The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from July 1995

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from July 1995

Old English waeta and the medical theory of the humours.
July 1, 1995... The surviving corpus of medical writings in Old English contains a valuable record of Graeco-Roman medical concepts available to the Anglo-Saxons and selected for transmission in the vernacular.(1) A survey of this corpus reveals the varying...

Loyal fathers and treacherous sons: familial politics in 'Richard II.'
July 1, 1995... The last act of Shakespeare's Richard II contains a pair of scenes that constitute a problem for the director and a puzzle for the critic, material so out of keeping with the rest of the play that even one of the dramatis personae is made to...

The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry.
July 1, 1995... In this polemical and absorbing study, Maria Damon waits but one sentence before launching one of the strongest of her claims for the poetry of her assorted "outcast" subjects: "In the hands of deterritorialized writers, poetry, itself...

Between Languages: The Uncooperative Text in Early Welsh and Old English Nature Poetry.
July 1, 1995... In these high and palmy days of theoretical enlightenment, when metonymy (contiguity/contrast) is privileged over metaphor (similitude), we are marcher lords, occupying liminal wastelands; we deploy our armies on the margins, exploring difference...

Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England.
July 1, 1995... The central claim of the first part of Seth Lerer's Chaucer and His Readers is not merely that the Chaucer we know today was constructed in the fifteenth century, but that he was invented by those scribes, readers, and poetic imitators...

Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England.
July 1, 1995... When a note in the margin of An Epistle to the Terrible Priests (1588) calls down "M. Marprelate" for blundering into a logical fallacy, Martin, speaking from the centered text, equates annotative "medling" with the way that bishops interfere in...

Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca.
July 1, 1995... Given the widely varying definitions of "influence" in today's influence studies, Robert Miola appropriately introduces his study of Shakespeare's debt to Seneca by theorizing about what constitutes a source and how sources function in the...

Milton in Government.
July 1, 1995... This learned, lucid account of Milton's participation in government is easily the most careful study of the poet's relation to the protectorate to date. Unfortunately, since it was Milton's primary task as Oliver Cromwell's Latin secretary to...

John Milton: The Self and the World.
July 1, 1995... The second effort by John T. Shawcross to have won the coveted James Holly Hanford Award of the Milton Society of America, John Milton: The Self and the World, is the most capacious and captivating of this critic's books - the most provocative,...

Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere.
July 1, 1995... Eighteenth-century novelists flaunted their socioethical virtues. Not only did their didactic claims help tie their fledgling, popular form to the "highest" genres of the past but those claims also spoke to a Britain that had not achieved even...

The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding.
July 1, 1995... When Henry Fielding invited James Harris to correspond with him, he emphasized that he seldom corresponded with anyone. The point is verified by the frequency with which his letters refer to his gout as the excuse for writing rather than waiting...

Tobias Smollett: Poems, Plays, and "The Briton."
July 1, 1995... Rarely has dedicated high-level scholarship been devoted to so undeserving a subject. Byron Gassman writes in his preface: "I recognize that most of Smollett's writings herein printed are properly labeled 'minor,' and I would not justify my...

Victorian Poets and Romantic Poets: Intertextuality and Ideology.
July 1, 1995... Few would resist a fresh look at Victorian poetry, one that aims at integrating intertextual and ideological approaches under the handy rubric of New Historicism. Although Harold Bloom has made poets the primary sufferers of an anxiety of...

Browning's Hatreds.
July 1, 1995... This is a wide-ranging and learned study that explores in considerable detail the instances of hatred and hating in Browning's work and the larger questions these instances raise about various aspects of Browning's creativity. In large measure...

Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment.
July 1, 1995... As Frank Kermode remarks in An Appetite for Poetry (1989), the war between theorists and the common reader has reached a point at which the theorists can seem to be exercising a kind of arid totalitarianism in departments of English,...

James Joyce and the Question of History.
July 1, 1995... The history of historical writing on Joyce is a curious one of brilliant near misses. Like many of the modernists, Joyce began to receive serious academic attention in the era of the New Criticism, and his complex verbal textures kept the...

D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology.
July 1, 1995... As Anne Fernihough notes early on in her study, D. H. Lawrence's critical fortunes have foundered in the wake of contemporary theoretical approaches that have made short shrift of both misogyny and post-Romantic organicism. D. H. Lawrence:...

D.H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works: A Commentary.
July 1, 1995... Michael Black's commentary on D. H. Lawrence's early philosophical works is part of an ambitious, ongoing project. In 1986 Black published a valuable study of Lawrence's early fiction that focused on Lawrence's distinctive, recurrent "figures of...

Paine, Scripture, and Authority: "The Age of Reason" as Political and Religious Ideas.
July 1, 1995... In this concise and closely reasoned book, Edward H. Davidson and William J. Scheick examine Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason as the culminating expression of an ambivalence toward authority that pervades Paine's life and writing. The preliminary...

Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles.
July 1, 1995... Sharon Cameron's latest book refreshes and substantially expands this culture's dialogue with Emily Dickinson and stands out even in the crowd of good recent reconsiderations. In less than two hundred pages of discussion, Choosing Not Choosing...

