ELH articles from June 1994

ELH archives from June 1994

Coming to terms: Thomas Elyot's definitions and the particularity of human letters.
June 22, 1994... I. DEFINITIONS Once upon a time in early sixteenth-century England there was no dictionary. There were some incomplete Latin-English lexicons like the Medulla Grammatica (the "marrow" or "kernel" of grammar), compiled in the early fifteenth...

"Arden lay murdered in that plot of ground": surveying, land and Arden of Faversham.
June 22, 1994... Without the habit of conceptualising space, a traveller going to war or work could not link his separate impressions to the nature of his route as a whole . . . [A] man could not visualise the country to which he belonged; a landowner, unable...

"The adoption of abominable terms": the insults that shape Windsor's middle class.
June 22, 1994... I I take the title of this essay from Francis Ford's first soliloquy in The Merry Wives of Windsor.(1) Misconstruing his wife's merriment as unfaithfulness, the distracted Ford laments: See the hell of having a false woman! My bed shall be...

Edward IV's secret familiarities and the politics of proximity in Elizabethan history plays.
June 22, 1994... But here the similarity ends, for Heywood, unlike Shakespeare, explores the age's dominant version of Jane Shore, inventing her husband's departure and return and their romantic death together. It is an extraordinary expansion of the source...

Mackenzie's 'Man of Feeling': embalming sensibility. (writer Thomas Mackenzie)
June 22, 1994... This extreme sympathy with misfortunes . . . though it could be attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other purpose than to render miserable the person who possessed it. --Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments....

Conspicuous consumption: white abolitionism and English women's protest writing in the 1790s.
June 22, 1994... In this paper I wish to examine two overlapping areas of middle-class polemic from the 1790s: white abolitionism and English women's protest writing. A certain polarization has crept into recent discussions of abolitionism, with some critics...

The politics of family in the 'Pickwick Papers.'
June 22, 1994... The celebration of innocence, benevolence and stability that traditional readings of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers share has been associated particularly with the celebration of family that "begins memorably with Christmas at Dingley...

"A Wilde desire took me": the homoerotic history of Dracula.
June 22, 1994... These four different attitudes correlate to three different real-world events. Harker's despair and sense of doom reflect the emotions Stoker imputes to Wilde. Lucy's day of triumph resembles Irving's. Seward's medical activities link him to...

Misreading 'Watt': the Scottish psychoanalysis of Samuel Beckett.
June 22, 1994... "It is well said," Poe says "of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen'--it does not permit itself to be read."(1) The figures in Beckett's Watt, as they move "slowly alone, like something out of Poe," move in a text that...

Bakhtin in African American literary theory.
June 22, 1994... Johnson to other contemporary white feminists who theorize fiction written by African American women, see Elizabeth Abel, "Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation," Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 470-98....