English Literary Tradition Research Articles

Educating the Mainland Public

This research focuses on two examples of young adult literature—Young Hunters in Porto Rico; or, the Search for a Lost Treasure, and A Yankee Lad’s Pluck: How Bert Larkin Saved His Father’s Ranch in the Island of Porto Rico—published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate and the syndicate’s league of mass-market imitators immediately following the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898. These imperialistic adventure novels coincided with the U.S. implementation of the doctrine of Americanization, or the American colonial mission to instruct Puerto Ricans in self-government and democratic values in anticipation for some uncertain future form of economic and political sovereignty for the island. Edward Stratemeyer built his vast fiction empire, the publishing house for such series as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, upon imperial romances which glorified the events of the Spanish-American War and presented recently-acquired U.S. territories—such as Puerto Rico—as sites of adventure beyond mainland confines to a predominately male, teenage audience. Borrowing from an English literary tradition, these novels energized young, white, American men to act as willing participants in the imperial imagination while simultaneously instilling in them expectations for Puerto Rican behavior and identity.

“Writing-to the moment”: Narrative Immediacy, Mystical Theology, and the Sanctification of Time in Richard Methley’sRefectorium Salutis

Richard Methley (d. 1527/8), a Carthusian monk in the north of England, wrote a series of mystical treatises in Latin that have received minimal attention from modern scholars. For that reason it has gone unnoticed that in his diary-like work Refectorium salutis (The Refectory of Salvation) Methley employs a quite unusual narrative strategy: he writes down his visionary experiences as they are happening, giving an immediacy to his text that the British literary tradition does not see the likes of until hundreds of years later with the development of the novel and Samuel Richardson’s experimentations with “writing-to the moment.” This essay sets Methley’s own precocious moments of “writing-to the moment” in the context of his text’s coherent program of temporal markers, extending from the liturgical year, to the hours of the Divine Office, to the indivisible instant and the “now” of the eternal present shared by narrator and reader-and God. With the help of Augustine and Paul Ricoeur, this article argues that Methley’s whole chronological system, and especially his narrative immediacy, captures to some extent the eternity of the divine and the time-rupturing mystical unity achieved by Methley in his ecstasies. Such an innovative intersection of literary and theological effects highlights how the Refectorium forces us to rethink a newly elongated history of “writing-to the moment” in terms of the sacred and not just the fictional.

