Showing papers in "Nineteenth-Century Literature in 1988"
83 citations
TL;DR: The magic realist text can succeed only partially because of the frustrating inadequacies of language as discussed by the authors, and the magic realists, always trying to overcome textual limitations, continuously fall short of their numinous goal.
Abstract: Magic realism seems plagued by a distinct dilemma, a problem arising primarily from its use of supplementation to "improve" upon the realistic text. The source of this nagging difficulty can be attributed to the faulty linguistic medium that all texts employ, and even though the magic realist text appears to overcome the "limits" of realism, it can succeed only partially because of the frustrating inadequacies of language. The magical text appears to displace these shortcomings through a textual apparition, but this appearance itself illustrates the representational bind which hampers its desired success. And thus the magic realists, always trying to overcome textual limitations, continuously fall short of their numinous goal. In Don Quixote, Cervantes offers an appropriate example of the textual strategies employed in magical texts, and their ultimate failure, as Sancho betrays the creaky machinations that fool the less wary reader (Don Quixote himself, in this instance). Sancho, after all, is not deceived by "magic"-although Don Quixote insists otherwise. Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez contribute further to this supplemental discourse by examining the condition of textual magic itself in their own writings. Largely because of his close ties with the fantastic, the designation of Borges as a magic realist has created critical dissension, although he is credited by some critics as one of the major early influences on the contemporary magic realism movement which has flourished internationally since the early part of this century. And, indeed, Borges' presence surfaces throughout a great deal of the magical strategies employed by the many practitioners of this textual sleight of hand. Moreover, his work also anticipates several of the major
34 citations
TL;DR: Lucy's development is marked by an increasing desire to signify, to mean something to someone as mentioned in this paper, which is problematic, as is the idea, central to some feminist readings of Lucy, that Lucy's development was measured by her willingness to play a central role in her own story and to abandon her status as pure observer.
Abstract: c7J Tkills me to be forgotten, monsieur," Lucy Snowe tells M. Paul near the end of Villette.' Through much of the novel, however, Lucy cultivates the oblivion she here resists. "Unobserved I could observe," she tells us early on (p. 198). Lucy's first words in the novel are: "Of what are these things the signs and tokens?" (p. 7); indeed, she seems first and foremost a decoder of signs, an interpreter of other people and events. One can say that Lucy's development is marked by an increasing desire to signify, to mean something to someone. And yet this notion of development as an increasing desire to signify is problematic, as is the idea, central to some feminist readings of Lucy, that Lucy's development is measured by her willingness to play a central role in her own story and to abandon her status as pure observer.2 For throughout Lucy's story (the
34 citations
TL;DR: The role of sentimentality in supporting and to a large extent creating those values has been examined in women's literature as mentioned in this paper, however, it has not yet been examined by women's authors.
Abstract: NJ spite of recent feminist interest in the antipatriarchal values of nineteenthcentury women's literature, scholars have not yet examined the role of sentimentality in supporting and to a large extent creating those values.' Even Nina Baym in the excellent second chapter of Woman's Fiction shies away from acknowledging the sentimental aspects of women's fiction. Although she aptly warns the modern reader to "assent to the work's conventions" before condemning it by modern standards, she asks readers to ignore the sentimental aspects of women's fiction as irrelevant to the fundamental message presented.2 Because she sees a feminist message below the surface conventions of sentimentality, she does not pause to understand sentimentality. Instead, Baym merely turns the modern condemnation of sentiment against the masculine canon:
30 citations
TL;DR: A review of Huckleberry Finn by Brander Matthews, an American who would in later years become a professor at Columbia University as mentioned in this paper, observes that Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huck downriver on the raft, displays the essential simplicity and kindliness and generosity of the Southern negro.
