NEOPHILOLOGUS最新文献

This article contextualises the Anglo-Italian aspects of Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS XIII.B.29. This fifteenth-century paper miscellany contains Bevis of Hampton, Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, St Alexius, Libeaus Desconus, as well as a recipe collection, a section of Lydgate’s “Doublenesse”, and a fragment of Sir Isumbras. The book is among a very select number of codices containing Middle English texts that are presently preserved in an Italian institution. Previous research has demonstrated XIII.B.29 must have travelled to the Italian peninsula at a relatively early date, but the exact reason behind its compilation and the method by which it arrived in Italy remain uncertain. This article reviews the manuscript’s design, provenance, and contents, arguing the book is not just an English manuscript in Italy, but also to some degree an English manuscript about Italy and Italian experiences. Specifically, the article contends that an episode in the manuscript’s Bevis, which describes a street fight near Lombard Street in London, benefits from a reading that acknowledges late medieval developments in finance and long-distance Anglo-Italian commerce, as well as the emergence of Italian communities in Southampton and the capital.

A number of bloggers, journalists, teachers, and librarians have compared Elizabeth Acevedo’s 2019 young adult novel With the Fire on High with Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989), recommending that fans of Esquivel’s work pick up Acevedo’s—and vice versa. These suggestions echo Acevedo’s own comments about the narrative, which she has characterized as “parecido a ‘Como agua para chocolate,’ pero en el barrio” (Acevedo & Pichardo, 2019). This article takes this recent reception history as an invitation to think through how With the Fire on High deepens and course-corrects the revolutionary path of Esquivel’s earlier text. More specifically, I interrogate how Acevedo and Esquivel engage with linguistic identities and with multilingualism in particular as source material for political resistance and healing. Acevedo, like Esquivel before her, represents multilingual identities in ways that disrupt and resist the neocolonial violence of the United States. However, whereas Como agua para chocolate’s references to minoritized languages are executed in a manner that threatens to reinscribe traumatizing ethnoracial and class hierarchies passed down via colonial history, multilingualism in Acevedo’s novel works more systemically to intervene in and undermine such established matrices of power. Acevedo participates in a project of linguistic resistance and healing that involves reclaiming a heritage language for a multiply marginalized protagonist and, through that act of reclamation, rejecting the received cultural wisdom propagated by both colonial and neocolonial systems.

This article characterises Quevedo's “musa décima”, his poetry not included in the posthumous editions, in order to deepen its features and to consider the future critical edition of the whole. The limits of the corpus are still blurred, due to the abundance of poems of doubtful attribution. After a brief contextualisation in the complex transmission of Golden Age poetry, the catalogue of poems, their textual sources and outstanding literary features are dealt with: jocular matter and antigongorism, burlesque sylvas and poems of praise, which situate the author at the beginning of his career. Unveiling this “peripheral” corpus will have an impact on the “nuclear” poetry of Quevedo.

In this essay, I analyze the extent to which repetition can be considered creative in the context of penitential poetry, and what the ramifications are of that pairing for our own understandings of that poetry. When sin is inherited and confessions were guided by eminently repeatable formulae, how does penitential poetry come into being for the first time and enter penitential discourse as a “makyng” that is created or made yet already received, already repeated and circulating at the moment of its birth? The carol, I argue, presents a good place to address that question: its idiosyncratic formal components present a site of creativity and repetition between text and audience, a conjunction which anticipates the dynamics of filmic montage as conceived by Sergei Eisenstein. This aspect of the carol also invites us to explore how authority is created and received in the present moment, bereft of the difference from the present moment so often involved in constructing auctoritas. In conversation with Eisenstein, the medieval penitential carol ultimately becomes a site to reconsider how poetic form can simultaneously uphold and dismantle hierarchical relationships between creators and audiences. In so doing, the penitential carol invites us to re-approach our own critical “makyngs,” which effectively channel the work of medieval poetic form from centuries past.

This paper studies two contemporary plays, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat (2015) and Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew (2017), and contends that they examine the assumption that the neoliberal ideology can be effectively confronted through a critical examination of the subject of neoliberalism. It draws mainly upon Foucault’s discussion of neoliberalism and Wendy Brown’s thoughts about the neoliberal society and argues that the subject that neoliberalism constructs and privileges, homo economicus, is motivated merely by economic gain and seeks to maximize his/her interests in a competitive environment with restricted resources. Sweat and Skeleton Crew, this paper suggests, point to the social immolation that the dominance of the neoliberal subjectivity brings about. They both also highlight the point that marginalized population is especially vulnerable to the principles of the neoliberal ideology. They, therefore, emphasize the need to confront neoliberalism through encouraging altruistic tendencies which requires abandoning the homo economicus model of human behavior.

