Category: Criticism

Shakespeare’s queer ‘Sonnets’ and the forgeries of William Henry Ireland – William Shakespeare Michael Keevak In 1795 a young man named William Henry Ireland, then about eighteen years of age, fabricated a series of Shakespearean forgeries that, for the space of few months at least, were enthusiastically believed by both the educated English public and […]

17th century AD Daniel Fischlin 1 Harvey Gross has convincingly argued that “[tlhe lute-ayre flourished during the two opening decades of the seventeenth century, a crucial and paradoxical period. It has been variously described as the ‘Elizabethan fin-de-siecle’ or the decades of Jacobean Weltchmerz. The prevailing mood can be sensed in Dowland’s great ‘grief songs’: […]

Knowledge and representation in The Ambassadors: Strether’s discriminating gaze Phyllis Van Slyck The things we see somehow manifest something that transcends both the features disclosed by vision and the consciousness of the one who sees. What there is then are not things first identical with themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor […]

Performing “The Solitary Reaper” and “Tears, Idle Tears.” – interpretive versus aesthetic literary criticism Kerry McSweeney In the years since Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” (1964) and Roland Barthes’s Le Plaisir du texte (1973), there have been numerous attempts to distinguish between interpretative/hermeneutic models of literary criticism and other models.(1) In some cases, the alternative model […]

William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement. – book reviews Margaret Russett The questions with which Susan Eilenberg begins Strange Power of Speech – “Who owns language? or, Who controls meaning?” (ix) – have been addressed in sometimes startlingly literal terms in the criticism of the past decade or so. The work of the New Historicists, positing […]

From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure – Critical Essay Stephen Cohen THROUGH MOST OF its critical history, responses to Measure for Measure have been of two types: those proffering a key that unlocks the play’s notorious difficulties to reveal its unity and integrity, and those that find the […]

Performing “The Solitary Reaper” and “Tears, Idle Tears.” – interpretive versus aesthetic literary criticism Kerry McSweeney In the years since Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” (1964) and Roland Barthes’s Le Plaisir du texte (1973), there have been numerous attempts to distinguish between interpretative/hermeneutic models of literary criticism and other models.(1) In some cases, the alternative model […]

‘Ivanhoe,’ chivalry, and the murder of Mary Ashford Gary R. Dyer Such was the readiness, with which, in those times, heroes put their lives in jeopardy, for honour and lady’s sake. But I doubt whether the fair dames of the present day will think, that the risk of being burned, upon every suspicion of frailty, […]

Shakespeare and the Bible – Book Review Harmonie Loberg by Steven Marx. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 165. $39.95 cloth; $18.95 paper. The Shakespearean canon has been exhausted by generations of critical interpreters–at least, this is the myth that many of us working in the early modern period tell ourselves. The […]

Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture. – book reviews Jose Garcez Ghirardi by Robert Stam. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 409. $59.95, cloth; $19.95, paper. Robert Stam’s Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture courageously addresses a number of […]