Posthumous Reputation Research Articles

From Alexander to Jesus by Ory Amitay (review)

Reviewed by: From Alexander to Jesus by Ory Amitay Ephraim Lytle Ory Amitay. From Alexander to Jesus. Hellenistic Culture and Society 52. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 246. US$49.95. ISBN 9780520266360. Ory Amitay’s provocatively titled From Alexander to Jesus aims “to suggest to the reader a possible link connecting the life, career and posthumous reputation of Alexander the Great with that of Jesus Christ” (2). His intent is achieved chiefly through exploring the links in life and in myth between Alexander and his ancestor Heracles, with special prominence given to ideas that Amitay constructs as central to the Jesus myths, such as divine sonship and reconciliation among peoples. While scholars of both the Hellenistic period and early Christianity alike accept that a whole range of developments during the Hellenistic period influenced the course of early Christianity (at least in a limited sense), the more specific thesis—that the myths about Jesus constructed by early Christians owe specific debts to the historical figure of Alexander—has never been persuasively argued (or even seriously pursued). General trends in both fields of scholarship—dominated by a close scrutiny of the sources—would [End Page 109] seem to render increasingly remote the possibility of discovering new and convincing links between the figures of Alexander and Jesus. Amitay, however, hopes to rescue for his thesis the evidence of an author such as Plutarch by suggesting that many of the myths he reproduces can in fact be traced back to Alexander’s lifetime and the generations immediately following his death. That process involves first recovering an Alexander historicus and then exploring his relationship to Alexander mythicus (these are Amitay’s preferred terms). For that process, the usual methodologies of Alexander historians are well adapted. But they are perhaps insufficient for the second part of Amitay’s project, which involves discussing and comparing structural similarities between two bodies of myth, and arguing for the influence of one upon the other. Here Amitay seems to have recognized that a more nuanced and theoretically informed approach is necessary. Indeed Amitay spends much of the introduction discussing “meme theory,” a model first developed by Richard Dawkins by analogy with biological evolution. It proposes that memes—units of cultural information such as symbols, practices, or ideas—evolve, like genes, through a kind of natural selection. Amitay concludes, “In memetic terms the thesis of this book is that the Jesus memeplex replicated a great many memes adopted and developed first by Alexander the living person, and after his death by the mythical memeplex which he had created” (5). Unfortunately, the author’s rudimentary grasp of this material does not inspire confidence, and I admit to having felt some relief upon reading that, because the author became acquainted with the theory only at a late stage, he “decline[d] to take up the challenge” of widely deploying it in the book, instead choosing to use it “sparingly” (5). One is left wondering what purpose such superficial application can serve. That discomfort is only enhanced when the language of memes and memeplexes appears in the text itself—generally on those occasions where the proposed links between material are less than convincing and the argument is weakest. Here, at least, it seems that better editorial guidance was needed. In fact the book’s strongest sections are those that will be most familiar to traditional Alexander scholars. These are concentrated in the first four chapters, which treat the evidence for Alexander and Heracles. The arrangement essentially follows Alexander’s campaign, the first chapter opening with Alexander offering sacrifice to Heracles when crossing the Danube and the third chapter concluding with discussion of episodes that take place in India. The portrait that emerges in these chapters is of an Alexander whose life is inextricably bound up with myth. Over the course of the campaigns his relationship to Heracles is both central and evolving. Throughout, Heracles is a recipient of worship, both as a god and as a heroic ancestor. But after Siwah, Heracles is no longer only a distant ancestor but also a half-brother. And he is also increasingly an object of rivalry, a hero whom Alexander consciously emulates and...

History of a success: Irène Némirovsky's posthumous reputation, 1944–2004

This article analyses the publication history of Irène Némirovsky's posthumously published fiction in the period 1944–2004. Frequently presented as a ‘neglected’ writer, no attention has so far been paid to the variations in Némirovsky's post-war reputation, and no detailed analysis of the reasons why her work was not read in post-war France has so far been proposed. This article reads Némirovsky's posthumous reputation through the prism of the dynamics of cultural memory of the Second World War in France. Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, it traces Némirovsky's visibility in post-war French culture and demonstrates that the success of Suite française in 2004 was foreshadowed by a renewed interest in Némirovsky that began in the 1990s. In the twenty-first century, a new generation of readers fascinated by Holocaust testimony have found reasons to read Némirovsky once again.

