Twentieth-century Literature Research Articles

Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies

ConradianaA Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies John G. Peters, Editor, Jana M. Giles, Managing Editor, Anna Bounds, Melissa Jackson, Karla Robertson, and Tia Smith, Editorial Interns Conradiana, an international journal devoted to and welcoming essays on all aspects and periods of the life and works of Joseph Conrad, is published three times yearly in the spring, summer, and fall. If possible, essays should cite Conrad’s works within the text. Essays must cite a major authoritative edition of Conrad’s works (such as the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad; the Uniform edition of the Collected Works of Joseph Conrad [Doubleday or Dent edition]; or the most recent editions of the Modern Library, Broadview, Norton Critical, Oxford, or Penguin editions of Conrad’s works), as approved by the General Editor of Conradiana. Submissions should be double-spaced throughout and follow the MLA Manual of Style. Manuscripts may be submitted electronically (preferred) as a Microsoft Word file (or in a compatible format) to John G. Peters, Editor, at jgpeters@unt.edu. Authors preferring to submit a hard copy may do so by sending their work to the Editor at 1155 Union Circle, #311307, Department of English, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5017. Correspondence should be directed to the Editor, except in the case of subscriptions and other business matters, which should be addressed to Texas Tech University Press sales office, Lubbock, TX 79409-1037. Books for review should be sent to Ellen Burton Harrington, Book Review Editor, Department of English, University of South Alabama, 5991 USA Drive, N., Room 240, Mobile, AL 36688 (eharrington@southalabama.edu). Subscriptions are $64.00 for individuals and $120.00 for institutions. Conradiana is indexed in Abstracts in English Studies, American Humanities Index, Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities, MLA International Bibliography, and Twentieth-Century Literature. COVER: Detail from “Joseph Conrad Listening to Music,” etching by Walter Tittle, courtesy of the Rare Book Room, Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University. This journal is a member of , the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Conradiana—ISSN 0010-6356 Spring/Summer 2019, Volume 51, Numbers 1–2 (published three times a year) Texas Tech University Copyright © 2018 Texas Tech University Press Box 41037 Lubbock, Texas [End Page i] Copyright © 2019 Texas Tech University Press

The Yellow Peril as a Travelling Discourse: A Comparative Study of Wang Lixiong's China Tidal Wave

Joining recent scholarly efforts to free the study of the Yellow Peril from the conventional framework of Asian American and postcolonial studies, this paper offers a comparative analysis of the manifestations of this mutable racial discourse in twentieth-century Anglophone and Sinophone literatures. As a case in point, I focus on the Chinese dissident writer Wang Lixiong and his ‘racist’ appropriation of the Yellow Peril ideology in fin-de-siècle Anglo-American popular writings. By juxtaposing his canonical work China Tidal Wave, known in Chinese as Huang Huo (‘Yellow Peril’), with the Asian invasion fictions by Jack London and M. P. Shiel, I argue that instead of some kind of indisputable metaphysical truth, the Yellow Peril ideology manifested in these texts is merely a performative cultural practice that shifts its functions and allegiances according to the situated socio-political agenda of its practitioner. This performative nature is made explicit through my analyses of the changes of their paratexts as these texts travel across languages, leading to further reflections on theoretical concepts such as Occidentalism, the postcolonial palimpsest, Sinophone literature, and world literature.

ANTI-UTOPIC MO OPIC MOTIVES IN THE NO TIVES IN THE NOVEL OF EV VEL OF EVGENIY ZAMYATIN "WE"

In this article, in a comparative aspect, the specificity of the antiutopian genre in twentieth century literature is considered. Anti-utopian motifs in the work of Yevgeny Zamyatin "We" are defined. Focused on a new, "planetary" reader, on a new life reality, the novel turned out to be fantastic, utopian, with elements of a detective story and amusement

