1,720,977 research outputs found
A critical examination of three Jane Austen fragments and their bearing on her completed novels
Full text linkWhereas the novels have been exhaustively treated, Jane Austen's fragments have suffered neglect. My thesis aims to help remedy this lack of critical emphasis. I examine three pieces from the early, middle and late periods of her life - Catherine or the Bower (1792), The Watsons (1804) and Sanditon (1817). By showing that Northanger Abbey was neither her first attempt at fiction nor Persuasion her last, I argue that a study of these fragments deepens our insight into her creative processes, showing some unexpected shifts of tone and emphasis not immediately apparent in the completed novels. Chapter I discusses the importance of Catherine or the Bower as an early essay in serious fiction, revealing an interest in certain themes, narrative devices and moral imperatives more subtly developed in her mature works. As the most accomplished of the juvenilia, it shows a move away from the epistolary mode and simple parody of Sentimental excesses towards an exploration of realistic social and economic conditions. I have examined this evolution of form and moral stance in her work, along with her use of spatial detail, and her thematic emphasis on meditation, the abuse of power and the efficacy of proper education. Chapter II considers The Watsons as another decisive point in her development as an artist. Grave in tone, the piece locates the heroine in circumstances harsher than those presented in the fiction hitherto. To stress the pain of poverty, loneliness and the prospect of spinsterhood, Jane Austen had to develop new techniques for conveying the thoughts and feelings of a heroine returning to uncongenial home life. Comedy is underplayed to give scope to a celebration of tranquillity and modesty that looks ahead to Mansfield Park, as does the concern with clerical duty. Chapter III focuses upon Sanditon. Coming after the tenderness of Persuasion, this fragment is disconcertingly robust. In its use of caricature, the device of mistaken identity and. mockery of unchecked imagination, it seems like a return to the juvenilia, but new artistic directions are clearly evident. Playing with motifs of speculation, novelty, hypochondria and uncontrolled energy (mental, physical and verbal), Jane Austen condemns the powerful forces of change that threaten traditional life and values. She is less concerned with tracing complex sentiment than with giving prominence to topographical details that stress the impact of change. The study has been conducted in terms of close analysis of passages stressing various thematic and technical concerns, with cross reference to the complete novels where this has seemed pertinent
Felix Holt: The Radical and the Gusset of Cryptic Futurity
Full text linkMost Victorian novels avail themselves of tidying codas in which the author projects the story into a future-turned-present and, counterpointed by wedding bells, maps out as close an approximation to the \u27happily ever after\u27 formula as the constraints of realism will allow. The locus classicus for this procedure occurs at the end of Martin Chuzzlewit:
And coming from a garden, Tom, bestrewn with flowers by children\u27s hands, thy sister, little Ruth, as light of foot and heart as in old days, sits down beside thee. From the Present, and the Past, with which she is so tenderly entwined in all thy thoughts, thy strain soars onward to the Future. As it resounds within thee and without, the noble music, rolling round ye both, shuts out the grosser prospect of an earthly parting, and uplifts ye both to Heaven!
George Eliot also avails herself of this standard template at the end of Felix Halt: The Radical, its \u27Epilogue\u27 sketching the future course of her characters\u27 lives through present-tense clauses (,As to the town in which Felix Holt now resides\u272), clauses that catapult the reader from 1833 to the date of composition, thirty-three years on. Futurity here becomes largely notional, its proleptic force bled into the narrative present, and this in turn causes the foregoing narrative to recede in time, investing the novel\u27s closure with a paradoxical sense of retrospection
Notes on Middlemarch and Romola
Full text linkRereading Middlemarch and Romola recently, 1 was struck by some unrecorded musical and literary parallels, none of them substantial enough (or indeed sufficiently interconnected) to be woven into an integrated article, but having, 1 hope, enough intrinsic interest to warrant my presenting them here as so many Casaubonic \u27leavings\u27 that might or might not be incorporated into future work on the author.