THE DEATH OF JOHN STUART MILL

ABSTRACTThis article surveys the fiercely contested posthumous assessments of John Stuart Mill in the newspaper and periodical press, in the months following his death in May 1873, and elicits the broader intellectual context. Judgements made in the immediate wake of Mill's death influence biographers and historians to this day and provide an illuminating aperture into the politics and shifting ideological forces of the period. The article considers how Mill's failure to control his posthumous reputation demonstrates both the inextricable intertwining of politics and character in the 1870s, and the difficulties his allies faced. In particular, it shows the sharp division between Mill's middle and working class admirers; the use of James Mill's name as a rebuke to his son; the redefinition of Malthusianism in the 1870s; and how publication of Mill's Autobiography damaged his reputation. Finally, the article considers the relative absence of both theological and Darwinian critiques of Mill.

<i>Gringo Iracundo</i>: Roque Dalton and His Father

In prose and poetry and throughout his career, Roque Dalton used the life story of his U.S. emigre father to explore the themes of power, dependency, and identity that interested him and other Salvadoran intellectuals of his era. Yet it was a theatrical image of Winnall Dalton, that of a marauding, gunslinging cowboy, that other writers took as fact and that became part of the poet's posthumous reputation. I show here that the image of a western outlaw is wrong and that Winnall Dalton came from a comfortable, Mexican American family in Tucson that had fallen on hard times just before he migrated to Central America around 1916. Dalton delved into the paradoxes of his own upbringing—raised in a working-class neighborhood as the illegitimate offspring of a millionaire, a Marxist revolutionary who was the son of pure capitalism—almost until his death in 1975. Taken together, the shifting depictions of his father all point to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Dalton's views on power and the nature of identity than previously understood in the con- text of the revolutionary struggle that ultimately consumed him. Roque Dalton—poet, journalist, essayist, and legendary literary fl ame- out—wrote often about his U.S.-born father Winnall Dalton and his mi- gration to El Salvador. Through the fi gure of his father, and through an image of his father that evolved from that of a distant, deep-pocketed pa- triarch to a caricatured cowboy fi gure, Dalton developed his ideas about oppression, identity, and the relationship of the excluded to the powerful. The father often personifi ed the unquestioned class hierarchy that Dalton and other writers of his generation sought to expose and bring down in their revolutionary critique of Salvadoran society. The depiction of Dal- ton's father thus linked the personal and the political in ways that were unusual for Latin American writers of the day, although the depiction

The Old English Life of St Neot and the legends of King Alfred

AbstractThe Old English Life of St Neot has been generally dated to the twelfth century and dismissed as a late and derivative work. The article argues that it was written much earlier, in the first few decades of the eleventh century, and is both a significant example of late Old English hagiographic literature and an important witness to early legends about King Alfred and his posthumous reputation.

Manliness in the Life and Posthumous Reputation of Robert Falcon Scott

Polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) was deeply uncomfortable with and sometimes critical of the traditional masculine role into which he had been forced as a naval officer and national hero. Yet it was necessary for him to accept this role in order to fulfill his family obligations. Scott's life story suggests that the "flight from domesticity" postulated by John Tosh may not tell the full truth about late-Victorian and Edwardian masculinity. This article uses Scott's case to reconsider the standard picture of British manliness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the influence of gender roles and ideologies on Scott's formative years, then examines representations of him in biographical literature. The combination of "masculine" and "feminine" traits in Scott's character intrigued his early biographers. In contrast, some later writers viewed him as effeminate and therefore unheroic. Their criticisms indicate that the ideal of "hard" manliness among imperial heroes may be a construction of the post-imperial age.

Tchaikovsky (review)

