Literary Attack Research Articles

Masculinity and Gatekeeping in Depictions of the Restoration Coffeehouse

Abstract: Examining a wide range of literary attacks against London coffeehouses during the Restoration period, I argue that, far from embracing the democratizing elements of the coffeehouse, this literature reveals the ways that writers pushed back against the popularity of these new public spaces. My argument demonstrates the complex modes of gatekeeping revealed by the many attacks on these emerging publics that were being used to police the boundaries of traditional privileges and uphold dominant ideologies around status and, in the process, to empty the early coffeehouses of participants. These attacks were based in ideologies of gender, race, and status and were intimately tied to cultural anxieties about the free flow of certain types of information, often but not always political in nature. While critical and historical discussions of the early coffeehouses in England tend to focus on their links to the rising public sphere and the growth of participatory politics and public opinion in England, I argue that focusing on the literary attacks against the early coffeehouses demonstrates the complex resistances to and attempts at gatekeeping against these political changes that characterized the coffeehouses' early introduction into Restoration London.

Literary Attacks on Thornton Wilder

Abstract Having been attacked by the Marxist critic Michael Gold in 1930 for ostensibly ignoring the social issues of the day, and by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson in 1942 and 1943 with accusations insinuating plagiarism, Thornton Wilder responded primarily as a creative writer. Although his plays and novels reflect his own literary goals, some passages include subtle responses to his critics. His prefaces, personal correspondence, and memoranda for his attorneys directly responded to the accusations. The attacks, at times ad hominem and homophobic, and often made in bad faith, had consequences. Wilder experienced astonishment, disgust, and personal distress. As a result of one controversy, The Skin of Our Teeth failed to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, Wilder did not win, an outcome some critics attribute to these controversies. Wilder reacted to these attacks in the same way he lived his life and composed his writings, with poise, dignity, sensitivity, creativity, and an affirmation of human freedom.

Nothing Until It Is Made Actual; or, Acker versus Growing Up

Abstract This essay argues for reading Kathy Acker in terms of what the author calls the “plasticity” of her sentences. These syntactic structures disclose Acker's attempt to expose and negate a bourgeois ideology of adolescence and maturity. The essay pursues this argument through a reading of Acker's novel In Memoriam to Identity, in particular its interest in Rimbaud as both biographical icon and literary precedent. The essay then argues that Acker's concerted literary attack on an ideology of maturity relates to the projects of trans literature at several critical junctures.

Poe vs. Himself

Poe vs. Himself Anne Whitehouse (bio) On May 3, 1841, Edgar Allan Poe, a thirty-two-year-old editor at Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia, penned a request to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University. Two years Poe's senior, Longfellow was established in an academic career and already had achieved a considerable reputation as a poet, translator, and author of travelogues and romances. Ambitious and poor, Poe was hoping to make his literary reputation and support himself as an editor and tastemaker. He had been trying to raise funds for his own publication, to be called Penn's Magazine, when a young Philadelphia lawyer and cabinetmaker, George Rex Graham, made him a liberal offer to join the staff of his newly established magazine, with a circulation of five thousand. Poe seized his chance. To impress the professor of modern languages, Poe self-consciously sprinkled his entreaty with French phrases and flattered him with compliments: DEAR SIR—Mr. George R. Graham, proprietor of Graham's Magazine, a monthly journal published in this city and edited by myself, desires me to beg of you the honor of your contribution to its pages. Upon the principle that we seldom obtain what we very anxiously covet, I confess that I have but little hope of inducing you to write for us,—and to say the truth, I fear that Mr. Graham would have opened the negotiation much better in his own person, for I have no reason to think myself favorably known to you; but the attempt was to be made, and I make it. I should be overjoyed if we could get from you an article each month, either poetry or prose, length and subject à discretion. In respect to terms, we would gladly offer you carte blanche; and the periods of payment should also be made to suit yourself. In conclusion, I cannot refrain from availing myself of this, the only opportunity I may ever have, to assure the author of the "Hymn to the Night," of the "Beleaguered City," and of the "Skeleton in Armor," of the fervent admiration with which his genius has inspired me; and yet I would scarcely hazard a declaration whose import might be so easily misconstrued, and which bears with it, at best, more or less of niaiserie, were I not convinced that Professor Longfellow, writing and thinking as he does, will be at no less to feel and to appreciate the honest sincerity of what I say. With the highest respect, Your obedient servant, Edgar A. Poe As Poe anticipated, Longfellow turned down the request. In a noncommittal yet gracious response, he conveyed to Poe his own compliments: [End Page 98] May 19, 1841 Your favor of the 3d inst., with the two numbers of the Magazine, reached me only a day or two ago. I am much obliged to you for your kind expression of regard, and to Mr. Graham for his very generous offer, of which I should gladly avail myself under other circumstances. But I am so much occupied at present that I could not do it with any satisfaction either to you or to myself. I must therefore respectfully decline his proposition. You are mistaken in supposing that you are not "favorably known to me." On the contrary, all that I have read from your pen has inspired me with a high idea of your power, and I think you are destined to stand among the first romance-writers of the country, if such be your aim. The two writers never met, and this exchange marked the beginning and end of their correspondence. Nevertheless, their names have been linked in the annals of American cultural history because of Poe's literary attacks against Longfellow four years later in 1845, which Poe titled the "Little Longfellow War." Poe's "War" was an unprovoked aggression against one of the most beloved figures of the New England literary establishment, outraging Longfellow's friends and fans. Chief among the contemporary writers who responded in Longfellow's defense was someone who referred to himself as "Outis," Greek for "nobody." This curious contretemps in American literary history...

