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{"title":"\"Bird, Jewel, or Flower?\": On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry","authors":"Kylan Rice","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907208","url":null,"abstract":"\"Bird, Jewel, or Flower?\"On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry Kylan Rice During the first half of the nineteenth century, women's poetry grew in popularity and gained unprecedented visibility as it circulated on both sides of the Atlantic in literary annuals and gift-books.1 Collecting prose and poetry by both male and female writers, these expensively produced volumes were marketed as gifts for women that could be presented as souvenirs or tokens of love.2 Frequently used by men as \"courtship objects\" or \"physical mementos of desire or intimacy,\" literary annuals bore titles like Forget Me Not, Token of Remembrance, Souvenir, Keepsake, Leaflets of Memory, Memorial, or Remember Me, often including poems and frame texts that petitioned the recipient to remember and permanently cherish the romantic affections of the giver.3 In this way, they helped to codify a gendered expectation that obliged nineteenth-century women to perform memory-work while tacitly granting men the freedom to forget. Given its \"reflexive\" nature, where the contents of each volume were designed to provide \"instructions\" that \"model[ed]\" to recipients how they should consume it, many of the individual poems included in literary annuals and gift-books show women performing their commitment to men by preserving tokens of love.4 It was not uncommon for these poems to be written by female poets. For instance, appearing in a gift-book called The Moss-Rose, A Parting Token (1840), the American poet Lucy Hooper's \"The Turquoise Ring\" is a narrative poem that describes a woman who is \"made to preserve\" a turquoise ring given to her by a lover before separating from each other for an extended period of time.5 In Hooper's poem, the woman's \"fervent … belief\" in the \"power\" of the ring as a memento that \"link[s] the future to all the past\" is \"met with its appropriate reward\"—her lover's continued faithfulness and eventual return, a conclusion suggesting that a man's fidelity is contingent on the woman who cherishes his gifts.6 For readers of annuals, this insight also applied to \"tokens\" like The Moss-Rose [End Page 767] which featured poems by female writers like Hooper, who modeled the gendered dynamics of gift exchange that drove the circulation of literary annuals, portraying women as repositories of romantic memory. However, even as they adhered to the conventions of a literary gift economy, writing poems that show women performing requisite memory-work, some female poets also challenged this charge, recognizing that the occupation of remembering made it easier to be forgotten. For instance, in \"Medallion Wafers\" (1823), a series of ekphrastic poems representing images impressed in paste by an intaglio seal, the English poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) critiques what she identifies as \"woman's weary lot,\" which is \"to love\" and then, in the aftermath of love, to \"be forgot.\"7 If, as Landon complains, \"love, love is all a woman's fame,\" then failing to lov","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tillie Olsen's Reproductive Aesthetics","authors":"Louise Mccune","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907212","url":null,"abstract":"Tillie Olsen's Reproductive Aesthetics Louise Mccune David and Eva, married for forty-seven years, with several adult children long departed from their care, cannot agree how they will spend the rest of their days. David wants to move to the Haven, a cooperative retirement community where the couple's needs—for recreation, socialization, medical attention—will be not only met, but anticipated. He points to the fixtures of their worn-in home life: that wheezing vacuum begging for repair, those dirty dishes stacked in the sink, the feeling that this miserable day is no different from any other. He turns to his wife, inspired: there will be no wheezing vacuums and no dirty dishes at the Haven. There, they will be relieved of their boredom, their responsibilities, and, not least, each other. They will have reading groups to attend and outdoor space to roam. Owing to these distractions, the resentment between them may be left to wither. Like so, David makes his case, but Eva holds her line. There is no way that she will go. It's not that Eva finds their house agreeable. In fact, she doesn't like it there: she resents the chores, she resents her husband, she resents the clamor and claustrophobia that make up her domestic environment. So why does she insist upon staying? In Eva's words, she is \"use't.