Literature Compass最新文献

The manipulation of gender in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is utterly opaque. While “The Knight's Tale” potentially entices readers to think that Chaucer defines a woman regarding her relationship to man, “The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale” suggests that the poet views a woman as an independent figure whose identity has nothing to do with man. This apparently controversial portrait of gender causes some critics to read Chaucer as a pro-woman individual; simultaneously, it inspires other critics to view the poet as anti-feminist. Such debate may cause readers to misjudge Chaucer's multifaceted approach towards gender as well as other hypersensitive topics, thus adding to the atmosphere of complexity and lack of clarity that dominates The Tales. Accordingly, this paper revisits Chaucer's gender-oriented philosophy in The Tales sieving what is conjectured by the poem’s critics from what is said by the poet himself regarding gender. The paper concludes that Chaucer has never had the choice to overtly be or not to be the friend of woman but has always adopted a fence-sitting strategy concerning the question of gender due to his sociopolitical status. The paper confirms that Chaucer's viewpoint of women is neither feminist nor anti-feminist but a realistic amalgamation that mirrors the opaque gender culture of England in the fourteenth century.

This essay analyzes the understudied practice of collecting, marketing, and displaying colonial plant commodities as garden ornaments in nineteenth-century Britain. From the early modern period onward, British garden writers discussed tobacco, sugarcane, coffee, tea, and other colonial crops in their books and magazines, often citing colonial agriculture as a point of interest to curious gardeners. As I will argue, this mode of collecting and aestheticizing plants discloses the deep ambivalence of the British horticultural press toward the realities of plantation agriculture. Building on previous analyses of plants and empire, I show how the cultivation of tobacco in nineteenth-century flower gardens contributed to a broader mediation of Britain's colonial past in horticultural literature. Paying attention to this collecting trend will not only recover an overlooked chapter in the history of British horticulture, but also show how nineteenth-century garden writing operated as a space for transmitting (and manipulating) narratives about colonial agriculture.

The ‘Romantic lyric’ as an idea or critical entity finds itself doubly maligned in contemporary lyric studies. As a perceived product of New Criticism, it finds itself accused by historicists of bringing about the ‘lyricisation’ of poetry in twentieth-century criticism, and, as a mimetic model of subjective expression, it’s disfavoured by lyric theorists who view it as a stepping stone towards the currently common misconception that lyrics are a species of dramatic monologue. Yet returning to the Romantics themselves, we discover other models of the lyric that sit outside the expressive model or the paradigm of lyricisation, and which may well be of use to contemporary lyric studies. This essay offers a reading of one such model in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the form of lyric’s semblance character: Coleridge is peculiarly and persistently concerned with the way the world appears to be (which is often not how the world really is), and his lyric poetry figures as a kind of seemingness in its own right, and one that reflects on the nature of appearances themselves. Before making a case for lyric semblance, this essay offers an overview of the state of lyric studies today, taking as exemplary the work of Virginia Jackson and Jonathan Culler; it places emphasis on the role of the ‘Romantic lyric’ in both accounts, and teases out some of what’s at stake in the tension between historicism and formalism that is at the centre of lyric studies today.

This study focuses on the short fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto and explores how formal techniques, generic patterns, and thematic ambiguities associated with modernism “travel” and are enacted within specific social contexts. Through a close reading of two of Yamamoto's stories—“Seventeen Syllables” and “Wilshire Bus”—I argue that her fictionalized rendering of internment, racism, and social restriction shed light on the constraints that peripheral “modernist” authors faced. Building on studies that have shown how Yamamoto's stories articulate subtle resistance though acts of voicing, this study explores how her fiction persistently draws the readers into the conditions of physical and social constraint, forcing us to grapple emotionally with the experiences of her characters while gaining perspectives on the boundaries that limit and structure individual actions. While Yamamoto was clearly influenced by the modernist revisitation of the short story as a literary form that could express the fragmentation, psychological intensity, and fleeting poetic qualities of twentieth-century life, her self-reflexive representation of minority experience provides a poignant alternative account of modernity, casting critical light on conventional notions of modernism as understood in relation to ideas of travel, mobility, artistic alienation, and cosmopolitan urban life.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, literary manuscripts came to be seen as tangible evidence of the creative process and as a key to the personality of the author. The material traces of writing were understood to outlive their creators and promise to resurrect the authorial body through the magic of the relic. This article reconstructs how authorial script gradually transformed into a collectible object pursued as a memento and a commodity. Letters, drafts, and fair copies by major modern writers found their way into the collections of British aristocrats and American industrialists at the same time that hunting for literary autographs diversified into a middle-class pursuit. Surveying recent scholarship on nineteenth-century collecting and material culture, the essay offers a condensed cultural history of the literary manuscript as a collectible and draws attention to how collectors and collecting feature in fictional texts of the period. It focuses on the artefactual mobility and custodial afterlives of Romantic papers in Victorian literature and culture, exploring a form of collecting which crossed boundaries between periods and national literary traditions.

