Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900597
Judith H. Anderson
Abstract:Paul Ricoeur's poetics illuminate time and narrative in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Ricoeur asserts the intimacy of narrative with human time, addresses the interweaving of narrative histories and fictions, and extends Augustine's subjective theory of temporality and Aristotle's objective theory of narrative form. Tradition, understood as sedimentation and innovation over successive generations, is a temporal concept that is evident in the Augustinian and Aristotelian roots of Ricoeur's poetics, as it is throughout Paradise Lost. Narrative's intimacy with time casts light on Milton's artistry and its human significance, including his narrator and plot and the metamorphic tradition that informs his Satan.
{"title":"Milton, Time, and Narrative: \"Now, / While Time Was\"","authors":"Judith H. Anderson","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900597","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Paul Ricoeur's poetics illuminate time and narrative in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Ricoeur asserts the intimacy of narrative with human time, addresses the interweaving of narrative histories and fictions, and extends Augustine's subjective theory of temporality and Aristotle's objective theory of narrative form. Tradition, understood as sedimentation and innovation over successive generations, is a temporal concept that is evident in the Augustinian and Aristotelian roots of Ricoeur's poetics, as it is throughout Paradise Lost. Narrative's intimacy with time casts light on Milton's artistry and its human significance, including his narrator and plot and the metamorphic tradition that informs his Satan.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"93 1","pages":"309 - 336"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89081096","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900603
M. Taylor
Abstract:This essay aims to initiate a reconsideration of literary criticism's ambivalent relation to idealism by returning to the moment of the discipline's emergence: the postwar essays of T. S. Eliot. Eliot, famously, came to literary criticism from philosophy, having completed a doctorate on the British Idealist F. H. Bradley. However, the broader intellectual context of British Idealism (in which Bradley's voice was but one among many) has attracted little scholarly attention. I argue that Eliot's innovative literary criticism was profoundly shaped by the Kantian strain of British Idealism represented by T. H. Green, Edward Caird, and Henry Jones. In particular, idealism of this stripe relied on a conception of "personality" that both resembled and, in key respects, contested the notion of "impersonality" central to Eliot's critical program. Examining several of Eliot's most influential early essays, I show how the theory of impersonality, as a precondition of good literature and good criticism alike, develops via an anxious negotiation with idealism—an antagonist everywhere present but nowhere named. As I also show, the principal site of this anxiety became Eliot's relation to the poetry of Robert Browning: a favorite among late nineteenth-century idealists and, as such, an embodiment of aesthetic values Eliot's modernism sought to displace.
{"title":"The Forgetting of Idealism: T.S. Eliot, Robert Browning, and the Origins of Literary Criticism","authors":"M. Taylor","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900603","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay aims to initiate a reconsideration of literary criticism's ambivalent relation to idealism by returning to the moment of the discipline's emergence: the postwar essays of T. S. Eliot. Eliot, famously, came to literary criticism from philosophy, having completed a doctorate on the British Idealist F. H. Bradley. However, the broader intellectual context of British Idealism (in which Bradley's voice was but one among many) has attracted little scholarly attention. I argue that Eliot's innovative literary criticism was profoundly shaped by the Kantian strain of British Idealism represented by T. H. Green, Edward Caird, and Henry Jones. In particular, idealism of this stripe relied on a conception of \"personality\" that both resembled and, in key respects, contested the notion of \"impersonality\" central to Eliot's critical program. Examining several of Eliot's most influential early essays, I show how the theory of impersonality, as a precondition of good literature and good criticism alike, develops via an anxious negotiation with idealism—an antagonist everywhere present but nowhere named. As I also show, the principal site of this anxiety became Eliot's relation to the poetry of Robert Browning: a favorite among late nineteenth-century idealists and, as such, an embodiment of aesthetic values Eliot's modernism sought to displace.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"8 1","pages":"491 - 518"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75894327","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900602
Sangam Macduff
Abstract:This paper argues for a complex and sustained engagement with logic in Virginia Woolf's early fiction. Her 1899 diary, pasted into Isaac Watts's Logick (1786), contains Woolf's earliest literary compositions. Initially, Woolf selected Watts's book because of its size and binding, but closer examination reveals considerable interaction with Logick. As the first book Woolf made, and her first formal literary experiment, it is significant that the diary responds to, and reacts against, traditional logic. Woolf's early essays and novels continue this agonistic relationship with the logic of Leslie Stephen, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, creating a productive tension that helps shape To the Lighthouse.
