Elizabeth Kraft is a scholar of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature. She is Professor Emerita of the University of Georgia and maintains an active research life in retirement.
The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of... more The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of comedy and innovation in the face of tradition, and they easily engage the twenty-first-century student with many aspects of eighteenth-century life: travel, inns, masquerades, political and religious factions, the '45, prisons and the legal system, gender ideals and realities, social class. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," discusses the available editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia; suggests useful critical and contextual works for teaching them; and recommends helpful audiovisual and electronic resources. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," demonstrate that many of the methods and models used for one novel-the romance tradition, Fielding's legal and journalistic writing, his techniques as a playwright, the ideas of Machiavelli-can be adapted to others.
university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 considered media of transmiss... more university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 considered media of transmission. By these faltering means, the messages passed back and forth. No wonder eighteenth-century people preferred to deal with relatives and clients, not independent strangers. The messages did not always travel well, especially at the margins among coureurs de bois and slaves, and not at all among Indians, to whom Banks gives little attention. We could simply say of the French colonies before 1763 that local officials and colonists looked to their own interests, that there was a lot of smuggling, and that the colonies were not sufficiently important to retain the attention they needed. Or we could accept Banks=s invitation to a new way of seeing. Either way, we may conclude that the vieilles colonies came into being, and mostly passed into history, well before adequate instruments of empire had been forged. I have only one quibble: the dozens of intratextual references to historians and ...
The Women's March on Washington in 2017, organized in protest of the 2016 election of the America... more The Women's March on Washington in 2017, organized in protest of the 2016 election of the American president Donald Trump, spawned a worldwide movement. Two years later, women in more than thirty countries participated in marches designed to draw attention to violence against women and economic austerities that disproportionately affect women's lives. In ever-increasing numbers, worldwide, women began to utilize all the resources at their command-political, technological, and cultural-to highlight inequities of gender, race, and class as well as global concerns such as the environment, climate change, immigration, etc. Women artists, from novelists and poets to filmmakers and songwriters/performers, devoted (and continue to devote) their talents to expressions of activism, protest, and calls for change. In many countries, prominent exposés of and legal actions against once-important male cultural icons resulted in prison sentences, dismissal from duty, public shaming, and calls for change in the various professions that allowed such behavior to occur without check-indeed, often with enablers and systemic support. The #MeToo movement bears witness to a growing determination to speak out about and demand reparation for wrongs too often endured, tolerated, or even celebrated in the past. All of this activity coincided with commemorations of an important milestone in the fight for women's equality in America, the 100th anniversary of the passage of the nineteenth amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote; therefore, it is no surprise that renewed commitment to the rights of women has been evident in the popular culture of the past four years. Two 2018 films based on the career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-a documentary entitled RBG and a feature-length dramatic recreation of her argument before the Supreme Court as a young lawyer entitled On the Basis of Sex-were particularly notable. And, significantly, both works solidly situated Ginsburg in the line of succession beginning with women of the Romantic era who were the first to demand social and legal reform. As we saw in both these films, Ginsburg ended her plea before the bench in the 1973 landmark sex discrimination case Frontiero v. Richardson with the words of nineteenth-century feminist Sarah Moore Grimké: "I ask no favor for my sex; all I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks" (Grimké 10). Recently, we have entered a new phase of worldwide protest, one centered more on racial injustice than on the specific concerns of women. In the Spring of 2020, due to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, the people of America and much of the world
The study of women Romantic poets has recently been enriched by two works-one an edition, one a c... more The study of women Romantic poets has recently been enriched by two works-one an edition, one a critical monograph-that speak not only to the vitality and significance of the individual poets but also to the way Romanticism itself has been remapped over the past forty or fifty years. These works build on the diligent work of scholars such as Harriet Linkin and William McCarthy, both credited with "singlehandedly" reviving interest, respectively, in Mary Tighe and Anna Letitia Barbauld (though in the latter case I seem to remember having lent a hand or two). Paula R. Feldman and Brian C. Cooney have produced what will long stand as the definitive edition of the poetry of Tighe. E. J. Clery has presented what will long stand as the definitive reading of the significance of the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a revisionist reading that calls conventional assumptions, beliefs, and interpretations into question. In a sense, both of these publications speak to endings that occurred at the close of the first decade of the nineteenth century. Mary Tighe died in 1810 at the age of thirty-seven. Her collected poetry was published the following year. And while Anna Letitia Barbauld would live until 1825, dying at the age of eighty-one, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven would be her final major poetic statement and would long be said (though erroneously) to be the poem that ended her career. But even with regard to the lives of the writers themselves, the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century marked beginnings: the publication of Tighe's works founded a reputation that inspired the next generation of poets, most significantly John Keats (though he later repudiated her work); the publication of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and the critical response it provoked set in motion a narrative about Barbauld that colored her reception and reputation for over a century. Both volumes under consideration here seek even newer beginnings-breaks from received wisdom made possible by re-examination of documentary evidence and re-envisioning of contextual history. I will begin with Tighe. Repudiation notwithstanding, no one familiar with Keats's odes can read the following lines in Mary Tighe's Psyche without hearing (to quote Keats himself) "melodies" of his "Ode on a Grecian Urn": And now, the royal sacrifice prepar'd, The milk-white bull they to the altar lead, Whose youth the galling yoke as yet had spar'd, Now destin'd by the sacred knife to bleed.
