Prose Epic Research Articles

Women, Intertextuality, Mobility: Mapping Transcultural Networks in the Fifteenth Century Prose Epic 'Herzog Herpin'

Considering the example of the fifteenth-century prose epic Herzog Herpin, attributed to Elisabeth of Nassau-Saarbrücken, through the lens of Caroline Levine's approach to networks, this essay examines the constitutive role of women in intra- and extra-textual constellations. Herzog Herpin is structured by networks colliding and interacting with each other. The family whose story it follows, the Mediterranean space that condition the movement of family members, and the network of intertextual references to Arthurian and Carolingian materials offer particularly productive examples of forms in which women act as connective agents. In turn, Herzog Herpin's composition is conditioned by the context in which Elisabeth evolves – a dynastic network in which women foster links between courts. Using a network approach to connect the intra- and extra-textual without implying causality, sheds light on a pattern of gender-specific involvement in literature relying on movement and connectivity.

The Nature of Comparison: Macunaíma and Orlando

Abstract Dominant modes for comparing modernist literatures do so by coordinating individual texts against a larger narrative of modernity conceived as economic or political globalization. This article proposes an alternative premise for comparison. Instead of focusing on development, it considers the ways in which different national modernisms registered a changing modernity in terms of nature and natural history. This switch is demanded by two texts that bear a number of thematic and conceptual similarities and were published months apart in 1928: Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma and Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Both works rethink Darwinism's import for national representation by adapting the genre of the national romance or prose epic. They come to offer a sense of nations as living or organic in queer and unexpected ways. Tracing this process in relation also to the context of rising fascism, the article sheds light on modernist views of nature and their heuristic value as a basis for comparison.

No meio desta prosa atual, um poema épico

Resumo: No presente artigo, o interesse é percorrer as referências à épica na prosa machadiana. O ponto de partida é a atuação crítica de Machado de Assis, chamado a debater as tentativas de poesia épica, principalmente nos anos de 1860. A crônica machadiana incorpora as referências épicas, em termos elevados, para ironizar a precariedade do cotidiano fluminense. No romance e no conto, a referência à épica também se apresenta enquanto ironia a personagens e ações rebaixadas. De certo modo, o crítico aprendeu o campo literário e o lugar da poesia épica no Brasil. O ficcionista, por sua vez, fez uma prosa em que o discurso incorpora os autores da tradição, as cenas e as personagens épicas, mas apenas no vocabulário. Esse descompasso entre cenas e discurso narrativo indica a impossibilidade da ação heroica, revelando uma prosa moderna, que rompe com a tradição épica.

LYRICAL AWKWARDNESS

The stylistic quirkiness of Ulysses is not only inconceivable but also unfathomable. The meanderings of speech from the opacity of narrative through chunks of silent thought to adopted discursive conventions do not leave the reader with the impression that they are facing a transparent narrative. On the contrary, the prose epic of Ulysses subverts expectations concerning “mood”, voice and discursive conventions, yielding threads of lyrically opaque speech. As these threads intertwine and cut across one another, a poetic fabric develops that diverts attention to itself and reveals how prose can foster lyrical foregrounding. The “Eumaeus” episode presents textual constructions that employ marked conventions of speech and eminent syntactic arrangements besides the indeterminacy of “mood” and voice to defamiliarize correlations of perception, thought and emotion. Accordingly, the work demonstrates that the thickly woven opacity of a multifarious fabric is indeed capable of leaving a lyrically subtle imprint on the attentive reader.

