Cultural Poetics Research Articles

A Response to Suzanne Gearhart

A Response to Suzanne Gearhart Stephen Greenblatt (bio) Here is a very quick response, written at long-distance [Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin], to Suzanne Gearhart’s interesting paper. I think that Suzanne Gearhart is astute in detecting that I am deeply, temperamentally resistant to the celebration of sadomasochism as the source of either political progress or psychological liberation. It may be that crowds at executions felt a frisson of erotic pleasure at the hideous spectacle, but it is difficult for me to grasp, even theoretically, that this pleasure, insofar as it exists, is a plausible source of progressive politics or psychic health. There may well be spectacles of state violence that arouse mass protest or lead men and women to feel differently about their own inner lives. But I can find no evidence—and certainly Gearhart’s essay, which stays very far from lived experience, does not provide such evidence—that such transformation derives from sadomasochistic excitation. Sometimes intellectuals, in the grip of powerful visions such as those of Freud or Foucault, seem to me to drift toward ideas that bear little relation either to the historical traces one can study from the past or to the observations one can make in the present. Let me take a single example of the subversive potential of the early modern spectacle of punishment. When in 1618 King James, in order to appease the Spanish ambassador and rid himself of an annoyance, decided to execute Sir Walter Ralegh, guards had to be posted all along the route to keep the crowds from tearing Ralegh to pieces. Ralegh was hated for his arrogance and his lucrative monopolies during the preceding reign, and the mobs that gathered to watch him die must indeed have anticipated a bloody delight. As it happens, this particular festival of royal power decisively backfired: when Ralegh comported himself in the face of death with magnificent dignity and courage, pleasure turned to a revulsion and outrage whose echoes continued to be heard throughout the Civil War. All of the popular hatred of the arbitrariness, cruelty, and injustice of royal prerogative came to be focused symbolically on the execution of Ralegh. It would be possible, I suppose, to claim that this revulsion was merely [End Page 481] the surface manifestation of the deeper erotic excitement at the sight of the ax falling on the victim’s neck, that it was pleasure and not disgust and a demand for due process that motivated the anti-Stuart protests that were framed in Ralegh’s memory. But such an argument has to be made in the complete absence of all evidence—and it then becomes incumbent upon Gearhart or whoever wishes to make such an assertion to explain clearly why we should accept it merely as an act of faith. Why exactly should we believe that a crowd’s sexual pleasure in someone’s suffering is in fact a progressive act and not a nightmare? Stephen Greenblatt University of California, Berkeley Stephen Greenblatt Stephen Greenblatt is Class of 1932 Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991), editor of New World Encounters (1992) and general editor of “The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics” and The Norton Shakespeare. Copyright © 1997 New Literary History, The University of Virginia

Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics (review)

Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics (review)

Cultural Poetics - 1.C. Dougherty, L. Kurke (edd.): Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics. Pp. xvi + 266, 30 ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cased, £45. - 2.C. Dougherty: The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece. Pp. x + 209. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Cased, £32.50.

Cultural Poetics - 1.C. Dougherty, L. Kurke (edd.): Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics. Pp. xvi + 266, 30 ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cased, £45. - 2.C. Dougherty: The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece. Pp. x + 209. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Cased, £32.50. - Volume 47 Issue 1

Clio and Canons: in Search of a Cultural Poetics of the Hebrew Bible

AbstractThe enterprise of writing "histories" of "ancient Israel" in which biblical historiography is reproduced by old credulists or critiqued by new nihilists represents one of the leading edges of contemporary biblical studies in relation to the Hebrew Bible. This quest for a cultural poetics or cultural materialist accounts of the Bible is virtually equivalent to a New Historicism in the discipline. In this article analyses of three topics from current debates in biblical studies (historiography of "ancient Israel", the empty land topos, canons and context) are used to provide insights into how new historicist approaches to contextualizing literature may contribute to these current debates about the Bible.

RUMORS AND POLITICS IN HAITI

This article considers rumors backbone of what Michael Taussig calls the nervous system. For last three decades Haiti has been a thoroughly nervous, sometimes terrifying place, struggling in grip of violence, fear, and despotic repression. The grapevine in Haiti is a dangerous and highly charged place where stories of violence and magic can paralyze people with fear and confusion, but it is also place of a type of speaking that limits ability of any institution or government to define social knowledge totally. Authoritarian forces depend upon word of mouth to help spread terror and fear. To accomplish this they must drive speaking out of open public debate and into back alleys of rumors. But in passing rumors speakers create an alternative public sphere and maneuver to speak in oppositional voices. It is task of a critical anthropology to interrogate these forms and to work out methods of explanation that are appropriate to such practices. [rumor, Haiti, violence, oppositional, cultural poetics]

