view rejects the implied gendered structure of such displacement. *[End Page
72]* Looking on Italy's body, on the incarnations of art, and on women's
bodies are culturally equivalent acts, and Kirkland responds by becoming
conscious of her own positioning and even of the technology--the spyglass--of
gazing. Resisting the overt construct that the totalizing gaze creates,
Kirkland rejects being, in Lauren Berlant's words, "reconstituted as a
_collective_ subject" (24) in the presence of a nationally meaningful icon.
The limits of her ability or desire to participate in elite acts of
supervision--efforts Crary implicitly defines as male--seem marked by gender.
position similar to that of the possible buyer of the news sheet. We have no
overview or supervision here but are instead placed in the position of the
consumer of news; both political history and the marketplace define this view
of Italy. This painting resists even as it comments on the tourist gaze; like
Kirkland, Heade seems temporarily to reject the totalizing vista for a visual
structure that replicates modern, republican ways of looking.
Nevertheless, although painted in support of the _risorgimento,Roman
Newsboys_ presents an ambiguous image of the republican press; the news in
dominant epistemological [End Page 167] changes, while dismissing the
vehement middle-class campaign that opposed, crippled, and partially
abrogated the Public Health Act of 1848? The answer to this and other
comparable questions indicates the degree to which Poovey's assumptions are
based on the same totalizing theoretical paradigm from which she claims
emphatically to break.
VII. Afterword: The Contemporaneity of Victorian National Character
-------------------------------------------------------------------
'Sociological' Traditions."
81. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 4. Athough she does not directly name
Foucault as the object of her critique, Poovey situates her thesis in
contrast to "New Historicist representations of modern power as a totalizing
force" in which "the distinctively modern form of power/knowledge subsumes
potential opposition by proliferating ever more differentiated versions of
itself." Poovey acknowledges this influence in some of her earlier work, but
proceeds to argue that "no theoretical position that credits modernity with
history, and moral stricture. But the definition of the novelist as
editor/curator is more than posture: the early novel often earnestly
seeks out a mode of presentation in which the novelist governs the
events and source material as adjudicator and compiler. The Coquette
in these terms does not present a totalizing understanding of the
facts; that is the work of the sermons and conduct manuals that had
by this time long mined the story, silencing Whitman and letting the
facts speak for themselves. But neither is it simply the
autobiography of Eliza Wharton, the would-be heroine of her own tale
It is toward a consideration of precisely these questions that Brown
will devote himself in his final years, defining the periodical as
the space in which unstable texts, fragments, and anonymous
diatribes can be made stable, ordered, and organized without the
totalizing narratives and central consciousness of the conventional
novel. Ultimately Jane Talbot works to show how the rigid judge who
practices "strict government" (J, 223) is as vulnerable to bad
reading as the woman Mrs. Fielder accuses Jane of being--defined by
"an inattention to any thing but feeling: a proneness to romantic
exception into a maelstrom of temporalization" and consequently that texts
themselves represent the "temporal process of detotalizing operations." 35
Time is, and should be acknowledged as, a key factor in understanding the
deconstructive conception of text, because the rupturing of time is what
prevents concepts from closing in on themselves, from totalizing.
Acknowledging the centrality of time in the deconstructive action of language
makes it possible to suggest in this context that (de *[End Page 1039]*
Manian) deconstruction and (Althusserian) materialism, language and history,
un-Smithean.
Exploiting the "sympathetick curiosity of our nature," Baillie's
text deftly coordinates the individualizing force of desire with the
totalizing impulse of its orientation towards Smithean sociability,
and effects, in so doing, the moral regulation of the individual
subject. "What human creature is there," she asks, "who can behold a
being like himself under the violent agitation of those passions
which all have, in some degree, experienced, without feeling himself
with liberalism's development of an art of government. Neither
should the apparent stage failure of _De Monfort_ detract from what
I suggest is an achievement of much greater consequence.
Coordinating the individualizing force of interest-_cum_-curiosity
with the totalizing gesture of Smithean sociability, Baillie's
work--under the rubric of liberal governance--newly inflects that
age-old term: romantic freedom.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
9. See Allen's _The Solitary Singer_ 60-66.
10. Ironically, _Franklin Evans_ appeared immediately following Park
Benjamin'spirated reprinting of Dickens's _American Notes_(Greenspan
46). Yet as Whitman himself made clear in his journalism, American
authors were left with few publishing choices in the unregulated
literary landscape.
interconnection between debates over centralized authority in slavery
policy—noting the strain, for example, between abolitionists' desire
for the center to exercise control by abolishing slavery and their fear of
central control as embodied in the Fugitive Slave Law—and the
discourse of reprinting, associated with the Jacksonian values of
decentralization and hemmed-in federal powers but ultimately abjured in favor
of a national copyright law. This might seem a far-fetched analogy, and
indeed if copyright and slavery are both discourses of property they have
little else in common in the abstract, but McGill shows that the analogy was
of a national copyright law. This might seem a far-fetched analogy, and
indeed if copyright and slavery are both discourses of property they have
little else in common in the abstract, but McGill shows that the analogy was
visible to commentators in the period weighing various dimensions of the
states' rights dilemma. Practices of reprinting as well as the rhetoric about
its benefits and dangers were factors in slavery's defense and abolition.
McGill also argues that Poe used regional unevenness in distribution to his
advantage as a writer—an argument that goes against the usual
assumption that his range of publication venues was a sign of a harmfully
material as evidence "to show how changes in the conditions of publication
make themselves felt at the level of literary form" (3). Sometimes the
history and criticism work perfectly together. For example, McGill's reading
of Dickens's _American Notes for General Circulation_ (1842) as a commentary
on reprinting and even on American banking would be precarious were it based
only on a pun, but she has the evidence of a dropped epigraph and responses
by American reprinters that ground her intricate reading of the responses
with a satisfying solidity. Nonetheless, when she claims that the book's
"episodic structure, the surprisingly long passages interpolated from other
rehearsals of Pizarro in an attempt to achieve a pure, spontaneous
communication with playgoers. If this was indeed his aim, then
Sheridan's dissatisfaction extended beyond anxieties over print, for
his manner of composing Pizarro also attempts to obviate performance
as a mediating agency, ideally rendering the actors mere conduits of
his creative powers. 19
The circumstances surrounding the production of Pizarroserve as a
kind of endgame of the complaints first articulated in the preface
299).
18. Reminiscences of Kelly, 2:308-9.
19. Sheridan's concern about actors and prompters as mediating
agents dates back at least to The Critic (1779), in which the
playwright, Puff, constantly worries about what the theater company
has cut from his play (Works, 519, 532).
9. I will continue to use the term "spectator" rather than "observer" because
I wish to underscore the etymological link to "specter." The connection is
reinforced countless times in nineteenth-century studies on ghosts, where the
popular phrase "ghost-seeing" always accentuates the mediating role of vision
in encounters between the living spectators and the specters of the dead. See
Suren Lalvani, _Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies_
(Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1996), for a useful distinction between
spectacle and surveillance in the nineteenth century. Lalvani rejects Michel
in the US before returning to Saint-Domingue to revolt; and a
mid-nineteenth-century US disavowal of independent Haiti precisely as a
nation of QUOTE and thus a potential threat to its own racially based
economy. It was, however, the latter inter-American relation--between the
first nation to abolish slavery in the Americas and its slaveholding
neighbor to the north--that Faubert brought to bear upon his own drama of
Og�'s uprising. In the opening scene of the first act, the Marquis de
Vermont, a leading plantation owner and member of the colonial Superior
Council, invokes the US in his response to news that the colony has been
Yet if Faubert seeks to consolidate the original status of his text in the
introduction, he also repeatedly problematizes the copy-model dichotomy so
often deployed to denigrate postcolonial literary production. When the
slaveholding marquis cries, QUOTE the larger play clearly signals not an
aesthetic lack in the copy but a moral bankruptcy in the model. At the same
time, the opening scene gestures toward a play within a play: within the
theatrical commemoration of Og� and his role in Haitian national history, in
other words, Faubert produces an inter-American drama--one that implicitly
redemption that link Tom's death with the deaths of the Haitian insurgents,
opposing the former's passive acceptance of slavery and the latter's active
vows to secure their rights or QUOTE (61). As in Stowe's novel, moreover,
the primary story of the titular figure, Og�, embeds the domestic tale of a
slaveholding father's painful loss of his beloved Creole daughter, Delphine,
a character repeatedly described as a noble and angelic spirit who, like
Stowe's Eva, pleads on behalf of the enslaved and is proscribed before her
family (including a vain and mean-spirited aunt who recalls Eva's mother,
Marie St. Clare). Like Eva, Delphine serves often as a mouthpiece for her
it QUOTE as Stowe puts it, precisely QUOTE (224). Yet their relationship--
QUOTE in Hortense Spillers's analysis (32)--is meticulously stripped of any
overt romantic potential by Eva's young age, by her spiritual status, and
ultimately by an untimely death that prevents her from reaching sexual
maturity in a heterogeneous, slaveholding Creole society that might [End
Page 425] threaten the racial purity she embodies. In Faubert's play, on the
other hand, the QUOTE of Eva's counterpart is not a slave at all but a young
homme de couleur who studied with Delphine in Paris. The relationship
between the worshipping Alfred and his beloved Delphine, moreover, overtly
set of racial anxieties prevailing in the contemporaneous US and emerging in
response to the very inter-American theater in which the play itself is
located. These concerns appeared with particular clarity in a series of
vigilant new restrictions passed in the early nineteenth century by
slaveholding states prohibiting the emigration of Haitians and other free
people of color from the francophone Americas. As early as 1778, Virginia
had enacted legislation to forbid QUOTE in general; passing similar
restrictions over the next 25 years, North and South Carolina directed their
legislation more specifically toward the West Indies. But by 1806, the newly
1854-1861_ (1973).
3. Along these lines, in his 1852 pamphlet, _The Condition, Elevatio
Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States,_
Delany argued that "freemen even in the non-slaveholding States,
occupy the very same position politically, religiously, civilly and
socially, (with but few exceptions,) as the bondman occupies in the
slave States" (14).
important and, on the other, fundamentally constrained by the incompletion of
the critical project that preceded it. 83
Consider, for example, Poovey's deliberate epistemological focus on dominant
rather than oppositional discourses: an example she offers is the privileging
of Chadwick's dominant Sanitary Report over the oppositional working-class
responses it evoked. 84 By assuming that certain texts--such as those by
Benthamite-influenced reformers--are the self-evidently dominant artifacts of
epistemological study, Poovey reproduces the defects of an insufficiently
nor, on the decease of a bishop . . . do we (yet) offer his diocese to the
clergyman who will take the episcopacy at the lowest contract. . . . [S]ick,
we do not inquire for a physician who takes less than a guinea, litigious, we
never think of reducing six-and-eightpence to four and sixpence" (173).
Ruskin's privileging of a fee system is also interesting in relation to
Middlemarch. Tertius Lydgate's attempt to supplant the extant practice of
selling drugs to patients rather than collecting a fee for a medical
consultation is, of course, a move away from early linkages between medicine
and trade, and towards modern medicine's rigorous professionalization.
proves the strict, anti-romantic reader as vulnerable to dangerous
texts as the novel-reading female quixote she believes Jane to be.
If the novel offers a resolution to this crisis it is similar to the
one presented by The Coquette, not in the privileging of any
character's position but in the model of the novel itself. The long
collection of letters neutrally adjudicates between our three
principles. In the end, there is no clear villain, no strong hero,
not even a strong plot: it is as if Brown is experimenting with a
self-reliance" (238). As Emerson makes clear from the outset of the
essay, the interpreter is "to embody every faculty, every thought,
every emotion which belongs [to the human spirit] in appropriate
events" (237), an [End Page 1001] exhortation which would seem to
undermine the case for privileging (or for that matter stigmatizing)
any one character trait when it comes to interpreting the past. But
the obvious inference here is that a concept like self-respect does
not refer in any primary sense to a character trait at all but
alludes, once again, to a certain interpretive stance or
The wanderer figures the novelistic development of what McKeon calls
"questions of virtue." 25 The question of her worth cannot be
resolved, as it is for McKeon in novels through Richardson's Pamela,
by privileging the superior instrumentality of one medium of
personal value--interiority or exteriority--over the other. 26
Instead, Burney offers as value her heroine's deferral of singular
interiority and exteriority in practice. Bourdieu theorizes this
change in the medium of value, rejected by Hazlitt in favor of the
sent in place of Whitman, taking his place _in absentia_. He sets
himself up first as passive receptacle, filled and penetrated by
language. In turn, his infusion of the reader with language
simultaneously empties out the subject position of the poetic
persona in a process of subjective absenting that replicates
Whitman's initial passivity. The scene of writing and the scene of
reading exist as separate but indissociable literary spaces that
reciprocally shape the poet's access to the reader and the reader's
access to the poetic text. Whitman's self-conscious inscription of
In the 1855 _Leaves of Grass_ "Black Lucifer" becomes simply
"Lucifer," and the overt reference to revolt is repressed, intimated
only in what Christopher Beach refers to as the "cultural intertext"
of the whale.28 The placement of the Lucifer passage, however,
enacts the process of absenting initiated in the notebook writings
by creating a moment of subjective suspension in the poem. Michael
Moon claims that "figures of black Americans in the 1855 _Leaves of
Grass_ . . . are included in the text but effectively excluded from
its 'fluid' dynamics. . . . [T]hey are represented as being
perfectly suited to a poem like "I Sing the Body Electric" with its
emphasis on genealogical progression, a poem like "The Sleepers"
allows the Lucifer figure to enact another type of textual fluidity,
flowing into and filling the vacated space left by Whitman's
momentary absenting. In other words, the inclusion of black
Americans results in part from the textual fluidity that allows for
the more radical exclusion or emptying of Whitman himself. In
connection with this dynamic, the implied *[End Page 933]*
opposition of master and slave in the Lucifer section continues to
sleep-chasing poet to the vehemence of the oppressed slave may be
jarring, but as unsettling as such a passage may be, such subjective
fluidity invites readers to acknowledge a moment of absence and, in
effect, learn for themselves how Whitman invites his reader into the
text. As in the Lucifer passage, Whitman's absenting creates a
tangible locus for alien identification that simultaneously marks a
space for the reader to enter the text.
Before moving this argument from race to reading, I would like to
race—his turning over of poetic voice—was
revolutionary, the revolution has more to do with the connection
between race and the implied reader than with a "sympathetic poetry
about slaves."34 In writing race, Whitman discovers more about a
radical absenting of the mind than about race.35 In this light, we
can now return to the unwritten _Poem of the Black Person_ and
interpret it as a proper departure point for Whitman's race writing.
A closer look at Whitman's proposal to "infuse . . . their
passiveness—their character of sudden fits—the *[End
interpret it as a proper departure point for Whitman's race writing.
A closer look at Whitman's proposal to "infuse . . . their
passiveness—their character of sudden fits—the *[End
Page 935]* abstracted fit" will provide a clearer representation of
this absenting process.
One of the meanings of "abstracted" that Whitman would have known is
"absent in mind" (_OED_). While on one level the passage denotes the
black person's predilection for absent-minded paroxysms, the
point for Whitman's race writing. While "fit" appears here to denote
a violent tantrum, it may also suggest the way in which surfaces or
bodies or articles are adjusted and adapted to fit one another. In
this sense, we can read the near-afterthought of "the abstracted
fit" as the poet's absenting of the mind to accommodate or adjust to
a radically new subjectivity. More so than any particular
sympathetic portrayal, it is in this radical/racial absenting that
race stands at the theoretical heart of Whitman's democratic
poetics.
bodies or articles are adjusted and adapted to fit one another. In
this sense, we can read the near-afterthought of "the abstracted
fit" as the poet's absenting of the mind to accommodate or adjust to
a radically new subjectivity. More so than any particular
sympathetic portrayal, it is in this radical/racial absenting that
race stands at the theoretical heart of Whitman's democratic
poetics.
III. An Aesthetics of Absence
the athletic reader that Whitman calls for nor settles for a
textually emplaced reader who functions as passive recipient for the
poet's meaning. Whitman balances the apparent subordination of the
reader by creating momentary suspensions in the poem, replicating
the processes of absenting and possession discussed above. Wolfgang
Iser's theory of active reading, specifically his ideas about the
role of "textual blanks," helps to elaborate this process. Iser
contends that "[a]s blanks suspend connectability of textual
patterns, the resultant *[End Page 937]* break in _good
moments in the poem where Whitman suspends the poetic text: first,
to invoke the absence of writing and, second, to absent himself from
the poem.
Whitman initiates this absenting process in section 4—the
short, five-line passage that serves as both coda _in medias res_
and the transition to the aggressive thrust of his initial fusing
approach: *[End Page 939]*
address to the reader, the more immediate and obvious metonymic
association would be with the reader. Opposed to the idea of poetic
reversion that underlies both Cohen's and Gilbert's readings, "Flow
on, river/reader!" preserves the continuity of the poem while
enacting the release of the text to the reader and the absenting of
the poet which began in section 4. The transition from suspension
and absence to the animated commands of the final section is
grounded in the shared experience of the poem and plays upon the
give-and-take between the reader's memory and expectation.49 If we
44. Roger Gilbert, "From Anxiety to Power: Grammar and Crisis in
'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,'" _Nineteenth-Century Literature_ 42
(1987): 341. Gilbert examines the interplay of the constative and
performative qualities of language in the poem to illustrate
Whitman's transcendence of the absenting and deadly qualities of
writing.
45. Cohen writes, "It seems that the recurrent fantasy of some
readers to be sexually possessed by Whitman may appear the case in a
facts speak for themselves. But neither is it simply the
autobiography of Eliza Wharton, the would-be heroine of her own tale
who would speak for herself at every turn. Where the sermonized
version of Eliza's tale goes wrong is easy to see, as epitomized in
the novel by Boyer's misreading and silencing of Eliza. Where
Eliza's version of the tale goes wrong is perhaps harder to
identify. But clearly it inheres in large measure in her fantastical
belief that she can refuse all choices and connections and still
control reception at every turn. The novel suggests that this
taste, or one's conception of autonomous selfhood in the first place--and in
the distortion of "common sense" produced thereby, to indicate the
possibility for radically transforming those conditions. If the literature of
Romanticism does not itself fulfill that role, it leaves at least a map of
misreading towards its possible realization. For the Romantics, after all, it
is not simply that in reading we read ourselves, but that in reading we read
ourselves as changed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
a mask) in which it is maintained for a certain time, through an at
least minimally complex extravagance, before returning to the
quiescence of the nonnarratable.13
The ladies' collective misreading of the Brunoni/robbery connection
and the various hauntings that attend the text (Miss Matty has a
recurring dream of a phantom child, the ladies tell gruesome ghost
stories in the heat of the entirely imagined "panic") all seem to
derive from an absent and longed-for external stimulation that
that serves as scapegoat for the transcendent abstractions of the
sublime. This is a historical terrain; it emerges from the inequities
of history as they are inscribed in the metaphors of power. As such,
they have a power of resistance lent them by their situation, not
intrinsic to them, a utopian dissent located in the desiring body.
One should not perhaps say this with any hope or even with any belief.
We know how all determinisms seek us out wherever we hide and show us
that our most treasured utopian visions are the product of the same
fully naturalized in this account (the guitar's inspiration coming from
the wind), nonetheless there is a parallel narrative in which the
depths of the house are explored. A friend of the family's, Captain
Lorenzo, wanders through the house in search of a chest that the
woman's seafaring husband was supposed to have hidden somewhere in the
house. He "rummag[es] in the arches an' under the stairs, an' over in
some old closet where he reached out bottles an' stone jugs" (549). The
story of the guitar's animation is inseparable from the search through
the house, the investigation of all the dark insides of the house. The
that "The function of all this colonial exotica—whether tea
caddies from the other side of the equator or shells left on an
island from pre-Dunnet days—is to situate Dunnet at the
center of a far-flung empire. It does not matter that the town's
seafaring heyday has passed; Dunnet still occupies a position of
cultural power" (93).
7. In his appendix to _The Maine Woods_, Henry David Thoreau
discusses both the fir's lack of practical value and its abundance
"impediments" (215; and see Hinsley, _Smithsonian_ 83-123). The neglect
of trade (and thus the very idea that goods might circulate beyond the
reach of language) symptomatically demonstrates how thinking about
things--thinking about things as embodied thoughts--meant fetishizing
place, just as thinking about place meant fetishizing things.
Mason had previously joined Goode in asserting scientific authority by
analogizing ethnology to botany or zoology. Artifacts were grouped to
show the sequence of technological developments, invariable among
"simple country people" who "have a kind of fetichism" (103), she means
that they believe there is a "personality" in "what we call inanimate
things" (104). In _The Country of the Pointed Firs,_ Jewett permits no
such distancing and simplifying account of the local population: the
narrator herself participates in the fetishism, fetishizing the
landscape and villagescape. Not only are people perpetually
metaphorized as natural objects, but artifactual objects are thoroughly
personified (377). Despite the resulting atmosphere of mystery,
particular objects attain legibility, and what one reads is human
of human depravity" (103). Falkland applies the epithet to Caleb when
he accuses him of theft (162), and it is picked up by Forester (174).
Caleb finally applies the term to the legal system of tyranny: "Among
my melancholy reflections I tasked my memory, and counted over the
doors, the locks, the bolts, the chains, the massy walls and grated
windows that were between me and liberty. These, said I, are the
engines that tyranny sits down in cold and serious meditation to
invent. This is the empire that man exercises over man. . . . How
great must be his depravity or heedlessness who vindicates this
mirror of breath, in which Medusa's countenance is reflected back to
her. This self-reflection is dangerous; it threatens to fix Medusa
as victim, to leave her a trunkless head. Though "every-shifting"
("M," 5.37), the mirror contains her revolutionary potential,
revealing merely "a woman's countenance, with serpent-locks / Gazing
in death on heaven from those wet rocks" ("M," 5.39-40). To be
caught in this brazen glare is to stay in the dynamic of
oppressor/oppressed.
voices and speak for them. Both of these are mistakes that Shelley
wanted to avoid. Given this context, "the inextricable error" is
not, as McGann claims, Medusa's sin, which puts the blame on her,
but the violence of patriarchal oppression. This oppression kindles
the serpents' "brazen glare" and locks *[End Page 199]* the
oppressed into the position of victimized woman, in which her only
options seem violent retaliation or complicity in her own
victimization. In the intricate windings of this poem, the poet
attempts to save himself, the reader, and the victimized woman from
self-observation frequently produces a distortion of common sense--an
experience of doublevision, a relic of childish thought--as the condition of
invoking a _sensus communis_. Such narratives as the _Confessions_, with its
anxious opening address "To the Reader," embody this experimental act and so
compel its readers to encounter it in similarly embodied form. Underlying De
Quincey's pleading and his nervous sensitivity to reproach in those pages,
perhaps, is the recognition that the critical judgment is subject to the same
distortions. The _Confessions_ thus brings the rule of aesthetic judgment
into contact with the cognitive procedures that it mimes.
reciprocal gazing through the fluid medium of the text that
inscribes both writer and reader, neither at the expense of the
other.
Underlying this notion of a dual inscription is a concern with how
the text of the poem and, more specifically, writing itself
function. In a manner complementary to Cohen's reading, Roger
Gilbert claims that the poem primarily concerns Whitman's
confrontation with the reality of his own mortality, a confrontation
song-writer, and poetic parodist. 1 Thelwall's cultural production
illustrates the unstable boundaries between discrete discourses
(political, aesthetic, and legal), as his songs and allegories exist
in both oral and print cultures. As legal evidence for Thelwall's
and the London Corresponding Society's seditious and treasonous
intentions, these poetic texts are sites for conflicting
interpretations. The government's wish to punish what it perceives
as symbolic violence in the various texts is not unconnected with
the violence of the judicial system and of loyalist groups. In this
then put on trial and ultimately acquitted for publishing a
seditious allegory. The acquittal, an invigorating triumph for
London Jacobinism, inspires Thelwall to write yet another defiant
allegory that is published only after his own acquittal for treason
in 1794. The three songs he composed for the London Corresponding
Society that were used as evidence against him at his treason trial
Thelwall publishes in 1795 in his periodical, The Tribune, which,
however, is forced to discontinue because of the repressive
legislation passed at the end of 1795. At lectures during 1796 and
-----
At his trial for treason in 1794, the prosecution used as evidence
three of Thelwall's songs that were sung and distributed at London
Corresponding Society meetings and that he later published in The
Tribune. 3 One satirizes the military debacle at Toulon in 1793,
another the rhetoric of constitutionalism, "Britain's Glory; or, The
Blessings of a Good Constitution," and the third, the one I wish to
examine, is a more general satire, "A Sheepsheering Song." 4 His
dependent on print, for being collective rather than
individualistic, and for being the symbolic interaction of a
politicized group outside the purview of constitutionally sanctioned
authority. They were an indispensable component of democratic reform
dinners, London Corresponding Society meetings, radical assemblies,
and protests. Even after severely repressive legislation made open
political work impossible, radicals could still retreat to their
taverns and sing radical songs. Iain McCalman writes extensively of
the radical use of "free and easies" for political organizing and
He publishes the ballad after his own acquittal for treason, just as
he wrote the poem initially after Eaton's acquittal for sedition.
Indeed, the preface and text of the poem are celebratory,
commemorating a triumph over the forces of repression. The London
Corresponding Society celebrated by producing medals imprinted with
a Chaunticlere image. 22
The plot of the poem is as follows: The ghost of John Gilpin, a
comical character in Cowper's poem by that name, awakens "Lawyer
ed. Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland, 1978), iv. John Gilpin's
Ghost is hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by section and
line numbers and abbreviated J.
22. See Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding
Society, 1792-1799, ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1983), 117 n. 50.
23. Steven E. Jones, Shelley's Satire (De Kalb: Northern Illinois
fleecing are used interchangeably. The song's theme, "all the world
are sheerers" (S, 4), is developed in a series of vignettes
beginning appropriately in the country (S, 1-63), and culminating in
the city (S, 64-108). The song's humor comes from the contrast
between shearing as harmless cutting of sheep's wool and harmful "cutting" of people. The gleeful tone and satirical focus
are announced in the first stanza: BLOCKQUOTE
(S, 1-9)
are announced in the first stanza: BLOCKQUOTE
(S, 1-9)
Death has the last word, the final shearing. The refrain is an
almost absurd assertion, as "we" are depicted as willfully shearing,
despite ourselves. Pastoral symbolism inevitably suggests a parallel
between innocent sheep and innocent--or gullible--people, as well as
a parallel between shepherd and social authorities. However, the
(S, 1-9)
Death has the last word, the final shearing. The refrain is an
almost absurd assertion, as "we" are depicted as willfully shearing,
despite ourselves. Pastoral symbolism inevitably suggests a parallel
between innocent sheep and innocent--or gullible--people, as well as
a parallel between shepherd and social authorities. However, the
song pointedly [End Page 952] avoids the bathos of victimized
between innocent sheep and innocent--or gullible--people, as well as
a parallel between shepherd and social authorities. However, the
song pointedly [End Page 952] avoids the bathos of victimized
innocence. The sheep, after all, are "silly," and the song seems to
equate shearing with living in a world where it is shear or be
sheared--or more accurately, whether one shears or not, one will
inevitably be sheared, sooner or later.
After the introductory first stanza the song's first part, focusing
as "we" of "every rank and state" are fleecers of one sort or
another, but the song's disenchanted stance makes the assertion of
popular rights that much more compelling, as the difference in
degree is reinforced by the bone-picking image--suggesting that
governmental shearing is of a much more deadly nature than other
kinds--and as the "golden fleece" of freedom is one of the very few
images of transcendent value in the entire song. To risk death for
an ideal, in the context established by the song's meaning, is to be
extraordinarily heroic in a world of shearers. Although not
kinds--and as the "golden fleece" of freedom is one of the very few
images of transcendent value in the entire song. To risk death for
an ideal, in the context established by the song's meaning, is to be
extraordinarily heroic in a world of shearers. Although not
elaborated, a system of values counter to shearing is evoked by the
"golden fleece"--a fleece not marked by fraud, trickery, and
self-interest. [End Page 954]
As a song for an audience of mostly urban artisans and
whereby eventually the king would lose his life in a political
conflict. 5 Factors contributing to "Sheepsheering's" legally
treasonous status include its access to a popular audience, its
popular form as a song, its discrediting of the constitutionally
sanctioned opposition (the Whigs), the shearing symbolism's hinting
of the guillotine's decapitation of royalty and aristocrats, the
apocalyptic conclusion that evokes symbolically a revolutionary
transition, and in general the overall repudiation of ruling-class
legitimacy. The song takes for granted popular sovereignty; it is
(which made the slave account for only part of a human being for purposes of
state taxation and representation), Madison argued for QUOTE (Rossiter 337).
Whereas Marrant sentimentalizes familial relations (chiefly through the
biblical model of the Prodigal Son), Smith reduces them to the prosaic
realities of slave economy. In narrating his subjectivity out of the
Madisonian paradox underwriting slavery, Smith nonetheless perpetuates the
ideology of value endemic to slave capitalism. Like the character featured in
his own narrative, the autobiographer Smith commits the sin of slavery
(apparent, for example, in the epigraph from Thomas Clarkson). He commodifies
Brown: the writer fully broken down, too close to the scene of
trauma to go on. But here, unlike in Wieland and Edgar Huntly, the
narrative begins not with the writer at the end of the experiences
narrating them to a silent audience, but with the writer in the
midst of the experiences, narrating them to an audience who will not
only respond, but who will script his responses and actions as well.
For a short novel, the story is a fairly complex weave of love
triangles, in which Edward, previously (though lovelessly) engaged
from the struggle. ("Commerce," he wrote in his notebook in 1818,
"is a game where the merchant is one party & ruin the other.") 40
Irving also sees, like Tocqueville after him, that material
conditions in the United States make the family less capable of
narrating beyond the individual life. Irving contrasts his American
tales with a long description of a landed patriarchy in the
"Christmas" section of The Sketch Book. There, feudally guaranteed
continuity of a family, conceived as a web of property and class
relations, works to provide a framework of temporality for the
might seem to be an odd aspect of feudalism for Washington
Irving--youngest of eleven children in a mercantile family,
bachelor, expatriate--to embrace. And perhaps it is just because of
Irving's persistent unease with his own relation to such structures
that he kept narrating them with obsessively alienated longing.
"Rip Van Winkle" does not tell the story of reproduction's
incoherence for someone left out of it or dominated by it. This is
the story of someone who by the end will be called "one of the
the most egregious instantiation of the primary ideological failing
of Hawthorne's writing and thought: his use of the aesthetic to
excuse, contain, or conceal the political problem of race-based
slavery. Thus, Eric Cheyfitz has argued that Hawthorne's
aestheticizing of Black slaves provides "an alibi" for the status
quo, that is, the continuing *[End Page 252]* "dehumanization of
these people," while Nancy Bentley contends that such aestheticizing
allows Hawthorne to simultaneously acknowledge and "safely enclose"
an "emblem of the real political crisis," and Evan Carton traces how
excuse, contain, or conceal the political problem of race-based
slavery. Thus, Eric Cheyfitz has argued that Hawthorne's
aestheticizing of Black slaves provides "an alibi" for the status
quo, that is, the continuing *[End Page 252]* "dehumanization of
these people," while Nancy Bentley contends that such aestheticizing
allows Hawthorne to simultaneously acknowledge and "safely enclose"
an "emblem of the real political crisis," and Evan Carton traces how
the complex aesthetics of _The Marble Faun_ attempt to repress the
"actualities" of race and slavery.8 It is imagined, in short, that
Indeed, if _The Marble Faun_ can be seen as an experiment in
bestowing personhood upon the man/faun Donatello, then "Chiefly
About War Matters" can be seen as Hawthorne's redaction of this
literary experiment as an explicitly political one.16 By
aestheticizing slaves, Hawthorne expresses and constitutes rather
than represses and avoids knowledge about slavery, race, and
personhood. Hawthorne's representation of an essential
correspondence between fauns and slaves, in other words, is
inseparable from antebellum disputes over what the indisputable
Since Hawthorne's account of the truth of the Negro slave has been
thoroughly superseded—become a debate beyond
debate—it has perhaps become too easy to condemn Hawthorne's
aestheticizing as a fundamentally inadequate response to the reality
of slavery. However, to presume that Hawthorne is making an obvious
mistake about what slaves essentially are (displacing or mystifying
the truth) is to erase how intensely the facts of slavery were being
contested during the antebellum period and to treat the conceptual
the literal and the figural can be. Hilda reacts so strongly not to
the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall, but to the notion that
Donatello's murder could be transformed from the literal act of
murder into an abstract theological question. Hilda, in short, is
disgusted by Kenyon's aestheticizing, more than by his
theosophizing. This climactic scene reveals the extent to which the
aesthetic in general, and the Romance in particular, are dangerous
precisely because each depends on the effacing of the literal and
the erasing of the individual (in this case the Model). In this
theosophizing. This climactic scene reveals the extent to which the
aesthetic in general, and the Romance in particular, are dangerous
precisely because each depends on the effacing of the literal and
the erasing of the individual (in this case the Model). In this
text, aestheticizing looks a lot like murder.
VIII. Fauning Slaves
--------------------
but the danger of the aesthetic itself. Indeed, since Hawthorne
opposes the category of the aesthetic to individuality, it is
ultimately immaterial whether the Negro is beautiful or ugly. All
that matters is that the Negro is a fundamentally aesthetic
creature. By aestheticizing the Negro, in short, Hawthorne
crystallizes his understanding of the Negro problem: the Negro is
ineligible for personhood not because of how the Negro looks, but
because the Negro incarnates the aesthetic experience itself.
34. Campbell asserts, "I do not say one word concerning the question
of slavery, that is entirely foreign to the nature of my book" (11).
But he is quick to point out that "I loathe that hypocrisy which
claims the same mental, moral, and physical equality for the negro
which the whites possess" (11). Campbell's de-aestheticizing of
Black women must be considered in the context of the numerous white
slave owners who raped their Black slaves—one suspects that
at least part of the motivation behind Campbell's account of the
ugliness of the African woman is to convince his audience both that
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The location of racial injustice and of citizenship's rights and
responsibilities within the interiors of citizens' bodies, as I've suggested,
had consequences: naturalizing, individualizing, and simultaneously
universalizing republican values; placing the causes and consequences of
racial inequality beyond the reach of structural transformation; and
providing white Americans with a sense of interior "depth" that made
identification (and typically appropriation) of black suffering a requisite
rhetorical edifice of racial ideology and justifications (539). And
like O'Conor's arguments before the New York Court of Appeals,
Delany's making Judge Ballard the audience for Armsted's remarks
underscores the law's role as one of the primary components of any
naturalizing discourse. Most important, though, Delany's crucial
repetition of the phrase "self-interest" here and in the novel's
opening scene emphasizes the connection between individual,
apolitical slave owners and the business of illegal, international
slave trading. Although Armsted protests that he would hold whites
love--rather it is recognized by its ability to serve the good of the
national home.
Nations depend on discourses of affect to construct and inspire a sense of
unity and commonality while simultaneously naturalizing the social divisions
that make nations possible. Kailyard narratives, in like form, erase
differences as they erect them, authoring myths of racial and cultural
distinction while reinforcing divisions of inequality and histories of
subordination. Thus, it is important to see emotions as a constructed
feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever
myself" (L, 17). It is this "involuntary sympathetic emotion," with its
centripetal force, that Wollstonecraft paradoxically seeks in her solitary
rambles, an attempt to reanimate her fidelity to "simple fellow feeling" by
naturalizing the [End Page 916] construction of self-in-the-world in and
through her predominate metaphor, the "face of the country." Sweden, Norway,
and Denmark are, significantly, politically neutral countries in the war
between England and France, and as Mary Favret points out, "they seem poised
at the threshold between feudal and industrial societies, between monarchy
purlieus of the princely hierarchy and to transfer this traditional
affinity to the modern procedures of the dominating eye of
ethnographic science and media technology. Burke's repudiation of the
beautiful on the eve of the transition from the old regime to the
middle-class state, his gendering of the image, and his search through
the sublime for a new heroism of the abstract suitable to the emergent
society, seriously bring into question the present accepted wisdom on
this subject. It is clear that the sublime, at least in Burke's
influential formulation, far from originating a moment of individual
it as a point of resistance precisely because of its marginal status.
If Deleuze and Reik are right about the unyielding opposition of
masochism to all forms of superego constraints, images may not cling
as obstinately to the current modes of [End Page 427] subjection as
abstractions. They are, so to speak, left over. And the gendering
retained by images from earlier misogynistic characterizations endows
them paradoxically with a certain resistance to the new patriarchal
functions. More specifically, unchaining the image from the reflexes
of power permits it to challenge the metaphysics of the real insofar
demonstration. Arthur's secrecy enables the plot; Hetty's would
forestall it.
What is striking about the transgressions of Hetty, when seen in
light of Eliot's own concerns about the gendering of her authority,
is that, in each case, the key issue is the ability to give birth: in
her letter to Stowe, Eliot specifically links this life-giving power
to interpretive--and therefore authorial--skill, while it is Hetty's
unwanted and problematic pregnancy that disrupts the easy resolution
But in calling attention to his own failed act of representation, he
creates the possibility for another metaphor, even if he cannot
fully articulate it. In this rewriting of the victimized woman, as
in _Mask_, Shelley reveals the violence involved not only in the
gendering of oppression, but also in the representation of any
victimized subject.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
of character. The question for Fielding, then, is not so much whether a
given event is likely, but rather whether, given a certain concatenation of
accidents, characters behave in a manner consistent with his understanding
of human nature. Fielding's specific objection to the marvelous is not
simply that it is unlikely, but that it obscures verisimilitude.
But Fielding's sense of probability is not strictly limited to character,
though it is not extended to likelihood in the modern sense. Actions in Tom
Jones do not occur in isolation, and the interactions of characters follow a
accumulation by thrift that is suggested by the word "Threadneedle"
in the Bank's nickname. If the Bank is a house, its work is figured
as the unpaid needlework of the housewife. The metaphorization of
banking as housework then obscures women in their roles as wage
laborers, just as it obscures the substantial profits the state bank
takes in the money market. In fact, in this era low-wage piece-paid
sewing was a widespread occupation for both single and married
women, but figuring needlework as housework (a labor of love)
obscures needlework as wage labor and appears to evacuate women from
laborers, just as it obscures the substantial profits the state bank
takes in the money market. In fact, in this era low-wage piece-paid
sewing was a widespread occupation for both single and married
women, but figuring needlework as housework (a labor of love)
obscures needlework as wage labor and appears to evacuate women from
the money economy. As the seeming stability of the land economy
wears out, the bank and the middle-class home are propped up as
shelters from the whirling public world of circulation, imaginative
locations that provide an origin and end of value. Just as bank
on Nemo's desk, obscure Lady Dedlock's path and recall the snow-like
whirl of the Chancery papers. Esther's mother returns eventually to
Nemo's grave, and Esther finds her there, dead, the next morning.
When Esther identifies her mother's body, the whirling snow has
become the hair that obscures her mother's face: "I lifted the heavy
head, put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face" (B, 869).
This trope of the hair obscuring the face--the final mark of Lady
Dedlock's identity--recalls the focus throughout the novel on
Esther's own face, the face that was changed during her illness, by
sensitive to the potential tyranny of the majority. "If all mankind
minus one, were of one opinion," John Stuart Mill would plead in On
Liberty, "and only one person of the contrary opinion, mankind would
be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he
had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." 72
Which brings us back to the defamiliarization characteristic of the
Romantic imagination and to Malouf's paradoxical claim that only the
difficult and unfamiliar can "speak out of the centre of each one of
facts speak for themselves. But neither is it simply the
autobiography of Eliza Wharton, the would-be heroine of her own tale
who would speak for herself at every turn. Where the sermonized
version of Eliza's tale goes wrong is easy to see, as epitomized in
the novel by Boyer's misreading and silencing of Eliza. Where
Eliza's version of the tale goes wrong is perhaps harder to
identify. But clearly it inheres in large measure in her fantastical
belief that she can refuse all choices and connections and still
control reception at every turn. The novel suggests that this
aesthetic problem. Hawthorne's understanding of racial aesthetics,
in other words, needs to be distinguished from arguments that turned
to the self-evidently ugly surface of the Negro as objective proof
of Negro inferiority, as well as from those who sought to challenge
prevailing claims about Negro inferiority by foregrounding the
beauty of the Negro.
Hawthorne establishes a critique of conventional racist aesthetics
that looks nothing like the effort of Black intellectuals to invert
VII. the Fall
-------------
Although Rome may promote art, it certainly does not promote
morality.60 Indeed, _The Marble Faun_ culminates by foregrounding
the serious moral problems raised by the aesthetic environment of
Rome. Miriam, near the Romance's conclusion, offers Kenyon an
explanation, one that most critics have seconded, of what _The
Marble Faun_ is ultimately about: "The story of the Fall of Man! Is
the terror there" ("M," 5.38). Her mask reveals her misuse as a
symbol to stabilize conservative male authority. Shelley's ability
to recover Medusa's radical power depends not only on being able to
read this "woman's countenance," but also on reading behind it,
unmasking the image of patriarchal authority.
The critical moment in this revision of the victimized woman occurs
in stanza 2, a turning point in the poem in which Medusa's viewer is
offered a choice of transformation or reification, of reading her
affective and moral understandings" (Soper, Troubled Pleasures:
Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism [London: Verso, 1990], 14).
47. Fredric Jameson argues that Bloch's work on the utopian is premised
on the idea that "real philosophizing begins at home . . . in lived
experience itself and in its smallest details, in the body and its
sensations" (Marxism and Form [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971],
122).
This sense of the intervening narrator as problematic (and of secrecy
as morally ambiguous) is one that Eliot shared with other
mid-Victorian advocates of literary realism. Certainly for the
original critics of Eliot's novels, the intrusive philosophizing and
directive interpreting of their narrators is an aesthetic, if not a
moral, failing--a criticism whose motivation is understandable when
we consider how the narratorial intervention seems to undermine
cherished *[End Page 542]* Victorian claims for realism. 3 I would
with Blackwood following the publication of _Adam Bede_. Furthermore,
it is important to remember that one of the primary *[End Page 549]*
registers of this tension is aggressively evident from the first
novel to the last: the instructive, directive, expounding,
philosophizing narratorial intervention. Eliot's habit is to use the
intervention not only to direct her readers' interpretation of the
plot (to defend the plausibility of her tale), but also to
superintend their philosophical engagement with theories of narrative
and literary representation generally. The shape and tenor of these
something is the case? According to Stich, "we are, in effect,
comparing the believer to ourselves. We are saying that the believer
is in a cognitive state that would underlie our own normal assertion
of the content sentence." And of course from this it follows that
"we should have increasing difficulty in ascribing content to the
cognitive state of subjects, as those subjects become increasingly
different from us" (7, original emphasis). My thinking about
"History" and the "folk psychology" upon which much of it is based
is indebted to Stich's account. See also Donald Davidson, Inquiries
Widow, Pap, the King, and Duke, not to mention the robbers and killers
populating the river, all labor to impose their wills upon others.
Even Jim intuitively expects to wield such authority over his
daughter. When the girl, having unbeknownst to him lost her hearing,
appears to disobey his command, Jim exclaims, as a prelude to slapping
her, "'I lay I _make_ you mine'" (171). "Mine" here means "mind," as
in "mind me," but the difference is negligible. No less than Pap, who
thinks Huck's reward money belongs to him, Jim imagines his authority
over his child to be absolute and proprietary.
Garrison's citizenship-without-nations might usefully be *[End Page 39]*
called, building on Etienne Balibar, the citizen-form. 13 Garrison's
construction of the citizen-form provided the illusions Balibar attributes to
the nation, universalizing the state by making citizenship the result of
divine wisdom, while individualizing the state by asserting the reflection of
divine will in personal affect. Garrison's divorce of citizenship from the
nation begins with his public stand against institutional and political
organizations (a somewhat paradoxical stand given the vast nationalizing
network of antislavery societies Garrison operated within). As Garrison
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The location of racial injustice and of citizenship's rights and
responsibilities within the interiors of citizens' bodies, as I've suggested,
had consequences: naturalizing, individualizing, and simultaneously
universalizing republican values; placing the causes and consequences of
racial inequality beyond the reach of structural transformation; and
providing white Americans with a sense of interior "depth" that made
identification (and typically appropriation) of black suffering a requisite
individual as individual, but necessarily antagonistic to anything
individual that wasn't recuperated by the category of the citizen.
If the object of the taxonomic discourse was civic man, that
innately political animal, then the emergence of the figure of
economic man--constituted first and foremost by the individualizing
forces of interest--introduced a new and powerful element, one that
would have no truck with the sacrifice of the individual in civic
and moral philosophy.
nature of the art of government, discusses the possibility that the
ruler's art is like the shepherd's who cares for each individual
sheep in his flock." BLOCKQUOTE
Bearing in mind liberalism's coordination of individualizing and
totalizing forms of power, I suggest, allows us to draw into focus
Baillie's particular achievement: outstripping Smith, she reconciles
his dusty stoic philosophy to the new demands of economic man. If
the movement in _Wealth_ is notoriously individualizing, with the
Bearing in mind liberalism's coordination of individualizing and
totalizing forms of power, I suggest, allows us to draw into focus
Baillie's particular achievement: outstripping Smith, she reconciles
his dusty stoic philosophy to the new demands of economic man. If
the movement in _Wealth_ is notoriously individualizing, with the
priority of economic self-interest and the subsequent extension of
its benefits to a social totality, then the entrenchment of the
figure of stoic man in _Theory_ signals--first and foremost--an
orientation towards the sociopolitical and its totalizations. Smith
is important for its registration of the manner in which she engages
Smith's legacy. Significantly revising Smith's concept of the
sympathetic imagination, Baillie inflects Smithean sympathy with her
own idea of curiosity (and its cognates such as desire), and thus
enables the individualizing move that Smith's commitment to a
smooth, stoic surface cannot permit. "If man is an object of so much
attention to man," she argues, "engaged in the ordinary occurrences
of life, how much more does he excite his curiosity and interestwhen
placed in extraordinary situations of difficulty and distress?"
angry man produces a reaction in his observers that is wholly
un-Smithean.
Exploiting the "sympathetick curiosity of our nature," Baillie's
text deftly coordinates the individualizing force of desire with the
totalizing impulse of its orientation towards Smithean sociability,
and effects, in so doing, the moral regulation of the individual
subject. "What human creature is there," she asks, "who can behold a
being like himself under the violent agitation of those passions
transformations--political, economic, social, cultural--concomitant
with liberalism's development of an art of government. Neither
should the apparent stage failure of _De Monfort_ detract from what
I suggest is an achievement of much greater consequence.
Coordinating the individualizing force of interest-_cum_-curiosity
with the totalizing gesture of Smithean sociability, Baillie's
work--under the rubric of liberal governance--newly inflects that
age-old term: romantic freedom.
itself, often represented as a beautiful woman in nationalist
iconography. Night after night, we learn, the artist pries open the
box to gaze upon her remains. Wyatt dies for her on the Fourth of
July, a gesture of patriotic martyrdom, but in fact the lady is
already irrecoverably lost, corrupted. That her putrefying corpse
sinks into the Atlantic off Roanoke Island locates the nation's
apocalyptic ending in its beginnings, in the original act of
European *[End Page 18]* encroachment. The inscription Croatoan
became, in nationalist mythology, the cryptic trace of Governor
While this is the most significant of their editional decisions,
other choices also differ markedly from Franklin's. For example,
they represent most dashes with the same short QUOTE Franklin
employs but use an apostrophe for those that QUOTE They also
represent the wide spacing of words in Dickinson's late handwriting,
note marginal comments as such and by position on the page following
the text of a letter, describe some of the poet's QUOTE in the
notes, and reproduce canceled words in brackets. 4 [End Page 237] In
Hart and Smith's pages a poem is shaped quite differently from QUOTE
review hints at the belief in social hierarchy that underpins Poe's
notion not only of American social formations but also of how we are
to regard those formations: as successful or unsuccessful, faithful
or unfaithful reproductions of those founded in predecessor
documents. The phrase QUOTE invokes the idea of an actuating
principle--in Bradfield's words, a QUOTE --that does not address
existing institutions but instead digs below those superstructures
to the foundational, originary moment (the QUOTE ) when any number
of arrangements and concepts of relation were still possible (100).
regarded as intentional, inasmuch as changing our conception of
social relations (how they should be conducted, how they are
conducted) is never entirely disconnected from the potential to
revise and alter those structures and relations themselves. The
actuating QUOTE accessed through cosmology and through the founding
documents revises in the abstract but never abandons the possibility
of doing so in the flesh. 8
But Poe's concern with foundations extends beyond Eureka itself to
initially imagined as a means not only of cultivating Indian
interest but also of deferring intercultural war. 16 Louis de
Bonneville saw the establishment of trading posts on the southern
Plains as the only means of pacifying the Comanches, and the trader
James Beckwourth noted the pacifying effect of trade on the "simple
Crows," who "supposed that the posts, with their contents, were the
property of the nation, and that the whites who were in charge there
were their own agents" (365).
with those of Annie Russell, Adelina Patti, or Sam Devere--or, for that
matter, of the world of Thomas Edison. For early Edisonian hagiography, there
was no place for affectation or performance. The Dicksons' _Life and
Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison_ of 1894, quoted by the _NED,_ gives us the
image of "[a] dudish applicant, with an overweening sense of his own
self-importance" (230). But when we read the passage in its original context,
we can see that such an applicant "refused to perform some of the rough work
attendant on an important experiment" (230). Edison, we are told, "simply
apologized with elaborate courtesy," rolled up his sleeves, and got to work
For Hawthorne, unlike for many of his contemporaries, the crucial
question is not whether the Negro is physically beautiful or ugly,
precisely because he is suspicious of the aesthetic itself.
Hawthorne can align the Negro with the beautiful precisely because
he is interested not in critiquing standards of beauty, but in
revealing how the Negro must be understood as a fundamentally
aesthetic problem. Hawthorne's understanding of racial aesthetics,
in other words, needs to be distinguished from arguments that turned
to the self-evidently ugly surface of the Negro as objective proof
encounter with the Creature, for example, Victor describes the wind
"as if it were a dull ugly siroc on its way to consume [him]" (F,
176). While the sirocco is as invisible as wind and hence cannot,
strictly speaking, qualify as ugly, his pathetic fallacy is apt. For
as the "contaminating life" of the Creature spills out from his
overstretched skin to pursue Victor physically and psychologically,
it threatens to "consume" him and the entire symbolic order in which
he is implicated. Thus while it is couched in admittedly boyish
terms, William Frankenstein's fatal encounter with the
signification. In this way, an appreciation of the social dimension
of agency takes on ethical force.40 In my view, Butler's and de
Certeau's theories are not only suspect but also unethical, because
they *[End Page 742]* misrepresent how agency actually works. Ethics
must be capable of being realized: by repudiating, however
unwittingly, the social dimension within which all subjects and
their actions have any significance, they fail to appreciate what
ethics demands.
7. For example, it seems that John Rokesmith unwittingly teaches
Rogue Riderhood how to mount an effective blackmail (Rogue-smith?),
for the scene in Pleasant's shop where the disguised Harmon
intimidates Rogue into repudiating his charges against Hexam is
clearly echoed in Rogue's successful blackmail of Headstone in the
schoolroom. Trying to distinguish these two cases by arguing that
John acts from selfless or disinterested motives (to clear Hexam's
name for the Harmon murder) while Rogue doesn't (his own neck is at
supernatural authority which in turn commands specific kinds of
beliefs from the reader (CW, 4.1:440).
It is hardly surprising to find Coleridge in his notebooks
associating Warburton and even Evangelicals like Wilberforce and
Hannah More (as much as he might have agreed with their positions on
abolition) with the "Devil-Worship" of "Savages"; and The Friend
elsewhere derides popular journalism not because of its tendencies
towards social anarchy, but because of its attempts to appeal to an
22. William Morris, _News from Nowhere, and Other Writings_ (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1993), 112-13.
23. Cited in Philippe Jullian, _Oscar Wilde_ (London: Constable, 1969),
145-46.
24. Reported by Ellmann, 243.
63. Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind," in _Shelley's Poetry and
Prose_, 69, 68.
64. Cited in Morton D. Paley, "Apocapolitics: Allusion and Structure
in Shelley's _Mask of Anarchy_," _Huntington Library Quarterly_ 54
(1991): 100.
65. The "maniac maid" appears in several of Shelley's poems. See
Significantly, after the claim to humanize and harmonize the strain,
the poet's attention is deflected away from Medusa's "dead face" to
the activity of her serpentine hair; in fact, though the poet claims
her beauty to be humanizing, Medusa is least human in the third
stanza. This diversion suggests Shelley's resistance to the
humanizing impulse and his desire to imagine Medusa outside of
patriarchal logic. The poet's reflections now become caught up in
the energy and "unending involutions" ("M," 3.21) of the serpents.
the poet's attention is deflected away from Medusa's "dead face" to
the activity of her serpentine hair; in fact, though the poet claims
her beauty to be humanizing, Medusa is least human in the third
stanza. This diversion suggests Shelley's resistance to the
humanizing impulse and his desire to imagine Medusa outside of
patriarchal logic. The poet's reflections now become caught up in
the energy and "unending involutions" ("M," 3.21) of the serpents.
These snakes that "curl and flow" ("M," 3.19) with life, "as it were
to mock / The torture and the death within" ("M," 3.22-23), are less
than repeating Irving's assessment of democratic republicanism as
yet another form of QUOTE Shields forces us to rethink the politics
of colonial gender-formation in two ways. First, he suggests that
the emphasis within the clubs and salons on the importance of
personal and intimate speech ought to make us skeptical about our
axioms concerning the equation of print publication and political
power--for either [End Page 326] men or women. Given the general
avoidance of print as a means of literary dissemination within these
societies, the QUOTE to publish can be reconceived as a QUOTE
Howe's vigorous denunciation of the Great Organ and the ceremony surrounding
it suggests at the very least that she had more than Annie Fields in her
sights. Unnamed in her review but almost certainly among the targets of her
scorn was the Fieldses' [End Page 220] good friend Holmes, intimate of their
salon at 148 Charles Street, whose lengthy article on the organ, titled QUOTE
appeared in the November 1863 Atlantic Monthly. Holmes pronounced the organ's
unveiling QUOTE ; in his account, as in Fields's QUOTE it is as if the New
World's providential nation were rediscovering itself by its own efforts,
Union armies have been eloquently explored in recent criticism, as well as in
nineteenth-century accounts of their heroism. Black soldiers earned title in
their bodies by exposing them to fire; they affirmed self-ownership by
enlisting in the Union army and thus immediately surrendered what they had
affirmed in their submission to the intimate bodily disciplines of military
life. (Moreover, as Kirk Savage points out in his study of Civil War
monuments, free white soldiers under military discipline in both the Union
and Confederate armies also experienced in their own ways the paradoxes of
freedom imagined as bodily self-ownership.) 17 For Emerson, it seems fair to
down here, for if the "landmark pine" still seems to be a part of the
world of Dunnet Landing, the circus animals certainly do not. And yet,
given that the point of the story is precisely that Mr. Elijah Tilley
_does_ talk to the narrator, the account is meant to confer "new value"
on the intimate conversation she manages to have with him at his house
that evening. But though Elijah Tilley first enters the scene coming
softly "out of his dark fish house, as if it were a burrow," he keeps
"the afternoon watch" together with the narrator more as a human
statue, silent as he knits and forgets his visitor (472). However much
lives in Mrs. Todd's house "as if it were a larger body," she assumes
the woman's memories to the point of making them her own; the
collection of sketches that comprise the novel read as an incorporation
of recollections that suffuse the narratorial voice with the tone of
intimate local knowledge. 9
Like the title character of "The Queen's Twin," a Dunnet story that
Jewett didn't include in _The Country of the Pointed Firs,_ the
narrator of the novel lives her life vicariously. Abby Martin, "born
though to find there the ghost of the general himself. If Gaston
Bachelard is right to designate chests as "veritable organs of the
secret psychological life," the means by which we image and imagine
intimacy (74-89), then the display as described in _Harper's_ might be
said to insist on a kind of intimate knowledge one would never have
gotten from the general himself. The history in things here far exceeds
expectation, as the writer finally fantasizes a kind of contact with
the dead.
contract and that the Union was dissolvable when the interest of the parties
diverged and one or both withdrew consent. Dramatic increases in contract
litigation and divorce after 1800--and their gradual appropriation as the
regnant themes of American romance--helped redefine social relationships at
the most intimate levels of society, broadening the role of contract law as a
regulatory force in the domestic, as well as the political, domain. 28
Crucial to understanding reunion romancers' invocation of seventeenth-century
political theory is that they sought not to trace the Constitution's meaning
na�vet� represents whites' habitual blindness to the crucial roles
people of color have historically played in the Western Hemisphere's
economy. Moreover, as Lori Merish astutely writes, the judge clings
to the notion of the cigar as an implicitly white commodity and is
therefore horrified by the symbolic recuperation of Cubans' intimate
relationship with the cigar that stems from the production process
(276). And similar to the earlier scene in which Ballard's wife and
Colonel Franks mix notions of civility and political economy as they
discuss slavery, Delany uses Ballard's foolishness subtly to protest
greatest intimacy with him.
Andrea and his wife are simultaneously close to each other and remote. The
parenthetical aside, "--forgive now--" (13), framed by dashes, sets the
weakly conciliatory but intimate domestic tone. The illusion of intimacy
is shatterd, however, by the chain of friends and lovers that intrude
betweeen them. Andrea is forced to please, not just his wife's friend, but
her "friend's friend," in a vista of receding obligations (5). Smooth
run-ons mime the ease and quietude of their married life. But that
Does the preposition "behind" have a spatial or a temporal meaning? Is
Andrea referring to the great canvases that are literally "behind" them,
lining the walls of his studio, and which Lucrezia could see if she
bothered to turn her head? Or is he alluding to the more intimate
pleasures of the marriage bed, which appear to have receded into a lost
paradise for both of them?
The bad faith and casuistry that abound in many Victorian and modern
rejection of use itself, but rather of an instrumental use-value that
can only relate to objects in terms of mere utility. What is thus
liberated from the drudgery of use-value is a different valorization of
use, which, in its refusal of mere utility, maintains the integrity of
objects and, crucially, makes possible an intimate relationship to
them.
Relations of nonidentity function in The Picture of Dorian Gray on a
number of different levels. In terms of defining the national body, as
speaks is not sustainable within the evolving relations of Dorian's
story or its eventual culmination. His progression towards an ever
greater narcissistic identification with his portrait ultimately denies
the kind of distinctness between subject and object that makes possible
an intimate relationship to objects. To recover that relation of
intimacy without the [End Page 188] domination of the object by the
subject: that is the utopian promise of Wilde's collection. Still
caught between the utopian and the present, the Age of Dorian stages a
dialectic of contradictions, a dialectic which does not so much offer
Veil."
The telepathic and scientific narrative devices that outline
Bertha's thoughts and the inadequate science Lydgate uses to
interpret Laure and Rosamond have given way to a still more intimate
version of the relationship Eliot and Lewes found between physiology
and the representation of consciousness. For the narrative of Daniel
Deronda uses the association between the two not to assess the
deficiencies of a superficial science (as with Lydgate) or even to
one's ancestors or as the point at which founding fathers begin. The
repainting of the sign has been a simple change of caption. The face
of one George will do for [End Page 789] another, and the paternal
image reproduces itself under a new name. For Irving, the
superficial naming of the portrait is an intimate self-reference; he
was born just five days before George III officially acknowledged
the cessation of arms that Yorktown had made inevitable, and his
christening commemorated the event. In a story Irving frequently
told, and encouraged others to retell, his Scottish nanny carried
Both from the standpoint of the family's moral vision for adults and
from the standpoint of what Marx called "the poetics of the future,"
Irving can only imagine life outside of the intense patriarchalism
of Bracebridge Hall by imagining the development of intimate
cultures outside the family, mediations that he is nevertheless
tempted to depict as surrogacies. Irving's writings show how
reproductive narrative exerts itself, often successfully, against a
lot of half-articulate discontent. But it also shows that some
In our own day, with more and more forms of surrogacy challenging
the forms of reproductive ideology--from public schooling, to the
social movement form, to lesbian parenting, to queer culture--the
strenuous attack in the name of family values has targeted an
extrafamilial intimate culture that we are still learning how to
have. Perhaps we will learn to think of it as something other than
surrogacy, to see in these conditions a future in which reproductive
narrative will appear as an archaism.
often used to describe the telegraph's province, referred not simply
to business transactions, but, as the _Webster's Dictionary_ of the
era euphemistically phrased it, "Familiar intercourse between the
sexes." This sexual aspect of the telegraphic union, its ability to
unify the nation in "closest and most intimate relations" through a
"subtle fluid," is underlined by the frequency and popularity of
anecdotes about couples who married over the telegraph. 18 Uniting
the nation into one great body, by annihilating space and time and
the bodily boundaries insured by the separations of geography and
these figures is a relation to the logic of slavery which compels
Poe's obsessive white male narrators to make violent use of the
distinctions of gender, the better to substantiate the distinctions
of race. And that gendered violence in turn unsettles the
possibilities of intimacy and of intimate exchange. Nor is Poe's
move to make gender ratify race a particularly idiosyncratic one. We
might remember, in this regard, the populist movement for the full
enfranchisement of free white men that gathered momentum across the
1830s and 1840s, a movement which coupled the opening of the
October 1849, the day of Poe's funeral. In his slanderous and
enduring biographical sketch (which came out in the New York _Daily
Tribune_, and which Griswald signed "Ludwig"), he notes typically of
"The Raven" that it "was probably much more nearly than has been
supposed, even by those who were very intimate with him, a
reflection and an echo of his own history." Quoted in _Recognition_,
33. Two of the more celebrated studies which followed Griswald's
psychobiographical line were Joseph Wood Krutch's _Edgar Allan Poe:
A Study in Genius_ (New York: Knopf, 1926), and Marie Bonaparte's
carefully sustaining a sense of ambiguity concerning the most important
facts. Key descriptions, for example, are purposefully vague; the tantalized
reader is left to speculate--to imagine, that is, but also to engage in a
sort of imaginative, interior spectatorship-- what the spectral woman's
"diabolical countenance" or the unfathomable "grin which seemed to intimate
the malice and the derision of an incarnate fiend" might actually look like.
The central image in the story is slightly out of focus, somewhat like a
blurry photograph in which one can just barely discern the outlines of a
person or object: "Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse were
The rhetoric of calm, transparency, and immediacy pervading this
passage seems to guarantee its verisimilitude: here, of all the
descriptions of whales offered by the novel, it appears to promise
the reader a clear view of the intimate natural life of the animal,
devoid of literary or symbolic coloration. *[End Page 1053]*
Of course this is far from being the case. As Vincent has argued,
the passage draws closely upon descriptions of nursing whales in
or not such a crossing would remain cloaked in the trappings of
death—writing, as Gilbert would have it. The real issue,
however, is that such a quandary is necessary only because both
Gilbert and Cohen work from the assumption that absence is anathema,
a space to be feared for its intimate association with subordination
and, ultimately, death. "Brooklyn Ferry" suggests something
completely different. As the poem proceeds, Whitman gradually
displaces the negative connotations of absence, transforming absence
into a space open for possession from outside the text. Moreover,
III.
----
John Hoole cut a figure amongst the late-Georgian literary set as a
translator of the Italian poets.34 He was intimate with Johnson
*[End Page 979]* himself, and friends with Burney, Joshua Reynolds,
and Richard Glover; but the writers of the succeeding generation,
Wordsworth's peers, were not charitable to his posthumous reputation
as a man of letters. Walter Scott called his translation of Tasso a
Moore's description of the telegraph as "fetter[ing] the hoary
potentate of storms on his very throne . . . [to] do the weak
bidding of man" (_T_, 15:109). Again and again, in fact, both
Northern and Southern commentators drew upon the idea of the
telegraph as enslaving the mysterious power of electricity: "The
invisible, imponderable substance, force, whatever it be . . . is
brought under our control to do our errands, like *[End Page 814]*
any menial, nay, like a very slave"; "It holds the terrible slave
[electricity] toil in the empire of a master." 26 The telegraph was
27. Joseph Henry (1859), quoted in Czitrom, _Media and the American
Mind_, 4; "Morse's Electro-Magnetic Telegraph," 133.
28. Abolitionists used this link between enslaving men and nature to argue that the South had become dependent upon slavery
because of its lack of technology. In 1854, for example, Theodore
Parker pointed out that "[w]hile South Carolina has taken men from
Africa, and made them slaves, New England has taken possession of
apocalyptic (Abrams), that which would foreground the historical elements of
Wordsworth's poetry (Thompson), and later deconstructive critics who would
find meaning in Wordsworthian figurative language (de Man). These traditions
are recast in this model to privilege Wordsworth's antithetical reference to
the real, in Liu's words, as "historicized figuration."
16. Perhaps the most forcefully leveled criticism of Liu has been aimed by
Liu at himself, both in the work in question and in subsequent publications.
See, for example, his "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism,
horribile quod non nominandum est_" (a variation on "the love that dare not
speak its name"--here, the horrible crime which is not to be named); in the
second, a character in Nancy Mitford's _The Pursuit of Love_ (1945) is told
not to mention Wilde's name by his father and is told by his mother only that
whatever he had done "was worse than murder, fearfully bad." Echoing Lord
Henry's comments about murder and secrecy, he is further asked, "And darling,
don't talk about him at meals, will you?" Name and crime coincide, then, as
synonyms which both need to be suppressed, since they so directly conjure
each other. 34 *[End Page 512]*
Scholars of the national tale have noted its engagement with the
defamiliarizing shock of cultural difference, a shock that Ina Ferris has
recently argued produces "destabilizing energies" which "place certain forms
of metropolitan reason under pressure and loosen their configuration." 36 But
The O'Briens offers a rare twist: the defamiliarizing shock is experienced
not by an English stranger, but a former native who is, moreover, the last of
an ancient Irish family. And that shock is neither educational nor
conciliatory, but marks, viscerally, O'Brien's alienation from his national
history and the people it defines. While Morgan's early novel, The Wild Irish
Described in this manner, "Frost at Midnight" offers a straightforwardly
diachronic solution to the problem it presents: the sound education that was
wanting in Coleridge himself will be realized in Hartley, who will come to
have a more solid grounding in common sense. The poem reaches its conclusion
when the speaker's consciousness reflects an awareness of this "regenerate
companionship," in Parker's words, and so learns to rejoice in it. Parker is
certainly correct to discern the most significant movement in the poem as one
*[End Page 133]* of consciousness towards this apprehension. Yet "Frost at
Midnight" is also, and just as obviously, an exploration of the mechanisms of
"self-watching." 50
In Parker's reading of the poem, and in many readings since, it is precisely
this state of "self-watching" that represents the tyranny of the solipsistic
mentality over the consciousness of regenerate companionship. Indeed, there
has been considerable critical consensus that the poem depicts the process by
which one overcomes self-consciousness, or at least attempts to do so. 51 Yet
this interpretation fails to account for why Coleridge's poem would itself be
represented as a toy of the self-watching mind, a reflection on the activity
turn to Hartley in the final movement of the poem, Coleridge wishes to
indicate the ultimate necessity of socializing these "[a]bstruser musings"
("F," 6). Yet while, on the one hand, "Frost at Midnight" seems to advocate
abandoning the preoccupations of the "self-watching subtilizing mind" for the
consciousness of a regenerate companionship, on the other, the poem suggests
that it is only within and through such self-observation that one may
establish those more permanent connections in the first place. 52
My argument, then, is that it is not by overcoming so much as by intensifying
The conditions that Reid elaborates for the illumination of common sense--the
activity of attentive self-observation, resulting in the violation of
commonsensical perception--have proven similar to those which Coleridge
imagines as the condition of a regenerate apprehension of community in "Frost
at Midnight." In both cases, self-observation is meant to lead beyond itself
to the firm faith in a common sense. Yet I have been arguing that we can best
understand *[End Page 136]* "Frost at Midnight" and other poems of this kind
not as efforts to overcome self-consciousness so much as attempts to
Dolls, and Eugene Wrayburn, Dickens is forging with extraordinary
intensity a Bakhtinian architectonics that counters the architecture
of the dust mounds. The entire architectonic of the world one
projects out of one's own inner affirmation and self-sensation must
always be radically restructured by the authoring or co-creating
that the other performs as the self's indispensable partner. 58 But
this partnership [End Page 781] cannot be a fusion. One must be able
to live in the other's consciousness but also to return to one's own
dialogic position in order to sustain the authoring--and
always be radically restructured by the authoring or co-creating
that the other performs as the self's indispensable partner. 58 But
this partnership [End Page 781] cannot be a fusion. One must be able
to live in the other's consciousness but also to return to one's own
dialogic position in order to sustain the authoring--and
answering--activity that constitutes the architectonics, or
orienting framework, of perceived meaning.
Jenny Wren is Dickens's supreme example of this activity. Jenny has,
Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number, followed
by book and chapter number since there is no standard edition of the
novel.
3. Issues concerning reading, authoring, performative relations, and
the text as figure in Our Mutual Friend have been much discussed.
See especially: Robert S. Baker, "Imagination and Literacy in
Dickens's Our Mutual Friend," Criticism 18 (1976): 57-72; Stanley
Friedman, "A Loose Thread in Our Mutual Friend," Dickens Studies
According to Hawthorne, the Negro does not belong in America
precisely because the Negro, like an aesthetic object, inaugurates a
tension between the *[End Page 275]* literal and the figurative, the
material and the transcendent, the interior and the exterior. By
linking the Negro race to the aesthetic, Hawthorne isolates the
danger of the Negro as fundamentally analogous to the danger posed
by the aesthetic.
Indeed, by rendering Black slaves as analogous to aesthetic objects,
their happiness? _Shirley_ answers this question by viewing marriage
relative to a larger dilemma about being a citizen, with
responsibilities to others, nagging doubts about what constitutes a
desirable group tie, and a host of unspoken expectations that
impedes the autonomy of individuals. Partly because interpersonal
enmity glides so easily into community warfare, the novel often
implies that group ties aren't worth the effort. *[End Page 212]*
To stress this point, the narrator begins the novel in 1812, close
Picturesque. Irregular variety is its life.32
The picturesque involves a struggle to attain a complete idea, with
the main idea to be attained less that of an object than of what
impedes totalization in an object. It implies a complex, diverse
material, having "the infinite divisibility of matter," and too many
parts to fit into some general plan.33 Or, the idea we have of it is
too general, too abstract—an outline or a
silhouette—to account for any but the largest divisions. The
too. Preparing to describe the multiple settings of his Armadale,
Wilkie Collins visited, among other places, the Isle of Man, Great
Yarmouth, and Naples. (Like Dickens, Collins was not a keen rail
traveler. As Catherine Peters notes, "[t]he man who so often used
trains in the plots of his novels hated travelling by them.") 64
The time-consciousness of the sensation novel is emblematized by the
role that "telegraphic messages" (the latter an offshoot of the
railway) play. 65 Thanks to the new networks of communication, not a
grave"--the life that remains, the vitality of human interests and
passions that is "the essence of humanism" and central to the
Renaissance, is here framed by the grave (which is figured by "his
actual work" that "has passed away," rather than by the death of his
body--he is entombed by his own writings!). We might interpret this
passage as suggesting that amidst the "death" of Pico's works (their
failure to provide a satisfactory solution to the tension between
pagan and Christian), there is still available for us the vitality
that produced them, the animating spirit that seeks to reconcile the
the "triumph of Christianity." 22 They are now "unfortunate
emigrants," and Apollo, suspect "on account of his beautiful
singing," (R, 24) is believed to be a vampire, and the last words
Pater quotes are "But they found the grave empty" (R, 25) (the
villagers had gone to drive a stake through the body of the entombed
Apollo, recently executed for being a pagan god). The Renaissance,
for Pater, may consist of a rediscovery, even a bringing back to
life, of a Greek spirit--"the care for physical beauty, the worship
of the body" (R, xxii)--but life is now also an experience of exile
"there are many misteries contained in Poetrie, which of purpose
were written darkely, lest by prophane wits, it should bee abused"
(Sir Philip Sidney). 22
As well as being willfully obfuscate, Pindar's poetry is also
relatively obscure. All poetry draws upon and often explicitly
alludes to knowledges or beliefs or contexts of varying degrees of
familiarity. "Zeus" would elude some readers, for example, "the holy
bird of Zeus" more. And without editorial mediation, how many of us
mysterious and unintelligible language," comparable with
Wordsworth's "talent for enveloping a plain and trite observation in
all the mock majesty of solemn verbosity." 29 Working variations on
the single theme of poetic difficulty in Wordsworth, Jeffrey
dismisses line after line and poem after poem as wantonly obfuscate
and thus an insult to the reader or the reading public: "it is often
extremely difficult for the most skilful and attentive student to
obtain a glimpse of the author's meaning--and altogether impossible
for an ordinary reader to conjecture what he is about." 30
which poems like Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam can be seen as
part of a continuum which included the political missives to the
nation that Shelley distributed by sea, in bottles, and by air
balloon. 59 The other mode of poetry was difficult and obscure, if
just this side of obfuscate: "My purpose has hitherto been simply to
familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select
classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral
excellence," he wrote in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, a poem
for which he at one stage envisaged as few as half a dozen readers.
sexes." This sexual aspect of the telegraphic union, its ability to
unify the nation in "closest and most intimate relations" through a
"subtle fluid," is underlined by the frequency and popularity of
anecdotes about couples who married over the telegraph. 18 Uniting
the nation into one great body, by annihilating space and time and
the bodily boundaries insured by the separations of geography and
history, the telegraph conjured up images not simply of the nervous
system, but of blood and semen, of a flow of all sorts of bodily
fluids. Through its subtle fluid, telegraphic commerce created a
paradigms of race posited it in terms of either space (geographical
determinism as biological essentialism) or time (cultural difference
in terms of progressive, civilizationalist history), the telegraph's
annihilation of space and time threatened to annihilate the very
determinants of racial difference. By annihilating space and time
through the medium of a spiritual yet physical fluid, the telegraph
was imagined to make not just geographic boundaries fluid but also
bodily and, specifically, racial boundaries fluid. Frederick
Douglass suggests this collapsing of racial distinctions through
the conditions of intellectual and social life under the
historically inscribed process of secularization that contributed to
shifts in the meaning of oneness, the nature of the transcendental
term (whether the One is read as QUOTE or QUOTE ), and thus the
conditions for legitimating social and/or theological formations.
The crisis to which Poe is responding is one of authority. Although
the nation's founding documents had transferred the foundational
power wielded by theology, or at least the responsibility of
wielding it, to political and social structures (Ferguson 415-25),
literary culture both distinctively national and concerned with
social as well as aesthetic matters, is carrying forward concerns
articulated by the Wits 50 years earlier (Parrington ix-xlviii). At
the same time, Poe transforms those concerns by exploring the idea
that the efficacy of literary texts intent upon legitimating,
supplementing, or revising social organization lies in their
attention not to explicit political practices but rather to the
relation of particulars in the abstract. Poe is talking about not so
much founding literary culture itself as founding a certain notion
particularly effective strategy for legitimating the nonpersonhood
of the Negro. In _Negro-Mania_ (1851), for example, John Campbell
explains that BLOCKQUOTE
According to Campbell, who is less interested in legitimating the
institution of slavery than in refuting claims for Negro equality,
the universal truth of aesthetic categories—embodied, as one
might expect, in the figure of the woman—makes clear the
inevitability of existing racial divisions.34 The beautiful and the
Garrison's citizenship-without-nations might usefully be *[End Page 39]*
called, building on Etienne Balibar, the citizen-form. 13 Garrison's
construction of the citizen-form provided the illusions Balibar attributes to
the nation, universalizing the state by making citizenship the result of
divine wisdom, while individualizing the state by asserting the reflection of
divine will in personal affect. Garrison's divorce of citizenship from the
nation begins with his public stand against institutional and political
organizations (a somewhat paradoxical stand given the vast nationalizing
church, and state--here becomes the precondition first of white sympathy and
then of its definitional corollary, civil entitlement. To love the
unappealable name of the Father is to accept the sins of whiteness.
In the _Address,_ Garrison sutures the universalizing and irresistible
imperatives of divine law to the social work of nineteenth-century
citizenship and labor: "I beseech you fail not, on your part, to lead quiet
and orderly lives. Let all quarreling, all dram-drinking, all profanity, and
violence, all division, be confined to the white people. Imitate them in
The location of racial injustice and of citizenship's rights and
responsibilities within the interiors of citizens' bodies, as I've suggested,
had consequences: naturalizing, individualizing, and simultaneously
universalizing republican values; placing the causes and consequences of
racial inequality beyond the reach of structural transformation; and
providing white Americans with a sense of interior "depth" that made
identification (and typically appropriation) of black suffering a requisite
of public authority. The degree to which the interiorization of racial
the face, the one dissevered from her body? Was it even possible to
use gender differently as a sign in the specific context of 1819
political representations? That is, given the dominant metaphor of
victim and victimizer, was it possible to make use of the figure of
the victimized woman in a way that was not reifying, not apotropaic,
and not affirming the victim as victim? Was it possible to represent
victimization without appropriating the *[End Page 186]* victim?51
These are the very questions that Shelley was exploring in 1819 and
feared he could not answer.
reaffirms the depth of the violation of the political protestors at
Manchester and forecasts the potential violent uprising of the
oppressed. In this act of ventriloquism, however, Shelley recognizes
the necessity and danger of retaliation and articulates it through
the agency of her voice. In contrast to Cruikshank's reifying
representation of woman as victim, Shelley's words underscore her
power. Moreover, Shelley's repetition of Beatrice's words
foregrounds a crisis of representation—the very issue at
stake in the reform movement—that is both political and
the pun makes clear how near *[End Page 198]* Shelley's task is to
the patriarchal one, it also creates a critical difference. Unlike
the poet, neither bat nor eft nor Perseus risks being turned to
stone. And, in light of stanza 2, it is this moment of
transformation that reveals the possible choice of reifying or
transforming one's view of the victimized woman. The poetic mirror
that Shelley uses is not reflective but refractive. Its transforming
powers enable him to see the "thrilling vapour," and it reveals the
"woman's countenance" athwart this revolutionary force as a
26. Rodolphe Gash�, "'Setzung' and 'Ubersetzung': Notes on Paul de Man,"
_Diacritics_ 11.4 (1981): 48.
27. Gash�, summarizing de Man, 47.
28. Liu, _Wordsworth_, 35; de Man, "Rhetoric," 207.
29. See Liu's reading of _The Prelude_'s Simplon Pass episode (_Wordsworth_,
further reveals the cartoon's ambivalent politics. The ancient
regime was associated with masks and masques, and the mask became a
symbol of corruption; the Revolutionaries saw themselves as
unmasking the corruption.39 Shelley, in fact, situates his _Mask_ in
this tradition of masking by punning on "mask" and "masque."40 The
cartoon, though, associates the values of the French Revolutionaries
with the conservative side by implying that they unmask Death, and
it aligns *[End Page 182]* radical reform with corruption and
deception. But, again, the image is ambiguous: what does it mean to
But is it? What kind of lie is this if the poem claims overtly that
it lies? Within the first five lines, the repeated and contradictory
use of lies ("It lieth" and "it seems to lie" ["M," 1.5]) makes the
reader self-consciously *[End Page 195]* aware of the object's lie,
of its position. This punning suggests that this victimized woman is
not what she first seems. Critically, Shelley never transforms
Medusa into a woman; it is never "she," but a "woman's countenance,"
a mask. Much as Radical Reform wears a mask over his death-like face
in Cruikshank's cartoon, much as Murder wears a mask like
his own). In this way Garth represents Eliot's symbolic attempt to
professionalize all business among the middle classes, supplanting an ethos
of capitalist competition with one based on meritorious service. 64
In Eliot as in Dickens, a professional mode of conceptualizing male
middle-class identity thus operates largely by implicit analogy rather than
opposition to a domestic ideal that is more typically attributed to women and
the home. Both novels thereby indicate the need to supplement Armstrong's
critical account of domesticity, by paying sustained attention to the
We come now to the second trial of Poe's experiment, in which he
grapples with the volatile character of the material and struggles
to calculate the minimum requirement for hierarchy, the point at
which the structural mediation of relations has not yet foreclosed
the possibility of ever overcoming mediation and actualizing
immediacy. Eureka, like the Constitution, wrestles with the paradox
that equality in relation cannot be practiced unless instituted
between persons, unless compromised by the very social formation
that actualizes it. 20 Poe expresses this paradox as a natural law:
realities and sources of Haitian history while also embracing the varied
contexts of its narration. There are QUOTE Faubert writes in the
introduction: QUOTE (29-30). Faubert's warning speaks not only to
contemporaneous Haitian [End Page 417] readers who might condemn Og� but to
those international readers of Haitian history who were disavowing Haiti's
independent nationhood throughout much of the nineteenth century. The
con-tingent unfolding of political events, he argues, appears entirely
different when examined within alternative historical and literary frames.
----. "Guevara on the Veneration of Images." _Brownson's Quarterly Review_
Jan. 1850: 39-60.
----. "The Laboring Classes." [Rev. of _Chartism_ by Thomas Carlyle.] _Boston
Quarterly_ July and Oct. 1840: 358-95, 420-512.
----. "The Literary Policy of the Church of Rome." _Brownson's Quarterly
Review_ Jan. 1845: 1-28.
undisciplined feeling. I feel so much because I must feel so little.
The entire plot of The Heir of Redclyffe, for instance, consists of the
hot-tempered Sir Guy Morville's exhausting and violent suppressions of
feelings of rage and vengefulness in response to the continuing
provocations of his cousin and rival, the upwardly mobile, perfectly
controlled, Philip Morville. In this High Anglican version of status
anxiety the aristocratic Sir Guy must acquire the sobriety and
self-discipline of the self-made man through repeated renunciations of
35. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy
to Heaney (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 4. Ramazani
notes, "Sometimes punishing themselves, thereby avenging the dead
and deflecting hostility inward, at other times modern elegists turn
their rage outward, attacking and debasing the dead" (5). Andrew
Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1995), 142-43. Support for this reading comes from an
analysis of the character of the poem's speaker (identified in the
manuscript as R. Alcona) that relies less on her self-presentation
God's divine vengeance (God as the principle of awe, terror, and
wrath) crushes man, who is no more than an insect on the face of this
earth: hence the references to blasting, insect, and vermin. Divine
wrath is a paroxysm of rage, but also of madness--thus there is a
connecting point with madness here (paroxysm of rage, paroxysm of
madness). 36 God as destiny is also responsible for unexplained and
mysterious events; hence the cluster fatality and calamity (which
links with tragedy in the theatrical arena). The field of reference
SUBLIME also includes a sub-area in which martyrdom and the sublime
Godwin critiques the concept of Christian divinity as figured in the
God of punishment and terror: violence and ferocity in this novel
tend to be cover-ups for guilty secrets. If God is as divinely
benevolent as described in the Scriptures, He should have no need for
divine rage, nor should the novel's figures of corrupted divinity,
Falkland and Tyrrel, need to be in the grip of paroxysm and insane
frenzy.
The term sublime is applied in the novel to several people, to
designations does Caleb go on to praise the "benevolence of his
actions," his "integrity," and adds [End Page 868] that his household
(not Caleb himself!) "regarded him upon the whole with veneration as
being of a superior order" (7). Falkland then surprises Caleb at his
trunk, evokes a reaction of thunderous rage in the course of which
Falkland calls him a "spy," "villain," and "wretch" (8), and this
leads into Mr. Collins's narrative about Falkland in chapter 2.
Collins, we should note, does not once use the term sublime in
reference to Falkland but exclusively applies the label to Mr. Clare;
BLOCKQUOTE
Mr. Clare, in his work, inspires sublime "transport," but he himself
is unaware of his own superiority. His major influence consists in
convincing people without producing resentment or displaying rage.
[End Page 869] Clare, unlike the terrible God of vengeance, that is,
unlike Falkland, astonishes without thunder. 46 In fact, Clare is an
idealized picture of Edmund Burke, without Burke's characteristic
rage--a feature given to Falkland in the novel. 47 Clare's
convincing people without producing resentment or displaying rage.
[End Page 869] Clare, unlike the terrible God of vengeance, that is,
unlike Falkland, astonishes without thunder. 46 In fact, Clare is an
idealized picture of Edmund Burke, without Burke's characteristic
rage--a feature given to Falkland in the novel. 47 Clare's
persuasiveness derives from inspiration and sympathetic influence on
his listeners: "Mr. Clare carried it home to the heart"; "the
countenances of his auditors . . . sympathised with the passions of
the composition" (26). 48 When Clare reads Falkland's poem, he
can become fatal if the masters by their "machines" give another
"turn" to this oppression, crushing the already weak and unfortunate
subjects as the torturer presses his victims to death. 72 These terms
evoke precisely the negative connotations associated with divinity in
the novel: Falkland in his rage wants to "crush" Caleb like an insect
and "grind" him "into atoms" (284). The term "machine" again is quite
relevant in the context; in the novel "engine" and "machine" have
been used in reference to "instruments" of torture or metaphorically
in reference to the malignant strategies of Gines--a telling name.
face [End Page 885] their ruin with fortitude and equanimity:
foremost of all Mr. Clare, Brightwel, and the two "wretches" that are
"pressed beyond bearing"--Emily and Hawkins. Despite their sublime
qualities, Falkland and Mr. Raymond face their respective calamities
with rage and indignation, and Caleb indulges in the same paroxysms
of indignation as Falkland. A less heroic form of virtue may be noted
in Mr. Collins, Falkland's steward, whom Caleb admires and reveres
and therefore wishes to engage in reciprocal sympathy (309-11). Caleb
desists from involving Mr. Collins in his troubles, and he does so
claiming that he knows nothing of the "passions" of the world (106),
and he represents his passions as harmless curiosity or as mere
sympathy with Mr. Forester (142). Passion--like enthusiasm--is indeed
very negatively connoted in the novel, and it leads to all sorts of
other evil deeds born of envy, jealousy, and rage. See also the
reference to Falkland's and Tyrrel's "temper" (28).
50. Note the blasphemous--by eighteenth-century standards--accusation
of God in this exclamation.
Liminality in the Literary Prison," Textual Practice 13 (1999):
43-77, and "The Topos of Carceral Transcendence in the Literary
Tradition" (under consideration).
59. See 8 ("rage"; "tolerably composed"); 129 ("stubborn patience";
"horror and despair"); or 136 ("even in frenzy I can preserve my
presence of mind and discretion").
60. As has been noted before, Caleb's curiosity has decidedly sexual
persuasively against this type of approach in _Charlotte Bront� and
Sexuality_ (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), when insisting:
"There has been a marked tendency to diminish Bront�'s work into a
mere personal expression of despair over her early traumatic
experiences, whether of sexual conflict or of loss, and of rage at
her role as a woman in a patriarchal society. . . . I have
deliberately avoided approaching Bront�'s work as if it were a
personal statement to be plumbed for its unconscious meaning" (ix).
While noting that Lyndall Gordon's recent biography alludes to
Maynard, a conviction that psychological factors such as fantasy and
hatred ultimately are irreducible to biographical concerns. In _A
Room of One's Own_ (1929), by contrast, Virginia Woolf famously (and
quite uncharacteristically) claimed otherwise, influencing many
later critics when arguing that Bront� wrote "in a rage" when "she
should [have] writ[ten] calmly"; that "she [was] at war with her
lot"; and that "anger was tampering with the integrity of" her
fiction. Woolf, _A Room of One's Own_ (London: Panther, 1984), 67,
70.
peacefulness of the community gathering as families in faithful
worship, but the movement of the three slaves divides the scene into
black and white. Sunday was the day colonists feared vengeful slaves
would choose for insurrection, and the three advancing black figures
appear bent on massacring the white people, defenseless in the
church. The inaugural motif of a peaceful city about to be attacked
by fanatics masked in blackness, servitude, and feigned loyalty
forecasts the conclusion of the courts that the religious fanaticism
of Spanish Catholics had directed the slaves down Broadway that
There can be no more compelling expression of the way moral principle trumps
historical process in More's fiction. Far from offering a reliable guide for
human conduct, the pattern of inherited transmission so venerated by Edmund
Burke threatens to "mislead" past, present, and future generations alike. 12
The "Roof-Raising" and "Sheep Sheering" episodes that occur in the early
phases of the second part of the tract are suffused with Farmer White's
iconoclastic determination "to break through a bad custom," and in each case
the communal traditions of "ribaldry, and riot, and drunkenness," associated
with the agricultural calendar, give way under his strong hand to more
In this novel, then, literary discipline is unrelievedly regulatory;
there is only following "regulations," no meaningful recombination of
them. The best available response to literary discipline is aggression
disguised as fiction. Twain thus doubts what his contemporary literary
and cultural scholars called the liberalizing effects of social
disciplining. Whether or not one thinks this novel is racist, I wish
to suggest that this question is framed by a larger one: to what
extent are the invidious distinctions that seem to accompany
subjectivization tractable? Racial hierarchization, as exemplified by
ideals, and their refusal to "cherish" ancestral traditions. 89
Wheeler was yet more direct, asserting, in a rare sentiment for the
period, that because of the "mingling [of] bloods and temperaments" in
the U. S., "American . . . is not at all a word of race." The most
fundamental liberalizing effect of literary discipline, therefore,
would be to supersede the idea that society should be organized around
divisions of caste or race. 90
Nonetheless, as hereditarians, scientific literary scholars envisioned
extent, enthralled to it. As this novel presents the situation, all
personages believe they possess an idealized form of mental
discipline--meaning all think themselves free from the constraints of
culture--and to that very extent they are doomed to repeat narratives
and precepts. No *[End Page 292]* liberalizing is possible, on this
account, no recombination of extant principles in new formations; nor,
therefore, can there be meaningful critique of either values or
identity. For Twain, proponents of literary discipline, and recent
critics of this novel, identification is a form of enslavement. The
this impure combination is "the ruin of thousands of our countrymen
and countrywomen." 42 While this assessment might seem extreme, it
is not completely off base. Knox's "disguise" is a metaphor of
stealth and subterfuge that we might equally well label as
embedding: "lust" or libidinal pleasure is seen here as being
embedded within writing characterized as "sentimental"; rather than
being pure, affection comes to be a mixed bag.
Of perhaps greater significance is the first publication, in the
between optical facts and optical illusions. More than that, such theories
inadvertently and invariably problematize the impulse to equate a certain
kind of vision with direct knowledge of facts and truths, thus exposing the
deficiencies and contradictions of a rigidly mechanistic theory of sight and
accentuating the possible epistemological limitations imposed on the subject
of knowledge by the physiological sensorium.
Numerous writers who followed Scott's example, and who contributed far more
prolifically than Scott to the ghost story's iconic cultural status in the
After the introductory first stanza the song's first part, focusing
on the social corruption of the country, begins with the farmer who
fleeces his sheep and is then in turn fleeced by his rack-renting
landlord. In subsequent stanzas the landlord himself is fleeced by
his steward, his lawyer, his physician, and his priest. Even those
at the very top of the social hierarchy cannot avoid being fleeced,
mostly by middle-class professionals, two of whom receive an
especially harsh treatment--the lawyer and the priest. Thelwall
on the social corruption of the country, begins with the farmer who
fleeces his sheep and is then in turn fleeced by his rack-renting
landlord. In subsequent stanzas the landlord himself is fleeced by
his steward, his lawyer, his physician, and his priest. Even those
at the very top of the social hierarchy cannot avoid being fleeced,
mostly by middle-class professionals, two of whom receive an
especially harsh treatment--the lawyer and the priest. Thelwall
hated lawyers, as becomes clear in his 1801 autobiographical
"Memoir," and he supplements the third stanza with a list of legal
the would-be victims of fleecers. Official ideology requires the
presence of watchmen who protect the needy, and of institutions to
safeguard the welfare of those less powerful. However, the song
insists that the pastoral system of caring for the populace has
disintegrated, replaced instead by a fleece-and-be-fleeced
competitiveness. There are no benevolent pastors, and there are also
no innocent sheep. The farmer of the second stanza, for example,
could have been portrayed as innocent, but the song does not do
that. Pastoral conventions also could generate a system of
At the center of urban and social corruption in general is the
political fleecing of both the party in power and the opposition.
Dismissing the Whigs as fleecers, Thelwall in the last two stanzas
enacts a dramatic reversal of the song's repetitive pattern of
passive submission to being fleeced. As the Whigs cannot protect the
people, the constitutional system having broken down, the people
must protect themselves. The tone shifts in the last three stanzas
from ironic humor to earnest declamation, even republican bravado
and apocalyptic hints. There is no pretense of innocent victimhood,
Lake Country in the year 1816. De Quincey cannot imagine what could
have brought him there: "What business a Malay could have to
transact among English mountains I cannot conjecture" (_C_, 55).34
How did the Malay get to his kitchen? Why, if he has any business in
the area, is he so manifestly unable to transact it, since he speaks
no English? All these questions raise another: Whence comes De
Quincey's certainty that his visitor is a Malay at all? Given that
he does not share a language with the visitor, how does he know what
to call him? The hero is guessing: "He . . . replied in what I
with sham by himself dealing in it to supplement his failing
knowledge. There is a veritable cascade of suppositions in the
passage:
What business a Malay could possibly have to transact amongst
English mountains, I cannot _conjecture_; but _possibly_ he was on
his way to a seaport about forty miles distant. (_C_, 55)
In this dilemma the girl, recollecting the reputed learning of her
I speak of giving laudanum away, I remember, about this time, a
little incident, which I mention, because, trifling as it was, the
reader will soon meet it again in my dreams, which it influenced
more fearfully than could be imagined. One day a Malay knocked at my
door. What business a Malay could have to transact amongst English
mountains, I cannot conjecture: but possibly he was on his road to a
sea-port about forty miles distant.
The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl born and
philosophy in the two centuries leading up to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,
and added encouragingly: "I think you had better read some of the Kritik. You
will find it very intelligible." 44 When she complained that she lacked
access to primary sources about Goethe's life, Clarke sympathized with her
frustration: "I wish I could be the jackal for the lion, and procure for you
all the other sources of information which you ought to have from abroad." 45
The flattery implicit in Clarke's metaphor suggests why Fuller was as
dependent on him as he was on her. In a world that denied her entrance to
as it turned out, that his attainments in English were exactly of
the same extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be an
impassable gulph fixed between all communication of ideas, if either
party had happened to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl,
recollecting the reputed learning of her master (and, doubtless,
giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of the earth,
besides, perhaps, a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to
understand that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly
imagined that my art could exorcise from the house. I did not
raise his hand to his mouth, and (in the school-boy phrase) bolt the
whole, divided into three pieces, at one mouthful. The quantity was
enough to kill three dragoons and their horses: and I felt some
alarm for the poor creature: but what could be done? I had given him
the opium in compassion for his solitary life, on recollecting that
if he had travelled on foot from London, it must be nearly three
weeks since he could have exchanged a thought with any human being.
I could not think of violating the laws of hospitality, by having
him seized and drenched with an emetic, and thus frightening him
explicit, as in Cohen's argument, as a reassertion of the poet's
active subject position. Gilbert writes, "In the last section of the
poem Whitman crosses definitively into spoken utterance, abandoning
the death-saturated written idioms of the middle sections and
reasserting his former position of absolute mastery over the
object-world" (358).
49. Iser's aesthetics of reading lends credence to such an
interpretation. He claims that "throughout the reading process there
it, "as physical appearance was readily represented and circulated in the
age of mechanical reproduction, interior essence was posed as an elite,
sacred realm only accessible to (and perhaps only possessed by) members of
the privileged middle classes" (61). Mattison's language, then, doesn't
grant Picquet agency as an "accomplished white lady," but reasserts his and
his privileged readers' ultimate authority to describe and proscribe. Her
"easy and graceful manners," "fair complexion," and "rosy cheeks" don't
align her with even objectified white womanhood; in the signifying chain
Mattison constructs, these descriptors situate her not as a lady but as a
that he prefers to recognize himself in the pirate, who is
implicitly synonymous with the slaver; piracy and slaving is the
seat of our American pleasure.
This glib, unsettling, Tom Sawyerish message reasserts itself in the
last installment of the _Autobiography_ that Twain published before
he died, which ends with a silly anecdote, the sort of shtick which
Michael J. Kiskis notes as having found its way back into Twain's
_Autobiography_ from his earlier work on the stage.54 Twain tells a
this scene, the next more decisively mediates between them: feeling
meets art to absorb [End Page 972] interiority in techn�e, to
transmit not "refinement" of feeling but refinement as feeling. It
is, then, not some exposed cache of feeling, but refinement itself,
that qualifies as "soul-pervading."
Upon entering the music room, everybody in the Maples's party except
Harleigh, her admirer, is stunned to find that the wanderer was
playing:
such scenes might be said to take the place of the sympathizing
character in the eighteenth-century sentimental text, thus permitting
multiple identifications along [End Page 1027] the chain of observation.
One could imaginatively (and emotionally) occupy any one or all of these
positions--both insider and outsider, sympathizing spectator, desiring
subject, and desired object. Such multiple identifications are made
textually explicit in Enoch Arden by the repetition of the spectacle of
dispossession. First Philip is portrayed as the hidden (and despairing)
observer of Enoch and Annie's happiness, then Enoch looks on as Philip
were central to the allure and the anxiety caused by antebellum reform in the
US. Appeals to the sufferings of a "group" to which one did not belong--the
poor, alcoholics, criminals, sex workers--increasingly supplied the intimate
pain that entitled more privileged citizens to engage in public debate with
an authorized moral authority. Taking one's authenticating intimacy from a
group by definition alienated from one's social identity both generated and
forestalled claims to authentic interiority. To be sure, these reformers
brought about significant changes in American civil life, relieving suffering
and remedying social policies through their moral activism. Despite their
natural price" (WN, 1:67; my emphasis), can be grasped as a naturalization of
the supernatural. 7 The same process of reversal, however, simultaneously
poses the threat of introducing the supernatural into the natural.
As the metaphor of "gravitating prices" suggests, the social science of
political economy seeks to follow the model of the natural sciences in
discovering hidden, regular laws behind nature's sensible appearances. This
modelling function of the natural sciences seems to be confirmed by Joseph
Glanvill's scientific treatise The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) which, a
though invisible beings" is also described in Smith's The History of Ancient
Physics (Smith, The Early Writings, 117; my emphasis).
7. See also: "The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central
price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating"
(WN, 1:65).
8. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: or Confidence in Opinions.
Manifested in a Discourse of the Shortness and Uncertainty of our Knowledge,
As several recent studies have documented, the eighteenth century saw
a radical shift in the techniques, practices, and culture of
childbirth. 37 Through the end of the seventeenth century, childbirth
in England had remained a nearly exclusively female domain: the
laboring mother would be brought to a darkened birthing chamber,
where she would be attended by a midwife and a circle of her women
friends ("gossips"), who would help her through the birth and care
for her during the lying-in period afterwards. There were no men
allowed in the chamber--either during the birth itself or throughout
but disappeared among the English upper classes and the lower urban
classes, replaced by the male _accoucheur_ or obstetrician. This
extremely rapid change in practices of childbirth was nothing short
of a revolution, since for centuries the mere presence of a man in
the birthing room had been a harbinger of death which laboring
mothers (and their friends and attendants) had feared and avoided
above all else. As Hugh Chamberlen, one of the seventeenth century's
most famous publishing "man-midwives," himself put it: "Where a man
comes one or both [the mother or the child] must necessarily die." 40
most famous publishing "man-midwives," himself put it: "Where a man
comes one or both [the mother or the child] must necessarily die." 40
The crucial question for medical historians of the period is thus:
how did such a radical change take place so quickly? How did the male
practitioners gain access to the birthing chamber, and to the trust
(and custom) of deeply suspicious--even fearful--women who had
previously avoided them at all costs?
There are of course many overlapping causes of this revolution in
midwives concerned for their livelihoods as well as commentators
concerned with the "social role" of the man-midwife, centered around
two major issues: the violation of female modesty by male
obstetricians, and the continued public distrust of interventionist
instruments in the birthing chamber. 43 This second question is the
most important for my purposes, for it demonstrates the strength of
the association between masculine medical practice and the invasion
of women's bodies.
legacy of eighteenth-century republicanism, for instance, continued
to powerfully shape ideas about empire in the 1840s. According to
republican beliefs, the pursuit of empire always threatened a
republic with corruption and decline through overextension and by
engendering luxury, bringing in foreign populations, and encouraging
the establishment of professional armies (Pocock 510). This
republican QUOTE as Angela Miller calls it (33), is staged in Thomas
Cole's famous series of paintings entitled The Course of Empire
(1833-36). Cole depicts what he and many of his contemporaries
often disappointing: arguments about the intrinsic human lust for
power receive as much attention as class questions, and inordinate
attention is given to the machinations of elites. But a rudimentary
institutional analysis is indisputably present, drawing upon,
developing, and situating the more individualist arguments.
Furthermore, the more effective analyses of conspiracy _envisioned
meaningful practical engagements with systems typically reified by
social sciences._ Fredric Jameson has argued that conspiracy
particular places characterized by local idiosyncrasies, but as
metonymic representations of the entire San Joaquin valley, the
"colossal...feeder of an entire world" (39). Metonymy threatens to
blur the specificity of this or any other region as the "expanded"
imagination pictures an infinite grid of ranches multiplying beyond
"the curve of the globe, the shoulder of the earth" (39).
_The Octopus_'s most dramatic revision of local color, however,
occurs when Norris juxtaposes agricultural scenarios with the
In these texts the (ambiguous) notion that character both determines and is
determined by a nation's institutions is implicit. This formulation becomes
explicit in polemics that self-consciously critique the manifest
un-Englishness of centralizing legislative reforms (most notably the New Poor
Law and the Public Health Act of 1848). For Herbert Spencer, whose ardently
individualist and evolutionary theories of character remained influential
throughout the nineteenth century, society is founded upon a "beautiful
self-adjusting principle" that naturally rectifies evils and "keep[s] all . .
seventeenth century through the end of the Victorian period and beyond"
("Writing Nationalist History: England, The Conversion of the Jews, and
Ivanhoe," ELH 60 [1993]: 196). For an example of the deployment of the "Yoke"
reading of history in arguments for the un-Englishness and
un-Constitutionality of centralizing reforms see Joshua Toulmin Smith's Local
Self-Government and Centralization (London: Longman, 1851).
9. The perceived singularity of British imperialism is neatly epitomized by
the opening line of Keith's 1937 history of colonial India: "It was the aim
will be able to make meaning of the incident. Romantic experiments such as
these demand that the reader turn inward and thus reproduce the condition of
inwardness that is so often their implied subject. Implicitly or explicitly,
they refuse the self-evidence of the _sensus communis_, complicating the
notion that one may invoke a preexisting community of taste, sympathy, or
doctrine as the ground for aesthetic, ethical, or political relations. In so
insisting on the priority of inwardness, however, such experiments expose the
limitations of the very category of individuality that supposedly underwrites
them. Thus, one apprehends the conditions of possibility for a common sense,
his audience of the horrors of the slave trade in a way that no other writer
had done so far. He also attempts to demolish the main arguments concerning
black inferiority. Clarkson's more-than-apologia for African industry and
culture makes him into a writer who pushes Eurocentric views of Africans to
their limits, problematizing the reader's assumptions about European
superiority.
Clarkson argues that the Africans in their own country "exercise the same
arts, as the ancestors of those very Europeans, who boast their great
(asserted by her blushes) and spectacularly revelatory (blindingly
revealed by the opened shutters). The snobby Mrs. Ireton takes on
the dispossessed, dusky wanderer because the wanderer's manners are
an incontrovertible guarantee of quality; yet Mrs. Ireton is also
audience to the drama of the wanderer's whitening, which restages
the wanderer's irresistible appeal in a single instance of dazzling
exposure. This scene illuminates a structural and an ideological
impasse that becomes more and more persistent as the novel
progresses: the wanderer irresistibly and consistently evinces
BLOCKQUOTE
The central question here is not the identity of the performer: this
is, like the whitening scene, a drama of redundant discovery. Its
more deeply indicative conundrum concerns the relation of "feelings"
and "art." Insofar as this might figure a relation of content to
form, it engages the central mystery of Burney's novel: might not
music, the scene of her private performance, reveal who the wanderer
an agency whose unity inhered in the problematic property known as
Mark Twain.
The exigencies of the melodrama can be effectively traced in a trail
of signatures--both absent and present--on a series of key legal
forms during these years. On 7 May 1907, Clemens apparently signed a
form granting full Power of Attorney over all of his affairs to
Isabel Lyon. On 14 November 1908--one month before the formation of
the Mark Twain Company--this form was amended to include Ashcroft.
view.
The vast space between scaffold and spectator allows for the abstraction of
the body that is the essence of martyrdom. Melville�s poem "The Portent"
(1859) anatomizes the process through which the absent body acquires meaning.
Nowhere is the elision of Brown�s corpse expressed with more formal precision
and linked more explicitly to the breadth of its political meaning. Melville
begins with a lurid evocation of Brown�s body,
*[End Page 70]* Lord Byron's _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_ (1812-18), one of
the most frequent touchstones for tourists (Buzard 115-18), and Fanny
Kemble's _A Year of Consolation_ (1847). Both connect sight-seeing to an
experience of exile, personal anguish, and a search for healing--elements
absent in Kirkland's account but that similarly tied touring to affective
management. Her description of the approach to Rome resembles Cole's image in
its extent, structure, and detail. She sees an illuminated "panorama," framed
by "the Alban hills" on the left and shot through with "brilliant" color; the
wide "plain of the Tiber" combines pastoral elements with the familiar
(137). Comforting as this comment is meant to be, its logic ought to
convey little solace; if Aunt Katherine has been so quickly exorcised
as the spirit of the house, then one might imagine that, were the
narrator to return alone and to settle in for the summer, she would
soon "find" there not her absent friend but herself. All but needless
to add, Aunt Katherine's worldly goods would have become little more
than illegible, meaningless relics. However unwittingly, the narrator's
comment proclaims the rapidity with which a prior inhabitant can be
displaced, both physically and spiritually.
following, lovely two-stanza lyric: BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
Immediately suspicious is the denial by so stylish a poet of "art"
and of "design." Prior means, of course, artifice and designing. But
can he really mean that these are absent? Interior rhyme and echo
("kind"/"design"; "part"/"heart") in the first stanza, close rhyme
("ways"/"chains") and etymological pun ("oblig'd," suggesting that
the chained heart is tied) in the second make a showier surface than
such a pretense of courtly pastoral should allow. How can we
enterprise, his history of ideas consists of alternations, denials,
revivals, and repetitions. The life of the [End Page 396] concepts
is ignored, with no space for their working-through (in the Freudian
sense) or for the dialectic in which they feed off of one another.
Such dynamics are by no means absent from discursive texts, read
with the requisite type of attention. But we confront the life of
the mind, like the life of the emotions, most directly in their
poetic embodiment. The combat of the passions and the interests is a
long but static moment, whereas the history of Anacreontic poetry is
having him speak the truth with a perverse tongue. For a joint labor
of love is the transcendent condition that the figure of partnership
always distantly descries. Venus is named in honor of that ideal,
and has only taken up with the preposterous Wegg because the ache of
absent love has darkened his heart. Yet Venus is already in revolt
against his darkness. He immediately replies to Wegg: "'I could have
wished you had ever asked me as your partner what we were to do,
before you thought you were dividing a responsibility'" (494; 3.7).
Their relationship is agonistic from the beginning (they actually
the other, the feelings of the child, and the feelings and rights, such
as those rights may be, of the grandparents." It is interesting to note
that the feelings of the only parent, as well as the rights of the
child, are missing in Shaw's formulation. These absent terms, however,
are crucial to his decision because it is precisely the absent feelings
of the parent which enable Shaw to deduce the best interests of the
child, or the child's rights. Knowing that his decision will produce
pain produces a kind of anxiety on his part ("it is to be regretted that
the law leaves cases of this description with so few rules for the
_Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement_ [New York:
Metheun, 1987]), instances his influence by the Jamesonian, Althusserian
insistence on the denial, or negation, of history at work in (the idea of)
the literary text. Liu envisions a history, following Jameson, which is
"_not_ a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that as an absent
cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach
to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior
textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious" (Jameson,
_The Political Unconscious: Narrrative as a Socially Symbolic Act_ [Ithaca:
While his theory of property does not otherwise conform to liberal economic
doctrine, such a passage reveals the basic homology between the development
of the individual subject, the general transformation in public opinion, and
economic growth. All three rely on a progressive model that draws upon the
notion of lack, of something which, while remaining absent, will inspire an
endless effort to achieve it.
The possibility of such a productive lack is foreclosed from this novel,
precisely because St Leon himself embodies what should be missing. In effect,
prefers what he demonstrates to be impossible. In effect, then, he renounces
the fantasy of immutable reason not to abandon it but to retain his loyalty
to it, even after its loss. St Leon occupies the place of the lack not
because Godwin wishes to have similar access to immutable truth but because,
knowing that this place is empty, he prefers what is absent there to the
world of progressive Enlightenment this absence brings into being. It is as
if his sole remaining form of protest is to identify with what he reveals is
a traumatic loss that culture must undergo as it enters modernity. But since
the terms of his protest are consistent with modern culture's myth of its own
Ethics of Psychoanalysis_, vol. 7 of _The Seminar of Jacques Lacan_, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 210-17.
23. In Lacan, one works through the fantasy by recognizing that the
_jouissance_ absent from the subject is barred from the Other--from the field
of signification--as well. On the lack in the Other, see Lacan, _�crits: A
Selection_ (New York: Norton, *[End Page 872]* 1977), 316-17; and Slavoj
�Zi�zek, _The Sublime Object of Ideology_ (London: Verso, 1989), 121-24.
and the threat of sexual violence in the tribulations of Clarissa
Harlowe. In cases like these, however, even as libidinal energy
serves as the motor of the novel for the influential persecution
narratives of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_, this energy is employed
ultimately in the service of a powerful didacticism clearly absent
in Sterne's work. The famous "ambiguity" for which Sterne came to be
known applies both to his generation of suggestive double-entendres,
in the midst of titillating situational comedy, as well as the
impossibility of clear and direct moralizing. 16
His youth is spent at school or as a runaway living precariously in
the houses of others. Even where his actual circumstances were of a
rich family life, the narrative deliberately seizes him apart from
them (in London while they are in Grasmere); or, where he is himself
at home, his family is most often absent—evoked at most by a
tea-table laid for two, or by an interior scene peopled by servants
and strangers. When his children do briefly haunt his bedside it is
to sharpen the contrast between his nightmares and the peaceful life
from which he has been exiled. His wife is mentioned as an
Advertisements for lost property filled with close descriptions of
things cannot be considered models of empirical observation or of
nascent realism; they are expressions of desire directed with
varying *[End Page 959]* degrees of intensity at what ought to be
one's own. The law's guarantee that the absent item still belongs to
the owner is of no use and no consolation and is neglected. So the
rhetoric of such an appeal is intended to materialize an abstraction
and restore it to the owner. In this respect the advertisements I
have been talking about are really an early form of the personal ad,
deferred origins, mirroring the creative enterprise of his poetics.
We see this most clearly in the early notebook attempts to write
race into the 1855 _Leaves of Grass_. The early drafts that would
lead to "The Sleepers" reveal the poet's struggle to empty out his
poetic persona in an effort to create an absent space for the
Lucifer figure to occupy. In these early notebooks, the scene of
writing emerges as a site of racial crossings and poetic
disembodiment. The emptying of the poetic persona allows Whitman to
develop absence and passivity as the central tenets of his poetic
desires. In order to show how the poet's racial crossings prove to
be a testing site for a more radical crossing between poet and
reader, this essay will conclude with a reading of "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry" as an exemplary instance of Whitman's efforts to
absent himself from the text by creating textual gaps that clear a
space for the reader to fill. As possession reciprocates the act of
absenting, the scene of writing and the scene of reading converge,
and the subjective space the reader occupies becomes the site of the
poem's construction and the effective origin of the poem itself.
there is an essential passivity to Whitman's persona that creates
these gaps and absences—interpretive space—for the
empowerment of the reader. The scene of writing leaves itself open
to this readerly *[End Page 922]* possession of the text. Writing
becomes a process of creating absent centers, and the scene of
writing emerges in the poetry as a site to be filled and possessed
by the subjectivity of the reader.5 That is to say, at the scene of
writing, Whitman's mind is full of absences—not only the
absence of words yet lacking from the language, but the absences or
or ensemble of poetic creation is simultaneously displaced to the
future reader who will complete, reciprocate, and reinitiate the
exchange as an "eternal, yet ever-new" circuity between writer and
reader. The yet unwritten origin at the scene of writing—the
absent presence that informs the text—is constructed between
the scene of writing and the scene of reading.
What develops then as a foundational element in Whitman's linguistic
writings, and what serves as the most telling connection between
in the "adhesiveness" between writer and reader. This tie between
origin and wholeness depends upon the creative act of writing that
includes a fundamental lack or absence, the supplement of which is
the reader's response that creates the desired wholeness between
poet and reader. In other words, the absent center provides the
necessary point of entry for the reader into the poem which will in
turn allow that reader to complete the reciprocal demands of the
poetic text. In the interchange between writing/absence and
origin/wholeness *[End Page 925]* the most radical concept to emerge
remembering an original wholeness—an act of creating
origins. But this too is deferred, even by the language itself that
relegates the temporal past to the anticipatory future. At the
moment of writing _Democratic Vistas_, this historical origin
remains unwritten, leaving an absent wholeness at the center to be
filled by an American literature that will go about "wording the
future with undissuadable words." Yet, because Whitman is moving
towards a concept of deferred origin, this absence is not a source
of anxiety, but the requisite center of the text:
does.
(1016-17)
The apostolic text sent as envoy in place of the author transports
the absent center that must be filled-in by the reader, thus
existing for the first time as an originating force only in its
reception. Whitman contemplates origin as a source deferred until
the scene of writing and the scene of reading converge.
feminist, abolitionist, and literary concerns coalesce around the
problem of embodiment: "Political representation enacts the fiction
of a bodiless body politic. Literary representation depends, of
course, on a similar though not identical system of proxies: words
stand in for an absent physical world" (_TL_, 6). Problems of
embodiment arise, however, in relation to female and slave bodies
precisely because women and slaves cannot relinquish their
corporeality. The physical properties of the body that mark their
subordination in nineteenth-century political culture preclude their
Page 935]* abstracted fit" will provide a clearer representation of
this absenting process.
One of the meanings of "abstracted" that Whitman would have known is
"absent in mind" (_OED_). While on one level the passage denotes the
black person's predilection for absent-minded paroxysms, the
multivalence of that peculiar phrase "the abstracted fit" suggests a
more complicated reading. Though it logically follows the train of
thought developed by "passiveness" and "sudden fits," the phrase
this absenting process.
One of the meanings of "abstracted" that Whitman would have known is
"absent in mind" (_OED_). While on one level the passage denotes the
black person's predilection for absent-minded paroxysms, the
multivalence of that peculiar phrase "the abstracted fit" suggests a
more complicated reading. Though it logically follows the train of
thought developed by "passiveness" and "sudden fits," the phrase
also offers a theoretical retrospection on what has
reading, and the scene of reading now embodies the original and
originating creative impulse traditionally associated with the scene
of writing. This transfer of poetic power evinces itself in two key
moments in the poem where Whitman suspends the poetic text: first,
to invoke the absence of writing and, second, to absent himself from
the poem.
Whitman initiates this absenting process in section 4—the
short, five-line passage that serves as both coda _in medias res_
Whitman's textual habitation simultaneously locates the scene of
writing at the scene of reading and initiates a process that will
depend upon the absence involved by the practice of writing: the
gradual emptying of the writing subject that clears a
space—the absent center that Whitman continually implies in
the deferred construction of the poem by the reader—for the
reader's subjectivity.
The repeated assurance that neither time nor distance avails in
space that precedes this seemingly forced complicity changes the
dynamics of the passage.47 The literal blank of the textual gap
serves a dual purpose: it places absence into the text, actually
referencing absence through blank space, and it serves as a tangible
locus for the passage's absent referent, namely what in fact has
been "accomplish'd." Rather than a smarmy, backhanded attempt to
bring us over to his perspective, Whitman creates an absent center
around which the whole poem now revolves. In other words, at the
scene of writing, Whitman creates a blank or absent space, here
serves a dual purpose: it places absence into the text, actually
referencing absence through blank space, and it serves as a tangible
locus for the passage's absent referent, namely what in fact has
been "accomplish'd." Rather than a smarmy, backhanded attempt to
bring us over to his perspective, Whitman creates an absent center
around which the whole poem now revolves. In other words, at the
scene of writing, Whitman creates a blank or absent space, here
literally, for the reader to enter and complete the poem in a
reciprocal act of conception. The lack of answers to the culminating
locus for the passage's absent referent, namely what in fact has
been "accomplish'd." Rather than a smarmy, backhanded attempt to
bring us over to his perspective, Whitman creates an absent center
around which the whole poem now revolves. In other words, at the
scene of writing, Whitman creates a blank or absent space, here
literally, for the reader to enter and complete the poem in a
reciprocal act of conception. The lack of answers to the culminating
questions of section 8 constitutes a further absence, a direct
deferral of fulfillment to the reader which simultaneously belies
the possibility of fulfillment in the esoteric riddling that
guarantees the continuation of interplay among poet, text, and
reader. It is a moment in which active aggression yields to
passivity and possession. The reference to absence (the blank space)
and the absent referent invite the reader into the text; Whitman
absents himself from the poem in a passive gesture that defers
understanding and meaning to the reader's subjective presence.
The transition from the interplay of absence in the previous section
rearticulate the entire poem as a convergence of the scenes of
writing and reading. The penning of the poem itself evolves out of
this convergence, and this convergence is reenacted in cyclical
eternity through the act of reading. Whitman creates what amounts to
an aesthetics of absence: a writing that revolves around an absent
center that the poet sends out in the *[End Page 943]* absolute
faith of an ever-revisable interplay between the reader and the
deferred origin of the poem's unwritten meaning.
uncertainties in which Whitman cohabits as passive recipient with
his Fierce Wrestler.
13. Davis, 14. Elsewhere, Davis claims that Whitman's sexual and
democratic doubts "circle the same absent center. . . . Both are
written indirectly. Both thrive in a space of creative doubt at odds
with the reality of postwar America" (39).
14. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, _Touching Liberty: Abolition,
strove to define citizenship by placing blacks outside the borders of the
nation and therefore to define the national interior as white, the
Anti-Slavery Society defined citizenship in relation to the individual
characters of citizens. With this new strategy came a move to define racial
injustice and to argue for national citizenship on the basis of interiorizing
logics--the correct affective states for sympathetic whites and the deserving
civic characters of black Americans--that correspond to, and in many cases
supplant, more explicitly social arguments about economic opportunity,
education, and class structure.
Instead of evoking the pathetic singularity of her trials, music
establishes the wanderer's claim upon the generic category of
"gentlewoman." The revelation of this claim is "stupi[fying]"
precisely because music provides no interiorizing rationale for her
"apparel, poverty, and subjection." Rather than vindicating interior
fortitude, then, this scene vindicates the fortitude of rank, which,
almost of its own volition, pervades even the most inauspicious
embodiment. That rank's tenacity can, paradoxically, only aggravate
"Lost the 1st Instant, a Snuff Box about the Bigness and Shape of a
Mango, with a Stalk on the Lid, it being a West-India Bean of a
reddish Colour, and like Shagreen; the End of the Stalk tipped with
Silver, opens with a Hinge, and the Inside lined with Lead. Whoever
brings it to Toms Coffee-House Cornhill, shall have a guinea Reward,
and no questions asked; it being three times the Worth of the
Silver."25 The writer of this notice in the _Daily Courant_ is so
absorbed in representing the fashion of the thing that the narrative
(how it was first acquired, how *[End Page 957]* it was lost, why it
with Drops of the first Water, and 1 odd Night Ear-Ring, with 3
Brilliant Diamonds; three large Bars for the Breast, set with Rose
Diamonds. If offered to be sold, pawn'd or valu'd, pray stop 'em
and the *PARTY, and give Notice to Mr. Drummond, Goldsmith at
Charing Cross, and you shall receive 200 Guineas Reward for the
same. *Especially if it be a young Lady29
How lost? How mislaid? If the diamonds could speak they would tell a
tale perhaps of disgraceful weakness, of a goldsmith so fascinated
race," or "race affinities." 82 Even the ecumenical Moulton, who
criticized the study of national literatures (which inclines students
to jingoism), made his case in racialist terms. Study of "World
Literature" would best "secur[e] the aims of literary culture,"
"broadening human sympathies, as travel broadens them by bringing us
into contact with racial ideas different from our own." 83
Though hereditarians, these scholars were not generally nativist, as
we understand the term from John Higham's seminal work. 84 Far from
represent a crisis within the embodied experience of the lyric persona, who
is in the grip of a conflict between erotic feelings and impulses and the
ethical categories furnished by culture through which subjects inescapably
understand themselves. They are also passages which exhibit a lyric persona
whose troping of his own thought, affect, and activity displays modes of
self-relation which are offered to the reader for the kind of subjective
reinscription that I argue is central to Whitman's theory of performative
embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_.
terms so as to lend them new self-authored meanings, much as the poet does
with the discourse of nineteenth-century capitalism, symbolically inverting
the wasted seed that sexual ideology prophesied would cause the ruin of the
nation by turning it into fecundating ejaculatory rain. Section 29 has been
read as troping a specific non-procreative sexual practice, anal penetration.
Christopher Newfield argues that homoeroticism appealed to Whitman not merely
as a metaphor of democratic political relations but as a "democratic" form of
subjectivity, a way of enacting political principles erotically within
concrete social life. For Newfield, the speaker of section 29 "is not
Transformations of Drives, Particularly in Anal Eroticism"). But it
shies from the light, in this case darkening even one named Lucia.
The discretion of the Anacreontic is [End Page 384] a key to its
always furtive discovery. "The Sparrow and Diamond" is a hush-hush,
"tongue-ty'd" world of lisping, moaning, and enforced silence.
Pre-linguistic, it is therefore also not capable of being brought to
consciousness. 36 Whereas, according to an old truism, romantic
lyric expresses feelings in their immediacy, this poem elides the
speech that intervenes between the traumatic seeing and the already
.
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
"dangerous reading"; redefining the "novel" as "museum," the author
is set up as something like curator--like Bowen, featuring
"principal figures, large as life," "historical, theatrical, and
fancy subjects," and "universally allowed to merit the patronage . .
. of the publick." 31 In referencing Bowen's museum Foster surely
also has in mind the most famous curator of the day, Charles Willson
Peale, who sought to present the "world in miniature." Peale had
great ambitions for his museum, long seeking to transform it from a
private to a national institution. At the time in which Foster
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
complementary audience for her tale: it is masculine, city-dwelling,
and modern—and because its members comprehend the ostensibly
more sophisticated systems of meaning that obtain in London, they
can chuckle in unison at Cranford's misreading Brunoni or the
Captain. Actually, Gaskell begins referencing her model listener
even earlier *[End Page 1006]* in the novel and with the identical
gesture. On page 2, Mary Smith relates a typically Cranfordian
anecdote in which a woman continues using a red silk umbrella long
after cotton umbrellas became the fashion for Londoners. In the
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
reader's complicity in this non-consensual climax. Yet, the blank
space that precedes this seemingly forced complicity changes the
dynamics of the passage.47 The literal blank of the textual gap
serves a dual purpose: it places absence into the text, actually
referencing absence through blank space, and it serves as a tangible
locus for the passage's absent referent, namely what in fact has
been "accomplish'd." Rather than a smarmy, backhanded attempt to
bring us over to his perspective, Whitman creates an absent center
around which the whole poem now revolves. In other words, at the
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
of scientific positivism on one side and "the seductions of a
crippling solipsism" on the other (7). This, of course, is one of
the chief problems Thoreau grappled with publicly and privately,
especially in the years after _Walden_ and with considerably less
success than Tauber's valorizing account credits him. Even Tauber
concedes that Thoreau never overcame his drive to know "the world
ultimately in relationship to himself" (114). John Burroughs
remarked that Thoreau was no guide to ornithology because "he was
more intent on the natural history of his own thought than on that
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
settlement of the Northwest boundary dispute with Britain at the
49th parallel in 1846. By the early 1880s the buffalo would be
virtually extinct, as Catlin predicted. Just as Beckwourth imagined,
the Plains nations would be cruelly starved out. But Astor's failure
in the Far West, and the difficulty of valorizing his adventure,
allowed Irving to express a more conflicted and a more real
US-American character than he might otherwise have done. Itwas in
the Far West of the 1830s, source of totemic buffalo robes and
beaver hats, imaginary region of national character long before
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
--------------------
Neither a bourgeois individualist (or liberal democratic) nor an
anarchist, Wilde is best situated within a particular strand of
Marxism, a utopianism whose basis lies not in valorizing labor (as in
much Socialist thought) but in a liberation from labor. It is at heart
a socialism of pleasure: "socialism was beautiful," "socialism is
enjoyment." 39
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
that model. Instead, the Men of England's passive looks disarm the
violence of other men: "With folded arms and steady eyes, / And
little fear, and less surprise / Look upon them as they slay / Till
their rage has died away" (_MA_, 344-47). Finally, the poem affirms
that disruption by valorizing women as the final judges of men's
actions: when those in power again plow down the passive resisters,
"every woman in the land / Will point at them as they stand" (_MA_,
352-53). In a sense returning the women to their active role in the
reform movement, Shelley's text does not finally affirm its
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
meaning where it might not exist for others seems at the center of
Gaskell's undertaking. As _Cranford_ makes plain, material traces
(and the manner in which people interpret them) are at once clues to
overcoming and emblems of the barriers between individuals, between
cultures. Obviously, valorizing surfaces and material objects in
this way can occlude certain contents (as in the Captain's joke,
Brunoni's nationality, Johnson's prose, or the fact that a boy in
his sister's dress is still a boy); but, like the personal
economies, Cranford's readings of surfaces also create a breadth of
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
Instead of evoking the pathetic singularity of her trials, music
establishes the wanderer's claim upon the generic category of
"gentlewoman." The revelation of this claim is "stupi[fying]"
precisely because music provides no interiorizing rationale for her
"apparel, poverty, and subjection." Rather than vindicating interior
fortitude, then, this scene vindicates the fortitude of rank, which,
almost of its own volition, pervades even the most inauspicious
embodiment. That rank's tenacity can, paradoxically, only aggravate
the wanderer's schizoid embodiment is evident in the plot trick
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
For Edmund Burke, the most pressing problems of aesthetic common sense were
solved simply by referring to the universality of flesh and blood. As most
people share the same senses, Burke argued, so "the whole ground-work of
Taste is common to all." 23 I confess that I share with Kant, as well as with
those literary critics recently concerned with vindicating him, a sense of
the inadequacy of such a conclusion. 24 Yet we are mistaken to assume that
Burke's is the only position available to an empiricist aesthetics. An
alternative approach to the empirical demonstration of common sense, for
instance, is suggested by Thomas Reid, to whom I will turn below. And
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
empirical science degenerates into obscure and imprecise metaphysical
speculation.
But exposing the ghost as an optical illusion is, for Brewster, ultimately
less important than vindicating the suspect notion that seeing is believing.
By better understanding the precise physiological causes that produce optical
deceptions, Brewster implies, it will become possible to distinguish with
greater certainty between subjective and objective perceptions, and hence
between subjective interpretations of reality and objective scientific facts.
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
Tourist paintings of Italy offered a national ownership not of land or
economic resources but of interiority, that is, of the scene of the imagined
costs of modern identity, the site on which this identity was stabilized and
organized. Cole's painting transcends contemporary history and republican
nation building by conflating a gaze into a past with a gaze into a far-off
future for the American empire, that is, by conflating pre- and postnational
images: an Arcadian scene with the end of history. Cole offers a vista into
an elite American subjectivity that comprehends the American present in the
broader context of images of pre- and postnational identity, in other words,
economic resources but of interiority, that is, of the scene of the imagined
costs of modern identity, the site on which this identity was stabilized and
organized. Cole's painting transcends contemporary history and republican
nation building by conflating a gaze into a past with a gaze into a far-off
future for the American empire, that is, by conflating pre- and postnational
images: an Arcadian scene with the end of history. Cole offers a vista into
an elite American subjectivity that comprehends the American present in the
broader context of images of pre- and postnational identity, in other words,
which is not overwhelmed by the transformations of history. 20 The tourist
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 248-275
Walt Whitman and the Question of Copyright
Martin T. Buinicki
---------------
inventors, in accordance with the mandate of the Constitution
"securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive
right to their respective writings and discoveries." Not
surprisingly, then, copyright was always closely aligned with
patents, conflating texts and prototypes into property owned by the
inventor/author. This language was taken up in 1837 in the earliest
proposed legislation for international copyright: "That authors and
Inventors have, according to the practice of civilized nations, a
property in the respective productions of their genius, is
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
Coleridge's use of "blasphemy," joined to the framework of
allegorical reference that casts the English as Cain and the slaves
as Abel, shows how slavery might be considered a distinctively
religious offense because the blessing of food that is "polluted"
with the blood of slaves is offensive to God. Coleridge, conflating
an offense against persons with an offense against God, might seem
to make a social problem into a religious problem: slavery exists
because of a lack of proper religious faith. While the Watchman
appears to be advocating abolition of the slave trade, its liberal
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
it is not, under normal circumstances of vision, present to the mind, for the
simple reason that no such doubling appears in the world. To adopt the terms
of Reid's important distinction, the experience of doublevision is a
sensation, but not a perception, in having for its object only the feeling
itself. It is in falsely conflating sensation and perception, Reid argues,
and in thus mistaking the chimera of sensation for indications of a
chimerical real, that the errors of metaphysics have been perpetuated.
Therefore it is only by separating these synthesized components of our
perception that we may understand how the very synthetic character of
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
metamorphosis that should not be mistaken for evolution or true
progress, but only as a masking of the slave's nature.
Hawthorne, thus, has not mistaken a social sign (clothes) for a
natural one (skin); rather, by conflating clothes and skin, he has
drawn attention to the precariousness of ostensibly natural signs.
Indeed, at a moment when many slaves did "look" white, such anxiety
over the mutable materiality of racial signifiers would be
understandable. However, Hawthorne, as will become clear, is not
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
("F," 19). As a simple instance of analogical thinking, the speaker's
comparison is described as a "toy of Thought" ("F," 23) not unlike that which
Reid excoriates in his philosophical contemporaries. In the earliest
published version of the poem, Coleridge is even more explicit in calling
such analogies "curious toys / Of the self-watching subtilizing mind." 49
Indeed, the peculiar construction of the lines in which Coleridge introduces
the comparison between himself and the "stranger"--"_Methinks_, its motion in
this hush of nature / Gives it dim sympathies with _me who live_" ("F,"
17-18)--at once suggests and linguistically reproduces such a state of
environment that make a common sense possible. It is undeniable that, by the
turn to Hartley in the final movement of the poem, Coleridge wishes to
indicate the ultimate necessity of socializing these "[a]bstruser musings"
("F," 6). Yet while, on the one hand, "Frost at Midnight" seems to advocate
abandoning the preoccupations of the "self-watching subtilizing mind" for the
consciousness of a regenerate companionship, on the other, the poem suggests
that it is only within and through such self-observation that one may
establish those more permanent connections in the first place. 52
Coleridge's lines draw an explicit parallel between these "reliques" of
childish thought and the "superstitious wish" of his childhood, but without
the opprobrium that critics often believe to be attached to these incidents.
54 Indeed, the motions of the "self-watching subtilizing mind" that first
seem inimical to the apprehension of a "companionable form" are instead
revealed as crucial to that apprehension. As in *[End Page 135]* those
experiments where reading breaks down in order to reveal the conditions that
make reading itself possible, Coleridge demonstrates how one violates common
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 301-318
Bruising, Laceration, and Lifelong Maiming; Or, How We Encourage Research
Andrew H. Miller
---------------
of parenting and self-parenting, of old men dying and, in Eliot's case, a new
woman being born, bearing new strength and ardor no less than shame and
self-contempt.
Eliot's attempt to describe what molting looks like in her species--to
provide a language that invites the recognition of such transformations--is
only an early effort in a project continued throughout her career. This
particular conceit naturalizes and makes vivid the paradoxical perfectionist
intuition that, as we are converted into our future selves, we become whom we
that what ought to be is: for the obligation of man is to realize his self;
to realize this self he must will it; but in order to will something, the
object of his will must exist. Accordingly, man must already be what he ought
to be, if obligation is to have any content for him." 12 Bradley's bland
manner takes molting as inevitable; others, Nietzsche for instance, are
driven to exasperation by recognizing that we manage, stubbornly,
ingeniously, dully, to avoid it. Thus in the opening paragraph of
_Schopenhauer as Educator_, written two years before Bradley's _Ethical
Studies_, he urged, "The man who does not wish to belong to the *[End Page
and teaching. It is as if, among its attractions, education allows us to
legitimate a desire we had anyway to haunt rather than inhabit the world.
Present then from the start, Theophrastus's anxiety that he is not human
dilates into full-blown skepticism at the moment of molting itself, the point
of his conversion into a new self. Noticing that his friends are far less
interested in what he has to say about himself than they are in reporting on
their own lives, Theophrastus schools himself in taking impressions:
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
I take it as the strongest sign of Theophrastus's failure as a dancer that he
did not know of it, that his arduous scrupulosity made him inattentive to his
audience's amusement. Because dancing professes our body's movements as
natural--as natural, say, as molting--it *[End Page 308]* exposes our solemn
self-absorption with special cruelty. But suffering exposure appears the fate
of each of us, pupils of whatever sort. As if to acknowledge the
inescapability of such unanticipated exposures, and our inability to gauge
their effects, Theophrastus then asks, remarkably, "What sort of hornpipe am
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
Poe those forces are not wholly identified with the African
American, and his enslavement does to little neutralize those
forces, which persist in the world (81). The fundamental problem (of
which slave rebellion and abolition are only instances) lies deeper,
manifesting itself more generally in the subversive, democratizing
passion of the "'many who want,'" the overzealous "'spirit of
liberty' . . . which destroys the 'governmental machinery' of
nations by asserting that 'all things be in common'" (qtd. in
Bradfield 83-84).
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
With this brief travelogue, which constructs both whiteness and intellectual
legitimacy, Mervyn joins the fellowship of the novel's other scientific
observers. 22 Mervyn's acts of classification resist the stage's
democratizing space and position him at the top of the moving microcosm's
social hierarchy. 23 "I was destined to be_something_ in this scene of
existence," he says on his return to Philadelphia, "and might sometime lay
claim to the gratitude and homage of my fellow-men" (589). Mervyn's
conception of his relation to audience recalls both the _Repository_'s ideal
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
numerically singular, those unique individuals whose souls and bodies are at
that moment engaged in reading his text. Whitman experimented with this
technique in his early journalism at a time when he was writing for more
narrowly defined readerships on typical political and reformist topics, and
before discovering the broadly democratizing effects of abstract address. 36
But in _Leaves of Grass_, this placing of generalized/specific readers serves
to coordinate Whitman's historical determinism with his emphasis on what
Raymond Williams calls "creative [practise] in the emergent sense," and forms
the rhetorical context for the collaborative enterprise of his lyric. 37
48. See Parker and Sedwick's introduction, "Performativity and Performance,"
to _Performativity and Performance_, 8-11. This is not to say, however, that
Whitman _never_ apostrophizes specific subjects in his lyric, as poems like
"To a Common Prostitute" or "To Rich Givers" (2:412-13) show. It is only to
say that when he is working in his most broadly democratizing lyric mode, he
is resisting the ideologico-cultural "disimpaction of the scene, as well as
the act, of utterance" (Parker and Sedwick, 8) that Parker and Sedgwick
perform on Austin. Whitman prefers instead to leave the scene of
interlocution in its most "fluid" (to use Moon's term) possible state, open
56. Erkkila makes a related point when she argues that it is the
interreferentiality of Whitman's languages--political, social, religious,
scientific, sexual--our inability to take one as the expressive system of
another, that characterizes _Leaves of Grass_ as a democratizing social and
political project: "The words Whitman did use to articulate and name his
erotic feeling for men were the words of democracy--of comradeship,
brotherhood, equality, social union, and the glories of the laborer and the
common people. But Whitman also used other languages. And thus, against those
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
countercurrents in political and aesthetic thought, gender politics
provide a recurrent case of plus �a change. With the gradual
relocation of power the always available misogynistic libel collects
on the neoclassic image, and iconoclasm comes to be gendered as male.
Burke's account of the beautiful, then, is a means of hastening
political change by feminizing the antagonistic political order, and
accusing traditional aesthetic theory of fostering a matriarchy by
submitting to idle and unproductive fantasies and illusions.
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
vague) indiscretions, Hallward wonders about the quality of his friend's
soul, at which point he is invited to view the picture and see it for
himself; but Dorian suddenly feels an intense hatred towards the painter for
having set the process in motion and kills him out of resentment, before
hastening to cover up his crime. Commenting on this incident, Alan Sinfield
concludes that it arises "from sentimental self-indulgence and want of
intelligence and self-control, not from aestheticism and amorality. . . .
Dorian arrives at disaster not because he abjures conventional moral
principles but because he remains under their sway." 18 As we shall see, this
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
stanza 4, Shelley presents two ways of seeing the victimized woman
that he rejects: while the eft, who "peeps idly" ("M," 4.26) from a
distance, is completely unaware and without sensitivity, the bat is
"bereft / Of sense" ("M," 4.27-28), even "mad" ("M," 4.28), as
self-destructively "he comes hastening like a moth that hies / After
a taper" ("M," 4.30-31). Whereas the former remains securely aloof
from danger, the latter is the hysterical male, threatened by
Medusa's image. This might seem to leave the viewer in the position
of the reassured patriarchal male, Perseus, who beheads Medusa by
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
Garrison's repeated denial of his reliance on print reveals an anxiety about
his relation to public opinion and, therefore, to the very organizational
vogues, distributional markets, and national public-formations--in short, to
ideology--he criticized in others. At the same time, however, Garrison's own
newspaper, _The Liberator,_ was effecting exactly the manipulation of public
opinion. Throughout Garrison's writings, the agency of print was always
subsumed on the one hand by providential wisdom and, on the other, by the
affective response of readers, who were constructed as embodied consumers,
both of the print-commodity and its ideology. That the readership of _The
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
experiment" of "living at the same time in several different
contiguous, but otherwise widely separated, worlds" (126). In a
classically voluntarist manner, Park sees the "fortuitous and
casual" (125) relationships *[End Page 601]* of the modern city as
effecting the "mobilization" of the individual: in the segmented
social worlds of the city, every individual can, in principle, find
the "moral climate" capable of stimulating his or her "peculiar
nature" and bringing it to "full and free expression" (126). But
Crane casts a rather more baleful and disenchanted eye on human
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
60). A Dionysian art intervenes to exhaust these feelings of nausea
and absurdity, producing plays within plays, poems within poems. But
a danger persists that the loss constitutive of such art will
receive, out of fear or grief or weariness, a transcendental
interpretation. 44 Excess succumbs to intelligibility, effecting a
loss of loss. The ecstatic agonies of the Dionysian, those pains of
opium's dubious pleasures, can just as easily receive transcendental
as lyrical treatment.
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
is neither relief from self-consciousness nor an easy way of invoking
community, the poem imagines autonomy not as the endowment of the isolated,
elevated individual, but rather as the capacity for imagining the conditions
of a common sense that is imperceptible but no less integral to subjectivity
in the first place. Far from effecting an aestheticized flight from politics,
Coleridge's literary experimentation seeks rather to reconceive the aesthetic
as a basis for imagining profoundly altered conditions for judgment and for
communities based on the same.
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
the commonplace argument for the triumph of interest over passion,
of which Smith is the avowed champion. In short, Smith's dissolution
of the distinction between passions and interests signaled the
demise of what had been a centuries-old sociopolitical and cultural
formation. Smith is not alone in effecting this transformation, but
rather is representative of a broader shift, generally understood as
the gradual, overlapping movement in the eighteenth century from
civic to economic man.
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
sublime, and [whose] bosom burned with a godlike ambition"
(postscript, 325).
This echo of Caleb's characterization of Falkland in Godwin's
memorial footnote on Burke has of course been read as corroborating a
reading of Caleb Williams in which Caleb is led astray by his
unwarranted admiration for Falkland (or Burke), and in which at the
end of the novel he rises to a superior realization of, and
compassion for, Falkland's lapse into depravity. That corruption is
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
After Lady Delacour's invigoratingly debauched behavior at an
earlier masked ball, to see her in her decrepitude is contrast
indeed. And yet, it is a fitting contrast, making still more
explicit the novel's proposed connection between wit and terror, and
corroborating the insinuating proximity between these terms that
occupies the early sections of the novel.
We now learn that Lady Delacour explicitly blames wittiness for her
predicament. These finger-pointings range from the more oblique--"my
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
into the truth, before she condemned any person of good character,
though appearances were against them" (_W_, 2:138). And indeed it
turns out that Hester couldn't afford a new dress because her
drunken father stole her savings. Mrs. Jones's ability to ascertain
character and withhold judgment, while corroborating her
impressions, renders her a more adequate—or at least
accurate—provider of charity than the clergyman.
Despite their rather mysterious knowledge of character, More's
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
content, rehearses the gender distinctions of Wordsworth's earlier
polemic on poetic diction: just as his "plainer" language will
rescue English diction from "the gaudiness and inane phraseology" of
the sensibility poets, so meter performs a disciplinary,
masculinizing role on improper subjects, specifically, on
Wordsworth's female and effeminate voices. Note too that
Wordsworth's theory of meter is essentially performative. The
"restraining" effect of meter cannot be understood outside the
sensual workings of poetry as an oral medium: as words uttered,
For Wordsworth, English is "rugged" and concentrates the manly mind,
while Italian is "easy and mellifluous" as a siren song.30 This
formulation suggests that Wordsworth considered his translating
Metastasio a form of masculinizing transformation, whereby he would
subject the insinuating feminine rhymes of the romance language to
the "rugged," "meagre," and "harsh" constraints of Anglo-Saxon
demonstratives: "'that' 'this' &c."
Wordsworth, to "encourage idleness and unmanly despair" in poets
(1802, 336-37).
In contrast to Hoole's empty and unmanly poeticisms, the
"masculinizing" austerity of Wordsworth's translation from "_Amor
Timido_" artfully restrains the operatic gesture at the heart of the
lyric, the *[End Page 983]* emotional extravagance of the lovesick
speaker and his tearful, effeminate "timidity." As Wordsworth
observes in the Preface, the regulatory effect of meter combined
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
motives and aims of agents to "an old immaculate pedigree"; in
looking past individual intentionality, we get beyond the
particular, the personal, the time-bound, and the determinant to the
general, the impersonal, the timeless, and the [End Page 1013]
indeterminant. If "put[ting] ourselves in the place and the state"
of others was, for "History," the only way for us to understand
action, here it is made clear that the only way for us to elude the
"trap" of love and homage is by refusing to rest with such a
gesture.
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
exacerbated, not resolved, by her moments of profound solitude. 47
When over a school vacation Lucy is virtually alone for seven weeks,
she likens herself to a hermit who must "swallow his own thoughts .
. . during these weeks of inward winter" by "mak[ing] a tidy ball of
himself, creep[ing] into a hole of life's wall, and submit[ting]
decently to the drift which blows in and soon blocks him up,
preserving him in ice for the season" (348). 48 Poignantly, during
other holidays Marie Broc (the cretin) is essentially her sole
companion.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
Although she acknowledges him only in passing, Levinson's Althusserian,
Jamesonian-inspired approach in many ways resembles de Man's deconstructive
approach, in that both, for example, confront a "greatly idealized corpus"
and work to subvert Cartesian dualism by "split[ting] the atom of Romantic
symbolism and organicism." 11 Both, too, work to solve the problem of the
Romantic symbol by way of recourse to Romantic allegory. And yet de Man
introduces allegory, it may be remembered, as a way of forcing the self to
confront its own anteriority or alterity, to prevent the self "from an
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
virtue--especially public virtue and benevolence--that shapes the
final sections of Franklin's history.
By the early forties, Franklin's business had become sufficiently
profitable for him to "disengage" from "private Business" and turn
his attention to "public Affairs" and natural philosophy: "I
flatter'd myself that, by the sufficient tho' moderate Fortune I had
acquir'd, I had secur'd Leisure during the rest of my Life, for
Philosophical Studies and Amusements" (A, 100). But, Franklin
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
Emerson aimed to induce in his readers, commentators invite us to
experience liberty in the act of pretending away that this is what
they are providing. The less sure we are of Emerson's meaning, the
more sure we can be of our sanction to mean; the more we can
disengage utterance from the "trap" of individuality, the greater
the power of utterance to engage our interest. Or again, in the case
of more politically minded interpretations of Emerson, the more
confident we are of his refusal to "attach meaning to individual
consciousness," the more persuaded we will be that his work implies
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
shamelessness." 15
Thus the two sides of the story that Goffman and Foucault tell,
however far apart in the tone they take to describe the individual's
inclination to disengage herself from society, come together in the
*[End Page 846]* ubiquitous reflection of its gaze in the mind of
the subject so inclined. In either version, she who takes leave from
the social unit where she is gathered does so conscious of its gaze.
This gaze is always on the mind of those who inhabit the society by
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
the "culture and refinement" she has seen "imitated" on the stage
(28). According to Seltzer, Maggie "gains an interiority or becomes
a person" by "internalizing a desire to imitate" (93). She
cultivates an interiority which is only made possible through a
self-objectifying process in which she is both warmly human and
doll-like, both self-possessed and socially disciplined. At this
point, Seltzer refers directly to class division: the melodrama
Maggie watches posits both an unbridgeable gulf between upper and
lower classes, as well as "a desire to transcend this difference";
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
example, these figures are "guides and tutors, demonstrating the
quality of perception that the reader must learn to apply to the
world within the novel." 17 This would seem to indicate that the
horseman is here to train us in appropriate sympathetic response. Yet
the horseman's relation to Adam is objectifying and dehumanizing.
Even Adam's own "unconscious" response to the stranger's gaze seems
to underscore the omniscient and analytical properties of our
surrogate narrator rather than his potential sympathetic
identification: for his "all-seeing eye surveys" Adam's manly
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
as she, which would mean that Venus would be the same as Pleasant,
_or_ his mind was completely possessed by hers, like Trilby's by
Svengali's, which would make Venus nothing more than Pleasant's
passive pawn.23 In either case, Venus _as other_ would disappear.
Escaping the fatally objectifying "boney" regard of Venus would
require the reciprocal outcome of objectifying him—depriving
him of his alterity and independent perspective altogether.
As I read Pleasant's message to Venus, it not only shows this
_or_ his mind was completely possessed by hers, like Trilby's by
Svengali's, which would make Venus nothing more than Pleasant's
passive pawn.23 In either case, Venus _as other_ would disappear.
Escaping the fatally objectifying "boney" regard of Venus would
require the reciprocal outcome of objectifying him—depriving
him of his alterity and independent perspective altogether.
As I read Pleasant's message to Venus, it not only shows this
radically individualistic side to performative agency but also its
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
Scott's notion of a properly literary subject for a "legitimate
drama"--"the concealment of the Scotch regalia during the
troubles"--shows the extent to which his "proper person" constrains
his creativity, and the degree to which he imagines that public self
participating in the project of instilling institutionalized
standards of taste in his literary audiences. 68 While The Doom of
Devorgoil raises the same issues of authorship that Lewis faced
twenty years previously, it also demonstrates Scott's willingness to
live within these parameters and to manipulate his culture's ideas
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
expectation that we will stay on the right side of the law,
proprieties that prescribe as well the most intimate and intricate
leanings of body and mind. The "details of dress, bearing, physical
and verbal manners" that Pierre Bourdieu assesses as the rudimentary
vocabulary of "an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole
cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy," are also
no more and no less than the stimulation that keeps the eye of
society ever wakeful, the sleepless eye which restrains us less by
any respect it installs for the particulars of our conduct and
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
would by no means suffer Belinda to follow her into the boudoir"
(16).
Marriott's province over Lady Delacour's private chambers seems to
have been gained through instilling fear in her employer. After she
has been dressed by Marriott, Lady Delacour decides that she would
rather switch costumes with Belinda, but refuses to do so in her own
dressing chambers, where Marriott might see the undoing of her
handiwork. She urges Belinda to change outfits at Lady Singleton's,
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
dolls really talk, only to be assured by Pete that "'it's some damn
fake'" (23). At the theater, Maggie ponders whether she can acquire
the "culture and refinement" she has seen "imitated" on the stage
(28). According to Seltzer, Maggie "gains an interiority or becomes
a person" by "internalizing a desire to imitate" (93). She
cultivates an interiority which is only made possible through a
self-objectifying process in which she is both warmly human and
doll-like, both self-possessed and socially disciplined. At this
point, Seltzer refers directly to class division: the melodrama
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
Thomas Weiskel's psychoanalytic terms, the terror of the sublime is
the function where "the higher faculty (reason . . . or the superego)
strengthens itself through reference to an external threat, the
relevant mechanism [being] identification or introjection, which
neutralizes oedipal anxiety by internalizing the terrifying image of
the father." 5 Burke's rejection of the beautiful, then, is not
incidental to his theory, but signals the return to the law of the
father and a flight from the feminization of the beautiful. W. J. T.
Mitchell sums up the larger implications of the oedipal mechanism when
is to identify with the victim, and, as we shall see, there is ample
reason for Burke to do so since Samuels has suggested that he had in
mind the execution of the Jacobite rebel, Lord Lovat. 25 This response
to the violence of authority is another example of Weiskel's
"internalizing the terrifying image of the father," and accounts for
male subject-construction through the otherwise unaccountable delight
of self-loss "under the arm as it were of almighty power" (E, 68).
Sympathy and identification then, belong not with the tragic
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
as though his life could be taken to represent something other than
its own course. One source of the variety of faces he shows us is
his willingness to follow his changeable nature into its least
defended positions. It would be wrong to characterize him
exclusively *[End Page 113]* as internalizing a principle of change,
or as being finally somehow uncentered in his person. Nonetheless,
the overall effect of his letters is to body forth something like
instability, whatever is the opposite of being frozen. We are never
quite sure of the Cowper we face, maybe least of all in the letters.
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
semantics results from such circumstances, a semantics which should not be
reduced to the simple absence of that which is being addressed, because the
event remains somehow "encrypted" within a language which is wried from the
norm by its apparent refusal to refer. Abraham and Torok speak of a process
of "designifying" by which words even as they signify normally are felt more
importantly to refer to some event which is inadmissible. 13 What is
difficult here and what marks the force of the de- or anti- in [End Page
995] "designifying" and "antisemantics" is the fact that the second
reference puts a new and troubling angle on the first, while appearing to
norm by its apparent refusal to refer. Abraham and Torok speak of a process
of "designifying" by which words even as they signify normally are felt more
importantly to refer to some event which is inadmissible. 13 What is
difficult here and what marks the force of the de- or anti- in [End Page
995] "designifying" and "antisemantics" is the fact that the second
reference puts a new and troubling angle on the first, while appearing to
leave it intact. Hence the first or normative reference is made to encrypt
the second reference, where "encrypt" means both "to bury" and "to render
cryptic."
what?," except that if the "door" to the missing "more" proposed by "or" is
simply "Lenore" (dead and buried), and her harbinger comes back to say as
much, surely--since this is what the poem overtly announces--there may well
be an entirely different and much more disruptive "or" being proposed by the
poem's designifying factors?
Since the clues, so far, turn on metrical exceptions, I shall consider less
systematically exceptional feet. These are few and far between, and I shall
work backwards through them because initial instances are liable to seem
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
individual's infancy, such as unresolved Oedipal anxiety. My
immediate concern is with the first form of the [End Page 160]
uncanny. We have, says Freud, surmounted our archaic beliefs and
fears, but the uncanny comes upon us, overwhelming us with feelings
of the fantastic, when this "surmounting" comes under threat, when
the animistic, supernatural world once more exerts itself in our
imaginations. 14 The American fantastic, however, includes an
additional variety. It comes about when the archaic European order
that America has surmounted breaks through the quotidian of
-------------------
For Melville, the Gothic genre encodes an archaic historical stage
America was to have surmounted; and to suspicions of the failure of
this surmounting he attaches episodes of the uncanny. I now want to
turn to [End Page 161] my first proposition: that Pierre discloses a
close knowledge of the ideological origins of the English Gothic. I
shall begin by briefly reviewing some of the main features of the
myth of the Goth which conditioned much of the political debate of
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
acts as an antidote to the dissolution produced by the beautiful. All
its strainings follow the dictates of the work ethic." And she reminds
us of Burke's assertion that "the best remedy for all these evils
[produced by the beautiful] is exercise or labour. And labour is a
surmounting of difficulties, an exertion of the contracting power of
the muscles." 42 An identical ascesis also appears as intellectual
labor in Neil Hertz's essay on the numerical sublime where he cites a
passage by Tom MacFarland as an example of "the scholar's wish for the
moment of blockage, when an indefinite and disarrayed sequence is
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
child during the Indian raid on the family's home. Reading this scene, a
number of critics have ascribed to Sedgwick the beliefs of Hope, whose "heart
die[s] within her" (237) when she and Faith meet again several years later.
Upon seeing Faith dressed "in savage attire," Hope is overcome with "a
sickening feeling," "an unthought of revolting of nature" (237). Judith
Fetterley argues that this scene is the moment where _Hope Leslie_ becomes
"Hope-lessly"; it marks the limits of any radical politics one might find in
the novel because "Sedgwick's narrative voice doubles Hope's" in this scene
("My Sister!" 504). Similarly Stephen Carl Arch asserts that "Hope's
"difference of character among the various races of the earth, arises mainly
from difference of condition" (4). The reunion scene is constructed to test
this proposition. The argument there in favor of "conditions" as a marker of
racial difference turns on the strangeness of the phrase used to describe
Hope's reaction: "an unthought of revolting of nature." The ambiguity of
language and syntax in this phrase, as is so often the case in the novel,
conveys disparate meanings. On the one hand, the phrase simply means that
Hope's "unthought" is of a kind that might be termed _revolting_ (i.e., an
unthought revolting of nature), in which case "revolting" is simply an
Hope's reaction: "an unthought of revolting of nature." The ambiguity of
language and syntax in this phrase, as is so often the case in the novel,
conveys disparate meanings. On the one hand, the phrase simply means that
Hope's "unthought" is of a kind that might be termed _revolting_ (i.e., an
unthought revolting of nature), in which case " adjective that describes the "nature" or type of unthought that Hope feels:
Hope finds the sight of her sister repulsive. On the other hand, the grounds
for that revulsion are indicated by the term _nature_, which refers not only
to Hope's unthought, but to Faith's decidedly _unnatural_ (according to Hope)
Hope finds the sight of her sister repulsive. On the other hand, the grounds
for that revulsion are indicated by the term _nature_, which refers not only
to Hope's unthought, but to Faith's decidedly _unnatural_ (according to Hope)
appropriation of Indian clothing, manners, and speech (i.e., an unthought of
revolting _against_ nature). In this case, " verb: Hope is revulsed because Faith seems to be revolting against nature.
