Literary Merit Research Articles

From the poetry front

As I write, it is Christmas Eve, the snow is falling, and Denise Levertov has died. Yesterday, I heard a taped interview with the poet: she described reading her poems at antiwar demonstrations, receiving letters of thanks from attendees suddenly turned on to poetry by her work, of young activists sallying forth equipped with knapsacks containing her poems. The frail voice of the elder poet evoked an era in which it seemed to many that poetry did-indeed was-political work, and that the audience reaction to poetry was tangible. But today, all the instruments agree that it is a dark, cold day for seriously entertaining such a notion. All the same, poets persist in doing so, as they have since the Renaissance. What has varied is the response of audiences and critics. The cold war hypostasization of a separation of spheres between poetry and politics seemed inadequate by the late 1970s, when it began to be acceptable in the American academy to consider the politics of canonical modern poets. By the early 1990s, more critics of modern U.S. poetry (such as Susan Schweik, Maria Damon, Cheryl Walker, Walter Kalaidjian, and Alan Golding) considered previously neglected figures, and did so in light of their politics. Nonetheless, the respectability of canonicity continues even for more radical critics, who often feel compelled to include a disclaimer apologizing for the lack of literary merit of the poems pre-

Samuel Johnson's Views on Scottish Gaelic Culture

H. R. Trevor Roper (Baron Dacre of Glanton since 1979) in his essay on 'The Highland Tradition of Scotland' pronounces the Gaelic language and culture of the Highlands as sterile and devoid of any original literary merit. This was because, he contends, the Scottish Gaels were not a distinct people but 'were simply the overflow of Ireland'. Their culture as a consequence was purely Irish and drew its sustenance from Ireland: 'their hereditary bards, physicians, harpers (for their musical instrument was the harp, not the pipes) came from Ireland'. This state of affairs had apparently not changed from Dalriadic times in the Dark Ages to the Age of Enlightenment, whose beneficent rays had failed to pierce the Stygian gloom of Ultima Thule. In fact matters had steadily got worse, and Scottish Gaelic literature, says Trevor-Roper, 'such as it was, was a crude echo of Irish literature'. And so it was, holds Trevor-Roper, that in an attempt to make up for this glaring deficit the notorious James Macpherson, alleged translator but in reality the only begetter of Ossian, had impudently provided the Scottish Gaels with a bogus history and ancient culture of their own. This alleged culture, too, was made up of heroic ingredients that were almost Homeric, and included incredibly polished manners.1 But in reality, according to Trevor-Roper, Highland culture scarcely existed. Trevor-Roper's essay on 'The Highland Tradition' has been praised for its rumbustious and entertaining qualities even though it obviously lacks authoritative documentation. But no one seems to have noticed

Voices from Cemetery Hill: The Civil War Diary, Reports and Letters of Colonel William Henry Asbury Speer (1861-1864) by Allen Paul Speer (review)

