Fair Copy Research Articles

Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi (review)

Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi (review)

Poe’s Assignation of “The Visionary”

Poe’s Assignation of “The Visionary”

Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry by Jennifer Putzi

Reviewed by: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry by Jennifer Putzi Wendy Dasler Johnson FAIR COPY: RELATIONAL POETICS AND ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY, by Jennifer Putzi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 320 pp. $69.95 hardback; $69.95 ebook. How do we read women’s American antebellum poetry? Or do we at all? Some of us asking these question have, like Jennifer Putzi, found clues that suggest how to read the poems and why so few do now. But such a search requires the dedicated attention Putzi gives to poetry collections before the Civil War, women’s periodicals, library and personal archives, and newspapers. If we are looking for traditional conventions of lone Romantic poetic genius, we might simply dismiss the vast majority of these women and their works. Perhaps that is because we still do not “know how to read their poems” as Cheryl Walker observed in conversation thirty years ago. Putzi’s thoroughly researched Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry offers us a framework, a poetics that allows more of us to read this genre with understanding. Her sense of “relational poetics” foregrounds imitation, community engagement, and collaborative partners. She finds these shaping conditions comprise “an earlier model of poetic authorship” that she argues is often erased today but which invited antebellum women poets to publish (p. 20). Two emphases characterize Putzi’s approach to each chapter subject: relational poetics and her persistent, thorough explorations “elbow-deep in the letters” and archives (p. x). Her chapters explore, respectively, Lydia Huntley Sigourney as the American Felicia Hemans; millworker women poets of the Lowell Offering magazine (1840-1845), whose imitation underscores their middle-class ambitions; Sarah Louisa Forten’s use of pseudonyms and “we” to support and obscure her position as a Black abolitionist activist; Maria James’s and collaborators’ simultaneous pride and ambivalence toward poetic individualism; and Elizabeth Akers Allen’s protest against verse imitators and impersonators who claimed her poems. Discussion of Sigourney as the American Hemans gives Putzi opportunity to examine some contemporary critics’ disapproval of Sigourney’s imitative prosody and the common feeling of her elegies—as well as, by extension, perhaps a chance to acknowledge today’s lingering discomfort [End Page 160] with antebellum women poets’ relational poetics. Sigourney’s feisty retorts to Edgar Allen Poe on these matters demonstrate the confidence and energy of an enormously popular antebellum woman poet, Putzi argues. As Hemans acts as model for her, likewise Sigourney guides thousands of women poets paradoxically thriving in the face of what Putzi terms “dominant” or “elite” poetic conventions (pp. 25, 34). Repeatedly, Putzi’s book acknowledges contemporary and current critical disapproval but then emphasizes the advantages that so-called limitations afforded antebellum women poets. Notably, she reframes imitation as a chief support to the millworker poets of the Lowell Offering rather than a shortcoming. Mill operative by day and Lowell Offering editor by night, Harriet Farley in “The Mouse’s Visit” (1844) overtly plays with Scottish dialect and the prosody of Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” (1785), enhancing her status as the well-read and imaginative director of the Lowell Offering. Imitation situates Farley and the Lowell Offering’s contributing poets in a wider literary marketplace, Putzi argues, setting “literary skills of the operatives on display in a way that only poetry will allow” (p. 76). Likewise, the collective “we” deployed by free Black poet Forten echoes her activist father’s proclamation: “We never will separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population [. . .] they are our brethren” (p. 113). Likewise, Forten’s “we” is distinctly not the solitary Romantic lyric “I.” It is a demonstration of oneness with her people, and they are surely African American, both enslaved and free. The pronoun indeed claims her equal citizenship with white Americans, exhorting every American that “we” must turn from slaveholding to our founding values: “Where—where is the nation so erring as we, / Who claim the proud name of the ‘HOME OF THE FREE’?” (p. 119). Only such exhaustive archival work as Putzi’s could have recovered a letter from Forten’s father, revealing that the author of poems appearing in William Garrison...