„CNOTLIWA” ŻYDÓWKA ZUZANNA. O empatii w opowiadaniu Antoniego Czechowa Grzęzawisko

This article examines Anton Chekhov’s short story (Quag)mire (Тина, 1886), which gave rise to a great deal of controversy among contemporaneous critics and authors. Some of their commentaries were pejorative, in spite of the fact that Chekhov himself regarded the story as successful. Since the critics frequently referred to the reader’s thoughts and feelings, the article proposes to analyse the story by virtue of cognitively-inspired literary methodology, with emphasis laid on (cognitive) empathy. Particularly useful is also the Deictic Shift Theory, which involves the reader’s engagement in the tracing of “relocated” deictic centres, as well as the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Accordingly, Kowalczyk argues, debauchery is a mire can be considered the story’s central conceptual metaphor, while the story’s title, Тина (Tina), literally a (quag)mire, provides a key to its interpretation. In the story, told by the third-person narrator, the reader empathically identifies her/himself with Alexandr Sokolsky, a Russian officer, as if “entering” the deictic field created "around" him. Together the protagonist, the reader —via a sequence of consecutive deictic shifts — is empathetically familiarized with Susanna, a Russified Jewish woman. Through several actions and utterances, Susanna attempts to question the negative stereotype of a Jew, commonplace in Russia, but fails. Arguably, the reader’s evoking the biblical story of the genuinely virtuous Susanna, implied in Chekhov’s text, entails her/his negative perception of Chekhov’s fictional female. This cultural undercurrent may be deemed responsible for the story’s unfavourable reception by Jewish readers, who interpreted Тина (Tina) in terms of a literary attack on their society. In light of the cognitive-literary approach delineated above, Chekhov’s story in question indeed proves to be anti-semitic.

Dickens, Miscellanies, and Classical Traditions of Satire

Dickens, Miscellanies, and Classical Traditions of Satire John Drew (bio) Adetailed examination of Charles Dickens's influence on the genesis and development of the periodical that was originally advertised in the Autumn of 1836 as "The Wits' Miscellany" has yet to be made. Nevertheless I am going to argue that the context of its establishment was something of a watershed in the development of Dickens's approach to satirical writing as a journalist, editor and author.1 "The Wits' Miscellany" was the planned title for the new monthly magazine that the publisher was projecting in 1836, to be jointly penned by the leading humorists of the day, and edited by the intensely fashionable "Boz," creative force behind a strange monthly confection of narratives known as The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, then taking literary London by storm. At Dickens's suggestion, we are led to believe, the title soon mutated from "The Wits' Miscellany" to Bentley's Miscellany, prompting R. H. Barham's quip "but why go to the other extreme?" The joke acts as an illustration of something that will also be touched on in this article, namely the place in satirical traditions of the hit which depends for its effect upon the identification of an individual victim. This gives satire a particular kind of hold which is more of a bite than an embrace. In exploring such matters, Dickensian satire will inevitably be brought into conversation–perhaps even criminal conversation–with the central Dickensian theme of conviviality.2 With its emphasis on shared [End Page 221] enjoyment, sociability and consensus, the convivial would seem to be at odds with the properly satirical, which has to leave its sting in somebody's flesh, and which usually exposes two sides to any question, leaving some unfortunate soul–at times even its readers–uncomfortably stranded on the wrong bank, and scrambling for safety. This naturally prompts the question of what Dickens himself, as a young writer already being lionized for his wit in the mid 1830s, understood by such terms, as they affected the practice of his craft. In other words, how did Dickens orientate himself as a budding humorist against the existing satirical and comic traditions of his day? To be sure, this is not a fashionable line of enquiry.3 Following the great twentieth-century re-evaluation of Dickens as an artist, we have perhaps become conditioned to look for ways in which his works anticipated, predicted and prototyped his Modernist and postmodern successors and influenced the international current of prose fiction that was to come after. Nevertheless, it must occasionally be permissible to glance upstream as well as down, and try to understand Dickens's aesthetic and ethical development as a writer in terms of those he acknowledged and navigated amongst as forerunners: in this case well-established exponents of classical traditions of literary attack and reform. Dickens's "small Latin and less Greke" as a schoolboy is, in this respect, irrelevant, because such traditions were so widely diffused in Regency, Georgian and Victorian print culture, partly though the periodical press, but also through the warp and weft of parliamentary rhetoric, which of course, Dickens himself was as responsible as anyone for weaving into text during the 1830s (Hessell ch. 5). As George Augustus Sala would put it, in his book-length obituary of his mentor and former employer, Dickens as a young journalist "had listened to masters in every style of rhetoric: he had followed Henry Brougham the Demosthenes, Shiel the Cicero, O'Connell the Mirabeau, of their age" (36–37). A classical education was by no means a prerequisite to participation in a literary culture imbued with neoclassical tendencies, and which was thoroughly accustomed to adapting familiar stylistic formulae and imaginative reference points in the contest between conservative and radical traditions. Dickens was literally and literarily in the thick of it. [End Page 222] Party spirits, party warfare and the satirical stakes were all high during the stormy passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), the "Great Reform" Act (1832), and the implementation of the radical Whig reform agenda during the Grey and first two Melbourne ministries (1830–39)–in particular as effects of the...

