Textual Notes Research Articles

Philistia: Final Chapter (1884) by Grant Allen. Edited with an Introduction and Note by Scott C. Thompson

Grant Allen’s Philistia (1884) is a naturalist novel that provides a critical commentary on sociopolitical idealism and London’s literary scene. The novel’s original ending was revised and replaced during the publication process in favor of a happier ending. The original ending is published here in print for the first time, with a contextual introduction and textual note. The manuscript has previously been accessible to scholars only in the Paterno Library in University Park, Pennsylvania.

Esther Inglis, Octonaries: Textual Notes and Glosses

These notes record variant readings from two further manuscripts of Esther Inglis's Octonaries, Folger MS V.a.92, and New York Public Library Spencer Coll. MS. 14, collated against the text transcribed in the preceding item, Folger Library, MS V.a.91. The notes also indicate the places where the order of the octonaries varies between manuscripts and also include a few glosses on Scots words likely to be unfamiliar to non-Scottish students or scholars.

The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar ed. by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader

Reviewed by: The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar ed. by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader John Dudley (bio) The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. x + 305 pp. Cloth, $59.95; Ebook, $59.95. Already acknowledged as an important figure in the rise of African American literature and culture at the turn of the twentieth century, Paul Laurence Dunbar nonetheless remains a somewhat elusive and underexamined presence who made significant contributions to nearly every published genre during his brief career. Although long familiar as a poet who divided his efforts between dialect and conventional verse, his novel The Sport of the Gods has been increasingly recognized as a canonical work of literary naturalism on par with Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Frank Norris’s McTeague for its unvarnished portrait of urban America during the tumultuous Progressive era. Much of his other work, including three additional novels, numerous short stories, plays, song lyrics and librettos, and published and unpublished essays on literature, politics, and culture, remains rare in print anthologies or the classroom. In this context, Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader have produced a valuable edition of Dunbar’s correspondence, the first focused on his role as a writer, and an accessible volume that promises to stimulate further scholarship on the author’s diverse and compelling body of work. As Murillo and Nader note, several biographers have cited Dunbar’s letters from archival sources, beginning with Benjamin G. Brawley’s Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People (University of North Carolina Press, 1936) and Virginia Cunningham’s Paul Dunbar and His Song (Dodd, Mead, 1947). In recent decades, critics have largely relied on Jay Martin’s A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Peter Revell’s Paul Laurence Dunbar (Twayne, 1979) for references to Dunbar’s correspondence with such major figures as William [End Page 85] Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Theodore Roosevelt. Notably, the very recently published biography by Gene Andrew Jarrett, Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird (Princeton University Press, 2022), also extensively cites archival sources for Dunbar’s literary correspondence in painting perhaps the fullest portrait of Dunbar’s eventful life. An important precursor to this volume, Eleanor Alexander’s Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore (New York University Press, 2001), draws upon correspondence from the turbulent relationship between Dunbar and his wife, whose own literary career, as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, has gained significant attention in recent scholarship. In a textual note, Murillo and Nader explain their decision to avoid reprinting the mostly frequently cited correspondence, familiar to many Dunbar scholars from the above sources, including much of the personal correspondence that documents disturbing details of Dunbar’s abusive behavior toward Alice, his close but difficult relationship with his mother, and his struggle with alcoholism and tuberculosis, which would claim his life at the age of 33, after a brief but prolific literary career. Indeed, it is the literary career that Murillo and Nader’s selections and annotations emphasize, and this approach offers a fascinating portrait of an author struggling to establish a creative career under extraordinary circumstances. Generally recognized as the first African American to make a living as a professional literary author, Dunbar’s accomplishments resulted from talent, ambition, and fearlessness, along with his canny willingness to capitalize on personal relationships and fortuitous opportunities. The son of parents emancipated from slavery, Dunbar was raised in Dayton, Ohio, where his first publications appeared alongside his high-school classmate and friend Orville Wright. Denied the opportunity to attend college, Dunbar sought every opportunity to publish while working often menial jobs through most of the 1890s, until the momentum achieved following Howells’s enthusiastic support of Dunbar’s second volume of poetry allowed him to leave his job as a reading room assistant at the Library of Congress in 1898 and pursue writing as his primary source of income until his death in 1906. Along the way, Dunbar...