Jennifer Putzi, Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry

Jennifer Putzi, <i>Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry</i>

Romantic objects, Victorian collections: Scribal relics and the authorial body

AbstractOver the course of the nineteenth century, literary manuscripts came to be seen as tangible evidence of the creative process and as a key to the personality of the author. The material traces of writing were understood to outlive their creators and promise to resurrect the authorial body through the magic of the relic. This article reconstructs how authorial script gradually transformed into a collectible object pursued as a memento and a commodity. Letters, drafts, and fair copies by major modern writers found their way into the collections of British aristocrats and American industrialists at the same time that hunting for literary autographs diversified into a middle‐class pursuit. Surveying recent scholarship on nineteenth‐century collecting and material culture, the essay offers a condensed cultural history of the literary manuscript as a collectible and draws attention to how collectors and collecting feature in fictional texts of the period. It focuses on the artefactual mobility and custodial afterlives of Romantic papers in Victorian literature and culture, exploring a form of collecting which crossed boundaries between periods and national literary traditions.

Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi

Reviewed by: Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi Madeline Zehnder Stokes, Claudia. 2021. Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $79.95 hc. 288 pp. Putzi, Jennifer. 2021. Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $69.95 hc. 320 pp. In a 2016 profile of the poet Eileen Myles, journalist Emily Witt coined the "Theory of the Bad Copy"—a distillation of Myles's belief that copying can be a vehicle for artistic and social change. According to Myles, who has suggested that Black Sparrow Press published them "as a bad copy of Charles Bukowski," people often break with the past by presenting as imitations of established figures (Witt 2016).1 Copying may ease difference, but it also allows new artists to slip through the door and shake things up. The Theory of the Bad Copy suggests that as much as contemporary Western society professes to value originality, it more readily cleaves to the familiar. Latent in the concept of a "bad" copy is the critique that failures of imagination cloud audience ability to recognize what is new or original. At the same time, there's something subversive about a copy characterized by its badness. In a culture that outwardly praises innovation while denigrating imitation, the bad [End Page 146] copy disrupts, slyly reframing the act of copying as creative work. Myles themself has described copying as an essential part of their poetic labor: "[copying] is a form of loving the world. … It is a form of chanting and I do it for religious reasons. I mean it's my default position" (Myles 2020). Practices of imitation also offer social and creative resources for the nineteenth-century Americans whom Claudia Stokes and Jennifer Putzi discuss in their respective monographs. Yet while Myles embraces copying as a mode of introspection and individual renewal, these earlier American authors copy and imitate primarily to forge networks and connections—with the past, with the literary establishment, with each other. Challenging the assumption that originality is a timeless artistic value, Stokes and Putzi explicate unoriginality's appeal for particular nineteenth-century American audiences by pairing close readings of texts with attention to material conditions of textual production, circulation, and use. The nexus of the textual and the material has been a generative site for thinking about the role of copying in the nineteenth-century United States. In recent decades, scholarship including Meredith L. McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003), Lindsay DiCuirci's Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (2018), and the Viral Texts Mapping Project (est. 2012) has positioned reprinting as an important heuristic for understanding early American literary culture. Research on nineteenth-century African American literature, including the essays in Early African American Print Culture (2012), has been crucial to recovering the social and political functions of copying, including how practices such as quotation index nineteenth-century Black American authors' orientation toward the collective. While both Stokes and Putzi engage this scholarship to examine how copying organizes material and social practices, their respective studies help connect the study of material texts with questions and methods drawn from aesthetics and poetics. Together, Old Style and Fair Copy invite scholars to take unoriginal texts seriously as literature—and to ask why the unoriginal has become cause for literary dismissal in the first place. In Old Style, Claudia Stokes charts the rise and fall of unoriginality as a "legitimate aesthetic mode" in the nineteenth-century United States (2021, 2). Revisiting a familiar story of the early national period as an era of print expansion, Stokes shows that even as some authors and publishers deployed novelty to compete for attention [End Page 147] in a crowded market, others advocated for treating the borrowed, familiar, and traditional as markers of literary skill and taste. For many early nineteenth-century Americans, Stokes argues, originality was suspect. Being perceived as literary was less about producing iconoclastic newness than showcasing knowledge of literary...

Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song: Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text

Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song:Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text Isobel Armstrong (bio) How does one think about an illustrated poem? Does the illustration belong to the poem or the poem to the illustration? The etymological derivation of "illustration" is from Latin illustrare—il + lustrare—to shed light, to illuminate, to light up. The sense of illustration as a text plus drawing did not emerge until the mid-seventeenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The meaning of illustration is strangely equivocal: logically the text is prior to its illustration—it gives instructions to the artist—but secondary in the illustration's capacity to light up the prior text. The image is the thing we see first, the primary exponent of meaning. It makes immediate visual claims on the reader—certainly in the case of Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song—almost before the text is absorbed. The illustration appears to throw light on the poem, but the poem also "explains" the illustration; and yet it may well be an explanation that is limited, posthumously as it were, by the illustration itself. Each exercises a limit on the other. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, the pioneering scholar of Rossetti illustration, has found a fertile language for this relation: she writes of Sing-Song's illustrations as "composites," texts with a "reciprocal" relation to each other, in dialogue, dialogical.1 I want to pursue this reciprocity by asking a further question: What does an illustration illustrate? There is no simple deictic relation between image and text. The animate world of the nursery rhyme, where animals and plants abut on the human world and where language plays with the acoustics of pun, riddle, nonsense, and the rhythms of the body, making use of nonsemantic sound and prosodic patterns of rhyme and assonance outside representation, can hardly be "translated" into the visual. Constance Hassett writes eloquently of the phonemic "delirium," for instance, of the fifth poem in Sing-Song, its "Kookoorookoo!" and "Kikirikee! kikirikee!"2 It is a world where the sensory and somatic qualities of words are ends in themselves. What sort of interrelation can there be between sheer sound and image? That is the problem for all [End Page 547] images claiming to represent language. For Jacques Rancière the image, is always problematical because the image is intrinsically cleft into two elements when it claims mimetic correspondence. While it can stand in for likeness to an original by lines and brush strokes, it is not what it images. Thus its double nature as resemblance and dissemblance means an oscillation between likeness and alterity. But language, too, is subject to this same coupling and uncoupling oscillation: signifiers are arbitrarily linked to the sound-signified, and yet they possess a "blinding" visibility for us, fused with what we think they represent, the sayable and the visible under the same rubric.3 So if language and images come together, if images claim to represent writing, a text, rather than objects in the world, that relation is bound to be complex. Some of these questions can be addressed because Sing-Song acquired not one but three illustrators—Christina Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, and Alice Boyd—and the play between them helps to show what an illustration can be. Or rather, it discloses three quite different forms of illustration, three Victorian modes of approaching image and text. Each one changes the poem in subtle ways. I call these emblematic, narratorial, and performative modes of illustration. Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song was published in 1872, with illustrations by Arthur Hughes brought into being by the facsimile wood engravings of the Dalziel Brothers.4 Rossetti herself illustrated her fair copy manuscript of Sing-Song with small figures placed above the text—she called these her "scratches."5 This makes the "meaning" of the book's illustrations complex enough, particularly as we might properly think of the Dalziel firm's unknown wood engravers, who turned a drawing into a print and were wholly responsible for mediating its end product, as more than proxy illustrators. These have recently been characterized, indeed, as "ghost writers," their critical functions recognized as an essential element of print illustration.6 I bracket the...

“Frances Burney's Legacy Duty Account” (1840)

“Frances Burney's Legacy Duty Account” (1840)

Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry. Jennifer Putzi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. xii+272.

<i>Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry</i>. Jennifer Putzi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. xii+272.

Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry by Jennifer Putzi (review)

Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry by Jennifer Putzi (review)

Measuring the Impacts of Using the Process Approach to Teach Second-Year English Major Students Essay Writing

This paper aimed at measuring the impacts of using the process approach to teach second-year English major students at the English Department of Université de Zinder (henceforth, UZ) essay writing. Drawing on the pre-test-post-test repeated measures design, this study examined the written essays produced by the EFL students before and after the writing class. These pre and post tests were scored based on a criterial fair copy, and the scores were compared by means of an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to check whether there were any statistically significant differences between the mean scores. The findings revealed that the process approach had a positive impact on the participants’ essay writing skills. Also, employing Classroom Observation, the article attempted to qualitatively measure student engagement in the writing class. The findings further exuded that the EFL students observed were cognitively involved in the learning activities conducted in the class. Based on the foregoing findings, this study recommends that the process approach to (the teaching of) writing be adopted and used to teach writing in EFL classes across/in Niger.

