Jeremy Tambling Research Articles

The Death Penalty in Dickens and Derrida: The Last Sentence of the Law by Jeremy Tambling (review)

The Death Penalty in Dickens and Derrida: The Last Sentence of the Law by Jeremy Tambling (review)

The Poetry of Dante's 'Paradiso': Lives Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter by Jeremy Tambling (review)

The Poetry of Dante's 'Paradiso': Lives Almost Divine, Spirits that Matter by Jeremy Tambling (review)

Reading Dickens Differently, edited by Leon Litvack and Nathalie Vanfasse

Reviewed by: Reading Dickens Differently ed. by Leon Litvack and Nathalie Vanfasse Melisa Klimaszewski (bio) Reading Dickens Differently, edited by Leon Litvack and Nathalie Vanfasse; pp. xvi + 259. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019, $50.95, $41.00 ebook. This collection of twelve essays aims to break new critical ground with fresh approaches to the works of Charles Dickens. The editors frame the volume as a type of care work, a nurturing endeavor embarked upon to save Dickens's works from obscurity. This framing relies upon nostalgia for a time when Dickens's writings were universally valued, relevant, and beloved—an idealization that was always questionable and that this collection does not set out to interrogate. Still, Leon Litvack and Nathalie Vanfasse's goal of presenting [End Page 132] interdisciplinary, diachronous readings to invigorate a field of study is laudable, and the broad scope of this volume ensures that most Victorianists will encounter some essays of interest. Reading Dickens Differently is presented in three sections: "Reconfiguring," "Reincorporating," and "Resetting Dickens." The first section, "Reconfiguring," is biographical and dominated by a lengthy piece from Litvack that presents newly published information about the key role the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, played in prodding Dickens's family to request a burial at the Abbey. Those interested in archival documents and granular detail about Dickens's funeral will find this section's emphasis on Dickens's burial compelling. It is less clear how the piece is "challenging a canonical view of the author" or leading to new insights beyond correcting some misunderstandings about how Dickens ended up buried in the Abbey against his own wishes (3). David Paroissien examines Thomas Babington Macaulay's influence on Dickens and the relevance of Macaulay's mode of historiography to Barnaby Rudge (1841). Lillian Nayder's piece on Dickens's relationship with his brother Fred in relation to fraternal dynamics and doubling in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) offers a more focused contribution to biographical studies. Similarly, Neil Davie's carefully historicized contribution on Dickens's acquaintances at London's Cold Bath Fields Prison, his views on prison reform, and Urania Cottage offers broadly relevant argumentation. The section as a whole, however, is not as methodologically innovative as the editors claim, which continues to hold true for most of the pieces in the volume's second section, "Reincorporating." A focus on the body—physical sensations and embodiments that cross boundaries between the imagined and the material—offers great potential for methodological innovation. Georges Letissier demonstrates how "somatic reading" can lead to new understandings of some of Dickens's descriptive techniques (95). In Dombey and Son (1846–48), for instance, "fleeting visual images force themselves in unrelenting, serial succession to the point of erasing the focaliser's consciousness" (99). Letissier draws parallels between fictional characters' hallucinatory states and the act of reading itself, urging those who read to engage in metacritical reflection on their own practice. Michael Hollington and Jeremy Tambling examine Dickens in relation to D. H. Lawrence and John Ruskin, respectively. Hollington outlines the trajectory of Lawrence's admiration for Dickens, which shifts to satirical targeting even as Lawrence's writing continues to exhibit stylistic similarities to Dickens's works. Tambling presents a dense web of linkages between Dickens, Ruskin, and J. M. W. Turner, identifying "Turneresque" (127) moments in Dickens's writing and noting that, although Ruskin's evaluations of Dickens were sometimes harsh, Ruskin "wants and needs" both Turner and Dickens in his thinking (145). Chris Louttit contributes the strongest piece in this section with a long-overdue critical assessment of posthumous illustrations of Dickens's works. Contravening early critics who maligned the original illustrations, Louttit not only offers astute analysis of the Household Edition illustrations but also ponders what a new digital resource, a Dickens Visual Archive, might offer. Imagining such a resource is exciting and stimulating in a manner that indeed leads to reading Dickens differently. As a unit, however, the pieces in this section struggle to cohere and to connect clearly to the volume's claim that it reincorporates Dickens, which exposes the collection's most glaring absence: race. [End Page 133] Particularly in a section addressing embodiment and corporeal concerns...