Civic Piety and Patriotism: Patrician Humanists and Jews in Venice and Its Empire

AbstractThis article focuses on the contribution of anti-Jewish themes to political ideals and reality in the works of two leading Venetian patrician humanists — Ludovico Foscarini and Paolo Morosini. The article demonstrates that their literary attacks on Jews were shaped by classical, patristic, medieval, and humanist texts, and by the experience of service to the state. It also demonstrates that their work contributed to debates about the toleration of Jews in Venetian territory and can be linked to the humanist engagement with Judaism at a critical point for both phenomena in the fifteenth century.

J. F. C. Fuller's Assessment of Winston Churchill as Grand Strategist, 1939-45

It is generally well known that Major-General J.F.C. Fuller was a strong critic of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's grand strategy and strategic decision-making during the Second World War. Historian's of Fuller's life, military theories and historical writing have offered, however, few explanations as to the nature of this critique, when it first emerged and what the motivations were which underpinned it. There has been little attempt to investigate just how well Fuller knew Churchill, either, or the extent to which this knowledge informed his historical writing. This article seeks to correct one or two of the general explanations which have been given, arguing that Fuller's questioning of Churchill's wartime leadership was based on a number of interlocking points of criticism, his personal knowledge of the Prime Minister and that it represented the first sustained literary attack on his performance as a strategist during six years of total war.

On Display: Conditions of Critique in Austria

Postwar Austrian literature features an unusual number of writers whose literary attacks are directed at their own nation. How do we account for the high concentration of tirades in Austria? Thomas Bernhard's Alte Meister provides a possible answer. For Bernhard, the work of art is the primary object of critical judgment. The crucial site for this critical judgment is the museum, since it puts artworks on display in a nonreligious context, as artifacts divested of sacred meaning and no longer insulated from critical assessment. Bernhard's novel indicates that Austria as a whole has become the object of sustained critique because it has elevated the museum to the status of the paradigmatic state institution. The critical judgments of authors are directed toward Austria because this nation has put itself on display and hence turned itself into an object of critical assessment. As a country that is also a museum, Austria is not the worst of nations, but it is the most criticizable.

Ernest Howard Crosby’s Swords and Plowshares : A Lost Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Militarism, and Anti-War Classic

In November 1902 a volume of poetry was published simultaneously in New York and London that put forth the sharpest indictment of war, militarism, and imperialism ever penned by an American. The book was titled Swords and Plowshares . Its author was Ernest Howard Crosby. Today the work and the author are virtually unknown. To say that Ernest Crosby is forgotten, verges on understatement. The last published essay to take Crosby as its focus appeared in 1973. The only published biography, a forty-page work titled Ernest Howard Crosby: A Valuation and a Tribute , appeared soon after his death in 1907. Yet, in addition to being the most prolific anti-imperialist writer of his era, Crosby was also the founding president of the New York Anti-Imperialist League and extremely active in both the American Peace Society and the American Anti-Imperialist League. Crosby has been neglected, and even more thoroughly neglected has been his volume Swords and Plowshares. No study of the work has ever been published. Nonetheless, the book is one of the most radical volumes in American history and a key work of anti-imperialist writing. The volume melds Whitman’s poetic style with Thoreau’s call for civil disobedience, and it draws inspiration most directly from the Russian prophet of nonresistance Leo Tolstoy. This essay outlines Crosby’s work as a radical reformer and examines how he boldly attacked war, militarism, and imperialism – especially on the pages of Swords and Plowshares . Though he may have been tilting at windmills in his efforts to demilitarize America and stop the course of imperialism, Crosby put forth the most extensive, radical, and potent literary attack against war and the war-makers of any writer of his day. Arguably, no author has yet surpassed him.