The American Short Story and Me

The American Short Story and Me

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By Nicholas A. Basbanes

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By Nicholas A. Basbanes

V. Ya. Bryusov’s Plan for publishing A. S. Pushkin’s Complete Works

The article is devoted to the plan for the publication of certain volumes of the Complete Works of Pushkin, edited by V. Ya. Bryusov. In 1920, the only volume of this edition was published, which caused honest discussions in the circle of Pushkinists, reflected in the press of those years. The following volumes, prepared for publication, were never published, but the editor did a large-scale job, leaving a lot of Pushkin’s drafts and fair copies along with this edition’s proofreads and layouts for future volumes. The purpose of the author of the article is to collect and study the archival documents preserved in the Bryusov fund at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, related to the further publication of the Complete Works. The article uses previously unpublished materials, describes the features of the unrealized Bryusov’s plan in comparison with other plans of the Collected Works of Pushkin of previous scholarly publications, analyzes the goals of the editor, the composition of the works included in the next volumes, the principles of the arrangement of the material, the methods of Bryusov’s work on notes and biographical articles in the collected works. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that Bryusov did a monumental work on the preparation of the following parts of the Complete Collected Works, which could solve the problem initially set by the editor for himself — to prepare an edition that would summarize everything that Pushkin’s researchers had done at the time of the publication of the collection.

A Latin Poem Translated into Russian in 1670: A Panegyric in Praise of King Louis XIII from Antoine de Pluvinel’s Book “Maneige Royal”

This paper offers an analysis of an early prose translation of a Latin panegyrical poem into Russian. The poem, “In lavdem Lvdovici XIII” was written by Peter / Petrus / Pierre Valens in 1623 or earlier. It was included in the book “Maneige Royal”, first published in 1623 under the name of A. de Pluvinel, who was the riding teacher of the young King Louis XIII. The book was translated into Russian in 1670, albeit not from the original French edition, but from the German version in the bilingual edition “Maneige Royal / Königliche Reitschul”, published in Braunschweig, 1626. The book's Russian title is a verbatim translation of the German one, “Korolevskaia ezdnaia shkola”. The translation is known from two copies: RNB, F.XI.1 (Saint Petersburg), and as one of the texts in the Codex AD 10 (Västerås, Sweden). Our analysis leads to the conclusion that both the translation itself and the two copies most probably were made at the Ambassadorial Chancery (Posol'skii prikaz). The translation of the Latin panegyrical poem shows that the translator understood the Latin text quite well, although it contains a few isolated errors. At the same time, some of these mistakes might have been the result of misprints in the German original, or they may have been caused by the copyist who produced the fair copy. It seems very likely that the translation of the Latin poem (as well as of the entire book) was made by the translator Ivan Tiazhkogorskii, who knew all three languages used in the book (German, Latin, and French). Although Tiazhkogorskii for the most part translated texts from his native language, German, he was able to make decent translations also from Latin and French; however, historical, political and above all mythological allusions caused a few difficulties.

