Great Novels Research Articles

Masalah Oedipus Complex Dalam Novel Umibe No Kafuka Karya Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami, a Japanese novelist is an example of a great novelist who has produced his works which have been translated in various languages for a variety of readers in the world. He has also been awarded the Yomiuri Literary Award for his novel Wind-up Bird Chronicle in 1996. In his novel Umibe no Kafuka, Murakami describes the life of a young man and the Oedipus complex problems he experienced. This study will look for root causes of problems in the Oedipus complex problem of Kafka Tamura, to analyze them through methods of role characterization.

Father Figures in the Novels of Jane Austen

Miniaturist as Jane Austen is, she has depicted the life of a few families. In her letter to her niece, Anna Austen, she writes: "three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on"(Chapman's Edition, 1970, P.10). Jane’s knowledge about these families is, in no way shallow. It is rich in variation and contrasts. Jane Austen is a great novelist due to the universal significance of her novels. This universal significance is achieved in two ways. First, she creates living characters; she penetrates beneath the surface to the underlying principles of personality. She has a full understanding of human psychology and this enables her to draw intricate and complex natures. She lays bare not only the processes of their minds but also those of the heart. Second, she considers them impartially and shows them compounded both of faults and virtues like human beings. They have a universal significance; they are not national types, but representatives of essential human nature. They reveal the weaknesses and virtues of human nature in every age and country. There has been insufficient attention focused on Jane Austen’s father figures: how she created characters and what character types and father figures emerge in the full range of her stories. Characters are centre front in her stories, many of which are chiefly fine vignettes, and in Austen's theoretical statements she has consistently stressed the importance of character creation. The objective of this research is to shed light on those father figures who are the heads of the central families in Jane’s six novels.

Introduction

Portuguese Studies vol. 27 no. 1 (2011), 5–7© Modern Humanities Research Association 2011 Introduction Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke The Brazilian Ambassador in London, His Excellency Carlos Augusto SantosNeves , had the excellent idea of holding a ‘Gilberto Freyre week’ in November 2009, along the lines of an earlier ‘Guimarães Rosa week’. The event took place partly in the Embassy and partly in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College London. It is scarcely necessary to remind readers of this journal of the central importance of Gilberto Freyre (1900–87) in twentieth-century Brazilian culture. He has a good claim to be regarded not only as a leading social thinker and historian but also as the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Brazil. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a cultural critic, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. Like Lewis Mumford, whose work he admired, he was a ‘generalist’ rather than a specialist. Freyre’scareer,whichwasrichincomplexityandcontroversies,canbedescribed as oscillating over the decades between ‘canonization’ and ‘excommunication’. His achievements have been assessed in very different ways, including praises and criticisms that often tend to simplify and ignore his many paradoxes and ambiguities. Freyre is best known as the author of Casa-grande e senzala (1933), a study of the patriarchal family in the colonial period, especially on the sugar plantations of the Northeast. This highly original contribution to social history helped Brazilians to define their identity by emphasizing the importance of both miscegenation and cultural mixing in their past. Casa-grande also enjoyed a popular success that few history books can match. Besides more than forty editions in Portuguese and translations into nine other languages, this study has been ‘translated’ into a comic book and a television mini-series, while two directors (one of them Roberto Rossellini) planned to turn it into a film. Freyre’s many books — two of which will be discussed in some detail below — include a pioneering study of environmental history (Nordeste, 1937); an unorthodox textbook of sociology (Sociologia, 1945), in which he suggested that the most important contributions to the subject had been produced by great novelists such as Proust; and a history of late nineteenth-century Brazil (Ordem e Progresso, 1959), based in part on the replies to a questionnaire he sent to a thousand Brazilians born between 1850 and 1900. Freyre’s contributions to social theory include the idea of ‘Lusotropicalism’ (discussed by Bethencourt below), arguing that the sixteenth-century Portuguese were unusually well fitted for the task of colonization, whether in Africa, Asia or Brazil, thanks to their unusual adaptability to different climates and cultures. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke 6 More relevant to today’s problems, however, are his ideas about miscegenation and hybridity. Whether or not we support quotas for ‘blacks’ in Brazilian universities, whether or not we think that ‘mixed-race’ should be or become an official category, Freyre remains a reference point in the debate. Looking beyond Brazil, in an age of racist revival and racist violence, it appears that the world still has something to learn from Gilberto Freyre’s ‘mixophilia’ and his encouragement of harmony and fraternity. The programme for the Gilberto Freyre week, appropriately enough in the case of homage to a ‘generalist’, drew on scholars from three different disciplines: history, literature and anthropology. It included three lectures, by Professor Jeffrey Needell, University of Florida; Professor Ricardo Benzaquen, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro: and Dr Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. Needell’s general survey of Freyre’s life and work, which serves as an introduction to the collection, stresses what he calls the ‘profoundly reactionary’ side of Freyre. By contrast, Pallares-Burke, focusing on a single book by Freyre, the important if neglected study Ingleses no Brasil, emphasizes its innovative features, while Benzaquen draws attention to Freyre’s literary art in an analysis of his collection of ghost stories, Assombrações do Recife Velho. In order to consider Freyre’s continuing relevance in the twenty-first century, a round table was devoted to the subject of cultural hybridity, a theme close to Freyre...

