Early Modern Poets Research Articles

Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England by Jeffrey S. Shoulson (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England by Jeffrey S. Shoulson Esther Liberman Cuenca Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2013) 263 pp. The sixteenth century witnessed a tempest of religious change for English people across all social and political divides. The country had undergone three dramatic “conversions:” the deepening of confessional divides between the Church in England and Rome during the reign of Henry VIII, the subsequent fissures between Protestants and Catholics under Mary I, and eventually the growing sectarian differences among Protestants themselves during the Elizabethan era. The great literary works of the early modern period, from Shakespeare [End Page 329] to Milton, reflected these social and cultural tensions, oftentimes in the figure of the Jew. Expelled from English society since 1290, the Jew cast a long shadow over early modern poetics and the rich tradition of biblical exegesis in this period. Jeffrey Shoulson argues that representations of Jews in literature and exegetical commentaries did not derive their symbolic power from realistic or complex depictions of the Jewish people or their religion; rather, archetypal tropes of the Jew stood in for the religious anxieties of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were deployed in a variety of “fictions” of conversion as commentary on broader political and religious changes during these tumultuous centuries. A lesser book might have focused solely on Jewish figures in the great works of early modern literature (Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta immediately comes to mind), but Shoulson’s ambitious meditation also examines two other types of conversion, the translation of classical texts and the science of alchemy, as a result complicating and deepening our understanding of conversion during this particularly fractious period. The introductory chapter spends little time on historiography, instead focusing on understandings of conversion in its various early modern contexts and meanings. One of Shoulson’s primary concerns is fear, particularly fears about social cohesion as manifested in literature and attesting to a deep anxiety about the authenticity of religious conversion. In the early modern Spanish context, the concern over the sincerity of the converso (or the Jewish or Muslim convert to Christianity) was one that intermingled with the general unease over miscegenation and disloyalty to the newly unified Catholic state. In the early modern English context, absent contact with actual Jews, English anxieties over conversion revolved around whether the authenticity of an individual’s conversion experience was sufficiently genuine to merit redemption and divine reconciliation, especially in a climate of millenarian angst. Whether insincere or false, conversions were phenomena whose implications stretched far beyond questions of individual salvation; the spiritual welfare of the realm and the political directives of the state-sponsored English Reformation also hung in the balance. While Jews were far removed from English society in both time (as distant biblical figures) and space (the nearest communities were in Holland), and thus ultimately posed no threat to the precarious status quo, the Jews, because of their unique position as biblical ancestors and antagonists, stood in as proxies for many of theological debates about conversion. The first two chapters of the book focus mainly on biblical conversion narratives that shaped exegetical commentaries. Chapter 1 treats Christian writings on conversion that predated the early modern period, and subsequently influenced the fictions of conversion that form the main focus of this book. The central and early figure of Jewish conversion is St. Paul, whose spiritual redemption on the road to Damascus represented the ideal for most early modern commentators, who sought exemplary models for conversion experiences. Other well-known non-Jewish figures whose conversion narratives influenced the discursive framework upon which early modern literature and commentaries drew included Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. The chap-ter’s most provocative contribution is an analysis of the deep and abiding English interest in the marrano, a derogatory Spanish term for a Jewish convert to Christianity. This term was rarely used in England, but the marrano came to [End Page 330] represent the frightening possibility that conversions could be inauthentic and thus indicative of a larger rot...

Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe: Memory, Melancholy and the Emblematic Tradition

Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe: Memory, Melancholy and the Emblematic Tradition

Louise Labé : sodalité expansive et individualité singulière, la formation d’une autorité poétique (féminine)

Considering the dominant concepts of achieving poetic authority in the Early Modern period, the following paper attempts to enlighten the position of the most famous female Petrarchist in France, Louise Labe. In order to obtain glory and success in the poetic agon of imitation, early modern poets aim to stage themselves ostentatiously as author-figures in their texts, whilst relying on a powerful and singular image of themselves on one hand and on a social and cultural contextualization on the other hand. These two functional dispositifs, to be called “singularisation” and “sodalisation”, are basically found in Labe’s poetic oeuvre. She presents herself both as an exceptionally affected loving woman, recurring to the literary topics of Latin love elegy and the features of Italian female Petrarchism and in the mean time she endeavours to be the leading authority within an extensive community, consisting not only of the other women but also of the cultural nobility in general. The exceptional prominence of inner passion in Labe’s work finally reaches beyond literary traditions and exploits the terrain of a nearly modern form of psychic individuality which might be the key to her long lasting success and glory.

