Century Readers Research Articles

Gothic Experiences in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This paper thoroughly analyses the theme of the gothic imagination in the works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, specifically in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The novels portray romantic and sublime scenes with elements of terror, horror, and the uncanny, which contribute to the gothic feelings experienced by the characters. The study also explores women's suffering in the context of gothic thought. Various factors inherent to the gothic genre actually contribute to the 19th century readers’ fascination with the supernatural and thrilling emotions. This work explores gothic experiences depicted in novels using gothic tropes and critical approaches such as Marxism, feminism, or psychoanalysis. The use of the framing narrative technique remains a distinctive aspect of this study which worthily includes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book that many critics have wrongly overlooked when interpreting the Bronte sisters’ novels in the light of the gothic trend. The analysis considers the common gothic features that characterise the novels, rather than treating them separately. This reinforces and enhances the scope of the analysis of the Gothic vision of these Victorian novelists.

예이츠의 슬라이고와 엘리엇의 이스트 코우커

Starting with a general assumption that poets and regions are closely connected, this study discusses the significance of specific locales in the works of Yeats and Eliot, who are at the center of “international” modernism beyond regional boundaries. This paper focuses on Yeats’s Sligo and Eliot’s East Coker, the places that they chose as their burial grounds, with the locales’ close proximity to their origins in mind. While examining their biographical details and letters related to Sligo and East Coker, and exploring how these regions are reproduced in Yeats’s poems and Eliot’s “East Coker,” we will find interesting points of comparison between the two poets. Yeats’s experience in Sligo County provides explicit settings and materials such as Sligo place names and mythic figures, and in his poems about Sligo, the literal and the mythical are mingled. In “East Coker,” however, Eliot explores more symbolic and metaphysical meanings evoked by the small village of East Coker, even with its casual or distinct associations with him and his ancestors. In addition, this study concludes with how the present ambience of Sligo and East Coker may function for the 21st century readers of Yeats and Eliot.

Wishing the Juvenilia Away

Caroline Austen wrote in 1867 that her aunt Jane, at the end of her life, had discouraged her from writing until she was 16, and had said that she herself wished that she had waited until she was older. She advised Caroline to spend her teenage years reading, rather than writing (“My Aunt Jane Austen”, Memoir ed. Kathryn Sutherland, 174). It is likely that Volumes the First, the Second and the Third of her teenage writings date from between 1787 and 1793, the years when Austen was aged between eleven and fifteen (Teenage Writings, ed. Kathryn Sutherland).
 Caroline was twelve when Austen died in 1817. Austen did not destroy the volumes and they were inherited by Cassandra who bequeathed them in turn to various male relatives, including Caroline’s brother James Edward, who received Volume the Third. These works are now admired for their vivacious audacity, and the idea that Austen wished that she had not written these brilliant and outrageous fragments is unsettling to the twenty-first century reader. We value them for many reasons: for the evidence of Austen’s experiments with contemporary literary forms, for the insight they provide into the teenage Austen’s attitudes and tastes, and for their sheer hilarity. We can also see, in the juvenilia, the mature Austen learning her craft. However, it is possible that she might, in later life, have looked back on the flagrant amorality of stories like “Jack and Alice” and “The Beautifull Cassandra” with mixed feelings, particularly, perhaps, as she faced her imminent death.
 In this paper I will suggest some reasons for her advice to her niece, in the context of writing advice she gave to her other young relatives and various circumstances of her later life.

