Abstract:Letitia Landon faced two seemingly contradictory complaints from contemporary critics: that her writing was mechanical and repetitive, and that it was overly personal, suggesting vanity and egotism. Each is a familiar criticism of lyric poetry, yet Landon's willingness to court them both in her work suggests a paradoxical dependency of intimacy on cliché. This essay explores the implications of Landon's intimate clichés for broader understandings of lyric, sociability, and the highly gendered publishing environment of the period. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, it reframes a typically representational debate about lyric in communicative terms. Finally, it suggests that Landon's repetition can be understood as an ethical project to defend common experience from the advocates of rural solitude.
{"title":"Landon's Clichés","authors":"A. Freer","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Letitia Landon faced two seemingly contradictory complaints from contemporary critics: that her writing was mechanical and repetitive, and that it was overly personal, suggesting vanity and egotism. Each is a familiar criticism of lyric poetry, yet Landon's willingness to court them both in her work suggests a paradoxical dependency of intimacy on cliché. This essay explores the implications of Landon's intimate clichés for broader understandings of lyric, sociability, and the highly gendered publishing environment of the period. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, it reframes a typically representational debate about lyric in communicative terms. Finally, it suggests that Landon's repetition can be understood as an ethical project to defend common experience from the advocates of rural solitude.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"70 1","pages":"106 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88378609","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}
Abstract:This article argues that Lord Byron's Don Juan repeatedly references digestion-and failures of digestion-to register the visceral effects of almost twenty years of near-continuous global warfare on bodies and especially stomachs. If epic is traditionally understood as a poetic form that aggrandizes and gives coherence to the brutality of war, Don Juan reworks epic as a way of rendering the experience of war poetically undigestible. In doing so, the poem develops a non-reparative poetics of indigestion that represents the violence and trauma of war without attempting to celebrate war or make it easily consumable.
{"title":"Byron's Poetics of Indigestion","authors":"S. Hall","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Lord Byron's Don Juan repeatedly references digestion-and failures of digestion-to register the visceral effects of almost twenty years of near-continuous global warfare on bodies and especially stomachs. If epic is traditionally understood as a poetic form that aggrandizes and gives coherence to the brutality of war, Don Juan reworks epic as a way of rendering the experience of war poetically undigestible. In doing so, the poem develops a non-reparative poetics of indigestion that represents the violence and trauma of war without attempting to celebrate war or make it easily consumable.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"8 1","pages":"55 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74254429","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}
Abstract:This article focuses on two writers whose work on Panama and Nicaragua confronts Britain's supersession by the United States as the hegemonic power in Central America. Reading the nurse and memoirist Mary Seacole and the novelist and civil servant Anthony Trollope, I argue that these British subjects both understood the fate of the Empire as tied to that of the Central American transit zones, particularly the transoceanic route across Panama. They differed, however, on whom waning British influence in Central America would benefit. While Trollope saw commercial and cultural continuity in an uninterrupted Anglo-American dominance of the hemisphere, Seacole, a Black Jamaican for whom the Empire functioned as a guarantor of political status within a larger colonial framework, worried that the United States would subject the region to its regime of strict racial separation. Taken together, these accounts suggest a surprising inversion of imperial identifications: Trollope evinces an informal imperialist's disdain for official entanglements, while Seacole emphasizes that her status as a British subject entails a duty on the part of the Empire to protect the region and its people from American rapaciousness.
{"title":"\"All Ways Open to all Men\": Anthony Trollope and Mary Seacole in The Central American Transit Zones","authors":"Dennis M. Hogan","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on two writers whose work on Panama and Nicaragua confronts Britain's supersession by the United States as the hegemonic power in Central America. Reading the nurse and memoirist Mary Seacole and the novelist and civil servant Anthony Trollope, I argue that these British subjects both understood the fate of the Empire as tied to that of the Central American transit zones, particularly the transoceanic route across Panama. They differed, however, on whom waning British influence in Central America would benefit. While Trollope saw commercial and cultural continuity in an uninterrupted Anglo-American dominance of the hemisphere, Seacole, a Black Jamaican for whom the Empire functioned as a guarantor of political status within a larger colonial framework, worried that the United States would subject the region to its regime of strict racial separation. Taken together, these accounts suggest a surprising inversion of imperial identifications: Trollope evinces an informal imperialist's disdain for official entanglements, while Seacole emphasizes that her status as a British subject entails a duty on the part of the Empire to protect the region and its people from American rapaciousness.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"125 1","pages":"137 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72656619","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}
Abstract:This essay examines Toni Morrison as a political theorist whose novel Paradise (1997) reconstructs the English social contract tradition. I show how Morrison conceptualizes "unmotivated respect"—an attitude of deep admiration for others without reason or motive—as an alternative to contractual agreements. Building on this ground, I establish a framework for what I call the "Fugitive Covenant," which works to restore the rights of personhood to those whom normative social contract theory excludes. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the Fugitive Covenant complicates and extends the pathbreaking critiques of social contractarianism advanced by political theorist Carole Pateman and philosopher Charles Mills.
