Showing papers in "ELH in 2010"
TL;DR: In Daniel Deronda, George Eliot moves away from the organic understanding of the individual and society central to her earlier novels as mentioned in this paper, influenced by thought in statistics and probability, she comes to believe that the social laws that govern large numbers do not necessarily apply at the individual level.
Abstract: In Daniel Deronda, George Eliot moves away from the organic understanding of the individual and society central to her earlier novels. Influenced by thought in statistics and probability, she comes to believe that the social laws that govern large numbers do not necessarily apply at the individual level. This is especially true of the Daniel Deronda's Gwendolen plot. The Jewish plot involving Daniel, while less familiar in subject matter, evokes more familiar Eliotic themes. The novel's moral censure of gambling condemns the belief that since things will "work out" at the level of large numbers, they will also work out for the individual.
23 citations
TL;DR: This essay seeks to unsettle some entrenched assumptions about Jane Austen's relationship to realism—and the ideological work of naturalization that realism is said to sponsor—as well as to romanticism.
Abstract: By annotating how in Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey Jane Austen tracks between the novelist's domain and the naturalist's, this essay seeks to unsettle some entrenched assumptions about her relationship to realism—and the ideological work of naturalization that realism is said to sponsor—as well as to romanticism. Austen's era, which we customarily identify as the time of a romantic return to nature, was marked by conflicts over what nature did and did not include—conflicts between, in the parlance of the period, "the botanist" and "the florist," between an account of nature as that which was given and an account of nature as that which (as with the modern nurseryman's new hybrids and luxuriants) might be manufactured. In arranging for her young heroines' stories of growing up to unfold in the "artificial climates" of modern fashionable gardening and amidst "florists' flowers," Austen deliberately works through those conflicts. She inhabits the plot of "natural development" to which she is often linked in elusively oppositional ways.
23 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that Defoe, far from countering this move by valorizing the individual, presents us with an intimate social space which is irreducible to the public or the private spheres and which is not covered by the social contract.
Abstract: Reading Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year alongside Hobbes's Leviathan allows us to rethink the narrative of the division of society into private and public spheres and the political contribution of the novel as a genre. This paper analyses Hobbes's attempt to remove all private sources of authority, including personal revelation, in favour of the public authority of the sovereign. It then argues that Defoe, far from countering this move by valorizing the individual, presents us with an intimate social space which is irreducible to the public or the private spheres and which is not covered by the social contract.
22 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that many critical readings of Herman Melville's 1852 novel depend on a non-necessary subordination of Pierre's extravagant style to questions of characterology and plot to which the text seems at best ancillary and nonconventionally attached.
Abstract: " Pierre and the Non-Transparences of Figuration" argues that many critical readings of Herman Melville's 1852 novel depend on a non-necessary subordination of Pierre 's extravagant style to questions of characterology and plot to which the text seems at best ancillary and nonconventionally attached. My essay suggests that characterological volatility or depletion might more profitably be understood in terms of Melville's own movement away from imagining characters as mimetic instantiations of persons, and toward an account of aesthetic personhood resonant with recent psychoanalytic and queer-theoretical investigations of ontology itself as a particularly aesthetic phenomenon and predicament.
21 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the history of the sonnets' reception with a special attention to this untidiness, from the moment of Shakespeare's production to today, and argued that a definitive eighteenth-century shift, which de Grazia identifies as inaugurating our "topsy-turvy" sense of sonnets, does not exist.
Abstract: This study of the reception of Shakespeare's sonnets takes as its starting point Margreta de Grazia's influential claim that contemporary understandings of the sonnets--which consider the sonnets to the young man scandalous and the ones to the young woman proper--are, from an early modern perspective, "topsy-turvy." I argue that in positing a single reversal we risk missing more complex synchronic variations and diachronic overlaps in the reception of the sonnets during their 400-year history. Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon have recently called for a "queer history" that embraces the untidiness of the relationship between past and present because neither past nor present is self-identical. I explore the history of the sonnets' reception with special attention to this untidiness, from the moment of the sonnets' production to today. I argue in particular that a definitive eighteenth-century shift, which de Grazia identifies as inaugurating our "topsy-turvy" sense of the sonnets, does not exist. This sense of the sonnets developed over a much shorter period of time, only since about the 1930s, along with a new understanding of heterosexuality per se as a positive value, what Jonathan Katz has called the modern "invention of heterosexuality." Nor is this reception of the sonnets simply definitive of the contemporary moment.