Negotiating Florio's A Worlde of Wordes

ARTICLES Negotiating Florio's A Worlde of Wordes David O. Frantz festes dies anniversarius quadrigentesimus Introduction With the exception of the work of Frances Yates in the 1930s, John Florio has received scant scholarly attention. The few studies that have been devoted to Florio have focused on highly specialized topics, whether on the art of Elizabethan translation, Renaissance dictionarymaking , or the relationship of England and Italy in the Renaissance. My own earlier work on Florio has been no exception to this rule. This continued neglect ofFlorio is all the more curious, given recent trends in Renaissance scholarship, particularly new historicism, with its emphasis on "cultural poetics," "social energy," and models "based on negotiation and exchange."1 My purpose here is not to provide a new his1 1 am thinking primarily of the work of scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions The Wonder of the New World 1991, Shakespearean Negotiations 1988, and Renaissance Self-FashioningFrom More to Shakespeare 1980; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgresnon 1986; Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ed., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism 1985; David Kastan, "Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule" 1986; Theodore Leinwand, "Negotiation and New Historicism " 1990; and Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England 1984. While the limitations of the new historicism seem to me at least as problematic as those of the old historicism, there can be little doubt that it has compelled us to ask new questions and examine many a time-honored assumption. See particularly Leinwand 479 and Greenblatt 1988, 5. It is also a fact that anyone who works with a figure like John Florio is always aware of how as researchers we depend on the painstaking work ofgenerations ofbiographers, and of course, lexicographers, whatever their theoretical biases. David O. Frantz toricist reading of Florio's life and work; rather, it is to acknowledge that such approaches with their emphases on "points of intersection" between the court and the people, for example, and "negotiation" among different worlds and value systems, suggest particular perspectives that sharpen a more traditional examination of Florio's work, especially his Italian-English dictionary of 1598, A Worlde ofWordes (WW). If ever there was a work based on true negotiation, a process perceived by its maker with a clarity that any new historicist might envy, it is Florio 's dictionary. By negotiation I mean primarily "coping with," "success in accomplishing" (to use contemporary dictionary meanings). In Florio's case I see negotiation as the process by which he "coped with" different social classes that were central to his success, which means as well the "business" or monetary conditions under which he produced his work. Negotiation also has the connotation of maneuvering, and I believe that such a connotation applies here, particularly in Florio's ability to define different cultures through a dual-language dictionary .2 A Worlde of Wordes brings into focus critical points of social, economic , cultural, and, specifically, linguistic intersection and exchange in a telling fashion. My aim in this paper is to illuminate Florio's clear sense of working in such a context. Indeed, if there is a quintessential figure of intersection and negotiation at the end of the 16th century, it isJohn Florio. The complexities and engagement with multiple worlds and identities are apparent on every page. Though Florio was born in England, he was a "foreigner" by name and association. Florio was employed by the French ambassador but probably served as an agent for Walsingham (and hence Burghley ) . He was a staunch Christian but became associated with the circle of Greville, Raleigh, and Bruno; and while he was a committed Protestant , he proved (in print at least) uncharacteristically tolerant of Roman Catholicism. Finally, he was a tutor to the aristocracy but was not of the aristocracy, and while he was a language instructor, he was not a traditional language schoolmaster. This last point requires amplification . Unlike some of the language teachers in Renaissance England, most notably Claude de Sainliens (Hollyband), Florio did not establish 2 Florio defines negotiare as "to exercise, to negotiate, to deale, to occupie, to emploie, to...

Performing a Visit: Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past

People visit places. Proposed here is an integration of approaches to place, one originating in performance, the other in archaeology. Archaeology is a major means of dealing with site histories and material traces, a key component of tourist heritages. Performance, and experimental site-specific theatre, is a powerful vehicle for integrating, into ‘deep maps’, informations generated by diverse practices, from archaeology to poetry through travelogue, genealogy, journalism and memoir. The focus here is upon experiences of place and the politics of landscape in contemporary Wales—forest plantations burying old landscapes, and valleys drowned by reservoirs serving English conurbations. The question is addressed—how may place be documented, how are sites to be worked with? The storyteller-guide is a performative figure who can enable the interconnectedness that is the experience of material place, incorporating informations, the factual and the fictive. Running through this nexus are the forms of archaeological time and ruin, memory, sensuous knowing and the creativity of a cultural poetics.

