Edward Lear Research Articles

Keedle, the Great and All You've Ever Wanted to Know About Fascism by Deirdre Conselman and William Conselman Jr., and: Yussuf the Ostrich by Emery Kelen

Reviewed by: Keedle, the Great and All You've Ever Wanted to Know About Fascism by Deirdre Conselman and William Conselman Jr., and: Yussuf the Ostrich by Emery Kelen Jan Susina (bio) Keedle, the Great and All You've Ever Wanted to Know About Fascism. By Deirdre and William Conselman, Jr. Illustrated by Fred L. Fox. Afterword by Jack Zipes. Little Mole and Honey Bear, 2020. Yussuf the Ostrich. By Emery Kelen. Afterword by Jack Zipes. Little Mole and Honey Bear, 2020. "Nazis, I hate these guys." This memorable line spoken by Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) neatly summarizes the message of these two picture books. They are part of the series edited by Jack Zipes that puts into print neglected children's fairy tales with a political message. Given the rise of Fascism in Europe and the United States in recent years, there has been an increased interest in adult and children's books published in the 1930s and 1940s. Consider the renewed popularity in Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935) after the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Keedle, originally published in 1940, and Yussuf the Ostrich, originally published in 1943, fit into this publishing trend. Either of these picture books would fit comfortably with the children's material reprinted in Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (2008) edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel; their anthology includes selections from well-known children's authors, including Dr. Seuss, Munro Leaf, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes. [End Page 100] These reprinted picture books remind readers that children's books have always been political, and that this did not begin with contemporary books, such as Michael Ian Black's A Child's First Book of Trump (2016). It is also true that children's books have always had the dual audience of children and adults. Many parodies of well-known children's picture books are intended primarily for adults, such as Faye Kanouse's If You Give a Pig the White House (2019) or John Lithgow's Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown (2020). There are also borderline books: Dr. Seuss's Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! (1972) took on a political meaning in 1976, when Seuss crossed out the name of his protagonist and inserted the name of Richard Nixon in a copy of the picture book. More recently, readers following Dr. Seuss's modification can easily update and insert Donald Trump's name for Seuss's orange-colored protagonist. Sadly, when it comes to political children's books, it seems that everything old is new again. Yussuf the Ostrich was written and illustrated by Emery Kelen, a self-described "violent pacifist" who served in World War I. After the war, he teamed with Alois Derso, and as Derso & Kelen they became famous for their satirical caricatures of politicians. With the rise of Nazism, they fled to the United States in 1938, and continued to publish political illustrations for Esquire, Fortune, and The New York Times Magazine. Kelen branched out on his own and produced two children's books, Yussuf the Ostrich and Dr. Owl (1945), as well as Mr. Nonsense: A Life of Edward Lear (1973) while working at the Public Information Office for the United Nations. Yussuf, unlike other ostriches in North Africa, does not hide his head in the sand about the dangers of the invading Nazi army. After attending school with his child owner, the clever Yussuf volunteers to be a messenger for the US Signal Corps. Captured by the Nazis, Yussuf faces execution, but is saved by the general's pet dachshunds, who secretly hate the Nazis and help him escape. Returning with plans of an attack, Yussuf saves the US Army and becomes a hero. Kelen's use of animals fighting against the Nazis is reminiscent of the propaganda films produced by the Walt Disney studios during World War II. Keedle was written by the son and daughter of William Conselman, who wrote the popular comic strip Ella Cinder (1925–1961), and illustrated by Fred Fox...

Inventing Edward Lear by Sara Lodge

Book Review| January 01 2021 Inventing Edward Lear by Sara Lodge Lodge, Sara, Inventing Edward Lear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 436 pp. Miguel Tamen Miguel Tamen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2021) 27 (1): 120–121. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8723263 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Miguel Tamen; Inventing Edward Lear by Sara Lodge. Common Knowledge 1 January 2021; 27 (1): 120–121. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8723263 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2021 Duke University Press2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: LITTLE REVIEWS You do not currently have access to this content.

Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties by Laurence Talairach

Reviewed by: Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties by Laurence Talairach Clayton Tarr (bio) Animals, Museum Culture and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties. By Laurence Talairach. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Laurence Talairach's Curious Beasties is a welcome addition to children's literature studies, especially to the continuing work on the intersections of natural science and children's literature during the long nineteenth century. Talairach traces the influx of [End Page 437] animals, both zoological and paleontological, brought to England from around the world and displayed in museums and menageries. These living, skeletal, and taxidermy specimens not only "illustrated the expansion of knowledge," but also "embodied British power and hegemony" (2). Children became a crucial part of this dual impact of exotic animal collection and display, being encouraged to participate in natural history "in the hope of moulding young minds into future British and imperial citizens" (3). The way that museums "offered visitors an experience of the natural world under control" also inculcates proper and productive children (4). The wonderous animals displayed for eager audiences "could simultaneously transport and instruct" (7), Talairach argues, while also "captur[ing] the elusive reality of imperial Britain" (8). Children's books similarly "conjured up the British empire and its booming capitalist economy through adventures where characters could both feel and see the urge to possess and subjugate these 'curious beasties'" (274). At the same time, however, children's literature sometimes provided "the opportunity to question the ideologies of imperialism" (274). Regardless of the ideological stance, children's literature of the long nineteenth century imaginatively represented "the sense of wonderment produced by museum culture" (10). Structurally, Curious Beasties moves both chronology through the long nineteenth century and from broad movements to discrete readings of nineteenth-century children's authors, including Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Edith Nesbit. I find the latter half of the book more compelling, though the first half is just as engaging and readable. Chapter 2 explores how children's literature of Georgian England uses "curious beasties" to "disseminate knowledge about the natural world" (32). Moving ahead to the Victorian period, chapter 3 further probes the "appropriation of animals" to examine how live animals "actively participated in the development of children's literature" (12, 73). Chapter 4 investigates how children's periodicals encouraged "children's interest in natural history collecting" (126). Talairach also studies the rise of taxidermy, which "represented a period when naturalists willingly explored and promoted the relationship between science and myth, or knowledge and narrative" (173). Chapter 5 examines nonsense literature by Lear and Carroll, which "foregrounded and questioned the issue of species classification" (176). Carroll's "curious beasties," in particular, "probe the era's taxonomic practices" (19). Talairach concludes with a chapter on representations of fossil discoveries in Victorian and Edwardian children's literature, particularly focusing on Nesbit, whose "curious beasties" "convey her stance on imperialism and consumerism and challenge the master narrative of British control over the natural world" (20). The main concern I have with Talairach's book is that I consistently found myself wanting a more expansive vision. Science fiction, in particular, which experienced a concurrent "golden age," seems relevant to the study, especially in regard to the [End Page 438] "human/animal divide" that Talairach frequently mentions. Certainly, H. G. Wells imagined grotesque and subversive menageries, challenging practices such as vivisection, which Talairach chooses not to pursue. Are not many of Carroll's monstrosities in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World examples of particularly disturbing cross-species (if not also subject/object melding) surgical experiments? And what about J. M. Barrie's own island, the Neverland where "beasts" occupy a crucial position in the circle of life and death? I am also left wondering about other forms of children's or adolescent writing in the Victorian period, particularly boys' adventure stories. H. Rider Haggard's novels, for example, often hinge on the role animals play in Britain's imperial project. I am also left a little disappointed that Curious Beasties does not spend more time with Christina Rossetti. A short discussion of "Goblin Market" (1862) appears in chapter one, but it is mostly to...

Review: Inventing Edward Lear, by Sara Lodge

Review: Inventing Edward Lear, by Sara Lodge

Cognitive Mechanisms for Creating a Genre form of Limerick As the Nonsense Literature

The article proves that a limerick is a genre form of nonsense literature. It also summarizes the cognitive strategies used in the translation of Edward Lear’s limericks into Russian. These strategies are used to convey the original structure and specificity of the semantic meaning of the limerick and include discursive construction — the direct process of constructing a discourse of nonsense from special language resources, the construction of the world itself, the representation of new reality with the help of this discourse; interpretation — adjustment to the current situation, when the original text is corrected based on the language parameters and specifics of native speakers world view; transfer of knowledge based on metaphor — the transition from directly given knowledge to indirectly given knowledge. The primary cognitive mechanism underlying the limerick as a genre form is the discursive construction of a specific nonsense world. According to the analysis, most of the surveyed students prefer the translations of E. Lear’s limericks, which are very close or entirely correspond to the characteristics of the original text from the formal point of view.
 Keywords: Limerick, cognitive theory of translation, interpretation, knowledge transfer, conceptual integration

‘Lays of the Octopods (The Last of the Octopods)’: An Unpublished Poem by Edward Lear

‘Lays of the Octopods (The Last of the Octopods)’: An Unpublished Poem by Edward Lear

The Pig Who Went to Market: Entrepreneurship and Exploitation in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Little Pig Robinson

