Modern Literature

This chapter has five sections: 1. General; 2. Pre-1945 Fiction; 3. Post-1945 Drama; 4. Pre-1950 Poetry; 5. Post-1950 Poetry (Pre-1950 Drama and Post-1945 Fiction will be covered in the next volume). Section 1 is by Julian Cowley; sections 2(a)-(c) are by Daniel Lea; section 2(d) is by Paul Poplawski; section 2(e) is by Lynne Hapgood; section 2(f) is by Richard Storer; section 2(g) is by Edward Neill; section 3 is by Malcolm Page; section 4 is by Alice Entwhistle; section 5 is by John Brannigan.

1. General

The Cambridge Companion to Modernism is prefaced with a chronology that begins with publication of the first volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough and ends with the outbreak of the Second World War. Editor Michael Levenson speaks in his introduction of the need to redress distortions which have often produced a ‘coarsely understood Modernism’. The essays comprising the Companion seek to provide a more accurate and nuanced account, while achieving at the century’s end critical distance from the ‘creative violence’ that characterized its first three decades. Michael Bell, in The Metaphysics of Modernism’, writes on the ‘underlying legacy of hermeneutic suspicion’ that filtered from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud into questions of interpretation characteristic of modernism’s various discourses. Lawrence Rainey scrutinizes coteries, public lectures, and magazines, the ‘social spaces and staging venues’ within which the ‘institutional profile of Modernism’ was achieved. David Trotter traces the modernist struggle with the precarious viability of the novel as a genre, in the wake of Flaubert and Henry James. James Longenbach charts the ‘shrinking visibility’ of modernist poetry within recent literary-historical perspectives. Christopher Innes restores visibility to drama within modernism’s history, citing European instances to expand the picture. Sara Blair probes political meanings, interrogating relationships between aesthetic activity and forms of power. Her purview extends to the Harlem Renaissance, and acknowledges ‘the contestatory nature of Modernism’s investments in form, technique, and literary value’. Marianne Devoken writes on the centrality of ‘powerful femininity’ to modernism’s ‘complex deployments of gender’. The visual arts are surveyed by Glen Macleod, who illustrates literature’s indebtedness to the lead offered by painters. Michael Wood notes that cinematic practice has comfortably embraced ‘ancient conventions of realism and narrative coherence’, then proceeds to investigate ‘what Modernism looks like when it does appear in the cinema’. Levenson acknowledges that it is necessary to perform ‘resolute acts of exclusion’ in order to speak about modernism. His goal, substantially achieved, is to displace the ‘dull monolith’ with a ‘profusion’ appealing to ‘widely different tastes and temperaments’.

Jay and Neve, eds., 1900, is a fm-de-siecle reader. The editors have identified areas within which a perceived crisis of civilization was articulated around the turn of the nineteenth century, and have assembled signal documents to illustrate that anxious self-consciousness. Writings from various disciplines are collected under the following headings: ‘Evolution and Degeneration’, ‘Science’, ‘Atheism’, ‘Spiritualism and the New Age’, ‘The Unconscious’, ‘Sexology’, ‘The New Woman’, ‘The New Frontiers’, ‘Rumours of Total War’, and ‘Regeneration’. Well-known materials are mixed with less familiar indexes of the time, culled from American as well as European sources. The year 1900 emerges as a historical fulcrum for concerns expressed by scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and literary people (including Wells, Conan Doyle, Conrad, George Griffith, Grant Allen, Sax Rohmer, and Sarah Grand) between the years 1836 and 1932.

Angus Calder has compiled a volume with the same format as 1900, entitled Wars. The entries address wars fought on land and in the air in the European theatre during the first half of the twentieth century. Some were written contemporaneously, some retrospectively, but all focus on fighting. Calder bluntly asserts, This book is about killing and being killed.’ His aim is ‘to restore vivid, immediate, meaning to bleeding’, and to counter ‘gross distortion by omission’. The collection opens with an excerpt from Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s voice being taken as prophetic of horrors to come, and it extends chronologically to include John Ellis and other writers of new military history. Calder is alert to the effects of his calculated juxtapositions, ‘positioning Graves beside Celine, Owen in relation to Trakl’, and he creates some telling alignments. Claude Simon is followed by Len Deighton; Louis Aragon is placed between Kipling and Vera Brittain. Editorial shrewdness ensures the collection’s success as a reader, without compromising its humane purpose.

Karen L. Levenback’s Virginia Woolf and the Great War, traces the novelist’s evolving sense of the impact in England of the First World War, as represented in newspapers and official histories. Woolf’s ‘war-consciousness’, as Levenback calls it, grew with recognition of the illusory nature of a feeling of immunity from the effects of the war, initially widespread amongst the civilian population, and promoted by the popular press. Levenback shows how this was reflected in Woolf’s reviews, essays, letters, and diary entries as well as in her fiction that appeared during the decades following the war’s end, while forms of denial of unpalatable realities still marked ‘the public mood’. The discussion considers how The difficulties of postwar life and postwar language’ posed an intense challenge to Woolf, highly sensitized to death by her experience of living through that time of war.

John Whittier-Ferguson’s Framing Pieces is subtitled ‘Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound’. He examines those authors’ various commentaries on their own lives and work, as they appear in footnotes, marginalia, primers, and expository essays. A paradigm, addressed briefly, is Eliot’s production of framing pieces for The Waste Land. Whittier-Ferguson avoids a general theory of the gloss, preferring to attend to specific effects, but he does draw out the political significance of gestures made within particular framing apparatuses. The opening chapter looks at Joyce’s promotion of contexts for reading Work in Progress, notably through his input into Herbert Gorman’s biography, and at the intervention made by Eugene Jolas, editor of transition. The ‘Lessons’ chapter of Finnegans Wake (II.2) is scrutinized closely as ‘Joyce’s most flamboyant, entirely overt display of apparatus’, and the role of Our Exagmination is delineated. Turning to Woolf, Whittier-Ferguson investigates notes and explanations appended to A Room of One’s Own, The Pcirgiters, and Three Guineas, showing her remapping the traditional borders of novel and essay. He takes these to be, in crucial ways, representative of Woolf’s ‘embroidered, many-stranded texts’. The final chapter looks at the means, including his notorious radio broadcasts, by which Pound sought to bring into existence an educated readership, prepared to receive his poetry.

For Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, Michael North undertook an ambitious hermeneutic experiment, immersing himself in other writings that appeared during the year which saw publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land. He read voraciously to acquire ‘a more comprehensive understanding of how the masterworks of literary modernism fit into the discursive framework of their time’. This extends to advertisements for sound-recording equipment, news reports of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and its offshoots in fashion, the popular vogue for psychoanalysis, and commemoration in the Times Literary Supplement of the centenary of Grimm’s Law. North records that the Daily Mail registered 1922 as the first real post-war year, while Phillip Gibbs, in his bestseller The Middle of the Road, noted ‘a new restlessness in the soul of humanity’. In 1922 fieldwork decisively supplanted older methodologies, inaugurating modern anthropology. It was the year of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, I.A. Richards’s and C.K. Ogden’s The Foundations of Aesthetics, and John Cournos’s novel Babel; of Walter Lippman’s Popular Opinion, Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, and James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry; of Robert Flaherty’s film Nanook of the North, the extensively covered ‘Grand Oriental Tour’ of the Prince of Wales, and Charlie Chaplin’s travelogue, My Trip Abroad. In prefatory comments, North posits himself as an ideal reader; in the event, he is necessarily a partial reader, constrained by practicalities and predilections. He delves into now obscure corners as well as attending to the subsequently celebrated, making illuminating links across disciplinary boundaries and disclosing fertile ground for further research. The nature of the vantage-point from which modernity has recognized irreducible diversity and universal relativity is the book’s underlying conceptual concern.

At the start of the twentieth century Henri Bergson was held by some to be the greatest living thinker. His fall from prominence, John Mullarkey suggests, resulted in part from incorporation of his ideas into the more amenable perspectives of phenomenology, existentialism, and structuralism. Mullarkey has edited The New Bergson to reflect a recent increase of interest in Bergson’s philosophy. He includes the essay ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’ by Gilles Deleuze, whose ‘contemporary implementation of Bergson’s thought is partly responsible for this resurgence’. Richard A. Cohen argues that Bergson initiated a new ‘epoch of ecology’ in which integral harmony is established between reason and revelation. P.A.Y. Gunter discloses the ‘green’ Bergson, placing aspects of his thought in relation to environmentalist concerns. Garrett Barden, in a discussion of method in philosophy, considers the distinction between measurement of duration and duration itself. Timothy S. Murphy shows how Bergson’s critique of Einstein’s view of time foreshadows David Bohm’s and Basil Hiley’s ‘ontological’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. Three essays focus on Matter and Memory’ [1896], ‘the bedrock of Bergsonism’, elucidating the philosopher’s reconciliation of materialism and idealism, his concept of person, and his final position on the mind-body problem. F.C.T. Moore examines Bergson’s observations on magic. Keith Ansell Pearson affirms the continuing validity of the notion of ‘creative evolution’, when rescued from simplification. Two essays address ‘art’: Mark Antliff locates the paintings of Henri Matisse within a Bergsonian frame; in the course of reviewing Bergson’s attitude towards cinema; Paul Douglass alludes to Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay, ‘The Movies and Reality’.

Amie L. Thomasson’s Fiction and Metaphysics, offers a measured investigation of the ontology of fictional characters, and argues for their status as ‘abstract artifacts’ which are ‘tethered to the everyday world around us by dependencies on books, readers, and authors’. This emphasis on connectedness to entities in the ordinary world distinguishes her approach from Meinongian theory, which ‘sees fictional characters as part of a separate realm of abstract or nonexistent objects’. As she explicates her ‘artefactual theory’, Thomasson tackles fundamental questions concerning conditions for the existence of figures such as Sherlock Holmes, Clarissa Dalloway, Gregor Samsa, and Gudrun Brangwen. They are, she asserts, ‘not possible people but actual characters’. Her case is made with the broader intention of initiating ‘a better analysis of cultural entities and abstract artifacts generally’, an ontology for a varied world, free from false parsimony.

‘Without an ethics, can the scholar be sure of the point to his or her work?’ The question is posed by Andrew Gibson in Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel. The book is subtitled ‘From Leavis to Levinas’, and although Gibson is swift to detach himself from Leavisite tenets he acknowledges a point of contact in his grounding assumption, that ‘in their own particular manner, novels perform an ethical work, or can be made to, and it is worth trying to enable that work to take place’. Surveying critical and academic discourse, Gibson is concerned to assess the effectiveness of ‘the politics of English’ in light of a ‘depressingly, stubbornly conservative culture’. He argues the case for a close relationship between theory and ethical criticism, engaging discriminately with the ‘many-sided, non-foundational ethics’ found in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, and deploying insights derived from Jean-Frangois Lyotard’s reading of the avant-garde. The emergence of ethics through narrative technique, and through destabilization of narrational and representational categories is demonstrated through reference to works by Henry James, Cather, Conrad, Bowen, Proust, Beckett, and postmodern writers including B.S. Johnson, Iain Banks, Patricia Dunker, Gordon Burn, Peter Ackroyd, and Jeanette Winterson. In concluding chapters, Gibson asks whether a postmodern ethics of fiction might also be an ethics of affect, reasserting ‘sensibility’ and ‘receptivity’.

Stefan Herbrechter deploys Levinasian ethics, in conjunction with Derridean deconstruction, in Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity, a book that shares many of the concerns articulated by Gibson. Durrell’s fiction is used ‘as a springboard into the pool of contemporary notions of alterity’, with the goal of producing a rigorous and radical conception of postmodernism. The Avignon Quintet [ 1974–85] is taken as a ‘receivable’ text (following Barthes), and a suitable focus for Herbrechter’s advocacy of a ‘“receptive” ethics of reading’. In the course of his discussion, Herbrechter examines the discrepancy between the initial literary reputation of The Alexandria Quartet and later views of Durrell’s work, in order to shed light on ‘cultural differences in the understanding of modernism and postmodernism’. Extended consideration is given to the novelist’s ‘gnostic world view’ and its ideological implications. Concluding evaluation of Durrell’s project assesses its openness to an ‘ethics of translation’.

Timothy Walsh’s The Dark Matter of Words is an urbane study of ‘Absence, Unknowing, and Emptiness in Literature’. It commences with reference to a 1,500-year-old Chinese text, then archly acknowledges the influence of basketball, a game that involves ‘hitting a marked circle of emptiness with a twirling globe’. Walsh defers to Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen rather than Derrida; he assigns authority to R.P. Blackmur and Richard Poirier rather than Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller. He engages with ‘fabricated lacunae and blank enigmas’, but aims ‘to explore the recondite by means of the conspicuous’, rather than being bound by the hermetic procedures of deconstructive method. His rebuttal of the metaphor of language as prison-house entails a degree of polemic and provocation, but it also offers a suggestive account of literary strategies for rendering apprehension of ‘genuine wordless states’, whether these are conceived as nothingness, silence, or the ineffable. Walsh draws attention to the insidious recurrence of the word ‘something’. Examples of ‘structured absence’ are drawn from sculpture and music, as well as from writing by authors including Henry James, Mary Webb, Joyce, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner, John Cowper Powys, and Beckett.

Tigges, ed., Moments of Moment, surveys ‘Aspects of the Literary Epiphany’ through a series of essays addressing a chronologically wide range of British and American authors, from C.C. Barfoot on Blake to Ashton Nichols’s unlikely coupling of Thomas Pynchon and Seamus Heaney. Following Tigges’s opening enumeration of instances, ‘Towards a Typology of Literary Epiphanies’, Robert Langbaum’s ‘The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature’ [1983] is reprinted to establish firmly the collection’s orientation. Paul Devine considers the influence of Wagnerian leitmotif upon George Moore’s writing in Evelyn limes and The Lake. Christine van Boheemen-Saaf, assuming a post-colonial perspective, argues that Joyce’s formulations of Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic are ‘the defensive gesture of the subaltern aspiring writer’. Nigel Parke uses Joyce and Katherine Mansfield in his discussion of ‘Rites of Passage in the Modern Epiphany’. Dermot Kelly discloses a Joycean legacy in Seamus Deane’s novel Reading in the Dark. For Suzette Henke, Lily Briscoe’s epiphanic vision in Woolf s To the Lighthouse is the triumphant aesthetic sublimation of an emotional need. Carmen Concilio focuses on the articulatory role of objects in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. Grazia Cerulli establishes a Heideggerian link between Beckett’s poetics and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Sjef Houppermans examines mourning visions in Proust and Beckett. Celia Wallhead scrutinizes Freudian revelation in D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel. Rachel Falconer identifies ‘a distinctly modernist chronotope’ that took shape in the short story form, and notes departures from it among contemporary practitioners of the genre. Other essays address Yeats, Pound, Larkin, and Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Laurie Langbauer’s Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, investigates the seductiveness of the series and the allure of the everyday, and uncovers connections between the two, as they have shaped her experience of reading fiction. Distancing herself from Marxist theorists who, she acknowledges, have helped shape her thinking, and from patriarchal assumptions of the kind she finds in Freud, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre, Langbaum explores the gendered nature of pleasure. Her commitment is to ‘the manifest and divided here and now’ rather than ‘some seamless elsewhere’ attained through transcendence of the multifarious everyday. The impetus for this study came from exposure to nineteenth-century series fiction, and the book’s focus falls on mid- to late Victorian writing, on Oliphant, Yonge, Trollope, and Conan Doyle; but Langbaum extends her discussion to include later serialists John Galsworthy and Dorothy Richardson. The series form of Pilgrimage appears archaic in the context of modernism, Langbaum suggests, but that may be interpreted as contesting the modernist view of history as progressing through rupture and revolution. She traces at greater length ‘the series’s remnants’ in Virginia Woolfs fiction, exposing unresolvable ‘contradictions of the everyday’ which may contribute to an understanding of the novelist’s ‘paradoxical political identity’ with regard to class and race.

Victoria Appelbe has translated Elisabeth Bronfen’s Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text, a study originally published in a somewhat different form and in German more than a decade ago, whose constituent concerns are itemized in the subtitle. Bronfen’s phenomenological approach engages with ‘corporeal emplacement, psychic topologies and spatial textuality’ in Richardson’s Pilgrimage. The first part, drawing on Martin Heidegger, Mircea Eliade, Gaston Bachelard, and Mikhail Bakhtin among others, examines Richardson’s representation of concrete spatial relationships, and the implication of the character Miriam Henderson in lived spaces. Part II, ‘Metaphorical Spaces’, starts from Nelson Goodman’s definition of the world-making process. Still attending closely to the novels in the sequence, it ‘examines the tectonic principles underlying epistemology and cognition’, paying special attention to the assignment of ‘spatial attributes to abstract concepts’. The book’s final part, ‘Textual Space—Spatial Textuality’, draws on the work of Gerard Genette to investigate terms for analogy between space and text. An appendix surveys critical responses to Dorothy Richardson’s writing, from May Sinclair in 1918 to studies produced during the 1990s. Bronfen sanctioned the project of translation, recognizing that her work might invigorate current debate. It offers a lucid exposition, as well as a persuasive application, of phenomenological critical practice, and is an important contribution to analysis of Richardson’s fiction.

Dorothy L. Sayers continues to attract critical attention. Janice Brown’s thorough study The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers foregrounds the novelist’s steadfast Christian belief and her understanding that sin lies at the root of human suffering and confusion. Brown suggests that medieval classification of sin provides an organizing principle that underpins Sayers’s varied output, including plays and non-fiction, which she surveys chronologically. Lord Peter Wimsey is seen to develop from ‘a worldly-wise Bertie Wooster with brains’, in his earliest appearances, to ‘a Christian hero trying to save the world from war’ as Sayers’s spiritual concerns and her skills in characterization developed. Supporting material is drawn from Sayers’s Christian apologist essays, collected as Unpopular Opinions, and her annotations to her translation of Dante’s Purgatorio.

Button and Reed, eds., The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders, assembles essays that extend chronologically from Byron to Anita Brookner. ‘Foreign’ is in this context taken to encompass ‘the political and sociological marginality of women’; ‘British’ in effect signifies English. Twentieth-century concerns begin with Ode Ogede’s essay on the construction of the African woman’s identity in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which insists that the novelist was culpable of bolstering racial prejudices. Karl Henzy looks at Frieda Lawrence’s influence on gender reversal in D.H. Lawrence’s fiction. Mary Mathew scrutinizes the ‘fascistic, bisexual’ heroine of Lawrence Durrell’s novel Livia, or Buried Alive. Marilyn Demarest Button examines Brookner’s use of socially alienated female figures in her early novels The Dehut and Providence. The collection is intended to assist moves towards ‘fuller recognition of women and better appreciation of cultural diversity’.

Duncan and Gregory’s, eds., Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, collects essays on the practice of reading European and American travel writing produced between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The prevailing method is new historicist, with special emphasis placed on ‘the physicality of representation itself. Duncan ponders the hybridity of British conceptions of Ceylon; Gregory considers Orientalist assumptions in light of the ‘scripting’ practices involved in travel and tourism, with reference to nineteenth-century texts. Roxann Wheeler examines Defoe’s Captain Singleton alongside eighteenth-century accounts of Africa. Robert Shannan Peckham evaluates the role of representations of Greece, including Virginia Woolf’s observations on that country, in the long-running debate concerning relationships between East and West. Richard Phillips explores Sir Richard Burton’s mapping of sexuality. Michael Brown scrutinizes ‘the closet’ as a spatialization of homosexual desire. Alison Blunt writes on ways in which Victorian women communicated, through fictional texts and documentary reports, their experience of travelling in India during a period of imperial conflict. Laurie Hovell McMillin looks at Kipling’s Kim in the course of her essay on British writers’ fashioning of Tibet as a site of personal transformation. Joanne P. Sharp examines possible effects on the imaginary and physical landscape of southern France in the wake of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence.

Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, A Literary Friendship, assembles correspondence between Ford Madox Ford and American novelist Caroline Gordon, from 1930 until Ford’s death in 1939. The majority of the letters are from Gordon, with some addressed to Janice Biala, Ford’s partner. The title is bland but accurate; shared passions and mutual concerns characterize the letters. As might be expected with Ford involved, those passions encompass gardening and chickens. The mutual concern is for physical and creative well-being. There is much discussion of reviews and dedications, highlighting how prolific Ford was during his final years, and how supportive of Gordon and her husband, Allen Tate. In 1934 Ford confides that he has been ‘trying to raise the “serious” book to the level of the novel by writing it with as much passion and similar technique’. Overall, there is little theorizing of fictional practice, but there are regular glimpses of other writers, including Katherine Anne Porter, John Crowe Ransom, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas enthusiastically reading William Faulkner, and Faulkner himself, drinking heavily. The practical difficulties of living by writing are constantly felt.

Shortage of serious critical engagement with Aldous Huxley’s later years, spent in America, writing Hollywood screenplays and exploring mysticism, prompted David Dunaway to edit Aldous Huxley Recollected: An Oral History, originally published in 1995 and now revised. For obvious reasons of mortality, a volume built on ‘oral testimony’ necessarily concentrates on those later years. Interviews were conducted between 1985 and 1990. A preface is supplied by Francis Huxley, the writer’s nephew. The life is divided into five phases, each sketched briefly before the reminiscences of those who knew Huxley are deployed. The ‘witnesses, coworkers, family, and friends’ include Huxley’s widow Laura, Christopher Isherwood, and Naomi Mitchison. The focus falls squarely on the man rather than his writings, although the final chapter offers a sample of current critical assessment through views expressed by eight participants in the Aldous Huxley Centenary Symposium, held in Munster, Germany in 1994. Dunaway presents his book as ‘a case study of contemporary oral biography’ and he concludes with observations on the methodology and practice of oral literary history.

Patrick Quinn has edited New Perspectives on Robert Graves with the aim of redressing scholarly neglect of the writer since his death in 1985. That neglect is, Quinn suggests, possibly a consequence of Graves’s ‘outlandish public image’. Contributions have been culled from centenary conferences held in Oxford and Palma. Quinn gathers them under five headings: ‘Criticism’, ‘Poetry’, ‘Fiction’, ‘Essays’, and ‘Influences’. In ‘Fiction’, Ian Firla examines the narrative technique of Graves’s short stories as a model for that of his longer fiction; Chris Hopkins places the Claudius novels in relation to other historical fiction written during the 1930s; and Ian McCormick looks at the novel Wife to Mr. Milton. The ‘Essays’ section is dedicated to the significance for Graves of the White Goddess. ‘Criticism’ includes Patrick McGuinness on Graves’s distaste for his modernist contemporaries in poetry, and Paul O’Prey’s examination of strategies, including the writing of Goodbye To All That, by means of which Graves sought to come to terms with his experience of the First World War. O’Prey suggests that Graves’s attempt to break with his past was ‘a form of suicide’, survival through textual self-destruction.

‘Literature teachers can play a vital role in suicide prevention’, asserts Jeffrey Berman, who believes that potentially fatal depression can be detected early through careful attention to a student’s class diaries and personal essays. The writing of Berman’s Surviving Literary Suicide was fuelled by a course he taught, and draws heavily on student responses to literary texts dealing with suicide. Statistical and documentary materials are imported from the classroom, but Berman also offers his own analysis of writers struggling with suicidal impulses. The death of Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway’s reaction to it form the focus of a chapter that more generally investigates Virginia Woolf s desperate struggle against impulses towards self-immolation. Berman assesses various accounts of motives underlying Woolf’s attraction to suicide in her fiction and her life, before concluding that the core of the novelist’s legacy is her ‘heroic embrace of life’. Other chapters examine romanticized suicide in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening; mocking poetry written by Ernest Hemingway following Dorothy Parker’s attempts to kill herself; the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; and William Styron’s survivor’s tale, Darkness Visible.

Jo Keroes’ Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film, investigates ‘an implicit link between knowing and loving’ which partly structures the exchanges that occur in teaching. She examines how representations of teachers, in a disparate selection of literary and cinematic fictions, have been used to register social change, and to probe psychological issues pertaining to identity and power. After venturing back to twelfth-century France to trace exemplary patterns in the case of Peter Abelard and Heloise, Keroes turns her attention to seduction and betrayal in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the tale of ‘a moral monster’. A later chapter reads Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw alongside Joyce Carol Oates’s 1995 retelling of the story in ‘Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly’, and Jodie Foster’s film Little Man Tate [1991], in order to disclose continuing ‘ambivalence about female power and the maternal-pedagogical role’. Another chapter follows critical transformations of the Pygmalion myth through two literacy narratives, Willy Russell’s Educating Rita and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God.

James Aubrey invokes the emergent field of ‘ecocriticism’ in his introduction to John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape, adding that, although this critical practice has not been systematically or restrictively codified, it offers appropriate access to Fowles’s imaginative engagement with natural places, and his advocacy of biodiversity. Contributors of the book’s ‘fourteen perspectives on landscape’ were among participants in a symposium held in Lyme Regis, where Fowles resides. Katherine Tarbox considers how the experience of reading is figured in Fowles’s metaphoric use of ‘islands’. That figuration is taken up again by Clark Closser in his explication of Fowles’s problematic story, ‘The Cloud’. Lynne S. Vieth investigates the interaction of visual image and text in the novelist’s non-fictional works. Carol M. Barnum offers a Jungian reading of Fowles’s fascination with the natural world; Barry N. Olshen alludes to D.W. Winnicott in his discussion of the Green Man archetype. Eileen Warburton analyses recurrence in the fiction of the image of a female corpse in natural surroundings. Several essays converge from different angles to explore the Undercliff, topological heart of The French Lieutenant’s Woman: it is viewed as an actual place and as an imagined site of primal experience, in evolutionary perspective and as inverted pastoral. Adopting a phenomenological approach, H.W. Fawkner takes a broader view of Fowles’s representation of landscape. Lisa Colleta brings D.H. Lawrence’s travel narratives to bear on her reading of Daniel Martin. Kirke Kefalea identifies interactions between myth and modernity in The Magus. Dianne L. Vipond presents Fowles’s poetry as transforming ‘the landscapes of loss’. The book is illustrated abundantly with photographs, some rather indistinct, depicting places associated with Fowles or his fiction.

Stephen Bernstein’s Alasdair Gray, is an introductory volume and critical survey of Gray’s novels, with the intention of redressing relative neglect in America of the Scottish author’s output. He opens with a bold flourish, declaring Gray ‘one of the most important living writers in English’, and remarking upon his ‘peerless’ activity as illustrator and designer, producing books that are ‘total works of art’. He also identifies Gray as a key figure in the Scottish literary florescence of recent decades. He makes no secret, however, of his sense that Gray’s writing career to date contains both ‘peaks and valleys’. Bernstein allocates a chapter to each of the full-length fictional works from Lanark to A History Maker, with the satires The Fall of Kelvin Walker and McGrotty and Ludmilla considered together, and the novella Mavis Self rage handled in the conclusion. The study aims to reveal the fiction’s underlying coherence in terms of ‘counter-history, and the problematics of memory’.

Papers given in August 1996, at the Fourth Triennial International Conference on Word and Image Studies, have been assembled in Heusser, Hannoosh, Schoell-Glass, and Scott, eds., Text and Visuality. The opening section, Theoretical Considerations’, includes Mieke Bal’s interrogation of ‘common assumptions regarding what is visual and what is verbal’; Hanjo Berressem’s theorization of the hypermedial environment; and Hugo Caviola’s examination of the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, with particular reference to ‘the penetration of inside and outside’ as a prominent ‘morphological image of Modernism’. The second section, ‘Paintings, Prints and Photographs’, includes Leo H. Hoek’s essay (in French) on the modernism of Manet; Debra Kelly on Pierre Albert-Birot’s painting La Guerre [1916) and his six-volume, unpunctuated prose epic, Grahinoulor; and Ruth Rennie’s observations on visual representations of political discourse, exemplified by the French Communist Party between the wars. The section ‘Books, Typography and Other Media’ includes ‘The Digital Scriptorium’, Will Hill’s musings on the resumption of the illuminated word within contemporary design practice and the digital communications environment, and Renee Riese Hubert on book-works by David Hockney and Clifton Meador. The final grouping, entitled ‘Beyond Mere Word and Image’, includes Burattoni and Abrioux on ‘ektopias’, or texts translated into landscape; Penny Florence’s discussion of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture in terms of ‘pathways between the sexed body and signifying practice’; Kenneth Hay on translatability, including thoughts on John Huston’s film adaptation of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’; and John Dixon Hunt’s ‘Word and Image in the Garden’.

Werner Wolfs The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality, examines, as Wolf recognizes, a thorny and controversial topic. He takes pains to establish and justify his theoretical and methodological premises in the course of a lengthy preliminary discussion of issues, and uses available terminology with evident care. Semiotic analysis is taken to be the appropriate point of entry to this mesh of conventionalized signifying practices that share an acoustic nature. A historical dimension is introduced through an account of the rise of music in aesthetic evaluation since the eighteenth century. Within this perspective, modernism appears to be a climactic moment, with attempts at musicalized fiction becoming conspicuous and frequent. Wolfs primary material is fiction that ‘shows signs of a “transposition” of music into narrative literature’, namely, De Quincey’s ‘Dream Fugue’, which concludes The English Mail Coach, Joyce’s ‘Sirens’ episode from Ulysses, Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet’, Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Samuel Beckett’s Ping, Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon Symphony, and Gabriel Josipovici’s short story ‘Fuga’. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is employed as a test-case. The assumed musical model is, of course, ‘Western non-monodic instrumental music of the past three centuries’, although Wolf is oddly parsimonious with his references to specific musical works and composers. There is much that might be contested, but this scrupulously considered book is a noteworthy addition to the expanding body of critical literature addressing intermedial concerns.

A distillation of Wolf’s theoretical position forms his contribution to Bernhart, Scher, and Wolf, eds., Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. The papers collected here were delivered at a conference held at Graz in 1997, and are predictably varied in nature. Definition of the field is consequently an aspiration only partly realized, although some fertile territory is marked out in the process of furnishing a conceptual basis for the newly formed International Association for Word and Music Studies. Wolf’s essay appears in the volume’s opening section, ‘Theoretical Considerations’, along with comparably purposeful reflections from his co-editors, plus John Neubauer’s cultural studies angle on Bartok’s uses of folk music, and Daniel Albright’s recasting of Lessing’s Laokoon within a modernist comparative arts perspective. The second grouping, ‘Literature and Music’, focuses on means to analyse song and opera. The third, ‘Music in Literature’, includes Ulla-Britta Lagerroth on the self-reflexive nature of musicalized texts, William E. Grim on problems that arise for literary critics when writers such as Mann and Joyce adopt musical forms, and Anja Miiller-Muth’s reading of Anthony Burgess’s idiosyncratic text Mozart and the Wolf Gang. A highlight of the volume is Mary M. Breatnach’s essay on Pierre Boulez’s settings of Mallarme in his song cycle Pli selon pli, which opens the section ‘Literature in Music’. Another highlight, Lawrence Kramer’s exposition of the notion of ‘songfulness’, with reference to Schubert and to Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, opens the concluding part, ‘“Meaning” in Vocal Music’. It is followed by Albrecht Riethmiiller’s essay on national anthems and musical semantics, which carries an appendix containing previously unpublished comments on anthems made, in German, by Theodor W. Adorno.

Fiona Cox’s Aeneas Takes the Metro, traces the intertextual ‘journey of Virgil’s oeuvre through twentieth-century French literature’, disclosing how recurrent use of certain passages from the Roman poet’s work signals particular twentieth-century anxieties and preoccupations. After surveying French Virgilian criticism, and establishing the significance, viewed as a critical intervention, of Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, Cox traces the Virgilian course through the Resistance poetry of Louis Aragon, bucolic works by Andre Gide and Jean Giono, Pierre Klossowski’s translation of thzAeneid, Michel Butor’s La Modification, and the novels of Claude Simon and Robert Pinget. She suggests that the Sibyl may be seen as the Muse of the nouveau roman, on account of that genre’s insistence on ‘the impossibility of attaining a final meaning’. More generally, she affirms that Virgil’s ‘flexibility and openness to reception’ has ensured his continuing relevance for writers of widely differing persuasions.

2. Pre-1945 Fiction

(a) Conrad

Another productive year in Conrad criticism has passed, and the diversity and breadth of investigation continue to impress, as does the high standard of scholarship being brought to bear on Conrad’s writing. Certain distinctive tropes have begun to appear over recent years, however, and this year’s work develops them into broader issues for interrogation. The interest in Conrad’s philosophical and ideological education is maintained in articles on Schopenhauer and Rousseau while several journal essays have focused on Conrad’s political affiliations and his relationship to the Polish independence movement. In wider terms this year has seen a movement away from examinations of the major novels (although these are still very prevalent) into considerations of the early and later fictions—a healthy development which can only be welcomed. Also of note this year are the number of critical works which seek to rescue the authorial subject from the influence of textualist and post-structuralist hegemony. Appreciations of Conrad’s background and life experience infiltrate many volumes and articles and suggest a growing trend in Conrad criticism to view the interpenetration of life and writing as an organic model for interpretation.

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan has followed up the polemical Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper [1991] with The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad: Writing, Culture and Subjectivity, a study which promises much and fulfils most of that promise. The study begins with an exploration of the issues of liminality arising from Under Western Eyes, but more broadly arising from Conrad’s antipathy towards Dostoevsky, his feelings about his own national identity, and his troubled sense of subjectivity. Propounding a theory which she refers to as the ‘dynamics of permeation’ (p. 5), Erdinast-Vulcan draws on Derridean notions of the borderline to explore the interpenetration of Conrad’s biographical imprint on the text with the realm of fictionality. Conrad’s text, she argues, elicits a complex interaction between extra-textual authorial persona, implied author, narrator, and characters which implies metaphysical questions about the liminal status of the text but also about the borderlines of the self and of culture. Chapter 2 explores ‘The Secret Sharer’ through Bakhtinian theories of subjectivity, arguing that the story constructs an identificatory relationship, thereby allowing the subject (both in and around the text) to erect a kernel of self-sufficiency against psychic dissolution. The later parts of the study broaden the discussion of subjectivity to focus on the interactions of author, culture, and subject. Running throughout are the same ideas of subjectivity as uncontainable within the boundary-lines of the self, in other words the invalidity of notions of enclosed subjectivity. Erdinast-Vulcan contends that Conradian textual strategies went in some measure towards delineating his own authorial identity, yet it was an identity she suggests he continually undermined and fought against. Of particular note among these chapters is the discussion of Conrad’s uneasy relationship with Romanticism, which stimulates wider questions about the development of modernist subjectivity. It has to be admitted that the volume does lose some degree of focus purely through the diversity of material and readings that Erdinast-Vulcan provides. It is a work of considerable interest, but occasionally the competing influences of the text collide, leaving the reader slightly unsure as to the intended motivation. Nevertheless, this study is valuable for its numerous insights into modern subjectivity and particularly into the relationship between that subjectivity and the author’s ethical responsibility. No longer, Erdinast-Vulcan claims, can or should we produce wholly textualist readings of literary works—the author may not be the supreme centre of the text, but neither is s/he absent. While such sentiments may not be totally fresh, this study provides us with an interesting and stimulating reformulation of the ideas in relation to Conrad.

