The Review of English Studies articles from May 1993

The Review of English Studies archives from May 1993

A Gregorian model for Eve's Biter Drync in 'Guthlac B.' (theme of Eve as source of death from Gregorian the Great's homily)
May 1, 1993... UNLIKE most medieval hagiographic poems, which open with an event of some direct relevance to the life of the commemorated saint, the Old English Guthlac B reaches back to the beginning of creation for an idyllic vision of prelapsarian Eden,...

Samuel Johnson, Richard Rolt, and the 'Universal Visiter.' (dispute over authorship of 18th century essays)
May 1, 1993... SINCE the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson has been associated with six essays printed in the Universal Visiter, a monthly periodical written by Christopher Smart and Richard Rolt. These six pieces, 'Some Account of the Life and Writings of...

For lucre of for fame: Lockhart's versions of the reception of 'Marmion.' (John Gibson Lockhart's manipulation of criticisms of Sir Walter Scott's poem)
May 1, 1993... To examine the collected twelve-volume 1833-4 edition of Scott's poetry edited by his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart is to appreciate how strongly our understanding of the early reception of Scott's poetry continues to be shaped by the...

A solution to riddle 72 in the Exeter Book. (Notes )
May 1, 1993... Ic waes faemne geong, feaxhar cwene, ond aenlic rinc on ane tid; fleah mid fuglum ond on flode swom, deaf under ype dead mid fiscum, ond on foldan stop--haefde fero cwicu.(1) (I was a young woman, a grey-haired woman, And a solitary warrior...

The first quarto of 'Hamlet' and the date of 'Othello.' (dating of William Shakespeare's plays) (Notes)
May 1, 1993... EVER since Alfred Hart suggested, in 1935,(1) that the first Quarto of Hamlet (hereafter Q1) incorporated words and phrases from Othello, those who have discussed the date of Othello have divided into two camps. The difference between them is...

Milton, Shakespeare, Pindar and the bees. (connection between William Shakespeare and Pindar in John Milton's 'L'Allegro') (Notes)
May 1, 1993... Or sweetest Shakespeare fancy's child, Warble his native woodnotes wild . . . I suggest that in representing Shakespeare as 'fancy's child' in line 133 of 'L'Allegro' Milton had in mind the legendary story that Pindar was fed honey by bees...

Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism.
May 1, 1993... I enjoyed reading about fifty of these ninety-one articles (and preface) by ninety authors, and they shall be listed presently. Of the rest, the majority concern a literary period or attitude, decently treated but sometimes obscured in a...

A Critical Bibliography of Old English Syntax to the End of 1984 Including Addenda and Corrigenda to Old English Syntax.
May 1, 1993... Innocent syntacticians might have been content to leave the concept of 'critical bibliography', like that of 'critical history', to students of literature, on the grounds that in syntax the factual preponderates over the opinion-led; and that...

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.
May 1, 1993... These three books focus solely on Beowulf, but offer the reader a wide variety of content and approach. Kendall's and Creed's studies apparently relate closely to one another in that both examine the Beowulf-poet's techniques of composition. In...

A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama.
May 1, 1993... This volume reprints from 23 sources 33 articles, of anything from six to thirty-six pages, by 30 different authors. Originals appeared between 1951 and 1983 in publications as well known as A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare...

The Battle of Maldon AD 991.
May 1, 1993... Professor Bately demonstrates the accuracy of the date in the book's title in a study of the appropriate annals in the various recensions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The confusion of the texts is extreme but she sorts the matter out in a way...

Allegorical Remembrance: A Study of The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man as a Medieval Treatise on Seeing and Remembering.
May 1, 1993... These two books are both concerned with the status and function of memory in medieval writings, but although their viewpoint is basically the same, their approach to the subject is very different, and there is little overlapping, which suggests...

Italy and the English Renaissance.
May 1, 1993... Piero Boitani's eclectic range of textual references in The Tragic and the Sublime, encompassing passages from Chaucer, Dante, Petrarch, Guillaume de Deguileville, Hemingway, and Seamus Heaney, is indicative of the ambitious critical scope of...

Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer.
May 1, 1993... Barry Windeatt's introductory survey of 'Chaucer traditions' situates the essays in this collection in relation to appreciations and interpretations of Chaucer from the poet's own lifetime until the end of the seventeenth century (neatly marked...

Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament.
May 1, 1993... Both these books have dramatic openings. The Rule of Art analyses the illustration by Girolamo Pozzo accompanying the thirty-third canto of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1584 edition) in which after dinner Bradamante is shown by torchlight a...

