Gates Of Ivory Research Articles

Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval

Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval

The Sinister Oracle. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Virgil’s Aeneid

The aim of this article is to re-examine the links between Heart of Darkness and the Aeneid—the Latin epic which is already known to have served as the main hypotext for Joseph Conrad’s novella. The transformation of several important motifs—such as those of the sacrifice, white worsted, the ivory gate and, finally, that of the prophetic voice—reveals that Conrad has shifted the focal point of Virgil’s dark tale, placing the figure of the Oracle—who has been disguised and transformed in a highly sophisticated manner—to its very centre.

Virgilian underworlds in A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book

A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book envisions life as a kind of afterlife, living death, or living burial in part by developing images of the journey into the underworld , katabasis, as depicted in Virgil’s Aeneid. Although Virgil is not Byatt’s only source, she has found in him not only compelling particular images (including the Sibyl’s possession by Apollo, the elm hung with false dreams, Tartarus, and the gates of ivory and horn) but also a more generally meaningful metaphysics of confinement and inescapability. In the master metaphor, the underworld is both literal and figurative, with what lies below the earth illuminating what lies beneath a person’s surface. By exploring this aspect of Byatt’s novel, we stand to learn more about her Virgilianism (as examined by scholars including Cox, Slater, and others) and, so, about Virgilian receptions in contemporary fiction .

Information in the Novel and the Novel as Information System: Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Margaret Drabble’s Radiant Way Trilogy

Each realist novel collects, interprets, and transmits information about what it means to be human in a certain time and place. Part of information history, realist novels help us understand the psychology of human beings and the dynamics of their political and social interactions. Although fictional, novels contain information about material conditions, social customs and values, the organization of institutions, and individual perceptions and identities. Readers understand that each novel includes, constitutes, and transmits information. Novels are not reference books; rather, they are “information systems” that describe fictional worlds with critical relevance to our understanding of history, politics, social organization, and individual development. Describing material conditions, information in the realist novel outlines socioeconomic and political conditions and problems. This essay looks at two cases: Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57) and Margaret Drabble’s Radiant Way trilogy of novels—The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989), and The Gates of Ivory (1991). These works offer accounts and critiques of social hierarchies and inequities by incorporating historical and social information into their overall thematics of plot, character, and setting.

Margaret Drabble's Wordsworth

Previous articleNext article No AccessMargaret Drabble's WordsworthRussell PerkinRussell Perkin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 46, Number 3Summer 2015Romanticism and Experiment Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24888034 Views: 11Total views on this site © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“The Conduct of Life” in Walter Besant's The Ivory Gate and The Alabaster Box

Walter Besant's best-known novels are now categorised as slum fiction and rarely given serious critical attention. The only ones likely to be discussed are All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon (1886), and these, despite the pioneering choice of material, seem old-fashioned today. Conventional in their narrative strategies, and openly didactic, they have more in common with the mid-Victorian social-problem novels of Dickens, Mrs Gaskell and others than with the naturalist fiction of such late-Victorian contemporaries as George Moore and George Gissing. Yet Besant went on to write many more novels, including The Ivory Gate (1892) and The Alabaster Box (1899), in both of which he experiments with new ways of exploring the individual psyche and demonstrates a subtler engagement with inner-city problems. Conflicted and to some extent unresolved, these deserve another look, and are perhaps the very works on which his reputation should now rest.