Thinking with the Nation: "National" Literatures at the Cusp

Thinking with the Nation"National" Literatures at the Cusp Sukanya Banerjee (bio) Critical discussions of the nineteenth-century nation tend to be anachronistic inasmuch as we retrofit contemporary notions of the nation into nineteenth-century politico-cultural formations. One can be forgiven for this anachronistic move because nineteenth-century literary and cultural history bears ample evidence of the singularity with which the spirit of nationalism imbued itself in and through aesthetic and cultural practices, be it in Romantic imaginings or the literary artifact of the Victorian novel. However, it is worth noting that the object of nationalism—the nation—remained considerably opaque throughout the century. Incidentally, while the French Revolution is widely understood to mark the point at which state power begins to affix itself to national sentiment, the sovereign nation-state was hardly a ubiquitous phenomenon until about the mid-twentieth century.1 But it is also the case that the nation itself was quite amorphous over the course of the nineteenth century. Even as Walter Bagehot authored a definitive treatise on what is a key instrument of nationhood, the constitution (in this case, the English constitution), he also mused: "But what are nations?"2 The opacity of the nation arose not so much from its mutability (changing borders) but from the uncertainty regarding its organizing logic. What was the coherent element around which a community imagined itself? Was it language? Was it race? How much could one put store in territoriality, which, after all, could shift? As twenty-first century readers and scholars, we are all too familiar with the artifice of the nation, the fact of its constructedness. But so were thinkers in the nineteenth [End Page 84] century. What does it mean, then, to read this contingency back into the nineteenth century, when nations were are at various stages of making, nonmaking, and unmaking? How does such a chronologically apposite view impinge upon our otherwise unitary understanding of "national literature" or "national tradition" that a post–Second World War critical and political legacy has bequeathed us? How might revisiting the nation in the late nineteenth century, at the cusp, in fact, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reorient our thinking about the nation and the critical frameworks that it might generate? In addressing these questions, I want to consider analytical frameworks that might be apropos to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given that this was a period that came in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento and German unification but also witnessed an upsurge in anticolonial agitation as well as colonial nationalisms that understood sovereignty and affiliation as nested, layered, and dispersed.3 The idea of the nation was very much in the air in Britain, too, where national sovereignty had been continually negotiated through franchise reform (the latest installment in 1882) and national identity found expression in patriotic jingoism attending the Boer wars. But the British nation was also inextricable from its empire, and if, as Hedinger and Hee point out, the tendency of "transnational history" is to "nationalize empires," such that "imperial history is read as the history of a nation-state beyond its borders,"4 then it is worth noting the inadequacy of the transnational as an analytical template in this context, not least because of the impossibility of reading the British nation as a discrete formation. In trying to read the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and the literatures and traditions that gathered under its rubric, it might be productive, instead, to consider theories of nation extant in the nineteenth century, which is to say, to read through the nineteenth century and with the Victorians—widely understood—rather than retrospectively superimpose our late twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical frameworks upon them. At one level, then, I am making a temporal argument about our reading of the nation, suggesting that while we tend to read back into the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and its literatures and cultures, we should focus instead on the nineteenth century and use that as a basis for reading [End Page 85] forward. Evidently, the famed temporal paradoxes of the nation inflect our reading habits, as well. But why focus on the...

Scott’s Reparative Land Ethic

A review essay discussing Susan Oliver's "important and convincing" book Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: Emergent Ecologies of a Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2021), noting Scott's land ethic and active role in managing his estate at Abbotsford and in afforestation, and suggesting that Oliver's book presents "a cumulative literary history of Scotland’s ecologies," so that Scott's poetry and novels "assume a new relevance for 21st century readers".

The Apostle of Failure: Queer Refusal, the Corinthian Letters, and Paul’s Unflattering Characterization in the Acts of Thecla

Abstract This article examines the Acts of Thecla’s unflattering presentation of the character Paul, as part of the reception of Paul’s Corinthian letters into the second century. Informed by feminist and queer biblical interpretations of the Corinthian exchange, it shows how the Acts of Thecla picks up on tensions over authority with Paul’s teachings on baptism, eschatology, and sexual renunciation in its portrait of Paul. Engaging Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, the article suggests that the Acts of Thecla reads Paul’s letters this way in service of the social critique and queer antagonism that it holds up for its second and third century readers. Where Halberstam claims “queer failure” as resistance to capitalist profit, reproductive futurity, and neoliberal notions of success today, here Thecla’s story is read as a narrative of refusal in its own time. Paul’s muddled encounters with Thecla, steeped in the Corinthian exchange, it concludes, are central to this ancient tale about being, and improbably surviving, outside and at the edges of imperial, civic, and familial frames.

Facing the Black Death: Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter in Times of Pandemics

At the end of Sigrid Undset’s medieval trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–1922), the heroine encounters the bubonic plague that so violently hit Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. The aim of this paper is to explore the connections between the 20th century novel and the European tradition of plague literature from the broader perspective of environmental history. Furthermore, it discusses the historical novel’s effect as a distant mirror for 20th and 21st century readers. An underlying argument is that the ethical imperative in Kristin Lavransdatter is affecting the way the protagonist encounters the plague, which may explain what distinguishes Undset from many of her contemporaries.

