Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from September 2007

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from September 2007

Jane Austen and the Happy Fall.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Jane Austen's novels are littered with fallen bodies. Louisa Musgrove's celebrated fall from the Cobb at Lyme Regis in Persuasion (1817) is but the culmination of a string of such accidents: think of Marianne Dashwood's fall in the rain that...

Manfred's mental theater and the construction of knowledge.(Baron George Gordon Noel Byron's poem)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Its obscurity is a part of its grandeur;--and the darkness that rests upon it, and the smoky distance in which it is lost, are all devices to increase its majesty, to stimulate our curiosity, and to impress us with deeper awe. ...

The problem of immunity in The Last Man.(Mary Shelley's novel)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... When a "last man" narrative presents itself from a first person point of view, the question invariably arises: how does the narrator survive the catastrophe that precipitates the death of all other humans? In Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's The...

Thomas De Quincey and the language of literature: or, on the necessity of ignorance.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Critics have struggled with Thomas De Quincey's definition of literature for over a century and a half now. First offered in "Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected" (1823), where he presents a plan of study for the would-be...

Italic typography and Wordsworth's later sonnets as visual poetry.(Willim Wordsworth)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... It will easily be perceived that the only part of this Sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed in Italics. --William Wordsworth on Thomas Gray. (1) The upsurge of critical interest in the Romantic sonnet revival, though...

The charity bazaar and women's professionalization in Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... In 1877, as an established novelist, Charlotte Mary Yonge reflected on a change that had happened during the course of her career. As a child, she had understood that a lady did not accept payment for her work, yet just thirty years later, she...

Triangulation, desire, and discontent in The Life of Charlotte Bronte.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Most, if not all, critical analyses of Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) discuss the parallels between the two novelists and the personal stake that Gaskell held in her biography of a fellow woman writer. It is, after all, a...

An objective aural-relative in Middlemarch.(George Eliot's novel)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Jubal... watched the hammer, till his eyes, No longer following its fall or rise, Seemed glad with something that they could not see, But only listened to--some melody, Wherein dumb longings inward speech had found, Won...

Recent studies in the nineteenth century.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... An overblown book report, or a dispatch on the "state of the profession"? Maybe it is the yoking of humility and presumption that makes the annual roundup so difficult to begin. While it goes without saying that the reviewer's reach will exceed...