Conventions Of Romance Research Articles

The Alchemist and Medieval Faerie Romance

In The Alchemist, Doll's faerie queen is frequently interpreted by critics as representative of Jonson's scepticism toward folkloric belief and superstition. The supernatural-monarch-come-prostitute who appears before Dapper the clerk is thought to be drawn from contemporary accounts of cozeners who would claim to be in contact with the faerie realm in order to part gullible patrons from their money. Jonson's faerie queen thus fits into wider critical discussions on the nature of faeries in Early Modern drama, in which faeries are frequently defined as deriving from rural and domestic folkloric tradition. However, whilst there is certainly some truth to the significance of folklore in representations of faeries on the early modern stage (see Shakespeare's Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example), such arguments have a tendency to downplay the significance of romance in Early Modern society and the ongoing influence of medieval romance convention in the way that faeries are incorporated into Early Modern literature and drama. This essay focuses on The Alchemist as an example of the continued importance of romance in shaping the themes and motifs that are associated with Early Modern faeries. Doll's faerie queen appears as part of a con enacted by the three cozeners, but her role and appearance still draw on certain romance motifs that equate faeries with wealth, aristocracy, and the testing of human morality. Through recognising a connection to romance in Jonson's work, this essay questions how we might better appreciate the meaning of The Alchemist's faerie queen episodes. Jonson, without relinquishing his sceptical approach to the supernatural, uses these motifs as a way of exploring themes of greed, social mobility, and new wealth, themes that permeate throughout the play and throughout his work as a whole.

Zagubione w Austen: Duma i uprzedzenie w postmodernistycznej odsłonie – między parodią a nostalgią

The article analyses an ITV series Lost in Austen (2008), directed by Dan Zeff, as an example of postmodern play with Pride and Prejudice. Moving the contemporary heroine to the imaginary, textual sphere, the movie compares the reality of the 19th and the 21st century, emphasizing the visibly different positions of women. It not only “rewrites” the course of events, but also makes the tensions (which were previously silenced by the romance convention) more dynamic. Oscillating between the parody and nostalgia, Lost in Austen both continues and enriches Pride and Prejudice. Playful engagement with the original novel is the principal theme and motif of the series, but also the subject of its parodistic criticism. Lost in Austen engages both with the novel and with its 20th century reception. Moreover, by creative reinterpretation of the writer’s text, it shows the changing paradigms of the 20th century criticism and the cultural and literary theory. Highlighting the aspects of the novel important for the contemporary era, it initiates an interesting dialogue with the rich intertextual tapestry that contemporary popular culture weaved around Jane Austen.

Z dziejów tematyki górskiej w literaturze czeskiej. František Palacký i Milota Zdirad Polák