Reviewed by: Tchaikovsky Albrecht Gaub Tchaikovsky. By Roland John Wiley. (The Master Musicians.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. [xxi, 546 p. ISBN 9780195368925. $39.95.] Plates, music examples, work list, glossary, bibliography, index. [End Page 126] Roland John Wiley, professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, published a book on Tchaikovsky's ballets (Tchaikovsky's Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985]), and wrote the article on the composer in the second edition of The New Grove. Now he has written a life-and-works monograph on the composer. The book is in fact not so new: according to his own testimony (http://www.annarbor.com/entertainment/u-m-scholar-has-new-tchaikovsky-biography/ [accessed 26 May 2010]), Wiley had already conceived it in 1990. The unusually long gestation period of his book saw not only the demise of the Soviet Union, but also a new wave of Western literature on Tchaikovsky. In his preface, Wiley criticizes these publications for neglecting Tchaikovsky's music in favor of his biography, and it is his goal to set this straight (no pun intended). The final result has been published in Oxford's series "The Master Musicians." This is remarkable insofar as this series already included a book on Tchaikovsky (Edward Garden, Tchaikovsky [London: Dent, 1973]), which Wiley's is undoubtedly intended to supersede. Not surprisingly, Wiley repeatedly takes on Garden and also David Brown, whom he punishes by excluding volumes 3 and 4 of the latter's four-volume monograph (Tchaikovsky [New York: W. W. Norton, 1978–1992]) from his otherwise rather extensive "select bibliography" (451 titles in alphabetical order). Speaking of Wiley's bibliography, it doubles as a numbered reference list for citations: his book comes without footnotes or endnotes. Wiley arranges his book in chronological order, and each chapter on a given period of Tchaikovsky's life is followed by another one on the music composed during the same period. He calls this arrangement "a difficult choice"; he chose it to counteract "the premise [prevalent in older literature on Tchaikovsky] that all of Tchaikovsky's music had immediate and profound motivation in his life" (p. xviii). Still, he is convinced that some of Tchaikovsky's works (the usual suspects from the Fourth to the Sixth Symphonies, Eugene Onegin, etc.) had such a motivation. The biographical chapters are a particular pleasure to read. Wiley's dealing with Tchaikovsky's homosexuality as well as with other facets of his personality that may cause or have caused controversy is straight-forward. I was particularly intrigued by two lesser-known phenomena exposed at length. The first is Tchaikovsky's inability to budget. Even with generous subsidies from Nadezhda von Meck, from his publisher Jurgenson and, last but not least, the House of Romanov, he was always short of money due to his lavish lifestyle and inclination to make generous gifts, and he inadvertently asked for more, feeling entitled to it. When he writes (in 1879) to one of his creditors, Vladimir Shilovsky, "you are a rich Maecenas and I am a poor artist" (p. 215), Tchaikovsky comes across as both preposterous and hypocritical. The second is the eerily unanimous, clannish behavior of Tchaikovsky's brothers, who seem to have placed the common good of the family's reputation over everything else. How they planned the details of Tchaikovsky's separation from his wife (p. 152ff.), how they spirited their sister's daughter away to Paris to let her give birth to an illegitimate child (pp. 246–47), how they brought that child back to Russia to be adopted by Tchaikovsky's oldest brother, Nikolay (pp. 290–91)—all this sets the stage for what happened after Tchaikovsky's death, when they immediately started destroying, cutting out from, and blotting out in Tchaikovsky's papers everything that might have compromised, according to the values and mores of Russia in 1893, their brother's posthumous reputation, and maybe their own as well (p. xiv). The culmination of this cover-up operation was the publication of Modest Tchaikovsky's three-volume biography in 1903 (Zhizn' Petra Il'icha Chaikovskago [Moscow: Sobstven nost izdatelia P. IUrgensona, 1903]), ostensibly endowed with the...

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (review)

Reviewed by: Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 Roxanne Eberle Devoney Looser , Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 252 pp. In Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, Devoney Looser suggests that examining the late careers of British women writers is a necessarily "compensatory gesture" for nineteenth-century critics who have focused upon issues of gender and genre without paying adequate attention to the significance of aging, particularly given the notably long lives of many of their literary subjects. As she trenchantly observes, "We have, for more than a century, comprehended the late lives of early modern British women writers too rosily, too darkly, or more often, not at all" (178). Looser unapologetically identifies the source of such misrepresentation and neglect as "ageism, whether malignant or benign" (168), and identifies some of the larger repercussions of disregarding the total arc of a literary career. Close analysis of the lives and works of nineteenth-century women writers reveals fissures — or perhaps more accurately bridges — between literary periods constructed around the lives and careers of male writers. The careers of many women writers are often incommensurable with standard literary periodizations, as critics such as Susan Staves, Anne Mellor, and Isobel Armstrong have also noted. Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, often identified as "eighteenth-century writers," both lived and published into the Victorian period, and it would have been impossible for Austen to have acted upon Virginia Woolf's injunction to pay homage at Burney's grave, since she died nearly two decades before her "predecessor." While the fact of the nineteenth-century [End Page 414] woman writer's longevity has been noted, Looser's book makes a truly original contribution to a comparative study of several different women writers. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain is written as a goad to other critics. Looser tends to ask questions rather than answer them, inviting her readers to follow avenues of study towards which she directs them. The exploratory nature of her critical methodology is evident throughout the volume: she examines the differences between the careers of several writers rather than construct a single unifying narrative. Indeed, she frequently refers to the chapters as "case studies," and she explores diverse perspectives on women writers and old age. As Looser notes, there was no single model for the aging professional woman writer in the nineteenth century, since it was only in mid-century that such a group came to be known: "These long-lived writers negotiated the literary marketplace early in their lives, during a time when women authors achieved greater visibility and, for some, greater respectability. Then, in their later years . . . these authors encountered a new set of complicated prejudices for which they were largely unprepared" (1). As Looser goes on to demonstrate, women writers chose various paths as they sought to sustain their cultural authority as authors, shape their posthumous reputations, or simply make enough money to guarantee themselves a relatively comfortable old age. Steadfastly committed to her contention that there is no single story to be told about old age and women writers, Looser synthesizes a variety of primary and secondary sources in order to construct a picture of the conflicting attitudes towards aging, gender, and authorship at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. She describes the multiple ways in which women writers responded to the range of unattractive representations of them in their culture, where they appear as rouged and bitter crones, benevolent and bespectacled wise women, or, more commonly perhaps, anachronistic nonentities. Much of the success of the Introduction, which is both compelling and persuasive, lies in its inclusion of a large group of women writers, ranging from Charlotte Lennox (whose prosperous career did not protect her from an impoverished old age) to Joanna Baillie (who publicly renounced writing for philanthropy) to Lady Morgan (who concealed her true age and refused to abandon an image of sexual desirability well into her eighties). The sweeping survey in the Introduction usefully situates the more detailed case studies that follow. In the first chapter of the volume, Looser contrasts...

