ELH articles from March 1993

ELH archives from March 1993

Seeking "the fruit of favour": the dedicatory sonnets of Henry Lok's 'Ecclesiastes.'
March 22, 1993... Henry Lok, the late-Elizabethan poet and intelligencer, published only two works: Sundry Christian Passions, a collection of devotional sonnets from 1593, and a verse paraphrase of Ecclesiastes brought out in 1597, which also included an...

'Hamlet,' Hales v. Petit, and the hysteresis of action. (legal property case of Sir James Hales and Cyriack Petit)
March 22, 1993... to intellectual history of the filtering of legal constructions of action into the theater, arguments that Hamlet can be situated determinately in that history are unlikely to be convincing, in part because the structure of the legal...

"Plainly partial": the liberal 'Areopagitica.'
March 22, 1993... (A, 747). For Milton -- from the early Of Reformation to the late prose -- popery and superstition are synonymous with idolatry. Because idolatry defies the very principle -- free circulation -- upon which Milton's commonwealth is founded, it...

Enlightenment canon wars: Anglo-French views of literary greatness.
March 22, 1993... Voltaire Foundation, 1979), 111-31. The analogy between Johnson and other apparently disparate French philosophers has been well expanded in Mark J. Temmer's, Samuel Johnson and Three Infidels. Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot (Athens and London:...

Writing under constraint: Swift's "Apology" for 'A Tale of a Tub.' (Jonathan Swift)
March 22, 1993... The "Apology" added to the 1710 edition of Swift's Tale of a Tub seems to offer readers the rare benefit of the author's commentary on his own text -- a singular instance of Swift reading Swift. Critics generally assume that as he defends the...

Finding Mr. Boswell: rhetorical authority and national identity in Johnson's 'A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.' (Samuel Johnson)
March 22, 1993... but to drive them apart. In an attempt to maintain the mere possibility of meaning in this confrontation with the indeterminacy that inhabits his own discourse, Johnson embraces a Cratylitic notion of language in the text's final episode. Though,...

Impositions of form: romantic antitheatricalism and the case against particular women.
March 22, 1993... Arguing that beauty is a "social quality," because we "experience sentiments of tenderness and affection" toward objects of pleasing appearance, Burke admits that he is unable to understand the grounds for this partiality in wording that gets to...

Writing nationalist history: England, the conversion of the Jews, and 'Ivanhoe.'
March 22, 1993... of the modern Jews as well. In reviewing and revising different European national histories, this literature attempted the comparative (re)definition of several national identities, often in opposition to each other -- French versus English...

Manual conduct in 'Great Expectations.'
March 22, 1993... the beginning of things. The fights we have examined illustrate different modes of repression, in varying degrees of punitiveness, for managing and disciplining the play of hands. In each instance, the sexual possibilities generated by hands...

Elegy and personae in Ezra Pound's 'Cathay.'
March 22, 1993... Pound first published his Personae in 1909, including two previous collections of his poems. The title "Personae" was used again for his collected poems of 1926, and for the selection from these of 1928. That Pound attached great importance to...