Metaphoric Topicality in Femi Osofisan’s Drama

This paper examines the functional and the significant role of metaphors in literary works. It discusses the centrality of metaphors as a dominant literary device consciously deployed by Femi Osofisan to project the theme of oppression, dehumanization, social injustice and poverty in his plays. The paper focuses on the use of animal and predatory metaphors in Osofisan’s plays to launch an offensive literary attack on the rich and the ruling elite in the society who use their privileged positions to brazenly oppress and brutalize the poor and the downtrodden. The paper, on the other hand, examines the appropriate use of animal metaphors to enlighten and educate the poor on their precarious condition as preys in the hands of the carnivorous ruling class. Finally, the paper discusses the settings and the titles of Osofisan’s plays, the quest motif and the traditional modes as metaphors for oppression.

"Uncle Tom is Dead!": Wright, Himes, and Ellison Lay a Mask to Rest

In his recent valorization of Tom's Cabin as ur-text in the fictional depiction of Americans across the color line (xxvii), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explained that the novel's demise in the college classroom was due to utter disdain of the character by the black community in the postwar era (xxvi). For Gates as for Linda Williams, the text that mark[ed] the definitive end of the popular appeal (Williams 62) was James Baldwin's essay, Everybody's Protest Novel (1949), his infamous attack on Stowe's title character, a man robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex (18). Yet four other African American male writers produced equally revealing attacks upon the figure of at the time, beginning a decade earlier with Richard Wright's Tom's Children (1938). Chester Himes literally buried in the short story, Heaven Has Changed (1943); Ralph Ellison killed him off figuratively in the opening chapter of Invisible Man (1952). Duke Ellington's objective in staging his Los Angeles revue Jump for Joy (1941) was [to] take out of the theatre, [and] eliminate the stereotyped image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway (175). Despite the vast literature on these artists, scholarship on Wright's collection rarely focuses on the title's figure of disdain, the Himes story has never received critical attention, and Ellison's opening chapter has not been analyzed in this context. Neither Gates nor Williams mentions any of these texts as their scholarship recuperates issues of gender and family lacking in these masculinist works. (1) In returning to the literary texts of Wright, Ellison, and Himes, I will change the register of the object of vilification: it was less Stowe's that incited these authors to literary attack than what I will call the Tom-mask. During the mid-1960s [when] the term 'Uncle Tom' became synonymous with self-loathing (xii) as Gates recalled its function as a metonym, black man all too eager to please the whites around him ... [was] the embodiment of 'race betrayal' and an object of scorn, a scapegoat for all of our political self-doubts.... We talked about him as the model to be avoided (xi; original emphasis). Here and throughout the essay, Gates conflates Stowe's Tom--the literary character with the set of gestures involved in the survival technique of masking, especially (but not only) in the U.S. South. It was not Stowe's who was model to be avoided; the African American vernacular had long since appropriated this figure and dumped its literary association. What was under attack was the lived embodiment of deference marked by the in the public sphere--as a convention of American theater and music, as a set of physical disciplines, as a marker read by whites of African American acceptance of national racial ideology. Stowe's perhaps retained purchase for older white Americans as a literary fantasy of African American passivity--the character had, after all, been transposed into minstrel, theatrical, and cinematic fantasy--but in the African American vernacular, Uncle Tom registered a survival practice of everyday life that required figurative literary murder in order to liberate both African American male artistic agency and the right to individualized social protest. In fact, Wright, Himes, and Ellison assess their Tom-masked characters with surprising nuance; they slay the yet manage to honor the survival strategies of Southern African American men. The postwar period marks the end of what W. T. Lhamon has called blackface lore cycle, a set of transgressive verbal and physical gestures--from whistling to dance moves--projected onto African American men and women in the minstrel theater, and often accepted by white Americans as authentic representations of black men and women. For Lhamon, the NAACP's lawsuits against the last minstrel shows in the early 1950s mark the retiring [of] the blackface mask (148). …

Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature by Anne Cotterill

MLR, I0 I .4, 2006 Io87 the written record in ways that erased its performative markers. Natasha Korda's authoritative narrative on the role that women performed in the networks of com merce surrounding the theatre is especially insightful. She provides the reader with an abundance of interesting factual information and cogent analysis about females in the needlework and second-hand clothingtrades who supplied and maintained the theatre company's most important investment, the costumes. Most impressive, however, is the contribution from Scott McMillin; his research adds greatly to the knowledge of the theatrical apprenticeship system of early modern England, providing valuable evidence as to how boy actors were trained in their female roles. Using the text of Othello and the pattern of its cue lines, he reconstructs a process of rehearsal, and combining information about the repertory of the King's Men with the starting and termination indenture dates of apprentices, he unearths the relationship of repertory to a boy player's career as awoman. Given the parameters of a short review, it is difficult to do full justice to the variety and ingenuity on display. It should neither undermine nor detract from the appeal of the collection to say that it asks more questions than it answers and that it hints atmany more fascinating areas of research than it collates. Throughout, the reader is provided with an accessible and rigorous challenge to return to the archives and re think easy assumptions about and narrow interpretations of the early modern theatre. This largely engaging read is a valuable resource, belonging on the shelves of anyone interested in early modern theatre history. UNIVERSITYOFGLASGOW VICTORIAE. PRICE Digressive Voices inEarly Modern English Literature. By ANNE COTTERILL. Oxford: OxfordUniversityPress. 2004. x+34I PP. ?6o. ISBNo-I9-926iI7-2. Anne Cotterill of Rutgers University guides us through the long seventeenth century. Her subject is digression inDonne, Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Dryden, and Swift; her texts include the Anniversaries, Upon Appleton House, Hydriotaphia, The Garden of Cyrus, Paradise Lost, The Hind and the Panther, The Battle of the Books, and A Tale of a Tub. She surveys the defences that digression provided against political, sectarian, and literary attack, where it acted as smoke from a rhetorical ca nister, obscuring the intentions of the writers using it. The result is an involved, laborious study, making extensive reference to the criti cism of the last twenty years, especially from North America. Those who reach the last page will feel they have travelled far. Specialists will surely return to its detailed and intricate discussion of particular texts. For non-specialists, perhaps the most memorable aspect of the book is the very strangeness of the themes analysed. On Donne, attention is thus called to images of 'the twitching, bleeding, beheaded man with a rolling tongue' (p. 57); 'aship with furled sails moving eerily on awindless sea' (p. 58); women who 'give birth constantly and irresponsibly, even "after fifty"' (p. 62); stars that 'appear and vanish in inexplicable upheaval like earthquakes or wars' (p. 72); 'amix of whales, elephants, and pygmies, the world falling out of its cradle, and empty wombs, vacuums, and vaults' (p. 78), as well aswobbling planets, midwives who stifle the child, spies, prisons, and poisonous snakes: allwithin a scheme of language breaking down. Within this melancholy universe are also Biathanatos, where Donne defends suicide, and Pseudo-Martyr, where Donne condemns as vain and futile the suffering of recusant priests and lay people (pp. 79-80). Marvell and his Yorkshire excursions are also sinister, with themes that include drowning (p. I03), lesbian nuns (p. iIo), the 'coffin-like fit of Nun Appleton House' (p. I22), and Mary Fairfax's being hacked to bits in druidic rites (p. 123). Does Sir io88 Reviews Thomas Browne inhabit similar gloom? He does. Hydriotaphia evokes 'ashortness of time, a lateness and degeneracy inhistory' (p. 136); Religio medici was published as Pu ritans sacked Norwich Cathedral and destroyed its organ (pp. 142, I45), in an agewhen soldiers at aChristmas service aimed muskets atAnglican communicants, arrested all, and imprisoned some (p. 146). The Garden of Cyrus, like gardens themselves, results from awareness of the 'inexorability of death and oblivion' (p. 15 5...

'Unionist Nationalism' in the Eighteenth Century: William Robertson and James Anderson (1662-1728)

