History Of Taste Research Articles

Food: the history of taste

Introduction: A New History of Cuisine 1. Hunter-Gatherers and the First Farmers 2. The Good Things That Lay at Hand 3. The Quest for Perfect Balance 4. The Pleasures of Consumption 5. Feasting and Fasting 6. New Worlds, New Tastes 7. The Birth of the Consumer Age 8. Chefs, Gourmets and Gourmands 9. Dining Out 10. Novelty and Tradition - The New Landscape for Gastronomy.

Snakes Legs: Sequels, Continuations, Rewritings and Chinese Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Snakes Legs: Sequels, Continuations, Rewritings and Chinese Fiction Victoria Cass (bio) Martin Huang , editor. Snakes Legs: Sequels, Continuations, Rewritings and Chinese Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. 306 pp. Hardcover $49.00, ISBN 0-8248-2812-7. Sequels to great novels have typically been considered the unwanted children of "great literature," labeled often as derivative and pandering, and evaluated, at best, as documents in the history of taste. In this intelligent conference volume, however, Martin Huang gathers ten reassessments of specific sequels to great works and reconsiders the nature of this difficult subgenre. Established scholars in the field of fiction take on the sequels to eight major novels: Journey to the West, Water Margin, Jin Ping Mei, Dream of the Red Chamber (with two essays), Sui Tang yanyi, Ruyijun zhuan, Jinghua yuan, and The Journey of Lao Can. To begin the volume, both in his introduction and in his lead essay, "Boundaries and Interpretations: Some Preliminary Thoughts," Martin Huang takes on some of the difficult issues in the consideration of the genre. In the lead essay, in particular, he grapples expertly with the issue of definition: what is a "sequel." Where, in effect, does the masterwork begin and where does it end, since "almost all the long works of vernacular xiaoshuo . . . have undergone in one way or another, some complicated process of textual evolution and repeated rewritings" (p. 19). Many of the novels are themselves xu shu (sequels) of other novels. The Sui Tang yanyi is based on three earlier versions; the last forty chapters of the Honglou meng can be seen as a sequel to the first eighty chapters; the Jin Ping Mei is itself a sequel—greatly expanded—derived from the Shuihu zhuan; and then there is Liu E's own sequel to his novel Lao Can youji. Huang also considers the issue of novels that are "sequels" derived from other types of sources—classical poetry and history, for example. Huang examines the boundaries of this very slippery genre, developing a useful framework for his analysis by relying on both Western and Chinese terminologies. Following Huang's essay, each of the subsequent contributions provides detailed comparisons of the original novels with their subsequent sequels, revealing the ways authors take possession of the parent novel, then reinterpret, shift, interpolate, and reshape it to create a new offspring. In addition to specific comparisons, however, the ten studies in this volume offer insights into larger issues, giving both specialists and nonspecialists of vernacular fiction an assessment of what constitutes reading and writing in the vernacular subculture of Late Imperial China. First, we see in these studies the role of the vernacular novel itself, for if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the hundreds of sequels and continuations pay obsequious homage to the novel form; this collection of studies is clear testimony to the status of fiction in Late Imperial China. Above all, sequels [End Page 451] demonstrate a passion for reading and for the novel. Keith Mcmahon, in his "Eliminating Traumatic Antimonies: Sequels to Honglou meng" proves "the irresistible urge the authors felt to resurrect the mesmerizing world of Cao Xueqin's original novel" (p. 98). Here we see that in the later recastings authors hope to change the unchangeable—to alter the past, to resolve the love affair of the central characters and improve on Baoyu and vindicate Daiyu, to make right a world that is in some sense as real as the actual worlds of the readers. But sequels did not simply show that fiction seized the imagination of the individual; sequels demonstrated that fiction resonated forcefully in the public realm. Although many contemporaries avowed that fiction was "mere entertainment," novels clearly were an influence in the larger world, seen to shape opinions, morals, politics, and events. Indeed, the novel clearly functioned both as a barometer of social change and as a vehicle for social debate. Novels were a battleground, as we see in the processes of making sequels, a culture in the process of defining itself; we see the conflict of narrative identities, the battle for the one true version, a battle never possible to win, and therefore subject to constant reinterpretation...

