Comparative Literature Commons^™

American Branch Report, Linda K. Robertson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The annual American dinner of the Fellowship was held on 28 December 1994 at The Harbor House restaurant in San Diego, California, site of the Modem Language Association convention. Arrangements for the dinner were made by Harriet Williams, and Linda Robertson hosted the dinner and served as recorder for the evening. Those who attended included William Baker, Margaret Carter, Catherine Civello, Connie Fulmer, Shoshana Knapp, Carol Martin, Solveig Robinson, and Jeanette Shumaker.

Horses And Hounds: The Importance Of Animals In The Mills On The Floss, Linda K. Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is not surprising that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, set in rural Warwickshire in the early 1800s, should contain references to domestic animals and livestock. What is remarkable is the variety, including dogs, kittens, sheep, cattle, horses, rabbits, ferrets, rats, snakes, toads, spiders, wasps, snails, bears, wolves, boars, a beaver, a chimpanzee, a lion, and an assortment of fish and fowl. From the barking cur in the opening chapter to Bob Jakin's dog Mumps, who comforts Maggie Tulliver after her disastrous trip down the river with Stephen Guest, Eliot uses animals to develop the setting and to …

Obituary Dorothy Edmands 1911-1995

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dorothy Edmands had been a member of the George Eliot Fellowship for well over 30 years and during that time had been a most supportive member... She served on the Fellowship Council for very many of those years and, although a quiet and very modest lady, had been extremely generous. Whenever money was needed for whatever project, Dorothy was there with her ever open purse.

Dorothy trained to be a teacher at Furzedown College in London and began her teaching career at Stratford upon Avon. A few years later she moved to George Street School in Bedworth, her home town, …

University Of London, Centre For English Studies: Conference Report, Caroline Levine, Mark Turner

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot claimed that Romla was written with her 'best blood', and her contemporaries certainly knew and appreciated the novel. Until late in the century Romla was even being regularly employed as a guidebook to Florence. But despite contemporary uses and accolades, the text has been largely overlooked by scholars, who have typically relegated the novel to footnotes and fleeting allusions. In response to this neglect, admirers of Romla have begurr to ask why it has attracted so little scholarly attention, given its thematic and theoretical abundance, its cultural and critical complexity.

In the spirit of what we perceive as …

Loyola College, Baltimore, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association: Conference Report, Rosealind De Sailly

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The 14th conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association was held at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland at the end of March. The conference theme, 'Conflict and Resolution’, allowed examination of the period from the French Revolution to the end of the Victorian era in terms of artistic, literary, philosophical, political, economic, religious, scientific and social change. This rich theme attracted papers on many of the issues that now interest George Eliot scholars and other Victorianists.

Christine Morris (University of South Carolina at Chapel Hill) examined Victorian keepsake annuals in her paper, 'Marketing Femininity in the 1830s: The Case of Heath's …

Placing The Places In Wordsworth's 1802 Sonnets, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Wordsworth's political sonnets of summer and fall 1802 recount the sights and sounds the poet encountered during the brief respite provided by the Peace of Amiens, which enabled him to return to France and to the woman and child who were the physical reminders of the time he had spent there ten years earlier in the spirited days following the French Revolution. Published together in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, they juxtapose the dispirited and pathetic state of France in 1802 with the ebullience Wordsworth recalled from that earlier time. More important, the sequence documents his "return" to England, …

Review Essay: Ardolino, Frank. Apocalypse And Armada In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Robin B. Barnes

Quidditas

Ardolino, Frank. Apocalypse and Armada in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies, 29. Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, Kirksville, Mo., 1995. xvi + 187 pp. $35.00.

1996 Allen D. Breck Award Winner: Narration And Quattrocento Annunciation Paintings, Joseph D. Parry

Quidditas

Quattrocento Annunciation paintings are particularly useful in offering us a better understanding of the nature of narration in Renaissance art. When we describe the narration in Renaissance art. When we describe the narrative construction of the Annunciation in the work of quattrocento painters, a Fra Angelico, a Fra FIlippo Lippi, or a Sandro Botticelli, we know, of course that the Annunciation as a narrative ultimately resides in the language of St. Luke's Gospel; though in being told and retold, it easily takes on a life of its own in oral transmissions, in paraphrasings in sermons, in elaborations in scriptural commentaries, …

Review Essay: Tanner, John S. Anxiety In Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading Of Paradise Lost, Robert L. Kindrick

Quidditas

Tanner, John S. Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Paradise Lost. Oxford University Press, New York, 1992. 224 pp., illustrated. $45.00.

Review Essay: Staley, Lynn. Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions, Cindy Ho

Quidditas

Staley, Lynn. Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1994. xiii + 224 pp. $35/$16.95.

On The Virtues Of Not Understanding, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

Because every attempt distorts the original perfect translation is impossible. Is it the cask of the translator to make this impossibility seem to disappear, to produce a text that flows effortlessly in the new language, presenting no problems of understanding, or should the translator somehow find a way to bring the reader to share a sense of the foreignness of what he is reading, and hence this much of the reality of the unknown text, its language, and its world? Several of the authors in this volume raise this issue one way or another, especially Indira Karamcheci, who argues for …

"Why Don't He Like My Hair?": Constructing African-American Standards Of Beauty In Toni Morrison's "Song Of Solomon" And Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

African-Americans, with their traditionally African features, have always had an uneasy coexistence with the European (white) ideal of beauty. According to Angela M. Neal and Midge L. Wilson, "Compared to Black males, Black females have been more profoundly affected by the prejudicial fallout surrounding issues of skin color, facial features, and hair. Such impact can be attributed in large part to the importance of physical attractiveness for all women" (328). For black women, the most easily controlled feature is hair. While contemporary black women sometimes opt for cosmetic surgery or colored contact lenses, hair alteration (i.e., hair-straightening "permanents," hair weaves, …

Adso And Omen Iii: The Antichrist In The Tenth And Twentieth Centuries, Boyd H. Hill Jr.

