Marilyn Butler Research Articles

Of School and the River: The Wind in the Willows and its Immediate Audience

Wind in the Willows is most innocently appreciated as nostalgic fantasy: a pastoral celebration of life along the riverbank, where the four primary animal gentlemen Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad enjoy a series of picaresque adventures that often involve messing about in boats but always end with a return to their snug and com- fortable homes. novel's episodes promote friendship, courtesy, competence, courage, and generosity in an idyllic world where sex, work, violence, and death are beyond the horizon. Experienced readers contextualize the story in var- ious ways. For Humphrey Carpenter the riverbank consti- tutes an Arcadia, one of the secret gardens characterizing the Golden Age of children's literature. Kenneth Grahame's biographer Peter Green sees the novel as a psychological escape for its author, Grahame's refuge from his disastrous marriage and his mundane, if well-compensated, job in the Bank of England. Lois Kuznets points out the mock-epic Odyssean theme and structure. Peter Hunt sees the novel as idyll, Bildungsroman, sociological document on class warfare, anarchist comedy, burlesque, nostalgia, sexist con- servative tract—by fits and starts, all of these (97). novel richly repays all such readings, but here I would like to head back to the text's origins, curiously neg- lected by most interpreters of the book and warranting examination of the sort Marilyn Butler calls for when she observes, The writings of the past ask for an educated read- ing, as far as possible from within their own discourse or code or cultural system (43). It is particularly worth remembering that the narrative involves not only a specific author but also a specific addressee. Wind in the Willows began as a series of bedtime stories that Grahame told his son Alastair in 1904, evolved into story letters when the two were apart in 1907, and finally took published form in 1908. In this essay, I contend that what Grahame wanted to pass down to Alastair, from father to son, from public- school old boy to future new boy, is material designed to inform the child about his future education, presented in a form meant to be palatable and accessible to the four-year- old audience of the oral stories and the seven-year-old on holiday with his governess. story of the neophyte Mole, who makes friends, acquires knowledge and skills, and widens his world, is specifically applicable to the situation Alastair was shortly to face. Though Wind in the Willows serves admirably as a general guidebook to the ways of that interesting young the English schoolboy, its fictive and rhetorical strategies specifically reflect the particular anxieties and circumstances of its author and its addressee.

The Purple Turban and the Flowering Aloe Tree: Signs of Distinction in the Early-Nineteenth-Century Novel

Research Article| December 01 1997 The Purple Turban and the Flowering Aloe Tree: Signs of Distinction in the Early-Nineteenth-Century Novel Marilyn Butler Marilyn Butler Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (1997) 58 (4): 475–495. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-58-4-475 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marilyn Butler; The Purple Turban and the Flowering Aloe Tree: Signs of Distinction in the Early-Nineteenth-Century Novel. Modern Language Quarterly 1 December 1997; 58 (4): 475–495. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-58-4-475 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1997 by Duke University Press1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

NEO IMPRESSIONISM? SOME EXAMPLES OF AUSTEN CRITICISM AND THEIR IMPORT FOR CURRENT CRITICAL DISCOURSE

While working on a book discussing critical approaches and using Jane Austen as a test case for my discussion. I encountered a problem of wider implications for current critical and theoretical discourse. This essay will discuss the problem and its implications by concentrating on three critical texts: Marvin Mudrick's Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (1952; Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1968), Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's TheMadwoman in the Attic (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

The Institutional Overdetermination of the Concept of Romanticism

The Institutional Overdetermination of the Concept of Romanticism John Rieder (bio) It is a commonplace gesture these days for studies of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century English literary history to criticize the period term “English Romanticism” as an anachronism or, worse, an outright mystification. Marilyn Butler, one of the most diligent critics of the generalizations often associated with the term Romanticism, puts the case succinctly in the opening sentences of a recent essay: English Romanticism is impossible to define with historical precision because the term itself is historically unsound. It is now applied to English writers of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, who did not think of themselves as Romantics. Instead they divided themselves by literary precept and by ideology into several distinct groups, dubbed by their opponents “Lakeists,” “Cockneys,” Satanists,” Scotsmen. It was the middle of the nineteenth century before they were gathered into one band as the English Romantics, and the present tendency of textbooks to insist upon the resemblance to one another of (especially) six major poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats—dates only from about 1940. 1 All of this places the title of Butler’s essay, “Romanticism in England,” into a curious situation. One has to attend now to the title’s deliberate ambiguity, since it gestures on the one hand to a critical concept which her own work seeks to undermine as “historically unsound,” and, on the other hand, repositions a revised but still viable Romanticism within a differently constructed historical field. Butler’s ambiguous gesture is by no means idiosyncratic. Jerome McGann’s momentous attack in 1983 upon the “Romantic ideology” of modern critics as “an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations,” 2 for instance, seems to perpetuate the theory of a coherent historical identity called “Romanticism” in the very terms of its attack upon contemporary criticism. McGann attributes René Wellek’s “triumph” over A. O. Lovejoy in the argument between Wellek’s broad, synthetic definition of Romanticism and Lovejoy’s “discrimination of Romanticisms” to the fact that “informed persons do generally agree on what is comprised under the terms Romantic and Romantic Movement” (18). Yet the point of departure for McGann’s exposition is precisely the use of a “secondary and critical metaphor” of Romanticism to [End Page 145] enforce a specious unity in the face of potent historical differences—in his example, the argument that including Jane Austen in discussions of English Romanticism has to proceed by isolating supposedly Romantic elements in her work, which reaches its “ne plus ultra” in a mistaken analogy drawn by Nina Auerbach between the theme of imprisonment in Sense and Sensibility and in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (19). The kind of historical unity projected in the term Romanticism has in this instance produced a critical error quite the opposite of seducing the critic into the “self-representation” of the writers in question. The status of the term Romanticism itself thus hovers uneasily between its critical usefulness and its obfuscation of historical complexity. Both Butler and McGann reproduce, more or less in spite of themselves, the options offered in the famed Wellek-Lovejoy debate, which, as all advanced students of Romanticism know, involved Lovejoy’s argument that the complexities of literary history render the use of Romanticism as a singular noun meaningless, or at best an avoidable temptation to overly reductive generalizations, and Wellek’s counterargument that literary critics merely need to learn to use the term appropriately. A kind of solution to this dilemma has emerged in the past decade. Much current criticism affords English Romanticism a pseudo-definition which renders it innocent of any generalizing tendency. It becomes, for instance, in Mary Favret and Nicola Watson’s especially conscientious and articulate formulation, a field “composed of multiple (and currently shifting) tectonic plates, alternative generic territories, whose relation to each other is determined by their different modes of negotiating the same historical, political, and cultural anxieties particular to the period 1789 to 1832.” 3 This version of the period term, at the same moment as it advances the thesis that a common historical ground determines some kind of representable unity for the diverse materials comprised under the...