Magic has served as a source of fascination for early modern scholars throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. While critics continue to debate magic's relationship to religion and science, in recent years the focus has turned to knowledge-making and how magic contributed to a diverse range of discourses during the 16th and 17th centuries. This article first explores some of the significant historical debates on early modern magic before turning to more recent work in literary studies of the Renaissance. While focusing on early modern England and the stage, the article also highlights newer directions for the study of magic that might enfold global contexts and critical methodologies.

From the 1980s onwards, relationality has been a key term in autobiography scholarship and life-writing studies, as it describes how the self in many instances of autobiographical literature emerges in relation to others. Yet, confusion reigns about the exact meaning and applicability of the term relational autobiography. Are all works of autobiographical literature to an extent relational, or only those in which the author's relationships with others form a central theme? Or is relational autobiography a genre on its own; a contemporary genre, clearly distinguished from the traditional genre of the autonomous autobiography? This article casts new light on the history of relationality and autonomy as concepts in autobiography studies, and suggests that contemporary works of relational autobiography ask for an approach of their relationality that does not place it in opposition with autonomy. Adopting the account of relationality developed by Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant's perspective on affective attachments to generic conventions, this article proposes to understand relationality in autobiographical texts as both their “dispossession by” and “working upon” generic norms for autobiographical writing such as depicting oneself as an autonomous being.

The majority of interdisciplinary studies on nineteenth-century Japonisme perpetuate an assumption that most connoisseurs of Japanese art in Victorian Britain were men. Despite recent feminist studies which have restored women to histories of private collecting and curatorship across Europe, there is a lack of consideration of how travelogues by women contributed to public discussions of Japanese art and anthropology in Victorian Britain—including accounts which complement or predate publications by celebrated connoisseurs such as A.W. Franks, James Lord Bowes, and Charles Holme. This article will examine brief passages from travelogues by Anna d’Almeida (1863), Alice Frere (1870), Isabella Bird (1880), and Mary Bickersteth (1893) which chronicle the authors' experiences purchasing ceramics and lacquerware in Japan. The women's careful attention to the history and features which distinguish valuable, antique art pieces from lesser factory productions contradicts the Victorian characterisation of female collectors as indiscriminate participants in commercial or ‘decorative’ trends. Furthermore, the women redress false Victorian conceptions of ‘Japanese’ aesthetics and report on the changing conditions of art production in post-feudal Japan. In context with the popularity of the travel genre across classes and genders in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, d’Almeida, Frere, Bird, and Bickersteth's accounts simultaneously signal their competence as discerning collectors of authentic Japanese art while providing an accessible introduction to Japanese art and aesthetics for aspiring lay-collectors of ‘things Japanese’.

This article interrogates the arbitrary distinctions made between “anti-Judaism” and “anti-Semitism” by contextualizing the treatment of Jews in Roman late antiquity within the broader framework of premodern critical race studies. It illustrates the value of employing models such as racialization and monstrification when reconstructing the various iterations of anti-Jewish prejudice that populate the long history of Christianity. More specifically, it outlines the modes of racialization utilized in two fourth-century Christian writings: Eusebius's two-part apology and the Pseudo-Hegesippus. While Eusebius's work serves as an example of the racialization of Jews through ethnographic mythmaking, the so-called Pseudo-Hegesippus demonstrates the use of monstrification in the service of creating an affective culture of fear and hatred toward Jews. Such examples of Christian race-making in late antiquity contribute to the task of tracing the developments of premodern race beyond the medieval period and disrupts the arbitrary and limiting distinctions made between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.

This article takes the current transnational turn in modernist studies as entry point to probe how that plays out in the classroom in non-Western locations that are often also the “locales” of that disciplinary shift. I propose a waylaying of the energies of dispersion and diffusion that currently animate the modernist field to decolonize the modernist classroom through a parallel vagrancy, but one focused on recovering the local from these compelling taxonomic shifts. It is quite easy to be sucked under by the adrenaline rush of these expansions of new modernist studies that mirror modernism's own self–mythologies. To resist that, we need to be vagrants inside the classroom, to bring into it the choice pickings from our wider reading and research. Our fealty to the modernist archive and the professional competence incumbent on us notwithstanding, our ability to bring tentative new findings from our own research and readings, can potentially dynamize our teaching spaces, as also our commitment to a more decenterd approach. Ready embraces of belatedly discovered writers into the modernist corpus might make our taxonomies look suitably plural and fashionable but subsume the writers' own demonstrated recalcitrance to those taxonomies. Teaching modernism as a core course with a fixed, prescribed, syllabi comprising largely of the Anglo-American presences such as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad has in some ways released the itinerant in me. Through carefully culled examples from my own teaching of the modernist canon, I argue that a genuine opening of modernist studies within the classroom can come from a tempering of the ‘professional’ by itinerant interludes.