Studies in the Literary Imagination最新文献

{"title":"The Inhumanity of Christ: Damnation and Redemption in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend","authors":"Andrew Hock Soon Ng","doi":"10.1353/sli.2013.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sli.2013.0015","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most sensitive treatments of the vampire tale is Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Blending horror with science fiction, the novel manages to infuse a familiar motif with an altogether original premise, and directly demonstrates the adaptability of the vampire to signify contemporary and future epistemological and axiological concerns. In Matheson’s novel, the vampire is not a primordial being that has somehow managed to survive into the present, and whose presence now threatens the status quo. Instead, the creature is the result of a global bacterial epidemic that has transformed every human being, except for the story’s lone survivor, Robert Neville, into the undead. Barricaded by night in his home from the neighbors who prey vigilantly on him, Neville ventures out by day to acquire supplies and to indiscriminately destroy anyone infected by the bacteria. Neville, who has dubbed the bacteria vampiris, sets up a makeshift biology lab in his home and desperately tries to find a cure (86). His motivation to eliminate the vampires is driven partly by survival instinct, and partly by anger against the disease that has robbed him of both his wife and daughter. He consigned the latter to the fire, for “Only flames could destroy the bacteria that caused the plague” (73). The narrative mostly oscillates between Neville’s violent escapades and his despair at failing to unravel the bacteria’s mystery, until his fateful meeting with Ruth. Initially, Neville suspects that she is a vampire, but when she is evidently unaffected by vampire repellents such as garlic and sunlight, Neville finally accedes that she is human after all, only to later discover that she is actually a member of an evolved community of vampires sent to spy on him, and engineer his capture. These vampires have learned to “survive” the daylight, and are working toward mobilizing a “new society” that will replace the previous, human one (158). To them, Neville is a dangerous threat whose death is necessary if they are to succeed in rebuilding civilization. Curiously, despite its innovation and popularity, I Am Legend has attracted little scholarly attention; available criticisms moreover, tend to concentrate on the screen adaptations rather than the novel,1 which often results in a focal shift to the issues privileged in the films (such as","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129686601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Incarnations of Christ in Twentieth-Century Fiction","authors":"Andrew Hock Soon Ng","doi":"10.1353/sli.2013.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sli.2013.0016","url":null,"abstract":"The history of western literature’s intersection with Christianity is a long, often complicated, but strangely complementary one. The latter has provided the ideological basis for the former, either explicitly as a reassertion of the religion’s supremacy, or, more restrictively, as the ethical persuasion underlying literature, while western literature has often been used to clarify and expand, or question and challenge the theological premise of Christianity. This relationship is, of course, neither surprising nor inevitable: Christianity was (and still is) one of the western world’s most dominant and expansive metanarratives and has seeped into every aspect constituting human existence, be it personal values, community identity, or even state policies. As a discourse operating within and directed by the compass of this metanarrative, literature necessarily reflects, sometimes if only to satirize or parody, Christianity’s trajectory. This relationship is further reinforced by the fact that as a foundational discourse familiar throughout the West, the Bible has also provided writers with various narrative strategies and an astonishing range of symbols from which to draw, and which in turn either specifically or obliquely inform the ideological and aesthetical tenors of their literary work. However, while these two institutions may have complemented each other, they were never equals, and the relationship remained, for much of their shared histories, an uneasy one. The worth of literature was heavily dependent on aligning itself with the faith’s truth claims. In this regard, C. W. du Toit’s observation that the novel, being “free,” is therefore able to “pose critical and challenging questions invaluable to theology, uncomfortable to the God of dogmas and creeds,” is only partially accurate and largely specific to writings after the Second World War (818). Prior to this, there were limits as to how far literature could confront Christianity, thus circumscribing the kinds of “critical and challenging questions” literature could pose. Works that blatantly undermined or lampooned Christianity (or, more often, the church), such as Diderot’s The Nun, may at best be permitted as expressions of the corruption in the cultural and social imaginations that resulted from the abuse or abandonment of reli-","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"133 