\"1 She's used to the tedium of keeping a home, used to boredom and isolation, used to being all used up. For too long, she was beholden to her children, to their \"tracking, smudging, littering, dirtying, engaging her in endless defeating battle\" (she's kept score), and to her husband's messes, too (T, 77). She seems now to want to enjoy whatever small prizes remain after a lifetime of surrender: a small library that's been read to tatters, a record player audible only at its loudest setting, and—most of all—the stillness of a house finally emptied of children. Residence at the co-op would entail new neighbors, a new schedule, and all the trappings of communal living, so Eva demurs. Party to her protest are the very same household implements which figured in David's appeal. She runs the offending vacuum. She stands over the sink and scrubs the dirty dishes. She's too exhausted to move to the [End Page 883] Haven, and she says so by turning away from her husband's desires, toward the very same tasks that have been exhausting her for years. My interest in Tillie Olsen's novella about David and Eva, titled, Tell Me a Riddle, has to do with Eva's contradictory refusal: though she makes it quite clear that she is aggrieved by the overlapping burdens of being a mother, homemaker, and wife, she resolves to remain in her family house and attached to the various discomforts of being there. Even when presented with the option to leave, Eva doubles down on the place that's made her miserable. I will refer later in this article to a transformation in Eva's demeanor that occurs over the course of the narrative: in brief, when Eva does finally quit her domestic routine, h","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Imoinda's Rebellion: Sovereignty, Slavery, and the Ancient Constitution in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko","authors":"Sarah Marsh","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907204","url":null,"abstract":"Imoinda's RebellionSovereignty, Slavery, and the Ancient Constitution in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko Sarah Marsh Indeed, the attribution of divinity to the king had probably always been motivated in some measure by the desire to limit him to actions becoming a god. —Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America Oroonoko was no sooner return'd from his last Conquest, and receiv'd at Court … like a Deity, when there arriv'd in the Port an English Ship. —Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave1 In her 1688 novel, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, Aphra Behn writes of an African divine-right prince and his wife, Imoinda, who die as insurrectionists instead of living as slaves in English colonial Surinam. These characters' heroic lives and tragic deaths have led readers to study Oroonoko's transoceanic dynamics between a contested, divine-right monarchy in Stuart England and the development of chattel, racial slavery in its colonies. The consensus on this aspect of the novel remains best summarized by Laura Brown's 1987 insight that \"both Charles I and Oroonoko are victims of the same historical phenomenon—those new forces in English society loosely associated with an antiabsolutist mercantile imperialism.\"2 Charles I and Oroonoko are similar, that is, because they are overthrown by anti-monarchical proponents of England's commercial empire. This consensus arises from scholars' appraisal of Oroonoko's execution by English slavocrats at the end of the novel, which bears unmistakable likeness to the regicide of 1649. Abrupt and brutal, this scene is the fulcrum on which critical attention to sovereignty, [End Page 639] slavery, and race in Oroonoko turns.3 Scholars' focus on the execution is noteworthy because, while spectacular, the event occupies just three paragraphs of the story. By contrast, the slave rebellion in Oroonoko—which also dramatizes the relation of sovereignty, slavery, and race—is typically noticed only in passing.4 And yet: this rebellion consumes the attention of Oroonoko's narrator and directs the novel's plot. Imoinda's justification for the rebellion, a moral claim in herself against sovereign and slaveholding tyranny, coordinates the novel's dual episodes in Coramantien and Surinam. Both the rebellion and its suppression are framed by a racializing vocabulary through which Africans, regardless of social rank, are animalized into chattels along the color line. Imoinda, consort to the Coramantee heir apparent Oroonoko, rebels to stop her family's chattelization by the English; in turn, the English retrench in the colony by animalizing Oroonoko. The rebellion's nuances disclose the power dynamics of sovereignty, slavery, and race in much greater detail than can be understood through Oroonoko's execution alone. This essay's fundamental claim is that the slave rebellion in Oroonoko is a comprehensive study of how anti-tyrannicism, exemplified by Imoinda, collapses under the evolving colonial p","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Who Could say now with What Passion?\": Reimagining Henry James and \"The Beast in the Jungle\"","authors":"Christopher Stuart","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907210","url":null,"abstract":"\"Who Could say now with What Passion?\"Reimagining Henry James and \"The Beast in the Jungle\" Christopher Stuart In her widely influential book Epistemology of the Closet (1990) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick imagines Henry James as a thoroughly repressed, self-blind Edwardian bachelor whose unconscious efforts to disguise his homosexual desires are precisely what reveal them in his fiction, at least to the contemporary reader willing to look beyond the dominant culture's pervasive homophobia. Examining one of James's best-known stories, \"The Beast in the Jungle\" (1903), Sedgwick discovers a meaningful pattern of \"perephrasis and preterition\" necessitated, she claims, by an Edwardian culture so universally and suffocatingly homophobic as to render same-sex desire \"Unspeakable.