Writing Medical Lives, Creating Posthumous Reputations: Dr Matthew Baillie and his Family in the Nineteenth Century

This article is concerned with the relationship between life writing and the construction of nineteenth-century medical identities. It explores those features of medical lives—in obituary, biography and autobiography—that were valorised within the evolving medical profession and shaped medical education. The primary illustration is Dr Matthew Baillie (1761–1823), celebrated morbid anatomist and physician, and his network of medical friends and kin. The article explores the rise of medical life writing, the themes of medical life writing and the role of families in the ‘construction’ of idealised medical lives. The importance of character, relationships with money, morality, family life and physical appearance and dress (indicated through portraiture) are explored. The article concludes that the sustained interest in Baillie was linked to changes in the medical profession and to a long-standing medical and popular conversation on the proper conduct of relationships between doctors and their patients.

‘To wound an oak’: the Poetics of Tree-felling at Nun Appleton

But I, retiring from the flood,Take sanctuary in the wood;And, while it lasts, my self embarkIn this yet green, yet growing ark1Andrew Marvell's poem, 'Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax', which searchingly explores the civilised retirement from public life of the Commander-in-Chief of Parliamentarian forces from 1645 to 1650, Sir Thomas, 'Lord General' Fairfax (1612-71), has, like Marvell (1621-78) himself, received a considerable measure of critical attention in recent years. Unsurprisingly, considering the poem features no fewer than eighteen stanzas on Nun Appleton's wood, a good deal of this attention, by scholars such as Chris Fitter, Diane McColley, Nigel Smith and James Turner, has focused on its environmental concerns,2 which include the felling of oak trees on Fairfax's idyllic Yorkshire estate, memorably effected by woodpeckers figuring the New Model Army: 'Who could have thought the tallest oak / Should fall by such a feeble stroke!'. Marvell, though, was not the only man to pen verses on Nun Appleton in the seventeenth century. As well as a modest offering from Lord Fairfax himself, 'Upon the New-built House att Apleton',3 there is another poem from this period concerned not only with this identical Yorkshire retreat but also, intriguingly, with the same theme of oak-felling. This poem is 'The Vocal Oak', subtitled 'Upon Cutting Down the Woods at Nun-Appleton',4 by Brian Fairfax (1633-1711), Thomas's cousin. Published in 1849,5 the poem has not been entirely ignored by literary critics. Turner quotes eight lines from it, arguing that Fairfax conveys the countryside as 'an object of capital investment and conspicuous consumption', and both Fitter and Smith make brief reference to it, if solely in relation to Marvell.6 Nonetheless, 'The Vocal Oak' has hitherto failed to receive the sustained critical examination which its literary, ecological and political moment merits. Written in 1679, the year following Marvell's death, Fairfax's poem provides a vivid illustration of seventeenth-century poetically framed attitudes to the exploitation of the countryside in general, and to deforestation in particular.7 In addition to its treatment of tree-felling as an intrinsically significant and wholly deleterious environmental event, the poem also demonstrates the richly symbolic uses to which responses to such activity could be put, in a Restoration era when the posthumous reputation of Lord Fairfax, for whom Brian had acted as private secretary from 1661, was being placed under growing strain. Though in many ways a strikingly individual piece, rooted in both the personal and political preoccupations of its day, 'The Vocal Oak' also betrays revealing parallels with Marvell's earlier poem, shedding new light on the manuscript circulation and contemporary popularity of a work which, like most of Marvell's poetry, was published posthumously in 1681.8 The poem does not rival Marvell's in ecological, any more than in literary, importance; rather, it operates as a satellite, orbiting around and in some ways dependent on it, yet at the same time exhibiting its own singular characteristics. This article, then, provides the first detailed analysis of 'The Vocal Oak', a close reading in which contemporary configurations of politics, environment and intertextuality are triangulated.Given the plethora of modern studies on seventeenth-century protoenvironmentalism, the wider context of a poem concerned, at least on one level, with deforestation needs little explanation. More than most other ecological anxieties, deforestation had been, and was still, a hotly-debated issue at the time of the poem's composition. Michael Williams gives the early modern British timber crisis an instructively European and Far Eastern context, suggesting that only Rome at its peak and northern China in the twelfth century match the scale of the problem experienced in Britain from the late sixteenth century onwards. Ken Hiltner has shown that early modern England experienced a host of environmental crises, including air pollution, acid rain, endangered species, wetland loss and, not least, deforestation. …