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114668327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Sign of a Woman: Femininity as Fiction in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless","authors":"Kristine Jennings","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Praised as the \"Great Arbitress of Passion,\" (1) Eliza Haywood garnered fame for her unabashed portrayal of the drama of human sexuality (Sterling 21). One of the most prolific writers of the eighteenth century, she entered the literary scene with wildly popular amatory novels (2) that highlight the passions of both sexes. Haywood's writing, however, seemed to undergo a significant transition from her early scandal fiction to the domestic novels she produced in the latter half of the century. This shift in style reflects a changing literary market that favored more moralistic fiction that rested on newly emergent ideas of femininity. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, published in 1751, ostensibly reveals the protagonist's moral conversion (3) and thus seems to promote values in keeping with the conduct book literature of the time with its focus on the chaste domestic heroine and with its obvious sexual double standards. However, the text also questions divisions of gender and explores contrasting ideas of female sexuality, illustrating that women are not \"merely docile recipients of men's natural urges\" (Booth 14). Thus, the novel reflects the era's changing notions of sex and gender as it captures the existing tensions between two competing theories of female sexuality: the age-old view of women according to Galenic theory, which marked them as anatomically inverted men with comparable and even heightened sexual appetites, and the emerging myth of the naturally chaste woman that became central to the domestic novel as popularized by Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa. (4) The unswerving virtue of these ideal women, however, did not come naturally to all fictional heroines. In The Rise of the Woman Novelist, Jane Spencer writes that \"Betsy Thoughtless and novels like it brought about a crucial shift in the novel's presentation of women, from the stasis of perfection or villainy to the dynamics of character change,\" initiating the tradition of the reformed heroine, whose foibles and mistaken view of her \"place in the world\" are corrected so that she may earn happiness (141). (5) While the novel tries to assure us that Betsy's flaws do not extend to her sexuality, that she is, indeed, chaste and modest from beginning to end, she does, in the course of her narrative, give up a very important aspect of her sexuality, namely the ability to take pleasure in her own body. In turn, this leads to a changed conception of herself and her own self-worth. The opening pages of the novel tell the reader that \"if he has the patience to go thro' the following pages, [he] will see into the secret springs which set this fair machine in motion, and produced many actions which were ascribed, by the ill-judging and malicious world, to causes very different from the real ones\" (Haywood 32). Despite the perhaps Cartesian allusion to the essential nature of the self beneath the mechanistic surface, identity in this novel is, indeed, neither stable nor independe","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127014810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Violence, Female Friendship, and the Education of the Heroine in Mary Davys’s The Reform’d Coquet","authors":"J. Stahl","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0013","url":null,"abstract":"INTRODUCTION Mary Davys's 1724 novel, The Reform'd Coquet, depicts fifteen-year-old heroine Amoranda's process of reformation as she learns to amend her promiscuous flirtations. By the novel's conclusion, Amoranda commits to marriage to her stern yet protective guardian, a young man disguised as the elderly Formator, who has shed his disguise. If we focus exclusively on Amoranda's relationship with Formator, then The Reform'd Coquet offers heterosexual romance ending in marriage as the heroine's just reward for remedying her misconduct and embracing culturally acceptable feminine behavior. However, Davys's novel is more complex than this. Amoranda's perceptions of her experiences with predatory men and her understanding of the importance of female intimacy and friendship play crucial roles in her journey to reformation. Critics often focus on Amoranda's relationship with her guardian, Formator, and have concluded that The Reform'd Coquet is a story about male power and female powerlessness. Mary Anne Schofield, for example, explores the convention of disguise in Davys's novel and argues that Formator masters this convention \"to gain and control the woman\" (86). Jane Spencer emphasizes The Reform'd Coquet as a novel describing \"the relationship between a faulty heroine and her lover-mentor\" (145). According to Spencer, Davys's novel demonstrates that \"the heroine must find an honest man, submit to his authority, and gain his protection\" (147). Natasha Saje shows how Formator watches Amoranda and manipulates his opportunities to re-form her \"into a good wife--a docile and quiet one\" (167). Helen Thompson argues that The Reform'd Coquet plots the trajectory of a