04/12/2025:

Chance, Choice, Evolutionary Canonicity, and the Anthologist’s Dilemma: A Response to William E. Engel

Barbara M. Benedict, Connotations, Vol. 34: 122-133.

Abstract

This response takes issue with Professor Engels’s contention that literary anthologists choose texts that perforce provide readers with a literary canon. By examining the British literary miscellanies of the long eighteenth century, I argue instead that the notion of a canon of literary works of consistent quality does not usefully apply to collections of works before the nineteenth century or after the twentieth. Rather, early-modern literary collections supply readers with topicality, variety, and novelty in the form of ephemeral miscellanies, while twenty-first century collections feature texts by new and marginalized authors. In both cases, too, serendipity and various conditions of production and readership complicate the anthologists’ power of choice and limit the texts available for a canon.

04/11/2025:

Dickens's Reality Show: Chromophobia in American Notes

Francesca Orestano, Connotations, Vol. 34: 109-121.

Abstract

This article originates from the Dickens Seminar, traditionally a feature of the biennial ESSE—European Society for the Study of English—Conference, which was held in 2022 at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. The Dickens Seminar, jointly chaired by Matthias Bauer, Angelika Zirker (both Tübingen University), and Nathalie Vanfasse (Aix-Marseille University) focused on “Dickens and / in Colour.” Hence the notion of chromophobia deployed in this article, a notion applied to a Dickensian text in which colour and its uses play a paramount role of remarkable importance. The text is American Notes: For General Circulation (1842), generally considered a travelogue, an account of Charles Dickens’s experiences when travelling across the United States. As a travelogue, American Notes should obey the laws of descriptive realism, but a close analysis of the text suggests that Dickens places a special emphasis on the use of colour which tends to create descriptive effects that bypass the accuracy of realistic description. Colours in the United States are either heightened to a maximum degree of saturation, or diluted to a wholly discoloured state. The transition between colour and non-colour is best described by David Batchelor in his study of chromophobia, a notion which illuminates the discursive meanings embedded in the Dickensian text, helping unveil his strategy of conveying disappointment and disgust for things American.

04/08/2025:

Familiar Studies: Stevenson's Multiple Voices

Richard Dury, Connotations, Vol. 34: 96-108.

Abstract

Stevenson’s ten essays collected in Familiar Studies (1882) differ stylistically from other contemporary studies of history, literary criticism, and literary history. They lack the single, authoritative, and impersonal voice that readers would expect of such methodical examinations of a restricted topic. The adjective in the title, on which Stevenson insisted, shows they are a hybrid combination of formal study and Stevenson’s familiar (or personal) essays. These essays are clearly organized and based on documentary evidence (three of them have scholarly footnotes), yet are written in an informal style with traces of the writer’s distinct personality: he allows himself essayistic digressions and uses language that draws attention to itself and typically uses extended meanings of words that involve the reader in an intuitive search for meaning. This style of variety, surprise, and foregrounding of the writer can be seen not only in all of Stevenson’s works but also in his letters and conversations. His “discontinuity of discourse,” even in these formal studies, can be seen as a way of reflecting a reality that is constantly changing, in opposition to the fixed beliefs of his authoritarian father. It is also a performance designed to give pleasure to the reader.

04/05/2025:

Intertextual Stevenson: A Brief Introduction

Lena Linne and Burkhard Niederhoff, Connotations, Vol. 34: 90-95.

Abstract

The writings of Robert Louis Stevenson have been extensively adapted and rewritten, in particular The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. However, Stevenson also imitated and transformed the works of others, as he admits very frankly in his essays and prefaces. He describes his literary apprenticeship as an exercise in imitation and pastiche, and he points out the sources that he used in such works as Treasure Island and The Master of Ballantrae. The pervasive intertextuality of Stevenson’s writings may be related to his aestheticism, the view that a literary text is based on other literary texts and structural principles much more than on reality and experience.

04/02/2025:

Medieval Jane Austen: A Response to Fritz Kemmler

Roger E. Moore, Connotations, Vol. 34: 81-89.

Abstract

In this essay, I respond to Fritz Kemmler’s provocative suggestion that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is indebted to medieval Christian traditions of moral instruction, particularly the seven deadly sins and their corresponding virtues. A growing number of scholars have recently begun to acknowledge Austen’s engagement with the medieval past, and I interpret Kemmler’s work as an important contribution to this scholarly trend. My response to Kemmler is two-fold. First, I propose that we identify specific survivals of the medieval paradigm of sin and virtue in the eighteenth century and suggest Samuel Johnson, one of Austen’s favorite writers, as someone who extends and develops it. Second, I maintain that acknowledging Austen’s acquaintance with medieval moral traditions may help us understand the religious dynamics of her other novels, particularly Sense and Sensibility, where a conversion from pride to humility is central to the work.