De vita cum imperfectis

De vita cum imperfectis Alfred Dürr Translated by Traute M. Marshall (bio) The creation of new editions of old music, an important area of musicology, usually has two goals: to enrich our understanding of history and, at the same time, to provide present musical practice with new material—a goal to which the overused notion of the "unjustly forgotten master" bears eloquent (and dubious) witness. The editorial method employed assumes the incontrovertible high quality of the work to be edited; the original, as conceived by the master, is deemed flawless. From this it follows that all the errors contained in the work as it has come down to us are due to flawed transmission and therefore have to be emended in the new edition. Similarly, all additions made to the work by another hand in the course of transmission do not measure up to the level of the master; therefore, they too have to go. This attitude leads to the ideal of the Urtextausgabe, the edition of the original text. And even though the term in recent decades has been interpreted in a considerable number of different ways, it still implies that the new edition must focus as much as possible on the evidence of the composer, and that foreign interpretation of any kind is to be excluded. There is no need to challenge the general validity of these principles. Whoever follows them, however (in the conviction that clarification of the composer's intent is demanded by the commitment to truth, without which our discipline makes no sense), must also become aware of the method's limits in order to use it effectively. The following observations will consider some of those limits. A work like Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion, which the author is currently [1971] editing, is well suited to clarify the problems, since there is no question about the quality of the work or the capabilities of the composer. Therefore, we will be able to focus exclusively on editorial problems. [End Page 212] First of all, we must address the following question: to what extent should the notational appearance of the autograph score be preserved? Whenever the fair copy of a composer is the topic, the autograph Mus. ms. Bach P25 in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek must not be, and cannot be, overlooked. All scholars agree that the idiosyncrasies of Bach's notational handwriting reveal to the eye—as well as to the inner ear—essential features of Bach's music. For that reason, every editor will strive to deviate from this visual representation as little as possible. Max Schneider, in his new edition, met this obligation in exemplary fashion.1 Therefore, the result reveals the problem of the method with particular clarity. Bach, for example, combines the two continuo staves of the first of the two choral movements, "Laß ihn kreuzigen," onto one staff (the lowest) for four and a half measures (folio 54r of the score): there was no space available for the normal separation. On folio 54v, on the other hand, there was sufficient space, and each chorus is given its own continuo staff for the remaining four measures of the movement. The same situation recurs in the second choral movement of the same text: on folio 56v it had to be notated on one staff for five and a half measures, but there was enough space on folio 57r to separate the continuo parts onto two staves for the remainder of the movement. Schneider notates both movements with just one continuo staff throughout (as the lowest staff), thus turning Bach's stopgap measure, necessitated by lack of space, into the governing rule. But when this rule is applied, should it then not be necessary to reproduce visually the lack of space in a new edition, so that the user can understand the rationale of the score layout? Would it not be more important to clarify what caused the composer to proceed in this particular way than to copy slavishly the mere appearance of the score? But is the lack of space the composer faced worthy to be enshrined in a new edition? A blind trust in authority ("he must have known why...

De vita cum imperfectis

De vita cum imperfectis Alfred Dürr Translated by Traute M. Marshall (bio) The creation of new editions of old music, an important area of musicology, usually has two goals: to enrich our understanding of history and, at the same time, to provide present musical practice with new material—a goal to which the overused notion of the "unjustly forgotten master" bears eloquent (and dubious) witness. The editorial method employed assumes the incontrovertible high quality of the work to be edited; the original, as conceived by the master, is deemed flawless. From this it follows that all the errors contained in the work as it has come down to us are due to flawed transmission and therefore have to be emended in the new edition. Similarly, all additions made to the work by another hand in the course of transmission do not measure up to the level of the master; therefore, they too have to go. This attitude leads to the ideal of the Urtextausgabe, the edition of the original text. And even though the term in recent decades has been interpreted in a considerable number of different ways, it still implies that the new edition must focus as much as possible on the evidence of the composer, and that foreign interpretation of any kind is to be excluded. There is no need to challenge the general validity of these principles. Whoever follows them, however (in the conviction that clarification of the composer's intent is demanded by the commitment to truth, without which our discipline makes no sense), must also become aware of the method's limits in order to use it effectively. The following observations will consider some of those limits. A work like Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion, which the author is currently [1971] editing, is well suited to clarify the problems, since there is no question about the quality of the work or the capabilities of the composer. Therefore, we will be able to focus exclusively on editorial problems. [End Page 212] First of all, we must address the following question: to what extent should the notational appearance of the autograph score be preserved? Whenever the fair copy of a composer is the topic, the autograph Mus. ms. Bach P25 in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek must not be, and cannot be, overlooked. All scholars agree that the idiosyncrasies of Bach's notational handwriting reveal to the eye—as well as to the inner ear—essential features of Bach's music. For that reason, every editor will strive to deviate from this visual representation as little as possible. Max Schneider, in his new edition, met this obligation in exemplary fashion.1 Therefore, the result reveals the problem of the method with particular clarity. Bach, for example, combines the two continuo staves of the first of the two choral movements, "Laß ihn kreuzigen," onto one staff (the lowest) for four and a half measures (folio 54r of the score): there was no space available for the normal separation. On folio 54v, on the other hand, there was sufficient space, and each chorus is given its own continuo staff for the remaining four measures of the movement. The same situation recurs in the second choral movement of the same text: on folio 56v it had to be notated on one staff for five and a half measures, but there was enough space on folio 57r to separate the continuo parts onto two staves for the remainder of the movement. Schneider notates both movements with just one continuo staff throughout (as the lowest staff), thus turning Bach's stopgap measure, necessitated by lack of space, into the governing rule. But when this rule is applied, should it then not be necessary to reproduce visually the lack of space in a new edition, so that the user can understand the rationale of the score layout? Would it not be more important to clarify what caused the composer to proceed in this particular way than to copy slavishly the mere appearance of the score? But is the lack of space the composer faced worthy to be enshrined in a new edition? A blind trust in authority ("he must have known why...