General Materials

General Materials Albert D. Pionke (bio) In this year of pandemic library closures, frustrated interlibrary loan requests, and nonexistent campus mail service, four books are featured in the general materials section. All monographs, each manifests an interest in the intersection of literary form with aesthetic, intellectual, material, political, regional, or theological history. Identifying a “key role” for the “nineteenth-century study of language” in the “emergence of popular sovereignty” during the period between the First (1832) and Third (1884) Reform Acts, Barbara Barrow’s Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry: Political Dialects (London: Routledge, 2019) proposes that Victorian poetry’s “lack of orderliness, its passages where poetic language spills over or exceeds its meter or formal confines,” be understood as philologically inflected interventions designed “to make visible the blind spots and exclusion of liberal reform” (p. 2). Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (1861)—which asserts a concurrence between political revolution and linguistic rejuvenation—provides an initial warrant for the book’s “nexus between language, philology, and politics,” itself first explored by means, not of a poem, but of Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 “experimental epic in prose,” The French Revolution (pp. 5, 6). Barrow retraces the text’s at times stylistically excessive engagement with the Revolution-era theories of language articulated within John Horne Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley (1786), Noah Webster’s Dissertations on the English Language (1789) and “Preface” to An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Panorama of Paris (1781–1788) and The New Paris (1789), arguing that “Carlyle’s positioning of the revolutionaries as a source of untapped, embodied potential paradoxically sets the terms for a Victorian conception of the modern polity” (p. 23). Poetic responses to Carlyle’s example, to later iterations of philological theory, and to the politics of ongoing franchise reform occupy the book’s four chapters, each of which addresses carefully selected works by one of the period’s major poets. Chapter 1 focuses on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s incorporation of the language theories of John Locke and Étienne de Condillac in An [End Page 315] Essay on Mind (1826), A Drama of Exile (1844), and, most importantly, Aurora Leigh (1856) in order to create “a bodiless poetry as a symbolic expression of women’s exclusion from the reformed electorate” (p. 33). Chapter 2 then reinterprets Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) as a “challenge [to] the democratic pretenses of mid-Victorian philology” during the period of the Second Reform Act (1867) and Richard Chenevix Trench’s early work on what would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary (p. 70). According to Barrow, Browning “refuses any easy consensus of the demos as imagined by Trench, showing how forms of mass consensus can perpetuate a dangerous and deadly collectivity—as in the growth of empire—as well as overlook those subjects still excluded from the political and social benefits of the reforming state” (p. 88). In chapter 3, Barrow devotes prolonged attention to Alfred Tennyson’s Maud (1855) and Idylls of the King (1859–1885), arguing that through “sound patterns, metonymic substitutions, and lupine and canine imagery, Tennyson subtly challenges the use of philology and evolutionary science as a model for British imperial sovereignty” (p. 95). The line between human and animal language appears increasingly porous in both works, exposing, in Maud, “the irresolvable crisis of Victorian class relations,” and, in Idylls, “the advent and decline of empire as a cycle of evolution from, and degeneration into, brutes” (p. 109). Finally, chapter 4 argues that Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and Present (1901) “challenge the metropolitan appropriation of rural speechways into a unified vision of the nation that followed the passage of the 1884 Reform Act” (p. 127). Barrow’s short reading of “Her Dilemma” (pp. 136–137) provides what is, perhaps, the book’s best example of the interanimating relationship between metrical irregularity, word choice, and an inferable resistance to both contemporary philological theory and overly optimistic assessments of the effects of electoral reform. Whether a wider selection of poems and/or poets would sustain the correspondence between Victorian...

Rewriting the Mabinogi

ABSTRACTThe Mabinogion has influenced authors ever since Lady Charlotte Guest’s nineteenth-century translation. In this paper, I reflect on my own 2017 poetic sequence The Mabinogi (Faber, 2017), based on the first four tales, ‘The Four Branches of the Mabinogi’, and discuss the challenges I faced in adapting this medieval prose epic for a contemporary poetry audience. I compare my version with literary adaptations by Saunders Lewis, Alan Garner and Gwyneth Lewis, demonstrating how the meaning of the text changes with each revision, while retaining the qualities of magic and fantasy that account for its enduring popularity.