\"1 Where most earlier interpreters accepted the story's ending as sincere––John Marcher collapsing in despair over his discovery that he should have loved May Bartram––Sedgwick interprets the final paragraphs' emphatic rhetoric as the starkest example of James's capitulation to compulsory heterosexuality. This interpretation has gained such wide acceptance that, as Michael Anesko recently put it, the story has come to seem \"a virtual parable about closeted queer identity.\"2 Of course, Sedgwick's work did much more to redirect the current of James studies than merely establish a new standard reading of a single canonical story. Her deconstructive method for revealing taboo desires within the gaps and ellipses of James's works unleashed a torrent of critical reevaluation, ensuring that James studies would never again be contained within the conventional channels carved out by mid-20th-century scholars. As readers of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1883) know, however, such powerful streams are unpredictable and treacherous creatures. They erode and reshape their own banks, hide deadly snags, and, in the case of tidal bores, they can even reverse course suddenly and flow upstream. This last is something like what has happened with Sedgwick's account of James and the \"The [End Page 827] Beast in the Jungle.\" Although her argument relied upon little biographical evidence beyond the broad assertion that James \"made erotic choices that were complicated enough\" to make him \"an emboldening figure for a literary discussion of male homosexual panic,\" the critical outpouring her thesis unleashed developed a natural tributary of biographical investigation exploring the precise nature of James's relationships with other men.3 The work of James biographers like Paul Fisher and Michael Gorra, and especially the continued archival investigations of Anesko, have provided James scholars with a more detailed and nuanced picture of James and his queer milieu at the turn of the century. The portrait that emerges from their work points back to what Leon Edel already more than implied in his revised 1985 biography, which is that by the time James composed \"The Beast in the Jungle\" in the autumn of 1902 ","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Gardens of Decay\": Decomposing Nature in Frederick Goddard Tuckerman's American Sonnets","authors":"Zoë Pollak","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907209","url":null,"abstract":"\"Gardens of Decay\"Decomposing Nature in Frederick Goddard Tuckerman's American Sonnets Zoë Pollak Yet in such waste, no waste the soul descries …For whoso waiteth, long & patiently,Will see a movement stirring at his feet —Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Sonnet V:II1 i. wasted aesthetics One of the most gnomic moments in Ecclesiastes occurs at its end, when the book's final poem aligns the waning of life with a series of collapsing forms. Recall the Creator before your own frame fails, the speaker implores, foretelling the day when \"the keepers of the house shall tremble\" and \"the daughters of musick shall be brought low,\" the \"silver cord\" will \"be loosed\" and the \"golden bowl\" will \"be broken,\" and dust shall return to the earth.2 Within this catalogue of degeneration, Ecclesiastes presents an image of a grasshopper that \"shall be a burden\" as our \"years draw nigh.\"3 What makes this grasshopper distressing to behold as we consider our mortality? Does its body pose an encumbrance to itself as it ages, or does its hardy exoskeleton and plague-worthy numbers underscore our human frailty by contrast? Over two thousand years after these lines were written, a Massachusetts poet steeped in Ecclesiastes invoked an equally enigmatic grasshopper to portray decline across species. In Frederick Goddard Tuckerman's Civil War-era sonnet, the speaker recalls his childhood \"when, our schoolday done,\" he \"hunted\" for insects in late fall and found only the dregs of the season: \"Tatter'd & dim, the last red butterfly\" and \"the old grasshopper molasses-mouth'd\" (SP, III:IV, 120). Tuckerman's images, poignant in their ability to evoke color and sweetness amidst autumn's senescence, comprise the sonnet's final lines. But while they gesture toward ebbing, these last phrases are [End Page 799] disarmingly open-ended. The evocatively euphemistic \"molasses-mouth'd\" refers to survival: namely, to the brown regurgitations grasshoppers produce to defend themselves against predators. How many modernist or contemporary sonnets, let alone sonnets written in the nineteenth century, conclude abruptly on depictions of vomit? To end a sonnet on a subject as unpalatable as biological waste without providing readers with any kind of tempering allegorical framework was unprecedented in Tuckerman's day. Yet his five-part series, the first two of which he self-published in an 1860 volume called Poems, abounds with sonsnets that begin with metaphysical abstractions and psychic dilemmas and stop unexpectedly on images of effluvia, spoilage, and decay. One sonnet, for example, starts with the speaker recounting the way he walks along the shore to face the \"restless phantoms of my restless mind,\" and leaves off with a description of a \"desolate rock with lichen rusted over, / Hoar with salt sleet, & chalkings of the birds\" (SP, III:X, 123). Another sonnet muses on how \"old associations\" between lovers \"rarely slip,\" and ends suggestively on a masticated stem of grass \"not to be put back, / ","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Addison's