Philological Quarterly 

About: Philological Quarterly is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Poetry & Literary criticism. It has an ISSN identifier of 0031-7977. Over the lifetime, 426 publications have been published receiving 1770 citations.

The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon's against the Day

Abstract: Since V. appeared in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has exemplified American postmodernism, and Against the Day carries on the process of undercutting our ontological assumptions and denying us the stability that would support claims of truth or authenticity. Its 1085 pages, its several hundred characters, and its settings--stretching from Colorado to New Haven to Venice to Siberia--combine to deny us the comfort of mastering this textual mini-world. In its religion and politics, however, this book differs from Pynchon's earlier novels. From V. (1963) through Mason E Against the Day's Webb Traverse is not thus compromised. Pynchon's support--at least within the novel--for violence has been ignored, perhaps because those politics and the religious views do not mesh well with postmodern relativism, possibly because they contradict our previous understanding of Pynchon novels as essentially ambiguous and infinitely complex, and probably because the reviewers do not wish to contemplate either a serious call to violence or a life of penance. His changed sense of what should (and should not) be explicit and unambiguous appears to reflect intensified personal convictions or increased desperation over the direction America is taking. (5) I would like to try to disentangle Pynchon's presentation of religious and political positions in Against the Day, and articulate the vision I understand him to be offering in this novel. Its political program appears to favor attacking industrial infrastructures as the way to slow or derail capitalism, and he intertwines this program with a Christian and often specifically Catholic set of doctrines. (6) If I am correct, for this novel we are no longer dealing with the infinitely scriptible Pynchon, whose many luscious phrases can be arranged to harmonize with most of his readers' ideologies. …

Wordsworth's Chaucer: Mediation and Transformation in English Literary History

Abstract: NEAR THE MIDDLE OF THE THIRD BOOK of his Prelude, "Residence at Cambridge," Wordsworth recalls the principal poets of England's literary tradition and describes his formative perceptions of them. He evokes Spenser, remembering a brother and friend moving through the clouded heaven. He evokes Milton, remembering an angelical boy bounding in a scholar's dress. But, first, he evokes another poet and remembers how: "Beside the pleasant Mill of Trompington /I laugh'd with Chaucer, in the hawthorn shade / Heard him, while birds were warbling, tell his tales / Of amorous passion" (Prelude 3.278-81). (1) As most annotated editions of The Prelude indicate, Wordsworth here links the narrative of his autobiographical poem with a narrative from the literary past. He incorporates into his personal account an allusion to The Reeve's Tale, a story that similarly features two scholars from Cambridge, and that similarly takes place "At Trumpyngtoun, nat fer fro Cantebrigge" where "ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge, / Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle" (3921-23). (2) To recall his engagement with Chaucer, Wordsworth rewrites a Chaucerian poem, reimagining both the personages it once described and the pilgrims who once related it. He transforms Aleyn and John, the students of "Cantebrigge" (3990) who walked beside the Mill of Trompington before exacting their violent and sexual revenge on the Miller, Symkyn, and his family. He transforms, too, the Reeve himself, the ornery pilgrim who tells his fabliau of rape and retaliation to avenge the preceding tale from the pilgrim Miller, Robin, about a cuckolded carpenter (3913-20). He transforms, finally, the Cook, the enthusiastic listener who laughs along with the Reeve after hearing his churlish story of harlotry and supposedly just deserts (4325-29). In The Prelude these characters, pilgrims, and the network of relationships that they form are refigured in the roles played by the medieval and romantic poets themselves. Reprising Aleyn and John, the Cambridge scholars visiting Trompington's banks, there now appear at Trompington a different pair of Cambridge-educated men, Chaucer and Wordsworth. (3) And, reprising the Cook and the Reeve, the one filled with laughter and the other inducing it, there now appears a different laughing and tale-telling tandem, Wordsworth and Chaucer. With these various metamorphoses, Wordsworth distances his autobiographical account from the manifold layers of mediation in The Canterbury Tales. There, the episode of Trompington Mill was initially described by a pilgrim narrator, then heard and interpreted by a pilgrim audience, subsequently recalled and rehearsed by pilgrim Chaucer, then written down and presented in book form to the broader reading public. But in Wordsworths account, this complex chain of communication, with its diverse participants and variously oral and written media, is not registered. Instead, Wordsworth describes a scene of Chaucerian tale-telling characterized by its simplicity, its intimacy, and its exclusivity--by its fantasy of Chaucer's words proceeding directly to Wordsworth himself. In transforming many of the Canterbury mediators and depicting his intimate connection with Chaucer, however, Wordsworth also, and paradoxically, opens his Chaucerian engagement to a far less intimate and far more mediated domain: the four-century-long history of Chaucer's reception. Wordsworth's description of his direct and amicable relationship deploys a topos already well worn by Chaucer's medieval and postmedieval followers--the Lydgates, Hoccleves, Scogans, Skeltons, and Drydens who had, for nearly half a millennium, asserted a similarly immediate and congenial bond with England's Old Poet. (4) Among the manifold documents that transmit this topos, two poems stand out as especially contiguous with The Prelude and its representation of Chaucer. The first is William Mason's Musaeus, a pastoral elegy written in commemoration of Alexander Pope, modelled on Milton's Lycidas, and printed in at least fifteen publications between its composition in 1747 and the end of the eighteenth century. …

