The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from July 1996

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from July 1996

On secondary and tertiary stress in Old English verses.
July 1, 1996... Except for Eduard Sievers's fundamental, pioneering exposition of the five types, the detailed reviews of the verse forms by John C. Pope and A.J. Bliss have no doubt been the most influential on conceptions of Old English meter during this half...

Langland's 'lewed vicory' reconsidered. (William Langland)
July 1, 1996... A figure in Piers Plowman who has received undeservedly scant attention is the "rewed vicory."(1) Some scholars focus upon the vicar's denunciation of the corrupt pope and cardinals and so interpret him as a trustworthy voice.(2) To Derek...

The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1800.
July 1, 1996... When we speak of a poet as being of a particular religion, we do not imply in him completeness or orthodoxy, or even explicitness of doctrine, but only that his secular utterance has the decisive mark of the religion upon it. --Lionel Trilling(1)...

The 'Jungeres Hildebrandslied' in its early modern printed versions: a contribution to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reception history.
July 1, 1996... The invention of the printing press exerted a remarkable influence on the way late-medieval culture transformed and simultaneously prepared the basis for its own demise.(2) The press was first developed in the early 1430s, and had reached...

The Germanic Languages.
July 1, 1996... Edited by Ekkehard Konig and Johan van der Auwera. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xv + 631. $99.95. A caveat concerning this review: Quite unusually (I thought), the publisher provided JEGP with a set of uncorrected page proofs...

The Unaccented Vowels of Proto-Norse.
July 1, 1996... (NOWELE: Supplement Volumes, 11.) By Martin Syrett. Odense: University Press, 1994. Pp. 323. Dkr. 300. This reworked dissertation presents a wide-ranging review of what the title says, but not in a form for beginners--nor even for the more...

Pall Jonsson Skalholtsbiskup: Nokkrrar athuganir a sogu hans og kirkjustjorn.
July 1, 1996... NOKKRAR ATHUGANIR A SOGU HANS OG KIRKJUSTJORN. By Sveinbjorn Rafnsson. (Ritsafn Sagnfraedistofnunar, 33.) Reykjavik: [Sagnfraedistofnun Haskola Islands], 1993. Pp. 139. Pall Jonsson, bishop of Skalholt from 1195 to 1211, is a much-neglected...

Magnusarkver: The Writing of Magnus Olafsson of Laufus.
July 1, 1996... By Anthony Faulkes. (Stofnun Arna Magnussonar a Islandi Rit, 40.) Reykjavik: Stofnun Arna Magnussonar, 1993. Pp. 144. Ikr. 3,500. The subject of this book is the poet, scholar, and priest Magnus Olafsson (ca. 1573-1636). A prolific and diverse...

The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200.
July 1, 1996... By C. Stephen Jaeger. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Pp. xvi + 515. $39.95. This is an ambitious, erudite, and difficult book. Its ambition is to become a companion volume to C. H. Haskins's The Renaissance of the...

The Lament of the Nibelungen (Div Chlage).
July 1, 1996... Translated by Winder McConnell. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture: Medieval Texts and Translations.) Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. Pp. xxiii + 219. $55.95. This is the first English translation of Div Chlage and, as...

Mechthild von Magdeburg: A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes.
July 1, 1996... By Frank Tobin. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. Pp. xii + $55.95. The monograph on Mechthild von Magdeburg (ca. 1207- ca. 1282) is published in the series "Literary Criticism in Perspective," one of the aims of which, according to the...

Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766): Harbinger of German Classicism.
July 1, 1996... By P.M. Mitchell. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture.) Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. Pp. x + $54.95. Der Verfasser kront mit diesem Buch seine Mitarbeit als Hauptherausgeber bei der kritischen und kommentierten...

The Poet as Thinker: Holderlin in France.
July 1, 1996... By Geert Lernout. (Literary Criticism in Perspective.) Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. Pp. [xii] + 136 + [2] $59.95. Geert Lernout's ambitious and interesting reception study embraces a complex subject, in seven chapters and on 136 pages of...