El perspectivismo lírico de Ramón Pérez de Ayala

El trabajo analiza la contribución de Ramón Pérez de Ayala a la renovación narrativa en la España del primer tercio del siglo XX. En sintonía con los grandes novelistas europeos del momento, el autor asturiano ensayó un tipo de novela lírica en la que la mirada interiorizada se fragmenta en multitud de perspectivas que aspiran a ofrecer una visión más compleja y rica de la realidad imaginada. La fusión de lirismo y perspectivismo, que aquí se denomina «perspectivismo lírico», constituye una de las grandes aportaciones de Pérez de Ayala al lenguaje narrativo de su época.

The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Vol. 4: 1790–1900. Edited by Peter France and Kenneth Haynes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi+595.

<i>The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Vol. 4: 1790–1900</i>. Edited by <i>Peter France</i> and <i> Kenneth Haynes</i>. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi+595.

Gavroche and the Great War: Soldier Gouaille and the Legend of the Poilu

This article describes the use of soldier Gouaille or cocky humour in the construction of a consensual typology of the French infantry soldier (Poilu) of the First World War. Drawing on a variety of nineteenth-century literary models, including that of the gamin de Paris, Great War novelists depicted the Poilu as a clever, resourceful, Parisian working-class grumbler and joker. In so doing, they created a model of soldier heroism and of republican patriotism that would have a wide national appeal and that would inform representations of the soldier throughout the twentieth century.

Great Britain and the World

Writing from Paris to his friend Grace Norton on December 15, 1877, five days after the fall of Pleven essentially settled the Russo-Turkish War in Russia's favor, Henry James wondered how the British would take this latest snub to their Balkan designs. One has a feeling now to me it is a very painful one England will take anything/' he wrote, that over-cautious somewhat sordid counsels will always prevail. On the continent, certainly, England's ancient prestige was gone, James almost wished she would fight in a bad cause, if only to show she still could. really think we are assisting at the political decadence of our mother-land, he told his American compatriot. I must say even the 'decline' of England seems to me a tremendous even, almost, an inspiring spectacle, he added; and if the British Empire is once more to shrink up into little island, the process will be the greatest drama in history!1 As it happened, the mighty mother-land had more than a little life in her yet, against the great novelist's expectation, the British Empire was about to enter its most vigorous territorially expansive phase. But James was not wrong to anticipate either its eventual decline or the great drama shrinkage into the plethoric little island would present. As British historians often observe, Edward Gibbon gave himself over a thousand years to trace the decline fall of the Roman Empire. Had he chosen, Piers Brendon could have gotten away with fifty: the scant half century separating the transfer of power in India (1947) the last lowering of the Union Jack in Hong Kong (1997). In retrospect, it is the swiftness of the British retreat most stands out lends the fall of the Pax Britannica its historically spectacular quality.