17 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an analysis of Pater's intellectual ties at Oxford and of his essay "Winckelmann" reveals that Pater actively questions aesthetic autonomy as theorized by German idealists.
Abstract: Walter Pater is often criticized for claiming that the aesthete is a solipsist and that art exists for its own sake. However, an analysis of Pater's intellectual ties at Oxford and of his essay "Winckelmann" reveals that Pater actively questions aesthetic autonomy as theorized by German idealists. Skeptical of Hegel's argument that art offers access to a sense of freedom, Pater asserts that aesthetic experience emphasizes our subjection to a material world of sensation. This challenge to the liberal individualism of German aesthetics has been overlooked by politically oriented interpretations of Pater's work that focus on his queerness.
17 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the author presents an argument for the literary figure of the wanderer or traveller having developed in the eighteenth century out of a reimagining of the prospect overview, and proposes the poetic wanderer as the figure for what Kevis Goodman has recently described as a shift around the mid-century from the observer as an "contemplative, closed subject" to an "open, vulnerable and dependent being."
Abstract: This essay presents an argument for the literary figure of the wanderer or traveller having developed in the eighteenth century out of a reimagining of the prospect overview. Through examination of a single moment of transition--the shift from the elevated prospective view of Alexander Pope and especially James Thomson's prospect poems to the wanderer narrative embodied in Oliver Goldsmith's The Traveller--I propose the poetic wanderer as the figure for what Kevis Goodman has recently described as a shift around the mid-century from the observer as an "contemplative, closed subject" to an "open, vulnerable and dependent being."
14 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that the blazon provides Wilde with a formal vehicle for negotiating the ethical impasse of poetic ornament and its impossible efforts to embody fully the object of desire, and that it can be used to amplify decorative language's failures even as it cultivates their attendant pleasures.
Abstract: This essay reads Oscar Wilde's Salome and its engagement with the lyric blazon in relation to a range of period representations of Salome. It argues that the blazon--a genre based on the extensive use of decorative language to describe the loved object--provides Wilde with a formal vehicle for negotiating the ethical impasse of poetic ornament and its impossible efforts to embody fully the object of desire. Wilde's text employs the blazon to amplify decorative language's failures even as it cultivates their attendant pleasures, reclaiming as a site of aesthetic and erotic possibility the invisible sphere into which the loved body is cast by the blazon and related modes of poetic embodiment.
13 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Although George Eliot's philosophy of sympathy is revered for its union of the ethical with the aesthetic, it also merges the ethical and the economic as mentioned in this paper. But while the Victorians were growing increasingly infatuated with the economy figure of psychic life, Eliot continued to probe the costs of that figure.
Abstract: Although George Eliot's philosophy of sympathy is revered for its union of the ethical with the aesthetic, it also merges the ethical with the economic. Invested with economic importance and investigated with economic language, Eliotic sympathy ultimately figures as an economy. But while the Victorians were growing increasingly infatuated with the economy figure of psychic life, Eliot continued to probe the costs of that figure. Such consideration arguably animates Middlemarch 's distinct narrative form of parabasis, and its heroine's vexing marriages.
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors trace the sources of Wilde's An Ideal Husband and Dorian Gray and James's The Ambassadors in French decadence and show that aestheticist depictions of servants recall, through literary form, the aesthete's dependence on servants' labor.
Abstract: The fictional representation of domestic servants reveals the relationship between aesthetic form and social domination in the work of aesthetes from Oscar Wilde to Henry James and beyond. Tracing the sources of Wilde's An Ideal Husband and Dorian Gray and James's The Ambassadors in French decadence and situating them within the history of service, I show that aestheticist depictions of servants recall, through literary form, the aesthete's dependence on servants' labor. I suggest that modernism shared this socially self-conscious concept of aesthetic form with aestheticism, precisely because it too pursued aesthetic autonomy.