‘As Rude As You Like – Honest’: Theatre Criticism and the Law

In 2001, when David Soul sued the Daily Mirror for printing a defamatory review of his West End show, The Dead Monkey, questions surfaced about the critic's rights and responsibilities under the law. There have been numerous accounts in recent years of the relationships between law and literature, and the general assumption is that critics can claim the defence of ‘fair comment’. However, very little work has been done on the history, rationale, and implications of that defence, or on the actions before Soul's in which aggrieved theatre people have attempted to bring critics to account. David Roberts evaluates individual cases from legal history in which the critic's rights have been tested, and considers what they have to tell us about the way our society conceptualizes critical activity. Bourdieu's history of taste is invoked, but modified to show how the law's concern with formalism in its own processes has endorsed a matching version of the critical process. David Roberts is Head of English at the University of Central England, Birmingham.

Three Ages of ''Patina'' in Painting

THIS ARTICLE TRACES THE HISTORY of a byword for the look of age since the early seventeenth century in art writing, the museum, the restorer's studio, and the art market. The seemingly material fact of patina has a career in the history of taste in Old Master painting through its old regime in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was much prized as an effect of time and as an artifice; in its modern age beginning with the formation of national museums, patina becomes an object of contention in the ''cleaning controversies'' that revolve around the obligations of the present toward the cultural legacy of the past. Postmodern patina has come to register the complex and precarious effects of age on old pictures in ways that should enable us to appreciate and to care for them more knowingly than we have been able to do before.

BROWNING’S BISHOP CONCEIVES A TOMB: CULTURAL ORDERING AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1845, Robert Browning sent a poem entitled “The Tomb at Saint Praxed’s” to the acting editor of Hood’s Magazine. He writes: “I pick it out as being a pet of mine, and just the thing for the time — what with the Oxford business, and Camden society and other embroilments” (DeVane and Knickerbocker 35–36). Because of this letter, the immediate historical context for the poem has commonly been taken as the Oxford (Tractarian) movement and Newman’s retraction in 1843. The Cambridge Camden Society (not the London antiquarian society of the same name, which is sometimes thought to be Browning’s reference) was also associated with Romanism, being accused of popery in 1844 and subsequently dissolved by the Cambridge authorities in February 1845, the same month Browning submitted his poem. (It continued as the Ecclesiological Society.) Through its journal, The Ecclesiologist (1841–), the Cambridge Camden Society aimed to study ecclesiastical architecture, following Pugin’s Contrasts (2nd edition, 1841) in complaining about the moral corruption of church architecture and promoting an ethical-spiritual basis for reform.1 Journal items focussed on a range of issues from the symbolic function of church layout to the details of epitaphs and tombs, generally mixing visual values with ecclesiology. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (139–44) and John Morley in Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (52–62) detail these issues. Browning’s “other embroilments” may well refer therefore to the growing controversy in the 1840s about sepulture and sepulchral style, about the appropriateness or otherwise of ornate tombs and canopies. Hence this poem about a deathbed scene and a Bishop’s tomb may be clearly located within the broadly enveloping mid- Victorian network of cultural practices related to death: distinctively encoded rituals of mourning, debate about gravestones and epitaphs, depictions of deathbed scenes (in painting as well as literature), and widespread discussion of what came to be known as the four last things — death, judgement, heaven, and hell.

Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (review)

