Forthcoming Issues

Spring 2005 (Vol. 38:1) Alexander Pope: A Poet on the Margins and in the Center
Flavio Gregori, Contributing Editor

Alexander Pope possessed an ambiguous status in the literary and political world of the first half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, he was undoubtedly the most talented poet in the neoclassical tradition, the fittest to represent contemporary society both as the rococo world of refinement and politesse and to censure bad taste, social impoliteness and political corruption with his satiric qualities; on the other hand, he was the constant target of satirical abuse and was censured by his many enemies as degenerate and fraudulent, psychologically, culturally and politically. Pope tried vigorously to defend a humanist conception of literature and poetry, at the same time elegant, learned and moral, distinguishing it from the sloppy works of booming popular culture (Grub Street) and at the same time incorporated within his works the most peculiar aspects of commercial literature, thus blurring the same cultural and social distinction he so much strove to draw.
This collection of essays investigates Pope's contradictory position within his culture and society, as well as in the canon and reception, in the economy of his times (as a censor of commercial and financial economics and as a careful exploiter of commercial possibilities at the same time), in politics (as a supporter of country values and of Bolingbroke's patriot politics, in his attachment to Catholic faith and his desire not to be confused with Jacobites) and cultural politics (as advocate for patronage and as a self-supporting, self-exiled intellectual), in his views of personal matters (as mythographer of his own persona and as an internally divided personality, for instance with regard to his physical aspect and to his relationships with his parents), and in poetics and aesthetics (Pope tried to combine and harmonise taste and imagination, poetic originality and neoclassical rules, nature and art, irony and the sublime).

Contributors and Topics:

Flavio Gregori (Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia)
This introduction considers the state of art in Pope's studies and places the reception and interpretation of Pope's works and life within the context of his oxymoronic status as the most important poet of his age and as a quasi-exiled citizen and man of letters in his own country.
Thomas Woodman (University of Reading) "Pope's Poetry on the Margins and in the Center"
This essay begins with a discussion of the paradox of Pope's Renaissance centrality and authority and yet his marginalization as a Catholic, middle-class, and disabled man. It continues with a run-through of Pope's career, starting with the aspiration to laureate centrality in Windsor Forest and then the traumatic effect of the Hanoverians.
Claudia Thomas Kairoff (Wake Forest University) "Living on the Margins: Pope and the Rural Ideal"
During his lifetime and afterward, Pope was famously associated with his grotto, the cave-like space he associated with poetic inspiration, and his garden, from which he fulminated against urban corruption. This essay, however, will focus on Pope's literal occupation of a marginal space, namely, his rented Thames-side villa, as the source of his perspective on the conservative rural ideal as well as on the urban political and professional scenes.
Francesca Orestano (Università Statale di Milano) "Pope at Stowe: Landscape on the Market and the Politics of Taste"
The essay starts from Stowe, the monument to the British Worthies, where Pope's bust is set among those of men who fought for England "with the pen." It considers Pope's relationship to Lord Cobham and to landscape garden as ambiguously poised between friendship with a wealthy patron and the role the same patron requires of the poet at Stowe.
Peter Davidson (University of Aberdeen) "Pope's Recusancy and the Epic of Exclusion"
Davidson's essay simply considers Pope as a member of the legally proscribed minority of the English Catholics. The essay considers first specifically Recusant coterie aspect of his poetry; then considers the Rape of the Lock as the genuine epic of a marginalized and legally un-mannered minority; finally, it considers the first grotto in the context of specifically Catholic building iconographies.
Colin Nicholson (University of Edinburgh) "Commerce and Conflict: Pope and the Political Economy of Modernity"
In order to examine conflicted values in his practical Tory engagement with the Whig financial innovations of his time, this essay applies to Pope Joseph Warton's description of Dryden as "the bard of commerce." It examines the formal consequences of the fundamental antagonism in Pope's verse, between a radically innovative economics and a vigorous defense of traditional social hierarchies.
James Noggle (Wellesley College): "The Ambiguities of Taste: The Epistle to Burlington"
Implicit in Pope's Epistle to Burlington is an account of aesthetic taste at odds with prevalent views of the time. For Pope, the moment of tasteful appreciation and the history of taste it enters interact in fundamentally ironic, difficult, opaque ways. By emphasizing the fracture between the two temporal modes of taste, Pope adopts a critical perspective on the commercial culture of eighteenth-century Britain celebrated by Addison and many other mainstream figures.
Ulrich Broich (Ludwig-Maximillian Universität München) "Pope, the 'Great Man,' the Hero, and Ovid"
The essay considers Pope's idea and ideals of heroism, placing them in the context of contemporary discussion of courage and gallantry, and in particular comparing them to Henry Fielding's and other eighteenth-century writers' and historians' deconstruction of greatness and bravery. It tries to prove that Ovid´s Metamorphoses, with their ironic view of heroism, and not Homer´s or Vergil´s heroic epics, are the most important intertexts for this poem and for Pope's mock-heroic view of heroism.
Helen Deutsch (UCLA) "Bolingbroke's Laugh: Alexander Pope's Epistle I, i and the Rhetoric of Embodied"
When in 1754 William Hay, member of the House of Commons and amateur man of letters, began his Deformity: An Essay, he turned to Pope as his model, and himself as his subject. Arguably the first in the history of English literature to conceptualize and articulate physical disability as a personal identity, Hay, like Pope, "atones for" bodily deformity with literary form. Deutsch uses Hay's relationship to Pope as a key to considering the essay and its chief rhetorical ornament, the aphorism, as uniquely protean forms that create a productive tension between material particularity and abstract generality.
Jane Spencer (University of Exeter) "'Mighty Mother': Pope and Maternity"
The illness which made Pope dependent all his life on being nursed gave him a deep appreciation formaternal care. At the same time, Pope created in The Dunciad perhaps the strongest attack on maternal authority in the English language. This essay argues that Pope's ambivalence about the power of imagination is linked to his ambivalence about the maternal and that his allegiance to a literary patrilineage of classical satirists who also attack maternal power is part of his attempt to gain within the public world of poetry a disembodied masculine identity.
Laura Tosi (Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia) "'Then rose the seed of Chaos': Masque and Antimasque in The Dunciad"
Tosi analyses the linguistic, symbolic and visual elements of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masque which Pope might have borrowed, or alluded to, in his Dunciad, in order to portray instances of mock kingship, of the monstrous body, and the debasement of alchemic as well as other kinds of knowledge.
Brean Hammond (University of Nottingham), "The Dunciad and the City: Pope's Heterotopia"
Hammond analyzes the kind of space that is constructed in The Dunciad using the concepts and categories that are currently being presented and contested in post-modern accounts of cultural geography.
Jorge Bastos da Silva (Universidade do Porto), "Political Aspects of Windsor Forest and Pope's Early Poems"

Fall 2005 (Vol. 38:2) Back Matter of 1590 Faerie Queene
Wayne Erickson, Contributing Editor

The back matter appended to the first edition of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene comprises explanatory, commendatory, and dedicatory texts, including Spenser's open Letter to his friend and patron Walter Ralegh; seven Commendatory Verses written by Spenser's friends and fellow poets; seventeen Dedicatory Sonnets written by Spenser to various government officials, members of the nobility, and friends; and an errata list entitled "Faults Escaped." These significant texts, situated both literally and figuratively between the poem and its audiences, occupy dynamic literary and cultural space, but they have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. This issue of SLI will begin to fill this substantial gap in Spenserian scholarship by analyzing the appended paratexts and the publication event in which they participate.

Spenser's Letter to Ralegh--the most sustained literary-critical statement of Spenser's career--has received substantial critical attention, but that attention has often been piecemeal and fairly superficial. Because the Letter purports to explain The Faerie Queene to its readers and defend its epic status against potential detractors, most critics treat it as an authoritative discourse with a transparent and unmediated relation to the poem. Other critics, puzzled and even annoyed by portions of the Letter, have severely questioned its value and accuracy as a guide to the poem. Several essays in this collection expose the complexity of the relationships between the Letter and the poem and between the Letter and other texts.