Chicana Strategies for Success and Survival: Cultural Poetics of Environmental Justice from the Mothers of East Los Angeles

L'A. examine une forme d'activisme de justice environnementale a travers la « poetique culturelle » des femmes de l'organisation « Meres de l'Est de Los Angeles ». Elle examine l'historique et le developpement de cette organisation ainsi que ses relations avec les autres mouvements. Elle presente son feminisme comme un defi aux versions dominantes blanches des pratiques feministes. Dans le meme temps, elle presente les strategies de cette organisation comme une facon de mettre en avant des questions environnementales ignorees par l'environnementalisme dominant

Patrolling the Border: Experiments in Poetics: The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding . Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.. ; Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas . Jose E. Limon.

The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding. Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas. José E. Limón. Madison

Dancing with the Devil

José Limón. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican‐American South Texas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. xii. 240 pp. (Honorable Mention, Victor Turner Competition for Ethnographic Writing, 1995.)

'Reading' Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period (review)

Reviewed by: ‘Reading’ Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period Joseph W. Day and Leslie Preston Day Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood. ‘Reading’ Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. xiv + 489 pp. 11 pls. Cloth, $79. This important book contributes much to the growing, though divided, scholarship on Greek mortuary practice as a system of behavior that reflected and constructed eschatological, religious, and socio-political attitudes and ideologies. Distancing herself strongly from I. Morris’ historical analysis of mortuary data (Burial in Ancient Society [1987]; Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity [1992]), with its rejection of what he sees as limiting text- and object-based approaches, S-I derives cultural attitudes from texts like Homer and artifacts like the archaic grave monument. Her approach to this conventional material is hardly conventional, however, nor are its results. Chapter 1, which most classicists could read with benefit, explains S-I’s reader-oriented method; but methodology is foregrounded throughout, especially the semiological principle that no element of a text or artifact, independent of its context, has a fixed meaning for readers. S-I recreates ancient readings of grave monuments, epitaphs, literary texts, and other artifacts accordingly, by reconstructing the cultural lenses through which contemporaries would have interpreted such an artifact (that is, their attitudes to death, expectations about relevant genres, and other aspects of their cultural repertoire). To alleviate the dangers of circularity inherent in such approaches, S-I constructs, and criticizes others for failing to construct, several independent arguments to support each point. Though “very idiosyncratic post-structuralist” (113), S-I’s method can be compared to recent semiological, cultural, and functional approaches to literary and artistic “texts” (e.g., C. Dougherty and L. Kurke, Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece [1993]) and inscriptions (e.g., D. T. Steiner, The Tyrant’s Writ [1994]). Chapter 2 deals with views of the afterlife in the Homeric poems and with beliefs about the dead from the Late Bronze Age to the seventh century. For S-I, Homer represents the culture of eighth-century Ionia, and she uses the poems to show later eighth-century attitudes toward death. This is too facile a solution to complex Homeric problems, and while her analysis of the beliefs reflected in the poems is excellent, she does not apply archaeological evidence to demonstrate that this analysis is relevant to eighth-century Greece. She sees two attitudes in the poems: the predominant belief that “everyone must die,” a simple statement of the inevitability of death without any idea of reward and punishment, and the nascent idea that a few individuals can achieve happiness and even immortality after death. She debunks the theory that this latter concept of Elysion comes from Minoan Crete. What she does not do is use archaeological evidence to support her hypotheses. As she rightly points out, reconstructing “belief systems on the basis of archaeological data is a complex and problematic enterprise” (90); [End Page 645] but given the hundreds of burials excavated all over the Greek world from this period, it seems amazing that she refers to them so little. S-I is not unfamiliar with archaeological evidence and uses it to good account in discussing Minoan and Mycenaean burial practices, and she makes excellent use of sculpture and vase painting in chapters 3 and 5; but she chooses not to use actual burial data for Homeric beliefs, perhaps partly in response to Morris. Chapter 2 supplies a useful background for the study of archaic grave markers, but the unwary classicist should know that a methodologically rigorous archaeologist, in particular, will have trouble with it, as with Morris, although for different reasons. Morris and his methodology come under heavy attack in the lengthy Appendix. While some find Morris’ model-building methodology problematic, it is widely accepted by anthropologists looking for an objective method akin to scientific hypothesis testing. S-I opposes this methodology because of its a priori assumptions, yet no methodology is free of cultural bias. We need a variety of approaches, and archaeology must be allowed to give its evidence without either being forced into Morris’ a priori models or S-I’s (and the traditional...

