Modern Language Quarterly articles from March 1995

Modern Language Quarterly archives from March 1995

Reader-oriented polyphony? Zhang Zhupo's commentary on the 'Jin Ping Mei.'
March 1, 1995... Jin Ping Mei, an anonymous work of the late sixteenth century first published circa 1618, is the earliest major Chinese changpian xiaoshuo, or "novel," that depicts everyday life in all its corporeal plenitude.(1) Noted for lively descriptions...

Nationalism and geoculture in Defoe's history of writing. (Daniel Defoe)
March 1, 1995... In An Essay Upon Literature; or, An Enquiry into the Antiquity and Original of Letters (1726), Daniel Defoe tells two stories at once: first, a history of the alphabet and of writing itself, through which emerges a second tale about the...

Mary Robinson and the myth of Sappho.
March 1, 1995... Describing the scope of her Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937, Joan DeJean points out that the French dominated the reception history of the Greek poet until the eighteenth century, when "the English and the Germans really began to play a role."(1)...

'Jane Eyre,' the woman writer, and the history of experience.
March 1, 1995... Elizabeth Gaskell, author of The Life of Charlotte Bronte, that bricolage of memories, anecdotes, and tales, thought she knew what information a woman's novel is made of. She records a conversation between Charlotte and her friend "Mary," who...

The Subject of Violence: The "Song of Roland" and the Birth of the State.
March 1, 1995... In the Song of Roland, claims Peter Haidu, we witness a "beginning moment" in our own cultural genealogy. It is the time at which Western subjectivity rises up side by side with a new image of the social body and its polity - "a putative State,...

Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730.
March 1, 1995... Richard Braverman offers a descriptive cultural history of the replacement of seventeenth-century cyclical narratives of return and restoration with eighteenth-century linear narratives of progress. He begins shortly after the Restoration with...

Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain: 1760-1830.
March 1, 1995... When someone is as intent upon rescuing you as Peter Murphy is here, it's probably best to find out why. His fervor is, it appears, next- (X-?) generational, for he clearly marks off his project by observing "how frequently literary critics...

Seeing Together: Friendship Between the Sexes in English Writing from Mill to Woolf.
March 1, 1995... This is a book of interest. It explores written representations of heterosexual friendships from such sources as the Mills, the Victorian feminist contributors to Women's Work, and Women's Culture, Browning, Eliot, New Woman authors of the...