The Pig Who Went to Market:Entrepreneurship and Exploitation in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Little Pig Robinson Jen Cadwallader (bio) In a letter to her American publisher, Alexander McKay, Beatrix Potter wrote, "I think Pig Robinson looking into a shop window is the best black and white I ever did" (Letter to McKay).1 The illustration to which she refers (Fig. 1), on page 83 of the American edition of The Tale of Little Pig Robinson,2 is one that many modern readers of Potter's works never encounter. The little-known story follows Pig Robinson to town to complete his aunts' errands, to sea after he is kidnapped and taken aboard a ship bound for Newfoundland, and to the tropical island to which he eventually escapes. As its title and plot indicate, Pig Robinson's literary progenitor is Robinson Crusoe; as a Robinsonade,3 the novella belongs to a tradition at the height of its popularity when Potter wrote her first draft in the 1890s. Readers of Pig Robinson would also recognize two other famous literary sailors playing supporting roles in Potter's narrative: the Owl and the Pussy-cat of Edward Lear's 1871 poem, itself inspired by Defoe's novel. By weaving together elements of Defoe's and Lear's texts in Pig Robinson, Potter situates her tale at the nexus of two versions of the Robinsonade. While Robinson Crusoe, the Owl, and the Cat have in common an adventure on a desert island, what the three do upon these islands differs significantly: Crusoe becomes a model of industry and piety, while the Owl and Cat "hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, / … danced by the light of the moon" (ll. 29–30). One works; the others play. These activities perhaps explain the popularity of the Victorian Robinsonade. Parents, as Susan Naramore Maher notes, saw in the typical Robinsonade an appealing didactic message: these texts "privilege action, hardwork, and material progress" (169). Child readers, on the other hand, were eager consumers of the exotic adventure and escape from responsibility the genre seemed to offer. Obedient, industrious, and entrepreneurially spirited, Pig Robinson is poised to capitalize on the economic fantasy the Robinsonade tenders; his failures in the marketplace, his exploitation (by consumers of both the capitalist and gustatory variety), and the exaggerated Lear-esque ending Potter chooses for him critically undercut both the genre's formulaic association of hard work with economic success and its [End Page 32] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Original line drawing for The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (American edition). Image provided courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia. © David McKay Co., 1930. depiction of natural economic laws governing human interactions with the environment. In sending Pig Robinson to market, Potter explores the market forces that influence personal autonomy and childhood identity. Obscure though it is, Pig Robinson's focus on political economy aligns it with a number of major works in the Potter canon that share this same interest—including The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or, The Roly-Poly [End Page 33] Pudding (1908), The Tale of Ginger and Pickles (1909), and The Tale of Pigling Bland (1913). The image of "Pig Robinson looking into a shop window" is not simply of interest to Potter scholars because she thought it was her best line drawing; it also serves as the culmination of a lifetime ruminating on the subject of political economy. Around this image coalesce Potter's ideas about the economic underpinnings central to her vision of children's role in capitalist society. I. Pig Robinson's Antecedents While its publication date places Pig Robinson at the very end of Potter's literary career (in fact, it is the last work she both wrote and illustrated), the story actually belongs to the same twelve-month period (1893–94) in which Peter Rabbit and Jeremy Fisher were created. Like Lewis Carroll's creation of the Alice books, or Edward Lear's creation of the Nonsense books, initially, Potter wrote her stories as "picture letters" to the children of her former governess, Annie Moore. Most famous is the opening of her letter to Moore's oldest...

Afterword: Lear Outside Time

Afterword: Lear Outside Time Jenny Uglow (bio) For Lear’s contemporaries, he was the writer of “beneficent and innocent” nonsense whom Ruskin (not given to laughter) placed top of his list of “Best 100 authors” in 1866.1 For a later generation, T. S. Eliot admired his verbal acrobatics but also his musical gift and intensity of feeling: “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy Bò” and “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” wrote Eliot, “are poems of unrequited passion—‘blues’ in fact. We enjoy the music, which is of a high order, and we enjoy the feeling or irresponsibility towards the sense.”2 W. H. Auden, who felt the melancholy beneath the wit, cherished Lear’s irresponsibility in a broader sense, seeing him as the defender of the odd, the marginal—the artist—against “The legions of cruel and inquisitive They,” so solid and strong, “like dogs” (Lear disliked dogs hugely).3 George Orwell saw him as a defender of willful individualism against “the realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in bowler hats who are always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing.”4 In Lear, as Philip Larkin recognized, “the silliness was part of the seriousness.”5 His quirky irony appeals to modern readers, as does his mix of wariness and lavishness. Writing to Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell felt that Lear would “have enjoyed your feeling, your disciplined gorgeousness, your drawing, your sadness, your amusement.”6 The words of earlier critics and poets hover behind today’s readings: we each react to judgments, pick up some threads, and discard others. The essays published here, and in Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry, as well as the books by Matthew Bevis, Sara Lodge, and James Williams published in 2018–2019 and forthcoming from Jasmine Jagger,7 all ripple with overlaps and subtle returns, illuminating Lear’s diversity and melancholy-comic spirit in rewarding new ways. It is good to read Lear in this company, returning to the work afresh. And the angle of reading has widened. Earlier criticism separated his multiple selves: the poet stood apart from the naturalist, natural history painter, landscape artist, and travel writer. Yet Lear’s diversity is celebrated here in James Williams’s polychromatic Lear—the “pertinacious peacock,” whose colors spill from landscapes to diaries, poems to letters—while Lear the musician, acutely sensitive to “the emotional dynamics [End Page 221] of sound and silence,” is acknowledged in Sara Lodge’s essay. Even in the lightest works, like the “Nonsense Botany,” Lear’s different talents flow together. And always his work is governed by a riddling sense of time. In Lear’s “Tickia Orologica” (see fig. 1; CN, p. 385), all the flowers tell different times, and some at the top have already shrunk into seed pods ready to burst and disperse: “If you are a dandelion clock, you can cast temporal accuracy to the wind—freedom from time is one of the pleasures of nonsense.”8 Lear wrote in his time, as we read in our time; but we can jump between the two, from the Dickensian “exhibitionism” of Lear discussed by Eliza Haughton-Shaw—rejoicing “in energetic gestures, postures, dances; in spectacular doings and undoings of decorum; in physical performances that take place in the interplay between word and image”—to the way that Paul Muldoon’s poetry finds itself, notes Alex Alonso, “dallying at the fringes of Lear’s nonsense, attracted not only to its playful perversities, its rhyme and unreason, but to the technical virtuosity of its ordering patterns, procedures, and conventions.” When Noreen Masud moves from Lear’s comic cookery to his deep sense of “impassable remnants,” this is a pointer not only to the way that he writes and feels but to the way we read and respond. Lear’s poetics, Masud writes, “revolve around a bustling using up of leftovers—but in doing so, they frame more acutely the astonishment of finding something still, starkly, remaining.” ________ This time-traveling in reading, and the fact that I am writing an afterword make me puzzle about Lear and time, public, private, and poetic. Beyond objective time, the cycle of sun and moon, the turning Earth...

Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology by Irving Massey

 Reviews in the ‘event’ of laughter. e Conclusion addresses competing interpretations of ‘anti-fascist’ laughter and the possibility of a ‘history of laughter’ in view of the model. eoretical material is rich and absorbing though some examples are more convincing than others—Punch and Judy, for instance, as opposed to Love’s Labour’s Lost. e book demonstrates laughter’s ideological stakes clearly but the idea that subject positions are ‘created anew’ (p. ) into ‘new hierarchies’ (p. ) by laughter will be more controversial. Unfortunately, a considerable number of typos get in the way of Bown’s lively prose. ose things aside, this is an ambitious and valuable addition to the field of humour studies because it takes laughter seriously by modelling its ideological import. D U D D Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology. By I M- . Columbus: Ohio State University Press. . viii+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Nonsense is a subject that scholars have turned to with increasing frequency in the last decades: global politics has perhaps put our faith in the rational under strain. While few accounts escape a mention of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, the field is generally interdisciplinary, taking in psychology, philosophy, cognitive studies, and linguistics. So it comes as some surprise that Irving Massey’s new book on the topic not only admits to not having read the most recent studies, but finds cause for alarm, rather than delight, at these rich new conversations: ‘my consternation on encountering the title [. . .] can only be imagined’ (p. ), he notes of Ben-Ami Scharfstein’s e Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), only half in jest. e range of writers, forms, disciplines, and arguments the topic allows can be liberating and daunting: nonsense is not a subject offering obvious structures, approaches, or conclusions. Massey moves from earlier chapters on nonsense and perspective, and the relationship between inspiration and fanaticism, to the relationship between nonsense and automaticity. He paints an ambitious canvas, and the book is rich with incidental detail. We learn about the reception of Kant in England via Madame de Staël, the rich new readings that poems by Marvell and Herbert can produce when the ‘lens’ of nonsense is applied, and how Lefebvre’s and Hills Millers’ work on metaphor can help us reframe our understanding of nonsense. ere is a particularly impressive account of what Massey terms ‘perceptual nonsense’, pitching Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘inscape’ and Lear’s limericks alongside the field of neuroaesthetics. Despite the range, Massey’s project returns most oen to poetry, and the language games or gems its figurative world permits . ere is an acknowledgement of Matthew Bevis and James Williams’s recent Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), and Massey’s ideas have particular currency for thinking about Lear’s work. MLR, .,   Nonsense theorists must oen grapple with problems of tone and form: how can a scholarly study track the digressive, playful, or contradictory nature of nonsense while shaping a coherent argument? Massey offers his readers a range of ploys: his second chapter, on metaphor and nonsense, includes his own notes, compiled over forty years and complete with highlighted text, and instructions to ‘skip the most awkward passages’ (p. ). Elsewhere, there are digressions, sustained analogies between clouds and sentences, Kant’s notion of beauty pinned onto the everyday, and some striking insights on the relationship between nonsense and ritual. Yet this levity is absent at other moments. Perhaps the necessary unease that writers must have when their subject is nonsense is notable in the implicit moral judgement which hovers throughout the chapters: Massey counters his own ‘downright offensive’ (p. ) accusation that Keats’s poetry might have something to tell us on the subject. Consideration of the moral or ethical grounds of the category would have been a welcome addition. Massey’s project is wonderfully capacious and discursive, and any study of nonsense worthy of the name must balance its interdisciplinary demands with the topic’s call to play. If the open-ended and provisional chapter structures sometimes make it hard to shape a developing argument, they have much to tell us about Hamlet’s clouds. U  S...

