Conventions Of Romance Research Articles

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Romance Writings (review)

370 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:3 Utopias with their large populations flaunting strange customs. Finally, however , as Friday becomes (in Crusoe's opinion) a better Christian than Crusoe himself, and as their Utopian idyll is disrupted by the arrival of more cannibals , Friday's father, Spaniards, and more Englishmen, readers wind up noting Friday's role as interpreter and should conclude with Rees that "Friday's mediating role is central to the initial harmonising of relations among men of different races and cultures" (p. 93). Yet as Rees also shows, this truth will not do as an entire summing up of the complications that unfold as Crusoe heads towards England, sets out anew in the Farther Adventures to revisit what has become an island colony, and at last publishes Serious Reflections. Taking all this into account, and providing as well useful comparisons with Captain Misson's Libertalia in A General History of the Pyrates (whose disputed authorship is not for this study an issue in need of resolution), Rees superbly shows how Defoe drew upon available resources of the Utopian imagination to challenge and perhaps enlarge every reader's moral imagination. Paul Alkon University of Southern California Isobel Grundy, ed. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Romance Writings. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1996. $86.00. xxviii + 276pp. ISBN 0-19-8183194 . Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Romance Writings is the first appearance in print of six substantially complete prose narratives and two fragments which Isobel Grundy dates from the period of Lady Mary's European "exile." Despite the fact that Lady Mary left these texts in draft and untitled form, the reader easily traverses occasional chasms, drawn into the spell of an accomplished storyteller. The most intriguing hints and ellipses are located at the beginnings and ends of the tales, suggesting potential narrative frames, plot developments, and links between characters that would certainly have influenced reading. Preceding these works is a short epistolary romance written by an adolescent Lady Mary and circulated in manuscript form among her female friends; "Indamora to Lindamira: Her Life Writ in 5 Letters," edited by Grundy, was also published, in 1994, as a volume of the Juvenilia Press series. While the collection is with some justification held together by the romance designation, since all the pieces depend to some extent upon romance conventions , only the juvenile work adheres to these conventions without question. The later narratives are suffused with Lady Mary's characteristically worldly, even cynical vision. As Grundy says of the "Docile " stories, "Like Swift, Voltaire, and other writers in this tradition [of Menippean satire], Montagu here flits from genre to genre, and touches none that she does not parody" (p. xxii); not only the romance, but also the Oriental tale, the fairy tale, the conduct-book, and REVIEWS 371 the English sentimental novel are exploited for their potential at once to satirize and be satirized themselves. Lady Mary's broad and voracious reading is clearly reflected, for example, in her transposition of a Clarissa-like heroine, the impoverished but beautiful and accomplished Louisa, into the French court. The heroine's fatal choice of personal integrity over desire holds an unflattering mirror up to the sophisticated mores of a hypocritical Madam Maintenon and Louisa's nobly generous yet ultimately self-serving lover the Duke d'Enguien. At the same time, Louisa's self-sacrifice is denied the triumphant effects of Clarissa's death: her cruel husband arrives at her deathbed "too Late to say any thing to the Dying Louisa"; Madam Maintenon's reaction is unrecorded; and the Duke merely suffers rather longer than is usual in his amours. If this conclusion refuses readers the moral- satisfactions of a Richardson novel, the story of Princess Docile multiplies its satiric targets to produce the effect of unremitting moral bleakness. In an attack on prevailing theories of female education, Lady Mary causes her pathologically innocent heroine to act upon the purest principles of friendship, duty, and sexual virtue without ever gaining the least insight into the self-interest of those around her. A sentimental picara victimized by parents , tutors, friends, subjects, husband, and lover, Docile is distinguished from the sentimental novel's protagonist and even the heroes of more satiric...

Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition (review)

356 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:3 always ostensibly stay close to her topic, but that has the effect of giving her work an unfocused, rambling quality. More important, she has simply declined to construct the kind of thesis I have been arguing for. Some readers may not mind; they may see it as a welcome freedom from tendentiousness. But many will regret that the intelligence displayed in Douglas's best moments is not brought to bear upon the problem of telling us what this material really has to teach us. Robert Mayer Oklahoma State University Nancy A. Mace. Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition. Cranbury, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1996. 198pp. US$32.50. ISBN 0-87413-585-0. Nancy Mace's Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition seeks to redress a balance and clarify blood lines. She reconsiders some familiar arguments—that Fielding's classical allusions are mere ornaments, that his fictions are inferior to Richardson's because less suited to presumed middle-class tastes, and that the most significant classical influence on Fielding is Lucian. Actually, she argues, that influence was a combination of Homer, Horace, Virgil , and Aristotle. She also argues for the continuing vigour of the classics in the eighteenth century. Fielding shared his classical learning with three different groups of readers: those with significant knowledge, those with modest knowledge gleaned from basic pedagogical tools, and those with knowledge drawn only from translations. To help make her case, she supplies several tables, including the authors and works taught at Eton, authors recommended by six of the most respectable guides to classical learning, and tables for the Latin and Greek authors cited in several of Fielding's works. Fielding quotes Horace, for example , twenty-two times and alludes to him thirteen times in Tom Jones—for 21 per cent of such classical materials. In Tom Jones as elsewhere, though, Fielding uses classical contexts tactfully, as both sources of knowledge and value and as ancestors often superseded by superior Christianity. Many of these points are sound and the documentation helpful. There is no reason other than populist snobbery that a putative "middle-class" genesis and genealogy should be superior to an "élite" genealogy. Fielding draws the fruits of his version of the novel from varied domestic and exotic plants. Lucian 's influence indeed is significantly overstated on the basis of inadequate and sometimes misread evidence. We may nonetheless offer only two cheers for this book and its modest goals. Mace sometimes belabours the obvious. Fielding knew epic theory and wanted his audience to do so as well (p. 67); "he does not think that novelists can, or should, imitate epics in every detail" (p. 69); Mrs Partridge as an Amazon REVIEWS 357 is "unsavory" (p. 72). Mace needs further to consider the disparity between Fielding's theory and practice (pp. 69-70). He surely denigrates one kind of heroic romance, while also using recognizable romance conventions, such as the youth of mysterious but ultimately well-born parentage. Her discussion of the popular Lucian is comparably tentative. Between 1634 (Hicks) and 1780 (Francklin) there were at least twenty translations or dialogues in his presumed manner, and numerous other works demonstrably patterned after some version of his dialogues of the dead or between the dead and the living. The French added their own tenderized meat to the stew and softened the Lucianic dialogue, as in the French and English versions of works by Fontenelle and Fénelon. Swift is more harshly Lucianic than Fielding, but especially in the Journeyfrom This World to the Next Fielding adapts the ameliorated Lucianic tradition, as in Tom Jones he adapts the ameliorated epic tradition. Mace wisely says that Fielding questions the heroic ideal, but her uncertain support for that reading suggests the difficulty of reclaiming contemporary response , which she assumes to be like her own. Aeneas's killing of Turnus may be morally dubious; but it is personally necessary when Aeneas sees Turnus sporting Pallas's spoils and is psychologically transformed into vengeful Pallas; it is politically necessary for the fledgling nation that Augustus was said to perfect after he eliminated his own competitors; and it was typologically...

Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature by Anne Clark Bartlett

REVIEWS appealed to them. But apart from the Crawned King the poems also all belong to the years before Oldcastle's 1413 rebellion had made it all too easy for the church to associate Lollardy with civil as well as religious dissent. Had laypersons in the upper echelons of society been able to con­ tinue thinking of Lollardy in terms resembling those deployed in these poems, the English reformation might have belonged to the fifteenth rather than the sixteenth century. Oldcastle helped destroy this possibility. As we learn more about Lollard discourse and the discourses immedi­ ately adjacent to it we will doubtless want to qualify some of Barr's find­ ings. At present, however, her book leaves little room for criticism. It may be worth noting that for this reader at least her section on "Legal Fictions" seemed in places inadequately assimilated to its present context. And rhe­ torically her discussion is sometimes less forceful than it might be: it is too often propelled by the observation that something is "interesting," for example (as in pp. 10, 17, 19, 65, 127, 129, 130, 163). There are some other minor flaws. It is not easy to find one's way around the volume's bibliography of primary sources, which at one point abandons all pretense at alphabetization. It also seems odd in a work so concerned with locating a Piers Plowman tradition to find no reference to the first chapter ofHelen C. White's Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Cen­ tury (New York: Macmillan Co., 1944). But all such criticisms fade into insignificance beside Barr's discussion as a whole, which obviously grows from wide reading as well as a good deal of hard thinking. We may well wish that the volume were more affordable. But we should be very grateful to Barr for having written it. CHRISTINA VON NOLCKEN University of Chicago ANNE CLARK BARTLETT. Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature. Ithaca, N.Y, and Lon­ don: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 212. $32.50. Feminist scholars of the past two decades have enriched the discipline by making accessible medieval women's writings as well as engaging the issue offemale representation in canonical texts. A few-such as Elizabeth Rob­ ertson, Bella Millett, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and now Anne Clark 175 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Bartlett-have ventured into the less glamorous territory of devotional literature; yet this is undoubtedly where the richest vein of information concerning gender and reception is yet to be mined, including material evidence of female textual communities, manuscript transmission, devo­ tional trends, literacy and Latinity, and, as Bartlett argues, "representation and subjectivity." Given the evidence for female ownership of manuscripts including male-authored works like the Speculum devotorum and Contempla­ tions on the Dread and Love ofGod, it is perhaps surprising that no enterpris­ ing scholar has attempted a full-length study to address Bartlett's central concern: "Why were these texts, whose antifeminism ranges from the sub­ tle to the vociferous, so popular among female readers? What did reading these works do to women?" (p. 2). Bartlett's response demonstrates just how fruitful a theoretically informed and interdisciplinary methodology can be. Bartlett's intellectual eclecticism is learned, sensible, and convincing. In negotiating the space between representation and subjectivity, Bartlett constructs authorship and reception in the "complex dynamism" of reading in medieval textual communities, "each with its own cultural authorities, reading strategies, and levels and definitions of competence" (p. 2). Rather than presenting the transmission and reception of devotional literature as an authoritative, hierarchical, or static process, Bartlett deftly explores the tensions, inconsistencies, and polyvalence of devotional works that ap­ peared in codices assimilating a variety of genres (courtly romances, prayers, antifeminist diatribes) and thus discourses of female representa­ tion. Three kinds of "counterdiscourses" in devotional literature challenge misogynist representations of women, each transmitting its own "cluster of social and cultural conventions" from which to "regender" female identity (p. 3). The conventions of courtly romance, monastic epistles of spiritual friendship, and narrative of nuptial and Passion contemplation offered women a variety of roles and rhetorical strategies from which to experience and...

François Villon: Complete Poems ed. and trans. by Barbara Sargent-Baur (review)

François Villon: Complete Poems ed. and trans. by Barbara Sargent-Baur (review)

(Un)Building the Nation: Mary Leslie's The Cromaboo Mail Carrier

One of the biggest challenges facing early Canadian writers of fiction was that of adapting Old World patterns to New World settings. Carole Gerson puts the case succinctly when she notes, in Purer Taste, that many writers overcompensated for their colonial insecurity by cramming their pages with an astonishing array of romantic conventions ? an overcompensation that often produced ragged, patchwork hybrids (90). During the Confederation period, especially, and the couple of decades after, a heightened sense of nationalism fostered a surge of literature dedicated to exploring the viability of Canada as a setting for fiction. Out of this movement came such works as Rosanna Leprohon's Quebec romance, Antoinette de Mir ecourt (1864), William Kirby's The Golden Dog (1877), also set in old Quebec, Graeme Mercer Adam and Ethelwyn Wetherald's An Algonquin Maiden (1887), and Gilbert Parker's immensely popular Seats of the Mighty (1896). Indeed, these novelists found that the events of Canada's past provided rich material with which to meet the prevailing literary taste for romance.1 Mary Leslie's only novel, The Cromaboo Mail Carrier (1878), published in Guelph, Ontario, under the pseudonym James Thomas Jones, also promises to be a romance. Subtitled A Canadian Love Story, the novel proposes to tell the tale of a mail coach driver and his lady love. At the same time, though, the novel is shockingly realistic in its portrayal of rural Ontario. In fact, the residents of Erin, near which Leslie lived, reputedly saw too accurate a description of their village in the novel and had the book withdrawn from circulation as libellous. Leslie went on to produce a witty but tame volume of poetry, Rhymes of the Kings and Queens of England (1896), and another of mixed

