CRITICAL QUARTERLY最新文献_第7页

‘Cucumber sandwiches that repeated’: Loneliness and melancholia in Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont “重复的黄瓜三明治”：伊丽莎白·泰勒在克莱蒙特的《帕尔弗雷夫人》中的孤独和忧郁症

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-06-06 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12728

Akshi Singh

{"title":"‘Cucumber sandwiches that repeated’: Loneliness and melancholia in Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont","authors":"Akshi Singh","doi":"10.1111/criq.12728","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12728","url":null,"abstract":"It remains a mystery to me why Elizabeth Taylor, onetime member of the Communist Party – ‘I did not see why economic freedom would not lead to the other more important liberties – of speech & thought & expression . . . a woman respected first as a person, not as a machine for reproduction’ – is hardly considered a politically engaged novelist.1 It really seems like a case where a writer's ability to describe hats has worked against her, as though someone who knows the details of women's clothing, and describes with precision the running of a household, can have little to say about the politics of her time. It is true that, with the exception of her first novel, At Mrs Lippincote's (1945), communists or political radicals don't occupy a prominent place in her writing. And even in this book, the depiction of the Communist Party is irreverent, a woman attending a party meeting misquoting Auden to herself to keep going (‘today the expending of powers on the ephemeral pamphlet’), only drawn to attention by horror, ‘Hindus tied to trees by their hands, their toes barely touching the ground, hanging there in the ferocity of the sun, a punishment for – and this was the point – trade union activity.’2 But the mostly conservative, sometimes sequestered characters that Taylor creates in her other novels are no less politically interesting than Communist Party members. Not least because of – to use a somewhat old-fashioned phrase – Taylor's historical consciousness, one that includes, much to her credit, awareness of the distinction between elasticised stockings and those held up by garters.I read most Elizabeth Taylor's thirteen novels during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Britain, and the ones I had already read, I reread. Taylor is excellent at plot, by which I mean its concealment – events seem to be just a flow of actions and consequences. Living alone, I was sometimes lonely. I borrowed a sense of movement, of time as something dynamic, from the novels. In those circumstances, one book stood out: Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. This is amongst Taylor's best known novels, and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1971. Here Taylor makes something of a page-turner out of the experience of stuck time, offering an intimate portrait of boredom and loneliness. This alone is remarkable, but in this essay I want to examine the ways in which Taylor's novel situates the roots of this loneliness in Britain's loss of empire, a reading of the nation that is all too relevant in the present.Taylor's writing takes us into Mrs Palfrey's experience of time. Already waiting for breakfast, she contemplates a day of waiting around. Observe the punctuation in the passage above, the commas in particular give pause, interrupt the reading. This halting movement through Mrs Palfrey's thoughts, the unwelcome and awkward pockets of enforced quiet between the clauses are much like Mrs Palfrey's day, where each errand is eked ou","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 2","pages":"58-73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12728","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43408565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Gull Island 海鸥岛

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-06-03 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12731

Alan Felsenthal

引用次数: 0

Stress: A Keyword for Today? 压力：今天的关键词？

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-05-26 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12725

Jonathan Arac

引用次数: 0

Bowing to a Cloud 向云鞠躬

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-05-22 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12732

Alan Felsenthal

引用次数: 0

Care 护理

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-05-22 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12727

Holly Yanacek

{"title":"Care","authors":"Holly Yanacek","doi":"10.1111/criq.12727","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12727","url":null,"abstract":"With global shortages of health-care workers, child care, eldercare and care for people with disabilities, news outlets around the world have reported a care crisis worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. In The Care Manifesto (Verso Books, 2020), the authors observe, ‘Rhetorically at least, governments worldwide have responded [to the pandemic], and in sharp contrast to 2019, talk of care is currently everywhere’ (p.7). A glimpse into care's long history adds what Raymond Williams described as ‘just that extra edge of consciousness’ (Keywords, 1976) to understand the implications of care in contemporary English usage. The word's complexity arises not only from its status as a noun and a verb but also from its ability to describe, variously, an action, a feeling, supervision, paid or unpaid labour and the object of care itself, as well as from the word's strong association with conflicting ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions.The word care is inherited from Germanic and first attested before the eleventh century in its noun and verb forms. Care the noun derives from Old English caru, cearu, and the verb derives from Old English carian. OED includes quotations from Beowulf (c. 975–1025) documenting some of the earliest uses in the entries for both the noun care (‘Cearu wæs geniwod, geworden in wicun’ [sorrow was renewed, it had come to the dwellings]) and for the verb (‘na ymb his lif cearað’ [he never cared about his life]). OED sense 1 of the noun care denotes ‘Mental suffering, sorrow, grief, trouble’ and ‘Utterance of sorrow; lamentation, mourning’ and is now obsolete. OED sense 2b of the entry to care remains an active sense of the word today: ‘To feel concern (great or little), be concerned, trouble oneself, feel interest. Also in colloquial phrases expressing or implying lack of interest or concern: for all I care, see if I care, who cares?’Beginning in the thirteenth century, to care for described an other-directed action or provision: ‘to take thought for, provide for, look after, take care of’. Still active today, this sense of the verb to care applies in many contexts, including parenting, eldercare, pet keeping, farming, and health care. OED sense 5 of to care, the most recent sense of the verb, indicates the addition of an affective meaning. This sense of to care denoting ‘To have regard, fondness, or attachment for’ dates back to the sixteenth century and could be used to describe one's feelings about a person or a thing. The most common collocation used when this affective sense of care is meant is to care about, whereas to care for typically describes an action, i.e. hands-on caregiving. While the OED notes that the verb was originally used only in negative constructions (e.g. he never cared to; they cared for nothi","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 3","pages":"51-54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12727","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47494705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Affliction’s Lonely Hour 痛苦的孤独时刻