Not unlike Erdinast-Vulcan, Beth Sharon Ash’s Writing in Between: Modernity and Psychosocial Dilemma in the Novels of Joseph Conrad, seeks a critical entrance into the text which encompasses both social and psychological impulses. She seeks what she calls a theoretical middle-ground in which the intertwined discourses of psycho-biographical and cultural criticism can be accommodated equally. To this end she chooses to interpret Conrad’s major fiction within three significant socio-historical contexts: the decline in ideas of organic social order; the pre-eminence of an imperialist culture in late nineteenth-century Britain, and the political problems of the Edwardian age. Motivating her throughout is the conviction that the mode and moment of production of Conrad’s major writings reflects not just the traumatic birth of modernist aesthetics but equally the psychological involvement of the individual in social institutions in transformation. Ash sees an overwhelming sense of loss at the centre of Britain’s late Victorian and Edwardian ‘Weltanschauung, and traces this both on a broad social level and also into the deeply nostalgic psyche of Conrad himself. The strategies which he used to combat this loss and the armoury of strategies with which he provides his characters to accommodate the crisis of identity which is seen to attend that cultural change, form a large part of Ash’s argument. The text does not wear its theoretical learning lightly, and Ash feels obliged repeatedly to situate her arguments (and those of Conrad) within an intricate web of forebears. This does lead to a degree of heavy-handed recapitulation which inhibits the free flow of her ideas. Ultimately however this is a rewarding study which goes far beyond a cultural-historical critique of Conrad’s fiction. Ash elucidates both the cultural and psychological transformations of early modernism, showing Conrad to be caught in a bind of insistent and yet simultaneously untenable dictates, a condition she then inflects onto British society at large. While the text would have benefited from some judicious editing, this is a serious and significant intervention in current Conrad studies.

From the Oxford English Monographs series comes the sparsely titled Conrad and Women by Susan Jones, which seeks to interrogate Conrad’s attitudes towards and dealings with women as well as their representation in his fiction. Disappointingly this investigation largely avoids the major novels and is instead limited to the later writings, particularly focusing on Chance and Suspense. Nevertheless the in-depth analyses of these texts is sufficient to provoke serious questions about Conrad’s reputation as a ‘masculine’ author, and raises important issues about his credentials as a supporter of feminist politics. Jones stresses that, far from being an exclusive chronicle of masculinity, Conrad’s fiction (and in particular his later fiction) shows him to be a ‘sympathetic interpreter of women’s contemporary situation’ (p. 2). Challenging the assumption that Conrad’s career traces a parabola of achievement and decline, which sees the later, more politically conscious fiction as a product of a declining imagination, Jones attempts to reconstruct the later texts as artistic detours into popular romance. The critical neglect of the popular fiction, with its more direct engagement with issues of female gender identity, has been the result, so Jones claims, of critical discourses that have privileged the masculinist bent of the earlier seafaring narratives. Through exploring the principal female influences on Conrad’s life, most notably his friendship with Marguerite Poradowska, Jones constructs a convincing portrait of a man trapped between the dictates of domesticity and adventure. Chance and Suspense evince his increasing engagement with issues of female identity and the roles which women were commonly invited to play. She also explores the growing readership of Conrad’s work among women, and the consequent marketing of these late novels for that audience. If one were to criticize Jones it would almost certainly be on the grounds of over-ambition. The implications of her argument are huge and need deeper exploration (particularly with relation to the earlier fiction) than she is able to give. This should not detract from a very thorough and insightful study which throws light on a little-covered area of Conrad’s work.

Following the tendency of others this year to move away from the major middle-period fiction in favour of the early or late writing, Linda Dryden’s Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance, engages with the early Malay stories, focusing principally on Almayers Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, ‘Karain’ and Lord Jim. She explores the relationship between Conrad’s early romances and the jingoistic imperial adventure stories of the mid- to late Victorian period. Fundamental to her argument is the notion that Conrad uses the tropes and formulas of imperial romance to subvert the genre’s casual assumptions about race and imperialism. Interesting and valid as this approach is, it is largely one that has already been established— most notably by Andrea White in Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition [1993], an influence which Dryden acknowledges but never fully seems to overcome. Admittedly the focus on the early materials is a departure, but it is couched in arguments so common to debates on Conrad that it already appears canonical. The first two chapters which provide the contextual springboard for the thesis—on the cultural construction of an imperial hero and on the cultural history of the imperial romance genre—cover ground which has been frequently traversed before. Having said that, Dryden’s text does offer some refreshing insights into the early fiction and points towards the deconstruction of Romantic idealism in the novels as a step towards the uncertainty of the modernist sensibility.

Peter Edgerly Fire how’s Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is an energetic and expansive attempt to reassess Conrad’s attitudes towards race and imperialism. A self-reflexive text in the sense that it cites dominant twentieth-century ideological imperatives as constitutive of a negative critical discourse about Conrad, Firchow re-examines not only the case for Conrad as a racist but also the ideological contexts within which those criticisms are couched. He argues that in many instances the literature of Heart of Darkness, hijacked by political consensus, has chosen to exaggerate Conrad’s negative judgements on race in order to conform to ‘acceptable’ discourses of pluralist criticism. Furthermore he complains that political expediency has determined the critical response to Conrad’s novel, and that the bulk of criticism has tended to ignore Conrad’s part in a wide and diverse European response to Africa. Instead Firchow offers a robust riposte to these claims, saving particular heat for Achebe’s criticisms of Conrad’s views of African peoples, which he dismisses in detail. On the whole this is a convincing rebuttal, but it does perhaps disregard too unremittingly the context within which Achebe’s comments were made. At times (for instance in the concluding discussion of genocide) the meticulously presented research can stand in the way of Firchow’s original points. Certainly at times his writing is overwhelmed by the tradition of scholarship within which he feels duty-bound to situate himself. He writes with an evangelical zeal, and his study plays a significant part in highlighting how the dominating concerns of literary criticism are more often than not extra-literary. His book is a valiant attempt to break away from overtly politicized readings of Conrad and to measure the ‘envisioned’ African against a recorded ‘reality’. The problems that go with this task are evident in the book, which lacks awareness of its own political location. It is nevertheless an intriguing attempt to forge a middle passage between visions of Conrad as either an angel or a devil.

This year has seen the publication of two reader’s companions to Conrad. From Oxford University Press comes the latest addition to the excellent Reader’s Companions series, Knowles and Moore, eds., The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, which lives up to the reputation already established by the preceding volumes. Containing contributions from the notable Conrad scholars Robert Hampson, Zdzislaw Najder, Allan Simmons and John Stape, this is an invaluable and authoritative reference guide to Conrad’s life and work. Reviewing a work of such encyclopaedic breadth is difficult, but the contributors, editors, and publishers should be congratulated on both the text’s presentation and its accessibility. The entries embrace the familiar (Conrad’s family, writing, and influences) and the less familiar (his attitude to suicide and the film versions of his fiction), and do so not only with commendable scrupulousness but also an engaging vivacity. Contained alongside the biographical entries are those on significant cultural and historical contexts to Conrad’s writing and to the predominant schools of literary criticism which have engaged with his work. The text also contains a family tree, a detailed chronology, maps, illustrations, and a bibliography of major critical studies. A reference work of a very high quality, this text will be a comforting addition to the libraries of Conrad scholars and will provide a thorough introduction to the general reader and to the student.

Complementing this project is Orr and Billy, eds., A Joseph Conrad Companion. Unlike its counterpart, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad [1996], this volume sets out to cover all Conrad’s significant writings, both fictional and non-fictional, and in addition has chapters on his letters and memoirs and an introductory biographical survey. The essays themselves have been commissioned for the book, and give a chronological sweep of Conrad’s career, although discussions of the later novels and the short fiction are covered in only two chapters. On the whole this is a very well designed and edited collection, providing readers with both a biographical narrative of Conrad’s writings and some form of accrued critical history for the individual works. The chapters frequently strive to collate the critical response to a given text while providing a carefully privileged reading—although this is never obtrusive. The structure of the various chapters can be wildly divergent, however: John X. Cooper’s piece on Nostromo is mainly given over to an appraisal of the major debates that have dominated the text’s critical history, while Leonard Orr is more prepared to provide a personal critical reading of Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. Ted Billy synthesizes responses to Heart of Darkness into a critical overview, whereas Stephen Arata and Paul Hollywood (on The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes respectively) stress the narratives of sources, production, and reception of their texts. While these disparities in style do occasionally suggest the separate and uncomplementary directions in which criticism of Conrad can pull, the overall impression of this diversity is of freshness and individuality, and once again reveals the vibrancy of Conrad studies. Although the brief of the volume is not always particularly adventurous (unlike its companion from CUP), this is a valuable source of perspective for the general academic reader on Conrad, certainly provides an excellent bibliography, and will undoubtedly become a standard reference work on the subject.

At a more basic level, this year has also seen the publication of a reader’s guide to Conrad’s most enduring fiction. Greenhaven Press have followed up last year’s Readings on Joseph Conrad with a volume devoted to Heart of Darkness. Clarice Swisher (who also edited the previous text) brings together a wide but unimaginative selection of critical responses to the novel and gives a generally informative overview of its critical history. Aimed primarily at a higher secondary-level market, the book does provide a useful introduction to some of the key issues of debate. Sections on ‘Major Themes in Heart of Darkness, ‘Kurtz and Marlow’, ‘Conrad’s Style and Methods’, and ‘Heart of Darkness in the Context of Africa and Colonialism’ contain canonical figures such as Albert Guerard, Ian Watt, Chinua Achebe, and Frederick Karl. Their essays are, however, quite severely edited to fall within the boundaries of simplistic subtitles such as ‘Marlow’s Failure of Will’. The principal criticism of the text that emerges is the lack of genuine context for the articles themselves. Because criticism of the novel is broken into broad categories, all articles are flattened on to the same level regardless of their period or context of production, with the effect that the volume becomes a decontextualized slice of Conrad criticism. This may not be a serious flaw, but it does point towards the extremely conservative nature of the anthology. As an introduction to the wealth of criticism on Heart of Darkness the volume is certainly worthwhile and timely, but, beyond that introductory level, its value would be severely limited.

The journals this year contain a wide variety of perspectives on Conrad’s life and writing, and in general these are interesting and valuable contributions. The Conradian contains its usual mixture of critical and bibliographical articles, although the former predominate this year. Alison Wheatley’s ‘Conrad’s One Day More: Challenging Social and Dramatic Convention’ (Conradian 24:i[ 1999] 1–17), attempts to rescue Conrad’s dramatic works from critical neglect. She argues that the plays were disregarded for their experimentation whereas in fact they show Conrad exploring the limitations of genre and attempting to ‘match aesthetics to epistemology’ (p. 2). Central to the essay is a vision of the play as a proto-absurdist drama, with its gaps and silences foregrounding the difficulties of understanding behaviour. The essay is an informative reiteration of Conrad’s dramatic skill, but the significance of the absurdist gesturing (and indeed its departure from modernist technique) is a little under-explored. Also in the first number of The Conradian is Allan Simmons, ‘Representing “the simple and the voiceless”: Story-Telling in The Nigger of the “Narcissus ”’ (Conradian 24:if 1999] 43–57), which readdresses the persisting problems of narratorial point of view in Conrad’s novella. Focusing on the proliferation of mini-narratives within the broader narrative structure, and on the relationship between those multiple stories and central narrating voice, Simmons argues that the novel suggests the inconclusive and inconcludable nature of narrative.

The second number of the journal contains a more varied and insightful collection of critical essays. David Gill’s ‘The Fascination of the Abomination: Conrad and Cannibalism’ (Conradian 24:ii[ 1999] 1–30), spends some time assessing reportings of cannibalistic activities in the Congo before judging that Conrad would almost certainly have come into contact with cannibals. While this preamble is largely superfluous, it does give way to some interesting comments on the motif of anthropophagy in ‘Falk’ and The Secret Agent. Gill’s conclusion that Conrad’s ‘unsatisfied hunger for maternal love’ (p. 28) gave rise at least in part to this motif is highly debatable, however. The contested meaning of the term ‘imperialism’ in Conrad’s day motivates Stephen Donovan’s “‘Figures, Facts, Theories”: Conrad and Chartered Company Imperialism’ (Conradian 24:ii[ 1999] 31–60). This excellent, if sometimes too proselytizing, essay distinguishes between imperialism as an ideological implementation of governmental policy and imperialism as the byproduct of chartered company entrepreneurship in the colonies. While his conclusions are not startlingly original, they do bear repetition. Paul Eggert’s ‘Conrad’s Last Novels: Surveillance and Action’ (Conradian 24:iif 1999] 61–73), reassesses the last novels in the light of Foucauldian notions of surveillance, and explores the interactions between surveillance and the responsibility for action. Action as a means of escaping from the paralysis of a Foucauldian surveillance, often through the subversion of techniques of subversion, are particularly noticeable in Conrad’s post-war novels, according to Eggert, and he provides an interesting reading of The Rover in that context. The Conradian also provides two papers on Nostromo. Hugh Epstein’s ‘Reading Nostromo “with conditions attached’” (Conradian 24:ii[ 1999] 75–94), examines the prevalence of parentheses in the text as a stylistic imitation of the novel’s notorious indirectness, and argues that they condition our reading practice to fragmentation and discursive dislocation. The punctuational jumps effected by the brackets reflect the wider collisions and retorts experienced by the reader throughout the text. Meanwhile, back in the first issue, Mario Curreli’s ‘A Survey of Nostromo Editions (Conradian 24:i[ 1999] 19–42), compares and contrasts successive editions of Nostromo and through an examination of their various suppressions, additions and emendations, draws some valid conclusions. Finally in The Conradian, Walter Putnam, ‘A Translator’s Correspondence: Philippe Neel to Joseph Conrad’ (Conradian 24:i[ 1999] 59–91), presents eleven letters between Conrad and his translator into French, Philippe Neel, covering the period 1921 to 1924. The letters themselves provide an insight into concerns Conrad had about his own dwindling powers, while Putnam’s commentary highlights the impact of Conrad’s writing in France, and in particular the relationship between Conrad and his main sponsor in that country—Andre Gide.

Conrad’s letters also feature in this year’s Conradiana. Frederick Karl’s ‘Life and Letters, Letters and Life: The Final Three Volumes’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 75–83), stresses the extent to which Conrad in his later years was reinterpreting the fictional work of his early days, and the philosophical and aesthetic ideas that had inspired it. He also interestingly dwells on the burgeoning correspondence between Conrad and Gide. Karl’s conclusion is that the diversity and intellectual ebullience of the letters make theories of a simple decline untenable—instead he suggests that we see a Conrad actively reviewing and rethinking his own life and output. Elsewhere in Conradiana readers are presented with a pleasingly diverse range of essays although the significance of some is debatable. The philosophical background to Conrad’s writing receives treatment in at least three essays. Fred Madden’s The Ethical Dimensions of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim: Conrad’s debt to Schopenhauer’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 42–60), re-examines Schopenhauer’s essay The Foundation of Ethics’ as a context for reading some of Conrad’s mature fiction. While Conrad shares Schopenhauer’s view of mankind’s rampant egoism ensuring a perpetual condition of conflict, Madden suggests that a fundamental compassion stands opposed to that rapacious will, and in the figure of Marlow he sees the altruistic spirit incarnate. Lorrie Clark’s ‘Rousseau and Political Compassion in The Nigger of the “Narcissus (Conradiana 31 [ 1999]), explores Conrad’s treatment of pity in the novella and argues for a reading which encompasses a Rousseauvian vision of compassion. Rousseau, who Clark constitutes as the father of modernity, has redefined what it means to be human, and although Conrad resists his politics of pity he paradoxically also attempts to accommodate them. The text articulates a struggle between a Rousseauvian democratic man and a Conradian ‘gentleman’, and in the figure of Wait we have an Everyman trapped on the precipice of modernity. Also engaging with Conrad’s antipathy towards Rousseau is Miriam Marcus, ‘Monsieur Rousseau, I Presume! Jean-Jaccjues Rousseau’s The Government of Poland and Joseph Conrad’s “Prince Roman’” (Conradiana 31 [1999] 199–212), which examines the legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in Conrad’s story. More specifically Marcus considers them within the context of Poland’s fight for self-determination and concludes that Conrad gleans from the Enlightenment a belief that the nation-state should be an inclusive entity which encompasses rather than perpetuates the divisions that imperialisms of all types practice.

Conrad’s patriotism and shifting relationship with his homeland are also considered by M.B. Biskupski’s ‘Conrad and the International Politics of the Polish Question, 1914–1918: Diplomacy, Under Western Eyes, or almost The Secret Agent’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 84–98). Biskupski explores the passionate affiliation Conrad felt with Polish nationhood, and examines his acquaintance with Jozef Retinger, an activist for Polish independence, through whom, Biskupski suggests, Conrad lived the life of political engagement that his exile distanced him from. Another essay which engages with the political life (or in this case the political afterlife) of Conrad is James Guimond and Katherine Kearney Maynard in ‘Kaczynski, Conrad and Terrorism’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 3–25). This is an intriguing essay which examines the parallels between The Secret Agent and the career and beliefs of the terrorist ‘Unabomber’. Guimond and Kearney Maynard explore the influence of Conrad’s text on Kaczynski’s manifesto against technology and science. The comparisons in genre and discourse that they draw are interesting, but throw little new light on Conrad.

The Secret Agent is also the subject of a rewarding essay by Ellen Harrington in ‘That “blood-stained inanity”: Detection, Repression and Conrad’s The Secret Agent’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 114–19). Harrington approaches the novel through the generic expectations of the detective story and contends that Conrad destabilizes the givens of the genre of detection by highlighting what is repressed in the structure and epistemology of the form. The Secret Agent does not provide a reassuring and socially stabilizing pattern of right and wrong because, Harrington suggests, such dichotomies of order/disorder never existed and therefore cannot be retrieved. On a theme not too distantly removed is Keith Carabine’s ‘“Gestures” and “The Moral Satirical Idea” in Conrad’s “The Informer’” (Conradiana 31 f 1999] 26–41), which concentrates on the intricate structuring of a story Conrad described as ‘simply entertaining’. Focusing on the tale’s double narrative and on the embedded ‘little joke’, Carabine relates the story to Conrad’s aesthetic vision outlined in the preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, and suggests that the narrative privileges the passion of true feeling over intellectualized and vicarious experience.

Linda Dryden follows up her volume with an essay on Heart of Darkness. While the link between that novel and H. Rider Haggard’s She has already been explored, Dryden suggests that fruitful parallels can also be drawn with another of Haggard’s imperial romances—Allan Quatermain. In ‘Heart of Darkness and Allan Quatennain: Apocalypse and Utopia’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 173–98), she explores the model of romance against which she sees Conrad writing, and contrasts the assumptions about race and imperialism contained in both texts. Meanwhile in the same number Vincent Hausmann examines the intersections between the literary and visual arts of modernism. In ‘Joseph Conrad and the Arts of Letters’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 147–72) he suggests that Conrad’s plea that literary art should make the reader see has been underexplored, and contends that such visuality is at the core of Conrad’s challenge to notions of both disciplinary boundaries and subjectivity. Through a discussion of The Arrow of Gold Hausmann contrasts Conrad’s belief in the limited ability of literary art to reconstruct a secure idea of the self with cinematic forms which seem more capable of situating a solid subjectivity. The final critical article of note suggests that Conrad’s characters are extensions of their creator’s own emotional life. It is a point made by G.W. Stephen Brodsky in ‘Joseph Conrad and the Art of Unlove: Art, Love and the Deadly Paradox of Service’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 131–41), and he goes on to argue that Conrad’s characters are essentially unlovable and find emotional stability only in their devotion to an ideal or in the service of some cause. Art becomes such a cause for Conrad, within which he can achieve self-creation and through which he can express both his aesthetic and the ethical framework through which that aesthetic is to be interpreted.

Of the bibliographical articles in this year’s Conradiana Ernest Sullivan and Mario Curelli have contributed perhaps the most memorable. Sullivan, ‘Eight New Holograph Leaves of Lord Jim’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 109–13), examines the evidence of manuscript emendations in a short extract of Lord Jim. The changes made to this text suggest Conrad’s uncertainty about the characterization of Jim and about his relationship with both Jewel and Marlow. Curelli’s second piece this year is on ‘Genuine Genoese Names in Nostromo’ (Conradiana 31 [1999]). Here he discusses the origins of the names Gianbattista Nostromo and Garibaldino, and establishes the contested meanings that have been tailored to the name of the eponymous anti-hero. Curelli plumps for a Genoese derivation—nostr’homo (our trusted man)—and explores Conrad’s knowledge of the port and his familiarity with maritime Italian. Also of note in this vein are Cedric Watts’ ‘Drake’s Trumpets in Conrad’s Nostromo’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 213–16), and Donald W. Rude’s ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald on Joseph Conrad’ (Conradiana 31 [1999] 217–20).

One essay of note outside the two major Conrad journals is John Marx’s ‘Conrad’s Gout’ (MoMo 6:i[ 1999] 91–114), which examines Conrad’s presentation of himself as a writer through his letters, and contends that the persona constructed stands as an intermediary between populist mass culture and the elitist modernist movement. Moreover, Marx suggests that Conrad relates his own ill health to his intensive labour as a professional writer—thus appropriating the stereotype of the suffering artist to emphasize the cost of his own transformation of low culture into high art.

(b) Wyndham Lewis

The field of Wyndham Lewis studies continues to produce a steady trickle of critical reappraisals, and this year’s publications are of a high standard. Anne Quema’s The Agon of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis’s Allegories, Aesthetics and Politics, seeks to position Lewis’s writing at the centre of the modernist movement, thus rescuing him from relative anonymity within the ranks of the avant-garde. Indeed the distinction between the avant-garde and the modernist constitutes a significant and interesting diversion in Quema’s study—modernism, she argues, negotiates the avant-garde’s radical rejection of stable hierarchies, but with an attendant awareness of a debt to a nostalgic sense of tradition. Quema organizes her study around considerations of Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction, and specifically examines his use of the pamphlet and essay, of the allegory and what she calls ‘satirical realism’ (p. 28). Central to the text is the notion of modernism’s ambivalent relationship with the past and with a sense of tradition. The desire to radicalize representational processes and yet remain within a tradition creates a form of schizophrenic self-contradiction in modernist texts which some critics have attempted to reconcile, but which Quema celebrates as the revelation of modernism’s inconsistency. By exploring the self-contradictory nature of Lewis’s writing on aesthetics, culture, and politics Quema suggests a reading of Lewis as exemplum of modernist ideologies, casting him as a central innovator rather than the ex-centric eccentric of the avant-garde, distanced by his extremist politics and generic diversity. The study is an important addition to Lewis criticism, and while its focus is not always as unwavering as might be desired, the readings of Lewis as the ‘agon’ of modernism are enlightening and valuable.

In this year’s Wyndham Lewis Annual Andrzej Gasiorek’s “The Cave-Men of the New Mental Wilderness”: Wyndham Lewis and the Self in Modernity’ (WLA 6[1999] 3–20), is an excellent, thought-provoking article on Lewis’s conception of the self in modernity. Looking at the critical works of the later 1920s and 1930s Gasiorek argues that Lewis’s view of subjectivity works in marked contrast to that proposed by such heralds of modernity as Nietzsche and Freud. Lewis, it is argued, believed that the wave of social and technological changes occurring during the early decades of twentieth century were detrimental to the integrity of the self, and that only by an adherence to the imperatives of reason could that integrity be restored and maintained. Gasiorek convincingly proposes that Lewis saw the self in all its plurality, and felt that only by balancing these various instincts and predispositions could psychic health be achieved. Such a delicate act of equipoise is difficult to maintain in a condition of modernity, with its deracinating impact on stable subjectivity. Slightly more pedestrian but of no less interest is Peter Caracciolo’s ‘Wyndham Lewis, M.R. James and Intertextuality: Part I: Ghosts’ (WLA 6[1999] 21–9). The first instalment of a two-part article, this charts the intertextual relationship between the ghost stories of M.R. James and some of Lewis’s later work, notably The Childermass. Caracciolo carefully picks through some striking parallels and points towards Lewis’s own ghosts as articulations of his traumas in the First World War. This discussion promisingly sets the scene for the second part of the essay, in which Caracciolo intends to consider Lewis’s ‘weighing of Christian canonicity against Gnostic fable’ (p. 27).

(c) Orwell

This has generally been a quiet year in Orwell studies, although Seeker and Warburg continue to produce the Collected Works, edited by Peter Davison. Unfortunately, despite frequent requests for review copies, none arrived, so YWES can only draw attention to this ongoing project.

Rodden’s, ed., Understanding Animal Farm, has been produced as part of the Greenwood Press’s Literature in Context series, whose remit is to provide students with a casebook outlining the principal issues and debates surrounding a text, with relevant source material and historical documents. With this textual/contextual approach editor John Rodden has drawn together material on Animal Farm s literary history, its position in post-war and Cold War culture, and its more recent relevance in the wake of Communist retrenchment. Alongside this are documents on totalitarianism, the Russian Revolution, and socialism in general. As casebooks go this is actually very useful, helped in no small part by the adaptability of Animal Farm to such contextual readings. Nonetheless, Rodden has collected diverse material not only on Orwell’s reception in Britain and America but also on the impact of Animal Farm in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and even Nicaragua. Unsurprisingly the casebook has an almost exclusively American bias and some of the readings are resultingly deterministic and politically heavy-handed, but the range of materials presented is broad and their perspectives complementary. How much British students of the novel w’ould derive from this casebook is debatable, but that should not discount what is a refreshing addition to the genre.

The importance of Hitler’s Mein Kampf to the dystopic vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four is examined in Michael Rademacher’s ‘Orw’ell and Hitler: Mein Kampf as a Source for Nineteen Eighty-Four (ZAA 47:i[ 1999] 38–53). This is an area that has been under-researched in Orw’ell studies, and Rademacher attempts to address that insufficiency by comparing the ideologies of the Nazis and of the Big Brother regime. Although at times he is too eager to match Orwell’s reactions to Nazism with the presentation of the totalitarian system of the novel, he does make some very interesting points, particularly about the manipulation of propaganda and the image of a messiah constructed around both Hitler and Big Brother. Where this essay is particularly successful is in its insistence that no single dictatorship provided the basis for Orwell’s vision of Airstrip One; instead, Rademacher rightly contends that elements of totalitarian ideologies were gleaned from the models of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union.

Douglas Kerr’s ‘Orwell, Animals and the East’ (EIC 49f 1999] 234–55), is a strangely unfocused piece of work, which takes commonplace notions in Orwell criticism and rehearses rather than rethinks them. The essay has two principal focal points: the representation of animals in Orwell’s writing and the ways in which those representations coincide with the portrayal of the non-European characters in Orwell’s writings on the East. Kerr establishes that Orwell’s attitude towards his colonial charges while he was an imperial official are deeply ambivalent, and draws comparisons with the presentation of the bestial. He is surely right to contend that Orwell’s attitudes to the Burmese—likening them to animals—is indicative of his imperial conditioning, but this is hardly an original concept. Where the author is more interesting is in his discussion of the discovery of an individual’s interiority as an epiphanic moment. This is particularly persuasive in the section on ‘Shooting an Elephant’.

(d) Lawrence

A stubbornly persistent perception of Lawrence criticism is that it continues to be dominated by traditionalist approaches (new critical, Leavisite, psycho-biographical, etc.). In fact—leaving aside the possibility that such a construction of the field was never quite accurate in the first place—there has been a steady renewal of critical perspectives on Lawrence along a theoretical axis since at least the mid-1980s, and the present year’s work firmly consolidates this trend with a number of devotedly theoretical discussions. Gerald Doherty’s representative Theorizing Lawrence: Nine Meditations on Tropological Themes may fail to live up to the forthright promise of its title (as I argue below), but such forthrightness itself may help at last to put paid to the myth of a purely atheoretical tradition of Lawrence criticism.

The stated aim of Doherty’s book is not to provide self-contained readings of any specific texts, but to explore the underlying patterns of Lawrence’s fictional rhetoric in general, focusing especially on the functions of metaphor and metonymy in the shaping of plots, characters, and themes. The broadly structuralist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric which underpin the book are sketched out in introductory chapters and in a final essay (one of the best) on ‘Lawrence and Jacques Derrida’. Doherty goes to great pains in his introduction to distance himself from the ‘long tradition’ of descriptive and evaluative Lawrence criticism (p. 9), and he laudably argues for ‘new approaches to Lawrence, which shift the critical terrain, and which prospect new perspectives in his vast novelistic domain’ (p. 10). However, although his work certainly represents a fresh approach to Lawrence, and although several of the essays do indeed open up the possibility of new perspectives on Lawrence’s fiction (and here I would single out the chapter on ‘Metaphor and Mental Disturbance’ in Lady Chatterley’s Lover), the book never quite lives up to its own heady (and often tortuously expressed) rhetoric. Few, if any, of the essays actually develop the new perspectives they hint at to any significant degree, and there is insufficient continuity from essay to essay to allow for any larger-scale theoretical argument to emerge clearly. Doherty tries to rationalize this as part of the book’s non-teleological design, but it seems to me merely to reflect the practical fact that this is a collection of previously published essays (written over sixteen years) which have been only lightly revised for the purposes of the book. What we end up with, therefore, is a hybrid text poised uncertainly between monograph and essay-collection.

Perhaps a more serious complaint about the book is its lack of self-critical contextualization. Doherty seems blissfully unaware that his essays traverse very well worn ground in Lawrence studies. Almost all the main topics he covers (language, metaphor, rhetoric, sex, death, romance) are prominently represented within the existing body of scholarship (in both ‘traditional’ and ‘theoretical’ forms), and yet Doherty nowhere engages in serious dialogue with any of it. Instead, he declares his essays to be sui generis (p. 163) and makes only the most cursory references to other critics (the limited bibliography symptomatically contains only three or four post-1990 works on Lawrence). For its date of publication, then, the book cannot be said to theorize Lawrence in a way that is fully coherent or convincing, even if the individual essays are to be welcomed as valuable and suggestive testaments to the late twentieth-century renewal of Lawrentian criticism along theoretical lines.

A more satisfyingly theorized account of Lawrence is provided by Barbara Ann Schapiro’s psychoanalytical study, D.H. Lawrence and the Paradoxes of Psychic Life. Although Schapiro, too, tends to traverse some familiar ground, she at least demonstrates a thoroughly scholarly and up-to-date grasp of the critical contexts within which she is working, and, most importantly, she is able to identify, with some breadth and depth of analysis, exactly where her argument potentially breaks new ground in psychoanalytical approaches to Lawrence. Indeed, her brisk introductory overview of the field provides a well-informed starting point for anyone interested in this aspect of Lawrence. Schapiro’s theoretical position is a stimulating fusion of post-Freudian theories of intersubjectivity (drawing in particular on the work of Jessica Benjamin), feminism, and Bakhtinian dialogics, and, as these three areas suggest, the emphasis of the book falls firmly on the ‘shifting dialectical tensions’ (p. 1) in Lawrence’s narratives. The profoundly dialogical nature of Lawrence’s fiction, with its rich play of voices and of ambivalence and paradox, is illuminated afresh by Schapiro’s analysis of intersubjectivity as it manifests itself both in the psychic lives of Lawrence’s characters and in the very procedures of his narrative discourse. Suggestive, too, is the feminist dimension of Schapiro’s argument in its careful balancing of Lawrence’s ‘rigid’ ‘polarities of gender’ and his fictional embrace of ‘an unusually fluid gender identity and a psychic flexibility that can accommodate, indeed play with, dialectical tension’ (p. 9). In fact, Schapiro’s main thesis is that there is a symbiotic relationship between rigidity and fluidity in psychic life generally (not just in terms of gender identity) and that what Lawrence’s works dramatize for us is the tension of opposition between these poles and the struggle to achieve an equilibrated tolerance of the inevitably ‘conflictual, contradictory nature of passionate life’ (p. 3). For me, the paradigmatic example of the thesis comes in chapter 5, in the incisive discussion of the sado-masochistic relationship between Gerald and Gudrun in Women in Love. Although the relationship itself reflects a collapse of intersubjectivity, it allows Schapiro subtly to illustrate how, even where psychic breakdown is portrayed, Lawrence’s narrative holds each relationship in dialogic tension with ‘other relational stories’ (p. 117). (A useful critical intertext here would have been Josiane Paccaud-Huguet’s Women in Love: De la tentation perverse a Vecriture (Grenoble: Ellug [1991]), which takes a Lacanian approach to the sado-masochism of Gerald and Gudrun.)

It is not, of course, a particularly original perspective on Lawrence to stress his concern with polarity, paradox, and the struggle for balance between self and other, and Schapiro herself acknowledges that psychoanalytical theory perhaps learns more from Lawrence’s insights into the dynamics of intersubjectivity than it can teach about him. However, she argues, reasonably, that such theory can at least suggest an appropriate language through which to explore new ways of understanding and articulating Lawrence’s psychological insights, and some of her own explorations here are certainly productive of new understanding and discernment. Personally, I am not convinced so much by Schapiro’s relational theories in themselves as by how they are combined with feminist and Bakhtinian perspectives to illuminate the complex interactions between ideology, psychology, and narrative technique in Lawrence’s work. Indeed, where Schapiro’s discourse fails to engage fully with this rich combination of approaches it becomes rather pedestrian and repetitive. Her conservative choice of texts (Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and a few short stories) and of passages for analysis— several of which she herself admits to have been ‘overanalyzed’ (p. 124)— accentuates this sense of deja vu. By the time she has cleared the critical decks of past psychological commentary in each case, there is, frankly, little scope for her to add anything new. Moreover, because she chooses similar fictional situations for analysis each time, and because her analyses tend to follow a similar pattern, one eventually starts to wonder if her argument might not have been better served by a long essay rather than a short book. Nevertheless, this is a rich and stimulating work which deserves credit for its theoretical originality and for its scholarly commitment to its subject.

Jack Stewart’s scholarly commitment to his Lawrentian subject—Lawrence and the visual arts—has been well attested to by a stream of outstanding essays stretching back over twenty years. He has now reshaped many of these for what is easily the best monograph on Lawrence for the year, The Vital Art of D.H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression. This is a richly detailed, wide-ranging, and lucidly written study which fully reflects Stewart’s long-matured understanding of his material. The book is certainly not strongly theoretical in the sense that Doherty claims his to be, but it nevertheless quietly develops an original theory of how Lawrence’s ongoing dialogue with the movements and methods of modern visual art help to motivate his exploratory ‘push against the boundaries of language’ (p. 93), and to give expressive visionary form to his ‘critique of beings and ... fhis] celebration of Being’ (p. 199). Each of the book’s nine chapters deals with the influence of a different complex of visual arts on Lawrence (impressionism, expressionism, futurism, etc.), but the underlying aim is always to explore how the various ways of seeing and being represented by modern art help to inform Lawrence’s writerly ‘ways of seeing’ and the ‘vision’ of being which these entail. In thus stressing how ‘Lawrence’s verbal art compounds seeing and being’ (p. 200), Stewart commits himself both to formal analysis of Lawrence’s narrative and stylistic techniques and to philosophical (or ontological) exegesis—and the book is at its best where these two different emphases are most closely integrated, as in the superb central chapters on ‘Expressionism in Women in Love and ‘“Primitivism” in Women in Love’ In the former there are outstanding discussions of the famous ‘Moony’ and ‘Excurse’ chapters: Stewart’s stylistic analyses of these episodes are tours de force, and generate some strikingly original insights: for example, in the moon-stoning episode, he identifies ‘the dense cluster of battleground images’ as ‘an objective correlative of the war’ (p. 87)—an important point I have not seen made before.

