Historicist Methods Research Articles

2008 AND ALL THAT: ECONOMICS AND VICTORIAN LITERATURE

In their collection of essays,The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics(1999), Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee identified and named a movement in economic literary studies and sought to place it alongside a cultural turn in economics. In their introduction, they offer possible reasons for the proliferation of scholarship in literature, culture, and economics. One is that “the critical pendulum has decidedly swung back toward historicist methods” and away from formalist approaches (3); another is that the 1980s thrust “interest rates, stock market speculation, takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and so on, into the public attention as never before since the 1930s” (4). Today, the proverbial pendulum has swung back toward formalism, and it is now surprising to encounter their comparison of the 1980s to the 1930s because we have become so accustomed to claim that comparison to the 1930s for our own post-2008 economy.

A sense of tradition: R.J.W. Selleck and the purpose of educational history

This short account of R.J.W. (Dick) Selleck's career and research suggests how he reoriented study of the history of education in Australia. Using a historicist method, he examined educational theories and practices to elucidate the educational purposes they were intended to serve. Through major biographies of leading educationists and biographical studies of teachers he broadened the social and cultural dimension of educational history. More recently he has applied the same rigorous scholarship to higher education.

The Poetics and Politics of Legend: Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn and the Invention of Irish History

Introduction: Truth and Error in History of IrelandIn polemical introduction to his 1634 Foras Feasa ar Eirinn (Foundation of Knowledge on Ireland, often called History of Ireland), Geoffrey Keating criticizes Meredith Hanmer's late-sixteenth-century Chronicle of Ireland for including early modern Irish narrative Cath Fionntragha (The Battle of Ventry) when it is clear that Ireland 's historians do not regard this tale as staire firinnighe (true history) but assert that it is finnsceul filidheachta (poetic legend ) (1: 50-51).1 Keating accuses Welsh historian of misrepresenting Ireland 's historical records by inserting this less-than-plausible tale as if it were characteristic of Irish history when Cath Fionntragha's legendary status is well recognized. As his refutation of Hanmer suggests, one of Keating's aims in writing Foras Feasa was to correct oft-repeated claim that Ireland had no reliable history and to provide a foundation, or foras, for future histories of Ireland. Without doubt, Keating's text did prove central to writing of Irish history for many centuries to come: it was rapidly translated into Latin and English, enjoyed a wide circulation for a manuscript text, and formed a pillar of Irish historical canon. Today it remains central to study of early mod- ern Irish national identities.The Foras Feasa is a text highly attuned to genre, and Keating was well aware that Irish records frequently mixed historical and legendary ac- counts. Claiming to possess ability Hanmer lacks in distinguishing be- tween genres, Keating occasionally informs his reader that certain episodes included in Foras Feasa are not to be regarded as historical and should in- stead be considered legends. Nevertheless, Keating retains sources he identi- fies as legendary, even those that had been criticized by British writers for their implausibility, such as accounts claiming that Ireland was first settled by No- ah's granddaughter (1: 140-47). The Foras Feasa asserts necessity of includ- ing all of Ireland's seanchas (ancient traditions) in telling of its history by employing chronological organization of annals and chronicles along- side taxonomic organization of tales by theme or type often used to present scela (stories or tales).2 If Hanmer's failing was his inability to distinguish between history and legend, Foras Feasa brings two together on a struc- tural level. The Foras Feasa deploys all of Ireland 's traditions and organiza- tional structures in its anticolonialist reclamation of Irish historical study for Irish scholars who were able, as colonialist writers were not, to read sean- chas.3 By casting Irish legends as rich material rather than defective method of Irish history, Keating makes a claim for a rigorous historicist method that at once honors principles of new humanism and yet pre- serves Irishness in retelling and reframing of Irish past.Keating's foundation for producing Irish knowledge imagines Irish history as incorporating all of seanchas, positing historian as collector and in- terpreter of a variety of texts, both legendary and historical. Keating deploys this generic inclusiveness against colonialist works claiming that Ireland 's chronicles, many of which related island 's independence from Britain until twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invasion, were essentially legends. The Foras Feasa endeavored to refute what Brendan Bradshaw has termed the most damaging of all English calumnies against Irish, namely that their native land constituted a mere appendage of realm of England (Apolo- gist 172). Keating's project is widely accepted as an anticolonial one in that it sought, by attacking scholarship and credentials of writers who could not read seanchas of Ireland, to counter texts written to legitimate Tudor reconquest of Ireland.4Anticolonialism and national identity are closely connected in Keating's work. …

Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel ed. by Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz-Robles (review)

LEVINE, CAROLINE and MARIO ORTIZ-ROBLES, eds. Narrative Middles: Navigating Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2011.257 pp. $54.95. In Narrative Middles, editors Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles assemble nine chapter-length studies of canonical nineteenth-century novels in an attempt promote neoformalism, a blend of historical and narratological approaches novel as a genre. They argue that by studying (broadly defined) of these novels, postmillennial critics can find new insights lacking in previous studies, which they claim have been heavily invested in beginnings and endings. Those older approaches, they argue, have played themselves out (2). Their book, instead, responds several recent theoretical efforts in narratology, most specifically Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practice (2008), Narrative Dynamics (2002), and Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1992). At first glance, a book devoted middle of novels seems be weak scaffolding for such weighty concerns, but introduction itself is so clear and well organized that premise generally works. The book offers interesting and insightful studies of novels by Jane Austen (twice), George Eliot, Henry James, Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and William Morris. The essays are grouped into three sections (centers; repetitions; and suspensions) that explore different aspects of middle. Levine and Ortiz-Robles identify three kinds of cultural and social match their formalistic concerns: middle class; nineteenth-century Britain's centrist reform program (7); and Britain as the hub of empire (7). In their introduction, editors (who also contribute one chapter each book) situate their exploration of in body of Western thought, literature, and theory, setting forth blend formalist readings with sociopolitical history (3). They proclaim two key objectives in this book: to contribute a long-standing gap in theory (5) and show that narrative middles are an ideal site for convergence of formalist and historicist methods (7). It would be difficult say that all nine essays in this book accomplish all objectives, but they do identify an unusual topic, define it variously, and apply that definition well-known Victorian texts. …

“Betuix pyne and faith”: The Poetics of Compassion in Walter Kennedy’s Passioun of Crist

Walter Kennedy’s Passioun of Crist , the only surviving vernacular work in the tradition of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditations of the Life of Christ to be composed in rhyme royal stanzas, is a more significant artistic achievement in the history of Middle Scots poetry and of late medieval devotional writing than has been previously recognized. Combining historicist and formalist methods of analysis, the article describes in detail the cultural locations of the text. The carefully crafted poem reveals a remarkable cooperation between specific material practices of medieval affective devotion and a high courtly mode of medieval literary aesthetics.

The Speculative Freedom of Colonial Liberia

This essay examines letters written by U.S. black settler-colonists in Liberia to their families, friends, and former masters in the United States during Liberia's colonial and early national periods, 1820–1855. It argues that the letters stage speculative, epistolary encounters with freedom that evade strictly historicist interpretive methods. Consequently, the essay proffers a reading practice that attends to the letters' speculative reflections on the meaning of freedom in nineteenth-century Liberia. It shows how the black settler-colonists represent freedom not simply as an event or an accomplishment (of a return to Africa, or of manumission, independence, or national citizenship) but as an ongoing, equivocal, ungiven possibility that also repeatedly returns, recursively, to the legacy of slavery in the United States.

From Pilgrimage to History: The Renaissance and Global Historicism. John G. Demaray . New York: AMS Press, 2006. Pp. xv+250.

<i>From Pilgrimage to History: The Renaissance and Global Historicism</i>. John G. Demaray . New York: AMS Press, 2006. Pp. xv+250.