{"title":"The Fugitive Covenant: Reconstructing the Social Contract this Side of Paradise","authors":"K. Roy","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines Toni Morrison as a political theorist whose novel Paradise (1997) reconstructs the English social contract tradition. I show how Morrison conceptualizes \"unmotivated respect\"—an attitude of deep admiration for others without reason or motive—as an alternative to contractual agreements. Building on this ground, I establish a framework for what I call the \"Fugitive Covenant,\" which works to restore the rights of personhood to those whom normative social contract theory excludes. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the Fugitive Covenant complicates and extends the pathbreaking critiques of social contractarianism advanced by political theorist Carole Pateman and philosopher Charles Mills.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"20 1","pages":"273 - 308"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88088094","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}
Abstract:As English Romanticism rejects Neoclassicism, so Antebellum Black Romanticism rejects the slavery-friendly White Unionism embodied in the Compromise of 1850. In Millard Fillmore's Buffalo, the Black Romantic barber-poet James Monroe Whitfield damned Daniel Webster as a traitor to Abolition ("The Arch-Apostate") and Buffalo's Reverend John C. Lord as a hireling Unionist priest ("How Long"). For White Unionists, Scripture blesses the slaveholding Davidic kingdom of the present, founded in compromise and positive law. For Black Romantics like Whitfield, Scripture blesses the liberated republic of the future, founded in Milton's prophetic tradition and in an Abolitonist higher law.
{"title":"Black Abdiel and the Higher Law: James Monroe Whitfield vs. the Fillmore Faction","authors":"James Holstun","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As English Romanticism rejects Neoclassicism, so Antebellum Black Romanticism rejects the slavery-friendly White Unionism embodied in the Compromise of 1850. In Millard Fillmore's Buffalo, the Black Romantic barber-poet James Monroe Whitfield damned Daniel Webster as a traitor to Abolition (\"The Arch-Apostate\") and Buffalo's Reverend John C. Lord as a hireling Unionist priest (\"How Long\"). For White Unionists, Scripture blesses the slaveholding Davidic kingdom of the present, founded in compromise and positive law. For Black Romantics like Whitfield, Scripture blesses the liberated republic of the future, founded in Milton's prophetic tradition and in an Abolitonist higher law.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"35 1","pages":"167 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86540595","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}
Abstract:This paper explores how Sarah Fielding's The Little Female Academy (1749) and The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757) made feminist, formal, and pedagogical interventions in the novel genre. Both books feature morally flexible characters who show their female communities how to critique and create excellent, plausible fictions. These literary women have too long been flattened in our scholarship into the quintessential anti-exemplars of the conduct book genre: a catch-all for unorthodox women's writing in the eighteenth century. It is time to reconsider Fielding's works as metafictional novels, full of covert feminist lessons for an increasingly diverse public of readers.
{"title":"Sarah Fielding's Feminist Literary Pedagogy, in Which Nasty Women Become Novel Writers","authors":"Joani Etskovitz","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper explores how Sarah Fielding's The Little Female Academy (1749) and The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757) made feminist, formal, and pedagogical interventions in the novel genre. Both books feature morally flexible characters who show their female communities how to critique and create excellent, plausible fictions. These literary women have too long been flattened in our scholarship into the quintessential anti-exemplars of the conduct book genre: a catch-all for unorthodox women's writing in the eighteenth century. It is time to reconsider Fielding's works as metafictional novels, full of covert feminist lessons for an increasingly diverse public of readers.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"9 1","pages":"29 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74561260","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}
M. Vinter, Joani Etskovitz, S. Hall, A. Freer, V. Baena, Dennis M. Hogan, J. Holstun, Brian Reinken, Brook Thomas, K. Roy
Abstract:Repetitive sound has an important role in early modern dramatic character construction, which modern accounts of sonic contagion and earworms can clarify. Hamlet repeatedly shows sonic snippets passing between characters, and transforming from unvoiced potentiality into audible noise and back. Shared sounds bring typified and psychological modes of character into contact. Rather than canceling out, these intensify and enrich one another. Similar sonic patterns affirm the Ghost's alien nature while validating Hamlet's interiority. Ophelia's ballads mark her at once as empty and full, and raise the possibility of a character who cannot be defined as psychological or typical.
