Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles) ISSN (Print) 0008-199X - ISSN (Online) 1471-6836 Published by Oxford University Press[392 journals]
Authors:Smallwood P. Pages: 305 - 324 Abstract: Enteredontheversooffolio 163 of the British Museum manuscript notes for his ‘Life of Pope’, transcribed by Harriet Kirkley in her A Biographer at Work, Samuel Johnson jots down a key heading for future elaboration: it reads starkly ‘Madness of Dennis’.11 In another location within Johnson’s Shakespearean criticism of 1765, Dennis appears as one of the ‘petty minds’ famed for ‘petty cavils’. In another, sixteen years later, he is a ‘formidable assailant’. Dennis’s contemporaries knew him as ‘the Critic’ or they poked fun at his thunderous demeanour in the character of ‘Sir Tremendous’. Pope called Dennis ‘a furious old Critic by profession’. All critics, without exception, have their ridiculous side, and perhaps the entire business of criticism – in some lights – will always seem an incitement to laughter: Johnson’s portrait of Dick Minim in his Idler papers of 1759 suggests why mild manners are not enough; and the fruitful interplay between criticism and satire in the eighteenth century, as Dennis’s own work suggests, can hardly be overstated.22 Yet there is no reason in principle why a critical windbag such as Dennis cannot from time to time seem impressively astute – indeed ‘formidable’. Viewing John Dennis’s literary criticism through the prism of Samuel Johnson’s reveals a surprisingly complicated array of defects and merits, and its outline throws light on the character of both critics. PubDate: 2017-11-22 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx025 Issue No:Vol. 46, No. 4 (2017)
Authors:Davis A. Pages: 325 - 343 Abstract: On 18 May 1924, Virginia Woolf, in a paper delivered to the Cambridge Heretics Society, drew her famous – and contentious – distinction between ‘Edwardian’ and ‘Georgian’ authors. Although her chosen topic was ‘Character in Fiction’, among the Georgians she names essayist and biographer Lytton Strachey and two poets, T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell. Towards the end of her paper she argues that connecting novels as diverse as those by E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce to Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Sitwell’s Façade is their authors’ shared impatience with inherited generic conventions, as they search for a way of expressing their ‘vision of reality’: ‘Thus it is that we hear all round us, in poems & novels & biographies & even in newspapers in essays, the sound of breaking and falling and destruction. It is the prevailing sound of the Georgian age.’11 PubDate: 2017-11-21 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx023 Issue No:Vol. 46, No. 4 (2017)
Authors:Marshall A. Pages: 344 - 363 Abstract: Denise Levertov was, from the publication of her second book, Here and Now, in 1957, the most highly regarded female poet of her generation to be identified with that American poetic tradition whose exponents variously saw themselves as following in the path of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound: writers such as Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan, each of whom was associated with Black Mountain College and with Donald Allen’s seminal anthology The New American Poetry (1960). She corresponded with H.D.11 and was admired by Marianne Moore,22 while the poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth called her ‘incomparably the best poet of what is getting to be known as the new avant garde’.33 Levertov’s prominence was all the more surprising given that she was, as she wrote, ‘Essex-born’,44 and moved to the United States in 1948, aged 25.55 But as she adjusted her ear to American vernacular, she also found her voice – one that was ‘willful, tender, evasive, sad & rakish’.66 Her work was also distinguished by its free or non-metrical lyricism (learned above all from Williams), fluent image-making, and marked visual orientation; and then, as the 1960s went on, for the way she sought to incorporate into her poetry, rather like her American contemporary Adrienne Rich, her developing political activism. PubDate: 2017-11-22 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx030 Issue No:Vol. 46, No. 4 (2017)
Authors:Stowell J. Pages: 364 - 385 Abstract: Itmayseemsurprising that Darwin, author of such defining scientific works as the Origin of Species, wrote in detail about aesthetics.11 Indeed, many of Darwin’s most explicit engagements with aesthetic philosophy have gone almost entirely unremarked. Aiming to reformulate previous approaches to his aesthetic thought, this essay will refer to a range of works that have not hitherto been critically examined in this manner. By reading Darwin’s publications in the light of his personal notebooks, I hope to demonstrate an under-appreciated coherence in those public discussions of beauty and aesthetics. Darwin wrote before the modern academisation of science, and, as Gillian Beer notes in Darwin’s Plots, the ‘common language of scientific prose and literary prose [in] this period allowed the rapid movement of ideas and metaphors to take place’.22 Operating in the open fields of Victorian natural history, this transferral of language, metaphor, and idea is at the heart of the stylistic strategy through which Darwin transformed contemporary natural-theological arguments. PubDate: 2017-11-21 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx022 Issue No:Vol. 46, No. 4 (2017)
Pages: 386 - 386 Abstract: In volume 46 no. 1 we published a review of Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick by Michael Shelden. It has been brought to our attention that this review contained a factual error. The author writes: PubDate: 2017-11-22 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx031 Issue No:Vol. 46, No. 4 (2017)
Authors:Masud N. Pages: 387 - 393 Abstract: The Aphorism and Other Short Forms by GrantBen. Routledge, 2016. £14.99. ISBN 9 7804 1582 9298 PubDate: 2017-11-22 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx019 Issue No:Vol. 46, No. 4 (2017)
Pages: 405 - 407 Abstract: Alex Davis is Professor of English at University College Cork. He is the author of A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic Modernism (Dublin 2000), and many essays in anglophone poetry from the 1880s to the present day. PubDate: 2017-11-22 DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfx036 Issue No:Vol. 46, No. 4 (2017)
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
[392 journals]
