Literary Grounds Research Articles

Portents of Violence: Jamesian Realism in Guy Domville

Portents of Violence: Jamesian Realism in Guy Domville Fred V. Bernard Guy Domville has now lain almost a hundred years, seldom visited and rarely analyzed, beneath the headstone of its author’s unceasing affection. One writer has said that the tendency continues to accept the judgments—of Edel, Walter Isle, Michael Egan, Leo Levy, and others—that the drama is best appreciated as a corollary to James’s fiction. Indeed, such critics have relied on their study of James’s plays to extend our understanding of the complexities of James’s fiction. But they have discouraged close study of the plays as plays. (Carlson, “Henry James” 409–10) The irreducible fact about the play is that James continued to speak of it as a much misunderstood drama 1 despite its being a clear theatrical failure that Jamesians have been encouraged to avoid. The author’s absolute loyalty in the face of his critic’s desertion makes us ask if his wounded pride made him perverse, or whether he may have known something about the play that we do not. I will show that Guy Domville has a basis in the Gordon Riots of June, 1780, 2 which helped James never to lose faith in the play. James’s realism offers a psychological answer as to why he used the Gordon Riots as context but not as drama in the usual sense. James opens the play with the date of June, 1780, which is unusually specific, not only for drama in general but for his works in particular. James was so caught up in the historical dating of his play that in writing to Gosse about the January opening night he dates his letter June 5 instead of January 5 (HJL 3: 495 n. 2). June [End Page 85] then has clear significance to James, and historical records help to explain why. During the week of June 4, 1780, the Gordon Riots began in Britain and dominated the news for the rest of the month. The Gordon Riots occurred in response to Parliament’s passing, in 1778, a bill to remove some of the penal laws against Catholics, whereby the clause in the act of William the Third for prosecuting of Popish bishops, priests, or Jesuits, is to be repealed; also the clause for subjecting Papists keeping schools for the education of youth to perpetual imprisonment; also the clause that disables Papists to inherit lands by descent, and gives to the next of kin (being Protestants) a right to inherit such lands; also the clause that disables Papists from purchasing manors, lands, or hereditaments in England or Wales; but leaves all lands in possession just as they were, and all causes in litigation, as if this act had never been made; on condition of taking the oath of allegiance within six months of its passing into a law. (“Historical Chronicle,” 1778, 237) Upon the passing of this bill, Lord George Gordon created a Protestant association that, in vigilante fashion, hunted down and attacked Catholic priests, teachers, and businesses beginning the week of June 4. Protestant mobs demolished and burned Catholic chapels and schools in a swath of violence from London west to Bristol. This is precisely the axis that James chooses for his play. Moreover, Guy Domville, a Roman Catholic school teacher, is intent on entering holy orders and is about to inherit an old Catholic manor—and the second and third clauses of the bill bear upon the matter of Catholic inheritance. In act two, which takes place in September 1778, Guy was the losing inheritor of the Domville manor of Gaye. The core of the play concerns an important theme for James, who said that a study of “the whole history of religious intolerance . . . is, I really believe, the history of humanity” (Nowell-Smith 117). The theme and the belief qualify James as having that which is often denied him, a genuine sense of history. 3 James could have learned of the Gordon Riots from various sources, but three are especially attractive on purely literary grounds. Editions of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1887) and Johnson’s Letters (1892), both edited by G. B. Hill, and the Diary and...

Colonialism and Coherence: The Case of Captain John Smith's "Generall Historie of Virginia"

In the past few years we have seen a major revival of interest in AngloAmerican colonial literature as a field for criticism a revival that at times presents itself as a crisis. We are aware, in any case, that much is at stake in the debate over our early colonial texts, for they lead us towards some of the most serious questions concerning the social and cultural history of both England and America over the four centuries since the English built their first outpost on Roanoke Island. Given the peculiar resonance of these texts for contemporary criticism, they now serve as meeting points for activity across the disciplines and form the convenient literary ground on which ethnohistorians, new historicists, and cultural materialists all gather and trade with one another, on more or less friendly terms.l This interdisciplinary ferment is an aspect, and probably also a cause, of the immense change during the past two decades in our understanding of colonial literature, a change which will have been obvious to anyone who followed the stormy fortunes of Christopher Columbus during the quincentennial celebration of his first voyage. An inevitable consequence of such a massive shift of perspective is that important elements of the critical discussion become neglected or obscured, perhaps to surface again only long after the general interest has shifted to some other topic.

