The Review of English Studies - Advance Access

NICHOLAS DAMES. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction.

Davis, M. — 2008-05-09

DAVID M. CRAIG. Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy: Political Argument in Britain, 1780-1840.

Duggett, T. — 2008-05-07

HELEN VENDLER. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form.

O'Donoghue, B. — 2008-04-30

KARL FUGELSO (ed.). Memory and Medievalism.

Matthews, D. — 2008-04-30

MATTHEW STEGGLE. Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres.

Ghose, I. — 2008-04-29

HENRY FIELDING. THOMAS LOCKWOOD (ed.). JOANN TARICANI (music ed.). Plays, Volume II: 1731-1734.

Domingo, D. P. — 2008-04-29

ANDREW BENNETT. Wordsworth Writing.

Roberts, J. — 2008-04-28

CLAUDE RAWSON (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding.

Power, H. — 2008-04-25

Pope's First Horatian Imitation? Ben Jonson's Crispinus and the Poisoning of Edmund Curll

Baines, P., Rogers, P. — 2008-04-25

SYLVIA ADAMSON, GAVIN ALEXANDER, and KATRIN ETTENHUBER (eds). Renaissance Figures of Speech.

Rhodes, N. — 2008-04-18

ELISABETH DAUMER and SHYAMAL BAGCHEE (eds). The International Reception of T. S. Eliot.

Hargrove, N. D. — 2008-04-18

CHRIS HOPKINS. English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History.

Clarke, B. — 2008-04-18

PATRICK CHENEY (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry.

Magnusson, L. — 2008-04-18

RICHARD BEGAM and MICHAEL VALDEZ MOSES (eds). Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939.

Parsons, C. — 2008-04-18

GERALD MACLEAN. Looking East. English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800.

Ballaster, R. — 2008-04-18

MATTHEW BEVIS. The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce.

Creasy, M. — 2008-04-18

Representations of the Interregnum and Restoration in English Drama of the Early 1660s

Bywaters, D. — 2008-04-18

The plays staged in London immediately after the Restoration are often said to reflect an unqualified royalism. In fact these plays are guarded and ambivalent in their politics, so that they may appeal to spectators who occupied various social levels and held often opposed political opinions. Where the Restoration appears specifically, it appears within the ordinary world of comedy, and always accompanied by some qualifying element that would have provided comfort to its victims.

SCOTT BOLTWOOD. Brian Friel, Ireland, and the North.

Sykes, J. — 2008-04-16

BLAIR WORDEN. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham.

Adams, M. — 2008-04-15

HUGH HAUGHTON. The Poetry of Derek Mahon.

Brearton, F. — 2008-04-15

JULIE NASH. Servants and Paternalism in the Works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell.

Corbett, M. J. — 2008-04-15

EMMA LIPTON. Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature.

Varnam, L. — 2008-04-15

ADRIAN WISNICKI. Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel.

Berberich, C. — 2008-04-15

DAVID LOEWENSTEIN and JOHN MARSHALL (eds). Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture.

Worden, B. — 2008-04-15

GORDON MCMULLAN. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death.

Prince, K. — 2008-04-13

ROBERT SHAUGHNESSY (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture.

Gillespie, S. — 2008-04-10

FRANCES MCCORMACK. Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent: The Lollard Context and Subtext of the Parson's Tale.

Winstead, K. — 2008-04-03

NICHOLAS FREEMAN. Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art 1870-1914.

Morris, R. J. — 2008-04-01

KARL TAMBURR. The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England.

Esser, C. — 2008-03-28

JANE RICKARD. Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I.

Smuts, M. — 2008-03-26

VALERIE ALLEN. On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages.

Tovey, B. — 2008-03-15

BILL OVERTON. The Eighteenth-Century British Verse Epistle.

Terry, R. — 2008-03-15

ALASTAIR MINNIS and JANE ROBERTS (eds). Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context in Honour of Eamonn O Carragain.

Stodnick, J. A. — 2008-03-15

JOCELYN HARRIS. A Revolution Almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen's Persuasion.