Obrazy niepowagi: O tłumaczeniu poezji nonsensu na przykładzie wiersza The Akond of Swat Edwarda Leara

Images of Irreverence: Nonsense Poetry in Translation as Exemplified by Edward Lear’s Poem The Akond of Swat The paper deals with selected “rewritings” of Edward Lear’s nonsense poem The Akond of Swat, focusing specifically on the translators’, illustrators’, adapters’ and editors’ attitudes towards the allusive nature of the poem – the reference it makes to the historical figure of the Pashtun religious leader Abdul Ghaffūr, also known as the Akond (or Wali) of Swat or Saidū Bābā, which may be viewed as problematic from a postcolonial viewpoint. Recent translated and illustrated versions of the poem inscribe it with new aesthetic and ideological values. Two Polish translations considered in the paper, produced by Andrzej Nowicki and Stanisław Barańczak respectively, demonstrate changing approaches to the nonsense genre displayed in Polish literary circles (gradual transition from pure to parodistic nonsense). Graphic representations of the poem discussed in the paper testify to the artists’ interpretive powers in redefining the genre of Lear’s poem: rebranding it as an infantile fairy tale on the one hand and a disturbing reflection on tyranny and “the war on terrorism” on the other.

The One, Other, and Only Dickens by Garrett Stewart

Reviewed by: The One, Other, and Only Dickens by Garrett Stewart Benjamin Westwood (bio) Garrett Stewart. The One, Other, and Only Dickens. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2018. Pp. xxv + 216. $22.95. ISBN: 9781501730139. In Edward Lear’s “Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos,” the happy couple begin making their home on top of a high wall, only for the latter to exclaim: “Oh! W! X! Y! Z! | It has just come into my head – | Suppose we should happen to fall! ! ! ! ! | Darling Mr. Discobbolos.” Lear’s nonsense, remote as it may seem from the matter at hand, epitomizes something of the thrust of Garrett Stewart’s latest book. As the exclamatory “Oh!” is transformed retrospectively into the letter O – a shift prompted by the following letters (“W! X! Y! Z!”) – there is a slippage between the individual graphemes with which written language is built and the expressive potential of the human voice; we hear, almost simultaneously, the letter and the word. This, in a way, is how Stewart proposes to come to terms with Dickens’s style in The One, Other, and Only Dickens. Dickens has been the subject of one other of Stewart’s books (Dickens and the Trials of Imagination, 1975), but in other ways his distinctive body of criticism on narrative fiction has always been energized by confrontations with Dickens’s prose. At heart, this is an attempt to find new ways of coming to terms with Dickens’s style – what Graham Greene famously termed Dickens’s “secret prose” (to the unpacking of which phrase Stewart devotes the second chapter). Stewart’s methodology for transcribing the punning musicality of Dickens’s prose is one that he has made his own from his earliest books: a granular approach that slows down the reading time and traces the way individual words and letters shift and recur through certain passages. In Stewart’s hands, letters and syllables take on something of the quality of notes in a musical scale. The main argument of the book, though, is that two of the most important influences on Dickens’s writerly sensibility are shorthand and Shakespeare (an alliterative pairing that no doubt played pleasingly on Stewart’s ear). In tracing the ripples of these two influences through the grain of Dickens’s prose, Stewart contends that another aspect of Dickens’s linguistic psyche comes into view. Or we might rather say an Other aspect, for this “Other Dickens” is the main subject of the book. Its close (very close) readings set out to discover for Stewart’s readers a kind of shadow Dickens, cloaked in the verbal and phonetic filigree of Dickens’s linguistic exuberance. This Other Dickens is best thought of, suggests Stewart, as a version of [End Page 67] Dickens’s “phonetic unconscious” (xvi), a kind of linguistic id that is both created and revealed by the grain and texture of Dickens’s language. He might be thought of as an anarchic counterbalance, at the micro level, to a sentimentality and domestic coziness that more readily appears at the level of Dickens’s plots. This idea of the One Dickens and the Other Dickens therefore gives Stewart a kind of shorthand for expressing a tension between the “microplots” of sound and syllable and the broader narrative structure – an argument that will be familiar to readers of Stewart’s Novel Violence: Towards a Narratography of Fiction (2009). Dickens’s readers, though, have long discerned the importance of tension, contradiction and paradox to his writing – think, for instance, of Wilson’s “The Two Scrooges” – and so it isn’t altogether clear that Stewart’s psychoanalytic-trinitarian approach to Dickens (One, Other, and Only) affords him a kind of heuristic purchase that wasn’t already available. The occasion or reason for the book – as Stewart himself admits – is a “considered inkling” (108) regarding the roots of Dickens’s inimitable style. The hunch is that Dickens’s early learning of stenographic shorthand in his brief career as a court reporter shaped the timbre and dynamics of his prose. The system Dickens used (Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy) omitted vowels, and registered consonants with a system of lines and curves, from which Stewart draws three conclusions: first...