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf

Reviewed by: Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf Jeremy Tambling Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty. By Peggy Kamuf. New York: Fordham University Press. 2018. 161 pp. $25. ISBN 978–0–8232–8229–6. Peggy Kamuf translated the first of two volumes of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, published posthumously, called The Death Penalty; these transcripts appeared in English from Chicago University Press in 2014 and 2015. She says nothing about her work of translation, but her book offers footnotes, as it were, to Derrida’s work, which itself gives a fascinating range of arguments against the death penalty, drawing many examples from French literature: thus Hugo and Camus appear in both Derrida and Kamuf, and Kamuf analyses Baudelaire through the récit given in Le Spleen de Paris, translated here as ‘A Heroic Death’. Kafka appears here; while there are chapters on Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’, an account of an execution he was responsible for in colonial Burma (Myanmar), and on two American texts: Robert Coover’s A Public Burning (1977), his treatment of the electrocution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979). The American emphasis reflects Kamuf’s desire to concentrate on America’s history: apparently ending capital punishment in the early 1970s, only to reintroduce it, Gary Gilmore being the first to die under the new permission to kill in 1977. Gilmore (Mailer’s subject), shot for a double murder, brings out an irony Kamuf explores: Gilmore wanted to be executed and refused to appeal against his sentence; lawyers tried to save him because of the precedent that would give for capital [End Page 108] punishment to resume in America. And where much of the rest of the world has abolished the death penalty, America, Kamuf says with further irony, ‘is struggling to survive in a largely hostile world’ given the protection of secrecy, everything to do with execution even being exempted by law from the Freedom of Information Act (pp. 65–66). The interest in discussing the death penalty through literature comes from Derrida claiming that literature, not philosophy, has advanced the cause of abolition, and that literature always speaks against it: ‘literature’, as Derrida considers it, is distinct from ‘belles-lettres and poetry’ (Kamuf’s quotation, p. 19); it is modern, post-French Revolution, metatextual, almost halfway towards theory; Kamuf quotes Derrida saying that it ‘has the right to say anything’ (p. 23)—that being almost a definition of modern literature, as with Blanchot, another writer discussed. (This modernism cannot really claim Orwell, but interestingly, Kamuf has good things to say about him.) Such a literature is essential for a democracy and can only live in one; its power is to question the death penalty, which is read as a particular aim to define the limits of life, terminating its openness to chance. Kamuf makes good points about literature as a witness to capital punishment—a witness being essential to say that an ‘execution’ (a word whose etymology she traces) has taken place. The chapter on Coover shows how modern executions demand secrecy, and how they relate to the obscene. The death penalty is ‘driven by the urge to indecent exposure, which has to call up the contrary drive to keep hidden what should not be exposed’ (p. 82): in this novel, the Rosenbergs are made to die publicly, as a way of bringing home what that shamefulness involves; Kamuf here invokes Freud’s idea of the passage à l’acte, an acting out of unconscious desires (p. 85)—disavowed desires projected in front of spectators who can see what they have repressed. The book is full of sharply suggestive points, mostly unusual in debates of this sort, affirming literature’s inherent value in contesting the absoluteness of the death penalty, cutting off life and language together. Jeremy Tambling SWPS Warsaw Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death by Jeremy Tambling

Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death by Jeremy Tambling

The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens by Peter Cook

Reviewed by: The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens by Peter Cook Justin H. Thompson Peter Cook. The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xiii + 276. $64.99. ISBN 978-3-319-96790-5. Writing for The Listener in 1954, the critic and writer V. S. Pritchett notes that while Charles Dickens's most obvious literary predecessors were Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, "Sterne and the romantic movement have taught [Dickens] the value of pathos, tears, changeableness, and the gestures against an unjust world" (28). Like other critics who have remarked upon Dickens's Romantic inheritance, Pritchett then moves on without much further clarification. These kinds of critical moves leave readers guessing at the connection between the most famous Victorian novelist and the Romantics, such as William Wordsworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and John Keats. It is precisely this ongoing gap in the scholarship that Peter Cook attempts to fill in his recent monograph, The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens, in which Cook announces he wants "to substantiate the assertion that Dickens was indeed an important legatee of the Romantic movement" (2). Cook's monograph is an important and necessary contribution to the field that should prompt more such scholarship. Cook's text, however, is not bibliographic detective work; rather he works to find the "parallels, echoes, [and] allusions" between Dickens and the [End Page 195] Romantics (255). As Cook summarizes in his conclusion, "Charles Dickens's debt to his Romantic Period predecessors is far more extensive and significant than has previously been recognised" (255). To show this, Cook reads eight of Dickens's novels against his Romantic predecessors in chapters structured around childhood, time, progress, and alienation. The book is most successful when Cook provides exceptional close readings of Dickens paired with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Romantics. He argues persuasively, for example, that "The Romantic roots of Dickens's exploration of progress in Bleak House are clear, and his conclusions unequivocal" (163). He then provides a convincing case that Harold Skimpole, the financially ignorant but charming painter in Bleak House generally considered to be modeled on Leigh Hunt, actually represents an older Samuel Taylor Coleridge who "never finishes his poems and sketches" (163). In such moments, Cook asks us to not only reconsider Dickens but also to rethink how the images of the Romantic poets passed from one generation to the next. Of the four chapters, Cook's strongest argument is Dickens's inheritance of the Romantic view of childhood, itself a monumental intellectual break. Cook argues convincingly that Dickens inherited this view and expanded it beyond what the Romantics could have imagined, particularly in his two first-person novels. It is an impressive argument that forces readers to question how much of our discourse on childhood is influenced by Dickens's portrayals of David and Pip. Cook then connects both novels back to the Romantics, summarizing, "If Steerforth is the Byronic hero of David Copperfield, then it is Joe, the hard-working, steadfast countryman, who is the Wordsworthian hero of Great Expectations, descendant of the Leech-gatherer, the shepherd Michael and the Solitary Reaper" (67). Even in such astute observations, Cook reveals a limitation of his study: the Romantics were never a monolith with a single aesthetic or political heuristic, so finding the "parallels, echoes, [and] allusions" to them feels almost inevitable. Cook is not the first to argue for such a relationship: he cites Iain Crawford's argument that Great Expectations (1860–61) is something akin to a reimagining of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). And Jeremy Tambling, in his notes for the Penguin edition of David Copperfield, observes that David has certain parallels to the Romantics. Cook's addition to Dickens scholarship is broader. He argues that in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) Dickens begins to ask questions "around the nature of human relationships and human interaction, and the relationship between human beings and their environment, in a post-revolutionary world: the kind of questions that Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley had asked during the birth pangs of the political and industrial revolutions" (222). The problem with such an assertion, however, is its generality. One...

Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, by Rebecca Hutcheon

Reviewed by: Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing by Rebecca Hutcheon Tom Ue (bio) Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, by Rebecca Hutcheon; pp. xiv + 233. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, £120.00, $145.00. Midway through Veranilda (1904), George Gissing's unfinished novel about Rome in the sixth century, we learn about the hero Basil's roots and how poorly his privileged position had prepared him for his beloved Veranilda's disappearance and for the war between the Roman emperor Justinian and the Gothic king Totila. Gissing explains how Basil's "dispirited idleness" is occasioned by want of a bath: "for all the Roman's exercises and amusements were associated with the practice of luxurious bathing, and without that refreshment the gymnasium, the tennis-court, the lounge, no longer charmed as before" ([The Harvester Press, 1987], 153). Once responsible for the cleanliness of the Romans and for promoting social interaction, the bath is now a relic, and vanishing with it is a way of life to which Basil had grown accustomed: "Now, to enter the Thermae was to hear one's footsteps resound in a marble wilderness; to have statues for companions and a sense of ruin for one's solace" (153). Places, as we see here, serve multiple rhetorical functions: the Thermae enables Basil (and Gissing) to reminisce about earlier and better times. Its abandonment leads to the changes in Basil's appearance and colors his current views. Basil's lament for, and internalization of, such losses—he "thought more than the average Roman about these changes" (153)—liken him to the cast of sensitive and conscientious figures that people Gissing's fiction, characters who, like Edwin Reardon and Henry Ryecroft, have felt the weight of the world on their shoulders. This episode would have been at home in Rebecca Hutcheon's rich and insightful study, Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, which attends to some of the ways in which Gissing resists clear spatial demarcations and which illuminates some of the nuances in his writing. "In Gissing," Hutcheon argues, "sites are subject to shifts and fluxes that challenge the reader's preset expectations" (2). Gissing ruminated on these [End Page 492] dynamics throughout his career. In the essay "On Battersea Bridge," which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette (30 November 1883) many years before he wrote Veranilda, he describes pedestrians heading home, "too weary to spend one thought upon the noble picture to be seen for a turning of the head" (Collected Essays, edited by Pierre Coustillas [Grayswood Press, 2015], 102). The first-person narrator finds company in a working man, who "was more awake to leisurely sympathies than his fellows" (104). The narrator projects his own interests onto his neighbor, imagining him to be of like mind. The conceit, of course, is that no two people can see the same thing in the same way. When the man notices the narrator's appeal, he nods downward, and observes, "Throws up a deal o'mud don't it?" (104). Identification does not necessarily mean consensus, and Gissing, even in this early essay, suggests dialogic relationships between literature and geography, between seeing and reading. Scholarship by Michelle Elizabeth Allen, Richard Dennis, Jason Finch, Jeremy Tambling, David Welsh, Julian Wolfreys, Tim Youngs, and others has opened new ways of reading Gissing geographically. Yet, as Hutcheon suggests, criticism has routinely revolved around three dominant strands—biography, the urban, and chronology—all of which imply mimesis. These narrow foci may spur us to overlook some of the imaginative aspects of Gissing's fiction and to concentrate on a select number of texts and locations. Writing Place contributes to scholarship by canvasing larger literary and geographical terrains. The four chapters assembled here examine Gissing's treatment of the North and the South, London in the 1880s, the country, and the Mediterranean. The conclusion offers a spatial chronology by considering representative works from three phases of Gissing's career. The rewards of this study lie in Hutcheon's ability to extract every drop of meaning from different passages, the poetic quality of her own...

Jeremy Tambling, Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy: Readings in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Benjamin

J<scp>eremy</scp> T<scp>ambling</scp>, <i>Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy: Readings in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Benjamin</i>

Dickens’ Novels as Poetry: Allegory and Literature of the City by Jeremy Tambling (review)

Dickens’ Novels as Poetry: Allegory and Literature of the City by Jeremy Tambling (review)

Dickens and Race

Reviewed by: Dickens and Race by Laura Peters Grace Moore (bio) Dickens and Race, by Laura Peters; pp. xii + 169. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013, £65.00, $100.00. In lots of ways, Laura Peters’ Dickens and Race is a useful book. Drawing on her expertise in children’s literature (Peters is also the author of the excellent Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire [2000]) Peters uses childhood as a lens through which to examine Charles Dickens’s complex and shifting attitudes toward other races. Peters argues convincingly—following Michael Slater—that childhood stories like the Tales of the Arabian Nights generated powerful and polarized responses to the “exotic” and the “savage” that the novelist never left behind (2). According to Peters, 1848 is a key year in the development of Dickens’s thinking on racial matters. She presents a helpful overview of the author’s scientific reading and thinking at this time, drawing on Dickens’s journalism to show the depth of his engagement with works like Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) and his friend Charles Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837). Peters expertly guides the reader through the complexities of nineteenth-century debates on race, drawing upon (but not always acknowledging) previous work in the area that draws out connections between class and race. She quite rightly highlights Dickens’s deep concerns about degeneration, particularly within the urban poor, and draws some important parallels between articles by Dickens pertaining to domestic social problems (such as “Ignorance and Crime” [1848] and “Ignorance and Its Victims” [1848]) and others on racial and scientific questions. One of the most striking elements of Peters’s argument surrounding the significance of the year 1848 is a subtle and compelling discussion of the home. Underpinned by Catherine Waters’s influential work on Dickens and the dysfunctional family, Peters equates the troubled home of Dombey and Son (1846–48) with a broader form of national domesticity that is equally disturbed. Indeed, when she asserts that “Issues of empire and [End Page 350] race permeate both home and culture at this time” and “The novel is peopled with migrants, nomads and those with multiple homes who never seem to be at home anywhere,” Peters might just as easily be writing of contemporary London (23). For Peters, “Dickens’s approach to race intermeshes both science and fancy,” and she suggests that this approach was crystalized through the novelist’s review of Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science (1848) (28). Turning from Hunt back to Dombey and Son, Peters reads the novel’s enigmatic “native” (who is, of course, the only non-native in the text) as a type of repository for colonial violence, arguing that the beatings visited upon him by Major Bagstock mark a distinction between class and race (31). This is an intriguing idea, and while Peters is correct in her suggestion that the native’s mistreatment allows us to see colonial excess at its worst, Rosemary Bodenheimer’s Knowing Dickens (2007) shows us that child factory workers remained just as vulnerable to mistreatment in the workplace at this time. In addition to its important discussion of exoticism, Dickens and Race also offers an interesting subsection on Dickens’s imaginative engagement with China—an area that deserves greater attention, notwithstanding Jeremy Tambling’s important contributions. Although, as Peters comments, Dickens often saw China as a place of insular stagnation, it was also a place of hope. Hence, Walter Gay and Florence Dombey head there as their “happy-ever-after destination” after their marriage, while in later novels like Little Dorrit (1855–57) and Great Expectations (1860–61), China offers the chance to escape—albeit temporarily—from Britain (44). Dickens and Race is not always an easy read. Peters’s decision to write in the continuous present tense is a curious one, and the strategy is not always effective. Furthermore, her prose is at times a little repetitive, which makes this short book more challenging to read than it might otherwise have been. Some of Dickens’s characters are consistently misidentified, with Peters referring to “Miss Prosser,” rather than “Miss Pross” in A Tale of...

