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Showing papers in "Criticism in 1994"


Journal Article
TL;DR: Milton's 1645 Poetry as discussed by the authors is, in many respects, a strange document, and some critics have attested to its strangeness, pointing out that it seems to be the prod uct of a gentleman poet, possibly a member of the landed gentry with close ties to the Caroline peerage.
Abstract: Milton's 1645 Poems is, in many respects, a strange document, and some critics have attested to its strangeness. It seems to be the prod uct of a gentleman poet, possibly a member of the landed gentry with close ties to Caroline peerage. We have among the collection of poems a "maske" written for an earl, a sonnet addressed to the daughter of another earl, an elegy on a Catholic Marchioness and an other sonnet addressed to an anonymous "Lady," presumably the daughter of a peer, all which endeavors would incline a reader to view the poet as an member of a privileged class patronized by the nobility. Among these poems, however, are intermixed others evok ing a reformist fervor not entirely consonant with the modest image of the gentleman poet,1 a special indication of this being Lycidas with its headnote, yet evident in less obtrusive passages in Comus and the devotional hymns. In his essay, "The Rising Poet, 1645," Louis Martz appears to have been among the first of modern critics to address the political impli cations of the volume, suggesting that the intention, presumably of both Milton and his publisher, Humphrey Moseley, was to project the image of a poet hailing from a courtly and Royalist milieu.2 Since Martz's 1965 essay, various critics have taken up this issue in the effort to reconcile such a mode of presentation with Milton's partisan politics. Thomas Corns, in "Milton's Quest for Respectability," focuses on Milton's motives for bringing out the volume and argues that Mil ton desired, despite his strong puritan partisanship, to project the im age of a contemporary gentleman poet asserting his claim to social respectability.3 Corns argues that Milton uses the volume to counter act his reputation as a lower class sectary, a reputation that he sup posedly won for himself in the pamphlet wars of the 1640s. Peter Lindenbaum, in "John Milton and the Republican Mode of Literary Production," endorses Corns's thesis, stating that the 1645 volume "appeals to a coterie audience, [and] insists upon its connections with the court."4 Lindenbaum argues that the effect of Milton's exposure, during his stay in Venice, to the "republican mode of publication" (a system whereby the author presents himself as independent of pa

41 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: In this article, the authors take as their working hypothesis the notion that the concept of the chronotope is not restricted to the analysis of novels, but, as Bakhtin suggested, can also be applied to other areas of culture, especially that of painting, where time is just as "intrinsically connected" to space as in the novel.
Abstract: Despite the ever-increasing renown that Mikhail Bakhtin's works have enjoyed sinced his death in 1975,1 his theory of the chronotope, which is based on the idea that spatial and temporal dimensions are as inseparable in works of literature as they are in Einstein's theory of relativity, has attracted few scholars' attention.2 The main use Bakhtin made of this theory in his own published works was in the study of literary history, where it served principally to demonstrate the "process of assimilating real historical time and space in literature [. . . and] the articulation of actual historical per sons in such a time and space."3 In this paper, I shall take as my working hypothesis the notion that the concept of the chronotope is not restricted to the analysis of novels, but, as Bakhtin suggested, can also be applied to "other areas of culture," especially that of painting, where time is just as "intrinsically connected" to space as in the novel.

16 citations



Journal Article
TL;DR: According to its initial critical reception, the flood of sensation fiction on the Victorian literary marketplace posed a social catastrophe that threatened to erode literary standards and to under mine domestic tranquillity, the guiding fiction of middle-class life.
Abstract: According to its initial critical reception, the flood of sensation fic tion on the Victorian literary marketplace of the 1860s posed a social catastrophe that threatened to erode literary standards and to under mine domestic tranquillity, the guiding fiction of middle-class life. This panicky critical reception excoriated sensation heroines and fe male sensation readers as unhappy evidence of what some today might term declining "family values." Margaret Oliphant says of sen sation fiction in her 1867 review essay:

15 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: Castle Rackrent (1800) as discussed by the authors is the first significant English novel to speak in the voice of the colonized, and the conjunction among these classificatory categories is no mere coincidence: its Irish narrator and its Irish setting are what give Castle Rackrent an ironic bent.
Abstract: Published in the year of the Act of Union, which ended Ireland's nominal independence from England by dissolving the Irish Parlia ment, Castle Rackrent (1800) has been read mainly as a regional tale, a novel of place. Said to inaugurate the Anglo-Irish novelistic tradi tion, it is likewise understood to be a comic work, an exemplar of the ironic mode in which Maria Edgeworth's narrator, Thady Quirk, is rather less knowing than he realizes about the full implications of the tale he tells. But it is also, in Suvendrini Perera's words, "the first sig nificant English novel to speak in the voice of the colonized,"1 and the conjunction among these classificatory categories—regional novel, ironic comedy, and colonial tale—is no mere coincidence: its Irish narrator and its Irish setting are what give Castle Rackrent an ironic bent. Situating her colonized Irish narrator and his reckless masters in a position of inferiority to the (so-called) mother country, Edgeworth represents the strangeness of the geographical other to her metropolitan reader; in the gap between "us" and "them" lies the ironic humor of the novel.

12 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: Sidney's Apology as mentioned in this paper describes poetry's ability simultaneously to teach and to delight, to instruct effectively by appealing to pleasure, and it is this ability that creates poetry as superior to history and philosophy, rather than subjecting them to tedious discussions or ambiguous ex amples.
Abstract: As one of its major strategies for defending poetry, Sidney's Apol ogy describes poetry's capacity simultaneously to teach and to delight, to instruct effectively by appealing to pleasure.1 According to the Apology, it is pleasure which creates poetry as superior to history and philosophy, for poetry's ability to delight moves readers to virtue, rather than subjecting them to tedious discussions or ambiguous ex amples. Even in the initial stages of civilization, it was the "sweet delights" (98) of poetry which prepared early peoples to exercise their minds for the reception of knowledge. But on the other side of the Apology's claim that poetry's delight enlivens its teaching lies the in ference that the experience of delight must be justified by instruction. This inference becomes explicit in the Apology's limitation of its de fense to a definition of poetry as "feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with . . . delightful teaching" (103). When sepa rated from its moral function, poetry's pleasure renders it a "nurse of abuse," dangerously capable of eliciting the wrong sort of pleasure to infect its readers with "pestilent desires" (123). By exploring the "nurse of abuse" image, together with other highly gendered figures, this essay advances the following argument: to the explicit charges against which Sidney's Apology defends poetry—that it lies, it pro motes immorality, it was banished from Plato's ideal republic, and that it serves no useful purpose—can be added an implicit charge, that the pleasures offered by poetry rendered it dangerously effemin izing. A reading of Sidney's Apology as defending poetry against charges of effeminacy was perhaps first performed in a passing comment by Walter Ong, who suggested that the anxiety, common among Renais sance humanists, that "literature, and poetry in particular, was ac tually soft or effeminate" motivated Sidney's claim that the Amadis de Gaule moved men to courage.2 More recently, M. J. Doherty's gen dered reading of the Apology has also linked Sidney's poet and femi ninity. Interpreting the Apology's Lady Poesy in terms of the ancient

8 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: Virtual reality has become a signifier or index of the spectrum of currently available techni cal functions as discussed by the authors, and has been used as a defense against and assault upon the illegibility of the real.
Abstract: Recent and sustained media attention to "virtual reality" or VR has brought that system into the mainstream of contemporary discourse. From the 1990 Gulf War to ABC's 1993 mini-series Wild Palms, me diated events involving computer-generated graphics have come to be referred to indiscriminately as VR, resulting in the creation of a virtual signifier or index of the spectrum of currently available techni cal functions. Within the academic milieu, telephonies, animation, military strategy, AI, anthropology, and pornography have assumed the anamorphic dimensions of VR technololgy with no discernible remove from the phenomenal world in which those operations al ready take place. Indeed, VR appears to have colonized the techno logical real, generating, in the process, an autonomous cultural infra structure. VR authors (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling), magazines (Mondo 2000, Wired, 2600), bands (U2), and theorists (Jean Baudril lard) have turned the corpus of reality into a hysterical body: the real is made apparent by making it virtual. The manic desire for hyper and virtual reality can be seen as the symptoms of a disorder origi nating in the irreducible atopicality of the real.2 The virtual culture seems to have invoked VR as a defense against and assault upon the illegibility of the real. Far from obliterating the category of the real, however, such discourses only serve to reinscribe the idea of the real as a transcendental signifier. The attempts by some apologists to claim VR in the name of truth or morality only accelerate the descent of VR into the realm of theocentric piety. In Virtual Worlds, Benjamin Wolley posits the real against the specters of postmodernism, what he takes to be a euphoric call for the elimination of the category of