There are some chapters where analysis and interpretation are not so successfully integrated, where, for example, as in the first and last chapters, Stewart spends too much time descriptively enumerating parallels between an artist or art movement and a particular Lawrentian text without fully developing any deeper underlying argument. This potential weakness in the book is compounded somewhat by a certain lack of discursive continuity from chapter to chapter, and, although the synthesizing introduction and conclusion mitigate the effect somewhat, there is often a vestigial sense (particularly at the beginning of chapters) of the self-containedness of the original essays from which the book grew. One other small reservation I have about the book is its dismissive treatment of Lawrence’s own painting practice. Stewart is probably correct to say that Lawrence’s paintings ‘are known today only because of his writing’ (p. 171) (though that has not prevented other critics from discussing them seriously), but in a book specifically about visual art one would have thought that the topic demanded a little more attention than the three pages or so Stewart gives to it. It would have been interesting, for example, to see how he might have applied his general approach to the interrelations between Lawrence’s writing and modern art to the interrelations between Lawrence’s writing and his own modern art.

One of the pleasing bonuses of Stewart’s book is that it includes reproductions (in black and white) of many of the paintings discussed in the text. It is perhaps not so much a bonus as a relief that Jane Jaffe Young’s D.H. Lawrence on Screen: Re-Visioning Prose Style in the Films of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ Sons and Lovers, and Women in Love, also contains a lot of pictures (this time stills from the films mentioned in the title), as the text itself is seriously over-written and over-long. It presents far too much unassimilated material and too many jostling arguments that are never properly disentangled from one another. One obvious problem here is that the book is evidently based on a Ph.D. dissertation and has simply not been sufficiently revised and recast for the purposes of a general audience. But there is also a fundamental theoretical problem with the very nature of the project, indicated by the book’s question-begging subtitle, which yokes together the quite separate domains of literary-linguistic stylistics and the practice of film adaptation. Do/can/ should film-makers ever ‘re-vision prose style’ in adapting works of literature? What sort of practical and theoretical assumptions are implicit in even suggesting that possibility (if indeed it is a possibility)? Who would identify the prose style in the first place (and by which methodology)? And, practically, who among the vast array of personnel involved in such an institutionalized process would be the source of the film’s re-visioning? Young from time to time touches on some of these issues (and there are many more one could raise), but she seems never to have seriously doubted the basic premise of her approach in the book, and she presents no theoretical rationale that might justify it. For me, that approach is misconceived from the start, and Young’s attempts to superimpose stylistic analysis of prose style on to film style remain largely specious.

Having said that, if we separate out these two elements of the book—literary stylistics and film studies—and view them independently, then each has something valuable to offer, even though Young’s film commentaries constitute the more original and more compelling material. Her stylistic analyses of the literary texts are competent, but a little mechanical, and there are also some odd lapses in descriptive terminology, as, for example, when she claims that ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ opens with an expletive (p. 20)! On the other hand, Young appears to know everything about the film adaptations she discusses, down to the exact number and duration of all the shots in each film, and, though all this material could have been better organized, the book is undoubtedly a valuable repository of facts and details about these adaptations. The 140 photographed stills in themselves make it a useful addition to Lawrence studies, and the stills from the rare 1949 adaptation of The Rocking-Horse Winner’ will be particularly useful to others working in this field.

If Young’s study in some ways contains too much material for one book, Anju Kan war’s The Sound of Silence, has to spread its material thinly in order to achieve even small-book status, and, really, Kanwar would have been far better advised to have condensed it into a more tightly focused critical essay. As it is, the book’s provenance as a Ph.D. dissertation is again quite evident in its loose style and diffuse argumentation. The text, moreover, has been very poorly copy-edited (if at all), and is peppered with solecisms, non-sequiturs, and repetitions. There is the basis here of a worthwhile (if perhaps tired) discussion of Lawrence’s representation of unmarried women in his short fiction, and Kanwar’s unusual feminist focus on several of Lawrence’s neglected studied short stories (The Witch a la Mode’ and The Primrose Path’, for example) generates some fresh perspectives and ideas. However, both the theoretical approach and the substantive argument needed a much clearer and much more concise exposition. Unfortunately, also, Kanwar’s feminist approach—‘pledging allegiance to ... precursors such as Kate Millett’ (p. 9)—is rather old-fashioned, and her attempt to theorize an ‘against the grain’ reading of Lawrence constantly founders on a fundamental failure to suggest what an adequate ‘with the grain’ reading might be. Kanwar frequently refers in the abstract to the complexities of Lawrence’s narrative language, but her textual analyses all follow the same schematized pattern, which, rather than conveying a nuanced sense of dialectical tensions in Lawrence’s art and ideology, as many other recent feminist discussions have done, tend to lurch awkwardly from one crude construction of Lawrence (archetypal male chauvinist) to another (subversive critic of patriarchy). One of the underlying problems here is that, as her bibliography testifies, Kanwar is simply not sufficiently well informed about recent debates on Lawrence’s gender politics (nor, indeed, his fictional techniques), and her critical discourse remains largely rooted in the 1970s.

Iida, ed., The Reception ofD.H. Lawrence Around the World, reflects Lawrence’s status as a major world author and provides an invaluable source of international critical and bibliographical reference. The book contains fourteen critical essays by leading Lawrence scholars from around the world. There is a useful introductory overview by the editor, and the essays are then, logically, grouped by continent (Europe, America, Australia, Asia). For British readers, the first, Peter Preston’s ‘Lawrence in Britain: An Annotated Chronology 1930–1998’, will be of most immediate interest. It takes the form of an annotated chronology, allowing Preston to present the mass of information he needs to cover clearly and quickly; but the real strength of the essay lies in the incisive commentaries which link the four main chronological lists. It is difficult to do full justice to the range and richness of Preston’s portrayal of Lawrence as a focus of scholarly, critical, and cultural discussion over the twentieth century, but perhaps its most refreshing feature is its ‘broad and liberal’ understanding of the notion of reception and reputation. Not only are we told about major scholarly debates (about textual editing for the Cambridge edition, for example), but we also hear about the many popular media adaptations of Lawrence’s works, and about such things as the growth in the exploitation of Lawrence’s tourist potential in his home area, a growth that is interestingly linked to broader post-war trends towards a ‘heritage’ culture in Britain. In a remarkably short space, Preston succeeds in both summarizing the key facts and publication data in Lawrence’s posthumous career, and constructing a cogent critical overview of how Lawrence’s reputation has evolved in close interaction with successive trends in culture, criticism, and the academy. He concludes with a neatly condensed Bakhtinian assessment of the ‘puzzling and challenging multiplicity’ of Lawrence, which now provides the context in which we must all continue ‘to study Lawrence’s dialogue with himself, and continue our dialogue with Lawrence’ (p. 39).

The other main pillar of the book for an English-speaking audience is Keith Cushman’s superb ‘DHL in the USA’ (I assume that the abbreviated forms are a conscious gesture towards an all-American response to Lawrence). Like Preston’s essay, this is rich, detailed, and authoritative, and it deals incisively and entertainingly with yet another huge body of critical and cultural material. Cushman usefully categorizes American critical responses to Lawrence along both period and broadly theoretical lines (feminism, psychoanalysis, etc.), and he engages remarkably closely (for a short essay) with a wide range of specific views, works, and trends in Lawrence studies since the 1920s. His critical assessments are consistently acute and accurate, and students new to Lawrence could do far worse than to begin here, and with Preston’s essay, for a reliable guide to twentieth-century Lawrence criticism in English. (The essays here by Paul Eggert, John Nause, and Sheila Lahiri Choudhury, on the response to Lawrence in Australia, Canada, and India respectively, would also usefully supplement that guide.)

Almost all the other essays in Iida’s collection are similarly well written and authoritative within their own specific range of cultural reference, and together they provide an awe-inspiring sense of just how widely Lawrence has been translated, studied, and written about across the world. Iida has performed a great service to Lawrentians by bringing together these essays and the detailed information they contain. I do, however, have some small reservations about the book, and in particular about inconsistencies in the style and nature of the different essays (though I should also mention the uneven nature of the copy-editing: some essays are flawless, but others are peppered with errors). To begin with, there is no standard system or policy for providing bibliographical references throughout the book. Even Preston and Cushman use two totally different referencing styles and systems (one providing references in endnotes and one using the MLA citation system), and while some contributors provide full publication details of all works mentioned in their notes or bibliographies, others simply make general references in the text to authors, titles, and dates. This lack of standardization is a great pity as it limits the bibliographical usefulness of what is otherwise a very useful book.

A less immediately obvious inconsistency is that, although most of the essays provide fairly comprehensive overviews of a particular culture’s reception of Lawrence, a few take a much more partial approach and concentrate on just one feature of that reception. For example, Christa Jahnsohn and Dieter Mehl focus on ‘Lawrence, his German Publisher and his Translators’, and although this is a fascinating and useful essay in its own right, and one of the most scholarly in the book, it does not quite fulfil what one assumes to be the book’s main brief. Other essays of this ‘case study’ sort are the ones by Arnold Odio (mainly on Mexico and The Plumed Serpent) and Paul Eggert (mainly on Australia’s response to Lawrence’s two ‘Australian’ novels). Again, both are excellent in their own terms (and I would particularly draw attention to Odio’s brilliant post-colonialist reading of Lawrence’s Mexican work), but they provide a different sort of perspective than the book generally advertises. Then there are a couple of other essays which are partial in a different (and less understandable) way. These are Anja Viinikka, ‘D.H. Lawrence in Finland’, and Fiona Becket, The Reception of Lawrence in Poland’, both of which are substantially briefer and more sketchy than the others in the book: Viinikka concentrates mainly on the 1930s for her ‘overview’ and then adds just a few details of later developments, while Becket admits to providing only a ‘brief survey of Lawrence’s reception in Poland and a “feeler” towards a Polish response’ (p. 125). Both these essays are actually reprinted, apparently without any revision, from their appearance in 1993 in an issue of Etudes laxvrencietines, and the impression is that they have been included simply as a matter of convenience and to ‘fill ouf the section on Europe. In fact, their sketchiness simply draws attention to the lack of adequate coverage of Europe: not only do they not do full justice to their own subjects (and one would have thought that an indigenous Polish scholar might have been found to update and expand Beckef s sketch), but they encourage one to ask why there is nothing here on Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and so on. Such caveats are perhaps inevitable when dealing with a book of such global ambition, and they should not detract too much from what is generally an impressive volume.

The remaining book on Lawrence for the year is also a collection of essays, Donaldson and Kalnins, eds., D.H. Lawrence in Italy and England. This has rather less unity of purpose than Iida’s collection as it is based largely on papers given at a conference held at Cambridge in 1995, and (as is common at conferences) some of the papers/essays have only a tenuous connection to the overall theme, which in this case is a fairly loose one anyway. As is also common with conference collections, some of the essays are perhaps too narrowly specialized to be of general interest, but there are at least four essays here which contribute importantly to the broad sweep of Lawrence studies and which deserve to be widely known and debated.

With great subtlety and range of both philosophical and stylistic insight, Michael Bell, ‘Cambridge and Italy: Lawrence, Wittgenstein and Forms of Life’, considers Lawrence’s relation to language and his unique ‘capacity to bring the unconscious into consciousness without making it damagingly selfconscious’ (p. 30). This essay represents one of Bell’s most eloquent statements of his long-standing engagement with questions of language and being in Lawrence, and he here powerfully conveys a sense of how Lawrence’s way of ‘inhabiting language’ (p. 30) reveals the tacit dimension of life, or what Wittgenstein called ‘forms of life’, without betraying it as a form of life by translating it into merely a linguistic form of life (the difference of emphasis defining the subtle distinction Bell makes between Lawrence and Wittgenstein in their otherwise similar understandings of language). Bell’s philosophical emphasis on Lawrence’s language is nicely complemented by George Donaldson’s close analysis of what he characterizes as the dynamically shifting processes of Lawrence’s language in Women in Love (‘Unestablished Balance in Women in Love’). Donaldson acknowledges that the general point he is making is not entirely original (the Bakhtinian polyvalence of Lawrence’s ‘exploratory imagination’ in this work is well established), but he provides a freshly observed and newly detailed working through of that point in an analysis that is minutely alert to the sometimes word-by-word shifts in balance and emphasis of Lawrence’s text. M. Elizabeth Sargent, ‘The Lost Girl: Re-appraising the Post-War Lawrence on Women’s Will and Ways of Knowing’, presents a superbly robust feminist reappraisal of Lawrence’s post-war gender politics. Drawing on recent work in feminist psychology and spirituality, and continuing the collection’s epistemological strain (introduced by Bell and also developed in Fiona Becket’s ‘Strangeness in D.H. Lawrence’), Sargent persuasively challenges the too easy labelling of the post-war Lawrence as misogynist by demonstrating in some detail his ‘extraordinary sensitivity’ (p. 190) to women’s ‘ways of knowing’ in The Lost Girl. As Sargent points out, there is an ironic parallel between how Lawrence’s ‘thinking’ is typically dismissed as ‘too passionate, personal, intuitive, or relational’ and how women’s ways of knowing have traditionally been denigrated by Western epistemology—indeed, to the point that ‘their knowing cannot even be seen—by them or others—to be knowing: it is often called “feeling” instead’ (p. 182).

In this otherwise slightly insular collection, Graham Martin’s literary-historical discussion of ‘Lawrence and Modernism’ provides a welcome expansion of perspective that is as valuable for what it tells us about modernism as about Lawrence. Martin questions current normative definitions of modernism and carefully manoeuvres our understanding of the term away from classic notions of self-contained formal experimentation to a more historicized sense of modernism as a critical artistic response to modernity. With this shift of emphasis ‘Lawrence’s work, far from being the marginal sport whose sole claim upon the modernist canon has to be confined to Women in Love, emerges as an entirely characteristic product’ (p. 144). In particular, Martin argues (and here he too connects with the epistemological theme developed elsewhere in the collection), it is Lawrence’s use of mythic language to ‘re-sacralize’ the natural world and to evoke pre-modern ways of knowing that constitutes his characteristic challenge to ‘the Weberian “disenchantment of nature” which modern rationality has brought about’ (p. 149). (Joyce Wexler, ‘Realism and Modernists’ Bad Reputation’ (SNNTS 31 [1999] 60–73), might also be mentioned here, as its attempt to rehabilitate modernist symbolism through the lens of postmodernist magic realism has interesting affinities with Martin’s argument. Specifically, Wexler argues that modernist symbolism, like magic realism, fuses myth and history.)

Among the more specialized essays in this book, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘Rage against the Murrys: “Inexplicable’* or “Psychopathic”?’, presents a detailed piece of biographical detective work in investigating Lawrence’s estrangement from J.M. Murry and Katherine Mansfield, while John Worthen, ‘Recovering The Lost Girl: Lost Heroines, Irrecoverable Texts, Irretrievable Landscapes’, interestingly complements Sargent’s reappraisal of that novel by discussing the problems of an editor’s ‘ways of knowing’ in attempting to recover textual meanings and materials from ‘historical strangeness’ (p. 211). James T. Boulton’s precisely documented ‘Lawrence and Cambridge’ also deserves mention for its astute analysis of the social, intellectual, and sexual prejudices of both sides in the famous March 1915 encounter between the working-class scholarship boy and representatives of the upper-class elite at Cambridge. Lawrence had gone, on the invitation of Bertrand Russell, with high expectations of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ he thought he was going to meet there, but, Boulton argues, these expectations were shattered not only by his well-known reaction to the ‘principle of Evil’ at Cambridge (Lawrence’s coded reference to homosexuality), but also by the fact that he was made to feel such an outsider, ‘on grounds of class and wealth, speech and social sophistication, and formal education’ (p. 17). Understandably, Lawrence bitterly resented this and he left Cambridge at the end of the weekend ‘hating everyone there’ and fulminating at what he saw as the betrayal of England by the ‘triumphant decay’ of ‘an entrenched, privileged minority’ (p. 18).

The big guns of critical theory enter the field in earnest with this year’s articles. Bakhtin, Bataille, Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger all figure strongly in discussions, and less common theoretical or ideological contexts are also explored in essays involving Dewey, Dostoevsky, and Peirce.

Jae-kyung Koh’s ‘D.H. Lawrence and Michel Foucault: A Poetics of Historical Vision’ (Neophil 83[ 1999] 169–85), presents a systematic and well-informed comparison between the main lines of historical thought of the two writers, drawing attention in particular to their shared conceptions of history as a cyclical process of destruction and creation, continuity and discontinuity. Part of this shared vision is a broadly similar view of how the forces of modernity have mechanized and instrumentalized the human body and psyche, including, most damagingly, human sexuality. Although this appears to be a pessimistic prognosis, Koh argues that both writers ultimately express an optimistic vision through their shared belief in the power of sex to resist and challenge the mechanisms of what Foucault calls disciplinary ‘bio-power’ This emphasis on sex is of course nothing new in Lawrence criticism, and connections between Lawrence and Foucault have been made before. However, few critics have explored this emphasis in relation to these connections in such a thoroughgoing and lucid manner as Koh, and this essay should serve as a useful point of reference for future discussions on these matters.

David Kellogg’s ‘Reading Foucault Reading Lawrence: Body, Voice, and Sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (DHLR 28:iiif 1999] 31–54), attempts to provide a more critical view of the potential similarities between Foucault and Lawrence, and in some ways he presents a sophisticated Foucauldian reading in itself of the putative connection. In fact, he draws also on Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (Oxford [1985]) in order to avoid too close an identification with Foucault and to enable him to look critically at Foucault too. Thus we end up with an attempted critique of Lawrence through Foucault and of Foucault through Lawrence as inflected through Elaine Scarry. As this might suggest (and as parenthetical comments such as ‘to appropriate Althusser via Jameson’ (p. 43) suggest), the whole enterprise is somewhat over-ingenious, especially for a relatively short essay, and it soon becomes bogged down with its own superfine self-qualifications and some less forgivable shorthand theoretical jargon. Kellogg is clear enough when he states his intention to provide a Foucauldian critique of Lawrence’s ‘discourse of sexualized subjectivity’ (p. 48) while also resisting the ‘totalizing’ perspective of Foucault (and the difference implied by this between Kellogg’s Foucault and Koh’s Foucault is worth considering), but unfortunately the actual execution of the critique is a good deal less clear. Kellogg, by the way, seems unaware of Stephen Heath’s The Sexual Fix (London: Macmillan [1982]) which presents a seminal Foucauldian critique of Lawrence’s investment in ‘sexualized subjectivity’.

Another rather over-ingenious but better executed essay on a related topic is David Bennett in ‘Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism’ (NLH 30[ 1999] 269–94). This is an impressively erudite elaboration of how modern discourses of sexuality, such as Lawrence’s and Freud’s, are inescapably inscribed by economic discourses of production, money, and exchange—and indeed how the ‘economizing’ of sex is also simply (or rather complexly) the flip-side of ‘the eroticizing of money’ (p. 287). This is an elegantly written, fascinating, entertaining essay, and Bennett has great fun generating puns from his little history of the ‘promiscuously inter-embracing discourses ... of sex and money’ (p. 288), but after twenty closely written pages (and some sixty-five discursive endnotes) one is left rather punch-drunk by its own promiscuous interembracing of discourses, and left wondering also if it was all quite worth the effort (see! even critical discourse is permeated by economic terms). Essentially, and Bennett half-acknowledges this, his essay says no more and no less than that all language is inevitably metaphorical and that the rhetoric of any dominant discourse in society is bound to infiltrate, and be infiltrated by, others. Bennett’s long Foucauldian discourse (though Foucault is one of the few theorists he doesn’t mention) effectively labours this general point. Moreover, while as general cultural criticism his essay contains many fascinating ideas and sharp insights, Bennett does not advance much beyond Heath in the book mentioned above (nor indeed much beyond Kellogg) in his analysis of Lawrence’s particular discourse of sexuality.

Where Bennett’s essay chimes with a relatively new postmodern note in Lawrence studies is in his bringing Lawrence into close alignment with the French theorist and novelist Georges Bataille. Bennett, however, simply introduces the two writers as part of his more general thesis and, as far as I am aware, the first fully sustained exploration of a potential ‘dialogue’ between the two comes in Terry R. Wright’s ‘Lawrence and Bataille: Recovering the Sacred, Re-Membering Jesus’ (L&T 13T1999] 46–75). Like Koh’s essay on Lawrence and Foucault, this is in the nature of a definitive introductory statement on relevant parallels between the two figures, and one might expect useful further work to be generated by it, not least because it suggests a theoretical framework that is both new and directly consonant with much existing work on Lawrence. In particular, as Wright argues, both writers share the desire ‘to recover a sense of the sacred, lost by modernity, and of the body, suppressed by centuries of Christian asceticism’ (p. 46), and, while Lawrence may embody this desire more fully in his art, Bataille’s theoretical perspective helps us to articulate it, as well as to discover in Lawrence ‘a more profoundly religious writer than has hitherto been recognised’ (p. 47). Wright explains the various intellectual sources which both writers share, and especially the pre-eminent importance of Nietzsche to both of them, and in his detailed discussion of Bataille’s theories (and fictional practice) of erotic transgression he suggests striking new perspectives on Lawrence’s own transgressive ways with the sacred. An overarching theme in the essay is the fascination of both writers with the figure of Christ crucified, though one of the differentiating features between them, for Wright, is that Lawrence finally turns away from motifs of sacrifice and laceration to those of resurrection—and this eventually directs Wright to a consideration of Lawrence’s late ‘resurrectionary’ works and, in particular, The Escaped Cock. Unfortunately, Wright loses some focus and momentum here, and although the Bataillian context sheds some fresh light on the story, his reading is disappointingly plot-driven and predictable (and surprisingly uninformed by the large body of existing criticism on the story).

Two other essays which deal in different ways with Lawrence’s concern with the sacred are Fereshteh Zangenehpour in ‘The Alternative Intoxication: The Sufist Implications of the Work of D.H. Lawrence’ (MSpr 93[1999] 35–40), and Eric P. Levy’s The Paradoxes of Love in Women in Love’ (CentR 43[1999] 575–84). The former presents a brief introduction to the potential offered by Sufism to unite some of the apparent dualisms in Lawrence’s religious vision through its careful balancing of the sensuous and the spiritual, the immanent and the transcendent. Zangenehpour draws attention to several features of Lawrence’s work which reflect the ideas and imagery of Sufism, and she makes a reasonable case for Lawrence’s direct knowledge of Sufism through his reading and the influence of his German Orientalist uncle, Fritz Krenkow. She also points to what appears to be an explicit reference to Sufism in Women in Love, the ‘dervish dance’ in the chapter ‘An Island’. Whether what Zangenehpour identifies in this essay amounts to anything more than a coincidental and localized convergence of terms and imagery remains to be seen, but she makes a plausible initial case. Levy’s article is about the sacred in Women in Love in the sense that he considers Birkin’s ‘doctrine of love’, like Paul Tillich’s theology of being, as a search for ‘the ultimate concern of human life’ (p. 583). Levy argues, however, that Birkin’s search is effectively doomed to failure because of the inherent contradictions in that doctrine of love, and the main part of the essay is taken up with pursuing these various contradictions. The problem, though, is that Levy never seems quite sure whether he is discussing contradictions or paradoxes, and the difference is surely crucial. In fact, it seems to me that he crucially misrepresents the nature of Lawrence’s fictional argument precisely because he does misrecognize the novel’s carefully balanced and dynamic paradoxes as static contradictions. The deeper implication of this is that he therefore misses the whole point of the processes of Lawrence’s narrative language (as discussed above with reference to Donaldson’s essay) and, inevitably, the heuristic function of its paradoxes. (Actually, when he comes to discuss the details of the text, Levy does convey something of this heuristic function, even if his abstract argument serves to obscure it.)

Allen Guttmann’s ‘Sacred, Inspired Authority: D.H. Lawrence, Literature and the Fascist Body’ (IJHS 16[ 1999] 169–79), clearly uses the word ‘sacred’ with pejorative intentions towards Lawrence, and, as the title suggests, it rehearses the tired old theme of Lawrence as proto-fascist through discussion of—surprise, surprise—The Plumed Serpent. This really is a lazy throwback, almost to the 1930s, in both its approach and attitudes. Guttmann has nothing new to say about Lawrence’s politics and he shows little awareness of how far Lawrentian debates have moved on in this area over the past twenty years. Moreover, although he hints at a potentially interesting new angle on Lawrence’s use of the body in The Plumed Serpent, this never actually materializes, and all we are left with is a pedestrian overview of the ‘fascist’ elements of the plot.

In stark contrast to Guttmann, Sungho Kim in ‘Lawrence’s “Believing Community”: Beyond Romanticism and Deconstruction’ (DHLS 8[ 1999] 21–35), and Arthur Efron’s ‘D.H. Lawrence, John Dewey and Democracy’ (DHLS 8[1999] 36–59), both make sophisticated cases for the fundamentally democratic nature of Lawrence’s thought. Efron’s is perhaps the more straightforward and more combative piece in tackling the issue of Lawrence’s supposed fascism head-on and provocatively aligning Lawrence with the philosopher of American democracy, John Dewey. There is no claim here of any influence in either direction but, Efron argues, both thinkers have ‘some vital, hard-won insights to offer us concerning the conditions that would make a meaningful democracy possible’ (p. 51), and Dewey’s conception of democracy as ‘a whole way of life’ (p. 36) (rather than a political system alone) provides the necessary context within which to assess Lawrence’s ‘political’ thought. Efron explores this thought in some unexpected places, and the main part of the essay dealing with Lawrence concentrates on Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious, which, Efron claims, shows Lawrence setting out the conditions of meaningful democracy through a theory of human development which allows for the growth of ‘unique individuality’ for every person’ (p. 44). Efron by no means ignores the potentially anti-democratic attitudes contained in some of Lawrence’s works, but his holistic, Dewey-influenced approach to the concept of democracy enables him to put these into what most contemporary critics now see as their proper perspective—on the margins of Lawrence’s central emphasis on ‘the liberation of the free spontaneous psyche, the effective soul’ (cited by Efron, p. 51). Sungho Kim’s approach to Lawrence’s social and political thought eventually makes a similar general assessment, but, as the reference to deconstruction in the title suggests, it does so in a more theorized way. In particular, Kim works to deconstruct the familiar ideological dichotomies that are adduced in this sort of discussion (liberalism vs. fascism, love vs. power, etc.) in order to give full weight to Lawrence’s ‘painfully explorative’ thinking and feeling and to his radically democratic appreciation of ‘the “otherness” of the other’ (p. 22). For those who still need convincing, Kim’s balanced conclusion neatly summarizes the case against seeing Lawrence as a fascist, while at the same time acknowledging some of the reasons why people have been tempted to do so.

Also of particular theoretical note in the same issue of D.H. Lawrence Studies, is Doo-Sun Ryu, ‘“Banana-skin” and “Sideward Glance”: Lawrence, Bakhtin, and the Theory of the Novel’ (DHLS 8f 1999] 60–80). There have been many good demonstrations of the relevance and usefulness of a Bakhtinian perspective to our understanding of Lawrence and this is a valuable addition to the field (though it is marred by some awkward expression in places). Ryu is concerned to demonstrate the similarities and differences between the two figures, and a main aim of the essay is actually to question what Ryu feels is a widespread uncritical assumption of compatibility between them. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Ryu is far more successful in establishing some of the quite remarkable parallels between Lawrence and Bakhtin than he is in questioning them, and his rather general account of divergences between the two writers (some of which merely boil down to the obvious differences between novelist and theorist) is less compelling than his much more detailed analyses of their convergences. Still, Ryu’s fine-tuning of the critical ‘friendship’ between Lawrence and Bakhtin is useful, and his brief Bakhtinian reading of The Rainbow is an original addition to this growing field. Michael Bell’s ‘Lawrence and the Present’ (DHLS 8[ 1999] 9–20), a slightly uneven meditation on Lawrence’s continuing relevance to the present era, further addresses the Bakhtinian context in Lawrence studies, but in much more aggressively sceptical terms than Ryu. Bell’s comments come in the course of a more general critique of what he fears may be a worrying trend towards ‘postmodern relativity’ and ‘ideological correctness’ in Lawrence studies (p. 16), and it seems to me that he seriously underrates the variety, scope, and complexity of Bakhtin’s body of theory if he sees it in such simplistic terms.

Bell notes Dostoevsky as a common source of influence for both Lawrence and Bakhtin, and Peter Kaye in Dostoevsky and English Modernism, 1900–1930, deals in detail with the Russian novelist’s influence on Lawrence in the chapter ‘Prophetic Rage and Rivalry: D.H. Lawrence’ (pp. 29–65). This is a lively and informative piece of cultural history which sets Lawrence’s dialogue with Dostoevsky firmly in its social and biographical context, and which rightly stresses Dostoevsky’s influence on the development of Lawrence’s novelistic ‘thought adventures’. Kaye is sometimes confused by contradictions of his own making, and his view of Lawrence is sometimes distorted—by, for example, his old-fashioned construction of Lawrence as a ‘prophet’, his uncritical acceptance of J.M. Murry’s account of Lawrence’s antagonism to Dostoevsky, and his exaggeration of Lawrence’s ‘anxiety of influence’ towards the Russian—but his concluding emphasis on the Dostoevskian multiplicity and flux of Lawrence’s works achieves an appropriate summary balance.

Paul Eggert’s ‘C.S. Peirce, D.H. Lawrence, and Representation: Artistic Form and Polarities’ (DHLR 28:i-ii[1999]) introduces an unusual new theoretical perspective on Lawrence and, in particular, his ‘rejection of the notion of form’ (p. 97). Eggert briskly summarizes Lawrence’s rejection of idealism and his recourse to pre-Socratic philosophy, before recasting Lawrence’s thought in the light of the American pragmatist philosopher, C.S. Peirce. That Lawrence engaged in a profound philosophical struggle with questions of representation is (or should be) almost a truism in Lawrence criticism by now, and the value of this essay and its focus on Peirce is to help to give clear, logical expression to this struggle. In the process, Eggert is able to express some timely reservations about the common invocation of Martin Heidegger in this context, though in the end his argument is perhaps a little too loose to make an entirely convincing case for the alternative relevance of Peirce.

Closely related questions of representation are raised in Michael Black’s ‘D.H. Lawrence: Spontaneity and Revision as Aesthetic’ (CQ 28f 1999] 150–66). Drawing on insights gained from editing Lawrence’s texts for the Cambridge edition, Black discusses how we can develop new critical perspectives on Lawrence from what we now know about his painstaking processes of composition and revision. What the various researches of the Cambridge editors have taught us in particular is that Lawrence was a much more highly deliberate and self-conscious artist than was previously thought. For Black, this does not mean that the older image of Lawrence as a ‘spontaneous’ artist is now invalid, but that we need to seek a way of understanding how the two impulses of artistry and spontaneity work together to produce a distinctively Lawrentian aesthetic. This is precisely what the rest of this very finely written essay does, as it ponders the symbiotic relationship in Lawrence’s compositional process between spontaneous ‘outflow’ and Flaubertian revision.

The appearance of two further works in that Cambridge edition of Lawrence can be conveniently noted here: Mehl and Jansohn, eds., The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, and Schwarze and Worthen, eds., The Plays. Both books have been superbly edited from original sources and they each contain full details of histories of composition, publication, reception, and, for the plays, performance. It is difficult to do justice to the amount of careful scholarship that these texts represent on the part of the editors, but some sense of the detailed recension involved is given in John Worthen, ‘Towards a New Version of D.H. Lawrence’s The Daughter-in-Law: Scholarly Edition or Play Text?’ (YES 29[1999] 231–46). Here, Worthen discusses just this one play’s highly ‘troubled transmission’ and entertainingly draws attention to the many minute but significant typographical (and performance) confusions that have been generated by Lawrence’s dialect forms throughout the play’s transmission history.

Two strangely inconsequential essays are L.R. Leavis’ ‘D.H. Lawrence in Context’ (Neophil 83[ 1999] 483–95), which loses whatever context it may be driving at in a confusion of textual examples, and Karl Henzy’s quirky The Foreign Woman is a Man: Gender Reversal in D.H. Lawrence’s Fiction’ (in Button and Reed, eds., pp. 139–44), which is based on the dubious premise that Frieda Lawrence was the model for most of Lawrence’s male foreign characters, while Lawrence projected himself onto his female characters. (Henzy has the nerve, later in the essay, to castigate critics who base their arguments on unwarranted biographical speculation!)

Four journal collections devoted to Lawrence for the year (some of whose essays have already been cited above) are DHLR 28:i-ii (the final issue of this journal to be edited at the University of Texas by Charles Rossman), DHLR 28:iii (the first issue to be edited by William M. Harrison at SUNY, Geneseo), DHLS 8 (edited by Michael Bell, Chong-wha Chung, Earl Ingersoll, and Nak-chung Paik), and JDHLS (the last volume of this journal to be edited at Hull by Catherine Greensmith). The first of these collections contains an illuminating commentary by John Worthen on the key differences between Women in Love and the recently published The First ‘Women in Love ‘ [1998]; an attractive sequence of colour reproductions of some of Lawrence’s original dust-jackets, with a commentary by Keith Cushman; some new letters from Thomas Seltzer and Robert Mountsier to Lawrence; an essay by John Turner on the real-life model for Jim Bricknell (from Aaron’s Rod), also including a reprinted article from 1932 by ‘Jim Bricknell’ (Captain James White); and a carefully researched discussion by Victoria Reid of the circumstances surrounding Lawrence’s writing of his ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’. DHLR 28:iii carries an essay by Weldon Thornton, ‘A Trio from Lawrence’s England, My England and Other Stories: Readings of “Monkey Nuts,” “The Primrose Path,” and “Fanny and Annie’”, a checklist of German work on Lawrence, and a large section of book reviews. Several essays from DHLS 8 have already been mentioned, and the issue also includes a carefully detailed biographical essay by John Turner and John Worthen on Lawrence’s ‘Ideas of Community’ as represented in particular by his notion of ‘Rananim’. Other essays in the issue deal with Lawrence’s primitivism in The Plumed Serpent (as compared to Joseph Conrad’s in Heart of Darkness); Aaron’s Rod; affinities between Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell; and with Quetzlcoatl Of the varied essays in JDHLS, those by Harrison and Robinson are particularly well written and researched: Andrew Harrison, ‘Reading the “Restored” Text of “Wintry Peacock”’; Takeo Iida, ‘St. Mawr, The Escaped Cock and Child of the Western Isles: The Revival of an Animistic Worldview in the Modern World’; Eva Yi Chen, ‘Naturalisation and Conflicting Generic Convention in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Masami Nakabayashi, ‘Sexual Explicitness in Lady Chatterley’s Lover ; Moira C. Robinson, The Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’; and Monica Nash, ‘D.H. Lawrence and Folk Music’. I would like finally to mention the Modern Library’s handsomely produced (and modestly priced) Wood, ed., Selected Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence, which is noteworthy for the editor’s eloquent and sharply observed introduction, as well as for the carefully balanced and original nature of his selection.

