{"title":"The Intelligible Ode","authors":"G. Davidson","doi":"10.2307/jj.1640544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.1640544","url":null,"abstract":"An auxiliar light Came from my mind, which on the setting sun Bestowed new splendour. William Wordsworth (1) THIS PAPER IS PREPARATORY TO A READING OF THE ODE. It tries to clarify the two principal ideas, or forms of experience, that Wordsworth believed made the Ode intelligible--the idea of immortality, and the relation of that idea to certain recollections of early childhood. The incomprehension and ridicule with which the Ode was first read moderated into a perception of its failure to reveal any recognizable form of immortality. How Wordsworth understood that term forms the first part of this paper, and attempts to reinstate his more complex insights, which later readings buried beneath simpler notions of physical resurrection and survival of the self. Unless we can look beyond those conventional ideas of immortality we will tend to ask the wrong questions of the poem, fail to see what Wordsworth was getting at, and so assert, mistakenly, I believe, that he could not substantiate his later subtitle, nor resolve the problems the poem raises. The second part considers what one reader called \"the very mysterious and idiosyncratic experiences that lie at the heart of the poem,\" the remembered glories of childhood. But as the same reader adds, the difficulty is that although he \"tries to do this with great precision and scrupulousness, both of argument and vocabulary... his articulation is ultimately unfathomable, because what he's attempting to express lies beyond the scope of words.\" (2) Eliot, in describing his own poetry as \"a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,\" (3) unwittingly typified the struggle Wordsworth himself acknowledged in such phrases as the \"sad incompetence of human speech,\" and in the need to \"make / Breathings for incommunicable powers\" (1850 6.593; 1805.3.187-88). Both poets believe that the attempt to articulate the inarticulate is at the center of their work. That persistence suggests they believe that words can be used to convey what they cannot express precisely. Are critics not bound, therefore, in some way or other, to follow these \"raids,\" to tie them together, to set them in a context that may render them a little more fathomable? Wordsworth is a poet particularly open to such a process, because he goes over similar ground in different ways, at different times, and in very different kinds of poems. If critical discourse abandons the attempt to follow him in this respect, then we may understand variously the political Wordsworth, or the elegiac Wordsworth, or the pastoral Wordsworth, and so on--in general the materialized Wordsworth--but not the kind of poet Wordsworth thought himself--the poet trying to apprehend experiences on the margins of conscious articulation, which he believed inform our being. And so we should avoid taking refuge in supposing Wordsworth's experience \"unfathomable,\" or hiding behind the term \"idiosyncratic.\" To p","PeriodicalId":43889,"journal":{"name":"PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46564582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Desire in the Canterbury Tales","authors":"S. Mayrhofer","doi":"10.5860/choice.192227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.192227","url":null,"abstract":"Desire in the Canterbury Tales by Elizabeth Scala. The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Elizabeth Scala's most recent monograph, Desire in the Canterbury Tales, reads Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a discourse of desire. She argues that this discourse is not only rooted in the topics chosen by individual pilgrims in the frame narrative, but can also, more significantly, be found in various acts of misreading occurring in the frame narrative that produce compulsive desires and that can in turn be traced in the structure of the language and in signifying chains connecting the tales. The frame narrative, Scala argues, is where Chaucer sets up a \"pretended unity\" among the pilgrims, \"a unity that then gets tested and discomfited\" (2-4) and results in competitive fictions that are often linked to misrecognitions and misreadings of the tale tellers. Scala's work, as a whole, contributes a structural reading of the tales to ongoing debates in Chaucer studies. But her monograph also productively intervenes in current criticism by linking her structural analysis of Chaucer's language to the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan. Scala argues that the \"conscious means by which speakers pursue various desires and goals\" are linked to the \"structure of unconscious desire assumed with language\" (11). Psychoanalytic theories help her to explain \"the subjects position within the complex and socially structured world of symbolization, the Symbolic order\" (11). Scala's readings are therefore heavily influenced by Saussure's structural linguistics regarding the signifier in language (the '\"audible image' of a sign\"), which Lacanian theories separate from the mental concepts the signifier inspires. Lacans essay on the \"Mirror Stage\" is referenced more particularly to point to the \"imaginary identifications and gestures of communication\" which arise from mistaking