The reputation of Isabella Fyvie Mayo: interpretations of a life

Isabella Fyvie Mayo was a friend of both Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. She became an ethical anarchist, pacifist, anti‐imperialist and anti‐racist campaigner. But she is remembered today only as a second‐rate Victorian novelist, who called a middle‐aged Quaker a nymphomaniac and precipitated a split in a pioneering British anti‐racism organisation, supposedly because of her ‘opposition’ to mixed‐race marriages. This article examines her posthumous reputation to explore the difficulties of retrieving a life embedded in many different social, political and geographical contexts and it looks at some of the contemporary incidents and coincidences and modern academic processes which may cause the misconstruction of a biography. It includes an examination of the history of the Society for the Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man and the impact of accounts by Vron Ware and Ida B. Wells‐Barnett of Mayo’s role in the anti‐lynching campaign of the 1890s.

Le Paradis perdu. (MHRA Critical Texts, 20) by Évariste-Désiré de Parny, Ritchie Robertson, Catriona Seth

MLR, 105.4, 2010 1159 amusement. Le Mariage de Figaro inevitably takes pride of place here; arguing against the naiver type ofMarxist approach, Goldzink sees thiswork as a portrayal of the strengths and weaknesses of the aristocratic order, undertaken at the precise point inhistorywhen it was possible to laugh at it.This studyhas many illuminating things to say on the linksbetween message and formal device, showing, for instance, how the role of Cherubin focuses attention on the fleetinghistorical moment and how theultimate triumph of thewomen inLeMariage de Figaro broadens the ambi tious social analysis thatBeaumarchais isoffering.There are telling comments, too, on the function of theOriental setting inTarare and on the powerlessness of Figaro in La Mere coupable. Goldzink breaks a few quixotic lances against the academic establishment in this highly personal reading; a few old scores being settled, per chance? His approach may irritate some readers, but there is something infectious in the enthusiasm with which he rereads these familiar texts,and a refreshing intel lectual honesty in his willingness to revise his own earlier views. This is a bracing back-to-basics interpretation,which sends its reader back to the texts refreshed. University of Nottingham Richard A. Francis Le Paradis perdu. By Evariste-Desire de Parny. Ed. by Ritchie Robertson and Catriona Seth. (MHRA Critical Texts, 20) London: Modern Humanities Research Association. 2009. vi+91 pp. ?12.99. ISBN 978-0-947623-90-6. As the editors of this volume, Ritchie Robertson and Catriona Seth, observe, Parny is nowadays probably best known for the three poems from his Chansons madecasses (1787) set tomusic by Ravel. For his contemporaries and successors, he was most significantly the author of the highly influential Poesies erotiques (1778, revised 1781). However, if there is a whiff of scandal about his name, it is not because of this collection, whose title should be interpreted in a classical rather than amodern way, but because of laterworks of religious satire, ofwhich Le Paradis perdu, a parody ofMilton published in 1805, is a perfect example. Robertson's authorship of a volume on mock epic, including Parny s, and Seth's extensive work on the poet make them an ideal editorial team for this volume. The introduction begins with a whistle-stop tour through Parny's biography, and an examination of his posthumous reputation, which remained significant until well into the nineteenth century. An examination of the reception of Milton's work in eighteenth-century France and of various aspects of his masterpiece that have provoked discussion follows, with indications of how Parny approached the latter.A section looking at how Parny's parody relates to both the events of its time and pro-Christian works being published by authors such as Chateaubriand, and an explanation of the principles of the edition, conclude the introduction. Written in decasyllables with a free rhyme scheme, the poem is an entertaining read, even ifParny does spend perhaps too much time sending up Milton's wars inHeaven. The satire of theHoly Trinity,with a curmudgeonly God the Father, and references to the Son as Te mouton' and theHoly Spirit as Te pigeon' raise a smile, but would certainly have been impossible during the ancien regime.Of most ii6o Reviews interest, though, are the introduction of a scientist demon, whose skills transform Hell into a much more entertaining and inviting place than dull, unchanging Paradise, and Parnys interpretation of the knowledge given by the forbidden fruit. For this is no less than the discovery of sexual urges and pleasure, a discovery which not only makes aman of the first man, but also makes him and Eve realize that the Fall has its compensations. Swansea University Derek Connon Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris. By Miranda Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. xi+328 pp. ?55. ISBN 978-0-19-954328-1. This innovative study explores the varied manifestations of eccentricity in Parisian life between the July Monarchy and thefin de siecle. As the author reminds us in her introduction, eccentricity implies behaviour divergent from the norms of a given centre or centricity' (p. 1), which in nineteenth-century France were those determined primarily by bourgeois society. In contrast to the...