or fails, and this book does a good deal ofthe former and a bit ofthe latter . Selections from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Earl Hamner's On Spencer's Mountain, and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are as powerful as they were in their original settings. But then again, they are engaging, at least in part, because we are familiar with those settings. Other selections are engaging because of their relative obscurity, coupled with the historical importance-ifnot the literary abilities —ofthe writers. It is intriguing to read the complaints ofthe King of France on his Shenandoah Valley holiday, to learn the ornithological expertise of Theodore Roosevelt, or to experience the way the war in Vietnam intruded on the mountain retreat of Washington journalist Charles Seib. Less engaging are selections from a handful ofwriters who, while rightly included (given the book's focus), have neither the intrinsic power to engage us as quickly as briefselections necessarily demand, nor the historical familiarity to make their works interesting despite a lack of literary merit. While all or many ofthese writers may be excellent in larger doses, the single thematic commonality-that they deal in some way with the region under study-is sometimes insufficient to maintain our sincere interest. But compensations abound. To begin, the descriptions of certain natural and human phenomena create continuities which interest us regardless ofwhether a particular writer fails to engage. Perceptions of the Natural Bridge, for example, develop a cumulative power, and the more the perspectives differ, the better. Too, certain political progressions , such as the creation of the Shenandoah National Forest, allow selections to become mutually enriching which might not have engaged us alone. And ifsome ofthe relatively obscure writers might just as well have remained obscure, the opposite is also true: we owe Branch and Philippon our thanks for rescuing from relative obscurity such superb pieces as Archibald Alexander's "The Sublime and the Beautiful," Havilah Babcock's "Hunting Bee Trees," and the selections from The Journal ofJohn Fontaine. In sum, despite the occasional lapse, this collection is a superb addition to the literature of the Appalachian region. And as a focused scholarly introduction to the nature writing of a region, it presents an excellent model and exercises it with exemplary rigor. -William Jolliff Speer, Allen Paul. Voices from Cemetery Hill: The Civil War Diary, Reports and Letters ofColonel William Henry Asbury Speer (1861-1864). Johnson City, Tennessee: Overmountain Press, 1997. 217 pages. Paperback $19.95. 70 Allen Speer ofLees-McRae College has compiled and edited a book here that is a monumental exercise in family history. Yet Dr. Speer's task is only partly done. When Speer's Aunt Nellie Dobbins died in 1980, a large family archive was left to him, and he has vigorously supplemented these family documents by drawing upon the Official Records ofthe War of the Rebellion, the Vance Papers, letters and diaries of family friends, broad reading in standard Civil War titles and North Carolina local history , research in the National Archives and local newspapers. Yet there are more stories to tell from this family stretching across the eight generations buried in the old Methodist cemetery on the Speer farm in central Yadkin County, North Carolina. Most of this volume involves the remarkably detailed diary, letters, and reports ofWilliam Henry Asbury Speer, which covers his Civil War experience between August 1861, when he enlisted in the Confederate service, and his death at Ream's Station, south ofPetersburg, on August 29, 1864. Together they follow Colonel Speer from the Battle of Hanover Court House (May 27, 1862), where he was captured; his incarcerations at Fort Columbus, in New York harbor, and Johnson's Island near Sandusky, Ohio; then his return to the Confederate army and action at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. Civil War scholars will find important insights into the battles ofHanover Court House and Chancellorsville not found elsewhere. James I. Robertson has called these memoirs what a "family wartime chronicle should be." Colonel Asbury Speer was an able officer and died a hero of the Confederate cause. Yet he opposed secession and attacked slavery...

Littérature et idéologie dans le Québec du XIXe siècle: le cas religio-nationaliste d'"Un épisode de la vie d'un faux dévôt"

In 1853, a short story by the Quebec writer Eugene L'Ecuyer (1822-98), entitled Un episode de la vie d'un faux devot, provoked a significant public debate that clearly illustrates the religious and nationalist utilitarianism pervasive in nineteenth-century literature in Quebec. During this period, a written work had to first satisfy the demands of French-Canadian nationalism and Catholic morality before being appreciated on its literary merits. Trying to serve the didactic purposes of patriotism and religion, Eugene L'Ecuyer stirred a debate that reflects these two concerns.

Bibliography of Bertrand Russell. Volume I: Separate Publications, 1896-1990, and: Volume II: Serial Publications, 1890-1990, and: Volume III: Indexes (review)