Thinking the Future through Blackness

Thinking the Future through Blackness

Teaching Eighteenth-Century British Literature beyond the Pale

Teaching Eighteenth-Century British Literature beyond the Pale Rebekah Mitsein (bio) In 2017 college students all over the country launched high profile and controversial protests against the tendency to put white art, white culture, and white aesthetics at the center of the humanities classroom. During the now infamous boycott of Humanities 110 at Reed College, for example, students took issue with the fact that the required humanities class focused largely on the translatio studii of intellectual history from the Mediterranean westward. Students argued that the class "perpetuates white supremacy—by centering 'whiteness' as the only required class at Reed."1 Whethe one agrees with these students' tactics, their complaint prodded a sore spot for those of us who teach historical literatures and whose background and training is in specifically Western literary traditions. Although surveys of eighteenth-century literature might include Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative or Phyllis Wheatley's poetry, the discipline is continually haunted by its Eurocentric canon. Even when we are teaching global or colonial texts like Oroonoko or Robinson Crusoe, we often put whiteness at the center of the curriculum, in part because it seems that our authors inevitably put whiteness at the center of their own worlds. In the spring of 2017, I taught an advanced undergraduate seminar called Global Crossroads in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, which I then taught as a graduate seminar in the spring of 2018. In these classes, I experimented with strategies to teach literature written largely by white [End Page 131] British authors from a more global perspective. I paired these canonical texts with material chosen to encourage students to consider how the discourse, narratives, knowledge, aesthetics, or material culture of non-Europeans became central to how eighteenth-century British writers represented the world (table 1). In other words, instead of starting the class from the premise that the British literary tradition invented the way Britons thought about "the global" in the eighteenth century, we examined the ways that global contact created the British literary tradition. This was a time, after all, when British travelers, readers, and writers were pushing their own intellectual, geographical, and cultural boundaries. There is no reason to assume that this global context—and the figures and discourses that animate this global context—did not have an impact on the British literary imagination. The course material I chose to illustrate the scale of these crossroads fell into three broad categories. The first category included global texts to which eighteenth-century Western readers had access, either as translations or epitomes, like the writings of early modern Arabic and North African geographers or the Ethiopian story of the Queen of Sheba retold by Hiob Ludolf and James Bruce. The second category included reports from European travel narratives of local informants describing their own cultures (embedded narratives) and reports of local arts and acts of self-representation (music, ritual, or dancing). The third category included non-alphabetic texts and material culture (art objects, artifacts, maps, textiles, goods created specifically for export to Europe, etc.). The organizational structure of the syllabus classified some texts as Western or British and others through the sweeping oppositional categories of non-Western, or non-European, which was in a way antithetical to the aims of the course; however, this structure also served as a concrete example of the paradigm the course was meant to push against and provided an opportunity to discuss the limitations of well-intentioned multicultural approaches to creating an inclusive reading list, neither of which were self-evident to my students. In other words we were not equipped to fully dispense with such geopolitical binaries, but we practiced recognizing them and then using the course readings, assignments, and discussions to sketch out alternatives to them. Students responded to prompts on Canvas (an online learning management system with a built-in discussion board) that asked them how exposure to this range of materials encouraged them to think differently about the European texts on the syllabus. For example, I paired Oroonoko with a translation of François d'Elbée's description of the luxurious Fon court at Ardra, along with lists of goods published by John Ogilby and Richard Hakluyt that were most...