On the history of mountain-related topics in Czech literature: František Palacký and Milota Zdirad PolákThe literature of the Czech national revival produced a unique type of cestopis travel account, which, from a Polish point of view, could be regarded as an equivalent of accounts of Polish Romantic travels of fellow countrymen across their country. In the Czech literature we can distinguish a clear thematic group associated with the Karkonosze mountains. It includes M.S. Patrčky’s O Krkonošských horách 1823, Josef Myslimír Ludvík’s Myslimír, po horách krkonošských putující 1824, Karel Slavoj Amerling’s Cesta na Sněžku 1832, Karel Hynek Mácha’s Pouť Krkonošská 1833–34, František Tomsa Přátelské dopisy z cesty na Sněžku 1845, Josef Frič’s Cesta přes Friedland na Krkonoše 1846, and Karel Hanuš’s Cesta na Sněžku 1847. These works testify to an expansion of themes tackled by literature during the so-called national revival. Characteristic forms of the period conformed to the Classical, pre-Romantic and Romantic conventions. One of the most interesting themes tackled by literature in those days were the mountains. In line with the spirit of national revival, the Czech cult of the domestic was expressed in the linking of the homeland and its landscape with important aspects of Czech national identity. This convention of referring, as means of self-identification, to spatial symbolism and its vocabulary was visible in the Czech and Slovak culture in several aspects. The vocabulary of Czech national symbols now included the Karkonosze mountains, Šumava or the Bohemian Forest, the Tatras and the Blanik hill. František Palacký referred to landscape-linked symbolism in his ode Na horu Radhošť, added to his youthful work, written together with Pavel Josef Šafařík, Počátkové českého básnictví obzvláště prosodie 1818. The poem formally served as an example illustrating theoretical analyses of poetry included in the study in question. Using the fact that Radhošť was a mountain in Moravia, Palacký included the mountain as a motif in a rather unique founding myth associated with the local Moravian patriotism. Thus mountains became a representative motif of the literature of the Czech national revival. When it comes to Czech poetry, mountain motifs were introduced into it on a broader scale for the first time by Milota Zdirad Polák Matěj Polák, 1788–1856 in his descriptive poem Vznešenost přírody 1819. Polák’s novelty lay in his introduction into Czech literature of a new genre, descriptive poem, as well as linguistic experiments neologisms thanks to which he developed his own poetic language. Using the category of the sublime as a tool to interpret the natural phenomena he described, Polák sought to demonstrate the richness of the forms of the world, their complexity and diversity. That is why the catalogue of motifs he used is vast. It accorded an appropriate place to the mountains with a brave attempt to concretise their motif: fragments of the poem deal with the Alps, a description of the Karkonosze mountains is highlighted and there is also a motif of volcanic eruption. Undoubtedly the most interesting and artistically the most valuable is an extensive fragment of the poem devoted to the Karkonosze mountains. The fear of the horror of high mountains, the Alps, described in the poem, found its equivalent in the writings of Jan Kollár 1793–1852, who presented his emotions associated with his stay in the Alps in an account of an 1841 journey to Italy Cestopis obsahující cestu do Horní Italie a odtud přes Tyrolsko a Bavorsko, se zvláštním ohledem na slavjanské živly roku 1841 konanou, Budin 1843. Both writers, Polák and Kollár, were hugely impressed by the mountains, but this did not lead to any Romantic reflection on their part.

Stanisław Tarnowski jako badacz dziejów myśli politycznej

The author tries to describe in the article the research method of Stanisław Tarnowski presented in his fundamental dissertation: Studies to the History of Polish Literature. Political writers of the 16th century. The work was published in 1886 and it contained strong references to the current research methodologies. As it turns out, Tarnowski opposes contemporary „scientism” (or, after MacIntyre, „encyclopedism”). He emphasizes his emotional approach, pointing to a strongly utilitarian understanding of reading passion. The category of „who harmed and who did not harm” Poland is at the same time an absolutely individual research perspective, which should perhaps be included in the romantic convention of historical literary research. The author points out that although this research perspective is very anachronistic today, it brings unexpected and very interesting readings of political texts from the 16th century, thanks to which Tarnowski’s fundamental work still has great cognitive potential.

Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance; A Tribute to Helen Cooper ed. by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders

Reviewed by: Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance; A Tribute to Helen Cooper ed. by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders Ivana Djordjević Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders, eds. Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance; A Tribute to Helen Cooper. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018. Pp. xii, 295. $99.00. That Romance Rewritten is the second tribute to Helen Cooper in less than three years testifies both to the importance of Cooper's work and to her generous collegiality. The earlier book, Medieval into Renaissance (2015), celebrated her often pioneering work on bridging the supposed gap between two periods now seen as continuous; this one turns to the study of romance, another field on which Cooper has left her mark. Frequent references to her English Romance in Time show that the new volume's focus on the transformations of romance conventions and motifs is inspired by and indebted to the innovative recasting of romance motifs as memes in her influential study. There is some thematic overlap between the two collections, though only Megan Leitch appears in both, here as one of the editors and author of the lucid and informative introduction, informed throughout by Cooper's idea that romance memes are central to understanding a genre that is intertextual by default. Neil Cartlidge's characteristically witty opening chapter on romance "mischief" begins by reexamining long-established critical commonplaces about romances as "ideologically conservative, morally normative" providers of "wish-fulfillment fantasy" (27). While such views, most influentially formulated by Eric Auerbach and Northrop Frye, have long been silently ignored by romance specialists, they still color attitudes to the genre by scholars less familiar with it. More damagingly, they produce readings that disregard what texts say in order to make them fit preconceptions about what they should be saying. To such readings Cartlidge opposes his spirited analysis of "tonal dissonance, contrived incongruity or calculated provocation" (30) in romances, with special emphasis on the often deprecated Sir Tristrem. Marcel Elias looks to specific historical contexts to account for how central motifs (hostile challenger, noble Saracen, ambivalent hero) are reconfigured in fourteenth-century English Charlemagne romances, [End Page 325] compared to their French antecedents. Reacting against some excessively one-sided accounts of romance Saracens in recent criticism, he draws attention to pervasive "gestures towards parallelism" (53) in texts in which the virtuous Saracen, to take just one example, is often a foil for Christian shortcomings, a vehicle for self-criticism that at times questions the core elements of knightly morality. The first section, "Romance Disruptions," concludes with Christopher Cannon's incisive argument for the centrality of comedy to Malory's Morte Darthur. Cannon turns on its head a long tradition of reading humor in the Morte as intrusive, arguing instead that Malory's "dark" comedy is a shadow of his "most pessimistic understanding of chivalry" (70). Bringing in Buster Keaton's style of slapstick as a surprisingly apt parallel, he shows Malory's comedy to be a matter of perspective: what makes a situation humorous is the "clarity with which it glimpses the terrible outcome that has been narrowly avoided" (69). In this light, the inveterate joking of a Dinadan is more clearly seen as "a form of ethical judgment," even "a kind of goodness" (78). A point implicit in Cannon's analysis takes center stage in Jill Mann's illuminating rereading of Chaucer's Knight's Tale: narrative meaning greatly depends on how the action is cut up, when it ends, but also when and how it begins. Scholars have studied beginnings less often than endings, yet, as Mann notes, beginnings "implicitly suggest causes of which the stories are effects" (89), thereby directing how we read them. Like Cannon, Mann is interested in the way comedy and tragedy are determined by what follows an event but also by the perspective from which the event is described. Mann is excellent on the deliberate haphazardness of narrative links between events in Chaucer's tale, and the tale's general narrative "open-endedness" (89). She analyzes Arcite's death and its aftermath as a bravura display of shifts in style and...