New Editions of The Great Gatsby

<i>New Editions of</i> The Great Gatsby

"Émile Zola and the Naturalistic School, or Realism in French Literature" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, edited with an Introduction and Textual Notes.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote an essay on the French Naturalist novelist, Émile Zola, in 1885 for the Fortnightly Review at the request of the editor, T.H.S. Escott. However, Braddon later withdrew from publication. This edition of the essay, with contextual introduction, a note on editorial principles and explanatory notes is the first publication of Braddon’s manuscript which otherwise remains accessible to scholars only in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

Women’s Household Drama: ‘Love’s Victorie’, A Pastorall’, and ‘The Concealed Fansyes’ by Mary Wroth, et al

MLR, .,   continuing ability to excite the reader’s mind just as he had in previous generations. We find, for example, that Juno turned back and to the Hours her rich-maned horse resigned, Who them t’immortal mangers bound; the chariot they inclined Beneath the crystal walls of heav’n and they in golden thrones Consorted other deities, replete with passions. (. –, p. ) Elsewhere, such rich poetic evocations of Olympian scenes may be starkly contrasted with the incisive accounts of hostilities beneath the walls of Troy: Idomeneus his stern dart at Erymas addressed, As, like to Acamas, he fled; it cut the sundry bones Beneath his brain, betwixt his neck and foreparts, and so runs, Shaking his teeth out, through his mouth, his eyes all drowned in blood; So through his nostrils and his mouth, that now dart-open stood, He breathed his spirit. (. –, p. ) Miola’s edition at last makes available the riches of this enormously influential translation for early modern Britain in a highly accessible and affordable publication . It constitutes an invaluable companion to the earlier publication in the series of Chapman’s Odyssey. B U/I. R. C. L., M 3 A H Women’s Household Drama: ‘Love’s Victorie’, ‘A Pastorall’, and ‘e Concealed Fansyes’. By M W, J C, and E B. Ed. by M S and S M. (e Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: e Toronto Series, ) Toronto: Iter Press. . xvi+  pp. $.. ISBN ––––. is volume is a welcome addition to the growing number of scholarly editions dedicated to early modern women’s dramatic writing. Since the publication of Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (London: Routledge, ), edited by myself and S. P. Cerasano, there have been a further eleven editions published . ese range from anthologies, such as, Diane Purkiss’s ree Tragedies by Renaissance Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ) to single-text publications, such as Elizabeth Cary’s e Tragedy of Mariam (London: Arden, ), edited by Ramona Wray. Another variable is the editorial choice of whether to retain original spellings and remain as close to the original text or manuscript as possible, or to modernize the language in order to make the play more accessible for teaching and performance. e edition reviewed here is an original-spelling anthology. e text is divided into three parts: the General Introduction, jointly written by Marta Straznicky and Sara Mueller; Wroth’s Love’s Victorie, edited by Straznicky; and Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s A Pastorall and e Concealed Fancies,  Reviews edited by Mueller. e first section provides a comprehensive and scholarly introduction to the significance of household theatre and manuscript culture to early modern women writers. Straznicky’s Introduction to Love’s Victorie is similarly erudite , with an in-depth analysis of the Huntington manuscript, the version used for this edition. e Textual Notes reproduce unedited variants between the Huntington and Penshurst manuscripts, thereby allowing readers to access the conclusion to Act . Straznicky’s Introduction also includes some detailed close reading, for instance of the political references in Venus’s speeches, and an up-to-date history of editions and performance. e text itself is carefully edited, with the notes providing details of how Wroth made changes to the manuscript versions of the play. As such, this edition of Love’s Victorie will prove invaluable for researchers, especially those with no direct access to the originals. Mueller’s Introduction to A Pastorall and e Concealed Fancies provides a similarly thorough analysis of the Beinecke and Bodleian manuscripts. In particular, she highlights the ‘significant differences between the manuscripts’ (p. ). e two dramas are subsequently allotted separate introductions; the masque’s introduction looks at biographical details and the impact of the English Civil War, while the play’s explores the possibilities of intended performance. e final section of the Introduction looks at the aerlives of the texts, detailing editions and modern performances. e masque and play are based on the Bodleian manuscript. Like Straznicky, Mueller provides careful annotation with notes that make the differences between the two manuscript versions clear. However, the notes here are more extensive and wide-ranging. For example, Mueller points out that ‘Bracken’ may allude ‘to Elizabeth Brackley...