Dutch Inlaid Aventurine Decoration: Study, Analysis, and Conservation

ABSTRACTA small group of seventeenth-century furniture comprised of four cabinets and one table distinguishes itself from contemporary furniture decorated with lacquer imitation techniques. Sumptuous patterns in European aventurine lacquer are inlaid into a background of ebony, thus creating a rich contrast. Inspired by the technique of Japanese nashi-ji lacquer, European motives are paired with the exotic effect of shimmering metal particles. Tying into previous research, one of the cabinets which was so far only known from photographs in early twentieth-century literature, was studied in-depth. A fragment from the table’s decoration could also be included into the technical study. The materials and techniques employed for the creation of these inlaid aventurine lacquer pieces were studied and compared to the hitherto studied three cabinets. The most recent treatment involving consolidating delaminated areas and replacing losses in the aventurine lacquer is briefly outlined.

The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature by Corina Stan

Reviewed by: The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature by Corina Stan Lucy Bergeret Corina Stan. The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature. Northwestern UP, 2018. 304 pages. In a day and age where screens are erected between individuals and borders between countries, can one still argue in favor of the ethical, perhaps even political, value of distance? Rather than defending an extreme or unilateral response to this question, Corina Stan's The Art of Distances develops a nuanced and incisive argument based on the multiple senses and connotations of the term "distance." As a starting point, Stan builds on the idea expressed in Roland Barthes' 1976–1977 course Comment vivre ensemble, according to which we need "a science, perhaps an art, of distances" to guarantee an ideal form of vivre-ensemble, of being with others (15). In Stan's title however, the term "art"—which, in its links to the particular and the contingent, was distinguished by Aristotle from the necessity of episteme—seems crucial. Indeed, in a world "deprived of shared morality" (12) and in the face of injustice, inequality, or alienation, individuals and collectivities have no choice but to rely on practices and dispositions—such as phronesis, or practical wisdom— which cultivate an art of distance. As Stan posits, such an art protects us from the dangers of its absence, as in totalitarianism. It is valuable as it maintains both the singularity and self-respect of the individual, as well as the dignity of others. It thereby preserves the richness of human life and brings us closer to the ideal of a "nonexclusionary notion of community" that remains open insofar as it distances itself from rigid, predetermined, or imposed ideas of commonality (198). The book is organized into two parts, which track the art of distances in works of anglophone, francophone, and German philosophy and fiction of the past century, spanning from the late 1920s to 2010. The introduction situates Barthes and Adorno among various thinkers and their criticism of the traditional notion of community, setting the stage to reveal the ethical value of distance and its neighboring notions, such as delicacy, discretion, "reject," tact, politeness, and so on.1 Part I traces the emergence of the "field of tension" of an art of distances both public and private in the first half of the twentieth century. In Chapter 1, Stan tackles the question of the "right (di)stance" for the intellectual and analyzes two metaphors which serve to represent the writer's retreat from the world: the leaning tower (Woolf) and the whale (Orwell). Following Lionel Trilling's distinction, she examines George Orwell's critique of English sincerity, as well as his self-imposed exile and poverty, which serve to overcome the guilt and distance of social class. She then turns to Henry Miller's model of authenticity in Tropic of Cancer, which corresponds to a flight from imposed social, moral, and aesthetic norms. From there, she is able to carry out a comparative analysis of three modes of detachment and of "not being at [End Page 1102] home in one's home" in the work of Orwell, Miller, and Paul Morand (29). From her close readings emerges the contention that unlike Miller and Morand, whose reliance on distance may be considered a lack of understanding, Orwell's "ethnography of proximity," his specific form of sincere authenticity—or authentic sincerity—that combines the exterior stance of the outsider and the direct experience of immersion, creates a form of tact which verges on tactlessness and a paradoxical balance of distance and closeness that aims both to unmask society and write "for it," in the hopes of bringing about change (64). Chapter 2 then examines a second model for overcoming the distances imposed by the everyday, as in Elias Canetti's conception of the "redemptive crowd" (84). According to Canetti in Crowds and Power, the experience of immersion in a multitude of people offers a glimmer of hope in a world beset with distances and hierarchies. The crowd overcomes distance through the shared experience of the ordinary and, most of all, of embodiment, creating a common feeling of equality among its members...

