Literary Merit Research Articles

Literary Technique, the Aestheticization of Laboring Experience, and Generic Experimentation in Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour

Literary Technique, the Aestheticization of Laboring Experience, and Generic Experimentation in Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour Steve Van-Hagen The year 2005 was the tri-centennial of the birth of Stephen Duck, the "thresher poet" of Wiltshire accorded patronage by Queen Caroline after the success of poems including The Thresher's Labour and The Shunamite (both 1730). The year 2006, meanwhile, is the 250th anniversary of his (probable) suicide in a river behind a Reading tavern. These anniversaries, coupled with the recent surge of interest in Duck and other laboring-class poets make this an appropriate moment to reexamine his most celebrated and discussed individual work.1 The Thresher's Labour is believed to have been composed third of Duck's extant poems2 (after "To a Gentleman, who requested a Copy of Verses from the Author" and "On Poverty," and immediately before the biblical-historical The Shunamite).3 Even now, these, as well as other significant poems, such as "On Richmond Park, and Royal Gardens," A Description of a Journey to Marlborough, Bath, Portsmouth, &c. (both 1736),4 Every Man in his own Way: An Epistle to a Friend (1741), and the prospect poem Caesar's Camp (1755), are often read (if at all) for the light they shed on The Thresher's Labour and its author. Despite Joseph Spence's view that The Shunamite was his finest poem,5 Duck's biographer Rose Mary Davis calls The Thresher's Labour "the best poem" he wrote,6 adding, "critics are almost unanimous in placing this poem, from the point of view of merit, at the head of Duck's works."7 Commentators in the eighty years since her assessment have tended to agree, or if they have not always been concerned with aesthetics, nonetheless often concur that The Thresher's Labour is Duck's most noteworthy work. As John Goodridge has written with reference to laboring-class poets in general, "one thing these writers have rarely been allowed to be is poets . . . Historically, the considerable interest there has been in labouring-class [End Page 421] poetry has not always extended to a recognition of literary merit."8 Yet a number of recent treatments of the poem have focused anew on its "literary" and formal achievements.9 In the wake of these readings, some of which concentrate on the relationship of The Thresher's Labour to existing genres such as georgic and pastoral,10 the aim of the present essay is to plot the poem's attempts to reconcile laboring-class experiences with verse, with reference to poetic mediums, techniques, and genres. The Thresher's Labour was composed when one of Duck's patrons, Rev. Stanley, suggested that he write about the life he knew.11 As a necessary part of doing so, a laboring-class poetic voice and a mode of writing about labor that dominates the poem emerged. In enabling the representation of experiences, this mode fosters an informal, confidential tone of friend to friend rather than of poet to public.12 It tends to produce narrative, descriptive verse, describing the vigorous performance of physical labor and depicting labor and laborer with respect and dignity. It does not just describe everyday objects or processes, however, but mimetically evokes the sights and sounds of physical labor. This mode is interested in physical objects as they are rooted in a world of sights, sounds, and smells, yet is suspended within the amber of neoclassical versification (the heroic couplet), and mingles specific everyday and colloquial terms with a familiar neoclassical poetic medium. In advancing these arguments through a detailed close reading, I will also be concerned to suggest that whereas The Thresher's Labour has long been defined in terms of being either pastoral or georgic, there are good grounds for arguing that it should be considered generically distinct. II The heroic couplets in which The Thresher's Labour is written were, as critics including J. Paul Hunter and Margaret Anne Doody have observed, the dominant medium of their time.13 As Bridget Keegan has argued, laboring-class poets were particularly influenced by the couplet's greatest practitioner, Alexander Pope (and other canonical figures who regularly used the couplet...

Beyond Stereotypes: Representational Dilemmas in Arabian Jazz

Before Diana Abu-Jaber published Arabian Jazz in 1993, Arab American writers had produced a significant amount of poetry, autobiographical works, and short stories. Although some writers had written novels, their work did specifically address Arab American themes. publication of novels that explored lives of Arab Americans seemed to be next step in growth of literature. Perhaps literary anticipation as well as need of Arab Americans to represent themselves in a positive light raised expectations that preceded Abu-Jaber's novel to an unrealistic degree. issue of representation dominated Arab American response to Arabian Jazz. In one review, Elaine Hagopian dismisses literary merit of novel, choosing instead to point out that content represents a stereotype of a stereotype with quite a number of implausible (1). Hagopian goes on to highlight several factual inaccuracies in book with regards to religion, characters' names, and historical events. A large part of her argument focuses on behavior of Arab characters; she claims that their actions are unrealistic and can therefore distort reader's understanding of Arab culture. Although Hagopian's critique raises important issues, her focus on inaccuracies in novel leaves little room for looking at Arabian Jazz as a fictional work. Certainly Arab Americans were right to be concerned that novel might be read as an accurate portrayal of Arab culture. I recall one American reader who raved about how much she enjoyed novel, ending with statement that now she felt she truly understood Arab culture. Abu-Jaber herself is aware of how concern with representation has affected reception of her novel. She says, There's also sense that ... Arab-Americans have been so maltreated by media, their image has been so dark, that I think there's a real anxiety about artistic representations that are out there (Shalal-Esa 6). question becomes to what extent should a writer cater to reader's tendency to read a novel as if it were a sociological or anthropological text. Certainly, Arabian Jazz is only novel to be caught in this dilemma. Hong Kingston's novel Woman Warrior met with similar responses. In her review of book, Katheryn Fong criticized Kingston because she does not totally represent identity of all Chinese American women (67). She goes on to discuss lack of historical information in book and negative portrayal of girls in Chinese culture. Yet Fong does seem aware that a large part of dilemma lies in how book will be received by readers: The problem is that non-Chinese are reading your fiction as true accounts of Chinese American history .... Your one experience, your one story, becomes definitive description of all of (67). In her article, Maxine Hong Kingston: Ethnic Writer and Burden of Dual Authenticity, Deborah Woo looks at reception of Woman Warrior within larger context of how ethnic writers carry the burden of being viewed narrowly as spokespersons for experience (173). result, she argues, is that 'ethnic' writers ... find their voices muted by readings which only allow for generalizations about ethnic experience (173). responses to Arabian Jazz and Woman Warrior are clear examples of this as Abu-Jaber and Kingston found themselves accused of presenting an inaccurate cultural experience. There is much at stake here: representation of Arab Americans, censorship imposed on minority writers by their community's expectations, and way novel is itself defined. Surely expectations we place on anthropological and social texts should be applied to novels. A novel is a place where writer can take fictional leaps and re-imagine reality. By judging Abu-Jaber's novel on how accurately it reflects reality of Arab and Arab American culture, we miss what novel attempts to show us through its fictional story. …

