Literary Merit Research Articles

Heywood’s Epic Theater

Heywood’s Epic Theater Mark Bayer (bio) As scholarship of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama turned towards questions of politics in the 1980s and 1990s, many commentators turned to Bertolt Brecht for a theoretical vocabulary to describe a socially engaged theater of the early modern era. Jonathan Dollimore opened his groundbreaking Radical Tragedy (1984) with an epigraph from Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule, insisting (a few pages later) that “Brecht in fact figures prominently in my argument to the effect that a significant sequence of Jacobean tragedies, including the majority of Shakespeare’s, were more radical than has hitherto been allowed.”1 Brecht, in other words, was essential in illuminating this important and underappreciated aspect of Shakespearean drama. For materialist critics like Dollimore, turning to Brecht offered an extraordinarily cogent and enormously productive critical agenda. After all, Brecht himself was interested in Shakespeare’s history plays and saw in them a precursor of his own theatrical experiments. Just as Brecht sought to save the German theater from the bourgeois aestheticism that had come to permeate it in the early twentieth century, so Dollimore’s generation of critics sought to save Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists from an arid formalism that ignored the social and political energies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Although I don’t wish to repudiate this productive line of inquiry, I want to suggest that the application of Brechtian principles to early modern drama is considerably more complicated. To locate traces of what we now perceive as Brechtian dramatic techniques in the drama of this period, I want to do more than examine the plays for moments of artistic discontinuity, ideological rupture, and self-conscious theatricality. Instead, I want to think about the positioning of early modern audiences in relation [End Page 371] to the drama they witnessed. How were specific groups of spectators affected by these plays? How did theatrical performance interrupt their daily lives, enlisting them in the production of theatrical meaning that resonated with their shared experiences? I will argue that the early modern theater in several important ways resembled what Brecht would later call the “epic” theater, but that we might more easily recognize that theater’s contributions to a socially resonant dramatic praxis by looking beyond Shakespeare and the Globe to Thomas Heywood and the Red Bull. Specifically, I want to look at the five-part cycle of plays known as the Ages (c. 1609–13) that draw on classical epic to trace Roman mythical history from the birth of Jupiter to the fall of Troy.2 Examining the Ages, and the venue at which they were staged, according to Brechtian precepts gives us a new way to appreciate these frequently disparaged plays while marking a significant contrast with Shakespeare’s much more acclaimed history plays. When evaluated according to twentieth-century critical tastes, the Ages didn’t measure up to the canonical plays with which they were compared; the action and spectacle that are Heywood’s plays’ most prominent features pale next to the linguistic density, vivid characterization, and literary merits of Shakespearean drama.3 Understanding these plays historically, however, we must recognize that their differences have less to do with abstract aesthetic standards and more to do with the different expectations and tastes of the audiences that the two playwrights catered to. According to James Wright’s retrospective account in 1699, the Red Bull was “mostly frequented by citizens, and the meaner sort of people,”4 a group perhaps best placated by nostalgic tales, visual effects, and the exploits of larger-than-life classical heroes—audiences who enjoyed nothing but “drums, Trumpets, Battels and Hero’s,” according to that theater’s detractors.5 Thomas Dekker, writing for the Red Bull in 1612, realized that audiences at this playhouse required a different kind of play, that the playwright’s “Worthy friends Muse...deserve[s] a Theater full of very Muses themselves to be Spectators.”6 Rather than “hearing a play,” as Hamlet proposed to the audience at the Globe, the “uncapable multitude” at the Red Bull seemed more interested in seeing the drama, a predisposition satisfied abundantly by the Ages.7 [End Page 372] Such claims have...

