English - recent issues

Editorial

Davidson, I. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:51 PDT

A Preview of The Ground Aslant: Radical Landscape Poetry (Forthcoming, Shearsman Books, 2010)

Tarlo, H. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:51 PDT

A Preview of The Ground Aslant: Radical Landscape Poetry (forthcoming, Shearsman Books, 2010)

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:52 PDT

'Times be Badish Vor the Poor': William Barnes and his Dialect of Disturbance in the Dorset 'Eclogues'

Edney, S. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:52 PDT

This paper places the early poetry of William Barnes against the background of agricultural upheaval during the 1830s and 1840s, particularly as it affected Dorset. As a dialect poet, Barnes shares qualities with earlier writers such as Robert Burns, in that he can write on behalf of his locality with direct simplicity, using expressions and poetic rhythms already familiar to an audience used to oral transmission of local news, ballads, and stories. He also shares with John Clare an attachment to place, to his childhood community and to what he considers to be a vanishing culture of self-help rather than self-interest. However, as a Victorian he exhibits two characteristics that inform his poetry, prose, and attitude to life: one is an autodidactic passion for knowledge and its dissemination; the other is a strong social conscience. Through a close examination of his ‘Eclogues’ – topical dialect ‘conversations’ – the paper seeks to explore the tensions inherent in his themes of labour and education, justice and misuse of power, love of the land and ignorance of its value. The poems are explored within their poetic and social context, uncovering a complex pattern of place and people and his attempt to link the Dorset language to landscape, while keeping a hold on his precarious position of schoolmaster in Dorset society. The paper argues that Barnes's poetry is not merely decorative or sentimental but displays deep compassion and demonstrates the need to examine Barnes's poetry with the same attention to cultural background and the poetic market place that Clare's poetry has received.

Aspects of Pastoral in Sylvia Plath's 'Child'

Tunstall, L. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:52 PDT

This article considers Sylvia Plath's late poem, ‘Child’, in terms of its relations with some pastoral motifs and conventions. In particular, Plath's use of floral imagery in her many presentations of children locates the work in a pastoral tradition which includes, for example, Marvell and Blake, but is closer in its depiction of landscape, and in register, to the early Americans Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. Plath's use of the unusual wildflower, the Indian pipe, references not only the American landscape, but also the work of Emily Dickinson. Plath's interest in the eye-like form of the Indian pipes suggests, also, an engagement with Emerson, but her dystopian anti-pastoral vision reverses Emersonian optimism. ‘Child’ is not simply, or not solely, an untroubled blessing for a child. Drawing on the heightened sense of both function and artifice associated with pastoral elegy, Plath allows her writing to register the fact that her poetry may be unable to do any good, or may even to do harm. The salient point is not that ‘Child’ was written so close to her death, but that it is a post-Ariel poem representing an impressive development from what is, anyway, a remarkable volume.

Community Poems: Ted Hughes and the Eclogue

Twiddy, I. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:52 PDT

Three collections Ted Hughes published between 1979 and 1983 demonstrate his intimate concern with different types of community. Hughes elegizes industrial communities in the Calder region in Remains of Elmet, and in the animal elegies of Moortown Diary, he analyses the complex relationship between the human and the natural, as well as tracing the disintegration of a farming community; River is pressurized by conservational anxiety, celebrating the processes of nature while voicing concern over human influence in those ecosystems. As they address the relationship of nature, culture, and loss, as well as the social role of the poet, these collections make use of varieties of Virgilian eclogue. The eclogue records a progression from nature to culture or civilization, in which culture may be consolation for the loss of a more natural state, while the reverse eclogue describes a return from civilization to nature. The types of eclogue which make up Moortown Diary and River, and the reverse eclogues in Remains of Elmet, show Hughes's Virgilian concern over integration – natural, cultural, and poetic – as they observe communities in flux and examine human consciousness estranged from the natural world.

Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics

Hammond, M. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:52 PDT

The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia

Van Hulle, D. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:52 PDT

A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900-1950

Kaufman, W. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:52 PDT

Erratum

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:03:52 PDT

Editorial

The English editorial team — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

The English Association Fellows' Poetry Prize

Moran, M. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Fellows' Poetry Prize 2008 Winning Poems: 1st Prize

Cash, P. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Fellows' Poetry Prize 2008: 2nd Prize

Sutherland, P. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Fellows' Poetry Prize 2008: 3rd Prize

France, R. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Fellows' Poetry Prize 2008

Robinson, P. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Late Style: Approaching Madness in Praeterita

Tambling, J. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

The article gives a reading of Ruskin's autobiography, Praeterita, situating it in relation to the title and interests of Fors Clavigera. It examines Ruskin's self-accusations and confessions of ‘folly’ within the context of his encroaching madness: an effort is made to relate this madness to that of Nietzsche, while the phrase, ‘late style’ in the title is intended to compare Ruskin's writing with what Adorno understands of music which can achieve no resolution, as with late Beethoven. The article compares the things going past of the title with Holman Hunt's ‘The Awakening Conscience’ and Ruskin's account of that, and suggests that the picture influences the autobiography, and both anticipate Proust. There is a close reading of several passages in Praeterita in view of the text moving in its late style towards madness.