Murphy, O. — 2008-03-13

HENRICUS INSTITORIS, O.P. and JACOBUS SPRENGER, O.P.; CHRISTOPHER S. MACKAY (ed. and trans.) Malleus maleficarum.

Kelly, H. A. — 2008-03-13

AARON KLEIST (ed.). The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice and Appropriation.

Godden, M.R. — 2008-03-11

CAROLYN W. DE LA L. OULTON. Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature.

James, F. — 2008-03-11

DUNCAN WU (ed.). New Writings of William Hazlitt. 2 vols.

Natarajan, U. — 2008-03-07

GORDON MCMULLAN and DAVID MATTHEWS (eds) Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England.

Ray, S. — 2008-03-04

DAYTON HASKIN. John Donne in the Nineteenth Century.

Cronin, R. — 2008-02-29

FIONA MCNEILL. Poor Women in Shakespeare.

Aughterson, K. — 2008-02-29

HAZEL WATERS. Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character.

Meer, S. — 2008-02-29

A. DAVID MOODY. Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and his Work. Volume 1: The Young Genius, 1885-1920.

Beasley, R. — 2008-02-26

MATTHEW BEVIS (ed.) Some Versions of Empson.

Fuller, D. — 2008-02-23

GIOVANNI CIANCI and JASON HARDING (eds.) T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition.

Morgenstern, J. D. — 2008-02-21

KAREN NEWMAN. Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris.

Potter, C. W. — 2008-02-20

MICHELLE BOLDUC. The Medieval Poetics of Contraries.

Coldiron, A. E. B. — 2008-02-19

JOHN GLENDENING. The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank.

Ebbatson, R. — 2008-02-15

Pearl: 'God's Law' and 'Man's Law'

Spencer, H. L. — 2008-02-14

Pearl is generally assigned to a date of composition in the 1380s; this study argues that the poem engages in debates on legal and political theory consonant with a date in the late 1380s, and that the standpoint taken would have been congenial to a noble, but probably not royal, audience, one bilingual in French as well as English. The poet engages with political and theological arguments persistently couched in legal terms: there may have been a general cultural trend among vernacular writers, orthodox as well as radical, to pursue such discussion within a legal context. Legal language and theology cannot be kept apart. Much of the vocabulary is susceptible of legal senses and nuances, even while it relates to everyday legal transactions, and does not require extended technical knowledge of the law. His evident fondness for exploiting the rich inheritance of theocratic symbolism establishes the strangeness of the Lamb's court, while not necessarily endorsing Richard II's tendencies towards absolute rule. The poet's concern with lawful possession affirms that, though an absolute ruler, God is no ‘tyrant’. The principles of equity and the rigour of the law are wholly consonant in his realm. Ulpian's famous dictum of Roman law, that ‘What pleases the prince has the force of law’, to which the poet alludes, could, in an English context, be reconciled with a more ‘constitutional’ model in which what pleased the king was Law, authorized by his magnates, and not just his personal will. It is argued that the synthesis of legal ideas in the poem makes Pearl a very ‘English’ poem, in which God's monarchy is described in terms deriving from Roman law, as found in Giles of Rome or John of Salisbury, but also in terms derived from the law of the land. Although it is possible to read the poem as a veiled criticism of Richard II's actions from around 1388 onwards, this is to diminish the poem and compromise its ‘plot’: the transfiguration of the pearl-maiden. But it is intimately grounded in fourteenth-century developments in doctrine, expressed in contemporary legal and political terms.

JOHN M. FYLER. Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun.

Clarke, K. P. — 2008-02-12

DENNIS D. KEZAR (ed.). Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance.

