Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914015
Adam Kozaczka
Abstract:This paper studies how and why Walter Scott's Waverley Novels remain outside of the canon despite a burgeoning Scott studies subfield on the rise in the literary studies community. The article identifies the disconnect between Scott scholarship and Scott pedagogy as a way into a larger set of problems involving how late nineteenth-century and modernist aesthetics set enduring standards for "good writing." If we take Scott's de-canonization as a test case, we gain insight into how literary interiority—itself a carefully disguised construct—obfuscates and displaces older standards of writerly quality and learn how to find new, twenty-first-century applications for now forgotten novels.
{"title":"Exclusive Interiorities: Forgotten Novels and the Walter Scott Importance Trope","authors":"Adam Kozaczka","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper studies how and why Walter Scott's Waverley Novels remain outside of the canon despite a burgeoning Scott studies subfield on the rise in the literary studies community. The article identifies the disconnect between Scott scholarship and Scott pedagogy as a way into a larger set of problems involving how late nineteenth-century and modernist aesthetics set enduring standards for \"good writing.\" If we take Scott's de-canonization as a test case, we gain insight into how literary interiority—itself a carefully disguised construct—obfuscates and displaces older standards of writerly quality and learn how to find new, twenty-first-century applications for now forgotten novels.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":" 3","pages":"1035 - 1068"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138613378","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914017
Carolin Benack
Abstract:The neoliberal individual, according to critics like Wendy Brown and Michel Foucault, treats all spheres of life as subject to utility maximization: Whether deciding on a job, a house, or a romantic partner—everything is treated according to a logic of economy. Scholars typically point to economics as the conceptual source of this subject. In this essay, I suggest a different point of origin: the late-nineteenth century novel. Taking a classic of American realist fiction, William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), as representative for a larger trend, I show that the novel both articulates and evinces a shift in the cultural conception of the individual. Silas Lapham reorients the individual away from the liberal subject, primarily defined by property ownership, and toward the incessantly choosing entity of neoliberalism. This essay at once reframes existing discussions of the neoliberal subject and shows that neoliberal thought has long been articulated by entities other than economics—namely, novels.
{"title":"On the History of Choice: William Dean Howells and the Roots of the Neoliberal Individual","authors":"Carolin Benack","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The neoliberal individual, according to critics like Wendy Brown and Michel Foucault, treats all spheres of life as subject to utility maximization: Whether deciding on a job, a house, or a romantic partner—everything is treated according to a logic of economy. Scholars typically point to economics as the conceptual source of this subject. In this essay, I suggest a different point of origin: the late-nineteenth century novel. Taking a classic of American realist fiction, William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), as representative for a larger trend, I show that the novel both articulates and evinces a shift in the cultural conception of the individual. Silas Lapham reorients the individual away from the liberal subject, primarily defined by property ownership, and toward the incessantly choosing entity of neoliberalism. This essay at once reframes existing discussions of the neoliberal subject and shows that neoliberal thought has long been articulated by entities other than economics—namely, novels.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"145 4","pages":"1099 - 1122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138621732","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914018
Victoria Wiet
Abstract: This article demonstrates the importance of Jude the Obscure's Oxford setting to Thomas Hardy's project of writing a novel of maturation that refuses to conclude with successful reproduction. Linking the character of Sue Bridehead with Hardy's interest in writing about Greek love by Oxford graduates, I show how Jude's coupling with Sue incites intellectual exploration rather than the reducing development to the ends of reproductive marriage or professional achievement. To narrate the effect of Sue's tutelage, I show, Hardy derails the novel's teleological progression in favor of a pastoral mode made possible by spaces where the couple can safely practice non-marital sexuality. By way of conclusion, I position Jude at the start of a queer pastoral tradition in British fiction in which setting is formally significant because of its historical significance to the sustainability of sexually nonnormative lives.
