Abstract:John Ruskin’s attention to details in art has generally been viewed in terms of objectivity and the rise of realism. This essay traces as an alternate trajectory linking detail with a liberated, individualist subjectivity. It traces this arc from Ruskin’s Gothic ornamental details to a range of modernist details, from Marcel Proust’s madeleine to Prufrock’s coffee spoons, by way of Hegelian theory. It aims to vivify reflection on the place of detail in aesthetics, which, though discussed by writers from Roland Barthes to Jacques Rancière, has yet to receive its full due.
{"title":"Reading The Detail In John Ruskin’s Gothic Aesthetics","authors":"Pritika Pradhan","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:John Ruskin’s attention to details in art has generally been viewed in terms of objectivity and the rise of realism. This essay traces as an alternate trajectory linking detail with a liberated, individualist subjectivity. It traces this arc from Ruskin’s Gothic ornamental details to a range of modernist details, from Marcel Proust’s madeleine to Prufrock’s coffee spoons, by way of Hegelian theory. It aims to vivify reflection on the place of detail in aesthetics, which, though discussed by writers from Roland Barthes to Jacques Rancière, has yet to receive its full due.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"67 1","pages":"719 - 756"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76650551","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 proposes a comparative approach that connects Anglophone and Francophone colonial contexts through an underlying dynamic that hinges on humor. Reading scenes from Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Ferdinand Oyono, Chinua Achebe and Athol Fugard, it examines the fundamental assumptions that transmitters and receivers of messages make about their purpose and authority in an interpreting exercise. This is in order to show how those rules are belittled by interpreters in colonial or settler fiction, when their function is comic. Even so, the humor transcends the colonial encounter. Deliberately or through ignorance, the interpreters studied here create a form of cultural mediation that takes advantage of the disarray created by existing power differentials. They create a new narrative where appearances matter more than accuracy or fidelity and where “official” messages are subverted to the benefit of humor.
{"title":"Comic Interpreting in African Literatures","authors":"Adwoa A. Opoku-Agyemang","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article proposes a comparative approach that connects Anglophone and Francophone colonial contexts through an underlying dynamic that hinges on humor. Reading scenes from Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Ferdinand Oyono, Chinua Achebe and Athol Fugard, it examines the fundamental assumptions that transmitters and receivers of messages make about their purpose and authority in an interpreting exercise. This is in order to show how those rules are belittled by interpreters in colonial or settler fiction, when their function is comic. Even so, the humor transcends the colonial encounter. Deliberately or through ignorance, the interpreters studied here create a form of cultural mediation that takes advantage of the disarray created by existing power differentials. They create a new narrative where appearances matter more than accuracy or fidelity and where “official” messages are subverted to the benefit of humor.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"23 1","pages":"757 - 779"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85695366","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:Since its publication in 1767, readers have wondered who wrote The Female American; or, the Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield. I argue that eighteenth-century readers and reviewers would have understood The Female American in relation to a particular business model—that of the publisher/bookseller/library proprietor—rather than as the work of a particular author. Yet, through its connection with its publisher Francis Noble, The Female American might, I suggest, have a story to tell us about authorship, not about its own authorship, but about the making of one of the preeminent “Authors” of the eighteenth century: Daniel Defoe.
{"title":"Who Wrote The Female American?: The Noble Brothers, Circulating Libraries, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel","authors":"R. Zuck","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Since its publication in 1767, readers have wondered who wrote The Female American; or, the Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield. I argue that eighteenth-century readers and reviewers would have understood The Female American in relation to a particular business model—that of the publisher/bookseller/library proprietor—rather than as the work of a particular author. Yet, through its connection with its publisher Francis Noble, The Female American might, I suggest, have a story to tell us about authorship, not about its own authorship, but about the making of one of the preeminent “Authors” of the eighteenth century: Daniel Defoe.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"76 1","pages":"661 - 688"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82046188","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:When, during the 1611-12 entertainment season, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale were staged for King James I and his court, they would have seemed to wade into the middle of an escalating, mythmaking war between the King and his ideologically adversarial son, Henry. The preceding year had seen Henry usurp the ceremonial stage’s legitimizing power, mounting a series of masques and spectacles that grew his neo-chivalric cult and promoted militant Protestant values detested by his father. 1611-12, then, was James’s opportunity to reestablish his supremacy: not only would Henry be excluded from the season’s sole masque and centerpiece, Ben Jonson’s Love Restored, but Jonson would explicitly condemn all challenges to the royally approved mythology and demonstrate the King’s absolute authority over the masquing space. In response, Henry turned to alternative means of advancing his cause, including portraits, poems, and histories, while James negotiated a Catholic match that would deal a crushing blow to his son’s supporters. These are the circumstances in which the Stuart court first saw The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, and this essay argues that viewers could not have helped but relate the plays’ interrogations of spectacle and royal authority to their present political moment.