{"title":"\"Who's There?\" Hearing Character in Hamlet","authors":"M. Vinter, Joani Etskovitz, S. Hall, A. Freer, V. Baena, Dennis M. Hogan, J. Holstun, Brian Reinken, Brook Thomas, K. Roy","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Repetitive sound has an important role in early modern dramatic character construction, which modern accounts of sonic contagion and earworms can clarify. Hamlet repeatedly shows sonic snippets passing between characters, and transforming from unvoiced potentiality into audible noise and back. Shared sounds bring typified and psychological modes of character into contact. Rather than canceling out, these intensify and enrich one another. Similar sonic patterns affirm the Ghost's alien nature while validating Hamlet's interiority. Ophelia's ballads mark her at once as empty and full, and raise the possibility of a character who cannot be defined as psychological or typical.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"14 1","pages":"1 - 106 - 107 - 135 - 137 - 165 - 167 - 203 - 205 - 235 - 237 - 27 - 272 - 273 - 29 - 308 - 54 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87121293","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}
Abstract:This essay reconsiders the place of 1848 in literary history by juxtaposing Emily Brontë's diverse strategies for incorporating and translating provincial dialects in Wuthering Heights (1847) with Karl Marx's comments on language and revolution around 1848. I first situate Brontë's interest in provincialisms within a longer history of debates over vernacular politics, before turning to Marx's metaphors of revolution as language learning and translation failure in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852). Brontë's own use of interpolated tales and borrowed, stolen speech leads to a reflection on the ethics and politics of translation in a provincial and imperial context.
{"title":"History's Borrowed Languages: Emily Brontë, Karl Marx, and the Novel Of 1848","authors":"V. Baena","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay reconsiders the place of 1848 in literary history by juxtaposing Emily Brontë's diverse strategies for incorporating and translating provincial dialects in Wuthering Heights (1847) with Karl Marx's comments on language and revolution around 1848. I first situate Brontë's interest in provincialisms within a longer history of debates over vernacular politics, before turning to Marx's metaphors of revolution as language learning and translation failure in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852). Brontë's own use of interpolated tales and borrowed, stolen speech leads to a reflection on the ethics and politics of translation in a provincial and imperial context.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"73 1","pages":"107 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85991299","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}
Abstract:In the midst of a turbulent decade, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) registered the uncertain future of British colonialism in southern Africa by endowing their white protagonists with alternative possible selves whose pluralism complements the alternative possible instantiations of the settler colony. Forking, parallel, and recursive developmental trajectories lead these novels' characters toward multiple, sometimes contradictory, future states. What results is a dynamic, antiteleological model of Bildung that conceives of the self as a pluralized assortment of potential subjects.
{"title":"Unsettlement: Destabilizing Development in Southern Africa's Settler Fiction","authors":"Brian Reinken","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the midst of a turbulent decade, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) registered the uncertain future of British colonialism in southern Africa by endowing their white protagonists with alternative possible selves whose pluralism complements the alternative possible instantiations of the settler colony. Forking, parallel, and recursive developmental trajectories lead these novels' characters toward multiple, sometimes contradictory, future states. What results is a dynamic, antiteleological model of Bildung that conceives of the self as a pluralized assortment of potential subjects.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"15 3-4 1","pages":"205 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78251357","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}
Abstract:If Albion W. Tourgée is remembered today, it is as a defender of racial justice, who wrote two best-selling Reconstruction novels and served as Homer Plessy's lead attorney. This essay emphasizes Tourgée's awareness of the inextricable link between racial and economic injustice by interweaving analysis of four neglected late works of fiction that explore the complicated relationship between race, class, and caste. Reading Plessy through the lens of these works highlights economic aspects of Tourgée's argument in the case obscured when Plessy is read, as it usually is, retrospectively through the lens of Brown v. Board of Education.
{"title":"Albion W. Tourgée on Race, Class, and Caste: Plessy v. Ferguson Redux","authors":"B. Thomas","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:If Albion W. Tourgée is remembered today, it is as a defender of racial justice, who wrote two best-selling Reconstruction novels and served as Homer Plessy's lead attorney. This essay emphasizes Tourgée's awareness of the inextricable link between racial and economic injustice by interweaving analysis of four neglected late works of fiction that explore the complicated relationship between race, class, and caste. Reading Plessy through the lens of these works highlights economic aspects of Tourgée's argument in the case obscured when Plessy is read, as it usually is, retrospectively through the lens of Brown v. Board of Education.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"206 1","pages":"237 - 272"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76173781","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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