Links between Mucedorus and The Tragical History, Admirable Atchievments and Various Events of Guy Earl of Warwick

THE play The Tragical History, Admirable Atchievments and various events of Guy Earl of Warwick was printed, for the first and only time, in 1661 by Thomas Vere and William Gilbertson. Though it is described on the title page as having been ‘Acted very Frequently with great Applause By his late Majesties Servants’, there is no known record of a performance of the play. The play is ascribed to ‘B. J.’, no doubt to give the impression that the author was Ben Jonson1. Despite its obscurity, the Tragical History may be a very important play. This is not because it has any special literary merits, but because it may contain a sustained sixteenth-century reference to Shakespeare. If this were true, the Tragical History would allow us to add a significant new chapter to Shakespearian biography. Alfred Harbage was the first to suggest that the Tragical History could contain a reference to Shakespeare. In 1941, he conjectured that, despite being printed in 1661, the Tragical History was probably written in the early 1590s, and that the play's Clown, called Sparrow, may be a ‘hit’ at Shakespeare.2 The passage in the Tragical History that struck Harbage was this: Rainborne. Art thou a Christian? prethee where wer't born? Sparrow. Ifaith Sir I was born in England at Stratford upon Aven in Warwickshire. Rainborne. Wer't born in England? what's thy name? Sparrow. Nay I have a fine finical name, I can tell ye, for my name is Sparrow; yet I am not no house Sparrow, nor no hedge Sparrow, nor no peaking Sparrow, nor no sneaking Sparrow, but I am a high mounting lofty minded Sparrow, and that Parnell knows well enough, and a good many more of the pretty Wenches of our Parish ifaith.

Sweet and Functional:Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets,(The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)

Sweet and Functional Reviewed by Dror Abend-David Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub, editors; Amelia Glaser, translator; Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets, (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) Horace's reference to poetry in his Ars Poetica (18 BCE) as "dulce et utile [sweet and functional]" pulls together the two fractions of what remains an eternal debate about the function of art in general and poetry in particular: Should poetry be written in the service of ethical, social and political ideals? Or should it be written and evaluated only according to an aesthetic and/or "literary" criteria? On the one hand, this timeless debate seems essential to the representation of American Left-Wing Yiddish Poets of the 1920s and '30s in the collection, Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets. The selection of poets in this collection; the division of poems into chapters of contrasting themes such as "Urban Landscape" vs. "Encounters with the Elements," "United in Struggle" vs. "Matters of the Heart" and "The Poet on Poetry" vs. "Wars to End All Wars;" and the fascinating introduction by Dovid Katz that both contextualizes and gives unique information about the poets in this collection; all place the tension between the political and the aesthetic function of poetry as central to the debate among left-wing (or rather, far-left wing) poets in writers' unions such as the "Young Workers Writers Union," "Union Square" and "Proletpen." On the other hand, the very same features of this collection serve to demonstrate that the dulce vs. utile debate might have had very little to do with the political divisions among New York Yiddish poets in the first half of the twentieth century. The poets in this collection, who were [End Page 158] often neglected and dismissed as "party-line poets," poets who care more for the "message" of their poetry then for its literary merit, are shown to have written love poems, poems of nature, personal poems and poetry that is often taken out of bounds of political interests, sometime in direct opposition to "official" guidelines. The introduction to the collection is written by Dovid Katz, one of the great authorities on Yiddish literature, who has a personal stake in retelling the stories of the poets in this collection. Among these poets is Katz's father, Menke Katz, a poet who struggled and succeeded in achieving complete artistic freedom within the Proletpen organization. In fact, as Katz writes, these "left-wing" poets were "much the same as all the other [poets]… American Yiddish leftist writers walked, loved, worked, and did all the other things that other writers did" (p. 14). And yet, under the guise of literary criteria, and under the pressures of cold war politics and McCarthyism, these poets were ostracized in the 1940s and '50s, never translated into English, and referred to, if at all, as "bad writers" whose poetry has been corrupted by ideological zeal. But the poetry in Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets is perhaps closest to the ancient ideal of "dulce et utile," incorporating both a sharp critical social outlook and a personal touch that covers the entire spectrum of human feelings from a celebration of life in the chapter, "Encounters with the Elements," to "decadent" suicide poems in the last chapter of the collection, "Matters of Life and Death." In a touching and silent gesture, Menke Katz's poem, "To a Butterfly," is translated on page 209 with particular attention to form: The poem, a double-sonnet, is made up of lines of varying length: first short, then long, and then short again. As a result, the poem has the shape of a wing. And when the poem is mirrored by its translation on the next page, the shape of a butterfly flutters off the leaf. Metaphorically, this collection is releasing poetic butterflies which, for a period of over fifty years, have been dismissed as literary caterpillars unworthy of attention. The collection itself can also be described as "dulce et utile." It is...