The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692 by Ebenezer Wheelwright

Reviewed by: The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692 by Ebenezer Wheelwright Dawn Coleman ebenezer wheelwright. The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692. Ed. Richard Kopley. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pp. x + 210. America remembers 1692 as a grim year. The story is infamous: girls twitching, writhing, and shrieking, soon followed by trials at which they named witches and reported seeing their familiars and being tortured by them, soon followed by hangings. The hysteria crested in summer and early fall. Accusers pointed fingers at those they begrudged, judges solemnly heard testimonies that invoked spectral evidence, and ministers—most notably, Cotton Mather—urged on the collective effort to defeat Satan. Salemites with misgivings hesitated to speak out lest they, too, be accused of covenanting with the Prince of Darkness. Before Governor Williams Phips ended the admission of spectral evidence in late October, nineteen people were hanged, one was pressed to death, and five more had died in custody. These events form a misty backdrop to this 1842 novel. Originally published anonymously, it is now attributable, thanks to editor Richard Kopley's sleuthing, to Ebenezer Wheelwright, a Boston-based West Indies merchant who petitioned for bankruptcy to the tune of more than thirty-three thousand dollars the year he published The Salem Belle. In the foreground is Mary Graham, the eponymous belle, whom a rejected suitor outrageously accuses of witchcraft to avenge his wounded ego, an all-too-plausible motive that [End Page 116] points up the risk women have always run in saying "no." Mary's efforts to mitigate the sufferings of other accused citizens and her scorn for the charges against her only deepen public suspicion. She is sentenced to hang, but true to Romantic convention, the faultless heroine escapes her unjust sentence. The night before her scheduled execution, her fiancé Walter Strale rescues her from imprisonment by masquerading as Satan and frightening the superstitious watchmen—contempt for superstition is the book's hallmark—with a costume that involves hooved feet and glowing eyes in a jailbreak-through-disguise device that echoes James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827). Notwithstanding this salable melodramatic plot, Wheelwright seems to have turned to authorship for reasons beyond filling his empty coffers. He avows admiration for the Puritan forefathers—"a nobler race was never seen on the globe"—yet presents his story primarily as a warning: "Follies equally great with those of the witchcraft delusion may yet infest a land as enlightened and civilized as ours" (27). Much of the narration evinces fascination with the non-rational as a force in public life: the collective paranoia operates as "an unseen yet terrible influence, before whose mysteries Reason was overthrown, and Religion herself was staggered" (106). Such meditations, while speaking to any period baffled by open animosities and state-sanctioned untruths, echo other critiques of the Salem witch hunt from the 1830s and 1840s. In The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America, Gretchen Adams details how these decades appropriated the Salem witch hunts as a cautionary tale about fanaticism, and Kopley proposes Robert Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), which has a few pages on Salem, as a possible source for Wheelwright, especially in its fixation on "the power of the irrational" (198n2). As a representative of an important strand of antebellum American cultural memory, Wheelwright's engaging novel is well worth reading. Kopley's introduction frames The Salem Belle less as a work to be appreciated for its historical value than as a vital source for The Scarlet Letter (1850). His introduction convincingly highlights three scenes in Wheelwright's novel that seem to have shaped passages in Hawthorne's, an argument that revisits Chapter 3 of his book The Threads of the Scarlet Letter: A Study of Hawthorne's Transformative Art (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2003). In the first borrowing, Hawthorne modeled the final private meeting in the forest between Hester and Dimmesdale on a similarly melancholy moment in The Salem Belle when Mary and her brother James walk in the forest and James urges Mary to flee the colony. Secondly, Hawthorne...

