The facts of evolution: fighting the Endarkenment

Editor’s Note Kate Bernheimer This Editor’s Note has three parts. As with all of my Editor’s Notes, I ask that you daydream while you read it. My students are often delighted that I encourage them to daydream during my lectures, even to sleep. I stand by this policy with intellectual rigor. There is a fairy tale theory hidden inside it. And besides, sleep and dreams are the themes of this year’s issue. To the Editor’s Note we go. ________ Fairy tales are imaginary places with real words in them. I often repeat this sentence to myself, and in my lectures. Its inspiration is Marianne Moore’s famous phrase from her famous poem “Poetry,” in which she exhorts that until we have “literalists of the imagination” we will not have genuine poetry. We have genuine fairy tales, many of them here in The Lilac Issue. Fairy tale tellers are literalists of the imagination. Are you? Do you dream? Consider what it might mean to be a literalist of the imagination, and where it might lead you—to what places? You sit somewhere reading this page—in a place—but you go somewhere else in the pages. Some of you are not writers. Some of you design buildings and parks, tutus and cufflinks, wheelchairs and hats. Some of you make cakes, cookies, latkes, and kugel. Some of you help children with math, help to make numbers—a language that, like all languages, relies on our belief in imagination—have meaning for them. There are many makers among us who might intuitively grasp what Marianne Moore means when she writes, “literalists of the imagination.” Poetry scholars have argued about her poem for a half century, but I think I [End Page 15] get it. In her poem, Moore describes genuine poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” She has described this poem as being about her contempt for poetry as it exists. Let’s hold all this in mind, too: imaginary gardens, real toads, and contempt. I prefer that readers drift in and out of daydreams as they read, just as you may have done as a child, likely still do . . . thinking insolent thoughts, or maybe confused, dazed, happy thoughts, or maybe fretting about a lost kitten, or hungry. When I read Moore’s poem I think, “Gardens and toads? Whatever on earth could she—well that’s a nice word, garden.” So we’ve got a place—here, the hearthside—and we’ve got an object, which is to say not only a toad, but a goal: to talk about fairy-tale places with real words in them, and we all know that words—words! Words! Why must they have so many meanings? Like fairy tales. Thank goodness. ________ To over-simplify Sigmund Freud’s dream theories, dreams are made of two essential components: a wish and an obstruction to that wish. The dreamer has a wish; the dream presents obstacles to it, often in a long series. Sounds a lot like a fairy tale to me. Freud also believed that dreams were like puzzles—written in code—like a rebus drawn by the dreamer. The royal road to the unconscious. Dreams tell us something we need to know about what we want. If we are brave and pay close attention to our own language. Dreams are a private language. Fairy tales are like dreams, but they are not dreams, because fairy tales are meant to be shared, to share meaning with others. I have written and said many times that fairy tales are a form, but I have moved along to the idea that fairy tales are a language. The psychoanalyst Ella Freeman Sharpe, from whom I contend Jacques Lacan owes his entire body of work, and who is the superior writer and thinker to him, wrote a book called Dream Analysis in which, through her background in literature, she describes how language operates in dreams the way it operates in poetry. She sets down a way to analyze dreams through their syntax and [End Page 16] structure—through the way dreams are told by the dreamer. Dreams have a double existence; they exist...