{"title":"The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, and Dramatic Absolutism on the Stuart Court Stage","authors":"Gabriel R Lonsberry","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When, during the 1611-12 entertainment season, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale were staged for King James I and his court, they would have seemed to wade into the middle of an escalating, mythmaking war between the King and his ideologically adversarial son, Henry. The preceding year had seen Henry usurp the ceremonial stage’s legitimizing power, mounting a series of masques and spectacles that grew his neo-chivalric cult and promoted militant Protestant values detested by his father. 1611-12, then, was James’s opportunity to reestablish his supremacy: not only would Henry be excluded from the season’s sole masque and centerpiece, Ben Jonson’s Love Restored, but Jonson would explicitly condemn all challenges to the royally approved mythology and demonstrate the King’s absolute authority over the masquing space. In response, Henry turned to alternative means of advancing his cause, including portraits, poems, and histories, while James negotiated a Catholic match that would deal a crushing blow to his son’s supporters. These are the circumstances in which the Stuart court first saw The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, and this essay argues that viewers could not have helped but relate the plays’ interrogations of spectacle and royal authority to their present political moment.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"32 1","pages":"637 - 659"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84663955","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:Models have become a central device in many sciences as much as in the public discussions on climate change or, topically, dealing with pandemics, but they have received only scant consideration in literary studies so far. This essay explores models with a focus on the context of narratives. It examines the relationship between models and narratives, and goes on to suggest ways in which insight gained from the study of narratives can enhance our understanding of models in general. Such insight could then become useful as an element in a general critique of models that ultimately will help in the assessment and decision taking wherever competing models have to be dealt with.
{"title":"Are Models Narratives? Perspectives on a Narrative Critique of Models","authors":"K. Stierstorfer","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Models have become a central device in many sciences as much as in the public discussions on climate change or, topically, dealing with pandemics, but they have received only scant consideration in literary studies so far. This essay explores models with a focus on the context of narratives. It examines the relationship between models and narratives, and goes on to suggest ways in which insight gained from the study of narratives can enhance our understanding of models in general. Such insight could then become useful as an element in a general critique of models that ultimately will help in the assessment and decision taking wherever competing models have to be dealt with.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"133 1","pages":"833 - 863"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88485440","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:Opening with the 1953 exposure of the Piltdown hoax, and its surprisingly extensive and irreverent media reception, this essay argues that public trust in national institutions was among the pressing concerns of English culture throughout the 1950s, and a recurrent theme of its major realist fiction. Focusing on novels by Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, and Angus Wilson about fraud and forgery in institutional settings, the essay proposes that questions of motivated misrepresentation allowed novelists to emphasize partiality and prejudice in historical and literary narrative in ways that anticipated the reflexivity of both modes later in the century.
{"title":"Piltdown, Realism, And Public Trust In 1950s England","authors":"Marina Mackay","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Opening with the 1953 exposure of the Piltdown hoax, and its surprisingly extensive and irreverent media reception, this essay argues that public trust in national institutions was among the pressing concerns of English culture throughout the 1950s, and a recurrent theme of its major realist fiction. Focusing on novels by Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, and Angus Wilson about fraud and forgery in institutional settings, the essay proposes that questions of motivated misrepresentation allowed novelists to emphasize partiality and prejudice in historical and literary narrative in ways that anticipated the reflexivity of both modes later in the century.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"29 2","pages":"781 - 805"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72474630","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:Despite Christopher Marlowe’s reputation as one of England’s more cosmopolitan renaissance playwrights, source study has given short shrift to his use of non-English vernacular texts. Focusing on Tamburlaine, this essay challenges biases in that discipline which helped shape a presumption that Marlowe encountered Pedro Mexía’s Silva de varia lección only in English translation. Afterwards, tracing one passage in Mexía’s Spanish-language text through its intervening adaptations into Italian, French, and English, the essay turns to the Messenger’s speech about Tamburlaine’s war tents to dissect how Marlowe channels an entire intertextual, multilingual system in one of his play’s most enduring stretches of poetry.