other subjects as our \"selves\" (24). Her individual chapters trace these structural and psychoanalytical theories in the frame narratives and tales of Fragment I, as well as in the marriage group and the religious stories of the Canterbury Tales. Her analyses therefore also consider how desire might be linked to gender and sexuality, as well as to religion. She moreover frames her argument by considering other voices in Chaucer studies (including debates by New Critics and Historicists) and, more specifically, the questions these schools of thought leave unanswered about language, selfhood, and expressions of desires in medieval texts (15-20). Her introductory chapter, \"Mobility and Contestation,\" describes her overarching argument for the book, and frames it by setting up her critical apparatus and her definition of Chaucer's discourse of desire. She begins her analysis of the primary source by quoting the first eighteen lines of the General Prologue and pointing to the \"function of desire\" in his poetry. Verbs like \"longen\" and \"seken,\" framed by the \"artifice\" of nature (\"rains, warming winds, and","PeriodicalId":43889,"journal":{"name":"PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71028723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission","authors":"A. Bricker","doi":"10.5860/choice.192164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.192164","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43889,"journal":{"name":"PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71028678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770","authors":"Nicholas Hudson","doi":"10.1353/book.23074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/book.23074","url":null,"abstract":"The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770 by Ashley Marshall. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. xx + 430. As Ashley Marshall began her career with an impressive series of essays and is already well known in eighteenth-century studies, scholars in the field have eagerly anticipated her first book. In many respects, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770 delivers what they have admired in her essays. It is well researched, ambitious, provocative, and generally sensible. Marshall sets out her whole vision of English satire for over 110 years after the Restoration of Charles II, making some challenging claims about how we should read satire during the period and indeed about literary historiography itself. Even if one does not always agree with her judgments, she presents a weighty and clearly articulated case that deserves serious consideration. It should be said at the outset that Marshall's scholarly methods are strongly marked by the influence of Robert D. Hume, her former supervisor and the dedicatee of this book. One might even say that Marshall attempts to do for satire what Hume did for drama in two important studies, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) and Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728-1737 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). In The Practice of Satire in England, there is the same wariness of existing literary categories and critical truisms, a similarly extensive range of primary texts, including many that have been neglected, and a parallel technique of reclassifying this broadened archive under new categories. If Hume gave us the distinction between \"humane\" and \"reform\" comedy, Marshall reorganizes satires into \"modes\" such as \"Harsh Derogation,\" \"Mockery and Ridicule,\" \"Provocation of Thought,\" and \"Exemplary Satire and Sympathy.\" Again emulating her eminent supervisor, Marshall makes an effort to position each work in its exact context in a particular decade or even year. She is highly impatient with scholars who generalize loosely about some \"Augustan\" era in which authors widely separated by time and immediate context, such as Dryden, Swift, and Pope, are treated as if they are all writing in the same year, with the same objectives, methods, and values. One believes Marshall when she says that, having read over 3000 satires, she could pin an unseen work to a particular decade or even half decade. This approach is fundamentally sensible: a few decades ago, at least, major scholars did routinely assume that a handful of canonical authors embodied the entire \"Augustan\" age, sharing not only a proclivity to satire but the same neoclassicism, high moral ideals, and commitment to social order. While Marshall dismantles these assumptions with great learning, however, one wonders how widely they are actually shared by eighteenth- century scholars in this particular decade. She claims that she is challenging a \"myth of 'Augustan satire'\" th","PeriodicalId":43889,"journal":{"name":"PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2013-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66387979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Journey Westward: Joyce, \"Dubliners\" and the Literary Revival","authors":"B. Shaffer","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-2539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-2539","url":null,"abstract":"Journey Westward: Joyce, \"Dubliners\" and the Literary Revival by Frank Shovlin. Liverpool U. Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 180. $99.95. James Joyce is inextricably linked with Dublin. Born and raised in the east-coast Irish metropolis and capital city, Joyce famously set all of his fictions there. The appearance of a monograph on Joyce and Western Ireland may therefore come as a surprise, yet such is precisely what Frank Shovlin, the author also of an excellent study on twentieth-century Irish literary periodicals, has written. The Gaelic-speaking west of Ireland is of course important to Joyce and other Irish authors as more than a geographical space; it connotes the essential, primitive, uncorrupted heart of Ireland--in Shovlin's words, the Revivalists' \"Utopia\" (3). Focusing on Joyce's Dubliners and, in particular, on that volume's closing masterpiece, \"The Dead,\" Journey Westward: Joyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival--steeped in Irish political and cultural history and possessing a keen eye and ear for linguistic detail and allusive nuance--makes the case for considering Joyce as a writer absorbed with \"what lay beyond the Shannon, for rather more historically grounded, and sometimes more personal, reasons than those romantic, mythological considerations so close to Yeats's heart\" (3). Journey Westward is divided into three long chapters, each of which \"takes a different central theme or trope to help build towards a broader reconsideration of Joyce's attitude\" to his homeland (3). Collectively, the three chapters explore Joyce's sense of estrangement from the \"systems of power prevalent\" in Ireland, in particular the British Empire, which \"manifested itself in Joyce's Ireland via the Protestant ascendancy\" (159-60). Chapter One treats the various \"ways in which Joyce critiques Protestant power in Ireland via a subtle series of prompts towards distillation and the production of whisky\" (3). To be sure, Dubliners is suffused with references to whisky and distilleries, the first of which appears early on in the collection's opening story, \"The Sisters,\" and the last of which figures in the volume's closing masterpiece, \"The Dead.\" Shovlin notes Joyce's familiarity with the well-known analogy between distillation and creative writing both involve a process of purifying and refining something (spirit or language) but argues that Joyce is far more interested in the \"historical and biographical significance of whiskey\" (15). Joyce's father, John, had a financial interest in and for a time was secretary of the Dublin and Chapelizod Distillery; when that distillery failed, John realized significant losses. Moreover, whiskey and its production in Ireland at the time \"were associated with England, with the landlord caste and with imperial domination generally\" (52). Given this view of whiskey, along with the \"Joyce family's own misfortunes in the failed distillery at Chapelizod,\" Shovlin writes, \"it is not surprising that Joyce blends the spirit into the ","PeriodicalId":43889,"journal":{"name":"PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71140518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary","authors":"Amy Clukey","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-0747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-0747","url":null,"abstract":"American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary edited by Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn McKee. Athens, GA: U. of Georgia Press, 2011. Pp. ix + 374. Paper $24.95. The University of Georgia's New Southern Studies series continues to put out books of strong interest to southernists with the publication of American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary. Edited by Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn McKee, this collection undertakes an \"exploration of the ways in which the southern imaginary is constitutive of American cinema and of the ways in which the makers of movies ... have imagined the 'South' both to construct and to unsettle national narratives\" (1). In view of Southern studies' long-standing interdisciplinary attention to the production and circulation of visual imagery and iconographies of southernness, a consideration of the South in film that approaches the topic through the lens of the New Southern Studies--that is, one that rejects exceptionalist and essentialist narratives and interpretations in favor of a more expansive, shifting, or even transnational \"South\"--is long overdue. Indeed, the last edited collection on the topic, The South in Film, edited by Warren G. French, appeared thirty years ago. The collection's title reflects the compelling framework for Southern film studies that Barker and McKee set out in the introduction: that, far from being a marginal or merely regional set of tropes and images, the \"South\" has been integral to the development of American filmmaking and the national narratives it constructs. Drawing on theories of film, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism, they define the concept of \"the southern imaginary\" as \"an amorphous and sometimes conflicting collection of images, ideas, attitudes, practices, linguistic accents, histories, and fantasies about a shifting geographic region and time\" (2). Barker and McKee, and their contributors, have no interest in deconstructing regional images in film in order to present a more \"accurate\" or, worse, more \"authentic\" South. Rather, they