The Collected Poems of Anna Seward by Anna Seward

Reviewed by: The Collected Poems of Anna Seward by Anna Seward Claudia Thomas Kairoff Anna Seward, The Collected Poems of Anna Seward. Ed. Lisa L. Moore. 2 vols. The Pickering Masters (London: Routledge, 2016). Pp. 688. $385.00. More than a century after Walter Scott published his seriously flawed, three-volume edition of The Poetical Works of Anna Seward in 1810, Lisa L. Moore has produced a much-needed collection of Seward’s poems that should be welcomed by all students and scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era writing. Moore has corrected many of Scott’s editorial offenses, and while hers is not the complete, critical edition that Seward devotees might wish for, this collection makes possible the kind of critical discussions previously almost impossible due to the scarcity of Scott’s publication and Seward’s disappearance from many recent anthologies. Moore has gathered over 370 poems, including a previously unpublished three-book manuscript, Telemachus, the only completed portion of Seward’s intended versification of Fenelon’s prose epic. Known at present chiefly through sparse reprintings in anthologies, or discussions of her work in scholarly books and articles, Seward’s canon resembles the elephant described by three blind men stationed at different parts of his body. Was she an early advocate of environmentalism? A celebrator of women’s domestic crafts? Did she write lesbian verse, or did the passionate poems about her foster sister reflect a deep familial, even quasi-maternal, love? Was Seward’s verse more Augustan or more Romantic? The broad scope of the poems arrayed here presents evidence for multiple critical assessments. Seward’s incomplete Telemachus represents one pole of a career that encompassed every type of verse popular throughout her lifetime, including occasional tributes, songs, elegies, a verse-novel, and odes. Seward may be best known today for her role in the late-century “sonnet revival,” and here we find all one hundred of her Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), as well as other sonnets published elsewhere. Their inclusion among so many other poems confirms the basis of Seward’s claim to preeminence among sonnet-writers, her mastery of English poetic form and technique. [End Page 127] Among Moore’s most valuable contributions is her concise but informative introduction. In just over twenty pages, she narrates the chief facts of Seward’s life and discusses numerous critical issues, such as the poet’s chief influences, her American reception, her sonnet revival role, her poetics, and her relationships with other contemporary writers. Each of these topics not only points the way toward further exploration but also suggests scholarly opportunities. Among the main virtues of Moore’s introduction is an absence: the omission of Scott’s patronizing tone and ambivalence, which apparently locked following biographers and critics into a pose of condescension—or, at best, a kind of aporia—for over a century. Building instead on Teresa Barnard’s recent biography and on less biased recent scholarship, Moore may have definitively released Seward from her “Sleeping Beauty”–like critical swoon. Moore describes her discovery of the surprising extent to which Scott interfered with Seward’s poems during their publishing. Two years before her death in 1809, Seward mailed Scott her poems, already prepared for posthumous publication. Seward believed she was honoring Scott by entrusting him with the task. Instead, the harassed young editor-writer disparaged Seward’s verse in his correspondence and omitted publication of Telemachus, which Seward considered her masterpiece although she never published the epic fragment. Moore found the Telemachus manuscript at the National Library of Scotland (another copy remains at the Johnson Birthplace Museum in Lichfield), where it was likely preserved while the rest of Seward’s poems were discarded after printing. Scott’s decision not to print a poem so highly esteemed by Seward is puzzling, but more discouraging is Moore’s revelation of the extent to which he tampered with her other poems. Moore discovered one surviving poem from the vanished manuscript, a previously published “Elegy Addressed to the Rev. Thomas Sedgewick Whalley” that Seward had retitled “Last Lay of the Lichfield Minstrel” in playful allusion to Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Scott restored the poem’s original...

The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo (review)