The Islands of Poetry; the Poetry of Islands Rajeev S. Patke An island, let it be, say, three or four hundred to a thousand miles or so from the nearest habitations of humanity and well out of the usual sea trade routes, preferably uncharted, fairly commodious, say thirteen miles by four, of a climate whose extremes are not of a pitiless severity, an island which nature's bounty has endowed with shade, fresh water, shelter and food fit for human consumption. And there —our recluse. Every seaman, every wanderer on the deep, has hearkened to the decoy of that ideal island. (de la Mare 16) Islands as Gardens Islands, like poetry, may be described in Marianne Moore's words as "imaginary gardens" with "real toads" in them (Moore 74). They have long served writers as pretext for a unique spectrum of conjurations, ranging from the exhortatory humanism of John Donne's Devotions, which supports the notion that "No man is an island, entire of itself" (Donne 538) to the melancholic eschatalogy of Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," which wonders if the entire planet we live on is not an "island solitude, unsponsored, free" (Stevens 70).1 In poetic —no less than ordinary —geography, land and water define themselves in relational terms as either that which surrounds, or that which is surrounded by, its Other. Islands are to oceans the converse of what [End Page 177] land is to lakes. W. H. Auden once remarked that if it took longer than an afternoon to circumvent a body of water —for instance Lake Michigan or Lake Baikal —he would rather call it "an estranging Sea." As for islands, he found it easier to think of them as lakes "turned inside out" (Auden 208). Poetry that uses islands as pretext raises a host of questions about their role in the psychic economy of human experience and writing: not simply the question of what it means to travel to an island, or to live on one, or to leave one behind, or to return to one, but of what it means to be turned inside out by one. This last question has exercised a special fascination for poets and novelists. The Islander as Crusoe One of the most familiar analogies that links land to peoples is that an island is to the mainland what the individual is to the community. One way of illustrating this parallel is to conduct a quick roll call of the community of Robinson Crusoes with which the literary imagination peoples islands. This figuration is a way of naming, and knowing, an island as the castaway does, one who is a type of the self not only undone by an island but learning to regard himself as one. This may be illustrated through the differences refracted by islands between the historically authentic Alexander Selkirk, who got stranded on one for four years and four months, Daniel Defoe's fictive Robinson Crusoe, who could leave his island only after "four and twenty years, two months and 19 days" (Defoe 302), J. M. Coetzee's variation, which takes the form of a Mr. Cruso who would rather die than cease "losing himself in the contemplation of the wastes of water and sky" on his island (Coetzee 38), and "Crusoe in England" as imagined by Elizabeth Bishop.2 Bishop's bored old creature finds, on getting back to England, that he has only exchanged one island for another, and made himself poorer into the bargain. This morose islander will not fail to remind us of yet another difficult homecoming, in which a transformed Lemuel Gulliver is compelled "to behold [his] figure often in a glass, and thus, if possible, habituate [him] self, by time, to tolerate the sight of a human [End Page 178] creature" (Swift 316). Bishop's Crusoe begins by providing all the reasons why his island leaves him miserable. Its many little volcanoes and waterspouts offer a variegated monotony which is "not much company" (1977: 11). He is full of self-pity for being marooned on an island that he does not remember choosing. But gradually the poem turns this moroseness into a positive feeling: "I felt a deep affection...

How We Become Real:The Making of Jewish and Transsexual Identities Joy Ladin (bio) The American poet Marianne Moore said that a poem is "an imaginary garden with real toads in it."1 That is the way I understand the symbolic systems that define and sustain gender and Jewish identities, giving meaning to terms such as "Jew," "man," and "woman," and enabling us to recognize, signify, and express these identities. These symbolic systems are "imaginary gardens" with "real toads"—real people—living in them, people who depend upon the identities those symbolic systems define and sustain in order to understand themselves in relation to others. The fraught, fascinating intersection between symbolic systems and those who live in and through them has been a focus of feminist, queer, and trans-gender theory. In much of this work, these symbolic systems are described neither as imaginary nor as gardens, but as sites or channels of social coercion and violence. Feminist scholars, for example, have extensively demonstrated how women have been "disciplined and punished" by the symbolic system—transgender theorists call it the "gender binary"—that defines female identity and turns biology into social destiny. Women are born into this "imaginary garden"—assigned to the female gender at birth, as transgender theorists say—and though feminists have shown that women can resist binary gender definitions, the gender binary itself offers no way out. In this imaginary garden, gender is defined as fixed at birth, and the only alternative to being a woman is being a man. From the perspective of these critiques, the gender binary and, by extension, other identity-constituting symbolic systems, represent an institutionalization of power as unilateral and univocal as prison. Its subjects may try to revolt, escape, negotiate its rules, or break down the walls, but no one would, or at least should, want to live within it. Some queer and transgender theorists invert this top-down model of the relationship between imaginary gardens and their real inhabitants. Their arguments hold that rather than being defined by symbolic systems, we can constitute our identities individually, mixing and matching signs, conventions, and other identity-signaling symbols to define ourselves. According to these accounts, identities are individually determined, rather than being fixed [End Page 67] at birth. For example, Sandy Stone's landmark essay, "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," often credited with launching transgender studies, argues that instead of trying to "pass" as men who were born male or women who were born female, transsexuals (those whose gender identifications as male or female conflict with their physical sex) should highlight their "dissonance" with the gender binary, and express their identities in ways that embrace "physicalities of constantly shifting figure and ground that exceed the frame of any possible representation."2 In other words, Stone calls for transsexuals to stop trying to tailor our bodies and life stories to the readily intelligible but inadequate terms of binary gender—terms which require us to hide any aspects of ourselves that would be "dissonant" with binary gender. Stone argues that we transsexuals should define our identities individually rather than communally, and express those individualistic identities in idiosyncratic ways that defy and confound the gender binary. According to Stone and others who embrace this approach, identity is self-determined, defined not by communal symbolic systems that govern how others see us but by how we see ourselves.3 From this perspective, none of us are bound to or defined by imaginary gardens such as that of binary gender. And whatever we choose to do with the signifiers of identity they offer, we should be completely unconcerned with whether we are seen as "real toads"—real men, real women, real Jews, or real exemplars of whatever identity they sustain—because we always are, and only are, really ourselves. Both the top-down and self-determination approaches to identity have proven theoretically powerful and politically useful. However, both tend to overlook the fact that to many people, identity-constituting symbolic systems, whatever their drawbacks, represent neither institutionalized oppression nor obstacles to self-determination; rather, these imaginary gardens represent home and community. For better and, always, of course, for worse, we willingly dwell within them, because...

