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The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

of his career but also, and more significantly, claiming that here she is providing 'for the first time, a stylistic analysis of one of the American theatre's most fascinating practitioners.' That she has this justification depends, partly at least, on the fact that his plays and productions have commonly been regarded as belonging largely, if not indeed exclusively, to the realm of the popular stage, whereas she seeks to draw them within the orbit of those revolutionary endeavours which in divers European countries sought to establish a new theatrical 'naturalism' both in play composition and in play presentation the avant-garde activities to be found in the work of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Danish Theatre Royal, the French Theatre Libre, and the German Freie Blihne. That her endeavour is indeed fully warranted is demonstrated by the fact that when, for example, the Russian company and its companion organizations visited the United States various critics stressed their belief that its prod uctions 'had nothing new to teach Broadway.' Still more significant is the fact that Stanislavski himself put the seal of his approval on the activities of the American directorplaywright by actually making him an honorary member of the Moscow troupe. No doubt labels in themselves are of little or minor consequence, and no doubt on occasion they can prove misleading: yet it is of importance that we should teach ourselves how properly to interpret and evaluate outstanding achievements such as those manifested by such men as Belasco, and here Mrs Marker's study must be regarded as indeed a most valuable and accomplished textbook, or guidebook, call it which we will (ALLARDYCE NICOLL)

The great war and modern memory

Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power

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Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945

As emblematic spaces of social and cultural contamination, the Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. This article explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. In the lived spaces around us there is in fact continuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism. This article explores spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972) and John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980) to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), the material culture of steampunk and the Telectros...

Afterimages of the Victorian City

Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001

The Longman anthology of world literature

Pike, David L.Passage Through Hell. Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds. Ithaca: Cornell UP 1997. 292 pp. $ 37.50 hardcover. The descensus ad inferos-the descent into hell-is unquestionably one of the more suggestive and intriguing motifs in Western literature. It is also one that has received extensive treatment in the past. Confronted with the burgeoning literature on the topic (primary sources as well as criticism), Pike has opted for a novel approach. Rather than attempting yet another survey of the subject, and rather than proposing yet another interpretation of the "classical" texts, old and new, he has chosen to focus his attention on some twentieth century texts that have been associated less frequently, if ever, with the descent into hell tradition in antique and medieval literature. Woven chiasmically around two medieval-modern intertextual pairings-Peter Weiss and Dante, on the one hand (chapter three), and Christine de Pisan and Virginia Woolf, on the other (chapter four)-the book opens with a survey of the tradition (Homer, Vergil, Paul, Augustine, Bernard Silvestris) followed by a chapter on Celine, and it closes with a chapter on Walter Benjamin and a conclusion that focuses on two postmodern writers, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. Clearly, this is an ambitious project and one whose logic is not easily recapitulated, or fairly evaluated, within the limited space of a few paragraphs. Among the more focal modern texts into which Pike-against the backdrop of Vergil, Dante and Christine de Pisan-undertakes his own enlightening interpretive descensi are Celine's Guignol's Band (1944), Feerie pour une autre fois (1952), and D'un chateau el'autre (1957); Weiss's Die Asthetik des Widerstands (1975-81) and Notizbiicher (1981 and 1982); Woolf's Orlando (1928) andA Room of One's Own (1929); and Benjamin's posthumously published Passagenwerk (1983). The underlying premise is that at some point in his or her life each author reached an existential crisis or nadir, a private hell that would be given narrative form in their idiosyncratic versions of the Dantean allegory of conversion. In each instance, Pike claims, it is precisely the medieval model of the trope of descensus ad in ferns that can be made out as "the site for the creation of the autobiographical voice" (246). And as diametrically opposed as they may have been in political and generational outlook, Weiss and Woolf, Benjamin and C6line have in common that, at least in the works dealt with in this study, they all resort to the trope of hell "to translate the individual allegory of conversion into a collective one" (246). …

David L. Pike

Papers

Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945

Afterimages of the Victorian City

Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001

The Longman anthology of world literature

Passage through Hell. Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds