Papers on Language & Literature articles from March 1996

Papers on Language & Literature archives from March 1996

Female captivity and the deployment of race in three early American texts.
March 22, 1996... In any discussion of early American literature, the captivity narrative stands out as one of the most interesting, and often troubling, forms of Puritan writing. While these tales of Indian attack and entrapment were often embedded in the...

Defusing the discharged soldier: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and homosexual panic.
March 22, 1996... The Bakhtinian "lyrical dialogue" which Paul Magnuson traces through Wordsworth's and Coleridge's texts is challenged almost from the start by words worth's desire to escape dialogics, win a poets' battle with Coleridge, and "describe himself...

'Garbage': A.R. Ammons's tape for the turn of the century.
March 22, 1996... Time and again a poem of such magnitude and power is written that it achieves what Whitman called a "tallying." T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land was such a poem for the Victorian era turned Modern, but it is A.R. Ammons's Garbage that tallies up...

Society and nature in the 'Cook's Tale.' (Chaucer)
March 22, 1996... With a few notable exceptions,(1) critical attention to the Cook's Tale has been brief, focusing principally on whether Chaucer chose to end it where he did. Given the limited evidence, we can not answer that question with certainty. We can,...

The Absent Shakespeare.
March 22, 1996... Mark Jay Mirsky. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1995, 176 pp. Hardcover $32.50. Mark Jay Mirsky's The Absent Shakespeare loosely argues in favor of the possibility (probability) that Shakespeare had a hand in the Quarto revisions of...

Understanding the Black Mountain Poets.
March 22, 1996... This is a useful book, modest in its physical dimensions and moderate in its critical appraisals. Such a description is based on what I take to be its primary audience, adventurous undergraduate and beginning graduate students anxious either to...

"Steel for the Mind": Samuel Johnson and Critical Discourse.
March 22, 1996... Charles Hinnant begins by explaining that this book is an attempt to reexamine Samuel Johnson's literary criticism in the context of current critical debates," which for Hinnant involve "poststructuralism, reader-response criticism and the...