:The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England

In this richly textured multidisciplinary work, Steven examines the cultural situation of popular drama in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Relying upon a dynamic model of cultural production, defines an original and historically grounded perspective on the emergence of popular theater and illustrates the critical, revisionary role it played in the symbolic economy of Renaissance England. Combining literary, historical, and broadly conceived cultural analysis, he investigates, among other topics, the period's exhaustive rehearsal of other cultures and its discomfiting apprehensions of the self; the politics of vanished forums for ideological production such as the wonder-cabinet and the leprosarium; the cultural poetics of royal entries; and the incontinent, uncanny language of treason. As demonstrates, Shakespearean drama relied upon and embodied the marginal license of the popular stage and, as a result, provides us with powerful readings of the shifting bases of power, license, and theatricality in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. A major study, not merely of selected Shakespearean plays but of the very conditions of the possibility of Renaissance drama. --Louis Montrose, University of California, San Diego Mullaney's rich and engaged reading of the place of Shakespeare's stage represents the texture of early modern life and its cultural productions in the vivid tradition of annales history and brilliantly exemplifies his theoretical call for a poetics of culture. -- Shakespeare Quarterly Mullaney marshals an impressive range of cultural representations which, taken together, will undoubtedly force a reconsideration of the semiotics of the Elizabethan stage. --Times Higher Education Supplement . . something of a dramatic feat in cultural studies: literary critic calls in a cast ranging from Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu to Raymond Williams, Mary Douglas, and Michel Foucault. --Contemporary Sociology Steven is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan.

Joyce, Bakhtin, and the literary tradition: toward a comparative cultural poetics

Literary studies of James Joyce, perhaps more so than those of any other author, have been enriched by important developments in literary theory in the last twenty-five years. Noting a curious gap in this scholarship, M. Keith Booker brings the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, unquestionably one of the most important literary theorists of this century, to bear on Joyce's dialogues not only with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, his three most obvious predecessors, but with Rabelais, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, three literary figures important in Bakhtin's theoretical work. Together, the comparative readings in these six chapters suggest a Joyce whose texts are very much in touch with the everyday lives of ordinary people despite Joyce's extensive engagement with the literary tradition; a Joyce whose work differs radically from conventional notions of modernist literature as culturally elitist, historically detached, and more interested in individual psychology than in social reality.

The Political Wisdom of Cultural Poetics

Last week I went to the seventh-grade display titled Create a Country at my daughter's school. Each child had designed a countrydrawn topographical maps, written creation myths for it, worked out its religion, its costumes, its customs, its sources of income, its monetary scheme. Students had their graphs and pictures and artifacts on display. The plan for the evening was that parents would cruise from display to display, asking students questions about their countries. The atmosphere was excited and happy (especially in the corner of the room where one seventh-grader had constructed a lightning rod; I suppose his country's main source of income was the tourist industry). After looking over the different countries, I selected one particularly eager-looking student and let him play the ambassador for his Rock Island. Like John Pietro Pugliano in Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy, he waxed eloquent in the praise of his party. He said that in his country there was no pollution: it depended entirely on sun, water, and wind power. He said that in his country there was complete freedom of religion. He said that his country put primary emphasis on education and the training of leaders. Clearly Black Rock Island was a Utopia. When I remarked on his country's admirable attention to educating the young, the student was pleased. I then asked him, is political participation in your country really helped by religion? Do you think your citizens should be religious at all? He looked baffled. I tried a different tack: What if the most popular religion of your country turns out to be the one that requires each family to give its most capable child to the priesthood? Will not such a requirement cut down on the pool from which excellent leaders might be drawn? This seventh-grader was intelligent enough to perceive that the question presented difficulties. But he had his democratic line ready: Well, you just have to go with what you believe in.

Dancing with the devil: society and cultural poetics in Mexican-American south Texas

Combining shrewd applications of current cultural theory with compelling autobiography and elegant prose, Jose E. Limon works at the intersection of anthropology, folklore, popular culture, history, and literary criticism. A native of South Texas, he renders a historical and ethnographic account of its rich Mexican-American folk culture. This folk culture, he shows whether expressed through male joking rituals, ballroom polka dances, folk healing, or eating and drinking traditions metaphorically dances with the devil, both resisting and accommodating the dominant culture of Texas. Critiquing the work of his precursors John Gregory Bourke, J. Frank Dobie, Jovita Gonzalez, and Americo Paredes Limon deftly demonstrates that their accounts of Mexican-Americans in South Texas contain race, class, and gender contradictions, revealed most clearly in their accounts of the folkloric figure of the devil. Limon's own field-based ethnography follows, and again the devil appears as a recurrent motif, signaling the ideological contradictions of folk practices in a South Texas on the verge of postmodernity.