Mukherji, S. — 2008-02-11

Jewels and Jewellers in Pearl

Davenport, T. — 2008-01-31

No one would deny that the symbolism of jewels is central to Pearl, but in recent years a number of critics have based historical, political, economic readings of the poem on literal interpretation of the dreamer as a professional jeweller, a craftsman or merchant. This essay takes a sceptical view of such readings on the basis of the poem's lack of technical vocabulary, the description of jewels here and elsewhere in alliterative poetry in terms of architectural structure and aesthetic effect rather than the process of making and uncertainty that the word ‘jeweller’ was used in the fourteenth-century with quite that sense (‘perrier’ being the preferred term in lapidary texts). The various vernacular versions of the fable of the Cock and the Jewel provide a gloss on the terms and attitudes in Pearl, as do lapidaries on the poem's conclusion.

Translating Grace: The Scala Claustralium and A Ladder of Foure Ronges

Iguchi, A. — 2008-01-24

This article examines A Ladder of Foure Ronges, a fifteenth-century devotional text translated from the Latin Scala Claustralium, a manual on contemplative union with God written by Guigo II, the ninth prior of the Grande Chartreuse. I will argue that the Middle English text deploys a number of strategies to appeal to a wider range of audiences than that once envisioned by Guigo II, who directed the Latin text to his fellow Carthusian monks. The Ladder is extremely reader-friendly in many ways: it clarifies the biblical allusions, translates biblical passages, foregrounds the spiritual dimension of meditation in such a way that everyone can have divine bliss under the proper procedures, and expounds those theological topics which the translator thought should be explained in detail, most notably the issue of God's grace and free will. God's grace provides the translator with the opportunity to discuss that even the unlettered can hope to attain to divine grace by ‘doing their best’, a much-debated theological issue in the later Middle Ages. A remarkable departure from the Latin source text, the Ladder participates in one of the major theological discussions at that time, and by doing so tries to reach audience well beyond the wall of the monastery, possibly including the laity.

'An Old Quarrel Between Us That Will Never Be At An End': Middleton's Women Beware Women and Late Jacobean Religious Politics

Streete, A. — 2008-01-18

In this article, I examine Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women as a response to the particular religio-political context in the years surrounding 1621. The onset of the Thirty Years War in 1618 and the subsequent humiliation of James' son-in-law Frederick, Elector of Palatine, the vexed question of a possible Catholic marriage for Charles, Prince of Wales, the ever present difficulty of Anglo-Catholic relations, particularly with Spain, as well as growing religious factionalism within the Church of England between Calvinists and Arminians: all contributed towards a culturally febrile atmosphere, one to which, as I will argue, Middleton was well placed to respond. Given Middleton's Calvinistic beliefs, I suggest that Women Beware Women offers an acerbic examination of contemporary debates concerning human will, especially women's will, as well as promoting a sceptically apocalyptic anti-Catholic agenda throughout. I also examine the religious language and imagery used to construct Bianca as the whore of Babylon, and argue that her emergence and fall offer a political commentary on the precarious position of the English Church around 1621.

A Newly Identified Holograph Manuscript by John Rich: 'Some Remarks on the Tragedy Call'd Agis' (1754)

Mcginley, K. J. — 2008-01-10

National Library of Scotland MS 16747 (fols 124–5), entitled ‘Some Remarks on the Tragedy call'd Agis’, a dissection and rejection of a 1754 draft of John Home's Agis: A Tragedy, can now be added to the list of writings in the hand of John Rich, manager of Covent Garden Theatre from 1732 to 1761. Not only do aspects of the manuscript's tone and style correspond with what Rich's contemporaries relate of his writing, but comparison with other existing samples of his handwriting confirms the ascription of the ‘Remarks’ to Rich. The ‘Remarks’ are the longest and most detailed instance of Rich's dramatic criticism. Rich was often accused of a concern with profit that led him to debase dramatic art by privileging entertainment value over literary quality. However, the ‘Remarks’ belie this reputation. Rich displays little interest in sensational scenes or affecting spectacles for their own sake. Rather, he expects that his audience will respond best to a coherent plot, plausible incidents, and sympathetic or engaging characters. Rich's undoubted concern with the profitability of the theatre thus goes together with considerable critical discernment and practical acumen when deciding what pieces, be they pantomimes or tragedies, should grace his stage.