Digging up the un/romantic past: Reworking Popular Romance Codes in Rose Tremain’s "The Colour" and Maxine Alterio’s "Ribbons of Grace"

This article offers a comparative reading of two neo-historical novels: Rose Tremain’s The Colour and Maxine Alterio’s Ribbons of Grace, both set in 19th century New Zealand and portraying interracial love stories between British and Chinese characters in the context of the gold rush. I read these neo-historical novels in relation to the romantic conventions they simultaneously employ and subvert. My contention is that their manipulation of certain romantic narrative and thematic conventions demonstrates the porosity between the literary and the popular ends of the historical spectrum. My analysis concentrates on how each author employs the romantic material to articulate their respective political agendas. Whereas Tremain’s novel prioritises a feminist perspective and emphasises the individual dimension of the love story, Alterio’s work is more concerned with the postcolonial revision of New Zealand’s past and highlights the social consequences of the interracial liaison.

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Feminist Cringe Comedy: Dear Dick, The Joke Is on You

AbstractFeminist cringe comedies eschew the conventions of romance and sentimentality in favor of comedy that discomforts. Cringe comedies are one example of what I call feminism's visual realisms, so named for doing feminist political work by evoking laughter and the cringe. The cringe pulls us inward in our posture, while laughter opens us to others. This bodily response to cringe comedies interrupts the fantasies of the male gaze and makes space for spectators to acknowledge the excessive, complicated, and seemingly shameful realities of female desire. My primary example is Jill Soloway's television adaptation of Chris Kraus's I Love Dick, a series that builds on the feminist legacy of avant-garde director Catherine Breillat. Departing from politically correct narratives and comforting or sentimental affect, I Love Dick achieves feminist community through the appeal, the cringe, and the irruption of laughter.

Social flux in the Knight’s Tale: Chaucer’s fourteenth-century reworking of a romance

While medieval romance tales often provide an uncomplicated endorsement of the nobility and of aristocratic values, this article analyses how the way in which the romance genre functions in the Knight’s Tale suggests an awareness of the threat posed to the chivalric worldview by socio-economic changes in Chaucer’s society. The article argues that Chaucer employs some significant deviations from traditional romance conventions, and makes key adaptations to his tale from its main source, Boccaccio’s Teseida, in order to engage with a tension between a traditional communal feudal ideology and a newer more individualist and commercial outlook present in Chaucer’s society.

How Eighteenth-Century Women Fended-Off Sexual Violence by Writing and Talking: A Study of Four British Novels by Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson by Jan M. Stahl