China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 by Eun Kyung Min

Reviewed by: China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 by Eun Kyung Min Eugenia Zuroski Eun Kyung Min, China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 288; 4 b/w illus. $99.99 cloth. Scholarship of the past two decades has firmly established the global quality of eighteenth-century British culture, political ambition, and self-definition. Eun Kyung Min's China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 reminds us that, in an age when British national identity was being reimagined in a global context, it was impossible to think geographically without simultaneously thinking temporally, and vice versa. Cultural difference marked the relationship not only between England and other nations, but also between England and its own past. While studies of orientalism have demonstrated how the West distinguishes itself by representing Eastern cultures as somehow of a "different time," Min's original study shows how English writers relied on the figure of China to conceive of their own time, and their relationship to it, as well as to place English literature as a tradition in historical perspective. The unconventional historical scope of Min's book aims to illuminate how modernity was conceived, prior to nineteenth-century British imperialism, as a quality of English writing. The "modern" is juxtaposed, in this context, against not the "primitive" but the "ancient." In contrast to the later imperial weaponization of the modern against the peoples Britain sought to colonize, the modernity championed [End Page 529] by its early eighteenth-century enthusiasts found itself pitted against the longstanding cultural standards of classical antiquity. Min wants us to understand that for most of the eighteenth century, while there was a broad and sustained concern with modernity in English letters, there was little consensus on how best to characterize the relationship of "modern" to "ancient," or of "modern" to "English." Nor was there any fixed notion of how being in time was supposed to feel from a modern perspective. Instead, we see various literary experiments engaged in quarrels over cultural value and how best to define it, and over historical time and how best to represent it. What the books shows is that, across different projects, genres, and positions within the debate, it was impossible to have these conversations without invoking a broader global context, and the figure of China in particular. China is written into the project of defining modern English literature through the foundational quarrel between William Temple and William Wotten in the 1690s over the relative merits of ancient versus modern accomplishments. On the side of the ancients, Temple proposed a broad perspective on world history as a "corrective to . . . modern hubris" (21), evoking the extreme antiquity of China to support this call for intellectual humility in the present. Wotton's response in favor of the moderns relied heavily on a condescending mockery of Temple's laudatory claims about China. In the eighteenth century, this quarrel persists but is reframed as one specifically between contemporary English writing and classical human-ism—China and other ancient civilizations beyond Greece and Rome are written out of the question of literary tradition from a British perspective. Yet, Min shows, that broader global historical context, signified so powerfully in the eighteenth-century European imagination by China, remains latent in the emergent category of "English literary modernity," an understanding of literature "imbued with a strong sense of its distance from the classical models, and burdened by a strong need to theorize its own historicity" (38). Ironically, it is Temple—the defender of the ancients—who, in Min's assessment, lays the groundwork for the eighteenth-century cultivation of a distinctly modern English literary tradition through "his interest in non-classical cultures, his theorization of alternative antiquities, [and] his ideas about English national character and the singularity of genius" (46). China, initiated into the "ancients versus moderns" quarrel as a representative of ancient greatness, comes to signify quite differently, helping to frame the capacity of modern English letters to reckon with plurality and cultural difference within its own history as well as in the wider world. The field of eighteenth-century letters this study presents is generically...

