Essays in Literature articles

Recent articles from Essays in Literature

'The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia,' Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' and the School of Night: An Intertextual Nexus
March 22, 1996... For at least a century, critics have acknowledged the relevance of specific plot lines, methods of characterization, and literary motifs in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593) (hereafter CoPA) for Shakespeare's plays beginning with King Lear and extending through the late romances to The...

Poetic Authority and Accountability: What We Expect of Seamus Heaney
September 22, 1996... I It has been alluded to often enough that Seamus Heaney's reputation was made, at least in the United States, when Robert Lowell hailed him as "the best Irish poet since Yeats." But Lowell's endorsement invites a comparison that Heaney has repeatedly questioned. He refuses to allow Lowell's...

Emerson's 'Montaigne; or, the Skeptic:' Biography as Autobiography
September 22, 1996... There is a curious absence in most of the text of Emerson's "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic": that of Montaigne. Of its forty-four paragraphs a total of nine are devoted to the French essayist (paragraphs fifteen to twenty-three). The whole treatment of Montaigne is less than one-fourth of the essay,...

On the Sublime and Beautiful in Shelley's 'Frankenstein.' (English Woman Author Mary Shelley)
September 22, 1996... The categories of the sublime and the beautiful were once the subject of heated debate as the dual focus of much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse. Their function in Shelley's Frankenstein needs to be translated for our time, a task Anne K. Mellor has begun in her excellent...

'The Assurance to Write, the Vanity of Expecting to Be Read:' Deception and Reform in Mary Davy's 'The Reform'd Coquet.' (18Th Century English Woman Author)
September 22, 1996... Since its coinage in mid seventeenth-century France, "coquette" labels a woman who gains power over others by manipulative verbal and body language, a skill referred to as her "art."(1) Etymologically, the word "coquette" comes from "cock," a male animal which controls its hens and is known for...