Early in this monograph, described as "a series of connected essays" (ix), Jonathan Kramnick focu... more Early in this monograph, described as "a series of connected essays" (ix), Jonathan Kramnick focuses on a scene in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) in order to illustrate what he means by a "paper mind" (2). Crusoe has completed the construction of his "island home" and turns his attention to writing his journal (1). He comments that if he had tried to write before he had ordered his domestic space, the journal would have been boring and unfocused. Having said as much, Crusoe goes on to elaborate a version of the narrative as he would have told it in such a frantic, unorganized state of mind and dwelling. He reports what he "'must have said,'" how he would have acted, what he might have felt: "Crusoe writes this hypothetical journal entry so that its first sentence might just go on forever.. .. And yet it doesn't" (1-2). Instead, Crusoe "stops, turns, and recounts his arrival in an altered form," revising his unorganized narrative from the newly created vantage point of "his well-appointed English home" (2). Crusoe's prose style in this passage is a "blend of past and historical-present tense" that, along with shifting perspectives, "perform[s] a kind of everyday synesthesia,. .. [t]he prose. .. attuned. .. to the way the world appears to a body in motion and to the way thought or feeling guides that world into being" (2). "This," Kramnick explains, "is a paper mind: the formal construal of a world as it shows up for an agent engaged or coping with built or natural environments" (2). This moment of close reading is deployed to introduce the four major concepts of the book: mind, ecology, form, and (inter)disciplinarity. In part 1, which comprises two essays, Kramnick is effective in mapping out what is at stake for literary studies in an interdisciplinary environ-Modern Philology, volume 117, number 2.
Anna Barbauld's 'Washing-Day' is a poem endangered by misreading, It has received thr... more Anna Barbauld's 'Washing-Day' is a poem endangered by misreading, It has received three significant critical comments in the past few years, all well-intentioned and all off the mark, The first appeared in 1986 in Ann Messenger's His and Hers, This study includes a rather extensive analysis of 'Washing-Day', which forms part of a chapter entitled 'Heroics and Mock Heroics', It is Messenger's contention that the satirical thrust of the poem is aimed at 'the whole male sex', In 'Washing-Day', Messenger asserts, Barbauld 'stuck a pin in the balloon of masculine pride and simultaneously glorified the endless drudgery of women'A The key to this reading resides in the poem's comparison of the Montgolfier balloon to a soap bubble, According to Messenger, the 'greatest exploits' of men are, by this comparison, 'reduced to the level of children's games'i-' Thus, she concludes, in 'Washing-Day', '[tjhe assumption that what men do is important and what women do is not is turned upside down, The women's washing is heroic; the men's exploits are child's play'." Donna Landry's 1990 Muses of Resistance faults 'Washing-Day' for its failure to give voice to the 'red-armed washers', but she follows Messenger in praising Barbauld for her recognition of 'washing-day as a scene of women's power': 'Such male escapades as the Montgolfier brothers' experiments in ballooning are shown to be no greater imaginative achievements than the whimsy represented by women's domestic verse, and achievements of less importance than the material necessity of washing'iAgain, the balloon is marshalled as evidence of Barbauld's disdain for masculine pursuits, though by Landry's formulation this disdain ultimately
... de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereueses to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meist... more ... de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereueses to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; the same issue includes articles comparing the ... he complains about the erasure of female desire and points to its traces in the very words Levinas uses to explain "responsibility for the ...
