English Literary Culture Research Articles

The Early Novels of Ivy Low: Literature, Love, and Lust in 1910s London

ABSTRACT This article examines the early literary career of the writer Ivy Low. Low’s work and literary friendships of this period offer a rich source of insight into the contradictions and challenges of British literary culture in the early 1910s, especially for a young woman of Jewish descent eager to belong to a new generation of writers. The article examines Low’s two early novels Growing Pains (1913) and The Questing Beast (1914). The novels continue existing literary traditions of the Victorian and Edwardian era while at the same time being determinedly modern if not Modernist in outlook. Low’s psychologically honest explorations of women’s sexual feelings and descriptions of women in the workplace supplement the more conventional subjects of marriage, education, religion, and art, as well as a vivid portrait of the process of becoming a published author. Drawing on archival autobiographical writing, the article explores how Low’s initially promising career becomes increasingly problematic as she grows more aware of barriers of class and race which make her an outsider despite her close friendship with the writer Viola Meynell and D. H. Lawrence’s early interest in her.

The Discourse of Sighs in Medieval English Literature

ABSTRACT The very ubiquity of references to sighing in medieval English literary culture has meant that the significance of sighs has remained hidden in plain sight. Yet the introduction of sighs into medieval reimaginings of biblical and other sources underlines how much sighing is part of late medieval affect. A dual quality to sighs makes their interpretation depend on context: sighs may express negative or positive responses. As nonverbal vocalizations, sighs constitute a mode of communication, while in devotional tradition the penitent’s sighs may offer a means of bringing into being a desired spiritual state. Chaucer’s poems show him aligning sighs with significant speech, most intensively in Troilus, where Chaucer suggests sighs’ communicative role and their different kinds, while exploring their interconnections with breathing and emotion, and how sighs can powerfully transcend speech with what is left unsaid.

Writing, Authorship and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880–1920: Capturing the Image by Emily Ennis (review)

Writing, Authorship and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880–1920: Capturing the Image by Emily Ennis (review)

Jennie Batchelor. The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History

This book is the culmination of a series of projects designed to rectify the neglect of The Lady’s Magazine, a monthly periodical that survived for more than six decades following its launch in 1770 but was largely forgotten soon after its publication ceased. The magazine fell out of literary history, Jennie Batchelor maintains, as Romanticist ideas of authorship and genre came to hold sway over the histories of the period in which it flourished. As an inclusive, community-building publication that supported amateur authorship and popular literary forms, The Lady’s Magazine was systematically marginalized, Batchelor argues, by mainstream historiography, which, with masculine leanings, favoured literary exclusivity and more professional models of authorship. Like many periodical publications, it was also literally thrown away, resulting in a situation where, despite huge print runs, there are now few extant copies of individual issues and no full runs of the magazine in any public library. Batchelor’s earlier work with the digital publisher Adam Matthew has enabled readers (with a subscription) to access The Lady’s Magazine more readily than ever before, while her Leverhulme Trust project ‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’ has resulted in a freely available annotated index to the vast body of content that accrued over the long run of the periodical—more than 15,000 items. Following this access-focused work, Batchelor’s book now offers an insightful and detailed history of the magazine, of its impact in its time and of its subsequent sidelining. It is an outstanding work that makes a major contribution to periodical studies and persuasively uncovers, as Batchelor terms it, an ‘unRomantic’ strand of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literary culture.

John Donne and the Legacy of Early Modern Testamentary Verse

This article explores John Donne's contribution to the relatively overlooked genre of early modern testamentary verse. I use Donne's work to show that poetic wills and testaments do not simply constitute poems that are structured as lengthy inventories of complaints and bequests. My study instead demonstrates that the formal features of his testamentary poems relate to and deviate from the egocentrically commemorative impulses of elegiac, epitaphic, and lyric verse. I argue that testamentary poems provide a unique textual site for self-display and self-commemoration because they function to communicate and fulfill the will of the (soon-to-be) dead. In sum, this article aims to advance our knowledge of the wider role that the composition of poetic legacies played in early modern English literary culture.