Reviewed by: The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo Logan Esdale Catherine Morley. The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. New York: Routledge, 2009. viii + 218 pp. For The Quest for Epic, Catherine Morley selected three American novelists who were born in the Depression and came of age in the 1950s, a decade of (as she says) profound national “myth-making” (144). John Updike was born in 1932, Philip Roth in 1933, and Don DeLillo in 1936. Their lives’ work attracted Morley because it covers the last half century of American history, from the beginning of the Cold War to millennial reflections. Midcentury mythmakers asserted the nation’s autonomy and uniformity, with the white male as its representative figure, its hero. By century’s close, however, America could not ignore its pluralist and global aspects. Above all, Morley is looking for “an evolving rather than static national consciousness” (75). While Updike, Roth, and (to a much lesser extent) DeLillo put their backs to the national border and documented everyday American life, they also, Morley argues, gave their work a transnational identity. There are nine texts under consideration, five by Updike—the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom series (published in 1960published in 1971published in 1981published in 1990, and 2000)—a Roth trilogy with Nathan Zuckerman as narrator—American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—and DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). The series, trilogy, [End Page 627] and novel ultimately have transnational identities because they follow the epic tradition of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Morley recognizes the “home-grown influences on their work,” Emerson’s in particular, but she focuses on how they “transformed the American epic by imbibing and re-working aspects of the Joycean epic” (33). “Genre transcends the national,” she says (32). Morley’s argument hinges on showing this Joycean influence and the extent to which these novels are rightly called prose epics, and in this regard she succeeds. As the “genre most associated with the national” (36), she writes, the epic enables “the nation to recognise itself” (44). However, while the epic is “locally and nationally specific,” it also “includes remnants and textures of other cultural edifices” (18). The epic remains what it was centuries ago, “the ‘book of the tribe’, a chronicle rooted in communal experience” (54), but it now also includes “those forbidden ‘true stories’ which have been systematically suppressed and omitted from the official, homogenous histories of nations” (47). Whether in poetry or prose, the epic is a “palimpsest” with allusions to a diversity of sources, from old plays and poems to recent newspapers and songs (150). The prose epic in Morley’s definition is thus a paradox, its inclusiveness making it both a “means of nation-building” (126) and an ideal genre for “destabilising” the nation-state (17). This genre not only transcends the national “on the strength of the number and sophistication of its generic crosscurrents” (29), it pluralizes national identity by telling a “popular history” (47). And although the modern epic continues to be “a predominantly masculine genre,” its hero is presented ironically (6). With Leopold Bloom in Ulysses as exemplar, the questing hero is mired in unexalted, domestic realities and is unknown in the public arena (67). Time ticks on without redemption or enlightenment in the conclusion. Moreover, the hero-protagonist is not a true-blood citizen: Bloom is Hungarian-Irish, Zuckerman is Jewish-American, and Nick Shay in Underworld is Italian-American. From this perspective “he writes himself into the larger world,” as DeLillo has said (qtd. in Morley 137). In short, the hyphenated identity of the epics’ heroes echo the mixed identity of the genre and the nation. American novelists are therefore drawn to the prose epic because of its “democratic sensibilities” and because it demands full reflection on the state of the nation (4). The writer’s historicizing abilities are tested. Morley asks whether, as their careers evolved, Updike and Roth were able to transcend the 1950s, that time when a “distinctly American canon as a response to matters of foreign policy” was formulated...

Alchemists, Epics, and Heroes: The Rhetorical Construction of the Seventeenth Century Experimental Philosopher

This dissertation contributes to the cultural study of the history of science by examining the rhetorical construction of seventeenth century natural philosophy and natural philosophers in a literary context. I offer as the heart of my study an original interpretation of Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society as a prose epic. The way in which Sprat incorporates epic tropes such as the in medias res opening, the invocation and re-invocations of his muse, the epic journey and quest, the divine intervention in the human world, and the epic flashback reveals that the History actively participates not only in the seventeenth century revision of the epic genre, but also in the reshaping of seventeenth century English cultural values. The chapters surrounding my reading of the History illustrate two very different rhetorical strategies that were used to explain and legitimize the character of the new experimentalist. The first strategy attempted to use comparisons and contrasts between the experimentalist and the alchemist. This strategy was ultimately unsuccessful in that it could yield for the experimental philosophers a cultural reputation that was only as variable and as unstable as that of the alchemist himself. The second and ultimately successful rhetorical strategy drew parallels between the experimentalist and the epic hero in terms of their growth and prowess, masculine asexuality, and distinctive linguistic style, and between the experimental and the heroic quest in terms of its command over physical space, communal nature, battle against foes, and specialized weaponry. These parallels, combined with careful discussion of the experimentalist’s relationship to the divine, effectively constructed the seventeenth century experimental philosopher as the quintessential English national hero. My methodology of situating close readings of specific textual passages in their broader cultural context reflects my concerted effort to historicize rather than to theorize about the texts, an effort undertaken to give readers an understanding not only of the ‘heroic’ rhetorical and ideological construction of seventeenth century experimental philosophy and experimental philosophers, but also an appreciation for how these constructions drew upon and helped solidify the cultural values of mid-seventeenth century England.

Aux origines du poeme en prose francais (1750-1850) (review)

