Nonfiction Prose Research Articles

Prelude

Prelude Irène Mathieu (bio) the moon slick and O as a singing mouth we could have eaten the trumpeting frogswe could have gotten wilder popped the lake orchestra into our mouths, each musician coated with pollen sauce. the ticks could have gotten wilderstrong-armed into the Volkswagen and plungedheadfirst in the valley of our skin reaching up to suck clouds. I wanted to sing, when did you get so? when you got so wild the poplars ahh-ed and the moonwith her aria held the long C and the tire-crushed onionsfloated through the sunroof you knockedon every doorof my ghost town the log cabins disemboweled by termites the lullabies drowned in glasses of water beside dust-packed mattresses. and you brought me home outside. [End Page 384] over here, the starsin my lungs were saying. I’ve overgrown through the years: my skin is purple in this light my eyes are marble.I’ve oxidized and become brittle. but over here still and with more wild to sing yet. [End Page 385] Irène Mathieu IRÈNE MATHIEU has published poetry, nonfiction prose, and photography in a number of periodicals, including The Caribbean Writer, 34th Parallel, Muzzle Magazine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Journal of General Internal Medicine, museum of americana, HEArt Journal, and Los Angeles Review. She is currently a medical student at Vanderbilt University. Before studying medicine, she studied international relations at the College of William and Mary and completed a Fulbright Fellowship in the Dominican Republic. Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Leaving Chicago

Leaving Chicago Jennifer Bartell (bio) Let me sleep in bed dreaming of disasters, let me lay awhile and wander, wallow in a swamp full of cypress knees that beckons us to forsake this mire full of bullets. We are the mighty cedar of Lebanon fortifying this bed in times such as these. Up there you hold up a green canopy above my head, but the sky bursts open and pours down rain, sour libations that ensnare our tongues, paralyze our feet. We missed our chance to be judged in May and instead stomped over to Memphis to try some blue barbecue. We then slid down farther south to whittle names in the cradle of the oak, laced with moss. Let me not dream of disasters. Let me not be lonely in the confines of your arms. Let me sleep in bed and let my slumber be restless. Content, let me dream of you before Chicago, before river, before wind, and drink the black coffee of your mouth. [End Page 394] Jennifer Bartell JENNIFER BARTELL, a teaching associate at Coastal Carolina University, graduated from Agnes Scott College in 2005 and received the MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina in 2014. She has published poetry and nonfiction prose in a number of periodicals, including pluck!: The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Blackberry, Jasper Magazine, and The Art of Medicine in Metaphors. She lives in Johnsonville, South Carolina. Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Rites and Reasons