JEREMY TAMBLING. Dickens’ Novels as Poetry: Allegory and Literature of the City.

There is something excessive about Dickens’s prose. It is frequently suggestive of things left unsaid, things that cannot quite be broached. Many readers have registered a version of that thought. G. K. Chesterton once remarked of Dickens’s writing that ‘the secrecy is sensational’. Graham Greene similarly referred to Dickens’s ‘secret prose’. Jeremy Tambling is a percipient reader of Dickens’s stylistic secrecy. His latest book investigates the quality of ‘excess in the mode of prose statement’ (p. 6)—a quality that he calls Dickens’s ‘poetry’. Language becomes poetry, for Tambling, ‘(a) when it focuses on detailed themes and (b) where it exceeds conscious control or any unifying intention shaping the work’ (p. 6). This stimulating, eloquent book delves into the ‘unconscious’ of Dickens’s style—the subterranean connections between words (within sentences, within novels, or across an oeuvre) and the unintelligible, unacknowledgeable reality evoked by poetic language. With its focus on the hidden and the unsayable, the book continues a tradition of exploring a ‘darker’ Dickens, in the line of Edmund Wilson, and Greene, in turn drawing upon G. H. Lewes who wrote of Dickens and the ‘phenomena of hallucination’. Lewes is discussed at the outset here and recurs, but his picture of Dickens as an ill-read writer is overturned by an early chapter establishing Dickens’s extensive reading, and by a sustained focus throughout on Dickens’s deeply allusive style. Tambling hears the echoes of many writers in Dickens’s prose, most often Shakespeare, but also Charles Lamb, Charles Dibdin, Thomas Moore, Fielding, Sterne, Coleridge, and others. He is also impressively and imaginatively alert to echoes of Dickens’s own fiction in his subsequent works. He is particularly responsive to the way that scenes and even single words are repeated and replayed in later novels (for example, on Dickens’s openings, ‘each revises the other, each comes out of the other’; p. 172). Key terms in his critical lexicon are ‘recalls’ and ‘anticipates’. Dickens’s prose is shown to be densely associative, where single words trigger myriad connections, both between the novels themselves and in wider literary and popular culture.

History Meets Modernity: A Conversation with Professor Jeremy Tambling

Jeremy Tambling was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong until 2006 and then Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester until December 2013. He has written many books touching on Renaissance literature and on religious writing of the period including Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject (Manchester UP, 1990), Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare (Rodopi, 2004), and, as part of the New Critical Idiom series, Allegory (Routledge, 2009). Hasting G. Chen is a graduate student at National Taiwan University who works on Renaissance Literature and History. He is also the Chief Executive of L’Atelier Culture and Publishing Co., Ltd., cofounded in 2012, which is interested in bringing English and Renaissance literature to more readers in Taiwan. Q: You taught English literature of the early modern period to students in Hong Kong for eighteen years. I wonder if you could share something of that experience with us. What courses did you teach? A: I taught a variety of courses, one on nineteenth-century literature, another on literature and philosophy, another on history of sexuality, still another on carnival and tragedy.While I was engagedwith cultural studies, I also started a course onDante and Boccaccio, just looking at these two writers and their English translators. It was a very enjoyable experience. I devised the course called “Carnival and Tragedy” to try to approach the early modern [period]. I took the view that [Hong Kong] students were completely new to the subject. For that reason, almost anything I offeredwould be new. It was best not to present them with a course on a particular topic or specific historical period.However, in “Carnival andTragedy” Iwas able to include a little bit ofRabelais, Erasmus (APraiseofFolly), andquite a lotof Shakespeare, albeit in translations. For this course I even covered Racine’s Phaedra. I was always trying to excite student interest. Q: What would you consider to be the most challenging aspect for introducing early modern English literature to students in Asia? A: When I first came to Hong Kong, I found it very challenging, because I had to teach all kinds of literature with which the students were not familiar. There was no reason why a Chinese student should feel interested in Western texts. However,

“unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable”: Attending to Henry James’s Music