Robert Burns and Cultural Authority

Burns, Fergusson and fraternity, Robert Crawford Burns and sex, A.L. Kennedy Burns, women and song, Kirsteen McCue Burns and politics, Marilyn Butler Burns and America, Carol McGuirk Burns and God, Susan Manning Burns and verse form, Douglas Dunn Burns and romanticism, Nicholas Roe Burns and Kailyard, Andrew Nash Burns and MacDiarmid, Alan Riach Burns's art speech, Seamus Heaney.

Romanticism and the heritage of Rousseau

Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau presents a timely and thorough-going critique of recent thinking on Romanticism. Beginning from the conviction that Rousseau may well have been the most important cultural figure of the last quarter millenium, Thomas McFarland confronts the misplaced emphases and serious misreadings of recent new historicist, post-structuralist, and feminist Romantic criticism. Using Rousseau as a guide and influence, McFarland tackles head on the work of six important scholars - including Jerome McGann, Marilyn Butler, and Paul deMan - and argues that the 'new orthodoxy' is signally unable to perform the ultimate task of criticism: to discern quality . In its place, McFarland advocates an attention to the 'texture' of the cultural fabric of Romanticism, in order to restore our sense of what Romanticism is, and to allow us to hear again the plangency of its distinctive bvoice.

Distilling Spirits and Regulating Subjects: Whiskey and Beer in Romantic Britain

DISTILLING SPIRITS AND REGULATING SUBJECTS: WHISKEY AND BEER IN ROMANTIC BRITAIN HEWITT S. THAYER the narrative section of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) concludes by considering the impending eVects of the union of England and Ireland. “The best that can happen,” Edgeworth writes, “is the exchange of the few Irish gentlemen of education for industrious British manufacturers .”1 Edgeworth thus seemingly dismisses questions about Irish identity after the union by asserting the pragmatic values of economic growth, greater employment, and investments in Irish infrastructure. Edgeworth acknowledges that an intellectual and artistic migration to England is a real loss for Irish culture, and that importing rich English manufacturers to Dublin will not necessarily improve the lot of the Irish. This “diYcult solution,”2 as Edgeworth calls it, may be somewhat ameliorated if the union successfully creates Britons rather than an underclass of Irish laborers who could not be assimilated into English or British culture as easily as the Irish gentlemen of education. Even the narrative shape of Castle Rackrent is marked by the pressure of the union. For example, the novel’s narrator places the story within a local Irish context by asserting that the tale itself is recounted by the novel’s main character, Thady, who may or may not be more deceptive than he seems. This emphasis on orality, on communal tale-telling, and on the necessity of a canny listener privileges a speciWc locale which is then ampliWed by the novel’s heavily inXected regional dialogue. Yet, Edgeworth gestures toward her English reading audience by including a “Glossary” to explain the tale’s various “Irishisms.” The Wrst note of the “Glossary,” in WHISKEY AND BEER IN ROMANTIC BRITAIN 7 1 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 122. 2 Ibid., p. 122. fact, appears to mock Irish traditions as quaint rusticisms out of step with the modern world, though it later appears that Edgeworth may be parodying the tendency toward mockery itself. These tonal ambiguities and complexities gesture toward the pressure generated by the union on such concepts as identity and tradition—for whom does Edgeworth write and where does her voice originate? Yet, rather than answering these questions, or even posing them directly, Edgeworth chooses the following, curious question with which to conclude her novel: “Did the Warwickshire militia, who were chieXy artisans, teach the Irish to drink beer? or did they learn from the Irish to drink whiskey?”3 The Warwickshire militia, as Marilyn Butler points out, was part of the roughly 80,000 troops diverted from the war with Napoleonic France to police Ireland during the 1790s.4 Inasmuch as the political function of the militia is to establish an order out of which the union can emerge, it mirrors the Glossary’s function as a narratological accommodation of English readers. Teaching the Irish to drink beer repeats, or completes at a lower social level, the easy assimilation of those Irish gentlemen of education into British culture. As Edgeworth suggests, beer-drinking is synonymous with an ordered, patriotic culture, in which systemic social relations occur in anticipated, regulated ways. As such beer-drinking is essentially connected to what Raymond Williams calls the “Morality of Improvement,”5 and improvement is precisely what the incursion of British manufacturers into Ireland promises. Improvement essentially restructures the relationship between an individual and the immediate environment in order to exploit the investment of one’s labor to maximum eVect. By capitalizing on reorganized relations with the land, with others, or with the self, personal proWt contributes to national ethos. The connection between improvement and imperialism becomes clear in the drive toward the well-ordered, stable, class relations, which Tom Nairn argues were essential to Britain’s imperial project.6 WHISKEY AND BEER IN ROMANTIC BRITAIN 8 3 Ibid., p. 122. The spelling of “whiskey” varies widely for a number of reasons. Scottish single malt is spelt “whisky,” but in Ireland the spelling is “whiskey.” For the purposes of this paper, I choose to standardize the spelling as “whiskey,” even when referring to Scottish malt. 4 Ibid., p. 351. 5 See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 6...

