History Of Literary Studies Research Articles

Arnold, Critic of Ideology

ity, and universality, for they now turn out to be mystifications that conceal motives of domination. We may experience Jameson's claim that a universal agreement exists as coercive and may wonder how ideology critique itself escapes being ideological if everything is ideology. And if it doesn't, we may ask what in the way of understanding is accomplished by the critique of ideology. But I doubt whether any of us have been unaffected by views such as Jameson's. We have all become to one degree or another suspicious of objectivist and universalist arguments. And Arnold, because of his centrality in the history of literary studies, continues to be a magnet for our suspicions. Arnold has in fact become the victim of a historical irony. Contemporary ideology critique has turned the tables on the cultural criticism practiced by Arnold. The idea of culture came into being in the nineteenth century as an optic through which the mechanical degradation of human life was seen and judged. In arrogating to itself the spiritual authority of failing religious dogma, culture claimed or aimed to be disinterested, free of the contaminations of the social and political practices it scrutinized. What has virtually disappeared in the current scene is the sense of culture or art as a force resistant to ideology. The task of the ideology critic is to demystify the ways in which cultural expressions conceal or deflect class, race, and gender interests. Arnold has his vulnerabilities and has been the target of a demystifying criticism, though often it seems to me on the basis of mystifications of his meaning by his critics.

The Medieval Greek Romance (review)

276 Reviews This volume is strongly recommended for libraries with European and Mediterranean collections, and for anyone interested in political, security, or economic issues in Eastern and Southern Europe. Van Coufoudakis Indiana University—Purdue University at Fort Wayne Roderick Beaton, TL· Medieval Greek Romance. Cambridge Medieval Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989. Pp. ix + 261. $49.50. The medieval romance is a genre of Greek literature definitely in need of a fresh critical réévaluation. This comprehensive study intended for both the specialized and the nonspecialized reader, and possessing an excellent bibliography, addresses such a need. The problem with the medieval Greek romances is not simply that they went critically unnoticed until the nineteenth century but also that such a delayed acknowledgment contributed to their disconnection from the tradition of the novel of antiquity and consequently to the loss of their rightful place in the history of medieval European fiction. If we were to isolate a background historical argument as a basis for Beaton's endeavor, it would go something like this: The fiction that flourished in the form of the novel in later antiquity with authors such as Chariton, Achilles Tatios, and Heliodorus became submerged under the more pervasive Christian religious culture. The world-view projected by the ancient fiction, where the individual was totally at the mercy of passion and the irrational forces of fate, was hardly compatible with the Christian one. Nevertheless, during the period of the novel's absence, the need for excitement and for stimulation of the imagination found some outlet, at least in part, in other genres that demonstrated novelistic qualities, genres such as chronicles and hagiography. The reappearance of the romance in the twelfth century rather than at an apocalyptic moment seems to have been signaled by some indigenous processes already manifest in the eleventh century, processes that implied a marked alteration in the function of reading for pleasure as well as in the nature of the readership involved. Beaton sees the heroic-erotic romance oÃ- Diyenis Abritas appearing earlier in the twelfth century as a harbinger announcing the later twelfth century romances, a resurrection of the ancient novel with its secular erotic content of pairs of lovers undergoing separation, adventures, and reunion. Such are the romances Aristandros and Kallithéa of Konstantinos Manassis, Roddnthi and Dosiklis of Theódoros Pródromos, Ysmini and Ysminias of Efstáthios Makrembol Ã-tis, and Drósilla and Hariklis of NikÃ-tas Evyenianós. Beaton calls Diyenis Ahitas a "proto-romance," a "precursor of the fullyfledged revival of the romance genre in the twelfth century" (p. 28). Still, one Reviews 277 cannot but notice that this complex work—formed of multiple traditions, from the Homeric to the Christian, a work which seems to have been very popular, judging from the wide circulation of its manuscripts—may have been also an example representing a tendency toward the production of a mixed heroic-erotic genre of fiction associated with the East. The themes of the Apeldtai, bandits of the Eastern provinces, in the E and A versions, for example, and the abduction of women to marry by die hero and his father (G version), point toward a tradition where the heroic and the erotic are defined in terms of one another. There is, after all, no plot justification for the abduction of Diyenis's bride other than to create an element of danger and adventure. In this study, Beaton also examines five of what he considers original romances of the later period, namely, TL· TaU of Achilliis, Kallimachos and Chrysorrhói, LiiAstros and Rodámni, Vélthandros and Chrysántm, The Tale of Troy, plus translations from Western prototypes, such as Imperios and Margaróna and Flórios and Platziafl&ra. The general objective and method here, stated in the author's own words, is "the study of literary history through the analysis of texts" (p. 208). On the other hand, the issues that this particular study has to deal with are multiple, complex, and frequendy controversial. The task of this book is indeed formidable, for the author attempts, in addition to analyzing the texts, to restore the medieval Greek romances to their rightful position by providing them with a full...