A textual note on Sappho’s Brothers poem (P. Sapph. Obbink, lines 17-20 [13-16

The reconstruction of lines 17-20 of Sappho’s ‘Brothers poem’ is controversial. This note aims to draw attention to a parallel supporting the interpretation of ἐπάρωγον […] περτρόπην as an instance of ‘proleptic’ predicative.

Two Textual Notes on the Old English Exodus

AFTER seven introductory lines, the Old English poem Exodus focuses on Moses as the Israelites’ leader to the Promised Land. The following lines are taken from the description of the Israelites’ approach to the Red Sea: The quoted passage offers various textual problems that have been dealt with by editors and commentators.2 Thorpe’s translation is still acceptable in its main aspects: ‘Had their harbinger fiery locks, pale beams; a cry of dread resounded in the martial host, at the hot flame, that it in the waste would burn up the host, unless they zealously Moses obeyed’.3 Tolkien’s posthumously published rendering differs in some aspects, but it is definitely also worth quoting: ‘Fiery locks that vanguard bore and gleaming rays of light; with hot fire and blazing terror he made threat against that embattled array that he would in the wilderness burn to nought their host, unless with hearts of courage they hearkened to the words of Moses’.4

Studies on the Language and Literature of the Bible: Selected Works of J. A. Emerton. Edited by Graham Davies and Robert Gordon

This is an important collection of essays, because they present the work of a scholar who, in addition to his outstanding accomplishments as an editor and reviewer, reached the highest distinction within Old Testament studies as a writer of learned articles rather than of monographs. Emerton seems particularly to have gravitated towards article writing because he only wanted to publish what was original and convincing and did not believe in wasting words—a feature which makes his fluid and varied prose such a pleasure to read. The editors have selected 48, approximately one-third, of Emerton’s essays from a period spanning half a century (1955–2005). Aside from the two opening essays on ‘Comparative Semitic Philology and Hebrew Lexicography’ (1997) and ‘The Hebrew Language’ (2000) respectively, the essays are grouped under six headings: Hebrew Lexicography and Grammar (seven articles); Textual Notes on the Old Testament (15 articles); Hebrew and North-West Semitic Epigraphy (six articles); Old Testament Issues (nine articles); New Testament and Early Christianity (six articles); Bibliography and History of Scholarship (three articles). The range of the essays is broad, but the presentation in one volume allows us to detect recurring patterns, some of which are even obvious in the titles, such as the frequent references to textual problems: ‘Some Difficult Words in Genesis 49’ (1968); ‘The Syntactical Problem of Psalm xlv. 7’ (1968); ‘Notes on Some Problems in Jeremiah v 26’ (1981); ‘Some Problems in Psalm 88:16’ (2004); ‘A Problem in Proverbs 3:35’ (2004). Other recurring themes are harder to detect, especially as there is, regrettably, no subject index. However, some topics occur in over half of the essays, including references to etymology, to emendation of the Masoretic text, and to G. R. Driver, who taught Emerton.