Henry James, so legend has it, was no musician, no music aficionado—a “strictly nonmusical auditor” in his own words (PS 174). Certainly, James’s letters back to America from Paris in the 1870s suggest large indifference to the many musical soirees to which he was “subjected” in the French capital (Brooks 33): in a letter to his father, he described a night of “interminable fiddling” and other “musical parties” at Pauline Viardot’s as “rigidly musical” and, as such, “rigidly boresome” (HJL 2.37). A few months later, a performance of piano “selections from Wagner’s Bayreuth operas” left him “bored” while “the rest were in ecstasy” (HJL 2.73). He was no musical naif—his responses, even when they were bored, often reveal a man saturated with an awareness of the classical music scene and the popular critical discourse associated with it. Yet, despite a career-long interest in and engagement with opera (well discussed by the likes of Michael Halliwell, J. Peter Dyson, and Jeremy Tambling), James seems to have kept his distance from musical appreciation. 1 With no formal training in any instrument or theory, James frequently experienced music as a foreign language. His response, in 1895, to composer George Henschel’s suggestion that he write a libretto to be set to music is typical: “I am,” he declared, “unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable” (LHJ 1.230). Visual tropes—such as perception, perspective, spectatorship, and display—tend to dominate the critical lexicon in Henry James studies, and scholars have paid ample attention to James’s representation of the visual arts and of painters and to his engagement with visual forms in his fiction. 2 Such attention is justifiable given James’s considerable body of art criticism and his explicit evocation of the “sister art” in his critical manifesto, “The Art of Fiction”: “[T]he analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete” (LC 1.46). But this visual predilection risks underplaying James’s consistent interest in aural performance as an artistic field tenuously analogous to his own novelistic experiments. Accounts of James’s painterly disposition tend to reinforce

The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Joseph J. Feeney

538 Reviews much more diffusely. Immediately the point is stated, it seems right:where Milton is cited byVictorian poets, it isoften in latent form, among many other Renaissance poets. Itdoes not seem possible to see the same degree of unmistakable influence, a point which Gray keeps returning to, in thisvery gentle and scholarly book, which gives plenty of space to readingMilton without coming to a definite conclusion why it should be so, and leaves it, therefore, as an issue to be developed further: how did modernism's reaction toVictorian poetry include a relationship toMilton? Milton in thenineteenth century gains a new lifeas a result of the discovery, and publication, in translation out of Latin, of Christian Doctrine (1825), which gener atesMacaulay's defence ofMilton in theEdinburgh Review. There are chapters on 'theVictorian Milton', and onMilton as Classic andMilton as Bible, which includes work on Christina Rossetti ('Milton I cannot warm towards', p. 45), and Hopkins, who, disliking Milton fiercelyforhis theology and views on marriage, defines him as a classic, in that it seems that everything in the poetry necessitates everything else, making a firstreading of the poem impossible, because it seems to have been heard before (p. 58). He has chapters on Arnold, and Tennyson, comparing Lycidas and InMemoriam. The section discusses the use of the phrase genial spirits' in In Memoriam (Epilogue, 1.77), and makes nice comparisons with similar phrases in Coleridge andWordsworth, using 'Samson Agonistes', 1.594 (p. 119). Similar work, though itdoes not render this otiose, was done by George Dekker, in Coleridge and theLiterature of Sensibility (London: Vision Press, 1978). Gray discusses the biography ofMilton by David Masson (1822-1907), Professor of English Litera ture firstat University College London and then at Edinburgh: the seven volumes appeared between 1859 and 1894. Gray indicates the debt thatGeorge Eliot owed to them, in themost interesting chapter in the book, which is, significantly,not on a poet's, but a novelist's pervasive debt to Milton. Using Dayton Haskin on 'George Eliot as a "Miltonist": Marriage andMilton in MiddlemarcK (in Milton and Gender, ed. by Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 207-22), it is argued that there is in Eliot a personal engagement with Milton in relation to divorce, which Gray compares toMiddlemarch, and specifically to Dorothea and her marriage to Casaubon. Milton is felt as a personality, and this conditions theway he ghosts Eliot and the novel. University of Manchester Jeremy Tambling The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins. By Joseph J.Feeney. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2008. xxi+206 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-7546-6005-7. I can think of no one more fittedto explore the subject of thisbook than JoeFeeney, long known as a cheerful presence inHopkins gatherings and enthusiastic lover of Hopkins's work. He shares Hopkins's calling as a Jesuit and therefore speaks with authority on certain aspects of the lifeand work, particularly the idea that the life ismore of a cause for joy than for agony. It is this conviction that drives the present book. As the author states candidly at the beginning of the preface, he wishes to do no less than 'to change theway MLR, 105.2, 2010 539 Hopkins is read as a poet and known as a person. As both poet and person he has long been viewed as serious and anguished, yet I have grown convinced that Gerard Hopkins was also playful, consistently playful, even compulsively playful' (p. xv). For me, Feeney is pushing at an open door in arguing thatwe must recognize Hopkins's love of fun in all sorts of things, and the book goes too far in the opposite direction, but the insistence forms an extreme counterbalance to an all too familiar ponderousness in critical pictures ofHopkins, which overemphasize his anguish. Surely no one could resist the comedy of the opening of his letter toRobert Bridges of 23March 1880, where he writes from his unhappy post in Liverpool to excuse his dilatoriness: 'The teapot of inclination has been tilted several times till the spout of intention very nearly teemed out the liquor of execution (I am speaking ofmyself now, not ofMr. Rathbone, and must point out the extraordinary merit of the...