Fernando de la Torre's "Juego de naipes", a Game of Love

FERNANDO DE LA TORRE'S "JUEGO DE NAIPES", A GAME OF LOVE Nancy F. Marino Michigan State University In the late 1450s Castilian poet Fernando de la Torre sent a collection ofprose and poetic texts to Doña Leonor de Foix, daughter ofKingJuan II ofNavarra and Aragón, who had repeatedly requested it. This compendium, known as El libro de las veynte cartas e quistiones, contains letters written to a variety of correspondents and almost two hundred poems on amorous themes. Among these verse compositions is an elaborate work entitled "El juego de naipes", which the poet dedicated to the Countess ofCastañeda Mencia Enriquez de Mendoza, a noblewoman of die Castilian court. In one of his studies of playing cards in Spanish literature, JeanPierre Etienvre affirms that it is the first literary version of a card game and diat the poet was die first author to use card suit symbolism in his work, which makes the "Juego de naipes" unique in all of early European literature ("Symbolisme" 427-28). But Etienvre finds the work's textual coherence and overall meaning difficult to discern and wonders if, in the end, it is simply an exercise in poetic virtuosity (Márgenes 317). Nicasio Salvador Miguel has also addressed the apparent system of symbols inherent in Fernando de la Torre's association of certain classes of women with card suits, and assumes diat contemporaneous readers familiarwith courdy debates on amorous topics would have understood the underlying meaning even ifwe cannot (219-20). María Jesús Diez Garretas agrees with Salvador Miguel's assessment of the difficulty of fully appreciating the poet's correlation ofcategories ofladies widi suits and colors. She also posits a few possible I would like to thankJosephJ. Gwara for reading an earlier version ofthis article and for his many useful suggestions that have improved it. La corónica 35.1 (Fall, 2006): 209-47 210Nancy F. MarinoLa corónica 35.1, 2006 figurai meanings based on known medieval symbols but is unable to explain what she considers some baffling references (Torre, Obra literaria 58-60). Only Antonio Paz y Melia fails to see any literary merit in the game, finding it amoral for its treatment of the love ofmarried ladies and nuns. He nevertheless admits that die deck itselfmightbe ofinterest from an artistic or historical point ofview (Torre, Cancionero xix).1 The "Juego de naipes" does exhibit Fernando de la Torre's considerable virtuosity as a poet; however, it does not merely parade before his reading public a series ofelements thatflaunthis considerable knowledge of proverbs and symbols of various sorts, references historical, biblical, and mythological. I would like to propose instead diat this poetic deck ofcards is a cohesive system that integrates all of these elements and leads its readers, sometimes playfully, to deduce that loyalty and constancy are the most important concerns in matters of love. One can arrive at this conclusion by paying close attention to the well-chosen signposts: the colors and traditional symbolism ofthe suits, the poetry written for each ofthese suits, and the people that the poet indicates the artist should paint on die cards. But we can gain additional insightby considering this work's inclusion in the Libro de las veynte cartas e quistiones, where it is surrounded by texts that provide information about Mosén Fernando's life, relationships with others, and attitudes towards women in general and love in particular. Some of these works, especially the prose correspondence with friends both male and female, appear to provide a context for the seemingly odd references or associations that he makes in the "Juego de naipes". In addition, several of the apparently obscure allusions or pictorial descriptions of contemporaneous persons can be clarified by looking to external historical accounts. Fernando de la Torre's connection with the Castilian court of both Juan II (1406-1454) and Enrique IV (1454-1474) and his relationship with the rulers of Navarra has been established bodi by evidentiary documentation and by his own words.2 A native of Burgos who studied in Florence and attended the Council of Basel, Mosén Fernando probably entered Juan II's service in the late 1430s and continued to 1...

Literary History's Alternate Groove: The Expectations of Periodization and Seventeenth-Century Literary Culture

This piece investigates the possibilities of periodization and its labels for the mid- and later seventeenth century, historical decades which have always posed certain problems for those in search of literary period names. The Interregnum as a historical period has very clear boundaries, but supposedly little literary merit. The standard literary histories of the seventeenth century emphasized continuity with earlier Stuart court literary culture and suggested to us that literature, too, was defeated by a Puritan aesthetic, the “Cavalier winter.” The Restoration is typically represented as a clean break with the Interregnum. This “rupture” model creates the expectation that literary culture comes back in from the cold and the countryside; it also privileges certain forms of literature associated with the new court culture. This has hindered the perception of such diverse contemporary writers as John Milton, John Bunyan, and Aphra Behn as emerging from the same period. While the war years and the Interregnum have been recently become the focus of literary study of alternative radical voices – women’s religious discourse, radical political discourse, and the creation of the genres of journalism – this essay looks at yet another Interregnum literary culture, of the reading habits of the middle class, or artisan consumer. “Literature” is a commercial commodity as well as a cultural one. Leaving aside periodization as a means to assist in evaluating artistic merit, this essay instead uses it to define a discreet slice of time to explore in terms of what was being written and what was being printed and sold, in other words to provide a time frame for a descriptive overview of literary production and consumption.

Of Imposture and Incompetence: Paul Sma�l'sVivre me tue

Paul Smail's Vivre me tue was marketed as a demonstration of the importance of artistic talent and the irrelevance of ethnic origins in determining the value of a literary text. Yet these claims are repeatedly contradicted by references to the author's Maghrebi (North African) origins, which are constantly presented as a reference point against which the triumph of his artistic achievement is measured. The ethnic bedrock on which these claims are based is further undermined by the true ethnicity of the author, who is of French, not North African, origin. In addition, the literary merit claimed for the novel is undercut by numerous inconsistencies in the narration of the text, which gravely compromise its artistic integrity. Far from representing the triumph of a free-floating literary talent over minority ethnic bonds, Vivre me tue flounders in a sea of artistic incompetence fed by the author's inability to divest himself of a majority ethnic mindset clouded by racist prejudices.