A Schubertian Moment in Middlemarch
George Eliot\u27s enthusiasm for the Lieder of Schubert is attested by a letter written in October, 1859 - \u27Schubert\u27s songs, 1 especially delight in\u27 (Letters, Ill: 178) - and our knowledge of that fact allows a partially concealed allusion to surface in Middlemarch. The \u27sound track\u27 for the meeting of Lydgate and Casaubon shortly before his death comprises \u27the cawing of the rooks, which to the accustomed ear is a lullaby, or that last solemn lullaby, a dirge\u27 (Ch. 42, 459) - an idea picked up and developed at the point where the clergyman is forced to contemplate his mortality as an immediate rather than a theoretical fact:
When the commonplace \u27We must all die\u27 transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness \u27I must die - and soon\u27, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first. (461- 62
Leigh Hunt and the poetry of fancy
No full textLeigh Hunt has long been stigmatized as Keats's evil genius, a superficial and mannered poet whose influence can be observed in such early poems as I Stood Tip-Toe and Sleep and Poetry. His portrayal as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House has also fostered an impression of triviality and selfishness in the minds of those who do not trouble to read him. Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy, so far the only book devoted exclusively to his verse, takes issue with these received opinions and argues that, overshadowed by the work of his more gifted contemporaries, Hunt's output has suffered repeatedly from invidious comparisons. Author Rodney Stenning Edgecombe suggests that we need to bring his admittedly minor poetry out of the shadows and, approaching it on its own sunny terms, find a way of enjoying its slightness and delicate charm. With this in mind, Edgecombe urges that we approach the poet as a rococo artist, using this aesthetic category to legitimize and focus the decorative impulse that informs his vision, and the escapism that sometimes led him, as a poet, to skirt many of the issues he so bravely fought for through his Radical journalism. Like Wordsworth, Hunt divided his output into loose generic categories when he began preparing a select edition of his poetry toward the end of his life, categories retained and amplified by H. S. Milford in his 1923 edition. Edgecombe has used these divisions as a way of organizing his study, and also of illustrating the immense range of forms and genres that the poet explored in the course of a long career. He furthermore offers close readings of many seminal poems in an effort to show that Hunt, dismissed by Carlyle as a sort of poetic "tinker," was a generally creditable craftsperson, and that when the occasion inspired him, he could write very well indeed
Marvell's 'The Garden' and the 'Ars Moriendi'
Full text linkIn this reading of 'The Garden' I shall attempt to show that the poem, universally acknowledged to be a hymn to the contemplative life, is also in itself a contemplative exercise. I shall suggest furthermore that its contemplation centres on death, a death which the lyricism of the verse denatures into something beguiling and restful. To view the poem from this angle is to view it as a version of the ars moriendi, the meditation on death which, after evolving for centuries, had acquired a distinct (if loose) generic form by the start of the seventeenth. In his introduction to an anthology of Middle English Religious Prose, N.F. Blake has remarked that the 'title Ars Moriendi is applied to works of several different types: the earlier examples are designed to encourage people to lead better lives; the later ones are more in the nature of battles between an angel and the devil for the soul of a dying man; and others, generally from the fifteenth century, are collections of prayers for the dying'. One such 'early example' is The Art of Dieing which Blake has extracted from The Book ofVices and Virtues and included in his collection. I shall take this as my point of reference in discussing the tradition, since it represents the form most relevant to my purpose. (While 'The Garden' clearly offers an invitation to 'a better life', it is quite as clearly neither a psychomachia nor a viaticum.