Which is only to say that what so sickens Hope is that her sister is
disguised as an Indian; she is, in Hope's view, _passing_, hiding what Hope
for that revulsion are indicated by the term _nature_, which refers not only
to Hope's unthought, but to Faith's decidedly _unnatural_ (according to Hope)
appropriation of Indian clothing, manners, and speech (i.e., an unthought of
revolting _against_ nature). In this case, "revolting" also functions as a
verb: Hope is revulsed because Faith seems to be revolting against nature.
Which is only to say that what so sickens Hope is that her sister is
disguised as an Indian; she is, in Hope's view, _passing_, hiding what Hope
believes is her true nature—whiteness—beneath Indian
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
earlier Victorian culture, he is also close kin to the mid-Victorian
novel. This is a play in which books can be mistaken for people, and
the changeling left by Miss Prism in Jack's perambulator turns out
to be none other than "the manuscript of a three-volume novel of
more than usually revolting sentimentality" (I, 336). The pram, as
far as Wilde is concerned, of course, is the right place for this
species of fiction. That the sensation novel as much as, if not more
than, the sentimental novel is the target of Wilde's wit is
suggested by a comment of Cecily's on the novels she receives from
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
'other and better worlds'" (O, 424). O'Brien's break with the national past
is not only marked by his failure to remember the Irish language, childhood
friends, and his aunts' home, but by a disgust that is explicitly ascribed to
O'Brien's non-Irish political education, a disgust that transforms even
Ireland's "new-born freedom" into something revolting rather than
revolutionary.
The "other and better worlds" which have initiated O'Brien's break with his
Irish past are the United States and France, favorably compared to Ireland
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
in a considerable degree, useful and instructive. In that hope it
is, that I have drawn it up: and that must be my apology for
breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve, which, for
the most part, restrains us from the public exploration of our own
errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to
English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on
our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that "decent
drapery," which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have
drawn over them. . . . _All this I feel so forcibly, and so
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
reversal is meant to say: 'I will bear everything, pain, suffering,
humiliation, and disgrace, but I will not renounce my satisfaction.'"
17 "[The masochist's] obedience," concludes Reik, "kills the commands
of his aggressors. His shameful and ridiculous acceptance of the
authorities makes them impotent and his uncompromising acknowledgment
of their power prepares for their overthrow." 18 The flight forward
therefore does have one element in common with Burke's beautiful: it
is [End Page 411] a form of deceit, deceit that has the power of an
ideal. "Phantasy," Reik claims, "has the power to transform the
ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537
"Bales of Living Anguish": Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing
Peter J. Kitson
---------------
affairs of the kidnapped slaves; these speculations about the state of the
slaves are unspoken, but nevertheless shared, and throughout Clarkson
emphatically uses the pronoun "we" to describe their common purpose. The
mutuality and shared objectivity of "these and other melancholy reflections"
(E, 84) profoundly indicates Clarkson's uncompromising acceptance of his
common humanity with his African guide. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, such
moments of mutuality arise only in the most intense and sublime experiences,
when the sense of an individual being merged with that of another, as in
Coleridge's projection of his thoughts onto his son Hartley in "Frost at
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
Emerson's conception of meaning, "the individual does not own, and
does not even hold meaning as part of himself, for this can only
belong to the world." The labor theory of knowledge is not thereby
abandoned but [End Page 1011] it is qualified in a way that makes
its expectations seem less uncompromising and its potential
contradictions less disabling. The passion for intellectual
independence is put in its place. It is to be understood as emerging
from a background set of assumptions that take meaning to be "both
public and private in that its ownership remains a form of social
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
susceptible to modification. At the end of her opening letter Wollstonecraft
recounts a distressing scene that implicitly ascribes causality to the face:
"I saw the first countenance in Sweden that displeased me, though the man was
better dressed than any one who had as yet fallen in my way. An altercation
took place between him and my host, the purport of which I could not guess,
excepting I was the occasion of it . . . The sequel was his leaving the house
angrily; and I was immediately informed that he was a custom-house officer.
The professional had indeed effaced the national character, for living as he
did with these frank hospitable people, still only the exciseman
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
scientific theories only to show that these do not suffice to solve the
mystery of the spectral.
For while Scott recognizes in his _Letters_ that the popular demand for ghost
stories, especially those which purport to be veridical, reflects the growing
need for empirical verification of things which ought to be perceived and
understood intuitively, he privately acknowledges that a kind of ghost story
in which the distinction between objective and subjective perception, between
optical fact and optical illusion, appears entirely arbitrary may produce a
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
themselves suggest that the opposition between individual autonomy
and social determination fails to provide a sufficient basis for an
adequate theory of the role of agency in social transformation.10 In
this essay I am concerned primarily with two influential
contemporary theories which purport to offer an approach to
politically relevant agency that does not depend upon individual
intentions, proposing instead that political agency should be
understood as nonindividualized and nonintentionalized. The first,
performative theory made popular by Judith Butler, underwrites
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
literary reputation, this is the very period of life most auspicious
for it, and I am resolved to devote a few years exclusively to the
attempt. Should I succeed, besides the literary property I shall
amass in copyright, I trust it will not be difficult to obtain some
official situation of a moderate, unpretending kind, in which I may
make my bread. But as to reputation I can only look for it through
the exertions of my pen."
39. On Irving's industrious cultivation of literary capital, see Ben
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
clusters a vocabulary of appearance, simulation, of looking and
looking-like. If the servant, tutelary spirit, wants her master to
exorcise him, it is because he brings out the simulated side of that
prototypical English home that is Dove Cottage. The cottage, we are
told, is "unpretending" (_C_, 55). Modest it may be, but without
pretense or show it is not; next to the "ferocious-looking" Malay a
number of salient details that denote pretense and seeming appear:
the kitchen's paneling is of "dark wood that from age and rubbing
_resembled_ oak" and the kitchen itself "_look_(s) more like a
ever before: I read Kant again; and again I understood him, or
fancied that I did. Again my feelings of pleasure expanded
themselves to all around me: and if any man from Oxford or
Cambridge, or from neither had been announced to me in my
unpretending cottage, I should have welcomed him with as sumptuous a
reception as so poor a man could offer. Whatever else was wanting to
a wise man's happiness,—of laudanum I would have given him
as much as he wished, and in a golden cup. And, by the way, now that
I speak of giving laudanum away, I remember, about this time, a
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
novel, the aesthetic and ideological antithesis of his literary
ambition.
The irony is stitched deep into the fabric of the book. The
disillusioned Pierre spurns what he once was, an aristocratic and
literary amateur, in favour of self-creation. After burning his past
(literally, by setting fire to the portrait of his "adulterous"
father) Pierre declares himself: "untrammeledly his ever-present
self! free to do his own self-will and present fancy to whatever
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
is defined in opposition to the "Southern land" (L, 39) of England.
England may be generous to minstrels, but he scorns it, preferring
poverty in the Ettrick hills and the free winds of Scotland even
though they "chill [his] wither'd cheek" (L, 39). But the English
generosity that the minstrel spurns, Scott reciprocates, for he
allows the minstrel's patriotic sentiment to blow south across the
border, until it becomes an expression of the passionate nationalism
that united all of Britain in its war against Napoleon.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
Miller, 39-49.
7. De Quincey, _Collected Writings_, 11:54.
8. In contradistinction to Rousseau, whose sensibility he spurns, De
Quincey spends his time explaining his lack of pathos: "My thoughts
on subjects connected with the chief interests of man daily, nay
hourly, descend a thousand fathoms 'too deep for tears' . . . the
sternness of my habits of thought present an antagonism to the
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
Thomas Weiskel's psychoanalytic terms, the terror of the sublime is
the function where "the higher faculty (reason . . . or the superego)
strengthens itself through reference to an external threat, the
relevant mechanism [being] identification or introjection, which
neutralizes oedipal anxiety by internalizing the terrifying image of
the father." 5 Burke's rejection of the beautiful, then, is not
incidental to his theory, but signals the return to the law of the
father and a flight from the feminization of the beautiful. W. J. T.
Mitchell sums up the larger implications of the oedipal mechanism when
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
seashore. "I hate you, Enoch" (EA, 34), the youthful Philip is permitted
tersely to announce. Yet all of this incitement to feeling is forcibly
countered by the techniques of sentimentality, which in addition to
converting the pressure for retaliatory violence to the repressive
energies of denial and renunciation, also neutralizes rivalry by the
fatalism that seems to govern the central losses experienced. Enoch's
anger toward Philip is shifted away from an agent against whom
retaliation might be sanctioned to the purely aleatory nature of loss
and decline. The woeful state in which Enoch finds himself, physically
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
mythology conceals. 48
In her fascinating reading of David Copperfield, Poovey demonstrates how the
natural selflessness and self-regulation of the English middle-class woman
"neutralizes" bourgeois contradictions, thereby stabilizing individual and
national identity. 49 Crucial to this representational strategy, however, is
both the erasure of aberrant female sexuality and the naturalization of class
difference. In David Copperfield, Poovey argues, bourgeois contradictions
threaten to "return" in the anti-heroic figure of Uriah Heep. 50 The novel
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
successful internalization of the rigors of domestic work. She
assumes the keys of John Jarndyce's estate, Bleak House, with
seeming gratitude, and she provides motherly care for the orphaned
wards of Chancery, the neglected Jellyby children, and for Jo. 30
She combines the orderliness of household economizing "with love,"
compensating for the emptiness of the various systems of work and
value in the novel. The opening of Esther's narration in chapter
three provides the possibility of narrative motion, as signification
can escape the static, horizontal circulation of chapters one and
magazine as a whole; the title announces that the publication is
about national subjects, discussed in familiar, "household" terms.
The metaphor [End Page 602] is an economic one, or one at least that
plays on the two gendered meanings of the word "economy" in modern
usage: (feminine) household scrimping, economizing, preserving,
tidying; and (masculine) political economy, market, world of
finance.
The metaphorical connection between banking and housekeeping that
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
sense, it is important to remember that charismatic authority "is
specifically foreign to economic considerations. . . . In the pure type, it
disdains and repudiates economic exploitation of the gifts of grace as a
source of income . . . .What is despised . . . is traditional or rational
everyday economizing." 33 Within class society, though, we might say that
charisma has paid the price of economic routinization. So, for example, even
Uriah's baleful mesmerism is thoroughly implicated in the routinized
calculations of the counting house: BLOCKQUOTE
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
self-regulating practice" (18), one of the key "affective forms of
disciplinary control" (8) in early America. Barnes argues that
postrevolutionary women were encouraged to form sympathetic relations to
sentimental novels in which wayward daughters learn to subject themselves to
the authoritative if arbitrary rule of fathers, thereby rationalizing the
"consensual" subjection of citizens to the founding fathers of the national
family. Demonstrating "early national culture's attempts to reconcile
conservative republican values of duty to others with a liberal agenda of
self-possession" (12), sentimental fiction is the logical outgrowth of
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
coincidence between Vaughan's didactic letter and Franklin's focus
on self-regulation in the second part of his narrative, a close
reading reveals a volatile body and an ironic, shape-shifting
persona that resist young Franklin's moral idealism and his
rationalizing regime. There is in fact an increasing temporal
dissonance between the young man who aspires and the old man who
narrates--between the working class body of Franklin the shopkeeper
and printer in Philadelphia in the 1730s and the cosmopolitan and
elite body of Franklin who drank, flirted, and flourished in France
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
nineteenth-century philosophical skepticism and evidential rules of
materialist science than with Carlyle's, Crowe's, and Ruskin's metaphysically
and theologically informed arguments for spiritual vision. And yet, what
early nineteenth-century physiological science makes amply evident,
inadvertently developing a counterdiscourse to its own rationalizing
imperatives and ideological agendas, is that the validity of empirical
evidence in general, and the evidence of bodily sight especially, demands the
same kind of blind and somewhat irrational leap of faith that spiritualists
like Crowe demanded for inner vision--faith in what turns out to be little
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
and tactics, see de Certeau, 35-39.
35. When Harmon sizes up Pleasant, we may imagine that he is
assessing her moral worth. Yet because her shrewdness,
closemouthedness, and rationalizing not only suit Pleasant to her
quasi-larcenous business but also correspond to Harmon's need for a
particular kind of service, it is only by according an absolute
positive moral status to Harmon—one he himself
refuses—that Harmon's use of Pleasant seems to be a
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
native to the region in question, Hamlin Garland calls for a
"statement of life as indigenous as the plant-growth" (5). (Jewett's
idea of entitling her projected collection of "Irish-American"
stories _Transplanted Shamrocks_ raises, in the metaphor of
transplantation, another objection to the essentializing concept of
geographical roots.) But Mrs.Todd's gardening and gathering do not
simply symbolize community—they actively produce it. These
practices are essential to the food she cooks for her guests, the
teas she shares with visitors, and the nostrums she dispenses to
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
documented, the project of de-familiarizing the past, and tracing its
duration in mythologies of the present, must continue. This project demands
rigorous historicization and methodological critique. With these ends in
mind, I look forward to a critical practice that neither capitulates to the
teleological and essentializing tendencies identified by recent criticism,
nor eludes those dangers by recourse to abstraction.
University of Washington
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
wearing of ornaments, because Harleigh has caught a glimpse of the
wanderer's writing as she copies a part from a play. The wanderer's
intellect manifests itself in the strictly mechanical task of
handwriting, revealing neither epistolary sentiment nor
de-essentializing rationality. Handwriting may, to be sure, claim an
attenuated relation to the body; but, instead of a Richardsonian or
Wollstonecraftian promise of interiority, the wanderer's copying
delimits the exercise of an impersonally interiorized techn�e, whose
appeal lies not in content but in the unmistakable evidence of
with the education of a gentlewoman. 23
Remuneration can only negatively effect essence, through the pain it
causes. Pain, then, distinguishes remunerative practices from
immediately essentializing ones like manners. In the milliner's
shop, the wanderer's companion embodies their pain in a "tragic
expression of constant woe" that leaves the wanderer the more
"attractive" of the two. Yet even with Gabriella present to animate
the pain of the wanderer's remuneration, Burney still has difficulty
narrative insistence, represents the deepest historical threat to
the wanderer's imagined transmutation of aristocratic being. In her
efforts to support herself, the wanderer is in danger of affirming
the bourgeois radical "ethos of the self-made individual," whose
de-essentializing promise is, paradoxically, also based in practice.
24
Burney distinguishes practice from (remunerative) practice; but it
is hardly a coincidence that she reveals the secret of the
doing and doing.
Yet The Wanderer does not end here, for Burney invokes more than the
wanderer's lineage to stabilize the difference between
essentializing (aristocratic) and de- radical) practice. To stabilize this difference, Burney also relies
upon the wanderer's anatomy. The rest of this essay considers how
The Wanderer imagines its heroine's animating practice only in
variously urgent reference to her "female difficulties."
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
In "The Brothers," a long dramatic poem first published in the 1800
_Lyrical Ballads_, Wordsworth makes strategic use of a masculinist
language familiar to his wartime readers. The "Priest of Ennerdale"
mistakes Leonard, a returned sailor, for an effeminate Lake tourist,
a "moping son of Idleness."3 His "tears," "fancies," and "solitary
smiles" represent to the Priest a masculine deficiency, a neglect of
industry and martial vigor. This (mistaken) description of Leonard
is also strikingly evocative of Wordsworth's own balladeer, and by
extension the poet himself:
not the _strength_ of overpowering feelings on learning of his
brother's death that struck him dumb, he says, but "the weakness of
his heart" (428). The affective meaning is the same, but not its
gender significance. Our last image of Leonard echoes our first,
that is, of a weak, effeminate man, a "moping son of Idleness."
Likewise, Timothy, the father who six months ago lost his last
child, is another man whose high emotion, represented by tears,
renders him silent. The balladeer, in a tranquil mood himself, must
speak for him by ventriloquizing his thoughts:
sentimental content truly effeminate, except in the strategic,
rhetorical sense in which Wordsworth employs these terms to "defend"
himself and his poems from masculinist critique in a time of war, a
time when he himself might have been called an effeminate
do-nothing, a "moping son of Idleness." The necessity for that
defense was borne out, as I have suggested, by Burney's 1799
critique of the _Ballads_ as _poesie larmoiante_, a crying game.
That said, the merely strategic, gender-political interpretation of
Wordsworth's "manly" style risks paying too little credit to the
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
37. James Baldwin, _Poetry_, vol. 1 of _An Introduction to the Study
of English Literature and Literary Criticism_ (Philadelphia: Potter
and Co., 1882), 4. For an argument that literary study can be
specifically "systematic," see W. T. Hewett, "The Aims and Methods of
Collegiate Instruction in Modern Languages," _PMLA_ 1 (1884-1885): 33.
38. Here is just one of countless examples. Henry S. Pancoast begins
his history of English literature with a remark that treats the terms
325.
68. Wheeler, "The Liberal Education," in _The Abundant Life_, 175-78
("liberal education"; "freemen's training"), 183 ("rescue men").
Wheeler, "What the University Aims to Give the Student," in _The
Abundant Life_, 187 ("free [students]"), 187-88 ("American freemen";
"initiate"; "independent").
69. Wendell, "Stelligeri," 15; MacCalister, "The Study of Modern
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 301-318
Bruising, Laceration, and Lifelong Maiming; Or, How We Encourage Research
Andrew H. Miller
---------------
question.
30. Hertz, 149.
31. John Mearshimer, "The Aims of Education," in _Philosophy and Literature_
22 (1998): 150.
32. Wayne Booth, "Introducing Professor Mearshimer to his Own University,"
_Philosophy and Literature_ 22 (1998): 176.
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
cultural and psychological dynamics. 10 My concern, rather, is with
what these denials of conspiracy dismiss and ignore, for their
leveling of the early national period to the circulation of surface
discourses methodologically prohibits the explication of certain
cultural structures. Levine writes of Carwin, the ventriloquizing
conspirator of Brown's _Wieland_ (1798), "the problem of whether to
view Carwin as a political conspirator is beside the point, for it
becomes increasingly clear that the society at the
summerhouse-temple bequeathed by the paranoid elder Wieland is in
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
Pater turns to the life of the artist in each essay in order to
provide a subjective medium with which to explore all the thoughts,
passions, and tensions of which the work is only "an outward sign,"
a "semblance" (as Donoghue states, ventriloquizing Pater), and with
which to impart to us the powers of influence that it still retains
for the receptive critic. Yet for Pater what is influential is
precisely what is vampiric: not simply the pleasure, or even the
forces, of another era, but these forces as having survived their
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
that is, of a weak, effeminate man, a "moping son of Idleness."
Likewise, Timothy, the father who six months ago lost his last
child, is another man whose high emotion, represented by tears,
renders him silent. The balladeer, in a tranquil mood himself, must
speak for him by ventriloquizing his thoughts:
Perhaps to himself at that moment he said,
"The key I must take for my Ellen is dead"
But of this in my ears not a word did he speak,
himself fascinated by the scene of pained departure between little
"Barbara Lewthwaite" and her pet lamb. He studies the "workings" of
regret in the girl's face, which in turn work on him to fire the
machinery of sympathetic identification, and awaken his
ventriloquizing powers. The next ten stanzas are not reported
speech, but the voice of the balladeer explicitly adopting the
sentimental tones of the "little Maid": "If Nature to her tongue
could measur'd numbers bring / Thus, thought I, to her Lamb that
little Maid might sing" (19-20). The vocal transposition is marked
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
characters' increasing preoccupation over the course of an evening
with a disgusting substance permeating the air and slowly settling
on windowsills and clothing; this indeterminate but emphatically
nauseous matter is variously described as "soot" (B, 398), "a
smouldering suffocating vapour," "a dark greasy coating" (B, 402),
"a thick, yellow liquor," and "a stagnant, sickening oil" (B, 401).
Eventually, two characters, joined with the impersonal narrative
voice, make the gruesome discovery that the source of this
substance--indeed, the substance itself--is Mr. Krook, the owner of
phenomenon of spontaneous combustion--to the narrative itself, if
not to the reader. Almost immediately following this description,
the character who had earlier discovered Krook's remains spots
Richard and comments: "'there's combustion going on there! It's not
a case of Spontaneous, but it's smouldering combustion it is'" (B,
489). The play of embodiment and abstraction in which Richard
engages here suggests the process of combustion--or perhaps even
enacts it, insofar as Richard's approaching death may be taken to
confirm Tony Weevle's diagnosis. Figuration and interpretation here
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
Krook's remains, remains which are, like Nemo's, out of place. The
whole thrust of this scene reminds us not only of the initial
unknowability of this thick yellow liquor, but of its general
displacement and ubiquitousness, for like the fog in the novel's
opening pages, it is everywhere, "a smouldering, suffocating
substance vapour"(_B_, 511) that slides down walls, clings to
windows, and saturates exposed human flesh.
We not only have Krook's remains, however, but also his cat, now
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
tour. Italy's images were icons in a double sense, both revered objects and
places (art, architecture, cities) within Italian religious and aesthetic
traditions and objects triggering aesthetic responses that confirmed elite
status in the US. Kirkland's responses to Italian sights shed light on
tourism as a normalizing visual technique of the period and reveal how the
discourse of iconoclasm could reinforce the impulse toward surveillance, as
in the cathedral at Genoa, and provide a possible strategy of resistance to
them, both possibilities inflected by her cultural position as a woman.
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
writer of the Fourth of July ode above made clear, it was a god of
"self-control" rather than the revivalist god to whom the patients were
allowed to pray.
Also subject to normalizing reform within the asylum were the gender roles
associated with middle-class domestic life, for, as Mary Ryan has written of
antebellum reform, "the pressure for moral regeneration was exerted within
and around families as much as across classes" (13). Entries on patient
improvement in the case books commonly include comments that patients are
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
missionary work identified US children as both the objects and the
subjects of Christian domestication, thereby ambivalently
reinscribing US imperial authority in this equation of *[End Page
456]* (white) children with nonwhite "savages." Wexler theorizes how
the normalizing sentimental response of domestic fiction
continuously reproduced the imperial binary which constructed that
colonial difference as absolute rather than relational and
historical. Gillman shows how US domestic fiction's concerns with
oppressed racial Others (as in _Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ramona)_ can be
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
past rather than a struggle for the present, a neutral memory of a foregone
Scotland.
The ideological project of the "cabbage patch" enforces a distance between
the image of the lost Highland culture and present conditions, normalizing
its contemporary political structures. Kailyard's focus on local, individual
moral struggles functions in its own world of time, inside of its own history
and exempt from the effects of urbanization, modernity, and the realities of
the outside world. It is a landscape without social divisions or privilege.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
rehabilitation, not so much to confirm as to comprehend his [End
Page 887] otherness. What, one might ask, is the truth of
habituation, the wisdom of the junkie? The alternative to
confronting such questions is the soporific confidence of
conventional, normalizing criticism.
II. Fix
-------
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
"retrospective anticipation."7 An expert in these matters, Patricia
Parker accordingly begins her book on _Literary Fat Ladies_ (1987)
with a "Retrospective Introduction," so-called because "it looks
back over and offers some conclusions from what is about to
follow."8 By normalizing the preface as a publishing practice we
have occluded its _pre_posterousness so successfully that any
genuine _prae-fatio_ is treated as a joke. When, for instance, Sir
William D'Avenant published his substantial _Preface to_ *[End Page
346]* _Gondibert_ (1650) a year before _Gondibert: An Heroick Poem_
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
Ahab's fathomless personality," citing as evidence the emergence of
his madness during a stormy voyage around Cape Horn after the
amputation of his leg during his first encounter with Moby Dick:
"[T]hen it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one
another, and so interfusing made him mad" (_M_, 156).15 But the
rhetoric here suggests that Ahab's madness derives not from
severance but from commingling, not from _lack_ but from
_augmentation_. Rather than the loss of a limb—as Ahab later
tells the ship's carpenter, he still feels the phantom leg (_M_,
severance but from commingling, not from _lack_ but from
_augmentation_. Rather than the loss of a limb—as Ahab later
tells the ship's carpenter, he still feels the phantom leg (_M_,
360)—the prosthetic represents its supplementation. The
wound is a site of conjuncture—an "interfusing [that] made
him mad"—wherein man and whale are grafted together, bone to
bone, leg to jaw. Ahab's madness arises at the point of mediation
between animal and human: the incommensurable contradiction produced
by the human's material dependence on the body of the animal,
(_M_, 270-73), or in Ahab's demand for their blood to cool his newly
forged harpoon (_M_, 371-72). The _Pequod_ belongs to an industry
that *[End Page 1050]* consumes some humans as it consumes
animals—two processes that the text understands by
interfusing them. Naming the ship after an indigenous people
decimated and dispossessed by the settler forbears of its white
crew,comparing the whalebone included in the vessel's construction
to the wearing of ivory trophies by "any barbaric Ethiopian
emperor," calling it a "cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
context are preceded by the definite article, as in Pease's well-known "new
historicist return of _the_ repressed context" ("New Americanists" 35;
emphasis added), or possessive pronouns (its, their), as in Wai-chee Dimock's
concise formulation: "the text and its context are in every case inseparable,
the latter . . . encompassing [the former] and permeating it as the condition
of its textuality" (5). My concerns about this historicist procedure are also
intended to echo those of Judith Fetterley, who has questioned its "strategic
usefulness for changing the evaluation of nineteenth-century American women
writers." Citing Jane Tompkins's important and influential historicist work,
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
political allegory of peculiarly vexed authority. Here, in fact, the
allegory in question involves a peculiar way in which authority
vexes itself. Chapter 32, "The Appointed Time," describes several
characters' increasing preoccupation over the course of an evening
with a disgusting substance permeating the air and slowly settling
on windowsills and clothing; this indeterminate but emphatically
nauseous matter is variously described as "soot" (B, 398), "a
smouldering suffocating vapour," "a dark greasy coating" (B, 402),
"a thick, yellow liquor," and "a stagnant, sickening oil" (B, 401).
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
institutions. The cult of Southern womanhood raised the standard of the
unbreachable hymen precisely because miscegenation breached the color line
throughout the prewar South. 37 Plainly much of the iconic resiliency of the
lily-white figure derived from that which it stood to negate. "She" was only
as beautiful, white, and impermeable as he was ugly, black, and permeating.
I summarize a cultural narrative to demonstrate how an ideal of beauty,
constituted by racial fear, may require the presence of that which it
denies. That Poe's "beautiful woman" must also be dead and therefore
available for melancholy ("the most legitimate of all the poetical tones")
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
repeated in The Statesman's Manual (CW, 4.1:100; 6:20). Living by
faith routinely enables a distinction between mere
"prudence"--actions pursued only for their effects rather than their
motives--and morality informed by religious faith (CW, 4.1:441). The
distinction, permeating arguments throughout this work, corresponds
with related discriminations between mere "obedience" and "faith,"
or between transient "EXPEDIENCY" and those "FEELINGS" that "God has
given us" (CW, 4.1:316). The moral conduct of the individual
extends, moreover, to the political conduct of the state. Religion,
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
"warfare" (CW, 4.1.97) among beliefs--is revealed to be a highly
circumscribed form of "liberty," perhaps so highly regulated that it
ceases to look like dissent at all. The 1817 Lay Sermon sets out to
preserve this version of liberty by attacking a "rank and unweeded
press" that "freethinking" writers use to influence their "ignorant
and half-learned" readers (CW, 6:152, 193). And the pages of the Lay
Sermon proceed to anatomize radical eloquence by enumerating its
multiple evils: the "compound poison," concocted from appeals to the
"passions" and "vague and commonplace Satyr" (CW, 6:152-54). The
and half-learned" readers (CW, 6:152, 193). And the pages of the Lay
Sermon proceed to anatomize radical eloquence by enumerating its
multiple evils: the "compound poison," concocted from appeals to the
"passions" and "vague and commonplace Satyr" (CW, 6:152-54). The
uncontrolled individual expression of freethinking can only lead to
a more dangerously pervasive public freethinking, tantamount to
utter disorder; and the sermon nervously foretells how writers will
"seek notoriety by an eloquence well calculated to set the multitude
agape, and excite gratis to overt-acts of sedition or treason" (CW,
Sermon proceed to anatomize radical eloquence by enumerating its
multiple evils: the "compound poison," concocted from appeals to the
"passions" and "vague and commonplace Satyr" (CW, 6:152-54). The
uncontrolled individual expression of freethinking can only lead to
a more dangerously pervasive public freethinking, tantamount to
utter disorder; and the sermon nervously foretells how writers will
"seek notoriety by an eloquence well calculated to set the multitude
agape, and excite gratis to overt-acts of sedition or treason" (CW,
6:145). 20 Coleridge's concerns about the unbridled production and
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
urban experiences and values.
There are twelve eight-line stanzas of alternating iambic tetrameter
and trimeter lines, with strong rhymes at the end of the trimeter
lines: abcbdefe. Thelwall plays with the ambiguity of fleecing--both
sheep and humans. To shear is to fleece, so that shearing and
fleecing are used interchangeably. The song's theme, "all the world
are sheerers" (S, 4), is developed in a series of vignettes
beginning appropriately in the country (S, 1-63), and culminating in
There are twelve eight-line stanzas of alternating iambic tetrameter
and trimeter lines, with strong rhymes at the end of the trimeter
lines: abcbdefe. Thelwall plays with the ambiguity of fleecing--both
sheep and humans. To shear is to fleece, so that shearing and
fleecing are used interchangeably. The song's theme, "all the world
are sheerers" (S, 4), is developed in a series of vignettes
beginning appropriately in the country (S, 1-63), and culminating in
the city (S, 64-108). The song's humor comes from the contrast
between shearing as harmless cutting of sheep's wool and shearing as
(S, 82-108)
At the center of urban and social corruption in general is the
political fleecing of both the party in power and the opposition.
Dismissing the Whigs as fleecers, Thelwall in the last two stanzas
enacts a dramatic reversal of the song's repetitive pattern of
passive submission to being fleeced. As the Whigs cannot protect the
people, the constitutional system having broken down, the people
middling-class professionals, it acquires some additional interest.
The ruling class of landowners who would not widen the franchise for
the upper ranks of the middle class, much less for those lower in
the social hierarchy, receive symbolically a thoroughly satisfying
fleecing in the song's first half, but their moral status as
fleecers is never in question, as their parliamentary
representatives are cut down in the song's last three stanzas. The
song depicts the ruling class, then, as oppressors who are both
powerfully evil and helplessly foolish. For inspiring aggressive
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 317-328
American Nationalism--R.I.P.
Bruce Burgett
---------------
final chapter where he focuses on the development of 1 January
slave-trade orations. When placed alongside 4 and 5 July
denunciations of slavery, these fascinating materials locate one
underacknowledged origin of antebellum abolitionism and black
nationalism, while also further exemplifying how nationalist rituals
could mean different things in different contexts. To respond to
such materials by arguing that they instance yet another ritual of
national consensus is to miss the ways in which they enabled a form
of political participation that was both accessible and influential.
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
will bring to light the abject cowardice of the race" (71).
This last pronouncement appears in the original French in the notes to
Faubert's text, along with six full pages of citations from L'Autre monde
exemplifying QUOTE ( QUOTE [37]). Of course, Faubert might have chosen from
any number of examples of nineteenth-century racist thought to illustrate
the prejudice that he argues should unite rather than divide Haitians. Yet
suturing passages from this particular work around the text of his play, and
making special reference to it in his introduction, allows him to position
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
when dealing with figures of the past, to amputate whatever we find
irrelevant from what the past itself considered the body of its
teaching" (1). For Hodder this amputation has involved a recent
neglect of Thoreau's spiritual life in favor of studies serving some
"social, political, or ideological agenda" or exemplifying critical
theory (xiii), in either case "using" Thoreau to mirror the concerns
of the interpreter and the present age rather than attempting to
elucidate Thoreau's own concerns.
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
never look for the personal or laudatory in discourse" (239)--there
is a sense in which this disclaimer is somewhat misleading. It is,
after all, Plato and a saint who get top billing in the essay's
first paragraph, whereas any ordinary figure would, in theory, have
done just as well in exemplifying the universality of "one mind
common to all." But ordinariness is quite plainly something which
already dominates the hearts and minds of Emerson's readership, who
need reminding they must not "suffer [themselves] to be bullied by
kings and empires" (239) nor allow "facts [to] encumber [and]
ELH 68.4 (2001) 1023-1047
"A Sort Of Adopted Daughter": Family Relations In _The Lamplighter_
Cindy Weinstein
---------------
become her own first colonial subject and purge herself of her origin in
a diseased uncivilized terrain." A key piece of evidence is the fact
that "she was born in Brazil to the daughter of a ship captain, who was
killed by malaria." 6 But in Kaplan's effort to make the case against
the text as exemplifying the imperialist logic of antebellum
sentimentalism, she has misread the novel. In its conclusion, we learn
that Gerty's father didn't die but rather "after an almost interminable
illness . . . made [his] way, destitute, ragged, and emaciated, back to
Rio" (384) and eventually back into Gerty's life, at which point she
charge" (34), and an "orphan" (36), has the capacity to become True's
"childish guardian" (88), as well as a "guardian" (133) to Willie's
grandfather when both men become ill and require her care. To be sure,
Gerty's guardianship involves taking care of other people and can thus
be seen as exemplifying women's limited options in antebellum culture.
But in the world of The Lamplighter, all worthy characters, regardless
of gender, willingly choose to care for others, whether it's Mr. Miller
kindly attending to Willie's senile grandfather, or Willie taking care
of the financial needs of his mother, or True offering Gerty a home.
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
new knowledges of the body, natural and social science taking the place of
the guards in Bentham's prison).
9. Lott describes the "pale gaze" as "a ferocious investment in demystifying
and domesticating black power in white fantasy by projecting vulgar black
types as spectacular objects of white men's looking" (153).
10. Garrison wrote, "The retributive justice of God was never more strikingly
manifested than in this all-pervading negrophobia, the dreadful consequence
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
relation to themselves.11 With few exceptions, these reformist
attempts to equalize *[End Page 440]* state functioning among
different racial groups advanced the culture of empire to some
degree; however progressive for white women, domesticity equated the
imperial spread of civilization with the homework of domesticating
conquered "foreign" peoples. In this respect, "civilization" or
"domestication" offered greater flexibility in implementing the
colonial state's regimes of disciplinary power to distinguish
colonizer from colonized in that the rule of colonial difference
Indian would become the "intelligently selfish," autonomous,
rational actor of classic laissez-faire economics. Only as this
economic subject could the Indian then enter into the social
contract of the "intelligently unselfish" nation. Instilling the
domesticating desire for private property, the invisible influence
of domestic interiors and the racial tutelage of wage labor would
make the savage Indian vanish, adding in due time the dark- skinned
yet civilized US citizen to the nation's fabric.
Southern belle. By having the working-class Southerner Aunt Ri
articulate the principles of a racially democratic project of nation
building, Jackson seemingly ties the Reconstruction-era project of
incorporating the freedmen into the nation as citizens with the
post-Reconstruction project of domesticating Indians into US
citizenship. Yet the coalescing of Jim Crow discourses of inherent
black male bestiality specifically precluded white women from
exercising a domesticating influence that would require a close
proximity to such imagined dangers. In contrast, the Indian
incorporating the freedmen into the nation as citizens with the
post-Reconstruction project of domesticating Indians into US
citizenship. Yet the coalescing of Jim Crow discourses of inherent
black male bestiality specifically precluded white women from
exercising a domesticating influence that would require a close
proximity to such imagined dangers. In contrast, the Indian
captivity narrative, which emphasized the dangerous potential for
the interracial rape of white women by Indian men, had for *[End
Page 458]* the most part ceased to invoke a generalized sense of
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
and genteel essence of a figure such as Herbert Pocket is inextricable from
the characteristic inability to amass "Capital." 60 Dickens's ambivalence
points both to the appeal and the difficulty of the gentleman--a kind of
middle-class male individual whose exemplary character obviates the
domesticating process delineated by Poovey (wherein male desire is first
produced as "acquisitive drive" and then "domesticated as its economic
aggression is rewritten as love"). For, in the gentleman, "acquisitive
drive"--should the gentleman in question be so impecunious as to require it
at all--is constitutionally separate from and incommensurable with
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
pity ("poor creatures") insists on casting that bonding hatred as a
mark of vulnerability and need, in a sentimental attempt to contain
the reality that the family might be a site of animosity, not
succor. After all, the entire structure of this charitable
enterprise depends upon the presumption that domesticating these
children will suture the social wounds of class.
Indeed, the Society's favorite project was not these temporary
lodging houses but rather its placing-out system, which largely
ELH 68.4 (2001) 1023-1047
"A Sort Of Adopted Daughter": Family Relations In _The Lamplighter_
Cindy Weinstein
---------------
Domestic self-possession has been convincingly linked to the workings of
the marketplace by Gillian Brown, who reads the "logic of sympathetic
proprietorship [in Uncle Tom's Cabin] . . . as symptomatic of a problem
within possessive individualism"; the problem being that such
proprietorship, while domesticating the experience of ownership, is
nevertheless fundamentally invested in the practice of ownership--and
therefore reproduces the structure and ideology of slavery (Domestic
Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America [Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1990], 41). Sympathetic proprietorship
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
subtlety of the counting words: flowers are plural, sand singular,
but then a collective singular is retained for all but the last of
the remaining stanzas. Diminutives ("cu�nta avecilla" [literally,
"how much little bird"] and "cu�nto arroyuelo" [how much brooklet])
belong to the Anacreontic trifling, but also to the sense of an
innumerable proliferation. Hence when the plural does return, it is
almost antithetical to the effect of [End Page 387] Cowley's hoard
of curses--a miracle rather than a multiple: "�Ves cu�ntas gracias
la mano / De las deidades te di�?" [Do you see how many graces the
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 133-166
Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wolfram Schmidgen
---------------
doesn't have a place that he departed from and lacks a place to return to,
becomes supernaturally aware of the changing environments he moves through.
"He had the peculiar felicity," Johnson notes, "that his Attention never
deserted him; he was present to every object, and regardful of the most
trifling circumstances. He had the Art of escaping from his own reflections,
and accommodating himself to every new scene." 49 As Smollett's illegitimate
Count Fathom shows, such rapid accommodation to new surroundings and
situations belongs to the cultural repertoire by which bastards were
constructed in the eighteenth century. 50
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
reception as so poor a man could offer. Whatever else was wanting to
a wise man's happiness,—of laudanum I would have given him
as much as he wished, and in a golden cup. And, by the way, now that
I speak of giving laudanum away, I remember, about this time, a
little incident, which I mention, because, trifling as it was, the
reader will soon meet it again in my dreams, which it influenced
more fearfully than could be imagined. One day a Malay knocked at my
door. What business a Malay could have to transact amongst English
mountains, I cannot conjecture: but possibly he was on his road to a
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
2. By describing nineteenth-century America as a QUOTE I refer to
the conditions of intellectual and social life under the
historically inscribed process of secularization that contributed to
shifts in the meaning of oneness, the nature of the transcendental
term (whether the One is read as QUOTE or QUOTE ), and thus the
conditions for legitimating social and/or theological formations.
The crisis to which Poe is responding is one of authority. Although
the nation's founding documents had transferred the foundational
power wielded by theology, or at least the responsibility of
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 659-684
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
Philip Gould
---------------
Yet it is just this kind of reading of the creative potential of individual
rights discourse for black writers that influential cultural critics resist.
Paul Gilroy, for example, understands the QUOTE that emerged in the
eighteenth century as the ideological source of modern QUOTE for writers of
the black Atlantic. Indeed, Gilroy's use of the term black Atlantic is meant
to displace the modern categories of QUOTE and QUOTE that imply QUOTE (220).
He likely would read Banneker's letter to Jefferson as an instance of what he
calls the QUOTE as opposed to the QUOTE : QUOTE (38). Saidiya Hartman makes a
similar, though certainly not identical, argument about the disciplinary
6. Rather than structure my argument within the dichotomy between
republicanism and liberalism, shaped by debates among Wood, J. G. A. Pocock,
Appleby, Isaac Kramnick, and John P. Diggins, I understand liberalism itself
to be an ambiguous, inchoate ideology during this formative period. My use of
the term liberalism recognizes throughout the important connections between
rights and duties in early modern philosophy and culture. Haakonssen's
summary of the conceptual problem of the traditional republican and liberal
traditions is useful: "[The syncresis between the two] still assumes that it
makes sense to talk of liberalism in this context, and that . . . it was . .
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1996), Bartlett's Familiar
Quotations (1992, 16th ed.), and The Home Book of American
Quotations (1967). Not surprisingly, these attributions have been
disputed. In an appendix titled QUOTE A. H. Saxon asserts that,
while the term sucker could be taken to mean an innocent or dupe as
early as the 1830s, this specific quip was probably QUOTE (336).
Saxon's source is a manuscript by Joseph McCaddon, brother-in-law of
James A. Bailey, Barnum's circus partner. R. J. Brown's article
QUOTE attributes the quotation instead to David Hannum, who
initiated a lawsuit against Barnum in the wake of the 1869 Cardiff
Giant craze. Whatever the true origins of the quotation, Barnum's
fame as a deceiver makes him an appropriate figure to invoke here.
Short-term fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the
Library Company of Philadelphia made possible much of the research
for this article. My thanks to those who read and commented on its
earlier incarnations.
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
Schroeder). While most Democrats favored the acquisition of at least
some territory, however, many who supported Polk and the war still
argued, like the Whigs, against the annexation of densely populated
Mexican areas (Horsman 237). The New York-based Democratic Review,
for instance, where John O'Sullivan famously coined the term
manifest destiny, defended Polk and welcomed the acquisition of
California and New Mexico, but argued in August 1847 that the QUOTE
(101; Stephanson 46-47). 7 The war and national expansion, in other
words, brought to the fore contradictions in the concept of manifest
QUOTE (Duganne 231), and his anti-imperialism derived from nativist
beliefs about the importance of keeping foreigners and Catholics out
of the republic as well as from radical republican and antislavery
convictions. After moving to New York around 1850, he was elected to
one term as a representative of the nativist Know-Nothing party in
the state assembly, and later served as lieutenant colonel of a
company of New York Volunteers during the Civil War (Johnson and
Malone 492).
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 317-328
American Nationalism--R.I.P.
Bruce Burgett
---------------
caps, badges, patriotic songs, partisan toasts, feasts, coins, [End
Page 319] titles, and other artifacts that informed the immediate
political lives of the new citizens of the republic. The study's
major drawback is that it organizes those details into a narrative
that is, to use Newman's own oft-repeated term, unsurprising. The
contours of his analysis are not fundamentally different from those
of canonical studies of the period ranging from Richard Hofstadter's
The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the
United States, 1780-1840 (1969) to Gordon Wood's The Creation of the
contained in his opening sentences: QUOTE (1). While this insight
has become something of a commonplace in the wake of Anderson's
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (1991), Looby's first chapter on the concept of
logocracy (a term he culls from Irving) nuances it two ways: first,
he agrees with Waldstreicher and Newman that nationality in the
early republic involved more dissent and dissonance than histories
focused on consent and harmony tend to reveal; second, he argues
that writers who uncritically repeat Anderson's thesis concerning
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 181-211
Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth
Brook Thomas
---------------
book's action unfolds over the seven years in which the relation
between the people and their sovereign was in doubt, the years
generally acknowledged as the time when QUOTE (Pocock 335); [End
Page 181] that is, as a citizen as those in the nineteenth century
would have understood the term. 1 Even so, it was not until after
the French and American Revolutions that good citizenship came into
common use.
When Hawthorne inserts the nineteenth-century term good citizenship
would have understood the term. 1 Even so, it was not until after
the French and American Revolutions that good citizenship came into
common use.
When Hawthorne inserts the nineteenth-century term good citizenship
into a seventeenth-century setting he subtly participates in a
persistent national myth that sees US citizenship as an outgrowth of
citizenship developed in colonial New England. Hawthorne's
participation in this myth is important to note because much of his
In different ways some of Hawthorne's best historically minded
critics have noted his challenge to the standard version of the
Puritan origins of US citizenship. But for all of their brilliance,
none have noted Hawthorne's anachronistic use of the term citizen.
On the contrary, like Hawthorne, some of these same critics refer to
Puritans in seventeenth-century Boston as citizens in the political
sense of the term (Berlant; Colacurcio, QUOTE ; and Pease), just as
does the allegedly ahistorical Frederick Crews (149). In doing so
Puritan origins of US citizenship. But for all of their brilliance,
none have noted Hawthorne's anachronistic use of the term citizen.
On the contrary, like Hawthorne, some of these same critics refer to
Puritans in seventeenth-century Boston as citizens in the political
sense of the term (Berlant; Colacurcio, QUOTE ; and Pease), just as
does the allegedly ahistorical Frederick Crews (149). In doing so
they unconsciously participate in the very myth they think they are
demystifying, a participation that makes it impossible for them to
recognize Hawthorne's important contribution to it. 4
1. Working on/with Myth
-----------------------
But what is a civic myth? The term comes from Civic Ideals:
Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History (1997), Rogers
Smith's exhaustive study of how the law both reflects and helps to
produce attitudes toward citizenship in the US. In Smith's complex
account, US citizenship has been determined not only by liberal
Leviathan (1651) Hobbes uses citizen more in the sense of a city
dweller. For instance, he writes of a man: QUOTE (186-87). QUOTE are
clearly those QUOTE who dwell in close proximity to the man.
2. Morgan also uses the term good citizen when he acknowledges that
the Puritans' phrase would have been a QUOTE (Puritan Family 1).
3. For an excellent summary of speeches by people like Daniel
Webster, Joseph Story, and Edward Everett that share Bancroft's view
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
fran�aise et le probl�me colonial (1961), his historical essay on the
emergence of Haiti as an independent state, Og� wrote to the colonial
Assembl�e du Nord attesting in no uncertain terms that his demands for
equality under the law extended not to QUOTE but only to those QUOTE (90).
(Og�'s use of the term American here reflects his argument that Haiti's
mul�tres had a QUOTE to rule the state, as they were true products of the
New World, descended exclusively from neither Europe nor Africa [Trouillot,
Haiti 126].)
Notes
=====
1. For overviews of recent scholarship in comparative American studies, see
essays by Porter, Jay, Patell, and Wald. The term New World studies has been
promoted by Dash, who calls it QUOTE in avoiding the exclusionary frame of
reference inherent in the terms American studies and American literature;
focusing on the Caribbean, Dash outlines a QUOTE --a field of study that he
hopes will QUOTE (Other America 1-3). See also Greene, who defines New World
Orleans-set novel based on QUOTE A Romance of the Republic (1867)--a work
replete with Franco-Africanist figures--within the historical development of
interracial literature (Sollors, Neither 202-11, 293-94).
22. On the term amalgamation and the vocabulary of nineteenth-century
literature of race more generally, see James Kinney. See also James's
compelling reading of Isabel as both a literary descendant of Tashtego and
the product of a mixture, QUOTE and thus QUOTE -- QUOTE (Mariners 97-112).
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
strike the dense region of eternal drudgery and starvation
wages--there you will find them by the million. The man that gets
that market, his fortune is made, his bread and butter are safe, for
those people will never go back on him" (Paine, MTA 1: 249).
Stevenson and Twain coin a new term for Davis�s literary reputation:
submerged renown. In this depth metaphor, the literary marketplace
acquires a heavy ballast of readers in the rapidly expanding and
increasingly literate working classes, but the names and needs of
this audience, and the authors who address them, never rise to the
Company (and, now, the editors of the Mark Twain Project).
Twain had earlier considered another closely related, and equally
novel, avenue to establishing perpetual property in literary works,
one that clarifies the significant ambiguity around the term
Shakespeare in his comments above. Is the name an object of or an
appositive to the "inventor-tribe"? In other words, does it refer to
an invention or an inventor? In the legal logic that undergirds
patent and copyright law, a name like Shakespeare would indicate the
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
In lieu of the actual body of the suffering slave, the body of the witness,
who imitates the slave�s pain in the process of identifying with her, often
becomes the object of scrutiny in abolitionist texts. Anatomizing the process
of readerly identification, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler coined the term mental
metempsychosis. Metempsychosis, a word that derives from spiritualist
practice, describes the soul�s migration, after death, into another body.
Chandler applies the concept to the imaginative migrations of the abolitionist
reader. If her audience could "imagine themselves for a few moments in his
Northerners and Southerners feared that violence was inevitable. Southerners
imagined that Brown and his men were backed by a Northern mob willing to take
the law into its own hands. Antislavery Northerners obliged this fear by
celebrating Brown�s transgressions and pledging their dedication to a "higher
law." The status of sympathy--a key term in this conflict--was called into
question time and again: was it a transformative power associated with
individual and collective renewal, or was it a byword for partisan aggression
that stood in opposition to the law?
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
the ethical imperatives that would come from historical conflict, a
displacement that here merges the romantic pathos of _Titanic_ with the
ironic humor of _All in the Family._
That such films should emerge during the term of a president who, during his
first campaign, told suffering black citizens "I feel your pain" is perhaps
not surprising. The resurgence of a liberal politics of feeling seems to have
necessitated as well the return of sympathetic incorporation, which has in
turn accompanied (and, *[End Page 53]* in its liberalizing cast, made more
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
of "Americans" who BLOCKQUOTE
In sum, republicanism denoted an ideological consensus combining
virtues of moderation with a whiggish political theory in an
all-encompassing "form of life" (Wood's term: _Radicalism_ 96) to
which institutions and events were secondary. Like the
poststructuralist construct of "discourse" taking shape at roughly
the same moment, republicanist "ideology" would encompass
subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and materiality--in short the
combinations provided the infrastructure for coordinated economic
actions (the concerted raising of prices, refusal to work without
higher wages), and when such actions challenged ordinances,
authorities could counter with conspiracy charges. Moral valences
aside, the term is descriptively illuminating. 14
These examples suggest, if not the "conspiracy of the bosses," a
range of conspiracies of producers, grounded in everyday praxis. It
might be objected that such small- or medium-scale economic
which was printed in _Harper's Magazine_ in 1964. An expanded
version commences _The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and
Other Essays_ (1964).
3. The term originates with Robert Shalhope's 1972 review essay,
"Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of
Republicanism in American Historiography" (1972), which usefully, if
tendentiously, chronicles the intellectual history upon which Bailyn
and Wood draw.
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
collection of such a fine thing or to rob you of your pleasant
associations with it. A collector has a peculiar affection for such
treasures, as I very well know" (108). Yet this knowledge hardly
quelled her own attraction to the quartz. She resolved the ambivalence
by considering the "robbery" a long-term loan: "This shall live on my
desk as long as my conscience will let it and perhaps a little longer,
and I shall never see it without remembering the kind thought that sent
it there" (108). The successive dislocations of the quartz--wrested
from the ground and into the international exhibition site, into
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 348-357
Perpetual Emotion Machine
Michelle Burnham
---------------
of bureaucratization--the creation of a standardized form, for
instance--designed, at least in part, to reduce the application's
affective (and expensive) effects.
Resch's central category of emotion is "gratitude," a term he
borrows from Adam Smith and uses to describe Americans' feelings
toward the soldiers who sacrificed their health, wealth, and comfort
for national freedom. In the course of his study, however, one
begins to wonder about the relationship between gratitude and those
have informed research on and debates about the early American
republic for decades. 1 The transnational contours of her study no
doubt contribute to this complication, but the larger meaning of
that complication is also left frustratingly imprecise. Even as she
disassociates the term _republicanism_ from its traditional
definition, she never quite elucidates a new understanding of it or
of its relationship to _liberalism,_ another term that appears in
multiple guises in her volume. As a result, the shifting and
historically nuanced meanings of both categories often get blurred,
doubt contribute to this complication, but the larger meaning of
that complication is also left frustratingly imprecise. Even as she
disassociates the term _republicanism_ from its traditional
definition, she never quite elucidates a new understanding of it or
of its relationship to _liberalism,_ another term that appears in
multiple guises in her volume. As a result, the shifting and
historically nuanced meanings of both categories often get blurred,
leaving undiagnosed the differences between, say, market liberalism,
liberal individualism, liberal guilt, welfare state liberalism, and
intrusion of liberalism with republicanism, one wonders whether
feeling can be sentimental if it is not also liberal. One sometimes
has the sense that Burgett's revitalized public sphere might host
other, nonliberal forms of democratic feeling that are only called
"sentimental" for lack of another, better term. Habermas's public
sphere has recently been described as "an institution that never
existed in the first place and then came, over time, to exist even
less" (Thorne 542), and the political vision of _Sentimental Bodies_
is finally as hampered as it is enlivened by this dilemma. Even if
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
expressive black female will and agency circulate both in the nineteenth
century and in current *[End Page 505]* literary criticism. Mulatto/a-ness
as a representational trope often designates a discursive mobility and
simultaneity that can raise questions of racial epistemology, while it also
functions as a juridical term that constrains citizenship by ante- and
postbellum law and force. The women I examine in this essay use their own
bodies to challenge such constraints by expressing a desire, not for
whiteness, but for familial and juridical relations in which _partus
sequitur ventrem_ produces freedom rather than enslavement for African
sequitur ventrem_ produces freedom rather than enslavement for African
Americans, light and dark.
Many contemporary scholars, however, deploy "white mulatto/a genealogies,"
a term I use _not_ to describe the lighter shades of a politically
determined African-American racial classification but to highlight an
overemphasis on patrilineal descent and an identification with and
projection of white desire that continually revisits the paternal and the
patriarchal, the phallic and juridical Law of the (white) Father. Russ
the year by _American Literature,_ Berlant's "The Queen of America" smartly
articulates some of the very issues of law, sexual vulnerability, and
racial-sexual-national codings and representations to which critics like
Castronovo refer, issues that are central to some of the best work in the
field. Yet as she introduces the term "mulatto genealogy," she so
destabilizes race that she facilitates the creation of a bodily category
into which any Other can fit. Writing of the postbellum period in another
essay, she contends that "the mulatta figure is the most abstract and
artificial of embodied citizens. She *[End Page 509]* gives lie to the
Mulatta genealogies are the subject of this inquiry not only because
"mulattas" are the African-American women we've inherited as protagonists
in much of nineteenth-century "race" literature and literary historiography
but also because the term seems to be enjoying a vernacular and critical
currency that, I fear, both expresses a current racial anxiety and
reproduces the politics of exceptionalism. 31 Today, people ask their peers
and professors, clients and customers, "are you a mulatto?" with little
sense of meaning or manners, while publishers clamor for novels,
reproduces the politics of exceptionalism. 31 Today, people ask their peers
and professors, clients and customers, "are you a mulatto?" with little
sense of meaning or manners, while publishers clamor for novels,
autobiographies, and anthologies about living on the color line. Although
the term "mulatto" etymologically hauls on its back the well-known
nineteenth-century ethnological concepts that this crossbred, "weak"
species would be unable--in the long term-- *[End Page 531]* to reproduce,
the fascination with this line (of inquiry) has anything but died off. 32
The present currency of mixed-race subjects, as well meaning and seemingly
sense of meaning or manners, while publishers clamor for novels,
autobiographies, and anthologies about living on the color line. Although
the term "mulatto" etymologically hauls on its back the well-known
nineteenth-century ethnological concepts that this crossbred, "weak"
species would be unable--in the long term-- *[End Page 531]* to reproduce,
the fascination with this line (of inquiry) has anything but died off. 32
The present currency of mixed-race subjects, as well meaning and seemingly
innocuous as it may be, is _not_ an acknowledgment that, as Albert Murray
once put it, "American culture was, and continues to be, 'incontestably
27. Robinson argues that identity politics can be figured "as a skill of
reading by African American and/or gay and lesbian spectators of the
cultural performance of passing. . . . Disrupting the conventional dyad of
passer and dupe with a third term--the _in-group clairvoyant_--the pass can
be regarded as a triangular theater of identity" (716).
28. Spirit rapping became popular in the 1850s and 60s and was practiced by
abolitionists like Jacobs's good friend Amy Post and by Adah Isaacs Menken
Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, and the
generalized amazement that followed its confirmation, is just one example
of this legacy of anxiety and the continued denial of black testimony.
34. I find this term particularly inadequate because while attempting to
recognize African-American multiraciality, it undermines that very concept.
The history of racial violence, intermixture, and race-based law assures
that almost all people of black ancestry are multiracial. The term
_biracial_ separates those with immediate nonblack ancestry from those with
34. I find this term particularly inadequate because while attempting to
recognize African-American multiraciality, it undermines that very concept.
The history of racial violence, intermixture, and race-based law assures
that almost all people of black ancestry are multiracial. The term
_biracial_ separates those with immediate nonblack ancestry from those with
equally complex racial inheritances. It so affirms individual claims of
difference over a collective history of racial admixture. Moreover, by
claiming "blackness" for one immediate ancestor, a parent, the term
that almost all people of black ancestry are multiracial. The term
_biracial_ separates those with immediate nonblack ancestry from those with
equally complex racial inheritances. It so affirms individual claims of
difference over a collective history of racial admixture. Moreover, by
claiming "blackness" for one immediate ancestor, a parent, the term
_biracial_ only defers by one generation the projection of absolute racial
classification onto the black parent, thus replicating the very
categorization the term is supposed to challenge.
difference over a collective history of racial admixture. Moreover, by
claiming "blackness" for one immediate ancestor, a parent, the term
_biracial_ only defers by one generation the projection of absolute racial
classification onto the black parent, thus replicating the very
categorization the term is supposed to challenge.
35. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have declared that racial
disparities in imprisonment and racial profiling in the US have reached
scandalous proportions. See The Justice Policy Institute,
_American Literary History_ 15.1 (2003) 14-21
The Claims of Rhetoric: Toward a Historical Poetics (1820-1900)
Shira Wolosky
---------------
immigrants, children--other activities were not. These included
direct political activism in abolition, Indian removal, urban
planning, sanitation, and suffrage. Indeed, throughout the century,
most social services (as we would call them) were performed by
women. Calling this _private_ while reserving the term _public_ for
the activities of men--who were overwhelmingly engaged in economic
pursuits that, while taking place outside the home, ultimately
served personal interests and private economic ends--is a use of the
terms _public_ and _private_ in ways that are already gendered. That
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 248-275
Walt Whitman and the Question of Copyright
Martin T. Buinicki
---------------
experience of that specific social group to which Whitman belonged,
both by origin and by conscious allegiance--an experience of being
subject to social, economic, and political processes beyond their
control, which eventually revolutionized every aspect of their
lives, and to which the victims affixed the emotive term 'monopoly'"
(27). On the other hand, Whitman was well aware of the new
opportunities and advancements being provided by economic
development, and this development included increased trade with
*[End Page 255]* international markets. Whitman's method of bringing
and fair correspondence between writers and their readers is tied to
his fervent belief that his poetry served as a medium for that
correspondence. Greenspan has explored this question thoroughly,
arguing that "Whitman's need for 'contact' with his readers--to use
a term which habitually gets his poetic accentuation--was an
obsession" (109). In pursuit of this obsession, Whitman struggles
desperately to construct a poetic language that will allow him to
move beyond the text. In the first edition of _Leaves of Grass_,
Whitman writes, "I was chilled with the cold types and cylinders and
to, the embodiment that he proclaims. A similar epigraph appears at
the front of the 1876 edition: "Ever with pleas'd smile I may keep
on, / Ever and ever yet the verses owning--as, first, I here and
now, / Signing for Soul and Body, set them to my name, [Whitman's
signature]" (_WW_ 147). Here, the term "owning" is quite ambiguous.
Although Whitman signs for "Soul and Body," the ownership of that
body remains in play. Even as the reader purchases the book once
owned by Whitman, the verses continue to "own" Whitman. Rather than
fixing possession or certifying a transaction, Whitman's signature
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
even at the altar, Virginia informs her family of her sacrificial intent: "I
shall say I consent" (98). Anxious that the marriage be absolutely legal in
form, she frames her consent in precise legal language so that it both
becomes the trigger for contract and allows for each party's "free" volition.
Virginia's aunt, for her part, seizes on the precise term of Virginia's
rhetorical equivocation: "Yes, say _consent_--that is the very word." The
casuistical inference in the repetition of "say" before "consent" underscores
the vexing problem with a postbellum model of political obligation predicated
upon an individual's free consent. After all, what chance did a reconstructed
Hobbesian compulsions of fear and cruel necessity. It had, in other words, to
encode the affective mechanism of civil union in the nineteenth-century
language of domestic sentiment rather than the seventeenth-century language
of martial passions. How could a reunion based in fear and self-interest
foster a meaningful national "conversion," the term De Forest repeatedly
invoked to convey the depth of transformation required for true
reconciliation? Consent without conviction guarantees the citizen's
obligation only as long as the fear required to motivate it remains in place.
For later in _Leviathan,_ even Hobbes acknowledged the difference between
Caught between accepting marriage to a Northern officer or relegating her
family to poverty, Virginia agrees to the arranged marriage. Alive to the
nuptial contract's legal formalities, both Virginia and her aunt emphasize
the term _consent,_ despite Virginia's view that she is a hostage to fortune.
The repeated use of the term emphasizes the legal form of nuptial
voluntarism, even as it points up a contradicting heart. But what of
coercion? And what of the spirit of the law in a sentimental age that equated
marriage with romance? If free volition framed as legal consent did not
Caught between accepting marriage to a Northern officer or relegating her
family to poverty, Virginia agrees to the arranged marriage. Alive to the
nuptial contract's legal formalities, both Virginia and her aunt emphasize
the term _consent,_ despite Virginia's view that she is a hostage to fortune.
The repeated use of the term emphasizes the legal form of nuptial
voluntarism, even as it points up a contradicting heart. But what of
coercion? And what of the spirit of the law in a sentimental age that equated
marriage with romance? If free volition framed as legal consent did not
connote romantic love, then the marriage compact differed little from a
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
built on exemplary writing that explores in minute detail the unmapped
terrains--cultural, geographical, geological--that confirm their distinction
in novelty. Its creation of a national audience of medical readers depended,
the editors believed, on a balance between imaginative form and informational
content that Elihu Smith captured in the striking term "medical eloquence"
(_Diary_ 191). The concern for the poetics of medical discussion perhaps came
naturally to Smith and his coeditor Samuel Latham Mitchill, both of whom
composed poetry on medical and nonmedical subjects, but Smith's diary entries
frame "medical eloquence" as a deliberate strategy for creating a general,
left to die by other fearful contagionists. His body rots above ground,
"suffered to decay by piecemeal," furthering disease (48).
In selecting decomposition as a principal trope, Brown plays vividly on the
term itself: in their "theatre[s] of disaster" (355), his fever novels stage
decomposition as the body's unwriting, a Gothic play on the notion of body
language. In _Ormond,_ the black vomit "testifie[s]" to Mary Whiston's
"corroded and gangrenous stomach" (52). The "lineaments" written on Wallace's
face in _Arthur Mervyn_ become "shadowy and death-like" (380). Bodies lose
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
neutral word was needed. Phone greetings, culturally, are arbitrary. German
_bitte,_ Italian _pronto,_ Spanish _bueno_--each culture confronts the
problem differently, in these cases by adopting other words of politesse to
telephonic social interaction. American English, by contrast, adopted the
interjection _hello,_ etymologically, from _hallo_ or _halloa,_ a term of
address among sailors between ships. This maritime metaphorics inflected more
directly Alexander Graham Bell's own usage, and until the end of his life (in
1922) Bell is said to have answered the phone with a loud, "Ahoy," while
Edison favored "hello." 14
fool?), the word's origin had to be placed in the realm of some indefinable
Other, some landscape far away and foreign. 20 When the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ volume for the letter D appeared in 1897 (under the title, as all
the original volumes appeared, of the _New English Dictionary_), _dude_ was
defined as: "A factious slang term which came into vogue in New York about
the beginning of 1883, in connection with the 'aesthetic' craze of that day.
Actual origin not recorded." The lexicography *[End Page 482]* practically
drips with condescension here, and the citations in this first edition of the
_Dictionary_ are recorded in such detail that they bear reproducing in full
themselves from the frippery of popular affect.
Twain's uses of _dude_ in _Connecticut Yankee_ resonate with these
philological debates, and they center on the qualities of costume,
affectation, and questionable origin of the term. His dudes and dudesses are
themselves performers on a stage of aristocratic pretension, people like
those described in the _American_ of 1883 "who affect English dress and the
English drawl." They are the kinds of people like the "dudes and dudesses of
Vegas [who] are rehearsing for the opera," as the 1885 _Weekly New Mexican
a heavy blow. The phrase _love-tap_ shows up, for the first time, in
_Connecticut Yankee.Head,_ meaning a "head of steam," appears, as do such
other idiomatic terms as _nub_ (meaning the gist of a story), _put_ (as in
the idiom "put in the time"), _pipe_ (to connote a way of speaking, as in
"pipe up"), _scantling_ (a technical term for a piece of wood), _shadow_ (in
the reference to the "shadow of Death"), and many others (see appendix for
complete citations).
Twain's use of these terms adds to the contemporary flavor of the novel, and
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
larger life of consciousness, of a _human_ nature, that even a
skilled, empathetic biographer like Hodder cannot compartmentalize
without distortion and loss.
William James has a term, _over-belief,_ for the accretions of
doctrine with which the religious seer subsequently clothes his
vision to explain it to himself and others. To one degree or another
each of the books discussed here suffers from excessive over-belief
with the exception of Smith's, which needs more of it. This is a
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
women--and men sympathetic with women--"is almost sure, if indulged, to
become lust, and to pave the way for wide-spread licentiousness and
impurity," and was the surest way to earn a disapproving notice in
_Brownson's Quarterly Review_ ("Sick Calls" 115). Finally, his views about
the matter hardened so that even the term _Young America,_ which once had
signified for him an auspicious national destiny tied to refined aesthetic
sensibilities and theformation of a new democratic literature, became a
pejorative term that he linked to moral decay--a cultural rot exacerbated not
simply by a hegemonic Protestantism but by women's activities within
_Brownson's Quarterly Review_ ("Sick Calls" 115). Finally, his views about
the matter hardened so that even the term _Young America,_ which once had
signified for him an auspicious national destiny tied to refined aesthetic
sensibilities and theformation of a new democratic literature, became a
pejorative term that he linked to moral decay--a cultural rot exacerbated not
simply by a hegemonic Protestantism but by women's activities within
nineteenth-century American culture.
For a time during the middle part of his career (1844-1855), Brownson had
(1854), a romance that satirizes the spiritualist movement in the US. The
autobiographical _The Convert: Or, Leaves from My Experience_ (1857)
documents his conversion to Catholicism.
11. The term _specially destined_ is drawn from Isaac Hecker, _Questions of
the Soul_ (1855).
12. Brownson's full-scale theological treatment of literal idolatry, or the
veneration of sacred objects, appeared in _Brownson's Quarterly Review_ as
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
whites in the southern part have decreased in numbers, degenerated i
character, and become mentally and physically enervated and imbecile
(221).
8. The term "self-cloaking mechanism" is Powell's. He uses it to
describe the ideological mystifications that have often undergirded
American policy toward its racial and colonial adventures (351).
9. Armsted's turning a blind eye is literally figured in the wrenchi
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
contemporary laments about the disappearance of the frontier betray
nostalgia for old enemies to manifest destiny and for aperiod when
continental outcomes were still theoretical. The twentieth century
has proved remarkably interested in keeping "the frontier" alive as
a rhetorical term, and it has served imperialist rhetorics as well
as the gentler interests of environmentalists and eco-tourists. 11 A
recent front-page article in the _New York Times_ offers a much
belated alternative to the US annexation of the Far West, suggesting
that because it has been proven that the Great Plains cannot support
Endnotes
========
1. When I speak of "manifest destiny" I am not only referring to
John L. O'Sullivan's various articulations of that term in the
_Democratic Review,_ but also to a variety of continentalist
rhetorics dating from the 1820s, when debates around Indian Removal
began to indicate the US desire for white, agrarian settlement of
the North American continent. Edward L. Widmer's cultural history of
lack of a potential market for woolens and India cloth, therefore a
lack of potential and prospective "manners" (119).
14. Irving's discussion of hybridity occurs approximately nine years
before Young notes the first instance of the usage of the term
_hybridity_ to indicate "human mixing," by the Alabama physician
Josiah Nott.
15. Reginald Horsman offers what has become the "classic" account of
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
privilege that could be taken away. And there is some evidence of more direct
interference. After Dorothea Dix, the great antebellum reformer, made a visit
to the asylum in 1857, the _Opal_ printed a cheeky conversation between two
female patients. When told that Dix is a philanthropist, one woman asks the
meaning of the *[End Page 9]* term, and the other replies that it means "a
lover of men," to which the first replies, "Well, then, are we ladies not all
philanthropists?" ("Editor's Table," _Opal_ 7.1 23). A subsequent letter from
Superintendent Benedict to Dix indicates that she was not amused: "I regret
that you have been annoyed by our 'Opal'—you shall not appear in it
1. All information about this patient is taken from New York State's _Utica
State Hospital Patient Case Files_, vol. 1.
2. The term _psychiatry_ had not yet been coined, but as no consistent was in use (_asylum medicine_ and _psychological science_ were two that were
used), I use it as shorthand here.
3. On the New York State Lunatic Asylum, see Dwyer. On the "moral treatment"
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 93-102
Transatlanticism Now
Laura M. Stevens
---------------
Developments within the academy have played a stronger role than
current events in provoking a turn toward the Atlantic, however.
While transatlantic scholarship is hardly new, its recent prominence
and appearance under the rubric of this term have emerged in tandem
with an expanded awareness of the histories of colonialism, slavery,
and nationality. An interest in movements across the Atlantic seems
an almost natural outgrowth of increased attention to the first and
second of these topics, while it exists in tense complementarity
anthology _The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800_ (1997),
have presented themselves as efforts to move beyond a nation-based
understanding of identity and literary history. The true opposition,
however, is not between the transatlantic and the national but
rather between the transatlantic and the exceptionalist. This term
has been used most often in connection with the US, as Joyce E.
Chaplin notes when she explains, "Exceptionalism emphasizes the
United States'—and earlier the colonies'—separation
from the rest of the world and development of unprecedented forms of
Ideas refined through a focus on these topics have assisted in the
conceptualization of Atlantic studies at least as much as the
accrual of detailed knowledge about them has. Mary Louise Pratt's
application of the ethnographic term _transculturation_ to
comparative literary studies and Benedict Anderson's description of
a nation as *[End Page 94]* an "imagined community" are among the
best known of these concepts with crossover influence. Such notions
have enabled a shift from paradigms of isolated development to
by an awareness of distant lands, although removed from actual
contact? Although there are vast differences between a study of,
say, Milton's texts in America and America in Milton's texts, one,
both, or even neither might be considered transatlantic depending on
how the term is understood.
A taxonomy of transatlantic studies would do much to forestall the
possibility of overusing this term and thus draining it of meaning.
In the opening essay of _The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800_
both, or even neither might be considered transatlantic depending on
how the term is understood.
A taxonomy of transatlantic studies would do much to forestall the
possibility of overusing this term and thus draining it of meaning.
In the opening essay of _The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800_
(2002), David Armitage has forwarded "Three Concepts of Atlantic
History." These include "Circum-Atlantic History," which focuses on
"the Atlantic as a particular zone of exchange and interchange,"
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
assert what her novel is not: a "historical narrative, or a relation of real
events" (3). Yet "real characters and real events are . . . alluded to" (3).
They are employed, however, only insofar as they serve the "author's design,"
which was "to illustrate not the history, but the character of the times"
(3). Operative at the start of the preface is this doubling of the term
_character_, which Sedgwick deploys twice for its dual meaning. "Character"
thus becomes both integral and opposed to "history": integral in that
historicalnarrative transforms "real" personages (John Winthrop, Thomas
Morton, Pocahontas) into "characters"; and opposed insofar as "history" is
Given my own training, both direct and indirect, by a generation of New
Historicist critics, my initial impulse when confronted with Sedgwick's
preface was to explore neither the implications of the apparent doubling of
the term character nor the preface's linguistic play, but to place it in
"its" context by considering the meaning and function of the term character
in Sedgwick's day; in the context of, for example, early republican
historiography. I might have argued, for instance, that history-writing in
the early republic was often driven by two contradictory impulses. The first
Given my own training, both direct and indirect, by a generation of New
Historicist critics, my initial impulse when confronted with Sedgwick's
preface was to explore neither the implications of the apparent doubling of
the term character nor the preface's linguistic play, but to place it in
"its" context by considering the meaning and function of the term character
in Sedgwick's day; in the context of, for example, early republican
historiography. I might have argued, for instance, that history-writing in
the early republic was often driven by two contradictory impulses. The first
is what Michael Kammen has called the "documentary" impulse—the
"chimerical thing" known as _national character_ (Kammen 248). Thus the
filiopietistic biographies of Revolutionary heroes like George Washington did
more than just praise the founders; they were also meant to provide citizens
with representative portraits of character that would stand, synecdochically,
as illustrations of the American character. In this sense, the term
_character_ refers not to an individual or a fictional personage, but, as
Kammen describes it, to "a particular constellation of ethical qualities"
deemed admirable in the republican citizen (249).9 Sedgwick's *[End Page
184]* interest in the character of colonial America, then, might be viewed as
Hope's "unthought" is of a kind that might be termed _revolting_ (i.e., an
unthought revolting of nature), in which case "revolting" is simply an
adjective that describes the "nature" or type of unthought that Hope feels:
Hope finds the sight of her sister repulsive. On the other hand, the grounds
for that revulsion are indicated by the term _nature_, which refers not only
to Hope's unthought, but to Faith's decidedly _unnatural_ (according to Hope)
appropriation of Indian clothing, manners, and speech (i.e., an unthought of
revolting _against_ nature). In this case, "revolting" also functions as a
verb: Hope is revulsed because Faith seems to be revolting against nature.
actually thinks here is not that Faith's true nature as a non-Indian *[End
Page 197]* will be revealed by removing her Indian clothing, but only that
she will "_look_ more natural" to Hope. So what Hope originally (un)thought
was Faith's immutable nature has now become a matter of appearances. This
explains, I think, the narrator's use of the odd term _unthought_; it refers
to Hope's prelinguistic reaction to the sight of her Indianized sister. When
that reaction becomes concretized, described, put into language, Hope's
position—her belief in an unchangeable nature or identity—is
undermined. Consequently, her strategy of restoration backfires: "The removal
instead, there are only layers of "disguise": beneath Hope's silk cloak is
"Whitebird" and beneath Whitebird is "Faith" and beneath Faith is "Mary."
Whom does Hope want to uncover? Yet in her failure to uncover—by
re-covering—Faith's nature, Hope also activates another meaning of
the pivotal term _revolting_. For in a text that makes such conspicuous use
of the rhetoric of the American Revolution and in which, as we have already
seen, to be "aboriginal" is to be Revolutionary, the logic of this scene
holds that Faith actually becomes "natural" by becoming native. This is why
Hope, in what may be the strangest gesture of all in this complex scene,
9. Kammen provides a brief but excellent discussion of the importance of
"character" in the nineteenth-century historical imagination; see esp.
248-51. For a discussion of "national character" as a racial discourse in
nineteenth-century history writing, see Callcott 166-71. Gould concentrates
his reading on the related term "virtue" to show how Sedgwick revises that
term's gendered meanings, 62-68.
10. See, e.g., Gould (_Covenant_ 9-12, 81-89) and Buell (208-11).
"character" in the nineteenth-century historical imagination; see esp.
248-51. For a discussion of "national character" as a racial discourse in
nineteenth-century history writing, see Callcott 166-71. Gould concentrates
his reading on the related term "virtue" to show how Sedgwick revises that
term's gendered meanings, 62-68.
10. See, e.g., Gould (_Covenant_ 9-12, 81-89) and Buell (208-11).
11. On this point, I am in agreement with both Gould and Nelson. However, for
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 496-508
South of the American Renaissance
Thomas M. Allen
---------------
magazine, a turn of events suggesting that "Caloya" not only
questioned the stability of the racial hierarchy that was the basis
of Southern society but also certain assumptions about race that
were of great importance to Northerners. Moreover, the fact that
_mingo_ was a pejorative term for Indian people in common use by
white frontiersmen gives the story's convoluted politics of racial
identity yet another twist, as does the adoption by Caloya's Catawba
husband of the comical English name Richard Knuckles. These
satirical touches underscore the perdurability of racial
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
of national coherence related to remapping the globe in light of the
American shift from colony to nation. Rowson's turn to North Africa
indicates how national citizenship and the dynamics of race and
gender were shaped in relation to a transatlantic economy linked to
a broader international world in which _race_ was an operative term
as well.
In the field of American literature, Rowson is primarily known as
the author of the first best-selling novel in the US, _Charlotte
liberty would seem to describe gender equality—a liberty
that allows women to speak in public and that allows women's words
to be given public value.
The prologue thus uses the term _freedom_ in a layered,
overdetermined fashion. We might schematically separate out the
three instances of freedom to which the prologue refers as follows:
the freedom of America from England might be understood as a
_national_ freedom, the freedom of the slave from the Algerian
captor as a _personal_ freedom with international political and
economic overtones, and the freedom of women to speak in public as a
_social_ freedom occurring inside of the nation-state. As is evident
from this fuzzy taxonomy, it is difficult to sort out the personal
from the political in these uses of the term _freedom_. Layering
these versions of freedom upon one another makes it even more
difficult to do so, and indeed this would seem to be the strategic
point of the prologue and much of the play as well. Although each of
these freedoms looks increasingly less abstract, more personal, and
deploys "liberty" as a switchword: "[O]ur law gives us great many
vives. [sic]—our law gives liberty in love; you are an
American and you must love liberty" (21). Hassan collapses sexual
*[End Page 414]* and political realms with a semantic play on the
republican term _liberty_ rather than _virtue_. In doing so, he
brings attention to the danger that Federalists such as Cobbett
found in the politics of republicanism: a lack of control among
those most unable to control themselves, including women. Indeed,
the rhetoric of republican virtue aims at countering precisely this
Augustus, Hassan's sexual advances enable this patriotism to become
the property of "sons and daughters of liberty" alike.
Yet Rowson's staging of the virtuous (female) American's defense
against corrupt seduction contains a key term that is strikingly
different from the Americanized allegory of Clarissa Harlowe's
battle to maintain her virtue: in Rowson's staging, Rebecca is not
defending herself against corruption by an Anglo-American rake but
against a racialized, un-American miscreant. Hassan has a
approval" (181). Marion Rust also places Rowson on the Federalist
side of the fence (304). On Cobbett's relation to feminism, see
Scherr.
10. Ruth Bloch has influentially argued that the meaning of the term
_virtue_ migrated in the late eighteenth century from referring to a
republican, masculine _virtù_ to naming female chastity.
However, in the 1790s, as the meaning of the term began to shift,
both meanings of the word circulated in public discourse (47). *[End
10. Ruth Bloch has influentially argued that the meaning of the term
_virtue_ migrated in the late eighteenth century from referring to a
republican, masculine _virtù_ to naming female chastity.
However, in the 1790s, as the meaning of the term began to shift,
both meanings of the word circulated in public discourse (47). *[End
Page 430]*
11. While neither Federalists nor Republicans endorsed women's full
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
itself" (143). Consumption is now conceived of as a punctual event
in the life of an individual, abstracted and isolated from economic
structures and the interrelationships between social groups.
This is why I have preferred to use the term _class mimicry_, rather
than _imitation_, to describe the social process which informs
consumption in Crane's text. And it is why I have tried to insist
that class mimicry draws individuals into nonreciprocal relations of
exchange which are determined by position, status, and class
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
British affectation, and of course the "proper" places for specific
items on a dinner table are based on arbitrary and culturally
variable systems of etiquette. Elsewhere, Washington reconsiders his
distinction between "actual" physical places and "artificial"
geographies when he discusses the origin of the term _Black Belt_:
"[T]he term was first used to designate a part of the country which
was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country
possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course,
the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and
items on a dinner table are based on arbitrary and culturally
variable systems of etiquette. Elsewhere, Washington reconsiders his
distinction between "actual" physical places and "artificial"
geographies when he discusses the origin of the term _Black Belt_:
"[T]he term was first used to designate a part of the country which
was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country
possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course,
the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and
consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later,
was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country
possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course,
the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and
consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later,
and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a
political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the
black people outnumber the white" (108). Here, Washington
notes—but expresses no preference for—the original
usage of the term _Black Belt—_a usage that would denote a
and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a
political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the
black people outnumber the white" (108). Here, Washington
notes—but expresses no preference for—the original
usage of the term _Black Belt—_a usage that would denote a
more or less fixed and clearly delineated physical region. The
political sense of the term, in contrast, acknowledges the
historical process of regional _production_ in which a particular
configuration of geographical and economic factors led to the
black people outnumber the white" (108). Here, Washington
notes—but expresses no preference for—the original
usage of the term _Black Belt—_a usage that would denote a
more or less fixed and clearly delineated physical region. The
political sense of the term, in contrast, acknowledges the
historical process of regional _production_ in which a particular
configuration of geographical and economic factors led to the
large-scale import of slaves to work cotton plantations before
emancipation. New economic conditions, in turn, could presumably
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
the present article seeks to describe more precisely which
distinctions are at issue in Bleak House and in this controversy, an
why.
Because the term allegory, in particular, has enjoyed remarkable
critical fortunes in recent times, it may be helpful to note that it
use here is governed by Dickens's use, both in "Mr. Booley's View"
and, as will soon become apparent, in Bleak House itself. My goal, i
other words, is to elucidate the issues which Dickens brings togethe
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
apparently uncontentious statement is actually more complicated than
it seems. As a genre, the Gothic romance is English in origin.
However, this origin is not a simple matter of a set of generic
features coalescing in a peculiar way at a particular time and
place. The term Gothic, as in Horace Walpole's "a Gothic story," was
not a neutral, value free description of the Middle Ages. On the
contrary, Gothic, meaning Albion's liberty-loving Saxon forbears,
was a key element of Whig political discourse.1 In the peculiar
meaning these phrases had during the 1740s and 50s, one could say
party--or the party with which his family had traditional
allegiances--the Democrats, tied themselves into opportunistic
knots, arguing that the annexation of Texas would hasten the
abolition of slavery in the state, even though it would mean
extending slavery into Texas, at least in the short term. But as
Marsh pointed out in his speech to Congress, the Mexicans had
already abolished slavery. Apart from this principled stand, Marsh
was a ferocious Democrat. He constantly inveighed against the
wickedness of English hereditary privilege, and he extends his
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido auf Grund der Psychoanalyse
seelischer St�rungen, in Psychoanalytische Studien, ed. Johannes
Cremerius, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1971), 1:134-42.
32. The term "Entmischung" is introduced in chap. 4 of "Das Ich und
das Es" (Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich
and others, 11 vols. [Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982], 3:308), in
connection with the love-death fusion; an editor's note refers back
to Jenseits des Lustprinzips, where the topic is love-hate (chap. 4;
of Minnesota Press, 1982), Samuel Weber shrewdly argues that the
silence of the death-drive "might be just another form of the
narcissistic language of the ego" (129).
39. "Surplus-repression" is Marcuse's term for the socially induced
regulation and structuring of the primary instincts, as opposed to
biologically necessary controls--a useful precursor to the more
intricate abstractions of Foucault. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and
Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage,
Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997): 103-23.
56. Zeman, 266-314; B�ckmann, 1:552 ("echte Sinnbildlichkeit") and
628-35; Schlaffer, 181-94. Zeman documents the introduction of the
French word "na�f" as a kind of technical term for feeling not
subsumed by rational understanding; he quotes Ludwig Friedrich
Heidemann, writing in 1732: "eine Eigenschaft . . . die dem Ansehen
nach blo� von der innerlichen Empfindung des Geistes herr�hrt, ohne
da� die Vernunft dabey besch�fftigt gewesen zu seyn scheinet" (90).
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
female genetic trait justifying the exclusion of women from active
participation in political life. I hope to show, however, that
passivity not only crosses gender boundaries but also appears as a
transgressive force even at the political level. In an age when
"proactive" is a term of praise, passivity seems to relinquish any
agency on the part of those who are not always agents. Agency however
need not be a term of unadulterated praise. Indeed, in the matrix of
technological self-construction agency not only risks subordination to
the processes of absolute negation that Deleuze sees as characteristic
passivity not only crosses gender boundaries but also appears as a
transgressive force even at the political level. In an age when
"proactive" is a term of praise, passivity seems to relinquish any
agency on the part of those who are not always agents. Agency however
need not be a term of unadulterated praise. Indeed, in the matrix of
technological self-construction agency not only risks subordination to
the processes of absolute negation that Deleuze sees as characteristic
of sadism, but even denies the notion of independence associated with
action initiated by the self. Within the rigorous mechanisms that the
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
irrelevant to the concerns of the present. With hindsight, it is
easy to see that Wilde was altogether too optimistic about the
disappearance of the antinomies of modernization. The nervous modern
body would make a big comeback after the first World War when the
term shell-shock came into use to describe the effects of modern
industrial warfare. Virginia Woolf's shell-shocked modern subject,
Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, may thus be seen as the
lineal descendant of Charles Dickens, Walter Hartright, Lady Audley,
Ozias Midwinter, and all those other nervous Victorian subjects,
Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), 14, and 11-16. He
suggests that The Scream is "a virtually programmatic emblem of what
used to be called the age of anxiety" (11).
16. Linking Walter Benjamin's notion of shock and Heidegger's term
Stoss, Gianni Vattimo argues that shock describes the "essential
oscillation and disorientation constitutive of the experience of
art" in the twentieth century, thus constituting a radical break
with older, more "harmonious," modes of experience of art. See The
bodies, and the graphic time-motion studies of Marey and, somewhat
later, Frank Gilbreth, make visible the unlinkings of motion and
volition that allow hysteria, locomotion, and machine-work to
communicate with each other." Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (London:
Routledge, 1992), 17. Seltzer borrows the term "machine culture"
from Thorstein Veblen among others. Also of interest here is Anne
Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1993), which discusses the relation of
film ("the last machine," in Hollis Frampton's words [quoted in Ian
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
Paris deliberately deceives Tennyson's Oenone and Guinevere deceives
Arthur. Even Aurora lies to Tithonus about the nature of the immortality
she agrees to confer on him. Like the speakers in "Locksley Hall" and
Maud, however, Tennyson's Lucretius and his lotos-eaters lie only to
themselves. In "bad faith," as Sartre defines the term, the deceiver and
the dupe are one and the same person. The lotos-eaters try to trick
themselves into believing that life in lotos-land is worthy of them.
Tennyson's Lucretius, face to face with nothingness, possesses in his
capacity as a poet and cosmologist the truths which are hidden from him in
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
Foundling (1749), and Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1747-48),
but Fielding in particular used it in a new way. "History" had both its
modern sense of a record of significant public events and a now largely
obsolete sense that encompassed any narrative, and it came to be a common
term for fictional narratives. But Fielding's "history" is not at all a
conventional usage; it is rather an attempt to redefine both senses of the
word. In Joseph Andrews, he blurs the distinctions between "history" as fact
and as fiction, unfavorably comparing the histories of "those
Romance-Writers, who intitle their Books, the History of England, the
structures (or Manners), and [End Page 723] collisions between different
ranks reveal those structures. Since Fielding regards Manners as a
"practical System" rather than formal knowledge, it is perhaps imprecise to
regard his understanding of Manners as a theory of social structure. But if
we substitute for "Manners" Pierre Bourdieu's term habitus--a system of
predispositions acquired through experience, which corresponds more closely
to a "feel for the game" than to an objective set of rules--then Fielding's
practical system begins to look more like a theory. Unlike rules,
habitus--or Manners--have limited predictive power, but they are nonetheless
by complex interactions, and individuals may possess greater or lesser
competence or "feel for the game." 35 For Fielding, the sense of the game is
not innate but learned through conversation; prudence is precisely the
understanding of the manners of others in order to judge probable actions.
Prudence is a problematic term both for Fielding and for eighteenth-century
writers in general; it is both the "art of life" and a cold, calculating
"art of thriving." 36 In both senses, however, it is integral to the
understanding of history.
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
In proposing to read Our Mutual Friend in the light of its social
horizons, its performative action, and its representation of
partnership, I take my general orientation from Mikhail Bakhtin's
dialogism and his model of the dialogical self. This last term is
not precisely Bakhtin's but Charles Taylor's. By using the term
Taylor acknowledges the compatibility of his brilliant and bracing
Sources of the Self with Bakhtin's emphasis on the dialogic
structure of identity. 4 Taylor has argued that a "crucial feature
In proposing to read Our Mutual Friend in the light of its social
horizons, its performative action, and its representation of
partnership, I take my general orientation from Mikhail Bakhtin's
dialogism and his model of the dialogical self. This last term is
not precisely Bakhtin's but Charles Taylor's. By using the term
Taylor acknowledges the compatibility of his brilliant and bracing
Sources of the Self with Bakhtin's emphasis on the dialogic
structure of identity. 4 Taylor has argued that a "crucial feature
of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character" and he has
"all that escapes or seems to escape" from the finalized social
order. 25 Willams breaks up this dichotomy by attempting to locate
the dynamics of social experience where the social has not yet
hardened into fixed forms but is also not merely private, traceless
feeling. The term "structures of feeling" is meant to be slightly
oxymoronic but it is also, in retrospect at least, more than
slightly Bakhtinian: BLOCKQUOTE
While academic criticism has proclaimed a nullifying ideological
association of Eugene and Mortimer forms a sort of paradigm of
partnership in the novel and is worth looking at in its several
sides. Eugene and Mortimer exemplify the duality of meaning that has
always characterized the word "partner" in English but which
substantially expanded in the nineteenth century as the term became
assimilated to the vocabulary of capitalism and acquired thereby a
readier economic than social signification. The developing usage in
the nineteenth century also tended to make ambivalent the once more
or less compatible meanings of the word. It is, of course, precisely
similarly surrounded by "mummied" (81; 2.7) beings who only simulate
animation. Even the clothes displayed at Pleasant Riderhood's
Leaving Shop, where John Harmon begins his narrative, have "a
general dim resemblance to human listeners" (357; 2.12). These
unresponding mannequins ("lay-figure" is the text's term [113; 1.9])
manifest the fate of the reader-as-Twemlow before Twemlow acquires a
social imagination. But while Twemlow is left for a long time in his
stupefaction, the reader is prompted more urgently into action by
the novel's great company of performers who themselves resist
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
station was indelibly marked upon character, demeanor, and appearance.
14 A rise in status, then, required dissociation not only from a prior
set of circumstances and associations but from a prior self as well.
Brian Harrison notes of the rising members of the laboring classes at
this period that "much of the battle involved a long-term triumph of
one-half of the [End Page 1018] personality over the other." 15 Charley
Hexam, the waterman's son in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, for instance,
struggles to "cancel the past and to raise myself in the world." 16 The
inundation of sentimentality in the middle decades of the nineteenth
28. Ren� Girard, Deceit, Desire & the Novel: Self and Other in Literary
Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1976).
29. The term "mimesis of renunciation" is from Girard, Things Hidden
Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael
Meteer (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1987), 9.
30. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Enoch Arden (1864), in Tennyson: A Selected
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
well as in such allied fields as history, law, and philosophy, a resurgence
that has led Richard Rorty to speak, both descriptively and hopefully, of "a
general turn against theory and towards narrative." 4 But if narrative has
retained or regained its prestige as a category of analysis, experience
remains a vexed term in contemporary critical discourse. It is a measure of
the peculiarity of our current circumstances that Raymond Williams's
common-sensical account is viewed even by sympathetic critics as an instance
of his doughty dissent from post-modernist orthodoxy: "Experience becomes a
forbidden word," Williams notes, "whereas what we ought to say about it is
[End Page 988] one of the centrally unifying themes of Williams's
oeuvre--which supplies at once the formidable power and drastic limitation of
his work." 6 The scale of judgment here, carefully balanced by the form of
the sentence, is tipped by "drastic," and it is not surprising that Williams
would have felt that experience was a term under suspicion, if not outright
banishment. Eagleton has subsequently qualified his judgment of Williams and
has found many opportunities to make clear that he recognizes the claims, and
claims the support for Marxist criticism, of such formulations as "the way
men and women actually experience their social conditions." 7 But this
hovering in the wings, about to be named, is that of formalism. But the
Victorian sages were not in any sense formalists, and neither, properly
called, were the twentieth-century critics whom I have invoked and some of
whose critical habits I am seeking to revive and revise for current practice.
The term is misleading and unhelpful to the extent that it implies (as John
Holloway may seem to in the passage above, but only because I have quoted him
so briefly and out of context) that there is a dismissable, or even
distinguishable, something called content that we must put aside in our
contemplation of another something called form. If one point of
Meredith, Wilde, and Joyce. "The sentimentalist," writes Stephen Dedalus in
Ulysses, echoing The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, "is he who would enjoy
without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." 35 And behind
that passage, from De Profundis: "A sentimentalist is simply one who desires
to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." 36 It is a key term,
too, for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who has issued the most arresting recent
challenge to such confidently evaluative deployments of the term, in linked
discussions of Melville, Wilde, and Nietzsche in The Epistemology of the
Closet. 37 But it seems to me that her analysis complicates, without
without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." 35 And behind
that passage, from De Profundis: "A sentimentalist is simply one who desires
to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." 36 It is a key term,
too, for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who has issued the most arresting recent
challenge to such confidently evaluative deployments of the term, in linked
discussions of Melville, Wilde, and Nietzsche in The Epistemology of the
Closet. 37 But it seems to me that her analysis complicates, without
disabling or abandoning, the critically and morally discriminating use of the
term. That is, she shows persuasively that the charge of sentimentality has
challenge to such confidently evaluative deployments of the term, in linked
discussions of Melville, Wilde, and Nietzsche in The Epistemology of the
Closet. 37 But it seems to me that her analysis complicates, without
disabling or abandoning, the critically and morally discriminating use of the
term. That is, she shows persuasively that the charge of sentimentality has
done different and often very dubious kinds of work over the course of the
last century, serving to mark and reinforce a variety of invidious
distinctions. But she also, in the midst of her discussion, names and judges
with great confidence and gusto instances of bad sentimentality in
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is
not" ("Introduction," Selected Writings of Walter Pater [New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1974], viii).
5. Pater often uses the term "antiquarian" disparagingly. In the
first essay of The Renaissance, "Two Early French Stories," he
writes: "Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting
its object in perspective, and setting the reader in a certain point
of view, from which what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
Before turning to Morgan's novel, I wish to distinguish further these
different streams of nationalism. It is almost a commonplace in recent
writings on nationalism that while its roots can be traced to earlier,
similar ideologies, the French Revolution and its aftermath acted as a
catalyst to produce a distinctive -ism. In this context, the term
"nationalism" is generally used to refer to a sense of communal identity that
includes a shared history, culture, and belief system, and often a particular
language, as well as a concern for the collective good and sometimes claims
to a particular territory. 9 But, as Benedict Anderson notes, this concept of
versions of nationalism in the early decades of the phenomenon, and while the
one that came to prevail is, as the paradox suggests, at odds with modernity
because of its investment in antiquity, there was another that fully engaged
and depended upon the concept of modernity. The first, which for the purposes
of this essay I shall term "antiquarian nationalism," fulfills the conditions
of the usual form of nationalism (commonly called "romantic nationalism" and
associated with what is termed "cultural nationalism"), embracing the English
writer who hails the Magna Carta as proof of England's libertarian tradition
and the Irish writer who publishes Gaelic verse to authorize Irish culture.
of the usual form of nationalism (commonly called "romantic nationalism" and
associated with what is termed "cultural nationalism"), embracing the English
writer who hails the Magna Carta as proof of England's libertarian tradition
and the Irish writer who publishes Gaelic verse to authorize Irish culture.
11 The second form of nationalism I wish to term "inaugural nationalism."
Inaugural nationalism might combine with the neoclassical nationalism
identified by Anthony Smith or the constitutional nationalism and radical
republicanism identified by Sean Cronin, but I want to emphasize the
inaugural emphasis of some nationalist discourse in order to draw attention
BLOCKQUOTE
This is not a form of nationalism that can readily be comprehended within the
usual definitions of the term; as with Shane, the "genuine wild Irishman," it
has produced a conflicted national subject that cannot easily be absorbed
into a totalizing national stereotype because it insists that the Irish have
not yet been allowed to fulfill their potential as free citizens. The key to
O'Brien's perspective is the term "social advancement," the promise of
usual definitions of the term; as with Shane, the "genuine wild Irishman," it
has produced a conflicted national subject that cannot easily be absorbed
into a totalizing national stereotype because it insists that the Irish have
not yet been allowed to fulfill their potential as free citizens. The key to
O'Brien's perspective is the term "social advancement," the promise of
progress towards a civilized nation rather than a return to a pre-colonial
one, and that priority produces, as well as justifies, his discomfort with
the people of the Irish present and his hostility to those of the Irish past.
4. Thomas Moore, "Prefatory Letter on Music," from Irish Melodies, in The
Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London: Frederick Warne, 1881), 194. Moore's
use of the word "multitude" would catch the ear of many of his contemporaries
as an allusion to Edmund Burke's term "swinish multitude" (Reflections on the
Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien [Markham: Penguin, 1986],
173). Burke's use of the term as a derogatory reference to the lower classes
was picked up by British radicals and United Irishmen alike, and the term
peppers their literature, from United Irishmen ballads such as "War, Cruel
Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London: Frederick Warne, 1881), 194. Moore's
use of the word "multitude" would catch the ear of many of his contemporaries
as an allusion to Edmund Burke's term "swinish multitude" (Reflections on the
Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien [Markham: Penguin, 1986],
173). Burke's use of the term as a derogatory reference to the lower classes
was picked up by British radicals and United Irishmen alike, and the term
peppers their literature, from United Irishmen ballads such as "War, Cruel
War and Starvation" to James Parkinson's Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke
from the Swinish Multitude (1793). The term was still current well after the
use of the word "multitude" would catch the ear of many of his contemporaries
as an allusion to Edmund Burke's term "swinish multitude" (Reflections on the
Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien [Markham: Penguin, 1986],
173). Burke's use of the term as a derogatory reference to the lower classes
was picked up by British radicals and United Irishmen alike, and the term
peppers their literature, from United Irishmen ballads such as "War, Cruel
War and Starvation" to James Parkinson's Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke
from the Swinish Multitude (1793). The term was still current well after the
1790s. In 1820, Percy Shelley used it as the basis for his spoof on the royal
173). Burke's use of the term as a derogatory reference to the lower classes
was picked up by British radicals and United Irishmen alike, and the term
peppers their literature, from United Irishmen ballads such as "War, Cruel
War and Starvation" to James Parkinson's Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke
from the Swinish Multitude (1793). The term was still current well after the
1790s. In 1820, Percy Shelley used it as the basis for his spoof on the royal
family, Oedipus Tyrannus; or Swellfoot the Tyrant, a play with a "CHORUS of
the Swinish Multitude," a "Swinish Monarch," and sundry other pigs (Shelley:
Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corrected by G. M. Matthews [New York:
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
Mutiny serves to emphasize BLOCKQUOTE
What is striking about this passage is the covert erasure of middle-class
professionalism (at least insofar as professionalism is understood to include
the Victorian state). The depersonalizing and pejorative term "officialism"
effectively isolates "gigantic blunders" from the "energy and self-reliance"
of "the men of the nation." Not only does it deprive the English middle-class
professional of individual subjectivity, it further excludes him by
identifying him with the un-Englishness of "officialism" on the Continent,
recently proposed (but not yet thoroughly implemented) practice of
competitive examination is not--as it might appear--a salutary application of
entrepreneurial principles to governance. It is, instead, a pernicious and
un-English (here Oriental rather than Continental) brand of
"functionarism"--a term that, like "officialism," denotes the kind of
intrusive government and unproductive (parasitic, sycophantic, effeminate)
character to which English liberty and the energy, vigor, and robust
masculinity of English spirit stand in bold contrast.
essay, depending upon the preference of the writer under consideration.
5. Colley, 5.
6. The term "social economy" is found in the writings of Samuel Laing, whose
early-Victorian travel writing is discussed below. Conceived as a "distinct
science," and productive of "national character," Laing's "social economy"
would include "construction of the social body," "institutions for the
administration" of law, police, civil, military and ecclesiastical affairs,
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
number of excellent studies and reevaluations of the event. Most
relevant to the project of this essay are several works that
highlight the impact of political economy on the administration of
colonial Ireland and the role the debates on the Irish disaster
played in the long-term shaping of British economic thought. See
Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley, Political Economy in Colonial
Ireland: The Propagation and Ideological Function of Economic
Discourse in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992);
Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
Which brings us back to the defamiliarization characteristic of the
Romantic imagination and to Malouf's paradoxical claim that only the
difficult and unfamiliar can "speak out of the centre of each one of
us." Opposed precisely to "the Idealization of the familiar" (the
term is Santayana's) that informed Jeffrey's notion of the common
apprehension, poetry according to Shelley "compels us to feel that
which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates
anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the
recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration." 73 What that
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
Cousins draws upon this notion of "contagion," proposing that the
ugly object appears as "an invasive contaminating life stripped of
all signification," one that "gorges on meaning" as it engulfs the
subject [End Page 568] with its own lack of meaning, its excessive
incoherence. 17 In fact, in Frankenstein, the term "ugly" emerges at
the precise point when the speaking subject is about to be consumed
by such incoherence. Descending the Mer de Glace after a traumatic
encounter with the Creature, for example, Victor describes the wind
"as if it were a dull ugly siroc on its way to consume [him]" (F,
lamentation) to the "heav'nly Muse" in the third book of Paradise
Lost--"these eyes, that roll in vain / To find thy piercing ray, and
find no dawn; / So thick a drop serene has quencht thir Orbs"--makes
a point of referring to his blindness as one that has not clouded
his eyes (the "drop serene" being the Latin medical term for
blindness that does not affect the appearance of the eye). 27
Elsewhere this point becomes central to Milton's defense against the
charge of being "A monster, dreadful, ugly, huge, deprived of
sight." 28
is the implied opposite of beauty, then it would seem that the ugly
entails the idea of evil.
Such a proposition has a long literary heritage. In Paradise Lost,
the term "ugly" first appears with Sin herself, who is described as
being "uglier" than the "Night-Hag" (PL, 2.662); later the devils
are transformed into "a crowd / Of ugly Serpents" (PL, 10.538-39),
and this juxtaposition of "ugly" with the morally repulsive Sin and
serpent is reinforced in Adam's prophetic vision of evil: "O sight /
speaks of "the depth of the intertextuality in Frankenstein" and
comes to the defense of Shelley's authorship: "the entire machinery
of this novel, from its knowledge of contemporary chemistry in the
early chapters to its elaborate and ongoing play against Paradise
Lost was the project of Mary Shelley." 51 His use of the term
"machinery" is propitious, for it harks back to the Frankensteinian
creative process: a method of production mechanical to the degree
that it cannot contain its own reality. Although Shelley struggles
to contain her "very hideous . . . idea" (1831; F, 360) in narrative
1831 introduction and 1831 textual variants included as appendices
to the Broadview edition are also cited parenthetically and
abbreviated 1831; F.
2. While the term "ugly" derives from the Old Norse ugglig (causing
fear or discomfort), the "grotesque" descends from the fantastical
hybrid forms painted in "grottoes" of ancient Roman buildings. Most
accounts of the grotesque from the time of John Ruskin stress its
hybrid (comic/horrific) nature: Wolfgang Kayser focuses on the
and pleasure as the effects of the ugly and the beautiful, and it
may be said that in general this was the point of view of the first
half of the century" (Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical
Theories in XVIII-Century England [Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan
Press, 1960], 91). I use the term "non-beautiful" since Hume does
not concern himself with "the ugly"; rather, he claims that "the
sentiments of men often differ with regard to beauty and deformity
of all kinds" (Hume, 134; my emphasis). The distinction between
ugliness and deformity is one Burke himself emphasizes in his
ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537
"Bales of Living Anguish": Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing
Peter J. Kitson
---------------
natural signs" written on the body. 20 This new conception of race derived,
perhaps unfairly, its most influential and scientific justification from the
work of J. F. Blumenbach. 21 Blumenbach follows the biblical account of race,
arguing that the different varieties of humanity can be accounted for by the
idea of "degeneration" (although he understands the term as signifying
"deviation"). The pure origin of humanity is the white male, all other forms
are descended from this race according to gender or geography or a
combination of the two. The European race (Caucasian) is the most beautiful
and least degenerate and therefore constitutes the historic race. For
"Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Dramatists" (1812), that Othello could not
have been envisaged by Shakespeare as a negro. 37 Although the racial type of
the maid hardly seems an issue, it is to be presumed that Coleridge's
audience would regard her as dark-skinned, despite the difficulties in
establishing what the term "Abyssinian" actually meant for Coleridge.
Blumenbach names his negro racial type as "Ethiopian" (often incorrectly
confused with "Abyssinian") and James Cowles Prichard in 1826 describes the
Abyssinians as "an ancient African race, nearly connected with the old
Egyptians" and descended from Cush. 38 It is possible that Coleridge
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
combustion, Lewes was also aided by recent scientific developments
that would accommodate his squeamishness in the face of pain. In
1846 Robert Liston became the first English surgeon to perform an
operation using "sulfuric ether" (ethyl oxide) as an "an�sthetic"
(the term suggested a few months previously by Oliver Wendell
Holmes). 7 Along with chloroform and chloral hydrate, ether became a
central drug in a gradually growing anesthetic pharmacopoeia that
would come to include morphine, curare (mistakenly and, by the
1870s, controversially, since it paralyzes without eliminating
affecting sensation; in the same way, "an animal, after removal of
the brain" in physiological experiments, may produce "struggles and
cries"--like the unflagging Micawber, one must assume--yet most
physiologists would agree that this is merely a reflex action,
triggered by sensation but unaccompanied by pain. "Now for the term
Pain in the foregoing paragraph substitute the term Consciousness,"
directs Lewes; the characteristics of pain are coextensive with
those of consciousness itself. 20 Research that employed vivisection
could thus investigate the properties of both, "filling up the gaps
the brain" in physiological experiments, may produce "struggles and
cries"--like the unflagging Micawber, one must assume--yet most
physiologists would agree that this is merely a reflex action,
triggered by sensation but unaccompanied by pain. "Now for the term
Pain in the foregoing paragraph substitute the term Consciousness,"
directs Lewes; the characteristics of pain are coextensive with
those of consciousness itself. 20 Research that employed vivisection
could thus investigate the properties of both, "filling up the gaps
of [End Page 623] observation with hypothesis" and elaborating
word that, although part of everyday English today, gave many of her
Victorian readers pause as they read the very first sentence of the
narrative: "Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the
secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her
glance?" (my emphasis). 52 The term emphasizes movement, energy,
process, "fluctuating spontaneity" (as Lewes had put it in his
Dickens essay)--the same emphases that made physiology seem the most
modern science to Lewes and many others.
Grandcourt, who produces Gwendolen's complex responses, and of
Daniel, who allows her to give them voice. 72 And Gwendolen Harleth
is no brainless frog but a complex fictional organism whose mental
movements are supposed to be "never calculable" (Eliot too uses
Lewes's mathematical term to describe the complexity of psychology
and behavior)--and, one might say, "rarely a single croak or a
single hop." The novel's unusually complex psycho-narration, free
indirect discourse, and treatment of psychology, which Leavis and
others have compared to Henry James, render the subjective aspect of
71. For the classic taxonomy and analysis of these three methods of
representing consciousness, see Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds:
Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1978). Cohn uses the more specific term
"narrated monologue" instead of "free indirect discourse."
72. Cvetkovich's chapter on Daniel Deronda elaborates this paradigm.
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
autonomous individual, the story told through one voice, one
psychology, and bound by the requirements of chronology, unity, and
a totalizing conclusion. While Brown's critique of the politics of
the American novel emerges out of a commitment to a "literary
federalism" (to use William C. Dowling's useful term) that we might
not easily recognize today as radical, it does resonate with
contemporary critique of the liberal subject and of the role of
literature in defining and defending individual desire and ambition.
19 And it resonates strongly and more immediately with the similar
provide anthologies of a range of excerpted pamphlets, books,
reviews, and letters. The early magazine explicitly figured itself
as a museum; two of the most important magazines of the period
titled themselves as such (The American Museum and The Massachusetts
Magazine, or Monthly Museum), with many others including the term in
their titles. 34 Matthew Carey's American Museum proudly listed in
its inaugural issue subscribers who included men who would in other
contexts have little to do with one another, including Jefferson,
Hamilton, and Rufus King. And of course it prominently displayed the
ELH 67.3 (2000) 801-818
Dangerous Acquaintances: The Correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke
Barbara Packer
---------------
Fuller appeared to them as a kind of adjunct professor, master of that
unofficial curriculum that played so large a part in the lives of
nineteenth-century American undergraduates. 6 Fuller's social position in
Cambridge added to her air of authority. Although her father had declined to
seek a fifth term in Congress and had resumed his law practice in Boston,
hoping for a diplomatic appointment that never materialized, Margaret Fuller
still enjoyed the prestige and wide acquaintanceship that her father's
prominence gave her.
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
Lodging House for Homeless Girls as the product of their feminine
labors. The Matron complains of "Their foolish pride or prejudice
against housework," but boasts that under her administration "All
were taught that this Lodging House was merely a stepping-stone to
getting on in the world [that is no long term stays], and that
nothing was so honorable as industrious house-work" (R, 1863,
12-13). The sorts of resistance boys show through play and
consumption appear among these girls as a more radical antipathy to
domestic norms.
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
revolt against hereditary sovereignty in America, and witnessing the
approach of a second in France, Jefferson wrote a letter to Madison
declaring the "self evident" principle "that the earth belongs in
usufruct to the living." 19 No generation, he says, has the right to
bind another. "Usufruct," a term from the feudal law of land tenure,
anchors Jefferson's idea in the concrete issues of inheritance and
entail, an area of law in which his revolutionary ardor was early
put into practice. He had successfully campaigned to eliminate
primogeniture and entail from the laws of Virginia. 20 Yet in the
follow from a study of averages. Arguing by means of figures derived
from Buffon that "half of the people 21 years and upwards at any one
instant of time" will be dead in nineteen years, Jefferson reckons
that this figure limits the contractual ability of any majority. No
nation has a right to contract a debt beyond the term of nineteen
years.
Undoubtedly this thought experiment had personal resonance for
Jefferson. He had inherited large debts from his father-in-law that
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
Deane is correct in focusing on this sense of loss--Synge's
realization of a fall from what he believes to be an a priori true
authenticity--but he fails to introduce an important term that would
productively complicate his reading: Synge's representations and use
of a gendered symbolic economy. Specifically, while Griffith would
celebrate the domestic peasant female as a symbol of a coherent
nation in the present, for Synge, the peasant female repeatedly
1996), 175.
8. For an example of an opposition reading see Kiberd's reading of
The Playboy of the Western World in Inventing Ireland, and for an
instance of what I term the "unintentional acquiescence" argument
see Seamus Deane's chapter "Synge and Heroism" in Celtic Revivals
(Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest Univ. Press, 1985), 51-62. In the
case of the former, opposition entails a necessary step toward
"liberation," the final step in Fanon's model of decolonization
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
the point: the example is intended to illustrate how absolutely the
event--the early scene of child abuse--has taken on phonic and graphic
substance. Tieret and rtut are both "defunct" semantically, at least in
terms of the scene they finally address, and yet because of that occluded
site elements of each term remain semantically over-charged--theirs is, we
might say, a forceful opacity. This turn away from language as
communication--away from the presentation of what we might call a knowable
event and toward an experience of the past as a kind of indeterminate
force--encapsulates that need to conceal which characterizes the discourse
the deforming effect of a specific historical event. Unless, at some level,
that event is recognized, opacity features will amount to no more than a
stylistic device which might properly be called a kind of decadence.
Recognition is potentially available through those features described by
Abraham and Torok as antisemantic. Each element of their term is operative
because the force released by the initial event is itself divided, seeking
semanticization in communicative language, even as it enacts its own
occlusion through the deformation of that medium. This double movement
inscribes a form of temporal play which in Freud's analysis of trauma has
What Abraham and Torok mean by anasemia is thus "a constant movement 'back
up toward' (from the Greek ana) successively earlier sources of
signification (semia that lie beyond perception)." 16 This kind of semantics
occurs, as Derrida might put it, because the angled term carries "a past
that has never been present." 17 For Derrida, the past or, we might say, the
traumatic event is both ever immanent and never present. In the remainder of
this essay I want to look more closely at this [End Page 996] double
condition, which produces a writing strongly marked by contradictory
exceptional feet in close proximity, and with a similar structure, create a
liaison between "radiant" and "Plutonian." Since "radiant" refers to the
angelic Lenore, while "Plutonian" is associated with the raven, light is
juxtaposed against dark even as "I" (first person pronoun) turns into "why"
(an interrogative term), so that "or" can beg the question "or what?,"
twice. "White," "black," "I," "why?," "Or--?" . . . more of this later.
In the fourth line of stanza fourteen, "memories" must be pronounced
"mem'ries" to supply a trochee. The phoneme "o," spoken as "or," is omitted
and contracted, can be further redistributed to give "bone," which arguably
foregrounds the cranial wound available within the word "Pallas." To recap:
rhythmically persuaded to cast "ebony" into its antisemantic fragments, I
find "i," and "y," and "ebon," which incline to "I," "why," and "bone,"
where the third term is drawn out by "Pallas"--a name which "bone" recasts
and recolors, so that Pallas becomes Minerva at the same time that she
assumes the form of a black bird sprung from the white head upon which it
perches. Well might a white subject ("I"), faced with such a phantom scene
issuing from "ebony," question its own integrity ("why?").
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
increasing sympathies with orthodox Christianity. 6
I would insist, though, that these arguments, by either dismissing
politics in order to favor belief or making belief look like veiled
politics, try too strenuously to resolve one term into the other.
They thus tend to ignore Coleridge's attention to the negotiated
relationship between belief and modes of government: the way that
beliefs are not simply self-governing but are governed within the
context of different kinds of political institutions. As a result,
parenthetically by page number and abbreviated as CW, 4.1 and CW, 6,
respectively.
8. I will concentrate my discussion on the rifacciamento
(Coleridge's term) of The Friend, published in November of 1818.
9. For this tradition of demonization of Catholic and Protestant
institutionalized religion, see Christopher Hill, Antichrist in
Seventeenth-Century England (1971; reprint, London: Verso, 1990).
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
xii. The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and
Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 1:296.
5. Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past on the English Poet
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1970). The term "writer's block" was
coined by Edmund Bergler in The Writer and Psychoanalysis (New York:
E. Brunner, 1950), and Bate, Bloom, and Leader all conceive of the
problem in psychological terms. Sheridan's case, though, is not
sufficiently accounted for by these models. He suffered, I will
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
II.i. Godwin and the Sublime
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The only critic who has, to my knowledge, pointed to the significance
of Godwin's use of the term sublime in Caleb Williams, linking it to
the presiding master signifier Edmund Burke, is Marilyn Butler:
BLOCKQUOTE
"[i]t is the contemplation of illustrious men, such as we find
scattered through the long succession of ages, that kindle into a
flame the hidden fire within us"; and he particularly refers us to
the ancients for our contemplation of philosophical truth. In other
words, Godwin sees history as a species of romance (a charged term in
Caleb Williams), and he regards true history as an exercise in the
sublime: the novel should partake of the sublimity of the imagination
by representing the human sublime, that is, great men of exalted
virtue. 25 The sublimity of virtue in the represented character is
divine rage, nor should the novel's figures of corrupted divinity,
Falkland and Tyrrel, need to be in the grip of paroxysm and insane
frenzy.
The term sublime is applied in the novel to several people, to
Falkland and Alexander, but also implicitly to Caleb and explicitly
to Mr. Clare. I contend that the one and only example of true
sublimity in the novel is rendered in the character of Mr. Clare, who
displays all the positive divine attributes without arrogating any of
being of a superior order" (7). Falkland then surprises Caleb at his
trunk, evokes a reaction of thunderous rage in the course of which
Falkland calls him a "spy," "villain," and "wretch" (8), and this
leads into Mr. Collins's narrative about Falkland in chapter 2.
Collins, we should note, does not once use the term sublime in
reference to Falkland but exclusively applies the label to Mr. Clare;
that is, if we trust Caleb Williams to repeat Collins' narrative
correctly on that point. Since Caleb himself labels Falkland as
sublime as soon as he himself takes over as narrator in book 2 ("Then
that is, if we trust Caleb Williams to repeat Collins' narrative
correctly on that point. Since Caleb himself labels Falkland as
sublime as soon as he himself takes over as narrator in book 2 ("Then
I recollected the virtues of my master, almost too sublime for human
nature" [107]), the absence of the term in book 1 must surely be
significant.
Mr. Clare, a poet who has dedicated his life to "the sublimest
efforts of genius" (23), combines in himself all the highest virtues
awe, and at another transporting it with luxuriant beauty" (26). Note
how Falkland's poem "overwhelms" the listeners with "awe." Clare is
therefore right in admonishing Falkland to "act up to the magnitude
of [his] destiny" (26) and to devote his powers to more serious
exploits. In Clare's handling of the situation, even the loaded term
passion is neutralized to legitimate proportions. 49
Mr. Clare's divine qualities emerge most forcefully during his final
illness and death. His only enemy is Death: "The enemy is too mighty
BLOCKQUOTE
Not only does Caleb here diabolically "thrill" at Falkland's
misery--a term that is, let us note, a key word in the aesthetics of
the sublime. Moreover, the circumlocution of Caleb in his reference
to divine retribution, which clearly distances itself from the
reality of hell and the existence of the devil ("imaginary"; "is
represented as"), can be juxtaposed with an earlier telling passage
BLOCKQUOTE
Caleb here assumes the role of a medieval saint or martyr; his
fortitude is complemented by his peace of mind, and the term serenity
links his condition with that of Mr. Clare before his death. 57 His
state is indeed "blessed"--a religious term appropriate to the genre
of the saint's legend. The contrast between his admirable awareness
of his own "innocence" and "integrity" and the sinful nature of the
Caleb here assumes the role of a medieval saint or martyr; his
fortitude is complemented by his peace of mind, and the term serenity
links his condition with that of Mr. Clare before his death. 57 His
state is indeed "blessed"--a religious term appropriate to the genre
of the saint's legend. The contrast between his admirable awareness
of his own "innocence" and "integrity" and the sinful nature of the
"splendours of nature and art" echoes standard elements of
hagiography, and the piercing sunlight of his own virtue tropes on
superiority, and on the unconstrained exercise of his imagination. He
"employed [him]self with imaginary adventures" (185-86), rehearsing
the tribunal before which he is to appear with consummate rhetorical
skill. Caleb puts himself on a stage and plays out in his "fancy" (a
loaded term!) "scenes of insult and danger, of tenderness and
oppression" (186). These scenes uncannily mirror the experiences of
Falkland, as is also indicated in the following sentence: "In some of
my reveries I boiled with impetuous indignation, and in others
patiently collected the whole force of my mind for some fearful
BLOCKQUOTE
It is noteworthy that Caleb here accuses others of the
"gratification" of their desires; the term gratification is employed
elsewhere to designate the quasisexual consummation that Caleb
experiences when satisfying his curiosity (144, 158), and it also
links up with Grimes's even less savory attempt to rape Emily (64).
60 The reference to slavery of course is an implicit critical
the novel that Falkland talks about his guilt and takes full
responsibility for his actions, whereas Caleb continues to see his
experiences as "calamities" (postscript, 325).
The term "calamity" recurs in the novel too frequently for me to
discuss individual passages. 67 Besides "calamity," "fate," and
"destiny," one also finds the phrases "catastrophe," "ruin," and the
reference to "blasted" reputation to indicate negative influences on
the major characters. Only Emily, one may note, hopes for a
bless the hand that wounds me" (postscript, 324). 69 Nor does
Falkland at this point lament his "blasted reputation," but talks of
his "crimes" (325).
This is all the more significant since the term blast recurs with
great frequency throughout the text. In volume 1, chapter 8, it is
used as a synonym of ruin in "[Tyrrel] did everything in his power to
blast the young lady's reputation" (56), and Hawkins is concerned
about his son's blasted hopes if he loses his reputation in jail
great frequency throughout the text. In volume 1, chapter 8, it is
used as a synonym of ruin in "[Tyrrel] did everything in his power to
blast the young lady's reputation" (56), and Hawkins is concerned
about his son's blasted hopes if he loses his reputation in jail
(75). Most interestingly, Falkland applies the term blast to Tyrrel
when he throws him out of the rural assembly, calling Tyrrel an
"inhuman, unrelenting tyrant!" and a "miserable wretch": "Go, shrink
into your miserable self! Begone, and let me never be blasted with
your sight again" (95). Ironically, Tyrrel does indeed manage to
when he throws him out of the rural assembly, calling Tyrrel an
"inhuman, unrelenting tyrant!" and a "miserable wretch": "Go, shrink
into your miserable self! Begone, and let me never be blasted with
your sight again" (95). Ironically, Tyrrel does indeed manage to
blast Falkland's reputation soon after. 70 The term blast has divine
connotations of omnipotent power. Its use in the noted circumstances
therefore descries an arrogation of the divine prerogative on the
part of Falkland, Caleb, and Tyrrel.
"turn" to this oppression, crushing the already weak and unfortunate
subjects as the torturer presses his victims to death. 72 These terms
evoke precisely the negative connotations associated with divinity in
the novel: Falkland in his rage wants to "crush" Caleb like an insect
and "grind" him "into atoms" (284). The term "machine" again is quite
relevant in the context; in the novel "engine" and "machine" have
been used in reference to "instruments" of torture or metaphorically
in reference to the malignant strategies of Gines--a telling name.
The pretended sublime in the novel is therefore a terrifying sublime
fugitive and refuses to turn him over to the bloodhounds despite his
disgust and "abhorrence" at Caleb's true identity, that of the
faithless servant or "monster" (249). This old man seems to Caleb
"extremely venerable" (246), and he notes his "sensibility" (a key
term in reference to Falkland!) and "benevolence" (246). As with Mr.
Collins, Caleb experiences "affection and esteem" for the old man and
delights in the exchange--the old man represents that "expectation of
sympathy, kindness and the goodwill of mankind" (247) which Caleb has
been shut out from for so long. He is therefore "inexpressibly
53. Tyrrel's "depravity" (80) is contrasted with Falkland's passing
from "a life unstained by a single act of injury to the consummation
of human depravity" (103). Falkland applies the epithet to Caleb when
he accuses him of theft (162), and it is picked up by Forester (174).
Caleb finally applies the term to the legal system of tyranny: "Among
my melancholy reflections I tasked my memory, and counted over the
doors, the locks, the bolts, the chains, the massy walls and grated
windows that were between me and liberty. These, said I, are the
engines that tyranny sits down in cold and serious meditation to
is particularly instructive in view also of the homosocial element in
Godwin's novel; the absence of a true love interest in the hero
becomes very clear when one views the novels side by side.
57. The term "martyr" is applied to Falkland (a "martyr in the public
cause" [172]), to the angelic figure of Brightwel (193), and to Caleb
(276), but it also implicitly pertains to Emily's ordeal. Tyrrel and
Falkland perceive themselves to be martyrs of fate. See also:
"Surrounded as I am with horrors I will at least preserve my
November 10, 1750, 1:362). Note also Falkland's use of the word
"serenity" in the quotation. This provides another parallel to
Caleb's ungodly serenity in prison.
67. In reference to Caleb the term "calamity" occurs sixteen times
(3, 145, 157, 193, 149, 276, 282, 296-98, 303, 306, 311, 318, 322,
325); Falkland applies the term to his predicament three times (98,
103, 120), and it is used also in reference to Brightwel (192).
Caleb's ungodly serenity in prison.
67. In reference to Caleb the term "calamity" occurs sixteen times
(3, 145, 157, 193, 149, 276, 282, 296-98, 303, 306, 311, 318, 322,
325); Falkland applies the term to his predicament three times (98,
103, 120), and it is used also in reference to Brightwel (192).
68. The term "catastrophe" is applied once to the Hawkinses (79), and
the other three times to Falkland (96, 311, 323).
(3, 145, 157, 193, 149, 276, 282, 296-98, 303, 306, 311, 318, 322,
325); Falkland applies the term to his predicament three times (98,
103, 120), and it is used also in reference to Brightwel (192).
68. The term "catastrophe" is applied once to the Hawkinses (79), and
the other three times to Falkland (96, 311, 323).
69. Compare in contrast Caleb's "My fairest prospects have been
blasted" (3).
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
Whatever the merit of such an objection (if that is in fact what it
is), I raise it here simply to note that perhaps the most striking
development in Emerson criticism over the past two decades has been
the effort to dissociate his sense of individualism from "the vulgar
meanings assigned that term." The phrase comes from Richard Poirier
and "the vulgar meanings" he has in mind derive from what he calls
"humanistic criticism," a criticism which "proposes to find in
literature things 'to know,' 'to learn,' 'to propagate,'" thereby
reducing the literary to a "servitor to established ideas of the
9. Early in "Self-Reliance" Emerson uses the word shame: we are to
believe our own thought lest "to-morrow a stranger will say with
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
another" (259). Stanley Cavell picks up on the term in
characterizing the goal of "Emersonian perfectionism" as "shaming us
out of our shame" (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The
Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1990]); George Kateb's Emerson and Self-Reliance likewise
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
Burney, far from simply trying to give nothing the narrative density
of something, imaginatively reconstitutes the wanderer's body in the
interest of a postrevolutionary reconstitution of rank. 6 For
Burney, this project does not entail the simple privileging of one
metaphysical term over another, such as we find, for example, in
Edmund Burke's claim that only "vast libraries," "great collections
of antient records," "paintings and statues," and "grand monuments
of the dead" can counter the noxious abstractions of republican
theory. 7 If, indeed, refinement [End Page 966] cannot be as easily
ELH 68.4 (2001) 1023-1047
"A Sort Of Adopted Daughter": Family Relations In _The Lamplighter_
Cindy Weinstein
---------------
choose how, when, and to whom her affections will be given. Although
Gerty gets to belong to everyone--that is, virtually every adult
character in the novel adopts her at some point--her sympathy produces a
family economy where one person's gain is not another person's loss. The
term judicious sympathy responds to June Howard's timely call for a
"transdisciplinary" approach to the study of the sentimental novel and
the role of sympathy in particular. 3 The disciplines being crossed are
law and literature, and this crossing is in the interest of intervening
in the important and contentious debate currently being staged in
her identity eludes any formal categorization. Because everyone and no
one has claims upon her (legally she belongs to no one), she enjoys a
freedom that derives from the fact that in not knowing her true origins,
she is free to choose them. That the "absurd" conclusion, to borrow Nina
Baym's term, eventually supplies her the story of her origins, indeed
legally effects her transformation from "the city's property" (12) to
Philip Amory's daughter, points to the central tension within the novel:
on the one hand, Gerty's unfettered, unstable identity is what permits
her development and is therefore desirable, and on the other, the novel
BLOCKQUOTE
Once again, names play a crucial role in both identifying and
destabilizing family relations. Whereas the term "uncle" when applied to
Uncle True signifies love freely given, "aunt" when used by Miss Patty's
blood relations signifies specious affection. Gerty's love for her uncle
is indeed truer than anything Miss Patty's relations feel for her. Miss
Patty fully intends to undermine through contract the blood relation
Uncle True signifies love freely given, "aunt" when used by Miss Patty's
blood relations signifies specious affection. Gerty's love for her uncle
is indeed truer than anything Miss Patty's relations feel for her. Miss
Patty fully intends to undermine through contract the blood relation
established by the very term "aunt." By naming Willie heir to her
fortune (he, as a young boy, had gallantly escorted Miss Patty through
inclement weather and had thus earned her ever-loving devotion) Miss
Patty's will breaks the equation of consanguinity and property. Indeed,
Miss Patty's "own perfect acquaintance with all the legal knowledge
10. Quoted in Morton Horowitz, The Transformation of American Law,
1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), 185.
11. My use of the term "contract" will operate both literally as well as
metaphorically, just as it often did, according to Horowitz, in
antebellum legal cases (244). He calls attention to the comparative
insignificance of contract law, which was "relatively passive and
amorphous" (246) and "the voracious appetite of the concept of contract"
though in precisely what sense, the books do not seem perfectly to
agree." If fathers are "in some sense" guardians (mothers, according to
Common Law, become guardians when fathers die), then how to distinguish
between the sense in which a biological parent is a guardian and a third
party, appointed either by the court or parent, is a guardian? The term
guardianship, then, is ambiguous right from the start in that it can
apply to any person, biological parent or not, "entrusted by law with
the interests of another, whose youth [and] inexperience . . .
disqualify him from acting for himself in the ordinary affairs of life"
paradigm for identity, but given that the novel works to authorize both
biology and contract, there are mutually competing "real stakes" in the
novel. Glenn Hendler also discusses the sentimental novel and its
ineluctable fascination with incest, suggesting that even as "sympathy
imagines that the term 'family' can designate something chosen rather
than a given set of biological or legal relations," sentimental novels
"contain this ambiguity by raising the specter of incest as the family's
internal limit" ("The Limits of Sympathy: Louisa May Alcott and the
Sentimental Novel," American Literary History 8 [1996]: 688). Both
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
various definitions offered in the _Oxford Latin Dictionary_ shows
that the two terms are close synonyms with at least one important
distinction. "Pax" tends to refer to peace as a self-contained,
self-sufficient state of existence, a meaning most clearly evident
in the occasional use of the term as the name of a goddess or as a
more generic personification of Peace. "Securus," in contrast,
usually describes freedom _from_ something, such as anxiety, danger,
or punishment. It designates a realm of peace that is by implication
circumscribed, surrounded by a larger realm of less desirable
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 223-243
Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot's _Middlemarch_
Jessie Givner
---------------
historical and political discourse. In Eliot's _Middlemarch,_ however,
historical and political discourse is inescapably tropological. Tropes, in
particular, the trope of personification, allow Eliot to create a world in
which the terms associated with the literary are _turned_ into the terms
aligned with the historical and political. Like politics, the term history,
in both Victorian texts and in current critical theory, is aligned with
action and practice. 4 Because the related tropes of personification and
prosopopeia enable a turn from inanimate to animate, from object to subject,
and from description to action, those tropes are central to Eliot's
international circulation, thus "rendering [the value of agricultural
property] in a great measure independent of local circumstances" (50). 17
The desire, expressed in Eliot's essays and fiction, to return to a concrete,
natural history, exemplified by an experiential understanding of the term
"railway," is perhaps a reaction to the increasing expansion of the railway
and of commerce as well as to the result of that expansion: the increasingly
abstract representation of value. Again and again in _Middlemarch,_ a tension
emerges between intrinsic and representative value, between literal and
handwriting, money emerges as a metaphor for metaphoricity itself via his
figures: the word "figures" refers both to his numbers and letters, and those
figures in turn represent the monetary value of the land. What is striking
about the passage, however, is the ambiguity of the word "figure," as it
slides between literal and figurative quantities. When the term is used in
one of its most literal senses, to mean numbers, it is nonetheless an
abstraction; the literal figures become numbers that abstract, that represent
the measurements and value of the land, whose value is in turn converted into
a whole network of other values, from that of votes determined by the
property tax to the elusive value of reputation that is attached to the
landed class.
When the word "figure" refers to Fred's letters, it would seem to convey the
most literal (or letteral) sense of the term. Indeed, it is worth noting that
the very word "figure" has a contradictory etymological direction, pointing
at once to the opaque form of language and *[End Page 233]* to its
oppositional other, transparent content. As the OED tells us, "figure" refers
both to the literal or letteral ("a letter of the alphabet, the symbol of a
character as a linguistic sign and as a feature of a natural species is one
that Darwin makes use of in his natural history when he writes that we have
"no pedigrees or armorial bearings; and we have to discover and trace the
many diverging lines of descent in our natural genealogies, by characters of
any kind which have long been inherited." As Gillian Beer notes, the term
character in this passage shifts from a semiological meaning ("armorial
bearings") to a natural historical one. 29 That same instability in the
word's meaning can be seen in Eliot's portrayal of Farebrother's collection
of species. We first encounter the characters of Farebrother's Natural
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
of politics; it invites us to reflect more carefully on the way we
define history and especially sociality.
The narrator argues that some of the weavers--either blind or
indifferent to retribution's long-term effects--find revenge more
satisfying than justice. They are prepared to destroy all the
renovated mills, and thus virtually everyone's chances of
employment, as long as they bankrupt the manufacturers in the
process. Thompson acknowledges that the novel is accurate in this
little parlour [is] in an uproar; you would have thought a duel must
follow such virulent abuse" (43-44).
By the time the narrator begins discussing Moore's misanthropy, the
term seems strangely devoid of personal meaning. At various points
of the novel, Yorke, Louis Moore (Moore's brother), and Mrs. Pryor
are each described, respectively, as "a misanthrope,"
"misanthropical," *[End Page 213]* and a "misanthropist" (174, 434,
596). But the term could as readily apply to James Helstone,
term seems strangely devoid of personal meaning. At various points
of the novel, Yorke, Louis Moore (Moore's brother), and Mrs. Pryor
are each described, respectively, as "a misanthrope,"
"misanthropical," *[End Page 213]* and a "misanthropist" (174, 434,
596). But the term could as readily apply to James Helstone,
Caroline's dead father ("a man-tiger" [427]), and to Mrs.
Yorke--"specially bilious and morose"--whose "natural antipathy" to
sensitive people makes her "as much disposed to gore as any vicious
'mother of the herd'" (388). Moreover, in young Martin Yorke, we
14. This passage is partly a rejoinder to Mrs. Pryor's High Toryism,
which the narrator reproduces for ironic effect: "Implicit
submission to authorities, scrupulous deference to our betters
(under which term I, of course, include the higher classes of
society), are, in my opinion, indispensable to the wellbeing of
every community" (_Shirley,_ 365).
15. Charlotte Bront� to G. H. Lewes, January 1850, printed in _The
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 133-166
Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wolfram Schmidgen
---------------
failed Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745 indicate, the revolution managed
to push the claim by divine right and strict descent to the sidelines of the
constitution. After 1688, it is no longer a divine genealogy with its
ultimate roots in Adam that legitimizes government. Defoe's use of the real
estate term "Entail" to conceptualize the accession of William and Mary
follows a tendency to anchor the altered constitution in possessive, not
genealogical right. 15 Rights to the crown were now widely constructed on the
model of property rights, as even Tories conceded. In a 1701 letter to Lord
Nottingham, for instance, John Sharp wrote that princes "hold their crowns by
institution of inheritance. *[End Page 139]* Within this central process of
social and cultural reproduction, the bastard has no place.
It is in this rather specific sense that the bastard can be described as a
"liminal" figure, following Victor Turner's classic definition of this term:
BLOCKQUOTE
Turner captures the dilemma of the bastard's non-position and underlines what
I have been saying about the participation of legal discourse in the
Fielding's and Burney's constructions of bastardy show with particular
clarity that what I have called the structural function of the bastard figure
in the eighteenth-century novel has centrally to do with that figure's
ability to mediate greater social diversity in a society that continues to
articulate identity through a vertical sense of social place. The term
structural is particularly appropriate because, in all *[End Page 156]* the
writers I have touched on, the bastard operates as a figure of observation
and social description. While these figures are utilized and presented
differently--from Johnson's and Chesterfield's discursive statements on
_Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-century Britain_ (New
York: Holmes and Meier, 1977), 48.
17. In the parliamentary debates over the Bill of Rights, common law and the
term "entailment" feature prominently. See Cobbett's _Parliamentary History
of England,_ vol. 5 (London, 1809), 39, 47, 103, 249-52. For an account of
how the common law and its focus on property comes to dominate constitutional
politics in the late seventeenth century, see Howard Nenner, _By Colour of
Law: Legal and Constitutional Politics in England, 1660-1689_ (Chicago: Univ.
impostor" (235).
40. Savage, _The Wanderer,_ 13-20.
41. See Johnson's use of the term wanderer in _Life of Savage,_ 97, 104, 119.
In emphasizing Savage's mobility, Johnson reinforces the sense of the
bastard's placelessness and draws on an established cultural assumption about
bastards: see Findlay's comments on the "physical mobility of the type"
(38-39).
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
As readers have noted, the world of _Bleak House_ is often a rather
shattered or tattered affair. Michael Ragussis observes, for
example, that the novel presents us with a "world where signifier
becomes an unreadable abbreviation, never quite taking us back to
the original whole: in short, it is a trace, to use Derrida's term
and Dickens." 28 Jo and Krook especially live in a world in which
signifiers are forever unreadable, a series of mysterious
hieroglyphs whose referents and meanings remain inaccessible. In
reflecting on Jo's life, the narrator observes how strange it must
is tantamount to transforming the penis to a hole, that is to say,
to transforming the man into a woman" (197-98).
52. Audrey Jaffe considers at length the question of omniscience or
the lack of it in _Bleak House_, writing that "I use the term
'omniscient' for this narrative not because I believe that it 'is'
omniscient, but because I believe Dickens meant it to be taken as
such." See her chapter, "_David Copperfield_ and _Bleak House_: On
Dividing the Responsibility of Knowing," in _Vanishing Points:
omniscient, but because I believe Dickens meant it to be taken as
such." See her chapter, "_David Copperfield_ and _Bleak House_: On
Dividing the Responsibility of Knowing," in _Vanishing Points:
Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience_ (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1991), 128. I am using the term "omniscient" in
much the same sense.
53. I have in mind here the concept of disavowal (_Verleugnung_) as
Freud uses it in his 1927 essay "Fetishism" (_SE_, 21.149-57),
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
unity--as indeed it was, insofar as it could be used to update the
Prichardian emphasis on developmental changes in the human type. The
result of this long-standing struggle was a compromise, finalized
institutionally in 1871: Huxley, a member of the ethnologist branch,
accepted the term "anthropology" for the purpose of official
institutional nomenclature within the British Society. At the same
time, however, he remained vigilant in ensuring that control over
the group was in the hands of Darwinian sympathizers. 23
utopian figure does not anticipate, in teleological fashion, the
altered boundaries of a new resolution located in the future. Even
implicitly, the valences of the utopian figure do not affirm one
totality, nor do they negate another. This is made clearer by
Marin's glosses on the word "utopia": "the term as the name of a
place designates a no-place; it designates another referent, the
'other' of any place." 36 In this way, the utopian figure is a
representation which, by the nature of its ambiguity, reflects the
fact that neither space nor identity can exist without frontiers.
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
Through its annihilation of space ("no elsewhere") and time ("in the
instant"), telegraphic "commerce" was imagined to all but eliminate
bodily boundaries through a nearly sexual union of individual
American bodies into one national body. "Commerce," the term most
often used to describe the telegraph's province, referred not simply
to business transactions, but, as the _Webster's Dictionary_ of the
era euphemistically phrased it, "Familiar intercourse between the
sexes." This sexual aspect of the telegraphic union, its ability to
should be viewed as a subordinate rather than the dominant theme in
European intellectual discourse on non-Western peoples." 29
According to Adas, "A survey of nineteenth-century works dealing
with racial categories suggests that only a minority of writers used
the term 'race' to differentiate between and rank human groups on
the basis of hereditary biological differences." In Adas's
understanding, ideas of technological difference and hierarchy--of
civilization--preceded and prevailed over those of racial difference
and hierarchy. But Moore and Guyot seem to suggest that, at least in
always fit together neatly, thus creating fissures within racial
ideology. Because of the centrality of ideas of progress and
civilization to racial definitions, even strict essentialists like
Nott readily embraced ideas of racial change and mutability to
support white superiority: "what we term Caucasian races are not of
one origin: they are, on the contrary, an amalgamation of an
infinite number of primitive stocks, of different instincts,
temperaments, and mental and physical characters. . . . Such
commingling of blood, through migrations, wars, captivities, and
fossil remains alone of man to tell the tale of his past existence
upon the earth?" (M, 80). Because of the ways in which his
biological (pseudoscientific) definitions of race rely upon
demonstrance through progress and civilization, and because of the
very slipperiness of the term "race" during this period, Nott's
argument of white racial superiority proven by technology,
civilization, and progress turns in against itself, dismantling
first the idea of strict racial difference, and then, in response,
the very idea of progress.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
Grass_. Gay identitarian examples of this tradition tend on the one hand to
apply anachronistically the signifier "homosexual" to Whitman and his poetry,
in reference to a period well prior to the emergence of the *[End Page 1047]*
distinctive complex of attitudes, identifications, and activities that the
term came to name. 5 They also tend to produce ahistorical treatments of
antebellum cultural concepts such as the male love and friendship tradition,
phrenological "adhesiveness," and such emergent gay-signifying terms as "gay"
and "queer," while making entirely undocumented claims about Whitman's actual
erotic practices. 6 Not only does work of this sort homogenize all of the
only help explain why Whitman is alternately critiqued as a liberal
consensualist, interpreted as a progressive multiculturalist, and lauded as a
sex radical. They also help to us to understand how the distinctive weave of
the personal and the collective--which I will treat under the "ambidextrous,"
to borrow Lawerence Buell's term, sign of the ethico-political--formalizes an
idea of intersubjectivity in lyric reading intended to have particular *[End
Page 1048]* extratextual effects within the active, sensual subjectivities of
readers and within the social and political worlds which they inhabit. 10
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
author's mind? Upon closer consideration we can see the apparently
contradictory rhetoric of hinting as a tactical imparting of mixed messages
concerning the nature and locus of meaning in _Leaves of Grass_. The notion
of lyric hinting encourages the reader to think of meaning as deep content
obscured to one's immediate perception. The speaker's use of the term in
effect charges the reader with the task of searching after, guessing at,
attempting to "hit" "that which" will be "use[ful]" to know, the learning of
which will have some practical utility for her/him. The idea of hinting, that
is, engages the reader's interpretive agency, linking it to the poet's
But Whitman also decouples interpretive agency from any conventional
understanding of hinting, deflecting the reader's desire to look for that
deep meaning, the message behind the hint, exclusively inside the text. We
see this in the way Whitman refunctions the concept of hinting for his own
purposes, lexically and logically linking the term to its other definition as
a subtantive--a "hint" as a slight indication of the existence or nature of
something: BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
Here the speaker makes a distinction, and an explicit parallel, between
consequential), utterances: _in_ Walt's speaking, the reader is also
speaking; or _in_ reading Walt's speech, the reader is speaking as well. 47
The poet's apparent confidence that he can *[End Page 1064]* successfully
intend and direct the speech act registers the sense that we can know that
the illocutionary "uptake," in Austin's term, of our utterances has been
secured as apart from knowing whether their full range of perlocutionary
effects have been achieved. We might think of moments like this in Whitman as
blank interpellatives; the speaker (like one of Whitman's democratic heroes,
Jesus Christ) is hailing those ("Whoever you are" [2:368]) who have ears to
Jesus Christ) is hailing those ("Whoever you are" [2:368]) who have ears to
hear, who are already in the minimal position required to be able to make his
words "avail" in their lives. Whitman allows here--but, as it were, absently,
(in my sense) rhetorically--for what Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick say
Austin does not: the invocation of a third term or Subject governing the
scene of interlocution, and within Whose ideological context the speech act
can only be said (or not) to have its intended illocutionary force. 48 But in
a more perlocutionary sense, Whitman is precisely interested in what ties up
readers' tongues, and in how to help that member better express itself. The
concepts that are transferred (_translatus_ being the past participle of
_transferre_, to carry between) and indifferently hosted by their new verbal
forms--to suggest that what gets translated is not verbal "content" at all,
but rather thought and affect into a new power to act, to "wield" oneself (in
Whitman's term) transformatively. 50 The tongue, moreover, is a member that
has taken on a significantly erotic charge in "Song of Myself," the oft cited
"plunged . . . tongue" passage having subsequently catalyzed much debate
around the sexual meanings of Whitman's poetry. The multiple meanings that
tongues assume in Whitman's trope of translation suggest that the speaker's
("my flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike") as they with him.
These "prurient provokers"--who "immodestly slid[e] the fellow-senses away /
They [the "fellow-senses"] bribed to swap off with touch"--then seem to
migrate _inside_ the speaker's sensual subjectivity, to be identified there
with the single and not multiple entity "touch." This term, which had
initially named an instance of physical contact ("_a_ touch"), now appears as
a "sense" which displaces the other senses who "go and graze at the edges of"
the poet.
"translation." The uninvoked "You" of the passage is one who is positioned to
explore the relationship between a "touch" and "a new identity" by analogy to
the poet's tropes of his own sexual affect and activity.
How might Whitman be using this term, and in what sense might a touch (or the
sense of touch) be said to "quiver" one to a new "identity"? For historical
as well as authorial reasons, as I have argued, and however redolently
homoerotic Whitman's verse can be, the sexual "identity" that gets performed
in _Leaves of Grass_ cannot be described exhaustively in the language of
homoerotic Whitman's verse can be, the sexual "identity" that gets performed
in _Leaves of Grass_ cannot be described exhaustively in the language of
same-sex desire, much less same-sex sexual activities; it certainly does not
assume all the lineaments of modern homosexuality. But if Whitman deploys a
term that has been challenged from the vantage point of poststructuralist
cultural critique, he does not seem, at least in the above passage, to use
"identity" to mean racial, gender, or sexual essences. In the long passage
above, identity seems quite mutable, a matter of fleeting bodily sensations
and not fixed internal entities. Yet far more than sensation is at issue in
say that when he is working in his most broadly democratizing lyric mode, he
is resisting the ideologico-cultural "disimpaction of the scene, as well as
the act, of utterance" (Parker and Sedwick, 8) that Parker and Sedgwick
perform on Austin. Whitman prefers instead to leave the scene of
interlocution in its most "fluid" (to use Moon's term) possible state, open
to as wide a variety of subjective reinscriptions as possible.
49. Bauerlein puts this well when he writes that the word for Whitman,
"instead of being a simple exterior or posterior record of a primary
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
Responding explicitly to Wimsatt's "Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery," de
Man marked a deconstructive shift in the Coleridgean tradition. The title of
his essay, "Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image," reflects his move
away from Romantic conceptions of Nature and towards language, where (in
adjusting Wimsatt's title to his purpose) he eliminates the term "Nature" and
modifies "Structure" with the term "Intentional." Familiar by now, his
argument begins by confronting the tradition of Romantic imaginative
synthesis as reflected in Coleridge, Abrams, and Wimsatt: the Romantic
imagination, he claims, marks the possibility not for the synthesis of mind
Man marked a deconstructive shift in the Coleridgean tradition. The title of
his essay, "Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image," reflects his move
away from Romantic conceptions of Nature and towards language, where (in
adjusting Wimsatt's title to his purpose) he eliminates the term "Nature" and
modifies "Structure" with the term "Intentional." Familiar by now, his
argument begins by confronting the tradition of Romantic imaginative
synthesis as reflected in Coleridge, Abrams, and Wimsatt: the Romantic
imagination, he claims, marks the possibility not for the synthesis of mind
and nature, of matter and consciousness, but for "consciousness to exist
of the ideology it aims to critique, is by now no revelation. 16 I am less
interested in suggesting (as have others before me) that a version of the new
historicism such as Liu's instantiates the (symbolist, idealist) ideology it
critiques, as I am in exploring the ideological potential inherent in recent
Romantic critical use of the figurative term "allegory." I shall proceed by
establishing a strategy and a motive by which Levinson and (especially) Liu
succeed in oscillating between a Jamesonian and a Coleridgean model, on the
back of the trope allegory. 17 *[End Page 1034]*
Medieval, theological, Philoan model of allegory rather than in the
poststructuralist accounts that immediately preceded him.
In pursuit of motive, now, I return once more to Caserio, focusing Liu's
commentary through Caserio's use of the term "repression." Initially, Caserio
cites de Man's perverse tendency to make "mere exposition seem a form of
repressive assertion," and then he identifies his view of de Man's repressed:
"De Manian allegory appears to derive from a repression of what is an
alternative to allegory's violent positionings and antitheses [where the
'alternative' is identified as modern narrative's 'anti-allegorical pathos of
uncertain agency']." 22 Here, establishing Caserio's strategy of associating
allegory with repression is useful not so much for its commentary on modern
narrative, but rather, in this context, for how the account models Romantic
new historicists' use of the term allegory. In the following lines, I
suggest, Liu's account of Wordsworth bears a striking resemblance to
Caserio's account of de Man: BLOCKQUOTE
This passage from Liu's _Wordsworth: The Sense of History_ observes two,
argument, rather, is in his ability to bring them together. Allegory in de
Man, Gash� reminds us, represents the subversion of the "totalizing
potential" of texts "in an endless process of narrative." 26 The remainder of
my account explores the relation, in this context, between one apparent pole
(allegory) and the other (narrative) in the understanding of the term
"allegory" through critical references to flight or repression. As de Man's
account suggests, for example, where he sees allegory as the "narration of a
totality which never quite takes place," an inherent proximity belies the
deconstructive materialist polarization. 27 I contend that the use of
reference: to repeat, he comments that allegory "prevents the self from an
illusory identification with the non-self." 28 Moreover, de Manian
deconstructive reading, in contrast to deconstructive materialist readings,
works to call the reader/critic back to the "uncertainty" (to use Caserio's
valorized term) of linguistic agency. Again, this uncertainty is contrary to
the thrust of Liu's approach, which calls the reader/critic back to the
"denied" (and by this very denial, still critically determinate) agency of
history, and which calling is often made most forcefully through a critical
certainty that revises the language of Wordsworth's text to produce more
Levinson's, where he posits the Wordsworthian "allegorization of narrative"
as an ideological reaction to the "irruption of political narrative" (51) in
the poet's early *[End Page 1042]* experience. Here, Liu's version of
allegory emerges as a defensive, reactionary stance in apparent contrast to
Levinson's use of the term, where her "negative allegory" doesn't "obscure,"
but rather works to gain access (as in Liu's "denied positivism," [40]
through negation or absence) to the historical-political.
And yet both accounts endorse a model of allegorical, structural
Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail," _Representations_ 32.3 (1990):
75-113. See also Simpson's introduction to his _Subject to History_ (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 1-33.
17. As Robert Caserio and Neil Hertz indicate, the term allegory suggests an
inherent shifting of reference, to an extent like all figurative language,
but here the *[End Page 1043]* term itself can be seen to shift meanings--in
this respect like Roman Jakobson's "shifters," simple grammatical terms which
carry no referential content but rather take on meanings derived from their
Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 1-33.
17. As Robert Caserio and Neil Hertz indicate, the term allegory suggests an
inherent shifting of reference, to an extent like all figurative language,
but here the *[End Page 1043]* term itself can be seen to shift meanings--in
this respect like Roman Jakobson's "shifters," simple grammatical terms which
carry no referential content but rather take on meanings derived from their
contextual use. See Caserio, "'A Pathos of Uncertain Agency': Paul de Man and
Narrative," _Journal of Narrative Technique_ 20 (1990): 195-209; and Hertz,
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
given that, according to popular definitions, she already was a
prostitute: _London Labour and the London Poor_, for instance, had
classified _all_ fallen women as prostitutes, on the assumption that
even those who were not hired piecemeal were simply "kept" on a
longer term (Henry Mayhew, _London Labor and the London Poor_, 4
vols. [1861-1862; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1968],
4:213). In the century following Mary Wollstonecraft's discussion of
marriage as an institution in which women are "legally prostituted"
(in _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ [1792] [Harmondsworth:
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
evidence for the primacy of "the private gentleman" in Cowper's
experience and career, to the exclusion of any notion of "the author
by profession" on the part of either critics or Cowper himself. This
habitual treatment has been owing in turn to critics' neglect of
criticism as the key term in Cowper's musing on his public and
professional existence. No one has fully acknowledged Cowper's
consuming preoccupation with the *[End Page 89]* workings of
criticism, nor the extent to which the letters evoke a paranoid
world in which literary criticism and criticism of any kind become
A passage from _The Task_ confirms this suppressed connection
between interest in writing poetry and interest in its fate, mainly
by filling into virtually the same linguistic equation the
conspicuously missing term "ambition": BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
In suppressing such understanding, the letters emphasize that the
indifference they profess is an achievement of will rather than an
automatic extension of belief. This is not surprising--the path to
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
examined the emergence since about 1860 of our discipline. 26 Though,
as Graff details, generalists and classicists resisted modern language
and literary studies, nevertheless both camps proclaimed similar
goals: to develop through their rival methods what they called "mental
discipline," a term that appears in every methodological essay and
literary textbook of the period. Wallace Douglas derides this idea as
an advertising effort to "create an academic reputation." Yet "mental
discipline" was no promotional coinage; it derived from the classical
Greek idea of mental gymnastic and had long been the aim of education
discipline" was no promotional coinage; it derived from the classical
Greek idea of mental gymnastic and had long been the aim of education
in rhetoric and the classics. In the nineteenth century, writers as
prominent as J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer deemed mental discipline
the aim of education generally. 27 The term encapsulates the reasons
that humanists (and academics generally) came to call their fields
disciplines rather than, say, guilds. The ideals attending the idea of
mental discipline allowed scholars to contend, as Horace Scudder
wrote, that literary study helps "make good American citizens." 28
be alert." 56 By training us to adapt to new contexts, which Huck
cannot do with Buck's riddle, literary discipline enables us to grasp
the subtlest nod, wink, or nub. It thus cultivated "discrimination,"
training faculties in "recombination of the proximate parts" of an
"aggregate." Note that discrimination, like its cousin term judgment,
is here a resolutely practical rather than metaphysical idea.
Recombining elements and reapplying ideas to diverse contexts, the
critical faculty remains indebted to, but does not merely recycle,
prior forms and traditions. 57
cultured self--having a specific (disciplined or imaginative) relation
*[End Page 280]* to phenomena, the past, and tradition--then the
disciplined subject can exist only by not being a subject at all. Yet
a good number of scholars deemed this idealized mode of being the
precondition for citizenship. Wheeler reminded audiences that the term
"liberal education" derives from "freemen's training" in Attica.
Liberal education will "free [students] from the bondage of prejudice
[and] routine," and thus "rescue men from slavery and make them free."
Liberal studies will thus yield "American freemen," who "initiate" and
values. Whether the novel is being funny, tragic, or pitying, its
irony concerns characters' utter subjection to the lessons they have
internalized but do not understand. In this novel, one's relation to
models--discipline--is irredeemably formal, as Garnett employed the
term. Wholly possessed by authorities, one might say, characters are
unable to apply principles in different contexts, to recombine
principles, to figure out a riddle. This predicament is dramatized
when Huck and Jim debate first Solomon's wisdom and then "speaking
_Franzy_" (87). Each insists that the other does not get the "pint"
seems so self-evident to him. These literate folks employ a kind of
evangelical version of what I called earlier formalistic
interpretation. For them, Solomon's offer to cut the child in half,
because so patently absurd, is in itself the sign that he is wise.
