There has been little...

Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics.
July 1, 1993... Lesley Sharpe, the author of Schiller and the Historical Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; see JEGP, 83 [1984], 282-84), has written a thorough introduction to Schiller's works. About his life we are told only the absolute...

Illusion and Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era.
July 1, 1993... Outstanding work sometime gathers in batches, and we should be grateful whenever that happens. In Das Spiel im Spiel (1977), Manfred Schmeling paved the way for a comparative treatment of the tradition of self-reflexive drama from the...

Bending the Frame in the German Cyclical Narrative: Achim von Arnim's 'Der Wintergarten' and E.T.A. Hoffmann's 'Die Serapionsbruder.'
July 1, 1993... Vickie Ziegler's announced focus in this study is "the interaction between the frame and the inner stories" (p. 3) in Arnim's Wintergarten and Hoffmann's Serapionsbruder. Ziegler charges previous scholarship with a "willful decision to...

Dialogue and Narrative Design in the Works of Adalbert Stifter.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1993... Brigid Haines's revised dissertation follows a format popular in those studies of the 1960s and 1970s which aimed at combining literary or socioliterary theory and the practice of interpretation. Before examining texts by Adalbert Stifter she...

Universitatsbibliothek Dusseldorf: Katalog der Thomas-Mann-Sammlung, 9 vols.
July 1, 1993... In the past forty-seven years, a number of research tools for studying Thomas Mann's works have appeared both in this country and in Europe. The first of them, still useful today after almost half a century, is Walter A. Reichart's survey,...

Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic.
July 1, 1993... It is no wonder that after defeat in World War I and the harsh dictates imposed by the Versailles treaty, the frustrations of so many former front line soldiers and monarchistically minded burghers should find expression in a number of...

Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism.
July 1, 1993... This volume is a paperback republication of a collection of essays originally published in 1989, most of which are revised versions of papers presented at a conference held in 1986 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Given the fact that a...

The Fortunes of German Writers in America: Studies in Literary Reception.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1993... This volume contains a selection from papers presented at a 1990 conference at the University of South Carolina entitled "The Fame of German Writers in America." There are general essays on German literature in South Carolina, post World War I...

Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media.
July 1, 1993... Radical Artifice is an interesting, perceptive, rewarding, and important book, easily the best of Marjorie Perloffs many books and one of the most important books yet written on contemporary poetry. Its focus is the effect that the electronic...

The Meaning of Literature.
July 1, 1993... University presses always ask their consultants if a work under evaluation might be adopted for graduate classes. Books are so specialized and expensive these days that I've rarely seen one that a student would want to own rather than check out...

Saint and Hero: Andreas and Medieval Doctrine.
July 1, 1993... Robert Boenig uses a chain metaphor - "author-text-reader-critic" - to define his critical approach to his text for analysis, an Old English poem that modern editors have named Andreas in honor of the reluctant hero whose rescue of a fellow...

The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century.
July 1, 1993... The "tremulous hand" was attached to a Benedictine monk who labored in the Worcester Cathedral Priory as late as the middle of the thirteenth century. This otherwise anonymous scribe is familiar to Anglo-Saxonists by his whimsical nickname...

John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the 'Confessio Amantis.'
July 1, 1993... The Confessio Amantis has never fit comfortably into the role of versified sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins to which received opinion, and one traditional line of criticism, have consigned it. If it is such, then Gower didn't manage it very...

The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.
July 1, 1993... Charles Owen's book provides the most detailed examination of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales since the Manly-Rickert edition of 1940. Owen has carefully studied nearly all of the manuscripts and compared his observations with the...

Chaucer's Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in 'The Canterbury Tales.'
July 1, 1993... Chaucer's Dante gives an intense, subtly articulated, and highly original reading of two great poems and of the relationship between them. it reflects the years of dedication that have gone into its and their writing. It recognizes at the...

Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender.
July 1, 1993... This is an enormously bracing and stimulating book, well and closely argued, sensitive to the text, full of surprises and revisions that will fundamentally change the way we read Chaucer's representation of the sexes. Hansen's is a deeply...

Metaphysical Wit.
July 1, 1993... The late A. J. Smith, formerly Professor of English at the University of Southampton, is well known for his many contributions to the field of seventeenth-century English literature. His present work, following Literary Love (1983) and The...

Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor.
July 1, 1993... This is a brave (seventeenth-century senses intended) book, expecting of its readers the degree of concentration it attributes to its poets, an expectation which seems fair enough, if at times unremitting in the claims it lays on us. Yet it is...

Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics.
July 1, 1993... This book makes a major contribution to the rapidly growing field of gay history. Smith characterizes his purpose as an attempt "to define the |imaginative vocabulary' that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers possessed for talking about...

Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society.
July 1, 1993... As the subtitle indicates, the scope of Anne Jennalie Cook's new book is broad. Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society examines the cultural assumptions governing marriage negotiations and actual courtship practice in early...