The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of... more The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of comedy and innovation in the face of tradition, and they easily engage the twenty-first-century student with many aspects of eighteenth-century life: travel, inns, masquerades, political and religious factions, the '45, prisons and the legal system, gender ideals and realities, social class. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," discusses the available editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia; suggests useful critical and contextual works for teaching them; and recommends helpful audiovisual and electronic resources. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," demonstrate that many of the methods and models used for one novel-the romance tradition, Fielding's legal and journalistic writing, his techniques as a playwright, the ideas of Machiavelli-can be adapted to others.
university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 considered media of transmiss... more university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 considered media of transmission. By these faltering means, the messages passed back and forth. No wonder eighteenth-century people preferred to deal with relatives and clients, not independent strangers. The messages did not always travel well, especially at the margins among coureurs de bois and slaves, and not at all among Indians, to whom Banks gives little attention. We could simply say of the French colonies before 1763 that local officials and colonists looked to their own interests, that there was a lot of smuggling, and that the colonies were not sufficiently important to retain the attention they needed. Or we could accept Banks=s invitation to a new way of seeing. Either way, we may conclude that the vieilles colonies came into being, and mostly passed into history, well before adequate instruments of empire had been forged. I have only one quibble: the dozens of intratextual references to historians and ...
The Women's March on Washington in 2017, organized in protest of the 2016 election of the America... more The Women's March on Washington in 2017, organized in protest of the 2016 election of the American president Donald Trump, spawned a worldwide movement. Two years later, women in more than thirty countries participated in marches designed to draw attention to violence against women and economic austerities that disproportionately affect women's lives. In ever-increasing numbers, worldwide, women began to utilize all the resources at their command-political, technological, and cultural-to highlight inequities of gender, race, and class as well as global concerns such as the environment, climate change, immigration, etc. Women artists, from novelists and poets to filmmakers and songwriters/performers, devoted (and continue to devote) their talents to expressions of activism, protest, and calls for change. In many countries, prominent exposés of and legal actions against once-important male cultural icons resulted in prison sentences, dismissal from duty, public shaming, and calls for change in the various professions that allowed such behavior to occur without check-indeed, often with enablers and systemic support. The #MeToo movement bears witness to a growing determination to speak out about and demand reparation for wrongs too often endured, tolerated, or even celebrated in the past. All of this activity coincided with commemorations of an important milestone in the fight for women's equality in America, the 100th anniversary of the passage of the nineteenth amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote; therefore, it is no surprise that renewed commitment to the rights of women has been evident in the popular culture of the past four years. Two 2018 films based on the career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-a documentary entitled RBG and a feature-length dramatic recreation of her argument before the Supreme Court as a young lawyer entitled On the Basis of Sex-were particularly notable. And, significantly, both works solidly situated Ginsburg in the line of succession beginning with women of the Romantic era who were the first to demand social and legal reform. As we saw in both these films, Ginsburg ended her plea before the bench in the 1973 landmark sex discrimination case Frontiero v. Richardson with the words of nineteenth-century feminist Sarah Moore Grimké: "I ask no favor for my sex; all I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks" (Grimké 10). Recently, we have entered a new phase of worldwide protest, one centered more on racial injustice than on the specific concerns of women. In the Spring of 2020, due to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, the people of America and much of the world
The study of women Romantic poets has recently been enriched by two works-one an edition, one a c... more The study of women Romantic poets has recently been enriched by two works-one an edition, one a critical monograph-that speak not only to the vitality and significance of the individual poets but also to the way Romanticism itself has been remapped over the past forty or fifty years. These works build on the diligent work of scholars such as Harriet Linkin and William McCarthy, both credited with "singlehandedly" reviving interest, respectively, in Mary Tighe and Anna Letitia Barbauld (though in the latter case I seem to remember having lent a hand or two). Paula R. Feldman and Brian C. Cooney have produced what will long stand as the definitive edition of the poetry of Tighe. E. J. Clery has presented what will long stand as the definitive reading of the significance of the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a revisionist reading that calls conventional assumptions, beliefs, and interpretations into question. In a sense, both of these publications speak to endings that occurred at the close of the first decade of the nineteenth century. Mary Tighe died in 1810 at the age of thirty-seven. Her collected poetry was published the following year. And while Anna Letitia Barbauld would live until 1825, dying at the age of eighty-one, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven would be her final major poetic statement and would long be said (though erroneously) to be the poem that ended her career. But even with regard to the lives of the writers themselves, the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century marked beginnings: the publication of Tighe's works founded a reputation that inspired the next generation of poets, most significantly John Keats (though he later repudiated her work); the publication of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and the critical response it provoked set in motion a narrative about Barbauld that colored her reception and reputation for over a century. Both volumes under consideration here seek even newer beginnings-breaks from received wisdom made possible by re-examination of documentary evidence and re-envisioning of contextual history. I will begin with Tighe. Repudiation notwithstanding, no one familiar with Keats's odes can read the following lines in Mary Tighe's Psyche without hearing (to quote Keats himself) "melodies" of his "Ode on a Grecian Urn": And now, the royal sacrifice prepar'd, The milk-white bull they to the altar lead, Whose youth the galling yoke as yet had spar'd, Now destin'd by the sacred knife to bleed.