{"title":"\"The Right Use of Reason\": Virginia Woolf, Isaac Watts, and Logic","authors":"Sangam Macduff","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900602","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper argues for a complex and sustained engagement with logic in Virginia Woolf's early fiction. Her 1899 diary, pasted into Isaac Watts's Logick (1786), contains Woolf's earliest literary compositions. Initially, Woolf selected Watts's book because of its size and binding, but closer examination reveals considerable interaction with Logick. As the first book Woolf made, and her first formal literary experiment, it is significant that the diary responds to, and reacts against, traditional logic. Woolf's early essays and novels continue this agonistic relationship with the logic of Leslie Stephen, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, creating a productive tension that helps shape To the Lighthouse.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"9 5 1","pages":"457 - 490"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90226284","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900598
S. Silver
Abstract:When Frederick the Great found "no maxim . . but is defective in some particular Cases," he signaled a new interest in tracing historical events to complex systems of cause. This essay positions the midcentury British novel in that tradition. It establishes a relationship between the new historiography and a philosophy of grammar, which viewed prepositions as the sign of history. And it offers readings of Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones to locate the new historiographic preference at the level of narrative style. Relevant theorists include Reinhart Koselleck (and Laurence Sterne) on mid-century historiography, John Locke and James Harris on grammar, and Étienne Souriau and Michel Serres on the prepositional philosophy.
{"title":"Fielding's Prepositions: Eighteenth-Century Historiography and the Novel","authors":"S. Silver","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900598","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900598","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When Frederick the Great found \"no maxim . . but is defective in some particular Cases,\" he signaled a new interest in tracing historical events to complex systems of cause. This essay positions the midcentury British novel in that tradition. It establishes a relationship between the new historiography and a philosophy of grammar, which viewed prepositions as the sign of history. And it offers readings of Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones to locate the new historiographic preference at the level of narrative style. Relevant theorists include Reinhart Koselleck (and Laurence Sterne) on mid-century historiography, John Locke and James Harris on grammar, and Étienne Souriau and Michel Serres on the prepositional philosophy.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"130 1","pages":"337 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76327765","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900604
Marta Figlerowicz
Abstract:Early twentieth-century research on pidginization had a profound, previously unstudied influence on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This influence was not only stylistic but also, more importantly, political. By following Joyce's growing fascination with pidgin languages and their formation from the earliest drafts of Finnegans Wake to its published version, one can discern in the work a more coherent, specific, and compelling linguistic and cultural politics than critics have previously noticed within it: an affirmation of provisional and instrumental forms of cross-cultural communication. Pidgins also provide a crucial link between the Wake's political dimension and its philosophical engagement with Giambattista Vico.
{"title":"Joyce-Pidgin-Man","authors":"Marta Figlerowicz","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900604","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Early twentieth-century research on pidginization had a profound, previously unstudied influence on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This influence was not only stylistic but also, more importantly, political. By following Joyce's growing fascination with pidgin languages and their formation from the earliest drafts of Finnegans Wake to its published version, one can discern in the work a more coherent, specific, and compelling linguistic and cultural politics than critics have previously noticed within it: an affirmation of provisional and instrumental forms of cross-cultural communication. Pidgins also provide a crucial link between the Wake's political dimension and its philosophical engagement with Giambattista Vico.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"78 6 1","pages":"519 - 548"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89728881","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900605
Ross Wilson
Abstract:The words hear and here sound but do not look the same, and in this essay I investigate the significance of this fact in poems by Richard Lovelace, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Amiri Baraka, and W. S. Graham. The hear/here homophone raises a number of abiding questions about the relation of the visible and acoustic in the reading of verse, as well as about where the poem exists. I also examine how the relation between the scripted here of the page and what the reader may be said to hear (or not) has been mobilized for ethical, theological, and political purposes.
{"title":"Hear Here: A Homophone in English Poetry","authors":"Ross Wilson","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900605","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The words hear and here sound but do not look the same, and in this essay I investigate the significance of this fact in poems by Richard Lovelace, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Amiri Baraka, and W. S. Graham. The hear/here homophone raises a number of abiding questions about the relation of the visible and acoustic in the reading of verse, as well as about where the poem exists. I also examine how the relation between the scripted here of the page and what the reader may be said to hear (or not) has been mobilized for ethical, theological, and political purposes.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"2 1","pages":"549 - 575"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74679658","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900606
Kevin Gallin
Abstract:Critics have argued that the historical novel today, in the era of globalization, has become outmoded, too nationalist, or simply too burdened by mere decoration of the past. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2008), however, embraces the pageantry of Tudor England to interpolate its readers into a collective project of refiguring national history, and the form of the nation itself, as an international process from its inception. The novel's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, marshals his considerable pan-European bureaucratic power to forge a coherent English nation-state. In rewriting English historiography around such an international practice, Wolf Hall reinvigorates the contemporary historical novel by dismissing claims that national history and globalized perspectives are in tension. Rather, thinking both nationally and globally simultaneously is not only possible, but the only way to understand national history in the first place.