Foreword

Foreword People sometimes ask me if we notice any threads or common themes in the manuscripts that we read from all over the country. Lately, I have noticed a surge of romance and relationship stories of aU kinds, both in fiction and nonfiction: tenuous relationships, would-be relationships, sublimated relationships, hot and bosomheaving ones, awful relationships, deraUed ones, comic, tragic— every imaginable kind of relationship. I am not speaking of the normal level of love and star-crossed love among our submissions, but many pounds of it every day. It doesn't seem to be due to O.J.'s trial, since the trend was conspicuous before that. I've wondered whether it's a demographic phenomenon, with baby boomers fantasizing about a last fling, or generation X'ers getting desperate in the glum world of post-AIDs sexuaUty. Or whether it's just a fad caused by temporary influences—television programmers vying for higher ratings with ever-increasing "candor" about romance. Or perhaps we are undertaking some culture-wide exploration of sexual relationships in an effort to synthesize new models. Who knows? So many people writing about relationships, at any rate, causes me to wonder about romance, and our conventions of romance. WhUe reading Romeo and Juliet, at age eighteen, I had one ofmy first Uterary epiphanies: After JuUet did herself in at the Capulets' tomb, I realized from how high the body count had gotten that Shakespeare regarded love as dangerous. This was perhaps something of a Precambrian epiphany, but I took them however I could when I was eighteen. One of the wonderful things about starting to seriously read for the first time is that just putting two and two together is enough to raise the hair on your neck. The splendid Mercurio, stabbed to death when Romeo tries to avoid fighting a Capulet, Tybalt then kUled by Romeo, as is Paris when he has the gall to take flowers to JuUet's tomb, then Romeo, then JuUet—these five deaths are due as much to the accidents and agitations of love as to the feud between the houses. Romeo in love is volatile, self-involved, and ultimately dangerous. Juliet is mature and earthy compared to her flighty lover, particularly considering that she is not yet fourteen, yet ultimately she too is a suicide. Showing the dangers and miseries of a powerful love was not Shakespreare's only purpose in Romeo and Juliet, but he certainly felt that his audience could share that assumption, and his portraits of love in other plays are similar. OtheUo is a gallant but naive warrior, surprised by love, then ambushed and destroyed by jealousy. Desdemona, like JuUet, takes her fate into her own hands by marrying her lover over her father's objections. Despite the fact that her minor indiscretions contribute to their problems, and despite her being slow to pick up on his jealousy, she remains faithful to OtheUo to the bitter end, when he comes into their bedroom, delivers a grotesque speech of fareweU, suffocates her, and later stabs himself. Even more than Romeo, OtheUo is rendered vulnerable and delusive by his passion. Unlike the princely but guUeless OtheUo, Antony in Antony and Cleopatra is a coarse soldier. Cleopatra at twenty-seven, with her wrinkled skin and strange fits of wUdness, has seen better days, yet she is the very archetype of someone who makes "defect perfection." The play in fact dweUs on its lovers' defects, but their relationship is the most robust in aU of Shakespeare's plays. They are deeply in contact with each other, with a passion that is both spiritual and physical, expressed in some of Shakespeare's most spectacular passages. However, the outcome of love is simUar: from the start, it undermines Antony's resolve and ,saps his strength, at length bringing about the ruin of both of them. In this, as in all the tragic romances, love is a mentaUy enfeebUng fever, almost an iUness. It goes without saying that these plays were taken from sources and that they were recognizable genre types with dominant moods. A tragic romance needs a tragic story, and there was a whole repetoire of standard elements in...

Decapitating Romance: Class, Fetish, and Ideology in Keats's Isabella

Critics of Keats's Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil (1818) traditionally focus on the poem's "transitional" status between the early Endymion and the later and much greater odes. This article reads the poem as a shocking and angry poem by interrogating the meanings of the decapitated head that lies at the core of the text. By interrogating the head I read the work as an expression of Keats's attempt to bury his grief for his parents' deaths, to repudiate his middle-class origins, and to deny his attraction to "Romance," the popular Gothic ballad tradition of his day. The text explores Keats's very personal need to elide pain with words, the linguistic conventions of Romance. The fact that he could not bury the body of his pain, the fact that the body comes back to haunt and consume the living-these are the central issues Keats could not resolve in Isabella. The hungry heart one always senses while reading Keats becomes in this poem the mouth that devours, the voice in his own head that would not die, that would not stop repeating the tale of his pain, anger, doubt, and grief.

Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper

Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper Elsa Nettels Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991. vi + 218 pp. No price given. Hawthorne’s dictum, “A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world,” could have been the epigraph for this perceptive study of Conrad’s fiction. Defining Conrad as “an incurable moralist infected with the ethical relativism of his age,” Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan sees his characters engaged in “active revolt” against the “modern temper,” which confounds them in their struggle to satisfy a “desperate need” for sovereign truth and source of value. “Modernity,” here equated with the radical skepticism of Nietzsche, functions as a malevolent force—a malaise, an infection, a pathology—which subjects novelist and characters to inner conflicts impossible of resolution. To develop her thesis, Erdinast-Vulcan analyzes nine of Conrad’s novels, grouping them under three headings which identify responses of author and character to the “modern temper.” Exemplifying “the failure of myth,” the protagonists of Lord Jim, The Rescue, and Nostromo become “failed epic heroes” in their vain attempt to sustain themselves in [End Page 880] isolated communities invaded by representatives of the modern world. The second group—Marlow in “Heart of Darkness,” Razumov in Under Western Eyes, and the narrator of The Shadow Line—suffer the “failure of metaphysics” in their foredoomed effort to find a “metaphysical object,” an ultimate truth to give meaning to their lives. They find salvation in “the bond of brotherhood” and affirm their own identity in identification with a rejected “other.” The protagonists of Chance, Victory, and The Arrow of Gold experience the “failure of textuality” in the paralysis and emotional sterility induced by their habit of seeing the world as text, an illusory construct of which they are fictive spectators. The terms of the argument are familiar, but the analysis is valuable for its many illuminating insights. Erdinast-Vulcan persuasively argues that Conrad’s late novels suffer not from the resort to the devices of conventional romance, as many critics have contended, but from the surrender of Conrad and his characters to the debilitating effects of modern skepticism. She demonstrates that Jim fails on the Patna and in Patusan not because his romantic dream paralyzes him (the usual reading) but because the dream is not strong enough to sustain him. Particularly striking is her reading of Chance, which identifies Marlow as the protagonist who, through his encounter with Flora de Barral, escapes his callous cynicism and recovers his powers of feeling and action. At times the author’s thesis pushes her to questionable assertions. Does Patusan, with its degenerate rulers and rotting garbage, really exist as “a space where the heroic-mythical mode of discourse is a viable ethical and aesthetic alternative to the modern outlook”? The author declares that “for Conrad . . . there is no objective representation of reality” and that “the mode of representation is entirely subject to the consciousness of the protagonists themselves.” If this were true, the kind of tension the author analyzes would be impossible. Also questionable is the author’s attributing Conrad’s skepticism to his “temperament,” and his “personal need” for objective truth to his “moral heritage” and its “ideology.” The bifurcations seem artificial, false to the complexities of Conrad’s mind and art revealed by the analyses of the novels. Readers will continue to interpret Conrad’s fiction in terms of his ideas and beliefs, but Erdinast-Vulcan’s monograph looks back to a period of Conrad criticism that culminated in the early 1980s. The most recent work in her bibliography was published in 1987. Since then, [End Page 881] major studies grounded in postcolonial and narrative theories have taken Conrad criticism in new directions. But later works do not diminish the importance and validity of the author’s thesis and her probing analyses of Conrad’s fiction. Elsa Nettels College of William and Mary Copyright © 1994 The Purdue Research Foundation

Money, Desire, and History in Eduardo Mendoza's City of Marvels

Eduardo Mendoza's City of Marvels recuperates the historical novel while subjecting it to the conventions of romance. These generic strategies relate to the manifest self-made man's rise to economic might between the two Barcelona World's Fairs and Barcelona's development as a modern metropolis—and to a later celebration: the 1992 Olympic Games. The depiction of the adventures of capital and the production of marvels responds to the bourgeoisie's role in Spain's modernization and to money's mediating function as a symbol of desire. The accomplishment of marvels involves the conquest of time and the substitution of illusory timelessness for historical contingencies. Timelessness mediated by money negates history through the production of ersatz historical images, which reinscribe an idealized past as the object of desire. A restoration—the figurative replication of historical events—is the response to nostalgia for a missed historical opportunity by a subject seeking myth's illusory power.

The Matter of Scotland by R. James Goldstein

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER thuriana and Popular Culture," by Mary Alice Grellner. Each essay presents three to five pages packed with specifics like Szarmach's rental and pur­ chase prices for specific films and slide presentations (p.137) and Hatty's listing of foreign and domestic Arthurian films (pp.148-5 0). Fries's"Women in Arthurian Literature " differs from the other essays in "Specific Approaches ": she discusses the three chief roles women play in Arthurian literature: "hero,...heroine,...counterhero " (p.155).Her perceptive essay,while it sketches her approach to teaching the topic,also displays a seasoned scholar's feminist approach to Arthuriana. Overall,the separate parts ofApproaches to Teaching the Arthurian Tradi­ tion focus on practical approaches to teaching while at the same time at­ tending to"'the sense ofwonder ...that runs through all ofArthuriana' " (KevinJ. Harty,quoted on p.34).Scholarly insights also appear,only a few of which I have noted here. The book will be highly useful for others who,like myselfin 1986,seek help in planning an Arthurian course.It will also reward mature scholar­ teachers who seek new insights into,for example, "Women's Roles in Mal­ ory " or"Vinaver's Text vs.Caxton's." The book takes a distinguished place at the table of MLA"Approaches to Teaching World Literature." D.THOMAS HANKS,JR. Baylor University R. JAMES GoLDSTEIN.The Matter ofScotland. Regents Studies in Medieval Culture.Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,1993.Pp. xvi,386.$4 0.0 0. The author opens with the heartfelt remark that his"book has been long in the making." He should be reassured.The time was needed and well spent. What he has achieved is the most thorough historical contextualization of The Bruce and The Wallace to date.Stated briefly,that may seem a worthy but not overly ambitious achievement.When one realizes that this goal might alternatively be translated as answering the broader question,What is"truth," poetical and historical?,Goldstein's concern with time passing becomes more understandable,and the expending of that time becomes justified by necessity. After all,The Bruce was written by John Barbour,genealogist of the 202 REVIEWS Stewart line of kings. He opens by promising "suthfastnes" over and over again, yet, even as he does so, conflates into one character the lives of his major hero Robert Bruce; his grandfather Bruce the Competitor and (strictly) his father Bruce of Carrick. To explain this feature alone involves the thorough investigation of at least four different versions of historical "truth." Goldstein first uses the modem approach, tracing the Wars of Liberty as a chain of cause and effect, mirroring the actual. Since that is precisely the view of history which does not account for Barbour's ap­ proach, he then turns to other definitions and sources. The first move was obvious to medieval writers. If you translate history into words, you translate it into another code with other causes and effects. As Pruseck notes of the early Chinese historian, "He knew that he had before him sources and relics which stood in a complicated relationship with the real happenings and that these sources and the facts included in them were a category of their own, the mutual connections of which were not defined." One's prime aim, therefore, is to make the new categories clear and so help your audience to understand the causes and effects within the differentiated artifact. Both Bruce and Wallace are works of persuasive rhetoric, though in dif­ ferent ways. The former seeks first and foremost to persuade the court of Robert II in the late fourteenth century to remember the courage and patriotism of its ancestors a century earlier. The warning was necessary because, in the previous reign, those nobles had allowed Scotland to return to English power. Cause and effect in this mode and context demand that Robert the Bruce become a symbol of liberty. To that end his early life (mostly spent serving the cause ofEngland) has to be deleted. It is replaced by the more patriotic example of his grandfather, so providing a family hero as permitted by the conventions of Romance, whose fictive life is purified of...