Edmund Spenser, Lucretian Neoplatonist: Cosmology in the Fowre Hymnes

J N THE DEDICATION to the Fowre Hymnes, Spenser offers one of the few explicit «autobiographical narratives to be found among his printed poems:Having in the greener times of my youth composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Love and Beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out poyson to their strong passion, then hony to their honest delight, I was moved by the one of you two most excellent Ladies, to call in the same.1This story, with its tale of attempted retraction, has presented Spenser scholars with a puzzle: are the Hymnes a hybrid work comprised of two youthful Petrarchan poems and two later religious corrections to the poet's giovenile errore? Why did Spenser feel moved to publish a hymnic palinode in 1596, the same year he published the six-book Faerie Que ene? Perhaps more importantly, does the mystery of chronology and autobiography help illuminate the subject of the Hymnes themselves? The propositions of Robert Ellrodt, in his 1960 study, have done little to settle these questions of motive and content. Despite claiming that the poems could not have been composed before 1595 through a discussion of the Neoplatonism of Spenser's poetry, Ellrodt only threw into sharper relief Spenser's story of retraction and the possibility that it may be a fiction.2 Why did the poet insist on this fiction? And what ex«actly was Spenser recanting in his own work?'Long considered the apotheosis of sixteenth-century English Neoplatonism, particularly in the form of Petrarchan poetry, the Hymnes are perhaps the least studied poems of the Spenserian corpus. While there is critic«al consensus about their importance, we have yet to grasp firmly their relationship to the poet's other works or to the sociopolitical matrix into which Spenser has so successfully been reinserted in the last twenty years of scholarship. In fact, the determined absence of topical detail in the Hymnes, as well as their sheen of formal symmetry, have made them somewhat impenetrable to critical approaches based on historicist methods and political interests; the handful of essays on the poems treat either their philosophical sources or their formal structure.4 Thus, we might note that the Hymnes have seemed paradoxically both too easy and too difficult to Yet Spenser's palinodie frame for the Fowre Hymnes in the dedication's story of origin provides us with a powerful key to understanding the poems. Indeed, it is worth noting that not only the dedication, but also An Hymne of Heavenly Love, contain palinodie gestures, as though Spenser meant to thematize the movement of action and retraction, turn and counterturn within the work as a whole. The palinode or recantation was of course a much-used lyric trope in the Renaissance.3 Its classical source is Stesichorus's ode recantation of the Helen, famously imitated and discussed by Socrates in the Phaedrus (243a), while its best known Renaissance imitator might be Petrarch, whose Rime sparse is framed as a palinode, an Augustinian recantation of juvenile erotic experience.6 This turn away from either erotic nugae or errori to grand devotional themes, whether in Socrates' repudiation of erotic furor or in Petrarch's turn towards the Vergine bella, was simultaneously a sign of humility and ambition, a double-edged gesture that suggested genuine conversion as well as ironic self-consciousness. …

The Novel and Prejudice

The Novel and Prejudice Sarah Winter (bio) In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that since "all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice," modern historicism suffers from a fundamental hermeneutic blindness: "historicism, despite its critique of rationalism and of natural law philosophy, is based on the modern Enlightenment and unwittingly shares its prejudices. And there is one prejudice of the Enlightenment that defines its essence: . . . the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power."1 Gadamer's critique alludes to the Enlightenment attack on prejudice, defined as an automatic prejudgment based on customary or habitual patterns of thinking. For Gadamer, such "provisional" judgments (273) are fundamental, as they inevitably involve the Heideggerian "fore-conception" [Vorgriff], or the interpretive expectations that we bring to a text or experience.2 By implementing an Enlightenment critique of prejudice to foreground the constructed and changing status of human knowledge, modern historicism attempts to evade both the effects of what we know in advance of each interpretive act and the historical status of our "anticipatory ideas" (272), thus paradoxically exhibiting its own anti-historicist predisposition. Gadamer's German term Vorurteil lends itself to his attack on Enlightenment historicism because, as Gerhard Joseph points out, "the term means both 'prejudgment' and 'prejudice'" as negative bias, and has commonly been translated both ways since the eighteenth century.3 In English, however, these alternative meanings of prejudice coexist less comfortably because the Enlightenment philosophical connotation has fallen into abeyance.4 Gadamer's critique of modern historicism draws our attention to a set of tensions within the concept of prejudice that, in turn, help us to align the history of the novel and the history of human rights in new ways. I want to make the case that the novel participated in transforming an [End Page 76] Enlightenment empiricist notion of prejudice as automatic prejudgment into the more familiar modern notion of prejudice as an unjust bias against certain persons or groups of people. By characterizing the psychological states and plotting the damaging results of traditional social biases, the subgenre that I will identify and characterize here as the novel of prejudice played an important early role in framing the experience of prejudice as a significant epistemological, political, and ethical problem of modernity. This type of novel, I will argue, taught readers that specific prejudices could be isolated and extracted from the customary ways of thinking and behaving in which they had been embedded. Once recognized, such instances of bias could be examined and rejected when they failed the tests of reason, experience, justice, or morality. Conceiving of traditional prejudices as negative and exclusionary requires questioning the necessity of certain kinds of ideas and judgments. In order to be corrected, prejudices must be viewed as historically and culturally contingent, even irrational. The novel's characterization of prejudice as complicit with social injustices and thus as morally compromising was also based on an empiricist presupposition that because they are merely automatic and often irrational assumptions instilled through education and custom, prejudices can be overcome through counter-evidence, concerted mental retraining, or the activation of a just conscience. According to this skeptical empiricist perspective, certain customs can be quarantined from their larger context so that the abuses they have come to justify can be rectified, or, as has happened more frequently, so that local traditions can be discredited based on universal moral or legal principles. Because the attack on the legitimacy of biases against groups and persons displaces the value of the traditions or history within which such biases have arisen, however, it appears paradoxically anti-historicist. It is this tension between an historicist method that is fully cognizant of cultural differences and its accompanying normative critique of unjust biases within particular mentalities and institutions that the novel of prejudice both explores and makes recognizable as a characteristic modern dilemma of understanding and political commitment. This tension also inheres in liberal conceptions of human rights. Jack Donnelly has pointed out that "liberals, from Locke to today, have been champions of rights-based political change . . . . [Liberals'] principal use [of human rights] is to demand that old ways, however convenient or time-honored, give way to the legitimate demands of the equal...