American Law, Hispanic Traces: Some Contemporary Entanglements of Community Property

T | SHE history of the American family conventionally starts with English families in the northeastern corner of the area of the North American continent that became the United States. Carole Shammas's article encompasses English families, but it also addresses Native American and Hispanic ones-all placed in a perspective that illuminates the distinctiveness of each. I will discuss the importance and some of the implications of this comparative approach. There are two central reasons to develop a multistranded narrative of American families that includes Hispanic traditions. The first reason is to understand how Hispanic traditions of family governance mediate family relationships in a culturally mixed way in United States Hispanic communities. The attendant negotiations and adjustments of family relationships incorporating elements of Anglo culture are examined in such works as Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation and Jose Limon's Dancing with the Devil. 1 The second reason is that Hispanic legal traditions concerning inheritance rules and ownership of marital property have powerfully shaped practices of governance among families of all ethnic and national origins in the southwestern part of the United States.2 This influence flowed from the region's historical ties to New Spain and Mexico; the legal systems of Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California were originally Spanish.3 Although nearly all these states disavowed most elements of Patricia Seed teaches in the history department at Rice University. She wishes to thank George E. Marcus for sharing notes from his fieldwork in Galveston, Migual Ramos for digging out newspaper articles, and Hans Baade and Joseph McKnight for advice on the intricacies of Texas law. 1 Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (New York, 1992), and Limon, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (Madison, Wis., I994). 2 Spanish and Portuguese inheritance systems were not modified by contact with indigenous peoples. The major legal code for Spanish America, the Recopilacidn de leyes de los rey nos de las

The Eating of the Soul

EVER SINCE ANTHROPOLOGISTS BEGAN to speak of the cultures they study as textual, and literary critics began to speak of the texts they study as cultural, one of the dreams of cultural poetics has been to link the text of anthropology and the text of literary criticism. Hence, to cite a single famous example, Clifford Geertz writes that if, to quote Northrop Frye . . . we go to see Macbeth to learn what a man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, Balinese go to cockfights to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of moral autocosm, feels like when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low.' Geertz is an intellectual equilibrist whom others, less endowed with an exquisite sense of balance, have tried unsuccessfully to follow. So it is probably worth acknowledging something right from the start: we will never find an adequate fit between the anthropologist's text and the literary critics', between a contemporary culture that has been the subject of anthropological study and a cultural artifact, let us say, from Renaissance England, or between a native practice and a play by Shakespeare. What do I mean by an adequate fit? I mean the full and resonant correspondence, the mutually constitutive and interanimating meanings, quietly conjured up by the structure of the sentence I have just quoted: If we go to Macbeth to learn X, Balinese go to cockfights to find out Y. Geertz is too thoughtful and canny a writer to insist dogmatically upon the correspondence, which hovers just beyond reach. He is not really claiming that we-whoever we are-are just like Balinese villagers, or that Macbeth has the place in our everyday life that cockfighting has in the lives of the Balinese, or that we even know why we go to Macbeth (it is, after all, Northrop Frye who claims to know that, and the claim is delicately recast in the conditional mode). Rather, Geertz's words have a well-crafted rhetorical effect: because of Shakespeare's exalted place in high culture and because of the centrality, complexity, and greatness of Macbeth within the Shakespearean canon (and, for that matter, because of the authority of Northrop Frye's literary criticism), the parallel implicitly confers a higher significance upon cockfights than they might otherwise appear to an outsider to possess. I have seen Balinese cockfights, and I can assure you that a resemblance to Shakespeare's work of art is not immediately apparent. No doubt the losing cock, bleeding in the dirt, feels the tragedy of the occasion-and we might remember that Macbeth likens himself to the animal in another blood sport, bear baiting-

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology. Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words.The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself book as a standard in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few.The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely new entries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry.Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry areincluded; bibliographies of secondary sources are ex-tended; cross- references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups.The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology. Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words.The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself book as a standard in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few.The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely newentries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry.Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry are included; bibliographies of secondary sources are ex-tended; cross- references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups.

Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge. Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600. (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, 19.) Berkeley, New York, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1992. 136 pls. + xi + 374 pp. $65.

Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge. Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600. (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, 19.) Berkeley, New York, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1992. 136 pls. + xi + 374 pp. $65. - Volume 47 Issue 4

WESTERN NARRATIVES OF EASTERN ADVENTURES: THE CULTURAL POETICS AND POLITICS OF CATALAN EXPANSION, 1300-1500

WESTERN NARRATIVES OF EASTERN ADVENTURES: THE CULTURAL POETICS AND POLITICS OF CATALAN EXPANSION, 1300-1500