(e) The English Novel, 1900–1930

Too often in the past the English realist writers of this period have been ghettoized or forgotten, or, like D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, required to straddle the realist/modernist categories uncomfortably. While the critical picture is not yet as consistent or as coherent as in some other literary periods, the recognition that the early twentieth-century novel rewards closer scrutiny and that the literary community is much more productively seen as a whole is rapidly growing. The relevance of history to literary readings and the interrogation of literary categories are the hallmarks of the current struggle to recover English fiction from the sole measuring-stick of modernism, although it is still a hotly contested issue. This year, considerations of women’s war writing and studies of Kipling have dominated critical interest, but all the work is informed by the spirit of scrupulous historical contextualizing and most by a desire to broaden and complicate conventional critical assumptions.

Peter Kaye’s Dostoevsky and English Modernism, 1900–1930, exemplifies this trend. His assessment of the impact of Dostoevsky on the lively and often acrimonious contemporary debate about the nature of fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century is a welcome and distinctive contribution to the slowly growing attention being given to a holistic picture of the literary milieu between 1900 and 1930. The title of the book provocatively sweeps all literary production up into the umbrella category ‘English Modernists’ and allows the fault-lines to reveal themselves through the letters, articles, and diaries of the main protagonists as they face an ‘intrusion into the house of fiction’ (p. 9). Kaye uses the publication of Garnett’s translations of Dostoevsky’s novels to crystallize and investigate the different responses of the literary community as ‘the modernist maelstrom’ (p. 3) swept through England. Dostoevsky, he claims, is a kind of ‘interlocutor’ (p. 194) who brilliantly illuminates the connections between novelists such as Galsworthy, Bennett, and Forster and those such as Conrad, Lawrence, and Woolf, among whom we find surprisingly common concerns. So Bennett, famously undone by Woolf’s essay on Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, is shown to be the earliest and most influential campaigner on behalf of Dostoevsky’s work and translations of his novels, who later calls in the debt by aligning Dostoevsky’s work with his own privileging of realism and moral purpose. Later Woolf was just as exploitative, using Dostoevsky’s work as a weapon in her own fight to find a new kind of novel. Galsworthy’s baffled public criticisms of Dostoevsky are resolved in his private recognition that he is facing a talent he can never aspire to—what Kaye encapsulates as ‘class-bound despair’ (p. 156). This book suggests a fascinating and intelligent rationale for recognizing the imperatives of the very real divisions that ran through the heart of the literary culture of the time: divisions not just of artistic achievement but of culture, class, and personal aspiration, and the demons which their responses to Dostoevsky s work reveal. This book considers writers as literary critics and makes no attempt to evaluate their own work, but literary judgements are subtly implied. The reader will come away from this book with a more complex understanding of the literary values of the time, and a richer understanding of Wells, Forster, Galsworthy, Bennett, Woolf, and Conrad and their ‘divergent artistic quests’ (p. 193).

Another attempt to draw early twentieth-century fiction into a common frame is Stuart Sillars’s in Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910–1920. Sillars’s work builds on a growing understanding of the links and interconnections between those inside and those outside modernism, and is something of a plea for a more sensitive critical reading of his chosen writers. His intention—to break down the barriers between what he calls the International Modernists and ‘the loose parentheses’ of the ‘English Line’ (p. 2) as well as between the proliferating critical categories of war writing, women’s writing, science fiction, etc.—is admirable, but his critical methodology is not always clear. He identifies the years 1910–20 as crucial for understanding the profound innovations in structure and language found in the writing of E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, and Siegfried Sassoon, but his use of structuralist theory to identify that the shared element in their literary innovation was ‘the structural use of literary devices’ seems unnecessary. More helpful is his discussion of irony as the particular literary tool which subverts and reconfigures novel conventions, and his detailed historical framing of the literary productions of this period is well done. His choice of writers is somewhat problematic. Bringing together apparently disparate writers, such as Sassoon and Forster, and different literary genres, promises to be constructive, but omitting, on the one hand, Woolf (English but labelled High Modernist) and, on the other, less critically explored writers such as H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, suggests that the canon remains intact, if reconsidered. Perhaps this touch of elitism accounts for the unsatisfactoriness of Sillars’s discussion of Howards End, which argues—with much interesting detail—for Forster’s self-conscious play with Meredith and Shakespeare which, Sillars claims, creates for the reader a ‘shocking moment ... almost one of Modernist alienation and exile’ (p. 37), because of the ‘realisation of our own complicity in the false strategy that we have up to now accepted’. I don’t think so—this is overstretched. Despite his careful deconstruction of this text, Sillars ultimately makes an Eliotean argument addressed to scholars who are assumed to be familiar with all the relevant texts that 1910 readers might be, as well as their history, culture, and literary milieu. He raises some interesting questions and offers some important insights, but this is an uneven book which needed a wider range of authors and a less self-conscious critical stance to help him answer them.

In contrast, Nancy L. Paxton in Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947, has a scope that reaches well beyond the confines of this period but offers a literary model which enhances the readings of all texts which concern themselves with colonial matter. Paxton offers what she calls ‘a genealogy of the sexual imaginary’ (p. 15) which she achieves by conjoining the conclusion from her analysis of the historical real, that ‘uncertainties constitute rape’s most powerful significance’ with rape as a colonial trope which points away from the supposed act towards the problematic context. This approach informs Paxton’s illuminating discussion of Forster’s last novel, A Passage to India [1924], and offers a way of reconciling some of the warring perspectives in Forster criticism. Her careful and helpful contextualization of historical and social events in both Britain and India shows with great subtlety how Forster engaged with his own time, and how his text mediated the complex personal, public, and artistic pressures that drove him. Particularly illuminating is the way Adela Quested emerges from this discussion as a psychologically complex woman, struggling to understand her own identity within the conflictual inscriptions of her society. This analysis will scotch the accusation often levelled at Forster that he was incapable of creating rounded women characters. Paxton’s psychoanalytical (specifically Freudian) reading is part of this historicization of Forster’s understanding, and enables us to grasp Forster’s agenda so that we see the text with its interplay of the colonial, cultural, sexual, and psychoanalytical growing before our eyes. Paxton claims the text as modernist and in her discussion is inclined to imply a distinction between its realist and modernist chunks. I think her argument works best as a celebration of the possibilities of realism, which captures in A Passage to India a historical period, a conflict of cultures as well as the mental landscapes of the main characters. (See also below.)

The argument of Arthur Maitland’s E.M. Forster: Passion and Prose, is specifically offered as a continuation of the debate around the impact of Forster’s homosexuality on his creative achievement, but one which claims to clear the ground of ambiguities on this issue and to be a ‘commonsense’ recognition that Forster’s sexuality and his writing, both textually and in the decisions he made about it, are inextricably bound up. The tilt of the argument is rather against the gay lobby and queer theorists who, Martland notes, have belittled Forster’s achievement since A.N. Wilson’s persistent and vindictive attacks, than against heterosexist critics who have trodden the paths marked out by Trilling in the 1940s. The introduction usefully charts the changing values and trends in Forster criticism and the battle between the heterosexist versus the gay critical voice since the publication of Maurice. It makes explicit a difficulty, so common for critics of this period, of finding a way to understand the past without excusing it (in this case, Forster’s closet sexuality) or reducing the work to a mere period study. Each novel is considered chronologically as the work of a homosexual—Maitland explicitly distances himself from the modern connotations of ‘gay’ and ‘queer’—and demonstrates that the ‘gap’ in Forster’s creative writing and his early ‘silence’ in terms of that chronology is a myth of heterosexist criticism. The chapter devoted to the ‘Uncompletable’ and ‘Unpublishable’ works, as Forster called them, shows him writing for his own pleasure, and traces the literary chronology from the completion of Maurice in 1914 to A Passage to India in 1924. We may question Martland’s hope for a ‘commonsensical’ reading of Forster, free from heterosexist and gay prejudice, and free from what Maitland sees as the lethal ‘-isms’ of feminism and post-colonialism, but there is a rewarding clarity and straightforwardness about Maitland’s approach which does reacquaint the reader with Forster’s novels. Forster’s homosexuality may not be the whole answer Maitland claims for it, but he is convincing and interesting in arguing for its intrinsic importance.

Michael J. Hoffman and Ann Ter Haar in ‘“Whose books once influenced mine”: The Relationship between E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves’ (TCL 45[1999] 46–65), contribute another perspective to the growing interest in the links between the realists and modernists, rather than their differences. The particular case of Woolf’s and Forster’s literary relationship is usefully explored through quotations from their letters, diaries, and reviews of each other’s work which show their common concerns about the function and future of fiction, and their vulnerability (at times) about the status of their achievement. More speculative is the analysis of Howards End and The Waves: the common ground they find (summarized as ‘an abiding concern with English history, landscape and character’, p. 58) could be replicated across any number of Edwardian and Georgian texts. Nevertheless, despite the title of the article, they supplement the discussion with a range of references from other works, which cumulatively illuminate the creative interaction between the two writers. Such articles enrich our readings of English fiction of the period, filling out our sense of the complexity of the literary community and increasingly calling into question the realist/modernist taxonomy. A nice conclusion links Forster’s pageant England’s Pleasant Land and Woolf’s Between the Acts with the contingency of English rain and the interruption of aircraft noise in an English country house, providing us with an accessible demonstration of the creative play between text and the world.

Kipling criticism continues to flourish, and this year has been a particularly fertile one with two new biographies, a further volume of letters, and a new anthology. Andrew Lycett’s exhaustive and scholarly Rudyard Kipling is the biography of a man who wrote, rather than the biography of a writer. Lycett’s declared aim is to uncover the vast, under-researched areas of Kipling’s life and to reveal that life as a panorama of British intellectual and cultural social history. In this way he avoids being an apologist for Kipling, and, in exhaustively accumulating facts and figures and allowing Kipling to speak through his extensive correspondence as well as (more briefly) through his fiction and poetry, he succeeds in making Kipling ‘ordinary’: that is, a man of his time reacting to a series of extraordinary cultural and political changes. When, in the later chapters, he shows Kipling as a man at odds with his time, driven more and more deeply into reactionary politics, we can trust Lycett’s judgements, and share his recognition of Kipling’s need to make a desperate last stand against modernity, as well as his criticism of those such as Edward Said who have demonized Kipling. Lycett helps the reader to understand that Kipling’s great fears—for the fragility of civilization, of the potential lawlessness of the masses, and of the loss of ‘shared remembrance’ as Edwardian society rejected its past—were pervasive concerns of the period. This is not a biography intended to penetrate Kipling’s heart and mind, but a carefully substantiated account of the events of his public, private, and writing life. Lycett calls his work a ‘voyage into the mind of a conservative’; it is also a voyage into a particular mode of consciousness that will enrich readings of Kipling and many of his more liberal contemporaries.

A second Kipling biography this year is Harry Ricketts, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. Ricketts writes in a lighter, more narrative style than Lycett. Like Lycett, he was first drawn to Kipling through reading his stories for children, but, unlike Lycett, he strives to maintain the sense of Kipling as a writer who can be enjoyed. He acknowledges the difficulties for twenty-first century readers (and many early twentieth-century readers) through a quotation from Rebecca West’s obituary in 1936 which sums up with painful and tragic accuracy the flawed politics Kipling espoused, but moves on to try and rediscover the spirit of the man who could create the ‘delighted celebration of cultural and racial difference—in the strongest contrast to his “White Man bluster’” (p. 271) in Kim [1901], the energy and inventiveness of the Just So Stories [ 1902], Puck of Pook’s Hill [1906] and the insight and literary brilliance of many of the short stories—he claims ‘Mrs Bathhurst’ to be ‘the first modernist text’ (p. 288). Ricketts deals particularly well with Kipling’s love affair with a newly discovered English landscape after his return from India, and how it became intensified to obsessional levels by what he saw first as political naivety and, after the First World War, as an abdication of responsibility for civilization. His idiosyncratic and internalized sense of history became focused on the English landscape: as he drives, he writes in ‘The Complete Motorist’, ‘the dead, twelve coffin deep, clutch hold of my wheels at every turn, till I sometimes wonder that the very road does not bleed’ (p. 289). Ricketts’s book is a partial but rewarding addition to the many analyses of a writer who appears to defy interpretation.

The fourth volume of Pinney, ed., The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, is a powerful addition to the series. It covers the period 1911–19 when Kipling was a wealthy and established man of letters, and when his efforts, imagination, and writing were increasingly devoted to war and the consequences of war. The even and often cheerful tone of the many letters to the diverse recipients belies his increasing bitterness and desperation as the war failed to live up to the aspiration of nationhood which he held so dear; they can be seen to be a version of his ‘war work’. It is notable that few of them are addressed to other writers or concern themselves with literary concerns other than the practicalities of royalties, publication, and the trappings of fame. One to Mrs Humphry Ward is triggered by their shared antipathy to women’s suffrage. There are many interesting strands to follow, but perhaps most intriguing is the correspondence with Roosevelt, so revealing in its belief in the possibility of American right thinking, his irritation that Americans could not grasp that Europe’s fate was also America’s fate, and his disillusion with American insularity. Most moving are the letters to his son, characteristically Edwardian in their combination of devotion, heartiness, and domineering fatherhood, as is his advice later to his nephew Oliver Baldwin about the relationship between father and son. These letters stop abruptly with his son’s death but, later, there are diary letters to his wife Caroline and daughter Elsie.

Many of the letters are crammed with detail—‘a souffle unlike any souffle that ever souffled, with strawberry jam of whole strawberries’ (15–19 March 1911)— and references to the personal impact of current political upheavals, as when Wellington school was threatened with closure by the General Strike (6 March 1912), and sudden moments of revelation, as when a visit to Egypt rouses memories of India: I felt as though I was moving in a sort of terrible, homesick nightmare as though at any moment the years would roll away and I should find myself back in India. But it is twenty-five years and twenty-six days since I left it’ (4 April 1914). But it is the war which ultimately dominates these letters, moving from tetchy criticisms of England’s decline, and hopes that the war might root out dishonour at home and evil abroad, to the growing anger and bitterness after his son’s death with the failure of war to deliver the grand vision of heroism and national pride he wanted. We are surprised he found time to read and enjoy Jane Austen in this period of emotional anxiety and intensity. Less surprising is his wholehearted endorsement of Henry James becoming a British citizen. ‘You don’t know what it means or what it will go on to mean not to the Empire alone but to all the world of civilization that you’ve thrown in your lot with them’ (July 1915). As Pinney points out, Kipling wrote prodigiously during the war period, but this is writing that is little known. What these letters do is give Kipling’s complex personality another context and another set of perspectives. What emerges is an emotional and creative life blocked and choked by Kipling’s determination to force the world into the template he desired.

The opening paragraph of the preface to Karlin, ed., Rudyard Kipling, acknowledges the hugely partisan nature of Kipling’s following: ‘All anthologists cower at the thought of their omissions and hard choices, but the selector of Kipling fears hate-mail’. From whom precisely? Those whose politics are confirmed by his writing, those who are offended by it, or those liberal sitters on the fence that fear the selection might be driven more by popular appeal than aesthetic value? With Kipling’s ‘If’ currently being recited in sonorous tones by Desmond Lynam on the latest CD of Football Anthems, we have to acknowledge that Kipling is a writer who refuses to go away, and who consistently demands we acknowledge the discomfort and/or pleasure of our responses. He is indeed a shifting target for the anthologists. Karlin follows the ‘pleasure’ line, limiting himself to the freestanding short stories (explicitly not the stories which are part of larger stories) and the poems that he judges give the ‘greatest pleasure’. There is much to enjoy and to rediscover in the immediacy of Kipling’s storytelling, the directness of the poetic voice, and the extraordinary sense of the modern that is implied in so much of it. ‘Chant-Pagan’, written in the voice of a Boer War soldier and resonant with contemporary echoes, speaks too of modern times—the sense of English decline, of the failure to connect imaginative vision with daily life, even the failure of English football to ‘bring it home’. Karlin’s short but perceptive introduction frames his selected material and intriguingly puts his critical judgement on the line with a claim to have found the key to Kipling—his ‘figure in the carpet’. Ah we think, how we would all like the comfort of summing up Kipling in a way that we in the twenty-first century can be happy with. How will Karlin get past his own ‘And yet... ’? He does it convincingly by offering us a Kipling whose writing embodies a series of identities and communities which he tries on for size. His magnetism for readers is their response to his ‘passion of exile’ which ‘creates and recreates the paradise of belonging’ (p. xxviii).

Nancy L. Paxton includes a discussion of Kim in Writing under the Raj, under the theme of ‘lost children’, which offers the opportunity to balance the nature/nurture debate within the colonial ‘script’. The clearest message from Kipling’s characterization of Kim is that nothing is a sure indication of race—not, interestingly enough, even colour (Kim is so dirty that, with the other contraindications, his whiteness is ambiguous). The only sure marker is the full internalization of colonial attitudes of Britishness. Through Kim, Paxton explores Kipling’s silences on racial identity. Because Kim is racially transgressive (English/ Irish/British/Indian) and later exploits his chameleon heritage through his skill at cross-cultural passing, he speaks for both cultures and no culture. His pre-sexual maturity (although, as Paxton points out, the time-scale of the novel in regard to Kim’s age is problematic) allows him to resist the final inscription of gender and sexual identity which would mark him as of one community or the other. Paxton shares Karlin’s sense of Kipling’s (and Kim’s) ‘inside story’—Kim’s ‘own’ identity, she argues, lies outside the inscription of his Raj culture for, as Kim says, ‘What is Kim?’

Kim continues to stimulate the most frequent work on Kipling. As Tim Watson in ‘Indian and Irish Unrest in Kipling’s KM (E&S 52[ 1999] 95–114), points out, critical interest in Kim’s place in colonial literature goes back to Edmund Wilson’s 1941 essay. Watson’s own contribution is to focus more closely on the detail of the historical context and at the same time to broaden the notion of the Raj to the concerns of the whole empire and the perpetuation of colonial power. He claims that trading links permeated the Indian subcontinent, and that ‘conquest’ by Britain, marked by the Indian Mutiny, indirectly enabled the emergence of an identity for ‘India’ as a nationalist unity. In Kim, the Great Game, which sought to know India, to set its boundaries and to pacify its peoples indirectly, gave the indigenous peoples the means of communication, the panoptic awareness, that made nationalism possible. Watson’s most useful point is that the national, religious, and cultural ambiguities of the subcontinent, and the individuals (including Kim, whose unity of character is further complicated by his Irishness) who live there, are sustained by Kipling through romance, but necessarily sustained since the empire’s chosen way of armies, espionage, and communication networks held in it the seeds of its own ruin. In a paradigm that can be applied to much of Kipling’s work, Watson claims that he proposed ‘a new fictive unity for the Empire, one that includes even the king’s rebel subjects’ (p. 111).

Perhaps it is the difficulty of reconciling Kipling’s politics with his power as a writer that forces critics again and again to contextualize him in such a way as we can ‘understand’ and place his politics. Michael Matin’s “‘The Hun is at the gate!” Historicizing Kipling’s Militaristic Rhetoric, from the Imperial Periphery to the National Center, Part Two: The French, Russian, and German Threats to Great Britain’ (SNNTS 31 :iv[ 1999] 432–70) makes a fascinating contribution to this quest, and at the same time illuminates works written by Kipling during the war years and after that are less frequently discussed. The pivotal text Matin discusses is Kipling’s A School History of England [1911] which was his attempt to fight the decline of empire by educating schoolchildren about its achievement and values. However, Matin is fair to Kipling by making clear just how much he was one of many, and that, while his writing has survived to be interrogated by many post-colonial scholars, in his own day his way of thinking interlaced with any number of influential perspectives as England was gripped by xenophobic fears. The literary framework for reading the Kipling of this period is the glut of invasion and blockade literature, in which London was depicted as under attack from a number of nations (notably France, Germany, and Russia) landing on the east or south-east coast, or reduced to starvation by blockades across the world. Although Matin is at no point an apologist for Kipling, the reader of this article, is enabled to see him afresh: Matin gives us a context for a better understanding of Kipling’s political position; he also brings out the immediacy of his writing, for, as he knew, it spoke directly to the feelings of many.

Much of the current critical interest in Kipling focuses on the latter part of his career, and particularly his attitude to the war; the First World War is also the focus of the ground-breaking work which has introduced a new dimension to understanding what constitutes war writing, that is, the steady growth of critical interest in women’s writing of this period. As recovery work has progressed, a key need has been to make women’s war writing more readily accessible. This year three anthologies—Cardinal, Goldman and Hattaway, eds., Women ’s Writing on the First World War, Higonnet, Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War One, and Tylee, Turner and Cardinal, eds., War Plays by Women—offer, individually and together, a wide range of interesting and original material in support of this project.

The imaginative organization of Tylee, Turner and Cardinal is clearly informed by their objective to provide as wide and diverse a selection as possible. I would question their decision to omit the work of the interwar Women’s Peace Movement and the various socialist movements: all these were surely an integral and consequential part of women’s war experience. However, the strengths are legion. There are examples of writing from Britain, America, France, Germany, Poland, and New Zealand: a global perspective focused and concentrated by the shared arena of the war. A strength of the pan-war approach is the emergence of common themes, as women of different cultures, education, and sexual orientation confront the challenge of the war and the glimpse it provides into the mobility of women and the cultural exchange between them which was increased exponentially by the experience of the war. Each extract is prefaced by brief notes and concluded with bibliographical details of the original source. There are welcome examples of writers whose names are familiar on the literary scene but much of whose work is still inaccessible: Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Townsend Warner, May Sinclair, and Cicely Hamilton, but there are also many names unfamiliar to English readers. The success of this collection in bringing fresh voices to the dilemmas of the war is Hilda M. Freeman’s ‘An Australian Girl in Germany: Through Peace to War, January-October 1914’, which illuminates a crisis of national identity. Staying in Germany when war breaks out, she is accepted by the Germans because Australia is ‘a different nation’. She is startled to realize that ‘the love of Empire is an integral part of my being’ (p. 46) and, despite the danger she is in, feels the need to state that Australia is bound to English ‘by love, not force’ (p. 48). Another example is the German bestseller by Adrienne Thomas in Die Katrin wireI Soldat (Katrin Becomes a Soldier), that was published to instant acclaim in 1930 only to be banned by Hitler later in the decade as war became imminent again. Higonnet’s collection shares many of the same strengths. Her selection has a strongly international flavour which emphasizes the variety and diversity of women’s experience of and response to war. There is a welcome emphasis on women’s political perspectives, while the broad range of examples from diaries, autobiography, memoirs, journalism, and other forms will further stimulate the lively debate about the relationship between literary, historical, and cultural representations of war. Tylee, Turner and Cardinal’s anthology of plays is welcome for diversifying even further our awareness of the genres to which women contributed and which they helped to shape. Her selection demonstrates the versatility of their talents, and is a timely reminder of the early twentieth-century theatre which has recently been subordinated in critical interest to poetry and the novel.

William: An Englishman, Cicely Hamilton s award-winning novel, first published in 1918, is a particularly valuable addition to the body of women’s war writing and an opportunity to link the playwright and social commentator with the novelist. In the introduction Nicola Beauman provides an informative context and thoughtful analysis of the novel. For those trying to understand the relationship of literary innovations to techniques of realism and modernism, this is a text to die for. It moves from a rather obvious satire on the warring ideologies at the turn of the century which obscured for many the imminence of a war of a very different kind looming on the horizon, to a moving account of a honeymoon couple caught in Belgium at the outbreak of war. Hamilton’s play with timescale (at times the text seems to move with all the horror of slow motion), with the inadequacy of language (the couple speak no French or German; sometimes gestures are understood, sometimes not), and with the scale of the individual against the size of armies, of landscapes and of incomprehensible meanings is brilliantly done. The reader is never sure what war William is fighting or, indeed, whether he is, or thinks he is, ‘an Englishman’.

Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, eds., Letters From a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, makes compulsive reading. The letters of the five friends and the occasional intervention—always at terrible times—of official notes and parental formalities—forces the reader to wonder again how history will be charted in the future when such immediate and personal records are no longer recoverable in the same way. These letters, with their peculiar middle-class voice, public school accent and concerns, Oxford milieu, and prosperous future over which play loves, uncertainties, fears, and hopes, reveal the subtle changes of a culture, a psychology, and a national identity which it would be hard to guess at otherwise. Between the Uppingham speech day of 1914 on a blazing July day and the first July of the war in 1915 lay a chasm of understanding which all the friends try to bridge, trailing their assumptions, immaturity, and secrets with them. Roland views the war through his love of poetry and the classics. Thurlow is afraid of being afraid, but dies bravely. Edward Brittain finds love in the arms of his fellow soldiers and dies heroically before he can be court-martialled for homosexuality, and Victor dies from brain damage after losing his sight. These young men’s words flesh out and give substance to the myth of the First World War encapsulated in the two clearly remembered moments of that speech day: the headmaster’s words, ‘if a man can’t serve his country, he’s better dead’, and the clear voices of the choir. The selection is well made and organized. The regularity of the letters charts the war and their responses in detail and the stopping of first one correspondent and then another provides a structural comment on war.

Sharon Ouditt’s Women Writers of the First World War: An Annotated Bibliography, is timely. As more texts are republished and critical work gathers pace, it is important to assess what has been achieved. Her ‘work of consolidation’ does that admirably. However, its greatest value will be in providing an infrastructure for future war studies in women’s writing. This is the kind of reference work we will turn to again and again, while giving a mental thank you to the scholar who performed such a gruelling task. Ouditt confines herself to British writers, but the range of themes and genres is considerable. She extends the historical period from 1914 to 1939, claiming that the impact of war experiences continued until the outbreak of the Second World War, and, taking an interdisciplinary approach, provides as wide and diverse a coverage as possible. The notes and bibliographical material are excellent, and the archive information particularly valuable. This is a work that will provide signposts for further productive study and help to avoid the duplication of anthologized material that is inevitably creeping in.

Trudi Tate’s Modernism, History and the First World War [1998] is concerned with understanding war writing in relation to literary movements of the time, and covers a wide range of writers including, H.D., Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf. She raises the interlinked questions, ‘is “modernism” a form of “war writing”?’ and ‘is war writing necessarily modernist?’, but by starting with the assumption that modernism is the true expression of the modern and stating that ‘after 1914 modernism begins to look like a peculiar but significant form of war writing’ (p. 3) she stretches an ‘imprecise and much contested term’ (p. 2) beyond its usefulness and sets out the trajectory of her argument too inflexibly. The contents of this rather strangely thematized book do not help to clarify or support her argument. It is hard to see Manning’s Middle Parts of Fortune, for instance, as modernist by any definition, although it could profitably have been considered as part of the ‘imaginative continuity’ Tate refers to but does not develop. There is much valuable material in this study—the relationship of modernism to politics which informs the concluding discussion of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway for instance—but the exclusively modernist perspective does not always do it justice.

Vera Brittain’s close friend Winifred Holtby is the subject of Marion Shaw’s biography, The Clear Stream: A Life of Winifred Holtby. ‘There is an empty space at the centre of Winifred Holtby’s life which has to do not only with her reticence and self-effacement but also with what one must call her goodness.’ So Shaw foregrounds her difficulty in finding a coherent narrative for a woman whose life was full of interest and achievement but who left few records and whose emotional life, despite her profound attachments to a range of people, including her mother, her friends, and the man she married on her deathbed, remains obscure to the public gaze. A further difficulty is that Holtby’s identity has been dominated by Vera Brittain’s version of it, published in 1940. Shaw’s mission is to colour in ‘the clear stream’ (Brittain quoting Holtby) with other perspectives. Organized around her various identities as daughter, lover, journalist, political campaigner, writer, and friend, the biography successfully fleshes out the portrait of a woman whose generosity, intelligence, and passion were channelled into social justice, journalism, and fiction. Shaw writes with a fluent, relaxed tone—this biography is a tribute to a woman rather than an analysis. I sense that she wants to make sure that Brittain is not left with the last word on Holtby, but that she struggled to fill that ‘empty space’.

The biography is supported by the publication of some of Holtby’s short stories in Shaw and Berry, eds., Remember, Remember. It is always important for the life not to overshadow the work, but these stories, most of which are drawn from collections published in 1934 and posthumously in 1937, but some of which are previously unpublished, will not make a significant difference to Holtby’s reputation. ‘Brenda Came Home’, ‘Unto the Hill’, and ‘The Casualty List’ show Holtby’s gift for pinpointing social moments which illuminate the larger social issues of war, morality, women’s position, and the aftermath of war. In fact, this biography and this collection sit well in a year in which so much was published concerned with war writing.

War novels written by men have not received the same level of interest as their war poetry or, indeed, as women’s war writing. Many of them were written ten years or more after the end of the war, so that their publication became enmeshed in mainstream publishing concerns. J.H. Willis Jr., in The Censored Language of War: Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero and Three Other War Novels of 1929’ (TCL 45:4[ 1999] 467–87) takes up this point in relation to Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Frederic Manning’s Middle Parts of Fortune, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, tracing the history of censorship and the comparative reactions of continental Europe, Britain, and the United States to these texts. This is an article which brings together some useful information and enhances our knowledge of the vagaries and pitfalls of literary production of the period. Further, the acts and processes of censorship illuminate the deeply ambiguous public attitudes to a war unprecedented in its horror and carnage. While European consciousness struggled to understand the knowledge it had gained, publishers, writers, and the literary public were locked in a battle over inappropriate dialogue and offensive material in an effort to sanitize representations of war.

One contribution to the study of popular fiction from the colonial perspective is worth noting. Published in 1998, Robert Fraser’s short investigation, Victorian Quest Romance, ties colonial fictional matter into two of the overarching concerns of Victorian life, anthropology and archaeology. Although his study is labelled Victorian, three of his chosen authors, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle, wrote well into the new century. Fraser takes a similar approach to Paxton in that he resists allying himself with the umbrella of colonial and/or feminist analysis and argues for a historicizing of the text that both informs and complicates a single-track literary theory. In identifying that the authors he discusses were ‘all seekers after origins’ Fraser begins his own exploration, seeking the sources that drove the creative impulse in a time when human identity and value were up for grabs. He finds that each writer is seeking beyond the social imperatives of daily life to find ‘the nature of man himself through contemporary fascination with anthropology and archaeology. The missing link between the past and the present, between the British and the ‘other’, between intuition and reason appeared to promise the origins of meaning and identity. The grouping of these writers is also useful. Lying in the hinterland of the literary canon but popular successes because of their adventure and detective stories, they subsume, in the tropes of their work, the biggest question for early twentieth-century Britons: where do we come from and what are we?

H.G. Wells’s The Croquet Player [1936], published in 1998 with an excellent introduction by John Hammond, shows how powerful a grip this early-century concern had on the imagination. Wells locates his tale in the Lincolnshire fens, where a sense of evil and some old bones act as a reminder of man’s basic nature and his capacity for evil. As the narrative is passed on from one member of the middle classes to the next, each of them is racked with fear, and their elegant lives are exposed as mere fragile artifice. The plot is cleverly structured through a series of voices, and predicts with inimitable Wellsian foresight the challenge to civilization that lies ahead. In 1936 this tale might well have seemed old-fashioned in the way in which it harks back to Darwinian anxieties. With the benefit of hindsight, we can appreciate Wells’s warnings more fully.

I want to conclude with Roger C. Schlobin’s ‘Danger and Compulsion in The Wind in the Willows, or Toad and Hyde Together at Last’ (in Smith and Haas, eds., The Haunted Mind: The Supernatural in Victorian Literature). Children’s literature has too long remained a separate category, but there are signs that this separatism is coming to an end. Although this short chapter flags up a series of ideas rather than formulating an integrated argument, it is welcome for keeping Wind in the Willows in the critical arena and, in this case, for locating it firmly in an adult literary tradition. Arguing for its place in the comedic tradition, Schlobin links it to A Midsummer Night’s Dream for its juxtaposition of social imperatives (the class system, the rise of the masses, the encroachment of technology) and the incantation and mesmerism (Pan: the pull of the South, the drive to go home) which operate in the unconscious. He singles out Toad for particular treatment, and explores his adventure in the light of ‘psychomania’ and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Perhaps Schlobin overemphasizes the role of the Dark Other, but the disjuncture between the Toad in the world episodes and the river bank are well noted, although Toad is finally reabsorbed into the comedic pattern as he returns home.

(f) Joyce

Ulysses dominated work on James Joyce this year, and also enjoyed some media attention after several polls declared it the most significant novel of the century written in English (see for example Guardian, 18 January 1999). This inevitably led to further reflection on the condition of Joyce studies and the peculiar status of Ulysses as an ‘unread’ classic. Derek Attridge’s ‘Judging Joyce’ (MoMo 6f 1999] 15–32), suggests that the ‘uniformly positive’ approach which has dominated commentary on Ulysses for so long may have had the effect of ‘disarming it of its alterity’ (p. 27): the Ulysses of 1922 was a disturbing and challenging text, whereas the Ulysses of 1999 is a ‘dense encyclopedic hypertextual web of internal cross-references’ (p. 26) with no power to challenge anything. Teachers and scholars should either try to find new ways of working with it or move on to other texts— Finnegans Wake may have been written, Attridge suggests, with this very problem in mind. More reflections on the condition of Joyce studies can be found in a special issue of the Journal of Modern Literature on ‘Joyce and the Joyceans’, which includes Fritz Senn’s memoir, ‘The Joyce Industrial Evolution, According to One European Amateur’ (JML 22[1999] 191–8). Julie Sloan Brannon’s ‘Joyce.com’ (SCR 32[ 1999] 74—80), also compares ‘academic’ and ‘popular’ discourses around Ulysses. Devlin and Reizbaum, eds., Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives. Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes, is a bravura display of contemporary American Joyce scholarship—almost every one of the eighteen contributors has published an important book on Joyce in the last two decades (including this year Reizbaum herself, and also Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf—see below). Here they each write about one chapter, with a particular focus on the cultural process by which categories of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are produced. Garry Leonard opens proceedings with “‘A little trouble about those white corpuscles”: Mockery, Heresy and the Transubstantiation of Masculinity in “Telemachus”’; Robert Spoo follows with ‘Genders of History in “Nestor”’; and, among those waiting to take the baton for later chapters, are Cheryl Herr (‘Proteus’), Joseph Valente (‘Scylla and Charybdis’), Enda Duffy (‘Oxen of the Sun’), Margot Norris (‘Circe’), and Vicki Mahaffey (‘Ithaca’). The calibre of the contributors and the chapter-for-chapter format (not original, but very useful for reference) should immediately establish this as an essential textbook for students of Ulysses. As the editors note, in exploring the impact of feminist issues on Joyce studies the collection also inevitably reflects ‘related trends and discourses (such as historicism, psychoanalysis, postcoloniality, or culture critique) that have likewise left their mark on exegeses of the Joycean texts’ (p. xvii).

