Literary Merit Research Articles

Altering Perspectives: How the Implied Reader Invites Us to Rethink the Difficulty of Graphic Novels

This article reports the author's experiences using graphic novels with pre-service teachers in a young adult literature course. Drawing on critical response papers two students composed after reading Pride of Baghdad, a graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, the author argues that when readers possess the background knowledge needed to approximate the role of the implied reader—that is, the imaginary audience for whom authors envision themselves writing—they are capable of engaging with graphic novels in ways that readers who lack experience with the form, or who question its literary merit, are not.

Review of biographies of doctors in Chinese history

After reviewing the biographies of doctors recorded in official history of China and books mentioned the biographies, it was seen that biographies of doctors in Chinese history are mainly composed of a resume of their life and medical achievements. Although a variety of other aspects, such as social, family and education background, personality, hobby, speciality, travel experience, medical ethics, comments and achievements outside medicine, which could make those figures more vivid, none of these has been described in detail. Biographies about doctors of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) should be both scientific and popular, and of literary merit on the basis of validity. Biographers should know both doctors' medical achievements and the background of the era, combine the internal history and external history and find the relationship between them to make reasonable explanations.

Bottersnikes and Other Lost Things: A Celebration of Australian Illustrated Children's Books (review)

Reviewed by: Bottersnikes and Other Lost Things: A Celebration of Australian Illustrated Children's Books Claudia Söffner Juliet O'Conor , Bottersnikes and Other Lost Things: A Celebration of Australian Illustrated Children's Books. Carlton, Victoria: The Miegunyah Press 2009 262pp ISBN 9780522856514 AUS $59.99 As its title suggests, this beautifully produced tome traces the history of illustrated books for children published in Australia within the past two centuries. Juliet O'Conor, who is responsible for the collection of children's literature held at the State Library of Victoria, has drawn upon this "most comprehensive public collection of Australian children's books [in the world]" to present children's literature enthusiasts with a variety of works from Down Under. O'Conor's focus is "not based purely on [the] literary or artistic merit" of the books - as she herself points out in her introduction. Her intention is rather to juxtapose popular works and lesser-known illustrations and thus draw attention to the great diversity of material available to Australian children and situate it within a wider [mostly Anglo-European] context. Divided into five broad thematic chapters entitled "Schooldays," "Morality and the Family," "Home and Land," "Journeys," and "Other Worlds," the book explores the general development of various genres, popular themes, and common motifs (alphabet books, fantasy, environmental conservation, imaginary journeys, fairies, anthropomorphic characters, etc.). In addition, it provides spotlights on selected authors and illustrators (Sheila Hawkins, David Henry Souter, May Gibbs), iconic works ("Blinky Bill" or "Seven Little Australians") and interesting literary forms ("cultural fantasy," "toy fantasies," "children's annuals," "the fox fable"). Even though it is by no means a comprehensive history of illustrated Australian books and also [intentionally?] omits a few important artists, the wealth of images included and the perspicuous text make this a valuable introduction into this nation's literary and artistic heritage that clearly invites further research. [End Page 70] Copyright © 2011 Bookbird, Inc.

Friends, Rivals, and Revisions: Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and Amis and Amiloun in The Faerie Queene, Book IV

In Book IV of The Faerie Queene, Spenser transforms former foes into friends, creating concord out of discord. To demonstrate this action, Spenser creates two focal tetrads in Cantos iii and ix: Cambell, Triamond, Canacee, and Cambina form the first, and Amyas, Placidas, Aemylia, and Poeana form the second. For each of these tetrads, Spenser has used a Middle English romance (Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and Amis and Amiloun, respectively) as the primary source. But Spenser does not simply appropriate certain aspects of his sources; rather, he revises the source material in a way that embodies his theory of friendship as developed in Book IV. Spenser reveals how he seeks both to pay homage to and to define his place within his native literary traditions. Simultaneously friend and rival, Spenser revises these romances to advance both his own literary merit and that of his sources.

Sitting Forward or Sitting Back: Highbrow v. Middlebrow Reading

This article begins by asserting that the distinction between high and middlebrow literary texts rests fundamentally not on literary merit or cultural hierarchies but on the culture and practices of reading as they changed and developed in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the difficulties of drawing a firm dividing line between high and middlebrow experienced by contemporary critical and cultural commentators such as Cyril Connolly, Q. D. Leavis and George Orwell, and argues that what was crucial for these commentators was not so much the precise boundaries they drew as the fact of drawing them. It suggests that we need to find new ways of thinking about the literature of the first half of the twentieth century that avoid simply replicating the snobberies and anxieties of that period. Following a suggestion in Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, it examines the reading bodies implied by the highbrow and the middlebrow in order to tease out some of the wider cultural implications of the battle of the brows. Firstly, it suggests that the difference between high and middlebrow texts, at its most basic, might simply be simply a matter of sitting forward or sitting back: of those texts that are read at a desk and those read while relaxing. It proposes an ethnography of the two groups of readers, and considers the culture of leisure that shapes middlebrow reading practices, and the institution of university English Literature that shapes those of the highbrow. Finally, it looks at the places and times where these distinctions start to break down, examining the reading surveys conducted by Mass Observation, and considering the phenomenon of Penguin Books and suggesting that an examination of the lived experience of readers presents a picture that is more various, complicated and resistant than neat theorising would allow.