Guillaume Le Blanc and Fabienne Brugère. La fin de l’hospitalité: Lampedusa, Lesbos, Calais … jusqu’où irons-nous? Paris: Flammarion, 2017. 240 pp.

Previous article No AccessThe CI ReviewGuillaume Le Blanc and Fabienne Brugère. La fin de l’hospitalité: Lampedusa, Lesbos, Calais … jusqu’où irons-nous? Paris: Flammarion, 2017. 240 pp.Corina StanCorina Stan Search for more articles by this author Corina Stan is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the English department at Duke University. She is the author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature (2018), and of articles published in Comparative Literature Studies, MLN, Arcadia, English Studies, Contemporary Women’s Writing, The European Journal of English Studies, Empedocles, and others. She is currently at work on two book projects. The first examines the oblique history of the twentieth century intimated in historical novels and plays set during the English Civil Wars, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution (1630s–1688) and the ways such texts engage in a lucid reexamination of modernity. The second historicizes the anxiety of the “end of culture” in the West, particularly in connection with the long histories of migration and the refugee crisis. At Duke, she is codirector of the Representing Migration Humanities Lab.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 45, Number 2Winter 2019Davidson and His Interlocutors Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700882 Views: 78Total views on this site © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey by Riccardo Saccenti

Reviewed by: Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey by Riccardo Saccenti R. S. White Saccenti, Riccardo, Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2016; cloth; pp. xiii, 155; R.R.P. US $45.00; ISBN 9780268100407. Natural law is an ancient and abiding way of thinking about the relationship between morality and law. Extremely simple in its premise, that knowledge of the difference between right and wrong is innate and 'written on the heart' as a way of preserving existence, the doctrine has led to vast amounts of commentary on its endless complexities and its very existence or otherwise. As Aquinas put it, 'Good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided'. However, natural law was also argued for in pre-Christian times, by Plato, Cicero, and others, using not Christian notions of God's divine purposes nor conscience, but reason alone to deduce its existence. Within the later Christian cosmology, conscience was considered central as the innate, God-given faculty, but some Christian thinkers did not draw the conclusion that natural law itself is also innate, insisting instead that God's emissaries on earth are needed to pass down divine law. Meanwhile, after its heyday in medieval and early modern times there have been revivals of natural law and its more civic equivalent, natural rights, which in turn underpinned human rights. Throughout history political applications have been based on the justification offered by natural law for resistance to unjust positive (man-made) laws and for issues like conscientious objection, since the argument runs that positive law must be consistent with natural law or it is no law at all, and can—indeed in some cases must—be broken. However, it needs to be said that Riccardo Saccenti's book is probably not the best place for beginners. Despite its inviting subtitle (A Survey) and its brevity (eighty pages of text, and almost the same of notes), the account presupposes some acquaintance with the mountain of scholarship on the subject. In particular, its intended audience is most likely those in the Natural Law Forum at Notre Dame, which has its own important journal. The subtitle could really be limited to 'A survey of twentieth-century literature' on medieval natural law theories, rather than implying a history of natural law. Furthermore, given the medieval lens, generally speaking the primary concentration is on theological approaches rather than historical, secular, or philosophical ones. Even more specialized, there is a focus on a particular medieval debate on distinctions between lex naturalis (natural law) and ius naturale (natural rights). Within its chosen parameters, Debating Medieval Natural Law is a challenging and important analysis. [End Page 243] R. S. White The University of Western Australia Copyright © 2019 Parergon