Rites and Reasons Ravi Howard (bio) Since the summer of 2012, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop has been hosted by Brown University’s Department of Africana Studies, and some of the sessions have taken place in the Rites and Reasons Theatre. The theater develops work using the “Research-to-Performance Method” (RPM), where teams of artists and scholars develop projects using “direct dialogue with the community through the development process.” The purpose and approach parallel what we strive to do in our fiction workshops: use layers of creation, dialogue, and revision to guide writers to a point of completion. As the Rites and Reasons collaborators plan and design, they also create their sets, the physical spaces of the storytelling. We build as well, developing the geography and architecture of imagined worlds. We build upon language and structure. How does the language create the color, dimensions, and feeling of the story and its moments? Such questions and their answers affect the minds and bodies of our characters. As the storytelling turns inward, we mine the unspoken and the remembered, letting the inward journey inform the choreography of the spatial story. We see the characters move, and we often understand the thinking that fuels their movements and words. Both stories, the interior and the exterior, follow the contours the writer creates. The blend of culture, history, ideas, and aesthetic is a mix of the writer’s choosing. The range of voices is key to showing the many layers, voices, and approaches within the African Diaspora. The RPM process applies to both the author and the characters. The “arc” is a common notion in story structure, but workshops often consider the arc of the writer’s life, assessing the path through each project and throughout a creative career. The workshop offers an important intersection for writers of color. The gathering provides access to a collective, but it also stresses the importance of an individualized storytelling approach. The collective moment is meant to resonate after the workshop sessions have ended. As the RPM model shows us, the cycle of creation, feedback, and development is the platform on which the author’s structures—the imagined worlds and the aesthetic approach—are built. [End Page 360] Click for larger view View full resolution Casey Rocheteau Jennifer Bartell © 2014 Click for larger view View full resolution Left to right: Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Jennifer Bartell, Ching-In Chen, Annette Majanja Leroy Cooper © 2014 [End Page 361] Click for larger view View full resolution Left to right: Lashon Daley, Aja Monet Bacquie, Jeremy Clark, LeRonn P. Brooks Ama Codjoe © 2014 Click for larger view View full resolution Left to Right: Jennifer Bartell, Irène Mathieu, Charan P. Morris, Dana Crum, Nadia Alexis, Isaac Ginsberg Miller, Ching-In Chen, Gregory Pardlo, Casey Rocheteau, Kimberly Collins, Aja Monet Bacquie, LeRonn P. Brooks, Jeremy Clark, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Vievee Francis, Ama Codjoe, Kimberly Reyes, Lashon Daley, Sheila Carter-Jones [End Page 362] Click for larger view View full resolution Desiree Bailey George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space Brown University, Department of Africana Studies Click for larger view View full resolution Racquel Goodison George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space Brown University, Department of Africana Studies [End Page 363] Click for larger view View full resolution Ravi Howard George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space Brown University, Department of Africana Studies Click for larger view View full resolution Vievee Francis & Gregory Pardlo George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space Brown University, Department of Africana Studies [End Page 364] Ravi Howard RAVI HOWARD, a native of Montgomery, Alabama, is author of two books of fiction, Like Trees Walking (2007) and Driving the King (2015). For his fiction and nonfiction prose, he has been honored by the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Hurston-Wright Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to being selected as a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Like Trees Walking, his first novel, won for him the coveted Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence (2008). For his work on HBO’s Inside the NFL he was awarded a 2004 Sports Emmy. His work on sports appeared on HBO, ESPN, Fox...

Theologies of the Wild: Contemporary Landscape Writing

Some of the most engrossing literary geographies of the past three decades are to be found in contemporary landscape writing, non-fiction prose texts that are centrally concerned with the relationships between self and place, nature and culture. These texts share a preoccupation with “landscape” in a dual sense: as the material environments inhabited by humans and non-humans; and as a way of seeing spaces and places that is closely linked to pictorial or textual representation. They combine an attunement to the significance of embodied spatial practices, such as walking or wayfaring, with an acute awareness of the ways in which language and form mediate experience. Contemporary landscape writing often seeks to revalue and explore ordinary landscapes and everyday habitats, eschewing conceptions of natural landscapes as “wilderness.” However, the same texts also tend to employ a common set of quasi-religious tropes that imply a deeper network of associations linking ideas of landscape to the sacred, the mystical, and the extra-ordinary: theologies of the wild.

NARRATIVE FOLKLORE OF THE NANAIS

The paper studies the narrative folklore of the Nanais, one of the original ethnic groups of the Amur River basin. It reflects on the artistic peculiarities and thematic range of major genres compared to fairy tales and nonfictional prose of European peoples. Keywords: Manchu-Tungus peoples, narrative folklore, genre compilations, fairy tales, nonfictional prose.

Poe in Cyberspace Technology, Magic, and Quack Physics

Poe in Cyberspace Technology, Magic, and Quack Physics

Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction by Allan Hepburn (review)