Text Complexity and “Comparable Literary Merit” in Young Adult Literature

Text Complexity and “Comparable Literary Merit” in Young Adult Literature

Why You Can/’t Believe the Arabian Historian Cide Hamete Benengeli: Islam and the Arabian Cultural Heritage in Don Quixote

Why You Can/’t Believe the Arabian Historian Cide Hamete BenengeliIslam and the Arabian Cultural Heritage in Don Quixote1 Nizar F. Hermes In Don Quixote: A Touchstone for Literary Criticism (2005), distinguished Cervantine scholar James A. Parr does not seem to go too far when he hails Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605–1615)—hereafter Don Quixote—as the perfect model of a “pivotal text,” that is “prescient in its formulation of the strategies of the self-conscious, self-questioning, and other experimental and historical texts of our time” (6). Indeed, in addition to its superlative literary merit and fictional uniqueness, Don Quixote is historically and culturally rich. This is very much true, for example, of the text’s distinctively complex dramatization of the early modern encounter between Europe and Islam. This encounter, of course historically speaking, was primarily embodied in the conflict between Habsburg Spain and the Ottoman Empire, then Europe’s and the Islamic world’s two leading powers.2 Although the Spanish-Ottoman rivalry was performed in different territorial and, mainly, maritime battlegrounds—the Battle of Lepanto (1571) looms large in this regard—the textual ones were not less significant and Don Quixote is a compelling textual illustration.3 In growing numbers, scholars are arguing that the “contact zone,” between Europe and Islam is textually and contextually very detectable throughout the works of Cervantes.4 “Islam,” to quote Frederick Quinn’s The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western Thought (2008), “was a topic not only in French and English political, religious, and cultural writings but also was the focus of a major seventeenth-century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes” (83). While a fair amount of ink has been spilled on the Islamic theme, and that of Algiers in particular, in works such as Los Bagnos de Argel (The Bagnios of Algiers), Los Tratos de Alger (The Traffic of Algiers), El Galardo Español (The Gallant Spaniard) and La Gran Sultana (The Grand Sultana), there still exits a lacuna when it comes to exploring Cervantes’ complex representation of Islam and his attitude towards the Arabo-Islamic cultural heritage in his magnum opus. Through addressing what I see as Cervantes’ reference to the medieval propaganda myth of “the idol Mahomet,” his literary transfiguration of the early modern subversive phenomenon of the conversion to Islam, and his ambiguous feelings [End Page 206] towards the Arabian historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, I will re-visit Cervantes’ views of Islam and Muslims. I will, further, explore—again, what I see as—the not yet duly studied possible Arabic influence on Don Quixote. I will do so by comparing, for the first time in Cervantine scholarship, the Moorish tale (i.e., “The Captive’s Tale”) to the Arabian Alf Layla wa-Layla’s Frankish tale known alternatively as “Princess Miriam the Girdle-girl, Daughter of the King of France” and “The Love Tale of ʿAli Nur al-Din the Cairene and Princess Mariam, Daughter of the King of France.” I will finally, albeit briefly, draw attention to the Arabic maqāma genre whose features and motifs bear some striking similarities to some of the salient narratological and structural aspects of Don Quixote. The hope is to stir further interest and future research on the possible (in)direct influence of the Arabic maqāma genre on Don Quixote.5 It is “universally acknowledged” that Don Quixote is introduced at the beginning of the narrative as an obsessive reader of romances of chivalry and a zealous admirer of Christian knights. “In short,” we are told, “our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset” (21). In his seemingly never-ending disputes with his entourage, specifically the learned curate of the parish and the connoisseur Master Nicholas, barber of La Mancha, he prides himself on fervently defending the valor of his favorite knights Amadís de Gaula, El Cid Ruy Díaz, Bernardo del Carpio,6 giant Morgante, and Reinaldos de Montalban.7 We need to keep in mind that most, if not all, of the aforementioned...

Critical Literature Pedagogy

This article introduces Critical Literature Pedagogy (CLP), a pedagogical framework for applying goals of critical literacy within the context of teaching canonical literature. Critical literacies encompass skills and dispositions to understand, question, and critique ideological messages of texts; because canonical literature is often taken-for-granted as conveying literary merit or cultural value, it offers apposite opportunity to engage students with critical literacies. Using Of Mice and Men as an example, this article illustrates how literacy educators can use CLP to teach their students to examine how canonical texts are embedded in and shaped by ideologies.