The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy by Jonathan Foltz

Reviewed by: The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy by Jonathan Foltz Jordan Brower The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy. Jonathan Foltz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $65.00 (cloth). Jonathan Foltz's The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy joins the post-millennium trend in scholarship intent on nuancing our understanding of modernism's media ecology. As he duly acknowledges in his introduction, that body of writing is too diverse to account for singly (the study cites as influences Mark Goble, Michael North, Laura Marcus, and many others), but Foltz writes most clearly after David Trotter's Cinema and Modernism (2007). There, Trotter announced his dissatisfaction with arguments based on an analogical relation between modernist literary experimentation and filmmaking techniques such as montage editing and camerawork, finding them "at once too loose … and too tight": that is, often ahistorical on the one hand, and positing an insufficiently mediated formal relation on the other.1 Foltz has learned well from Trotter and company. In studying the writings of Virginia Woolf, H.D., Henry Green, and Aldous Huxley, he at once tracks those authors' relations to and reflections on film—which include their involvement in various forms of film criticism, and, in Huxley's case, participation in production—and sensitively reads the formal and stylistic ramifications of those engagements.2 From these "singular correspondences between literature and film" (The Novel After Film, 11), Foltz seeks "to clarify a set of related attitudes toward medial difference, generic identity, and the compromised aesthetics of address that bind these disparate styles together in a common history" (23). The book is thus remarkably ambitious—it tackles the Novel, and Film, and Modernism, and Autonomy—and that high aspiration is the study's great virtue. But by taking on those big words which make us so unhappy and by allowing their augustness to compound and their slipperiness to slicken—even the preposition "After" is purposely ambivalent, suggesting temporal belatedness and a "conflicted relation of indebtedness and disavowal"—that ambition is also the study's principal limitation (5–6). The work of this review will be to give a sense of the challenge and promise of Foltz's book and what they mean for media-oriented studies of modernism going forward. Although he declines to "bind" his analysis to "either a historical or a formal definition of modernism as such," Foltz acknowledges as sources for his sense of that concept the sociology of twentieth-century literature undertaken by scholars ranging from Lawrence Rainey (Institutions of Modernism [1999]) and Mark McGurl (The Novel Art [2001]) to Andrew Goldstone (Fictions of Autonomy [2013]) and Evan Kindley (Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture [2017]) (24). It is by way of McGurl that Foltz conceives of the modernist novel as the "art-novel," which is conceivably why Henry James hovers over his study—literally, as the provider of its first epigraph, and figuratively as the author perhaps most often associated with the self-conscious effort to refine novelistic technique (5).3 Broader questions aside, Foltz is above all interested [End Page 222] in the way his four chosen authors warp what he calls "novelistic address" along four vectors: character, point of view, omniscience, and irony (10).4 For Foltz, these deformations find their etiologies in his four authors' particular experiences of film. But despite being the common name for the art form of celluloid-based moving images, Foltz's "film" is not "a coherent medium, with concrete and materially identifiable properties or styles that writers might emulate with confidence"; "rather," Foltz goes on to say, "I treat film as a transitive figure through which writers came to articulate modes of writing that the tradition of the novel had disallowed" (The Novel After Film, 9). Foltz's notion of the "transitive figure"—which has presumably been selected for its flexibility—also introduces a tension in his study's conceptual framework. The critic's admiration of the sociological approach to modernism and his attention to writers' unique responses to "film" might make us expect him to build his case from the bottom up, coordinating these individual, socially embedded, culturally...

The Conception of Home in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature of Travel