Satiric Method and the Reader in Sir Launcelot Greaves

Satiric Method and the Reader in Sir Launcelot GreavesDaniel Punday Tobias Smollett is best known for his picaresque social satires, such as Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker. Critics have generally considered Sir Launcelot Greaves a failed experiment, an unhappy mixture of his characteristic mode with chivalric romance conventions.1 Although Smollett seems to use his hero as a satiric mouthpiece whose exemplary nature implicitly criticizes the age,2 critics have considered the clash between romantic and picaresque world views a major fault in the novel and its satiric methods. This essay will attempt to explain how this clash functions as part of the overall satiric method of the novel. That Smollett both uses and criticizes the romantic conventions embodied by Greaves should not surprise us; interpretive tradition has assumed that Greaves is careless because of the conditions under which it was conceived and executed, and consequently critics have failed to investigate the conflict between romantic 1 See in particular Robert Giddings, The Tradition ofSmollett (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 127— 39. Although Robert Donald Spector defends Greaves in a number of ways, he nonetheless censures its satiric method. See Robert Donald Spector, Tobias George Smollett, updated ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1989), pp. 85-103, esp. 92-97. 2 James Beattie provides an early example of this tendency: "Sir Launcelot Greaves is of Don Quixote's kindred, but a different character. Smollet's [sic] design was, not to expose him to ridicule; but rather to recommend him to our pity and admiration. He has therefore given him youth, strength, and beauty, as well as courage, and dignity of mind, has mounted him on a generous steed, and arrayed him in an elegant suit of armour. Yet, that the history might have a comic air, he has been careful to contrast and connect Sir Launcelot with a squire and other associates of very dissimilar tempers and circumstances." "On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition," Essays (Edinburgh, 1776), pp. 350-51. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 2, January 1994 170 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION and picaresque perspectives. Such a clash is, in fact, part of the definition of the picaro; as Ronald Paulson suggests: "In a sense the picaro represents ... an ironic structure embodied in a character: a prudential awareness is joined to a moral obtuseness. Lázaro does not see the truth, but his peasant cunning makes him see something close to it, and so his observations betray himself and his surroundings simultaneously."3 While Greaves clearly does not have "peasant cunning," I will suggest below that he does have a dual nature—as critic and as satiric butt in his own right. The critical failure to recognize this dual role and integrate it into interpretation of the novel has led to a perception of the novel and its methods as sloppy and piecemeal. Greaves's seemingly random adventures reiterate a basic theme— the problematic and antagonistic relationship between social roles and individual personality. By adopting the highly formal code of knighterrantry in order to expose individuals who fail to be socially responsible, Greaves attempts to reaffirm the balance between the social and personal. Greaves's dual nature—as a critic upholding the connection between such external forms and the self, and as a character who is defined by just such a formal role—is a way of obviating a problem central to Smollett 's satiric method. For Smollett, the formal relations constituted by the text can, like social roles, seem cut off from their "personal" meaning to the reader. Greaves's dual role partially enables Smollett to collapse the distinction between the satirist and the objects of that satire. Yet Smollett must overcome a far greater barrier—that between the lesson of the text and its application in the real world of the reader. We will see that Smollett finds the solution to this problem in the very writing and publishing context that critics have assumed accounted for the novel's carelessness. The bulk of the satire in Greaves exposes the way in which society fails to live up to the hero's expectations. This focus has led critics to assume that the novel's adventures are a loosely joined collection of Smollett...

The Romance Convention of the Disguised Duel and the Climax of Piers Plowman

The Romance Convention of the Disguised Duel and the Climax of Piers Plowman

The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of "Persuasion"

Persuasion is novel constructed around what was, for its time, radically unusual narrative premise: love affair that should have culminated in marriage to end conventional romance novel has gone bad, and heroine of piece must begin again, eight and half years later, on her quest for narrative closure. It is story of lost love regained, of oppositions reconciled. Feminist readers in 1990s may wish, like Anne Elliot, to reclaim an old attachment. Is it time for critics to stop worrying and learn to love Jane Austen again? According to Julia Prewitt Brown, readers of Austen are often among novelist's detractors. Brown has recently taken to task such influential critics as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nina Auerbach, Mary Poovey, and Claudia Johnson for having misprized Austen's politics by taking too literally (and too ahistorically) Austen's insistence upon marrying off her heroines. Brown's polemical suggests that a literary criticism that is worthy of name (313) would take socio-political approach different from one that has so far dominated Anglo-American feminism. Brown finds the philosophical basis of feminism in Mary Wollstonecraft, not in J. S. Mill; she privileges communityor global-based ideal over individualism, and implies that anyone reading from this more genuine angle will come to appreciate Austen properly. Positioning herself as taking broader view than Austen's feminist detractors, Brown concludes that we can only be grateful that Jane Austen's place in history is not dependent on narrow approach of feminists writing today (313). What could be more narrow, though, than an approach that identifies one true philosophical basis for feminism, or, for that matter, than call for revising reading strategies that limits available possibilities to variations among ways of looking at heroines as if they were historical figures subject to socio-political constraints of their author's era? The kinds of feminist-historicist criticism that delimit Brown's horizons tend to treat characters as if they were real people, whose marital fate depends upon their situation in history. But what happens when resists powerful temptation to think of Jane Austen's heroines as persons, and scrutinizes them as functions of texts, instead? Feminist narratology (the study of narrative structures and strategies in context of cultural constructions of gender) provides method