Reviewed by: Aux origines du poème en prose français (1750-1850) Catherine Witt Vincent-Munnia, Nathalie, Simone Bernard-Griffiths, and Robert Pickering, eds. Aux origines du poème en prose français (1750-1850). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003. Pp. 620. ISBN2-7453-0660-X Literary scholars view Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose (1869) as a seminal work that both crystallizes the generic identity of the modern prose poem and connects the precursory experiments of the Romantic poets with those later undertaken by the Symbolists. [End Page 149] However, it is also widely acknowledged that the prose poem emerged long before Baudelaire's time. Initially coined to designate prose epics in the style of Fénelon's Aventures de Télémaque (1699), the term poème en prose rapidly became associated with a variety of "unorthodox" literary practices such as novels and translations. By the mid-eighteenth century, this association resulted in the pervasive infiltration of the concept into the discursive spheres of poetry and æsthetics: it is notably invoked in Du Bos' Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719), Jaucourt's article for the Encyclopédie (1765), and Marmontel's Essai sur les romans (1772). Positing a direct lineage between the classical epic in prose and the modern prose poem, the editors of this collection envision a history of the genre for the period spanning 1750 to 1850. The volume comprises forty contributions (most of which are by specialists in the field), and abounds in stimulating essays on literary works and topics typically ignored by critics. As such, it will surely become a scholarly reference for those interested in the poetic effervescence that followed the breakdown of Classicism. Missing, however, is a critical introduction conceptualizing the relations between the classical and the romantic prose poem in terms other than an impressionistic genealogy. As it stands, the preface gives a cursory and sometimes inaccurate summary of the contributions, foregrounding Fénelon, Chateaubriand, and Bertrand as key figures in the genre's chronological development. The editors' ostensible reluctance to break away from diachronic interpretative models is all the more surprising since many contributors provide them with the critical avenues to do so. Marc-Mathieu Münch, for instance, makes a case for an æsthetic approach to the prose poem, while Adriano Marchetti outlines an ontological hermeneutics based on Aristotelian conceptions of reflexivity and musicality. Part One, "Poésie et prose," which heeds the poetic investment of prose in the eighteenth century, begins with Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand's lexicological analysis of the syntagma poème en prose. In the subsequent survey of the Journal encyclopédique, Jacques Wagner reveals the extent to which, by the 1750s, versified poetry had become anathema to the spirit of Enlightenment. The next grouping of essays identifies instances of new poetic practices distinctive to the prose epic: cadence and harmony in Fénelon's Télémaque (Jean Foyard); the metapoetic value of the burlesque in Cazotte's Ollivier (Christian Leroy); the semantic and cultural modernity of Marmontel's Les Incas (Sylvain Menant); and the biblical intertext of Dugat's La Mort d'Azaël (Max Milner). A second section, devoted to the influence of new translation practices, attends to various adaptations of Ossian's verse both in Italian (Catherine O'Brien) and in French (Michel Bellot-Antony and Dany Hadjadj). The third section theorizes the relation between poetry and the arts. Robert Pickering explores the impact of new conceptions of phenomenal spatiality on the re-thinking of poetic space, while Gérard Loubinoux re-situates the question of poetic lyricism within the Querelle opposing Gluck and Piccinni. The fourth section examines the renewal of descriptive prose in light of a nascent pre-romantic sensibility. Here, case studies include analyses of the literal / corporeal manifestations of peripatetic thought in the Rêveries (Michel Philippon); the interplay between analytic and lyrical discourse in the first Promenade (Roger Barny); Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's ethnographic descriptions (Gabriel-Robert Thibault); the [End Page 150] breakdown of classical mimetic codes in Senancour's Oberman (Barbara Wright); and the function of Chateaubriand's tableaux in operating the shift from poetic prose...

Notes on Shatsk as a Gogol Figure

In his brief essay Origin of Pynchon's Tchitcherine, Steven Weisenburger catalogues many of extensive similarities between that character and Pavel Chichikov, protagonist of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, even arguing that [p]arts of Gravity's Rainbow have a compelling affinity with Gogol's unfinished prose epic, and Tchitcherine is principal link between two texts (42). While ChichikovTchitcherine correlation may well be principal link, it is enriched and extended by appearance in Gravity's Rainbow of a parody of Gogol himself in person of Tchitcherine's colleague Shatsk, the notorious Leningrad nose-fetishist, who carries a black satin handkerchief to Party congresses and yes, more than once has been unable to refrain from reaching out and actually stroking noses of powerful officials (352). The antecedent author's refraction into one of Pynchon's secondary characters deserves a gloss as well as a brief sketch of some possible connections to Gravity's Rainbow's larger themes.

"All Wove into One": Camilla , the Prose Epic, and Family Values

"All Wove into One": Camilla , the Prose Epic, and Family Values

Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624.