A Visit to the Island of Dreams

A Visit to the Island of Dreams Lucian (bio), Stephen Donadio, and as rendered by A. J. Church LUCIAN (ca. 115–120 CE to ca. 180 CE) was an author born at Samosata in Syria, then under the rule of the Roman Empire, who wrote in Greek and pursued a successful career as a traveling practitioner of rhetoric in various parts of the ancient world. None of his contemporaries mentions him, and the circumstances of his life are only suggested in what appear to be fragments of autobiography (for example, his account of his apprenticeship in sculpture, which lasted one day) and in allusions to certain places and events made in passing in his other writings. Within our own frame of reference, many of these writings seem more or less uncategorizable, but a satirical intent is often evident, and he himself judged his most original contribution to literature to be a fusion of philosophical dialogue (of the Platonic variety) with comedy to produce texts meant to be read and not performed. The model of satire that influenced him most deeply was that of Menippus—a freewheeling combination of prose and verse in which the objects of ridicule were often not identified conclusively, leaving readers uncertain about exactly when it might be appropriate to laugh. To this general model Lucian added a high degree of fantasy, and among the chief subjects identified for satirical treatment were the tales told by travelers, including those of Odysseus; such elaborate imaginings presented as fact make up the Verae Historiae (True History), a portion of which appears in a loose English translation here. This work later comes to figure significantly in the writings of Rabelais and Jonathan Swift; and readers of NER may well ask if it has anything to do with Zana Previti’s story entitled “The Letters of Odysseus to Kalypso,” which appeared in our issue 32.4 (2012). A[lfred] J[ohn] CHURCH (1829–1912), the translator of the pages that follow, was a British classical scholar who over the course of his career held a variety of appointments, as a clergyman, schoolmaster, and university professor. Educated at Oxford at Wadham College and then Lincoln College, he took his degree in 1851; among his examiners in Classics was the renowned and widely published translator Benjamin Jowett. With his cousin William Jackson Brodribb, Church undertook the translation of the works of Tacitus and subsequently the letters of Pliny, and in 1880 he was appointed Professor of Latin at University College, London, where he remained for almost a decade. His writings include numerous books and essays on a variety of topics, as well as stories and poems, but he is now best known as the author of a highly popular series of English renderings of classical works for young readers, among them The Story of the Iliad and The Story of the Odyssey. The chapter of Lucian’s True History presented here is taken from Church’s The Greek Gulliver, Stories from Lucian, published by Macmillan & Co. in New York in 1891. —SD [End Page 192] In a short space of time after we had set sail we espied the Island of Dreams close to us. But the place seemed to be very like to that which men see in their dreams upon the Earth; for it appeared to fly before us as we went forward, and to grow more distant. But at the last we came up with it, and sailing into a certain harbour which they call Sleep Haven, so disembarked. Close to the place where we landed was an Ivory Gate, and a temple that was said to be the Temple of the Cock. The time of our coming, I remember, was late in the afternoon. As soon as we had passed through the Gate into the city, we saw a great multitude of all manner of dreams. But before I speak of these, I would first say something of the city, about which no man, as far as I know, has written anything, excepting Homer only, who has erred in more than one matter, and neglected to tell, or it may be knew not, others. About the city...

Scarf

Scarf Rita Dove (bio) Whoever claims beauty lies in the eye of the beholder has forgotten the music silk makes as it settles across a slim, bared neck: skin never touched so gently except by a child or a lover’s breath. [End Page 511] Rita Dove Rita Dove is the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011, paperback edition due out in the fall of 2013). The most recent of her nine poetry collections are Sonata Mulattica (2009), American Smooth (2004), and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). A book of short stories, Fifth Sunday, was published in 1985 in the Callaloo Fiction Series. Her novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992) was widely acclaimed as a coming of age tale, and her drama The Darker Face of the Earth was produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and the Royal National Theatre in London, among many other venues. In 1998 the Boston Symphony debuted her song cycle “Seven for Luck” with music by John Williams, under the composer’s baton. United States Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove received the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama, making her the only poet ever honored with both awards. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Prologue of the Rambling Sort

Prologue of the Rambling Sort Rita Dove (bio) This is a tale of light and shadow, what we hear and the silence that follows. Remember this as we set out across sea and high roads, as talk turns to gentlemen and valets, grave robbers and tormented souls. This is a story about music and what it does to those who make it, whom it enslaves . . . yes, slavery of all kinds enters into the mix, although the skin of our protagonist does not play so great a role in his advancement and subsequent fade from grace as might be imagined. Or does it? Rather, let us say that the racial divide has not yet been invented; you lived, you died, things happened between the two. But you are here for the story. The story someone penned in thirst and anger on an uncharted desert isle, then stuffed into a bottle that now floats, a glassine porpoise, swell upon swell, too small for anyone to find . . . until the paper inside finally crisps, tanned beyond recognition by the sun that is its constant lover . . . . So it is a lost story but we will be imagining it, anyway We’ll leave out the boring parts There’ll be marching bands, wardrobe changes and, of course, Love—melting hearts, sweaty meringues, Flowers of the Realm and the occasional heave-to in the shrubbery. Political cartoons. Honorable, quiet fools. [End Page 671] The major players: Father and son, son and father. Two composers, a violinist between them. An African Prince in Turkish robes; a Prince of Wales turned Regent turned King; an Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to the Queen. (Always the wait-staff, ever vigilant, eye- and ear-y.) A music student turned copyist, a performer turned entrepreneur, a faux emperor, a famed chef, a fiddling beggar; plus assorted fops and dabblers, countesses and dwarves, all with their freakish bundles of accouterments: turbans and reticules, wigs and vinaigrettes; brooches painted in the shape of the lover’s eye. Enter two prodigies (of an age but not a color), an absent mother and all-too-present father, a fattening son and his maddening sire, a small man and his indigestion, a fat man and his gout, rabble and revolutionaries, guillotines cranking up in time with the organ grinders, just your average gulp of hope and gobble of terror—then picture a river pouring itself through a city, picking up garbage and gulls, doused in barge-oil, speckled with swans, lapping and sloshing and pooling . . . that’s how we’ll be traveling—and the rest, as they say, is background music. (Ah, but what heavenly music that was . . . ) [End Page 672] Rita Dove Rita Dove, U. S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, is Commonwealth Professor of English of the University of Virginia (Charlottesville). She is author of nine collections of poems, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah and the forthcoming Sonata Mulattica—A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play (W. W. Norton, April 2009). She is also author of two volumes of fiction—Fifth Sunday, short stories, published in the Callaloo Fiction Series; and Through the Ivory Gate, a novel—and widely produced play, The Darker Side of the Earth. Her song cycle Seven for Luck, with music by John Williams, debuted at Tanglewood in 1998. Her many literary and academic honors also include the 2006 Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service, the 1996 Heinz Award, the 1996 National Humanities Medal, and the 1993 NAACP Great American Artist Award. Copyright © 2008 Rita Dove