The Literary Essay as Encomium in Virginia Woolf’s “The Enchanted Organ”

This article proposes a rhetorical analysis of “The Enchanted Organ”, a short essay by Virginia Woolf that reviews Anne Thackeray’s collection of letters that was published after her death. In this review, Woolf portrays Anne Thackeray’s character starting from extracts from the diary and letters that she wrote as part of her literary production. The argumentative nature of this essay can be studied by means of a rhetorical analysis that examines the operations of inventio , dispositio and elocutio . The account of arguments and rhetorical figures that appears after the analysis of these operations results in an interpretation of presence that draws Anne Thackeray as a gentle figure that was content with simple things and that “was dancing to the music” of her writing. As a result, “The Enchanted Organ” can be read as an encomium that praises Thackeray’s cheerful personality rather than her literary merits.

Powerful women, vulnerable men and postfeminist masculinity in men’s popular fiction

Part of a wider project concerned with the mediation of intimate relationships, this paper examines ‘guy lit’, ‘lad lit’ or ‘postfeminist male romances’. The genre has been growing for the past two decades but has received little scholarly attention. Understood as an answer to ‘chick lit’, the genre is organised around the trials and tribulations of young to middle-aged men as they navigate the perils of growing up and looking for love. The analysis presented here is not concerned with literary merit or cultural value but rather looks sociologically at these popular texts, examining their constructions of masculinity, femininity and intimate gender relations. Drawing on an analysis of 25 novels, the paper explores the ‘unheroic masculinity’ depicted, in which men are presented as troubled, bumbling, hypochondriacal losers in counterpoint to women’s (apparently effortless) success and accomplishments. Although the affable, self-deprecating (un)heroes of postfeminist male romances seem like unlikely ideological warriors, the paper argues that this patterned popular construction effects ideological work by contributing to a distinctively postfeminist sensibility in which male power is repudiated, while feminism is humorously ‘sent up’.

Embedded Poetry and Coterie Readers in Mary Wroth’s Urania

This article explores how Mary Wroth’s Urania is positioned at the intersection of manuscript and print cultures. While part 1 of the romance offers a literary representation of manuscript culture; Wroth, significantly, chose to print her romance. Wroth’s choice reflects her ambivalent relationship with her literary circle and may have allowed her both to critique her coterie audience and to seek an audience who would read her romance for its literary merit rather than to “decipher” it for personal information. Though critics have suggested that part 1 of the Urania offers a largely positive portrayal of a welcoming coterie audience for Pamphilia’s verse, its portrayal of the coterie is much more complicated, particularly because the coterie’s attempts to decipher Pamphilia’s verse push her to create ever-more indecipherable poetry. The article concludes with a discussion of readers’ handwritten endings to the printed Urania , which complicate the relationship between reader and writer, as well as between manuscript and print.

Johann Damgaards Alithia (1597). Genrehistorie, teksthistorie og idehistorie: Omkring et dansk fyrstespejl til Christian 4.

The history of Danish political thought is a neglected field of study. This is due to scholarly traditions as well as to the lack of “great texts.” The present article presents a Danish manuscript mirror of princes, Alithia, written in 1597 by Johann Damgaard and presented to King Christian 4. The text itself is neither original nor of exceptional literary merit, but the King liked it and discussed it chapter by chapter with the author. In other words: Damgaard’s Alithia seems to have hit the bull’s eye of political correctness and royal taste. This makes it an interesting source for Danish political culture in the decades around 1600. It represents a synthesis of humanist and reformation ideology where humanism has determined the form while the contents is mostly traditional Christian kingship in the protestant tradition. An exploration of Damgaard’s sources reveals that Damgaard’s text represents a sofisticated writing up of material found in two earlier manuscript mirror of princes by Jens Skafbo from 1590 and 1592 respectively. Skafbo, on the other hand, compiled his mirror of princes on the basis of Paulus Helie’s Danish adaption (printed 1534) of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Institutio principis christiani and diverse other texts mainly from the 1580’s. This plagiarism, as modern eyes would see it, was typical of the age. The interesting point is the thorough stylistic and ideological twist towards humanism that Damgaard gave his text. A last interesting point is that these mirrors of princes were not destined for the King alone. In more modest and shortened manuscript editions they circulated among the higher nobility. In one such edition of Damgaard’s Alithia one finds a paragraph with no parallel in the King’s version. It describes the relation between King and realm by means of a parable about a lion (the king) and a unicorn (the realm). If the lion behaves peace is assured, but if the lion offends the unicorn it will throw him out by means of its sharp and strong horn (the nobility). The paragraph ends with some barbed verses about the expulsion of King Chrsitian 2. in 1523. This is precious evidence for a radical aristocratic ideology which only occasionally, if at all, surfaces in the sources.

