Thomas Creech’s 1682 translation of Lucretius, the first complete English version printed, earned its author praise from the likes of Aphra Behn, John Evelyn, and Nahum Tate. Creech’s work has recently attracted renewed attention from scholars of Lucretius’s reception, who have situated his translation within the context of Restoration intellectual culture. This article argues that Creech’s Lucretius cannot be understood without reference to the new science of the seventeenth century, particularly the experimentalism of Robert Boyle, which forms a more important context to the conception and reception of the translation than has previously been supposed. The first section following the introduction assembles information about Creech’s institutional context in the late 1670s and early 1680s, with a focus on the scientific interests that preoccupied his contemporaries at Wadham College, Oxford, and the Oxford Philosophical Society. The next section examines the Lucretius translation itself and the appended notes, demonstrating Creech’s close engagement with the Boyle-Hobbes controversy on the existence of vacua. The final section concludes that Creech addressed his translation especially to readers among the “virtuosi,” the fellows and fellow travelers of the Royal Society, and perhaps even more specifically to Boyle himself. Creech’s Lucretius is thus shown to offer an illuminating case study of the intersections of literature, classical scholarship, and science in Restoration England.
{"title":"The New Science and the Virtuoso Reader in Thomas Creech’s Lucretius","authors":"T. Vozar","doi":"10.1086/723113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723113","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Creech’s 1682 translation of Lucretius, the first complete English version printed, earned its author praise from the likes of Aphra Behn, John Evelyn, and Nahum Tate. Creech’s work has recently attracted renewed attention from scholars of Lucretius’s reception, who have situated his translation within the context of Restoration intellectual culture. This article argues that Creech’s Lucretius cannot be understood without reference to the new science of the seventeenth century, particularly the experimentalism of Robert Boyle, which forms a more important context to the conception and reception of the translation than has previously been supposed. The first section following the introduction assembles information about Creech’s institutional context in the late 1670s and early 1680s, with a focus on the scientific interests that preoccupied his contemporaries at Wadham College, Oxford, and the Oxford Philosophical Society. The next section examines the Lucretius translation itself and the appended notes, demonstrating Creech’s close engagement with the Boyle-Hobbes controversy on the existence of vacua. The final section concludes that Creech addressed his translation especially to readers among the “virtuosi,” the fellows and fellow travelers of the Royal Society, and perhaps even more specifically to Boyle himself. Creech’s Lucretius is thus shown to offer an illuminating case study of the intersections of literature, classical scholarship, and science in Restoration England.","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"120 1","pages":"356 - 377"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60728238","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}
{"title":":Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind","authors":"Beatrice E. Kitzinger","doi":"10.1086/722257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722257","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41884970","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}
Book 1 of The Faerie Queene constitutes Spenser’s most searching study of morbid sadness, which he associates with a wish for “careless” rest and, ultimately, for death. His account of Redcrosse’s disease makes use of medieval conceptions of acedia and Renaissance ideas of melancholy, but it diverges from both, as well as from modern conceptions of depression. From the opening stanza Spenser suggests that there are two Redcrosse knights, the one consciously aggressive and eager for glory, the other “too solemn sad,” desiring escape from the cares of the world. Spenser embodies this second impulse in the House of Morpheus. In the early cantos the Morpheus impulse remains accessible only in dream, but as Redcrosse deteriorates it becomes more dominant and more conscious. It next appears as Sans Joy, who undermines Redcrosse’s attempts at self-glorification in the House of Pride and who (despite the young knight’s seeming victory) forces him to recognize the emptiness of the ambition imaged in Lucifera’s palace. Having humiliatingly fled the House of Pride, Redcrosse allows himself to be seduced by Duessa to distract himself from his incipient despair—a despair he voices in Orgoglio’s dungeon as a desire for death. Despaire is the deadliest embodiment of the Morpheus impulse, no longer inchoate feeling but articulate sin. But Redcrosse’s experiences in the House of Holiness and afterward suggest that he will never in life lose this weight of grief, which is part of the human condition. Spenser revisits these attacks of morbid sorrow in later episodes of his epic.