Widsith and the Anthropology of the Past

Abstract: Thanks in part to the opacity with which it names, without comment, tribe after tribe and ruler after ruler of the ancient world, the poem that we know as Widsith defies literary analysis. Those who know this work, either in modern translation or in its unique Old English text, will recall above all its central character, the itinerant singer Widsith himself, the imagined speaker of all but the first nine and last nine lines of the text.(1) The words that begin the poem--Widsi?? ma??olade, wordhord onleac (Widsith spoke, he unlocked his hoard of words, 1)--mark off the long speech that follows as a formal one that is imagined to take place in a dignified setting.(2) In elevated poetic discourse, the singer tells how he found patronage among various tribes and kings of the past, some of whom he celebrates in short eulogistic passages. The ruler whom Widsith singles out for special attention is Eormanric (or Ermanaric),(3) the legendary king of the Goths, who commands ambiguous attention as both a magnificent host and a waerloga, or "oath-breaker."(4) Despite this uneasy mix of praise and blame, Eormanric stands out as a grand figure suggestive of the idealized archetypal king of former times, just as Widsith is the idealized bard who is imagined to have entertained him. One can forgive readers if their memories of other aspects of the poem remain a blur. Few people praise Widsith for its artistic qualities, for compared with Beowulf (a poem with which it is often linked)(5) its narrative moments are empty of drama. The anonymous author seems not to have aspired to the literary verve that distinguishes some of the poem's well-known companion pieces in the Exeter Book. A detractor could call Widsith the sort of thing that results when a piece of language cannot make up its mind if it is a minimalist short story or a shopping list. It is appropriate that, in what is either a pun or an inspired typographical error, one critic has referred to it as arguably the greatest "scissors-and-past" job in English literature.(6) That Widsith contains remarkable items of pseudo-historical lore should go without saying. That it is composed in a genre of its own is clear. That it is a profitable text to study, a work that is capable of yielding important insights into the early culture of the British Isles, remains to be shown. In the past, those scholars who were accustomed to tracing all good things to their origins in ancient Germania tended to regard Widsith as the earliest poem in the English language (which it surely is not) and therefore as a precious example of primitive poetry(7)--a misunderstanding that also identified it as a subliterary work that did not deserve critical attention. The poem's two chief modern editors, R. W. Chambers and Kemp Malone, used its lists of proper names as points of access to some of the great stories and cast-off ephemera of Germanic antiquity.(8) Their commentaries, though learned to a degree that would be hard to imitate today, are not necessarily to the taste of current readers who turn a skeptical eye on claims regarding ancient Germania or who dismiss that term as one that has largely outlived its usefulness outside the orbit of ancient Rome.(9) One modern critic, regarding the poem not so much as a source of information about the past as a source of insight into how the Anglo-Saxons idealized the past, has used Widsith's imagined autobiographical journey as the focal point for remarks concerning the role of the poet in early English society.(10) In its idealization of the singer of tales, such a study, though full of insight, runs the risk of mirroring the poet's own ideal portrait of the scop and thereby provides ammunition for cynics who view the "search for the Anglo-Saxon oral poet" as largely the quest for a chimera.(11) Despite one hundred and fifty years of commentary, Widsith remains an enigmatic work whose reason for existence is obscure. My first purpose in this essay is to promote understanding of Widsith in period-specific terms by inquiring into the cultural work that must have been done by a poem of this kind during the time when it was in circulation. …