A IMPORTÂNCIA DO TEXTO LITERÁRIO

Partindo das propostas das Diretrizes Curriculares no Paraná (2008), no que se refere à Língua Estrangeira Moderna para o Ensino Médio, podemos observar que o texto é o pressuposto inicial para explorarmos as quatro práticas discursivas (oralidade, compreensão auditiva, escrita e leitura). O texto literário assume um papel importante na busca pela formação de um sujeito cidadão com competência criativa, consciente social e culturalmente, oportunizando ao aluno uma nova maneira de repensar a sociedade e o mundo. A diversidade de gêneros textuais apresentados aos alunos possibilita a percepção das diferenças estruturais, além de abranger o pensamento humano, a emoção e a experiência. Dentre os gêneros textuais a serem percorridos, sugere-se resgatar os textos literários por possibilitarem a formação de indivíduos críticos capazes de interagir socialmente. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo relatar uma aula de Língua Inglesa para o último ano de um curso do técnico integrado ao Ensino Médio no Instituto Federal do Paraná (IFPR), em que se exploraram os limeriques de Edward Lear, um gênero pouco conhecido nas nossas salas de aula de Língua Estrangeira, mas com grandes possibilidades de realização de um trabalho divertido e envolvente, ampliando a competência comunicativa dos discentes no processo de aprendizagem da língua inglesa. Além disso, pretende-se também conscientizar os professores de Língua Inglesa, do Ensino Médio, quanto à importância de se trabalhar com o texto literário.

The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, edited by Amber K. Regis

Reviewed by: The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition ed. by Amber K. Regis Richard A. Kaye (bio) The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, edited by Amber K. Regis; pp. xx + 587. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, £79.69, £27.99 paper, $100.00, $39.99 paper. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, edited by Amber K. Regis, indirectly highlights one of the ironies of Victorian literary history as it intersected with the history of sexual attitudes—namely, that, while Oscar Wilde is the nineteenth-century British writer who today is most associated with the candid expression of male same-sex desire, the writer of the era who actually bequeathed to posterity the most self-revealing account of homosexuality is John Addington Symonds, author of the largely forgotten seven-volume The Renaissance in Italy (1875), now out-of-print biographies of Michelangelo and Walt Whitman, and posthumously published Memoirs (1984). This edition reproduces the latter text, written over a four-year period between 1889 and 1893 and detailing Symonds’s conflicted feelings for other men and his academic and literary ambitions. Symonds’s Memoirs reveal boyhood ordeals, erotic obsessions, and illicit adult relationships that do not so much deviate from conventional married life as uneasily consort with it. “I have written things you would not like to read,” Symonds once informed his wife, Catherine, as if the act of writing were the primary transgression and not the sexual illicitness that the Memoirs so meticulously detailed (17). A friend of Edward Lear, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Sidgwick family, Benjamin Jowett, Edmund Gosse, Leslie Stephen, and Margot Asquith, as well as a father of four daughters, Symonds held a central place in Victorian letters. Yet it is his Memoirs, with their revelations of a robust and secret erotic life as the lover of men, which have the greatest claim on contemporary attention. Unsealed in 1949, they were first published by Random House in 1984 in a handsome trade edition edited by Symonds’s earliest twentieth-century biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, whose 1964 The Woeful Victorian: A [End Page 691] Biography of John Addington Symonds was an earnestly psychoanalytic attempt at understanding Symonds’s erotic conundrums. That Grosskurth was only permitted to paraphrase passages from the Memoirs indicates how incendiary his descendants (and the London Library, to which Symonds’s first biographer Horatio Brown bequeathed the manuscript) considered its contents. While Grosskurth’s 1984 edition claimed to reproduce four-fifths of the manuscript held in the British Library, Sarah J. Heidt revealed in a 2003 article in Victorian Studies that Grosskurth in fact had excluded about a third—53,000 of some 160,000 words (what Grosskurth characterized as “execrable poetry and . . . self-conscious nature descriptions”) (The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, Grosskurth, edited by Phyllis Grosskurth [Random House, 1984], 11). Heidt worried that the complex “heterogeneity” of the manuscript—which includes early letters and diary entries, some corrected in ink or pencil, several of them pasted in—was occluded in the 1984 edition, a problem exasperated by Grosskurth’s failure to indicate through ellipses where excisions were made (“‘Let JAS words stand’: Publishing John Addington Symonds’s Desires,” Victorian Studies 46.1 [2003], 14). Heidt argued, too, that Grosskurth was fixated on a conception of Symonds as harboring a true, “internal nature” and thus was inattentive to the many ways in which his sense of self was shaped by the views of others (19). In her introduction, the editor of the new edition, Amber K. Regis, acknowledges the force of Heidt’s critique but also stresses that “incompleteness is an essential feature of the Memoirs” even though it is the first to reproduce the surviving manuscript, given that there are missing pages (16). With its informative critical commentary, extensive notes, illuminating appendices, and photographs of several manuscript pages as well as of Symonds’s family, friends, and at least one lover, the version edited by Regis is a superb, editorially expansive edition. The appendices go especially far in enhancing one’s understanding of Symonds, particularly his history of his erotic life that appeared in Sexual Inversion (1896), his account of the...

