English and Film Studies

for modern audiences, or do the updating connections provide an intensity and immediacy that can link devils and henpecked husbands and human suffering to the way we live today? I don't think a simple yes-no answer to such a question is possible, as the varying reactions to the stridently post-moderǹ Last Judgment' demonstrate, but I know that for me the effects of `relevany did not cheapen my appreciation of the performances we saw in Toronto this June . That the York Plays are living entities is nowhere more evident than in their responsiveness to a wide range of interpretation . Those plays were themselves, after all, vividly anachronistic in their own late medieval context, choosing to update biblical and exegetical narrative into the immediacies of parish life in the north of England. Even if some purists were not amused then and are not amused now, we today can offer these plays no more fitting tribute than to perform and savour them in the same free spirit in which they were conceived .

The body of Christ was central to late medieval and early modern European culture, not merely as symbol or idea but as physical presence. It hung from crosses in churches and homes and along roadsides, shone from stained glass windows and gestured from scaffold and wagon stages. In the form of the Eucharist, Christ’s body was not only consumed daily at mass, but also paraded through city streets once a year, and reverently displayed in countless chapels for perpetual adoration. It was the object of spiritual meditation and devotion that many now find startlingly physical in focus.

In 1936, when the Surtees Society published the first modern edition of the contents of Huntington MS HM 1 — still at that point owned by the Towneley family in Lancashire — they entitled the work The Towneley Mysteries. While these plays have been edited several times since then, including twice for the Early English Text Society, they remain mysterious. Still often but erroneously referred to as the Wakefield cycle, this heterogeneous collection contains some of the best and best known examples of early English drama; the beautiful manuscript is also marked by disorder and confusion, both obvious and (as in the case of the Advent sequence) subtle enough to have been overlooked for generations. This article discusses some of the issues facing the modern editor of the Towneley plays, particularly an editor who is interested both in these plays as plays, and in communicating the richness of this material — and the scholarly debates that it has generated — to new student audiences.

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During the Romantic period, British representations of what could be called the “matter of Spain” responded to intensifying public interest in the fate of the Iberian Peninsula and its empires in relation to Britain’s ongoing struggle for global dominance.

During the Romantic period, British representations of what could be called the "matter of Spain" responded to intensifying public interest in the fate of the Iberian Peninsula and its empires in relation to Britain's ongoing struggle for global dominance. In this struggle, modernization and accompanying discourses of modernity were perceived as crucial to victory. "Modernity" has diverse, often contradictory uses in research, so for clarity I adapt Anthony Giddens's exposition (Consequences; Modernity; Transformation). This adaptation sees modernity as a contested discourse formulated gradually by certain interests over the long eighteenth century. It centred on self-reflexive autonomous personal identity that enabled "pure" or disinterested relationships ranging from intimacy, conjugality, and domesticity through sociability, community, ethnicity, and "nation" to the "national" chronotope or time-space as persistence of a people in and shaped by a particular land over time. Such relationships in turn supposedly aided successful engagement with modernization's intensifying relations of risk and trust, new and changing chronotopes, new and expanding abstract or faceless systems and knowledges, and the necessity for disembedding from what was perceived as an outmoded or oppressive locus and