One of the slightly unnerving features of Paul Schwaber’s very different study, The Cast of Characters: A Reading of Ulysses, is that there is almost no trace of these marks on his exegesis. Schwaber’s reading is a psychoanalytical one, but his approach is that of a ‘Freudian clinician’ (p. xvi) analysing his patients Stephen, Leopold, and Molly, and the text itself is not much more than a vehicle for the realistic characterization of ‘minds in action’ (p. xvii). Schwaber speaks a language of ‘character’ and mimetic representation, in other words, which would probably be disavowed by all the contributors to Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives. The result, as may be expected, is a jargon-free but rather less demanding work. A lot of space is given over in each chapter to sympathetic retelling of parts of the narrative, tracking Bloom’s ‘inner sense of Jewishness’ (p. 120) through his day, for example, or Stephen’s preoccupation with Shakespeare. But in its own way Schwaber’s analysis is quite compelling. He knows the narrative as well as any other Joycean, and he succeeds more convincingly than Devlin and Reizbaum in demonstrating a way in which reading Ulysses can still be an enjoyable learning experience. This book can at least be recommended as a kind of introductory guide (one level up from, say, The New Bloomsday Book), if not as a theoretical model.

It is not so easy to know quite what to make of John S. Rickard’s Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. The subject does not seem promising: what is a book about ‘the ways that memory functions within Joyce’s writing’ (p. 2) really about? A number of more encouraging answers emerge as the book progresses: this is partly a study of subjectivity, partly an exploration of the intellectual context that shaped Joyce’s ideas about memory (Bergson, Darwin, and theosophy are among the sources discussed), and partly a reading of Ulysses as a site of tension between narrative closure and narrative fragmentation. This book is well worth reading, then, even if memory in itself does not seem a particularly interesting topic. Several chapters of Ulysses are studied in special detail: ‘Circe’, with its many echoes of earlier chapters, is central to Rickard’s idea of ‘Joyce’s textual mnemotechnic’ (p. 166); there is also an interesting analysis (fully documented in an appendix) of references to the classical text The Golden Ass in ‘Nausicaa’. Another intertext for ‘Nausicaa’ is discussed in William Kupinse’s ‘Household Trash: Domesticity and National Identity in The Lamplighter and the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses’ (SCR 32[ 1999] 81–7), which argues that Joyce alluded to the popular American novel The Lamplighter in order to highlight the interconnectedness of discourses of domesticity and discourses of national identity. There is also a somewhat eccentric discussion of this chapter, with cross-references to Freud and Homer, in Semon Strobos’ ‘Nausikaa’ (CentR 43[1999] 423–32).

Ulysses is the main focus of Len Platt’s excellent Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival, although there is also some initial consideration of the earlier works, including Joyce’s Trieste lectures. Platt’s thesis is that Ulysses was shaped by Joyce’s animosity towards the Irish literary revival and its claim to represent the national consciousness, and he demonstrates this very effectively through close readings of a number of chapters (including ‘Aeolus’, ‘Sirens’, ‘Cyclops’, and ‘Circe’) and a discussion of the subversive intentions behind Joyce’s structure of Homeric correspondences. No quarter is shown to the revivalists, and Platt seems particularly determined to drive a wedge between Yeats and Joyce at every opportunity. But the analysis is so resourceful and readable it never becomes predictable, and even readers who are indifferent to Platt’s polemic should find this a useful handbook for study of Ulysses. It is certainly one of the most engaging and accessible of recent historicizing studies of Joyce.

More research has appeared this year on the early publication and censorship of Ulysses. Since recent studies have tended to concentrate on the trials of Ulysses in America (see YWES 79[2000] 639), Alistair McCleery, ‘A Hero’s Homecoming: Ulysses in Britain, 1922–1937’ (PuhH 46f 1999] 67–93), which tells the story of the British ban and the events leading up the first British edition in 1936, is particularly welcome. Willard Goodwin, “‘A very pretty picture M. Matisse but you must not call it Joyce”: The Making of the Limited Editions Club Ulysses. With Lewis Daniel’s Unpublished Ulysses Illustrations’ (JoyceSA 1 Of 1999] 85–103), presents some archival research on the background to George Macy’s deluxe edition, published in New York in 1935, which included illustrations by Matisse based (because the artist had allegedly not read Joyce’s text) on the Odyssey rather than Ulysses. Goodwin’s article includes some unpublished illustrations by another artist, also commissioned by Macy, which were more relevant to the text but considered at the time too ‘pornographic’ in their interpretation. Robert Spoo’s ‘Copyright and the Ends of Ownership: the Case for a Public-Domain Ulysses in America’ (JoyceSA 1 Of 1999] 5–62), also contains a great deal of information about the publication history of Ulysses. This is a revised and extended version of the case study published first in Yale Law Journal last year (see YWES 79[2000] 640), to which Spoo has now added a more detailed final section, specifically for Joyce scholars, outlining the practical implications of his claim that the 1922 and 1934 editions of Ulysses should now be considered ‘in the public domain’ in the US.

Two more studies of Joyce’s relation to Judaism appeared this year, representing sharply different approaches to this topic. Erwin R. Steinberg in The Source(s) of Joyce’s Anti-Semitism in Ulysses’ (JoyceSA 1 Of 1999] 63–84), represents the established and more literal-minded approach which assembles documentary evidence to help resolve such issues as whether Bloom is Jewish (technically and by his own account the answer is no) and whether Joyce shared the anti-semitism of his era (according to Steinberg the answer is yes, at least as far as east European Jews were concerned). Marilyn Reizbaum’s James Joyce’s Judaic Other pours scorn on critics like Steinberg for having ‘made a career of disavowing that Bloom is Jewish’ (p. 4) while missing the point about the significance of Jewishness in Ulysses. That point according to Reizbaum is that in its thematics and poetics Ulysses is ‘everywhere Jewish-related’ (p. 119), and that Jewishness is ‘symbolic of Joyce’s method’ (p. 54) in the book. Reizbaum attempts to give the whole discussion a more textual and theoretical cast, drawing on Homi Bhabha among others, and invoking a number of rather vaguely defined and disorientating concepts, such as ‘impossibility’ and the German racialist term Mischling to develop her argument. ‘Circe’ is again the chapter analysed in most detail, and there is also a discussion of the ‘figurations of Jewishness’ (p. 51) in Nietzsche, Freud, and Otto Weininger (also a key reference for Steinberg), as well as an interesting short section on references to Jewishness in Dubliners. The writing is at times disappointingly obscure and evasive, but James Joyce’s Judaic Other is clearly an important new addition to work on this subject.

James Joyce Quarterly published a special issue (36:n[ 1999]) on ‘the Italian Joyce’ this year, which is particularly rich in biographical information about Joyce’s life in Trieste and Triestine allusions in his works. Material on Joyce’s Italian connections can also be found in Massimo Soranzio’s The Expatriate and the Ex-Patriot: Joyce’s Friend Roberto Prezioso’ (Prospero 6[ 1999] 133–45). Edna O’Brien’s short biography James Joyce does not contain any new information, and will probably be of more interest to students of O’Brien than students of Joyce, but it is still worth reading for its oddities and occasional memorable phrases: O’Brien describes Stanislaus Joyce, for example, as summoned to Trieste ‘not as brother but as underling’ (p. 52). Her publishers seem to be under the impression that O’Brien has provided some special new insights into Joyce’s relationship with Nora, but in fact she is fairly tight-lipped on her (‘this peasant woman’, p. 68), and more interesting on the other women in Joyce’s life, particularly his mother and Harriet Shaw Weaver. How to avoid biographical approaches is John King’s concern in ‘Trapping the Fox You Are(n’t) with a Riddle: The Autobiographical Crisis of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses’ (TCL 45[1999] 299–316). King notes the tendency of ‘Joyceologists’ (as he rather oddly calls them) to treat the Stephen of Ulysses as an autobiographical figure and relate details in the text to ‘pretexts’ in Joyce’s life. He attempts to develop an alternative approach via some close exegesis of passages from Stephen’s ‘lecture’ on Shakespeare in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and corresponding references to Shakespeare in ‘Circe’. The close readings are useful, the warning against autobiographical readings likewise, but King’s hypothesis that Stephen is having a ‘metafictional identity crisis’ (p. 305) is even harder to follow than Stephen’s Shakespeare theory. ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ is also the focus for Helen Sword in ‘Modernist Hauntology: James Joyce, Hester Dowden, and Shakespeare’s Ghost’ (TSLL 41 [1999] 180–201), an analysis of the centrality of spiritualism to modernism. This essay includes a fascinating account of the slighting references to Shakespeare scholar Edward Dowden in Ulysses and the bizarre revenge taken by his spiritualist daughter Hester Travers Smith, who enlisted the ghost of Oscar Wilde to denounce Ulysses in her 1924 volume Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde. Other work on individual chapters of Ulysses includes Adam Woodruff, ‘Nobody at Home: Bloom’s Outlandish Retreat in the “Cyclops” Chapter’ (EJES 3f 1999] 275–84), a brief political and psychoanalytical analysis of ‘Cyclops’, in which he suggests that the chapter ‘catches nationalist rhetoric in the act of staging its conflicts of repression’ (p. 278). Mark Nunes’ ‘Beyond the “Holy See”: Parody and Narrative Assemblage in “Cyclops”’ (TCL 45[ 1999] 174–85), tries to move analysis of the narrative technique of ‘Cyclops’ on from the standard binary model of narrator/parody towards appreciation of the chapter as ‘experimental writing in the Deleuzean sense’ (p. 183). Martha C. Carpentier has an interesting chapter on ‘Eleusis at Ithaca: Mother, Maid and Witch in James Joyce’s Ulysses’ in her Ritual Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf. Carpentier argues that Joyce would have been aware of anthropological studies of the Eleusinian rituals based on the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and that these provide an alternative to the Odyssey as a framework for understanding Ulysses, producing an ‘optimistic reading’ of the final chapters as Stephen is ‘reborn’ through ‘visionary union’ with Molly (p. 99). With so much work on Ulysses appearing this year, it is worth highlighting one study which does not actually have as much to say about it as one might expect from its title. Piero Boitani in ‘The Shadow of Ulysses Beyond 2001’ (CCrit 21 [1999] 3–19) starts with a meditation on Bloom in ‘Ithaca’, but its subject is more generally the myth of Ulysses in Western culture.

Peter Francis Mackey’s Chaos Theory and James Joyce’s Everyman seems to have two aims: first, to explain chaos theory and its relevance to the study of Ulysses, and secondly to celebrate Leopold Bloom as the Everyman figure who learns to live with chaos and who shares what Mackey calls the ‘metaphysical vision’ (p. 168) of chaos theorists, a vision that ‘resonates in fundamental ways with our lives’ (p. 25). In its first aim Mackey’s book should be seen, as he acknowledges, as a companion to Thomas Jackson Rice’s recent study on the same topic, Joyce, Chaos and Complexity (see YWES 78[ 1999] 683), from which Mackey’s book differs mainly in its focus on Ulysses rather than the whole of Joyce’s oeuvre. The second aim is worthy enough, but Mackey has unfortunately chosen to organize his analysis around different aspects of Bloom’s day rather than different sections of the text, and there is only one extended and detailed study of a particular chapter (‘Ithaca’). This makes for a rather rambling approach, and impatient readers may prefer to sample Mackey’s thesis in shortened form in his essay ‘Chaos Theory and the Heroism of Leopold Bloom’ (in Gillespie, ed., Joyce through the Ages: A Nonlinear View). In editing this collection, based on a Joyce conference held at Miami in 1997, Michael Patrick Gillespie has attempted to impose some coherence on the papers selected by grouping them under headings borrowed from chaos theory. But as most of them have little or nothing to do with this theme the device does not really work and the collection is best regarded, like most conference collections, as a useful miscellany of work in progress and interesting footnotes on subjects treated more fully elsewhere. Jean Kimball, for example, highlights and also tabulates the ‘parallel development’ (p. 27) of Joyce as a writer and psychoanalysis as a movement between 1900 and 1922; Tara Williams discusses the multiple possibilities of interpretation generated by the symbolism deployed in the apparition of Rudy Bloom at the end of ‘Circe’; Heyward Ehrlich contributes an interesting study of the literary politics of Joyce’s 1902 lecture on Mangan; and John Gordon provides a list of possible allusions to Hitler in Finnegans Wake. There are also several essays adding to the growing body of work on Joyce as a significant presence in the work of later writers: Vivian Valvano Lynch considers three American authors (William Kennedy, Peter Quinn, and Henry Roth), and Sandar Manoogian Pearce three Irish ones (Flann O’Brien, Mary Lavin, and Sean O’Faolain). A Finnish variation on this theme is provided elsewhere by Janna Kantola in ‘The Joyce of Influence: Moments of Joyce in the Poetry of Pentti Saarikoski’ (ScanS 71 [ 1999] 325–40). Still on the subject of Joyce’s influence, there are several essays on music influenced by Joyce’s works in Knowles, ed., Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce. Knowles himself contributes an essay on Samuel Barber and Joyce, while Myra Russel puts in a plea for more critical attention to Chamber Music and discusses Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer’s musical settings of the lyrics in Joyce’s first book. Bronze by Gold is a more specialized and more coherent collection than Joyce through the Ages, presenting an interesting range of music-related work. John Gordon is in this book as well, contributing a discussion of a particularly operatic moment in ‘Circe’. There is also some useful biographical and contextual material: Seamus Reilly helps to document the musical culture which shaped Joyce by providing a complete catalogue of operas produced in Dublin theatres from 1888 to 1904, and John McCourt does something similar for the musical culture of Trieste during Joyce’s time there. As one would expect, there are also some essays on ‘Sirens’ and on the songs in Finnegans Wake. Other work on Finnegans Wake this year included Dale Scott’s Tlurabilities of Washerwomen’s Working Talk in Joyce’ (SiV71[1999] 183–8), and Jen Shelton’s Tssy’s Footnote: Disruptive Narrative and the Discursive Structure of Incest in Finnegans Wake’ (ELH 66f 1999] 203–21). R.J. Schork in ‘James Joyce and the Eastern Orthodox Church’ (JMGS 17[ 1999] 107–24), continues his series of well-informed studies of Joyce’s allusions to Greek and other cultures, mostly in Finnegans Wake.

Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf s new book on Joyce is one of the most ambitious to appear this year: no fewer than seven complex terms are invoked in her title Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism. By reconfiguring these in a new relationship Van Boheemen-Saaf aims to produce a new understanding of Joyce’s achievement and a new way of reading literary and theoretical texts—not to mention healing the breach between ‘Kennerites’ and ‘Ellmannites’ (p. 22), a polarization which she sees continued in the different approaches of Derrida and the later Lacan to Joyce. This is a richly layered book, which in addition to much theoretical analysis includes detailed discussion of Finnegans Wake, Ulysses and (a rarity this year) Portrait. Stephen Dedalus’s experience is central to Van Boheemen-Saaf s interpretation of Irish history as trauma—what she provocatively calls ‘the death in life of the condition of being born Irish and lacking a natural relationship to language’ (p. 50). This is a demanding study, and although the writing is not as difficult as one might expect, the author’s bland assurance that her argument ‘does not require the reader’s specialist knowledge of either Joyce or poststructuralist theory’ (p. i) should be treated with caution. A useful companion to Van Boheemen-Saaf’s discussion of Derrida and Joyce is Alan Roughley’s Reading Derrida Reading Joyce, a more carefully limited study which provides detailed exegesis of Derrida’s references to Joyce, tracking Joyce’s ‘spectral’ presence through his books and talks and concluding with a discussion of some of Derrida’s key terms and their relevance to selected passages from Finnegans Wake. For readers who want to approach Joyce via Derrida, this can be recommended as a useful guide. Although Roughley describes his readings as ‘necessarily fragmentary’ (p. 120), the book is clearly structured and written in a style that at least does not add any additional difficulty to the inherent difficulty of the subject matter. The same can unfortunately not be said for Sam Slote in The Silence in Progress of Dante, Mallarme, and Joyce, which affects a more recklessly Derridean style. This is a comparative study of the three authors cited in the title and a potentially interesting enquiry into the nature of the difficulty or obscurity of their texts. But Slote’s diction is disconcerting, and even allowing for the conventions of the genre the argument seems on the nonsensical side. There are two chapters on Joyce, but only Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are discussed, and it is Finnegans Wake which predominates, praised by Slote for ‘redegenerating writing one splurge at a time’ (p. 13). There is also some discussion of Derrida’s interest in Joyce (or ‘with Joyce’ as Slote annoyingly puts it).

Little in the way of new teaching material appeared this year, but teachers working with Portrait should find Iona McGregor’s volume on Portrait in the GCSE-oriented Teach Yourself Literature guides series at least worth browsing for ideas. More creative teachers, and anyone looking for an alternative way of engaging with Joyce, should also be aware of Alison Armstrong’s The Joyce of Cooking: Food and Drink from James Joyce’s Dublin—An Irish Cookbook (originally published in 1986 but reprinted this year and not previously reviewed). This contains a large number of recipes, every one cross-referenced to food mentioned in Joyce’s works. Readers who have never had the faintest idea what ‘nutty gizzards’ or ‘lemon platt’ might be can find out here. The book can be used as a glossary on food in Joyce or simply as a way of putting some fun back into the way he is studied.

(g) Woolf

Ruth Webb’s Virginia Woolf in the British Library’s Writer’s Lives series, is so modestly short on ideas and long on Alice-pleasing pictures that the text seems quite happy to subtend them rather than vice versa, rendering unto us, yet again, the domains and dramatis personae, the cultural spaces and familiar personages of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury appears emancipated yet exclusive, apparently privileged but privately abusive, neurotic, and claustrophobic, and Webb’s book offers a pretty, but pretty inconsequential, re-imaging rather than imagining of that vanished world, of which a wag remarked that ‘all the couples were triangles and lived in squares’, a remark whose tone sounds right for this book. Told in pictures, from Hyde Park Gate, to Talland House in Cornwall looking out to the Godrevy lighthouse ‘of’ her most famous novel, to the final residence of Monks Cottage, here also are the familiar people and usual suspects—Woolf, in her seven ages, and Leonard, Clive and Vanessa, and Duncan and Vita (‘so living’, as Hardy might have said) modelling for Orlando [1928], Lytton and Carrington, and, behind them all, the haunting parents, Julia and Leslie, as well as less reassuring personae such as half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth. Highly unpretending in its all too limited and limiting brief, the book evades the intrusive ethos of biography by a pyrrhic victory of the all too pleasantly agnostic (‘Was she a snob?’ is a concluding question here, for example).

Linden Peach’s Virginia Woolf, sets out to rescue Woolf from the larger (mis)apprehension of a Bloomsbury enclave categorized as terminally effete or productive of only an idiosyncratic and paradoxically ‘backward’ modernism, citing Jane Marcus on Woolf s still quite fashionable image as ‘an upscale Laura Ashley English female objet d’art, as collectable as a faded bit of lawn or lace’. He notes Woolf’s sustained and critical examination of received ideas of empire and patriarchy as involving the perpetuation of what we might describe as ‘abusive relations’, especially as she herself had a few of those in her private cupboard. Retrieving Foucault’s notion of the ‘cultural archive’, he attempts to show how she not only handles but dismantles the discursive formations she was often thought uncritically to traffic in. Inciting to a kind of labour of cryptonomy (crypta is by way of being his keyword here), he reveals how critics have often been persistently wrong-footed even over formally ‘conforming’ or straightforwardly proceeding narratives such as those of The Years [1931] and The Voyage Out [1915]. Glancingly allusive in relation to recent sophisticated critical writings, his book, although not informed by strict theoretical paradigms, is loosely based on a Foucauldian sense of meaning as embedded in wider discursive relations, discourses of ‘Englishness, Empire, the social structure, love and marriage’. Jacob’s Room [1922] is in deconstructive relation with its Bildungsroman genre and also in tension with the primal intertext, the appositely named Eddie Marsh’s sentimental memoir of Rupert Brooke to which it alludes (not to mention John McRae’s ‘poppy’ poem). In Mrs Dalloway ‘neither the fluidity of the mind’s activity ... nor the fragmentary codes of culture exist independently of the other’ and the apparently rather conservative novel actually flicks a kind of ink(y) pellet at national conservatism and the government of Baldwin. In To the Lighthouse [1927] patriarchy suffers marginalization in successive draftings which convey the interruption of past by present in a process reminiscent of Freud’s Nachtraglichkeit, but as feministically (re)conceived rather than merely artistically therapeutic. Such later work posits how hegemonic gender identities might well be a social consequence of the dominant ideologies that shape male and female subjects. Orlando [1928] is a scene of androgyny, disguise, and masquerade in what we might call overtly encrypted representations of what may or may not ‘be there’. Peach evokes the genre of the ‘apologue’ to cover such later work, including The Waves [1931] and Between the Acts [1941], in which an ongoing engagement with the solemnities of history and historiography is always assailed by the demons of satire and fantasy, by a sense of mockery, ridicule, farce, and the carnivalesque. Woolf, it seems, is ‘exploring the importance of fantasy in the principal discursive formations of Englishness, empire, masculinity and sexuality’.

In another implicit protest against excessively parochial and implicitly antiintellectual treatments of Woolf and Bloomsbury, Anne Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism, usefully explicates the paradoxical relationship, involving at once linkage and lesion, of Virginia Woolf and the Cambridge philosophers, not just Moore, quite famously but with arbitrary exclusiveness annexed to Bloomsbury, but Russell, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein. Woolf herself, rather like Jane Austen, stood in something of a mediated relation to processes of formal, not just tertiary, education, and her explications of the ‘ugly academic jargon’ itself, standing in an (im)mediate relation to patriarchy in To the Lighthouse is not initially encouraging.

But Woolf does of course handle epistemological and ontological issues, even if her celebrated metaphor for (a feminized?) consciousness as a ‘luminous semitransparent envelope’, seemingly a chora of sorts, evokes the lyrical wonder of the artist, as Wittgenstein puts it, rather than the bloodless ballet of abstractions delivered by the mathematical and ‘physic(s)-al’ formalities of Cambridge realism, the sharp distinctions and clear outlines explicitly preferred by Russell. Yet Woolf too arranges a meeting of sense and ‘sensibilia’, a key word here; she too refracts the problems she parodies of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’ mediated by an ‘I’, which, as one among many, and so less than the whole world, ‘ceases to block the view’ (p. 385) in a sentence which perhaps remembers her father’s carapace of ‘egoism’ as perhaps part at least of his problem as a ‘failed philosopher’. Tartly ‘complying’ with the apparent Anglo-Saxon capitulation to the idea that everything philosophical must have a French ‘imprimatur’, Banfield initially cites Foucault on the importance, not merely of Freud, but also of Russell, for the pre-eminent formal construction of a sense of ‘how it is’ in the modern world. This is a highly intelligent book, but the reader might have a few objections to the way it presents itself, which is rather reminiscent in manner of the reverently phenomenological younger J. Hillis Miller, endlessly citing, with something of the deferentiality of the modest waiter rather too anxious not to interrupt the conversation.

Elena Gualtieri’s Virginia Woolf’s Essays: Sketching the Past, is also, in its way, a challenge to the vision of Virginia Woolf as a writer of ineradicable effeteness or as an author of a glacial and petrifying socio-cultural elitism which substitutes for status as writer and artist. Taking a different route to artistic revaluation, Gualtieri, in a book ‘excavated’ from a Ph.D. fashioned under Rachel Bowlby at Sussex, looks at the Woolfian essay as an art form which suggests a kind of unresolved Hegelian dialectic which comes to rest only with questions, not answers. This recalls the sense of the essay itself as an individual and empirical modality developed in the wake of the reaction against the scholasticism of the medieval period, part of the cultural revolution of the Renaissance. For Gualtieri, the Woolf form invokes the tentativeness and unfinished quality of the Montaigne-style essay, with its endlessly dissolving sense of a highly provisional selfhood. Participating in this sense, Woolf is obviously far from the statically ‘aphoristic’ manner of Francis Bacon—although not, it might be said, from the reserved drollery and whimsicality of the English essay after, say, Lamb. Gualtieri finds Woolf in tune with Lukacs’s postulate about the essay as a different way of thinking about history and modernity, and its hybridity in genre terms pairs off well with an androgynous vision, or vision of androgyny. She develops the Lukacsian view of the essay as a kind of ‘mixed mode assessment’ which asks fundamental questions but offers an aesthetic experience as its form of cognition, attempting to bridge the gulf between knowledge and experience in radical resistance to the imposition of system, or of Adorno’s devil of identity-thinking. Gualtieri acknowledges recent work in the field by Graham Good [1988], Gillian Rose [1978], and John Snyder [1991]. The book as a whole is soundly based on Michele Barrett’s claim [1979] that the essays and critical writings offered a more empowering model for feminists than Woolf s fiction, and her final intellectual port of call against finality is Robert Musil’s invocation of ‘essayism’ as promoting suggestive ways of ‘living hypothetically* and so against the increasing rationalization of the modern world.

Allie Glennie’s Ravenous Identity: Eating and Eating Distress in the Life and Work of Virginia Woolf is a new look at anorexia in general and what looks like Virginia Woolfs proneness to it in particular, solidly based on a new understanding of the disorder, and of Woolf, in the work of Louise DeSalvo and others. Glennie establishes the importance of the illness itself, and its frequent correlation with childhood sexual abuse, in Woolfs case underlining the destructive effects of her serious mistreatment by both her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, to excellent effect. However, unlike those crudely reductive biographical treatments of writers which merely reveal the philistinism which is a constant accompaniment to literary production, Glennie does get real critical purchase as well as biographical and psychological insight. Patriarchal criticism has notably failed to spot the centrality of such patterns of abuse, ironically combined with the tribulations imposed by the neurotic and bullying patriarch Leslie Stephen, self-condemned by his own character note of ‘brutal wetblankef, yet significantly unapproachable in relation to such matters as his daughter’s long period of sexual maltreatment and unhappiness. In a further irony developed here, we see Woolfs husband Leonard as less than wholly helpful as a stubborn, unimaginative man gently if complacently set on getting his own way, whose ministrations were thus something of a civilized but perhaps finally not less lethal rerun of earlier male imposition, abetting those patriarchal doctors who consistently discussed Virginia’s case with him, not the sufferer herself. The discussion ‘encodes’ an almost Foucauldian perspective on the voices of madness which appear to express something of the ‘hunger, rebellion and rage’ famously and critically attributed to Charlotte Bronte by Matthew Arnold. Chapters such as ‘To the Lighthouse’. An Instinct like Artichokes for the Sun’, ‘The Waves: Some Fasting and Anguished Spirit’, and ‘The Years: The Admirable Mutton’ compose a genuinely interesting critical menu.

Cambridge University Press is well known not to favour fat tomes, but, reflecting the recent bulimic over-indulgences in the area of Woolf criticism, Roe and Sellers, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, is, understandably, only just this side of incipient obesity. The field contains ‘tensions’, a polemical note is often, and necessarily, present, and this is reflected in the different emphases of contributors to this volume. Andrew McNeillie’s portrait of ‘Bloomsbury’, for example, is definitely an insider’s vision. He does note that Leslie Stephen’s ‘no flowers by request’ motto for his Dictionary of National Biography provides a good ‘regulative concept’ for the study of Woolf and her artistic environment, but his depiction of the milieu as essentially that of ‘a group of friends held together by marriage and affection’ is too gently ironic to satisfy politicizing and feminist incursions from, as one might say, Zwerdling to Abel, although McNeillie concedes that new criticism was patriarchal and inadequate, and notes the tensions in the world he so eruditely invokes—tensions between the aesthetic and the ethical, ambiguities of an upbringing at once privileged and abusive, as well as in attitudes to democracy and modernity—usefully revising our sense of Woolf as a reader of Plato and Jane Harrison rather than a persistent peruser of the dryly donnish expositions of George Moore. Ill at ease with the ‘hunger, rebellion and rage’ side of Woolf which produced Louise DeSalvo’s broadsides, the essay attempts a recuperative emphasis in its treatment of Leslie Stephen while conceding that the lushness of what we might call ancien regime writing about Woolf was certainly misplaced, and that a more apposite form of appreciation, however disgusting to him in the weak Johnsonian sense, est arrive.

Suzanne Raitt in ‘Finding a Voice: Virginia Woolfs Early Novels’, noting that Woolf was prone to hallucinate articulate singing, like those famous nightingales warbling in Greek, develops the idea that ‘in Woolfian aesthetics voice, style, sex and the body come together’. Raitt adduces a Barthesian theme of the grain of the voice, in which that music to which all art was said to aspire by Pater offers a kind of feminized opposition to linearities of discourse but with no underlying guarantee that heroines will not succumb to male pressure as a consequence, so that The Voyage Out, for example, will become a voyage ‘out of girlhood and out of life as well as out of England’. Susan Dick, ‘Literary Realism in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves’, notes that, although Woolf abjures the fussy materialistic realism of her forebears, she is always including the ordinary with the extraordinary, her tenuous lucubrations always elaborated on a ‘a very solid table’: Mrs Ramsey and William Bankes, partaking of eternity, do not forget to partake of the ‘boeuf en daube’ as a portion of it. The essay qualifies, in good readings of the novels specified, taking in hand and exemplifying the well-disseminated idea that modernism is realism’s ‘other’. Julia Briggs, ‘The Novels of the 1930s and the Impact of History’, explores Woolf’s virtually ‘inherited’ sense of history as a nightmare narration of heroes and great men as one very much requiring intellectual renegotiation and interpretation. As this will not entail a sense of a grand narrative, it will naturally impinge on the novelist’s own attitude to narration, with a necessary scepticism entailing a decentring or deconstructing of male histories of identity, authority, and authorship, and a cognate avoidance of ‘outworn conventions of character-drawing’; the readings of the novels, with subtle involvement, are interesting, noting the ‘punch-pulling’ in the revised version of The Years and a revaluing upwards of Between the Acts.

Hermione Lee in ‘Virginia Woolf’s Essays’, reveals Woolfs mixed feelings about the literary marketplace as somewhat in tension with her inclusive and enthusiastic response to the many forms of cultural production, her ability to rethink an extraordinary range of intellectual issues and absorb herself in, or with, non-canonical subjects or projects, especially in relation to women’s lives and writing, and ‘her passion for entering into domestic detail and for recovering hidden histories’ (p. 95). She notes that, although the essays are not programmatic, indeed they are affably user-friendly, they are as iconoclastic in their disruption of genre as in their arguments, their formal hybridity married to an ambiguous ‘androgyny’. A related essay by Susan Sellers, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Letters and Diaries’, considers them as offering ‘distinct works of art’. Woolf’s sense that ‘we’re splinters and mosaics’ carries over into a Kristevan sense of a ‘subject-in-process’, and is also effortlessly and suggestively cognate with Cixous’s ‘feminine writing’, with its hostility to false conventions of omniscient perspective, order, consistency, and definitive summations of people and plot. Though the account itself raises questions it communicates well ways in which the letters and diaries shun linear logic, objective viewpoint, and the single self-referential meaning, showing how these writings enter avant la lettre into the spirit of Cixous’s idea of feminine writing as the ‘inscription of what is repressed within history and culture’.

Maria DiBattista’s ‘Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship’, notes (what might not escape some kind of censure in other contexts) the heavy filter on the kinds of language to which Woolf will permit an entree, a formal problem which might invoke charges of effeteness or snobbism, and so far removed from the modernist practices of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound. A sense of her originality is regained by a reconsideration of Erich Auerbach’s surprise (in his celebrated Mimesis [1946]) at the difficulty of assigning voices in To the Lighthouse, raising the question of ‘who speaks’ in what for us is a proto-Bakhtinian fashion, secreting David Lodge’s claim (in After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism [1991]) that modernism aspires to quash diegesis altogether in favour of mimesis, as those terms were originally defined by Plato and subtly developed by Bakhtin himself.

Michael Whitworth, ‘Virginia Woolf and Modernism’, notes that she certainly didn’t find ‘male modernism’s’ cult of ‘hardness and dryness’, political authoritarianism, and ‘exaggerated’ masculinity congenial, and that she reviewed for the intellectually wide-ranging, if not quite yet avant-garde, Athenaeum rather than the Little Review or the Dial or the Egoist. But he also notes the new power conferred by the Hogarth Press to be, as one might say, as far from the Mudie’s crowd as possible, not to mention the editorially as well as sexually abusive Duckworth, though most people would otherwise settle for a half-brother with a little publishing house of his own. Idiosyncratic here too, her essays, though not programmatic, conceal Ruskin’s theories, Pater’s sense of flux, and Bergson’s ‘doubling’ of the self into dilated and contracted forms, in bestowing the power to interrogate the assumptions of her readers, but also those of other ‘modernists’, for example in the celebrated theory of the ‘mythic method’ which implies a conservative view of history which Woolf didn’t share.

Sue Roe’s The Impact of Post-Impressionism’, explores the impact of Roger Fry’s influential theorizing and exhibition at the Grafton in enabling Woolf herself to refract ‘aspects of our own baffling and insistent multiplicity’ through a linguistic apprehension of Fry’s claim that ‘the graphic arts are the expression of the imaginative life rather than a copy of actual life’. This goes with an aspiration to ‘sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts’ in which ‘the making of art enables us to draw together, in our mind’s eye, aspects of our own baffling and insistent multiplicity’ (p. 187) in what seems to be an approach to cubist ‘simultanisnv.

David Bradshaw in The Socio-Political Vision of the Novels’, cites George Eliot on how much we are beneficiaries of the artist for ‘the extension of our sympathies’. Yet, while very much at home with the idea, Woolf’s critique of the fabric of things, unlike that of her great forebear, is subtly persuasive, never bluntly didactic. Ironically, if predictably, it is only relatively recently that the degree to which her novels seem to be conceived to extend our ethical and political ‘sympathies’ has begun to be recognized (p. 191). As with George Eliot, she claims ‘let us never cease from thinking—what is this civilisation in which we find ourselves?’ an investigation carried out in a manner which is subtly subversive of the unsubtly coercive, so that, as Bradshaw nicely puts it, ‘Woolf’s sociopolitical vision is never protuberant but neither is it missable’ (p. 207).

Laura Marcus’ ‘Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf, explores the ‘symbiotic’ relationship of the two, in which revision and revaluation of Woolf’s achievement is meshed with the preoccupations of feminist literary and cultural criticism: with the respective states of realism and modernism and the ‘gender’ of modernism, as well as ‘relationships between socialism and feminism, feminism and pacifism, patriarchy and fascism’, between Brontean anger and gentle androgyny, between essentialism and disintegrating fantasies of gender, and between the chora and the communal. As Marcus points out and then ably illustrates, all of these binaries find expression in literary spats which include the arbitration of the respective influence of Bloomsbury men and Bloomsbury women, the ‘realist’ emphasis in Elaine Showalter’s witty critique of Woolf as herself the exorcizable ‘Angel in the House’ of modern feminist musings which precipitated Toril Moi’s attempt to transpose the discussion into Kristevan terms and concepts and so escape the Showalterian premise. In ‘internal’ critiques, this time relating to ‘Woolf’s feminism’, Jane Marcus noted the male predominance in the family custodians and curators of Woolfs reputation which offered only an etiolated version of a Woolf constructed by her (male) relatives as ‘seen from the neck down and in the bosom of her family’. In place of this we might put influence, the matrilineal emphasis of Jane Harrison the anthropologist, and a Kleinian emphasis on the maternal which resists the Freudian emphasis on oedipality.