No Balm (in) Gilead: Aspects of Cultural Communication in Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” Book Series

Three aspects of cultural communication of Stephen King's “The Dark Tower” book series are discussed in this paper: a literary tradition, a literary genre, and a cultural message. Narrative motives are established as a mean of connection of this book series with some of the classic works of English and European literature, and the whole series is fashioned according to the literary form of the (folk or fairy) tale. The purpose of this is to refer to the idea that a given book series should be viewed as part of English literature and of the English literary tradition. The tale form is used as a mean of categorizing the literary form within a given literary tradition. The third aspect in which the series communicates is the social context in which it was created, and it establishes parallels between states of social stability and instability, order and chaos, wholeness and breakup in the two basic worlds in which the series' action takes place: in our world and in that of the principle protagonist. It aims to emphasize the responsibility of the individual for the functioning of society, since society represents a consensual community of individuals.

Queer Friendship: Male Intimacy in the English Literary Tradition by George E. Haggerty

<i>Queer Friendship: Male Intimacy in the English Literary Tradition</i> by George E. Haggerty

Alison Milbank, God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition

Alison Milbank, <i>God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition</i>

“Having Cleared and Embellished the Earth”: Agricultural Science and Poetic Tradition in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village

Critics have long noted a discrepancy between Canadian landscape and the imported European literary forms early Canadian writers used to describe a young country. Yet, in the early nineteenth century, some parts of the landscape were actively transformed in ways that would seemingly preclude the need for poets to transform their literary inheritance. This essay examines agricultural reform initiatives in Nova Scotia, which included deforestation in the interest of warming the temperature, as espoused in letters published in the Acadian Recorder. Focusing on Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village, the essay locates a poetics at once beholden to English literary tradition and celebratory of indigenous flora and fauna's "native exoticism," both of which embrace a transformation of British North America into some place familiar to settler-colonials. Although the paradigmatic reading of early Canadian literature as struggling to fit English literary forms to a new landscape remains accurate, this reading of The Rising Village demonstrates how that paradigm struggled to gain acceptance.

Lawrence's Female Travellers

In Study of Thomas Hardy, Lawrence rephrases a common trope of the male venture within the unknown of the female (STH 104) an alienating yet fulfilling journey, echoing many representations of travelling by male writers and critics a phallic thrust forward into the world. As critic Karen R. Lawrence states in Penelope Voyages : Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition, the traveller is conventionally portrayed as a male who crosses boundaries and penetrates spaces ; the fem...

Jerusalem and Arabia in Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam

Elizbeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), the first dramatic text authored by a female playwright in the English literary tradition, suggests that Jerusalem shapes the play’s racial, national, ...