Scrolling through Revelation: A Note on the βιβλ- Word-Group in the Narrative Structure of John’s Apocalypse

The narrative shape of Revelation is notoriously difficult to identify, and varies from commentator to commentator. However, there are indicators of structure, some of which are subtler than others. This textual note identifies uses of three Greek words for ‘scroll’ (belonging to the βιβλ- word-group), twenty-eight in total, and suggests that the hitherto unidentified cluster of seven uses of the word ‘scroll’ in Revelation twenty-two could form an inclusio with the seven uses in chapter five. It further proposes that in chapter ten we are alerted to the forthcoming contents of the now opened scroll by the equivalent use of ‘little scroll’ and ‘scroll.’ I argue that the opened scroll’s contents, relating a metanarrative of salvation and judgement, are narrated from 11:19 to the close of the inclusio in chapter twenty-two, where I postulate a double ending—that of the scroll eaten by John and that of the whole book.

Locating the Devil “Her” in MS Junius 11

This article focuses on the images and texts on page 3 of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, in which Lucifer foments rebellion, falls, and, as Satan, is bound to the mouth of hell. The bottom third of the page contains an image of falling angels, Satan, and the hellmouth. Above that image and to the left is written “hER SE,” Old English for “here that” or “here the.” We contend that this fragmentary textual note exaggerates both the linguistic function of other here x did y formulae in the manuscript and the interaction between these formulae and the visual images. Such exaggeration in the textual note at the very space and moment between the representation of rebellion and that of the completed transformation of Lucifer into Satan locates that metamorphosis in the act of reading-viewing itself. We consider the composition of the image and its inscriptions and set them into the context of Richard Drew’s Falling Man. Viewing the fall of Satan as part of a sequence of images and texts, we argue for the collaborative role of the viewer in sequential art and contend that Satan, as he appears in this depiction, is not safely distant from the reader-viewer but rather becoming through the active engagement of the viewer and reader in the creation of the world of image and language.

Historical and Textual Notes on Magical Texts in the Papyrus Collection of the University of Oslo Library

This article, which concerns the history and texts of some of the magical papyri in the collection of the University of Oslo Library, has two parts. The first part (Hickey and Maravela) sheds light on the acquisition of the celebrated Oslo magical roll, P.Oslo I 1, by drawing on Samson Eitrem's account of the purchase in the Norwegian daily Aftenposten and the correspondence of Francis W. Kelsey, who had sought to buy the papyrus for the University of Michigan. The second part (Zellmann-Rohrer) offers critical remarks on the formats and texts of the magical papyri P.Oslo I 1, 4–5 and II 15.

&lt;I&gt;The Storm at the Lighthouse&lt;/I&gt; by Wilkie Collins, with an Introduction, Textual Notes, and Appendix

&lt;I&gt;The Storm at the Lighthouse&lt;/I&gt; by Wilkie Collins, with an Introduction, Textual Notes, and Appendix

Banners, Spears, Black Raiders and Byzantines: Some Textual Notes on Late Sasanian and post-Sasanian Zoroastrian Apocalyptic Texts

AbstractThis article is a philological study of literary motifs in the Middle Persian apocalyptic work of uncertain date,Zand ī Wahman Yašt. The author claims that the motifs under his consideration in the text of ZWY (=Zand ī Wahman ī Yašt) go back to Middle Persian version of several AvestanYašts, especially, to the Middle Persian translation of the second part ofYašt1 (known asWahman Yašt),Yašt11, andYašt8.

Bronte, Branwell, Charlotte, Anne, and Emily. 2010.Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Early Writings, edited by Christine Alexander

