Brett Rutherford

Some American autobiographies, such as Benjamin Franklin’s, may be written with some candor about early faults, making “errata” along the way for mistakes, sharing with the reader life’s lessons learned. Frederick Douglass’s three autobiographies, on the other hand, are works connected to an ongoing performative act: the author’s public life as advocate for slaves, and later, for all free people of color. When the slave Frederick Bailey renamed himself as Frederick Douglass to mount the lecture platform, he created both a literary character and a dramatic one. This brief paper will examine how Douglass’s “performative act” evolved from an appeal to shared Christian values with some of his readers, to a more universal appeal to reason. I also suggest, from Douglass’s stances on particular issues, and from his brief collaboration with atheist Robert Ingersoll, that he might be perceived as a “closet freethinker.”

Expressions of vitalism run throughout the fiction of H. G. Wells, although the writer himself did not acknowledge the concept as central to his thinking. Instead vitalism emerges, in the voices of various characters, as a tentative thesis to explain life, or an expression of culminating purpose that Wells considered poetic mysticism rather than scientific truth. In this article I examine several instances of vitalist thought in Wells’s work, and attempt to decipher from the critical reception of those works why these ideas remain largely undetected. Specifically, I contend that readers confined within the discourse of Man versus Animal have difficulty apprehending statements about Life itself, and that Wells cleverly satirizes the “othering” of animal or potential superhuman, to demonstrate the common man’s inability to understand Life within a larger framework. I use four texts — The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Food of the Gods (1904),  Things to Come (1935) and Star-Begotten (1937) — to demonstrate a vitalist undercurrent in the writings of this most scientific of all fiction writers.

In Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, her first attempt at realistic
fiction in a novel, the author melds together narrative strands from
her juvenilia, from her own experiences as teacher and unrequited
lover, and from Goethe’s Faust. For the psychology of her highly neurotic
male protagonist and narrator, she also leaps ahead of her contemporaries and virtually discovers the Oedipal conflicts deeply concealed in the human psyche. Although her 1846 novel was judged a failure when it was posthumously published in 1857, modern readers and critics are finding a number of reasons to admire it, not the least of them being its multi-threaded narrative. A detailed analysis of the narrative structure of The Professor, and its sources, yields a fascinating view of how Brontë combined and tried to unify the diverse elements of her story.
This paper is a summary of the narrative, with appropriate quotations,
showing those aspects that demonstrate Brontë’s intuitive grasp of
male Oedipal conflicts, followed by a review of pertinent criticism that
supports or reflects upon this thesis. Brontë’s adaptation of the Faust
narrative is discussed in detail. A synopsis of the Oedipal plot elements,
chapter by chapter, is shown side by side with the Faust narrative elements, in a chapter-by-chapter table.

In Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre," the Victorian reader was presented with a shocking manifestation of personality: a female lead character who was poor, homely in appearance, intelligent, and absolutely unwilling to bow to arbitrary authority. Where the heroines of Anne Brontë’s novels bore their misery in silence, or kept their superior intellects to their private diaries, Charlotte’s title character has a fully-formed ego in childhood and does not hesitate to assert her evaluations of the bad behavior around her, to her great cost in most cases. So pronounced is Brontë’s individualism, in fact, that it could be called a softer mirror of the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the individualism of Thomas Paine, and a precursor of the Hegelian individualism that was taking shape on the Continent in the mind of Max Stirner, author of The Ego and His Own, the first fully-developed statement of egoistic individualism.

Among all the books classed as “boys’ literature,” Jules Verne’s 1870 novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, maintains its position as one of the most-read and best-remembered adventure tales. Despite truncated and inept translations, and indeed, despite the strictures imposed on Verne by his own publisher, this novel, and its dark hero, Captain Nemo, transcends genres and continues to be read by a wide audience of both juveniles and adults. The power of the book derives partly from the ingenious ways in which Verne casts four principal male characters and portrays their homosocial relationships, and partly from Verne’s use of the imagery and symbolism of the ocean, representing both the repressed female and the savagery of Nature. Indeed, within the double claustrophobic enclosure of submarine and ocean, the interplay of the characters forms a complete mythos of filial (as opposed to familial) conflict and heroic quest. This narrative form excludes females — a perfect analogy to the psyche of the pre-adolescent boy.