{"title":"The Persistence of Morpheus: Redcrosse’s Carelessness","authors":"W. A. Oram","doi":"10.1086/722597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722597","url":null,"abstract":"Book 1 of The Faerie Queene constitutes Spenser’s most searching study of morbid sadness, which he associates with a wish for “careless” rest and, ultimately, for death. His account of Redcrosse’s disease makes use of medieval conceptions of acedia and Renaissance ideas of melancholy, but it diverges from both, as well as from modern conceptions of depression. From the opening stanza Spenser suggests that there are two Redcrosse knights, the one consciously aggressive and eager for glory, the other “too solemn sad,” desiring escape from the cares of the world. Spenser embodies this second impulse in the House of Morpheus. In the early cantos the Morpheus impulse remains accessible only in dream, but as Redcrosse deteriorates it becomes more dominant and more conscious. It next appears as Sans Joy, who undermines Redcrosse’s attempts at self-glorification in the House of Pride and who (despite the young knight’s seeming victory) forces him to recognize the emptiness of the ambition imaged in Lucifera’s palace. Having humiliatingly fled the House of Pride, Redcrosse allows himself to be seduced by Duessa to distract himself from his incipient despair—a despair he voices in Orgoglio’s dungeon as a desire for death. Despaire is the deadliest embodiment of the Morpheus impulse, no longer inchoate feeling but articulate sin. But Redcrosse’s experiences in the House of Holiness and afterward suggest that he will never in life lose this weight of grief, which is part of the human condition. Spenser revisits these attacks of morbid sorrow in later episodes of his epic.","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"120 1","pages":"312 - 334"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48748350","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}
Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewInfectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism. Robert Mitchell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. x+322.Colin JagerColin JagerRutgers University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLeft-identified intellectuals have enjoyed beating up on liberalism for some time. Liberalism’s omnipresence, not to mention its association with individual liberty, private property, and (especially) a market economy, have made it an irresistible counter in the academic parlor game of demonstrating that those who seem to be our friends are in fact our enemies. In his excellent book, Robert Mitchell writes that, having absorbed the critique of liberalism in graduate school, its primary theorists seemed to him “cramped, provincial, and reactionary” compared to the excitements of continental theory (vii). I imagine this bit of intellectual autobiography will resonate with Mitchell’s readers; it certainly did with me. I too learned in graduate school that novels inculcated liberal norms (individualism, agency, freedom) and that liberalism was pernicious—or, as Mitchell puts it in more measured terms, that literature was “a technology of normativity” (2). Was I supposed to hate novels, then?Infectious Liberty guides its readers beyond this intellectual cul-de-sac. Mitchell writes that when he read Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, and Roberto Esposito’s development of Foucault’s ideas, he came to see the liberal tradition as concerned with groupings, averages, and collective experiments, not simply with individual agency and private property. Liberalism, in short, was a mode of biopolitics: it was a way of seeing the world in terms of populations, regularities, collective bodies, and the overall processes of life and death (illness, production, birth, etc.). Like Foucault and Esposito, Mitchell is not interested in condemning biopolitics or getting rid of it, “whatever that might mean” (x). Rather, he follows Esposito by parsing it: on the one hand, into the death-dealing “thanatopolitics” that emerge in the work of Agamben and others, focused on security and survival; on the other, into an “affirmative biopolitics” focused on openness and transformation. One name for that affirmative biopolitics, Mitchell argues, is Romanticism.Infectious Liberty is divided into six chapters. The first three are organized by way of concepts familiar to literary scholars: genius, difference, character, and free indirect discourse. Chapters 4 through 6 take up more general concepts in critical sociology: flow, experiment, and self-regulation. All the chapters are characterized by an admirably dialectical impulse toward complication and nuance. Mitchell seems interested in clarity rather than academic point scoring, and so I fear my summary below will sc
{"title":":<i>Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism</i>","authors":"Colin Jager","doi":"10.1086/722228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722228","url":null,"abstract":"Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewInfectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism. Robert Mitchell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. x+322.Colin JagerColin JagerRutgers University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLeft-identified intellectuals have enjoyed beating up on liberalism for some time. Liberalism’s omnipresence, not to mention its association with individual liberty, private property, and (especially) a market economy, have made it an irresistible counter in the academic parlor game of demonstrating that those who seem to be our friends are in fact our enemies. In his excellent book, Robert Mitchell writes that, having absorbed the critique of liberalism in graduate school, its primary theorists seemed to him “cramped, provincial, and reactionary” compared to the excitements of continental theory (vii). I imagine this bit of intellectual autobiography will resonate with Mitchell’s readers; it certainly did with me. I too learned in graduate school that novels inculcated liberal norms (individualism, agency, freedom) and that liberalism was pernicious—or, as Mitchell puts it in more measured terms, that literature was “a technology of normativity” (2). Was I supposed to hate novels, then?Infectious Liberty guides its readers beyond this intellectual cul-de-sac. Mitchell