Likewise, Nicole Ward Jouve is expert and insightful on ‘Virginia Woolf and Psychoanalysis’, itself also something of a survey of the ‘deconstructing’ impact of feminisms on the ‘tea-table manners’ world of Woolf critique: Woolf had a ‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman’-like attitude to psychiatrists, partly as a result of her experience with the savage Dr Savage, who recommended Yellow Wallpaper-style treatments which might have been advantageously replaced with an emphasis on psychoanalytic and feminist procedures, even including an actual interest in ‘What ails you, exactly?’ However, even feminist psychoanalysis must reckon with Woolfs association of Freud with ‘carceraf patriarchal attitudes, hardly irrational in view of his notorious recantation of the idea that female patients’ accounts of intra-familial sexual abuse were to be taken as fact, not fantasy. Jouve, still presenting versions of Woolf in a specifically anti-‘Freudian’ sense, points out one implication of their findings—that she was committed to anti-patriarchal versions of ‘what it is to be a woman’. She cites Hermione Lee’s over-cautious response to the effect and influence of the abusive situation, which recalls us to a sense of Woolf as artist-figure, but her admonishings surely make Jouve a little too hard on Louise DeSalvo’s rather telling broadside in the wake of Florence Rush’s revelation of widespread incestuous practices and their malign effects. A particularly sad irony is that Jouve thinks the psychiatric emphasis on madness in the Stephen family, combined with a highly un-Foucauldian attitude to ‘madness’ in the first place, seemed to make the possibility of psychoanalytical consultations for her recede: Woolf herself satirized relatives who became analysts, disliking its scientific claims and its patriarchal attitudes; we might, for example, fantasize formal contact with Melanie Klein, whom she liked, as a possible matrilineal expositor of the sort even she might have been tempted to ‘appreciate’. As it was though, her attitude to her ‘illness’ was sophisticated, and she could even write about her attacks as achieved conditions: good critics on Woolf and psychology are cited here, and several novels attest that Woolf straddles genre and gender as she ‘carnivalises logocentric discourse’ and ‘shakes notions of sexual identity’ (p. 268).

Caughie, ed., Virginia Woolf and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, takes a refreshing and original look at Woolf and Benjamin in the Border Crossings series under the general editorship of Daniel Albright, as each figure complements or is congruent with the ‘other who is not one’. The notion is well caught in an essay by Leslie Kathleen Hankins, ‘Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin: Selling Out(siders)’, in which the mechanical reproduction of actual photographs of the ‘pair’ then purloins features of its ‘other’, mechanically to (re)produce the faces of ‘Woolf-Benjamin’ and ‘Benjamin-Woolf, claiming that Woolf too is adept at the paradoxes of modernity, and participates in the ironic sense of the magic released by new technologies and our responses to them. Both writers, as explicated here, seem to lead a fascinating chiasmic or double-helixing intellectual existence, Woolf’s work providing an ironic commentary on what is excluded in the vision of those (exclusively) male flaneurs, Benjamin providing a pretty sardonic perspective on that oh-so-bourgeois ‘room of one’s own’, while both, simultaneously insiders and outsiders (to universities, for example, and with an ironic attitude to them) have unexpected areas of intellectual congruence.

Sonita Sarker, examining the qualifiably radical ‘project’ of the Hogarth Press, cannily notes a Benjaminian thematics in the fact that ‘Woolf and her works of art are propagated in our own age of mechanical reproduction (including press, photo and film) in a curious combination of aura-making and canon politics’ (p. 57). Jane Garrity reproduces the wonderful ‘Bass’ advertisement—a blazoned photograph with a transcendent Virginia at her most ‘ethereal’, foaming beer below, but basically claims that, far from being ‘all commodity culture far above’, Bloomsbury itself was a ‘corporate logo’ of sorts (a point made by Regina Marler), as she demonstrates that neither Woolf nor her peers were isolated from the mass culture of the 1920s, a conclusion soundly based on research in Vogue, a journal itself offering a fascinating cultural hybrid, while actually exploring Fredric Jameson’s notion that modernism and mass culture represent ‘dialectically interdependent phenomena’.

Melba Cuddy-Keane notes the impact of the new sound technologies in the 1920s, and wishes to retrieve the term ‘auscultation’ from exclusively medical use in assaying their effects, noting how ‘literary representations help to shape cultural thinking, which helps to shape media use, which in turn has an effect on literary works’ (p. 73). Without putting it quite this way, she seems to exploit an ambiguity in the phrase ‘the sound(s) of the gramophone’—as an intermediary for music, or emitting sounds of its own ‘as’ a music of sorts, as Joyce intuited and Derrida reiterated. Woolf sustains a discussion of this kind of aural alertness: ‘whereas Three Guineas exploits the possible semantic implications of the gramophone sound, Between the Acts focuses on auscultation and sonicity’ (p. 75). Bonnie Kime Scott neatly picks up on her own ‘nostalgia for mechanical reproduction’ (‘the victrola is gone’, p. 99), and remarks on Haraway’s as well as Derrida, her master’s voice’s attempt to signal, using the gramophone, that ‘the human is always already mechanical’. More pronounced and perhaps equally startling is the notation of Virginia Woolfs surprising attitudes to new technologies, her acquired fondness for jazz—with St Louis man T.S. Eliot the ambiguous bearer of popular culture here— her equally surprising alienation in the face of the pomposity and portentousness of the BBC radio as a ‘co-opted’ institution, and the other role of the gramophone as a conductor of ‘high culture’ (Woolf notes that even in bad weather after a drive you can be in the warm and listening to a Mozart quartet in next to no time—so much for ‘the ache of modernism’ (a Hardy tag)); and the quasi-Joycean exploration of the ‘sounds of the gramophone in Between the Acts, with Miss La Trobe almost a promisingly auditioning ‘cyborg’ of sorts with the gramophone as an ‘extension’ of herself. Despite a slight scattergun effect, the essay is engaging.

Michael Tratner in ‘Why Isn’t Between the Acts a Movie?’, points out that Woolfs last novel is remarkably similar in its actual effects to Benjamin’s description of the fate of the arts in the age of mechanical reproduction. Other essays revaluing upwards the last novel, with its cracked pageant of England, are involved in those almost Joyceo-Beckettian sound-effects as the gramophone misbehaves. Makiko Minow-Pinkney takes up the theme of ‘Virginia Woolf and the Age of Motor Cars’, correlating what we might call ‘the sound of horns and motors’ and the shock of modernity, that shock of disrupted continuities and coherences associated with modern technologies famously described by Benjamin, made surprisingly (shockingly?) cognate with what Woolf called ‘the shock-receiving capacity [which] makes me a writer’, a comment actually made in relation to motoring (though not of course to the actual effects of her own highly erratic driving). Maggie Humm in ‘Virginia Woolf’s Photography and the Monk’s House Albums’, negotiates a sense of paradoxicality in Woolf’s apparent commitment to and even dependence on photography while she remained a foe of conventional representations, soundly based on Susan Sontag’s claim that ‘photography is the most successful vehicle of modernist taste in its popular version’, noting its paradoxical complex of attitudes to the complexities of ‘representation’ and their potential insidiousness.

Holly Henry in ‘From Edwin Hubble’s Telescope to Virginia Woolfs “Searchlight”’, relates the discoveries of Hubble and the subsequent popular science astronomy of Jeans and Eddington, and the perspectives of Woolf’s writing (particularly the ‘suggestive counterpoint’ (p. 144), between her two short stories ‘The Searchlight’ and ‘The Symbol’), describing the obsessive interest signalled by the installation of a telescope at Monk’s House, which is used as a structuring device for Woolf’s own aesthetic practice. (Though treating of Hardy, the essay sadly fails to mention his Two on a Tower [1882], a work Woolf knew well, in which the decentring of man through astronomical research is already fully envisioned.)

Mark Hussey, sharing the auratic nostalgia and technological awareness of Woolf and Benjamin, notes how Paul Virilio joins Benjamin in the idea of speed as inseparable from military technologies of the ‘industrial complex’ which brought forth the ambiguous triumph of the ‘information superhighway’ and the hypertext. He also notes the implicit hostility to the act of reading and reflection, on which Woolf reflected at length from the unusual position of an editor-free press-owner; his article urges the Woolfian emphasis on reading as ‘intersubjective communication’, not just information transfer, seeing a meaning inherent to the physical artefact which cannot transfer to screens. He sees Woolfs sense of the onset of war in 1940 as itself engendering an eerie sense of ‘no audience, no echo’, and the ineluctable military components of the ‘engineering aesthetic’ of the global information technology.

Without striking too strident a polemical stance, though she does cite others who are not so guarded, including Lawrence of course, Rosemary Sumner describes a different Route to Modernism in those who claim spontaneity rather than empathy with the procedures of Joyce’s meticulously planned Ulysses, as we move from the ‘unmethodical’ books of Hardy through Lawrentian spontaneity to a Woolf equally caught up in the ^indefinable [and] ... unresolved’ in a venture which will for ever, in Barthes’s idiom, ‘generate signifiers’ rather than attain some ‘ultimate signified’. Brief discussion of Woolf notes N.K. Hayles’s relating ‘Chaos theory to deconstruction’ (p. 155) in evading ‘arbitrary definitions of closure’, finding a suggestive movement of thought from Mrs Dalloway, through To the Lighthouse [1927] and The Waves [1931], to Between the Acts [1941] with its violent ‘oscillations of thought’, its Foucauldian ‘questions without answer’ (p. 157), and its marriage of sound and silence, suggestive of the work of the composer John Cage intended to move ‘out of the world of art into the whole of life’.

Andrea P. Zemgulys in “‘Night and Day is Dead”: Virginia Woolf in London “Literary and Historic” (TCL 46[2000] 56–77), takes up Virginia Woolf’s sardonic attitudes to literary pilgrimages and the ‘blue plaque movement’, pinpointing ‘tombsters’ like Mrs Hilbery and Rodney in the novel as ‘sharing in their work several traits: the devotion to tradition, the inability to finish, and the creation of museum spaces for their work’ (p. 67), indicating Woolf’s desire not to repeat her father’s mistake of writing, as it were, a Mausoleum Book, and in her literary journalism points out how this apparent homage to art/culture returns quickly to the philistinism which quashes it. She will consequently develop her art by rendering London as fiction rather than fact, as in Jacob’s Room [1922] and Orlando [1928] and thus concentrate her mind rather wonderfully, although Zemgulys doesn’t quite put it this way, on ‘discursive formations’.

Nick Montgomery, ‘Colonial Rhetoric and the Maternal Voice: Deconstruction and Disengagement in Virginia Woolfs The Voyage Out’ (TCL 46[2000] 34–55), bears particularly on the ‘deconstruction of the paternal word’ and the complacencies of colonialism embedded in the Dalloways, for example, in suggestive paralleling of the Kristevan distinctions between the semiotic and the symbolic, depending both on, as he (a)cutely puts it, ‘Woolfs acute ear for the concealed weaknesses and tropological instability of apparently uncontroversial rhetorical formulations’ (p. 35), so that the ‘out’ of the title becomes a nodal point of various forms of extrication, especially as Richard Dalloway fatuously inscribes the imperial subject as a ‘screw’ in a (great) machine, well characterizing Woolfs deftness in the field of what de Man calls ‘referential aberration’ or ‘aberrant referentiality’, in which rhetoric and grammar sabotage each other to produce a ‘historical meaningful distortion or cancellation of meaning’ (p. 45).

Jack Stewart in ‘A “Need of Distance and Blue”: Space, Color and Creativity in To the Lighthouse (TCL 46[2000] 78–99), notes Woolfs closeness to the Roger Fry she ‘biographized’ as she abandons representation in the light of the idea that, as Hopkins put it, ‘beauty is a relation’. ‘Woolf interweaves emotional and oneiric images with spatial impressions’ Stewart writes (p. 84), in a difficult argument involving Fry ‘s theories and her sister Vanessa’s practice with the explication of a poetics of space, in which distance modifies emotion, and the leitmotif is the colour blue (‘the matrix of silence and contemplation’), and Lily’s artistic moment is to that zone where, as Kristeva puts it, ‘phenomenal identity vanishes’, in what makes up a suggestive (but also rather confusing and under-edited) essay.

Miriam L. Wallace in ‘Theorizing Relational Subjects: Metonymic Narrative in The Waves’ (Narrative 8[2000] 294—323), is also meshed with ‘theory’ as she also presents brilliantly ‘useful’ little sketches of the sophisticated ambits of recent Woolf criticism, but notes its relative inability to rule The Waves. The Waves is seen as an important text ‘written at the fracturing moment of modernism’, showing the tensions inherent in the voices, which are both rigidly individualistic, resisting the social pressures upon them, and also ‘multiple, fluidly bounded entities, merging unexpectedly with each other’. In the novel ‘both individuation and merging are experienced as a release from each other’, and the insight is fascinatingly correlated with feminist theory in its sense of ‘gender crossing and socially negotiated subjectivity’ (p. 313): The Waves, despite its limitations, is established as ‘an important feminist text in the tradition of fiction as theory’.

However, one feels the fresh breath of real criticism in Marina MacKay’s ‘Mr Wilson and Mrs Woolf: A Camp Reconstruction of Bloomsbury’ (JML 23f 1999] 95–109), as she alludes to Woolfs attack on ‘materialist-realist’ Arnold Bennett in her essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ and Angus Wilson’s attacks on and parody of the elitist sequestrations and ‘clique society intuition’ of Woolf and her central characters, especially in his The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot [1958], but describes (and details) how the camp gentility of Wilson’s postures implicates and entangles him in the exclusionary rhetoric he formally seeks to censure, so that he finally achieves only the self-cancelling genre of ‘iconoclastic homage’.

3. Post-1945 Drama

I begin by outlining the structure of this section. Work on seven individual writers is noted in alphabetical order of writer, followed by seven more general books. Here I would highlight the breadth of those by Shellard and Rebellato, and the value of the information Innes provides. The third section considers articles about playwrights from Barker to Wertenbaker, and two general articles.

I am never sure where Samuel Beckett fits—novelist as well as dramatist, Anglo-Irish but also part of French literature. I should, however, record that the annual devoted to him, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, edited by three Dutch scholars, has reached volume 8. There are no bibliographies or reviews of books and performances, simply nine essays in English and five in French, mostly on the curiously worded theme, ‘Poetry and Other Prose’. Wilma Siccama discusses Beckett’s control of his texts, with particular reference to Krapp’s Last Tape. Mary Ann Caws focuses on Beckett as translator, of his own work but mainly of French poets. One essay of interest is by Bruce Arnold. Comparing the proof copy of Anthony Cronin’s biography of Beckett with the final text, he finds Cronin made various changes and corrections drawn from James Knowlson’s biography—and did not acknowledge his debt. Further, the American hardback and the British paperback revert in part to the proof copy text. Arnold rightly concludes that he has raised ‘fundamental questions ... on the ethics of research and publishing’ (p. 218). The topics for the ninth volume will be post-colonialism, religion, and humanity, and for the tenth, ‘parody and pastiche’.

Edward Bond became notorious overnight with Saved in 1965, and was viewed as a top playwright through the 1970s, though the stature of most of the plays—Lear, Bingo, Restoration—is not clearly established. He was always a difficult author, and, though still active, he has not had a high-profile production since Summer in 1982. Five books about his work have preceded Michael Mangan’s 1998 short study for the Writers and their Work series. Mangan’s book is a very good introduction. He summarizes plays, comments intelligently, and connects the texts because ‘Bond’s plays comprise in effect one long, and as yet unfinished, poem’ (p. 95). He points out that Bond became more overtly Marxist in the 1970s, and hints that his work may have suffered after his long connection with the Royal Court ended in 1975. He shows Bond exploring in non-fiction as much as in creative work, and deals succinctly with both the influence of Brecht and Bond’s own theorizing about ‘The Event’ (TE) as crucial in drama. Bond, he demonstrates, ‘insists that the drama interrogates the audience as much as the audience interrogates the drama’ (p. 14). Mangan establishes that the effort to understand much of Bond’s drama of the 1960s and 1970s should be made. I sense that he has more difficulty justifying this effort with some of the more recent scripts, which are postmodern in the distinct sense that Bond assigns to the term.

A unique, curious, project for informing readers of Bond’s ideas, his Letters reached Volume IV in 1998 (the three earlier ones appeared in 1994, 1995, and 1996). Bond presumably copies correspondence he thinks significant and sends it to the editor, Ian Stuart, who adds only a little commentary. Presumably, too, this batch of letters, written between 1989 and 1997, was written in expectation of publication. The recipients are identified only as a teacher, a student, or a writer. The letters are grouped, not by chronology or recipient, but by subject, in four sections. Bond obviously enjoys writing letters, and uses them to work out what he believes about education, children, tragedy, the purposes of theatre. He has a few autobiographical titbits: T grew up in a working-class family during a war. This was a political education’ (p. 188). He responded to Macbeth, which he studied at school, because he saw echoes of the menace of the Blitz. He supplies background information on his At the Inland Sea’ 1997] and some remarks on In the Company of Men and Lear. Of the latter he says succinctly: Tn it you see, as in all my plays, the conflict between a philosophy of death and a philosophy of life’ (p. 191). He can also turn to the minutiae of aiding the struggling Theatre in Education company. This volume adds just a little to understanding the plays; also, he shows a mind constantly at work grappling with the giant questions of how to live and what is wrong with society now. These letters are the work of a sensitive, humane man who feels as much as he thinks. A fifth volume—Bond on violence and justice—is announced.

As with Bond, Caryl Churchill’s more recent work has puzzled many, and several of the thirteen essays in Robillard, ed., Essays on Caryl Churchill, concentrate on Ice Cream, Mad Forest, and The Skriker. Several of the essayists invoke Derrida, Lacan, and Kristeva, and the newly fashionable Una Chaudhuri and Bonnie Marranca. To draw out four essays: Anthony Jenkins displays his common sense in the general survey. He concludes that ‘all her scripts inject public meanings into private acts.... Her plays do show the consistent appeal of indirection: her temperament and middle-class education resist polemics’ (p. 26)—though Serious Money and parts of Top Girls are clearly polemical. Meeakshi Ponnuswami, ‘Fanshen in the English Revolution’, is an informed study of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. She traces Churchill’s use of the writings of Coppe and Clarkson as well as of the Putney debates, and the influence of studies by A.L. Morton and Christopher Hill, and skilfully distinguishes Diggers, Ranters, and Levellers. The drama, Ponnuswami indicates, seeks a language ‘to express a politics of the personal’ (p. 43) and ‘is permeated by a deep sympathy for those who fanshened during the English Revolution, as well as by a nostalgic awareness of the magnitude of the lost opportunity’ (p. 46). Susan Bennett, ‘Growing up on Cloud Nine: Gender, Sexuality and Farce’, writes of seeing the original 1979 production, of New York in 1981, and of two later Canadian student productions. The passage of time and move from the UK to the US obviously reduces the importance of the anti-Thatcher theme, but she also finds that class issues are ignored in the US, and that by 1994 audiences know ‘sexism is wrong’ (p. 37) yet may still be homophobic. She discovers that a production may bring out farce more than politics, and suggests that Cloud Nine may be a popular feminist play because ‘it’s possible to produce this play in a markedly unfeminist manner’ (p. 36). Lizbeth Goodman, ‘Overlapping Dialogue in Overlapping Media’, is fascinating on Top Girls. She looks at the two productions of 1982 and 1991, and the TV version, where one camera was in the middle of the dinner table of the first act. About half her long piece consists of excerpts from interviews with Churchill, Max Stafford-Clark, the director, and three actresses. Churchill remarks disarmingly of the women from history and fiction in Act I: ‘The choice of the women was fairly arbitrary—it was people who happen to have caught my fancy at that time’ (p. 80). Though the text is attributed to Churchill, ‘a feeling of creative collaboration was shared’ (p. 73). Such questions as doubling and overlapping speeches (done in one way for TV and another for a big New York theatre) are examined.

The Pinter Review is the model for what a yearbook on a living playwright should contain. This volume in fact covers two years, 1997–8, and the bibliography three years, 1994–6. The bibliography is huge, if occasionally under-annotated. Four stage productions are thoroughly reviewed, and an essay responds to the London production of Ashes to Ashes, remounted in Barcelona. The one book about Pinter published in the period is reviewed three times, accompanied by an interview with its author, Michael Billington. The first draft of a major drama by Pinter, The Homecoming, is presented in facsimile, followed by an essay by Francis Gillen which carefully relates it to the published version. Ronald Knowles superbly reports on what Pinter did in the two years, acting and directing numerous political activities as ‘citizen’; he also reviews London revivals. I must, however, protest at his vicious treatment of Billington’s biography: he quotes only four reviews, three of them negative. In fairness, he should also quote such reviewers as Mel Gussow, who in the Observer found Billington’s study ‘probing and perceptive’, and Aleks Sierz, who in the New Statesman described it as ‘convincing and compelling’ and ‘pretension-free, accessible and precise’. Finally, the Review has five articles, two of them about Pinter’s film scripts and a good study by Katherine H. Burkinan of ‘how the dynamics of Speer’s battle with truth as told by Sereny’, his biographer, informs Ashes to Ashes (p. 86).

When I read the title Kafka and Pinter Shadow-Boxing I expected emphasis on the Kafkaesque in the early comedies of menace, The Dumb Waiter and The Birthday Party. I expected, too, that any book-length study would be comprehensive on the fairly small topic of the influence of Kafka on Pinter. Instead, Raymond Armstrong painstakingly looks at only three plays, The Homecoming, Family Voices, and Moonlight, and only in terms of conflicts between father and son. As Armstrong acknowledges, Pinter’s approach to these battles can be viewed biographically, not only as drawing on Kafka.

When Dennis Potter began writings plays for television in 1965, the distinct form of the television script, a drama of talking heads, was evolving (Alan Bennett has exploited the power of a single talking head on a small screen). By the time Potter died in 1994, the ‘film for TV’ had replaced the art of the television play; only one feature remained, that a writer for television might be allowed six hours or even more. However, as the imitation of film took over, the few published television scripts became difficult on the page. Evaluating Potter is difficult, and his reputation is coming to rest on the two six-part serials, Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective. Only eight of his thirty single plays are published. Further, he overshadows the other major television dramatists of his generation. As Peter Preston has pointed out: Totter possessed a narrow gift. He had neither the warmth of Alan Bleasdale nor the control of John Hopkins’ (Observer, 6 September 1998).

Why does Humphrey Carpenter need 600 pages for his biography, which takes 144 pages to reach Potter’s first play? Potter embodies the ‘working-class boy makes good’ story, followed by the tragedy of a painfully disabling illness while still in his twenties. We may also be curious about autobiography in his scripts. Carpenter reports that Potter wrote few letters and didn’t keep a diary. Though he was interviewed many times, Potter sometimes appears honest, sometimes provocative, sometimes a tease, and it is difficult to tell which is which. Potter had a ‘capacity for making up his own life story’ (p. 3), starting with the way he managed to make his birthplace in the Forest of Dean seem extraordinary. Carpenter diligently tells us all we need to know of the life, interspersed with accounts of the many scripts, often quoting extensively (as with Double Dare, where Kika Markham reports the events on which it was based, and Moonlight on the Highway, a ‘masterpiece’ (p. 228), for Carpenter). This long book is dutiful, competent, and workmanlike. I continue to wonder how so many intelligent, demanding scripts did reach television.

David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience [1997] by David Ian Rabey is the first study of this playwright. Rudkin first drew attention with Afore Night Come (RSC [1962]) and has continued writing ever since, with Ashes [1974], Sons of Light (RSC [1977]), and The Saxon Shore [1986] having some success. Rabey lists many works for radio, television, and film, libretti, translations from Greek and French, and of Ibsen’s work, and including scripts ‘destroyed’, ‘abandoned’, ‘lost’, and ‘not finished’. Rabey appears to be divided between a wish to draw attention to Rudkin’s merits, especially when most of the work is unavailable, and his need to show his mastery of theory. Thus the intimidating introduction has such subheadings as ‘Kearney and a Postmodern Poetics’ and ‘Kristeva and Expression’. By the fourth paragraph of chapter 2 Rabey is largely providing a sensible introduction to Rudkin, starting with a radio play of 1960. Subsequently he mentions no fewer than fifty-eight works. Only The Triumph of Death (Birmingham [1981]) has a chapter to itself. For Rabey this play is a ‘Baroque Meditation’, ‘Rudkin’s densest and bleakest Song of Experience’ (p. 102). Rudkin himself adds a paragraph to the chapter. The book concludes with statements by six actors who have performed in Rudkin’s plays. Rudkin emerges as one of those contemporary dramatists passionately admired by a few (this is the case with Howard Barker, Peter Barnes, and Snoo Wilson) who remain puzzling minor figures to most followers of theatre.

John Whiting was also a controversial and individualistic author. His Saints Day was as much of a problem play in 1951 as Godot was four years later. He died aged 45 in 1963. John Whiting on Theatre [1966] contained his thirteen reviews for the London Magazine, 1961–2. The Art of the Dramatist, which Ronald Hayman edited in 1970, had the lecture of the title, three short stories, a fragment of a novel, and bits and pieces which first appeared in Nimbus, Adelphi, Twentieth Century, and the like. Thirty years later Hayman returns to Whiting, taking as his title At Ease in a Bright Red Tie. He omits the fiction, which is defensible, but includes only twenty-two of the thirty-eight pieces in the two earlier books, when what is clearly needed is Whiting’s complete non-fiction. Hayman adds ‘Writer as Gangster’, a substantial interview given in 1961. Though we may not find much point in reading that ‘the theatre in the provinces is dwindling fast’ (p. 82; 1956), Whiting writes well: Graham Greene’s The Complaisant Lover is ‘as sour as the taste of a not very well-known mouth in the dawn hours’ (p. 118). Whiting reminds readers of the merits of such plays as Sartre’s Altona, and supplies such aper^us as ‘The purpose of art is to raise doubt; the purpose of entertainment is to reassure’ (p. 94). Hayman’s curious rambling introduction is partly praise for Whiting and partly a generalized lament for a culture in decline.

Several scholars have attempted to take a broad view of this period. Christopher Innes chose 1890 as a starting date, John Elsom began in 1945, Arnold Hinchliffe and Susan Rusinko in 1950, and Ronald Hayman in 1955. The first survey, however, John Russell Taylor’s Anger and After established 1956 as the key date, because of the renaissance of serious theatre following from the success of Look Back in Anger. The latest study, Dominic Shellard, British Theatre since the War, starts in 1945, a date more noteworthy in history than in the theatre. Shellard writes in his preface that his purpose is ‘introductory’ (p. ix), and acknowledges his London bias. In fact he ranges not only to Stratford but to Stoke and Scarborough. His title should be ‘English’ though: Scotland receives two pages, Wales a mention. Shellard divides the fifty-three years into five unequal chunks, with forty-eight pages for 1963–8, and only forty-three pages for his final eighteen years, 1980–97. He attempts to include everything—not only dramatists, actors, directors, and companies, but also finances, buildings, big musicals, the Lord Chamberlain as censor, Peggy Ramsey as influential agent, even Gracie Fields and George Formby. Consequently this is sometimes confusing to read. One sentence tries to place the design innovations of John Bury and Sean Kenny. Inevitably, he makes lists, one naming nineteen new dramatists (p. 119: which makes me wonder whatever happened to Stanley Eveling and Donald Howarth). Shellard rarely analyses, scarcely even justifying assertions. Why does he believe that 1973 was ‘a watershed year for theatre as a whole’ (p. 162)? Sections are entitled ‘The Return of Actors’ Theatre, 1979–1986’ (p. 192) and ‘The West End: Sclerosis, 1987’ (p. 198). These headings may be valid, but they lack context. Was ‘actors’ theatre’ absent in 1978? Was the West End free from sclerosis in 1986? Personal judgements are rare: he greatly admires Joe Orton and Trevor Nunn’s Macbeth, and claims that audiences were ‘amazed’ and ‘thrilled’ by Martin Sherman’s Bent (p. 155).

Shellard is uncertain of his audience. He assumes his readers require a plot summary of Waiting for Godot (pp. 39–42) or need to be told what the Edinburgh Festival is; at other points they are expected to know about N.C. Hunter and Paines Plough. Shellard is accurate, though there are some slips: Arnold Wesker’s trilogy ends with the Conservative election win of 1959, not in 1956 (p. 86); Chips with Everything was unwritten at the time of the opening season of the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry (p. 88); Tony Harrison’s The Mysteries draws on all the mystery cycles, not York alone (p. 169). Shellard piles up facts, and readers form a sense of much activity, some excitements and controversies, and a shift from West End commercialism to the centrality of the subsidized companies. Basically, others must make sense of the data supplied by this book.

In contrast, Dan Rebellato’s 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama, is full of theses, ‘that the theatre of the forties and early fifties was quite unlike the theatre we have been told it was, that the theatrical revolution was motivated by different concerns from those conventionally proposed, and that the manner of its unfolding involved far-reaching transformations of the modes of theatrical production and reception’ (p. 8). He claims ‘that the Royal Court should not be simply opposed to the West End, that the criticisms of the West End were misplaced, and that the Court’s success was not out of the blue, but was shaped by wider forces organising the cultural life of the nation’ (p. 38). These remain assertions, for Rebellato’s method is often by indirections to find directions out. Exploring Leavis’s influence on Hoggart takes readers far from the stage of the Royal Court. Chapter 5 describes the end of empire and the Suez crisis, merely juxtaposing this broad context with the content of plays. Rebellato believes that ‘the whole revolution in British theatre can be seen as responding to the linguistic perversity of a homosexuality which seemed on the point of constituting itself as an oppositional subculture’ (pp. 190–1). He sees George Devine at the Royal Court affirming heterosexuality, closing with a subtle argument which appears to ‘out’ Jimmy Porter as gay for his ‘intriguingly homoerotic’ language (p. 221).

Rebellato usefully rediscovers Anne Ridler’s The Shadow Factory, Brigid Boland’s The Cockpit and the British Theatre Conference of February 1948. Equally important, this study is stimulating. Rebellato shows how Keynes led the Arts Council to emphasize professionalism and buildings, and the question of playhouses versus multi-purpose arts centres. Attacks on West End values in the 1950s focused on plays, ignoring ‘the structures of ownership’ (p. 69). That the Royal Court set out to be a writers’ theatre minimized performance as a collaborative art. In the section on audiences, he remarks on booing, loud talking and rustling chocolate boxes more than the age and class of spectators. In his discussion of drama and the New Left, Rebellato might usefully have looked at Bernard Kops’s The Dream of Peter Mann and David Mercer’s TV trilogy, The Generations. He examines The Entertainer as social criticism but does not quote what was in 1957 its most audacious line: ‘What’s it all in aid of—is it really just for the sake of a gloved hand waving at you from a golden coach?’ He claims that Brecht had a ‘major London breakthrough in 1956’ (p. 129). This is true in terms of awareness of Brechtian theory and staging techniques, but Brecht’s plays were rarely performed in the next ten years. Rebellato provokes more than he convinces.

Philip Roberts in The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage, fails to live up to its title. The Royal Court is connected to the modern stage in only one sentence, that without it ‘the emergence of what became the Royal Shakespeare Company [and] the Royal National Theatre ... might not have been possible’ (p. xiii). Neither does Roberts write much of plays, dramatists, or actors. This is administrative history, thorough and conscientious. He has apparently read everything, published and unpublished, sought out archives, public and private, interviewed many, even read Max Stafford-Clark’s diary. But—apart from a few episodes when people put on paper fury and personal abuse—this is names, dates, and numbers. Roberts’s passion for detail means we constantly learn of plans to alter the administrative structure. He tells of advisory committees, influential or ignored, of the balance of power between a board and a director. Constantly he foregrounds such men as Greville Poke, involved in various capacities throughout the history of the English Stage Company, of Neville Blond, Alfred Esdaile, and Lord Harewood. They were, of course, important, and the topics they discussed were often theatrical: the length of runs; whether the Royal Court had a place for stars; the proportion of new plays to revivals; whether West End transfers should be sought; what kinds of scripts suited the Theatre Upstairs. Some Royal Court activities receive only passing mention, such as the Young People’s Theatre. The Writers’ Group of 1958–60, influential for Arden, Bond, and Wesker, earns only one paragraph.

While Roberts has chapters entitled ‘A Socialist Theatre, 1965–1969’ and A Humanist Theatre, 1969–1975’, he does not develop these assessments. Only once, in fact, does he pause for an overview (pp. 170–1), contrasting the 1970s with the 1980s. His study effectively ends in 1993, with the following years summarized in an afterword. Roberts fails to communicate the sheer excitement of the plays at the Royal Court, from Look Back in Anger and Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance to the work of Bond, Brenton, Churchill, Hare, and many less famous playwrights. To recall the challenging atmosphere I turn back to At the Royal Court, edited by Richard Findlater in 1981. Roberts has done valuable spadework; someone else needs to explain the unique role of the Royal Court in inspiring theatres such as the Bush and Hampstead, in making new writing central, and in discovering new writers from Arden to Sarah Kane.

Christopher Innes and two assistants have accomplished a massive task with Twentieth-Century British and American Theatre: A Critical Guide to Archives. His justification is ‘to develop the field of theatre studies by promoting the study of performative elements.... Over the last two decades, drama studies have shifted from text-based criticism to the analysis of performance.’ While, as he points out, usually only published texts and press reviews are readily available, the researcher may want also ‘unpublished playscripts or early drafts of printed texts, stage- and costume-designs, directors’ books and promptbooks, lighting plots, stage-photos, correspondence, theatre programmes’. Innes notes the relative wealth of material, though actors have rarely made or kept many notes. Also, documents have increasingly been kept systematically, by the National Theatre from the start and the RSC since the late 1950s, while little record of the Old Vic, 1927–63, survives. Innes and his researchers have examined over a hundred archives.

Dipping in at random, Innes records that John Osborne’s notebooks are ‘almost indecipherable’ and that Howard Brenton keeps his papers ‘unavailable, being currently stored, unsorted, in the attic of his home’. David Hare and Tom Stoppard, on the other hand, have ‘deposited’ most of their files at the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas. The correspondence between Stoppard and Pinter are not listed because ‘these are all one-line notes of the “Cricket, Saturday? Yours, Harold” variety’. The final location of Joe Orton’s papers is still uncertain more than thirty years after his death. A typical case is John Arden. His accessible papers are divided into five parts, at the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford, at Indiana University, at the National Theatre Museum, at Cambridge University Library, and at the British Library. One play is in the National Sound Archives, plus some photos and programmes in the Mander and Mitchison Collection. All this, although Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy still possess their ‘personal papers and records’. The entry twice directs us to Arden’s published essays without naming them. I can vouch for the accuracy and thoroughness of the entry for John McGrath, whose papers are split between three collections. Innes adds thirteen helpful annotations, for example, ‘giving clear indie, of rehearsal process’. He gives a short list of people left out because ‘only marginal amounts of materials were found’. The book is a mind-bogglingly large undertaking, providing a starting-point for research on a vast number of modern topics.

