The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from October 1995

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from October 1995

Arofel's death and the question of Willehalm's guilt. (medieval drama)
October 1, 1995... When Wolfram vor Eschelibach's narrator picks up the tale of Wille the hero is fighting against overwhelming odds. A mammoth army from all the lands of heathendom has almost entirely exterminated the Christian forces on the fields of Alischanz....

The fourth tone. (poet Friedrich Holderlin's four tones)
October 1, 1995... That Halderlin is a philosopher as well as a poet has been recognized ever since Wilhelm Bohm first published the texts of the Homburg essay fragments in [1911;.sup.1] during the postwar period attention to the Homburg aesthetics, especially to...

Mazers, mead, and the wolf's-head tree: a reconsideration of Old English 'Riddle 55.' (solution to riddle)
October 1, 1995... While many of the ninety or so riddles contained within the Exeter Book now have been solved to the satisfaction of most Anglo-Saxonists, the solution to [Riddle.sub.55], arguably the most puzzling of the riddles, continues to elude us despite...

"miserrimum dictu": Donne's epitaph for his wife. (poet John Donne)
October 1, 1995... The love poet, as Anne Ferry has reminded us, is always in war with time. And no love poet, Anthony Low has pointed out, is more instrumental to our modern, postfeudal concept of romantic love than John Donne, whose "solution... to the threats...

Berkeley inside out: existence and destiny in 'Waiting for Godot.'
October 1, 1995... Although some readers of Beckett's Waiting for Godot have noted Lucky's cryptic references to Bishop Berkeley and to the matterless state of things, they have yet to see that his phrases provide clues to the play's singular world view.(2) For...

The Case for a Humanistic Poetics.
October 1, 1995... Daniel Schwarz is deeply committed to what Meyer Abrams calls "the traditional explanatory paradigm," that is, the belief that language is (in Abrams's phrase) "the medium of a communicative transaction between human beings in a circumambient...

The Saxon Genesis: An Edition of the West Saxon 'Genesis B' and the Old Saxon Vatican 'Genesis.'
October 1, 1995... A successor to Doane's 1978 edition of Genesis A, this book is an integrative study of two fragmentary poems that descend from a lost Saxon original composed around the middle of the ninth century. The poems are fascinating in their own right,...

Jonsonian Discrimination: The Humanist Poet and the Praise of True Nobility.
October 1, 1995... Michael McCanles's study of Ben Jonson's poetry attempts to comment on every one of Jonson's poems from the perspective suggested by its title. Though this goal of inclusivity sometimes strains the coherence of his argument, his thesis proves...

Shakespeare and Ovid.
October 1, 1995... These books reveal exciting new dimensions of the classical revival during the European Renaissance. Jonathan Bate's magisterial study shows that Shakespeare's creative relationship with his favorite Ovid extends from Shakespeare's first...

Catullus and His Renaissance Readers.
October 1, 1995... These books reveal exciting new dimensions of the classical revival during the European Renaissance. Jonathan Bate's magisterial study shows that Shakespeare's creative relationship with his favorite Ovid extends from Shakespeare's first...

Reading the Classics and 'Paradise Lost.'
October 1, 1995... These books reveal exciting new dimensions of the classical revival during the European Renaissance. Jonathan Bate's magisterial study shows that Shakespeare's creative relationship with his favorite Ovid extends from Shakespeare's first...

Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy: 1660-1710.
October 1, 1995... Corman's book derives in good measure from a number of scholars who in the last thirty years or so have traced the development of the comedy from 1660 to the opening decade of the eighteenth century. Corman follows the work of Arthur Scoutan,...

Satire and Sentiment: 1660-1830.
October 1, 1995... Would you hire the author of this book? Suppose that Claude Rawson were not already familiar to every student of the British eighteenth century from his Gulliver and the Gentle Reader, Order from Confusion Sprung, and Henry Fielding and the...

Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen's Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts.
October 1, 1995... Jane Austen did not write imperial fictions. In this, her novels are different from those of, say, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, or G. A. Henty. However, as critics like Suvendrini Perera (Reaches of Empire) and Edward Said...

Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing.
October 1, 1995... Mr. Bennett wants us to think about a variety of issues having to do with Keats's use of narrative in his poetry. One of Bennett's basic ideas is that, despite "the Romantic distrust of narrative" (p. 16), Romantic writers were intent upon...

The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity.
October 1, 1995... Harry Stone has given us an exceedingly curious and ponderous book, over seven hundred pages long, longer than any critical study of Dickens I can think of. It is hefty enough, indeed, for a full-scale biography, and, indeed, it trails the sort...