A New Woman of Romance

An examination of Pamphilia, the cynosure and central character of the Lady Mary Wroth's romance Urania, shows to how great an extent her author appears to have internalized the Renaissance ideal of womanhood with its insistence on chastity above all, then silence and obedience. On the other hand, Wroth's women characters also embody glimmerings of new kinds of political, poetic, and persuasive powers just becoming available to women as well as men. Pamphilia suppresses her impulses to power or disguises them as something more acceptable; she keeps her most extreme transgression, her writing, very private. Other women, like Nereana, who try to exercise undisguised power, are usually presented as eccentrics who risk public shame, punishment and even insanity. Pamphilia, however, for all her conventional perfections, finally subverts the ideal in another way: she carries the patriarchal ideal of feminine virtue to fiercely independent extremes. Lady Mary Wroth published The Countesse of Montgomery's Urania, a long but unfinished prose romance, in 1621. Almost immediately objections to its publication were raised by Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, who fancied that he saw himself and his family's private affairs pilloried in the episode of Seralius and his father-in-law, and the book may have been partially suppressed.' A continuation, which follows the heroines and heroes of the romance into the next generation but also is without formal ending, exists only in a single holography copy held by the Newberry Library. Josephine A. Roberts, editor of Wroth's poems, is presently at work on an edition of both parts of the romance; meanwhile the text of the published Urania is available from Brown University's Women Writers Project.2 Seminars, conference papers and publications that comment on it have begun to appear.3 The earliest published reaction to the Urania, when critics noticed it at all, was to dismiss it as an impoverished derivative of Sidney's Arcadia,4 but recently scholars have realized that the ways in which the niece's romance is different from her uncle's are significant, and have begun to disagree in interesting ways about how Wroth's work may best be understood. Gary Waller, in the 1977 introduction to his edition of her sonnets, emphasizes its Jacobean anomie, the disillusioned amorality, where betrayal, loss, and infidelity are accepted with resignation as inevitable, in contrast with the moral tone and conventional romance closure of the Arcadia.5 Josephine Roberts agrees with Waller that the Urania depicts a court life rife with corruption and villainy, but claims that the important difference from the Arcadia is its intense focus on love to the virtual exclusion of conventional romance heroics.6 Comparing the two Renaissance romances has begun a continuing interest in Wroth's text as the voice of a woman writing about woman's experiences. Lyn Swift and Elaine Beilin both have claimed that Mary Wroth holds conservative

Rape, murder and revenge in ‘slavery's pleasant homes’: Lydia Maria child's antislavery fiction and the limits of genre

As a genre created to arouse sympathy for slaves among readers who refused to purchase abolitionist tracts, antislavery fiction was fraught with contradictions. Writers who sought to dispel romantic illusions about slavery were hampered by romantic conventions and a code of gentility that barred ‘vulgar’ language, sordid details, and frank treatment of sexuality. Lydia Maria Child wrestled with these contradictions in her masterpiece, ‘Slavery's Pleasant Homes,’ which depicted the plantation as a harem. Dramatizing a female slave's rape and murder and defending a male slave's retaliation against his master, the story proved too radical to publish outside of antislavery circles.

Romance Conventions in Voltaire's Candide

Romance Conventions in Voltaire's Candide

Romance and Richardson’s Pamela

R O M A N C E A N D R IC H A R D S O N ’ S P A M E L A BARBARA B E L Y E A University of Calgary W h eth er Richardson or Defoe is the first English novelist is a dead, because moot, issue to most critics interested in eighteenth-century prose fiction. But the assumption underlying this debate needs reconsideration. Both the pro-Richardson and pro-Defoe factions agree implicitly that there is such a phenomenon as the first English novel. The real question is whether this new form of fiction represents a variation on the structure and conventions of romance, or an abrupt, radical departure from the form and themes of a centuries-old genre. That the novel is a radically new form is the thesis of two landmark studies of eighteenth-century English fiction, by Walter Allen (1954) and Ian Watt (1957).1 This view is generally assumed, although with certain qualifications, by recent critics of Richardson’s works, among them Mark Kinkead-Weekes (1973) and Margaret Anne Doody (1974).2 Allen and Watt argue for the emergence of a “novel” genre by the mid-eighteenth century, a new fiction which “purports to be an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals,” in contrast to improbable fictions on the one hand and generalized moral observations on the other.3 For Allen, Pamela is “the first great flowering of the English novel,” while Watt speaks of Richardson as “occupying the central place in the development of the technique of narrative realism,” and remarks on “ the suddenness and com­ pleteness” with which the novel genre was brought into being.4 The usual critical premise, that by the mid-eighteenth century a body of fiction with distinctive, “novel” characteristics had developed in opposition to traditional romance, is derived in large measure from Johnson’s definition of the new fiction in the Rambler. The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.5 For this view, Johnson is indebted in turn to Congreve’s preface to JncogE n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x , 4, December 1984 nita, published in 1692. Congreve rejects the “lofty Language, miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances” of romance in favour of “ Intrigues in Practice . . . Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unpresidented [sic].” 6 In the early eighteenth century, Congreve’s distinction between romance and new fiction was echoed by writers of amatory novellas, such as Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood,7 and later, at least apparently, by Richardson himself. The author of Pamela distinguishes his “new Species of Writing” from “the French Marvellous and all unnatural Machinery,” maintaining that “Nature is my whole View, and such a Conduct in such a Life, as may generally happen, and be of Use.”8 More often than not, however, Richardson shares the view of the Spec­ tator writers: Addison satirically catalogued the romance reading of a lady of leisure, and Budgell indiscriminantly condemned “ Romances, Chocolate, Novels and the like Inflamers.” 9 While it is doubtful whether the Spectator writers had bothered to read much of the fiction they denounced, Richard­ son’s own narratives betray his greater knowledge.10 Yet Richardson con­ demns both novels and romances as roundly as Addison, Steele, and Budgell did two decades earlier. Of the Pamela continuation, he writes: I am endeavouring to write a Story, which shall catch young and airy Minds, and when Passions run high in them, to shew how they may be directed to laudable Meanings and Purposes, in order to decry such Novels and Romances, as have a Tendency to inflame and corrupt.11 The same purpose is expressed in the preface to the Pamela continuation.12 Of Clarissa he writes, “ I intend more than a Novel or Romance by this Piece . . . I wish . . . that the Ladies would look upon it...