Reviewed by: Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction by Allan Hepburn Lisa Mendelman Allan Hepburn. Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. x + 278 pp. Allan Hepburn’s Enchanted Objects contemplates the centrality of art objects—paintings, statues, books, porcelain, vases, excavated ruins—in contemporary fiction. Considering how these objects circulate in novels of the past forty years, Hepburn uses literature as a leaping-off point to theorize aesthetic value in culture writ-large. His description of his primary sources aptly summarizes his own monograph: like the novels Hepburn analyzes, Enchanted Objects “speculate[s] on what an artwork is and does,” as well as “historicize[s] value and critique[s] museum culture” (10–11). Organized by topic (details, ornamentation, fragility, ugliness), Hepburn’s meditation integrates discussions of museums and objects (The Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Portland Vase, Peter the Great’s collection of pulled teeth) into its expansive study of recent fiction and several centuries of theory. As such a capacious archive intimates, Enchanted Objects reflects Hepburn’s wide-ranging interest in contemporary visual art, museum culture, and determinations of aesthetic value. Hepburn’s study moves fluidly between the novels he analyzes and the questions of aesthetic and economic value dramatized by the narratives, and it is these questions of non-fictive cultural investment that are ultimately Hepburn’s major concern. In his second chapter, for example, Hepburn analyzes the function of detail in recent novels that feature the paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, most notably Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (1999). Developing a poetics of detail that focuses on literature but considers art objects more broadly, Hepburn suggests that detail’s role in the narrative and style of these specific works of fiction has its corollaries in painting and other aesthetic forms. In the particular case of these Vermeer novels, Hepburn contends, the details of paintings and other art objects reveal often hidden or obscured issues of gender, class, and labor. Thus, Hepburn concludes, “details are not [End Page 408] valuable in themselves, but function as the repository of value” in both narrative and visual art (86). In subsequent chapters, Hepburn relies on similar analogies to advance claims about the economic underpinnings of contemporary aesthetics in literary and nonliterary contexts. His third chapter, for example, focuses on ornamentation. Engaging theories of ornament by Kant, Blake, Ruskin, and Baudrillard as well as the case studies of Allen Kurzweil’s A Case of Curiosities (1992) and Thomas Wharton’s Salamander (2002), Hepburn argues that ornamentation functions in both an economic and extra-economic aesthetic of valuable excess. Kurweil’s and Wharton’s novels, Hepburn proposes, “recuperate ornamentalism as an aesthetic” through their narratives and literary style (112). Reinforcing the novels’ metafictional representation of books as objects of ornamental value, “Kurzweil and Wharton create an ornamental style characterized by exuberance, digression, narrators’ intrusions, and puzzles” (88). Hepburn concludes, “Although the narrative trajectory of Salamander, dedicated as it is to the making of an infinite book, purports to demystify cultural production, the generous detail and ornate structure of the novel maintain the mystery of language and its textual manifestation in books” (128). Thus, Hepburn argues, both novels affirm the potential of their own physical form—the book—as a valuable aesthetic object, regardless of its market worth. The second half of Enchanted Objects concentrates on museum culture and its literary dramatizations. In Hepburn’s discussion of Bruce Chatwin’s novels and nonfiction prose, the organizing concept of fragility takes on several meanings, connected by shared issues of collection, ownership, and possession. First, fragility exists as a physical property that increases an object’s aesthetic value, as in the case of the state-protected porcelain that the eponymous protagonist of Chatwin’s Utz (1988) collects, protects, and ultimately shatters. Second, fragility characterizes the cultural status of objects in the “long history of looting and breakage” involved in cultural acquisition (171). Third, fragility describes aesthetic reception and the viewing experience in light of “the devitalizing effect that museums have on objects” (159), as institutional practice “dehistoricizes and rehistoricizes artefacts” (160). Given their potential for damage in each of these contexts, fragile...

Social Inequality: A Multidimensional Study of Some Selective Works

This paper focuses on the concept of social inequality from the point of view of critical analysis of some poems, fiction and non-fictional prose. It brings into light the prevalent caste system in the society and tries to find its root. Not only this, the aim of this paper is to highlight the condition of the women in the society from the point of view of feminism. Through the critical analysis of the literary writings, this paper draws one’s attention to the process of horizon making by representing the fact behind all binary oppositions like male/female; civilized/uncivilized etc. To reach at the above mentioned goal, this paper takes into account the writings of Jotirao Phule’s “Caste Laws”(essays), Prem Chand’s “Deliverance”(fiction), Hira Bansode’s “Bosom Friend”, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (prose monologue),and Amitav Ghosh’s “Count Down” (nonfiction) etc. It tries to find out the location of the subaltern group in the society. It shows the helpless condition of this group who remains detached from the main current of the society and remains as a silent group. Jotirao Phule’s essay “Caste Laws” discusses the social inequality from the point of view of mythical and historical context. This work puts into question the binary opposition of Devas/Daityas as it has been depicted in the Hindu mythologies and also tries to forward a solution of this caste problem. On the other hand, Hira Bansode’s “Bosom Friend” brings into light the demarcative attitude of the educated people in this modern era. Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” focuses on the conservative attitude of the society towards girl. And Premchand’s fiction “Deliverance” focuses on the caste system and the hypocrisy of Brahmanism representing the happenings in the life of Dukhi, a character in the story. Thus this paper analyses social inequality as it has been depicted in various literary writings from different perspectives.