Reviewed by: A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell. Volume I: Separate Publications, 1896–1990 by Kenneth Blackwell, Harry Ruja G. A. Wedeking and A. D. Irvine Kenneth Blackwell and Harry Ruja. A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell. Volume I: Separate Publications, 1896–1990. Pp. lvi + 611. Volume II: Serial Publications, 1890–1990. Pp. xiv + 575. Volume III: Indexes. Pp. xi + 305. London: Routledge, 1994. Cloth, $455.00 the set. As Russell remarked: “It is a curious fact that the most indubitably useful books are those most devoid of literary merit; for example, railway timetables and the telephone [End Page 146] book” (Vol. I, p. xlviii). Even so, since it will be agreed immediately that, for anyone interested in learning more about Russell’s writings, this beautifully crafted bibliography will be extremely useful, it would be a disservice to the authors to imply that it has no more literary merit than a railway timetable. The entire project simply has too much style. When Russell’s bibliographers began their task, fewer than 600 publications by Russell were known. By the time of publication they were able to record 181 of Russell’s books, pamphlets and leaflets, 629 contributions to books, pamphlets, and leaflets primarily authored by others, and approximately 3,550 serial publications of various types. Not being content merely to record the details of these publications, the authors follow each publication through its various editions, impressions, reprints, and translations. This is no mean task, given that Russell’s work has been translated into some 47 languages. In addition, the authors cite related pre-publication materials, give sources for rare and difficult-to-find books and documents, and include a comprehensive index. In short, they do nothing less than provide an authoritative, detailed record of Russell’s published work from 1890 to 1990. As the authors also point out, this is “a bibliography not only of Russell’s writings submitted and actually published, but also of certain other texts. Together they can be regarded as his published thoughts” (I: xix). Thus the bibliography mentions not only Russell’s books, articles, and published letters, but published accounts of his speeches, addresses, press conferences, and interviews; book reviews and recommendations (what Russell called “puffs”) for other people’s books; multiple-signatory letters to the editor and other similar documents; published extracts from Russell’s private correspondence and originally unpublished manuscripts; and audio recordings and films. A mark of the bibliography’s completeness is its catalogue of works that have been spuriously attributed to Russell, including two posthumous “spirit communications” (II: 573–74). The authors candidly describe Russell’s reaction when in 1966 he was shown slips of accumulated new entries: “ ‘I am impressed’, he said, ‘but I don’t think it’s worth it’ “ (I: li). Now, after several decades, we are finally in a position to evaluate Russell’s opinion. To do so, users of the bibliography will want to know the answer to three questions: Is the bibliography complete? Is it accurate? Is it easy to use? With regard to the first two of these three questions, the authors have made a commendable effort to balance comprehensiveness with accuracy (see their discussion of some problem cases, “Introduction,” I: xxvi ff.), rightly preferring accuracy to other desiderata. Concerning ease of use, one issue which comes to mind is whether the inclusion of such minor items as political pamphlets, letters to the editor, and statements made at news conferences, are always worth recording, or whether these items simply make the project so large as to be unmanageable. Once again, upon seeing the completed work, the reader will have little doubt that the correct decision has been made. Researchers interested in Russell’s political involvements and their relation to his more theoretical works, for example, will find this an invaluable resource. All in all, we believe that the bibliography will surpass the requirements of even the most demanding of users. It was, pace Russell, definitely worth it. [End Page 147] As with other volumes associated with the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell project, these three volumes are beautifully typeset and bound. They will be a pleasure to use for both students and scholars alike for generations to...

Renewing Our Sources: Children's Literature as Rediscovery

As many of us tell our students, one of the primary pleasures of a specialty in children's literature, if occasionally one of its frustrations, is that so much remains to be rediscovered and reassessed. Oddly, as Suzanne Rahn begins her superb book of just such rediscoveries by pointing out, the establishment of children's literature as an academic field has limited, rather than expanded, the number of titles used in college classrooms. Because professors, often new to children's literature themselves, have only a quarter or a semester to present their material, they tend to focus on well-known books that are readily available through publishers mindful of the bottom line. Gary D. Schmidt rues this homogeneity of material in his review (Children's Literature 23) of Glenn Sadler's 1992 Teaching Children's Literature: Issues, Pedagogy, Resources, in which the syllabi of many contemporary college children's literature courses are collected. And the recycling of the same books is perpetuated: Students who become schoolteachers take the knowledge of authors they obtained in college with them into their classrooms; there they add to these primarily books that have been canonized by having won awards. Books assigned or available to public school students during free reading times thus tend to be of the same kind or, to entice unwilling readers, books with little literary merit such as Goosebumps and TL· Babysitters' Club. Time once spent with one's local children's librarian, who would escort young book lovers to treasures such as Eleanor Farjeon's Martin Pippin in tL· Apple Orchard (1922), Edwin Abbott's Flatland (5th ed. 1963), or Dodie Smith's I Capture tL· Castle (1948), has been replaced by solitary moments at the impersonal computer to find information on books. In Rediscoveries in Children's Literature Rahn goes a long way toward

Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (review)

Reviewed by: Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 Claudia Nelson (bio) Carolyn Steedman. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Strange Dislocations is a work of many virtues. It is wide-ranging and erudite, clearly written and free of jargon, likely to direct our attention as readers to connections and circumstances that we may not have considered before. Its author, Carolyn Steedman, is a historian (she is Reader in the Centre for Social History at the University of Warwick and the author of an impressive array of books, most notably a 1990 study of Margaret McMillan, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain), and Strange Dislocations is perhaps more immediately useful for historians than for specialists in children’s literature. While it would certainly be possible and potentially fruitful to trace in fiction intended for children the ideas that Steedman explores here, her own focus is squarely on commentaries and theorizings aimed at adults. She notes near the beginning that she hopes her work “will have serious . . . implications for social histories of [End Page 122] children” yet to be written (7); its implications for literary studies merit consideration as well. Indeed, Steedman’s starting point is a literary work: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–96). Wilhelm Meister introduces a child acrobat, Mignon, who is figured as exotic, “other” by virtue of her Italian ancestry, her mysterious past, her body deformed in the service of her calling. Strange Dislocations traces ways in which Mignon—who dies in Goethe’s narrative—has been resurrected and rewritten, not only over the 150-year span delineated in Steedman’s subtitle, but into the present as well. Steedman employs the Mignon figure to personify what she sees in the Western culture of the last two centuries as an ongoing fascination with personification itself. Specifically, she argues that Mignon and her kin (the children of melodrama, child performers, children “on view” to the public eye, and ultimately childhood in its largest sense) have lived a dual life. On one level they are individuals with their own consciousnesses; on another they have long been made to embody changing adult beliefs about such cosmic questions as the nature of selfhood, of the past, of life and death. Steedman, then, is concerned with the perennially interesting question of the Romantic and post-Romantic fixation on childhood, in which children are both children and “children,” symbolic and often feminized figurings of adult obsessions. One virtue of Strange Dislocations, however, is its fresh angle of approach. While Steedman is by no means the first scholar to suggest that in talking about children, adults in and around the nineteenth century were really talking about themselves, she covers comparatively untrodden ground in equating the understanding of childhood during this period with a developing understanding of interiority. The tendency has been to link Victorian representations of childhood with Victorian reactions to a rapidly changing outside world; Steedman usefully reminds us that the inner world was (and is) undergoing a radical reshaping of its own. Thus her study, which begins by tracing Mignon’s provenance and “extra-textual afterlife” (21), quickly moves into a discussion of elements still smaller and more inward-tending than Mignon herself, namely cells. Examining Goethe’s understanding of cell theory and physiology, together with the nineteenth century’s rewriting of that understanding to fit newer ideas, Steedman focuses on the development of an important image, that of “the smallest place within: the fundamental unit of life” (59). Mignon, or the child in general, could thereafter be seen as the encapsulation of “notions of growth and development (and thwarted development)” (61), change and death merging into one. [End Page 123] Physiological theorizing quickly found its way into child-care manuals and medical texts, which encouraged a new level of interest in the child’s body and in how exterior appearances might reflect more important processes within. Steedman examines such writings to discuss how “children became the problem they represented: they became the question of interiority” (76). She then turns to a discussion of Freudian theory as an outgrowth of evolutionary and physiological thought in which the...

Bloom on Books, Reading, and the Determination of Greatness: A Critique and an Alternative

The place of the canon in institutions of higher education has been a matter for considerable debate in recent years. While there are important variations between different conservative positions in the battle over university reading requirements, many traditionalists assume that texts should be selected purely on the basis of their literary or philosophical merit, and that some people are able to objectively distinguish "Great Books" from those of lesser value. This paper concentrates on Allan Bloom's version of this thesis. Bloom suggests that "writers of quality" know other writers of quality. The author argues that Bloom's analysis is premised on a problematic theory of legitimation, a flawed conception of greatness, and a restrictive view of possibilities for reading at the university level. An alternative position - one based on the Freirean view of critical reading - is advanced.