This fascinating study explores 'how the experience of reading romance, the "giddy Delight", the pleasure and transport it induces, comes to be transferred to and transformed in philosophical explanations of how we experience the world' (p.3). Novel Minds presents how the romance and its readers 'were conceived and reconceived in theories of reading and practices of authorship' (p.27). According to Locke, there are two kinds of reading, elicited by two different kinds of language: philosophic discourse provokes 'a critical process in the reader [...] a laborious turning and twisting of ideas to examine them from any angle', while the visual nature of figurative language in literature is not read so much as it is 'an unmediated experience' of sensation (p.38). Language is the 'foundation of knowledge and identity' (p.25-6), and writing imprints itself on the mind. In essence, we become what we read. Romance's perceived refusal of 'a tidy distinction between language and feeling' and its 'insist[ence] on the entanglement of body and text' (p.7) make philosophers-who focus on the reasonable, masculine mind-anxious. But writers such as Aphra Behn embrace and utilise the entanglement of body and text. Behn makes the corporeal and the text indistinguishable-in women's tears on their love letters, in her narrator figures and in her own playful inclusion of herself in her fiction: 'for her, text is fundamentally about [...] the movement of language over the boundary between internal and external, desire and its fulfillment' (p.82). 'Reading and writing [...] are about the circulation of spectacular bodies on a mental stage' (p.90-91). Supported by Tierney-Hynes's theorisation of the woman-asspectacle are provocative interpretations of the novellas The Fair Jilt and The Dumb Virgin, or, The Force of the Imagination, as well as close readings of several of Behn's prefaces. The ease with which Tierney-Hynes moves from philosophical discourse, to theatrical spectacle, to Behn's 'staking claim to a feminized narrative form' (p.84) is impressive. Her rich readings discover in Behn's works intriguing allegories for textuality, the imagination and the containment of visual signification. Juxtaposed with Behn's endorsement of the passionate body is Shaftesbury's intention to segregate the body and the 'prostitute nature of romance' from masculine, philosophical discourse (p.115). Contrasted with his 'frantic de-feminization of the authorial imagination' (p.30) is Hume's theory of sympathy, which is really, argues Tierney-Hynes, a theory of reading. Engaging both our sympathy for things that are not true or real and the imagination which structures the self, 'romance can build a self on a tissue of lies' (p.140). Hume warns that the potent combination of lies and the 'boundarylessness' of sympathy in the reader of romance endangers the 'constitution of the self in society' (p.134, 140). The chapter on Richardson's Pamela concerns understanding 'the body and text as defining principles of the self ' (p.30). Pamela insists that she is not what Mr B sees but what he reads in her letters. Richardson's attempts to 'resurrect [the romance] as a moral form' (p.147) echo Behn's earlier insistence that romance and poetry contain 'more than empty philosophy' (p.90). The most compelling example of Richardson's thought on misreading text is Tierney-Hynes's treatment of the 'ricocheting book' (p.148). Sir Simon Darnford, in anger, hurls a book at his daughter's head, leading to Pamela's censure. What would have happened if one sister after another hurled the book at someone else in the family? She offers to write a memorandum: ' "This Book, instead of subduing the Reader's Passions, [...] had like to have been the Cause of a violent and peevish Evil" ' (p.147). Tierney-Hynes effectively connects Pamela's rewriting of this scene with Richardson's rewriting, even over-writing, of Pamela the text as he attempts to control and circumscribe how his book is read. As Novel Minds alternates between chapters on philosophers and novelists, the material is connected not only through the discussion of romance reading but also through the recurrence of the mirror image: Locke's dismissal of the mind as a 'Looking-glass' that reflects but does not retain, Behn's example of The Dumb Virgin's Maria sitting at a glass painting her self-portrait (an example of female authorship), Shaftesbury's 'pocket-mirror' as a self-assessing tool that reveals two selves (reason and the appetites) and Richardson's letter-as-a-mirror metaphor for 'the imitative function of art' (p.145). Tierney-Hynes notes that over time the mirror metaphor is gradually reconfigured 314 BOOK REVIEWS

Press, 1996). 2. I adapt the account in Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), to see modernity as a discourse and field of contest rather than a comprehensive and monolithic condition and process. 38 Gary Kelly since the 1980s to indicate meanings made by certain people from and through social and cultural practices, including "consumption," often as a basis for larger claims to political citizenship and other rights. 3 For the onset of modernity, recent scholarship has focused more on political print's role in assembling of a reformist agenda and "public sphere" than on cheap print's wider uses in creating such a sense of cultural citizenship in formation of the modern constitutional state. 4 There are various ways of taxonomizing print, but to explore such uses this essay considers print less in relation to authors, themes, ideas, innovations, engagements, reception, reviews, and so on than to leading producers and likely purchasers and users of print around a major "price point." This was a price corresponding to certain purchasers' material ability and socio-culturally established willingness to pay. During the onset of modernity, and indeed for generations before and after, one important such price point for a print object was sixpence. The United Kingdom's 1971 transition to decimal currency soon flushed from English a pejorative meaning of the adjective "sixpenny" going back to the sixteenth century at least, as "worth only sixpence; paltry, petty" (OED). Such usage is found throughout the eighteenth century. The sixpence was a piece of money, when a labourer's weekly wage would be five to ten shillings (or ten to twenty sixpences). 5 Further, the epithet "sixpenny" could be merely descriptive, indicating a certain quantity, kind, size, or extent of goods or services, such as sixpenny worth of punch, a sixpenny brick, a sixpenny loaf, or a sixpenny coach ride. But money's meaning is always social and cultural. 6 3. See for example M.

English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (Longman Literature In English Series) Gary Kelly English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 is the first comprehensive historical survey of fiction from that period for many decades. It combines a clear awareness of the period's social history with recent developments in literary criticism, theory and history, and explains the astounding variety of forms in Romantic fiction in terms of the various cultural, political, social, regional and gender conflicts of the time. It provides a broad-ranging survey from the major authors and works through to the sub-genres of the period. Jan Austin and Sir Alter Scott are discussed alongside the Gothic Romance, political and feminist fiction, social satire and regional, rural and historical novels. It also provides a comparison of the methods of distribution and marketing and the availability of books then and now; examines cheap popular fiction and children's fiction, and considers the recent debate about the place of prose fiction in a Romantic literature hitherto dominated by poetry.