Reviewed by: Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy Christy L. Burns Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997. xxv + 212 pages. In 1988, Barbara Herrnstein Smith published Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Intervening in the canon formation debates launched in the 1970s, Smith’s work marked a culminating moment of analysis and clarification in discussions of literary value. With philosophical acumen and directness, she laid out both the “central pragmatic issues” and current theoretical positions on the concept of value. For Smith, the American literary establishment had too often remained “beguiled by the humanist’s fantasy of transcendence, endurance, and universality [so that] it [End Page 986] has been unable to acknowledge the most fundamental character of literary value, which is its mutability and diversity” (28). This changeability is for Smith, as a relativist, the very strength of literary value. She goes on to dissect and dismiss the notion that one need (or could) have normative criteria by which to sort “great” literature from the more common dross. Most importantly, she moves beyond critique and develops a cohesive narrative of “the history of taste” as always related to, and constituted by, both a general model of cultural dynamics and the relevant conditions of local context. Contingencies of Value thus defines a version of relative values that is neither fickle nor rapidly transient, but one enmeshed in its cultural, political, and institutional immediacies. If this necessarily creates multiple value systems then how, she asks, do we compare them? Her answer, although resounding with clear common sense and shored up by thorough analysis, rattles the cages of objectivist thinkers: “There is no way to give a reckoning that is simultaneously total and final. There is no Judgment Day. There is no bottom bottom line anywhere, for anyone or for ‘man’” (149). In Smith’s latest book, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, she repositions her critique of “axiology” or objectivism at the interstices of cognitive, social, and science studies. She explores the phenomenon of intellectual polarization, where multiple and variously differing beliefs shift into polarities which become contradistinctive and mutually antagonistic. Smith is well-suited to the role of contemporary cultural analyst, as she now directs Duke University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. Like Contingencies, her new project can be characterized as an alternating critique of axiology and explanation of what she now calls “revisionist” positions. Once again she articulates the positive gain of the emphasis on process and change rather than fixed positionalities. Revisionism, in her terms, offers the “long-range political advantage of flexibility and responsiveness. The cause or movement that acknowledges the contingency of its own analyses, judgments, and justifications is less liable to fall apart in face of differing perspectives or to become paralyzed when new conditions emerge” (5). As a relativist, Smith cannot pretend to occupy a privileged space outside of the debates she examines, and indeed here more than in Contingencies she is pitched into polarized battles. As a literary scholar, I found the prior work invaluable, and was initially disappointed to discover fewer of her literary anecdotes and a more intensely oppositional engagement. Yet this is a text directed to the broader political and institutional debates of the 1990s, and so the very polarity of the debates—and her effort to develop a general theoretical analysis of this polarization—are crucially relevant. The book moves through a series of argumentative engagements, starting with Robin West’s criticism of non-objectivism in feminist studies and ending with science studies, after taking a turn through Habermas’s effort to reclaim an objective space for literary analysis. The book’s design makes it most useful [End Page 987] by chapter, where readers can seek out those debates they know least about, to get a good sketch of core differences. So, for example, her rebuttal of the objectivist’s rebuttal of the skeptic’s rebuttal held the least appeal for me, given my familiarity with analytic philosophy. I share Smith’s sense that American philosophy’s invocation of mystified, “intuitively obvious,” abstract truths is little more...

James Stevens Curl. <italic>Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival; A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste</italic>. New York: Manchester University Press; distributed by St. Martin's. 1994. Pp. xxii, 298. Cloth $90.00, paper $24.95

James Stevens Curl. <italic>Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival; A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste</italic>. New York: Manchester University Press; distributed by St. Martin's. 1994. Pp. xxii, 298. Cloth $90.00, paper $24.95

Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival; A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste.

This study analyzes the influences of ancient Egypt on the art, architecture and design of Europe. It begins with a consideration of the ancient civilization of the Nile Valley and demonstrates the widespread adoption of Egyptian deities and motifs in the Greco-Roman world. It goes on to describe the enormous range of objects that were made in the lands of the Roman Empire and which constitute the first manifestations of the Egyptian revival. It continues with the survival of these themes during the Dark and Middle Ages, and the influential rediscovery of both Ancient Egyptian and Egyptianizing Roman works during the Renaissance. The book shows that this influence of Ancient Egypt continued through to the late 18th century, after the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt. The 20th-century discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun led to a major revival associated with the movement known as Art Deco. The Egyptian revival is still with us, argues the author, but now usually features as a component of postmodern design.

The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis and the Translation Muddle

The history of translation is littered with normative, exhortatory, and judgemental propositions. 'Translators are the post-horses of civilization', said Pushkin. 'Poetry', said Robert Frost, 'is what gets left out in translation.' An old Italian proverb tells us that 'traduttore traditore', to translate is to betray, and the male chauvinist French speak of 'les belles infideles', faithless beauties; translations, it appears, are in Latin eyes like mistresses if they are beautiful, they are unfaithful, and vice versa. Comments of this kind have their place in the history of taste, but their descriptive and interpretative power is questionable. Moreover, they have tended to reinforce the common error at the heart of much translation theory which postulates an 'original text' or 'source text' as some ideal entity having an absolute, autonomous existence in its own right, against which any given translation can be measured by criteria of exactness or adequacy which are clearly, in themselves, exceptionally inexact and inadequate. There is no other branch of literary studies in which one right reading is hypothesized, or the reading process seen in terms of a simple cause-and-effect or linear model, which is what happens with alarming frequency in commentaries on translations. There are complicated historical reasons why Translation Studies have only just begun to dissociate themselves from the tyranny of this source text/target text model derived from Classical Studies and their afterlife in Modern Languages departments, a tyranny shaken many years ago in other branches of literary scholarship and literary criticism. One reason is the special type of 'inauthenticity' that is attributed to translations: being somehow designed to take the place of the original, translated texts thus acquire not only the distortions implicit in the value-charged idea of the 'original', they also compound such distortions in some kind of Oedipal model of successiveness, whereby the translated text acquires, by an act of usurpation, the bogus virtue of originality, while at the same time recognizing its own helpless subservience. On such grounds as these, we speak glibly and in quite inappropriate contexts of a 'good' translation, or sometimes even of an 'accurate' translation, or worse still (is it?) of a

Manet, The Execution of Maximilian: Painting, Politics, and Censorship.