Europa som utopi og dystopi hos Antonio Muñoz Molina

Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Europe in Antonio Muñoz Molina:How does a modern European society like the Spanish one reflect upon the experience of having dead bodies of illegal immigrants washed up on the nice clean beaches prepared for English, German and Danish tourists? How do such experiences affect the dominant national discourse, which identifies itself with the EU as a global centre of modernity? How do these experiences affect the Spanish citizen’s understanding of the character of this modernity? And what kind of narratives does it take to bridge the gap between the image of the democratic, open and human-rights oriented European Community created by official discourse and these traumatizing experiences? Taking its point of departure in two books written by one of Spain’s greatest novelists, Antonio Muñoz Molina, the article aims to investigate the role of literature as an actor in the creation and negotiation of cultural identities. The hypothesis is that literary discourse has got the unique capacity to offer the reader the image of him- or herself as another and to present the other as a self through its aesthetic strategy, thereby contributing to the reader’s appropriation of textual experiences as his or her own. In this process, the different aspects of reality, the dark and brighter sides of European history and the rise of modern, globalized society become mediated and dialogized.

Orhan Pamuk and modernist liberalism

"Is there is a global culture today? I think there is. Its images come from movies, old and new, and from television; its sounds are rock-and-roll, rap, and heavy traffic on the street. But only the novel has the Faustian chutzpah to try to connect all the dots, to put this immense world together. Orhan Pamuk, one of the world’s great novelists, lives and works within shouting distance of Dissent. The least we can do is shout to our readers that he’s here. I don’t know him, but it’s a thrill to know he’s nearby. He spends half the year in New York, where he teaches comparative literature at Columbia, the other half in his hometown Istanbul, where he speaks truth and gets in trouble."

Many Seasons Gone: Memory, History, and the Atlantic Slave Trade

[First paragraph]African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Anne C. Bailey. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. 289 pp. (Cloth US $ 26.00)Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. Saidiya Hartman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. xi + 270 pp. (Cloth US $ 25.00)In Two Thousand Seasons, the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah describes the effects of centuries of European exploitation and violence in Africa and the alienation and death that separated Ghanaians in 1973 (when the book was published) from those before them. “Pieces cut off from their whole are nothing but dead fragments,” he laments. “From the unending stream of our remembrance the harbingers of death break off meaningless fractions. Their carriers bring us this news of shards. Their message: behold this paltriness; this is all your history” (Armah 1973:2). It is this seeming paltriness, this history of meaningless fractions that Anne C. Bailey and Saidiya Hartman explore in their latest works, identifying and mending shards of memory and written and oral fragments into recognizable and meaningful forms. As with Armah in Two Thousand Seasons, for Bailey and Hartman, “the linking of those gone, ourselves here, those coming ... it is that remembrance that calls us” (Armah 1973:xiii). Both of them, haunted by remembrance and driven by a personal quest for reconciliation with the past and a scholarly desire for the truth, are unwilling to accept the past as passed, or to settle for the scattered silence that so often substitutes for the history of Africans and those of the diaspora.

