Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from September 1994

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from September 1994

Society and the superfluous female: Jane Austen's treatment of widowhood.
September 22, 1994... In Northanger Abbey Jane Austen outlines her strategy for happy endings. Faced with the dull task of explaining General Tilney's rudeness, she solicits the reader's aid: "I leave it to my reader's sagacity to determine how much of all this it was...

"The First Fire": Barbauld rewrites the greater romantic lyric. (English poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld)
September 22, 1994... The current rapid expansion of the literary canon, brought about by a reconsideration of women writers and others writing in a tradition outside the privileged "mainstream," must raise questions about the critical canon as well. How useful in the...

Byron's ludic lyrics. (Romantic poet Lord Byron)
September 22, 1994... The idea of the Romantic lyric as a confessional and sincere effusion overheard by a sympathetic auditor was most influentially presented in M.H. Abrams's "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric." In this essay, Abrams traced the...

Keats's "Outlawry" in "Robin Hood." (poet John Keats)
September 22, 1994... In one of his famous formulations, Keats wrote John Hamilton Reynolds on 3 February 1818 that "poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject."(1)...

The muse in chains: Keats, Durer, and the politics of form. (poet John Keats and engraver Albrecht Durer)
September 22, 1994... With that, Medusa's ugly head he drew, His owne reversed. Forthwith, Atlas grew Into a Mountaine equall to the man. George Sandys's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses "If by Dull Rhymes" is one of the last sonnets Keats ever composed, and...

Making it new: Scott, Constable, Ballantyne, and the publication of 'Ivanhoe.' (Walter Scott, Archibald Constable and James Ballantyne)
September 22, 1994... Though Sir Walter Scott's importance in literary history is now increasingly recognized, many of the volumes in the Waverley Novels series remain firmly on the shelves, untouched, unread, and in some cases almost unknown. But if relatively few...

Narrative surveillance and social control in 'Villette.'
September 22, 1994... In his 1857 review of Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte, W.C. Roscoe compared Bronte's work to the "dark, somewhat disproportioned and forbidding aspect of a daguerreotype," the "hard" and "dark" qualities of which she was...

Not speaking the unspeakable: religion and repetition in Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata sequence.
September 22, 1994... It must forever be ridiculous in Petrarch to compare his mistress, Laura, to Jesus Christ. David Hume In spite of strong modern elements in much of Christina Rossetti's work, the effect of her religiosity remains an issue. It contributes to...

Gissing's 'In the Year of Jubilee' and the epistemology of resistance. (writer George Gissing)
September 22, 1994... A story was a story, a picture a picture, and I had a mortal horror of two stories, two pictures, in one. . . . The reason of this was the clearest--my subject was immediately, under that disadvantage, so cheated of its indispensable centre as to...

Recent studies in the nineteenth century.
September 22, 1994... individual quality is impressively high. Before moving on to the sizable number of historicist studies, three works of more traditional historical contextualism deserve notice. Beth Fowkes Tobin's Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and...