The role of nationalism in Australian war literature of the 1930s

Australian readers consumed with great interest the fruits of the war books boom that began in Europe in the late 1920s. But it was not until the early 1930s that returned soldiers in Australia began to consider the war in memoir and fiction. This article examines the nature of Australian writing about the Great War during the 1930s and seeks to explain why the conflict produced little work of enduring interest or literary merit. It argues that literary representations of the war, which gave emphasis to its tragic and traumatic elements, were overwhelmed by those remembering a war that challenged but did not defeat its Australian participants. The article traces the reason for the triumph of what can be called ‘middlebrow’ representations of the Great War to the nationalist boon delivered by the experience of war to a colonial settler society of uncertain status. In prosecuting this argument, the article challenges the transnational emphasis of contemporary scholarship about literary modernism and seeks to reassert the significance of the nation-state as a category of analysis.

The Sympathetic Vampire:A Study of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

The myth of the vampire has continued to frighten and fascinate people all over the world. The idea of an undead night-stalker that feeds on human blood has been around for centuries and endures to this day. Numerous countries and cultures across the globe have personal deviations of a similar mythical entity. No matter the variation, all the vampire tales have a key commonality ‒ the lust for human blood. The cornerstone upon which all the vampire characters now turn was established in 1897 byBram Stoker in his novel Dracula which, since its publication, has never been out of print and its title character, Count Dracula, has become an icon of terror that inspired many subsequent novels and stories of the vampire fiction genre. However, only a handful of these novels were considered of literary merit. That handful includes the works of Anne Rice (1941‒) in which she develops a new way of portraying the vampire in fiction. The figure of vampire has changed from the evil and menacing figure of Dracula to a kinder and more sympathetic vampire who questions the meaning of its existence.

Relation du naufrage de l'Eole sur la cote de la Cafrerie en avril 1829

D. J. Culpin has salvaged from the depths of literary history a hitherto unexplored account of a nineteenth-century French shipwreck. En route from India via La Réunion, the Eole was wrecked on the south-eastern coast of Africa in April 1829. Her eight surviving crew members and passengers subsequently journeyed overland to Cape Town through the region then known as ‘Cafrerie’, a hinterland between the southern frontier of Portuguese Mozambique and the northern frontier of the English-administered Cape Colony. The account of their experiences was written by Charles Étienne Boniface, a journalist, author, and playwright then living in Cape Town, whom the survivors encountered on their arrival. Boniface figures in the text as the aptly named ‘Monsieur Mordant’, who gives the group a tour of Cape Town in order to engage in a biting satire of the colony's society and institutions. Boniface claims to have based his account on first-hand reports of the survivors' experiences, and Culpin speculates in his Introduction as to which member of the crew might have been the original author. He opts for Charles Lafitte, a passenger on the Eole who was designated ‘le mentor de la bande’ (p. 21) and on whose perspective much of the narration is centred. Opening with a preface from the current French consul in Cape Town, this edition presents the work as a foundational text in Franco-South African relations. Boniface's account was the first French-language text published in Cape Town, and it also reveals much about French attitudes towards British and Dutch colonization of the Horn of Africa in the early nineteenth century. The work's publication by subscription (a list of the subscribers who financed the first edition is included here) also, arguably, makes it an important document in terms of the Cape's social and intellectual history. Boniface's text is introduced as being of twofold interest to the modern reader. First, in anthropological terms, Culpin connects the author's descriptions of the manners and customs of southern African tribal populations with Diderot's descriptions of Tahiti or Charlevoix's work on Native Canadians. However, Boniface's account appears to belie these Enlightenment antecedents. The native peoples are referred to as ‘barbares’ (p. 31) and ‘animaux à figure humaine’ (p. 69), while the survivors' journey is summed up as ‘un séjour où la nature humaine s’était offerte à notre vue dans son dernier degré d'abrutissement' (p. 76). Culpin also stresses the work's literary merit and connections with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau; but in fact Boniface here demonstrates a marked preference for the colonizing ‘hommes civilisés’ (p. 39) over any notional ‘natural man’. Culpin is right, however, to emphasize Boniface's fascinating intertextual references to a range of French works, including plays by Molière. Lafitte's use of honey as a magic elixir to cure a sickly African child is, for instance, likened to the actions of Sganarelle in Le Médecin malgré lui. The attitude of manipulative superiority implied here, as elsewhere in the text, makes this newly discovered work ripe for exploration by postcolonial theorists, literary historians, and scholars of the colonial period.