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge

ofFrench philosopher Maurice Blan chot, transmutes his desire for the lostEurydice intoart. Erudite and containing refer ences to and quotations from many of Kis's influences, Mansarda is "a blend of autobiography and mis sion statement," as the translator JohnCox notes in his introduction. It reveals itselfas a bildungsroman at the conclusion ofwhich Orpheus, who is also the author of thenovel, "dismounts" fromhis lofty existence in full awareness of the life sur rounding him. "Dethrone Mansarda! Warm itup with the sun" becomes Orpheus's new project, as he com poses a registryof all the tenantsof his apartment block, complete with briefbiographical notes. Does this mean that as the nar rative voice of Orpheus metamor phoses into thatof the student Igor, and as he "matures" as a writer, he assumes the existentialist position exchanging his modernist explora tions forengage literature? Not really, forthere isnothingmore prominent inKis's poetics than his refusal to create literatureresponding topoliti cal and /or social prescriptions. In rl e a f sentence F> AVTD LODGE this respect, Mansarda is theembryo ofhis laterprose which further artic ulates his opposition to literature's subservience topolitical dictates. It is welcome news that this text is finally available in an Eng lish translation, and the translator's explanatory notes are very useful in clarifying instances in which Danilo Kis's erudition could present obstacles to the understanding of the text. Tatjana Aleksic Universityof Michigan, Ann Arbor David Lodge. Deaf Sentence. New York. Viking. 2008. 294 pages. $25.95. isbn978-0-670-01992-2 David Lodge isnot a great novelist, and bymodernist or postmodernist standards he ishardly a novelist at all since his technique would not startleTrollope or even Fielding. But in thisnovel and several others, he does for the academic world what Tony Hillerman does for theNavajo Reservation: describe and give some insight into rituals and some of the reasons behind them, present stimu lating but easily forgettable infor mation more or less connected to theplot, create believable characters performing comprehensible actions for readily understandable reasons without undue interior thrashing, and describe accurate topographies ofphysical and cultural landscapes. Deaf Sentence lacks the energy ofChangingPlaces and SmallWorld? understandably, since protagonist Desmond Bates, in his sixties, is a linguistics professor retired from a British university and deprived of the structure of the academic year, who lacks the sexual energy tokeep up with a youngerwife with a flour ishing career. He is anxious about an aging and failing father and is increasingly separated from social contact by his progressive hearing loss?which accounts for the title and for innumerable puns on deaf/ death. His life isunsettled by a young American woman, a graduate stu dent, charming, attractive, manipu lative, and either disturbed, dishon est, or both. She draws Desmond into her dissertation project and threatens?mostly inhis guilty con science?his relationship with his wife. But she is conveniently and painlessly removed from the center of his attention by an unexpected BritishCouncil invitation to lecture in Poland (where he takes a docu mentary-style triptoAuschwitz that seems to have little to do with the restof thenovel), thebirthofhis first grandchild, the last illness and death of his father,and by her defaulting on various financial obligations and disappearance, presumably back to America. Desmond becomes somewhat reconciled tohis deafness, realizing that it is not death, and at the end enjoys a lip-reading class because, he says with some satisfaction, "I always learn something new." That might also be said of the novel's readers, who can acquire a good deal of information about odd bits of linguistic trivia from Desmond's internal musings and external monologues. As for the deeper implications, I'm reminded ofDwight Macdonald's remark that JohnGalsworthy's plays "offer tests for right feelings." Deaf Sentence holds up a mirror to the reader's? especially the aging reader's?cir cumstances and evokes sympathetic reactions. It's a good read, take that how you will. Robert Murray Davis Universityof Oklahoma MarchApril2009169 ...

Writing Islam in Contemporary American Poetry: On Mohja Kahf, Daniel Moore, and Agha Shahid Ali

Who would want to read an essay titled “Writing Christianity”? “Writing Judaism” might by now sound a bit dated, given that Jewish subject matter is the domain of some of this country's greatest novelists and poets. “Writing Buddhism” still has an appealing ring to it. “Writing Islam” as a topic would not sound interesting to most Muslim authors in Muslim societies. In fact, “Writing Islam” could sound like a fundamentalist ploy to corrupt the thoroughly secular world of literature in contemporary Muslim societies. A more appealing angle might be to focus on writing Islam in the West, or on the global stage, where a growing body of Muslim literature written in European languages is emerging. The authors of this body of literature are outside two folds: Western literature per se and the literatures of their Muslim societies of origin. How do Muslim authors, specifically poets, fashion a voice when they are writing mostly to outsiders? What subject matter will they treat and in what manner? This essay explores these questions by examining how writing Islam is exercised differently by three American Muslim poets, Mohja Kahf, Daniel Moore, and the late Agha Shahid Ali.