John Goldingay. Hosea-Micah. Baker Commentary on the Old Testament: Prophetic Books

John Goldingay. <i>Hosea-Micah. Baker Commentary on the Old Testament: Prophetic Books</i>

Sincerely Luther: Narrative Letters of the Great Reformer by Neal E. Snider

Reviewed by: Sincerely Luther: Narrative Letters of the Great Reformer by Neal E. Snider Mark D. Tranvik Sincerely Luther: Narrative Letters of the Great Reformer. By Neal E. Snider. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 2019. 304 pp. As readers of this journal know, Martin Luther is among the most written-about figures in human history. Novel approaches to his life [End Page 224] and thought are rare, but Neal Snider's book opens a fresh path. The author, tongue in cheek, has claimed to receive 110 "letters" from Luther from beyond the grave. By means of this correspondence, Snider, a retired Lutheran pastor who is extremely well read in the works of the reformer, provides his readers an overview of Luther's life and theology. The result is an imaginative blend of biography, theology, and history with a bit of whimsy mixed in. The first thing I checked in this book was the author's grasp of Luther's profound and tension-filled theology. I am happy to report that Snider has done a fine job of exploring some of Luther's most complicated topics. He handles the gradual "conversion" of the reformer with nuance and subtlety. His summary of the Heidelberg Disputation and the theology of the cross is illuminating. He also does nice work explaining Luther's sacramental theology and the changing contexts that led the reformer to accent the promise in his early career and then underline the value of the element in later life. In Letter 91 he tackles the famous 1525 debate on free will with the humanist Erasmus. I particularly enjoyed Snider's account of Luther's views on the bondage of the will: "Consider the implication of affirming free will in relation to God. If you have a free will, then God is in your hands; He awaits a decision from you. Don't you see the blasphemy? God is at your disposal; you can accept Him and His promises or reject the same. In either case, you are in control of God" (243). That is a fine summation of Luther's argument. Snider also does not duck the troubling writings in Luther's works. There are letters covering his responses to the Peasants' Rebellion as well as one that deals with his hate-filled remarks concerning the Jews. While the author clearly loves his subject, this is not hagiography. Moreover, Snider's eye is clearly on the world of the parish pastor. He devotes moving letters to the topics of marriage, suffering, the struggle of prayer, and the trials of preaching. Throughout the text the reader can detect the experiences of one who has struggled on Saturday nights with sermons, prayed next to many bedsides, and officiated at countless funerals. A few items are missing that might have made this book stronger. It could use an index and a chronology, since those unfamiliar with Luther's life and teaching need such aids to fully comprehend the [End Page 225] reformer. Also, the accent here is clearly on the early Luther. The later Luther is also a fascinating figure but the references to the 1530s and 1540s are brief. Finally, one could get the impression from Snider's book that Luther was a solitary figure leading the charge of reform. References to the wider "Wittenberg movement," as it is known today, would have shown the reformer's dependence on a remarkable community of scholars and preachers. None of these criticisms should obscure Snider's accomplishment. This is an imaginative book that sparkles with insight. It clearly comes from one who has been captivated by the life and theology of Martin Luther and who has sought to pass along his reforming spirit to twenty-first century readers. Mark D. Tranvik Luther Seminary St. Paul, Minnesota Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Consciousness and the nonhuman: the imaginary of the new brain sciences in Ian McEwan’s Nutshell and Machines Like Me

ABSTRACT The article sketches the philosophical theories of consciousness of the 2010s inspired by neuroscience and computer science, in order to relate them to Ian McEwan’s investigation of a protohuman and a posthuman mind, those of a foetus and a robot, in Nutshell and Machines Like Me respectively. McEwan engages inventively with the contemporary imaginary of the new brain sciences and tries to make sense of the increasingly blurred boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, by revisiting the theme of the emergence of consciousness found in Frankenstein. Human consciousness is shown as poised ontogenetically and phylogenetically between two nonhuman states: its origin in neurobiological substance and its possible final dissolution into digital matter. McEwan affirms the importance of human agency in the face of the determinisms of biology and algorithm, and asserts the idea that the mind is shaped by narrative, against the reductionisms of biogenetic and algorithmic materialisms. He also challenges transhumanist visions, by showing that the beauty of human imperfection lies in pleasure, playfulness, and the endless dilemmas of the soul. Finally, the article considers the way in which Nutshell and Machines Like Me engage with collective consciousness and discusses their ethical message for the twenty-first century reader.