{"title":"\"Boyish as a Ganymede\": Greek Love and the Erotic Experiment in Jude the Obscure","authors":"Victoria Wiet","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article demonstrates the importance of Jude the Obscure's Oxford setting to Thomas Hardy's project of writing a novel of maturation that refuses to conclude with successful reproduction. Linking the character of Sue Bridehead with Hardy's interest in writing about Greek love by Oxford graduates, I show how Jude's coupling with Sue incites intellectual exploration rather than the reducing development to the ends of reproductive marriage or professional achievement. To narrate the effect of Sue's tutelage, I show, Hardy derails the novel's teleological progression in favor of a pastoral mode made possible by spaces where the couple can safely practice non-marital sexuality. By way of conclusion, I position Jude at the start of a queer pastoral tradition in British fiction in which setting is formally significant because of its historical significance to the sustainability of sexually nonnormative lives.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"63 1‐2","pages":"1123 - 1157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138623679","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914021
Rory G. Critten
Abstract:Sir Orfeo is a retelling of the Orpheus myth that allows the hero to keep his bride. This paper counters readings of the poem as a vindication of married love by focusing on its reception in the shadow of a significant omission: both Virgil and Ovid state that after losing Eurydice, Orpheus gave up loving women; Ovid adds that Orpheus loved boys. The significance of these missing conclusions is explored for readers of the poem from its scribes to their patrons and their patrons' families. The paper shows the usefulness of a reception-oriented approach for queer readings of the text.
{"title":"A Queer Omission in Sir Orfeo","authors":"Rory G. Critten","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Sir Orfeo is a retelling of the Orpheus myth that allows the hero to keep his bride. This paper counters readings of the poem as a vindication of married love by focusing on its reception in the shadow of a significant omission: both Virgil and Ovid state that after losing Eurydice, Orpheus gave up loving women; Ovid adds that Orpheus loved boys. The significance of these missing conclusions is explored for readers of the poem from its scribes to their patrons and their patrons' families. The paper shows the usefulness of a reception-oriented approach for queer readings of the text.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"2 11","pages":"909 - 932"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138623905","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914013
Ted Tregear
Abstract:In a poem to his friend Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley offered a critique of hope in ostentatiously metaphysical terms. He thus initiated an exchange, "On Hope," whose philosophical tenor offers new insights on the dialectic between poetry and metaphysics in seventeenth-century England. Following Cowley's lead, this essay explores the principle of hope in metaphysical poetry. It reads his poem against the metaphysical tradition, from Aristotle to Theodor Adorno, to clarify its engagement with the Aristotelian notion of potentiality. And it shows how, even in writing against hope, Cowley's poetry can think, and hope, in ways that metaphysics cannot.
{"title":"Hope Against Hope: Abraham Cowley and the Metaphysics of Poetry","authors":"Ted Tregear","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In a poem to his friend Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley offered a critique of hope in ostentatiously metaphysical terms. He thus initiated an exchange, \"On Hope,\" whose philosophical tenor offers new insights on the dialectic between poetry and metaphysics in seventeenth-century England. Following Cowley's lead, this essay explores the principle of hope in metaphysical poetry. It reads his poem against the metaphysical tradition, from Aristotle to Theodor Adorno, to clarify its engagement with the Aristotelian notion of potentiality. And it shows how, even in writing against hope, Cowley's poetry can think, and hope, in ways that metaphysics cannot.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":" 9","pages":"1006 - 979"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138617509","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914022
Tamara A. Goeglein
Abstract:Noah's ark ([inline-graphic 01] or thebah) fascinated the Christian Hebraist makers of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible. Their sacred philology interpreted thebah as a singular life-preserving vessel, and their Bible's elegant engravings of thebah insert Christ's crucified body inside it. "Christ's ark," as I call this emblem, figures the life-preserving Resurrection promised in Christ's sacrificial death. I argue that "Christ's ark" informs John Donne's "A Hymne to Christ." In its first stanza, Donne makes a distinctly personal emblem of "Christ's ark," which intersects with the hymn's controversial closing lines. These closing lines express faith in Christ's Resurrection, and, with His Resurrection, Donne's own.
{"title":"Emblematic Arks in John Donne's \"A Hymne To Christ\" and the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568–73)","authors":"Tamara A. Goeglein","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Noah's ark ([inline-graphic 01] or thebah) fascinated the Christian Hebraist makers of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible. Their sacred philology interpreted thebah as a singular life-preserving vessel, and their Bible's elegant engravings of thebah insert Christ's crucified body inside it. \"Christ's ark,\" as I call this emblem, figures the life-preserving Resurrection promised in Christ's sacrificial death. I argue that \"Christ's ark\" informs John Donne's \"A Hymne to Christ.\" In its first stanza, Donne makes a distinctly personal emblem of \"Christ's ark,\" which intersects with the hymn's controversial closing lines. These closing lines express faith in Christ's Resurrection, and, with His Resurrection, Donne's own.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"32 S115","pages":"933 - 953"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138623228","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914012
Christopher Pye
Abstract:Engaging current affect theory through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin, "Hurt Feelings" argues that affect should be understood neither as a form of embodiment nor of sympathetic correspondence but as a state of incommensurability between self and world that is at the same time the originative condition of those categories; rather than extending the self into the world, affect concerns the possibility of world as such. The essay brings such claims to bear on a scene of miraculous conversion in As You Like It that suggests both the grounds of theater's affective hold and affect's inextricable relation to our status as historical beings.