Abstract: HE London Saturday Review for 31 January 1885 carried a review of Huckleberry Finn by Brander Matthews, an American who would in later years become a professor at Columbia University. In the midst of much that is apt and insightful, Matthews observes that Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huck downriver on the raft, displays "the essential simplicity and kindliness and generosity of the Southern negro."'l This general impression of Jim has been challenged only very rarely in the century since the novel first appeared. But in place of Matthews's obvious approval of Mark Twain's treatment of Jim, more recent critics have been strongly inclined to contrast the submissive slave who appears in the closing chapters with the more complete human being who moves through the central sections of the narrative. Modern observers are in broad agreement that this simpler, more passive Jim is radically out of character. He is a mere fragment of his former self, a two-dimensional parody, a racial stereotype with roots in the minstrel tradition, and one symptom among many others of Mark Twain's failure of moral vision and artistic integrity in the complex evasion that closes the action. Among the more prominent voices in this critical litany are those of Leo Marx, who finds that Jim "has been made over in the image of a flat stereotype: the submissive stage-Negro," and Henry Nash Smith, who writes that "Jim is reduced to the
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TL;DR: Hemingway's "Indian Camp" (1924) has been subjected to a wide variety of interpretations, ranging from the obvious to the absurd, by critics who have recognized its power and struggled with its meaning as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Hemingway's "Indian Camp" (1924)-the first story in his first trade book and always one of his favorites -has been subjected to a wide variety of interpretations, ranging from the obvious to the absurd, by critics who have recognized its power and struggled with its meaning. The story contains two shocking incidents: the doctor performs a Caesarean operation with a jackknife but without anesthetic, and the husband silently commits suicide. At least one critic has sensed that the suicide seems gratuitous-"in the context of the situation as given, it is too extreme an action"2-but did not attempt to explain the Indian's behavior. My own interpretation, based on Hemingway's attitude to primitive people and on his knowledge of anthropology, explains the most difficult aspects of the story: why the husband remains in the bunk of the shanty during the two days his wife has been screaming, and why he does not leave the room if he cannot bear her agonizing pain and shrieks. Despite his badly cut foot, he could have limped or been carried out of range of the screams, if he had wished to, and joined the other men. "Indian Camp" reflects Hemingway's ambiguous attitude to primitivism and shows his notable success in portraying the primitive. The interpretations of the story reveal the limitations of New Critical readings and of Hemingway criticism during the last thirty-five years. The obvious explanation of the Indian's suicide is provided by the doctor in the story-"He couldn't stand things, I guess"3-and has been dutifully repeated by more than twenty critics from 1951 to 1983.4 Other students of the story, bored with the manifest simplicity of this interpretation, have strained for variant readings but offered little more than subjective opinions. George Hemphill (1949) tersely blames the
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TL;DR: The call to protect the bodies of the dead from insults and indignities was common throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as discussed by the authors, and even by the early 20th century, the call was still alive.
Abstract: N our town," a subscriber wrote to Gentleman's Magazine in 1794, "the venerable remains of the dead 'hearsed in earth' have 'burst their cerements,' and been exposed to every insult and indignity which the unprotected can experience."' Such calls to protect the bodies of the dead were common throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Essays and letters in popular magazines, pamphlets, and even-by the 1820s-whole books decried the overcrowding of graveyards and advocated more gracious, healthful, and, as one writer put it in 1801, "sweet-smelling" burial
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, Graham rechristens "the heroic theme" and finds no explicit reference to it in letters and plans written earlier than December 1930, and suggests that Woolf herself must have been wrong in her assessment of the theme's centrality.
Abstract: Whatever J. W. Graham says about The Waves Woolf scholars take seriously because he is, deservedly, the foremost authority on the text of Woolf's masterpiece (see WHD).' As epigraph to a 1983 article, Graham quotes Woolf's December 1930 diary (she is referring to The Waves): "the theme of effort, effort, dominates; not the waves; & personality; & defiance" (VWD, 3:339).2 This theme Graham rechristens "the heroic theme," expressing surprise that he can "find no explicit reference to it in letters and plans written earlier" than December 1930. "If the heroic theme is dominant" (and the verb form of the diary-entry indicates that Woolf thought it was) "then its expression should certainly have affected Woolf's artistic strategy [for the novel as a whole] far earlier than the date of my epigraph" (TCL, p. 313). In the first section of his essay, Graham outlines his understanding of the heroic theme; in the second, he traces through Woolf's manuscript revisions her development of the theme; in the third, he asks "whether or not the heroic theme dominates The Waves." His answer is negative. Noting, quite correctly, that "critical commentary rarely treats the theme as central, when it treats it at all," he infers that Woolf herself must have been "wrong in her assessment of the theme's centrality" (TCL, p. 327). The key-point in Graham's complex argument is that the novel's "symbolic peripeteia" (Bernard's appropriation of "the world of the interludes" in his summing up) fails. Woolfs narrative "is intended to achieve a flash point where its elements are fused, its tensions released, and its contradictions resolved" (TCL, p. 328). She intended this by making Bernard "Percival's successor [as hero], and by suggesting . .. the hero's liberation from time, his entry into another realm of being,
TL;DR: In this paper, the anonymous publication of a book is discussed, and the author's name is not revealed unless it harms the publisher's interest, to interfere with the booksellers' orders, etc., but if no such detriment is contingent I should be much thankful for the sheltering shadow of an incognito.