Dryden's 1687 poem, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” and Handel’s 1739 musical setting of it, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, signify the meeting of poetry and music in the realm of the Sublime. Dryden’s poem takes music and its role in the universe as its theme, and hence invites examination against the eighteenth century’s radically evolving aesthetics of the Sublime. Handel’s musical work, setting to music a text about music itself, invites study to determine whether musical practice in Handel’s time enacted the aesthetics of contemporaneous poets and critics, insofar as they claimed to understand the Beautiful and the Sublime in music. This paper will attempt to illustrate the enormous gap between the two arts by showing that eighteenth-century British critical understanding of music was based on abstract ideas largely unrelated to musical practice, an understanding that failed to acknowledge music as an art capable of sublime effect on its own. I will use Handel’s work to demonstrate that composers achieve sublime effects — with or without text — by employing harmonic, dynamic and rhythmic techniques that constitute a kind of rhetoric. This techne, closer to the Sublime of Longinus than to that of Burke or Kant, allows music its acknowledged power even when accompanied with less-than-inspired text. I will review some of the criticism around Dryden’s poem that relates to its original 1687 musical setting, and then examine Handel’s work itself on a musicological basis.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is imbued with images, symbols, characters, and narrative elements taken directly from Egyptian myth and from The Book of the Dead, a reflection of Woolf’s classical reading and of the rampant “Egyptomania” of the 1920s. This article reviews the Osiris-Isis-Horus myth, the body of published literature about Egypt available to Woolf, the cultural phenomenon of Egyptomania, describing how character names, locales, plot elements and other details of the novel echo aspects of The Book of the Dead and Egyptology. Woolf’s overlay of Egyptian gods on the Ramsay family requires a re-examination of her treatment of Freud’s Oedipal complex, a concept she resisted even while employing it. Further, Woolf’s allusions to the matrilineal culture of ancient Egypt and the international cult of Isis demonstrate her search for alternate discourses, less patriarchal than Graeco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Freudian modes. Finally, there is the question — perhaps unanswerable — of whether Woolf’s “Egyptianizing” of her novel during its writing constituted a private coding of the text for her literary friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. This study includes an examination of Woolf’s own statements in letters about To the Lighthouse, her classical readings that referred to Egypt, and other possible sources of her knowledge about the lore of Isis. Finally, it presents a summary of some prior critics’ discoveries of Egyptian connnections in Woolf’s writings.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is imbued with images, symbols, characters, and narrative elements taken directly from Egyptian myth and from The Book of the Dead, a reflection of Woolf’s classical reading and of the rampant “Egyptomania” of the 1920s. This article reviews the Osiris-Isis-Horus myth, the body of published literature about Egypt available to Woolf, the cultural phenomenon of Egyptomania, describing how character names, locales, plot elements and other details of the novel echo aspects of The Book of the Dead and Egyptology. Woolf’s overlay of Egyptian gods on the Ramsay family requires a re-examination of her treatment of Freud’s Oedipal complex, a concept she resisted even while employing it. Further, Woolf’s allusions to the matrilineal culture of ancient Egypt and the international cult of Isis demonstrate her search for alternate discourses, less patriarchal than Graeco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Freudian modes. Finally, there is the question — perhaps unanswerable — of whether Woolf’s “Egyptianizing” of her novel during its writing constituted a private coding of the text for her literary friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. This study includes an examination of Woolf’s own statements in letters about To the Lighthouse, her classical readings that referred to Egypt, and other possible sources of her knowledge about the lore of Isis. Finally, it presents a summary of some prior critics’ discoveries of Egyptian connnections in Woolf’s writings.

Ovid's story of Niobe was part of a common classical discourse in trans-Atlantic culture. Richard Wilson's several paintings depicting the killing of Niobe's children reached the American colonies via engravings, and sometime between 1770 and 1773 Boston slave poet Phillis Wheatley translated Ovid's Niobe episode into a long poem. This chapter presents the proposition that Peter Pelham and Paul Revere, the artists and authors of the famed 1770 engraving of The Boston Massacre, copied visual elements from the Wilson painting, presented a personification of Boston as Niobe, and encoded an allusion to the Niobe myth as a female figure, "Unhappy Boston," in the verses on Revere's version of the engraving. While no claim is made that Pelham and Revere knew of Wheatley's poem, it is demonstrated here that the Niobe myth was part of a common discourse. Illustrations of the Richard Wilson Niobe canvasses and engravings made from it are provided.

