ELH articles from September 1993

ELH archives from September 1993

Longinus, the dialectic, and the practice of mastery. (Longinus' 'On the Sublime,' is a work on rhetoric in relation to power)
September 22, 1993... In Europe a disaffected subject makes plans to obtain secret information, go over to the enemy, capture some stronghold, or start some empty movement of protest among the people. In Asia such a man goes straight to the...

Whose god's on first? Special providence in the plays of Christopher Marlowe.
September 22, 1993... In act 4, scene 4 of Tamburlaine part 1, the hero is baiting the caged Turkish emperor with more than ordinary gusto, thus prompting Theridamas to wonder aloud whether "Mahomet will suffer this." Techelles responds: "|Tis like he will, when...

Pleasure and danger: measuring female sexuality in 'Measure for Measure.' (William Shakespeare's play)
September 22, 1993... Despite its initial promise of equity and levity--a balance title and a Folio classification as a comedy -- Measure for Measure delivers what many readers have felt to be a skewed and dismal account of sexual desire. Feminist and...

The interested heart and the absent mind: Samuel Johnson and Thomas Otway's 'The Orphan.'
September 22, 1993... The horror of physical, primarily sexual, desires and impulses overriding the mind and will, so characteristic of seventeenth-century writing, is replaced in the eighteenth century by fears of mental vacuity and insanity. In the opening pages...

Rereading Shelley. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
September 22, 1993... Geoffrey Hartman's conception of the "Romance of Being Named" serves to describe how autobiography is determined as a kind of quest "by the idea of a hidden--spectral or specular--name."(1) Miming precisely the sort of sublimity as is...

Wordsworth, revision, and personal identity. (William Wordsworth, romantic poet)
September 22, 1993... "THE CURRENT CONSENSUS" My interest in the problem of Wordsworth's revisions began in the early 1980s, in the face of an awkward pedagogical reality: many of the upper-level undergraduates to whom I taught the English Romantic poets...

"Safely to their own borders": proto-Zionism, feminism, and nationalism in 'Daniel Deronda.' (George Eliot's novel)
September 22, 1993... When twentieth-century literary critics take issue with the representation of the Jews in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), it tends to be because they find the Jewish characters sentimentalized and overly idealized. A critic like Deborah...

Stephen Crane's "Maggie" and the modern soul. ('Maggie: A Girl of the Streets')
September 22, 1993... In Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), it is possible to read the decline of the nineteenth-century mental philosophy of "character" and the rise of a modern psychology of "self-esteem." Crane's novel represents some of the...

The novel, the play, and the book: 'Between the Acts' and the tragicomedy of history. (Virginia Woolf's work)
September 22, 1993... In a playful review of a volume of Dostoevsky's stories published in 1919, Virginia Woolf asks us to imagine that the great Russian novelist has been magically "transplanted" to an English village straight out of Jane Austen. "How," she...