Literature

This chapter examines Miles Smith’s King James Bible preface, ‘The Translators to the Reader’, excavating the polemical, hermeneutic, and literary contexts that frame the preface and determine its rhetoric, style, and tone. Smith’s preface took shape in response to successive installments of the Catholic Douai-Rheims translation and the Sistine Vulgate of 1590, and drew on classic Protestant principles of argument and exegesis. At stake in these debates was the question of a textual and doctrinal return ad fontes, as both Reformed and Roman polemicists claimed the authority of the early church for their cause. In a detailed examination of the paratexts of the Rheims New Testament and the King James Bible, a compelling case study of the debates surrounding reform and interpretation is provided.

A bold, imaginative work, The Star Rover demonstrates Jack London’s inventive approach to the social-protest genre. London mixes in the typical problem-novel ingredients: gritty, realistic details; sympathetic, downtrodden victims; greedy capitalist villains and their muscle-headed henchmen; brisk, often violent, action; outraged invective; individual and collective resistance; and radical action for precipitating change. But, in the process of exposing conditions within American prisons, London deviates sharply and creatively in The Star Rover—not only from the conventions of protest writing but also from the type of writing that normally assured him of good sales and positive reviews.

This chapter explores the inaugural moment for the English Reformation, and for the rendering of the scriptures in English within a national church. In May 1530, Henry VIII began to suggest that it was his duty to cause the New Testament to be translated into English for his subjects, marking a hesitant and reluctant shift towards a possible translation of the Bible. The King’s suggestion was met with opposition from senior churchmen on the one hand, and frustration by English evangelicals on the other, and Henry subsequently imposed legislation that limited Bible reading. This chapter examines the complex issues involved in the protocols that governed how scripture was disseminated to the laity.

This chapter deals with the largely neglected field of political Hebraism. Biblical citations are ubiquitous in virtually all political discussion in the seventeenth century, yet the political uses of Hebraic scholarship have been more or less absent from scholarship until recent years. The post-Reformation era, with its emphasis on sola scriptura, placed the Bible squarely in the centre of culture. One of the main issues for early modern political theorists was whether God approved or disapproved of a monarchy, based on their interpretation of Deuteronomy 17 and I Samuel 8. This chapter discusses the influence of political Hebraism on some influential seventeenth-century thinkers in England and argues that the Bible played an influential role in the formation of early modern political thought in the West as transmitted through the idea of the rebirth of the Hebrew Republic.

The divorce tracts, which consist of four prose pamphlets published between August 1643 and March 1645, represent a significant and underappreciated development in John Milton's theorizing of liberty. His arguments raise issues not only of family harmony, but also of political commitment. This article explores the emotional and political breakthroughs and sunderings visible in, and prompted by, these texts. Milton's tracts became the centre of a storm of anti-sectarianism, and were held up for ridicule as a harbinger of anarchy. They also engaged the stricken political realm. In recontextualizing Milton's divorce writings, the article places his analysis of irremediable difference, both on a personal and political level, in relation to the practical political work of the day. It also helps to explain the larger, both more local and more philosophical, significance of Milton's analogy between the marriage contract and the contract of civil obedience to the magistrate.

The sketch of prosodic theory presented in this article helps to clarify how the blank verse of Paradise Lost is virtually a new beginning and transmits a quite un-Shakespearean energy. Prosodic analysis shows that John Milton ranges freely within his chosen limits: there is no iambic jog-trot, and the rhythms are endlessly varied. The verse of Paradise Lost is distinguished by the sustained length of its sentences, which are on average about ten lines long, despite the frequent use of short sentences for rhetorical effect. Its blank verse is a deliberate and distinctive creation, influenced by but antithetical to late Shakespeare, through working within a strict discipline. Prosody and syntax are almost inseparable in effect in Paradise Lost.

This article examines the concept of cognitive environment in relation to ecocriticism. It discusses Gaston Bachelard’s analysis, in his The Poetics of Space, of historian Jules Michelet’s work depicting the building of a bird’s nest. It suggests that the corporeal act of nest-building may then be argued to imply the continuity of an organism and its environment and that the notion of enclosure is built into any ecology or Thoreavian economy.