Thompson's Second Front

Thompson's Second Front Get access Marilyn Butler Marilyn Butler Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 39, Issue 1, SPRING 1995, Pages 71–78, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/39.1.71 Published: 01 March 1995

Putting Down the Rebellion: Notes and Glosses on Castle Rackrent, 1800

PUTTING DOWN THE REBELLION: NOTES AND GLOSSES ON CASTLE RACKRENT, 1800 KATHRYN KIRKPATRICK introducing his Oxford edition of Castle Rackrent, George Watson argues that Maria Edgeworth wrote the Wrst half of her novel in the mid-1790s. This dating of the early stages of composition, now generally accepted, is for Watson evidence which “usefully destroys the myth that Rackrent is a novel occasioned by the rebellion of 1798.”1 Here Watson invokes the same static relationship between Edgeworth and her sociopolitical environment that he had apparently sought to dismiss. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was not a self-contained, isolated incident, but rather the culmination of a decade of political turmoil and rural disturbance with which, well before 1798, Maria Edgeworth was more than passingly familiar. To say that Castle Rackrent was not “occasioned” by the events of 1798 is thus to formulate the issue of writer and context in a falsely dichotomized way. Unlike their anxious counterparts among the English gentry, Edgeworth and her Anglo-Irish family were faced with more than rumors of revolution in the 1790s. Throughout the decade, the frustrations of small farmers, cottiers, and laborers found a voice in Defenderism, which was openly anti-Protestant, anti-English and anti-settler.2 Yet, this period of political crisis formed an oddly liberating context for Edgeworth as a writer. Until that time, most of Edgeworth’s writing had been inXuenced by her father, and had taken the form of educational works and instructive children ’s stories. Richard Edgeworth’s preoccupation with the threat of imminent invasion and his frequent absence from the Edgeworth estate in NOTES AND GLOSSES ON CASTLE RACKRENT, 1800 77 1 George Watson, Introduction to Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. xxi. 2 For more on Defenderism, see Thomas Bartlett, “Select Documents XXXVIII: Defenders and Defenderism in 1795,” Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1985), 373-380. County Longford during the latter half of the 1790s created an environment in which Edgeworth wrote without his supervision and produced her Wrst novel, Castle Rackrent. Edgeworth’s work was thus marked by the ebb and Xow of patriarchal control during this period, both within and outside her household. Consequently, in Castle Rackrent the voices vying to articulate the issue of Irish national identity during the 1790s emerge correspondent to Edgeworth’s own struggles for an independent authorial voice. In examining Edgeworth’s narrative, it is important to keep in mind Mary Poovey’s formulation of writing as an imaginative and symbolic response . During this period, the rhetorical strategies employed by women writers suggest a kind of double consciousness: Within the domain of literature, nearly every woman who wrote was able to internalize a self-concept at least temporarily at odds with the norm. . . . [T]he legacy of this period is a repertoire of the strategies that enabled women either to conceive of themselves in two apparently incompatible ways or to express themselves in a code capable of being read in two ways: as acquiescence to the norm and departure from it.3 The multiple frames and competing voices of Castle Rackrent provide a good example of this kind of symbolic response to the contradictions of female authorship. Castle Rackrent is eVectively a polyphonic narrative: in addition to the narrative proper, told in Wrst person by the Irish servant Thady and containing its own explanatory footnotes, the novel is framed by a preface and postscript written by the “Editor”; this “Editor,” who is referred to in the text as “he,” is also the implied author of the extensive glossary which interrupts the narrative no fewer than twenty-one times. The history of this layered narrative is complicated as well. According to Marilyn Butler, the Wrst half of the text proper was written by Edgeworth in the mid-1790s, probably between 1794 and 1795. The last half was written “in the years 1796-8, when Ireland’s endemic local unrest became politicized, and far more threatening to an England at war with revolutionary France.”4 Fearing the novel’s implications in this dicey political climate, Edgeworth’s family and friends urged her to qualify and dilute her essentially radical narrative with the last minute...

Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827 (review)

396 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:4 of Berglund's book as the symbol of eighteenth-century female wish-fulfilment, does not constitute Austen's final word on the subject. Perhaps the largest problem with this work is its historical arbitrariness and cultural vacuity. The introductory survey of the position of middle-class women at the end of the eighteenth century certainly explains the interest of these writers in the social and psychological dimensions of domestic space, but it does not account for (or even recognize) a much longer, larger cultural interest. It is as if house imagery bloomed suddenly among these three women writers in response to new or sharply felt social conditions. The houserepresents -owner (or-ought-to) theme, of course, goes back through Palladio to Vitruvius, and its literary history is rich: elaborately treated in the works of Roman poets, revived in England with the country-house poems of Jonson, Donne, and Marvel, re-idealized by Pope, Fielding, Smollett, and Byron, and surfacing in many less obvious works from Defoe 's A Journal of the Plague Year to Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, the image of the house has been a standard fixture of English literature. Berglund's rather mechanical dichotomy between male and female experiences of confined space (for men "there is never any doubt ... that confinement is bad and liberty good. ...[PJersecution ... comes from outside their family circle," pp. 16, 102) pays no attention to the literary works of Defoe (and only briefly mentions Richardson), or to the critical work, among others, of W.B. Camochan and John Bender. Although Berglund cites Mark Girouard's indispensable Life in the English Country House, she makes no comparable use of his rich historical background to contextualize the apparently dramatic debuts of her chosen authors . Woman's Whole Existence follows the boundaries of gendered literary space; it does not push them. Cynthia Wall University of Virginia Gary Kelly. Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ? + 328pp. £35.00. ISBN 0-19-812272-1. The political importance of women's writing, and particularly women's fiction, in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is now well established. Among the critics who have contributed over the past twenty years or so to our developing understanding of this literature, Marilyn Butler, Mary Poovey, Terry Lovell, Nancy Armstrong, Claudia Johnson, Janet Todd, and Patricia Meyer Spacks spring immediately to mind. So does Gary Kelly. Alongside the work of these female and feminist commentators, Gary Kelly's studies of fiction in the Revolutionary period—The English Jacobin Novel (1976) and English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (1989)—scrupulously map the interventions made by novels in political debate and ideological struggle. In doing so, they inevitably engage with the importance of women's writing; and in Kelly's recent book on Mary WoUstonecraft , Revolutionary Feminism (1992), and now in Women, Writing, and Revolution, that focus on the revolutionary role of women has become explicit. In the preface to Women, Writing, and Revolution Kelly presents his method of "historical enquiry" as having "much to offer" both to "women's literary studies" and to "Uterary and cultural studies in general" (p. vi). And he enlists strong feminist support for this unexceptionable position, quoting both Rita Felski and Laurie Finke on the importance of investigating the particular meanings of gender and feminism within specific cultural and REVIEWS 397 socio-economic formations. Thereafter, KeUy confines his engagement with current feminist analyses to footnote references and concentrates on offering the results of his own "historical enquiry." His study is divided into two equal sections: "Women and Writing in the Revolutionary Decade" focuses on the 1790s; "Women, Writing, and the Revolutionary Aftermath" deals with the remaining thirty years of his chosen period. Both sections follow exactly the same pattern: a lucid and densely documented overview of the gendered politics of writing in the period is foUowed by chapters on the careers of three individual women—Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton. Through these case-studies of women who, in very different ways, "challenged discursive , generic, and stylistic orders that subordinated women and their writing" (p. vi...

Are We Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophy of History, and "Practicing Historians"The New Historicism. H. Aram VeeserRethinking Historicism. Marjorie Levinson , Marilyn Butler , Jeorme McGann , Paul HamiltonThe Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literary Culture. Heather Dubrow , Richard StrierLanguage, History, and Class. Penelope CorfieldWriting from History: The Rhetoric of exemplarity in