Abstract: As to the anonymous publication, I have this to say: If the withholding of the author's name should tend materially to injure the publisher's interest, to interfere with the booksellers' orders, etc., I would not press the point; but if no such detriment is contingent I should be much thankful for the sheltering shadow of an incognito. I seem to dread the advertisements-the large-lettered "Currer Bell's New Novel," or "New Work by the Author of Jane Eyre."
TL;DR: In Wuthering Heights, Nelly's famous assertion, "Nelly, I am Heathcliff" as mentioned in this paper, has been taken largely at face value, with the assumption that Nelly and Heath Clifton share some identity of being.
Abstract: AT is it that Catherine Earnshaw sees in Heathcliff, anyway? Many readers of the novel, following the heroine's own lead, have suggested that the attraction is based on an extraordinary affinity. The central statement is her famous assertion, "Nelly, I am Heathcliff"-a sentiment she rephrases variously in the same conversation as "he's more myself than I am" and "[he is] my own being."' This claim that she and Heathcliff share some identity of being has been taken largely at face value. Critics have differed in the language they use to describe that likeness, but almost all have tended to see these lovers as united on one side of a polarity that opposes nature to culture, or the inhuman to the social, or the energetic to the placid.2 Wuthering Heights, however, is a novel in which we
TL;DR: The Golden Notebook as discussed by the authors is one of the most famous works of post-modern literature, with a pervasive rhetoric of psychic integrity, unity of vision, and narrative coherence that is repeatedly aligned with the orthodox Marxism that Anna finally repudiates.
Abstract: Shortly before she leaves the Communist Party, the protagonist of The Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf, insists to her quondam comrade Jack, "But humanism stands for the whole person, the whole individual, striving to become as conscious and responsible as possible about everything in the universe."' In its emphasis on personal and societal wholeness, this passage is part of a network of assertions that seems to set The Golden Notebook squarely against tendencies of most other experimental fiction being written during the early 1960s-especially against the decentered subject and the destabilized narrative structure of the emerging literary movement that would be called postmodernism. Yet two considerations suggest that Doris Lessing's most famous novel has more in common with the narrative ruptures of postmodern writing than either its critical reception or its own injunctions to holism might indicate. First, the pervasive rhetoric of psychic integrity, unity of vision, and narrative coherence is repeatedly aligned with the orthodox Marxism that Anna finally repudiates. Second, this rhetoric resounds through a work that ultimately breaks down its major characters without even making a gesture at reassembling them, and that bifurcates its plot to the point where two separate and irreconcilable versions of a story jostle uneasily for ontological supremacy-for the status of being the account of what "really" happened. To adopt Lessing's own terminology from the 1971 introduction to The Golden
TL;DR: A.J. Waldock as mentioned in this paper argues that the true and clearly richer story of James's The Turn of the Screw is its dramatization of a woman's psychosexual problem and the damage it does to the children in her charge, the immovable stumbling block has always been the governess's detailed description of Peter Quint, a man dead and buried whom she has never seen.