Homer's Odyssey, Books 19 and 23: Early Recognition; A Solution to the Enigmas of Ivory and Horns, and the Test of the Bed

Interpreting certain aspects of Homer's Odyssey has created problems for scholars for centuries. For example, in Book 19, why does Penelope ask the strager to interpret a dream she supposedly had when the dream is self-interpreting? What does she mean when she speaks of gates of ivory and horns? Why does she decide to hold a contest with the bow, with her as the prize, at a time when she has been told that Odysseus is near? And finally, what is the true purpose of the so-called test of the bed in Book 23? This essay suggests that a plausible answer to these questions can be found only if we acknowledge that beginning in Book 19 Penelope knows that she is speaking not to a stranger but to her husband, disguised as a beggar, and that their conversations therein are cryptic and discreet in order to avoid alerting the unfaithful serving-maids.

Conversations with Rita Dove

In 1993, Rita Dove (b. 1952) became the nation's youngest and first female African American Poet Laureate. This collection of interviews offers a fascinating portrait of her. Having published over a half-dozen collections of poetry, Dove won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah. In addition, she has published a novel, Through the Ivory Gate, and her play, The Darker Face of Earth, has been produced on several stages. Unlike many other writers, Rita Dove has no objection to being interviewed, in part because she enjoys reading interviews. Toni Morrison's, for instance, gave Dove her inspiration as a beginning writer. In these conversations that range over a decade and a half, she reveals an extraordinary dedication to preserving the integrity of her art, particularly as others intrude upon her to crusade on behalf of racial and gender issues. Although she regards herself as a feminist and expresses pride in her African American heritage, she leaves crusading outside the door as she enters the writer's workroom. Once inside, she focuses on making each poem stand up to her own exceptionally rigorous standards. In these conversations the reader meets also the Rita Dove who lives outside the poet's workroom. In addition to writing, she plays the viola de gamba, is addicted to crossword puzzles, and has taken lessons in singing and in ballroom dancing. In response to What kind of questions are you not asked in interviews that you would like to answer? she bravely and surprisingly replies, Personal questions. Earl G. Ingersoll is distinguished teaching professor of English emeritus at SUNY College at Brockport. His previous books include Conversations with May Sarton (University Press of Mississippi), The Post-Confessionals: Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties (with Judith Kitchen and Stan Sanvel Rubin), and Doris Lessing: Conversations, among others.

Lucretius on the Gates of Horn and Ivory: A Psychophysical Challenge to Prophecy by Dreams

Lucretius' Epicurean account of dreams in Book IV of De Rerum Natura indicates that they are wholly void of prophetic significance and of little practical significance. Dreams, rightly apprehended, do little more than mirror our daily preoccupations. For Lucretius, all dreams pass through the gate of ivory and all are reducible to psychophysical phenomena.In this paper, I examine Lucretius' account of sleep and the formation of dreams in light of the Epicurean aims of the poem as a whole. In doing so, I give what I take to be a plausible sketch of the formation of dreams through what I call Lucretius' "selection model" of dreams. The selection model forbids, strictly speaking, the phenomenon of genuine prophecy through dreams, while at the same time it allows for a surprisingly rich psychophysical explanation of the genesis of seemingly prophetic dreams in sleepers. Thus, I argue, a proper grasp of the Lucretian account of oneiric formation is itself a significant part of the Epicurean cure for superstitions and religiously based ills of his day.

