Some Current Publications

Abstract

Some Current Publications Rose Botaish APHRA BEHN Mathes, Carmen Faye. "Lucretius Taken Lightly: Women's Educations and the Radical Materialist Joke." Representations, vol. 159, 2022, pp. 34–57. This article is an examination of eighteenth-century jokes about Lucretius and their connection to the inadequacies of women's education. Mathes analyzes the radical materialist joke and its potential to invoke "notions of subjectivity beyond agential autonomy" in the work of Aphra Behn, Anne Ingram, and Mary Robinson (34). Jokes generally, Mathes points out, fail to revolutionize because they fail to "move beyond the social spheres already likely to appreciate them" and promote continual comedy rather than consideration of "real-world implications" that would incite actionable change (36). In particular, Mathes highlights the reliance on "patrilineal inheritance" in jokes about Lucretius as pointing to the failures of women's education without successfully inciting useful social change (35). Ultimately, Mathes concludes that jokes' democratic potential is undermined by the boundaries set by its necessary appeal to a certain ingroup audience. MARGARET CAVENDISH, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE Zimmern, Arnaud. "Silkworms and Panaceas: Margaret Cavendish, Infinite Nature, and the Progress of Utopia." ELH: English Literary History, vol. 89, no. 1, 2022, pp. 89–113. Zimmern examines Margaret Cavendish's departure from her typical form in the utopian fiction The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, a work of fiction wherein she abandons prior convictions that "nature abhors philosophical reduction and will not be made to cure all" in favor of satirizing her contemporaries in the Royal Society (89). Zimmern argues [End Page 189] that she entertains more imaginative "conjectures what a panacea might look like if, rather than a work of artifice, it was an unrefined wonder of Nature; rather than mimic the alchemist's chrysopoeia, it mimicked the caterpillar's chrysalis" (90). Zimmern disagrees with Lara Dodds, Laura Knoppers, Marina Leslie, and John Morillo's scholarship which supposes that Cavendish used the Empress and The Blazing World's panacea to reimagine the role of women and the value of fertility (or, in Cavendish's case, lack thereof) in the Restoration. Zimmerm instead interprets her butterfly language as evidence of her "her remarkable ability to abide on the threshold between warranted skepticism of art and persistent hope in Nature" (108). WILLIAM CONGREVE Urban, David V. "Ironic Allusions to Hebrews 13:4 and Romans 11:16 in William Congreve's The Way of the World, Act III, Scene XVIII." Notes and Queries, vol. 68 [266], no. 4, Dec. 2021, pp. 419–21. Urban points to Congreve's biblical allusion to Hebrews 13:4 and Romans 11:16 in The Way of the World, which scholarship has not previously considered. Contextualizing this allusion with Congereve's insistence that "language 'which is seemingly allusive to the Bible' ought 'be understood only in the context of the play' in which it appears," Urban examines the allusion as signifying the role of the characters Fainall and Mrs Marwood (419). Urban shows the couple's use of scripture in their conversation within the play as Conreve's emphasis on the characters' "impiety and their extreme cynicism towards the institution of marriage" to indicate the sadness of their cuckoldry (420). In this sense, Urban contends that rather than Congreve being blasphemous, his biblical allusions serve to present his characters in a certain light. See DRAMA & PERFORMANCE, RELIGION & THEOLOGY COMPARATIVE STUDIES Hulse, Mark C. "Dryden and Shakespeare in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger: Contrasting Emblems of Nature, Empire, and Communion." Modern Philology: Critical and Historical Studies in Literature, Medieval Through Contemporary, vol. 119, no. 2, Nov. 2021, pp. 276–98. Hulse investigates Barry Unsworth's 1992 historical fiction novel Sacred Hunger and its depictions of eighteenth-century slavery through engagements with Roman, Renaissance, and Restoration texts. This intertextual approach, Hulse claims, expands the novel's reach to be "prescient and timely for modern debates about economic and ecological tensions" (277). Hulse focuses on the references to Shakespeare's The Tempest and its Restoration adaptation by John Dryden, The Enchanted Island. Specifically, Hulse delves into the multiple iterations of the Caliban role in Enchanted Island, which he sees as upending more typical ideas of "the non-European savage" to show that...