Yeni Eleştiri[1]
 kuramının, eserlerin bağımsız birer yapı olduğu ve kendi kendine yeterliliği
 prensibinden hareketle, bu makale, konusunun şekillenmesi için referans olarak
 seçilen gezi edebiyatı metinlerinin sunduğu tanımlamalar ve betimlemelere
 olabildiğince sadık kalarak, insan yaşamı için merkezî bir mekân olma
 niteliğine sahip ve bununla birlikte kimlik, kültür ve kişilik gibi olgularla
 da bağlantılı olan ve bunun yanı sıra teknik ve teknolojik sahada kaydedilen
 ilerlemelerin bir sonucu olarak mekânlararası etkileşimin daha sık ve daha
 hızlı gerçekleştiği son iki yüzyılın kayda değer sorunsallarından olan ev ve
 yurt algısına dair bir inceleme sunmayı hedefliyor. Bu bağlamda, referans
 olarak seçilen metinler, yalnızca deneyimsel nitelikleriyle değil aynı zamanda
 “gezi edebiyatı teorisi eseri” nitelikleriyle bağlantılı olarak da ele
 alınacaktır. Dolayısıyla, algılayıcı özne olarak insan ve algınanan nesne
 olarak mekân diyalektiğinden hareketle, gezgin-yazar olarak
 nitelendirilebilecek çağdaş yazarlar tarafından, evlerinden ve yurtlarından,
 alışılmış ve sıradan olandan uzakta, dünyanın çeşitli yerlerinde
 gerçekleştirilen gezi deneyimlerinin edebî boyut kazanmış hâli olan gezi
 edebiyatı eserleri, içerdikleri parçalar aracılığıyla, bu makalenin konusu olan
 mekân algısı paradigmasına yaklaşımda izlenecek tutumu birincil elden
 besleyeceklerdir. Böylelikle, belirli bir mekânsal gerçekliği yansıtan
 kavramlar olan ev ve yurdun gezgin-yazar açısından algısı noktasında, biri
 diğerinden bağımsız şartlarda gerçekleşmiş olsa dahi birbirini besleyen ya da
 tamamlayan bireysel deneyimler neticesinde yazıya aktarılan tanımlama ve
 yaklaşımlar üzerinden mekân algısı meselesinin farklı boyutları göz önüne
 serilecek, bu sayede de mekân olgusuna dair önerilecek olan herhangi bir
 yargının hem bütünselliğine hem de eksikliğine vurgu yapılmış olacaktır.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 [1] Yeni Eleştiri
 (New Criticism), bir eserin kaynak
 veya kaynaklarına ve sosyokültürel arka planına odaklanmaktan ziyade,
 sayfalarında yer alan kelimeleri merkeze koyan, edebî eserleri, eser dışındaki
 ögelerden bağımsız, otonom ve organik unsurlar olarak ele alan bir eleştiri
 yaklaşımı, anlayışı olarak tanımlanabilir (Das 2005: 24-25).
 
 
 

Narratives of Nothing in Twentieth-Century Literature by Meghan Vicks

<i>Narratives of Nothing in Twentieth-Century Literature</i> by Meghan Vicks

“No Country for Old Men”? The Question of George Moore’s Place in the Early Twentieth-Century Literature of Ireland

The paper scrutinizes the literary output of George Moore with reference to the expectations of the new generation of Irish writers emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although George Moore is considered to belong to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy writers, he began his writing career from dissociating himself from the literary achievements of his own social class. His infatuation with the ideals of the Gaelic League not only brought him back to Dublin, but also encouraged him to write short stories analogous to famous Ivan Turgenev’s The Sportsman’s Sketches. The idea of using a Russian writer as a role model went along with the Gaelic League advocating the reading of non-English European literature in search for inspiration. However the poet’s involvement in the public cause did not last long. His critical view on Ireland together with his uncompromising approach towards literature resulted in a final disillusionment with the movement. The paper focuses on this particular period of Moore’s life in order to show how this seemingly unfruitful cooperation became essential for the development of Irish literature in the twentieth century. The Untilled Field, though not translated into Irish, still marks the beginning of a new genre into Irish literature—a short story. More importantly, the collection served as a source of inspiration for Joyce’s Dubliners. These and other aspects of Moore’s literary life are supposed to draw attention to the complexity of the writer’s literary output and his underplayed role in the construction of the literary Irish identity.

On Twentieth-Century Literature's Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism, 2018

On Twentieth-Century Literature's Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism, 2018

An Outpost of Modernism: The Diplomatic Design of Cosmopolis

Although certain works published in the fin-de-siècle journal Cosmopolis: An International Review (1896–8) would have a lasting impact on twentieth-century literature, the principles behind its design have escaped critical attention. This article posits that Cosmopolis anticipated a form of modernism that Walter Benjamin would later conceptualise in his ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921) and ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923). The interplay between Benjamin's two essays suggests that translation allows one to reach a nonviolent resolution of conflict through language: a translation's mediation between an original work and pure language presents a nonviolent form of coexistence. The editors and writers of Cosmopolis had already put this idea into practice: a significant number of contributors wrote in a language that was not their own, while those who did write in their own language addressed a non-native audience. The geopolitical implications of this multilingual approach come to the fore most emphatically in a case of pseudo-translation that deals with the case of Alsace-Lorraine. More subtly, the periodical creates echoes and reverberations between articles on international politics and works of literature. Through these translational practices, Cosmopolis was designed to foster a ‘diplomatic’ form of cosmopolitanism, a fact highlighted by the diplomatic credentials of a number of contributors, including the main editor, and thematised in short stories by Joseph Conrad and Henry James.