The Invention of Style

Style is a rare word in Middle English. It has long been assumed that the concept of a writer's individual or personal style only developed during the early modern period. This paper traces the emergence of style in English writing from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, performing textual analysis at both the macro and the micro level by using computer software (Voyant; Stylo for R; AntConc) in tandem with traditional close reading. Two major databases were deployed: first, a collection of 279 Middle English digital texts assembled by my research assistant, Imogen Forbes-Macphail, and second, the Middle English Glossarial Database created by Professor Larry Benson, which includes lemmatized texts of Chaucer and Gower's English corpora. The results show that the literary sense of "style" is introduced to the English literary tradition by Chaucer, by way of Petrarch, and then more fully explored by Lydgate, especially in his Fall of Princes. Using stylometry software (Stylo for R by M. Eder), the essay shows in a series of graphs how Chaucer and Gower's styles are distinct from one another, using principal components analysis, cluster analysis, a bootstrap consensus tree, and network analysis; these graphs also show a clear distinction between Chaucer's verse and his prose. I suggest that the difference between Chaucer and Gower is related to these writers' explicit gestures toward the "high style" (Chaucer) and the "plain style" (Gower). The final section of the paper returns to the larger question of style as the word appears in the Forbes-Macphail database, investigating more closely the large spike in usage that appears in the fifteenth century in Lydgate's poetry. By examining his use of personal pronouns and adjectives in conjunction with style, I show that Lydgate pioneered the notion of a writer's personal style, in contradistinction to the rhetorical levels of style (high and low) to which Chaucer and Gower refer.

Philip Pirrip as grandes e as perdidas ilusões

Este artigo explora a aclimatação do paradigma do Bildungsroman no âmbito da tradição literária inglesa, discutindo suas ressonâncias no romance Grandes esperanças de Charles Dickens. Argumenta-se que as decisivas mudanças decorrentes dos processos de industrialização e urbanização, assim como a ascensão das classes médias, imprimem traços específicos à narrativa da trajetória do herói, a qual encarna as contradições de seu tempo.

A Revelation of Purgatory

A Revelation of Purgatory

Juvencus' Four Books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor trans. by Scott McGill

Reviewed by: Juvencus' Four Books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor trans. by Scott McGill Michael Dewar Juvencus' Four Books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor. Translated and with an Introduction and Notes Scott McGill London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xii + 308. ISBN 978-0-415-63583-7. "The ELQ is not a great poem," says the author of the first full translation of Juvencus' work into English (26). Detachment is a virtue in scholarship, but to find oneself in the presence of virtue can sometimes be a little unsettling. Why not just put this book down, readers might ask, and go and read a truly gifted poet—Prudentius, say, or Claudian—instead? McGill no doubt trusts that his readers will have the sense to understand that they should at least reward his honesty by finishing the paragraph, which goes on to lay a proper and justified emphasis on Juvencus' importance in the history of literature as the inventor of Biblical epic and as an influential and representative participant in a great cultural shift, "the wider hybridity of Late Antiquity." Read on, then, and learn from both the well-executed translation and the often rich and illuminating notes that, if not a poet of the first rank, Juvencus nonetheless does have some real merits: independence of mind in combining his varied and sometimes discordant sources, a certain daring in his handling of the hexameter, and, most strikingly, a genuine talent for sustained and engaging narrative. Like all the volumes in the Routledge Later Latin Poetry series, whose description makes prominent mention of courses and students, and which promises accessible translations, this new Juvencus assumes very little pre-existing knowledge of the poet and his times. The introduction is therefore appropriately thorough but straightforward, providing such biographical and historical information as a first-time reader will need. Care is taken to establish Juvencus' status as an innovator, but also to demonstrate his poetic ambition: his aim is to give glory to Christ but also to earn fame for himself as a literary pioneer. McGill also sees Juvencus as a radical "agent of change" (13), in that his epic hero overcomes ordeals to win eventual victory, and therefore remains true to the generic model established by his pagan predecessors, and yet is also deeply unlike them, in that he remains unmistakably the socially marginalized religious teacher of the Gospels. The battles and victories of the Son of Man are of a different and still more cosmic kind than those of the son of Anchises. McGill boldly opts to present a verse translation, arguing that to turn verse into prose would be to "undo Juvencus' achievement in turning the Gospels into [End Page 232] poetry" (24). The meter he chooses, the iambic pentameter, is the one he rightly sees as best corresponding in the English literary tradition to the Latin hexameter as the sanctioned vehicle for heroic verse. A third choice, however, complicates the task. The decision to produce as nearly as possible a line-for-line translation must, given the differences in the syntactical structures of the source and target languages and the lower average syllabic count of the English meter, entail compression, which in effect means carefully considered omission. McGill walks this tightrope with delicacy, and though occasionally three lines are reduced to two (e. g., 2.177–79 and 3.498–500), most reductions take the form of the suppression of just one or two words of no great significance for the comprehension of the passage. Now and again, however, some readers who consult the original may think that what is cut out is indeed significant. Juvencus may be "adjective-happy" (2.285 n.) but, as McGill knows, he usually employs adjectives to good purpose (3.513–16, 521, 525–26 nn.), and omitting one may therefore result in some loss of point. At 3.302, for example, molli is not translated, but the adjective is surely not otiose, for Christ is there rebuking Peter "the Rock" for, on that occasion, turning shamefully soft. Similarly, at 4.622 the phrase hoc magis is not translated, but Juvencus is telling us something important: he depicts the Jews as being...