The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons by Carolyn Lesjak

Reviewed by: The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons by Carolyn Lesjak Joseph Albernaz LESJAK, CAROLYN. The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 256 pp. $90.00 hardcover; $30.00 softcover. The significance of the enclosure of common lands for English literary culture of the long nineteenth century—indeed, for the literatures of the British Isles (not to mention the imperial periphery) as a whole since at least the sixteenth century—has been enormously underappreciated. Carolyn Lesjak’s refreshing and bold recent book The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons is a vital step forward, not only in affording this context its proper importance for studying Victorian fiction, but in providing conceptual and methodological tools that will be of interest to scholars working on other periods, genres, and problems. Lesjak turns to major works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy to reframe some of the basic contexts of the Victorian novel and the fundamental machinery of realism [End Page 452] with attention to the long, slow violence of enclosure, which, following Rob Nixon’s work, she calls an “attritional catastrophe.” Focusing on the traces of the lands once held, managed, and cultivated collectively (the commons), and the ordinary, low, vulgar, and everyday (the common), Lesjak’s readings uncover a “worldly ethics” and “radical politics” at the heart of a bevy of major Victorian novels which, however familiar they are, feel revitalized in Lesjak’s hands (4, 3). By the early Victorian period, the process of land enclosure in England was essentially complete (save for the occasional late privatization grab or breaking the will of a particularly stubborn village). But this fact is precisely why the nineteenth-century realist novel, Owl of Minerva-style, appears as such an intriguing and apposite form for taking stock of what has been lost (or rather, defeated), registering what might linger from the cultures of the commons, and imagining how these lingering communal textures might be re-energized in new contexts and configurations. In addition to Lesjak’s substantial (and for this reader, welcome) framing move of enjoining scholars to pay more attention to enclosure, the commons, and their “persistence” as essential to the formation of industrial capitalist modernity, the book makes three broad significant contributions, to my mind. First, it works to disentangle the realist novel and liberalism, putting convincing pressure on more received accounts of the cozy marriage between these two formations. Second, it deftly thinks through the problem of enclosure as a problem of “figurability,” looking to the novel for technologies of oblique representation that can encompass slow, indiscrete, temporally and spatially dispersed events like enclosure. And third, it presents an original intervention into how we might understand the working of characterization in the Victorian novel as flecked everywhere with the residue of the commons. Recasting Alex Woloch’s influential account of character in his book The One vs. the Many (2003), Lesjak finds “the relationship between individuals and their social world” to resemble a dialectical dance, “the one as the many” (5). Rather than focusing on individual novels for sustained readings, Lesjak treats each of her three main figures’ prolific work as a complex unity, cutting across a wide swath of their fiction, while leaving room for perfectly timed close readings of specific passages to illustrate her conceptual claims. This approach of seeing each writer’s work as an “ongoing thought experiment” rather than a series of individually enclosed narratives comports methodologically with her claims about the importance of the commons, and also keeps the book nicely paced (9). Each close reading—say, of one of Jo’s devastating speeches (“They dies more than they lives”) in the second chapter of Bleak House, for example—takes on a new significance when placed primarily in the context of an author’s entire oeuvre rather than in the novel in which the passage is housed. After an introduction and opening chapter construct the connections between realist fiction and the process of enclosure, the first chapter turns to Dickens, reading his novels’ famously exaggerated characters alongside popular contemporaneous character books (collections of “types”), arguing for the latter’s...