Early Modern Poetic Exegesis: Henry Vaughan’s Leprous Pharisee and Marcan Wilderness

Early modern English poets often put events from the life of Jesus to verse. They drew liberally from the four canonical gospels to do so, but those gospels sometimes relate events with unique or seemingly conflicting details (e.g., a man who is both leprous and a Pharisee). The shortest of the four gospels, the Gospel of Mark, often has the fewest unique details for poets to use. This relative paucity of unique details did not mean that early modern poets neglected Mark’s possible contributions to their work—even if more modern literary critics seem to neglect Mark’s possible contributions to early modern biblically based poetry. By contextualizing Henry Vaughan’s “The Search” in biblically based early modern verse and exegesis, this article argues that the fullest reading of “The Search” relies on an understanding that Vaughan followed Mark’s terse account of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness instead of Matthew’s and Luke’s much more full accounts.

Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry by Sarah Kay (review)

Sarah Kay’s new book takes its cue and its central approach from an age-old emblem that identifies the task of the lyricist with that of the nightingale (or the sparrow), as opposed to that of the parrot (or the crow). While the sparrow and the nightingale (from Catullus to Keats) are identified with the articulation of a rhetoric of spontaneity and natural correspondence, the parrot would imply the verbatim repetition of words and a higher reliance on adequate contextual response by the audience, but also a higher mediation by literary institutions and cultural gatekeepers. The way of the nightingale presents itself as one of free-flowing, unproblematic poetic thought, articulated by the objective existence of its objective content (be that feeling or experience). In stark opposition to it, the way of the parrot would be one of strict quotation: of negative response, modification, twisted irony, or parasitic appropriation. And yet, the core question of mimesis that lies at the centre of early modern poetics emerges precisely from the intersection of both ways: the way of the nightingale and the way of the parrot. Renaissance imitation stems from this crossroads as a textual development in both its philosophical and rhetorical aspects; not primarily a matter of ontology, but also, quite crucially, one of rhetorical practice.The book starts by examining textual practice, and maintains a close attention to detail throughout the entire volume. This approach makes the volume useful even for the non-specialist...

