The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from July 1994

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from July 1994

Imperfective aspect and episode structure in 'Beowulf.'
July 1, 1994... Recent work in discourse analysis has shown that speakers and authors frequently manipulate aspect for narrative purposes. For example, shifts in aspect may be used to perform basic narrative operations such as foregrounding or backgrounding...

Legal and spiritual sanctuary in the 'Northern Homily Cycle' and 'Piers Plowman' B, XVII, 1-126.
July 1, 1994... The Northern Homily Cycle, composed in its original form circa 1300, extends to approximately 20,000 lines in each of its three versions, making it one of the most compendious and important homiliaries in Middle English.(1) Saara Nevanlinna...

From gyves to graces: 'Hamlet' and free will.
July 1, 1994... The opening lines of the final act of Hamlet confront us, in emblematic fashion, with two gravediggers preparing for the funeral of Ophelia and discussing her death. "Is she to be buried in Christian burial when she willfully seeks her own...

Verb-first position in the Old High German 'Isidor' translation.
July 1, 1994... In his 1974 book Beitrage zu Technik und Syntax althochdeutscher Ubersetzungen, Jorg Lippert gives the following tabular characterization of the placement of the finite verb in main declarative clauses in the Old High German Isidor...

Norwegianisms and hyper-Norwegianisms in AM 325 IIIalpha 4to/598 Ibeta 4to.
July 1, 1994... The manuscript fragments AM 325 III [alpha] 4 to (two leaves) and AM 598 I[beta] 4to (one leaf) are believed to be all that is left of a mid-fourteenth-century Icelandic codex of otherwise unknown provenance. AM 325 III [alpha] 4 to contains...

Strindberg's Letters.
July 1, 1994... There are about 10,000 letters extant from Strindberg's hands, a small number compared to the vast correspondence of Shaw or Voltaire, but a goodly number when set next to Ibsen's meager output. In this edition of Strindberg's correspondence,...

Die Versstrukturen der altsachsischen Stabreimgedichte Heliand und Genesis, vols. 1-2.
July 1, 1994... These two volumes offer a more detailed analysis of the alliterative meter of Old Saxon than it has ever received before, and they are a welcome addition to the sudden reflorescence of scholarship on early Germanic meter in recent years - an...

Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Handbuch, 3. Aufl., Bd. 14.
July 1, 1994... Volume 14 of the new Kosch incorporates an extensive and valuable bibliography of Friedrich Schiller. The compiler, Reinhard Muller, has performed his assignment with thoroughness but also with an understanding of the needs of the user. He...

Kudrun.
July 1, 1994... Winder McConnell's new Kudrun-translation is the third recent English translation of that problematical work. First came Brian Murdoch's in 1987 (Everyman) and even more recently the one by Marion Gibbs and me, a month or so before...

Die Handschriftliche Uberlieferung des 'Tristan' Gottfrieds von Strassburg: Untersucht an Ihren Fragmenten.
July 1, 1994... In this monumental study of the surviving fragments of Gottfried's Tristan, Rene Wetzel has undertaken something no one else has really dared, or had the patience, to do: he has reexamined the data upon which Friedrich Ranke based his...

Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic.
July 1, 1994... "Few writers are remembered more by their legend and less by the content of their writing than Jacob Boehme. Few have been rediscovered as often. And few have been marked by such contradictory cachets: as the humble soul and God-taught...

Samtliche Werke und Briefe, Bd. 1-2.
July 1, 1994... It should be stated at the outset that Silvio Vietta and Richard Littlejohns have produced the most scholarly and reliable edition of Wackenroder's writings published so far. Unless the manuscript of the Herzensergie[beta]ungen or of the...

The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 1, The Beginnings to 1066.
July 1, 1994... This volume comes at a time when new research tools and analytical methods are available for study of the earliest English. Control of the data has been much enhanced by publications from the Dictionary of Old English Project at the...

Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique.
July 1, 1994... There has recently developed a certain classicizing strain in Chaucer studies, as exemplified in such books as Alistair Minnis's Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, Winthrop Wetherbee's Chaucer and the Poets, and Judson Allen's The Ethical Poetic of...

Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England.
July 1, 1994... This study argues - sometimes brilliantly, sometimes tendentiously - that Tudor humanism shapes its culture's fundamental discursive practices. As Crane shows, the new humanist curriculum, which rested upon the linked techniques of gathering...

Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England.
July 1, 1994... On "Empire Day 1950" A. L. Rowse wrote the preface to the first volume of his influential two-volume anatomy of Elizabethan England, The England of Elizabeth (1950) and The Expansion of Elizabethan England (1955). As the date suggests,...

Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament.
July 1, 1994... Cultural Aesthetics presents a fascinating and detailed exploration of the role of the "ornamental" and the "trivial" among English aristocrats in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In it, Patricia Fumerton argues that the...

Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship.
July 1, 1994... In Licensed by Authority, Richard Burt pursues both a short-term and a longterm goal. The former is to investigate the historical specifics of Ben Jonson's relation to various forms of censorship, censure, and criticism; the latter is to...

The Making of a National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769.
July 1, 1994... Michael Dobson's thinly veiled bias against the preeminence that Shakespeare has long held in literature - a bias fashionable among a number of revisionist critics today - reveals itself, first and last, in the chapters of The Making of a...

Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome.
July 1, 1994... Since Martin Butler's ground-breaking Theatre and Crisis (1984), scholars have read the Caroline playwrights mainly in the hope of discovering their political implications or their political unconscious. Professor Clark chooses to focus on a...

Milton's History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution.
July 1, 1994... The two volumes under review are welcome contributions to the increasing number of critical studies focused on the literature of the English Revolution. Both books add to our understanding of the interaction between political contexts and...

Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640-1660.
July 1, 1994... The two volumes under review are welcome contributions to the increasing number of critical studies focused on the literature of the English Revolution. Both books add to our understanding of the interaction between political contexts and...

Contemplation of Created Things: Science in Paradise Lost.
July 1, 1994... The time is ripe for a comprehensive book on Milton and science. Two fine books on Harinder Singh Marjara's topic, Lawrence Babb's The Moral Cosmos of "Paradise Lost" (1970) and Kester Svendsen's Milton and Science (1956), are now dated....

Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689.
July 1, 1994... In two previous books, Dryden's Political Poetry (1972) and Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry (1984), Steven Zwicker has pursued the relation of poetry and politics in Restoration England. Here he continues that pursuit, and once again...

Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock-Epic.
July 1, 1994... In this stimulating and informative book, Gregory G. Colomb attempts to approach what he calls "the paradigmatic genre of high Augustan poetry" (p. xi) - mock-epic - from a new perspective. Colomb argues that,while mock-epic has received its...

Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature.
July 1, 1994... In reading the past from what Nietzsche calls "the highest strength of the present," Laura Brown demands that we recognize the politics of our literary practices and understand conceptually what we wish to judge. This analysis of women and...

Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels.
July 1, 1994... Patricia Meyer Spacks's study of the novel from Fielding to Scott has made a valuable contribution to the dialogue on sexual politics in literature. Following Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), Spacks concurs in reading...

The Poet Without a Name: Gray's Elegy and the Problem of History.
July 1, 1994... The Poet Without a Name is a beautifully conducted meditation about a difficult poem. Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard" should not be a difficult poem. Samuel Johnson said it "abounds with... sentiments to which every bosom...

William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement.
July 1, 1994... It is always an event to read a new book on Wordsworth or Coleridge by Professor Thomas McFarland, one of the world's leading experts on both poets. In his Preface McFarland indicates that this book does not pretend to be a comprehensive...

Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W.M. Thackeray.
July 1, 1994... "A literary man," explains W. M. Thackeray in Pendennis, "has often to work for his bread against time, or against his will, or in spite of his health, or of his indolence, or of his repugnance to the subject on which he is called to exert...

Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature.
July 1, 1994... Lloyd Davis maintains, in his introduction, that this volume of essays examines the articulation of virginity and representation. The virginal as a gendered system of power/knowledge and as cultural ideal, he says, operated in the nineteenth...

City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London.
July 1, 1994... In this cultural study of London in the 1880s, Judith Walkowitz identifies a formative moment in the history of feminist politics and the production of "popular narratives of sexual danger." Arguing that late-Victorian London became a...

Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot.
July 1, 1994... As their prefix indicates, both Poststructuralism and Postmodernism deny modernism's claims to newness and progress. All that can happen has already occurred; no longer does the present signify progress, but sameness masquerading as...

Sons and Lovers.
July 1, 1994... This new version of Sons and Lovers in the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence is unquestionably important for, as its editors announce: "Here at last is Sons and Lovers in full: uncut and uncensored. Until now it has only been available in the...

But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse.
July 1, 1994... One might at first think that this study is a production of the Grand Academy of Lagado or another chapter from the Tristra-paedia. Studying parentheses may seem as important as studying fingernails, as though some Swiftian mock of...

The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans?
July 1, 1994... There is, the Preacher said, no new thing under the sun. Dennis Baron's detailed study The English-Only Question is an exemplum of that text, showing that the issue of official status for English in the United States is topical, but not...

The Word in Black and White; Reading 'Race' in American Literature, 1638-1867.
July 1, 1994... This is bold and valuable work that deserves the attention of anyone interested in American literature. In her "Preface," Nelson acknowledges Toni Morrison's 1989 Princeton lecture on race, literature, and social responsibility in America as...

The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult.
July 1, 1994... Leon Surette knows he is swimming against prevailing currents. Modernism has been under attack for some time as elitist, politically reactionary, and excessively male. It has also been seen as a momentary congealing of cultural energies that...