The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture by Alfred Thomas

Reviewed by: The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture by Alfred Thomas Elizabeth Allen alfred thomas, The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 225. isbn: 978-1-8438-4566-9. $105. Over more than two decades, Alfred Thomas has brought to light for an English readership the international court culture of medieval Bohemia and its influence in England. Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) took Anne's marriage to Richard II as the justification for a masterful survey of Czech literature with an eye to inviting comparisons with English literature. Thomas's subsequent work on Czech and English literature, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cornell University Press, 2007), cemented this essential scholarly project of making known in English a thoroughly cosmopolitan eastern European literary history; a deeper dive into the Bohemian connections to Chaucer's works came in Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). From Thomas' erudite and meticulous body of work, scholars of late-medieval English literature have gained crucial insight into the cultural relations between [End Page 158] England and Bohemia. Thomas' work is essential to an important twenty-first century scholarly undertaking—spearheaded by David Wallace (Europe: A Literary History) and taken further by scholars like Candace Barrington (Global Chaucers) and Marion Turner (Chaucer: A European Life)—to widen the context of English literary culture to include all of Europe and indeed, the rest of the globe. In his present monograph on the subject, Thomas details Bohemian art, literature, and statecraft in order to pursue readings of late fourteenth-century works by Chaucer, Gower, the writer of the Alliterative Morte Darthur, and the Pearl poet. The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture is a handsome volume: printed on clay-covered paper, it contains 40 high-resolution, full color in-line illustrations. These visual materials draw a particularly vivid picture of the ties between Bohemia and England: the shared materials, styles, and themes which, Thomas argues, emphasize not so much national identities as 'familial and dynastic affiliations that transcended the west-east European divide' (p. xvi). This book consists of four chapters and a conclusion. In Chapter One, Thomas establishes that Richard II's court found creative inspiration in the multilingualism of Anne's Bohemian relatives, especially her father, Emperor Charles VI, and her half brother, King Wenceslas IV. This political link creates occasions for reading the English poetry of the late fourteenth century in an international context. In Chapter Two, Thomas treats Anne as the real-life corollary to Venus in Gower's Confessio Amantis and to Alceste in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, where the 'collaboration' with the patron 'is clearly not working out' (p. 71). In a series of short sections, Thomas explores the literary culture of female patronage in other works by Chaucer and by other authors including Dante, Petrarch, and Machaut. Chapter Three turns to more sustained readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Darthur, arguing that both poems, far from provincial, register the international court culture he describes. In Gawain's seduction scenes, he finds a reflection of Robert de Vere's scandalous affair with Anne's lady in waiting, Agnes Lancecrona; in the Morte, he finds in King Arthur's grief a reflection of Richard II's grief for de Vere upon his death. In both poems Thomas finds an ambivalence about the moral and political values that international court culture seems to embrace. Chapter Four finds that Pearl's 'curious blend of consolatio and courtly love motifs' (p. 167) registers links to Bohemian architectural, visual, and poetic texts: Karlstein Castle outside Prague, and the Czech Legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria. Here and in the book's conclusion, Thomas describes Richard's political ambition and his investment in the ideology of sacral kingship as thoroughly embedded in an international court culture shared by England and Bohemia—an international culture that, after Richard's death, gave way to the comparative insularity of the Lancastrians. Thomas' work proceeds by testing associations (as opposed...

The Phoenix and the Interlingual Dimensions of Early English Literary Culture

The Phoenix and the Interlingual Dimensions of Early English Literary Culture

Shakespeare's Comedy of Judgment

Early modern English literary culture was thick with tales of divine judgment. Texts ranging from true-crime pamphlets to Thomas Beard's vast collection The Theatre of God's Judgements (1597) promised to disclose God's work in history, and they found signs of that work in stories of horrific come-uppance: usurers eaten by rats, adulterers mutilated, Sabbath-breakers struck dead. Because they were concerned with the consequences of human transgression, these tales drew heavily on the conventions of tragedy. And because they were concerned with vice and come-uppance, they also drew heavily on the conventions of comedy. They are therefore fraught with difficult questions. When is retribution hilarious, and when is it lamentable? On what imaginative and moral conditions do tragedy and comedy depend? These questions likewise haunted dramatists such as Shakespeare, who drew heavily on the literature of divine retribution for his own experiments in tragic and comic representation. His Othello, especially, is built from tales of vice and retribution, and in it Shakespeare tests the boundaries that separate justice from atrocity, comic satisfaction from tragic violence. By reading Othello alongside the literature of divine judgment, this essay makes several claims: that the hilarious come-uppances of comedy depend on certain cultural conditions; that those conditions have changed in the context of the Reformation, in ways that tales of retribution make graphically visible; and that Shakespeare responds to exactly these changes when, in his own comedy of judgment, he finds the mechanisms of comic justice collapsing.