New Gibbon Letters

Lock, F. P. — 2007-12-14

A miscellany of eleven previously unpublished letters of Edward Gibbon (and a fragment from a twelfth), addressed to Thomas Becket (1767), Dorothea Gibbon (1779), William Hayley (1781), an unidentified correspondent (1781), Eliza Hayley (1782), William Eden (1782), Francis Hugonin (1784), William Whitehead (1784), Madame de Bottens? (1784), Lord Malmesbury (1788), Peter Elmsley? (1793) and William Vincent (1793).

Edward Alleyn, Richard Perkins And The Rivalry Between The Swan And The Rose Playhouses

Mateer, D. — 2007-12-14

The completion in 1595 of Francis Langley's Swan theatre not far from Philip Henslowe's Rose on Bankside caused the management of the latter house a number of problems relating to its personnel. R. A. Foakes's analysis of Henslowe's Diary highlights the cases of Richard Jones and Thomas Downton, two of the Lord Admiral's Men then working at the Rose under the leadership of Edward Alleyn, who defected to Pembroke's Men at the Swan. However, the desertions did not end there. Documents newly discovered at The National Archives show that a ‘Richard Parkyns’, who had contracted to serve Alleyn for three years from November 1596, also left. This is undoubtedly the actor Richard Perkins, who was later to have a distinguished career on the London stage. He quit Alleyn's service on 19 April following, and was promptly sued in the court of King's Bench. The legal documents, which show that Perkins had enlisted the financial backing of Langley and Downton, are transcribed and translated in appendices. It is likely that Perkins's flirtation with the Swan was short-lived and that he was back at the Rose in time to participate in the now lost Frederick and Basilea, which the Lord Admiral's premièred in June 1597. It is suggested that Perkins was the actor ‘Black Dick’ mentioned in the ‘plot’ of that play. His early association/training with Alleyn, who was of course famed for the creation and interpretation of Marlovian roles, may account for Perkins's success in seventeenth-century revivals of the playwright's work.

Bunyan, the Great War, and the Political Ways of Grace

Stevens, P. — 2007-12-05

Subliminal Consciousness

Ko, C. — 2007-11-28

As the fifteenth chapter or episode of Joyce's Ulysses, ‘Circe’ continues to challenge the reader with its hallucinatory psychodrama and its capricious recirculation of the book's textual past which both defies and demands psychological explanation. These ongoing difficulties are mainly the result of an insufficient appreciation for the way in which the psyche was understood historically and, in particular, the way in which ‘Circe’ is underwritten by a startling turn-of-the-century theory of telepathy and unconscious agency. The latter belongs to the British psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers, whose celebrated theory of the ‘subliminal consciousness’ offers up a multiply porous subjectivity through which the unconscious is seen to communicate not only intrapersonally but also interpersonally. The implications of this theory are profound, and are encoded in both ‘Circe’'s aesthetics and its genetic history. At stake is a recognition, on the one hand, of reading and writing as reciprocal activities, and on the other hand, a subversive vision of language and communication as a kind of subliminal or telepathic leakage within and between minds and texts, operating outside the authorised channels of intentional or rational discourse along multiple levels of hidden association.

'In Search of Something Chance Would Never Bring': The Poetry of R.S. Thomas and Edward Thomas

Perry, S. — 2007-11-27

This article argues that, at two distinct stages of R.S. Thomas's life, Edward Thomas's poetry had an enabling influence upon his writing. There is considerable evidence that, at the beginning of the 1940s, Edward Thomas's verse contributed to the evolution of R.S. Thomas's aesthetic, offering him an instructive example of how he might begin to get beyond the rather clichéd and often excessively sentimental verse he had been producing in the Georgian style and towards a much more tactile poetry, characterised by close and often deeply unromantic observation. As well as identifying a number of significant biographical connections between the two poets, the essay examines the impact that the task of editing and introducing Faber's Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (1964) had upon R.S. Thomas's writing, locating his re-engagement with Edward Thomas's work during the 1960s within the context of his search for new ways of exploring and expressing personal feeling.