heroine \"who must learn to love a manifestly arbitrary domestic law: Amoranda's venerable, sympathetic, and fatherly guardian\" (51). Thompson claims that Formator \"effects his purpose so well\" that Amoranda internalizes his moral instruction and believes she is accepting his authority as a result of her personal inclination (52). In her recent study, Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century, Theresa Braunschneider develops a provocative thesis about \"two dynamics\" that combine to facilitate Amoranda's change from coquette to marriageable woman: her desire to engage in intimate and erotic friendships with women and her growing fear of physical endangerment from men (109-15). Braunschneider, however, focuses almost exclusively on Amoranda's interaction with a cross-dressing man whom Amoranda mistakes for a female. My interest in this essay is in the ways that Amoranda grapples with the problem of coping with the sexual violence of men and how her friendships with two women, Altemira and Arentia, play important roles in her developing awareness of her need to find strategies to empower herself within a threatening male-dominated world. While female friendship in The Reform'd Coquet has not been a focal point of critical attention, the topic of friendships and intimacy among wom","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128327241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comparative Gender in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda","authors":"Dannie Leigh Chalk","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0012","url":null,"abstract":"I have covered my old carpet with a handsome green baize, and every stranger, who comes to see me, I observe, takes it for granted, that I have a rich carpet under it. --Aunt Stanhope to Belinda (Maria Edgeworth, Belinda 9) Maria Edgeworth is a problematic figure for literary scholars. She is an emblem of bourgeois values for many, a progressivist to others. Feminist scholars interpret her variously as a radical anti-patriarchist and anti-essentialist and conversely as a conservative polemicist enmeshed in the project of validating patriarchy and paternalism. One possible reason for these conflicting interpretations is Edgeworth's own determination, as evidenced in her published writings, to avoid being shoehorned into any one extreme position. Her writings often straddle the spaces between extremes, forcing her readers into positions as uncomfortable as her own. Such is the case with her first domestic novel, Belinda, first published in 1801. Belinda has been subjected to a series of attempts to reinterpret its various and often self-contradictory depictions of gender, race, class, and nationalism in terms of its adherence to particular paradigms. For Toni Wein, \"Edgeworth merely reifies the visions between the two types of prudence, materialistic and moralistic, making the former the province of men and the latter the preserve of women, and thus fostering the separation of spheres upon which the middle class will depend in the nineteenth century\" (301). For Jennie Batchelor, the novel's original title, Abroad and at Home, signifies it as Edgeworth's attempt to \"describe woman's unachievable desire to dominate both the social and domestic spheres\" (159). And Anne Mellor, attempting to situate Belinda within the emergence of Romanticism, calls it a textbook example of the new feminine Romantic ideology [in which] Belinda succeeds in establishing a marriage of equality and compatibility because she has remained true to her moral and rational principles, cemented by the solid example of the benevolent and egalitarian Percival marriage. (44) And in contrast to all such interpretations of the novel as centered on various iterations of bourgeois femininity, Susan C. Greenfield would have it that \"although Belinda, Edgeworth's first 'domestic' novel, takes place in England, it centrally concerns the problem of the West Indies\" (215). Unfortunately for literary scholars, any and all attempts to place Belinda within a clearly defined paradigm are undermined by the text itself. Any reading of the novel as a tool for promoting the bourgeois separation of spheres is ultimately undone both by Lady Delacour's reformation and by Clarence Hervey's own preference for the eponymous heroine as a woman fit for public and private responsibilities. Attempting to read Belinda in terms of Romantic principles of egalitarianism is quickly subverted by the novel's clear demonstration of class and gender differences rather than parity and of its general advocacy of social ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122255681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Deadly Snares”: Female Rivalry, Gender Ideology, and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers","authors":"Elizabeth Johnston","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Oh the deadly snares That women set for women--without pity Either to soul or honour! Learn by me To know your foes. In this belief 1 die: Like our own sex, we have no enemy, no enemy! --Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women 5.2.209-13 Dear sisters, we have met the enemy and she is us. --Marianne M. Jennings A14 The first quotation above is from Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, a bloody