{"title":"Hurt Feelings: Affect, World, and Time in As You Like It and Early Modern Studies","authors":"Christopher Pye","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Engaging current affect theory through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin, \"Hurt Feelings\" argues that affect should be understood neither as a form of embodiment nor of sympathetic correspondence but as a state of incommensurability between self and world that is at the same time the originative condition of those categories; rather than extending the self into the world, affect concerns the possibility of world as such. The essay brings such claims to bear on a scene of miraculous conversion in As You Like It that suggests both the grounds of theater's affective hold and affect's inextricable relation to our status as historical beings.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":" 13","pages":"955 - 977"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138612764","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914016
Martin Dubois
Abstract:This essay addresses the status of voice and print in dialect poetry through a study of its mid-nineteenth-century heyday in British literature. Dialect poems are often imagined to render oral forms into print, so that their writtenness appears secondary and belated. This essay argues differently, proposing that the Victorian poets it considers—William Barnes, Janet Hamilton, and Ralph Ditchfield—instead develop original forms of expression from the interaction of speech and text. Rather than needing to be liberated from print by voice, Victorian dialect poems play on the difficulty of their being spoken, thriving on the difference between types of language and varieties of audience.
{"title":"Dialect, Victorian Poetry, and the Voices of Print","authors":"Martin Dubois","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay addresses the status of voice and print in dialect poetry through a study of its mid-nineteenth-century heyday in British literature. Dialect poems are often imagined to render oral forms into print, so that their writtenness appears secondary and belated. This essay argues differently, proposing that the Victorian poets it considers—William Barnes, Janet Hamilton, and Ralph Ditchfield—instead develop original forms of expression from the interaction of speech and text. Rather than needing to be liberated from print by voice, Victorian dialect poems play on the difficulty of their being spoken, thriving on the difference between types of language and varieties of audience.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":" 32","pages":"1069 - 1098"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138618371","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914014
Alexander Paulsson Lash
Abstract:Focusing on Robert Hooke's spectacular 1665 Micrographia and Thomas Shadwell's 1676 satire of Hooke and other members of the early Royal Society, The Virtuoso, this essay argues that the concept of discovery was central to managing the challenges of technologically assisted perception. In Hooke's accounts of how he discovered new objects in his microscope, Shadwell discovered a language for thinking through how characters could be known inside the new scenic stage of the Restoration theaters.
{"title":"Discovering Discovery in Restoration London; Or, the Theatre Under the Microscope","authors":"Alexander Paulsson Lash","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Focusing on Robert Hooke's spectacular 1665 Micrographia and Thomas Shadwell's 1676 satire of Hooke and other members of the early Royal Society, The Virtuoso, this essay argues that the concept of discovery was central to managing the challenges of technologically assisted perception. In Hooke's accounts of how he discovered new objects in his microscope, Shadwell discovered a language for thinking through how characters could be known inside the new scenic stage of the Restoration theaters.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":" 10","pages":"1007 - 1034"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138619020","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a914019
Maren Linett
Abstract:Recent scholarship has demonstrated some of the ways modernism depends on eugenic thinking. Exploring similarities and differences between eugenics and early transhumanism, this article identifies in modernist literature a strand of more radical transhumanist desire. Looking in particular at Mina Loy's poems "Parturition" and "Songs to Joannes" and Olive Moore's novel Spleen, it argues that these texts turn the modernist call to "make it new" on human beings ourselves, as Loy and Moore imagine maternity as a means to advance evolution, if only it could transcend the disappointing reproducibility of the human being.
{"title":"All Winged Their Supermen: Mina Loy, Olive Moore, and the Transhumanist Imagination","authors":"Maren Linett","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a914019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Recent scholarship has demonstrated some of the ways modernism depends on eugenic thinking. Exploring similarities and differences between eugenics and early transhumanism, this article identifies in modernist literature a strand of more radical transhumanist desire. Looking in particular at Mina Loy's poems \"Parturition\" and \"Songs to Joannes\" and Olive Moore's novel Spleen, it argues that these texts turn the modernist call to \"make it new\" on human beings ourselves, as Loy and Moore imagine maternity as a means to advance evolution, if only it could transcend the disappointing reproducibility of the human being.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":" 108","pages":"1159 - 1186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138613860","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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