Most readers will agree that Marianne Moore, the premier poet of what she liked to call observations, presented in her work through the 1930s the 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them' recommended by the speaker in the early, unbutchered versions of her poem Poetry. One deduces that in such gardens the toads may be transmogrified into princes. But readers are also commonly aware that much of what she wrote after the early 1940s maintained the manner but not the steely precision of her earlier work. Her later work is notably more public, less intense: the gardens are less firmly imagined, their toads remain warted amphibians. Perhaps the turn from the great poems of precise observation is to be attributed to the middle-age blahs (Moore became fifty in 1937). A more rational view, however, is that World War II clouded her lenses. Her poems of the war years suggest that she found the war destructive to her comfortable understanding of the world as a place where though confusion is rampant and danger always exists as in her poem Steeple-Jack one may hope to survive by armoring the self with courage, fortitude, honesty, and other primary values. The war threatened to destroy not only her understanding, her ability to make the voyages of discovery that she enacts in her poems, but also her preferred persona, the self as moral observer that she had painstakingly created. Though all of her poems touching on the war indicate that her comprehension was under siege, the difficulty she found is most directly apparent in In Distrust of Merits (Complete Poems 136-38), a piece that has been both praised and damned. It was hailed at the time by W. H. Auden as the best poem of the war and was saluted in doggerel by Robert Penn Warren. It appears today in both the Norton and the

I, too, dislike it, begins Marianne Moore in her poem on Poetry. But dislike turns out to be only part of the picture, for, as we discover by the end of the poem, she also delights in the poet's imaginary gardens with real toads in them. For me, similar mixed emotions well up around the subject of creativity. Part of what gets my emotions churn ing stems from the word itself. Creativ ity. Certainly it has a pleasing ring, but it also has a mushy, unprincipled quality that's enough to make any English teacher queasy. In the past decade or so, it has become a catchword for all kinds of training and development programs, and there are people out there making money on creative management, creative marketing, creative coffee breaks. ... These objectives may be worthy, but occasionally I find myself wondering what they're doing in Mari anne Moore's garden and in the world of represented by, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Picasso, and Albert Einstein. Actually, however, the confusion of meaning is nothing new. As a part of both pop culture and psychological jargon, creativity is used to cover

Willis explores Moore’s early interest in Blake’s pictures and poetry and her seventeen poems, written between 1914 and 1919, that reference Blake. Willis demonstrates that Moore mines Blake’s illustrations to Paradise Lost in “In the Days of Prismatic Color,” “When I Buy Pictures,” and “Inheritance.” She adopts from his “Milton” the position that “contrarieties are equally true”—that opposite ideas can be held in balance, which is key to such statements as “imaginary gardens with real toads / in them” from “Poetry.” By 1924 Moore has so mastered holding contrarieties in balance that she can present opposing views of nature and of civilization in “An Octopus,” a development that would mark her work long after she named Blake as her inspiration.