Abstract: R readers and critics for whom the true-and clearly the richer-story of James's The Turn of the Screw is its dramatization of a woman's psychosexual problem and the damage it does to the children in her charge, the immovable stumbling block has always been the governess's detailed description of Peter Quint, a man dead and buried whom she has never seen. If James does not mean for readers to take Quint (and subsequently Miss Jessel) as a bona fide ghost, so the argument runs, why does he arrange things so that the only way to account for her description of him is that she has seen a supernatural manifestation? Asks A.J.A. Waldock, in the classic formulation of the question,
TL;DR: Melville associated the taste of "the overwhelming majority" of America's reading public with journalism; concentrating on the issue of popularity led him to disregard even the grossest distinctions of genre or format in referring to "those most saleable of all books nowadays-i e-the newspapers, & magazines." as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: CN the summer before Melville wrote Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), the work he described as "very much more calculated for popularity" than his books since Omoo (1847), his notion of popular writing came to center on magazines. In a 20 July 1851 letter to his British publisher, Richard Bentley, Melville associated the taste of "the overwhelming majority" of America's reading public with journalism; concentrating on the issue of popularity led him to disregard even the grossest distinctions of genre or format in referring to "those most saleable of all books nowadays-i e-the newspapers, & magazines."' Only a few weeks earlier Melville had observed Hawthorne's growing celebrity most specifically in conjunction with Holden's Dollar Magazine. "By the way," he wrote Hawthorne, "in the last 'Dollar Magazine' I read 'The Unpardonable Sin'.... I have no doubt you are by this time responsible for many a shake and tremor of the tribe of 'general readers'" (p. 129). While Melville was himself continuing to struggle, as he drew near completing Moby-Dick, with his perennially conflicting intentions to write "what I feel most moved to write" and what
TL;DR: Forster as discussed by the authors pointed out that the passivity of tourists was encouraged by the guidebooks' practice, since the 1830s, of arranging "descriptive and practical information along numbered 'routes' that extended from one large town to another"; readers were offered the structured freedom of choosing their own itineraries from within the range of choices covered by Baedeker and Murray, who could presumably be trusted as to which was the beaten track and which the nooks and corners.
Abstract: "I have always respected guide books-particularly the early Baedekers and Murrays." So wrote E. M. Forster in a late edition of his own guide to Alexandria; but it may be that his respect was in the manner of one's esteem for a loyal opponent.' For Forster could look back on a career marked by considerable critical engagement with the phenomenon of tourism, the vast and complex set of institutions and practices for which Baedeker and Murray had long been familiar symbols. The inevitable mark of the tourist, the guidebook had, by Forster's time, already come to stigmatize its bearer in contrast to all that was indigenous, authentic, and spontaneous. In 1869 Leslie Stephen sounded an already familiar note when he vented his wrath in Cornhill Magazine against "the ordinary tourist [who] has no judgment, [who] admires what the infallible Murray orders him to admire ... [and who] never diverges one hair's breadth from the beaten track of his predecessors. . "2 The passivity that so irritated Stephen was encouraged by the guidebooks' practice, since the 1830s, of arranging "descriptive and practical information along numbered 'routes' that extended from one large town to another"; readers were offered the structured freedom of choosing their own itineraries from within the range of choices covered by Baedeker and Murray, who could presumably be trusted as to which was the beaten track and which the nooks and corners.3 The books also
TL;DR: For example, the authors pointed out that in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, "she stamps her foot at what she stands on" and "she yells at the voice she yells with".
Abstract: COR DING to Karl Keller, Emily Dickinson is a Puritan rebel against Puritanism: "She stamps her foot at what she stands on. She yells at the voice she yells with."' It is well known that Dickinson uses traditional religious meters and metaphors in a way that, almost casually, undermines traditional religious attitudes and assumptions. Specifically, in her lyrics, her allusions to the sacrament of communion call into question that whole system of sacraments and types by which the gap between heaven and earth is supposedly bridged. Dickinson's sacraments hallow either the elusive-the evanescent-or the immediate. Sometimes her sacramental imagery points toward an elusive deity, who glows within the natural world for a day or a summer, and then glides away along a "Route of Evanescence" (1463).2 More often, Dickinson's sacrament of communion is informed by an immediately secular longing-a longing for the written or spoken word, or for a specific physical presence. What we do not have in Dickinson's lyrics is an acceptance of a stable system of likenesses, established by God, and shadowing forth eternal truths through temporal forms. In such devotional
TL;DR: Pound's Cantos have been used to examine the influence of the Theosophical movement in Europe and America during the late Victorian and early modern period as discussed by the authors, and it has long been evident that occult ideas have had an impact upon modernism at least through French symbolism, William Butler Yeats, and Wassily Kandinsky.