Huck so takes for granted the middle term of the syllogism (that the
child's real mother would waive her custody claim to avert such
partition) that he cannot rehearse it for Jim and cannot imagine (nor
tolerate) any other view of the parable. Huck regards the relation
between the story and its moral tautologically rather than
regards as ontological. 77 They symbolize the inevitability of social
hierarchization, with some persons commanding cultural capital while
others are visibly subjugated. Hierarchization occurs because persons
desperately need to remind themselves of their own sovereignty, to use
the scientific literary scholars' term. Most interactions in this
novel involve the attempt by one person or group, fearing dominion by
others, to subjugate others, often by violent means. Miss Watson, the
Widow, Pap, the King, and Duke, not to mention the robbers and killers
populating the river, all labor to impose their wills upon others.
"broadening human sympathies, as travel broadens them by bringing us
into contact with racial ideas different from our own." 83
Though hereditarians, these scholars were not generally nativist, as
we understand the term from John Higham's seminal work. 84 Far from
seeking to purify the American race (whatever that term could mean),
they celebrated the way the American race or American type was
composite. In his influential history of American literature, Moses
Coit Tyler located the vitality of the American people in its
into contact with racial ideas different from our own." 83
Though hereditarians, these scholars were not generally nativist, as
we understand the term from John Higham's seminal work. 84 Far from
seeking to purify the American race (whatever that term could mean),
they celebrated the way the American race or American type was
composite. In his influential history of American literature, Moses
Coit Tyler located the vitality of the American people in its
"multitudinous, variegated" composition. 85 E. C. Stedman was enthused
integration" (21) have in effect permitted Mark Twain's novel "to
license and authorize the continued honored circulation" (29) of an
explosive racial epithet, if only because journalists and scholars
inveterately refer to Jim as "Nigger Jim," even though the appellation
does not appear in the novel. Arac cites 213 instances of the term in
the novel (20).
8. See Thomas Sargeant Perry's review of _Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn_, in _Huck Finn among the Critics: A Centennial Selection_, ed.
even appreciating aggressive adolescent narratives, was incisive
parody. Twain's use of the bad boy trope is no doubt parodic, but its
end, in my view, is more tragic than critical.
80. This term, meaning that character traits can be inherited and are
visible in corporeal features, underlies the more general idea that
racial difference affects the customs or temperament of groups. For a
discussion of hereditarianism in America after the mid-nineteenth
century, see Mark H. Haller, _Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
studies; far from representing an aberrant component of his work, such
pursuits were utterly central to it. 10 Whereas Ren� Descartes famously vowed
to "turn away all [his] senses" the better to know himself, for Coleridge
*[End Page 119]* inwardness is necessarily an aesthetic in the broadest sense
of that term--a form of sensuous cognition integrally related to the process
of self-discovery. 11 Following Coleridge, then, I want to ask what kind of
knowledge we acquire when we attend to our own sensations, and further ask
how, through experimental self-observation, early Romantic literary culture
sought to reform common sense.
54. 241, 1812 version. *[End Page 147]*
55. The notion that "Frost at Midnight" is metascientific, in the strong
sense of that term, is in keeping with M. H. Abrams's remark that Coleridge's
philosophy of nature "was not science, nor anti-science, but metascience," an
investigation into the procedures and aims of science in the first place.
Abrams, "Coleridge's 'A Light in Sound': Science, Metascience, and Poetic
Imagination," _The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism_ (New
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 151-169
Walking on Flowers: the Kantian Aesthetics Of _Hard Times_
Christina Lupton
---------------
with "forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and
twelve incisive"; and on the other, there is the circus child, Sissy
Jupe, whose emotional involvement with the world of horses and
horseriding proves useless in meeting this educational system's
demand for facts about horses (44). Facts, to use Dickens's term,
cleave away from fancy; the intuitive world of subjective experience
contradicts the forms of reckoning which set human beings to work
instrumentally and inhumanly against themselves.
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
Miller's book advances the thesis that the Victorian novel tacitly endorses a
liberal ideology: "the point of the exercise, relentlessly and often
literally brought home as much in the novel's characteristic forms and
conditions of reception as in its themes, is to confirm the novel-reader in
his identity as 'liberal subject,' a term with which I allude not just to the
subject whose private life, mental or domestic, is felt to provide constant
inarguable evidence of his constitutive 'freedom,' but also to, broadly
speaking, the political regime that sets store by this subject." 3 _The Novel
and the Police_ brilliantly exposes the narrative ruses through which the
thus mistaking the formal ideological content of his education for the
informal rules that undergird the asymptotic moral structure of cultural
capital. Unlike Steerforth, Heep lacks _sprezzatura_; on the contrary, he is
a mechanistic, hidebound functionary and is therefore too good a bourgeois to
be truly middle class, as that term will come to be understood in a
post-Arnoldian age. Heep's chaotic office is the objective correlative to his
inner asymmetry: both lack the organic unity that we attribute to the
aesthetic object. Only the hero of the _Bildungsroman_ and his double, the
realist writer, possess the synthetic faculties necessary to organize
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
Pornographers in London, 1795-1840_ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988),
113-27.
3. Though widely applied to Hannah More by critics and historians alike,
"evangelical" is in some respects an imperfect term. In using it, I accept
Robert Hole's caution that, while the term usefully indicates her concern for
personal salvation and her social activism with respect to slavery and
poverty, it should not obscure her dislike for Methodism and her firm
commitment to social hierarchy and the established church: "It does no harm
113-27.
3. Though widely applied to Hannah More by critics and historians alike,
"evangelical" is in some respects an imperfect term. In using it, I accept
Robert Hole's caution that, while the term usefully indicates her concern for
personal salvation and her social activism with respect to slavery and
poverty, it should not obscure her dislike for Methodism and her firm
commitment to social hierarchy and the established church: "It does no harm
to describe More as an Evangelical, so long as it is remembered that that is
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
infanticide under the rubric of obstetric practice, more generally.
Until well into the nineteenth century, there was no sharp
distinction made between professional obstetric intervention and
newborn child murder: as we shall see, what modern commentators might
well term infanticide was part of a continuum of obstetric practices,
and could not be radically separated from those practices. Third,
there is the fact that the composition of _Adam Bede_ took place
during a time of unprecedented public discussion of the problem of
infanticide, in the 1850s and 1860s. It was in 1862, for example,
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
self-critique, for it demonstrates that St Leon is pursuing a doomed project
all along. Consider the effects of St Leon's attempt to improve life in
Hungary. In his account of his sojourn in Hungary, where he attempted to
revive the nation with his benevolent public expenditures, St Leon writes, "I
was aware that, in the strictness of the term, money was not wealth; that it
could be neither eaten nor drunk; that it would not of itself either clothe
the naked or shelter the houseless"; it could do these things only if he
spent the money to employ the most people in the most productive form of
labor (_S_, 372-73). In itself, money has no value. St Leon does not in fact
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
of the weird "mystic vapor" ("F," 319) which enshrouds the manor;
and it does more than scientistically literalize the figurative
linking of family and domicile in the appellation "House of Usher."
Above all, Roderick's disquisition suggests the communicability of
the animate and the inanimate through the mediating term of
sentience. "The evidence of the sentience" ("F," 327) of the stones,
according to Roderick, BLOCKQUOTE
Due to that "silent yet importunate and terrible influence" which
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
warrior ethos. There may be little overlap between the delicate
lancet windows, crocketed fl�ches, and crenelated roofline of
Strawberry Hill and the berserkers, Valkyries, and Ragnarok of
Gray's poems, but those works can be considered Gothic in the broad,
eighteenth-century use of the term to mean "Germanic" (Gray listed
the Scandinavian ballads under the Commonplace Book heading
"Gothic") or simply "medieval." According to Roger Lonsdale, these
poems echo the originals at times, particularly in the use of
alliteration and kenning, but they also draw heavily on the language
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
I suggest is an achievement of much greater consequence.
Coordinating the individualizing force of interest-_cum_-curiosity
with the totalizing gesture of Smithean sociability, Baillie's
work--under the rubric of liberal governance--newly inflects that
age-old term: romantic freedom.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
_York University _
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
paradoxically, the most unreliable method imaginable, since ghosts can be
perceived only with the intuitive inner sense: BLOCKQUOTE
Following Carlyle's lead, Crowe reminds her readers that in regard to "the
term _invisible world_ . . . what we call _seeing_ is merely the function of
an organ constructed for that purpose in relation to the external world; and
so limited are its powers, that we are surrounded by many things in that
world which we can not see without the aid of artificial appliances and many
other things which we can not see even with them" (_N_, 21-22). The urgent
broadens the category of ghost story to include narratives dealing with
"possession and demonic bargains, spirits other than those of the dead,
including ghouls, vampires, werewolves, the 'swarths' of living men and the
'ghost-soul' or _Doppelg�nger_" (12). While for Briggs, as for many other
critics, the term "ghost story" is interchangeable and synonymous with
"supernatural fiction," I will presume that stories dealing specifically with
spectral appearances (or so-called visitations) may, at least in
nineteenth-century fiction, be considered a distinct literary form, motivated
by the need to negotiate a particular set of problems and concerns.
BBC, 1972). Berger succinctly expresses what has since been reiterated by
historians and cultural critics many times over: "The way we see things is
affected by what we know or what we believe" (8).
9. I will continue to use the term "spectator" rather than "observer" because
I wish to underscore the etymological link to "specter." The connection is
reinforced countless times in nineteenth-century studies on ghosts, where the
popular phrase "ghost-seeing" always accentuates the mediating role of vision
in encounters between the living spectators and the specters of the dead. See
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
of authority.
While More's views of the poor were not particularly original, her
insistence on the significance of charity as a regulatory profession
for women was idiosyncratic. The term "profession" was More's own:
BLOCKQUOTE
More was adamantly opposed to the notion that women should be merely
decorative. For women, just as for men, there was work to be done.
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
polygenesis. See Dana Nelson, _National Manhood: Capitalist
Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men_ (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, 1998), for a discussion of this debate.
13. I am deliberately using the superannuated term "Negro" to
emphasize how thoroughly historical identity categories are.
14. This potential citizenship, of course, is a theoretical and not
a legal possibility, since the Dred Scott decision declared U.S.
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
comers for no cost."1 By Frederick Jackson Turner's definition, the
frontier is essentially over once there is no longer a habitable
region in the United States, or the territories it claimed, occupied
by fewer than two people per square mile. I'd like to prescribe
another use for the term "post-Frontier," which is similar to the
pragmatic use of the term "postmodern." Rather than imagining
particular moments in time when the idea of the frontier is
superseded, I recognize "post-frontier" as the marker of a literary
style and a political orientation that exists alongside frontier
frontier is essentially over once there is no longer a habitable
region in the United States, or the territories it claimed, occupied
by fewer than two people per square mile. I'd like to prescribe
another use for the term "post-Frontier," which is similar to the
pragmatic use of the term "postmodern." Rather than imagining
particular moments in time when the idea of the frontier is
superseded, I recognize "post-frontier" as the marker of a literary
style and a political orientation that exists alongside frontier
literatures and ideology as an ongoing critique of their
is "the whitest man inside that ever walked" (_T_, 214). At the same
time, the terms "white nigger" (_T_, 203) and "counterfeit nigger"
(_T_, 211) are ascribed to the Duke, who has been passing himself
off as a slave in order to be sold for profit by the King. The same
troubled term, "white nigger," is ascribed to Tom, who was also
hoping to profit in gossip by selling and stealing himself as a
slave. Tom recognizes the Duke as another "white nigger" when he
sees him sleeping in the cabin of the slave trader Bat Bradish.
Tom's means of *[End Page 414]* identifying a blackface minstrel are
the commodity-form that threatens to cancel even the most apparently
essential human values. Unlike Jim's "blackness," which is filled
with a culturally validated whiteness equivalent to personhood,
Tom's "whiteness" is empty insofar as he is a "nigger" or
nonperson—as that pejorative and abusive term implies. Tom's
"white nigger" enactment is nakedly appropriative; again, he does it
to sell himself and to create a juicy scandal in the village. Tom's
racial play indicates Twain's experimentation with whiteness as an
appropriative and empty sign reminiscent of the "eating the other"
36. bell hooks, _Black Looks: Race and Representation_ (Boston:
South End Press, 1992).
37. David L. Smith offers a useful gloss on Twain's use of the
pejorative term "nigger" in _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn._
Most obviously, Twain uses "nigger" throughout the book as a
synonym for "slave." There is ample evidence from other sources
that this corresponds to one usage common during the antebellum
synonym for "slave." There is ample evidence from other sources
that this corresponds to one usage common during the antebellum
period. We *[End Page 429]* first encounter it in reference to
"Miss Watson's big nigger, named Jim" (chap. 2). This usage, like
the term "nigger stealer," clearly designates the "nigger" as an
item of property: a commodity, a slave. This passage also provides
the only apparent textual justification for the common critical
practice of labeling Jim "Nigger Jim," as if "nigger" were a part
of his proper name. This loathsome habit goes back at least as far
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
antiquarian sense of the past classified anachronism as an
impropriety, and began—ludicrously, in the opinion of
twentieth-century editors—to find fault with Shakespeare for
making a clock chime in _Julius Caesar_ .49 Joseph Justus Scaliger
was apparently the first to use the term when inaugurating the
science of chronology in _De Emendatio Temporum_ (1583).50 Italian
humanists alert to the historicity of linguistic usage pioneered the
detection of anachronisms as a method for identifying textual
forgeries.51 The best known exponent is Lorenzo Valla, who in 1440
of the phenomenon.54
Of course anachronisms may have been considered faults in literary
texts before the middle of the seventeenth century, when the first
English usages of the term are recorded by the _OED_ . For, as
Quentin Skinner observed when revealing the shortcomings of Raymond
Williams's _Keywords_ (1976) as a cultural lexicon, phenomena
precede the labels that subsequently identify them. Confident that
_Paradise Lost_ (1667) contained "things unattempted yet in prose or
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's, he displayed "Shakspeare's manhood at a
boy's wild heart."80 As an old boy whose jocoserious temperament led
an acquaintance to describe him oxymoronically as "a sad wag,"
Chatterton personified that parachronistic invention of the 1760s,
the "modern-antique," another term which instantiates
_pre_posterousness *[End Page 356]* by reversing the chronological
sequence from antique to modern.81 It was as if, in the course of
antiquating his poems in order to make them Rowley's, Chatterton had
inevitably distressed himself. "The person of Chatterton, like his
we bring to our reading of texts written decades or centuries ago
memories of their aftertexts. Our knowledge of the various futures
of literary classics validates not only the White Queen's
observation that "it's a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards" but also Laurent Milesi's introduction of the term
"promnesia" to describe the "act of . . . remembering forward."119
Having ensured prosodically that Rowley would remember the future of
English verse, ironically Chatterton was himself compelled to do so
by literary historians who allocated him to a period called
Ingpen and Grant, 1930], 475).
74. Frances Schouler Miller, "The Historic Sense of Thomas
Chatterton," _ELH_ 11 (1944): 126, 127. "Medieval," however, was not
yet a period term when the Rowley poems were published. Texts
written before the end of the sixteenth century were classified as
uniformly "antient," as for instance in _Miscellaneous Pieces of
Antient English Poesie_ (London: Robert Horsefield, 1764), which
contains _The Troublesome Raigne of King John_ (1591) as well as two
120. Lawrence Lipking, _The Ordering of the Arts in
Eighteenth-Century England_ (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1970), 353. Michel de Certeau expresses comparable misgivings about
the term "pre-Reformation" (_The Writing of History_ , trans. Tom
Conley [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988], 31). According to
Arthur H. Scouten, Paul Van Tieghem's _Le Préromantisme_
(Paris: Rieder, 1924), introduced this period term ("The Warton
Forgeries and the Concept of Preromanticism in English Literature,"
1970), 353. Michel de Certeau expresses comparable misgivings about
the term "pre-Reformation" (_The Writing of History_ , trans. Tom
Conley [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988], 31). According to
Arthur H. Scouten, Paul Van Tieghem's _Le Préromantisme_
(Paris: Rieder, 1924), introduced this period term ("The Warton
Forgeries and the Concept of Preromanticism in English Literature,"
_Etudes Anglaises_ 40 [1987]: 440). In _Preromanticism_ (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), Marshall Brown defends the term
"precisely because" the literary works it signifies were "_not yet_
Arthur H. Scouten, Paul Van Tieghem's _Le Préromantisme_
(Paris: Rieder, 1924), introduced this period term ("The Warton
Forgeries and the Concept of Preromanticism in English Literature,"
_Etudes Anglaises_ 40 [1987]: 440). In _Preromanticism_ (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), Marshall Brown defends the term
"precisely because" the literary works it signifies were "_not yet_
romantic" (2). A spatial parallel is the _pre_posterous naming of
Antillia or Antilles, so called because European mariners hoping to
reach Asia via the West Indies saw it as "an 'island before'
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
bodily knowledge, our ability to transform our lives and our
circumstances grows, no matter what our conscious intentions. See
Clarke for a fuller discussion of Bourdieu's links to Merleau-Ponty.
28. For Bourdieu's definition of the _habitus_, his term for these
durably inculcated predispositions, see _The Logic of Practice_
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1980), 54-55.
29. Other parts of Pleasant's body also partake of this duality. For
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
the country which boasts their birth, their deeds, and their sufferings.
(_W_, front matter)
This second paragraph equates the "interest"—a wonderfully ambiguous
term—of Scotland and England in Scottish heroes, literally devaluing
exactly the national connection that the poem's Wallace uses to reclaim the
allegiance of the Bruce. If English and Scottish people have equal interest
in the Wallace story, in other words, national origin has no value in the
patriotic calculation. While the soldiers of the poem fought to "buy their
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
volatility of contending economic and cultural ideologies, the
boundary *[End Page 1043]* between human and nonhuman evinced
greater permeability than would subsequently be admitted. Indeed,
Melville's novel bears witness to forms of mediation—or, in
Latour's term, translation—that prove considerably more
radical than those identified so far, which remain at the level of
rhetoric and representation. With greater or lesser degrees of
consciousness, _Moby-Dick_ registers, I think, several crucial ways
in which the natural world and mid-nineteenth-century American
contemporary explanations of their behavior: timid and bold,
defensive and offensive, instinctually reactive and wilfully
aggressive.25
Moreover, Wilkes hints that this increased "wildness"—a term
encompassing the same pair of opposed denotations—might
actually be a response produced by the whaling industry. If he is
correct, the "scary" whale would have to be considered a human
construction at the material, rather than just the rhetorical,
popular sentimental error, or scientific vice—attempts to
maintain the strict separation of human and nonhuman ontologies upon
which modernity relies. In this respect,*[End Page 1049]*
the term "anthropomorphism" actually "underestimates our humanity,"
in that the "_anthropos_" and the "_morphos_" together mean both
that which has human shape and that which gives shape to humans. .
. . People thus give form to non-humans, but are themselves acted
upon and given form by non-humans.40
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
Hinduism, and Sikhism, and, following the 16th-century Dutch
occupation of the area, Christianity. The languages spoken are
correspondingly diverse. Perhaps De Quincey has called his visitor a
Malay because, like a painter on a mission to delineate a profuse
diversity, he has gone for a general outline. The term "Malay,"
designating a citizen of a country inhabited by groups from all over
Asia, is apt, for in him live variety and indistinctness.35
Certainly, the way De Quincey deliberately piles up hodgepodge bits
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
the God of Revolt" underwent heavy editing and additions, in which
"I am the God of Revolt" replaces the initial phrase, "I am
Apollyon," and the phrase "deathless sorrowful vast" is interpolated
above the word "scorner," which I have assumed was intended to
precede the latter term.
27. For a more complete treatment of Whitman's writings about
Lucifer, and the multivalence of that name, see Folsom, 47-53.
the discourse of slavery in "The Sleepers."
29. Moon, 82.
30. Moon argues that the term "mastery is by no means an
unequivocally positive or honorific quality; rather, implicit in its
(ostensible) opposites 'slave(s)' or 'slavery,' it denotes the
social and political role of slavemaster—one which the text
. . . represents as an oppressive one" (81).
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
But despite the masculinist rhetoric of Wordsworth's Preface, and
its reiteration by Hazlitt, not all Regency critics were convinced
of the poetic manhood of _Lyrical Ballads_. One of the volume's
first reviewers, music historian Charles Burney, invoked a term
conventionally employed to describe sentimental French novels in
calling _Lyrical Ballads_ a "_poesie larmoiante_, more plaintive
than Gray himself."8 It is a stinging pre-emptive dismissal of the
Preface, where Gray serves as Wordsworth's prime example of what
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 133-166
Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wolfram Schmidgen
---------------
Of course, this important moment of generic wrestling in the novel doesn't
undo the ultimate result of Evelina's reintegration. And it doesn't undo the
novel's problematic suggestion that, by naturalizing Lord Orville's
rank-specific manners, by chastening the fop and the rake, and by exposing
the manners of the middle ranks, it accomplishes some kind of escape from, or
at least a purging of, the system *[End Page 155]* of ranks. But while
_Evelina_ remains divided between undercutting and preserving the distinction
of ranks, it successfully escapes the dialectic of place and placelessness by
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
best of England, the best of Englishness, so much so that the
narrator hits on the idea of bringing back several high Ydgrunites
for edifying display to his countrymen, the implication now being
that Erewhon is not, or not only, a satirical reflection of English
follies, but rather a chastening demonstration of undernourished or
forgotten potentials in the home culture. The disdain for English
hypocrisies that seemed to be implied by the early responses to
Erewhon reverses its course, and the narrative becomes a voice of
nationalistic advocacy for the enlightened form of hypocrisy
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
best judge of how well one safeguarded its happiness, Godwin avoids the
impasses of purely external or purely internal modes of punishment. Rather
than submitting to the Law through the voice of conscience or the sentence of
a judge, people would listen to the responses of others to their own accounts
of what justice would require (_E_, 636-42), entering into a chastening
debate not only over their actions but also over what right action *[End Page
852]* should be. Just as the Law is not the same as its enactment, so also it
is not the same as any particular judgment; it would become best known if
conscience were mediated through the judgments of others, and those judgments
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
"symbol[s] of the republic" abroad (33-37).
9. See, e.g., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's typical response to religious art
in his sketch book, _Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea_ (1833-34), where
he subordinates its "bodily presence" to "the contemplation of the sublime
attributes of the Eternal Mind" (187).
10. Kirkland prefers Powers's _The Greek Slave_ (1844) (1: 204, 235). See Joy
Kasson on mid-century audience responses to ideal sculpture (21-45) and
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
female the South, the gendered relationship is not one of strength courting
frailty, but rather, of a masculine but vulnerable North wooing a feminine
but strong South. By revising conventional understandings of nuptial power
relations, romancers performed important cultural work by depicting both
regions as self-sacrificing subordinates, brides, in fact, through their
sentimental *[End Page 283]* devotion to a masculine federal sovereign. In
creating representations of marriage in which both husband and wife suffer
for each other and, ultimately, the nation, romance narratives transformed
their postwar status as victor and vanquished to that of sentimental
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
(Fuller 116), and a skepticism toward everything advanced as
absolute Truth--these are precisely the qualities McMillin will
claim for his "natural philosophy of reading," but he cannot allow
them to Cabot's Emerson, or even begin to discover them there, for
he is committed to the belief that biography ipso facto subordinates
the multisignification of textuality to the unification of character
portrait and life narrative. In his own terms McMillin's reading
ofCabot is "preposterous" in that "the pretext, established before
the text is encountered, makes possible what will be construed as
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
of the sixteenth-century border ballads whose subject matter Scott
appropriates. The minstrel tells his tale to the Duchess of
Buccleuch and her ladies, and their role too is mediatory. He is a
warrior poet, but he responds to his audience of women with a tale
which celebrates martial exploits and yet subordinates the theme of
war to the theme of love. Warmed by the women's presence, and by
their wine, he belies his own account of his abilities and sings a
hymn in praise of the power of love. The women arouse in him, too, a
new tenderness, so that his pride in his son, who died bravely in
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
locates Pamela's "personal merit" in "the plastic powers of her
mind" (378), bases the redemption of her aristocratic pursuer upon
her zealous defense of her "female capacity to ensure, through
chastity, the transmission of gentility and property in the male
line" (366). Thus even though McKeon subordinates Pamela's "dress"
to her "writing" as proof of her value and dissolves the possibility
of "pregnancy" into "creative labor" (374), one might want to
stipulate that chastity remains an anatomical criterion, whose
specification in discourse can hardly obviate the material demands
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
life in the North is to forget the literal, existing world and to
enter the ethically perilous and essentially foreign realm of the
Romance. Or to put this *[End Page 276]* problem in terms of the
lesson of _The Marble Faun_, the imagined personhood of the Negro
can be expressed only if Hawthorne subordinates himself to the
Negro, if he denies his individuality for the sake of the Negro's.
In the end, Hawthorne's point is not that these slaves look like
fauns (they clearly do not), but that both reproduce the logic of
the aesthetic.
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
literary field was the argument that fiction is an "art." This art, in
James's words, should be judged wholly by its "execution," not by the
response it provokes in readers. James's emphasis on "execution" is
specifically a rebuke to Besant's having endorsed the Victorian orthodoxy
that art should be "moral," but even Besant subordinates art's morality to
its status as "art." James's essay also contains remnants of Victorian ideas,
of course, including his argument that good novels can "compete" with reality
by creating an "illusion of life." When James states that the "supreme virtue
of a novel" resides in the "air of reality" the writer manages to create,
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
Click for larger view *Figure 1*
Clark Howell, "The Gateway of the Continent"
(© _2004 The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution_. Reprinted with
permission from _The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution_; provided by the UC
Berkeley library).
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
1. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817; reprint London: Dent, 1975
174.
2. Charles Dickens, "Mr. Booley's View of the Last Lord Mayor's Show
Household Words, November 30, 1850. Reprinted in Miscellaneous Paper
2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d.), 1:234. Volume one hereafte
cited parenthetically in the text by page number and abbreviated M.
3. In the Preface to the Cheap Edition of Martin Chuzzlewit, publish
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
16. John Baptist Jackson, _An Essay on the Invention of Engraving
and Printing in Chiaro Oscuro_ (London, 1754), 8.
17. Reprinted in Denvir, 52.
18. John Shebbeare, _Letters on the English Nation_ (1756), quoted
from Denvir, 58. Lord Kames, _Elements of Criticism_ (1762), quoted
from Denvir, 58. William Hogarth, _The Analysis of Beauty_ (1753),
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
in which Brown describes a "beautiful girl, apparently about twenty
years of age, _perfectly white_" who is being sold into slavery
(690, my emphasis).
48. John S. Rock, _Liberator_, 12 March 1858. Reprinted in _A
Documentary History of the Negro People of the United States_, vol.
1 of _Colonial Times through the Civil War_, ed. Herbert Aptheker
(New York: Citadel Press, 1968), 405.
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
Yet all these assertions seem to me to misread the novel. Certainly, that the
otherwise "progressive" Hope views her sister as transgressing against
"natural" racial boundaries the scene leaves little question. That this view
is shared by Sedgwick, however, is arguable. After all, in an effort to
recover her sister, Hope resorts to bribery, offering Faith "jewels from head
to foot" (240) if she will return to her English family. In reply, Magawisca
admonishes Hope in terms that Sedgwick's narrator (and her readers) clearly
value: "Shall I ask your sister to barter truth and love, the jewels of the
soul, for these poor perishing trifles?" (240). In other words, the voice
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
chronicle's verisimilitude, but this requires him to raise, and then
answer, a contradiction implicit in his quasi-judicial summation:
Why would Hughson take poison if he expected to be rescued on his
way to the gallows? Unable to give an answer based in the workings
of the physical world, Horsmanden resorts to a false racial symbolic
that represents blackness as evil. In fact, he claims that Hughson's
prophesy was fulfilled and had affirmed the trials' facts. Hughson
predicted that "some remarkable sign would happen to him, to shew
(or signify) his innocence; and if his corpse becoming monstrous in
ELH 66.1 (1999) 87-110
"Monumental Inscriptions": Language, Rights, the Nation in Coleridge and Horne Tooke
Andrew R. Cooper
---------------
It is in passages such as these from volume two that we see the challenge
that Diversions presents. Despite its clear reiteration of the view that
language belongs to all individuals, not to the state authorities, and that
words are representative of human sensations of the world, the extract still
implies a reactionary stance and resorts to an account of language that
invokes, if not promotes, conformist politics. This is symptomatic of the
difficulty of assessing the politics of Horne Tooke's work published in 1805.
Moreover, these complexities cannot be resolved simply by consulting the
authoritative version of volume one published in 1798, since many of the
ELH 66.3 (1999) 739-758
The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel
Stefan Andriopoulos*
---------------
The apparent opposition between supernatural agency in Walpole's Castle of
Otranto and natural agency in Smith's Wealth of Nations resurfaces here
within Smith's own writings: the "savage" perceives the [End Page 740]
"invisible hand of Jupiter" in irregular, seemingly supernatural events but
not in regularly descending bodies. The economist, on the other hand, resorts
to the figure of "an invisible hand" to refer to the regular and natural
course of the market. This inversion from "the invisible hand of Jupiter,"
disrupting the regular descent of heavy bodies, to an impersonal "invisible
hand," which causes the "gravitating [of the nominal] . . . towards the
unable to grasp this miraculous process of self-regulation or tat�nnement
conceptually, since he can offer no explanation of how the movement from
disequilibrium to equilibrium is actually effected. It is precisely this gap
within his economic argumentation that is closed by the figure of the
"invisible [End Page 746] hand." Smith resorts to this metonymy less to
legitimize the bourgeois merchant pursuing his private interest than to
represent the self-regulating capacity of the market which he cannot describe
in purely economic terms. 24 However, given the lack of a conceptual economic
foundation for this trope, it necessarily relies on the language of the
ELH 66.4 (1999) 965-984
Fathoming "Remembrance": Emily Bronte in Context
Janet Gezari
---------------
"mention one significant detail": [End Page 977]
BLOCKQUOTE
Bront� resorts to the "ing" ending only once in "Remembrance"--in
lines 10 and 12, where she rhymes "spring" with "suffering,"
wrenching the accent for "suffering" so as to produce a masculine,
rather than the usual feminine, ending, and a rhyme of one syllable,
not two, to contrast with the poem's only triple rhyme, "Decembers /
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
Giorgione provides not simply a new way of painting, or even a new
way of seeing, but rather a crystallization and personification of
the spirit of the time. Pater resorts to tropes of embodiment to
characterize and convey that which Giorgione transmits to others.
Giorgione, as a "crystal man," enables us to see "a spirit, a type
in art," and it is this which lives on, even now when most of his
paintings have been attributed to others. 7
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
individuals, Greg argues that their "natural" condition is a dependent state
in which they "complete, sweeten, and embellish the existence of" (436) men
in exchange for material support. Interestingly, in order to preclude the
"fatal" effects of women's "artificial" employment, Greg, like Martineau,
resorts to the state, urging that the government oversee emigration of
"redundant" women to the colonies where wives are in short supply. See W. R.
Greg, "Why are Women Redundant?," National Review 14 (April 1862): 434-60.
46. See John Gibbons, "J. S. Mill, liberalism, and progress," in Victorian
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
--
"The poet's task is increased by the strange obligation to set apart
his words from the words of everyday life and communication
thoroughly and fundamentally." 7 Here Rilke resorts to what has
become, at least since the Russian Formalists early in the century,
the most common way of characterizing poetry. By far the bulk of
formal and informal definitions of poetry concentrate on its
transformation or transgression of ordinary language, on the
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
manipulative interests, or resentment, as is the case in the
imaginary relationship between Tyrrel and Falkland and, later,
between Falkland and Caleb, gives rise to violence and then
appropriates to itself the tools of the negative sublime. Genuine
untarnished sympathy resorts only to the violence of conviction and
persuasion and is imaged in the metaphors of seduction. (The sublime,
already with John Dennis, was said to "commit a pleasing rape upon
the soul.") 78
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
the streets of London in all their varieties, whether mere loafers
or sellers of fruit, vegetables, or anything else." 39
In writing of the case history of Dora, Jane Gallop has noted that
when Freud resorts to French ("_J'appelle un chat un chat_") in
order to refer to gynecological matters, "he takes a French detour
and calls a pussy a pussy," and Dickens, I would argue, draws upon
his familiarity with London street vernacular in order to take his
own English detour in pursuit of a similar end. 40 It is only
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
Subsequent imagery in the text generates a charged ambiguity around
the topic of mechanical violations of the integrity of the human
body. But the novel does not produce a policy decision on the
subject of a parasitically infested humanity. Instead, it resorts to
a polemical feint with analogies. Hence the antimachinist's
disputant returns a euphoric inversion of the above passage:
BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 66.1 (1999) 111-128
Seeing Romantically in Lamia
Paul Endo
---------------
guards against the plots of others. It may not even be necessary to
possess a secret so long as others believe one does. If the secret
is the only way of resisting another's plot--that is, of preserving
one's individuality--then subjectivity would be the sum of all one's
secrets, that unique, individuating store of private knowledge.
Passing Apollonius in the street, Lycius shrinks closer (1.366). It
is as if identity becomes more impenetrable with the concentration
of its boundaries. D. A. Miller proposes that "the self is most
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
entrepreneurial writing of a "hospital-less" England linked by disciplinary
nurse-mothers to the mid-Victorian operations of the Charity Organization
Society (in which middle-class volunteers visited the homes of the poor,
pioneering the case study method of inquiry into the causes of poverty); to
the Fabian professionalization of this individuating technique and Fabian
efforts to revise and implement institutional discipline; to the
mid-twentieth-century establishment--as well as the recent Thatcherite
disestablishment--of the welfare state. 80
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
narrative of _Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy._ Here the "white nigger" is
an uncomfortable, imperfect inversion of the "black" who is white
inside. "White niggers" can easily wash up to visible social
personhood but their transracial play reveals that they have no
proper inside, not the individuating map of the palm nor the
unself-conscious "nigger talk" that Twain seems to have identified
with authenticity, beginning in 1874 with his first narrative
written in African American dialect, which is significantly titled
"A True Story."
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
psychologically uncritical to satisfactorily accomplish the task. In
this last respect--the psychological--one wishes that Hodder had
more closely followed William James. James never foreclosed the
possibility of transcendent reference, but the thrust of his
book--subtitled _A Study in Human Nature_--was to explore what he
called, without denigration, the "pathology" by which the "sick"
(dis-integrated) soul became unified and empowered. This was
precisely what Thoreau sought--self-unity and empowerment as they
impelled him toward ever higher levels of being. What Hodder
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
[1899]), and survival in the Klondike (London's _The Call of the
Wild_ [1903]). Yet Norris is known no less for his Californian
settings than for his naturalist aesthetics, and he often
incorporates regionalist themes into his texts (_McTeague_, for
example, is subtitled "A Story of San Francisco").10 By including
_The Octopus: A Story of California_ within his larger, unfinished
"Trilogy of the Wheat," Norris inserts regionalist aesthetics into
an emotionally charged epic of globalization and dramatizes how
imperialism and international commerce contribute to the ongoing
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
around interchangeable conventional tropes and themes of love, covenantry,
and sentimentalized rural life to contribute to a mythic depiction of
Scottish history. Its authors were journalists and Kirk ministers rather than
trained artists and their stories appeared in Rev. Will Robertson Nicoll's
religious periodical the British Weekly (subtitled A Journal of Social and
Christian Progress) and William Howie Wylie's Christian Leader rather than in
high culture literary journals. It was no secret that Kailyard fiction stood
outside the walls of acclaimed literature, but this did not prevent its
authors from enjoying prolific success. Ian Maclaren's Beside the Bonnie
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
their idea of themselves and their actual selves"--a psychological
type she labels "The Inadequate Personality."11 Coleridge, we are
left to conclude, was in some decisive way inadequate. This opinion
reaches its epitome in Molly Lefebure's biography, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, blithely subtitled A Bondage of Opium. It is here that
Coleridge finally, after a century of moralizing criticism, achieves
the stature of master addict. Lefebure dares to declare aloud what
Coleridge's friends would only confide in whispers, that Coleridge's
life and labors were a failure and that demon opium was the cause:
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
more than two dozen plays during his lifetime. He began his writing career as
a dramatist, but he galvanized his contemporaries' attention with his novels.
More precisely, it was the publication in 1856 of his third novel, _It Is
Never Too Late to Mend_, that catapulted Reade to fame. Like four of his
subsequent novels, this one was subtitled "A Matter-of-Fact Romance."3 By
this epithet, Reade called attention both to his method, which involved
extensive research in print archives and visits to the sites of social
injustice (in *[End Page 434]* this case, jails where the draconian silent
system was enforced), and to the melodramatic plots with which he sought to
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
citizen even though I may spend many weeks of the winter within the
limits of Ward Nine!" (_Letters_ 95). Regionalism, of course, was
perceived in the 1890s as providing relief from the cosmopolitan scene,
as the antidote to "the same cosmopolitan monotony which is everywhere
effacing the last vestiges of local color and local feeling" (Shorey
156). Moreover, the Boston milieu was precisely where the artistic
possibilities of transcending the specificities of time, place, and
milieu (anthropology's culture) were being thought and felt as a new
American devotion to Culture (in Matthew Arnold's sense). 2 As Willa
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
arrives in Flora's hands in London, and convinces her to return:
BLOCKQUOTE
The metaphorical weight of effacing the daughter's name from the Bible and
the use of "Father's Hoose," or church, above suggest that Flora's flight has
also led to a moral fall. Her whimsical desire for liberty implies that she
has gone to London to become a prostitute since, according to Scotland's own
1881 version of the Contagious Diseases Act, the only "test of a prostitute"
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
struggle for political representation becomes a critical question.
Though women were fighting for universal suffrage and forming their
own union societies, gender, defined as male power and female
weakness, provided a stable metaphor for signifying power relations
and political conflicts. It had the added benefit of effacing
women's political activity and putting them in their traditional
places. The politicized woman, the woman who demanded so-called
equal representation, transgressed social codes; hence her threat
needed to be contained. Earlier images of women's equal
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
murder into an abstract theological question. Hilda, in short, is
disgusted by Kenyon's aestheticizing, more than by his
theosophizing. This climactic scene reveals the extent to which the
aesthetic in general, and the Romance in particular, are dangerous
precisely because each depends on the effacing of the literal and
the erasing of the individual (in this case the Model). In this
text, aestheticizing looks a lot like murder.
VIII. Fauning Slaves
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
image, her womanly center threatens to cave in on itself when encased
in the crushing iron of masculine authority. The center of the cannon
is, of course, a void--an absence that signals the loss of self in a
process of imminent collapse. The procedure of iron-encasement
threatens to nullify the subject: the combination of "reflective
analysis" and "flexible sympathy" (_D_, 412), unless balanced
perfectly, will leave Daniel a paralyzed weakling; Evans feels unable
to speak to her admiring public, and is ironically voiceless and
without identity, behind the mask of her incognito. At least in this
perhaps less obviously, the intranarrative pause that partakes of the
analytical mode is also inimical to the operations of sympathetic
identification. The pause of the horseman objectifies and
aestheticizes Adam, as if he were a tree being measured for lumber.
For Eliot, too much sympathy threatens to nullify the subject (Daniel
Deronda, Latimer, the hole at the center of the cannon), yet too much
reflective analysis threatens to nullify the object (the striding
carpenter, the soon to be lumber beech tree).
identification. The pause of the horseman objectifies and
aestheticizes Adam, as if he were a tree being measured for lumber.
For Eliot, too much sympathy threatens to nullify the subject (Daniel
Deronda, Latimer, the hole at the center of the cannon), yet too much
reflective analysis threatens to nullify the object (the striding
carpenter, the soon to be lumber beech tree).
This tension between the necessity of the pause and its danger, and
more broadly between the demand for sympathy and the strictures of
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
The Kailyard School has been described, both positively and negatively, as
sentimental. To be sure, the rhetoric of affect is written all over Kailyard
narratives and the history of their critical reception. An 1896 review
described a Barrie novel as an "excursion into boyhood in pursuit of its
sentimental qualities" whose main character was "a creature of fermenting
mind, companioning his own emotions." 29 More often than not sentimentality
has been a charge used to dismiss Kailyard narratives. In 1935, George Blake
scornfully accused Kailyarders of being "a small group of sentimental, if
gifted, Scots, [who] gratified Victorian sentimentality." 30
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
of art from its archaic phase: It marks the permanent return of the
archaic." 45 That same transition from the archaic-chaotic to a
post-archaic, symbolic order is one the Creature cannot seem to
accomplish for himself. He remains stuck, striving for subjective
completion in the fermenting crack of the ugly.
Unable to affirm himself as a subject, the Creature thus commences
his own autobiographical narrative by inverting Victor's declarative
"I am" into the pathetically interrogative "Who was I? What was I?"
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
narrated [End Page 629] perceptions piece apart their inner lives
even as they live them (V, 197). His very consciousness, which is
coextensive with the narrative itself, vivisects their minds. The
surface signs of character and conversation peel back to reveal
something deeper: the "chaos" of consciousness, a "fermenting heap"
both riotously active and rank-smelling.
The final pages of the story reintroduce Charles Meunier, who
appears in order to carry out on a human being an experiment he has
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
Hughson's body. It is the inevitable moment in all chronicles when a
silent narrator, confronted with the disintegration of the very
authority that sanctions his voice, insists on his right to speak.
By exorcising the supernatural, Justice Horsmanden restores the
chronicle's verisimilitude, but this requires him to raise, and then
answer, a contradiction implicit in his quasi-judicial summation:
Why would Hughson take poison if he expected to be rescued on his
way to the gallows? Unable to give an answer based in the workings
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
Browne's arrival, Woodville was forced to reopen the allegedly haunted
chamber, but Browne's unexpected visit, the nobleman later confesses, also
"seemed the most favourable opportunity of removing the unpleasant rumours
which attached to the room." Browne, it turns out, had been the unwitting
subject of an experiment, an ideal candidate for exorcising certain
"unpleasant rumours," since his "courage was indisputable, and [his] mind
free of any pre-occupation with the subject" ("T," 139). Unfortunately, for
Woodville, these rumors appear to be true after all; before taking his leave,
Browne visits the Woodville gallery of family portraits where, in one
immediate purpose of works such as John Ferriar's pioneering _An Essay
Towards a Theory of Apparitions_ (1813) and Samuel Hibbert's _Sketches of the
Philosophy of Apparitions_ (1824) was to burst the bubble of superstition
with the fine point of scientific fact, and thus complete the Enlightenment
project of exorcising the specter from the popular imagination, new theories
about ghosts also effectively undermined the Enlightenment imperative for
absolute scientific objectivity by foregrounding the subjective nature of
sensory perception, especially sight, and the ensuing uncertainties of all
knowledge derived from empirical investigation.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
being brought into view.
A word should be said about the Malay's host, because it is that
host who—faced with the realization that he has taken a
construct as nature, charged by the servant girl with exorcising
simulation from the house—acts in a peculiar way: he deals
with sham by himself dealing in it to supplement his failing
knowledge. There is a veritable cascade of suppositions in the
passage:
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
simply insult her more. On the one hand, music's intangibility
grants the wanderer's education a phantasmatic imminence; on the
other, this transparent apparition of rank takes its life from her
hidden body, which must keep playing behind the music room door. At
its schizoid limits, then, the wanderer's practice dissipates into
pure distinction, [End Page 973] while its constitutive remainder
is, comically, her entire body, whose introduction back into the
novel reanimates its plot. The following passages elaborate
variations of that plot:
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
context of a government and social hierarchy contending with unprecedented
economic distress and popular discontent: BLOCKQUOTE
Eventually, the narrative energy derived from a tale of Tom's spiritual fall
and redemption dissipates entirely, and is replaced in the climactic "Parish
Meeting" episode by the polemical force of Dr. Shepherd's spirited harangue
against the prevailing "_bad management_" of cottage households, apparently
the real reason for popular distress (5:271). As the logic of the tract
becomes increasingly programmatic and pedagogical, More exercises her
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
narrative structures. It can be thought as causal. The I may live
with strangers because it cannot rely on itself. Its recourse to
others, meanwhile, further impedes it from developing its own
resources. Thus, in trying to borrow against his paternal
inheritance, the young De Quincey dissipates his money on a vain
journey to find a friend to stand him surety for the loan. What is
true of the hero is also true of the narrator, whose dearth of
material leads him to lay hold of topics and texts extraneous to his
subject that, while meant to fill in for a deficiency, end by
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
capital and salvation at the moment when the mother Marget employs the
biblical story of the chaff and wheat to console a young Kirk minister who
has just performed an unsatisfactory sermon. Yet, in her version of the
allegory, the separation of the grain from the flax is likened to the process
of a mill: "'Ye mean,' said the minister, 'that my study is the threshing
mill, and that some of the chaff has got into the pulpit'" (B, 72). The
mediation of spiritual purity by the supplemented "threshing mill" rewrites
the biblical story to rest comfortably within the contemporary context of
machine-efficiency and heightened productivity. While threshing machines
has just performed an unsatisfactory sermon. Yet, in her version of the
allegory, the separation of the grain from the flax is likened to the process
of a mill: "'Ye mean,' said the minister, 'that my study is the threshing
mill, and that some of the chaff has got into the pulpit'" (B, 72). The
mediation of spiritual purity by the supplemented "threshing mill" rewrites
the biblical story to rest comfortably within the contemporary context of
machine-efficiency and heightened productivity. While threshing machines
themselves were not nineteenth-century industrial technology (they were
introduced in 1775), mill machines in all forms were commonly viewed as
of a mill: "'Ye mean,' said the minister, 'that my study is the threshing
mill, and that some of the chaff has got into the pulpit'" (B, 72). The
mediation of spiritual purity by the supplemented "threshing mill" rewrites
the biblical story to rest comfortably within the contemporary context of
machine-efficiency and heightened productivity. While threshing machines
themselves were not nineteenth-century industrial technology (they were
introduced in 1775), mill machines in all forms were commonly viewed as
emblems of industrial society. 26 For Maclaren, one wonders if the inclusion
of this mill in the allegory somehow saves more souls in less time. Godliness
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
dissatisfaction, however, it is doubtful that he arranged the sitting.
Letters reprinted in _The Octoroon_ refer to daguerreotypes arranged by and
exchanged between mother and daughter before Mattison and Picquet met (35).
11 We can surmise that by submitting the image used for the engraving,
Picquet resists reenacting the fetishized presentation of the flushed,
nubile, loose-haired young mulatta on the block popularized in _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_ when the slave mother Susan advises her daughter Emmeline to brush
her hair back "smooth and neat and not havin' it flying about in curls;
looks more respectable so" despite the girl's innocent remonstrance that
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
freedom possible. In other words, what appears, from the standpoint
of explanatory interest, to be devoid of importance, now begins to
look as though it were not just critical to but actually
constitutive of intellectual autonomy. If explaining past events
involves reenacting the states of minds of those who caused them,
affirming that autonomy requires going beyond any such interest.
Ethical individualism and methodological individualism, at [End Page
994] first glance natural allies, turn out to be seen by Emerson as
mutually opposed. I advance and clarify these claims in the third
"there is one mind common to all individual men" (237). Corporate
minds and generic souls make odd company for the individualist to
keep. What is the connection between these "collectivist specters"
(to borrow Weber's phrase) and Emerson's insistence that
understanding above all demands reenacting the states of mind of
other problem-solving creatures like ourselves? Can we call his
approach truly reductionist in spirit when he exhorts us to find
"the genius and creative principle of each and all eras in [our] own
mind" (239, my emphasis) or when he suggests that the reason we like
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
that initiates the novel's narrative of liberation--setting Huck on
the *[End Page 269]* river to escape, it is often said, the confines
of convention while Jim escapes slavery--exemplifies literary
discipline. When Huck flees Pap's brutal regime by lying down in a
canoe and setting it afloat downriver, he is reenacting Moses's
salvation, despite having earlier announced skepticism of the story of
Moses and the Bulrushers because he "don't take no stock in dead
people" (2). Huck has so deeply internalized this parable that he
restages it unconsciously.
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
were, not through frontier narratives or colonial romances but
through doubly foreign (that is, uncanny _and_ un-American) fables
of revenge, obsession, and domination that sometimes critiqued
ordered, class-bound European society. The critic who later
disparaged the popularity abroad of American writers *[End Page 7]*
who "had lurking in their hearts a secret principle at war with
Democracy" (_Essays_ 1077)—and here he was surely thinking
of Irving—embedded in tales like "Metzengerstein" and
especially "The Masque of the Red Death" implicit criticism of
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
commercial value in advancing the circulation of Cheap Repository Tracts. She
was shrewd enough to see that the immediate crisis of the 1790s promised to
expand the constituency for existing evangelical campaigns to reform the
manners and morals of ordinary British subjects: elites, who, in the past,
saw little to fear in the excesses of tavern culture, and even disparaged the
likes of Tom White and Mrs. Jones for their incursions upon British liberty,
might now be recruited to a campaign to put down public houses if they could
be convinced it might limit the venues for Painite radicalism.
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
unique.
Gray acted like an antiquarian but he was averse to identify as one.
Committed to the ethos of the amateur, he did not want what he did
to determine who he was, especially since what he did was disparaged
by so many others. By the mid-eighteenth century, there was in place
a stereotype of the antiquarian as a ponderous, awkward figure who
pursued trivia with an energy at once fanatical and workmanlike.
Alexander Pope scornfully dismissed the group as a whole: "A
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
comparable misgivings about the activities of one-eyed presentists
who roam literary studies. Our "humble task" as critics and
scholars, she wrote in _The Limits of Literary Criticism_ (1956), is
"to protect . . . from the corruption of fashions" the works of
"past ages," which are "neglected or disparaged by those absorbed in
the preoccupations of the hour."38 For Butterfield and Gardner, as
for L. P. Hartley, "the past is a foreign country" where "they do
things differently": we therefore cannot access its alterity unless
we abandon those anachronizing habits that misrepresent difference
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
Reframing the question of colonial difference as a matter of degree
rather than of kind, Indian reform novels suggest that racial
tutelage could dissolve tribal sovereignty and thereby transmute
savages outside US law into citizens subject to the nation's law. By
reinscribing colonial difference not strictly as a matter of race
but *[End Page 439]* loosely as a question of culture, these
narratives sought to transform the antebellum policy of Indian
expulsion into the pedagogical project of Indian assimilation.
Indian reform novels relied upon domestic influence not only to
impulse as a reaction to threatening domestication by white women.
Sánchez-Eppler demonstrates how the US discourse of
missionary work identified US children as both the objects and the
subjects of Christian domestication, thereby ambivalently
reinscribing US imperial authority in this equation of *[End Page
456]* (white) children with nonwhite "savages." Wexler theorizes how
the normalizing sentimental response of domestic fiction
continuously reproduced the imperial binary which constructed that
colonial difference as absolute rather than relational and
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
in mind is the self-made man, a key part of the "ethos which promoted
the kind of labor needed to achieve [middle-class] ambitions and to
justify the recruitment of labourers into agricultural and eventually
industrial capitalism." 39 Furniss's view plays down the liberatory
potential of the sublime in favor of its function of reinscribing the
autonomous self in a new social framework. For Furniss the aesthetic
of the sublime is a kind of hinge between social eras, between the old
regime and nineteenth-century capitalism. Though liberating the
subject from the restrictions of the oligarchy, the sublime prepares a
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
consequences of marriage for female friendship and women's writing.
However, in our [End Page 749] justifiable desire to rescue Eliza
from the prison house of the conduct manual to which many forces
within both fictional and historical society would relegate her, we
risk reinscribing the very dualisms that the novel challenges.
One way to reconsider the meaning of the ambivalences of The
Coquette is to shift our critical focus somewhat away from Eliza,
the author of the majority of the letters until she drifts into
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
relationship to Irish nationalism need not be treated (as it often
is) dialectically, as opposition or unintentional acquiescence. 8
Indeed, In the Shadow of the Glen suggests that Synge can
fundamentally challenge several aspects of Irish nationalism while
simultaneously reinscribing other, perhaps less obvious, of its
elements. Again, gender is the key factor that must be introduced.
And here it is useful to return briefly to Elkins's and Roche's
examination of patriarchy as it functions in the play. Though
differing in their readings of Nora's final departure--Elkins
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
Writings of William Morris, ed. A. L. Morton (New York: International
Publishers, 1973).
6. Fredric Jameson makes this point in his essay on pleasure as a
political issue, claiming that the thematizing of a particular
'pleasure' as a political issue . . . must always involve a dual focus,
in which the local issue is meaningful and desirable in and of itself,
but is also at one and the same time taken as the figure for Utopia in
general, and for the systemic revolutionary transformation of society
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
allow them to forge what Whitman's speaker calls a "new identity."
I would like to conclude this essay with an extended close reading of two
passages from "Song of Myself" which demonstrate--while neither invoking the
reader nor thematizing reading--how Whitman's lyric is meant to work in the
rhetorical interspace between the text and the reader's embodied
subjectivity. In these passages, the speaker explores the causal relationship
between "a touch" and "a new identity." We almost immediately find him in the
midst of a subjective ordeal that is at once painful and pleasurable, single
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
within early modern theorizations of critique, as well as between
these and our own efforts. 2
Turning to Edgeworth's novel, we find that itcenters the issue of
demystification right away, thematizing it in at least one of the
novel's two central narratives of suspense. In the first, readers
chase after the marriage plot between Belinda Portman and her
suitor, Clarence Hervey. Their ultimate union, though, is a foregone
conclusion to any reader familiar with the genre. Secondary in
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
It would be difficult to exaggerate the important role that
confession played in an eighteenth-century capital case,
particularly in the public's acceptance of the verdicts. In an era
predating forensic sciences, confession sanctioned the guilty
verdict, reflected praise on the magistrates, and justified the
punishment. Thus, the court's failure to obtain confessions from the
principle conspirators led to one remarkable episode in which the
public wondered whether the dead bodies of Caesar and Hughson were
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
early texts are read? Twain's own reading of Malory has, in fact, been
documented for us by the recent rediscovery of his personal copy of the
_Morte D'Arthure,_ and it is clear that one of the things that both
fascinated and no doubt annoyed him about the book (in addition to what Betsy
Bowden, in a review of this reading, dubs the "aimless wandering and fighting
and smiting and betraying and celebrating" [185]) was Malory's language
itself. 23 Twain underlined words and phrases notable for their oddity or
archaism, and at one point he wrote in the margin of his copy: "certain
expressions come suddenly in and become frequent thereafter" (Roberts 173).
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
and inventing traditions to keep--was performed assiduously during and
after Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition of 1876. It became a
familiar topic in newspapers and journals, where the passion for
collecting relics often became an object of fun. As one writer said of
"these times," "everybody seems to be furbishing up his ancestors and
setting them on end, as it were, in company with all the old
tea-kettles, queue-ties, rusty muskets, snuff-boxes, and paduasoys"
(Harrison 301). In "Tools of the Nation Maker" (1897), explaining the
importance of a collection that would become the basis of his history
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
In a public dispute with Edmund Clarence Stedman over the existence
of "literary genius," Howells had claimed that Grant�s autobiography,
"written as simply and straightforwardly as his battles were fought,
couched in the most unpretentious phrase, with never a touch of
grandiosity or attitudinizing, familiar, homely, even common in
style, is a great piece of literature" ("Literary Genius" 14). And,
in an equally public dispute with Matthew Arnold over "General
Grant�s Grammar," Twain agreed that "General Grant�s book is a great
and, in its peculiar department, a unique and unapproachable literary
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
Howells's narrative works to reiterate what had already become, by
the late nineteenth century, a well-established topography of New
York as a city polarized between the "opulent rich" and the
"degraded poor," its citizens occupying self-contained,
noncommunicating worlds (Blumin 18). Stephen Crane's _Maggie: A Girl
of the Streets_ (1893) initially adopts this point of view. Crane's
characters inhabit the brutal, lower-class realm of the Bowery
tenement, recently opened up to a middle-class readership by Jacob
Riis's _How the Other Half Lives_ (1890): a world of "dark
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
identification--gave rise to a complex pedagogical discourse. Garrison
imagined black citizens as abstract markers of civic virtues (making blacks
more worthy of American citizenship than prejudicial, and hence unvirtuous,
whites). Through sympathy with blacks, then, white abolitionists absorbed the
virtues born of private purity and public pain. The yoking of sympathy and
the citizen-form, in short, permitted radical reformers like Garrison to
imagine "blackness" as white interiority, as a shared, yet unmarked, bond
that rendered certain whites more virtuous and ultimately more "deep" than
their opponents. Although white sympathy, as I have suggested, potentially
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
earlier American tale, "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact
Sciences" (1843), itemized the traits essential to successful
deception: "minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity,
_nonchalance_, originality, impertinence, and _grin_" (_Poetry_
607). Goodfellow has perfected the art of diddling; his
rapacity—concealed by a veneer of
respectability—epitomizes the get-rich-quick ethos of the
American "market revolution."16 But Poe also satirizes the
credulousness of the citizens of Rattleborough, who too readily
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
profound incision into the tip of the subject's nose" (810). Poe's
nod to nosology, a subject rife with sexual innuendo, hints at the
genital mutilation sometimes entailed in amusements involving the
bodies of slaves. But the Count responds to these affronts by
booting Dr. Ponnonner through a window (809) and by rebuking Gliddon
and Buckingham, both travelers knowledgeable about the cultures of
the Near East: "What am I to think of your standing quietly by and
seeing me thus unhandsomely used? What am I to suppose by your
permitting Tom, Dick, and Harry to strip me of my coffins and my
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
Stansell, Christine, and Sean Wilentz. "Cole's America." Truettner and
Wallach 3-21.
Stebbins, Theodore E., Jr. "Martin Johnson Heade." _The Lure of Italy:
American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914._ Ed. Stebbins. New
York and Boston: Harry N. Abrams and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1992.
201-03.
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
By arguing that property does not exist in a state of nature,
O'Conor also countered the common argument that slavery was itself
against the law of nature. According to O'Conor, outlawing slavery
was equivalent to abandoning laws of property altogether and
regressing to a state of nature. 6 *[End Page 715]* Even more
interesting, perhaps, than O'Conor's discussion of humans' natural
state was William M. Evarts's response on behalf of New York. He
argued that slavery is maintained by "mere predominance of physical
force" (Lemmon 597), so, in the words of his cocounsel, Joseph
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
Mark Twain, in order that the protection of his copyrights and the
conduct of his literary business should not require his personal
attention" (MT 3: 1485). By this time Twain was getting old, and his
business dealings were complicated and time-consuming; the Mark Twain
Company allowed him to delegate many of the tasks involved in
managing and maintaining his property. However, according to the New
York Times article reporting on the formation of the company, Twain
incorporated his name "in order to keep the earnings of [his] books
continually in the family, even after the copyright on the books
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
commonwealth addressed by Madison especially in The Federalist
(1787-88) was not a problem of law, of "energetic" national
government, or a written Constitution but a problem of bodily
constitution, of personal virtue and morality extended outward into
the public sphere. As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention,
which met in Philadelphia between 25 May and 17 September 1787,
Franklin pressed for structures of governance that would increase
rather than decrease popular representation: a plural executive; a
single legislature grounded in popular rather than state
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
takes place "[o]n one of those exciting occasions during a contest
for the presidency of the United States," several Cuban and American
businessmen, including Blake's owner, Colonel Stephen Franks, travel
to Baltimore "for the purpose of completing arrangements for
refitting the old ship 'Merchantman'" (3). It quickly becomes
apparent that the _Merchantman,_ a Baltimore clipper, is being
illegally "refitt[ed]" as a slave ship. And following this meeting,
Henry's master returns to Mississippi, provides Blake with a paper
allowing him "to pass and repass wherever he wants to go," and dates
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
urges us to consider Bridget Cook's question: "[H]ow are images of
racialized spectacle . . . able to make successful interrogations of their
own construction? In what ways can images of spectacle be used to support a
reading that challenges the social order's dominant racial meaning?" (70).
Picquet's iconographic resistance, her very unrevealing image, is
paradigmatic, for "one convention of the nineteenth-century slave narrative
was the inclusion of a frontispiece drawing or interior illustration that
depicted the Black author in garments symbolic of dignity, restraint,
eloquence, reflection and cultivation" (McCaskill, "A Stamp" 81).
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
by [Thoreau's] eroding relationship with Emerson" (68). When Thoreau
writes that "in human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there
is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is *[End Page
581]* not understood" (_A Week_ 226), he is not abstractly
pontificating on life with Olympian detachment; he is responding to
the inhibition that kept him from discussing his feelings with
Emerson and to the impercipience that kept Emerson from
understanding what his silences meant. As it evolved over the years,
the book that began as the celebration of a friendship ended by
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
demonstrating, among other things, David Brion Davis's assertion that
abolition and market capitalism were always more consistent than history has
recognized. In the last section, I want to look at a series of contemporary
films that purchase white depth through sympathetic identification with
blacks, occluding the conflicts that push white characters to strive for
"deeper" consciousness in the first place.
Emblematic of this trend is James Cameron's immensely successful film
_Titanic_ (1997)_._ Twice in the film, the lead characters (Kate Winslet and
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 230-253
Book Review ~~~~~~~~~~~ Whose Dickinson?
Cristanne Miller
---------------
me QUOTE Dickinson QUOTE because their QUOTE (L 265)--no matter how
wildly she experimented with their jingling.
More broadly approached, those who would return the basic Dickinson
poem to the manuscript seem to me in danger of reprivatizing the
poetry. As Margaret Dickie powerfully argued in the pages of this
journal in 1995, feminists have battled for the last 20 or 30 years
to assert the extraordinary aesthetic, cultural, intellectual, and
psychological power of Dickinson's poems, thereby attempting to move
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
Pierce, a Northern Democrat with strong Southern ties *[End Page
710]* who was also committed to the acquisition of Cuba as a slave
state. When Pierce won the White House in 1852, his victory was
boisterously greeted with raucous torchlight parades and
bannersannouncing "The Acquisition of Cuba Must Now Be Fulfilled"
and "May the Queen of the Antilles Be Added to Our Glorious
Confederacy under the Prosperous Administration of Pierce" (Foner 2:
70). Pierce responded by implicitly referring to Cuba and its
strategic commercial location in his inaugural address: "[T]he
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
(410). Modeling the novel's ideal of an inclusive racial tolerance,
the multihued rag carpet represents a post-Reconstruction US that
makes no distinctions on account of color.1 Indeed, civic and
aesthetic virtue flow from the juxtaposition of domesticated
difference, while Jim Crow segregation only produces displeasing
results: those who "hed 'em planned aout" from "ther warp" to "ther
stripes" are always "orful diserpynted when they cum ter see 't
done" (410). Post-Reconstruction domesticity posits diversity in
integration, and harmony in diversity; the incorporation of all
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
What was at stake in this cumulative explication of conspiracy *[End
Page 4]* theory? Each account used conspiracy theory as a symptom
from which to diagnose errors of historical analysis, three
predominating. Conspiracy theory identified some ideologies as false
consciousness to be overcome and corrected. It then asserted agendas
not accessible to public or "surface" discourses. And finally, it
posited dishonest or ironic forms of cultural expression used by
conspirators to achieve those agendas. Conspiracy theories thus
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 659-684
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
Philip Gould
---------------
entrepreneurial values for black farmers only so far as they are tenants to
former masters--to whom they are busy repaying their debt for lands they
ambiguously own (38-39). St. George Tucker's plan for gradual emancipation
more openly advocates a social servitude in which QUOTE (100). Relying on
Adam Smith, Tucker defends the virtue of free labor while in effect divesting
emancipated slaves of private property and hence independence, Tucker thus
relies on the QUOTE to monitor their behavior (102): "[W]here the numbers of
persons without property increase, there the coertion [sic] of the laws
becomes more immediately requisite" (102).
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
it. Thomas Bender comments that the "culture of metropolitan life is
largely the product of its spatial elaboration—the proximity
and necessary contact of various competing narrative trajectories
and hierarchies of representation" (qtd. in Banta 42). Crane
produces what might be called discursive space, spatializing
competing discourses that derive, however ambiguously, from class
locations.
3. A Girl of the Crimson Legions
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
commerce that the US, like Britain before it, hoped would bring
"civilization," through emulation *[End Page 684]* and dependency,
to rival cultures and would-be colonists. But unlike the artifacts
of gentility, such as the piano, that Richard Bushman recognizes as
gentrifying the US hinterlands, the primary articles of trade in the
Far West prior to the 1840s--animal skins and liquor--could not be
conceived as productive of manners. Narratives that depict Far
Western trade indicate that it was not at all a given that this
trade would pave the way for an advancing civilized nation.
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
Lippard contends that the US empire will be unique, a holy,
antimonarchical community dedicated to the brotherhood of man. But
this conception of America as immanent utopia is fundamentally
grounded on racial hierarchies and the dynamics of violent
expansion: Lippard's radical Protestant millennialism sanctions US
imperialism as he imagines history culminating in a US empire which
he describes elsewhere as a Palestine for redeemed labor. In this
utopian fantasy, the contradictions of history, class conflict, and
violent conquest are displaced by a vision of the American QUOTE as
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
Hughson's body. The historical account is hostile to the crowd's
belief in mystery and, by implication, in the conversion of
Hughson's body. It is the inevitable moment in all chronicles when a
silent narrator, confronted with the disintegration of the very
authority that sanctions his voice, insists on his right to speak.
By exorcising the supernatural, Justice Horsmanden restores the
chronicle's verisimilitude, but this requires him to raise, and then
answer, a contradiction implicit in his quasi-judicial summation:
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
it is guaranteed that no fish will disturb one's reverie, or
'getting a tan' on the beach--activity that shields reverie or
sleep." 12 Such "involvement shields, behind which individuals can
safely do the kind of things that ordinarily result in negative
sanctions" (58), are as various as the forms of supervision whose
ubiquitious dispersal in modern society Foucault and his followers
have tabulated, and the resourcefulness required to devise them no
less artful than these powers of supervision that demand them. *[End
Page 845]*
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
some power must be exercised, some exclusion must be enacted,
despite (and because of) that indefinite susceptibility to
resignification, no matter our intentions. The degree to which we
will succeed in these efforts, or be held accountable for them by
others, or suffer sanctions as a result of our actions, of course,
will not be determined solely by ourselves. This is the condition of
signification. We ignore, disavow, or deny this condition to the
degree that we imagine (or exhort others to act accordingly) that we
can know in advance how others will interpret our meanings and
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
own peccadilloes, Poe parodies tactics widely employed in the
American periodical trade: the submission and knowing publication of
plagiarized material; the inflation of circulation figures; the
exaggeration (or arbitrary suspension) of premiums to contributors;
the unremunerated reprinting of literary works; the "scalping,
brow-beating and otherwise using-up the herd of poor-devil authors"
(781); and the indiscriminate puffing of bathetic works such as the
narrator's own "The Oil-of-Bob."17 By shrewd maneuvering, Thingum
Bob at last merges four periodicals to create "one magnificent
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
issuing his own 1855 history, St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and Its Patriots,
in which he fashioned Toussaint Louverture as an American revolutionary
superior to his US counterpart in George Washington, the author lectured and
published in support of African-American emigration to Haiti and considered
repatriating there himself. Later turning his hopes again upon the US and
the Civil War, Brown published an 1864 version of the earlier novel in which
Clotel (now Clotelle) reunites with her white father in France only to send
him home, from her francophone haven back to Virginia, to emancipate his
slaves. 25
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
the entertainment itself of excessive vulgarity" (Burrows and
Wallace 1145). But he also promised respectable patrons a more
relaxed form of entertainment: "Your Broadway belles" and "Fifth
Avenue swells" might be "afraid to go in for a little fun for [fear
of] disarranging their toilets [sic]," but in the Bowery, "people
enjoy themselves just when they feel like it. They don't care a
curse for what others may say, for that's the custom" (qtd. in
Snyder 19).
_American Literary History_ 14.4 (2002) 837-844
Contagion and Culture: A View from Victorian Studies
Mary Burgan
---------------
Dickens's grasp of the power of the representation of contagion has
continued to be a presiding model in Victorian studies for thinking
about the intersection of narrative, medicine, and effective social
reform. _Bleak House_ (1852-53) best embodies the power of Dickens's
model; it invokes the miasmal, interpenetrating mud and fog of
London from its very first paragraphs. And thereafter, the carriage
of smallpox from Jo, the crossing sweeper at the heart of London's
slum, to Esther Summerson, the saintly maiden in the heart of the
country, becomes the narrative vehicle for a panoramic diagnosis of
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
De Forest uses the nuptial impediment of fraud to cast Virginia's submission
as an assertion of agency. If her destitution coerces her consent, her
subsequent duplicity recovers something of her lost agency. Her plan to
vitiate the terms of Mather's will isnothing short of fraud: the other
"voidable" impediment. When she suggests that the extent of the marriage will
be to "meet, marry, and separate" (100), her scandalized aunt asks, "will you
tell him so before you marry?" Virginia replies, "after the wedding." That
she agrees to marry for money while secretly conspiring to live as a _femme
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
his editors will keep his drive alive after his body dies,
continually expanding the gap between his biological and symbolic
deaths. The autobiography, in other words, was never intended to be a
single, marketable text. Rather, it was conceived as a corporate
affair continuously ballasting the ephemerality of mass cultural
celebrity with the posthumous persistence of high cultural fame. [End
Page 682]
3. Incorporating the Author
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
In reading Eureka as socially vectored, I am consciously arguing
against received notions that have made a certain kind of contextual
argument seem not worth pursuing because irrelevant to Poe.
Biographical studies of Poe, as well as Poe's own tendency to
vacillate between seeming apolitical and trenchantly partisan, have
contributed to the current critical impression that he is not in the
least concerned with the social and that, far from being merely
unconcerned with democracy, he is vehemently antidemocratic. Despite
the credence given this portrait, it is demonstrably false and stems
_American Literary History_ 15.1 (2003) 14-21
The Claims of Rhetoric: Toward a Historical Poetics (1820-1900)
Shira Wolosky
---------------
own poetic conduct, which offers intensely complex figures for the
variety of experiences, individual and communal. Whitman, however,
*[End Page 19]* is also deeply disturbed by the obvious failures of
America to be true to its own promise. His poetry is born from, and
reflects, a profound misgiving and alarm at the dissolution of
America's varied constitutive forces: most explosively in the Civil
War and in the slavery that contradicts the American commitment to
freedom, but also in the war's aftermath, as the American promise
threatens to shrink to a narrow, flat, and restrictive material
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
hypocrisy? Surely one possible reading (among many) is that although
immediate abolition will produce social chaos, indefinite oppression
must provoke violent revolution. Writing for both Northern and
Southern audiences and aiming, as Whalen suggests (121–38),
to alienate neither, Poe avoids oversimplifying the national
contradiction between liberty and slavery yet feels compelled to
expose its ironies. With its embedded ambiguities, the multilayered
satire (its second paragraph parodying "The Fall of the House of
Usher") resists simple paraphrase and exemplifies the difficulty of
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
master's name but her husband's (_Octoroon_ 5). In this way, Mattison
highlights the ways in which "legal enslavement removed the
African-American male not so much from sight as from the _mimetic_ view as
a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father's name, the
Father's Law" (Spillers 80). Jutting "Mrs." against the symbolic "P"
(Property, sexual Production, P***y) only places in relief Mattison's
erection of (his own) white phallogocentric power over and above Picquet's
will to choose a (black) partner and (new) name. Mattison's anthropological
framing underscores that Picquet's genealogy is symbolized by a "matrix of
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
etymological hoax (a hoax of difference) insinuates that social
formations cannot be built on any [End Page 27] other ground. To
speak of mediation as not an unfortunate fact but as a QUOTE (the
QUOTE ) seems both an insidious naturalization and a nervous elision
of democracy's dirty little secret. But Poe is at once conning us
and inviting us in on his game. His game is in fact the one we have
been playing ourselves by accepting assurances (like those of the
Constitution) that coalescences are not coalitions, that no social
bonds are discriminatory.
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
with Abbé Raynal in 1770, calls for the conquest of North
Africa were made in the name of Enlightenment ideals of progress and
civilization. As Thomson points out, these arguments contain a
unifying economic logic: "one of the undoubted advantages of
civilising Barbary is the consequence that these states would then
abandon piracy for agriculture, and would thus provide Europe with
agricultural products" (112-13).
29. _Slaves in Algiers_ was performed in Philadelphia on 30 June and
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
provisions for redistributing state and federal power. The trope of exogamy
speaks to citizens' double duty: marriage as a symbolic act of bipartisan
unity and as a literal union that forges national ties through intersectional
breeding. Just as Lincoln, during his 1860 presidential campaign, used his
own marriage to a Southern woman as a model for reunifying the divided house,
so too De Forest offers intersectional marriage as an impetus for
reconciliation.
While _The Bloody Chasm_ emphasizes marriage as a consensual act, postbellum
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
Literature," Howells, affirming that "we would not restrict
autobiography to any age or sex, creed, class, or color," declared
the genre to be the "most democratic province of the republic of
letters" (798). As evidence, Howells notes that "the most popular
autobiography of our time, outcirculating and outselling any fiction,
was the story of a soldier," Ulysses S. Grant (797). The Personal
Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1886) was one of the great publishing
successes of the nineteenth century, at least partly because Twain
had convinced Grant to publish it on a subscription basis with his
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
"Asylumia," a mythical land peopled by a genteel, sorrowful race who can
spread wisdom and light among the benighted and who need in turn only the
sympathy and loving *[End Page 12]* kindness of the outside world is the
central conceit of this mode ofself-representation. An anonymous article
apostrophizing Pinel concludes by asking, BLOCKQUOTE
In this picture, enforced removal from the world of material cares and
competition has transported patients not to a carceral institution but to a
gay resort for the pursuit of elevated thought and feeling. They are being
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
culture of consumption, class has dropped out of the picture.
Indeed, consumption itself appears to offer not just an instance of
the "realist tautology" but a solution to it. The "rhythm of
suspending and recovering animation and agency" witnessed in
Maggie's theatrical experiences becomes a "reanimating ritual of
consumption," which we are to read as "the reaffirmation of agency
itself" (143). Consumption is now conceived of as a punctual event
in the life of an individual, abstracted and isolated from economic
structures and the interrelationships between social groups.
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
Quaker City, Lippard frequently contrasts the high life of the rich
and powerful with the lowly life of the poor and oppressed. This
strategy is so common in mysteries-of-the-city literature that it is
one of its defining features. Mysteries-of-the-city novels also
often attack wealthy nonproducers by misrecognizing capitalism as
the intrusion of a feudal-aristocratic mode of production into
liberal democratic America. Here, however, Lippard uses contrasts
and the language of feudalism to cast Mexicans in the role of
wealthy oppressor. When he first introduces General Arista before
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
family to poverty, Virginia agrees to the arranged marriage. Alive to the
nuptial contract's legal formalities, both Virginia and her aunt emphasize
the term _consent,_ despite Virginia's view that she is a hostage to fortune.
The repeated use of the term emphasizes the legal form of nuptial
voluntarism, even as it points up a contradicting heart. But what of
coercion? And what of the spirit of the law in a sentimental age that equated
marriage with romance? If free volition framed as legal consent did not
connote romantic love, then the marriage compact differed little from a
commercial contract--a comparison abhorred by both antebellum Federalists and
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
early chapters, Melville inscribes such concerns onto the apparently
black body of a beggar, thus intertwining the epistemology of doing
good with the question of QUOTE blackness; the beggar's racial
identity is called into question along with the genuineness of his
poverty, hyperbolizing the crisis of urban begging that so obsessed
charity writers. But instead of a single benevolent doubter,
Melville's readers encounter a crowd whose members, in deciding
whether to give or withhold alms, must consider several axes of
possible deception (including the beggar's apparent physical
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
equality--from published works whose titles and authors he never mentions
within the nearly obsessive annotations that accompany his text--with his
own QUOTE which counter Schoelcher's work as well as other histories
critical of Og� and of the events leading up to the 1790 uprising simply by
recontextualizing them.
Faubert thus cultivates what he calls a particular QUOTE or point of view
throughout the drama, one that derives in part from QUOTE in the home of the
French priest and reputed abolitionist, [End Page 416] Henri Gr�goire, from
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
assumptions about historical time; its historiographical discourse questions
the very contextualizing procedure employed by New Historicists. By deploying
anachronism as both method and trope, _Hope Leslie_ challenges fundamental
conceptions of the form and shape of history that are as prevalent today as
in Sedgwick's time. Put plainly, a noncolonizing form of presentism is
precisely what the novel invites its modern readers to experience. And it
does so, I suggest, because it is enlisted in a larger project coming into
being in the antebellum period as authors and historians alike grappled with
the perils and potentialities of a nascent multicultural democracy: the
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
The organ projected by the city fathers will speak in the voice of romantic
nature rather than Puritan theology, thus erasing the cruelties of Boston's
original foundation and rechartering its nineteenth-century citizens as the
people of nature's innocent nation: BLOCKQUOTE
Fields imagines Boston's Great Organ as the voice of a kind of civic
Wordsworthianism, bringing the city's surrounding mighty waters to inland
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
ambassadors, suppressing an imagined black rebellion becomes the mos
compelling way to gain control over Cuba's economic potential.
In Delany's novel, Judge Ballard also spitefully argues that Cuba is
"a moral pestilence, a blighting curse" and "must cease to be a
Spanish colony, and become American territory" because "[t]hose
mongrel Creoles are incapable of self-government" (62). Like the
authors of the Ostend Manifesto who drew together economic and
territorial forms of imperialism and defended their cause with the
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
races." For Catlin, the simple mingling of European-American and
American Indian men engaged in a buffalo hunt is symptomatic of the
passions (avarice, desire) that inspire commerce but are also
potentially destructive to the individuality, and survival, of
species. Catlin's prediction of the overhunting of the American
bison includes the suggestion that avarice blurs and disarranges
racial character. In the discourse of eighteenth-century commerce,
the passions were imagined as "interior and exterior" forces of
disorder. 12
_American Literary History_ 14.4 (2002) 837-844
Contagion and Culture: A View from Victorian Studies
Mary Burgan
---------------
financial--only rationalizes moral indifference to the possibility
of amelioration in a diseased world. Thus Richard Carstone's notion
that all of his problems will be solved once he comes into his
inheritance yields one final moral to the tale, and the fact that he
wastes away at the end indicates Dickens's rejection of hereditary
rationalizations for social paralysis. *[End Page 842]*
There is, however, a continuing vacillation in Dickens's rhetoric
between the fear of general decline and the invocation of individual
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
481]* Dedlocks in their graves" (_B_, 56), similar smells and tastes
pervade much of the novel's landscape. Krook's cat haunts this text,
Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat cast, as it were, for a Stephen King
novel, licking her lips and lusting, like the rat, after forbidden
tastes. The corpse "is the most sickening of wastes," Kristeva
writes, "a border that has encroached on everything." It is "the
utmost of abjection . . . death infecting life," and in this case,
the infection from Nemo's corpse, insufficiently or shallowly
buried, spills easily over into life. 22 Nemo or rather Nemo's
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
produces uneven geographical development. This global insight
undermines the primary role that the larger view plays for Norris's
characters—that of detaching them from local
identifications. Individuals, regions, and domestic arrangements
stop mattering to Presley and Laura as they embark on westward
journeys away from the scenes of capitalism's crimes; but, in light
of the ubiquity of (racialized) class conflict and the production of
agricultural regions oriented toward commercial export on both sides
of the Pacific, we see that they are only entering new crime scenes
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 496-508
South of the American Renaissance
Thomas M. Allen
---------------
the brutal defamation of the other" (_Simms Reader_ 343). He
reminded Northern audiences thus during an 1856 lecture tour. Simms
had originally planned to travel North in an attempt to ameliorate
relations between the regions, but in the wake of Massachusetts
Senator Charles Sumner's caning at the hands of South Carolina
Representative Preston Brooks, Simms received a hostile reception.
Simms's intended celebration of South Carolina's contributions to
the Union came across as belligerent partisanship, and the main
effect of the tour was, as Guilds writes, to cause Simms "to lose
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
a king's leman" (8).
_Shred_ (def. 6b): "At last it [smoke] began to shred away lazily" (43).
_Slat_ (vb., def. 4b): " I couldn't seem to stand that shield slatting and
banging... about my breast" (12).
_Slump_ (vb., def. 2b): "Clarence had slumped to his knees before I had half
finished" (5).
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
itself is cast as what Brook Thomas has called a "narrative of progressive
emergence" (32)—feminists loosening the stranglehold male modernist
critics once held on the literary *[End Page 195]* canon, African Americans
and other minorities struggling to gain literary independence and
emancipating themselves from Eurocentric literary values, marginalized
authors and texts being freed from oppressive ideologies and finding their
way to the center.
And like all narratives of emergence (which imply a progression), the
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
(Heinl 189), and culminating in the presidency of Faustin Soulouque, who,
according to the hardly neutral point of view of a US commissioner stationed
during 1849 in the eastern half of the island, QUOTE (qtd. in Heinl 193). By
1851, the US special agent in Haiti, Robert Walsh, wrote to Secretary of
State Daniel Webster bewailing the Souloque administration as QUOTE its
press QUOTE and its people QUOTE (qtd. in Heinl 199). 15 Faubert himself
alludes to a supervention of QUOTE in these years, during which he was QUOTE
and after which he was exiled to Paris (14). Though he had for many years
hoped to publish his QUOTE --to defend his text against the accusations of
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 230-253
Book Review ~~~~~~~~~~~ Whose Dickinson?
Cristanne Miller
---------------
Dickinson's formal and generic conception of her work. As a
consequence, questions usually only of interest to editors now
occupy critical attention: does Dickinson indent poetry differently
from prose in letters? Does she ever break a metrical line where
there is unquestionably ample room to complete it, without cramping
or altering her hand? What percentage of the poems contain word- or
line-breaks, and how often are they significant? Does handwriting
change from manuscript to manuscript within the same period in ways
that imply calligraphic significance in particular texts? The
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
his theory of reading calls for a rich interchange between texts,
other texts, contexts, and the biotext, in practice his illustrative
discussion of "Experience" is a meditation on fragments, which are
drained of situational content (textual as well as contextual) and
treated more or less as aphoristic pronouncements on life. Detached
from the "person," even if it is only the persona established by the
text, Emerson's sentences become mottos to pin on a wall or adages
to ponder during a quiet moment before dinner. The words have no
_body._ They relate to no _gestalt._ They cease to be circumstanced,
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
our primitive savagery, how strong the tendency to atavism" (83).
Fletcher's division of the nation into the homely, civilized East
and the savage, racialized West indicates the degree to which only
domestic influence countered white men's proclivity for
civilizational backsliding, particularly in the vacuum of
institutional authority on the frontier. As if to illustrate
Fletcher's point in _Ramona_, a "gruff and surly" white settler with
"the countenance of a brute" (252) who has stolen Alessandro's home
in Temecula takes a potshot at his victim while uttering "a fearful
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
stomach of all vigour. Some fatal influence appeared to seize upon my vitals;
and the work of corrosion and decomposition to be busily begun" (360). What
remains continuous from fact to fiction is Brown's belief that physical and
mental exhaustion facilitate infection. The most feared symptom, evidence of
a vitiating of the stomach's "vital energies," was the black vomit, often
signaling death's immanent approach. (When Smith died in September 1798, he
had just coughed up a mass of black vomit and pronounced a single-word
self-diagnosis: "Decomposition!" [qtd. in Dunlap 84].) The brain's "vital
energies," when sapped by the fever, yielded to a loss of reason or a
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
although he argued against the annexation of the Philippines and
Cuba, Washington not only trained black soldiers at Tuskegee but
also sent them to fight in Cuba during the war.
Capitalism is often criticized for attenuating place-based emotions,
but in fact it depends on such local loyalties for establishing and
reproducing differentiated regions of agricultural and industrial
*[End Page 61]* production. The ubiquitous exportability of
Washington's system of industrial education, uplift through labor,
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
of the North American West by failing to establish "a chain of posts
from the Pacific to St. Louis" (212). But without government funding
or support, Astor's design could not have included continental
settlement, even in the provisional form of a chain of hunting
posts. Naturally enough, Irving de-emphasized the limitations *[End
Page 689]* of Astor's project, following the "genius" of his
biographical subject to imagine the Far West as "various expeditions
and adventures by land and sea," a scene of movement and trade that
was "necessarily of a rambling and somewhat disjointed nature"
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
dictionary projects of the later nineteenth century were getting under way
(not only Murray's _OED_ in England but also Whitney's _Century Dictionary_
in America), the novel both reflected and was absorbed into the traditions of
academic lexicography. It participates, in perhaps a unique way, in the
making and unmaking of the English language, and I focus here on two words
that exemplify that double process and for which _Connecticut Yankee_ is
their first literary appearance.
These words are _hello_ and _dude._ They stand at the nexus of what critics
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
The Spanish mission system, a crucial historical backdrop to
_Ramona_, provided Jackson with the institutional precedent for the
project of racial tutelage. From 1769, when the first mission was
established in present-day San Diego, until 1834, the year the
Mexican Republic secularized the missions and disbursed their lands
to form the great Californio _ranchos_, the missions had served as
the economic engines of Alta California, supplying the material
needs of the remote colony through forced Indian labor.21 The
missions had long since fallen into ruin by the time Jackson toured
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
yet another dimension in 1844 to the allegory of empire. Poe's
twinning of Bedloe and Mr. Oldeb, the victim of a Bengali poisoned
arrow 47 years earlier, hints that, like British imperialism in
India, American efforts to subjugate dark-skinned, indigenous
populations may have fatal consequences. Probing this embedded
historical analogy, Michael Williams characterizes the tale as
something of a "warning" about the "violent consequences" of
"imperial ambitions," which he relates not only to government
oppression of Native Americans but also to "the dangers lurking in
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
Poe was just then experiencing an extraordinary burst of
productivity that enabled him to write and publish more tales in
1844 than during any other year in his career.8 In July he confided
to Lowell, "I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully
industrious— by fits. ...I have rambled and dreamed away
whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for
composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as
the disease endures" (_Letters_ 1: 256). Evidence suggests that Poe
entered an "industrious" manic phase in December 1843, when he
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
Here, as elsewhere, the practice of sympathetic identification presents a
certain dilemma: should we understand mental metempsychosis as an exercise in
solipsism in which sympathy produces [End Page 645] a particularly acute
experience of one�s own body, or as an imaginative encounter which briefly
shatters the very bounds of identity? Scholars have often taken an emphasis on
the responsive suffering of the sympathetic witness or reader as evidence of a
certain ineffectiveness, even self-indulgence, at the heart of sentimental
method.7 They have elaborated on the tendency of sentimental representation to
dwell on the body�s experience and to abstract it--what Shirley Samuels has
presence in the world" (96). If sympathy aims to reconstruct social division
as affective harmony, the relationship between a real reader and a fictional
character and, more broadly, between fictional and real worlds, provides an
analog to the problem of social difference. Indeed, the process of identifying
across the bounds of representation resembles the imaginative work of
cultivating feeling for strangers. And yet, while Holmes uses Brown�s example
to substantiate the political effect of Uncle Tom, and of sentimental fiction
more broadly, it is tempting to reverse this relationship and ask if Brown
might not derive credibility from Uncle Tom�s example. A white man who dies on
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
ranting, liquor smuggling, throwing his clothes out the window, *[End Page
19]* even eating his own feces, and, one presumes, more scribbling. His
astonishing editorial career, then, took shape within an arc of personal
havoc, confinement, and a two-decades' long struggle to express himself
within the bounds of his physicians' rules, rather than to lash out in a
self-defeating fury.
What is most striking about A. S. M.'s literary persona is its range. He is
sometimes topical, referring to popular singers, asylum entertainments, and
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
Enacting closure through the reunion of parents and child (rather
than through the union of young lovers in marriage) works to shift
the locus of republican political identity and agency away from
prodigal acts (breaking existing cultural bounds through interracial
marriage) and toward filiopiety: Olivia achieves political agency
insofar as she embodies the union of British and American blood as a
true daughter of Columbia. Rowson thus offers a version of American
political identity for women that does not involve breaking bonds
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
controversial nature of her appointment, Jackson refused the
position's wages and only sought reimbursement for her travel
expenses. Rather than making explicit claims for governmental
employment of women, *[End Page 444]* Jackson wanted her reform
activities to appear within the bounds of philanthropic domesticity;
nonetheless, her feat of transforming women's domestic influence
upon public policy into women's direct participation within
governmental agencies would facilitate the explicit merger of
domestic practices with those of colonial management.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
imagination are terminals of a continuum of human relation to the
world of matter, at one end, the abstraction of the object into the
experience of terror, and at the other, the subsumption of the object
into a fantasy image. Through terror, furthermore, pain seems to
escape altogether the bounds of representation: pain is too immediate
to be relegated to a mere signifier and at times it comes to be the
real. As an abstract mode [End Page 410] of inscription, pain draws on
the nonrepresentational neurological excess of what Nietzsche claimed
were the mnemotechnic devices:
much nearer to contempt than is commonly imagined; and accordingly,
though we caress dogs, we borrow from them an appellation of the most
despicable kind, when we employ terms of reproach" (E, 67). The same
contempt carries over into the weakness of the clearly delineated
image: "to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is
one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a
little idea" (E, 63) and "a great clearness helps little towards
affecting the passions" (E, 60). Burke takes a similar stance, then,
toward the notion of the beautiful and the efficacy of the image.
of an object too large for the plate to record. "But let it be
considered," he says, "that hardly anything can strike the mind with
its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards
infinity; which nothing can do while we are able to perceive its
bounds" (E, 63). The sublime, then, is evoked by a tension internal to
the mind, a functional tension instigated by the imagination's
inability to retain a complete image narrowly defined as a bounded
object. In other words, the pain and horror of the sublime is a form
of iconoclasm that depends on the breaking of the imaging faculty
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
connections, which unify or go beyond the opposing currents that
have narrowed men's minds. Pater writes that "In their search after
the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for
beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled beyond
the bounds of the Christian ideal" (R, 18-19), and he offers a
fanciful portrait of "the enchanted region of the Renaissance . . .
Here are no fixed parties, no exclusions: all breathes of that unity
of culture in which 'whatsoever things are comely' are reconciled,
for the elevation and adorning of our spirits" (R, 20-21). Even the
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
the extent that he remains outside its redemptive program that his
words are funny. The appeal of Paddy's speech lies in the
multiplicity of its targets, joking at the expense of the boy with
no boots and the well-heeled philanthropist. The newsboys' famed
capacity for play affectionately crosses class bounds, yet it is not
without its barbs for both parties. As Paddy goes on to tell his
life story of escapes from drunken and abusive parents, his audience
grows ever more raucous.
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
and a belief that practical equilibrium rather than abstract justice
was the only way of regulating power in the actual social world.
Wordsworth seems to accept that some essentially coercive element is
an irreducible fact of political life, and he looks to remove that
element to a place outside the bounds of the necessarily
circumscribed community. Whether one applauds or disdains such a
strategy, Wordsworth withstands scrutiny as a sophisticated and
astute political thinker, albeit one whose conclusions are
essentially pessimistic.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
poetically replaying the structural paradoxes inherent in American national
ideology which allow only certain subjects access to the rights, privileges,
and protections of full liberal citizenship, while others suffer the forms of
historical trauma that follow from partial or total discursive exclusion from
the bounds of the nation? 25 Symptomatizing readings of Whitman as a prophet
of a *[End Page 1055 ]* liberal subjectivity which ignores such inequities
construe the giddy and absorptive moods of Whitman's speaker as an expression
of a liberal self who appropriates all social differences and transforms them
into sameness; these moments in his poetry, it is argued, work to homogenize
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
free.
At what a price though: as aloof from the will and guile of its
subject as the rush of the river that draws Maggie Tulliver and
Stephen Guest beyond all bounds of propriety, such rapture is also
no less destructive to her. Hetty is lead down the garden path to a
mode of transportation that makes a life sentence out of a moment's
daydream; permanent exile out of her brief escape from the sight of
a friend's impatient or imploring eye; a casual lapse that brings on
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
Immanuel Kant. The Romantic literary experiment thus emerges as an unique
instantiation of the discourse of autonomy, both an expression of and an
effort to overcome the most difficult question raised by that discourse: how
does one acquire a standpoint for making judgments that are shared and at the
same time individual? In stretching the bounds of convention, the
experimental poem is meant to promote self-reflection upon the basis for
one's attachment to those conventions in the first place. On account of its
explicit or implied emphasis on self-reflection, however, the experimental
lyric invites charges of solipsism precisely where it seeks to get beyond it.
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
redirects--and thus works to contain--relations of desire attendant
on the gaze. His model of the social not only presupposes a specular
play of surfaces, wherein the stoic sufferer and impartial observer
reflect back to each other an image of well-governed passion, but
only admits within its bounds those individuals already so
disciplined.
Some of the tensions in Smith's model of the sympathetic imagination
can be further explored by returning to Baillie's "Introductory
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
that sets a cash price on one of a number of possible objects, like
Dinely's; nor that which draws a hypothetical lover by means of
enigmas into a common judgment of taste, like those of the _LRB_; it
is the self-advertisement so far deficient in discretion and shame
that it puts the crier outside the bounds of civil society, whence
she engages exclusively in discourse with a singular object whose
absence has expelled all positive notions of home, identity,
belonging, and perhaps even of species, leaving a vacuum penetrable
only by the outline of an impossible narrative of escape. The singer
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
In his discussion of meter in the 1800 Preface, Wordsworth theorizes
an economy of form and content in gendered terms.12 The importance
of poetic meter, he argues, lies in its "restraining" effect on
"excitement [that] may be carried beyond its proper bounds" (1800,
505, 502). Meter as pleasure principle, in which the machinery of
form acts as a restraint on the improper excitations of sentimental
content, rehearses the gender distinctions of Wordsworth's earlier
polemic on poetic diction: just as his "plainer" language will
the aria depends on highly formalized protocols that accommodate the
physiological demands of vocal production to the dramatic
representation of feeling. Without this accommodation, the
vocal-emotional outpouring would appear, in Wordsworth's words,
"pathetic beyond the bounds of pleasure" (1800, 509-10).
Between the formal demands placed on a lyric singer and those
Wordsworth submits to as a lyric poet, I wish to argue, are
differences of degree rather than kind. True virtuosity in poetry,
I will now consider in specific poems of _Lyrical Ballads_ are those
he employs to regulate "operatic" speakers of the kind we have
already met in his translations from Metastasio, namely those
lamenting women and tearful, effeminate men who are most in danger
of carrying "excitement . . . beyond its proper bounds." As we shall
see, Wordsworth's crying game allows for no schoolgirl hysteria, but
has strict rules governing its performance. *[End Page 985]*
Wordsworth's figure of masculine failure, his poet _larmoiant_,
(41-43)
In _Lyrical Ballads_, tears must cease for poetic utterance to
begin. The youth's feelings never discover the creative constraints
of lyric speech and so pass beyond the bounds of pleasure into
improper excitement: "his heart could not sustain / The beauty." The
youth knows rapture but not "the silent hour of inward thought,"
emotion but not tranquility. His tears, therefore, are less an
expression of emotion than a symptom of speech unheard and
restrains the shepherd's deeply sentimental "woes," an effect I have
described as performative or operatic, and which Wordsworth insists
upon in the Preface as necessary for the maximum emotional impact on
the reader. A truly lamenting Shepherd, a threnodic Shepherd, would
carry emotion "beyond the bounds of [aesthetic] pleasure," that is,
beyond poetry itself.
Wordsworth offers a narrative allegory of his principle of formal
restraint at two separate moments in "The Last of the Flock." First,
power of a talking cure. She weeps not because the pain of her
memories has returned, but because she has temporarily ceased to
relate them and thus lost the palliative power of speech. As Freud
perceived, the regulatory power of language keeps emotion within
proper, operable bounds, an effect which, for Wordsworth, is
exponentially intensified by a metrical, unornamented, or "manly"
poetic idiom, what the balladeer makes a point of describing as the
Vagrant Woman's "_artless_ story" (2, my emphasis). Just as the
youth's tears in "Lines left upon a Seat . . ." did not express
narrative allegory of the conditions the poet has set himself for
lyric composition, as "emotion recollected in tranquility." For both
Wordsworth and his many surrogate speakers, the subsiding of tears
into tranquility, the restraint of "excitement" within "proper
bounds," is the condition for telling one's tale of woe. That
Wordsworth in his Preface chose to represent that poetic principle
in masculinist terms—as a manly restraint on the excesses of
"feminine" sensibility—had less impact on the extraordinary
gender experimentation of _Lyrical Ballads_, and its operatic
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
Young American literature to fulfill its promise, Brownson knew that
influence within the popular press led directly to control and influence
among the widest range of readers and potential converts; therefore, his
reviews work steadily to undermine the female ethos of idolatry that he saw
at the heart of both anti-Catholicism and popular literature. Alarmed by the
surrender of Young America to the influence of women, he decried the direct
relationship between "the deification of woman in the natural order, or the
institution of woman-worship" and "the worship of lust... the god of the
modern world" ("Women's" 597).
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
documented for us by the recent rediscovery of his personal copy of the
_Morte D'Arthure,_ and it is clear that one of the things that both
fascinated and no doubt annoyed him about the book (in addition to what Betsy
Bowden, in a review of this reading, dubs the "aimless wandering and fighting
and smiting and betraying and celebrating" [185]) was Malory's language
itself. 23 Twain underlined words and phrases notable for their oddity or
archaism, and at one point he wrote in the margin of his copy: "certain
expressions come suddenly in and become frequent thereafter" (Roberts 173).
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
Stevens's detailed clinical anecdote clarifies the nature of Brown's
participation in "medical discussions" of the disease: the narrator-physician
informs his audience immediately where he stands on *[End Page 231]* debates
over the fever's etiology. Remaining safe, Stevens explains, doesn't require
fleeing the city, avoiding infectious sites, or filling the air with
substances popularly believed to counter the pestilence. Rather, simple
sanitary measures at home, along with careful attention to personal fitness,
will allow him to conduct business even in the "receptacles of infection"
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
classify his diverse surroundings; self-government leads to social authority
as his authoritative narrative drowns out competing voices. "I cannot but
admire the exaggerations of rumor," Brown had ambiguously declared in the
letter to his brother with which I opened this essay. _Admiration._ For it is
the very ability of rumor to seize the imagination, to monopolize the body's
"vital energies," to generate an ever-expanding audience, that the novelist
and medical writers alike most hoped to mimic.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 248-275
Walt Whitman and the Question of Copyright
Martin T. Buinicki
---------------
in 1871. There Whitman writes that in addition to the benefits to be
found in heroes and great events, "even greater would it be to
possess the aggregation of a cluster of mighty poets, artists,
teachers, fit for us, national expressers, comprehending and
effusing for the men and women of the United States, what is
universal, native, common to all, inland and seaboard, northern and
southern. The historians say of ancient Greece, with her
ever-jealous autonomies, cities, and states, that the only positive
unity she ever own'd or receiv'd, was the sad unity of a common
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
In some respects, the turn to North Africa might appear to be
diversionary; *[End Page 408]* Jared Gardner argues that the
conflict with Barbary pirates enabled Americans to overlook the
increasingly tense divisions between Republicans and Federalists:
"All sides could unite in abhorring the pirates, and Federalists and
Republicans alike used the cause to unify Congress and the public in
support of the establishment of a navy. . . . At a time when the
nation had much more serious threats to confront, the Algerian
captive and the exotic, 'oriental' background of this first American
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
reproducing the terminology of the Ostend Manifesto as he shows how
white violence breeds black revolution. As _Blake_ draws to a close
and politico-racial tensions mount, Ambrosina Cordora, daughter of a
upper-class, revolutionary, Cuban woman, is stopped on the street by
an American shopkeeper who, "[s]natching up a horsewhip" and "seizin
her by the breast of the dress rending it in tatters," beats the you
woman mercilessly (311). Fuming with anger after this symbolic if no
literal rape, Ambrosina declares, "I wish I was a man, I'd lay the
city in ashes this night, so I would" (313). Just a few lines later,
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
the universal nature of divinity; the anecdote is still frequently
used to such effect in present-day sermons (Harlan and Smock 410).
28. Ironically, the organizers of the exposition committed the very
sin of conflation that Washington deplores when they lumped
African-Americans with the foreigners and other examples of regional
"local color" exhibited in the hodgepodge "Midway Plaisance": "This
street swarmed with horn-blowing Dahomeyans, gorgeous *[End Page
66]* pig-tailed Chinamen, somber-eyed Mexicans, fat Germans,
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
ground" between the "expensive type" offered around Union Square and
the cheaper goods offered downtown (Gilfoyle 389 n. 28). Again,
Maggie is out of luck. She glances "keenly" at a "young man in light
overcoat and derby hat," who rebukes her, with a "mocking smile,"
for sizing him up as a farmer (52). Although this man is apparently
able to read the signs of prostitution, the next, "[a] laboring man"
with bundles under his arms, is seemingly oblivious to them: to
Maggie's "remarks" he replies, "'It's a fine evenin', ain't it?'"
(52). Another boy tells her, "'Not this eve—some other
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
well as madness and sanity *[End Page 16]* are recurrently put in
doubt, where the narrator is instructed by Maillard to "believe
nothing you hear, and only one half that you see" (703)—the
dubious narrator ultimately praises Maillard's "treatment," his
tarring and feathering of the keepers, as "a very capital one of its
kind" (716). That is, he endorses the hierarchical reversal by which
keepers have become captives (that is, overseers have become
slaves). The fact that Maillard, the superintendent, has himself
become "crazy" and led an insurrection suggests two flatly
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
never occurred to our learned and philosophic lady to ask, if there was not
some relation of cause and effect between the part women took in these
ancient religions, and these filthy rites and shameful practices?" (225).
This sort of aversion to the influence of women on culture led
toacorresponding anxiety about the evolving modes of political participation
for women in the US. As Barbara Welter has pointed out in commenting on his
contributions to the debates between nineteenth-century Catholics and their
nativist adversaries, Brownson "used the presumed model of the Blessed Virgin
to speak against the women's movement... [and] identified the demand for the
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
provides several glimpses of her emergence as a public speaker during the
Civil War. She composed QUOTE during a trip to Washington in late 1861. It
was during that same trip, Howe records, while making a visit to the camps,
that QUOTE ; invited by Colonel William B. Greene of the First Massachusetts
Heavy Artillery to address his men, she ran away twice, "[f]eeling my utter
inability to do this," before finally being able to tell them how glad she
was to meet QUOTE (271). The soldiers' courage, Howe implies, called for a
corresponding courage on her part; given the exposure of men's bodies in
combat, how to refuse them the minor exposure of her own body in eloquence?
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
public arguments about federalism with their private views of marital rights.
De Forest, as well, wrestled with tensions in the marital analogy. In _The
Bloody Chasm,_ political obligation, consent, and gender mutually constitute
the idiom of marriage and romance, but they conflict in thenovel's depiction
of postbellum federalism. De Forest begins bylinking social contract to
principles of obligation and duty grounded in early modern marital
hierarchies. He then modernizes the model by emphasizing ongoing consent, a
legal innovation of modern companionate marriage that significantly departed
from early and premodern nuptial contract. However, by continuing totie
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
on the recognition that the widely distributed modern book or essay could now
do tremendously effective cultural work--eventually made itself known in a
*[End Page 444]* variety of religious circles as well. Didactic religious
operations like the Protestant evangelical American Tract Society, with its
ubiquitous leafleting during the antebellum years, figure as only the most
prominent examples of religious interest in an increasingly powerful and
inexpensive form of modern media. 3 Nor did the utility of "Young America" as
a descriptor of nineteenth-century social, political, aesthetic, and
religious imperatives escape the notice of the mercurial Brownson, who along
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
Wise stopped just short of imposing martial law in Charlestown. He circulated
a proclamation cautioning citizens to remain at home, guarding their property.
The army took over the Winchester and Potomac railroads, refusing passage to
civilians and arresting "strangers" who could not account for themselves.
Further militarizing the scene of Brown�s execution, Wise deployed 1,500
troops around the scaffold. These preparations insured that unruly crowds
would not gather at Brown�s execution. A crowd of vengeful residents was
hardly more attractive to authorities than a crowd of unruly sympathizers.
Virginia represented the law in the face of Brown�s lawless aggression and,
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
Americanist literary scholars.2 As is by now well known, the historicist
tendency is to treat literary characters and their creators alike as the
property of the moment in history that called them into existence. In this
sense, historicism is dedicated to precisely the obverse of the procedure
Sedgwick here employs; not to contravening the linearity of historical time,
but to keeping texts assigned to their proper place in history.3
Consequently, while the historicist procedure of reading a text in relation
to its context often yields valuable insights, it also necessarily imposes a
certain conception of history on the texts of the past—even when, as
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
systems, the individual often feels he must strenuously resist them.
"They pin me down. They look backward and not forward," Emerson
complained in "The American Scholar" (57). Feeling "pinned" seems
the root of McMillin's quarrel with Stephen Whicher, who, "by
charting Emerson, maps out a place for himself and future tourists
in the land ofEmerson" (96). It is not merely that Whicher has
simplified Emerson--who can read Emerson _without_ simplifying
him?--but that, in preceding McMillin, he forces McMillin to attend
to _him_ and _his_ mapping and threatens (in Emerson's conceit) to
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
the War with Mexico. That is to say, if for Anderson, the
nationalist QUOTE produces a sense of QUOTE as it connects different
parts of the nation (25, 36), Lippard's war literature shows how
nationalism works by also particularizing and foregrounding bodies
rather than simply abstracting from and decorporealizing them. If
the QUOTE of national history must be clothed QUOTE in order for
people to respond to it (26), then nationalism as mediated by print
capitalism also depends on thrilling sensations of embodiment.
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
points to issues of reading rather than of being, as none of the
phenotypically indeterminate women featured here wish to _claim_
"whiteness." The inability to attach concrete meaning to ideologically
inflected taxonomies of race and power provokes anxiety for those whose
ciphering ability the texts challenge, be they contemporaneous or
contemporary viewers, readers, and critics or the original
sponsors/amanuenses of the texts themselves.
Mulatta genealogies are the subject of this inquiry not only because
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
to demystify an American historiography then gaining prestige by
inventing a past, constructing a "fable" or narrative of the nation
congruent with what Anthony D. Smith calls a "myth of ethnic
election" as a "chosen people" (130). Poe here resists the
forgetting essential to such mythmaking.
As Nelson has noted (212–14), the Count's remarks on the
"Creation" and the origins of humanity covertly allude to
contemporary debate over monogenesis and polygenesis. At stake is
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
Not coincidentally, perhaps, a subsequent exercise in
antinationalist fabulation, "Some Words with a Mummy," incorporates
the not-quite-subliminal message "all a mistake." Here, a scientific
experiment backfires on Anglo-American savants eager to confirm
their own racial and cultural superiority by unwrapping an Egyptian
mummy named Allamistakeo. In _National Manhood_, Dana Nelson has
delineated the tale's many implications for the rise of white,
democratic manhood, scientific fraternalism, and race theory
(206–16). More pertinent to my argument, however, is its
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
answered, "Cast down your bucket where you are." The captain of the
distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his
bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the
mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on
bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate
the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern
white man, who is their next-door neighbour, I would say: "Cast
down your bucket where you are"—cast it down in making
friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
too does Poe's complex engagement with an emerging national culture.
Far from ignoring ideas popular with the American literati and the
reading public, Poe challenged, exploited, and often mocked them.
And during his turbulent career, as he shuttled between Richmond,
New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, crossing and recrossing the
Mason-Dixon Line, playing the national man of letters in the South
and the exiled Southerner in the North, Poe confronted the
multifaceted project of nation-building that gripped the population
of the US as well as thepublishing world. His long resistance to
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
Buzard, James. _The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways
to "Culture," 1800-1918._ Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Chambers, Bruce. "Thomas Cole and the Ruined Tower." _Currier Gallery of Art
Bulletin_ (Fall 1983): 2-32.
Cherry, Deborah. _Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists._ London:
Routledge, 1993.
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
Africanized and become a second St. Domingo, with all its attendant
horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our ow
neighboring shores...." (266). Fearing such "Africanization" of Cuba
the ministers' rhetoric reached a fever pitch when they claimed that
America was "justified in wresting it from Spain" in order to preven
another black republic from forming in the Caribbean, "upon the very
same principle that would justify an individual in tearing down the
burning house of his neighbor, if there were no other means of
preventing the flames from destroying his own home" (265). For these
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
apparent contradictions within the writings of a reformer who was at once
anti-institutional and the center of a national network of *[End Page 33]*
abolition institutions; antinationalist and the primary advocate for
considering African Americans as national subjects; anti-imperialist and yet
capable of imagining a denationalized republicanism free to extend beyond the
national borders. In the pages that follow, I explore these apparent
contradictions not as weaknesses of Garrison's courage or powers of
conception, but as symptoms of a shift in nineteenth-century social thought,
as the workings of power moved out of the structural life of American society
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 230-253
Book Review ~~~~~~~~~~~ Whose Dickinson?
Cristanne Miller
---------------
individual texts providing clear evidence to the contrary. Franklin
assumes that QUOTE and argues in his introduction that the poet
herself acknowledges this principle because her manuscript copies of
a poem are never identical to each other in scriptural lineation,
slanting of dashes, capitalization, and so on (27). Moreover, in
Franklin's judgment, Dickinson sends only QUOTE copies of poems
(copies without variants) to friends--a pattern he reads as evidence
that manuscripts containing variants are unfinished, whether or not
those manuscripts have been bound into fascicles (18). As he
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
rebellion, led to the burning of a fort, the governor's mansion, and
other government buildings. Ultimately 34 participants were executed
and 77 transported (Linebaugh and Rediker 225-26). Conspiracy was
also a constant threat in the slave trade. There are at least 155
documented cases of captives collectively rebelling on ships
(Rediker 49n86; Rawley 299-300), and it became policy among traders
to carefully select polyglot human cargoes to prevent communication
and organization. Aptheker chronicles numerous insurrectionary
outbursts occurring in the South during the military conflict with
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
thought to be so common that the crutch served as an emblem of
duplicitous begging. A cartoon in the June 1856 issue of Yankee
Notions shows several alarmed citizens looking at what is labeled a
QUOTE The portrait is festooned with wooden crutches, which frame
the image of a woman in madonna-like garb who thumbs her nose at an
apparently respectable group of onlookers (Fig. 1). Another
representation of affected disability, this time of the QUOTE
variety (Fig. 2), features a woman with stereotypically Irish
rhythms of speech whose ruse of blindness is discovered by the man
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
an inventory of nitty-gritty details. Seemingly nothing is left
untouched, from the question of flaring gas chandeliers (a definite
no-no, destined to discolor and ruin everything else you might do in
the way of decorating the room) down to Queen Anne furniture (which
gets a thumbs up, much favored over its Gothic predecessor which was
"very well for those who lived in castles and who needed occasionally
to use it as a means of defence or as a weapon of war," but rather out
of place in nineteenth-century America). 8 The whole essay proceeds
apace in this manner: "But to return to our room," "About the ceiling,"
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
dreams, his close attention to "the very skin of the world" (98),
and his contrary fascination with the closing down of the senses
under anesthesia and in meditation--but it also keeps him fixed in
an essentially, if nondoctrinally, religious context that functions
insomething of the way that a "moral" context functioned for Tauber:
it forestalls open inquiry into the inclusive
consciousness"Thoreau." I have elsewhere sketched my own version of
this monomyth (see especially Milder, chs. 1, 2, and 5), and I see
no reason why Hodder should think as I do, though we observe many of
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
3. On the American Colonization Society, see my "Pedagogical Discipline."
4. Walter Jackson Bate was among the first critics to note the social
function of sympathy in choreographing civic morality in eighteenth-century
England. Bate documents the rise of a specific mode of sympathy that linked
classic conceptions of civic order to an early Romantic focus on states of
feelings, giving rise to a distinctively modern individualism. At the center
of this philosophic development, according to Bate, was Adam Smith's _Theory
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
consider: he represents their voices and their doubts throughout the
chapter. In fact, the narrative at times attends more closely to the
conflicts and exchanges between white men that Black Guinea's
presence prompts than to the beggar himself. 19 A prominent
interpretive strain within twentieth-century scholarship furthers
this emphasis by associating Black Guinea and the novel's other
confidence men with the devil or abstract evil and thus suggesting,
perhaps even insisting, that readers should trust Melville's white
donors rather than his beggar. 20 Nevertheless, the novel's
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
a reading is apropos, given the immediate referent: Poe's
apocalyptic vision of the end of the universe, the collapse of
differentiated matter back into the QUOTE and finally into
nothingness (1277). One must not forget, however, that for Poe
apocalypse cannot be divorced from its reversal, and the reflowering
of matter from a new originary particle into many particles
overshoots what, in this reading, would be the postwar
reconstruction of unity. So while Poe may be stating war as the
unavoidable outcome of sociopolitical tensions that were already
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
3. A Girl of the Crimson Legions
--------------------------------
Maggie's immersion in the phantasmagoric world of the commodity
leads her into the process of commodifying herself. Imitation of
middle-class domestic styles, the fashioning of lambrequins, *[End
Page 606]* takes Maggie from standardized propriety to a
self-destructive immersion in the delusory world of appearance. In
the Bowery beer garden, she wonders at the "splendour" of the
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
Asian subcontinent who resisted British rule. Both races have
suffered from the regnum of Anglo-Saxons convinced of their cultural
and racial superiority, and the prospect of war with Mexico added
yet another dimension in 1844 to the allegory of empire. Poe's
twinning of Bedloe and Mr. Oldeb, the victim of a Bengali poisoned
arrow 47 years earlier, hints that, like British imperialism in
India, American efforts to subjugate dark-skinned, indigenous
populations may have fatal consequences. Probing this embedded
historical analogy, Michael Williams characterizes the tale as
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
complains about "the hateful customs" of Cuba, which permit "the
most stupid and ugly Negro you meet in the street [to] ask for a
'light' from your cigar" (62). In such cases, Ballard "invariably
compl[ies], but as invariably throw[s] away [his] cigar" (62). A
bemused Armsted cannot refrain from gently lampooning the judge's
squeamishness: "You Northerners are a great deal more fastidious
about Negroes than we of the South, and you'll pardon me if I add,
'more nice than wise,' to use a homily. Did ever it occur to you
that black fingers made that cigar, before it entered your white
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
political, and pluralist nationalism (with its corollary image of an
American "melting pot") and the latently homogeneous ethnic and
cultural nationalism tied to a myth of Anglo-Saxon descent. *[End
Page 26]* When Poe inveighed in 1845 against the sin of colonialism,
that aping of "British models" and pirating of English books that
disseminated a "monarchical or aristocratical sentiment...fatal to
democracy" (1374), he seems also to have had in mind the "open and
continuous wrong" of worshiping "the mother land" as the source of
national identity (_Essays_ 1375).
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
the _Opal_ that the asylum was an institution with unprecedented powers to
rescind the liberties of the socially deviant or psychologically aberrant;
that the patients were subject to the physicians' haphazard experimentation
with serious drugs like opium and to their "cures" for problematic behavior
that included cauterizing the genitals of masturbators; that attendants
occasionally beat patients who challenged their authority; and that many of
the patients themselves were violent, tore their clothing to shreds, smeared
their faces with excrement, committed suicide, and ranted or sang out their
hallucinations into the night. 4
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
the responsive suffering of the sympathetic witness or reader as evidence of a
certain ineffectiveness, even self-indulgence, at the heart of sentimental
method.7 They have elaborated on the tendency of sentimental representation to
dwell on the body�s experience and to abstract it--what Shirley Samuels has
referred to as the "corporealizing and transcendentalizing double impulse of
sentimental discourse" (160). Yet rather than viewing both impulses as
integral to sympathetic epistemology (it is this double impulse that allows
the reader to acknowledge the suffering of others and to absorb it as if it
were her own), critics have lauded a sentimental interest in embodiment, while
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
restaurant's solicitation of her eye through its decor of "immense mirrors,
statuary, flowers" (1: 134); the restaurant, like many tourist spots,
positions its consumers as spectators rather than as objects. Kirkland adds,
"though there may be twenty other parties dining... nobody looks at you" (1:
134). 15 In a caf� in Florence she sees, approvingly, a "lady breakfasting
quite alone, with as much nonchalance as if her feet were on her own
fender... with twenty men in sight" (1: 227). The shift from being an object
of visual consumption to being a consumer of other objects and people, occurs
via aesthetic tourism; art authorizes gazing, and seeing others as art--that
_American Literary History_ 15.1 (2003) 14-21
The Claims of Rhetoric: Toward a Historical Poetics (1820-1900)
Shira Wolosky
---------------
andcurtail, the earlier call to republican commitments and the
valueof community as against private concerns. There is in this
*[End Page 16]* women's verse a pressing sense of a double
standard--itself a recurrent image in the sexual sense, but also as
a broad figure of America's bifurcating worlds and conflicting
values.
This poetry is valuable as representations of women's lives but also
raises aesthetic issues that need not be merely dismissed. Much of
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
Lippard's second major strategy is to unify the US nation-people by
repeatedly sketching pictures of endangered, mutilated, or destroyed
US bodies. He often uses bloody, gothic language and imagery to
illustrate the horrors of war. Lippard zooms in on gory scenes where
a Mexican cannonball is unroofing the skull of a US soldier (55); or
where US troops advance through a battlefield strewn with their
comrades QUOTE (82); or where a soldier's lower jaw is torn away
QUOTE (128). Like other prowar writers, he also represents evil
Mexican soldiers mangling and robbing the US dead and wounded as
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
The few specialists in Haitian literature to mention Faubert find his work
characterized by QUOTE QUOTE a QUOTE a vocabulary of QUOTE and the undue
influence of European writers (Berrou and Pompilous 92-93; see also
Gouraige, whose lack of critical interest in Faubert is esp. evident in the
misnaming of the play's main character throughout his discussion). This
dismissal echoes the current consensus on early Haitian writing in general
for its ostensibly repetitive, insular focus on national heroes in
imitative, Eurocentric literary models (e.g., L�on-Fran�ois Hoffmann's QUOTE
[1994]), and for what Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant have called
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
Susan McCaslin's analysis of Eureka as a cosmogonic, socially
vectored poem comparable to Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days and
Horace's Ars Poetica).
4. Without impugning the achievement of Quinn's and Silverman's
biographies, it is worth noting that both use broad strokes to
present their subject's political views. Silverman depends on Poe's
QUOTE and QUOTE portrayal of blacks in QUOTE (1843) and QUOTE (1843)
as evidence that, QUOTE (206-07). Turning to a review in which Poe
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
ringleader in a vast conspiracy to burn the city to the ground, free
the slaves, and install himself as king. Burton also testified that
two slaves, Caesar and Prince, were the leaders of Hughson's "black
guard" and that Hughson had promised them the opportunity to murder
white people, to loot their homes, and to serve as commanders in
what would be their colony's new military. In addition to Hughson,
Caesar, and Prince, the prosecution charged Hughson's wife, Sarah,
and Margaret Kerry, who worked the brothel at Hughson's tavern. She
was also known as Peggy, the "Newfoundland Irish beauty," and "Negro
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
These lordships survive not just like, but literally on, the graves
of the continent's first inhabitants; and their legitimacy is as
good (or as bad) as that of an European aristocrat in possession of
his loot; or indeed, as legitimate as a bastard girl of unknown
origin.
Sacvan Bercovitch argues that Isabel's story is indeed questionable,
but he reads her as a sign of America's immigrant underclasses upon
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, crossing and recrossing the
Mason-Dixon Line, playing the national man of letters in the South
and the exiled Southerner in the North, Poe confronted the
multifaceted project of nation-building that gripped the population
of the US as well as thepublishing world. His long resistance to
literary nationalism, his *[End Page 2]* ridicule of its fundamental
assumptions, and yet his apparent capitulation to the clamor for
American themes during his most productive year, 1844, reveal much
about the illusions, quarrels, and compromises from which
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
spectacle of suffering that Underhill's ballads evoke among Northerners and
Southerners alike. The repetition of suffering that De Forest's novel seeks
to initiate, like the sentimental ballads that it frames, transforms the
"injured" reader (both in and outside the novel's frame) into a properly
sentimental citizen, congealing national feeling through alliances forged in
sorrow. In this sense, Virginia's identification as a "reader" of Underhill's
sentimental ballads enacts the reader's identification with De Forest's
romance, a repetition all the more authentic because of the novel's close
approximation of historical detail and thus the contemporary reader's lived
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 181-211
Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth
Brook Thomas
---------------
she did not in her rebellious earlier days. Nonetheless, she does
not, as Dimmesdale does, submit totally to the state. On the
contrary, she receives the Puritan magistrates' toleration of--and
even admiration of--actions that are not directly under their
supervision. Concerned with counseling and comforting those who feel
marginalized by official Puritan society, especially women whose
attempts at intimacy had failed, those activities extend the
parameters of good citizenship to an interpersonal realm concerned
with affairs of the heart that no affairs of state seem capable of
ELH 66.4 (1999) 965-984
Fathoming "Remembrance": Emily Bronte in Context
Janet Gezari
---------------
family, is their different relation to memory. Lintons recollect;
Earnshaws remember. Thus Isabella Linton, in her last interview with
Nelly, says she can "recollect how happy we were--how happy
Catherine was before [Heathcliff] came." 7 The same sense of
recollection as a voluntary effort of memory, usually comforting, is
active in Nelly's description of Edgar's "resignation" to
Catherine's death: "He recalled her memory with ardent, tender love,
and hopeful aspiring to the better world, where, he doubted not, she
was gone" (W, 2.3.226). Earlier, Nelly has warned Heathcliff against
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
option/threat, but Nora rejects both attempts at containment,
embracing (tragically) a difficult life on the road. Nora thus
becomes Peggy Cavanagh's physical representative, the role of the
abject performed on stage, not as an abstract threat or the
comforting, voiceless other who marks the limit of the [End Page
1021] domestic space but as a flesh and blood woman--the acting and
speaking peasant female whose very existence exposes the injustices
of an economically grounded system of patriarchy.
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
the genuine anthropological achievement of the fair was to be found not
in its exhibit of "men" in the "ethnological villages" along the Midway
Plaisance, but in its vast accumulation of "things." The anthropologist
of the day, after all, devoted a professional life to things: to the
business of securing artifacts from amateur archeologists, of curating
exhibits, of funding fieldwork through the sale of sundry relics to
both individuals and institutions, of sustaining the traffic in
ethnological artifacts by ascertaining and certifying their value. In
retrospect, Chicago's Exposition, no less than the Paris exposition of
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
machinery, on the other! . . . Such is the organ, man's nearest approach to
the creation of a true organism" (638). The organism that begins as QUOTE
--alive, but a created body separate from its creator--morphs over the course
of this paragraph into something more like a cyborg: mechanical tendons
interlacing with human tendons, the human brain shaping itself to the
combined organism's voice.
Still later in the essay, Holmes imagines the organ as something else again,
as that QUOTE a soul able to shape its own body. QUOTE he says, QUOTE (641).
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
counterhistory to the legal, sanctioned forms of moving slaves.
_Blake_ gains its initial momentum, as several scholars note, from
the paradigmatic scene in antislavery novels of the forced breakup
of slave families. The sale of Henry's wife while he is away from
Franks's plantation incites his peripatetic travels stoking
rebellion throughout the slave states. The novel thus yokes the
deeply personal with the political and does so in a way that offers
a direct riposte to nineteenth-century racist beliefs concerning
slaves' supposed inability to form emotionally intimate ties.
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
elicit sympathy, it also fulfilled whites' expectations, proving in
their minds the degradation of the race (caused, many believed, by a
congenital lack of motivation and industry) and the wisdom of
excluding its members from full citizenship. Thus the possibility
that the black beggar is not actually black alarms the donors
because it necessarily undermines those self-congratulatory
associations and unsettles their ingrained tendency to associate
need with marginality. As I have argued, benevolent hierarchies and
racial hierarchies were mutually reinforcing in antebellum culture,
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
light horseman sort of stanza." It seems more than a coincidence
that the years of Scott's significant poetic achievement--the years
in which he compiled the Minstrelsy and wrote his first three
narrative poems--coincided with those years in which there were
recurrent invasion alarms. During this period Scott devoted himself
to his duties as a cavalryman with just as much enthusiasm as he
pursued literature and his legal profession. Scott may be
self-mocking when he describes himself as "a complete hussar," but
it is characteristic of Scott to mock himself when he is at his most
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
in the Tudor claim that Elizabeth I was descended from King
Arthur.19 As a semiotropic device, _hysteron proteron_ challenges
the political hegemony of the status quo by imagining "the world
upsidedown."20 The prospect of a transvalued world in which "the
baby beats the nurse" alarms conservatives, who fear the political
consequences when "quite athwart / Goes all decorum." But radicals
welcome the advent of a _mundus inversus_ , in which the wretched of
the earth triumph over their oppressors, as they do momentarily in
the carnivalesque behaviour condoned during the Feast of Fools.21 In
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
argument, and/or by the conditions of perception itself? Can we
have, and should we want to have, a literary equivalent of Emerson's
"original relation to the universe" ("Nature" 7) like the one
McMillin proposes under the heading of "a natural philosophy
ofreading" (see ch. 6, esp.122-25)? Or are there only different
degrees and kinds of "use," all of them deficient when measured
against an ideal of inclusiveness and balance, but some of them
deliberate, some nearly unconscious; some fertile, some
impoverishing; some overriding or reifying a text, others
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
progress—as well as the conclusions of Euro-American
craniologists—by positioning the Caucasian race as the most
highly evolved. But Count Allamistakeo shatters that assumption by
interpreting the etymology of "Adam" to refer to the "spontaneous
germination...of five vast hordes of men, simultaneously upspringing
in five distinct and nearly equal divisions of the globe" (817).
Although early theorists of race like the notorious Dr. Josiah C.
Nott evoked polygenesis to corroborate absolute racial differences
that (in his mind) legitimated slavery, the Count's assertion of the
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
the institutions of society, are yet very far from their possible and
destined perfection. Still, how far is the present age in advance of that
which drove reformers to a dreary wilderness!—of that which hanged
quakers!—of that which condemned to death, as witches, innocent,
unoffending old women!—But it is unnecessary to heighten the glory of
our risen day by comparing it with the preceding twilight" (15). Because
Sedgwick was also a writer of didactic fiction (and to be sure, _Hope Leslie_
is not without strains of didacticism) it is tempting to read such lines as
moral earnestness. Viewed in this light, this passage reveals Sedgwick's
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
the plot, the first detail also happens to evoke the final threat of
a potential slave conspiracy. A group of slaves walk down the street
after yet another mysterious fire in the spring of 1741, and a white
woman, Mrs. Earle, looking out her window, overhears one of them,
Quack, boast "with a vaporing sort of an air, 'Fire, Fire, Scorch,
Scorch, ALITTLE, damn it, BY-AND-BY,' and then [he] threw up his
hands and laughed" (27). The sequential ordering of events is
fundamental to the chronicle's rhetorical effectiveness; as the
curse is presented as evidence, it acts as a secret code in the
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
Emerson said, "the true preacher... deals out to the people his
life, --life passed through the fire of thought" ("Divinity School
Address" 86), it may be of some importance to consider how life has
tempered that thought. Part of the "life" behind _Walden_ is
Thoreau's struggle for identity, which included unburdening himself
of his illustrious friend, neighbor, mentor, and benefactor. Smith
notes that "Thoreau was not kind to Emerson in _Walden_" (149),
choosing to conceal his personal, literary, and economic debts. "Of
the $13.34 Henry proudly proclaimed was all he needed to earn
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
argument for allegiance to a sovereign nation above the citizen's loyalty to
either region or state. Like the postbellum tradition of reunion romance of
which it was a part, his novel staged the domestic crisis as a
misunderstanding among family members who, while deeply ethical,
compassionate, and loyal, were also misinformed, distrusting, and
self-absorbed.
2. The Re-Union Romance
-----------------------
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 348-354
Melville the Poet: Response to William Spengemann
Elizabeth Renker
---------------
incorporate this new work into syllabi; the nonacademic press will
publish more essays by leading scholars and poets; and the news that
Melville wrote poetry will start to get around. New readers and new
poets will read it in greater numbers than ever before. The poems
apparently missed their chance in the twentieth century, but the
twenty-first century beckons as their new era of discovery.
Four: In the life cycle of English studies, new fields regularly
come into being. In the history of this process, new fields are
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 659-684
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
Philip Gould
---------------
moments he takes control of his body as a symbolic commodity and redeploys
its function. At one point he schemes with another white man, Hempsted Miner,
to appear QUOTE during negotiations in order to lower his market value and
thereby retaliate against his master Stanton: "[A]nd that in return he would
give me a good chance to gain my freedom when I came to live with him. . . .
Not long after, Hemsted Miner purchased me of my master for fifty-six pounds
lawful. He took the chain and padlocks from off me immediately after" (379).
These moments lend irony to Smith's lament that Stanton wished to sell him
only QUOTE (379). For this sort of symbolic speculation is just what Smith
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 181-211
Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth
Brook Thomas
---------------
Letter as civic myth does not advocate obedience to the state or
even primary loyalty to the nation. 10 Instead, it illustrates how
important it is for liberal democracies to maintain the space of an
independent civil society in which alternative obediences and
loyalties are allowed a chance to flourish. It should come as no
surprise then that the novel's power comes more through its love
story than through its politics, or perhaps better put, its politics
reminds us of the importance love stories have for most citizens'
lives.
it would not have had a very long reception history. Even so, by
responding to this emotional aspect of the book, such misreadings do
give us a sense of the book's popular power that critical dismissals
of the love plot miss. A novel or story that simply works on myth
without working with it will have little chance of having a popular
reception. My reading of The Scarlet Letter as civic myth tries to
account for both its long and its popular reception.
12. Of this moment, when the two QUOTE William Dean Howells writes,
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
solidarity with Brown and to commemorate his martyrdom. These meetings gave
the era�s most illustrious thinkers and activists an opportunity to renew
their assault on slavery. They also provided an occasion for fundraising.12
Those attending were often charged a fee at the door while inside they had a
chance to buy Brown paraphernalia--photos of Brown or copies of his courtroom
speech featuring a facsimile of his signature on the back. As well as raising
money for Brown�s family, these meetings disseminated memorial objects that
materialized, and thus fostered, the community�s attachment to Brown.
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
is "intensely rationalistic," compulsively ordering a fantasy world
to leave "no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities" (36).
Conspiracy theory, then, is an amalgam of historical fallacies, such
that paranoid stylists "see only the consequences of power--and this
through distorting lenses--and have little chance to observe its
actual machinery" (39-40).
Yet the two most decisive accounts of conspiracy theory, those of
Bailyn and Gordon Wood, were yet to come. _The Ideological Origins
form"--stressing "consent" of the _convention_ if not the document,
stressing the approval of the _states_ if not all state
delegates--"had been drawn up by Mr. G. M. [Gouverneur Morris] in
order to gain the dissenting members, and put into the hands of
Docr. Franklin that it might have the better chance of success"
(654). This stratagem aimed, in the context of the convention, to
conclude debate without further substantive objections and produce a
statement with the appearance of unanimous support for the
Constitution, since full unanimous support was not forthcoming. The
characterized the Federalist era in similar terms, as "the beginning
of a hiatus in American politics between ideology and motives": "By
using the most popular and democratic rhetoric available to explain
and justify their aristocratic system... the Federalists in 1787
hastened the destruction of whatever chance there was in America for
the growth of an avowedly aristocratic conception of politics and
thereby contributed to the creation of that encompassing liberal
tradition which has mitigated and often obscured the real social
antagonisms of American politics" (_Creation_ 562). What seems
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
responsible only for exhibiting the interesting objects accumulated by
government-sponsored exploring expeditions. Renamed the US National
Museum in 1876, it became responsible for representing natural and
technological history (Goode, "Report in 1893" 3-10). The
transformation of American museums meant eradicating the "chance
assemblage of curiosities," discarding the "cemetery of bric-�-brac,"
and replacing it with a "nursery of living thoughts" (Goode,
"Museum-History" 72; "Museums" 427). As Curtis Hinsley has summarized
this transformation, "the mundane . . . rather than the exceptional"
organization of the scene of history into what would become the "living
history" museum, set in the sort of "period room" itself inaugurated in
1896 by Charles P. Wilcomb at the Oakland Museum in California
(Schlereth). This is a fantasy of unobtrusive intrusion constructed so
that we get a chance to see what we're not really permitted to see, a
chance to see _inside;_ that is, he literalizes _insight_ as a seeing
_in._ Though it was unquestionably Eggleston's archival research in
England that enabled him to thicken his account of the James River
experiment, his own archeological work at the site inspired the
history" museum, set in the sort of "period room" itself inaugurated in
1896 by Charles P. Wilcomb at the Oakland Museum in California
(Schlereth). This is a fantasy of unobtrusive intrusion constructed so
that we get a chance to see what we're not really permitted to see, a
chance to see _inside;_ that is, he literalizes _insight_ as a seeing
_in._ Though it was unquestionably Eggleston's archival research in
England that enabled him to thicken his account of the James River
experiment, his own archeological work at the site inspired the
project. He describes the work at length in a note: as the lone
a boy," she encouraged him to walk over to the shell-heap, allowing the
two women to talk between themselves (438). At its most significant,
then, the shell-heap serves as a distraction.
When the narrator herself finally has the chance to go to the *[End
Page 217]* island, the man who sails her there, Captain Bowden,
presumes she's interested in gathering Indian relics. But the Indian
relics, the shell-heap--these are beside the point. She goes to linger
there where Joanna lived her isolated life. As she walks the path
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
Virginia's aunt, for her part, seizes on the precise term of Virginia's
rhetorical equivocation: "Yes, say _consent_--that is the very word." The
casuistical inference in the repetition of "say" before "consent" underscores
the vexing problem with a postbellum model of political obligation predicated
upon an individual's free consent. After all, what chance did a reconstructed
nation have of securing the true obligation of a people whose consenting
tongues belied dissenting hearts?
The nuptial ceremony occurs in a darkened church between a bride and groom
for the other. In this sense, romances' standard allusion to social contract
is both figurative and literal. They used marriage to model a reconstructed
relationship between federal and state governments *[End Page 286]* that
dated back to Hobbes's and Locke's debates about sovereignty. They took no
chance that the reader might miss the connection between nuptial and social
contract, often weaving the seventeenth-century social contract debates into
the fabric of their myths of national origin.
Reunion romances repeatedly referenced the English Civil War in exploring
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
is guided by a powerful inner sense of himself which brought
coherence to his diverse activities and offered a singular direction
*[End Page 583]* to his life" (214). The young Thoreau regarded
himself in very different terms: "I am a parcel of vain strivings
tied / By a chance bond together, / Dangling this way and that"
(_Poems_ 81). It is difficult to read Thoreau's journal without
feeling that in this respect the child was the father of the man, no
matter how much the terms of the problem (self-fragmentation)
altered over the years. Although Tauber claims to mean by "Thoreau"
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
was always "loaded with trinkets for the squaws" (16). Pourtales, in
his _Journal,_ equivocated: "[E]xperts assure me that there are few
Lucretias among [the Creeks] who resist advances accompanied by
little gifts or who even resist the attack against their modesty
waged by the chance of owning a bottle of whiskey. How would I
know?" (43). *[End Page 697]* When Pourtales was temporarily
separated from the Irving party, lost on the prairie, Ellsworth took
the opportunity to comment on his moral location, writing: "[A]nd
here let me ask if ... it is so dreadful to be lost for a time! What
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
disrupting the unidirectional course of history and reminding the reader to
view even the present historically: "It must be confessed that the tendency
of the [present] age is to laxity; and so rapidly is the wholesome strictness
of primitive times abating, that, should some antiquary, fifty years hence,
in exploring his garret rubbish, chance to cast his eye on our humble pages,
he may be surprised to learn, that even now the Sabbath is observed, in the
interior of New-England, with an almost judaical severity" (164). In this
instance, the narrator projects a future in relation to which her own present
is past. Yet this is not an ordinary example of prolepsis, or temporal
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
In the eighteenth century, public execution was an event in which
the crowd actively participated by bearing witness, interpreting
signs, and, if the punishment was deemed unjust, empathizing with
the victim. It also turned the criminal into the central actor in
the production, the stake-side declaration of guilt a chance to earn
God's forgiveness and to initiate deliverance for a community
afflicted by the criminal's sin. Horsmanden remembers Hughson as a
puzzling text: showing no remorse, he walked to the gallows like a
prizefighter, predicting the miraculous appearance of a sign that
the star witness, if she wished to add anything to her original
testimony. Her memory seemingly prompted by this new concern, she
now remembered that Hughson and Quack talked of their Spanish
partners, who were to be the vanguard of the Spanish invasion. That
same day, perhaps spying a chance at freedom, two
slaves—Jack and Bastian—repeated the same story, and
the magistrates rewarded them with a pardon. *[End Page 395]*
Taken together, the conversion narratives of Hughson and the five
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
Atlantic_ (1993) stresses the distinction between a transnational
traveling "interculture" and fixed nation-states, identifies the
ship as a prominent "chronotope" for the history of African
diaspora: "[S]hips were the living means by which the points within
that Atlantic world were joined. The ship provides a chance to
explore the articulations between the discontinuous histories of
England's ports, its interfaces with the wider world" (17). The
cultural and geographical fluidity embodied by ships in the Atlantic
connects Washington's ships not with America or the South alone, but
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
reaches of this mode is rococo. 19 "Namby-pamby" Philips is its
representative English versifier, as in his short-breathed
(seven-syllable) couplets to the adorable child actress Signora
Cuzzoni, or in a "Song" ("Why we love, and why we hate"), which
attributes the "riddle" of love to "Random chance, or wilful fate,"
without confronting the antinomies in his paired terms, love/hate,
chance/fate. Even Philips, though, finally (and nothing takes him
long), wishes away the child and sighs for the man: "Leave us as we
ought to be / Leave the Britons rough and free." 20 Such
(seven-syllable) couplets to the adorable child actress Signora
Cuzzoni, or in a "Song" ("Why we love, and why we hate"), which
attributes the "riddle" of love to "Random chance, or wilful fate,"
without confronting the antinomies in his paired terms, love/hate,
chance/fate. Even Philips, though, finally (and nothing takes him
long), wishes away the child and sighs for the man: "Leave us as we
ought to be / Leave the Britons rough and free." 20 Such
Anacreontics embody what one of the great pre-World War II
comparatists called "literature as a means of defense." 21
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
nerves" (W, 33, 34). Nor are the villains of the piece immune to
anxiety: Sir Percival Glyde has a fit of trembling before he is sure
of Laura's hand, and there is "suppressed anxiety and agitation in
every line of his face" (W, 149); Count Fosco's "nerves are so
finely strung that he starts at chance noises" (W, 199). Even the
minor characters enter this nervous freemasonry: the "light-haired
man with the scar on his cheek" who belongs to the same mysterious
"Brotherhood" as Count Fosco (and Walter's friend Pesca) has at
least one "long, delicate, nervous hand" (W, 579). I will not
time-bomb while the seconds tick away (the recent Speed [1994] is a
good example). The time of the spectator matches the internal time
of the film as fingers fumble over color-coded wires. Even the most
tedious industrial tasks of assembly/disassembly become the stuff of
drama if there is a chance that the worker will be blown up if he or
she makes a mistake or doesn't work quickly enough.
69. Similarly, it could be argued that Baudelaire's Spleen has its
mirror image in the suspense tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Georg Simmel
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
not of landscape.
That the plot of Tom Jones is improbable seems self-evident, despite
Fielding's insistence that he will not violate probability by introducing
the marvelous. The story abounds with improbable coincidences, chance
meetings, and happy accidents. And yet calling the history of Tom Jones
improbable conflates different meanings and overemphasizes the modern sense
of the word. 32 We can distinguish, for example, probability of events--the
modern sense--from probability of character, or more specifically,
to a "feel for the game" than to an objective set of rules--then Fielding's
practical system begins to look more like a theory. Unlike rules,
habitus--or Manners--have limited predictive power, but they are nonetheless
susceptible to analysis. Each individual action involves an instinctive
assessment of a large array of variables, some determined by chance and some
by complex interactions, and individuals may possess greater or lesser
competence or "feel for the game." 35 For Fielding, the sense of the game is
not innate but learned through conversation; prudence is precisely the
understanding of the manners of others in order to judge probable actions.
sympathetic characters offer providential explanations, they are made the
butt of satire. When Adams admonishes Joseph Andrews to accept what
providence offers, he is interrupted by the news of his son's drowning,
which he is unable to bear with equanimity. Fielding, as Braudy observes,
emphasizes the role of chance in determining events as a corrective to the
naive acceptance of providence. And yet things turn out for Tom Jones just
as if Providence were in effect, which has led critics like Battestin to see
the work as providential. 40 Fielding does seem to invoke providence at one
point: BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
pride to the mortification of a rebut from one, who, for reasons
impossible for you to discover, considers his station far more
unequivocal than your own." 10 Both Bulwer Lytton and Tocqueville
attribute the famous English reserve to the anxiety about misjudging the
suitability of a chance acquaintance. When in doubt, apparently, a snub
was the general rule. [End Page 1017] As John Stuart Mill puts it in The
Autobiography, "everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or no,
exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore." 11
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
of Harden, Wight Willie of Aikwood, and Jamie Telfer of the fair
Dodhead; or the days spent in his father's office refreshing himself
amidst "the barren wilderness of forms and conveyances" by devouring
"like a tiger . . . every collection of old songs or romances that
chance threw in [his] [End Page 866] way." 11 It was Scott's sense
of this difference, after all, that enabled him to maintain at once
a staunch Hanoverian patriotism that expressed itself most
comfortably in a cultivation of the civic virtues and a sentimental
Jacobite nostalgia, rival impulses that powered his first novel and
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
This legal morass--supporting Wollstonecraft's suspicion of "constitutions
formed by chance, and continually patched up"--affects the entire [End Page
946] population's relationship to the land, uniting all, regardless of
religion or class, in their anxiety over ownership. As Morgan writes, "a
feeling of insecurity in all classes prevailed through this anomalous
condition of things; which, while it kept capital out of the country,
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
Marcuse uses (and even from his more tempered reflections in the
preface) speaks to the distance which now separates us from the 1960s
and its language of liberation. If in 1966 Marcuse could still turn to
the international arena and the revolution in Vietnam, specifically, as
a site for at least "the historical chance of turning the wheel of
progress to another direction," what we now face is the opening of
Vietnam to the West and market-oriented economic reforms. 3 Clearly,
given our changed historical moment, the liberation of both eros and
civilization does not lie with an (impossible) return to an equation of
Writing specifically on book collecting, Walter Benjamin links the
collector's passion to the aleatory and to memory: "Every passion
borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the
chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse
the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed
confusion of these books." 24 The books function as Benjaminian ruins,
containing within them a whole host of memories: memories of the cities
in which they were found, of the past, and of the selves congealed in
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
bodily functions that Wollstonecraft for one considered "so very
disgusting." 30 Like the fair Elizabeth the "wondrously fair" Safie
exhibits an "animated eye" and "countenance of angelic beauty and
expression" (F, 144). While an animated eye conveys the animating
mind behind, a static eye only increases the chance that [End Page
572] the viewer's gaze will come to light on the horrific substance
of the eye itself. As Burke observes, "the motion of the eye
contributes to its beauty, by continually shifting its direction"
(E, 118). One look in the "dull yellow" eye of the Creature is
the long-standing connection: "How ugly a person looks upon whose
reputation some awkward aspersion hangs, and how suddenly his
countenance clears up with his character." 38 The Creature himself
is called a "devil" (F, 104) and a "daemon" (F, 112) before he ever
has a chance to speak for himself. Nevertheless, in strictly
aesthetic terms, according to Kant this approach will not do. The
concept of good must be distilled from the ideal of "pure" beauty
since "an estimate formed according to such a standard can never be
purely aesthetic" (C, 80). [End Page 576] It would follow that the
(subhuman) species recalls the downtrodden Jemima from
Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel Maria, who complains that she was
"treated like a creature of another species": "I was . . . hunted
from family to family, [I] belonged to nobody--and nobody cared for
me. I was despised from my birth, and denied the chance of obtaining
a footing for myself in society" (Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman
[1798; New York: W. W. Norton, 1975], 38-40). Although Jemima
ultimately earns a place within society, the Creature's ugliness
blocks all of his efforts to become "linked to the chain of
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
23. Franklin, "Speech in the Convention at the Conclusion of its
Deliberations," in Writings, ed. Lemay, 1140. Hereafter cited
parenthetically in the text and abbreviated S.
24. The new government was like a game of chance, Franklin wrote to
Dupont de Nemours on 9 June 1788, shortly before the Constitution
had been approved: "The players of our game are so many, their ideas
so different, their prejudices so strong and so various, and their
particular interests, independent of the general, seeming so
particular interests, independent of the general, seeming so
opposite, that not a move can be made that is not contested; the
numerous objections confound the understanding; the wisest must
agree to some unreasonable things, that reasonable ones of more
consequence may be obtained; and thus chance has its share in many
of the determinations, so that the play is more like tric-trac with
a box of dice" (in Writings, ed. Smyth, 9:659).
25. Franklin to Charles Carroll, 25 May 1789, in Writings, ed.
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
has grown out of them. Not only do Alger's heroes rarely achieve
riches, settling rather for the humble rewards of office jobs, but
even this small success is never dependent upon the skill and
industry with which they work their street jobs. Rather, Alger's
heroes get their "chance" at respectability through
extra-professional services rendered to the wealthy: it is the
finding and rescuing of wallets and children that most often win
Alger's street-boys their patrons. This is not to say that work is
irrelevant; the newsboy Rufus, for example, is called "Rough and
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
The archaeologist who "digs and measures in the mummy-pits and
pyramids of Thebes" (241) provides a further illustration of the
same idea. What he's apt to call research into "the emphatic facts
of history" Emerson presents as a search for empathic opportunities.
So far as the archaeologist has a chance of understanding "the
monstrous work," he must be able "to see the end of the difference
between the monstrous work and himself." For the "problem" of the
mummy-pits and pyramids will be "solved" only when the interpreter
has satisfied himself that such things were "made by such a person
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
of course, have to switch between one and the other), she animates
and misanimates, lending herself to her labor at the same time that
she stylizes it the wrong way. Sir Jaspar's "reverential"
acknowledgement of this wrongness suggests how much Burney has at
stake: the chance that labor and rank might be merely [End Page 978]
two competing performances, whose arbitration can only be settled by
narrative insistence, represents the deepest historical threat to
the wanderer's imagined transmutation of aristocratic being. In her
efforts to support herself, the wanderer is in danger of affirming
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
private life. We preserve this struggle, Hazlitt argues in a final
turn of the screw, because our protection from others depends upon
it; our humiliation would otherwise give them exquisite joy. The
very satisfaction that we obtain from art must therefore block any
chance that we will become objects of ridicule for others: "The
history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy," he says,
"constructed upon the principles of _poetical justice_; it is a
noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to
the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
union perhaps hinted at in Douglass's idea of "intercourse of
nations," of "nationalities. . . being swallowed up." Finally, then,
by collapsing bodily boundaries in creating one national body,
telegraphic discourse encouraged the possibility of a mulatto
American identity, the chance that the national body it produced was
a multiracial body, a threatening possibility already staged in the
cultural practices surrounding minstrel songs like "O Susanna." In
closing, I will focus on the bodily implications of telegraphic
union, drawing upon Whitman's poetry to suggest how the telegraphic
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
his watch" (_A_, 183). Less thrilling perhaps than the feel of the
tightening clasp, such release from all that reminds Hetty of the
claims of others helps make her assignation with Arthur well worth a
walk in the woods, if not all the woe that follows from it. For
Arthur himself, the chance to forget for a moment his craving for
the approbation of others must come as a relief, although it comes
as well at the unbearable cost of relinquishing it forever in the
"scandal . . . among tenants by whom he liked, above all to be
respected" (_A_, 184).
---
We will return to assess the status of the sexual as the primal
scene of a social withdrawal this acute, but not before we have had
a chance to review something simpler--simply the frequency and
variety of the inclination to social withdrawal more generally. Just
as they do in real life, people go to considerable lengths to get
away from others in the nineteenth-century novel, and to get others
away from them. For those as keen about their labor as Hetty is not,
Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and
sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed
among hindrances, instead of centering on some long-recognizable
deed." The "passionate ideal nature" that this latter day Theresa
has no chance to ground in monumental accomplishment secures instead
the eternal life of the figure, who before our eyes, laughing or
crying, exits the stage for good before the final curtain has fallen
(_M_, 4). This "offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur" fails to
gain a happy seat at the table of saints or epic heroes, but she
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
asking whether in fact such hyperbolic virtue serves its purpose. These
competing perspectives finally break the novel open in the two versions of
the final chapter. The first ending, in which Caleb encounters Falkland one
last time, fails to alter his antagonist in any way, and ends up imprisoned
and mad, gives Caleb the chance to act out the fantasy that he is the
solitary truthteller in the face of a closed and total system of oppression.
But it also exposes the failure of this fantasy, its impotence in the face of
what it opposes. The novel is caught between two closed orders, tyranny and
resistance, without indicating any way beyond them. In the second, published
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
everyone is transformed. That is, not only is Rome a land of ruins,
it is also the land that ruins individuality. The exuberantly
figurative atmosphere of Rome is, as one would expect, incomparably
productive of art and destructive of particularity. Rome initiates
the possibility of universal analogies: the chance that everything
can seem to be something else. Hilda, the pure and innocent
"daughter of the Puritans" (_M_, 54), and Miriam, the dark and
fallen European, both look remarkably similar to Guido Reni's
portrait of Beatrice Cenci; Miriam's tormentor, who works (at least
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
status might shift radically, down or up. Some canny speculators
managed to convert unpredictable river levels into capital. "When
the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in
the country, and therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his
chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark
night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short time .
. . the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch,
and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank, quadrupling its
value."21
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
novel they considered immoral simply by refusing to stock or distribute it.
Until the 1880s, then, when the circulating libraries voluntarily agreed to
abandon the triple-decker format, neither the literary value associated with
sales and the public nor whatever standards journalists might try to
establish had a chance of acquiring the cultural authority necessary to
transform the literary field.
Some changes did occur in the Victorian literary field, of course, and they
deserve mention here. Beginning in 1859, when _Macmillan's Magazine_ was
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
which extends the comparison between cetacean and human reproductive
and nursery habits, it has seldom been noticed that an economic
imperative cuts violently through the idealized maternal imagery:51
When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by
the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and blood rivallingly
discolor the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has
been tasted by men; it might do well with strawberries.
(_M_, 303 n. 7)
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
De Quincey's hero lives instead on intimate terms with strangers. As
a runaway he occupies a makeshift bed for weeks with a forsaken
child about whom he knows little, but whom "I loved . . . because
she was a partner in my wretchedness" (_C_, 20). Ann is the very
type of the stranger, the human being "that chance might fling my
way" with whom "it has been my pride to converse familiarly" (_C_,
20), and she is "loved . . . as affectionately as if she had been my
sister" (_C_, 27). Ann's name suggests her status as first comer;
not only does De Quincey not know her family name, but her given
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
strays between two crucial points of a narrative: how the thing went
missing and how it will return. But the narrative itself is
sedulously avoided. Whether owners believed that lengthy
concatenations of cause and effect might breach the code of secrecy
and silence that payback demands, and lose them forever the chance
repairing their loss; or whether they lacked the confidence in
ownership that a narrative of possession requires, they never give
the history of their property. They stick to description and what
Wolfram Schmidgen calls its "trembling search for a clear sense of
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
within the insulated frame of a fairytale-like episode between a
little girl and her pet lamb.
In "The Pet Lamb," as in so many poems from _Lyrical Ballads_, the
balladeer assumes the role of lyric opportunist, recording chance
encounters on the public way. From his "shady place," where he is
*[End Page 990]* "unobserved" (17-18), the sentimental spy finds
himself fascinated by the scene of pained departure between little
"Barbara Lewthwaite" and her pet lamb. He studies the "workings" of
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
technological accomplishment would not be without its detractors: "A dark
outlook for comparative philologists," they muse: technology may replace
learned linguists in the study of the self (132). And, finally, in a set of
images worthy of Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_ itself, they imagine the
electric light deployed across the world, dispelling ignorance and even
history itself: "The soft gloom of Oriental bazaars, with their perfumed and
mysterious recesses, the sculptured avenues of colossal temples; the quaint
strongholds of medi�valism; the primitive structures of rude and uncultured
races; these were brought under new dominion, and despoiled of such lingering
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 348-354
Melville the Poet: Response to William Spengemann
Elizabeth Renker
---------------
Hollander's contribution but also has actively advocated the poems,
publishing her own selected edition and writing in numerous
nonacademic intellectual magazines and literary quarterlies about
their greatness. Rosanna Warren, daughter of Robert Penn Warren (who
spent decades reading, meditating on, and publishing about Melville
as poet), recently argued that "[o]nly poetry of the highest order
weaves its strands of sound so complexly into its semantic and
syntactic orders, converting the arbitrary into the provisionally
significant. . . . Melville found himself writing poems of
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
instructions to heart, and we know that specific volunteer contributors were
reading widely in contemporary novels and contributing their slips of paper
to the _Dictionary_'s office. 31 Thus, a review of the entries from
_Connecticut Yankee_ can chart something of a critical response: a marker of
contemporary taste, but also of what may have been preoccupying the
individual reader. Take a word like _monotonousness_--not much to it, but
Twain's commentary on political journalism must have struck a weary
contributor to the _Dictionary:_ "There is a profound monotonousness about
its facts." Or take the entry for the verb _push,_ using this quotation
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
in the civilized nation that will not hold... the compact a fraud?"
(_Congressional Globe_ 13). On these grounds, Wigfall declared the national
contract "voidable," granting that "according to the law of nations, each one
of these States has the right to secede." 17 But, as Reconstruction would
teach De Forest, redacting social contract through the formula of commercial
contract came at a heavy price. While commercial contract explained political
obligation in clear terms, it obviated social ties not easily articulated
with the *[End Page 289]* rational calculus of fiscal exchange. Loyalty,
duty, commitment, self-sacrifice, and love are motivations incomprehensible
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
viable analogy for the South's willing reconciliation, *[End Page 297]* De
Forest begins his reunion allegory with an arranged marriage that downplays
the problem of consent under duress.
By closely paralleling postbellum conditions, _The Bloody Chasm_ furnished a
script that allowed readers to collectively rehearse the drama of
reconciliation. De Forest addressed Reconstruction's political dilemmas by
portraying a legal ground for marital consent more complex than the marriage
analogy that had governed constitutional debates since Hobbes and Locke. He
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
landscape tourism in the 1820s in the US (75). Richard H. Brodhead discusses
travel writing in late-nineteenth-century American periodicals as embodying
an elite perspective (125-31). William W. Stowe considers travel as a social
"ritual" (16-28) and argues that nineteenth-century guidebooks positioned
tourists as bearers of a "subjugating gaze" that "elevates the tourists and
their class, race, gender, and nation to the position of the authoritative
knower" (48). James Buzard defines tourism as "an exemplary cultural practice
of modern liberal democracies" in its claim to popular accessibility and its
simultaneous masking of the material inequalities of class, gender, and
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
found that BLOCKQUOTE
Douglass's active promotion of the "paranoid style" is grounded in
the praxis of both organized flight and resistance--his "invisible
agency"--and, harkening back to his discussion of the overseer
Covey, practices of slaveowners' surveillance (56-57).