A Collapse of Trust: Reconceptualizing the Crisis of Historicism

AbstractThis essay redefines the crisis of historicism as a collapse of trust. Following Friedrich Jaeger, it suggests that this crisis should be understood, not as a crisis caused by historicist methods, but as a crisis faced by the classical historicist tradition of Ranke. The "nihilism" and "moral relativism" feared by Troeltsch's generation did not primarily refer to the view that moral universals did not exist; rather, they expressed that the historical justification of bildungsbürgerliche values offered by classical historicism did no longer work. In Niklas Luhmann's vocabulary, this is to say that moral values could no longer be trusted on historical grounds. But when the "reduction of complexity" offered by classical historicism collapsed, Troeltsch's generation faced a justification problem: what other modes of justification, if any at all, were available in a time of increasing secularization and growing feelings of discontinuity with the past? In identifying the crisis of historicism with this moral justification problem, this essay helps explain why such debts of despair could be reached in the early-twentieth-century disputes over historicism.

Unconventional Guest: Masao Abe’s Dialogue with the American Academy

Unconventional Guest: Masao Abe’s Dialogue with the American Academy William R. LaFleur During the two years we were together at Princeton I once took Masao Abe to meet my parents, then alive and living in New Jersey. I had told them some things in advance about Abe, about Zen, and about what in Abe’s ways could at times be unconventional. My mother, I knew, would put lots of effort into preparing the Sunday dinner we ate on the day of our visit. At the meal’s conclusion Abe turned to my mother and declared: “Mrs. LaFleur, this meal has been simply outrageous! ” For a moment I thought he might have meant “delicious” and had landed on the wrong word. But then I saw his smiling eyes and mouth. He had meant what he said. Everyone laughed and my mother promptly thanked him for his “compliment.” Being at times a genially unconventional guest, one who also in academic or dialogic contexts would say surprising or even unsettling things, was something at which Abe excelled. He was also unconventional in his teaching. He frustrated us when we expected the usual approach. In the book edited by Donald Mitchell I told how in 1969 at the University of Chicago Abe aggravated those of us graduate students who wanted to do a survey of all of modern Japanese philosophy; Abe forced us to stay with certain sentences in Nishida, wanting our minds to be changed. He would not budge.1 Some years later at Princeton he proved to be maddeningly insistent on this. Reading The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch with graduate students in 1977 who knew some Chinese and Japanese was not for Professor Abe going to be exercise in the usual historico-textual excavation; all that was available, he said, in the introduction and notes to Philip Yampolsky’s translation of that text. He was not interested in an “objectification” that put distance between the voice speaking through the text and the person being addressed by it today. For him the ancient text must read as if written for us and for us today. With Abe as teacher the dialogic mode of the seminar room had to replicate in its own way the lecture hall of the Ta-fan Temple! But graduate students at Princeton, inured as they were to the conventional mode of textual-historical analysis, were made clearly uncomfortable by this. Therefore, hoping I might serve as a mediator, they asked me to ask Abe if we might be more historical and move on more quickly. When, with some trepidation, I transmitted this request [End Page 127] to Abe, he merely chuckled and smiled, leaving me to guess why we should expect no change in his emphasis. What follows is my attempt to unpack what was involved in this . . . and why it remains relevant today. Even some more recent scholars of East Asian Buddhism in our academy today resemble those graduate students back then in Princeton. They, too, have been suggesting that there was something “behind the times” or in need of being updated in the dialogic teaching mode used so brilliantly by Abe—as