Reviewed by: How Eighteenth-Century Women Fended-Off Sexual Violence by Writing and Talking: A Study of Four British Novels by Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson by Jan M. Stahl Jennifer L. Airey Jan M. Stahl. How Eighteenth-Century Women Fended-Off Sexual Violence by Writing and Talking: A Study of Four British Novels by Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson. Lewiston: Edward Mellen, 2014. Pp. ii + 101. $99.95. Ms. Stahl surveys a broad range of crimes committed against women: "I use the terms aggression, violence, and abuse interchangeably to account for a wide range of behaviors that female characters experience and that are portrayed as victimizing, such as sexual coercion, physical assault, forcible confinement, and verbal attacks." By expanding her definition of sexual violence to include seduction, physical and verbal abuse, and female imprisonment, however, Ms. Stahl has diluted the focus of her short volume. While each of these topics is worthy, Ms. Stahl never fully acknowledges the many ways in which early modern understandings of rape differ in fundamental ways—legally, socially, culturally—from early modern understandings of domestic violence or emotional abuse. That Ms. Stahl relies frequently for support on studies of modern psychology—"My approach has been influenced by a body of work appearing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century"—also limits her study's effectiveness; too heavy a reliance on contemporary social science creates anachronism and elides recognition of the ways in which early modern psychology may be foreign to our own. Ms. Stahl's volume would be improved by deeper engagement with prior scholarly work on the eighteenth century. In her first chapter, Ms. Stahl contrasts the Charlot and Delia episodes of Manley's New Atalantis, both of which feature women preyed on by male guardians. While Charlot dies loving her rapist, "a testimony to the self-destructive nature of a woman's naı¨ve and passive devotion to the whims and caprices of an abusive, inconsiderate, and inconstant lover," Delia takes control of her destiny and becomes a writer who "survives and thrives." Comparative readings of the two characters are not especially new, and Ms. Stahl overlooks, for example, Ellen Pollak's work on familial incest. Additionally, Ms. Stahl does not adequately acknowledge the differences between the two situations. Delia is undeniably victimized by Don Marcos, but she is the victim of sexual deceit, not rape, and early modern cultural narratives surrounding rape differed from those surrounding seduction and bigamy. Attention should have been paid to the political nature of the text. In her second chapter, Ms. Stahl turns to Jane Barker's Exilius, calling Clarinthia remarkable for ignoring the patriarchal expectation that women be silent and for publicizing her father's incestuous assaults. Later, in forgiving her father, Ms. Stahl argues, Clarinthia plays out one of the "fantasies of forgiveness" common among [End Page 71] modern trauma survivors. To depoliticize the text in favor of modern psychological analysis, however, is to overlook much of Barker's intent, as rape imagery was very common in discussions of the Glorious Revolution's legitimacy. Additionally, while Clarinthia's speech is certainly disruptive of patriarchal norms, it is not unique in works of the period. Victims of rape and attempted rape in early modern literature are often given license to be voluble, less constrained by silence once chastity is gone. Similarly, Ms. Stahl suggests that Clarinthia may be seen as "unworthy of marriage to a great hero because of her status as an immoral man's daughter," but it was a truism in rape narratives that the truly virtuous woman would always escape sexual assault. Clarinthia's worth is confirmed by her rapist's failure. In chapter 3, Ms. Stahl treats Alovisa and Camilla in Haywood's Love in Excess as parallels of one another. Where Camilla is able to parlay "controlled and composed" letters into successful marriage with the man she loves, Alovisa's "uncontrolled verbal outbursts" cannot win her D'Elmont's love. Ms. Stahl's reading of Camilla, that she "recreates herself in accordance with acceptable romance conventions," is her most effective moment of analysis, but her argument about Alovisa...

“[A] glowing gold tinge on the waters of the Pantai”: Conrad’s challenge to the narrative of economic success in Almayer’s Folly

The exotic setting of Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly suggests the novel’s affinity to the adventure romance, a genre popular in the final decades of the nineteenth century. However, readers expecting a story of dangerous exploits in the remote lands (or seas) must be disappointed. As Andrea White showed in Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition, Conrad challenges the romance convention by contrasting a life full of adventures, which can only be glimpsed from afar, with the protagonist’s mundane existence. The aim of my paper is to take White’s argument further, and to present Conrad’s first novel not only as a challenge to the late-Victorian romance tradition but also to any narrative of (economic) success which accompanied colonial ventures. Conrad exposes both the myth of the adventurer, whose luck coupled with daring enables him to find a treasure, and the myth of a self-made man, whose perseverance and hard work in the colonies ensure his financial success.

Transcending ‘Cold Intimacies’ in Veiko Õunpuu’s Works

AbstractThis article examines five films by Veiko Õunpuu, Estonia’s most renowned contemporary director –Empty(Tühirand, Estonia, 2006),Autumn Ball(Sügisball, Estonia, 2007),Temptations of St Tony(Püha Tõnu kiusamine, Estonia/Finland/Sweden, 2009),Free Range: Ballad on Approving of the World(Free Range: ballaad maailma heakskiitmisest, Estonia, 2013) andRoukli(Estonia, 2015), focusing on his representations of neoliberalism and especially its effect on the emotional and intimate lives of the characters. We argue that the characters of his films typically reject the conventional romance promoted by neoliberal discourses, including Hollywood cinema, yet this does not make them happy, but disoriented and restless. The repudiation of ‘emotional capitalism’ also pertains to the way Õunpuu’s films are conceived and executed. Most importantly, he resists the conventions of Hollywood cinema, including a classical script and happy ending, and also sets and shoots his films in peripheral places. Our main theoretical framework is the concept of ‘emotional capitalism’ as elaborated by Eva Illouz.

