Verse Epistle Research Articles

The Menagerie or the Visitor’s Pass? Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia and Praskov’ia Bakunina on Russian Women Writers

This article examines an 1842 literary exchange between Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia (1805-1867) and Praskov’ia Bakunina (1810-1880?) concerning the place of women writers in nineteenth-century Russian literature. It is followed by a translation of the exchange itself. Zrazhevskaia’s “Zverinets” (The Menagerie), a formally innovative work of literary criticism addressed in part to Bakunina, challenged the social norms that discouraged women’s writing, as well as the men literary critics who enforced them. In a verse epistle response, Bakunina repudiated Zrazhevskaia’s ideas, maintaining that Russian men critics will extend hospitality and courtesy to women writers who comport themselves as guests in the men’s club of Russian letters. The exchange raises questions about the critical reception of women writers in mid nineteenth-century Russia, women as literary critics, and the gendering of nineteenth century literary movements and aesthetics, which are discussed in relation to the wider pan-European literary climate of the time.

Horace to Torquatus: Epistle 1.5 and Ode 4.7

This article documents and explores the relationship between Horace Epist. 1.5 and Ode 4.7, one a verse epistle, the other one of Horace's most magnificent odes, both addressed to a certain Torquatus. It first analyzes each poem individually in detail and then goes on to examine the overlap between the two in search of Horace's purposes behind the interaction. The epistle, an invitation to a convivium at the speaker's home on the evening before Augustus' birthday, deals with the importance of self-discovery in a private setting where confidentiality is crucial. The ode pits this individuality against far larger spatial and temporal universals, and it reminds us of our mortality and of the loss of self that accompanies death.

Sexual Imagery in the Verse Epistles of Robert Burns and Anna Louisa Karsch

The verse epistle has suffered fate of occasional poetry as a whole: it tends to be ignored or demoted because it fails to satisfy a normative notion of pure art.1 This holds true despite fact that two of these standards are completely non-literary: circumstances under which poem originated and its purpose or social function. Because it depends on person to whom it is addressed and has clear designs on reader, verse epistle is not free, which might disqualify it as high art. Yet charm of epistles I will discuss here is directly related to their various purposes and social con tingencies. Indisputably epistles, a popular verse form during eighteenth century, work differently than poems of romantic cannon. Anna Louisa Karsch (1722-1791) and Robert Burns (1759-1796) found epistle form attractive precisely for its affinity with occasional poetry. The fact that the projection of epistolary audience [...] unmistakably insists on engagement between poetry and world2 appealed to poets like Anna Louise Karsch and Robert Burns. In fact, some of best poetry of these two artists is to be found in their epistles.3 The dialogic interplay Karsch and Burns cultivate with addressee and general audience contrasts with abstract intellectuality of Augustan epistle and studied introspection of romantic poetry, which shunned epistle genre. In ad dition to providing entertainment, Burns and Karsch congratulate, praise, advise, instruct, or express friendly solidarity in their epistles. What one critic said of Burns's epistles is true of countless others of eighteenth century, including Karschs: To its recipient, a verse-epistle from Burns could be a lifeline, a challenge, a source of humor, an appreciative thump on back, or a considered appeal for support.4

Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century by G. Gabrielle Starr

522 Reviews He concentrates on Gay's Polly, set in theWest Indies, at the expense of the more Scriblerian Beggar's Opera, though he does attempt to readMacheath's collection of 'doxies', via orientalist conceptions of the harem, as slave-related, a process far too attenuated to command assent. There is simply too much else happening in these texts to laymuch blame on African slavery. Richardson's reading of Swift's A Modest Proposal in terms of a 'land of slaves' actually tends to deprive Swift's Irish of a specific history. While genocide and slavery may originate in similar mental configurations, they are not the same thing. If Richardson's focus is sometimes too wide, it is also often too narrow. He does cite accounts of slavery from some Defoe novels, but he does not mention Defoe's own association with Harley, and, astonishingly, fails tomention Robinson Crusoe at all. This is a serious omission, given that novel's concern with slavery, cannibalism, colonial authority, master-servant (or -slave) relations, and pseudo-anthropological encounters with otherness. Itwas also, of course, perhaps themajor literary source of Swift's own ideological disgust at Britain's colonial project. A book about the whole range of writing about slavery in the first half of the eighteenth century might have had amore equitable moral foundation. UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL PAUL BAINES Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century. By G. GABRIELLE STARR. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. X+298pp. ?31. ISBNo-8oI8-7379-7. This dense and thoughtful book starts from the observation that in the biggest novel of the mid-eighteenth century, the heroine (Clarissa) responds to her rape with a lyric expressiveness that resembles the biblical poetry of Job. The novel, that is to say, absorbs and is reconstituted by a specifically poetic subjectivity in search of a participatory reader. Subsequent chapters confirm under-observed correspondences between lyric and novel in the poet-novelist Behn, in the verse epistle (generated from the isolations of lyric), in the disappearing selves of Gray and the reappearance of the body in first-person novelistic narratives. The book ends with encounters in the zone of domesticity between Cowper, Wordsworth, and Austen, with Charlotte Smith an influential cross-over figure. The central concern of the book is subjectivity and its literary incarnations, and in this novel and poetry play contrapuntal, not antipathetic, parts, each posing formal problems that the other absorbs and solves. In G. Gabrielle Starr's analysis, novels provide representations of consciousness that are rhetorical rather than mimetic, amatter of interchange between text and reader rather than a mirror of the world. The book's sense of history is almost exclusively formalist and there is little attempt at historical context for any of the shifts it describes. It comes as a shock to be reminded of anything outside textual osmosis, aswhen issues of subjectivity are teasingly aligned (p. 8o) with the aftermath of the Civil War and Act of Union. (This might have been explained by one of the book's trademark endnote mini-essays, which occupy a quarter of the text.) The literary history is also rather selective: 'lyric' here means Donne and Herbert, not Rochester. The history of the novel presented here is that of Behn and Haywood rather than Defoe, though an effort to include the unpoetical novelist ismade by focusing on a raremoment of emotional intensity inRoxana. It is the simultaneous inwardness and outreach of Richardson rather than the programmatic authority of Fielding that occupies centre stage, though again Starr manages to insert a tiny hook into Fielding's burlesque invocations. Even within Richardson, however, there are significant blind spots, for Starr is really interested only in figures of suffering. As a MLR, IOI.2, 2006 523 whole Clarissa displays considerable hostility towards secular lyric, and while Starr notices that Lovelace's persona derives in part from Rochesterian song, she is too keen to align him with the elegiac Donne and pays no attention to themarked genesis of his persona and speech within Restoration drama. The near-complete exclusion of drama in general does leave one cause for wonder: many writers were fluent in...