consistently argue that \"never more so than today has the South failed to call forth a set of stable defining features\" (2). Appropriately, then, the fourteen essays that follow reject easy definition and geographical pinpointing in order to evoke a panoply of unstable, even contradictory, Souths: at once biracial and multiethnic, backwards looking and future oriented, regional and national, local and global. American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary is remarkable for the range of genres and films it manages to cover in a single volume. The contributors--a wide-ranging group drawn from English, film studies, African American and Native American studies, and musicology--discuss over thirty films such as silents, big-budget productions, classics, indies, documentaries, prestige films, and less high-minded projects. These include iconic films that one would expect in such a collection--The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, O Brother,","PeriodicalId":43889,"journal":{"name":"PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71134933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Milton and Maternal Mortality","authors":"P. Mcquade","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-4894","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-4894","url":null,"abstract":"Milton and Maternal Mortality by Louis Schwartz. Cambridge U. Press, 2009. Pp.282. Paper $36.99. This is a smart, elegant book that powerfully illuminates our understanding of Milton and women. It accomplishes this by focusing upon a historical problem: the high rate of maternal mortality in seventeenth-century London. This was, of course, a problem of considerable personal import to John Milton, who witnessed the childbirth death of two of his three wives. In the hands of a less thoughtful critic, this book could have exemplified a certain type of reductive new historicist criticism. But Milton and Maternal Mortality is the result of Schwartz's long engagement with this subject and his analysis is consistently nuanced, complex, and thought provoking. Milton and Maternal Mortality, which won the James Holly Hanford Book Award from the Milton Society of America in 2010, is divided into three parts. The first three chapters provide a historical framework, as Schwartz outlines the seventeenth-century understanding of unproblematic childbirth, discusses how and why \"things went wrong,\" and articulates seventeenth-century religious understandings of maternal mortality. In these chapters, Schwartz brings together material from obstetric manuals, religious discourses, and demographic analyses to provide a comprehensive account of the discourses surrounding seventeenth-century childbirth. (I could imagine assigning these chapters profitably in a course on early modern women writers.) But what I especially admire about these chapters is Schwartz's recognition that the religious discourses surrounding childbirth offered women (and early modern culture generally) a hermeneutic framework through which they could conceptualize the dangers of childbirth positively, as an act of voluntary submission to the divine will. Schwartz's greatest strength lies in his sensitive readings of Milton's poetry. The second section explores the representation of maternal mortality in Milton's early poetry, while the remainder of the book examines Milton's later poetic work. Schwartz's approach allows him to provide valuable insights into works not typically considered relevant to the problem of maternal mortality (such as \"On Shakespear\"), but his best readings concern texts in which Milton explicitly grapples with the problem of childbirth death. Schwartz's analysis of the \"Epitaph for the Marchioness of Winchester,\" for example, addresses this little-discussed poem both in terms of its literary accomplishment and its relevance to the ongoing poetic anxieties that Milton experienced early in his career. …","PeriodicalId":43889,"journal":{"name":"PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71129282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Mimesis of Time in Hamlet","authors":"E. Levy","doi":"10.5040/9781474292078.ch-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474292078.ch-001","url":null,"abstract":"Hamlet opens on intense attention to time, as the sentries \"watch the minutes of this night\" (1.1.30). (1) The emphasis gains thematic depth when Hamlet formulates his predicament in terms of temporal dislocation: \"The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right\" (1.5.196-97). The problem of time is raised to philosophical status in Polonius's rhetoric: \"Why day is day, night night, and time is time\" (2.2.88). The importance of time in Hamlet has provoked numerous studies, but none has approached the marter through recourse to the temporal analysis of John McTaggart, whose celebrated article on the unreality of time, published in 1908 and later republished in the second volume of his metaphysical work, The Nature of Existence, is often recognized as the seminal treatise in the philosophy of rime of the last one hundred years. (2) Though virtually no philosophers have defended McTaggart's claim that time is unreal, scores of them, in hundreds of articles and books on the subject, have addressed some aspect of his description of the two