Recent scholarship on classical literature and the eighteenth century

AbstractThis article provides a survey of the scholarship on classical literature and eighteenth‐century British literary culture that has appeared since 2010. Drawing on general overviews of the period, as well as more specific work on translation and classical reception, it focuses on the following five subject‐areas: non‐elite readers of classical literature; the status of Homeric epic; the relationship between classical literature, Celticism and the Gothic; Horatianism; georgic poetry. The article then addresses the classical authors, texts and genres from outside of these areas which have also recently received scholarly attention, and identifies further topics of enquiry which require examining to provide the fullest picture of the eighteenth century's engagement with the literature of antiquity.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller

Reviewed by: The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller Jaime Goodrich (bio) The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn Gary Waller Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 288 pp. €105, cloth. Over the past fifty years, scholarship on early modern women writers has grown exponentially as critics have discovered, edited, and analyzed a significant corpus of previously unknown works. Gary Waller was an early pioneer in this field, and he continues to break new ground with a new book that applies Julia Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque to key texts by early modern female authors. In the first two chapters, Waller lays the groundwork for the rest of his study by conceptualizing the Baroque. Admitting that it is difficult to define this term, Waller focuses on five key "Baroque tendencies" (20, his emphasis), as follows: 1.) "fictionalizing" (29), or narrative multiplicity; 2.) "le pli" (31), or acts of folding that move into infinity; 3.) paradoxical juxtapositions of hyperbole and melancholy; 4.) kitsch, with its emphasis on duplication; 5.) "plateauing" (31), or the indefinite postponement of climax. The second chapter then turns to Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque, itself based on Teresa of Avila, in order to redress the lack of scholarly attention to the role of gender in the Baroque. Surveying different early modern exemplars of femininity (the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, the Petrarchan mistress), Waller poses a key question: "Given the dominance of these largely oppressive models for women,…how were Baroque women writers and artists able to explore their own lived experiences as providing an 'owned' source of meaning" (66)? He finds an answer in Kristeva's theory of the semiotic mode, in which a feminine subconscious erupts through patriarchal language. The remainder of the monograph analyzes the ways that various Englishwomen rebelled against patriarchal domination through writings that display Baroque characteristics. Chapter three covers the Catholic female Baroque, by way of Gertrude More and Mary Ward. In the next chapter, [End Page 218] Waller turns to the Protestant Baroque with a discussion of Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, the women of Little Gidding, Anne Bradstreet, and Anne Hutchinson. Chapter five considers works by women associated with the court, with special attention to the role of masques and country house drama: Mary Wroth, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Hester Pulter. The next chapter is the strongest in the book, providing a compelling and fascinating analysis of labyrinths, narrative multiplicity, plateaus, and folds in Wroth's Urania. Finally, chapter seven considers how Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn moved beyond the Baroque toward the Enlightenment. The project of situating English literature—and especially works by women writers—in relation to the Baroque is an intriguing and timely one, particularly since scholars such as James E. Kelly have recently begun to consider the role of Englishwomen on the continent (English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Yet the very indeterminacy of the Baroque becomes problematic, as this key term is frequently paired with qualifiers that are never defined. Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalms are "emergent or incipient Baroque" (121), Anne Bradstreet's poetry is "'accidentally' Baroque" (150), Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's dramas are "at least 'pale' Baroque" (186), and Aphra Behn's Love Letters is "clearly if superficially Baroque" (268). As variants of the Baroque proliferate, the concept itself takes on a multiplicity that is aptly ironic and may leave readers wondering what, if anything, truly constitutes the Baroque. Furthermore, the inclusion of authors whose works are "accidentally," "pale," "incipient," or "superficially" Baroque serves as a distraction from the more successful analysis of writers such as Wroth and the women of Little Gidding. Indeed, what unites all of the writers covered in this book is not their connection to stylistic traits of the Baroque but rather to the Kristevan female Baroque described in chapter two. As Waller observes in the postscript, "in the Baroque…women were able, to greater or lesser extents, to give voice to counter-dominant surges and explorations of 'intimate revolt,' discovering many means by which paternal realms might...