Classical Criticism and the Origins of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics","authors":"Paul Davis","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907206","url":null,"abstract":"Addison's Classical Criticism and the Origins of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics Paul Davis Joseph Addison's fame as a critic—like his literary reputation in general—rests on The Spectator. In particular, his series of Spectator papers on \"The Pleasures of the Imagination\" (June-July 1712) is widely recognised as marking the epochal transition from the author-centered neoclassical poetics of England's Augustan age to the new reader-centered, psychological mode of eighteenth-century aesthetics. But long before he became Mr. Spectator, during the first phase of his literary career as a scholar-poet at Oxford in the 1690s, Addison produced two substantial critical works about classical poets: \"An Essay on the Georgics,\" prefixed to the translation of the poem in John Dryden's complete Works of Virgil (1697); and what I'll refer to as his \"Notes on Ovid,\" notes Addison appended to his translations from Books II and III of the Metamorphoses published in the fifth instalment of Jacob Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies (1704). These works were much admired in Addison's lifetime and for generations afterwards: Samuel Johnson found in the Ovid notes \"specimens of criticism sufficiently refined and subtle,\" while the \"Essay\" \"set the terms for discussion of georgic poetry for over a century.\"1 Today, though, they are little known, even to specialists in the period. What scholarly discussion they have received has sought to establish how far they anticipate Addison's later aesthetic principles. However, all these existing accounts are marred to a greater or lesser extent by mistakes and misconceptions about Addison's early career carried over from nineteenth-century sources. The first half of this article corrects these errors, particularly regarding the composition dates of the two works and the order in which they were written. The date usually given for the \"Essay\" is 1693 and for the \"Notes\" 1697. Drawing on a wealth of hitherto unreported evidence, I show that these dates are back to front: in fact, Addison wrote the \"Notes on Ovid\" in 1693–94 and the \"Essay on the Georgics\" in 1696–97. In the second half of the article, I use that revised chronology to offer a new account of the place of Addison's classical criticism [End Page 693] in his personal development as a critic and the history of criticism more generally around the turn of the eighteenth century. The five years from 1693 to 1697, often dismissed as the juvenile or student stage of Addison's career by commentators for whom everything he wrote before The Spectator is mere prelude, were in fact a richly productive and pivotal period in Addison's writing life, his heyday as a classical scholar-poet. Before 1693, he was indeed a novice writer, with only a couple of neo-Latin panegyrics to his name; but by 1697 he had produced all but one of his major classical translations, which won the respect of Dryden, and the set of eight boldly innovative neo-Latin imitations of Virgil and Horace which made his n","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"T. S. Eliot and the Problem of the Archive","authors":"Nicholas Smart","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907211","url":null,"abstract":"T. S. Eliot and the Problem of the Archive Nicholas Smart The final section of T. S. Eliot's early series \"Goldfish (Essence of Summer Magazines)\" has been read as the student poet packing away mementoes from his summer vacation before embarking on his year abroad in Paris: Among the débris of the yearOf which the autumn takes its toll: –Old letters, programmes, unpaid billsPhotographs, tennis shoes, and more,Ties, postal cards, the mass that fillsThe limbo of a bureau drawer –Of which October takes its tollAmong the débris of the yearI find this headed \"Bacarolle.\" (iv, 1–9)1 In his recent study of the poems in the Inventions of the March Hare notebook, Jayme Stayer observes a key moment of personal transition at work here: \"While the speaker sifts the contents of a bureau drawer, the poem registers a more existential cleaning out.\"2 The poem's phrasing catches us off guard; these are not items \"on which the autumn takes its toll,\" as the idiom might lead us to assume, but \"of which.\" The preposition strikes us as curious, working to complicate our understanding of these objects which now appear as a form of payment, facilitating the speaker's progression beyond \"October\" and into the next stage of life. In Charles Baudelaire's \"Spleen,\" which Christopher Ricks offers as a precursor to this passage, the débris represents concealed information; the drawer \"cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau.\"3 But Eliot makes it more ambiguous. In \"Goldfish,\" the \"limbo\" is associated not only with the potential revelation of secrets, but with the uncertain ontological status of the objects themselves. The bureau drawer encompasses different frames of time; some items belong to the past, \"Old letters, programmes,\" \"photographs,\" and \"postal cards,\" some may have future use, \"unpaid bills,\" \"tennis shoes,\" \"ties,\" [End Page 851] and yet their collected presence in the drawer also situates them in a subjunctive space. As long as the drawer remains closed, the objects are positioned out of time, waiting for the opportunity to emerge from their transactional \"limbo.