The First Document About the Killing of Mental Patients

Many years ago, Peter Breggin and I visited Germany together and spent time talking to each other and to other scholars about the killing of mental patients during the Second World War. We both spoke in Cologne at a conference, "Medicine Without Compassion" in 1988, the first ever devoted to the history of medicine in Nazi Germany. Peter addressed psychiatry's role in the holocaust (Breggin, 1993) and I spoke about Carl Jung's Nazi sympathies and affiliations (Masson, 1988). We were invited by Benno Muller-Hill (1991), a German professor of genetics who wrote one of the first books describing how psychiatry's "euthanasia" program developed the theory and practice that led to the holocaust. It was one of the most stimulating intellectual times I ever had. Peter had a knack for putting his finger on central issues ignored by others. Nobody was as intuitively right about some of the deepest issues facing psychiatry. Living in New Zealand, I sorely miss Peter's company. We were hoping to do a book, Psychiatry and the Holocaust, about the collusion between psychiatry and the Third Reich in the murder of possibly 300,000 so-called mentally ill people. During the course of our research I came across a document that can be considered the very first account of the killings, by none other than Alfred Doblin, one of Germany's greatest novelists, when he was still an officer in the French-occupying army. Doblin, born in 1878, was a psychiatrist and a writer (his most famous novel is the 1929 Berlin Alexanderplatz -later turned into a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder), and was in trouble with the Nazi regime from the beginning, both as a Jew and as a socialist. He fled to France in 1933. Ironically, he died (in 1957) in Emmendigen (near Freiburg) in one of the same asylums whose killing of mental patients he was the first to document. In his autobiographical Schicksalsreise, he wrote prophetically about his countrymen: "It will be much easier for the Germans to rebuild their cities than it will be to get them to truly feel what they have been through, and to understand how it came about" (Doblin, 1993, p. xxx). The document in question is the very first piece written about the killing of mental patients by German psychiatrists. It was published in an obscure German daily newspaper, and has only recently surfaced. Doblin explained how it came about in his posthumously published diary (Doblin, 1980, p. 490, my translation from the German) 1 : I tried to inform myself. I looked for a committed Nazi and could find not a single one. Whenever I asked somebody, he would reply: "I didn't know anything, nor did I know about what happened." [He would claim] it was actually a giant exaggeration, just a means of making propaganda that the radio and the newspapers exploited. Only a single time did I find a traitor. He was a doctor, and told me that he knew me from one of the Berlin asylums. Without my asking he began to tell me how the Nazis went about getting rid of chronically ill patients, [as well as those] who were mentally ill and could not be cured. He told me gruesome details. At the end, he even gave me something in writing. I used parts of this account in a newspaper article I wrote. I sent it to a newspaper in Baden, and it took months and months before the newspaper decided to print the article. Here is my translation into English (the first) of this remarkable document, which I dedicate to my friend Peter Breggin. 2 THE MYSTERY TRIP (FAHRT INS BLAUE), 1946, BY ALFRED DOBLIN A few weeks ago, during a trip made to the countryside, I heard a story the outlines of which I already knew but which touched me as if it were new because of the details. In a small village I ran into a gentleman who had looked at me for a moment on the street with a puzzled look on his face, and then came over to me and called me by name. He was a doctor from Berlin I knew only casually who had been living this village for a year and a half. …

A Study on the Women's "Taekho" and Their Lives Greatest Novels by Cho, Jeong Rae

A Study on the Women's "Taekho" and Their Lives Greatest Novels by Cho, Jeong Rae