Roman Greatness

In the 1776 preface to his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon set out his aim to recount the revolutions that ‘gradually undermined, and at length destroyed, the solid fabric of Roman greatness’.1 Brimming with erudition, Gibbon’s hefty tomes stood testament to the pervasive influence of Rome and its most famous dramatis personae on English literary culture. Gibbon was uneasy with the violence of empire in all its manifestations, judging it continually self-destructive. Nonetheless, the period of Roman history that he held most in awe, which gave rise to and sustained ‘the solid fabric of Roman greatness’, preceded the narrative of decline that Decline and Fall charts from the accession of Commodus in 180 ce. This earlier period of Roman history, populated by late republican writers such as Cicero and Sallust, famous generals such as Scipio Africanus, and writers of the...

A Marriage between Tricksters: Literary Heritage in Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth"

A Marriage between Tricksters:Literary Heritage in Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth" Yuki Miyazawa Charles W. Chesnutt expresses his outlook on creativity very clearly in the essay "Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the South" (1901). He notes that his knowledge of conjuration, a folk belief prevalent among African Americans in the southern US, provided "literary value" instead of a "sociological bearing" for his stories in The Conjure Woman (1899): Imagination . . . can only act upon data—one must have somewhere in his consciousness the ideas which he puts together to form a connected whole. Creative talent, of whatever grade, is, in the last analysis, only the power of rearrangement—there is nothing new under the sun. I was the more firmly impressed with this thought after I had interviewed half a dozen old women, and a genuine "conjure doctor;" for I discovered that the brilliant touches, due, I had thought, to my own imagination, were after all but dormant ideas, lodged in my childish mind by old Aunt This and old Uncle That, and awaiting only the spur of imagination to bring them again to the surface. (865) Here, "data" signifies the knowledge of African American folklore that Chesnutt acquired during his stay in North Carolina. In his short story collection, Chesnutt uses his knowledge of folklore to directly address the African American conjure tradition as noted by many scholars.1 He employs this mechanism in "Stories of the Color Line" and in the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Eric J. Sundquist argues in his extensive study of ethnicity in American literature that although Chesnutt mentions his "curt personal belief that conjure [is] 'superstition'" (295), [End Page 271] he simultaneously "circles back, by the path of personal and historical memory, to merge his narrative art with the stories of the black ancestors" (297). It seems that writing fiction functioned as a way for Chesnutt to preserve racial memory. Chesnutt writes about the African American culture of the South, using features such as dialect and a folklore-based plot. Yet, he writes in a form adopted from European culture, sometimes quoting English and American writers such as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Lincoln. Considering his statement that "one must have somewhere in his consciousness the ideas which he puts together to form a connected whole" (865), the European elements to which the characters sometimes refer, together with the African American elements, must be contemplated. An appropriate example of this notion can be found in "The Wife of His Youth" (1898), a well-known story that represents the African American and European sides of Chesnutt's own background. In this story, the protagonist Ryder is a mixed-race man who escapes from the South and becomes a member of a progressive society in the North by virtue of his pale skin and acquisition of knowledge about English literary culture. Later, he reunites with a black woman who used to be his wife back in the South. As Sundquist notes, English literary culture, which is evident from Ryder's direct quotations of Shakespeare and Tennyson, and, in a broader sense, his cultivated character, might be no more than something "laden with idealized notions borrowed from European culture" (301). The simultaneous use of the African American folklore of the southern US and European texts in "The Wife of His Youth" reflects Chesnutt's origins as a product of an environment filled with diverse cultures. Chesnutt's utilization of the two cultures as a cornerstone of his fiction evokes the concept of "double consciousness" proposed by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois, Chesnutt's colleague at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), states in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (first published in 1897 as "Strivings of the Negro People"), Chapter 1 of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), that an African American is born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, [End Page 272] this sense of always looking at one's...