Reading difference: How race and ethnicity function as tools for critical appraisal

Literary theorists and cultural sociologists alike acknowledge that there are no universal standards for appraising the value of a book. Yet, book critics regularly pronounce the literary merits and failures of novels in their reviews. Research on cultural criticism has shed considerable light on how reviewers are able to assess the meaning and value of novels in the absence of objective indicators of literary quality by relying on different cultural “tools”. This study examines how critics use authors’ race and ethnicity as a tool for constructing the value of literary fiction. Based on analysis of 265 book reviews from The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker magazine, I find that reviewers use racial and ethnic identifiers to: (1) establish the authenticity of the novels, (2) classify works into ethnic genres, and (3) nominally identify international literary talent. I also present data on what influence racial and ethnic identification has for critics’ overall assessment of the books under review.

Reporting and the transformations of the journalistic field: US news media, 1890-2000

How have journalistic ideals of public service arisen? To what extent do journalists live up to these ideals? Can we make any claims as to the social conditions that this performance depends on? Using Bourdieu’s theory of fields of cultural production, this article addresses these questions with evidence from the history of journalism in the United States. What is most distinctive about modern journalism is a specific practice: active news-gathering or reporting. This practice became common in the 1860s and 1870s with the emergence of journalism as a field with its own stakes, relatively independent from political advantage or literary merit. The power of field-specific capital to organize practices in the media has varied since then. The field consolidated in the era from 1890 to 1914, with the newspaper industry expanding. In the interwar years, the boundary between PR and journalism became blurry and the institutional basis for active news-gathering declined. Under favorable economic and political conditions reporting practices, including local and investigative reporting, flourished between 1945 and1970 across media forms. In the past 40 years the importance of active news-gathering has declined.

David and the Gibeonites

The story of David and the Gibeonites in II Sam 21,1–14 has long presented scholars with a curious puzzle about its literary and compositional character and how it is to be related to the rest of the David story. Is it an ancient tradition that includes historical information about the reigns of Saul and David? Or does it belong to a collection of late additions in the »appendix« of chaps. 21–24? In response to recent studies that seek to remove additions to the story in order to recover an old historical tradition, It is argued that it is a late composition made up of narrative elements drawn from earlier biblical stories to produce the present tale. The result is a totally confusing composition with no historical usefulness and little literary or artistic merit. It was never part of the DtrH or one of his sources, nor of the David Saga (»Succession Narrative«), but only a late addition to the present collection of David stories.

An Interview with David Wagenknecht

I first met David Wagenknecht on my arrival at Boston University an assistant professor in the fall of 1979, fresh from UC Berkeley. Though he was only a decade older than I, David seemed even then an entire generation wiser. His shock of salt-and-pepper hair wasn't the only reason I thought so, nor was it my own Miranda-like wonder at the brave new world of faculty life in the City on a Hill. (I soon learned to leave my sandals at home.) In our first few substantive conversations, in our many discussions of literary merit since that time, whether in job searches or joint evaluations of graduate student work or on those occasions when I was asked my opinion of a submission to Studies in Romanticism, I never ceased to be amazed by David's ability to get to the heart of even the most complex and recondite argument, or to retrieve a pearl of wisdom from the murkiest depths of terminological--and often grammatical--obscurity. While I would find myself distracted by an intransitive use of the verb transform, David would remain open to transformation, listening, like a doctor with a stethoscope, for the idea beating softly, deeply beneath the surface. A more sympathetic and, at the same time, a more intellectually alert and scrupulous reader I have yet to meet in over thirty years of teaching and writing. It wasn't just his uncanny sense of what a writer whose reach exceeded his grasp had in mind, but his sharp eye for what was original and groundbreaking that set David apart an editor. All of us who have read Studies in Romanticism over the three decades of his residence on the fifth floor of the BU English Department can recall, almost effortlessly, those essays that have turned our thinking around as with the might of waters. He has read widely and with penetration, in and out of the field, and is himself a Lacanian with several challenging essays to his credit in that demanding theoretical discipline. And yet he remains to this day the most modest and unassuming scholar I know. In short, David set a daunting standard for any new editor, and the reputation of Studies in Romanticism at its half-century mark is a testimony to his achievement. Part of what made the prospect of succeeding David less terrifying for me was the realization that it wouldn't be until the beginning of 2013 that my own apprentice handiwork would appear in the pages of the journal. Now, almost a year into the job, eagerness is starting to overtake dread at the approach of my real opposed to nominal debut. That's one reason I was delighted to be asked, two years ago and incoming editor, to shepherd into print the outstanding essays that Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun have gathered for this, our 50th Anniversary issue. If the work I am considering today for publication a year from now is half good what our guest editors have assembled in these pages, there is little any of us have to fear. For the honor of having my name associated with this number of SiR, I have David to thank, who, true to form, graciously stepped aside to let me cut in. I trust you will enjoy reading it much I have, and take much pleasure in the following interview I did in conducting it. CR: How many years were you editor of SiR? Can you describe the circumstances surrounding your appointment and how you felt just starting out? DW: I the editorship (what a word!) of SiR in 1978, and assumed is the right word because with respect both to preparation and intention--and also to anxiety--I felt the journal was more something happening to me than something I really wanted or could conceivably be good at. This is less weird than it sounds if you consider that, even though colleagues had suggested I might be suitable, I was much less an all-round romanticist than a Blake geek, and I had already observed that editorial work was not necessarily a great career move. Younger colleagues I knew and admired had not been advanced a reward for working on SiR, and clearly there was a fair amount of scut-work. …