writes that when he read Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, and Roberto Esposito’s development of Foucault’s ideas, he came to see the liberal tradition as concerned with groupings, averages, and collective experiments, not simply with individual agency and private property. Liberalism, in short, was a mode of biopolitics: it was a way of seeing the world in terms of populations, regularities, collective bodies, and the overall processes of life and death (illness, production, birth, etc.). Like Foucault and Esposito, Mitchell is not interested in condemning biopolitics or getting rid of it, “whatever that might mean” (x). Rather, he follows Esposito by parsing it: on the one hand, into the death-dealing “thanatopolitics” that emerge in the work of Agamben and others, focused on security and survival; on the other, into an “affirmative biopolitics” focused on openness and transformation. One name for that affirmative biopolitics, Mitchell argues, is Romanticism.Infectious Liberty is divided into six chapters. The first three are organized by way of concepts familiar to literary scholars: genius, difference, character, and free indirect discourse. Chapters 4 through 6 take up more general concepts in critical sociology: flow, experiment, and self-regulation. All the chapters are characterized by an admirably dialectical impulse toward complication and nuance. Mitchell seems interested in clarity rather than academic point scoring, and so I fear my summary below will sc","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136063957","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}
Literary critics and translators alike have widely criticized Alexander Pope’s 1725 translation of The Odyssey for Pope’s non-Homeric poetic embellishments. Nevertheless, the translation has remained popular among poets for the ways in which Pope’s verse preserves the linguistic sensuousness of Homer’s Greek epic. This article contends that Pope achieves that preservation through a translation not of Homer’s verses denotatively but instead by a translation of Homer’s letters, their sounds, and the affective poetic qualities Pope discerned within them. Focusing on three vignettes from Pope’s Odyssey, I explore correspondences between Pope’s sonic constructions and Homer’s; through those correspondences, I examine Pope’s practices of Greek reading and translation as I also challenge the notion that Pope’s Odyssey is a product overdetermined by the literary proclivities of its translator. Ultimately, this argument reveals that Pope’s translation of The Odyssey is far more faithful to the original poem than generally imagined. Moreover, it argues for a critical return to Pope’s rarely treated translation when considering both the limits and possibilities of Homeric translation.
{"title":"“Untranslated and Untranslatable”? A Sonic Study of Pope’s Odyssey","authors":"Spencer Fugate","doi":"10.1086/722507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722507","url":null,"abstract":"Literary critics and translators alike have widely criticized Alexander Pope’s 1725 translation of The Odyssey for Pope’s non-Homeric poetic embellishments. Nevertheless, the translation has remained popular among poets for the ways in which Pope’s verse preserves the linguistic sensuousness of Homer’s Greek epic. This article contends that Pope achieves that preservation through a translation not of Homer’s verses denotatively but instead by a translation of Homer’s letters, their sounds, and the affective poetic qualities Pope discerned within them. Focusing on three vignettes from Pope’s Odyssey, I explore correspondences between Pope’s sonic constructions and Homer’s; through those correspondences, I examine Pope’s practices of Greek reading and translation as I also challenge the notion that Pope’s Odyssey is a product overdetermined by the literary proclivities of its translator. Ultimately, this argument reveals that Pope’s translation of The Odyssey is far more faithful to the original poem than generally imagined. Moreover, it argues for a critical return to Pope’s rarely treated translation when considering both the limits and possibilities of Homeric translation.","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":"120 1","pages":"378 - 393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42279993","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}
Drawing on ancient concepts of the senescence of the world, King Lear depicts an old world overshadowed by an apparently imminent apocalypse. Waiting in agonized suspense for a day of judgment that never arrives, however, audiences as well as the characters on stage experience the “weight of this sad time”—not the end of time but the time that stubbornly refuses to come to an end. King Lear therefore stages the experience of living in the old age of the world as conceptualized by Augustine, a time in which history, marked by suffering, is plunged into darkness. While the senescence of the world is a commonplace idea from ancient times onward, it is Augustine’s version of the concept, in which the old age of the world signifies not simply decline but a temporality characterized by the anguished tension between a suffering present and a hoped-for future, that informs the world of King Lear. One of the places Shakespeare encountered this model of temporal experience was in Calvin’s Sermons on Job (1574). Demonstrating Shakespeare’s extensive engagement with this work, I argue that King Lear is informed by the Augustinian models of time and history expounded by Calvin in these sermons.
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{"title":":Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature","authors":"R. Barr","doi":"10.1086/724132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724132","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41974736","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}
{"title":":Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia","authors":"Noel Blanco Mourelle","doi":"10.1086/723648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723648","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45201,"journal":{"name":"MODERN PHILOLOGY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42005767","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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