La loa en las Indias: la obra de Antonio Marcos en las Fiestas de la Coronación de Carlos IV en Cuenca de Perú

<span class="subtitulo">In this paper the recovery of a eulogistic piece -loa- composed by Antonio Marcos for the celebrations held in the city of Cuenca in Ecuador on the occasion of the coronation of King Charles IV of Spain is describe d. The work may not be of any great literary merit, but it does reflect the activity that was triggered by the great festivities organised by Spanish-American cities to celebrate events conncected with the monarchy. Such commemorative acts allowed the survival there of a minor literary genre which in Spain was in crisis.</span>

The homeless of Ironweed: blossoms on the crag

The Homeless of Ironweed is both a meditation on Kennedy's remarkable novel and a literary and cultural analysis. Benedict Giamo's explorations of the social conditions, cultural meanings, and literary representations of classic and contemporary homelessness in America and abroad inform his understanding of the literary merit and social resonance of Ironweed. Throughout Giamo remains grounded in a close reading of the novel. He moves with great relevance from Dante to Kenneth Burke, from Sartre to Robert Jay Lifton, to locate meaning and value in the lives of Kennedy's characters; by extension, with intelligence and compassion, he regards the lives of the homeless who wander through our streets and shefters today.

CrossConnections: Literary Cultures in Cyberspace

CrossConnections: Literary Cultures in Cyberspace Rena Potok On-line literary and university reviews Search the Web for on-line creative writing, and you will find a burgeoning number of electronic literary reviews, or literary zines, ranging from the downright tacky and macabre to high quality poetry and fiction. Whatever their level of literary merit, one thing is clear: the Web is rapidly becoming a new medium for the production of literary culture. Indeed, we are witnessing the emergence of a new literary era, in which narrative and poetics interconnect with the world of artificial intelligence and computer-generated graphics to redefine our notions of how and where literature is produced. Yet, this literary-electronic interconnection produces a curious irony: the best of the literary zines are the most traditional, and the least experimental. While they offer high quality fiction, poetry, art and criticism, they do not explore the possibilities of the Web—hypertext is the first example that comes to mind—in the manner that might be expected. And those zines that do attempt to make use of the world of the Web tend to do so poorly, boasting experimental writing and hypertext links, but in fact presenting amateurish poetry and prose, and links that lead nowhere. One might think that an electronic narrative experiment like on-line zines would be an excellent way to explore the idea of crossing boundaries between literature and cyber culture, and of breaking down barriers between author and reader. Hypertext can afford a reader a large element of narrative authority, and can produce a collaborative experiment between reader and author—a collaboration that seems in keeping with the notion of synthesizing digital technology and established literature. The editors of these literary zines might expand their horizons and take advantage of the imaginative possibilities presented by the electronic medium they use. Furthermore, it would be interesting to see how they might respond to the challenges that would be presented by trying to translate hypertext from the zine forum to print media. Literary zines may be divided into two broad categories: high-caliber, traditional literary reviews that happen to be produced electronically, and low-caliber experimental zines that often try but more often fail to explore the potentially exciting possibilities of electronic literary writing. Put otherwise, these zines may be classified as the good, the bad, the ugly, and the university reviews. Among the better literary zines is Oyster Boy Review, published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which offers a combination of fiction, poetry and essays. The writing is strong, traditional and complex. Oyster Boy presents good quality writing, with the feel of a seasoned literary review. Other top-tier zines are The Abraxus Reader, The Richmond Review, The Mississippi Review, and The Paris Review (the latter two are electronic versions of the long-standing print reviews). In a category almost unto itself is The Jolly Roger, originating at Princeton University, and calling itself the “Flagship of the WWW literary revolution,” and “The World’s Largest, Most-Feared Literary Journal Ferrying over 12,000 to Greatness, While the Rest of the World Waits.” One could pause here, and say no more, but this unusual zine is worth characterizing, if only for its quirky qualities. The Jolly Roger has been described as prose and poetry for Generation X, and indeed has sections devoted to X-ers and their (presumed) interests and desires. The home page of the latest issue boasts many offerings, among them the warning: “Anyone trying to deconstruct anything aboard the Good Ship will be keelhauled.” Among other offerings are ghost stories, pirate tales, pseudo-literary criticism, “conservative environmentalism” (articles on “conserving Great Books and the Great Outdoors”), and an essay titled, “What I Learned in Toni Morrison’s Long Fiction Writing Class.” The visual presentation and text bullets are designed on a pirate-ship theme. While this zine cannot boast the best literary writing on the Web, it deserves points for originality and personality. It is a smart-alecky, skillfully written and provocative on-line magazine lampooning literary, academic, generational and traditional politics. Along other lines entirely is 256 Shades of Grey, which calls itself a “progressive” literary magazine, and features new writers’ works...