Religious Criticism, the Verse Epistle, and Donne's Daring Discretion

John Donne's verse epistle, Honour is so sublime perfection, is his most religious poem, (1) at least the restricted sense that the word appears it more often than any of his other poems. (2) This curious fact might surprise both specialist and non-specialist readers of Donne alike. poem is never printed with or listed among his religious poems. Like Donne's other neglected verse epistles, it lacks the qualities we most readily associate with his best studied religious poetry: the witty profanity of the Songs and Sonnets, the searching skepticism of Satyre III, and the devotional intensity of the Holy Sonnets. (3) Indeed, since it takes up Horatian themes of friendship and patronage, ethics and politics, it is unclear how Honour is so sublime perfection might qualify as a religious poem the first place. This problem has been made all the more acute the wake of the so-called to early modern literary criticism. (4) This turn is now far enough advanced that its methods and motives have begun to be challenged. One objection has been that it has tended to equate religion with inwardness, so that religious criticism adopts the agenda of analytic psychology and existentialist phenomenology and searches out a lineage of spiritual self-alienation that links Saint with Levinas via Augustine, Luther, and Freud. In this essay, I will propose a further turn within the to that will enable our conception of Renaissance religion to encompass Honour is so sublime perfection. This further turn away from inwardness has been made other disciplines--specifically biblical scholarship, early church history, and post-secular critical theory--and has only just begun to register early modern literary criticism. (5) In Honour is so sublime perfection, Donne likewise turns to religion order to move away from inwardness. His model for doing this is Paul, from whom Donne gleans a strategy for reconciling daring and discretion, two qualities that critics tend to polarize as the hallmarks of Donne's rakish youth and his prosperous maturity, respectively. But, by explaining how Donne reconciles daring and discretion this poem of his middle years, I hope to interject at least one of Donne's verse epistles into our critical discussions of Donne's religious poetics and the scriptural poetics of the early modern period more generally. Hee must worke and frame it after the modell of that panta pasi, all things to all men The Reformation fought and conquered, Albert Schweitzer once wrote, in the name of Paul (2). Schweitzer could have gone further and said that the Reformation fought for a specific version of Paul. It was Luther who, following Augustine, read Paul's description of the self divided between the flesh and the spirit Romans 6-8 as autobiography and then made it the normative account of the Christian condition (see Steinmetz). For Luther and later reformers, the core of Paul's theology was the introspective analysis of the subconscious, the motives, desires, and anxieties that betray our human frailties. Their had established a new Christian faith that rejected both Hebraic work-righteousness and Hellenistic rationalism favor of absolute dependence on God's saving grace. Because of his belief humanity's fallen epistemology and enslaved will (non posse non peccare), helped Reformed theologians to enshrine what Richard Lanham has called the Christian West's bad conscience about language (5). On this view, rejected worldly rhetoric as sinfully carnal and sinfully rational (cf. 1 Cor. 1-3), so that his own style became idealized as simple and transparent. In his study Saint and Protestantism, Matthew Arnold would complain, not altogether fairly, that Calvin, the heavy-handed Protestant Philistine, would read every verse of as if it were a mere formal scientific proposition (70). Reformations version of inward-looking has come under attack recent years by biblical scholars and critical theorists alike. …

‘Letem Deck Their Verses with Farinelli's Name’: Farinelli as a Satirical Trope in English Poetry and Verse of the 1730s1

Journal for Eighteenth-Century StudiesVolume 28, Issue 3 p. 421-436 ‘Letem Deck Their Verses with Farinelli's Name’: Farinelli as a Satirical Trope in English Poetry and Verse of the 1730s1 XAVIER CERVANTES, Search for more papers by this author XAVIER CERVANTES, Search for more papers by this author First published: 01 October 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2005.tb00310.x 1 For those who must be Scribling. right or wrong, / Whose numbers of themselves flow into Song, / Letem deck their Verse with F-lli's Name‘. The Happy Courtezan: or, The Prude demolishd. An Epistlr from the celebrated Mrs. C[onstantia] P[hilips], to the Angelick Signior Far[i]n[el]li (London 1735). p.12: reprinted in Thomas McGeary. Verse Epistles on Italian Opera Singers, 1724–1736’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 32 (2000), p.77. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume28, Issue3December 2005Pages 421-436 RelatedInformation