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Early ventures: writing under the Gilbert and Ralegh patents 2. Ralegh's discoveries: the two voyages to Guiana 3. Mastering words: the Jamestown colonists and John Smith 4. The 'great prose epic': Hakluyt's Voyages Notes Bibliography Index.

"A Myth to Be Alive": James Welch's Fools Crow

Let glory go the way of all sad things./ Children need a myth that tells them be alive, pleads the speaker of James Welch's poem Blackfeet, Blood, and Piegan Hunters (Riding the Earthboy 40 36). In his historical novel Fools Crow, Welch creates that myth. Although the text includes the historical events leading to the massacre of a band of Blackfeet by the United States Cavalry January 23, 1870,' Welch tells this history, for the most part, from the Blackfeet point of view. This perspective both admirably conveys the social and cultural lives of the Pikuni tribe of Blackfeet2 and, given the visionary nature of Plains Indian culture, allows Welch to create a survival myth within the historical genre. Indeed, Welch develops his novel as prose epic when he presents a hero who must survive for his people, retells and extends traditional Blackfeet myths, and connects his hero to these myths and to historical events.3 Significantly, this epic development serves to emphasize the importance of the survival myth as it redefines Native American heroism in spiritual and psychological terms. The myth of Fools Crow adheres to Claude Levi-Strauss's dictum that on the one hand, a myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago. But what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the past as well as the (Structural Anthropology 205). Within the nineteenthcentury time frame of the novel, Welch evokes the past by retelling ancient Blackfeet myths, describes the present by implicitly paralleling Fools Crow's life to the lives of his contemporaries and to a certain extent to culture hero myths, and predicts the future by explicitly connecting his hero to an extension of the myth of Feather Womanthe Woman-who-married-the-star. The myth of Fools Crow is timeless in that even now Native Americans are called upon to embody a courage not unlike Fools Crow's to achieve cultural survival. Fools Crow's life shows parallels to the lives of culture heroes who bring back sacred ceremonies from supernatural beings.4 For example, in the novel Fools Crow says that is most like us and there are some significant parallels to the Scarface myth and Fools Crow's

Gravity's Novel: A Note on the Genre of <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>

Hugh Kenner, in a discussion of Eliot's The Waste Land, notes how comforting it would be to critics if only one had a name for the sort of poem that The Waste Land is.Indeed, the comfort to be found in categorization of literature is a general one, forming as it does the basis of the whole field of genre criticism. Such categorization is not always easy, however. For example, when Melville's Moby-Dick was first published in England (as The Whale), a reviewer in the Britannia wrote that he was at a loss to determine in what category of works of amusement to place it. It is certainly neither a novel nor a romance, although it is made to drag its weary length through three closely printed volumes, and is published by Bentley, who, par excellence, is the publisher of novels of the fashionable world, for who ever heard of a novel or romance without a heroine or a single love scene? Indeed, much of the reaction to Melville's perplexing book involved puzzled attempts to classify it and thereby render it tame. American reviewers, perhaps less steeped in tradition than their British counterparts, seemed less determined to fit the book into preexisting categories, but instead were often content to announce it as the beginning of a new genre all its own, calling it such things as an intellectual chowder, a Whaliad, and a prose epic.

Virgil the Magician in an Early Hebrew Tale

Hebrew literature in the Middle Ages was not restricted to theological and philosophical literature only. Mediaeval Jews, and likewise their gentile neighbours, loved a good story even if it had no relationship to religion; and, if such stories were created in the Christian world, Jews translated them into Hebrew. There was in the Middle Ages great interest in entertaining stories and in their accomplished recitation. This period also witnessed the creative development of the epic in both prose and poetry. Fortunately, Hebrew literature too did not exempt itself from taking an active part in this work. Understandably, our contemporary taste is sufficiently different that this creativity is neglected in our own day. From another perspective we should remember that a discernible portion of modern literature would have caused embarrassment and stimulated disgust in the ’’darkness'* of the Middle Ages. However, if not for their innocent curiosity and preference for fine plot there would never have developed such classics as the Decameron or The Canterbury Tales. One of the more famous mediaeval novellae which, however, does not fit our contemporary taste, even though it was popular among mediaeval readers and even artists, is the story of Virgil in the basket and his vengeance.