Charles A. Carpenter’s purpose in his Dramatists and the Bomb: American and British Playwrights Confront the Nuclear Age, is limited to ‘describing] at least briefly every original American or British dramatic work I could find which comes to grips with a major aspect of the nuclear situation’ (p. 7). He approaches this with a brief historical background, dividing his period, 1945–64, into ‘the birth of the atomic age’ and ‘the early thermonuclear era’, though his cut-off date seems arbitrary. Carpenter comments on nine British playwrights: Bernard Shaw (for parts of Buoyant Billions and Farfetched Fables), J.B. Priestley, Marghanita Laski, Doris Lessing, Robert Bolt, David Mercer, Bernard Kops, David Campton, and Elaine Morgan. He also presents Beckett’s Endgame as perhaps set in a fall-out shelter, and quotes Sean O’Casey on the Bomb. He mentions in passing that Christopher Fry signed an open letter for peace published in the Daily Worker in 1951. Carpenter usefully rediscovers Campton, ‘a small-a absurdist with an active social conscience’ (p. 116), and finds Laski’s The Offshore Island ‘by far the most interesting and impressive English-language drama of the first phase of the Nuclear Age’ (p. 61). He is unaware of its premiere at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, in May 1958 (I have the programme!), citing instead the production at Unity two years later. A serious omission is Ewan MacColl’s Uranium 235 [1946], published in Goorney and MacColl, eds., Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop [1986].

Carpenter admits that the A-bomb, the arms race, and the nuclear disarmament movement passed him by. Though he may believe that this aids his objectivity, he has to rely on quotations to communicate the fears of people living in the 1950s, conveyed especially in the plays of Lessing and Mercer. Mostly he summarizes plots, which can be tedious reading. He never speculates about whether the plays had any influence, nor enters a debate on art versus propaganda. His conclusions, in the chapter entitled ‘Introduction’, include finding in many of these plays ‘the same sense of futility and rootlessness that inflicts Absurd literature’ (p. 6). Carpenter gives the evidence on how these authors responded onstage to the threat with fear, anger, obliqueness, and ingenuity. The reader has to make connections.

Assorted papers given at a German conference are collected in Huber and Middeke, eds., Contemporary Drama in English: Anthropological Perspectives [1998]. Four are relevant here. Margarete Rubik, “The Bacchae in Modern English Drama’, considers four plays shaped by Euripides’ tragedy: A Mouthful of Birds, by Caryl Churchill and David Lan, Rites, by Maureen Duffy, The Erpingham Camp, by Joe Orton, and The Loves of the Nightingale, by Timberlake Wertenbaker. Rubik carefully shows the different attitudes to women, sexuality, violence and Dionysian abandon in each play. She finds that all these rewritings engage with ‘the deconstruction of social role cliches’ (p. 67). Stuart Marlow, ‘Hovering between the Post-Colonial and the Pastoral: Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa’ is searching. His angles include Ngugi on colonialism, Hardy on the decline of pagan ways, Empson on pastoral, and analogies with Friel’s Translations. He draws out the ‘interaction between a central narrator, lost narratives, and lost pre-material worlds’, as found also in Heart of Darkness and The Go-Between (p. 93). Marlow claims that FrieF s drama links ‘the erosion of ancient oral African and Irish traditions by the twin forces of cultural interruption: colonialism and literacy’ (p. 85). Stephanie Kramer, ‘Imaging/Imagining Women’s Lives: Biography in Contemporary Women’s Drama’, is tightly packed. Most of her study is of two 1991 plays, The Winter Wife, by Claire Tomalin, about Katherine Mansfield, and Variations on a Theme by Clara Schumann, by Shiela Yeger. She shows Yeger ambitiously ‘questioning the concept of a stable, unified subject’ (p. 78). Kramer suggests that, when women write of historical figures, they choose women who have ‘been misinterpreted by conventional male historiography (Queen Christina, Mary Queen of Scots, and Clara Schumann), marginalized (Isabelle Eberhardt in New Anatomies and the painter Gwen John in Self-Portrait) or completely forgotten because of different standards in traditional historiography (black, lesbian or “ordinary” women)’ (p. 72). David Edgar in ‘From Babel to Pentecost’, writes of his discovery of the anthropologist Victor Turner, who defines ‘a four-step model of the development and resolution of social crises’. The third stage is ‘liminal’, ‘where normally fixed conditions are open to flux and change’. This liminal area may be ‘a magic forest or island in which a rite of passage occurs’ (p. 45). Edgar applies this to two of his recent plays, The Shape of the Table and Pentecost, with remarks on language and change in eastern Europe along the way. He reveals that he has seen the mural in a Macedonian monastery which resembles Giotto yet was painted a hundred years earlier, raising the tantalizing possibility that the Renaissance began there. Distinguishing story from plot, he summarizes the story of Pentecost as ‘a dialectic which accepts the failure of the universal Communist utopia, but questions whether the only cultural alternative is a return to the exclusive national and religious fundamentalisms of olden times’ (p. 50). Edgar is splendidly ambitious in his themes and thoughtful about his craft.

Ridgman, ed., Boxed Sets: Television Representations of Theatre, consists of thirteen essays about stage plays appearing on British television. The context is the way in which audiences have achieved much more awareness of drama and its conventions because of television, and the evolution of writing specifically for it. ‘The televised play has enjoyed a privileged, if unsteady, position in the schedules since the beginning of television in Britain’, states Ridgman (p. 4). Yet we know very little of how television looked in the years when all was ‘live’. Jason Jacobs records that definite information is provided solely by a surviving American six-minute fragment, without soundtrack, from 1939. Neil Taylor’s ‘A History of the Stage Play on BBC Television’, catalogues the huge number of stage plays which have been seen on television in Britain, but less frequently in the last forty years. His total to 1994 is 2,586, excluding excerpts and plays on ITV and Channel 4. Brecht and Wesker, for example, each have had twenty-three plays presented. Taylor traces the impact of ITV and the quest for overseas sales. He concludes: ‘When it comes to theatre plays [the BBC] has always played safe and gone for the typical West End’ product (p. 35). Simon Curtis explains the choice of stage plays for the Performance series, five or six plays annually starting in 1991. He seeks scripts which will succeed in a studio because of ‘quality writing and the psychology of characters.... What works best is just capturing those faces, those close-ups’ (pp. 200–1).

Derek Paget’s ‘Road: From Royal Court to BBC—Mass Observation/Minority Culture’, studies Jim Cartwright’s play, which was initially in promenade form at the Theatre Upstairs in 1986, moving into the Royal Court after a few weeks. He describes the attempts to keep elements of promenade, with new sequences for ‘pre-show’ and the interval, ‘ingenuity and effort’ to keep in the ‘danger’ (p. 118). When Alan Clarke directed Road for television, it had to be cut by half, and was filmed on location in Darlington. Olga Taxidou’s discursive essay has the broad title ‘Where Exactly is Scotland? Local Cultures, Popular Theatre and National Television’. She notes how the Tramway in Glasgow, which opened with Peter Brook’s The Mahahharata, on the international festival circuit, has served John McGrath’s distinctively Scottish works, Border Warfare and John Brown’s Body. These were planned from the start for the Tramway and for Channel 4, and McGrath created two versions, suited to the different media, though Taxidou fails to support her view that they were ‘quite different’ (p. 103). She comments also on how McGrath’s earlier The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil on TV was ‘a new fusion of theatre and television’ (p. 102).

Bob Millington’s ‘Myths of Creation’, examines the South Bank Show about Willy Russell [1993] and demonstrates how the programme took for granted the idea of the writer as an individual talent. Not only was the writer privileged, the basic fact that theatre is collaborative was ignored. A book such as Boxed Sets indicates that media studies and cultural studies are coming of age, enriching ways of looking at drama, enhancing understanding of the impact of television. The contributors come mostly from theatre or from newer creations, Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Hertfordshire, and Roehampton Institute (Ridgman and three others).

Before commenting on articles, a reflection on the experience of reading many in quick succession. Perhaps one in eight has wide appeal, such as Alek Sierz on Blasted and other notorious recent plays, Stephanie Kramer on dramas by women about historical women, and David Edgar on the rite-of-passage phase in many plays. One in twenty has an individual voice, such as David Krause’s attack on FriePs ‘Irishing’ of Chekhov. At least one in ten strikes me as trivial, wrongheaded, and unworthy of publication. The rest all have some use, often urging attention to be given to a minor or neglected dramatist (Elaine Feinstein, Christina Reid, Shiela Yeger). Too many of these pursue detail rather than providing a more general introduction.

Graham Saunders’ ‘Missing Mothers and Absent Fathers’ (MD 42:iii[ 1999] 401–10), takes two recent, not very well known plays, Howard Barker’s Seven Lears and Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters. He shows their focus on the family in King Lear, directly attributing ‘Lear’s tragic fate to his neglect of his roles as husband and father’ (p. 401). He concludes that playwrights ‘have become authorial archaeologists, scraping away to reveal the hidden play’ (p. 409). Saunders contributes to the continued use of Shakespeare by modern dramatists—perhaps Ruby Cohn should bring her Modern Shakespeare Offshoots up to date.

Joel N. Super’s ‘Fred Zinnemann, A Man for All Seasons (1966) and Documentary Fiction’ (in Noletti, ed., The Films of Fred Zinnemann: Critical Perspectives), uses most of his space to draw parallels between Robert Bolt’s script and several other films made by Zinnemann with a documentary element. Super’s comments are sensible; he sees Zinnemann’s search for ‘bucolic’ locations (p. 168) and Bolt’s attention to how the political and theological become personal.

Ian Stuart’s ‘Revisiting The Sea: Bond’s English comedy in Toulouse’ (NTQ 58[ 1999] 178–82), is brief. He includes no less than twenty comments by Bond, in an interview, letters, and ‘Notes to the Audience’. The French production, it appears, made the play ‘sadder and yet more serene’ (p. 178).

Apollo Amoko’s ‘Casting aside Colonial Occupation: Intersections of Race, Sex and Gender in Cloud Nine and Cloud Nine Criticism’ (MD 42:i[ 1999] 45–58), argues that criticism has stressed sexuality and ignored issues of race and colonialism, while admitting these arise only in the first half of the play. Churchill, in her unspecific Africa, does not refer to ‘the unique deprivation suffered by African women and children’ (p. 49). The one black character, Joshua, does not ‘disrupt the fundamental assertions of hierarchical racial identification’ (p. 54). The article is firmly rooted in post-colonial theory.

William L. Horne’s ‘“Greatest Pleasures”: A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)’ (in Welsh and Tibbetts, eds., The Cinema of Tony Richardson), praises Richardson’s film of Shelagh Delaney’s play (they co-wrote the film script). Horne writes that the film ‘is never a doctrinaire portrait of the indignities and deprivations of industrial working-class life, but a portrait of individuals who experience loneliness and loss but who are capable of great warmth and romance’ (p. 98). Both, in fact, are found in play and film. Horne explains Richardson pioneering the move from studios to location (interiors were shot in 74 Fulham Road), and how he blended grittiness and lyricism.

In the same collection, John C. Tibbett’s ‘Breaking the Proscenium: Tony Richardson, the Free Cinema, the Royal Court, and Woodfall Films (Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (I960))’, is an elementary account of the films of John Osborne’s first two plays. Tibbett clearly describes how the films differ from the plays. The Entertainer suffers more because the shifts—from spectators watching a family to becoming a music-hall audience, and back—are lost. He fails to grasp the ambition of The Entertainer as a ‘Condition of England’ play. He evaluates briefly: Richard Burton was too strong and too old to be satisfactory as Jimmy Porter, while Laurence Olivier made Archie Rice ‘more sympathetic’ (p. 76) on screen than he was on stage.

David Krause’s ‘Friel’s Ballybeggared Version of Chekhov’ (MD 42:iv[ 1999] 634–49), is angry. He loves Three Sisters and is infuriated by Friel’s version, published as a ‘translation’ but in fact put together from six existing translations. Friel’s purpose is to write in Irish English, as an Irish nationalist. Mostly working-class characters, who include Natasha, are made markedly Irish in speech, but so is Masha, which ‘coarsens’ her (p. 638). Krause quotes Friel to demonstrate that his language is ‘insensitive and inappropriate’ (p. 641) and ‘inconsistent, careless, and often awkward’ (p. 645). He comments on the very few critics who have discussed Friel’s version.

David Pattie in The Common Good’ (MD 42:iii[ 1999] 363–74), carefully places David Hare’s trilogy in terms of various statements by Hare, with his earlier plays and within the uncertain 1970s and Thatcherite 1980s. Pattie looks for Hare’s conclusions about the Church of England, the legal system, and the Labour Party. One message is that ‘there is no way to express the common good outside the institutions of the state; however, these institutions are themselves so damaged as to be ineffective’ (p. 370). Hence, ‘they need a radical overhaul’ (p. 373). Pattie’s subject is less drama than Hare’s thought and continued observation of the Condition of England; he establishes that this is often shrewd and original.

Claire Gleitman’s ‘Clever Blokes and Thick Lads: Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark’ (MD 42:iii[ 1999] 315–25), makes this 1961 play about an Irish family settled in Coventry sound intriguing. By attentive reading she shows how Murphy ‘depicts emigration as a delusory promise’ and portrays ‘a class-based destiny’ (p. 315).

Theatregoers are often disturbed by the passivity of audiences, sitting back safely detached from what’s happening on the stage, without interaction. One exception is Richard O’Brian’s The Rocky Horror Show [1973], on stage and film. Here spectators dress like characters in the show (a homage), throw rice, toast, and cards at appropriate moments, and chant their own lines, such as ‘What time is it Brad?’ just before Brad looks at his watch (surely mockery). Susan Purdie’s ‘Secular Definitions of “Ritual”’ (in Levy, ed., Theatre and Holy Script), studies this participation. She looks at aspects of the text, such as a critic’s view that this is ‘a gay rewriting of Euripides’ The Bacchae’ Her primary objective is involvement in the performance as communal activity, Saturnalia, perhaps ritual behaviour at once ordered and transgressive.

Nandi Bhatia in ‘ Anger, Nostalgia and the End of Empire: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (MD 42:iii[ 1999] 391–400), correctly notes that angry Leftist Jimmy Porter (and probably his creator) have a scarcely acknowledged sympathy for Alison’s father, the defeated imperialist. After this truism, her work is ahistorical and misleading. That she does not know her British 1950s well is shown when she suggests that Porter has spent ninepence on Sunday papers: the reference to J.B. Priestley’s column shows that he has bought the New Statesman. She misreads Porter’s temperament—operating a sweet stall is anti-Establishment protest for him; he has not been ‘forced’ into it (p. 395). She is wrong to see early 1956 Britain concerned with issues of race and non-white immigration; she ignores the actual imperialist issues of the time, the British army in action in Kenya and Cyprus. Bhatia writes: There is nothing directly mentioned about the Suez defeat in this play’ (p. 396). Of course not: the play is staged five months earlier!

Joanna Luft’s ‘Brechtian Gestus and the Politics of Tea in Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup’ (MD 42:ii[ 1999] 214–22), indirectly argues for the importance of this drama. Reid both constructs ‘a female order around the phenomena of tea and china’ and ‘directly engages with political issues in Northern Ireland’ (p. 214). The play is feminist, and in it tea may be seen as a gestus.

Jeremy Sandford’s docudrama about homelessness, Cathy Come Home, directed by Ken Loach in 1966, is one of the most celebrated of British television plays. Derek Paget’s ‘Cathy Come Home and “Accuracy” in British Television Drama’ (NTQ 57[ 1999] 75–90), examines various issues. The play was a crusading social purpose work and as such so risky that the author and director concealed the content, telling the BBC either that it was ‘a love story’ or ‘a knockabout family comedy’ (p. 80). Some viewers were angered, arguing that no one couple met with all the misfortunes faced by Cathy and her husband—hence the unreliability of a semidocumentary. Paget is particularly helpful on the effects of the screening, such as the founding of Shelter and changed policies in Birmingham hostels.

Modern Drama enters here yet again for Susanne Vees-Gulani in ‘Hidden Order in the “Stoppard Set”: Chaos Theory in the Content and Structure of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’ (MD 42:iii[ 1999] 411–26). Stoppard told an interviewer that Chaos, by James Gleick, was a source for Arcadia. Vees-Gulani briefly and lucidly explains chaos theory, then demonstrates how this provides structure for the play as well as some of the content. She shows how sex, literature, and gardens are ‘attractors’ in the work. This is necessary reading for anyone determined fully to understand Arcadia.

Sheila Robillard’s ‘Threads, Bodies and Birds: Transformation from Ovidian Narrative to Drama in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Loves of the Nightingale’ (Essays in Theatre 17:iif 1999] 99–109), adds to our understanding and appreciation of a difficult text, showing how Wertenbaker treats Ovid’s myth to make a contemporary, socially concerned drama.

I much admired Aleks Sierz’s ‘Cool Britannia? “In-yer-face” Writing in the British Theatre Today’ (NTQ 56[ 1998] 324–33). Did a new kind of play begin with Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing in July 1993? Or with Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator a few months later? Or with Sarah Kane’s Blasted on 12 January 1995? Sierz puts Blasted with Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh), Mojo (Jez Butterworth), and Shopping and Fucking (Mark Ravenhill) and asks what they are like and what have they in common. He sees that ‘British theatre was taking up violence as a way of exploring social issues’ (p. 325). These plays are also about sex, drugs, and masculinity. They have postmodern elements (Mojo mixes genres), but the content is what’s new. Sierz cautiously concludes that such plays are ‘perhaps a temporary phenomenon’ (p. 333). I suspect Stephen Berkoff introduced most of these elements at least fifteen years before Kane and company. And I still don’t find ‘cool Britannia’ a helpful phrase.

Jatinder Verma’s ‘“Binglishing” the Stage: A Generation of Asian Theatre in England’ (in Boon and Plastow, eds., Theatre Matters:Performance and Culture on the World Stage), is a useful though brief introduction to Asian companies. Verma describes how Tara Arts was established in 1976, mainly by Asians from Kenya, and writes of two of their productions, adaptations of The Government Inspector and Tartuffe. He comments on the two other Asian companies, Mehtaab, who perform in Punjabi, and Tamasha, who performed plays by Ruth Carter and Ayub Khan Din (East is East [1997]).

4. Pre-1950 Poetry

Some general surveys to begin with. James Persoon’s Modern British Poetry, 1900–1939, is more inclusive than most: having been required to exclude several ‘greats’ (Yeats, Pound, and Eliot for reasons of nationality; Hardy as a Victorian), Persoon crams many more poets than might otherwise have been possible into chronologically sequenced discussions organized around the war (and the contemporaneous socio-political and cultural conflicts which attended it). His treatment is rigorously fair: it is refreshing to see lesser-known names such as Alfred Austin or Frances Cornford being paid the same attention as, say, Auden, but there are obvious drawbacks. Broader in scope but similarly compact and comprehensive, Peter Childs, The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey, provides a thorough analysis of how and why portmanteau terms such as ‘English’ or ‘British’ have become inadequate for literary classification. Confined to the poetry of the British Isles, Childs’s socio-historicist account makes room for the kind of brisk, sensitive, and accessible close reading from which students can only gain. That said, he pays insufficient attention to women, making reference to the work of women poets mostly in the chapter on the 1930s (Edith Sitwell is mentioned in passing only once, in the context of the Wheels anthology).

Since women poets scarcely feature elsewhere this year, enthusiasts might like to note the references to a wide variety of poets (A. Mary F. Robinson, Alice Meynell, ‘Michael Field’, Vernon Lee et al.) in Ana I. Parejo Vadillo, ‘New Women Poets and the Culture of the Salon at the Fin de Siecle’ (Women 10[ 1999] 22–34), a usefully detailed account of socio-literary networking among saloniers at the turn of the century. Otherwise, Housman’s steady rehabilitation continues. Clarence Lindsay in ‘A.E. Housman’s Silly Lad: The Loss of Romantic Consolation’ (VP 37[ 1999] 333–51), decides that scholarly admiration for what Christopher Ricks called ‘the tug of contraries’ in Housman’s work has needlessly damaged his critical status, partly since ‘they don’t tell us exactly what is tugging’. The self-aware envisaging of the ‘silly lad’ in ‘Oh Fair Enough are Sky and Plain’ from A Shropshire Lad prompts this defence of Housman’s ‘revolutionary’ qualities. Lindsay finds Housman’s often suspicious conversation with the traditions and mythologies of the Romantic tradition fuelling the dualities of an idiom of which we shouldn’t assume too much: he discovers at least four different personae qualifying and complicating—sometimes ironically, sometimes not—the poet’s own perspective. Too many critics take for naivety what for Lindsay is a tough-minded and deceptively modern resolve to control the ‘silly’ lad’s adolescent leanings towards Romanticism.

Archie Burnett has not stopped sifting through Housman’s light verse. A footnote to The Poems of A.E. Housman is supplied in his ‘A Limerick by A.E. Housman’ (N&Q 244[1999] 68–9), which describes the discovery—in the uncatalogued Henry H. Hart Collection at the California State University at Hayward—of the previously unseen manuscripts of four limericks (‘There is Hallelujah Hannah’; ‘“Hallelujah!” was the only observation’; T knew a gentleman of culture’ and ‘Oh would you know why Henry sleeps’). Finding the original notebook page from which the last was taken helped in deciphering the extra thirteen heavily erased lines of verse which photocopies had rendered illegible. Burnett reports that, in addition to an eight-line draft of ‘Morbid Matilda, or Over-education’ (variants duly recorded), the first five cancelled lines comprise ‘the only known limerick by a poet who wrote a great deal of light verse, and who is reported to have liked clever limericks’, but not, apparently, his own. I quite see why.

In Kramer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, Hardy’s poetry is covered by various senior critics such as (more fleetingly) Norman Page and Robert Schweik, and (in more depth) Dennis Taylor on the nineteenth century and John Paul Riquelme on modernism. None of the essays is very long: together they make a serviceable rather than detailed ‘companion’ to a prodigiously productive writer, although it’s hard to see how editor Dale Kramer could have done more justice to the novels or poems within the confines of the series. The Companion at least underlines the extent to which Hardy’s poetry can both illumine and be illuminated by his novels. Two other articles by Dennis Taylor will leave more of a mark on Hardy studies for what they add to primary sources. Famously haphazard about recording dates of composition and revision, Hardy has never been regarded as a reliable guide to the dating of his own works. The Chronology of Hardy’s Poetry’ (VP 37f 1999] 1–57) uses Hardy’s prefaces, letters, and autobiographical writings to prove that the contents of each collection were invariably arranged by date and theme unless we are warned otherwise: ‘if a poem of a different period is included in any grouping because it is thematically appropriate, it will almost always be dated as an exception’. The preface to Time’s Langhingstocks, which explains ‘that some lines in the early-dated poems have been rewritten, though they have been left substantially unchanged’, supplies a formula for dating completions of part-written pieces and revisions: ‘If the revision is not substantial he will let the poem stand with its early date; most of his revisions are of this sort. [However] if the revision is substantial ... he will let the poem stand as a new poem.’ Such notes validate the twenty-two-page chronology appended to the discussion, although the ‘huge miscellany’ of Moments of Vision seems to nettle even Taylor. It will be fascinating to see how his unravelling of this ‘chronological muddle’ weathers the passage of time and the attention of fellow Hardy specialists.

Strictly speaking, in dealing with the early development of Hardy’s poetic idiom the shorter of Taylor’s articles falls outside the scope of my review period, but ‘Hardy’s Copy of The Golden Treasury’ (VP 37[ 1999] 65–191) reveals the poet’s much-marked copy of Palgrave as an influential source of information and inspiration. As well as prompting him to buy poetry for himself and others, it supplied many formal models and other practical guidance. The marginalia on Hardy’s copy (some preserved here in a useful appendix) betray his careful study of idiom, glossing words, marking and re-marking useful phrases, picking out the aural resonances of particular lines. Remnants of this vocabulary reappear in prose, but Taylor sees Hardy using Palgrave chiefly as a comprehensive manual (and history) of poetic forms to be tested and practised with, instilling his habit of formal variation, and interest in the relationship between metre and musicality of expression.

Several other discussions of Hardy concentrate, in various ways, on time and history. Ellen Anne Lanzano’s Hardy: The Temporal Poetics, seeks to gauge the difficult resonances of Hardy’s sense of time, observing—with an archness which begins to grate—that There never was a poetic field more drenched in the was, the now, the will be, than Hardy’s.’ Arguing that the reach of a career which spanned the divide between two centuries underpins the antiphonal character and ‘temporal patterns’ of the poetry, she finds Hardy struggling towards a constructive response to the public but also deeply personal threat of temporality. Doubleness of voice is reflected in the doubleness of a vision which absorbed the philosophical counternarratives of spiritualism and science which split the Victorian world and made way for the sceptical relativism of the twentieth century. Weighing rationalist (Darwinian) attempts to understand existence as progress, and a more ancient irrational faith in existence as cyclical, Hardy’s dialectical reconciliation of the opposing epistemologies prefigures twentieth-century relativism in making sense of his public duties while struggling with personal experiences of loss. Lightly historicist in approach, Lanzano uses different contexts (the real region of Dorset, the semi-fantastic world of ‘Lyonesse’, the emotional burden of Emma, and the professional anxieties of the successful poet) to demonstrate how an early determinism drifts into the cyclical view of history taken in Wessex Poems.

Generally speaking, few commentators have deployed the (millennial) fin-de-siecle filter, but the centenary of Wessex Poems caused Bernard Jones to notice that the collection itself appeared in the centenary year of Lyrical Ballads. ‘1798–1898: Wordsworth, Hardy, and “The Real Language of Men”’ (ES 80[1999] 509–17) suggests that, while Wordsworth’s Preface resonated with Hardy’s sympathetic championing of regional identity, its promotion of more democratic poetic language proved harder—100 years of considerable socio-economic change later—for Hardy to put into practice. Jones finds Wordsworth’s failure to practise what he preached mirrored in Hardy’s struggle to find an idiom in which to celebrate a rural diversity embattled by grim socio-economic necessities.

Finally, the distinguished biographer and editor of Hardy’s Collected Poems James Gibson has distilled an absorbing collection of encounters with the poet from a huge range of sources, in Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections. The last of five chronological chapters, ‘The Final Years 1900–1928’ (split into two parts, the first spanning the Boer War and the First World War; the second recording the final decade of Hardy’s life) takes up more than half the book. Forgoing footnotes to save space, Gibson draws from the public and private memoirs of numerous visitors an engaging portrait of a genial host but reluctant interviewee, a novelist who longed to be remembered only for his poetry, a poet who took criticism hard but humbly. He reveals how fame and increasing frailty sharpened Hardy’s sensitivities to critics, autograph-hunters and publicity of any sort, even the presentation—by W.B. Yeats and Henry Newbolt—of a gold medal from the Royal Society of Literature; his pride in his own poetry (‘far superior’ to his novels), his view of predecessors and contemporaries, and his impact on younger poets (Blunden and Graves among others). A longish extract from Sassoon’s diaries of 1919 includes some touching vignettes of ‘T.H.... who has never seemed more loveable than this afternoon’, an aside from whom can turn Sassoon implacably ‘against trying any long tales in verse’. Such details will interest researchers, and delight non-specialists.

You might be forgiven for thinking that we could have done without more biographies of Yeats. The documents recording the automatic writing sessions with his wife Georgie Hyde Lees are the primary resource and excuse for Brenda Maddox’s rather commercial George*s Ghosts: A New Life ofW.B. Yeats, chiefly an account of the complicated emotional and spiritual life colouring Yeats’s sudden marriage at the age of 51, and the relationships of his later years. Maddox makes free if not always responsible use of the poetry, but if her book (which makes an irritating habit of casually sacrificing syntax to pace) fills a diverting gap it has none of the grace and gravitas of Terence Brown’s The Life ofW.B. Yeats: A Critical Biography. In many ways the best of a recent crop of critical biographies, Brown’s ‘interpretative synthesis’ of place and poetics reviews Yeats’s work in the contexts in Ireland and Britain from which it derived. Delicately probing the suggestive intercourse between place (cities, countries, and particular cultural moments such as the ‘English 1890s’), always heavy with private and public history, and Yeats’s personal and professional life, Brown is careful to anchor his discussions of the poet’s contemporaneous literary (indeed aesthetic) context in the ever-broadening scholarly discourse to which any responsible account of Yeats must defer. His well-appointed readings (in spite of the rather self-conscious effort to evade theory) consort usefully with the likes of Foster, Howes, and Heaney. The whole thing is a quietly sophisticated triumph.

Peter McDonald, ‘Yeats’s Poetic Structures’ (English 48[ 1999] 17–32), offers a more focused examination of the interaction of place and form. Concentrating on ‘the punning relation’ of architectural and poetic forms, McDonald notes that a poem such as ‘Coole Park, 1929’ ‘comprehends its own falling apart’. The creative partnership between loss and gain is played out in formal poetic structures secure in their own resilience even as they are used to comment on—construct—the kind of decay anticipated of Coole Park, or more dramatically performed at Thoor Ballylee. Reflecting on the generative conversation between a poem’s physical disposition— its formal structure—and the edifices which Yeats’s later works so often seek (implicitly or explicitly) to commemorate, McDonald, a poet himself, declares ‘poetic form can be a metaphor only in a secondary sense: in poems, form is the pressing reality according to which metaphors and meanings must make their way’. This recognition only reinforces his respect for the structural ambivalence of the ‘different varieties, and scales, of building and destroying, writing and unwriting’ which characterize the poet’s final legacy.

The opening chapter of Neil Corcoran’s latest book Poets of Modern Ireland: Text, Context, Intertext explores a similar theme. ‘Architectures of Yeats: Perspectives on The Winding Stair is in some ways less focused than McDonald’s piece: Corcoran senses in the ‘literal architecture’ of Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee both the spectral shape of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish culture and the developing form of a post-war Irish nation, which complicates ‘an architecture of the self [and] a figurative architecture of psychology and sexuality’. Like McDonald, he finds all three framed by a performative ‘architecture of utterance’, for which the titular ‘Winding Stair’ becomes (in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’) a site of ‘process and review’ promising ‘progress and disintegration’ and a larger trope for ‘a move from exterior to interior, from unyielding straightness and assurance to anxious circuitousness; from, it may be, phallic authoritativeness to ... insecurity’. It is in accounting for the aesthetic rather than political significance of this through the Coole Park poems (before turning to the Crazy Jane poems) that Corcoran’s discussion most closely parallels McDonald’s.

Since Yeats never goes unmentioned here, even in leaner years, it cheers to find critical attention being paid, however briefly, to some of the less visible poets of his generation. Walter de la Mare rarely features in these pages despite the considerable popularity and many distinctions rehearsed in Burton R. Pollin’s ‘The Pathway of Edgar Allen Poe Traced in the Works of Walter De La Mare’ (£’L7 42[1999] 39–69). Pollin finds Poe’s influence, for all de la Mare’s changing view of his predecessor, to have been pervasive, but this long and detailed discussion is less balanced than it might have been: if the section on prose is admirably comprehensive he could have devoted more time to the poetry, instead of simply isolating general themes (dreams, haunting, etc.) in fragments of verse, quoted line by line, which are then juxtaposed with matching lines of Poe’s work. Given the bulk of the evidence, the paucity of the critique is woeful. Peter Scupham is briefer but more discerning in one of the three columns in Poetry and Nation Review’s ‘Shelf Lives’ spot devoted to once popular contemporaries (PNR 25:vi[1999] 44–6). Acknowledging that de la Mare’s fiction and poetry together have the opulent air of a ‘superb late Victorian or Edwardian theatre-set’, Scupham emphasizes the poet’s ‘Jacobean’ interest in horror, hails the complex musicality and inventive variety of an idiom he aligns with Hardy or Auden (who like Eliot admired him), and urges a ‘new winnowing of the poems’, calling for more serious critical activity to go with it.

Scupham is more forgiving of the passing of interest in Edmund Blunden (PNR 25:iii[ 1999] 59–61), of whom he regrets ‘a deal of slumber and lotus-eating ... theeing and thouing’ and Edwin Muir (PNR 25:v[ 1999] 53–5). Even so, his sense of the parallels between Muir and Herbert Read (mediated to some extent by Kathleen Raine) and their successor Ted Hughes is as instructive as his pleasure in the selfbalancing resonance of Blunden’s poems of war experience. Nor is Scupham alone in revisiting Georgian poetry. Rennie Parker has produced a slender paperback on The Georgian Poets: Abercrombie, Brooke, Drinkwater, Gibson and Thomas for Northcote House’s Writers and their Works series, worth noticing not so much for its critical import (it is more of a student/general interest guide than anything else) as for its choice of poets. Unlike Edward Thomas and, to a lesser extent, Rupert Brooke, Abercrombie, Drinkwater, and Gibson command virtually no attention nowadays (Parker’s bibliography confirms how little recent criticism exists) so any study, however limited—this one comprises a set of brief critical biographies—is handy, if only to sketch in the context and relationships linking the different members of the group. Given separate chapters, the different individuals are treated in a way which overlooks neither their distinctiveness as writers nor their sense of community, while the figures of Georgian Anthology editor Edward Marsh, Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, and Eleanor Farjeon move on the periphery.

Reviving interest in the Georgians is calling some of the central scholarship on the second decade of the century into question. Reviewing Ivor Gurney, another poet closely identified with both Gloucestershire and Georgianism, Sally Minogue in ‘Displaced Poet: Location and Dislocation in Ivor Gurney’s Poetry’ (CR 39[ 1999] 29–45), finds his delight in his own locality undoing the opposition between urbs and rus on which Raymond Williams based The Country and the City. She argues that Gurney’s poetics celebrate the synthesizing reach of the local across a larger web of relationships linking place (say, Gloucester) to its geographical and historical context (say, England, even the English). Several excellent readings (the best of them are The Coin’, To his Love’, and The Mangel-bury’) underscore her claim that Gurney refuses to ‘restrict himself to being the poet of a particular place; rather it is that in this place his sense of beauty, history, identity, and poetic language is rooted. From that root he can branch.’ In pondering the connective and disconnective aspects of this activity, she defends the modern qualities of an idiosyncratic poetic idiom which matured throughout and beyond the First World War, and partly because of that contrives ‘to speak in a common voice in a way that does not misrepresent difference and disparateness’.

One of the finest accounts to appear this year, Stuart Sillars’s excellent Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910–1920 also finds this decade offering more compound and multiple emphases than much of the existing discourse allows. Confining himself to three poets (Owen, Sassoon, and Thomas, juxtaposed with Woolf, Forster, and Lawrence) in arguing for a radical reappraisal of the period, Sillars’s corrective has wider ramifications. Reversing the tendency to prioritize context over text, he traces in each ‘the subtle play of continuation and refusal with a pattern of social and literary frames, and the larger idea of inherent instability within the text itself which may not depend on any such interchange’. Close readings of familiar poems show how respect for the traditional structures within which all three poets work, and the language on which each depends, coexists with a profound dissatisfaction with the limits of these resources in a world chiefly defined by loss. In ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ the awkwardness of structure (two overlapping sonnets) and phrasing (where patches of imprecise imagery, ‘like old beggars under sacks’, abut moments of compressed modernist precision, such as the famous ‘blood-shod’) dramatize the predicament of the poet whose troubling experiences have taught him about ‘the buckling of language and tradition under the forces of the inexpressible’. Owen’s ambivalent extension and refusal of the conventional forms of his craft is amplified in Sassoon’s more bullish charting of the disintegration of the larger structures of language in a world at war; the reassuring Georgian resonances of his imagery and references are compromised by the ironic failure of his speakers either to utter or wholly to disguise the unnervingly chaotic ideological context in which they find themselves. Thomas, by contrast, achieves a deeper emotional satisfaction in surrendering to a Romantic yearning for the dissolution of self and language altogether.