Unionist Nationalism in the Eighteenth Century:William Robertson and James Anderson (1662-1728) Alexander Du Toit With the exception of David Allan and Mary Fearnley-Sander, no authorities have seriously considered Robertson as heir to an earlier Scottish tradition of historiography.1 The usual views tend to emphasise either a strong English influence suitable for post-Union 'British' Scotland or a powerful connection with the ideas of philosophes like Voltaire or Montesquieu.2 In particular, the familial and historiographical link between Robertson and his great-uncle, the patriotic Scottish antiquary James Anderson (1662-1728) has gone largely unnoticed. However, Robertson's correspondence shows that he made enquiries into the Anderson link, and that he drew heavily on Anderson's Collections Relating to the History of Mary, Queen of Scotland (1727) in preparing his own History of Scotland.3 Both Robertson and Anderson were Whigs and Presbyterians, which conditioned their views on Mary and led to literary attacks being made on them by a later Scottish historian, the glutinously sentimental Tory Mariolater George Chalmers.4 Robertson also used the Historical Essay, Shewing that the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland is Imperial and Independent (1705), Anderson's contribution to the 'imperial crowns' controversy as to whether Scotland was subordinate to England. This work dealt chiefly with mediaeval history, while Robertson's focused largely on the sixteenth century, so that Anderson's relevance is not immediately apparent. Indeed, Robertson is frequently aligned with David Hume in showing a typically [End Page 305] 'Enlightened' contempt for the mediaeval period and pre-Union Scotland generally.5 Robertson certainly had little time for the 'Dark Ages'; he divided Scottish history before 1603 into four periods, and the first of these, 'to the reign of Kenneth II' in the mid-ninth century, he believed 'ought to be totally neglected'.6 However, the second of Robertson's divisions is that 'from Kenneth's conquest of the Picts to the death of Alexander III' in 1286, and, far from rejecting this age as worthless, Robertson states that 'from this period the history of Scotland would merit some attention, were it accompanied with any certainty'. It is lack of evidence, not 'enlightened' contempt, that explains Robertson's attitude, and he blames this lack on 'the malicious policy of Edward I' who 'called in question the independence of Scotland, pretending that the kingdom was held as a fief of the crown of England'. This policy led Edward to destroy archival evidence that 'tended to prove the antiquity or freedom of the kingdom' of Scotland.7 Robertson's patriotic condemnation recalls Anderson's anger regarding the 'miserable Fates, that most of our ancient Charters and Records have undergone … by the general Havock and designed Extirpation of our Memory, by Edward the first', and contrasts strongly with the genuine 'enlightened' disdain of Hume, who says that 'the Scots pretend that he [Edward] also destroyed all the annals preserved in their convents: But it is not probable that a nation, so rude and unpolished, should be possessed of any history'.8 Robertson's third division is the period from the death of Alexander III to that of James V. His insistence that 'every Scotsman should begin not to read only but to study the history of his country' from this age onwards again argues that Robertson's view of pre-Union Scotland was far from contemptuous. Significantly, this period begins with 'the famous controversy concerning the independence of Scotland', and it is here that Robertson cites Anderson's Essay.9 Anderson's work was a response to the English pamphleteer William Atwood's Superiority and Direct Dominion of the Imperial Crown of England over the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland of 1704, an effort which not only asserted Scotland's historical subordination but also based this assertion upon wildly indiscriminate and dubious evidence, such as spurious charters showing that early Scottish kings like Malcolm III had done homage to English monarchs for Scotland. Furthermore, as Anderson noticed, he trawled the depths of Britain's mythical 'history' and used [End Page 306] the 'lying and fabulous Tales of Jeffrey of Monmouth' to support his case.10 To make matters worse, Atwood suggested that some mediaeval...

The Nihilist Imagination: Dmitrii Pisarev and the Cultural Origins of Russian Radicalism (1860-1868) by Peter C. s> Pozefsky (review)