well as by Hisamatsu Shin’ichi and D. T. Suzuki. However, there is, I think, something both laughably conventional and arrogantly neocolonialist in these critics’ assumptions. They believe that textual and historicist methods (of which Ideologiekritik is an extension) remain something that the West still needs to teach to the non-West, that these render all other methods outdated and irrelevant, and that they can be deployed to expose what remains flawed in the way that, for instance, Japanese such as Abe study and teach Buddhism and Zen. Ironically, this presumptuous stance itself crumbles under historical and textual analysis—at least when applied to Japan. In various studies, Michael Pye has shown that Tominaga Nakamoto’s studies of Buddhist texts, historical and critical to the core, were done in the early seventeenth century and show a solid tradition of scholarship in this mode arising there without any influence from Europe. As Pye shows, interest in the plurality of religions and an early stage of a “science of religions” were present in Japan...

Mediums, Media, Mediation: Response

adequately theorized or refined, and the failure to do so continues to undermine even some of the most promising work now being produced. At the recent NAVSA Conference, both the influence of new historicism and this chronically undertheorized area were on view. As the three papers printed here suggest, however, some adaptations of new historicist methods are bringing the topic I want to examine to our collective attention in new and exciting ways. The topic I have in mind is mediation. Mediation appears as an

The Hidden Diplomatic History of Argentine-Brazilian Integration: Implications for Historiography and Theory

Most sources have given the credit for the Argentine-Brazilian bilateral integration either to the military administrations on the grounds of the diplomatic rapprochement of 1979–1982, or to the newly democratic administrations by virtue of the announcement and formalization of integration in 1985 and 1986 respectively. Fresh primary material, both archival sources and interviews with key players in those events, reveals that the idea of integration was born and discussed between 1983 and 1984, in a situation of regime asymmetry, Argentina having returned to democracy in 1983 and Brazil in 1985. However, democracy proved to be fundamental in the development of negotiations and their finalization. Implications for historians may be quite straightforward. Theorists of democratic peace and cooperation may have to temper certain results emerging from essentially statistical exercises with the qualitative analysis the historicist method provides for a correct assessment of the significance of regularities and exceptions.

The Accent's on Evil: Ancient Egyptian "Melodrama" and the Problem of Genre

This contribution will address two related and partly-overlapping questions: (1) What, in the context of Egyptian narrative literature, is a genre? (2) How is it possible to distinguish between types of Egyptian fictional narratives? I will approach these questions through a literary analysis of the narrative frame of the Middle Kingdom Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, the Ramesside tale The Blinding of Truth by Falsehood, and the legend of Osarsiph (from a fragment of Manetho's Aegyptiaca preserved in Josephus, Against Apion). I will identify the narrative plots of these disparate compositions as instances of melodrama, a particular type of story in which evil, though it mo mentarily overcomes good, is decisively defeated in the story's conclusion. I will argue that this analysis is only made possible by considering the narratives at the level of plot and characterization. I conclude that the contemporary conception of genre within Egyptological literary scholarship, which stresses the uniqueness of Egyptian literature as revealed through an inductive, historicist method and which most often locates literary genre at the levels of external form and social func tion, invites re-examination. Deductive use of some universal generic categories may reveal broad commonalities between Egyptian and other world literatures; this may suggest interpretations that are not obvious when we limit ourselves to conventional Egyptological methodology.

Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879 (review)

Reviewed by: Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879 Hildegard Hoeller Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879. By Carolyn Sorisio. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2002. 299 pp. $44.95. Sorisio's impressive study examines representations of the body in the work of seven authors: Lydia Maria Child, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delaney. Combining close readings with new historicist methods, Sorisio discusses how, in a climate in which science developed new theories of the body, "these authors struggled ... to flesh out America, to grapple in other words, with the discourses of abolition, women's rights, and science—all of which had the cumulative effect of debunking the myth of the disembodied 'person' of Revolutionary rhetoric" (1-2). Using Michel Foucault and Elaine Scarry, among others, as theoretical frames, the introduction most importantly discusses the emerging scientific theory of polygenesis, which replaced the earlier theory of monogenesis by assuming innate differences between races (and genders) rather than posing a common origin for different races. This shift had enormous political implications since it enabled "the invention of a biologically determined subject [End Page 109] whose corporeality contradicted any claim to the Declaration of Independence's higher laws of equality by means of creation"(15). The study then offers a breathtaking journey into each writer's struggle to resist or re-employ these racial and corporeal theories for their own ends. How far can and do they resist? And at whose expense? Each chapter delineates a single writer's corporeal experience and then reveals complexities, gaps, and even contradictions in each writer's negotiation of the body. This parallel structure makes the book so readable and so beautifully complex, allowing readers to see the commonalities, synchronicity, and divergences between writers rarely discussed together. Sorisio accurately claims that "[b]y examining these authors' corporeal depictions, we begin to understand that essentialism, or knowledge claimed through the body, became both an obstacle in people's efforts to attain full access to the literary and political spheres and a tool to deploy cautiously when advantageous" (7). The first chapter shows how Child negotiated the problems of the perceived indecency of revealing the bodily experiences of slaves and of entering the public sphere as a woman in her work as an abolitionist activist. Sorisio then considers race in her analysis of Harper's strategic redirection of the audience's gaze away from her own body or any racialized body inwards by "proposing self-discipline as a liberatory strategy" (9). While Emerson's anti-slavery essays similarly commit him to resist "science's relegation of identity to corporeality" (9), his later work, Sorisio argues, "[endorses] stereotypical conceptions of male Anglo-Saxon superiority" (9). Sorisio then traces the dependence of Fuller's "feminist vision ... on the symbolic transference of unwanted corporeal associations to the bodies of Native Americans" and follows with a chapter on Whitman which delineates how his initial "trust in the body" gives way to "envisioning a race of North Americans that is predominantly masculine and Caucasian" (9, 10). Next, Sorisio reveals Jacobs's "[invention of] a dual strategy that demonstrates the importance of corporeality to identity, but ultimately proposes that it can be transcended" (203). The final chapter on Delany demonstrates how he "[built] upon and [reinvented] theories of racial essentialism that not only served his personal politics, but also provided the theoretical background for his vision of the globalized destiny of people of color" (11). Fleshing Out America offers a complex understanding of nineteenth-century American literature's preoccupation with race and the body. It also demonstrates, to a large degree, the cohesion of nineteenth-century American writing across gender and race lines. Nonetheless, Sorisio surprisingly reinstates one long-challenged distinction between male and female writers in her undertheorized judgment of, even distaste for, sentimental writing. Particularly when arguing for Child's increasing distance from sentimental rhetoric, Sorisio's study gets side-tracked. This is regretable not only because it leads to a loss of focus but also because Sorisio misses the opportunity to...