6 citations




Journal Article
TL;DR: Anthony Trollope as mentioned in this paper wrote He Knew He Was Right from November 1867 to June 1868, years during which a bill to grant property rights to married women under common law was being fiercely debated in both Parliament and the press.
Abstract: Anthony Trollope wrote He Knew He Was Right from November 1867 to June 1868, years during which a bill to grant property rights to married women under common law was being fiercely debated in both Parliament and the press. The first Married Women's Property Act passed in 1870.1 As an editor and writer for popular periodicals, and as a politician manque who actually stood for Parliament in No vember 1868, Trollope was certain to have been familiar with argu ments on both sides of this issue. He Knew He Was Right, an explora tion of male authority and women's rights within marriage—core is sues in arguments over married women's property—is Trollope's timely contribution to this debate. I attempt to make explicit the na ture of this contribution by showing how He Knew He Was Right in tersects with the broader cultural discourse of contract, which informs Victorian Feminist arguments, and which was central to an ideal of married love.

3 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: In the first book of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the hero engages in two di erent dialogues which, in the vein of the psychomachian tradition, dramatize aspects of the protestant soul engaging in self-debate as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Towards the end of the Redcrosse Knight's quest for holiness in the first book of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the hero engages in two dia logues which, in the vein of the psychomachian tradition, dramatize aspects of the protestant soul engaging in self-debate. The first one, in canto 9, follows on the heels of Redcrosse's release from Orgo glio's dungeon when he rushes into Despair's cave and provokes a near-suicidal conversation with the honey-tongued villain. The sec ond one, in canto 10, occurs as the culmination of Redcrosse's educa tion in the House of Holiness when he climbs to the top of Mount Contemplation and speaks with the last of his holy tutors, Contem plation himself. Neither dialogue is long, taken together they amount to some twenty stanzas, but each serves as the agent of a pivotal spiritual action: the first moves to eradicate the life of holiness and the second to affirm it. That these crucial moments are allegorized as mise-en-scenes underscores the intimacy spoken language shares with our innermost selves, an intimacy we have come to understand as one's "voice" and "presence." As utterances of despairing and con templative habits of mind, these two dialogues represent structures of language as a resource for our spiritual identities. And, as I shall sug gest, the logic of the contemplative self-dialogue in canto 10 is consti tuted by the humanist discourse of reason, a discourse that was pro mulgated in sixteenth-century England by protestant intellectuals who forged a tie between godly casts of thought and the godly spiri tual life.1

Journal Article
TL;DR: Clampitt's Voyages: A Homage to John Keats as mentioned in this paper is one of the earliest works to explore the relationship between romanticism and the extra-textual in poetry.
Abstract: If one of the challenges of contemporary criticism is to locate one's subject and oneself within the discursive norms of a critical modus op erandi, then Amy Clampitt's Voyages: A Homage to John Keats,1 poses peculiar difficulties. In the capacious industry of scholarship about contemporary women's writing, Clampitt figures minorly, or within the contexts of somewhat hostile reviews.2 Various species of Ameri can "formalists," for their part, have been receptive, even celebratory, but as J. D. McClatchy points out, Clampitt is not strictly a formalist.3 In fact, ever since Clampitt sprung on the scene in 1983 with her first major publication, The Kingfisher, she has occupied a place in the American literary scene unlike anything else we have yet to encoun ter. At once formally aware, as it were, and experimentally willing, both displaced Romantic and egregious American, Clampitt pays her debts to British and American modernism no less than to the high Romanticism which has been both her rallying ground and her point of insistent departure. It is hard to pin Clampitt, and her allegiances, down, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Voyages se quence. For here Clampitt marries her Romantic obsessions to her equally obsessive—and indeed, equally Romantic—hypersensitivity to the extra-textual, especially where that conception of the extra textual is shown to share a necessary co-existence with the very quest to write about it. As such, the sequence is one in which the value of poetic composition per se is displaced; but rather than collapsing poetic struggle into form (a more common occurrence in post-modern writing), Clampitt's displacements are signals of the very foundations in which poetic struggle begins. It may be, perhaps, that such anxiety over the experiential foundations of poetry smacks of a time long ago in a place still the same;4 but Clampitt is neither confessional, auto biographical, nor hermetically sealed within her own poetic spaces. Hers is a poetry as sensitive to the unbridgeable gulfs between lan guage and desire as to the urgency of our need formally to order de sire.


