Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from January 1993

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from January 1993

Charactonymic structures in Sidney's 'Arcadias.' (Philip Sidney)
January 1, 1993... "We see we cannot play at chess but that we must give names to our chessmen."(1) In his Course in General Linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure compares language to a game of chess: "just as chess is based entirely on the combinations afforded by...

The theology of the sign: St. Augustine and Spenser's 'Legend of Holiness.' (Edmund Spenser)
January 1, 1993... Book 1 of The Faerie Queene is preeminently about language, its use and misuse, its potential and its limitations. It is therefore not inappropriate to study the text from the perspective of modern language theory. Jonathan Goldberg in one such...

Reading between the lines: manuscript personality and Gabriel Harvey's drafts.
January 1, 1993... (Quodvultdeus) to a thoroughly wilful exercise in the best of intentions (Benevolo). Whoever Volens nolens might technically have been, the nominal allusion is presumably to Harvey, who, willing or not--such is the pretense--is going to get...

The "press and the fire": print and manuscript culture in Donne's circle. (John Donne)
January 1, 1993... Recent critics of Donne have focused on conditions of writing, that is, on the important (and troublesome) fact that as a poet Donne actively shunned print throughout his lifetime and chose to remain a "coterie poet" whose writing existed almost...

Robert Burton's geography of melancholy.
January 1, 1993... about Burton's grasp of geography and cartography is Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988). 10 Albert Baugh et al., eds., A Literary History of England (New York and London:...

Euripides' 'Alcestis' and the "saint" of Milton's reparative twenty-third sonnet. (John Milton)
January 1, 1993... In spite of "greatly exaggerated" reports of the Death of the Author, literary biography still has a purpose. Through all the centuries of literature in English from Sir Philip Sidney to Yeats great poems have been written whose meaning is...

The narrator as chorus in 'Paradise Lost.'
January 1, 1993... Milton's narrator invokes his muse to aid the "advent'rous Song" that is Paradise Lost, "while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme" (1:12-16).(1) Its attempt, I suggest, is to incorporate the choric voice of tragedy into the...

Ithuriel's spear: purity, danger, and allegory at the gates of Eden.
January 1, 1993... Lost" and the New England Tradition, 1630-1890 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 34-61. As Stavely points out the problem has been greatly complicated by the feminist debates of the 1970s and 80s. Some of these problems are addressed in my...

The provenance of the 'Christian Doctrine': addenda from the Bishop of Salisbury. (Thomas Burgess)
January 1, 1993... When I was investigating the provenance of the Christian Doctrine, a frequently heterodox theological treatise that has been assigned to John Milton ever since its discovery in 1823,(1) I came across another writer, Thomas Burgess (1756-1837),...

Recent studies in the English renaissance.
January 1, 1993... the reader can find mention of all one hundred and thirty-three epigrams, each of the fifteen poems in The Forrest, eighty-nine entries from The Vnder-wood, and fifty uncollected poems. "Each poem is worth a glance, and most more than that", the...