William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity – By Robert Rix

Journal for Eighteenth-Century StudiesVolume 32, Issue 1 p. 123-124 William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity – By Robert Rix Jeremy Tambling, Jeremy Tambling University of ManchesterSearch for more papers by this author Jeremy Tambling, Jeremy Tambling University of ManchesterSearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 February 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2008.00073.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume32, Issue1March 2009Pages 123-124 RelatedInformation

The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: From Spitzer to Frye by William Calin

828 Reviews context ignores Deleuze and Guattari's book on Kafka, subtitled 'Towards aMinor Literature'. That concept would complicate the idea of a singleworld literature,with the triumphalism apparent in it, suggesting that no one world' literature can do without another literature outside itwhich contested its values, even when they seemed to be most persuasive. University of Manchester Jeremy Tambling The Twentieth-CenturyHumanist Critics: From Spitzer toFrye. ByWilliam Calin. Toronto: University ofToronto Press. 2007. $60; ?40 (pbk $27.95; ?18). viii+ 267 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9283-0 (pbk 978-0-8020-9475-9). The twentieth-century humanist critics studied byWilliam Calin are Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Albert Beguin, JeanRousset, C. S. Lewis, E . Matthiessen, and Northrop Frye. Their major works, arguments, religious views, and attitudes towards literature and itshistory, and the critiques they received, are discussed in Part 1.But the scope seems narrow: such important figures as Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, and Bakhtin are ignored. Part asks 'What do these scholars of literaturehave in common? How can we place them in literaryand cultural history?How arewe to differentiate them from theirpredecessors and their successors?' (p. 141). Calin contrasts their 'nobility'with deMan and Jauss,who he claims were both for a time 'fascists' (p. 145): not inmy view a sufficient reason to omit de Man especially. He says they 'were committed to the close reading of the text itself [. . .] over extratextual questions concerning, for example, the author's lifeor his intentions', and he compares them to theNew Critics, structuralists, and Russian Formalists, noting that 'the end of agency and the death of the author are notions scarcely invented by postmodernists' (ibid.). Apart from this limited view of postmodernism, Calin oversimplifies theoretical concepts such as 'thedeath of the author'. And 'the end of agency' relates less to questions of whether or not the author's intention is important than itdoes to questions of the unconscious, particularly thepolitical unconscious. Calin does not seem to like theory.Although he refers to Said on Mansfield Park and Gayatri Spivak on Jane Eyre as exciting and illuminating (p. 167), 'still,we are not obliged to accept that the Said-Spivak interpretations are the only or themost important ones relating to these texts, or that, because of them,we ought to think less highly of JaneAusten and Charlotte Bronte and/or of their novels' (p. 177). He discusses 'the question of the canon', asking 'which books should we read, teach, and privilege in cultural terms' (p. 168), advocating the study of an inclusive, enlarged scholarly canon (but inherently 'humanist') and critical pluralism. Saying that the success of contemporary critical theory in reading medieval texts is due to theirbelief in 'archetypal patterns, level ofmeanings, registers of style, rhetoric, and all the symbolism and sexual overtones inherent indreams, the four elements, and thepilgrimage ofman' (p. 181), he thinks it 'possible [...] to envisage our twentieth century as a return to theMiddle Ages, as a century ofmedievalism when themedieval achievement can be better appreciated MLR, 104.3, 2009 829 than at any time since Ariosto and Spenser (p. 182). This over-domesticates theory, while appreciating texts is not the point: they need criticizing, as the humanist Leavis, also neglected, could tellhim. Calin fails to give critical theory a just reading. His understanding ofmodernism and postmodernism is simplistic, and he seems hostile to students. 'So many of the young, the gifted young?our students and our children?are held captive by their computers, television, video games, contact sports,what they call music, and their unique, never seen before, eternally riveting love life' (p. 183), and All our students are ignorant of the past' (p. 174). What past, what 'history'? Benjamin argues that historicism empathizes with the victor, and 'there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism', and therefore we must 'brush history against the grain' ('Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1968), pp. 245-55 (p. 248)). Calin believes in literature, but he wants it to exist within a determinate history which needs questioning, by both himself and his students. Shue Yan University, Hong Kong Louis Lo Medieval Go-Betweens...

The French Language and Questions of Identity. (Studies in Linguistics, 4) by Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Mari C. Jones

