ELH articles from March 1995

ELH archives from March 1995

Trifunctionality and the Tree of Charity: literary and social practice in 'Piers Plowman.'
March 22, 1995... discussion of how the "backbyter" and his lot, like "grete wynedes and grete tempestis," blast a "vair tre, vul of fruit, bewtewus of bowes" (Three Middle English Sermons From the Worcester Chapter Manuscript F. 10, ed. G. M. Crisdale [Leeds:...

Prudence and her silence: Spenser's use of Chaucer's 'Melibee.' (Edmund Spenser; Geoffrey Chaucer)
March 22, 1995... In an important recent essay on the relation of Spenser's late lyrics to The Faerie Queene, Paul Alpers is especially concerned to defend Spenser's Melibee, the kindly old shepherd destroyed in the sixth book by marauding brigands, from other...

Visible bullets: 'Tamburlaine the Great' and Ivan the Terrible.
March 22, 1995... On 18 March 1584 Tsar Ivan IV, Emperor and Great Duke of Vladimir, Moscow and of all Russia, King of Astrakhan, King of Kazan, and King of Siberia, was carried on a throne into his treasury, where (in the account of the English emissary Sir...

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the hammam: masquerade, womanliness, and Levantinization.
March 22, 1995... Halsband (Life [note 1], 19.1). 14 Montagu criticizes Addison's distracting foray into romantic subplot, and upholds classical Aristotelian notions concerning the unity of action. She finds Shakespeare's Julius Caesar much better in its...

Elizabeth Thomas and the Two Corinnas: giving the woman writer a bad name.
March 22, 1995... In life as in fiction, names help to fix and prescribe character - thus offering opportunities for liberation as well as constraint. Sometimes, for example, poets assume literary names so that they can construct a position from which to speak:...

Chasms in connections: Byron ending (in) 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' 1 and 2. (Lord George Gordon Byron)
March 22, 1995... Two years and twelve days after departing England for his continental tour, Lord Byron landed at Sheerness on 14 July 1811 bearing the manuscript about to rocket him into international fame.(1) It tracks the months of recurrent dislocation...

The ambivalence of generosity: Keats reading Shakespeare. (John Keats; William Shakespeare)
March 22, 1995... We cannot put aside, and yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: "I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing...

'Wuthering Heights' and the Liverpool slave trade.
March 22, 1995... [T]hey were simply trying to master the racial disorder from which they had formed themselves. - Michel Foucault "The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them - You are welcome to torture...

Fictional territory and a woman's place: regional and sexual difference in 'Shirley.'
March 22, 1995... reader . . . if you be a southern . . .(1) Reviewing Charlotte Bronte's Shirley in 1849, Eugene Forcade remarked that "as a picture of society, the novel could have been called Shirley, or the condition of women in the English middle-class":...

Rhetoric and courtship in 'Can You Forgive Her?'
March 22, 1995... Subtleties! my dear Miss O'Carroll. I am sorry to find you participating in the vulgar error of the reading public to whom an unusual collocation of words, involving a juxtaposition of antiperistatical ideas, immediately suggests the notion of...