Treading the Digital Turn: Mediated Form and Historical Meaning

Treading the Digital Turn:Mediated Form and Historical Meaning Jen Boyle (bio) This essay offers a framework for thinking about the active mutability of form in an early modern context. My purpose is to illuminate a potential point of intervention in emerging relationships between the digital humanities and historical scholarship. As Henry Turner has recently pointed out, many of our current understandings about the materiality of form are drawn from contemporary assumptions about the limits of disciplinary practice. Turner identifies rich influences from both contemporary historians of science and early modern poetics that work to inflect a "notion of form [that] is not a static architecture or an immanent, closed idea," but which flourishes as a "renewing, relational network" (5). I am particularly interested in following this idea as a way back into our prevailing sense of what historical work can offer to the "digital turn" (including the new institutional hegemony of the digital humanities) and, conversely, what the digital turn can offer to historical work. My principal contention is that we are yet to see a thoroughgoing consideration of the deeper impacts of historical methodologies on digital practices and theories. I close with a brief demonstration of how attention to "renewing, relational" networks of form, using the works of Margaret Cavendish as an example, have the potential to transform our investigations into the practical and theoretical implications of the digital. As a scholar, teacher, and practitioner of both new media-digital studies and early modern studies, I am particularly attuned to the trajectory of historical studies as the digital humanities gains prominence across disciplines. Apart from a few exceptional examples, the majority of early modern digital projects [End Page 79] are still very much concerned with digital access to and distribution of early modern texts.1 This observation is in no way meant to imply that there is something deficient about such a priority; the digitization of early editions and archives has had a tremendous impact on the range and reach of early modern scholarship and pedagogy.2 That said, both the digital humanities and historical scholarship stand to benefit dramatically from a more nuanced discussion about their constitutive influences upon one another. Such an exchange seems particularly relevant at a moment when traditional humanities programs are increasingly defunded, while, as an emerging field, the digital humanities continues to gain prominence and add new funding sources. Scholarly historical approaches have gained much from the digital humanities as a source for the development of augmented media that distribute and deliver early texts and archives. However, there is perhaps a deeper and more critical relationship to be forged in thinking about how our digital methodologies might be inflected by earlier models of material and procedural form. I draw here on some pertinent specifics to Turner's discussion of how we might re-define and re-animate approaches to form, transhistorically and across contemporary disciplines. Turner emphasizes that literary study has integrated into its various methodologies an increasing repertoire of ideas and concepts of form: stylistic form (semiotics, syntax, and semantics); structural form (the component descriptions of "meaningful systems," and interrelationships among parts and whole); material form (textual and paratextual elements of format); and social form (models and modes of relationship that extend beyond the textual).3 He further points out that even with the last category of social form taken into account (inclusive of work from Claude Levi-Strauss to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu) that one significant problem facing literary critics is the need to extend formal models beyond language and text. Interestingly, this becomes not just a question of adding more categories to or expanding the epistemological foundation of form, but of rethinking form as an kind of ontology, as a moving, "shaping principle" (584) that is temporally in-process as opposed to a static model that defines and delimits. Turner highlights some perspectives and influences from both literary studies and the history of science that contribute to an understanding of form as a mutable in-process event.4 Yet early modernists—poets, rhetoricians, and natural philosophers—provide him with some of the most provocative and insightful examples of form as mediating action. Such principles, for example, can be...

The Men in the Seersucker Suits

The Men in the Seersucker Suits Joseph Campana (bio) There is no shade in this city. There is no shade because there is no rest. Or if there is shade it is a long walk from here, along the boulevard where the scions of the learned stroll or jog before returning to their comfortable conveyances, whereas you have, on your way to the post office to send news of your body’s newest whereabouts, realized this day with your limbs the constitution of a brave new world of class: those who are carried, those who are cool, those who will not drown in their own bodies. Do you hear above how the jets swoop and pass, leaving behind their sooty wake? Call it commerce but imagine it a species of eternity. It’s as if they will never land, will never be pulled from the sky. How the sun burns and the creatures bite: is that a migraine blooming or some new urban epiphany writ in a sullied heaven? Don’t be alarmed. You’ve only killed one thing today, and as you listen to the gods speak through several channels and in many languages, each braving a searing weight of glass, you realize this is not, by such standards, the worst sin. Worse things you can’t imagine: all life curling up to die in the sun. [End Page 256] Welcome to the veil of Arcady. Welcome to the day the heavens burn. All the while the city throbs, the city pulses on. Look: you can see it move. You can see men wandering the lanes as if they could walk on traffic. The men in the seersucker suits are walking into the sun. They do not mind heat, they do not mind glare. They are cool because they can be. Everything’s all right because it can be. [End Page 257] Joseph Campana Joseph Campana is author of The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005), a collection of poems, and academic articles on Edmond Spenser, William Shakespeare, early modern poetics, and the history of sexuality in PMLA, Modern Philology, Shakespeare, Prose Studies and elsewhere. His poems have also appeared in such journals as Slate, New England Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Kenyon Review. Copyright © 2009 Charles H. Rowell