Edgar, King of the English, 959-975

The posthumous reputation of King Edgar has ensured that his reign has been regarded as a golden age in English history, but reliable evidence for the period is unfortunately sparse. This book, in part the fruit of a conference held at the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies in 2005, assembles scholars from various disciplines to wring what can be discovered out of the intractable sources. Since no connected narrative is possible, the book is divided into thematic sections. The first, containing two studies by Simon Keynes, sets the scene. ‘Edgar rex admirabilis’ identifies significant topics: the development of Edgar's reputation; royal government and the emergence of a united English kingdom; the royal court and its members, ecclesiastical and lay; the economic and social consequences of political unification; and the monastic reform movement. Professor Keynes also examines the coronation of 973 and the subsequent events at Chester, and the consequences of the king's early death. Most of the strictly contemporary evidence consists of royal charters, and no one is better qualified to handle these than Keynes; his second contribution to the volume (and perhaps its crowning glory) is an annotated conspectus of all the known charters in Edgar's name from 957 to 975, including those which are suspect, incomplete, or lost.

The Life, Works and Reception of an Evangelical Radical: James Woodhouse (1735–1820), the ‘Poetical Shoemaker’

AbstractThe article surveys the life, career, reception and works of James Woodhouse, ‘The Poetical Shoemaker’, making use of a wide variety of sources. The article outlines his posthumous reputation, arguing that many accounts until recently seem to have perpetuated the same (sometimes misleading) impressions of Woodhouse and his work. It is suggested, however, that more nuanced critical approaches to Woodhouse's oeuvre, emphasising his significance to the labouring‐class poetic tradition, have emerged in recent years. The article surveys new directions for future scholarship, concentrating on the construction of identities in Woodhouse's posthumously‐published verse autobiography, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus. The poem charts the growth of Woodhouse/Crispin(us)'s radical evangelical Methodist identity in his later years, as he retreats from an early quiescence with patrons that saw all but one poem in his first published collection dedicated to them. The article argues that contemporary critical approaches can account for why and how the autobiographical act of Crispinus Scriblerus embodies the complexities of Woodhouse's multiple and contradictory simultaneous identities. Crispinus Scriblerus uses the philosophy of Heraclitus to reproduce the same strategy that Woodhouse accuses the educated classes of adopting towards him during his early years of poetic celebrity: that of claiming superiority on the grounds of absolute difference between his own identity and that of his antagonists. It is argued that paying critical attention to the fluidity of the seeming autobiographical oppositions that the critic Stuart Sherman terms ‘compound rubrics’ can demonstrate how the poem (sometimes unwittingly) realises some of its aims, while failing in others.