The Readers of the Manuel Des Peches Revisited

Abstract: In her book-length study of William of Waddingtons Manuel des peches (Dean no. 635), Ulrike Schemmann laments that the Anglo-Norman guide for penitents "has not yet found the interest it deserves." (1) Despite her contribution and several others on the subject, the situation remains largely unchanged. The text is in many ways an important one for understanding vernacular theological literature of the late medieval period. Written sometime between 1250 and 1260, it is one of the earliest of the comprehensive devotional guides that became increasingly popular in the second half of the thirteenth century. It survives in twenty-eight medieval copies and fragments, and sparked three independent adaptations into English, including Handlyng Synne, which itself survives in nine copies. (2) Extracts of it were translated into Latin and Icelandic. (3) Given this popularity, it stands as a valuable witness to late medieval literary tastes. My present purpose is to take up one question that has become central to studies of the Manuel des peches and of late medieval vernacular pastoral texts more generally: who read it? I will answer this question as best as possible given the available evidence by surveying all available catalogue information for copies of the text. As we shall see, discussions of the audiences of the Manuel generally focus on the number of copies owned by the clergy, but this has obscured the significant number owned by the laity. The question of who read the text is important, because the Manuel was written on the cusp of an emerging wave of texts concerned with penitents. This development was described perhaps most famously by Leonard Boyle in several groundbreaking studies of medieval pastoralia--a "very wide term indeed" in Boyle's estimation that "embraces any and every manual, aid or technique, from an episcopal directive to a mnemonic of the seven deadly sins, that would allow a priest the better to understand his office, to instruct his people, and to administer the sacraments, or, indeed, would in turn enable his people the readier to respond to his efforts in their behalf and to deepen their faith and practice." (4) According to Boyle, "the first wave of manuals of confession--that up to about the year 1260--is largely concerned with educating priests," while "the second wave of penitential pastoralia," "that around or about 1260-has a broader basis and is more directly concerned with the penitent as such and with the education of the penitent." (5) Given the relatively early date of the Manuel des peches, it is an important witness to this emerging emphasis on educating the penitent. Indeed, Rob Lutton calls it "one of the earliest" of the vernacular works on confession produced in wake of the Fourth Lateran Council. (6) To date, most discussions of the texts audiences--both intended and actual--have focused on the clergy. In an early discussion of its intended audience, Charlton Laird supposed that, "our author did not expect penitents to use the Manuel as a reference work," and suggested that it was instead intended for preachers. He argued that clerical readers were also part of its actual audience: "The manuscripts leave us in no doubt that the Manuel became popular as a reference book for preachers." (7) Matthew Sullivan examined the issue of audience at length in his dissertation on the text and in a subsequent series of articles. Like Laird, Sullivan argued emphatically that the Manuel was intended for the clergy. Although the Manuel's prologue contains several lines explicitly addressing a lay audience, Sullivan suggested that these were later additions that had no bearing on William's original. Sullivan also held that clerical readers were the text's actual audience. He based this claim on an examination of about half of the surviving copies and fragments. (8) In a more recent study, Schemmann examined the text's intended audience. She offered a correction to Sullivan's approach to the text by showing that Waddington intended it for lay audiences in addition to, and, perhaps, before, religious ones. …