The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from October 1994

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from October 1994

Schrifsteller auf Abwegen?: Uber politische 'Offene Briefe' deutscher Autoren in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart.
October 1, 1994... `Den Lesern der `Leipziger Allgemeinen Zeitung' wurde in der Weihnachtsausgabe des Blattes vom 24. Dezember 1842 eine ungewohnliche Lekture geboten: ein Brief an den Konig von Preuben--Friedrich Wilheim IV.--, in dem erstaunliche Satze standen;...

Thor's 'hamarr.'
October 1, 1994... Despite its reputation for unfettered violence, Old Norse mythology arms only the three major gods, and although their weapons are great treasures, they hardly seem to be ordinary ones. Odin, the chief god, has the spear Gungnir, which he can...

Representation and readership in the Middle English 'Havelok.'
October 1, 1994... The Middle English romance of Havelok is notable for its attention to the details of what would, in a later text, be called bourgeois realism--non-courtly characters, town life, labor and money, pathos and poverty. The young king who has grown up...

Figurations of the dying: reading Fielding's 'The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon.' (Henry Fielding)
October 1, 1994... In The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Fielding fashions a work which, upon his death, will provide for his widow and orphaned children.(1) Fielding painstakingly inscribes the vicissitudes of his journey, paying particular attention to the...

Saving ideals: revolution and benevolence in 'The Prelude.' (by William Wordsworth)
October 1, 1994... Towards the end of the second book of The Prelude, Wordsworth, alluding to the course of the French Revolution, refers to the present as "a melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown." All around him, Wordsworth writes, he sees men turning to...

Telling Time: Levi-Strauss, Ford, Lessing, Benjamin, de Man, Wordsworth, Rilke.
October 1, 1994... By Carol Jacobs. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. ix + 246. $37.50. Telling Time is the third collection of essays by Carol Jacobs. Like her models Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, Jacobs is a reader whose writing is...

Agents and Lives: Moral Thinking in Literature.
October 1, 1994... By S. L. Goldberg. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xviii + 331. $59-95. In a USIS lecture tour that I was invited to give in Australia in spring 1993, I came to understand the influence and legacy of the...

Imaginative Prophecy in the B-Text of Piers Plowman.
October 1, 1994... By Ernest N. Kaulbach. Piers Plowman Studies, 8. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993. $59. Let me begin this review by acknowledging that Ernest Kaulbach's book is difficult when not daunting. I do not mean that the larger outline of the argument...

Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England.
October 1, 1994... By Donna B. Hamilton. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Pp. xviii + 253. $36. Late in her industrious study of how several of Shakespeare's plays are situated within the context of church-state politics, Donna B. Hamilton...

Writing Women in Jacobean England.
October 1, 1994... By Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. pp. xii + 431. $45. These diverse studies demonstrate Elaine Hobby's observation in Virtue Of Necessity (1988) that "in many ways, we find in the past what we look...

Writing Women's Literary History.
October 1, 1994... Margaret J. M. Ezell. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. viii + 205. $32.95. These diverse studies demonstrate Elaine Hobby's observation in Virtue Of Necessity (1988) that "in many ways, we find in the past what we...

Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne's "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions."
October 1, 1994... By Kate Gartner Frost. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. pp. 178. $27.50. Kate Gartner Frost's study of Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions is a welcome contribution to understanding a major religious prose work of the...

Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671.
October 1, 1994... By Nancy Klein Maguire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xvi + 276. $59.95. By "tragicomedy" Nancy Klein Maguire means romance, and she therefore includes under the rubric not only tragicomic romance--what the Restoration...

Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740.
October 1, 1994... By Ros Ballaster. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. 233. $49.95. Scholars long have probed and critically dissected the novel in order to discover its origins, but because of the overwhelming amount of material have been unable to do so. In...

Arguments of Augustan Wit.
October 1, 1994... By John Sitter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 188. $44.95. Asking a laurel-entwined scholar to define "wit" in what is "not a witty book" (p. 5) is a bit like asking Houdini to chain himself to his typewriter to...

Samuel Johnson and Biographical Thinking.
October 1, 1994... By Catherine N. Parke. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 178. $34.95. The title of the book rings true. Johnson wrote biography from the beginning of his career ("Life of Boerhaave") to the end (Prefaces, Biographical...

Byron's Heroines.
October 1, 1994... By Carolyn Franklin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. [x] + 280. $59. Byron's Heroines, Franklin claims, is not intended as a "classic feminist critique proclaiming the poet's patriarchalism." Rather, it will explore Byron's changing...

Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation.
October 1, 1994... By Steven Goldsmith. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv + 324. $46.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Steven Goldsmith begins this lively and wide-ranging study of apocalypse and representation with a trenchant critique of how...

British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire.
October 1, 1994... By Nigel Leask. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xvi + 266; 9 illustrations. $54-95, In 1950, Raymond Schwab argued that the late eighteenth-century "discovery" of ancient "oriental" languages bears the same relationship to...