The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing.
October 1, 1995... By the time J.A. Symonds's volumes on the Italian Renaissance began appearing in the late 1870s, the concept of the period, as a period, was firmly established in the minds of the Victorians, although what precisely it meant as a moment in the...

Thomas Hardy's 'Studies, Specimens, &C.' Notebook.
October 1, 1995... As the editors' excellent "Introduction" makes clear, the notebook here edited and made publicly available for the first time was saved from the famous Max Gate bonfires by something like lucky accident. Although it was marked "To Be Destroyed"...

Cancelled Words: Rediscovering Thomas Hardy.
October 1, 1995... [When] Hardy placed himself in the hands of Leslie Stephen, who commissioned Far from the Madding Crowd for serial publication in The Cornhill Magazine in 1874, he submitted his work to a Victorian editor whose professional pride was...

Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology.
October 1, 1995... This recent entry in Twayne's series of Studies in Literary Themes and Genres turns out not to be quite so all-inclusive as the title promises. Since the main text only runs to I38 pages, there is barely enough room to hit the highlights of...

Virgil and the Moderns.
October 1, 1995... As classics, rather like alchemy, more and more becomes part of the intellectual history of the West rather than a discipline in its own right, scholars who themselves are not classicists are better able to write about it. They see it in the...

No Man's Land: The Place of the Women Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, Sexchanges.
October 1, 1995... The second volume of this three-volume project confirms the distinction, authority, and style of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar as commentators on British and American literature of the twentieth century, and the role of women in shaping it....

Engendering Romance: Women Writers and the Hawthorne Tradition, 1850-1990.
October 1, 1995... Emily Miller Budick's Engendering Romance is a work of literary history from a liberal feminist perspective on the issue of what constitutes the main tradition of American fiction. For Budick, as for Richard Chase so many years before, the...

The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction.
October 1, 1995... Beginning her study of African American women's fiction with Pride and Prejudice's famous first sentence, Ann duCille sets out to "trace a literary history" of black women's novels by using the "coupling theme" as lens through which to view...

Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It.
October 1, 1995... A first biographer has mixed blessings: she is often the first researcher to attain entree to her subject's personal papers, a heady and gratifying experience; but she has to sift material with no help from predecessors, to shape the formless...

American Fiction in the Cold War.
October 1, 1995... Thomas Hill Schaub's subject is the postwar "liberal narrative," by which he intends "the accounts of liberalism produced in the wake of the thirties and forties and the recurrent story one finds within them" (p. 5). The key context is...

The Dilemma of "Double-Consciousness": Toni Morrison's Novels.
October 1, 1995... Heinze's book delineates the entire Morrison canons exploration of double consciousness - W. E. B. Du Bois's famous term describing the plight of African Americans always simultaneously aware of their own definitions of reality and and the...

Two Tales of Icelanders. Ogmundar Pattr Dytts og Gunnars Helmings. Olkofra Pattr.
October 1, 1995... Ogmundar pattr dytts and Qlkofra pattr make strange bedfellows, but they are alike in that they are both very entertaining tales, and as such they constitute a sufficient basis for a pedagogically oriented edition. As the preface states, these...

Wilhelm Schmidt - Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache.
October 1, 1995... This is the sixth edition of a book which first appeared in 1969 in the former GDR, the product of an Autorenkollektiv under the leadership of Wilhelm Schmidt. Like most such products, it had the virtue of a relatively encyclopedic coverage of...

The Beginning of Terror: A Psychological Study of Rainer Maria Rilke's Life and Work.
October 1, 1995... David Kleinbard's The Beginning of Terror is a fascinating study of the relationship between genius and illness as well as of fantasies of physical and psychological fragmentation as they appear primarily in Rilke's prose piece, Die...

Brechts, Lehrstucke, Entstehung und Entwicklung eines Spieltyps.
October 1, 1995... Klaus-dieter Krabiel, best known perhaps for his extensive work as an editor of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is at some pains to stress how different his work is from almost everything done before on Lehrstucke. Krabiel claims that earlier work was...

Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon. Biographisch-Bibliographisches Handbuch.
October 1, 1995... It is gratifying that work on the new Kosch is proceeding at a satisfactory rate. The transition from one publisher (Francke) to another (Saur) seems to have been smooth, accomplished in the middle of that difficult letter, "S." Here we have...

Music and German Literature: Their Relationship Since the Middle Ages.
October 1, 1995... The nineteen essays published here comprise the proceedings of a rather momentous symposium convened at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in April 1989. Muffled by some of the current and more boisterous trends in literary...