These are the articles recently published. Original replies, which can start off a debate, are listed with their abstracts. Please note that responding articles do not have separate abstracts.
03/23/2024:
From Rivers to Fountains: Henry Vaughan’s Secular and Sacred Inaugurations
Jonathan Nauman, Connotations, Vol. 33: 48-60.
Abstract
Henry Vaughan began his poetic career in emulation of the occasional verse of the Jonsonian coteries; and the pastoral title poem “To the River Isca,” which opens his Olor Iscanus collection, evokes an explicit classicist pedigree of canonical river poets that Vaughan effectively sought to join. This self-canonizing effort was effectively revised and transfigured in Vaughan’s conversion to sacred verse, with the introductory lyric to Silex Scintillans, “Regeneration,” advancing a visionary pastoral sequence merging Vaughan’s new devotional work with the sacred-canonical Song of Songs.
03/12/2024:
Literary Anthologies: A Case Study for Metacognitively Approaching Canonicity1
William E. Engel, Connotations, Vol. 33: 18-47.
Abstract
Anthologies promote and perpetuate what amounts to a canon. The roots run deep in the Western tradition, with the Anthologia Graeca, a collection of Classical and Byzantine Greek literature modelled on Meleager of Gadara (first century BCE), using the term “flower-gathering” (ἀνθολογία) to describe this literary exercise. Mixing his own works with those of forty-six others, Meleager arranged “a garland” that ended up establishing a paradigm for the ages. The trope reached a kind of apogee in Tudor England, buttressed with criteria for critical assessment and instructions for the proper way to enjoy, for example, Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet nosgay, or pleasant posye contayning a hundred and ten phylosophicall flowers. The “anthology,” as such, raises important questions about the curation, preservation, and even the prefigured afterlife of literary works notwithstanding shifts in aesthetic sensibilities and once-novel stylistic inventions. The decisions underlying the culling and arrangement of material for anthologies—most notably those produced and disseminated by corporate titans who impose their imprimatur on a wide range of “anthologies” and thus set standards for a generation at least—warrants closer scrutiny. As editors of two such anthologies (The Memory Arts in Renaissance England and The Death Arts in Renaissance England, both with Cambridge University Press), our team experienced periodic crises of conscience when
confronting the reality that our determinations implicitly were setting the canon for a period-specific collection of literary excerpts. We therefore sought intentionally to foreground our deliberations concerning canon formation and to articulate our principles for proceeding, resulting in a metacognitive approach to producing—as duly is reflected in the subtitle: “A Critical Anthology.”
02/29/2024:
The Yellow Leaf: Age and the Gothic in Dickens
Franziska Quabeck, Connotations, Vol. 33: 1-17.
Abstract
Dickens was a fashionable writer, and from what we know he was also a very fashionable person, but the use of the colour yellow in his works differs surprisingly from the fashion of his times. He hardly uses canary yellow for his materials, and he abstains from the use of yellow as an indication of brightness and symbol of optimism and hope, too. Yellow in Dickens is not a gay or illuminating colour, and it seems that Dickens creates his own logic of colours, in which he uses yellow predominantly not as a primary colour but as a tinge, a discolouring of that which was formerly white, or conceived of as white. This does not mean, however, that the use of the colour in his works is not heavily invested with symbolism—quite the opposite. Dickens uses his own colour code, and yellow signifies both the literal and metaphorical imprisonment in and of old age.
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"I Wish I Were a Tree": George Herbert and the Metamorphoses of Devotion
Debra K. Rienstra, Connotations, Vol. 32: 145-164.
Abstract
This article considers Herbert’s engagement with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in order to explain the speaker’s wish to turn into a tree in “Affliction (I)” and “Employment (II)”. I argue that, though Ovid’s presence in “The Church” is muted, it does irrupt especially at key moments of devotional crisis. Herbert “resorts” to Ovidian strategies as a subtle form of protest when the God of his poems seems most to resemble the gods in Metamorphoses. Further, viewing these moments through an Ovidian lens helps reveal an underlying aesthetic of transformation in the sequence and an emphasis on figuration as a devotional tool. From this point of view, the sequence as a whole becomes a kind of slow-motion metamorphosis in which the speaker—not unlike in Ovidian myth—undergoes a transformative fragmentation. For Herbert, paradoxically, this fragmentation, in which human subjectivity appears momentarily lost, enables the speaker to reach a deeper state of communion with God.
12/09/2023:
A Particular Trust: George Herbert and Epicureanism
Katherine Calloway, Connotations, Vol. 32: 114-144.
Abstract
This article explores George Herbert’s engagement with Epicureanism, and Lucretius in particular, with Donne and Bacon serving as important intermediaries. While differing on questions about divine care for the world and eternal resurrection, Lucretius and Herbert both use poetry to shape readers’ views about these metaphysical questions. In his Latin and English poetry, Herbert challenges Epicurean ideas about death and securitas, but he also begins to develop a Christian theology of nature that can accommodate Epicurean atomism, which sets him apart from an Aristotelian mainstream and makes way for the physico-theology of later decades.
10/31/2023:
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the (Re-)Invention of Tragedy: A Response to Angelika Zirker and Susanne Riecker
Thomas Kullmann, Connotations, Vol. 32: 100-113.
Abstract
In their contribution, Zirker and Riecker provide a comprehensive survey of how Shakespeare used his sources, especially Plutarch’s Life of Caesar and Life of Brutus, when writing Julius Caesar. Their claim that Shakespeare had to overcome the historical “fetters” of Plutarch and the generic fetters of tragedy, however, can be questioned. Shakespeare was not in any way fettered by his sources but in a position to pick and choose from the rich “banquet” of historical and literary material on offer in the Renaissance.