Other contributors analyze, from a variety of perspectives, the Commendatory Verses and the Dedicatory Sonnets; these essays include close readings of the poems within the contexts of Elizabethan culture, the 1590 publishing event, and Spenser's life. Additionally, two broadly based essays provide historical and bibliographical readings of the appended texts and the publishing event. Together, the essays in this volume suggest some of the ways that Spenser uses the back matter of the 1590 Faerie Queene to respond to cultural pressures, engage his audiences, and assert control over the reception of his poem.

Contributors and Topics:

Jean R. Brink (Huntington Library) and Robert O. Bucholz (Loyola University Chicago) contribute an essay on the order of the Dedicatory Sonnets in the context of court conventions and protocol.
Ty Buckman (Wittenberg University) examines competing generic and political contexts in the Letter to Ralegh.
Wayne Erickson (Georgia State University) analyzes Spenser's simultaneously assertive and submissive rhetorical strategies in the Dedicatory Sonnets.
Thomas Herron (Hampton-Sydney College) discusses the Irish--specifically, Munster--contexts of the Dedicatory Sonnets and the connections between Spenser's Letter to Ralegh and Hooker's dedication to Ralegh in his translation of Giraldus Cambrensis's Expugnatio Hibernica.
F. J. Levy (University of Washington) offers historical contexts of the publishing event and the people involved, including the dedicatees.
William A. Oram (Smith College) writes an introduction to the volume.
Judith Owens (University of Manitoba) examines the London context of the Commendatory Verses as a guide to Spenser's 1590 epic vision.
Toshiyuki Suzuki (Kinjo Gakuin University) offers a bibliographical analysis of the errata ("Faults escaped") page.
Andrew Wallace (Carleton University) argues that the Letter to Ralegh provides a justification for the placement of the Dedicatory Sonnets at the end of the 1590 Faerie Queene, suggesting that the Sonnets thereby endorse Spenser's plans for an ultimate conclusion to his poem.
Patricia B. Wareh (Indiana University) investigates the role of gift giving in the Dedicatory Sonnets.
Andrew Zucher (Gonville and Cains College, Cambridge) speculates on biographical and bibliographical issues concerning the title page of the 1590 Faerie Queene.

Spring 2006 (Vol. 39:1) Literature of the Graveyard
June Hadden Hobbs, Contributing Editor

Graveyards have sparked the interest of anthropologists, historians, visual artists, and others for years, but much less has been written about the connections between graveyards and literature. This special issue will extend the fruitful interdisciplinary approach already employed by journals such as Markers to include a look at cemeteries as topoi of the literary imagination.

The literature of the graveyard comprises literary texts inscribed as epitaphs and icons on tombstones, literature inspired by cemeteries, and graveyards as texts in themselves. Examples of this literature include several of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's novels, which helped to popularize the Biblical "gates ajar" view of heaven; eighteenth-century poets such as Thomas Gray, Robert Blair, and Edward Young of "The Graveyard School"; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who used tombstones as the inspiration for a sketch about an itinerant tombstone carver named Mr. Wigglesworth in "Chippings with a Chisel," which was included in the 1851 edition of Twice-Told Tales. Gaston Bachelard's classic, The Poetics of Space, discusses the oneiric nature of important human spaces. In Bachelard's view, "a creature that hides and 'withdraws into its shell,' is preparing a 'way out.' This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man from his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent." In addition to including essays by academics who study both literature and material culture, this issue showcases the writing of some nonacademic professionals who write about material culture (museum curators, for example) as well as independent scholars in the area of gravestone studies.

Fall 2006 (Vol. 39:2) The 18th-Century Sermon in Speech and Print
George Williams, Contributing Editor

While valuable objects of study for a variety of scholarly concerns, sermons are curiously neglected in eighteenth-century studies. This trend is striking in light of the fact that, whether printed or preached, the sermon is everywhere in eighteenth-century England. It is no exaggeration to say that, as oral discourse, there was no more commonly spoken or heard genre.

Although regular church attendance was no longer legally required following the Toleration Act of 1689, weekly services were woven into the cultural fabric of the vast majority of communities in Britain. The sermon, needless to say, was a central feature of these services. Nor was the sermon any less prevalent in print. As commodities, printed sermons--both individual pamphlets and collections--were extremely popular. Because religious subjects represent the largest segment of publishing activity in the eighteenth century, sermons were one easily packaged part of an already vibrant market. Many sermons were written for and delivered on significant occasions that would have attracted the attention of many, making these sermons as much consumer mementos as spiritual reading material.

