ELHPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0011
E. Wade
{"title":"Skeletons in the Closet: Scholarly Erasure of Queer and Trans Themes in Early Medieval English Texts","authors":"E. Wade","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Early medieval English studies has dealt with queer and trans themes in their source material in different ways over the last two hundred years. This article argues that the common narrative—that scholarship has become more accepting of such themes in recent years—is only partially correct. Examining the scholarship produced since the mid-nineteenth century, this article argues that, while early scholars considered the presence of references to same-sex desire in medieval texts unsurprising, later scholars discounted such references. The rise of New Historicism leads to a concurrent rise of scholarship arguing that pointing to the presence of same-sex desire or gender non-conformity in medieval texts was anachronistic and that even explicit references to it in medieval texts did not reflect historical reality. Such scholarly narratives are, as this article argues, part of a scholarly investment in an idea of white Anglo-Saxon masculinity that itself has shifted from Victorian condemnation of the early English as crude to a late twentieth-century investment in protecting their masculinity from connotations of effeminacy.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"134 1","pages":"281 - 316"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74546903","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}
ELHPub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0007
Atti Viragh
{"title":"\"The Keener Touch\": Walter Pater and the Hermeneutic Scene of Contact","authors":"Atti Viragh","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article situates Walter Pater's thought within the broader philosophical inquiry of his generation into the fundamental nature of experience. Across his works, Pater sets forth an original theory of intersubjectivity grounded in close analysis of emblematic \"scenes of contact\" in the sphere of art. His concepts of \"touch,\" \"impress,\" and the \"scene of human experience\" show how the artwork participates in broader relationships that make social existence possible. The affinity of these concepts to Wilhelm Dilthey's contemporaneous theories of lived experience, expression and understanding shows Pater's participation in an emerging intellectual paradigm. Taken together, these readings offer an alternative to accounts of Pater as a materialist, an impressionist, or a hedonist.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"110 1","pages":"185 - 213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82334786","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}
ELHPub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0005
S. Hughes
{"title":"George Eliot, Typology, and the Moral Psychology of Historicism","authors":"S. Hughes","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Where several recent critics have shown how George Eliot's conception of sympathy is informed by her historicism, this article analyzes her investment in the moral psychology of historicism itself, the structures of motivation and consolation needed to accommodate the rigors of seeing oneself as historically situated. To draw out her thinking on the moral psychology of historicism, I examine her characters' frequent recourse to typology, their tendency to interpret themselves and each other as repetitions of earlier historical figures. I argue that typology becomes a crucial supplement to sympathy in her ethical thinking and ultimately transforms it in Daniel Deronda.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"29 1","pages":"137 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87441022","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}
ELHPub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0008
Ichiro Takayoshi
{"title":"Art and the Poor","authors":"Ichiro Takayoshi","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Can the poor make art? Can they appreciate it? What is the point of asking if economic inequality has any aesthetic consequences? The present article argues that in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Walker Evans and James Agee ask and answer these questions and in the process develop three contradictory accounts (economism, populism, and existential fatalism). While my analysis shows that all findings about the poor's relation to art are by necessity contingent because aesthetic categories themselves are contingent, it also raises the possibility that the main effect of morally serious inquiries into the aesthetic lives of the poor is not so much to make factual determinations on aesthetic consequences of poverty as to give creative vent to the inquirer's unease about the difficulty of class reconciliation in a divided society. The economically privileged can certainly articulate their relation to the poor in purely economic terms, but Famous Men strongly suggests that the aesthetic approach that deforms the economic problem of poverty into the problem of art is far superior in the range, variety, and subtlety of feelings it allows them to express.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"119 1","pages":"215 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80335376","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}
ELHPub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0003
A. Zimmern
{"title":"Silkworms and Panaceas: Margaret Cavendish, Infinite Nature, and the Progress of Utopia","authors":"A. Zimmern","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Panaceas and philosopher's stones were, in late seventeenth-century Europe, the holy grails of medical progress. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-1674) rejected her contemporaries' obsession with cure-alls but, armed with the conviction that fiction is the more pleasant and the more rigorous part of natural philosophy, she conjectured wildly about natural rejuvenation. In the fancies adjoined to her mature philosophical treatises, she adapts recent findings by William Harvey and Virginia Ferrar about the reproductive cycle of silkworms to imagine a natural gum that restores centenarians to youth and \"Restoring Beds, or Wombs\" at the center of the world. In so doing, Cavendish stakes out an unpopular position: Nature will not cure all our diseases but, if we wait for it, it may usher in the medical progress and sought-after eternal youth that human artifice never shall achieve. Her conjectures of all-natural remedies ground, I argue, a massive redefinition of utopian writing. Revising a genre that delights in the progress and dominion of techne, Cavendish invites readers to join her in celebrating the unfathomable potency of Nature, not by testing what seems reasonable but by conjecturing what by all accounts should appear impossible","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"75 1","pages":"113 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73558429","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}
