English - recent issues

Editorial

Hiscock, A., Wilcox, H. — 2008-01-01

Fors Clavigera: Outside Chances, Posthumous Letters

Tambling, J. — 2008-01-01

This reading of Ruskin's ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’ (1871–84) discusses what it might mean to think of these letters as ‘posthumous’—one description that Ruskin used of his work—and examines what in them resists that sense that they are free from the founding authority of the father, and so are controlled by chance (fors). Examining the letters closely, for the implications of the meaning of their title, and giving attention to their language, the essay sees the letters as divided between wanting to claim and use authority (as with the comments on Whistler), and as accepting a certain madness, or chance, within both life and art. The work of Derrida is used to comment on the power of this chance, and to give sense to the idea of the ‘gift’ as this appears in Ruskin's text.

Poems

Kerr, L. D. — 2008-01-01

'Between the Conception / And the Creation': T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men

Day, T. — 2008-01-01

This article considers the relation between thought and feeling in Eliot's The Hollow Men (1925), in light of some of his prose pronouncements, and in the context of other of his poetic writings, particularly The Waste Land. Thought, as it inheres in the formal, philosophical and anti-dramatic textures of the poem, serves to stifle feeling and emotion, and with them the creative impulse itself, resulting in a work that is overly methodical, studiedly strictured, thought out but ill thought through. Furthermore, the poem seems emotionally clogged, numb as opposed to impersonal, the artistic surrender lacking in the necessary daring. But though the poetic presence—never quite a persona—cannot feel, let alone live by, the idea, there are hints that his unreadiness for thought, and the weaknesses this evinces, have their place along the way of dispossession, the via negativa—which further problematizes the ‘problem of belief’ that A.D. Moody dismisses.

Unpacking the Old Valise: Reading Paul Muldoon through Madoc: A Mystery

Sykes, J. — 2008-01-01

Over the last twenty years, critical attention devoted to Paul Muldoon has proliferated dramatically, and critics remain divided on how best to read his poetry. How seriously should we take him? As Fran Brearton observed recently, technological changes often mean that: ‘What might once have entailed weeks of research now requires little more than an afternoon with Google’, and for her, the great virtue of this ‘is not the ease with which Muldoon is now "elucidated"; rather, we can now shortcut to a recognition that such elucidations and explications ... don't really help that much at all.’ Taking a contrary stance, by examining Muldoon's densely intertextual Madoc: A Mystery, this article argues we should recognise that turning to source materials may help considerably with appreciating Muldoon's work. A detailed analysis of Madoc draws attention to some neglected aspects of the collection, and is designed to encourage scholarly readings of other Muldoon texts.

Poems

Wilson, A. — 2008-01-01

'People Have Forgotten How to Hear the Music': The Teaching of Poetry and Prosody

Overton, B. — 2008-01-01

This essay aims to initiate a debate on the teaching of prosody in British higher education. It presents data and discursive comments from a survey conducted in 2007 that achieved a response rate of over 75 per cent from 112 institutions. These reveal a widely shared belief among higher education teachers that knowledge of prosody is important, and an equally widely shared perception that most students enter higher education without it. They also suggest, however, that most institutions do too little to help students acquire the metrical understanding and skills that they need, with the result that many remain functionally illiterate as readers of verse. Taking into account some of the factors that militate against the teaching and learning of prosody, the essay argues that understanding of versification is necessary for a proper understanding of poetry, and that it should therefore become a formal requirement of higher education curricula nationally.