Sweet and Functional

Sweet and Functional Reviewed by Dror Abend-David Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub, editors; Amelia Glaser, translator; Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets, (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) Horace's reference to poetry in his Ars Poetica (18 BCE) as "dulce et utile [sweet and functional]" pulls together the two fractions of what remains an eternal debate about the function of art in general and poetry in particular: Should poetry be written in the service of ethical, social and political ideals? Or should it be written and evaluated only according to an aesthetic and/or "literary" criteria? On the one hand, this timeless debate seems essential to the representation of American Left-Wing Yiddish Poets of the 1920s and '30s in the collection, Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets. The selection of poets in this collection; the division of poems into chapters of contrasting themes such as "Urban Landscape" vs. "Encounters with the Elements," "United in Struggle" vs. "Matters of the Heart" and "The Poet on Poetry" vs. "Wars to End All Wars;" and the fascinating introduction by Dovid Katz that both contextualizes and gives unique information about the poets in this collection; all place the tension between the political and the aesthetic function of poetry as central to the debate among left-wing (or rather, far-left wing) poets in writers' unions such as the "Young Workers Writers Union," "Union Square" and "Proletpen." On the other hand, the very same features of this collection serve to demonstrate that the dulce vs. utile debate might have had very little to do with the political divisions among New York Yiddish poets in the first half of the twentieth century. The poets in this collection, who were [End Page 158] often neglected and dismissed as "party-line poets," poets who care more for the "message" of their poetry then for its literary merit, are shown to have written love poems, poems of nature, personal poems and poetry that is often taken out of bounds of political interests, sometime in direct opposition to "official" guidelines. The introduction to the collection is written by Dovid Katz, one of the great authorities on Yiddish literature, who has a personal stake in retelling the stories of the poets in this collection. Among these poets is Katz's father, Menke Katz, a poet who struggled and succeeded in achieving complete artistic freedom within the Proletpen organization. In fact, as Katz writes, these "left-wing" poets were "much the same as all the other [poets]… American Yiddish leftist writers walked, loved, worked, and did all the other things that other writers did" (p. 14). And yet, under the guise of literary criteria, and under the pressures of cold war politics and McCarthyism, these poets were ostracized in the 1940s and '50s, never translated into English, and referred to, if at all, as "bad writers" whose poetry has been corrupted by ideological zeal. But the poetry in Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets is perhaps closest to the ancient ideal of "dulce et utile," incorporating both a sharp critical social outlook and a personal touch that covers the entire spectrum of human feelings from a celebration of life in the chapter, "Encounters with the Elements," to "decadent" suicide poems in the last chapter of the collection, "Matters of Life and Death." In a touching and silent gesture, Menke Katz's poem, "To a Butterfly," is translated on page 209 with particular attention to form: The poem, a double-sonnet, is made up of lines of varying length: first short, then long, and then short again. As a result, the poem has the shape of a wing. And when the poem is mirrored by its translation on the next page, the shape of a butterfly flutters off the leaf. Metaphorically, this collection is releasing poetic butterflies which, for a period of over fifty years, have been dismissed as literary caterpillars unworthy of attention. The collection itself can also be described as "dulce et utile." It is...

Le Grand Concours: ‘Dissertation sur les causes de l'universalité de la langue française et la durée vraisemblable de son empire’

Every undergraduate knows, we hope, about Rivarol's victory in the Berlin Academy's competition of 1784 and his epigram on French clarity. Less well known is that he shared the laurels with Johann Christoph Schwab, a Leibnizian professor from Stuttgart, and Schwab's dissertation is edited here in its French translation by Denis Robelot, an émigré priest working in 1803. By comparison with these two worthies, Rivarol is made to look small, an adventurer of letters whose superficial brilliance covers insecure facts and a failure to answer the Academy's tripartite question. Schwab, by contrast, writes at twice the length because he quotes sources and subjects the question to a thorough examination, seeking explanations for the French linguistic hegemony in a wide range of political, cultural, pedagogical and structural factors. Where Rivarol fails to address the future of this hegemony, Schwab considers the prospects for English, for which he predicts great things, and his native German, which has little hope despite the contemporary flourishing of German culture of which he is part. Although its literary merits are modest, Schwab's text is well worthy of a modern edition for the light it throws on many themes, including, among others, the status of the French language in Germany at the end of Frederick the Great's reign, ways of analysing language in the period preceding the birth of modern linguistics, notions of literary taste, the interaction of the political and the cultural and the self-image of Germany in the generation preceding Goethe and Kant, whom Schwab did not like. Robelot's scrupulous translation adds an extra dimension, with its discreet critical apparatus questioning some of Schwab's judgements and its tendentious addendum on French in the Middle Ages which fails to match Schwab's scholarship. There is also the question of its date. By 1803 Schwab's francophilia had been tempered by the Revolution, and he and Robelot, cautious moderates both, share a concern with the subsequent re-establishment of order in the French world; both writers therefore view the text in a different light from the way Schwab viewed it in 1784. Freeman G. Henry's edition ably sets all this in context and offers a substantial and instructive introduction, explaining the institutional background of the Berlin Academy and Frederick's role in it and comparing the approaches of writer, rival and translator. There are rather too many misprints, and the introduction is not supplemented by editorial footnotes, which is perhaps a pity, as this text will be read as a testimony of its age rather than as an intrinsic masterpiece, and an even more ambitious critical apparatus offering further pointers into contemporary debates would have been of great value. However, it would have led to an unwieldy volume, and it would be churlish to complain; Henry has done enough to demonstrate his command of the field and the interest and importance of his subject. His work will deservedly stand as a starting point for much future study.

Um moralista nos trópicos: O visconde de Cairú e o Duque de la Rochefoucauld

Reviewed by: Um moralista nos trópicos: O visconde de Cairú e o duque de La Rochefoucauld Roderick J. Barman Monteiro, Pedro Meira . Um moralista nos trópicos: O visconde de Cairú e o duque de La Rochefoucauld. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2004, 326 pp. The eighteenth century was, among other things, the age of the maxim. Maxims often analyzed the behavior and the character—virtues and vices—of human beings, as with "hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue." The most celebrated writer of maxims was François, duke of La Rochefoucauld, who died in 1680. By 1695 the sixth edition of his maxims, originally published anonymously, had appeared. The eighteenth century saw the publication of no less fourteen works, based on La Rochefoucauld but reorganizing and amending his maxims, commenting on them, and incorporating the aphorisms of other writers. In the 1820s, almost a century and a half after La Rochefoucauld's, there appeared in Rio de Janeiro a work, Constituição moral, e deveres da cidadão, by José da Silva Lisboa (future viscount of Cairu) with an appendix containing La Rochefoucauld's maxims. Pedro Meira Monteiro is enamoured by La Rochefoucauld. A major theme of his wide ranging study, composed of three disparate parts, is the contrasting perceptions of human nature and behavior presented by La Rochefoucauld and [End Page 167] by Silva Lisboa. For Meira Monteiro the most revealing of La Rochefoucauld's sayings are "our virtues are generally no more than our vices in disguise" (26) and "nobody merits being praised for goodness, if he does not possess the power and the boldness to be wicked" (78). Maxims such as these indicate a detached, almost cynical view of existence. Virtue and vice are so interrelated that moral perfection is an illusion. To Silva Lisboa such an attitude was the first step on the downward path to the French Revolution, the font of all evil. Maxims in Silva Lisboa's view had to guide, direct, and uplift, instilling the virtues proclaimed in both Natural Religion and the Catholic faith, which he did not perceive as incompatible. Understandably, given the Brazilian's didactic style, his aphorisms do not figure in Meira Monteiro's text. The book's first and briefest part reviews the perception of human character, nature, and culture appearing in the Júbilos da América, a collection of prose and poems produced in 1754 by the Acadêmia dos Seletos at Rio de Janeiro. Silva Lisboa made use of this bombastic and self-laudatory work in his Constituição moral, and he did so, Meira Monteiro suggests, because the panegyrists agreed with him in ignoring nature and equating civilization solely with European culture. The author's motive for including this first section may in part be to discover some utility in the Júbilos and so rehabilitate it as an element an incipient Brazilian literature. The second, longest, and perhaps ablest section is devoted to an analysis of the reception of La Rochefoucauld's maxims after 1700. During his own lifetime the duke's perception of morality and human nature aroused unease, often distaste. The passage of time confirmed the perspicacity and literary merit of the maxims but intensified unhappiness over their view of humanity. Meira Monteiro demonstrates how a virtual industry grew up to make, through reordering, reinterpretation, and even rephrasing, La Rochefoucauld's aphorisms palatable both to a specific public's emotional and intellectual expectation. Silva Lisboa, for example, reproduced some of La Rochefoucauld's maxims, as "Worldly Morality," with his own precis of Catholic doctrines, "Christian Morality," thereby sanitizing the duke's aphorisms. The final section reviews Silva Lisboa's many publications, seeking to understand his vision of humanity and the world. Whereas physical ruins, decline, and decadence fascinated authors such as Edward Gibbon, the Brazilian saw the world in terms of constructing a coherent and beneficent order, an order Silva Lisboa identified with European culture and Catholicism. Belonging to a new nation state, Silva Lisboa necessarily sought to shape through his writings model citizens, but he was also, despite his clamor against "the libertines," a product of the Enlightenment and shared its assumptions about the capacity...