Romancing The Adventure: Geoffrey Household's Against The Wind As Picaresque Autobiography

Geoffrey Household's autobiography titled Against the Wind (1958) demonstrates the hybridity of life-writing or personal narrative by borrowing freely from the major dynamic of his prose fiction, which involves the playing off of the picaresque against old-fashioned romance. Reconstructing the major stages of his career in international commerce, military service, and literary authorship, Household's text bears witness to his sympathy for Zionism, given the horrors of the Holocaust, and to the specter of a “dying Europe” that was rapidly succumbing to the interwar realities of political modernity. Although his 23 novels probably will never enjoy a widespread readership, in Against the Wind this once popular author presents a compelling minority report on his times. For these and other reasons, Household's midlife memoir warrants attention by those interested in the reconfigurations of nonfictional prose.

Stain removal, shopping and social responsibility: Aunt Daisy, New Zealand’s first multi-media celebrity, 1933–1963

For over thirty years, Maud Basham was a New Zealand food writer and media personality who, under the name of ‘Aunt Daisy’, exerted an immense and unparalleled influence over domestic behaviour, household spending and pantry stocks. So prominent was she that she was named a ‘Goodwill’ ambassador for New Zealand and made several visits to the USA during and after WWII, where she was described as ‘the dynamo from Down Under’. Best known in popular memory as a radio personality, Aunt Daisy also wrote regular magazine columns, as well as fifteen cookery books and books of handy hints which combined non-fiction and fictional components, and included tips for recycling products as well as readings, quotations and sayings which she found inspiring. By focusing on these innovative texts, this paper will look at how the voice, personality and attitudes of the ‘first lady of New Zealand radio’ are embodied in non-fiction prose to create texts that are still popular, in print, and on sale.

Social Studies Content Reading about the American Revolution Enhanced with Graphic Novels

Graphic novels can contribute to effective content area reading on social studies topics such as the American Revolution. This action research study’s purpose was to examine student recall of facts, enjoyment of reading, and interest in the topic when using graphic novels as compared to illustrated nonfiction prose in social studies content area reading. Twenty-two fifth grade students (13 females, 9 males) in a public school in a Midwestern state participated in the study. Half of the students read about the Boston Massacre and Patrick Henry through graphic novels and read about Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party with illustrated nonfiction texts, with the other half doing the opposite. The mean number of correct ideas recalled by students two weeks after reading two books in the graphic novel condition was 8.6 compared to 7.1 for the nonfiction prose condition with a medium effect size. Students rated their reading enjoyment significantly higher in the graphic novel condition indicating that graphic novels should be employed more often into the school curriculum. Suggestions for integrating graphic novels into the curriculum are provided along with other ways to take action.

Beating the Bounds: mapping the borders of self and landscape in the work of John Burnside and Tim Robinson

This article examines the significance of borders and boundaries in the work of Tim Robinson and John Burnside. Robinson's circumnavigation of the coast of Aran and Burnside's explorations of the borders of the ‘dwelling space’ are discussed in relation to the folk ritual known as ‘Beating the Bounds’, which is theorised here as a process of physical, experiential mapping. This article argues that both Burnside and Robinson use their literal and literary ‘Beating the Bounds’ as a means of mapping the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘landscape’ at non-human scales. Links between these two writers are explored through an analysis of Robinson's metaphor of the ‘good step’. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which these writers make use of their respective forms (poetry and non-fiction prose) to explore similar ideas relating to borders and boundaries. The conclusion discusses this reading of Burnside and Robinson in relation to Timothy Clark's recent paper ‘Derangements of Scale’.