seventeenth-century tragedy that focuses on a wealthy widow who routinely betrays the women who trust her. The second excerpt can be found in the essay, \"Who's Harassing Whom?,\" in which Marianne M. Jennings argues that twentieth-century women have exacerbated the issue of sexual harassment, muddying the court system with unwarranted complaints. Both quotations represent a significant rhetorical tradition by which social and political conflicts are displaced onto the narrative of female rivalry. The prevalence of this tradition raises pertinent questions: What motivates this long-existing cultural preoccupation with pitting women against women? Moreover, what can we say about the historical specificity of the trope of female rivalry--or of its narrative's ability to trespass historical, cultural, and ideological boundaries? This essay begins with a discussion of the dissemination of eighteenth-century gender ideology in British literature, in particular the construction of the domestic ideal in conduct book literature. I argue that the success of domestic ideology in the cultural imagination depends on exorcising from \"ideal\" femininity any desire not consistent with patriarchy. In conduct book fiction, this means that the positive female exemplar is necessarily contrasted with a negative female exemplar; the hero's choice of the positive female exemplar thus represents society's corresponding rejection of the traits embodied by her rival. I then consider how negative representations of groups of women might also represent anxieties about the threat posed by increasing female authorship to male authority. Finally, given that so many of the authors of eighteenth-century courtship novels are women, my essay then considers how two particular women writers--Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth--redeploy the trope of female rivalry to interrogate the factors underlying women's vexed relationships with each other. DISSEMINATING DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND EXORCISING THE \"WHORE\" The Christian New Testament tells the story of Jesus meeting and healing a man possessed by demons; Jesus does so by casting the demons into a herd of pigs who then throw themselves from a cliff. The eighteenth-century construction of ideal femininity might best be understood as a similar sort of exorcism insofar as, prior to the eighteenth century, it was commonly suspected that all women might contain both sides of the virgin/whore binary. In pre-eighteenth-century literature, female characters tend to take one of two forms: the chaste virgin, existing only as a muse or object of male worship (thi","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124968642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Nothing but human”: Righting the Rightless in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria","authors":"D. Sherman","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0005","url":null,"abstract":"By way of an alliterated subtitle, Mary Wollstonecraft's 1798 Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman immediately raises a seemingly simple question: why the \"Wrongs\" for the novel, but the \"Rights\" for the Vindication? If A Vindication of the Rights of Woman describes the \"revolution in female manners\" necessary in the advancement of women's rights, the \"wrongs,\" then, seem to present something uncontained and uncontainable in the Vindication: rights in negative, the rightless, and the wronged (92). It is a negative and uncertain space, and one that is pure horror to Wollstonecraft, hence her invocation of the Gothic genre. Maria's hybrid form, with ever-shifting layers of focalization, reflects the difficulty in giving expression to this problematic excess; it is a novel in search of a genre, and one that finds even the genre that epitomizs excess insufficient. The Gothic lurks in Maria's settings and diction, but only to demonstrate even its inability to encompass Wollstonecraft's dilemma: how to define Woman, collectively, as human and deserving of the rights of man, because her rights and her dignity must be defined against something else, against an exclusion. A sacrifice must be made in delimiting the boundaries of woman as citizen. There must be someone, or something, that does not deserve rights and against which woman will emerge, defined as fully righted citizen, and that something is Jemima, Maria's maidservant in the asylum. It will be the work of this article, then, to demonstrate Jemima's centrality as a sacrifice to Maria's emergent subjecthood and consequent citizenship, to use a more politically charged word. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's work on human rights, particularly with the role of exclusion in emergent citizenship, as well as on Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life, I hope to show that there is a kind of horror beyond the Gothic, a threat for which even it cannot provide containment. Furthermore, this terror is uniquely bound to gender, an aspect of human rights that Arendt does not address. The purpose of this article is then twofold but mutually constitutive: to demonstrate on one hand Jemima's haunting necessity in the sphere of political rights, but also the difficulty inherent in her incorporation into the mass--or put another way, her inclusion in the subtitle as Woman. In Maria, this problem erupts as both a generic and formal instability, and this very imperfection is central to its attempted production of rights in literary form, rights whose production likewise produces terror and displeasure that exceed even the capacity of the Gothic to express transgression. Wollstonecraft opens Maria with an apparently Gothic setting: an insane asylum, described in seemingly Gothic prose: Abodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of genius to harrow the soul, and absorb the wandering mind. But, formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, what were ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127202897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Problem with Binaries: Balancing Reason, Emotion, Body, and Mind in A Simple Story","authors":"Sheron L. Decker","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Elizabeth Inchbald expresses a complexity of political sentiment in her works, and she does not divorce political issues from their domestic and social ramifications. Of particular interest to Inchbald in her 1791 novel A Simple Story is the notion of a balanced education for both genders. Inchbald suggests throughout the novel that the current educational system effectively teaches women to use their bodies instead of their minds and that it educates men to read females only as bodies; as a result, female bodies are commodities, and patriarchal power is reinforced through commanding silences, unclear linguistic symbols, and corporeal actions. The novel reveals flaws in the contemporary education system and offers up a solution for reform through Matilda, an ideal character who is a composite of mental and physical strength, a product of a male and a female tutor, and a result of the combination of a domestic-sensible upbringing and a rational-Jesuit education. Matilda is the platform upon which Inchbald builds her new educational system; by the end of the novel, the character is a construct of rational, emotional, and physical traits, as well as conventionally masculine and feminine characteristics. Inchbald argues for more than natural and social reform, though; she advocates for a redefining of the academic process, of the courting process, and of the marriage process. She blurs the lines between all of these cultural institutions, and in doing so, argues for a new order. As such, Inchbald calls for a rethinking of the mind and the heart, of sense and sensibility, a rethinking, in the broadest sense of the word, of education, of gender, of institutions. INCHBALD AND THE QUESTION OF EDUCATION In 1791, the Gentlemen's Magazine reviewed Inchbald's A Simple Story, claiming that, through her characters and plot twists, Inchbald had \"struck a path entirely her own\" (\"Review\"). I would agree, but for a different reason: her attack on the educational system is \"entirely her own.\" Throughout her novel, Inchbald undertakes a serious look at the system of female education and offers a much more informed view than many have recognized. Her progressive ideas echo, and even precede, those of some of her contemporaries, and she places her characters on paths that have not been well trodden to explore how the public will receive these new theories. Inchbald's stance is a calculated one. She understood that a \"radical\" label would hinder future publications, as well as limit sales of her current novel. (1) In order to tread lightly but still get her views across, Inchbald broke her narrative into two distinct volumes, one following Miss Milner, a female who was educated in a contemporary manner, and one following Matilda, who received a balanced education that emphasized more possibilities than the domestic arts and avenues traditionally available to women. Through Miss Milner, Inchbald reveals how domestic education teaches women to use their bodies to gain h","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134150158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Her mind had that happy art”: Acting sensibility in Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest","authors":"Katherine Richards","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0002","url":null,"abstract":"When Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth of the witches' prediction and they begin to discuss their plan to kill Duncan, she tells him, \"To beguile the time, / Look like the time\" (5.65-66). \"To beguile the time,\" that is, Macbeth needs to make those around him feel as if everything is normal, that he is still Duncan's loyal subject; in order to do that, he must \"look like the time,\" or comport himself in a way that portrays loyalty. He must, in other words, act. These are some of the earliest lines Lady Macbeth speaks, and no doubt when Sarah Siddons, probably the most famous embodiment of the character, delivered them, her own ability to beguile the time was palpably clear. It is equally clear that Ann Radcliffe was one of the audience members touched by Siddons's performance. Whether or not she was touched by these particular lines is relatively unimportant, but as her biographer Rictor Norton has proven, Radcliffe did in fact see Siddons play Lady Macbeth, and her description of Siddons's affect on her is one of the few personal recollections we have: Whenever the poet's witch