The novels of Ross Macdonald

In his examination of Ross Macdonald's eighteen detective novels, Michael Kreyling suggests that this widely read author elevated a popular genre from the plateau reached by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to a level of sophistication yet to be surpassed. Including in his study such early volumes as Ivory Grin and Meet Me at the Morgue, Kreyling takes a fresh look at forgotten works as well as Macdonald's better known novels. Kreyling proposes that the literary merit of the Macdonald corpus calls for a closer, more discriminating reading than scholars commonly accord the genre. Kreyling moves beyond the usual critical focus on the internal structure of the works - the disclosure and hiding of clues, for example - to provide a fuller assessment of why Macdonald's writings deserve the same critical attention afforded serious novels. He considers the mutual bond of structure and life that informs Macdonald's work, the Freudian theories he has adopted to advance his genre, and the place his novels occupy in the larger literary canon. Illumining the ways in which Macdonald's writing engages reality, Kreyling stresses the importance of reading Macdonald in his time. He looks with particular interest at the life of Ken Millar, the man who adopted the pen name Ross Macdonald, and relates the author's experiences to the storylines surrounding hardboiled detective Lew Archer. Kreyling shows that instead of presenting a static protagonist, Macdonald forces Archer to mature and change by incorporating themes drawn from the travails of the novelist's own family life, the social and moral upheavals of the 1960s, America's and California's obsession with race, environmental sins associated with unreflective development, and the difficulties of aging.

The Post-Classical Icelandic Family Saga by Martin Arnold (review)

1162 Reviews ticultural writing in the German language (by the Russian-Jewish immigrant writers Wladimir Kaminer and Vladimir Vertlib or the Turkish German writer Feridun Zaimoglu , forexample)?to name just one European language in which some ofthe most interesting literature is currently being produced by non-Christian immigrants ofthe first,second, or third generation?likewise indicates that German, for example, has long ceased to be purely 'Christian' or even ethnically 'German'. Although I cannot concur fully with all of Sherman's conclusions, the building-blocks of his narrative (the examination ofthe Joseph story as the master narrative ofthe Jewish Pope myth, as well as the analyses of individual reworkings of the myth) are truly insightful, meticulously researched, and masterfully argued. His book is an important contribu? tion to Jewish literary and cultural studies and will also be of great interest to students and scholars of folklore. University of Illinois at Chicago Elizabeth Loentz The Post-Classical Icelandic Family Saga. By Martin Arnold. (Scandinavian Stu? dies, 9) Lampeter: Mellen. 2003. viii + 296pp. ?69.95. ISBN 0-7734-6804-8. Martin Arnold calls for a critical re-evaluation of post-classical family sagas?those Islendingasogur dated to the century following the loss of Iceland's independence to Norway in 1262, and therefore, crucially, the period after what virtually all scholars have characterized as the high point of saga-writing, to which the so-called 'classical' Islendingasogur belong. His primary contentions are that post-classical sagas have been neglected because of unfavourable comparisons with the classical ones, and that not enough attention has been paid to how Iceland's colonial status and increasing economic dependence on Norway have shaped these fourteenth-century sagas. Arnold's analysis of the scholarly reception of the classical Islendingasogur is thorough and careful. He shows how the subject matter of these sagas?the lives of Icelanders who built up an independent republic after the ninth-century settlement of Iceland, with its own legal and parliamentary structures?fitted perfectlythe nationalist agenda of Icelandic critics, and that saga style?that cool, realist narrative which continued to be privileged even when its subject matter came to be regarded as more fictional than historical?met the literary taste of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The predispositions of early saga critics are ruthlessly exposed by Arnold. And yet (at the risk of being accused of not having examined one's own critical position with sufflcientrigour), one could take issue with the implication that the classical Islendingasogur have for these reasons been over-valxied. Certainly, both critical approval forthem?as proto-novels written by 'men of refinedtaste'?and the celebrated dismissals of what came after?sagas touched by continental romance giv? ing offa whiffof 'the sultry and stale air of the boudoir'?reflect these predispositions, but literary merit, hard as it is to define, cannot be absolutely reduced to a matter of taste. Significantly, Arnold's excellent discussion of Hrafnkels saga as a classical saga which 'reveals a great deal about the coincidence between the idealising valuations of the Icelandic national character in the thirteenth century and the idealising valuations of scholarly judgement in the twentieth' demonstrates almost in spite of itself the fine literary quality ofHrafnkels saga, not least in the way that itis farfromclear even from a plot synopsis that the hero is indeed idealized; the saga itself is more complex still. Arnold's characterization and analysis of the post-classical sagas is constantly stimulating and engaging. The 'ideological dynamics' of Fostbrcedra saga?that 'a tran? scendent ethic is achievable beyond ethnic insularity'?mark it out for Arnold as a post-classical product. Kroka-Refs saga, neatly and acutely described as 'paradig? matic in its presentation ofthe improbable in the language of probability', is held to MLR, 100.4, 2005 1163 be taking issue not with historical reality,but with the supposed representation (ac? tually idealization) of it in literary discourse: the classical Islendingasogur themselves. He sees Kroka-Refs saga as a proto-postmodernist parody ofthe classical sagas; until now critics have dismissed it as derivative, or even plagiaristic. One might argue, of course, that Arnold's judgements are as context-bound as those which precede him. But the Islendingasogur can...