12 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a preliminary review of the British book market through period auction catalogues and Bent's retail pricing indexes suggests that the cost of literature for those buying to read varied minimally between 1750 and 1790.
Abstract: Eighteenth-century cultural historians have long asserted that the British book market was flooded with sharply discounted classics after the 1774 Donaldson copyright verdict, giving birth to a middle-class reading public and radically altering the use of literature as a social and political steering mechanism. Despite the work of William St. Clair and others in recent years, the empirical basis for this claim has never been systematically examined. In particular, the vibrant and extensive resale market for literary works in the eighteenth century has been almost wholly ignored. A preliminary review of this market through its period auction catalogues and Bent's retail pricing indexes suggests that the cost of literature for those buying to read varied minimally between 1750 and 1790. Price data for major figures and works is given in both real and nominal terms, correcting for purchasing power differentials, opportunity costs, and alternative access to reading material. Signal attention is granted selected editions of Milton and Shakespeare as the dynasty-making authors and editions of the era. What emerges is a late-century book market identifiable not so much by price movements as by market complexity and product differentiation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, therefore, the cheap literature hypothesis fails in all relevant particulars. Its inability to underpin widely held assumptions about literary canon formation and common reading habits should encourage us to rethink the complex relationship between culture and society at the time. Above all, we should consider more seriously the importance of source work to effective theory building.
TL;DR: Wuthering Heights as mentioned in this paper attacked the fundamental premises of the narrative of the rise of the novel, disturbing the progressive logic of the history of novel by demonstrating the interdependence, and ultimate indistinguishability, of gothic and domestic modes.
Abstract: The history of the novel in the nineteenth century depended on a developmental narrative in which the domestic novel became the basic form of British fiction, taking over from earlier forms such as the picaresque or the gothic. By revealing that the efforts of the domestic to separate itself from the gothic result in a replication of gothic violence, Wuthering Heights attacked the fundamental premises of the narrative of the rise of the novel, disturbing the progressive logic of the history of the novel by demonstrating the interdependence, and ultimate indistinguishability, of gothic and domestic modes. In so doing, Wuthering Heights became a deeply uncomfortable text for nineteenth-century literary history, so uncomfortable that it remained marginal for nearly a century after its publication.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this article, a reading of Jane Austen's Persuasion is described, and the authors argue that it demonstrates the determination to wed Smithian theory to the novel form, primarily through exemplification and the strategy of making cases, labor performed by both the novel's heroine and its form.
Abstract: Anchored in a reading of Jane Austen's Persuasion , this essay proposes three main claims. The first treats Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments as narrative theory and argues for its important and under-recognized influence on the development of nineteenth-century realism. The second posits a relationship between Smith's model of sympathy and nineteenth-century literary realism, offering a new term--sympathetic realism--to account for that realism's formal structure. The third argues that Persuasion demonstrates Austen's determination to wed Smithian theory to the novel form, primarily through exemplification and the strategy of making cases, labor performed by both the novel's heroine and its form.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: This article argued that these pamphlets defended free speech on the basis of both Milton's acknowledgments of female equality and his assertions of male superiority, but failed to harmonize these very different premises for discursive liberty and revisited and reconsidered this failure, however, in Paradise Lost, where problems of free speech in marriage structure Eve's fall.
Abstract: For two decades, scholars have argued whether egalitarianism or masculinism dominates Milton's views on marriage in the divorce tracts. This article instead draws on the work of Habermas and his feminist critics to argue that these pamphlets defended free speech on the basis of both Milton's acknowledgments of female equality and his assertions of male superiority. As his increasingly strained rhetoric reveals, Milton ultimately failed to harmonize these very different premises for discursive liberty. He ultimately revisited and reconsidered this failure, however, in Paradise Lost , where problems of free speech in marriage structure Eve's fall.