Dryden's "Cymon and Iphigenia": The "Vigour of the Worse" Prevailing

Dryden's "Cymon and Iphigenia":The "Vigour of the Worse" Prevailing David Gelineau In the spring of 1698, Jeremy Collier published A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, sparking off a long and furious pamphlet controversy that involved many of England's most important contemporary literary figures. Most of those who were directly and ruthlessly attacked by Collier responded in kind. But one figure who seemed-to the contemporary scene as well as to later literary historians-largely muted in his response was John Dryden. This is certainly surprising; Dryden was more than capable of a spirited response, as his satires testify to. Furthermore, Dryden was the most sustained object of Collier's moralistic diatribe. The most common answer to this muted response has always been that Dryden felt chastened by Collier's arguments and did on occasion, with many qualifications, acknowledge their justness. But I think other reasons should be considered when assessing the nature of Dryden's response. First is the general prudence that Dryden felt he had to practice in an England where he was a political outcast, where Collier was so obviously applauded by those in power, and where even someone like Congreve, never the prop of the former political regime that Dryden had been, could find himself before the courts because of the hysteria Collier was stirring up.1 But second and more importantly, Dryden did not just see the attack as a personal one; therefore, his response, unlike so many of the others' in the pamphlet war, was more rational and involved, less obvious, and more dangerously political. To Dryden, Collier represented something [End Page 210] much larger than just a somewhat deluded preacher gaining fame at his expense. He was a part of the cultural world Dryden had spent all of his energies denouncing since its ascendancy after the Glorious Revolution. Yet Dryden's most elaborate and direct ideological attack against Collier has gone largely unnoticed as such because it is presented in the more subtle, allegorical form of his translation of "Cymon and Iphigenia" in Fables Ancient and Modern. In "Cymon and Iphigenia," Collier, like William throughout Fables, is made an icon of a degenerate cultural regime that Dryden portrays himself heroically opposing. In this final story in Fables, Dryden fuses the figures of Collier and William to signal their dual threat to the world that Dryden portrays as a meaningful, moral one overrun by the forces that Dryden in "To Sir Godfrey Kneller" calls William's "stupid Military State."2 The general critical reaction, both past and present, to Dryden's response to Collier is best summed up by Samuel Johnson's remark: "Dryden's conscience or his prudence, angry as he was, withheld him from the conflict."3 Dryden's references to the debate have also been typified as the efforts of "an overmatched general who is unwilling to surrender though he is conscious of his inability to make an effectual resistance." 4 But the effectiveness of the resistance depends upon what you think he was trying to resist. Critics have been overly preoccupied with the concessions Dryden makes to Collier in terms of the lewdness of some of his own performances, for this is a minor part of the issue for Dryden. After Collier's first volley, Dryden made a brief response in June of 1698, but only indirectly: it appeared in his verse epistle addressed to Peter Motteaux and attached to that author's Beauty in Distress. A Tragedy. Dryden demonstrates here a pattern that he will follow in all references to this controversy in the future. His argument will deflect the petty concerns of "profaneness" or some "immodesty," charges Dryden had already made against himself years earlier in "To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew"(1686),5 and will focus on what the controversy says about the culture at large. Here, as in Fables, Dryden admits some guilt: "What I have loosely or profanely writ / Let them to Fires [End Page 211] (their due desert) commit."6 Dryden's anger is leveled less at the particular admonishers of the stage and more at the culture that permits them to flourish; it...

Burning the Aspern Papers (review)

"The Aspern Papers" is one of those rare works of fiction in which mysteries of scholarship dramatically reveal human character. Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is another, along with A. S. Byatt's Possession. But James's novella remains the quintessential cautionary tale about literary motives, which turn out to be as dubious as motives in any profession. It is of course about much more as well. Like so much of James's writing, it is about Americans abroad and failures of affection in deeply damaged lives. One can see why John Drury chose James's story as a subject for his longer poem, the centerpiece of this solid new collection. This ambitious poem of more than four hundred lines re-imagines the dilemmas of James's characters and reminds me that, in such capable hands, verse is the perfect vehicle for dramatic narratives. James's tale is told by an unnamed scholar renting rooms from the Misses Bordereau, who "lived now in Venice in obscurity, on very small means, unvisited, unapproachable, in a dilapidated old palace on an out-of-the-way canal" (153). The elder of the two women, Juliana, was once beloved of Jeffrey Aspern, an American poet, while her niece and caretaker, Miss Tita (Tina in the New York Edition), remains a hopeless spinster. In James's realistic vision all human ideals succumb to expediency and passing time. In fact, he gives us an image of this in what amounts to pentameter—"The divine Juliana as a grinning skull"—that signals to a poet something of the lyrical shape of James's narratives (168). This one focuses on the duplicity of the narrator, his willingness to exploit the emotional desperation of the niece in order to get at the aunt's papers, including any letters from her deceased suitor. As it plays out, we never see the Aspern papers, at last discovering that Miss Tita has burned them, partly to get back at the narrator, who refused her proposal. [End Page 296] Drury's most daring move has been to give us Jeffrey Aspern's letters—in rhymed verse, no less—interspersed with the blank verse interior monologue of the woman who is destroying them. We are allowed, in other words, to "hear" two voices that no one will in fact ever hear. The poet's most intimate words are consumed by the fire, and the woman who destroys them will live on in utter neglect, "unheard" by any companion. It is a devastating conceit, and Drury handles it with deft restraint. While burning the letters, Miss Tina addresses her thoughts to the scholar who had sought them and had trifled with her affections: You wouldn't talk so foolishly to me if you could answer, looking up from reading. I'd love to watch you reading silently in this dark room. The paper isn't silent— it catches at the edges, and I hold on as long as I can, watch it burn, and drop it. (49) As she says, the paper isn't silent, but it's not just the crackling flames she means. It's also the voice she systematically burns, and this image of a soul's most intimate expression being ruthlessly eradicated is chilling to say the least. "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen," wrote Thomas Gray, "And waste its sweetness on the desert air" (540). The vision of private devastation in both James and Drury is far less serene. In Aspern's ardent verse epistles we have a voice that questions conventional scruples, desiring to know and be known. The attractive personality Drury conveys makes Tina's gesture even more appalling. Here is one in sonnet form: Getting lost is a solace of the blest, a sweet prerogative, through turning lanes and sudden bridges as I take the crest and look out at dark water, darkened panes. It matters little what had been my plans...

Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature by Joshua Scodel (review)

738 Reviews Reformation, 1521-1538', and shows how Tyndale and More acknowledge the force of their opponent's case in the moment of making their own. A deft afterword by David Wallace draws together some of the various threads of the volume. In sum, this strong collection of essays can be recommended for its sus? tained quality and welcomed forhaving pointed the direction towards freshpathways of thought. University College Dublin Alan J. Fletcher Excess and theMean in Early Modern English Literature. By Joshua Scodel. (Litera? ture in History) Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2002. viii + 367 PP- ?37-95- ISBN 0-691-09028-9. In this rich, precise monograph, Joshua Scodel charts the complex and diverse ways in which early modern writers responded to and developed ideas of means and of extremes. The book begins with considerations of the contrasting ways in which John Donne and Francis Bacon revised the notion of the middle way. Through close read? ings of Donne's 'Satire 3' and the verse epistle to Sir Henry Wotton ('Sir, more than kisses'), Scodel argues that Donne's poetry advocates neither total acceptance nor to? tal rejection of any ofthe rival Christian denominations and, more generally, of forces of authority, but rather suggests 'a mean skeptical inquiry' (p. 21) that encourages the reader to 'doubt wisely' (p. 31) and which justifies social mobility. As part of a critique of Aristotelian scholasticism, Bacon, Scodel argues, asserts the importance of various kinds of extremes 'as essential for human empowerment' (p. 12) and as a means to master nature. Part 2 ofthe book examines 'Means and Extremes in Early Modern Georgic'. By suggesting that Virgil's Georgics constructed a complex and ultimately unresolved idea of the mean?particularly since it linked the temperate farmer with the imperial soldier?Scodel traces the competing ways in which a range of early modern texts? Spenser's Faerie Queene-, Joshua Sylvester's Divine Weeks; Drayton's Poly-Olbion; Milton's LAllegro; John Denham's Cooper's Hill; John Davies of Hereford's Microcosmos ?appropriate and develop ideas of the mean. In particular, Scodel suggests, early modern texts exhibit a conflict between the praise of moderation and national temperance, on the one hand, and exhortations to expansion, on the other. Part 3, 'Erotic Excess and Early Modern Social Conflicts', examines the tension between the ideal of conjugal moderation and celebrations of erotic excess. By reading texts by Thomas Carew, Thomas Lodge, Samuel Daniel, Philip Sidney, and William Davenant, Scodel argues that erotic passion or obsession was constructed as a noble or aristocratic mode of behaviour, superior to and distinct from the ideal of moderation in love and marriage which, these writings suggest, the masses were constrained to pursue. In the strongest section of the book, Scodel considers 'Moderation and Excess in the Seventeenth-Century Symposiastic Lyric' and offersa marvellous exploration of the neglected area of drinking and poetry. Scodel analyses, among other things, Ben Jonson's emphasis on the link between moderate drinking and poetic inspiration; the association between alcoholic excess and elite civility, constructed by the Caroline Sons of Ben such as William Habington and Thomas Randolph; and the role of cel? ebrations of excessive drinking as a 1650s consoling strategy for defeated Royalists like Alexander Brome and Charles Cotton the younger. The book concludes with 'Reimagining Moderation: The Miltonic Example': a reading of Paradise Lost which counters these celebrations of drunkenness and extreme passion by exploring the epic's emphasis on 'pleasurable restraint', self-governance, and love as moderation? MLR, 99.3, 2004 739 ideas which, Scodel suggests, were to become central to later liberal ideologies of the good society (pp. 283-84). Scodel's methodology is one ofprecise, close reading?his discussion of Donne con? centrates on two texts?and, as a result, the book's arguments are invariably nuanced and perceptive. This methodology also means that Scodel foregrounds particular kinds of texts: texts that are, in his own words, 'complex' and 'allusive' (p. 10)?or, to put it another way, conventionally canonical. As a consequence, other, particularly 'popular', texts are omitted from the survey. This is understandable given the con? straints of space, particularly since Scodel provides such rigorous local...

Neoclassicism, Late Modernism, and W. H. Auden's 'New Year Letter'

This essay examines Auden's use of poetic forms associated with alienation and exile in the context of the Frankfurt School and Fredric Jameson's conceptualisation of ‘Late Modernism’. Focussing on the dialectical relationship between public and private figured in the verse epistle, rather than, as Randall Jarrell stressed, marking a retreat from the ideals of modernism, the essay argues that Auden's ‘New Year Letter’ is both a marked development in Auden's interest between the writer and his society and a significant re-engagement with those developments in Marxist analyses of history proposed by Adorno and Habermas.

Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture by Chris Mounsey (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 183 could have been deduced from its use in Rover II, n. 1. A phantom 'blurring of generic boundaries' arises in this epilogue when Behn's aspiration to 'Sacred Poetrie' is seen as an ambition to write specifically 'religious poetry', rather than poetry in general (p. 152). The importance of feminine gentleness in this period is underestimated : Valeria, in The Basset Table, is admittedly an ambiguous figure, but if she were intended to be as attractive as Kreis-Schinck claims, Centlivre would not have given such dramatic prominence to her penchant for dissection (see p. 216). Most of these corrected readings, however, reinforce the author's basic thesis that women writers must take account of male obsession with women's bodies and sexuality. Kreis-Schinck is at her best looking round the edges of her material, especially when identifying the topics avoided by writers of early modern comedy. She raises fresh, challenging questions, culminating in why Behn and Centlivre never allowed their comedies to represent anything like themselves: pondering the answers should occupy feminist scholarship for years. University of Reading Carolyn D. Williams Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture. Ed. by Chris Mounsey. (Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture) Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 301pp. ?40. ISBN 0-8387-5477-5. This collection often diverse essays opens with a well placed piece by Conrad Brunstrom , examining ideas of masculinity and nationalism in the eighteenth century. Brunstrom explores the debate between men of letters as to the nature of masculinity, underpinning this by reference to the contemporary scientific understanding of sex and gender. The conclusion that he is able to draw, that it was believed that there was 'only a finitequantity of masculinity to go around' during this period, provides a useful starting point for an understanding of the later essays. Carolyn D. Williams's contribution to the work shows how little early modern society appeared to be disturbed by the actions of cross-dressing women. Williams argues that such transvestism, often undertaken as a practical solution to economic or social challenges, was depicted as neither undermining masculinity nor radically altering femininity. Her lively and informative article is supported by a plethora of fictional and historical references. Karma Williamson makes a convincing argument in her essay for more research to be carried out on the Augustan verse epistle and, in particular, its relationship to notions of gender. Williamson gives the readers a valuable overview of a fascinating genre but is then, inevitably, curtailed by space, and has to focus upon a narrow range of poems from the genre. Thomas A. King's essay is a densely packed study of theatrical practices and theo? ries in the period and the ways in which these related to constructions of masculinity. He also links the decline in boy players for female parts in dramatic performances with a perceived political maturing of masculinity. He enlivens his text with several illustrations. The next essay reverts to the issue of female transvestism, principally in Mary Robinson's Walsingham. Julie Shaffer is able to achieve much in a relatively short space: she grounds Walsingham in the gender anxiety of its time, and the resultant reduction in female cross-dressing and a waning of enthusiasm for such practices in popular literature. The political section of the book opens with David Michael Robinson's engaging piece on the continuitiesand connections between homosexualityand ideas of gender 184 Reviews in the ancient world, in early modern England, and in modern society. The essay is well focused, and perceptive in its reading both of its source material and ofthe mores of society. Ruth Herman has chosen a fascinating subject for her contribution: 'Enigmatic Gender in Delarivier Manley's New Atlantis'. Although her analysis is of necessity complex and at times speculative, she handles the subject matter with confidence, and her assertion of deliberate fictive gender reversal will encourage readers to reassess the material with which she is concerned. The following two essays, by Elizabeth Kubek and Rachel K. Carnell, focus upon the work of Eliza Haywood. Kubek figures Haywood as a proto-feminist figure, immersed in the politics of her...

Feasting and Fasting: Nourishment in the Novels of Samuel Richardson

Feasting and Fasting: Nourishment in the Novels of Samuel Richardson Peter Sabor In A Natural Passion—one of a handful of books that revitalized Richardson studies in the early 1970s—Margaret Anne Doody devotes several pages to the uses of nourishment in Pamela (1740). Contending that "both hero and heroine are fond of eating," she discusses the novel's many food-related scenes, which, she believes, "reinforce the lovers' physical and instinctual relationship." Doody adds that "there is nothing approaching this emphasis on food in the two later novels, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, where relationships are more sophisticated."1 Although fasting in Clarissa has been the subject of a recent work by Donnalee Frega,2 very little has been added to Doody's remarks, published over twenty-five years ago, on nourishment in Pamela or Sir Charles Grandison. My purpose here is first to reconsider the depiction of eating and drinking in Pamela in the light ofRichardson's own dietetic concerns in the 1730s and early 1740s—before and shortly after the publication of Pamela— and then to re-examine the relationship between the treatment of 1 Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 50, 52. Other seminal works on Richardson published in the early 1970s are TC. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel's still standard biography, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); and Mark Kinkead-Weekes's Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (London: Routledge, 1973). 2 Donnalee Frega, SpeakinginHunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in "Clarissa" (Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, 1998). See also Frega, "Speaking in Hunger: Conditional Consumption as Discourse in Clarissa," Studies in the Literary Imagination 28 (1995), 87-103. The references to nourishment in the first edition of Clarissa have been exhaustively indexed, under headings such as "food," "drink," "meals," and "collation," in Susan Price Karpuk, SamuelRichardson's "Clarissa": An Index (New York: AMS Press, 2000). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Number 2,January 2002 142EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION food in Pamela and that in Richardson's two later, more ambitious, and more complex novels. In January 1736, Edward Cave, proprietor of the Gentleman's Magazine, wrote a set ofhudibrastic verses to Richardson, urging him to attend a printer's feast. Mocking Richardson's considerable bulk, Cave assures him: I'll place two seats, whene'er you come, This for your arms—and that your bum. Cave envisages the gathering illuminated by Richardson's glowing features: Oh! could it gain your rosy face, How the full orb the board would grace, When flush'd with wine, and plump with praise! Diminish'd stars shall hide their head, Twinkle a while, then drop to bed, While you shine forth serenely bright, Restore the day in midst of night.3 Richardson's detailed self-description in a later letter to Lady Bradshaigh ,4 as well as surviving paintings byJoseph Highmore, Francis Hayman, and Mason Chamberlin,5 confirms the accuracy of Cave's portrait: he was short, plump, thick-necked, and ruddy-cheeked. Richardson's "rosy face," however, would not be present at the dinner . Pleading a prior engagement, he had declined the invitation in a verse epistle which, like Cave's, was printed in the Gentleman's Magazine. Almost five years before the publication of Pamela and twelve before the first instalment of Clarissa, the verse exchange creates a scene in which the consumption of food entails a struggle for control: one persuades, the other attempts to resist. In this case the printers will dine without Richardson, "who, pre-ingaged, can't know / The pleasures that wou'd from your meeting flow." 3 Gentleman's Magazinen (1736) , 51 . The verses were reprinted byJohn Nichols in Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer (London, 1782), pp. 89-90, 160; and in Literary Anecdotes oftheEighteenth Century (London, 1812-15), 2:74—79. 4 See Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, late November (?) 1749, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed.John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 135-36. 5 Highmore's portraits of Richardson are at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Hall of the Company of Stationers; Hayman's portrait is in a private...

