Recently added articles from ANQ:
Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Deowwealh: a legal source for the queen's name.(Essays)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Several scholars have analyzed Wealhtheow's name, and it has become convention to accept that it is a compound meaning "foreign servant," even though this description does not seem to fit with Wealhtheow's status or behavior in Hrothgar's court. (1) In a 1935 article, E.V. Gordon ...
A reference to martyrdom in Cynewulf's ascension poem (Christ II, 679a).(Essays)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... In lines 664-82 in the second part of his Christ poem, Cynewulf enumerates various talents granted by God to human beings, and in the ensuing three lines, he explains the divine wisdom of distributing these talents among various individuals, pointing out that granting all faculties to one ...
An early set of beekeeping words in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English.(Essays)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... A basic apiarian vocabulary consisting of bee, comb, hive, honey, and swarm is represented in Old English ("beo," "comb," "hunig," "hyf," and "swarm," respectively) and survives intact in Middle English and beyond. However, not much is known about Anglo-Saxon beekeeping--for example, ...
Reconsidering emending the capital at line 1711 of The Owl and the Nightingale.(Essays)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... While working on a transcription of The Owl and the Nightingale (O&N) from N. R. Ker's facsimile edition for the Early English Text Society (EETS) and verifying the transcription's accuracy using E. G. Stanley's edition, I encountered Stanley's emendation of line 1711's capital letter. (1) ...
The presence of Abraham Ibn Ezra in seventeenth-century England.(Essays)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... By the seventeenth century, Jewish literature and scholarship had become well rooted in England, as is demonstrated by citations during this period of the Talmud and the Kabbalah, as well as of scientific treatises and biblical commentaries authored by Jews. (1) One example is the ...
Captain Walton's divine wanderer and The Dream of Scipio.(Essays)(Frankenstein)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. (Shelley, Introduction 23) As frequently noted, the structure of Frankenstein consists of concentric circles of narrative. Marc A. Rubenstein ...
The Squatter and the Don: title page as paratextual borderland.(Essays)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Since its "recovery" and republication in 1992 and its subsequent academic rehabilitation, The Squatter and the Don (1885) has become a mainstay of Mexican American literary studies. The novel's author, "C. Loyal" (Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton [1832-95])--born in Ensenada, married to a U.S ....
Kipling's "Follow Me 'Ome" and 2 Samuel 1.(Essays)(Rudyard Kipling)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Rudyard Kipling's "Follow Me 'Ome" movingly vocalizes a low-ranking soldier's acceptance of a fellow cavalryman's death as part of the common order of things. (1) In Kipling's depiction of a soldier's homosocial world, a cavalryman's horse can be trusted to remain loyal to its fallen ...
A newly discovered manuscript by George Santayana.(Essays)
Mar 22, 2009; ... A holograph manuscript of one of George Santayana's best sonnets has been unearthed in the collection of the Vaughan Memorial Library at Acadia University, a small university in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. A cataloguer working on Pain, Pleasure, and Aesthetics (1894) by Henry Rutgers Marshall ...
The cruelty of the soup bone: the Chicago eccentric behind Saul Bellow's "Doctor Pep".(Essays)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Very little has been written about Saul Bellow's 1949 short story "A Sermon by Doctor Pep," and what scholarship there is disagrees about the story's success. Daniel Fuchs calls "Pep" Bellow's "first brilliant short fiction" (283). Sanford Marovitz dismisses this assessment, finding Doctor ...
"News of the maker" in Thomas Nashe.(Essays)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) begins with an epistle "to the dapper Mounsier Pages of the Court." The author challenges his young readers to a game: "Gallant Squires, have amongst you: at Mumchaunce I meant not, for so I might chaunce come to short commons, but at novus, ...
The genre "meditative poem" and some wide-ranging examples.(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... In the first edition of The Poetry of Meditation (1954), Louis Martz presented an analysis of some seventeenth-century poetry, arguing that it reflected the practice of methodical meditation (drawn largely from the spiritual exercises of the Jesuit order, notably from St. Ignatius Loyola, ...
Wordsworth and Collins.(William Collins and William Wordsworth)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... William Collins (1721-59), a friend of James Thomson, appealed to Romantic poets for three distinct reasons. First, like Christopher Smart and Thomas Chatterton, he was beguilingly contextualized in a myth of madness that read him as a victim of his own sensibility and genius. In the Lives ...
The motto in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter".(Essays)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... "Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio" ("Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cunning"). Edgar Allan Poe used this Latin phrase in 1845 as the motto of the second edition of his tale "The Purloined Letter" (Tales and Sketches 2: 974), attributing it to Seneca. He had also ...
Gerard Hopkins's "Hark, hearer, hear what I do": two editorial traditions examined.(Essays)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... In May 1888, Gerard Hopkins told friend and poet Robert Bridges something unusual: "I wrote a paper of Readings and Renderings of Sophocles this year and sent it to the Classical Review" (Hopkins, Letters 277). There is nothing odd in a professor of classics at University College, Dublin, ...
The "bordereau" of The Aspern Papers.(Essays)(Henry James)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... It is common knowledge among his readers that Henry James often named his characters for their suggestive, sometimes even allegorical significance. Examples abound: Rowland Mallet, Christopher Newman, Winterbourne, Gilbert Osmond, Dr. Prance, Miss Birdseye, Maria Gostray, and Fanny ...
Building a house of his own: yeats, domesticity, and "Meditations in Time of Civil War".(Essays)(W.B. Yeats)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... "Meditations in Time of Civil War" was destined to be an important poem for W. B. Yeats and for Irish history. Written at a pivotal time in Ireland's emergence as a nation, the poem marked an equally pivotal moment in Yeats's personal history. The years 1917-22 were perhaps the most ...
"I Declare War": a new street game and new grim realities in Roth's The Plot Against America.(Essays)(Philip Roth)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004) begins in June 1940 with a first-person narrator named Philip Roth (in this novel of an alternate United States and thus an alternate Roth family history) introducing the reader to a tightly knit Jewish community in the Weequahic section of ...
DeLillo's intertexts: some observations on Love-Lies-Bleeding.(Essays)(Don DeLillo)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... In his review of Underworld, Martin Amis observes a facet of its author that remains underappreciated: "DeLillo has always been a literary writer; deeply literary, and also covertly literary" (12). However unimpeachable this insight, one may resist that second, italicized adverb, which ...
The paintings in The Day of the Locust.(Essays)(Critical essay)
Jan 01, 2009; ... Tod Hackett, a stand-in for Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust, is not a screenwriter but a Yale-trained artist and Hollywood set designer. Although West does not name specific works of art in the novel, he alludes to well-known paintings for satiric purposes. The paintings aid ...