John Hawkes's Second Skin : The Dead Reckoning of a Northrop Frye Romance

John Hawkes's Second Skin: The Dead Reckoning of a Northrop Frye Romance Carol Helmstetter Cantrell Colorado State University The improbable, desiring, erotic, and violent world of romance reminds us that we are not awake when we have abolished the dream world: we are awake only when we have absorbed it again.1 Northrop Frye Second Skin is a troubling book, a book that presents a contemporary reality as disturbing in its outlines of massed menace as in its detail of felt cruelty, fear, and pain. It is a book that plunges the reader into the horrors as well as the immediacy of nightmare. From time to time, the reader enjoys with the narrator the relief of a pause in a dream world that is a nearly exact counterpart of its opposing nightmare. These peaceful episodes are, however, also troublesome, for they raise the book's central question as insistently as their nightmare counterparts: What is the book's moral center? Or more narrowly, what are we to make of the narrator and protagonist, Skipper? Critics of this book have disagreed sharply on the answers to these questions, and much discussion of the book has inevitably centered on the question of whether Skipper is or is not an unreliable narrator.2 Important though this aspect of the book's structure is, a more basic question ought to precede it. Given Skipper's two allusions to his tale as "the dead reckoning of my Romance,"3 how does it fit into the romance tradition? Once we ask this question, we are freed from the assumptions of realistic fiction; in exchange, we find that the conventions of romance illuminate every aspect of the book. Northrop Frye's The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance provides us with an exceptionally illuminating 1.Northrop Frye,The Secular Scripture; A Study ofthe Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p.61. Further references will be indicated parenthetically within the text. 2.See, for example, John Kuehl's excellent discussion in John Hawkes andthe Craft of Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975), pp. 113-126. 3.John Hawkes, Second Skin (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1963), pp. 162, 173. Further references will be indicated parenthetically within the text. 282ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW analysis of the nature of romance, for it reads almost like a gloss of Second Skin. Central to romance, in Frye's analysis, and central to Second Skin, is "the polarization of ideal and abhorrent worlds" (Frye, p. 80) into day, night; dream, nightmare; upper and lower — "as though romance were simply replacing the world of ordinary experience by a dream world, in which the narrative movement keeps rising into wish fulfillment or sinking into anxiety and nightmare " (Frye, p. 53). This description not only catches the ambiance of Second Skin, but also the specific contrasts between the cold and rocky Northern island and the warm and verdant dream world of Skipper's Southern island. More generally, it describes the contrasts between a whole lifetime cursed by the legacy of the "seeds of death" inherited from Skipper's mortician father, where love is scorned and where eggs are hand grenades, and the contrasting world where Skipper as artificial inseminator bestows "seeds of life," where everybody wants to kiss him, and where Catalina Kate bears their child as he completes the telling of his tale. Consonant with the polarized world they inhabit (Frye, p. 53), the characters in Second Skin characteristically come in pairs. The nightmare women, Miranda, Cassandra, and Gertrude, for example , seem to have their dream counterparts in Big Bertha, Josie, and Catalina Kate: Miranda who cuts the nipples off baby bottles is transformed into Big Bertha, a cook; Cassandra, cold but not virginal , associated with silver, is replaced by Josie, a smiling little nun with gold teeth; and promiscuous, insecure Gertrude is metamorphosed into the dusky-skinned Catalina Kate, happily shared by Skipper and his beloved friend Sonny. Sonny's nightmare counterpart is Fernandez, Cassandra's Peruvian husband, whose abandonment of his wife and family finds its converse in Sonny's faithfulness and ultimate reunion with Skipper. Similarly, the destructive homosexuality of Fernandez finds its benign counterpart in...