Kinship ecology and the bildungsroman: the child–animal relationship in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House series

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the question of what it means to be human from a Native American (specifically, Ojibwe) perspective by interrogating the human-animal relationships in The Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich (1999–2016). The article begins by considering the human-nature ontology shared by Native American tribes, before developing the idea of a kinship ecology within an Ojibwe context. The novels’ designation as children’s literature adds further complexity to this study due to its tendency towards didacticism and the nature of the child ‘learning’ to be human and about their place in the world. Furthermore, within the novels there exists a counterpoint to the author’s portrayal of Ojibwe values through the impact of settler colonialism on the lives of the characters, and with it, the differing treatment of animals and the wider environment. I consider how the novels’ presentation of Ojibwe ‘human nature’ is at odds with settler colonialist beliefs about what it means to be human, both in the historical setting of the narrative and in the novels’ message for the twenty-first century reader.

"A Spirituall Song of Submission": The Eikon Basilike, Prayer and Poetry in a Seventeenth-Century Royalist Miscellany

"A Spirituall Song of Submission":The Eikon Basilike, Prayer and Poetry in a Seventeenth-Century Royalist Miscellany Francesca Cioni In its textual and material history the Eikon Basilike tells the story of the textual and material cultures of the loyal Royalists who composed, produced, read, and shared it. Despite official suppression by Parliament, the Eikon appeared in dozens of different imprints between Charles' death and the Restoration, in various forms and formats, for specific readerly uses: folios featuring the full text with lavish engravings; abridged duodecimos for pocket reference; versions digesting the Eikon into commonplaces, advice, or rhyming devotional verse.1 The variety of such printed forms bespeaks the broad and wide-ranging appeal and use of the Eikon by late-seventeenth century readers. The proliferation of scribal copies that circulated more easily without attracting notice of parliamentary censors offers an intimate glimpse into not only readers' use of and relationship to the text, but also the operation of the literary, political, religious, and social circles through which the Eikon circulated. MS Eng 625, a copy of Eikon Basilike held at the Houghton Library, is one of such text.2 A substantial portion of the Eikon is included, closely following the 1649 edition (a copy of which is held at the University of Illinois); the volume also includes several printed engraved portraits of Charles I, and a handwritten prayer of contrition. The composition of this manuscript Eikon represents an act of pious commemoration of the deposed monarch; tracing its compilation can tell us much about the reception of the Eikon in the late-seventeenth century, and its role in establishing Charles' reputation and the textual practices of Royalist loyalism. [End Page 3] But the volume tells another story. If we rotate the codex 180° and open it from the other end, we find a miscellany of original religious, commendatory, and philosophical verse, comprising an ambitious range of styles: acrostics and anagrams; hymns and songs; and long philosophical poems on human sins and divine mercy. Three prayers that begin the volume, collected under the heading "Orationes miscellane," suggest their writer's political and ecclesiastical loyalism (including the prayers "For ye king" and "For ye church"). These are followed by a collection of apparently autograph poems: "The Returne," a song; an occasional poem on the poet's recovery from smallpox; an anagram and an acrostic to the collection's apparent patron Mary Midmore; a "Spirituall Song of Submission" a version of George Herbert's "Submission"; and four long poems: "The Review," "The Grand Deceit, and the Great Evill under the Sun," "Divine Mercies Miracles," and "Gods method in curing Sinners." The variety of poetic forms gathered in the miscellany not only serve to demonstrate their author's literary skill of their author, but also perform, in their diverse ways, his religious and political loyalty to a monarchy and a church recently restored. From the relatively direct expression of royalist and Anglican beliefs in his prayers and longer theological verse, to the verbal and literary dissection of his patron and of Herbert's verse in the praise poems and "Song of Submission," Shirley's verse gives textual form to these loyalties. The volume's reproduction of the Eikon Basilike and assembly of images of Charles are acts of political loyalty; but it also materializes pious devotion in its reformulation of scripture, and social relationships in its praise poems to Mary Midmore. These social, textual, religious, and political acts are performed through diverse means of reformulation of particular texts and figures: its collator Drew Shirley and its apparent patron Mary Mid-more as well as George Herbert and Charles I, whose works, together with the Bible, form the volume's source material. Drew Shirley, whose name appears on the first leaf of the Eikon, and in whose hand the miscellany seems to be written, is not a prominent historical figure. He is not published in print, nor is he politically active, and he is only recorded in this manuscript and in records of his matriculation at Exeter College, Oxford in 1656, his will, and his burial.3 The latter both occur at Chiddingly, Sussex in 1707, in the same village where one...