God's Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry by John D. Niles

Reviewed by: God's Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry by John D. Niles Greg Waite Niles, John D., God's Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2019; cloth; pp. xv, 288; R.R.P. £75.00; ISBN 9781905816095. John Niles contextualizes the 'Exeter Anthology' (Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501) in the English Benedictine reform, and reads it as a collection of poems chosen purposefully to celebrate and teach 'God's exiles', the monks and nuns whose lives of heroic self-denial and prayer anticipate their journey to a heavenly home. He argues that the poems are the work of 'craft-poets', or monastic writers schooled in theology, liturgy, and rhetoric both in Latin and in English. Niles proceeds along varied lines of literary analysis framed within a model of 'monastic poetics' (a term employed by Brian O'Camb in his 2009 University of Wisconsin– Madison doctoral thesis and his subsequent studies of Exeter poems, read in the light of the monastic reform). As Niles puts it, 'monastic poetics is […] a hybrid poetics, based on Latinate and Germanic models yet striving to achieve expansive new forms of expression in the medium of Old English alliterative verse' (p. 5). Part 1 of the book sets out the background of the Exeter Anthology in relation to later tenth-century reformed monastic culture. While the manuscript cannot be traced to a specific centre, Niles argues that it is the product of a literary culture in the south-west of England emanating from Glastonbury Abbey. Part 2 explores individual poems and how they relate to one another. Chapter 4, 'An Overview of the Book's Contents', surveys the poems in manuscript order. Niles argues for various principles of ordering, but the main one is hierarchical: the weightier items are placed first, establishing the encyclopedic scope of the work, encompassing the whole of creation. Within this structure, nevertheless, the volume's 'intratextuality' is enhanced by the separation of poems that might be considered closely related, such as Widsith and Deor. An outstanding part of this chapter is the exploration of ethopoeia and prosopopoeia under the headings 'The Voice of the Sage: A Father's Precepts and Related Poems' and 'Voices from the Germanic Past: Widsith and Related Poems'. Together with other methods of relating poems to one another, such as the exploration of 'keywords' in Chapter 8 (the words focused upon are sīþ 'journey', ellen 'courage', bōt 'redress' or 'recompense', and hām 'home'), or Chapter 9's 'Intratextual Hermeneutics', this book offers fresh and challenging insights into the poems of the Exeter Anthology that vindicate Nile's critical approach, even if questions remain about the thesis of origin. Niles often illustrates his readings with reference to key texts of the Benedictine reform, the Rule of Benedict itself, and the Regularis Concordia (see p. 101, for example, on the preparation of a body for burial). Yet many of the same points might be made with reference to passages from other texts such as Bede's Historia. That is to say, they involve widely accepted tenets and practices of English monasticism over a long period (whether strictly Benedictine or not). Niles claims that the Exeter Anthology poets can all 'reasonably be taken to have been active during the period c.880–970' (p. 23). 'c.970' is the terminus supplied [End Page 250] by the palaeographical dating of the Exeter manuscript. Presumably 'c.880' marks the beginning of Alfred's program of intellectual revival. In the light of Sisam's 1934 observations (in a review of the Exeter Book facsimile, reprinted in Studies in the History of Old English Literature, Oxford, 1953) that the Exeter Book is a fair copy of a pre-existing collection, and that its spellings signal a probable early West Saxon copying of the poems subsequent to their compilation, should not consideration be given to an Alfredian or earlier tenth-century context of production? Megginson's work (for example, his 1995 essay 'The Case against a "General Old English Poetic Dialect"') suggests that Sisam's views on this matter are not outmoded. Niles interestingly...

