The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from October 1993

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from October 1993

Vater und Tochter im burgerlichen Drama oder: ist in 'Miss Sara Sampson' wirklich nichts passiert?
October 1, 1993... Das burgerliche Drama bei Lessing und im Sturm und Drang gilt als "Sprachrohr" der sich heranbildenden Mittelschicht fur ihre "weltanschaulichen Ideale und gesellschaftlichen Postulate".(1) Der "Tugendidealismus" dieser Vorarbeit zu einer...

Weak stress and poetic constraints in Old English verse.
October 1, 1993... For all its innovations and new insights, Geoffrey Russom's recent description of OE verse follows most others in its assumption of three levels of metrical stress for OE poetry.(1) The three-stress system, first established by Eduard Sievers...

The compiler's awareness of audience in medieval medical prose: the example of Wellcome MS 225.
October 1, 1993... The late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England witnessed the emergence of numerous medical texts in the vernacular, texts which for the most part were compilations and translations from Latin of standard medical and scientific...

Decoding Poe? Poe, W.B. Tyler, and cryptography. (Edgar Allan Poe)
October 1, 1993... Did Edgar Allan Poe pseudonymously send himself the cryptographic messages appearing at the conclusion of his Graham's Magazine essays on "Secret Writing"? And what did those messages say? I By December of 1841 Poe had for two years...

Die Sprache der Verstellung: Studien zum rhetorischen und anthropologischen Wissen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert.
October 1, 1993... Das 1990 in Koln abgeschlossene Buch, konzipiert auf der Grundlage anthropologisch-literarischer Forschung, befa[beta]t sich mit dem in deutscher Kultur in bestimmten Epochen zu beobachtenden dominanten Phanomen der Innerlichkeit und ihrer...

Bodies and Machines.
October 1, 1993... In the deployment of New Historicism (or, as it is now called, Cultural Poetics) by Americanists, the historical period from the 1880s to the turn of the century has proven especially congenial. Whereas New Historicism in English literature...

Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages.
October 1, 1993... The relation of medieval texts to their origin or supposed origin in oral tradition is a question that has now exercised several generations of scholars. A fundamental problem is that in the nature of things direct evidence of orality must...

Chaucerian Belief: The Poetics of Reverence and Delight.
October 1, 1993... Chaucerian Belief is a surprisingly rare effort in Chaucer studies, an attempt at a species of philosophical criticism. Given its title, the reader who opens the book expecting prolonged analyses of Chaucer's relation to late medieval...

Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority.
October 1, 1993... In 1927, Hope Emily Allen published her masterful study of the Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materials for His Biography. This book established the canon of Rolle's writings, surveyed all of the manuscripts in which...

Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet.
October 1, 1993... Although this new biography of Sidney appears, for the most part, to have escaped the last twenty years of literary theory, it does follow through admirably on one of Clifford Geertzs maxims: "The problems, being existential, are universal;...

From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage.
October 1, 1993... Renaissance theater historians have been slower than most to rethink their basic assumptions, largely because the evidence about theater practices in Shakespeare's time is so fragmentary and yet so tangible in its application to the plays that...

Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590-1642.
October 1, 1993... Renaissance theater historians have been slower than most to rethink their basic assumptions, largely because the evidence about theater practices in Shakespeare's time is so fragmentary and yet so tangible in its application to the plays that...

Revising Shakespeare.
October 1, 1993... Although some scholars will disagree, in general or in specific, with the arguments Grace Ioppolo puts forward in Revising Shakespeare, hers is an extremely useful book. Beginning with a brief discussion of contemporary theories of text, she...

Dryden in Revolutionary England.
October 1, 1993... In John Dryden's last letter, dated 11 April 1700, he describes his final contribution to the culture of his century: "Within this moneth there will be playd for my profit, an old play of Fletchers, called the Pilgrim, corrected by my good...

Sentimental Comedy: Theory and Practice.
October 1, 1993... Students of Restoration and eighteenth-century British comedy may be somewhat puzzled by the appearance at this late date of a book entitled Sentimental Comedy. Surely the notion that there is a substantial body of stage plays from roughly...

The Invisible Riot of the Mind: Samuel Johnson's Psychological Theory.
October 1, 1993... What makes this book a delight to read is, first of all, Samuel Johnson. Perhaps with sufficient exertion, it might be possible to write a dull, lifeless book on Johnson, but instances of such prodigious effort are rare. All that is really...

Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism.
October 1, 1993... For some time now Don Bialostosky has been advocating Bakhtin and dialogism, particularly for Wordsworth studies. Fulfilling the program announced in his "Dialogics as an Art of Discourse in Literary Criticism" (PMLA, 1986), his new book on...

Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession.
October 1, 1993... For some time now Don Bialostosky has been advocating Bakhtin and dialogism, particularly for Wordsworth studies. Fulfilling the program announced in his "Dialogics as an Art of Discourse in Literary Criticism" (PMLA, 1986), his new book on...

Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems: 1797-1800.
October 1, 1993... The Cornell Wordsworth was launched in the mid-1970s amid polemics against existing editions for perpetuating Wordsworth's latest and "worst" texts. All that was promised at that point was a supplementary edition giving "full and accurate texts...

A History of Carlyle's "Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches."
October 1, 1993... What emerges from D. J. Trela's study of Oliver's Cromwell's Letters and Speeches is a portrait of Carlyle, warts and all. Trela has spent much time and diligence peering over Carlyle's shoulder, so to speak, as he prepared his monumental work on...

Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience.
October 1, 1993... Audrey Jaffe's book on Dickens consists of a short introduction, an even shorter conclusion, and five chapters on six of Dickens's novels (one each on Sketches by Boz, The Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son, and Our Mutual Friend and one on...

The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel.
October 1, 1993... Long before "New Historicism" became a touch-phrase of literary theory, Richard Altick had abandoned the new-critical focus on text alone to write about nineteenth-century novels in their social context. Political history, popular culture, mass...

The Ends of the Earth.
October 1, 1993... The Ends of the Earth, edited by Simon Gatrell, is the fourth volume of a series entitled "English Literature and the Wider World." As Michael Cotsell says ill the "General Editor's Preface," the purpose of the series is to transcend the...

Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies.
October 1, 1993... Reading Mary Jean Corbett's lucid and suggestive study of self-representation in nineteenth-century women's autobiography recalled to this reader's mind the coy disclaimer of Esther Summerson in Bleak House: "It seems so curious to be obliged...

Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth.
October 1, 1993... That Virginia Woolf didn't have a political bone in her body is a truism hard to dislodge because Leonard Woolf's casual remark has seemed to confirm the pious placement of her among the artists, a spineless lot altogether. Woolf's deficiencies...

Poetry and Pragmatism.
October 1, 1993... The title of Richard Poirier's new book may strike some readers as misleading; less than twenty of its pages are devoted to discussions of poetry in the conventional sense of that term. This discrepancy is only apparent, however, since Poirier...

ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of the American Poetic Tradition.
October 1, 1993... Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems," Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself. Many works have explored Whitman as a source of the American tradition in modern poetry. A recent one is Thomas Gardner's...

Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos.
October 1, 1993... Lawrence Rainey aims to resurrect historical studies from the "sepulchre," as he puts it, of contemporary critical theory. For Rainey, the linguistic turn in criticism represented by poststructuralism and hermeneutics has meant the displacement...

A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War.
October 1, 1993... Some readers may pause over the subtitle of Susan Schweik's book: "American Women Poets of the Second World War." Were there any? Or enough of them to write a book about? Comedians will take it to be one of those thinnest-book jokes, like...

Wilbur's Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time.
October 1, 1993... This is a splendid book, with many rewards for the reader who wants, like Wilbur, to see. Michelson shows us a poet who is committed to the "minute particulars of the world and of language," whose vision is "neither of Jerusalem nor of The...

The Haunting of Sylvia Plath.
October 1, 1993... Here, after more than a quarter of a century, criticism has finally caught up with Sylvia Plath. The poet who emerges from Rose's study is not only Plath for the 1990s (the postconfessional, postpsychotic, postprotean Plath), but she is the...

Hermann Paul: Deutsches Worterbuch, 9th rev. ed.
October 1, 1993... The editors characterize their truly revised edition of a venerable German dictionary approaching its centenary as follows (p. ix): "Die Neubearbeitung des Deutschen Worterbuchs von H. Paul folgt den Vorgaben des Begrunders: Das Werk ist...

Women in the Viking Age.
October 1, 1993... Occasionally Scandinavians still depict their ancestors as bearded, beer-bellied, and horn-helmeted vikings eager to attack foreign shores. Once cherished at home and scorned abroad, this image is now used with mockery and self-irony, and for...

Heimskringla: An Introduction.
October 1, 1993... Old Norse-Icelandic is one of the decreasing number of academic fields in which it is still possible to contribute basic books. Diana Whaley has written one of them. Although Snorri Sturluson is the most renowned writer of medieval Iceland, and...

The Life and Writings of Laura Marholm.
October 1, 1993... In her essay "Reaktion in der Frauenbewegung" (1899) the renowned German feminist Hedwig Dohm linked Laura Marholm with Ellen Key and Lou Andreas-Salome as dangerously seductive "antifeminists" whose prescriptive views of sexual difference...

Grammatik des Fruhneuhochdeutschen: Beitrage zur Laut- und Formenlehre.
October 1, 1993... Writing a grammar of Early New High German is like cataloguing all objects, ranging from Grimm's Deutsches Worterbuch to a candy bar, in the study of a busy but disorganized scholar. ENHG is the medley of German dialects spoken south of Low...

Herzog Ernst D: Wahrscheinlich von Ulrich von Etzenbach.
October 1, 1993... The new edition of Herzog Ernst D is a bizarre example of what can happen if one trusts the all too frequent commonplace in scholarly publications: "see my forthcoming" article, book, or, in this case, edition. Hans-Friedrich Rosenfeld points...

Exempel und Exempelsammlungen.
October 1, 1993... Walter Haug's contribution to the collaborative volume on exempla and collections of exempla, "Exempelsammlungen im narrativen Rahmen: Vom 'Pancatantra' zum 'Dekameron,"' (pp. 264-87) is broader than its title suggests. Indeed, the essay is...

The Shifting Fortunes of Wilhelm Raabe: A History of Criticism as a Cautionary Tale.
October 1, 1993... The first volume to appear in the series Literary Criticism in Perspective, this study by Jeffrey Sammons provides an expert account of what literary scholars have written about the late nineteenth-century author Wilhelm Raabe, whose fiction in...

Elemente des Erzahlens: Die Paettir der Flateyjarbok.
October 1, 1993... A renewed interest in paettir has been evidenced by the growing body of work on this subject. Attempts have been made to classify the Islendingapaettir as a genre and to examine the etymology of the term itself. The ghost of the pattr theory of...