My "Dull-Witted Enemy": Symbolic Violence and Abject Maleness in Edith Wharton's Summer

MY "DULL-WITTED ENEMY": SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND ABJECT MALENESS IN EDITH WHARTON'S SUMMER William E. Hummel Arizona State University "Where in New England did Mrs. Wharton unearth the scene and people for her latest novel?" the Boston Transcript cried in 1917 of Summer—a novel that, despite the querulous reviews it received, Edith Wharton ranked as one of her five favorites.1 Unable to offer a satisfying answer to this question, many reviewers expressed their dislike for a novel that Wharton considered an extension of Ethan Frome (1911), whichhad enjoyed greatpopular success.2 Butifreviewers were puzzled and exasperated, Wharton's creation of what Shari Benstock calls "a novel that indicts American provincialism while invoking rural beauty" did not escape the eyes of the expatriate intellectual of Wharton's lifetime ;3 writing anonymously for The Egoist, T.S. Eliot praised Wharton as a "satirist's satirist" and valorized the novel for dealing a "deathblow " to the New England novel of"stunted firs . . . granate [sic] boulders . . . [and] white farmhouses where pale gaunt women sew rag carpets."4 Eliot's praise of Summer is undoubtedly connected to the novel's harsh critique ofromantic love, which inflects Prufrock's own "restless nights in one-night cheap hotels." Still, many critics of Wharton's day remained unconvinced ofthe novel's literary merits; some, as Eliot himselfpredicted , found the novel "disgusting."5 While few scholars today would challenge Wharton's esteem for Summer, the question of just where Wharton "unearth[ed]" Charity, Lawyer Royall, and Lucius Harney has elicited provocative and divergent responses. Recent criticism has taught us that instead of surveying a New England landscape for the donnée oíSummer, Wharton dove deep into a psychobiography that allowed her to write over the scar tissues of her virtually celibate marriage with Teddy Wharton, her passionate but abbreviated love affair with Morton Fullerton, and perhaps her veiled, taboo desire for her own father, George Frederic Jones. The surfacing of the "Beatrice Palmato" fragment in 1974 was the key piece of information critics needed to respond to the Boston Transcript's flustered question: "The relationships among characters in Summer are unrealistically close," Gloria C. Erlich notes, "all spawned by the same central imagination, which seems to have been an incestuous one."6 216William E. Hummel Wharton knew that her fascination with incest would be deeply subversive ofthe cultural imperatives ofAmerica as it grudgingly let go of its Victorian sensibilities; in a letter to Bernard Berenson, eighteen years after the publication of Summer, Wharton wrote, "I've got an incest donnée up my sleeve that wd make them all [Faulkner and Céline] look like nursery-rhymes."7 She would have had an appreciably more difficult time predicting the dissension among recent feminist scholars faced with her incest donnée.8 Candace Waid, for example, boldly claims that in Summer Wharton "domesticates the horror of incest by marrying Charity Royall to Lawyer Royall, the only father she has ever known," and thereby restores "stable hierarchies and the benevolence ofpaternal authority."9 More cautiously, Cynthia Griffin Wolffcontends that "Royall is willing to assist Charity in the transition from a love that is extrasocial ... to a love that contains both passion and affection—both some element offreedom and some appropriate component ofmutual dependency ."10 On the other side of this particular feminist divide is Erlich, who cautions that "the father-derived figures in Wharton's work act as forces inhibiting sexual consummation with more appropriate men"; thus Julius Beaufort interrupts "almost every one ofNewland Archer's visits to Countess Olenska, breaks into their incipient tryst in the patroon's house and thus short-circuits the fulfillment of their passion."11 Amplifying Erlich's circumspection, Sandra M. Gilbert, in her much-anthologized essay, "Life's Empty Pack: Towards a Literary Daughteronomy," denounces Lawyer Royall as "ultimately, no more than the role his professional title and allegorical surname together denote: a regal law-giver, a mythologized superego whose occupation links him with the library and with culture, that is, with the complex realm of patriarchal history that both puzzles and imprisons the wild child he is trying to make into a desirable daughter/bride."12 In a sense, Wharton...