The same applies to the genre of tragedy, which was a rather loose concept and did not fetter Elizabethan dramatists in any way. Julius Caesar can even be considered to mark a new departure, in that Shakespeare invents, or re-invents, a tragic pattern which he would repeat in Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. It involves a central hero who makes a mistake which causes enormous suffering and will result in the hero’s self-recognition and death. This pattern, of course, resembles that of classical Greek tragedy, as summarized by Aristotle. While Elizabethan scholars did not usually have direct access to the Greek tragedians, Plutarch’s Life of Brutus may be considered the “missing link” between Greek an Shakespearen tragedy, as it contains all the features of tragedy mentioned.
10/29/2023:
Historical Fetters and Creative Liberation in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: A Response to Angelika Zirker and Susanne Riecker
John D. Cox, Connotations, Vol. 32: 95-99.
Abstract
The authors describe Shakespeare’s double tragedy of Julius Caesar and of Brutus as a creative liberation from the constraints imposed by a historical source. They note that Shakespeare christianizes Calpurnia’s nightmare about her husband’s assassination, and he invents parallels between Caesar and Brutus and their wives. But what makes Julius Caesar a tragedy? The Folio sometimes calls it a “tragedy” and sometimes “The Life and death of Julius Caesar.” In fact, a good case can be made that Julius Caesar is a Roman history play. Shakespeare came to it fresh from writing nine plays about English history, and generically Julius Caesar resembles a history play more closely than a tragedy. It consists of a struggle for power. It is open-ended, like all Shakespeare’s history plays, starting in the midst of unexplained action and ending inconclusively. This is the form for secular history that Shakespeare invented in the 1590s.
10/25/2023:
Auden’s “This Lunar Beauty”: Keats’s Urn and Hardy’s Tess
Clay Daniel, Connotations, Vol. 32: 80-94.
Abstract
W. H. Auden’s “This Lunar Beauty” (1930) appears as homage to a pure “lunar beauty” that is defined by its sexual innocence and remoteness from the changes wrought by painful mundane experience. However, Auden, even at this time, argued the necessity of vital experience, even if painful and wrong, and often contemptuously dismissed innocence, especially sexual innocence. Auden’s poem can be more readily aligned with these arguments when we recognize its links with John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. According to Auden (“Robert Frost”), Keats, who was an important early influence on Auden, vigorously interrogates the urn’s insistence on an immaculate beauty that excludes the suffering and misery of human experience. In “This Lunar Beauty,” Auden, appearing to praise immaculate and timeless beauty, actually warns us against such fashionings. This critique, I will argue in the last third of the essay, is enabled by his distancing of himself from his speaker, as Keats (Auden believed) had distanced himself from the urn (and, though to a lesser extent, from his speaker). Auden’s speaker thickly echoes Hardy’s Angel Clare, in his fatal and extremely un-Audenesque constructions of pure beauty, pure woman, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
10/24/2023:
Six-Word Stories as Autonomous Literary Works in Digital Contexts: An Answer to Paola Trimarco
David Fishelov, Connotations, Vol. 32: 68-79.
Abstract
In my answer to Paola Trimarco’s thoughtful response to my essay on parodies of six-word stories, I will take up two important issues raised by her. Trimarco claims that, while many six-word stories published online may have a (minimal) narrative element, they should not be categorized as stories. To address this issue, I point out several meanings associated with the term story and argue that it is useful to adopt a flexible and inclusive approach for its application. To demonstrate the usefulness of an inclusive approach to the definition of a story, I briefly discuss a specific six-word story that, according to Trimarco, should not be categorized as such. The second issue is that of Trimarco’s suggestion to regard six-word stories published online as turns in an ongoing conversation among members of Internet communities, as posts in a dynamic thread of posts and comments, rather than as autonomous literary works. To address this issue, I broaden the perspective and contend that many literary texts, not only online six-word stories, have close relationships with their co-texts (e.g. a sonnet in a volume of sonnets). That online six-word stories may have close relationships with their co-texts (e.g. in the form of comments) should not, however, undermine their status as autonomous literary works, a title that they undoubtedly deserve.
08/04/2023:
“Pride” in Byte and “Prejudice” in Bits: A Medievalist’s Perspective on Jane Austen’s Novel
Fritz Kemmler, Connotations, Vol. 32: 39-67.
Abstract
It is well known that many of the moral aspects, concepts, and themes that can be found in Jane Austen’s novels are based on the eighteenth-century tradition of moral instruction, which, in itself, is part of an older, and in many respects Christian, tradition of moral philosophy and spiritual guidance.
In this paper I wish to demonstrate by means of a computer-aided close reading of the novel, supplemented by a comparative approach as well as several interpretative hypotheses, to what extent Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice mirrors, in a secular context, important elements that are characteristic of the Christian tradition of moral instruction and spiritual guidance. It will be seen that the majority of these elements can be traced back to the mediaeval moral paradigm of the Seven Deadly Sins, with the sin of pride usually heading the list. The seven deadly sins—together with their “remedies,” the Seven Virtues—constitute the subject matter of numerous mediaeval handbooks of religious instruction written in Latin and the vernacular for both clerics and laymen. A word list of Jane Austen’s novel will help to identify lexical items that refer to moral concepts. Together with “pride” and “prejudice” these items clearly indicate that Pride and Prejudice is eminently suitable for a critical reading on the basis of the mediaeval moral paradigm of sin and virtue.