This Is the Reason We Persevere: The 2010 Neustadt Prize Lecture

Perhaps ponderingwords isalso a formof seekingjustice.If a monologue can invitea chorus, then perhaps itcan speak for othersas well. Poetryisselfsufficient in its uselessness,and therefore itis contemptuous of power. LadiesandGentlemen: Tonight, in front ofeveryone here,I wish tokeepmytonelow,so that thewordgratitude canbe heardmoreclearly. Thisis a wordthat must besaid,andshouldhavebeensaida long time ago. Upon hearingthe versesof Baudelaire, Lorca,Tsvetaeva, and Ehrenburg forthefirst time, a generation ofChinese poetswasalready grateful - for thetransmission ofcreativity from handtohandduring thosestark years. Words, in thehandsof theirreceivers, had directly become destiny. Poetry hitus withitspowerofimmediacy, andIbelieved that from that point ofimpact, the powerwouldbetransmitted backoutfrom us. Sincethen, myborders havebeenonlytwo rowsoftrees. Even as I speak,remnants of the 1970s stillresound, and containeveryecho of the reshaping ofone'scharacter. One country, one voice - thepoet expelshimself fromall that. Thusbeginswriting, thusbeginsexile.A positionapproaches meon itsown.I am onlyone man;I establish myself onthat. Iamonly a man. I amnotspeaking abouthistory, butabout man, whoseappearance inthis wordhistory has longbeendebated. Inthis word, life isledaway bypoetry, tosearch for, as SylviaPlathsaid,"a country far awayas health." I amspeaking aboutwriting, that difficult étude. Intheprocess, whatmust bespoken meets whatcannotbe said. Eachwordis a catalyst, requiring the writerto breakout forcefully from another story, from theprimitive camp where history, society, andpolitics converge, to touch uponthat "what" andthat "who."Atthat touch,one findstheunlimited boundaries of man,concealed bywords. Atthispoint, halfofeachwordhas been written, thehalfthat canbe understood. Grammarisstill pondering theother half. Eachword is notonlya sign.Insideeachwordthere is an orphan's brain.No wordscanbe younger, but insidethewordsuffering areall thesecrets of beinghuman. Perhaps pondering wordsisalsoa form of seeking justice. Ifa monologue caninvite a chorus , then perhaps itcanspeakfor others aswell. Poetry is self-sufficient in itsuselessness, and therefore itiscontemptuous ofpower. At the very least, the ideal of poetry demandsthis: evenas thepoetis stillcatching up, ithas alreadyrevealeditsmostdignified aspect.Itallowslighttobe caston thescales, whichlight mustshineand moveupon.Light therefore arrives where manhimself canarrive, soas torecognize loveanew. Whatilluminates us is hesitancy, so action isalwayscondemning; darkness becomes more complete, tothepoint that ithassealedupallits remaining cracks, without knowing thatlight infact originates from within itself. Andthat is whatwordsmust penetrate through. 46 1WorldLiterature Today WÊÊÊIm ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^fl ^^H^^^^^^^^^H ^^^^^^^^^^^H Thepresent is thereby evenmorehidden, thehierarchy cannotspeak thisrule - a spell that hasbeenwritten down. Whenthe road has alreadybecomean unstressed word, evenwhentracing itsgenealogy ,whatreturns are onlytheechoesofthis particular civilization. So westophere, westop attheplacewhere wethink wecangobackand experience thewholejourney, on a questfor that wordwhich hasbeenenclosed inorealong witha swooning, ancientpast - a sealed-up riddle that isonlytesting itslistener. In a poet'slistening, at thelimitsof his honesty, at theends of logic,a "what"will be opened,that"what" - thepresent moment. Fromitsdeepestroots, a wordwillburstout from theriddle. Perhaps thiswordis whathas been revealedby hints:an approaching, an encountering, a dialogue. Theroadisonlyinthepresent, andweuse theechoesas milestones. WhatI amspeaking aboutis howa poet's experience isbrought into words. Afterexperiencingthe cacophony of revolution, subversion, experimentation, and deconstruction, whatcan thepoetstillhear? Insidethiswordthathas burstout from the riddle - silence - is ourcommon condition: on thelevelofa completely material world,on a humanphysical level,we areallowinga dysfunctional intelligence topeckatandeataway thelandscape; itisa continuation ofslogans;a sustainable violenceis usingmemory as fuel, and whathas been replenished is theecho ofour condition, becausetheexileofwords beginshere. Butfrom thediscursive space created by thepoeticcanon,whatconstantly echoes is thespeechthat hasnever beenseparated from silence:thereis onlymemory, no forgetting, becausethere arenomountains, onlypeaks The pantheon of classicalChinesepoets is emerging, bringing mountain ranges, rivers, weight, andpressure alongintheir wordsand between their lines, tobewith usnotonly where languagebreaksbut also at geologicalfault lines, waiting forus topickup wherethey left off - another seasonin thismeadowoflife.In another story, inthesameallegory, thewaywe return tothesoundofthefresco is thewaythe light creates ourhorizon. Atthispoint, we needthevoiceofan allencompassing story tospeak. ABOUT THENEUSTADT PRIZE The Neustadt InternationalPrizeforLiteratureis sponsored bythe University ofOklahoma and WorldLiterature Today,an international bimonthlynow in itseighty-fifth year ofcontinuous publication. The prize,conferredeverytwo years,consists of $50,000, a replica ofan eagle's feathercast insilver,and an award certificate.Funding forthe prize has been ensured in perpetuitybya generous endowment fromthe Neustadt familyof internati on ai Ardmore,Oklahoma, and Dallas, Texas. literature Established in 1969 as the Books Abroad InternationalPrizeforLiterature, then renamed the Books Abroad /Neustadt Prizein 1972 before assuming itspresent name in 1976, the Neustadt Prizeisthe first internationalliterary award ofitsscope to originate inthe United States and is one ofveryfew internationalprizes forwhich poets, novelists, and playwrightsare equally eligible. The charterofthe award stipulates thatthe Neustadt Prizebe given in recognitionofimportantachievement in poetry,fiction,or drama and that itbe conferredsolely on the basis of literary merit. The prize...