TL;DR: The authors argued that Thoreau's ornamental aesthetics, fascinated by the provocation of effects by blunted pressures, sidesteps an aesthetics concerned with reshaping the natural world into the expression of human thought.
Abstract: Questioning the view that Thoreau abandoned aesthetics in order to know nature, this essay argues that he articulated an alternative, ornamental aesthetics. Far from rejecting his era's taste for ornament, Thoreau developed nineteenth-century understandings of ornament into an aesthetics focused upon impact and reaction, and crossing between the natural and man-made. Taking ornamental forms as the result of pressures in the material world, such as the way ice bends trees into feathery shapes, Thoreau ultimately understands form as a contingent effect. He also presents ornamental writing as a result of pressure, rather than expression, and suggests that it is the thought indicated by gnomic sentences that is ornamental (rather than, as we might expect, the material form of lettering). Thoreau's ornamental aesthetics, fascinated by the provocation of effects by blunted pressures, sidesteps an aesthetics concerned with reshaping the natural world into the expression of human thought. Still, his preoccupation with pressure and force indicates that even a recessive, posthumanist aesthetics will entail impact, transformation, and even damage. This makes his ornamental aesthetics both a model and a warning to contemporary critics concerned with rethinking the aesthetic.
TL;DR: This paper read the 1743 Dunciad in four books within the context of eighteenth-century concerns with the representation of character in satire following the passing of the Theater Licensing Act of 1737.
Abstract: This essay reads Pope's 1743 Dunciad in Four Books within the context of eighteenth-century concerns with the representation of character in satire following the passing of the Theater Licensing Act of 1737. Pope's choice of Colley Cibber for the Dunciad _'s new hero demonstrates the importance he placed on his audience's participation in constructing the Dunciad '_s meaning through its references to people and events in the world outside of the poem, which he feared would be nullified by the literary censorship dictated by the Act.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors frame Conrad's practice of verisimilitude as a technique of securing the reader's trust, and examine how professionalism functioned in Conrad's self-presentation, but also how the technique of verizimilitude that he developed in Lord Jim surpasses the rhetoric of professionalism.
Abstract: This paper frames Conrad's practice of verisimilitude as a technique of securing the reader's trust. Understood in this way, verisimilitude emerges as a vital term in the equation linking Conrad to modernism, on the one hand, and to the mass market, on the other. I draw on Georg Simmel, H. G. Wells and other contemporary sources to establish the importance of trust and trustworthiness to literary writers at the dawn of mass society. Engaging with recent critical studies of professionalism and modernist self-fashioning, I examine how professionalism functioned in Conrad's self-presentation, but also how the technique of verisimilitude that he developed in Lord Jim surpasses the rhetoric of professionalism: Conrad deployed verisimilitude in Lord Jim as a substitute for certification.
TL;DR: This paper read George Eliot's Daniel Deronda as a self-conscious revision of the Christian scriptural approach to Jewish identity and Jewish literary authority, which restored the Jews to primary ownership of their textual tradition.
Abstract: This essay reads George Eliot's Daniel Deronda as a self-conscious revision of the Christian scriptural approach to Jewish identity and Jewish literary authority. Whereas the Christian Scriptures discredit Judaism and Jewish people, severing them from the authority of their Jewish literary and scriptural canon, in Daniel Deronda Eliot restores the Jews to primary ownership of their textual tradition. Linking the discourses of poetic identity and Jewish identity throughout the novel, Eliot thus challenges universalist assumptions of Western (Christian) aesthetic theory.
TL;DR: For instance, the authors found that Wallace Stevens brought Connecticut into his works of art partly through his arrangements of grammar and sound, and partly through matters of regional lore and urban planning: the poems' view of public life includes the varied uses of public space.
Abstract: Facts about real sites that Wallace Stevens knew well (some of them noted by no earlier critic) inform the deliberately "plain" poems of his final years. Stevens brought Connecticut into his works of art partly through his arrangements of grammar and sound, and partly through matters of regional lore and urban planning: the poems' view of public life includes the varied uses of public space. Regarding Connecticut as a place of abstraction, of "thin" colors and hard work, the late poems make southern New England (unlike the other regions in Stevens' work) a place to which the mature poet could feel he belonged. To read the late poems in the light of Stevens's Connecticut is to see one more source for their verbal powers. It is also to see how that work speaks to recent debates about literature and geography, literature and the environment, and even literature and the human body.