Journal Article
TL;DR: The Heart of Midlothian (1818) as mentioned in this paper is a heroine-centered novel with a focus on female readers and writers, and it is the only work of Scott's that is explicitly written for women.
Abstract: The energy he put into an exercise of canon-formation (the Lives of the Novelists he wrote for Ballantyne) and into criticism and reviews that took the novel seriously attest to his sense that the novel had been in the past, and could continue to be, something more than ephemeral. Yet he has little to offer in defence of the novel as a genre except to suggest that novels are less morally harmful than their de tractors claim, or that they are a pleasurable diversion from boredom, suffering, and even poverty.1 Far from being a spirited defender of the novel, he seems instead defensive about it. George Levine notes that "Scott's defensiveness is reenacted everywhere in his novels," a defensiveness Levine regards as "essential to his achievement and to the enormous importance of his work."2 Given the cultural associa tions of the novel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century with women readers and writers—a fact of literary history that femi nist critics dealing with the period have emphasized—we might ex pect some of Scott's defensiveness about the novel to reflect his anxi eties about the relations of genre to gender. I shall argue here that such anxieties are particularly legible in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), which, as Scott's first and only heroine centered novel, offers a likely arena for their expression. After explic itly suggesting in the framing introductory chapter that novels effem inize the male reader, Scott pursues various strategies for masculiniz ing his novel, seeking to stamp it with a masculinity that seems always to elude him.3 Lurking in these not wholly successful efforts to make his novel an unambiguously "masculine" text are two possi bilities that Scott would probably find disquieting: that the novel is in some way inherently "feminine" (an essentialist view I would reject, whatever Scott may have feared), or that masculinity is itself tenuous, never completely and simply achieved. This second possibility echoes an observation made by the feminist critic and theorist Jacqueline Rose in an essay defending the theoreti cal importance of psychoanalysis for feminism. If we accept the no tion of an unconscious, Rose argues, we grasp that "there is no conti

Journal Article
TL;DR: The subject matter of Dowson's poetry, in particular, seems problematic for contemporary readers as discussed by the authors, as the prevalent, oxymo ronic themes of unrequited love and ideal religion appear archaic, ar tificial, neither concerned with the real world nor with the world of art.
Abstract: It has always been to the detriment of an understanding of Ernest Dowson's poetry that it is linked with the rather dreamy and deca dent life conceived by his critics and followers. Dowson's poetry, so carefully grounded in literature, philosophy, dialogues and commen tary on other poets and writers, is often limited by relating it to a life constructed to suit the image of the decadent. Contextualized and studied as verse, Dowson's poems often yield far more interesting in sights into a unique and rather sophisticated approach to the possibil ities and limits of poetry in his time. But there are good reasons why a direct entrance to Dowson's po etry has been difficult to obtain. The subject matter, in particular, seems problematic for contemporary readers—the prevalent, oxymo ronic themes of unrequited love and ideal religion appear archaic, ar tificial, neither concerned with the real world nor with the world of art. Thomas Swan derides the poet for his unconvincing poetic seduc tions: "He dared not argue too winningly because, had his love ac cepted his invitation, he could not have continued to respect her. . . . If Dowson and Herrick had wooed the same mistress, there would be