Hugo, Goethe and Patrick White: Sources for \u27The Eye of the Storm\u27 and \u27The Vivisector\u27
No full textAspects of imagery, syntax and metrics in the poetry of George Herbert
Full text linkI intend In this thesis to examine some central features of George Herbert's art - aspects of his imagery syntax and metrics. These topics have been chosen because they encompass large areas of his poetic practice, ramifying as they do into questions of theme, tone and structure. Even a partial. survey of Herbert' s imagery, such as the one I attempt to offer, should enable the reader to judge the range of experience that Herbert brings to bear upon a comparatively circumscribed number of themes, (The "Affliction " poems, for example, are wonderfully diverse, although they have a common thematic centre). A brief examination of the traditions within which Herbert's manipulation of imagery falls should allow one also to judge his resourcefulness, especially in the composites of emblem and symbol he devises on occasion; which in the concluding analyses I attempt to show the structural significance of image patterns in representative poems from The Temple. Thus Chapter I falls into three sections: a brief discussion of emblematic and symbolic traditions together with Herbert 's place in relation to them, a deliberately selective glance over some images (a full examination is far beyond the scope of this thesis), and finally some close analyses of poems in the course of which I try to show the imagery operating as a structural and coordinating device. In Chapter II, I move on to the closely related area of syntax, examining Herbert's formulation of his material, and finding - amongst other things - that there is evidence of "grammatical" imagery where the disposition of a sentence provides a concrete embodiment of the theme. This interrelationship of imagery and syntax (and of imagery and metrics) is a corollory of poetry's organic nature, and in order to stress the mutual collaboration of these features, I have subjected a single poem, "The Flower" to an analysis from three different angles, assuming that each approach will further illuminate the others. All the lyrics would yield riches if treated in this way but my limits of space have naturally precluded so elaborate an undertaking. Even In the analyses of poems that are treated only once, I have been at pains to allow in a glimmering of topics other than that in hand, so as to enlarge the scope of my examination. Although the material in Chapter II is designed to highlight the structural, tonal and thematic effects of syntax in turn, such divisions remain theoretical rather than actual, for they combine almost indivorcibly into a complex whole. Chapter III is patterned like Chapter I in that it moves from a general survey of Herbert's metrics, his rhyme and his stanzaic design, to further close analyses of his metrical procedures in particular lyrics. Both here and in the preceding chapters I have undertaken to look at Herbert's work in close detail, because, as I have already suggested, his is an art of compression, of telescoping a whole range of meanings into the neatest and most compact shape. Given the differences in mode and intention, his poetry often puts one in mind of Jane Austen's fiction - at least in the profundity it achieves within a consciously limited scale and a critical magnifying glass seems to me to be the most apposite aid for such a study as I have undertaken
Supplementary Annotations to Daniel Deronda
Full text linkThe annotations to the first and second Penguin Classics editions of Daniel Deronda, by Barbara Hardy and Terence Cave respectively, and those of the Oxford World\u27s Classics edition, by Graham Handley, weave a web like that attributed by Marvell to Cromwell - \u27a net of such a Scope\u27\u27 that very little has escaped its threefold curtain. Even so, one or two leavings that they missed or deliberately passed over might be worth recording here.
Chapter 1, p. 42:2 Do you mean that old Adonis in the George the Fourth wig?
Terence Cave passes over this entirely, but Barbara Hardy comments that it\u27s \u27A very mid-Victorian allusion to the bad old days before the image of the monarchy had been made respectable and domestic\u27. In fact, it is a Regency allusion, recalling the words that landed Leigh Hunt in jail when, in the Examiner of 22 March, 1812, he referred to the Prince Regent, the future George the Fourth, in the following dismissive terms: \u27this Conqueror of hearts was the disappointer of hopes! - ... this Exciter of desire... this Adonis in loveliness, was a corpulent gentleman of fifty!\u27
Chapter 9, p. 123. Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach.
This echoes (and assumes for its irony) the opening sentences of Pride and Prejudice
Leigh Hunt, Theophile Gautier, Primitivism and the Romantic Ballet
Full text linkBecause no great poet of English Romanticism was drawn to ballet, it seldom figures in discussions of that movement. Even so, while the ballet in London lacked a chronicler as thorough and knowledgeable and eloquent as Theophile Gautier, it occasionally caught the attention of Leigh Hunt. Hunt\u27s general culture and intelligence, if not his talent, bear comparison with the Frenchman\u27s, although their ballet criticism is hardly commensurate in scope and significance. I propose therefore to examine their differing responses to the art so as to throw light on what I believe to be a characteristically primitivist note in English Romanticism. Even though Hunt\u27s interest in the ballet appears to have been fitful and a touch patronising, he was an authoritative critic of the drama, one of the first to review plays independently of management. And even his casual obiter dicta are worth analysing for the light they throw on his assumptions about the dance. Theodore Fenner has produced a satisfying overview of Hunt\u27s ballet criticism, but whereas he uses the reviews to glean more information about the Romantic ballet per se, I shall focus instead on what Hunt\u27s dance criticism tells us about Hunt in particular, and about English Romanticism in general
- …