A 'tender Correspondence': Pope and The Spectator

Some time around 1710 Pope sent his female friend, Miss Blount, a small present, a book: 'the Works of Voiture'. Vincent de Voiture, whose life (1598 1648) occupied the first half of the seventeenth century, was a poet, but he was celebrated more particularly as the author of correspondence (his Lettres were published posthumously in 1650), which distilled the moral and stylistic qualities of the aristocratic French culture of his age. Pope accompanied his gift to Martha Blount with a letter, or more properly an 'Epistle' as it was called in its title when it was published in Lintot's Miscellany in 1712. The root meaning of 'epistle' is clear in its origin in the Greek verb 'stellein', to send, and the prefix 'epi', on the occasion of. An epistle was a missive for a particular occasion, the little occasion in this case being the present of the book. The concept of the epistle links the written word to the world of living, and this is underlined in Pope's verse epistle by his making his first theme the extent to which Voiture's life was expressed in his text: ' . . .all the Writer lives in ev'ry Line'.1

Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration of Russia's Best-Loved Writer by A. D. P. s> Briggs Pushkin's Hiostrical Imagination by Svetlana s> Evdokimova Pushkin on Literature by Tatiana s> Wolff (review)

REVIEWS 311 the travestyfrom Scarron(pp. IO8-27), and second, in his use not so much of native Russianmaterialbut a complex systemof recurrentRussianfolkmotifs (PP. 13I-50). The specific nature of Maikov'sburlesque should be sought in these two developments. In general the lexis of Eliseiwith its popular speech and vulgarismsbelongs to the traditionof the travesty,whereas its rhetoricin the sense of its stylistic resourcesand formal structurescomes from the mock heroic (p. 12 i). Hence as well as the burlesquecontrastbetween the elevated and the debased caused by an incongruity between subject and style, Eliseiexhibits an intra-stylistic burlesquecontrast,arisingfroma non-correspondencebetween itslexical and rhetoricallevels (p. I56). Dr Schrubaoffersnew solutionsto severalproblemsof fact and interpretation . The date of Maikov's introduction to masonry is advanced from the beginning of the i770s to the early I76os on the groundsthat symbolismfrom masonic ritual can be recognized in Igrok(pp. 21-28). The composition of JNaloi, which L. N. Maikov and G. A. Gukovskiipresumed to have followed the publication of Elisei in I77I, is assigned instead to four months of the preceding year,January to April I770, firstbecause it refersto V. P. Petrov's tranislationof the Aeneid,which came out in January I770, and second, because, as ProfessorMaria Di Salvo has pointed out, it contains an allusion to Emin's novels inappropriateafterEmin's death in April 1770 (PP. 30-3I). The anonymous verse epistle Poslanie kg. izdateliuTrutnia should be attributed to Maikov rather than to Emin or D. I. Fonvizin on the basis of numerous verbal parallels with Maikov's own poetry (pp. 40-41). A skilfully argued discussion of the date of composition of Eliseirefutes A. V. Zapadov's view that it was alreadycirculatingin manuscriptin I769 (pp. 44-58), and a whole clhapterexplores Mlaikov'sindebtedness to the manuscriptcollection associated with the name of I. S. Barkov(pp. 83-107). W'iththis fresh, penetrating and comprehensive study, Dr Schruba has made a valuable contribution to a too rarelyinvestigatedfield of eighteenthcenituryRussianliterature . Iniiperial College C. L. DRAGE London Briggs,A. D. P. (ed.),Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration ofRussia's Best-Loved Writer. Hazar Publishing,London, 1999. 208 pp. ? I6.99. Evdokimova, Svetlana. Pushkin's Hiostrical Imagination. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999. xviii 300pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00. W'Volff, Tatiana. Pushkinon Literature(revised edition). Athlone Press, London, 1999. xxxViii + 554 pp. Footnotes. Bibliographies. Index. k4 .95. THE bicentenary is over and these books, like a score of others, are the spent cartridges left from the battle to get the English-speaking world to recognize Pushkin as a luminary of the same magnitude as Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe. They have been backed up by the heavy artillery of translators (some 312 SEER, 79, 2, 200I of whom give an account of their fight in Briggs'celebratoryvolume) and if, afterAntony Wood'sLittleTragedies and BorisGodunov (not to mention the lyrics shortlyto appear)or the FalenEvgenii Onegin, victory is stillnot achieved, and Flaubert'slament 'yournationalpoet is so flat'stillsumsup the reactionof the English- and French-speakingpublic, we shall have to wait for the campaign of 2037 and maintain our faith that the untranslated is not forever demonstrablyuntranslatable. The Briggsvolume may seem a light-weighttome better suited for a radio programme or a series of weekly magazine articles: certainly none of the twenty-threecontributorsevergetsnearthe depthorpersuasivenessof Marina Tsvetaeva's Moi Pushkin(Paris, I937). The preface by Mikhail Gorbachev is sadly preposterous: if he had read more attentively the ten-volume set he claims to have had on his bookshelf,then he might not have connived at the killingsin Vilnius and Tbilisi and could have come back from Forosnotjust unbloody but unbowed. The afterword, compiled from Isaiah Berlin's utterances (Berlin died before a contribution could be commissioned from him) is the complete opposite:nothing the other contributorssay makesquite the impact of his declaration of love for Pushkin, the cross between Racine and a fox. In between these great men one's fellow academics and dilettantes (the contributors are mostly Anglo-American, with one Hungarian and a couple of Russian emigres)are best at providing an opening into themselves, especially interesting, even endearing for the readers of SEER: how they driftedinto Russian studies by accident, throughparentage, in flightfrom pack-drill,mathematics...