In T. S. Eliot's (1950) play Murder in the Cathedral, the Archbishop of Canterbury, engaged in a of wills with his monarch Henry II, confronts three tempters. After the last tempter speaks, the Archbishop ruminates: last temptation is the greatest treason / To do the right thing for the wrong reason (196). We teachers of literature and composition believe we are doing the right thing by teaching literary analysis and encouraging our students to assume the intellectual rigor of serious study of the language arts. However, we seldom justify the teaching of these courses with reasons other than the practical ones of going to college or finding a job. In our dollar-driven world, this single-vision, to borrow William Blake's phrase, is eminently natural, but is it the only, the best, or the right reason? In recent years, I have attempted, in remarks primarily intended for teachers of advanced placement literature and composition courses but relevant to all language arts instructors, to clarify our justifications for teaching literature and composition courses. Of course, most of us would agree that the worlds of language and imagination have inherent worth. Although Immanuel Kant's argument for the aesthetic response has less currency in our theory-driven world than it once did, somewhere deep in our souls many of us, perhaps secretly, delight in Marianne Moore's (1990) imaginary gardens with real toads (1318). However, without losing sight of the sheer pleasure of imaginary gardens, I have, in the past, challenged instructors to remember that teaching literature and composition to students offers them other-less concrete but, nonetheless, practical-rewards, such as empowerment, selfunderstanding, and effective communication skills. The relevance of the kind of thinking and writing most literature and composition courses require, exemplified at the advanced levels by the advanced placement examinations, seem questionable not only to teachers and administrators but also to our students. Since the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, since the indictments of stock analysts and traders, and especially since September 11, we Americans struggle to cope with a loss of innocence comparable to that which horrified the world in 1917. In the space of a few hours after the collapse of the World Trade Center, we realized that the bombing of our embassy in Sudan, the attack on the battleship Cole, and the killing of our soldiers in Saudi Arabia all represented what Bernard Lewis (2001), the distinguished Princeton professor of history, calls the clash of civilizations. Herein this of values lies one of the right reasons for engaging students in literature courses, even if it means simply having them discuss passages from literature and analyze characterizations and plot structures.

9 Postscript to Don Quijote: Hero or Fool? Remixed _____________________________________________John Jay Allen For Ana Rueda I n one of her poems, Marianne Moore says that poetry presents us with “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” (135). Don Quixote invents an alternative reality that requires him to show his bravery by attacking evil. The descent into the Cave of Montesinos is one of a number of attempts to demonstrate the strength of his spirit. Deep into part two, he makes a pact with Sancho: “Sancho, pues vos queréis que se os crea lo que habéis visto en el cielo, yo quiero que vos me creáis a mí lo que vi en la cueva de Montesinos. Y no os digo más” (2.41:373). His performance throughout has given us a mock epic. Once, though, he is presented with what looks to him like a serious threat: the batanes. Dumbstruck by the discovery that the terrifying noise is made by fulling mills, he is stunned and embarrassed. When Sancho bursts out laughing, Don Quixote has to laugh himself. It is only when Sancho launches into an elaborate parody of Quixotic bombast, kicking the usual archaism up a notch, that his master strikes him with his lance and asks for a real test: “Haced vos que estos seis mazos se vuelvan en seis jayanes, y echádmelos a las barbas uno a uno, o todos juntos, y cuando yo no diere con todos patas arriba, haced de mí la burla que quisiéredes” (1.20:289). Much later, Sansón Carrasco, disguised as The Knight of the White Moon, attacks and defeats Don Quixote, threatening him with death 10 Cervantes John Jay Allen if he denies the supremacy of Casildea de Vandalia. Don Quixote has no idea who it is that has a sword at his throat. He has finally elicited a real toad for his imaginary garden, and his reaction is heroic: “Aprieta, caballero, la lanza, y quítame la vida, pues me has quitado la honra” (2.64:572). jjallen@kih.net University of Kentucky (Emeritus) Works Cited Cervantes, Miguel de. El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. John Jay Allen. 2 vols. Madrid: Cátedra, 2005. Moore, Marianne. The Poems of Marianne Moore. Ed. Grace Schulman. New York: Viking, 2003. ...