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleAre We Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophy of History, and "Practicing Historians" The New Historicism. H. Aram Veeser Rethinking Historicism. Marjorie Levinson , Marilyn Butler , Jeorme McGann , Paul Hamilton The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literary Culture. Heather Dubrow , Richard Strier Language, History, and Class. Penelope Corfield Writing from History: The Rhetoric of exemplarity in Renaissance Literature. Timothy Hampton Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked. Hans Kellner Towards a Rational Historiography. Lionel Gossman The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past. Stephen Bann Time's Reasons: Philosophies of History Old and New. Leonard Krieger Rethinking Intellectual History. Dominick LaCapra History and Criticism. Dominick LaCapra Soundings in Critical Theory. Dominick LaCapra John H. ZammitoJohn H. Zammito Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 65, Number 4Dec., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/244726 Views: 16Total views on this site Citations: 16Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Michael N. Forster, Kristin Gjesdal The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics, IV (Dec 2018).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316888582Ed McLuskie Grounding Communication Studies in Enlightenment Criticality: Scaling Up Theoretical and Dialectical Ambition, Javnost - The Public 23, no.11 (Mar 2016): 1–18.https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2016.1149761Paul A. Roth The silence of the norms: The missing historiography of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44, no.44 (Dec 2013): 545–552.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2013.08.001Stephanie Decker The silence of the archives: business history, post-colonialism and archival ethnography, Management & Organizational History 8, no.22 (Feb 2013): 155–173.https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2012.761491Julie-Anne Boudreau, Felipe de Alba The figure of the hero in cinematographic and urban spaces: Fear and politics in Ciudad Juarez, Emotion, Space and Society 4, no.22 (May 2011): 75–85.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2011.02.002Lynda Stone Educationalization in a USA Present: A Historicist Rendering, (Jan 2008): 61–78.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9724-9_5John Zammito What's ‘new’ in the sociology of knowledge?, (Jan 2007): 791–857.https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-044451542-1/50025-8Damon A. Young The Fine Arts of Distinction: Bourdieu on Society and Art, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 7, no.22 (May 2015): 23–44.https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2006.11432773Richard Lim Conversion or Adhesion? Historians between the Social Sciences and the Linguistic Turn, Church History 74, no.44 (Jul 2009): 820–826.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640700100927Joseph M. Bryant On sources and narratives in historical social science: a realist critique of positivist and postmodernist epistemologies*, The British Journal of Sociology 51, no.33 (Sep 2000): 489–523.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2000.00489.xAvner Segall Critical History: Implications for History/Social Studies Education, Theory & Research in Social Education 27, no.33 (Jun 1999): 358–374.https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.1999.10505885 Michael Dintenfass Crafting Historians' Lives: Autobiographical Constructions and Disciplinary Discourses after the Linguistic Turn Dintenfass, The Journal of Modern History 71, no.11 (Jul 2015): 150–165.https://doi.org/10.1086/235198 Martin J. Wiener Treating “Historical” Sources as Literary Texts: Literary Historicism and Modern British History Wiener, The Journal of Modern History 70, no.33 (Jul 2015): 619–638.https://doi.org/10.1086/235119Patrick Finney Ethics, Historical Relativism and Holocaust Denial, Rethinking History 2, no.33 (Sep 1998): 359–369.https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529809408972Jack S. Levy Too Important to Leave to the Other: History and Political Science in the Study of International Relations, International Security 22, no.11 (Jul 1997): 22–33.https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.22.1.22Marc W. Steinberg Fence Sitting for a Better View: Finding a Middle Ground Between Materialism and the Linguistic Turn in the Epistemology of History, Qualitative Inquiry 3, no.11 (Mar 1997): 26–52.https://doi.org/10.1177/107780049700300102

Ambush: the politics of National Curriculum English, 1990–3

Critical QuarterlyVolume 35, Issue 4 p. 8-12 Ambush: the politics of National Curriculum English, 1990–3 MARILYN BUTLER, MARILYN BUTLERSearch for more papers by this author MARILYN BUTLER, MARILYN BUTLERSearch for more papers by this author First published: December 1993 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.1993.tb00497.xCitations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume35, Issue4December 1993Pages 8-12 RelatedInformation

Vies et images maternelles dans la littérature française du dix-huitième siècle (review)

100 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:1 patriarchal culture. The "fantasy" of powerful female networks in Lady Susan and the equivocal presentation of female friendship as a positive alternative to marriage in The Watsons are denied, she argues, in Pride and Prejudice, where "Elizabeth Bennet's bold talking stands in for a community of female voices—and points us towards its absence" (p. 196). Kaplan's readings of the novels are often suggestive, and her insistence that Lady Susan and The Watsons are Austen's "most daring and experimental" works (p. 154) is persuasive. But it is in this section, and particularly in trying to account for this perceived shift in the fiction, that the more myopic aspects of Kaplan's methodology and range of reference become most apparent. When Austen's letters fail to provide her with an explanation for the shift to greater conventionality in Pride and Prejudice, Kaplan has to resort to the suggestion that it must be attributable to Austen's move from "private" to "public" writing. But "public" here remains largely undefined, a reification of the separate spheres which elsewhere Kaplan has tried to problematize. What her microhistorical method fails even to acknowledge is the possibility that the wider political debates of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period might inform not simply women's fiction, but also Austen's "two cultures." Claudia Johnson's recent book Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (1988), a subtle examination of Austen's novels in the context of 1790s fiction and the revolution debate, would be the obvious referent here. But Kaplan mentions Johnson only in passing, unfairly dismissing her as yet another example of American feminist criticism's wilful celebration of female experience. Kaplan presents herself as "making a case" for a literary criticism that is "both feminist and historically grounded" (p. 183). For feminist critics of Austen working within a British tradition—and, indeed, to many Americans, besides Johnson—this is hardly the daring claim she seems to assume it to be. In her eagerness to criticize American feminism 's naive championing of the "female voice" (a critique which in some cases, it must be said, is nevertheless justified), Kaplan ignores or misrepresents work on Austen which one might have expected her to recognize as either allied with, or at least relevant to, her own project. Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas is never mentioned; nor is the work of Janet Todd. Perhaps what is at stake here is the definition of "historical grounding." Kaplan's concern, as I have said, is with accessing the "specific social circumstances" of women's "differing experiences of subordination" (p. 14), and her account of how members of Austen's female community negotiated the constraints of gender is scrupulous and suggestive. But what the book lacks, in spite of its initial stress on contingency and historical change, is any sense of the complex discursive context which might reveal those negotiations as part of a wider social process. Vivien Jones University of Leeds Isabelle Brouard-Arends. Vies et images maternelles dans la littératurefrançaise du dix-huitième siècle. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 291. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991. ix + 465pp. ISBN 0-7294-0428-5. Isabelle Brouard-Arends has undertaken a very ambitious study, which includes medical and moral discourse, the novel, and theatre. Each genre is represented by a large number of works, including famous authors as well as lesser-known ones. She finds that eighteenth-century medical discourse, on the pretext of protecting the mother's health, deprives her of all responsibility. The widespread custom of sending REVIEWS 101 children out to nurse separated mother and child, and a legal system that held the bond of father and child to be more important than that of mother and child contributed to "une méfiance qui empoisonne durablement" the mother-child relationship (p. 106). In literary works written during the first part of the century, the mother is often absent or only briefly mentioned, and little interest is shown in the child. According to BrouardArends , there are relatively few mothers in French literature before about 1730, and those who appear...

