Recently added articles from Philological Quarterly:
Editorial statement.
Sep 22, 2007 ... From its inception after the end of the First World War, PQ has published contributions in many genres of literary scholarship and has opened its pages to a wide range of critical methodologies. One constant over the years, however, has been its commitment to the study of textuality in its ...
Caring for the dead in The Fortunes of Men.
Sep 22, 2007; ... Whether it is an effect of what was once called the "somber cast of the Teutonic mind" or of St. Benedict's dictum to "have death always before our eyes," the Old English poetic tradition seems unusually given to depictions of the indignities suffered by dead bodies. (1) A handful of verse ...
The mimesis of time in Hamlet.
Sep 22, 2007; ... Hamlet opens on intense attention to time, as the sentries "watch the minutes of this night" (1.1.30). (1) The emphasis gains thematic depth when Hamlet formulates his predicament in terms of temporal dislocation: "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it ...
Locating Byron: languages, voices, and displaced utterances.
Sep 22, 2007; ... Exhausted and excited after crossing the Alps and sailing on Lake Maggiore, Byron arrived in Milan on 12 October 1816 and, the following day, wrote to his half-sister Augusta with no small degree of satisfaction: "I have got to Milan." (1) He had finally reached Italy. Soon after his ...
Translation and adaptation in Tennyson's Battle of Brunanburh.
Sep 22, 2007; ... Dost thou think Alexander look'd o' this fashion i' the earth? Hamlet, 5.1.217 Because of the special (some would say insurmountable) difficulties posed by the genre, literary translations commonly fail or succeed with critics based on their local faults or merits ....
Ruskin on his sexuality: a lost source.(Notes and Documents)
Sep 22, 2007; ... Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire May 15 '86 My dearest S. How little you know me, after all! After all these years! As if I ever cared about marriages!--The moment people marry I drop them like hot coals.--Go suckle your babies and don't bother ...
Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell.
Sep 22, 2007; ... Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell by Diane Kelsey McColley. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. 252. $89.95. Halfway through his essay "Walking," H. D. Thoreau asks "Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?" The question is rhetorical. He ...
Edmund Curll, Bookseller.
Sep 22, 2007; ... Edmund Curll, Bookseller by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers. Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. x + 388. $55. In 1927, Ralph Straus published a biography of the eighteenth-century bookseller Edmund Curll. The Unspeakable Curll (London: Chapman and Hall, 1927) has 200 generously set pages, ...
Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work.
Sep 22, 2007; ... Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work by Peter Simonsen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. x + 216. $69.95. This meticulously researched monograph is the latest in a relatively recent trend in Wordsworth ...
Northern Irish Literature: The Imprint of History.
Sep 22, 2007; ... Northern Irish Literature: The Imprint of History by Michael Parker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Volume 1, 1956-1975, pp. xx + 357. Volume 2, 1975-2006, pp. xix + 334. $125 per volume. In a talk given in 1989, the poet Michael Longley told his Northern Ireland audience: ...
Books received.
Sep 22, 2007 ... CLASSICS INCLUDING LATER LATIN Barker, Andrew. The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece. Cambridge U. Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 481. $115. Behr, Francesca D'Alessandro. Feeling History: Lucan, Stoicism, and the Poetics of Passion. Ohio State U. Press, 2007. Pp. xiv ...
The form of formlessness.
Jun 22, 2007; ... Virtually every discussion of the new formalism, whether remonstration or encomium, mentions some variant or synonym of the word "return," which should cause us to wonder what the "new" in the "new formalism" is. Advocates of the new formalism scrutinize the language, genre, structure, and ...
Formalist cultural criticism and the post-restoration periodical.
Jun 22, 2007; ... Some will have it, that I often write to my sell and am the only punctual correspondent I have. This objection would indeed be material, were the letters I communicate to the public stuffed with my own commendations, and if, instead of endeavouring to divert or instruct my readers, I ...
Couplets and curls: a theory of form.
Jun 22, 2007; ... Practitioners of formalism are frequently anxious to assert the primacy of aesthetic value and its pleasures, whether that formalism is characterized as "new," "activist," or "normative." In so doing, they often register a critical fatigue with and rebuke of historical and ideological ...
The obligations of form: social practice in Charlotte Smith's Emmeline.
Jun 22, 2007; ... In Charlotte Smith's first novel, Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, the heroine finds herself caught between her obligations to competing forms of male "protection." Emmeline, seemingly illegitimate, has promised her uncle and guardian, Lord Montreville, that she will not marry his son ...
Aesthetico-constructivism: farther adventures in criticism.
Jun 22, 2007; ... CONSTRUCTIVISM AND FORMALISM For at least a generation, most critics of the eighteenth-century novel have argued or assumed that canonical texts do not passively reflect a pre-existent reality but help to shape or construct what readers perceive as reality. Although "construct" ...
John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life.
Jun 22, 2007; ... John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford U. Press, 2007. Pp. 201. $75. How to assess the truth value of statements of apparent fact that occur in fictions ("Sherlock Holmes lived on Baker Street" is a favorite example) may sound like a merely academic, indeed ...
Repossessing the Romantic Past.
Jun 22, 2007; ... Repossessing the Romantic Past edited by Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton. Cambridge U. Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 254. $90. In the past three decades a new picture of British Romanticism has emerged in opposition to the focus on six male poets in two generations. Along with the ...
Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660-1820.
Jun 22, 2007; ... Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660-1820 by David E. Shuttleton. Cambridge U. Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 265. $91. The writing of this review coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the last fatal case of smallpox, which occurred in Birmingham, England, in 1978. Janet ...
Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera.
Jun 22, 2007; ... Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera by Derek Hughes. Cambridge U. Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 313. $85. Despite its fairly standard size for a monograph, Derek Hughes's book is a expedition of veritably epic proportions through the entire history of Western ...