Reviewed by: Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Early Writings by Branwell Bronte et al. Peter Shillingsburg Bronte, Branwell, Charlotte, Anne, and Emily. 2010. Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Early Writings, edited by Christine Alexander. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-282763-0. Pp. lvi + 620. $14.95/£12.99. Charlotte Brontë’s writings before The Professor (completed 1846; published posthumously 1857) exceed in volume her adult output. From 1826 to 1839, along with Branwell, Anne, and Emily, Charlotte wrote fantasy stories, mock magazines, poems, and essays in the mode of extended play-acting for their own entertainment. None of this material was published in the lifetime of their authors. In the 1970s, when Christine Alexander began her work on the early writings of the Brontës, only about a third of the manuscripts had been published, mostly in the work of Thomas J. Wise, John Alexander Symington, C. W. Hatfield, Clement Shorter, Fanny Ratchford, and Winifred Gérin. Charlotte Brontë’s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, obtained a large packet of these writings from Charlotte’s widower, Arthur Bell Nichols, but did little with them before returning them after writing her biography of Charlotte (1857). Nichols later sold the packet to the bibliographer, book collector, forger, and cheat, Thomas J. Wise, who manufactured some limited-edition pamphlets and, with John Alexander Symington, printed a selection from the juvenile materials in the Shakespeare Head Brontë (1932–1938). Wise subsequently sold off most of the collection in small bits and pieces that ended scattered in libraries and private collections worldwide. The first task was to locate all the surviving manuscripts and identify the publications of any pieces for which manuscripts could not be located. The result was Alexander 1982, which reports the bibliographic results of Alexander 1978. In volume two of the dissertation, she provided a genetic scholarly edition, listing all the anomalies of the manuscripts and correcting (by re-transcription) the errors of previous copyists, most of whom had assumed that close approximations would do for juvenilia or had worked from photocopies. A revised form of the first volume of the dissertation, a comprehensive critical and descriptive study of Brontë’s juvenilia, was published in Alexander 1983, for which the author was awarded a prize by the British Academy. [End Page 122] The Brontë juvenilia do not present a complicated history of textual variants, but they raise two interesting and difficulty textual problems: do juvenilia deserve to be edited with the care for detail demanded by a scholarly edition? And should a reading text of the juvenilia reflect accurately the inadequacies and errors of childhood carelessness or inabilities? Alexander answered the first with a resounding yes in her dissertation. She answered the second in two ways, first in her dissertation, treating these manuscript works to the no-holds barred scholarly approach and then slightly differently in An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (1987 and 1991, respectively vol. 1–2; vol. 3 is forthcoming). The great achievement of this work is its collection, transcription, and arrangement of the fugitive manuscripts. For this version, Alexander rechecked her transcriptions against original manuscripts, but relaxed slightly the requirements of scholarly editions, perhaps to the grateful sighs of Brontë scholars generally, by normalizing minor aspects of the manuscript, previously recorded in detail in her thesis. She records in “Textual Notes” at the end of the volumes only those corrections by Charlotte Brontë that she believes substantially alter the meaning of her text. The result makes for easier reading, but scholars might want to follow the hints in Alexander’s introduction and notes about the actual text of the manuscripts by looking at manuscript facsimiles or examining the textual apparatus of her thesis. One cannot overestimate the difficulty of the task left by Wise’s unscrupulous, selfish, and inaccurate treatment of the manuscript collection he obtained from Nicholls. Over ten publicly accessible repositories in the U.S. and England contain significant amounts of manuscripts, sometimes dividing single works among them; and numerous private collectors and other libraries have a page or more, all of which had to be found, identified, dated...

“The King His Play”: Charles II, Christina of Sweden, and Dryden’s Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen

“The King His Play”: Charles II, Christina of Sweden, and Dryden’s Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen Candy Schille Today only a few specialists may know of John Dryden’s Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen (1667), but during the Restoration it pleased readers and playgoers mightily.1 Samuel Pepys sat through it four times during its first season, twice during its second, and twice again during its third; he thought it “one of the best plays I ever saw.” Between March 1667 and January 1668 King Charles II watched it five times, twice at court (Loftis, “Commentary” 331), and, Dryden proudly tells us in his Preface, “grac’d it with the Title of His Play” (115). It was first printed in 1688, with two editions the following year and three more before 1700 (Loftis, “Textual Notes” 420). For modern scholars, the interest of the play has been primarily in the comic plot—in its importance to the genesis of the “gay couple” and tragicomic patterns.2 Nell Gwynn, playing Florimell, caught Charles II’s eye, and by 1669, she had supplanted his long-time favorite, Barbara Castlemaigne, the “uncrowned queen of England”(Novak 381–82; Fraser 102). My focus here, however, is not on the comic but rather the serious plot of the tragicomedy and how a play about a “Maiden Queen” might have drawn the recently restored king to claim the play as his own. I will argue that this play, concerned with a monarch lacking an (legitimate, in Charles’s case) heir, provides for a peaceful resolution to a looming succession crisis, yet still keeps issues of fitness to rule—issues, that is, of “title” and/or “merit”—very much alive. In this, more broadly, Secret Love is an early example of Dryden’s habit of qualification even in plays that purport to underwrite an orthodoxy or promote a profitable party line. In effect, his dramatic [End Page 41] works usually (and I believe intentionally) evidence a sort of internal deconstructive impulse. Secret Love offers a particularly cogent handling of the issues of monarchical responsibility and prerogative. In brief, the unnamed virgin queen of the title loves a commoner, Philocles, whom she has promoted as her court favorite, but she has jealously guarded her right to rule independently of a husband. Philocles loves another woman of royal blood, but loves as much, or more, the idea of becoming king. Ultimately the queen’s struggle between her desire to marry beneath her and her desire to maintain her primacy as ruler results in a baroque settlement in which she will live unmarried and the crown will in time devolve upon the commoner’s head. In part, the play is an early expression of anxieties about succession, anxieties that would later deepen as Charles II remained without legitimate offspring to inherit the throne. Two of the most recent and most substantive handlings of the contemporary issues at stake have emphasized another aspect of the cultural work that Secret Love may have been intended to do: that is, not merely to express, but also to allay anxieties caused by the recent restoration—and the potential abuses--of monarchical power. Though he mentions Secret Love only briefly, Duane Coltharp has argued that in general Dryden “attempt[s] to appropriate revolutionary energies for royal uses” (417).3 Among these “revolutionary energies” is sexual desire, which becomes an “imperative of generational succession” (423).Stephen P. Flores, dealing specifically with Secret Love, makes explicit what Coltharp’s argument only permits: a broad analogy between the play’s passionate, absolutist queen and Charles II. In Flores’ reading, what audiences may have perceived as contemporary threats to political stability are contained by their embodiment in a woman; assumptions and traditions concerning gender allow these threats to be diffused or dismissed (180–88). Although Flores’ and Coltharp’s readings strongly suggest that Dryden’s ending produces in audiences some sort of affective repose friendly to royal interests, the resolution, such as it is, to Secret Love is manifestly unsettled and unsettling. None of the characters’ private desires are satisfied, and the immediate public solution to the succession crisis ensures neither the successive legitimacy nor the personal...

Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions. Volume II: Introduction, Textual Notes, Commentary, Bibliography, and Indexical Glossary

Book Review| January 01 2012 Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions. Volume II: Introduction, Textual Notes, Commentary, Bibliography, and Indexical Glossary Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions. Volume II: Introduction, Textual Notes, Commentary, Bibliography, and Indexical Glossary. By William Langland. Edited by A. V. C. Schmidt. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008. Pp. xii + 948. $100. Michael Calabrese Michael Calabrese Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2012) 111 (1): 127–130. https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.111.1.0127 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Calabrese; Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions. Volume II: Introduction, Textual Notes, Commentary, Bibliography, and Indexical Glossary. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 1 January 2012; 111 (1): 127–130. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.111.1.0127 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressThe Journal of English and Germanic Philology Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Ubs Greek New Testament: Reader's Edition With Textual Notes – Edited by Barbara Aland et al.

The Ubs Greek New Testament: Reader's Edition With Textual Notes – Edited by Barbara Aland et al.

