Roman Fever Research Articles

The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman. Volume VII: Editing the British Critic, January 1839-December 1840 ed. by Gerard Tracey

The Letters Diaries of John Henry Newman. Volume VII: Editing British Critic, January 1839-December 1840. Edited by Gerard Tracey. (New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. 1995. Pp. xxvi, 550. $95.00.) This latest volume of John Henry Newman's Letters Diaries, for years 1839 1840, sees Newman at very height of his powers as an Oxford High Churchman redefiner of Anglican Via Media, as leader of Tractarian crusade to recatholicize Church of England. The volume also contains first evidence of his unsettlement, which led to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845. The reader's first impression, however, is of sheer volume of literary productions by which Newman was known to world outside Oxford. Between 1838 1840, he was editor of British Critic, for which he wrote ten substantial articles a good deal more besides. Other essays in Journal, like John Keble's review of young Gladstone's first book on Church State, are still of importance to historians. The modern editor will wryly recognize Newman's difficulties with dilatory reluctant contributors: if you were Editor of a Review, he wrote to Henry Woodgate, and had to extemporize four or five sheets on a sudden, you would feel for me. I was writing last week till my hand ached again. Newman also republished his earlier patristic essays as The Church of Fathers, brought out fourth fifth volumes of Parochial Sermons, wrote four of University sermons later published in 1843. He oversaw translations of Catena Aurea of St. Thomas of Fleury's Ecclesiastical History undertaken by his younger followers. He was involved in publication of two final volumes of Froude's Remains, in Library of Fathers, in projected Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. He translated Greek devotions of Lancelot Andrewes, which appeared as Tract 88. His own private study advanced through acts of Council of Chalcedon Monophysite controversy. We are reminded that underlying everything that Newman did or wrote was this steady, continuing program of his study of Fathers, begun in 1828 climaxing in his translations of St. Athanasius. There are also references to his never-completed edition of works of St. Dionysius of Alexandria. And at end of 1840, he began to write Tract 90, from which further controversy would come. This great endeavor in these years, a superlative combination of scholarship, homiletic, journalism, was also sustained through large body of letters published here, which are evidence for both stormy passage of Oxford Movement elements in its dissolution. This is undercurrent of numerous episodes, both grave gay, in which Newman his friends tried their political strength or were denounced for Popery: from endeavor to embarrass them by erecting a memorial to Protestant martyrs in Oxford, to controversy over eccentric John Morris, who from Newman's pulpit, infuriated Vice-Chancellor by preaching that on fast days, animals should be compelled to fast. Newman wrote of this, May he (salvis ossibus suis) have a fasting horse next time he goes steeple-chasing. Another theme is temptation of Newman's younger followers to Roman Catholicism. Newman counsels Robert Williams, first to get Roman fever, that any such move to Rome on his own part would require two or three years of preparation. Newman magnificently states dissuasives to Romanism in his letter of September 1, 1839, to Henry Edward Manning, in spite of his own admission to his sister Jemima that the Fathers do teach doctrines a temper of mind which we commonly identify with Romanism. Events sharpened this concern. There was misunderstanding over Newman's misjudged resort to Bishop of Oxford about an allegation that his curate had bowed his head at elevation of host in a Catholic family chapel. …

Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics (review)

Reviewed by: Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics Jean Rohloff Dale M. Bauer. Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994. 225 pp. $55.00 (Hardcover); $17.50 (Paperback) Edith Wharton’s later post-World War I novels have long been dismissed as aesthetically flawed, culturally nostalgic, and politically conservative, even reactionary, when compared to her earlier works. In its challenge to this traditional view, Dale M. Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics is very welcome, even “brave” itself. Bauer argues that one of the main reasons critics have viewed Wharton’s later fiction as the product of a writer wilfully disengaged from the cultural trends and political forces that emerged in the twenties and thirties is because Wharton’s “ambivalence makes her difficult, if not impossible, to pin down” (18). Indeed, Bauer sees this ambivalence as revealing the depth, complexity, and introspective nature of Wharton’s dialogue with modern culture. In chapter 1, Bauer places Summer (1917) in the context of the emerging national preoccupation with social engineering that fostered debates about family dynamics, heredity, anthropology, and, ultimately, eugenics. Bauer sees Wharton’s novel as representing not only Wharton’s first “participation in the cultural dialogue on reproductive rights” (34), but as the beginning of her new engagement with the modern political atmosphere. Seeing a form of cultural scapegoating behind the new theories of family heredity and maternal culpability, Wharton blurs the distinctions between “civilized” and “primitive” people and between “good” and “bad” mothering portrayed in Summer. This ambivalence, Bauer contends, is effective in questioning the reductive binary logic of eugenics doctrines and taking a stand against the public interference in private sexuality and morality these doctrines ultimately called for. The second chapter argues that The Mother’s Recompense (1925) represents Wharton’s “sympathies with and her ambivalences about the ‘new America’” (53), specifically her concerns with the emergence of mass culture, the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, and the loss of ethical values she sees resulting from technological progress. Placing the novel against a rich backdrop of 1920s economic abundance theories, psychoanalysis, and popular novels, Bauer counters the retro-critical impulse to see Wharton as merely nostalgic and argues that in this work she “adopts a cultural dialogic, immersing herself in the rhetoric of the day in order to critique it” (55). Bauer ultimately sees the novel as representing Wharton’s progressive rejection of genetic engineering and the sentimentalization of motherhood. [End Page 308] A third chapter treats Wharton’s return to the social and reproductive power of women. In her analysis of Twilight Sleep (1927), Bauer contends that what critics have perceived as the “chaos” of the novel’s plot is actually Wharton’s representation of the chaos of the culture she is critiquing. Wharton leaves oppositions unresolved, such as that between the New Woman and the flapper, to foreground the contradictory nature of women’s position in that culture and to force her readers to analyze themselves. The Children (1928), Bauer asserts, is Wharton’s more explicit treatment of eugenics and her more vehement stand against it. In chapter 4, Bauer turns to Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and its sequel The Gods Arrive (1932) and argues that in these works Wharton explores the intersection between politics and aesthetics. Bauer carefully illustrates that while these works may represent Wharton’s “most critical positions with regard to the new American mass culture”—in the form of advertising, free love, revivalism, and more—these positions also represent her most complex cultural theorizing, not her political conservativism (114). Once again, ambivalence marks Wharton’s representations in part because as a commercial writer she herself must come to terms with modernity in all its forms and because she once again recognizes and underscores the “vexed intricacies of women’s positions” (144) in movements and trends that are ultimately deeply gendered. Chapter 5 presents a compelling reading of “Roman Fever” establishing its often-overlooked context in 1930s Rome during the rise of fascism. Bauer argues that the “myth of origin” the Slades and the Ansleys have clung to concerning legitimacy and respectability is similar to all myths civilizations or individuals use to assert their authority and...