MLR, 104.3, 2009 855 those committed politics matter. It corresponds to an evasiveness which may relate to the present state of the Left in Britain; but it left me thinking three things: first that the provenance and direction of the journals which Collini has written for,the TLS in particular, need discussion; and what do they allow to be said and what consensual values do they require of the reviewer? Second, that the limitations of journalism associate with those of biography, a subject Collini raises (p. 284), but not sufficiently to critique either biography as a mode of understanding either a subject or subjectivity, or Collini's own usual method, which follows a biographical pattern, though in the name, often, of an intellectual history. Third, thatwhatever brilliance projects itself,the essays remain safe'; very Oxbridge-oriented (see page 291 on Brasenose for an instance) to the point of being gossipy, silly about cul tural studies ('that combination of sociology plus street cred', p. 270), and isolating Britain from Europe and America: an essay on Malraux and another onWilson do not free the reader from the thought that if many figures considered here seem dated and provincial, that is repeated in a book whose scope means that theymust still be regarded as major. If that sounds severe, a brilliant comment from James theAmerican on the necessity of being 'damned critical', which Collini quotes as epigraph (p. ix), is enough support. University of Manchester Jeremy Tambling The French Language and Questions of Identity. Ed. byWendy Ayres-Bennett and Mari C. Jones. (Studies inLinguistics, 4) London: Legenda. 2007. ix+244 pp. ?48. ISBN 978-1-904350-68-2. The origins of this collection lie in a conference held inCambridge in 2004. Follow ing an introduction inwhich the editors present the themes of the book, seventeen chapters are grouped into four sections, each relating to a different type of identity: institutionalized, regional, social, and competing (in contact situations). In Part 1 Gilles Sioum adopts a theoretical approach to the question of seventeenth-century linguistic attitudes, suggesting also that, in 1620-70, the relationship between inno vation and conservatism changed decisively. Chantal Wionet analyses usage markers in seventeenth-century dictionaries. Danielle Bouverot also discusses usage mark ers, but in the digitized Tresor de la languefrancaise. JohnE. Joseph explores how French national identityhas evolved, with particular reference to Franco-German contact. Edith Esch investigates language attitudes in a French lycee in Senegal. Questionnaires and group discussions reveal that teenagers from France attach less importance toWolof than do the others. In Part (regional identities) Jacques Landrecies surveys language and identity in Picardy, while the following two chap tersdiscuss theNord-Pas-de-Calais. David Hornsby finds that semi-speakers of the dialect show their linguistic allegiance by using selected high-frequency markers while speaking French. Tim Pooley reports that 'ChtKmi)' has greater appeal to the general public than themore learned term,Picard. Part 111 on social identitybegins with Penelope Gardner-Chloros on tu/vous.Her data come from an informal dis cussion of this issue by a group of female friends in southern France. They focus on 856 Reviews unexpected usage and confirm thatmany socio-psychological factors are involved. Inmy view, the tulvous choice is not strictlyan act of identity', since neither pro noun isassociated with a given social group. Dominique Lagorgette also investigates address. Using historical and contemporary data, she argues that address terms function asmarkers of spatial spheres ('bubbles'), while insultsmark transgressions of these spheres. Roger Baines employs interviews and questionnaires in his study of three insults:males report using themmore than do females, although the differ ences are not always very great. Kate Beeching examines post-rhematic quoi in three spoken corpora, and claims that, in addition to itsdiscoursal function, it serves as an identitymarker. Nicolas Pepin offers a detailed analysis of conversational inter views with some French citizens living in Switzerland and discusses the emblematic significance for them of septante and nonante. In Part iv on competing identities', David Cowling suggests thatmany of the Italianisms ridiculed by Henri Estienne in the sixteenth century probably figured in code-mixed discourse, rather than be ing integrated borrowings as such. He also observes that Estienne's...

Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period by Adrian Grafe

848 Reviews to which I wish he had said more about its realism, and Lilith and Phantastes. Because the book traces the presence of folklore and folk tales in such literature, it is prevented from being as interesting as it could be about what is distinctive in this fiction: the account of Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a JustifiedSinner being a casualty of this approach, so that the reader not knowing Hogg might not suspect what an extraordinary psychic analysis takes place within it and so might not even read it.The book does not set itself targetswhich are either exciting or challenging to itself, as here: 'The question remains: what are some of the ways in which nineteenth century British writers of the fantastic who use supernatural folklore represent "the marvellous within everyday life"?' (p. 101). The latter is, of course, a reference to 'magic realism'. This is hardly T. S. Eliot's 'overwhelming question'; nor ismore originality signalled by the declaration of intent, to show 'how the tension between folkmetaphysics and rationalism produces the literaryfantastic, and [todemonstrate how] narrative and ideological negotiation with folklorewas central to the canon, aswell as popular in themargins of British literature' (p. viii). There is little here to surprise, and the knowledge that such folklore is somewhere inmuch nineteenth-century writing demands, to justify furtherwork, more of a sense of how itmakes a difference. Alas, when it comes to justification, Harris rather flails out: 'through their attention to the supernatural folklore of rural regions in particular, Carleton and Sharp challenge the cultural dominance of English industrialism, the complacency of mundane rationality and the narrative totalitarianism of realism' (p. 165). The book isnice in having footnotes, not endnotes, and useful in suggesting that Scottmay have helped block the reception ofHoffmann in Britain (p. 38), so limiting the psychoanalytic power of his work, so influential on Freud's 'The Uncanny', a text needed on page 183. But refusal of Jack Zipes's Marxism means a serious downplaying of his work (p. 48) in favour ofmuch lesser secondary literature,while neglect of Freud means that Jacqueline Rose's decisive study The Case ofPeter Pan; or, The Impossibility ofChildren's Fiction (London: Macmillan, rev. edn 1994) gets a bare mention, and does notmake it to the index. University of Manchester Jeremy Tambling Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period. Ed. byAdrian Gr?fe. London: Continuum. 2008. xi+183 pp. ?60. ISBN 978-0-8264-9864-9. No consistent party line can be expected from a volume of fourteen essays by different authors. Adrian Gr?fe, in his introduction, does, however, set his own agenda, ranking Geoffrey Hill along with Hopkins and Eliot as arguably the three greatest poets' of the period (p. 2). The notion thatHill's work is superior to that ofHardy, Housman, Owen, Auden, Larkin, or Plath will seem risible to those who clearly distinguish poetry from theology. Eliot held that the testof religious poetry is that it should excite and hold the interest of readers who are not religious. The MLR, 104.3, 2009 849 question haunting religious poetry isposed byDaniel Szabo, one of the contributors here, in relation to R. S. Thomas's prayers to a silent God: 'And yet who is really convinced? Is the poet himself convinced?' (p. 127). Grafe's own essay assumes that it is natural for art to embody theology. Simone Weil restsher religious belief neither on reason nor on any pre-established disposi tion or passion tobelieve, but ratheron aesthetic grounds'. The perfect beauty of the accounts of thePassion', she says, 'forces'her tobelieve inChristianity (p. 164). How convincing is this?Those brought up on theQuran know that the story ofChrist's incarnation, however beautiful, isblasphemous; while atheists will struggle to find 'beauty' in a God who requires a blood sacrifice for the 'sins' of those he has created. Some essays in thevolume followGr?fe in eliding poetry and Christian theology. Catherine Phillips argues that the borrowing of images fromHopkins by Geoffrey Hill, George Mackay Brown, and Edwin Muir ensures a continuity of 'religious sensibility'. Maureen Moran writes: 'Luxurious material artefacts and dramatic gestures are...

