Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088718
Dawn M. Coleman
Critiquing the literary-critical habit of approaching religion primarily in terms of individual belief, this essay proposes that the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s definition of religion as a “lineage of belief” can reorient literary scholars to religion’s investment in its own survival and reproduction. Hervieu-Léger’s model emphasizes that religious institutions ensure their continuity by negotiating intracommunity conflict and intergenerational transformations. Building on this model, the essay argues that literary texts participate in religion’s collective memory and self-definition, then illustrates this point by demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks (1869) creates a bildungsroman-like narrative to shape the story of Protestantism’s Anglican-Puritan branch from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Although this representation is political in that it reinforces Protestantism as integral to American identity, Oldtown Folks prioritizes the vibrancy and longevity of Anglo-American Puritanism and Episcopalianism as relatively autonomous, family- and community-based institutions that maintain complex relationships to state violence and imperialism. For instance, while Oldtown Folks endorses Protestantism’s collaboration with North American settler colonialism, it also challenges the efficacy and desirability of the Congregational Church’s South Seas missionary work.
{"title":"Fathers, Mothers, Saints, Martyrs: Religion as a Lineage of Belief","authors":"Dawn M. Coleman","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088718","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Critiquing the literary-critical habit of approaching religion primarily in terms of individual belief, this essay proposes that the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s definition of religion as a “lineage of belief” can reorient literary scholars to religion’s investment in its own survival and reproduction. Hervieu-Léger’s model emphasizes that religious institutions ensure their continuity by negotiating intracommunity conflict and intergenerational transformations. Building on this model, the essay argues that literary texts participate in religion’s collective memory and self-definition, then illustrates this point by demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks (1869) creates a bildungsroman-like narrative to shape the story of Protestantism’s Anglican-Puritan branch from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Although this representation is political in that it reinforces Protestantism as integral to American identity, Oldtown Folks prioritizes the vibrancy and longevity of Anglo-American Puritanism and Episcopalianism as relatively autonomous, family- and community-based institutions that maintain complex relationships to state violence and imperialism. For instance, while Oldtown Folks endorses Protestantism’s collaboration with North American settler colonialism, it also challenges the efficacy and desirability of the Congregational Church’s South Seas missionary work.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89496290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10088731
W. Werner, Mimi Winick
Recent developments in the field of Victorian studies include its increasingly “global” or “transnational” scope as well as its “religious turn,” with a proliferation of scholarship on religion from Christian sects to new religious movements such as Theosophy. However, the highly relevant concept of global or globalized religion is not yet a part of Victorian literary scholarship. This speculative essay explores why this topic has been relatively invisible in Victorian literary studies and how the field might better encounter globalized religion and literature. The essay suggests that global religion remains absent from the field in consequence of how certain nineteenth-century ideas structure Victorian studies: for example, the treatment of religion as a fairly stable category that indexes an author’s or a text’s nationality and even aesthetic value. To move these ideas farther from structure to subject of studies in the field, this essay turns to religious studies and recent projects informed by work in Black studies that engages in “undisciplining” scholarly fields. Such work suggests how Victorian literary studies functions within a comparativist logic that treats religion as a universal cultural phenomenon that corresponds to national and aesthetic characteristics. A promising alternative is a “connective” rather than a comparativist approach, which entails emphasizing the historical formation of religious practices in cultural exchange. This more connective approach seeks to attune Victorian studies to aesthetic projects it has previously overlooked as outside its disciplinary borders. To illustrate this claim, this essay discusses the literary-spiritual project of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship, which flourished in twentieth-century America in literary and spiritual commentary on texts, including texts themselves more and less usually understood as Victorian, such as Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of the Rubaiyat.
{"title":"How to See Global Religion: Comparativism, Connectivity, and the Undisciplining of Victorian Literary Studies","authors":"W. Werner, Mimi Winick","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10088731","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10088731","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Recent developments in the field of Victorian studies include its increasingly “global” or “transnational” scope as well as its “religious turn,” with a proliferation of scholarship on religion from Christian sects to new religious movements such as Theosophy. However, the highly relevant concept of global or globalized religion is not yet a part of Victorian literary scholarship. This speculative essay explores why this topic has been relatively invisible in Victorian literary studies and how the field might better encounter globalized religion and literature. The essay suggests that global religion remains absent from the field in consequence of how certain nineteenth-century ideas structure Victorian studies: for example, the treatment of religion as a fairly stable category that indexes an author’s or a text’s nationality and even aesthetic value. To move these ideas farther from structure to subject of studies in the field, this essay turns to religious studies and recent projects informed by work in Black studies that engages in “undisciplining” scholarly fields. Such work suggests how Victorian literary studies functions within a comparativist logic that treats religion as a universal cultural phenomenon that corresponds to national and aesthetic characteristics. A promising alternative is a “connective” rather than a comparativist approach, which entails emphasizing the historical formation of religious practices in cultural exchange. This more connective approach seeks to attune Victorian studies to aesthetic projects it has previously overlooked as outside its disciplinary borders. To illustrate this claim, this essay discusses the literary-spiritual project of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship, which flourished in twentieth-century America in literary and spiritual commentary on texts, including texts themselves more and less usually understood as Victorian, such as Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of the Rubaiyat.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84649810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-9792659
M. Goble
{"title":"Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism","authors":"M. Goble","doi":"10.1215/00267929-9792659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9792659","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88448203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-9791003
J. Werlin
This essay describes how commercial publishing in Renaissance England made the age of authors newly salient, especially at the important moment of the literary debut. Drawing on a prosopographic survey of Tudor and early Stuart writers, the essay sketches the age structure of debut authorship, adding concrete detail to the much-discussed association between youth and literature in this era. It also shows how ideals such as precocity and categories such as juvenilia arose in response to the new possibilities and problems opened by dated publication.