The Focus of Satire in The Squire of Low Degree

T H E F O C U S O F S A T IR E IN T H E S Q U I R E O F L O W D E G R E E BRYAN RIVERS St. Boniface College T h e late medieval romance usually referred to as The Squire of Low Degree has generally not fared well at the hands of critics. W. E. Mead, who com­ piled the standard edition, declared: “we can praise The Squyr of Lowe Degre only with considerable reservations, and do not seek a place for it among the great creative poems of the world.”1 Other commentators have tended to share this unenthusiastic perspective, being brief, hostile, or patron­ izing in their evaluations.2 A welcome exception to this trend, however, is a recent article by K. S. Kieman which views the work not as a flawed romance, but rather, as a witty satire of popular romance conventions. Kiernan observes, quite cor­ rectly, that the complete title of the work is Undo Your Door, Otherwise Called the Squire of Low Degree, and argues that “No intentionally serious romance. .. could have been called Undo Your Door.” 3 Viewing the work as a burlesque of popular romance readily resolves a great many problems of interpretation, especially with regard to the extraordinary behaviour of the princess. Unfortunately, by his own admission, Kieman deliberately limits the scope of his discussion, observing that “though humor pervades the poem a good deal of it is controlled by the knighting motif, and so, for clarity, I have limited my discussion of humor to those sections which relate directly and indirectly to the knighting ceremony” (346). Thus, while Kieman’s argu­ ment is convincing, its focus is arbitrarily limited. The present article argues that the poem’s satire embraces both lovers, and that the colophon Undo Your Door, with its obvious bawdy innuendo,4 indicates that the primary target of the satire is the sexual timidity of the princess rather than, as Kiernan would argue, the mercenary aspirations of the squire. From the outset the princess exhibits an ambivalent attitude towards her would-be lover. Although flattered to have a suitor, she is nevertheless intimidated by the thought of a sexual consummation. She attempts to mask her inhibitions behind the stylized posturings of courtly love, accepting the squire as a suitor but manipulating the conventions of the code in order to E n g l ish Studies in C anada, vii, 4, December 198 keep him at a respectful distance. Thus most of the poem’s somewhat sar­ donic humour is derived from the ongoing disparity between her romantic declarations and her pragmatic behaviour. The satiric treatment of the princess is further reinforced by the poetic justice of the conclusion where she is unexpectedly forced into a marriage which she had thought to evade through the imposition of a formidable quest of several years’ duration. The context of the first meeting of these unlikely lovers symbolically illus­ trates the basic dynamics of their relationship. The squire is associated with the vitality of the natural world. He is discovered in an arbour “fayre and gaye” (103) which is itself an image of natural fecundity replete with over sixteen varieties of trees and nineteen species of birds which sing “wyth notes clere” (61). The princess, by contrast, is confined within her chamber, “Closed well with royall glas” which is “Fulfylled . . . with ymagery” (94-95). She is an outsider viewing the world, quite literally, through rose-coloured glass, being a romantic spectator of, rather than a participant in, the cycle of Nature. From her window the princess overhears the squire lamenting and enquires after the cause of his distress. He politely, yet desperately, declares his love for her, and she accepts him as suitor immediately, declaring: “Though I for thee should be slayne / Squyer, I shall the love agayne” (153-54). How­ ever, the remainder of her speech radically qualifies this initial enthusiasm as she seeks to intimidate and distance her aspirant lover. Firstly, he must remain silent: “If ever ye wyll come to your wyll, / Here and se, and holde you styll” (159-60). Secondly, she warns him of the...

A History of Modern Poetry

PART ONE. THE AGE OF HIGH MODERNISM 1 Ascendancy of T. S. Eliot, 1925-1950 2 Eliot's Later Career The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday. Four Quartets. 3 Modes of Modern Style in the United States E. E. Cummings. Archibald MacLeish. Robinson Jeffers. 4 Hart Crane Plate of Vibrant Mercury. Bridge. 5 Poetry of Critical Intelligence Sources and History of the Style. Metaphysical Wit. Samples of the Style. Laura Riding. Robert Graves. William Empson. John Crowe Ransom. Allen Tate. Yvor Winters. 6 Period Style of the 1930s in England Impact of Auden. Coming after the Modernists. Poetry as Thinking and Talking. English Tradition. Freud, Marx, and Lawrence. Politics and Romantic Convention. Day-Lewis, MacNeice, and Spender. 7 W. H. Auden Auden in the 1930s. Long Poems of the 1940s. Poetry as Conversation. Later Auden. 8 English Romantic Revival, 1934-1945 Beginnings of the Romantic Revival: Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, and George Barker. Edwin Muir. War Years. PART TWO. THE RESURGENCE OF POUND, WILLIAMS, AND STEVENS 9 Reappraising the Modernists 10 Ezra Pound: Cantos Components of the Texture. Ideograms. Incremental Repetition. Major Form. Pisan Cantos. Paradiso. 11 Impact of William Carlos Williams Williams Lyric. Theory of the Poem. Paterson and the Last Poems. 12 Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens Harmonium. Winter Devising Summer in Its Breast. Theory of Poetry Is the Theory of Life. Myth of a Sufficing Naturalism. Major Poetry of the Final Phase. 13 Other Modernist Poets David Jones. Basil Bunting. David Ignatow. Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists. PART THREE. POSTMODERNISM 14 Postwar Period: Introduction Concept of a Period Style. Poetry in the United States. Development of Contemporary Poetry. 15 Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop Robert Penn Warren. Minor American Poets and the Return of Romantic Values. Theodore Roethke. Elizabeth Bishop. 16 Breaking Through the New Criticism Richard Wilbur. Randall Jarrell. John Berryman. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Dream Songs. 17 Robert Lowell Style as Hardship. Life Studies. Lowell's Later Career. 18 In and Out of the Movement: Generation of the 1950s in England Movement. Style of the 1950s. Orientations to an Audience. Roy Fuller, C. H. Sisson, and R. S. Thomas. Larkin and His Contemporaries. 19 English Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s Charles Tomlinson. Ted Hughes. Geoffrey Hill. Thom Gunn. 20 Poetry of Ireland Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh. Thomas Kinsella. John Montague and Michael Longley. Seamus Heaney. 21 Open Form Derivation from Pound and Williams. Theory of Open Form. Syntax as Kinesis. Charles Olson. Robert Creeley. Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn, and Paul Blackburn. Robert Duncan. 22 Poetry in New York and San Francisco Frank O'Hara and the 'New York School. Minor Poets of San Francisco. Countercultural Ethos. Allen Ginsberg. 23 Against Civilization A Shared Style. A Modal Poem. Robert Bly. James Wright. Galway Kinnell. W. S. Merwin. Gary Snyder. 24 Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich Sylvia Plath. Anne Sexton. Adrienne Rich. 25 Black Poets of America Melvin Tolson. Robert Hayden. Gwendolyn Brooks. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). 26 Meditations of the Solitary Mind: John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons John Ashbery. Nature of the Real. Unsaying What You Say While You Are Saying It. Reading Ashbery. A. R. Ammons. 27 Achievement of James Merrill Changing Light at Sandover. Merrill's Trilogy in Literary History. Readers versus the Ouija Board. 'The Book of Ephraim. Mirabell and Scripts for the Pageant. Acknowledgments Index