Victorian Connections edited by Jerome J. McGann (review)

Reviews113 combined to produce the photograph, another of the Victorian triumphs over time and space, leading to fashions such as cartes de visite and pictures on postcards, themselves a hugely popular Victorian craze. Even the Queen and Albert kept a darkroom at Windsor. But not everyone approved. "The Weekly Times and Echo in 1893 applauded the formation of a 'Vigilance Association with the purpose of thrashing cads with cameras who go about in seaside places taking snapshots of ladies emerging from the deep. ' " This is a book of impressive erudition. Its bibliographical notes are a great convenience for further reading, and the index is extensive. It is, perhaps, an odd book, tending towards an anatomy, but I like odd books, Burton ' s Anatomy, Tristram Shandy, Sartor Resartus. Within its general compass, it goes off in all directions and sometimes fatigues attention, but it adds up to a significant piece of cultural history, a worthy successor to Victorian People and Victorian Cities. R. D. McMaster University ofAlberta Jerome J. McGann, ed. Victorian Connections. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989. 214. $29.50 US. This collection of essays is offered in "homage" to Cecil Y. Lang by a group of Victorianists influenced by his teaching and his scholarship, especially as these matured during the more than thirty years Lang spent at the University of Virginia. Such Festschriften can be notoriously uneven, and this particular collection does not quite live up to the publisher's claim that it "definefs] the shape that Victorian studies will be taking in the immediate future." However, the general quality of the essays assembled here is remarkably high, while a number of the connections they explore will surely inspire further work along similar lines. The first essay in the collection is an enterprising piece by Jerome McGann in which he makes connections between the history of literary studies in the United States since 1945 and the career of Cecil Lang. His comments are not of "merely" biographical interest but demonstrate, in part through a shrewd comparison between the careers of Lang and Paul de Man, how far we have come in understanding the social forces that shape scholarship, however disinterested that scholarship may purport to 114Victorian Review be. McGann ' s development beyond formalism in his own work as critic and editor is seen to be anticipated and authorized by Lang ' s practice in editing the correspondence of Swinburne, Tennyson, and now Matthew Arnold. It is a practice distinguished by "first of aU, a materialist orientation toward the texts, their producers, and their reproducers; second, an uncompromising insistence upon accuracy and procedural rigor at every level, from the most abstract areas of critical method to the local details of prose style; and third, a clear understanding that memory—not forgetting—is the mother of the muses, and one of the essential bases of aU culture as weU" (6). Many of us who admire the erudition and insight displayed by Lang may have wondered why he has not written more criticism. McGann offers a persuasive explanation of Lang ' s commitment to the editor ' s craft, and in the process makes some challenging claims about what is most valuable in the range of activities available to professional students of uterature, and to Victorians in particular. The principal lessons of a career like Lang's would seem to be the following: daring to defy academic fashion may cost the scholar influence and celebrity in the short run, but the American academy is sufficiently large and diverse to accommodate and reward someone who was "already moving out of fashion in 1949"; a commitment to phüology and history may result in more enduring achievement than New Criticism and deconstruction can lay claim to; and, perhaps most important of all, there ought to be as much consistency as possible between a scholar's pedagogy and her publications. Lang's beUef in diversity and divergence as indelibly marking the materials of Victorian (or any other) culture caused him to teach and write with a humility more ironic than abject, and he must surely be pleased by the kinds of indirect and independent tributes to him offered here. The essay by Karen Chase that foUows McGann ' s...