{"title":"The Age of the Author: Print and Precocity in the English Renaissance","authors":"J. Werlin","doi":"10.1215/00267929-9791003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9791003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay describes how commercial publishing in Renaissance England made the age of authors newly salient, especially at the important moment of the literary debut. Drawing on a prosopographic survey of Tudor and early Stuart writers, the essay sketches the age structure of debut authorship, adding concrete detail to the much-discussed association between youth and literature in this era. It also shows how ideals such as precocity and categories such as juvenilia arose in response to the new possibilities and problems opened by dated publication.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82951110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-9790977
Katherine G. Charles
Across her career the modernist Edith Sitwell iterated eccentricity as a category of reclaimed value that sanctions an expansive array of previously overlooked and frequently unshared pleasures. These intimate appetites are broadly conceived as operating in variable proximity to embodiment and eros but also as enticingly out of joint with their historical moment. In pursuit of the concept of eccentricity, this essay applies twenty-first-century methods developed by queer studies to the representational strategies Sitwell undertook in English Eccentrics (1933) and I Live under a Black Sun (1937), two counter-Enlightenment texts that draw their found content and characters from the Age of Pope and Swift. It argues that reappropriating eccentricity as a badge of creativity rather than a label for dismissal allows Sitwell to explore more capacious models of pleasure and erotic attachment that are not circumscribed by physical contact or heteronormative consummation. In doing so, Sitwell develops eccentricity as a framework oppositionally defined by the mystification of its peers but angled to claim future recognition.
{"title":"“To Consort with Eccentricities”: Edith Sitwell’s Eighteenth Century","authors":"Katherine G. Charles","doi":"10.1215/00267929-9790977","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9790977","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Across her career the modernist Edith Sitwell iterated eccentricity as a category of reclaimed value that sanctions an expansive array of previously overlooked and frequently unshared pleasures. These intimate appetites are broadly conceived as operating in variable proximity to embodiment and eros but also as enticingly out of joint with their historical moment. In pursuit of the concept of eccentricity, this essay applies twenty-first-century methods developed by queer studies to the representational strategies Sitwell undertook in English Eccentrics (1933) and I Live under a Black Sun (1937), two counter-Enlightenment texts that draw their found content and characters from the Age of Pope and Swift. It argues that reappropriating eccentricity as a badge of creativity rather than a label for dismissal allows Sitwell to explore more capacious models of pleasure and erotic attachment that are not circumscribed by physical contact or heteronormative consummation. In doing so, Sitwell develops eccentricity as a framework oppositionally defined by the mystification of its peers but angled to claim future recognition.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85952609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-9790990
Hal Gladfelder
The advent of a new political regime in Italy in the 1790s led to decrees banning castrati from the stage and the closure of the singing academies where they taught. But seventy years later the composer Gioacchino Rossini looked back to the castrati as the last adepts of the art of bel canto: “As to the castrati, they vanished, and the usage disappeared in the creation of new customs. That was the cause of the irretrievable decay of the art of singing.” This essay focuses on the eighteenth-century castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti—friend of Charles, Frances, and Susan Burney, idol of William Beckford—and on the efforts of the novelist and critic Stendhal to “remember” Pacchierotti’s lost voice. Stendhal never heard Pacchierotti in his prime, but in his 1824 Vie de Rossini he declared that the art of bel canto had reached its apogee with Pacchierotti in 1778: five years before the writer’s own birth. Stendhal sought to demonstrate that the lost voice could be remembered by way of both historical evidence and the textual and viva voce “recordings” of earlier listeners: Beckford, the Burneys, and the singer Gabriel Piozzi. In Stendhal’s erotics or mnemonics of musical sensation, such textual and performative recordings allow us to remember the sensations elicited by an absent voice as vividly as the phonographic or digital recordings on which later listeners would rely.