We should also recall the legal meaning of _conspiracy_ during this
period. Richard B. Morris maintains that in court practice, and in a
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
particular individual identity, but an identity as aspecifically
national subject, Delany's passage also ironically highlights
America's historical linkage of citizenship and whiteness. He is
thus appropriating one of the prime signifiers of antebellum
whiteness as an ironic textual metaphor for escaping thedebilitating
effects of a white apartheid culture, for moving "_through_ that
White Gap _to_ freedom."
By invoking this image of passports, _Blake_ represents the passage
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
The civic poet summoned in the conclusion to Fields's QUOTE will win the
Civil War by purely aesthetic means: by staying at home, vibrating with
responsive sympathy, and felling slavery with song--by means of the
transmission of culture, in short. And unlike military sacrifices, of course,
these means of waging war were fully available to women of Fields's education
and class. 8
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
28. This is the lingering hypothesis about his mysterious death.
Arthur Hobson Quinn calls "vivid pictures" of Poe being "drugged,
taken from one polling place to another" entirely "problematical."
Yet after noting that newspapers made no connection with election
violence, he speculates that the practice of "cooping" might have
been so well known that such mention was "unnecessary" (639).
Kenneth Silverman notes the coincidence of election day but insists
"no reliable evidence" supports theories about political
manipulation (433). Whether or not Poe was the victim of political
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
Levy, Andrew. The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
Limon, John. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A
Disciplinary History of American Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1990.
Maddison, Carol Hopkins. QUOTE Texas Studies in Language and
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 659-684
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
Philip Gould
---------------
Liberty Press, 1983.
Rossiter, Clinton, ed. The Federalist Papers. New York: Penguin, 1961.
Rothen, Winifred Barr. From Market-Place to Market Economy: The
Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1992.
Ruttenberg, Nancy. Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
American Renaissance. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
Carey, Mathew. Preface. Essays on the Public Charities of
Philadelphia, Intended to Vindicate the Benevolent Societies of the
City from the Charge of Encouraging Idleness, and to Place in Strong
Relief, Before an Enlightened Public, the Sufferings and Oppression
under which the Greater Part of the Females Labour, Who Depend on
their Industry for a Support for Themselves and Children. 4th ed.
Philadelphia: J. Clarke, 1829.
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
Wild West show that Slotkin has called QUOTE in the late nineteenth
century (Gunfighter Nation 87). But another influential narrative
about Buntline and popular culture turns eastward, especially to New
York City, focusing particularly on Buntline's participation in the
Astor Place theater riot, his role in shaping white working-class
culture through various forms of sensational literature such as
journalism and the urban melodrama, and his significance in the
story of the emerging split between high culture and mass culture. 9
In 1848, Buntline began to write massive, muckraking
readers, who were drawn to his sensational stories as well as,
presumably, the notices for meetings of nativist organizations such
as the Order of United Americans and the Order of United American
Mechanics that appeared in its columns. He was also jailed for
inciting the Astor Place theater riot, which Lawrence Levine
suggests marked the emergence of a split between high and low
cultures in the mid-nineteenth century (68-69). If, as Eric Lott
argues, the Astor [End Page 5] Place riot indicates a QUOTE (67),
then Buntline was an important figure and producer within that
Mechanics that appeared in its columns. He was also jailed for
inciting the Astor Place theater riot, which Lawrence Levine
suggests marked the emergence of a split between high and low
cultures in the mid-nineteenth century (68-69). If, as Eric Lott
argues, the Astor [End Page 5] Place riot indicates a QUOTE (67),
then Buntline was an important figure and producer within that
sphere.
While both of these accounts--one which focuses on public culture
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
Angert, Eugene H. "Is Mark Twain Dead?" North American Review 190
(1909): 319-29.
Atwan, Robert. "The Territory Behind: Mark Twain and His
Autobiographies." Located Lives: Place and Idea in Southern
Autobiography. Ed. J. Bill Berry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990.
39-51.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
layered republicanisms--a crude, unifying one for the Army; a more
sophisticated one for Federalist elites--and of the strategic,
"artful" uses of republican discourse.
In her _Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory_
(1996), Margaret Archer has lamented the "conceptual poverty" of
cultural analysis, stressing in particular the "glaring lack of
descriptive cultural 'units'" (xii-xiii). She takes as her starting
point the "Myth of Cultural Integration," which levels something
Aptheker, Herbert. _American Negro Slave Revolts._ New York:
International, 1963.
Archer, Margaret. _Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in
Social Theory._ Rev. ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Bailyn, Bernard, ed. _The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and
Anti-Federalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
----. _Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne,
and Melville._ New York: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Limon, John. _The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary
History of American Writing._ New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Manley, James R. _An Inaugural Dissertation on the Yellow Fever, Submitted
tothe Public Examination of the Faculty of Physic under the authority of
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
manifest destiny achieved hegemonic force, I argue, the many and
varied possible worlds generated by Western commerce continued to
challenge its blunt assumptions. 5
1. The Politics of Place
------------------------
The problem of depicting a physical environment or a landscape
dominated by economic irrationality is significant. To borrow the
Colorado Territory, enabling the shockingly brutal Sand Creek
Massacre of 1864, where 200 or more American Indians were killed and
brutally mutilated (Brown 86). 17
4. Dislocations: Place and Accountability in Trading Narratives
---------------------------------------------------------------
While the hybrid may have been specifically associated with the
transformative-destructive potential of trade, all traders were
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
_Essays in Our Changing Order_. Ed. Leon Ardzrooni. New York:
Viking, 1934. 65-77.
——. "Some Neglected Points in the Theory of
Socialism." 1892. _The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and
Other Essays_. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1990.
——. _The Theory of the Leisure Class_. 1899.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
Culture_ Kaplan persuasively argues that domestic and national
culture were inextricably linked to the US seizure of an overseas
empire between the 1840s and World War I. For a broad survey of how
cultural geography has influenced American literary critics, see
Sara Blair, "Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary,"
_American Literary History_ 10.3 (1998): 544–67.
3. On Jewett's complicity with "the vacationing habits of an urban
upper class," see Brodhead 144–49; for a broader discussion
Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua. _Nicaragua: The Gateway to the
Pacific_. 1895.
Massey, Doreen B. _Space, Place, and Gender_. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1994.
Metcalf, Barbara D., and Thomas R. Metcalf. _A Concise History of
India_. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
Apess, William. "Eulogy on King Philip." _On Our Own Ground: The
Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot_. Ed. Barry O'Connell.
Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992. 277–310.
Baym, Nina. "Putting Women in their Place: The Last of the Mohicans
and Other Indian Stories." _Feminism and American Literary History_.
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992. 19–35.
Benesch, Klaus. "Do Machines Make History? Technological Determinism
Scheckel, Susan. _The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism
in Nineteenth-Century American Culture_. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1998.
Seelye, John. _Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock_. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998.
Sellers, Charles. "The Election of 1844." _History of American
Presidential Elections, 1789–1968_. Ed. Arthur M.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
to York, out to the towns of the Thames [End Page 473] valley, in
and around the swelling villages that were rapidly becoming London."
61 The sensation novel sees this mobility reach its full-blown form.
In the briskly paced Lady Audley's Secret, for example, amateur
detective Robert Audley shuttles between London, Audley Place,
Southhampton, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Dorsetshire, and Yorkshire, in
search of clues, taking expresses wherever possible, and fretting
when he has to take a slower train. The temporal frame of reference
of the story is filled out with references to the 10:50 (express)
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
concern not only money, but maintaining their status. They are willing to
accept change as long as they can maintain their place in a new social
order.
Place is foundational for Fielding's theory of historical change; he is not
concerned with the absolute value or meaning of individual actions, but of
actions performed in a particular field of circumstances. He teases readers
by mentioning "the great, useful and uncommon Doctrine, which it is the
Purpose of this whole Work to inculcate" without specifying precisely what
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
Theory, ed. Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling (Evanston: Northwestern
Univ. Press, 1993); Beyond Poststructuralism: The Speculations of Theory and
the Experience of Reading, ed. Wendell V. Harris (University Park: Penn State
Univ. Press, 1996); and Eugene Goodheart, The Reign of Ideology (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1997); see also Timothy Peltason, "The Place of
Reading: Graduate Education and the Literature Classroom," ADE Bulletin 113
(1996): 9-12.
2. Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist, Part 1" (1890), in Oscar Wilde: The
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
Franklin presents it is a dangerous place, full of passions,
self-interest, secrets, and masquerade. Images of liquidity,
instability, and risk abound, from [End Page 722] the "drunken
Dutchman" who "fell overboard" on the boat to Philadelphia (A, 17),
to the "Croaker" who warned that "Philadelphia was a sinking Place"
in the very year that Franklin opened his "new Printing-House" (A,
47), to the many who sink or swim amid the fluctuations of the
market economy. Like the increased social interest in the art of
swimming that went hand-in-hand in the eighteenth century with
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
Eighteenth-Century Racism," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture: Racism
in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland: Case Western
Reserve Univ. Press, 1973), 245-62; Michael Banton, Racial Theories
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987); John C. Greene, "The American
Debate on the Negro's Place in Nature, 1780-1815," in Race, Gender, and Rank:
Early Modern Ideas of Humanity, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Rochester: Univ.
of Rochester Press, 1992), 64-76; Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity:
Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); and Robyn Wiegman, American
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
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Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
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Kerry Larson
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_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
34. Franklin Carter, "Study of Modern Languages in our Higher
Institutions," _PMLA_ 2 (1886): 19.
35. F. V. N. Painter, "A Modern Classical Course," _PMLA_ 1
(1884-1885): 114; Theodore W. Hunt, "The Place of English on the
College Curriculum," _PMLA_ 1 (1884-1885): 126. *[End Page 295]*
36. Garnett, 73; William H. Payne, _Contributions to The Science of
Education_ (New York: Harper, 1886), 58.
82. Thomas R. Price, "The New Function of Modern Language Teaching,"
_PMLA_ 16 (1901): 88.
83. Moulton, _World Literature, and Its Place in General Culture_ (New
York: MacMillan, 1911), 448.
84. See John Higham, _Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American
Nativism, 1860-1925_ (1955; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1973).
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
of the picturesque, see Daniel Cottom, _The Civilized Imagination: A
Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott_
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1958), 1-32.
19. John Barrell, _The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place
1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare_ (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), 5, 2.
20. Raymond Williams discusses the ideological work of the
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
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The Romance of the Impossible:
William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
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David Collings
--------------
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 141-165
William Blake's Androgynous Ego-Ideal
Tom Hayes _Baruch College and The Graduate Center_ _City University of New York _
---------------
inaccessible."26 In _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ Blake states
unequivocally: "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called the
Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses" (_CPP_, 4), and in _A
Vision of the Last Judgment_ he notes: "Mental Things are alone Real; what is
call'd Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place" (_CPP_, 565).27
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Click for larger view *Figure 5*
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 230-253
Book Review ~~~~~~~~~~~ Whose Dickinson?
Cristanne Miller
---------------
the death of biographical criticism. With the later demise of New
Criticism, we saw the death of the QUOTE and the fallacy of
regarding any text as an isolated icon, or QUOTE With the rise of
first New Historicism and then cultural studies, we see the
reembedding of texts in rich (social) historical as well as
theoretical contexts. Feminist criticism has argued powerfully in
each of these modes of reading and revived the author (complete with
biography) under the aegis of the argument that women and other
marginalized writers have not had an authorial position to lose. In
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
voices, over organ music in general, Howe takes special exception to the
organ's mechanical means of amplifying human agency. The organ's QUOTE make
one [End Page 231] man seem like a hundred, like a host--a kind of prosthetic
godhood she finds ugly, irreligious, objectionable as a model for civil
society, and implicitly insulting to the real bodies of the Union armies in
their hour of peril. This is precisely the power of the organ that Holmes
most celebrates in his essay QUOTE Nor does he stop at simply praising QUOTE
(640). Reasoning from the organ's power to generate within its mechanisms all
of QUOTE Holmes deduces that the organ is all but alive. QUOTE he punningly
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
9. Peter Buckley's unpublished 1984 dissertation, QUOTE is still the
best source for information on Buntline. See also Buckley, QUOTE
(1988) and Monaghan.
10. In the 1850s, however, Buntline would promote filibustering
expeditions to take over Cuba, in part because of his proslavery
allegiances; this imperial enterprise was supported by proslavery
Southerners who wanted to expand that institution. See Monaghan 194.
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
disappeared its communicative powers were lost. At Gettysburg, the identity of
the dead body and the particulars of its demise have no place. What remains
important, however, is the ability of the dead to sustain community. The
brevity of Lincoln�s address at Gettysburg suggests humility: what is there to
say, he implies, in the face of such profound loss? Observing that "in a
larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not
hallow--this ground," Lincoln describes a nation of mourners similarly humbled
by the spectacle of mass death (405). Portraying [End Page 661] himself and
his fellows as nearly immobilized by the tragedy of war, Lincoln grants
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
incarnations occurred earlier and owed much to the perception among
the QUOTE that duplicity represented a pressing, if remediable,
threat.
Some, of course, resisted this emphasis on ferreting out [End Page
694] trickster-beggars. A number of antebellum authors, especially
those who wrote poems and stories aimed at children, represented
beggars' uninvestigated claims as entirely credible and urged
readers to be generous. 10 A few commentators, such as the prominent
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
alternate knowledge of the plot.
In the eighteenth century, public execution was an event in which
the crowd actively participated by bearing witness, interpreting
signs, and, if the punishment was deemed unjust, empathizing with
the victim. It also turned the criminal into the central actor in
the production, the stake-side declaration of guilt a chance to earn
God's forgiveness and to initiate deliverance for a community
afflicted by the criminal's sin. Horsmanden remembers Hughson as a
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
principles, if not the purposes, that structured Brown�s abolitionism and led
him to radical action at Harpers Ferry. Like other abolitionists, Brown saw
slave suffering as a catalyst for identifications that might further
resistance to slavery. In the weeks before his execution, he described his
impending death as the consequence of his sympathy for slaves and hoped that
his public suffering would prompt others to action. When applied to the
problem of wartime nationalism--how to create an affective bond between state
and citizen strong enough to compel the citizen�s willing
self-sacrifice--Brown�s own belief that pain produces political community
On 2 November 1859, Brown, having been convicted of treason, conspiring with
slaves to rebel, and murder in the first degree, was given an opportunity to
address the court. In this speech, Brown went some distance toward shaping the
meaning of his death for his contemporaries as well as future historians.
Brown embraced his impending execution with the following words: "Now, if it
is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the
ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and
with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded
by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,--I submit; so let it be done!" (qtd.
ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and
with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded
by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,--I submit; so let it be done!" (qtd.
in Scheidenhelm 36-37). In a sweeping rhetorical gesture made meaningful by
his impending death on the scaffold, Brown used the figure of blood to ally
his extraordinary fate with the routine abuse of slaves. Blood, imagined here
as a sort of universal fluid, unites Brown, his family, and countless slaves.
Combining his lifeblood with the "blood of millions," Brown participates in,
and radicalizes, a tradition of abolitionist sympathy that describes slave
rendered this figure obsolete. Similarly, I believe that representations of
martyred slaves continue to exert influence as they are absorbed, and nearly
eclipsed, by representations of martyred white soldiers.
4. This is how Brown liked to refer to his impending execution. Paul
Finkelman has edited an important collection of essays that survey responses
to Brown�s raid, trial, imprisonment, and execution. Unlike earlier
scholarship, which concentrates on Brown�s biography and his character, His
Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
2. Several years before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Brownson had
caused a political firestorm with the publication of his remarkable essay
"The Laboring Classes" in the July 1840 number of the _Boston Quarterly
Review._ Stimulated by the Great Depression of 1837 and writing with an eye
toward the impending Democratic versus Whig presidential election of 1840,
Brownson's proto-Marxian essay predicted violent insurrection by the working
classes. Aspartial remedies to the crisis among wage laborers, he went on to
advocate that the current banking system--which represented the interests of
employers and merchants--be dismantled and that the hereditary descent of
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
the citizenry and devise plans for taking over the island itself. Th
sets up Delany's final move in his depiction of the several forms th
property disputes took in this period, as he ends the novel by turni
to the contentious question of what nation would claim Cuba as its
property and on what grounds. As the final chapters depict impending
revolt on the island and highlight the various attitudes toward Cuba
held by American businessmen, Spanish politicians, Cuban slaves, and
free people of color, the novel also, coincidently, brings readers
back to the connections between presidential politics and notions of
antebellum ideas. While even Delany in his later years omitted his
only and largely forgotten novel in discussions of his eventful life
imaginative literature's ability to reconfigure dominant *[End Page
727]* beliefs, and perhaps thereby shake them, must have figured in
his decision to write a novel of impending black revolution. And
again, even though Delany's scant remarks on the novel imply that it
was mostly motivated by a desire to earn money that could finance hi
trip to scout out Africa's potential as a site for a black American
emigrant colony (Levine 178-79), this dismissive explanation turns o
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
revolutionary resistance, and to the cultural practices of the
immediate post-Revolutionary era, but a scholarly consensus locates
the decisive, self-conscious work of nation-building in the decades
between 1820 and 1850, between the great compromises that signaled
the onset and then impending explosion of sectional differences that
complicated and delayed the reification of American nationhood.2
Much has already been made of the taunt of Sydney Smith, who in 1820
triggered a periodical war by asking in the _Edinburgh Review_, "In
the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or *[End
1: 262). That energy continued through early December, when he
apparently composed "Some Words with a Mummy" and perhaps "The
Raven," the poem that would soon make him a literary celebrity.25
But Poe's story about Egyptology, race theory, and national destiny
contains a hint of impending disaster. After his encounter with the
talking mummy, the narrator renounces his faith in progress (and
perhaps Anglo-Saxon preeminence as well) when he decides to get
himself embalmed: "The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life and
of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything
the equivocal national narratives of the 1850s examined in Priscilla
Wald's _Constituting Americans_ and Powell's _Ruthless
Democracy—_ tensions that arguably inspired Walt Whitman's
"Preface" to _Leaves of Grass_ (1855), that eloquent appeal to
national unity in the face of impending cataclysm.27 But one may
argue retrospectively that the cultural politics of
1844—Poe's wonder year—first exposed the aporia at
the heart of American nation-building: the gap between acivic,
political, and pluralist nationalism (with its corollary image of an
Oblong Box," arguing that the sinking of the _Independence_ due to
"a tremendously heavy blow from the southwest" (Poe, _Poetry_ 650)
alludes to Texas annexation and the threat of war with Mexico. She
associates multiple references to Wyatt's "state-room" with the
"constitutional crisis" impending in the US over slavery and
connects the "peculiar" odor emanating from the box with the
"peculiar institution" (210–11).
20. The dates can be thus established: the departure was scheduled
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
the error of her social ways, but will be forced to accept that her
identification of wittiness as the source of her illness is itself
an error.
The narrative of Lady Delacour's impending death runs through the
bulk of _Belinda_. Towards the end, however, Belinda persuades her
to agree to have a doctor--the novel's likable expert, Dr. X--look
at her breast. After the meeting, Belinda is happy to report that
Lady Delacour was never ill at all, although the household had been
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
victimization by prostrating herself: "Then she lay down in the
street, / Right before the horses' feet, / Expecting, with a patient
eye, / Murder, Fraud and Anarchy" (_MA_, 98-101). The word
"Expecting," after her own comments about father Time having "child
after child" (_MA_, 94) implies her impending victimization as both
waiting and potential birth.
Instead of the expected violation, however, Shelley disrupts the
dynamic with an abstract revolutionary force, "a mist, a light, an
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
about to change from slave to freeman as they simultaneously change
from one garb to another. By linking the potential transformation of
slaves into citizens to a departure from a realm in which exterior
and interior states correspond, Hawthorne suggests that the
impending transformation of the slave is superficial, a
metamorphosis that should not be mistaken for evolution or true
progress, but only as a masking of the slave's nature.
Hawthorne, thus, has not mistaken a social sign (clothes) for a
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
several areas of American life. By the mid-nineteenth century, the
growth and global expansion of the nation's economy following the
War of 1812, and the pugnacious expansionism exemplified by the
Mexican War and the ideology of manifest destiny, were giving way to
signs of strain and impending civil discord: 1850 and 1851, the
years during which Melville wrote his novel, were the years of the
doomed compromise between opponents and proponents of slavery.
The oceans provided a space in which these contending currents met
continue to harness, exploit, and foment precisely that immanent
power of production that . . . might at any given moment overflow
beyond its confines, spin out of control, exceed itself, and bring
about the catastrophe of a crisis beyond crisis."45 Michael Paul
Rogin identifies a key moment in this impending crisis when he
relates the composition of _Moby-Dick_ to a decision by Chief
Justice Lemuel Shaw, who in April 1851 declared the Fugitive Slave
Law constitutional, thereby returning Thomas Sims, an escaped slave,
to servitude in Georgia. The verdict, which provoked public outrage,
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
scene where he, Judge Ballard, and Colonel Franks witness the
tormented Jim Crow dancing of a young slave boy who is compelled by
the crack of a whip on his bare skin. During this scene of torture,
"Franks stood looking on with unmoved muscles," but "Armsted stood
aside whittling a stick...." (67).
10. Henry Louis Gates defines signifying as a rhetorical maneuver th
offers a "tropological revision or repetition and difference" (88).
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
truths while writing about specific locales, "The Frontier Gone at
Last" presents a teleological, expansive evolution of affect in
which each successive scale of identification supplants its
precursors. For example, when "patriotism" becomes national it "is a
far larger, broader, truer sentiment than that first huddling about
the hearthstone of the family"; and when we supersede this "stage"
of patriotism we will no longer "arrogantly boast ourselves as
Americans" but embrace, instead, the merging of all nations into one
(1189). _The Octopus_ seems to bear out such a teleological model of
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
"suffered to decay by piecemeal," furthering disease (48).
In selecting decomposition as a principal trope, Brown plays vividly on the
term itself: in their "theatre[s] of disaster" (355), his fever novels stage
decomposition as the body's unwriting, a Gothic play on the notion of body
language. In _Ormond,_ the black vomit "testifie[s]" to Mary Whiston's
"corroded and gangrenous stomach" (52). The "lineaments" written on Wallace's
face in _Arthur Mervyn_ become "shadowy and death-like" (380). Bodies lose
"composure" (357) until signs of life have been fully replaced by signs of
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
his years in Hartford and the painful loneliness of the conditions
under which the autobiography was conceived. But his discussion of
the biography also reveals the degree to which he perceived of his
public persona as both penetrating into and emerging from the private
space of his household. He confirms that he has "had no compliment,
no praise, no tribute from any [End Page 679] source, that was so
precious to me as this one was and still is," aligning his daughter�s
text with the overwhelming accolades he had received over the course
of his public career. Furthermore, he admits that, once he discovered
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
examines the dual function of US military action over the past five
decades. Armed conflicts function geopolitically and domestically in
order to control contested markets and raw materials, as well as to
reinforce white citizenship. Nationalist rhetoric, military
spectacles, and patriotic displays compliment military ventures and
reveal the "particular rewards of white identity" (70-71). As I see
it, the historical seeds of Lipsitz's insight are buried in the
formative decade of the 1740s, when imperial warfare contributed to
the production of a nascent "American" identity. *[End Page 402]*
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
It may seem that Scott chose an odd subject for a poem dedicated to
the idea of Britain, England, and Scotland not in harmony, but at
war. But in Scott conflict becomes an occasion for mutual
compliment. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the English Howard
marches against the Lady of Branksome, but the two forces agree to
resolve their differences by single combat rather than in battle,
and as soon as the decision is taken the hostile armies mingle in
gruff good fellowship: BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
self-consciousness should have set in amongst the poets and that the
prestige poetry retained should have become bound up with a
rejection of the "easy," passive pleasures of prose fiction as a
"kill-time," as Coleridge stigmatized it: "as to the devotees of the
circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or
rather kill-time, with the name of reading" (B, 1:48n). It is not
surprising, in other words, that poetry became "literature" and was
sorely tempted to recede, gloriously if self-defensively, into
obscurity and difficulty. Recently, Harold Bloom reinscribed the
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 141-165
William Blake's Androgynous Ego-Ideal
Tom Hayes _Baruch College and The Graduate Center_ _City University of New York _
---------------
Since homosexuality, like women's sexuality, is both excessive and
uncontrollable, men must guard against succumbing to either of them.
Therefore Freed's statement that Blake "is not given the credit he deserves
for a concept of gender that was remarkable for its time in its sensitivity
to female sexuality" is a backhanded compliment, a way of dismissing Blake's
attempts to resolve problems that are still very much with us.60
Blake never advocated prostitution or concubinage, and Peter Ackroyd assures
us that "there is no evidence that Blake was ever unfaithful to his wife."61
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
nervousness about race. There are many ways of talking about racial
discomfort in the novel, including the representational problem of
minstrelsy, which Eric Lott has addressed most powerfully and which
I will touch upon in a quite different way. Lott recognizes Huck's
great compliment to Jim that Jim is "white inside" (_H_, 341), a
compliment inspired by Jim's refusal to escape when Tom has been
shot during the boys' raid on the Phelps's home, as "the crowning
statement on the centrality of blackface's contradictions to Twain's
imagination." Blackface imagery in Twain's work allows the exercise
discomfort in the novel, including the representational problem of
minstrelsy, which Eric Lott has addressed most powerfully and which
I will touch upon in a quite different way. Lott recognizes Huck's
great compliment to Jim that Jim is "white inside" (_H_, 341), a
compliment inspired by Jim's refusal to escape when Tom has been
shot during the boys' raid on the Phelps's home, as "the crowning
statement on the centrality of blackface's contradictions to Twain's
imagination." Blackface imagery in Twain's work allows the exercise
of the imperialist psychological orientation Homi Bhabha calls
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
Consequently, many elements of Brownson's writing reveal aset of deep and
direct concerns about the role of passion and desire, not only as they relate
to issues of religious devotional practice and literalized iconography but
also in the formation of aproper convert: the efficacy of popular sentimental
literature inwinning new believers, and the feminized corruptions and
disorderly process of the conversion experience and important Catholic
evangelical events like the revival meeting. 18 Brownson's all-important
antinomies of will and understanding (as they influence belief and
conversion) were constantly under threat from infusions of
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 230-253
Book Review ~~~~~~~~~~~ Whose Dickinson?
Cristanne Miller
---------------
the significant differences in the types and forms of this art which
the poet sent various friends would necessitate some biographical
contextualizing. Moreover, because in this reading a poem used in
letters to multiple friends would constitute multiple QUOTE each
would necessarily be localized within its correspondence--regardless
of whether the texts of the poems themselves (to the extent they are
isolatable) were identical. Dickie sees this problem of
reprivatization as one of the central issues in Dickinson studies
today. 11 [End Page 248]
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
backwards to another civic performance of poetry at the beginning of 1863,
Ralph Waldo Emerson's recitation of his QUOTE also in the Boston Music Hall,
at the 1 January ceremony celebrating the promulgation of the Emancipation
Proclamation. I understand these texts and their public occasions as a set of
skirmishes in a localized intra-elite culture war over the legitimacy of the
religion of art in the city at war--a quarrel with ramifications reaching
beyond Boston, and beyond 1863. This small culture war of 1863 illustrates
something of the different and changing conditions under which women and men
of Boston's literary elite entered the sphere of civic poetry in this
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
time they are anger or grief" ("_Blithedale_" 563). These twin aversions to
idolatry and sentimentality exemplify Brownson's broader project to create
and implement a mode of _masculine_ Catholicism that could claim ancient
theological authority while sloughing off any investment in the iconographic
modes of Catholic tradition--especially localized or *[End Page 458]* other
ethnic traditions of Catholic piety and representation--or in the vivid
iconography of popular literary sentimentality or sensationalism of the
mid-century print marketplace.
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
would be, provisionally, "the Indian country" or an un-nationalized
West (United States, 23rd Cong. 729). The negative terms that this
Act of Congress uses to give shape to the Far *[End Page 683]* West
("_not within ._.. ") suggest the trader's emphasis upon negotiable
and shifting contact zones rather than the localized culture
associated with nationalist ideas of homeland and _Volk._ Trading
documents and narratives offer an alternate version of US manifest
destiny, which can be described as imperialist, commercial, and
anachronistically postnational. Although the Far West in the
trading stations" (50). A rivalrous international commerce
complicates imperial desire, making the trading zones of the Far
West resistant to clear-cut narratives of progress. Again, the
trading culture of the Western countries challenged the US literary
imagination because it could not be localized or entirely
rationalized; it was a spreading commercial culture that didnot
automatically implement loyalties to the US nation-state. Nor did
this trading culture cultivate in European Americans or American
Indians the willingness to engage in the kind of exchange that
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
Jenny Cameron, but whether they are living in an essentially Hanoverian or
Jacobite England. Rumors of battles and large scale invasion forces
configure the countryside and even London itself as a place under siege,
whereas news of government victories renders the invasion a far off and
localized disturbance. The sense that one's neighbors may be Jacobites
further undermines mental bearings, which rely as much on people as place.
III.
----
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
vivisection, this may be because the social web of the novel has
first recalled the neural web of the nervous system, with each human
thread a neural fiber. The correspondence becomes less forced when
one recalls that Lewes regarded consciousness as distributed through
every component of the nervous system, not simply localized in the
brain. Certainly, Lewes's parliamentary model of the nervous system
offers at least a latent image for the relationship between
individual psychologies and the social world they compose.
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 133-166
Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wolfram Schmidgen
---------------
here do not communicate a systematic knowledge about the social, they
nonetheless create panoramas of social life that did not constitute common
knowledge in eighteenth-century Britain. The descriptive function of the
bastard--its remarkable ability to make tangible social spheres defined by a
logic of place--can thus be said to "lift out social activity from localized
contexts," as Giddens puts it. 68 It is able to bring together, into the life
cycle of a single individual represented in a single narrative, the varied
enclaves of eighteenth-century society and thus contributes to the
homogenization of an uneven social space. True, the narrative capture of the
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
Johnson and his allies circulated in advance. *[End Page 521]* *[Begin Page
523]*
The Cheap Repository could not have been more deliberate about its departure
from localized, contained, or nostalgic approaches to managing the lives of
the working poor in the face of revolutionary challenges. The ballad poem
_Dame Andrews_, a 1795 Cheap Repository broadsheet that was not written by
More, provides a vivid case in point. The opening lines are firmly embedded
in a local community--"Near Lechlade Town, in Glostershire, / Upon the Banks
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
difference between the reunion-romance tradition and De Forest's revision
centers on the placement of marriage in the narration of the social bond. The
traditional version resolves the conflict with marriage, the conventional
ending of a romance novel, while De Forest's version takes marriage itself as
the site of conflict and therefore thestarting point of social innovation
rather than its consummation. After the Civil War, the baggage that North and
South brought to their reunion was filled not with hope but rather, as De
Forest repeatedly suggests, "a dowry of suffering."
_American Literary History_ 14.4 (2002) 837-844
Contagion and Culture: A View from Victorian Studies
Mary Burgan
---------------
for knowledge of his or her disease.
The bias against science in the Victorian academy did not, of
course, block the efforts to profit from fear of disease in England.
I believe, however, that the merchandizing of sanitary reform--with
attendant quackery and medicine shows--was less prominent in British
fiction until the twentieth century. The result of such enterprising
manipulation of disease was less the concern for improving public
health than the climb of an enterprising shopkeeper into the
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
comprise _The Country of the Pointed Firs,_ as they work
synecdochically to represent a self-contained culture, may be said to
depend on those "poetics of detachment" that Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes as the requisite work for producing the
"ethnographic object": the act of excising a fragment that, reappearing
as part of a collection, comes to express the culture as a whole (388).
But though readers have often described regionalism as an ethnographic
or anthropological pursuit, American anthropology itself was just being
_regionalized_ in the closing decade of the century. And though other
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
(_Address_ 4). Having gained his public authority from their experience
(their approbation secures his right to speak and instruct), Garrison's words
first reflect but then "improve" ("producing fruit") that experience. His
agricultural metaphor naturalizes his pedagogical power over the memory of
black Americans, while echoing, albeit in a liberalized and sympathetic form,
the plantation structure he works to abolish. Black citizens become the
conduit between profit (what is produced through them without credit to their
labor) and the identity of the "master" (who accumulates his authority as the
surplus value of their uncredited labor) in ways that repeat, rather than
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
head, after he had pronounced the words (_by-and-by_) and then
concluded with a loud laugh" (31; emphasis added). The lingering
impression of Quack's resistance to colonial authority is
short-lived. The narrator's authoritative voice meets Quack's
antagonistic rhetoric, camouflaging what the narrator deems his true
intent. Unlike the earlier representation of Quack's resistance,
Horsmanden now intrudes and provides the correct interpretation of
the "by-and-by." Lacking a confession from Quack, Horsmanden mimics
the slave in a way that conveys to the reader what Quack "thereby
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
valuing the QUOTE of "One" over the QUOTE (the notion of individual
sovereignty as privileged by the Declaration and the Articles) (PT
1320). As an intentionally constructed founding document, Eureka
supplements the operative documents of American state formation by
reenvisioning what in those documents was merely a political ideal
(unification) as an inexorable law of physics, a material fact:
BLOCKQUOTE
QUOTE has the revolutionary timbre of the Declaration of
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
particularly not in thiscase. Positions have been taken, myths have
been made" (3). And she closes her book with a brief epilogue,
"Biographer," thatsketches her involvement with Woolf within an
Emersonian awareness that a writer's story, like everything in
nature, will be "reformulated by each generation" (758). The
self-reflective biographer acknowledges myth and cultural
impermanence and looks for authority not in definitiveness but in
creative imagination exercising itself upon the body of the archive
(the writings, the letters and journals, the social, psychological,
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
Indeed, the reason that Mrs. Ballard is so determined to have Maggie
in the first place is somewhat puzzling because the Northern woman
is horrified at the decent treatment the maidservant receives from
Mrs. Franks. As Maria Franks fusses over her maid's appearance,
acting "more like ... an elder sister than amistress" and even
allowing Maggie to wear dresses made from the same cloth as hers,
Arabella Ballard is aghast at the Southern woman's conduct (6).
Delany's point, of course, is to demonstrate that Northerners could
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
through the sale of primary allotments (Limerick 198-99).33 Tribal
nations without treaties fared no better; even the Mission Indians
gained little as a result of _Ramona_'s phenomenal popularity.
Rather, the novel's very success prompted heavy promotion of
southern California for literary tourism and homesteading, further
displacing Indian communities as more white settlers migrated to the
area.34
In contrast, white women gained ground as legitimate state actors,
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
make that voyage was to go first to New York and depart from there,
the Lemmons sailed to the metropolis, where they took their slaves
ashore with them to a hotel while they waited to continue their
journey. But in 1841, New York had repealed all statutes allowing a
"foreign slaveholder" the "privilege ... of temporarily sojourning
in or passing through the State with his slaves" (Lemmon 619). As of
that date, any slave brought into New York by his or her master was
considered free. Therefore, a free black man named Louis Napoleon
petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus on the Lemmon slaves' behalf
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
In Kirkland's class, the aesthetic gaze associated with tourism transformed
women travelers from sexualized objects of the gaze to authorized subjects.
14 Kirkland discusses this transition as she describes the novel spectacle of
elite women eating in public, a "considerable feat" at home (1: 133). She
says that "[d]ining at a restaurant is one of the novelties of the
lady-traveller in Paris" and that this exposure of herself to the public eye
takes "boldness": "[T]o sit down in a public room, to a regular dinner of an
hour's length or more,... requires some practice before one can refrain from
casting sly glances around during the process, to see whether anyone is
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
connection between nuptial normativity and national loyalty. Even a less
sophisticated reconciliation plot, Belasco's _Heart of Maryland,_ registers
an opposition between the deviant, nonaffective status of a "patriot of
free-love" and the loyalty born of legitimate feeling and marked by consent
(211). An officer in the Confederate army who also spies for the North,
Colonel Thorpe is a polygamous figure, loyal to neither North nor South,
claiming, "Idon't care which rag I serve under" (212). Professing commitment
to each side while profiteering at the expense of both makes his national
affiliation the equivalent of political infidelity. Like Belasco's Thorpe,
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
with the government power of withholding tavern licenses, it was
very difficult to suppress tavern radicalism because in London there
were so many different places where one could meet; moreover, tavern
meetings were not easy to prosecute for seditious libel because it
was easy to [End Page 955] detect spies there and because songs,
toasts, and spontaneous, casual speeches were difficult to construe
as threats to the state. 6 One reason that the content of Thelwall's
songs was never discussed at the treason trial was that the very
fact of the radical songs as a threat was the claim that had to be
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
paranoia of the third volume, in which Caleb believes that an entire society
is bent on persecuting him, echoes the passage in which Godwin denounces the
machinations of the tyrant whose eye "is never closed"; here again "no man
can go out or come into the country, but he is watched," nor publish without
attracting the attention of spies, nor frequent "places of public resort"
without becoming "objects of attention"; it is as if Caleb stands in for the
English nation, for he too could be "held in obedience by the mere operation
of fear" (_E,_ 438). It seems that almost every feature of the novel extends
or confirms Godwin's previous work. *[End Page 855]*
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
Like a piece of faulty, unreliable equipment, in certain situations the organ
of sight fails to function properly--or refuses to do so, as if it had a will
of its own--and confuses the mind with misleading information. "In such
unhappy cases," Scott goes on to explain, "the patient is intellectually in
the condition of a general whose spies have been bribed by the enemy, and who
must engage himself in the difficult and delicate task of examining and
correcting, by his own powers of argument, the probability of the reports
which are too inconsistent to be trusted" (_L_, 35). 28 Scott's use of the
military idiom (the duties and betrayals of the "bribed" sensorium) expresses
must engage himself in the difficult and delicate task of examining and
correcting, by his own powers of argument, the probability of the reports
which are too inconsistent to be trusted" (_L_, 35). 28 Scott's use of the
military idiom (the duties and betrayals of the "bribed" sensorium) expresses
his militant attitude toward specters: like spies, who seek to destabilize
the body politic from within, ghosts must be identified and eliminated--or
rather, their precise cause must be scientifically determined so that the
effects they produce (fear and superstition) may be dispelled once and for
all.
28. It is hence appropriate--and could hardly be called a coincidence--that
Scott should have given Browne the title of general: someone used to being
obeyed without question, and presumably experienced in dealing with
flesh-and-blood spies, but demoted to the humiliating and humbling rank of
petty officer, as it were, when forced to evaluate the "reports" of the
"spies" within.
29. For an account of Brewster's and Scott's shared interest in ghosts and
Scott should have given Browne the title of general: someone used to being
obeyed without question, and presumably experienced in dealing with
flesh-and-blood spies, but demoted to the humiliating and humbling rank of
petty officer, as it were, when forced to evaluate the "reports" of the
"spies" within.
29. For an account of Brewster's and Scott's shared interest in ghosts and
vision, and the argument that Scott was less invested in the physiological
explanation of spectral appearances than I have here suggested, see Frederick
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
being. Maggie is finally unable to escape the zone of production:
the blare of pleasure in which she supposed Pete to live cannot
sustain life any better than the mere mechanical grinding out of the
sweatshop. The river her body will momently disappear into is lit by
the "yellow glare" of a "hidden factory," its waters "lapping
oilily" (53). *[End Page 610]*
4. Why the Young Clerk Swore
----------------------------
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
powerful ways. Or, as Brownson put it soon after his conversion to
Catholicism, in his essay "The Literary Policy ofthe Church of Rome," "Books
are companions, and bad books are as dangerous as any other species of
companions. Evil communications corrupt good manners, and we may be corrupted
by reading bad books as well as by frequenting bad company" (4).
Over the several decades of his writing career, while his own efforts as a
self-described "Catholic publicist" and champion of Young _Catholic_ America
proliferated and became a vital part of a deeply conservative interpretation
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
little over a month before his death, in which he warns his official
biographer that, after he dies, it will "rain swindles and forgeries
from the Ashcroft camp," since "Ashcroft has a supply of genuine
signatures of mine in his possession on blank sheets of paper." The
letter is initialed "SLC per HSA," since Clemens had dictated the
letter to Helen Allen. Clemens�s signature doesn�t appear on the
letter conceding that his "genuine" signature can be as easily mass
produced as his books. Thus, by the end of his life, Clemens had
almost entirely lost confidence in and control over the conventional
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
15. For a later, dazzling version of a telephone conversation, see Twain,
_The 30,000 Dollar Bequest_ ch. 10.
16. For the importance of typesetting in _Connecticut Yankee,_ and the
relationships between the novel and Twain's own failed investment in the
Paige Typesetter, see Moreland 46-47.
17. For a reading of this scene that stresses late-nineteenth-century
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
response, and the question of how to organize knowledge about the fever in
such a way as to shape an American informational elite into a manageable
audience--that simultaneously enabled and imperiled both a national medical
community and an emergent literary culture. In this context, a novel's claim
to factuality has less to do, perhaps, with caving in to a puritanical
reading public than with a sincere attempt to disseminate medical and moral
facts in one's fiction. *[End Page 218]*
My location of Brown's novelistic "venture" within the early Republic's
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
While Catlin saw trade with the Indians as a precursor to
annihilation, Irving viewed it as a precursor to something even more
disturbing: the commercial interval that does not necessarily pass
away, the uncivilized society born of unscrupulous exchange,
identity trading, and most shockingly, interbreeding. "The
amalgamation of various tribes, and of white men of every nation,"
Irving imagines, will produce "hybrid races" in the Far West "like
the mountain Tartars of the Caucasus" (_Bonneville_ 269). Irving had
*[End Page 693]* glimpsed such amalgamation firsthand at the home of
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 248-275
Walt Whitman and the Question of Copyright
Martin T. Buinicki
---------------
regularly printed, changed, and adapted without the author's
knowledge or permission. Whitman sought to prevent such piracy
throughout his career, and when he could not, as in the case of
Worthington, he sought to reestablish a connection with his text, no
matter how tenuous or financially unrewarding. This connection was
critical for Whitman, for _Leaves of Grass_ was his way of reaching
out to readers throughout the world. In his vision of an open
democratic exchange, he and his readers would knowingly engage in a
transaction in which each copy purchased moved from the author's
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 248-275
Walt Whitman and the Question of Copyright
Martin T. Buinicki
---------------
class are in any other part of the world. And this will continue to
be the case so long as we have no international copyright. At this
time there is hardly any encouragement at all for the literary
profession in the way of book-writing. Most of our authors are
frittering away their brains for an occasional five dollar bill from
the magazine publishers" (_Journalism_ 252). As a writer frequently
publishing short stories during this time, Whitman would have found
the issue of how magazines paid their writers one of particular
personal importance. 9
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
at odds with the ethic of bodily representation in the emergent religion of
art as dramatized in the ceremonies surrounding the Great Organ in 1863--and
it is to Howe's quarrel with that religion that I want to return in closing.
In commending orchestral music, at once massed and differentiated in its
voices, over organ music in general, Howe takes special exception to the
organ's mechanical means of amplifying human agency. The organ's QUOTE make
one [End Page 231] man seem like a hundred, like a host--a kind of prosthetic
godhood she finds ugly, irreligious, objectionable as a model for civil
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
provide a recurrent case of plus �a change. With the gradual
relocation of power the always available misogynistic libel collects
on the neoclassic image, and iconoclasm comes to be gendered as male.
Burke's account of the beautiful, then, is a means of hastening
political change by feminizing the antagonistic political order, and
accusing traditional aesthetic theory of fostering a matriarchy by
submitting to idle and unproductive fantasies and illusions.
Conversely, the sublime offers a renewed site of male
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
of the disciplinary function of the novel, specifically in terms of
its construction of a proper model of the family through the
simultaneous entertainment and violent rejection of same-sex desire.
For Miller, the nervousness of the novel is coded as feminine and
feminizing. Developing Mrs. Oliphant's early insight into the
readerly effects of The Woman in White, he argues that, through his
stand-in (or stunt-man, as it were) in the text, Walter Hartright,
the reader catches this nervousness from the very touch of the Woman
in White when Walter meets her on the road to London. Miller reads
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
poetry appeared during the 1990s, headed by John Hollander's 1993 Library of
America American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and including more
specialized collections of women writers and African-American poets. 5
Critical readings of this revived body of poetry have been somewhat slower to
emerge, especially by contrast with the flourishing of critical work on
rediscovered nineteenth-century American fiction and autobiography. Karen
S�nchez-Eppler's 1993 recommendation that critics of nineteenth-century
American culture attend to the QUOTE of lyric poetry as they QUOTE met with
few immediate takers (12); surveying the field in 1998, Elisa New found that
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
task of generating a proper American literature unless that energy is joined
within the culture by a more somber mode of scholarship: "Everybody knows
that the great poets, the great artists, have never flourished, save in
epochs and countries marked by severe discipline, and ennobled by serious and
solid studies. The flourishing period of true art is always immediately
preceded or accompanied by a flourishing period of philosophy, of moral
science, and of religious truth" ("_Vision_" 270). Although he had at one
time been an advocate of Lowell's poetry, Brownson's concern is that while
Lowell's Arthurian poem about a knightly quest for the Holy Grail, _The
within the culture by a more somber mode of scholarship: "Everybody knows
that the great poets, the great artists, have never flourished, save in
epochs and countries marked by severe discipline, and ennobled by serious and
solid studies. The flourishing period of true art is always immediately
preceded or accompanied by a flourishing period of philosophy, of moral
science, and of religious truth" ("_Vision_" 270). Although he had at one
time been an advocate of Lowell's poetry, Brownson's concern is that while
Lowell's Arthurian poem about a knightly quest for the Holy Grail, _The
Vision of Sir Launfal,_ amply demonstrated his technical gifts as a poet, it
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
his obsequiousness, rebellious in his submission, a humorist, a
logician of consequences" (C, 89).
It must not be forgotten, furthermore, that insolence, parody, and the
flourishing of fantasy all signal the profound contestation of the
mutterrecht to the exercise of masculine activity and the logic of
domination. "The male masochist," says Silverman, "not only prefers
the masquerade of womanliness to the parade of virility, he also
articulates both his conscious and unconscious desires from a feminine
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
_Shirley_'s diffusion also stems from its lack of a single
protagonist, the formal repercussions of which become apparent when
the novel ends. The narrator's oddly laconic conclusion makes little
effort to bind together the marriage plot with the hatred
flourishing in the opening chapters. For instance, her suggestion
that the reader supply the right moral exacerbates her noncommittal
statement, "I suppose Robert Moore's prophecies" about the end of
the blockage against Napoleon and the consequent rise in trade
"were, partially, at least, fulfilled" (599). The conclusion tries
unwarped impression of good and evil. . . . We are hunting after
what we cannot find, and quarrelling with the good within our
reach." 41
In light of these claims, the resentment flourishing in _Shirley_'s
early chapters is best viewed as a deeply historical account of
religious conflict _and_ as an allegorical pronouncement on forms of
enmity. As the novel emphasizes, religious conflict often influences
how we look at, and define, history. Yet enmity in history and in
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
households, now transplanted onto semipublic terrain. They bring some of the
enchantments of home with them. But these artificially enchanted households,
seeped in the monasticism of a vanished guild life, must strike the reader as
a lapse in Dickensian realism. And if we are nonplussed to find such
anachronisms flourishing in the commercial metropolis, so is David.
Explaining the apparently inscrutable function of Doctors' Commons,
Steerforth plays the role of "native informant" to satisfy David's
ethnographic curiosity. "What _is_ a proctor?" David asks, on the eve of his
apprenticeship with Spenlow at Doctors' Commons (403). Steerforth answers:
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
negotiations over the Doom of Devorgoil (composed 1817-18; published
1830) the extent to which Castle Spectre's critical reception--and
that of Gothic drama in general--forced someone such as Scott to
revise and complicate his ideas of authorship. I am interested in
depersonalizing Lewis's experiences as the author of Gothic fiction
and drama by showing Scott handling these same considerations along
unmistakably similar lines almost two decades later. Scott's own
history of authorship, I contend, stems primarily from his own
experience in watching the much-besieged author of The Monk and
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
Mutiny serves to emphasize BLOCKQUOTE
What is striking about this passage is the covert erasure of middle-class
professionalism (at least insofar as professionalism is understood to include
the Victorian state). The depersonalizing and pejorative term "officialism"
effectively isolates "gigantic blunders" from the "energy and self-reliance"
of "the men of the nation." Not only does it deprive the English middle-class
professional of individual subjectivity, it further excludes him by
identifying him with the un-Englishness of "officialism" on the Continent,
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
from the pages into his Camerado's arms, remains strangely obscure, the
metaphor resistant to systematic parsing, almost impossible to visualize
without a significant admixture of imaginative input from the reader.
Whatever this speaker's "messages" might mean, they make *[End Page 1054]*
him "really undying" only in that what survives of his presence in the poetry
is the reader's newly empowered subjective agency. "Once more," as he says,
"I enforce you to give play to yourself--and not depend on me, or on any one
but yourself" (2:449, 1860 lines).
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
The rocks with their eternal towers;
The soul to struggle and to dare,
Is mingled with our northern air,
And dust beneath our soil is lying
Of those who died for fame undying.
Tread'st thou that soil! and can it be,
No loftier thought is roused in thee?
(_W_, 17)
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
materialists, who are absorbed in surfaces, Goths see through to the
indwelling spirit of things. 28
Did Melville know of Marsh? While the textual evidence I shall be
adducing suggests that Melville did, no direct references prove the
case. But there is circumstantial evidence. An anonymous riposte to
Marsh's first discourse was published in Boston in 1845 in which the
writer acidly summarizes Marsh's argument as: "About the only part
of the Gothic race worth mentioning are the Puritans who emigrated
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
responds (T, 58). If, for instance, there is some disproportion in the
degree of feeling exhibited by a sufferer and that felt in response to
his injury by an "indifferent spectator," the sufferer needs to "bring
down his emotions to what the spectator can go along with" (T, 70).
Although Smith is adducing a general theory of moral sentiments, his
notion that sympathetic response depends on the perceived suitability of
the feelings exhibited and on the propriety of the performance of those
feelings offers an astute analysis of the process by which sentiment is
produced for literary consumption. Sentimentality may in part be defined
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
Jefferson did both before and after Madison reminded him, that
generations do not exist in nature. His own relation to futurity is
a new kind of problem. His heirs can no longer be the vehicle of his
imprint on the world, for they have been imagined as radically free.
His will cannot shape posterity by entailing his descendants. [End
Page 779]
In a rather different context, Alexis de Tocqueville gives a similar
explanation of family values:
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
past "facts" in sequence. 10 "Working through" ostensibly releases us from
argument, dialectic, and the hegemony of the will, relying instead on
mechanisms of association which produce an unpredictable and ultimately
therapeutic cross-weave of times and images. The linguistic extension of
this cross-weaving is what is meant here by "opacity," entailing in its
necessary tensions a radical unsettling of what Foucault terms the
"philosophy of representation--of the original, the first time, resemblance,
imitation, faithfulness." 11
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
Yet the law went largely unenforced. In 1824, the US similarly enter
into negotiations with Britain over a treaty that would identify the
slave trade as piracy, but an agreement was never enacted because th
Senate encumbered it with amendments unacceptable to the British (Du
Bois 138-40).
Maybe Delany did not have this unenforced law or unratified treaty i
mind when he wrote _Blake,_ but such explicit language connecting
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
allusion and that abides, not just in spite of the estrangements,
but in resolute opposition to them. 1 More broadly, my interest here
is to suggest through a re-reading of Our Mutual Friend how
Dickens's social imagination might be seen as not quite so
encumbered by the ideological incoherence that is persistently
ascribed to him.
Interestingly, wherever we go in the thicket of the text we find
people in partnership. To be sure, many of the partnerships are
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
horror of degeneration and gruesome death: more often than not,
Morella the *[End Page 896]* Beloved becomes, in a flash, Morella
the Undead. Such is the unenviable fate of femininity in Poe's
Gothic fictive world. 26 Within this world, only very young girls,
who are not yet encumbered by the revulsions of adult femininity,
seem capable of providing a site for stable heterosexual male desire
in Poe, since only they do not appear liable at any moment to mutate
into some quasi-animate monstrosity. Thus, the transitoriness Poe
finds so very poignant in his women about to be monsters is
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
for the visual image that will give maximum stimulation governed
entirely by the excitement of his own sexual responses. The aesthetic
of masochism, then, abandons [End Page 409] history just as the erotic
of masochism does; the ideal construct of the motherworld is
reinforced by an idealizing fantasy function that deploys fictiveness
and illusion as an intrinsic part of its mode of excitement. Masochism
rejects the metaphysics of the real for the personal fantasy, whether
acted out in the imagination or whether the imaginary is activated in
the routines of the sexual scenario.
Sublime," New Literary History 16 [1985]: 427-37), has not only
catalogued the almost inconceivable variety of applications of the
word sublime but has also shown how the connotations of transcendent
individualism in the sublime can reinforce the worst excesses of
tyranny by idealizing the tyrant in the epic mode. En route to noting
American sublimes, "this endless and unencompassing landscape . . . on
huge canvases" (434), abstract sublimes, "the luminous, numinous
square or a single vertical line [of Rothko, Newman and Kline]" (435),
and figurative sublimes, "Guston . . . expanded to the grotesque, with
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
powerful, and perhaps more unpredictable audience than the one whose
preeminence Sheridan repeatedly asserts. That is, if Sheridan wanted
to believe that the success of a play is determined by its ability
to please the "mixed assembly" that attends its performance, he also
worried that the playgoing audience's judgment might be decisive
onlyin the theater. He seems concerned, that is, that the reception
of The Rivals is conditional and awaits ratification by that larger
audience outside the theater. Presenting the play to the reading
public makes it available to a new set of judgments that cannot even
among earlier playwrights), Sheridan allowed his fear of
relinquishing control to reach absurd proportions long before the
publication phase, ultimately denying even the actors ofPizarro a
stable working text. When he finally released his plays to the
playgoing public, he did so seemingly without making any editorial
decisions at all: on opening night, The Rivals lasted more than
three hours; Pizarro's first performance was five hours long. The
Critic, performed as an afterpiece, was an astounding two hours
long, prompting a reviewer for The Morning Chronicle to write: "If
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
to feed the mind, the superiority of natural to human law, and the
potential moral application of that law, are all discernible within
the combined sixty-odd lines of the two poems.
"Expostulation and Reply" begins with a bookish speaker upbraiding
the poet: BLOCKQUOTE
Here, and in the poem that follows, Wordsworth defends the
ideational content of what his mind perceives in solitary,
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
spotless reputations to get credit. 12 Jemima can thus attack
Farquhar for his attempts to gain "credit" in the business world by
suggesting that they rely on the same hypocrisy that her father
exerts on her behalf in the marriage market: "'Oh, Mr Farquhar!'
said she, suddenly changing to a sort of upbraiding tone of voice. .
. . '[Y]ou are good because it adds to your business credit--you
talk in that high strain because it sounds well, and is
respectable'" (223-24). She expresses her own dilemma in nearly
identical terms: "So! I am to behave well, not because it is
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
as individuals. The lives, fortunes, and honors involved were
emphatically their own. In the Articles and then in the
Constitution, the structure of the union becomes increasingly
complex and stratified (that is, hierarchical) and moves closer
toward the hegemonic model refuted by the Declaration. The motive
for this return--or regression--to hierarchy is not so much the loss
of desire for an open, nonhegemonic structure as it is the
realization that any protocol of relations--that institution
itself--is inherently hierarchical. And because institution in some
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
two were moving down some mental checklist of qualifications that
Lewis's play should have but does not. With its systematic and
orderly analysis, Coleridge's critique reminds one almost of an
empiricist refutation of God--except that in this case what is being
refuted is any possibility of Lewis laying claim to originality or
genius.
Coleridge's attacks on the play's derivative nature echo the earlier
criticisms of The Morning Chronicle and Monthly Mirror, and
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
on the intuitive revelations of spiritual vision, which looks beyond the
questionable facts of material reality to apprehend a higher and more
enduring order of truth, but on physical evidence brought to light through
"mechanical vision." For Ruskin, the value of empirical observation lies not
in contesting particular scientific theories, which can sometimes be refuted
simply by looking at what scientists disingenuously prefer not to see, but,
more generally, in demonstrating the gross illusions and self-deceptions of
materialist science. By adopting a double standard toward physiological
sight, Ruskin ends up advocating the exercise of something like a double
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
the insurrection. In addition to this restriction, the city decided
to enforce an ordinance—it had been on the books since the
1730s— that made it a crime for slaves to be out at night
without a lantern. Such piecemeal legislation represented white
power reconstituting itself against a slave population that was more
of an international threat than it had been before the first fires
in the spring of 1741. Perhaps there is no suitable historical
vantage point from which to speculate about whether the resurgence
of imperial power after the trials made New York's colonists feel
ELH 66.1 (1999) 111-128
Seeing Romantically in Lamia
Paul Endo
---------------
encourages us to see as magical or aesthetic what we have in fact
been positioned to see. For Frye, charm mobilizes "repetitive
formulas [that] break down and confuse the conscious will, hypnotize
and compel to certain courses of action."21 Rather than breaking
down the will, such formulas or patterns work by reconstituting it,
by encouraging certain mental attitudes that make it more receptive
to some phenomena and not others. Repetitions, duplications, and
regularities seem to disclose a deep structure--a depth whose only
proof is these repetitions--that is taken to betray some underlying
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
trying to reach through the doppelg�nger plot. Harmon and Headstone
meet their reversed fates in their own way through their own
resources. In Eugene's case there is a call for an intercessor, for
someone who realizes how lost he is and who can act as his partner
in the work of reconstituting the narrative line of his life. This
can only be Jenny, who knows all about the wrecked self buried
within Eugene and who is richly empowered as an authoring figure not
only among the few who know her but in the narrative text that
celebrates her. Through the dialogic relationship of Jenny, Mr.
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
general-purpose pedagogical anthologies began expanding their coverage of
nineteenth-century American poetry: thus the Heath Anthology of American
Literature, one of the more reliable indicators of Americanist canon
revision, both added poems by familiar nineteenth-century authors and began
experimenting with new modes of anthologizing this poetry, for example in a
QUOTE of 1890s verse by various hands.
6. For other examples of work on nineteenth-century American poets (beyond
Whitman and Dickinson) that specifically connects the QUOTE of lyric poetry
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
22. Victor's method of selecting the most beautiful parts and
suturing them together parallels another "mechanistic" process in
vogue during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries: the
mode of anthologizing beauties. Volumes of "Beauties" were produced
from recycled parts, which could be culled either from a single
poetic corpus or from several corpora (as in the case of The
Beauties of Milton, Thomson, and Young [1783]) to form a composite
textual body in the Frankensteinian mode. Whether this process of
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
separate the "_chaste_" elements from the "obscenity" that often
"taints" Sterne's writing, thereby enabling new generations of
readers to "escape" the dangers faced by reading the works in toto.
43 Two other principles are employed in addition to this
anthologizing principle of selection. The editor also makes clear
that this is a project of canonization, of selecting the best
portions of "the sun of Genius," in order to distinguish this as
clearly as possible from the "affectation and unnatural rhapsody" of
Sterne's "competitors." 44 The anthology of _Beauties_ will thus
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
view" (O, xv), nationalism is extensively disputed in the novel. Rather than
endorsing the antiquity and value of an indigenous Irish culture and society,
as Glorvina does in Morgan's early and most influential novel The Wild Irish
Girl (1806), Morgan's protagonists in The O'Briens promote a brand of
nationalism specific to the United Irishmen while devaluing, and even
mocking, the idealization of the Irish past. In representing the United
Irishmen and the years before their uprising, Morgan suggests the
illusoriness and destructiveness of a nationalism that harks back to the
pre-colonial condition rather than forward to a constitutional, modern state,
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
the country which boasts their birth, their deeds, and their sufferings.
(_W_, front matter)
This second paragraph equates the "interest"—a wonderfully ambiguous
term—of Scotland and England in Scottish heroes, literally devaluing
exactly the national connection that the poem's Wallace uses to reclaim the
allegiance of the Bruce. If English and Scottish people have equal interest
in the Wallace story, in other words, national origin has no value in the
patriotic calculation. While the soldiers of the poem fought to "buy their
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
pleasure and the challenge it offers to current feminist and Marxist
models of the utopian. She argues for a utopianism that "needs to
trouble some of the blander images of pleasure and in doing so
associate an anti-capitalist and egalitarian politics with more complex
affective and moral understandings" (Soper, Troubled Pleasures:
Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism [London: Verso, 1990], 14).
47. Fredric Jameson argues that Bloch's work on the utopian is premised
on the idea that "real philosophizing begins at home . . . in lived
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
outside, "Reality" and "Appearance." Franklin and his "Appearances"
do not mask an inner self, or soul, or reality: he is the body and
its various public effects.
Troubled by the materialism, bodiliness, and godlessness of his
youth, he resolves to practice certain religious and moral
principles because they might be useful as forms of bodily and
social control and as a means of achieving social order and human
happiness. 14 And yet, despite [End Page 724] Franklin's resolve,
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
predicted that cultures which had reached the commercial stage would
remain "inert until supplied with fresh energetic material by the
infusion of barbarian blood."9 As is well known, Adams idealized the
soldier and prescribed the renewal of military rather than
commercial conquests. Troubled by Turner's prediction of the end of
the frontier as a stimulant for national consolidation, Adams sought
Indian wars abroad. Roosevelt found the _Law of Civilization and
Decay_ unsubtle, yet he essentially crafted his political persona in
accordance with *[End Page 408]* Adams's imperialist, militaristic
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
off their own relationship, vowing that she will not marry him
unless and until Mary is married to another. She sends him off to do
his duty by offering himself to the abandoned Mary. The problem is
that Mary has disappeared without a trace and the letter in which
she informs him of her decision has been mislaid (the first of
several such missent letters in these novels). The [End Page 758]
first half of the novel describes the epistolary struggle between
Edward and Clara, as Edward pleads his case while Clara reiterates
her terms flatly--"my esteem can be secured only by a just and
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
and the *PARTY, and give Notice to Mr. Drummond, Goldsmith at
Charing Cross, and you shall receive 200 Guineas Reward for the
same. *Especially if it be a young Lady29
How lost? How mislaid? If the diamonds could speak they would tell a
tale perhaps of disgraceful weakness, of a goldsmith so fascinated
by a woman's youth and good looks as imprudently to allow her to
wear and then walk off with his stock in trade.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
of the "Preface" to The Renaissance Pater rejects Ruskin's attempts
to "define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general
terms, to find some universal formula for it," and a few sentences
later he ironically quotes Arnold's dictum "to see the object as in
itself it really is" in order to disparage it with his own twist:
"in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object
as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to
discriminate it, to realise it distinctly." 4 Against these concerns
with properly defining and knowing the artwork, Pater shifts his
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
Given the parrot's imitative capacities, it seems Rogue is worried
that Pleasant will unthinkingly repeat something that gives his
criminal activities away. He also implies that Poll Parroting is
empty chatter, a wasteful habitual or customary social practice
(351). Rogue uses the epithet to disparage any conversational
efforts Pleasant undertakes for her own purposes, as if she is mere
appendage, like a parrot on a sailor's shoulder or an animal that
has somehow learned the trick of speaking.31 For him, her
independent speech and action are at the same time unmeaning,
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
19. Sweet helps us understand the logic of substitution as it applies to
representations of war violence. Analyzing the "rhetorical operations" used
during the Civil War to transform "the body of the soldier" into "the
ideological discourse of the state" (6), he observes that the rhetoric of
national unity, specifically the galvanizing image of the body politic, is
based on a substitution whereby "millions of actual bodies are transformed
into a single, powerful figure" (12-13).
20. As many scholars have noticed, Lincoln�s stated intention in this
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
which genealogies of the modern subject are traced through the operations of
what critics describe as discursive strategies. Perhaps the most influential
of these studies has been Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction
(1987). Like another important critical work, D. A. Miller's The Novel and
the Police (1988), Armstrong's book makes the galvanizing connection between
Foucault's genealogical work [End Page 152] and Victorian literature. While
Miller's book redresses Foucault's conspicuous "reticence" towards
literature, establishing the novel as "a central episode in the genealogy of
our present," Armstrong demonstrates the importance of feminine writing
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
aggressive revisionism of More's _Tom White_. The historical ironies at work
in a transgressive reactionary culture become more complicated still if we
recall that the Cheap Repository was part of a tradition of Christian moral
reform that went back to the late seventeenth century and culminated in the
1780s, before the French Revolution had its galvanizing impact upon British
radicalism. While there may be little reason to worry here about
transgressing one of Romantic studies' more peculiar yet enduring fictions
("1789"), it does seem curious that reactionary enterprise should, in this
instance, precede the revolution. 19 In her careful study of the development
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
only help explain why Whitman is alternately critiqued as a liberal
consensualist, interpreted as a progressive multiculturalist, and lauded as a
sex radical. They also help to us to understand how the distinctive weave of
the personal and the collective--which I will treat under the "ambidextrous,"
to borrow Lawerence Buell's term, sign of the ethico-political--formalizes an
idea of intersubjectivity in lyric reading intended to have particular *[End
Page 1048]* extratextual effects within the active, sensual subjectivities of
readers and within the social and political worlds which they inhabit. 10
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
of thoughts, structures of desire, and ordinary bodily activities all present
themselves as material for reshaping by the subject for the purpose of living
differently. 32 Indeed, as I will argue, this turn in the _Leaves_ project
from representation to rhetoric, and from theory to performativity,
formalizes Whitman's attempt to do politics through this kind of ethical
praxis. The politics of _Leaves of Grass_, which cannot be adequately
described according to typical consensualist or contestatory models, situates
the reader's active embodied subjectivity as the locus of transformations
intended ultimately to reverberate throughout American society, as new waves
Kerry Larson argues that _Leaves of Grass_ ranks with "texts which, as a
rule, do not seek to master a meaning so much as to bring to pass the 'common
ground' in which a meaningful exchange may take place." Whitman's poetry, in
other words, formalizes (in Jonathan Culler's phrase) "the circuit or
situation of communication itself." This poetic enterprise, according to
Larson, is driven by a political impulse, "the peculiar blend of motives
making up Whitman's conservative radicalism," which "compel[s] him to take
the rules of exchange between himself and his interlocutors to be his subject
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
translates that iconoclasm out of the vocabulary of patriotic nostalgia for
former civic spaces and into the vocabulary of romantic idealism. 18 Music
functions in QUOTE both as a figure for freedom and as a [End Page 228]
sense-image or embodiment that needs to be transcended in the interests of
further freedom. Thus Emerson commends BLOCKQUOTE
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; typically, Emerson
adds a third stage of synthesis to this romantic dualism, in which the
sensual QUOTE giving way to QUOTE at length return to the world in heroic
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
A similar means of assessing the national condition--and one that underscores
Smith's implicit association between Centralization and the Continent--is
articulated by Samuel Laing, the early-Victorian author of Notes of a
Traveller (1842), and self-styled "social economist." 18 Thus, while Laing
commends the political democracy installed by the French Revolution, he (like
Smith) distinguishes it from the "practical civil liberty" (N, 77) so crucial
to "moral, intellectual and national character" (N, 77). The Revolution, in
other words, failed to transform French character because it disregarded
France's longstanding history of administrative "functionarism" (N, 77)--that
permeable and dramatically more contingent than those in the feminine writing
emphasized by Armstrong. 41
For example, in a discussion of Switzerland, where agricultural property is
widely diffused, Laing commends the "higher and more rational social
position" (N, 357) assumed by Swiss women relative to their counterparts in a
rural England still impeded by concentrated [End Page 154] upper-class land
holdings. On the Swiss farm, he explains, the wife undertakes "the thinking
and managing department in the family affairs," while "the husband is but the
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
premises, promises, confesses, testifies or otherwise translates the
discourse of knowledge into that of power and justice. And Levinas's
insistence on the "pure sign made to the other; sign made from the
giving of the sign," his concern with a language that is not one of
message ("an incessant unsaying of the said") but of address "from
the revelation of the Other," places him squarely in the domain of
the performative.4 A consideration of the performative might allow
Levinas and autobiography to be linked.
of an alterity greater than Levinas allows for affecting the
subject.39
A second comment can be made about the problem of a saying that, in
Levinas's formulation, is an "incessant unsaying of the said."40 The
possibility came to light as a result of an iterability that allowed
the subject and the other to greet one another without sharing
anything beyond that greeting. But iterability, which unsays the
said, is also a potential that comes to dog the I's language at
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
the War with Mexico. That is to say, if for Anderson, the
nationalist QUOTE produces a sense of QUOTE as it connects different
parts of the nation (25, 36), Lippard's war literature shows how
nationalism works by also particularizing and foregrounding bodies
rather than simply abstracting from and decorporealizing them. If
the QUOTE of national history must be clothed QUOTE in order for
people to respond to it (26), then nationalism as mediated by print
capitalism also depends on thrilling sensations of embodiment.
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
knew, was to scribble furiously on the walls. To publish in the _Opal_ was to
accept one's constraints and to find in them a certain liberation.
A. S. M.'s is a self-portrait of nonpersonhood, of anonymity; he conveys in
print the perverse pleasures of practically abstracting himself out of
existence, of entering a public sphere of the undead. But writing in the
_Opal_ must have occasionally compounded the pain of his situation—as
editor he seeks to express, rationally, the logic of the institution that has
denied him his freedom because he is subrational. This quality is especially
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
a break with patriarchy's moral vision, its political, economic, and
legal infrastructure, and its sense of time. Their fanfare is for
abstract individuals rather than fathers and mothers, sons and
daughters. Individuals, having ceased to be sons or fathers, now
belong, by the abstracting magnetism of averages and nations, to a
more grandly conceived succession, that of generations. Generational
belonging is the essence of the modern. The dead are dead.
One consequence--and not simply of the revolutionary political
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
Here Whitman abstracts his addressees in much the same way he has his
speaker, projecting into their locally situated subjectivities a more
conscious interior core to which he hopes his poetry can make appeal. The
seemingly paradoxical purpose of this abstracting process is to particularize
even more radically his readers. Whitman wants his poetry to interpellate
actual persons who are both socially concrete and _at the same time_
numerically singular, those unique individuals whose souls and bodies are at
that moment engaged in reading his text. Whitman experimented with this
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
decades of the American nineteenth century. If, as Burke says,
"variants of the scene-agent ratio abound in typical nineteenth-century
thought, so strongly given to the study of motives by the dialectic
pairing of people and things," then we might say that a new
variant--the scene-text ratio--abounds in recent historicist thought
(9). To borrow Burke's illustration, it is as though you've stepped too
close to a Seurat painting and found the foreground figures dissolved
into the background.
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
not of landscape.
That the plot of Tom Jones is improbable seems self-evident, despite
Fielding's insistence that he will not violate probability by introducing
the marvelous. The story abounds with improbable coincidences, chance
meetings, and happy accidents. And yet calling the history of Tom Jones
improbable conflates different meanings and overemphasizes the modern sense
of the word. 32 We can distinguish, for example, probability of events--the
modern sense--from probability of character, or more specifically,
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
road," it is nevertheless clear that moral development cannot simply be
gauged by proximity to village or city. Far from marking the depth of
corruption into which the hero falls, the metropolitan center serves as a
pivot for recovery, since the "space for repentance" lies in "one of those
excellent hospitals with which London abounds" (5:226, 230). 11 If the Bath
road transmits the vices associated with the Black Bear and the Red Lion, it
is also a conduit for the evangelical enterprise and charitable capital that
flow throughout the narrative. For More, redemption and corruption both
depend upon national and local relations. When he returns at last to the
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
character, and become mentally and physically enervated and imbecile
(221).
8. The term "self-cloaking mechanism" is Powell's. He uses it to
describe the ideological mystifications that have often undergirded
American policy toward its racial and colonial adventures (351).
9. Armsted's turning a blind eye is literally figured in the wrenchi
scene where he, Judge Ballard, and Colonel Franks witness the
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
politicizing fiction by incorporating the struggles of authorized European
history, while the national tale has been devalued because of its engagement
in local (read as feminine) cultural concerns. Its tradition of describing
cultural differences in terms of sentiment and sensibility rather than
official history, undergirded by a distrust of these dominant explanations,
was seen to move counter to enlightenment principles of social progress and
empirical truth. According to many of his nineteenth-century readers, Scott
then revived the tired form of the national tale, infusing it with the energy
of real historical import, giving a manly authority to a female genre while
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
refinement of the Caucasian features:
BLOCKQUOTE
White's schema is typical of the polygenist hypothesis, which, undergirded by
the emerging geometry of the human head that calibrated everything from the
width of the brow to the texture of the hair, sought to construct a graduated
hierarchy of human variation from European to Hottentot to orangutan.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
spiritual interest as individuals, can only exist for the people in
the form of religion." 66 Religion thus conceived is a more
political than spiritual institution, reproducing a moral unanimity
that regulates national identity. The kind of identity that arises
in Coleridge's poetry as a means of meliorating the life of loss
becomes the foundational unit of a self-disciplining body politic,
at least in that social order whose history and tradition coincide
with England's: "in regard of the grounds and principles of action
and conduct, the State has a right to demand of the National Church,
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
a single glance the "present state of manners" as well as the historical
trajectory of the world's gradual "improvement." The philosophical impact of
Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian excursion is perhaps best measured in the
cautionary tale she appends to her published text. Noting that "the
meliorating manners of Europe" have expedited "the increasing knowledge and
happiness of the kingdoms I passed through," Wollstonecraft nonetheless warns
that there are still many "prejudices . . . which only time can root out" (L,
197). She closes then with an admonition:
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
There are many other passages in The Renaissance where Pater's
insights about art and about the "powers or forces" that live on
from this historical period go against Mrs. Pattison's understanding
of "the historical element." Pater's essays suggest that following
such a "scientific method" would only be to misinterpret the art and
literature of the Renaissance, drawing on too simple a notion of
"the life of the time" to guide our understanding. Pater's work also
points to the difficulty of viewing the Renaissance as "an originary
moment of cultural reunification," to use Bill Readings's terms,
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
addition to his early successes on the social scene, before stating quite
bluntly that "if we set aside his achievements in the sphere of poison, what
he has left to us hardly justifies his reputation." 11 As Regenia Gagnier has
persuasively argued, though, Wilde's insouciant tone has led most critics to
miss the sense of irony, and thus to misinterpret statements like this or to
take them at face value; Richard Ellmann, for instance, suggests that
"forgery was a crime which perhaps seems closest to Wilde's social
presentation of himself," and concludes that this essay demonstrates that
"Wainewright's criminal craft revealed a true artist." 12 The key point here
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
point the "Myth of Cultural Integration," which levels something
designated "culture" either as a determining system or as a
superstructural epiphenomenon. Archer challenges this myth by
distinguishing between what she labels "Cultural Systems" and
"Socio-Cultural Interaction," the former denoting the established
"components of culture," the latter describing the hermeneutics of
everyday communication (xviii). Within such a schema, she hopes to
differentiate between a body of religious doctrine and the
expression of those beliefs in everyday communication, or, in the
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
current, online third edition there are more, all adding up to 102 citations
to the novel. Based on this current edition, _Connecticut Yankee_ is the
first attested text, or at the very least the first literary appearance, for
the following words: _call_ (as a verb, meaning to make a telephone call);
_central_ (denoting a telephone exchange); _dude;hello;phase_ (for _faze_);
_random_ (used as a verb); _slim-jim;_ and _up-anchor_ (used as a verb). The
_OED_ also records a clutch of words that emerged in the technical or popular
culture of late-nineteenth-century America for which _Connecticut Yankee_
offers significant evidence. _Ironclad_ (first attested in 1852), used as
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
characterizing the goal of "Emersonian perfectionism" as "shaming us
out of our shame" (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The
Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1990]); George Kateb's Emerson and Self-Reliance likewise
notes its importance. But shame sounds the wrong note, denoting fear
of public exposure or the internalization of communal norms in ways
that, at the very least, stand to the side of Emerson's concern.
Docility seems a more exact word for the syndrome Emerson sees
himself combating, though its prominence in the work of Tocqueville
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 133-166
Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wolfram Schmidgen
---------------
dismantling of ethnic nationalism emphasizes, above all, the "mixed" nature
of English national identity, and throughout the first part of the poem,
terms such as "blended," "Mixture," and "Medly" proliferate. Defoe's argument
on the mixed character of the English people draws on one critical strand of
the meaning of bastardy, denoting an impure, uncontrolled union of disparate
elements. 11
Defoe substantiates this reference by asserting the illegitimate status of
the English. He finds it remarkable that "of all Men" the English should
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
Blessington and celebrity authors like William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, Mary
Shelley, and Letitia Landon. As Peter Manning notes, such
collections, especially after the elegant innovations of the
_Keepsake_, clearly functioned first and foremost as status-denoting
gifts rather than as books one actually read. 1 Or more accurately,
what was read were first and foremost the portraits, subscribers,
and contributors; in other words, the signs of status with which
those who wished to be in the know needed to be familiar.
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
McDougall in marrying a Chinook woman quickly enough reveals itself
as treachery when McDougall sells *[End Page 696]* Fort Astoria to
the British. Irving depicts the sexual transgression as symptomatic
of disloyalty to "the company" and the state. Intermarriage between
white traders and Indian women called for the disrobing of the
euphemistic "interest." When faced with such sexual mixing
European-American writers like Irving invoked what Pocock summarizes
as "the patriot ideal," an anticommercial agrarian discourse that
linked civic virtue with territorial settlement, the possession of
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
were as ready to the story-teller's or the playwright's hand, as the
rich cloaks and dresses of his time." 50 Synge identifies with the
peasant female as a collaborative partner, a subject who will speak
through him, yet, as his analogy implies, that collaboration
functions as a disrobing, a donning of the peasant garb by which he
constructs and controls peasant subjectivity. Far from speaking at
all, the peasant remains the naked other, an absence for which Synge
assumes a voice, a body displaced by Synge's desire, a being given
consciousness through sublation not collaboration.
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
conforms to sentimental convention, strikes us as being less
tiresomely scripted. 19 Readers of Edgeworth's novel often remark on
the striking quality of the intimacy between the two women, a good
deal of which is achieved through the revelation of Lady Delacour's
breast. This disrobing, we might say, is what instigates Belinda's
most compelling course of action--her surrender to belief: a belief
in Lady Delacour's illness; a belief in the cancerousness of Lady
Delacour's breast; a belief that wit _did this_ to her.
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
With what seems to be a scientific revision of The Pickwick Papers's
(1836-37) "Ode to an Expiring Frog," Lewes castigates Dickens for
[End Page 617] producing characters who, like frogs whose brains
have been removed by vivisecting physiologists, display the basic
operations of a living organism without its inherent intricacy and
contingency. 2 In part, perhaps, because of the uproar created by
the scientific comparisons in the essay, in part because absorption
in his Problems of Life and Mind (1874-79) left Lewes little time
fails to conceive" (D, 149; my emphasis).
The shortcomings of Dickens as a novelist are thus precisely the
deficiencies of an incompetent vivisector. On the one hand, Lewes
denounces vivisecting critics for torturing the minds of authors,
but, on the other, he suggests that the attitude of a subtle
novelist to her subject may resemble that of a skillful vivisector
to his. Success in vivisection or fiction is hard to achieve; yet if
undertaken with foresight and an imagination rooted in reality,
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
put together a lecture series on such topics as QUOTE QUOTE and QUOTE ;
offered in a private home, charging (at her husband's insistence) no fee, the
lectures attracted not only Howe's QUOTE but some eminent men as well, as she
proudly recorded (305-06; see also Clifford 159-65 and Grant 151-52). Soon
she was reading her poetry and lecturing actively, sometimes for fees, in
public venues ranging from the Parker Fraternity to the New York City
celebration in 1864 honoring William Cullen Bryant. Perhaps reminded of the
public occasions in 1863 when she had not been invited to recite her poetry,
Howe in her journal called her participation in the Bryant ceremony QUOTE
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
best hotels as they rode first class to freedom. Abolitionists cheered;
these were relatively well-situated slaves--William, a skilled craftsman,
Ellen, a favored and protected house "servant"--who proved that slavery was
insupportable in any state. And the Crafts continued to make that point,
joining the abolitionist community in Boston and lecturing with antislavery
societies in the US and later throughout Great Britain, where Ellen was the
first formerly enslaved woman to visit since Phillis Wheatley in 1772. In
multiple mediums, abolitionists such as Lydia Maria Child, William Still,
William Lloyd Garrison, William Wells Brown, and Colonel Thomas Wentworth
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
each passing decade (qtd. in Ryan 74).
Soon after the publication of Emerson's "American Scholar," Brownson made one
of his more urgent arguments for a new literary tradition, this time
lecturing on "American Literature" in 1839 before a literary society at Brown
University. As in the earlier essay of the same title, Brownson reminded his
audience of his disagreement with Emerson over the developmental pattern for
an emerging national literature during an era marked by what Emerson had
called "the new importance given to the single person" (58). Denying that
ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537
"Bales of Living Anguish": Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing
Peter J. Kitson
---------------
of the treatment of the slaves found their way into Coleridge's lecture. 49
Benezet's Account and Wadstr�m's Essay provided Coleridge with descriptions
of the idyllic life of Africans and Clarkson's Essay on the Impolicy of the
Slave Trade gave him details of the manner in which the trade was conducted.
Coleridge was, of course, lecturing in one of the three cities which were
vital to the British trade in slaves. As James Walvin puts it, "London,
Liverpool and Bristol formed the axis around which the lucrative and
revolutionary system" of the slave empire turned. Walvin argues that from the
"beginnings of the abolition campaign in the eighteenth century until the
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
"consequences are hardly ever confined to ourselves . . . [a]nd it is
best to fix our minds on that certainty" (_A_, 172). Mr. Irwine fails
to force a confession from Arthur--the pivotal nonevent that allows
the unfolding of "all this guilt and misery" (_A_, 407)--because he
is too busy lecturing him about the central ethical insight of the
novel. Had he *[End Page 558]* heard Arthur's secret, rather than
delivered the moral of the story, he would have prevented the
demonstration of that moral through the exercise in consequences that
follows. Concealment is necessary to narrative, while the strictures
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
concern is the continuous parade of "near white" or "very light" concubines
that "pollute" Southern homes. Mattison quotes Picquet directly in the
first half of _The Octoroon_ (or represents himself as doing so) as she
tells of her struggle as a 14-year-old against one master's sexual
aggressions, which she evades, despite the beatings that ensue, although
her mother cannot. Despite her ingenuity and the help she enlists, Louisa
is sold and then raped by her new owner, an aging Mr. Williams, who soon
after leaving the auction block explained "what he bought me for" *[End
Page 512]* (20). When he dies, as she had prayed for him to, he sets Louisa
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
clarity ("I am . . ."), the Creature emphasizes the murkiness of
memory, the "considerable difficulty" of remembering a past that is
"confused and indistinct": a primal, amniotic sea of sensation. 44
Yet the mere fact that he tries to remember those origins
distinguishes him from his maker, who evades such messiness by
describing a self that is a social, and largely familial,
construction: "My mother's tender caresses, and my father's smile of
benevolent pleasure while regarding me, are my first recollections"
(1831; F, 322). While Victor's description illustrates the Lacanian
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
traveler. 19
An element of sexual intrigue is diffused through his experiences in
Erewhonian culture. Our narrator must penetrate, seduce, and decode
Erewhon; at the same time, Erewhon frustrates, evades, and partially
reveals itself to his understanding. An eroticized curiosity is
predictable in an adventure story, but it is also and relatedly
predictable for a novel that encodes a colonialist experience and a
colonial act of knowledge. The complex operations of sexual
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
Tale," [End Page 956] and Caxton's "Reynard the Fox." With
considerable poetic license, Thelwall portrays his King Chaunticlere
as an arrogant barnyard tyrant whom he finally beheads; after its
execution, the beheaded body still moves. He develops extensively
two aspects of this narrative, allegorizing the gamecock's fate as
regicide, and commenting on the scientific conundrum of a headless
body still moving as if alive.
Thelwall begins by picking up where the last speaker, who tried to
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
possible to see de Man's approach to narrative by way of allegory as a
powerful revival, indeed as the most vital recent episode, in modernism's
attack on story and plot." Where Caserio asserts that de Man approaches
narrative by way of allegory, he suggests that de Man's approach to modern
narrative takes the form of binarized allegorizing: by his account, not only
are allegory and narration for de Man "grindingly antithetical," but overall
de Man is characterized as "always inciting" "wars of elemental antagonisms."
We are informed, finally, that these very "antagonisms," which Neil Hertz has
characterized as de Man's "lurid figures," are what have contributed to the
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
frequently maintain a subordinate story line in which notorious
degenerates transform into sage *[End Page 575]* domestic icons.
Such metamorphosis is taken as a given of bourgeois storytelling, a
forum for an emergent class to imagine itself demystifying, and thus
enfeebling, entrenched value systems. As if to say that aristocratic
codes have only the most tenuous holds on their easily tamed
subjects, Enlightenment strategies seem to unveil docile creatures
behind flashy masks.
if, to some extent, it always already has won (the conventions of
the sentimental novel tell us from the start that Belinda will tame
the rakish Clarence and the two will set up home together)--aren't
we to assume that wit has always already "lost"? The seemingly
superfluous enfeebling of wit, however--the novel's suggestion that
it isn't that wit is dangerous, per se, but rather that our
_believing it to be so_, is--suggests that we reread the terms of
this apparent contest. While _Belinda_ has been popularly regarded
as representative of the late-century struggle between the
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
29. Warner has recently argued that liberal-symptomatizing readings of
Whitman "[get] almost everything wrong, though it's a misreading partly
developed by the late Whitman, as it were, himself." Whitman, in Warner's
view, problematizes the "phenomenology of selfing" intrinsic to the "ideology
of self-characterization" that underlies the consolidating and instrumental
movement within liberal subjectivity: _Leaves of Grass_, Warner writes,
"thematizes a modern phenomenology of self everywhere . . . [and] almost
always . . . in order to make the pragmatics of selfing a mess." See "Whitman
view, problematizes the "phenomenology of selfing" intrinsic to the "ideology
of self-characterization" that underlies the consolidating and instrumental
movement within liberal subjectivity: _Leaves of Grass_, Warner writes,
"thematizes a modern phenomenology of self everywhere . . . [and] almost
always . . . in order to make the pragmatics of selfing a mess." See "Whitman
Drunk," in _Breaking Bounds_, 39-40.
30. "Song of Myself" provides good examples of Whitman's inchoate theory of
the subject. Walt imagines the social world--"the latest dates, discoveries,
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
empire and fall (Franchot 35-82; Levin; McWilliams 158-86;
Wertheimer 128-31). Despite the complexities and paradoxes of The
Conquest of Mexico, however, readers often interpreted it as a sort
of guidebook to Mexico for US military forces and as a historical
model for the US-Mexican War, with the Spanish conquest prefiguring
the victory of the US over Mexico, though the Spanish were widely
considered to have been excessively cruel and QUOTE (Johannsen 180).
According to this logic, as the misquotation of Paine's words
suggests, because the US fought QUOTE it could escape Spain's fate
ELH 66.1 (1999) 87-110
"Monumental Inscriptions": Language, Rights, the Nation in Coleridge and Horne Tooke
Andrew R. Cooper
---------------
of an Englishman's rights) is defined by a collection of man-made signs of
private property and wealth: the "grand monuments of the dead."
The echoes of Reflections that run through "Fears" and "France" could be read
as prefiguring the Burkean Coleridge who wrote The Statesman's Manual and On
the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each. But, more
importantly, by exploring the intertextuality of Diversions and Coleridge's
poetry of 1798 it is possible to see "Fears" and "France" not only as
representing Horne Tooke's materialist theory of language, but also as the
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
(B, 2:148)
It is as if Pindar were writing of William Wordsworth, and
prefiguring the Edinburgh reviewers as crows chattering impotently
against the genuine poet or holy bird of Zeus. [End Page 549]
IV.
---
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
The true mirror image of Clare in the novel is Brightwel, whose death
Caleb watches over with much the same reaction as Falkland does over
Clare's. Caleb is shattered at Brightwel's death, which he calls a
"tragedy," and like Falkland, he would have liked to die in the
victim's stead; and while Falkland raves in unavailing anger at the
cruelty of Destiny, Caleb excoriates the cruelties of the legal
system:
BLOCKQUOTE
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
37. Elizabeth Gaskell, _Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life_
(1848) (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 22. Not surprisingly,
Engels voiced a similar endorsement of working-class expenditure:
"To save is unavailing, for at the utmost [the worker] cannot save
more than suffices to sustain life for a short period of time, while
if he falls out of work, it is for no brief period. To accumulate
lasting property for himself is impossible. . . . What better thing
can he do, then, when he gets high wages, than live well upon them?
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
The term sublime is applied in the novel to several people, to
Falkland and Alexander, but also implicitly to Caleb and explicitly
to Mr. Clare. I contend that the one and only example of true
sublimity in the novel is rendered in the character of Mr. Clare, who
displays all the positive divine attributes without arrogating any of
the terrible powers of divinity to himself. Clare is also the first
person to receive the label sublime in the novel. Although in the
opening chapters Caleb had described his new master as
"compassionate," he then noted his "incessant gloom," his being
Falkland he employs the intimate thee and thou to address his
antagonist. The thou is here the thou of the Biblical God confronting
man the worm with His omnipotence and man's insignificance in the
scheme of things; in Caleb's language, the usage is therefore one of
calculated insolence--putting down Falkland by arrogating to himself
the powers of divinity. When Caleb repudiates Falkland's tyranny
after the message from Gines that he is not allowed to leave England,
he inveighs against Falkland as a Nero or Caligula:
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
Ultimately, it is hard to know whether to attribute the final two
stanzas of "The Sparrow and Diamond" to the infatuated speaker or to
the glib poet. The moralizing superego, at any rate, does not come
easy to the incapacitated psyche. In exaggerating, pluralizing, and
mythologizing, it treats behavioral foibles not just as character
flaws but as cosmic defects. It is here that Lucia becomes a symbol,
representing her class (the fair), her sex, and her species. But a
hallucinatory moral is hardly more useful than no moral at all. The
indiscriminate terror of the superego is itself an agent of surplus
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 141-165
William Blake's Androgynous Ego-Ideal
Tom Hayes _Baruch College and The Graduate Center_ _City University of New York _
---------------
At the beginning of _Jerusalem_, furious Los says to his fearful Spectre: "I
must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans" (_J_, 10). Although this
is not necessarily Blake's own view, _Jerusalem_ can be read as an attempt to
provide an alternative to the Oedipal narrative whereby the master signifier,
the phallus, centers the subject. By mythologizing all cultural acts as the
unfolding of desire, Blake calls attention to how, in order to show they have
the phallus, men torture and kill one another. In a canceled stanza to
_Jerusalem_ *[End Page 151]* he makes the connection between imperialist
warfare and the phallus explicit: BLOCKQUOTE
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
self-sufficiency as well as the potential to deceive. Because the
body offered such unreliable testimony, donors also looked to other
means of authentication, from QUOTE references to home visits. The
illegible--or worse, the theatrical--supplicant was constantly
adapting, shifting tactics, remaking himself/herself in a
dialectical relationship with those who attempted to establish rules
and safeguards. Dissatisfied with the assurance that, whatever the
beggar's true circumstances, their alms met some sort of need, the
benevolent sought a guarantee that they were doing well at doing
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
contributor to the _Dictionary:_ "There is a profound monotonousness about
its facts." Or take the entry for the verb _push,_ using this quotation
(facts were clearly on the reader's mind): "There was another fact, which he
had never pushed upon anybody unmasked." A simple word like _remake_finds its
illustration with a characteristic Twainian maxim: "If I had the remaking of
man, he wouldn't have a conscience." An ordinary word like _sheep_ becomes
transformed in this passage: "The sheep-witted earl who could claim long
descent from a king's leman." The verb _solidify_ becomes the locus for the
figurative expression not of matter but of politics: "The tower episode
_Put_ (def. 44): " I couldn't do anything with the letters after I had
written them. But I put in the time" (43).
_Remake:_ "If I had the remaking of man, he wouldn't have a conscience" (18).
_Scantling_ (def. 7a): "About two hundred yards off... we built a pen of
scantlings" (23).
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
serving "to situate ourselves in the world and thus guide our
actions" (71). From a functionalist point of view, it would seem, on
the contrary, that memory is only incidentally and subordinately
"moral" when it reconfigures the past for the purpose of idealized
self-remaking and self-presentation. We may "_choose_ our
recollections" by "what has value to us" (72), but is the
determination of "value" a disinterested ethical consideration, a
function of psychological need, or some subtly irreducible amalgam
of both? There are two respects in which Thoreauvian "memory" seems
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
privileges of a shared imperial whiteness.
Yet limiting the cultural work of domesticity to structuring
national identity through racial exclusion underplays the continuous
remaking of colonial difference in other modes. Official US colonial
policy towards tribal nations had historically combined strategies
of treaty making, removal, genocidal conquest, and cultural
assimilation (although not always equally or consistently).6 With no
lands beyond the reach of white settlers to practice the decidedly
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
thinking sought to ameliorate, moralize about, or wish away those same
conditions.
In a landmark article, Gareth Stedman Jones has attempted to trace elements
of an ideological "remaking" of the working class, which included the origins
of a distinctive commercial culture within which the new music halls featured
prominently, the more reformist emphasis of the new unionism, the beginnings
of a marked working-class conservatism and patriotism (articulated especially
in support of the Boer campaign), and the powerful appeal of "respectability"
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
polls, forthwith!" Quoted in Greenspan, _Walt Whitman and the American
Reader_ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 107.
37. Raymond Williams, _Marxism and Literature_ (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1977), 209. "The long and difficult remaking of an inherited (determined)
practical consciousness: a process often described as development but in
practise a struggle at the roots of the mind--not casting off an ideology, or
learning phrases about it, but confronting a hegemony in the fibres of the
self and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
European immigrants by promoting a more expansive whiteness defined
in opposition to blacks. Although the emphasis on black-white racial
divisions is important, however, the present essay focuses on
Lippard's war literature to support the argument that the
sensational QUOTE of empire were also significant racializing
discourses. Despite his scorn for party politics, Lippard, unlike
Duganne and Buntline, generally promoted the pro-European immigrant
whiteness championed by Democrats. But Lippard's war novels make it
clear that imperialism also played an important role in
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
attitude toward the former Ottoman empire that developed at the
close of the eighteenth century and that was accompanied by a
racial- civilizing narrative (170). In the US the 1790s mark a turn
toward defining American identity in ascriptive terms, making race
an increasingly important signifier of difference. A racializing
logic is related both to concerns within the nation over
establishing the coherence and stability of a white citizenship and
to concerns with establishing American commercial authority and
liberty in the larger world. Joanne Melish suggests that a central
emerges most clearly is not the specific terms of their racial
identities (as Turk, Jew, or African) but rather the fixed whiteness
of American identity.14
The racializing force of the play becomes clearer when we examine
two additional elements: the contrast between the fates of Rebecca
and Fetnah and the subplots of interracial marriage. The opening two
scenes of the play, in their propinquity, liken Fetnah's subjection
to Rebecca's and provide both characters with a republican rhetoric
American women's virtue.17 Critics of the theater in the 1790s
imagined England as the corrupt and tyrannical enemy of a fragile
American people; Rowson displaces this image by describing Algerians
and Jews as corrupt and tyrannical threats to American women. By
racializing the threat of tyranny, English paternity is, by way of
contrast, bleached and purified, and the virtuous American daughter
emerges as both loyal to her English culture (genealogically pure)
and to American politics (committed to freedom).
of Americans in Africa to the enslavement of Africans in America.20
*[End Page 422]* As I argue above, her concern with extending
political subjectivity to white women leads her to implicitly
construct and sustain racist assumptions rather than to combat them.
Ironically, Rowson's racializing discourse relies upon a structural
dimension of the equalizing politics of republicanism.21
Republicanism espouses a doctrine of equality among members of the
polity; as such, it would seem to be antithetical to race slavery
and, more broadly, to racism. Yet the equality of members of the
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
The wanderer's blush links manners to the somatic. 14 Its
specifically racializing powers--its ability to convert
"complexion," in the first instance, into "disguise," in the
second--derive from its status under patriarchy as, according to Dr.
Jonathan Gregory in A Father's Legacy to his Daughters, "so far from
being necessarily an attendant on guilt, that it is the usual
the ambiguity of women's blushes. This is summed by Jonathan
Swift--as cited in Pamela by Samuel Richardson: "They blush because
they understand." Swift, "Cadenus and Vanessa," in The Poems of
Jonathan Swift, ed. Padraic Colum (New York: Collier Books, 1962),
87. Yeazell does not, however, discuss the racializing function of
the blush. For a consideration of this function, see Mary Ann
O'Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel
and the Blush (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997).
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
overt position with respect to the Federalist/Republican divide, it
was nonetheless attacked by prominent Federalist William Cobbett,
and championed by Republican Senator John Swanwick.9 In his critique
of _Slaves in Algiers_, Cobbett seizes upon Rowson's feminist
claims, adumbrating a nightmare of disorder following the
dissemination of Rowson's ideas. First, he imagines, the word _obey_
will be removed from the marriage service; next, marriage itself
will go by the board; and then, "Who knows but our present house of
Representatives, for instance, may be succeeded by members of the
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
IX.
---
Although such a complex account of Negro aesthetics is certainly not
explicit in Hawthorne's texts, what I have been adumbrating are the
assumptions (both conscious and unconscious) that frame Hawthorne's
knowledge of what the Negro is. Hawthorne in these texts
demonstrates a sustained engagement with the problem of the Negro
becoming a person, an engagement that has not been appreciated
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
phallocratic classification of females as the second sex by putting
women on top.22 Noting that sixteenth-century synonyms of
"preposterous" include "arsy-versy," Parker identifies the
"Arts-man" in _Love's Labours Lost_ as an "Arse-man," thus
adumbrating the prospect of a sodometrics of early modern studies
that would use _pre_posterousness to critique the homophobia
generated by heterosexual normativity.23 The temporal concepts of
before and after are often represented in spatial terms, either
horizontally as fore and aft or vertically as top and bottom.
ELH 67.3 (2000) 801-818
Dangerous Acquaintances: The Correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke
Barbara Packer
---------------
social gatherings in Cambridge where he quickly became impressed by the
brilliance of her conversation and by the range of her reading. While Clarke
had been plodding through the prescribed curriculum at Boston Latin and then
at Harvard, where the Greek professor forced students to wade through the
Iliad as if it were a bog, Fuller had been educated by a series of tutors. 3
Her first tutor was her father Timothy, a lawyer who in Margaret's youth had
been a congressman from Cambridge. He started her out when she was six with
lessons in Latin and English grammar. He continued to direct her progress by
letter when he was absent in Washington during congressional sessions. Her
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
thinking in the long nights it was a big fool I was that time,
Micheal Dara, for what good is a bit of a farm with cows on it, and
sheep on the back hills, when you do be sitting looking from a door
the like of that door, and seeing nothing but the mists rolling down
the bog" (S, 112). Oblivious to the transformation occurring in
Nora, Micheal counts the money, and, having satisfied himself of its
(read: her) worth, proposes marriage: "Twenty pound for the lot,
Nora Burke. . . . We'ld do right to wait now till himself will be
quiet awhile in the Seven Churches, and then you'll marry me in the
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
comes to the portrait of his uncle Oliver, done before the man had
spent years in India, Charles finds that he is unable to part with
it. Sir Oliver, who until this point had been on the verge of
agreeing with the negative consensus about Charles, now changes his
mind instantly, exclaiming "the rogue's my nephew after all!" (407).
The gesture of withholding the portrait carries more persuasive
power than Charles's explanation of his decision, and Sir Oliver
returns again and again to that moment when Moses, the moneylender
who introduces Premium to Charles, attempts to point out what he
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
principles, to figure out a riddle. This predicament is dramatized
when Huck and Jim debate first Solomon's wisdom and then "speaking
_Franzy_" (87). Each insists that the other does not get the "pint"
(86) of the Solomon story. In the end, frustrated at Jim's refusal to
yield to his superior book learning, Huck quits the debate exclaiming,
"'You can't learn a nigger to argue'" (88). Most readers probably
judge that Jim wins the argument. Critics like David L. Smith, Steven
Mailloux, and more recently Jehlen have argued that although Jim is
culturally ignorant, his syllogisms contending that Solomon is cruel
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
This made religion into a political mechanism that was corrupt, in
Coleridge's view, much less for its doctrines than for its
structure: a structure that either excluded (from parliament, from
civil offices, from educational and military institutions) adherents
of nonconforming beliefs or--at the very best--encouraged people to
lie for the purposes of inclusion. This is essentially to say that
the church was not merely guilty of endorsing personal hypocrisy but
of institutionalizing the very beliefs that it disavowed.
Coleridge's apparent willingness to defend religious uniformity in
his later work is no exception to this way of thinking. As frequent
as his attacks on superstition, atheism, fanaticism, and other kinds
of nonconforming beliefs may be, we should not take them as markers
of any simple position of religious orthodoxy. We should instead
view these attacks in the context of a more comprehensive account of
the way that beliefs are socially organized. Coleridge's
characterizations of the "anti-christian priesthood" and "Papal
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 223-243
Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot's _Middlemarch_
Jessie Givner
---------------
the novel's margins." 5 The forces of industrial revolution, that is, are
"real" history, and those forces are contained and reduced by the text.
Distinguishing "between the _text_ and the 'real' _history_ to which it
alludes" (my emphasis), Eagleton cites Eliot's overarching figure of the web
as an exemplary "dehistoricizing" (and therefore depoliticizing) literary
structure. In a famous passage in _Middlemarch,_ the web appears as a figure
for history itself, when the narrator refers to the novel's form of history
as "this particular web" (128). Eagleton writes that "the web's symmetry, its
'spatial' dehistoricizing of the social process, its exclusion of levels of
as an exemplary "dehistoricizing" (and therefore depoliticizing) literary
structure. In a famous passage in _Middlemarch,_ the web appears as a figure
for history itself, when the narrator refers to the novel's form of history
as "this particular web" (128). Eagleton writes that "the web's symmetry, its
'spatial' dehistoricizing of the social process, its exclusion of levels of
contradiction, preserve the essential unity of the organic mode." 6 The
metaphor of the web, Eagleton suggests, belongs to a timeless, spatial,
rural, organic realm, a realm that he associates with preindustrialism. While
Eliot figures history through the metaphor of *[End Page 224]* the web,
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
decision to publish an expanded edition of the play. Rather than
following common publishing practice and printing the play "as now
seen at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane," Lewis had chosen to print the
full, unexpurgated text of the play, adding numerous notes and
appending a short essay "To the Reader" at the end of his text. 38
If we open the text of Castle Spectre with this assumption, however,
it does not take long for us to understand the confusion of Lewis's
reviewers when they first read it. Nowhere in its text do we find
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
although, once again, they mystify the process in order to deflect the
perception that the author might be conducting a revolution of her own: the
ambitious and highly mediated designs of the Cheap Repository are represented
within _Tom White_ by relatively informal modes of community intercourse.
Rather than appending the final sequence of recipes to the tract in the form
of a list, as she sometimes did, More works to integrate them into the
narrative, through the device of a spontaneous village discussion inspired by
the vicar's carefully staged reprimands about luxury.
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
to eschew what he described in 1837 as that "vast net-work of administrative
tyranny . . . that system of bureaucracy, which leaves no free agent in all
France." 13 In his definitive 1838 critique of Bentham, Mill faulted the
latter for his indifference to and ignorance of "national character." "The
same laws will not suit the English and the French," Mill insisted, indicting
Benthamism on the grounds that "A philosophy of laws and institutions, not
founded on a philosophy of national character, is an absurdity." 14 This
aspect of Mill's critique, moreover, is all but anticipated by Harriet
Martineau. Martineau's proto-sociological study of Society in America (1837)
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
reformist and loyalist causes; scholars have been unsuccessful in
pinning down his politics further than to say he was a moderate
concerned about the possible violence of radical reform.5 The year
culminated in his collaboration with William Hone on the radical
pamphlet _The Political House that Jack Built_, a poem indicting the
current government through the writing of the children's nursery
rhyme "The House That Jack Built." This pamphlet, the engravings of
which included the image of mother and child to signify the
oppressiveness of the current regime, was extremely popular and had
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
1994), 170 ("the individual"), 166 ("to the light").
51. Although this essay focuses on the novel's representation of
Gwendolen, I would also like to point out the visionary Mordecai
Cohen's joy at beholding the arrival of Daniel, who corresponds to
Cohen's visions of a sort of proto-Zionist Messiah, in a passage
that connects science and prophecy just as "The Lifted Veil" does:
"His exultation was not widely different from that of the
experimenter, bending over the first stirrings of change that
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 151-169
Walking on Flowers: the Kantian Aesthetics Of _Hard Times_
Christina Lupton
---------------
for knowledge is one of the least fanciful and most factual of all
Dickens's literary achievements. Rather than defend _Hard Times_
against the general accusation that it seems only to entertain one
way of seeing, what I would now posit is that the novel's ultimate
fact is not something to behold, but a way of beholding. This
gesture of transcendence, which is characterized in Sissy Jupe and
repeated in Dickens's approach to the question of alienated labor,
cannot be dismissed simply as unimaginative objectivity. The
possibility of objectivity could not have held court for so long
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
book--subtitled _A Study in Human Nature_--was to explore what he
called, without denigration, the "pathology" by which the "sick"
(dis-integrated) soul became unified and empowered. This was
precisely what Thoreau sought--self-unity and empowerment as they
impelled him toward ever higher levels of being. What Hodder
addresses as Thoreau's "spiritual" life--and what he seems
determined in the face of counterevidence to regard as a triumph,
even in the benumbingly fact-ridden late journals--is part of a
larger life of consciousness, of a _human_ nature, that even a
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
time into a popular dream of empire. The decision to "civilize" the
continent, to annex Texas and wrest control of the Southwest from
Mexico, fundamentally redefined national aspirations. Understanding
the inherent contradictions of American nationhood that have subtly
impelled our mutation from a much-admired republic wary of foreign
entanglements into a dominant superpower scornful of world opinion
forms one objective of this study.
Despite current emphasis in the profession on thinking beyond the
Whig loyalist dispersing jobs in Philadelphia, Poe never received
preferment and bristled at the spectacle of party
stooges—"low ruffians and boobies" Poe called them
(_Letters_ 1: 219)—receiving appointments in his stead.
Desperation impelled his mortifying visit to Washington in March
1843 to entreat the president himself or his son Robert Tyler, an
aspiring poet. Poe never met John Tyler and despite the intervention
of friends spent most of the week inebriated, offending nearly
everyone, including Robert Tyler and his wife (Silverman 192). His
(206–16). More pertinent to my argument, however, is its
connection to an emerging *[End Page 20]* ideology of Manifest
Destiny and to the territorial aspirations that shaped the 1844
presidential election. Significantly for Poe's American turn and for
the manic productivity that bracketed (and in some sense impelled)
his move to New York, the year 1844 marked the end of a seven-year
economic depression and the return to aggressive capital investment
and business growth. That recovery triggered an expansionist view of
markets and helped to incite growing sentiment for war with Mexico
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
specific condition of Scotland, a nation that had lost its
independence in 1707 and had failed to reassert it despite two
rebellions. The rapid development of historical studies in Scottish
universities, according to Brown, was a direct consequence of this.
The need to recover a sense of national identity impelled Scots in
the later eighteenth century to develop a new understanding of the
nature of historical process. 18 Brown's argument has obvious
advantages over Luk�cs's. It can be shown that Scott was [End Page
869] exposed to this newly developed historical understanding while
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
constraints and limits. A new vitality is achieved by forging new
connections, which unify or go beyond the opposing currents that
have narrowed men's minds. Pater writes that "In their search after
the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for
beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled beyond
the bounds of the Christian ideal" (R, 18-19), and he offers a
fanciful portrait of "the enchanted region of the Renaissance . . .
Here are no fixed parties, no exclusions: all breathes of that unity
of culture in which 'whatsoever things are comely' are reconciled,
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
pleasant anecdote, / So rich, so gay, so poignant is his wit, / Time
vanishes before him as he speaks" (_M_, 1.1.78), Rezenvelt is
gradually revealed to be preternaturally unctuous. In addition to
the fact that De Monfort remarks, in an *[End Page 1057]* aside,
that Count Freberg is "undiscerning" in his "praise" (_M_, 1.2.79)
(and "undiscerning" is about as spirited an insult as there is in
the Bailliean lexicon), the text indicates on numerous other
occasions that we can trust neither Freberg's opinion, nor that of
any of the other baubled patricians who visit his "fancifully
vanishes before him as he speaks" (_M_, 1.1.78), Rezenvelt is
gradually revealed to be preternaturally unctuous. In addition to
the fact that De Monfort remarks, in an *[End Page 1057]* aside,
that Count Freberg is "undiscerning" in his "praise" (_M_, 1.2.79)
(and "undiscerning" is about as spirited an insult as there is in
the Bailliean lexicon), the text indicates on numerous other
occasions that we can trust neither Freberg's opinion, nor that of
any of the other baubled patricians who visit his "fancifully
decorated" apartment (_M_, 2.1.81). Indeed, the play bears ample
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
This little coming-of-age story may be divided into three stages.
First, the man who was once a child sees in the tyrant of his youth
the child he used to be. Seeing the teacher cower before "names and
words and forms" as the pupil once cowered before the teacher
allows, in turn, the pupil to see how something like a contented
servility may come to pass. The third and final step is of course to
apply this realization to other situations where it is reasonable to
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
that leaves parent and child alone in public gatherings and at home,
or the more defiant ones committed in extreme cases, such as those
of the "mental patient" who "casting off the raiments of the old
self--or . . . having this cover torn away" declines "a new robe and
a new audience before which to cower," choosing to practice instead
"at least for a time," "before all groups the amoral arts of
shamelessness." 15
Thus the two sides of the story that Goffman and Foucault tell,
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
becomes the bearer of the appellation of desire. Now "hello-central" stands
not as the invitation to male fantasy but as the site of parental concern.
But just what is the origin of such a name? In the next chapter we appear to
learn (in an oblique and cloudy reference) how Hank was still beset by dreams
of his more modern world; how "[m]any a time Sandy heard that imploring cry
come from my lips in my sleep" (407). That cry is, of course,
"hello-central." Sandy imagines "it to be the name of some lost darling of
mine," and so of course, she names their daughter after it: "The name of one
who was dear to thee is here preserved, here made holy, and the music of it
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
are the people who try to do most good." If this superficially reads like a
standard Wildean paradox, the essay goes on to suggest a more precise target:
in recent years, he noted, "we have had the spectacle of men who have really
studied the problem and know the life--educated men who live in the
East-end--coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its
altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the
ground that such charity degrades and demoralizes. They are perfectly right.
Charity creates a multitude of sins." 19
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
Stephen Guest beyond all bounds of propriety, such rapture is also
no less destructive to her. Hetty is lead down the garden path to a
mode of transportation that makes a life sentence out of a moment's
daydream; permanent exile out of her brief escape from the sight of
a friend's impatient or imploring eye; a casual lapse that brings on
civic extermination. Like the pleasant narcotic effects in the
recent variation on the one-false-move Victorian melodrama that
Eliot stages in _Adam Bede_, the contemporary tale of addiction that
begins with the first inhaling and ends in a social death at least
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
is arguably one of Bront�'s strongest political points, and it
emerges from her interest in Shakespearean and Hazlittian rancor.
Yet for Bront� (as for Hazlitt and Coriolanus) such violence
persists _despite_ social conditions, and this is clearly what irks
historicists such as Thompson and Terry Eagleton. Indeed, although
_Villette_--Bront�'s last completed novel--describes society
ostensibly in times of _peace,_ Lucy Snowe, the protagonist, seldom
experiences tranquillity, instead viewing her peers, students,
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
The fatal inattention of critical handling requires like treatment
in turn--because critics have convinced him to "murder" some of his
*[End Page 109]* liveliest poetry, he will "hang them all." What
especially irks Cowper is the need, having once put himself in the
position of accommodating criticism, to respond to such a
multiplicity of voices. More often than not, the proffered
suggestions conflict with one another. Where his early
correspondence assumed a kind of natural consensus, a presumed
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
1.5).
On the other hand, Boffin is a paragon of the person in search of
new voices, not necessarily to dislodge all authoritative discourse,
but to enter into "interanimating relationships with new contexts"
as part of his sudden experience of "ideological becoming." His
testing of internally persuasive discourses is apparent immediately
in the way his "rhinoceros build" is set off by "bright, eager,
childishly-inquiring eyes" (45; 1.5). When he strikes his bargain
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
continually revolves around belief's inseparable social value (the
"cost," for example, of Godwinian philanthropy). His object is not
to discount the importance of personal beliefs; rather, the
significance of those beliefs is reinterpreted within an economy of
action that takes a view of their wider interanimating effects. This
is why The Watchman so consistently understands a range of beliefs
to be significant in terms of wider costs and benefits, for the
meanings of actions cannot be circumscribed by any person's ability
to count themselves among a [End Page 950] community of Christian
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
this unsettling mimesis between the individual and the community, as Dickens
himself realizes, is that the autonomous self will always be under threat
from the social forces waiting to normalize it. In _David Copperfield_,
Dickens strikes a Faustian bargain that at once damns the private imagination
to a perpetual struggle with the economic, while reenchanting privacy,
professional life, and independence. Displaying our own hermeneutic
suspicions without the ideological heavy weather, _David Copperfield_ probes
the limits of individual autonomy constrained on all sides by social power.
The novel scrutinizes the complicity of its own mimetic practices at every
Manifesto_), but it was (and still is) possible to find fragments of that
older economy in the flexible logic of professional authority. 22 So when
David senses the ruses within the firm as family, his suspicion returns us to
the first scene of _David Copperfield_ in which the weird aura of the caul
survives as a _fata morgana_, reenchanting an otherwise disenchanted
marketplace of commodified expertise. It is this dialectic of enchantment and
disenchantment which sets in motion Dickens's ethical and aesthetic
imagination.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
hide in sunlight a darkened spirit. 30
The two love stories in "The Sparrow and Diamond" can best be
examined in sequence. If the speaker is a knowing sophisticate,
Lucia is an unknowing naive. More clearly in view, her syndrome
lends itself to readier diagnosis. Her disorders, in succession, are
hysteria in stanza 4 (as she hallucinates the bird's imagined
illness on her own body), melancholia in stanza 5, and sadistic
paranoia in stanzas 9 and 10. Seeking immediate gratification at the
writes about Flaubert's milieu, who
BLOCKQUOTE
The "unknowing poetics," as Bourdieu calls it, is a "double
refusal," both rejecting the slighter mode and then concealing its
rejection. Bourdieu does not employ the Freudian language I have
introduced here, but I think he well might, for the minor
Anacreontic mode becomes in effect a textual unconscious of, let us
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
says Sandy, "and cannot I say all that myself?" (90). Indeed, the mastery of
such a tongue would be the skill of any hello-girl.
Hank's fantasy hello-girl reappears much later in the novel, when he finds
himself jousting with the knights. Again, text and performance juxtapose
themselves, as chapter 39 begins with brilliant visual parody of provincial
newspapering (382-83). With its turned letters, its blots, its mis-set words,
its garble of type, Twain's reproduction of Arthurian newsprint transforms
knight-errantry into the textual (and thus, by implication, moral and
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
history as an experience encompassing both past and present at once,
dissolving the historicist opposition between historical- and
present-mindedness. This is why the past in the novel is always filtered
through the ambiguously situated narrator who, for her part, invites the
reader continually to juxtapose "our" day and colonial America.
The peculiar way the reader experiences history in _Hope Leslie_ becomes even
clearer when one realizes that the narrator's news from the present typically
comes at crucial moments in the narrative, often those very moments when the
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
Page 43]* fashion at the turn of the last century "local color did
not disappear; it instead became fragmented, dissolving into a host
of new literary trends" (47). Norris's naturalist novels and
Washington's rhetoric of racial uplift both incorporate such
fragments of regionalist discourse, but they also juxtapose regional
allegiances with larger-scale spaces—specifically, their
concern with regions as geographical units of production frequently
leads them to turn toward the horizon of international commodity
markets for California wheat and Southern cotton. Although they end
44]* then two years later to Cuba when the U.S. military invaded the
island. The aesthetic for Norris has its roots in imperial adventure
and global exchange" (165).
Norris's own critical essays explicitly juxtapose regional and
global concerns. He begins a commentary on "The Great American
Novelist," for example, by arguing that American literature must be
regional because the nation is too large and too diverse for novels
of a literally "national" scope: "[S]uch a novel will be sectional.
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
Though the dialogical self we have been observing must, of course,
face the threat of its own materialization, it also projects its
expressive energies into the world of matter. There is
materialization, but there is also metamorphosis. The novel pivots
on passages that juxtapose these two actions, as in the following
instances: BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
In the first passage, the material supplement is converted into
material essence; Wegg becomes an object for the mounds. In the
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
thinking of allegory, it is likely because de Manian deconstruction (counter
to what Caserio or Hertz might assert) interrogates the very binaries which
key aspects of Liu's account, such as time/history or allegory/narrative,
appear to be based in. 25 The success of claims such as Liu's, and also
Caserio's, rests on their ability to juxtapose and maintain a differential
between concepts such as allegory and narrative; the force of de Man's
argument, rather, is in his ability to bring them together. Allegory in de
Man, Gash� reminds us, represents the subversion of the "totalizing
potential" of texts "in an endless process of narrative." 26 The remainder of
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
surface, yet retaining its veneer of wonder. Where passion had been
caught in the antinomies of desire and disgust most fully
articulated by libertine verse and songs "against fruition," and
hence incompatible with affection, romantic lyric makes it possible
to transmute leaden-eyed despairs into golden dreams by giving love
time to breathe.
Even the simplest achieved romantic lyric communicates intensities
never sought in the eighteenth century. That was the problem with
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
Unable to affirm himself as a subject, the Creature thus commences
his own autobiographical narrative by inverting Victor's declarative
"I am" into the pathetically interrogative "Who was I? What was I?"
46 He despairs of "brother, sister, and all the various
relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual
bonds," and then demands: "where were my friends and relations? No
father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with
smiles and caresses; . . . I had never yet seen a being resembling
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
conflicts arising in each register, the novel uses misanthropy to
expose their arbitrary and perhaps insoluble design. 12 _Shirley_
tries halfheartedly to resolve the political strife and communal
hatred accompanying the Luddite revolts in 1811 and 1812,
harmonizing what Bront�--following William M. Thackeray--called "the
warped system of things." 13 But the opening chapters set in motion
a chain of events that the narrator cannot curtail without
manipulation and cant. Indeed, the scope of hatred in _Shirley_
logically belies a tidy ending. As the narrator declares in the
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
Italian and English as "poetical languages" and, indirectly, their
respective gender associations. Wordsworth argued that although
English was "unmanageable," costing the poet immense labor to mine
its sonorities, it was more conducive to "thought" than the "music"
of endlessly harmonizing Italian vowels:
[He] repeated a stanza of Tasso to show how naturally the words
fell into music of themselves.—it was one where the double
rhymes "ella "nella" "quella" occurred, which he compared to the
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
directed are in general the most sensible, the most liberal, the
most independent and the most respectable characters in our body as
well as the most unequivocal friends to the army. In a word they are
the men who think continentally" (320-21). Hamilton also made sure
to inform Washington that not "a single fact" substantiating the
conspiracy could be found (319). The most illuminating document of
this exchange, however, is Washington's final response to Hamilton.
Washington mitigated his earlier accusations, *[End Page 19]*
stating that he "only" wanted to explain the diverse "sentiments in
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
technological difference, that the two conceptions of difference
depended upon one another. 30
This fusion of civilizational/environmentalist and biological
discourse proved doubly powerful in substantiating racial lines, but
*[End Page 815]* these two distinct ways of defining race did not
always fit together neatly, thus creating fissures within racial
ideology. Because of the centrality of ideas of progress and
civilization to racial definitions, even strict essentialists like
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
accumulation of coincidences and suggestive details (which can be rejected as
precisely nothing more than that, coincidental and merely suggestive), or by
weighing the eyewitness's testimony. If visions such as Browne's carry any
evidential *[End Page 1125]* import, it is, first of all, to suggest
something about the difficulty of generating or substantiating belief from
sensory perceptions, no matter how convincing and conclusive certain observed
details may appear to be. What, then, are we to make of that second, arguably
more important scene of spectatorship in "The Tapestried Chamber" where
Browne identifies his spectral visitant from a painted portrait? The moment
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
At what is very nearly the precise textual center of The History of Tom
Jones (Book 9, chap. 2), Jones and the Man of the Hill view the prospect
from "Mazard-Hill," a fictitious peak of the Malverns. Rather than admiring
"one of the most noble prospects in the World"--which Fielding coyly
declines to describe--Jones is instead "endeavouring to trace out [his] own
Journey hither." 2 By omitting a description, Fielding foregrounds the
responses of Jones and the Man of the Hill to the prospect. The Man of the
Hill, who has seen the "wondrous Variety of Prospects" in Europe and its
"Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Insects, and Vegetables" (T, 8.15.481), but almost
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
means of this veiled attack on women poets, and his own contrasting
"manly" style (1800, 493), Wordsworth employs the Preface to protect
himself "from the most *[End Page 971]* dishonorable accusation
which can be brought against an Author, namely that of an indolence
which prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain what is his duty"
(1800, 59-63). For duty as an author, read _duty as a man_. In his
Preface, Wordsworth assumes the role of Leonard in "The Brothers,"
whose conspicuous attention to "honor" and "duty" automatically
repudiates charges of effeminate "indolence," whatever appearances
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
putative gentility, Smiles marks the official body with the recognizable
stigmata of the feminine, the aristocratic, the Continental, and the
Oriental.
In the ideological clash between Smiles and Arnold, one discerns the outline
of a fraught mid-Victorian contest for English middle-class identity. At the
heart of this battle are fundamental contradictions: English liberty versus
an indisputably alien but inexorably expanding state; foundational
mythologies of capital and competition versus a genteel and professionalized
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
viewed it as something the Romantics themselves managed to get beyond, my own
approach sees the Romantic literary experiment as seeking paradoxically to
realize the social uses of solipsism-- *[End Page 120]* if only by revealing
in especially clear terms its own categorical negation. 14 In Coleridge's
work especially, one discerns an experimental aesthetics in which common
sense is realized neither through the formal character of the reflective
judgment nor through the universality of sense-perception. Rather, I suggest
that Coleridge paradoxically sets the condition for invoking common sense as
the seeming violation of commonsensical perception. The activity of embodied
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
suitably eerie and lofty mood. Although the imitations would have
been impossible without the revival of scholarly interest in the
Middle Ages, it is significant that Gray depended on an ancient
language to understand the poems, and a more recent idiom to
translate them. The anachronizing technique of imitation generated a
unique temporality, a medieval mediated as well as flanked by the
classical and the modern. The imitations would probably have been
impossible without the example of Macpherson as well. If the Ossian
poems made Gray aware that his historical and artistic interests
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
"past ages," which are "neglected or disparaged by those absorbed in
the preoccupations of the hour."38 For Butterfield and Gardner, as
for L. P. Hartley, "the past is a foreign country" where "they do
things differently": we therefore cannot access its alterity unless
we abandon those anachronizing habits that misrepresent difference
as sameness.39 Yet although the inviolability of alterity is now a
sacrosanct principle in crosscultural encounters, we all know that
"utterly other discourse" would be utterly unintelligible.40
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
of the passage is precisely to play those to whom one will be "a
giver of good counsel" off those to whom one will be "an author."
Cowper thus recoups the attitude of "indifference," even as he
allows for the special authority of "the few who are judicious." By
playing with his audiences--grouping and regrouping them--he can
strike several poses at once.
But it is important to note the trick here, the way "the few" have
carefully been smuggled into the company of the "one" Cowper *[End
readers--as essentially the closest circle of friends, as those to
whom he could admit ambition, now he defines them as the farthest
thing from friends, as perfect strangers. "The few who are
judicious" are now suspected of expressing "the partiality of the
few who approve." What is called for is another "few," a regrouping
of the ideal readers into faces and facings less familiar to the
author. The problem of prejudice is a concern he later shares with
Unwin: BLOCKQUOTE
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
that reaction becomes concretized, described, put into language, Hope's
position—her belief in an unchangeable nature or identity—is
undermined. Consequently, her strategy of restoration backfires: "The removal
of the mantle, instead of the effect designed, only served to make more
striking the aboriginal peculiarities; and Hope, shuddering and heart-sick,
made one more effort to disguise them by taking off her silk cloak and
wrapping it close around her sister" (239). What Hope wants here, but fails
to achieve, is for Faith to _re-pass_ or to pass back to her original
whiteness. But that identity is no longer available (if it ever was);
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
his body shall sink to the narrow house, amidst the chree of his clan" (O,
345). Rather than being popular with the "lower orders," the younger O'Brien
has a string of successes with the Anglo-Irish elite. Although he earns an
impoverished family's gratitude by buying them some food, he is securely
distanced from the people that he helps by his shuddering at their cultural
practices and their economic conditions: "Familiar as O'Brien had been with
such objects in his early youth, and well acquainted with the barbarous Irish
custom of exposing the dead, for the purpose of obtaining means of interment
. . . he shuddered at the spectacle" (O, 401). For O'Brien, a clear border
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
anonymity. Just at the moment when the fraudulence of her marriage
is affirmed by her newly recovered English connections, the wanderer
learns that her guardian has been recaptured, and that she must
"sacrifice" (825) herself to the marriage to save him. This
"terrible compliance" elicits the wanderer's "shuddering disgust and
horror" (827): "off all guard," [End Page 982] she pronounces the
prospect "hideous! hideous!" (843). Revolution, "hideous[ly]"
incarnated by "this agent of the inhuman Robespierre" (739),
threatens to divest the wanderer of her chastity. If for Harleigh
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
images: an Arcadian scene with the end of history. Cole offers a vista into
an elite American subjectivity that comprehends the American present in the
broader context of images of pre- and postnational identity, in other words,
which is not overwhelmed by the transformations of history. 20 The tourist
gaze consolidates an American national subjectivity by validating the
"feminine" contents of this landscape and yet relegating them to the realm of
the aesthetic, that is, subordinated to the present identity of the US.
Like most tourists, Kirkland understands Italy's primary function as offering
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
influence of the empire of the mother along racial lines: "The
Manifest Destiny of the nation unfolds logically from the imperial
reach of woman's influence emanating from her separate domestic
sphere" since domesticity "imagines the nation as a home delimited
by race" (597). Antebellum domesticity consolidates manifest destiny
by providing the conceptual framework through which to fashion
colonial difference. Invoking the imminent threats of racial
violence and interracial sexuality posed to white homes by colonized
Others, the logic of antebellum domesticity mandates an ethnic
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
These mnemotechnics of pain, however, if we follow Scarry, need no
pressure from the image to impose themselves upon the memory, and the
rules that pain consolidates acquire the impression of truth from the
violence with which they are imposed; no residue of fantasy remains to
suggest the arbitrariness and ideological composition of the reality
that pain imposes on the perception.
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
manners, minds, and bodies of a populace and compel the organic discourse and
the quietist politics of Wollstonecraft's final passage. The text thus ends
in consolation, playing out in global terms that internal drama that
Wollstonecraft herself described in her first letter home, worth repeating if
only because it consolidates so poignantly the deep structures of the
author's faith in history: "I have considered myself as a particle broken off
from the grand mass of mankind;--I was alone, till some involuntary
sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was
still part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself" (L, 17).
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
it not only for scant sentences within the actual performance but
also for excesses rumored to be in the original play manuscript
which they have not even read. This is the context that produces the
publication of the text of Castle Spectre in its unexpurgated form.
"To disprove these reports," Lewis explains, "I have deviated from
the usual mode of publishing Plays, as performed, and have printed
mine almost verbatim, as originally written. Whether it merited the
above accusations, the reader has now had an opportunity of judging
for himself." 43
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
constitution to its new state, and cultivation shall have meliorated the
climate, the beauties of Greece and Circassia may be renewed in America." 26
Not surprisingly, in his second edition Smith maps out that which is presumed
here and elsewhere in the original Essay, that Greece occupies the
geographical standard from which all races have deviated, a region where "the
human person is so often seen to display that perfect symmetry of parts, and
those beautiful proportions, which most clearly correspond with the original
idea of the Creator." Animated by a strange melding of climatological
evolution and democratic principles, Stanhope Smith's America stands as a
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
depends on cultural context, and truth is so provisional that it varies
unpredictably from the consensus of one generation to the next. Welcoming
the risks of unprotected living, Browning and Landor both abandon the
search for categorical definitions. Instead, they use their monologues to
cultivate more flexible habits of mind. Substituting conversations for
proofs, and open dialogue for closed system-building and the construction
of summas, both writers practice forms of double irony that embrace
multiple codes and values simultaneously.
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
Dramatist Was "Guilty of the Grossest Faults in Chronology."61 the
Very First Editor of _the Works of Mr. William Shakespear_ (1709),
Nicholas Rowe, Had Already Engaged in Damage Control by Removing the
Word "Aristotle" from His Text of _Troilus and Cressida_ and
Substituting "Graver Sages."62 Hector's Mention of Aristotle So
Neatly Epitomized this Newly Discovered Problem with Shakespeare's
Plays That It Became the Standard Example of Anachronism among
Eighteenth-Century Editors and Commentators.63 Neoclassical
Condescension on this Point is Still Discernible in Thomas Warton's
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
confidence men with the devil or abstract evil and thus suggesting,
perhaps even insisting, that readers should trust Melville's white
donors rather than his beggar. 20 Nevertheless, the novel's
representations encourage a disgust with the passengers' behavior
that prevents this identification from persisting comfortably. The
narrator's account of the unpleasantness of penny catching gives way
to a fuller consideration of the beggar's position: QUOTE The
narrator goes on to note the beggar's labored grins and his
swallowing of QUOTE (11). Although these remarks are phrased as
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
upsets his metaphysical scheme entirely: in a new modality of
distinction, and a new modality of femininity, the wanderer iterates
the revelation of conservative practice. If, for Bourdieu, that
practice is both self-evident and radically autonomous, Burney's
novel fleshes out its history, persisting as an urgent, rapturous,
and insistent trace of the contingency of the wanderer's work.
Northwestern University
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
Nor is Scott's project underwritten by a thorough and systematic critique of
rationalism and materialism, of an epistemological and ontological paradigm
which restricts the field of human vision and scope of human knowledge to
"the ordinary forms and commonplace meanness of reality," but rather, if more
subtly and imperceptibly, by a persisting ambivalence in the nineteenth
century, registered early on by Scott, about both spiritual and physiological
models of vision and ways of seeing. "The Tapestried Chamber," I have argued
here, like Le Fanu's "Strange Disturbances" and Edwards's "The New Pass,"
foregrounds at once the ascending hegemony of the physiological model of
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
from narcissistic introversion. Avarice, the passion to possess and
even (in this case) to consume, forestalls external acknowledgment.
The sparrow is her toy; her panic appears multiply determined--not
just because the sparrow has infringed her property, but because the
bird has begun to separate from her. Not just playing and nestling,
Dicky now engages in transitive and self-oriented actions:
swallowing and pecking. What was an "it" in stanza 1 soon becomes a
"he." Insufficiently determinate in his specific nature (bird,
child, or lover) or indeed in his sexual identity (since "little,
unconscious, no progression in what is sung from the bird's-eye
perspective of "now," and hence his confusion exceeds Lucia's. 34
The choice of the childish Lucia as love object evidently derives
from what in his case too is a still primitive libido. Hence the
regressive envy of the stroking, nestling, and lisping gestures; as
Freud says, "The ego must be developed. The autoerotic drives,
however, are there from the earliest beginning [uranf�nglich]." 35
What complicates the picture still further, however, is that the
speaker knows his rival is dead, and was indeed never a real rival.
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
railroad and the telegraph in particular represent European and
American conquest of nature: "Space is annihilated by railroads; the
word of man, borne on the wings of electricity, outruns in its
course the sun himself; distances vanish, obstacles are smoothed
away. Man thus disposes at will with the forces of nature, and the
earth at last serves her master" (_E_, 292). Technology, in other
words, both enables and becomes the supreme expression of man's
subjection of nature, of civilization and progress.
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
gradations" are thus available to infinite, infinitely specifying,
narrative description. Given this style, it is of course small
wonder that the simple fact of having a body, in Poe, habitually
induces upheaval, transformation, and continual uncertainty; the
very nature of Poe's verbal imagination disposes him, again and
again, to exactly these turns.
It may be, however, that talk about syntax and idiom and sequence is
just a particularly involved way of describing an effect that is, in
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
Pierre's titanic, Emersonian effort at creative self-reliance is
doomed to failure.
Recently returned from Europe, the Europeanized Glen Stanly provokes
the denouement. Pierre murders Glen, equally incensed at Glen's
usurpation of his position as the head of the house of Glendinning
and at his unchivalrous treatment of Lucy. After the murder the
narrator says this of Pierre: "his own hand had extinguished his
house in slaughtering the only unoutlawed human being by the name of
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
initial encounter with Mrs. Waters, whom he would have recognized as his
former servant, because he has fallen asleep during the Man of the Hill's
story. After waking and running "every Step from the Hill" (T, 9.3.502)
because of his superstitious fear of the Man, he arrives at Upton just as
the landlady attacks Tom. The landlady is incensed because she believes Mrs.
Waters is a prostitute, and that Jones has placed her above her station.
Partridge, reluctantly entering the fray, falls on the landlady rather than
the landlord, but nonetheless receives the worst drubbing, thus missing Mrs.
Waters. At the one point when he might recognize her, her face is covered in
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
one man could be the hero of truth, another could be equally committed to
radical evil. Such is the case with Caleb and Falkland. But then it is not
entirely clear whether Caleb himself escapes becoming a hero of evil as well:
in the novel's penultimate chapter, just before the second ending, he becomes
so incensed at his impossible situation that he explodes in a furious
denunciation of his antagonist: "What should make thee inaccessible to my
fury!--No, I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale--! I will show thee
for what thou art, and all the men that live shall confess my truth!" Beneath
this fantasy of murder through truth lies the wish for a power to destroy the
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
Dorian; at the same time, Dorian as subject is separate from yet united
with it: "He hated to be separated from the picture that was such a
part of his life" (D, 172).
What Wilde imagines is a non-utilitarian form of use which circumvents
the transformation of use-value into exchange-value in the commodity
form and thus recreates a different relationship to the objects of the
commodity world. That is, the very form of collecting serves both as a
recognition of the temptations of commodity fetishism and as a
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
his most desperate expression of dread at the prospect of finished
composition, but it is consistent with his lifelong writing habits.
It reveals a key fantasy that motivates his efforts as an author: by
deferring composition until literally the last moment, Sheridan
circumvents every possible intermediate step in the transmission of
the play from himself to his audience. Whereas he wished to deny
that The Rivals was ever finished and described its first night's
performance as a "rehearsal," he effectually eliminates even the
rehearsals of Pizarro in an attempt to achieve a pure, spontaneous
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
from the precariouly balanced carriage, after first extricating the
Ternans and offering assistance to the injured and dying. 3 Ellen
Ternan appears to have been hurt in the crash, but Dickens felt no
ill-effects until he was back in London, when he describes himself
as being "quite shattered and broken up." 4 "Shaken" is the word
that he uses to describe his nervous condition in letter after
letter. On June 10 he apologizes to Charles Lever that he "can't
sign [his] flourish, being nervously shaken." 5 On June 13, in a
letter to Thomas Mitton, he describes himself as still reliving the
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
1833), 335. Percy Shelley offers one of the more vivid articulations of this
model: "The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass, / Thrice sifted by the storm,
had gathered there / Flake after flake, in Heaven-defying minds / As thought
by thought is piled, till some great truth / Is loosened, and the nations
echo round / Shaken to their roots" (Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley's Poetry
and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers [New York: Norton,
1977], 2:3:36-42). Such an "avalanche" is implicit in much of the apocalyptic
rhetoric which permeates radical discourse in the 1790s. Consider, for
instance, Henry Yorke's assertion, "the Proclamation . . . has only enlarged
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
goal of racial discipline is neither negation nor understanding, but
internalization; and to Barnes's assertion that "to read sympathetically is
to read like an American" (2), I would add that it is to read like a white
American, since the end result of racial sympathy, I am contending, is not
the subsuming of difference into a national sameness, but the reification of
white Americanness through the manufacture of racial character. Gender is
made to produce a fantasy of sameness in postrevolutionary America, in other
words, while race is made to produce difference.
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
this patriarchal system: "Was it a hard woman to please you were
when you took himself for your man?" (S, 112). Female self-will--her
own phallic hardness--exists, as Nora's reply indicates, in
opposition to the domestic sphere, and embracing the latter
necessitates the subsuming of the former: "What way would I live and
I an old woman if I didn't marry a man with a bit of a farm, and
cows on it, and sheep on the back hills?" (S, 112). By exposing this
contradiction, Synge's play, ironically, holds forth the possibility
of consolidating the domestic space, for if the play reaches its
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
of a *[End Page 1055 ]* liberal subjectivity which ignores such inequities
construe the giddy and absorptive moods of Whitman's speaker as an expression
of a liberal self who appropriates all social differences and transforms them
into sameness; these moments in his poetry, it is argued, work to homogenize
all of the historical contingencies of identity, thus subsuming all
minoritized subjects within the transcendentalizing logic of "America" and
thereby forestalling all political critique. 26 In this reading, globalizing
abstraction works to domesticate all contingencies within the liberal self
itself. 27 This, however, would suggest that the self, for Whitman, is
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
of the day, after all, devoted a professional life to things: to the
business of securing artifacts from amateur archeologists, of curating
exhibits, of funding fieldwork through the sale of sundry relics to
both individuals and institutions, of sustaining the traffic in
ethnological artifacts by ascertaining and certifying their value. In
retrospect, Chicago's Exposition, no less than the Paris exposition of
1889, appears as the culmination of anthropology's museal era, when an
anthropologist's place was in a museum, not in a university (see
Stocking, _Objects;_ Conn 75-114).
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
representational melding of her experiential claims, but it also marks her
persistent interest in delineating national and native character by merging
the physiognomies of the land and its people. 40 With each new geographic
location Wollstonecraft stresses the correspondence between figure and
ground, often ascertaining the progressive degrees of "cultivation" by
measuring the divergence between the two, so that along the rocky coast of
Rusoer "the character of the inhabitants is as uncultivated, if not as
picturesquely wild, as their abode" (L, 103), while the city of Christiana
possesses "none of the graces of architecture, which ought to keep pace with
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
Indeed, for More, giving money was a secondary aspect of charity.
True charity involved supervision and instruction; it was easy
enough to distribute money indiscriminately, but true virtue
necessitated first ascertaining where and how money would do the
most good. As she noted, "[Scripture] cannot literally mean that we
should _give_ to all, as then we should soon have nothing left to
give: but it seems to intimate the habitual attention, the duty of
inquiring out all cases of distress, in order to judge which are fit
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
Andromache. The first stands for the libidinal image that the Trojans
cannot relinquish even under the threat of correction, and the second
for the maternal will undermining the value of heroic combat.
The dangers to masculinity inhering in this version of the image are
passivity and sympathetic attraction. Though the condition of
passivity attributed to the doomed city inheres in the lesser powers
of pity and love, the pictures of female pathos nevertheless threaten
to imprint themselves on the perception of the male reader as well as
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
paradigmatic texts, to deploy gender (or class) specifically to maintain
those differences. On the Swiss farm, business as well as domestic duties are
seamlessly comprehended as family affairs and no special feminine qualities
predetermine the capacity of Swiss women to conduct them. Instead of inner
qualifications inhering in gender, outer social economic (national)
conditions account for the "hen" being the "better bird." The distinctive
entrepreneurial character of Swiss women is produced by their unimpeded
ownership of property. Swiss men, by contrast, are disciplined by military
drill rather than practical experience and free enterprise. Hence, the binary
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
to write a poem for the occasion. 1 Although Annie and James T. Fields as a
couple stood at the acknowledged center of Boston's literary elite, thanks to
James Fields's editorship of the Atlantic Monthly and partnership in the
publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields, Annie Fields herself was, as of
November 1863, an aspiring but relatively little-published poet. (Some seven
of her lyrics had appeared by then, anonymously or under a pseudonym, in the
pages of the Atlantic Monthly.) The organ QUOTE then, constituted Annie
Fields's debut as a poet of significant public ambition. The ode's
authorship, although not publicly acknowledged in the ceremony, was an open
Civic space is never redeemed from that nadir in QUOTE despite the poem's
exaltation of Shaw's individual heroism and despite Emerson's own
considerable civic diligence as a public speaker during the war years--as
witnessed, for example, in his recitation of the QUOTE Setting Howe's QUOTE
next to QUOTE we might think of Howe as aspiring in her printed poetry to a
civic space she had not yet, as of 1862, fully entered in her speaking
body--or that she imagines the prophet of a new civic space coming to her,
smashing the enclosed salon and opening a new space for all the
disenfranchised bodies, women and laborers and slaves. In QUOTE Howe looked
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
nothing but what is clearly good, and carefully shun even the appearance of
evil" (_Address_ 21). Urging black auditors to be resigned, sober,
hardworking, and polite, Garrison echoes his characterization of the freed
West Indian slaves as "industrious, economical, orderly, docile almost to a
fault, filled with grateful emotions, aspiring after intellectual and moral
cultivation, and rejoicing continually over the boon of liberty" *[End Page
45]* ("West India Emancipation" 345). Throughout his writings, and most
particularly in his addresses to black audiences, Garrison inscribes the
citizen-form onto the characters of those who, as emulators of republican
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
humankind.
Like most regionalist fiction, _The Octopus_ is narrated, for the
most part, from the point of view of an outsider. Presley, an
aspiring poet who has been on an extended visit to Magnus Derrick's
ranch, is distinguished by both geography and education from the
novel's other characters, having "graduated and postgraduated with
high honors from an eastern college" (13). Like that of the
narrator's wife in Charles Chesnutt's _Conjure Woman_ (1899),
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
Poe's insistence here that literature and nationalism were inimical
deserves closer scrutiny. He seems to suggest not that literature
must avoid politics altogether (his own satires belie that
assumption) but rather that nationalism circumscribes the work of a
writer aspiring to global, transnational appreciation. In effect,
national literature is always subjugated to the official, cultural
imperatives that call it forth and ensure its favorable domestic
reception. Decrying the stupidities of a nationalized criticism, Poe
in the same essay archly notes that "a foreign subject, at this
stooges—"low ruffians and boobies" Poe called them
(_Letters_ 1: 219)—receiving appointments in his stead.
Desperation impelled his mortifying visit to Washington in March
1843 to entreat the president himself or his son Robert Tyler, an
aspiring poet. Poe never met John Tyler and despite the intervention
of friends spent most of the week inebriated, offending nearly
everyone, including Robert Tyler and his wife (Silverman 192). His
approving review of young Tyler's poem "Death" in the December 1843
issue of _Graham's Magazine_ marked his last, pathetic effort to
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
Fire-side," the lingering uncertainty is made more acute by the tentative
force of the ababa rhyme scheme, in which the final a rhyme abides like an
unsettling echo, just when we assume we have heard the last of it.
Even when the aspiring lover adapts Renan's argument that nature knows
nothing of chastity, the ugly mounting of the small orange cup by five
groping beetles is not reassuring. The speaker exhorts his silent auditor
to help him hold his ideas fast. But his proliferating thought branches
out in directions he cannot control, like the obliterating weed and
ELH 66.4 (1999) 965-984
Fathoming "Remembrance": Emily Bronte in Context
Janet Gezari
---------------
Catherine was before [Heathcliff] came." 7 The same sense of
recollection as a voluntary effort of memory, usually comforting, is
active in Nelly's description of Edgar's "resignation" to
Catherine's death: "He recalled her memory with ardent, tender love,
and hopeful aspiring to the better world, where, he doubted not, she
was gone" (W, 2.3.226). Earlier, Nelly has warned Heathcliff against
"thrusting [himself] into [Catherine's] remembrance, now, when she
has nearly forgotten you, and involving her in a new tumult of
discord and distress" (W, 2.3.181). He counters that Catherine's
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
recurrent critical issue for at least two and a half thousand years.
Pindar I choose for two reasons, one of which will become apparent
later. The main reason is because his name became a by-word in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--as indeed it had been in his
own time--for an aspiring, often audacious poetry that was difficult
of access. All sorts of affectations have been foisted upon the
world in the name of the "Pindarick," the advent of which, along
with that of the associated notion of the sublime, initiated modern
theorizing about literary difficulty.
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
without recourse to brutal force; his only means of persuasion were
good example and wisdom. 51
If Clare is the character closest to the ideals of human sublimity,
with Falkland closely aspiring to this ideal, Tyrrel, Grimes, and
Gines are situated at the opposite end of that scale. Since Falkland
is so frequently described by means of divine attributes, it is
appropriate that Tyrrel and his associates should be referred to as
devils, demons, and animals. 52 However, the same terms are also
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
night" (639). As this is really an astounding recognition scene for a
traditional novel of professional education, it bears some close examination;
for by voicing his insights into the machinery of class society, Heep raises
the stakes for _David Copperfield_ and for the _Bildungsroman_ in general. By
lifting the curtain, as it were, Heep, the aspiring professional, risks
losing what he most desires: a demonstration that he has a feel for the game.
31
Ironically, because of Heep's slavish devotion to the explicit rules of
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
democratic space. It was, instead, fresh territory on which new
boundaries based on taste could be drawn. If by the mid-eighteenth
century a preference for the art of ancient Greece and Rome had
become widespread, the works of the medieval period were still
relatively unknown and therefore available to those aspiring to form
a rival clique of _cognoscenti_.
Equal to Gray's pleasure in understanding the Gothic style was his
disdain for those who got it wrong. In 1754 Wharton began to search
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
Insanity_ (Oxord: Clarendon Press, 1996), chap. 6.
46. It is doubtless the case that factors external to the literary field also
contributed to the demise of interest in texts and modes of criticism that
were overtly political, in the narrow sense of aspiring to change existing
social inequalities. Among these extraliterary factors, the Cold War figures
prominently.
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
29. In the third and subsequent editions to _The Queen's Wake_, Hogg changed
the lines to a milder version of a similar sentiment:
Ocould the bard I loved so long,
Reprove my fond aspiring song!
Or could his tongue of candour say,
That I should throw my harp away!
(Hogg, _Queen's Wake_, 3rd ed. [Edinburgh: George Goldie, 1814], 329)
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
interest has been largely expelled, and in which humanity itself is
redefined as a quality no longer residing in human beings. Those
owners disgraced by the loquacity of Diderot's jewels are variously
derided as animals and automata.32 Jonathan Wild, perched on the
fulcrum between things aspiring to voices and humans degenerating
into silence, was himself divided between the human and the
nonhuman, being widely supposed to be the offspring of a human
mother and an ape.33 Hence Hitchin's jeering reference to Wild in
his heyday as "his Skittish and Baboonish Majesty."34 The year after
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
production from this period reveals a number of writers who helped to
shape--often self-consciously, sometimes unwittingly--a transnational
American literary arena that looks surprisingly different from the insular
scene that they (along with contemporary scholars) have been criticized for
envisioning. James Fenimore Cooper consolidated the QUOTE identity of his
character Duncan Heyward precisely at the moment when the British soldier
becomes conscious of his antipathy for Cora, whose West Indian and racially
mixed heritage has permeated the Anglo-American borders of the emerging
nation; as Doris Sommer has shown, moreover, Cooper sired a series of Latin
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 814-822
New Origins of American Literature
Grantland S. Rice
---------------
transformed into artists, and aesthetic creations were in the early
stages of becoming commodities, genres, and disciplinary subjects. In
short, Rigal takes us to the moment just before an infinite array of
multiple aesthetic labors were both divided into disciplines and
consolidated into a singular American literature.
Of course, Rigal�s focus is on what she calls the "cultural
constitution of labor" (12), and not explicitly on the institutional
origins of the discipline. Consequently, the book our field
ELH 66.1 (1999) 87-110
"Monumental Inscriptions": Language, Rights, the Nation in Coleridge and Horne Tooke
Andrew R. Cooper
---------------
show more fully the political dimensions of its discursive production. The
poetry allows us to see how, as it leant itself to middle-class appropriation
by the Utilitarians, Horne Tooke's materialist theory of language also opened
the way for the arrival of a philological approach to language which
consolidated the conservatism of the late nineteenth century. But "Fears" and
"France" also indicate how Horne Tooke's theories produce an intertextual
field, in which a radical discourse of materialist understanding of language
is capable of reinstating a political critique of middle-class cultural and
national hegemony.
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
it. I am suggesting, therefore, that these national oppositions between
Continent (or Orient) and England amount to more than simple attempts to draw
imaginary boundaries between public and private domains; and while the
Victorian domestic woman certainly provided a common ideal through which
middle-class power was consolidated, I question Armstrong's leap to the
(Foucauldian) conclusion that the need for modern institutional surveillance
was thus established.
To make my point clearer I return to Laing's Notes of a Traveller. Laing's
Britons in the years between the 1707 Act of Union (joining Scotland to
England and Wales) and the beginning of Victoria's reign. See Linda Colley,
Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701-1837 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992),
1-9. Philip Dodd, by contrast, examines an "Englishness" that was
consolidated in the wake of the reformed Oxbridge culture of the 1860s.
Predicated upon essentialized differences between an English core and its
Celtic peripheries, this version of Englishness offered subordinated groups
within the United Kingdom a "unique" place within the national culture in
exchange for quiescence. See Philip Dodd, "Englishness and the National
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
process--what eventually becomes a fully developed account of
national religion in On the Constitution of Church and State. 33 If
this is a civilizing process, however, I do not refer to an
improvement or cultivation of manners (as Norbert Elias describes
it), to a consolidated middle-class "ideology," or to the triumph of
conventionalism. Religion as civilization, rather, consists of an
increasingly widened scope for the opportunities, protections, and
obligations of civil society--a principle of toleration itself. This
is why even the most fervently Christian of Coleridge's political
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
Yet there was still considerable debate over how this emergent grammar of
otherness was to be deployed, and how science, philosophy, and theology
together were to account for racial and national difference. Inquiries into
the origins of human diversity consolidated [End Page 901] around two
distinct hypotheses: monogeny and polygeny. 17 Monogenesis represents a
faithful adherence to scriptural precedent, whereby humanity originates from
a single source and racial dissimilarities (and the modern concept of race
itself) are a product of a migration away from edenic perfection. For most,
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 133-166
Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wolfram Schmidgen
---------------
framed by the narrative of familial origins which eventually reclaims Tom and
reintegrates him into the logic of social place. Tom is in the end revealed
as an emissary of the landed order who gathers in the social complexities of
*[End Page 149]* eighteenth-century England and brings them home, creating an
expanded and consolidated Paradise Hall.
This ending also joins a failed Jacobite rebellion and a deviation from the
established line of succession, the latter of which makes Tom sole possessor
of Paradise Hall. As such, the ending has been associated with a defense of
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
that "the connexion between words and ideas may, in general, be
considered as arbitrary and conventional." Campbell observed,
similarly, that "not a natural and necessary, but an artificial and
arbitrary connexion" "subsisteth between words and things." 48 Both
Blair and Campbell believed that words are to some degree consolidated
with ideas and objects. Blair felt that language is ideally mimetic:
names for objects "imitat[e] . . . the nature of the object"; "words
[are] copies of our ideas." Without speculating on the origins of
words, Campbell declared that the "habit of associating the sign with
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
the many poor but climbing whites who emigrated to the Mississippi
Valley from the 1820s through the 1840s. In a small way, Huck tests
the concept of manifest destiny, the promise that providence will
look after those who keep moving farther from where they started,
toward yet to be consolidated territory whose apparent openness
allowed antebellum *[End Page 410]* boosters like John L. O'Sullivan
to speak of the nation's infinite expandability.17 As Turner would
assert in his nostalgic revisitation of manifest destiny in the
1890s, "America has been another name for opportunity. . . .
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
belonged to the reading public, not to self-identified, paid critics. Because
the members of the public could not effectively speak for themselves, Kenrick
also argued that the public needed professional journalists like himself to
articulate their opinions. In Kenrick's account, the journalist's anonymity
was an enabling cloak, which consolidated unnamed members of the public into
one authoritative voice while protecting the reviewer from the degrading
associations of professionalism.13 At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, journalists' efforts to claim authority over literary evaluation
were strengthened and then eventually undermined by the writings of two even
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
Bront�, far outnumber those who strive for precarious altruism.
Lewes missed this point when lamenting that Moore has "something
sordid in [his] mind . . . and repulsive in [his] demeanour." "A
hero many be faulty, erring, imperfect," he insisted, hobbling
Bront�'s interest in misanthropy, "but he must not be sordid, mean,
wanting in the statelier virtues of our kind." 46 A critic as
intelligent and unorthodox as Lewes here illustrates a profound
mid-Victorian resistance to Bront�'s bleak vision of society. Still,
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
While Godwin's system of conversational enforcement undoes other forms of
coercion, it creates one of its own. The theory of internal assent requires a
form of moral aggression, the willingness of people to serve as
self-appointed embodiments of justice. In reference to the recalcitrant,
erring man, he writes, "I must teach him to feel himself, to bow to no
authority, to examine the principles he entertains, and render to his mind
the reason of his conduct" (_E_, 692). But in doing so, he will intrude upon
his possible preference to remain as he is, a man content with unfreedom.
Godwin might argue that people, once taught to be free, would recognize this
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
battle and, with his head close to hers, had tried to console her.
This QUOTE was only QUOTE (117).
Lippard ends by trying to give the chapter a redemptive conclusion,
one which rings resoundingly hollow after the pages of horror that
precede it. First, he pulls back from the battle scene, takes a
remote perspective, and pictures the landscape restored and
transfigured, the river no longer blushing with blood, the homes of
the town framed in gardens of flowers. QUOTE Lippard writes, QUOTE
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
language intended to deflect *[End Page 410]* criticism of the
theater itself, which was often viewed as a symbol of British
culture and associated with luxury, corruption, and lack of fiscal
and moral control.7 The prologue to _Slaves in Algiers_ thus
repeatedly rings the patriotic chimes of "glorious liberty" as well
as "virtue," but it also shifts the meanings of these words in order
to give Rowson the authority to speak on stage as a virtuous woman:
Tonight our author boldly dares to choose,
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
the *[End Page 598]* life of the poor" (257). "From her post behind
the counter [she] examines every detail of costume, every air and
grace of the women she so often despises, even when longing most to
be one of them. She imitates where she can, and her cheap shoe has
its French heel, her neck its tin dog-collar. Gilt rings, bracelets
and bangles, frizzes, bangs and cheap trimmings of every order,
swallow up her earnings" (257). Crane makes a similar observation.