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Determining the Criteria for Graphic Novels with Literary Merit

This article describes a rubric by which graphic texts can be evaluated for literary merit.

A Study of Female Characters in Selected Novels of Krishna Sobti: A Feminist Approach

Whenever an unbiased literary history of the 20th century is written it will be remembered as the century of woman writer. And this would be judged not by number of women writers but by the quality and literary merit of their writings. Writers like Ashapurna Devi, Ismat Chugtai, Qurratulain Haider, Mahasweta Devi, Kamla Das, Amrita Pritam, Shivani, Anita Desia, Shobha De and many others have broken through the given sexist politics of literature and make a place for themselves as writers who happened to be women. In this century India has seen the rise of women writers. Krishna Sobti is a pioneering writer in Hindi who has paved way for many other writers to follow. The importance of Krishna lies not merely in the fact that she writes in a language which is read by a large number of people of the country but that she can tell the story like none other. She captures the very pulse of the times by portraying the lives of common people. Two of her novels 'Let me Live' and 'Heart has its Reasons' are portrayed here for their feminist appeal.

The Religious Language of Russian Poets in 1812

Russian poets during the reign of Alexander I widely employed images and stories from Old Testament Scriptures to describe the ongoing wars with Napoleon, especially regarding the invasion of 1812. Their ideas are collected in a body of patriotic literature, which has received little attention for its literary merits but provides insight into the contemporary climate of opinion and the ways in which Russians responded to the French Revolution and Napoleon. Across Europe, other writers and intellectuals exhibited millenarian tendencies, seeking a renewed world with the old order swept away. While Russian writers exhibited similar concerns with finding a way to regenerate the decadent European world, they did so by appealing to their own experience as expiation for Europe’s sins. This study argues that the Napoleonic Wars catalyzed the development of Romantic Nationalism and the development of a messianic national myth, which arose primarily in Moscow after its destruction in 1812.