“Auðunar þáttr vestfirska” or the story of “Audun and the Bear” is about two kings, one Icelander, and one bear, and concerns a wide range of topics and issues. The core of the story, however, concerns the comparison of two great men (a medieval and Icelandic topos) and how an apparently naïve and certainly stubborn young Icelander succeeds in making them reveal themselves as moral actors. On first reading, it might appear that King Svein of Denmark is the clear winner of this implicit contest, but the comparison is a subtle one and the kings more equal than such a reading might initially suggest.

This essay analyzes the allegorical mode of the previously understudied poem by Robert Henryson, The Bludy Serk. In Serk, a knight saves a lady whom he loves from an evil giant, dying in the process. This story is then compared to the story of Christ's Passion, and the poem concludes by identifying the two stories as, in some sense, the same story. This narrative mode is best described using the concept of figura as understood by Erich Auerbach in his essay on the subject. Serk is the only poem in Henryson's corpus which seems to employ this manner of constructing its narrative(s) and is relatively unique among lyrical poems about Christ's Passion in the later Middle Ages. In this regard, it seems to be innovative, and merits future study by Henryson scholars and students of allegory alike.

Kevin Kuhn’s novel Hikikomori is a postmodern Entwicklungsroman. In this essay, I read the novel as a subversion of the neoliberal paradigm, which manifests itself in an omnipresence of self-optimisation options, that the protagonist Till is constantly encouraged to take advantage of. By withdrawing into his room and creating a collaborative online world, Till rejects the cult of individuality modelled by his plastic surgeon father and his interior designer mother. Rather than going on a scheduled journey of self-enhancement around the world, I will argue that it is his virtual journey that attempts self-realisation. However, this rejection of a Weltanschauung based on economic principles comes at the price of exclusion from the analogue world, which bears many parallels with one of the most famous 20th century German language novellas: Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung.

The debate about world literature holds a prominent place in national and comparative literary studies today. However, despite its significance, critics have yet to reach a consensus on how to address its challenges, which include its methodology, the vast volume of texts, uneven circulation, and difficulties of translation. This essay examines the concerns of world literature through the lens of William Godwin’s philosophy on history writing. While Godwin’s historical perspective has not been widely discussed in relation to world literature, his reflections on history and history writing that resist a comparative approach to universal history engage with similar issues found in the debates on world literature. Delving into Godwin’s writings on history, which challenge distant approaches to history and stress the importance of the individual and the particular, this essay argues that Godwin’s pursuit of a purposeful and intimate relationship with the past offers important insights for addressing the issues of world literature. In particular, Godwin’s emphasis on the purpose of studying history and his affectionate approach toward the temporal “other” provide helpful directions in forming respectful relationships with the geographical and ethnic “other” and their literature. Godwin’s pursuit of deep knowledge and friendship with the inspiring past proposes a valuable alternative to seeking systematic incorporation of the other’s literature or unthinkingly expanding world literary canon.

Four hitherto unpublished letters from Edward Garnett (1868–1936) to Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), dated 26 February and 6 March 1902, and 27 November and 29 December 1908, throw light on Garnett’s perspicuity as a publisher’s reader for Duckworth and on the earliest reactions to Anna of the Five Towns, the novel that put Bennett on the map as a writer of fiction. Garnett had caveats: the suicide of Willie Price should be cut and in places, the novel was “over prosaic”. However, it gave Garnett and his wife, Constance Garnett (1861–1946), translator of Turgenev—an author that also interested Bennett—“enormous pleasure” and was strongly recommended. Bennett resisted making the changes and Anna was published by Chatto & Windus, who offered a higher royalty. It had a laudatory reception. The letters—the first pages of which are included in the article as an illustration of each transcription—illuminate Garnett and Bennett, their attitudes, and other literature they encountered. In 1902 Bennett was the supplicant, hoping to persuade Duckworth to publish his work, but by 1908 the correspondence is between equals. Thereafter it was Bennett who was the established figure in the literary world.