In order to impress Pete, Maggie spends a portion of her week's pay
from the collar and cuff factory in which she works "in the purchase
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
original, delightful, or elevated, and so is not convincingly any of
the three. And in the eighteenth century the lovable William
Thompson would be worth reviving if his best lines had ever
coalesced into a coherent poem. "He took her by the lily-hand, /
Which oft had made the milk look pale" (C, 15:25) rings a delightful
change on an erotic clich�, but "The Milkmaid" sinks into pieties;
and the inspired phrase, "Feather'd lyric," that opens "The Morning
Lark: An Anacreontic" (C, 15:26) cannot support the closing "Promise
of eternal day." Such symptomatic authors either fall short of
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
This passage echoes and radically reconceptualizes Plato's notion of
art in the Ion, as a "divine power that moves [us], as a 'Magnetic'
stone moves iron rings." 26 In contrast to Plato, there is no
origin, no Muse that inspires and possesses the poet, and no
endpoint to this chain of iron rings, no final destination in either
the spectator or the enthusiast. Rather than a series of individual
portraits, or a series of visions of what these clairvoyants have
This passage echoes and radically reconceptualizes Plato's notion of
art in the Ion, as a "divine power that moves [us], as a 'Magnetic'
stone moves iron rings." 26 In contrast to Plato, there is no
origin, no Muse that inspires and possesses the poet, and no
endpoint to this chain of iron rings, no final destination in either
the spectator or the enthusiast. Rather than a series of individual
portraits, or a series of visions of what these clairvoyants have
seen, Pater describes the magnetic power of art itself, "all those
finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
In the final pages of the novel, Morgan paints a cynical picture of
expatriate Irish society: the too-Irish Anglo-Irish elite, the stage-Irishman
O'Mealy, and the now-married O'Brien and O'Flaherty are all in France. In
dialogue so saturated with witty repartee that it rings hollow, the event of
O'Brien's escape is presented in two different gossipy narratives: in one it
is an unclear incident scattered among innuendoes of a sexual scandal and a
"rebelly O'Brien" (O, 559); in the other, it is the dramatic prelude to the
tale of "a perfect hero of romance," that is, O'Brien's rise to "Irish
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
or punishment. It designates a realm of peace that is by implication
circumscribed, surrounded by a larger realm of less desirable
conditions.
Perhaps a more important consideration is the way the Latin rings in
the English ear, strongly urging the translation "with security"
rather than "in peace." In either case, the external referent of the
war could not be avoided in 1807, and we must acknowledge that the
shift from advertisement to epigram is not without substance.
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
which was being serialized as _Ruth_ came out. In Cranford, everyone
considers something or other too precious ever to be used, something
*[End Page 210]* whose "little unnecessary waste" seems worse than
"spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance." The
narrator herself collects string and rubber rings, supposedly
because she cannot stand to see them wasted. In effect, though, her
manic collecting is scarcely distinguishable from sheer
wastefulness: BLOCKQUOTE
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
the corresponding pages at the other end came out as well; and this
little unnecessary waste of paper (his private economy) chafed him
more than all the loss of his money. . . . I am not above owning
that I have this human weakness myself. String is my foible. . . .
How people can bring themselves to use Indian-rubber rings, which
are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do, I
cannot imagine. (40-41)5
Attachments to paper, string, rubber bands (and, later, butter and
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
robbed, paying the value only (or a little more) of their goods,
might have them again. This was of notable use to several persons
who had lost pieces of plate they had received from their
grandmothers; to others who had a particular value for certain
rings, watches, heads of canes, snuff-boxes, etc., for which they
would not have taken twenty times as much as they were worth,
either because they had them a little while or a long time, or that
somebody else had had them before, or from some other such
excellent reason, which often stamps a greater value on a toy than
tournaments of value. Whether in that great circuit of gifts in the
Trobriand islands known as the _kula_ ring, or in an auction at
Sotheby's, a tournament of value occurs when personal prestige or
_mana_ is invested in arresting or diverting the passage of highly
valued items such as arm-rings and old masters. Such tournaments are
distinguished by the exclusive and privileged company of people who
take part in order to calculate the price of a thing "by some
negotiated process other than the impersonal forces of supply and
demand."13 Within this enclave the price may affect but it cannot
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
In both cases, for all their discussion of commerce, commentators
omit the economic ground of the expansion of the telegraphic network
and its consolidation into the Western Union monopoly by the late
1860s. 44 Underlying the rhetoric of both, however, is another kind
of materiality, the way in which nerving the nation (and the world)
at once freed it from particular bodies and at the same time
re-embodied it. While the telegraph was described as an instrument
both demonstrative and productive of the dominance of white mind
over brute nature, as specifically figured in black bodies, it was
(1858), imagined the "The vigor of the Northern brain" "nerv[ing]"
the "outworn" geographies of Asia and Africa through the telegraph,
and Guyot imagined a global telegraphic body racially divided into
the brain and the hands, Whitman represents the ways in which the
nerving of those geographies became consummate with sexual
consummation, with the marriage of bodies physically linked by the
subtle "procreant" fluid of electricity. Whitman then illustrates
how the technology of electricity and the telegraph became a vehicle
for imagining not simply a cultural and spiritual exchange between
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
signs of how English culture (for one) is repeated, divided, and
distorted, its boundaries dissolved, and its claim to an ordering
subject position profoundly, if only discursively, challenged. For
Bhabha, such moments of "hybridity" in the archives of colonialism
have the effect of depriving an imperializing culture of stable
authority and claims to authenticity. Where hybridity is most
devastating is in the challenges it poses to the concept of human
nature embedded in the Western philosophical tradition: BLOCKQUOTE
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
settlement had been established in Singapore, and in 1824, an
Anglo-Dutch treaty solidified British presence in the area. The
Malay in England on some unknown business is a reverse image of the
British, gone on business to Malaysia. Perhaps the guilt and fear of
an imperializing nation drives the supposition.
Identifying the visitor as phantasmatically Oriental and
understanding that, in De Quincey, the Orient is defined as a region
where reigns a disorder at once threatening and, in its primeval
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
As popular writers fantasized about heterosexual union between a
feminized Mexico and a masculinized US, they tried to stabilize the
volatile and historically contingent categories of gender and
sexuality in order to turn force into consent and conquest into
international romance. 24 In this way, they tried to establish
distinctions between a rapacious Spanish conquest and an idealized,
peaceful, and nonaggressive US relationship to Mexico. But these
romances rarely conceal the coercive power [End Page 22] relations
invasion by promoting a vision of consensual relations between the
US and Mexico. In the first instance, he invokes the ideals of
democracy to rewrite the story of violent conquest as a narrative
about the extension of freedom. In the second, he attempts to turn
force into consent and symbolic rape into marriage, making his
readers feel at home in Mexico by replacing disturbing images of the
invasion of Mexican homes with a romantic wedding picture.
But if Lippard repeatedly tries to turn force into consent, most of
force into consent and symbolic rape into marriage, making his
readers feel at home in Mexico by replacing disturbing images of the
invasion of Mexican homes with a romantic wedding picture.
But if Lippard repeatedly tries to turn force into consent, most of
Legends of Mexico reveals that, as the Mexican writers of The Other
Side argued, the age of US empire building, which was called QUOTE
was, QUOTE (Alcaraz et al. 32). And in Lippard's second novel set in
Mexico, 'Bel of Prairie Eden, which was published in 1848,
'Bel and was refused; to that refusal her father QUOTE (22). But if
this contemptuous refusal seems at first to partially justify
Marin's vengeful feelings, attempts to represent him as anything
other than monstrous disappear after he threatens 'Bel's virginity.
Soon thereafter, he drugs her with opium, gets her consent to have
sex with him in order to save her father's life, and then hangs
Grywin anyway. Later, Marin also orders his soldiers to murder [End
Page 31] Grywin's younger son, Harry. At these moments, Lippard
blames Mexico for the war and encourages readers to feel for white
suggests that romance cannot heal the wounds of war: the marriage
plot used by Lippard at the end of Legends of Mexico, a plot that so
many writers deployed to make the conquest of northern Mexico appear
to be consensual, fails as a way of resolving international
conflict. Force is never plausibly transformed into consent; the
violence that structures most of the narrative does not disappear
but instead fully implicates the Texas colonizer in the bleak
conclusion. It is even possible to read this as an antiwar novel if
one emphasizes the ending and interprets the escalating revenge
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 317-328
American Nationalism--R.I.P.
Bruce Burgett
---------------
both the likelihood and the importance of contention among competing
political actors and ideologies. Newt and I each participate in one
of the many rituals that construct a national consensus, but we do
so in a way that severely limits the possibility of critical or
public disagreement concerning the ground of that consent. While we
may differ on any number of topics of national concern, the absence
of any accessible space of meaningful debate, dialogue, or action
leaves us with little more than our shared sense that nationality is
indeed among our central concerns. In the early republic, this
Nationalism (1991), Looby's first chapter on the concept of
logocracy (a term he culls from Irving) nuances it two ways: first,
he agrees with Waldstreicher and Newman that nationality in the
early republic involved more dissent and dissonance than histories
focused on consent and harmony tend to reveal; second, he argues
that writers who uncritically repeat Anderson's thesis concerning
print nationalism tend to overlook the importance of QUOTE as a
counterdiscourse that complicates the hegemonic process of
subjecting individuals to national norms.
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
republicanism onto the structures of church and monarchy, their words become
a new order of icons and, for Kirkland, who is generally sympathetic to the
1848 revolutions, possibly a new form of idolatry: BLOCKQUOTE
Kirkland signals the ambiguity between engineering consent in a republic
(giving "direction") and offering a platform for a grassroots "expression" of
consent by shifting from the near equation of "the government" with "the
people" to suggesting that the "magic words" she sees are the revolutionary
government's "direction" of the popular will. This ambiguity of French
1848 revolutions, possibly a new form of idolatry: BLOCKQUOTE
Kirkland signals the ambiguity between engineering consent in a republic
(giving "direction") and offering a platform for a grassroots "expression" of
consent by shifting from the near equation of "the government" with "the
people" to suggesting that the "magic words" she sees are the revolutionary
government's "direction" of the popular will. This ambiguity of French
republican pronouncements implicates them in the "magic" of
prerepublican--that is, monarchical and Catholic--icons, which, from an
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
their African brethren from the bondage of idolatry and the dominion of
spiritual death" (_Thoughts_ 37). Ironically, the very forces that would
"enlighten" Africa, according to Garrison, would "darken" America: those
institutions that he entrusts with securing African-American
consent--education, religion, filiopietism--he named, in regard to white
Americans, as sources of proslavery deception. The overlap of coercion and
consent, *[End Page 42]* central to his conception of the citizen-form, makes
his notion of voluntary emigration seem consistent with his condemnation of
the Colonization Society and other imperial ventures, even though Garrison's
"enlighten" Africa, according to Garrison, would "darken" America: those
institutions that he entrusts with securing African-American
consent--education, religion, filiopietism--he named, in regard to white
Americans, as sources of proslavery deception. The overlap of coercion and
consent, *[End Page 42]* central to his conception of the citizen-form, makes
his notion of voluntary emigration seem consistent with his condemnation of
the Colonization Society and other imperial ventures, even though Garrison's
anti-institutional writings make that overlap seem, at best, questionable. 16
themselves visible to the prisoners. The result is that prisoners, who are
always potentially watched (but are never assuredly so), begin to act
continually _as if_ they are under guard. Having internalized surveillance,
then, prisoners lose the ability to distinguish between coercion (what is
imposed from outside) and consent (behaviors produced, under internalized
scrutiny, as if from free will). Modes of self-regulation produced under
internalized cultural scrutiny Foucault called, following Bentham,
panoptical, which became the basis of the shift from punishment (force
exerted by external authority) to discipline (force produced through
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
need despotic government" (1: 3). Finally, reflecting upon the
convention, it argued that no better constitution was possible,
suggesting that the subsequent success of the new system hinged on
positive popular opinion (1: 4). Franklin's closing exhortation then
raised the imperative of unanimous consent: "I cannot help
expressing a wish, that every member of the Convention who may still
have objections to it, would with me on this occasion doubt a little
of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put
his name to this Instrument" (1: 4). The unanimity resolution was
have objections to it, would with me on this occasion doubt a little
of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put
his name to this Instrument" (1: 4). The unanimity resolution was
passed in the following form: "Done in Convention by the unanimous
consent of _the States_ present the 17th of Sepr. &c--In Witness
whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names" (Madison 654).
The resolution and rationale seem almost innocuous, in keeping with
republicanist rhetoric, and certainly not indicative of
republicanist rhetoric, and certainly not indicative of
conspiratorial action. Madison's notes at the convention, however,
reveal the strategic, performative dimensions of Franklin's speech
and resolution. Madison noted that the resolution's "ambiguous
form"--stressing "consent" of the _convention_ if not the document,
stressing the approval of the _states_ if not all state
delegates--"had been drawn up by Mr. G. M. [Gouverneur Morris] in
order to gain the dissenting members, and put into the hands of
Docr. Franklin that it might have the better chance of success"
statement with the appearance of unanimous support for the
Constitution, since full unanimous support was not forthcoming. The
maneuver was fairly successful on the first score; 18 ironically the
real debate of the last session had to do with Franklin's "unanimous
consent" proposal. Edmund Randolph declared he would not sign, while
Hugh Williamson of North Carolina asked for a more indirect form of
signing off, prompting Morris and Alexander Hamilton to reemphasize
Franklin's point. Hamilton warned that "[a] few characters of
consequence, by opposing or even refusing to sign the Constitution,
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 248-275
Walt Whitman and the Question of Copyright
Martin T. Buinicki
---------------
enthusiastic response to a letter sent to him in 1881 by Dr. John
Fitzgerald Lee, seeking permission to do a Russian translation of
_Leaves of Grass_: "Your letter asking definite endorsement to a
translation of my _Leaves of Grass_ into Russian is just received,
and I hasten to answer it. Most warmly and willingly I consent to
the translation, and waft a prayerful _God speed_ to the enterprise"
(_Correspondence_ 3: 259). After elaborating on the connections
between Russians and Americans, Whitman proceeds: BLOCKQUOTE
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
project. The source of his excitement is made clear in the letter:
the prospect of an "internationality of poems and poets" and the
opportunity *[End Page 261]* for him "to get the hearing and
emotional contact of the great Russian peoples!" In his eagerness,
Whitman transforms his letter of consent into an epistle to the
Russian people, transforming Lee into all of Russia and his letter
into a preface for the Russian edition. As we have seen, Whitman's
book served him as a metonymic extension, one that could bring him
into contact with a multitude of readers. This is the kind of
19. This again raises questions concerning Whitman's dealings with
Worthington. His reluctance to see older versions of _Leaves of
Grass_ competing with the most current expression seems offset by
his willingness to consent to the circulation of his text once he
becomes an informed participant in the exchange. *[End Page 273]*
Works Cited
===========
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
oaths, revised and coercively ratified state constitutions, and prescribed
ballot outcomes--merely *[End Page 276]* disguised postwar sectionalism and
did little to heal the national schism. In his memoir _A Union O_ffi_cer in
the Reconstruction_ (c. 1867-85), he acknowledged that federal policy may
have used proper legal and civil standards to coerce Southern consent but
lamented that neither those who experienced nor those who enforced such
coercion would perceive it as the democratic rule of law. 1 National
reconciliation, he argued, required a unified vision of the nation as family,
not a citizen obligation based on ineluctable economic and political ties. A
lamented that neither those who experienced nor those who enforced such
coercion would perceive it as the democratic rule of law. 1 National
reconciliation, he argued, required a unified vision of the nation as family,
not a citizen obligation based on ineluctable economic and political ties. A
"heartfelt" reconciliation required consent through a gentle wooing of a
"frail and conquered region"; coerced obligation only suppressed, even as it
heightened, sectional animus.
De Forest's growing concern with what he perceived to be Congress's unduly
while Acting Assistant Adjutant General in the Veteran Reserve Corps, he
turned to a popular genre of postbellum reconciliation romance with the
publication of _Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty_ (1867).
De Forest found the sentimental particularly salient for staging the
contradiction of consent and coercion at citizenship's core. 2 Many writers,
Northern and Southern, sought to bridge the national schism by crafting
allegories of national unification that drew on sentimentalism's broad
diffusion throughout American culture. While these writers' diverse politics
presented competing visions of national reconciliation, they all shared a
engaged theories of social contract, helping readers imagine the political
subject who agrees to be contractually bound. His 1881 romance, _The Bloody
Chasm; or, the Oddest of Romances,_ provides one of the most sophisticated
illustrations of how postbellum accounts of citizenship integrated *[End Page
277]* romance and contract, consent and coercion, and the political and the
literary. Illustrating the political service into which national
reconciliation pressed literary narrative and genre, De Forest's novel
brought new legal and affective reality to the allegory of marital consent
that had dominated constitutional theories of political obligation since the
illustrations of how postbellum accounts of citizenship integrated *[End Page
277]* romance and contract, consent and coercion, and the political and the
literary. Illustrating the political service into which national
reconciliation pressed literary narrative and genre, De Forest's novel
brought new legal and affective reality to the allegory of marital consent
that had dominated constitutional theories of political obligation since the
seventeenth century. In the nuptial contract--at the core of romance--De
Forest found a compelling model of citizenship that expressed national
devotion, but transcended crass economic ties, the social contract's
approximated conventional contractualism in its use of military force and
property expropriation to coerce Southern states and citizens back into the
national pact. Yet to view postbellum reconciliation solely as an achievement
of coercive social contract overlooks competing narratives of contract and
consent, obscuring the complexity of political obligation. Contesting the
supremacy of rationalism, reason, self-interest, and common sense by
appealing to the romantic impulses of passion, intuition, sorrow, insanity,
and erotic love, proponents of postwar reconciliation like De Forest seized
on alternative discourses of civic obligation that rejected theories of
appealing to the romantic impulses of passion, intuition, sorrow, insanity,
and erotic love, proponents of postwar reconciliation like De Forest seized
on alternative discourses of civic obligation that rejected theories of
external motivation compelled by self-interest in favor of internal
motivations for consent based on self-denial and public interest. De Forest
believed that national reconciliation could best be achieved by citizens'
self-disciplining love, sympathy, and sacrifice for each other, and that in
learning to be worthy of another's sacrifice they would come to understand
their proper national obligation.
impoverished Southern woman must marry a young Union army officer whom, as
her conqueror, she despises. The "chasm" of the title thus figures both an
intersectional and a nuptial breach. At the romance's core are
Reconstruction's essential questions: Can the citizen-as-spouse divide his or
her duty between two sovereigns? And what amounts to consent freely given and
consent coerced? Forced to wed a Northerner with whom sherefuses to speak,
even at the altar, Virginia informs her family of her sacrificial intent: "I
shall say I consent" (98). Anxious that the marriage be absolutely legal in
form, she frames her consent in precise legal language so that it both
her conqueror, she despises. The "chasm" of the title thus figures both an
intersectional and a nuptial breach. At the romance's core are
Reconstruction's essential questions: Can the citizen-as-spouse divide his or
her duty between two sovereigns? And what amounts to consent freely given and
consent coerced? Forced to wed a Northerner with whom sherefuses to speak,
even at the altar, Virginia informs her family of her sacrificial intent: "I
shall say I consent" (98). Anxious that the marriage be absolutely legal in
form, she frames her consent in precise legal language so that it both
becomes the trigger for contract and allows for each party's "free" volition.
Reconstruction's essential questions: Can the citizen-as-spouse divide his or
her duty between two sovereigns? And what amounts to consent freely given and
consent coerced? Forced to wed a Northerner with whom sherefuses to speak,
even at the altar, Virginia informs her family of her sacrificial intent: "I
shall say I consent" (98). Anxious that the marriage be absolutely legal in
form, she frames her consent in precise legal language so that it both
becomes the trigger for contract and allows for each party's "free" volition.
Virginia's aunt, for her part, seizes on the precise term of Virginia's
rhetorical equivocation: "Yes, say _consent_--that is the very word." The
her duty between two sovereigns? And what amounts to consent freely given and
consent coerced? Forced to wed a Northerner with whom sherefuses to speak,
even at the altar, Virginia informs her family of her sacrificial intent: "I
shall say I consent" (98). Anxious that the marriage be absolutely legal in
form, she frames her consent in precise legal language so that it both
becomes the trigger for contract and allows for each party's "free" volition.
Virginia's aunt, for her part, seizes on the precise term of Virginia's
rhetorical equivocation: "Yes, say _consent_--that is the very word." The
casuistical inference in the repetition of "say" before "consent" underscores
form, she frames her consent in precise legal language so that it both
becomes the trigger for contract and allows for each party's "free" volition.
Virginia's aunt, for her part, seizes on the precise term of Virginia's
rhetorical equivocation: "Yes, say _consent_--that is the very word." The
casuistical inference in the repetition of "say" before "consent" underscores
the vexing problem with a postbellum model of political obligation predicated
upon an individual's free consent. After all, what chance did a reconstructed
nation have of securing the true obligation of a people whose consenting
tongues belied dissenting hearts?
Virginia's aunt, for her part, seizes on the precise term of Virginia's
rhetorical equivocation: "Yes, say _consent_--that is the very word." The
casuistical inference in the repetition of "say" before "consent" underscores
the vexing problem with a postbellum model of political obligation predicated
upon an individual's free consent. After all, what chance did a reconstructed
nation have of securing the true obligation of a people whose consenting
tongues belied dissenting hearts?
The nuptial ceremony occurs in a darkened church between a bride and groom
relationship, a divided loyalty that mirrors the Southerner's torn allegiance
between the sovereignty of region (or state) and nation.
For Virginia, as for the South, marriage was not open to the possibility of
consent. Reconstruction was nothing short of a shotgun wedding. Joel Bishop,
the best-known nineteenth-century American jurist, restated the popular
analogy between nuptial and social contract when he asserted in his landmark
1852 _Commentaries on the Law of Marriage and Divorce_ that "consent is
theessence of marriage, without which it cannot exist" (95). 6 Believing that
For Virginia, as for the South, marriage was not open to the possibility of
consent. Reconstruction was nothing short of a shotgun wedding. Joel Bishop,
the best-known nineteenth-century American jurist, restated the popular
analogy between nuptial and social contract when he asserted in his landmark
1852 _Commentaries on the Law of Marriage and Divorce_ that "consent is
theessence of marriage, without which it cannot exist" (95). 6 Believing that
Americans were better informed about their politicalliberties than their
nuptial rights, he drew a parallel between the citizen's political obligation
and a spouse's marital duty: "A government which should compel people into
theessence of marriage, without which it cannot exist" (95). 6 Believing that
Americans were better informed about their politicalliberties than their
nuptial rights, he drew a parallel between the citizen's political obligation
and a spouse's marital duty: "A government which should compel people into
matrimony withouttheir consent, could not be endured" (95). Grounded in the
seventeenth-century correlation between nuptial and political obligation,
Bishop's explanation unwittingly underscored the vexing question of consent's
meaning and duration that had haunted social contract discourse since its
inception. Seeking to reconcile the North and South through romance, De
nuptial rights, he drew a parallel between the citizen's political obligation
and a spouse's marital duty: "A government which should compel people into
matrimony withouttheir consent, could not be endured" (95). Grounded in the
seventeenth-century correlation between nuptial and political obligation,
Bishop's explanation unwittingly underscored the vexing question of consent's
meaning and duration that had haunted social contract discourse since its
inception. Seeking to reconcile the North and South through romance, De
Forest posed solutions to this thorny constitutional issue. _The Bloody
Chasm_ ultimately explores the proper balance between sovereignty and
meaning and duration that had haunted social contract discourse since its
inception. Seeking to reconcile the North and South through romance, De
Forest posed solutions to this thorny constitutional issue. _The Bloody
Chasm_ ultimately explores the proper balance between sovereignty and
subordination, consent and coercion, and subjection and subjectivity in both
nuptial and civic relationships. By making a political analogy that genders
the citizen, male or female, as a bride of the state, De Forest's allegory of
union offers an alternative motivation for contractual obligation and thus an
argument for allegiance to a sovereign nation above the citizen's loyalty to
the sentimental novel for purposes of civic pedagogy. This romance tradition
argued that human feeling was a more effective source of political obligation
than rational self-interest. These novels developed both sides of the
political analogy of modern marriage: the nuptial contract figured the
individual's consent to the social contract, while erotic love became a
metaphor for how political obligation (or subjection) was transformed into a
willing duty to and self-sacrifice for another. Filtering scenes of
interregional suffering through a lens of domestic sentimentalism, _The
Bloody Chasm,_ like Beecher's sermon, idealizes the wedded couple's unity--or
relationship between the federal government and the state--was to invoke
rights laid out in seventeenth-century political theory. The thwarted
interregional romance of De Forest's protagonists provided an analogy for
Reconstruction debates about political obligation and helped dramatize the
question of whether the Union, like marriage, rested on irrevocable consent.
But his plot of marriage and divorce also provided postbellum federalism with
a gendered pattern for the citizen's subordination to the state: nuptial
coverture--the legal subsumption of the wife's property and person in the
person of her husband.
century, and widely at play in American political thought since the 1780s.
Throughout the Reconstruction period, political theorists of all persuasions
represented social contract through nuptial contract in their efforts to
justify a particular constitutional interpretation. Competing parties tracked
the logic of consent and sovereignty back to complex and conflicting
Revolution-era models of political obligation to arrive ex post facto at the
Constitution's authentic meaning. One set of debates showcases well the
stakes of this historical revisionism and offers a particularly poignant
window on how Hobbes's and Locke's respective theories played out in
how politicians, North and South, sought to tie competing accounts of
contractualism to the nation's constitutional framers.
On 6 December, Texas Senator Louis Wigfall offered the prevailing Southern
interpretation of constitutional consent. Accusing the North of breaking
faith, he offered a civics lesson figured in the "plain rule of construing
contracts": "if a partnership is about to be entered into by individuals," he
asked, "and after it has been signed by some, one of the parties inserts
above the signature an additional qualification, is there a court of justice
Northern propaganda that promoted the war as a family struggle to preserve
the sanctity of a nuptial union.
Northerners argued that secession fraudulently breached an irrevocable
consent. Underscoring the marriage contract's sacred "until-death-do-us-part"
clause, they claimed the authority of divine ordination cemented national
vows. Drawing on the same tradition of political analogy as the reunion
romance, one writer summed up the long-standing Northern position in "The
Philosophy of the American Union," published in _The Democratic Review_ in
While, like Iverson, some Southerners argued that simple contracts bound both
marriage and society, others recoiled at pronouncements that might seem to
weaken marriage, even if doing so strengthened the North's claims on state
allegiance. Either way, the substantive differences between the commercial
and nuptial contract revived the Hobbesian-Lockean conflict over consent and
sovereignty in the social contract. Reconstructionists found the historical
parallel foreboding. They knew that this dilemma, left unresolved after the
English Civil War, had come perilously close in 1688 to igniting a second
war.
English Civil War, had come perilously close in 1688 to igniting a second
war.
Overturning an ancient social theory that depended on feudal *[End Page 290]*
allegiances, contractualists adapted their models of consent to new concepts
of human volition rooted in Protestant Reformation philosophies. In the early
modern period, consent became the principal trigger for entering into
society, but Hobbes and Locke disagreed about the degrees of volition this
act required--a difference that would become a vital point of contention in
Overturning an ancient social theory that depended on feudal *[End Page 290]*
allegiances, contractualists adapted their models of consent to new concepts
of human volition rooted in Protestant Reformation philosophies. In the early
modern period, consent became the principal trigger for entering into
society, but Hobbes and Locke disagreed about the degrees of volition this
act required--a difference that would become a vital point of contention in
the December 1860 congressional debates. For Locke consent was the
unqualified product of free will, but for Hobbes the limitations of civil
of human volition rooted in Protestant Reformation philosophies. In the early
modern period, consent became the principal trigger for entering into
society, but Hobbes and Locke disagreed about the degrees of volition this
act required--a difference that would become a vital point of contention in
the December 1860 congressional debates. For Locke consent was the
unqualified product of free will, but for Hobbes the limitations of civil
society already circumscribed free will. 18 Aligning his theory of political
obligation with his liberal view of marriage, Locke argued in _Two Treatises
on Government_ (1690) that the subject, like the spouse, could opt out of the
obligation with his liberal view of marriage, Locke argued in _Two Treatises
on Government_ (1690) that the subject, like the spouse, could opt out of the
contract when the union's terms ceased to be mutually advantageous. 19 In
1787, the founders had tacitly embraced Locke's political expedient by
refusing explicitly to define the nature of consent and power between the
federal and state governments.
Hobbes himself was not vague on the issue of consent, denying that consent
once given could be revoked. 20 He saw all consent as a restricted act of
1787, the founders had tacitly embraced Locke's political expedient by
refusing explicitly to define the nature of consent and power between the
federal and state governments.
Hobbes himself was not vague on the issue of consent, denying that once given could be revoked. 20 He saw all consent as a restricted act of
volition that justified some coercion, for "Covenants entered into by fear,"
he reasoned in _Leviathan,_ "are obligatory... for whatsoever I may lawfully
do without Obligation, the same I may lawfully Covenant to do through feare:
refusing explicitly to define the nature of consent and power between the
federal and state governments.
Hobbes himself was not vague on the issue of consent, denying that consent
once given could be revoked. 20 He saw all consent as a restricted act of
volition that justified some coercion, for "Covenants entered into by fear,"
he reasoned in _Leviathan,_ "are obligatory... for whatsoever I may lawfully
do without Obligation, the same I may lawfully Covenant to do through feare:
and what I lawfully Covenant, I cannot lawfully break" (97-98). A citizen's
volition that justified some coercion, for "Covenants entered into by fear,"
he reasoned in _Leviathan,_ "are obligatory... for whatsoever I may lawfully
do without Obligation, the same I may lawfully Covenant to do through feare:
and what I lawfully Covenant, I cannot lawfully break" (97-98). A citizen's
initial consent thus created an a priori agreement to conform his will
thereafter to that of the sovereign, a usurpation softened in the phrase the
"collective will." 21 Unionists' clear reliance on Hobbes's belief in limited
consent placed them in an embarrassing position in the 1860 debates and
during Reconstruction, for they chafed at the thought of embracing an
and what I lawfully Covenant, I cannot lawfully break" (97-98). A citizen's
initial consent thus created an a priori agreement to conform his will
thereafter to that of the sovereign, a usurpation softened in the phrase the
"collective will." 21 Unionists' clear reliance on Hobbes's belief in limited
consent placed them in an embarrassing position in the 1860 debates and
during Reconstruction, for they chafed at the thought of embracing an
abridged consent that had been designed to justify monarchical tyranny.
Nevertheless they were continuously drawn to Hobbes's social contract, which
seemed engineered specifically for post-civil war conditions, for binding a
thereafter to that of the sovereign, a usurpation softened in the phrase the
"collective will." 21 Unionists' clear reliance on Hobbes's belief in limited
consent placed them in an embarrassing position in the 1860 debates and
during Reconstruction, for they chafed at the thought of embracing an
abridged consent that had been designed to justify monarchical tyranny.
Nevertheless they were continuously drawn to Hobbes's social contract, which
seemed engineered specifically for post-civil war conditions, for binding a
nation together through "acts of engagement"--the oath of loyalty required by
the Cromwellian Protectorate or the "test oaths" required of paroled
reconciliation? Consent without conviction guarantees the citizen's
obligation only as long as the fear required to motivate it remains in place.
For later in _Leviathan,_ even Hobbes acknowledged the difference between
mere words and outward shows and an inward and self-disciplining belief--the
difference, for example, between Virginia's mouthing consent ("I shall say
that I consent") and her true nuptial conversion. Responding to a
hypothetical leveled at his arbitrary power of sovereignty, Hobbes argued
that even if a king were to require his subject to worship the throne "by the
terrour of death, it is... not a sign that he that obeyeth him, does inwardly
obligation only as long as the fear required to motivate it remains in place.
For later in _Leviathan,_ even Hobbes acknowledged the difference between
mere words and outward shows and an inward and self-disciplining belief--the
difference, for example, between Virginia's mouthing consent ("I shall say
that I consent") and her true nuptial conversion. Responding to a
hypothetical leveled at his arbitrary power of sovereignty, Hobbes argued
that even if a king were to require his subject to worship the throne "by the
terrour of death, it is... not a sign that he that obeyeth him, does inwardly
honour him as a God, but that he is desirous to save himselfe from death"
(449-50). As Hobbes reminds us, words without thoughts never to heaven go. De
Forest's opposition to the Hobbesian contract intensified as an agent of
Reconstruction, and he came to realize that words without feeling, and action
without conviction, could never be the basis of a citizen's obligation to the
nation. When De Forest helped impose the Hobbesian model of coerced consent
by administering mandatory federal loyalty oaths, he came to wonder how
happiness could result from a liberty so narrowly construed. What internal
devotion could external fear hope to instill?
happiness could result from a liberty so narrowly construed. What internal
devotion could external fear hope to instill?
While De Forest struggled with his doubts about the Civil War's abridgment of
consent, Northern politicians, romancers, and the press, in political
broadsides and debates, incorporated the Hobbesian model into their nuptial
contract analogies to deny secession's legality. By claiming that the Union
was predicated onthe "correlative organization of the wedded couple," as _The
Democratic Review_ put it, they articulated the commonwealth-as-family model
broadsides and debates, incorporated the Hobbesian model into their nuptial
contract analogies to deny secession's legality. By claiming that the Union
was predicated onthe "correlative organization of the wedded couple," as _The
Democratic Review_ put it, they articulated the commonwealth-as-family model
of government, in which consent is irrevocable. One could say that unionists
hatched this model merely as a moral expedient to sustain consent as an
irrevocable component of social contract. Yet this interpretation would
ignore the nuptial contract's imbrication in seventeenth-century theories of
political obligation and would deny a worldview that flourished until late
contract analogies to deny secession's legality. By claiming that the Union
was predicated onthe "correlative organization of the wedded couple," as _The
Democratic Review_ put it, they articulated the commonwealth-as-family model
of government, in which consent is irrevocable. One could say that unionists
hatched this model merely as a moral expedient to sustain consent as an
irrevocable component of social contract. Yet this interpretation would
ignore the nuptial contract's imbrication in seventeenth-century theories of
political obligation and would deny a worldview that flourished until late
*[End Page 292]* in the nineteenth century. While not all unionists believed
Dahlgren's use of the Reconstruction model of federalism reveals the reason
for Reconstruction's Hobbesian resonance. For Dahlgren, like Hobbes,
matrimony provided more than a metaphor of social cohesion: the conflation
ofmarriage's contractual mechanism with the model of sovereign
aspatriarch--in which the subject does not consent--created a model of
obligation in which the citizen irrevocably consents to the state in the
manner of wifely subordination. 26 Dahlgren's political model rested on the
widely accepted principle of nuptial coverture, in which, as Timothy Walker
explained in his 1855 _Introduction to American Law,_ "marriage makes the
between the subordinate subject and sovereign government, Dahlgren simply
applied a lesson drawn from the political analogy of the North and South
asman and wife, which had merged the domestic and the political in the
language of filial obligation and Hobbesian contractualism. Just as refusing
the states ongoing consent ensured national cohesion, so denying women
ongoing consent through political enfranchisement ensured family stability.
From Reconstruction, Dahlgren had learned that beneath the romance of
marriage conveniently lay the bonds of political coverture.
applied a lesson drawn from the political analogy of the North and South
asman and wife, which had merged the domestic and the political in the
language of filial obligation and Hobbesian contractualism. Just as refusing
the states ongoing consent ensured national cohesion, so denying women
ongoing consent through political enfranchisement ensured family stability.
From Reconstruction, Dahlgren had learned that beneath the romance of
marriage conveniently lay the bonds of political coverture.
In sharp contrast, secessionists often turned to Locke's model of ongoing
From Reconstruction, Dahlgren had learned that beneath the romance of
marriage conveniently lay the bonds of political coverture.
In sharp contrast, secessionists often turned to Locke's model of ongoing
consent and his liberal construction of marriage *[End Page 293]* as a simple
contract. However, Ohio Senator George Pugh, the moderate arbiter in the
December 1860 Senate debates, drew on the marriage analogy to sustain the
right of secession. By evoking the transcendent, national bonds of domestic
affection, he attempted to lift the debate from the damaging exchange of
secession debates. Federalists held that, though contractual, the
Constitution took the permanent form of nuptial "ordination." Secessionists
argued that the Constitution, like marriage, was no more than a commercial
contract and that the Union was dissolvable when the interest of the parties
diverged and one or both withdrew consent. Dramatic increases in contract
litigation and divorce after 1800--and their gradual appropriation as the
regnant themes of American romance--helped redefine social relationships at
the most intimate levels of society, broadening the role of contract law as a
regulatory force in the domestic, as well as the political, domain. 28
contradictions inherent in this rhetorical strategy. Both secessionists like
Pugh and unionists like Dahlgren, for instance, struggled to reconcile their
public arguments about federalism with their private views of marital rights.
De Forest, as well, wrestled with tensions in the marital analogy. In _The
Bloody Chasm,_ political obligation, consent, and gender mutually constitute
the idiom of marriage and romance, but they conflict in thenovel's depiction
of postbellum federalism. De Forest begins bylinking social contract to
principles of obligation and duty grounded in early modern marital
hierarchies. He then modernizes the model by emphasizing ongoing consent, a
Bloody Chasm,_ political obligation, consent, and gender mutually constitute
the idiom of marriage and romance, but they conflict in thenovel's depiction
of postbellum federalism. De Forest begins bylinking social contract to
principles of obligation and duty grounded in early modern marital
hierarchies. He then modernizes the model by emphasizing ongoing consent, a
legal innovation of modern companionate marriage that significantly departed
from early and premodern nuptial contract. However, by continuing totie
understandings of social contract to the evolving social institution of
marriage, as Locke had done, De Forest risked undermining the philosophic
from early and premodern nuptial contract. However, by continuing totie
understandings of social contract to the evolving social institution of
marriage, as Locke had done, De Forest risked undermining the philosophic
foundation of the Union cause. By articulating a political obligation based
on revocable consent, his romance nearly rejects the Union's premise for the
war and ostensibly validates antebellum arguments for contractual
nullification and state secession.
Yet whereas romance authors, political pundits, and the press swallowed the
Yet whereas romance authors, political pundits, and the press swallowed the
contradictions inherent in the nuptial analogy, De Forest's _The Bloody
Chasm_ provided a logically skillful and ideologically sophisticated solution
to a federal marriage that to all appearances denied consent. De Forest
acknowledged that despite the social contract pageantry--the ratified state
constitutions, nullification of secondary ordinations, and loyalty
oaths--Reconstruction could not mask the truth that the South returned only
under the duress of lethal violence and brutal coercion. Faithful to that
remained in what Hobbes described as a state of war. 30 Todemand a loyalty
oath as a contractual act enforced through fear of violence or property
expropriation promised not lasting peace but a deferral of war, not the
internalized, self-regulating obligation of citizen duty but the external
yoke of servitude. The absence of consent--or worse, coercion dressed as
consent--presented an impediment to contract, nuptial and social. Absent
consent, Reconstruction seemed no more credible than the union between
Underhill and Virginia, called by one observer a "sham marriage" (139).
oath as a contractual act enforced through fear of violence or property
expropriation promised not lasting peace but a deferral of war, not the
internalized, self-regulating obligation of citizen duty but the external
yoke of servitude. The absence of consent--or worse, coercion dressed as
consent--presented an impediment to contract, nuptial and social. Absent
consent, Reconstruction seemed no more credible than the union between
Underhill and Virginia, called by one observer a "sham marriage" (139).
How, De Forest asked, can romance narrate a consensual reconciliation to a
expropriation promised not lasting peace but a deferral of war, not the
internalized, self-regulating obligation of citizen duty but the external
yoke of servitude. The absence of consent--or worse, coercion dressed as
consent--presented an impediment to contract, nuptial and social. Absent
consent, Reconstruction seemed no more credible than the union between
Underhill and Virginia, called by one observer a "sham marriage" (139).
How, De Forest asked, can romance narrate a consensual reconciliation to a
nation that continued to rattle the sword of state? To approximate postbellum
reconciliation.
While _The Bloody Chasm_ emphasizes marriage as a consensual act, postbellum
society witnessed rapidly rising divorce rates. Highlighting South Carolina's
hypocritical insistence upon a state's ongoing contractual consent--given its
status as the only state to prohibit divorce for any reason, thus denying
ongoing consent in marriage--De Forest targeted impediments to consent,
women's most successful loophole in marital litigation. A student of law, De
Forest knew that coercion on the part of one of the marriage parties (spouse
While _The Bloody Chasm_ emphasizes marriage as a consensual act, postbellum
society witnessed rapidly rising divorce rates. Highlighting South Carolina's
hypocritical insistence upon a state's ongoing contractual consent--given its
status as the only state to prohibit divorce for any reason, thus denying
ongoing consent in marriage--De Forest targeted impediments to women's most successful loophole in marital litigation. A student of law, De
Forest knew that coercion on the part of one of the marriage parties (spouse
or region) could be used as an argument for contractual nullification. To
surmount coerced consent in _The Bloody Chasm,_ he strengthens the parallel
ongoing consent in marriage--De Forest targeted impediments to consent,
women's most successful loophole in marital litigation. A student of law, De
Forest knew that coercion on the part of one of the marriage parties (spouse
or region) could be used as an argument for contractual nullification. To
surmount coerced consent in _The Bloody Chasm,_ he strengthens the parallel
between Virginia's postwar destitution and the poverty of the war-ravaged
South. Through the veiled correlation of Virginia's willing--though
necessitated--conversion to unionism, De Forest redefines and renarrates the
nature ofNorth-South relations by offering a legal solution that represents
the term _consent,_ despite Virginia's view that she is a hostage to fortune.
The repeated use of the term emphasizes the legal form of nuptial
voluntarism, even as it points up a contradicting heart. But what of
coercion? And what of the spirit of the law in a sentimental age that equated
marriage with romance? If free volition framed as legal consent did not
connote romantic love, then the marriage compact differed little from a
commercial contract--a comparison abhorred by both antebellum Federalists and
defenders of the sacred marriage covenant. Through the voice of its romantic
protagonists, _The Bloody Chasm_ repeatedly asks: can the tongue consent to
marriage with romance? If free volition framed as legal consent did not
connote romantic love, then the marriage compact differed little from a
commercial contract--a comparison abhorred by both antebellum Federalists and
defenders of the sacred marriage covenant. Through the voice of its romantic
protagonists, _The Bloody Chasm_ repeatedly asks: can the tongue consent to
what theheart does not? Consent proffered in desperation can hardly be an act
of free volition, even if it cannot be legally termed coercion. To find a
viable analogy for the South's willing reconciliation, *[End Page 297]* De
Forest begins his reunion allegory with an arranged marriage that downplays
what theheart does not? Consent proffered in desperation can hardly be an act
of free volition, even if it cannot be legally termed coercion. To find a
viable analogy for the South's willing reconciliation, *[End Page 297]* De
Forest begins his reunion allegory with an arranged marriage that downplays
the problem of consent under duress.
By closely paralleling postbellum conditions, _The Bloody Chasm_ furnished a
script that allowed readers to collectively rehearse the drama of
reconciliation. De Forest addressed Reconstruction's political dilemmas by
By closely paralleling postbellum conditions, _The Bloody Chasm_ furnished a
script that allowed readers to collectively rehearse the drama of
reconciliation. De Forest addressed Reconstruction's political dilemmas by
portraying a legal ground for marital consent more complex than the marriage
analogy that had governed constitutional debates since Hobbes and Locke. He
invoked a loophole within nuptial law that renders a marriage legal in form
but "voidable" in function: he makes the long-standing political allegory of
marital consent answer to the legal conditions of obligation in real
portraying a legal ground for marital consent more complex than the marriage
analogy that had governed constitutional debates since Hobbes and Locke. He
invoked a loophole within nuptial law that renders a marriage legal in form
but "voidable" in function: he makes the long-standing political allegory of
marital consent answer to the legal conditions of obligation in real
marriage. Then as now, laws governing marriage (as well as all contracts)
distinguished between marriages that were "void" and "voidable." Both terms
referred to marriages entered into under one or more of four legal
impediments, but whereas voidable marriages could find remedy within the
"voidable." These latter two impediments enjoyed a long tradition of common
law intervention that, by providing for a greater legal maneuvering, afforded
local benches a measure of discretion. Because marriage was entered into over
the threshold of a contract, contractual theory informed the basic
requirements for nuptial consent. As an impediment to for contractual nullification--insanity, like fraud, rendered a marriage
voidable but not necessarily void. Following canon law, both civil and common
law defined insanity as the absence of volition; no insane person could form
the requisite consent to enter into a contract.
requirements for nuptial consent. As an impediment to consent--and thus cause
for contractual nullification--insanity, like fraud, rendered a marriage
voidable but not necessarily void. Following canon law, both civil and common
law defined insanity as the absence of volition; no insane person could form
the requisite consent to enter into a contract.
De Forest sets the stage for a legitimate claim of insanity by his
protagonists early in the narrative. Mauma Chloe pithily sums up the ceremony
with all the authority her title suggests: "It's jess like a weddin' of mad
of famine, poverty, and defeat upon the South's entire social structure,
Mather reluctantly admits that tragic circumstances had driven Southerners
"all mad together, black and white" (71).
Because it triggers a couple's entrance into marriage, the moment of consent
frames the temporal window in which nuptial status is either validated or
voided. Essentially, De Forest places the entire plot of his allegory within
this window, suspending the transformation in nuptial status by questioning
the civil capacity requisite for consent. 31 In this way, his allegory
Because it triggers a couple's entrance into marriage, the moment of consent
frames the temporal window in which nuptial status is either validated or
voided. Essentially, De Forest places the entire plot of his allegory within
this window, suspending the transformation in nuptial status by questioning
the civil capacity requisite for consent. 31 In this way, his allegory
narrates a postmarriage courtship that, for all intents and purposes, is
premarital. The union between Underhill and Virginia, like that of the
postbellum nation, is a material fact, while all claims of contractual
coercion are collaterally suspended pending the moment of legal consent, when
the civil capacity requisite for consent. 31 In this way, his allegory
narrates a postmarriage courtship that, for all intents and purposes, is
premarital. The union between Underhill and Virginia, like that of the
postbellum nation, is a material fact, while all claims of contractual
coercion are collaterally suspended pending the moment of legal consent, when
both parties are again deemed sane. 32 According to what measure was one
deemed _non compos mentis_? Since the laws governing a judgment of insanity
varied from state to state, De Forest scripts a nuptial ceremony so
outrageous that there could be no question as to the existence of an
varied from state to state, De Forest scripts a nuptial ceremony so
outrageous that there could be no question as to the existence of an
impediment toconsent by which the marriage could be voided. Neither Virginia
nor Underhill would have met even liberal criteria for sanity during the
interval in which they consent. Even if by some odd decree they were deemed
sane at the time, their irrational behavior in the wedding ceremony demanded
a declaration of insanity. As Bishop explained, the ability to form consent
was in the most liberal rulings determined not so much by "'brain quantity'
or 'brain quality'" as it was by "whether the party alleged to be insane
impediment toconsent by which the marriage could be voided. Neither Virginia
nor Underhill would have met even liberal criteria for sanity during the
interval in which they consent. Even if by some odd decree they were deemed
sane at the time, their irrational behavior in the wedding ceremony demanded
a declaration of insanity. As Bishop explained, the ability to form consent
was in the most liberal rulings determined not so much by "'brain quantity'
or 'brain quality'" as it was by "whether the party alleged to be insane
acted rationally regarding the particular matter of marriage, and regarding
the particular marriage" (129).
throughout the ceremony a personal weakness that had driven him to propose to
an Irish immigrant he met on the way to the church.
De Forest uses the nuptial impediment of fraud to cast Virginia's submission
as an assertion of agency. If her destitution coerces her consent, her
subsequent duplicity recovers something of her lost agency. Her plan to
vitiate the terms of Mather's will isnothing short of fraud: the other
"voidable" impediment. When she suggests that the extent of the marriage will
be to "meet, marry, and separate" (100), her scandalized aunt asks, "will you
polygamy provides another instance of how reconciliation returns to the
connection between nuptial normativity and national loyalty. Even a less
sophisticated reconciliation plot, Belasco's _Heart of Maryland,_ registers
an opposition between the deviant, nonaffective status of a "patriot of
free-love" and the loyalty born of legitimate feeling and marked by consent
(211). An officer in the Confederate army who also spies for the North,
Colonel Thorpe is a polygamous figure, loyal to neither North nor South,
claiming, "Idon't care which rag I serve under" (212). Professing commitment
to each side while profiteering at the expense of both makes his national
make a man virtuous, but its discipline shapes a lot of orderly, temperate,
moderate, careful, and self-controlled citizens. If it does not lead the will
directly to virtue, it establishes habits which unconsciously turn it that
way" (book 2: 131). Similarly, in De Forest's model of political obligation,
citizens consent to deny themselves for a devotion and duty to others. For De
Forest the desire to act for oneself is--like Underhill's "superb
self-sacrifice"--qualified by an emotional commitment to others.
De Forest's representation of consent seized the affective mechanism at the
citizens consent to deny themselves for a devotion and duty to others. For De
Forest the desire to act for oneself is--like Underhill's "superb
self-sacrifice"--qualified by an emotional commitment to others.
De Forest's representation of consent seized the affective mechanism at the
core of the Hobbesian social contract. If for Hobbes citizen obligation
depends on the martial passions of fear, anger, and courage provoked by the
sword, for De Forest it is monitored by self-regulating sentiment from
within. But De Forest's model of obligation is also Lockean in that it
core of the Hobbesian social contract. If for Hobbes citizen obligation
depends on the martial passions of fear, anger, and courage provoked by the
sword, for De Forest it is monitored by self-regulating sentiment from
within. But De Forest's model of obligation is also Lockean in that it
preserves the fiction of the citizen's ongoing consent through the sentiment
of suffering that constituted the national romance of reunion. In a sense,
the citizen's ongoing consent is folded, not into the abstraction of Hobbes's
collective will, but into the desire of an embodied other. Through the
self-imposed bonds of political coverture, De Forest believed that
sword, for De Forest it is monitored by self-regulating sentiment from
within. But De Forest's model of obligation is also Lockean in that it
preserves the fiction of the citizen's ongoing consent through the sentiment
of suffering that constituted the national romance of reunion. In a sense,
the citizen's ongoing consent is folded, not into the abstraction of Hobbes's
collective will, but into the desire of an embodied other. Through the
self-imposed bonds of political coverture, De Forest believed that
sentimentalism and the sympathy it evoked reoriented subjects to a subjection
that was the more profound because it emerged as part of their pursuit for
self-discipline and incremental sacrifice, believed that he could transform
ordinary tasks and domestic rituals into nationalizing exercises. Through the
aesthetics of sentimentalism, he imagined new possibilities *[End Page 304]*
for grounding the abstraction of citizenship in an affective attachment to
_the_ ongoing daily reality of consent--marriage. In this sense, the bloody
chasm De Forest intends his romance to bridge is both the social and
political rift between North and South and the epistemological gap between
representation and reality, between romance and reader. In line with his
vision that "life is a romance" and his promise of a newly reconciled nation
right to all things, but on the terms that he may enjoy nothing. In a
commonwealth every man enjoys a limited right in security" (116).
19. In book 2 of his _Two Treatises of Government,_ Locke leaves room for
secession: "For when any number of men have, by the consent of every
individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body,
with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination
of the majority; for which acts any community being only the consent of the
individuals of it, and it being necessary to that which is one body to move
19. In book 2 of his _Two Treatises of Government,_ Locke leaves room for
secession: "For when any number of men have, by the consent of every
individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body,
with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination
of the majority; for which acts any community being only the consent of the
individuals of it, and it being necessary to that which is one body to move
one way, it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater
force carries it, which is the consent of the majority; or else it is
impossible it should... . continue one body, one community, which the consent
with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination
of the majority; for which acts any community being only the consent of the
individuals of it, and it being necessary to that which is one body to move
one way, it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater
force carries it, which is the consent of the majority; or else it is
impossible it should... . continue one body, one community, which the consent
of every individual that united into it agreed that it should" (331-32).
20. In large part, Hobbes's view of volition stemmed from his deep
of the majority; for which acts any community being only the consent of the
individuals of it, and it being necessary to that which is one body to move
one way, it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater
force carries it, which is the consent of the majority; or else it is
impossible it should... . continue one body, one community, which the consent
of every individual that united into it agreed that it should" (331-32).
20. In large part, Hobbes's view of volition stemmed from his deep
reservations about human nature. Thus, motives for forming a society were as
the people constitute an abstract body of "the community": "When any number
of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are
thereby presently incorporated and make one body politic wherein the majority
have a right to act and conduct the rest. For when any number of men have, by
the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made
that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by
the will and determination of the majority" (_Two Treatises_, book 2: 332).
22. See Burgess 6-27. Excepting officers, Confederate war prisoners who were
So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known
disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the
contrary. All other time is PEACE" (_On the Citizen_ 88-89).
31. Although marriage with an insane person was valid so long as consent
occurred in a moment of mental lucidity, the converse was not true. As Bishop
articulated *[End Page 308]* it, "the marriage of a person habitually sane,
celebrated in a period of temporary insanity, is invalid" (130). By
"invalid," Bishop meant that it is voidable but not void. The individual
Bishop explained it, offered "authority for the proposition, that a marriage
by a _non compos,_ when of unsound mind, is rendered valid by consummation
during a lucid interval." The inference, he continues, is that although the
law requires "first a compliance with certain formalities" and second "the
consent of the parties, it does not appear that the formalities and the
consent must concur in point of time" (141).
32. As De Forest knew, whether or not one or both parties was deemed insane,
no one outside the marriage could sue to invalidate the marriage if the
by a _non compos,_ when of unsound mind, is rendered valid by consummation
during a lucid interval." The inference, he continues, is that although the
law requires "first a compliance with certain formalities" and second "the
consent of the parties, it does not appear that the formalities and the
consent must concur in point of time" (141).
32. As De Forest knew, whether or not one or both parties was deemed insane,
no one outside the marriage could sue to invalidate the marriage if the
nuptial ceremony adhered to legal forms. Massachusetts's framing of what
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
more generally, for the history of language in the large. William Dwight
Whitney reflected on a similar set of problems in his popular volume,
_Language and the Study of Language_ (1875). Words may enter languages
through many venues, he explains, but they invariably gain acceptance through
the *[End Page 486]* authority of their users and through the consent of the
general populace. Great writers may, by their authority, condone a new
word--so, too, may the authorities of etymologists and pedagogues. "Downright
additions... to the vocabulary of a spoken tongue" come, he claims, from
"human agency" (40). And "no man in his sober senses" would believe that
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
Delany's point, of course, is to demonstrate that Northerners could
be even more vicious toward blacks than Southerners, but the import
of this scene lies even deeper and rests more centrally in Colonel
Franks and Mrs. Ballard's agreement to transfer ownership of Maggie
"without [the] knowledge and consent" of Maria Franks (8). 3
Franks and Ballard's collusion in Maggie's personal fate exemplifies
their agreement on larger political and economic issues. When
Colonel Franks presses his wife's Northern cousin on the potential
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
that charming place where there are no bolts and bars; no mutes and
guards; no bowstrings and seymetars. — Oh! it must be a dear
delightful country, where women do just what they please" (38-39).
The coerciveness of sexual subjugation is *[End Page 418]*
transformed here into the language of mutual love and consent.
Despite Fetnah's embrace of a republican ideal that welds political
and personal freedom, Rowson clearly pokes fun at her in this
passage, suggesting that Fetnah's romantic desires have become too
politically (rather than personally) scripted. This implied critique
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
space, by the living that takes place within it" (Topographies [Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1995], 21).
16. Barthes writes: "History (historical discourse: historia rerum gestarum)
is in fact the model of those narratives which consent to fill in the
interstices of their functions by structurally superfluous notations, and it
is logical that literary realism should have been--give or take a few
decades--contemporary with the regnum of 'objective' history" ("The Reality
Effect," in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard [Berkeley: Univ.
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
several minutes after her death, and then to note the effects of the
postmortem infusion. "It can do her no harm--will give her no pain,"
Meunier argues, "for I shall not make it until life is extinct to
all purposes of sensation" (V, 221). Latimer gives Meunier
permission to proceed; the consent of the maid herself, informed or
not, is never discussed. Momentarily reanimated, the dead woman
cries out that Bertha has planned to poison her husband. Bertha and
Latimer separate, and the tale ends with Latimer's lonely death.
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
"Water-American" anticipates in the body and as body the language of
"Reason," "Liberty," and the "Rights" of Englishmen that Franklin
would use in his 1729 Pennsylvania Gazette editorial describing the
"warm Contest" between Governor Burnet and the Massachusetts
Assembly over the principle of colonial consent, the "mutual
Dependence between the Governor and the Governed" (A, 50-51). "Their
happy Mother Country will perhaps observe with Pleasure," Franklin
wrote, that "her SONS in the remotest Part of the Earth, and even to
the third and fourth Descent, still retain that ardent Spirit of
The public-ness and commonness of the bodily image Franklin
cultivates is complimented by his work in "Public News" and the
popular medium of print and his support of causes popular with "the
common People" (A, 53), such as paper currency and the consent of
the governed. 13 If on the one hand Franklin's self-description
suggests the ways the Franklinian body extends itself outward,
structuring public space and the fundamental habits and categories
that organize the modern world, on the other hand it suggests a
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
Madison wrote a devastating reply, pointing out that Jefferson's
model is profoundly counterfactual. Generations have no beginning
and no end. Madison also pointed out that the ideal of explicit
consent to all laws was impractical, requiring such absurdities as
female suffrage. 21 Yet the idea of national generations was so
powerful that Jefferson repeated it, almost word for word,
twenty-seven years later. 22
ELH 68.4 (2001) 1023-1047
"A Sort Of Adopted Daughter": Family Relations In _The Lamplighter_
Cindy Weinstein
---------------
relationship between adopted children and adoptive parents remained
unprotected by law--natural parents could reclaim their biological
children at any time, and adopted children were greatly disadvantaged
when they tried to claim their inheritance. The law attempted to clarify
everyone's rights: both biological parents, if living, had to consent to
the adoption; adopting parents assumed all "legal rights whatsoever as
respects such child"; and children aged fourteen and up had to consent
to the adoption. 14 The child, however, came to assume center stage, and
the legal cases narrativize the acquisition of the child's rights to
children at any time, and adopted children were greatly disadvantaged
when they tried to claim their inheritance. The law attempted to clarify
everyone's rights: both biological parents, if living, had to consent to
the adoption; adopting parents assumed all "legal rights whatsoever as
respects such child"; and children aged fourteen and up had to consent
to the adoption. 14 The child, however, came to assume center stage, and
the legal cases narrativize the acquisition of the child's rights to
choose her family and to have those rights protected in court.
Such a transformation in affection is also the subject of Pool v. Gott,
a Massachusetts case decided by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, in which the
father of Lydia Gott Pool attempted to regain custody after she had
lived with her grandfather for fourteen years "with the father's
consent." Unlike Gilkeson v. Gilkeson in which a contract was used as
evidence against the father's custody claim, Shaw conceded that "there
is no evidence as to the nature of the agreement made, if indeed there
was any agreement at that time." He nevertheless maintained that, "I
have no doubt that it was understood on all sides that the child was to
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
come to the farm on the Tuesday evening" for a ritual disbursement. The shift
here from the volition of the poor ("wished") to the command of the wealthy
("ordered") indicates with unusual clarity how middle-class provision worked
to establish material incentives (in this instance, cheap rice) which, if
accepted, implied a form of consent to the revised social hierarchy that Dr.
Shepherd and the Whites embody. This glimpse into the contractual foundations
of a political economy of charitable relief vividly confirms Dorice Elliott's
argument that More treated charity as a form of exchange, in which the female
philanthropic benefactor acquires "the right and responsibility . . . to
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
person, doctrine, or law but that *[End Page 861]* nevertheless would shape
the social order as a whole. 24 This schema accepts institutional authority
only within the context of its perpetual interrogation, retaining external
power alongside modes of investigation that would force such power to win
general consent. Kant's notion of Enlightenment thus corresponds to the ethic
found at the end of the novel, which proposes that the reader interpret the
novel to discern in its representations of things as they are signs of things
as they might be, to find in the gap between representation and being the
place for possible enlightenment.
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
Hawthorne repeatedly foregrounds the reader's power to disrupt
aesthetic experience.52 As the American sculptor Kenyon declares,
"It is the spectator's mood that transfigures the Transfiguration
itself. I defy any painter to move and elevate me without my own
consent and assistance" (_M_, 17). Hawthorne, in fact, repeatedly
acknowledges the extent to which the aesthetic depends upon the
viewer: BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
Although Hawthorne shows the aesthetic to be threatened
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
inscribes a whole new kind of speaking, a wild attempt to voice the
full range of selves in his contradictory nation."24 This leaves
open the question as to how this "new kind of speaking" manifests
itself. In this notebook passage, Whitman imagines himself
"[e]ntering into" the slaves and the masters of slaves. As
Sánchez-Eppler argues, "Here the equality of the master and
slave lies in their being 'equally' possessed" (_TL_, 53). The
equality of this dual possession, however, also equally depends upon
the dispossession of the poet. His "[e]ntering into" is executed
"[e]ntering into" the slaves and the masters of slaves. As
Sánchez-Eppler argues, "Here the equality of the master and
slave lies in their being 'equally' possessed" (_TL_, 53). The
equality of this dual possession, however, also equally depends upon
the dispossession of the poet. His "[e]ntering into" is executed
less as poetic invasion and more as a poetic disembodiment of the
persona.
If we pursue these original, "hesitatingly inscribe[d]" attempts to
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 659-684
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
Philip Gould
---------------
writer into Jefferson the reader--of his own avowed principles of natural
rights. Though not an entirely original strategy, it is nevertheless
effective in gaining the black writer the moral high ground: QUOTE (Carretta
321). In this way, Banneker makes particularly racial claims to such QUOTE by
interrogating the res (read QUOTE ) publica: QUOTE (Carretta 320; emphasis
added). But this last phrase is potently ambiguous: does QUOTE make
egalitarian claims to the very man before whom Banneker supposedly humbles
himself? Or does it suggest, and even accept, the hierarchical privilege
underwriting the republic?
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 348-357
Perpetual Emotion Machine
Michelle Burnham
---------------
psychosomatic sureness that at least "I know how I feel." It might
also be the case that sentiment is, in the end, very much about
caring about categories precisely at the moment when they collapse.
Ellison ends both with a Spivak-inspired call for the "curative
labor" (185) of interrogating further our own emotional scripts and
with some uncertainty about her own book's relationship to the very
political and emotional categories that it interrogates so well; she
asks, "By writing this, am I defending myself against the dynamics
of liberal guilt or perpetuating them? Or both? Or neither?" (184).
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
each summer--to see straight and behave accordingly.
If _Arthur Mervyn,_ like all of Brown's work, is fundamentally concerned with
sensory evidence and experience, it is particularly preoccupied with
interrogating the evidence of the eye. Eyes abound in the novel, from
Arthur's need to see things with his "own eyes" (586), which "sparkle with
pleasure" when he has original information to convey (589), to the restless
eyes of Watson's corpse (328), to Stevens's faith in physiognomy (436), to
Achsa's Jewish eyes, which against her will communicate the secret of her
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
that followed, each blaze contributed to the mystery until the
report of a slave running from the scene of the tenth fire persuaded
the people of New York that the puzzling fires were really opening
salvos in a massive slave insurrection. City officials acted
quickly, interrogating more than 200 people, black and white, and
soon uncovered what they believed to be a gang of dispossessed
slaves and Irish indentured servants, who, it seems, had planned to
burn New York City to the ground and kill their masters. Stunned by
the boldness of the plot, authorities immediately began to
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
insincerity), but that they are obscured if we see him only in light of
current concerns rather than those of the time. 45 The evidence of _Dorian
Gray_ and "The Soul of Man under Socialism" would particularly question the
idea that Wilde adopted the perspective of the outlaw or transgressor at this
time, as Dollimore has argued, when he is in fact interrogating the valences
of that position and seeking to make fine distinctions about who is entitled
to take it up and on what basis. His insistence on the justifiable
criminality of the underclass in the face of crushing social conditions
speaks to a commendable materialism, especially as the dominant political
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
25. Witemeyer, 143.
26. While a full discussion of Eliot's treatment of the picturesque
is beyond the scope of this paper, I would note that she seems
generally interested, in this novel, in interrogating the usual terms
of picturesque discourse. In the introductory description of the Hall
Farm, for example, she invites her readers to consume the image of
the long grass, rusty gate, lichen-covered brick, and limestone
ornaments of the outside of the house ("imagination is a licensed
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
writing almost without concern for consequences.
Some of A. S. M.'s work may be read as public self-policing, the record of a
man displaying his awareness of ideological limits by putting them in his
sights and never quite transgressing them. 26 Paradoxically, however, this
introjection of the asylum's discipline left open a space for the free play
of his mind—a kind of roaming and deferral of meaning. We see it in
every column of A. S. M.'s as he travels across the social landscape in
search of perverse analogies or topsy- turvy metaphors for his fate and at
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
"inadvertently undercuts the progressive mission its preface has
outlined"(84).
Yet all these assertions seem to me to misread the novel. Certainly, that the
otherwise "progressive" Hope views her sister as transgressing against
"natural" racial boundaries the scene leaves little question. That this view
is shared by Sedgwick, however, is arguable. After all, in an effort to
recover her sister, Hope resorts to bribery, offering Faith "jewels from head
to foot" (240) if she will return to her English family. In reply, Magawisca
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
recall that the Cheap Repository was part of a tradition of Christian moral
reform that went back to the late seventeenth century and culminated in the
1780s, before the French Revolution had its galvanizing impact upon British
radicalism. While there may be little reason to worry here about
transgressing one of Romantic studies' more peculiar yet enduring fictions
("1789"), it does seem curious that reactionary enterprise should, in this
instance, precede the revolution. 19 In her careful study of the development
of late eighteenth-century moral reform movements, Joanna Innes offers one
clue to this puzzle by invoking an earlier revolution: in her account,
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
Indeed, so harsh was this enforced separation that, years after the
sinking of the _Ann Alexander_, Henrietta DeBlois actually took ship
with her husband on board the _Merlin_ on 25 June 1856. In fact, by
the mid-century, a number of whaling wives were transgressing the
gender roles implied by the industry. One of the first to do so,
Mary Brewster, accompanied her husband aboard the _Tiger_, out of
Stonington, Connecticut in 1845, and again in 1848. She recorded her
delight at meeting Betsy Tower, wife of the captain of the New
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
the family garden with her (scandalously secret, thus assumed
illegitimate) ersatz baby, this drag version of Deborah drew a
sizeable crowd of spectators until Mr. Jenkyns recognized his son,
stripped the women's clothing from him, and flogged him before the
gathered throng. After the flogging, Peter bid farewell to his
mother and disappeared, leaving Cranford bereft, and his parents, as
I've tried to suggest by the opening quotes, fallen.
For this story, Gaskell allows Miss Matty's normally hesitant,
leaving the reader with satisfaction as a merely temporary antidote
for desire.
I'd like to return for a moment to a sentence Mr. Jenkyns speaks in
reference to the terrible upshot of his flogging Peter. Looking to
his wife for sympathy, he laments, "I did not think all this would
happen." This comment is particularly poignant coming from a man who
trained his daughters to monitor their expectations in double-entry
diaries, the design and intent of which Miss Matty describes to
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
larger network of national, political, and family ties:
BLOCKQUOTE
By parceling out his subjective content into the various links that
comprise his chain of existence, Victor cloaks himself in the
"pleasing illusions" of symbolic identity. As he consecutively
elides "family" and "republic," "ancestors" and "counsellors,"
"father" and "public situations," his genetic encoding fuses with
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
handshaking and then shakes his own head, but the phrasing of "gives
him a shake of the hand . . . a shake of his own head" not only
emphasizes the articulation of Venus and Wegg into body parts, but
also creates a momentary confusion about who is doing what to whom
by indefinitely parceling out those body parts to individuals (a
shake of whose hand?), by turning "shake" into a substantive that
can be transmitted like a disease or an object ("gives . . . a shake
of"), and then by *[End Page 740]* employing pronouns that could
refer to either party ("him . . . his"). Reading the scene as
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
and the female ideal who exercises that power authorizes the state in the
very act of authorizing the household.
If this history of domesticity is complete, then the "old tradition of
radical Protestant dissent" was moribund, bequeathing to English national
identity only the shell of the domestic woman without her imperative
inviolability. 38 Victorian domesticity was content, in other words, to make
its bed willingly with the state. Yet, as I have suggested, a variety of
theorists of national character--even those who, like Harriet Martineau, were
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
wealth to the children of that man and of no other. . . . By
transforming the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent,
heritable wealth--the means of production--into social property, the
coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety
about bequeathing and inheriting" (_Origins of the Family_, 138-39).
23. As Hilary Schor observes, the morally corrupt characters in
_Ruth_ attempt to fix prices in order to sidestep the more difficult
(and interminable) work of evaluation: "the question of 'price' is
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
abstraction works to domesticate all contingencies within the liberal self
itself. 27 This, however, would suggest that the self, for Whitman, is
self-repressive and rigidly bounded, and that it exteriorizes thoughts,
feelings, and activities that cannot be instrumentalized and oriented towards
the ascetic and productive goals of capitalism. 28 The loafing,
pleasure-loving attitudes of Walt run counter to such an interpretation, as
do the recent powerful queer readings of _Leaves of Grass_ which emphasize
the mobile and decompositional critical tactics of Whitman's representations
of subjectivity. 29
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
persistence of postrevolutionary rank and, following Bourdieu's
logic, irreducibly denature it.
For the wanderer, rank is work: articulating a claim upon ornament
proves no easier than disproving an identity with rags. Indeed, it
is harder, as her performance in The Provok'd Husband indicates:
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
Yet having bluntly asserted that the philosophy of mind was incapable of
experimentally establishing the principles of common sense, and thus that
this branch of study was unlikely ever to materially benefit the world,
Jeffrey capitulates on this point only paragraphs later. The key to proving
or disproving an epistemological common sense, he suggests, might be obtained
through an analysis of altered states of consciousness: "The phenomena of
Dreaming and of Delirium . . . appear to afford a sort of _experimentum
crucis_, to demonstrate that a real external existence is not necessary to
produce sensation and perception in the human mind." 63 An unregenerate
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
belongs finally to no one. If white civil virtue circulates in a purely
discursive space, so Garrison, who *[End Page 48]* wishes to possess those
virtues as the grounds of his public authority, must also circulate between
the "whiteness" and "blackness" he has created. In gaining his authority,
then, he risks his claim to authenticity (the indwelling "truth" of one's
"character") upon which that authority depends.
Neither the appropriation of another's suffering nor the consequent
inauthenticity is particular to the remarkably earnest Garrison. Rather, both
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
to purify the heart, and steel to the utmost the energies of
spirit."27 Marsh Christianizes the Goth. Moreover, he refigures the
Goths as Transcendentalists. Whereas the English are lazy
materialists, who are absorbed in surfaces, Goths see through to the
indwelling spirit of things. 28
Did Melville know of Marsh? While the textual evidence I shall be
adducing suggests that Melville did, no direct references prove the
case. But there is circumstantial evidence. An anonymous riposte to
27. Marsh, Goths, 10.
28. "The Roman mistakes the means for the end. . .The Goth, valuing
the means only as they contribute to the advancement of the end,
looks beneath the form, and seeks the indwelling, life giving
principle, of which he holds the form to be but the outward
expression." Marsh, Goths, 15.
29. Anon., Remarks on an Address Delivered before the New England
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
change so great, as to make it imperative on me no longer to give to that
enterprise that support and favor which are justly expected from all
connected with it" (3). Chief among the society's activities that Birney
found "cruel, unmanly, and meriting the just indignation of every American"
was its efforts to convince free blacks to emigrate to Africa by manipulating
their "civil disabilities, disenfranchisement, exclusion from sympathy" (7).
Birney's letter registers a shift in political influence away from the
Colonization Society, which governed national debates about race and
citizenship in the 1820s, and toward the organization to which Birney
ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537
"Bales of Living Anguish": Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing
Peter J. Kitson
---------------
impossible for a man to make sugar without the assistance of the Negroes, as
to make bricks without Straw." 53 Although the Pinney family appears to have
taken more care than many of their slaves this was as much for prudential as
humanitarian motives. 54 It was to Pinney's estate at St Nevis in 1801 that
Coleridge hoped he might emigrate with the Wordsworths and the Southeys. 55
Coleridge's "Lecture on the Slave Trade" was given to an audience sympathetic
to abolition. It is probable that his audience contained friends and
supporters such as Thomas Poole, John Prior Estlin, the Unitarian minister at
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
and habitat that would resemble that of "old England." 10 A text
from as late as 1878 sounds this theme concisely: "There is room in
New Zealand for millions. It would relieve the over-crowded country
at home . . . if all who find it hard to get on in England, would
only emigrate to New Zealand. It is but to go from one England to
another." 11 As they did elsewhere, the English brought their place
names with them along with their plants and animals. Lady Barker
assured her readers back home that the results in Christchurch
resembled the best of English beauty without its social constraints:
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
a hermeneutic mode to account for the positive ugliness of Mary
Shelley's Creature. If the ugly object lacks beauty, the Creature,
as the aesthetic object of Frankenstein's "unhallowed arts" (1831;
F, 339), functions more actively than lack. He not only fails to
please, he emphatically displeases. And in his relation to the
subject, Victor Frankenstein, he manifests precisely the opposite of
lack: excess. In a recent psychological foray into the uncharted
field of the ugly, Mark Cousins proposes a model of ugliness as
excess, which Slavoj Zizek develops in his discussion of "Ugly
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
admit. The typical Dickens novel, for example, grapples with the same power
asymmetries analyzed in the typical Michel Foucault essay: prisons,
scaffolds, "the hideous apparatus of death" are often made visible in order
to be critiqued. 7 It's just that Dickens resolves those violent power
asymmetries in a way that displeases many critics. Through narrative closure,
Dickens resolves complex social questions into manageable individual ones.
But, as I will argue below, in its haste to expose the shortcomings of
liberal society by exposing the shortcomings of the liberal novel,
contemporary theory conveniently overlooks the tendencies of literary realism
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
contractualism to the nation's constitutional framers.
On 6 December, Texas Senator Louis Wigfall offered the prevailing Southern
interpretation of constitutional consent. Accusing the North of breaking
faith, he offered a civics lesson figured in the "plain rule of construing
contracts": "if a partnership is about to be entered into by individuals," he
asked, "and after it has been signed by some, one of the parties inserts
above the signature an additional qualification, is there a court of justice
in the civilized nation that will not hold... the compact a fraud?"
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
to medico-moral reform theory. Similarly morally fraught and self-condemning
language also appears in the passage in images of treachery, villainy,
assault, and betrayal, as well as in the tidal metaphors of flooding and
being overwhelmed, favorites of the reform writers. These rhetorical moments
show the speaker construing his tormented bodily experience from within the
ideological terms of antebellum sex/gender ideology. He is caught up in
agonizing ethical conflict generated by the tensions between his erotic
desire and affect and the cultural concepts through which he must necessarily
process them.
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
produce an aesthetic experience even if the text itself is not considered
more narrowly aesthetic or literary per se. Moreover, such experiments ask,
for scientific purposes, questions just as central to eighteenth-century
aesthetics: what are the conditions for reading, *[End Page 131]* and for
construing that activity as a common sense? While for Reid the experiment
provides an example of how metaphysicians fall into error, for Coleridge the
activity of experimental reading becomes a subject not exclusively for
scientific reflection, but rather for aesthetic perception itself. Through
the use of the book, Coleridge indicates, in terms we often associate with
ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537
"Bales of Living Anguish": Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing
Peter J. Kitson
---------------
such as Sir William Jones, Jules Mohl, Constantin Volney (and those
associated with Napoleon's Institut d'Egypte), into the riches of Eastern
culture and language. Jones excitedly describes Asia as "the nurse of
sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious
actions, fertile in the productions of human genius, abounding in natural
wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government,
in laws, manners, customs and languages, as well as in the features and
complexions of men." 7 Africanist discourse in the period, with a few notable
exceptions, is predicated on the denial of any sophisticated linguistic,
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me;
and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in
it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an
abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this
avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their
hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to
say. . . . Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all
squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
The professional had indeed effaced the national character, for living as he
did with these frank hospitable people, still only the exciseman
appeared--the counterpart of some I had met with in England and France" (L,
17-18, my emphasis). Here the economic encroaches on and "efface[s]" the
national character, foreshadowing the way in which the letters that follow
will grow increasingly critical of the kind of commercialism in which Imlay
himself is implicated. In fact, Wollstonecraft utilizes this same rhetoric in
her private correspondence with Imlay, differentiating between her lover's
"commercial face" and his "best looks," the latter of which "lend me the
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys." 30 Here, though, the
reference is not to Wilde himself but the Cleveland Street scandal of 1886,
in which the seduction of a young telegraph delivery boy led to the discovery
of a gay brothel, frequented by illustrious clients like Lord Arthur
Somerset. It seems--again in retrospect--like an uncanny foreshadowing of
Wilde's own fate, in which he played the part of the "outlawed *[End Page
511]* nobleman" who engaged in the seduction of working-class boys supplied
to him by Alfred Taylor; indeed, even the question of location seems
appropriate, since the social significance of Cleveland Street (on the
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
persuasion of others:
BLOCKQUOTE
The three major key areas therefore interconnect by means of the
theatrical scenario which involves both the sublime (terror) and
sympathy (pity) and functionalizes the ambivalence between truth or
sincerity, on the one hand, and artful deception and persuasion on
the other. I have found the following key terms in Caleb Williams
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
aesthetic, a pattern which, until recently, Shelley criticism has
followed. Despite this division, however, much of Shelley's work at
this time wrestles with the relationship of the two. In this
article, I concentrate on two of Shelley's 1819 poems that explore
how the political and aesthetic interconnect and present the image
of the victimized woman as a site of contention: _The Mask of
Anarchy_, the occasional poem he wrote about Peterloo, and "On the
Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci," a poem about a painting in which the
central figure is the decapitated head of Medusa, a conservative
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
the responsive suffering of the sympathetic witness or reader as evidence of a
certain ineffectiveness, even self-indulgence, at the heart of sentimental
method.7 They have elaborated on the tendency of sentimental representation to
dwell on the body�s experience and to abstract it--what Shirley Samuels has
referred to as the "corporealizing and transcendentalizing double impulse of
sentimental discourse" (160). Yet rather than viewing both impulses as
integral to sympathetic epistemology (it is this double impulse that allows
the reader to acknowledge the suffering of others and to absorb it as if it
were her own), critics have lauded a sentimental interest in embodiment, while
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
52. The regulative gloss that Coleridge added to the "Rime" in 1817
only exaggerates this effect. The definitive treatment of the gloss
is Jerome McGann's subtle analysis of its simulated historicity,
"The Meaning of the Mariner" (Critical Inquiry 8 [1981]: 35-67); I
would only add that its moral force has a transcendentalizing
effect.
53. Coleridge to Joseph Cottle, 26 April 1814, Letters, 3:476.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
construe the giddy and absorptive moods of Whitman's speaker as an expression
of a liberal self who appropriates all social differences and transforms them
into sameness; these moments in his poetry, it is argued, work to homogenize
all of the historical contingencies of identity, thus subsuming all
minoritized subjects within the transcendentalizing logic of "America" and
thereby forestalling all political critique. 26 In this reading, globalizing
abstraction works to domesticate all contingencies within the liberal self
itself. 27 This, however, would suggest that the self, for Whitman, is
self-repressive and rigidly bounded, and that it exteriorizes thoughts,
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
debases his sexual conquests into hungry beggars, haunting the door where
once his charities were dispensed.
If we listen carefully, we can sometimes hear Rochester, the ventriloquist
behind the mask, detonating a land mine in enemy terrain. Sometimes a
single damaging phrase may acquire explosive force: "Secure in solid
sloth," for example, blows up Mulgrave's whole mindless edifice of praise
in honor of the Sultan and his harem. BLOCKQUOTE
dismisses the latest triumph of scientific engineering, the Atlantic
telegraph, as a "great rope, with a Philistine at each end of it talking
inutilities" (the Victorian equivalent of the Internet), we can hear in
the voice behind the mask a satiric animus that is radioactive with wit,
energizing and sometimes detonating the language. 27 Equally destructive
[End Page 457] is Arnold's ironic praise of Lumpington, Hittall, and
Bottles, whom he secretly despises, and his use of phrases like "great"
and "pitch of splendour," which bristle with irony by looking two ways
simultaneously: "Be great, O working class, for the middle and upper
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
something true. This link between truth and excess warrants further
treatment. Coleridge begins his life as an artist in the manner of
the Dionysian. He ends up a philosopher, preferring morality to
music. Lost in the interim is the abundant life of loss, the
disrupting rush of excess ever deforming its living forms. Coleridge
may have gained discipline, security, and even health as a result,
but at the cost of forgetting the creative life that his poetry
remembers.
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
The kinds of opacity or linguistic dysfunction which result from what may be
called the traumatic event should not be perceived as simply a stylistic
option. Opacity here signifies a condition of language which is not a
transhistorical and epistemological linguistic given, but rather registers
the deforming effect of a specific historical event. Unless, at some level,
that event is recognized, opacity features will amount to no more than a
stylistic device which might properly be called a kind of decadence.
Recognition is potentially available through those features described by
Abraham and Torok as antisemantic. Each element of their term is operative
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
Burke's depiction of "a just idea of the deity" as a sublime object:
BLOCKQUOTE
By reframing the attributes of God so that terrifying power takes
priority over goodness and justice, Burke advocates an impregnable
male authority, a transcendent father who guarantees both the
powerlessness of the son and his place in the paternal order. In
Thomas Weiskel's psychoanalytic terms, the terror of the sublime is
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
interference with its structure, its voice, or its action. "It is by
its very nature incapable of being double-voiced; it cannot enter
into hybrid constructions." Conversely, internally persuasive
discourse, which is "half-ours and half-someone else's," is
appropriated, responsive reframing of another's discourse. It is not
so much interpreted as freely developed in the ongoing "struggle
within us for hegemony among various available verbal and
ideological . . . directions and values." 69 Wegg is a perfect
embodiment of corrupted authoritative discourse. He owns the texts
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
the final erasure of colonial borders caused by slaves and Roman
Catholics joining forces, the ships carry news that depicts both the
dangerous loss of order and of national solidarity: he cites
"several pretended prophecies of negroes that Charles-Town in South
Carolina, and the city of New York, were to be burnt down on the
twenty-fifth of March next" (387). The southern border of South
Carolina now cuts through Manhattan. Horsmanden next introduces an
official directive from Governor Clarke, a letter of warning
delivered to every town and public official in New York. In it
of emergency is a ledger that lists all the slaves implicated in the
conspiracy. Presented in lists of neat columns—each one,
from right to left, giving the names of the slaves, their masters,
and a mark designating whether the accused was committed, arraigned,
convicted, confessed, burnt, hanged, transported, or
discharged—the accounting gives a distinct impression of the
state's power, its ability to force order out of chaos. Although not
as dramatic as the "naked terror" of the executed slave's head on a
pike in 1712 or bodies displayed in gibbets in 1741, the ledger
as dramatic as the "naked terror" of the executed slave's head on a
pike in 1712 or bodies displayed in gibbets in 1741, the ledger
exerts its own force as metaphor of terror. One hundred fifty-six
slaves and free blacks were committed, 17 executed by hanging, 13
burnt at the stake, and 70 deported to West Indian slave markets and
plantations. If the spectacles of torture in 1712 and 1741 were
primarily directed toward the local slave population, the ledger
also attempts to secure the allegiance of white colonists.
Nevertheless, this ritualistic purging of the scapegoat has only
ELH 66.1 (1999) 111-128
Seeing Romantically in Lamia
Paul Endo
---------------
involved in the formation of larger collectives. But even here their
relationship can betray the darker side of desire: Lamia, "the cruel
lady," is "without any show / Of sorrow for her tender favourite's
woe" (1.290-91); Lycius later takes "delight / Luxurious in her
sorrows, soft and new" (2.73-74), while Lamia "burnt, she lov'd the
tyranny" (2.81). The stability of their romance and, in fact, of all
romantic or magical spaces derives not from some pre-established
harmony, but from shifting, oscillating positions that blur
together--like rapid pulses of light--into a relative continuity and
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
unwholesome trades, the sewerage, bad water, and burial-grounds to
account" (B, 393). Mr. Snagsby, for example, "paus[es] to sniff and
taste the air a little," and observes to Tony Jobling that "'you're
rather greasy here, sir'" (B, 394). Jobling attributes the "queer
kind of flavour in the place to-night" to burnt chops at a
neighboring restaurant (B, 394). Mr. Snagsby "sniffs and tastes
again," and "sniffs and tastes again, and then spits and wipes his
mouth," doubting that the chops "were quite fresh, when they were
shown the gridiron" (B, 394). When William Guppy arrives, he stares
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
the modern city can only exist because of this temporal sense: "If
all the watches in Berlin suddenly went wrong in different ways even
only as much as an hour, its entire economic and commercial life
would be derailed for some time" (328). Watches play a part in The
Woman in White too: Sir Percival's burnt body is indentified by his;
Anne Catherick is bribed by Sir Percival with a gold watch to alter
the parish marriage register to conceal his illegitimacy. It is
entirely appropriate that the gift Lady Audley makes to her and
George's child is a watch.
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
alive, while brainless frogs remained torpid (therefore, it was
argued, indicating the primacy of the brain over the rest of the
nervous system), Lewes made a series of experiments involving
brainless and in some cases skinless frogs who were boiled alive or
had their "limbs . . . pinched, pricked, cut, burnt with acids, and
even burnt to a cinder with the flame of a wax taper," which he felt
lent credence to his own claims. 21 When an anonymous letter to the
editor of Nature objected to Lewes's experiments as "shocking,"
"torture," "of excessive cruelty," "a case in which the infliction
argued, indicating the primacy of the brain over the rest of the
nervous system), Lewes made a series of experiments involving
brainless and in some cases skinless frogs who were boiled alive or
had their "limbs . . . pinched, pricked, cut, burnt with acids, and
even burnt to a cinder with the flame of a wax taper," which he felt
lent credence to his own claims. 21 When an anonymous letter to the
editor of Nature objected to Lewes's experiments as "shocking,"
"torture," "of excessive cruelty," "a case in which the infliction
of pain is not an unavoidable attendant on the experiments, but the
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
Franklin reports it, this is a story about a man and a woman
possessed not by the devil but by the excesses of their own bodily
desire, as signified by the habit of dramdrinking. I drink therefore
I am. The emphasis on human rather than divine agency is underscored
by their punishment: "They were sentenced to be burnt in the Hand"
(M, 234). More "terrible and shocking" than this outward
"Punishment," however, is their inner recognition of their own
abjection: "the inward Reflection upon their own enormous Crimes"
(M, 234).
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
Thelwall begins by picking up where the last speaker, who tried to
prove that love of life was stronger than love of liberty by using
the example of a tortured "negro slave," left off. 9 A runaway
slave, having lost his hands and feet as punishment, was further
brutalized by being burnt in a frying pan; at that point someone
tried to end his life and suffering by cudgeling him to death, but
the slave protected his head from harm. According to the previous
speaker, the slave's protecting himself proved that love of life is
stronger than love of liberty. Thelwall does not challenge the
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
purity codes--as Sally Mitchell has noted, the Victorians were all
too familiar with the social phenomenon of the fallen woman, and
with her literary representative, the fallen woman novel. Yet the
publication of _Ruth_ caused a disproportionate scandal: two of
Gaskell's friends even burnt their copies to demonstrate how "_very_
bad" they thought it. 8 This reaction initially appears puzzling,
since Gaskell's novel is in many ways less overtly shocking than its
predecessors: after her initial fall, Ruth remains
uncharacteristically chaste, neither cementing her moral depravity
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
actualization of the principle of _e pluribus unum;_ thus, extreme antebellum
unionists articulated a centralization of power that perpetually possessed
the a priori will of the people. Compare Hobbes's model to Locke's in which
the people constitute an abstract body of "the community": "When any number
of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are
thereby presently incorporated and make one body politic wherein the majority
have a right to act and conduct the rest. For when any number of men have, by
the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made
that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
Grandcourt presses her to reveal her feelings about him, Gwendolen
intentionally drops her "gold-handled whip" with "a little scream of
distress" and runs to recover it (DD, 120). But after she agrees to
marry Grandcourt, she loses hold of the whip in earnest; "it was as
if she had consented to mount a chariot where another held the
reins" (DD, 301). 53 And at last she becomes neither the charioteer
nor the chariot's passenger but the horse, held by Grandcourt "with
bit and bridle."
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 133-166
Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wolfram Schmidgen
---------------
years after his arrival. After his death, his daughter Miss Evelyn--Evelina's
mother--grows up in England, under the wardship of Mr. Villars. When her
mother remarries, Miss Evelyn has to move back to France, where her mother
tries to force her into an undesirable union with a Frenchman. To escape from
this situation, Miss Evelyn "consented to a private marriage with Sir John
Belmont" (15), with whom she returns to England. On his return Sir John finds
that his expectations of a considerable fortune are disappointed and denies
ever having been married to Miss Evelyn, who is pregnant. Left thus alone,
Miss Evelyn gives birth to her child, Evelina, and dies shortly thereafter.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
blankness, there is a gradual decentering of the subject that
culminates in its possession by the Lucifer figure. The poet "see[s]
the white body" of the swimmer dashed against the rocks; he "pick[s]
up the dead" washed upon the shore; at "the defeat at Brooklyn," he
merely describes the scene, the "I" subsiding as the poet begins to
withdraw; in the story of the red squaw, the "I" returns briefly,
but only to say that the poet is now speaking with another's voice:
"Now I tell what my mother told me today" (111-12). In the story
that follows, the "I" entirely disappears, until:
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
"tell[s] . . . not," so, in _Lyrical Ballads_, Wordsworth's
characters cannot cry and speak (or "sing") at once. It is a
narrative allegory of the conditions the poet has set himself for
lyric composition, as "emotion recollected in tranquility." For both
Wordsworth and his many surrogate speakers, the subsiding of tears
into tranquility, the restraint of "excitement" within "proper
bounds," is the condition for telling one's tale of woe. That
Wordsworth in his Preface chose to represent that poetic principle
in masculinist terms—as a manly restraint on the excesses of
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
Poe those forces are not wholly identified with the African
American, and his enslavement does to little neutralize those
forces, which persist in the world (81). The fundamental problem (of
which slave rebellion and abolition are only instances) lies deeper,
manifesting itself more generally in the subversive, democratizing
passion of the "'many who want,'" the overzealous "'spirit of
liberty' . . . which destroys the 'governmental machinery' of
nations by asserting that 'all things be in common'" (qtd. in
Bradfield 83-84).
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
this political metaphor. In the Senate debate, Georgia Senator Alfred Iverson
declared in favor of a new social trend: "My doctrine," he announced, "is
that whenever man or wife find that they must quarrel, and cannot live in
peace they ought to separate; and these two sections--the North and
South--manifesting, as they have done and do now, and probably ever will
manifest, feelings of hostility... my own opinion is they can never live in
peace; and the sooner they separate the better" (_Congressional Globe_ 12).
While, like Iverson, some Southerners argued that simple contracts bound both
marriage and society, others recoiled at pronouncements that might seem to
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
The readings of the novel that most aggressively argue for Mervyn's duplicity
and unreliability fail to account for the intricacy with which Brown treats
the subject of informational accuracy, particularly where the fever is
concerned. 21 Similarly, the critics who read the novel's second part as a
repudiation of the first, as manifesting a shift in Brown's political and
moral attitudes, are not attuned to recognize the information culture context
for the second volume, in which Mervyn systematically seeks to right
Welbeck's wrongs by making himself a broker of previously concealed truths.
Scientific and moral accuracy are intricately linked: Mervyn's newfound
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
the title itself is worthy of remark--Jeffrey praises her fiction in
explicit contrast to the "pernicious absurdities" of, amongst
others, "Messrs Wirdsworth [sic] & Co." 48
Nor is it surprising that a reaction manifesting varying degrees of
self-consciousness should have set in amongst the poets and that the
prestige poetry retained should have become bound up with a
rejection of the "easy," passive pleasures of prose fiction as a
"kill-time," as Coleridge stigmatized it: "as to the devotees of the
ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537
"Bales of Living Anguish": Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing
Peter J. Kitson
---------------
racial supremacy. 27 The Romantic period thus witnessed the beginnings of a
paradigm shift in race theory and in the ways race was related to nationality
and culture. By discussing various representations or constructions of the
African in a number of writers of the time we can see how this paradigm shift
was manifesting itself, and how, in speaking for and/or giving voice to an
estranged and silenced other, the literature of the period was complicit
with, and/or resistant to, such trends. 28
The idea that the human race is essentially one species or family, although
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
family can benefit from--a talent that Belinda's mind "had never
been roused to" (6). As Michaels says, "the family survives only by
drawing on the good credit of its individual members." Belinda must
learn to distance herself from the corporation to which she thus
becomes a part--manifesting the kind of individualism within (or in
reference to) a larger family structure that will mark the Delacours
as transitional, hovering between aristocratic honors and capitalist
credit: "Much of . . . [Edgeworth's] fiction . . . is an experiment
in the *[End Page 585]* principles of free-market capitalism. . . .
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
frotteurism in the scene with the _fille de chambre_--I will focus
in detail on the particularly generative pleasure of masturbation
that opens the text. During the early episode in his journey, in
which Yorick is energetically composing his "Preface" (_SJ_, 9) to
the written version of the travels, discomposing both the vehicle in
which he is sitting (the Desobligeant) as well as the "vehicle"
(_SJ_, 11) of his trembling body, he is in the process of making an
observation about the difficulty in "communicating out of his
sphere" (_SJ_, 9). 27 It strikes Yorick at this moment that
often successful than not in Yorick's world. *[End Page 826]*
This is especially true of that which is most important to
communicate--feeling. And the paradoxical key to the communicative
process is the fact that discomposing one's "vehicle" leads to
composing the text, which in turn can discompose the feeling readers
who engage it. In addition to selling good copy for the author's
benefit, this stimulation had the added effect of spurring many
people to compose their own feeling textual responses. One of the
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
Tom has both saved Jim from the gallows and rendered him obsolete.
What Tom reveals is what the reader already knows: everyone acting
in this plot is actually white. Jim's testimony in court is
cursorily summarized and irrelevant. Jim's voice is reduced in _Tom
Sawyer's Conspiracy_ to an evasive "mumbling" (_T_, 171). The
minstrel behaviors that vaguely represent Jim throughout the novella
are so exaggerated as to be grotesque.51 Twain either really doesn't
care about Jim anymore by the time that he writes _Tom Sawyer's
Conspiracy_, or he is elaborately acting out a disowning of this
50. Emerson, "Lecture on Slavery," in _Emerson's Antislavery
Writings_, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1995), 106.
51. Twain writes, in Huck's voice, that Jim "went on a mumbling to
himself, the way a nigger does, and saying he wouldn't give shucks
for a conspiracy that was made up out of just any kinds of odds and
ends that come handy and hadn't anything lawful about it. But Tom
didn't let on to hear; and it's the best way, to let a nigger or a
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 181-211
Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth
Brook Thomas
---------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Early in The Scarlet Letter (1850), as Hester Prynne faces public
discipline, the narrator halts to comment, QUOTE (55). In a subtle
reading of this passage Larry Reynolds notes the anachronistic use
of QUOTE --the normal instruments of punishment in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony were the whipping post, the stocks, and the pillory--to
argue that Nathaniel Hawthorne self-consciously alludes to public
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
In _Adam Bede_ we see the full force of these difficult conflicts. In
her first novel, Eliot is particularly anxious to link--at both the
conceptual and descriptive levels--the directive commentary of her
narrator and the project of sympathetic realism and identification.
So concerned, in fact, that she halts the unfolding of the plot with
her heroine on the very brink of seduction by the local squire,
Arthur Donnithorne, in order to treat her reader to a disquisition on
realism, representation, and sympathy in the oft-analyzed chapter
entitled "In Which the Story Pauses a Little." This interruption of
Arthur Donnithorne, in order to treat her reader to a disquisition on
realism, representation, and sympathy in the oft-analyzed chapter
entitled "In Which the Story Pauses a Little." This interruption of
the story is the _sine qua non_ of narrative intervention: it not
only halts the forward movement of the tale, but is explicitly
thematized by the narrator as doing so.
But before we turn to the famous chapter 17, let us pause a moment to
consider some other emblematic pauses the text is at pains to
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
Indians would come in the night, & kill us" (_Indian_ 330). *[End
Page 445]* Although the yet more dreadful captivity narrative lurked
behind the fear of being murdered by Indians, Jackson recognized
that the most popular discourses about Indians advocated
"extermination" by propagating a sense of immutable "red deviltry."
Countering older narratives of inhuman Indian savagery that still
shaped the national imaginary, the Indian reform movement would
circulate new narratives about Indian families under siege by white
settlers. Through the "privileged character" of Aunt Ri (412),
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
Jerome and the virgins, the domesticated Wife of Bath is assuming in her
premise what she purports to discover only in her conclusion: namely, the
suitability of all women for procreating. Since procreation is presumably
the final cause of all seeds, which (if left unsown) would defeat their
natural purpose of propagating the species, only the Wife's chosen
metaphor can make her circular reasoning seem plausible. [End Page 451]
The Wife of Bath's word play alerts us to the double worlds she inhabits
and to the double irony of Chaucer's complex treatment of her. "If I be
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
A prime example of Perkin's entrepreneurial ideal, Smiles's critique of the
perceived gentility of government occupation is, at bottom, an
anti-professional polemic. By "draw[ing] the educated youth of the country"
away from "ordinary industry," while "propagating" a degenerative and servile
"passion" for government salaries (S, 335-36), the trend Smiles identifies
privileges the professional middle classes at the expense of their
entrepreneurial counterparts. This mode of intra-class conflict, exalting the
gentlemanly status of the middle-class civil servant while snubbing the
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
As the Shepardsons and Grangerfords absurdly continue a homicidal feud
whose origin and rationale they cannot recall, this novel rebukes not
so much the rampant cruelty of culture as its members' relation to its
values. Whether the novel is being funny, tragic, or pitying, its
irony concerns characters' utter subjection to the lessons they have
internalized but do not understand. In this novel, one's relation to
models--discipline--is irredeemably formal, as Garnett employed the
term. Wholly possessed by authorities, one might say, characters are
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
women reformers' behavior. However, he displaces his own discomfort
onto other working class women. He describes: BLOCKQUOTE
While fervently counting the number of women, Tyas and his cohorts
are "internally pitying" the women's "delusions" that took them away
from their "usual habits" of tending their homes. Speaking as the
universal "we," he normalizes his critique of the women's behavior
even as he tells us he only does so "internally." But his critique
is immediately confirmed by the arrival of "a group of Manchester
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 141-165
William Blake's Androgynous Ego-Ideal
Tom Hayes _Baruch College and The Graduate Center_ _City University of New York _
---------------
allegory of Lacan's axiom that there is no such thing as a sexual relation.11
The three naked figures are here depicted in a scene of terrifying alienation
and abjection. Oothoon is chained back to back with her rapist Bromion, in
mocking agreement with the original hermaphrodites Aristophanes describes,
while the self-pitying Theotormon squats nearby with his face buried in his
hands. The sun looming ominously in the dark sky reflects God's view of this
depressing scene. This motif is further elaborated on the title page. A naked
woman flees from a bearded patriarch who appears to be trapped in a fiery pit.
At the bottom of the title page there is an inscription: "The Eye sees more
_American Literary History_ 14.4 (2002) 837-844
Contagion and Culture: A View from Victorian Studies
Mary Burgan
---------------
own version of the determinism of bloodlines--the preoccupation with
birth and class. Allan Woodcourt's mother is a minor but persistent
presence in the consciousness of Esther. Knowing that Esther is an
illegitimate orphan, Mrs. Woodcourt constantly harps upon her son's
lineage and legitimacy, intimating the loss of a genetic endowment
if he were to marry Esther. The happy ending overcomes that effort
at eugenics as if by magic, and the novel as a whole indicates
Dickens's conviction that reliance upon inheritance--physical or
financial--only rationalizes moral indifference to the possibility
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
more than suggest how easily shared economic interests can paper
over other potential political disagreements. Starting the book with
the election campaign that signaled a renewal in American attempts
to acquire Cuba as a potential slave state, Delany undermines the
apparent distinction between civic and personal duties by intimating
that, in fact, such differences do not really exist. With the US on
the verge of electing a government already committed to the
possibility of both American slavery's southward expansion, and, as
we will see later, the pursuit of shadowy attempts to acquire Cuba,
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
to the Pennsylvania Assembly, "reciting my Paper, complaining of its
want of Formality as a Rudeness on my part . . . adding that they
should be willing to accommodate Matters, if the Assembly would send
over some Person of Candor to treat with them for that purpose,
intimating thereby that I was not such" (A, 144).
It is here that Franklin's narrative breaks off suddenly without a
period in 1757, with Franklin being constituted in the image of the
"Rude" and low class colonial American, with the on-going contest
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
problem of women for whom there were, statistically, no husbands
available, social observers such as Henry Mayhew and L�on Faucher
drew attention to the limited economic prospects for unmarried
women. Both Mayhew and Faucher further attribute the number of
"fallen women" to the problem of female redundancy, intimating that
prostitution might be the sole means of support for these otherwise
economically helpless women. 22 This argument underscores the sheer
illogic of Gaskell's economic structure, in which the spinsters are
an asset, but Ruth--who, unlike Sally and Faith, earns wages which
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
lover's lucid, self-confident defense of his love is designed to control a
scoffing male critic. Unless we imagine the implied criticisms of this
actively silent auditor, we shall have difficulty explaining the
monologue's swift progression in tones, as the lover passes from brusque
and familiar jesting to an energetic defense of his ennoblement through
love. Even when the witty ironist denies any use of Petrarchan hyperbole
as he passes swiftly through the whole gamut of drowned merchant ships,
tear-flooded ground, and lovesick fevers, he deftly converts his
contradiction into a rhetorical trope, paralipsis, over which he continues
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
tours of the west end of the city, and brought back fantastic
reports of several of the costly mansions there, which exactly met
their lofty ideas." What they got instead were "plain, yet
comfortable, lodging rooms in Pearl Street." 29 I suspect that in
suggesting more illustrious addresses these boys were jesting
themselves--pointing out the gap between the wealth of their
benefactors (whose addresses appear in the subscription lists) and
the modest nature of their grandly offered largess. Why is it that
what is appropriate for one appears absurdly "lofty" for another? In
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
The heterocosm of Burke's beautiful demonstrates all the
characteristics of the potential threat of masochism to draw the son
away from the father, pain alone excepted. And, as we shall see, there
is good reason for this omission. Pain must be kept in all its purity
for the use of the supervening logic of the sublime. Even in the
example of Lovat's execution pain is the defining distinction between
what might be otherwise thought of as two kinds of theater. Burke's
treatise establishes an almost ontological difference between what he
considers the foundations of the beautiful and the sublime, pain and
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
perilously routed and from the residual pressure of those same feelings
in the surcharge of emotion which has long defined sentimental affect.
22 The correspondence of feeling between the object of sentimentality
and the sympathetic subject (Smith's "perfect concord") is thus achieved
through a struggle to suppress or transvaluate supervening obstacles to
sympathetic identification (anger, hatred, and resentment, for instance)
whose traces can still be felt in the outpouring of emotion that is
meant to signal their absence.
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
he QUOTE for freedom. As the poem's punning title underlines, the slave's
QUOTE and QUOTE seem unable to rise on their own to the condition of QUOTE
In musical terms a voluntary means in general a free or improvised virtuoso
piece, often more specifically performed on an organ and prefacing a longer
work; Emerson's title thus links the compositional freedom of the musical
QUOTE to the freedom of the young man saying yes to his duty. Interestingly,
QUOTE as a title was not Emerson's own inspiration, but that of his
publisher, James T. Fields. Annie Fields's entry in her diary for 1 September
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
underlying their role in his aesthetics remains the same: "the
application of the beautiful in things common to all." 14 Similarly,
the method of the tour will manifest itself in new styles, from the
diversionary style of The Picture of Dorian Gray to the aphorisms
prefacing it. 15 But what will draw all these disparate elements
together and yet maintain them as qualitatively different is a new
notion of use which emerges in the very form through which Wildean
social space is defined, namely the form of the collection.
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
_perspicuity_ , the _majesty_ of stile, and the vertue of _numbers_
."86 In Addison's progress of poesy scenario, the cultural wasteland
of the fifteenth century was anomalous. After Chaucer's death in
1400, "Tast, Judgment, and Manner were lost," wrote Elizabeth Cooper
when prefacing a book read carefully by Chatterton, _The Muses'
Library_ (1737), which assembles specimens of poetry ranging from an
eleventh-century piece by Edward the Confessor to Samuel Daniel's
_Civil Wars_ (1595-1609).87 Thomas Warton confirmed Cooper's
judgement that English poetry after Chaucer had "relaps[ed] into
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
eighteenth century, the river had been a primary conductor of
commercial traffic, carrying, among more innocent commodities,
slaves and slave-grown cotton. Imagining the great river highway,
Twain identified our American pleasure with a commercial imperialism
which perpetuated the piracy and slaving that had characterized the
era of mercantile capitalism; in his Mississippi River fictions, he
reproduces in miniature the volatile commercial space of the early
modern oceans. For Twain, the North American West had not been about
the political disinterest, domestic economy, and republican virtue
nineteenth-century United States's compromised version of modernity,
where eschatological idealism competed with a brutal international
history to tell the story of the world from here. Twain confides
that he prefers to recognize himself in the pirate, who is
implicitly synonymous with the slaver; piracy and slaving is the
seat of our American pleasure.
This glib, unsettling, Tom Sawyerish message reasserts itself in the
last installment of the _Autobiography_ that Twain published before
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
exclusively in historical context, but also, in fact, in the lyric text--in
Sprinker's words, the "site of political engagement need not be in the
streets." 3 Second, and again following de Man but thinking beyond Sprinker
in this respect, I argue that temporality mediates the relations between
allegory and narrative, language and materiality. Revising the Romantic
deconstructive materialist understanding of "time," in light of a materialist
understanding of de Man, would encourage a rethinking of our understanding of
Romantic allegory, and, finally, a reconsideration of the materiality of the
Wordsworthian lyric, along the lines of Sprinker's new(ly retemporalized)
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
seems to function as a truly referential sign of social analysis. 26
Ultimately, however, the pictorial sign here functions no more
directly than the linguistic sign in Chancery. In revealing the
process of labor, the picture represents an exchange that is one
step removed from that transacted in a rag shop like Krook's. That
is, if the picture is intended to advertise to illiterate rag
collectors that this shop buys rags for money, then why would the
image not depict this transaction specifically? Why not show a rag
collector handing a bundle over a shop counter and receiving coins
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
Drawing on Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's _Family Fortunes_,
Michaels asserts that because the eighteenth century lacked
"'impersonal forms to encompass market relationships,'" the family
became a personal form through which business was transacted. 11 For
Michaels, Belinda must take on the character of the Delacour
household, a task which should be relatively simple since we're told
that Belinda is devoid of character, and "had in general acted but
as a puppet in the hands of others" (6). A blank slate, Belinda is
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
may eventually help off the profane--and my Sermons spread a sort of
sanctity over my Sedition." 21 And the radical tendencies of his
writing seemed to be not only disguised but forsworn in his vow to
Charles Lloyd's father in 1796 that "I have . . . snapped my
squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition, and have hung up its fragments
in the chamber of Penitences." 22 Another way of making this point
would be to refer back to those instances from The Watchman--to the
imagery of the Anglican church as whore of Babylon, for
example--where Coleridge's opposition to religious establishments
1:79).
22. Coleridge to Lloyd, 15 October 1796 (CL, 1:240). Coleridge
expanded this statement in a March 1798 letter to his brother
George: "I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of Sedition & the
fragments lie scattered in the lumber-room of Penitence. I wish to
be a good man & a Christian--but no Whig, no Reformist, no
Republican." Quoted in E. P. Thompson, "Disenchantment or Default? A
Lay Sermon," in Power and Consciousness, ed. O'Brien and William
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
Foster--a yeoman farmer who wants no truck with the Blithedaler's
citified pranks--"disenchants" the scene, rendering it not
commonplace, but "weird and fantastic." 15 In setting up his
opposition, Hawthorne second guesses the reader. We expect Foster's
disenchanting stare to bring the scene down to earth; instead, it
produces the fantastic. Suddenly Silas Foster, too, appears in
costume. For the Blithedalers dress is the badge of their freedom,
their ability to change their identities. But their dress is also
socially coded. It is, in this respect, always in bondage to
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
If this last claim seems to offer a negative version of the material fact as
antidote to revolution (French hunger rather than British beef), my point is
to notice also the communicative circuit along *[End Page 529]* which More
imagines that such disenchanting truths get transmitted, so that Tom can make
them available to Jack and to the reader: "Sir John's butler says his master
gets letters which say" (1:340). This active exercise of counterrevolutionary
orality and literacy, rather than any repressive prohibition of seditious
texts, becomes the principal mechanism for contesting and defeating popular
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
Jouissance" and which will be useful to us here:
BLOCKQUOTE
Unlike the ghostly figments populating the Fantasmagoriana which
Shelley originally set out to emulate on the shores of Lake Leman,
Frankenstein's Creature is only too real. He is, like the blood and
guts oozing from the fissures in his skin, an excess of existence,
exceeding representation, and hence appearing to others as a chaotic
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
the scientific literary scholars' term. Most interactions in this
novel involve the attempt by one person or group, fearing dominion by
others, to subjugate others, often by violent means. Miss Watson, the
Widow, Pap, the King, and Duke, not to mention the robbers and killers
populating the river, all labor to impose their wills upon others.
Even Jim intuitively expects to wield such authority over his
daughter. When the girl, having unbeknownst to him lost her hearing,
appears to disobey his command, Jim exclaims, as a prelude to slapping
her, "'I lay I _make_ you mine'" (171). "Mine" here means "mind," as
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
question) should front a missing alternative, or foreclose on the reiterated
question of that alternative. Seldom can the word "memory" have been under
such pressure from one of its syllables to reveal the differences (the ors
and the eithers) that generate its substance. I would stress that "or" can
do all this because it takes its place among metrical events, activating
phonic and graphic agents whose rhythm runs counter to narrated events. The
lady Lenore serves to explain both the narrator's grief and his
ornithological obsession; but the word "Lenore" disfigures that explanatory
analogy by its rhythmically induced capacity to carry its own alterity. The
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
Emerson against this legacy on the grounds that his writing, "filled
with a sense of the vehicular, transitive, mobile nature of
'something' passing through writing," is not only indifferent to but
actively "disrupts the prevalent humanistic designs of--and
upon--literature." Outside of activating "a more self-surrendering
and at the same time more self-discovering" process of inquiry than
is conventionally acknowledged in most accounts of literary
interpretation, the benefits we draw from his [End Page 1005] prose
resist assimilation to established or conventional expectations
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
In addition to the steamship episode, Washington's first trip to
Europe—which he embarked on reluctantly and describes only
in a cursory manner—provides one of the only other exemplary
instances (excepting, of course, Washington's own severely
compromised and politically compromising "success") of successful
racial uplift in _Up from Slavery_. Washington reports of the
popularity enjoyed by the painter Henry O. Tanner that "When we told
some Americans that we were going to the Luxembourg Palace to see a
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
be recognizable, while from the publication of "The Gold Bug" to the
end of Poe's career, American situations or locales figured in 20 of
29 or 69% of his tales. How one defines _tale_ influences the
calculation: I counted all prose works included in _Poetry and
Tales_, excepting the preface to _Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque_, the introduction to the "Folio Club" tales, the essay
"Instinct vs Reason—A Black Cat," and two plate articles not
usually counted as tales ("Some Account of Stonehenge" and "Byron
and Miss Chaworth"). Neither did I include as a tale the prose-poem
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
recounts a distressing scene that implicitly ascribes causality to the face:
"I saw the first countenance in Sweden that displeased me, though the man was
better dressed than any one who had as yet fallen in my way. An altercation
took place between him and my host, the purport of which I could not guess,
excepting I was the occasion of it . . . The sequel was his leaving the house
angrily; and I was immediately informed that he was a custom-house officer.
The professional had indeed effaced the national character, for living as he
did with these frank hospitable people, still only the exciseman
appeared--the counterpart of some I had met with in England and France" (L,
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
while those female whales are characteristically timid, the young
males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the
most pugnacious of all the Leviathans, and proverbially the most
dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous greyheaded,
grizzled whales. . . . Like a mob of young collegians, [the young
males] are full of fight, fun and wickedness, tumbling round the
world at . . . a reckless, rollicking rate. . . . They soon
relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three fourths
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
Literary culture allows a species being, apparently male and
parthenogenetic. It would be very easy to be misled by the metaphors
here. Authors' begetting can be metaphorized as species reproduction
in part because it represents a realm of culture-building that,
outside of metaphor, is fairly independent from the family form and
reproductive sexuality. Literary reproduction is, for Irving, the
ultimate form of surrogacy: a mode of cultural reproduction in which
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
or calculate the significance of their own acts looks like a kind of
freedom. So far as knowledge continues to be conceived as a
possession, dispossession can, depending on one's perspective,
appear as a threat or an opportunity. Thus Shakespeare's texts,
begetting an expectation that outruns his own performance, affects
readers in ways unforeseen by Shakespeare himself. Why should this
seemingly trivial realization be experienced as a source of
inspiration? The most plausible response is that what Shakespeare
meant can no longer be regarded as just that but has in some sense
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
(15)--centers on the comic transformation of a social role into a textual
artifact. Twain's work is parodic in that it depends on a shared knowledge of
its textual predecessors for its humorous effect. But Twain also parodies the
self-conscious textuality of Malory's own narrative, with its presentations
of inscribed objects and documents (the unremitting tedium of portentous
epigraphs in _Le Morte D'Arthure_ must have struck Twain as particularly ripe
for mockery). In Malory, such presentations offer commentary on the action,
and they direct the hero and the reader to the thematic and spiritual centers
of the story. In Twain, such presentations direct the hero and the reader to
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
"In The Significance of Theory (1990), Eagleton remarks: 'The only good
reason for being a socialist, in my opinion, is that one cannot quite
overcome one's amazement that the fate of the vast majority of men and women
who have ever lived and died has been, and still is today, one of fruitless,
unremitting labour' (p. 33). But this is a very poor reason for being a
socialist--certainly of a Marxist kind--unless one believes that socialism
will change this condition in the future" (The Critical Decade: Culture in
Crisis [Manchester: Carcanet, 1993], 134).
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
or his own in protecting Jim's; individual freedom conflicts in this
novel with "social responsibilities." Jehlen judges _Huckleberry Finn_
"peculiarly unsettling," because it "stands witness to the
impossibility of any acceptable resolution" to these contradictions.
19 The novel's unremitting immersion in contradictions makes it what
Eric Lott calls "immanent criticism." Lott traces Twain's
"ambivalence" toward African-Americans; he recognized the curtailment
of their rights and opportunities but also understood the satisfaction
whites derive from their disadvantage, as exemplified in the
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
Such phantasms persisted because they "settled easily into a
structure of historical interpretation" (157).
Fifteen years later, Bailyn's student Wood gave this analysis deeper
foundations, reacting in part to the misguided pathologizing of the
Founders inspired by Hofstadter, in part to naive defenses of
conspiratorial thinking ("Conspiracy" 405-06). Where Bailyn situated
conspiratorial visions in North Atlantic political and religious
ideologies, Wood offered "a quite different, wider *[End Page 3]*
discursive analyses of conspiracy theory recounted above. And in
their writings the framing of conspiratorial rhetoric as the
"extreme distrust of representation" (Gustafson 23) does double
*[End Page 6]* duty, situating past conflicts in the realm of
discourse while pathologizing attempts to seek history "beneath"
language. The most sustained study of early conspiratorial rhetoric,
Robert Levine's _Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown,
Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville_ (1989), focuses on "the discursive
energies, conflicts, desires, and anxieties" of early America (2),
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
judgments do not openly attribute Coleridge's apparent failure to
his habit of eating opium. Other public figures--William
Wilburforce, Clive of India, James Mackintosh, and Thomas De
Quincey--were known after all to be drug dependent without
disastrous personal effect. But the habit of pathologizing Coleridge
as somehow failed, broken, beaten--Other--was established early and
still shapes the way he is read, celebrated, or dismissed. 9
The justification for this othering, particularly in our own time,
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
how they appear, but this does not mean that one will stop seeing them.
Yet Scott, it is important to note, is finally less anxious than Brewster to
rescue physiological vision from the vicissitudes of uncertainty and doubt,
and his insistence on pathologizing the ghost-seer in the end serves to
support a very different kind of argument about seeing and believing. 29
Scott's impatience with popular superstition indicates not the intolerance of
a modern scientist toward metaphysical or religious concepts, but instead
points to his deeply felt concern about the increasing lack of faith in what
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
countersubversives--that is, in the cultural logic of early
modernity.
Three years later, Richard Hofstadter gave his famous lecture, "The
Paranoid Style in American Politics." 2 Defining the conspiracy as
"a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international
conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most
fiendish character" (14), Hofstadter stressed a "style," a "way of
seeing the world and expressing oneself" recurring at crisis moments
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
Morgan, Philip. "Conspiracy Scares." _William and Mary Quarterly_ 59
(2002): 159-67.
Moses, William J. "Sex, Salem, and Slave Trials: Ritual Drama and
Ceremony of Innocence." _The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in
African American Literature and Culture_. Ed. Werner Sollors and
Maria Diedrich. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. 64-76.
Nordstrom, Carl. "The New York Slave Code." _Afro-Americans in New
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
_Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire_ (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985). See esp. chap. 4. *[End Page
842]*
25. Northrop Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," in
_Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology_ (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1963), 133.
26. This quote comes from Roland Barthes's interview in _Le Magazine
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
sometimes does what she wants and sometimes seems to act
independently: neither eye nor hair are fully at her command. *[End
Page 747]*
30. See Athena Vrettos, "Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology
of Repetition," _Victorian Studies_ 42 (2000): 399-426.
31. I am grateful to Warren for this image of Pleasant-parrot as
sailor sidekick.
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
(1993): 939-60; Graham.
5. Bode, 96.
6. On the subject of unreliability, compare N�nning, who discusses
exaggerated asseverations of the veracity of the narrator's discourse
as a typical signal of unreliability. See "Unreliable Narration":
Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubw�rdigen Erz�hlens in der
englisch-sprachigen Literatur, ed. Ansgar N�nning and others (Trier:
6. On the subject of unreliability, compare N�nning, who discusses
exaggerated asseverations of the veracity of the narrator's discourse
as a typical signal of unreliability. See "Unreliable Narration":
Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubw�rdigen Erz�hlens in der
englisch-sprachigen Literatur, ed. Ansgar N�nning and others (Trier:
WVT, 1998), 28. On Caleb's inconsistencies see Mitzi Myers, "Godwin's
Changing Conception of Caleb Williams," Studies in English Literature
1500-1900 12 (1972): 591-628; Eric Rothstein, "Caleb Williams," in
Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
the author's author, than himself" (579).
It would be a mistake to suppose, however, that the process of
rendering intentionality irrelevant clears the way for intellectual
self-determination. Rather, the act of redescribing the intentional
in terms of the intentionless ("a piece of nature and fate") is what
constitutes intellectual self-determination as such. Consider, for
example, the following passage from "The Oversoul," whose frequent
appearance in commentary on Emerson may be taken as one sign of its
despise all that we have done. This sense of despising, whether of
Shakespeare or ourselves, is a far cry from Nietzsche's slave
morality, with the weak reveling in the misfortunes of the strong.
In effect, Emerson takes the psychology of resentment and transmutes
it into a rhetoric of effortful striving, redescribing the envy we
feel toward others as in fact a misguided cherishing of our own
powers.
26. Brown, 209; Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, 75. In the
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
What is it like to read contemporary criticism? There must be many right
answers to such a question--and many more wrong ones given the temptations
that it offers to the unscrupulously quick-witted or the automatically
defensive. When it comes to particular instances, however, we are likelier to
ask taxonomizing and instrumental questions--"What are the methodology and
the allegiances of this work?" "Where does it fit in?" "How can I use
it?"--than "What is it like to read this?" "What do I find," paraphrasing
John Holloway, "in the actual words, in the critic's own use of language?"
But these latter questions, whether asked of Newman or of the latest book
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
the natural standard of beauty. The obvious ugliness of the Negro
provided certain knowledge about the order of things. The aesthetic,
in short, was never an autotelic category; it always revealed
significant proof of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon in the real
world. The process of taxonomizing particular physical signs as
representing Blackness, of identifying these signs as absolutely
ugly, and of drawing social conclusions from these obvious empirical
facts dates back in U.S. political discourse at least to Thomas
Jefferson's _Notes on the State of Virginia_ (1785). In the _Notes_
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
attitude, contrasted with the sallow and bilious skin of the Malay,
enameled or veneered with mahogany, by marine air, his small,
fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures and adorations.
Half-hidden by the ferocious looking Malay, was a little child from
a neighbouring cottage who had crept in after him, and was now in
the act of reverting its head, and gazing upwards at the turban and
the fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand he caught at the
dress of the young woman for protection. My knowledge of the
Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive, being indeed confined
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman
disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the
only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by
being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business
all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble,
distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does
become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. What could they
do if they were there?
(1)
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
simply virgin matter waiting to be inscribed by history, but an
urgently referenced anatomy under open-ended threat of rape. 37 Thus
his conservative, speechless body shows its illusory autonomy
relative to one of its ideological mothers (Burney's text). Only the
chronology of Burney's novel, which weds the thematic of discovered
lineage to the retroactive exacerbation of its heroine's
penetrability, allows her to have it both ways, suspending
indefinite, relatively abstracted practice in an anatomical
qualification whose persistence goes unnoticed by the reader. Most
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
Boffin. Wegg enlists the taxidermist Mr. Venus in his plan, but
Venus, who only participated while he was down in the dumps about
being rejected as a marriage partner by Rogue's daughter Pleasant,
reveals the plan to John Harmon. In the process of thwarting Wegg's
plans, John falls in love with Bella and weds her.
In the second Hexam story line, Gaffer Hexam is suspected of the
Harmon murder. John seeks the true culprit, Rogue, and wrestles with
his conscience about revealing himself so that Gaffer's daughter
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
articulate the principles of a racially democratic project of nation
building, Jackson seemingly ties the Reconstruction-era project of
incorporating the freedmen into the nation as citizens with the
post-Reconstruction project of domesticating Indians into US
citizenship. Yet the coalescing of Jim Crow discourses of inherent
black male bestiality specifically precluded white women from
exercising a domesticating influence that would require a close
proximity to such imagined dangers. In contrast, the Indian
captivity narrative, which emphasized the dangerous potential for
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
Missouri statehood to the formation of a national literary
consciousness. At the other end of the nation-building era, the
Compromise of 1850 marked the incipient disintegration of national
unity fostered for three decades against forces of sectional
division by then coalescing as Northern and Southern nationalisms.
For helpful discussions of sectional variants of nationalism, see
Susan-Mary Grant's _North over South: Northern Nationalism and
American Identity in the Antebellum Era_ (2000) and John McCardell's
_The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
the English Gothic romance than is generally understood. This
apparently uncontentious statement is actually more complicated than
it seems. As a genre, the Gothic romance is English in origin.
However, this origin is not a simple matter of a set of generic
features coalescing in a peculiar way at a particular time and
place. The term Gothic, as in Horace Walpole's "a Gothic story," was
not a neutral, value free description of the Middle Ages. On the
contrary, Gothic, meaning Albion's liberty-loving Saxon forbears,
was a key element of Whig political discourse.1 In the peculiar
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 301-318
Bruising, Laceration, and Lifelong Maiming; Or, How We Encourage Research
Andrew H. Miller
---------------
practical, between teaching and learning and violence?
In addressing these questions, raised by Eliot's essays at a moment when many
of the distinctive features and aims of modern liberal arts education were
coalescing--in, for instance, John Henry Newman's _Idea of A University_ and
Matthew Arnold's _Culture and Anarchy_ not to mention the various
institutional developments occurring in the later part of the last century--I
have several aims. The most narrow of these is to provide a conceptual
structure within which to read _Impressions_, presently in competition with
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
Whitman's discursive strategies for addressing racial issues. He
traces the development of Whitman's treatment of race prior to and
including the 1855 edition, leading him to believe "that Whitman's
passionate rhetoric about African Americans developed from a unique
and perhaps unrepeatable coalescing of historical and discursive
forces at the very moment he was seeking to create a work
transcendent and new" (163).
34. Klammer, 4.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
probably does according to Defoe) never hearing of their goods
again.
This is an interesting paradox because it shows how the importunate
desire to repossess one's own thing involved a felonious bargain
that destroyed title to the very property it was aiming to secure.
Thus the illicit attempt to recover the trace of the self in the
missing thing actually risked releasing the thing from its character
of property, and from the secret bargain in which its value was
that the incomplete advertising self—the self minus the
missing thing—might be restored to unity.20 And this
circumstantial account of the thing, she argues, runs parallel with
techniques of verisimilitude in the novel. We have already seen that
attempts to repossess possessions unsettles and compromises the
status of the owner, and that the detailed descriptions of
advertisements are superfluous since they are addressed not to a
finder but to a thief or broker who knows very well what the missing
thing looks like. This is especially true of missing servants, who
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 659-684
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
Philip Gould
---------------
This inversion of liberty and slavery suggests the importance of rhetorical
irony to the Narrative's autobiographical and political design. As Mikhail
Bakhtin distinguishes between them, linguistic hybridity comes in two forms:
one QUOTE in which one discourse unmasks the other, and one QUOTE in which
two cultural discourses unintentionally and unconsciously collide, mix, fuse,
and ultimately enable the historical evolution of language (see Young 20-24).
In this light, the Narrative ably manages the competing religious and
economic meanings within the discourse of redemption:
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
state (or region) and the nation, even as her next breath resolves the crisis
in a nuptial, and thus national, reconciliation. Virginia stammers the truth
at last: "I-I am married!" (296), evidencing the mental lucidity that seals
her vows and announces her political monogamy, her conversion to "Unionism."
The marriage is then reconciled in the instant that Underhill unmasks his
true identity. In the guise of the Confederate colonel from Richmond,
Underhill has proved himself a true "Virginian," a loyal admirer of Virginia.
In putting romance _after_ marriage, De Forest illustrates the argument of
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
conclusive evidence of "the marked inferiority of the old Egyptians
in all particulars of science, when compared with the moderns, and
*[End Page 22]* more especially with the Yankees" (817). This
transparently racist claim, which places "Yankees" (that is,
Anglo-Americans) at the pinnacle of human evolution, unmasks a
crucial assumption of national ideology while exposing the
exclusionary effect of American Anglo-Saxonism.
In Poe's story validation of this inflammatory hypothesis rests on
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
viewed, that is, through the prism of Tulkinghorn's death scene--not
as authoritative but rather as desperate, an act of escapism driven
by [End Page 141] horror and nausea. Rather than signaling a return
to the narrator's state of detached omniscience, that is, the
allegory unmasks this detachment as simply another version of
flight. With his frantic totalizing gesture, in fact, the narrator
acquires a distinct resemblance here to one of the novel's most
risible interpreters, Sir Leicester Dedlock, who uses his "rapid
logic" to turn almost any event into a sign that "'the floodgates of
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
own victims.
Whereas _Mask_ disrupts patriarchal power by altering the roles of
the players, "On the Medusa" destabilizes the victimized woman's
signification and unmasks how her image was used to shore up male
authority. Portraying Medusa, the monstrous woman, as victim, *[End
Page 193]* Shelley rescues her from conservative rhetoric and loads
the victimized woman with a revolutionary power she does not have in
Cruikshank's cartoon. This conflation of the two female figures in
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
street-children's vulnerability and pathos elicit the generous
sympathy of middle-class readers--distinguishing each caring
individual from the exploitative system that produces such
suffering. Which is to say that these apparently opposing images
functionally support each other in exonerating the middle class's
increasing self-identification with childhood leisure. For
street-children, however, play serves not as a measure of leisure
but as a mechanism of resistance, a means of claiming autonomy and
pleasure on their own, non-productive, terms--of thumbing their
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
(_C_, 287-88). Similarly, on at least two occasions, Caleb closely resembles
the ethical hero of both Kant and Godwin, one who will risk future suffering
to adhere to the truth. In one instance, he decides to tell the truth about
his name although he is being sought by bounty hunters; in another, he
refuses to sign a statement exonerating Falkland although he knows he will be
subject to indefinite future persecution as a result. Even the stunning
paranoia of the third volume, in which Caleb believes that an entire society
is bent on persecuting him, echoes the passage in which Godwin denounces the
machinations of the tyrant whose eye "is never closed"; here again "no man
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
vows to secure their rights or QUOTE (61). As in Stowe's novel, moreover,
the primary story of the titular figure, Og�, embeds the domestic tale of a
slaveholding father's painful loss of his beloved Creole daughter, Delphine,
a character repeatedly described as a noble and angelic spirit who, like
Stowe's Eva, pleads on behalf of the enslaved and is proscribed before her
family (including a vain and mean-spirited aunt who recalls Eva's mother,
Marie St. Clare). Like Eva, Delphine serves often as a mouthpiece for her
creator's didactic purposes: she casts truth in Stowe-like rhetoric as QUOTE
and denounces QUOTE (55). The similarities between the young
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
reliance on culturally authorized models of feeling and response.
Still, if sentimentality may reasonably be seen as "safe emotion" that
"reassures the self about the group," its compelling power is
nonetheless derived, in large measure, from the proscribed (or
"disagreeable") feelings through which sentimental response has been so
perilously routed and from the residual pressure of those same feelings
in the surcharge of emotion which has long defined sentimental affect.
22 The correspondence of feeling between the object of sentimentality
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
"interdependence of transgressive writing and censorship" in
Whitman's writing and the "oscillative relationship" between
"literality" and "indeterminacy" that *[End Page 945]* creates a
"thoroughly liminal" space in the text, encoding subversive desires
within conventionally proscribed terms. This textual space mirrors
the liminal space at the scene of writing: the textual oscillation
between literality and indeterminacy is a doubling of the creative
doubt at the scene of writing/revision (34-35).
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
in touch with the central socially determined content of subjectivity, but
which can distinguish that content from possibilities of thought and feeling
that hover at the edges of consciousness in some rude, semiconceptualized
state. That raw subjective content, never really imagined as extrasocial, can
then be marked out for purposive, but noninstrumentalizing, development. 30
In the way that Whitman pictures the inside and outside content of the
subject, its co-constitutury positive and negative dimensions, without
falling into a rigid historical determinism, he anticipates the contemporary
notion of "the abject," understood as the "constitutive outside to the domain
28. Here I follow Michael Warner's description of the self-instrumentalizing
liberal subjectivity. See "_Walden_'s Erotic Economy," in _Comparative
American Identities_, ed. Hortense J. Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991),
162. Warner's understanding *[End Page 1078]* of Thoreau's erotics as
noninstrumentalizing and antiliberal has significantly influenced the larger
project of which this essay is a part.
29. Warner has recently argued that liberal-symptomatizing readings of
Whitman "[get] almost everything wrong, though it's a misreading partly
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
of essence, she is already working. Remunerative work threatens the
practice of another class.
Burney has already addressed this difficulty. She does so not by
underlining the wanderer's unwillingness to work, for the wanderer
is distinguished by her stoic application to the most tedious of
tasks. Work's distastefulness inheres, rather, in the fact that it
makes money:
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
well-known steamboat of the era (_Doo-dah!: Stephen Foster and the
Rise of American Popular Culture_ [New York: Simon and Schuster,
1997], 130-31). Yet in "O Susanna," this steamship for the black
songster takes on the properties of its namesake before then
becoming a train later in the second verse, thus underlining both
the singer's inability to keep new technologies straight and the way
new technologies were metaphorically linked together in the culture
at large.
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
Brown's fever writing, an emphasis on the difficulties of controlling the
flow of medical information and its effects on "the public mind" in the midst
of epidemics ancient and modern. Writing in his diary in 1795, during New
York's first major yellow fever outbreak, Smith acutely dramatizes the
dilemma: "Wherever you go, the Fever is the invariable & unceasing topic of
conversation... . People collect in groups to talk it over, & to frighten
each other into fever, or flight. I saw, in Maiden-Lane, this morning, a
Carman, at a Cabinet-maker's, taking in a load of Coffins. A number of
persons, of various colors, ages & sexes, were staring, half-dismayed, at
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
of Emerson as a man of icy sublimity whose "jets of affection"
("Friendship" 114)--a loaded metaphor, if ever there was one--dried
up with the death of Ellen Tucker Emerson in 1831. Yet surely the
metaphor was unconscious. What stands out *[End Page 580]* most in
Smith's portrait of Emerson is Emerson's unceasing befuddlement
before the incursion of the psychological into relationships that
ought, he felt, to have been intellectual and spiritual. Margaret
Fuller describes a dinner-table scene at the Emersons' in 1842
during which Lidian Emerson burst into tears at Fuller's mention of
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
sorrow came over her countenance, and she said, "Dearest John!
don't cry; come with me, and we'll find him," almost as cheerfully
as if she knew where he was. And she took my father's great hand in
her little soft one, and led him along, the tears dropping, as he
walked on that same unceasing, weary walk, from room to room,
through house and garden.
—Elizabeth Gaskell, _Cranford_1
About one third of the way through Elizabeth Gaskell's _Cranford_,
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
poetry and prose, attempts by Whitman to construct a particular type
of reader, one that will ultimately assume what the poet assumes.
Such interpretations have left us at times with the lingering
specter of Whitman's poetic totalitarianism, an effort by the poet
to colonize the reader in an unceasing struggle for domination.3
Other interpretations have been more generous, reading various
transgressions—whether intertextual or between poet and
reader—as creative rather than invasive gestures.4
Regardless of where scholars situate themselves in terms of
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 659-684
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
Philip Gould
---------------
by which the late eighteenth century updated traditionally religious
discourse to the ideological needs of commercial society. In the context of
an earlier scene in the Narrative, however, Smith's language bears out
satiric intentionality. In this case, the young Smith justifies his defiance
of his master's son by claiming that he is merely obeying his master's
instructions. When the son becomes violently irate, Smith wryly summarizes
the American slave's predicament: QUOTE (376). By alluding to Christ's
injunction to distinguish between spiritual and secular authority, Smith is
able to call attention to the moral bankruptcy of slaveholding QUOTE --a
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
advanced further than any other peoples. For Guyot, technology is an
especially apt representative of "the spectacle presented by
European civilization": "Who shall describe the thousand
applications of the science of nature . . . those ingenious and
mighty machines obeying without pause the orders of man, and under
his watchful eye accomplishing, with the same ease, the most
gigantic works and the most delicate operations?" (_E_, 291-92). The
railroad and the telegraph in particular represent European and
American conquest of nature: "Space is annihilated by railroads; the
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
(_B,_ 1.13.125)
Mandeville could conceive of the same contradiction attending the
relinquishment and flight of stolen goods, when an honest
property-owner, disdaining advertisement and obeying the letter of
the law, asserts title by letting things go that have already gone,
and saying a fond farewell to what he has willingly forsaken. The
element of advertisement in Polly's song—the intense desire
for something of her own that she herself has parted from—is
ELH 66.1 (1999) 87-110
"Monumental Inscriptions": Language, Rights, the Nation in Coleridge and Horne Tooke
Andrew R. Cooper
---------------
surely correct to raise questions about the ways in which laws are likely to
be ordered in different ways in different countries, raising important
questions concerning ideology and the role of government or state to dictate
what is "ordered" or "right" in a nation. Horne Tooke's reply does nothing
more than gesture towards the notion of "custom," circumventing the problem
that Burdett alludes to but also, more crucially, disclosing the text's
resonances of a particular conservative [End Page 105] discourse of nation.
For Burke, possessions, including land, "attest and explain laws and customs"
that become the monumental signs of the ideal nation on which the
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
remain sealed for sixty years (with the interesting coincidence that it
would then be unveiled during the height of the '60s); and, finally,
its early unveiling in 1913 and the subsequent and rapid publication in
America of the original carbon copy by Robert Ross, as a means of
circumventing Douglas's plans to publish it there himself accompanied
by his own comments. 34
The path of De Profundis is at least as ambient as the events and
emotions it narrates. In De Profundis, Wilde composes a new catalogue,
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
language: a "syntactic turn or 'deviance' from the eroded and
expected in daily usage," to quote Steiner again. 8 In his effort
objectively to isolate the "literariness" of literature, for
example, Viktor Shklovsky came up with the technical device of
ostranenie--"estranging"; "defamiliarizing"--a characteristic that
has the virtue of [End Page 540] doubling as apperceptive and/or
affective on the one hand and formal on the other. 9
As it happens, the concept of defamiliarization is nothing other
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
into Greek, a written language of power of no earthly value for
communicating knowledge but having great symbolic potency.13
In short, the _Confessions_ shows De Quincey deprived or depriving
himself of the familiar, actively seeking out the other, estranging
himself habitually even from his own tongue. It is in the company of
strangers that De Quincey is at home, on others that he depends for
his existence and sustenance. Like Baudelaire's poet, whose soul
wanders in the gutters outside its apartment, De Quincey is always
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
[1887-1908; reprint, Bath: Kingsmead Reprints, 1970], 1:8-9). The
Gillray print previously mentioned exaggerates Chatterton's
youthfulness by depicting "an infant holding a pen and a book,
_Rowley Poems_ " (George, 721). By February 1770, Chatterton had
dissociated himself from "infant authors, mad'ning for renown" (_CW_
, 1:448).
78. William Hazlitt, _Lectures on the English Poets_ (1818; reprint,
London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1924), 189; David Masson, "Chatterton: A
notice" (quoted from Meyerstein, 475). When reviewing _The Fortunate
Blue-Coat Boy_ (London: J. Cooke, 1770)—a two-volume memoir
of a former Christ's Hospital pupil by an anonymous
"orphanotrophian"—the _Monthly Review_ deplored the prospect
of other "charity-boys . . . run[ning] their callow heads against
the press" (_The English Novel, 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey
of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles_ , ed. Peter
Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, 2 vols.
[Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000], 1:126, 127).
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
novel that does adequate justice to this topic. A few examples may
suffice to indicate its applicability (I have supplied a bare-bones
version of the main story lines in the endnote here).3 Like old
Harmon, some characters in _Our Mutual Friend_, such as the
blackmailing Silas Wegg or the usurer Fascination Fledgby, not only
behave transgressively but in doing so deploy both culturally
sanctioned incentives and established institutional procedures to
make puppets of other people. Others, like Headstone the
social-climbing headmaster and Veneering the parvenu, align
Harmon murder. John seeks the true culprit, Rogue, and wrestles with
his conscience about revealing himself so that Gaffer's daughter
Lizzie will not suffer on account of the *[End Page 744]* false
accusations against her father. Instead, John settles on
blackmailing Rogue into helping him clear Hexam's name. Eugene
Wrayburn, whom Lightfoot involved in the legalities surrounding the
case, falls in love with Lizzie despite the difference in their
social standing and his father's displeasure. Unfortunately,
Lizzie's brother, Charlie, who is trying to better himself, wants
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
"drawing on the character and power of the original" (xiii). The
Bowery bartender can "break boundaries" by exercising his mimetic
faculty, "slipping into Otherness, trying it on for size" (33). Pete
practices the kind of "mimetic excess" made possible by modernity,
with its proliferation of images and goods; his "miming body"
exhibits "an ineffable plasticity in the face of the world's forms
and forms of life" (34).
The anthropologist's hymn to mimesis captures something of the
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
26. Morning Herald, 16 December 1797, 5:2030.
27. "Speaking Pantomimes" were performed early in the eighteenth
century, put out of fashion in the 1720s by John Rich's powers of
miming, and then revived in 1759 by David Garrick (Harlequin's
Invasion) and in 1779 by Charles Dibdin (The Touchstone). They
became popular after the success of The Touchstone, and dominated
pantomime in the early nineteenth century under the influence of
Joseph Grimaldi. Throughout these years, however, the form received
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
the purer and the more efficacious for there being no content
passed. On the other side, through that same ritual considered as
pure simulacrum, the I salvages his reputation in the neighborhood
as a man of universal parts, able to speak all languages. By putting
on this show of *[End Page 887]* conversing, by miming speaking, he
puts himself in cahoots with the Malay (understood as the principle
of simulation) and tricks the neighborhood into believing that he
has communicated with him. There is a paradox here: De Quincey's
most masterful gesture, the one that gives him the greatest renown,
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
most compelling evidence of the effects of this writing comes in the
continued mobility of pleasure manifested in Sterne's textual
reception. As the wealth of ongoing responses testifies, there were
plenty of people ready to pick up the pen--some of them even
alleging to be picking up Yorick's own pen, or penning themselves as
Yorick--and willing to continue what was seen as an enduring
tradition of writing in the Sternean (or Shandean) vein. Having
previously inspired parodic explanatory remarks, poetic tributes,
anecdotal collections of biographical notes, a new card game, the
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
the poem remains open to the continual interplay writing initiates,
whether through textual writing or the metaphysical writing of the
natural world. The closing lines of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
rearticulate the entire poem as a convergence of the scenes of
writing and reading. The penning of the poem itself evolves out of
this convergence, and this convergence is reenacted in cyclical
eternity through the act of reading. Whitman creates what amounts to
an aesthetics of absence: a writing that revolves around an absent
center that the poet sends out in the *[End Page 943]* absolute
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
anti-professional polemic. By "draw[ing] the educated youth of the country"
away from "ordinary industry," while "propagating" a degenerative and servile
"passion" for government salaries (S, 335-36), the trend Smiles identifies
privileges the professional middle classes at the expense of their
entrepreneurial counterparts. This mode of intra-class conflict, exalting the
gentlemanly status of the middle-class civil servant while snubbing the
vulgar commercialism of the tradesman or manufacturer--has a complicated (and
decidedly British) history of its own. 33 But one need only recall the works
of Matthew Arnold, mid-Victorian England's premier professional polemicist,
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
a better inheritance, an enterprising mind, an inquisitive spirit, a
liberal ambition" (255).
42. In Political Justice, Godwin praised Caesar and Alexander after a
passage exalting Satan's fortitude in his battle against divine
despotism, arguing that Caesar and Alexander had good intentions and
"had their virtues" (309). The passage appears in the appendix to
chapter 5 of book 4. In the original version it had been placed in
appendix 1 following chapter 4 of book 4. See Political Justice, ed.
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
Whig loyalist dispersing jobs in Philadelphia, Poe never received
preferment and bristled at the spectacle of party
stooges—"low ruffians and boobies" Poe called them
(_Letters_ 1: 219)—receiving appointments in his stead.
Desperation impelled his mortifying visit to Washington in March
1843 to entreat the president himself or his son Robert Tyler, an
aspiring poet. Poe never met John Tyler and despite the intervention
of friends spent most of the week inebriated, offending nearly
everyone, including Robert Tyler and his wife (Silverman 192). His
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
denial meet as a single destructive nexus) is "tranced grief":
BLOCKQUOTE
Pierre, finally, is about "tranced griefs": it is where the romance
begins and ends. The story bears witness to the mortifying vitality
of memories that have been buried alive. The theme is at its most
overt in Isabel, whose autobiographical narrative, Caspar
Hauser-like, is full of things she does not quite understand. It is,
rather, a discontinuous series of images whose meaning escapes her:
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
of nervous illness, bodily wasting, and a more general kind of
uncertain animateness: the condition, that is, of morbidity. Of
Roderick's appearance, the narrator writes: BLOCKQUOTE
Of Roderick's equally cadaverous sister, and of her mortifying
illness, we are told, "A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of
the person, and frequent although transient affections of a
cataleptical character were the unusual diagnosis" ("F," 322).
Unusual indeed: for what appears to live in these twin bodies are,
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
(91)
In this moment of parting, Venus and Wegg enact a curiously
one-sided social ritual. It seems that Venus initiates the
handshaking and then shakes his own head, but the phrasing of "gives
him a shake of the hand . . . a shake of his own head" not only
emphasizes the articulation of Venus and Wegg into body parts, but
also creates a momentary confusion about who is doing what to whom
by indefinitely parceling out those body parts to individuals (a
being interpreted and misinterpreted: they give our actions a
relatively predictable (if illusorily so) social meaning, even as
recourse to these customs signals our need to be protected from
threats to our sense of stable significance. By the same token,
habitual and stabilizing social practices, like handshaking or
marriage proposals, can be disturbing in themselves; using them, we
seem to be living out someone else's script, creatures of custom
rather than autonomous agents. To use the pun Dickens puts in
Venus's mouth, social agency is a function of the "human
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
visual marker of the domestic space that Nora is called to embrace,
a materially conditioned space that now cannot contain the
fundamental contradiction Nora represents--the self-willed woman who
is not the silent, static, commodified peasant female. The remainder
of the play presents repeated attempts to normalize this
contradiction that cannot be normalized, a contradiction that the
male characters seem to recognize even as they banter back and forth
as to what should be done with Nora. Thus, when Dan threatens to
expel Nora and the Tramp states, "[pointing to Micheal] Maybe
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
obligations; this broader notion of accountability challenges the novel's
equally powerful commitment to unfettered self-making. The price paid for
this unsettling mimesis between the individual and the community, as Dickens
himself realizes, is that the autonomous self will always be under threat
from the social forces waiting to normalize it. In _David Copperfield_,
Dickens strikes a Faustian bargain that at once damns the private imagination
to a perpetual struggle with the economic, while reenchanting privacy,
professional life, and independence. Displaying our own hermeneutic
suspicions without the ideological heavy weather, _David Copperfield_ probes
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
primitive fetishism that cannot distinguish sexual object choice
from narcissistic introversion. Avarice, the passion to possess and
even (in this case) to consume, forestalls external acknowledgment.
The sparrow is her toy; her panic appears multiply determined--not
just because the sparrow has infringed her property, but because the
bird has begun to separate from her. Not just playing and nestling,
Dicky now engages in transitive and self-oriented actions:
swallowing and pecking. What was an "it" in stanza 1 soon becomes a
"he." Insufficiently determinate in his specific nature (bird,
ELH 68.4 (2001) 1023-1047
"A Sort Of Adopted Daughter": Family Relations In _The Lamplighter_
Cindy Weinstein
---------------
mother "had committed [Margaret] to [Joseph Hammond], on a verbal
contract for support and education." This verbal contract, however, went
against a previous judge's ruling [End Page 1030] which had named
Ephraim Tufts the child's guardian. The court decided that because "the
liberty of the party is not injuriously or unwarrantably infringed . . .
the child [is] at liberty to remain in the charge of the respondent, or
to go at large, as she may elect." She elected to stay with Hammond. But
what about the rights of the legally appointed guardian? In this case
they were nonexistent, even though a judge had appointed Tufts as
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
whether to give or withhold alms, must consider several axes of
possible deception (including the beggar's apparent physical
disability).
Melville's twinned representations of black need and threat in this
episode disclose his contemporaries' concerns about the seemingly
inescapable presence of the QUOTE but they also speak to the
specifics of black and white racial formation in the antebellum US
and to the role of benevolent rhetoric in that vexed process. The
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
mysteriously, QUOTE (196).
Through this charged revelation of kinship between Augustine and a dark
brother, the narrative introduces a possibility of racial ambiguity it
cannot quite close off despite their biologically twinned origin from the
same French mother. It comes as little surprise, then, when Alfred's son
Henrique appears as a virtual twin to his novelistic namesake, Harry, the
mixed-race child of Eliza and George Harris: Henrique is QUOTE (236), while
Harry, with QUOTE has QUOTE quite like Alfred's (3). Though Harry appears
child only to reappear miraculously in the final pages of the text.
This Franco-Africanist shadow cast by New Orleans and its proximity to Haiti
and the larger West Indies produces, then, a profusion of ambiguous,
cross-racially twinned identities that undermine the novel's overt project
of racial essentialism. In an odd but telling conversation between Augustine
and Alfred, the dark twin contends that the history of the QUOTE would have
been entirely different had the QUOTE been Anglo-Saxon: QUOTE (234).
Augustine concurs, [End Page 430] but remarks ominously that QUOTE : QUOTE
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
echo, perhaps, Garrison is able to characterize his address as both a
reflection of and a substitution for the interiors of black citizens: his
words become interchangeable with their hearts and memories. Their
experiences have circulated through his public address and return to them in
the twinned form of "improved" affect and white public authority, a
sympathetic circuit that leaves the emulative pupils devoid of a language to
critique that authority or to express a dissenting countermemory.
If the lack of civil virtue signified by their emulative desire threatens to
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
religious and secular culture to the extent that idolatry may be read within
the proprieties and decorum of the cult of true womanhood and its attendant
moral structures.
This twinned critique--of inappropriately emotive women and their adoption of
incorrectly "idolatrous" forms of piety--had long been familiar ground for
Brownson. In his review of Margaret Fuller's pathbreaking feminist account,
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_ (1845), Brownson savaged Fuller for her
literary and feminist cathexis of the classical age and of the "ancient
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
19. While bestowing a historical existence onto the colonized,
Morgan's theory nonetheless construes "savages" and "barbarians" as
people who did not record "History," a status that distinguishes
them from the truly civilized. For Morgan, "History" and
civilization only come into being with the twinned inventions of
writing and the territorial state, the combination of which allowed
for the tracking of property transactions abstracted from kinship
relations. Karl Marx's "Ethnological Notebooks" reflects his
interest in Morgan's materialist historicization of the family, the
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 301-318
Bruising, Laceration, and Lifelong Maiming; Or, How We Encourage Research
Andrew H. Miller
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
Hence, I think, the often willed quality of Eliot's gratitude towards the
sheer existence of the world and towards acts of others, gratitude which was
called upon to serve as protection from (or denial of) the twinned
temptations of asceticism (giving up what cabbage gardens she possessed) and
bitter envy. Without certifying the truth of philosophic estimates, of
course, exercising gratitude patrols their motives. (The importance of
Spinoza and Emerson for Eliot marks the beginnings of one explanation for why
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
25. For more on Poe, pedophilia, and Nabokov, see Elizabeth Freeman,
"Honeymoon with a Stranger: Pedophiliac Picaresques from Poe to
Nabokov," _American Literature_ 70 (1998): 863-97.
26. Marianne Noble writes suggestively of the twinned motives, and
stark affective oppositions, of sentimentalism and Gothicism: "in
both genres, pleasure arises from a fantasized experience of
suffering [terror for the Gothic reader, tears for the sentimental],
which stimulates a sensation of expansion beyond the limitations of
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
were in a rude state of primitivist good health; while the second
decadent period ran from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries,
and was marked by feuding Barons, and lawless knights left over from
the Crusades. Chivalry arose during the latter period as a
counterbalance to growing decadence, and as a countervailing
expression of the true Gothic character. 19 Pinkerton's division is
typical in that it registers a fundamental ambivalence with regards
to the Goths. On the positive side, the hereditary traits bequeathed
by the Gothic [End Page 162] genius flowered as the British
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
about Smith.See, in particular, 69-113.
9. These ranged from arguments for repressing the passions, to the
harnessing theory (within and out of which early arguments for
commerce are framed), to the "principle of the countervailing
passion" (Hirschman, 20), which depended upon the discreteness of
passions and interests, so that the latter could be opposed to and
thus quell the former. These last two models, articulated in the
writings of, among others, Baruch Spinoza and David Hume, proposed
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 230-253
Book Review ~~~~~~~~~~~ Whose Dickinson?
Cristanne Miller
---------------
Dickinson's lifetime, redated letters, the titles or
characterizations the poet assigned various of her poems, a revised
list of the recipients to whom Dickinson mailed particular poems,
and other extremely useful information for negotiating between
previous editions and Franklin's text and for contextualizing the
poems. Additionally, Franklin revises Johnson's chronology in
several cases, and although he continues to print the poems
chronologically rather than according to fascicle or set groupings,
he both lists dates and poems for each fascicle and set in an
and little meaningful biographical content, and hence should be seen
as artistic performances rather than more typical correspondence,
the significant differences in the types and forms of this art which
the poet sent various friends would necessitate some biographical
contextualizing. Moreover, because in this reading a poem used in
letters to multiple friends would constitute multiple QUOTE each
would necessarily be localized within its correspondence--regardless
of whether the texts of the poems themselves (to the extent they are
isolatable) were identical. Dickie sees this problem of
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
*[End Page 182]*
Yet New Historicism has something of a paradoxical relationship to the old
problem of presentism (or anachronism): it is at once that which its
contextualizing procedure is designed to avoid and that which, because of its
frequently announced political commitments and its self-consciousness about
the representational function of every act of historical
(re)creation—its engagement with the political and critical
present—it is often accused of.7 Consequently, New Historicism's
_Hope Leslie_'s anachronistic imagining of history attempts to negotiate
these paradoxes. It does not share, and therefore challenges, historicist
assumptions about historical time; its historiographical discourse questions
the very contextualizing procedure employed by New Historicists. By deploying
anachronism as both method and trope, _Hope Leslie_ challenges fundamental
conceptions of the form and shape of history that are as prevalent today as
in Sedgwick's time. Put plainly, a noncolonizing form of presentism is
precisely what the novel invites its modern readers to experience. And it
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
The point of this criticism, finally, is not to delineate and
correct beliefs or doctrines. It is not, therefore, an attempt to
encourage a more moderate, "latitudinarian," or tolerant kind of
belief. Instead, these discussions consistently draw attention to
the self-contextualizing features of text. The adherents of
superstitious and fanatic faiths can only be criticized, that is,
insofar as they do not read (or, at least, they do not do what
Coleridge would call reading) but only see objects, including all
writing, as the epiphenomena of belief; hence the Statesman's
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
Oxford, 1987], 42). Here, "ideology" refers precisely to a bourgeois
ideology whose female battlefront is the household, and Armstrong
understands this feminized middle class mode to be profoundly
linguistic. In fair Foucauldian fashion she turns the spotlight on
herself, contextualizing her own power as literary critic: "I want
to use my power as a woman of the dominant class and as a
middle-class intellectual to name what power I use as a form of
power" (26). Armstrong's identification of literary-critical study
as tapping into a power that is both domestic and bourgeois is an
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
rehabilitate the current reputation of the bad boy poet, as well as
a necessary economic supplement for Mary Shelley, it does not--in
feeding both of these needs--simply play to the current tastes of
the market of the 1820s. In fact, Mary Shelley's strategic
contextualizing of her late husband's work (regardless of what his
own intentions for these pieces might have been) is less a
debasement of his genius, as critics of an earlier era argued, than
it is consummately true to its spirit. What Percy Shelley's essay
makes clear, especially to its contemporary audience, is that his
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
within).
Thus we often encounter the suggestion in the essays that the
authority or prestige certain figures command does not have much to
do with their own actions. Instead, they "begot an expectation that
outran all their performance." Readers of Emerson know that
overvaluation of others typically signifies a devaluation of
ourselves, but in this case it is not others who are under
consideration but the "expectation" to which their acts give rise.