In the 1990s, ceasefires were adopted in Ireland, followed in 2007 by the institution of devolved government at Stormont. With the Troubles now gone, the country has experienced a dramatic growth in tourism. Goodwill is everywhere, as is ‘progress’. Poetry now crowns the dome of one of Ireland's largest and plushest shopping malls. This chapter explores whether Belfast has stopped posing more problems than it offers solutions, and how the poets now coming of age will define themselves and their role, particularly in relation to the city. It focuses on the work of three poets – Leontia Flynn, Sinéad Morrissey, and Alan Gillis – all of whom wrestle with the problem of representing and interrogating their ‘own moment in history’. The chapter argues that, perhaps contrary to expectation, the peace context renders identity in Northern Irish poetry more, rather than less, problematic.

John Milton put A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle in the middle of his authorial identity when he announced that he was an important writer. A Maske has often been linked with Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess was one of Milton's favourite plays and reading it can feel like a phantasmagoric encounter with Milton's Maske. The points of intersection between Coelum Britannicum and A Maske show the difference between the sceptical courtier and the romantic humanist. A Maske is the crucial nexus of Milton's two great English influences: Spenser's pastoral romance and Shakespeare's richly human drama. The most fascinating feature of the masque is the Lady. The masque's reversion to a conventional deus ex machina (Sabrina, or, if necessary, Heaven) only underscores retrospectively the boldness of Milton's most original creation in A Maske, a real woman acting nobly in the world.

The Irish national theatre movement developed in the ferment of cultural nationalism at the turn of the century, but it was not at all clear what form a national theatre should take: an Ibsenian model of critical realism, favoured by Edward Martyn, George Moore, and John Eglinton, the mythological poetic drama of Yeats, or the peasant plays that came to be written by Yeats and Gregory. Apart from the playwrights, the company of actors formed around the Fay brothers, nationalist groups such as Maud Gonne’s Inghinidhe na hEireann, and the Abbey’s English patron Annie Horniman all had ideas of their own. This chapter analyses the national and theatrical politics of the period up to the death of Synge in 1909, paying particular attention to the ways in which debates of the period centred around the idea of an Irish theatre in ways that were to influence future generations.

The aesthetic principles of education and representation that Yeats and Gregory set out at the founding of the Abbey Theatre enabled the directorate to cultivate a relationship with the state that ensured the theatre’s place as the Irish National Theatre. Yet this was a relationship that demanded compromises on both sides—in the negotiation for a state subsidy, finally granted in 1925, in issues of censorship over controversial plays such as The Plough and the Stars in 1926, and in the uneasy relationship with the Fianna Fáil government that came to power in 1932. Even so, at least during Yeats’s lifetime, the Abbey directors were able to resist the complete ideological co-option of the theatre, and any compromises to artistic freedom were made willingly in order to ensure the continued alliance of the theatre and the state.

This article focuses on the Ranters, who have been described as ‘forming the extreme left wing of the sects’, both theologically and politically. Combining a ‘pantheistic mysticism and a crudely plebeian materialism’ with a ‘deep concern for the poor’ and a ‘primitive biblical communism’, the ‘Ranter Movement’ spectacularly manifested itself in late 1649, peaked the next year, and then splintered under the hammer of ‘savage repression’ Special attention is given to Abiezer Coppe (1619–72?), whom some contemporaries regarded as a fiery sectarian preacher turned diabolically possessed mad libertine. So blackened was Coppe's name that in the late eighteenth century he was still remembered as one of the wildest enthusiasts of a fanatical age. Nineteenth-century critics concurred with this verdict, calling Coppe a ‘strange enthusiast’ and the ‘great Ranter’.

This article examines the relationship between literary critical practice and human rights, and describes the present uses of literary criticism. It analyzes an example of abolitionism and activism as it was conceived and practiced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and William Lloyd Garrison. The article evaluates how our understanding of texts and issues today can be informed by our analysis and understanding of the myths and metaphors of who we are that we have inherited from earlier literatures and movements.