The classification of psychology : A case study in the classification of a knowledge field

Different approaches to the classification of a knowledge field include empiristic, rationalistic, historicist, and pragmatic methods. This paper demonstrates how these different methods have been applied to the classification of psychology. An etymological approach is insufficient to define the subject matter of psychology, because other terms can be used to describe the same domain. To define the subject matter of psychology from the point of view of its formal establishment as a science and academic discipline (in Leipzig, 1879) is also insufficient because this was done in specific historical circumstances, which narrowed the subject matter to physiologically-related issues. When defining the subject area of a scientific field it is necessary to consider how different ontological and epistemological views have made their influences. A subject area and the approaches by which this subject area has been studied cannot be separated from each other without tracing their mutual historical interactions. The classification of a subject field is theory-laden and thus cannot be neutral or ahistorical. If classification research can claim to have a method that is more general than the study of the concrete developments in the single knowledge fields the key is to be found in the general epistemological theories. It is shown how basic epistemological assumptions have formed the different approaches to psychology during the 20th century. The progress in the understanding of basic philosophical questions is decisive both for the development of a knowledge field and as the point of departure of classification. The theoretical principles developed in this paper are applied in a brief analysis of some concrete classification systems, including the one used by PsycINFO / Psychological Abstracts. The role of classification in modern information retrieval is also briefly discussed.

There's no Place Like Rome: American Protestant Fascination with Catholicism

Jenny Franchot has produced a dazzling book about a topic that has been long overdue for a new synthetic treatment. In light of the number of recent books reevaluating cultural and intellectual life in antebellum America, her contribution to the historiography of Protestant nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment is as impressive as it is timely. Her central thesis is simple: that antiCatholicism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers of popular and elite fictional and historical texts indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture (p. xvii). The New Historicist method by which anti-Catholic discourse is examined, however, requires patience and continuous engagement from the reader. There is abundant historical evidence that Catholicism functioned as the Other in nineteenth-century Protestant America. Following the removal of non-Protestant populations from the eastern settled areas-most of the eastem Indian tribes were forced to the western frontier in the 1830s-and even before the arrival of a first wave of papists from Ireland and Germany in the 1840s, Protestants constructed a new Catholic enemy. Their suspicions of a Catholic revival beginning in Europe were heightened by the revival of the Jesuit order in 1814, the British Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829, and campaigns in England against increasing state funding for the Catholic seminary founded in 1795 at Maynooth, Ireland. This militant Anglo-Protestantism was in many ways a revival and extension of old Reformation polemics against Rome. Because Americans imported much of their antiCatholic discourse, it seems there would be little novelty in North American anti-Catholic texts. Nonetheless, Franchot contends, by the 1840s American Protestants faced special anxieties about their own disunity despite their hegemony since the seventeenth century. Against these fears of fragmentation

Shelley's satire: violence, exhortation, and authority

Jones challenges traditional images of Percy Bysshe Shelley in this first book-length analysis of his major satiric works. Bringing to bear genre theory and a New Historical frame of reference, Jones places Shelley's satires in their broad context of popular, political, and material culture. Jones argues that Shelley's satiric poems express an important countervoice within Shelley's work as well as within Romanticism as a whole. These ironic, public, referential, and worldly texts are shown to be deeply ambivalent, employing the imagery of curse, revenge, and punishment in a coercive rhetoric of violence only occasionally covered with laughter. Thus the satires vividly represent the darker side of the Romantic poet's relation to society as well as his efforts to engage and to change the world. Shelley's Satire illuminates the historical and cultural contexts that stirred the poet's imagination - contemporary superstition, the popular entertainments of the pantomime and graphic prints, and historical events such as the Peterloo Massacre and the Queen Caroline affair. It will engage not only Shelleyans and Romanticists but also anyone interested in satire as a genre, New Historicist methods, theories of cultural formation, and the Regency period in English history.

Poetic Friends: A Study of Literary Relations During the English Romantic Period by Warren Stevenson