Abstract: My study of Ezra Pound's Cantos has led me to examine the occult movement in Europe and America during the late Victorian and early modern period.' It has long been evident that occult ideas have had an impact upon modernism at least through French symbolism, William Butler Yeats, and Wassily Kandinsky. Less well known is the probable influence of the man who was the founding editor of the Theosophical Society's journal, George Robert Stow Mead. We know that Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme attended lectures organized by Mead's Quest Society in the Kensington Town Hall; Pound's attendance was regular and began at least as early as 1912. He would often find his future wife, Dorothy, and her mother, Olivia Shakespeare, at the Quest lectures accompanied by Yeats.2 Mead's position within the occult movement was prominent and unambiguous. Born in 1863, he joined Blavatsky's Theosophical Society in 1884. After meeting Mme. Blavatsky in 1887, he became her private secretary, undertook revision of her major work, The Secret Doctrine, and became editor of the Theosophical Review. He was general secretary of the European section of the society until 1897, and was offered the presidency in 1907 on the death of Blavatsky's successor, Colonel Olcott. Instead of becoming president he led a schism and founded the rival Quest Society in 1909. Its center of operation was Kensington, the London borough in which Ezra Pound set up residence late in 1909. Pound read "Psychology and Troubadours" at the Quest Society meetings and the piece was published in the society's journal, The Quest, in 1912. Mead was also well known to Yeats.3
TL;DR: In this article, two outsiders are responsible for discovering in Imber Lake, and secretly raising from its depths, the medieval bell that had, according to legend, belonged to Imber Abbey but, when one of the nuns took a lover and the Abbey was placed under a curse, flew out of its tower into the lake.
Abstract: At the high-minded Anglican lay community Imber Court, in Iris Murdoch's The Bell (1958), two outsiders are responsible for discovering in Imber Lake, and secretly raising from its depths, the medieval bell that had, according to legend, belonged to Imber Abbey but, when one of the nuns took a lover and the Abbey was placed under a curse, flew out of its tower into the lake. The faithless nun drowned herself, and legend has it that the tolling of a bell in the lake portends a death.' The two outsiders are a graceful, cheerful, innocent boy Toby Gashe, whose natural goodness and receptivity (particularly to the natural outdoors world at Imber) contrast somewhat with the studied, willed disciplines of the Imber Court brotherhood; and a much more incongruous visitor, Dora Greenfield, the classically errant wife of an art historian working at Imber. In the upright, effortful, doctrinaire company at the Court Dora appears morally tarnished and erratic after the manner of the fallen nun herself. Joyously drenched in the sun, entering the cool ecstasy of the water, lithely swimming and exploring under the lake, the humble and happy Toby detects the sunken bell. And at the behest of the unhappy Dora, who knows the legend from her husband Paul, he engineers the raising of the bell, named "Gabriel." The memorable climax of this action is when, disavowing her original witchlike purpose of substituting the old bell for a new one shortly to be installed in the adjacent Imber Abbey, yielding to the still yet "living" presence and "spell" of the risen bell in the barn, feeling "reverence for it, almost love," Dora rings it because the "truth-telling voice . . . must not be silenced" (p. 289). The
TL;DR: In this article, Alkon discusses the influence of metafictional self-awareness in the development of the Man in the High Castle, and the existence within Geoffroy's book of a novel based on the ''ridiculous'' premise that Napoleon was forced to retreat from Moscow and was then defeated at Waterloo and sent into exile.