FRESH WORDS FOR A FRESH WORLD: TĀZA-GŪ'Ī AND THE POETICS OF NEWNESS IN EARLY MODERN INDO-PERSIAN POETRY

This article examines a crucial phase of Indo-Persian literary modernity, beginning in the late sixteenth century CE, when poets and other literati across South, Central, and West Asia began articulating an unprecedented break with their cultural past through calls for ‘speaking the fresh’ (tāza-gū'ī). In later, nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, this period of literary ingenuity has been almost universally decried as decadent and unworthy of serious study, an indictment that has, over the years, become specifically and explicitly coded in terms of India's allegedly debilitating effect on Persian language and literature. Thus in scholarly parlance this era is regularly (and pejoratively) referred to as that of the ‘Indian Style’ (sabk-i hindī), despite the fact that the early modern poets themselves never used such metageographical terminology, and despite the tāza-gū'ī movement's incontrovertibly transregional reach and cosmopolitan tenor. To interrogate this conceptual slippage, this article historicizes some key factors in the twentieth-century formulation of the notion of sabk-i hindī, and then contrasts them with evidence from a case study of the celebrated Mughal munshī and litterateur, Chandar Bhān Brahman (d. 1672–3), whose sense of literary possibility and the interconnectedness of the early modern world are clearly at odds with the nationalist frames of later Iranian (and even Indian) thinkers. After using Chandar Bhān's example as a barometer for calling into question much of the modernist discourse about Safavid-Mughal literary and political culture, I offer a brief précis of some suggestive comparative possibilities that could open up if we were to abandon the anachronistic sabk-i hindī model and return our attention to the poetics of ingenuity and ‘freshness’ (tāzagī) that were of central concern to the early modern Indo-Persian literati themselves.

The Development of the English Love Lyric, 1580-1680

This essay was runner-up in the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section. In the classical and Petrarchan love lyrics’ depiction of the relationship between the desiring lover and his normatively scornful beloved, early modern poets discovered a vehicle for exploring the English social and political order as well as the boundaries between tradition and innovation. As poets from Philip Sidney onward discovered, the social, political, and gender hierarchization of early modern society could be rehearsed as well as confronted in the symbolic staging of a relationship between dominant and submissive parties of opposite sexes. At the same time, the deep enmeshment of the love lyric in the humanist practice of imitatio engendered an abiding reverence for past models while simultaneously urging authors to achieve poetic independence. In the verse of writers like Philip Sidney, John Donne, Mary Wroth, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, and the Earl of Rochester, the interplay between the changing structures of English life and the individual's relation to those structures is registered in a dialectical engagement between modern verse and its models in a movement paralleling the interactions between the fictive lovers who form its subject matter.

Reinvention and Globalization in Hughes's Stories

In short, there seems to be a powerful disjuncture between the global narratives and images that attract postcolonial critics and another set of narratives and images which do not exactly fit into a theoretical apparatus that seems bent on difference and hybridity. Postcolonial literature is not, of course, deaf to the disjuncture between its performance of a global culture and the persistence of this other, darker, older narrative of poverty, of failed nationalism, of death, that will simply not go away. Postcolonial theorists may have sought to forget the nation in order to become global, but the nation has not forgotten them. --Simon Gikandi By reconsidering the narrative posture of Langston Hughes, transnational readers may well perceive a negotiated balance through which his narrators provide the world a way out of global paradox. Reinvention of the communal perception is necessary because the dislocation of an African American on the Atlantic Ocean or in Havana requires adaptation of the explorer's internalized nation. Finally, the wanderer's homeland needs to readapt to the reinvention of what American really means. I propose that the emerging greatness of Langston Hughes was and remains the structuring of synchronic history and diachronic time within the immediate space of a narrative event. Langston Hughes reinvents an African American imagination at port in Senegal (The Little Virgin 1927) and re-adapts the international perspective to the reassessment of Civil Rights in Hopkinsville, Missouri (Home 1934). Given Hughes's well-known travel to France during 1922-23, it is not surprising that he was prepared to explore the historical locale of Cuba in 1934. (1) Often his forte was representing the vision of a Diaspora in French and Spanish as well as German. He represented African American voice to Africa and Europe, and then translated the transnationalized voice back to the Americas. Juxtaposing an early modern poet with a post-modern theory produces a kind of historical incongruity. James Langston Hughes emerged as a lively storyteller during the 1920s and 1930s, but the subsequent term of globalization has developed only since the 1970s. Often globalization involves an international traveler's willingness to adapt the cultured values and texts of one's native land to new ones. While such a process takes place within national discourses, its real mission is to dissolve them. Perhaps one could reassess the importance of stories by Langston Hughes by testing the assumptions of globalization in light of his implied concept of an internalized nation, while working one's way backwards through the global framework to a few lively moments in the texts. Langston Hughes emerges as an African American standard by which global theory should be reassessed. Globalization entails an international flow of capital along with a worldwide development in the new communications such as the telephone, fax, email, and internet. Leading the vanguard are such international corporations as Microsoft, Gateway, and McDonald's. According to Jackie Smith and Hank Johnson in Globalization and Resistance (2002), at least six compulsions to globalize emerge. First, a global era demands world responses because political policies have effects beyond nation states. Second, the expansion of new technologies such as satellite transmissions and internet shrink the distance between nations, collapsing them into a shared cyberspace. Third, the radically increasing power of transnational corporations (and I would add activist governments), that enables them to control the flow of raw materials (and fission materials for weapons and wealth) has outpaced the effectiveness of local and national movements to contain them. Fourth, today the environmental movement has become worldwide as was the peace movement in earlier decades. Fifth, the human rights movement, one so informed by racial and female liberation, assumes a global logic. …