In recent years, scholarly concern for the eighteenth-century sermon apparently has begun to increase, perhaps driven by the intersection of two burgeoning areas of study: religious history and print culture. While scholars clearly are turning their attention to this subject, much of this work has not yet been published. This special issue of SLI begins to fill the current gap in published scholarship. Essays will approach the topic from a variety of directions, addressing the sermon as rhetoric, performance, political discourse, tool for colonization, commodity, object of satire, and literary work.

Proposed Contributors:

James Caudle (Yale University
Polly S. Fields (Lake Superior State University)
Keely McCarthy (Temple University)
Richard Sher (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
Laura M. Stevens (University of Tulsa)

Spring 2007 (Vol. 40:1) Scripting Urban Culture
Robert Brazeau (University of Alberta) and Michael Borshuk (Texas Tech University), Contributing Editors

This issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination will be guided by the assumption that studying the city allows us to grasp the ways in which it is subtended by an order that is in a perpetual state of derealization. The artistic and literary works studied in this volume do not simply "represent" the city, as if a stable sociological form underwrites the various stagings of metropolitan modernity. In fact, these essays will show that the city disrupts the assumption that realities can be simply rendered or represented in works of art; rather, artistic works on the city can at best offer a single, possible, and above all tentative glimpse into an urban reality that is always in transit. Despite its appearance of ontological and sociological stability, the city is a shifting series of images, signifiers, allegories, performers and heterotopic sites.

Proposed Contributors:

Robert Brazeau (University of Alberta)
Michael Borshuk (Texas Tech University)
James Mulvihill
Anna Westerstahl Stenport
Lewis MacLeod
Rebecca Rugg
Myles Chilton
L. Anne Delgado

Fall 2007 (Vol. 40:2) Generations: Women, Age, and Difference
Victoria Bazin, Contributing Editor

Like the categories of gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity, age appears to be self-evident, written on the body of the subject. Yet the ways in which the signs of age are codified and interpreted are, undoubtedly, culturally determined. Age seems to be the last "difference," the unspoken but inevitable site of a difference not only between subjects but also within subjects as they are exiled from their younger selves.

In this edited collection of essays, feminist scholars examine the difference of age as it is discursively produced via the technologies of film, fashion, photography, popular fiction, and television. More specifically, these essays consider contemporary Western cultural representations of "older" or "old" women as they reinforce or resist the dominant discursive practices framing both gender and age. However, as the title suggests--referring as it does to "generations"--the difference of age is not a fixed and stable category as it is always and inevitably a relative term. Thus, the essays also deal with age in relational terms as it is embedded in the generational model and as it is figured through the relationships between mothers, daughters, and granddaughters.

Proposed Table of Contents:

Victoria Bazin (University of Northumbria) Introduction: "The Technologies of Age"

Part One: Fashioning Age
Hilary Fawcett (University of Northumbria) "Doon the Toon": Fashion, Generation, and Identity: A Regional Perspective
Pamela Church Gibson (London College of Fashion) Invisible Women: The Fashion Industry, the Older Consumer, and Feminist Perspectives
Stacy Gillis (University of Exeter) Displaying, Betraying, Decaying: Our Bodies, Our Selves

Part Two: Visualizing the Difference of Age
Martine Beugnet (University of Edinburgh) Screening Invisibility: Old Women in French Films and Fin de Siècle Anxiety
Rachel Gear (Loughborough University) Tracing the Textures of Age: Representations of Older Women in Contemporary Women's Photography
Rosie White (University of Northumbria) Mis-Staking Feminism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the New Feminism

Part Three: Lines of Age: The Textual Figure of the Older Woman
Rachel Romano (University of Western Australia) Older Desiring Bodies: Text and Textures
Diana Wallace (University of Glamorgan) "Women's Time": Women, Age, and Intergenerational Relations in Doris Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers
Sarah Gamble (University of Sunderland) Growing up Single: The Postfeminist Novel
Bella Adams (University of Northumbria) Generational Resistance Between Women in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club