Penny Eley Penny Eley (review)

Abstract

494 Reviews to focus on particular details so as to make them resonate with wider significance. In early chapters, his detailed attention to tropes of the body in the poetry allows for a wider consideration of America's body politic in the mid-Nineteenth Century. And in later chapters, imagery of wounding, dissolution, and farewells that signals Whitman's decline into death also, Aspiz hints, signals a sad sense of America in a terminal, post-war decline. The eloquent and detailed attention that this book gives to Whitman's poetry of death is ample testament to Whitman's poetic afterlife. University of Glasgow Nick Selby Piramus et Tisbe. Ed. and trans. by Penny Eley. (Liverpool Online Series: Critical Editions of French Texts, 5) Liverpool: University of Liverpool, French De? partment. 2001. 164 pp. Not on general sale. ISBN 0-9533816-4-1. Narcisus et Dane. Ed. and trans. by Penny Eley. (Liverpool Online Series: Critical Editions of French Texts, 6) Liverpool: University of Liverpool, French De? partment. 2002. 94 pp. Not on general sale. ISBN 0-9533816-5-x. These editions are hard-copy replicas of the online versions available in pdf format at http://www.liv.ac.uk/sml/los.The Liverpool Online Series aims to make available critical editions of French texts that are unedited, difficultto obtain, or where a new edition is needed. The two texts considered here fall into the latter two categories, as although both have been edited several times in the last century, these editions have tended to be perhaps unduly interventionist or are lacunary. Penny Eley offers a critical edition of each text based on the most reliable manu? script source, with scrupulously referenced emendations from other manuscripts only in cases of obvious scribal error or omission, and a facing-page English translation. The texts are accompanied by an introduction discussing the manuscript tradition, sources for and retellings of the plot, form, genre, and major themes; notes, principally concerned with departures in Eley's edition from previous editions of the texts; and a bibliography. In Piramus et Tisbe diplomatic transcriptions of the four principal witnesses conclude the volume, thus making available to the scholar a vital tool for comparing the manuscripts and for evaluating the reconstructed versions of the text given in earlier editions. Eley presents Piramus et Tisbe as it appears in MS R (Rouen, Bibliotheque municipale 1044 (0.44)) with limited emendations mainly from MS B (Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, fr.19152). Narcisus et Dane is based on the longer version ofthe text found in MS C (Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, fr.2168) with conser? vative emendations from the other three manuscripts. Both texts have much in common in terms of date, form, source, and the modifications made to the material by the medieval adaptors, aspects which are thoroughly discussed in Eley's introduction. Both may be dated to the third quarter ofthe twelfth century, when interest in classical sources was especially marked. Eley's comments on how the anonymous authors manipulated the Ovidian tales, particularly in their foregrounding of the female protagonists, lead to an interesting debate on female sexuality, courtly love, and morality. The lyric sequences in Piramus et Tisbe, with their use of disyllables and monorhymed octosyllables, also generate a fascinating, although necessarily speculative, suggestion that this text may hint at the original form of that genre which repeatedly defies definition: the Breton lay. Two criticisms may be made about the user-friendliness of the format. Some in? dication in the critical edition of lines which have accompanying notes would be welcome, particularly in the online version, where the grouping of the notes at the end ofthe edition results in lengthy scrolling between the notes and the relevant lines. MLR, 100.2, 2005 495 A point concerning the online version alone is that, unless the file is downloaded or printed, the reduced magnification needed to display the French and English texts side by side also significantly reduces the readability of the font. This is a pity as Eley has succeeded in producing a translation of the texts which is at once readable and spirited and which remains very close to the lines and structure of the...