The Art of Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Art of Fiction Stephen Arata (bio) Henry James , "The Art of Fiction" (1884) Consult just about any anthology of modern literary criticism and you are likely to find Henry James's "The Art of Fiction" somewhere on the premises. This 1884 essay—I am not going out on a limb here—is the best-known theoretical statement on the novel published in Victorian England. Together with a handful of other essays and, more pyrotechnically, the 1907-09 prefaces to the New York edition of his works, "The Art of Fiction" established James's posthumous reputation as the foremost narrative theorist of his era. For Anglo-American critics in the middle decades of the twentieth century, that reputation was decisively shaped by Percy Lubbock and R.P. Blackmur. Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) and Blackmur's introductory essay to The Art of the Novel (1934) celebrate James for shaking the novel—theory and practice alike—out of its cozy Victorian slumber and charging it with modern sophistication and rigour. For the New Critics who read him by way of Lubbock and Blackmur, it was James's mastery of technique and his attention to novelistic form that separated his achievement from those loose, baggy monsters casually turned out by his immediate forebears. It was likewise, in this view, James's conception of his art as a sacred office that helped deliver narrative fiction from the banal moralism and misguided social activism characteristic of the Victorian novel. Such views have not worn well, and few would now argue either that Victorian novelists were unsophisticated in the practice of their craft or that James's own novels conform more than intermittently to New Critical standards. (Then again, neither would James.) If "The Art of Fiction" no longer seems the proto-Modernist manifesto it once was taken for, it nevertheless remains essential reading for literary critics. Its interest is not merely antiquarian, either. At this historical remove, what is most striking about the essay is the continuing relevance of the case it makes for the activity of criticism itself. In terms that are still recognizable, "The Art of Fiction" validates what we do. If some of James's evaluative criteria seem less compelling than they once did, his impassioned defence of the importance—as well as the pleasure—of criticism retains its freshness. This is not always the case with Matthew Arnold, whose apologies for criticism often sound, well, apologetic, as if Arnold were disappointed with the world for getting itself into such a state that criticism had become necessary and disappointed with himself for giving in to the critical impulse. It is doubtful that Arnold ever believed, as James did, that to exercise our critical faculties is to "enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures" (50). "The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle," James avers a few pages earlier, "but the theory too is interesting" (45). The occasional [End Page 53] dilettantishness of his phrasing should not obscure the serious, indeed crucial, benefits James attributes to acts of responsible criticism. He does not, as Oscar Wilde would a half-decade later, go so far as to say that criticism is on par with the other creative arts, but he does insist that the arts are immeasurably enriched by creative criticism. It seems clear that James was moved to write "The Art of Fiction" primarily in the hope of getting a discussion going. He is less concerned, that is, to insist on the validity of his own critical methodology (though he does so insist) than to open a space for critical debate. Throughout the 1880s, James continually presents himself as a critic in search of someone to talk with. Later commentators have pointed out that the critical landscape was not quite so arid as James made it out to be. There is some truth to their claim, but only some, as anyone who has spent much time reading Victorian periodical literature dating from prior to 1890 will probably attest. Much more common are sentiments such as those expressed by Walter Besant in the lecture to which James's essay was a direct response. "I, for one...

Reading Tao Yuanming: shifting paradigms of historical reception (427-1900)

Tao Yuanming (365-427), although dismissed as a poet following his death, is now considered one of China's greatest writers. Over the centuries, portrayals of his life - some focusing on his eccentricity, others on his exemplary virtue - have elevated him to iconic status. This study of the posthumous reputation of a central figure in Chinese literary history, the mechanisms at work in the reception of his works, and the canonization of Tao himself and of particular readings of his works sheds light on the transformation of literature and culture in premodern China.It focuses on readers' interpretive negotiations with Tao's works and on changes in hermeneutical practices, critical vocabulary, and cultural demands, as well as the intervention of interested and influential readers, in order to trace the construction of Tao Yuanming. Driven by a dialogue on categories at the very heart of literati culture - reclusion, personality, and poetry - this cumulative process spanning fifteen centuries, the author argues, helps explain the very different pictures of Tao Yuanming and the divergent ways of reading his works across time and illuminates central issues animating premodern Chinese culture.

John Hunt to Edwin Atherstone: Seven Letters

(2009). John Hunt to Edwin Atherstone: Seven Letters. The Keats-Shelley Review: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 56-81.

David Mallet, Anglo-Scott: Poetry, Patronage, and Politics in the Age of Union by Sandro Jung