에드워드 고리의 작품에 나타난 일러스트레이션의 특징 - 보고 논문 -

Edward Gorey authored more than 100 books and illustrated more than 60 books for other authors such as Edward Lear and Samuel Beckett. Moreover, Gorey was interested in building a career in theatre. Therefore, he designed sets and costumes for Dracula, which was a Broadway hit in 1977. In spite of his tremendous volume of achievements, it is hard to find his research materials. Therefore, this study will explore Edward Gorey’s career. First, Gorey’s background will be examined. Second, a variety of episodes will be described in his life, including the initial phase of his work, his method of work and his drawings. Then, his typography and masterpieces will be mentioned. Finally, the works of Tim Burton, who was inspired the most by Edward Gorey, will be explained. Through this study, the research basis of Edward Gorey’s illustration would be formed.

Edward Lear

Edward Lear has secured a prominent position in the history of literature and travel writing thanks to his nonsense books and his journals; he is considered one of the most innovative zoological illustrators of the nineteenth century and is being rediscovered as a landscape painter in watercolour and oil. This article argues that he also deserves to be remembered among the precursors of modern comic art. His picture stories, though never published in his lifetime, represent an early instance of autobiographical graphic narrative, while his limericks, never out of print since 1861, introduced a radically innovative caricatural style and a conception of the relationship between pictures and text that strongly influenced modern comic artists.

Romantic Poetry and Victorian Nonsense Poetry: Some Directions of Travel

This essay explores links between Victorian nonsense poetry and poetry of the Romantic period, with a focus on narratives of quest, voyaging and escape. It discusses brief instances from various writers of the two periods and moves on to a more developed comparison between Wordsworth and Edward Lear, centring on ‘The Blind Highland Boy’. The comparison between periods leads to an argument that self-critique and scepticism were quite robustly in place from the start in the Romantic period, and that obstacles to sense could at times be experienced not just as perplexity but as enjoyment shared with an audience. It also points to a further appreciation of some of the less canonical works by the most canonical writers, and suggests a tradition in which Romantic aspiration was often coolly linked to a sense of absurdity.

Actantial Models in the Owl and the Pussy-cat: A Narrative Scheme on Poem

The study entitled "Actantial Model in The Owl and The Pussy Cat by Edward Lear: A Narrative Scheme on Poem " revealed a narration scheme to find out three models in narration text, namely the function model, action model, and narration model realized in the poem. The approach used to solve the problem is a structuralism approach by using Greimas' Actant theoretical base. The method of data collection in this study is objective literary research. Presentation of data processing is a report using the qualitative description design. The benefits of this study are expected to be one of the developments in literary studies, especially the study of poetic literary works for future students, teachers, researchers and literary critics. The results of this study are the discussion of narration schemes, which consist of the functional model, action model, and narration model of the poem.

Modalities of translating nonsense

ABSTRACTThe essay deals with the paradox of translating nonsense texts: how can one translate a text that is devoid of meaning? And yet, surely, text being written in a recognizable natural language (there is such a thing as English nonsense) can be translated. The essay considers a proto-lettrist poem by Morgenstern, a nonsense letter by Edward Lear, and a series of translations of the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky”: first Carroll’s own youthful translation into “literal English”, then a number of French translations, culminating in the “perfect” translation by Henri Parisot and Artaud’s famous non-translation in his “anti-grammatical attempt against Lewis Carroll”. The translations are analyzed using various combinations of grammatical modalities and negation (“you cannot translate nonsense and yet you must”, etc.). Their sequence forms a gradient that goes from non-translation (Morgenstern’s poem cannot be translated insofar as it is always-already translated) to Artaud’s non-translation, which might be more properly called an “un-translation”.