condescends, according to the vulgar notion, to mingle mere ordinary mischief with her malignity, and to become familiar, she is ludicrous, and loses her power over the indignation; the illusion vanishes. So vexatious is the effect of the stage-witches upon my mind, that I should possibly have left the theatre when they appeared, had not the fascination of Mrs Siddons's influence so spread itself over the whole play, as to overcome my disgust, and to make me forget even Shakespeare himself; while all consciousness of fiction was lost, and his thoughts lived and breathed before me in the very form of truth. Mrs Siddons, like Shakespeare, always disappears in the character she represents, and throws an illusion over the whole scene around her, that conceals many defects in the arrangements of the theatre. (Radcliffe qtd. in Norton 50-51) (1) It is highly likely that Radcliffe saw Siddons perform on several occasions including in The Tempest and Hamlet, and she seems to have also been affected by the performances and by the theater in general (Norton 62). While Radcliffe did become more of a recluse as her publications became more successful, initially she spent quite a lot of time at the opera and theater both in Bath and in London (see Norton 50). Radcliffe was careful to pay attention to the ways in which acting made the audience feel, which we see when she imagines Siddons in the role of Hamlet: I should suppose she would be the finest Hamlet that ever appeared, excelling even her own brother in that character; she would more fully preserve the tender and refined melancholy, the deep sensibility, which are the peculiar charm of Hamlet, and which appear not only in the ardour, but in the occasional irresolution and weakness of his character.... Her brother's firmness, incapable of being always subdued, does not so fully enhance, as her tenderness would, this part of the characte","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116795666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kristeva before Kristeva: Gender and Creativity in Russian Symbolism","authors":"Kirsti Ekonen","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0003","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I will look at Julia Kristeva's theory of subjectivity and creativity in the context of early Russian modernism, that is, Russian symbolism. My anachronistic way of \"reading with Kristeva\" is based on my argument that comparing Kristeva and early modernist culture and its gendered aspects will provide a deeper understanding of Kristeva's theoretical background and of how Kristeva's concepts and theoretical thinking help analyze the gendered aspects of the aesthetics and literary practices of Russian symbolism. Moreover, Kristeva's thinking enables us to distinguish the specific circumstances these practices create for women writers. Kristeva's theoretical thinking (along with that of her contemporary feminist critics) provides analytical tools and new viewpoints for reading women writers' strategies in the gendered and androcentric aesthetical discourse of Russian symbolism. I will begin by discussing Kristeva's thoughts on subject and creativity from the point of view of gender and some feminist responses to those thoughts. After that I will show the (Russian) fin-de-siecle roots of her thinking. Feminist responses to Kristeva and her theoretical background in fin-de-siecle culture lead me to the women writers of Russian symbolism. I will look at their reactions to contemporary aesthetical discourse, and, as a case study, I will analyze the strategies of two women poets, Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Liudmila Vilkina (1873-1920). They developed special strategies for constructing female creative subjectivity within androcentric symbolist discourse, and, as I will show in the last part of this article, these strategies resonate with Kristeva and her feminist critics. CREATIVITY AND GENDER IN KRISTEVA Kristeva builds her understanding of creativity and the creative process by using the central concepts of the semiotic and the symbolic. In general, these concepts refer to the two orders that participate in the constitution of the subject, production of discourse, and regulation of social relations, as Elizabeth Grosz summarizes (49). In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva uses the concepts of the semiotic and the symbolic to explain the creative process and especially modernist artistic practices and their political significance. The symbolic process refers to the establishment of sign and syntax and to grammatical and social constraints. The semiotic process can also be understood as a kind of pre-verbal energy at work in the text, the source of inspiration. In Kristeva's thinking, the semiotic is related to the child's pre-oedipal relationship with the mother, the mother's body, and, therefore, the feminine. In contrast, the symbolic process refers to the paternal, masculine function. While the symbolic maintains order, the semiotic includes revolutionary aspirations, which threaten order. Kristeva introduces into the formulation of the semiotic the concept of chora: a non-expressive (in the sense of non-verbal) totality und","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129940443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}