History of Medicine. "Through the horny or ivory gate" -- dream interpretation in the Antiquity. I. From Homer to Aristotle

History of Medicine. "Through the horny or ivory gate" -- dream interpretation in the Antiquity. I. From Homer to Aristotle

Deferrals of domain: contemporary women novelists and the state

Preface Hobbes's Fish Introduction: Women and Fictions of the State Three Political Narratives Fantasies of Power: Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm The Romance of Politics: Paule Marshall's Daughters Political and Sexual Liberations: Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature Mothers and Capitalists in International Politics: Margaret Drabble's The Gates of Ivory Works Cited

Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature

Reviewed by: Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature Ashraf H. A. Rushdy Madelyn Jablon. Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997. x + 209 pp. It wasn’t long ago that those of us who spent our professional lives writing about the experiences and representations of people of color, women, and working people were troubled, a few scandalized, by some of the antihumanist claims of postmodernity. The author seemed to be dying just as African American authors were being brought to renewed life; the subject became split, internally divided, eternally deferred, unintelligible, and essentially absent, just as women, workers, and otherwise colonized peoples were finding their voices and their subjectivities. For some, it appeared that the ontological claims of modernity (death and absence) and the epistemological pronouncements of postmodernism (deferral and aporia) were yet another means of ensuring that those wounded by the material realities of history would continue to be misserved by the intellectual climate of the present. The “other” emerged to find the self absent; the ethnic author was born into a cemetery. This history, for Madelyn Jablon, seems to be repeating itself from the other side. Anglo-European theorists are now claiming the end of postmodernity just as African American authors are beginning to get recognition for a long history of theories and practices of self-conscious artistic representation. Just as African American authors otherwise [End Page 502] as diverse in subject matter and style as Ishmael Reed, Al Young, Albert Murray, Xam Cartiér, Leon Forrest, Reginald McKnight, Clarence Major, John Edgar Wideman, and Ntozake Shange produce works of heightened self-consciousness, of “Black metafiction,” William Gass, the critic who coined the term “metafiction,” is condemning the practice as a form of solipsistic, bourgeois self-indulgence, and advocating a “new realism.” Intellectual trends, it seems, just keep exceeding the grasp of ethnic literary practitioners, just keep excluding the rabble from the elite. Black writers in the seventies found themselves serious subjects in an age of play, and in the nineties become playful artists in an age turning serious. It is hard to tell whether this historical repetition is tragedy or farce. In this study of self-conscious texts in contemporary African American fiction, Jablon offers two challenges to those who have theorized and renounced metafiction. First, she claims that earlier theoretical descriptions of metafictional practices were radically flawed because they did not take into account the developments in Black metafiction. Second, she argues that rumors of the death of metafiction are premature given the vitally robust quality of metafictional texts in contemporary African American literature. The study falls into five parts, Jablon demonstrating how African American artists since the sixties have written about the “thematization of art,” revised the trajectory of the künstlerroman, practiced and shown the limits of intertextuality, employed the oral tradition to exemplify the play of voice in written texts, and transformed popular genres such as science fiction and detective novels. After an introduction in which she draws on the mainstream theories of metafiction formulated by Linda Hutcheon, William Gass, Patricia Waugh, and Mikhail Bakhtin, and then shows in what ways these theories are reconfigured by African Americanists like Deborah McDowell, Henry Louis Gates, Gwendolyn Mae Henderson, Donald Gibson, and Houston Baker, Jablon turns to extended readings of ten novels that exemplify the five techniques of Black metafiction. She reads Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and Alice Walker’s Temple of My Familiar as expressions of artistic self-consciousness in which the characters who are artists represent “black metafictionists” and the artistic process itself becomes a metaphor for African American self-fashioning. Rita Dove’s Through the Ivory Gate and Arthur Flower’s [End Page 503] Another Good Loving Blues are texts that redefine the künstlerroman’s conception of who can be an artist and what constitutes conflict. Taking as her exemplary texts Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Jablon shows how contemporary African American texts revise and rewrite their predecessor texts (for A Lesson it is Native Son, for Tar Baby, the mythic folktale and Their Eyes Were Watching God). Charlotte Watson-Sherman’s...