REVIEWS Warren Stevenson, Poetic Friends: A Study of Literary Relations During the English Romantic Period (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). 195. $35.95 US. This compact book focusses on the theme of intellectual friendship in the Romantic period, specifically how three poets — Blake, Coleridge, Shelley — gave poetic form to their relationships with, respectively, Hayley, Words­ worth, and Byron/Keats. This is interesting and potentially fruitful ter­ ritory. While much has been written about biographical and intertextual dynamics of individual relationships in the Romantic period, room remains for a good book that would synthesize existing research and construct a the­ oretical framework for the subject, for example by extending to other poets Gene Ruoff’s careful intertextual method in dealing with the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth or by applying historicist methods to determine how and why friendship became such a culturally powerful concept in the Romantic period. Unfortunately, this is not that book. Poetic Friends purports to steer a humanist mid-course between “the heaven of archetypal criticism and the hell of deconstruction” (1), but it offers no coherent theory or methodology, and pays scarcely any attention to relevant criticism on the subject. Indeed, this is not really a scholarly book at all, at least not in the modern sense of the term. In both tone and substance, it is reminiscent of the academic lecture of yesteryear, in which a genial professor delivers, amid a good deal of biographical anecdote, plot summary, personal witticism and generaliza­ tion, a series of eccentric readings of isolated passages and poems, based on unfounded assumptions and haphazard research, and decorated by a few touches of poorly digested myth criticism and neo-Freudian psychoanalysis. Poetic Friends has a tripartite structure, with one part devoted to each of Blake and Hayley, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Insofar as Stevenson has a thesis, it is that a battle for poetic and pyschosexual dominance animates these relationships and takes poetic form in the work of one of its members. (Stevenson asserts that the literary transformation of friendship is evident only in the work of Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley, as “Hayley, Wordsworth, and Byron did not reciprocate this 355 ‘forming’ to any significant degree” (3), a questionable statement given the amount of material written on Wordsworth’s dialogue with Coleridge alone.) What Stevenson means by “forming” appears to differ among the sections. In the first two sections he is concerned with the transformation of a conflict­ laden relationship into dramatic, symbolic, or mythic terms, as, for example, in his reading of the symbolic personages in Blake’s Jerusalem, as aspects of Blake’s difficult relationship with Hayley. In the final, less successful section, forming appears to be a simple synonym for portraying or influencing, as in the statement that Shelley formed Byron by “dosing” him with Wordsworth at a crucial stage in his poetic career (133). Each part is divided into several relatively self-contained subsections or mini-essays offering biographical information on the relationship and bring­ ing that information to bear on individual poems. In the first two sections, this generates allegorical interpretations of Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem and Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel.” Here Stevenson’s method seems to be the finding of images or passages in the poems that he can identify with a biographical event or feature of the relationship (e.g., Satan’s relationship with Elynittria, in Milton, is a dramatization of Hayley ’s putative attraction to Blake’s wife; the word “askance,” used thrice for the way Geraldine looks at Christabel, also appears in Coleridge’s notebook description of Wordsworth looking at him). By accumulating these details he attempts to construct a coherent interpretation of a particular charac­ ter or poem as an allegorical portrait of the friend (thus Satan in Blake’s Milton is Hayley, or at least the set of attitudes he represents, while Geral­ dine in “Christabel” is Wordsworth, or at least the way Coleridge dramatizes Wordsworth’s dominance over him). While the readings in these sections are eccentric, and too often overstated, reductive, superficial, and/or unfounded in their use of evidence, they are at least memorable. This cannot be said for the essays...

Equestrian Imagery in European and American Political Thought: Toward an Understanding of Symbols as Political Texts

TjHE Marxist critic Frederic Jameson recently (1981) argued that the interpretive apparatus used study literary texts must be political. In the study of political theory, I propose reverse this formulation by arguing for the priority of literary interpretations of political texts. To say that political theory needs be studied from a more literary perspective is suggest that its language must be confronted metaphorically and symbolically. The literary treatment of political texts returns the study of political theory, political language, and politics itself, their origins and foundations in everyday life and discourse. Fundamentally, it returns them the body and its experiences what Marxists have understood in terms of necessity, Freudians in terms of desire, post-structuralists in terms of power, and cultural anthropologists in terms of ritual and representation.' The body, and the terms by which we seek either live within or outside of it, provide the basic set of symbolic referents for understanding our status as political creatures. In this paper, I argue that symbolic language returns the study of politics its bodily foundations. I aim do so through a detailed examination of equestrian imagery in European and American political thought. My specific focus is on England during the seventeenth century. While the primary concerns of this essay are historical and interpretive, I also address the methodological implications of a literary approach the study of political theory. The consequences of this approach are manifold, not the least of them being its subversive impact upon the analytic and historicist methods that have predominated within the Anglo-American tradition of political theory. The historical significance of equestrian themes relates what Simone de Beauvoir has termed the male desire to assert transcendence over