Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from June 1996

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from June 1996

Self-assessment in Dryden's 'Amphitryon.'
June 22, 1996... By 1690, the date of John Dryden's Amphitryon, or the Two Sosia's, British drama reflects, along with its well-documented political emphases, an urgent concern with metaphysical and epistemological questions: How shall humans know, much less...

Congreve's 'Way of the World' and popular criminal literature.
June 22, 1996... In a last desperate attempt to wrest control of two fortunes from Lady Wishfort and spoil the marriage of Mirabell and Millamant, Mr. Fainall's cynical lover Mrs. Marwood in Congreve's Way of the World (1700) warns Lady Wishfort (pretending to be...

Anticlericism in Swift's 'Tale of the Tub.'
June 22, 1996... Since its first publication, the central question about Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub has been whether it affirms or challenges Anglican orthodoxy. In dealing with this issue, recent critics have either ignored Swift's intellectual context...

Have you eaten yet? The reader in 'A Modest Proposal.'
June 22, 1996... I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no...

Repetitive patterns in Samuel Johnson's 'Rasselas.'
June 22, 1996... Ye who would listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow;...

Sterne's sentimental Yorick as male hysteric.
June 22, 1996... In A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne, the narrator protagonist Yorick embodies both masculine and feminine qualities. These male and female roles produce tensions in Yorick's character and work both to facilitate and hinder his acquisition...

Female abjection in Inchbald's 'A Simple Story.'
June 22, 1996... The abjection that is articulated in late-eighteenth-century writings by women has rarely been remarked. Recent theories of abjection articulate a post-Freudian description of the abject individual, and studies such as those by Julia Kristeva and...

Revolution and the French disease: Laetitia Matilda Hawkins's 'Letters' to Helen Maria Williams.
June 22, 1996... In the years preceding the French Revolution, a patriarchal ideology emphasizing proper female behavior, the "natural" domestic role of woman, and her acquiescent subordination to her husband (underscored in various biblical texts) had been in...

Recent studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.
June 22, 1996... The good people at Studies in English Literature sent me ninety-three books this year. As always, the choice here is simply to list them and make some concluding observations, or to attempt some kind of synoptic view of the whole: given this...