Hyacinth Robinson’s sensitive consciousness is the mirror which controls the shape of Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima. As in so many of his other novels, this consciousness is the aesthetic device that reflects the experience of the people involved, and is responsible to some degree for the value attached to that experience. But Henry James’s happily chosen term, ‘consciousness’, has been given such complicated treatment by scholars as would seem to be directed only to aesthetics or metaphysicians, whereas his novels actually adhere to Marianne Moore’s more accessible dictum: he created ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’. Hence, anyone who wishes to read him aright must know something about ‘toads’ as well as about aesthetics lest he take the reality of the life portrayed for artifice, or worse still, the ‘imaginary gardens’ for the ‘real toads’.

Observing the claims for poetry is a curious pastime. It’s like going to the zoo and seeing a preening cockatoo, a slumbering leopard, and a camouflaged toad in successive glimpses. No wonder Marianne Moore’s fastidiously poetic temperament was most keenly invested in a menagerie. For all its variety, a zoo remains a selection, an anthology of animal life. Anthologies fitfully persist in the poetry world, of course, but nearing the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century it seems unlikely that anything resembling the “anthology wars” of fifty years ago will erupt again. One reason is demographic. In 1960, when the two anthologies famously duked it out 1 —the American population was 178 million. With the figure now over 300 million, you would expect it would take at least four anthologies (with no overlap of contents) to begin to replicate that distant moment when the Beats and other outsiders clamored at the gates of official verse culture. But such a simple numerical calculation is misleading: one would also have to factor in the vast increase in the percentage of the collage educated population, and within that educated portion, one would have to take into account the graduates of creative writing programs (of which there are now over four hundred in the US, nearly all established in the past forty years). There are other reasons that make a return of the anthology wars unlikely. Demographic proliferation of poets has been accompanied by a corresponding proliferation of constituencies. The old paradigm of insiders and outsiders, establishment figures and renegades, makes little sense now. Finally, we should bear in mind the hugely transformative advent of the Internet. It may not yet be the first place we turn to find poetry, but the validity of this sentence has an expiration date looming up rapidly. Three recent publications help

In the pages of her editor's Comment in Dial for August 1927, Marianne Moore paused to ruminate about, of all things, snakes. The usefulness, companionableness, and gentleness of she began, sometimes alluded to in print by scientists and by amateurs. to dissent from the serpent deity; and enlightenment is preferable to superstition when plagues are to be combated - army-worms, locusts, a mouse army, tree vegetable blights, diseases of cattle, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, and floods. Destruction such was experienced by us in western states and in Florida the past winter, from tornadoes and from the Mississippi in the spring, could not have been more portentously afflicting more admonitory had believed ourselves to have been preyed upon by an aquatic serpent by a wind god. (Complete Prose 187) Moore's comments appear to bespeak an internal conflict. Initially, Moore approaches her subject from the pose of a rational skeptic. Needless to say, she insists, that we dissent from the serpent deity. Her emphatic phrase, Needless to say, places her firmly on the side of the enlightened scientists who prefer to rely on technology rather than superstitious ceremony to solve the pesky problems - locusts, mice, and vegetable blights - that nature doles out. No sooner has Moore uttered her preference for enlightenment, however, than she invokes images of the destructive powers of nature that extend well beyond the reach control of technological know-how: earthquakes, fires, floods, tornadoes. Such natural disasters, Moore states, are usefully admonitory. Even though rational science insists that nature is not a collection of powerful gods, floods and tornadoes warn us to check our arrogant assumption that nature, however void of vengeful spirits, is comfortably controllable. Qualifying her own scientific pose, Moore turns back to the serpent and professes her admiration for those less-skeptical cultures that once viewed nature with reverence, wonder, and a healthy dose of dread. A certain ritual of awe - animistic and animalistic - need not, however, be effaced from our literary consciousness. serpent a motive in art, an idea, beauty, is surely not beneath us, see it . . . in the turtle zoomorphs, feathered serpent columns, and coiled rattlesnakes of Yucatan; in the silver-white snakes, chameleon lizards, and stone dragons of Northern Siam. Guarding the temple of Cha-Heng in Nan, the hundred yard pair of blue-green-yellow painted monsters - with reared head and flowing, skin-like rise of body - are, one infers from Reginald le May's description and partial photograph, majestic worms. Nor does the mythologic war between serpent and elephant seem disproportionate when one examines a stone dragon which guards rice fields in Northern Siam from raiding herds of elephants. As Edward Topsell has said in his Historie of Serpents, Among all the kinds of serpents there is none comparable to the Dragon, and the fact of variants seemed to Aldrovanus, no detraction. Dragons there are in Ethiopia ten fathoms long and there are little ones. In an old letter to the public read: Thirty miles from London, this present month of August, 1614 - and the news is attested by men and by a Widow Woman dwelling near Faygate - there lives a serpent or dragon some call it, reputed to be nine feet, rather more, in length. It is likewise discovered to have large feet, but the eye may be there deceived and two great bunches as some think will in time grow to wings; but God, I hope, will defend the poor people in the neighborhood, that he shall be destroyed before he grow so fledged. Farewell. By A. R. He that would send better news, if he had it. (187-88) Engaging the mythology of the serpent, Moore's thoughts move from the companionable snake to the mysterious dragon, from a gentle creature to a fierce myth, from an image of nature's utility to an implication of nature's might, from the rational present to the imaginative past. …