Gerrard Winstanley and Jacob Boehme

Given, firstly, justifiable claims made by the editors of the complete works of the Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley, that he was not just the ‘foremost radical of the English Revolution’ but also one of the ‘finest writers’ of a ‘glorious age of English non-fictional prose’, and secondly, the important suggestion that Winstanley was a forerunner of Quakerism, indeed that his writings shaped the formation of Quaker thought, Winstanley’s potential reading of the German Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme deserves close attention. For more than a century scholars encompassing a range of backgrounds and ideological commitments have, with varying degrees of caution, drawn a number of rarely convincing and, unfortunately, usually ill-informed parallels between Boehme and Winstanley. As I will show, it seems certain that Winstanley did not consult any of Boehme’s works while writing his own. It also appears very probable that he never read Boehme. The disparities between them are far too great. Indeed, there is no analogue in the relevant texts by Boehme for a number of Winstanley’s doctrines and exhortations. Furthermore, Winstanley never quotes, paraphrases or alludes to Boehme. His prose style differs from the way in which Boehme’s translators rendered him into English. Nor does Winstanley adopt any of the neologisms introduced by these translators. Consequently I will suggest that since Winstanley most likely possessed only a handful of printed works or else a modest library, greater consideration needs to be given to how ideas were transmitted – not textually but orally, because it is probable that some of the seeds that germinated into Winstanley’s mature philosophy were sown in this manner.

‘travels of memory, imagination and fact’: Kate O'Brien's Archival Notes

This essay explores Kate O'Brien's attitude towards autobiographical narrative and her quest for self-articulation. It argues that the repeated abstinence from the writing of her autobiography becomes a dominant trope in much of her late-life writing, much of which currently remains unpublished and/or uncollected. By analysing O'Brien's archival material alongside her published non-fiction prose, significant insights into O'Brien's thinking on the processes of memory, as well as her somewhat pained and contradictory relationship with the self and its expression, are brought to light. O'Brien's Farewell Spain (1937), Teresa of Avila (1951), My Ireland (1962), and Presentation Parlour (1963) all establish a mode of self-articulation through the relationship of the self with place (Spain), and person (her female relations and forebears). As such, this essay argues that these texts form a series of carefully averted auto/biographies and further utilises archive theory to offer a framework through which O'Brien's autobiographical impulse can be understood. Within this theoretical paradigm, O'Brien's quest for self-articulation finally becomes a desire to capture the anticipation of memory, opposed to direct recollection, and to seek out literary forms within which to express those memories.

Book Review: The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis's Nonfiction Prose

The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis's Nonfiction Prose. By Gary L. Tandy. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009. ISBN 798-0-78338-973-0. Pp. xiii + 135. $39.95. In The Rhetoric of Certitude, Gary Tandy has produced a detailed study of the nonfiction rhetoric of C. S. Lewis. Considered as a contribution to the growing body of Lewis scholarship, this book's success is mixed. Mr. Tandy notes that a study of the rhetoric of Lewis is challenged from the outset in multiple ways. First is the size of the corpus--dozens of titles. Second is the number and diversity of the genre of those titles: literary scholarship, theology and apologetics, novels, poetry, children's fantasy, science fiction, essays, and letters. Third, and trickiest, is the seductive tendency of Lewis' writing to draw the critic away from matters of style into the substance of his arguments. Tandy addresses the first two challenges by determining to examine only(!) Lewis' nonfiction prose, encompassing the literary scholarship, the theology and apologetics, and essays. Even though this sub-set of Lewis' work is still substantial in size and quite diverse in audience, he considers that it is critical to a comprehensive assessment of Lewis' rhetoric to look for evidence of stylistic unity across a wide array of Lewis' work. Tandy states: Because of this natural separation of Lewis's into these seemingly exclusive categories, many critics have failed to recognize the unity of Lewis's rhetoric and have failed to identify those stylistic traits common both to his literary criticism and religious apologetics. (x) Tandy addresses the third challenge by simply refusing to be seduced by the content of Lewis' writing. Philosophers such as I consider this fairly odd, but Tandy has a job to do, and he sticks to it resolutely--to a fault, but that will be discussed below. This brief but loaded book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter, 'The Stance of the Last Survivor': C. S. Lewis and the Modern World, sets Lewis as a thinker and writer in the intellectual context of the twentieth century. Tandy states that Lewis viewed himself as a holdover from an earlier era, the Christian era, which Lewis thinks ended around the early nineteenth century. The first chapter sets this crucial perspective for understanding Lewis' work. Chapter 2 describes Lewis' theory of rhetoric, gleaned from his comments about language, communication, and style in his nonfiction prose (xii). This chapter includes a review of the basic categories of Lewis' theology and apologetic approach, because his view of rhetoric is so deeply entwined with his overall theory of language. In chapters 3 and 4, Tandy analyzes Lewis' practice, taking the reader through a fairly comprehensive catalog of rhetorical categories. In chapter 5, Tandy ultimately argues for the essential stylistic unity of Lewis's literary criticism and religious prose (xii). Three earlier books aim to analyze Lewis' prose: Chad Walsh's The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, Richard Cunningham's C. S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith, and James Como's Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis. All three are very good books with their own strengths, and Como, a professor of rhetoric at City University of New York, York College, has deliberately organized his book according to rhetorical categories. As far as offering an overall understanding of the excellence of Lewis' writing, ComUs brilliant essay is certainly a far more thoughtful contribution than Tandy's. Tandy's work, however, offers an extremely detailed and comprehensive basic rhetorical analysis, sticking painstakingly to that more specific and particular task. Thus, Tandy's volume has its clear contribution to make to the scholarship on Lewis. At the basic level of scholarship--the accumulation, cataloging, and marshaling of relevant primary and secondary material on the subject--Tandy's book is a significant resource in two dimensions. …