The Remake of Judita

To mark the five hundredth anniversary of the first edition of Marko Marulić’s Judita in 2021 the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics issued a prose adaptation of this famous epic in modern Croatian. Drawing on straightforward examples, this paper aims to illustrate and describe the adaptation techniques that were essential to bring this early sixteenth century work closer to a wider readership and to prompt readers from different walks of life and educational background to read Marulić’s original. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first section outlines basic facts about Marulić’s life and work. The second section analyses the historical, linguistic and cultural background of Marulić’s Judita and considers its role in a contemporary society. The third section addresses specific aspects of its prose adaptation and the expected reception among twenty-first century readers, but also explores the concepts of intralingual translation and adaptation. The conclusion posits that this particular translation exemplifies that albeit intralingual translation is still an important theoretical construct, its practical purposefulness continues to be ambiguous.

The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist

The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist

Forever Young! Tintin’s Adventures as an Example of Physical Activity and Sport

Created by Hergé in 1929, Tintin is a truly successful publication, since these comic books have been translated into about a hundred languages and published throughout the world during the 20th century. Several studies have already been conducted on Tintin. However, the place and role of physical and sports activities practiced by this tireless journalist in the promotion of these highly sustainable activities have never been analyzed. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses (descriptions, counts, frequencies and percentages), this work studies all the panels of the 23 albums of Tintin’s adventures dealing with any form of physical exercise or sport. The results indicate that the representation of physical and sporting activity in Tintin’s adventures remains steady and consistent from the first (1931) to the last book (1976). Thus, Hergé had never ceased to believe in the beneficial, physiological, psychological, moral and social effects of physical activity on his young, tireless hero. To summarize, the eternally youthful and perfectly fit, Tintin leads both his core band and occasional characters and may serve as a role model influencing young 20th century readers toward the benefits of an active lifestyle.

Women Talking Business: Domestic Settings for Economic Discourses in The Squatter and the Don

Women Talking Business:Domestic Settings for Economic Discourses in The Squatter and the Don Mike Lemon (bio) María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885) has proven a polarizing text for twenty-first century readers. Ruiz de Burton calls attention to illegal land seizures, frustrated economic development, and the subsuming of Californio land and culture within an Anglo-American nationalist paradigm. However, she simultaneously condemns mid-nineteenth-century racial hierarchies and relies on those very structures to argue the Alamar family's position within white American society.1 Additionally, the author's use of multiple popular nineteenth-century genres may distance readers. Literary scholars have identified within The Squatter and the Don historical romance, sentimentalism and melodrama, and realism, among many others.2 The novel's multiple genres warrant a complex reading approach; overlapping generic frameworks also suggest Ruiz de Burton's sophisticated rhetorical strategies for presenting the novel's pressing political and economic questions. To this point, however, scholars have neglected how Ruiz de Burton constructs physical and social spaces to facilitate conversations regarding business. While Marissa K. Lopez has written an excellent analysis on railroads in the author's [End Page 359] work, the use of domestic spaces as transgressive sites also deserves sustained attention.3 In analyzing how The Squatter and the Don uses physically constructed space, we can see that where Ruiz de Burton locates economic discourse allows the author to highlight exclusionary tactics that remove women from conversations about American economic affairs. The novel contains two economic narratives that were contemporary concerns. Furthermore, Ruiz de Burton demonstrate the plotlines' interconnected nature by using romantic storylines to entangle her principal families—the Alamares, Darrells, and Mechlins. The first plot functions as a composite account of illegal settlements on Mexican American lands. It details how William Darrell and other Anglo-American squatters seize and despoil the Alamar rancho. As the courts settle the contested land-claims, squatters shoot the family's cattle, depriving them of capital. Ruiz de Burton attempts to resolve this narrative through the marriage of Mercedes Alamar and Clarence Darrell; moreover, Clarence purchases the rancho to provide the Alamares capital.4 The second narrative centers on the proposed Texas Pacific Railroad that would have connected San Diego to the Mexican Gulf. Because they want to deter competition, the Central Pacific Railroad's so-called Big Four—men who fundamentally shaped California's economic future—frustrate the Texas Pacific's completion.5 The railroad's collapse necessitates Clarence, Mercedes, and the extended Alamar family to relocate to San Francisco. Even though male characters largely preclude women from business discussions, I argue that Ruiz de Burton intentionally has the novel's two matriarchs—Mrs. Mary Darrell and Doña Josefa Alamar—use their homes to invite themselves or become invited into these economic narratives. After framing domestic space historically, I track the author's gendered emphasis through three locations: the Darrells' homes, the Alamar daughters' placement in elite Eastern [End Page 360] venues, and Doña Josefa's San Francisco home. Because the story opens with Mrs. Mary Darrell admonishing her husband while they sit in their shared sitting room, the author emphasizes female voices in domestic spaces. During this and other moments within the land-claim plot, Mrs. Darrell actively drives the narrative action, instructing her affluent son Clarence to buy the land rather than pre-empt—that is, to prematurely settle on disputed Mexican land claims.6 Her climatic entrance into the room that the family later calls the "colony"—a domestic space appropriated by her husband—signals her reinsertion within the land-ownership plotline. That her presence discomforts the male audience demonstrates the author's ironic stance on excluding women from business matters. In the middle of the novel, the author curiously emphasizes the need for the female voice through its absence. During the wedding party chapters, Ruiz de Burton relocates two Alamar daughters on an extended visit to the eastern American seaboard. Even though these chapters do not overtly involve either economic plotline, they signal how gardens and trains actively remove the younger women from talking business. Ruiz de Burton closes the main narrative by returning her...