Transfigured Rites in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry.
July 1, 1993... In that central document of English Renaissance hermeneutics, An Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney points out that the success of "Poesy [as] an art of imitation [that would] teach and delight" depends on the "learn[ing]" of the readers:...

The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution: 1642-1660.
July 1, 1993... Like Milton's "Lycidas" and Hobbes's Leviathan, "the English Revolution" seems extraordinarily fertile for interesting interpretations. Their diversity is astounding. Marvell held the radical goal too good a cause to be fought for. Men should...

The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age.
July 1, 1993... Joseph Levine's The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age attempts to assess the issues, personalities, and writings associated with the intellectual and rhetorical debate between the "ancients" and the "moderns,"...

Oracles and Hierophants: Constructions of Romantic Authority.
July 1, 1993... David Riede's intention is to question "our inherited models of Romantic authority" together with "the continuing Romantic assumptions of much of our criticism" (p. 278). His study is therefore broadly revisionist in the vein of the New...

Jane Austen's Novels: The Art of Clarity.
July 1, 1993... "It is the serious duty of professionals," Roger Gard writes, "to try to speak as far as possible to the common reader" (p. 5). The aim of his book, thus generally stated, is impeccable. Who could dispute the value of the endeavor, as he puts...

Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D.H. Lawrence.
July 1, 1993... In the ten chapters of Erotic Faith, Robert Polhemus explores twelve major novels by Austen, Scott, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Hardy, Joyce, and Lawrence. Along the way, he touches on a good many more fictional...

Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel.
July 1, 1993... In the sense that Professor Litvak intends it, "theatricality" has little to do with the actual theater. "Unlike |theater,' which may denote a fixed place, institution, or art form," he writes, "|theatricality' resists such circumscription,...

Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse.
July 1, 1993... One might expect, given the current critical climate, a book so titled to take up a Bakhtinian analysis of Conrad's novelistic discourse as a dialogical critique of nonfictional discourses: Nostromo as heteroglossic commentary on colonialism or...

Narrative Con/Texts in 'Ulysses.'
July 1, 1993... Bernard Benstock opens his Narrative Con/Texts in "Ulyses" with a quotation from Valentine Cunningham: "Bluntly: all texts and contexts will be thought of here as tending to lose their separate identities, collapsing purposefully into each...

In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing.
July 1, 1993... Colloquialisms pepper the language and a playful, genial host presides in this engaging miscellany of essays on nineteenth-century American romantic writings. Most of the chapters essay their arguments in lecture hall rhetoric. Porte's new book...

'Wanderer,' lines 45-57 and the Birds of Diomede.
July 1, 1993... 45 Donne onwaecneo eft wineleas guma, gesiho him biforan fealwe wegas, bapian brimfuglas, braedan fepra, hreosan hrim ond snaw, hagle gemenged. ponne beoo py hefigran heortan benne, 50 sare aefter swaesne....

Guiding the glance: Spenser, Milton, and 'Venus looking glas.'
July 1, 1993... In Book IV of Paradise Lost Eve sees her reflection in a pool, an apparent allusion to Ovid's tale of Narcissus. The problem for commentators is how to interpret Eve's fascination with her reflection. Some critics regard the allusion to...

Mr. Thomas Hardy composing a lyric.
July 1, 1993... What would happen, I have sometimes wondered, if we put aside all scholarly detachment and the deliberateness of our critical methods in order to ask some simple and perhaps naive questions about Thomas Hardy and his poetry - questions like Why...

"Girt and ready to ascend": a dewdrop travels through four languages.
July 1, 1993... Some literary motifs, especially those known by Latin names such as "carpe diem," "vita brevis, ars longa," "et in arcadia ego," have a long and resplendent history. An author who incorporates such motifs in his work does so in the awareness...

The development of Old Norse textual worlds: genealogical structure as a principle of literary organisation in early Iceland.
July 1, 1993... Sir Guyon chaunst eke on another booke, That hight Antiquitie of Faerie lond, In which when as he greedily did looke, Th'off-spring of Elues and Faries there he fond, As it deliuered was from hond to hond: Whereat they burning both with feruent...

'Ein Spiegel mit mir darin: Sarah Kirschs Lyrik.
July 1, 1993... Die vorliegende Studie, die die Autorin wohl kurz vor oder wahrend der hektischen Ereignisse im Herbst 1989 abschloB (vgl. "Nachwort", S. 172), ist eine Art Leseanleitung, die Sarah Kirschs poetische Entwicklung nachzeichnet, also die Stationen...

Die Moderne Parabel: Parabel und Parabolik in Theorie und Geschichte.
July 1, 1993... Elm nimmt "die Parabet und das Parabolische als wesentliches Mcrkmal der modernen Literatur" und daher konsequent als Ma[beta]stab fur Intention, Verfahrensweise, bewu[beta]tseinsgeschichtlichen und damit dichterischen Rang bedeutender Autoren...