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
that characterize so much of Poe's writing, although they do so
somewhat obliquely. For the prevalence of such strains of morbidity
is not a matter to which Poe's writing is inattentive, and it is the
peculiar nature of his response to that morbidity--his careful
apportioning of its terrors--that returns us to questions of
intimacy and its permutations. How exactly, then, does Poe presume
to manage the racial anxiousness into which his pervasively morbid
narrators and narratives threaten to be dissolved? Once again, "The
Fall of the House of Usher" helps us begin to unpack these
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
economy of race is at work here. The human race to which all
individuals, most notably Americans, belong both transcends and
transmits racial types. 96 "Unity of thought," best expressed and
studied in world literature, supersedes individual racial types by
preserving and distilling their best characteristics. Lowell named
this effect "idealism," and deemed it the characteristic activity of
the imagination, by means of which persons can be understood as at
once types and distinctive. "The imagination always idealizes," Lowell
wrote; "in the representation of character, it goes behind the species
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
The Captain was a-reading some new book as he was deep-in,
a-waiting for the down-train; and there was a little lass as wanted
to come to its mammy, and gave its sister the slip, and came
toddling *[End Page 1004]* across the line. And he looked up sudden
at the sound of the train coming, and seed the child, and he darted
on the line and cotched it up, and his foot slipped, and the train
came over him in no time.
(16)
ELH 68.4 (2001) 1023-1047
"A Sort Of Adopted Daughter": Family Relations In _The Lamplighter_
Cindy Weinstein
---------------
precisely so that affections will not "congeal." And far from abandoning
a "commitment to social justice," to quote Amy Lang's assessment of The
Lamplighter, the text's preoccupation with Gerty's multiple positions
within a variety of chosen families intersects with legal cases
similarly concerned with adjudicating children's rights within an array
of domestic arrangements. 8 In fact, it is through her multiple
arrangements that Gerty at once becomes everyone's and yet loses nothing
(of) herself. What she gains is herself. Gerty's self-possession is, in
other words, established on the foundation of her multiple adoptions. 9
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
Limon provides a more recent, more balanced account of Poe's
ambivalence toward science (comfort derived from its classificatory
regimes combined with an anxiety about its enviable
professionalization). Locating Eureka within contexts other than
scientific debate has received rare but rewarding attention (see
Susan McCaslin's analysis of Eureka as a cosmogonic, socially
vectored poem comparable to Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days and
Horace's Ars Poetica).
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
This is a strange state of affairs for a satirical novel. For, as
readers of the novel generally infer, the Erewhonian management of
disease and financial impropriety also and more directly works to
criticize--and not to praise, condone, or apologize for--the
analogous pattern of rewarding arbitrary success and punishing
arbitrary failure in Victorian capitalist society. The specter of
Erewhonians suffering the injustices of a society that punishes
misfortune are certainly calculated to arouse the reader's
indignation towards real analogies in the British system, its hollow
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
domestic management (5:269). The "fresh subscription" for poor relief
promised at the end of the tract guarantees that an updated contract between
rich and poor will be renewed, its disciplinary clauses formalized by a
strict "rule of giving" which, in effect, punishes the unregenerate by
exclusively rewarding those of steady habits: "We will not give to sots,
gamblers, and Sabbath-breakers" (5:279).
These interventions in the moral comportment of the poor may seem remote from
the political considerations familiar to readers of _Village Politics_, but
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
and a particular sort of attention. Lucilla Stanley, the exemplary
heroine of *[End Page 213]* _Coelebs in Search of a Wife_, devotes a
full day each week to working for the poor, two days a week to
visiting the poor, and every Sunday morning to supervising and
rewarding apt scholars at the village Sunday school (_S_, 2:63).
The first requirement of proper charity was, then, to ascertain the
worth of a particular case of poverty. More frowned on
indiscriminate giving: to relieve poverty that was insufficiently
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
British situation of 1813. This sudden invocation of Scott as a critical
authority places him in the poem's chain of patrons, linking the minstrel
theories of the poem to its equally suggestive theory of patronage. Whereas
Scott had argued for a meritocracy of minstrelsy, with instinctive taste
rewarding deserving performers, Hogg presents a network of obstacles facing
his own poetical aspirations—obstacles including the disfavor of his
own patron, Scott himself.
The happy ending of the prize contest itself thus stands out as a brief
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
When the bird swallows the diamond as a digestif, Lucia, in
ignorance of the habits of the feathered kind, nearly overwhelms it
with her vaporous attentions and with the lascivious arts of the
doctor and the apothecary; then, when it recovers, she "Relapses for
the ring" and, proleptically literalizing a Wordsworthian conceit,
murders the bird in order to dissect it. As the poem says, Lucia is
torn between "two different passions," one natural, and one
artificial--and neither one is what Keats would call passion. With
all her efforts devoted to getting the bird to disgorge or evacuate
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
only ever belatedly came to terms with genius. For a more
philanthropic, gregarious poet like Shelley, this Wordsworthian
compromise with time and fame was altogether less satisfactory: "the
seeking of sympathy with the unborn and the unknown is a feeble mode
of allaying the love within us," he wrote to the Gisbornes in 1820.
56
Like Wordsworth largely unfortunate in his reviewers and with the
public, Shelley had the single consolation of finding his politics
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
its stupidity is American" (_Essays_ 506). In an 1841 review of
Lambert Wilmer's _The Quacks of Helicon_, he unleashes a parody of
national self-congratulation: "Our fine writers are legion. Our very
atmosphere is redolent of genius; and we, the nation, are a huge,
well-contented chameleon, grown pursy by inhaling it" (_Essays_
1010). Recalling the advent of literary nationalism, he repeats the
gibe about American ignorance in 1842 in his "Exordium to Critical
Notices": "We found ourselves daily in the paradoxical dilemma of
liking, or pretending to like, a stupid book the better because
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
a friend's impatient or imploring eye; a casual lapse that brings on
civic extermination. Like the pleasant narcotic effects in the
recent variation on the one-false-move Victorian melodrama that
Eliot stages in _Adam Bede_, the contemporary tale of addiction that
begins with the first inhaling and ends in a social death at least
as ugly as the bodily expiration to which it is typically yoked. The
costs of obliviousness prove no less prohibitive for the Methodist
preacher close by. As if scared straight by the sight of the girl
next to her nearly lifted to the gallows, Dinah chooses the other
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
Hoffer, Peter Charles. _The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741:
Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law_. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2003.
Horsmanden, Daniel. _A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection
of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with
Negro and Other Slaves, for Burning the City of New York in America,
and Murdering the Inhabitants_. Ed. Thomas Davis. Boston: Beacon,
1971.
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
reel 17, British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings
(Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healy, Ltds., 1978), 13258. See also John
Wardroper, _The Caricatures of George Cruikshank_ (Boston: David R.
Godine, 1978), 79. R. J. H. Douglas, _Catalogue of the Collection of
the Works of George Cruikshank, Formed by Captain R. J. H. Douglas,
R. N._ (London: J. Davy & Sons, 1910); and George William Reid, _A
Descriptive Catalogue of the Works of George Cruikshank_, 2 vols.
(London: Bell and Daldy, 1871). The word "strike" is, of course, a
loaded word to choose about such a massive organized meeting for
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
book's literal-minded readers want to know whether Donatello really
is a faun. Standing precariously "between the Real and the
Fantastic," this anomalous creature, Hawthorne states, should have
"excited [the reader] to a certain pleasurable degree, without
impelling him to ask how Cuvier would have classified poor
Donatello, or insist on being told, in so many words, whether he had
furry ears or no" (_M_, 463-64). Hawthorne's point is clear. If
readers translate Donatello into the realist register of comparative
anatomy, all they will discover is that they do not know how to read
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
spends most of the novel resisting its nuptial teleology. 14 In this
economy centered around hoarding, a woman's sexual purity, preserved
as carefully as a miser's wealth, at once defines the standard of
value and remains suspended in a kind of unproductive and
noncirculating uselessness. This is not Thorstein Veblen's usefully
useless conspicuous leisure, in which a woman's withdrawal from the
marketplace serves (necessarily, in a credit economy) as one of the
signs of her husband's or father's solvency--any more than a miser's
hoarded treasure is equivalent to a capitalist's productively
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
unhinging but actually works to produce it.
In the most elaborate explanation of his hatred, De Monfort recounts
to Jane his long history with Rezenvelt; passing together from
"youth to man's estate," he complains, Rezenvelt's "envious gibing
malice" towards those of fortune and rank was "poorly veiled" by his
"affected carelessness of mirth," which, over time, "more detestable
and odious grew." "There is no living being on this earth," De
Monfort continues, "who can conceive the malice" of Rezenvelt's
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
Delacour's performances of hiding a secret and her history of using
mesmerizing wit to distract Belinda from this secret are frothed to
a high pitch here. Though the deveiling is written as if it were
revelatory, however, Belinda has been well prepared for such a
moment by the novel's diligent steeping of Lady Delacour's wit in
terrifying undertones. The captivating use of language that makes
Lady Delacour, to Belinda, "the most agreeable--no, that is too
feeble an expression--the most fascinating person she had ever
beheld" (6) also leads Belinda to suspect her mentor of harboring a
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
this period usefully demonstrates the stakes of American "freedom,"
particularly economic freedom, for nascent nationalism. The
Tripolitan War and the discursive constructions of race and
nationality advanced in Barbary captivity narratives evoke questions
of national coherence related to remapping the globe in light of the
American shift from colony to nation. Rowson's turn to North Africa
indicates how national citizenship and the dynamics of race and
gender were shaped in relation to a transatlantic economy linked to
a broader international world in which _race_ was an operative term
republic, Rowson redraws the boundaries of the republic such that
race (rather than gender) becomes a primary line of demarcation
between the interior and the exterior of the republic.
In her remapping of the American "people," moreover, Rowson relies
upon territories and bodies outside of the US and England to define
both a national US space and a racialized republic. Thomas
Jefferson, as well, turns to geographical displacement as a means
for resolving conflicts over the question of citizenship in the US
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
domesticity proposed a revised colonial characterization of Indians
that held out the promise of citizenship rather than categorical
exclusion. Assuming absolute racial difference, extermination would
ensure that no Indian could ever become a US citizen. In contrast,
_domestication_ allowed for Indian incorporation by remapping a
static hierarchy of absolute racial difference onto a teleological
trajectory of relative cultural development, making the eventuality
of ex-Indian citizens the measure of the nation's own civilized
status.9 If discourses of manifest destiny such as antebellum
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
I. "Vestiges Faintly Discerned in a Majestic Ruin," or the Face of Race
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The latter half of the eighteenth century witnessed the virtual remapping of
human difference. In her study of travel writing and transculturation, Mary
Louise Pratt argues that the emergence of "natural history as a structure of
knowledge" worked to consolidate what she calls "planetary consciousness," a
promise that the entire globe in all its heterogeneity would eventually
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
salacious critical archive: "there is good reason to believe that
this amorous young man avoided all his life the sexual connection
with any *[End Page 895]* woman"; "Virginia was Poe's first cousin,
and it may be that, on account of this, he had scruples about
consummating the marriage;" "[Virginia's] illness, which forbade any
direct consummation of erotic desire, inspired those texts in which
the fascination for a woman is dependent precisely on her
unattainability." 23 The notion of Poe's sexually obsessive
asexuality is a strikingly obstinate piece of folk wisdom, the
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
oblique communication, to ask Freberg whether it might be possible
to extract a smile from his misanthropic rival (_M_, 2.1.83).
Similarly, after the failed reconciliation between him and De
Monfort, Rezenvelt admits to Freberg that he has been guilty of
"pride-provoking jest" and "contemning carelessness" (_M_, 4.1.91).
In an earlier scene, at his first meeting with De Monfort since
arriving at the Frebergs', Rezenvelt goads De Monfort with the
following sarcastic exchange: BLOCKQUOTE
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
Does Godwin therefore rely on the opposite notion that ultimately reason must
speak to us directly, ineffably, without articulating itself at all? Consider
the ethical theory of Immanuel Kant, another of his contemporaries. While
Bentham hoped to provide ethical theory with ways of arbitrating between
competing demands for justice using a utilitarian calculus, Kant argued that
one could never determine the contents of the moral law according to the
empirical, practical good it might bring about. In _Critique of Practical
Reason_, he argues that the moral law "is that which first defines the
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
Things_ (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), 35.
29. Slavoj �Zi�zek, for instance, never mentions Eliot when
remarking that "every advent of a new master-signifier changes
retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the
narration of the past, [and] makes it readable in another, new way"
(_The Sublime Object of Ideology_ [London: Verso, 1989], 56). Kubler
claims that André Malraux "appropriated the 'Eliot effect'"
in _The Voices of Silence_ (1954), "where major artists are
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
is, seeing them as aesthetic objects--authorizes gazing at a broad social
landscape.
Her interest in women and vision is especially pronounced when she encounters
institutional attempts to regulate the female gaze. In London she ridicules
the "exclusion of women from the House of Commons" and their having to view
its proceedings from "a sort of dust-hole, from which we could peep down
through blinds" (1: 66-67). This confinement of women's gazes recurs in a
Genoese chapel forbidden to women through a "law enacted by some wiseacre of
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
the"usurping tyrant," the Count recalls that it was "_Mob_" (820).
In the context of literary nationalism, the election of 1844, the
imminent *[End Page 23]* annexation of Texas, and the emerging
desire for continental conquest, Poe's allegory equates raw
democracy with despotism, ridicules American arrogance ("bragging"),
and punctures the notion—still cherished as American
exceptionalism—that the new republic was setting "a
magnificent example for the rest of mankind." Initially regarded as
crazy, Count Allamistakeo silences his chauvinistic examiners with
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
degree, thus transforming themselves at a different rate. Fielding's gypsies
seem almost entirely insulated from change, whereas tradesmen, who depend on
their successful interaction with a multiplicity of social groups, are not.
But what is the precise mechanism of change? Fielding is clear about
theories of change to which he does not subscribe; he regularly ridicules
both the great man theory of history and providential explanations of
change. Fielding mocks "greatness" throughout Jonathan Wild and in Tom
Jones, the great man Allworthy is largely ineffectual in carrying out his
best intentions and ultimately does little to shape the history. [End Page
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
failing in his responsibility to his audience by writing difficult
poetry. Even those with more patience and sympathy felt bound to
object that Wordsworth "is too familiar with his art to see where
the beginner finds difficulty . . . and makes his writings obscure
and fantastical for want of a little care in unravelling a thread of
ideas"; indeed, he might have "smoothed off many allusions which now
come so abrupt and unexpected as to startle even his more
experienced readers." "By so doing," the unidentified reviewer of
The Excursion in the British Critic continues, "he would have come
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
of his public career. Furthermore, he admits that, once he discovered
her project, he began "posing for the biography," much as he was
doing for Paine at the very time he dictated these lines (MTA 2: 65).
And this interpenetration of private life and public persona
increasingly turns on death, as Twain figuratively resurrects Susy in
order to forge his own posthumous image.
It would be these sections, prompted by Susy�s biography and tenderly
dwelling on Twain�s Hartford family life, that Colonel George Harvey
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
themselves have critiqued civil republicanism (Cinque, upon learning that an
initial trial victory has been appealed, asks Baldwin, "What kind of place is
this, where you almost mean what you say, where laws almost work? How can you
live like that?"), Adams's act of appropriation (when Cinque asks him, "What
words did you use to persuade them?" Adams responds, "Yours") resurrects that
very republicanism with a renewed depth of sympathetic feeling. Such a
renewal involves an aspect of reformist transcendence over prejudice, but it
does so only through two acts of appropriation. In the *[End Page 52]* first,
cultural difference (Mende beliefs) is subsumed into a universal humanity
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
Given Hawthorne's insistence that the figure of the man/faun is
subject only to the rules of the Romance, it is striking that
shortly after writing _The Marble Faun_, Hawthorne himself
resurrects this creature in his only piece of journalism on the
Civil War. In "Chiefly About War Matters" (1862), his ostensibly
realistic account of his trip to Washington D.C. to gather firsthand
information about the war, Hawthorne comes across a group of
fugitive slaves heading North: BLOCKQUOTE
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
Throughout his career, Cowper relies heavily on the editorial
advice--what he refers to as the "critical notice" (14 March 1782,
2:37)--of his publisher, Joseph Johnson. That Cowper considers such
help a way of forestalling and preempting criticism in the
periodical press is seen in his request that Johnson mark "lines
that he or his object to as not sufficiently finished," because he
would "rather submit to chastisement now, than be obliged to undergo
it hereafter" (7 July 1781, 1:495). Cowper's request of Johnson
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
946] population's relationship to the land, uniting all, regardless of
religion or class, in their anxiety over ownership. As Morgan writes, "a
feeling of insecurity in all classes prevailed through this anomalous
condition of things; which, while it kept capital out of the country,
paralyzed industry, and misdirecting the spirit of the people, awoke a spirit
of litigation" (O, 49). "Misdirecting the spirit of the people," the legal
patchwork makes uncertainty, territorial dislocation, and legal alienation,
not cultural traditions or kinship with the land, the features of Irishness.
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
stagnant existence. . . . The *[End Page 205]* explosiveness of the
book is not primarily the actual attack on the mill, the broken
windows, and the wounded; it ferments in the destructive force of
feeling that may not be stated." 20 This is surely why Caroline
tells Shirley that love "is so tormenting, so racking [that] it
burns away our strength with its flame" (265). Still, according to
this insight, women see more acutely into social "system[s]" than do
the men who attribute to women "soft blindness." "The most downcast
glance has its loophole," the narrator adds, "through which it can,
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
them from, in the heroine's case, the superficial elite among whom her fate
has been cast and, in the case of the hero, his partying pals in steerage.
Both characters signify their "depth" and hence separate themselves from
other whites by imagining themselves as slaves. That their "blackness" is an
interior state of purifying suffering rather than a trait marked on their
bodies makes these characters' claims no less believable to a consuming
audience. Through the depth purchased by their black self-(mis)recognitions,
the leads are united in a fantasy sequence of class transcendence (Leo and
Kate embrace passionately while all on board ship, rich and poor alike,
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
measure--and I mean verse measure as much as material
one--Anacreontics take the heart out of love. What is left is only
pain--sensation rather than emotion.
Emptiness can, of course, be purifying. "Let what is graceless,
discompos'd, and rude, / With sweetness, smoothness, softness, be
endu'd," prays Robert Herrick, who, drunk or sober, is the great
English poet of delight in small pleasures. 15 Like Cowley, he wants
to cumulate sensations, until they might have some effect: "Numbers
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
his wife out of love, out of "superb self-sacrifice" (139). Virginia panics
when her disguised husband proposes, dramatizing her torn loyalty between her
state (or region) and the nation, even as her next breath resolves the crisis
in a nuptial, and thus national, reconciliation. Virginia stammers the truth
at last: "I-I am married!" (296), evidencing the mental lucidity that seals
her vows and announces her political monogamy, her conversion to "Unionism."
The marriage is then reconciled in the instant that Underhill unmasks his
true identity. In the guise of the Confederate colonel from Richmond,
Underhill has proved himself a true "Virginian," a loyal admirer of Virginia.
ELH 68.4 (2001) 1023-1047
"A Sort Of Adopted Daughter": Family Relations In _The Lamplighter_
Cindy Weinstein
---------------
30. Pool v. Gott, 14 Mon. L. Rep. 269 (Mass. 1851), 269. Zainaldin
observes, "within the doctrine of child custody, then, an adopter
maintaining custody for a lengthy period of time might acquire a
customary right upon evidencing a superior ability to meet the child's
critical needs. Under the decisions in Gilkeson and Gott as well, an
adopter might also reap a Common Law right through an explicit or
implicit transfer" (1083).
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
the Opera House, though so ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In
a cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall with dark wood that from
age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall
of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay—his turban and
loose trowsers of dingy white relieved upon the dark panelling: he
had placed himself nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish;
though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity contended with the
feeling of simple awe which her countenance expressed as she gazed
upon the tiger-cat before her. And a more striking picture there
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
is not a retrospective fantasy. This is the last memory recounted of
an incident with the apparent status of a lived experience, and it
is followed by a broken and fragmentary series of dreams. Why not
then consider this last episode the first of the dream *[End Page
886]* sequences? In sum, the I's conjecturing is an indication that
the story recounted as if it were lived experience might instead
have a conjectural basis.
The fictions do not only stand as testimony to indeterminacy
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
character had to be repressed before civil society could properly
take root. Up until the French Revolution differences between Whigs
and dissenting radicals were marked mostly by shades. Radicals
affirmed a discontinuity between Saxons and Normans as a means of
entrenching the Saxon principle that the monarch ruled at the
suffrage of parliament, whereas Whigs embraced continuity as a means
of affirming the British constitution's organic perfection. This was
of course Burke's Whiggish line in his Reflections. Radicals
retaliated by editing out the positive qualities of the Goth,
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
Here surfaces a deep skepticism about the prospects for culture.
Characters merely regurgitate lessons; they act not of their own
accord but rather as emblems of the lesson. Tom's relation to his
authorities exemplifies this phenomenon. We laugh at his inability to
explain to his cohorts what ransoming is, especially the idea of
keeping kidnap victims "'till they're ransomed to death'" (10). His
devotion to his authorities provides the gratuitous occasion and
instructions for Jim's torture, and proves ludicrously risky to Tom
himself, who at novel's end proudly displays the bullet he received
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
a Mexican cannonball is unroofing the skull of a US soldier (55); or
where US troops advance through a battlefield strewn with their
comrades QUOTE (82); or where a soldier's lower jaw is torn away
QUOTE (128). Like other prowar writers, he also represents evil
Mexican soldiers mangling and robbing the US dead and wounded as
they lie helpless after the fight. By representing Mexicans as a
threat to the bodies of the nation-people, Lippard urges readers to
unite despite their differences.
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
real political action. Some kind of action is unquestionably urged,
but what exactly it consists of remains unfixed. The tone of
Thelwall's allegory is another issue to which neither lawyer pays
adequate attention. [End Page 962] The phallic puns, the grotesque
mangling of the slave, the absurd image of being burned in a frying
pan all suggest farcical humor, not sober analysis. Indeed, Thelwall
later comments that his Chaunticlere story "was told with such an
irresistible spirit of humour, that it at once put an end to the
argument, and was received with shouts of laughter and applause." 19
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
of the suit--but the irrelevance of any particular sign within a
vast system. Krook dies not because, as a common expression would
have it, the sign "burns a hole in his pocket"--that is, not because
his desire to deploy or spend its value consumes him--but rather
because the market-system loathes a hoarder. Stoppage of circulation
creates build-up, friction, heat. 24
III. Chancery as Famine
-----------------------
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
the ring" and, proleptically literalizing a Wordsworthian conceit,
murders the bird in order to dissect it. As the poem says, Lucia is
torn between "two different passions," one natural, and one
artificial--and neither one is what Keats would call passion. With
all her efforts devoted to getting the bird to disgorge or evacuate
the stone, the evident kernel of her tale is no more than an
unarticulated pun on "consuming passion."
But the poem can't be written off as a riddle, for the moralist's
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 301-318
Bruising, Laceration, and Lifelong Maiming; Or, How We Encourage Research
Andrew H. Miller
---------------
Eliot, for her part, recognized that becoming oneself was a struggle
sufficiently severe to make repose itself an end dearly desired. Her
narrator, Theophrastus, characteristically responds to the exhaustion of
metamorphosis by understanding one of the attractions of gaining a new self
to be liberation from the harrying demands of the perfectionist narrative
itself: BLOCKQUOTE
Doubtless, the fertility with which Theophrastus imagines alternative lives
marks an imaginative endurance in the midst of his fatigue. Nonetheless, I
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
from _The Country of the Pointed Firs,_ coupled with the absence of
Christian faith, does not simply mark Jewett's difference from the
sentimental tradition (Brodhead 160-61); it also manages to erase both
secular and spiritual futurity; it helps to arrest time on behalf of
apprehending an autonomous and self-contained culture. Wrested from the
diachrony of technological progress, the material objects are now
frozen in the synchrony of cultural coherence. If Jewett's fiction
helps us to understand the narrative force of the life-group exhibits,
then, those exhibits help to show how her fiction can feel like
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
of the existence of distinct types of human beings, declaring that
crucial intellectual, moral, physical, and temperamental differences
were fixed and unalterable and passed on from generation to
generation. The most influential and respected scientific work of
the period, in fact, was dedicated to apprehending, explaining, and
ranking the types of Mankind.10 And, as this nation's most
influential scientists were debating the question of whether the
Negro constituted a separate species, biblical scholars were
heatedly debating the question of whether there were multiple
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
makes it more intense, since she is painted onto his soulless canvases,
which stare back at him in silent admonition and rebuke.
As a master of bad faith and casuistry, Andrea is the target of Browning's
sustained double irony. As a weak pleader, contriving to hold his wife's
hand by pressing money into it, he is a figure of some pathos if not much
dignity. But as an off-stage actor, who is continually inventing different
roles for himself, first as the genius of unfulfilled promise, then as the
betrayer of his patron, King Francis, and finally as the improvident son,
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
nature into an early grave. While on the one hand the poem by no
means endorses the solipsistic quest, it does paradoxically
celebrate the single-minded pursuit of beauty and truth that
distinguishes the poet-hero's aspirations from those of the
"unforseeing multitudes who constitute . . . the lasting misery and
loneliness of the world"; multitudes "whose hearts are dry as summer
dust" (quoting Wordsworth), and who "Burn to the socket." 61 That
Shelley is only partially successful in enforcing a meaningful
distinction between his private poet-hero and his public
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
helped establish the Smithsonian Institute, and he was a great
naturalist.22 He was, in short, an American aristocrat. Ethan Allen,
the Vermont free-booter, Revolutionary warrior, and extreme
Democrat--much admired by Melville--said of Marsh's family that they
were "a petulant, pettefogging, scribling sort of Gentry" 23 My
interest in Marsh rests in the two controversial addresses he gave
in 1843 and 1844: The Goths in New England and the Address Delivered
before the New England Society of the City of New York. [End Page
164]
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 151-169
Walking on Flowers: the Kantian Aesthetics Of _Hard Times_
Christina Lupton
---------------
In _Persuasion,_ Admiral Croft is intrigued by a picture of a boat.
But unlike Sissy, who can disentangle her feelings about flowers
*[End Page 158]* themselves from her reasoning about floral carpet
and glean from this the victory of an interpretive role, Admiral
Croft is left in a frustrated dyadic loyalty to boats themselves:
BLOCKQUOTE
At one level, Admiral Croft's frustration suggests that he, like
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
mere utility and reduce the objects that meet those needs to mere
commodities; he needs to denaturalize and defamiliarize them, in order
that they may be reappropriated in all their richness and variety.
(This is a two-step process: first, to defamiliarize, disassociate,
disassemble; second, to reassemble, reconfigure, reappropriate.)
Reminiscent of the goals of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, Wilde sees
the need to put accepted truths on the high wire before they can be
evaluated. As he puts it, "To test reality we must see it on the
tightrope. When the verities become acrobats we can judge them" (D,
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
movement of time so successfully that it now goes "backward and most
præposterous."2
Orthographic sameness has erased this semantic difference, which can
be made audio-visible by dissociating the absurdities of
"preposterousness" from the inversions of "_pre_ posterousness." For
unlike "preposterous," which presents itself as a word without a
history but with several synonyms, "_pre_ posterous" preserves its
etymology as a latinism which instantiates the phenomenon it
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
"orphanotrophian"—the _Monthly Review_ deplored the prospect
of other "charity-boys . . . run[ning] their callow heads against
the press" (_The English Novel, 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey
of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles_ , ed. Peter
Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, 2 vols.
[Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000], 1:126, 127).
113. John Dix, _The Life of Thomas Chatterton, including His
Unpublished Poems and Correspondence_ (London: Hamilton, Adams,
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
Works of John Ruskin_, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39
vols. (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), 8: n.68-69, and the editors'
note on 69-70. The association of iron with intrusion and corruption
reaches its greatest elaboration in the nineteenth century, when many
commentators decried the despoiling of the countryside by the "iron
veins" (Ruskin, 8:246) of the railroad. We see these objections on
both sides of the Atlantic; Henry David Thoreau, for example, refers
to the "devilish Iron Horse ... [who] has muddied the Boiling Spring
with his foot" (_Walden_, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley [Princeton: Princeton
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 212-241
The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston's Public Poetry and the Great Organ, 1863
Mary Loeffelholz
---------------
society, and implicitly insulting to the real bodies of the Union armies in
their hour of peril. This is precisely the power of the organ that Holmes
most celebrates in his essay QUOTE Nor does he stop at simply praising QUOTE
(640). Reasoning from the organ's power to generate within its mechanisms all
of QUOTE Holmes deduces that the organ is all but alive. QUOTE he punningly
calls it, "[a] kind of Frankenstein-creation, half framed and half vitalized.
. . . Thousands of long, delicate tendons govern its varied internal
movements, themselves obedient to the human muscles which are commanded by
the human brain, which again is guided in its volitions by the voice of the
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
frequent reminder elsewhere that such entities surpass rational
comprehension, an argument of sorts does accompany their initial
appearance in "History." From the fact that it seems possible for
different people at different places and times to think the same
thought Emerson deduces the existence of a "Universal Mind," of
which "each individual is one more incarnation" (238). From the
fact, in other words, that meaning can be shared, Emerson affirms a
transcendent Intelligence immanent to all.
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
Synge's impressionistic description produces this woman as
geographical [End Page 1027] and temporal link between rural west
and urbanizing east as well as between past and present. Having
visited Galway she perceives--or more correctly, Synge perceives
through her--the "disillusion" of a modern world divorced from the
primitive, the heart of Ireland moving inevitably from Aran to
Galway and, perhaps eventually, to Dublin. Never "a simple
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
good writing" (2 July 1780, 1:359), promises to "examine and
cross-examine" (26 February 1790, 3:347) his verses, and maintains
that "it is . . . [his] . . . daily business to polish and improve
what is done" (8 March 1790, 3:354). Taken together, Cowper's
"touching and retouching," "examining and cross-examining," and
"polishing and improving" constitute a massive defense against
critical disapprobation.
But Cowper does not labor alone. When he is preparing his first two
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
in 1854 brought his address on "Slavery in Massachusetts" to a
remarkable conclusion. "Slavery and servility," he writes,
BLOCKQUOTE
Were it not for the cozy naturalist metaphor bookending them,
Thoreau's pronouncements might well impress us with the force of
their curious Gothicism. What lends Thoreau's homespun wit its
notable bite in this passage is the very thing that makes for
anxiousness and volatility in Poe's tales: Thoreau trades here on
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
benevolence in which donors are supposed to hold more social power
than supplicants. If the supplicant is, as some of the passengers
suspect, a trickster rather than (or in addition to) the destitute
figure he claims to be, then his would-be patrons are in fact his
dupes and can no longer think of themselves as astute judges of who
merits help and who does not. But the specific question of the
beggar's racial identity introduces other tensions as well. For one
thing, the suspicion that the beggar is faking his blackness in an
attempt to win the passengers' sympathy suggests that blackness at
another perspective they are getting precisely what they pay for--a
game and a performance. 18 The role that self-interest and volition
play in the behavior of Black Guinea's donors prepares readers for
the novel's subsequent confidence men, who so explicitly take
advantage of their dupes' greed.
However complicit the donors/dupes may be, they are the characters
whose subject positions Melville most clearly invites readers to
consider: he represents their voices and their doubts throughout the
play in the behavior of Black Guinea's donors prepares readers for
the novel's subsequent confidence men, who so explicitly take
advantage of their dupes' greed.
However complicit the donors/dupes may be, they are the characters
whose subject positions Melville most clearly invites readers to
consider: he represents their voices and their doubts throughout the
chapter. In fact, the narrative at times attends more closely to the
conflicts and exchanges between white men that Black Guinea's
white liberal guilt (345), though I have replaced that state with
one of its analogues--white liberal doubt.
18. This exchange exemplifies what Wai-chee Dimock has termed the
victims' QUOTE (188). Because the confidence man's dupes make
choices that at least appear to be free (that is, there appear to be
alternatives), they command little sympathy. Melville, she claims,
thus replaces QUOTE (187; see also 204-07).
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
the passions were imagined as "interior and exterior" forces of
disorder. 12
Catlin's willingness to portray American Indians as merely "victims
and dupes of white man's cupidity" in trade is balanced by a real
but muffled fear of what else white commercial passions might
create. His too-ready answer to the legacy of the whiskey and
buffalo trade is the vision of a National Park, a largely aesthetic
solution; it will support in perpetuity a "beautiful and thrilling
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
promulgation of a rationalist agenda and onto her interaction with
Lady Delacour, we find that in _Belinda_ domesticity is aligned with
aristocratic mores through a froth of coordinated feminine mishap:
to the extent that Belinda and Lady Delacour are, together, the
dupes of wit, domesticity is attached to aristocratic delights. And
demystification thus has less to do with domesticity's rational
insight, and rather more with the image of women being jointly
bedeviled by their enchanted perceptions. I am suggesting, in other
words, that if _Belinda_ presses anything on its reader, it is not
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
but he does not acknowledge as much in his own analysis. As quoted in the
same piece (a quotation, however, which Sprinker relegates to a footnote),
Gash� concludes at one point that "all of de Man's concepts are drawn without
exception into a maelstrom of temporalization" and consequently that texts
themselves represent the "temporal process of detotalizing operations." 35
Time is, and should be acknowledged as, a key factor in understanding the
deconstructive conception of text, because the rupturing of time is what
prevents concepts from closing in on themselves, from totalizing.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
The American model quickly entered Irish nationalist debate. Henry Grattan
refers to the American Revolution in a famous speech that precipitated the
restoration of some powers to the Irish Parliament in 1782, and he echoes the
inaugural rhetoric: "The nation begins to form; we are moulding into a
people." 17 The United Irishmen largely grew out of the erosion of that
Parliament's powers and the nationalist groups that were contemporary with
it, and so had strong historical roots in the American as well as the French
Revolution. 18 In their published writings, the United Irishmen mixed
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
assigned to women and to clergymen—who, in this instance,
participate in much the same profession.
As noted by Charles Ford, More "clarified and restricted the
relatively unexacting criteria by which most eighteenth-century
justices discriminated between the deserving and undeserving poor."9
She was determined that relief should not be given to just anyone,
and, in this regard (as I will argue more fully), her tracts were
addressed as much to the middle and upper classes as they were to
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
than particular cultural practices) compromises the subject and is
brutal. The subject should be absolutely free (even though all
recognize the untenability of this ideal). As I have suggested, this
premise has been the criterion by which _Huckleberry Finn_ has been
defended or censured. But if the measure of this novel is whether or
not it succeeds in releasing us from habitual structures, then it
fails its defenders' own test.
The anxiety and compensatory idealism I have been tracking express a
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
walks, had the pleasure to see many an honest man drinking his
wholesome cup of beer by his own *[End Page 219]* fire-side, his
rosy children playing about his knees, his clean cheerful wife
singing her youngest baby to sleep, while with her hands she was
making a dumpling for her kind husband's supper" (_W_, 1:177). A
large part of this pleasure is doubtless the glow of accomplishment,
as Mrs. Jones has just succeeded in getting two alehouses shut down
so that the honest men can be obliged to drink their cup of beer at
home rather than at the pub. But the extent of Mrs. Jones's vision
ELH 66.1 (1999) 111-128
Seeing Romantically in Lamia
Paul Endo
---------------
is able to manipulate it as an alienated, third-person counter
("Lamia's self"). 33 To be seen does not condemn one to being the
passive recipient of meaning. Lamia is seen by the guests--seen,
moreover, through a kind of collective plotting that is all the more
real because of the multiplication of effect. But by foreseeing that
she will be so seen, she is able to dissimulate herself and resist
the plots of others. Lamia is acting "tactically" rather than
"strategically": that is, she is not exterior to the other but
operates from within its space. 34 She circulates and recycles its
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
. . People thus give form to non-humans, but are themselves acted
upon and given form by non-humans.40
Alongside its anthropomorphic humanizing of the whale, Melville's
novel invites the reader to recognize a zoomorphic animalizing of
the human, radically locating the nonhuman, the inhuman, and the
inhumane within Enlightenment humanism's own most crucial and
privileged category. Taken together, these processes represent a
mutual interchange between the social and the natural domains. This
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
at the beginning (S, 770). After his return Rip prefers "making
friends among the rising generation" (S, 783). His own children are
not part of his entourage. "His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his
own likeness, promised to inherit the habits with the old clothes of
the father. He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his
mother's heels, equipped in a pair of his father's cast off
galligaskins, which he had much ado to hold up with one hand, as a
fine lady does her train in bad weather" (S, 771).
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
catalogued the almost inconceivable variety of applications of the
word sublime but has also shown how the connotations of transcendent
individualism in the sublime can reinforce the worst excesses of
tyranny by idealizing the tyrant in the epic mode. En route to noting
American sublimes, "this endless and unencompassing landscape . . . on
huge canvases" (434), abstract sublimes, "the luminous, numinous
square or a single vertical line [of Rothko, Newman and Kline]" (435),
and figurative sublimes, "Guston . . . expanded to the grotesque, with
a kind of sublime laughter as accompaniment, the idiom of 1930's comic
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
foresaw deliverance of the individual through the exorcism of
convention, when the individual's relation to culture is made
indirect. Jehlen, Lott, and Carton value the book for destabilizing
key categories, like identity, and therefore warning readers against
hypostatizing that (identity, values) which is contingent. These views
are more subtle *[End Page 274]* than Trilling's idea that the reader,
like at some moments Huck, can "discard" inveterate values like
racism. They nonetheless share a basic premise: good literature,
immanent criticism (whether or not _Huckleberry Finn_ qualifies),
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
power to disrupt civic order and recall the disreputable vigilante customs
that had given anti-abolitionism a bad name.15
Guarding against public disorder, Wise also hoped to deny Brown access to the
press and, through the press, the Northern public. Reversing a lax policy that
had allowed Brown�s words and deeds to flow freely to the Northern press, Wise
tried to make sure that Northern newspapers would not convey Brown�s heroism
in death. It was not only the spectacle of Brown�s execution Wise hoped to
suppress, but also the power of his public speech. Although Wise claimed he
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
workmen of the "detestable Custom" of drinking beer all day long
that they "might be strong to labour" (A, 36). Franklin's temperate
and self-regulating "Water-American" registers on the level of the
body the increasing conflict between the American colonies and the
British empire. Reversing the image of the American colonies as the
receptacle for the idle and criminal of England, Franklin presents
America as the future of the British empire in accord with the ideas
he sets forth in Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind
(1751). 10
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
beliefs. It would be incorrect to say that Coleridge judges the
Bible to be a repository of specific lessons for political or
religious conduct. Indeed, Coleridge criticizes all Biblical [End
Page 956] scholarship that might judge the authority of parts of the
Bible for the sake of "discountenancing" some "doctrine concerning
which dissension existed." Even if disbelief in a doctrine may
discredit the holders of that doctrine as Christians, the reader
must do everything to avoid the "fearful license" of "picking and
chusing . . . religion out of the Scriptures" (CW, 6:57). The
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
book's original leading title, as if to instruct the reader about the *[End
Page 854]* modes of "domestic and unrecorded despotism" referred to in the
preface, or is it a confession that will be complete only after the reader
has responded with his or her own judgment of Caleb's views? 12 Does it
belong to the mode of heroic truthtelling or of conversation and mutual
judgment?
The novel does not immediately make clear how it is to be read. The preface
suggests that it will merely convey the teachings of the treatise: "It is now
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
with Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith, to whose
influence Hirschman attributes the subsequent historical elision of
the "interests-versus-passions thesis." If this thesis is
"unfamiliar," suggests Hirschman, "it is so partly owing to its
having been superceded and obliterated by the epochal publication,
in 1776, of _The Wealth of Nations_." "Smith abandoned," he
continues, "the distinction between the interests and the passions
in making his case for the unfettered pursuit of private gain."
Moreover, "holding that ambition, the lust for power, and the desire
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
author. It is this same concern with the construction and maintenance
of an authoritative persona, according to the feminist narratological
analyses of Nancy K. Miller and Robyn Warhol, that leads Eliot (not
wholly consciously) to adopt the strategy of narratorial intervention
throughout her novels, and thus to bifurcate her texts into action
and justificatory commentary on that action. 7
However, as we have already seen, Eliot's attitude toward the
necessity of disguise, concealment, and secrecy is deeply conflicted.
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
sick, with a once vital population now "lonely and dwindling." The
void thus marks the cancerous center of the rural Irish nation, a
cancer that suggests at once Ireland's ancient health and its
current, terminal state of illness. Indeed, while the Tramp is
capable of negotiating the void by romanticizing the natural world,
the other males, particularly Micheal, embrace the domestic as a
means of maintaining, at the very least, the outward trappings of
rural stability and health. Thus, Micheal's proposal to Nora closes
with a poignant appeal: "and we won't have anything we'ld be afeard
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
But if Jack's luggage connections show that his roots lie in an
earlier Victorian culture, he is also close kin to the mid-Victorian
novel. This is a play in which books can be mistaken for people, and
the changeling left by Miss Prism in Jack's perambulator turns out
to be none other than "the manuscript of a three-volume novel of
more than usually revolting sentimentality" (I, 336). The pram, as
far as Wilde is concerned, of course, is the right place for this
species of fiction. That the sensation novel as much as, if not more
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
Offering a secular rendition of Christ�s burial and resurrection, "John
Brown�s Body" puts religion to work in the service of wartime nationalism.
Opening with the graphic "John Brown�s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,"
the song proceeds to describe the transformation of Brown�s corpse; he becomes
a foot soldier in "the army of the Lord," and finally a martyr. As Brown�s
body decays, his spirit is reborn and, in turn, donates new life to the army
and the nation it serves.
1. Some scholars claim that the John Brown of the song�s title was a sergeant
at Fort Warren, not the John Brown of Harpers Ferry fame. Nonetheless, as
soldiers began to take up this tune, they certainly had John Brown�s historic
martyrdom in mind. Although there are countless versions of the song, all of
them begin "John Brown�s body lies a-mouldering in the grave / His soul is
marching on," and include the verse "He�s gone to be a soldier in the army of
the Lord, / His soul is marching on." On the genesis and development of "John
Brown�s Body," see Browne 181-99 and Boyd Stutler�s "John Brown�s Body"
(1958).
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
"outward forms," Sterne's sense of creation is somewhat different.
11 His focus is on setting up circuits of exchange between inner and
outer stimuli that work to erode the wall between inner and outer,
as well as between self and other, and even between finding and
creating. These are the mouldering walls Romanticism works to
re-erect in support of a more autonomous self.
Perhaps most importantly, the point of communing with nature for
Sterne is not to pacify oneself in solitude, but to excite oneself
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
to be aggressively taught and actively learned, through the procedures
developed in her educational and publishing schemes, and then relentlessly
thematized in her fiction. Again, her willingness to innovate in order to
preserve, and educate in order to subordinate, assisted a work like _Village
Politics_ from sedimenting as a reactionary canon. When it reappeared in 1819
as _The Village Disputants; or, A Conversation on the Present Times_, in an
edition priced at "2d. or 25 for 3s. 6d.," the text was revised to meet the
distinctive challenge of early nineteenth-century radical reform: a batch of
"fine new papers and tracts" replaced the work of Paine, footnotes indicated
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
crowded and touched by other people detectable in many novels
written in a century notable for the growth of its cities, an
aversion especially pronounced in Eliot, where all sorts of
characters shrink from those who press themselves on them, and where
with the sublimating resourcefulness of a full fledged phobia it
spills past its borders and becomes an allergy to all forms of
closeness.
But there is a brand of disengagement prized above all others in the
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
twentieth-century Irish nationalism--characterizations that set the
outmoded, idealistic, and puritanical nationalist against Synge the
modern, realistic, radical artist--hold some truth, but such
historiography tends to obfuscate important complications that
underpin both sides of the nationalism/Synge [End Page 1012]
dialectic. What Declan Kiberd claims about the Playboy rioters holds
equal validity for the Shadow's critics: "those who disrupted the
performance were no random collection of hotheads, but some of the
most sensitive and intellectual thinkers of the time, risking arrest
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
*[End Page 954]* Flanders says a single unadvised woman is like a
lost piece of gold or jewelry, and "if a man of virtue and upright
principles happens to find it, he will have it cried, and the owner
may come to hear of it again."15 In Wild's system of redemption, it
depends on the owner asking questions or refraining from asking
them, whether the thing will or will not be "hear[d] of." The reason
it needs to be heard of at all arises from its having been "spoken
with" (in the cant) by the thief. "Advertisements were daily cram'd
into the Publick News-Papers, calling loudly out for all sorts of
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
silenced. The poet expects the "pillory" for his "ditty," which will
be deemed a "libel" because "ev'ry word is true" (J, 1.4-8). The
satire represents the rich stealing from the poor in terms of taking
away bread (J, 1.40), of eating what the workers' produce (J,
1.111-12), and of feasting on "others' toil" (J, 2.44). Reinforcing
the alimentary symbolism are numerous images of genteel pleasures
and even gluttony: the clergyman Williams, "trembling for his
tithes," kisses his "buxom maid" and hunts after the mouth-watering
game birds (protected, of course, by the brutal Game Laws) (J,
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
_Civil Wars_ (1595-1609).87 Thomas Warton confirmed Cooper's
judgement that English poetry after Chaucer had "relaps[ed] into
barbarism."88 A prominent barbarian, in Joseph Ritson's opinion, was
that "voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk," Lydgate, who,
Chatterton imagined, avoided a flyting or "boutynge matche" with
Rowley when the pair of them exchanged mutually admiring verses
instead (_CW_ , 1:60, 62-63).89 Rowley's _Ælla_ (_CW_ ,
1:174-228) was designed to constitute proof "that the Monks . . .
were not such Blockheads, as generally thought and that good Poetry
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
creative enterprise. Paul Outka supports just such a complementary
relationship in his recent argument concerning Whitman's poetry and
journalism. Outka convincingly argues that Whitman did not view
"race as a _problem_ but as an _opportunity_ for daring intimacy,"
and that Whitman's "queering" or "initial 'Othering'" of African
American figures in his poetry of race sustains both the racism of
the journalism and the "unstable, live, queer, dangerous, desired"
fluidity and intimacy of the poetry.19 In other words, besides
Whitman's vastly *[End Page 930]* complicated perspectives on
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
approach truly reductionist in spirit when he exhorts us to find
"the genius and creative principle of each and all eras in [our] own
mind" (239, my emphasis) or when he suggests that the reason we like
to study the Greeks is that their culture, in representing the raw
and unreflecting exuberance of Western civilization in its infancy,
therefore represents a "Greek phase" which all of us pass through as
a stage in our intellectual development (247-49)? Notorious not just
for his contradictions but for his zeal in courting [End Page 995]
them, Emerson's reputation for rhetorical elusiveness has become so
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
Instead of evoking the pathetic singularity of her trials, music
establishes the wanderer's claim upon the generic category of
"gentlewoman." The revelation of this claim is "stupi[fying]"
precisely because music provides no interiorizing rationale for her
"apparel, poverty, and subjection." Rather than vindicating interior
fortitude, then, this scene vindicates the fortitude of rank, which,
almost of its own volition, pervades even the most inauspicious
ELH 66.1 (1999) 111-128
Seeing Romantically in Lamia
Paul Endo
---------------
away from gaps.
Foucault maintains that disciplinary seeing "must not be sought in
the primary existence of a central point," but Keats embodies this
point in Lamia. 42 What is lost by the attribution of "disparting"
to a single, central figure is, of course, the "other" of social
formation, all the variable and indeterminate forces that remain
opaque to consciousness even while shaping it. If we must see
romantically, if we cannot help but select and plot, we can at the
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
infernal setting. In one scene he appears as a "fantastic and
frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one,"
frenetically wheeling himself around his firelit room "with floating
hair, and arms furiously raised and lowered" "through the field of
red light." 73 Departing from the verisimilitudes of the sensation
novel to produce a more fantastic mode, Collins produces in Dexter
one of the most memorable figures of Victorian technological
nightmare. Dexter is animated by an almost superhuman energy, and
possessed of considerable creative powers, but he also represents
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
the "glances" of another, her haunting night and day by his "face
and presence," only sustains the seclusion it might be expected to
annul. Here the usual dream of romance in which familiar bonds are
abandoned for the ecstatic union of souls is halted at its midpoint:
dulling the sense of those bonds, it fails to form a new one.
Intoxicated as she is, the milkmaid could hardly be drunk enough to
imagine that the squire will raise her to his station, like that
girl in the fairytale, lifted from the drudgery of household, dairy,
or papermill by prince, officer, or gentleman. Drawn away from "this
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
. Repetitions create a _return_ in the text, a doubling back. We
cannot say whether this return is a return _to_ or a return _of_:
for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed.
Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend temporal
process, or rather, to subject it to an indeterminate shuttling or
oscillation that binds different moments together as a middle that
might turn forward or back. This inescapable middle is suggestive
of the demonic: repetition and return are perverse and difficult,
interrupting simple movement forward.12
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
Lucy and Eliza have enjoyed together, and it is celebrated here as
"a source of rational and refined amusement. Here the eye is
gratified, the imagination charmed, and the understanding improved"
(C, 113). This celebration, far from a random digression, suggests
an attempt by Foster to realign the novel with the work of the
museum. The word "novel" as it is used in the 1790s is shorthand for
"dangerous reading"; redefining the "novel" as "museum," the author
is set up as something like curator--like Bowen, featuring
"principal figures, large as life," "historical, theatrical, and
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
Gray's search for antiques to furnish Wharton's new home proved
fruitless: BLOCKQUOTE
This was the first mention of wallpaper in the correspondence, and
the image of a crass gentry chucking precious tapestries to make
room for the latest fad was hardly positive. Since the letter was
written at the beginning of Wharton's remodeling, it seems safe to
assume that wallpaper was not the first choice, but rather one made
necessary by the scarcity of true Gothic wall coverings. Gray did,
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
of the US novel within its hemispheric arena, he traced this oppositional
QUOTE exploring what he viewed as QUOTE (xviii).
In this spirit, a number of recent works have pointed to new possibilities
for enriching and historicizing the transnationalist studies currently
available in the Americanist field. Much of this work follows in the
footsteps of Paul Gilroy, who explores an intimate relation between slavery
and modernity by turning to the writings of several nineteenth-century
African-American intellectuals working within the transnational formation
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
religious iconoclast, the idolater is someone "who has 'forgotten'... his own
act of projection" of value onto the fetishized object, while the iconoclast
"sees himself at a historical distance from the idolater, working at a more
'advanced'... stage in human evolution, therefore in a position to provide
a... historicizing interpretation of myths taken literally by the idolater"
(197). Mitchell salvages iconoclasm as "an instrument of cultural criticism"
by setting it in dialectical relation with an imaginatively "sympathetic"
understanding of icons (_Iconology_ 204). This dialectical relation
characterizes particularly women's tourist writings; what Mitchell does not
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
food was served by people in ethnic dress (37).
12. In response to the narrator's neglect of the Indian relics, readers
have pointed out how the violence against Native Americans remains
suppressed in Jewett's fiction. The work of "historicizing Jewett,"
which qualified a feminist celebration of her, drew attention to her
complicity in the racist, nativist, exclusionist ideology of a
threatened New England genteel culture (see Howard, _New Essays_).
Jewett's treatment of the Indian relics, as I'm trying to focus it
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
allegory is said to be effected through the vehicle of time: "time," claims
Liu, "reified finally as an 'idea' and ideology," is made "necessary as the
obscure *[End Page 1040]* allegorization of narrative." 40 Thus "time" in
this way becomes for Liu the (negative) linchpin for his historicized and
historicizing account. In his "Before Time," the introduction to his book's
part 2, "Violence and Time: A Study in Poetic Emergence," he observes the
remarkable unanimity within the modern critique of Wordsworthian time,
footnoting what appears to be a representative sampling of figures and
summarizing their method--and the modern method generally--elsewhere: "The
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
grammar that proclaims the pile of newspapers "more big as he could
carry," is not, of course, the newsboy's. It speaks in the
third-person, and besides, among the first things that Child notices
about this newsboy is that he lacks "the sweet voice of childhood."
By interpolating such a "sweet voice" into her letter, by the
evident fondness with which she produces its little errors, Child
demonstrates how a cherished childhood should sound. [End Page 822]
One literary use of the newsboy is thus to define and value
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
Antiquarianism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1976), 122-24. In
Scotland, the Wade roads offered for the first time access by
carriage to the Highlands. The Wade roads, it is important to note,
were not built solely, nor even primarily, for commercial reasons,
but to facilitate the garrisoning of the Highlands in the wake of
the '45.
5. Robert Burns to John Murdoch, Lochlea, 15 January 1783, in The
Complete Letters of Robert Burns, ed. James A. Mackay (Ayrshire:
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
Morgan, for instance, troubles antiquarian nationalism and its construction
of a coherent national people by troubling racial certainties, persistently
drawing attention to genetic evidence of the waves of colonization to which
Ireland was subjected. O'Brien's aunts persistently locate their neighbors in
terms of which invasion planted their families in Ireland. Surveying their
guests at "Jug-Day," one of the sisters declares, "it's a rule in Bog Moy,
that the Milesians ever take the wall of the Strongbowians; and no disrespect
meant neither to the English by descent, nor to the thirteen tribes, no, nor
the half tribes; since all here, are gentry bred and born; and not a
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
personality. 42 The distinguishing property of personality was the
imagination, the faculty that both produces and interprets literature.
As evolutionists, literary scholars defined the imagination not as
some _sui generis_ phenomenon but as a principle of variation and
differentiation,analogous to idiom in language, inflecting the
materials treated in literature and prior forms of expression.Moulton
wrote that the imagination is neither mimetic of objects nor
self-engendering. It "select[s among] conditions of life"; "the
creative faculty is . . . a sort of lens, focusing human phenomena for
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 348-354
Melville the Poet: Response to William Spengemann
Elizabeth Renker
---------------
American Literary History) is right that Herman Melville's poems
have mostly languished since they were originally published between
1866 and 1891. But his argument that they are languishing now and
will continue to do so if scholars persist on their present
misguided path is based on what I will argue to be a
misinterpretation of the current reception scenario. I contend that
a sea change in the reception of the poems is incipient. In fact, I
believe that a revival of Melville's poetry will begin within the
next 10 years.
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
Philadelphian Mathew Carey, decried the strict categorization of the
poor and argued that, even if poverty were caused by intemperance
and vice, one should not QUOTE (iv-v). William Logan Fisher, author
of Pauperism and Crime (1831), proposed that pauperism owed more to
structural inequities within the economy than to misguided
benevolence. Others made an explicitly religious argument, claiming
that God was a more appropriate judge than human beings of who
merited assistance, while a small minority, despite the possibility
of deception, advocated a studied credulity. South Carolinian Henry
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
its own self-stated novelistic nemesis, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. For if
Grandfort's sociological preoccupation is with racial mixture, her literary
obsession is clearly with what one of her Creole characters sardonically
terms QUOTE which are spreading what Grandfort argues are seriously
misguided beliefs about the goodness of American slaves and the moral
imperatives of abolition (51). Thus, Julien arrives in the QUOTE believing
Uncle Tom's Cabin to be QUOTE (51), but through his experience with QUOTE is
soon converted to understand that those members of the race QUOTE : "[T]hey
are merely an error of nature!" he cries in his moment of illumination (69).
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
she responded with characteristic practicality. She wrote to Virginia Governor
Henry Wise to ask for permission to visit Brown in prison.9 In her letter, she
explains that while she does not approve of Brown�s raid, she and "thousands
of others" cannot help "feel[ing] a natural impulse of sympathy for the brave
and suffering man." However misguided his actions, Brown now needs "a mother
or sister to dress his wounds, and speak soothingly to him." Praising Wise as
a "man of chivalrous sentiments," she asks, "Will you allow me to perform that
mission of humanity?" (Letters 104).10
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
Such phantasms persisted because they "settled easily into a
structure of historical interpretation" (157).
Fifteen years later, Bailyn's student Wood gave this analysis deeper
foundations, reacting in part to the misguided pathologizing of the
Founders inspired by Hofstadter, in part to naive defenses of
conspiratorial thinking ("Conspiracy" 405-06). Where Bailyn situated
conspiratorial visions in North Atlantic political and religious
ideologies, Wood offered "a quite different, wider *[End Page 3]*
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
figures of fever victims function as a litmus test for characters, a means of
determining their observational or interpretive prowess. Furthermore,
decomposition serves as a natural punishment for those who fail the test.
Contagionists, in other words, become sources of contagion. The merchant
Thetford, _Arthur Mervyn_'s most chilling example of the misguided
contagionist, receives, for his inhumane behavior, an "adequate"
"retribution": "the death of his wife and child," then "the close of his own
existence" (374). Thetford's malignancy is rivaled in Brown's fiction only by
_Ormond_'s Whiston, who abandons his dying sister and spreads terror by
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
"To read Emerson we must rid ourselves of Emerson," McMillin
announces (3), much like Emerson had said that to be agood Christian
one must rid oneself of the historical Christ. In one respect or
another McMillin finds the entire body of Emerson studies--from
Moncure D. Conway to Stanley Cavell--misguided or worse, but his
particular b�te noire is "biographical or subject-centered
criticism," which, "in conquering the nature of atext, limits
textual movement, curtails interpretive vision, and impedes a
participatory, engaged reading--all in the name of the author and by
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
nineteenth century (most of them published in the _Boston Quarterly Review_
and _Brownson's Quarterly Review_), Young America metamorphoses from a
nationalistic politico-literary stance into aflexible weapon of religious
cultural critique. "Young America," rather than signifying political idealism
and literary innovation (however misguided that innovation might have
appeared to bitter skeptics like Melville), instead became an epithet
suggesting the naivet� and shallowness of American social mores and cultural
production that obstruct the development of American religion. In particular,
Brownson's polemic against Young America comes to indicate an array of
Brownson's polemic against Young America comes to indicate an array of
obstacles to the implementation of a distinctively new form of American
Catholicism: family disruption, resistance to authority of all kinds,
salaciousness in popular fiction, and so on. Above all, however, Brownson's
project of dismissing Young America as a misguided and immoral set of social
trends lays the blame for cultural problems in the nineteenth century
squarely upon the shoulders of women, especially on what he perceived as
their tendency to "feminize" (and thus to weaken and debase) American
literary practices and social habits that he saw as requiring the necessarily
By the waning years of his long reviewing career, though, and especially
after the Civil War, Brownson had essentially concluded that his early
optimism about a positive moral force that might be named "Young America" was
misguided. Having first embraced the idea that the US might fulfill what he
saw as the crowning religious achievements of Western civilization by
embracing Roman Catholicism, he soon became persuaded that it was
increasingly difficult to expect popular literature to have the kind of
wholesome effect he had once envisioned for it. Moreover--and here is the
conditioning the impulse toward false gods, he found culpable the drenchingly
femininized sentimentality of the nineteenth century. And finally he
concluded that the problem of feminine sentimentality grows directly out of
what, he complained, is a sexually *[End Page 460]* provocative and
culturally dangerous female nature. 15 In this way, the problems of misguided
idolatry (an error in Catholic piety) and feminized religion resolve into
roughly congruent problems, with both attributable to the presence and
influence of women in the religious sphere. Sentimentality, as Brownson
understood it, fosters a reshaped version of the provocative feminine in
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
over the influences of both foreign immigration and the _emigration_
of blacks abroad informs both _Up from Slavery_ and the Tuskegee
Institute's dedication to vocational training. For example,
Washington contrasts the local with the global explicitly in his
account of the misguided and impractical way in which blacks are
educated: "While they could locate the Desert of Sahara or the
capital of China on an _artificial_ globe, I found that the girls
could not locate the proper places for the knives and forks on an
_actual_ dinner-table, *[End Page 55]* or the places on which the
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
that the limits to the domain of the textual expert are by no means
fixed. The very fact that Dickens was wrong about the possibility of
spontaneous human combustion, in other words, need not and ought not
be taken to indicate that his intervention in this scientific debate
was inherently misguided, let alone as a sign of the futility of all
such interventions at all times. At the very least, the ale
controversy takes the bitter taste the spontaneous-combustion incide
has left in the mouths of many readers with an interest in defending
the authority of textual experts, and transforms it into something t
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
racialist anxieties of the day, see Jared Gardner, Master Plots:
Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998), chap. 3. Even in
Huntly Brown articulates ambivalence about the resolution he offers.
Indeed, we might register in Edgar Huntly's misguided hopes for the
deranged Irish immigrant Clithero (hopes maintained against all
evidence and the warnings of his father-figure, Sarsefield) the
author's own ambivalence about the "villain" he must exorcise from
his fictional landscape. For example, Paul Downes compellingly reads
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
of the "author's author," a moment that in turn triggers the
reader's emancipation ("and we then feel . . ."). This is why the
same reader, in throwing aside one kind of formalism, does so by
embracing another. If treating Shakespeare's verse as "a sort of
self-existent poetry" denotes a misguided impulse, born of fear and
idolatry, the corrective is to assign it to a "soul" superior in
knowledge and wiser in its works than any local manifestation of its
energies could suggest. A mistake in one context, the erasure of
agency provides its own solution in another.
Shakespeare or ourselves, is a far cry from Nietzsche's slave
morality, with the weak reveling in the misfortunes of the strong.
In effect, Emerson takes the psychology of resentment and transmutes
it into a rhetoric of effortful striving, redescribing the envy we
feel toward others as in fact a misguided cherishing of our own
powers.
26. Brown, 209; Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, 75. In the
passage cited Brown points to "Emerson's gaps and contradictions" as
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
has traditionally been the hallmark of aesthetic appreciation. But prejudice
enters in this instance, in hypothetical cases of the "noisy politician,"
"brawling social reformer, or poor narrow-minded priest," whenever one tries
to act on others' behalf out of an "emotional sympathy" which is always (for
Wilde) condescending, misguided, and ineffectual. More systematic efforts,
such as those measures of Gladstonian Liberalism which helped form the
bedrock of the modern welfare state, are less egotistical in their
conception, but still represent futile attempts to "stave off the coming
crisis, the coming revolution as my friends the Fabianists call it, by means
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
Here the speaker links not understanding his lyric with trying to understand
_him_, to capture him in a certain way. In lines like this, Whitman signals
through his speaker that the enterprise of looking for an actual person, the
_real_ Walt, to serve as identificatory model is misconceived. The speaker
figures this problematic kind of reading as deriving from misguided
epistemological and moral desire: BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
Not only is the assumption that, by reading, one can enter into reality
problematic, but the attempt to find an actual hero or liberator in the text,
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
directly confronts such questions: BLOCKQUOTE
Cowper here hints at the vanity inherent in assertions of
indifference and suggests that such self-congratulation may be
premature and misguided. In so doing, he suggests two crucial
problems with his well-cultivated apathy: it may be "not altogether
sincere," and he "may lose it just in the moment when [he] . . . may
happen most to want it." These doubts about the "since[rity]" and
utility of his indifference shadow virtually all of the letters in
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
fails its defenders' own test.
The anxiety and compensatory idealism I have been tracking express a
desire for subjectivity without disciplining, without
subjectivization. 100 Such idealism is misguided and unnecessary. Its
*[End Page 291]* initial assumption is that subjectivity is
compromised by the sheer fact that it arises through disciplining
structures. This premise is self-negating, of course. Only within
formative structures does the subject possess a frame of reference in
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
recall Tom White's fierce determination "to break through many old, but very
bad customs," and take seriously More's own reformist designs upon the
existing social order, there is a sense in which the "fantastical" author of
_Village Politics_ succeeds in reconstructing "yonder fine old castle" where
the misguided wife failed.
The crucial break at this point from vernacular dialogue to allegorical
narrative again suggests the limits of an understanding of More's work as a
variety of social realism: the object here, and in the Cheap Repository's
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
spiritual vision for the short-sighted eyes of skeptical empiricism.
Teufelsdr�ckh's misdirected question, "Where is the Godhead; our eyes never
saw him!," encapsulates for Carlyle the distressingly common error of seeking
evidence of spiritual existence with the bodily eye. 30 "Till the eye have
vision," the misguided Professor eventually learns, "the whole members are in
bonds" (_SR_, 146). With the re-opening of his inner eye, the Professor
"becomes a Seer" in what Carlyle suggests is the true and original meaning of
this word: "In a word, he has looked fixedly on Existence, till one after the
other, its earthly hulls and garnitures, have all melted away; and now to his
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
arguing for this fragment as a "point of departure" is problematic
because Whitman's depiction of the "black person's" passiveness runs
contrary to his other pre-Civil War poetic conceptions of black
Americans.22 The most compelling argument as to why this poem was
never written, or why it is at best a misguided departure point, is
that in this proposed poem Whitman has the passivity reversed.
This becomes more apparent if we consider an often quoted passage
from Whitman's early notebooks:
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
The tableau of the happy family upon which Enoch gazed through the
window, seemingly invulnerable in its generic fixity to the shocks of
emotional and economic dislocation, is paralleled by the concluding
tableau of Enoch's funeral procession, which takes death itself out of
the realm of the contingent by monumentalizing it. The material
prosperity that characterizes Philip and Annie's home and toward which
Enoch had directed all his energies and aspirations also assures that
Enoch's funeral will be among the "costlier" the little port had ever
seen (EA, 615). This notorious line, which has seemed to later
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
The story is remarkable in its bodily excess, its pairing of
appetite and excrement, and its lack of a religious perspective. As
Franklin reports it, this is a story about a man and a woman
possessed not by the devil but by the excesses of their own bodily
desire, as signified by the habit of dramdrinking. I drink therefore
I am. The emphasis on human rather than divine agency is underscored
by their punishment: "They were sentenced to be burnt in the Hand"
(M, 234). More "terrible and shocking" than this outward
"Punishment," however, is their inner recognition of their own
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
will succeed in these efforts, or be held accountable for them by
others, or suffer sanctions as a result of our actions, of course,
will not be determined solely by ourselves. This is the condition of
signification. We ignore, disavow, or deny this condition to the
degree that we imagine (or exhort others to act accordingly) that we
can know in advance how others will interpret our meanings and
thereby govern results, or that we can control the degree of
susceptibility to resignification (creating greater or lesser
availability to appropriation), or that we can exclude this
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
Although often at odds with the British Administration over land
sale policies and Maori relations, the New Zealand Company advocated
annexation and played an active role in bringing it about. 5 From
the beginning, the Company was an effective propagandist for
investors and immigrants, and it stepped up its propagandizing
efforts in the 1850s and 1860s, as labor shortages impeded the
colony's development. A wonderfully fertile and beautiful land, New
Zealand did not need to be greatly embellished in its descriptions
to British readers, but the myth of idyllic expansion necessarily
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
departs but not before De Quincey has given him three pieces of
opium, enough to fell "three dragoons and their horses," which he
swallows in a single gulp (_C_, 57). The host, afraid the man will
die poisoned by so large a dose, even more afraid to force an emetic
down his guest's uncomprehending throat, allows him to depart, but
remains anxious about his fate.
In lieu of conditional hospitality, the scene is concerned with the
absolute "_laws_ of hospitality" (_C_, 57). Instead of likeness and
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
been taken as an animate primer in Enlightenment domesticity. 1 This
is a demystificatory domesticity, we're told, in which Belinda is
said to lift the veil off a household of aristocratic mayhem,
revealing the tepid but reliable bedrock beneath. It seems hard to
argue otherwise--indeed, the second half of the novel famously tires
us with its plodding treatment of such reasonable topics as
pedagogy, decency, and moral consequence. But I will argue in what
follows that _Belinda_ in fact details a domesticity that is in
crucial ways aligned with mystification, and, if this is so, that
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
But an Ancient "Poetick Licence" Observable in Sophocles's Play
_Electra_ , Whose Hero Orestes is Killed by Being Thrown from His
Chariot at the Pythian Games First Held 600 Years after His Death.65
as Evidence That Shakespeare Knowingly Took Liberties with
Chronology for Dramatic Effects, Theobald Recalls That Moment in
_King Lear_ (3.2.93) When the Fool Remarks That Merlin Will
Eventually Make the Prophecy He Himself is about to Utter, "_for I
Do Live_ before His Time."66 "History and _Fact_ in Particular
Cases," Rymer Asserts in His 1692 Hatchet Job on _Othello_ , "Are No
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
significant that General Miles, who supposedly had helped capture
Geronimo, figures in Twain's apparently absurdist bit about selling
the dog. Twain recognizes that the romantic pirate of child's play,
the Indian fighter, and the historical slaver are one. For Twain,
piracy, land theft, slavetrading, "selling what does not belong to
you," offers not just a precondition of modernity, but also a
precondition of comic imagination and, implicitly, of knowledge. His
ethnobiography betrays a peculiarly contemporary recognition of the
United States as situated in a rich and perilous transnational
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
alterity created by chronological difference and make himself
coetaneous with John Lydgate. In order to achieve this effect,
Chatterton antedated his life as a posthumous son (born
three-and-a-half months after the death of his father) by
retrojecting himself into the fifteenth century. He then wrote the
poems which, fathered by Geoffrey Chaucer, were designed to preexist
his own nativity. In this myth of filiation, Chatterton's affinities
are with Spenser, who (Dryden thought) "insinuates" in _The Faerie
Queene_ "that he was begotten by [Chaucer] two hundred years after
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
surreptitiously inserts an American logic of mass production into a
French logic of artistic production through exploiting one crucial
element they share: the value of the name. The cipher--in art the
signature on the artwork; in business the brand name on the
product--insures value and authenticity in both fields. And, almost
astonishingly, the only thing necessary to leap from one field to
another is to change names. Smith�s plan is a success; he and his
"dead" friend become rich for life. "Is He Living or Is He Dead"
economically illustrates what Bourdieu calls "the miracle of the
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
his fellows as nearly immobilized by the tragedy of war, Lincoln grants
tremendous agency to those buried at Gettysburg. Having declared his inability
to commemorate the dead adequately, Lincoln asks those gathered at Gettysburg
to take "from these honored dead . . . increased devotion." This devotion,
directed to the Union cause, insures that the nation will have "a new birth of
freedom" (405). In the absence of any individualizing features, the Gettysburg
dead exert great influence. As in "John Brown�s Body," which enacts the power
of the martyred body to inspire a living army, these unidentified corpses
nourish the will of the community. Thus the war�s most difficult practical
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
The Woman in White utilizes (perhaps even introduces) a temporal
trope that will later become a staple of the suspense plot: what we
might call the dramatic time limit or deadline. In the form that
this takes in Collins's tale, Walter Hartright insures himself
against foul play when he goes to visit Count Fosco by leaving a
letter with his friend Pesca, to be opened if Hartight has not
returned by nine o'clock the next morning. The sealed letter will
reveal Fosco's identity, entraining his certain death at the hands
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
mutually reflect one another." 48 This effect is repeated and
enhanced even in the internal discourses of these characters. Our
Mutual Friend, riskily but convincingly, has John Harmon narrate his
own story in nearly a whole chapter of interior monologue. His
narration constitutes a resurfacing of his identity, a deliberate
recreation of his harrowing experience in the river which functions
as a recreation of himself in the text. "'[P]erhaps most men . . .
evade thinking their way through their great perplexity. I will try
to pin myself to mine. Don't evade it, John Harmon [using his real
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
police of literature. They do not make laws--they interpret and try
to enforce them.--Edinburgh Review." 10 Thus, even as Lewes ignores
the allegorization of Krook's death, he nonetheless seizes upon the
very issue the allegory itself addresses: authority and its abuse.
Indeed, by accusing Dickens of "overstepping the limits of Fiction"
and thereby "giving currency to a vulgar error," Lewes identifies
Dickens himself as an example of what Krook has been made to
represent: an authority making false pretences. 11 Lewes's
intervention places Dickens--who has already described himself as
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
counter-proposition, he claims first not to "desire to change anything in
England except the weather," and then more seriously that it is to science
that we should look to restrain the present "over-expenditure" of emotion and
sympathy (36-37). All of this looks like an evasive forestalling of
discussion, especially when a Duchess compliments Wotton for absolving her
guilt at taking "no interest at all in the East End" (37), but Wilde surely
had a more serious point in mind when he added this scene for the first
English edition: it is, I think, that there is no interest that she can take
which could short-circuit self-interest, and nothing to propose (taking
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 248-275
Walt Whitman and the Question of Copyright
Martin T. Buinicki
---------------
the text and the authentication of his signature is made explicit in
Whitman's epigraphic introduction to the 1889 printing of _Leaves of
Grass._ He writes, "Doubtless, anyhow, the volume is more A PERSON
than a book. And for testimony to all, (and good measure,) I here
with pen and ink append my name: [Whitman's signature]" (qtd. in
Myerson 131). Whitman's signature is the guarantee of, a "testimony"
to, the embodiment that he proclaims. A similar epigraph appears at
the front of the 1876 edition: "Ever with pleas'd smile I may keep
on, / Ever and ever yet the verses owning--as, first, I here and
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
religious views of the editor: "'I must know your character. By that
knowledge, I shall regulate myself with more certainty than by any
anonymous declaration you may think proper to make.'" 17
But Brown pointedly refuses to append his name to this declaration
of principles. Instead he expresses regret that his name and his
earlier productions might have the effect of giving precisely the
"character" the imagined reader is mistakenly looking for. In the
context of this editorial manifesto, his previous works, which had
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
in the collective imagination as the forceps had 50 to 100 years
earlier. See Moscucci, 111-27. Interestingly, the association of male
obstetric practice and gender dysphoria also continues: much of the
public debate of the middle decades of the nineteenth century focuses
on the potential "unsexing" of women who undergo (by modern
standards, largely unnecessary) ovariotomy procedures. See Moscucci,
134-64. Mary Poovey also sees a continuation of the rhetoric of the
man-midwifery debate in the nineteenth-century controversy over
anesthesia in childbirth. See _Uneven Developments: The Ideological
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
"'hideous spectacle'" of Lady Delacour's breast and her "death-like
countenance" are not, after all, signs of insidious disease. Wit
thus begins the novel as a ruse or mask *[End Page 581]* of the
gothic, but a ruse that is deliberately flimsy. For
_Belinda_'sbanishing of Lady Delacour's wit takes place
simultaneously with the novel's demonstration of wit's
impotence--the needlessness, that is, of banishing wit in the first
place. In this way, wit's masking of Lady Delacour's gothic
interiority is itself shown to be a hoodwinking: there was no gothic
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
De Forest uses the nuptial impediment of fraud to cast Virginia's submission
as an assertion of agency. If her destitution coerces her consent, her
subsequent duplicity recovers something of her lost agency. Her plan to
vitiate the terms of Mather's will isnothing short of fraud: the other
"voidable" impediment. When she suggests that the extent of the marriage will
be to "meet, marry, and separate" (100), her scandalized aunt asks, "will you
tell him so before you marry?" Virginia replies, "after the wedding." That
she agrees to marry for money while secretly conspiring to live as a _femme
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
for its illusoriness, or as he calls it, "deceitfulness," his analysis
brings out not the power of the illusion generated by the image, but
its weakness.
Burke addresses the question of the beautiful only to vitiate it. Or
put another way, the beautiful functions only to aid and abet the
definition of the sublime through the work of contrast. Beauty is
internal to Burke's discourse as the negation that determines the
identity and integrity of the sublime. Where the sublime is rugged,
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
scarred the landscape, and to have been brought under an almost
diagrammatic narrative control. Like Poe's descriptive
fastidiousness, this obsessively sequential mode provides for a kind
of boasting as well. For when Poe levels the gaze of his acutely
temporalizing narrative style at the world, what he tends to see are
not objects or even events but _processes_, whose minute increments,
because they can be separated out each from each, are therefore
infinitely susceptible to obsessive ordering and painstaking
sequential arrangement: in short, to narrative. Among the principal
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
With dreadful faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.
—John Milton, _Paradise Lost_
"Molly!" said he, "I did not think all this would happen." He
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
The willingness of the Cheap Repository to measure its success in the
proliferation of millions of printed tracts invites a more pointed
interrogation of the whole tract system. Who or what ensured the value of all
of this printed material? And particularly for elites who were enjoined to
participate as subscribers and distributors, and who therefore lent their
credit to a network of effects they could not possibly witness, where was the
guarantee that any of this reading material did any good in the world? In an
era in which the threat of a French invasion had compelled Britain after 1797
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
finely graded deferrals of internal and external particularity,
using up all of the wanderer in the process, in what can she subsist
but the narratively tedious structure of redundant discovery? For
McKeon, the early novelistic trope of lost parentage is resolved in
the resuturing of interior and exterior, of internal worth and the
proper name; The Wanderer, because it imagines the persistence of
worth as anonymous practice, would seem to require no resolution at
all.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
to its own defense. In the midst of one invasion scare Scott dashed
off a letter in which he noted that nothing stood in the way of
Napoleon, should he land in Scotland, but Scottish volunteers. The
tone of his letter is not at all fearful, it is jubilant. 37 Scott's
joy in his soldiering, an enthusiasm that struck some of his friends
as ridiculous, marks his sense that he and his fellow volunteers
were not just offering their services for the defense of Britain,
but were seizing the opportunity to reassert Scottish nationhood.
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
tithes," kisses his "buxom maid" and hunts after the mouth-watering
game birds (protected, of course, by the brutal Game Laws) (J,
2.12-24). The "loaves and fishes" for the Oakham clergy are entirely
secular and have nothing to do with the Gospel (J, 2.36). The poor
endure their oppression because of ideological brainwashing, thanks
to the clergy and others who generate and reproduce systematic
illusions about the society. "'As all divines agree, / The Swinish
Multitude must crouch / Before the pow'rs that be'" (J, 2.39-40).
The combined efforts of church and state must "awe" the world in
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
of course Burke's Whiggish line in his Reflections. Radicals
retaliated by editing out the positive qualities of the Goth,
stigmatizing Burke as a defender of all the negative ones. Hence
Christie's representation of Burke as a master rhetorician
prostituting his gifts in the service of a regressive, feudal,
Gothic idolatry. For Christie, Burke transmogrifies the past into
ancestral fetish.
Christie's rhetoric uncannily anticipates this seminal passage from
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
woman but a man, and moreover, a man who is black. When the "other" in
question darkens and switches gender, the "or" rhythmically drawn from
Lenore's name (as "Lenore-or?") suggests that the event of her death
operates in the poem as a first order of reference, containing and
encrypting quite another referent.
Let us suppose that what lies buried in the poem's narrator is not a dead
mistress whom he sustains, but a dead slave whom he cannot let die. At once
I have both a formal and a historical problem which may yet prove to be part
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
experience of history, and his temporally-influenced lyric poetry. If history
is "originally and deeply," "quintessentially" narrative (Liu, 50), and
narrative is the "all-informing process," the "central function or instance
of the human mind" (Jameson, 13), then--by this account--Wordsworth's poetry
necessarily repudiates both by ideologizing history and narrative into the
lyricized forms of time and allegory, which become in his analysis the hybrid
"allegorization of narrative" (Liu, 51).
This line of reasoning enables Liu to sublimate figure to reference: "The
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
uncomfortable self-consciousness was his daily practical experience
of Original Sin. It is possible that Thoreau did briefly and
figuratively stand "in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch"
(_Walden_ 202), but the significance of such putative mystical
experience, which left no sanctifying legacy of self-transformation,
was in the position it assumed within a larger monomyth--involving
an impulse to get _back_ somewhere or push *[End Page 588]*
_forward_ somewhere--that governed Thoreau's sense of location in
the world through most of his career.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
373.
9. Coleridge criticism, like his writing, is vast and various. As
one might expect, it falls into the two major categories of the
sanctifying and the demonizing. Anyone interested in coming to terms
with Coleridge in all his complexity should begin with what remains
the best introduction to his thinking, Owen Barfield's What
Coleridge Thought (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1971). A good
biography is indispensable, too, such as Walter Jackson Bate's
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
_Truth_ in March 1893, after Crane answered an ad in the _Herald_,
the paper that had just fired him as a correspondent, and took a job
as a clerk in "a gentleman's furnishing shop on Bleeker Street"
(Stallman 79). The story concerns a "lonely clerk with a blond
mustache and a red necktie" (33) who languishes in a "little gents'
furnishing store," covertly reading "a French novel" in a kind of
mimicked bohemianism (34). In his furtive perusal of this story of
inadvertently revealed ankles, "warm blush[es]," and "wet eyes"
(36), the clerk is interrupted by a succession of customers from
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
chase after the marriage plot between Belinda Portman and her
suitor, Clarence Hervey. Their ultimate union, though, is a foregone
conclusion to any reader familiar with the genre. Secondary in
importance, perhaps, but entirely more compelling, is the chronicle
of Belinda's mentor--the dissipated Lady Delacour--who languishes
mysteriously and, we're told, will meet an early death unless she is
exorcised of witty debauchery. The seductive reformation of a rake
is not unique to _Belinda_; late-century sentimental novels
frequently maintain a subordinate story line in which notorious
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
disparity in attribution points to Brace's shifting sense of which
kind of source gives more authority to his account: the prestige of
newspaper coverage or the immediacy and authenticity of a diary. In
all events, these multiple publications make it evident that Brace
recognizes this scene as peculiarly useful advertizing for the
Lodging House. So it is remarkable how much of the newsboy's ironic
relations to the charity offered by Brace and the Children's Aid
Society remains legible through all of these beneficent
publications:
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
constructed as a species of gay confessional. 2 These energetic and
politically passionate readings unfortunately often extend the old enterprise
by which empirically oriented critics have traditionally tried to sound the
truth of Whitman's sexuality through literary interpretation, sometimes with
the seeming (and sometimes explicit) purpose of heterosexualizing or
de-eroticizing it. 3 Gay identitarian readings of Whitman's verse typically
do one of two things. They either treat _Leaves of Grass_ as a repository of
data to be read back into the biography as a way to compensate for the
maddening lack of reliable evidence of the author's actual activities; or,
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
the best and that writers who cut themselves off from biography,
either by _a priori_ conviction (McMillin) or tactical decision
(Tauber), not only diminish their work but also compromise it for
readers who know the author well and are able to gauge what the
argument has omitted, distorted, wrenched from context, or otherwise
misconstrued. One needn't be a biographer or write biographically to
have a biographically informed sense of the proportions and
probabilities that can restrain the more egregious violations of
"use." This doesn't mean that biographical critics get things right;
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
epigram is born out of despair: despair of the present (not the past)
and the desire to destroy it. As Basil counters Lord Henry Wotton, "You
cut life to pieces with your epigrams" (D, 126). The epigram functions
to tear things out of context while simultaneously maintaining the very
concept wrenched out of place in an altered state. In The Picture of
Dorian Gray, strewn with countless examples of such epigrammatic wit,
Dorian proclaims, "I don't think I am likely to marry, Henry. I am too
much in love" (D, 71). Here the concept of love is sustained (Wilde and
Dorian indeed like it), but is critiqued in its social expression in
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
focuses on a band of QUOTE (284). As their leader, the socialist
mechanic-hero Arthur Dermoyne, gazes on the moving caravan, he sees
his followers as QUOTE (284). For just a moment, the eastern US
class divisions that Lippard foregrounds in his
mysteries-of-the-city novels promise to recede as his sensational
story moves [End Page 1] westward. That is to say, when in 1852
Lippard finally finished the novel that he had begun in 1848, the
year that the US-Mexican War officially ended, he tried to resolve
the violent, tangled urban gothic plots of The Empire City, or, New
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
Lincoln�s attitudes toward the political uses of violence. See Castronovo
1-10; Sundquist 4-6; and Forgie 55-87.
21. Examining the work of historian James McPherson and filmmaker Ken Burns,
Edward Ayers notes that the struggle and uncertainty of war recede as
soldiers appear to "kill each other for the common purpose of discovering the
depth and the nature of their nationalism" (149). These narratives, and
others like them, lend support to the notion that wars are "engines of
beneficial social change" and that the Civil War was "good for the country in
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
seen from afar and mysterious "fog-shaped men" who flit away so that
the crew "never could get near them" (25). Moreover, the motif of
distance paradoxically links these mysterious northern regions with
the seemingly more familiar regional town. For Dunnet Landing itself
most impresses the narrator with its tendency to recede from view:
"The little town...stood high above the flat sea for a few minutes
then it sank back into the uniformity of the coast.... [W]hen I
looked back again, the islands and the headland had run together and
Dunnet Landing and all its coasts were lost to sight"
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
"kill-time," as Coleridge stigmatized it: "as to the devotees of the
circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or
rather kill-time, with the name of reading" (B, 1:48n). It is not
surprising, in other words, that poetry became "literature" and was
sorely tempted to recede, gloriously if self-defensively, into
obscurity and difficulty. Recently, Harold Bloom reinscribed the
choices precisely as Coleridge and Wordsworth conceived of them:
"Contra certain Parisians, the text is there to give not pleasure
but the high unpleasure or more difficult pleasure that a lesser
ELH 66.1 (1999) 87-110
"Monumental Inscriptions": Language, Rights, the Nation in Coleridge and Horne Tooke
Andrew R. Cooper
---------------
Johnson. Horne Tooke writes, "seek no further for intelligence in that
quarter; where nothing but fraud, and cant, and folly is to be found -
misleading, mischievous folly; because it has a sham appearance of labour,
learning and piety" (D, 303-4). This indicates little change in his
theoretical perspective. Second, after revoking the accepted thinking on
language he goes on to employ the methodology of volume one that established
the radical political credentials of his work on language. In direct response
to Burdett's claim that "RIGHT itself is an abstract [End Page 99] idea" (D,
303), Horne Tooke insists that the true meaning of the word can be discovered
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
temporary agency. "Laughter is a free instrument in their hands,"
Mikhail Bakhtin declared famously about medieval peasants, and for
the sake of his plot Horsmanden will let the sound reverberate. The
narrative's opening requires the sensation of three slaves dreaming
of burning the city and then reveling in it, a folkloric image bent
on massacring the city's white people.
2. War and Conspiracy: Patriotism
---------------------------------
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
essays urge us to treat our accomplishments as the occasion for
further striving; these, too, serve us best by teaching us to
despise all that we have done. This sense of despising, whether of
Shakespeare or ourselves, is a far cry from Nietzsche's slave
morality, with the weak reveling in the misfortunes of the strong.
In effect, Emerson takes the psychology of resentment and transmutes
it into a rhetoric of effortful striving, redescribing the envy we
feel toward others as in fact a misguided cherishing of our own
powers.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
Flanagan suggests that such rifts in the novel arise from the incompatibility
of "heroism" and "the actualities of Irish life," but the hero's visceral
loathing suggests that there is more to it. 37 O'Brien's disgust goes beyond
the exoticism which J. Th. Leerssen finds in Morgan's work by abjecting the
past and those who have failed to escape it. 38 On his way to his nomination
to the United Irishmen, O'Brien has to pass through the poorer part of Dublin
where the society holds its meetings: "More than once, as he applied his
musked handkerchief to his nose, to cover the noxious exhalations of new-born
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
Perhaps the most ironic episode in Cowper's quest for the
perfectible text occurred after his death in 1800, when Robert
Southey issued his landmark edition of Cowper's works in 1837.
Cowper had spent the last decade of his life buttressing the
revision of the Homer translation against anticipated and actual
complaints. Yet when Southey published _The Life and Works of
William Cowper_, containing all the poems, correspondence, and
translations, in addition to a short biography, he chose to include
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
20. In the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously
regrets that his public has had its senses dulled by modernization:
"a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with
a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and
unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of
almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the
great national events which are daily taking place, and the
increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of
their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident,
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
it is not my argument here. Because my concern is with the
bachelor's relation to reproductive time as it discloses stresses in
heteronormative ideology, it is important to note that this problem
is independent of the association of bachelors with homosociality,
or the emergence of a stereotype of the bachelor that could presage
the personal deviance of the invert. Bachelorhood is a category that
only makes sense against a narrative background of life
expectations, and it is this background, rather than categorical
stigma, that seems most compelling in the case of Irving, though of
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
Mervyn would triumph over the "thousand dangers to [his] virtue" (530) 14 ;
the guessing game I have argued is equally crucial to the novel's plot (Where
did this fever come from? How are we to respond?) centers on ways in which
the epidemic pretext for Brown's American Gothic threatened to undermine the
body politic by fragmenting scientific observers and the "public mind" more
generally. In _Arthur Mervyn,_ which can be read as a medical repository in
its own right, and _for_ Arthur Mervyn (the eponymous character), Brown
proposes a solution to this cultural dilemma by teaching his hero--and his
audience, who will likely face the fever personally as it continues to return
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
Dickens's use of phrases from proverbs ("The Cup and the Lip,"
"Birds of a Feather") for volume titles in the _Our Mutual Friend_
exploits both of these operations. While the proverb has a
relatively stable meaning, organizing a host of particulars as
examples of its application, it is also true that the fragmenting of
the proverbs and the specific particulars associated with them in
each volume provide opportunities for readers to attribute new
significances to the proverb itself, in effect destabilizing its
meaning as a function of the social nature of signification. Dickens
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
of soda-water, as though he was wringing the neck of some unlucky
creature and pouring its blood down his throat" (267; 2.4).
Sophronia can't keep up with Alfred, morally speaking. In the
friction of partnership, Sophronia's self-knowledge begins to form.
It is through such events, in this case an event pivoting on body
language, that Dickens constructs the lattice-work of social
experience in the life-world.
Other major instances of partnership in Our Mutual Friend include
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
_Rural Architecture in the Gothick Taste_ (1752), instead of
Wenceslaus Hollar's precise engravings of London landmarks, made it
clear that the manufacturers' goal was ease of production rather
than accuracy of design. For Gray, preparing the Gothic for sale
inevitably cheapened the style, as the slighting reference to
"Halfpenny" implied. The letter registers the disappointment of a
fan who has found the object of his enthusiasm stultified by the
marketing process.
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
It would have appeared in the same form in which it is now offered to the
Public, under the direction of its proper Editor, the giver of the Prize:
but his privilege has, with pride as well as pleasure, been yielded to a
Lady of the Author's own Country, who solicited permission to avail herself
of this opportunity of honouring and further remunerating the genius of the
Poet; and, at the same time, expressing her admiration of the theme in which
she has triumphed.
(_W_, front matter)
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
but to enter into "interanimating relationships with new contexts"
as part of his sudden experience of "ideological becoming." His
testing of internally persuasive discourses is apparent immediately
in the way his "rhinoceros build" is set off by "bright, eager,
childishly-inquiring eyes" (45; 1.5). When he strikes his bargain
with Wegg, his delight in dialogic interanimation is palpable.
"'Print is now opening ahead of me. This night, a literary man--with
a wooden leg . . . will begin to lead me a new life!'" (53; 1.5).
Boffin, with all the mixed motives of the nineteenth-century English
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
necessitated first ascertaining where and how money would do the
most good. As she noted, "[Scripture] cannot literally mean that we
should _give_ to all, as then we should soon have nothing left to
give: but it seems to intimate the habitual attention, the duty of
inquiring out all cases of distress, in order to judge which are fit
to be relieved" (_S_, 2:61). While one might quibble over whether
Scripture did indeed require that we "_give_ to all," More was quite
certain that "habitual attention" and inquiry were more significant
and useful—not to say far more plentiful—than money.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
as a political act of subjective self-empowerment that will have
consequences for both his poetic project and the future of the
nation.
So Whitman repeats this textual tonguing in various forms throughout
the poetry, but his embrace of the reader is nowhere more explicit
than in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."39 Though scholars tend to address
"Brooklyn Ferry" primarily in terms of Whitman's active and
aggressive poetic persona, the value of the poem actually depends
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 659-684
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
Philip Gould
---------------
[Access article in PDF]
Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist:
Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic
==============================================================================
Philip Gould
------------
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
Angert, Eugene H. "Is Mark Twain Dead?" North American Review 190
(1909): 319-29.
Atwan, Robert. "The Territory Behind: Mark Twain and His
Autobiographies." Located Lives: Place and Idea in Southern
Autobiography. Ed. J. Bill Berry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990.
39-51.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book."
_Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism_ 17.2 (1987): 65-81.
Sterling, Dorothy. _Black Foremothers: Three Lives._ Old Westbury: Feminist
Press, 1979.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Dwight Lowell Dumond. _Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or,
Life among the Lowly._ 1st Collier Books ed. New York: Collier, 1962.
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
Catholic revivalism.
19. For extended considerations of Roman Catholicism's influence on
twentieth-century art and culture, see Paul Giles, _American Catholic Arts
and Fictions_ (1992) and Thomas J. Ferraro, ed., _Catholic Lives/Contemporary
America_ (1997).
Works Cited
===========
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
Pizer, Donald. _Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century
American Literature_. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP/Feffer &
Simons, 1966.
Riis, Jacob. _How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements
of New York_. 1890. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957.
Sante, Luc. _Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York_. London:
Granta, 1998.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1990), esp. chap. 1, "Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and
Literature." For a trenchant critique of the deployment of literary critical
methods by these and other philosophers, see S. L. Goldberg, Agents and
Lives: Moral Thinking in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993),
chap. 8, "Afterword: Some limits of philosophy?" For an account of the uses
of narrative in legal reasoning, see Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1995); and, for a tellingly skeptical view, Daniel A. Farber
and Suzanna Sherry, "Telling Stories Out of School: An Essay on Legal
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
43. Byron, 111.
44. Byron, 109.
45. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, 2 vols. (London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1906), 2:464.
46. See William St. Clair, "The Impact of Byron's Writings: An
Evaluative Approach," in Byron: Augustan and Romantic, ed. Andrew
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
child-rearing practices made in the consolidation of middle-class
values (Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New
York, 1790-1865 [New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981]). Also see
Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two
Lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987), for an account of
how paying attention to class alters the psychoanalytic norms of ego
formation in children.
2. Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
agreeing with Shapiro about the ubiquity of selfishness in Bront�'s
novel, my essay claims that selfishness conceptually shatters all
elements and characters in the novel and in this respect is Bront�'s
means of engaging with anticommunitarian impulses in Victorian
society. Shapiro, "Public Themes and Private Lives: Social Criticism
in _Shirley,_" in _Critical Essays on Charlotte Bront�,_ ed. Barbara
Timm Gates (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 224.
13. Charlotte Bront�, preface to _Jane Eyre,_ 6-7. In this preface,
society), are, in my opinion, indispensable to the wellbeing of
every community" (_Shirley,_ 365).
15. Charlotte Bront� to G. H. Lewes, January 1850, printed in _The
Bront�s: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence in Four
Volumes,_ ed. Thomas James Wise and J. Alexander Symington (1933;
reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 3:67.
16. Lewes, "Currer Bell's _Shirley,_" _Edinburgh Review_ 91 (January
18. Gordon, 180.
19. Charlotte Bront� to William Smith William (a reader at Smith,
Elder), 18 January 1849, in _The Bront�s: Their Lives, Friendships
and Correspondence,_ 2:301.
20. Gordon, 190.
35. Among the books for which Bront�expressed thanks to Williams on
19 March 1850 was Hazlitt's "Essays." On 25 October of that year,
she declared, "I liked Hazlitt's essays very much." See _The
Bront�s: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence,_ 3:188, 174.
36. William Hazlitt, _Characters of Shakespear's Plays_ (1817), in
_The Complete Works of William Hazlitt,_ ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols.
(London: Dent, 1931-1934), 4:216 ("the whole"; "This is"), 215 ("the
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
Optik_ (1855-1866). See Crary for a discussion of how physiological optics
gave rise to subjective theories of visual perception in the first half of
the nineteenth century.
14. Sir Walter Scott, "Mrs. Ann Radcliffe," in _The Lives of the Novelists_
(1821-1824; reprint, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1906), 328. Hereafter
abbreviated "AR" and cited parenthetically by page number.
15. Scott, "The Tapestried Chamber," _The Keepsake_ of 1829 facsimile
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
Bible for the sake of "discountenancing" some "doctrine concerning
which dissension existed." Even if disbelief in a doctrine may
discredit the holders of that doctrine as Christians, the reader
must do everything to avoid the "fearful license" of "picking and
chusing . . . religion out of the Scriptures" (CW, 6:57). The
licentiousness of license is not to be found in a lack of moral or
religious orientation but in the attempt to turn scripture into an
image of that orientation. The value of the Biblical text is that it
does not conform to the prejudices that individual readers may apply
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
eighteenth-century use of the term to mean "Germanic" (Gray listed
the Scandinavian ballads under the Commonplace Book heading
"Gothic") or simply "medieval." According to Roger Lonsdale, these
poems echo the originals at times, particularly in the use of
alliteration and kenning, but they also draw heavily on the language
of William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and Milton to create a
suitably eerie and lofty mood. Although the imitations would have
been impossible without the revival of scholarly interest in the
Middle Ages, it is significant that Gray depended on an ancient
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
most pugnacious of all the Leviathans, and proverbially the most
dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous greyheaded,
grizzled whales. . . . Like a mob of young collegians, [the young
males] are full of fight, fun and wickedness, tumbling round the
world at . . . a reckless, rollicking rate. . . . They soon
relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three fourths
grown, break up, and separately go about in quest of settlements,
that is, harems.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
version of the sublime does to psychoanalytic classification.
Furthermore, a certain structural affinity links the eighteenth- and
twentieth-century thinkers: Burke's decisive gesture in separating the
sublime from the beautiful is repeated in Deleuze's equally daring
uncoupling of masochism from sadism. These surgical operations at the
interior of bodies of thought that try to preserve the integrity and
even the identity of the concepts leave a wound in the history of
ideas that we might almost call achronic. With Burke's essay as a
pretext, then, we can venture further afield than the eighteenth
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
Kames: "Every Man in England seems to consider himself as a Piece of
a Sovereign over America; seems to jostle himself into the Throne
with the King, and talks of OUR subjects in the Colonies" (25
February 1767, in Papers, 14:65). When Lord Howe suggested the
possibility of pardoning the Americans for their offenses following
the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, Franklin responded:
"Directing Pardons to be offered to the Colonies, who are the very
Parties injured, expresses indeed that Opinion of our Ignorance,
Baseness, and Insensibility which your uninform'd and proud Nation
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
More complex are the many passages in which it is hard to decide which
side Arnold is on. When Arminius presses the letter-writer about the
education of aristocrats at Eton, is Arnold supporting or mocking the
Englishman's defense of "the grand, old, fortifying, classical
curriculum"? If "the most astonishing feats of mental gymnastics" at
Oxford are feats of not sleeping for four nights and consuming incredible
quantities of "wet towels, strong cigars, and brandy-and-water," then
Arminius would seem to be vindicated. Because the abuse of a classical
ELH 67.3 (2000) 801-818
Dangerous Acquaintances: The Correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke
Barbara Packer
---------------
many kinds of aid they gave one another helped sustain them through painful
experiences. Their letters to one another were momentary liberations from
drudgery and loneliness, reminders of intellectual companionship, and acts of
love. What the correspondents really wanted from one another was the
vivifying shock of intimacy that Clarke requested in one of his earliest
letters to Fuller: "Electrify my stupor with your generosity." 61
University of California, Los Angeles
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
"appropriator" who has come upon a tool and seen how he may begin to
employ it, returning to the text to explore what the thought may
yield but coming soon to expand it, revise it, dispute it, and
subsume it to my own thought. There is no reason why a biography
must be a presumptuous "pinning down of truth" (McMillin 124); it
may equally be an act of perception performed with self-awareness
through a classifying lens, inviting us to perform a subsequent act
*[End Page 579]* of triangulation--biographer, literary text,
ourself as reader--as we engage with its construction of its
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
example, with an essential Southern proslavery bigotry ("Antebellum"
42–62). Yet, as Terence Whalen has suggested in his
discussion of Poe's "average racism" (111–46), a fully
historicized understanding of Poe's work reveals the insufficiency
of contemporary political labels and the difficulty of pinning down
his beliefs about race—to say nothing of his shifting
opinions about class, gender, economics, region, or nation. As Joan
Dayan, Teresa Goddu, and others have suggested, the implications of
Poe's supposed Southern viewpoint demand more careful scrutiny. So
contradiction between liberty and slavery yet feels compelled to
expose its ironies. With its embedded ambiguities, the multilayered
satire (its second paragraph parodying "The Fall of the House of
Usher") resists simple paraphrase and exemplifies the difficulty of
pinning down Poe's politics as it reveals the complex interplay of
his regional and national sentiments.
3. Bodies of Evidence
---------------------
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
political audiences. Both Cruikshank and Shelley aligned themselves
with reform, but their relationships to the movement were not
straightforward. Cruikshank, in fact, produced cartoons for both the
reformist and loyalist causes; scholars have been unsuccessful in
pinning down his politics further than to say he was a moderate
concerned about the possible violence of radical reform.5 The year
culminated in his collaboration with William Hone on the radical
pamphlet _The Political House that Jack Built_, a poem indicting the
current government through the writing of the children's nursery
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
reasoning upon the ebbs and flows of our humours" (_SJ_, 5). This is
all the more reason, then, for finding the most effective ways
possible to stimulate those humors in ways that, if immediately (and
at least partly) self-indulgent, are also productive of some social
good. If this is true, then self-pleasuring seems to be key to this
dynamic of putting Sensibility in motion, and Sterne is proving the
lie of late eighteenth-century culture's insistence that *[End Page
829]* self-pleasure is a form of self-abuse, or that its exercise is
dangerously solitary, self-invested, and antisocial. It may even be
All goes well, if sleeplessly, until Yorick's discursive
"ejaculation"--a frustrated "O my God!"--leads to his breach of the
treaty. Not only is the reader led to imagine that this deliciously
tempting scenario has left the sleepless Yorick frustrated on
several levels--or, perhaps pleasuring himself in his own bed--but
it also initiates an interchange with the equally sleepless lady
beside him, who responds to his defense that "it was no more than an
ejaculation" with an equally insistent claim that it was "an entire
infraction of the treaty" (_SJ_, 124). Yorick's allegedly innocent
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
that it offers to the unscrupulously quick-witted or the automatically
defensive. When it comes to particular instances, however, we are likelier to
ask taxonomizing and instrumental questions--"What are the methodology and
the allegiances of this work?" "Where does it fit in?" "How can I use
it?"--than "What is it like to read this?" "What do I find," paraphrasing
John Holloway, "in the actual words, in the critic's own use of language?"
But these latter questions, whether asked of Newman or of the latest book
about him, are a necessary part of the total process of understanding,
response, and judgment. When we dismiss them as invitations to impressionism,
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
heroic closure, the end of the play demands that its contemporary audience
resist the sentimentalist pieties that are also integral to this
nineteenth-century text and instead grapple with the opposing voices of the
play that continue in their own moment to circulate the pr�jug� de couleur.
Insisting that the past is subject to a number of conflicting
interpretations, the play asks its audience, as Faubert himself puts it, to
QUOTE
For Faubert, this mode of reading took on strategically international
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
other characters, such as Jane, say about him. "He [De Monfort]
perpetrates the murder," the reviewer maintains, BLOCKQUOTE
It is worth remarking the extent to which the reviewer's comments
are themselves not without contradiction. Insisting, on the one
hand, that De Monfort is too allegorical in having no foil to his
vice, his most vociferous complaint is reserved, on the other, for
the charge that De Monfort is an inconsistent villain--his "black
and deadly" hatred is "almost instantly soothed and appeased" by the
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical; not
so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of
them toward a common end. . . . Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical,
abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite,
self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. . . . The novel, which is
a work of art, exists, not by virtue of its resemblances to life, which are
forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but by its
immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and significant, and is
both the method and the meaning of the work.40
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
narrative. Moreover, Harmon's key question is more important than
his immediate answer since the question is, crucially, at the heart
of the novel's whole dialogical exploration of the "living-dead"
(373; 2.13) who inhabit the world of Our Mutual Friend. Harmon's
soliloquizing performance is already a coming to life even if
Bella's rebuff temporarily checks the process. Jenny and Eugene form
a contrasting pair of other cases in point. Each appropriates a
literary genre--romance for Jenny, satire for Eugene--in order to
articulate a [End Page 789] buried self that cannot ultimately be
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
those wielding, or succumbing to, illegitimate power. The passage is
interesting additionally because it describes a method of execution
which is not the standard one for thievery--Mr. Raymond would simply
have been hanged at Tyburn--but invokes the punishment for treason
(drawing and quartering) as well as the well-known French
eighteenth-century spectacles of execution for regicide. 64 Raymond
visualizes himself in the position of a regicide at the same time
that he accuses Gines of possible treachery against himself who has
been the king of the gang; in a sympathetic reversal he therefore
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
Brace, 1926), 251. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and
abbreviated P.
26. Eliot contends that "When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its
work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's
experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or
reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other,
or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of
the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes" ("The Metaphysical
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
interpreted _Belinda_'sreformation of the rake as a straightforward
revision of traditional authority in which Belinda, with her rustic
manner and honest, rational feelings for books, exposes rank and
frippery as mere flourish. Such accounts envision the novel's
Enlightenment project gelling in Belinda's "interpretive process,"
which "penetrates the magic of appearances," we're told, "with a
rational display of causal relations." 4 By contrast, I will argue
that many of the domestic corrections that Belinda makes to Lady
Delacour are themselves corrected further by the novel. Aristocratic
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
telegraph, for annihilating space and time, the telegraph alone made
communication independent of embodied messengers. Because
electricity was understood as both a physical and spiritual force,
the telegraph was read both as separating thought from the body and
thus making the body archaic, and as rematerializing thought in the
form of electricity, thereby raising the possibility of a new kind
of body. Recovering how race appeared in descriptions of the
telegraph in literary texts, mass culture, and middle-brow
scientific discussions, I describe how the telegraph's technological
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
question, this technique seems to have met with unprecedented
success: James Creelman's account of the Atlanta Exposition Address
in the _New York World_ notes that "the multitude was in an uproar
of enthusiasm, handkerchiefs were waved, canes were flourished, hats
were tossed in the air....It was as if the orator had bewitched
them....Most of the Negroes in the audience were crying, perhaps
without knowing just why" (qtd. in Harlan and Smock 9–10).
Whether or not Washington himself cares for fiction, he is certainly
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
between his father's antiquarian nationalism and his own Paine- and
Locke-inspired nationalism. O'Brien's contempt recalls his father's even less
moderate feelings about his membership in the United Irishmen: the elder
O'Brien calls his only child "Rebel! Atheist!" (O, 343), "seduced" and
"bewitched" (O, 344), because he joined the republican society. The
generational rift in the novel marks the paradox noted by Anderson: the past
versus the future, the antiquarian versus the inaugural, and the ancient
rights of family versus the universal, inherent rights of the individual.
And, in keeping with the logic of paradox, there is no resolution for father
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
cooperation, subjects who try to preserve their private
meaning-universes can only withdraw or perpetually struggle for
domination, with violence a likely resort. If Pleasant's strategy of
disavowal makes it seem as though her dual positions of disembodied
intentionality and desired object will expand rather than expunge
her agency, we have only to keep before us the specter of Pleasant
the hypnotic carcass and Venus the zombie to be reminded of the
violence that lies hidden in performativity's Gothic fantasy of
political agency.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
this takes in Collins's tale, Walter Hartright insures himself
against foul play when he goes to visit Count Fosco by leaving a
letter with his friend Pesca, to be opened if Hartight has not
returned by nine o'clock the next morning. The sealed letter will
reveal Fosco's identity, entraining his certain death at the hands
of the "Brotherhood," the shadowy European secret society in the
novel. To extract a date from Fosco, one might say, Hartright uses a
time. Fosco's hand trembles as he asks how long he has "before the
clock strikes and the seal is broken" (W, 548); time itself rather
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
Rather than giving us Belinda as a mouthpiece of bourgeois ideology,
delivering her benefactress from the brink of voguish dissolution,
the novel concatenates bourgeois and aristocratic systems and
attaches them to a scene of female blundering. And yet readers have
interpreted _Belinda_'sreformation of the rake as a straightforward
revision of traditional authority in which Belinda, with her rustic
manner and honest, rational feelings for books, exposes rank and
frippery as mere flourish. Such accounts envision the novel's
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
dark, like a haggard head suspended in the air: so completely did
the force of his expression cancel his figure" (544; 3.10).
The actions of the three men intersect so significantly that it is
"impossible to determine [one] position without correlating it with
[the] other positions." In the corridor of voices no actions are
"indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they . . .
mutually reflect one another." 48 This effect is repeated and
enhanced even in the internal discourses of these characters. Our
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
Hauser-like, is full of things she does not quite understand. It is,
rather, a discontinuous series of images whose meaning escapes her:
as her memory is fragmentary, so is her identity. As it is on the
veracity of her story that Pierre has sacrificed all, its accuracy
is clearly of some moment: but by the end it even dawns upon Pierre
that her story's intertextual features, and its character as a
tissue of textual references, make it self-subverting. Her story
bears not the ring of truth, but the ring of other romances. Isabel
could be anybody. Pierre suspects that she is the victim of a false
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
are confirmed.
A moment "stretched with conflict" for an actress like this--"The
darting sense that he was measuring her and looking down on her as
an inferior . . . roused a tingling resentment which stretched the
moment with conflict" (_D_, 10)--is a breach that renders acute a
constant but usually less dramatic sense of the eyes trained upon
her: "Gwendolen with a passionate movement thrust . . . all into her
necessaire, pressed her handkerchief against her face, and after
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
eye.
Ahab's idyll, and his relentless pursuit of the whale, therefore
represent the strictest imaginable adherence to the organization of
gendered spheres of activity dictated by an industrializing economy,
which required strengthened opposition between an aggressive,
courageous, and active masculinity and a tender, nurturing, and
passive femininity—complementary gender dispositions
consonant with, respectively, the competitive and acquisitive arena
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
protagonist Iola grows up believing herself to be an entirely white French
Creole child, though in reality her mother was, like Cassy's and Armand
Aubigny's, her father's slave before marriage. Unlike the ambiguous
Franco-Africanist figures invented by authors from Stowe to Faulkner,
however, Harper's Iola, without capitulating to an ideology of racial
essence, embraces QUOTE upon the revelation of her ancestry and refuses to
marry or move further in the novel QUOTE (117). By the early twentieth
century, on the other hand, a number of writers were creating francophone or
French-identified protagonists who chose to live under precisely such a
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
So the novel shows wit as terrifying, and has Belinda and Lady
Delacour--though at odds in their opinions about wit--struggling
together with the perils of cleverness. Belinda is desperate to
extricate Lady Delacour from the mire, while the Lady veers between
capitulating to and railing against wit's charms. Their proximate
labors bring intimacy between them. Yet, in the novel's most
anticlimactic moment, when it is revealed that Lady Delacour was
never ill at all, this simultaneous engagement with wit is recoded
as simultaneous foolishness. Wit, that is, never had the power to
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
7. The converse of Burke's vision of the civilizing influence of
American whalers is best represented by Henry Cheever in his 1850
book _The Whale and His Captors_ (Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press,
1991); for Cheever, whaling proved morally debilitating because of
the brutalizing nature of the trade, long absences from hearth and
home, and exposure to the godless cultures of the Pacific and
elsewhere.
8. For his detailed descriptions of the factory ship's processing of
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
coquettish, and of course fertile, she is nevertheless utterly
lacking in sympathy, generally, and maternal, and readerly,
instincts, specifically. She is persistently figured, both by the
narrator and by her Aunt Poyser, the repository of feminine wisdom
and acerbic insight in the novel, as hard-hearted, uncaring,
unfeminine. As Jill Matus has pointed out, Eliot carefully prepares
the reader for Hetty's infanticide later in the novel by consistently
describing Hetty as utterly unmaternal: "Hetty hates nasty little
lambs, hates hatching time, and finds the Poyser children 'as bad as
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
approach to "household education" which assures that, in matters of
childrearing, "Nature may be trusted here, as everywhere. If we have patience
to let her work without hindrance and without degradation, she'll justify our
confidence at last." 74 As figurative English mothers, Nightingale's trained
nurses adopt a comparable approach, beneficently superintending rather than
invading private domesticity. By facilitating nature, their
ministrations--unlike doctors'--promote patients' self-help. Nightingale thus
appropriates a radically individualist and entrepreneurial rhetoric in order
to imbue nursing with a palpable Englishness in contrast to which the
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 223-243
Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot's _Middlemarch_
Jessie Givner
---------------
traditions. To Dorothea, Casaubon is a personification of history. But to
Casaubon, Dorothea represents all that is outside of his historical volumes
and all that threatens his identity as an author. We are told that "Dorothea
was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which
surrounds the ill-appreciated or desponding author" (184). This reading of
one character by another is enabled by the same operation that allows George
Eliot to stand in for social communities and great literary traditions:
personification. In order for one character to read another as a text, the
character reading must herself move beyond the merely textual. She must come
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
Teufelsdr�ckh ("Devil's Dung") famously responds to the question,
"Why am I not happy?" by writing that the universe "was all void of
Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility." 49 But Lucy
cannot accept this last clause. "If life be a war," she says,
reenlivening a military metaphor and giving voice to a sentiment
that recurs throughout _Villette,_ "it seemed *[End Page 216]* my
destiny to conduct it singlehanded." This realization goads her into
asking, with superb pertinacity, "but, oh! what _is_ the love of the
multitude?" (381, 539). For important conceptual reasons, none of
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the mood of narrative,
similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues instead an independent and
creative aim. . . . *[End Page 447]* Our art is occupied, and bound to be
occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical; not
so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of
them toward a common end. . . . Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical,
abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite,
self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. . . . The novel, which is
a work of art, exists, not by virtue of its resemblances to life, which are
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
collective body that convulses, quivers, and thrills to the news of
the War with Mexico. That is to say, if for Anderson, the
nationalist QUOTE produces a sense of QUOTE as it connects different
parts of the nation (25, 36), Lippard's war literature shows how
nationalism works by also particularizing and foregrounding bodies
rather than simply abstracting from and decorporealizing them. If
the QUOTE of national history must be clothed QUOTE in order for
people to respond to it (26), then nationalism as mediated by print
capitalism also depends on thrilling sensations of embodiment.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
Whitman's political attitudes have been hailed as a precursor of modern
multiculturalism, and this has to do in part with his perhaps most famous
literary device, the catalog of objects, persons, or activities. In the
catalogs of persons, Whitman describes the American body politic by
particularizing types of subjects according to their material and embodied
attributes, such as race, gender, class, profession, ethnicity, or regional
origin. This poetic technique formally levels the subjects represented in a
way that suggests a radically egalitarian view of American citizenship. 20
Whitman's catalogs, however, open themselves up to a critique on
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
the preceding examples as refutations of democracy and conclusive
evidence of Poe's aristocratic beliefs (as critics such as Scott
Bradfield [69-72] and Geoffrey Rans [38] have done), I contend that
Poe's political stance is neither purely democratic nor wholly
aristocratic and that he is not refuting democracy altogether, only
insofar as it intends social as well as political equality. And as
an examination of America's founding documents as well as some of
Eureka's contemporaries demonstrates, equality unqualified is a
phantom of American rhetoric. A narratable state of affairs, a
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
Twain scholars as the "Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript."
The manuscript, marked "private" in Clemens�s own hand, is addressed
three times and signed twice. The first address is to "My dear Mr.
Ochs," above a letter refuting a number of details in the Times
article; this letter is signed "S. L. Clemens" (9). However,
immediately after this letter is an address "To the Unborn Reader,"
followed by a series of prefatorial remarks inviting the future
reader to witness "an intimate inside view of our domestic life of
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
Extending his reluctant support to the literary nationalism of the Young
America movement, Brownson's reactions to the ubiquitous nativist rhetoric of
mid-century were remarkably muted, ashe typically did not engage directly in
debates or polemic with Know-Nothing writers themselves. Apart from a few
essays refuting the Know-Nothing political agenda, Brownson did not mention
the nativist party at all, except for the occasional publicist's
acknowledgment that "The Know-Nothing movement has done more in two years to
bring our religion before the American people and to force them to examine
it, than all our journals could have done in twenty" ("Archbishop" 59).
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
of the Negro. In _Negro-Mania_ (1851), for example, John Campbell
explains that BLOCKQUOTE
According to Campbell, who is less interested in legitimating the
institution of slavery than in refuting claims for Negro equality,
the universal truth of aesthetic categories—embodied, as one
might expect, in the figure of the woman—makes clear the
inevitability of existing racial divisions.34 The beautiful and the
ugly, Campbell explains, are matters of universal assent, clear even
ELH 66.3 (1999) 739-758
The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel
Stefan Andriopoulos*
---------------
the lack or impossibility of a purely literal representation of economic
self-regulation places him in that "dungeon [End Page 747] of metaphorical
obscurity" he himself denounces in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles
Lettres. 28 In these lectures, Smith not only favors the "Newtonian style" of
deducing even those "phaenomena . . . reckoned the most unaccountable" from
"one principle" over the Aristotelian style that gives "a new [principle] . .
. for every phaenomenon"; he also argues that tropes and figures should only
be used "sparingly"--only in those cases "when they are more proper than the
common forms of speaking," that is, when a literal expression is unavailable.
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
those determinants are a mix of inner and outer forces, then
consequentialist moralizing loses its suasive power, and assigning
responsibility on the basis of intention or outcome becomes an
extremely vexed matter. For example, when John Harmon wins Bella,
and Headstone loses Lizzie, the comparison does not redound to *[End
Page 721]* Harmon's moral credit, for while each man seeks to change
the woman he loves, Harmon gains his goal through deceit and
manipulation while Headstone forthrightly (if frighteningly)
confesses himself to Lizzie.6 A brief survey shows that characters
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
poems "Fancy," "Bards of Passion and of Mirth," "Lines on the
Mermaid Tavern," and "Robin Hood. To a Friend"--it would be clear
that Keats's volume entails a reckoning with the poetry of wine and
love. But despite the various attempts by John Bayley, Christopher
Ricks, and Marjorie Levinson to reclaim his dictional gush as
somehow personal, it must also be acknowledged to be not just
conventional (as has never been ignored), but pointedly historical
in its conventionality. The struggle to awaken, to realize himself,
to be, reclaims for the psyche a set of feelings that had been
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 348-354
Melville the Poet: Response to William Spengemann
Elizabeth Renker
---------------
recent years. These works in progress are already feeding a higher
scholarly profile for the poetry and will likely continue to do so.
To cite only one example, the Melville Society sponsored a panel at
the American Literature Association convention in Baltimore in May
1999 on the subject of Melville as poet, which drew a healthy crowd.
The books and articles and classroom editions now in progress will
appear roughly proximate to the standard edition noted above and
these publications will, in sum, create a fertile ground for
reception by a broader audience. 7
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
good with the question of QUOTE blackness; the beggar's racial
identity is called into question along with the genuineness of his
poverty, hyperbolizing the crisis of urban begging that so obsessed
charity writers. But instead of a single benevolent doubter,
Melville's readers encounter a crowd whose members, in deciding
whether to give or withhold alms, must consider several axes of
possible deception (including the beggar's apparent physical
disability).
Integral to the episode is Melville's unflattering portrayal of
whites engaged in public acts of donation. QUOTE whom the narrator
describes as a QUOTE catches in his mouth the coins pitched to him
by a crowd of white passengers (10). 13 While the narrator calls
this exchange a QUOTE and refers to the coin-tossers' acts as QUOTE
(12), not everyone is having fun: the beggar, as he bobs back and
forth catching coins, struggles to keep them QUOTE and winces when
some come QUOTE (11). This dehumanizing game--the narrator [End Page
imperiled, lured into firing range, so to speak, by the beggar's
antics, and suggests that qualities they might prefer to hide
(pettiness, cruelty) are being drawn out for scrutiny. But the
wooden-legged man reverses the terms of his own metaphor by treating
Black Guinea as his quarry, working to turn the crowd against the
beggar. (This is presented as an incongruous development; the
narrator, after all, describes the beggar and his accuser as QUOTE
and suggests that the latter, himself a victim of suddenly halted
patronage, might have cause to identify with the beggar's dependence
verify or disprove his claims to legitimate destitution and [End
Page 698] that through which the wooden-legged man might know
himself as astute doubter or ill-tempered tormentor. In his zeal
QUOTE the investigator QUOTE had he not been prevented from doing so
by the crowd, who were temporarily QUOTE (12). The proposed but
never enacted stripping reinforces the sexual titillation that the
beggar's submissive penny catching has initiated and gestures toward
other means of shaming him through physical assault and exposure.
The other passengers shrink from this openly aggressive method, but
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
Mexicans go down at every shot, by ranks, by platoons, by columns.
It is no battle, but a hunt, a Massacre!" As the US troops set fire
to the prairie, the movement of the flames QUOTE And yet, instead of
describing this as a glorious sight, the narrator seems to shrink
from it: QUOTE (99). And then, when Mexican soldiers try to crowd
onto a raft and escape down the river, the boat capsizes, QUOTE For
days afterward, QUOTE (100). At this point, as the battle turns into
a massacre, it becomes difficult to distinguish scenes of US empire
building from the QUOTE legends of the Spanish conquest.
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 317-328
American Nationalism--R.I.P.
Bruce Burgett
---------------
support this central claim by focusing--topically and
chronologically--on the diverse sites where these battles were
engaged: the prerevolutionary colonial adaptations of British
festivals like Guy Fawkes Day, along with the parades, songs, and
crowd actions that accompanied them (chapter 1); the
postrevolutionary skirmishes over the meaning and significance of
Washington's presidency, most centrally the partisan debates over
the appropriateness of modifying celebrations of the king's birthday
to suit that of the president (chapter 2); the rise of Fourth of
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 181-211
Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth
Brook Thomas
---------------
Pearl's biological father, but he was her father in the eyes of the
law. That legal status adds another dimension to the recognition
scene that occurs when Chillingworth walks out of the forest and
finds his wife on public display for having committed adultery.
QUOTE he QUOTE cries from the crowd. QUOTE (68). Commanding his wife
to reveal the name of her lover, the wronged husband also
inadvertently reminds us that at any moment Hester could have given
Pearl a legal father by identifying him. Even more important,
Chillingworth could have identified himself. But the same man who
teleologically projects a utopian vision of a cohesive--and, it is
important to emphasize, closed--Puritan community into the future.
Dimmesdale, in other words, becomes the obedient subject that
Winthrop desires. He is joined during these public ceremonies by
almost the entire Puritan crowd, which submits QUOTE to its rulers
(250). Hester, however, is not among that crowd. Her good
citizenship comes because of, rather than despite of, her failure to
submit so loyally.
important to emphasize, closed--Puritan community into the future.
Dimmesdale, in other words, becomes the obedient subject that
Winthrop desires. He is joined during these public ceremonies by
almost the entire Puritan crowd, which submits QUOTE to its rulers
(250). Hester, however, is not among that crowd. Her good
citizenship comes because of, rather than despite of, her failure to
submit so loyally.
Through her return Hester acknowledges the civil law in a way that
American eagle over its entrance that warns QUOTE (5). Instead, they
seek QUOTE (5), not so much to serve the country as to be guaranteed
a comfortable livelihood. The expectation that the federal eagle's
QUOTE (5) is the mirror-image of the childlike loyalty that causes
the Puritan crowd uncritically to submit to its magistrates' rule.
Choosing neither the nation's maternal protection nor its paternal
authority, Hawthorne weaves a fiction in which he best serves the
country not as a civil servant paid by the state but as a
nonpartisan writer located in an independent civil society. Thus he
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
The army took over the Winchester and Potomac railroads, refusing passage to
civilians and arresting "strangers" who could not account for themselves.
Further militarizing the scene of Brown�s execution, Wise deployed 1,500
troops around the scaffold. These preparations insured that unruly crowds
would not gather at Brown�s execution. A crowd of vengeful residents was
hardly more attractive to authorities than a crowd of unruly sympathizers.
Virginia represented the law in the face of Brown�s lawless aggression and,
more significantly, the irreverence and hostility of antislavery Northerners.
To allow for any expression of violence from civilians would suggest Brown�s
civilians and arresting "strangers" who could not account for themselves.
Further militarizing the scene of Brown�s execution, Wise deployed 1,500
troops around the scaffold. These preparations insured that unruly crowds
would not gather at Brown�s execution. A crowd of vengeful residents was
hardly more attractive to authorities than a crowd of unruly sympathizers.
Virginia represented the law in the face of Brown�s lawless aggression and,
more significantly, the irreverence and hostility of antislavery Northerners.
To allow for any expression of violence from civilians would suggest Brown�s
power to disrupt civic order and recall the disreputable vigilante customs
construct the weeks preceding Brown�s execution as an extended and eventful
deathbed scene (Fig. 1, Fig. 2).
As if to suppress any emotions that the spectacle of Brown�s suffering might
provoke, Wise deployed a crowd of armed spectators at the scene of Brown�s
death; these soldiers, standing "mute and motionless," expressed the power of
the state (Strother 11). In the end, however, Wise�s order forbidding
journalists near the scaffold was "partially rescinded" and a handful of
reporters were [End Page 655] allowed a position near the major-general�s
disappointed: his body is an undifferentiated black splotch at the far side
of this military display. Although the executioner is engaged in some action,
we cannot tell whether he is letting Brown�s body fall or raising it up
again. The features of Brown�s body, and of the event itself, are
subordinated to an examination of the crowd that gathers at the scaffold.
Wise imagines the community of Northern sympathizers as yet another violent
mob that, like the lynch mob, must be kept at [End Page 657] a distance from
the prisoner. What he doesn�t understand is that the space between Brown�s
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 814-822
New Origins of American Literature
Grantland S. Rice
---------------
"lounger" (a generic convention later adopted by a wide variety of
American writers, including Washington Irving) represents a sustained
culture of complaint leveled at the economy�s surplus of commodities.
She notes persuasively that "the lounging subject of the Port Folio
faced an enormous crowd of commodified objects--books, words,
authors, producers, workers--that had been produced, advertised,
celebrated, displayed, and cast up as detritus by American commercial
expansion . . . for the lounger, such surplus was not stimulating but
overwhelming" (124). Finally, two chapters, one a reading of John
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
seamlessly into republican demonstrations. On traversing the Apennines, where
the "scenery becomes in all respects more Italian" (1: 170), Kirkland
describes a classic genre scene, a religious procession, complete with
costumed peasants; on hearing news of a military victory in the revolt
against Austria, the crowd becomes celebratory: "[T]he joy of victory
superadded to the festa feeling, brightened every eye and animated every
voice" (1: 171). In such scenes Kirkland momentarily imagines the sentiment
of liberal revolution as merely an intensification of the "festa feeling."
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
voted upon. By contrast, a stronger case can be made that the
Constitutionalists conspired to subvert ratification. When the
assembly met to plan the ratifying convention, Constitutionalists
walked out of the proceedings, leaving Republicans without a quorum
and unable to proceed; only an angry crowd forcing two delegates
back to the hall made a legitimate vote possible. And
anti-Federalists may have tried to retard ratification with
protracted debate and obstructive and illegitimate calls for
amendments. But the Constitutionalists had the advantage of a
anti-Federalist delegates were staying; the goal apparently was to
intimidate rather than harm. Targeted delegates complained to the
assembly, which condemned the attacks but refused to order the
attorney general to prosecute the rioters, and not a single
Philadelphia newspaper reported the crowd actions (Jensen 2: 225).
The Centinel's most specific complaint concerned attacks on the
_PennsylvaniaHerald,_ a Federalist newspaper that published
anti-Federalist essays and accounts of the convention; Federalists
organized a boycott that closed the paper. 22 In spite of these
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 348-357
Perpetual Emotion Machine
Michelle Burnham
---------------
asks "where mother is" (590). The story is otherwise silent as to
how Dame Rugg herself feels about her temperamental husband's sudden
and inexplicable disappearance or how Jenny Rugg feels during and
after her very long journey home. A disembodied voice sadly
announces from the crowd that Rugg has arrived to find that he has
an "estate. . . but no home" (191). He is just in time to rescue the
former from the auctioneer's gavel, but too late to recover the
latter. In what ways have emotional and economic disinheritance
compensated for, or collaborated with, each other in America's
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
its garble of type, Twain's reproduction of Arthurian newsprint transforms
knight-errantry into the textual (and thus, by implication, moral and
political) confusion that he believes it to be. 16 Hank comes out in costume
("flesh-colored tights from neck to heel, with blue silk puffings about my
loins" [385]). Applause reigns with every parry, and the crowd yells words
that they have never yelled before: "Go it, Slim Jim!" and "Encore! Encore!"
(386-87). Hank muses, "I wondered where they got the word, but there was no
time to cipher on philological matters" (387). But there is plenty of time to
cipher on personal matters, and the performative and philological come
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
the loyalty of the local Chinook (80). McDougall's marriage to a
Chinook woman--an "absurd marriage" in Everett Emerson's phrase
(231)--further strengthens the intercultural trade. French-Canadians
who race their canoes on the Hudson River at the start of Astor's
enterprise signal Astor's commercial muscle to a crowd of astonished
New Yorkers. Irving credits the multiethnic Canadians in the company
with a "constitutional vitality" notably absent from Anglo-American
principals like Wilson Price Hunt, the St. Louis merchant who rather
incompetently leads Astor's overland party (_Astoria_ 30).
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
admission, she was executed. The pace of executions accelerated. In
an attempt to inspire more "Negro evidence," the court condemned
Quack and an alleged coconspirator named Cuffee to be burned alive,
an extraordinary punishment in the mid-eighteenth-century; on their
way through the crowd and toward the stake, they screamed for mercy,
claiming Burton knew even more than she had testified to. If the
condemned offered to confess, they might earn a lesser punishment.
Perhaps Quack and Cuffee considered this way out when they were
being chained to the stake. As the fire burned around their bound
Justice Horsmanden would have to find a way to counter this
alternate knowledge of the plot.
In the eighteenth century, public execution was an event in which
the crowd actively participated by bearing witness, interpreting
signs, and, if the punishment was deemed unjust, empathizing with
the victim. It also turned the criminal into the central actor in
the production, the stake-side declaration of guilt a chance to earn
God's forgiveness and to initiate deliverance for a community
afflicted by the criminal's sin. Horsmanden remembers Hughson as a
puzzling text: showing no remorse, he walked to the gallows like a
prizefighter, predicting the miraculous appearance of a sign that
would prove his innocence, all of it a bold performance against the
court. The crowd marveled at the red spots suddenly appearing on
both his cheeks (Was it a miracle?) and took note of his body
language as he neared the stake, holding one arm up in the air, palm
outstretched, expectantly (274-76).
monstrous corpse, seemingly alive as it grows bloated and putrid
underneath the late summer sun. As a result, Horsmanden's summation,
its attempt to reposition the reader within the state's
jurisdiction, rides on the narrator's "realistic" representation of
Hughson's body. The historical account is hostile to the crowd's
belief in mystery and, by implication, in the conversion of
Hughson's body. It is the inevitable moment in all chronicles when a
silent narrator, confronted with the disintegration of the very
authority that sanctions his voice, insists on his right to speak.
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
Circassian girls of cheap museums" (183). In the Bowery's "frantic
panorama" March perceives "the fierce struggle for survival," a
struggle waged against "deformity," "mutilation," "destruction," and
"decay" (184). He watches as a "Christian mother" is wheeled down
Mott Street in a cart by two policemen, followed by a crowd of
"swarming and shrieking children" (186). A later walk down Madison
Avenue on a Sunday afternoon presents March with a radically
different spectacle, one of "fashion," "richness," and "indigeneity"
(301). "Their silk hats shone," he observes of the promenaders, "and
name" (21). But when Pete arrives, offering to take Maggie for "a
hell of a time," she becomes suddenly concerned for the family's
honor and condemns Maggie as "'a disgrace teh yer people'" (30).
Later, raising a "dramatic finger" (48), she publicly rejects her
daughter before the tenement's regular crowd of "interested
spectators" (30). Catching the mood of melodrama, Jimmie refuses his
sister's plea for help: "Radiant virtue sat upon his brow and his
repelling hands expressed horror of contamination" (48). These
contradictions form a widely noted aspect of Crane's irony and are
"prostitution like everything else, has its degrees, its upper, and
lower, and middle class, with miscellaneous varieties" (438).
Chapter 17 of _Maggie_ opens in an uptown entertainment district
where "[t]wo or three theatres" are emptying a crowd "upon the
storm-swept pavements" (51). Cabs clatter to and fro, electric
lights shed "a blurred radiance," and there is "[a]n atmosphere of
pleasure and prosperity" (51). This is most likely Union Square,
which by the 1890s had become an upscale amusement area that
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
ridir chi pu�?" [Who has ever felt so many and so many Loves in his
heart? Who could recount the whole infinite number?]. And Pietro
Metastasio, evidently trumping him, writes in "Il Nido degli Amori":
"cresce la turba a segno, / Che gi� quasi � infinita, / E a
numerarla impazzirebbe Archita" [the crowd grows to the point that
it is almost infinite, and Architas would go mad counting it]. Both
quoted from Il Fiore de' nostri poeti anacreontici. But quantity can
be a loose cannon. The 1744 collection, Versuch in scherzhaften
Liedern, which was the first publication of Johann Ludwig Wilhelm
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
the power that is being exercised over him." 33 We may differentiate
between the two as the representation that uses a visual process, the
image, and one that consists of abstract signifying systems without a
visual component. The spectacle imposes its impact visually on the
eyes of the crowd. Exercise consists of mechanisms that need have no
visual dimension. This is clearly the sense of Foucault's distinction
between the pain of the body and the pain of the mind and is essential
to his historical transition between the old regime and the new
bourgeoisie.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
available as artistic technique or as subject matter. In his highly
suggestive essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin points to
shock as the defining experience of modern life in the nineteenth
century, whether it be the disturbance felt by the pedestrian
jostled by the city crowd (perhaps one might think of Walter
Hartright's solitary experience as a sort of stylized version of
such anonymous encounters, or the jolts felt by the industrial
worker. 17 Drawing on Georg Simmel's essay, "The Metropolis and
Mental Life" (1903), Benjamin's account of Baudelaire enables us to
problems, to the "unprecedented beauty of American women" (vi).
53. On the railway as the middle-class experience of
industrialization, see Schivelbusch, 122. Schivelbusch is in effect
reworking Benjamin's insight about the nineteenth-century crowd:
"The shock-experience which the passer-by has in the crowd
corresponds to what the worker 'experiences' at his machine" ("On
Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 176).
53. On the railway as the middle-class experience of
industrialization, see Schivelbusch, 122. Schivelbusch is in effect
reworking Benjamin's insight about the nineteenth-century crowd:
"The shock-experience which the passer-by has in the crowd
corresponds to what the worker 'experiences' at his machine" ("On
Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 176).
54. Schivelbusch, 43. Stephen Kern points out in The Culture of Time
56. While sometimes we have to deal with actual railways in the
novels, at other times the relation of text and context is that
which Benjamin established between Baudelaire's poetry and the
nineteenth-century crowd: "The is always aware, has not served as the model for any of his works,
but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure" ("On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire," 165).
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
2. This temporality of the "disconnected" ("we pass a corner and we
are in a changed world") is what Walter Benjamin refers to in the
famous formulation "homogeneous, empty time": the time of the
newspaper, the telegraph, the urban crowd, a time that attenuates
the telos of the Christian calendar (Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the
Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt [New
York: Schocken, 1969], 261). This idea of a temporality of
modernization is a founding concept in Benedict Anderson's study of
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
to those that understand. For beneath my arm, within my
the quiver, many an arrow that
world at large, they need is vocal
interpreters. to the wise; but for the
Wise is he who knows many things crowd they
by nature. But those who have need interpreters. The
merely true poet
learned [?are merely learned] is he who knoweth much by
gabble gift of
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
Such a proposition has a long literary heritage. In Paradise Lost,
the term "ugly" first appears with Sin herself, who is described as
being "uglier" than the "Night-Hag" (PL, 2.662); later the devils
are transformed into "a crowd / Of ugly Serpents" (PL, 10.538-39),
and this juxtaposition of "ugly" with the morally repulsive Sin and
serpent is reinforced in Adam's prophetic vision of evil: "O sight /
Of terror, foul and ugly to behold" (PL, 11.463-64). In Pamela
(1740), to take another example from Shelley's reading list at this
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
to those readers drawn to the excesses and recesses of Brown's
gothic tales. If anything, these novels seem deliberately designed
to displease these readers, and they (myself included) have
responded in kind, seeing both novels as a last desperate attempt to
play to the crowd by borrowing the moral absolutism of Richardson
and his American imitators. 20 Yet the more relevant and immediate
model for Brown's version of the epistolary novel is not Clarissa
but The Coquette, a best-seller first published in 1797, and one
that Brown, arguably the most devoted student of American literature
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
revival of the 1760s and 1770s (led largely by Sheridan's father,
Thomas), which deems the "living voice" superior to the "dead
letter"; the obscure and esoteric verse of Thomas Gray, who stopped
writing well before his death in 1771 because he believed that "the
still small voice of Poetry was not made to be heard in a crowd";
and the individually engraved illustrated manuscripts of William
Blake, who opted out of the conventional book trade altogether in
order to exercise complete control over the meaning of what he
writes. 4 Each of these instances is, I would suggest, part of a
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
sedition," and _Shirley_ explores the extension of sedition into
potential anarchy without dismissing the weavers' anger (62). George
Eliot's narrator arguably strives for similar effect in _Felix Holt_
when her narrator claims, during the novel's riot scene, that
"mingled with the more headstrong and half-drunken crowd . . . were
some sharp-visaged men who loved the 'irrationality' of riots for
something else than its own sake." 30 Although Eliot and Bront� gave
this "irrationality" a face bordering on caricature, this doesn't
obscure their larger point: in both novels, destruction is as
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
extracting semantic content located inside the hypostatized container of the
text. When in "So Long!" the speaker imagines himself dying, he links his
death to the advent of a series of individual, social, and political
realities, "what comes after me," that he performatively "announces." These
phenomena, however, which come "thicker and faster" and "[crowd] too close"
upon him, as if to squeeze him out of the space of the poem, are named as
conventional liberal Enlightenment abstractions: "natural persons,"
"justice," "liberty and equality," "the Union," "the great individual," and
so forth. However, the speaker does not merely invoke these things, as if
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
Go and eat thy supper, and shut the door, so as I mayn't hear
mother's talk" (_A_, 88). Another artisan takes up more frankly the
shield that work provides against the sound of someone else's
voice--this time the village blacksmith, who, alarmed by the power
of the Methodist to engross the crowd that has gathered to hear her,
retreats to his horseshoes: "Chad, frightened lest he be 'laid hold
on' too . . . walked hastily away, and began to work at his anvil by
way of reassuring himself. 'Folks mun ha' hoss-shoes, praichin' or
no praichin': the divil canna lay hould o' me for that,' he muttered
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 151-169
Walking on Flowers: the Kantian Aesthetics Of _Hard Times_
Christina Lupton
---------------
activity to the suggestion that an emotional, subjective form of
witnessing arises from the noninstrumental or aesthetically pure
gaze.
Describing the crowd of strikers gathered to hear the union
representative speak, Dickens directly couples the idea of
subjective affect to the idea of objective truth: "it was
particularly affecting," he writes, "to see this crowd of earnest
faces, whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from
Describing the crowd of strikers gathered to hear the union
representative speak, Dickens directly couples the idea of
subjective affect to the idea of objective truth: "it was
particularly affecting," he writes, "to see this crowd of earnest
faces, whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from
bias could doubt" (170). In the next paragraph he claims that "the
whole of that crowd were gravely, deeply, faithfully in earnest must
have been as plain to anyone who chose to see what was there, as the
subjective affect to the idea of objective truth: "it was
particularly affecting," he writes, "to see this crowd of earnest
faces, whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from
bias could doubt" (170). In the next paragraph he claims that "the
whole of that crowd were gravely, deeply, faithfully in earnest must
have been as plain to anyone who chose to see what was there, as the
bare beams of the roof and the whitened brick walls" (170). It is
not that Dickens wants us simply to make a fact of this crowd being
in earnest. It is rather that by seeing its earnestness as a visual
bias could doubt" (170). In the next paragraph he claims that "the
whole of that crowd were gravely, deeply, faithfully in earnest must
have been as plain to anyone who chose to see what was there, as the
bare beams of the roof and the whitened brick walls" (170). It is
not that Dickens wants us simply to make a fact of this crowd being
in earnest. It is rather that by seeing its earnestness as a visual
attribute, available to the clear-sighted *[End Page 163]* observer,
he makes this fact into something which must be subjectively felt.
Like Sissy, we must fancy our way towards recognition of the crowd's
not that Dickens wants us simply to make a fact of this crowd being
in earnest. It is rather that by seeing its earnestness as a visual
attribute, available to the clear-sighted *[End Page 163]* observer,
he makes this fact into something which must be subjectively felt.
Like Sissy, we must fancy our way towards recognition of the crowd's
virtues, not as an act of identification or agreement, but as an act
of purposeless looking. It is a kind of distance, akin to the
distance Sissy takes to the carpet flowers when she recognizes them
as flowers which can be walked on, that frees us to approve of the
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
the "perfect resemblance" between daughter and wife quickly causes
that ardent, "pure affection" ("M," 237) to resonate to a
substantially different chord: BLOCKQUOTE
Fearful and exciting indeed are the thoughts that might crowd in
upon the guardian of a child who, in his fervor of affection,
notices particularly in her "the adult powers and faculties of the
woman," "the lessons of experience," and above all "_the passions of
maturity_." The sexualization both of the child and of the father's
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
"Blocked up, all the fruits of his industry rot upon his
hand—open and he carries on a trade with all the nations of
the earth."22 Twain, writing to his friend Ann E. Taylor in 1857
from New Orleans, recognized that city's centrality through the
cosmopolitan crowd that gathered at its overstocked markets. Of New
Orleans's French market, Samuel Clemens wrote: "I thought I had seen
all kinds of markets before—but that was a great
mistake—this being a place such as I had never dreamed of
before. . . . Out on the pavement were groups of Italians, French,
its primary ports. In his memoir, the St. Louis barber and former
slave James Thomas recalled with pride the New Orleans port of the
1830s and 1840s as a rival to New York, handling the transport of
"horses, cattle, hogs, mules, corn flower" and, in what appears
almost as an afterthought, "occasionally a crowd of blacks."25 The
slave market in New Orleans was the biggest in the country by the
1840s, moving slaves from the Atlantic seaboard and upper south into
the cotton frontiers of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. Meanwhile,
Caribbean islands like Cuba had become depots for international
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
closer to home than Geoffrey Chaucer. Best known was Scott's series of
minstrel songs in the final canto of _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ (1805).
Far from competing with one another, Scott's singers specifically work to
defuse the competitive tensions around *[End Page 697]* them by entertaining
their crowd; the minstrels sing "lest farther fray / should mar the concord
of the day."20 Such is the tendency of national minstrel writing: in battle
or in private service to the gentry, a spirited competition for money would
have been portrayed as unethical or militarily irresponsible. In many cases,
such as Scott's, the minstrels enjoy and admire one another's work,
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
sister, Deborah; and in addition to wearing her clothes, he
fashioned a "little baby" out of a pillow (52). Promenading about
the family garden with her (scandalously secret, thus assumed
illegitimate) ersatz baby, this drag version of Deborah drew a
sizeable crowd of spectators until Mr. Jenkyns recognized his son,
stripped the women's clothing from him, and flogged him before the
gathered throng. After the flogging, Peter bid farewell to his
mother and disappeared, leaving Cranford bereft, and his parents, as
I've tried to suggest by the opening quotes, fallen.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
the tyrannical Whitman behind the poetics of seduction lead him to
conclude that "[b]y invoking the future reader, the privileged
priority of the poet is advanced. . . . Here, the reader is also
_anteriored_ by inscription, even potentially placed in the
faceless, costumed crowd of foreclosed readers/riders, positions
crossed, any future 'present' also vacated and parasited." The
parasitic element of the vacated space that Cohen advocates suggests
a unidirectional dynamic that fails to account for the recursive
strategies of Whitman's poetry. Cohen contends that Whitman's
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
Hugh Crawford's article "Networking the (Non)Human: _Moby-Dick_,
Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour," _Configurations_ 5
(1997): 1-21. Crawford focuses on mid-nineteenth-century
oceanography as the domain within which Ahab represents the desire
to standardize the unpredictable "networks that produce reality,"
while my own analysis concentrates on the politics and economics of
race and gender as the contexts within which _Moby-Dick_ maps out
the complex of translations between nature and culture (Crawford,
9).
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
the states appoint their own Congressional delegates, Congress is
not significantly differentiated from the states themselves. All
powers delegated to the national government are symbolic rather than
actual: the states are forbidden from exercising these powers (such
as coining money or making treaties) QUOTE and yet, when the states
are Congress, there is little to stop them (956). The Articles give
Congress the power to adjudicate disputes between states but deprive
it of the power to enforce its own rulings. The states, both ideally
and physically, remain sovereign. The equality proposition [End Page
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
circulation to bring about the greater good, launching a major public works
project in Hungary, the massive increase of specie in circulation leads to
inflation and disrupts the conditions for employment for everyone (_S_, 379).
To spend money on this scale brings about a small-scale version of the
economic disaster that would follow upon telling his secret. If coining gold
in solitude is useless, making the gold useful threatens to undo the actual
relations of labor.
A similar logic informs the novel's treatment of St Leon's political
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
finished" (5).
_Solidify_ (fig): "The tower episode solidified my power" (8).
_Swash_ (vb., def. 2): "The gusts of wind were flaring the torches and making
the shadows swash about" (7).
_Unconfessed:_ "It were a peril to my own soul to let him die unconfessed and
unabsolved" (17).
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
Wilde's "House Beautiful." In this piece Wilde moves into a different
register altogether in terms of both style and effect, as he takes us
on a walking tour of the typical bourgeois household. What we find is
an inventory of nitty-gritty details. Seemingly nothing is left
untouched, from the question of flaring gas chandeliers (a definite
no-no, destined to discolor and ruin everything else you might do in
the way of decorating the room) down to Queen Anne furniture (which
gets a thumbs up, much favored over its Gothic predecessor which was
"very well for those who lived in castles and who needed occasionally
_American Literary History_ 14.4 (2002) 837-844
Contagion and Culture: A View from Victorian Studies
Mary Burgan
---------------
image of London mud invites the reader to consider the origins of
urban disease from the very start: "As much mud in the streets, as
if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and
it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or
so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill" (1). Is the
situation of London a reversion to the unevolved mire of prehistory,
or can the actions of individual human beings make a difference?
Dickens answers this question in the marriage of Esther Summerson to
Allan Woodcourt--and with specific reference to Victorian England's
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
or gates, haunted by the fear that what does not belong might
somehow find a way in, that the unnamed, the non-thing, might find
its way into the realm of the named and acknowledged; and in this
respect, the opening paragraph's "Megalosaurus, forty feet long or
so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill" (_B_, 49),
appears as a kind of free floating signifier, identifying that which
is out of place, blurring or complicating our sense of the place and
order of things.
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
to meeting with "more favourable and candid judges" (27 May 1782,
2:49) in the future; engaging the good criticisms of "the few who
are judicious" provides the author with weapons to contain his foes.
Such an active stance against the power of critics is clear in the
next day's letter to Unwin. Bolstered by praise from Benjamin
Franklin, whose letter to his friend John Thornton he includes with
his own, Cowper declares: BLOCKQUOTE
With marvelous insouciance, Cowper turns the tables on his critics,
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
The nonchalance with which equality is regarded ( QUOTE ) and
inequality is underplayed ( QUOTE )--and the qualificatory prose in
which such regard is couched--is justified by its end: the
integration of individuals into a single social order. 21 Poe has
provided an explanation that naturalizes unification as a physical
law that requires opposition and resistance. If matter is to
condense, if any kind of body is to form, then inequalities of mass,
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
that one need not be a professional author to write great literature.
In a public dispute with Edmund Clarence Stedman over the existence
of "literary genius," Howells had claimed that Grant�s autobiography,
"written as simply and straightforwardly as his battles were fought,
couched in the most unpretentious phrase, with never a touch of
grandiosity or attitudinizing, familiar, homely, even common in
style, is a great piece of literature" ("Literary Genius" 14). And,
in an equally public dispute with Matthew Arnold over "General
Grant�s Grammar," Twain agreed that "General Grant�s book is a great
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
handed down by the Marshall Court only anxiously asserted the
superior degree of US nationhood, not the invalidity of tribal
nationhood.
24. However Jackson may have couched her Indian reform work in the
tradition of abolition, she clearly considered Indians as more
deserving of (white) philanthropy than the freedmen. In a letter
written in 1880, Jackson castigated former abolitionist activist
Moncure Daniel Conway for the apparent lack of abolitionist interest
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
strictly speaking, qualify as ugly, his pathetic fallacy is apt. For
as the "contaminating life" of the Creature spills out from his
overstretched skin to pursue Victor physically and psychologically,
it threatens to "consume" him and the entire symbolic order in which
he is implicated. Thus while it is couched in admittedly boyish
terms, William Frankenstein's fatal encounter with the
Creature--"monster! ugly wretch! you wish to eat me, and tear me to
pieces" (F, 169)--contains a fundamental insight into the nature of
ugliness itself: the ugly is that which threatens to consume and
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
Falkland, and indeed at one point he admits that he is an
"inquisitor" of sorts. Caleb has been dangling a "bait" before
Falkland, trying to "entrap him" by putting "questions and innuendos"
to him that were "regulated with the cunning of a grey-headed
inquisitor," lancing Falkland's "secret wound" (109). His strategies
of inquiry result in one of Falkland's outbursts:
BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
of cultural history.
The largest difference between Scott and his minstrel is that the
minstrel speaks or sings, whereas Scott writes his poem. Between
them [End Page 868] stretch the centuries that have elapsed as
Scotland passed from an oral to a literary culture. The minstrel
accompanies his poem with a harp, while Scott prefers the detailed
historical notes with which he furnishes his poem. Again the
difference is allowed to infiltrate the text, the first three cantos
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
of argument sees Hawthorne's interest in aesthetics as blinding him
to politics, the other argues that Hawthorne invokes the aesthetic
to blind others to political realities. This latter view is the one
currently in vogue; Hawthorne is regularly indicted for a
"derealizing style," a mode of representation that incites a
relentless "indeterminacy" about the substance of politics and thus
mystifies the possibility of concrete action.6 Where once Hawthorne
had no politics, all he has now is bad politics.7 Where once
Hawthorne simply wanted to avoid the real world, he now is regarded
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 151-169
Walking on Flowers: the Kantian Aesthetics Of _Hard Times_
Christina Lupton
---------------
expresses itself as an almost priestly moral certitude. Her "modest
fearlessness, her truthfulness which put all artifice aside, her
entire forgetfulness of herself in her earnest quiet holding to the
object with which she had come" are listed as the qualities that
make Sissy able to overpower and correct Mr. Harthouse, Louisa
Gradgrind's amoral seducer (255).
If Dickens had been even more committed to the moral value of the
aesthetic he might have led the fanciful Sissy much farther down
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
about the unaccountable "agitation" of the otherwise stationary
vehicle in which Yorick alone was sitting, wondering "what could
occasion its motion" (_SJ_, 13). Though this episode is meant on
some level to really be the "Preface," to establish a principle of
order and a systematizing approach to the work, it is also very
significantly not there at the beginning; like the center of gravity
of the characters in the scene in Yorick's bedroom, the narrative
order is significantly and suggestively "off center." This order, of
course, calls into question what exactly the reader _has_ read up
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
domains. He fuses his own body with the factory ship he commands,
fitting his prosthetic leg into an auger hole in the deck,
envisaging his relation to the crew in mechanical terms—"my
one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they
revolve" (_M_, 143)—and fantasizing about the construction
of a mechanical automaton completely obedient to his will (_M_,
359). In these ways, as critics have argued, Ahab embodies
contemporary "American hopes that technology would empower free
men," and his quest becomes an allegory of that attempt to master
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
nostalgia. They are occasions on which Scotland's past intersects
with its present. In March 1804, the beacon fires were lit in Kelso,
the message passed from hill to hill, and all through Scotland men
seized their arms and made for their meeting-places. Again in 1806
the beacon-fires were lit. Scott was holidaying over the border, and
he rode the 100 miles to Musselburgh in twenty-four hours. 38 On
both occasions the invasion warnings proved false, but for Scott the
gatherings they brought about had symbolic importance: a conquered,
disarmed, and garrisoned nation was proclaiming itself once again a
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
30. Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse," in his The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge,
1994), 86.
31. This definition of "bumming" comes from "Newsboys' Dictionary or
Glossary" (R, 1855, 26).
32. For fine historical accounts of this placing-out system see
Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
authorization, conveyed an offer of immunity to Hastings if he and
his friends would drop their opposition to the Indian Bills, which
[End Page 849] would have restructured the English government of the
colony. 62 Sheridan was also the first key player in the affair to
demur from Burke's zealous efforts to punish Hastings, quipping even
before the 1788 trial that he wished "Hastings would run away and
Burke after him." 63
Whatever the status of Sheridan's political commitment, both
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
ofreading" (see ch. 6, esp.122-25)? Or are there only different
degrees and kinds of "use," all of them deficient when measured
against an ideal of inclusiveness and balance, but some of them
deliberate, some nearly unconscious; some fertile, some
impoverishing; some overriding or reifying a text, others
encouraging a vital immersion in the life (not simply the words) of
the text?
1
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
characterized, the accuracy of those descriptions gets contested, judgments
get made--about what to read and what to teach and what to write about; about
who to hire, who to publish, who to promote. We do not and cannot operate
without a vocabulary of textual description and discrimination, but that
vocabulary now operates at an impoverishing distance from the quite different
vocabulary of our most ambitious critical practice.
This is to re-introduce, by way of the category of experience, consideration
of the special kinds of attentiveness and judgment that are ordinarily
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
issuing from no particular source, while claims to possession denote
the fallenness of mere individuality, an inescapable condition.
Agents, as a consequence of being agents, do not particularize the
meanings they happen to have in mind but are in some sense bent on
monopolizing them. This is especially true of Emerson's
overreachers--so "Jesus would absorb the race" (582), just as Plato
would "clap copyright on the world" (653)--but the logic of part and
whole more generally presumes the same compulsion, to varying
degrees, in us all. With the background of the whole looming behind
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
acted (by John Lee). The Public Ledger (18 January) identified five
of the play's most egregious malapropisms. 6 The revised version
which debuted on 28 January was significantly shorter; the part of
Sir Lucious was reassigned to Laurence Clinch, and the character
itself had undergone a "whitewashing and ennobling." 7 Moreover, the
play's diction had been evened out and Sheridan deleted three of the
five malapropisms named in The Public Ledger, keeping two spoken by
Mrs. Malaprop. 8
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
title) by producing and adhering to an elaborate social etiquette
that would verify their class status. Such rules were needed,
however, not only for the settings Halttunen emphasizes, in which
middle-class Americans performed gentility for their putative social
peers, but also for points of contact between the well-off and the
destitute.
