The Review of English Studies articles from February 1996

The Review of English Studies archives from February 1996

Why is Falstaff fat?
February 1, 1996... In 1990 Barbara Everett published an essay entitled `The Fatness of Falstaff', In which she explored the notion that Falstaff's corpulence is the signature of his opaque reality as a character.(1) This is the most recent example of a...

Alexander Pope and the nature of language.
February 1, 1996... Recently, a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary studies have explored in detail the relations between literary productions of the period and contemporary ideas and debates about the origin and nature of language. These...

Browning's music: the L.L. Bloomfield Collection. (Robert Browning)
February 1, 1996... The Bloomfield Collection in Brighton provides a unique insight into Browning's musicianship. In the Collection are some 400 items of music belonging to the poet himself, and to his father, his sister Sarianna, and his son Pen. Ranging in...

Faustus and the apple. (the concept of sin in Christopher Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus)(Notes)
February 1, 1996... SHYLOCK. Three thousand ducats, well. BASSANIO. Ay sir, for three months. SHY. For three months, well. BASS. For the which as I told you, Antonio shall be bound. SHY. Antonio shall become bound, well. BASS. May you stead me? Will you pleasure...

New Jonson documents. (Ben Jonson)(Notes)
February 1, 1996... Three financial documents relating to Ben Jonson appear to be unknown to modern scholars. One is among the papers of Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex and Lord Treasurer until his downfall in 1624; those form part of the Sackville papers,...

A literary ghost: William Plomer's proposed biographical account of E.M. Forster.(Notes)
February 1, 1996... It is known that William Plomer agreed to prepare a biographical account of E. M. Forster for publication after the latter's death. P. N. Furbank refers to this(1) and there is also a fuller account by Peter Alexander.(2) In addition, one can...

The Black Dwarf.
February 1, 1996... The publication of the first complete critical edition of the Waverley Novels, of which these are the first three volumes, is an exciting event in the history of the reception of Scott's work. Scott published his novels amid unprecedented...

The Tale of Old Morality.
February 1, 1996... The publication of the first complete critical edition of the Waverley Novels, of which these are the first three volumes, is an exciting event in the history of the reception of Scott's work. Scott published his novels amid unprecedented...

Kenilworth: A Romance.
February 1, 1996... The publication of the first complete critical edition of the Waverley Novels, of which these are the first three volumes, is an exciting event in the history of the reception of Scott's work. Scott published his novels amid unprecedented...

Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English.
February 1, 1996... The entries in this Catalogue, some 507 in all, are not unexpectedly less numerous than those which occupy 111 three-column pages in the Linguistic Atlas of Later Medieval English; thus Aberystwyth has here 2 entries as against 16 there, York...

Morphology.
February 1, 1996... Morphology was for many years disregarded in mainstream Linguistics theory, either as the reflection of an earlier Latin tradition concerned with inflexions largely irrelevant to modern English, or as the survival of an analytic American...

Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition.
February 1, 1996... In Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition Vivian Cook presents a clear, informed, and wide-ranging study of this particularly interesting area of language research, and of its developments as an independent discipline in its own right....

A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry.
February 1, 1996... Behind this book seems to lie a belief in `a body of folk-wisdom, not yet in metrical form, a body which can be sensed as a living, pulsing, gnomic background to all Germanic poetry' (p. 18). But this belief is largely left undocumented:...

Old English Poetry and the Genealogy of Events.
February 1, 1996... By `the genealogy of events; Richard Schrader means a conception of time past as a linear series of moments, an Orosian rather than Augustinian model, based on causality rather than typology. It is the model of history followed by Gildas and...

The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature.
February 1, 1996... By `the genealogy of events; Richard Schrader means a conception of time past as a linear series of moments, an Orosian rather than Augustinian model, based on causality rather than typology. It is the model of history followed by Gildas and...

The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden.
February 1, 1996... This book is a sign of the times, in which scholars must publish or perish. Perhaps without it, Dr Saunders's considerable abilities would not have brought her the academic appointments listed on its dust-jacket; yet she may come to wish she...

The Index of Middle English Prose: Handlist VIII, Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prose in Oxford College Libraries.
February 1, 1996... These two cataloguers faced very different tasks. The Ashmole manuscripts display one antiquarian's hobbyhorses: heraldry, amateur science, and medicine; the college manuscripts are diverse, but, since the core of the older libraries is...