Down Among the Fishes by Natalka Babina

100 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews This triangle resonates throughout the novel. But the geopolitical forces spawned by 9/11 drive the plot: “History is the third parent.” Accompanying Rohan on a journey to Peshawar , Jeo and Mikal surreptitiously enter Afghanistan, in “the crosshairs of history,” to help wounded civilians . Foredoomed by Kyra, sold by warlords to the Taliban, attacked by anti-Taliban villagers, Jeo dies, and Mikal is taken into US custody. Released after extensive torture, he mistakenly kills two US soldiers and undertakes a grueling journey home, where he impregnates the widowed Naheed. Returning to Afghanistan to aid a family who sheltered him there, he disappears from the novel after giving himself up to the Americans . At home, meanwhile, Mikal’s brother, Basie, married to Jeo’s sister , Yasmina, dies at the Christian school where they both teach, in a bloody hostage incident orchestrated by Kyra. But Yasmina, like Naheed, is pregnant, and the birth of their sons signals hope. Some aspects of this novel may distance readers. The achingly lyrical style that renders Rohan’s domain goes flat, graphic, almost Hollywoodish for fighting and torture scenes. Flashbacks and histories repeatedly interrupt the omniscient narrator’s present tense, so the novel can feel overmediated. And a reliance on coincidence seems programmatic. Nevertheless, Aslam credibly represents the internal and external forces engulfing Pakistan and Afghanistan as the American behemoth struggles to end jihad. The Blind Man’s Garden, finally, designates not only Rohan’s family but his beleaguered region and our global culture, wherein warring ideologies limit vision and perpetuate violence but which, properly tended, can yield beautiful fruit. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Natalka Babina. Down Among the Fishes. Camilla Stein, ed. Jim Dingley, tr. London. Glagoslav. 2013. isbn 9781782670766 Natalka Babina’s Down Among the Fishes has all the charm of a bad adventure novel. Any aspirations of literary merit fall by the wayside in its gleeful and unabashed pursuit of entertainment value. The novel’s heroine, Ala Babylyova, is living a relatively peaceful life in her Belarusian village when, suddenly, the mysterious death of her grandmother launches her into national and international conspiracies involving opposition politicians, thugs, buried treasure, and even time travel. Babina doesn’t waste too much time on her characters’ motivations or on the internal consistency of the world she creates. Instead, she packs the novel full of exciting subplots, cases of mistaken identity, and visits from ghosts. By the end, all the wild strands of Ala’s adventures do not neatly resolve into anything coherent , nor do they seem to be commenting on any of the genres they imitate. They exist, it seems, for no other reason than to keep the reader entertained. In this, Babina succeeds. And by the time the book is finished, its unrestrained gimmickry has kept the reader’s attention focused, for 350 pages, on a country and culture often forgotten in the farrago of eastern Europe. Belarus nestles among better-known neighbors Russia , Ukraine, and Poland, all of whose languages and influence cross into its territory. “On my right,” Ala, the narrator, tells us, “I can hear people shouting in Polish. . . . To my left people are speaking Russian.” All the while, Ala writes in Belarusian. Whatever its faults, Down Among the Fishes successfully evokes the liminality of its setting. Babina’s characters are all caught in the middle of this Babel, where speaking a particular language becomes a matter of etiquette and ethics as much as ethnicity. The local strongman speaks Russian to his connections in the capital but addresses villagers in Belarusian when he wants to buy their land, and Ala navigates her increasingly dangerous world with amazing linguistic and cultural nimbleness. Ala’s linguistic aplomb is a much more compelling talent than her fantastical physical endurance or her ability to time travel, and to the English-language reader it might seem almost superhuman. In fact, the realism in the background of Babina’s novel is consistently more interesting than the flashy fantasy of its plot. Ala’s very realistic personal history gives her character an unusual perspective and Ulrich Baer Beggar’s Chicken: Stories from Shanghai Earnshaw Books Humorous and candid, Ulrich Baer’s first book of...

Three Very Different Translators: Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon and Richard Thomson

As a rule, medieval versions tended to function as replacements of the original Greek text: very few contemporaries could read Greek, and so they were not equipped to take issue with the equations of their translators. Moreover, most medieval trans- lations were of works of Greek science, and of the technical manuals of medicine and philosophy, practical works with no pretensions to literary merit....I shall suggest that the idea of translations as replacements retained its currency in the sixteenth century, but that it coexisted with an awareness that specific claims about replacement would not survive scrutiny.

Relative Obscurity: The Emotions of Words, Paint and Sound in Eighteenth-Century Literary Criticism

SummaryThis essay investigates the marginalisation in eighteenth-century literary theoretical discussions of a category of emotion, ‘the affections’, which plays a significant role elsewhere in eighteenth-century thought, especially in moral philosophy and theology. It proposes that affections are incompatible with a series of principles that underpin dominant concepts of the literary in early and mid-eighteenth-century literary criticism by authors including Kames, Burke, Alison, Duff, Brown, Du Bos, Trapp and Beattie, many of whom were associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. By analysing eighteenth-century theories of the perceived obscurity of literary emotions in comparison with the emotions of the other fine arts (in particular, painting and music), and by highlighting the perceived distinction of literary emotions from what theorists of the period term ‘reality’, it shows how the supremacy of the belief that literary merit is tied to the individuality, particularity, and plausibility of represented emotion gives rise to a prioritisation of passions over affections in literary critical discussions about the emotions.