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Gary Waller. Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 288 pp. €105.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Gary Waller. Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 288 pp. €105. - Volume 75 Issue 1

“Piers Plowman” and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages

“Piers Plowman” and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages

“Piers Plowman” and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages

“Piers Plowman” and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.

<i>Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500</i>. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller

Reviewed by: The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller Elaine Hobby THE FEMALE BAROQUE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERARY CULTURE: FROM MARY SIDNEY TO APHRA BEHN, by Gary Waller. Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 290 pp. $125.23 hardback; $125.32 ebook. There is much to celebrate in Gary Waller's new book The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, which I read with constant interest, even fascination. As its title indicates, the study refuses the common fragmentation of the early modern period into pre- and post-civil wars and ranges from the poetry, plays, and fiction of Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth to that of Margaret Cavendish (and her stepdaughters Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley) and Aphra Behn. Along the way—and clearly planned from the start as integral to the argument—are writings by figures less well-known in mainstream literary studies, including the English nuns, Gertrude More and Mary Ward. There is also briefer mention of several mid-seventeenth-century prophets—Anna Trapnel, Margaret Fell, Sarah Wight, Elinor Channel—and some discussion of two New World figures, Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson, as well as the extraordinary verse of Hester Pulter (unknown until its discovery in manuscript in the 1990s) and the "scissoring" activities of the women of Little Gidding as they produced their Bible concordances (pp. 138-47). Folded into the argument are discussions of the structures of Petrarchism and reference to Baroque artists including Artemisia Gentileschi. The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture is informed, then, by the wide-ranging activities of those engaged in the collective endeavor since the 1970s to recover past women's creativity. Waller repeatedly draws explicit attention to the importance of the "powerful community of scholars" who have, like him, taken part in the endeavor, and he firmly—and correctly, I hope—asserts that "their work has permanently altered how we picture the period" (p. 10). Given the rich findings of the recovery efforts, no single work of this length could take account of all its possible sources. Waller makes his selection through a theoretical model that he sets out in some detail in his first two chapters, approaching the period's writings through Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concepts of the "semiotic" erupting through the "symbolic." Throughout the book, it is Kristeva who is most often referred to as an authority (see, for example, pp. 9, 12-14, 30-31, 66-69, 80-81, 90-92, 221-22, 249-50, 278-80) [End Page 395] and whose writings are most numerous in his bibliographies. As Waller elaborates his theoretical framework, other perspectives are also merged with the Kristevan one—Raymond Williams's "structure of feeling" (pp. 20, 115, 152) and Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation" most importantly (pp. 24, 168)—as he seeks to "go beyond [the] autobiographical reductionism" that he thinks readings of Wroth, in particular, have been limited by (p. 221). For this reader, the endeavor to not be overly focused on biographical frameworks is only partially successful. As I read, despite the great attractions of the writings presented and the most welcome unfussy clarity of the book's style, I was repeatedly frustrated by Waller's drive to find in his writers the Baroque sub-categories that he defines (drawing on José Antonio Maravall) as "fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch, and plateauing" (pp. 10, 17). The first and last of these, especially, seem to prompt Waller to the biographical speculation that he warns against. The theoretical model also seems to have led Waller to select for analysis a disproportionate number of authors where control, editing, or direction from a man or men is at issue: Catholic authorities for Ward and More, Hutchinson's persecutors, the Little Gidding women, and the rather odd selection of civil war prophets, who include such manipulated figures as Channel and Wight without any mention of their dozens of sisters who did not encounter equivalent obstacles. It might be that—allowing for the liberal use of such variants as "pale Baroque," "emergent...

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary F. Waller

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary F. Waller