From structuralism to post-structuralism: Was the structuralist project beyond redemption?

It is argued that the reasons advanced by J. Culler for abandoning the structuralist project in favour of post-structuralism are invalid. Structuralism opened up, for the first time in the history of literary studies, the possibility of an explanatory alternative to traditional interpretative criticism. However, Culler and other structuralists never took the scientific aspirations of early structuralism seriously. In fact, to some extent, Culler misunderstood his own project of a structuralist poetics. The final aims of his project are not very different from those of interpretive criticism, in spite of his emphasis on explanation rather than interpretation. A major reason for this is that Culler's extreme conventionalism and his underlying idealist assumptions concerning the relation between language and reality prevent him from distinguishing clearly between an explanation of why texts mean what they mean to an experienced reader and the semantic content of texts and the beliefs they might challenge. The original explanatory potential of structuralism has now been developed further within the cognitive sciences — largely outside established forms of literary studies.

Fictional Discourse and Historical Space: Defoe and Theroux, Austen and Forster, Conrad and Greene , and: Knowledge and Experimental Realism in Conrad, Lawrence, and Woolf , and: Conrad's Mythology (review)

Reviewed by: Fictional Discourse and Historical Space: Defoe and Theroux, Austen and Forster, Conrad and Greene, and: Knowledge and Experimental Realism in Conrad, Lawrence, and Woolf, and: Conrad's Mythology James Gindin Andrew Wright . Fictional Discourse and Historical Space: Defoe and Theroux, Austen and Forster, Conrad and Greene. New York: St. Martin's, 1987. 116 pp. $27.50. Patrick J. Whiteley . Knowledge and Experimental Realism in Conrad, Lawrence, and Woolf. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987. 235 pp. $25.00. Robert Wilson . Conrad's Mythology. Troy: Whitston, 1987. 158 pp. $22.50. Two of these books are thoughtful, complicated works of literary criticism, intelligent approaches to both fiction and current academic discourse. Andrew Wright, in Fictional Discourse and Historical Space, examines possible boundaries between the reading of fiction and the study of literary history, as well as the various audiences for fiction, the varieties of relation between fiction and the reader's fictions of self. In trying to isolate coherent voices in diverse fiction through changing times and audiences, Wright concentrates on three pairs of novels: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast; Austen's Emma and Forster's Howards End; Conrad's The Secret Agent and Greene's The Human Factor. More rigorous philosophically, although less imaginative about the complexities of readers and times, Patrick Whiteley traces theories of epistemology back to Cartesian dualism in order to locate a change in the applications of knowledge to the constant novelistic question of the identity of the self that indicates modernism in the fiction of Conrad, Lawrence, and Woolf. Although neither critical work is completely convincing, both suggest thoughtful historical speculation and provide sensitive and illuminating readings of particular works. Andrew Wright is acute in using historical knowledge and insight to formulate authors' individual perspectives, as in his account of how Defoe deliberately reduced the complexities of experience to a regressive dream of appealing childishness. The dream is both contrasted to the less naive, more social vision in Swift's Gulliver's Travels and made parallel to a similarly regressive but historically different dream in Theroux. Wright is excellent on the complexities and frustrations of the class-and gender-bound voice in Austen, which can be connected to various class and culture voices in Howards End, alike in their deliberate "refusal to be great," their "irritating" or fascinating lack of pretense. He also makes shrewd connections between the ways in which metaphor suggests only partially knowable political and religious points of view in both Conrad and Greene, although the novelists' politics and metaphysics differ. Always sensitive to the fact that readers relate to characters in fiction partially or randomly, seldom requiring conclusive identification, Wright uses history to [End Page 270] underline the differences between examples of roughly similar emotions and perceptions. His recognition of incomplete identification leaves his readers free to respond or not to the differences his pairs illustrate, depending on their own perceptions of literary history. In this way, I find myself stretched and convinced by his account of the differences between Conrad's and Greene's treatments of anarchism and the implications for social and political control; Greene's use of Trollope to suggest both a kind of historical alienation and a lost order is explained particularly well. I have also learned from Wright's discussion of the adaptations and rejection of Crusoe myths in Theroux's fiction. Although I admire the subtlety of his treatment of similar voices in Austen and Forster, his account of the differences is too simplistic. Unlike Austen, Forster may never have dedicated a novel to a member of the Royal Family, but his historical development of what the Schlegels represent is not unconnected to the conscious and politically futile attempt by Victoria, Albert, and especially their eldest daughter to liberalize and civilize the ruling Prussian aristocracy. Forster's connections to and ambivalences about a social establishment may have been more buried and complicated than those of Austen (as the establishments themselves were more complicated and threatened by events in the century between), but the two authors share a multiplicity of voices and questions about the stances of self that can never ignore or transpose into "utter unthinkability" an...