This article discusses the satires of Samuel Butler, Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden. All three authors convey a strongly satirical take on the volatile Zeitgeist — its mood of damaged and shaky authority — but their modes of rejection are politically and stylistically distinct. Butler tends toward a poetics of the absurd that drains recent events of larger meaning. Marvell's satirical processing of historical reversals emphasizes a piquant element of the perverse. Dryden favours a counterpoint of the grotesque and baroque. Each of the three satirists tends to pit the small and the domestic against the overblown. All three reject what they see as brainless attitudes toward recent history, narcotized manifestations of the oblivious, the forgetful, and the soothingly dull. There can be no question in their satires of merely rehabilitating the mystique of olden times. And though their satires reject present-day chaos, they do so by way of trying out newly domesticated and denaturalized configurations of authority.

This article examines the acquisition of wisdom through literary text in medieval England. The most famous collections of wisdom in the Middle Ages were found in two Old Testament books attributed to King Solomon, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes which contains aphorisms, often arranged around themes and at times profoundly enigmatic in style. Old English epic poems, including Beowulf to Geoffrey Chaucer's Miller's Tale, also offered the medieval reader a measure of common sense with which to understand the chaos of human existence. This article suggests that the unlettered were not ignorant of the traditional knowledge of their society because a store of wisdom was preserved and transmitted in memorable sayings, proverbs, and maxims.

This chapter examines the critical discourse on acting in early Chinese cinema, and particularly the ways in which the contrast of film acting with stage acting exemplified broader rhetorics of realism, modernity, and scientism in semicolonial China following the May Fourth Movement. An emphasis on realism and mimesis in cinema rather than the formalism and semiosis of traditional Chinese art forms was part of a broader contemporary interest in the idea of objective representation. At the same time, the close-up in particular was thought to demand a new style of “interior performance” in which character emotions were felt by the actor and conveyed through the eyes and face with the purpose of “moving” modern audiences with authenticity. Nonetheless, claims for the unique realism of the film medium must be viewed in light of the growing dominance of realism in all the arts, including theater.

This article examines what can be learned from nineteenth-century American literature regarding twenty-first-century citizenship. It investigates how the intellectual project of reading and interpreting American literature can prepare us for the deliberative work of democracy and what American literature tells us about this difficult relationship. The article explores how literature can be read politically, and describes the relevant works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown.

This article examines the debate over the vita activa versus the vita contemplativa in England across the late medieval and early modern periods. After considering the inversion of the traditional hierarchy of contemplative life over active life as the defining paradigm shift of modernity, it explains how contemplation and the contemplative enterprise offered a vocabulary and a conceptual framework for Francis Bacon’s sense of his own project. It also analyzes Margaret Cavendish’s appropriation of intellectual stances and methods associated with the contemplative life.

This chapter explores the ‘aesthetics of catastrophe’ that informs the stage experiments of the period, epitomized by Edward Gordon Craig’s essay-manifesto of 1909, ‘The Actor and the Übermarionette’, one of many anti-theatrical tracts of early modernist theatre whose aim, paradoxically, was to ‘retheatricalize’ an art form that many felt had been dulled by realism. Anti-theatrical stage experiments, frequently located within the physical, semantic/representational, and ideological contours of the performing body, were deeply influenced by puppets, masks, robots, and automata. These are the focus of Taxidou’s discussion as writing on puppets by Arthur Symons, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde are charted, in conjunction with the work of Heinrich von Kleist, Charles Baudelaire (on dolls), and the actual puppet theatres of France and Italy that were so influential at the end of the nineteenth century.

When Quince first meets his actors in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he tells them who they will be playing and a little about their fictional characters. He also distributes to the actors their ‘parts’, the pieces of paper on which their words are written. Walking away from the meeting, the actors take their paper parts with them for memorising at home: by the time they next gather together, each player must be word-perfect. So the players are going to learn from a text that is only ‘part’ of the play — an idea so strange to scholars that it is still regularly called into question. Passages in plays of the time referring to what is rehearsed often suggest that the verbal content of a play is not the emphasis of collective rehearsal; that a general rehearsal is largely intended to determine action that affects the group. Parts had their effect on the way a performance was watched. With parts informing so fundamentally the way actors performed and audiences watched, they must also have affected the way playwrights wrote.