This issue of Pedagogy opens with Gail Stygall’s examination of a specific instance—the struggle over the unionization of teaching assistants at the University of Washington — that crystallizes the ongoing question of the journal itself: What is the relationship between praxis and theory? That is (to paraphrase Marianne Moore on poetry), how do the “real toads” of our everyday professional lives thrive in the “imaginary gardens” that are our theories? As editors, we struggle with our own toads. In his series of columns as the new editor of PMLA, Carlos J. Alonso has identified many of them; in particular, we were struck by his discussion of the move in the profession away from refereed submissions and toward solicited ones. As Seth Lerer argues in his letter included in one column, “Now it is not acceptance but solicitation that marks achievement — you know you’ve made it when you’re asked for an article” (Alonso 2001: 10). Though Alonso points out some of the difficulties faced by PMLA that might account for the recent makeup of its issues, we find Lerer’s concerns compelling, because they highlight the tension between the culture of celebrity that permeates our field and the desire of editors (and, we believe, of the profession as a whole) to see quality scholarship reach its audience. This tension is not easily resolved when even editorial practices such

Why did quotation come into vogue among modernist American poets when, historically, allusion had been the preferred mode of intertextual reference? Elizabeth Gregory argues that quotation served as a site of these poets' struggle with questions of literary authority and, relatedly, of cultural and gender identity. While different poets quoted very different kinds of texts to very different effects, their shared reliance on quotation suggests their commonality of concerns - concerns that remain of interest in the postmodernist world, where quotation has become the prevalent artistic method. Gregory reads the efflorescence of poetic quotation as part of an attempt to redefine the sources of authority in the modernist world, in which traditional hierarchies of all kinds seemed to be disintegrating. For Americans and for women this breakdown offered an opportunity, since they had long occupied a secondary position in the reigning cultural and gender orders. But it was an opportunity with a cost, and not all poets welcomed it. Through close readings of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, William Carlos William's Paterson, and a selection of the poetry of Marianne Moore, the author explores the spectrum of modernist response to these issues and the ways in which each poet used quotation to establish a very different position of authority for him or herself. Eliot employs quotation to reassert old hierarchies and, by denying his Americanness, to claim a place of authority within them. Moore, oppositely, employs quotation as a means of questioning hierarchy and of laying claim to a kind of anti-authoritative authority for herself. Williams takes an insistently ambivalent position toward authority,represented most clearly in his schizophrenic attitudes toward gender.