\" The \"limbo of the bureau drawer\" is, for Eliot, a theoretical space, but for those who collected his \"débris\" it was a highly practical term. Informing Donald Gallup that he had acquired two letters from his brother in which he and Pound discussed whether to prefix The Waste Land with \"Gerontion,\" Henry Eliot conceded that \"EP's letter is so peppered with obscene phrases that it won't do for general exhibition.\"4 In his role as curator of the Eliot Collection then at Eliot House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Henry looked for a way around: \"TSE prohibited its inclusion in the Collection; but I think some kind of limbo might be instituted for such items.\"5 Since Eliot's death, many of his archives have been plagued by this kind of limbo, with scholars forced to wait out decades-long embargoes and restrictions imposed on access and quotation. In the initial gifting of copies and drafts of his work","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Print Elegies, Henry Vaughan, and the Everyday Deaths of War","authors":"Catharine Gray","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907203","url":null,"abstract":"Print Elegies, Henry Vaughan, and the Everyday Deaths of War Catharine Gray Can you scale up grief? How do you mourn the ongoing, the escalating? While these kinds of questions about the scale and pace of mourning haunt many moments of historical crisis, including our own, they were particularly pressing for writers of the British Civil Wars faced with the proliferating mortality and bloody, youthful deaths of combat. These writers and their readers, living through waves of famine and disease, were accustomed to death, but the wars that shook England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales between 1638–51 put pressure on traditional cultures of mourning and literatures of grief, as the visibility of military men, framed as eminently grievable by honor codes and political polemic, collided with the sheer numbers and pace of deaths. This pace, which exacerbated already-existing mortality rates, was in turn compounded by the periodical print journalism that developed in large part to report the wars—their political divisions, as other scholars have long argued, but also their widespread material damage. If seventeenth-century news offered \"an extreme example\" of \"information overload,\" as Joad Raymond recently suggests, then this overload took a particularly bellicose form, including information about war deaths whose fast-paced accumulations threatened to undercut the heroic singularity of martial exemplarity and raised questions about the relations of immediacy to historical commemoration, of accelerated cycles of news to fixity of meaning and consolation.1 This essay turns to a range of seventeenth-century published war elegies that struggle to mourn death, to keep up with the high mortality rates and their dissemination in the onslaught of events characterizing the war news of their moment. For some of these poets, producing broadside and pamphlet elegies in the midst of the wars, this struggle means adapting techniques of information management and journalistic formats to produce metonymies and congeries of combat mortality that make each death one in a repeatable series of current events. Others, such as Henry [End Page 609] Vaughan in his 1646 \"An Elegie on the death of Mr. R. W.,\" play on the mixed media of memorialization—on tombs and monuments, whether of stone or paper—to develop emblems of poetic repetition and fleetingness, dailiness and decay. In doing so, all these elegists undercut the widespread understandings of elegy at the time as, as Andrea Brady puts it, building \"paper monuments\" that, outlasting the mere matter of bodies and marble memorials, offered durable memory of the dead alongside understanding and closure for the mourners.2 As they negotiate the tense relations between received understandings of elegy and new experiences and media, these multiple poets do not so much produce artifices of eternity as develop a presentist, even journalistic, poetic, as they use war deaths to index the everyday deaths of wartime and thus help figur","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Form, History, and the Politics of Lyric in Shelley's \"ode to the west Wind\"","authors":"Eric Tyler Powell","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907207","url":null,"abstract":"Form, History, and the Politics of Lyric in Shelley's \"ode to the west Wind\" Eric Tyler Powell \"In considering the political events of the day I endeavour to divest my mind of temporary sensations, to consider them as already historical. This is difficult.