Dickens After Dickens ed. by Emily Bell

Reviewed by: Dickens After Dickens ed. by Emily Bell Valerie Purton (bio) Emily Bell, editor. Dickens After Dickens. White Rose UP, 2020. Open access. doi.org/10.22599. ISBN 978-1-912482-22-1 (ebook). Dr. Emily Bell's collection of papers from her 2016 "After Dickens" conference at the University of York has become in book form "Dickens After Dickens" and the change encapsulates one of the paradoxes of the enterprise. The book's epigraph from G. K. Chesterton, "We have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant"(1), already suggests, as Bell points out, a two-way process: Dickens lies in our future as well as in our past. Bell seems to be intent on capturing a sense of the constant to-and-fro movement in Dickens studies between the Life and the After-Life. The contrast between "Dickens in our past" and "Dickens in our future" is therefore addressed in a variety of ways in this collection of eleven essays: the more historically-based chapters deal with Dickens's direct influence, in the traditional sense of exploring how he changed the world around him. A striking example is the excellent chapter by Joanna Hofer-Robinson which tracks the transformation of Jacob's Island in London as the result of Dickens's description in Oliver Twist. At the other extreme is the Neo-Victorian approach, in which rereading Victorian fiction results in contemporary rewriting, rewriting absorbed in its own time, in which "Dickens" is merely a cultural marker rather than a goal. Rob Jacklosky's chapter on Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch describes Tartt's appropriation of Dickens in this way. In Tartt's novel, being true to the original does not figure: getting back to what Dickens meant is not the aim. What matters are contemporary concerns. "Dickens" transmogrifies into whatever form is relevant to twenty-first century readers. Juliet John's Foreword astutely shows that this approach was adumbrated decades before it became widely recognized. In the 1990s, she points out, "[Robin] Gilmour and [John] Sutherland were the first to draw attention to what we now call neo-Victorianism" and to explore "the creative tension and mutuality between past and present "(x). The chapters in this volume unite in revealing the sheer omnipresence of both the biographical Dickens (the first approach) and "Dickens" (the second) [End Page 341] in our culture. The word "Dickens" never appears in scare quotes in this book, but simply in different typefaces and, on the cover, visually, in a witty move from a sepia photograph (the biographical Dickens) to a slash through with colored pixilations to suggest twenty-first century "Dickens"es. There is, sadly, no room for a direct discussion of the concept of "Global Dickens," although most of the chapters offer unwitting testimony to the strength of that idea which, as John says, is "perhaps the most dynamic area of Dickens studies in the twenty-first century" (viii). Of the chapters dealing with Dickens's direct influence, the Jacob's Island chapter and Michael Eaton's wonderfully rumbustious account of his own attempts to adapt Great Expectations stand out. The latter suggests, in a wistfully Chestertonian way, the pre-eminence of the Master: "The company who have become so close now disperse, perhaps never to meet again. Yet another piece of theatre has been written on water. Yet another version of Dickens's masterpiece has become a thing of memory, while the original continues to live forever"(193). A surprisingly similar conclusion is reached by Rob Jacklosky in his analysis of Tartt's Neo-Victorian novel. Though he enjoys and admires Tartt's work, he concludes: "What is lacking–the mixture of pathos and humour, the insistent charming narrator, the warmth, the texture, the 'crooked capricious' lived moments–is perhaps, after all, inimitable" (133). A surprising number of the chapters, in fact, do return in the end to Chesterton's original question of "what Dickens meant." Dickens After Dickens is, as Emily Bell explains in her Introduction, "a series of case studies" (5) and it is all the better for that, in that each chapter is grounded in close reading rather than theoretical...

Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980 by Elly McCausland

Reviewed by: Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980 by Elly McCausland Ashley Johnson (bio) Elly McCausland. Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980. D. S. Brewer, 2019. In her study, Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child 1862–1980, Elly McCausland tracks King Arthur’s location at what she deems “the crossing places” that inspire adaptations of Thomas Malory’s influential Morte Darthur. In doing so, she maps both Arthur’s and Malory’s places in the development of Arthuriana for children (189). As McCausland makes clear, she is not so much interested in the children who read Malory’s Morte and its adaptations as she is in the authors who invent the child-reader for those texts. Her work, which surveys an impressive number of narratives by multiple authors, fills a substantial gap by addressing the long overlooked relationship between Arthuriana and children’s literature. McCausland begins by outlining the significance of Malory’s Morte, arguing that as a case study it suggests that “shifting conceptions of the child—as bold and adventurous, socially fragile, magical and innocent—actually manifested themselves in texts that either attempted to engage with these children or were shaped by a profound authorial interest in the realm of childness. It reveals the complexities of interacting with the child as a writer, parent, teacher, or through memory of one’s own childhood” (6–7). McCausland then breaks her discussion into five chapters and a conclusion, each of which investigates either a specific selection of texts and their corresponding illustrations or an author who has either revised or reimagined Malory’s tale. Her first chapter focuses on abridgements of Malory’s narrative, and the subsequent chapters examine adaptations. Chapter 1 surveys the works of J. T. Knowles, Sidney Lanier, Charles Henry Hanson, and Margaret Vere Farrington. Here, McCausland highlights the ways that authors emphasized the enduring, moral themes of knighthood and adventure, and expanded Malory’s definition of chivalric masculinity to involve both the physical and the moral. Significant here is McCausland’s contention that these abridgements rely on Tennyson’s Idylls. Using Tennyson as a model, the authors hoped to craft a narrative appropriate for young readers by following Tennyson’s strategy of making the Morte ethically suitable for Victorian audiences. Thus, ultimately, these texts were created as attempts to popularize and moralize the Morte. Chapter 2 continues this discussion through an analysis of the works of American author Howard Pyle (1903–10) and British author Henry Gilbert (1911). Pyle and Gilbert reinterpret [End Page 124] Malory’s knightly adventures as “an example to children, specifically boys, by reformulating [Morte’s] martial adventures to emphasise a series of social and moral qualities linked to the development of idealised manhood” (57). These authors use their narratives to consider the value of adventurous manhood in early twentieth-century Britain and America by positioning the knights as youthful. Significant here is a discussion of the late Victorian and early twentieth-century trend to offer inspirational, didactic stories that would instill manly courage in the hearts of boys, suggesting that boys could be capable of heroic deeds. In line with this, McCausland juxtaposes the rise of the Boy Scout movement with the dissemination of these texts, arguing that these mechanisms worked together to offer boys a way to indulge in fantasies of risk-taking of knighthood while remaining socially responsible in their everyday lives. McCausland returns to a survey of multiple texts in chapter 4 with a review of five adaptations that demonstrate the versatility of the Arthurian narrative. These works by Phyllis Briggs, Roger Lancelyn Green, Alice Hadfield, Antonia Fraser, and Barbara Leonie Picard are obviously influenced by Malory’s Morte, but they alter his materials drastically by embellishing the narrative extensively, changing or deleting scenes, and making the narrative relatable to mid-twentieth century readers. Here, Mc-Causland assesses the strategies shaping these adaptations, from magic and mysticism, and from spirituality and psychological drama, to reveal “unstable constructions of childhood and the child reader” (117). In addition to an extensive survey of Malory-inspired texts, McCausland focuses on the lives and writings of T. H. White...