Corruption of the “American Dream” in Death of a Salesman: A Thematic Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller published his most famous work Death of a Salesman in 1949. This play received numerous awards for its literary merit, including the Pulitzer Prize for drama and it is regarded by many critics as the perfect embodiment of the modern American drama. Willy Loman, the hero of the play, is caught-up in the “American Dream” which consists of a genuine and determined belief that in America all things are possible to all men regardless of birth or wealth. If you work hard enough you will achieve anything. However, Miller believes that people have been ultimately misguided and Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, is a moving destruction of the whole myth.Key words: Death of a Salesman; American Dream; corruption; tragedy

Review of *Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography*, by Jill Roe

In recent decades, the name 'Miles Franklin' has been best known for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, an antipodean Booker or Pulitzer. It is given annually to the author of the previous year's novel of the highest literary merit, a work which must also 'present Australian life in any of its phases'. Now, though, with Roe's very substantial work before us—a 'full-dress biography' Laurie Hergenhan calls it in the Australian Book Review (March 2009) —we must all know that there are a great many other claims on our attention to the name 'Miles Franklin' as well.

Rewriting Genre in The Country Girls Trilogy

On Edna list of her Top Ten books in Women's Review, number eight is Wuthering Heights; she calls the novel an old favourite and one responsible for certain unwise attitudes of mine towards the opposite sex.1 A number of critics have noted the significance of Emily Bronte's novel, arguing for its cen trality to what Amanda Greenwood calls O'Brien's analysis of the compromised nature of female subjectivity.2 Yet, The Country Girls Trilogy owes a largely unexplored debt to the work of another Bront? sister: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.3 A central theme within the Trilogy is the refashioning of the romantic marriage plot found in the Brontes' works. First published as three separate nov els?The Country Girls (i960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Mar ried Bliss (1964)?then republished in 1986 as a trilogy with a new epilogue, the Trilogy's final incarnation critiques the options historically offered to literature's female heroines and authors. For years, critics have debated the novels' literary merit; until recently, most believed that to understand novels, the reader must understand O'Brien, thereby viewing the novels solely as works of autobiography.4 Others, including Grace Eckley, who was the first to write a monograph on O'Brien, fault the author for not being feminist enough; she