To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature.
July 1, 1995... Today no one needs to be reminded of how grossly negligent traditional American literary scholarship has been regarding the important role of African American writing in our national culture. Whether one surveys anthologies published before 1970,...

Medieval Scandinavia: From Conversion to Reformation Circa 800-1500.
July 1, 1995... Intense specialization and a strong local focus among Scandinavian historians, coupled with an emphasis on different periods and aspects of the Middle Ages in each country, have made the writing of medieval history in Nordic Europe a strictly...

Personnamn I Nordiska Och Andra Germanska Fornsprak: Handlingar Fran NORNA:s Attonde Symposium I Uppsala 16-19 Augusti 1991.
July 1, 1995... After a foreword and an introduction by Thorsten Andersson this volume continues with thirteen chapters on aspects of personal names, of which eleven concern themselves with Nordic names and name giving, one with Old Dutch, and one with a runic...

Alvissmal: Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Kultur Skandinaviens: Herausgegeben von Edgar Haimerl, Thomas Krommelbein, Donald Tuckwiller und Andreas Vollmer.
July 1, 1995... Readers from outside the medieval Scandinavian field who find themselves perplexed by the main title of this attractive new journal, edited at Freie Universitat Berlin, may wish to know that the italicized portion, mal, is a common noun for...

Snorri Sturluson: Kolloquium anlaBlich der 750: Wiederkehr seines Todestages.
July 1, 1995... In 1990 the Sigurdur Nordal Institute in Reykjavik celebrated Snorri Sturluson, Iceland's most famous son, by an international conference, which resulted in a significant collection of articles (Snorrastefna, JEGP 93 [1994]: 607-10). A year later...

Tulkun Heidarvigasogu.
July 1, 1995... The relatively few monographs on family sagas to date have tended to be either sternly philological or literarily freewheeling. The philological style originated with Konrad Maurer and Bjorn M. Olsen and culminated in Einar Ol. Sveinsson's Um...

Halldorsstefna 12.-14 Juni 1992.
July 1, 1995... This second volume in the series of publications by the Stofnun Sigurdhar Nordals contains papers delivered at a conference held by the Stofnun on 12-14 June 1992. Although the book does not carry "festschrift" in its title, it may be designated...

The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel.
July 1, 1995... This translation, with copious footnotes expressing G. Ronald Murphy's views, continues the interpretations and partial translations given in his previous book, The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century...

Philipp von Zesen: Samtliche Werke: Lyrik I.
July 1, 1995... Volume 1, part 2, continuing the fine tradition established in the first part of the volume (1980), brings together several individual publications of Philipp von Zesen (1619-89). The Gekreutzigter Liebsflammen oder Geistlicher Gedichte...

Philipp von Zesen: Samtliche Werke: Adriatische Rosemund.
July 1, 1995... With the publication of Adriatische Rosemund the modern edition of Zesen's novels is complete. It is perhaps fitting that the Adriatische Rosemund, Zesen's first novel (1645) be the last one to be edited for the Samtliche Werke, since it is the...

Die Nymphe Noris in zweyen Tagezeiten Vorgestellet.
July 1, 1995... By a happy coincidence, the first scholarly edition of Hellwig's magnum opus reached this reviewer's desk during the week when the city of Nurnberg celebrated the 350th anniversary of the "Pegnesischer Blumenorden." Not only was Hellwig a...

Griedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: Briefe 1795-1798.
July 1, 1995... What writer today would not be delighted to receive a communication from his or her publisher asking whether the author "wurklich geneigt seyn mir, den Verlag der neuesten Ausgabe Ihrer Oden zu uberlassen, so bestatige ich das Honorar . . . und...

Handeln im Drama: Theorie und Praxis bei J. Chr. Gottsched und J.M.R. Lenz.
July 1, 1995... This publication of Thorsten Unger's 1992 University of Gottingen dissertation is an innovative and well-documented analysis of the relationship between the theory of action and the dramatic theory and practice of Gottsched and Lenz. Divided into...

Space to Act: The Theater of J.M.R. Lenz.
July 1, 1995... When Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz was found dead on a street in Moscow in 1792, he had already been forgotten by most of his contemporaries, and Goethe's critical portrait of his former friend nearly finished him off for posterity. Even without...

Holderlins Spate Gedichtfragmente: "Unendlicher Deutung Voll."
July 1, 1995... It is surely a measure of strength in a contribution to Holderlin studies if in addition to interpreting a problematic work it newly establishes the text. Preeminent among texts in need of being so established are those found in the "Homburger...

Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and The Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative.
July 1, 1995... As its title indicates, this study provides a political, social, and historical context for its analyses of musical evocations in significant modernist German-language imaginative writing within the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning...

The temptation of Milton's Eve: "Words, Impregn'd / With Reason."
July 1, 1995... "Out of my sight, thou Serpent" (X. 867). In this harsh repudiation of Eve, fallen Adam's name-calling contrasts with his prelapsarian naming of the animals ("I nam'd them, as they pass'd, and understood / Thir Nature" [VIII. 352-53]) and has...

American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique.
July 1, 1995... By Walter Kalaidjian. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Pp. xvi+316. $55 (cloth); $18.50 (paper). American Culture Between the Wars announces its topic straightforwardly in its title, but the interbellum culture Walter Kalaidjian...