Black Lives Matter: A Spiritual Response

Black Lives Matter:A Spiritual Response Michael Battle (bio) A soul of a child that is born and is unchristianed, because of original sin has no likeness of God; he is nought but an image of the fiend and a brand of hell. But as soon as it is christened, it is reformed to the image of God, and through virtue of faith of Holy Kirk suddenly is turned from the likeness of the fiend and made like an angel of heaven. Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, II.6.1 The Black Lives Movement (BLM) paradoxically sheds "light" on negative racial construction in Christian spirituality. Blackness sheds light. This is indeed a paradox and yet throughout Christian spirituality even the benign element of the via negativa could not prevent the onslaught of racism that infected Western Christian spirituality. This onslaught is important to be conscious of since the association of light and whiteness came to be synonymous with white people. Even in my own Anglican tradition, this is so in both the confusion of evangelizing the British Isles (already containing Christian faith) in the 6th century and mistaking Angles for angels (Non Angli, sed Angeli), a play on words attributed to Pope Gregory I for his affinity for fair-haired Anglian, slave children being auctioned in the Roman marketplace. For Pope Gregory, those children may have been born "unchristian," but they seemed innately closer to the kingdom of heaven because they resembled angels in their whiteness. In case the reader may have missed an important fact in my paragraph above, I need to reiterate it here. Anglian children were being sold as slaves in the Roman marketplace. For the 21st century reader this may come as some surprise but in the 6th century world this was commonplace in Greco-Roman occupational rule. What is most surprising, however, is that there was no legal justification to enslave these children on the basis of physiognomical difference as became the case in subsequent centuries to justify the North Atlantic slave trade. It took the epiphany of a pope in power to recognize the contradiction in this phenomenon of an Anglian slave that looked like an angel. I dare say it took a much longer time in the North Atlantic slave trade for a pope to see the contradiction of an African slave. My intention here is not simply to blame [End Page 20] individuals of the past for being racists, but to explore the confusing world-view of Christians in power when it came to the blindness of recognizing the likeness of God in black bodies. In particular in this essay, I look at how the BLM sheds light on how Western Christian spirituality can learn from the particular focus of how indeed black lives matter to God's likeness. I do this by looking at two well-known saints in Christian spirituality, St. Antony of Egypt and Hildegard of Bingen. Both of these saints are instructive in how they point to complex themes of light and darkness in Christian spirituality without being seduced into the evil associations of black people somehow being the image of the fiend and the brand of hell. I write this not because this allusion back to Walter Hilton makes him somehow a racist but to expose the confusing worldview in much of Western Christian spirituality that the Holy Kirk (Church) has often lacked virtue in seeing the likeness of God in black people and have instead structured such likeness primarily for those of European descent. ST. ANTONY OF EGYPT (251–356) In the past I engaged such contradictions between God's likeness and black bodies through the paradox of St. Antony's contest against the devil in the guise of a black boy.2 In holy passion, Antony boldly rebukes the devil's form of a black boy. When hearing this rebuke, the devil immediately flees, cowering at the words of Antony. Thus, from the very beginning of this seminal piece of hagiographical literature, Athanasius depicts Antony with a character so powerful that even demons fear to confront him. It is anachronistic however, to conclude that Antony was a racist because as I...

Characterization in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar, one of Shakespeare finest tragedies, has baffled readers, critics and scholars alike for centuries. It still remains one of the most read plays written by William Shakespeare and it has been part of high school curriculum in many English speaking countries world-wide. One of the most important features of it is the ambiguous and ambivalent portrayal of its characters and this paper endeavors to elaborate on the kaleidoscopic characterization in Julius Caesar by exploring its main characters with a special focus on the two tragic heroes of this play: Caesar and Brutus. Also, the paper will deal with some other important aspects of the play such as its political implications, its characteristics as a problem play and a tragedy of moral choice by building upon a wide corpus of critical criticism on Julius Caesar, and finally it will attempt to work out the play’s relevance to the 21st century readers and audiences.