Sir Andrew Macphail: The Life and Legacy of a Canadian Man of Letters (review)

Reviewed by: Sir Andrew Macphail: The Life and Legacy of a Canadian Man of Letters Edward MacDonald Sir Andrew Macphail: The Life and Legacy of a Canadian Man of Letters. Ian Ross Robertson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. Pp. 448, $49.95 In a sense this meticulous and well-considered biography bookends Ian Ross Robertson’s academic career. Back in 1974, when Canadian intellectual history was waxing on the strength of Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), Robertson’s doctoral dissertation examined Sir Andrew Macphail as a social critic. Three decades later, Robertson has returned to this somewhat neglected figure, perhaps the best Canadian embodiment of that lost archetype, the man of letters. [End Page 576] Born in 1860s rural Prince Edward Island, Macphail moved to Montreal, where he became a medical doctor and the first professor of the history of medicine at McGill University. Although he ‘tried his hand at almost every type of literary activity’ (231), Macphail made his reputation as an editor and essayist in the pre–Great War period. In the pages of the influential University Magazine, which he founded, edited, and helped fund, Macphail ‘articulated a philosophy of political and social conservatism whose pivotal components were imperialism and attachment to a traditional rural way of life’ (281). His imperialism, expressed in familial rather than economic terms, urged a greater role for Canada within the British Empire, and his rural vision of self-reliant, family-based farms reacted against the manifest evils of urban industrialism. His later years were dogged by ill health and disillusionment at current trends, yet produced two of his most enduring works: a controversial Official History of the Canadian medical services during the Great War and The Master’s Wife, his posthumously published memoir of life in the rural Island community of his youth. There is, in fact, a whole chapter on The Master’s Wife, examining its connection to Macphail’s social thought, its literary merit, and its continuing influence on Prince Edward Islanders’ sense of their own history and identity. Although Robertson pointedly acknowledges the diversity of Macphail’s activities, there are two main strands to his biography: Macphail the turn-of-the-century man of letters, situated at Canada’s leading university in Canada’s leading city, and Macphail the chronicler, celebrator, and interpreter of Prince Edward Island’s traditional rural culture. In Robertson’s estimation, the latter is the key to the former: ‘On all matters, including his imperialism, he displayed an extraordinarily consistent conservatism that was firmly rooted in the soil of Prince Edward Island’ (281). Robertson employs a formidable arsenal of sources, chief among them Macphail’s own papers and published writings, and Robertson’s own encyclopedic grasp of Prince Edward Island history. He writes in a lean and muscular prose that Macphail, the consummate stylist, would probably have endorsed. Macphail might also approve Robertson’s focus on his ideas rather than his persona. One comes away with little sense of Macphail’s interior life. Robertson is reluctant to speculate on the impact on Macphail of his beloved wife’s untimely death. An attempted assassination, which permanently damaged Macphail’s health, gets one paragraph. The paradox of a man who experimented with crops, but wrote, ‘Machinery is fatal to good farming’ (202) goes unexplored, while Macphail’s refusal to install telephone, radio, washer, [End Page 577] electricity, or even a pump (he used a bucket and well) at his home in Orwell is merely noted as evidence of his consistent anti-modernism. Robertson clearly admires Macphail, though he never fawns on his subject. Nor is he an apologist for Macphail’s views, some of which – such as his trenchant, ‘separate spheres’ anti-feminism – have drawn the ire of modern commentators. Robertson does not judge; he explains. He takes a similar approach to Macphail’s lapses as a historian of Canada’s wartime medical service, carefully citing modern disclosures that Macphail routinely disguised his own opinions as unnamed sources. As Robertson observes, it was not just Macphail’s ideas, but his artistry, the ‘vigour, wit, clarity, and topicality’ of...

