Papers on Language & Literature articles from January 1997

Papers on Language & Literature archives from January 1997

Ahab and the glamour of evil: a Burkean reading of ritual in 'Moby Dick.'
January 1, 1997... Numerous critics have commented upon the significance of ritualistic acts in Moby Dick, particularly in the "Quarterdeck," "Forge," and "Candles" chapters. Poet W. H. Auden writes that Ahab enacts "every ritual... of the Religious Hero, only...

"A heart terrifying Sorrow": an occasional piece on poetry of miscarriage.
January 1, 1997... In a seventeenth-century manuscript inspired initially by the fear that she would die in childbirth, Lady Mary Carey included among the prose meditations several poems on the suffering of motherhood.(1) The longest of the poems, and the final...

Sexual matter and 'Votes for Women.'
January 1, 1997... In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler demonstrates that materiality is a "site at which a certain drama of sexual difference plays itself out" and suggests that "to invoke matter is to invoke a sedimented history of sexual hierarchy and sexual...

Josephine Herbst's 'The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs': literary history "In the Wide Margin of the Century."
January 1, 1997... So let me plunge into my central matter at once: a challenge of time and space, a rejection of the platitudinous interpretations of the twenties. If the twenties has become a kind of fetish may it not be because the thirties has been isolated...

Billy "The Kid" Collins: Jim Thompson's enigmatic savior in 'After Dark, My Sweet.'
January 1, 1997... After Dark, My Sweet is not one of Jim Thompson's better-known works, and the critics have had relatively little to say about it; even Michael J. McCauley, in his biography of Thompson, allows the book a mere two pages. However, what little...