Verse Epistles on Italian Opera Singers, 1724–1736

Writing from Dublin in February 1724, Jonathan Swift responded to some London gossip and joked about the ‘gallantry’ of the aged military hero the Earl of Peterborough, who had publicly commanded an apology from the castrato Senesino for his impugning the honour of the soprano Anastasia Robinson. This scandal set off a series of obscene, misogynistic, satiric epistles written to or about Mrs Robinson, Senesino, Faustina, Mrs Barbier, and Farinelli that accuse the female singers, British prudes, and others of a variety of deviant, sexually subversive practices. This article introduces and presents annotated texts of this group of epistles written between 1724 and 1736. Several have been discussed by historians of opera and literary scholars, but the whole corpus has not been identified or made readily available to opera scholars.

Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (review)

Reviews 269 the clarity of the exposition. The grammarians and their works are treated with respect, rather than condescension, and with an appreciation of the real and practical purposes for which they wrote. As well as deftly and effectively summarising the current state of knowledge, L a w opens up m a n y lines for investigation in the future, especially in relation to the visual presentation of linguistic materials in early medieval manuscripts. This work is indispensable for any serious study and research in this field. Toby Burrows Scholars' Centre The University of Western Australia Lerer, Seth, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Cult and theArts ofDeceit (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 18), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; cloth, pp. xiv, 252; 8 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$95.00. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is central to this book, in parti the role of Pandarus. In Chapter One, Lerer notes the latter's 'distinctive blend of advisory tuition and transgressive voyeurism', and stresses that it is the second 'privy' aspect, Pandarus's part as 'an entrepreneur of the erotic...transrnitting private missives, and misreading and misrepresenting female motives and his o w n desires', that 'defines courtly poetics for the Henrician age and, more generally, that shapes the making of the early modern reader'. If these are large claims, they also produce some fruitful, provocative discussion, and some perceptive re-evaluation of a variety of contemporary literary texts, both well k n o w n and less so. Letter writing and letter reading—whether of verse epistle or political correspondence—are Lerer's foci. (It is not surprising that 270 Reviews Lerer draws attention to that aspect of G. R. Elton's Policy and Pol (Cambridge, 1972), concerned with the tensions between private and public behaviour during the Cromwellian 'revolution'.) Chapter Two examines the 'culture of the go-between, the state Pandarism' that was established, Lerer argues, from the early years of Henry VIII's reign. He does so in three ways: by study of literary examples (including the Twelfth Night, 1516, performance of 'Troilus and Pandar'; Skelton's Magnyfycence and Phyllyp Sparowe; Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure and Conforte ofLouers; Leues of a Truelove; the romance of The Squyr of Lowe Degre ('U Youre Dore'), and the Spanish comedy, La Celestina); by exploratio of the details of the lives of the king's courtiers (William Compton, Henry Norris, Anthony Denny) as friends, confidants and pandars; and by analysis of the correspondence about the possible pregnancy of Queen Katherine written by Luis Carroz, ambassador to King Ferdinand of Spain. Lerer draws upon each to comment illuminatingly on the others' 'theatrics of the intimate' at Henry's court. The play, 'Troilus and Pandar', for instance, is considered a story 'not of lovers but of friends' in its concern with 'maxims of male companionship', and thus powerfully associated with the 'theatrics of [Henry VIII's] minion polities'. In Chapter Three, Lerer examines Henry's secret correspondence with Anne Boleyn, adroitly discussing many aspects of these letters—the king's unique signature, his use of French and English, his plays on the language of the body—in careful detail. The roles of the hand—as an instrument of love and tool of violence; as the letters' handler, official or unofficial, discree or unsanctioned; as evidence of authorship, or of royal power, for example—are explored with great skill. (Note of the fact that 'Writtin with m y hand...' was a popular epistolary ending could have helped Lerer's development of this theme.) Reviews 271 In Chapter Four, Lerer moves on to the later Henrician era, the age of Thomas Cromwell, during which 'codes of national loyalty, religious belief, and personal affinity were irrevocably recast', the 'interception of personal correspondence had become a tool of government', and 'informancy and arrest terrorized the gentry'. Lerer argues persuasively that the personal anthologies now compiled—of familiar Pandaric advice, and excerptions from fifteenth-century manuscripts on the 'priuite' of love—were shaped by the 'surreptition and sedition' of these years, since, in removing, breaking up and reassembling pieces from their original contexts, they were similarly preoccupied with acts of...