Romantic Recognition in Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven

Romantic Recognition in Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven Michèle Rackham (bio) Gwethalyn graham’s novel Earth and High Heaven is one of Canada’s great literary success stories: in addition to winning the Governor General’s award in 1944, this popular romance was the first Canadian novel to top the American bestseller list, Collier’s Magazine paid $7,500 to serialize it before its publication, and Sam Goldwyn (of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame) bought the movie rights for $100,000. The novel’s popularity peaked with Goldwyn and Graham casting Gregory Peck and Katharine Hepburn in the major movie production as protagonists Marc Reiser, a small-town Jewish Ontarian, and Erica Drake, a wealthy socialite Gentile (Cameron 157)—two star-crossed lovers whose romance is thwarted by religious prejudice in wartime Montreal. In spite of the novel’s convenient mise-en-scène and the script-like dialogue of Graham’s characters,1 the [End Page 121] movie version of Earth and High Heaven was never made. Production was called off in part because Laura Z. Hobson’s novel Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) beat Graham’s novel to film. Released in 1948, and starring Gregory Peck, Gentleman’s Agreement was similarly based on a romantic narrative about anti-Semitism. Elspeth Cameron notes that the release of this movie sealed Earth and High Heaven’s fate; immediately after the success of Gentleman’s Agreement, “Sam Goldwyn announced that he did not wish to make another film on the same subject” (158). Goldwyn’s decision not to proceed with the film version of Graham’s novel, however, was inspired by more than just the recent release of a similarly themed film. He was not happy with the script, which he felt focused too closely on the novel’s preaching against anti-Semitism (Cameron 157). Having little desire to make a film that condemned racial prejudice in North America, Cameron remarks that “Goldwyn was interested almost solely in the novel’s romantic plot” (157). While Goldwyn was attracted mainly to Earth and High Heaven’s unapologetic love story, surely it is this romantic plot that has led to the novel’s “forgotten” status in the Canadian canon (Cameron 146). “Earth and High Heaven was a success for all the wrong reasons,” writes Cameron: “This banal romance … attracted droves of unsophisticated readers and obscured the remarkable literary skills and complex profile of social, political, ethnic, and feminist issues that the novel displayed” (161). For Cameron, the novel’s romantic plot veils the sociopolitical message of the text and stands in stark contrast to its literary merits. John Moss might disagree with this comment, but only in its claims of literary merit. He writes, “[w]ere it not for the ‘timeliness’ of the topic, this novel would more properly belong in the company of drug-store romances” (102). Even the more recent reviews of the novel’s 2003 edition are flippant about its romantic sentimentality. Consider, for example, Fiona Foster’s 2004 review of Earth and High Heaven in which she jokingly remarks,“[i]f Oprah had been around, she would have slapped an endorsement on its cover quicker than you could say, ‘It made me cry, it made me laugh, it made me hope’” (d14). Although Foster’s review of the novel is favourable, she is also critical of Earth and High Heaven’s popular romantic element. More recent criticism of the novel, conversely, has turned a blind eye to its glaring romantic elements to focus exclusively on its important social critique. Patrick Coleman and Michael Greenstein both explore the ways [End Page 122] in which Graham’s novel challenges readers to question stable conceptions of racial and social identities.2 While both Coleman’s and Greenstein’s exceptional studies of Earth and High Heaven have repositioned it as more than just a dime novel, both studies also gloss over the importance of the novel’s genre to its socio-political message. A closer reading of Earth and High Heaven reveals that it is highly self-reflexive about its status as romantic fiction; such introspection suggests the novel’s romantic elements may play a larger part in staging its social critique...

"The Best of Both Worlds": Rethinking the Literary Merit of Graphic Novels

"The Best of Both Worlds": Rethinking the Literary Merit of Graphic Novels

Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (review)

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons Julia M. Wright (bio) Sarah Prescott. Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. xxiv+206pp. £18.99. ISBN 978-0-7083-2053-2. This book is valuable not only for its major contribution to the recovery of eighteenth-century Welsh writing but also for its nuanced analysis of Welsh writers’ stance on the “four nations” problem. Sarah Prescott’s introduction is a deft and historically sensitive account of developments in discussions of this problem after J.G.A. Pocock’s groundbreaking 1975 “Plea” (“British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 [December 1975]: 601–28), beginning with the historians, including Linda Colley, and then turning to the literary scholarship that followed. Prescott notes in particular Welsh writers’ tendency to read the union of Wales and England “as a reuniting of Britain rather than an appropriation of Wales by England” (111), the ways in which the Welsh antiquarian project served that vision by reinforcing the value of Welsh culture and history and seeking to preserve the Welsh language, and the significance of religion, both as cultural institution and as a rhetorical resource, to eighteenth-century Welsh writing. The first chapter is a close examination of the Welsh in London. As scholars are becoming increasingly aware, London was a generative site for the formation of national identity through the formal and informal expatriate clubs that met in the city (on terms that recall Benedict Anderson’s important essay, “Long-Distance Nationalism,” in [End Page 558] The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World [London: Verso, 1998], 58–74). Addressing in detail the London-based “Society of Ancient Britons,” Prescott traces the group’s position on the relation of Wales to Britain in terms of language, religion, and two national symbols, St David and the leek in particular, through a range of literary materials, from sermons to poems. This body of work suggests an uneasy ambivalence about Wales’s participation in the idea of Britain. On the one hand, these Welsh authors generally supported the existing regime, partly through “the providential message of Protestant British triumph” (7); on the other hand, they lamented the replacement of Welsh by English as the official language of Wales and worked to promote its preservation (9–13). The second chapter is a rich examination of the work of Jane Brereton, a poet clearly deserving of more critical attention for her literary merits and her engagement with national, class, and gender tensions. Prescott suggests, “it could be argued that Brereton’s commitment to the dynastic claims of the Hanoverian monarchs does not so much detract from her Welsh identity, but rather refracts this identity through a lens of ‘Britishness’ familiar to Welsh writers” (31). This chapter is marked by such alternations between nature (“Welsh identity”) and culture (“lens of ‘Britishness’ familiar to Welsh writers”), as well as the hesitant phrasing of “it could be argued.” Such tension between Herderian nationalism, in which the nation determines individual character, and foundational literary critical ideas, in which authors are original and complex, often bedevils scholarship concerned with the recovery of Celtic-Periphery writing. This tension is also in the literature itself, and Prescott does much to introduce a richly suggestive poet who mediates between the cultural forms of dominant English culture and the icons of Welshness, such as distinctive landscapes and the figure of Merlin. Chapter 3 offers valuable insights into the antiquarian recuperation of the bard in the mid-eighteenth century, focussing on Evan Evans and suggesting that scholars to date have been too quick to see his “translations [as] mostly executed for an English audience” (58). Prescott considers instead the “combative motive for antiquarian recovery and memory” (59) outlined in the work of Katie Trumpener and Jane Aaron. In this context, Evans’s refusal to adapt his texts to normative English standards of taste and his representation of the bards as “freedom fighters” constitute a defiant gesture (59, 67). The core of this chapter is a critically well-situated discussion of Thomas Gray’s The Bard, in the context of the larger English co-optation...