REVIEWS 327 (Leningrad, I988). Where Chereiskii does not record a date, Binyon too is silent. Some of the very few gaps can now be filledvia www.google.ru, which reveals the birthdates of all three of Natal'ia Goncharova's children by Petr Lanskoi, and the death dates of two of them, as well as the dates of I. A. Krylov'sfatherand those of a numberof more marginalfigures.There remain some tantalizinggaps. As might be expected, the birth and death dates of the humble poor, such as the Pushkins'various servants,remain for the most part unknown, and probablyunknowable. Perhaps,however, it is not too much to hope that the death date of Pushkin'sniece Nadezhda, born to his sisterOlga in i837, will one day emerge fromthe archives. Binyon does not, however, use detail for detail'ssakein an attemptto mask ideologically controversialaspects of Pushkin'slife such as the vexed question of his relationship with Nicholas I. He makes it quite clear that in general Pushkinapprovedof the Tsar, both personally(hiscourage in visitingcholerastricken areas) and politically (his suppression of the Polish insurrection of I830). Indeed, Nicholas, farfrombeing the unpersonof Soviethistoriography, emergeswith some credit, his treatmentof Pushkinand his familycontrasting sharplywith that meted out to turbulentpoets in Soviet times. Binyon drawsour attention to, and comments on, otherunsolved mysteries of Pushkin'slife. Did he fight a duel in I820, and if so, was his opponent the poet and future Decembrist Kondratii Ryleev? Which of the numerous Golitsynaswas the one whom Pushkinvisited in I830, thus exciting his future wife'sjealousy? Was he the fatherof ElizavetaVorontsova'ssecond child?As for the most famous mystery of them all, who wrote the fateful anonymous letter, Binyon's surveyof the suspectsis as masterlyas one would expect from an authorwhose otherspecializationis crimefiction.Binyon'sexpertisein this area is also shown to good effect in his incisive psychological insights. For instance, Pushkin's behaviour in I828 is convincingly described as 'manicdepressive ' (p. 28I), while that of D'Anthes in I836 as 'a classic case of the "stalker"syndrome' (p. 556). Although Binyon expresslyleaves the businessof literarycriticismto others, he cannot avoid it completely. Forthiswe mustbe thankful,as his accounts of EvgeniiOnegin, Mednyivsadnik and Pikovaia damaare as concise and precise as the most exacting critic could wish and, like the whole of this book, are preeminently readable. Maidenhead MICHAEL PURSGLOVE Pozefsky,Peter C. TheNihilistImagination: DmitriiPisarev andtheCultural Origins of RussianRadicalism (i86o-i868). Middlebury Studies in Russian Language and Literature, 27. Peter Lang, New York and Oxford, 2003. xi + 272 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $70.95: C48.oo. THE abrupt dismantling of the Soviet literary canon has cast numerous Russian literaryfiguresand groups into the criticalwilderness,but the recent neglect of nineteenth-century radical criticsand authors, adopted enmasse by the Bolsheviksas ideological precursors,is a particularlyunfortunate case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. The publication of Peter 328 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 C. Pozefsky'swell-researchedmonograph on Dmitrii Pisarevis thereforeto be warmlywelcomed. The firstchapter of the studydiscussesthe place of Pisarevin the context of Russian radicalismand the development of nihilism. In chapterstwo to four, Pozefskyfocuses on the development of Pisarev'sphilosophy and writings in relation to the radicals'interestin the physiological dimension of psychology. Chapter two discusses the scientific approach and the place of the body in Pisarev's essays. In chapter three, this theme is continued with a lengthy discussionof Pisarev'sfamousessay'Bazarov'(i 862) and otherliterary-critical worksof the period, while chapterfourexamines Pisarev'sattitudeto love and sexual relationships in his literary criticism. The following three chapters address contemporary responses to nihilism and radical literature. Chapter five is an illuminating exploration of official attitudes to nihilism, which introduces some particularlyinterestingsourcesto demonstratethe similarity of representationsof the 'spectre'of nihilismin, for example, police reports,in terms of their preoccupation with matters such as the body and modes of dress,to those of the nihiliststhemselves,in theirown literatureand criticism. In chaptersix, Pozefskyfindsan equalpreoccupationwith the body in literary attacks on nihilism by its opponents, in particular Dostoevskii and, more unexpectedly, Gertsen, as they adopt the nihilists'termsof referencefor their own contributionsto the debate. Chapter seven examines Pisarev'slegacy for subsequent generations of radicals but, aside from one brief comment, does not look beyond the Revolution to discuss official...

The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius & Rome (review)

Ancient The Making of Christian Empire.- Lactantius & Rome. By Elizabeth DePalma Digeser. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 2000. Pp. xvii, 199. $39.95.) Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, recent Ph.D. in ancient history from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1996), and current assistant professor for Roman history at McGill University in Montreal, proffers an interesting and controversial analysis of the Divine Institutes of Lactantius in The Making of Christian Empire. Historians of early Christianity will welcome this detailed treatment of the Institutes of Lactantius in the English language, and will appreciate this thorough assessment of that work within the religious debates of the fourth century. However, as is often the case with dissertations expanded into first books, the author overlooks some important questions and sources, and pushes her thesis further than the evidence allows. The book begins with prologue set in Nicomedia during the winter of 302-03. Digeser posits that the pagan intellectuals Hierocles and Porphyry were giving public lectures in support of the new tetrarchic political theology, and assailing the Christians for failing to support the new order and refusing the guidance of emperors, jurists, and philosophers. She is on firm ground in assuming that Lactantius was in Nicomedia at that time, and that pagan literary attacks and the start of the Great Persecution by Diocletian and Galerius that winter inspired him to compose the Divine Institutes as an answer to the critics of Christianity and as a manifesto for political and religious reform (pp. 1-17).Yet, her identification of Porphyry with the unnamed philosopher mentioned in Book V of the Divine Institutes, and his On Philosophy from Oracles as the work read in Nicomedia that winter will not be acceptable to all. There is no evidence for journey by Porphyry to the east at that time, and many scholars, including Timothy Barnes, feel that the work on Oracles was written much earlier and that his great tome Against the Christians was composed nearer to the start of the Great Persecution. The bulk of the book is divided into five chapters in which the author details Lactantius' criticisms of Diocletian's policies and his later influence on Constantine's policies. The first three chapters are the strongest. In these Digeser shows how Lactantius attacked the political, legal, and philosophical underpinnings of Diocletian's tetrarchic system, stigmatizing them as tyrannical, unjust, and irrational innovations from earlier Roman traditions. She relates how Lactantius presented Christians as deserving of toleration because their beliefs were compatible with the more legitimate principatial, Ciceronian, and Neoplatonic concepts of rule, law, and philosophy (pp. 19-90). In Chapter IV she expands upon her thesis that Porphyry was the anonymous philosopher against whom Lactantius was writing the Divine Institutes, and that many of the arguments in it were meant to refute the contentions in the On Philosophy from Oracles that Christians did not deserve tolerance-her arguments are well presented, but not entirely convincing (pp. …