Numb Networks

In this response to “Whitman’s Sympathies” by Jane Bennett, I show how Whitman broke with Romantic poetic convention by representing sympathy as an involuntary, embodied affect—as, in Bennett’s terms, “(onto)Sympathy.” However, as I argue, the ontology of Whitmanian sympathy undermines the notion of individual identity—of autonomy, singularity, and difference—upon which sympathy’s traditionally inclusive, pluralist politics depends. Instead of persons and interpersonal ethical relations, Whitmanian sympathy conjures a networked and processual ontology in which discrete entities cannot finally be distinguished. Thus, I argue that Bennett’s notion of “(onto)Sympathy” is incommensurable with the syntax of individual identity and (race, sex, gender, class, species) difference. But even if this makes it incompatible with a politics of recognition, I argue that this networked ontology may nevertheless be strategically better adapted to address the political challenges of ecological crisis.

The ‘living room war’ in the escalation period: Romance, irony, and the narrative ambivalence of tragedy in Vietnam War era photojournalism

A scholarly consensus suggests that the press largely followed public opinion in its coverage of the Vietnam War, only becoming critical after the US public turned against the conflict in Fall 1967. A similar consensus holds for photojournalists, whose work is found to be generally uncritical of the war. This scholarship offers little valuation, however, of the performance of photojournalists alongside the decline of public support for the war during its escalation from 1965 to 1967. In this article, the author reexamines this consensus through case study-based criticism of photoessays by Henri Huet, Catherine Leroy, and David Douglas Duncan, and suggests that changing conventions for the representation of US casualties could have contributed to the emergence of the climate of controversy surrounding the war. The author examines the visual narratives present in this photoessay as well as audience reactions, and argues that the ambivalent juxtaposition of romantic and ironic conventions for telling tragic stories allowed Vietnam era photojournalism to be used to support arguments on either side of the debate.

“You Sleep with None and You Wake with Ghosts”: Emmylou Harris as the Widow of Nashville

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Emmylou Harris's solo musical career began with a death. On September 19, 1973, her duet partner Gram Parsons collapsed from a drug overdose and died in his hotel room in Joshua Tree, California. Harris and Parsons had just completed a successful tour earlier that year, and the two singers were eagerly anticipating a long-term musical partnership. At the time, Parsons was relatively obscure, best known for his brief tenure with the Byrds and for his countercultural country-rock group the Flying Burrito Brothers. Like many artists who meet an untimely end, Parsons's stature increased dramatically in the years following his fatal heroin binge. Flis unexpected death and its bizarre, body snatching aftermath--his road manager stole his corpse from the Los Angeles airport and burned it in the desert--sparked wider interest in Parsons as both a musician and an icon of the 1970s country-rock movement. (1) Emmylou Harris had been singing professionally since 1969, first as a folksinger and then on Parsons's albums GP (1973) and Grievous Angel (1974)- While Parsons was the dissolute scion of a wealthy Florida citrus family, Harris's background was decidedly less gothic: her father was a career military officer who spent much of his career in and around Washington, D.C. Although she admired folksingers like Joan Baez, Harris often found herself torn between the left-leaning pacifism of the 1960s folk scene and venerating her father's achievements. (2) Harris often credited Parsons with introducing her to the artistic possibilities of country music, and her work with him constituted her first national exposure as a musician. Duets composed much of that work, performed with enough sexual tension to fuel speculation about their offstage relationship. (3) Given this close personal and professional association, it is hardly surprising that much of Harris's later work would be viewed through the lens of Parsons's Joshua Tree overdose. By the 1980s, Harris had become a star in her own right, achieving the mainstream acceptance that Parsons had sought but never attained. Her singles came from diverse sources--the Chordettes' Mister Sandman, the folk hymn Wayfaring Stranger, and English singer-songwriter Paul Kennerley's Born to Run all made it into the Top Ten on the Billboard Hot Country charts when she sang them--and she became known for collaborating with artists from across the spectrum of country, folk, rock, and pop music. This ability to work with musically and politically diverse artists made Harris into something of a bridge between two increasingly distant poles: scholarly, urban folk-music audiences and rural, working-class country listeners. Harris's crossover image was rooted in loss: the particular loss of Gram Parsons, but also the idea of loss more globally. Placed in the difficult position of being forced to react to Parsons's death in public and on stage, Harris used the concepts of mourning and widowhood as foundations for her burgeoning career. While much of the melancholy in her public persona has its roots in the Gram Parsons story, Harris has transformed this sadness into an independent aesthetic stance. This article explores what it means for Harris to build her persona on loss that is simultaneously literal (Gram Parsons's death) and conceptual (grief more generally). It will begin with a brief discussion of the ways that bereavement resonates in the country-music culture that Harris draws upon as a performer. It will continue with an overview of the Harris/Parsons duets and their place in the context of country romantic duet singing. From there, the article will explore the ways that Harris shaped her early career in the shadow of Parsons's death, especially on the album Pieces of the Sky (1975). It concludes with some of Harris's post-Parsons duet work, illustrating her negotiation of this genre full of romantic conventions as a woman forever without her true singing partner. …

Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Great New Adventure Story”: Journalism in The Lost World

This essay discusses the critical engagements of Arthur Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) with the rise of journalistic professionalism at the turn of the century. With a focus on features from the novel’s serial publication in George Newnes’s illustrated periodical, the Strand Magazine , this essay argues that this popular work of fiction self-consciously positions itself against what had become a fairly mainstream ideological and generic split between literature and journalism. Through its masquerade as a first-person account mediated by a professional network of journalists and editors, The Lost World integrates conventions of literary romance and objective journalism to combat perspectives on the incompatibility of romance and modern reality.

Tempering Romance

Tempering Romance Katherine R. Larson (bio) The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation by Tiffany Jo Werth. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. 248, 8 illustrations. $65.00 cloth. When John Milton sets out in Areopagitica (1644) to defend the freedom of the press against Parliament’s 1643 Press Ordinance, he advocates confrontations with seemingly seductive texts as vital opportunities for moral reform: ’Tis next alleg’d we must not expose our selves to temptations without necessity, and next to that, not imploy our time in vain things. To both these objections one answer will serve . . . that to all men such books are not temptations, nor vanities; but usefull drugs and materialls wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong med’cins, which mans life cannot want.1 Reading widely, he argues, fosters the interpretive acuity required to inculcate virtue. Romance is not an explicit focus of his argument here, but clearly Milton sees the genre, conventionally associated with vanity and temptation, as an obvious target for licensers. Warning of the difficulty of silencing musical instruments across England, for instance, he imagines the acoustic “lectures” produced by village fiddles and bagpipes as rural alternatives to romance reading: “[T]hese are the Countrymans Arcadia’s and his Monte Mayors.”2 Romances like Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590, 1593) and [End Page 137] Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1559) may have constituted “recreations and pastimes”3 that were inherently suspect, but they were also integral to the didactic tempering that Milton associates with reading “promiscuously”4 and well. Elsewhere in Areopagitica, he lauds Edmund Spenser’s Sir Guyon for modeling discernment and moderation, and he concludes that readers should grapple vicariously with Mammon and the Bower of Bliss so that they too might “see and know, and yet abstain.”5 In his capacity as a writer of romance, Spenser constitutes for Milton an exemplary “teacher”6 of active readers who are challenged to demonstrate their virtue and to discern truth as they are drawn into Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and navigate its tempting landscapes alongside Guyon. In The Fabulous Dark Cloister, Tiffany Jo Werth probes the Janus-faced attributes of romance reading that inform Milton’s argument in Areopagitica. The romance was demonized in the aftermath of the Reformation as an inherently Catholic and effeminizing genre that led readers astray. Yet Werth demonstrates that Protestant writers sought to harness its affective power for edifying purposes. As such, the romance emerges in Werth’s compelling analysis as a distinctly “hybrid” (2) genre that registers the transitional nature of the post-Reformation period through its ability both to tempt and to temper readers. Bridging Catholic and Protestant practices, the four romances featured in this rich study—Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Pericles (ca. 1607), and Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621)—contributed to the ongoing religious and cultural reform of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries even as they reveal considerable ambivalence about those changes. Given the “self-reflexivity advocated in Protestant modes of reading” (101) and the related tenet of sola scriptura (by Scripture alone), it is not surprising that seemingly secular texts and the interpretive practices of their readers likewise became “fraught catalysts for—or against—faith” (5) in the post-Reformation period. Werth innovatively structures her book so as to foreground this dynamic and implicitly transformative relationship between text and reader. In part 1, “Fabulous Texts,” she examines the vilification of the romance genre in the light of the slippage between the moralizing miracles extolled in biblical parables and the potentially damning supernatural feats of secular romance. If both narrative models were widely recognized as holding the power to move readers and auditors, how might romance writers [End Page 138] deploy these affective tools to help mold pious readers? Werth begins to probe this question in chapters 1 and 2 as she considers how Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare rework romance’s familiar wonders for instructive and virtuous ends. All three of these writers rely on their readers’ memory of romance conventions and recognize the appeal of wondrous...