Ludwig Uhland and the Critics.
July 1, 1996... By Victor G. Doerksen. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. Pp. xiii + 136. $54.95. "Even a knowledgeable reader will not be blamed for asking: Ludwig Who? For a poet who several generations ago was a standard figure of the literary canon...

The Critical Fortunes of a Romantic Novel: Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
July 1, 1996... By Dennis F. Mahoney. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. Pp. xiii + 159. $54.95. By and large Dennis Mahoney fulfills in this study the goal of the Camden House series Literary Criticism in Perspective "to gauge the influence of social and...

The German Novella: Two Centuries of Criticism.
July 1, 1996... By Siegfried Weing. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. Pp. xii + 191. $49.95. The subject of this volume in the Camden House series Literary Criticism in Perspective is not indicated with sufficient clarity by the book's title. This is not a...

The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales: Responses. Reactions, Revisions.
July 1, 1996... Edited by Donald Haase. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Pp. 347; 4 illustrations. $34.95. The purpose of this volume is clearly stated in its double title, but its investigations are limited to Western Europe and North America. In...

Die Dramen Ernst Tollers im Kontext ihrer Zeit.
July 1, 1996... (Beitrage zur neueren Literaturgeschichte; Folge 3, Bd. 133.) Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1994. Pp. xiv + 303. DM 98. Ernst Tollers Dramen "in den Kontext ihrer Zeit" einzuordnen, heiBt fur die Verfasserin der vorliegenden Kolner...

Utopien von Freiheit: Die Schweiz im Spiegel swedischer Literatur.
July 1, 1996... (Beitrage zur nordischen Philologie, 23.) Basel und Frankfurt am Main: Helbing & Lichtenhahn Verlag, 1994. Pp. 220 + 16 plates. DM 70. Karin Naumann's Utopien von Freiheit :Die Schweiz im Spiegel schwedischer Literatur is, as the subtitle...

The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England.
July 1, 1996... By William Calin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Pp. xvi + 587. $75 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). In this ambitious volume, William Calin takes on the task of reevaluating the relationship between English-language literature of the...

St Katherine of Alexandria: The Late Middle English Prose Legend in Southwell Minster MS 7.
July 1, 1996... Edited by Saara Nevanlinna and Irma Taavitsainen. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, and Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 1993. Pp. xiii + 160. $53. The text edited in this interesting volume by two Helsinki scholars is not the full,...

Interpretation and Theology In Spenser.
July 1, 1996... By Darryl J. Gless. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 273. $49.95. Darryl Gless's splendid study of Book One of The Faerie Queene and its relation to Reformed theology rejects the notion that Spenser's religious "position"...

The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance.
July 1, 1996... By Wendy Wall. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 373; 18 illustrations. $42.95 cloth; $17.95 paper. What distinguishes Wendy Wall's work from the rich studies which inform it is her insistence that "nondramatic works printed...

Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths.
July 1, 1996... By Camille Wells Slights. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Pp. viii + 290. $45. Arguing that in many instances characters are "defined less by their relation to love than by their place within a human society," this lucid and astute...

Incest, Drama and Nature's Law: 1550-1700.
July 1, 1996... By Richard A. McCabe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 361; 1 illustration. $59.95. Richard A. McCabe's informative study will be most valuable to those who read the epilogue first. There he lays out the historical...

Literature and Revolution in England: 1640-1660.
July 1, 1996... By Nigel Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 425; 16 illustrations. $40. In Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660, Nigel Smith argues that the literature of mid-seventeenth-century England underwent a series of...

Milton and the Culture of Violence.
July 1, 1996... By Michael Lieb. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 273. $32.50. This is a tightly organized, fascinating study of the motif of violence in Milton's poetry and prose. Lieb opens his book with a chilling account of how Milton's...