Building Bridges with Biblical Counselors

Few bridges exist between the fields of biblical counseling and Christian psychology. Even in the 1970s, at the height of the debate, dialogue was scarce and limited to public literary attacks. Today, Christian psychology rarely interacts with the biblical counseling world, much less dialogues with it. These interactions often are limited to pointing out perceived flaws in biblical counseling or sweeping generalizations about the whole field as examples of narrow-minded therapy. On the other hand, biblical counselors have also done little to pursue contact with those in the field of Christian psychology. Some prominent and searing books portray Christian psychologists as worshippers of a false religion or as professionals who structure sessions into neat packages of 50-minute slots for the purpose of convenience and income. In this regard, bridge-burning seems more prevalent than bridge-building. In an effort to renew dialogue and decrease polarizing rhetoric, bridge-burning tactics of each group are surveyed. The author presents four topics for future discussion, and suggests ways to promote dialogue.

'He hath changed his coppy': Anti-Theatrical Writing and the Turncoat Player

In 1580, Anthony Munday wrote a pamphlet (from which the above quotation is taken) entitled ‘A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Playes and Theatres’, a banal polemical text of a kind very common to early modern London. This work was a very self-conscious contribution to the literary attack on the London stage; indeed, it was the first of such works to single out the stage for exclusive criticism, rather than include it as one among many decadences, as is the case in Philip Stubbes’ notorious Anatomie of Abuses (1583).

The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art by Paul Corby Finney

The invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art. By Paul Corby Finney. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1994. Pp. xxviii, 319. $45.00.) Paul Corby Finney professor of Roman imperial and early church history in University of Missouri at St. Louis. From gymnasium studies in Germany in late 1950's and doctoral program at Harvard in early 1970's up through university career in mid 1990's, he has had an intense Interest in earliest literary attitudes toward and oldest material remains of early Christian art. This tome is detailed statement of his findings and challenge to traditional interpretive framework on early third century lamp decorations and catacomb paintings. Dr. Finney starts by reviewing how eighth-century Byzantine iconoclasts, sixteenth-century Protestant reformers, and modern German scholars from Adolf von Harnack to Theodor Klauser have built up an interpretation of Christianity as a religion simultaneously hostile to pictures in theory (iconophobic) and opposed to their use in practice (aniconic) (p. 10). He points out how this interpretation seemed to be buttressed on one hand by literary attacks of second-and third-century Christian apologists on pagan art, and on other hand by lack of distinctive Christian before year 200. This traditional interpretation presented appearance of catacomb paintings thereafter as fall from primitive spiritualism to crass materialism forced on educated clergy by uneducated laity. The author spends rest of his book analyzing early Christian apologetic attacks on pagan and early Christian motifs on Roman lamps and in catacomb paintings to challenge this scenario. Finney's analysis of Christian literary attack on pagan attempts to prove that apologists were not opposed to per se, but were using this genre of literature as a clever ploy (p.47) to win over philosophically inclined political elite of Roman world to sympathy for Christian cause. By attacking excesses of pagan art, apologists were showing that it was not Christians, but crass devotees of pagan gods who were really guilty of atheism, superstition, and sexual misconduct. The author posits that the reasons t nonappearance of Christian before 200 have nothing to do with principled aversion to art, with other-worldliness or with antimaterialism. The truth is simple and mundane: Christians lacked land and capital. Art required both. As soon as they acquired land and capital, Christians began to experiment with their own distinctive forms of art (p. 108). Although admitting that Christians had inherited through Judaism and strand of Hellenism belief that God was invisible, Dr. …

Horace, Epode 6.16

Here Horace gives warning to an adversary of his powers of literary attack, comparing himself with the great iambists Archilochus (‘Lycambae spretus infido gener’) and Hipponax (‘acer hostis Bupalo’). The general sense of the last two lines seems clear: ‘If someone attacks me (gifted as I am with the weapons of the iambist), shall I weep like a mere boy?’, i.e. ‘Am I not to take revenge?’