ELH articles

Recent articles from ELH

(Dis)embodied letters and The Merchant of Venice: writing, editing, history.
June 22, 1995... The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself. - Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the...

Aborting the "mother plot": politics and generation in 'Absalom and Achitophel.'
June 22, 1995... Although critics have discussed the connections between fatherhood and kingship in Absalom and Achitophel, nobody has yet attended to the poem's less obvious, but equally important and politically-charged representations of maternity.(1) Absalom and Achitophel begins and ends with references to...

Imagining the nation in Defoe's A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain. (author Daniel Defoe)
June 22, 1995... Admiring the "Gentlemen's Houses" along the banks of the Thames from Richmond to London in his 1724-26 Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe admits that "many Descriptions have been accurately given" of their "separate, and distinct Beauties." He continues: But I find...

The two Amelias: Henry Fielding and Elizabeth Justice.
June 22, 1995... In May of 1751, Elizabeth Justice published a thinly veiled autobiographical tale entitled Amelia: or, The Distress'd Wife. In December of the same year, Henry Fielding published his own Amelia, also the story of a distressed wife. Had Fielding's novel appeared in May and Justice's in December...

The story of O: politics and pleasure in 'The Vicar of Wakefield.'
June 22, 1995... Soon after he sets out on the journey to "reclaim" his daughter Olivia "to virtue," after she has been "undone" by the libertine Squire Thornhill, Dr. Primrose, in Oliver Goldsmith's the Vicar of Wakefield (1766), has a debate with a "person discontented with the present government," a Mr....