Scholars and students of art and art history, the history of literature, culture and social history of 19th-century France, and the history of taste and censorship. Collectors, dealers and the non-specialist Manet enthusiast.

Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel

Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the NovelJ. Paul Hunter Somewhere in the dawning light of modern science, the consciousness that led to the novel—as plot, literary form, epistemological system, and physical book—came to be. Here almost all accounts of the beginnings and origins of the novel agree, for it is hard to imagine, in preempirical ages, a literary species with the distinctive modern features of the novel.1 But there are radical differences of opinion about sequence, influence, and cause: protestantism, empiricism, individualism, imperialism , and modernism are key terms for nearly everyone in describing the ideological and cultural contexts of the early novel, but the sequence and weight among these forces is open to doubt. The emergence of the novel is concurrent and consonant with the rise of these other values, biases, and methods, but in the sorting a new cultural and literary history may well emerge. I will not propose here a causal sequence, but I do want to indicate how one quasi-scientific goal became a feature of the culture, bridged several of the categories, and led, at least in an indirect way, to the novel. The novel's curiosity about process, its interest in how people make sense of a dense, complex, and resistant world, and its concentration on the materials and rhythms of everyday life all seem to have their roots in ways of thinking about the world that emphasize 1 It is, of course, possible to define the novel more broadly so that the fictions of virtually all ages and nations may be called novels, in which case historical considerations about cultural enablement do not apply. See, for example, Arthur Heiserman, The Novel before the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) and David Margolies, Novel and Society in Elizabethan England (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 2, Number 4, July 1990 276 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION immediacy, personal observation, subjectivity of response, circumstantiality , empirical modes of thinking, and the desire to systematize. One curious popular strand of science provides part of the cultural explanation of what happened. Newton was not the only scientist to demand the muse; the demands I am interested in here are Robert Boyle's. As a chemist, Boyle has always had his due, but his reputation in intellectual history is slender. Jonathan Swift helped establish opinion early with two typically Swiftian footnotes: his subtitle to "A Meditation upon a Broom-Stick" makes Boyle responsible for literary and philosophical absurdity, and a marginal scrawl in his copy of Burnet's History of his Own Time calls Boyle a "silly writer."2 Boyle largely deserves the place Swift and history have given him, the specialist who strayed too far from his expertise: he is like a good, well-meaning actor who strays into politics (as distinguished from bad actors who stray into politics ), and it is hard to feel sorry for him in spite of good intentions. But he deserves a larger niche in literary, cultural, and intellectual history , though not because he was a great or even a clear thinker. Rather, his pedestrian commitments make him important in the history of taste, desire, and ideas, for his fuzzy categories and refusals to make distinctions are in fact responsible for popularizing ways of thinking crucial to the reception of novels. To think about the historical reception of novels—what goes on with actual "common" readers who voraciously devour narrative accounts of daily life and experience in the contemporary world—at the same time that one thinks about the complex cultural history of epistemology may seem contradictory, and it is a challenge to standard ways of doing intellectual history under the auspices of traditional historicisms. Even to search for the conceptual roots of the novel in a post-Baconian epistemology may appear to be inconsistent with the novel's commitment to ordinary, everyday life and its accessibility to a wide variety of readers without deep learning or philosophical sophistication.3 Reconciling the 2 In the 1711 Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, Swift said his meditation was "According to the Style and Manner of the Honourable Robert Boyl's Meditations," p. 231. The standard account of how Swift...

The Attitude of John Nash toward the Gothic Revival Style

This paper explores the impact of an error in an important secondary source, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, written in 1928 by Kenneth Clark, on the attitudes of subsequent architectural historians, as they describe the supposed antagonism of the English architect John Nash (1752-1835) toward the Gothic Revival style.