TL;DR: This paper argued that the poem's consolation is based less on the mechanism of compensation than on the cryptonymic process of placing an unplaced feeling of loss, and they used object-relation theory to prove it.
Abstract: Recent scholars have noted the anti-consolatory trend in modern elegy, and remarked on the ways in which twentieth-century elegies revolt against the convention of compensatory consolation in their expression of disconsolation. Using Wallace Stevens's "The Owl in the Sarcophagus" as a test case, this essay proposes a rethinking of our notion of elegiac consolation: instead of reading this allegorical, equivocating poem as an anti-elegy, this article argues, with the aid of D. W. Winnicott's object-relation theory, that the poem's consolation is based less on the mechanism of compensation than on the cryptonymic process of placing an unplaced feeling of loss.
TL;DR: In the eighteenth century, Johnson's hostility towards Scotland and the Scots English dialect of the Lowlanders is well-known, however, his support for the preservation of Scottish Gaelic is not so as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Samuel Johnson's hostility towards Scotland and the Scots English dialect of the Lowlanders is well-known. Not so, however, his support for the preservation of Scottish Gaelic. A seeming contradiction, Johnson's position on Gaelic is essential for what it reveals about language, dialect, and national identity in the eighteenth century. Although Johnson believed in preserving all languages, he opposed diversity of dialect within languages. For him, Gaelic was a language of its own, but Scots English was an impure, corrupted dialect of a language.
TL;DR: Baldwin's approach, the essay argues, conceives of the film as an unstable, fragmented textual structure and of actors and viewers as historically situated subjects whose "flesh-and-blood" existence the film puts at stake as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: This essay argues that James Baldwin's writings on film exemplify the broader project that he undertakes in his midcareer nonfiction: to enlist an ethics of intersubjective love in the dismantling of racial categories. Applying ethical concepts like the "shattering" effect of the self's encounter with the other to the analysis of classical Hollywood films, Baldwin develops an original and coherent hermeneutic approach, at once highly literary and engaged with academic film theory's foundational concerns (the ontological status of the image, spectatorship, ideological critique, and historiography). Baldwin's approach, the essay argues, conceives of the film as an unstable, fragmented textual structure and of actors and viewers as historically situated subjects whose "flesh-and-blood" existence the film puts at stake.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The authors examines Austen's late manuscripts to complicate the dominant narrative of her literary life as a simple progression from script to print and from amateur to professional authorship, and evidence both a continual struggle to reconcile her fictional impulses with the publicity of print and an ongoing need for more socially circumscribed forms of literary transmission.
Abstract: This essay examines Jane Austen's late manuscripts--written at the height of her career--to complicate the dominant narrative of her literary life as a simple progression from script to print and from amateur to professional authorship Austen's late manuscripts, and her representations of manuscript culture within the published novels, evidence both a continual struggle to reconcile her fictional impulses with the publicity of print and an ongoing need for more socially circumscribed forms of literary transmission Just as scholarship has overlooked the persistence of Austen's scribal habits throughout her print career, so too have we neglected the vital role that an invigorated manuscript culture played during the print boom of the Romantic period
TL;DR: Heywood's plays as mentioned in this paper use historical figures like Thomas Gresham and Jane Shore to reconcile the growing economic power of the bourgeoisie with traditional, aristocratic modes of evaluation, and to show that mercantile social status does not necessarily involve allegiance to this demonic power.