The Dante Anecdote in Gower's Confessio Amantis, Book VII

In the second recension of the Confessio Amantis, John Gower added an anecdote on the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri as an example in his discussion of flattery in Book VII. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Petrarch's Rerum memorandarum libri has been indicated as the source for such an anecdote. The anecdote in question does not appear in what is currently considered to be the third and final version of Gower's work; it together with other passages is one of the characteristics defining the second version of the Confessio Amantis. In this article I investigate the origins and early history of this anecdote and the most likely channels for its transmission to Gower. This investigation revises previous assessments of Petrarch's influence and suggests the likelihood that Gower had recourse to oral sources based upon a received synthesis of the two main strands of the anecdote. These findings offer support for a revision of the chronology of recensions 2 and 3 of the Confessio Amantis, and also raise wider questions about the use of source material not only by Gower but also by other medieval and early modern poets. My contention, as illustrated below, is that the Dante anecdote in the Confessio Amantis represents the earliest known written manifestation of an oral tradition that is in fact the conflation of two different strands of the tale. A specific, practical consequence of this contention is to rule out the possibility, should anyone be so inclined, of referring to such anecdote as evidence of Gower's direct knowledge of Petrarch's Rerum memorandarum libri. More importantly, an awareness of the multifarious background from which the anecdote arose provides a useful case study illustrating the importance of oral traditions as narrative material for medieval writers and showing that the lines of demarcation between oral and written sources were far from clear-cut. Tracing oral traditions is ipso facto a hazardous enterprise. However, in this case, we are fortunate in that this specific tradition has left behind a trail of written clues. In an important and influential study of Dante's fortune in England, published in 1909, Paget Toynbee indicated a paragraph in Petrarch's [End Page 420] Rerum memorandarum libri as the source of the Dante anecdote in the second recension of John Gower's Confessio Amantis.1 The Gower anecdote reads in this manner: Nota exemplum cuiusdam poete de Ytalia, qui Dante vocabatur. How Dante the poete answerde To a flatour, the tale I herde. Upon a strif bitwen hem tuo He seide him, "Ther ben many mo Of thy servantes than of myne. For the poete of his covyne Hath non that wol him clothe and fede, But a flatour may reule and lede A king with al his lond aboute." (VII.2329–37*)2 The Petrarch text is as follows: Dantes Allegherius, et ipse concivis nuper meus, vir vulgari eloquio clarissimus fuit, sed moribus parumper contumacior et oratione liberior quam delicatis ac fastidiosis etatis nostre principum auribus atque oculis acceptum foret. Is igitur exul patria cum apud Canem Magnum veronensem, comune tunc afflictorum solamen ac profugium, versaretur, primo quidem in honore habitus deinde pedetentim retrocedere ceperat minusque in dies domino placere. Erant in eodem convictu histriones ac nebulones omnis generis, ut mos est; quorum unus procacissimus obscenis verbis ac gestibus multum apud omnes loci ac gratie tenebat. Quod moleste ferre Dantem suspicatus Canis, producto illo in medium ac magnis laudibus concelebrato, versus in Dantem: "Miror" inquit, "quid cause subsit, cur hic cum sit demens nobis tamen omnibus placere novit et ab omnibus diligitur, quod tu qui sapiens diceris non potes." Ille autem: "Minime" inquit, "mirareris, si nosses quod morum paritas et similitudo animorum amicitie causa est."3 Dante Alighieri, also a former fellow citizen of mine, was a most excellent author in the vulgar tongue, but of rather more insolent manners and freer speech than is...

Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe's Legacies

Introduction: Sites of Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic Part One: Embodiments 1. The Decay of Memory William E. Engel 2. Lethargic Corporeality on and off the Early Modern Stage Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. 3. Pleasure's Oblivion: Displacements of Generation in Spenser's Faerie Queene Elizabeth D. Harvey Part Two: Signs 4. Textual Crudities in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica Grant Williams 5. Off the Subject: Early Modern Poets on Rhyme, Distraction, and Forgetfulness Amanda Watson Part Three: Narratives 6. Reassuring Fratricide in 1 Henry IV Christopher Ivic 7. 'The Religion I Was Born In': Forgetting Catholicism and Remembering the King Donne's Devotions David J. Baker 8. Legends of Oblivion: Enchantment and Enslavement in Book Six of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Elizabeth Mazzola Part Four: Localities 9. Nomadic Eros: Remapping Knowledge in A Midsummer Night's Dream Philippa Berry 10. 'Unless You Could Teach Me to Forget': Spectatorship, Self-Forgetting, and Subversion in Antitheatrical Literature and As You Like It Zackariah Long 11. Monuments and Ruins: Spenser and the Problem of the English Library Jennifer Summit

Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study by Duncan Large (review)

268 Reviews Stella that explores the anxieties attendant upon expressions of imperial power. In his final revelatory chapter, the chronologically oriented thrust of the argument focuses upon the writer known as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (i539-1616), the mestizo child of both Inca and Spanish parents, whose work represents perhaps 'the last moment in which the lyric discourse that shaped empire could still be manipulated to work critically against its own erstwhile purposes' (p. 24). Unrequited Conquests offers a remarkable array of radical new avenues of enquiry into the relationship between the Old and New Worlds, placing early modern poetics at the heart of the continually disputed power structures binding the conqueror to the conquered. While there exists throughout the tantalizing glimpse of the Old Worlds of the east behind transactions with the west?an area ripe forenquiry?the insistent focus of the text ensures that it will remain a significant contribution to the field for some time to come. Royal Holloway, University of London Matthew Dimmock Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study. By Duncan Large. (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2001. xi + 298 pp. ?45- ISBN 0-19-924227-5 (hbk). As time passes, the relationship between writers becomes ever more murky and multiform . Duncan Large's introduction to this ambitious work traces some ofthe intricate shadow-boxing that Proust and Nietzsche have been put through, before he himself steps into the ring to referee the real contest, as much between promotional critics as between the contenders themselves. Large's firsttask is to address a Proustian cri? ticism which either suppresses Nietzsche altogether or treats him as the go-between of a 'truer' source (Schopenhauer), a merely convenient provider of an appropriable vocabulary or set of assumptions. Large's admirably combative approach leads him to tax Derrida with methodological slippages and Kristeva with a derivativeness against which he needs to defend Deleuze's implicitly Nietzschean reading of Proust. Chap? ter 2 looks at Proust's Nietzsche, and particularly at his use of Nietzsche as a paradigm of the philosopher too dedicated to the truths of the intellect and the illusory rewards of friendship. But Proust's Nietzsche is a fictional flag of convenience, created out of an imperfect knowledge, culled in large part from Daniel Halevy's early biography. Had he been more patient, less satisfied with prejudice, Proust might have found in Nietzsche the kindred spirit that Large so deftly reveals to us. Chapters 3 and 4 delve into the perspectivisticattitudes shared by the pair: Proust's perspectivism has not the same afBrmative and exhilarating drive that Nietzsche's has, connected as it so often is with experiences of deception, and seeming as it does to entail the abandonment of notions of a unified, founding self. But Large takes us through the complex corporal and epistemological issues associated with the enterprise of self-discovery to the sunny uplands of self-creation: I would suggest that the self-creative potential of Nietzsche's 'yea-saying' Ubermensch yields a paradigm in terms ofwhich one can under stand both whyProust's narratorfeels a sense of necessity in his involuntary memories, a sense of self rescued from the world of human contingency, and why the self-revelations of involuntary memory should lead him on to a work of art?a 'metaphoricaP art of self-creation. (p. 202) This part of Large's engrossing and highly persuasive investigation leads him, with satisfying inevitability, to the future perfect as the couple's defining temporality. And so the final chapter digs deep into the strategies adopted to outwit a problematic pre? sent: Nietzsche 'exploits the virtual perspective ofthe future perfect as an opportunity MLRy 98.1, 2003 269 both to critique the nihilism of contemporary culture and to celebrate the redemptive potential of the Ubermensch' (p. 216), while Proust explores the future perfect in greater psychological close-up, as it acts with corrosive insinuationson the experience of the present moment; but it is this temporality, too, which, paradoxically, holds out the promise of redemption when east in a new light at the close of A la recherche. Overall, the case is convincingly made that, in finding new paths of thought...