Poems

Tarlo, H. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Violence and Representation in Elizabeth Bowen's Interwar Short Stories

Stewart, V. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Many of Elizabeth Bowen's short stories of the 1920s and 1930s display a concern not only with violence, but, more specifically, with the ways in which violence is represented in the media. The self-reflexive foregrounding of the process of representation in stories including ‘Recent Photograph’ (1926), ‘Dead Mabelle’ (1929), ‘The Disinherited’ (1934) and ‘The Cat Jumps’ (1934), suggests that the containment of violence, and, in particular, literature's role in this process, is a key concern for Bowen in this period.

Poems

Lopez, T. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

'Past Never Found' - Class, Dissent, and the Contexts of Tony Harrison's v.

Kennedy, D. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Critics of v. have tended to elide the poem with the historical and political circumstances surrounding the moment of its writing, first publication and subsequent controversial television version broadcast by Channel 4 on 4 November 1987. It is almost as if v. exists more as its reception than as a poem. Crucially, critical desire to read the elegiac aspects of v. as being deployed in the service of a document of crisis has meant that accounts of the poem have ignored to extent to which the poem amplifies pre-existent tendencies in elegy towards what might be termed national critique. Part of the argument of this article involves an exploration of this aspect of the poem. However, the article's primary focus is on the historical contexts of the poem but to a different end from the majority of Harrison's critics. The article argues that a greater understanding of these contexts does more than allow us to characterize v. as, say, ‘a picture of 1980s Thatcherist Britain’. Such understanding is linked to an exploration of what the author argues is the crucial question that arises out of reading v. now, some twenty years after its first appearance: exactly what is Harrison's poem mourning and commemorating? The article explores the extent to which the poem can be said to mourn not only the decline of the working class, but also the decline of class as a social and political conception and signifier and the possibility of dissent.

Freedom's Empire. Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940

Newman, J. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Conrad's Marlow

Jones, S. — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:36:47 PDT

Editorial

The English editorial team — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:31 PST

Wordsworth and Touch

O'Gorman, F. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:31 PST

William Wordsworth's poetry is strangely reluctant to record acts of touch between human beings, despite its commitment to sympathy. That reluctance is made more suggestive by the poet's self-consciousness about it. This essay considers the oddly visible absence of sympathy's gestures across Wordsworth's career, and proposes that, in fact, the absence points to a deeper and more consequential engagement with touch's relationship to language. Considering the variety of ways in which language moves towards, or longs for, tangibility, the essay analyses the poet's fascination with what it describes as a betweenness, a powerful and moving space in which words approach but do not actually become touchable. Related issues of the preciousness of words as words, and of the frailty of poetry envisaged as wholly solid are considered. But the central interest is Wordsworth's fleeting fantasy of language that can persuade, and achieve, by becoming, in a mysterious, hard-to-describe manner, almost touchable.

Poems

Graham, D. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:31 PST

For Empire, England's Boys, and the Pageant of War: Women's War Poetry in the Year of the Somme

Murdoch, B. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:31 PST

Three collections of war-poems by women writers (Margaret Sackville, Catherine Renshaw and Nadja Malacrida), published in the turning-point year 1916, raise questions about poetry by non-combatants who are also women. Sackville's pacifist writing has no overt patriotic elements, and although Renshaw retains some, the anti-war tone is becoming clearer; in spite of its title, Malacrida's now unknown collection focusses also upon the misery of the survivors. The ability to respond to the war is not gender- or experience-based, though some adopted voices are more appropriate to women. The collections share a sense of memorialization, in Sackville's case embracing all the dead, soldiers, non-combatants and refugees.

Poems

Goar, J. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:31 PST

Provincialism and the Modern Diaspora: T. S. Eliot and David Jones

Matthews, S. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:31 PST

This article considers how T. S. Eliot's promotion of the work of the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones after the Second World War further involved him in a process of considering the resonances of the local and familiar as operative within the displacements of modernity. This promotion therefore retrospectively prioritized an aspect of Eliot's poetics which had been present, but occluded, all along. Conversely, the article considers how similar resonances in Jones's own work were enhanced by his encounter with Eliot's translation of the Francophone Caribbean poet St-John Perse's Anabase, an encounter which enabled Jones to establish an idiom responsive to the divergent cultural affinities inherent in ‘our situation’.

Poems

Thomas, M. W. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:31 PST

Public Intellectuals and the Schoolteacher Audience: The First Ten Years of the Critical Quarterly

Atherton, C. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:31 PST

The Critical Quarterly, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, was originally intended to attract an audience beyond university departments of English. One particular aim of its editors was to bridge the gap between schools and universities, appealing to teachers of English at secondary level and offering its readers the chance to keep up to date with developments in their subject. As time went on, however, the journal became more specialized, and today its appeal is largely to what Stefan Collini has described as the ‘academic public sphere’. This essay explores the first ten years of the Critical Quarterly as a specific example of the relationship between public intellectuals and their wider audience, and concludes by highlighting the need for a continued engagement between schools and universities.

Middle English Literature

Boboc, A. D. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:32 PST

Knowing Dickens

Rainsford, D. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:01:32 PST