O livro infantil ilustrado: a produção nonsense de Edward Lear (1812-1888) e Edward Gorey (1925-2000)

This essay explored the relationship between word and picture in the configuration of the children’s picture book by Edward Lear and Edward Gorey, having as its basis two previously selected works: Viagem numa peneira (2011), the Brazilian edition that is analyzed side by side with the original A book of nonsense, published in 1846, both by Edward Lear, and The epiplectic bicycle (1969), by Edward Gorey. The works were analyzed in light of the concepts of image according to Wolff (2005), of text and image according to Necyk (2007), of picture book according to Linden (2011), of relationship between image and word by Nikolajeva and Scott (2011), of nonsense literature according to Sewell (1952), as of a comparative methodology, emphasizing its similarities and differences in the contexts to which the authors belonged to. The development of our reflection positions Gorey as heir to the production of Lear and as author of children’s picture books in connection with the contemporary nonsense. positions Gorey as heir to the production of Lear and as author of children’s picture books in connection with the contemporary nonsense.

Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830–1930 by Shilpa Bhat Daithota

Reviewed by: Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830–1930 by Shilpa Bhat Daithota Sharon Smulders (bio) Shilpa Bhat Daithota. Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830–1930. Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxxi, 103. US$90.00. Shilpa Bhat Daithota’s Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830–1930 is the most recent installment in Lexington Books’ series Children and Youth in Popular Culture. It examines the impact that Eurocentric discourses had on colonial children’s literature during the century preceding the Purna Swaraj Declaration (1930), which heralded the advent of political independence in India. Interested in the allegorical nature of animal stories, Daithota understands nineteenth-century children’s literature as legitimizing Western economic and cultural hegemony, both by mythologizing British imperial adventure and by dehumanizing indigenous Indians. Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives explores how animal imagery rehearsed “tropes of the ‘sub-human native’” (xx), indulged in racist domination as a pleasure, and encouraged young Britons to envision the colonial subjugation of India “as a vocation” (xxi). One strength of the monograph rests in the variety of materials Daithota considers “to understand the psychosis of whiteness that ran as an undercur-rent in the literature of the period” (xxx). Surveying exhibition pamphlets, alphabet books, nonsense poems, didactic tales, and adventure novels, she [End Page 174] examines the work of an eclectic range of imperial propagandists, including Mary Frances (Mrs. Ernest) Ames, Edward Lear, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, G. A. Henty, Alma Buley, Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edith Nesbit, Barbara Hofland, and Sara Jeanette Duncan. One rather surprising omission, however, is Helen Bannerman, whose first book, Little Black Sambo (1899), likely owes something to Goodrich’s “The Umbrella and the Tiger” in Peter Parley’s Short Stories for Long Nights (1837). In addition, while Daithota notes that Goodrich is American and Duncan Canadian, she does not similarly position Ames as Canadian or Buley as Australian. This oversight is a missed opportunity since it obscures the extent to which white colonists globally imagined India in children’s literature. Her discussion of several works would be enriched, moreover, by contextualizing their authors’ familiarity (or lack thereof) with South Asia. For example, The Jungle Book (1894), though written in Vermont, was informed by Kipling’s first-hand knowledge of India, where he spent the first five years of his life and where he later returned to work as a journalist. Given this experience, Kipling’s attitude toward India unsurprisingly possesses a complexity that differs from that of Burnett who, although she “neither visited India nor came from a family with Indian connections” (Buettner 27), chose to begin The Secret Garden (1888) and A Little Princess (1909) in the east. Similarly, some consideration of Lear’s own experience as a traveler would help to provide a more nuanced analysis of “The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World” which, appearing in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (1872), was published a few years before the painter embarked on the thirteen-month tour of the subcontinent documented in his Indian journal. As Ann Colley notes, Lear benefited significantly from acts of imperial power and control in his artistic career, but in his work for children, he also satirized the trophy-taking impetus “to show off colonial authority” (90) and “tame the exotic other by converting it into a domestic commodity” (91). Taking a chapter-by-chapter approach to various genres of colonial children’s literature, Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives implicitly traces young readers’ exposure to imperial ideologies from infancy to adolescence. Since individual chapters often treat texts in reverse chronological order, however, the organization of the whole tends to obfuscate the historical development of Eurocentric discourse from the 1830s to the 1930s. The discussion of imperial primers is typical insofar as Ames’ ABC for Baby Patriots (1899) precedes Colonial Alphabet for the Nursery (1880). Yet although Daithota usefully demonstrates how such works align imperial pedagogies with literacy education, occasional errors detract from the argument. For example, she states that the illustration for “A” (“Army”) in ABC for Baby Patriots shows a [End Page 175] row of “British citizens” arrayed...