The Journal of English and Germanic Philology articles from October 1996

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology archives from October 1996

The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature.
October 1, 1996... By Charles D. Wright. (Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 6.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 Pp. xii + 321. $59.95. To students of medieval Insular culture and history, the traditional oppositions--political, literary, and...

Aelfric's Prefaces.
October 1, 1996... Edited by Jonathan Wilcox. (Durham Medieval Texts, 9.) Durham: Durham Medieval Texts, 1994. Pp. vii + 202. 7 [pounds sterling]. This book brings together in an accessible and user-friendly way all of AElfric's major prefaces and most of his...

Chaucerian Realism.
October 1, 1996... By Robert Myles. (Chaucer Studies, xx.) Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. Pp. xiv + 153. $53. In this book Robert Myles has undertaken to refute those critics who seek to find traces of postmodernism in certain medieval works, particularly in...

Julian of Norwich's 'Showings': From Vision to Book.
October 1, 1996... By Denise Nowakowski Baker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 215; 3 illustrations. $29.95. Denise Nowakowski Baker has written a learned, graceful, and very welcome addition to the growing literature on Julian of Norwich....

Authorizing Petrarch.
October 1, 1996... By William J. Kennedy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 301. $36.50. The title derives from Foucault's "What is an Author," which is mentioned at both the beginning and end of this book. Kennedy seeks to examine the process...

History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic.
October 1, 1996... By Michael Murrin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. xvi + 371; 21 illustrations. $37.50. Murrin's book takes as its subject the influence of history on art, specifically the history of warfare on the poets of epic and romance...

Donne's Idea of a Woman: Structure and Meaning in the Anniversaries.
October 1, 1996... By Edward W. Tayler. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 190. $39-95. Some are of the opinion that John Donne never took seriously the "thought" out of which his poems were made, but produced only (as J. E. V. Crofts once...

Milton and the Revolutionary Reader.
October 1, 1996... By Sharon Achinstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 272. $35. As the title indicates, Sharon Achinstein's first book focuses both on the role of the reader during the English Revolution and on what she sees as the...

The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton.
October 1, 1996... By Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1992. Pp. xvii + 515. $49.95. The Empty Garden is the first book of a young scholar of remarkable range, depth, and well-earned confidence. Ashraf Rushdy already demonstrates the...

Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England.
October 1, 1996... By Laura Lunger Knoppers. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 209; 20 illustrations. $45. This is a splendidly written and richly illustrated book, as pleasurable to read as can be any account of the execution, mutilation, and...

Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing.
October 1, 1996... By Lincoln B. Faller. (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, 16.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xx + 263. $54.95. On the surface, Professor Faller's study is an investigation between those...

Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England.
October 1, 1996... By John Cannon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. vii + 326. $59. Professor Cannon's book on Samuel Johnson comes at an apposite time. Dr. Johnson, Professor Cannon's iconographical Englishman, is by virtue of that status a major target in the...

The Business of Common Life: Novels and Classical Economics Between Revolution and Reform.
October 1, 1996... By David Kaufmann. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 196. $35. David Kaufmann's book posits the emergence of a language of legitimation for England's post-1688 "commercial revolution" (p. 5) in the writings of...

Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832
October 1, 1996... By Alan Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xviii + 327. $54.95. Ideas about education often incorporate cultural inconsistencies deriving from the presence of conflicting ideologies that transfer to schooling the...

Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World.
October 1, 1996... By Timothy Morton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 298. $54.95. This book is a strong addition to the "Cambridge Studies in Romanticism" series. Like other titles in the series, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste is...

Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria.
October 1, 1996... By Esther Schor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 290. $35. The appearance of Schor's distinguished book is a double occasion. It sets a new standard for the recontextualizing of Romantic literary studies. In so doing, it...

Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions.
October 1, 1996... By W: David Shawl Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 279. $39.95. On taking up Shaw's book, a reader might well ask why the world needs yet another book on the elegy. As Shaw's useful Bibliographical Essay makes...

Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction.
October 1, 1996... By Michiel Heyns. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. v + 293. $49.95 Taking a cue from Rene Girard's The Scapegoat (1982), Michiel Heyns examines the tensions of community values and ostracism in Mansfield Park, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel...

Bloom's Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music.
October 1, 1996... By Zack Bowen. Foreword by Bernard Benstock. The Florida Joyce Series. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. Pp. ii + 151. $34.95. I have always thought it peculiar that in the "Ithaca" chapter we find a catechetical inquiry implying...

The Environmental Imagination: Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture.
October 1, 1996... By Lawrence Buell. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. 586. $35. Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination is an important book that asks us to change the way we read environmental nonfiction and demonstrates how to do...

Faulkner and Southern Womanhood.
October 1, 1996... By Diane Roberts. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 246. $35. William Faulkner's work continues to attract a wide range of critical approaches, from the New Criticism which first canonized him to the current cultural studies...