Homer: A relational mnemohistory

This article proposes to extend the prevalent short-term and presentist frameworks of research on transcultural memory and to consider its dynamics across long-term relational mnemohistories. After more than two and a half millennia, “Homer” and the Homeric epics still resonate in memory cultures across the world. But they are often erroneously cast as “European heritage” or “foundations of the West.” This is the result of what I call a tenacious “Homeric genea-logic.” Highlighting three moments in the relational mnemohistory of Homer, this article shows, first, that already during their emergence in the archaic age, the Homeric epics were relational objects; second, how during the Middle Ages Homer could arrive in Petrarch’s Italy only as a product of relational remembering between the Roman and the Byzantine empires; and third, how twentieth-century literature (Joyce, Walcott) developed conscious modes of mnemonic relationality connecting diverse cultural memories. Relationality thus emerges as a key term for a reflexive memory culture today, a tool to overcome exclusive memory logics (“Homer as the heritage of Europe”) while enabling the articulation of meaningful long-term transcultural memories (“Homer as relational heritage in Europe”).

A Central Consciousness at Work Beneath the Surface Artlessness: Narrative Strategies in “Tristram Shandy”

‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ (hereafter shortened to “Tristram Shandy”) is a unique novel written by British author Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century. While Sterne’s contemporary readers may have conflicting viewpoints about the artistic value of “Tristram Shandy” because of its surface artlessness and chaos, readers today in the contexts of such twentieth-century critical theories as postmodernism, existentialism, and deconstruction, find it congenial and more intriguing. I argue that despite the apparent chaos of this novel, the author-narrator Tristram is a central consciousness that holds the whole work together. And I believe Sterne narrates his story in such a peculiar way in conformity to his own perception of the outside world. Specifically, this paper aims to explore the inventive narrative strategies employed in Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” in the three aspects of narrative structure, time-shifting technique and self-conscious narrator. Amazingly, “Tristram Shandy” presents a wholly new notion of creative writing, one that goes beyond its time, and has unbreakable connection with twentieth-century literature.

Lauren S. Cardon, Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Lauren S. Cardon, <i>Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature</i>

The Formation of Hemingway’s Ecological Awareness

Hemingway, who has done a lot to shape twentieth-century American literature, remains an interesting writer because it is possible to read him in many ways. With the rise of American nature writing, the natural world in Hemingway’s fiction has recently caught critical attention. This paper is going to explore the origin of his nature complex and ecological awareness from three aspects, that is, his life experience in nature, his reading experience and the influence of the painter Cezanne.

Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance by Matthew Mutter

Reviewed by: Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance by Matthew Mutter David Jarraway Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance. By Matthew Mutter. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance is a daunting study of the relation between writing and religion in modernist literary discourse. With its broad-ranging focus on the work of both American and British literary practitioners of the last century—Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, and W. H. Auden—Matthew Mutter endeavors to rival what he nominates some of the "best recent books on twentieth-century literature and religion" (7): Pericles Lewis's Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010), Amy Hungerford's Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion after 1960 (2010), and John McClure's Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007). Flagged by his title, Mutter's particular contribution to all this prodigious critical achievement is to focus on "secularism" rather than "religion," as he states at the outset, clarifying further that "this book investigates not post-secular religious experience but the secular frames that alter the coordinates of all experience, religious or other" (8). The overriding frame, moreover, is Stevens's famous declamation that "The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God," and that "One of the visible movements of the modern imagination is the movement away from the idea of God" (qtd. on 8). For Mutter, then, "secular" becomes a kind of shorthand "for the imaginative frame within which Stevens resists or reworks all of the perspectives he thinks of as religious," so that for the remaining writers he takes up in the book, the term "could mean a number of things and take a number of shapes, including ones that show significant continuity with religious ideas" (218). With that somewhat ambiguous swerve back in the direction of religion, therefore, readers are given to think that "secularism" is a considerably "restless" notion indeed. Stevens's own programmatic secularization of the idea of God, as that famous declamation above goes on to elaborate, suggests a trio of creative alternatives: namely, adaptation, substitution, and elimination. These alternatives can further suggest more particular and highly individualistic gathering points or "fields of experience" from which modernist secularization might be viewed: "language" in the case of Stevens himself, "aesthetics" for Woolf, "emotion" for Yeats, and, finally, "material life" for Auden (3). Some of these idiosyncratic (and in all cases quite extensive) elaborations work better than others, but none is ever facile or uncomplicated or seamlessly uninflected. Be warned, therefore: this is not a book for speed readers. With Stevens, the secular movement away from God by means of language can suggest a kind of "demythologized, self-conscious anthropomorphism" to take His place, according to Mutter (38), a stance about which Stevens can [End Page 131] only be deeply suspicious in light of modernism's existential "still inhuman more" rendered, for example, in a late poem like "The Sail of Ulysses"—"the impersonal [as] 'the ultimate inamorata,'" as Mutter puts it—whereupon "the value and urgency of personhood recedes" (40). This suspicion bleeds into an even deeper one for Stevens: "the way metaphor slides into metaphysics, the way an analogical worldview has been associated with a theological one, and how signs and symbols tend to refer solid, immanent things to supersensible narratives or 'meanings'" (42). At this point, Stevens arguably resorts to a certain rhetoric of "tautology" to halt the analogical slippage into the metaphysics of "signs and symbols" (49). Toward the end of Stevens's writing career, however, the poet's secularization would alarmingly appear to falter. And its restlessness, according to Mutter, can be seen to register in another late poem like "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," for there George Santayana as its eponymous philosopher "has taken upon himself the prerogative of the Christian God by becoming the Word through whom the world is made. He has 'projected the idea of God into the idea of man'" (63). Rather formulaically, then, fracture points of restless betrayal like this one in Stevens recur in aria da capo type moments in Mutter's...

Roger Martin du Gard and Maumort: the Nobel Laureate and His Unfinished Creation by Benjamin Franklin Martin

Martin, Benjamin Franklin. Roger Martin du Gard and Maumort: the Nobel Laureate and His Unfinished Creation. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2017. ISBN 978-0-87580-749-2. Pp. 234. This monograph represents an unveiling on several levels: an unveiling of the significance of Roger Martin du Gard (1881–1958), within twentieth-century literature , to many contemporary readers; an unveiling of the inner struggle of Martin du Gard, between the adherence to Catholicism expected by his family and many of his peers, and his own religious skepticism; and an unveiling of the mentalities in effect in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. First, although Martin du Gard is rarely mentioned along with his contemporaries and closest friends, Gide, Camus, and Malraux, he was one of the Western world’s most celebrated authors in the late 1930s and early 1940s, winning the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature. In fact, the main reason for which Martin du Gard is not often enumerated among these giants of literature is not the lack of quality of his novels. It is because he did not finish the work for which he is best known, Le lieutenant-colonel de Maumort, about the perspective of a retired French military officer on Vichy France. This incomplete novel was only published for the first time in 1983. Second, the unveiling of Martin du Gard’s questioning of the tenets of Catholicism is illuminated by Martin the biographer’s portrayal of the author’s occasionally contentious relationship with his wife, Hélène Foucault Martin du Gard, a devout Catholic (38). The significance of Martin du Gard’s religious struggle may not be apparent to contemporary readers, who are accustomed to hearing debate about religious orthodoxy, but in the first half of the twentieth century in France, Martin du Gard’s doubt brought him guilt and shame, and strife to his marriage (12). Third, this biography of Martin du Gard brings to the forefront, not only the mentalities of the first half of the twentieth century, but also those from the nineteenth that continued to be in effect. The title character of Le lieutenant-colonel de Maumort doubts the legitimacy of his own contributions to the defense of France during World War II, and his faith in Christianity. Overall, this biography of Martin du Gard invites exploration of his understudied novels. Additionally, the theme of inner struggle is accentuated by a fascinating parallel between Martin du Gard’s difficulty with Catholicism and the conflicts in Europe that spurred the World Wars. In both domains, the capacity of the individual to make his or her own choices, within a society that expects narrowly-defined ones, is paramount. This theme recalls the concepts of existentialism, to which Martin du Gard subscribed. The end of the work, portraying Martin du Gard’s acceptance of his own death, is somber, especially in light of the fact that the work that he never finished led to his non-inclusion in the French literary canon. Nonetheless, the raw honesty of Martin’s biography is appealing, especially since internal struggle is an experience to which everyone can relate, and it is in line with Martin du Gard’s own use of realism. Grove City College (PA) Michele Gerring 204 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 ...