Una traducción hispanoamericana de The Raven, de E.A. Poe:El cuervo, de José Antonio Pérez Bonalde

Pérez Bonalde (1846-1892) was a poet and translator from Venezúela who spent a important part of his life in the United States. This article focusses on one of his most outstanding literary merits: his early translation of the famous poem by E. A. Poe The Raven, El cuervo. It´s irnportance and influence in the development of the Hispanic Modernism is remembered, but commentaries and examples of the talent and resources of Pérez Bonalde, as a successful translator, fill the lines of most of the following paragraphs. Especially those related to the vocabulary and metrics. El cuervo supposes a real effort to faithfully adapt the original poem and denotes a profound knowledge of the American and Hispanic literary traditions.

The Last Word: Claude McKay's Unpublished "Cycle Manuscript"

During the summer of 1943, five years before his death and one year before his baptism into the Roman Catholic Church, Claude McKay began his Cycle Manuscript, a collection of fifty-four new and poems, mostly sonnets (Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance 358-59). He would never see it published. Too bitter and personal, claimed the editor at Harper's, and Dutton's said his sonnets were not poems at all (qtd. in Cooper, The Passion of Claude McKay 307). In a letter Max Eastman, editor of the socialist journal The Liberator and McKay's close friend, a frustrated McKay lamented a loss of his old style, as he appealed Eastman to look through the poems and make any needed corrections (qtd. in The Passion 307). Once the fiery poet who could deftly balance lyricism and polemics, McKay now felt more like Pope and Swift... than like Shelley and Keats and the Elizabethans. Betraying a waning confidence, he welcomed Eastman's judgment: And the poems! They are wonderful look at after you chop them up! (qtd. in The Passion 309). Despite Eastman's emendations, McKay's collection was never published. The work remains a typescript at the Beinecke Rare Book and Library at Yale University. But beyond any question of its literary merit, the Cycle Manuscript is an important document that sheds light on the reflections of a sensitive, gifted artist at a dramatic stage in his life.

The Depiction of Disability in Children’s Literature: Changes for the Better, with Particular Attention to Three New Titles; Mama Zooms (Cowen-Fletcher, 1993), The Race (Mattingley, 1995), and No Time At All (Sallis, 1994)

Children’s literature has the power and potential to reflect societal attitudes. Changes in attitudes towards disability in Western literature can be traced by “turning the pages” through the history of children’s books. This paper addresses issues concerning children’s literature published during the past few decades. Have there been improvements since Baskin and Harris’ (1977) major review of children’s fiction depicting characters with disabilities written between 1940 and 1977? This study revealed that stereotypical portrayals of characters with disabilities were common. Furthermore, have there been attempts to move away from the educative properties of “quasi-fiction” used to promote integration of children with disabilities into regular schools? This paper concludes that many recently published children’s books of the 1980s and 1990s are presenting a more realistic and positive picture of characters with disabilities. Three new titles have been examined in detail. The success of these books in creating a climate of tolerance and empathy towards characters with disabilities is due to their high standards of literary merit and attractive, sophisticated presentation.