Early in this monograph, described as "a series of connected essays" (ix), Jonathan Kramnick focu... more Early in this monograph, described as "a series of connected essays" (ix), Jonathan Kramnick focuses on a scene in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) in order to illustrate what he means by a "paper mind" (2). Crusoe has completed the construction of his "island home" and turns his attention to writing his journal (1). He comments that if he had tried to write before he had ordered his domestic space, the journal would have been boring and unfocused. Having said as much, Crusoe goes on to elaborate a version of the narrative as he would have told it in such a frantic, unorganized state of mind and dwelling. He reports what he "'must have said,'" how he would have acted, what he might have felt: "Crusoe writes this hypothetical journal entry so that its first sentence might just go on forever.. .. And yet it doesn't" (1-2). Instead, Crusoe "stops, turns, and recounts his arrival in an altered form," revising his unorganized narrative from the newly created vantage point of "his well-appointed English home" (2). Crusoe's prose style in this passage is a "blend of past and historical-present tense" that, along with shifting perspectives, "perform[s] a kind of everyday synesthesia,. .. [t]he prose. .. attuned. .. to the way the world appears to a body in motion and to the way thought or feeling guides that world into being" (2). "This," Kramnick explains, "is a paper mind: the formal construal of a world as it shows up for an agent engaged or coping with built or natural environments" (2). This moment of close reading is deployed to introduce the four major concepts of the book: mind, ecology, form, and (inter)disciplinarity. In part 1, which comprises two essays, Kramnick is effective in mapping out what is at stake for literary studies in an interdisciplinary environ-Modern Philology, volume 117, number 2.
Anna Barbauld's 'Washing-Day' is a poem endangered by misreading, It has received thr... more Anna Barbauld's 'Washing-Day' is a poem endangered by misreading, It has received three significant critical comments in the past few years, all well-intentioned and all off the mark, The first appeared in 1986 in Ann Messenger's His and Hers, This study includes a rather extensive analysis of 'Washing-Day', which forms part of a chapter entitled 'Heroics and Mock Heroics', It is Messenger's contention that the satirical thrust of the poem is aimed at 'the whole male sex', In 'Washing-Day', Messenger asserts, Barbauld 'stuck a pin in the balloon of masculine pride and simultaneously glorified the endless drudgery of women'A The key to this reading resides in the poem's comparison of the Montgolfier balloon to a soap bubble, According to Messenger, the 'greatest exploits' of men are, by this comparison, 'reduced to the level of children's games'i-' Thus, she concludes, in 'Washing-Day', '[tjhe assumption that what men do is important and what women do is not is turned upside down, The women's washing is heroic; the men's exploits are child's play'." Donna Landry's 1990 Muses of Resistance faults 'Washing-Day' for its failure to give voice to the 'red-armed washers', but she follows Messenger in praising Barbauld for her recognition of 'washing-day as a scene of women's power': 'Such male escapades as the Montgolfier brothers' experiments in ballooning are shown to be no greater imaginative achievements than the whimsy represented by women's domestic verse, and achievements of less importance than the material necessity of washing'iAgain, the balloon is marshalled as evidence of Barbauld's disdain for masculine pursuits, though by Landry's formulation this disdain ultimately
... de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereueses to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meist... more ... de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereueses to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; the same issue includes articles comparing the ... he complains about the erasure of female desire and points to its traces in the very words Levinas uses to explain "responsibility for the ...
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