Ut Pictura Poesis, Ut Pictura Hortus, and the Picturesque

Abstract In 1807 Robert Southey confirmed what had been apparent for some years, that ‘a taste for the picturesque has sprung up’. He noted that a ‘course of summer travelling is now looked upon [as] essential’ and its main purpose was ‘to study the picturesque, a new science for which a new language has been formed, and for which the English have discovered a new sense in themselves, which assuredly was not possessed by their fathers’.1 Southey was certainly right about the modishness of picturesque taste, a fashion upon which Jane Austen was also commenting more satirically at about the same time in Northanger Abbey.2 He was, however, less accurate about the newness of the ‘science’and its language, even wrong to claim that earlier generations had possessed no picturesque sense. His historical errors nevertheless highlight an aspect of the picturesque which has never been studied: the reason for its popularity at that precise point in the history of taste. The ‘picturesque moment’, as Martin Price has c...

A propos d'un poncif pictural provincial

Since his own studies which aimed at establishing relations between the stone quarries discovered and expoited throughout Antiquity, and the places where their produces were discovered, and which brought into evidence the trade routes connecting the Mediterranean to the northwest of the Roman Empire (fig. 1). François Braemer has been mostly concerned by the Roman province of Belgium, where recent surveys allowed him to include the Somme Valley into the Atlantic route he made out and to stress the presence of decorative elements originating in this province. He wishes that future excavations, in bringing evidence of the role and date of erection of each element in the discovered monuments, will make the specialists' interpretation easier and will yield precise data regarding the history of taste and the trading activities of the Roman province of Belgium.

Horror on the Grand Tour

product of a system for ordering knowledge of the foreign which was subject to historical change. Transformations in the procedures for describing and commenting on works of art as objects of the traveller's attention have therefore been largely ignored. Many such transformations nevertheless took place over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: new theoretical options became available, strategies which had previously played an important role in commentary on art were rejected or excluded, and the boundaries defining those empowered to utter this commentary shifted considerably. This reluctance to situate accounts of art in Italy within the context of a discourse of European travel is evident in the comments of literary critics as well as in those of art historians, and in both cases is partly due to a preoccupation with assessing the merits of particular travel books, rather than examining the common determinants of the whole range of utterances about art in Italy possible at any given period. The historial specificity of the writings is obscured both by assessments of the adequacy of language to its objects which invoke twentieth-century expectations in the guise of absolute criteria of judgment, and by appeals to concepts of 'literary merit', for which absolute, a-historical status is also claimed. Such distributions of praise and censure frequently pose a continuity between the qualities identified in the text and the abilities of the author, as a means of reinforcing distinctions between individual writings. Taste and the Antique, for example, by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, removes one travel book from its discursive context by the declaration that 'the visual appetite and discrimination of the Richardsons are quite exceptional' (1982, p.45). Herbert Barrows' introduction to Hester Piozzi's Observations and reflections made in the course of a journey through France, Italy and Germany expresses its appeal to exceptional abilities even more directly: 'It is a better book than many of its contemporaries simply because it is by her' (1967, p.xiv). This article; in contrast, is concerned with analysing certain historical changes discernible in utterances which order knowledge of the foreign; it is not concerned with judging the merits of the works in which these utterances appear. The passages considered here are taken from works which follow the literary forms of several different genres: guide books and treatises on art as well as narratives of journeys. These passages are all analysed, however, as part of a discourse in which the objects of commentary are delimited by the practice of travel on the Grand Tour, and in which the subject speaks with an authority based on a claim to personal experience of travel. This authority may assume an important role even in writings which do not explicitly proclaim a co cern with travel on the title page: in William Aglionby's Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues, for example, information about the history of painting is proffered by a 'Traveller', returned from Italy. Though concerned with the formation of certain concepts in the course of the eighteenth century, the present survey analyses these concepts as the products of sp cific orderings of language, and not as abstract enti ies to be defined in isolation from their linguistic context, as in a 'history of ideas' or a 'a history of taste'. The theories and arguments which are discussed here, moreover, are considered as strategies with precise rhetorical functions within the discourse of European travel, rather than generalized patterns of thought to be abstracted from it.

