ELH articles from June 1995

ELH archives from June 1995

(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...

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)...

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,...

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...

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...

Graved in tropes: the figural logic of epitaphs and elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper and Wordsworth. (Robert Blair; Thomas Gray; William Cowper; William Wordsworth)
June 22, 1995... Some of the most influential work in the deconstruction of rhetoric, work often tested on Romanticism at large and on Wordsworth in particular, has repeatedly returned for discussion and debate to a figural complex - namely, the overlap of...

The churchyard among the Wordsworthian mountains: mapping the common ground of death and the reconfiguration of romantic community.
June 22, 1995... As scholars devoted to the anthropology and sociology of death would teach us, the way that individuals relate to death - and to the dead - has much to do with how individuals relate to each other. In his pioneering study devoted to the...

Acting naturally: Bronte, Lewes and the problem of gender performance. (Charlotte Bronte; George Henry Lewes)
June 22, 1995... I During the summer of 1851, Charlotte Bronte visited London and saw Rachel Felix, the famous French actress, perform in several plays. "Thackeray's lectures and Rachel's acting," she wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell, "are the two things in this...

"The commerce of shady wares": politics and pornography in Conrad's The Secret Agent. (Joseph Conrad)
June 22, 1995... I. REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AS PORNOGRAPHY IN THE SECRET AGENT In a scathing review of Conrad's archly-ironic The Secret Agent, an anonymous reader for Country Life took the author to task for being "naughty" without being "at all nice."...

Elizabeth Bishop's social conscience.
June 22, 1995... In "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," the long sequence that makes up the second half of Your Native Land, Your Life, Adrienne Rich meditates on Elizabeth Bishop's late villanelle, "One Art": acts of parting trying to let go without giving up...