On the Presuppositions of Literary Periods Ralph Cohen and John L. Rowlett (bio) The Problem of Periods As i consider the problem of literary periods, I am reminded of Marianne Moore's statement about poetry: "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."1 Periods are imaginary gardens, but the works that compose them are alive and actual. Literary periods are concepts of literary works that exist in time, and although time does not have a stop, literary periods do. They are concepts ordering literary works, and as critics frequently remark, there are more ways than one to order such works, more ways than one of conceiving of periods. As Francis E. Sparshott says, the vitality of literary historiography "shows itself in two things: that some try to fix periods, and others try to stop them."2 But whether critics try to fix or unfix periods, they rely for their concepts on the knowledge of their own time, and to this extent, periodization is a historical phenomenon. I wish to offer three examples of this taken from writers in three different centuries. Oliver Goldsmith in "An Account of the Augustan Age of England" (1759) took the concept of period to mean the years in which the high point of writing was reached. "Some have looked upon the writers in the times of Queen Elizabeth as the true standard for future imitation; others have descended to the reign of James I, and others still lower, to that of Charles II. Were I to be permitted to offer an opinion upon this subject, I should readily give my vote for the reign of Queen Anne, or some years before that period."3 Goldsmith's view of "period" was not chronologically firm, but the basis for comparing the period with Augustan Rome rested on the quality of writing and the support of patronage. In the nineteenth century, George F. Underhill wrote a book on Literary Epochs: Chapters on Noted Periods of Intellectual Activity (1887) and "laid down the dictum that the individual is the archetype of the nation and the period to which he belongs."4 His procedure was to define the period and then to discover its traits in the authors. It is unnecessary for me to point out that "period" is not an entity, and that writers contribute to the shaping [End Page 113] of periods. The most recent discussion of periods is in an essay by the Hungarian Marxist, István Sötér. He begins with a recognition of the role of the individual in the period. It is from the individual, what he calls "human nature" or "human essence," that a period takes its particular form because human beings are members of a class. From the conflicts, conditions, and relations of and within the class, a literary period takes its themes: "Single periods themselves are not delimited by changes in the literary or ideological currents, but the changes in the 'human essence' and 'human nature' are present in the emergence of literary or ideological currents."5 Sötér is aware of the problem of different themes and movements in a segment of time, but he wishes to preserve a period theory that depends on the acceptance of a class theory, and thus he posits a period as a change in human nature or class relations. But this critic seems unable to demonstrate a direct relation between literary style and class change. These three views seem naive, and my point is that concepts need to take account of a body of data in order to be considered as usable hypotheses. It is therefore necessary to suggest the data involved. I wish to confine myself to literature, and to the literature of England, using as an example of a period the time span 1660–1770. I know that the term period has been applied to the "Renaissance" and to "Romanticism" and that these cross national boundaries. I know, too, that the term has been applied to "Baroque" and "Rococo" entering the domains of art and music as well as literature. But a concept that has produced little usable scholarship had better be examined in its most elementary rather than...

The brief and remarkable introduction to this collection of essays, speaks eloquently for the publication as a whole. Its intention is to disabuse scholars of the notion that ecocriticism as a critical theory and methodology is limited because of its focus on what normatively is considered to exist outside of the realm of language or textuality, that dry and intolerable chitinous murmur of terrestrial allusions, as Jameson puts it; a focus which discredits the discipline as a proper participant within poststructuralist theory and its arenas of enfranchising social constructivism and linguistic determinism (10). The collection treats the figure of nature as at once phenomenon and aesthetically charged category (13), and ecocriticism, having caught up in the twenty-first century with the established theories of structuralism, new historicism, feminism, psychoanalytic criticism, and postcolonialism, as a methodology that re-examines the history of ideologically, aesthetically, and ethically motivated conceptualisations of nature, of the function of its constructions and metaphorisations in literary and other cultural practices, and of the potential effects these discursive, imaginative constructions have on our bodies as well as our natural and cultural environments (10). These remarks are welcome to scholars famished for writing within a field that contributor Louise Westling states, in the first essay in the collection, is still undertheorized (26). Herbert Zapf, another contributor to the collection, notes theory itself as this refers to the late hallmark of is partly to blame for the lacuna. Until recently, during the period when emerged as a dominant critical practice, writing that addressed the physical world as a figure equal to the human in either or both its material and non-material effects was considered politically questionable and epistemologically naive in the pansemiotic universe of poststructuralism (50). The collection contributes to dispelling this condescension. They are exemplary, respecting nature and language, not as disparate and antithetical figures but, analogous to Marianne Moore's real toads with imaginary gardens, as richly intertwined.