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Reexamining Sir Walter Scott in the Light of Three Female Scottish Novelists

Since the 1920s, criticism on Sir Walter Scott, ironically oscillated between the Scylla of presenting Scott as the progressive founder of the historical novel, and the Charybdis of being considered the first British author of international best sellers of questionable literary merit. The former view, of course, comes from the work of Hungarian critic Georg Lukacs, and more specifically from his groundbreaking The Historical Novel (1947), book of criticism in which he put forward critical approach that emphasized how 'great novels' should link their narrative elements (characters mainly, but also all kinds of descriptions, motifs, themes, point of view etc...) to the material conditions of existence of given historical moment. For Lukacs, the genuine historical (or 'total') novel appears with Sir Walter Scott, although this writer's conscious political allegiance was, nevertheless and according to the Hungarian scholar, utterly reactionary (Lukacs 8-12). However, the of this Scottish author, Lukacs argues, present the reader with the progressive disintegration of residual, aristocratic, social forms as consequence of the emergence of capitalism (the bourgeoise) (3-19). Additionally, Scott - for Lukacs -understood how historical events intervene in the affairs of ordinary people, who in his appear as characters who are not either modernized or made our contemporaries. In other words, if, until Scott, historical had merely portrayed their historical characters with superficial 'historicized' features, and characters had been simply presented in 'historical' settings, Scott went beyond that formula in order to offer his readers connection with vividly exposed 'typical' conflicts and dynamics of their societies (Eagleton 30), becoming, albeit his reactionary character in other respects, literary figure of gigantic proportions: for Lukacs, Scott was the first writer to articulate the true historical novel (Lukacs 3).But - as mentioned above - there another earlier and similarly influential approach to Scott's fiction, one that presents the Scottish writer as, basically and solely, good narrator of considerable success, and this comes from another seminal work, namely E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927). In this collection of lectures, Forster developed an approach to Scott's fiction that, far from finding in Scott's narrative any insightful perception of something like the Lukacsian true historical consciousness, emphasized Scott's allegedly superficial and facile story-telling ability. For Forster there was no realization of the historical forces of an epoch revealing their unfolding potential in its fullest complexity (Eagleton 28); instead, he argued that Scott a trivial mind and heavy style; that he cannot construct and that he has neither artistic detachment nor passion (Forster 44). In Forster's words, Scott only temperate heart and gentlemanly feelings, and an intelligent affection for the countryside (44). Furthermore, even his as writer easily discarded as commercial integrity 44). His success simply consequence of his being reminder of early happines (45), of his being entangled with happy sentimental memories (44-5). All of which, of course, is not basis enough for great novels (44)}The object of such contradictory perceptions, Walter Scott (1771-1832), was the sheriff of Selkirk and son of magistrate. He eventually became more humanist than lawyer: translator (of Goethe and several French authors) as well as fluent reader of Cervantes in Spanish and of Ariosto in Italian, an editor of Swift and Dryden, poet (rival and friend of Byron), an antiquarian and philologist, and, above all, an extremely reputed and successful fiction writer. Interestingly, this dichotomy seems to extend to his self-appointed role as writer involved in promoting the Union of Scotland and England and advancing the British Empire, to the extent that, in spite of his tremendous success as fiction writer, it sometimes difficult to say how seriously he took his own writing from strictly literary point of view, as we can judge from the following statement reproduced by Thomas Carlyle:But how soon he had any definite object before him in his researches seems very doubtful. …

The Drama of 1916: The American Jewish Community, Birth Control, and Two Yiddish Plays

Jewish women played important roles in many aspects of the birth control movement, as activists, consumers, and distributors. Yet just as the legal system was not yet sure what to make of contraception, neither was the American Jewish community. While hundreds of thousands of Jewish women clearly limited their family size, both ambivalence toward birth control and pockets of outright opposition also persisted. This essay briefly examines the developments in the birth control movement during the pivotal year of 1916 in which Jewish women played important roles. The essay then turns to analysis of two Yiddish plays on the topic written that year. Neither play has ever before been translated in full. Because the Yiddish theater was a central American Jewish cultural institution, the production of plays on the subject of birth control in 1916 dramatized the importance of the issue within the American Jewish community. Though the plays quite possibly loom larger in retrospect than they did at the time and are notable more for content than literary merit, they nonetheless provide a critical lens through which to explore the complex relationship between American Jewry and the birth control movement.