03/22/2025:

Henry Vaughan’s Poetic Identities: A Response to Jonathan Nauman

Thomas Willard, Connotations, Vol. 34: 70-80.

Abstract

Jonathan Nauman suggests that Henry Vaughan twice inaugurated himself as a poet in a new subgenre: first as a Welsh river poet in Olor Iscanus (1651) and then as a born-again Christian poet in the first part of Silex Scintillans (1650). He argues that Vaughan established the new identity in the first poem of each book, “To the River Isca” in Olor and “Regeneration” in Silex. He accounts for the reversed order of the two books’ publication by suggesting that Olor was complete when its dedication was written in 1647 and that the “friend” who prepared it for the press did so without the author’s approval. He develops the case that Vaughan eventually found the identity as a river poet untenable in the historical and personal contexts within which he wrote. In doing so, Nauman raises some questions that my response identifies. I also discuss the larger symbolism of the river and the fountain, which may connect readers to the very private mind from which the two signature poems emerged nearly four centuries ago.

03/07/2025:

Vaughan’s Living Waters: A Response to Jonathan Nauman

Donald R. Dickson, Connotations, Vol. 34: 62-69.

Abstract

This article extends Jonathan Nauman’s analysis of how Vaughan used the trope of the classical river poet to establish his poetic pedigree as the Swan of Usk. I try to show how Vaughan transforms this trope in “Regeneration” into biblical pastoralism, then uses sacred watercourses to bring closure to Silex Scintillans. The mysterious fountain in “Regeneration”—whose antecedents are in Eden, in the enclosed garden of the Canticles evoked in the poem’s coda, and in the restored pastoral paradise of the New Jerusalem—prepares us for a more involved journey in such poems as “The Search” and “Vanity of Spirit,” where the poet’s failure to read the mysteries in the flowing waters is significant. By contrast, one of the last poems in Silex, “The Water-fall,” demonstrates just how far the poet has come in his spiritual understanding.

01/27/2025:

Now Tell Me What Else It Means: Gender, Genre, and Canonicity in Contemporary Fiction

Francesca Pierini, Connotations, Vol. 34: 31-61.

Abstract

This article analyses three different texts—a short story, a novel, and a book chapter—that each focuses on a young female protagonist who strives for a modicum of emancipation and agency: A. S. Byatt’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1998), Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), and Jennifer Donnelly’s book chapter “Anne of Cleves,” from the young adult historical fictional work Fatal Throne: The Wives of Henry VIII Tell All (2018).

It specifically looks at the texts’ critique of the relations of power inscribed within the practice of the artistic profession. As the texts under scrutiny focus on the unbalanced gender relationships underlying the artistic process, they all mobilize pictorial perspective as the most accomplished (male) expression of a worldview in which women are “made,” celebrated, and manipulated, in function of a specific artistic and/or political design.

01/27/2025:

“Speak, Mnemosyne”: Genre Performance and Metagenre in Petina Gappah’s Memoir-Novel The Book of Memory

Katrin Berndt, Connotations, Vol. 34: 1-30.

Abstract

This article contends that the genre of the memoir-novel is inherently metageneric in purpose and design, arguing that it combines the novel’s aesthetic and thematic diversity with the memoir’s confessional self-reflection in order to produce self-referential comments on the characteristics of both genres, while simultaneously drawing attention to its own, hybrid form. Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015) is a memoir-novel that exemplifies several forms of metagenre. The analysis identifies the novel’s foregrounding of its own production as a story, its confessional qualities, the self-reflexive and retrospective construction of memories, and the implementation of telling names as a convention of other genres as explicit forms of metagenre; implicit forms include inter- and transtextual references to Greek mythology, to the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, and to different cultural narratives. Among the implicit forms, there is also the protagonist’s suggestion that her narration of her own story is based on unreliable memories, which undermines her credibility and hence deviates from the genre convention of the memoir-novel. Gappah’s novel moreover contains examples of implicit metagenre that are transformed into explicit forms: it foregrounds the status of progressive myths as cultural narratives in order to subvert them, and it stages genre conventions of the memoir-novel as motifs. Both conversions are transpositions that have the potential to substantiate as well as undermine the subjective, confessional quality of the memoir-novel, suggesting a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of metagenre overall.

11/23/2024:

A Response to Franziska Quabeck: "The Yellow Leaf: Age and the Gothic in Dickens"

Robert L. Patten, Connotations, Vol. 33: 328-332.

Abstract

The response to Franziska Quabeck’s contribution to the debate on “Dickens and Colour” takes up a few points for further discussion and suggests that “yellow” does not always signify imprisonment in and of old age.