\" –Percy Bysshe Shelley1 Percy Bysshe Shelley's \"Ode to the West Wind\" has been simultaneously one of the most influential and controversial lyric poems in the English-language canon. It has often been taken as paradigmatic, not only of Shelley's \"genius\" and value as a poet, but of Romanticism and of lyric poetry as a genre.2 This reception history is coextensive with what M. H. Abrams called a \"reorientation\" of criticism—originating with the Romantics—inverting the traditional hierarchy of poetic genres inherited from Aristotle and elevating lyric poetry as the most essentially poetic of genres.3 In recent years, this reorientation has been powerfully and usefully reconsidered through the lens of historical poetics, in particular, the concepts of \"lyricization\" and \"lyric reading,\" introduced by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, through which the invention of the lyric as genre in the nineteenth century came to replace a variety of poetic forms and social functions.4 Shelley has continued to figure prominently in critical debates surrounding theories of lyric poetry, much as he figured prominently in such debates in his own time, and among the modernists and New Critics. The concept of lyric reading, I argue, is a powerful tool to reconsider Shelley's famous ode. The protocol of lyric reading is well-known: there is a speaker of the poem, who should not be confused with the poet; the dramatic situation of the speech act must be gleaned as context for interpretation and analysis; the poem itself should be the focus of interpretation, without considering the biography or intentions of the poet; historical context is only relevant insofar as it is \"in\" the poem itself. This conception of the lyric as a [End Page 723] single genre, with a defined set of rules for reading, hand in hand with expressivist theories of Romanticism, have led to a neglect of Shelley's own historical poetics as developed in his late works—in poetry and critical prose—and of the formal complexity of the \"Ode to the West Wind\" in particular.5 Foregrounding Shelley's historical poetics—the view that poetic forms have historical specificity and varying social functions as part of diverse cultures of circulation—is part of the burden of this essay. Part of what makes Shelley's Ode an interesting case for historical poetics, aside from its status as an exemplar of lyric, is that the poem is concerned with its own circulation. As an ultraradical in an era of extreme political reaction and censorship, Shelley was forced from the very start of his career as an author to consider questions of publication, circulation, and the materiality of text.6 The question of circulation is also central to contemporary debates about the lyric ","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fops Vs Tops: Character and Attention in the Country Wife","authors":"Eve Houghton","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.a907205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a907205","url":null,"abstract":"Fops Vs TopsCharacter and Attention in the Country Wife Eve Houghton When Sparkish first appears on stage in William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), everyone expects a bad performance. According to his friends, Horner, Harcourt, and Dorilant, he is \"one of those nauseous offerers at wit\" whose attempts to be funny can immediately ruin the mood: \"No, the rogue will not let us enjoy one another, but ravishes our conversation, though he signifies no more to't than Sir Martin Mar-all's gaping and awkward thrumming upon the lute does to his man's voice and music.\"1 The other men do not appreciate his belabored and unfunny jokes; in response to their silence, even Sparkish admits that \"it does not move you, methinks\" (1.1.356-357). On the one hand, this chilly reception from the other characters on stage confirms Harcourt's initial claim—that Sparkish does not \"signifie,\" that he is a minor and ultimately irrelevant presence in the world of gentlemanly conversation. On the other hand, the staging of Sparkish's first appearance could give precisely the opposite impression, building excitement about the entrance of a character who was crucial to audience pleasure. After all, when the other men compare Sparkish to Sir Martin Mar-All, a bumbling and socially awkward aristocrat from John Dryden's popular 1667 comedy, they are encouraging Restoration audiences to associate him with a comic performance that was both conspicuously embarrassing and famously enjoyable.2 In that light, Horner's announcement that Sparkish is \"the greatest fop, dullest ass and worst company, as you shall see\" is a warning and an enticement, cueing Wycherley's audience to an impending social disaster: \"for here he comes\" (1.1.316-317). The scene's conflicting signals point us to the peculiar status of the fop on the Restoration stage, as a figure who reliably failed in his bids for recognition by other characters while capturing the interest and affections of the audience.3On the page they may seem merely laughable, but in performance, fops like Sparkish could upend and reconfigure the distribution of attention between minor parts and leading roles—or, as one Restoration commentator put it, between [End Page 667] fop characters and \"Top Characters.\"4 In their tortured, tortuous, and often time-consuming bids for regard, they remind us that, as Jonathan Crary has shown, attention is both etymologically and conceptually linked to ideas of tension, stretching, and waiting.5 Fops frequently arrest or stretch the focus of the audience—by arriving at unexpected times, by straining against the norms of conduct shared by other characters, or by otherwise capturing audience interest and turning it in unexpected directions—and the performers who embodied them onstage possessed a similarly unpredictable force.6 How much and in what ways does Sparkish signify to the conversation between these men? For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her influential queer reading of Wycherley's play, the answer i","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135428618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}