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-05-19 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12717

James Morland

{"title":"Affliction’s Lonely Hour","authors":"James Morland","doi":"10.1111/criq.12717","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12717","url":null,"abstract":"It is two years since my diagnosis and I am still no closer to finding a reason why I have become so ill; I am an idiopathic medical anomaly. My diagnosis of chronic pancreatitis occurred in the middle of the first coronavirus lockdown in the United Kingdom. It was a solitary experience as I shuffled into distanced hospital waiting rooms, was fed into various machines that instructed me on when and how to breathe and sent back to my flat to await a phone call appointment to discuss their results. This solitary experience of illness was populated by many literary diagnostic voices. The words ‘no apparent cause’ were repeated across letters from my consultants to my GP surgery. As I was copied into an ongoing epistolary conversation about my health, it often felt like I was merely overhearing a conversation about me with no chance to interject. As if in response, the eighteenth-century poets that I was researching gave their parallel diagnoses to my twenty-first century consultants. While I had lost the energy to do most tasks, I spent the moments when my brain and body reconnected reading and taking notes on eighteenth-century poems about health. If my consultants could not find the answer as to why I was ill, their eighteenth-century counterparts pushed me to delve deeper inside my body and listen to my own rhythms of illness.A 2016 study on chronic pancreatitis confirms that this could be a fruitful means of discovering why my pancreas has turned against itself. Presenting chronic pancreatitis as a ‘diagnostic dilemma’, it notes that it is ‘characterised by irreversible morphological change and typically causing pain and/or permanent loss of function’ and is ‘beset by destruction of healthy pancreatic tissue and the development of fibrous scar tissue’.1 The pancreas attempts to conceal itself by hiding behind the stomach and hampers research by being inaccessible and inflaming itself at the slightest touch. To understand the pancreas, it seems we need to reach beyond the medical and consult various sources. An article on the history of pancreatitis turns to the allegory of Plato’s cave in its conclusion, suggesting that those searching to understand the pancreas are the cave dwellers as ‘most of our knowledge of pancreatitis comes from the shadows cast by the disease’.2 We are always multiple steps behind the events that trigger the pancreas to destroy itself, attempting to understand its reasoning for doing so through the shadows cast by its inflammations. There is no universally accepted diagnostic standard for chronic pancreatitis; instead it is usually diagnosed with an array of radiological and endoscopic tools. But could poetic or emotional tools also be added to this list? An eighteenth-century physician-poet would argue that they were essential.Mark Akenside’s 1745 Odes on Several Subjects are wide ranging, though there is a particular through line of the poet’s physical and emotional health ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 2","pages":"25-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12717","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47890110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The shaping of character: The classics as a remedy for cultural despair in Victorian England 性格的塑造:古典文学作为维多利亚时代英国文化绝望的一剂良药

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-05-19 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12724