{"title":"Tamburlaine, “Mexía,” and More Intertextual Source Study","authors":"Michael Lind Menna","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Despite Christopher Marlowe’s reputation as one of England’s more cosmopolitan renaissance playwrights, source study has given short shrift to his use of non-English vernacular texts. Focusing on Tamburlaine, this essay challenges biases in that discipline which helped shape a presumption that Marlowe encountered Pedro Mexía’s Silva de varia lección only in English translation. Afterwards, tracing one passage in Mexía’s Spanish-language text through its intervening adaptations into Italian, French, and English, the essay turns to the Messenger’s speech about Tamburlaine’s war tents to dissect how Marlowe channels an entire intertextual, multilingual system in one of his play’s most enduring stretches of poetry.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"55 1","pages":"603 - 635"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73394736","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:Elizabeth Bishop famously asserted in 1964 that poetry “can be cheerful AND profound! – or, how to be grim without groaning,” delineating a form of tragicomic equilibrium which she found embodied by “any of Buster Keaton’s films.” This article explores how Keaton provided Bishop with a model of stoic comedy, one through which she could reimagine worldly tribulation as slapstick poetry. Examining the dramatic monologue “Keaton” alongside “Sandpiper” and other poems, I argue that Bishop’s imaginative investment in slapstick film is most palpable in a recurrent scenario from her poetry, in which a singular figure exists on brinks and limits. In these poems, humor functions as an invitation to read more deeply, while the reserve for which Keaton’s character is famous becomes a self-referential play on Bishop’s own reputation as a reticent poet.
{"title":"The Stoic Comedy of Elizabeth Bishop and Buster Keaton","authors":"George A. Potts","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Elizabeth Bishop famously asserted in 1964 that poetry “can be cheerful AND profound! – or, how to be grim without groaning,” delineating a form of tragicomic equilibrium which she found embodied by “any of Buster Keaton’s films.” This article explores how Keaton provided Bishop with a model of stoic comedy, one through which she could reimagine worldly tribulation as slapstick poetry. Examining the dramatic monologue “Keaton” alongside “Sandpiper” and other poems, I argue that Bishop’s imaginative investment in slapstick film is most palpable in a recurrent scenario from her poetry, in which a singular figure exists on brinks and limits. In these poems, humor functions as an invitation to read more deeply, while the reserve for which Keaton’s character is famous becomes a self-referential play on Bishop’s own reputation as a reticent poet.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"50 1","pages":"807 - 832"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88514105","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 his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Francesco Petrarch introduced a new poetic strategy of deliberate and beneficial failure as a central requirement of literary love and a means of unifying a newly complex and fragmented literary subjectivity. In his rendering of Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt carries this celebration of necessary failure into the sixteenth century. By making Petrarchan failure central to his own concerns, Wyatt changes its fundamental nature. This is more than simply transferring the same narrative strategies into a new historical context. In lifting poetic love out of the realm of the spiritual, and rooting it firmly in the context of a purely secular striving, Wyatt effectively raises the stakes and alters the meaning of the poetic dynamic he embraces. What was, in Petrarch, a narrative strategy—an important part of the fictional construct—becomes for Wyatt, and the English Petrarchists who followed him, a structural element of the lyric form and a new basis for the construction of the literary self—I fail, therefore I am.
{"title":"Structural Failure: Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch in Early Modern England","authors":"D. K. Smith","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Francesco Petrarch introduced a new poetic strategy of deliberate and beneficial failure as a central requirement of literary love and a means of unifying a newly complex and fragmented literary subjectivity. In his rendering of Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt carries this celebration of necessary failure into the sixteenth century. By making Petrarchan failure central to his own concerns, Wyatt changes its fundamental nature. This is more than simply transferring the same narrative strategies into a new historical context. In lifting poetic love out of the realm of the spiritual, and rooting it firmly in the context of a purely secular striving, Wyatt effectively raises the stakes and alters the meaning of the poetic dynamic he embraces. What was, in Petrarch, a narrative strategy—an important part of the fictional construct—becomes for Wyatt, and the English Petrarchists who followed him, a structural element of the lyric form and a new basis for the construction of the literary self—I fail, therefore I am.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"23 1","pages":"575 - 601"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87178117","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：