7. Rosemarie Garland Thomson writes that QUOTE (48-49). Because of
the potential for deception, Americans were often more approving of
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
"mulattas" are the African-American women we've inherited as protagonists
in much of nineteenth-century "race" literature and literary historiography
but also because the term seems to be enjoying a vernacular and critical
currency that, I fear, both expresses a current racial anxiety and
reproduces the politics of exceptionalism. 31 Today, people ask their peers
and professors, clients and customers, "are you a mulatto?" with little
sense of meaning or manners, while publishers clamor for novels,
autobiographies, and anthologies about living on the color line. Although
the term "mulatto" etymologically hauls on its back the well-known
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
definite article here ("_the_ age"), rather than the more precise pronoun
(_her_age), is telling. Historical time in the novel, it suggests, is _not_
possessive. The effect of this imprecision is a purposeful ambiguity. The
readers the narrator explicitly addresses are asked to compare Hope both to
her Puritan peers and to the "thoroughly disciplined" young ladies of the
present age (both the narrator's and ours) at once. The result is that the
reader must think both historically and presently about Hope; she signifies
in two different temporal registers at once. Placing Hope in relation to both
her fictionalized seventeenth-century world and the reader's own (future)
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
modernity itself--the sense of continuous and rapid change, of
shocks, thrills, intensity, excitement." 50 In reviews of the novels
themselves divisions between individual readers' bodies and the
social body were frequently erased, and the fictions of Collins,
Braddon, Wood, and their peers were perceived as "a collective
nervous disorder, a morbid addiction within the middle class that
worked directly on the body of the reader and as an infection from
outside." 51 The American nerve specialist, George Miller Beard,
made explicit this assumption of a connection between new
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
Arden offers the paradigmatic expression of the nature and sources of
Victorian pathos as I understand them. Like the homeless Nell, who
observes the joyful companionship of the Edwards sisters from a
sequestered distance, Enoch, "broken and bowed" from his long years at
sea and stranded on a desert island, peers through the window of his
friend Philip's home to see his own wife and children grouped about the
hearth with Philip, once the "slighted suitor of old times," now "Lord
of his rights": BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
me, shrieked loudly, and, quitting the hut, ran across the fields
with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable"
(F, 133-34). Adorno has suggested that by repressing what Kant calls
"real existence" the beautiful object only manages to preserve the
fear of it: "Terror itself peers out of the eyes of beauty as the
coercion that emanates from form." 40 His insight may go some way
toward explaining why, when "real existence" finally does break out
in the mode of the ugly, a violent reaction should be axiomatic.
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
persists _despite_ social conditions, and this is clearly what irks
historicists such as Thompson and Terry Eagleton. Indeed, although
_Villette_--Bront�'s last completed novel--describes society
ostensibly in times of _peace,_ Lucy Snowe, the protagonist, seldom
experiences tranquillity, instead viewing her peers, students,
employer, and even the man who would be her future spouse as a
menace from whom she requires sanctuary. In this regard, the novel
develops _Shirley_'s meditations on group ties by forging links
between company and sorrow. "In public, [I] was by nature a cypher,"
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
perfectly, especially when considered in retrospect after his trial in 1895,
when he literally became a criminal aesthete and jokingly insisted that "The
Ballad of Reading Gaol" be offered for publication to _Reynolds's Magazine_,
which "circulates widely amongst the criminal classes, to which I now belong,
so I shall be read by my peers." 10 He also wrote an essay called "Pen Pencil
Poison," which is often paired with De Quincey's, in which the poisoner
Thomas Wainewright is described as "a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an
antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a
dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or *[End Page
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
ways in which literary evaluation was conducted in their country. In 1864,
for example, the journalist and reviewer Francis Espinasse echoed Lord
Stanhope and called explicitly for England to found an Academy modeled after
the _Académie Française_, and Reade, among others, openly
longed for his peers to create a "science of criticism" similar to what they
imagined to obtain across the Channel.25 Also in the 1860s, some journalists
began openly seeking to improve the quality of British reviewing and literary
evaluation by reflecting specifically on the function of criticism itself. In
the wake of explicit attempts to improve the state of criticism mounted by
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1981), 2.
5. Walker, 91n.
6. By 1800, Linda Colley says, "over 70 percent of all English peers received
their education at just four public schools: Eton, Westminster, Winchester,
and Harrow. And in the first half of the eighteenth century, sons of the
peerage and the landed gentry made up 50 per cent of the pupils of all the
major public schools" (_Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837_, [New Haven:
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
John Hoole cut a figure amongst the late-Georgian literary set as a
translator of the Italian poets.34 He was intimate with Johnson
*[End Page 979]* himself, and friends with Burney, Joshua Reynolds,
and Richard Glover; but the writers of the succeeding generation,
Wordsworth's peers, were not charitable to his posthumous reputation
as a man of letters. Walter Scott called his translation of Tasso a
"flat medium," and mocked his prolific output: "he did exactly so
many couplets day by day, neither more or less; and habit made it
light to him, however heavy it might seem to the reader."35 Macaulay
influential for Wordsworth to include a quotation from _Institutio
Oratoria_ as a motto for volume 1 of the 1802 _Lyrical Ballads_. In
his _Oratory_, Quintilian speaks of the current fashions for
"effeminate" verse in a tone strikingly similar to that Wordsworth
employs so many centuries later to chide his own peers. He
prescribes, as Wordsworth implicitly does, a masculinization of
meter: "I should prefer my rhythm to be harsh and violent rather
than nerveless and effeminate [_compositionem . . . effeminatam et
enervem_], as it is in so many writers, more especially in our own
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
London might represent a kind of normative model to which Cranford
can never attain; but on the other, London might operate with a set
of hermeneutic principles that run parallel to Cranford's without
ever intersecting them. In a tour de force of materialist
description, Mary Smith makes clear that the peculiar overvaluing of
small things and surfaces she's chronicling is not necessarily
unique to Cranford. She describes a pair of such "individual small
economies," accordingly:
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
Mary's strange lament: BLOCKQUOTE
Here Blake muses that his countenance announces his politics even before his
tongue can speak them, and interestingly, he sees the physiognomic equivalent
of silence in "passivity," a formal stillness (like the "quieting" of Mary's
face ) that shunts political consciousness and retards imaginative
production. 7 Blake's figuration suggests that the face-to-face encounter
operates as the most fundamental of political sites, and furthermore, that
writing functions metonymically as a form of symbolic "facing." Reading
ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537
"Bales of Living Anguish": Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing
Peter J. Kitson
---------------
which according to Robert Young allowed "Long's expedient prejudices [to]
move into the realm of scientific theory." 30
It was this pseudo-scientific view of the African that the opponents of the
slave trade were trying to excise. Two writers who were important for
Coleridge's and Southey's early views of race are Anthony Benezet and Thomas
Clarkson. Benezet, America's most prominent opponent of the slave trade,
published his Some Historical Account of Guinea . . . with an Inquiry into
the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade (1771) to persuade his readers to
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
1990], 82). See also J�rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991).
Whereas Warner emphasizes the abstract, universalizing, and
disembodying effects of print culture, I want to focus on the ways
the struggle to regulate the body and public space underwrites and
enables the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere and a republican
print discourse of reason, liberty, and disinterested truth. If
Franklin aspired to what Warner calls "print rationality" and "civic
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
absolute equality. Extant social formations are described as both
rigid ( QUOTE ) and tenuous ("only up to a certain epoch")--and not
because social formations are going anywhere, not because the
present state of relations is nonnegotiable, but because the refusal
to accept a renegotiation of both individual and group integrity
makes it so. Insist on one or the other and the whole thing
collapses into either the many (the QUOTE in which all relations are
mediated) or the one (the state of QUOTE the nation of one, in which
there are no relations to mediate). Both the utopic and the dystopic
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
attendant privileges depended to some extent on whether one needed
help or was in a position to help others. The level of one's
participation in benevolent exchange did not single-handedly grant
the privileges of whiteness or push one unequivocally outside its
boundaries. But a group's position, or perceived position, within
benevolent hierarchies could affect the degree to which its members
were considered QUOTE into whiteness. That Irish immigrants, for
example, were widely believed to constitute a high percentage of
urban beggars delayed the group's acceptance into the white
boundaries. But a group's position, or perceived position, within
benevolent hierarchies could affect the degree to which its members
were considered QUOTE into whiteness. That Irish immigrants, for
example, were widely believed to constitute a high percentage of
urban beggars delayed the group's acceptance into the white
mainstream. Building on the logic of such exclusions, one virulently
nativist editor went so far as to claim that QUOTE were QUOTE thus
implying that the very fact of begging proved an individual's alien
status ( QUOTE 11).
Donors, for their part, did not escape scrutiny. The Boston Society
for the Prevention of Pauperism went so far as to suggest that what
often passes for a benevolent impulse is, in fact, a combination of
laziness and squeamishness. QUOTE to make appropriate inquiries
regarding beggars, the group's 1859 report asserted, while QUOTE
(15). Such irresponsible figures resisted the role of the assertive,
investigative caregiver, preferring instead the passivity of an
isolated, and therefore unmanageable, donation. In other cases, the
honesty of benevolent agents--who, as fundraisers, were supplicants
215). This approbation of silent sufferers, whose destitution must
be discovered by an investigative philanthropy, coexisted with a
pervasive suspicion [End Page 690] of their designated opposites,
those who begged in public and complained audibly of their troubles.
The latter group, according to many commentators, lacked appropriate
Christian forbearance and sufficient shame in the face of
middle-class standards of respectability and were perhaps out to
mislead potential donors with invented tales of hardship. The very
fact of a public appeal undermined the supplicant's credibility,
presumed able-bodiedness, a particularly good way to pass as needy
was to affect some sort of physical disability. 7 In Eliza Farrar's
Adventures of Congo, in Search of His Master (n.d.), an English
children's story republished in the US in the 1840s, the
once-enslaved protagonist, on seeing a group of beggars returning to
their dwelling at the end of the day, QUOTE (86). 8 Such ruses were
thought to be so common that the crutch served as an emblem of
duplicitous begging. A cartoon in the June 1856 issue of Yankee
Notions shows several alarmed citizens looking at what is labeled a
duplicitous begging. A cartoon in the June 1856 issue of Yankee
Notions shows several alarmed citizens looking at what is labeled a
QUOTE The portrait is festooned with wooden crutches, which frame
the image of a woman in madonna-like garb who thumbs her nose at an
apparently respectable group of onlookers (Fig. 1). Another
representation of affected disability, this time of the QUOTE
variety (Fig. 2), features a woman with stereotypically Irish
rhythms of speech whose ruse of blindness is discovered by the man
she tries to deceive. Both representations play with the notion of
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 317-328
American Nationalism--R.I.P.
Bruce Burgett
---------------
and norms that governed the discourse of civility through which
political and social power was deployed and contested in the
colonies. They also document the rise of those QUOTE (nonstate)
institutions that European critics such as J�rgen Habermas and
Reinhart Koselleck group together as the emerging public sphere of
civil society.
The immediate benefit of this research is that it renders obsolete
earlier critics who toed the American exceptionalist line by
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 181-211
Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth
Brook Thomas
---------------
Wendell Holmes, Jr., summarized much nineteenth-century writing on
law's anthropological function when he wrote: QUOTE (2). Adultery is
a case in point. Prior to the sixth century, revenge for adultery in
England was carried out by the wronged husband and his kinship
group. This reliance on vendetta resulted in longstanding blood
feuds. To stop the social disruption caused by cycles of revenge,
Aethelberht created his Code of Dooms that gave responsibility for
punishing adultery and other crimes to the state. In his famous
Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and
her QUOTE (161). She willingly chooses to wear it, in part because
through her own agency the letter has QUOTE (263). In contrast, the
possibility of achieving the status of model citizen through
individual effort was denied African Americans because their race
meant that, as a group, they inherited a badge of slavery, whose
stigma persisted. The civil society argument about QUOTE by itself
is not adequate to deal with that problem (Walzer, QUOTE 7). Instead
a much more traditional argument about active citizen participation
in the political sphere would seem to be called for.
American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444
The Writing of Haiti: Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond
Anna Brickhouse
---------------
rights to its almost entirely noir population of slaves. 14
Boyer's presidency had ended, however, long before the actual publication of
Faubert's play. Facing not only noir opposition to his mul�tre supremacy but
the political attacks of a group of young mul�tre reformers, Boyer was
ousted from office in 1842 and deported to Paris, where he remained until
his death. The following years witnessed rapid changes in Haiti's political
climate, involving a series of noir uprisings against the mul�tre elite
(Heinl 189), and culminating in the presidency of Faustin Soulouque, who,
compatriots, that QUOTE (102). Whatever Og� and his fellow gens de couleur
libres may have said to the contrary was only QUOTE the colonial official
argues; Og�'s true QUOTE was nothing less than QUOTE (102-03). Here, the
Procureur G�n�ral quotes at length from what he contends are Og�'s actual
words, during a well-documented historical meeting with a group of colonial
planters in Paris, describing the right of all men to liberty-- QUOTE the
colonial official bitterly concludes (102). Only the absence of a source in
the notes indicates the fictional status of Og�'s speech, which is rendered
in the same style as the play's numerous other quotations from historical
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
rotting corpse was brought back into view. When soldiers sang "John Brown�s
Body," they did not simply celebrate Brown�s death or its redemptive
aftermath, but rather the very process of transformation through which
corpses, in all their gruesome and seemingly intractable materiality, are
reinterpreted as group spirit: [End Page 640] the song schooled soldiers in
the abstraction of bodily suffering that allows for the amplification of the
body�s social meaning.
Keeping the rotting corpse firmly in view, the song speaks to the problem, at
essay examines the construction of Brown�s martyrdom--by friends and foes, the
press, and Brown himself--in the weeks preceding and following his "public
murder."4 The struggle over the significance of Brown�s death was, most
broadly, a contest over the political meaning of the violated body--its
ability to confer identity to a group and to grant that identity political
legitimacy. Abolitionists who supported Brown took their cues from Brown
himself: describing the raid on Harpers Ferry as an example of sympathy put
into practice, they viewed the violence initiated and suffered by Brown as a
model for further antislavery activism. Embracing Brown�s resistance to unjust
Because he is willing to suffer physical rather than emotional pain, the
martyr undermines the analogy which at once associates and divides victim and
spectator. In doing so, he realizes the most extraordinary and ominous
implications of sympathetic thought--that suffering inflicted on one person,
or one group of people, will inevitably express itself as violence which
transcends distinctions of circumstance and identity altogether.
3
-
face is again "Hidden in the cap" and analogized to Virginia�s "veiled" future
(11). In the absence of the literal body, the meaning of Brown�s corpse grows.
It comes to signify a future of apocalyptic violence. In retrospect, the
military spectacle intended to control Brown�s power seems instead to embody
it; standing in for Brown�s body this group of soldiers--yet another community
brought into being by Brown�s actions--testifies, unwittingly, to his
influence.
5
redemption, the absence of black bodies suggests the tendency of wartime
culture to suppress the importance of slavery while taking the suffering of
slaves, as elaborated by reformist discourse, as a model for the suffering of
soldiers. If sympathy reliably intimates the power of individual suffering to
generate group identity, its applications vary widely depending on whether the
collective that is galvanized by an individual�s pain stands in for state
authority or resists it.
As the enduring popularity of "John Brown�s Body" suggests, Governor Wise
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
national contract is moot, however, since Garrison's imagining of black
civility rhetorically separates black Americans from the body politic. Asking
his audience, "Do you not congratulate yourselves that you are so united?"
(_Address_ 13) and relegating "division" to licentious whites, Garrison
defines civility as group cohesion. Even while Garrison asks blacks to become
model citizens in ways that seem to promise incorporation within the national
public, then, he also asks them to remain coherent as a group presumably
distinct and distinguishable from the national body as a whole.
his audience, "Do you not congratulate yourselves that you are so united?"
(_Address_ 13) and relegating "division" to licentious whites, Garrison
defines civility as group cohesion. Even while Garrison asks blacks to become
model citizens in ways that seem to promise incorporation within the national
public, then, he also asks them to remain coherent as a group presumably
distinct and distinguishable from the national body as a whole.
The dynamic of always already failed emulation is prefigured in the
pedagogical structure of the address itself: praising his audience for the
Neither the appropriation of another's suffering nor the consequent
inauthenticity is particular to the remarkably earnest Garrison. Rather, both
were central to the allure and the anxiety caused by antebellum reform in the
US. Appeals to the sufferings of a "group" to which one did not belong--the
poor, alcoholics, criminals, sex workers--increasingly supplied the intimate
pain that entitled more privileged citizens to engage in public debate with
an authorized moral authority. Taking one's authenticating intimacy from a
group by definition alienated from one's social identity both generated and
US. Appeals to the sufferings of a "group" to which one did not belong--the
poor, alcoholics, criminals, sex workers--increasingly supplied the intimate
pain that entitled more privileged citizens to engage in public debate with
an authorized moral authority. Taking one's authenticating intimacy from a
group by definition alienated from one's social identity both generated and
forestalled claims to authentic interiority. To be sure, these reformers
brought about significant changes in American civil life, relieving suffering
and remedying social policies through their moral activism. Despite their
label as "reformers," however, some, such as Garrison himself, wanted a
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
analysis of class and institutional structures with that of
strategic combinations. The combination is best expressed in the
commonplace, "What is the primary object of government, but to *[End
Page 15]* check and control the ambitious and designing" (no. 5),
stressing institutional checks on group actions. Other essays
contained systemic analyses on a diverse range of political and
social questions, including the institutional balance of powers
(no.1); the dissipation of public criticism via the differentiation
of governmental agencies (no.1); the importance of a free press and
approve the impost _and_ guarantee the military pensions. The
officers responded accordingly, warning congressional authorities of
possible mutiny. When the impost was still not passed, the
nationalists heightened the pressure, and through various liaisons
invited a group of officers to threaten--or appear to threaten--a
coup d'�tat. These officers appear to have taken this project
seriously, and in March 1783, two mutinous letters were distributed
throughout the army camp. 24 The nationalists certainly did not want
a coup, which, if effected, would likely undermine attempts to
the flow and texture of culture._
This second-order conspiratorial rhetoric, as a type of cultural
mapping, should not be overly individualized. In a discussion of
group cultures, Jameson argues that the "anthropologist-other"
viewing the cultural collective is not a lone observer, but "stands
in for a whole social group." He continues, "it is in this sense
that his knowledge is a form of power, where 'knowledge' designates
something individual, and 'power' tries to characterize that mode of
This second-order conspiratorial rhetoric, as a type of cultural
mapping, should not be overly individualized. In a discussion of
group cultures, Jameson argues that the "anthropologist-other"
viewing the cultural collective is not a lone observer, but "stands
in for a whole social group." He continues, "it is in this sense
that his knowledge is a form of power, where 'knowledge' designates
something individual, and 'power' tries to characterize that mode of
relationship between groups for which our vocabulary is so poor"
("On _Cultural Studies_" 272). The second-order conspiracy theorist
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
without sensing how such a materialism was also bound up with (or bound
by) a regionalist temper that precipitated a significant shift in
anthropology: away from the diachronic, evolutionist narration of
technology that considers "the whole human race in space and time as a
single group" and toward the synchronic description of cultures that
are symbolically and physically self-contained (Mason, "Report" 63).
Indeed, the analogy between regionalist writing and anthropology has
been underwritten by a sense not of epistemology but of genre: the
And yet by the 1890s, and extensively in the 1893 exposition,
anthropology had begun to rely on what we might call a narrative
exhibitionary genre--the environmental reconstructions, the so-called
life-group exhibits that became increasingly popular with curators
despite their expense. These demonstrated the contingencies of time and
place in a way that previous displays could not. They constellated
person, place, and thing into an absorbing drama, supposedly bringing a
local culture to life. These were the exhibits that most significantly
material object and a materialized human body--a mannequin made of
plaster and wax--itself attached to a materialized milieu, composed of
other objects. In _The Country of the Pointed Firs,_ Jewett's sketches
attain, in their tableaux of the everyday, something of the uncanny
arrangement of these life-group exhibits, and together the sketches and
the exhibits help disclose the logic, or the metonymic magic, whereby
an object seems to embody a way of life, attaining an aura of culture.
The act of differentiating between the merely curious and the
gathered about the life-size groups of Scandinavian peasants" (Donald
Mitchell 891; see Rydell 58). Hazelius was hardly alone in exhibiting
mannequin tableaux, but the specificity of the scene and the narrative
force of the grouping established the Scandinavian contribution as the
ideal to be achieved, and established the life-group as the mode of
localizing culture while bringing artifacts to life.
For the Atlanta exhibit of 1895, and working for the Smithsonian, Boas
himself created a display to supplement those "scientific" exhibits
producing type. They demonstrated that the cultural aura of an object
is transmitted by a point of contact, however ghostly, between one
human and another.
Just as the genre of the life-group thrived beyond the walls of the
ethnology museum--in the 1880s the first wax mannequins (still
headless) were used in display windows, which became inseparable from
the success of the ready-to-wear garment industry--so too the genealogy
of the life-group in America can be traced to various forms of
Just as the genre of the life-group thrived beyond the walls of the
ethnology museum--in the 1880s the first wax mannequins (still
headless) were used in display windows, which became inseparable from
the success of the ready-to-wear garment industry--so too the genealogy
of the life-group in America can be traced to various forms of
representation: tableaux vivants, photographs, habitat groups, and the
wax museum and its progeny in circuses and dime museums (see, e.g.,
Leach 64-65 and Haraway 26-58). Such a diverse genealogy no doubt
contributed to Goode's sense that the environmental groups necessarily
genre that dramatized stasis, intensely indexical and iconic signs
meant to arrest and spectacularize history. Plaster life casts used by
the artists working for Boas could result in the same effect, of an
uncannily lifelike body in motion but out of time. Such uncanniness
remains in the record of the exhibits at fairs, where the life-group
displays competed with the exhibits of living natives: when Rebecca
Harding Davis describes an Eskimo exhibit at the Centennial Exposition,
it's impossible to tell *[End Page 207]* whether the family is a family
of mannequins or real ("Odd Corners" 950).
Harding Davis describes an Eskimo exhibit at the Centennial Exposition,
it's impossible to tell *[End Page 207]* whether the family is a family
of mannequins or real ("Odd Corners" 950).
The use of the life-group to vitalize physical objects thus brings the
human into a kind of crisis, into a posture of instability between
animate and inanimate. The magic that fosters a cultural apprehension
of objects threatens to reify the human. As much as the anthropologists
wanted to exhibit "not things, but men," they did so in part by
story were longer it "would have no plot. I should have to fill it out
with descriptions of character and meditations. It seems to me clear I
can furnish the theatre, and show you the actors, and the scenery, and
the audience, but there never is any play" (_Letters_ 29). Drama
without a play amounts to a life-group exhibit, a tableau, in which
humans remain as inanimate as the material things around them, in which
time has come to a stop. Indeed, the remarkable absence of children
from _The Country of the Pointed Firs,_ coupled with the absence of
Christian faith, does not simply mark Jewett's difference from the
secular and spiritual futurity; it helps to arrest time on behalf of
apprehending an autonomous and self-contained culture. Wrested from the
diachrony of technological progress, the material objects are now
frozen in the synchrony of cultural coherence. If Jewett's fiction
helps us to understand the narrative force of the life-group exhibits,
then, those exhibits help to show how her fiction can feel like
narrative standing still, less like a tableau, even, than a still-life.
3. Material History
mise-en-sc�ne, with its bed and blankets, sword and leathern scabbard,
pistols, "and the bellows wherewith he urged the fire and kindled the
unwilling wood when snow lay upon the ground and all was sodden and
dreary" ("The Centennial" 781). This metamorphosis from description to
a kind of narration--crucial in the subsequent life-group
displays--recurs in the account of the camp chest: "[T]his has
compartments large and small, deep and shallow. Some of them are for
the dishes. . . ; others for the square bottles holding vinegar. . . ;
smaller bottles for red and black pepper, square boxes for his salt,
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 348-357
Perpetual Emotion Machine
Michelle Burnham
---------------
admirable effort to resist repeating this same "unifying story," by
the narratological difficulty of including both halves of the loaf,
of telling the story of those moving ahead without leaving out the
story of those left behind (but who nevertheless keep showing up).
Read as a group, these four books under review suggest that it is
around this phantom and troubling "half loaf" that liberalism takes
on its sentimental structure of feeling. The question they
collectively raise, therefore, is whether sentimental liberalism can
integrate these counterstories without abandoning its own emotional
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
identify the dissonance between the pictorial representation, a white
planter, and its human referent, a runaway woman. In other words, the image
is not passing at all. Robinson contends that the structure of passing is a
triangular one in which "the passer, the dupe, and a representative of the
in-group--enact a complex narrative scenario in which a successful pass is
performed in the presence of a literate member of the in-group" (723). When
the "visibility of the apparatus of passing, the machinery that enables the
performance," was available, "Mr. Johnson's" viewers could choose between
locations: those in the know or those outside of it. Those who chose to
planter, and its human referent, a runaway woman. In other words, the image
is not passing at all. Robinson contends that the structure of passing is a
triangular one in which "the passer, the dupe, and a representative of the
in-group--enact a complex narrative scenario in which a successful pass is
performed in the presence of a literate member of the in-group" (723). When
the "visibility of the apparatus of passing, the machinery that enables the
performance," was available, "Mr. Johnson's" viewers could choose between
locations: those in the know or those outside of it. Those who chose to
identify as literate members, "in-group" clairvoyants, *[End Page 528]*
performed in the presence of a literate member of the in-group" (723). When
the "visibility of the apparatus of passing, the machinery that enables the
performance," was available, "Mr. Johnson's" viewers could choose between
locations: those in the know or those outside of it. Those who chose to
identify as literate members, "in-group" clairvoyants, *[End Page 528]*
unlike those duped in the narrative and during the escape, could reassert
the connection between racial telling and knowing. It is the pleasure and
power implicit in that racially reconstructive act, perhaps, that helped
make the cut successful as a curio and commodity. Moreover, viewers could
Frantz Fanon will echo Boucicault, querying "what indeed could be more
illogical than a mulatto woman's acceptance of a Negro husband?" (54).
23. The illicit visual possibilities of William and Ellen's partnering were
disrupted again, when an interracial group including the Crafts promenaded
through London's 1851 Great Exhibition to view the popular sculpture "The
Greek Slave" among nobility, members of Parliament, and Queen Victoria's
party. Ellen made her appearance on the arm of an English officer of the
National Reform Association, and William Wells Brown and William Craft
27. Robinson argues that identity politics can be figured "as a skill of
reading by African American and/or gay and lesbian spectators of the
cultural performance of passing. . . . Disrupting the conventional dyad of
passer and dupe with a third term--the _in-group clairvoyant_--the pass can
be regarded as a triangular theater of identity" (716).
28. Spirit rapping became popular in the 1850s and 60s and was practiced by
abolitionists like Jacobs's good friend Amy Post and by Adah Isaacs Menken
_American Literary History_ 15.1 (2003) 14-21
The Claims of Rhetoric: Toward a Historical Poetics (1820-1900)
Shira Wolosky
---------------
an integral part of America's poetic enterprise, even while gender
introduces specific textual questions and expressions. At issue in
this poetry are both new conceptions of America as a national
framework and new conceptions of the individual's place within it.
Yet, rather than emphasizing group identifications as determinative,
with pluralism measured through the interactions between groups,
this poetry suggests a possibility of multiple participations in a
number of groups, with a relatively *[End Page 18]* high degree of
voluntarism and permeability. Identity in this sense itself becomes
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 248-275
Walt Whitman and the Question of Copyright
Martin T. Buinicki
---------------
Whitman clearly was in sympathy with the artisans, who were such an
important part of his development. His close association with the
workers, the tradesmen, those who felt dispossessed by the rapid
industrial advances, "flowed quite naturally from the historical
experience of that specific social group to which Whitman belonged,
both by origin and by conscious allegiance--an experience of being
subject to social, economic, and political processes beyond their
control, which eventually revolutionized every aspect of their
lives, and to which the victims affixed the emotive term 'monopoly'"
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
with readers' realities, suggesting that personal loss prepared one to share
in and identify with a larger national community of suffering. As Berlant
suggests, practitioners of nineteenth-century romance hoped that the
"sentimental could promote individual acts of identification based on
collective group memberships," not through a homogeneous sense of
citizenship, but through "the capacity for suffering and trauma at the
citizen's core" (636). In this way, romancers believed that the production
ofsentimentalism would initiate a repetition of the reader's past *[End Page
285]* suffering--an act of literary engagement that would injure the reader
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
Friendly Club, 1795-1798"; and Thomas Bender, _New York Intellect: A History
of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own
Time_ (1987). Bender's useful overview is marred by a mistaken conflation,
dating to nineteenth-century histories of the city, of the Friendly Club with
another group, the Calliopean Society.
6. No one living in Philadelphia or New York--or any other major city from
Charleston to Baltimore to Boston--escaped the repeated epidemics without
losing at least an acquaintance. Prior to the 1798 epidemic, New York had
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
traversed the course of fertile valleys and past busy factories.... It went
through lonely forests.... It heard the music of the sea..." (qtd. in Marvin
196). So, too, the scholars of such words had seen themselves as great
explorers. In his 1884 Presidential Address to the Philological Society,
Murray considered his group at the _Dictionary_ to be "pioneers, pushing our
way *[End Page 494]* experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no
white man's axe has been before us" (509). Earlier, he had written to Henry
Sweet in 1882: "I am absolutely a pioneer.... [N]obody except my predecessors
in specimens of the Dicty. has yet tried to trace out historically the sense
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
literally buy the liberty that whites possess. As Ernest puts it,
Blake's "literal and figurative map to liberty" ironically
"capitaliz[es] on the dominant culture's bankrupt moral economy"
(122-23). The novel makes this economic lesson concrete shortly
after this scene, when Henry, leading a group of runaway slaves,
encounters a recalcitrant ferryman who refuses to accept their
forged passes and row them across the Arkansas River. Henry
therefore shows the man "a shining gold eagle." Seeing this monetary
"emblem of his country's liberty, the skiffman's patriotism was at
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 407-436
_Slaves in Algiers:_ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
---------------
the contingent creations of people attracted to liberal
republicanism" (Smith, "Constructing" 20-21). As Smith suggests,
racialization in this period is less aimed at identifying the
_Other_ as different and therefore undesirable than at creating a
broad national coherence out of a group of individuals with
primarily local attachments.4
In the midst of the debates between Federalists and Republicans, an
enormous amount of public attention turned to the Barbary captivity
Boydston indicates that the elitism of Federalist politics was
hospitable to a privileged white woman such as Murray. Because
Federalists believed that an upper echelon should lead the nation,
they could countenance (at times) the inclusion of elite women
within this group of political agents.11 Republicans, in turn,
decried hierarchies of class and property ownership, arguing for a
more inclusive and democratic polity. Ultimately, however, the
expansion of political rights, for Republicans, obtained only for
white men and occurred at the expense of white women and persons of
associated with Barbary pirates because of the role of prominent
Jewish bankers from Algeria in negotiating the release of the
captives.13 Shifting configurations of Jewishness thus point to a
concern with linking whiteness and American identity to the
exclusion of Jews as a racial and religious group. In Rowson's play,
Hassan's willingness to place self-interest and financial concerns
above those of nation and family seem to mark him, in particular, as
the antithesis of American virtue, a virtue that Rowson sought to
identify with a nationalist-branded commerce and liberty. In a song
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
During New York's political wars of the 1730s, Horsmanden rose to
prominence because he was skilled at using the written word to
defend Governor Cosby's imperial administration against a rival
group led by Lewis Morris, chief justice of the provincial court.
When the administration grew irritated with the opposition's
criticism, it charged the opposition's public voice, the New York
_Weekly Journal_, and its editor, John Peter Zenger, with publishing
seditious material. Governor Cosby appointed Horsmanden to acouncil
plot: the first-day, second-day chronology is the flashing red light
of a conspiracy that inevitably grows into a security threat with
each passing day. Because Horsmanden aims to identify the origins of
the plot, the first detail also happens to evoke the final threat of
a potential slave conspiracy. A group of slaves walk down the street
after yet another mysterious fire in the spring of 1741, and a white
woman, Mrs. Earle, looking out her window, overhears one of them,
Quack, boast "with a vaporing sort of an air, 'Fire, Fire, Scorch,
Scorch, ALITTLE, damn it, BY-AND-BY,' and then [he] threw up his
This new patriotism of empire transformed the racial climate in New
York City; when the fort burned to the ground, followed by the
governor's home, people were conditioned to see a Spanish-led
conspiracy rather than an accidental overturning of a lantern, a
homegrown group of disgruntled slaves, or a local gang of thieves.
For example, one potent image circulating in reports on the war was
of slave forces fighting on both sides, reports that surely caused
many New Yorkers to worry about war's potential effects upon the
slave population. The Caribbean practice of using slave militias in
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
Rather than merely stabilizing the ideology of separate spheres, the
long history of nineteenth-century domesticity-inspired reform
movements, whose ultimate aim had been state intervention on behalf
of an oppressed racial group, often resulted in a transformed
relationship between the state, the groups imagined as the
beneficiaries of reform, and the domestic reformers, who based their
justification for moral interventions within the public sphere upon
the very conceptual binary their actions abridged. Whether
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
society governed by "laws of conspicuous and performed identity"
(Fisher 165). But they are also practices pressed into the service
of class formation, that paradoxical process which constitutes
individuals by equipping them with the signs and tokens of a social
group. Together, these practices function in a highly ambiguous
manner to both make and unmake the self, weaving and unraveling the
fabric of identity as they perform their cultural work. *[End Page
599]*
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
crucial role in Washington's technique for—as he calls
it—"master[ing] my audience" (243). Despite his disavowal of
literary pursuits, Washington suggests here that public speaking
depends upon literary language—the story or
anecdote—for the forging of a group identity joined by
communal feelings of "sympathy and oneness." On the occasion in
question, this technique seems to have met with unprecedented
success: James Creelman's account of the Atlanta Exposition Address
in the _New York World_ notes that "the multitude was in an uproar
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
Eager to level the literary playing field, Poe began in early 1841
to advocate an international copyright law to protect American
authors (1: 152), a move that eventually led to his pragmatic
affiliation with the American Copyright Club and with Evert
Duyckinck's nationalist "Young America" group.7 In 1844, shortly
after moving to New York, Poe confided to James Russell Lowell that
he had been "collecting and arranging materials for a Critical
History of Am. Literature" (1: 261), surveying US writing as a
discrete field defined by national commonalities—although
Accusing his examiners of incivility, the mummy shatters their
pretensions to superiority. In a gesture of cultural denial, they
affect no alarm and refuse to consider "that any thing had gone
especially wrong" (811), yet Allamistakeo reveals their mistake,
reducing the group to silence *[End Page 24 ]* and infantile
thumb-sucking. Their illusions of Anglo-Saxon progress and mastery,
sustained by the successive boasts that comprise their argument,
collapse before incontrovertible evidence of Egyptian scientific and
technological prowess. Even when the moderns finally baffle
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
in "Moore's 'Kiss � l'Antique and Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,'"
Notes and Queries n. s. 28 (1981): 316-17.
52. Moore, Ode 39, in Poetical Works, 23. Moore's Anacreon ends with
a group of old age poems supplementary to the accepted sixty
Anacreontea (Odes 61-79, plus some unnumbered fragments) that
acknowledge aging, but still in a lighthearted way.
53. Even in the landscapes of the early Blake one can sense an
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
as to place masochism as the origin of fantasy." 10 In other words,
the very source of the imaginative function itself can be assigned to
the masochistic impulse. Whether or not we are willing to accept this
extreme view, most psychoanalytical authorities generally agree that
some form of mimesis designates the central group of masochism's
clinical symptoms.
According to Reik and Deleuze the transgressive principles of
masochism are found precisely in painting and the theater. "Wanda,"
conception." 11 Among numerous examples, he gives us the English
officer who had researched a cycle of fantasies with the thoroughness
of a diligent neoclassical dramatist: "[There] was a phase when he was
sexually excited by the idea of sacrifice of prisoners in the Aztec
kingdom. The 'Queen cycle' was a group of fantasies in which a queen
of the Amazons had her lovers subjected to horrible torments . . . The
'Marsyas cycle' centered around the well-known myth of Marsyas's
quarrel with Apollo." 12 In these fantasies, of course, the clinical
subject himself is always the victim.
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
Fielding invokes the sublime by suggesting the scene is unrepresentable. And
yet it is closer to what Marshall Brown has called the "urbane sublime" than
the Burkean sublime. 6 He carefully situates the conditions of observation:
he is not a solitary poet, but among a group, "women and all"--when the
women had been seasick, Fielding found his hours of solitude "the most
disagreeable" that had ever "haunted" him (V, 122). The weather is so
pleasant "that even my old distemper perceived the alteration of the
climate" (V, 125), and after weeks of waiting for a wind they have "flown"
Fielding's theory of historical change involves not simply the
transformation of individuals, but the transformation of manners. The
manners of the various time travelers--the Man of the Hill, Squire Western,
the Gypsies--are all different; that they coexist is an indication that
Fielding does not see change as uniform. A particular social group--country
Tories, for example--might be insulated from change to a greater or lesser
degree, thus transforming themselves at a different rate. Fielding's gypsies
seem almost entirely insulated from change, whereas tradesmen, who depend on
their successful interaction with a multiplicity of social groups, are not.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
emotional therapeutics of sentimental narrative are grounded in this
reliance on culturally authorized models of feeling and response.
Still, if sentimentality may reasonably be seen as "safe emotion" that
"reassures the self about the group," its compelling power is
nonetheless derived, in large measure, from the proscribed (or
"disagreeable") feelings through which sentimental response has been so
perilously routed and from the residual pressure of those same feelings
in the surcharge of emotion which has long defined sentimental affect.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
described a Barrie novel as an "excursion into boyhood in pursuit of its
sentimental qualities" whose main character was "a creature of fermenting
mind, companioning his own emotions." 29 More often than not sentimentality
has been a charge used to dismiss Kailyard narratives. In 1935, George Blake
scornfully accused Kailyarders of being "a small group of sentimental, if
gifted, Scots, [who] gratified Victorian sentimentality." 30
I want to argue, however, that affect functions as an ideological instrument
of nation to cloak, ossify, contain, and enforce social differences. Feelings
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
and a fiercely partisan one, who viewed the war against Napoleon
with uncomplicated enthusiasm. But whereas his Toryism had once
found occasion to express itself only in outbreaks of patriotic
hooliganism, as when he went to the theater in Edinburgh armed with
a cudgel for the express purpose of leading an attack on a group of
Irish radicals who were intent on drowning out any attempt to sing
the national anthem, the war allowed him to present his conservatism
in its most dignified guise, as an expression of national purpose
within which mere party political differences were subsumed. 31 So,
ELH 66.4 (1999) 965-984
Fathoming "Remembrance": Emily Bronte in Context
Janet Gezari
---------------
the context of her century's fears of both remembering and
forgetting the dead seems to me a more likely route to understanding
it than, for example, reading it in relation to Emily Bront�'s
personal experience, or to the experience of Gondal characters, or
to the experience of "belonging to a particular group defined by
their sexuality," the context Isobel Armstrong proposes for reading
the poetry of Victorian women writers. 39 Death and dying are the
main subject of Emily Bront�'s nearly two hundred poems, Wuthering
Heights is the nineteenth-century's greatest novel about mourning,
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
because he is an inheritor of the nineteenth-century tradition that is my
subject and partly because no single name in the modern history of American
criticism so efficiently represents a belief in the value of literary
criticism, conceived broadly as a reader's testimony to the nature and value
of the experience offered by a particular text or group of texts. 3 [End Page
987]
A favorite and familiar critical procedure of twenty years ago was the
demonstration that one or another avowedly un-theoretical, or
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
to cause it in patients, Lewes abandoned the study of medicine in
favor of a career in letters. Such a vocation would entail the
production of far less pain, even in the unfortunate readers of his
tedious philosophical novel Ranthorpe (1847), which in fact presents
the antics of a group of boisterous medical students in London.
For nearly two decades Lewes labored as a literary journalist, hack
playwright, reviewer, editor, and biographer of Goethe; this last
project involved the 1854 trip to Weimar that semi-publicly
Disraeli, and even Queen Victoria herself; along with the Earl of
Shaftesbury and Cardinal Manning, Carlyle was an officer of Cobbe's
Victoria Street Society. 25 On the side of vivisection, or at least
in favor of the freedom of physiologists to engage in "animal
experiment," was a smaller group consisting chiefly of scientists
and medical researchers, including Huxley, Owen, Spencer, Darwin,
and Lewes. 26 In light of the length and acrimony of the debate, it
seems fair to conclude that "[h]owever marginal England may have
been for experimental physiology" in comparison to France and
Bernard's laboratory, which he had recently visited. Hoggan laments
that "although hundreds of such abuses are being constantly
perpetrated amongst us, the public knows no more about them than
what the distant echo reflected from some handbook for the
laboratory affords"; the group of scientists who wrote the notorious
Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory had in fact been inspired
by the work of Bernard, and the Handbook's editor was one of his
former students. 66 The figure of Bernard haunted the debate even
after his death in 1878, as Frances Power Cobbe and her fellow
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
permits him to imitate just such visitors, to play one of those
"influence men" who can claim Brace as "my friend" and dole out
advice and encouragement to hapless newsboys. 30 For what is so very
funny about Paddy's identificatory claim that "I was a bummer once"
is the group's knowledge that the speaker had been a bummer--"roving
about the streets of night without sleep"--in the recent past, and
no doubt would soon be one again. 31 Thus it is in the gap between
the actual present tense and this fictive past tense of progress and
reform that Paddy's play doubles into critique. Paddy pleases both
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
in the form of a dowry, and, as anthropologists Arensberg and
Kimball note, "when we remember that the farm is identified in
popular thinking with the patrilineal and patronymic family line of
the land-owner and that the girl is an outsider brought into that
group, the money appears as a payment for the girl's inclusion." 35
The groom's family received a monetary return for assuming the
burden of what Irish sociologist David Fitzpatrick labels "another
redundant dependant female." 36 The female as "redundant" resonates
on a number of levels, marking an important intersection between
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
I have both a formal and a historical problem which may yet prove to be part
and parcel of one another. Formally, I have traced how a silent syllable
metrically nominates an act of withholding, whose rhythmic effect in a
number of exceptional lines encourages either a scansion that will obstruct
that occlusion, or the suppression of a group of phonemes which, even as
they are phonically wiped, leave a graphic residue--a residue that, despite
being "relieved of [its] communicative function," retains through opacity a
capacity to imply a buried referent. Indeed, by systematically going
missing, these graphemes suggest that something has been missed. My formal
they are phonically wiped, leave a graphic residue--a residue that, despite
being "relieved of [its] communicative function," retains through opacity a
capacity to imply a buried referent. Indeed, by systematically going
missing, these graphemes suggest that something has been missed. My formal
problem can be simply stated: why should a group of sub-communicative
effects, amounting to opacity, retain a semblance of transparency? In this
instance, reading the unreadable, or trying to demystify textual effects as
they stop short of articulation, might well start at the level of the poem's
announced referent, Lenore or "the death . . . of a beautiful woman." The
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
the ideological position from which the song proceeds. Songs were
especially threatening for being orally reproducible and not
dependent on print, for being collective rather than
individualistic, and for being the symbolic interaction of a
politicized group outside the purview of constitutionally sanctioned
authority. They were an indispensable component of democratic reform
dinners, London Corresponding Society meetings, radical assemblies,
and protests. Even after severely repressive legislation made open
political work impossible, radicals could still retreat to their
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
might be falsified or betrayed by the requirements of those
institutions. 10 It might be said, in fact, that The Watchman's
counterconfessional strategy comes to be defined by assuming a
necessary disagreement or misalignment between an individual's
beliefs and the beliefs required for group membership. However The
Watchman may initially align its sympathies in the Prospectus with
radical political groups, the journal's more pervasive strategies
effect an even more rigorous logic of disassociation. Any
association of persons, that is, amounts to a falsified account of
(CW, 2:12, 14). Although he would later characterize The Watchman as
an effort in journalism that was too highly politicized, the more
vexing problem with the work is, perhaps, that it pursues its
commitment to disassociation so relentlessly that it threatens to
undo any kind of group membership whatsoever.
Such rigorous sectarianism--a sectarianism too constraining for sect
itself--could be read as an ailment in Coleridge's thinking that The
Friend successfully cures. Indeed, he introduces The Friend--which
readers. Indeed, there is a great deal in these works to suggest
that something else is at stake besides the preservation of a
"polemic divinity" that I mentioned earlier. For the very act of
writing in which Coleridge imagines himself to be engaged involves
consolidating a group of like-minded believers, or so it would seem
when he directs the Statesman's Manual towards "a very different
audience" from that which he finds in the present British public.
Just as a system of education should recognize classes of
individuals and educate them according to the "sphere in which the
objects and actions that convey to the believer the powers of a
higher authority: "amulets, bead-rolls, periapts, fetisches, and the
like pedlary, on pilgrimages to Loretto, Mecca, or the temple of
Jaggernaut, arm in arm with sensuality on one side and self-torture
on the other, followed by a motley group of friars, pardoners,
faquirs, gamesters, flagellants, mountebanks, and harlots" (CW,
6:64-65). The terms that Coleridge uses not only remind us of the
opposition to Warburton, but also of The Friend's discourse on
witchcraft and sorcery; more than attempts to ridicule foreign or
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
picture, the stage, not print, is the populist medium, and print
does not aid but rather restricts democratic communication. 9 In
Sheridan's articulation, theater is public because plays are
presented before an "assembly" of individuals whose shared attention
to the spectacle on stage constitutes them as a group. So cohesive
is this group in Sheridan's utopian vision that he considers them as
a single friend. By contrast, readers in his view are always private
individuals. In an era when most authors had conceded to the
existence of a literary market driven by the reading public,
does not aid but rather restricts democratic communication. 9 In
Sheridan's articulation, theater is public because plays are
presented before an "assembly" of individuals whose shared attention
to the spectacle on stage constitutes them as a group. So cohesive
is this group in Sheridan's utopian vision that he considers them as
a single friend. By contrast, readers in his view are always private
individuals. In an era when most authors had conceded to the
existence of a literary market driven by the reading public,
Sheridan denies the collective status and influence of the English
consisted in Sheridan's time of 558 members, fewer than half were
likely to be present for each day's session. Of those, fewer than
twelve would typically speak in a debate on a relatively unimportant
issue; 25 to 30 would speak in an important debate. Thus the scene
would have looked very much like a play, with a group of actors
performing for an audience which, while responsive and often vocal,
was not thoroughly interactive. 33
Common interjections from that audience included exhortations that
is, "gentlemen and provincial bourgeois of modest means whose
commitment to the interests of their friends, neighbours and
'country' (i.e. locality) outweighed the lure of office or gain."
Thus, during this period, parliamentary politics "revolved around
this group far more crucially than around the King's Friends.
Whichever aristocratic party was in power, its leaders sought to
reassure the Independents that they were diligently upholding
Britain's interests overseas, were (relatively) honest and frugal
and that the King was content to keep them in office. Any
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
violence in the hands of a single legitimate authority, while more
utopian thinkers hope to eradicate conflict by eliminating its
perceived social causes. 28 The recognition of external threat as a
factor in the life of all possible social organizations, however,
distinguishes Wordsworth from the latter group, and his support for
the Spanish guerrillas, who represent the widest possible
dissemination of the responsibility for civil defense, sets him
apart from the former. This combination of concerns makes Wordsworth
a fairly unique political thinker. The egalitarian foundation out of
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
Heather Glen in a valuable introduction to the novel, "self itself
appears to be held together by violence." 11 While this point is
almost indisputable, it could also be applied to most of Bront�'s
works. In _Shirley,_ for instance, violence governs--indeed,
characterizes--the novel's interest in group bonds. Surpassing _The
Professor,_ _Shirley_ does more than interrupt the reputed
continuity between _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_; for significant
reasons the novel fails to restrict hatred to the private realm.
_Shirley_'s conception of interiority and exteriority makes this
Because it distrusts these claims about social harmony, _Shirley_
undermines all myths about communities (including bourgeois ones),
in this way veering uncannily close to Barraclough's antisocial
impulses. The novel arguably cannot define group ideals without
identifying a type of misanthropy that is capable of thwarting them.
Granted, the novel stops short of this full undertaking, trying
ultimately to narrow the gap between Moore and Farren by
recommending that the former treat the latter fairly. But it does so
can women find self-fulfillment in a state that seems inimical to
their happiness? _Shirley_ answers this question by viewing marriage
relative to a larger dilemma about being a citizen, with
responsibilities to others, nagging doubts about what constitutes a
desirable group tie, and a host of unspoken expectations that
impedes the autonomy of individuals. Partly because interpersonal
enmity glides so easily into community warfare, the novel often
implies that group ties aren't worth the effort. *[End Page 212]*
responsibilities to others, nagging doubts about what constitutes a
desirable group tie, and a host of unspoken expectations that
impedes the autonomy of individuals. Partly because interpersonal
enmity glides so easily into community warfare, the novel often
implies that group ties aren't worth the effort. *[End Page 212]*
To stress this point, the narrator begins the novel in 1812, close
to Napoleon's defeat, with a caustic account of three local curates:
Donne, Malone, and Sweeting. _Shirley_'s opening chapter is entitled
ostensibly in times of _peace,_ Lucy Snowe, the protagonist, seldom
experiences tranquillity, instead viewing her peers, students,
employer, and even the man who would be her future spouse as a
menace from whom she requires sanctuary. In this regard, the novel
develops _Shirley_'s meditations on group ties by forging links
between company and sorrow. "In public, [I] was by nature a cypher,"
claims Lucy, though this suggestion of anonymity and facelessness is
exacerbated, not resolved, by her moments of profound solitude. 47
When over a school vacation Lucy is virtually alone for seven weeks,
warped effects of sustained egotism while telling us that we can't
escape the intractable qualities that time and history "impress" on
us, to borrow one of Lucy's terms (341). In this respect, the novel
echoes _The Professor_'s suggestion--voiced by Crimsworth--that
narcissism regrettably is the basis for affection and group ties:
"No regular beauty pleases egotistical human beings so much as a
softened and refined likeness of themselves" (57). Perhaps,
Crimsworth implies, we're drawn to confirm our worst faults,
especially in love, in ways replicating them throughout society. As
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 133-166
Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wolfram Schmidgen
---------------
presenting a national history in which all Englishmen are bastards. The
following lines condense Defoe's vision of the English past: BLOCKQUOTE
Two basic arguments are at work here. Most immediately, Defoe responds to
Tutchin's charge that a group of foreigners is running the English nation by
pointing up the pronounced heterogeneity of England's nationhood, composed of
Britons, Scots, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and, indeed, "all Nations." This acute
dismantling of ethnic nationalism emphasizes, above all, the "mixed" nature
of English national identity, and throughout the first part of the poem,
which Joseph Addison had celebrated is symptomatic of his exclusion from a
dominant mode of social life, an exclusion that has centrally to do with the
bar from inheriting property. 38 The pleasure of prospect is not an innocent
enjoyment, but closely associated with the culture of the landowning classes,
and it is from this group that Savage feels unfairly excluded. 39
Savage's status as a wanderer is given more explicit social terms in his poem
_The Bastard_ (1728), in which he characterizes his illegitimacy as follows:
BLOCKQUOTE
ranks. He complicates this sense of distance by referring to the "Medium"
that makes any observation of rank from distant viewpoints unreliable as it
is likely to be distorted by the splendor of dress and the apparent unity of
station and merit. Savage is able to take a "nearer View" of this social
group because of his ambiguous status: he is able to be "in" this (through his dress, Lord Tyrconnel's protection, and his parents), but he is
not "of" it because he is illegitimate and cannot lay claim to any social
position. Savage calls himself "No-body's Son," and this lack of
positionality motivates "Savage's Enquiry," as Johnson terms it, and enables
---
Evelina's status as an illegitimate female emerges most forcefully in volume
three of Burney's novel, where she resides at Mrs. Beaumont's country estate
among a select and self-consciously superior group of noblemen and women.
During her stay, Evelina is caught between the extremes of coolly calculated
neglect and the unrestrained and occasionally violent courting of Sir Clement
Willoughby and Lord Merton. 59 She recognizes what Sir Clement's
disrespectful pursuit most blatantly shows: that these extreme reactions are
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
24 The constable complains that Jo, "although he's repeatedly told
to, won't move on" (_B_, 319), but as Jo tells Snagsby, "I'm always
a-moving on, sir . . . I've always been a-moving and a-moving on,
ever since I was born" (_B_, 319). Jo's job as street sweep suggests
that he belongs to that group that Corbin identifies as "the city's
untouchables," those "comrades in stench, the people who worked with
slime, rubbish, excrement, and sex." 25 And like Freud's gentleman,
most of the people who see Jo turn up their noses, their delicacy
offended by his presence. Jo, the narrator tells us, imagines
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
As George W. Stocking explains, the period in Victorian anthropology
between roughly 1850 and 1870 was characterized by an ongoing
institutional battle between the older branch of scientific
practitioners who operated under the name of ethnology and a
splinter group of self-styled anthropologists. The semantic
distinction bespoke an antagonism of principle. While the
ethnologists, by and large, maintained belief in the fundamental
familial unity of the species man, the anthropologists promoted the
polygenicist interpretation of races as betokening a difference of
institutionally in 1871: Huxley, a member of the ethnologist branch,
accepted the term "anthropology" for the purpose of official
institutional nomenclature within the British Society. At the same
time, however, he remained vigilant in ensuring that control over
the group was in the hands of Darwinian sympathizers. 23
Evolutionary theory used the concept of development to expand the
vexed and historically fluid category of the human to include the
more vexed and fluid category of race. Placed beside this set of
The universal principle of cultural systems that the narrator thus
uncovers from its implicit, buried state is one of amoral
pragmatism. In Darwinian fashion, this pragmatism is beholden only
to the interests of the group, not of the individual, and thus our
would-be missionary--the separate registers of irony and neutrality
in his voice now intermingled--is converted to a materialist
sociology, which in his instance fuels a social conservatism:
BLOCKQUOTE
towards the diminished significance of individual exceptions that
this new allegory of culture implies. What is good for the
individual is not necessarily good for the species, and against the
manifold protests motivated by empathy or sentimentality the novel
upholds the insuperable interests of the group over the *[End Page
456]* individual. _Erewhon_ thus presents the "revelation" of Social
Darwinism--the jolting extension of the theory of natural selection
to sociological interpretation that results in the centrifugal pull
of cultural as well as ethical questions into the explanatory rubric
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
of the "prejudices and hostilities" which have separated "race from
race." The authors' two references to "all the nations of the earth"
suggests that they have in mind not simply the American and English
"races" (as George Stocking notes, this was a "period when almost
any human group . . . might be called a 'race'"), but, as Moore's
racial charts indicate, the emerging pseudoscientific, biological
notion of "race." 35
Whether all these writers understood race in terms of essential,
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
hierarchization, with some persons commanding cultural capital while
others are visibly subjugated. Hierarchization occurs because persons
desperately need to remind themselves of their own sovereignty, to use
the scientific literary scholars' term. Most interactions in this
novel involve the attempt by one person or group, fearing dominion by
others, to subjugate others, often by violent means. Miss Watson, the
Widow, Pap, the King, and Duke, not to mention the robbers and killers
populating the river, all labor to impose their wills upon others.
Even Jim intuitively expects to wield such authority over his
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
increased subscriptions and more extensive circulation, and her ambition was
evidently contagious; the Religious Tract Society, founded on More's model
within a year of the formal termination of the Cheap Repository, accounted
for sales of more than four million tracts by 1808, and ten million by 1824,
and the group maintained a regular catalogue of hundreds of tracts in a *[End
Page 511]* variety of formats and series throughout the early decades of the
nineteenth century. 41 Historians have long recognized More's achievement as
a watershed event in the history of print, since it was through the Cheap
Repository "that influential middle-class Englishmen got their first
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
to determine who he was, especially since what he did was disparaged
by so many others. By the mid-eighteenth century, there was in place
a stereotype of the antiquarian as a ponderous, awkward figure who
pursued trivia with an energy at once fanatical and workmanlike.
Alexander Pope scornfully dismissed the group as a whole: "A
Lumberhouse of Books in ev'ry head, / For ever reading, never to be
read." 25 Gray attempted to distance himself from that stigma,
sometimes by directing it at others, sometimes by embracing it
parodically. He tartly remarked that, although the authors of
Gray was trapped in a whale with his inferiors! Three of the four
patrons were paid assistants, referred to here only by the names of
the men who hired them; the final patron as well as the librarian,
though graced with impressive titles, apparently suffered from
unmerited pride. Gray obviously did not agree that this group made
for "good company" or that he was part of it. For Gray, the label
"antiquary" deprived him of his individuality and forced him into a
community he found ridiculous. Given the humiliation he feared the
label could cause, it's not surprising that he rejected it.
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
the difficulty, not a solution," but nevertheless believes that, BLOCKQUOTE
If not with "Story of an Apparition," which appeared pseudonymously, then
certainly after the publication of "The Tapestried Chamber," Scott would have
had to include himself in this group of "artful" and distinctly modern
writers of ghost fiction, who manage to appeal to both the skeptic and the
believer, courting rational explanations and drawing upon contemporary
scientific theories only to show that these do not suffice to solve the
mystery of the spectral.
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
are "internally pitying" the women's "delusions" that took them away
from their "usual habits" of tending their homes. Speaking as the
universal "we," he normalizes his critique of the women's behavior
even as he tells us he only does so "internally." But his critique
is immediately confirmed by the arrival of "a group of Manchester
women" who utter his sentiments that the women reformers should "go
home" to their families. By having his internal thoughts
externalized by these working-class women, Tyas gets to critique
them without speaking against the radical cause. The last sentence
fire-breathing, *[End Page 183]* animated guillotine monster. The
guillotine wears a liberty cap and wields a dagger. Flames erupt
from its belly below the blade, and peeping through the hole at its
crotch, through which pours blood like urine, is a skull. On the
right of the cartoon appears a fleeing group of governmental
officials, including Lord Liverpool, who falls over bags of gold;
Lord Castlereagh; Lord Chancellor Eldon, telling the regent not to
mind losing his wig "so long as your head's on"; and the legs of the
King. As John Wardroper suggests, it is hard to know whether to take
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
shortly after writing _The Marble Faun_, Hawthorne himself
resurrects this creature in his only piece of journalism on the
Civil War. In "Chiefly About War Matters" (1862), his ostensibly
realistic account of his trip to Washington D.C. to gather firsthand
information about the war, Hawthorne comes across a group of
fugitive slaves heading North: BLOCKQUOTE
Apparently, the faun has escaped the realm of the Romance and
entered the literal premises of Hawthorne's nonfiction. Indeed, even
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
the circulating libraries and the increased self-consciousness of literary
reviewers. This factor involved a revaluation of the ambiguous concept of
literary value which Besant described. This revaluation, in turn, was the
product of a reworking of the terms by which journalists evaluated new works.
By the second half of the 1880s, a group of prominent reviewers, many of whom
were also novelists, had begun to agree that literary works should be judged
as "art" and not according to their popularity, market value, or moral worth.
As an effect of this agreement, which can be dated, symptomatically at least,
to 1884, some kinds of writing that had previously been valued were devalued,
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
identification form a crucial part of the social relation, so long
as we understand that relation, as I explain below, to be
necessarily split.
24. The members of this group best known in the U.S. are Pierre
Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau. Luce Giard and Henri
Détienne are other influential theorists.
25. In fact, Butler herself appeals to Bourdieu's theories for just
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
guardians. I was sent to various schools, great and small; and was
very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially
for my knowledge of Greek" (_C_, 6). One can hardly emphasize enough
the lengths to which De Quincey goes to depict the I as deprived by
circumstance of any sense of rootedness in the family group. In the
1821 _Confessions_, we never once see him at home with his mother
and siblings.11
His youth is spent at school or as a runaway living precariously in
from the pains of wandering.
(_C_, 57)
To this group can be added the "dialogue" the I makes up with the
Malay's help. We could even point forward to the next section, a
long hypotyposis which describes the ideal happy day on opium: "Let
there be a cottage . . . let it be a white cottage. . . . Let it be
in winter. . . . Paint me the room. . . . Therefore, painter, put as
much greater than disputes over an apple orchard that De Quincey had
uprooted, over his addiction, his marriage to a member of the
servant class, and so forth, for they concerned the status of nature
itself. De Quincey exhibits a number of traits that would allow us
to group him with the sort of Modernism linked to Baudelaire rather
than with mainstream Romanticism. For treatment of De Quincey and
Romanticism, see Thomas McFarland's _Romantic Cruxes: The English
Essayists and the Spirit of the Age_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1987); and Margaret Russett, _De Quincey's Romanticism: Canonical
giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of the earth,
besides, perhaps, a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to
understand that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly
imagined that my art could exorcise from the house. I did not
immediately go down: but, when I did, the group which presented
itself, arranged as it was by accident, though not very elaborate,
took hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the
statuesque *[End Page 896]* attitudes exhibited in the ballets at
the Opera House, though so ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
I.
--
In a group portrait of opera superstars from the mid-eighteenth
century, Jacopo Amigoni places the castrato, Farinelli, at center
stage, with the soprano Castellini at his right hand (see figure 1).
Amigoni indulges artistic license by placing himself in the most
intimate relation to Farinelli—leaning over him as if
throughout the eighteenth century, the critique of effeminacy
belonged to a broad indictment of the debilitating effects of the
new urban, commodity-rich age on the fighting readiness of British
men. Effeminacy was thus not a social quirk, nor the sinful
characteristic of a marginal group, but a perilous moral failing of
the culture at large.
The introduction of Italian opera in the first decade of the
eighteenth century became synonymous with England's cultural decline
and present danger to martial vigor and, by extension, to British
liberty.
The effeminate taint of opera communicated itself to Italian poetry.
In the 1750s, a group of Italian _literati_ led by Giuseppe *[End
Page 975]* Baretti, a member of the Johnson and Burney circles,
sought to establish a canon of Italian literature among the growing
constituency of English connoisseurs and grand tourists. Baretti's
first duty as he saw it was to rehabilitate the Italian epic
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
illustrating to his reader a "style" of decomposing and reformulating those
terms so as to lend them new self-authored meanings, much as the poet does
with the discourse of nineteenth-century capitalism, symbolically inverting
the wasted seed that sexual ideology prophesied would cause the ruin of the
nation by turning it into fecundating ejaculatory rain. Section 29 has been
read as troping a specific non-procreative sexual practice, anal penetration.
Christopher Newfield argues that homoeroticism appealed to Whitman not merely
as a metaphor of democratic political relations but as a "democratic" form of
subjectivity, a way of enacting political principles erotically within
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
the bounds of the Christian ideal" (R, 18-19), and he offers a
fanciful portrait of "the enchanted region of the Renaissance . . .
Here are no fixed parties, no exclusions: all breathes of that unity
of culture in which 'whatsoever things are comely' are reconciled,
for the elevation and adorning of our spirits" (R, 20-21). Even the
two impulses of "elevation" and "adornment," often at odds with each
other in Romantic poetry, are here reconciled. It is such synthetic
and typical depictions, with only the occasional odd Paterian twist
of conjoining "liberty" and "comely," that lead Bill Readings to
ELH 66.3 (1999) 739-758
The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel
Stefan Andriopoulos*
---------------
attempt to give a causal explanation to the circulation of rhetorical tropes
and narrative patterns between political economy and the gothic novel; it
also generates prolific citation. As the invisible hand leads, this [End Page
751] peculiar power to provoke citation may reflect a fear of autonomy, a
desire of being led. Yet the exclusive attention to a figure, occuring only
once in a text of more than thousand pages, is not triggered before the late
nineteenth century. After the first publication of The Wealth of Nations in
1776 the figure of "an invisible hand" is quoted neither in the lengthy,
serialized reviews appearing in The Critical Review and The Monthly Review,
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 639-670
"The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community
Franny Nudelman
---------------
deathbed scene (Fig. 1, Fig. 2).
As if to suppress any emotions that the spectacle of Brown�s suffering might
provoke, Wise deployed a crowd of armed spectators at the scene of Brown�s
death; these soldiers, standing "mute and motionless," expressed the power of
the state (Strother 11). In the end, however, Wise�s order forbidding
journalists near the scaffold was "partially rescinded" and a handful of
reporters were [End Page 655] allowed a position near the major-general�s
staff ("Execution").16 It is difficult to understand why, at the last moment,
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
virtually any point in his career. I am not sure what
"self-determination" (166)--the core of Tauber's "moral agency"--can
mean with one whose relations to other individuals, to his townsmen
and society at large, and to himself were so tangled, skewed, and
fraught with mute emotion. Thoreau lived "deliberately" so far as he
came to fashion an outward life through conscious choices (e.g.,
living with his family, taking long daily walks, working for periods
as a surveyor to support himself), but whether the postures he
adopted in his writing were equally "willed," and his will equally
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
although Child (in "The Black Saxons," for example) had allowed
African-American slaves to voice grievances, seldom had narratives
of the dominant culture featured minority figures who not only spoke
their minds but displayed superior wisdom and civility. First
perceived as a mute object of scientific inquiry, Poe's
Allamistakeo—whose origins are North African, "from the
Lybian Mountains" (806), and whose skin color is described as
"reddish" (808)—unmistakably represents the dark, racial
Other presumed by Anglo-Saxon craniologists to be intellectually and
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
York: Norton, 1958), 84-88.
38. Of greatest relevance are Freud's remarks on silence in "Das Ich
und das Es." He reports the "impression that the death drives are
predominantly mute and the noise of life proceeds from Eros," then
concludes, "The id . . . has no means to attest its love or hate to
the ego. It cannot say what it wants. . . .We could portray it as if
the id stood under the mute but powerful death drives that want rest
and that wish to bring the troublemaker Eros to rest following the
und das Es." He reports the "impression that the death drives are
predominantly mute and the noise of life proceeds from Eros," then
concludes, "The id . . . has no means to attest its love or hate to
the ego. It cannot say what it wants. . . .We could portray it as if
the id stood under the mute but powerful death drives that want rest
and that wish to bring the troublemaker Eros to rest following the
hints of the pleasure principle, but we are concerned that we might
thereby underestimate the role of Eros" (Studienausgabe 3: 313,
325). A poetic genre that is urbanely terrified of death and in
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
In stanza twelve, lines four and five share in their repetition of
"ominous," a contraction of three syllables into two so that a trochee,
"om'nous," can be sounded. Again "i" is silenced, permitting "yore--," via
its demonstration of omission, to advance a mute alternative. The letter "i"
and the dash are metrically tied; the nature of their knot is implied at the
site of excision which ties that knot--"om in ous" as it becomes "om nous."
Division of the word syllabically produces a pun, and once more the
antisemantic infers an alternative semantics. "Ominous" can be designified
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
The Woodville portrait gallery narrates both a personal and national history,
and depicts, through a chronologically ordered succession of images, the
memorialized places and moments where the two intersected, for better or for
worse. But the images themselves would be mute without an interpretive
voiceover--they would not be images that are just (truthful and
truth-telling) but precisely "just images." 39 While it would seem that
Browne's epiphanic recognition of Woodville's ancestress from a portrait
ratifies the notion that seeing warrants believing, it is none other than the
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
seemingly becomes a process of their silencing. In line 260 deeds
are the means to resistance. By 299, these have become "strong and
simple words / Keen to wound as sharpened swords" (_MA_, 299-300)
and finally are merely "looks": "Stand ye calm and resolute / Like a
forest close and mute, / With folded arms and looks which are /
Weapons of unvanquished war" (_MA_, 319-22). In this process,
"slaughter" (_MA_, 360) becomes "inspiration" (_MA_, 361) that is
"eloquent and oracular" (_MA_, 362), another voice which will make
the poet's words "like oppression's thundered doom" (_MA_, 365). As
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 141-165
William Blake's Androgynous Ego-Ideal
Tom Hayes _Baruch College and The Graduate Center_ _City University of New York _
---------------
(_CPP_, 665). Knowing of these ambiguous uses of the word "imagination,"
whoever made the second copy of the "Visionary Head" drawing—probably
either Varley himself or Blake's young patron John Linnell—omitted
the word "imagination" and added the phrase "in his Dreams," thus hoping to
mute the figure's overtly erotic expression.
But this attempt to tame the figure does not succeed. The uncanny
configuration in the middle of the figure's forehead still appears strangely
familiar. Geoffrey Keynes believes this configuration resembles a Menorah.20
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
redemption, with the same enigmatic status as stolen goods before
*[End Page 965]* they are either destroyed or returned. But it
cannot sustain at the level of action the powerful ambiguity of
these songs to a missing lover. The player has a choice either to
obey the law and sacrifice his mute hero, or to redeem him at the
cost of poetic justice and let him sing a song: to let him go and
not to hear of him more, or to buy him back, declare him not quite
legally his own, and let him borrow a weak form of sententiousness
for a song. In effect the play stays with a descriptive, not a
cost of poetic justice and let him sing a song: to let him go and
not to hear of him more, or to buy him back, declare him not quite
legally his own, and let him borrow a weak form of sententiousness
for a song. In effect the play stays with a descriptive, not a
narrative, regime, showing Macheath again and again as the mute
property of other people, not as a fox, sparrow, or rat with things
to say and a tale to tell.
Endnotes
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
female beauty was evidently uppermost in Mr. Burke's mind when he
wrote his book." 3 This contention is supported by the examples of
eighteenth-century conventions of female behavior such as "[w]omen are
very sensible [that beauty is weak and imperfect] for which reason,
they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness
and [End Page 406] even sickness" (E, 110). It was even suggested that
Burke incorporated some of the character of his own wife in his
definition. Frances Ferguson has developed this aspect of Burke's
treatise in order to argue that the testing of limits in Burke's
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as
if the letter were not of red cloth, but of red-hot iron" (25). History, for
each of these writers, as with Sedgwick, was incomplete; it was something
more than knowledge of the past. Their texts present it instead as an
experience, a palpable sensation, something approximating the paradoxical
feeling of déjà vu—the memory of an experience one
has not had, but a memory nonetheless real because felt.
Modern Americanist historicists, too, link questions of historiography to
pursuit . . . then marriage will not be essential to your usefulness,
respectability, or happiness" (19). The point here, however, is not to
attribute the narrative intrusions to the "author," the historical Catharine
Sedgwick; rather, the point is only that, knowing the author, it should come
as no surprise that she would imbue her narrator with something approximating
her own acerbic wit.
19. Several readers have commented on the novel's pattern of imprisonment.
Fetterley, for instance, argues that "Sedgwick manages to keep Hope out of
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
Portrayal of Warren Hastings in Burke's Writings and Speeches on
India," _Criticism_ 29 (1987): 415-38.
7. One wonders whether the irony--that her theory of drama permitted
little room for anything approximating spontaneity in the
spectator--was not lost on Baillie. The veneration of rudeness,
moreover, has been cited as the basis of Baillie's connection to
William Wordsworth's rustic. I find this tie to be tenuous at best,
primarily because Baillie's investment in polite sociability renders
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
Corbin tells the story of a monk from Prague who "was capable of
spotting the odor of adulterous women," and Lady Dedlock, guilty of
sexual transgression, if not adultery, fears such exposure, engaging
from the beginning in strategies of evasion and denial with
Tulkinghorn, a monk-like figure given to nosing around in other
people's affairs. 48 Like Nemo and Jo, Lady Dedlock is filth, for
she too has been jettisoned out of a boundary, moved to the other
side, beyond its margins. "Margins are dangerous," writes Douglas,
for they can be crossed and transgressed, and Lady Dedlock has done
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
of the Cheap Repository. Affixed as they are to "the clean white walls" of
the cottage interior, these single sheet tracts offer a private, domestic,
and orthodox response to the disruptive public handbills of popular radical
culture. The configuration of the Shepherd's (nominally) private space would
surely have allayed conservative anxieties about the emergence of a plebeian
public sphere, to which More's Sunday schools were sometimes felt to
contribute, by containing the counterrevolutionary version of that sphere
within the four walls of a cottage and limiting it to provided texts. In the
same way, the Shepherd's reclusive scripturalism--"my bible has been meat,
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
many couplets day by day, neither more or less; and habit made it
light to him, however heavy it might seem to the reader."35 Macaulay
shared Scott's contempt, and places Hoole's versifying style in a
context by which we can usefully compare him to Wordsworth:
"[C]oming after Pope, [he] had learned how to manufacture
decasyllabic verses; and poured them forth by thousands and tens of
thousands, all as well turned, as smooth, and as like each other as
the blocks which have passed through Mr. Brunell's mill, in the
dockyard at Portsmouth."36 In short, John Hoole, a third-rate
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
Page 193]* Shelley rescues her from conservative rhetoric and loads
the victimized woman with a revolutionary power she does not have in
Cruikshank's cartoon. This conflation of the two female figures in
Cruikshank's cartoon transforms Medusa into a victim with a
legitimate cause, no longer a threat to be warded off, but a complex
and potentially radical force for reform.66 Although this poem
reveals Shelley's identification with Medusa, it also shows how
volatile her image is—how the image of the victimized woman
could work against Shelley's cause by turning him into another
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
Poets half create not only what they see, but what their culture sees.
Fielding is not simply concerned with the perception of the poet in
Wordsworthian solitude, but with the shaping influence of poetry. By
classing "heroes and gods" with mountains and rivers, Fielding makes
landscape description into a kind of myth-making, though his comparison of
"little hillock and blind stream" with "the noblest rivers and mountains in
the world" suggests that landscape features possess qualities like nobility
prior to being poeticized. And yet those noble rivers remain blind streams
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
between 1877 and 1886, evolutionary theory provides him with the
vehicle for a visionary liberation from humanism, an expos� of the
groundlessness of what is now felt to be its oppressive concepts of
individualism, essential species difference, and self-reliance. 38
_Erewhon_ paves the way for these later displacement of social urges
to scientific fantasy by dismantling the credibility of a
metaphysical human nature as the subject of cultural authority.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
owned by the other, his face-to-face position in which he tries to
own the other, and his private anguish which marks his struggle to
own up to himself ("'Is there summ'at deadly sticking to my clothes?
What's let loose upon us? Who loosed it?'" [76; 1.6]). The
articulation of these interpentrating discourses matters a great
deal to Dickens; much of the narrative action in his texts is
preoccupied with their interplay and with the structure of feeling
in which they seem to be grounded. Indeed, what we are often
following from page to page in Dickens's novels is the presence of
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
election day, discovers that the painting of King George outside the
inn has merely been relabeled "General Washington"--as though the
Revolution doesn't make much difference either as a rupture with
one's ancestors or as the point at which founding fathers begin. The
repainting of the sign has been a simple change of caption. The face
of one George will do for [End Page 789] another, and the paternal
image reproduces itself under a new name. For Irving, the
superficial naming of the portrait is an intimate self-reference; he
was born just five days before George III officially acknowledged
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
existence and create a documentary record that would not be, as Brigham and
others insisted, "in the care of the supervisor" (New York State, _Annual
Reports_ 6: 33). Unsanctioned asylum writing is produced on rags, underwear,
or the margins of newspaper; it is concealed behind mirror plates, in band
boxes and secret pockets. When such texts reach the public—the
best-known being Elizabeth Packard's famous exposés of her
confinement at a state hospital in Illinois—part of their resistance
is that they call attention to their own materiality, contrasting their free
circulation and expression with the subterfuge that incarcerated writers had
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
door also occurs within a larger spatial field. The space of concealment can
only occur within certain parts of the social structure; concealment is the
privilege of power, of those who possess not only something to conceal, but
also the means to conceal it. At one end of the spectrum is the completely
tactical existence of Defoe's Colonel Jack, who lacks even pockets to keep
his money in; at the other end is the strategic power of Richardson's
Lovelace, who can contain and conceal Clarissa. Thus the space of
concealment is more than a physical space, more even than an interpersonal
space (self concealing from other): it is profoundly a social space,
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
national imaginary as the scene of American origins--the story of
the rise of the self from an "unlikely Beginning" (A, 20) to fortune
and fame. The bodiliness and materiality of Franklin's arrival,
however, is left out of later mythologizations. "Dirty, "hungry,"
and poor, his pockets "stuff'd out with Shirts and Stockings,"
Franklin appears in the figure of a grotesque Rabelaisian body as he
marches up Market Street eating "three great Puffy Rolls": "a most
awkward ridiculous Appearance," thought his future wife, Deborah
Read, as he passed by her house "with a Roll under each Arm, and
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
second and third stanzas would have been likely either to know English or to
have access to print forms in the 1850s (much less one of the thousand copies
of the 1855 edition from which the passage derives). Whether Whitman imagined
"fishtearers" and nomads going about their business one day with _Leaves of
Grass_ in their pockets is not clear; to be sure, Whitman would later become
one of the most translated American poets, a fact that would allow his
speaker eventually to address a myriad of readerships in multiple tongues. 35
What this passage illustrates, however, as the phrase "I see not merely that
you are" indicates, is that the poet does not want to confuse complex human
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
25. In a letter of January 1796 to Zachary Macaulay, More described the Cheap
Repository in terms that similarly insist upon an antirevolutionary vocation,
at least with respect to the "horrid blasphemy" of infidel theory: "Vulgar
and indecent penny books were always common, but speculative infidelity,
brought down to the pockets and capacities of the poor, forms a new era in
our history. This requires strong counteraction; I do not pretend that ours
is very strong, but we must do what we can." See William Roberts, _Memoirs of
the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More_, 4 vols. (London: R. B.
Seeley and W. Burnside, 1834), 2:458.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
looks, compliments, dues"--as circulating both around and through him and as
being both part of him and not ("These come to me days and nights and go from
me again, / But they are not the Me myself"); he imagines himself as "Both in
and out of the game and watching and wondering at it," suspending both
dimensions of himself without differentially valuating them ("I believe in
you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, / And you must not
be abased to the other" [1:5]), and so on.
31. See Judith Butler, _Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
reference to fixed values. If the masculine world of the market
represents a circulation without end, then feminine domesticity [End
Page 600] represents the fantasy of the circuit's closure.
Domesticity "finishes" the rough world of circulation,
reterritorializing the "homogeneous, empty" landscape of the nation,
just as the art of finance (from Old French finer) is meant to
provide an end to capital's circuit, in the form of a boomerang-like
revenue (from Old French revenir). 32 When industrial development
produces an infrastructure without any limit, its infinite movement
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
specific readership's needs.
But as ever with Cowper, it would be a mistake to assume that he
comes to rest here at some final representation of his relationship
to criticism. That several months later he is once again inveighing
against "abusive" critics is only the most immediate proof that his
rhetoric of accommodation has its limits: BLOCKQUOTE
And Cowper always fears that the efficacy of "carefulness of
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
plenitude of aesthetic sensation." 14 One can find passages
throughout Pater's writing to support this claim, and the
"Conclusion" to The Renaissance offers the key example: "analysis
leaves off" with "that continual vanishing away, that strange,
perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves," and gives way to the
insight that "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to
maintain this ecstacy, is success in life" (R, 188-89). Readings
also argues that the history of the university in the nineteenth
century "is that of modernity's encounter with culture, where
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
themselves with a potentially healthful condition of _internal_
social order. At the same time as that project is proceeding (or
attempting to proceed), the historical fact of war on an
unprecedented, pan-European scale foregrounds the phenomenon of a
disordering force that is _external_ to any conception of a
circumscribed state.
It is the preliminary matter appended to the collection that first
draws our attention to the problem of war and places it into
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
Rub to me with your chaffing beard . . rub to my breast and
shoulders.
(127-28)
In these transgendering scenes, Whitman performs a kind of gender
crossing similar to the racial crossings I will be addressing in the
following pages. In these observations and descriptions, the persona
appears fluid and passive, vacating a space for differently embodied
bodies to mediate between themselves. Sánchez-Eppler
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
A. S. M.'s literary urges, however, were not entirely satisfied by writing
for the _Opal_ and for official asylum proceedings, for A.S. M. also wrote on
the walls. Six years into his stay at Utica, he was removed from the pleasant
First Hall, where the more manageable and presentable patients—among
them most of the _Opal_'s contributors—resided. "Removed to [2H],"
says the casebook, "for marking with pencil upon the doors & casings &
tearing up newspapers & c." He was soon back at the editor's table,
conducting himself "with more propriety," but his self-possession—and
his stewardship of the journal—were interrupted by bouts of violence,
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
Do Live_ before His Time."66 "History and _Fact_ in Particular
Cases," Rymer Asserts in His 1692 Hatchet Job on _Othello_ , "Are No
Warrant Or Direction for a Poet," Who "Is Not [obliged] to Be an
Historiographer." Moreover, Editorial Vigilantes Could Be Offended
Only by Anachronisms They Happened to Notice. Editors Who Removed
"Aristotle" from the Text of _Troilus and Cressida_ , Theobald
Remarked, Were Evidently Unfazed by Hector's "Talk of
Philosophy"—a Term Unknown until Pythagoras Put It into
Circulation "Near 600 Years after the Date of _Hector_ ."67
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
communion remains either a mere projection of the self onto the other, or the
simplistic inference of my own likeness from yours. To maintain a conception
of sympathy as the capacity to "put [oneself] in the place of another and of
many others," after all, presupposes a rigid differentiation between self and
other that can be seen as dooming in advance such an effort, however
well-intentioned. 65
There is an alternative to this scheme, however, which is suggested not so
much by the flesh-and-blood universalism of Burke as by the activity of
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
Chatterton personified that parachronistic invention of the 1760s,
the "modern-antique," another term which instantiates
_pre_posterousness *[End Page 356]* by reversing the chronological
sequence from antique to modern.81 It was as if, in the course of
antiquating his poems in order to make them Rowley's, Chatterton had
inevitably distressed himself. "The person of Chatterton, like his
genius, was premature," George Gregory remarked in 1789: "he had a
manliness and dignity beyond his years."82 But popular culture in
the form of a memorial handkerchief issued in 1785 had taken a
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
similarly surrounded by "mummied" (81; 2.7) beings who only simulate
animation. Even the clothes displayed at Pleasant Riderhood's
Leaving Shop, where John Harmon begins his narrative, have "a
general dim resemblance to human listeners" (357; 2.12). These
unresponding mannequins ("lay-figure" is the text's term [113; 1.9])
manifest the fate of the reader-as-Twemlow before Twemlow acquires a
social imagination. But while Twemlow is left for a long time in his
stupefaction, the reader is prompted more urgently into action by
the novel's great company of performers who themselves resist
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 496-508
South of the American Renaissance
Thomas M. Allen
---------------
Simms was a proslavery South Carolinian whose historical romances,
literary criticism, and social and political commentary seem
distinctly out of place in the company of other recovered
nineteenth-century authors. Consider the following lines: "Democracy
is not levelling—it is, properly defined, the harmony of the
moral world. It insists upon inequalities, as its law declares, that
all men should hold the place to which they are properly entitled.
The definition of true liberty, is the undisturbed possession of
that place in society to which our moral and intellectual merits
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend to
human kind" (JA, 245). For Adams, as for others in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth century, Franklin embodied the American
Revolution in its most radical, "democratical," populist, and
levelling dimensions. "His plans and his example," Adams wrote,
"were to abolish monarchy, aristocracy, and hierarchy throughout the
world" (JA, 248).
Although Weber would later identify Franklin with the "Protestant
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
are themselves not without contradiction. Insisting, on the one
hand, that De Monfort is too allegorical in having no foil to his
vice, his most vociferous complaint is reserved, on the other, for
the charge that De Monfort is an inconsistent villain--his "black
and deadly" hatred is "almost instantly soothed and appeased" by the
blandishments of a sister--and therefore insufficiently systematic.
De Monfort is, according to this logic, simultaneously too
allegorical and not allegorical enough. 26
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
It is exactly such attention to psychology that Marian Evans had
found lacking in Dickens. In an essay written shortly before her own
entry into fiction, she declares that "[w]e have one great novelist
who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits
of our town population," tactfully forbearing to mention Dickens by
name,
BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
of the play's most egregious malapropisms. 6 The revised version
which debuted on 28 January was significantly shorter; the part of
Sir Lucious was reassigned to Laurence Clinch, and the character
itself had undergone a "whitewashing and ennobling." 7 Moreover, the
play's diction had been evened out and Sheridan deleted three of the
five malapropisms named in The Public Ledger, keeping two spoken by
Mrs. Malaprop. 8
Sheridan's preface to the published version of the (revised) play is
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
the human suffering which ruins and broken cottages so often imply."
25 Granted, the horseman in _Adam Bede_ is gazing not upon ragged
peasant children, ruined abbeys, and desperate banditti, but rather
at a well-fed carpenter, a *[End Page 554]* pleasant village scene,
and a well-tended estate. 26 However, his appraising analysis, as I
hope I have shown, partakes fully of the aristocratic privilege of
the picturesque, of which Eliot shared a deep suspicion with Ruskin.
27 The latter characterized the lover of the picturesque as
"kind-hearted, innocent, but not broad in thought; somewhat selfish,
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
as obstinately to the current modes of [End Page 427] subjection as
abstractions. They are, so to speak, left over. And the gendering
retained by images from earlier misogynistic characterizations endows
them paradoxically with a certain resistance to the new patriarchal
functions. More specifically, unchaining the image from the reflexes
of power permits it to challenge the metaphysics of the real insofar
as the real is grounded upon the experience of pain. In the
masochistic image the subject appears to say, "if history is what
hurts, so what. I reject the demands of pain to be recognized as the
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
of finding a politically telling agency in social practices, for she
exemplifies the same kind of overdetermination or indeterminate
origins of behavior found in the Victorian analysis of habit. She
winds herself up in accord with social custom; she "has it in the
blood, or [is] trained" like a bloodhound to pursue her seagoing
"prey" in accord with capitalist dictates; and she tries to protect
her father, despite his abuse, in accord with patriarchal ideology
and prevalent social norms (345). Of course, although she lives
within and upon institutions, conventions, ideologies, and
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
equipped with theatrical props, which in the case of old Gruff and
Glum's timber toes, are simultaneously literal and figurative. His
brief intrusion in the novel illustrates a whole pattern in Our
Mutual Friend which revolves around collages of selves, bodies, and
typifying props. If the body is for Dickens the self's figurative
projection of identity in the material world, the props are
acquisitions from the material world that supplement the self's
expressiveness. The distinguishing prop in Our Mutual Friend is,
with many important variations, the stick (or, more clumsily, oblong
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
written by a man who joined the cavalry after Custer's massacre, the foppish
soldiers of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, are dudes. "Company C, 20th Infantry,
was at the time composed of dude soldiers, pets of dress parade officers"
(Mulford 16). 18 These men had become objects of mockery at the base. The
commanding officer's wife asked them to parade by her family's porch because
it made her baby laugh, and the author of this account comments, "We lonely
and homesick recruits laughed in our sleeves when we overheard expressions of
indignation among the 'baby entertainers' over the incident" (16).
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
suggests, "it may indeed be difficult for women sexually repressed as
children to switch from a masochistic to a sadistic position in their
fantasies, just as the young investment banker accustomed to adopting
a servile attitude toward the superior he wishes to impress may find
it hard to assume a more commanding tone at will (Sadomasochism in
Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness [New Brunswick:
Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992], 3). There seems to be no way back, even if
it were desirable, from the dissemination of these terms into every
corner of our existence and the dilution of their usefulness except as
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
In contrast to the casual opening, the ending of the monologue is an
attempt to impose the speaker's will on Lucrezia. But his illusion of
control is deceptive. Though he wants to seem in charge, Andrea is merely
commanding Lucrezia to do what she is going to do anyway. Even when Andrea
dramatizes the end of strenuous illusion by pretending to know the worst
about himself and his art, he still acts in bad faith. For he keeps acting
out fantasies of ascribing his failures to the inattentive but often
censorious Lucrezia. Worst of all, the scapegoat who should ease his guilt
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
others. Slavery and its attendant racism, which the novel understands
to have evolved rather than ended since the Civil War, are prominent,
historically specific manifestations of this phenomenon, which Twain
regards as ontological. 77 They symbolize the inevitability of social
hierarchization, with some persons commanding cultural capital while
others are visibly subjugated. Hierarchization occurs because persons
desperately need to remind themselves of their own sovereignty, to use
the scientific literary scholars' term. Most interactions in this
novel involve the attempt by one person or group, fearing dominion by
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
time, the procedures of collecting, testing, and verifying sensations in an
experimental context were analogized with the practices of reading and
aesthetic evaluation, and the literary text began to develop a rhetoric and a
set of protocols for investigating the principles of--as well as
commanding--critical judgment by similarly experimental means. Aesthetic
evaluation and scientific self-experimentation were united primarily through
criteria that these two pursuits shared. If the first of these criteria was
the obvious necessity of appealing to the sensations of the experimental
subject, the second condition was that the experience be subject to
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
assumptions about Wild's enterprise I want to tackle and to modify.
The first is that he was a kind of super-capitalist, extending
exchange and profit across the boundary dividing legal exchange from
illicit deals. Certainly this is how Fielding regarded him, a sort
of nefarious factory-owner of the underworld commanding the maximum
number of hands to labor purely for his benefit. The second
assumption is that the advertisements of the kind Wild pioneered
were precursors to or outriders of the formal realism of the early
novel, exhibiting in miniature the techniques of narrative developed
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
A letter to Unwin provides the most complete and interesting account
of this attitude: BLOCKQUOTE
Here Unwin alone outranks both neighbors and anonymous "hundreds."
As Cowper explains, the support of friends enables him to disregard
the noisy sentiments of the many: "their applause . . . is a sound
that has no music in it for me." More tuneful is Unwin's still,
small voice, a "pretty loud whisper" that comes closer to matching
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
with sculls (699; 4.6). The Lammles discover their mutual duplicity
as they walk on the Shanklin sands: "[O]ne may see by their
footprints . . . that they have not walked in a straight track, and
that they have walked in a moody humour; for the lady has prodded
little spirting holes in the damp sand before her with her parasol,
and the gentleman has trailed his stick after him" (122; 1.10).
Later, Lammle beats Fledgeby like a carpet and, on his way out hands
Jenny "three broken and frayed fragments of a stout little cane."
When Eugene finally recovers, he walks by "leaning heavily upon a
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
influential formulation, far from originating a moment of individual
freedom from the maintenance of state power through ritual and
spectacle, reinforces a new determination by abstract systems,
commonly summarized in Foucault's figure of the panopticon but also
apparent in Anthony Giddens's phrase of "disembedding mechanisms" that
do not primarily depend on theatrical devices to render a modern
population susceptible to manipulation. 30 The true candidate for
aesthetic affinity with modern systems of technological control is the
terror of abstraction, the components of a sadistic sublime.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
rather than a genuine species of ventriloquized lyric. 4
Sartre offers an intriguing model of both single and double irony. 5 If
another person is looking at me and I am too ashamed or guilty to return
her look, then she reduces me to a censored object. Nothing in a stage
play is quite so touching or dramatic as the impossible-to-perform moment
in Tennyson's idyll, "Lancelot and Elaine," when Lancelot knows that
Elaine is looking at him, and Elaine is conscious that he knows.
BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
If we open the text of Castle Spectre with this assumption, however,
it does not take long for us to understand the confusion of Lewis's
reviewers when they first read it. Nowhere in its text do we find
the unexpurgated Lewis made famous by the outcry against The Monk.
Published just before the release of that novel's self-censored
fourth edition, the text of Castle Spectre carries none of The
Monk's eroticism; its Prologue and Epilogue treat the text of the
play, and Gothic drama in general, with irony. Its footnotes, rather
than displaying Lewis's erudition or arguing for his play's
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
It would have appeared in the same form in which it is now offered to the
Public, under the direction of its proper Editor, the giver of the Prize:
but his privilege has, with pride as well as pleasure, been yielded to a
Lady of the Author's own Country, who solicited permission to avail herself
of this opportunity of honouring and further remunerating the genius of the
Poet; and, at the same time, expressing her admiration of the theme in which
she has triumphed.
(_W_, front matter)
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
feeling through a grammatical twist which is awkwardly aesthetic.
Clarence does not say that he feels as if a cobweb is coming over
him, but rather that he _has_ a cobweb feeling. Does this mean that
he feels like a cobweb--_like_ the web of emotion that he says is
ensnaring him? One is not sure whether Clarence is being lightly
assaulted by the cobweb feeling that Belinda gives him, or if the
feeling is somewhat *[End Page 589]* more organic. Does the feeling
come from without, as the metaphoricity of the cobweb reference
urges, or is it more Clarence's "own," as his omission of any
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
"we, the people" existed for decades nowhere except in Thomas
Jefferson's grandiloquent prose. Differences of ethnicity, religion,
culture, and region, as well as the difficulties of communicating
across vast distances, complicated unification. The founders
espoused equality but delimited citizenship by institutionalizing
racial oppression—enslaving African Americans, removing
Native Americans, and thus deeply complicating foundational notions
of liberty.1 From such divisions and contradictions emerged a
peculiar nationalism whose contemporary vehemence ofexpression seems
ELH 68.4 (2001) 929-963
Coleridge's Polemic Divinity
Mark Canuel
---------------
civil offices, from educational and military institutions) adherents
of nonconforming beliefs or--at the very best--encouraged people to
lie for the purposes of inclusion. This is essentially to say that
the church was not merely guilty of endorsing personal hypocrisy but
of institutionalizing the very beliefs that it disavowed.
Perhaps Coleridge's most characteristic response to this logic
emerges in the second issue where, after the celebrated "Essay on
Fasts" (which I will discuss later), he launches a satirical
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
health--from which "proper" feelings (gratitude, docility, ambition, but
never rage or resentment) emanate. Once social relations became the domain of
interior forces--sympathy and character, phobia and human nature--reform came
to be limited to initiatives (medical, moral, and domestic) aimed at
standardizing human nature toward a set of fixed social virtues, foreclosing
social analyses of structural ills and diminishing the value of cultural
difference. In suggesting the normative work of civil inclusion, then, I am
not attempting a cynical argument in which power is all-pervasive and
irresistible. Rather, I want to suggest that part of what makes power
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
circulation and to publish weekly accounts of gold and securities on
deposit.
To understand why politicians would seek to stabilize prices by
standardizing the currency system, we need first to understand the
representative function that money serves. While commodities only
realize their value by dropping out of circulation and being
consumed, money circulates constantly. Money thus takes on an
appearance of permanence and regular motion; it seems to stand for
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
become the commodified carriers of exchange value violates the logic
of a sexual marketplace classically premised on "_the virginal
woman['s] . . . pure exchange value._ She is nothing but the
possibility, the place, the sign of relations among men. In and of
herself, she does not exist: she is a simple envelope veiling what
is really at stake in social exchange" (Luce Irigaray, _This Sex
Which is Not One_ [1977], trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke
[Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985], 186). By recuperating money
from the abstract realm of exchange to the material world of petty
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
initially named an instance of physical contact ("_a_ touch"), now appears as
a "sense" which displaces the other senses who "go and graze at the edges of"
the poet.
The modulating tropes in this passage represent the speaker conceptually and
ethically processing his sensual experience of a stimulating and
multiplicitous external world. This moment of contact between the culturally
situated subject and the world--where *[End Page 1069]* even the speaker's
own stimulating hands seem to reside as part of external, unruly nature--is
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
helped establish the Smithsonian Institute, and he was a great
naturalist.22 He was, in short, an American aristocrat. Ethan Allen,
the Vermont free-booter, Revolutionary warrior, and extreme
Democrat--much admired by Melville--said of Marsh's family that they
were "a petulant, pettefogging, scribling sort of Gentry" 23 My
interest in Marsh rests in the two controversial addresses he gave
in 1843 and 1844: The Goths in New England and the Address Delivered
before the New England Society of the City of New York. [End Page
164]
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
independent consciousness. The solution to the master's impassable
contradiction is that the slave become a revenant in language, and in
language of a particular kind. [End Page 1006]
Enough of parables--instead, an example of linguistic revenanting. Take the
word "Lenore": with its first syllable concluding a trochee and its second
triggering a catalectic foot, the name has been analyzed as inviting its own
alterity; indeed, it declares itself an improper name, whose essence is
present only as a withdrawal from nomination, prefaced by "or." One might
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
narrative *[End Page 273]* bearing it repress this fact. 18 The
novel's voice modifies our relation to national identity.
Such attenuation of cultural identity is the thrust as well of
arguments esteeming the novel's most profound subtlety, its exposure
of our nation's contradictions regarding race, identity, and what Myra
Jehlen has called "the ideal of individual freedom." The "absolute
freedom" that Huck desires requires compromise of either Jim's freedom
or his own in protecting Jim's; individual freedom conflicts in this
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
as "a spiritual Body; in which (by strange inconsistency) the
hampering, weakening, and destroying, of every individual mind of
which it is composed--is the law which must constitute the strength
of the *[End Page 188]* whole" (316). The first victims of this
incapacitating process are logically those most implicated in such
structures: institutional leaders. "There are promptings of wisdom
from the penetralia of human nature," he says, "which a people can
hear, though the wisest of their practical Statesmen be deaf towards
them" (227). Such distinctions between associations of people and
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
Miriam, it seems, is simply asking a rather traditional theological
question: if sin is not educational, why else would God permit it to
continue? But within the context of _The Marble Faun_, her
hypothesizing is represented as profoundly scandalous. Kenyon
replies that he finds her line of speculation "too dangerous" (_M_,
435). Inferring that Miriam may be suggesting that we ought to
imitate Adam—or worse Donatello—and sin deliberately
in order to learn, Kenyon declares that he will not follow her into
_American Literary History_ 14.3 (2002) 505-539
Who's Your Mama? "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom P. Gabrielle Foreman
---------------
justifies his penchant for exposing "inside views" by invoking sacred
considerations. "Alas, for those telling mulatto, and quadroon, and
octoroon faces," he declaims, after numbering no less than 10 instances of
miscegenous behavior in his "conclusion and moral of the whole story";
"They stand out unimpeached, and still augmenting as God's testimony to the
deep moral pollution of the Slave States" (_Octoroon_ 51). In this context,
*[End Page 529]* we can read his placement of Picquet's opening image as
"God's testimony," infused with the authority of a new technology widely
proclaimed to be the real Master's eye. Yet, for Mattison, this hybridity
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
Most important, Bront�'s unique turn to third-person narrative in
_Shirley_ clashes with the novel's unusual method of undermining
objectivity. The narrator often weakens external point of view, in
this way augmenting the novel's vacillation between inward and
outward life. When describing the Yorke family, for example, she
destroys its fragile domestic harmony by whisking us forward twenty
years and telling us, rather bluntly, that one of the Yorkes'
daughters will die at a young age. "Mr. Yorke," interrupts the
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
though the idea of urging in this context is somewhat misleading,
since Emerson takes himself not to be issuing recommendations about
how to [End Page 998] reform current interpretive practices so much
as claiming to describe what any historical interpretation "must
be." And the point of exhorting people to do what they can't help
doing anyway is that they have misdescribed the true nature of their
enterprise: "these hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night,
let us use in broad day" (239). Indeed, "it is remarkable that
involuntarily we always read as superior beings" (238).
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
Warton's secret complicity in _pre_posterous composition made him
acutely conscious of what was at stake in the Rowley affair. For as
David Fairer revealed in 1975, the Wartons had similarly tampered
with the historical record by composing and antedating poems they
attributed to their father, Thomas Warton the Elder, in a
posthumously published volume of his _Poems on Several Occasions_
(1748). As a result of this maneuver, Warton _père_ (who was
a contemporary of Pope's) posthumously acquired the prochronistic
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 141-165
William Blake's Androgynous Ego-Ideal
Tom Hayes _Baruch College and The Graduate Center_ _City University of New York _
---------------
their misogynistic fantasy. "[B]ound / In spells of law" to Bromion, she is
condemned to "drag the chain / of life, in weary lust" while in her womb "the
abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form. / . . . live a pestulance and
die a meteor" just as the hell-hounds in _Paradise Lost_ wander in and out of
Sin's womb where they gnaw her bowels (_VDA_, 5).12
In a feeble and self-indulgent gesture of masochistic humiliation and
spiritual blindness, Theotormon brandishes a small three-thonged whip over
his head while, with his other hand, he covers the place on his forehead
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
mechanical evolution is brought to life via a familiar
nineteenth-century tale about the fragile social homeostasis that
suppresses class revolution.
Offsetting, as it is, a tract writer who cautions against the
machinic assault on the human species is also one who welcomes it as
an expansion of human power, the layered narrative registers of the
text are locked together in a logic of ambivalence. Let us consider
these antithetical pulls through the lens of Marin's descriptions of
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
things--thinking about things as embodied thoughts--meant fetishizing
place, just as thinking about place meant fetishizing things.
Mason had previously joined Goode in asserting scientific authority by
analogizing ethnology to botany or zoology. Artifacts were grouped to
show the sequence of technological developments, invariable among
disparate peoples and regions; typological classification was both the
impetus and telos of anthropology. Mason had argued that ethnological
specimens "may be divided into families, genera, and species"; they
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
warp McMillin from his own orbit and make him a satellite in
another'ssystem ("American Scholar" 56).
In contrast, McMillin's system seems hardly a system at all but a
method of free association. McMillin is fond of analogizing between
texts and nature, which he labels a "biotext" (134). However, though
his theory of reading calls for a rich interchange between texts,
other texts, contexts, and the biotext, in practice his illustrative
discussion of "Experience" is a meditation on fragments, which are
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
that the slave was acting out of habit, without thinking, so that he
cannot be construed as having consciously chosen life over liberty.
One feature of Thelwall's fable is its frequent and almost
gratuitous analogizing, so that superimposed over a logical argument
is a patchwork of digressive comparisons and similes. Just as the
black slave is mentioned, a parenthetical analogy is made to
"pressgangs," "slaves of labour," and "slaves of war" (K, 186). That
is, "slavery" is an indeterminate word that Thelwall detaches from
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
increasingly (by means of representations among which Dickens's own novels
loom large), by their reputation as gentlemen.
Interestingly, twenty years after David Copperfield, George Eliot avoids
Dickens's mid-Victorian dilemma by shifting emphasis away from definining the
gentleman per se, and towards reinventing the businessman. [End Page 160] In
so doing, she also complicates the simple opposition between entrepreneur and
professional. In Middlemarch (1870), Eliot juxtaposes Nicholas Bulstrode's
self-interested hypocrisy with Caleb Garth's non-acquisitive,
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 814-822
New Origins of American Literature
Grantland S. Rice
---------------
_The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in
the Early Republic._ By Laura Rigal. Princeton University Press,
1998.
With all the emphasis on expanding and diversifying the field over
the past three decades, early Americanists probably haven�t paid
enough attention to our discipline�s institutional history. As
scholars like David Shumway and Gerald Graff have noted, the
disciplinary origins of American literature are found in the birth of
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
----------------------------------
_Arthur Mervyn_'s yellow fever epidemic is characterized equally by a surfeit
of diseased bodies and a corrosion of social discourse, acutely dramatizing a
crisis of audience control in a rapidly diversifying public sphere. The novel
unfolds through a proliferation of competing narrative voices, conflicting
characterizations of Mervyn himself, crucial information knowingly withheld,
misinformation unwittingly passed on, language barriers that prevent
communication, misreadings of appearances, conversations overheard illicitly
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 133-166
Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wolfram Schmidgen
---------------
significant expansion and complication of social ranks on the one hand, and
the persistence of a hierarchical organization of society on the other. The
liminality of the eighteenth-century bastard and its potential for making
social structures visible have to be grasped within the context of an
economically and socially diversifying society that continues to rely on
vertical solidarity to maintain a hierarchical separation of ranks. Even
while social mobility increases, as Lawrence Stone and Jeanne Fawtier Stone
have stressed, it continues to be significantly inhibited by perceived and
real distinctions of status. The crossing of ranks, and in particular, the
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
ideally become (_Thoughts_ 15-17). In making such a claim, Garrison brackets
the role of westward expansion in extending and strengthening slavery in the
US (a connection he elsewhere acknowledged and condemned, but only at the
level of federal agency, as when the government admitted Texas as a slave
state). In bracketing that connection, Garrison sidestepped as well the
consistency of his fantasy of citizenship-without-nations with the
imperialist rhetorics of Manifest Destiny: both relied on divine injunction;
both freed the citizen-form from specific national borders to generate a
universal, imperialist "mission"; both justified their universalism through
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
and readable in the undecidability of its own writing" (191). This
analysis allows McCann to suggest a very provocative and interesting
argument about the interrelation of the novel's concepts of race and
gender, and he argues that, because she is invested with the weight
of undecidability, Freke allows for _Belinda_'s "bracketing of
race." The novel, we know, attempts to *[End Page 594]* make an
"egalitarian gesture" by presenting Juba--Mr. Vincent's (Belinda's
third suitor's) servant--as utterly educable and rational. Such a
gesture is possible, McCann asserts, "because the substratum of
ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537
"Bales of Living Anguish": Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing
Peter J. Kitson
---------------
with its acceptance of the hypothesis of one species of humanity, remained
the consensus throughout the nineteenth-century. 18 However, the idea that
there was a hierarchy of races within the family of humanity and that the
Negro was at, or near, the foot became generally accepted as a result of "the
rise of a new science of human taxonomy" and "the homogenising pressure of
imperialism and the slave trade." 19 It appears that the discourse on race
underwent a shift in the late eighteenth century from being a system of
arbitrary marks that distinguish between humanity to being "an ascription of
natural signs" written on the body. 20 This new conception of race derived,
American Literary History 12.4 (2000) 685-712
Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence
Susan M. Ryan
---------------
colonization--would result in all too many pleading African
Americans in QUOTE cities.
Melville's grotesque portrayal of an importunate black man
exacerbates the anxieties that this emblem conjured, but it
negotiates the relationship between race and benevolence rather
differently. Within the nineteenth century's racial logic, color had
to be deemphasized if affiliation was to be convincingly asserted on
any large scale, since most Americans, including most white
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
character," Wharton in the "exchange of intimacy," and Dreiser in
"anonymous consumers and spectators with shared desires" (12).
Crane's modernity, it seems to me, lies in his refusal to establish
any kind of common ground and in his determination to forge a style
that highlights and exacerbates the incommensurability of urban
realities. *[End Page 605]*
Crane mixes and juxtaposes discursive formations and systematically
plays on the incongruities and abrupt shifts of perspective this
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
protagonist, the formal repercussions of which become apparent when
the novel ends. The narrator's oddly laconic conclusion makes little
effort to bind together the marriage plot with the hatred
flourishing in the opening chapters. For instance, her suggestion
that the reader supply the right moral exacerbates her noncommittal
statement, "I suppose Robert Moore's prophecies" about the end of
the blockage against Napoleon and the consequent rise in trade
"were, partially, at least, fulfilled" (599). The conclusion tries
to show how people's plans mesh with political events, but the
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
break with the Irish past means a break with most of the Irish people because
they have not yet been changed by the constitutional transformation
envisioned by the United Irishmen of the novel. Rather than offering a
nationalist vision that would create a cultural and political ideal, Morgan
examines the splintering of nation and nationalism [End Page 944] produced by
an inflection of the paradox noted by Anderson--the conflict between
antiquity and modernity. The pessimistic end to the national tale, which
departs emphatically from the conciliations which close other national tales
such as The Wild Irish Girl and Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), represents
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
literacy would not exceed the limits of Christian piety, it seemed to
indicate that scripture could by itself produce orderly, submissive, and
industrious subjects. 51 Recommending the Bible to her readers in the opening
paragraph of _The History of Hester Wilmot_, More's narrator reflects that
"it is a pity people do not consult it oftener. They direct their ploughing
and sowing by the information of the Almanack, why will they not consult the
Bible for the direction of their hearts and lives?" (5:284). Yet despite this
confidence in scriptural sufficiency, More was keenly aware that available
forms of piety and loyalty were not adequate grounds for antirevolutionary
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
responsibilities--for example, correspondence between the queen and her
subjects. Conversely, the lowest status (and pay) were in the recently added
criminal affairs department, even though this modern office offered the
greatest potential for demonstrating the specialized expertise of Perkin's
mature middle-class professional ideal. Because the most coveted positions
consequently involved mechanical (clerical) labor, Sir James Stephen, himself
a civil servant, anticipated Smiles when he opined that "the qualities of
'self-reliance, self-possession, promptitude, address, resource, hopefulness
and courage,' shown by the most successful graduates of the two ancient
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
Uriah's evil is utterly unaccountable. As Malvolio, Uriah is the uppity
steward of the household, comically proud of his symbolic authority. As Iago,
Uriah's seething resentment threatens to compromise his attempt to achieve
recognition; at times, his anger threatens to boil over and destroy his
coveted status distinctions altogether. Dickens is both a social realist and
a moralist, and since we learn so much about Uriah's social background, Uriah
must be split in two. He cannot function solely as a melodramatic foil to
David's virtue.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
Owing to its location on the major sea lane of the Straits of
Malacca, the area of Southeast Asia known as Malaysia has long been
a country at the crossroads, a meeting place of peoples, languages,
and religions, as well as a busy marketplace for barter and exchange
that was early on coveted by Europeans. As a result, in West
Malaysia alone are found groups of aboriginal Orang Asli, Malays,
Chinese, Indians, and Pakistanis. Religions include, besides the
dominant Islam, native religions, Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism,
Hinduism, and Sikhism, and, following the 16th-century Dutch
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
I follow Fredric Jameson when I say that "[t]his is not a
proposition one proves." Indeed, the possibility that critique is in
some crucial way premised on the vista of folly--in particular, the
madness of female connection--is a proposition I am making in "the
interest of presupposing" it. 5 What new critical genealogies, I
want to ask, spring from modifying critique's story this way? To
begin, I offer a shift in emphasis, concentrating less on what early
modern critique might "see," and more on the setting--in this case,
the backdrop of Belinda and Lady Delacour's tandem mistake--in which
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
leaving her, in her next letter to Lucy, far from the rational tones
she had previously assumed: "I am shipwrecked on the shoals of
despair!" (C, 105).
Lucy responds by needling Eliza for her "truly romantic letter,"
containing "all the et ceteras of romance" needed to "make a very
pretty figure in a novel" (C, 107). Lucy does not simply voice here
the chorus of societal judgment on Eliza's wayward character; at
this moment she also engages in an act of fairly savvy literary
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
officialism, and zeal for industrious self-reliance. Rather, in David
Copperfield (and indeed throughout his oeuvre) Dickens engages the same class
problematic identified by Poovey--only, I want to stress, his attempts to
naturalize class difference relate to a discourse over the gentleman that was
crystallizing at mid-century in the contest between entrepreneurial and
professional definitions of Englishness.
To make this point more clearly I turn to a decidedly professional polemic of
Arnold's. In an 1861 essay proclaiming the imminence of "Democracy," Arnold
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
obstruct direct articulation of the event, with heightened non-semantic
features operating in the service of the need to conceal. One example chosen
by Abraham and Torok in their exploration of Freud's Wolf Man case may serve
to make the point: tieret (Russian, to rub) is taken to crystallize a
four-year-old boy's trauma over witnessing his father fondling or rubbing
his six-year-old sister. 3 At sixteen the sister commits suicide by
swallowing mercury (Russian rtut). Abraham and Torok, noting two shared
consonants ("r" and "t") and "the glottal [End Page 993] pronunciation
t.r.t.," hear rtut as an oblique enunciation of tieret. 4 The girl swallows
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
this way becomes for Liu the (negative) linchpin for his historicized and
historicizing account. In his "Before Time," the introduction to his book's
part 2, "Violence and Time: A Study in Poetic Emergence," he observes the
remarkable unanimity within the modern critique of Wordsworthian time,
footnoting what appears to be a representative sampling of figures and
summarizing their method--and the modern method generally--elsewhere: "The
unthought continuum of everyday being is 'broken in the middle' and _then_
time is thought as the explanation, mitigation, and denial of the difference
history makes." 41 By Liu's account, time in recent Wordsworthian criticism
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
the literal. These plural entities, moreover, seem to transform. Associated
with the elements, the atmosphere, sun, the outdoors, animals, they appear
initially as the provoking aspects of an external world that stimulates and
arouses the poet, "straining," "behaving licentious toward," "depriving,"
"unbuttoning," and "deluding" him. But these stimuli (whatever they might be)
that seem to be outside of and different from the speaker are also "hardly
different from" him, and he is as much an agent of electric contact with them
("my flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike") as they with him.
These "prurient provokers"--who "immodestly slid[e] the fellow-senses away /
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
features and form, his forehead small, without frontals; his jaws
large; . . . and every thing tending toward what is truly Ugly, the
incapability of intellect." 42 While the Ugly Man serves Blake's
particular purposes as a figure of Urizenic reason, he is bestial in
that he has not undergone the process of subjectifying his
existence. He demonstrates the same incapacity to elevate himself
over himself and achieve coherence in the eyes of his viewer that is
characteristic of the ugly.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing
mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth
seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was
to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human
infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the
breast . . . even so did the young of these whales seem looking up
towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in
their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also
seemed quietly eyeing us.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
wife and my child in thine eye.
(_M_, 405-6)
But despite Starbuck's appeal to his affection for home and family,
Ahab cannot turn back: "[W]hat cozening, hidden lord and master, and
cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural
lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming
myself on all the time . . . ?" (_M_, 406). The novel implies a
psychological or ontological answer to this question, but Ahab's
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
compensate himself for the loss of social position of which his
foster-father had deprived him; that, in consequence, perhaps of a
'fixation' on his mother, he became sexually impotent and was
forced, as a result of his inability to play a part in the normal
world, to invent an abnormal world full of horror, repining, and
doom" ("Poe at Home and Abroad," quoted in _Recognition_, 143).
Bonaparte's reading of Poe is less manifestly punitive, since the
sexual pathologies of which Poe is the avatar are in her account
less personal than universal (and this, she says, is why so many
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
such attention.
In this context, then, Castle Spectre constitutes Lewis's twofold
attempt to avoid the kinds of difficulties he had faced after
avowing authorship of The Monk. In turning to a heavily regulated
theater to produce a drama of ordinary materials and extraordinary
effects, he attempted to create a space for himself where his genius
could not be reduced to textual form, and thereby be subject to the
cultural policing that the published texts of public figures
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
concealment, secrecy, and murderous intent is intimately bound up
with a deep distrust of their appropriate gender identification.
Despite the vociferousness of anti-obstetric rhetoric, the
man-midwife (soon restyled the _accoucheur_ and then, finally, the
obstetrician) ultimately won the battle for supremacy--as measured by
cultural capital, remuneration, and public confidence. During the
early decades of the nineteenth century, the battles around the new
profession of obstetrics shifted first to questions of accreditation,
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
into the volume "for the Common People," with a note directing readers back
to "the preceding volume" (5:283). 48 In one sense, the editorial logic here
was clear enough: the opening pair of tracts considers the induction of Mrs.
Jones, "the widow of a great merchant" (4:325), into the reformist enterprise
of organizing charity schools, putting down public houses, and regularizing
the habits and morals of the common people; while the second part addresses
the impact one of these Sunday schools has in reforming Hester Wilmot, the
daughter "of parents who maintained themselves by their labour" (5:283). Yet
in all the essentials of idiom, presentation, and format that mark *[End Page
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
example, before entering the Hale household in Elizabeth Gaskell's
_North and South_ (1854), a novel that draws extensively upon
Gaskell's own firsthand familiarity with Manchester, the same city
that provides the material for Engels's essay, we may suspect that
he does so because he has been tromping through those streets that
Mayhew and Engels write of, but the novel does not tell us so. On
the other hand, we cannot read much of Dickens without becoming
aware of the general foulness and smelliness of the world he
describes, and thus readers have paid attention to what he has to
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
committed to the idea that feeling is anchored in the organism" in his
_Consequences of Enlightenment_ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999),
253.
21. In the _Notebooks_, Coleridge averred that Kant was "a wretched
Psychologist" (_CN_, 1:1717). It is not, however, likely that Kant--no friend
to psychology--would have objected to this characterization.
22. Not surprisingly, Coleridge has been central to this critical work. See,
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
These multiple accounts of Reverie Lost imitate the occurrence of
music, making loss constitutive of the poem's emergence. That is why
its language and imagery, when finally they come, imitate nothing
other than their passing. Kubla's dome, for all its rare device,
appears first doomed (by "Ancestral voices prophesying war!"; K,
30), then dimmed to nothing (vanishing in the abyss between
stanzas). And when a poet steps in at the end to revive it, his only
access comes through a music that is always already gone: BLOCKQUOTE
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
why the narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" pauses in his
exposition to say that he paused to think: that little parenthetical
quip, and the temporally regulated analysis that follows it, call
clear attention to the fact that even cognition, once held in the
unyielding grip of Poe's sequentializing style, can be anatomized
down to its least tremors and tiniest operations.
For all that, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is yet among the very
least exaggerated versions of this style we can find in Poe's work.
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
sweetening the already preexisting "portion of acidity, Nature,
Misfortune, and Disappointment have mixed in my composition." A
bastard hybrid is born from this instruction in Sternean sentiment:
the "pleasing blossoms" of "good fruit" that have been "produced by
ingrafting upon a _crab_." Less monstrously, the anonymous piece,
"On the Imitators of Sterne" from the _Westminster Magazine_ of
November 1785, notes the mix of "the finest satire, and the most
delicate sympathy . . . qualities which seldom unite." And by 1818,
in a lecture to the Philosophical Society of Fetter Lane, Coleridge
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
whose reticence there occasions one of Elizabeth Bennet's most
celebrated impertinences, which like many fine acts of aggression
has its aim perfected by the archer's sense of her affinity with the
target: "We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition unwilling
to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the
whole room." 6 There is the insistence, especially eloquent in the
Bront�s, of unusual passions, the forms and objects of love that
cast characters like Heathcliff, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, and Helen
Huntington as exiles and eccentrics in a world of bland and common
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
right, the symbolic order is ultimately the order of a fundamental
deception--his mistake lies on the contrary in his being too easy of
belief and supposing the existence of a hidden agency manipulating
this deception, trying to dupe him" (Slavoj Zizek, "How the
Non-Duped Err," Qui Parle: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts,
History 4.1 [1990]: 12; quoted in Chow, 53).
55. Chow, 53.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 965-984
Fathoming "Remembrance": Emily Bronte in Context
Janet Gezari
---------------
smile on her face" (W, 2.15.349-50).
That the body's purity, signified by incorruptibility after death
(as also by miraculous bodily closure--not eating, menstruating, or
excreting in life), requires more dramatic substantiation in women's
lives than in men's in Western culture is suggested by the fact that
these anomalies feature disproportionately in the lives of female
saints, as Caroline Walker Bynum points out. 19 I take it for
granted that the mystery of Catherine's immunity to physical decay,
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
precisely, it constitutes the vehicle for the displacement of the repressed.
Drawing from the discussion above, I shall suggest, finally, that the
repressed elements of accounts such as those of Liu, Levinson (and Caserio)
are the antitotalizing, poststructuralist claims of early Romantic,
deconstructive accounts. 24 Where Liu and Caserio accuse others, Wordsworth
and de Man, of using allegory to repress or flee, I claim, rather, that Liu's
mention of repression is actually self-indicating: where he projects his own
critical polemic onto Wordsworth's text, he, rather, is the one repressing.
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
vertex, an ideal point never reached and, more curious, constantly
rising!" Piaget credits this insight to the mathematician Kurt
Gödel, who demonstrated in 1931 that we cannot analyze the
presuppositions of any theory without assistance from another and
"higher" theory. "The 'fastening' of any story in the edifice of
human knowledge," Piaget concludes in an architectural metaphor,
always "calls for the construction of the next higher story."123 In
religious contexts, top-down building is regarded as a uniquely
divine practice. Unlike the edifices of mere mortals, Sir Matthew
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
sentimental mode itself. 23
The assumption that the production and reception of pathos resides as
much in disavowed as avowed sentiments need hardly be invidious or
self-exculpatory. One has only to accede to what Freud called "the law
of ambivalence of feeling"--that we often hate where we love, that we
resent those to whom we are most indebted, and that we have a tendency
to deny these feelings at considerable cost and representational
ingenuity. 24 Certainly the mode whose aim is precisely to make us feel
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
is not equal to Mr. Reade in the spirit."42 James could praise Reade strictly
for his "art" because he was willing to isolate "art" from all the other
features of Reade's novels, including those facts in which he took such
pride. This set the stage, of course, for others to dismiss Reade completely,
for they could judge him harshly for merely collecting and collating the
"useless knowledge" that Orwell ridiculed in 1905.43 When the mature Howells
registered Reade's "artistic vulgarity" and the "many aesthetic errors" of
his novels, he did so in the context of the literary field we recognize,
where "errors" are transgressions of rules defined in aesthetic terms, not
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 709-731
Martin Delany's _Blake_ and the Transnational Politics of Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
---------------
naturalizing discourse. Most important, though, Delany's crucial
repetition of the phrase "self-interest" here and in the novel's
opening scene emphasizes the connection between individual,
apolitical slave owners and the business of illegal, international
slave trading. Although Armsted protests that he would hold whites
or blacks in slavery merely according to "custom," this repetition
reinforces how the major's feigned political disinterest and silence
as he pursues economic gain nonetheless comply with the racist
policies and economic practices to which he turns a blind eye. 9
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
sees the journal as a "miscellany" that does not speak "in one voice" (203);
ultimately, though, she focuses on the journal's "political" writings, which
she sees as "writing to power" (2)—challenging the doctors'
definitions of insanity as well as popular images of the insane. In several
fine readings, she deciphers coded protests against asylum punishments,
against the ascendancy of an unpopular superintendent, and against the
physicians' policy of opening mail sent to patients; several articles even
hint at connections between the condition of asylum inmates and slaves. But
she self-consciously avoids discussion of what she terms the merely "private"
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
challenges and participates in the national narrative," at times
advancing "a transnational perspective on the place of blacks in the
Americas and throughout the world" (230). In _A Son of the Forest_
(1829) and elsewhere, Apess relentlessly exposes injustices to
Native tribes; for example, the memoir bitterly protests his being
denied voting rights after serving his country in the War of 1812.
Apess's "Eulogy on King Philip" asserts a provocative analogy
between Philip (or Metacomet) and "the immortal Washington (who)
lives endeared and engraven on the hearts of every white in America"
rather from an assumed cultural cosmopolitanism. Although like many
compatriots Poe resented British condescension toward American
writing, he regarded provincialism and jingoism as even greater
obstacles to national literary development. In his "Drake-Halleck"
review of 1836 he thus protests the overpraise of inferior work "of
home manufacture" as "misapplied patriotism," observing that we
Americans "often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of
liking a stupid book the *[End Page 6]* better because, sure enough,
its stupidity is American" (_Essays_ 506). In an 1841 review of
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
A masterpiece of casuistry and single irony, Rochester's "Very Heroical
Epistle in Answer to Ephelia" mocks the self-centered complacencies of his
enemy, the Earl of Mulgrave. Responding arrogantly to an earlier verse
epistle by George Etherege, in which "Ephelia" reproaches "Bajazet" for
his infidelity, Mulgrave protests that his inconstancy has always been
self-evident: he has never set out to deceive anyone. In his persuasive
redefinition of the word "infidelity," he tries to give inconstancy a
favorable emotional meaning while retaining its standard descriptive
meaning. BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
completely that Dryden's distraction from romance is described in
exactly the same terms as Scott's devotion to it, as a retreat from
serious labor to "sport."
The "high theme" of which Scott protests his unworthiness was given
him by the death of Britain's two great statesmen, Pitt and Fox, and
his letter begins as a memorial to their greatness. But Scott finds
himself inadequate to his mighty subject: BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
and this juxtaposition of "ugly" with the morally repulsive Sin and
serpent is reinforced in Adam's prophetic vision of evil: "O sight /
Of terror, foul and ugly to behold" (PL, 11.463-64). In Pamela
(1740), to take another example from Shelley's reading list at this
time, Richardson's heroine protests: "It is impossible I should love
him; for his vices all ugly him all over, as I may say." 37 Percy
Shelley has the "Spirit of the Earth" describe women as the "ugliest
of all things evil, / Though fair" in Prometheus Unbound (1819), and
in a Reflector essay several years earlier, Charles Lamb satirizes
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
individualistic, and for being the symbolic interaction of a
politicized group outside the purview of constitutionally sanctioned
authority. They were an indispensable component of democratic reform
dinners, London Corresponding Society meetings, radical assemblies,
and protests. Even after severely repressive legislation made open
political work impossible, radicals could still retreat to their
taverns and sing radical songs. Iain McCalman writes extensively of
the radical use of "free and easies" for political organizing and
for sustaining radical culture at a time of extreme repression. Even
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
resulted from precisely the same contempt for the popular will that
the government had demonstrated in the immediate aftermath of the
French Revolution. 24 Dalrymple had not invited local Portuguese
authorities to take part in the negotiations, a failure that
resulted in official protests that were made public in England.
Moreover, the terms dealing with the disposal of property and the
dispensation of justice were regarded as unconscionable usurpations
of Portuguese sovereignty.
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 223-243
Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot's _Middlemarch_
Jessie Givner
---------------
land. "God A'mighty sticks to the land," he tells Fred, "But you take the
other side. You like Bulstrode and speckilation better than Featherstone and
land" (100). By "spekilation," Featherstone means the abstract values of
currency and exchange that are alienated from the intrinsic value of natural
resources such as land, cows, and coal. Vincy's protests, that he likes
neither Bulstsrode nor speculation, *[End Page 230]* have no effect on
Featherstone, who eventually leaves his land, Stone Court, to Joshua Riggs.
One of the novel's ironies is that Riggs immediately exchanges the land for
money, while Fred Vincy ends up actually working on the land under the
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
different conclusion. Butler's text displays a jaw-clenched bravado
towards the diminished significance of individual exceptions that
this new allegory of culture implies. What is good for the
individual is not necessarily good for the species, and against the
manifold protests motivated by empathy or sentimentality the novel
upholds the insuperable interests of the group over the *[End Page
456]* individual. _Erewhon_ thus presents the "revelation" of Social
Darwinism--the jolting extension of the theory of natural selection
to sociological interpretation that results in the centrifugal pull
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
novel's courtship plot altogether. Taking refuge in the sentimental
logic of her mother's novels, she repudiates the commercial ethics
motivating her father to try to transfer her to his business partner
"as a sort of stock in trade" (228). Commodification, in her eyes,
is tantamount to objectification, prompting Jemima's protests that
her future husband is shopping for a wife "just as you would do
*[End Page 199]* for a carpet" (224). Despite the narrator's claim
that this description is an "exaggeration of all her father had
said" (223), British law would have confirmed Jemima's sense that
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
Packwood--and regards Edgeworth's work as greatly interested in
making such a distinction: "The bulk of the novel is tirelessly
devoted to denying the reality of this connection between Belinda
and self-promoting entrepreneurs like Packwood." 13 Though _Belinda_
protests quite a bit about the association of its heroine with a
mere commodity, however, Michaels points out that its vision of
Belinda's authentic character is in fact modeled on the same sort of
entrepreneurialism that Packwood's trumped-up commodities are. Both
systems, in other words, rely on the credit of their
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
transgression by quoting his most contentious critic, Thomas
Mathias, that a Member of Parliament is "elected guardian and
defender of the laws, the religion, and the morals of the country."
53 The Biographia's entries for Lewis's individual plays are equally
suggestive. While dimissing Adelmorn as "better suited to a . . .
pantomime than to a regular drama" and Castle Spectre as without
value but "productive of profit," it does not comment upon Alfonso
at all. Two decades later, John Genest's Account of the British
Stage (1832) names Castle Spectre as by "Mr. Lewis, the author of
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 93-102
Transatlanticism Now
Laura M. Stevens
---------------
of empiricist epistemology, and a dislike of theatricality. "Pope
links a failure of knowledge (universal darkness) to a failure of
reason on the stage. Richardson states the positive side of the case
by tying up artifice with knowledge and virtue in his heroines"
(45). The novels' attacks on artifice supercede the artifice in
which the narratives actually engage, prioritizing moral reliability
over representational trustworthiness.
Through studies of eight additional authors— Sterne,
ELH 68.4 (2001) 1023-1047
"A Sort Of Adopted Daughter": Family Relations In _The Lamplighter_
Cindy Weinstein
---------------
were parents abdicating once their child left the home? How long a
separation was necessary before parental rights were de facto
relinquished? Indeed, was it even possible for a parent to relinquish
her rights to her child? And at what point did the child's rights
supercede all others?
Commonwealth v. Hammond (1830) illustrates the complex domestic
scenarios which judges had to disentangle and deliberate upon. The
Massachusetts case contains two competing contracts, and at least three
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
explains, "the persistent Roman has been pointing, with no
particular meaning, from that ceiling. It is not likely that he has
any new meaning in him to-night. Once pointing, always
pointing--like any Roman, or even Briton, with a single idea" (B,
585). The narration filters the discovery of Tulkinghorn's corpse
through attention to Allegory: BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
The Roman now points "with far greater significance than he had in
Mr. Tulkinghorn's time, and with a deadly meaning," because, the
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
formula, "Sir John, who is wiser than I, says," have persuaded Jack, as they
will soon persuade Tom, that "the whole [French] system is the operation of
fraud upon folly" (1:340-41). Even the private letters of the Squire
contribute to a common network of loyal discourse, as his foreign
correspondence filters out through his servants into the village, to expose
the bleak reality behind a Jacobin lie: "'Tis all murder and nakedness, and
hunger" (1:340).
If this last claim seems to offer a negative version of the material fact as
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
it. Now I've forgotten what it's like to be centre Left-wing and own
a portfolio of shares. I don't laugh at Matthew Norman's hilarious
diaries anymore. And really I don't care what the next Harry Potter
book is like."39 The obliquities of this kind of signaling are
filters and codes, designed to ensure even in public an enclaved
communion with someone who is cast in a double role, both as the
missing thing and the conspiratorial broker who appreciates its
occult value.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 965-984
Fathoming "Remembrance": Emily Bronte in Context
Janet Gezari
---------------
goes on to contrast Bront�'s satisfaction in "dramatizing herself in
a tragic role" with Hardy's "conversational" or "self-communing"
intimacy in "After a Journey," a poem in which Leavis sees the
skeptical intelligence of the comfortably middle-aged male mourner
triumphing [End Page 969] over disorderly, disarming, and immature
feelings. 15 C. Day Lewis makes the point that "Sincerity is an
active virtue only in personal poems," and "Remembrance," as Henry
James recognized in his reading of it, is not a personal poem. 16 It
is the kind of poem that is more than likely to cause a reader like
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
him. He wants to be calm, and a lion--both terms earlier applied to
Falkland--and he repudiates forbearance and clemency, terms used by
Falkland and Forester in relation to Falkland's behavior towards
Caleb (for example, 172 and 281). Caleb here echoes Falkland's
earlier diatribe against him: "It is well! said he, gnashing his
teeth, and stamping upon the ground. You refuse the composition I
offer! I have no power to persuade you to compliance! You defy me! At
least I have a power respecting you, and that power I will exercise;
a power that shall grind you into atoms" (284). Caleb's contemptuous
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
violation and mutuality at which the subject encounters itself as Other. It
can therefore function as an ambiguously signifying "hint" of an actual
desire, complex of feelings, or practice which the reader might be able to
employ as identificatory material. The reader might experience similar
feelings of being harried by desires which are both exciting and enraging,
pleasurable and painful, and which take either single or reciprocal
activities, male or female companions, as their object. To begin to open such
traitorous thoughts and affect to consciousness--and to then imagine being
overwhelmed by them--would be to begin to drive the discursive sentries of
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
25. Perkin, Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London: Routledge,
1989), xii. Although a fuller consideration of Perkin's theory of
professionalism--a theory that continues to prevail today--is beyond the
scope of this essay, his basic premises are worth recapitulating. According
to Perkin, BLOCKQUOTE
W. D. Rubinstein offers a very different interpretation, arguing that
"Britain's was never fundamentally an industrial and manufacturing economy;
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
this one openly announce the commodification of women that other
Victorian novels strive to disguise, they also uncover a conflict
between the sexual and market economies. Unlike flour, whose price
increases with scarcity, these old maids are gradually
depreciating--recapitulating, in slow motion, Ruth's precipitous
"fall" in market value. The unexpected parallel in the sexual
marketability of these elderly virgins and the prematurely
"corrupted" teenager reveals that neither removing oneself from nor
participating in sexual exchange successfully navigates this
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 317-328
American Nationalism--R.I.P.
Bruce Burgett
---------------
legal training. And I am convinced by Looby that Brown intended to
investigate the concept of representation by metaphorically
collapsing these different registers. But when Looby mimics that
intent by reading the parallelism between theatrical ventriloquism,
political representation, and legal advocacy as evincing the QUOTE
his analysis ignores important differences in how power is
negotiated within different spheres of discourse. While it may be
true that all languages are QUOTE they become QUOTE and QUOTE only
within specific political and cultural environments.
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
This tension between hatred's expression and curtailment is
intriguing, leaving us to discern whether it implies retreat from
the world, direct confrontation with it, or a partial break with the
conventional bonds evincing membership in it. As Bront�'s notion of
citizenship is frequently inseparable from aggression, freedom
logically consists in her protagonists' spurning their neighbors.
Because her invocations of personal duty modify her protagonists'
troubled relationship to their communities, moreover, Bront�
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
Jewett establishes an overwhelming intimacy between natural and human
matter: whereas the _sight_ of objects always depends on sufficient
distance, the _smell_ of things depends on proximity, on chemical
contact, on physical infiltration. The culture of nature, as she
describes it, is one where nature comes to saturate bodily life.
Which is why the metaphorization of the Dunnet villagers themselves as
both flora and fauna seems so artless: it simply reads like the
rhetorical effect of the narrated fact of the intimacy between people
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
preoccupation that makes the sketches cohere as a novel, just as it
solidifies the relationship between the narrator and Mrs. Todd, it
is the gathering of plants" (201). He suggests that plants, for
Jewett, epitomize the regionalist vision of intimate, organic links
between people and place: "nature comes to saturate bodily
life....Which is why the metaphorization of the Dunnet villagers
themselves as both flora and fauna seems so artless: it simply reads
like the rhetorical effect of the narrated fact of intimacy between
people and place" (203).
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
embody the modern individual's crisis of reproductive time, though
in crucial ways the spinster and the bachelor are not parallel
cases.) 14 Modern culture contains an acute contradiction: sexuality
no longer needs to be reproductive, but the norms of reproductive
narrative continue to saturate the moral imagination of time, both
in Irving's day and in our own. Neither quite inside nor quite
outside the moral order of reproduction, Irving's writing
demonstrates the long reach of reproductive narrative in the lives
even of nonreproductive persons.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
attributes, such as race, gender, class, profession, ethnicity, or regional
origin. This poetic technique formally levels the subjects represented in a
way that suggests a radically egalitarian view of American citizenship. 20
Whitman's catalogs, however, open themselves up to a critique on
consensualist grounds: that by syntactically serializing subjects in this
way, Whitman suppresses the real relations of dominance and subordination
that obtain among them in the historical world. 21 But Whitman has been
claimed for multiculturalism on account not only of his representations of a
diverse embodied citizenry, but because of his lyric technique. His lyric
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
proportion was bought directly from hawkers by the poorer people, but it was
probably not very high." 46 Elite provision, through subscription and
subsidy, proved the most effective means of circulating a literature of moral
reform, and this made the recruitment of middle-class and gentry support a
critical element of the project. More's class-inflected versioning of the
tracts, which included annually compiled volumes that could be bound for
libraries, and octavo booklet versions of broadside ballads, was meant to
exploit their appeal among elite readers, whose motivations for purchasing
tracts on their own behalf were no doubt complex. Beyond their direct
ELH 67.3 (2000) 801-818
Dangerous Acquaintances: The Correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke
Barbara Packer
---------------
1830 that he was obliged to plough through "Hartley on Man" and other
treatises even more formidable. "Alas! I sigh when I reflect on the hard
reading and hard thinking which it has fallen my lot to perform. They rise
before me--the heaps of black-bound, red-edged folios of old divinity,
cumbering my path of life! How strong the temptation to leap the hedge and
cut across the wavy meadows, regardless of the sloughs of despond which, I am
told, wait to grapple the feet of the eccentric pilgrim." 19
Worse trials awaited Clarke in the months ahead. The illnesses of a brother
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
Puritan, Magawisca dresses up as Master Craddock to escape prison, and even
Hope, in the chapter immediately following her reunion with Faith,
"identif[ies] herself with a catholic saint" (253) in order to escape from
drunken Italian sailors. Clearly in _Hope Leslie_ not all disguises are
transgressions. In fact, the text does not pronounce on dissembling as such;
disguises are neither good nor bad. Rather, they only serve good or bad ends.
The same is true of historical authority in the text. As with dissembling,
the novel does not pronounce on authority (narrative or *[End Page 198]*
drunken Italian sailors. Clearly in _Hope Leslie_ not all disguises are
transgressions. In fact, the text does not pronounce on dissembling as such;
disguises are neither good nor bad. Rather, they only serve good or bad ends.
The same is true of historical authority in the text. As with dissembling,
the novel does not pronounce on authority (narrative or *[End Page 198]*
otherwise) as such. There are only good or bad authorities, like Hope's heart
(124, 189) and Governor Winthrop's head (245, 310), respectively; there are
only good or bad narratives. In fact, the novel actively resists the very
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
are better known for the fine eye they fix on the ordeals of
civility undertaken to gain social acceptance, ordeals which,
especially for those who like the "ex-mental patient," "the Negro,"
or "the homosexual," are burdened with stigmas that would prevent
their admission, involve acts of dissembling nothing short of
heroic. 13 But Goffman as much appreciates the strategies that
individuals devise to accomplish "awayness" even in the midst of
this or that social gathering, even where its demands are as binding
as those that characterize and constitute what he calls "total
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
considered respectable; or, on the other hand, you may subject your
pride to the mortification of a rebut from one, who, for reasons
impossible for you to discover, considers his station far more
unequivocal than your own." 10 Both Bulwer Lytton and Tocqueville
attribute the famous English reserve to the anxiety about misjudging the
suitability of a chance acquaintance. When in doubt, apparently, a snub
was the general rule. [End Page 1017] As John Stuart Mill puts it in The
Autobiography, "everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or no,
exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore." 11
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
both inheres in the moment and is actuated by the reader as a result of the
lyric encounter. Where hinting involves reading, and reminding a kind of
remembering, translating tropes the reader as taking whatever has been
remembered in the rhetorical encounter with Walt and turning it into a speech
act, respeaking the poet's words for her or himself in the activity of
subjective poesis, becoming an author, in the sense of being able to perform
"new" (because heretofore un-"realized") thoughts, feelings, and actions, new
"life." Whitman figures this kind of intersubjective transaction as a
simultaneous enactment of both speakerly and readerly agency in the lyric
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 230-253
Book Review ~~~~~~~~~~~ Whose Dickinson?
Cristanne Miller
---------------
manuscript QUOTE In contrast, Hart and Smith hypothesize that the
QUOTE --that is, their apparatus contains biographical commentary as
well as description of the artifact. But how can QUOTE QUOTE that a
manuscript was passed back and forth--especially given Dickinson's
propensity to write on scraps of paper?
Hart and Smith specifically address a popular, not a scholarly,
audience; they want their volume to be QUOTE (xxii). I take this in
part to mean that these editors have chosen to tell less than they
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
of this discourse, by the logic of returns. The household and the
bank, then, are constructed as spaces of shelter from the crashing
risks of circulation. The labor of housekeeping causes value to
accumulate at home, as worn clothes, for example, are mended and
household decorations made from scraps. It is, I think, this sort of
accumulation by thrift that is suggested by the word "Threadneedle"
in the Bank's nickname. If the Bank is a house, its work is figured
as the unpaid needlework of the housewife. The metaphorization of
banking as housework then obscures women in their roles as wage
in Bagehot's account, produces the discontinuous vision of
London-as-newspaper in the passage with which I began this essay:
"everything is there, and everything is disconnected." While
evocative in their "microscopic detail," his works are simply
"graphic scraps" (D, 83) that do not reveal the "binding element" of
society (D, 81).
Bagehot argues that the world of social and economic values, far
from being discontinuous and chaotic, is unified, governed by subtle
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
type of narrative that, if brought to its expected conclusion, would
serve to reinscribe (and strengthen) the peasant domestic sphere as
the site of stability, a site then readily appropriated by
nationalist discourse. 26 Speaking on nationalism and
historiography, Homi Bhabha has noted that "[t]he scraps, patches
and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a
coherent national culture, while the very act of the narrative
performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects." 27
Though the focus here is on historical narratives, Bhabha's remarks
coherent national culture, while the very act of the narrative
performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects." 27
Though the focus here is on historical narratives, Bhabha's remarks
are, in another sense, applicable to The Shadow. Synge's play
affords the possibility of assembling the scraps of domestic
degeneracy--precisely that which marks the Irish as England's
other--into a coherent representation of the Irish nation, a
coherence grounded in patriarchal performance, the peasant familial
leader reasserting his leadership so that the domestic space will no
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
While Sally carefully saves her wages to bequeath them back to her
employer, the household suffers for lack of basic necessities. By
this point, the Bensons' budget has become so strained that, in an
additionally ironic twist, they are reduced to making furnishings
out of scraps of refuse: BLOCKQUOTE
Even under these circumstances, Sally's money is of course not
touched; more importantly, the recycling in this scene, and
throughout _Ruth_, is itself a kind of hoarding, extending Sally's
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
Evans's _De Bardis Dissertatio_ (1764): "[T]he Welch Poets are also
coming to light," he wrote Wharton, "I have seen a Discourse in Mss.
about them . . . with specimens of their writings. [T]his is in
Latin, &, tho' it don't approach [the Ossian poems], there are fine
scraps among it" (_C,_ 2:680). 35 Some of those " prominently "Gwalchmai's Triumph of Owen," were the models for other
imitations by Gray. Worried his modest output would "be mistaken
*[End Page 1010]* for the works of a flea," Gray included the three
major imitations--"The Fatal Sisters," "The Descent of Odin," and
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
-------------
The University of Iowa
In a notebook entitled, simply, "Words"—an ensemble of
variously sized and colored scraps pasted between the covers of a
book from which the original pages had been torn out—Walt
Whitman writes the word "absences," tags a dash onto the end of it,
and then adds the parenthetical phrase, "('his mind was full of
absences.')." Just below this is written the word "apostle,"
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
as Hume believes, then he has no desire to ring her death knell. But the
modest Hume is under no delusion that his philosophical essays will be
widely influential. And since he knows that no refutation of causality or
necessity will make him a skeptic when he leaves the study for the idols
of the marketplace, Hume also denies (in the spirit of a self-deprecating
ironist) that his writings will make society a less gracious or happy
place to live in. Blessed with a keen eye for the civilizing power of
social customs, Hume ironically redefines "Wisdom" as the intellectual
animus that divides people whom "a few paces, a glass of wine, a cup of
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
of "excellence" with, as Coleridge puts it, "simplicity and
naturalness." For Lewis's reviewers, Castle Spectre's displays of
poetic versatility add to its transgressiveness by creating a text
of widely disparate genres and eclectic notions of literary class.
This effect is compounded by the ironic and self-deprecating
attitude Lewis takes toward his play in his Prologue and Epilogue:
while the former treats the "maniac" Romance with superior critical
irony and deconstructs the Gothic into its component parts, the
latter launches immediately into doggerel and outrageous puns as if
ELH 66.4 (1999) 965-984
Fathoming "Remembrance": Emily Bronte in Context
Janet Gezari
---------------
the poems Bront� wrote about the relation of death to life, she
reverses these associations, representing the living as struggling
against their confinement in the world and the flesh, while the dead
have won release. But this poem begins in the place where Keats's
"Ode to a Nightingale" leaves off, with its speaker deprecating the
sensory deprivation and frozen immobility of the noble dead.
Sacks, who grounds his study of the English elegy in the work of
mourning described by Freud in "Mourning and Melancholia," cites the
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
Cowper himself seems to have been aware of some of these ironies, or
at least to have understood that his poetic liberation originated in
something less than the abandonment of all cares. This
acknowledgment takes the characteristic form of Cowper's
self-deprecating claim that he writes for his own amusement rather
than for worldly acclaim. Poetry helps him, he says, to "divert [his
mind] fromsad subjects, & fix it upon such as may administer to its
amusement . . . [to] forget everything that is irksome" (21 December
1780, 1:425); it is for him analogous to fiddling, making birdcages,
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
simultaneously proves himself a deficient artist and a worthy man.
In _The Marble Faun_, to state the case most boldly, Hawthorne
imagines both aesthetic creation and aesthetic appreciation as
precluding self-expression.55 Hawthorne affiliates subjectivity and
materiality because of their common role in thwarting aesthetic
expression. Both need to be subordinated for the aesthetic to be
realized. If, in _The Marble Faun_, this subordination never
completely occurs, and thus great paintings are repeatedly reduced
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
either the mindless law of the species or a naked avowal of
narcissistic will to self-perpetuation. At the beginning of the
story, none of this is a problem; Rip seems content to ignore both
family and property as modes of self-perpetuation or
self-transcendence, contenting himself with the alternative styles
of identity, sociality, and pleasure whose investment the story
clearly shares in. By the end of the story, Rip has been confronted
with the problem of mortality and generational time.
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
schools.35 But perhaps the field matron program most fully developed
the idea of white women as teachers of civilization itself. Started
in 1890 at the behest of the Women's National Indian Association,
this program sent white women onto reservations for the express
purpose of inculcating the civilized gendered division of labor.
Instructing Indian women in proper domesticity through sewing,
cooking, and general housekeeping lessons, field matrons acted as
secular, state-paid missionaries of civilization who also monitored
Indian communities for the colonial bureaucracy.36 Even though most
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
for fifteen years a general oversight, suggested the plan of the
Hampton School. The Negro and the Polynesian have many striking
similarities" (213). Like Hawaii's programs of colonial education,
Hampton and Tuskegee focused education not on conveying knowledge so
much as on inculcating _character—_a notion that embodies
capitalist traits like responsibility, perseverance, and
conciliation.
In describing apprenticeship for directing the Tuskegee Institute,
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
start and, in the end, the victory of an inexorable reality." 22 But he
points to a dysfunction between semantic event and the emergent sequence of
metrical incidents; at the level of overt meaning, someone knocks seeking
entry from outside, but does so (line three) within a rhythmic series free
of incident and inculcating drowsiness. The three catalectic breaks or
omissions occur as the story speaks of reassurance. Consequently, there is a
dissonance between meaning and rhythm which Abraham takes as exemplary:
BLOCKQUOTE
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 377-406
Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741
Andy Doolen
---------------
commentary by dramatizing it as scenery or symbol" (196), and the
chronicle's setting of a curse in a peaceful cityscape forecasts
violence. The three original conspirators walk below Mrs. Earle's
window on the Sabbath, a sacred and patriotic day that also contains
within it the promise of a fateful reckoning: "This Sunday as three
negroes were walking up the Broadway towards the English church,
about service time" (Horsmanden 27). The sequence expresses the
peacefulness of the community gathering as families in faithful
worship, but the movement of the three slaves divides the scene into
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
breeze" (175).
These passages complicate one common view concerning the modest or
diminutive scale of Jewett's work. Richard Brodhead rightly notes
that the "issue of size or scale has formed part of every reckoning
of Jewett" (163), but he goes on to reaffirm several critical claims
about the author's "limits" and her own "compulsive
self-miniaturization" in restraining herself to a "minor," regional
form. Brodhead insists that "in choosing the regional form, Jewett
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
Even without its interpolated Anacreontics--the seldom-discussed
poems "Fancy," "Bards of Passion and of Mirth," "Lines on the
Mermaid Tavern," and "Robin Hood. To a Friend"--it would be clear
that Keats's volume entails a reckoning with the poetry of wine and
love. But despite the various attempts by John Bayley, Christopher
Ricks, and Marjorie Levinson to reclaim his dictional gush as
somehow personal, it must also be acknowledged to be not just
conventional (as has never been ignored), but pointedly historical
crystal fortress and destroyed it too]). But the whiplash of feeling
becomes too strong for the childish imagination; in the last stanza
he yearns for the magic wand that would preserve his lost
masculinist paradise. Desperately Anacreontic is the only way one
might adequately characterize this self-reckoning with Goethe's
earliest style. But of course from here the way leads directly to
Mignon, whose first and last lines ("Kennst du das Land" [Know'st
thou the land], "Dahin m�cht' ich . . . ziehn" [Thence would I
head]) echo the end of "Der neue Amadis." If, for Wordsworth, the
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R.
Jones (London: Methuen, 1965), 154. Hereafter cited parenthetically
in the text by page number and abbreviated LB.
55. For a subtle reckoning with romantic negation as a transumption
of irony, see John Baker, Jr., "Grammar and Rhetoric in Wordsworth's
'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal': Heidegger, de Man, Deconstruction,"
Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997): 103-23.
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
dominant [End Page 637] in those beams?" (DD, 3). The woman being
watched is Gwendolen Harleth, and the first scene of the novel
presents Daniel Deronda's observation of her as she gambles in a
casino at Leubronn. In some sense, the novel, and even the virtuous
Daniel, never stop measuring Gwendolen, reckoning her, assessing her
composition. The novel represents Gwendolen as willful, vain,
clever, superficial. In many ways, Eliot has simply provided a more
intelligent but less robust version of Rosamond, herself a near
relative of Eliot's earlier female egoists, including Hetty Sorrel
ELH 67.4 (2000) 1011-1034
In the Shadow of the Glen: Gender, Nationalism, and "A Woman Only"
Rob Doggett
---------------
native heterosexual male; as Nora explains: "There's no one can
drive a mountain ewe but the men do be reared in the Glen Malure,
I've heard them say, and above by Rathvanna and the Glen Imaal, men
the like of Patch Darcy, God spare his soul, who would walk through
five hundered sheep and miss one of them, and he not reckoning them
at all" (S, 110-11). Capable of driving his ewes, capable of
monitoring five hundred sheep without reckoning them, Darcy serves
as Synge's ideal peasant, "a great man surely" (S, 111), Nora
proclaims, who restores love to the loveless marriage, contentment
I've heard them say, and above by Rathvanna and the Glen Imaal, men
the like of Patch Darcy, God spare his soul, who would walk through
five hundered sheep and miss one of them, and he not reckoning them
at all" (S, 110-11). Capable of driving his ewes, capable of
monitoring five hundred sheep without reckoning them, Darcy serves
as Synge's ideal peasant, "a great man surely" (S, 111), Nora
proclaims, who restores love to the loveless marriage, contentment
to a domestic sphere in degeneracy, vitality to a community in
decay.
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 151-169
Walking on Flowers: the Kantian Aesthetics Of _Hard Times_
Christina Lupton
---------------
Jupe, whose emotional involvement with the world of horses and
horseriding proves useless in meeting this educational system's
demand for facts about horses (44). Facts, to use Dickens's term,
cleave away from fancy; the intuitive world of subjective experience
contradicts the forms of reckoning which set human beings to work
instrumentally and inhumanly against themselves.
The idea that a nonrational way of knowing might challenge the
results of quantitative reason is of course not original to Dickens.
The worker finds in his personal life "an activity which is turned
against him, neither depends on nor belongs to him." 20 This state
of self-estrangement is played out even in Dickens's reassurance
that his readers, the "good people of an anxious turn of mind," can
see themselves as made by God: in this reckoning they are
objectified to the extent that they can be compared with this alien
"forest of looms."
Seen like this, Dickens's passage enacts, rather than alleviates,
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
to be stricken with cancer of the breast. The moment of revelation
is also the climax of the novel's gothic indulgences: Lady
Delacour's performances of hiding a secret and her history of using
mesmerizing wit to distract Belinda from this secret are frothed to
a high pitch here. Though the deveiling is written as if it were
revelatory, however, Belinda has been well prepared for such a
moment by the novel's diligent steeping of Lady Delacour's wit in
terrifying undertones. The captivating use of language that makes
Lady Delacour, to Belinda, "the most agreeable--no, that is too
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
Not the vision but the vision's loss is what Coleridge undertakes to
imitate, and as he does so he doubles, triples, even quadruples his
account: with first the story itself of the distracting businessman,
then a self-quotation that misrepresents loss by promising an
impossible restoration, then a resolution (in Greek) to sing a
sweeter song, originally [End Page 896] "Today" but changed
mercifully in 1834 to "tomorrow." Finally comes the poem itself,
that sweet musical remembrance of Kubla's miraculous pleasure dome.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
poems" pretend here to rhetorical superiority? How can we coordinate the
speaker's previous rejection of an epistemology of reading as decoding with
the authoritarian sense of hinting as a game of guessing what's in the
author's mind? Upon closer consideration we can see the apparently
contradictory rhetoric of hinting as a tactical imparting of mixed messages
concerning the nature and locus of meaning in _Leaves of Grass_. The notion
of lyric hinting encourages the reader to think of meaning as deep content
obscured to one's immediate perception. The speaker's use of the term in
effect charges the reader with the task of searching after, guessing at,
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
career he has separated himself so sharply from the British tradition I am
describing, partly because his position in the history of this tradition is
so influenced by his current isolation, an isolation that makes him at once a
powerful and brilliant reader of literature and an apocalyptically
undiscriminating and mood-driven reader of the contemporary critical scene.
4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony and solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1989), xvi. For other recent accounts of the centrality of
narrative to philosophical analysis, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
prove that love of life was stronger than love of liberty by using
the example of a tortured "negro slave," left off. 9 A runaway
slave, having lost his hands and feet as punishment, was further
brutalized by being burnt in a frying pan; at that point someone
tried to end his life and suffering by cudgeling him to death, but
the slave protected his head from harm. According to the previous
speaker, the slave's protecting himself proved that love of life is
stronger than love of liberty. Thelwall does not challenge the
racist and colonialist assumptions of the previous speaker but
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 835-860
Eros and Isolation: The AntiSocial George Eliot
Jeff Nunokawa
---------------
Grandcourt, whose contempt for the opinion of the world's opinion
must take it into account--"[i]t is true that Grandcourt went about
with the sense that he did not care a languid curse for any one's
admiration; but this state of not caring, just as much as desire,
required its related object--namely, a world of admiring or envying
spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling
persons, the persons must be there and they must smile" (_D_,
585-86); not Deronda, whose trepidation over his private meetings
with Gwendolen has less to do with any anxiety about the competence
ELH 66.1 (1999) 157-177
'Tranced Griefs': Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic
Robert Miles
---------------
refuge in his gothicized Strawberry Hill, each a highly visible
vindication of their rival claims to uphold, indeed to embody, the
liberty that defined true Whiggism. 2 In The Castle of Otranto,
Walpole extended his conceit to the novel. The first preface
declares his hand by averring that the book was a sixteenth-century,
anti-Reformation document. That is to say, Walpole claims that it
was a text arising out of the very nexus that defined Whiggism as
Whigs saw it: the conflict between despotism and a historical
vocation for reform, providentially vouchsafed to England. So when I
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
I want to take seriously Hawthorne's claim that the United States is
no place for Romance. Hawthorne, after having not written a Romance
for six years, repudiates the genre of the Romance for the same
reason that he rejects the aesthetic: both imperil individuality. It
is because Hawthorne is so intent on disconnecting the Romance from
the United States that he makes the seemingly outrageous statement
that, in his "dear native land," there "is no shadow, no antiquity,
no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong" (_M_, 3). In
particular, Hawthorne locates Rome as the ideal realm for a Romance
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
is less a matter of revealing wit's mystifying powers, and more that
_Belinda_characterizes wit's mystification as itself a
mystification. Put another way, the novel sets about "demystifying"
wit not by demonstrating the superiority of a domestic lifestyle
over a wittily debauched one, but by declawing wit itself, and
depicting it as less capable of harm than we--seduced by Lady
Delacour's spectacular accounts of wit's ravages--might have thought
it to be. Though Lady Delacour believes her life to be imperiled by
her use of wit, the novel asserts that wit never, in fact, had this
ELH 68.4 (2001) 857-896
William Godwin's _Caleb Williams:_ The Tarnishing of the Sublime
Monika Fludernik
---------------
of the homosocial element in the novel. If Falkland is a close
counterpart of Edmund Burke--Boulton, Butler, McCracken and Storch
have all suggested this--then Godwin is possibly alluding to rumors
about Edmund Burke's homosexuality which were sparked by Burke's
courageous intervention in the House against the pillorying of
sodomites. 11 (In 1780, one of two men condemned to the pillory for
sodomy had died a cruel death of asphyxiation because he was too
short for the neck hole of the pillory.) In his account of this
episode, Isaac Kramnick went on to argue that Burke might indeed have
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
not "she," into an interior both singular and collective. Although the
narrator does not enunciate the female pronoun (despite having fallen into
the habit of talking aloud to the bird), the unuttered "she" is sufficient
to produce spectral competition for the raven in the form of stanza
fourteen's seraphic "footfalls" presaging the offer of a cessation of sorrow
("nepenthe")--all of which rises from "memories of Lenore." Single syllables
appear to pack a lot of plot. You may recall that in the middle of the
ghostly stand-off (stanza fourteen, line four), hesitation over whether to
express or repress the syllable "or" in "memories" induces a metrical
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
Todd ("she seemed to class him") comprehends the human world according
to her own natural history (385). "There's a great many such strayaway
folk, just as there is plants," she says, explaining the correspondence
between a displaced laurel she knows and a displaced member of the
Bowden clan, both of which thrive despite their unaccommodating
environment.