Theoretical History and the Novel: The Scottish Fiction of John Galt

The history of the novel is characterized, among its other attributes, by a continuous quest for new or modified forms and structures adequate to convey new or modified perceptions of reality. Some novelists are content to appeal to the specifically tradition and, like Fielding with his comic epic in prose, adapt existing structures to express their perceptions while others search more radically beyond the boundaries of imaginative literature for new formal and structural models. In an attempt to recreate individual and modern experience Defoe and Richardson have recourse to the journal, the autobiography, or to private correspondence, while Sterne's yet more radical reliance on a structure suggested not by preceding literary models but by Locke's associationist psychology is well-known. In the early nineteenth century Scott demonstrated that reality had an immensely important historical dimension, though he preferred to express this insight by accommodating older structures to his purposes, as Fielding had done in a different context. It was Scott's less wellknown contemporary, John Galt, possessed of a historical consciousness only somewhat less remarkable than Scott's, who sought to develop a new form with its own characteristic structure to embody a vision of reality redefined to include its influential historical component. This essay is an attempt to give an account of the form which Galt developed. The account provides another example of that process of cross-fertilization between fiction and non-fiction manifested in the history of the novel generally. More particularly, it also provides what seems to me the proper context for serious critical discussion of an author whose works have always enjoyed a respectable readership yet one not as widespread as his talents deserve.

Life as Journey and as Theater: Two Eighteenth-Century Narrative Structures

M YTEXT WILL BE Spectator No. 219, in which Addison says that according to one metaphor, from Scripture, men are Strangers and Sojourners upon Earth, and Life a Pilgrimage, but according to another, Epictetus' metaphor, the world is A Theatre, where everyone has a Part allotted to him and is judged by how well he plays his part.1 Addison prefers the second, and I am going to show how his preference applies to a few narratives in the first half of the eighteenth century. These are narratives in that they connect two or more points in time, but they are, to be more precise, a spiritual autobiography, a ballad opera, a graphic series called a progress, and a comic epic in prose. I am proposing that in these works the metaphor of life as a journey, with its emphasis on sequential actions and a lone protagonist, began to be augmented and radically altered by the metaphor of life as a stage, in which a role-playing protagonist has to interact with other actors; and that this change is reflected in the major novels of the following decades. In the passage I have quoted, Addison uses the metaphors of journey and theater as alternative models of providential design. journey stresses teleology: whether the Christian pilgrimage or the epic journey, whether the travels of Adam or Odysseus or Aeneas, it must have a destination. aspects of divine providence Addison found in the theatrical metaphor were its apparent arbitrariness, inscrutability, and incalculable distance from our everyday concerns. This metaphor, he says, is wonderfully proper to incline to be satisfied with the Post in which Providence has placed us (Epictetus himself, he reminds us, was a slave), for there may well be a discrepancy between the way the drama ends or the fate of the dramatis personae and the fate of the actors who played them. When the play is over and the roles relinquished, the actors are all equal; or, as Addison suggests, there may be new roles assigned in heaven commensurate with our performance in the assigned roles on earth: The Great Duty which lies upon a Man is to act his Part in Perfection. We may, indeed, say that our Part does not suit us, and that we could act another better. But this (says the

Fielding'sJoseph Andrews:A comic epic in Prose

(1971). Fielding's Joseph Andrews: A comic epic in Prose. English Studies: Vol. 52, No. 1-6, pp. 331-339.

The Harlot's Progress and the Tradition of History Painting

IN HIS PREFACE to Joseph Andrews (1742) Fielding associated himself as author of epic in prose with Hogarth as history painter. He was employing familiar analogy between the epic and history painting, the most exalted genres of poetry and respectively, and he alluded to Hogarth's prints to suggest how Joseph Andrews related to the literary tradition. A great deal has been written about the comic epic in prose, but very little about the comic history painting. Hogarth used the term history painting himself. Beginning to put his thoughts on paper in the 1750's and 1760's, he frequently called attention to the uniqueness of the form he had invented (this uncommon way of Painting, a Field unbroke up in any Country or any age) and to its combination of comic and moral qualities and its use of contemporaneity (modern moral Subjects).' His nearest approach to Fielding's term was in references to his new genre as occupying an area between the accepted categories of and grotesque. He commented sadly that painters and writers never mention, in the historical way of any intermediate species of subjects for between the and the grotesque, whereas he believed that the subject[s] of most consequence are those that most entertain and Improve the mind and are of public utility, and that true comedy is more economical and difficult genre than sublime history painting.2