This detailed study of Phillis Wheatley's classical mini-epic, "Niobe in Distress for her Children Slain by Apollo" traces the slave-poet's fascination with the Greek and Roman classics, and her small triumph in translating and adapting the Niobe episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Within this disturbing story of hubris and gruesome killings, Wheatley speaks for the African mother whose children were carried off by slavers, and cautiously alludes to how "rebellion" is punished by arbitrary power, apt in the years leading up to the American Revolution. This chapter defends Wheatley's work as a heart-felt classical adaptation on its own terms, not just an attempt to write "white" poetry to please her mentor and captors. Finally, the chapter demonstrates Wheatley using classical discourse subversively in a joking homoerotic verse written to two British sailors. Wheatley cannot be confined as a Christianized slave, an abolitionist, or even as an African American woman writer, even though those who first published her capitalized on these identities.

Introduction to a new edition of selected fiction by two Silver Age Russian writers, Leonid Andreyev and Mikhail Artsybashev. Surveys the critical response to the two writers, censorship and suppression of their writings, their relations to the 1905 Revolution and to the Bolsheviks, and the quality of English translations available in the public domain.

Tales of Wonder is a landmark work in the history of Gothic
literature, and a milestone in Romantic poetry. Percy Shelley owned the
book as a young man, and drew ghosts and monsters in its margins;
indeed, a cluster of Shelley’s juvenile poems are imitations of the
supernatural ballads collected here. Sir Walter Scott allowed himself to
be tutored by its author and compiler, and both Scott and Robert
Southey provided Gothic poems and ballads for the collection, originally
to be titled Tales of Terror. These are the Introductions to both volumes of my complete annotated edition of Lewis's collection. This annotated edition traces the literary origins of the poems and the stories behind them, connecting them to the long line of eccentric antiquarian scholars who collected classical, Runic, English, and Scottish manuscripts or folk material. The poems here also reveal the late 18th-century British project of constructing a pagan pre-history for England.

This foreword to a new translation of Heine's "Germany: A Winter's Tale," traces the career of the banned German-Jewish poet, the history of the reception of his work, and events around the Heine Bincentennial in 1997. The preparation of this facing-pages, bilingual edition, and the approach employed by translator Jacob Rabinowitz, are also described.

Thomas Lisle (d. 1767) was an obscure British poet who spent some years in exile after a sex and blasphemy scandal in his college years. His long poem, "History of Porsenna, King of Russia," combines Arcadian neo-classicism, Gothic elements, and coded homoerotic content in a strange mix, a kind of baroque masque abduction fantasy. This book chapter reveals the history of this text as published in Matthew Gregory Lewis's 1801 Tales of Wonder, and presents an annotated full text of the poem.

This article traces the publication history and origins of Robert Southey's poem, "Saint Patrick's Purgatory." Published anonymously by Matthew Gregory Lewis in 1801, the poem was not acknowledged by Southey until 1838. The poem has its origins in the writings of Marie de France, and the chronicles of Roger of Wendover. Southey's original, and revised versions are included here, as well as the original Wendover chronicle, and historical accounts on the destruction, and latter-day revival, of the legendary site in Ireland.

Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe’s posthumous defender in her 1860 book, "Edgar Poe and His Critics." She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916, the same year the only full-length biography of her, by Caroline Ticknor, appeared. The list of Whitman’s critical writings, most published under pseudonyms, has only recently been correctly identified and attributed to her. A reassessment of Sarah Helen Whitman as poet places her squarely in the Romantic tradition; and, as critic, as a ground-breaking American defender of Poe, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Alcott, and Emerson. Whitman’s accomplishments were small but significant, given the limits placed upon her success by the social, gender and religious norms of the time and place in which she lived —Providence, Rhode Island in the antebellum decades, as well as in the 1870s, when she published little, but carried on an extensive literary correspondence and served as her city’s artistic den mother.

Robert Graves called Charles Hamilton Sorley one of the three best poets killed in World War I. Shot by a German sniper in the Battle of Loos, Sorley died at age 20, leaving behind enough poems for a slender volume published by his father in 1915, "Marlborough and Other Poems." Several of Sorley's poems have been featured in war anthologies, but the poet's complete work was kept in print only until 1932. There was a reprint sometime in the 1970s and then Sorley seems to have been forgotten again. This annotated edition of Sorley's poetry and selected letters makes clear the names and place names and numerous classical and Biblical allusions that would have been well-known to Sorley's contemporaries. Some 1903 photos of the Wiltshire landscape have also been added, taken from an edition of Jefferies' nature writing. The book was completely re-typeset from the 1932 edition, using typefaces from the World War I era. The book also includes an annotated checklist of the critical reception of Sorley's work from 1915 through 1973, by Larry Uffelman; a biographical sketch of the poet written by his mother for the 1919 Letters of Charles Sorley; additional letters; and juvenilia.