Multifarious Multiplicity

Journal Article Multifarious Multiplicity Get access Doubles: Studies in Literary History. By KARL MILLER. Oxford. £17.50. John Batchelor John Batchelor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 35, Issue 151, Spring 1986, Pages 85–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/35.151.85 Published: 01 March 1986

Book Reviews

Journal Article Book Reviews: MULTIPLES Get access Doubles: Studies in Literary History. By KARL MILLER. Clarendon Press, 1985; £19.50. DEREK RUSSELL DAVIS DEREK RUSSELL DAVIS Department of Mental Health University of Bristol Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Essays in Criticism, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1, 1 January 1986, Pages 89–94, https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/XXXVI.1.89 Published: 01 January 1986

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Doubles: Studies in Literary History. By KARL MILLER. Pp. xiv+468. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. £19.50 net. VINCENT NEWEY VINCENT NEWEY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXVII, Issue 148, November 1986, Pages 615–617, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXVII.148.615 Published: 01 November 1986

Literary History at Indiana

about in the Department of English at Indiana University can usefully begin with a brief history of its undergraduate and graduate programs since the beginning of the century. The Department at Indiana has always included faculty members who have practiced and sometimes helped to fashion diverse ways of studying and teaching literature. Before the Second World War its faculty included teachers and scholars who were to become important in the creation of departments of folklore, linguistics, and comparative literature. In the 195os and Ig6os other members of the Department's faculty became associated with modes of study as different as the critical formalism of the School of Letters, the interdisciplinary study of culture conducted in Victorian Studies and the American Studies program, and the textual work of the center which is preparing an edition of the writings of William Dean Howells. In addition, individual faculty members have always been eclectic in their teaching of literature, ready within one course to come to an apprehension of literature through several quite distinct ways of talking about it. For this reason, the course and program descriptions in the university catalogues from which we will draw many of the quotations in this essay do not fully record the variety of ways in which literature has been studied in the Department during the past seventy years. But a reading of the catalogues does produce one certain generalization, which would probably also hold true for other large departments of English in public universities whose multiple purposes not only tolerate but even require diversity. No matter how many other ways they found to study literature, the faculty in English at Indiana have consistently assumed that the study of literature ought to include the study of literary history. What has the study of literary history included? Here the answers are less certain, but a more particular account of the Department's

Literatuurgeschiedschrijving én empirische literatuurwetenschap?

The empirical study of literature might be tolerated as a discipline, withinliterary studies it remains an unknown, peripheral possibility, that has to dealwith a lot of scepticism and ignorance. Often it is associated with sheer quantitativeresearch, only focusing, moreover, on the contemporary. In this articleI try to show that the empirical approach also can be applied for the study ofliterary history, with attention paid to qualitative aspects. I demonstrate thisby means of empirical research I have done into the Swedish first time poetsof the 1970s. I point out that the empirical study of literature is conceived ofas a methodology that is applied within a specific theoretical framework, thesystemic study of literature.

The Third Dimension: Studies in Literary History

The Third Dimension: Studies in Literary History

The Third Dimension: Studies in Literary History

The Third Dimension: Studies in Literary History

The Third Dimension: Studies in Literary History

The Third Dimension: Studies in Literary History