Whereas Mason thought of the phenomena of "all mankind as natural
objects" ("Progress" 528), Mrs. Todd simply regards social behavior as
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
Up to this point, the metaphor of Bank as house is pursued only
ironically: the narrator of the piece finds the stately house
strangely unaccommodating. Here especially, among the paper notes,
we find nothing that could sustain life. This money is only paper,
and though the paper notes are "representatives of weightier value"
(that is, gold) (O, 340), they don't serve to make the house into a
home. The powerlessness of paper money, mere representation of
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
as a man of letters. Walter Scott called his translation of Tasso a
"flat medium," and mocked his prolific output: "he did exactly so
many couplets day by day, neither more or less; and habit made it
light to him, however heavy it might seem to the reader."35 Macaulay
shared Scott's contempt, and places Hoole's versifying style in a
context by which we can usefully compare him to Wordsworth:
"[C]oming after Pope, [he] had learned how to manufacture
decasyllabic verses; and poured them forth by thousands and tens of
thousands, all as well turned, as smooth, and as like each other as
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
illness, we are told, "A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of
the person, and frequent although transient affections of a
cataleptical character were the unusual diagnosis" ("F," 322).
Unusual indeed: for what appears to live in these twin bodies are,
precisely, the slowly unfurling processes of death and degeneration.
In the peculiar stasis of their lives in the tomb-like manor, in
their pallid cadaverousness and their unwavering morbidity, they
give living expression to death; or, put differently, they _are_
death, expressed in the form of life. No "simple humanity" attaches
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
devouring him in progressive stages from within. The suggestion of a
sin both undisclosed and monstrous (again, the very meat of the
Gothic) finds a particularly grisly analogue, however, in the tale's
climactic moment. In his final monologue, Roderick speaks in "a low,
hurried, and gibbering murmur," but what he says is clear enough to
the narrator: BLOCKQUOTE
In a way that's as striking as it is eerie, death returns Madeline
emphatically to her gender. "There was blood upon her white robes,"
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
Scotland but a point of mutual alienation: one of the two misfit bards in the
contest "seemed a courtier or a lord; / Strange his array and speech withal,
/ Gael deemed him southern—southern, Gael" (_Q_, 24). Other regional
and national differences produce rancor as well: the poem presents vicious
stereotypes of foreigners (the Italian and Irish poets are both simpering and
effeminate; we can tell them apart only because the Irishman is also drunk),
and the Scots and Britons hardly come off much better. The contest
degenerates into regional bickering:
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
unlikely for an author not given to preachy or dogmatic poetry, I
would contend that counterpropositional poetry in actuality is even
more related than didactic poetry to changing states of affairs
because it gets at the mechanism of change, the core, instead of
proffering a prescriptive model that the present does not but should
match. However much Poe's theoretization of poetry invests in the
aesthetic and recoils from the didactic, such a commitment in no way
forecloses the possibility that poetry may have an efficacy that
cannot be categorized as either didactic or prescriptive (ER 75).
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 348-354
Melville the Poet: Response to William Spengemann
Elizabeth Renker
---------------
appear roughly proximate to the standard edition noted above and
these publications will, in sum, create a fertile ground for
reception by a broader audience. 7
My ultimate point in proffering these signs of growing interest in
Melville's poetry is to argue that, in the aggregate, they signal a
material change in reception--the opposite of the complete and
ongoing neglect Spengemann portrays. Scholars will produce critical
books and articles (like this one, I might add, as well as
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
there be a content shared, but rather that both participants be
prepared to engage in a liminal speech act where "To present oneself
in signifying is to speak," in an act which is a "Saying without a
Said."38 The lines of ritual greeting deny translation and exchange
and act instead as a pure performative proffering hospitality to the
other. The lines from the _Iliad_ may quite possibly _say_ hostility
rather than hospitality (the _Odyssey_ would be a better choice to
express the latter), but they _perform_ greeting. As such, as lines
that do not mean what they say, they are consistent with the
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
placement of the Lucifer passage at the end of the sequence
signifies the nadir of this poetic wandering, it is a low point that
shifts the blankness of death to the subject position of the poet.
If we track the progression following the invocation of death's
blankness, there is a gradual decentering of the subject that
culminates in its possession by the Lucifer figure. The poet "see[s]
the white body" of the swimmer dashed against the rocks; he "pick[s]
up the dead" washed upon the shore; at "the defeat at Brooklyn," he
merely describes the scene, the "I" subsiding as the poet begins to
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
world, as does the boundary between the free individual and cosmic
order in the ideal world. This proves to be the most important
ideological event of the poet's life since the inception of _The
Recluse_ project, and it is the explanation for his increasingly
nationalist bent. For as we shall see, within the circumscribing
environment of international anarchy he discovers a manner of giving
the visionary individual a means of social action.
We first encounter this paradoxical solution in a poem that was
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
amidst "these distressing circumstances. . . . One whose offense for
which he had been sold was an overfondness for his wife, played the
fiddle continuously."28 By allowing the substitution of the slave's
music for his inevitable if undetectable grief, Lincoln
aestheticizes this scene, transmuting it into a valediction. 29
The presence of slaves in river traffic imaged the social death
characteristic of all speculative risk, and in _Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn_ this slave presence disrupts the confirmation of
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
34. Erichsen in On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System
(1866) struggles to separate out the specific nervous phenomena he
is interested in from hysterical symptoms for which, he claims, they
were often mistaken. For Mark Seltzer, "The cross-influences among
Charcot's studies in hysteria, Muybridge's gridding of moving
bodies, and the graphic time-motion studies of Marey and, somewhat
later, Frank Gilbreth, make visible the unlinkings of motion and
volition that allow hysteria, locomotion, and machine-work to
communicate with each other." Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (London:
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
Dryden's Objection Would Have Been Stronger, Jeremy Collier Observes
in His _Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage_ (1698), If He Had Avoided Similar Mistakes in His Own Comedy
_Amphitryon_ (1690). Warming to the Subject of Chronological
Absurdities in Drama, Collier Reveals That "_Shakspear_ Makes
_Hector_ Talk about _Aristotles_ Philosophy" in _Troilus and
Cressida_ .60 and So Began the Scandalous Accusation—as
Formulated in 1712 by John Dennis—that England's Greatest
Dramatist Was "Guilty of the Grossest Faults in Chronology."61 the
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
objects of the commodity world, his materialist aesthetic grapples with
the lure of those self-same objects as commodities. In short, Wilde is
fully aware of what he is up against. Most vividly, Wilde's description
of the opium den in The Picture of Dorian Gray conjures the strange
transmogrifying powers of commodity fetishism: "Dorian winced, and
looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such fantastic
postures on the ragged mattresses. The twisted limbs, the gaping
mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. He knew in what
strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were teaching
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 814-822
New Origins of American Literature
Grantland S. Rice
---------------
long-standing performative role of our discipline, updating such
integrating concepts as the frontier or the Puritan ideal with the
current cultural preoccupation with racial identity. And by doing so,
Gardner�s effort reconfirms the longitudinal vitality of our
discipline�s traditional role in interpellating popular visions of
national identity.
Laura Rigal�s book, by contrast, exposes some of the intricate
machinery behind American literary origins. By providing a close look
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
Mitchell writes, "Landscape as a cultural medium thus has a double role with
respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a cultural and social
construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and
inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by
interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its
givenness as sight and site" (2).
42. Of the young women she meets ("several very pretty faces"),
Wollstonecraft notes: "As their minds were totally uncultivated, I did not
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
world-containing Imperial Self--but in the sense of Whitman's attempting at
moments to vocally perform a lyric self devoid of embodied, historically
marked concreteness, to be understood as empty form to be filled with content
by the reader. This paradoxical aspiration gets picked up in tropes--like the
one in the preceeding epigraph from the last lines of "So Long!," the last
poem of the 1860 edition--concerning the supersession, abandonment, or death
of the poet-speaker. But how can such a speaker be efficacious for the
variety of reader-subjects towards whom he launches his utterances when he
himself, as he says, is disembodied and dead? What would constitute, in
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
to write and the number of titles they were expected to review in a single
article, encouraged reviewers to subordinate careful judgments about what
they read (or pretended to read) to displays of their own vituperative style.
Besant repeatedly complained about the latter: "I cannot conceive any kind of
work more demoralising to a writer than that of reviewing a dozen novels
every week in, say, two columns," he wrote. "The inevitable result is that .
. . the reviewer, after a short course of this kind of work, loses the power
of judgment; he scamps the reading so persistently that he becomes unable to
read; he makes an effort to get at something like the story, which he
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 151-169
Walking on Flowers: the Kantian Aesthetics Of _Hard Times_
Christina Lupton
---------------
Edward Thompson, or the writings of Ossian as part of this
counter-Enlightenment that extends throughout the century.
3. Here I am of course thinking ahead to Georg W. F. Hegel's
dialectic, rather than refering to a contradiction which Immanuel
Kant himself observed.
4. Kant, _Critique of Judgment_, trans. Werner Pluhar (Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 78. Hereafter abbreviated _CJ_
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
of life--to his side. Finally, though, the gnomes "impede the Demon's deadly
course" by marshaling "bands" of "celestial" alkalis, who provide "neutral
chains" to bind Septon: the "Operation of calcareous earths," the gloss
explains, including "alkaline salts, oily substances, clay, etc." triumph
over Septon by "attracting" and neutralizing "pestilential airs" (134).
The poem attempts to convey in verse what Mitchill and his friends had long
argued: that the unregulated decomposition of organic matter--both vegetable
and animal--generates disease. Yellow fever is not a "catching disease," he
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
passion" (Hirschman, 20), which depended upon the discreteness of
passions and interests, so that the latter could be opposed to and
thus quell the former. These last two models, articulated in the
writings of, among others, Baruch Spinoza and David Hume, proposed
restraining or redirecting a particular passion by neutralizing it
with an opposite passion. For a fuller discussion of this
trajectory, see Hirschman, 7-66.
10. Hirschman also notes the relevance of Bernard Mandeville's _The
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
than accurate and constant observation.17
Even the wealthy, it would seem, must be carefully watched. Lady
Aston, for example, was a pious woman, but far too gloomy and
untrusting of God's mercy. Luckily, however, her neighbors the
Stanleys observed her error and came to her rescue: "Our esteem for
her increased with our closer intercourse, which, however, enabled
us also to observe some considerable mistakes in her judgement. . .
. These errors we regretted, and with all possible tenderness
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
certainly *[End Page 1011]* have preoccupied Gray during this
period. Such was the mindset in which he wrote to Wharton in
September of 1761 to offer his assistance in the quest for Gothic
wallpaper, while expressing doubts about success. A month later Gray
reported that he had had no luck: "on rummageing Mr Bromwich's [the
premier retailer of wallpaper at the time] & several other shops I
am forced to tell you, that there are absolutely no papers at all,
that deserve the name of Gothick, or that you would bear the sight
of. [T]hey are all what they call _fancy_, & indeed resemble nothing
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 223-243
Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot's _Middlemarch_
Jessie Givner
---------------
at once to the opaque form of language and *[End Page 233]* to its
oppositional other, transparent content. As the OED tells us, "figure" refers
both to the literal or letteral ("a letter of the alphabet, the symbol of a
musical note, a mathematical symbol") as well as to the rhetorical and
tropological ("any of the various 'forms' of expression, deviating from the
normal arrangement or use of words . . . e.g. Aposiopesis, Hyperbole,
Metaphor, etc."). It refers at once to the body ("Of a living being: Bodily
shape") and to the representation of the bodies and matter ("The image,
likeness, or representation _of_ something material or immaterial"). In this
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
implacably anchored in another bodily function, chastity, then
Burney appears to draw from that deeper fund of somatic innocence to
adjudicate between the wanderer's embodiments of manners and of
race. Burney's recourse to the blush joins manner to anatomy,
recalibrating the materiality of manner to dissolve the materiality
of complexion and, in so doing, releasing the wanderer into the
novel's dominant abstraction of whiteness.
The wanderer's reversion to whiteness transpires as follows:
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
female patients. When told that Dix is a philanthropist, one woman asks the
meaning of the *[End Page 9]* term, and the other replies that it means "a
lover of men," to which the first replies, "Well, then, are we ladies not all
philanthropists?" ("Editor's Table," _Opal_ 7.1 23). A subsequent letter from
Superintendent Benedict to Dix indicates that she was not amused: "I regret
that you have been annoyed by our 'Opal'—you shall not appear in it
again" (Benedict).
One curious fact about the _Opal_ is that its articles received relatively
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
Karshish encounters the biblical Lazarus, Landor's conversation [End Page
455] between the free-thinking David Hume and his religiously orthodox
kinsman, John Home, sets two habits of mind against each other. One is
evangelistic, assertive, homiletic--Hebraic, if you will, deploying
powerful single ironies. The other is amused, "cool," analytic, lightened
by a Hellenistic preference for seeing all round an issue instead of
choosing sides. When the earnestly Hebraic Home redefines Parisian
tolerance as a deficency of zeal, his skeptical adversary contrasts the
intellectual despotism of many theologians with the free play of mind that
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
revealing note to his Aids to Reflection, Coleridge redefined the
word "amusement" in the light of the contemporary reading public's
craving for instant and easy gratification as a-musement: "to be
away from the Muses!" 53 Like Victoria, serious readers are not
amused. "Our typical experience of a work" of literature in the
twentieth century, Trilling concludes, "is to begin our relation to
it at a conspicuous disadvantage, and to wrestle with it until it
consents to bless us. We express our high esteem for such a work by
supposing that it judges us. And when it no longer seems to judge
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
the speaking member be attended to or silenced, but others were more
like the responses of theater audiences. Edward Gibbon, who was an
M. P. from 1774 to 1784 but never once spoke in debate, wrote to a
friend, "Still dumb: but see hear, laugh sometimes, am oftener
serious but upon the whole very well amused." 34 Carl Moritz, who
visited the House in 1782, observed that "if it happens, that a
member rises, who is but a bad speaker, or if what he says is
generally deemed not sufficiently interesting, so much noise is
made; and such bursts of laughter are raised, that the member who is
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
led them to believe that poetry, like society, began in a savage
condition but improved gradually.85 That mindset is exhibited in
Joseph Addison's versified "Account of the Greatest English Poets"
(1694), which moves immediately from an "unpolished" Chaucer to "Old
Spenser" (whose "ancient tales amused a barbarous age") before
reaching that "mighty genius," Abraham Cowley, a poet eulogized by
Rymer in 1674 for having "understood the _purity_ , the
_perspicuity_ , the _majesty_ of stile, and the vertue of _numbers_
."86 In Addison's progress of poesy scenario, the cultural wasteland
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
the metaphor of the unsown seed to describe virginity. In baking barley
bread herself, which is of a coarser grain than the pure white seed of
Jerome and the virgins, the domesticated Wife of Bath is assuming in her
premise what she purports to discover only in her conclusion: namely, the
suitability of all women for procreating. Since procreation is presumably
the final cause of all seeds, which (if left unsown) would defeat their
natural purpose of propagating the species, only the Wife's chosen
metaphor can make her circular reasoning seem plausible. [End Page 451]
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
24
Burney distinguishes practice from (remunerative) practice; but it
is hardly a coincidence that she reveals the secret of the
wanderer's birth precisely at this juncture. As Sir Jaspar ogles the
two noble milliners with amazement, Gabriella incautiously tells him
that the wanderer is the legitimate, but unacknowledged, daughter of
a deceased English lord. Certifiable being arrests the confusion of
doing and doing.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 831-861
Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama
Michael Gamer
---------------
flood and an ill-gotten hidden treasure, divine retribution and
judgment. While aiming to make the play a "productive success,"
Scott takes special pleasure in the fact that he will derive no
profit from it other than pleasure. The play, then, allows him to
glut his own gothic predilections without risking his reputation as
a public author responsible for maintaining existing cultural
standards of taste. The play's ultimate thematics, furthermore, turn
on questions of authority and legitimacy; what separates the hero
Durward from the false Gullcrammer in the play's final act is
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
his earliest articles to his most famous work, Lombard Street,
Bagehot is a theorist of the money market, that is, the market for
business capital which centered on the commercial banks in London's
Lombard Street. According to Bagehot financial crises were caused by
a glut of loanable money available at temptingly low rates of
interest. "John Bull can stand a great deal," Bagehot writes in a
number of places, "but he cannot stand 2%." 42 That is, when
interest rates go down to 2%, investors get restless, and
entrepreneurs get greedy. With money available so cheaply, an
the "practical sagacity" (D, 80) or "broad sagacity by which the
great painters of human affairs have unintentionally stamped the
mark of unity on their productions" (D, 84). The feminized excesses
of Dickens's imaginative overproduction do, in Bagehot's view, lead
to a kind of glut of Dickens's products on the literary market. 48
But the sexual and economic metaphors governing the piece do not
take up this supply-demand argument in any extended way. Rather,
Dickens's lack of masculine restraint is used to diagnose the
haphazard qualities of his novels. His indiscriminate imagination,
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 433-453
Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field
Mary Poovey
---------------
esp. part 1; and Simon Eliot, "The Business of Victorian Publishing," _The
Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel_, ed. Deirdre David (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 37-60.
2. Among other contemporary responses to this glut of printed materials, see
the two essays Margaret Oliphant published anonymously: "The Byways of
Literature: Reading for the Million," _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ 84
(August 1858): 200-16; and "New Books," _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ 108
(August 1870): 166-88.
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
for the elevation and adorning of our spirits" (R, 20-21). Even the
two impulses of "elevation" and "adornment," often at odds with each
other in Romantic poetry, are here reconciled. It is such synthetic
and typical depictions, with only the occasional odd Paterian twist
of conjoining "liberty" and "comely," that lead Bill Readings to
claim that "the Renaissance . . . actually took place in the
nineteenth century as the nostalgia of Burckhardt, Pater, and
Michelet for an originary moment of cultural reunification." 13
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
stabilizing this passage. Her stress upon the simultaneity--and the
radical incommensurability--of "elegance" and millinery work makes
the wanderer embody incompatible states in the same modality of
practice, compelling Burney to refute her animation of labor by
stylizing that very labor. Because the wanderer cannot lend herself
totally to the practice of either labor or elegance (she would then,
of course, have to switch between one and the other), she animates
and misanimates, lending herself to her labor at the same time that
she stylizes it the wrong way. Sir Jaspar's "reverential"
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
this pause as a very particular activity on the part of the gentleman
traveller: he is engaged in an appreciation of the picturesque. As
John Barrell notes in his study _The Idea of Landscape and the Sense
of Place_, the "contemplation of landscape was an activity with its
own proper procedure, which involved recognising the stretch of land
under your eye . . . as a complex of associations and meanings, and
more important, as a composition, in which each object bore a
specific and analysable relationship to the others." This practice of
carving up natural scenes into compositions, furthermore, was so
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
in more insidious terms, considered to be intentionally
misrepresenting the real world.
As scholars have increasingly emphasized Hawthorne's unpardonable
politics, this fauning of Black slaves has come to stand as merely
the most egregious instantiation of the primary ideological failing
of Hawthorne's writing and thought: his use of the aesthetic to
excuse, contain, or conceal the political problem of race-based
slavery. Thus, Eric Cheyfitz has argued that Hawthorne's
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
away from "ordinary industry," while "propagating" a degenerative and servile
"passion" for government salaries (S, 335-36), the trend Smiles identifies
privileges the professional middle classes at the expense of their
entrepreneurial counterparts. This mode of intra-class conflict, exalting the
gentlemanly status of the middle-class civil servant while snubbing the
vulgar commercialism of the tradesman or manufacturer--has a complicated (and
decidedly British) history of its own. 33 But one need only recall the works
of Matthew Arnold, mid-Victorian England's premier professional polemicist,
to see how middle-class professionals were able to capitalize upon their
ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537
"Bales of Living Anguish": Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing
Peter J. Kitson
---------------
attempting to efface the sign of difference between white and black,
unsettling such binary oppositions by positing a dark olive as the primary
color, so removing the grounds for the workings of any manichean allegory
based on such an opposition. Although he does not explicitly state them,
Clarkson must have realized the implications of his discussion in decentring
Western assumptions of white as privileged and primary.
It is in his representation of an African subject that Clarkson is most
innovative. Giving a voice to an African whose representation powerfully
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
intentionality and autonomy, emerges in the novel as a function of
the interaction of social conditioning and individual purposes. Not
only are social determinants inculcated into individual psyches,
making it impossible to distinguish idiosyncratic motivation from
socially directed activity, but the inmixing of individual
intentions with social determinants is further complicated by the
ways that the purposes and actions of one person come in conflict
with those of others.5 Actions transpire in a social sphere in which
interior motivations are thoroughly entangled with external
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
individual is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due
to the swift and and continuous shift of external and internal
stimuli" (325). The metropolitan individual defends him or herself
against these stimuli by living life more rationally or
intellectually--by secreting a layer of consciousness, as it were.
19. Benjamin, "Baudelaire," 163.
20. In the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
allegorical paintings in the 1840s, such as Daniel Huntington's 1843 _Italia_
(Bailey 101-2), which depicted Italy as a woman and which, unlike most
nineteenth-century representations of woman-as-nation, defined the nation
itself as feminized by associating the female figure with aesthetic, rather
than martial or political, implements.
Landscape paintings subsumed such genre themes into vistas that are visual
analogies of the tourist's gaze. Thomas Cole's 1833 _Italian Scene,
Composition_ (Fig. 2) rehearses the motif of nonproductive activity, here
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
domestic influence as depicted in _Ramona_. Whether swaying the
household or the nation, women ventriloquized agency through
language in domestic novels or everyday speech. Just as Felipe
Moreno mistakenly believes that he makes key decisions for the
Moreno _rancho_ when in fact he unwittingly implements his mother's
will, Tourgée's sense that Jackson "instinctively" wrote
_Ramona_ "with that unconscious art which characterizes true genius"
(251) reiterates Jackson's concept of indirect domestic influence as
practiced by Señora Moreno.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
_Moby-Dick_ simultaneously humanizes the whale and shows the whale
voraciously consumed by humans, making visible the ways in which the
lives of Melville's fellow Americans were reliant—for
prosperous housing, for food and the implements with which it was
consumed, for clothing and fashion, and even for the perfume of the
body and the complexion of its skin—upon the consumption of
the whale and other mammals.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
against the father's likeness" (C, 125). For Deleuze the difference
inheres in the relative values of pleasure and pain for the masochist
and the sadist. Though the masochist takes pleasure in the experience
of pain, the pleasure depends on all aspects of the experience--from
requisitioning the props to the "safeword"--being within his or her
control. Such a demand is contrary, in Deleuze's view, to the
pleasures of a sadism whose exponents require absolute power in the
infliction of pain.
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
produced by these institutions as repositories of extreme patriotism and
masculinity.6 At once an extension of the classical curriculum and an
expression of its "constant diet of stories of war, empire, bravery, and
sacrifice," Colley writes, "[s]chool and university prize poems and essays
from this period creak under the weight of such themes, as well as exuding a
lush appreciation of masculine heroism."7
I have found such "lush appreciation of masculine heroism" abundantly evident
in Oxford prize poems of the time. Cambridge prize poems, because of the
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
Burney's invocation of "rights" exploits the inclusive capacities of
that word (as claimed by a vandalizing populace) to reinflect the
wanderer's "struggle" for privilege. But this struggle, if it is
most vividly manifest in the wanderer's endless iteration of
gesture, loses its impetus at the close of the novel. The wanderer's
long-lost uncle, reunited with his niece, avers that "his lordship
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
predates him, in early modern theories of mercantile empire that
posit oceans as the primary sites of nation-building, and allows him
to appear in sync with the New Western History and with contemporary
theories of global empire as a fluid, "decentered and
deterritorializing apparatus of rule," in the current terms of
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.5 My purpose here is not to
dehistoricize Twain by forcing his work into contemporary paradigms.
However, I do think that current understandings of "sovereignty" and
"empire" as expressed through international or even transnational
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
network— appeared in A. S. M.'s mind more frightening than to speak
within the abstracted realm of the _Opal_. As opposed to the "freeness and
grandeur of the movements of the soul" that characterized the gentle realm of
Asylumia, he viewed society outside the walls (or the pages) as tyrannical,
deadening. "We are all seeking after society," he wrote, "and what is society
but a restraint—oftentimes alas! most dreadfully despotic? Yet how
cheerfully are these restraints submitted to. Take the case of love, or
jealousy, tight boots, or corsets. Is not the thought even, to say nothing of
the experience, of them sufficient to still this clamorous cant about
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
attraction/repulsion for _nouveau riche_ flamboyance, this
description of "Chinese and Indian paper" satirized an outlandish
style that couldn't be further from that of the bland specimen Gray
mockingly compared to a latticework pastry crust. If Gray's letter
deplored the deadening effects of consumer culture--the Gothic's
vitality bled dry by a crudely vampiric industrialism--then Parrat's
piece addressed the problem of commodities that were too
exhilarating, that incited people to believe they could survive
outside their proper environment, like "fantastic" fish "perching
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
One of the most compelling recent explorations of gender differences
in psycho-social terms is Gilles Deleuze's Coldness and Cruelty.
Deleuze [End Page 407] expands our notions of sadism and masochism by
affixing these two perversions to heterocosms, or alternate worlds,
each distinguished by a gender particular orientation, sadism to the
male and masochism to the female orientation. It is important to note,
however, that Deleuze does not follow the common psychoanalytic
assumption that women are inherently masochistic. On the contrary,
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 223-243
Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot's _Middlemarch_
Jessie Givner
---------------
the novel's margins." 5 The forces of industrial revolution, that is, are
"real" history, and those forces are contained and reduced by the text.
Distinguishing "between the _text_ and the 'real' _history_ to which it
alludes" (my emphasis), Eagleton cites Eliot's overarching figure of the web
as an exemplary "dehistoricizing" (and therefore depoliticizing) literary
structure. In a famous passage in _Middlemarch,_ the web appears as a figure
for history itself, when the narrator refers to the novel's form of history
as "this particular web" (128). Eagleton writes that "the web's symmetry, its
'spatial' dehistoricizing of the social process, its exclusion of levels of
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall, but to the notion that
Donatello's murder could be transformed from the literal act of
murder into an abstract theological question. Hilda, in short, is
disgusted by Kenyon's aestheticizing, more than by his
theosophizing. This climactic scene reveals the extent to which the
aesthetic in general, and the Romance in particular, are dangerous
precisely because each depends on the effacing of the literal and
the erasing of the individual (in this case the Model). In this
text, aestheticizing looks a lot like murder.
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
bodies, in doing so, creating one (white) national body. The
telegraph's power to free thought from the body, however, encouraged
doing away with even this one united body as in its place appeared a
white mind freed from particular bodies (and the political divisions
of region) through the spiritualizing power of telegraphic "nerves."
For most antebellum commentators, the telegraph's spiritual conquest
of the material world occasions the disappearance of the white body
altogether as it grants a disembodied white mind dominion over the
natural, physical force embodied in both electricity and
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
liberty and equality) that, by analogy and extension, undermines
entrepreneurial claims to the genteel first plane of Englishness. Indeed, his
subsequent opposition, in Culture and Anarchy, of the idealized Hellenism of
a first-plane middle-class to the Hebraism of its inferiors, subtly deploys
anti-semitism to further impugn the gentility of entrepreneurial character.
Dickens, of course, is not Arnold--desirous neither of a vanguard state, nor
an elitist ideal of perfection located in culture. Nevertheless, while
admiring the industry, enterprise, and self-reliance of entrepreneurial
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
political, and pluralist nationalism (with its corollary image of an
American "melting pot") and the latently homogeneous ethnic and
cultural nationalism tied to a myth of Anglo-Saxon descent. *[End
Page 26]* When Poe inveighed in 1845 against the sin of colonialism,
that aping of "British models" and pirating of English books that
disseminated a "monarchical or aristocratical sentiment...fatal to
democracy" (1374), he seems also to have had in mind the "open and
continuous wrong" of worshiping "the mother land" as the source of
national identity (_Essays_ 1375).
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
own weakness for narratives of self-making.
Uriah's grotesque malfeasance perverts the sorcerer's ultimate weapon, the
spellbook, by turning authentic professional writing into a performance of
virtual virtue. Cynically aping the work habits of the self-made man, Heep's
is a counterfeit vocation, a parody of the Protestant work ethic: BLOCKQUOTE
The clammy spellbook suggests a corporeal crime, a grotesque masturbatory
pleasure taken at the expense of the professional's voyeurism. Since Uriah
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
became suspect by definition, as it were, proof of the radical
unfitness of a poet for canonization. To quote Thomas Love Peacock,
consoling Shelley in a letter: "Considering poetical reputation as a
prize to be obtained by a certain species of exertion, and that sort
of thing which obtains the prize is the drivelling doggeral under
the name of Barry Cornwall, I think but one conclusion possible,
that to a rational ambition poetical reputation is not only not to
be desired, but most earnestly to be deprecated." 64 All of which
explains why both the existence and the constitution of the canon
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
possible." 3 The moral Law (henceforth capitalized to indicate its absolute
status) does not serve the good; on the contrary, it is the basis for any
understanding of the good. One obeys the Law because it is already the good
itself; it needs no justification. Accordingly, Kant also holds that the Law
"commands the most unhesitating obedience from everyone," is "plain to
everyone," and is itself "pure practical reason." 4 We know what is just
immediately through the voice of conscience. Furthermore, since the Law
commands a universal good, it demands that one comply with it not out of what
Kant calls a "pathological motive," not out of personal desire or interest.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
Ultimately, it is hard to know whether to attribute the final two
stanzas of "The Sparrow and Diamond" to the infatuated speaker or to
the glib poet. The moralizing superego, at any rate, does not come
easy to the incapacitated psyche. In exaggerating, pluralizing, and
mythologizing, it treats behavioral foibles not just as character
flaws but as cosmic defects. It is here that Lucia becomes a symbol,
representing her class (the fair), her sex, and her species. But a
hallucinatory moral is hardly more useful than no moral at all. The
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
the subtlest nod, wink, or nub. It thus cultivated "discrimination,"
training faculties in "recombination of the proximate parts" of an
"aggregate." Note that discrimination, like its cousin term judgment,
is here a resolutely practical rather than metaphysical idea.
Recombining elements and reapplying ideas to diverse contexts, the
critical faculty remains indebted to, but does not merely recycle,
prior forms and traditions. 57
The effect of literary discipline is to "liberalize us," as Lowell put
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
(351). Rogue uses the epithet to disparage any conversational
efforts Pleasant undertakes for her own purposes, as if she is mere
appendage, like a parrot on a sailor's shoulder or an animal that
has somehow learned the trick of speaking.31 For him, her
independent speech and action are at the same time unmeaning,
unnatural, and revealing. It is, therefore, all the more maddening
that he cannot control her: despite his attempts to discipline her,
the effects of her actions remain unpredictable. No matter how
practiced she is, nor how obedient, she may end up a "rogue" to his
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
potential unhinging of, Smithean social stability. Opposed to his
smooth, passionless surface, Baillie presents us with a suffering
subject whose interiority is constituted by the play of passions;
her spectator, moreover, defined by his/her avid curiosity to
witness the rankling affect of another, bears little resemblance to
Smith's disinterested figure. Rather, she encourages her audience to
understand themselves as possessing an interior space similarly
traversed by the passions, and to recognize in themselves a desire
to make those passions a legitimate object of curiosity. The danger
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
Time," Burke's "return . . . upon himself" in his judgment of the French
Revolution is "one of the finest things in English literature," and its
fineness consists not in the particular distinction with which it is
expressed or in the value of the judgment itself, but in this intrinsically
valuable experience of tensed inwardness, offered as an inspiriting example
of human, as well as critical, functioning.
BLOCKQUOTE
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
her use of wit, the novel asserts that wit never, in fact, had this
sort of muscle.
But why is it not sufficient to depict wit as precisely what Belinda
says it is: a pernicious (if delightful) atavistic agent, blockading
the progress of domesticity? If domesticity "wins" in the end--and
if, to some extent, it always already has won (the conventions of
the sentimental novel tell us from the start that Belinda will tame
the rakish Clarence and the two will set up home together)--aren't
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
the Terror. At daybreak, she removes her gloves to "[exhibit] hands
and arms of so dark a colour, that they might rather be styled black
than brown," provoking one passenger to ask whether she comes from
"[t]he settlements in the West Indies? or somewhere off the coast of
Africa?" (19). Her blackness aggravates the rudeness of her
introduction into the families among whom she will circulate for the
rest of the novel. Without money, a name, or "female protection"
[End Page 968] (41), she agrees to attend the most irascible of the
escapees, Mrs. Ireton, to London. Burney gives the uncharitable Mrs.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
This optimistic and nationalist Whitman, however, has been often critiqued as
an apologist for the liberal-national status quo. If, as many critics have
asked, Whitman draws on his nation's liberal inheritance in order to
cultivate subjective agency among his readers, what prevents him from
poetically replaying the structural paradoxes inherent in American national
ideology which allow only certain subjects access to the rights, privileges,
and protections of full liberal citizenship, while others suffer the forms of
historical trauma that follow from partial or total discursive exclusion from
the bounds of the nation? 25 Symptomatizing readings of Whitman as a prophet
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
significant aspect of this listing, this collecting, this serial
assemblage of objects and so on, is that Wilde does not attempt to
imbue them with an overarching sameness; he does not attempt to equate
them in any way, but instead enjoys their multiplicity and variety and
unlocks them from the homogeneity to which their existence as mere
objects of exchange consigns them.
Another very important point, and something that is very Wildean and
perhaps one of his more utopian moments, is that need becomes
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
she grew"). What makes them moving--destabilizes them--with respect
to Anacreontic lyric is the uncertainly ironic power of their
presence. Where Green's "what now I sing" fixes passion with
analytical precision, Wordsworth's "now" slips and slides: "No
motion has she now. . . , / Rolled round." 54 Passion fuses with
love in the precariousness of experience. In "She dwelt among the
untrodden ways," the accomplishment can't be named because its
temporality is the boundary state that conditions what is knowable:
the verbs and adverb phrases do not name time (permanence or change)
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
"they were becoming 'blacker' with every increment of industrial
advance," see Eric Lott, _Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and
the American Working Class_ (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995),
71. I am also especially indebted here, and throughout my
description of the racial anxieties lacing Poe's narratives, to Toni
Morrison's pathbreaking account of Poe's place of prominence within
"the self-conscious but highly problematic *[End Page 900]*
construction of the American as a new white man." Morrison, _Playing
in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination_ (New York:
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
In his broad survey, Modern Scottish Literature, Alan Bold warns against
quick dismissals of the popular late nineteenth-century "Kailyard School" of
fiction: "we should be wary of categorizing the kailyarders as sentimental
fools; they were men who had a shrewd judgment for public taste and the
public responded by adoring the intellectually undemanding entertainment the
kailyarders produced." 1 Bold's evaluation of the Kailyard (literally,
cabbage patch) and its unavoidable presence in Scottish literary and cultural
history illustrate the tension between "public taste" and high art,
"entertainment" and serious intellect, that still gathers around these
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
society. Elizabeth Schultz has described a pattern of cyborg imagery
in the novel that "simultaneously compares whales to natural forms
and to human technological inventions. . . . Right whales, for
example, are compared to great boulders and their eating to
scything."16 Such metaphorical transgressions of the dualism between
the realms of human enterprise and animal activity were by no means
uncommon in mid-nineteenth-century scientific writing, although they
did not always serve the ideology of environmental care that
twentieth-century ecocritics such as Schultz tend to project onto
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 151-169
Walking on Flowers: the Kantian Aesthetics Of _Hard Times_
Christina Lupton
---------------
the bloodless definition of a horse as a "graminivorous quadruped"
with "forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and
twelve incisive"; and on the other, there is the circus child, Sissy
Jupe, whose emotional involvement with the world of horses and
horseriding proves useless in meeting this educational system's
demand for facts about horses (44). Facts, to use Dickens's term,
cleave away from fancy; the intuitive world of subjective experience
contradicts the forms of reckoning which set human beings to work
instrumentally and inhumanly against themselves.
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 195-226
Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett)
Bill Brown
---------------
(356). By 1891, Mary Murfree's _In the "Stranger People's" Country_
(1891) showed how the archeological imagination could frame regionalist
writing, and how the palimpsest of the land could devolve into a single
text. In her novel, the lawyer Shattuck, in the Tennessee mountains to
pursue "semi-scientific researches in his idle summer loiterings"
spends time (as the mountaineers put it) "a-diggin' fur jugs an' sech
ez the Injuns hed--least wise them ez built the mounds" (Craddock 90,
15). Though his excavation for Cherokee relics is unsuccessful, and
though the secret of the more mysterious "strange burial grounds of the
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
both by the _Knickerbocker_ and the moral treatment movement. "A person can
not be taught to poetize, and for any to attempt poetry-writing because it
is, as they hear, the fashion of the day, or to make an effort to versify for
the purpose of obtaining a support by the publication of their effusions is
an idle and useless affair" (193). A wistful air of melancholy, she believes,
a remembrance of better days from a position of lonely isolation, provides
the perfect tone for the poet. To pursue the lonely task of poetry requires
that one forego the expectation of "the plaudits of all" (195). The enforced
solitude and anonymity of her authorial position thus enable a kind of
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
mode and thus realize within the poem the divisiveness of passion in
the very attempt to imagine purity.
The Anacreontic was always a minor form. It is the poetry of the
young, the recreation of the idle, the conviviality of the solitary.
48 But, too much of this minor verse has been, in Pierre Bourdieu's
phrase, "written out of literary history" when it should rather be
acknowledged as a necessary substratum. "The analysts," Bourdieu
writes about Flaubert's milieu, who
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
on the neoclassic image, and iconoclasm comes to be gendered as male.
Burke's account of the beautiful, then, is a means of hastening
political change by feminizing the antagonistic political order, and
accusing traditional aesthetic theory of fostering a matriarchy by
submitting to idle and unproductive fantasies and illusions.
Conversely, the sublime offers a renewed site of male
self-construction in terms of a kind of "worldly asceticism," in Max
Weber's phrase: the theme of labor as a testing of the parameters of
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
household is purely the territory of women, although they clearly never own
it. Noticing the arrangement of women as extensions of the home--both as part
of men's property and the keepers of it--reveals the two hands that for
centuries women have been expected to play. The Kailyard female is delicate,
energetic, generous, wholesome, idle, charitable, and subservient while
simultaneously demonstrating qualities of strength, hardiness, efficiency,
skill, and the fortitude to be constantly productive for the health of nation
and its version of home. The ideological work of the Kailyard Highland [End
Page 1063] depends on a construction of gender that leaves women no room to
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
"tale," that Scott will tell, but as it dissolves it reveals that it
was itself a romance, a Gothic church like his own Melrose Abbey,
and subject, like all the visions of romance, to dissolve in the
hard light of day. Scott's opening epistle begins by rigorously
distinguishing the "high theme" of patriotic poets from the idle
predilection for romance, a stern attention to the momentous present
from the whimsical devotion to things that have long since passed
away, and having established the distinction the poem works to
confuse it. So does the tale that follows.
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
who has been cursed with the power of prevision and the ability to
read--really, the inability to screen out--the thoughts of those
around him. Only the mind of the beautiful and haughty Bertha, his
future wife, initially remains veiled to him. Aware of the future,
conscious of the idle thoughts and secret motives of the other
characters, Latimer is a sort of audacious but morbid authorial
experiment: he is an omniscient narrator who has been trapped as a
character in the story that is rendered in his voice. 35 "The Lifted
Veil" in fact offers the only sustained first-person narrative in
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
his [End Page 717] occasional attendance at Presbyterian services,
the report is part of Franklin's general effort in the 1730s to use
the newly emerging power of the print press in America to clean up
both private character and public space by writing against the
excesses of drink, alehouses, fairs, gaming, and other idle
pursuits. 2 The story suggests both a new conceptualization of the
body as a source of agency and responsibility in the eighteenth
century and the constitutive role that the unruly body would come to
play in defining enlightenment notions of the natural, the human,
that they "might be strong to labour" (A, 36). Franklin's temperate
and self-regulating "Water-American" registers on the level of the
body the increasing conflict between the American colonies and the
British empire. Reversing the image of the American colonies as the
receptacle for the idle and criminal of England, Franklin presents
America as the future of the British empire in accord with the ideas
he sets forth in Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind
(1751). 10
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
voice to the important ideas and productions of his time, to create
what Brown terms elsewhere a "repository" for the wisdom and genius
of his country. 16 Brown goes on to imagine the reader's demand for
the anonymous editor's identity: "'This is somewhat more than a
point of idle curiosity,' my reader will say, 'for, from my
knowledge of the man must I infer how far he will be able and
willing to fulfill his promises. Besides, it is of great importance
to know, whether his sentiments on certain subjects, be agreeable or
not to my own.'" This imagined reader will not submit himself to any
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
As children, street-traders both embodied the chasm of class (since
middle-class children would not occupy the streets in this way) and
made that divide appear less frightening. For whatever New York's
chief of police, George Mastell, might say about the "idle and
vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public
thoroughfares," an infestation of children poses a largely future
threat, while the adult poor appear far more immediately dangerous.
9 Street-children, as children, accrued much of the charm that the
ELH 68.4 (2001) 831-856
Avoiding the "Cooler Tribunal of the Study": Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Writer's Block and Late Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Frank Donoghue
---------------
unpretentious, virtuous medium of communication. The play reflects a
thoroughgoing wariness of print. Both the scandalmongers and their
potential victims recognize printed rumors as more threatening than
those spread in conversation. For example, Sir Peter Teazle fears
not idle talk but "Ballads--and Paragraphs" about his wife's
infidelity (415). Mrs. Candour, unsure of the exact details of the
climactic meeting between the Surface Brothers and Sir Peter, says,
"I'm not mistress of half the circumstances!--we shall have the
whole affair in the news Papers with the Names of the Parties at
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
slaughter-house anatomy on an aristocratic victim might fetch in round half a
million and save the necessity of sacrificing four women of the people. Such
is the stark-naked reality of these abominable bastard Utopias of genteel
charity, in which the poor are first to be robbed and then pauperized by way
of compensation, in order that the rich man may combine the idle luxury of
the protected thief with the unctuous self-satisfaction of the pious
philanthropist." Shaw, "Blood Money to Whitechapel," reprinted in
_Agitations: Letters to the Press, 1875-1950_ (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1985), 10-11.
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
differentiation by gradual process of specific varieties out of what
was more general, and the reunion of species in new combinations"
(_Modern Study of Literature_, 7). Matthews wrote that language cannot
be "fixt." In language "there is always incessant differentiation and
unending extension. To 'fix' a living language finally is an idle
dream," and success in any such effort would be a "dire calamity" ("Is
the English Language Degenerating?" (1918), in _Essays on English_
[New York: Scribner's, 1921], 8). Moulton, _Modern Study of
Literature_, 461 ("select"), 348 ("creative faculty").
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
More makes it clear throughout _Tom White_ that there is a direct link
between political unrest and the complaints that "Amy Grumble" and other
characters raise (to no effect) against the discipline of a new domestic
economy. Dr. Shepherd begins his climactic sermon on diet and household
management with a sharp warning about "idle, evil-minded people, who are on
the watch for the public distresses," so that "they may benefit themselves by
disturbing the public peace" with "riot and drunkenness" (5:269). Rice
pudding may seem a feeble hedge against Jacobin revolution, but More and her
collaborators firmly believed that political unrest is what happens when
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
entered the literal premises of Hawthorne's nonfiction. Indeed, even
though Hawthorne claims that the seriousness of the Civil War has
"compelled" him to "suspend the contemplation" of the "fantasies" he
customarily writes, going so far as to assert that it would be "a
kind of treason" to think such "idle thoughts in the dread time of
civil war," it appears that when he looks closely at
slavery—the social and moral problem at the center of the
Civil War—he cannot help but apprehend it in terms of the
Romance ("C," 299-300).
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 969-1000
Crying Game: Operatic Strains in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Gillen D'arcy Wood
---------------
21. _Quarterly Review_ 24 (1820): 82.
22. Late in life, Wordsworth recalled how in his first year at
Cambridge he "got into rather an idle way; reading nothing but
Classic authors according to my fancy, and Italian poetry. My
Italian master was named [Augustine] Isola. . . . As I took to these
studies with much interest, he was proud of the progress I made"
(Christopher Wordsworth, _Memoirs of William Wordsworth_, 2 vols.
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
55. Taylor, Sources, 105-7.
56. In this context, Taylor is not alluding to Bakhtin so that
"dialoguing self" might be a better phrase in my very compressed
account of his argument.
57. For the quoted phrase, see The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870),
The Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956),
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
In Paris, Kirkland sees a compelling combination of the roles of representing
and producing the nation. She describes a performance of the revolutionary
anthem, the "Marseillaise," by the famous tragic actress Rachel Felix, a
"sight" for mid-nineteenth-century tourists; Kirkland reads both body and
performance to present Rachel (as she was called) as at once personifying the
new republic and expressing her own republican sympathies and aspirations:
"she grasps the tri-color; she kneels before it; she clasps it to her bosom"
(1: 131). 13 Like the 100-foot-high plaster statue of a female "Republic"
Kirkland sees at a Parisian celebration of the revolution (1: 127), Rachel
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 141-165
William Blake's Androgynous Ego-Ideal
Tom Hayes _Baruch College and The Graduate Center_ _City University of New York _
---------------
misogynist—though he sometimes sounds like one" but who is guilty of
"homocentric gynophobia in which heterosexual love means human
destruction."52 Jackie DiSalvo also sees Blake as a schizoid figure who is
"not usually a misogynist," but she acknowledges that "there are, finally,
misogynist implications, if not intentions, in Blake's personifying the
fallen state as Vala and in 'the female will' of _Jerusalem_ which are
inherent in the myth of women as nature."53
No one challenged this view of Blake's attitude toward women until Gerda S.
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
The incident recurs when the eight trochees of line three give way to the
seven and a half of line four; this, despite the fact that the third line's
rhymes (c 1 and c 2 ) are reinforced internally by the fourth line (c 3 ),
as though lulling us towards a sleep which the line's catalectic conclusion
dashes. Metrically, lines five and six serve to reiterate the tension
between trochee-recurrent and trochee-interruptus, with the closing
three-and-a-half-foot line being mainly interruptus.
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
make the case properly our own. Our imaginations are sufficiently
excited, we have nothing to do with the matter but as a pure
creation of the mind, and we therefore yield to the natural,
unwarped impression of good and evil. . . . We are hunting after
what we cannot find, and quarrelling with the good within our
reach." 41
In light of these claims, the resentment flourishing in _Shirley_'s
early chapters is best viewed as a deeply historical account of
ELH 67.4 (2000) 993-1009
Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, Another Way of Looking at that Black Bird
Richard Godden
---------------
1002] "Raven" (second foot, first line, stanza twelve) stands as a metrical
correction of "ebony" (second foot, first line, stanza eight), but much
would vanish were the earlier line changed to "Then this Raven fast
beguiling my sad fancy into smiling." "Ebony" contains more than a play on
"i" and "y" activated by a suppressed syllable; it is the first tinting of
the raven who on entry settles on a bust of "Pallas" (line five, stanza
seven). "Pallas" will later euphonically yield "pallid" and is doubtless the
preferred perch (referred to three times) for reasons of color contrast. But
"Pallas" contains another word, being an alternative name for Minerva,
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
Rogatis has the following, in "Ad una rondinella": "Chi mai nel cor
sentito / Ha tanti Amori, e tanti? / Il numero infinito / Tutto
ridir chi pu�?" [Who has ever felt so many and so many Loves in his
heart? Who could recount the whole infinite number?]. And Pietro
Metastasio, evidently trumping him, writes in "Il Nido degli Amori":
"cresce la turba a segno, / Che gi� quasi � infinita, / E a
numerarla impazzirebbe Archita" [the crowd grows to the point that
it is almost infinite, and Architas would go mad counting it]. Both
quoted from Il Fiore de' nostri poeti anacreontici. But quantity can
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
16. Adorno makes a similar claim for different political ends,
namely that the disruption of the social order is a positive effect
of ugliness. For him, the ugly represents the socially repressed (in
the sense of oppressed), and he argues that in order to avoid
deteriorating into a vacuous plaything, art must assert the ugliness
of the social real against the ideological status quo of the
beautiful ideal. Ugliness thus acquires a social dimension that
Burke would acknowledge, but condemn. See Theodor Adorno, "The Ugly,
the Beautiful, and Technique," in Aesthetic Theory, 2d ed., ed.
ELH 66.3 (1999) 739-758
The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel
Stefan Andriopoulos*
---------------
As the metaphor of "gravitating prices" suggests, the social science of
political economy seeks to follow the model of the natural sciences in
discovering hidden, regular laws behind nature's sensible appearances. This
modelling function of the natural sciences seems to be confirmed by Joseph
Glanvill's scientific treatise The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) which, a
hundred years earlier, already employs the same figure to represent the
regular course of nature. Glanvill invokes the simile of the hidden wheels of
a watch to which he compares "Nature work[ing] by an Invisible Hand in all
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
is, that I have drawn it up: and that must be my apology for
breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve, which, for
the most part, restrains us from the public exploration of our own
errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to
English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on
our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that "decent
drapery," which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have
drawn over them. . . . _All this I feel so forcibly, and so
nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency, that I have for
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
corrupt water," confronting "such smells and sights that he, who has
lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses" (_B_,
364). Things in _Bleak House_ are variously slimy, sticky,
runny--oozing through the crevasses and cracks of a decaying world
whose surface has been pockmarked by escaping gases and the viscous
liquids of putrefaction. The steps leading to the burial ground
where Esther's father lies buried and her mother lies dead are *[End
Page 477]* "drenched in a fearful wet of such a place, which oozed
and splashed down everything" (_B_, 868). Whatever physical
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
the night-journeys they take in the city. John Harmon's journey
becomes an authentic search for himself. Eugene's is organized as a
slow torturing of Headstone--"'I have derived inexpressible comfort
from it'" (542; 3.10)--which becomes, as he lures the schoolmaster
into meaningless treks, a deflected and ritualized hounding of
himself. And Headstone's baffled, enraged stalking of Lizzie spells
out his humiliating quest for social validation of a self that his
monomania has already annihilated. The torment of Headstone in his
night wanderings is the occasion for one of the novel's most
American Literary History 13.1 (2001) 1-40
American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War
Shelley Streeby
---------------
accounts for its relative immediacy, its closeness to the QUOTE
functions of the penny press, and the uneasy fit between literary
conventions and historical experience often combine to foreground
the gaps, contradictions, and seamy underside of the ideological
projects of white settler colonialism and manifest destiny.
These contradictions are especially striking in the work of three
popular writers who not only were important figures in the labor
cultures of northeastern US cities such as New York and Philadelphia
some territory, however, many who supported Polk and the war still
argued, like the Whigs, against the annexation of densely populated
Mexican areas (Horsman 237). The New York-based Democratic Review,
for instance, where John O'Sullivan famously coined the term
manifest destiny, defended Polk and welcomed the acquisition of
California and New Mexico, but argued in August 1847 that the QUOTE
(101; Stephanson 46-47). 7 The war and national expansion, in other
words, brought to the fore contradictions in the concept of manifest
destiny and disagreements about its meaning even among those who
for instance, where John O'Sullivan famously coined the term
manifest destiny, defended Polk and welcomed the acquisition of
California and New Mexico, but argued in August 1847 that the QUOTE
(101; Stephanson 46-47). 7 The war and national expansion, in other
words, brought to the fore contradictions in the concept of manifest
destiny and disagreements about its meaning even among those who
promoted it, though there were also many who attacked the concept as
well as the war, which one historian has compared to the Vietnam
[End Page 4] War because of the fierce opposition and dissent that
well as the war, which one historian has compared to the Vietnam
[End Page 4] War because of the fierce opposition and dissent that
it provoked (Schroeder x-xi). 8
These debates about the war, expansion, and manifest destiny resound
throughout the pages of the war literature produced by
sensationalists such as Lippard, Buntline, and Duganne. Despite the
substantial differences in their positions on the war and the role
of nativism in their class politics, the trajectories of all three
Industry and Evans's Young America. Despite his advocacy of utopian
reforms that might enable large numbers of small freeholders to
settle in the West, Duganne denounced US imperialism in the long
poem QUOTE (1855), where he argued against war in general and
satirized the rhetoric of manifest destiny in particular. But he
also saw the war as an unfair contest between the QUOTE and the
QUOTE (Duganne 231), and his anti-imperialism derived from nativist
beliefs about the importance of keeping foreigners and Catholics out
of the republic as well as from radical republican and antislavery
popular sensational literature and northeastern labor cultures more
generally.
In part 1, QUOTE I suggest that in Legends of Mexico Lippard makes
manifest a racialized definition of the nation-people and labors to
justify exceptionalist theories of US empire as uniquely progressive
and beneficent. Then, in the second part of this essay, I frame
Lippard's war pictures with an account of the woodcuts and
lithographs of battle scenes that circulated widely in newspapers
Europeans Lippard includes in this QUOTE American race are admitted
to the union as equal partners, Mexicans remain subordinated to
white America. This vision of a united, more inclusive, white
American race defined through a hierarchical relationship to Mexico
is entirely consonant with the politics of manifest destiny, as
Lippard himself makes clear: QUOTE He concludes, QUOTE (16).
As this passage suggests, Lippard attempts to identify America with
a particular racially defined community in order to justify US
relationship between QUOTE and QUOTE (53), see Guti�rrez-Jones, esp.
50-79.
7. Edward Widmer suggests that while in the early 1840s O'Sullivan
hoped that the US could realize its manifest destiny through
peaceful rather than violent means and although he initially QUOTE
he QUOTE (50).
8. For an excellent discussion of the contradictions in O'Sullivan's
peaceful rather than violent means and although he initially QUOTE
he QUOTE (50).
8. For an excellent discussion of the contradictions in O'Sullivan's
and other literary young Americans' use of the concept of manifest
destiny, see Wald 105-06.
9. Peter Buckley's unpublished 1984 dissertation, QUOTE is still the
best source for information on Buntline. See also Buckley, QUOTE
Gibson's edited collection, The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes
in the Old World and New (1971); Guti�rrez 68; Paredes 139-65; and
Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America 335-41. For an
excellent account of how QUOTE as well as to US ideologies of
manifest destiny, see Mariscal 7-22.
20. While Prescott, according to John P. McWilliams Jr., assumed
QUOTE (174), his contemporaries were more likely to emphasize the
cruelties even as they paradoxically described the US-Mexican War as
American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 317-328
American Nationalism--R.I.P.
Bruce Burgett
---------------
The remainder of Voicing America draws on thinkers ranging from
Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida to Ferdinand de Saussure and
Emmanuel Levinas in order to provide a thematic analysis of how
these two motifs manifest themselves in three canonical texts of the
period: Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1771) (chapter 2),
Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) (chapter 3), and Henry Hugh
Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792) (chapter 4). The theoretical
scope of these readings is impressive, as anyone who has tried to
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 32-59
Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth
Christopher Castiglia
---------------
(_Address_ 13). In other writings, Garrison reveals the disciplinary intent
of the "resignation" he here attributes to free blacks. In "West India
Emancipation," for instance, Garrison, imagining the charge that freed slaves
will seek revenge, replies, "On the contrary, is it not to be taken for
granted, as a matter of course, that they will manifest the liveliest
gratitude, be docile as lambs, perform their enumerated labor with alacrity,
and make each field and hill vocal with melody? 'Instinct is a great master'"
(336). As Garrison suggests in the _Address,_ "instincts" are not innate, but
are the products of his rhetorical interpellation: "It is said that I am
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
positive popular opinion (1: 4). Franklin's closing exhortation then
raised the imperative of unanimous consent: "I cannot help
expressing a wish, that every member of the Convention who may still
have objections to it, would with me on this occasion doubt a little
of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put
his name to this Instrument" (1: 4). The unanimity resolution was
passed in the following form: "Done in Convention by the unanimous
consent of _the States_ present the 17th of Sepr. &c--In Witness
whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names" (Madison 654).
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 276-310
"A Dowry of Suffering": Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance
Gregory S. Jackson
---------------
declared in favor of a new social trend: "My doctrine," he announced, "is
that whenever man or wife find that they must quarrel, and cannot live in
peace they ought to separate; and these two sections--the North and
South--manifesting, as they have done and do now, and probably ever will
manifest, feelings of hostility... my own opinion is they can never live in
peace; and the sooner they separate the better" (_Congressional Globe_ 12).
While, like Iverson, some Southerners argued that simple contracts bound both
marriage and society, others recoiled at pronouncements that might seem to
weaken marriage, even if doing so strengthened the North's claims on state
_American Literary History_ 15.2 (2003) 213-247
_Arthur Mervyn_'s Medical Repository and the Early Republic's Knowledge Industries
Bryan Waterman
---------------
bile with autumn and melancholy; and yellow bile with summer and the bilious
or choleric temperament)." 13 White to black, red toyellow, cold to flushed
to clammy, the transitions read like the seasonal life cycle in fast forward,
until the yellow and black of thelate-summer, early-autumn ("bilious") fever
season manifest themselves through the body, which, jaundiced and ejecting
black vomit, begins to decompose even before burial.
As in this account, Smith, Mitchill, Miller, and Brown described *[End Page
228]* the fever as disabling body and mind: the two organs most commonly
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
BLOCKQUOTE
This anecdote encapsulates an ideal of American directness and invention that
had been embraced for half a century. It signals a kind of linguistic
manifest destiny, for the word clearly took off as the telephonic greeting of
choice. Whitney's _Century Dictionary_noted, in its 1889 definition of
_hello,_ "As a preliminary telephone call it is now in very common use."
Twain is the first literary writer to use the word, and _Connecticut Yankee_
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
The intensity with which the brash concept of American "manifest destiny" was
joined by a correspondingly fervent drive for the development of "Young
American" literature may be registered at numerous junctures in the
antebellum literary archive but nowhere more bitterly than in Herman
Melville's scathing chapters on the subject in _Pierre; or, the Ambiguities_
By 1844, when he converted to Catholicism, Brownson had located the great
moral and religious project--the "serious and solid studies"-- that would
occupy him for the remainder of his career. Catholicism, understood by
Brownson as the religious manifest destiny for an America transformed by both
moral progress and immigration, becomes the fulcrum for raising a long line
of criticisms, first, against the traditions of "Protestant" literature, and
second, against the various, and often misconceived, efforts at creating an
indigenous "Catholic" literature. Always attuned to the interpenetrations of
the systematic catechism of which Brownson was so enamored, the
impressionable American reading public became open to the debasements and
idolatry of enervating sentimentality: *[End Page 462]* "The staple
literature of our times, the staple reading of our youth of both sexes, is
sentimental novels and love-tales, and the effect is manifest in the diseased
state of the public mind, and in the growing effeminacy of character and
depravation of morals" ("Religious" 145). The effect of this
theology-resistant, Euro-American culture of sentiment Brownson diagnosed in
gendered medical terms: sensational literature, which opposes the moral
_American Literary History_ 15.4 (2003) 683-708
Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West
Stephanie LeMenager
---------------
Act of Congress uses to give shape to the Far *[End Page 683]* West
("_not within ._.. ") suggest the trader's emphasis upon negotiable
and shifting contact zones rather than the localized culture
associated with nationalist ideas of homeland and _Volk._ Trading
documents and narratives offer an alternate version of US manifest
destiny, which can be described as imperialist, commercial, and
anachronistically postnational. Although the Far West in the
narratives I examine turned out to be prenational territory, I argue
that the incorporation of lands west of the Mississippi into the US
The tumultuous trading economies that defined the Far West through
the early 1840s generated narratives that have been either ignored
or hastily read by literary historians eager to incorporate them
into the ideology of manifest destiny, with its familiar agrarian,
racist rationales. 1 The most admirable readings of narratives about
the US commercial frontier treat these narratives as "the new
republic's first national literature" (Sundquist 129); yet, while
this may be an essentially accurate designation, it ignores the
informative analyses of the role of commerce in the production of
civility and the quasi-racial notion "complexion." Wheeler's concern
with the necessary power of residual proto-ideologies that precede
the modern discourse of race is echoed in my own attempt to undress
the racist, agrarian rationales for manifest destiny by examining
the narratives of intercultural trade that precede and follow the
projects of Indian Removal and territorial annexation. 4 In trading
narratives, I argue, the authority of the US state is not
necessarily "manifest" in the sense of being readable to US trappers
the racist, agrarian rationales for manifest destiny by examining
the narratives of intercultural trade that precede and follow the
projects of Indian Removal and territorial annexation. 4 In trading
narratives, I argue, the authority of the US state is not
necessarily "manifest" in the sense of being readable to US trappers
or traders and their American Indian and European counterparts;
however, state authority is _expressed_ through the objects of
commerce that the US, like Britain before it, hoped would bring
"civilization," through emulation *[End Page 684]* and dependency,
conspicuous to Irving and to a host of lesser-known writers. As the
place where the logic of commerce, as well as the logic of
civilization, broke down, the Far West was difficult to incorporate
into the national imaginary. Even after the racial argument for
manifest destiny achieved hegemonic force, I argue, the many and
varied possible worlds generated by Western commerce continued to
challenge its blunt assumptions. 5
1. The Politics of Place
including sinkholes, interior icebergs, bears, and rival traders who
deliberately withhold local knowledge and steal the furs and traps
of competitors.
Not surprisingly, the prophecy of manifest destiny that Leonard
wrings from this uncertain landscape is itself uncertain. Answering
the question of whether the Far West will at last be incorporated
into the US, Leonard delivers a resounding "yes," although he
anxiously qualifies his assertion. "But this [work of incorporation]
conducted by a master spirit" (_Astoria_ 4). Emerson recognized in
_Astoria_ the compositional unity Irving sought: "[A] great variety
of somewhat discordant materials is brought into a consistent whole"
(205). But Emerson's failure to find a consistent purpose, or a
manifest destiny, in the text is belied by his own peculiar
juxtapositions. Emerson's review is a fragmentary m�lange of
anti-imperialist rant, Anglophobic rant, gentle critique of Astor's
commercial monomania, and faint praise of Irving's good "humor" and
"taste." Emerson's varied responses point to the significant ghosts
appealed to later generations facing the closing of the frontier or
"the risk of isolation," in the terms Brooks Adams used to
rationalize US imperialism in 1898 (641-51). Both historical and
contemporary laments about the disappearance of the frontier betray
nostalgia for old enemies to manifest destiny and for aperiod when
continental outcomes were still theoretical. The twentieth century
has proved remarkably interested in keeping "the frontier" alive as
a rhetorical term, and it has served imperialist rhetorics as well
as the gentler interests of environmentalists and eco-tourists. 11 A
bison hunted to virtual extinction by 1883, expresses a wish to
reverse the course of empire and reinvent the "Great American
Desert." As early as the 1830s, the itinerant painter and
proto-ethnographer George Catlin imagined a national park in the
Great Plains as a means of suspending manifest destiny and
preserving American Indian nations in a conveniently bordered
wilderness. Catlin enthusiastically projected: "A nation's Park,
containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their
nature's beauty!" (1: 262).
Texas was repeatedly denied entry to the Union until 1845 because
the Union could not weather the sectional debates it provoked.
Throughout the 1850s Southerners imagined themselves leaving the
Union to join a more profitable Caribbeanempire. John L. O'Sullivan,
the same Young American who coined the phrase "manifest destiny,"
also supported the Confederacy and imagined a beneficial secession
(White, _It_'_s Your Misfortune_ 74). The pre-Civil War insecurity
of the Union, and the fact that, in the world, the US was still a
semiperipheral nation, made the prospect of hybridity both more of a
Endnotes
========
1. When I speak of "manifest destiny" I am not only referring to
John L. O'Sullivan's various articulations of that term in the
_Democratic Review,_ but also to a variety of continentalist
rhetorics dating from the 1820s, when debates around Indian Removal
began to indicate the US desire for white, agrarian settlement of
the North American continent. Edward L. Widmer's cultural history of
O'Sullivan's relationship to the "Young America" movements of the
1840s and 1850s helpfully distinguishes O'Sullivan's interpretations
of his famous phrase from other elaborations of it. However, since
in the 1850s O'Sullivan's "manifest destiny" essentially joined the
chorus of racist rhetorics of expansionism *[End Page 703]* that
were initiated by Indian Removal, I feel justified in speaking of
"an ideology of manifest destiny."
of his famous phrase from other elaborations of it. However, since
in the 1850s O'Sullivan's "manifest destiny" essentially joined the
chorus of racist rhetorics of expansionism *[End Page 703]* that
were initiated by Indian Removal, I feel justified in speaking of
"an ideology of manifest destiny."
2. To my mind, Sundquist's description of the literature of Western
exploration and empire is the most complete and admirable treatment
of early US-Western narrative. Moreover, Sundquist's framing of
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
is, the fervor of the Revolutionary fathers, their oratorical authority,
suddenly appears autochthonous, as if somehow _native_ to the land itself,
while the native Magawisca becomes a protonationalist, less an enemy than a
source of founding principles. This explains why Magawisca appears at her
trial with her "national pride . . . manifest" (297) in her native Indian
dress and why her first words to the judges echo the political philosophy of
the Declaration of Independence: "I am your prisoner and ye may slay me, but
I deny your right to judge me. My people have never passed under your
yoke—not one of my race has ever acknowledged your authority" (302).1
_American Literary History_ 16.3 (2004) 437-465
The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_
John M. Gonzalez
---------------
centrality to late-nineteenth-century US imperialism and suggests
how white women's engagement with the colonial project advanced
their own quest for national agency.
Casting the aftermath of manifest destiny less as an intense
conflict between tribal nations and the US for political sovereignty
and cultural survival than as the apparently noncoercive
consolidation of _e pluribus unum_, Indian reform novels such as
_Ramona_ highlight the critical need to join two areas of literary
influence of the empire of the mother along racial lines: "The
Manifest Destiny of the nation unfolds logically from the imperial
reach of woman's influence emanating from her separate domestic
sphere" since domesticity "imagines the nation as a home delimited
by race" (597). Antebellum domesticity consolidates manifest destiny
by providing the conceptual framework through which to fashion
colonial difference. Invoking the imminent threats of racial
violence and interracial sexuality posed to white homes by colonized
Others, the logic of antebellum domesticity mandates an ethnic
_domestication_ allowed for Indian incorporation by remapping a
static hierarchy of absolute racial difference onto a teleological
trajectory of relative cultural development, making the eventuality
of ex-Indian citizens the measure of the nation's own civilized
status.9 If discourses of manifest destiny such as antebellum
domesticity depicted Indians as literally disappearing "before the
white man," then, within the discourses of post-Reconstruction
domesticity, "savages" were to disappear figuratively as the objects
of white women's civilizing instruction.
nations no longer pose a threat to the integrity of white households
but rather loom as a challenge to the nation's ability to
domesticate Indian difference. With the final military defeat of all
tribal nations by the mid-1880s, the very cultural formations that
legitimated the conquest phase of manifest destiny now hindered the
nation's ability to assimilate the Indian population. For
Indian-policy reformers, Indians represented the nation's
incompleteness by virtue of their distinct political and cultural
existence even in defeat; exercising tribal sovereignty, Indians
Bronze_ can only be addressed by banishing even the most remote
possibility of miscegenation.
3. These critics discuss domesticity not only within or against
patriarchy but also as part of manifest destiny. Romero traces how
discourses of white masculinity constructed the national imperial
impulse as a reaction to threatening domestication by white women.
Sánchez-Eppler demonstrates how the US discourse of
missionary work identified US children as both the objects and the
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
trade—was prospering" (455). Presley's rapturous experience
of "the larger view" (458)—which subsumes individual
suffering to the good of the human race as a whole—seems
naïve when contrasted with Cedarquist's explicit description
of the India-bound wheat cargo in terms of "manifest destiny," new
markets, and his profiteering desire "to sell 'em carpet sweepers
for their harems and electric-light plants for their temple shrines"
(455).14 In fact, this notion of a _larger view_ was often invoked
at the turn of the twentieth century to describe or justify
conclusion sees humans not as laboring producers but as mere
middlemen in an entirely naturalized and thus politically empty
process of production (26).
14. Cedarquist's equation of Far Eastern commerce with "manifest
destiny" recalls Frederick Jackson Turner's claim, in "The Problem
of the West" (1896), that territorial and commercial expansion into
the Pacific represents the logical extension of the Western
frontier: "[T]he demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 1-35
"A Mania for Composition": Poe's Annus Mirabilis and the Violence of Nation-building
J. Gerald Kennedy
---------------
narratives as Irving's _Astoria_ (1836)—as cultural
delusions by suggesting that magazine writers languished in an
inescapable economic prison house.
Of the four stories composed in 1844 that manifest Poe's erstwhile
predilection for indefinite or European settings, three of
them—"Mesmeric Revelation," "The Thousand and Second Tale of
Scheherazade," and "The Purloined Letter"—contain no obvious
commentary on the cultural milieu in which Poe was working.18 One
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
hardly surprising for a retiring bachelor. It is a masterpiece of
poetry at once gaily erotic ("other haire" is not far from Pope's
"Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these") and risk-free. 17
In such a poem, then, passion is manifest only under erasure: the
Anacreontic aesthetic is anesthetic. With one gaudy exception ("A
Nuptiall Verse to Mistresse Elizabeth Lee"), Herrick was not given
to the Petrarchan love-war analogy, and his combination of royalism
with discretion about the causes of discord is not naive, but a
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
beauty supposedly generates cause a considerable flurry of defensive
strategies that makes us suspect the latent goals of the entire
composition. Burke's denial of sublime affect to the clear and
discrete image is fundamental to the aesthetic economy of the sublime,
but this apparently well-modulated position is actually the manifest
sign of a recoil from objects invested with a libidinal power. Burke's
anxieties about the image culminate in his fear of the female breast.
Recoil at its highest pitch is manifest in the famous example that
Frances Ferguson calls "the beheaded woman as the epitome of beauty."
discrete image is fundamental to the aesthetic economy of the sublime,
but this apparently well-modulated position is actually the manifest
sign of a recoil from objects invested with a libidinal power. Burke's
anxieties about the image culminate in his fear of the female breast.
Recoil at its highest pitch is manifest in the famous example that
Frances Ferguson calls "the beheaded woman as the epitome of beauty."
20 "Observe the part of a beautiful woman," Burke exhorts, "where she
is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the
smoothness, the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
sort of hysterical peak during the scene in which he is shown the
clock by Major Milroy. 71
Armadale shows that if the sensation novel takes part in the
production of the modern nervous body it can also manifest
considerable pessimism about the future of that body. But the most
vivid example of this dystopic vision of the modernized body--at
once mechanical and nervous--appears not in Armadale, but in
Collins's The Law and the Lady. Miserrimus Dexter is an extreme
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
animation. Even the clothes displayed at Pleasant Riderhood's
Leaving Shop, where John Harmon begins his narrative, have "a
general dim resemblance to human listeners" (357; 2.12). These
unresponding mannequins ("lay-figure" is the text's term [113; 1.9])
manifest the fate of the reader-as-Twemlow before Twemlow acquires a
social imagination. But while Twemlow is left for a long time in his
stupefaction, the reader is prompted more urgently into action by
the novel's great company of performers who themselves resist
Twemlowian objectification by asserting their own powers of
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
It is this common source of both sympathy and rivalry in the
identification with the other that links the sentimental mode to the
stresses of social mobility. The ethical core of sentimentality is the
connection between empathic emotions and moral behavior. Its manifest
ethos is to transcend distinctions in the interests of a common
humanity, a shared, organic response to suffering and joy. While the
increasingly democratic society of nineteenth-century Britain may have
facilitated identification with others and thus the ability to see
ELH 66.4 (1999) 985-1014
The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism
Timothy Peltason
---------------
caricature and gross misdescription in the potted histories of the discipline
that preface and interrupt so much recent criticism.
A final example from Jameson's writing shows still other ways in which
aesthetic failure and limitation can manifest themselves in avowedly
political criticism. The book is Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism, the subject, once again, is Paul de Man and his wartime
articles for the fascist newspaper, Le Soir:
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
state of exact conformity of institutions." 15
In these texts the (ambiguous) notion that character both determines and is
determined by a nation's institutions is implicit. This formulation becomes
explicit in polemics that self-consciously critique the manifest
un-Englishness of centralizing legislative reforms (most notably the New Poor
Law and the Public Health Act of 1848). For Herbert Spencer, whose ardently
individualist and evolutionary theories of character remained influential
throughout the nineteenth century, society is founded upon a "beautiful
ELH 67.1 (2000) 179-204
Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Carolyn Lesjak
---------------
Thus while Wilde's later, more properly literary works will supplant
the figure of the artisan with that of the artist, the philosophy
underlying their role in his aesthetics remains the same: "the
application of the beautiful in things common to all." 14 Similarly,
the method of the tour will manifest itself in new styles, from the
diversionary style of The Picture of Dorian Gray to the aphorisms
prefacing it. 15 But what will draw all these disparate elements
together and yet maintain them as qualitatively different is a new
notion of use which emerges in the very form through which Wildean
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
publicization of formal-political principles as a manifesto.
Designed in part to affirm a sense of shared purpose and worth, this
theoretical and/or socio-political gloss stands in a curiously
ambiguous relationship to poems as expressive cultural forms, often
making manifest what might otherwise remain too oblique, too
ingenious, or too metapoetic--in short, too difficult--to be
understood. It was this, certainly, that annoyed and to some extent
gave argumentative leverage to Jeffrey and the critics of
Wordsworth, for example. From the first, Jeffrey chose to read the
The second, no less equivocal phenomenon that has developed by way
of concession is the institution of the university English
department mentioned earlier, established at least in part similarly
to make manifest--to mediate and interpret for the literary culture
at large--while in reality serving also to maintain that culture and
the practice of reading poetry itself. Again Frank Kermode neatly
contextualizes:
ELH 67.3 (2000) 717-741
Franklin and the Revolutionary Body
Betsy Erkkila *
---------------
principles because they might be useful as forms of bodily and
social control and as a means of achieving social order and human
happiness. 14 And yet, despite [End Page 724] Franklin's resolve,
his "abominable" (A, 34) and godless perspective continues to
manifest itself in the body of his text. Alluding to his secular and
utilitarian understanding of biblical revelation, he writes:
BLOCKQUOTE
in France after aiding in the negotiation of the peace treaty with
Britain, which was signed 3 September 1783. Franklin never finally
gets to an account of the American Revolution in his narrative,
which breaks off open-endedly in 1757. 16 But while the Revolution
is not present as part of the manifest content of Franklin's
narrative, it is present as the political or narrative unconscious
of Franklin's "Life"--as a scene of social crisis, bloody contest,
and challenge to traditional structures of authority in family,
society, church, and state. Like Jefferson's Notes on the State of
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
had his esteem, but not his love" (CH, 102). In using almost the
identical phrasing--"one who esteems her, indeed, but loves her
not"--to that which Clara uses to describe Wilmot's relation to
Mary's mother--"one who had his esteem, but not his love"--Edward
makes manifest Clara's blindness to the parallels between the story
she tells and the "exquisite justice" (CH, 72) she herself bestows.
Further, Edward complicates the easy solution Clara would find to
her moral problem by calling to her attention the other "person[]
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
referring to the members of the family with oddly distant nouns:
"the lady," "the man," "the little baby" (R, 1863, 62). In this way
letters written to the Children's Aid Society by children who had
been placed-out powerfully document the children's own acute sense
of class identities and differences, and the ways that they manifest
themselves in daily patterns of intimacy, work, and play. These
letters regularly detail the children's farm and school work,
sometimes in pride ("I am busy now grafting our roots. Perhaps you
would like to know something about gardening. I will tell you some
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
Aristotle (often predicated on variations in climate and geography), it
wasn't until the eighteenth century that a comparative racial physiology
developed. 14 In particular, the period produced what Michel Foucault calls
"the nomination of the visible," a new lexicon for registering and thinking
through heterogeneity as it is empirically manifest: not surprisingly, the
physical markers of human diversity soon yielded to an abstract human
calculus (e.g. Camper's studies of prognathism and "facial angle," Gall and
Spurzheim's phrenology, Jean-Joseph Sue's mathematical physiognomy). 15 As
one intellectual historian recently put it, the concept of race "gradually
Essay (1787), 17-18).
24. Smith, An Essay (1787), 6-7 ("the law"; "ground"; "[W]hen heat"), 8
("national"), 60-61 ("a young"; "sensibly"; "[His native]"), 25 ("melt").
Smith also relates the changes manifest in a young servant girl's physiognomy
after she is lifted out of "abject poverty" to become a domestic in Smith's
household: she has become "in the space of four years, fresh and ruddy in her
complexion, her hair long and flowing, and she is not badly made in her
person" (55). By the time Smith published his expanded second edition in 1810
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
The Wanderer's reviewers pay less attention to its story--whereby a
female protagonist flees revolutionary France and attempts in
England to maintain a paradoxically anonymous and ladylike
sustenance--than to its bulk, to the peculiarly irritating
disproportion between the novel's manifest content and its
apparently endless recursivity. John Wilson Croker offers an analogy
between the body of the book and that of its "old," "dim,"
"furrowed," and "withered" author; Burney's predilection to
"self-imitation and tautology" has, in The Wanderer, "increased in
BLOCKQUOTE
The wanderer's manners offset her anonymity and her appearance. How,
a reader such as Hazlitt might ask, can Burney grant manner a
phenomenality more "striking" than that of the manifest signs of
class and race? What modality of matter, to again cite Althusser's
phrase, can so forcibly contravene the prejudicial evidence of "mean
apparel" and "dusky skin?" Bourdieu's account of the habitus stakes
itself upon this very differentiation of materiality from
Burney's novel stages the appeal of the wanderer's practice, whose
serial revelation threatens to make The Wanderer interminable.
The structure of redundant discovery that animates The Wanderer is
manifest, quite literally, as repetition. Yet the critical status of
Burney's novel, as it has extended into the twentieth century,
appears to have been dictated less by the text's recursiveness than
by the wanderer's lack of interiority. The wanderer's lack of depth
reflects, over the novel's critical history, two things: either
Bourdieu's claim for distinction in late twentieth-century France,
that it is "the area par excellence of the denial of the social,"
locates the manifestation of denial in the self-referentiality of
the habitus. 27 That the denial of the social might be manifest in
the radical autonomy of the body is evident in this body's relation
to speech:
BLOCKQUOTE
itself independently of property, titles, or documents finally
subsists only because the wanderer, as her brutal husband's
prospective victim, occupies the very modality of matter that her
practice would displace. This circularity of Burney's text is
equally manifest in its parallel register, that of the species of
self-evidence exerted by the wanderer. Burney's novel is an account
of discovered parentage: if one, crucially inconclusive, element in
its reconstitution of rank is the specificity of the wanderer's
body, the other is the degree to which Burney asserts the
Burney's invocation of "rights" exploits the inclusive capacities of
that word (as claimed by a vandalizing populace) to reinflect the
wanderer's "struggle" for privilege. But this struggle, if it is
most vividly manifest in the wanderer's endless iteration of
gesture, loses its impetus at the close of the novel. The wanderer's
long-lost uncle, reunited with his niece, avers that "his lordship
[the wanderer's father] was so honourable as to entrust me a copy of
his codicil to his will; written all in his own hand, and duly
"complicate our political thinking" because the novel manages
neither protodeconstruction nor protest: in other words, it would
seem, because it does not "complicate our political thinking" in the
right ways. But this is to presuppose an agenda for Burney that
contravenes, or at least reduces, the manifest political interests
of her text. Is it taboo or ungracious for a feminist reader to
suggest that Burney--very complicatedly--innovates conservatism in
the wanderer?
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
shift from advertisement to epigram is not without substance.
Although his original impulse was to speak of a failure of poetic
will that results in a choice of play over work, further
consideration inclines Wordsworth to point towards an environmental
obstacle, the external presence of threat made manifest in the
phenomenon of war. The spatial implications of internal versus
external, as the idea of war prompts us to apply them to the state,
are parallel to the metaphysical implications of internal will
versus external order as they have bedeviled Wordsworth's conception
merely the *[End Page 192]* external threat of the French invader,
but the potential internal danger of coercive and alienated domestic
institutions. In the pamphlet the most clearly visible sign of this
latter evil is the corruption of the English allies themselves, made
manifest in the ministry's opposition to the people's spontaneous
judgment against the convention. The juntas, therefore, are
important to Wordsworth not simply because they fight against
Napoleon, but because he understands them to be extant political
models in which the reconciliation of the free will of the
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
bodies of primitive peoples. For both of them, the telegraph's
potential lies in its ability to raise blacks and other "inferior
races" up to a level where they can function properly as the "hands"
under the "watchful eye" of the "brain of humanity." This link
between telegraphic technology and slavery becomes manifest in
Moore's description of the telegraph as "fetter[ing] the hoary
potentate of storms on his very throne . . . [to] do the weak
bidding of man" (_T_, 15:109). Again and again, in fact, both
Northern and Southern commentators drew upon the idea of the
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 89-115
William Cowper and the "Taste of Critic Appetite"
Priscilla Gilman
---------------
emotional distance, it is a strong version of diffidence,
turning-away elevated to complete detachment. But at the same time
that Cowper cultivates an "indifference to fame," he also, as he
says, "take[s] . . . the utmost pains to deserve it"(6 October 1781,
1:527-28). As is manifest in his concern with revision, Cowper
internalizes criticism's rules, striving to preempt possible
complaint by subjecting his work to the closest imaginable
attention, and thereby substituting, in advance, his own scrutiny
and his own distanced relation to his writing for that of others.
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
performance, exonerates Caleb and denounces himself in turn. Here the
personifications of the closed orders of tyranny and resistance suddenly
admit their mutual implication and accept the violence implicit in their own
self-righteous claims. In these pages, Caleb indicates that his book does not
manifest some prior truth but rather seeks an as yet unsuspected truth in the
response of the reader. As Tilottama Rajan argues, "Through Caleb as reader,
Godwin inscribes a model of reading as the unearthing of truth and the
correction of past misrepresentations. In finally becoming to Caleb what
Caleb has been to Hawkins, we recover a truth of a different kind: the truth
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1107-1135
The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story
Srdjan Smajic
---------------
physiological model of vision and a way of seeing which always seems to
promise more than it can deliver. The revelations experienced through bodily
*[End Page 1128]* sight are, at once, the only revelations Scott's readers,
living in "an age of universal incredulity," can accept as trustworthy, as
well as revelations of the manifest ineffectuality of bodily sight to provide
a solid foundation for religious belief, for that supremely important
knowledge of the final "destination of the soul." The soul that lingers in a
haunted chamber, scaring visitors out of their wits, is a debased form of the
human spirit, morally unfit for a Christian afterlife, yet one promising,
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 141-165
William Blake's Androgynous Ego-Ideal
Tom Hayes _Baruch College and The Graduate Center_ _City University of New York _
---------------
At the bottom of the title page there is an inscription: "The Eye sees more
than the Heart Knows," which might be paraphrased: "It is impossible to fully
grasp the emotional *[End Page 145]* significance of everything we see." For,
as Saint Paul reminds us, we see but through a glass darkly. Our emotional
knowledge often surpasses our physical ability to see, to manifest, our
vision.
Blake has here reversed the Pascalean notion that the heart has reasons that
reason does not know. He has done everything he can to ensure that as we read
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
guide him home to the United States "with that white wisdom which
clothes you" (_M_, 460).
One wonders why Hilda is so shocked by what seems not only
platitudinous, but so clearly the manifest theme of the Romance. As
Richard Brodhead has asked, "What are we to make of a novel that so
prominently hushes the speech it seems designed to express?"62 It is
a mistake, however, to regard Hilda's rejection of Kenyon's version
of the story as motivated by her aversion to the doctrine of the
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
Sawyer's Conspiracy_ (1897-1899) transforms Twain's classic river
novel into a profound, postnational critique of white mobility on
the western frontier. As Twain rewrites _Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn_ through _Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy_,he reconnects the racial and
spatial praxes of U.S. expansion, or manifest destiny, to an always
international slave market that enabled the emergence of the United
States' normative—white, middle-class—national
character. *[End Page 405]*
However, I do think that current understandings of "sovereignty" and
"empire" as expressed through international or even transnational
networks of capital and power can reopen the deeply resonant locale,
the Mississippi Valley, which has lent an enduring popularity to
Twain's work. Twain most successfully reimagined manifest destiny
and U.S. national emergence in terms of the socioeconomic
possibilities of a river that could not be contained as purely
national space.
abusive father and gain ownership of himself. The trip is a
calculated risk that places Huck, historically, in the company of
the many poor but climbing whites who emigrated to the Mississippi
Valley from the 1820s through the 1840s. In a small way, Huck tests
the concept of manifest destiny, the promise that providence will
look after those who keep moving farther from where they started,
toward yet to be consolidated territory whose apparent openness
allowed antebellum *[End Page 410]* boosters like John L. O'Sullivan
to speak of the nation's infinite expandability.17 As Turner would
look after those who keep moving farther from where they started,
toward yet to be consolidated territory whose apparent openness
allowed antebellum *[End Page 410]* boosters like John L. O'Sullivan
to speak of the nation's infinite expandability.17 As Turner would
assert in his nostalgic revisitation of manifest destiny in the
1890s, "America has been another name for opportunity. . . .
Movement has been its dominant fact."18 But in Twain's river
fictions the Mississippi River and the culture of the river make
plain that nature does not necessarily complement the emigration of
about how whiteness also works as a sociological and epistemological
problem in the earlier fictions where Tom appears. Through Tom,
Twain breaks whiteness away from the constellation of mobility,
property, and nature, the constellation of Euro-American virtues
that had underwritten U.S. manifest destiny and conferred a
national-racial character upon the North American West that even in
the 1840s seemed mythic, in the Barthesian sense, dehistoricized,
and apparently inevitable. In _Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy_, Tom
Sawyer's race is a conspiracy, exceptional in a historically
defy them made whiteness a particularly unstable category on and
along the river.
Drifting and floating on the raft proves to be a politically ironic
movement in _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,_ a parody of manifest
destiny in which providential protection is denied to the earnest
white boy who initially rejoices in the naturalness of his travel.
The river sensually joggles Huck and seems to fit him so well he can
even smell the passage of time in it. "Sometimes moonlight,
parenthetically by page number.
17. In an article in the _United States Magazine and Democratic
Review_ that followed on the heels of his famous assertion of the
United States's "manifest destiny," John L. O'Sullivan argued that
"the representative system as practically enjoyed in this country,
will admit of an indefinite expansion of territory." O'Sullivan,
"Territorial Aggrandizement," _United States Magazine and Democratic
Review_ 17 (October 1845): 244.
26. See the essay "Walking" (1862), which Henry David Thoreau
originally gave as a lecture in the 1850s. In part inspired by a
panorama of the Mississippi River, Thoreau offered his highly
personal account of manifest destiny, declaring his own tendency to
follow expanding circles in the direction of the southwest in his
daily walks. See Thoreau's _Collected Essays and Poems_, ed.
Elizabeth Hall Witherell (New York: Library of America, 2001), 239.
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
priority of the temporally first." When, for instance, the Clown
remarks at the end of _The Winter's Tale_ that he "was a gentleman
born before [his] father," he produces what Parker calls (after
Derrida) "a genealogical _hysteron proteron_ " that replicates the
"social practice of retroactively constructed lineages," as manifest
in the Tudor claim that Elizabeth I was descended from King
Arthur.19 As a semiotropic device, _hysteron proteron_ challenges
the political hegemony of the status quo by imagining "the world
upsidedown."20 The prospect of a transvalued world in which "the
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
_Moby-Dick_ emerges at a point of crucial historical transition in
several areas of American life. By the mid-nineteenth century, the
growth and global expansion of the nation's economy following the
War of 1812, and the pugnacious expansionism exemplified by the
Mexican War and the ideology of manifest destiny, were giving way to
signs of strain and impending civil discord: 1850 and 1851, the
years during which Melville wrote his novel, were the years of the
doomed compromise between opponents and proponents of slavery.
agency—that of the animal, and that of the
slave—both of which, in *[End Page 1051]* different but
"translatable" ways, threatened the mid-nineteenth-century American
economy. These coterminous assaults upon American confidence
manifest themselves, in Melville's novel, in the intimacy of the
relation between the threat represented by the agency of the animal,
and that of those various human "others" upon whose labor, in 1851,
American federal and economic stability remained tenuously poised.
Given this mutual transference between anxieties about nonwhite and
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
sings of this before an audience whose interest in the song derives
from its own utter remoteness from the particular case it opens. Of
course such a song is really a personal ad the wrong way round, for
instead of supposing that an extraordinary object might have a
being, and calling upon it to manifest itself, it acknowledges its
actual existence and the reason why it must stay hidden. And in
knowing this it knows also why a woman is uniquely like a fox, and a
man specifically like a sparrow; and under what particular
circumstances such hybrid things might break into speech.
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
assiduously governed. Liberalism's task, then, is to ensure that
citizens understand themselves as freely choosing to submit to
government. *[End Page 1047]*
Elaborating the concept of pastoral power that lies at the heart of
Foucault's notion of governmentality, Colin Gordon asserts, for
example, that "Plato's dialogue, _The Statesman_, concerning the
nature of the art of government, discusses the possibility that the
ruler's art is like the shepherd's who cares for each individual
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
all over town. The only work he resists is "family duty" (S, 771).
His fences collapse, his cows go astray. "His patrimonial estate had
dwindled away under his management, acre by acre" (S, 771). Rip,
we're told, doesn't mind losing his inherited property, "but his
wife kept continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his
carelessness and the ruin he was bringing on his family" (S, 771).
Both stories regard family property as an environment of shame and
repression for men. Women are adored [End Page 784] or despised
depending on whether they are seen as shaming or consolatory toward
ELH 66.1 (1999) 129-156
"Sublimation strange": Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
Daniel Hack
---------------
the events themselves: back, that is, to questions of plot.
By providing an event that would more convincingly carry the
significance assigned to Krook's death and then parodying and
stymieing the search for such meaning, the novel makes the earlier
allegorization newly salient and renders its authority newly
suspect: Krook's death is, as Garrett Stewart puts it, "a blatant
allegory," but this is the case precisely because the narrator
blatantly allegorizes it, an action the novel can no longer be seen
American Literary History 13.4 (2001) 671-693
Trademark Twain
Loren Glass
---------------
strongest motive for incorporating the dead Mark Twain" (322-23). And
Angert�s nail in the coffin, so to speak, is the significant fact
that "Mark Twain was not one of the organizers of the Mark Twain
Company. His signature does not appear to the agreement which
constituted him as a corporation" (323). By dislodging the name from
the signature Angert breaks the metonymic chain that would link Mark
Twain to the Mark Twain Company. According to Angert�s clever
conceit, the Mark Twain who emerges between two deaths is a corporate
Mark Twain, a trademark name that ensures property in and elevates
_American Literary History_ 16.2 (2004) 179-207
Anachronistic Imaginings: _Hope Leslie_'s Challenge to Historicism
Jeffrey Insko
---------------
2. News from the Present
------------------------
But recognizing the temporal complexity of that discourse and the experience
of history that emerges from it may well require dislodging historicist
methodology from some of its more entrenched principles, in much the same way
that historicists themselves have learned to peel the method of close reading
away from the principles of the New Criticism.15 In other words, I think one
can continue to use careful textual analysis to explore text-context
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
4. Andrew McCann, _Cultural Politics in the 1790's: Literature,
Radicalism, and the Public Sphere_ (New York: St. Martin's, 1999),
132_._ Lisa Moore's chapter on _Belinda_ follows this model as well.
She concludes with a version of _Belinda_ in which its heroine's
ultimate marriage and dislodging from the aristocratic indecency of
the Delacoursis representative of "the domestic novel . . . as
quintessential literary vehicle of bourgeois hegemony." Moore,
_Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British
Novel_ (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), 107. I want to note that
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 443-470
Orestes Brownson in Young America: Popular Books and the Fate of Catholic Criticism
James Emmett Ryan
---------------
4 Or, as Brownson himself remarked dourly in his admiring yet disapproving
review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's _The Scarlet Letter,_ "Mere literature for
its own sake we do not prize.... [Men] are moral and accountable beings, and
we look only to the moral and religious effect of their works. Genius
perverted, or employed in perverting others, has no charms for us" ("_Scarlet
Letter_" 528). Apart from the relatively minor interest they held as works of
literary art or intellectual sophistication, the utility of literary texts
lay primarily in their ability to motivate society in the right directions,
morally and religiously.
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 867-897
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey
E. S. Burt
---------------
21. Derrida, _Adieu_, 76.
22. The logic has been laid out by Derrida as what he calls the
"paradoxical and perverting law" of hospitality. In _De
l'hospitalité_ (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997), he *[End
Page 893]* says that "inviolable immunity is the condition of
hospitality" (51) and then goes on to explain the necessity of
inviolable reserve:
ELH 66.3 (1999) 707-737
Historical Space in the "History of": Between Public and Private in Tom Jones
George A. Drake
---------------
his judgment of Partridge. That kind of judgment, perhaps, seems
unattainable to him; it is certainly questionable whether Tom Jones has
attained that level. Fielding's ambiguous use of the word "prudence" may
reflect his ambivalence about the real possibilities of true prudence and
judgment, as would his coyness in enunciating the doctrine. Prudence and
judgment seem to be limited by the existing state of manners; thus he argues
that the Gypsy King's perfection is owing to the absence of "false Honours"
and the efficacy of "Shame." The "nowhere" of the Gypsy utopia is
essentially outside of historical space; the Gypsy King has no need of
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
5 As his championing of Goethe and his interest in the scientific
positivism of Auguste Comte indicate, one of the main strengths of
Lewes as a man of science, as it had been when he was principally a
man of letters, was his familiarity with European thought and his
devotion to popularizing it in England. This cosmopolitan outlook
was especially handy for a budding physiologist, since for many
years English physiologists had lagged behind their continental
counterparts, in part because of concern in England over the cruelty
of animal experiments. 6
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
sentimental. To be sure, the rhetoric of affect is written all over Kailyard
narratives and the history of their critical reception. An 1896 review
described a Barrie novel as an "excursion into boyhood in pursuit of its
sentimental qualities" whose main character was "a creature of fermenting
mind, companioning his own emotions." 29 More often than not sentimentality
has been a charge used to dismiss Kailyard narratives. In 1935, George Blake
scornfully accused Kailyarders of being "a small group of sentimental, if
gifted, Scots, [who] gratified Victorian sentimentality." 30
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
to learn you nothing, Huck'" (269). The point of these mirror episodes
is not just that Huck and Tom are incapable of arguing, but that
argument or learning--the adaptation of logical structures to
different contexts--is impossible. In this novel, once we have
absorbed a model of values, we spout it inveterately until another
overcomes us.
The figure of Huck may offer hope of an alternative to Twain's
dystopic vision of literary discipline, but it is false hope. Huck's
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 439-472
Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism
Sue Zemka
---------------
splinter group of self-styled anthropologists. The semantic
distinction bespoke an antagonism of principle. While the
ethnologists, by and large, maintained belief in the fundamental
familial unity of the species man, the anthropologists promoted the
polygenicist interpretation of races as betokening a difference of
species. For this reason, many early anthropologists eschewed
Darwinism, which seemed to be a disguised apology for human
unity--as indeed it was, insofar as it could be used to update the
Prichardian emphasis on developmental changes in the human type. The
American Literary History 12.1&2 (2000) 1-40
Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution
W. C. Harris
---------------
But the locality of one of these sites does not entail the
explicitness one might expect. In the manuscript-found-in-a-bottle
with which Eureka opens, the QUOTE (writing from the distant future)
critiques the QUOTE of deductive [End Page 8] reasoning precisely
for its crippling devotion to detail: "[O]ur progenitors . . .
blinded themselves . . . with the impalpable, titillating Scotch
stuff of detail. . . . The vital taint . . . in Baconianism . . .
lay in its tendency to throw power and consideration into the hands
of merely perceptive men . . . --the diggers and peddlers of minute
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
not only as addressing the subject-object problem that has been at
the root of Western consciousness at least since Descartes but also
as forging a voluntarist middle way between the ethical neutrality
of scientific positivism on one side and "the seductions of a
crippling solipsism" on the other (7). This, of course, is one of
the chief problems Thoreau grappled with publicly and privately,
especially in the years after _Walden_ and with considerably less
success than Tauber's valorizing account credits him. Even Tauber
concedes that Thoreau never overcame his drive to know "the world
_American Literary History_ 16.4 (2004) 596-618
Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City
Andrew Lawson
---------------
repeated in the case of Pete. Pete's borrowed "aristocratic"
identity appears to lend him mimetic substance through a
self-constituting act achieved entirely within the realm of
consumption. Pete's subsequent actions, however, reveal not
traditionalist working-class bravado but a crippling
lower-middle-class anxiety that stems from his position as a new
kind of white-collar worker. Pete represents a marginal class poised
between rowdiness and respectability, on the verge of its
transformation by an "enforced gentility" (Kasson 251). This class
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 167-197
Wordsworth's Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War
Brian Folker
---------------
that Wordsworth's best poetry was prompted by a heroic and
semi-tragic internalization of millennial desire, or with more
recent New Historicist critics who see a craven and hypocritical
substitution of the poetic for the social, the sense that there is a
crippling discontinuity between Wordsworth's aesthetic principles
and his political beliefs remains essentially the same. Certainly,
it would require considerable sophistry to argue that the individual
who defended the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 and campaigned for
the Tories in 1818 did not undergo significant changes in his
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
ultimately to narrow the gap between Moore and Farren by
recommending that the former treat the latter fairly. But it does so
by indicating that the cycle of revenge spawns a disturbing economy
of its own, whose enjoyment far outweighs productive gains in wealth
while crippling any real sense of closure. Moore discovers that the
"excitement" he obtains from seeking redress "was of a kind pleasant
to his nature: he liked it better than making cloth" (370).
Barraclough's followers discover too that attacking Moore "rouse[s]
. . . the fighting animal" in all of them (336). As violence exceeds
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 575-596
The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth's _Belinda_
Jordana Rosenberg
---------------
_Belinda_'sbanishing of Lady Delacour's wit takes place
simultaneously with the novel's demonstration of wit's
impotence--the needlessness, that is, of banishing wit in the first
place. In this way, wit's masking of Lady Delacour's gothic
interiority is itself shown to be a hoodwinking: there was no gothic
interiority to mask because Lady Delacour was hiding a secret that
wasn't there.
It's important to mark this shift in emphasis, for it is
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 921-948
His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Keith Wilhite
---------------
Come here, she blushingly cries . . . . Come nigh to me
limber-hip'd man and give me your finger and thumb,
Stand at my side till I lean as high as I can upon you,
Fill me with albescent honey . . . . bend down to me,
Rub to me with your chaffing beard . . rub to my breast and
shoulders.
(127-28)
In these transgendering scenes, Whitman performs a kind of gender
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 223-243
Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot's _Middlemarch_
Jessie Givner
---------------
it's to do harm to the land and the poor man in the long-run" (502). The
Reform Bill is equally controversial because it ties property value to
political power: it gives the vote only to those who pay 10 pounds or more in
property tax. The "breeding coins" which circulate throughout Eliot's text
are thus changed into "the minting of Tory votes" (455).
Not only does the emergent railway system create a new evaluation of land,
but it also produces a new evaluation of time, for it speeds business up so
that time can be saved. 18 Yet the railway's role in speeding up
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 117-149
Critical Conditions: Coleridge, "Common Sense," And The Literature Of Self-experiment
Noel B. Jackson
---------------
perceiving the difficult position he has struck with respect to the autonomy
of *[End Page 138]* judgment, he is less able to escape this difficulty. His
effort to resolve the contradiction necessitates the impossible task of
persuading "the most inexperienced reader" of the inaccuracy of his or her
own judgment without actually disqualifying the judgment itself (_LB_, 8).
Neither in their writings nor in their poetic careers did Wordsworth or
Coleridge manage to provide a fully satisfactory account of how a radical
inwardness might square with the demand that poetry be read by an audience of
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
offers a rare opportunity to gauge precisely how More's supposed literary
realism was betrayed by her insistence that "the poor exist to be saved by
the upper classes." 55 As the agent of this rescue mission, the mobile
"charitable gentleman" (5:1), Mr. Johnson, becomes the key figure in
refashioning the real as evangelical fantasy. Like the campaign for moral
reform, and like the author he represents, Johnson operates without regard
for existing geographical boundaries and social hierarchies, through the
protean movements of charitable capital and middle-class philanthropy. Title
page images reinforce this by consistently distinguishing Johnson's superior
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
cargoes.19 Just on the other side of the seasonal rises that
facilitated trade and allowed western farmers access to markets, the
flood signaled financial collapse. Historian John W. Monette notes
that there were twelve significant Mississippi floods from 1820 to
1840.20 Floods washed away the wood yards necessary for fuelling
steamboats, buried boat landings deep in mud, and destroyed crops
and homes. In _Life on the Mississippi_,Twain represents the
Mississippi flood as a moment of transition in which socioeconomic
status might shift radically, down or up. Some canny speculators
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
tranquillity of his beloved Lucie with Darnay, and thus his own
beatification. The dissolute Carton, Darnay's "Double of coarse
deportment," had once been "famous among his earliest competitors as a
youth of great promise." 37 He sees (and resents) in Charles, who has
prospered "with great perseverence and untiring industry," what he,
Carton, "has fallen away from, what [he] might have been" (TC, 116).
Carton's resentment ("You hate the fellow" [TC, 116]) is countered by
active suppression. (You may remember Philip Ray's "I hate you, Enoch.")
The shabby and mournful witness of the Darnays' happy home, Sydney
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
self-construction in terms of a kind of "worldly asceticism," in Max
Weber's phrase: the theme of labor as a testing of the parameters of
the self, a self-construction through pain, conjoined with a force for
liberation from an image corrupted by too long a sojourn in the halls
of princely and ecclesiastical power. The pain of stonecutting is made
more agreeable to the male because of the supposed femininity of the
illusions of the image. Frances Ferguson concludes that "the sublime
acts as an antidote to the dissolution produced by the beautiful. All
its strainings follow the dictates of the work ethic." And she reminds
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 1-28
Letters from Asylumia: The _Opal_ and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851-1860
Benjamin Reiss
---------------
would publish, distribute, and read the works of a former patient? A cloud of
popular suspicion enveloped these works, a suspicion fed by asylum
superintendents' arguments that such exposés were evidence of
lingering pathology (Ray, "Popular Feeling" 39). Fear of stigmatization might
also lead to self-censoring. As the publisher of one asylum exposé
wrote, "Few of those discharged cured are willing to recapitulate the
circumstances of their own condition, or of their surroundings, while _behind
the bars_" (Lunt 5). And one former patient who wrote a memoir critical of
her stay at Utica only succeeded in exposing herself to ridicule for
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
their self-divided minds. 19 He is of two minds himself, uncertain whether
his life repeats the hypocrisy of his Evangelical guardian or whether both
he and Hawkyard are (despite their compromising names) models of
benevolence. Interesting tricks of language can be found in the speaker's
use of self-affirming parentheses and in his self-censoring [End Page 454]
reinventions of meaning that still allow corrected first impressions to
stand.
The single and double ironies of Landor's Imaginary Conversations are the
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1015-1032
"Dismal Pleasure": Victorian Sentimentality and the Pathos of the Parvenu
Miriam Bailin
---------------
resent those to whom we are most indebted, and that we have a tendency
to deny these feelings at considerable cost and representational
ingenuity. 24 Certainly the mode whose aim is precisely to make us feel
openly and extravagantly about our most private relations and
vicissitudes while censoring their opprobrious and divisive aspects
necessarily participates in the murkiness that attends all human
emotions. The aims of the sentimental mode may be transgressive or
conservative, liberating or disciplinary in different instances and in
different historical periods, but the sentiments evoked in pursuit of
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
_habitus_, lack of economic and cultural capital due to the
domination of a hierarchical class system, susceptibility to
force—it is clear that Riderhood's bid for agency can be
redescribed quite accurately as complicit with the very structures
oppressing him.
Pleasant's actions throughout the chapter also speak to the problem
of finding a politically telling agency in social practices, for she
exemplifies the same kind of overdetermination or indeterminate
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
This moment also provides a clear connection of the two economies,
foregrounding the linkage between sex/feeling and commerce. 23 But
rather than using this parallel to satirize the commercialization of
sex, Sterne exploits it in the service of sexing commerce; in other
words, it is feeling--in all of its possible forms--that makes the
world go around, the motor that powers all of our "vehicles." This
becomes more clear in the resolution of the temptation, "The
Conquest" episode. The last moment preceding the conquest comes as
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
recovering and will be with her shortly to claim his prize, she
quickly reverses course as thoughts of Mary's plight return to the
forefront. Edward is once again sent on his way.
Caught in these buffeting crosswinds, Edward continues on his
journey, all the while sending Clara reports, exhortations,
pleadings, commands, rejections, and farewells, but never able to
liberate himself from her narrative control. The ultimate effects on
his constitution and sanity prove to be presaged by his early
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
14. This passage is partly a rejoinder to Mrs. Pryor's High Toryism,
which the narrator reproduces for ironic effect: "Implicit
submission to authorities, scrupulous deference to our betters
(under which term I, of course, include the higher classes of
society), are, in my opinion, indispensable to the wellbeing of
every community" (_Shirley,_ 365).
15. Charlotte Bront� to G. H. Lewes, January 1850, printed in _The
Bront�s: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence in Four
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 575-591
On Creating an Unusable Past
Robert Milder
---------------
and realizing an unattained self, McMillin seems to be following
Emerson's own method of "creative reading" ("American Scholar"
58)--but with a difference. As a reader, Emerson himself had
anything but the innocent receptivity of the "beginner's mind," nor
was he a budding poststructuralist delighting in the endless play of
language. According to Richardson, he was a _user_ of texts whose
method of "appropriate appropriation" involved not only the "freedom
to take whatever struck him" but the "obligation to ignore whatever
did not" (173). In this Emerson understood that, in addition to the
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
dust mounds (488; 3.6). 78
Dickens, of course, was always fascinated by physical accouterments
of identity, but his use of them in Our Mutual Friend is so
extensive that he seems almost to be delighting in his own practice.
Taylor writes that the self encodes the world with the stylus of the
body: "some of the most pervasive features of [my] attitude to the
world and to others [are composed] in the way I carry myself and
project in public space." 79 Dickens extends this kind of encoding
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 223-243
Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot's _Middlemarch_
Jessie Givner
---------------
critics, he comments, have "appropriated _Middlemarch_" in order to read,
"not George Eliot's novel but its 'text.'" He goes on to cite approvingly
Kerry McSweeney's assertion that such deconstructive criticism "is
excessively _engag�_ and ideological, too concerned with its own premises,
methods, and self-delighting excruciations, and insufficiently disinterested
in George Eliot's novel." Hornback, Middlemarch_: A Novel of Reform_ (Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1988), 12.
9. Eliot, "The Natural History of German Life," reprinted in _Essays of
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
which there are always counter-arguments to be formulated) would be forced
to abandon their double ironies for the tediously predictable single
ironies of a dogmatist like Calvin. Landor's Montaigne would feel
imprisoned in Zion, and he uses every stick at hand to beat a dogma. In
particular, he detests Calvin, whose antinomian theology is a target of
Browning's own irony in "Johannes Agricola in Meditation." Though a
lavishly annotated copy of the second edition of Montaigne's Essais (Lyon,
1593) finds a place of honor in Browning's library, The Apology of Raymond
Sebond would not be found in Calvin's library, nor would Calvin's
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
participate in much the same profession.
As noted by Charles Ford, More "clarified and restricted the
relatively unexacting criteria by which most eighteenth-century
justices discriminated between the deserving and undeserving poor."9
She was determined that relief should not be given to just anyone,
and, in this regard (as I will argue more fully), her tracts were
addressed as much to the middle and upper classes as they were to
the poor: More was as concerned with educating the charitable in how
ELH 67.3 (2000) 801-818
Dangerous Acquaintances: The Correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke
Barbara Packer
---------------
James Freeman Clarke, on the other hand, was the son of a hapless speculator
whose schemes for raising money to support a family of thirteen children all
went badly awry. The senior Clarke practiced [End Page 802] medicine, served
as a judge, tinkered with various inventions, tried raising merino sheep in
Vermont (the sheep sickened and died), and experimented with bleaching
beeswax in Boston (the factory burned down just after the insurance policy on
it had expired). At last the family came to depend upon a boardinghouse Mrs.
Clarke opened in Boston. 7 James had been spared the worst of his family's
misfortunes. Since the age of five he had been raised in the rural home of
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1039-1063
"Leviathan is a Skein of Networks": Translations of Nature and Culture in _Moby-Dick_
Philip Armstrong
---------------
divide the real. _Moby-Dick_'s Captain Ahab, for example,
simultaneously inhabits the human, technological, and animal
domains. He fuses his own body with the factory ship he commands,
fitting his prosthetic leg into an auger hole in the deck,
envisaging his relation to the crew in mechanical terms—"my
one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they
revolve" (_M_, 143)—and fantasizing about the construction
of a mechanical automaton completely obedient to his will (_M_,
359). In these ways, as critics have argued, Ahab embodies
ELH 66.2 (1999) 461-487
Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses
Nicholas Daly*
---------------
observed that season-ticket holders, especially on the Brighton
line, age very rapidly" (22). Some of the deaths he attributes to
the railway's baleful influence might well have had other causes,
one imagines, as in the case of a man with a history of heart
disease who died while hurrying to catch a train "after eating
heartily of pickled pork, greens, and lobster," and who lit a cigar
en route (51).
56. While sometimes we have to deal with actual railways in the
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
his finest piece of work" (68). As Flinn observes, this report
"ranged more widely and probed more deeply than any of the previous
investigations of this subject," exposing "the evils resulting from
the exploitation of pride and sorrow by undertakers, as well as the
fearful consequences to health of the mismanagement and overloading
of urban burial-grounds" (68). Yet, Flinn also notes that
BLOCKQUOTE
_American Literary History_ 17.1 (2005) 36-69
Literature and Regional Production
Hsuan L. Hsu
---------------
with a bigger picture in which _all_ corners of the world are
transformed and oppressed by an economic system that requires and
produces uneven geographical development. This global insight
undermines the primary role that the larger view plays for Norris's
characters—that of detaching them from local
identifications. Individuals, regions, and domestic arrangements
stop mattering to Presley and Laura as they embark on westward
journeys away from the scenes of capitalism's crimes; but, in light
of the ubiquity of (racialized) class conflict and the production of
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 719-749
Articulating Social Agency in _Our Mutual Friend_: Problems with Performances, Practices, and Political Efficacy
Molly Anne Rothenberg
---------------
Venus's mouth, social agency is a function of the "human
warious"—"wary-us" or "war-I-us." In this arena, each
individual, at once a member of a collective and distinct from it,
is in a perpetual struggle to exempt herself from the vicissitudes
of social meaning, without detaching herself completely from the
social world on which she must rely for any sense of her own
significance. When we experience such constraints on our ability to
impose our will or our estimation of our own value, we may long to
regain the comfortable illusion of intentionalism. Yet if we could
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
withdrawing all forty-two pounds in sovereigns, "for fear of fire,"
she bizarrely advises Mr. Benson to protect the money from her:
"Lock it up safe, out o' the way," she warns Mr. Benson, "Dunnot go
and leave it about to tempt folks. I'll not answer for myself if
money's left about. I may be cribbing a sovereign" (379). 29
Evidently, Sally's and Mr. Benson's reciprocal generosity is a
reciprocal fiction. When returning the money, Sally maintains that
it has been Mr. Benson's all along--which is to say that she only
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
He desires its arrival as he has never desired the person of his
wife.
Or has he? In what must be the weirdest turn of this
self-consciously strange tale, Morella lays upon her unloving
husband a deathbed curse and summarily dies--_but not before giving
birth to a child_. This revelation comes quite literally out of
nowhere, and is voiced not by the narrator himself, but by Morella,
in her deathbed soliloquy: BLOCKQUOTE
ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178
"A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character
Lauren M. E. Goodlad *
---------------
upon him." 73 Such a rhetoric, reminiscent of Spencer's evolutionary
discourse, allies nursing with a progressive Nature and locates both in the
individualist sanctum of the home. It distinctly recalls Harriet Martineau's
approach to "household education" which assures that, in matters of
childrearing, "Nature may be trusted here, as everywhere. If we have patience
to let her work without hindrance and without degradation, she'll justify our
confidence at last." 74 As figurative English mothers, Nightingale's trained
nurses adopt a comparable approach, beneficently superintending rather than
invading private domesticity. By facilitating nature, their
_American Literary History_ 16.1 (2004) 93-102
Transatlanticism Now
Laura M. Stevens
---------------
novels' specific engagement with the discourse of sensibility. Of
novels in general he suggests that formalized structures promote
modes of thought that are conducive to ethical engagement. Surveys
of modern readers lead him to suggest that "formally structuring or
narrativizing a world is an essentially ethical act. A realist novel
may promote vice or virtue,...but it is always an appeal to order,
to a set of shared rules, always a call for consensus, for mutual
understanding. As such it is in the purest word, ethical" (141).
Many eighteenth-century *[End Page 98]* novels also undertake a
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
structures (such as his and Jameson's) to the "allegorical" structure of
Wordsworthian autobiographical poetry, which emerges as ideologically
motivated and, therefore, anti-narrativistic. Wordsworth's formulation is, we
are told, anti-narrativistic, or allegorical, because it denies history; it
turns its back on the rupturing or narrativizing inherent in the historical
in favor of textual coherence or cohesion. 15
Where Liu seeks to align himself with Jameson, he is clearly also aligned
with Levinson, not only where his "denied positivism" recalls her "negative
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
specifications: trees are _decayed_, the tarn is _unruffled_, images
in it are both inverted and _remodelled_. These past-participial
adjectives (holdovers from Poe's Southern classicist education in
Latin) etch the passage of time into the objects to which they are
attached, so that time itself is seen both to have coursed over and
scarred the landscape, and to have been brought under an almost
diagrammatic narrative control. Like Poe's descriptive
fastidiousness, this obsessively sequential mode provides for a kind
of boasting as well. For when Poe levels the gaze of his acutely
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
In sum, literary scholars claimed that mental discipline would alter a
basic racialist notion of how to organize society, broadening
Americans' definition of national identity to include and even welcome
foreign and minority influences. A few scholars went further,
disjoining the idea of national identity from race. In a textbook that
*[End Page 288]* went through eight editions between 1900 and 1924,
Wendell asserted that language and the ideals it bears are "more
potent in binding men together than any physical tie," like that of
blood. What makes immigrants Yankees is not their blood but their
ELH 68.4 (2001) 897-927
Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science
Scott Juengel
---------------
five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was
a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any
individual eminent either in action or speculation" (I've marked significant
changes in italics). The original footnote is cited in John Immerwahr's
discussion of Hume's revisions, "Hume's Revised Racism," Journal of the
History of Ideas 53 (1992): 481-86.
22. Henry Louis Gates, "Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes," Critical
Inquiry 12 (1985): 3.
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
which it is contrasted by reversing the hypostatization which
usually obscures the meaning of money: for Sally and Mr. Benson, her
sovereigns are not so many material objects, nor even markers of
abstract and exchangeable value, but rather the concrete signs of
their relationship. By repersonalizing this money--and with it the
labor-relation it *[End Page 208]* represents--Sally's hoarding
becomes not simply an aberration within a commodity culture, much
less an exaggeration of its principles, but instead a fundamental
disruption of the reification on which capitalist exchange depends.
ELH 67.3 (2000) 801-818
Dangerous Acquaintances: The Correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke
Barbara Packer
---------------
Yet Fuller would discover during the course of her correspondence with Clarke
that traditional roles were not so easily abandoned, while Clarke, who wanted
to address Fuller with masculine frankness yet still find in her feminine
receptiveness, blundered repeatedly into cruelties he did not even know that
he was committing. These painful moments form only a small part of a
correspondence that is overwhelmingly brave, generous, and high-spirited. But
they seem all the more significant for that. With genuine affection on both
sides, with mutual esteem, with the boundaries of their relationship
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1033-1051
Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater's Renaissance
Jeffrey Wallen
---------------
analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of this purpose
[the 'reconciliation of the gods of Greece with the Christian
religion'] in his writings" (R, 27), and Pater's literary portrait,
his attempt to render palpable again this "visible equivalent," also
aims at re-enacting "the essence of humanism," the belief "that
nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly
lose its vitality" (R, 38).
In each of his essays Pater presents a literary portrait of an
ELH 67.2 (2000) 589-615
Market Indicators: Banking and Domesticity in Dickens's Bleak House_
Gordon Bigelow
---------------
population of Ireland, Krook and his clients appear to be outside of
the circulation of the written sign. 28 But Krook's sign presents
another message. As a signifier, the picture points toward its
signified--the fact that rags are bought in this shop--only
indirectly, triangulating the signified by reference to another
signifier--the rags being unloaded at the paper mill. Understanding
the picture's meaning requires a knowledge on the part of the
interpreter of an entire network of other signs, in this case the
stages in the process of making paper. The pictorial signifier
ELH 66.4 (1999) 965-984
Fathoming "Remembrance": Emily Bronte in Context
Janet Gezari
---------------
3. Quoted in Phillips, with the original's italics omitted, 26.
4. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Complete
Text Reproduced Micrographically), 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1971), under "recollect" (emphasis in the original).
5. John Addington Symonds, Sleep and Dreams (London: John Murray,
1851), 47-48.
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1029-1045
"Back To The Future?": The Narrative of Allegory in Recent Critical Accounts of Romanticism
Karen Hadley
---------------
deconstructive insights into concepts such as "narrative" and "time" and
demonstrate how pragmatic forms of the literary text instance key elements of
its socio-historical context.
Summarizing some key representative figures, I show how the "negative
allegory" of the Romantic new historicism--where it reflects its Jamesonian,
Althusserian roots--embraces what is (in the Romantic tradition) a
Coleridgean understanding of allegory. 2 When such critics use a Coleridgean,
or classical, understanding of allegory as structure, they then can displace
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
/ My School-mistress to be; / To teach poor children and for this, / You
shall be paid by me." 56 The double substitution here is crucial: as the
condition for neighborhood shifts from proximity to charitable motive, so a
recruitment to evangelical enterprise replaces bread, alms, or respectability
as the reward of virtue. This conscripting mode of recompense allowed More
and her collaborators to legitimate their own ambitions by representing the
indigenous pious poor and the mobile, reformist middle class as
interdependent social forces and reciprocal narrative effects. 57 It also
sustained the pattern by which a print economy of charitable provision
ELH 67.3 (2000) 801-818
Dangerous Acquaintances: The Correspondence of Margaret Fuller and James Freeman Clarke
Barbara Packer
---------------
pleaded, "I can never find such another as you." 38
The relationship Clarke wanted with Fuller--the progressively deepening
intimacies of courtship without its termination in union--was inherently
unstable, and though Fuller agreed (without retracting anything she had said
to him in anger) to welcome Clarke back as a correspondent in the hopes that
they might "begin a new era and . . . alter the nature of our friendship
without altering the soul," little had really changed between them. 39
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
the desire of elites to balance the social possibilities of word and image
for a gradual and contained progress that avoids revolutionary rupture.
In looking at Italy and France in 1848, Kirkland looks at the functions of
icons and iconoclasm in the shaping of citizens and republics. Projecting
American elites' ambivalence toward images onto these two European sites, she
complicates the problem of constructing an American subjectivity further by
her sporadic resistances to the gendered structures of the aesthetic gaze.
Written during the American turn to visual culture in its nation building,
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 251-287
The Art of Discrimination
Arthur Riss _Salem State College _
---------------
44. One could argue that theoretically this racist account of Negro
appearance, though it may seem to depend on the physical features of
the Negro, ultimately imagines these physical features in formalist
and idealist terms. Projecting an essence onto these physical
markers, it represents ugliness as an essential trait, and then
looks for visible markers. Ultimately this aesthetic logic need not
have anything to do with the way that the Negro really looks.
Although the claim that all human *[End Page 284]* beings share a
ELH 66.4 (1999) 863-883
Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy
Richard Cronin
---------------
exchanging his business dress for a suit of Lincoln green and
retreating from his professional duties into the greenwood. But the
epistles fit oddly with the poem that they introduce and interrupt,
for Marmion is "A Tale of Flodden Field," and if the subtitle agrees
with the epistles in modestly disclaiming that the poem is any more
than a tale, it nevertheless identifies its subject as the greatest
military disaster in the history of Scott's nation. There is an odd
discrepancy between the confession of a playful refusal of
seriousness and the choice of theme, a disparity that the very first
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
disastrous personal effect. But the habit of pathologizing Coleridge
as somehow failed, broken, beaten--Other--was established early and
still shapes the way he is read, celebrated, or dismissed. 9
The justification for this othering, particularly in our own time,
has come routinely to involve his use of opium. Thus Elizabeth
Schneider, [End Page 886] while admitting Coleridge was a habitual
user, saves "Kubla Khan" from all unseemly pharmacological taint,
concluding that the poem's "special character was not determined or
ELH 67.3 (2000) 819-842
Playing at Class
Karen S�nchez-Eppler
---------------
("free play").
11. First Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society (New York:
1854), 6. In 1854 the New York Children's Aid Society was founded in
the charitable hope of mitigating the social and individual dangers
of child poverty and homelessness. It initiated a flurry of
experimental programs: industrial workshops, Sunday "meetings,"
schools, and clothing distribution. Its most famous programs,
however, were a placing-out system, which sent urban children to
_American Literary History_ 15.3 (2003) 471-503
Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twain's _Connecticut Yankee_
Seth Lerer
---------------
explorers. In his 1884 Presidential Address to the Philological Society,
Murray considered his group at the _Dictionary_ to be "pioneers, pushing our
way *[End Page 494]* experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no
white man's axe has been before us" (509). Earlier, he had written to Henry
Sweet in 1882: "I am absolutely a pioneer.... [N]obody except my predecessors
in specimens of the Dicty. has yet tried to trace out historically the sense
development of English words.... I shall have to do the best I can at
defining probably 80,000 words that I never knew or used or saw before" (qtd.
in Mugglestone 2). *[End Page 495]* Such acts of pioneering were, for Murray,
principles" (2). 38
Experimentalism and colonial expansion, technology and politics, merge in
this statement to articulate a vision of the lexicographer far from Samuel
Johnson's "harmless drudge." He is now Victorian pioneer, an industrialist of
the imagination, a colonist of language, a dude of the dictionary. In these
adventures, too, the philologist shares much with the technologist of the
day. The Dicksons' _Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison_ makes explicit
these associations. In their discussion of the impact of the phonograph, they
ELH 66.2 (1999) 405-437
Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image
Peter Cosgrove
---------------
Garrett Nagle, a relative of Burke's mother, who "was mentioned in a
House of Commons report in 1733--when Edmund Burke was four years
old--as being 'the person who manages the Pretender's affairs in
Munster.' . . . This Garrett Nagle was the father of the educational
pioneer, Nano Nagle (1718-1784), foundress of the presentation Order
of nuns. Edmund Burke gave discreet support to Nano in her educational
and charitable work" (17).
27. O'Brien, 30-31.
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
. . if he is good for anything should know what was the matter with
you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you
were gone" (M, 434). Stymied by such antipathy, Lydgate is left to
compare himself unfavorably to the [End Page 631] grave-robbing
pioneer anatomist Vesalius, a comparison that elicits the disgust of
his wife Rosamond--and one that Collins would place in the mouth of
Benjulia. 43
In fact, the novel's early hints about Lydgate's experience in
ELH 67.3 (2000) 743-771
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
Jared Gardner *
---------------
gothic plotting, which Brown rightly understood as essential
ingredients in successful novels, is therefore not so easily read as
a move designed to secure a larger audience. Instead the evidence
points to Brown's serious reconsideration of both the value and the
politics of the novelistic conventions he had helped pioneer.
Despite the avowed conventionality of Clara Howard in terms of its
moral lesson there is, as in the "Portrait of an Emigrant," profound
difficulty in determining what exactly that lesson is, a difficulty
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 493-540
"Study to Be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain
Kevin Gilmartin
---------------
--------------------------------------------
Critics interested in recovering More's didactic fiction for literary history
have tended to stress that these tracts were "drawn from life," and have
identified her as a "pioneer social novelist" with an abiding interest in the
concrete experience of the rural poor: "Here are hard facts and hard lives,"
Mitzi Myers has written, "vigorous, racy dialogue and homely domestic
detail." 30 While this approach does help situate the Cheap Repository with
respect to literary tradition, particularly the rise of a socially reformist
Sir John, the effective instrument of social order, fades from view as Tom
and his creator turn away from the authority of the landed gentry in an
isolated village, and towards the more modern, national, and centralized
network of middle-class philanthropy and reactionary enterprise that the
Cheap Repository would soon pioneer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
California Institute of Technology *[End Page 533]*
of submission" (38).
30. Mary Alden Hopkins, _Hannah More and Her Circle_ (New York: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1947), 213; and Myers, "Hannah More's Tracts for the Times,"
267 ("pioneer"), 267-68 ("Here are").
31. See Sutherland, 42-44, and Krueger, 95-96. While Krueger identifies this
strand in the critical response to the Cheap Repository, her own work aims to
complicate our understanding of More by attending to her early plays and to
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
Like Scott's Waverley hero, the story is told from a vantage point authorized
by the new fashions of English modernity while still being connected by
blood, birth, or sympathy to the Highland ways. In pointing out the exotic
idiosyncrasies of the natives, the narrator becomes the master of their
peculiarities, infantilizing their intellect, speech, and customs, while
offering a non-threatening, placid picture of quaint country life. S. R.
Crockett similarly foregrounded the difference of colloquial dialect from
standard English with characteristically lengthy passages of careful phonetic
approximations of Scots speech. For the English, Canadian, and American
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
self-discipline advocated by More's brand of Evangelical
Protestantism were then turned outward in order to discipline the
rest of the world.
More was certainly far from propounding an original view: the care
of the poor had been imagined as a civilizing mission for some time.
Daniel Defoe, for example, in his copious (if repetitive) writings
on poverty, described the poor as a teeming horde, a "[c]rowd of
clamouring, unemploy'd, unprovided for, poor People," who clogged
ELH 67.2 (2000) 617-653
Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot
Richard Menke *
---------------
Daniel, who allows her to give them voice. 72 And Gwendolen Harleth
is no brainless frog but a complex fictional organism whose mental
movements are supposed to be "never calculable" (Eliot too uses
Lewes's mathematical term to describe the complexity of psychology
and behavior)--and, one might say, "rarely a single croak or a
single hop." The novel's unusually complex psycho-narration, free
indirect discourse, and treatment of psychology, which Leavis and
others have compared to Henry James, render the subjective aspect of
consciousness in an apparently objective form, as Lewes imagined a
_ELH_ 69.3 (2002) 805-833
The Telegraph in Black and White
Paul Gilmore
---------------
electricity was understood as both a physical and spiritual force,
the telegraph was read both as separating thought from the body and
thus making the body archaic, and as rematerializing thought in the
form of electricity, thereby raising the possibility of a new kind
of body. Recovering how race appeared in descriptions of the
telegraph in literary texts, mass culture, and middle-brow
scientific discussions, I describe how the telegraph's technological
reconfiguration of the mind/body dualism gave rise to a number of
competing but interrelated, racially-inflected readings.
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 989-1019
Diy Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Barrett Kalter
---------------
deplored the deadening effects of consumer culture--the Gothic's
vitality bled dry by a crudely vampiric industrialism--then Parrat's
piece addressed the problem of commodities that were too
exhilarating, that incited people to believe they could survive
outside their proper environment, like "fantastic" fish "perching
upon trees." No longer constrained by "[p]rice," the tradesman's
wife set out to buy the trappings she considered appropriate to her
newly dignified station. By emphasizing the gaudiness of her
"[c]hoice," however, Parrat aimed to show that her ambition was as
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
the country, and therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his
chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark
night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short time .
. . the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch,
and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank, quadrupling its
value."21
As a carrier of the booms and busts of the nation's market economy,
the Mississippi was described by Andrew Jackson as a domestic
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 875-901
Poe in Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery
Peter Coviello
---------------
as well: for so thoroughly do the processes of death inhabit those
of healthy life that any one of Poe's clear-eyed narrators may well
discover, in his frenzy of self-scrutiny, that he is himself
actively dying, or, to put this another way, insufficiently alive.
Equipped with such high-powered stylistic tools of self-perception,
Poe's narrators seem always to find themselves riveted by the
faintest *[End Page 884]* echoes of a death that ticks away inside
themselves. We tend to call this nervous condition, for want of any
better word, morbidity. 16
_American Literary History_ 14.2 (2002) 348-357
Perpetual Emotion Machine
Michelle Burnham
---------------
and cultural province of women.
Jonathan Dunwell, the narrator of "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," is
a confident and self-satisfied young man who finally confronts the
disbelieving and disoriented Rugg with the new technology,
vocabulary, and geography of what has become the US. Dunwell, who
variously meets Rugg outside of Boston, in Virginia, and on the way
to New York, appears every bit as mobile as the lost man, except
that Dunwell the businessman, rather than moving in search of his
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 501-523
Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties
Simon Joyce
---------------
presumably Lord Henry Wotton's point, when he *[End Page 506]* tells his
prot�g� that "murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that
one cannot talk about after dinner." Behind the familiar rhetoric of
inversion which underpins the epigram, though, Lord Henry has another reason
for disbelieving Gray's hypothetical confession: "I would say," he replies,
BLOCKQUOTE
That last line can mislead us into thinking that Wilde is offering up his
usual blend of rhetorical insouciance and imagining a world in which only
ELH 68.4 (2001) 991-1021
Individualism and the Place of Understanding in Emerson's Essays
Kerry Larson
---------------
particular," the only use of history is "to discover the constant
and universal principles of human nature," principles that may be
adduced through simple "observation." 7 Many passages in "History"
appear to record discoveries of this kind, as when, upon reading
Greek poetry and sensing "time passing away as an ebbing sea,"
Emerson writes: "I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his
thought. The Greek, it seems, had the same fellow beings as I. The
sun and the moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they
meet mine" (249).
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 405-431
Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi
Stephanie Le Menager
---------------
of St. Petersburg by having himself fictitiously run off by
"ablitionists." This ruse does provoke terror in the village when
Jake Flacker, detective, identifies the faux abolitionists (Tom and
Huck) as "members of Burrell's gang," an allusion to the legendary
slavestealing ring of John Murrell.16 As Tom and Huck are repeatedly
and mistakenly cast as "niggers," abolitionists, and slave thieves,
Twain plays with the question of which misidentification proves most
true. Of course, this question has troubled many readers of the
_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn._
_ELH_ 71.3 (2004) 691-718
Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry
Erik Simpson
---------------
produced by these institutions as repositories of extreme patriotism and
masculinity.6 At once an extension of the classical curriculum and an
expression of its "constant diet of stories of war, empire, bravery, and
sacrifice," Colley writes, "[s]chool and university prize poems and essays
from this period creak under the weight of such themes, as well as exuding a
lush appreciation of masculine heroism."7
I have found such "lush appreciation of masculine heroism" abundantly evident
in Oxford prize poems of the time. Cambridge prize poems, because of the
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
Dickens writes of how the "thick yellow liquor" in Krook's chambers
is that which "defiles," a peculiar but wholly appropriate word.
Cultural rituals and ceremonies and laws of prohibition are designed
to prevent one from coming into contact with defiling elements, but
such rituals remain inaccessible to Guppy and Weevle as they, in a
grotesque choreography of demented communion, feel, smell, and taste
Krook's remains, remains which are, like Nemo's, out of place. The
whole thrust of this scene reminds us not only of the initial
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 141-165
William Blake's Androgynous Ego-Ideal
Tom Hayes _Baruch College and The Graduate Center_ _City University of New York _
---------------
as "the Man from Outer Space in any science fiction movie."22 Robin Hamlyn
says it "suggests the tree of knowledge."23 Catherine said that when Blake
was young his "locks stood up like a curling flame, and looked at a distance
like radiations, which with his fiery Eye and expansive forehead . . . made
his appearance truly prepossessing."24 The lines streaming from Blake's
forehead, in the profile portrait that Catherine made a few years after
Blake's death, could be seen as such a fiery eye (figure 5).
This uncanny configuration is what Lacan calls a piece of the real. It
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
contempt for an "Art for All." "Let man be democratic; the artist
must separate and remain an aristocrat"; and again, "Oh, poets, you
have always been proud; now be more than proud, be scornful!" 66
Baudelaire's scornful [End Page 555] fable "Le Chien et le Flacon"
from Le spleen de Paris uses the analogy of a dog recoiling from
fine perfume: "Ah! miserable chien, si je vous avais offert un
paquet d'excrements, vous l'auriez flaire avec delices et peut-etre
devore. Ainsi . . . vous ressemblez au public." 67 Pierre Bourdieu
sums up the sociology of "the economic world reversed" represented
_ELH_ 72.2 (2004) 345-375
Preposterous Chatterton
K. K. Ruthven
---------------
eleventh-century piece by Edward the Confessor to Samuel Daniel's
_Civil Wars_ (1595-1609).87 Thomas Warton confirmed Cooper's
judgement that English poetry after Chaucer had "relaps[ed] into
barbarism."88 A prominent barbarian, in Joseph Ritson's opinion, was
that "voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk," Lydgate, who,
Chatterton imagined, avoided a flyting or "boutynge matche" with
Rowley when the pair of them exchanged mutually admiring verses
instead (_CW_ , 1:60, 62-63).89 Rowley's _Ælla_ (_CW_ ,
1:174-228) was designed to constitute proof "that the Monks . . .
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 60-82
Gender, Nation, and the Tourist Gaze in the European "Year of Revolutions": Kirkland's _Holidays Abroad_
Brigitte Bailey
---------------
press's power to "elevate the... character of the people," to be a force for
"civilization," to "disseminat[e] information" and "diffus[e]... taste,"
revolutionary Paris makes Kirkland aware of public discourse as contested,
not secured to the interests of any one class (including the benevolent
cultural elite) but entangling elite, governmental, and popular expressions.
Further, in revolutionary Paris, Kirkland finds the distinctions between text
and icon blurred in disturbing ways that result in words made spectacular.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson explains that each of the century's revolutions,
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
her now, but in a somewhat indirect way, first looking at Krook's
spontaneous combustion, or more precisely at what remains of Krook
after his combustion, and also at his cat once more, considering the
ways in which their presence is entangled with that of Lady
Dedlock's and how such an entangling can help shed light on her
problematic status in the novel. Mindful of Dickens's reference to
"Tom's slime," I also want to consider the presence of slime, for
although _Bleak House_ is in some respects a novel congested with
slime, the scene involving Krook's spontaneous combustion is still
ELH 66.3 (1999) 739-758
The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel
Stefan Andriopoulos*
---------------
purchase or produce, naturally regulates itself" (WN, 1:456).
24. Given Smith's unwillingness to address moral questions, which he probably
considers as solved by his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Vivienne Brown is
right in terming The Wealth of Nations an "amoral discourse" (Adam Smith's
Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce, and Conscience [New York: Routledge, 1994],
26).
25. Without linking the "invisible hand" to the gothic novel, a limited
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
experience." 64 To compensate, literary discipline was often imagined
to release readers from ordinary habits of thought, which scholars
virtually equated with the narrower category of prejudice. It seems
fair to say that literary discipline, because it enhances readers'
skill at recombining elements of experience, promotes
"open-mindedness"or "keeps the mind flexible," or even that it amounts
to "self-discipline," with persons practiced at curtailing automatic
responses to unfamiliar phenomena. 65 The idea that the disciplined
subject, no longer slave to dogma, has been "delivered from all
ELH 66.3 (1999) 739-758
The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel
Stefan Andriopoulos*
---------------
necessarily promotes social interest. 46
An astonishing instance of this reticence in citing the "invisible hand" is
to be found in Henry Thomas Buckle's influential History of Civilization in
England (1859). After acclaiming The Wealth of Nations as "probably the most
important book which has ever been written," Buckle goes on to state, "one of
the peculiar features of [the] . . . book" was "to show, that men, in
promoting their own interest, will unintentionally promote the interest of
others," a principle he sets out to present at length: BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 847-874
The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason
David Collings
---------------
his name although he is being sought by bounty hunters; in another, he
refuses to sign a statement exonerating Falkland although he knows he will be
subject to indefinite future persecution as a result. Even the stunning
paranoia of the third volume, in which Caleb believes that an entire society
is bent on persecuting him, echoes the passage in which Godwin denounces the
machinations of the tyrant whose eye "is never closed"; here again "no man
can go out or come into the country, but he is watched," nor publish without
attracting the attention of spies, nor frequent "places of public resort"
without becoming "objects of attention"; it is as if Caleb stands in for the
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
the literal. These plural entities, moreover, seem to transform. Associated
with the elements, the atmosphere, sun, the outdoors, animals, they appear
initially as the provoking aspects of an external world that stimulates and
arouses the poet, "straining," "behaving licentious toward," "depriving,"
"unbuttoning," and "deluding" him. But these stimuli (whatever they might be)
that seem to be outside of and different from the speaker are also "hardly
different from" him, and he is as much an agent of electric contact with them
("my flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike") as they with him.
These "prurient provokers"--who "immodestly slid[e] the fellow-senses away /
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 171-195
The Clerks' Tale: Liberalism, Accountability, and Mimesis in _David Copperfield_
Matthew Titolo
---------------
case, temperament, character, and privacy), in _David Copperfield_ we can
still glimpse authentic community within the cold heart of commerce. Like
Wemmick's domestic castle, each household enterprise--and each firm--has its
informal custom that can neither be reduced to instrumental logic, nor
dismissed by Dickens as a mere flight of self-deluding fancy.
All of this suggests that Dickens sensed the tension between independence and
social discipline that afflicts his own moral vision (and ours). His solution
to this, so unsatisfying to us today because of its sentimentality, is to
_ELH_ 69.2 (2002) 473-500
Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_
Robert E. Lougy
---------------
intermediary figure, situated in a transitional state between the
two, still in the process of crossing the threshold between these
two worlds. As such, he is a liminal figure, what Howes refers to as
a "corpse god," offensive and feared not so much for hygienic
reasons as because he is still transitional, confusing or smudging
those categories of life and death. 19 Such a figure, as Hertz
observes, occupies a "confused period," for it exists among the
living in a "somewhat illegitimate and clandestine" fashion: "the
stay of the soul among the living is somewhat illegitimate and
ELH 66.2 (1999) 373-404
Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
Marshall Brown
---------------
the prologue to his poems: "Amidst the inclination that I have for
Poetry, I have always regarded its lyric part as little worthy of a
serious man, especially when it contains no greater object than
love. I know very well that youth prefers love in its compositions,
and I do not reprove it. It is natural for a young poet to seek the
object of his compositions from among those that most sweetly occupy
his heart . . . Thus it is that we see those who are born to be
great poets making their trials in tender and amorous poetry, and I
am persuaded that we would not have the great poems whose beauty has
ELH 67.2 (2000) 565-587
Facing The Ugly: The Case Of Frankenstein
Denise Gigante *
---------------
object, clogging it, and hence closing the subject off from its own
imaginative capacity.
While the subject is seeking the phantasmal Ding-an-Sich, in other
words, the ugly stands in the way, like Blake's "opake blackening
fiend," to turn the subject back on its own opacity. 39 Unlike the
ugly, the beautiful object can be imaginatively comprehended. And
even the sublime object, though it inspires a representation of
limitlessness, can still be comprehended as an object: it causes "a
_ELH_ 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082
"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in _Leaves of Grass_
Vincent J. Bertolini
---------------
between an individual's thoughts, feelings, and desires on the one hand, and
the discursive conditions of embodied life on the other--color the variety,
amount, and quality of bodily experience? The subject who displays himself in
these lines is one who wants to cross these categories of body and soul as a
way of transforming and reintegrating pain as a living part of identity while
enlarging the sphere of pleasure. Whitman uses the image of the "tongue" as
the medium of this kind of translation--rather than any notion of idealized
concepts that are transferred (_translatus_ being the past participle of
_transferre_, to carry between) and indifferently hosted by their new verbal
ELH 67.2 (2000) 539-564
A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty
William Christie
---------------
invisible ministers" (B, 1:59). For Jeffrey, as we have seen, poets
like Coleridge and Wordsworth threatened the ideological unanimity
of his Whig version of what J�rgen Habermas would later call the
"public sphere"; for Coleridge and Wordsworth, Francis Jeffrey was
the prime minister of an "invisible" Cabinet misgoverning the
reading public "by factitious influence." Among the many strategies
that comprise Coleridge's extended defense of Wordsworth's
imaginative singularity against Jeffrey and the reviewers in the
Biographia is his invocation of the second Olympian of Pindar as an
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
sympathetic relations necessary for full human life. And the blend
of language suggests there is Romanticism afoot here, too: unlike
the effusions of Shelley's sensibilious predecessors, correspondence
here is "secret," relations "inconceivable," and tenderness
"mysterious." All of these are figures of Romantic subliming,
rendering the material immaterial. 9 And running through both modes
is a sustaining sense of mobility, the "motion" Shelley notes
connecting nature and the "heart." Fittingly enough, this is also
the point in Shelley's "On Love" at which Sterne enters the picture,
_ELH_ 70.2 (2003) 541-574
Incognito, Intervention, and Dismemberment in _Adam Bede_
Deanna K. Kreisel
---------------
merely a murderous interventionist and poacher on a traditionally
female preserve, he is also a deceiver--and above all a concealer.
Full of the "tender alluring words" of feminine sympathy, he yet
conceals an iron instrument: a strictly masculine violence and
murderous urge to dismember. In fact, one of the most successful
man-midwives of the eighteenth century invented a forceps whose
blades were covered with leather in order to disguise their metallic
nature, which he acknowledged was "terrible to women." 45
ELH 67.4 (2000) 951-971
John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793-95
Michael Scrivener
---------------
system of analogy is an odd one: beheaded gamecock (king) and
tortured slave (people). The purpose of the analogy is to illustrate
the argument concerning voluntary and involuntary action, but the
other argument--that voluntary action is possible only by
extirpating the habitual fear and awe of "kings and
lords"--generates a permutation of the analogies so that people, in
order to be other than mechanical automatons of habitual
determinants, must be tyrannicides. [End Page 958]
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 167-207
"What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed": George Cruikshank, Percy Shelley, and the Gendering of Revolution in 1819 Ashley J. Cross _Manhattan College _
---------------
lips are padlocked (with "no grumbling" written on the padlock). He
stands on the Magna Carta with pen and paper in his tied hands.
Shortly after the publication of Cruikshank's _Death or Liberty!_,
Parliament passed the Six Acts, which included the Libels Act or
gagging bill and the Publications Act, which attempted to make cheap
publications liable to stamp duties, both acts of particular affront
to writers and artists.
43. This is another example of the interconnected iconography of
_American Literary History_ 14.1 (2002) 1-31
The Value of Conspiracy Theory
Ed White
---------------
Hugh Williamson of North Carolina asked for a more indirect form of
signing off, prompting Morris and Alexander Hamilton to reemphasize
Franklin's point. Hamilton warned that "[a] few characters of
consequence, by opposing or even refusing to sign the Constitution,
might do infinite mischief by kindling the latent sparks which lurk
under an enthusiasm in favor of the Convention which may soon
subside" (656). *[End Page 11]* Ultimately only 3 of the 42
assembled delegates refused to give "the sanction of their names,"
virtually giving the Federalists the appearance of unanimity they
_ELH_ 69.1 (2002) 199-222
Charlotte Bront� on the Pleasure of Hating
Christopher Lane
---------------
"irreparable breach" separating Crimsworth from his uncles, after
his father's death he decides to ask his brother Edward for
financial assistance, trying subsequently to live without betraying
"the sense of insult and treachery [that] lived in me like a
kindling, though as yet smothered coal" (141). *[End Page 201]*
"In the peculiar centrifugal prose of [Crimsworth's] story," writes
Heather Glen in a valuable introduction to the novel, "self itself
appears to be held together by violence." 11 While this point is
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
elaborate analogies also postpone that moment. Even as Donne's lover
creates the heart-wrenching effect of an unnatural postponement or
deferral, he may still prefer talking about sex than having it.
In a sense the lover is less in love with lovemaking than with his
ingenious reversal of the Platonist's traditional metaphor of the body as
the soul's prison. The body is love's book, the seducer argues, and just
as medieval astrology holds that the stars' influence has to be transmuted
to humanity through the air, so Donne's seducer thinks of the body as
ELH 68.4 (2001) 965-989
How The Wanderer_ Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu
Helen Thompson
---------------
is finally marshalled to represent the threat of revolution. 36
Revolution compels a far more urgent conjunction of poverty and
anatomy than that intimated in Harleigh's formula, because, as
Burney reveals at her novel's close, the wanderer has fled France to
avoid the consummation of a forced marriage. Compelled to marry a
brutal French commissary to save her aristocratic guardian from the
guillotine, the wanderer has escaped capture by preserving her
anonymity. Just at the moment when the fraudulence of her marriage
is affirmed by her newly recovered English connections, the wanderer
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 197-221
_Ruth_'s Perverse Economies: Women, Hoarding, and Expenditure
Natalka Freeland
---------------
and the modest girl who isn't aware of the transaction may
(temporarily) disable courtship, but it enables plot: once the
heroine becomes self-conscious, her transfer to a husband and her
story come to a simultaneous end. Thus, after spending the novel
reviling the marriage market, Jemima is saved from spinsterhood by
an eleventh-hour husband _ex machina_ and immediately becomes an
almost insignificant, and conspicuously absent, footnote to _Ruth_'s
main narrative.
_ELH_ 70.1 (2003) 267-300
Can We Learn to Argue? _Huckleberry Finn_ and Literary Discipline
Howard Horwitz
---------------
critical faculty remains indebted to, but does not merely recycle,
prior forms and traditions. 57
The effect of literary discipline is to "liberalize us," as Lowell put
it in his president's address to the MLA. By sensitizing readers to
the "diversity" of experience and men's minds,it effects an
"enlargement of ourselves," with literary study a kind of "foreign
travel" that broadens sympathy. 58 "The ability to assume others'
point of view is the most valuable equipment that an education can
ELH 68.4 (2001) 1023-1047
"A Sort Of Adopted Daughter": Family Relations In _The Lamplighter_
Cindy Weinstein
---------------
Russ Castronovo argues that "adoption is the patriarchal act par
excellence" ("Incidents in the Life of a White Woman: Economies of Race
and Gender in the Antebellum Nation," American Literary History 10
[1998]: 247). By contrast, adoption in the world of The Lamplighter
works to undermine patriarchy by disarticulating authority from its
biological bonds.
10. Quoted in Morton Horowitz, The Transformation of American Law,
1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), 185.
_ELH_ 71.1 (2004) 209-227
Hannah More and the Invention of Narrative Authority
Emily Rena-Dozier _University of Chicago _
---------------
More was certainly far from propounding an original view: the care
of the poor had been imagined as a civilizing mission for some time.
Daniel Defoe, for example, in his copious (if repetitive) writings
on poverty, described the poor as a teeming horde, a "[c]rowd of
clamouring, unemploy'd, unprovided for, poor People," who clogged
the streets, burdened the nation, and were deeply in need of
"[r]egulation."4 Other contemporary writers were more explicit.
Isaac Watts, an early eighteenth-century philanthropist, described
the need for charity schools in order to save the poor from a
_ELH_ 70.3 (2003) 813-845
Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility's Pleasures of Proximity
Christopher Nagle
---------------
_Sentimental Excursions to Windsor and Other Places_ and a
self-confessed imitator of Sterne who was brazen (or foolish) enough
to attempt to adapt _Tristram Shandy_ for the stage, Sterne's
writing has a mixed effect "like a _conjunction of love and wine_,"
sweetening the already preexisting "portion of acidity, Nature,
Misfortune, and Disappointment have mixed in my composition." A
bastard hybrid is born from this instruction in Sternean sentiment:
the "pleasing blossoms" of "good fruit" that have been "produced by
ingrafting upon a _crab_." Less monstrously, the anonymous piece,
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
In an earlier scene, at his first meeting with De Monfort since
arriving at the Frebergs', Rezenvelt goads De Monfort with the
following sarcastic exchange: BLOCKQUOTE
Fully aware that De Monfort does not love him, Rezenvelt's baiting
has a different effect than it would if the play were a comedy,
wherein the disjunction between what Rezenvelt says and what he
means would effect the inevitable turn to De Monfort, and the
accentuation of the latter's relative lack of wit. Here, however,
_ELH_ 70.4 (2003) 1043-1065
Governing Economic Man: Joanna Baillie's Theatre of Utility
Julie Murray
---------------
sheep in his flock." BLOCKQUOTE
Bearing in mind liberalism's coordination of individualizing and
totalizing forms of power, I suggest, allows us to draw into focus
Baillie's particular achievement: outstripping Smith, she reconciles
his dusty stoic philosophy to the new demands of economic man. If
the movement in _Wealth_ is notoriously individualizing, with the
priority of economic self-interest and the subsequent extension of
its benefits to a social totality, then the entrenchment of the
ELH 67.3 (2000) 773-799
Irving's Posterity
Michael Warner *
---------------
effects of the patriarchal estate, making them flow from sentiment
("all that heart could wish") in the absence of both a normatively
patriarchal authority and its reproductive sexuality. Irving
represents himself not as feared and revered, but as loved and
coddled. The servants maintain the estate without command. The
property and its folk are his extension, though he is no sire. And
the style mists the scene with an aura of antiquity, supplying
reproductive continuity without hint of sexual necessity.
ELH 66.2 (1999) 439-460
Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue
W. David Shaw
---------------
("Andrea del Sarto," 29, 39) [End Page 449]
Each successive item in these triads becomes more alien, as Andrea's love
and youth are placed at a greater and more desolating distance from him.
The puns play the same role in "Andrea del Sarto" that the muted couplets
play in "My Last Duchess": they alert us to the subterranean motives, to
the artifice behind the offhand tone, and to the bad faith of a seductive
ELH 66.4 (1999) 939-963
"The Nation Begins to Form": Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Brien's and the O'Flahertys_
Julia M. Wright
---------------
Cromwellian, nor a Williamite in the party, I'll engage" (O, 443).
Fitzwalter, the fictional leader of the United Irishmen in the novel (and an
allusion to an historical leader, Lord Edward Fitzgerald), identifies himself
as a hybrid of Anglo-Norman and Italian blood that "can never assimilate with
[O'Brien's] Milesian colouring" (O, 318). Instead of the familiar,
quintessentially Irish peasant of post-Emancipation writing, Morgan offers a
very different representation of the native rural population: "forms, which
nature seemed to have intended for other associates and other regions, were
occasionally visible among the rustic population. . . . O'Brien saw such
ELH 66.4 (1999) 1053-1073
The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland
Richard Cook
---------------
Drumtochty" (B, 80) and "Our women do not kiss one another like the city
ladies" (B, 88).
Some strong-handed ideological work is being done in each case. These
specific Highland practices of emoting, while being common and properly
exchanged in these moments, are collapsed almost completely into the private
space of the individual. Emotions are not freely shared, but are strictly
preserved and personally contained. Barrie's romantic couple hardly hold a
conversation, let alone exchange passionate words or mingling glances. Affect
ELH 66.3 (1999) 759-799
The Partners' Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend
John P. Farrell
---------------
feeling. The term "structures of feeling" is meant to be slightly
oxymoronic but it is also, in retrospect at least, more than
slightly Bakhtinian: BLOCKQUOTE
While academic criticism has proclaimed a nullifying ideological
split in Dickens, Williams has seen how Dickens's "incompatible
ideological positions" point to strengths much richer and more
resilient than allegiance to a perfectly uniform political agenda.
27 Williams makes a key exploration into the obvious difference that
ELH 66.4 (1999) 885-909
Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess
Paul Youngquist
---------------
It memorializes desire in behaviors that demonstrate desire's loss,
so forcefully in fact that habit itself can come to substitute for
"Fruition": "May not the Desirelet, a, so correspond to the Desire,
A, that the latter being excited may revert [End Page 890] wholly or
in great part to its exciting cause, a, instead of sallying out of
itself toward an external Object, B?" 31 In a reversal worthy of
Derrida, Coleridge wonders whether desire might realize fruition in
the habit that produces it. Cause and effect would merge in a
logical loop wherein the loss of desire is a condition of its
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 1001-1017
Meaning and Misinterpretation in _Cranford_
Alyson J. Kiesel
---------------
out the written leaves of his now useless bankbook; of course all
the corresponding pages at the other end came out as well; and this
little unnecessary waste of paper (his private economy) chafed him
more than all the loss of his money. . . . I am not above owning
that I have this human weakness myself. String is my foible. . . .
How people can bring themselves to use Indian-rubber rings, which
are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do, I
cannot imagine. (40-41)5
_ELH_ 71.4 (2004) 949-967
The Crying of Lost Things
Jonathan Lamb
---------------
to the said Roads."17 The more the object inclines to fashion,
however, the more lavish the description: "Lost Monday 27th in White
Conduit Field, a small Spaniel Dog, all white on the Right side, two
Liver coloured Spots on the Left side, white streak down the Face,
with a Bell about his Neck, ty'd with a Yellow String."18
Undoubtedly the most particular accounts are given not of things,
but of humans who have become things—prisoners, slaves or,
indentured servants. Perhaps because they are more valuable, or
perhaps because they are situated more critically between the status