{"title":"Cromwell on the World Stage: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and the Historical Novel After Globalization","authors":"Kevin Gallin","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900606","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Critics have argued that the historical novel today, in the era of globalization, has become outmoded, too nationalist, or simply too burdened by mere decoration of the past. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2008), however, embraces the pageantry of Tudor England to interpolate its readers into a collective project of refiguring national history, and the form of the nation itself, as an international process from its inception. The novel's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, marshals his considerable pan-European bureaucratic power to forge a coherent English nation-state. In rewriting English historiography around such an international practice, Wolf Hall reinvigorates the contemporary historical novel by dismissing claims that national history and globalized perspectives are in tension. Rather, thinking both nationally and globally simultaneously is not only possible, but the only way to understand national history in the first place.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"9 1","pages":"577 - 607"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83010212","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900600
Ben Hewitt
Abstract:This essay reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge's responses to the French Revolution using Fredric Jameson's concept of the "fear of Utopia," a fear of radical social change that Jameson traces to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Focusing on the poems in Fears in Solitude (1798) but ranging over Coleridge's whole career, the essay argues that Coleridge's writings remain animated by utopian political impulses even as they advocate anti-utopian ideas. Exploring this persistent tension opens new perspectives on Coleridge's writings in their historical context, and highlights the relevance of his thought for contemporary politics and its theorization.
{"title":"Coleridge and the Fear of Utopia","authors":"Ben Hewitt","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900600","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge's responses to the French Revolution using Fredric Jameson's concept of the \"fear of Utopia,\" a fear of radical social change that Jameson traces to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Focusing on the poems in Fears in Solitude (1798) but ranging over Coleridge's whole career, the essay argues that Coleridge's writings remain animated by utopian political impulses even as they advocate anti-utopian ideas. Exploring this persistent tension opens new perspectives on Coleridge's writings in their historical context, and highlights the relevance of his thought for contemporary politics and its theorization.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"2 1","pages":"393 - 423"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76067380","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900599
L. Peh
Abstract:This essay studies the strange ambivalences of John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam in order to develop an alternative account of how horror functions within the genre of natural history. As I hope to show, natural history, with its emphasis on sorting and categorization, does not merely create the conditions for horror. It also models a way of regarding horror with what I term "productive indifference." Upon encountering horrifying scenes of torture and mutilation, the readers of Stedman's Narrative are not left paralyzed. Instead, they retain the emotional space necessary to plot out future courses of political action.
{"title":"Stedman's Horror, Blake's Indifference","authors":"L. Peh","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900599","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900599","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay studies the strange ambivalences of John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam in order to develop an alternative account of how horror functions within the genre of natural history. As I hope to show, natural history, with its emphasis on sorting and categorization, does not merely create the conditions for horror. It also models a way of regarding horror with what I term \"productive indifference.\" Upon encountering horrifying scenes of torture and mutilation, the readers of Stedman's Narrative are not left paralyzed. Instead, they retain the emotional space necessary to plot out future courses of political action.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"39 1","pages":"367 - 391"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77968097","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a900601
Meghna Sapui
Abstract:This article examines the entanglements of the gustatory and the literary in the first English-language drama written by an Indian, The Persecuted (1831) by Krishnamohan Banerjea. Krishnamohan was among the first generation of Bengali men to receive a formal English language education at the Hindu College. These men fashioned themselves as Young Bengal and beef eating became their most demonstrable form of rebellion against Brahminical Hinduism. The Persecuted, Krishnamohan's only play, dramatizes his real-life excommunication by his family for publicly eating and condoning the consumption of beef. I look at The Persecuted alongside its reception, and other Anglo-Indian writings about Young Bengal's gastronomical rebellion. I use the term "gastro drama" for Young Bengal's gustatory texts to designate a literary genre that dramatizes dramatic, messy, and difficult forms of gustation. I analyze the gustatory, literary, and linguistic traffics in these gastro dramas to argue that the English-educated Bengali imagines a new masculine identity not as a mimic identity but rather as a liminal one between colonial acculturation and resistance. My essay, therefore, pushes back against Young Bengal's popular conception as colonial "mimic men" to instead argue for a more agential form of self-identification and self-representation. By being attentive to gustatory and literary forms, I attempt to imagine a way of analyzing colonial texts that moves beyond extant theoretical frameworks.
{"title":"Eat, Write, Dramatize: Young Bengal's Gastro Drama","authors":"Meghna Sapui","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a900601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a900601","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the entanglements of the gustatory and the literary in the first English-language drama written by an Indian, The Persecuted (1831) by Krishnamohan Banerjea. Krishnamohan was among the first generation of Bengali men to receive a formal English language education at the Hindu College. These men fashioned themselves as Young Bengal and beef eating became their most demonstrable form of rebellion against Brahminical Hinduism. The Persecuted, Krishnamohan's only play, dramatizes his real-life excommunication by his family for publicly eating and condoning the consumption of beef. I look at The Persecuted alongside its reception, and other Anglo-Indian writings about Young Bengal's gastronomical rebellion. I use the term \"gastro drama\" for Young Bengal's gustatory texts to designate a literary genre that dramatizes dramatic, messy, and difficult forms of gustation. I analyze the gustatory, literary, and linguistic traffics in these gastro dramas to argue that the English-educated Bengali imagines a new masculine identity not as a mimic identity but rather as a liminal one between colonial acculturation and resistance. My essay, therefore, pushes back against Young Bengal's popular conception as colonial \"mimic men\" to instead argue for a more agential form of self-identification and self-representation. By being attentive to gustatory and literary forms, I attempt to imagine a way of analyzing colonial texts that moves beyond extant theoretical frameworks.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"33 1","pages":"425 - 456"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77762587","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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