The Responsibility of Freedom

The Responsibility of Freedom Eric Miles Williamson Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression Edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters City Lights http://www.citylights.com 224 pages; paper, $14.95 In the United States, writers fret a great deal about "freedom of the press," worrying that if we can't say naughty words our literature will suffer enormously. After all, without a "shit," a "fuck," a "cunt," and an occasional "asshole," what the fuck would our literature be? American writers, compared to writers from most othercountries, enjoy a freedom of expression that is unparalleled. Here in the United States, writers can say just about anything they want to say without fear of public outcry or censorship. This is largely because here in the United States no one pays much attention to writers who aspire to the condition of literature. In Europe or South America, by way of contrast, literary writers are often public figures: Rómulo Gallegos, his country's foremost novelist , was elected president of Venezuela in 1948. Mexico's greatest novelist, Carlos Fuentes, served as his country's ambassador to France. Mario Vargas Llosa nearly became president of Peru in 1990. In many other countries—notably Catholic ones—if one is a writer, one is not reviled and mistrusted as writers are in Protestant America: writers in other nations are respected intellectuals and role models for their people. We in Pinocchio America prefer to let actors, puppets incarnate, be our mayors, our governors, our presidents—making no pretense to their actual functions with respect to the corporations they serve. Our writers we ignore as so many crybabies, perverts, druggies, and drunks. And so American writers can shit, fuck, cunt, asshole, and gosh-golly-god-darn it all they want, and they don't go to jail for it. Samuel Delany can publish his vile, shit-and-cum-soaked Hogg (1995) and his only punishment is the book's obscurity. Why bring attention to the silly people, when in this country a book that gets banned will invariably make the writer famous? It's better to let the petulant children cry themselves asleep and into oblivion. In Shakespeare's day, playwrights were required to submit their manuscripts to the Master of Revels, whose job it was to comb the plays for not only obscenity, but unfavorable depictions ofpeople in positions ofpower. Aplay that even hinted at criticism of the court could land the author in the Tower or Old Bailey's. Ifthe playwright wanted to comment on the court ofKing James, for instance, he not only had to set the play in a foreign land (Italy was a favored foreign stage set for comedies, and Rome was the favored guise for political intrigues), but he'd better be certain the characters in the play bore no resemblance to any bigwigs . Take, for instance, Ben Jonson's Sejanus: His Fall (1603); though the play very closely follows actual recorded history as told by Tacitus, and though it contains no overt references to King James, it landed Jonson in jail. Censorship was serious business. In 2006, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication ofAllen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), a book to which we owe much in terms of our current wide-sweeping freedom of expression. Howl is arguably the most important book of American poetry of the twentieth century. This is not to say it is the best book, but, to be sure, no other single volume of poems has had greater social ramifications than Howl. Not only did its trial set the precedent for allowing naughty words into print, but Howl is the book at the bookstore that's most likely to have been browsed by people too cheap to purchase it. People who don't read poetry read Howl. Undergraduates discover it and decide they want to be poets or poet-dropouts or poet-stoners. Hillbillies in Missouri find it in their teenager's room in their single-wide and bum it. College professors get threatening calls from infuriated parents and Bible-beating Jesuspeople. Posturing poets perform it (with emotion) at Banned Books events. Michael McClure can't speak a paragraph without name-dropping...

Closet Addiction in Fiction: The Search for Christiana Evans

Mary Ann Evans, who would later become the great nineteenth-century novelist George Eliot, takes up in her first three works of fiction a discussion of the use of alcohol in her own culture. However, it is in "Adam Bede" (1859) that a significant portion of the discussion (the alcoholism of one female character in particular) is so deliberately closeted -- so backgrounded -- that the structure of the text becomes a slippery portrait, not only of the extent to which the culturally pervasive alcoholism of women was persistently denied, but of Eliot's own mother's hidden substance abuse. An important minor character in "Adam Bede," identified by more than one biographer as having a kinship to Eliot's mother Christiana Evans, shows all the signs and symptoms of alcoholism, a phenomenon which even the story's narrator appears to be hiding from the reader.