Paternal Nightmare: Division and Masculinity in the Restored Edition of A Death in the Family

On the surface, A Death in the Family appears to be James Agee's dreamy meditation on his childhood and its defining event: the sudden death of his father in an automobile crash when Agee was only six years old. Early in its imagining, Agee believed the book would not be work written for any aesthetic value but rather for its intrinsic personal value, especially because through it he had hoped not only to complete picture of his absent and heroic father but finally to piece together the interior image of himself and project it for his reader. Originally published posthumously by Agee's editor and long-time friend David McDowell in 1957, A Death in the Family won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958. In 2007, fifty years after its initial publication, the University of Tennessee Press offered readers a restoration of Agee's original text, edited by Michael A. Lofaro. The progression of this newly restored edition of A Death in the Family moves from Agee's first recollections of life with his father to his father's death in an automobile accident and the ensuing inner turmoil Agee experiences at the funeral and beyond. As book that ostensibly examines Agee's inner world as child, it also reveals the adult author's emotional life during the period in which he composed it. (1) In fragmentary essay about his intention for what Agee terms his autobiographical he writes that its composition was not just rendering of childhood memories or memorial to my but rather an effort to regain significant part of his life that suddenly seemed lost to him: Now as awareness of how much of life is lost, and how little is left, becomes even more piercing, I feel also and ever the more urgently, the desire to restore, and to make little less impermanent, such of my lost life as I can, beginning with the beginning and coming as far forward as need be. This is the simplest, most primitive of the desires which can move writer. I hope I shall come to other things in time; in time to write them. Before I do, if I am ever to do so, I must sufficiently satisfy this first, most childlike need. (Collected 142) A Death in the Family will be, as Agee describes it, book for himself first, work that not only restores the experience of his childhood but is itself an expression of child-like selfishness. Through the novel, he hopes to memorialize his father, but the book, as he later says in the fragment, is chiefly remembrance of my childhood. As such, it is all ego, (2) and Agee understands the selfishness of its composition, even as he justifies his need to work through himself. For all these reasons, critics have often argued that A Death in the Family is satisfying last work for Agee. Though he did not know it, his final novel would become the defining work of his career, and because of McDowell's arrangement of the text, Death was easily the most popular and accessible text in Agee's oeuvre. However, the structure and progression of the edition of A Death in the Family available for over fifty years does not seem to emphasize satisfactorily central part of Agee's artistic vision: the emphasis on the wounded body, the paranoia over making art out of the personal, the fragmentation of the body, the imagined violence as atonement, and the re-imagining of his father's body. Few critics really have questioned the authenticity of the first version of Agee's novel. The posthumous book manuscript was given to Agee's friend and collaborator David McDowell, who created cogent and readable version of Agee's sprawling novel even though Agee had provided no complete blueprint for how he wanted his book to be laid out. (3) After the novel won the Pulitzer Prize, few critics actively questioned its literary merits, and the Pulitzer gave the McDowell version credibility that continued for close to fifty years. However, serious questions over how Agee conceived his book, including central ideas of progression and placement of key scenes, deserved an answer, or, at the very least, comprehensive review. …