Milcah Martha Moore's book: a commonplace book from Revolutionary America

Milcah Martha Moore (1740-1829) lived and flourished in the Philadelphia area during its peak, when it was the center of commerce, politics, social life, and culture in the young republic. A well-educated woman, disowned by her Quaker Meeting for an unauthorized marriage, Moore knew and corresponded with many of the leading lights of her day. From her network of acquaintances, she created a commonplace book, which is published here for the first time. Moore compiled her commonplace book during the American Revolution, carefully selecting works of poetry and prose that she and her friends most enjoyed reading and wanted to remember. Contained are 126 works of prose and poetry by at least sixteen different authors, mostly women. Catherine Blecki and Karin Wulf have edited and reproduced the entire collection, adding helpful annotations and interpretive essays that set the collection in historical and literary context. Moore's Book will be a treasure trove for feminist and early American scholars, for it includes two of the most avidly sought-after bodies of writing from British America: sixteen new poems (twenty-four in all) by the Quaker polymath Susanna Wright and a previously lost portion of the journal kept by Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson during her trip to England. There is also a remarkable selection of pieces by Hannah Griffitts, the Quaker moralist and wit who commented on politics, society, and domesticity during the Revolution. Moore also included writings by Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Fothergill. While scholars have speculated about the extent to which elite women exchanged ideas through reading and writing during this period, Moore's Book is the richest surviving body of evidence revealing the nature and substance of women's intellectual community in British America. The quality of the writing is high and reflects a range of popular literary genres including religious and meditational poetry, elegies, verse epistles and extempore verse, hymns, occasional poems, letters, and journal writing. Topics range from family and friends to religion and mortality, to politics and war-belying the notion that women's concerns were limited only to a domestic sphere. Taken as a whole, Moore's collection presents an unparalleled view of the interests and tastes of educated women in early America.

Courtly letters in the age of Henry VIII: literary culture and the arts of deceit

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Note on editions and abbreviations 1. Pretexts: Chaucer's Pandarus and the origins of courtly discourse 2. The King's Pandars: performing courtiership in the 1510s 3. The King's hand: body politics in the letters of Henry VIII 4. Private quotations, public memories: Troilus and Criseyde and the politics of the manuscript anthology 5. Wyatt, Chaucer, Tottel: the verse epistle and the subjects of the courtly lyric Notes Index.

Book Rreview: Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century

Reviewed by: Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century Sandra Sherman Colin Nicholson. Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+219. $54.95. Colin Nicholson’s Writing and the Rise of Finance is one of several recent studies integrating imaginative production and the machinery of public finance in the early eighteenth century. It is joined by James Thompson’s Models of Value: Eighteenth Century Political Economy and the Novel (1996), Patrick Brantlinger’s Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (1996), Thomas Kavanagh’s Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Early Eighteenth-Century France (1993), William Dowling’s The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (1991), and my own Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (1996). Of course, it is plain why scholars of eighteenth-century literature in the 1990s are drawn to a period of soaring government debt, failed expedients, and epic stock market losses. Nicholson argues that the transition to a credit economy, inimical to traditional measures of worth based on landed property, produced a milieu of moral and financial uncertainty resonant with our own time. He reads works by Swift, Pope, and Gay as registering the deracination of the self implicated in market relations, detached from sources of autonomy and concrete value imputed to older modes of proprietorship. In The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), J. G. A. Pocock established that the politics of emergent financial credit entailed a backlash against “moneyed men” dependent on paper profits, ultimately allied with the City and Walpole. Ideologues opposed to government’s expansion asserted that its insatiable demand for funds promoted “corruption,” the civic ascendancy of mobile property lacking fixed, determinable value. Committed to hierarchies based on claims of perceptual transparency, they denounced what to them was a politics of perceptual derangement, a regime that floated on financial simulacra, subordinating “intrinsic” value to speculation, opinion, imagination. Pocock’s analysis, now classic, examined contemporary polemics, but said little concerning the engagement of imaginative literature with antimarket ideology. Howard Erskine-Hill’s explorations, especially of Pope, provided a stimulus, but until Nicholson no one comprehensively mapped this terrain in its most prominent feature, satire. His scrupulously historicized study recovers formerly vibrant resonances; demonstrates the imbrication of Scriblerian satire with opposition discourse; and establishes the necessity of a an informed economic hermeneutic. Unlike, for example, Christine Gerrard in The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (1994), Nicholson approaches opposition discourse specifically through literary/economic relations. The crux that animates his analysis is the Scriblerians’ dissociated sensibility: while Swift, Pope, and Gay join with the Opposition, stung by their own marginalization from centers of power, they are playing the market they attack, buying stocks, risking their fortunes, giddy at the rise of South Sea shares. They enact, indeed embody, the liminality of the emerging order, satirizing its avatars while seizing its opportunities. As Nicholson comments, “the ego is itself compromised when what was once a classically derived and coherent moral structure based on terra firma is called into question by new forms of capital liquidity increasingly held and passed in paper pledges of credit that were by definition and practice uncertain and socially unstable” (89). The essential interest of this observation is its ramification in Nicholson’s analyses of Scriblerian texts, which emerge, both in subject matter and form, as implicated in fracture and fragmentation. Clearly influenced by Lukacsian models of reification in emergent capitalism, Nicholson argues that Gulliver disorients the reader: “Gulliver and those who read him are subjected to discomfiting permutations of perception and construction, so that the threat to individual integrity and self-knowledge which corruption had always implied and which was reinforced by the rise of forms of property seeming to rest on fantasy and false consciousness becomes [End Page 144] both a central topic and a structural principle of the text” (109). Long ago, critics cited “reader entrapment” in Gulliver, but never linked it to broader, ontological dilemmas posed...

Edmund Spenser: a reception history

Spenser was vital to attempts to define what English literature should be: in Tudor England, a Protestant literature; in Stuart England, a modern literature; in Hanoverian England, a romantic and British literature. In Victorian Britain, lecturers and essayists used Spenser to exemplify the proper aims of a popular and moral literature, while in the twentieth century philologists and academic critics have used The Faerie Queene to illustrate the workings of 'culture'. David Radcliffe argues that Spenser's writings entered actively into the process of redefining what literature is and does. In epigrams and verse epistles, prose redactions and scholarly essays, the Poet's Poet became the Critic's Poet, as various readers adopted his typology, characterisation, allegory, description, narrative devices, and modes of interpretation.