References to J.R.R. Tolkien in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye

References to J.R.R. Tolkien in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye Robert D. Denham, compiler Collected Works of Northrop Frye CW 1 = The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939. Vol. 1. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 1996. CW 2 = The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939. Vol. 2. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 2 vols. 1996. CW 3 = Northrop Frye's Student Essays, 1932–1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 1997. CW 4 = Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady. 2000. CW 5 = Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 2000. CW 6 = Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 2000. CW 7 = Northrop Frye's Writings on Education. Ed. Goldwin French and Jean O'Grady. 2000. CW 8 = The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 2001. CW 9 = The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy. Ed. Michael Dolzani. 2001. CW 10 = Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 2002. CW 11 = Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. 2002. CW 12 = Northrop Frye on Canada. Ed. Jean O'Grady and David Staines. 2003. CW 13 = Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 2003. CW 14 = Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Ed. Nicholas Halmi. Intro. Ian Singer. 2004. [End Page 197] CW 15 = Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance. Ed. Michael Dolzani. 2004. CW 16 = Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. 2005. CW 17 = Northrop Frye's Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Imre Salusinszky. 2005. CW 18 = The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory. Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. 2006. CW 19 = The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Ed. Alvin A. Lee. 2006. CW 20 = Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature. Ed. Michael Dolzani. 2006. CW 21 = The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. 2006. CW 22 = Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 2006. CW 23 = Northrop Frye's Notebooks for Anatomy of Criticism. Ed. Robert D. Denham. 2007. CW 24 = Interviews with Northrop Frye. Ed. Jean O'Grady. 2008. CW 25 = Northrop Frye's Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings. Ed. Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani. 2007. CW 26 = Words with Power: Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature." Ed. Michael Dolzani. 2008. CW 27 = The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975. Ed. Eva Kushner and Jean O'Grady. 2009. CW 28 = Northrop Frye's Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance. Ed. Gary Sherbert and Troni Grande. 2010. CW 29 = Northrop Frye's Writings on Twentieth-Century Literature. Ed. Glen Robert Gill. 2009. CW 30 = Index. Compiled by Jean O'Grady. 2012. Frye, Northrop. Selected Letters, 1934–1991. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.* [End Page 198] I started attending lectures the first week. … All pretty awful. Nichol Smith wouldn't be bad for my sort of job: getting one point per lecture hammered home, but to me he's prolix & dull. Then there's Tolkien on Beowulf, dealing with a most insanely complicated problem which involves Anglo-Saxon genealogies, early Danish histories, monkish chronicles in Latin, Icelandic Eddas and Swedish folklore. Imagine my delivery at its very worst: top speed, unintelligible burble, great complexity of ideas and endless references to things unknown, mixed in with a lot of Latin and Anglo-Saxon and a lot of difficult proper names which aren't spelled, and you have Tolkien on Beowulf" (CW 2: 794–95). The great imaginative productions of Oxford—the Anatomy of Melancholy, Alice in Wonderland, the development taking place there when I was a student around C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Tolkien, all suggest a slightly mad fantasy.1 This throws a light on other products of the same genius loci, such as Pater and Hopkins and such passages in Newman as: "So-and-so taught me the doctrine of Apostolic...