The Reception of Henry James in Europe (review)

Reviewed by: The Reception of Henry James in Europe Greg Zacharias Annick Duperray, ed. The Reception of Henry James in Europe. New York: Continuum, 2006. xlviii + 379 pp. $250.00 (hardcover). The depth and breadth of the reception of Henry James in advertising, film and television, the classroom, the scholarly community, and among other fiction writers in North America and the United Kingdom since Hound and Horn 7 (1934), at least, are not news. At the same time, The Reception of Henry James in Europe, which demonstrates clearly that James has been actively received in Europe during this period, is probably not so well known and thus generates discussion. As an important part of that discussion, this volume adds significant detail to the “broad transnational picture” (260) of Henry James in the past and suggests some outlines to come. It also helps to explain why some of the best work in James studies is now being done by scholars outside the United States, Canada, and the U.K. Annick Duperray brings together essays from seventeen established and younger Jamesians from across Europe, who take up many crucial aspects of the reception [End Page 301] of James’s writing. Three other contributors are from the U.K. and one is from the U.S. Thus Duperray summarizes the aims of the volume, which “examines the ways in which . . . [James has] been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed on the continent of Europe. In doing so, it throws light not only on specific strands of intellectual and cultural history but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas and texts” (viii). Most of the essays follow a similar format by surveying relevant translations and translators, M.A. theses, Ph.D. dissertations, important reviewers, cultural and literary exchanges (such as F. O. Matthiessen’s visit to Charles University in Prague in 1947), pedagogical traditions, and similarities between the Jamesian style and that of particular European writers. Especially interesting to me were the open and frank discussions (short though they had to be) of the relation of politics and government to the promotion or suppression of James studies. Philip Horne notes in his essay on James in European cinema that the presence of James illustrates that his “cultural stock continue[s] to be high” (260–61). Just how high that stock has risen can be estimated more precisely when universities and governments discourage or prevent citizens from reading his work and also when popular culture encourages it. Taken together the essays account for some of the richness of James scholarship both of yesterday and today. Jean Bessière and Miceala Symington describe James’s reception in France. Sergio Perosa expertly details James’s Italian translations. Do-natella Izzo traces with a subtle and steady hand James studies in Italy. Madeleine Danova maps the Bulgarian reception of James. Erik S. Roraback writes on the status of James in the Czech and Slovak lands. Miroslava Buchholtz deftly assays James’s Polish translators. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák concisely summarizes the James reception in Hungary. Irina Burlui-Wahrig gives a careful overview of the history of James studies in Romania. Andreea Ionescu insightfully addresses translations of James into Romanian. Tamara L. Seletrina brings readers up to date regarding James in Russia. Maria Antonia Álavarez Calleja attentively covers work on James in Spain. Eleftheria Arapoglou describes the extent of James studies in Greece. Hannu K. Riikonen writes on the reception of James in the Nordic countries and especially Finland. Denis Tredy offers a thoughtful essay on Henry James in Spanish film. As for scholars from the U.K., Angus Wrenn writes on Paul Bourget and James, and also on James and Proust; Jeremy Tambling on Henry James and European and American opera; and Philip Horne on James’s “presence” in European cinema. Finally, George Monteiro (U.S.) writes on the reception of James in Portugal. In addition, it is well worth mentioning that the “Timeline: European Reception of Henry James, 1875–2005” is superb. The equally excellent “Bibliography” includes Horne’s “A Filmography: European Film and Television Versions of Henry James,” which serves as an important supplement to J. Sarah Koch’s “A Henry James...

The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe

Series Editor's Preface Acknowledgements List of Contributors Abbreviations Timeline: European Reception of Walter Scott Paul Barnaby Introduction: Scott and the European Nationalities Question Murray Pittock 1. Scott in France Richard Maxwell 2. Scott and Defauconpret: A New Model of Translation Paul Barnaby 3. The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Spain Jose Enrique Garcia-Gonzalez and Fernado Toda 4. Ivanhoe, a Tale of the Crusades, or, Scott in Catalonia Andrew Monnickendam 5. The Reception of Walter Scott in Nineteenth-Century Austria Norbert Bachleitner 6. The Reception of Walter Scott in German Literary Histories, c1820-c1945 Frauke Reitemeier 7. The Reception of Walter Scott in East, West and Reunified Germany, (1949-2005) Annika Bautz 8. The Hungarian Reception of Walter Scott in the Nineteenth Century Emilia Szaffner 9. The Canonization of Walter Scott as the Inventor of the Historical Novel in Twentieth-Century Hungarian Reception Gertrud Szamosi 10. From Romantic Folklorism to Children's Adventure Fiction: Walter Scott in Czech Culture Martin Prochazka 11. The Polish Reception of Sir Walter Scott Mirka Modrzewska 12. The Rise and Fall of Walter Scott's Popularity in Russia Mark Altshuller 13. Walter Scott and the Idea of History in Russia Tatiana Artemyeva with Mikael Mikeshin 14. Slovene Reception of Sir Walter Scott in the Nineteenth Century Tone Smolej 15. 'His pirates had foray'd on Scottish hill': The Danish Reception of Scott with an Outline of his Reception in Norway and Sweden Jorgen Erik Nielsen 16. European Reception of Scott's Poetry: Translation as the Front Line Tom Hubbard 17. Scott's 'Heyday' in Opera Jeremy Tambling 18. 'Seeing with the Painter's Eye': Sir Walter Scott's Challenge to Nineteenth-Century Art Beth Wright 19. 'Scotland is Scott-Land' Scott and the Development of Tourism Alastair Durie Bibliography Index