C. Louis Leipoldt and the Role of the “Cape Malay” in South African Cookery

Summary The famous Afrikaans poet C. Louis Leipoldt (1880-1947) has long been misread as a nationalist writer. During the first half of the 20th century Leipoldt's poetry seemed to be in sympathy with Afrikaner nationalism, and since his death he has mostly been remembered for this element of his work. Recent scholarship reveals a different Leipoldt, one fiercely anti-nationalist in his unpublished English fiction and more openly aggressive in his non-fiction prose. Leipoldt regularly wrote about food and culinary traditions in South Africa and used his knowledge of local cuisine to argue against notions of “authentic Afrikaner dishes”, instead insisting that the earliest authorities behind original South African dishes camefrom the “Cape Malay” population of theWestern Cape. This article aims to explore Leipoldt's cosmopolitan argument against political, sectional possessiveness in the cultural development of South Africa between the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, with a sustained focus on the importance of food as a cultural marker.

Norwegian få ‘get’: A survey of its uses in present-day Riksmål/Bokmål

The present survey of the uses of the Norwegian verb få ‘get’ is based on its converse relationship to the three-place achievement predicate gi ‘give’, which combines with an agentive subject, a recipient indirect object and a direct object. The syntactic constructions in which få appears and their relative frequency of occurrence are described on the basis of a corpus consisting of 779 examples from works of present-day Norwegian fictional and nonfictional prose. About 60% of the examples have NP or PP arguments only and about 40% show, in addition or only, a nonfinite verb form. The former group of constructions comprises numerous examples representing syntactically complex lexical predicates. The latter group consists of four different construction types that show grammaticalization features: causative with an infinitive with the marker å (å-infinitive); modal with the bare infinitive; “recipient passive” with a passive past participle; and “resultative active” with an active past participle. In addition, there is an “infinitival relative” construction where an å-infinitive is adjoined to the object of få. These various types of constructions are investigated with regard to the extent to which the arguments of få reflect or deviate from the semantic properties of gi in the basic use of this verb as a three-place achievement predicate.

Tom Stoppard: a bibliographical history

Tom Stoppard is one of the most prolific living British authors with a creative career of over half a century. This bibliographical history provides a comprehensive account of his creativity and will provide an invaluable resource for those who study contemporary British literature, theatre, film, journalism and the media. This book also documents late 20th-century political activism. Stoppard's engagement with political causes, especially in Eastern Europe and his native Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, are fully documented as is his journalism, non-fiction prose writings, essays, articles, published speeches, letters and films.