Eliza Haywood, Savage Love, and Biographical Uncertainty

King, K. R. — 2007-10-25

The surmise that Eliza Haywood (1693?–1756) was the cast-off mistress of Richard Savage and mother of one (or two) bastard children by him is generally accepted by Haywood scholars. This speculation is, however, almost groundless; it grows out of a misunderstanding of the dynamics of the circle that gathered around Aaron Hill in the early 1720s. Coterie verse and satire produced by Savage, Haywood, Hill, and Martha Fowke Sansom suggest that it was not Savage but Hill who was the focus of erotic interest in the circle, and that Haywood was furious with both Sansom and Savage for their role in alienating the affections of Hill, whom she regarded as a mentor and collaborator in a poetry of the sublime. Too much of the Haywood biography as now understood is deformed by undue respect for the veracity of sexualising lampoons by the likes of Savage and Pope as well as the tendency to cast her as one of her own seduced and abandoned heroines.

'Market-Faces' and Market Forces: [Corn-]Factors In The Moral Economy Of Casterbridge

Franklin, M. J. — 2007-10-11

Questions of appropriate behaviour, mercantile integrity and market forces reverberate throughout Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. This article attempts to analyse the ‘corn factor’: both the wife-selling self-destructive ‘hero’, and the ubiquitous presence of grain. Integral to almost every conflict or crisis in the creation, continuation or destruction of human bonds within the novel is the consumption or exchange of seeds, grain or the products and goods made from them. In tracing a path from furmity to skimmity, the article examines what Hardy reveals concerning the impossibility of restoring what has been spoiled. Concepts from the disciplines of political history and economic sociology, such as E. P. Thompson's notion of ‘the moral economy’, or Mark Granovetter's construct of ‘the strength of weak ties’, are applied to this market town to demonstrate that bread is simultaneously a staple and a symbol of what binds individuals and families together in society.

A Renaissance Reader's English Annotations to Thynne's 1532 Edition of Chaucer's Works

Harbus, A. — 2007-10-04

This article introduces a heavily annotated copy of the first collected edition of Chaucer's Works, published by William Thynne in 1532 (Beinecke Library, Osborn fpa 5). Over 1100 annotations, in English, record one near-contemporary but anonymous reader's engagement with the content and style of texts in this edition. The marginal comments demonstrate this annotator's predilection for proverbial material and figurative language, perhaps as a first step in transferring excerpts to a commonplace book or other place of record. This Renaissance reader evidently understood Chaucer's language, so does not provide glosses to the existing diction, but reflects individual linguistic preferences in summarising and recasting the texts in the marginal annotations, at times commenting on Chaucer's imagery or turn of phrase. This study indicates the range and type of annotation in this unique book, and suggests some implications for our knowledge of the reception of Chaucer in the sixteenth century.

The Punctuation System Of Elizabethan Legal Documents: The Case Of G.U.L. Ms Hunter 3 (S.1.3)

Calle-Martin, J., Miranda-Garcia, A. — 2007-09-14

Punctuation in Elizabethan drama has been a recurrent topic of research in the relevant literature published in the last century, the other genres being often underestimated on account of their lack of standardisation and arbitrariness. Unlike other prose compositions of the period, legal texts were composed under the patronage of the court and they provide a unitary view of the Elizabethan attitude towards pointing. In light of this, this work analyses the uses and functions of the punctuation symbols found in a collection of 68 Elizabethan warrants, housed in G.U.L. MS Hunter 3. With this approach we obtain evidence of (a) the existence of a conventional punctuation system by Elizabethan scribes, which is systematically used to signal both micro- and macro-textual relations; and (b) the preference for grammatical punctuation in spite of the rhetorical nature of the texts under scrutiny. Finally, the present-day English equivalents are proposed by taking into consideration the underlying function displayed by punctuation symbols.

Fanshawe's Critique of Caroline Pastoral: Allusion and Ambiguity in the 'Ode on the Proclamation'

Pugh, S. — 2007-09-10

Editing Milton: The Case Against Modernisation

Dobranski, S. B. — 2007-06-14