Imitation and Ideology: Henry Mackenzie's Rousseau

Imitation and Ideology: Henry Mackenzie's Rousseau Kim Ian Michasiw Any critic who discusses Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigné is likely to consider it an imitation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. In more general terms the work will be seen as an assimilation of Rousseau's novel to the tradition of English sentimentalism or sensibility, which Mackenzie's earlier works had done much to codify. This view, held by such early nineteenth-century critics as Walter Scott,1 persists among twentieth-century critics: Harold Thompson in A Scottish Man ofFeeling, Gerard A. Barker in his Twayne Authors Volume , Marilyn Butler in her Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.1 More recently the association of Mackenzie and Rousseau has been revived by Janet Todd in her Sensibility: An Introduction. Todd attributes to La Nouvelle Héloïse the development of one of four basic types of women of feeling—"the chaste, susceptible and unwilling wife"—and suggests that 1 See Walter Scott, "Henry Mackenzie" in Biographical Memoirs ofEminent Novelists. Miscellaneous Prose Works, 3 vols (Edinburgh: R. Cadell, 1841), 1:112-13. 2 Harold W. Thompson, A Scottish Man ofFeeling (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), pp. 148-49; Gerard A. Barker, Henry Mackenzie (Boston: Twayne, 1975), p. 70; Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp. 23-28. See also Emest A. Baker, 77»e Novel ofSentiment and Gothic Romance, vol. 5 of 77i« History ofthe English Novel (London: H.F. and G. Witherby, 1935), p. 1 10; Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade ofthe English Novel (New York: H. Holt, 1954), p. 94; John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), pp. 159—64. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 2, January 1993 154 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION in English fiction "the Rousseauist novel offamily against love is typified by Julia de Roubigné."3 Rather than dissenting from this commonplace, I intend to play out its implications as an instance of the processes by which ideas are mediated to and interpreted for a reading public. The case of Mackenzie and Rousseau is of particular interest because the attribution of similarity arises not from Mackenzie himself, who avoids any mention of Rousseau in the novel, but from those who read Julia de Roubigné.4 A reading of the novel depends, then, on the reader's provision of the unmentioned intertext, a strategy that brings into play a tension between the reader's idea of La Nouvelle Héloïse and the ostensibly unmediated collection of actual letters Mackenzie presents. The suppression of the continental precursor accords with Mackenzie's increasing distrust ofFrench influence. In paper number 30 of The Mirror, he registers his uneasiness with the art of translation: imitation is often so clumsy, as to leave out all the agreeable, and retain all the offensive. In the translation of the manners, as in the translation of the language, of our neighbours [i.e. the French], we are apt to lose the finesses, the petits agremens, which (I talk like a man of the world) give zest and value to the whole.5 This passage is notable in a variety of ways. First, it registers Mackenzie 's own concern, one animating both The Mirror and The Lounger, with the transmission of manners, attitudes, and ideas. The impact of the increased traffic" in fashions of all kinds between London—and, more dangerously, Paris—and the "mimic metropolis" of Edinburgh,6 is an overriding concern in his periodical writings.7 This movement, appropriately enough, is mirrored in the quotation's second sentence where the naturalized French word "finesses" is followed by the newer, still italicized import "petits agremens." In order to write about translation the 3 Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 111,1 14. 4 I have discovered no mention of Rousseau in Mackenzie's novels or periodical esssays. There are three references to Rousseau in his letters, two of which are very much en passant. See Henry Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose ofKilravock, ed. Horst W. Drescher (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1967), pp. 59, 113. 5 77ie Works ofHenry Mackenzie, 8...