Shoddy and Pernicious Books and Youthful Purity: Literary and Moral Censorship, Then and Now

Though some librarians and teachers believe censorship is a recent phenomenon, it has been a part of librarians' lives for more than a century. Indeed, many late-nineteenth-century librarians regarded themselves primarily as censors, duty-bound to protect the young from shoddy and pernicious books, especially fiction. Some librarians and teachers today carry on this censorial tradition by circulating or teaching only works of high literary merit or the proper moral content. Those censoring on literary grounds often provide only subjective criteria, justifying censorship by their own personal tastes. Those censoring on moral grounds often provide no better criteria, justifying censorship by their own personal morality. Librarians and teachers have no right to impose personal literary or moral standards on the public, young or old. They have a duty to provide materials of all sorts to allow clients and students to search through and seek out ideas.

Psalm 89: A Lament over the Davidic Ruler's Continued Failure

At least from the time of the influential analysis of B. Duhm in 1899, a scholarly consensus has developed which judges Psalm 89 to be a composite of poems of widely different date. Often cited is the view of H. Gunkel: to an old hymn (vv 29–52) a lament (vv 39–52) has been appended. The hymn was joined to the lament by interposing vv 20–38 and at the same time vv 4–5 were inserted. Articles in recent years have challenged the prevalent view of original disunity. J. M. Ward in 1961 showed that arguments based on metric considerations are not conclusive and that logic, vocabulary links throughout the whole poem, and poetic structure all argue that the psalm was a single poem from the that logic, vocabulary links throughout the whole poem, and poetic structure all argue that the psalm was a single poem from the beginning. In 1972 J.-B. Dumortier showed convincingly on purely literary grounds that at least two of the sections commonly thought to be diverse, the so-called royal poem of vv 2−5+20−38 and the cosmic hymn of vv 6–19, were in fact originally one.

The Vinland map

Your report on the Vinland map (Physics Bulletin January 1975 p11) gives the impression that only physical and chemical examination could prove that it is a forgery and that historians had no other evidence of this. This is a somewhat partisan attitude, and in fact it was doubts of the map's authenticity on historical and literary grounds that led to the examination by McCrone.

The Humanity of Molière's Dom Juan

The critical history of Molière's Dom Juan is full of uncertainties and controversy on literary and many other grounds. Among its competent critics there seems to be no clear-cut decision for or against the play. Its enemies willingly ascribe to it a high degree of excellence, even to calling it a masterpiece. Its friends, not all of whom agree that it is such, are equally willing to find fault with much of it. Friend or foe, those who call it a masterpiece do not say with any precision what they mean: There is a marked tendency on the part of most writers to pass it over with a minimum of comment of any kind.

‘Flowering Rifle’

To the Editor of Blackfriars.Sir,—I must resolutely disregard the red herrings drawn across my path by the correspondents who give such a sinister reading of my notice of Roy Campbell’s Flowering Rifle. I criticised the book only on literary grounds, and mentioned that works like Auden’s Spain and Spender’s Vienna were also poor art because of their excessive political preoccupations; and because I reject inferior Leftist art along with Rightist work, I apparently suggest that the Rightist writer is Leftist. A remarkable piece of reasoning to come from a great theological college.It is precisely on literary grounds that the critics neglect to base their criticism. The book is lyrical invective at best, and in trying to make an epic of it, the poet has executed a mechanical exercise, which oftenest sounds like a brass band at its brassiest repeating ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ ad nauseam. The language of the less prosy parts is worn-out ‘poetical’ currency like ‘golden,’ ‘scarlet,’ ‘silver,’ ‘storm-red,’ while often the faded literary metaphors of ‘rhyme,’ etc., are used to jolt the poem into life. The author himself says the poem is not meant to emulate people like Claudel, and we can easily agree when we read such bathos as :‘Toledo, here, against the morning sky Like some great battle-cruiser from the fight Returned with Victory (terrific sight I)’—the capitals being used to galvanise the cliche into some shadow of life. But above all, the epic lacks the structure of an epic, and is largely a broken record of literary quarrels.

On the Names of Aelivs Caesar, Adopted Son Of Hadrian.

Historians of the Roman Empire have been nearly unanimous in giving the ill-fated Caesar whom Hadrian designated as his successor the cognomen Verus ascribed to him by Spartianus.2 Following the same biographer Annalists have given the names Aurelius and Annius to his father and grandfather. Noris in his Epistola Consularis3 maintained against Pagi that the original names of this prince were Lucius Ceionius Commodus, that neither he nor any of his family bore the names Aurelius, Annius, or Verus ascribed to them in the Historia Augusta, but that the name Verus has been mistakenly reflected upon him from his more famous son L. Verus Augustus the colleague of M. Aurelius Antoninus. De Tillemont4 rejected Noris’ opinion on purely literary grounds, saying, ‘il est bien difficile de croire qu'un auteur ait esté assez ignorant et assez malheureux pour nommer toujours un prince, mesme en faisant exprès son histoire, d'un nom qu'il n'a jamais eu.’ By consequence the mistake, if mistake it be, is become inveterate and is repeated5 down to our own day. Klebs6 alone rejects the jiame, and the error is not corrected in Dr. Bury's edition of Gibbon.