Reading Nostalgia

Reading Nostalgia

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing by Julie A. Eckerle (review)

Reviewed by: Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing by Julie A. Eckerle Jessica C. Murphy (bio) Julie A. Eckerle. Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing. Farnham, England/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. 309 pp. ISBN 978-1409443780, $104.95. According to Richard Hyrde’s 1529 translation of Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman, reading romances is very unhealthy for young women. This “poyson” leads women to think about things that take them away from the virtuous path and thus their potential virtuous selves (E4r). While many critics discuss conduct authors’ edicts against reading fiction as an example of early modern behavioral expectations, most do not consider the possibilities that fiction offers early modern women writers. Julie A. Eckerle’s excellent study of early modern Englishwomen’s life writing argues that romance offers women writers a narrative model for autobiographical and biographical writing. But romance is not merely a model, it is also a genre that the women life writers Eckerle examines use to create a new way of expressing a self. Romancing the Self challenges assumptions about women life writers in early modern England, and at the same time asks us to reconsider the position of romance in literary history. Eckerle opens with what we know about early modern women’s experiences of reading romance in order to establish the pattern that her study uncovers. Reading romance, according to Eckerle, was a lot like women’s other devotional practices. While women definitely reported pleasure from their reading, they also discussed learning lessons from what they read. The evidence for these reading practices is not always the easiest to locate, and Eckerle argues that we can then turn to women’s life writing itself to see the effects of reading romance. The book’s first chapter offers ample evidence that women readers engaged with the romances they read in the form of marginalia and letters. Contrary to the long-held belief that early modern women could never really write autobiography, Eckerle claims that the woman’s autobiographical voice present within the romance genre itself in the form of embedded narratives offered women the possibility of the necessary subject position. Eckerle shows, through careful textual analysis, that the embedded narratives used a woman’s voice to speak in a language that early modern women could understand. Expressed in these stories were women’s anxieties about domestic [End Page 1161] violence or abandonment and perhaps also their wishes for the future. The idea that romance might, as Eckerle suggests, offer women models for their wishes and fears will be very familiar to scholars of modern romance. Although only a single chapter in Eckerle’s book, the question of the effect of embedded narratives is one with which scholars of early modern women still grapple. In her third chapter, “Becoming the Heroine,” Eckerle turns to the evidence that early modern Englishwomen life writers did engage with the conventions of romance in their life writing. Eckerle recognizes a specific voice in what she calls “heroine-making” texts, and this voice comes from the influence of romance. There are a few specific purposes to which early modern Englishwomen life writers tend to put this voice, according to Eckerle: self-justification, presenting a particular image of one’s self to the world, improving or changing the way we perceive history, and providing an “alternate reality.” Throughout the chapter, Eckerle provides examples of texts that use the conventions of romance for these purposes. Early modern Englishwomen writers could use romance with intention; that is, they could take the tools that the romance genre offered and write their own stories. But, as Eckerle shows, even the writers who specifically reject the genre still must engage with the “specter of romance.” Margaret Cavendish, for example, was very frustrated by the lack of realism in romance narratives. In particular, Eckerle examines the presence of romance conventions in the “occasional meditation” writings of Elizabeth Livingston Delaval and Mary Boyle Rich, Countess of Warwick. Both of these writers were avid romance readers in their youth who fully rejected the genre in adulthood. In their many devotional writings, however, Eckerle detects the presence of...