temporal series proper to time (or, more precisely, the notion of time). These two series, easily defined, can serve as powerful lenses though which to analyze and illumine the structure of rime in Hamlet. The result of our inquiry will be a new understanding of the representation of time--or, more precisely, what Gerhard Dohrn-van-Rossum terms \"time-consciousness\"--in the text. (3) For the elements which we shall draw from McTaggart are not theoretical (in the sense of imposing ideational constructs on reality or what actually is), but descriptive, in the sense of articulating the actual conceptual content of the notion of time--what E.J. Lowe calls the \"indispensable ingredients in our understanding of what time is\" and what L. Nathan Oaklander calls the \"two ways in which we ordinarily conceive and talk about time.\" (4) Despite the fact that McTaggart's theory of the non-reality of time turned out historically to be a dead end, his succinct and penetrating analysis of what time is conceptually--what concepts are intrinsic to the very idea of time--has exercised profound and lasting influence on philosophers of time, ever since he published his formulations. Ironically, though ultimately concerned with demonstrating that time is not, McTaggart's analysis has become indispensable to many philosophers in defining what time is. But before proceeding with this investigation, brief recapitulation of earlier approaches to the problem of time in Hamlet will contextualize discussion. A convenient introduction to such considerations concerns emphasis on the Renaissance as the period when temporal awareness broke through to a new level. Georges Poulet stresses the upsurge in the sense of transience: \"It is indeed true that one felt then as always, and perhaps more keenly then ever before, the precarious and fugitive character of each lived moment.\" David Scott Kastan elaborates on this aspec","PeriodicalId":43889,"journal":{"name":"PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70529713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell","authors":"M. Brady","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-4233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-4233","url":null,"abstract":"Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell by Diane Kelsey McColley. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. 252. $89.95. Halfway through his essay \"Walking,\" H. D. Thoreau asks \"Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?\" The question is rhetorical. He has already announced his own intent to speak for Nature, and turned to survey the territory behind, where he finds little in the way of precedent or guidance: English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare included, breathes no quite flesh and in this sense wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood--her wild man a Robinhood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. The literature that speaks for Nature is yet to come, or so it would seem. Thoreau's gesture is at once a ground-clearing and an investiture; it heralds the American tradition of nature writing, which has at heart the belief that before the nineteenth century \"Nature herself\" is mostly absent from Western literature. This is also a central tenet of ecocriticism, which generally does not regard early modern literature as ecological in its concerns or sensibilities. Although Thoreau's name does not appear in Diane McColley's Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell, it is largely his judgment on English literature and its formidable critical legacy that the author has in her sights when she announces her intent to challenge the notion \"that pre-Romantic and pre-Darwinian poetry, especially if it is monotheistically religious, is intrinsically unecological, or that 'ecocriticism' of it is intrinsically anachronistic\" (1). The book's central argument is that many English poets of the seventeenth century, including Milton and Marvell, but also George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Margaret Cavendish, among others, demonstrate sensibilities properly deemed \"ecological\" when they criticize contemporary practices of deforestation, pollution, and large-scale mining; show regard for plants and animals as \"fellow creatures whose lives belong to themselves\"; and promote a sense of kinship with and empathy for all living things by means of \"language responsive, in sound and form as well as image and thought, to the lives of plants, animals, elements and places\" (1, 7). McColley chooses the modern term \"ecology\" over the classical and early modern term \"economy\" because, she says, \"economy,\" with its roots in the Greek words oikos (household) and nomos (law), designates the management of an estate for human benefit, while \"ecology,\" with its root logos (word, knowledge), \"suggests that our use of knowledge needs to be good for the whole household of living things\" (1). Ecology, then, concerns the knowledge of nature in itself, as opposed to knowledge of its use-value for humans; it also involves the intimate personal engagement o","PeriodicalId":43889,"journal":{"name":"PHILOLOGICAL QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71119430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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