Introduction

Introduction TO UNDERTAKE THE PUBLICATION of yet another "Yearbook" of studies devoted to an eminent European writer may seem a dismaying enterprise, especially in view of the awesome difficulties which the publishing of books and journals in the humanities seems at the moment to offer. We have nevertheless thought it important and useful to gather, as often as feasible, the work of American scholars dealing with the incomparably rich world of Goethe, that central figure in the history of German literature and culture. We join illustrious predecessors in England, in Germany and in Austria and are thereby reaffirming the interest in an extraordinary mind and his age that in America never ceased to be alive. Throughout our social and intellectual history the substance of Goethe's convictions has represented a link (more powerful here than in the shifting perspectives of European life) between the stirring insights of the late eighteenth century and their continuing presence in modern political thought and institutions. Goethe's essentially pragmatic idealism, so congenial to men like Jefferson or Emerson, the close interplay in his thinking of scientific, poetic and social impulses, his commitment to tradition as well as to a humane vision of the future, have made his cast of mind peculiarly rewarding for the American experience. It is no mere accident in the history of taste that some of the most appealing translations of Faust have been the accomplishment of American writers, and that American scholarship has significantly contributed to the understanding of Goethe's achievement. The memorable Goethe Bicentennial Convocation at Aspen in 1949 was a remarkable indication of this appreciation. It was the first major gathering after the war of men of letters from all parts of the world; it brought together scholars and writers of great eminence such as Albert Schweizer, Ortega y Gasset, Ernst Robert Curtius, Martin Buber, Thornton Wilder, Ernst Simon and many others, to bear eloquent witness to the shared respect for Goethe's work. The astonishing energy and the testimonial character of that meeting in what was then a little known abandoned mining town in an enchanting valley in Colorado, confirmed the magnetism of a mind transcending and healing a wounded and divided world. The questions concerning the value and validity of Goethe's tenets for our time were, in those weeks more than thirty years ago, asked in a mood deeply serious and hopeful, without sentimentality or easy adulation. They have remained urgent enough, and it was with an awareness of their challenge that we founded the Goethe Society of North America. May the sense of obligation implied in these questions toward elucidating the inexhaustible richness of Goethe within our common heritage sustain the efforts that come together in our Yearbook. Victor Lange Princeton University ...

Subjective Criticism (review)

Shorter Reviews Subjective Criticism, by David Bleich; 309 pp. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, $16.00. How can a book of literary theory make me want to flee to the quantitative and physical sciences, from whose concrete dungeons I escaped so many professional years ago? To suggest that my judgment of it may be wholly explained by my personal biography is to evoke the spirit of Bleich's program to reconstitute literary criticism into what he calls "subjective criticism." Confusion and error, both interesting and uninteresting, riddle it. The early chapters introduce Bleich's theory, beginning with the "subjective paradigm," a belief that reality is defined subjectively, and with its opposite, the "objective paradigm," a "maladaptive" belief made up of religion and older science (the latter having been infected by the presumption of absolute truth in religion). Supporting the newer paradigm with discussions of dream interpretation , language theory, pedagogy, and recent critical trends, Bleich is led to praise one critic who reforms from saying "This is how Pinter is" to "This is how I see his work" (p. 128). The book's soul is its pedagogical program derived from ten years of collecting "response statements" from students (who were often studying the the ory that their responses illustrate and verify). The response statement is "a symbolic presentation of self, a contribution to a pedagogical community, and an articulation of that part of our reading experience we think we can negotiate into knowledge" (p. 167). These student essays, cited in full and examined in detail, frequently take on a rigid organization: paragraphs that begin with an enjoyed incident from the literary work proceed with some associated, personal recollection (praised, if painful, as "sincere"), and conclude with a generalized formal observation about the work. Personal preoccupations transform into criticism by way of the degree of "identification" with literary characters or authors: Mr. P's fear of getting a B in the course enables him to interpret Prufrock 's fear of being misunderstood; Mrs. A recognizes a victim/victimizer opposition in Kafka through her analysis of hostile treatment by her parents, and so on. Through such examples Bleich shows subjectivity operating in literary meaning, taste, and one's sense of an author. This experimental teaching is to me the interesting confusion or error. Daring a radical therapy for fear of "affective fallacy," Bleich shows how to achieve sophisticated literary analysis by being resolutely and thoughtfully affective. Checks against interpretive anarchy are included: communities of responsible readers (Fish's idea watered down); the rejection of the merely "clinical" value 114 Shorter Reviews115 of totally reader-oriented response or solipsism (as in a reader for whom More's "Utopus" sounds like "octopus"); the hard work of the method for the student, and its uncoached naturalness. (Delusions intrude when he finds his own words parroted in one response, but he takes this to be "more authentic than compliant "—p. 210). The theory is uninteresting, especially its grounding in a misreading of Thomas Kuhn, reverentially and frequently cited. Bleich reads into Kuhn a supposed isomorphism between the history of science and the history of taste, trivializing both. In point of fact, the easy, undergraduate relativism of Bleich's theory is contradicted by essential but ignored ideas of Kuhn, who rejects a simplistic dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity, warns against attributing to personal biography all scientific progress, and explicitly respects "concrete achievements," corrigible theory, and "the test of time." Consider the following nested confusions: "the greatness of Shakespeare ... is ... in principle , as ephemeral as the absolute truth of Newton's laws of motion" (p. 165). But Newton's law still works (as any student of high school physics can show); it is no more "ephemeral" than is a rough description of France's shape as "hexagonal ." Bleich defines "objective paradigm" spectacularly as the belief that "all people perceive things in the same way" (p. 295). Relevant villains are trotted out one by one: New Critics, logical positivists, behaviorists, science before modern physics, religion, quantification, the "idea of progress," definers of genres and periods, prescribers of "great books" (incredibly linked to the practice of censorship), and traditional university education . Most teachers, we are told, believe that...