Abstract: Thomas Heywood's plays use historical figures like Thomas Gresham and Jane Shore to reconcile the growing economic power of the bourgeoisie with traditional, aristocratic modes of evaluation. Drawing on the economic theories and demonology of contemporary thinkers like Jean Bodin, Heywood suggests that, when it is regarded as an autonomous power, financial value becomes a dangerous, metaphysical force, which is comparable in ethical status and psychological effects to magic. His work undertakes to show that mercantile social status does not necessarily involve allegiance to this demonic power, and to reconcile the mode of evaluation inculcated by market activity with the values and mores of the established social structure.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Close attention to the tone, details, and ethical principles of the novel, as well as its place in Austen's published oeuvre, shows that in writing Mansfield Park Austen created a provisional plot that's shadowed by an alternative and equally plausible scenario whose possibilities are seldom voiced but ever evident.
Abstract: Why have Henry and Mary Crawford, perhaps Jane Austen's most controversial brother and sister, proved so persistently appealing to readers, who often fall for their charms and reject the matrimonial conclusion of Mansfield Park ? Close attention to the tone, details, and ethical principles of the novel, as well as to its place in Austen's published oeuvre, shows that in writing Mansfield Park Austen created a provisional plot that's shadowed by an alternative and equally plausible scenario whose possibilities are seldom voiced but ever evident--and all-too-seductive.
TL;DR: In this article, Weberian sociology, law and literature studies, and Victorian novel criticism are explored to explore Trollope's representation of the law in Orley Farm and The Eustace Diamond s.
Abstract: This essay draws upon Weberian sociology, law and literature studies, and Victorian novel criticism to explore Trollope's representation of the law in Orley Farm and The Eustace Diamond s. It reveals Trollope's damaging juxtaposition of the ethics of the realist novel and the commercialism of criminal advocacy in Orley Farm , and his persistent elevation of realist fiction as ethically superior to legal and romantic maneuvering in The Eustace Diamonds . Ultimately, the essay argues that Trollope is engaged in a vigorous competition on behalf of writers to rival lawyers for professional stature and charismatic authority in Victorian England.
TL;DR: This article argued that Inchbald's A Simple Story should be read as a complex moral fable about making contracts and giving promises in spheres neglected by social contract theory: the spheres of sexual love and difference, marriage, parenthood, and inter-generation bonds.
Abstract: Drawing on Thomas Hobbes's distinction between contract and gift, as well as Hannah Arendt's discussion of promise and forgiveness, this essay argues that Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story should be read as a complex moral fable about making contracts and giving promises in spheres neglected by social contract theory: the spheres of sexual love and difference, marriage, parenthood, and inter-generation bonds. The novel shifts our moral attention away from the contract to the promise and its alternative ethics of the gift, while emphasizing forgiveness as its necessary, and corollary, structural pair.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: This article explored Lytton Strachey's participation in a central debate in early twentieth-century British historiography, which centered on the question, Is History an art, or a science?
Abstract: This essay explores Lytton Strachey's participation in a central debate in early twentieth-century British historiography, which centered on the question, Is History an art, or a science? As a history student at Cambridge University at the turn of the century, Strachey was keenly attuned to this debate. His participation in it, particularly in a still-unpublished essay, "The Historian of the Future" (1903), helps to illuminate the ethical and aesthetic complexity both of his attitude toward science and of the early development of his innovative approach to biography at a time that saw a widening gap between "scientific" and "artistic" historiography.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors link the concept of auto-ethnography with spiritual conversion narrative in order to argue that evangelical autobiography contains the tools not only for spiritual but also for cultural selffashioning.
Abstract: This essay links the concept of autoethnography with spiritual conversion narrative in order to argue that evangelical autobiography contains the tools not only for spiritual but for cultural selffashioning. What I call spiritual autoethnography was a way of imagining the self in relation to knowledge that turns the (spiritual) self into the condition of (cultural) knowledge. I argue this by way of the radical evangelical social critic Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whose autobiography Personal Recollections: Life of Charlotte Elizabeth (1841) harnessed the rhetorical contradictions of evangelical conversion narrative to fashion a method for negotiating ethnic and religious difference at the margins of Britain: in rural Ireland, but also in its London proxy, the Irish slum of St. Giles'. Tonna's spiritual autoethnography allowed for a form of textual selffashioning that transcended the genre of spiritual autobiography to become a model for cultural inquiry 'on the ground,' so to speak--the spiritual self-writer as fieldworker.