The Fabliau in English.
February 1, 1996... The Fabliau in English hardly seems an appropriate choice of title for a book that offers `an assessment of the place of the history of fabliau within the history of literary genres in Europe from the Middle Ages to the modern era' (p. ix),...

The Complete Works of the 'Pearl' Poet.
February 1, 1996... The first parallel text edition and translation of the Pearl Poet must, you would think, give cause for gratitude. But if you want a translation to serve the original, there is rather cause for concern. Consider this: `I am deeply pleased,...

A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.
February 1, 1996... A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge is one of the most challenging medieval texts to have come down to us. It has attracted attention because it is contemporary with the apparent origins of many medieval plays, including the Corpus Christi cycles....

The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory.
February 1, 1996... Nearly fifty years ago J. R. R. Tolkien complained about the dominance of biographical concerns in Malory studies; `[it is] the beauty and virtue of the [Morte Darthur], which alone makes the name of Malory interesting, were he recreant or...

Spenser's Secret Career.
February 1, 1996... In Spenser's Secret Career Richard Rambuss puts forward a proposition that many of us may find uncongenial, namely that Spenser is to be considered as much a secretary as a poet; indeed we are told that a poetic career alone `could hardly...

Spenser Studies X: A Renaissance Poetry Annual.
February 1, 1996... In Spenser's Secret Career Richard Rambuss puts forward a proposition that many of us may find uncongenial, namely that Spenser is to be considered as much a secretary as a poet; indeed we are told that a poetic career alone `could hardly...

Shepheards Devises: Edmund Spenser's 'Shepheardes Calender' and the Institutions of Elizabethan Society.
February 1, 1996... In this study Robert Lane proposes an innovative, politically radical interpretation of The Shepheardes Calender, arguing that despite the poem's learned and courtly aspects its central purpose is to articulate a critique of the hierarchical...

Pseudo-Martyr.
February 1, 1996... In his first published prose work, John Donne's literary persona was that of the inscrutable polemicist seeking to persuade English Catholics that, since they might with impunity take the Oath of Allegiance to James I, executions for...

Jacobean Public Theater.
February 1, 1996... Establishing his book as complementary to Keith Sturgess's Jacobean Private Theatre (1987) in the same series, Alexander Leggatt notices that the popular theatre of Jacobean England still lies largely neglected, by academicians: `there is not...

Biblical References in Shakespeare's Comedies.
February 1, 1996... The third in a series of volumes devoted to Shakespeare's biblical allusions, Naseeb Shaheen's Biblical References in Shakespeare's Comedies follows the formula laid down in the author's two preceding studies, Biblical References in...

A Midsummer Night's Dream.
February 1, 1996... In 1921 A. E. Housman famously expounded `The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism', concluding that one thing, beyond all others, is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders'. Alas, in the world of...

The Third Part of Henry VI.
February 1, 1996... In 1921 A. E. Housman famously expounded `The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism', concluding that one thing, beyond all others, is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders'. Alas, in the world of...

Macbeth.
February 1, 1996... In 1921 A. E. Housman famously expounded `The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism', concluding that one thing, beyond all others, is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders'. Alas, in the world of...

Romeo and Juliet.
February 1, 1996... The third in a series of volumes devoted to Shakespeare's biblical allusions, Naseeb Shaheen's Biblical References in Shakespeare's Comedies follows the formula laid down in the author's two preceding studies, Biblical References in...

The Merchant of Venice.
February 1, 1996... The third in a series of volumes devoted to Shakespeare's biblical allusions, Naseeb Shaheen's Biblical References in Shakespeare's Comedies follows the formula laid down in the author's two preceding studies, Biblical References in...

The Moral Art of Philip Massinger.
February 1, 1996... Ira Clark's Massinger is neither Coleridge's democrat, nor the embittered feudalist reactionary of some later accounts. Rather, he `presented a potential solution for the Carolines' deep desires for community - a reformation that would...

Reading the Classics and 'Paradise Lost.'
February 1, 1996... William Porter writes as a professional classicist rather than a Milton scholar, and is suspicious of the proliferation of allusions to classical poetry which editors and critics of Paradise Lost have claimed to find. He suggests that we...

Telling People What to Think: Early Eighteenth-Century Periodicals from 'The Review' to 'The Rambler.'
February 1, 1996... It is indeed a peculiarity of our times, that we must instruct so many persons. On politics, on religion, on all less important topics still more, everyone thinks himself competent to think... to the best of our means must be taught to think...