Milton's Burden of Interpretation.
July 1, 1996... By Dayton Haskin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Pp. xxii + 314. $39.95. Readers of Paradise Lost will recall how the angel Raphael, in the dialogue on astronomy, leads Adam on a "progress toward an O altitudo" (Robert...

Torah and Law in "Paradise Lost."
July 1, 1996... By Jason P. Rosenblatt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 274. $39.50. This book is of far greater scope and importance than its title suggests. Reassessing Milton's ambivalent Hebraism, Rosenblatt brilliantly illuminates...

Pilgrim's Progress, Puritan Progress: Discourses and Contexts.
July 1, 1996... By Kathleen M. Swaim. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Pp. [xiv] + 368 + [1] $44.95. In the last thirty-five years, the study of Bunyan has acquired a wider dimension with the publication of new editions of all of his major works...

Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730.
July 1, 1996... By Richard Braverman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xviii + 333; 2 illustrations. $64.95. Plots and Counterplots provides a serious and important examination of the ways in which literature both registered and shaped the...

The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Party, and National Myth, 1725-1742.
July 1, 1996... By Christine Gerrard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 213. $55. History repeats itself--unhappily, Santayana remarked, because human beings choose to ignore it. Marx commented further that history begins as tragedy, but repeats itself...

The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man.
July 1, 1996... By Warren Montag. London: Verso, 1994. Pp. vii + 174. $17.95 (paper). "Why was it so difficult for Swift to speak in his own voice? To what extent was his recourse to impersonation a necessity imposed on him rather than a choice freely made... ..

Rethinking Blake's Textuality.
July 1, 1996... By Molly Anne Rothenberg. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Pp. x + 164. $34 95. Dr.Johnson's remark on lapidary inscriptions applies also to dust jackets: no one expects them to be written on oath. According to the blurb for...

Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women.
July 1, 1996... By Judith W. Page. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 200; 6 b/w illustrations $35. Seeking to read beyond the resistance of recent feminist and historicist approaches to Wordsworth, Judith Page sets out to reconsider the...

Coleridge's Submerged Politics: "The Ancient Mariner" and "Robinson Crusoe."
July 1, 1996... By Patrick J. Keane. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 419. $39.95 In this learned, well-researched and lively book, Patrick J. Keane proposes a political reading of The Ancient Manner, arguing that this poem, far from...

Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey.
July 1, 1996... By Charles J. Rzepka. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 340. $55 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). The decade of the 1990s has witnessed a remarkable revival of interest in De Quincey, an enterprise that has enhanced our...

The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts.
July 1, 1996... By Grant E Scott. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994. Pp. xvi + 228; 19 illustrations. $37.50. Whether or not they knew the word, ekphrasis has always been a matter of concern for readers of Keats when they tried to interpret the...

Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and 19th-Century American Literature.
July 1, 1996... By Stephanie A. Smith. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 248; 10 illustrations. $39.95. "It would be hard indeed," Stephanie Smith points out, "for any sustained consideration of nineteenth-century cultural practices in the...

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America.
July 1, 1996... By Joan Burbick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 350. $59.95. Healing the Republic traces the intersecting discourses of health reform, medicine, science, and nationalism in nineteenth-century America. In doing so, Joan...

Edith Wharton's Inner Circle.
July 1, 1996... By Susan Goodman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 165; 15 illustrations. $24.95. In his luxuriant 1993 film rendition of Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), director Martin Scorsese understood some important connection--a...

Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty.
July 1, 1996... By Ruth D. Weston. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 194. $25. Ruth Weston takes her place among the many scholars and critics of both the gothic tradition and Welty's fiction whom she cites in this book to focus...

Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy.
July 1, 1996... By John Lowe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 373; $34.95. John Lowe's Jump at the Sun is an engaging examination of the major works of Zora Neale Hurston which offers new insights on the motivation and cultural...