A Reply to Richard King, “The Discipline of Fact/The Freedom of Fiction?”

no more than a refined version of hers. In other words, from the opening page of the tale, James is dramatizing the telling. As he composes the plot, James allows us to see that Grace Mavis's future is somewhat uncertain, and we can infer that Jasper Nettlepoint's attentions would have been desirable. Thus, the ambiguity achieved at the climax is earned, rich enough for the reader to appreciate. But I hasten to add that Grace's suicide has nothing of the objective-correlative force of Daisy Miller's Roman fever. And in that text, unlike this one, we are not led to associate Winterbourne with the tragedy. narrator of The Patagonia is given no self-knowledge at the tale's conclusion, unlike Winterbourne, whose mediated last utterance casts a brilliant glow over the meaning of events. Our narrator here will presumably go his snobbish ways as before. It is the reader alone who is challenged to understand and judge.

Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever": A Rune of History

R.W.B. Lewis' biography of Edith Wharton mentions with her other late works the 1934 short story Fever as a masterpiece of rhetorical coherence, but insists that in writing the piece Wharton was unperturbed by news from Europe of a terrible ... at hand (Biography 527). He suggests that the pervading tone of calm and repose in the story underscores her virtual mastery of history, of the past-both Wharton's own past and, in particular, the question of her paternity-as as the past of the species represented by the Roman ruins. Yet her Fever questions origins, persecution, and sexual violence-Rome itself a powerful site of primal violence. Her story interrogates society's periodic demand for an ultimate return to origins: whether it be racial purification or sexual housekeeping. Lewis writes that the possibility of Wharton's illegitimacy must have edged its way into Mrs. Wharton's mind over the years that followed [1908-09: the years in which the rumor began]. . . . situation of Grace Ansley's whole lifetime is revealed in a single phrase, and just possibly, with all obliqueness, one phase of Edith Wharton's situation as well (Collected Stories xxv). question of race and origin, which is central to Fever, also centers the moment of history-the terrible revolution brewing in Europe. Many critics would agree with Lewis about Wharton's apolitical, serene, and new state of being in the thirties (Biography 524). Cynthia Griffin Wolff does not deal with Wharton's politics at all, while, at worst, other critics label Wharton an anti-Semite. Cynthia Ozick writes that Edith Wharton was compliant in the face of her friend Paul Bourget's openly-declared anti-Semitism (293). Sol Liptzin's in American Literature cites Wharton's caricature of the bounder Jew as an example of her anti-Semitism (154); Wharton's name also appears as evidence of a general cultural anti-Semitism in Florence Kiper Frank's 1930 Bookman essay, The Presentment of the in American Fiction (274; see Dobkowski 177-80). At best, Wharton is considered a social critic with her own ideological blindspots, racism and anti-Semitism among them. (She condemns Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, along with all nigger society in Harlem, in an April 1, 1927 letter to Gaillard Lapsley.)

"Roman fever"

"Roman fever" Get access A. M. Coleman A. M. Coleman Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume CLXIX, Issue jul06, 6 July 1935, Page 11, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CLXIX.jul06.11e Published: 06 July 1935

Book Reviews

THIS little volume must prove of practical value to a considerable class of people, that class which every year furnishes a large contingent of visitors to Italy and winter residents in Rome. Dr. Young has himself long resided in Italy, and has had ample opportunity of observing its climatal and sanitary conditions. He shows in his instructive book that Rome has got an undeservedly bad name for its climate, and the object of the volume is to show exactly what that climate is, under such heads as—the climate of Rome and its effects upon health and disease; the unhealthiness of Rome; Roman fever and malaria; water-supply of Rome; how to live in Rome class; of invalids likely to derive benefit from a residence in Rome, and so on.