Stephen Gaukroger

{"title":"The shaping of character: The classics as a remedy for cultural despair in Victorian England","authors":"Stephen Gaukroger","doi":"10.1111/criq.12724","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12724","url":null,"abstract":"In an essay on Grote's History of Greece, John Stuart Mill remarked: ‘The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.’1 We may find this statement surprising, but Mill's contemporaries would not have. Just as nineteenth-century European scholars focused on the ancient Orient and its religions largely because they thought modern Eastern cultures static or degraded and of incidental value, so too, as Suzanne Marchand has pointed out, many members of the European educated elite thought the same was true of their own culture, ‘which is why the study of classical antiquity was dominant in educational institutions and why religious reformers emphasized the virtues of Jesus and the apostles, rather than those of contemporary Christians’.2In nineteenth-century England, appeal to classical antiquity was used to remedy cultural despair, yet in the course of the century the programme was collapsing, as there arose an increasingly acrimonious struggle between the claims of science and those of classical antiquity with regard to the explanation for the uniqueness and success of Western culture. Nowhere is this clearer than in the attempts of promoters of classical education to provide a model of character development. Character development was something that had almost always been a core role of the study of classical antiquity and, as the claims of Christianity in this role began to be questioned in Europe from the end of the eighteenth century, it took on a new urgency. Frank Turner notes that Greek antiquity began to absorb the interests of eighteenth-century Europeans as their Roman and Christian heritage began to come apart, attempting to identify ‘prescriptive signposts for the present age in the European past that predated Rome and Christianity’.3To understand the extent of classical studies in the curriculum of the English educational system, however, we need to recognise from the outset how class-bound education was in England. By contrast with Germany, for example, where Humboldt's reforms of 1810 were designed to open up tertiary education to the middle classes, in England in the first half of the nineteenth century education was seen as a privilege, and there was a widespread belief among the elite that too much education would produce overqualified and unemployable people.7 The resistance to general education was reflected in literacy levels: in 1850 the literacy rate (reading and writing) in Prussia was 85 per cent, that in Britain just 52 per cent.8 Museums, at the forefront of general educational programme in Germany, laboured under a class-ridden ideology in Britain. The trustees of the British Museum, predominantly members of the aristocracy and Anglican clergy, were staunchly resistant to displaying its specimens to the public, and by contrast with French and German museums its collection was sadly lacki","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 2","pages":"4-17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12724","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47715776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Solitary Mind in the Anatomy of Melancholy 忧郁解剖中的孤独心理

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-05-17 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12726

Angus Gowland

{"title":"The Solitary Mind in the Anatomy of Melancholy","authors":"Angus Gowland","doi":"10.1111/criq.12726","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12726","url":null,"abstract":"Much could be said about these lines, but my concern here is with the relationship they thematise between melancholy, self-reflection and solitude. The rest of the poem leaves us in no doubt that Burton regards solitary meditation upon oneself as an integral part of the ‘abstract’ of the melancholic pathology (‘When to myself I act and smile / With pleasing thoughts the time beguile … When I lie, sit, or walk alone, / I sigh, I grieve, making great moan … Friends and Companions get you gone, / 'Tis my desire to be alone; / Ne'er well but when my thoughts and I / Do domineer in privacy …. I am a beast, a monster grown, / I will no light nor company, / I find it now my misery’).3 The special significance of solitude in the Anatomy is also announced on its illustrated frontispiece, produced from Burton's instructions by the Frankfurt engraver Christof Le Blon, and first appearing in the third edition of 1628 (Figure 1). Again, when Burton provides his readers with a guide to the contents here, the importance of solitude is reflected in the fact that it is given its own panel (Figure 2), together with depictions of the main types of melancholy discussed in the book, and two famous herbal therapies (borage and hellebore), set beside portraits of the author and his ancient philosophical predecessor Democritus.4 Solitude here is depicted, as Burton explains in another poem added in 1632 (‘The Argument of the Frontispiece), ‘[b]y sleeping dog, cat: Buck and Doe, / Hares, Conies in the desert go: Bats, Owls the shady bowers over, / In melancholy darkness hover’.5 All of these creatures were traditionally associated with both solitude and melancholy, and it is perhaps also notable that all the human figures on the frontispiece are alone.6In this essay, I explore the pathological aspects of solitude in The Anatomy of Melancholy. The first part outlines Burton's account of the medical dimension of solitude, in which the desire to be alone is, according to the teachings of physicians from antiquity to the seventeenth century, a prominent symptom of the melancholic disease. Here, the Anatomy draws on a range of medical authorities to connect solitariness with the characteristically melancholic passions of fear and sorrow. However, when analysed in conjunction with physical idleness and excessive thinking, solitude could also be regarded as part of an unhealthy physical and psychological regimen, and thereby come to be a cause of melancholy. As we shall see, Burton is particularly interested in the effects of solitude upon the mind of the melancholic sufferer, and describes the process of ‘melancholizing’, the passage from pleasurable meditation to painful mental fixation, as one of the intrinsic dangers of the voluntary withdrawal from the external world. In the second part of the essay, I turn to the spiritual significance of solitude in Burton's work. Whilst solitude had been regarded","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 2","pages":"5-24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12726","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42532307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Buffer of Hedges 套期保值的缓冲

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-05-17 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12730

Alan Felsenthal

引用次数: 0

Introduction: Solitudes Past and Present 导言:《过去与现在的孤独

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2023-05-15 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12719

James Morland, Akshi Singh, Charlie Williams

引用次数: 0