John Gay and the London Theater.
February 1, 1996... With the full texts of all Gay's plays available since 1983 in John Fuller's edition, it is certainly time that a full-length critical study appeared. Attention in this century to Gay's dramatic oeuvre had previously been only spasmodic and...

Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq.; Vol. 2.
February 1, 1996... When the component volumes of the Wesleyan Fielding were being assigned to prospective editors the second volume of the Miscellanies might well have been considered the short straw. It contains three works only, all in the third division of...

Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution.
February 1, 1996... The link between Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and his Reflections on the Revolution in France has become a familiar topic of study, particularly for literary specialists. Tom...

Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain: 1760-1830.
February 1, 1996... Although Peter Murphy opens with the disconcerting disclaimer that his book `is about what all books about Romantic poetry are about: the Romantic interest in the primitive and the simple; Romantic experiments with form; Romantic problematics...

The General Correspondence of James Boswell 1766-1769, Vol 1, 1766-1767.
February 1, 1996... No doubt intending to provide future ages with a suitable metaphor for the Boswell papers, his friend Sir Alexander Dick kept all his own correspondence, we are told, `in a barrel or hogshead in his library, into which everything of interest...

The Poems of Charlotte Smith.
February 1, 1996... `Charlotte Smith was the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic' (p. xix). This claim, with which Stuart Curran opens the introduction to his new edition of Charlotte Smith's poems, is a large one. It is true that...

The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism.
February 1, 1996... The major exemplification of Professor Galperin's title seems to be in the increase in the later Wordsworth of what Coleridge called `matter-of-factness': attention to mere physical description at the expense of the visionary. This can be...

Byron's Heroines.
February 1, 1996... Caroline Franklin's book is attractive but its last section is marred by some blunders. She sets out clearly what she intends to do. Her study is of `Byron's heroines, in the sense of `female protagonists'. It reviews in detail almost all...

Byron: Don Juan.
February 1, 1996... Caroline Franklin's book is attractive but its last section is marred by some blunders. She sets out clearly what she intends to do. Her study is of `Byron's heroines, in the sense of `female protagonists'. It reviews in detail almost all...

Don Juan.
February 1, 1996... Caroline Franklin's book is attractive but its last section is marred by some blunders. She sets out clearly what she intends to do. Her study is of `Byron's heroines, in the sense of `female protagonists'. It reviews in detail almost all...

Victorian Yellowbacks and Paperbacks: 1849-1905, Vol. 1, George Routledge.
February 1, 1996... The late 1840s and early 1850s witnessed a revolution in book marketing. Small-format books (usually 6 1/2 or 7 inches tall) began to appear; they were bound in straw boards covered with glazed paper that was frequently yellow in colour. They...

Great Expectations.
February 1, 1996... This is the third volume of the Clarendon Dickens to be edited by Margaret Cardwell. The first was Edwin Drood (1972), prepared from 1961 onwards under Kathleen Tillotson's supervision, and closely following the principles of her Oliver Twist...

Browning's Hatreds.
February 1, 1996... Without contraries is no progression: Dr Karlin has already written beautifully about the courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, and now he turns his attention from love to hatred. It is easy to think of some obvious examples of...

Romola.
February 1, 1996... Romola must surely be the hardest of novels to edit. Editors, in order to give useful and in many cases necessary explanatory notes, must steep themselves in the details of Renaissance Florence much as George Eliot herself did. That she...

The Oxford Pamphlets, Leaflets, and Circulars of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
February 1, 1996... This is the first volume of a series planned by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America to contain all Dodgson's '185 pamphlets, booklets, leaflets, form letters, and instruction manuals'. It is handsomely produced and includes...

Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in his Work.
February 1, 1996... In this study of sources and influences, Adeline Tintner argues that references to the visual arts in Henry James's novels and tales are not merely decorative or locally illuminating, but that, in a far more radical way, the unifying vision...

The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization.
February 1, 1996... These books, though strictly incomparable, form an interesting couple. Brian Shaffer attempts a great academic enterprise; Martin Ray's ambition is bounded by the student market. The big book and the handbook illuminate each other's scope and...

Joseph Conrad.
February 1, 1996... These books, though strictly incomparable, form an interesting couple. Brian Shaffer attempts a great academic enterprise; Martin Ray's ambition is bounded by the student market. The big book and the handbook illuminate each other's scope and...

Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative.
February 1, 1996... This is an intelligent study of Conrad's narratives, making good use of recent biographical work on Conrad as well as of Bakhtinian studies of narrative. Henricksen takes issue in an interesting and persuasive way with Aaron Fogel's...

Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling.
February 1, 1996... It is now generally agreed that Kipling's concern with imperial and military issues was rarely merely political or propagandist, but was fundamentally metaphoric and allegorical: the work of the imperial protagonist is a paradigm for an only...

The Great Gatsby.
February 1, 1996... Jeffrey Meyers, the distinguished biographer of Hemingway, has edited The Great Gatsby for the newly revamped Everyman Library and helpfully supplied the reader with an apparatus of chronology, suggestions for further reading, and a plot...

I'm Sorry about the Clock: Chronology, composition, and Narrative Technique in 'The Great Gatsby.'
February 1, 1996... Jeffrey Meyers, the distinguished biographer of Hemingway, has edited The Great Gatsby for the newly revamped Everyman Library and helpfully supplied the reader with an apparatus of chronology, suggestions for further reading, and a plot...

F. Scott Fitzgerald.
February 1, 1996... Jeffrey Meyers, the distinguished biographer of Hemingway, has edited The Great Gatsby for the newly revamped Everyman Library and helpfully supplied the reader with an apparatus of chronology, suggestions for further reading, and a plot...

English Poetry Since 1940.
February 1, 1996... No ground is ever exactly uncontested in literary history, over which battles about canons and interpretation are always likely; nevertheless, the domain of the roughly `contemporary' is more troublesome than most and is, owing to its very...

Epic Romance: Homer to Milton.
February 1, 1996... Dr Burrow's book tells a powerfully original version of a fascinating, but hitherto often obscure, story. In conventional terms, it is the story of European epic poetry down to Milton in its constantly shifting relations with romance; but...

Literature and Censorship.
February 1, 1996... Eclectic in both subject and in methodological approach, the essays in Literature and Censorship seek to explore ways in which literary texts negotiate the tacit or implicit constraints of their culture. Inhibitions may be politically...

The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England.
February 1, 1996... Eclectic in both subject and in methodological approach, the essays in Literature and Censorship seek to explore ways in which literary texts negotiate the tacit or implicit constraints of their culture. Inhibitions may be politically...

The English Novel in History: 1895-1920.
February 1, 1996... David Trotter sets himself no easy task in aiming to give an account of the development of fiction from 1895 to 1920, extending his survey to include a wider range of works than are usually considered (The Sheik as well as Women in Love and...

Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War: 1919-1939.
February 1, 1996... David Trotter sets himself no easy task in aiming to give an account of the development of fiction from 1895 to 1920, extending his survey to include a wider range of works than are usually considered (The Sheik as well as Women in Love and...

Over his Shoulder.
February 1, 1996... David Trotter sets himself no easy task in aiming to give an account of the development of fiction from 1895 to 1920, extending his survey to include a wider range of works than are usually considered (The Sheik as well as Women in Love and...

Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916.
February 1, 1996... The increased pressure on academics to publish and the simultaneous dwindling of the market for literary monographs have led to an increase in titles which appeal to more than one market. Such titles may be interdisciplinary, may cover a...

In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History.
February 1, 1996... The increased pressure on academics to publish and the simultaneous dwindling of the market for literary monographs have led to an increase in titles which appeal to more than one market. Such titles may be interdisciplinary, may cover a...

The T.S. Eliot-Middleton Murry Debate - The Shaping of Literary Theory: Modernist to Post-Structuralist.
February 1, 1996... The increased pressure on academics to publish and the simultaneous dwindling of the market for literary monographs have led to an increase in titles which appeal to more than one market. Such titles may be interdisciplinary, may cover a...

Constructing Postmodernism.
February 1, 1996... McHale's second volume addressing the vexed issues raised by postmodernism attempts to redress the problems of his first volume, Postmodernist Fiction. Amongst other points were criticisms of his concept of the literary as too stable, his...

The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First-Person Singular.
February 1, 1996... Literary autobiography has a much longer pedigree than plain literary biography, a genre whose very existence was still being justified in the nineteenth century. It has always been accepted, in principle at least, that writers may tell their...

Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation.
February 1, 1996... Cultural Capital ends where William Morris's News from Nowhere began, pursuing a `thought experiment, based on Marx's The German Ideology. If - Professor Guillory romances - we were to have a truly communist society, in which all members had...

Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva.
February 1, 1996... `Th[e]... moment of doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading'; thus Derrida in a passage from Of Grammatology to which Michael Payne not only refers but is, in effect, constantly recalling us. For all its...