Fashioning the Duchess of Alba: Vicarious Thrills and Sartorial Flirtations during the Spanish Enlightenment

By examining Francisco de Goya's The Duchess of Alba as a Maja (1797), I investigate how the duchess’ fascination for and experiences with popular Spanish customs and dress relate to the general shift in aristocratic taste for folkloric traditions during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alba fashioned herself in part after the fiery maja, whose notorious behavior could be utilized by her for personal and political purposes to experience vicariously the supposed libertine lifestyle of the lower classes. I suggest that this vicarious act—both imagined (in works of art) and real (at the bullfight)—serves as a flirtatious role-play emblematic of aristocrats during the Enlightenment. By focusing on her promotion of nationalistic traits and heroes in her style, patronage, and activities, I consider Alba's fashionable individualism in relation to the broad theme of female agency in the 1700s. Notwithstanding the rumors surrounding the duchess’ life, I argue Alba's vital role as a trendsetter at the Spanish court and in artistic and literary circles merits more scholarly scrutiny. Looking to the popular class for inspiration, she proactively challenged conventional feminine roles and conduct, elevating national dress to the level of high couture to assert her individualism.

‘To wound an oak’: the Poetics of Tree-felling at Nun Appleton

But I, retiring from the flood,Take sanctuary in the wood;And, while it lasts, my self embarkIn this yet green, yet growing ark1Andrew Marvell's poem, 'Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax', which searchingly explores the civilised retirement from public life of the Commander-in-Chief of Parliamentarian forces from 1645 to 1650, Sir Thomas, 'Lord General' Fairfax (1612-71), has, like Marvell (1621-78) himself, received a considerable measure of critical attention in recent years. Unsurprisingly, considering the poem features no fewer than eighteen stanzas on Nun Appleton's wood, a good deal of this attention, by scholars such as Chris Fitter, Diane McColley, Nigel Smith and James Turner, has focused on its environmental concerns,2 which include the felling of oak trees on Fairfax's idyllic Yorkshire estate, memorably effected by woodpeckers figuring the New Model Army: 'Who could have thought the tallest oak / Should fall by such a feeble stroke!'. Marvell, though, was not the only man to pen verses on Nun Appleton in the seventeenth century. As well as a modest offering from Lord Fairfax himself, 'Upon the New-built House att Apleton',3 there is another poem from this period concerned not only with this identical Yorkshire retreat but also, intriguingly, with the same theme of oak-felling. This poem is 'The Vocal Oak', subtitled 'Upon Cutting Down the Woods at Nun-Appleton',4 by Brian Fairfax (1633-1711), Thomas's cousin. Published in 1849,5 the poem has not been entirely ignored by literary critics. Turner quotes eight lines from it, arguing that Fairfax conveys the countryside as 'an object of capital investment and conspicuous consumption', and both Fitter and Smith make brief reference to it, if solely in relation to Marvell.6 Nonetheless, 'The Vocal Oak' has hitherto failed to receive the sustained critical examination which its literary, ecological and political moment merits. Written in 1679, the year following Marvell's death, Fairfax's poem provides a vivid illustration of seventeenth-century poetically framed attitudes to the exploitation of the countryside in general, and to deforestation in particular.7 In addition to its treatment of tree-felling as an intrinsically significant and wholly deleterious environmental event, the poem also demonstrates the richly symbolic uses to which responses to such activity could be put, in a Restoration era when the posthumous reputation of Lord Fairfax, for whom Brian had acted as private secretary from 1661, was being placed under growing strain. Though in many ways a strikingly individual piece, rooted in both the personal and political preoccupations of its day, 'The Vocal Oak' also betrays revealing parallels with Marvell's earlier poem, shedding new light on the manuscript circulation and contemporary popularity of a work which, like most of Marvell's poetry, was published posthumously in 1681.8 The poem does not rival Marvell's in ecological, any more than in literary, importance; rather, it operates as a satellite, orbiting around and in some ways dependent on it, yet at the same time exhibiting its own singular characteristics. This article, then, provides the first detailed analysis of 'The Vocal Oak', a close reading in which contemporary configurations of politics, environment and intertextuality are triangulated.Given the plethora of modern studies on seventeenth-century protoenvironmentalism, the wider context of a poem concerned, at least on one level, with deforestation needs little explanation. More than most other ecological anxieties, deforestation had been, and was still, a hotly-debated issue at the time of the poem's composition. Michael Williams gives the early modern British timber crisis an instructively European and Far Eastern context, suggesting that only Rome at its peak and northern China in the twelfth century match the scale of the problem experienced in Britain from the late sixteenth century onwards. Ken Hiltner has shown that early modern England experienced a host of environmental crises, including air pollution, acid rain, endangered species, wetland loss and, not least, deforestation. …