“Forward youth” and Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode” Matthew Harkins MARVELL’S “AN HORATIAN ODE” opens with that unquiet figure, the “forward youth”; and yet, despite his prominence, we have never properly understood that figure. Many readings have nodded to him in passing; those who have more closely examined the youth explore buried meanings in Roman poetry […]
Category: Criticism
“As Good as Nowhere”: Dickens’s Dombey and Son, the Contingency of Value, and Theories of Domesticity David W. Toise IN THE ORDER OF THINGS, Michel Foucault traces the shift from an early modern paradigm in which meaning was an inherent part of the sign to a more modern formulation in which meaning was positioned as […]
Romancing the reign of terror: sexual politics in Mary Robinson’s Natural Daughter Sharon M. Setzer Given Mary Robinson’s widely publicized affairs with the Prince of Wales and other members of fashionable society, it is not surprising that the public appetite for scandal shaped her career and reputation as a novelist. According to Janet Todd, Robinson’s […]
History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature. – book reviews Charlotte Sussman Edited by Beth Fowkes Tobin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Pp. vii + 309. $50.00. In the past ten or fifteen years, the study of eighteenth-century British literature and culture has been invigorated by a new attention to the relation between gender roles and […]
Acting out: method acting, the national culture, and the middlebrow disposition in Cold War America Marianne Conroy In 1956, in his regular Sunday feature column on the New York theater, critic Walter Kerr registered astonishment at how thoroughly knowledge of the personally expressive approach to realist performance called Method acting had penetrated American popular consciousness […]
D.H. Lawrence’s narrators, sources of knowledge, and the problem of coherence Michael Squires Readers of D. H. Lawrence have long been intrigued by the quality and texture of his prose. Its complex fragmentation has elicited widespread comment; its linguistic challenges are critical commonplaces. As part of what remains to be done, I want to examine […]
Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From Steve Newman Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From by David Simpson. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 290. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper. David Simpson knows that he has assigned himself a difficult task. By writing a book […]
Art and economics: Duchamp’s postmodern returns – Marcel Duchamp – Post-ing Modernism Dalia Judovitz In the fall of 1987, after confiscating the works of J.S.G. Boggs and hauling him off to jail, the Bank of England filed suit against the artist for putative reproduction and, therefore, deliberate counterfeiting of British currency.(1) The seriousness of the […]
Prospero’s counter-pastoral – criticism of John Milton – Critical Essay Kevin Pask AT THE BEGINNING of the period in which Caliban was to acquire his strongest association with revolutionary energies of every sort, William Hazlitt lodged what remains a powerful if underappreciated critique of this association. Writing in response to the report of a lecture […]
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Jonson and the Motives of Print
Jonson and the Motives of Print Richmond Barbour Scholars concur that Ben Jonson presented himself to the world with unprecedented force in print. How it was that he came to do so, however–how particular social constraints and opportunities incited his self-presentation–remains a slippery question. Accounts of Jonson’s emergence into self-proclaimed canonicity, by which he cleared […]