In Defense of Sentimentality

I HAVE JUST finished reading Martin Chuzzlewit. Much of it ranks with Dickens's finest work, particularly the figures of Mr Pecksniff, sanctimonious hypocrite, and his two appalling daughters, both of whom acquire added dimensions as the book proceeds; and there are, in its huge cast, many other telling and striking characters, and some typically acute and hilarious, even some acute and poignant, diagnoses of perennial ills in human nature and in the way people make one another's lives hell. There are also some convincingly good characters, whose virtue does not exclude high spirits and large appetites. Yet at the end of the book I was furious and even disgusted by several of the figures who hijack its last chapters. There are some examples of impossibly virtuous, endlessly put-upon, shockingly exploited figures who remain trusting, gentle, only happy in the happiness of others, resilient to the point of imbecility, and of course unafflicted by the desires of the flesh, by jealousy of those they love but are not loved by—the kind of thing that any cultivated reader of this very great novelist comes to expect and to dread.

Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa by James How

311 own study to include ‘‘Richardson’s extensive newspaper printing and his official Parliamentary printing,’’ and by increasing five-score the number of printer ornaments traced to Richardson’s press, Mr. Maslen manages to identify some 10,000 pieces printed during a career spanning forty-one years, from 1720 to 1761. Many of these—roughly 7,000—are issues of the various newspapers Richardson printed between 1723 and 1746; they have been and continue to be mined for clues as to Richardson’s notoriously obscure political sympathies. But there is much more here. Mr. Maslen shows, for instance, that Richardson began printing issues of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1744, some nine years prior to the date suggested by Sale—a gem of a find for scholars interested in the two novels Richardson wrote during these years. The 1,000 private and local bills ‘‘laid before the House of Commons’’ which Richardson printed during his long career, as Mr. Maslen notes, may well have provided the ‘‘nascent novelist’’ a window to upper-class behavior. And while we have long known that Richardson quotes from Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) in The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734), we now learn that he printed editions of Locke’s religious manifesto in 1731 and 1736. On the other hand, Mr. Maslen has so thoroughly qualified the tendency of literary scholars to see ‘‘the printer only through the author’’ that the prospect of finding in the products of Richardson’s press interpretive keys to his novels has become even more fraught with difficulty . To Sale’s comforting notion that Richardson’s printing record reveals his own personal biases as a thinker and writer, Mr. Maslen responds with ‘‘a different sense of probabilities,’’ ones rooted far less in Richardson’s intellectual preferences, far more in his keen business sensibilities and in his ties to the standard printing practices of his day. Indeed , while literary scholars will benefit immensely from Mr. Maslen’s painstaking work, the best fruit of his labors is a full account of what Richardson was doing when he was not writing novels— that is, what Richardson was of necessity doing most of the time. To understand Richardson’s press, Mr. Maslen shows, is to understand a great deal not only about a master printer who became a great novelist, but about eighteenth -century print culture generally. His book includes a thoroughly researched Introduction, fully documented lists of books, parliamentary bills, and newspapers printed by Richardson, and an annotated reproduction of 518 of the 526 ornaments used by his press. Closer proofreading would have been useful— the Introduction contains at least 10 rather egregious typos. Nevertheless, Mr. Maslen’s book will enjoy a degree of longevity worthy of the book it replaces—typos be damned. E. Derek Taylor Longwood University JAMES HOW. Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. 214. $89.95. Mr. How offers us a useful new term in letter writing, ‘‘epistolary space,’’ which means ‘‘spaces of connection, providing permanent and seemingly unbreakable links between people and places. . . . epistolary spaces are ‘public’ spaces within which supposedly ‘private’ writings travel—at once imaginary and 312 real.’’ This new epistolary space was the direct result of the establishment of a new and reliable postal system, an invention that itself actively provoked new forms of behavior: specifically, writers chose new content for their letters; new forms of ‘‘connectivity’’ were established for all letter writers, no matter their social status; a new informality and lack of urgency defined the style of letters ; and new epistolary spaces connected letter writers to their rapidly growing capital city of London. Dorothy Osborne’s letters to Sir William Temple, a clandestine correspondence (1652 and 1654), enabled the prolonged courtship of the daughter of the last royalist to remain fighting for Charles I. Osborne chose not to use the new postal system, for fear of having her letters intercepted by Cromwell’s intelligence gatherers. Moreover, Osborne did not want her letters coming under the watchful eyes of her male relatives. This indicates the circumscribed but permeable boundaries of Osborne’s epistolary space...

Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America

Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America Marina Moskowitz. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. One evening in 1894, the philosopher John Dewey and his brother, the economist Davis Dewey, went slumming in Chicago. Both were interested in the varieties of in America. First, they went to outdoor gospel meeting, then to ten cent lodging house, next to two gambling places, and finally, to Carrie Watson's famous brothel. The last was a high select place ... furnished as elegantly [as] ... 3/4 of the millionaire's houses. The girls, John noticed, weren't even powdered, and he realized that an expert pick them out, but I shouldn't know them from women you meet at evening party anywhere. One might have been kindergarten teacher for all I could see in her. Another girl told the philosopher that for her, it was a profession, and that like any other business person, she made her regular donations to charities. At Carrie Watson's, John Dewey discovered how far the of and its concomitant creation of definite middle-class ideology had spread. Hitherto, he had been much concerned with the conflict between workers and capitalists. Now his attention turned to the center of American life, its middle class. He was to become the philosopher of of thinking and of behaving in philosophy that he called instrumentalism and that others called pragmatism. In Standard of Living, Marina Moskowitz mentions neither Dewey nor his fellow pragmatist William James. William Dean Howells and Henry James, the great novelists of middle-class American life, are nowhere discussed. The profound effects of politics, legislation, public policy, and judicial decisions receive no attention. The ways in which the conflict of the Civil War accelerated in the immediate postwar period the development of national middle-class culture, and the effects of the First World War upon consolidating middle-class standards and these values, are not discussed. The relation of Christian religion, social gospel, and charity to the dominance of the middle class is omitted. The astonishing increase in volunteer social organizations that fostered middle-class values as the of life is not considered. The expositions and fairs that occurred with such regularity in America between 1876 and 1939-most importantly, the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago-are barely mentioned, though it was at these that the nation could be introduced to the everexpanding products and values that made the middle class's standard of living. These fairs contributed powerfully to the increasingly planned obsolescence of middle-class material culture, since the focus on the progressively new was strongly inscribed into its value sets. Last, the author shows no interest in how possession of the automobile became central symbol of proper standard of living. Admittedly, the literature on the rise of the middle class and the systematic creation of the national standardization in living is vast, even during the period of 1870-1920, on which Moskowitz focuses. A small library of books on the subject comes to mind, and this has undoubtedly pre-empted many of the subjects and issues that seem to be absent from her study. Her focus, then, is on four emblems of middleclass standards that she offers as representing much more. Her first focus is on the Reed & Barton Silver company. …

Napoleon in the Flesh

The Emperor Napoleon had not yet left his bedroom and was finishing his toilet. Uttering snorts and grunts, he presented now his stout back, now his plump hairy chest to the flesh-brush with which a valet was rubbing him down. Another valet, with his finger over the mouth of a bottle, was sprinkling eau-de-Cologne on the Emperor's pampered person .. .' There is something about Tolstoy's description of Napoleon Bonaparte on the eve of the battle of Borodino that is not only wonderfully funny, but marvelously revealing about nineteenth-century attitudes towards the French emperor. After all, the great novelist never depicted Tsar Alexander I en toilette. Nor did he go so far as to undress General Kutuzov, although he did not hesitate to present the Russian commander as sliding towards the edge of mental and physical ruin. But there is something about Napoleon that invites the intimacy of the rubbed flesh and the snorts. True, Napoleon himself, during the years of his rule, desperately tried to create monarchical distance between himself and his subjects. Borrowing indiscriminately from the Romans, from Charlemagne and from Louis XIV, he draped his person in ermine, his entourage in gaudy uniforms and gaudier titles (Duke of Ragusa, Prince of Benevento . . .), and his cities in grandiose stone monuments to glory. Yet to his subjects, and particularly his faithful grognards, he stubbornly remained the little corporal who shared the discomforts and privations of his troops, and who stepped in to help aim the artillery pieces at the battle of Lodi. Which is to say that