The German image

Abstract This important book is not a technical history, nor is it ‘sociological’ in any scientific sense; its main thrust is rather in the realm of ‘the history of ideas’ and ‘the history of taste’, and it is thus intimately concerned with human values and attitudes. In this way, and because human nature transceinds national boundaries with conspicuous ease, Fritz Kempe's work is not ‘merely’ about Germany, but about photography and people in general. Without constraining system and without claims to exhaustive coverage, the book manages to get at the spirit and core of relationships by discussing 24 topics, which range from local history (‘Bremen, Wannover, Kassel’) to episodic accounts (‘On the secret magic of the hruman image’). That is its special charm, and also its lasting testament, because photography is really too complex a field to permit a stereotype presentation, if the finer nuances of the human response are to be given their due. If anything is lacking—but it would be chnrlisll to expect a single volume to cover every base—it is a more extensive discussion of the daguerreotype's influence on German painters.

Arthur’s Misuse of the Imagination: Sentimental Benevolence and Wordsworthian Realism in Adam Bede

A R T H U R 'S M ISU SE OF THE IM A G IN A T IO N : SE N T IM E N T A L B E N EV O LEN C E AN D W O R D SW O R TH IA N R E A L ISM IN ADAM BEDE MASON HARRIS Simon Fraser University ^ 3 ecause Adam Bede is "a country story - full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay,"1 it seems to invite oversimplified interpretations. Critics assume that George Eliot's first novel lacks the complexity of her later work, or at least that any complexity it possesses must be in conflict with its pastoral elements. Part of the problem in getting a clear perspective on this novel arises from a tendency to concentrate critical attention on the rather idealized Adam and Dinah as representatives of the author's values, while passing over Arthur, who does not belong to the pastoral community and whose affair with a tenantfarmer 's niece almost destroys it, as a rather ordinary seducer treated with conventional Victorian moralism. In a recent book on George Eliot, Neil Roberts expresses a widely-held view of the novel when he says that it presents a "static moral drama" enacted in an "absence of social and historical analysis" because Arthur's sin is only "a matter of private morality" unrelated to his grandfather's acquisitiveness as landlord.2 I shall argue that this seduction is very much a matter of class, and that Eliot's sense of historical process, if somewhat muted by nostalgia, is still active in the novel. A close study of the psychology behind Arthur's crime will show the vital thematic use Eliot makes of his aristocratic status and his participation in the literary taste of the later eighteenth century (Arthur turns twenty-one in 1799). As the well-intentioned heir to his grandfather's estate, Arthur reveals much about the influence of unconscious snobbery in rationalizing the exploita­ tion of social inferiors, while as a reader of fashionable fiction who scorns the first edition of Lyrical Ballads he provides a contrast to the narrator's Wordsworthian realism, revealing what the imagination should not be both in art and life. This contrast also suggests a turning point in the history of taste and sensibility. The moral vision of Adam, Dinah, and their author has something in common with the Romantic concept of the imagination (in Dinah's case mixed with the best aspects of the religious revival), while Arthur, thoroughly imbued with the aristocratic taste and social attitudes of his period, reflects the limitations of the old order and thus helps to show how the novel's narrative English S tudies in Can ad a, iv , 1, Spring 1978 42 vision looks forward to the needs of Eliot's own time as well as celebrating the virtues of the past. The timing of the action, with a leisurely account of the rustic community through the summer of 1799, while crime, suffering, and new insight come in the winter and spring of 1800, suggests a sense of transition between past and present. Hetty, the "lost lamb," is rejected by the rustic community but rescued by Dinah, whose Methodism has been nurtured in a bleak industrial town and who recognizes no distinctions of rank.3Again, the new insight which enables Adam to bear the pain of Hetty's fall foreshadows Eliot's mid-Victorian religion of humanity.4 On the other hand, Arthur's ideal vision of his future reign as Squire is based on the world-view of a ruling class soon to become obsolete. In her depiction of the semi-feudal community of Hayslope, Eliot makes much of the dignity of labour as manifested in the Poysers' farm and Adam's workshop, while old Squire Donnithorne, whose income derives from posses­ sion of fields which others till, represents the least admirable aspect of this society; as Mrs Poyser angrily remarks to the Squire, "I know there's them as is born t'own the land, and them as is born to sweat on't" (353). The limitations of the aristocratic world-view...