Hardar Saga.
October 1, 1996... Reykjavik: Hid islenzka fornritafelag, 1991. Pp. ccxxviii + 528 + 5 maps Ikr. 4900. This large and interesting volume completes the editing of the sagas of the Icelanders (Islendinga sogur) in the Islenzk fornrit series that began with...

Islensk Bokmenntasaga I, II.
October 1, 1996... Vesteinn Olason ritstjori. Reykjavik: Mal og Menning, 1992, 1993, Pp. 625, 565 illustrations; pp. 571, 518 illustrations. Ikr. 4900; Ikr. 4280. These are the first two volumes of what will soon be a four-volume history of Icelandic literature....

Mattheus Saga Postula.
October 1, 1996... Olafur Halldorsson (Stofnun Arna Magnussonar a Islandi, Rit 41.) Reykjavik: Stofnun Arna Magnussonar Islandi, Rit 41.) Reykjavik: Stofnun Arna Magnussonar a Islandi, 1994. Pp. cxlviii + 86; 9 plates. Mattheus saga is preserved wholly or...

Dialects Converging: Rural Speech in Urban Norway.
October 1, 1996... By Paul Kerswill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 181. $39.95. In few parts of Norway does the speech of a city differ so much and in so many ways from that of the rural areas that surround it than does the language of Bergen from the...

Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature, 800-1300.
October 1, 1996... By D. H. Green. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xvi + 483. $74.95. Dennis Green's ambitious book on Medieval Listening and Reading aspires to offer a comprehensive account of orality and literacy in relation to...

Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology.
October 1, 1996... By Matthew Bell. Oxford, New York and Toronto: Clarendon, 1994. Pp. x + 346. $65. Without a preface or introduction, the author examines Goethe's "naturalistic anthropology" in five chapters, in the first drawing mostly on British scholarship...

Poems and Fragments.
October 1, 1996... By Friedrich Holderlin. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Third bilingual edition, with a Preface, Introduction, and Notes. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1994. Pp. xlvi + 750 + [4]. $59.95. Michael Hamburger is the dean of living translators of...

Deutschsprachige Exilliteratur Seit 1933. Bd. 4: Bibliographien USA: Schriftsteller, Publizisten und Literaturwissenschaftler.
October 1, 1996... Herausgegeben von John M. Spalek, Konrad Feilchenfeldt und Sandra M. Hawrylchak. 3 Teilbande. Bern und Munchen: K. G. Saur Verlag, 1994. Pp. 2,010. DM 620. In 1976, Francke Verlag Bern published Vol. I of John M. Spalek and Joseph P. Strelka,...

Dithyrambiker des Untergangs: Gnostizimus in Asthetik und Philosophie der Moderne.
October 1, 1996... Von Michael Pauen. Berling: Akademie Verlag, 1994. Pp. 449. DM 84. Allein als Materialsammlung ware dieses Buch wertvoll, und in der Tat liest es sich uber weite Text- und FuBnotenstrecken hin wie eine Datensammlung zum vorliegenden Thema. Es...

Poetik der Autoren: Beitrage zur Deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur.
October 1, 1996... Herausgegeben von Paul Michael Lutzeler. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 1994. Pp. 311. DM 19.90. Der vorliegende Band geht von der Pramisse aus, daB, in den Worten des Herausgebers, "die deutsche Literaturgeschichte ohne die...

Zwischen Wirklichkeit und Traum: Das Wesen des Osterreichischen in der Literatur.
October 1, 1996... Von Joseph P. Strelka. (Edition Orpheus, 9.) Tubingen: Francke, 1994. Pp. xii + 332. DM 84. Zu einem Zeitpunkt, zu dem die Literaturwissenschaft entweder dem postmdernen Multikulturalismus oder der totalen Theoretisierung zu erliegen droht,...

Amazons in Vinland. (Icelandic sagas)
October 1, 1996... The nameless authors of the Sagas of Icelanders have fabricated women figures of great psychological complexity, but none as enigmatic as Freydis Eiriksdottir. Freydis Eiriksdottir is known from only two sagas, Groenlendinga saga and Eiriks...

Beowulf's androgynous heroism.
October 1, 1996... Beowulf is, as Gillian Overing has observed, "an overwhelmingly masculine poem."(1) The poem's alternation between combative exploits and manly mead-hall camaraderie offers little space for women, and, at first glance, it appears to relegate all...

'Queynte': some rime and some reason on a Chaucer[ian] pun.
October 1, 1996... In 1984, Larry D. Benson took many Chaucerians to task for characterizing queynte as a "favorite pun" of Chaucer. In 1990, John Fleming took Benson to task for arguing that it was not.(1) The tone of this debate was sometimes caustic, sometimes...

'But speak every thing in its Nature': influence and ethics in Durfey's adaptations of Fletcher.
October 1, 1996... Thomas Durfey, the most prolific playwright of the Restoration, adapted three plays by John Fletcher: Trick for Trick (1678) from Monsieur Thomas (1615), A Commonwealth of Women (1685) from The Sea Voyage (1622), and A Fool's Preferment (1688)...