Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles) ISSN (Print) 0008-199X - ISSN (Online) 1471-6836 Published by Oxford University Press[370 journals]
Authors:Baker R. First page: 99 Abstract: Thelightthatreturnsafterapoundingrain is particularly clear, leaving you with the impression that you can see a little farther than usual, and there’s a simple joy in walking through such light. A joy like this is present in nearly everything Alice Oswald writes. ‘Exuberance is Beauty’, Blake says, a point of view Oswald seems to share. Her poetry is animated by both a spirit of play and a spirit of generosity. PubDate: 2017-06-02 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx002
Authors:Ashford D. First page: 119 Abstract: A curtainiswithdrawnandamachine rolled to within twelve feet of the nearest spectators: a large box of maple wood on castors or brazen rollers with a puppet like a pantomime Turk at the back (see Figure 1). His right arm extended to the chequer-board on the table, his left supporting a pipe, the Turk is wrapped in a heavy green cloak. But he is discovered to consist of mechanical parts, operated by a larger clockwork engine in the box.11 Having inspected the compartments containing this mechanism, spectators engage the Mechanical Turk in a game of chess: the Turk moving the pieces with his left hand, eyes and head rolling in triumph, on putting his enemy into check he will cry Échec! Échec! Built by Wolfgang von Kempelen for the Empress Maria Theresa in 1769, the Turk is said to have won games against Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, mystifying audiences in Europe and America with a winning streak lasting eighty-four years, only ended by a fire in 1854, in which the mechanism is said to have perished screaming: Échec!.22 In his own eyewitness account of the Automaton, produced shortly after seeing the chess-player in action while on tour in America in 1836, Edgar Allen Poe suggests that no exhibition of the kind has ever elicited such speculation. ‘Wherever seen it has been an object of intense curiosity, to all persons who think’, remarks Poe. ‘Yet the question of its modus operandi is still undecided … accordingly we find every where men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind.’33 PubDate: 2017-06-02 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx005
Authors:Churchwell S. First page: 140 Abstract: Anecdote: Something yet unpublished; secret history. – Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language PubDate: 2017-06-02 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx006
Authors:Baldridge C. First page: 162 Abstract: AttheverymidpointofDisgrace, amidst the attack that will change the trajectory of his life, David Lurie grasps at a momentary hope, since the men who have invaded his daughter’s home ‘are not harming him, not yet’. He wonders if robbery ‘will be enough for them’, if it is ‘possible they will leave Lucy unharmed too’. This wishful thinking evaporates, however, when the door to his lavatory prison is opened and he is doused with flammable spirits and set alight. ‘So he was wrong! He and his daughter are not being let off lightly after all! He can burn, he can die’ (pp. 95–6).11 To ‘burn’, to ‘die’. In Lurie’s previous life as a university professor, one imagines him encountering and deploying these terms in their figurative sense, as somewhat musty tropes for romantic desire and sexual release. Suddenly, however, they have acquired a dire literality in a world where his academic credentials and indeed the entire tradition of figurative expression it was his vocation to inculcate have become decidedly irrelevant. For some time now, critics have read David Lurie’s path from professor to ‘dog-man’ as a series of dispossessions – of his Romantic temperament,22 of his Platonic and Cartesian pretensions,33 of his belief in his own capacity for empathy,44 of his hopes to possess a soul that transcends his body’s vulnerabilities.55 But there exists another process of dispossession that operates alongside these: his forced march from a lexical realm in which the figurative is valorised over the literal into a newly emergent world where only the literal is spoken or acknowledged, where ‘declarative truth-telling’ is the only ‘mod[e] of representation’ deemed appropriate.66 The most painful process of shedding that Lurie undergoes involves the renunciation of his settled habit of troping. PubDate: 2017-06-02 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx012
Authors:Leonard A. First page: 183 Abstract: Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book by SmithEmma. Oxford University Press, 2016. £19.99. ISBN 9 7801 9875 4367 PubDate: 2017-06-02 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx010
Authors:Gorman C. First page: 189 Abstract: The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth Century England by PrestonClaire. Oxford University Press, 2015. £60. ISBN 9 7801 9870 4805 PubDate: 2017-06-02 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx003
Authors:Masud N. First page: 194 Abstract: Everyday Stories by BowlbyRachel. Oxford University Press, 2016. £14.99. ISBN 9 7801 9872 7699 PubDate: 2017-06-02 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfw035
Authors:Roberts G. First page: 201 Abstract: Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Debate by ColliniStefan. Oxford University Press, 2016. £30. ISBN 9 7801 9875 8969 PubDate: 2017-06-02 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx004
First page: 207 Abstract: David Ashford is a lecturer in English at City University, London. His monograph on the London Underground was published by Liverpool University Press in 2013. His second book, Autarchies: the invention of selfishness, was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury. He has published widely on topics relating to Modernism, Urbanism and Cultural Geography. The essay published here will form part of a wider investigation into Promethean horror. PubDate: 2017-06-02 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx015
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
[370 journals]