The Welles Anthology: MS. Rawlinson C. 813: A Critical Edition.
May 1, 1993... Over a period in the second quarter of the sixteenth century Humphrey Wellys (by 1502-65), a Staffordshire gentleman, compiled, or had compiled for him, a collection of principally lyric verse and political prophecies which is now MS Rawlinson...

Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation.
May 1, 1993... These two books share a political approach to Renaissance texts, but offer sharply differing methodologies. Howard Dobin draws on deconstruction and on the sociology of Max Weber in his analysis of prophetic discourse. Prophecy in English...

Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide.
May 1, 1993... This is a revised version of a guide to Shakespeare studies published in 1973. The first edition had seventeen contributors and ran to 300 pages; in its revised version it has two additional chapters and is 131 pages longer. Ten of the chapters...

Shakespeare's Dramatic Transactions.
May 1, 1993... Michael Mooney's book, as the author explains, is heavily indebted to the notions of locus, platea, and Figurenpositionen developed in Robert Weimann's Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978). Unfortunately, Mr Mooney has...

Staging Shakespeare's Late Plays.
May 1, 1993... Focusing on Peter Hall's staging of three of Shakespeare's late plays at the National Theatre in 1988 (Cymbeline, The Winters Tale, and The Tempest), Roger Warren aims to explore 'the way in which the practical process of rehearsal brings out...

Antony and Cleopatra.
May 1, 1993... In editing Shakespeare, as in the visual arts, it may sometimes come about that less is more. Two imposing new editions of Antony and Cleopatra illustrate the point. Marvin Spevack's ice-breaking New Variorum, first of the projected...

The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796.
May 1, 1993... The last few years have witnessed a revival of interest in that much-neglected field of literary production, eighteenth-century women's poetry. Roger Lonsdale's Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford, 1989) brought to light...

Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel.
May 1, 1993... This book consists of three distinct parts, loosely connected by the idea of 'space': architectural space; urban space; and a search for space in the novels of Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson. In all three the author is looking for space as an...

Henry Fielding: A Life.
May 1, 1993... Apparently the Plan of the Universal Register-Office has not previously appeared in an edition of Fielding's works--and one can see why. It is simply a prospectus for the business-venture undertaken by Henry and John Fielding in 1750. In the...

The Sociable Humanist: The Life and works of James Harris, 1709-1780.
May 1, 1993... At one of the 'prettiest little dinners in the world', on which Gibbon prided himself, were gathered on 6 May 1775 'Sir Edward Worsley and his brother, Mr Harris of Salisbury, Mr Cornwall and Mr Barne, all Members of Parliament, and Sir Stanier...

Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey.
May 1, 1993... No one knows what to make of English biography of the early nineteenth century. The two full-length studies, by Reed and Hart,(1) have so little common ground that the latter considered 'further dialogue . . . futile'. There are two areas of...

Ossian Revisited.
May 1, 1993... The title of this collection of nine essays with an editorial introduction is appropriate. There have been periodic visitings to the controversial topic of James Macpherson's Ossianic 'translations' over the last two centuries, and this volume...

Frances Burney: The World of Female Difficulties.
May 1, 1993... In her introduction to this welcome paperback edition of The Wanderer, Margaret Anne Doody (whose work on Burney has effectively undermined the traditional image of 'a cheerful Georgian satirist') addresses the novel as a product of Romanticism...

Table Talk, 2 vols.
May 1, 1993... 'My Uncle is much as usual--very grand & eloquent, & my memorabilia augment rapidly': thus Henry Nelson Coleridge writing home to Ottery St Mary in 1831. Professor Woodring, in his excellent introduction both informative and critical, states...

Victorian Doubt: Literary and Cultural Discourses.
May 1, 1993... Both of these books explore aspects of Victorian religion but there the similarity ends. Wheeler focuses very sharply on a particular area of theology (eschatology), trawling widely in all kinds of writing to produce a work of impressive...

Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement.
May 1, 1993... If the poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson is seldom read nowadays, his name, and some rudimentary grasp of his significance, figure often in critical summaries of nineteenth-century Irish poetry. W.B. Yeats's invocation of a trinity of precursors...

The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant.
May 1, 1993... In her edition of Margaret Oliphant's 'prosaic little narrative, all about the facts of a life so simple as mine' Elisabeth Jay has returned to the original 'bits' and 'fragments' of manuscript previously tidied up by Oliphant's niece and...

Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition.
May 1, 1993... James dominates the dust-jacket of Philip Horne's book: caught in a 1905 photograph by Katherine McClellan in the act of writing. Head composed, pen in a hand raised and actually blurred in movement over the page held steady above his crossed...

W. B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism.
May 1, 1993... When K. P. S. Jochum's bibliography of Yeats criticism first came out in 1978 it seemed that nothing could have been more complete. It was rightly hailed as the definitive work of its kind. Now Jochum has put us further in his debt with a...

D. H. Lawrence and the Trembling Balance.
May 1, 1993... In an essay published in 1989, based on a paper delivered four years previously, John Worthen dismissed Charles Ross's Penguin edition of Women in Love (1982) as 'unreliable and untrustworthy'. Worthen accused Ross of selective emendation of...

The Boy in the Bush.
May 1, 1993... In August 1923, the day before setting off to travel across the United States and down its western seaboard, Lawrence received a typescript of 'The House of Ellis', the novel he had encouraged Mollie Skinner to write during his fortnight in...

W.H. Auden: 'The Map of All My Youth:' Early Works, Friends, and Influences.
May 1, 1993... This is the first in a new series of volumes, one of which will appear every two or three years. Undoubtedly the series will be welcomed by Auden scholars, since it aims to 'make available some of the unpublished writing by Auden that has been...

Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter.
May 1, 1993... Pinter in Play might be seen to have three aims (or strategies). The first is to provide a survey of Pinter criticism, showing dominant trends over the past two decades. The critics whose work is surveyed are subdivided into groups, each group...

Irish Writers and Politics.
May 1, 1993... The present collection of essays conforms to a model made familiar by its publishers. It appears in the IASAIL-Japan Series, and the two-page Introduction is a kind of newsletter for Japanese members. Otherwise, though Notes on Contributors is...

The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century.
May 1, 1993... 'All signs become null when the thing signified is taken away.' Calvin's warning in the Institutes of the Christian Religion points to a theology of dispossession, exclusion, and separation. Susan Manning traces the impact of this theology, and...

Walt Whitman and the American Reader.
May 1, 1993... In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Ezra Greenspan reveals Whitman's ambivalent expectations of the reader-poet relationship. A large part of the book examines the idea that Whitman created a democratized form of poetry, befitting his...

Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader.
May 1, 1993... Peter Messent's book will be welcomed for its pedagogic value by those faced with the annual task of teaching 'canonical' texts in the American literary tradition. The critical orthodoxy implied here is that most varieties of contemporary...

The Great Gatsby.
May 1, 1993... This is the first volume of a planned series of scholarly editions of the complete works of Scott Fitzgerald. Matthew J. Bruccoli gives a lucid account of the history of its first production and of the materials available for an editor....

Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance.
May 1, 1993... Professor Vickers is suing replevin. Rhetoric--'the faculty,' as Aristotle put it, 'of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion'--has been prostituted, 'the harlot of the arts'; he is concerned to make her once more an...

Jewish Presences in English Literature.
May 1, 1993... In a version of a famous Yiddish joke, two Jews face a firing squad. 'I'm going to ask if we can smoke a last cigarette', murmurs one. 'Shh...', whispers the other. 'Don't make trouble'. Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller's Jewish Presences in...

Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization of Literary Criticism.
May 1, 1993... Not without a struggle, Professor McCrea has made his peace with the state of literary studies. The uneasy equilibrium at which he has arrived has something to displease everyone. Those lamenting the ascendancy of theory over literary studies...

Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture.
May 1, 1993... The opening and closing essays in this book have a more personal air than other works by Greenblatt. He begins by describing his 'intellectual trajectory' from undergraduate days intimidated by, but not quite in the thrall of, an imposing...

What's Wrong with Postmodernism? Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy.
May 1, 1993... Tough, demanding, Christopher Norris's new book is a valuable one, not least for those who stand at a sceptical distance from some of the current preoccupations of literary theory. For Norris is surely one of the leading explicators,...

The Ends of History: Victorians and 'the Woman Question.'
May 1, 1993... Of these contributions to feminist studies, Minogue's anthology addresses a range of issues, from Milton's Eve to criticism of contemporary women's poetry, with continuous attention to the nineteenth century; while Crosby's study pointedly...

Stories, Theories & Things.
May 1, 1993... It is curious that the teaching of courses and the writing of books on women's writing can provoke hostile reactions, whereas similar activities dealing with, for example, Irish writing, or Canadian literature, do not. The basis for the...