Poems

Welch, R. — 2008-01-01

'Commemoration. What Does it Mean to Us, Here, Now?' On Not Audaining Auden

Smith, S. — 2008-01-01

The centenary in 2007 of W. H. Auden's birth raised questions about the nature of public commemoration in a memorial culture where, as Auden and his friend and co-author Christopher Isherwood demonstrated in their 1930s writings, remembering the dead was regularly bound up with the celebration of the martial values and narrow nationalisms which had led to the Great War. Auden's The Orators: An English Study and Isherwood's novel The Memorial both appeared in 1932, at a time of national and international crisis when the shadow of another war already loomed on the horizon. Both books constitute warnings against lurching once again into the kind of jingoism that sent young men to die in the trenches, and both are centrally concerned with exploring, depicting and deconstructing the ways in which a national culture co-opts its subjects to be willing carriers of its violence and exclusiveness, demonstrating how the commemoration of the war dead becomes a recruiting agent for future wars, and exposing the role of education in the process of national re-inscription. Deploying the ideas of Pierre Nora and Homi K. Bhabha about the relations between memory and amnesia in the formation of a national culture, this article examines in detail these and other texts by Auden and Isherwood to show how they sought to intervene actively in contemporary debates about national identity, re-armament and pacifism. It concludes by discussing whether a writer as iconoclastic and subversive as Auden should be commemorated at all, if this means appropriating him to the national culture he rejected, and considers his own thoughts on who should be remembered and celebrated: those true teachers who, as he wrote in his elegy for Freud, taught us ‘to remember / Like the old and be honest like children’, and so be ‘life-forgiven and more humble’. This is the revised text of the keynote plenary lecture at the Auden Centenary Conference, University of York, 24 February 2007.

A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras

King, P. M. — 2008-01-01

Shakespeare on Film: Such things as dreams are made of

Hindle, M. — 2008-01-01

The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House

2008-01-01

Editorial

Hiscock, A., Wilcox, H. — 2008-01-01

A Prophet Looking Backwards: H.G. Wells's Curriculum for the Future

James, S. J. — 2008-01-01

H. G. Wells was a literary writer very closely involved in education. From his early career as a teacher and his first writings onward, his work always attempts to instruct. This article considers Wells's involvement with the teaching of history. Novels such as Joan and Peter discuss the ideas which led to Wells's writing The Outline of History, which Wells hoped would found a World State and end war between nations.

Poems: from Warrant Error

Sheppard, R. — 2008-01-01

'I Need a Master': Sylvia Plath Reads D. H. Lawrence

Bayley, S. — 2008-01-01

Although scholarship exploring the intertextual relations of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes continues to grow, little attention has thus far been paid to D. H. Lawrence's impact on the development of Plath's poetry. This paper aims to remedy that situation by exploring the circumstances of Plath's readings of and fascination with D. H. Lawrence's poetry and prose, with particular attention to imagery, symbolism, thematic and lexical choice. I expound the relationship between Plath and Lawrence evidenced in Plath's annotations to Lawrence's texts held in her personal library, which reflect both writers' preoccupation with ‘the ghastly’, as Plath terms it. I argue that Plath's readings of Lawrence shape her 27 October 1961 poem, ‘Ariel’, in which the ‘end’ of one self signals the rebirth of another. Yet, Lawrence's literary influence is rendered problematic through Plath's cognizance of his stylistic inadequacy, thus complicating his status as her ideal literary ‘master’.

Poem

Halsey, A. — 2008-01-01

'Moral Pornography' and 'Total Imagination': The Pornographic in J. G. Ballard's Crash

Francis, S. — 2008-01-01

This article discusses pornographic elements in Crash, J. G. Ballard's controversial 1973 novel about ‘the perverse eroticism of the car-crash’, situating the novel in relation to the debate in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s about the availability of pornography. The text is seen as displaying many characteristics of pornographic representation, and its problematic depictions of sexualised violence are discussed. However, I argue that the text also parodies pornographic representations and critiques the sexual politics of contemporary culture, particularly the pornographic or voyeuristic sensibility created by the prevalence of technological representations and scientific thought-modes. The novel, I therefore suggest, can be read in terms of Angela Carter's controversial concept of a ‘moral pornography’. I conclude by considering, with reference to Susan Sontag's essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, how Ballard's ambiguous novel may also be seen as speaking to the possibilities of the pornographic imagination as a means of accessing extreme modes of consciousness.

Poems

Hampson, R. — 2008-01-01

Bardic Aspirations: Philip Roth's Epic of America

Morley, C. — 2008-01-01

This article focuses upon the Jewish experience of post-war optimism and ‘innocence’ in Philip Roth's American Pastoral trilogy. The epic sequence retrospectively depicts three lives, each in various ways enchanted and disappointed by the dream of a self-reliant American identity. Mediated from an indefinite moment in the present by Roth's alter-ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, the trilogy self-consciously addresses the role of the writer in the construction of a mythical national identity. The three novels of the sequence are presented as historical narratives. They uncover the processes whereby the memories of post-war America became, for better or worse, interlaced with the foundational myths of the United States. Their presiding themes are of disenchantment, and the slow collapse of myriad fictions of nation and race. Oscillating between expressions of escape from an entangled web of memories and explorations of the prerogatives of nostalgia, these works ultimately concern the epic process of unmaking the American ‘race’. Each subverts the phoney rhetoric of nation-building polemicists and myth-makers, yet acknowledges these myths as a formative component of their individual, national and literary identities. Like Joyce, Roth is presented as both fascinated with and repelled by the concept of the epicist as the founder of his people.