Abstract: the imagined Paris of the future. He is on safer ground, however, with Louis Geoffroy's extraordinary Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1836; revised as Napoléon apocryphe in 1841), in which Napoleon, having succeeded in his Russian campaign, goes on, in the space of a mere twenty years, not only to conquer Europe, but to establish French domination over almost the whole planet, convert all Protestants, Jews, and Muslims to Catholicism, and sponsor an amazing series of geographical, archaeological, technological, and scientific discoveries. A fascinating link with one of the best-known of modem uchronias, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (in which the Axis powers have won the Second World War and have occupied the United States), is provided by the existence within Geoffroy's book of a novel based on the \"ridiculous\" premise that Napoleon was forced to retreat from Moscow and was then defeated at Waterloo and sent into exile. In Dick's book a novel within the novel presents the fantastic premise that it was in fact the Allies who won the War. The degree of technical sophistication displayed in this toying with alternative and multiple fictional realities lends some credence to Alkon's attempts to endow most of the books he discusses with a greater degree of metafictional selfawareness than his summaries of their often bizarrre and confusing contents might suggest. Even if this aspect of his study is not totally convincing (fake and multiple prefaces, introductions, and commentaries being standard features of much literature of the period and not necessarily evidence of premonitions of post-Modernism), he has performed a valuable function in describing and analysing them so carefully and in fitting them into what is overall a coherent and satisfying framework. Most of his readers, however, will probably remain content to know about these works at second hand, rather than attempting to struggle with the originals which, for all their undoubted historic interest, seem unlikely ever to regain a widespread audience on their own merits.
TL;DR: The distinction between the inner and outer, between anima and res, has been identified as one of the most basic polarities in the human experience as discussed by the authors, and it has been highlighted in the present lull that has settled over Western society.
Abstract: John Updike has written that his "deepest pride" rests "in [the] ability to keep an organized mass of images moving forward."' This herding and balancing act depends to a great degree on his presenting human experience in terms of polarities, the most basic pair "revealed all the more sharply in the present lull that has settled over Western society, the great aboriginal distinction between the inner and outer, between anima and res. .. ."2
TL;DR: The road to Northanger Abbey is described in this paper as a story of secret places and horrifying clues, a story that suggests crimes but never reveals them, and the heroine is the heroine.
Abstract: the road to Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney invents for Catherine Morland a Gothic romance of the sort to which he knows she is addicted. It is a story of secret places and horrifying clues, a story that suggests crimes but never reveals them. Catherine disclaims the credulous responses to this story that Henry attributes to her, but at the same time she becomes more and more engaged in it. "Oh! Mr. Tilney, how frightful!" she exclaims. "This is just like a book!-But it cannot really happen to me.... Well, what then? ... Oh! no, nodo not say so. Well, go on."' The difference between Henry's thriller and the novels Catherine is fond of reading is that in Henry's tale Catherine herself is the heroine. She becomes both audience and actor, analyst and participant, witness and victim of the
TL;DR: In a recent special issue of the TriQuarterly special issue as discussed by the authors, Terrence Des Pres makes a call for poets to produce writing "strong enough to handle history and not stay cowed within the halting world of self." Des Pres values poetry "not so much grounded in ideology as in the concrete reactions of men and women who find themselves in history's path."
Abstract: In his essay "Poetry and Politics"-the lead piece of a recent TriQuarterly special issue-Terrence Des Pres makes a call for poets to produce writing "strong enough to handle history and not stay cowed within the halting world of self." Des Pres values poetry "not so much grounded in ideology as in the concrete reactions of men and women who find themselves in history's path."' Since the 1970s a number of British poets have begun producing works growing out of rootedness in a particular locality's history, topography, and mythology. Dissatisfied with discrete lyrics bounded by Des Pres' "halting world of self," these poets-including Irishman Seamus Heaney, Scotsman George MacKay Brown, Welshman R. S. Thompson, and Englishman Jeremy Hookerhave been working on extended structures: sequences and narratives focusing on history, culture, and politics. Among English poets today, Geoffrey Hill, in his sequence Mercian Hymns, has gone furthest toward placing the self within the historical and political life of his or her culture.2 Even though Mercian Hymns weaves in material from Hill's personal experience, the self does not exist in isolation in the sequence. Instead, the various speakers of these hymns3 interact with past and present elements of English culture. Hill achieves this interaction by creating an idiom that allows a public voice to take on the intensity and immediacy of a private consciousness, and a private voice to gain the breadth, resonance, and authority of a public persona. Mercian Hymns is a record of the growth of a poet's mind4 and of the development of a culture. It is a self-portrait, particularly of Hill as a child growing up in England in the 1940s; but it is also a portrait of a potent British myth: Offa, the king who stands at the beginnings of
TL;DR: Boyle's early work puts the old categories into motion and marks out a new literary space of intense descriptive prose as mentioned in this paper. Yet her impact on literary history has not seemed so powerful as her writing would warrant.