Oeditorial Repression: The Case Histories of Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds

With the persistence of repetition compulsion, Modernists define their movement vis-à-vis the classic Freudian assumption that sexuality is the mainspring of virtually everything, including literary merit. The most libidinous of their aesthetic manifestos is Ezra Pound's characterization of creativity as a “phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos … driving a new idea into the great passive vulva of London.” Though C. G. Jung is far less enamored of the phallus, he endows masculinity with the “creative and procreative” power of Logos, which, echoing Pound, he calls the “spermatic word.” As if to fend off “scribbling women,” Jung warns that “mental masculinization of the woman has unwelcome results,” most notably frigidity, homosexuality, and “a deadly boring kind of sophistry.” Gertrude Stein's iconoclasm notwithstanding, her paradoxical assertion that her genius is masculine simultaneously reifies and defies this theory that biology determines literary destiny. In the Modernist canon, the pen is a penis, even when a cigar is just a cigar. The most influential of the movement's manifestos, T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” codifies aesthetic essentialism, positing an Oedipal model of canonicity contingent on the authority of literary fathers. Even Virginia Woolf's rejection of gendered canonicity inA Room of One's Ownassumes its tenacity, as if she were protesting too much against the inevitable.Woolf is not alone in protesting too much. Modernism's swaggering canonicity masks a castration anxiety that debilitated F. Scott Fitzgerald and even bedeviled Papa Hemingway inThe Garden of Eden. One of Hemingway's most famous letters to Fitzgerald, written during the tortured composition ofTender Is the Night, provides a paradigmatic example of the Modernist crisis of masculinity:We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it – don't cheat with it…. You see, Bo, you're not a tragic character.

Judging a Book by Its Cover: Publishing Trends in Young Adult Literature

A book's materiality is often taken for granted. In the publishing industry, however, the paratext, specifically the book's cover, is the foremost aspect of the book. The cover sells the book; literary merit becomes irrelevant if the book does not, or cannot, reach the reader. Yampell focuses on the cover art of Young Adult novels and explores recent trends in the marketing of YA literature to the elusive teen audience. A close analysis of the five different covers of Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat (1989) demonstrates trends in contemporary publishing and posits potential rationales for the publisher change the cover.

Nathalie Morello , Catherine Rodgers (review)

834 Reviews extensive analysis ofthe links between Bicentenaire Kit and Butor's other 'American' texts or between the Liechtenstein postcards and 6 810 000 litres d'eau par seconde, Description de San Marco, or Intervalle would undoubtedly have yielded illuminating results. Furthermore, although the link which Miller establishes between Bicentenaire Kit and home assembly kits is convincing, she does not address the issue ofthe work's artistic ancestry (e.g. Duchamp's Boite verte). Finally, the occasional authorial asides fitsomewhat uncomfortably within an academic study, though the enthusiasm they convey, combined with the generous illustration and translations, may well help to bring these works to the attention of non-specialist readers; it is certainly to be hoped that Miller's concluding plea forfurtherresearch will be heard by Butor specialists, as well as by supervisors and prospective doctoral students. Prisms and Rainbows offers sensitive, well-informed, and sympathetic readings of several challenging and multifaceted works and well prepares the ground for furtherexploration of this rich field. University of Edinburgh Jean H. Duffy Nouvelles ecrivaines: nouvelles voix? Ed. by Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers. (Faux Titre, 230) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2002. 331 pp. ?65. ISBN 90-420-1043-6. This collection makes a rich and substantial contribution to the growing body of criticism preoccupied with the emergence in the 1990s of a new generation of women writers writing in French, and like Gill Rye and Michael Worton's 2002 collection of essays, Women's Writing in Contemporary France (see MLR, 99 (2004), 106061 ), provides ample evidence to support the contention that a thriving new wave of women writers has and continues to make a sizeable contribution to the contemporary French literaryscene. Each of its fifteenchapters is dedicated to the work of a different woman writer.These include some, such as Christine Angot, Louise Lambrichs, and Amelie Nothomb, whose work will be familiar to readers and scholars ofcontemporary French literature, as well as others with whose work they may be less familiar, such as Genevieve Brisac and Linda Le. The collection opens with an insightful and very useful introduction of more than forty pages in which Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers examine the public reception in France of works by women and the many common textual preoccupations which unite an otherwise diverse group of writers. For Morello and Rodgers, the under-representation of women in the fields of publishing and academia, as well as a media-driven preoccupation with persona? lity rather than literary merit, has significantly contributed to the continuing poor visibility of women writers in France and a consistent failure to acknowledge their contribution to the contemporary French novel. In an attempt to address this apparent marginalization, Morello and Rodgers devote the second half oftheir introduction to a valuable discussion ofthe work of featured authors not only in the light of the thematic and formal features of ecriturefeminine but also from the perspective of numerous trends discernible within the contemporary French novel. The co-editors observe that, while female-authored texts of the 1990s share many points of contact with the work of previous generations of French women writers, the irony,intertextuality, and authorial aggression that mark contemporary French literary productions also characterize the work of many ecrivaines actuelles. Further, several contributions bear out the co-editors' observation that many recent textes de femmes display an ambivalence towards established feminist precepts. In their introduction Morello and Rodgers write: 'il semblerait que certaines ecrivaines des annees 1990 se sentent capables d'aller plus loin: de se concevoir implicitementfeministes tout en produisant des textes qu'il est difficiled'apprehender comme favorables a des pensees feministes' MLR, 100.3, 2005 835 (p. 45). Examples include Catherine Rodgers's searching discussion of the conflicting feminist interpretations invited by the many evocations of extreme states of being contained in early texts by Marie Darrieussecq. Shirley Jordan's exploration of the transgressive and often violent fictions of Virginie Despentes is marked by a similar interest in the feminist implications of female-authored textual productions. Despite the absence of an index, the collection is presented with a good deal of clarity.A short chapter summary?provided both in French and in English?appears at the head...

Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture , and: Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (review)

Reviews251 Carol Thomas Neely. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 244. $52.50 casebound; $21.95 paperbound. Virginia Mason Vaughan. Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800.Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 190. $75.00. These two books by respected scholars are comparable in many ways— particularly because of their shared interest in "marginal" groups who functioned as "others" in English Renaissance culture. Virginia Mason Vaughan explores staged representations of black skin color over the course of three centuries in early modern England, while Carol Thomas Neely studies staged representations of "mad" or "distracted" persons, especially in the hundred or so years beginning with the mid-1570s. In style, method, argument, and even in physical design, the two volumes have much in common, and both are also comparably successful. Both books, for instance, are concerned to untangle what Vaughan calls the "collapsed chronology" (3) of some earlier scholarly accounts oftheir subjects . In other words, each seeks to examine the process of historical change patiently and minutely, warning against the tendency of some earlier writers (including, in Neely's case, Foucault) to make sweeping generalizations in a way that erases our awareness of gradual, incremental developments. Each book, men, necessarily engages in helpful and illuminating dialogue with earlier scholarship, and indeed Neely's volume is especially impressive in this regard. Her footnotes (and both books, thankfully, do place their notes at the foot of each page, rather than in the rear) are often quite lengthy and detailed. Each book makes its readers aware of trends and tendencies in earlier scholarship, and each also indicates clearly how the present volume differs from its predecessors . Each book, then, provides a solid introduction not only to its nominal topic but to earlier relevant studies. Both books also, by surveying a multitude of dramas and studying how patterns "are repeated from play to play" (Vaughan, 4), provide a comprehensive overview of staged works dealing with their respective topics, even as they also call attention to the ways in which particular plays altered customary patterns . Neely has an advantage over Vaughan in this respect since many of the plays dealing with madness are fascinating works by major, canonical authors (especially Shakespeare) and thus are likely to be ofinterest to a broader range ofreaders because they are often aesthetically intriguing.Vaughan,on the other hand, surveys (and summarizes) not only canonical plays but also some that 252Comparative Drama seem ofslight literary merit (however interesting they may be in other respects). Vaughan, though, does focus major attention on Othello (surely one ofthe most interesting plays ever written). Readers who have admired her wonderful earlier work on that play will welcome her new thoughts here (and they may also wish that Neely had paused to examine the issue of madness in this Shakespearean tragedy, as she does so well when writing about Hamlet,Macbeth, and Lear). Both books emphasize the need to be familiar with period-specific terminology . Thus Vaughan writes (for instance) that the Moors discussed in her book would mainly "have been considered 'blackamoors' in the early modern period, as opposed to the tawny Moors ofnorthern Africa" (5). Likewise, Neely begins with an extensive discussion ofthe various terms used by early moderns to describe what we would term mental illness, and she particularly stresses the usefulness ofthe terms distracted and distraction since these words imply"early modern attitudes toward madness as a temporary derailing" rather than as a necessarily permanent condition (2). In both cases, then, the books seek thoroughly to historicize their discussions ofconditions that might otherwise seem to invite discussion from ahistorical perspectives. Other similarities between the two volumes are numerous. Both make effective use ofillustrations; both draw, in illuminating ways, on the work ofscholars from other disciplines (this is especially true of Neely); both allude briefly to present-day works of art dealing with the nominal topics of their volumes; both employ a method that encourages comparisons and contrasts between and among a whole series ofworks; both tie their titular themes to issues ofsex and gender; and both show how an "exotic" condition could be used to help define"normality." In...

The Lutetian Society1

This paper will examine the role of the late-Victorian Lutetian Society translators (Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, their leader, Ernest Dowson, Havelock Ellis, Percy Pinkerton, Victor Plarr, Arthur Symons) as translating subjects and cultural agents, united by the “cause” of providing British readers with unexpurgated translations of some of Émile Zola’s maligned, if not banned, masterpieces so that they might be able to form an unbiased opinion of the literary merits of the works. Furthermore, the paper will explore what motivated these translators to join in this clandestine translation project and try to give some insight into the effect of their (re)translation activity on their personal appreciation of Zola and the novel translated. The paper concludes that the act of (re)translation served to expand the cultural horizons of the Lutetian Society translators. Their translations would, in turn, expand the cultural horizons of those who read them.

How to Write the Great Darwinian Novel: Cognitive Predispositions, Cultural Complexity, and Aesthetic

This essay argues that the new field of Darwinian (or biocultural) literary criticism must attend to sociocultural change as well as evolved predispositions in the assessment of literary merit (aesthetic value). Because contemporaneous sociocultural factors constitute a major part of the environment of literary production, they have significant bearing on the perceived aesthetic value of any given work of literature. In particular, the development of a complex literary culture since the industrial revolution enables manipulations of literary forms not possible in oral culture. Focusing specifically on the example of postmodern antinarrative and the Peter Carey (1997) novel Jack Maggs, a retelling of Charles Dickens' (1860/1999) Great Expectations, the author suggests that subversion of linear story may have culturally contingent epistemic, and therefore perhaps aesthetic, value.

Cheating Death: Combat Air Rescues in Vietnam and Laos (review)

Reviewed by: Cheating Death: Combat Air Rescues in Vietnam and Laos John F.Gene Guilmartin Jr. Cheating Death: Combat Air Rescues in Vietnam and Laos. By George J. Marrett. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003. ISBN 1-58834-104-6. Photographs. Map. Pp. xxii,225. $27.95. Apart from its literary merit, this memoir is of value in addressing a largely overlooked aspect of the Vietnam War: the creation by the U.S. Air Force of a specialized combat rescue force to recover aviators downed deep within enemy territory in Laos and North Vietnam. Based on long-range Sikorsky HH-3 and later HH-53 "Jolly Green" helicopters, so-called for their radio callsign, it saved hundreds of aviators from capture and death, facing enemy antiaircraft artillery and on occasion surface-to-air missiles in addition to the usual small arms and automatic weapons fire. The big helicopters were supported by HC-130 command-and-control and communications relay aircraft that served as aerial tankers for the helicopters and—the focus of the book—a dedicated force of piston-engined Douglas A-1 Skyraider attack aircraft flying under the "Sandy" callsign. Helicopters proved too vulnerable for search operations and Sandys were responsible for locating survivors, supporting them with fire, serving as forward air controllers for flak suppression strikes, and providing fire support for the rescue helicopter. With a massive ordnance load, excellent low-altitude endurance and surprising maneuverability for so large an aircraft, the A-1 was perfect for the job, and a demanding job it was: In addition to the survivor, enemy activity, terrain and weather, Sandy Lead had to keep track of two helicopters (Jolly Greens committed in pairs with one in reserve), his wingmen, and supporting strike flights—the list is not exhaustive. Surely, there has been no more demanding job in the history of aerial warfare. In this reviewer's opinion, rooted in combat experience flying Jolly Greens in 1965-66 and 1975, the Sandy mission represents the limiting case in situational awareness, spatial orientation, and tactical judgment. For reasons that the reader will come to appreciate, not all A-1 pilots could handle the Sandy mission and only a minority qualified as Sandy Lead. Marrett was an experienced jet test pilot before he was a Sandy, and he addresses his subject with aeronautical sophistication. His tour with the Thailand-based 602nd Fighter Squadron (Commando) ran for a year beginning in April 1968, encompassing a full range of strike missions in support of the so-called "Secret War" in Laos in addition to an impressive array of rescue missions. Marrett's first Sandy sorties were flown as a wingman on the 31 May-2 June mission to rescue Navy A-7 pilot Lieutenant Kenny Fields, callsign Streetcar 304, the biggest rescue mission of the war to date—thirty-nine hours and 189 combat sorties—and not without cost: Fields's wingman ditched at sea, two Sandys were shot down and one pilot captured, another Sandy was heavily damaged and a Jolly Green was abandoned in enemy territory. Marrett received his baptism of fire watching his element lead shot down early in the mission and Fields's rescue required fire support so close that he was wounded by cluster bomb pellets from an accurate F-4 drop just [End Page 282] before being rescued. It is a dramatic story and well told, but by no means the end of the book. Marrett takes the reader through his tour, repeatedly confirming the adage that flying combat consists of hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of terror, nor was the terror always caused by enemy guns: miserable weather, errors in judgment, matériel failure, and poor leadership inflicted their share of losses on Marrett's squadron and his clinical descriptions of each loss provide a catalog of all that can go wrong—and usually does—in aerial warfare. The roll of his fellow pilots lost in combat and the account of the fates of those who survived, and of those whom they rescued, adds poignancy. This is an honest, well-written and exceptionally well-informed account, conveying the airmanship and human reality of the Vietnam air war "Up North" as well...

Florante at Laura and the History of the Filipino Book

The metrical romance Florante at Laura by Francisco Baltazar (1788–1862) is a unique case in the history of Philippine literature and publishing. It holds the distinction of being the only poem published in the country that has not gone out of print since its first publication, that has been translated into various local and foreign languages, and that continues to be read to this day. Baltazar, popularly known as Balagtas, has been hailed as the greatest of Tagalog poets and his Florante at Laura acclaimed as a masterpiece.1 But beyond literary merit, what has ensured the survival of both poet and poem through the years is the great historical, social, and cultural value they have been granted. The poem was written while Balagtas was serving time in a Manila prison, beginning around 1835 or 1836, and published in 1838 after his release. It comprises 399 monorhyming dodecasyllabic quatrains in Tagalog, and its original full title is Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at ni Laura sa kahariang Albania, kinuha sa madlang "cuadro historico" o pinturang nagsasabi sa mga nangyayari nang unang panahon sa imperio ng Grecia at tinula ng isang matuwain sa bersong Tagalog (The History of Florante and Laura in the Kingdom of Albania, based on various "historical scenes" or portraits relating events in ancient times in the Greek Empire and written by one who delights in Tagalog verse). The poem is, as one critic put it, "romantic and lyrical in inspiration, social in intent, and allegorical in conception."2 At one level, and as its title suggests, Florante at Laura is a love story. Balagtas drew from the literary tradition of courtly love in fashioning [End Page 131] Florante as the suffering lover, Laura as the beautiful beloved, and their love impeded by powerful forces. At the time of the poem's writing, Balagtas was himself an unfortunate suitor, imprisoned on false charges by a rich and influential rival. However, he apparently set out to do more with the poem than merely give expression to his misfortunes in romance. He indicated other levels of meaning in his preface, "Sa Babasa Nito" (To the Reader): Kung sa biglang tingi'y bubot at masaklap palibhasa'y hilaw at mura ang balat, nguni't kung namnamin ang sa lamang lasap, masasarapan din ang babasang pantas. (At a glance, this may look unripe and sour, because its rind is still green and immature, but when savoured, the taste of its meat will be enjoyed even by the discriminating reader.)3 Balagtas was thought to have employed elements far removed from nineteenth-century Philippine society to get his poem past the strict censorship of the government and the Church. Thus his fantastic characters and settings have been regarded as symbolic, and Florante at Laura has come to be read consequently as a stirring piece of patriotism—a depiction of the sufferings of the Filipino people under the oppressive Spanish colonial regime. Balagtas is now a Filipino hero and Florante at Laura one of the country's sacred texts. It was the longing for and imagining of a Philippine nation that engendered the secular canonization of the poet and his poem. This is evident not only in the historical developments that established, celebrated, and preserved Balagtas and Florante at Laura as part of the national heritage of the Philippines, but also in the printed versions of the poem themselves, which display this nationalist sentiment at work. Many volumes have already been written on the poet and the poem; however, very little attention has been paid to Florante at Laura's history as a book. This study seeks to address such a gap in scholarship. Premised on the concept of the book as a cultural artifact and its life cycle—publishing, manufacture, distribution, reception, and survival—influenced by political, social, intellectual, and commercial factors, it explores how Florante at Laura has survived in its printed form.4 This study surveys the publishing history of...