The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House

Davies, R. — 2008-01-01

Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere

Sandru, C. — 2008-01-01

EDITORIAL

Hiscock, A., Wilcox, H. — 2008-01-01

Re-reading Edgar Linton and Wuthering Heights

Leung, W. — 2008-01-01

This article explores the characterization of Edgar Linton in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. It attempts to debunk the negative conclusions about Edgar that have been almost taken for granted in commentary on the novel, arguing that this negativity is based on a partisan view of Brontë's aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical commitment. By vigorously engaging with entrenched ideological assumptions about Edgar, this article traces, through detailed analyses, Edgar's relationship with the two Catherines, revealing the sustained symbolic patterning that establishes Edgar as (at best) an agent of rejuvenative nature and civilized humanity. Furthermore, it is argued that the reinstatement of Edgar as the positive counterpart of Heathcliff clarifies the tragic dichotomy informing the novel's exploration of masculinity, family, and society. This dichotomy, in turn, reflects the tension generated by Brontë's conflicting Romantic sympathies.

Sequences

Ellis, R. — 2008-01-01

Resistance, Regard and Rewriting: Virginia Woolf and Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Holton, A. — 2008-01-01

This article discusses the literary relationship of the novelist and memoirist, Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837–1919), and her step-niece, Virginia Woolf. Ritchie's influence was a highly significant one which prompted a powerful ambiguity in Woolf, who was alternately admiring and dismissively anxious to deny influence, eager to relegate her to a staunchly Victorian past while covertly sensitive to those elements in her writing linking her with Modernism. These ‘Modern’ elements, including emphasis on the subjective nature of reality and the everyday life of the mind, occur in Ritchie's fiction, affecting its style and structure. This article focuses on Night and Day, then on Woolf's more direct comments about Ritchie in diaries, letters and essays, comparing these comments and Woolf's theoretical agenda in defining Modernism and, implicitly, her own place in it. It also considers some of Ritchie's fiction, with particular attention to two novellas, one a source for To The Lighthouse.

'To Vary the Timehonoured Adage': Ulysses and the Proverb

Creasy, M. — 2008-01-01

Ulysses contains over 130 locutions from the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, but this abundance of proverbial sayings and familiar sayings has received relatively little direct critical attention. This essay examines the importance of proverbs to Ulysses, paying particular attention to Joyce's repeated habit of varying or adapting the form of the proverbs he quotes. These alterations have, it is argued, significant implications for our understanding of the proverb as a form and Ulysses itself. By misquoting and misattributing proverbs from a variety of literary and non-literary sources, Joyce raises important questions about linguistic agency, about the distinctions between high literature and low popular culture and about the politics of literature in Ireland. The authorship of proverbs, their relation to individual utterance and collective wisdom is shown to be as complex and richly ambiguous as Joyce's stylistic achievement.

Two Poems

Robinson, P. — 2008-01-01

'And Doubly Sweet a Brotherhood in Song': Allusion and Imitation in Tony Harrison's A Kumquat for John Keats

Pellicer, J. C. — 2008-01-01

This essay argues that poetic allusion and imitation are among Tony Harrison's chief means of representing his relationship to Keats in A Kumquat for John Keats (1981). A detailed analysis of the poem occasions further engagement with questions about the usefulness of reception as a critical tool. What can Harrison's emulation of Keats teach us about reading Keats? How may Harrison's response to Keats aid us in redefining our conceptions of the Romantic poet? Harrison's remarkably ‘strong’ allusive reading of Keats, it is argued, enlists familiarity with Keats's life and letters to move beyond the biographical fixation which has so far characterized the greater part of Keats's reception among the poets.

The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English

Neagu, A. — 2008-01-01

The English Association: One Hundred Years On

Wilcox, H. — 2008-01-01