The Scope of Sidney's Defence of Poesy: The New Hermeneutic and Early Modern Poetics

The Scope of Sidney's <i>Defence of Poesy</i>: The New Hermeneutic and Early Modern Poetics

Write or be written: early modern women poets and cultural constraints

Write or be written: early modern women poets and cultural constraints

‘But-þat þou louye me, Sertes y dye fore loue of þe’

In this paper, I look at how medieval and early modern poets present and exploit the potential inherent in opening moves in (love) relationships for the purpose of plot motivation and protagonist characterisation. The depiction of the opening moves depends on three interrelated pairs of variables: 1) legalistic tradition (marriage as the reason for initiating a relationship) vs emotional tradition (focus is on the beloved person’s affection), 2) plot motivation vs protagonist characterisation, and 3) brevity vs length. Longer texts that focus on the lovers’ feelings and that pay some attention to protagonist characterisation are more likely to feature relatively complex linguistic strategies presented in a basically realistic interactional manner. In shorter texts of the emotional tradition, the complexity is reduced, and poets working in the legalistic tradition often pay hardly any attention at all to the finer points of opening moves in love interaction.

Laura: uncovering gender and genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell

How do men imagine women? In the poetry of Petrarch and his English successors—Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell—the male poet persistently imagines pursuing a woman, Laura, whom he pursues even as she continues to deny his affections. Critics have long held that, in objectifying Laura, these male-authored texts deny the imaginative, intellectual, and physical life of the woman they idealize. In Laura , Barbara L. Estrin counters this traditional view by focusing not on the generative powers of the male poet, but on the subjectivity of the imagined woman and the imaginative space of the poems she occupies. Through close readings of the Rime sparse and the works of Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell, Estrin uncovers three Lauras: Laura-Daphne, who denies sexuality; Laura-Eve, who returns the poet’s love; and Laura-Mercury, who reinvents her own life. Estrin claims that in these three guises Laura subverts both genre and gender, thereby introducing multiple desires into the many layers of the poems. Drawing upon genre and gender theories advanced by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Judith Butler to situate female desire in the poem’s framework, Estrin shows how genre and gender in the Petrarchan tradition work together to undermine the stability of these very concepts. Estrin’s Laura constitutes a fundamental reconceptualization of the Petrarchan tradition and contributes greatly to the postmodern reassessment of the Renaissance period. In its descriptions of how early modern poets formulate questions about sexuality, society and poetry, Laura will appeal to scholars of the English and Italian Renaissance, of gender studies, and of literary criticism and theory generally.