Abstract: Modernist experiments with language have an especially problematic relationship to women's writing which is experimental. Kay Boyle's early work puts the old categories into motion and marks out a new literary space of intense descriptive prose. Yet her impact on literary history has not seemed so powerful as her writing would warrant. In 1929, Kay Boyle signed a manifesto for transition calling for "The Revolution of the Word."' Other signers included Hart Crane, Harry and Caresse Crosby, and Eugene Jolas. The "Proclamation" asserted, among other things, that "The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words" and that "We are not concerned with the propagation of sociological ideas except to emancipate the creative elements from the present ideology." Boyle's rewriting of the new word was a different matter from the poetics of someone like Hart Crane, a difference she in fact had signaled herself in a critique of his obsession with the primacy of words, in "Mr. Crane and His Grandmother."2 Nevertheless, though she prefers the American renewals of Williams and Moore, Boyle shows herself to be in the tradition of Baudelaire and Rimbaud as well. Her
TL;DR: The Schulpforta School as discussed by the authors specialized in Greek and Latin literature, in the German classics, and, to a lesser extent, in science and mathematics, including Klopstock, Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel, and Ranke.
Abstract: GJN September 1865, Matthew Arnold, on an official inspection tour of the secondary schools and universities on the Continent, stopped at "the famous establishment of Schulpforta," Prussia's equivalent to Rugby. Alumni of the school, which specialized in Greek and Latin literature, in the German classics, and, to a lesser extent, in science and mathematics, included Klopstock, Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel, and Ranke. Just a year prior to Arnold's arrival its "best pupil,"' Friedrich Nietzsche, had graduated; and so a chance en-
TL;DR: In a note to the third edition of The Renaissance (1888), Pater stated that he was restoring the "Conclusion," suppressed in the second edition because "it might possibly mislead some... young men," as he had "dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean [1885] with the thoughts suggested by it.".
Abstract: N a note to the third edition of The Renaissance (1888) Walter Pater stated that he was restoring the "Conclusion," suppressed in the second edition because "it might possibly mislead some... young men," as he had "dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean [1885] with the thoughts suggested by it."' Although nearly all Pater's critics and biographers have remarked on the connection, none has convincingly demonstrated the precise link between the two.2 I should like here to suggest that it is the philosophical doctrine of becom-
TL;DR: The term "anarchist" has been used to describe Dos Passos' literary politics as discussed by the authors, which has been called everything from agrarian to radical republican, rebellious neurotic to arch conservative.
Abstract: After his long and controversial career, John Dos Passos' literary politics remain a matter of some dispute. Starting out on the far Left and ending on the far Right, he has been called everything from agrarian to radical republican, rebellious neurotic to arch conservative. But the term most often applied to his fiction is "anarchist." Dos Passos, numerous critics have argued, was faithful to the individual alone, defending him in the early novels against the army, big business, and liberals, and in his later novels against the New Deal, big labor, and communists. "Dos Passos believes in absolute or primitive liberty, the supreme good of the anarchist creed," wrote Martin Kallich in 1950, calling that creed "a kind of unchanging monomania lending unity to all his creative work."' Ten years later, confronting the writer's sharp turn right, David Sanders argued that Dos Passos was "driven by an anarchistic philosophy" that attacked "the submergence of the individual."2 And John Diggins, in his recent, careful study of "conservative odysseys," refers as a matter of course to Dos Passos' "anarcho-individualist sensibilities," his "anarchistic suspicion of the movement of power from one source to another."3 Yet the novels themselves cannot be so neatly classified, for it is difficult to find in them any radical individualist who thrives. From the early aesthetes like John Andrews, crushed by the senseless machine, to the helpless vagabonds who wander through U.S.A., to the noble failures like Jasper Milliron and Blackie Bowman of the later novels, Dos Passos' individuals fare badly indeed. Even during the writer's most militant phase, his characters never find that bliss in unrestricted freedom that an anarchist philosophy would suggest. Instead, Dos Passos seems to be doing something else in his fiction-portraying his