MLR, 104.3, 2009 841 have incorporated thewealth of insight and information found in themuch larger bibliographical work these scholars produced with The Pamela Controversy: Criti cisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson's 'Pamela, 1740-1750, 6 vols (London: Pickering 6kChatto, 2001), which provides headnotes to the facsimiles of themany pamphlets, parodies, plays, verses, illustrations, and other printed matter generated by the 'Epidemical Phrenzy' caused by Richardson's best-seller. Another overlooked study, Janine Barchas's Graphic Design, Print Culture, and theEighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), has raised a number of important issues about typography and textualmeaning in thisprinter's fiction. Itmay well be that the final chapter of this book, a meditation on our present electronic media revolution, is themost original contribution offered here. But the apocalyptic call for a 'restructuring of knowledge itself seems unlikely to help the cause of teaching the humanities as aworthwhile pursuit of ideas. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign John A. Dussinger David Mallet, Anglo-Scott: Poetry, Patronage, and Politics in theAge ofUnion. By Sandro Jung. Newark: Delaware University Press. 2008. 211 pp. ?33.50. ISBN 978-0-87413-005-8. David Mallet (i70i/2?-i765) was a Scottish-born poet, dramatist, and historian. He mingled with literati including Aaron Hill, JamesThomson, and Alexander Pope, wrote for the patriot* opposition to Robert Walpole, and was literary executor to that opposition's leader,Henry St John,Viscount Bolingbroke. Here, Sandro Jung seeks to overturn Samuel Johnson's unjustly negative' (p. 55), 'jealous' (p. 13), and 'spiteful' (p. 32) 'immoralization ofMallet in the Lives of thePoets' (p. 14). In fact, Jungvastly exaggerates Johnson's actually quite mild censure, overstating itsnegative influence on Mallet's posthumous reputation. This is indicative: Jung's treatment of hismaterial is amateurish and error-strewn throughout thisbook. The section on The Excursion (1728), Mallet's first long poem, isan extended example, as Jungattempts to account for revisions made to the 1743 second edition, suggesting thatMallet adapted his 'flightof fancy' poem to the new trend, the sublime. However, the literaryanalysis, when itcomes, is rambling, vague, and inconclusive, bombarding the reader with tangentially relevant information, quoting at lengths that occlude close engagement, and listing literary techniques without analysing or accounting for them (see page 45 on 'synesthesia', for example). Mallet's tragedies, Eurydice (1731) and Mustapha (1739), and his other long poem, Amyntor and Theodora (1747), get similarly patchy attention. Perhaps themost significant new information in Jung'sbook is the existence of a draft ofMallet's biography of the Duke ofMarlborough, commissioned by his widow, theDuchess, in 1744, butwhich everyone assumed Mallet had not even startedwhen he died in 1765. It is typical of the book's skewed prioritization that Junggives this just four anodyne pages in the epilogue (pp. 163-66). Moreover, Jung'sbook isburdened throughout by arbitrary and irrelevantdetails. For example, we are told that '[John]Dyer's friendshipwith John Wesley, the founder 842 Reviews ofMethodism, may also have influencedMallet inhis religious convictions' (p. 31). Wild conjectures need some elaboration; this is tacked on to the end of a paragraph and nowhere pursued. In addition, thebook misleads the reader. Jungclaims (p. 140) that 'ithas generally been assumed thatMallet was responsible' for changes to the 1752 edition of Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use ofHistory (1738), but cites a 1962 article which proves Mallet was not theman. How can an assumption be general' when dismissed for almost fifty years? If this seems pedantic, there are certainlymore egregious errors: 'Before theRestoration [Bolingbroke] had engaged in the negotiations against the Exclusion Bill', states Jung (p. 89). Even if we accept 'Restoration' (1660) as a slip for 'Revolution' (1688), this is nonsense: Bolingbroke was born in 1678 and was not so precocious as to have opposed the Exclusion Bill one year later. Jung continues: 'Bolingbroke, a Tory, then confirmed his staunch allegiance to Jameswho succeeded his brother Charles as King James II (1685-88)' (ibid.). How useful James II found the staunch allegiance of the ten-year-old St John history has not recorded. Worst of all, one senses that there are interesting things to be said about Mallet in regard to the three items in Jung's subtitle?poetry...

The Pursuit of Martyrdom in the Catholic Church in Korea before 1866

The first century of the Catholic Church in Korea was characterised by recurrent and often severe persecutions. Consequently a cult of martyrs developed from early in the Church's history. Wider Catholic concepts relating to martyrdom and spirituality, in particular belief in a corrupting world and the significance of martyrdom in offering a means of release, set individuals on the path of martyrdom. They were then informed and encouraged by the development of the cult itself, and the solidarity and support of the Christian community. However, Korean Christians also carried with them Confucian and Buddhist concepts concerning the nature of virtue, asceticism, world-renunciation and self-sacrifice, and they subscribed to a set of social values which saw kinship ties and posthumous reputation as paramount. In the area of martyrdom these indigenous concepts and values complemented and reinforced those derived from Catholicism.

“The Colossal Fabric’s Form”: Remodelling Memory, History, and Forgetting in Byron’s Poetic Recollections of Ruins

This essay reads Byron’s personal and historical reflections in Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage through Nietzsche’s meditations on memory and forgetting in Untimely Meditations. These poetic recollections are explored as moments of wilful erasure. Central to Nietzsche’s thoughts “On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life” is how single moments are forgotten only to be unwillingly recalled at some future present historical moment. Byron’s desire to forget biography and history, paradoxically, produces a capacity to remember. Byron’s meditations on historical ruins become his own imaginative reflections on both the impulse to, and impossibility of, recovering historical and personal origins or securing an authorial posthumous reputation.