Investing in Conrad, Investing in the Orient: Margaret Drabble's The Gates of Ivory

The days of heroic travel are gone; unless, of course, in newspaper sense, in which heroism like everything else in world becomes as common if not as nourishing as our daily bread. Conrad, preface xviii I began to feel I was surrounded by almost palpable spectres from Lord Jim, Victory, and Falk whenever I was in Singapore or Bangkok--1 would catch flick of Marlow's nautical jacket or a whiff of his cheroot, or get a glimpse of Captain Whalley's bushy whiskers on Singapore's sunlit esplanade, and hear rattle of horse-tramway down Bangkok's New Road passing Schomberg's hotel. Young 2 In The Gates of Ivory (1991), Margaret Drabble's enterprise, and that of her protagonists, is stamped by Joseph Conrad's legacy, one that remains problematic, contested, and controversial. [1] This dark excursion into Southeast Asia, third volume of her trilogy that began with A Radiant Way (1987) and continued with A Natural Curiosity (1989), represents culmination of Drabble's negotiation with global issues, of her journeys both outward to perimeter and inward to the heart of darkness. Though her characters may be sent briefly to Africa in The Needle's Eye (1972) and The Realms of Gold (1975), Drabble's earlier fictions largely depict separate worlds of British northern provincial life and London's metropolitan culture, but primary address is increasingly NW3 or NW5, domain of middle-class professional folk, of journalists and television producers whose diaries record numerous lunch meetings at favored trattoria in Soho or Notting Hill Gate. Beginning with The Ice Age (1977), i ndividual struggles of her female characters are overshadowed by a sense of collective crisis (Sutherland); canvas is enlarged and Drabble establishes herself as chronicler of a contemporary Britain (Stovel 186), monitoring social, economic, and political realities in Age of Thatcher. Further, James Gindin asserts that Drabble always seen herself as part of an English literary tradition (255), and depends on a consistent use of guides and models from that tradition: Bunyan, Austen, George Eliot, Thackery, Dickens, and Arnold Bennett. As trilogy sends her metropolitan characters in search of outer limits of a known and knowable community, Drabble begins to diagnose a condition of world rather than a condition of England, and neither Bunyan's allegorical geography nor brimming social panoramas of nineteenth-century and Edwardian realists seem able to cope with this growing complexity. The new guide was not English-born; he knew Poland, Russia, France, Africa, and Eastern Archipelago before he counted England his home. It is to Joseph Conrad that Margaret Drabble turns to contemplate, if not to explain, cruel and bewildering path of contemporary civilization, and to interrogate shifting definitions of postmodernity. The relationship between novel and guide is therefore one key to Drabble's vision of her time; frequent failure of her characters to read Conrad is as much a part of that key. The issue of reading and interpretation is also signaled in novel's title and epigraph, taken from The Odyssey, Book XIX, where Penelope warns stranger to distinguish between false dreams that come to us through gates of ivory and those that appear through gate of polished horn and speak truthfully of what will come to pass. The lure of dreams that ultimately deceive is a crucial source of action, particularly for Stephen Cox, trilogy's most avid traveler and only truly dedicated reader of Joseph Conrad. At end of first novel in series, we learn that he has to Kampuchea (Radiant Way 392), gone to research a play about Pol Pot. The absent Cox is not forgotten through pages of A Natural Curiosity. Alix Bowen wonders about Stephen Cox and Cambodia. In Cambodia, people disappeared. …

Porte d'Ivoire et Rameau d'Or : éléments de cacozélie dans le sixième livre de l'Énéide

Aeneid 6 is examined from the angle oí cacozelia latens, conceived as a methodical, though masked, enterprise of disparagement of Aeneas and, through him, of Augustus. Forced by the requirements of his subject to suspend for a time his attacks (from 1. 637), Virgil has made good for this breach with the Ivory Gate device, which must be connected with the Golden Bough's resistence to the auidus hero. Outside this « neutralized » passage, the poet never, misses a chance to satirize Aeneas, and, inside it, Caesar and Augustus.

Fragmented Bodies/Selves/Narratives: Margaret Drabble's Postmodern Turn

flect upon-a problematic, violent, and arbitrary universe. From The Waterfall, The Realms of Gold, and The Middle Ground (published in the late sixties and seventies) to her most recent series of novels, The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and The Gates of Ivory (published during the late eighties and early nineties), her characters suffer bodily injury and fragmentation as terrorism, crime, random accidents, and disasters seep into and disrupt their lives. I would like to consider the evolution of Drabble's darkening vision from two angles: first, the way in which the imagery of bodily injury and fragmentation mirrors and represents Drabble's increasingly pessimistic view of contemporary life; and second, the fact that the narratives themselves have become structurally fragmented, mirroring the author's evolution from a focus on domestic manners toward a more

The Gates of Ivory

The Gates of Ivory

Book reviews

Book reviews