"The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun": Sexuality, Imagery, and Desire in Tolkien's Works

"The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun":Sexuality, Imagery, and Desire in Tolkien's Works Yvette Kisor The book publication of The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun in 2016 brought to wide attention a text first published in 1945 and likely completed in 1930 (Aotrou xi). "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun," based on Breton models,1 relates the story of a childless Lord (Aotrou) and Lady (Itroun),2 and the Lord's choice to seek out the help of a corrigan who then attempts to coerce him into sexual intercourse as payment once twins are born; when he refuses, he dies, followed shortly in death by his Lady. Neither sees their son and daughter grow up. Belonging to an earlier period than Tolkien's better-known works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and associated with his early experiments in turning medieval poetry of many genres into modern English verse of various forms,3 it belongs as well to his early work with the Silmarillion materials and is especially associated with "The Lay of Leithian." In fact, as Christopher Tolkien points out, it can be conclusively shown that The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun "interrupted the composition of Canto X of The Lay of Leithian" through comparison of written dates in both manuscripts (Aotrou xi). It is published along with two "Corrigan" poems, renderings into English of Breton lays, and speaks to an early interest of Tolkien's in Celtic literature, specifically the lays of Brittany, not generally acknowledged.4 This interest of Tolkien's could seem merely an early diversion, not nearly as important as his lifelong study of Beowulf, for example, and his deep engagement with Old English and Old Norse literature. Certainly his professional engagement with Beowulf and Old English more broadly is of prime importance, as has been acknowledged. However, "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" is not simply an early interest quickly discarded or merely a formal exercise in the craft of verse. It reaches out in various directions, both towards other writings from the 1920s and 1930s and even to his later, bestknown work, The Lord of the Rings. It does this largely through the presence of desire, romantic love, and overt sexuality, as well as enchantment, elements often sublimated in his better-known fiction. In particular, the figure of the beautiful, cruel, seductive fay haunts the pages of these early works; the Corrigan in "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" and the "Ides Ælfscýne" from Songs for the Philologists embody her in a literal sense, and the [End Page 19] human women Grímhild in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and Guinever in The Fall of Arthur evoke her in subtler ways. According to Tolkien in "On Fairy-stories," written at the end of the 1930s, "The fear of the beautiful fay that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp."5 Clearly it did not elude Tolkien's and a shadow of this preoccupation of the 1920s and 1930s can be found in the later figure of Galadriel.6 Further, much of the imagery found in "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" shows clear connections to The Lord of the Rings. This is especially true of images of light and dark, of the Corrigan and her abode with fountain and cave, and the incursions of Aotrou's adventure with the Corrigan into his domestic life, particularly his dreams. However, the text that "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" is most closely associated with is "The Lay of Leithian." I. "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" and "The Lay of Leithian" "The Lay of Leithian" bears a special relationship to "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun." Unusually for him, Tolkien kept running dates of individual sections of "The Lay of Leithian" (B&L 88–89; Lays 150), and when compared with the fair copy of "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" dated "Sept. 23 1930," it becomes clear that "Aotrou and Itroun interrupted the composition of Canto X of The Lay of Leithian" (Aotrou xi). Canto X introduces an element not present in the earlier version of the tale, "the...

A Series of Sonnets: Revisions in “To My Mother”

A Series of Sonnets: Revisions in “To My Mother”