Quakers and the Arts (review)

52Quaker History practices. For example, the quotation "twenty to twenty-five shillings per sheet, or page" on page 37 confuses two very specific technical terms (sheet and page). A description of Philadelphia in 1767 based on William Birch's Views of Philadelphia published in 1802 seems ill-advised, in view of the tremendous growth and change in the city after the Revolution. As for the Quaker background, Mr. Hixson puts his foot wrong at the beginning. He includes "Thomas Godfrey, the inventor, and Benjamin West, the painter" in a brief list of prominent Philadelphia Quakers of 1767; neither man was then a Friend, and in fact Godfrey had died in 1749, and West gone abroad to study in 1760, never to return. A few pages on, the Yearly Meeting for Pennsylvania and New Jersey is "the policymaking body of the Quakers in the Middle Colonies," ignoring the fact that there were Yearly Meetings in New York, Maryland, and Virginia. Fortunately, the details of Collins' disownment and re-instatement by Burlington Monthly Meeting are given correctly, but the earlier errors do not create confidence in the reader. The book is neither good Quaker biography nor a scholarly contribution to the history of American printing, and can only be recommended with reservations. Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaWillman Spawn Quakers and tL· Arts. By Frederick G. Nicholson. London: The Friends Home Service Committee. 1968. 123 pp. 10s. This informative study was prepared by a Fellow in Residence at Woodbooke· It presents the record of a religious testimony rather than a history of taste. Plainness, that is, avoidance of superfluity, made Quakers "a peculiar people." It should be borne in mind that under the Stuart kings court styles in dress, amusements, and conventional behavior had reached the frivolous extreme which brought about the Puritan reaction extending to all sober-minded dissenters. People were "hungry for God." Because Friends were literate from the start they felt no need of pictures to convey their religious teaching. Indeed they demonstrated "uncommon ability to express," as they said in their journals, "the dealings of the Lord with us." Imagination was suspect, the "world's" fashions were ruled out. A "guarded education" forbade music, hunting, dancing, acting, fiction, and even poetry. In the eighteenth century the pattern became standardized . You could spot a Quaker anywhere in England or America. Frederick Nicholson comments upon the rigid period which he entitles "Religion in Drab" as a time of "loss of members, domestic discord, and social isolation." With the Romantic period in England a change set in. Friends read more widely. Yearly Meeting attendere began to include on their program of days in the city "the sights" of London. Now gaps appeared in the fences and eventually the fences fell. Howard Brinton's and my life-span has coincided with the period when this severe construction of the discipline gradually gave way to the present cultivation of "the abundant life." Our great-grandmothers wore the kerchief, cap, and bonnet familiar from the days of Elizabeth Fry. Our grandmothers tolerated the shirred bonnet, while our mothers unashamedly wore hats. After a visit to Book Reviews53 England my grandparents allowed an engraving on their living-room wall. American Friends were a full generation behind their English counterparts in thus coming to terms with the "world." Especially has this been true in respect to music and the so-called "plain language." I attended Westtown School when the change was well under way. Our elders visibly belonged to the vanishing age, we children enthusiastically to the new. Fiction was still called "pernicious" and Shakespeare forbidden. My graduation essay, also a look backward, was entitled "Friendships of Quakers with Men of Letters." This included Ellwood and Milton, Bernard Barton with Charles Lamb and the Lake Poets, our own Whittier, who was my grandfather's friend, Caroline Fox and all the Victorians. With the picture-less era of drab, American readers will like to contrast Fritz Eichenberg's Art and Faith (second edition, 1952, Pendle Hill Pamphlet No. 68) with its invigorating wood engravings. On the cover is Old Noah, pressed upon by his beasts, reaching up to welcome his dove: "and in her mouth was an ohve leaf." Also as...