Shelley's Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity.
October 1, 1994... By Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xviii + 311. $45 (cloth); $19-95 (paper). At one point in her reading of Prometheus Unbound (Act III, Scene iv), Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi argues that the apparently...

Romola.
October 1, 1994... By George Eliot. Edited by Andrew Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Pp. lxxxii + 688; 16 illustrations. $125. Romola is the sixth volume in the Clarendon edition of George Eliot's works; the other five have already been reviewed here (80...

Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University.
October 1, 1994... By Gail McDonald. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 241. $45. Although Pound and Eliot lived at the margins of academe and beyond the fringes of official liberal culture, generations of professional readers and their captive students...

Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism.
October 1, 1994... By Langdon Hammer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xviii + 277. $35. It is surprising to be reminded that Hart Crane and Allen Tate were born in the same year, 1899, because they seem to belong to two different generations...

Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment.
October 1, 1994... Edited by Frank Scafella. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. x + 273. $29-95. In June of 1988, in Schruns, Austria, a favored skiing base for Ernest Hemingway in his twenties, the Third International Conference of the...

Snorrastefna 25-27: Juli 1990.
October 1, 1994... Ritsjori Ulfar Bragason. (Rit Stofnunar Sigurthar Nordals 1.) Reykjavik: Stofnun Sigurthar Nordals, 1992. Pp. 283. Ikr. 2,180. Snorri Sturluson (1178/79-1241)--historian, poet, mythographer, politician--needs no further introduction to the...

Glossary to the Poetic Edda: Based on Hans Kuhn's 'Kurzes Worterbuch.'(Brief Article)
October 1, 1994... By Beatrice La Farge and John Tucker. (Skandinavistische Arbeiten, 15). Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1992. Pp. xxiv + 321. DM 75. This English glossary to the Old Icelandic Eddukvaethi is a welcome addition to the scholarly...

Gesta Romanorum, Teil 1, Untersuchungen zu Konzeption und Uberlieferung, vol. 2, Texte, Verzeichnisse.
October 1, 1994... (Fortuna vitrea, 3-4.) Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1992. Pp. viii + 215; v + 189. DM 182. The subtitles of volumes I and II of Brigitte Weiske's Gesta Romanorum delineate the scope of her work. In the first part of volume I the...

Zur Theorie des Gebarens im Mittelal;ter: Analyse von Nichtsprachlicher Ausserung in Mittelhochdeutscher Epik, Rolandslied, Eneasroman, Tristan.(Brief Article)
October 1, 1994... (Kolner germanistische Studien, 31.) Koln: Bohlau, 1991. Pp. 247. The central one hundred pages of this Cologne dissertation are a straightforward and clearly laid-out appraisal of depictions and discussions of nonverbal conduct in three...

Shamanism in the Eighteenth Century.
October 1, 1994... By Gloria Flaherty. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. PP. xv + 320. Illustrated. $35. The author has chosen her title with care. Her study not only offers a detailed account of the interest in shamanism and other forms of the...

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: Briefe, 1767-1772, vol. 2.(Brief Article)
October 1, 1994... Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Werke und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. Abteilung Briefe: V 2) Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992. Pp. (6), 339-1049, (1). DM 528. One could not expect or wish a more detailed and meticulous commentary than...

Werther's Goethe and the Game of Literary Creativity.
October 1, 1994... By Deirdre Vincent. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Pp. 268. $50. Because she claims that scholars and critics tend to ignore the differences in the two versions of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Deirdre Vincent proposes in the...

Holderlin and the Golden Chain of Homer: Including an Unknown Source.
October 1, 1994... By Emery E. George. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 126; 2 illustrations. $49-95. The careful, thoughtful reader of poetry seems fated to be struck again and again by parallels, references, implications, and similarities...

Herder Yearbook: Publications of the International Herder Society, vol. 1.
October 1, 1994... Edited by Karl Menges, Wulf Koepke, and Wilfried Malsch. Volume I. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1992. Pp. iii + 152. $49.50. In the "Preface" the editors document some of the events leading to a renaissance in Herder scholarship during the...

Figures of Failure: Paul de Man's Criticism: 1953-1970.
October 1, 1994... By Jan Rosiek. Arhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1992. Pp. 247. Dkr. 134. This book is handicapped by two distressingly obvious afflictions. First, although largely written in 1989 and including the i 989 volume on Paul de Man's...

Die Geschichte von Rotkappchen: Ursprunge, Analysen, Parodien eines Marchens, 10th ed.
October 1, 1994... Von Hans Ritz. 10., abermals erweiterte und neubearbeitete Auflage. Gottingen: Muri Verlag, 1992. Pp. 191. Now in its tenth printing, this pocketsize compendium of commentary and other material relating to Little Red Riding Hood--perhaps the...