Journal Article
TL;DR: A Warning to the Dragon and All his Angels (A Warning) as mentioned in this paper is a treatise on the final vision of Daniel written by the prophet Eleanor Davies and published in 1625.
Abstract: With the publication of A Warning to the Dragon and All his Angels in 1625, Eleanor Davies becomes perhaps the only one of the Civil War prophets to launch her literary career prior to the easing of cen sorship restrictions in 1641.1 The boldness of her decision to have her exegetical treatise on the visions of Daniel printed may have been mi tigated by the position of her then-husband, the poet and prominent barrister, Sir John Davies, who could have shielded her from legal sanction.2 Still, the claims she makes for her prophetic authority dem onstrate the sort of intellectual daring that would come to character ize religious radicals of the Civil War period such as the royalist prophet Arise Evans who, in 1653, described himself as "a man to whom God hath given foreknowledge."3 In A Warning, she professes to have determined the meaning of the final vision of Daniel, denied to the prophet himself,4 which enables her to predict that "the day of Judgement" will take place "nineteene yeares and a halfe" from 28 July 1625.5 (Her later texts identify the execution of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, in January of 1645 as ringing in the "day of Judgement" anticipated by A Warning.)6 Within the context of seventeenth-century women's writing, the real surprise of A Warning is that Davies does not apologize for her gender but explains her reasons for writing in terms of a simple, yet powerful, assumption of authority: "And I thinke that I have also the Spirit of God."7 However, some fifteen years into a prophetic career that ended, with her death, in 1652, Davies claims the legitimacy of her visions by attempting to appropriate the political authority ac corded to the name of her father, George Touchet, Baron Audeley and Earl of Castlehaven. In large measure, her struggles with civil and ecclesiastical authority in the years between 1625 and 1641 shape her new prophetic identity. For instance, in 1633, when she publishes her visions for the second time, she pays for the audacity of both her words and her deed with two years in jail. Unable to find a willing printer in England, she travels to Amsterdam. Once she be gins to distribute her newly printed treatises, Laud orders them burned because they presumed to interpret "the new laws and some

Journal Article
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe a network of symbols that envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him "by flesh and blood", those who bring to his birth, along with the gift of the stars and the shape of his destiny, the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the laws of the acts that will follow him right to the place where he is not yet and even beyond his death.
Abstract: Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him "by flesh and blood"; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gift of the stars, if not with the gift of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so to tal that they give the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the laws of the acts that will follow him right to the place where he is not yet and even beyond his death. (Ecrits, 68)

Journal Article
TL;DR: Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786) as mentioned in this paper is an especially intensified form, structured around the sin gle autumn of 1773 that Johnson and Boswell spend touring the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland.
Abstract: One of the commonplaces of Johnsonian and Boswellian scholar ship has been the relationship between conversation and biography in James Boswell's writings on Samuel Johnson, the degree to which Boswell substitutes in his works the words of Johnson for the body and life of the good Doctor. If Boswell's texts produce the effect of a Johnson larger than life in his unavoidable and capacious corporeal ity, such a production is itself underwritten by a metonymic dialectic that the recording of Johnson's speech sets up: the quantity and qual ity of Johnson's conversation stands in for the very figure of Johnson, while the literal volume of that figure is itself a figure for the plenti tude of genius found in Johnson's words. In Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786) we can observe this rhetorical strategy in an especially intensified form, structured as the text is around the sin gle autumn of 1773 that Johnson and Boswell spend touring the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland.1 The Journal also adds a particular political dimension to Boswell's strategy, in that Johnson's conversation participates in the constitution not only of Johnson him self, but also of a certain body politic, the cultural, economic, and jur idical binding of Scotland to Great Britain—a political body haunted by what are also the Journal's own political memories of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

Journal Article
TL;DR: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) as discussed by the authors introduces the fact that the construction of collections can carry corporeal consequences, and demonstrates the need for the collector to "take the whole upon his own shoulders" from violent, degrading display.
Abstract: Tobias Smollett prefaces The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) with a telling and adumbrative literary exchange that defines his epistolary novel's dynamics of collection. As editor Dustwich and bookseller Davis, in their brief correspondence, negotiate the publica tion of the letters that make up Humphry Clinker's three volumes, they also introduce the fact that the construction of collections can carry corporeal consequences. The letters, according to Dustwich, be long in the public domain—there exists, in fact, "a sort of duty to promulgate them in usum publicum"—and he declares himself willing to accept full responsibility for any prosecutions arising from the let ters' publication (3). Importantly, he feels compelled to anchor his as surance in his body: "I will," he writes, "take the whole upon my own shoulders." Yet he qualifies his assertion immediately, confessing that, though he could subject himself to fines and imprisonment, he "should not care-to undergo flagellation." Using studied Latin, Dust wich at once expresses and exhibits his desire for social distinction, explaining that physical, public punishment produces turpitudinem and amaritudinem, disgrace and bitterness. While he feels obliged to expose the letters of the living to the gaze of all, he also feels privi leged to reserve his "own shoulders" from violent, degrading display. In this decorous attempt simultaneously to create and break a bond between his body and "his" letters, Dustwich points to the always in terested physical and social tensions that define interactions between the collector and the collected. Collectors attempt to use their power to escape the physical punishment that can accompany the imposi

Journal Article