Ideology and Genre in the British Antirevolutionary Drama of the 1790S

The bicentennial year of the French Revolution brought a great deal of scholarly energy to bear upon the events surrounding 1789 and upon the literature, usually called Romantic, that grew up in response to it. Little space, however, was found within such studies for the British antirevolutionary literature of the 1790s and none, I daresay, for its antirevolutionary drama. The British plays written against the French Revolution during the 1790s have been completely obscured from critical view by a number of preconceptions about the literary history of the period. Some of these are old prejudices, such as the opinion that the drama of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is simply not worthy of attention. Others are linked to what Jerome McGann has identified as the romantic ideology, the tendency to see every work between roughly 1789 and 1832 from the perspective of the self-definitions of the small group of writers we call Romantic. As Marilyn Butler has also shown, much of the literary work of this period falls outside our definitions, and the antirevolutionary drama offers another example of her point.' Our focus on the six major Romantic poets and our interest in the perceived pattern of their response to the Revolution-radical politics giving way to imaginative liberation or escape-renders alternative groups of writers and other patterns of reaction to the events of the day invisible. The antirevolutionary drama and the literary history to which they contribute challenge our standard formulations about the period. These plays were not Romantic; they should not even be read as a context for Romantic works-which would subordinate them to models with which they are not engaged-but instead as dramas significant in their own right. These plays are part of a broader reactionary literature and culture as relevant to the literary and political situation of England in the 1790s as the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge or Blake. Considering the particular contexts that shaped these texts, we will find that these dramas have an important place in the ideological struggles of the day as well as a sig-

Narrative and Ideology in Godwin's Caleb Williams

Narrative and Ideology in Godwin's Caleb WilliamsKenneth W. Graham Seventeen ninety-three and 1794 were years of growing nervousness for British radicals. After 1792—the "annus mirabilis"1 that saw the founding of the London Corresponding Society and the rapid growth in membership of societies for political reform—the responses of the government and other supporters of the social order constituted a disturbing backlash. When Godwin completed his final corrections of the first edition of Political Justice in January 1793, John Reeves had founded the anti-reform Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers and the gentry had begun to organize their tenants into a yeomanry for purposes of drill and propaganda. Pitt's Attorney-General, Sir Archibald Macdonald, had just achieved a conviction of Thomas Paine in absentia for seditious libel over The Rights of Man, Part II, and had prepared two hundred indictments, for the most part against publishers of radical opinions.2 Government, gentry, and or1 Marilyn Butler, "Introductory Essay," Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 7-8. 2 The Morning Chronicle of 14 January 1793 reminded its readers: "There are no fewer than two hundred indictments prepared by the Crown Officers, to be presented to the Grand Juries throughout the kingdom for libels and seditious words. They are of all kinds, some against newspapers, some against pamphlets, hand-bills, &c. and of the seditious words some were uttered from the pulpit, and some in the ale-houses, in moments of jollity and inebriation. On the slightest computation, the trial of these indictments in law costs, and the value of the time of the imprisonments that may follow conviction, cannot be less [for the indictees] than 50,000 [pounds] to say nothing of the utter extinction of free opinion." See Lucyle Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England. 1792-1793 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 199. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 2, Number 3, April 1990 216 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION dinary citizens alike were becoming increasingly intolerant of reformist ideas: as support grew for Reeves's Association, it diminished for the London Corresponding Society. Godwin's preface to Political Justice shows his awareness of the change in atmosphere: "it is the fortune of the present work to appear before a public that is panic struck, and impressed with the most dreadful apprehensions respecting such doctrines as are here delivered. All the prejudices of the human mind are in arms against it."3 When Godwin started to write Caleb Williams, six weeks after completing Political Justice, relations with France had made the atmosphere more threatening. Godwin's journal records that during those weeks Louis XVI had been tried, sentenced to death, and executed. The very day that Godwin presented a copy of Political Justice to Chauvelin , the French ambassador was directed to leave the country. Soon Britain and France were at war. When Godwin finished Caleb Williams in late April 1794, the government were about to arrest the officers of the London Corresponding Society, some of whom were Godwin's friends and all of whom were acquaintances. About this time, Godwin rewrote the ending of his novel. The texts of both endings exist and a comparison of them raises the question: Did Godwin tone down the radicalism of his novel with an ending palatable to political authorities? If not, what motivated the revision? The two endings contrast strikingly. The original ending seems unflinchingly reformist. Caleb testifies to Falkland's murders before an unsympathetic magistrate and Falkland convincingly debunks the testimony as the clever fabrication of a thief, prison-breaker, and master of disguise. This final trial is a victory for Falkland, who resumes control over Caleb. Caleb, imprisoned and harassed, declines into madness, debility , and death, leaving behind only his manuscript to proclaim a final condemnation of "Things as They Are." The ending that Godwin published is much less reformist. It features a trial also, but during the hearing Falkland acknowledges Caleb's innocence and confesses to his crimes. Much weakened by age and struggles with his conscience, Falkland dies three days later. The establishment of Caleb's innocence seems to undermine the novel's extended demonstration...

Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (review)

260 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xxv + 186pp. US$27.50. Claudia Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel is a participant in two lively and expanding critical projects. One is the attention being given recently to eighteenth-century women writers, and thus to Jane Austen not as the initiating point of a single "female tradition" but as the heir to a century of exploration, by hitherto marginal and unknown authors, of the possibilities of female-centred fiction. The other is a revisionary movement within Austen scholarship itself. Fed by the concerns of feminist scholars challenging received canonical wisdom, Austenians have been questioning the (largely male) critical adulation based on the modesty of their subject's choice of subject matter, her feminine disdain for politics, and her artistic wisdom in refusing to argue for a particular position or set of ideas within that properly male domain. Johnson's principal argument is with the conservative Austen of Marilyn Butler 's provocative Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas. But she wittily works against the critical grain in all political directions, commenting that "whatever the station to which Austen is assigned," be it Tory apologist or subversively resentful old maid, "she is not held to entertain an opinion independent of it. She is the 'parson 's daughter' or the 'sailors' sister,' and the mere identification of her kinship relationships to the men in her family is judged enough to warrant the inference that her social opinions affirmed [or automatically reacted against] theirs as a matter of course" (pp. xvii-xix). Austen's contemporaries did not draw the line, Johnson reminds us, between fiction and polemic that we assume to be normative and laudatory. Johnson's method is historical, drawing on the critical thinking that constructs historical periods from a variety of narrative sources, including (for the 1790s, the formative period of Austen's writing) the treatises of Burke and his radical opponents, the debates over female education and the value of novels and romances , including the popular Gothics. Her positioning of Austen in the "middle rank" along a continuum of her female contemporaries moving from Jane West and Hannah More on the extreme right, through Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney , Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, and Mary Brunton, to Charlotte Smith, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft, allows her to contrast Austen's six novels with the work of really conservative writers, and to show how deeply her strategies question and undermine theirs. Conservative ideologues, drawing on the writings of Burke, "met the threat posed by the revolution in France and the voices of reform in England by reasserting the political momentousness of the family" (p. 50), she observes in the chapter on Sense and Sensibility. Novelists of the same stripe upheld the patriarchal power of the gentry, manifesting itself in a benevolence that provokes, in tum, undying gratitude on the part of those who depend on it. Against this ground, the figures in Austen's fiction, and those in her two least popular novels in particular, show up as quite other than the apologists REVIEWS 261 for reaction that readers have usually found them to be. Thus in Sense and Sensibility the family tends to be the locus of "venal and idle habits," habits which are cast into relief by a likeable scoundrel like Willoughby but which are shared by a host of other privileged male characters in this and other novels. Similarly, it is because of Austen's exposure of the manipulations of patriarchs like Sir Thomas Bertram that the "conventionally happy ending which ensconces Fanny [in Mansfield Park], indispensable at last and still adulating now enervated figures whose discernment has been radically impeached, sustains rather than settles the problems the foregoing material has covered" (p. 116). By neither claiming Austen for the progressive tendency in the fiction of the 1790s nor criticizing her harshly for defecting from this stance, Johnson can argue that Austen's political reticence makes possible a critique of fictional oversimplification that is all the more profound for its lack of programmatic focus. Every one of the novels is illuminated by Johnson's rigorous, informed...

Radicalism and Linguistic Theory: Horne Tooke on Samuel Pegge

In addition to being a radical political journalist and pamphleteer, twice prosecuted by the British government for treason,John Horne Tooke was by far the best-known philologist in the English-speaking world for more than fifty years after the French Revolution. The theory of language and the etymological 'proofs' advanced in support of it in his book, EHEA HTEPOENTA or the Diversions ofPurley, were to appeal not merely to radicals of such various hues as Godwin, Wordsworth, Erasmus Darwin, Bentham, Hazlitt, Peacock, Cobbett, Mackintosh, Brougham, and James Mill, but also to such distinctly un-revolutionary members of the establishment as Archbishop Trench. In America his theories were taken up by Ralph Waldo Emerson and by Noah Webster who was only one of a number of lexicographers fired by the idea of creating a true etymological dictionary on Tookeian principles. But for someone as widely-known and controversial as Tooke, there has been curiously little agreement among subsequent critics as to the relationship between his philology and his politics. Marilyn Butler, for instance, introduces Horne Tooke in a recent anthology on the French Revolution debate as follows:

Romanticism in national context

Contents Notes on contributors Introduction 1. Romanticism in Wales Gwyn A. Williams 2. Romanticism in England Marilyn Butler 3. Haunted by history: Irish Romantic writing 1800-50 Tom Dunne 4. Romanticism in Greece Roderick Beaton 5. Romanticism in Germany Dietrich Von Engelhardt 6. Romanticism in Switzerland Clarissa Campbell Orr 7. Romanticism in Scandinavia Gunnar Eriksson 8. Romanticism in The Netherlands Nicholas A. Rupke 9. Romanticism in Hungary Mihaly Szegedy-Maszak 10. Romanticism in France Stephen Bann 11. Spanish Romanticism Susan Kirkpatrick 12. Russian Romanticism John Mersereau Jr and David Lapeza 13. The agony in the garden: Polish Romanticism Donald Pirie Index.

Thomas Love Peacock's Crotchet Castle: Reconciling the Spirits of the Age

E in none of his works did he ever seriously contemplate settling the great and and interesting controversies' he discusses, Thomas Love Peacock has often been criticized for failing to do just that; and in no case, perhaps, has the criticism been more pointed than that directed at Crotchet Castle (1831). Marilyn Butler complains of endlessly incomplete conversation and concludes that Peacock's meaning remains remarkably unclear in this novel, while Carl Dawson calls its debates, which are so integral to Peacock's novels of talk, mock Socratic dialogues without a guiding Socrates. Putting the most explicit case, Douglas Hewitt decides that there is no intellectually formulated resolution of conflicting ideas in