(Un)couth: Chaucer,The Shepheardes Calender, and the Forms of Mediation

This essay elucidates The Shepheardes Calender and its relationship to the Chaucerian past. I argue that the Calender constructs its Chaucer by engaging not only with the works in his corpus itself but also with various Medieval and Renaissance texts that mediated his legacy. In doing so, the Calender fashions an English literary tradition rooted both in a single, preeminent figure and in a multitude of interpretations about him. During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, the interpretations of Chaucer, which I call the “forms of mediation,” are diverse and variable in content. I concentrate here on a small but influential assortment of them: the Tudor editions that printed Chaucer’s works and the poems of Gower and Lydgate that depicted Chaucer’s authorial identity. The Calender incorporates ideas from them into the June eclogue and E. K.’s prefatory epistle. There, they shape the representation of Chaucer and his poetic legacy, and dictate the terms through which Colin and Spenser may succeed to Chaucer’s model. The Calender thus makes poetic succession proceed not according to a path of direct descent but through a circuitous route populated by intermediaries—intermediaries who, as Lydgate and E. K. suggest, themselves share a special characteristic with Chaucer.

The Man of Law’s Reading of Chaucer: The Readers and Scribes of Late Medieval Vernacular Literature

이 논문은 중세 후기 자국어 문학 작품의 생산에 깊이 관여했던 필경사라는 직업을 중심으로 인쇄술이 도입되기 이전 14세기 영국의 매체와 시장의 변화를 역사적으로 접근함으로써 제프리 초서를 비롯한 자국어 작가들의 저자성을 규명한다. 중세 시대에는 하나의 텍스트가 작가 외에도 텍스트의 생산과 유통에 관계된 사람들의 공동 작업의 산물이라는 점에서 시장과 매체의 변화는 작품을 이해하는데 있어서 중요한 요소이다. 저자의 지위는 절대적인 것이 아니며, 인쇄술 도입 이전 자국어 문학 작품의 필사를 담당했던 필경사나 중세 문학 시장의 기능을 수행했던 후원자 혹은 독자 등, 일종의 매체로서 문학 작품의 생산에 관여했던 사람들과의 관계 속에서 끊임없이 타협하고 유동한다. 따라서 중세 후기 자국어 작가의 저자성을 이해하기 위해서는 정부나 의회, 런던 상인 길드에 소속되어 있으면서 자국어 작가들의 작품을 필사했던 중세 후기 필경사들의 활동과, 그들이 속했던 법률가와 상인 등 중산계급 전문직 지식인 독서층의 성장을 탐색하는 작업이 필수적이다. 필경사 집단과 중산층 독자에 대한 이와 같은 역사적 탐구는 초서의 작품에 대한 새로운 해석의 가능성을 제시한다. 자국어 문학에 관심이 많았고, 법에 대한 지식이 풍부했으며, 속인으로서는 보기 드물게 식자층이었던 이들은 초서 작품의 일차적인 독자이자 비평가로 그의 작품의 방향을 제시했다. 이 논문에서는 초서의「법률가의 이야기 도입부」와 「총서시」에 묘사된 순례객 법률가의 모습, 그리고「필경사 애덤에게 보내는 초서의 전언」을 분석하면서 독자층의 변화에 대한 저자의 인식이 뚜렷이 드러나는 1380년대 이후 초서의 작품들과 필경사 집단과의 연관성을 탐색한다.Focusing on late medieval English lay scribes, this paper examines changes of material and social conditions before the introduction of the printing press to understand contemporary ideas about vernacular authorship. The authority of an author was never absolute and constantly under the negotiation between the scribes, readers, and patrons, whose interests and tastes dictated the direction of late medieval English literary tradition. An investigation of the scribes and their association with Westminster and the London Guildhall sheds light on the role played by the middle-class readers who promoted vernacular literary writing. Well-educated and well-equipped with legal knowledge, these professional readers and writers chose and read the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, establishing them as canonical authors. This paper pays particular attention to The Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale , and “Chaucer’s wordes unto Adam, his Owne Scrivener,” while arguing an interrelationship between Chaucer’s later works and the changes of readership.

The Case of Mór Jókai and the Detective Story

While from the viewpoint of typology it is often stated that the genre of detective fiction originated with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, this statement can be challenged from the standpoint of literary or reception history. Several recent histories of detective fiction emphasize the importance of employing a wider generic view, yet they hardly expand their perspective beyond English literary traditions. This paper examines how the usual, theorized requirement for detective fiction concerning the work’s exclusive focus on the crime committed and its detection was not characteristic of nineteenth-century detective stories written in Central Europe. Even though the detective story pattern is recognizable in Mór Jókai’s short story, “A három királyok csillaga” [‘The Star of the Magi’], it does not dominate the entire depiction, but rather represents one strand woven into a tragic love story as well as the history of national resistance, aspects bearing equal significance in this very sophisticated work.

Teaching English Fantasy in the Nineteenth Century Using Alice in Wonderland

This study introduces methods of teaching nineteenth century English fantasy novels using Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland by. Alice in Wonderland has become a part of English literary canon as criticism of life. This work, interesting but serious, is primarily considered as entertainment for children. The novel, however, is ripe with criticism of life that might well fascinate adult readers as well as childeren: conducting a literary experiment inspired by fairy tales, Carroll created an interesting story for children with an eye on human reality. Alice in Wonderland is thus a search for the conditions of human life and a delicate and humorous satire in fairy-tale form. This has enabled the novel to enjoy a large readership to this day and establish itself as a canonical work within the English literary tradition.

British Perceptions of Nordic Peripheries: An Historical Survey

This article offers an historical overview of the various stages and varying significance of the impact of Nordic literature in Britain, from the late 1500s up to Modernism, and a tentative evaluation of the situation over the last hundred years. It focuses especially on the revival of the ancient literature of the North, and how this came to be adopted within the British literary tradition, in, for instance, such genres as the Gothic and the historical novel. The article also emphasises how British travel in the nineteenth century renewed this interest, but created a sentimental perception of the Nordic countries that caused considerable problems the moment these countries, while being perceived as a periphery, brought out a new and avant-garde literature in the late nineteenth century. The focus is thus on British-Nordic literary relations as an interesting example of the tensions between stereotyped ideas of centre and periphery.