ELHPub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0000
T. C. Sawyer
{"title":"Bookish Brains and Visionary Learning in the Apocalypsis goliae episcopi","authors":"T. C. Sawyer","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Through a close examination of the Apocalypsis goliae episcopi (\"The revelation of bishop Goliath\"), this essay explores the limitations of human cognition in recording visionary experience. Scholars frequently look to visionary texts for imaginative reflections on the written conditions of memory and identity that characterize the fundamentally bookish cultures of the late Middle Ages. The Apocalypsis obsessively describes acts of inscription, announcing throughout its narrative an interest in the complex relationships that emerge between and among books, texts, authors, and readers. Turning on a provocative memorial metaphor--when the dreamer's angelic guide inscribes a record of the vision onto the physical matter of the dreamer's brain--the poem both performs and discloses a bifurcation central to all reading experience. At once parodic and sincere, the Apocalypsis suggests that the experience it describes, as with all visionary experience, is constituted by someone other than the dreamer of the dream.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"30 1","pages":"1 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80559162","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}
ELHPub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0001
J. Crawford
{"title":"George Herbert's Outlandish Wisdom","authors":"J. Crawford","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:George Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs has never been regarded as part of his literary corpus. The work is not a composition but a collection, an assemblage of proverbs translated mainly from French, Italian, and Spanish originals. These proverbs come with no front matter, commentary, or other signs of an authorial persona, and the small body of scholarship that has addressed Herbert's book of wisdom has treated it as raw material, a source or analogue for passages in his other works. But the Outlandish Proverbs can also be read otherwise. This essay claims that Herbert's translations, in the Proverbs, are pointedly enigmatic and ironic, distinctive compositions in their own right; that Herbert's practices as a translator reflect his collection's persistent concern with obscurity and apocalyptic disclosure; that the distinctive forms and concerns of Herbert's proverbs align not with the main bodies of early modern proverbial wisdom but with other discourses, older and stranger; and that these older discourses are vital not only to Herbert's proverbs but also to his poetry. The proverbs therefore raise fresh questions about Herbert's relationship with a literary past, and about the emerging literary modernity in light of which both his proverbs and his poetry must be understood.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"74 1","pages":"33 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79700597","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}
ELHPub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0006
Karen Bourrier, Kelly Hager
{"title":"How Many Siblings Had Philip Pirrip?: Counting Brothers and Sisters in the Victorian Novel","authors":"Karen Bourrier, Kelly Hager","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this paper, following a midrange methodology that combines insights from narrative theory with human and machine reading, we gather data from fifty domestic realist novels. We find that while the average mid-Victorian family hovered just below six children, the average family in the Victorian novel has 2.8 children, and more than a third are only children. Novelists responded to the demands of the narrative when constructing their sibling sets: certain quantities and gender configurations of siblings are wrought from formal necessity. We identify several patterns stemming from our data in the composition of the novelistic Victorian sibling set, including orphans, heiresses, brother-sister pairings, and the long family as a joke. We find that the Victorian novel's focus on lineage leads novelists to prune the long families of history quite aggressively, representing them vaguely if at all. We conclude by offering our methodology, which relies on a combination of minimal computing and close reading, as an example and provocation to scholars seeking to embark on more empirical projects, and to see familiar texts anew.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"7 1","pages":"159 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79958694","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}
ELHPub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0002
Vanita Neelakanta
{"title":"Paradise Lost Under Heaven: Milton's Surveillance Society","authors":"Vanita Neelakanta","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:There is a curious imbrication of two distinctive ocular matrices in Paradise Lost: the omniscient spectator-deity of theatrum mundi (\"world as stage\") whose eye surveys all action, and a network of angelic surveillance that is fallible and inefficient when compared with the divine gaze. Such conjoining has an insidious effect on the fallen angels and the humans in the poem, who tragically tailor their actions to suit (or hoodwink) the guards and surveillants rather than their panoptic God. The result is a disquieting examination of paranoia, duplicity, and the radical failure of both angelic surveillance and heavenly witness.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"73 1","pages":"63 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80246672","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}
ELHPub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1353/elh.2022.0004
Brianna Beehler
{"title":"Charlotte Brontë's Paper Dolls","authors":"Brianna Beehler","doi":"10.1353/elh.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the nineteenth century, dolls were powerful emblems of mourning practices, teaching children how to perform the rites of grief, death, and burial. However, nineteenth-century children found that burial brought about equal promises of reanimation (a doll that is buried can be dug up again). The possible reversibility of doll burial (and thus death) became a source of narrative potential for the Brontës, who used toy soldiers to create fictions that reversed death. For Charlotte Brontë, this play spanned from her early writing to her novel Shirley, which she writes to bring her sisters back from the dead.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"87 1","pages":"115 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72722676","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}