Tracing Vaishnava Strains in Tagore

The religio-cultural milieu of urban and rural Bengal within which Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) lived was variegated and dynamic with multiple Indian and foreign streams converging on Calcutta, then the capital of British India. One of the more popular but also more refined of the indigenous Bengali Indian streams was the religio-literary Vaishnava tradition of devotion (bhakti) to God Krishna and his human manifestation Chaitanya (1486–1533). Although Rabindranath was exposed to this tradition from his childhood, scholars, especially those writing in English, have tended to neglect this aspect of his experience and formation. The present article provides a corrective to this neglect by showing how Rabindranath treats Vaishnava matters in his fictional and non-fictional prose writings, including personal correspondence, and by examining how passages from his poetry resonate with basic Vaishnava themes, sentiments, and values. In summation, the article confirms that Rabindranath was well informed about the Vaishnava tradition in Bengal and that at the level of aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities, especially as expressed in poetry and song, he shared much with that tradition despite being critical of its restrictive dogmatic tendencies and alleged organisational distortions of the genuine spirituality that he would call the ‘religion of man’.

The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (review)

Reviewed by: The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Catherine Robson Andrew H. Miller , The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. xiv + 260 pp. There are some very good reasons to be cheerful about Andrew Miller's book, its doleful title notwithstanding (more about that in due course). The Burdens of Perfection strides fearlessly into areas that many Victorianists have studiously avoided. For one thing, by engaging wholeheartedly with the writings of such figures as Stanley Cavell, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams, the book demonstrates that a turn to moral philosophy has the potential to open up a set of absorbing and rewarding topics for readers of nineteenth-century literature. For another, it dares to speak out loud a thought that, I suspect, passes frequently through the minds of those of us who teach the Victorian novel, but which for many a long year has seemed inadmissible within the dominant tendencies and paradigms of our discipline. Namely, we have a sense that the experience of immersing ourselves in these long works' complex networks of personal interactions has somehow the potential to make us (and our students) better people, but are unwilling to transform this feeling into words: who would want to shoulder the weighty baggage packed into such a statement, and who is not afraid of sounding as preachy as the Victorians themselves? Fortunately, Miller is brave enough to insist upon the importance of being earnest: The Burdens of Perfection argues that analyzing the ethical experience of reading is a necessary response to the literary productions of the era most famously obsessed with ethical questions. In making the case for the value of conjoining literary studies to moral philosophy, the Introduction to Miller's book includes an attack upon the modes of Victorianist criticism that have taken history as their principal interlocutor; new historicism's interrogation of the ideological operations and investments of nineteenth-century literature comes under particularly heavy fire. This is a puzzling move, not least because Miller happens to be the co-editor of Victorian Studies, a journal which maintains a marked, if not a monolithical, historical bent, and the author of Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative, a work firmly in the new historicist mode. Of course, scholars are at liberty to choose to wear different hats at different times, but it is curious that Miller makes no mention of these two biographical facts, especially in a study that (i) grants us more than usual closeness to its author in his everyday life (at one point he presents himself reclining on the sofa, identifying with Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, and at another, sitting in bed talking to his wife, trying to decide whether to keep on reading) and (ii) concerns itself extensively with the present-tense self's relation to its various past-tense instantiations. But, perhaps more importantly, [End Page 431] the rejection of historicist-oriented literary criticism seems odd because The Burdens of Perfection is itself a solidly grounded historical study. The book's commitment to history makes itself felt most obviously in its focusing only on nineteenth-century texts: novels by Dickens, Eliot, Austen and short stories by James are the favored literary objects, inspiring Miller's liveliest and most appealing critical engagement, but he also works deftly with poetry by Browning and Tennyson and non-fiction prose (here the works of Mill, Arnold, Carlyle and Pater come to the fore). Miller's explanation for his selection policy runs as follows: "perfectionist narratives" — explorations, dramatizations, discussions of how one might become a better person — can be observed within a wide array of texts in many different eras, but works from his chosen period offer especially overt manifestations thereof, and for certain key historical reasons (7-26), in particular, that distinctive feature of the age, the advance of skepticism — here not religious skepticism but rather "what philosophers traditionally call the problem of other minds, the question of whether we can know anything of the inner lives of others" (xii). The characteristic nineteenth-century response to "a culturally general but forceful doubt over the certainty...