Political Writings (review)

Reviewed by: Political Writings Stephen C. Brennan (bio) Political Writings, by Theodore Dreiser. Pref. Thomas P. Riggio. Ed., intro., and notes Jude Davies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. 321 pp. Cloth, $50.00. Political Writings is the latest volume in the Dreiser Edition, whose goal in numerous volumes since the 1981 Sister Carrie, based on the original manuscript, has been to make accessible works not previously published or not readily available. Jude Davies has selected, in whole or in part, 55 works demonstrating the development of Dreiser’s political ideas from 1895 to 1945. The selections constitute less than a third of the more than 200 books, articles, essays, broadsides, speeches, plays, and poems that Dreiser wrote on political subjects, but specialists will not likely feel any significant lack in the coverage, and those encountering Dreiser’s political ideas for the first time will find the collection indispensable. With the “partial exception” of letters Dreiser wrote in 1933 to Hutchins Hapgood to deny Hapgood’s charge of anti-Semitism, all texts in Political Writings were either published during Dreiser’s lifetime or written for publication and therefore have been edited as “public documents.” That is, Davies has corrected typos and factual errors and has “silently standardized” punctuation and spelling to conform to today’s usage or to regularize Dreiser’s inconsistencies. (In my view, standardization comes with a cost, minor to be sure, when the flavor of Dreiser’s original wording is lost, for example in replacing “sweater-shop” with “sweatshop” and “moralic” with “moralistic”). Previously unpublished items have been edited from manuscripts or typescripts at the Dreiser Collection at the University of Pennsylvania; previously published items have been edited anew when the latest typescripts are available. Differences in substance between published versions of a text or between the published version and the latest type-script have been reconciled in light of “Dreiser’s intentions with reference to his general objectives at the time of composition.” Those who frown on eclectic editions might object to some of Davies’s choices, but the textual notes and headnotes provide the publication history for texts published [End Page 216] more than once and explain the choice of copy text. A full list of emendations has been placed on file at Penn. Besides the headnote, textual note, and historical notes for most items, the apparatus includes a preface by Thomas P. Riggio, General Editor of the Dreiser Edition, an introduction by Davies describing the development of Dreiser’s political ideas, and a Historical Commentary by Davies for each of the four stages of that development: 1895–1910, 1911–1928, 1929–1937, and 1938–1945. Riggio’s Preface describes a Dreiser familiar to students of his fiction, “a bundle of contradictions” who is “essentially hard to pin down.” Riggio sees Dreiser’s political ideas as falling roughly into two phases. Up until the stock market crash of 1929, Dreiser saw himself as “an interpreter of the spectacle of life” who could admire “amoral capitalists” like Frank Cowperwood while calling for reforms “within the limits of generally accepted progressive politics.” After 1929, he adopted “an openly activist stance” that involved him directly in leftist causes and led to his joining the Communist Party in 1945. The reason for the neglect of Dreiser’s political thought since the end of World War II, Riggio contends, is Americans’ antipathy towards the left during the Cold War and the widespread belief that his polemics were poorly written and filled with inaccuracies. In his Introduction, Davies links Dreiser’s political writing to his fiction in that both are concerned “with human dignity and self-fulfillment, and the obstacles to both.” But while Dreiser’s novels and other literary works found their “essential subject” in “the American scene,” his political work found it in “America-in-the-world,” with “American exceptionalism” being the primary target of his attacks. Following a survey of Dreiser’s political interests from 1895 on, Davies returns to the “important parallels” between the political writing and the fiction, maintaining that at times “throughout his career, Dreiser took up in the political sphere issues depicted in his fiction.” His efforts to prevent the judicial lynching of the...

Textual and Historical Notes on the Eliashib Archive from Arad

The first part of the article discusses in detail some letters addressed to eliashib, possibly the commander of the fortress of Arad. New readings and interpretations are suggested for Ostraca Nos. 3, 5, 10, 12 and 18 and their structure and contents are clarified. The second part of the article offers new solutions for some problems in the history of the Negev in the late years of the Kingdom of Judah. it suggests that the elite troops of Kittiyim were hired by one of the last kings of Judah and sent to the Negev in an effort to curtail the edomite danger. However, the efforts to defend the Negev failed and its centres were destroyed some time before the Babylonian 588–587 BCe campaign against the Kingdom of Judah. The heavy destruction brought about by the edomites was deeply engraved in the collective memory and provides the background for the distinctive negative attitude to edom in biblical prophecy of the exilic and post-exilic periods.