The depiction of disability in children's literature: Changes for the better, with particular attention to three new titles; Mama Zooms (Cowen-Fletcher, 1993), the race (Mattingley, 1995), and no time at all (Sallis, 1994)

Children's literature has the power and potential to reflect societal attitudes. Changes in attitudes towards disability in Western literature can be traced by “turning the pages”; through the history of children's books. This paper addresses issues concerning children's literature published during the past few decades. Have there been improvements since Baskin and Harris’ (1977) majorreview of children's fiction depicting characters with disabilities written between 1940 and 1977? This study revealed that stereotypical portrayals of characters with disabilities were common. Furthermore, have there been attempts to move away from the educative properties of “quasi‐fiction”; used to promote integration of children with disabilities into regular schools? This paper concludes that many recently published children's books of the 1980s and 1990s are presenting a more realistic and positive picture of characters with disabilities. Three new titles have been examined in detail. The success of these books in creating a climate of tolerance and empathy towards characters with disabilities is due to their high standards of literary merit and attractive, sophisticated presentation.

Anatomy of wonder 4: a critical guide to science fiction

Barron's classic work has been updated and reorganized to reflect changes in the genre over the past decade, and meet the needs and tastes of today's readers and those who work with them. Renowned experts in the field have contributed to this new edition, providing authoritative historical and contemporary coverage of the best in science fiction. Users will find succinct, critical discussions of more than 1,400 SF novels, story collections, and anthologies. In addition, there is a comprehensive survey of the secondary literature-books and other resources that discuss fantastic literature, film, and illustration-plus chapters on teaching SF and a directory of libraries containing significant collections of science fiction. Titles appropriate for or appealing to teens are noted, as are award-winning titles and titles of literary merit. Author, title, and theme indexes provide additional points of access. An essential tool for collection development, research, and reference, this book also supports readers' advisory work. Young adult and adult. Grades 9 and up.

Cardinal Philip Howard OP, Rome and English Recusancy

Philip Howard remains an enigmatic character — clearly influential in Church and State in his time — but a shadowy figure in the history of English Recusancy. Yet his career opens a window on all the major problems which dogged the English Catholics in the 17th century — episcopal government, relations between religious and secular clergy, loyalty to the Stuarts, the ramifications of the Oates plot and, of course, finance. He played a crucial role in the most turbulent period of Recusancy between the Restoration and the Revolution Settlement, yet because he spent the last six months of his life destroying papers his influence is not easy to assess. Howard was the subject of a lengthy unpublished biography by his later confrere Father Godfrey Anstruther OP. This was a project which began in 1955 when Anstruther was living at Santa Sabina in Rome and was Spiritual Director at the Venerable English College. He wrote to a friend, “... I have been rereading Palmer’s Life of Howard, and I never realised before how uninspired it is. It has all the matter but no literary merit and, alas, no references. Shall we do a new one?” His new one occupied much of the rest of his life and it was a source of frustration that he was never able to get it published. This paper draws heavily upon it and I am grateful for the late Father Anstruther’s exhaustive research and to Father Bede Bailey OP for access to his files at the Dominican Archives in Edinburgh.

Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones's Production of Langston Hughes'sMulatto

Although Langston Hughes'sMulattoholds the record as the second longest Broadway production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry'sA Raisin in the Sun), the reasons behind its commercial success have been virtually ignored. This oversight in part reflects a tendency among theatre scholars to treat the dramatic text as the primary (if not the only) source of a play's meaning. In the case ofMulatto, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defendsMulattoas a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s “to oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama” because of the recognition of Bert's “tragic situation” (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist thatMulattois melodramatic, Smalley advises, “let [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.” Smalley presupposes a dichotomous relationship between fiction and reality, advancing a mimetic theory in which representation directly corresponds to the real. Rather than answering specific charges, he defines contemporary race relations as melodrama, implying thatMulatto, even if melodramatic, is “natural” and “accurate.”

The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice*

The Year 1600 Witnessed A significant though little-noted event in Italian cultural history: the publication of the first substantial full-length works by Italian women writers arguing the case for women's moral and intellectual equality with men. The writers in question were two Venetians, Lucrezia Marinella and Modesta Pozzo (Moderata Fonte); their works, respectively, a polemical treatise,La nobilta et I'eccellenza delle donne,and a dialogue, Ilmerito delle donne.These texts, long neglected, have recently begun to attract a certain amount of critical attention: particularly Fonte'sMerito,far the more accessible of the two and a work, as is now being recognized, of considerable literary merit.