Quidditas

The Seventies are said to have shattered when Johnny Rotten screamed "I am the antichrist!" (Pond 53)

The Cavendishes, The Evelyns, And Teasing In Verse And Prose, James Fitzmaurice

Quidditas

It is often noted by those who study seventeenth-century women writers that Mary Evelyn, wife to the famous diarist, pronounced Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, "rambling as her books, aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity." Such evidence is sometimes used to show that Margaret Cavendish deserved to be called "Mad Madge of Newcastle," an epithet that frequently made its way into biographical references to her in after ages. Nevertheless, it as easily might be the case Mary Evelyn was merely a little miffed with the attentions her husband, John, paid the not unattractive …

Review Essay: Crockett, Bryan. The Play Of Paradox: Stage And Sermon In Renaissance England, Frederick Kiefer

Quidditas

Crockett, Bryan. The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1995. xi + 213 pp. $32.95.

Review Essay: Dunn, Kevin. Pretexts Of Authority: The Rhetoric Of Authorship, Nancy A. Guttierez

Quidditas

Dunn, Kevin. Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1994. xvi + 198 pp. $35.00.

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Review Essay: De' Medici, Lorenzo. The Autobiography Of Lorenzo De' Medici The Magnificent: A Commentary On My Sonnets, Joseph Rosenblum

Quidditas

de' Medici, Lorenzo. The Autobiography of Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent: A Commentary on My Sonnets. Trans. James Wyatt Cook. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 129. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Binghamton, N.Y., 1995. 289 pp. $28.

Review Essay: Baswell, Christopher. Virgil In Medieval England: Figuring The Aeneid From The Twelfth Century To Chaucer, Anita Obermeier

Quidditas

Baswell, Christopher. Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995. xviii + 438 pp. 6 black-and-white facsimile plates. $64.95.

Review Essay: Earl, James W. Thinking About Beowulf, Joyce Tally Lionarons

Quidditas

Earl, James W. Thinking about Beowulf. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1994. xiv + 204 pp. $42.50.

Review Essay: Acheson, Katherine, O., Ed. The Diary Of Anne Clifford, 1616-1619: A Critical Edition, Retha M. Warnicke

Quidditas

Acheson, Katherine O., ed. The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616-1619: A Critical Edition. Garland, New York, 1995. 225 pp. $67.00.

The Trinity Gild Of Coventry And The Royal Affinity, 1392-1413, Douglas Biggs

Quidditas

Perhaps the principal difficulty that all late-medieval monarchs faced centered on the process by which royal wishes and needs were transformed into governmental reality in local communities throughout the kingdom. This process, long ignored by historians, has in the past forty years received increasing attention. Most of this attention, following K. B. McFarlane's "Bastard Feudal" construct, has focused on personal relationships between the king or a magnate and local gentry.

Review Essay: Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency Of Eros: Women's Love Lyric In Europe, 1540-1620, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990. xi + 256 pp., illustrated. $29.95/$11.95.

The Rest After The Desert: Ending Confessions, George S. Tate

Quidditas

Augustine, it seems, ends the Confessions twice: the first time neatly at the conclusion of Book 9; the second, problematically, at the end of Book 13. The first ending is an autobiographical ending, but what of the second? The structural and generic unity of the Confessions is a vexed issue, even though its coherence of theme is increasingly recognized. If the work is unified, is it unified as autobiography? If (as I argue) Augustine had come to find the conversion paradigm of his first ending to be unsatisfactory and had exploded it by adopting a new and dangerous strategy in …

Review Essay: Guerin, Victoria M. The Fall Of Kings And Princes: Structure And Destruction In Arthurian Tragedy, Gina L. Greco

Quidditas

Guerin, Victoria M. The Fall of Kings and Princes: Structure and Destruction in Arthurian Tragedy. Figuræ: Reading Medieval Culture. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1995. xi + 336 pp. $39.50.

Review Essay: Groos, Arthur. Romancing The Grail: Genre, Science, And Quest In Wolfram's Parzival, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Groos, Arthur. Romancing the Grail: Genre, Science, and Quest in Wolfram's Parzival. Cornell University Press, Ithica, N.Y. 1995. xvi + 270 pp. $37.50.

"Properly Presented": The Autobiography Of Parley P. Pratt, Taunalyn Ford Rutherford

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination of the autobiography of Parley P. Pratt in light of current American autobiography research, intended to assert its worthiness for greater consideration by scholars of American culture. The findings suggest that the Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt is comparable to other works now included in the canon of American autobiography such as Jonathan Edward's "Personal Narrative," Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Critical theories on the above autobiographies are applied to the Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt in order to show its applicability to the current dialogue of American autobiography. Finally, the …

Wreath-Laying In Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

What can I say about the great writer whom we are gathered here to commemorate that is new, witty or informative or even interesting? After all, you will appreciate that I am not an academic so I can't offer you a Marxist viewpoint, certainly not a feminist one and not even a deconstructionist one. I'm not a biographer either so can't tell you about my latest book, full of such delicious new theories and completely free of any stuffy old evidence to support them. I'm not involved with the media so I can't tell you about camera angles on Dorothea. …

A New World And An Old Moon: Empires Of Fact And Fancy, David S. Lovejoy

Providence: Studies in Western Civilization

No abstract provided.

Empathy And Morality In Montaigne's "Of Crueltie" And The Tempest, John Hennedy

Providence: Studies in Western Civilization

No abstract provided.