{"title":"The Decay of Singing: Remembering the Castrato","authors":"Hal Gladfelder","doi":"10.1215/00267929-9790990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9790990","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The advent of a new political regime in Italy in the 1790s led to decrees banning castrati from the stage and the closure of the singing academies where they taught. But seventy years later the composer Gioacchino Rossini looked back to the castrati as the last adepts of the art of bel canto: “As to the castrati, they vanished, and the usage disappeared in the creation of new customs. That was the cause of the irretrievable decay of the art of singing.” This essay focuses on the eighteenth-century castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti—friend of Charles, Frances, and Susan Burney, idol of William Beckford—and on the efforts of the novelist and critic Stendhal to “remember” Pacchierotti’s lost voice. Stendhal never heard Pacchierotti in his prime, but in his 1824 Vie de Rossini he declared that the art of bel canto had reached its apogee with Pacchierotti in 1778: five years before the writer’s own birth. Stendhal sought to demonstrate that the lost voice could be remembered by way of both historical evidence and the textual and viva voce “recordings” of earlier listeners: Beckford, the Burneys, and the singer Gabriel Piozzi. In Stendhal’s erotics or mnemonics of musical sensation, such textual and performative recordings allow us to remember the sensations elicited by an absent voice as vividly as the phonographic or digital recordings on which later listeners would rely.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87616078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-9791055
Lidan Lin
{"title":"Beckett and Buddhism","authors":"Lidan Lin","doi":"10.1215/00267929-9791055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9791055","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80970023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-9791042
Andrew M. Hui
{"title":"Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England","authors":"Andrew M. Hui","doi":"10.1215/00267929-9791042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9791042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75362103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-9791016
A. Rosensweig
This essay examines how members of the political Right in the United States—including insurrectionists, antiabortion extremists, and adherents of the QAnon conspiracy—have mobilized theories of resistance from early modern Europe to justify their opposition to state and federal law. Rather than simply dismiss these right-wing appeals to resistance theory as unscholarly and anachronistic, the essay argues that we must take them seriously as an uncomfortable part of this theory’s legacy.
{"title":"Whose Resistance Theory?","authors":"A. Rosensweig","doi":"10.1215/00267929-9791016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9791016","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines how members of the political Right in the United States—including insurrectionists, antiabortion extremists, and adherents of the QAnon conspiracy—have mobilized theories of resistance from early modern Europe to justify their opposition to state and federal law. Rather than simply dismiss these right-wing appeals to resistance theory as unscholarly and anachronistic, the essay argues that we must take them seriously as an uncomfortable part of this theory’s legacy.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87269363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-9791068
Jason Groves
scholar who has spent years immersed in the archives. The events reconstructed from these materials were shrowded in secrecy and deliberately obscured by the agents involved, which created a major analytical challenge. This makes the work Michels undertook all the more impressive. The book is at its strongest when the narrative pauses to address these issues and assess the nature and contents of several contradictory sources. Some may find the selected phrases and words frequently reproduced in their original languages a distraction. Though experts in the field will welcome Michels’ precision, students without a working knowledge of German, Latin, Italian, and Hungarian might be intimidated by these insertions. This deep archival work lays the foundation for future studies, many of which are suggested by Michels in the conclusion. That ordinary Hungarians sought their fortunes with the Ottoman sultan rather than the Habsburg emperor may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with the complicated positions taken by the residents of the former Kingdom of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The romanticized popular rebels described by Michels are known in Hungarian historiography as the legendary kuruc freedom fighters. They were a staple of twentieth-century nationalist children’s literature and textbooks. In subsequent studies, an important task will be to disentangle the complicated positions occupied by these and other similar rebels in the collective memory of the region. A related task that remains for future scholars is the reconstruction of popular attempts to become subjects of the sultan before and after these revolts. Indeed, archival sources reveal the willingness of Hungarian and Transylvanian noblemen and commoners to shift their allegiance to the sultan throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Another important topic for further research is the Ottoman perspective on these events, highlighted by Michels himself as a necessary complement to his own outstanding piece of scholarship.
{"title":"The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany","authors":"Jason Groves","doi":"10.1215/00267929-9791068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9791068","url":null,"abstract":"scholar who has spent years immersed in the archives. The events reconstructed from these materials were shrowded in secrecy and deliberately obscured by the agents involved, which created a major analytical challenge. This makes the work Michels undertook all the more impressive. The book is at its strongest when the narrative pauses to address these issues and assess the nature and contents of several contradictory sources. Some may find the selected phrases and words frequently reproduced in their original languages a distraction. Though experts in the field will welcome Michels’ precision, students without a working knowledge of German, Latin, Italian, and Hungarian might be intimidated by these insertions. This deep archival work lays the foundation for future studies, many of which are suggested by Michels in the conclusion. That ordinary Hungarians sought their fortunes with the Ottoman sultan rather than the Habsburg emperor may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with the complicated positions taken by the residents of the former Kingdom of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The romanticized popular rebels described by Michels are known in Hungarian historiography as the legendary kuruc freedom fighters. They were a staple of twentieth-century nationalist children’s literature and textbooks. In subsequent studies, an important task will be to disentangle the complicated positions occupied by these and other similar rebels in the collective memory of the region. A related task that remains for future scholars is the reconstruction of popular attempts to become subjects of the sultan before and after these revolts. Indeed, archival sources reveal the willingness of Hungarian and Transylvanian noblemen and commoners to shift their allegiance to the sultan throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Another important topic for further research is the Ottoman perspective on these events, highlighted by Michels himself as a necessary complement to his own outstanding piece of scholarship.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72369180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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