An interesting shorter discussion voices more dissatisfaction with criticism of the period. James Campbell in ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Criticism’ (NLH 30[ 1999] 203–15), contends that the ‘trench lyric’ has nurtured the assumption in twentieth-century literary criticism that ‘war’ is only synonymous with ‘combat’. This derives from the efforts of the soldier poets of the First World War to reproduce their intensely personal and oddly clubbish experience of conflict in order to instruct an innocent (by definition uninitiated) audience about horrors it has unwittingly and passively conspired in authoring. Campbell aligns himself with (often feminist) revisionists, such as Elizabeth Marsland, Catherine Reilly, and Nosheen Khan, who answer by recovering the poetry of non-combatants. If the poets themselves fail to acknowledge the self-defeating exclusivity of their ideology (although Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ and ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ imply that the poet himself could only utter the ‘pity’ by keeping it at a distance) Campbell insists that ‘Combat experience by itself cannot tell the whole story’ and warns that critics of any war writing should strive against replicating the same divisive gnosticism themselves.

As Campbell observes, few ‘war poems’ were actually composed in the trenches, but A.D. Harvey’s ‘A War Sonnet by C.E. Carrington’ (N&Q 244[ 1999] 65–6), finds one written in the ‘reeking smoke and heat of war’ of the battle of the Somme. A later transcription of the original explains that it commemorates a Corporal Day, the only casualty of the battalion in the first two days of the battle. Harvey takes the precaution of reminding us that Carrington (author of A Subaltern*s War and biographer of Kipling) was angered to be cited in Paul Fussell’s discussion of homoeroticism in The Great War and Modern Memory, and notes that, in addition to his socialism, his energetic interest in women is borne out by unpublished papers held at the Imperial War Museum. Meanwhile, as J.M. and F.J.M. Blom in ‘Bertram Dobell, Sonnets and Lyrics: A Little Book of Verse on the Present War (1915)’ (ES 80f 1999] 454–61) recount, when war—to which he was essentially opposed—broke out, the elderly Dobell had retired after a varied career ‘as a bookseller, publisher, man of letters and minor poet’. The indifferent poetry he produced and began preparing for publication in the first months of war (he died late in 1914) is illuminated by the diary he kept at the same time, which exposes the gulf between his feelings about the conflict (‘from the very beginning pessimism, jingoism, cynicism, anger and despair are all mixed up’) and what he decided he could—or should—print. It records the complexity of Dobell’s response to a war effort which, against his better judgement, his poems were intended to help.

The 1914–18 war provides the backdrop for two studies of Eliot’s poetry. Richard A. Kaye’s “‘A Splendid Readiness for Death”: T.S. Eliot, the Homosexual Cult of St. Sebastian, and World War I’ (M/M 6f 1999] 107–34), traces how Eliot’s bewildering The Love Song of St Sebastian’ carefully recasts the saint (a popular homoerotic symbol among European decadents throughout the nineteenth century and particularly at the fin de siecle) as a murderously heterosexual descendant of Othello and Psyche sharing Prufrock’s incapacities. Since Eliot’s reinvention of the legend dilutes its ‘homoerotic import while retaining the saint’s symbolic power to denote erotic paralysis and willed self-destruction’, for Kaye his exploitation of Sebastian in this way at this time not only utters the pre-war mood of despair in Europe but also anticipates the chief preoccupation of the war poets. Sandra M. Gilbert in “‘Rat’s Alley”: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy’ (NLH 30f 1999] 179–201), develops this idea (and James Campbell’s thesis). She argues that the desperate realities of the war forced its poets to recognize that the paradigmatic model of classical-pastoral elegy could not answer modern death. The ‘new poetics of grief’ constructed by Stevens, Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg both longs for and dismisses the traditionally regenerative possibilities of elegy, and denies the consolations which historian Jay Winters, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge [1995]), claims they found in the literary past. The ‘deathscape’ of no man’s land permanently contaminated the decorously hopeful pastoral elegy, which turned into a nihilistically anti-pastoral testimonial driven out of writers who were themselves agents of the kinds of death to which their poems bear witness. Gilbert discovers in Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ and The Waste Land a ‘comparable hopelessness’; her rather compacted reading of Eliot’s poem as anti-pastoral elegy gives earlier studies of its elegiac aspects (and Eliot’s original epigraph from the ending of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) fresh resonance.

The Waste Land has attracted no less comment than usual. A note by James A. Means, ‘An Echo of Gissing in The Waste Land’ (N&Q 244[ 1999] 66) points out the similarity between Eliot’s depiction of the crowds flowing over London Bridge (in ‘The Burial of the Dead’) and a moment in a story by George Gissing, ‘A Lodger in Maze Pond,’ published posthumously in 1906. Elsewhere Jennifer Kroll in ‘Mary Butts’s “Unrest Cure” for The Waste Land’ (TCL 45[1999] 159—73), considers how Armed with Madness, a novel published by Eliot’s contemporary Mary Butts in 1928, ‘subtly critiques’ both poet and poem in its more positive response to the Grail mythology on which, like Eliot, Butt draws. Although they shared many social connections and intellectual interests (Butts’s novel owes much to Frazer’s Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance), the writers were never close; Kroll’s essentially psychoanalytical weighing of the poem (she claims that knowledge of Eliot’s difficult private life—more obvious in early drafts—would have encouraged the novelist to do so too) finds that difference of temperament, lifestyle, and beliefs explain Butts’s resolve to answer the despairing vision of the poem with the healing alternatives of empathetic and loving connection. On the other hand John Richardson’s ‘After the Imagination of our own Hearts: Biblical Prophecy and The Waste Land (English 48f 1999] 187–98), highlights how readings which adopt Weston’s linking of Grail mythology and Christian beliefs in interpreting Eliot’s desert overlook the fundamental incompatibility of the two traditions (‘prophets regard as the cause of the drought in the desert what fertility cults regard as its cure’). The poem’s biblical allusions to the prophetic tradition illumine its sexual symbolism (linking female promiscuity with drought), and the cast of seers and mystics (all lacking the powers of biblical prophets). Since the unifying force of the prophetic mode is denied by the poem as a whole, Richardson can only conclude that its opposition to Grail mythology makes the work more deeply fractured and contradictory than other twentieth-century readings (unfamiliar with the traditions of Old Testament prophecy) allow.

Michael Levenson in ‘Does The Waste Land have a Politics?’ (M/M 6[ 1999] 1–13), scrutinizes the interplay between the poem and the complex matrix of the postwar world in which it first appeared. He depicts it as both the product of a cannily commercial banking mind and an ‘anti-finance’ protest against the ‘hectic peace’ and ‘political incoherence’ of its historical moment: ‘What the poem both dreads and desires is the annihilation of the city as apparatus ... as the relentless wheel.’ Centrally, he claims that John Maynard Keynes’s polemic The Economic Consequences of the Peace (published after the Paris conference in 1919) prefigures more fully than either Weston or Frazer the poem’s sense of the growth of materialism in the post-war world. Among various textual echoes, Keynes’s tract clarifies the reference to the ‘present decay in Eastern Europe’ in the headnote to ‘What the Thunder Said’ as meaning not the Russian Revolution but the crisis in world economic order stemming from the breakdown of central and eastern Europe. Keynes even proposed ‘the replacement’ of European governments as one way of staving off the imminent ‘bankruptcy and decay of Europe’. In search of nonpoliticizing compensation for such contemporary anxieties, The Waste Land turns to the literary past: ‘the quotations are citizens in an ideal community’. (Levenson was also responsible for editing The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, in which an array of leading names—such as Michael Bell, Lawrence Rainey, and James Longenbach—range across the chief contemporary debates, cutting few corners in surveying a discourse which remains acutely suspicious of simplistic classifications. Longenbach’s chapter on ‘Modern Poetry’ somehow steers a responsible route through difficult terrain, permitting enough detail to give the chief literary and historical landmarks colour while carefully resisting—even in so limited a space— the impulse to overlook complexity for the sake of clarity.)

Edward Costigan’s ‘Eliot’s Invocations’ (CQ 28[ 1999] 277–92), a vaguely post-structural pursuit of how and why ‘Eliot makes and unmakes, tells and untells’, moves beyond The Waste Land, observing how the inferential invocations of ‘La Figlia che Piange’ and Four Quartets (among other poems) conspire in and replay the ‘speculative uncertainty’ of a poetics which habitually mediates between knowledge and experience. The formal and linguistic uncertainties of the poetry reflect the central tenet of a religious philosophy in which doubt and hope jointly fuel the struggle to make sense out of experience. Two books also take a broader view of the poet: Ronald Schuchard’s excellent monograph, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art, and a collection of essays edited by Harriet Davidson for Longman’s Critical Readers series, and presumably aimed at the student market. Davidson gathers classic essays from authorities such as Maud Ellmann, Terry Eagleton, Jacqueline Rose, Sandra Gilbert, and Michael North in a brisk survey of postmodern theorizing of Eliot’s work. All emphasize how actively modernist thought influences contemporary critical theory, and how generative Eliot’s own criticism has remained despite changing attitudes to his poetry. Grouping the essays into sections treating the poet’s theoretical work, post-structural leanings, ideology, and sexuality, Davidson insists that they represent an up-to-date account of Eliot’s current status in contemporary criticism. Significant as her selections undoubtedly are, I was struck that the earliest (Gilbert’s ‘Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature’) dates from as far back as 1980, while the most recent (North’s ‘The Dialectic In/Of Modernism: Pound and Eliot’s Racial Masquerade’) appeared in 1992. Not, then, as up to date as all that.

Schuchard’s book ranks among the most considerable contributions of the year for significantly revising some central planks of the standard biographical narrative, let alone the discourse. The account reflects, and reflects on, two important strands of recent Eliot criticism: the recovery of the personal in the apparently impersonal, and the poet’s enjoyment of aspects of nineteenth-century culture as diverse as music-hall comedy and romantic Decadence. For Schuchard the chief elements of Eliot’s late Victorian sensibility converge in the ‘Dark Angel’ described by Lionel Johnson, one of the 1890s poets who helped to prompt the tormented preoccupation ‘with the conflicts of desire and beatitude, body and soul, flesh and Absolute’ which informed Eliot’s creative process and featured in moments of personal crisis throughout his life. Johnson’s figure becomes a powerful analogue for the horror which Schuchard claims as ‘the agon and the muse’ of a developing poetics. Justifying his pursuit of its impact on the poet as well as the poetry, Schuchard notes that Eliot’s own criticism seeks out the personal, most significantly in reading Baudelaire and Donne, and later rereading Herbert with increasing spiritual respect. Written ‘as interconnected layers in an ongoing atlas of Eliot’s life, poetry and criticism’, separate chapters consider how fresh discoveries about the writer’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life cast light on his poetics: there are the three years of lecturing in what we might now call Continuing Education, and the breadth of knowledge and interests displayed in the courses he designed; the underplayed significance of T.E. Hulme, with whose ideas Eliot was familiar rather earlier than most critics assume; the blackness of his comic touch, and the equally dark literary updating of the bawdy and boisterous traditions of the music-halls he loved to frequent; and finally the reverberations of sexual betrayal in Bertrand Russell’s affair with Vivien, the subsequent breakdown of that first unhappy marriage, and the bouts of depression and spiritual crisis punctuating Eliot’s life then and later. Schuchard argues that the last two great poems are love songs as much as if not more than devotional treatises. This is a book to be savoured.

Since, for various reasons, Auden came off badly in YWES 78[ 1999] I hope to straighten the record now. Interest continues to be directed at the frantically productive first decade in the States, an interest foreshadowed in 1998 by Alan Jacobs in What Became of Wystan? Change and Continuity in Auden’s Poetry. Jacobs’s warning that ‘neither change nor continuity are always what they seem’ resonates through his account of the relentlessly suspicious and self-redirecting aesthetic of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Exploring the philosophical (rather than the formal) complexity of the poetry through thematically related poems, Jacobs explores the poet’s efforts to impose order on the conflicting traditions in which he was interested. Auden sets a demanding pace. Whisked from the Romantics (rejected for Horace, whose sense of civic and moral responsibility Auden admiringly sought to renovate in answer to the war) to Marx and Kierkegaard (both viewed with scepticism), sent to Hardy (‘The Master’) and Pope before the high modernists (all praised and censured); forced to reconcile civic ideals of an updated Hellenism with the individual freedoms of protestant Christianity, to test eros against agape, to unravel the mixed forms of Auden’s Menippean satire and to chart the aesthetic consequences of these oppositional (but rarely adversarial) partnerships, no wonder Jacobs wearily resolved while writing the book, ‘never again [to] write about anyone so damnably smart’. But his grounding of Auden-as-guildsman (his art democratic and local, his loyalties to the community respectful of the individual) in Alisdair MacIntyre’s understanding of traditionalism (‘every social practice including poetry is tradition-generated and tradition bound’) is convincing and useful.

Peter Firchow’s ‘The American Auden: A Poet Reborn?’ (AmLH 11 :iii[ 1999] 448–79), uses some of the same poems while reviewing Auden’s complex relationship with his adoptive nation. Finding that Auden was never as committed to his new country as the ‘American’ tag implies, Firchow understands the poet’s emigration as a phase of development, rather than a rebirth or reinvention, which finally confirmed rather than altered many of Auden’s original ideas, most valuably his sense of difference. The introduction to The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse [1956] is summoned to support the sense that, despite the professional successes and personal happiness which he found in America, Auden was more isolated there than he let on. Alienation suited him: he could identify with the literary traditions he was colonizing (a note on ‘New Year Letter’ describes a national literature ‘of lonely people’) while distance sharpened his poetic voice. As a foreigner he could be coolly critical, in ‘September 1939’, of a mechanistic, antispiritual consumer society on the brink of war; being an emigre—one hint of his dislocation perhaps the absence of natural landscapes in his poetry—gave him a cosmopolitan edge over the more provincial interests of Betjeman and Larkin.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable Edward Mendelson has completed his standard biography (begun as Early Auden [1983]) with the appearance of Later Auden. Chronologically speaking, much of this volume’s scope (it stretches from Auden’s departure for America in 1939 to his death in 1973) falls outside my period, but the intense productivity of those early years in the States forces Mendelson to devote practically half of his lengthy account to just eight years of writing. The twin themes of the biography emerge in Auden’s continuing meditation on the burdensome but potent and compelling legacy of the poet’s struggle with language, and elsewhere on the sometimes fruitful sometimes destructive cross-currents between the public role (and its diverse, often political, responsibilities) and the domestic private life which Chester Kallman came so powerfully to symbolize. In recasting Auden’s personal history, spiritual argument, and ideological development in a critical work of considerable stature, Mendelson misses no nuance in the poetry. Although he is never prurient, he doesn’t prevent the poet’s profound emotional and spiritual crises from contributing to the air of gloom hanging over a narrative which rarely seems to forget the inevitability of its conclusion.

Elsewhere Mendelson, ‘Eight Poems on a Set Subject: W.H. Auden’ (Multi 18[ 1999] 127–34), draws attention to some poems which Auden sent Isherwood in a letter of 10 December 1931, relating Faber’s plan to publish The Fronny and The Orators together, and suggesting the enclosures as ‘a Conrad insulating wad between the two’. The plan never came off: four of the poems he includes (‘Nothing is asked of you, being beautiful’, ‘Morning is calling us now’, ‘If this love dear one’, and ‘We’ve seen now for ourselves we know surely’) were never published, while the texts of the others differ in various ways from their printed versions. It is for such contributions to the field that Mendelson’s ‘benign and stimulating presence’ is repeatedly acknowledged in John Fuller’s monumental reference work, W.H. Auden: A Commentary. If Fuller fails to register the four unpublished poems, or the relationship between all eight (Mendelson’s discoveries presumably too late to include), never mind; following his Reader’s Guide [1970]—which he calls ‘a hasty scavenging raid’ by comparison—this latest study more than fulfils its promise ‘to say something useful about every original poem, play or libretto of [Auden’s] written in English that has so far reached print.’ Scrupulously referenced and cross-referenced, Fuller’s critical bibliography is judicious, incisive (especially in longer critiques of the ‘big’ thirties poems such as ‘1929,’ ‘Spain’, and ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’) and balanced. While you may choose to read it as a massive narrative of the fragmentary often contradictory development of one of the chief poets of the twentieth century, A Commentary simply proposes itself as a book for dipping into. Exhaustive without being pedantic, scholarly but readable, the details it supplies (a little publishing history here, a detail about a poem’s composition or a brief survey of sources there; an aside or an exchange from some correspondence; comments from friends or editors, a fragment from a notebook or journal; variants rescued from drafts or other published versions; an occasional paraphrase, some weighing of form, the odd interpretative suggestion) will be a rich resource for students of Auden (specialist or not) for some years, despite warning of the ‘limits to one man’s understanding of such a polymath’. Not shy of proposing new readings or bringing fresh evidence into play, Fuller also takes ready account of recent scholarship in tracking the inter-generic and cross-generic links between different works, a staggering range of influences and intertextual echoes, and the complex intersections of Auden’s private and professional life.

Another book overlooked last time was Devine and Peacock, eds. Louis MacNeice and his Influence. Collecting contributions from several major critics, it utters their shared dissatisfaction with an existing discourse which is at best defensive of MacNeice’s Irishness, at worst badly skewed by interest in the anomalies of his life and career which have been allowed to distort his reception and distract from the kind of close reading which his poetry rewards. These essays view the confused and confusing issue of MacNeice’s relationship with the nation of his birth through the textual substance of his work, rather than the other way round. Terence Brown explores the lasting impact of a classical (traditionally English) education, which taught the poet so much about form; Peter McDonald examines MacNeice’s experiments with those classical forms, the rigour of which always underpins his deceptively casual poetics, deliberately destabilizing its idiomatic resources. Other critics review MacNeice’s relationship with earlier and later generations of poets: Robert Welch investigates his response to Yeats, Edna Longley uses his criticism to point up his differences (political and social) with Auden, while Richard York, Michael Allen, and Neil Corcoran review his impact on Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and ‘the contemporary poetry of Northern Ireland’ respectively.

Although it adds little to John Ackerman’s A Dylan Thomas Companion [ 1991], shelf space will presumably be made for James A. Davies, A Reference Companion to Dylan Thomas, expensive as it is. Davies covers the life, works and critical history, but although the bibliography is fuller than Ackerman’s, the poems are discussed in bite-size readings which rarely do them justice, and pay little attention to the relevant new theoretical ideas which one might have reasonably expected a Companion of this sort to focus on. In my view, Davies’s attention to Caitlin lacks the insight of the new edition of Paul Ferris’s authoritative Dylan Thomas: The Biography, although Ferris himself applauds Davies’s succinct biography. In the former, what was a modestly self-contained two-page introduction now takes some ten pages to explain (with none of Davies’s gusto) Caitlin’s disruptive influence on earlier versions of the book. Ferris’s filling in of the background circumstances in which the first edition appeared illumines the addition of one new chapter— ‘Marriage’—and an extended ‘Postscript’ retitled ‘The Thomas Business’ (mostly given over to reviewing Caitlin’s role in the commercialization of Dylan’s poetic legacy), update current values (the four letters that Caitlin carried in her handbag until her death in 1994 fetched £12,650) and emend the usefully critical review of Thomas’s posthumous publishing history: he is dismissive (as elsewhere in the narrative) of Nashold’s and Tremlett’s theory that Thomas was killed more by undiagnosed diabetes than drink. Since Ferris didn’t seem to care much for its 1975 predecessor, one wonders what he will make of Andrew Sinclair, Dylan the Bard: A Life of Dylan Thomas, which focuses on the unresolvable divisions of Thomas’s Welshness. In rather precious prose, Sinclair depicts Thomas’s truncated life as a doomed effort to escape the tensions inherited from two opposing traditions: the discipline of the courtly bard and the more self-indulgently transient life of the wandering minstrel. What promises to be a loosely post-structural analysis of Thomas’s overriding and subversion of his inheritance seems to lose sight of its early aims, faltering its way into an uninspired rehearsal of Thomas’s gradual decline and ending with a half-baked memoir of the making of the film of Under Milk Wood.

5. Post-1950 Poetry

R.P. Draper in An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, aims to create a ‘map’ of modern poetry for general readers and undergraduate students. It succeeds in giving a balanced introduction to an ambitious range of poetry and poets. Draper begins with a phrase from John Donne—‘all coherence gone’ (p. 1)— which he sees echoed in Yeats’s The Second Coming’: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. This provides the keynote for his central argument, which is that the upheavals and turbulence of the twentieth-century produced a ‘bewildering multiplicity and multivalency’ (p. 1) in modern poetry. The difficulties of representing the twentieth century in poetic form, according to Draper, have resulted in greater richness, variety, and energy in modern poetry. The book begins with chapters on experimentation in modernist poetry and the alternative ‘traditional’ mode represented by poets such as Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and A.E. Housman. Draper analyses these two poetic modes as different ways of responding to the problems presented by the West’s ideas of civilization, Christian morality, and objectivity. The tension between traditional and experimental modes of poetic writing forms a recurring theme in his analyses, and he concludes on this point with some illuminating comparisons of John Ashbery and Philip Larkin. Draper expresses the hope in his preface that he has not omitted consideration of any ‘really major’ poets. Most undergraduate students ought to be able to compile a fairly lengthy list of twentieth-century poets who have been omitted, and one cannot help but shudder when one sees, for example, Caribbean poetry represented only by Derek Walcott and Canadian poetry only by Margaret Atwood. Draper has opted for meaningful discussion of major poets, however, rather than citing all those worthy of discussion. For the most part, he gets this balance right, although the one area which I feel suffers from his attempt to consider a decentralized ‘English’ poetry is contemporary poetry in England. This is represented by Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes only, with Larkin seeming to have the last word on the state of poetry in England today. There is perhaps a poetic justice in seeing England through the lens of just one or two poets, in the same manner as Draper treats Wales, Australia, and Ireland, and one might applaud him for approaching the regional variety of ‘modern poetry in English’ with democratic rigour. But there are important counters to the voice and vision of Larkin in contemporary English poetry which deserve further representation and explication here too.

Neil Roberts in Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry, is less concerned with the coherence of its historical and geographical scope than Draper. Roberts considers in separate chapters the work of Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Anne Stevenson, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, Les Murray, Seamus Heaney, Peter Redgrove, Tony Harrison, Peter Reading, and Carol Ann Duffy. These are poets whom Roberts finds interesting and about whom he has ‘something to say’ (p. 5). There is no teleological schema to this book, but there is a pervasive influence and theoretical model in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work is useful to Roberts in bridging the rift between poetry and narrative which he dates to the Romantic period. Hence, we find Roberts using the Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, hybridity, and addressivity, which were formulated in discussion of novelistic discourse, to study the cultural orientations and linguistic register of certain post-war poets. Bakhtin often interrupts rather than illuminates Roberts’s analyses, however, especially where Roberts seems to insist on finding ‘striking’ resemblances and ‘intriguing’ similarities between Bakhtinian ideas and one poet or another’s description of her technique. This is a minor quibble with analyses and discussions which are otherwise inventive and provocative. Roberts frequently gravitates towards literary controversies—Larkin’s racism, Plath’s suicide, Hughes’s editing of Plath’s work, the ferocious debates which appeared in the London Review of Books in 1986 about language and social class in Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. These controversies provide platforms from which Roberts explores the relationship which he describes in his chapter on Peter Redgrove as one ‘of negotiation between the poet’s most inward imaginative, emotional, and one may say religious reality, and the social reality of the poem being read’ (p. 150). Roberts is more persuasive in some chapters than others. His analysis of addressivity and modes of poetic performance in Plath is brilliant, as is his complication of Hughes’s own conception of Crow, and his readings of the political ideologies suggested in the poetry of Les Murray and Seamus Heaney are compelling. Less satisfactory is his opening grapple with racism and class prejudice in Larkin, which he concludes by suggesting that Larkin’s poetry entails an ‘ironic rejection of the “common” discourse it employs’ (p. 17), a point which is not fully earned in his analysis.

Phil Bowen in A Gallery to Play To: The Story of the Mersey Poets, provides a valuable account of the principal ‘pop’ poets of the 1960s—Brian Patten, Roger McGough, and Adrian Henri. Bowen argues that the Mersey poets were as central to the 1960s as the Auden generation, the Beat writers, or the Movement were to their own times. His book weaves the story of Patten, McGough, and Henri with the rise to fame of the Beatles, beatnik influences on the British literary scene, and the ‘cultural decentralization’ of Britain in the 1960s. The result is a lively and accessible history of the emergence of the three poets in ‘swinging’ Liverpool, and their wavering careers since then. Bowen’s chief aim is to present a cultural history of the poets and their contexts, which he does admirably well. He also defends the accessibility and ‘pop’ form of their art persuasively, arguing that they were rooted in the cultural cosmopolitanism of Liverpool, and sought to ‘put Liverpool on the map and give it a voice’ (p. 48). This is where Bowen argues for a clear distinction between the Mersey poets and ‘underground’ poets such as Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown, who were influenced by the American Beats and who, Bowen suggests, also gravitated towards American subjects and art forms. The Mersey poets, in contrast, were rooted in the bohemian activities of Liverpool in the early 1960s, and both benefited and suffered from the fame of the Beatles. Bowen rightly suggests that Penguin might not have published The Mersey Sound, which launched the three poets into considerable fame and critical acclaim in 1967, had it not been for the vogue created by the Beatles (and others) for the Liverpool scene. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Bowen’s book is his assessment of the legacy of the three poets, which he suggests lies in the subsequent success of poets such as John Hegley, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, poets who have pursued the same goal of creating poetry for a wide audience, and who cherish the same values of accessibility, relevance, and lack of pretension.

Keith Tuma’s Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers, begins with the blunt statement that ‘In the United States, British poetry is dead’ (p. 1). Tuma sets out to examine the reasons for American indifference to contemporary British poetry and to explore the reluctance to celebrate or even acknowledge American influences on poetry in modern Britain. In doing so, he returns to a persistent debate of the post-war period about the relationship between British and American poetry, whether nationality marks a definitive break in poetic styles and forms, or whether indeed language is the determining factor. Tuma does not provide a satisfactory resolution to these debates (nor should he), but he rehearses the issues and controversies involved in considerable depth in the first half of his book, ‘Histories’. The latter half, ‘Readings’, is more innovative and remarkable. Tuma uses the framework of Anglo-American poetic relations to explore the role of the avant-garde and the legacy of modernism in British poetry, beginning with a chapter on Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’. His essay on Bunting’s Briggflatts is compelling in the way in which it connects the poem with the cultural politics of regional, post-imperial England. A lengthy chapter on ‘Alternative British Poetries’ displays an impressive understanding of the cultural dynamics of contemporary British poetry, and discusses in some depth the marketing hype surrounding the ‘New Generation’ poets, the London and Cambridge groups, and the work of Peter Riley, Allen Fisher, Geraldine Monk, Tom Raworth, and Roy Fisher. In the final chapter Tuma considers Kamau Brathwaite’s X/Self volume as a way of decentring Anglo-American traditions, and argues the case through Brathwaite that Black British poetry itself deconstructs the oppositions between modernist and postmodernist, conventional and experimental, while also paradoxically renewing faith in the possibilities of ‘nation-language’. It is in the latter half of his book that Tuma’s focus on Anglo-American poetic relations really rewards the critical reader, whether American, British, or otherwise, for in those four essays he makes a persuasive case for the value, diversity, and significance of modern British poetry.

Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century is a collection of the lectures, essays and reviews of the poet and critic Eamon Grennan. The earliest piece in the collection dates from 1977, the latest from 1998, but most appeared first in the 1980s. Grennan declares in his preface his predilection for ‘close reading’ of poems, which are ‘rooted in the “presence’* of an author and, by implication, the author’s context’ (p. xv). This is borne out in his pieces, which ponder the relationship between individual poems and their authors’ experiences, and which dismiss contemporary theoretical and critical approaches as constrictive and combative. Grennan aims instead to return the reader to ‘the practical, substantive presence of the actual literary text itself in its body of language’ (p. xvi). There is perhaps a little too much protest and posturing in the preface, which, in setting its author up as some sort of ‘palaeocritic’, misrepresents the real strengths of many pieces in the collection. Grennan’s thoughtful probing of Yeats’s poetry collections, of the poems of Ni Chuilleanain and McGuckian, and of sexuality and power in Irish poetry since The Tain makes for rewarding and entertaining reading. His evaluations of lesser-known poets such as Padraic Fallon, Richard Murphy, and Michael Hartnett are worthy contributions too. Most of the pieces bear the hallmarks of the critic or reviewer engaging closely with the book before him (and there is an emphasis in many of the pieces on books rather than individual poems). But when Grennan strays from the mould of reviewer, as he does in discussing MacNeice’s representations of Ireland, or in his essay on sexuality in Irish poetry, he is equally adept and assured. The collection as a whole has no great design or organizing principle, but consists instead of thirty-one diverse and free-standing engagements with poetry (and occasionally prose). What brings it together is Grennan’s obvious pleasure in reading, his ability to embark on an imaginative journey to understand poetic language and form, and his prioritization of the intimacy between reader and text. This latter quality can become somewhat stifling at times, however, more for the questions Grennan refuses to pursue than those he does.

Paul Bentley’s The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion and Beyond is a short, lucid study of Hughes’s styles, themes, and contexts. Bentley professes from the beginning his interest in accounting for how the ‘poems tick as poems’ (p. 1), and his explanations of the stylistic and thematic development of Hughes’s poetry are compelling. The book is arranged in chronological sequence, so that, after an introductory discussion of Hughes’s poetic influences and treatments of myth, Bentley follows his poetic career from The Hawk in the Rain [1957] up to New Selected Poems, 1957–1994 [1995]. This includes a brief but illuminating discussion of Hughes’s differences from the Movement poets, an intriguing and persuasive consideration of the influence of Plath on Hughes, and inventive chapters on Crow and Cave Birds. Bentley states in the introduction his belief that Hughes’s poems draw attention to the materiality of their own medium, and this leads him to consider Hughes in the light of the post-structuralist thinkers Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Although he leans a little too heavily on finding correspondences between particular aspects of Hughes’s poems and Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, or Kristeva’s notions of semiotics, Bentley does succeed in making Hughes’s poetry converse intelligently with poststructuralist ideas of language and reality. The study closes with a discussion of Hughes as the Poet Laureate, focusing attention on his relationship to post-war England. Here his judgements are hard to fault: ‘What lends Hughes’s poems their distinctive form of ambivalence’, he writes, ‘their ability to wrong-foot and disturb the reader, is their sense of complicity with the energies—natural, religious, historical—they interrogate’ (pp. 118–19). In writing a critical and inventive introduction to Hughes’s work, and a contribution to situating him within modern and postmodern British poetry, Bentley’s book manages to be insightful and accessible at the same time.

Dennis Brown’s short study, John Betjeman, aims to take seriously the popularity of Betjeman’s poetry and to argue for its relevance to ‘contemporary social conditions, poetics and literary theory’ (p. 3). Brown begins by considering the poet’s formal conservatism, using psychoanalytic conceptions of ‘containment’ to argue that the traditional verse forms he favoured throughout his poetic career were strategies for containing adverse reaction to the subtle subversions of his poetry. Brown eschews the conventional chronological or developmental model for such studies in favour of four interrelated essays which discuss Betjeman’s ‘profoundly unsettling’ (p. 20) meditations on masculinity, Englishness, and Christian spirituality. In these essays, Brown argues in lucid and bold fashion that Betjeman was ‘an early poet of multiculturalism’ (p. 37), an advocate of a ‘devotia postmoderna of tolerant ecumenism’ (p. 63), and a ‘postmodern environmentalist’ (p. 43). A comparison with Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard stretches credibility a little, but Brown’s argument for serious consideration of Betjeman as a postmodern English poet is stimulating and intelligent.

Brown’s study of Betjeman appears in the Writers and their Work series published by Northcote House. In the same series, Deryn Rees-Jones has written a valuable introduction to the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. Rees-Jones sets Duffy’s work in the contexts of contemporary feminism, psychoanalysis, surrealism, and experimentation with poetic language. She resists categorizing Duffy with convenient labels, and instead positions her within a complex network of influences and styles. The first of four chapters analyses the influence of Adrian Henri, Antonin Artaud, and surrealist art on Duffy’s work. Chapter 2 considers the role of ventriloquism as both theme and device, particularly its implications for representations of women. The third and longest chapter is also the strongest, analysing in detail Duffy’s poem of lesbian seduction, ‘Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer’, to assess how she uses the conservative form of love poetry to articulate the complex relationship between self and other, and between liberation and constraint. The final chapter discusses Duffy’s recent work, and, in brief, some of her preoccupations: nostalgia, desire, loss, the surreal imagination, and the inadequacy of language. Carol Ann Duffy explores the poet’s impact to date on contemporary poetry, and achieves a fine balance between surveying her oeuvre and considering how particular poems work.

Timothy Clark, Charles Tomlinson, also published in the Writers and their Work series, focuses on Tomlinson’s experimental approaches to poetry and art. Chapter 1 discusses the significance of place, landscape, and ecology, and suggests that Tomlinson anticipated recent preoccupations with global ecological issues in his early work in the 1950s. The second and longest chapter identifies and analyses the ‘artisanal and musical skills that have made [Tomlinson] perhaps the most rhythmically innovative poet of his generation’ (p. 15). In the third chapter Clark considers the relationship between Tomlinson’s poetry and his paintings, particularly his adoption of surrealist techniques. Finally, Clark turns to Tomlinson’s work as a translator and shows how his multilingual practices and collaborations (including the quadrilingual poem sequence Renga, on which he collaborated with Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, and Edoardo Sanguined) have influenced and borne out his approaches to poetry. For Clark, Tomlinson embraces cross-cultural experimentation, and continues a distinctive strand of modernist interrogations of language, form, and reality. His book surveys Tomlinson’s poetic and artistic career thoroughly and clearly, and argues for his importance to post-war English poetry.

Medbh McGuckian’s pamphlet, Horsepower Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, is an insightful, thoughtful consideration of its subject. McGuckian begins by surveying the significance of the car in modern Irish poetry generally, and observes that no collection of Heaney’s poetry to date is without its reference to the car. In Heaney’s work, she argues, the car is encountered as a casual motif frequently, and occasionally it becomes ‘a virtual alter ego, a Yeatsian mask, a character in its own right’ (p. 3). McGuckian is skilful and perceptive in her analysis of the place of the car in Heaney’s poetry, to such an extent that it becomes a kind of prismatic perspective on his oeuvre as a whole, leading to discussion of themes of sexuality, mortality, nature, politics, creativity, vision, travel, and love. The car at once symbolizes the liberating experience of travel, enabling the poet’s encounters with natural beauty, for example, while at the same time being an everpresent image of explosion, carnage, and terror, a constant reminder of the political turmoil of Northern Ireland. For all that, McGuckian closes with the observation that what is astounding about Heaney’s use of the car in his poetry is the ease with which it appears ‘almost imperceptibly’ (p. 34) beside words and symbols of much more traditional and ancient bearing. It fits as comfortably into Heaney’s imaginative landscape as the spade, hedgerow, or pen, a point which McGuckian makes from the outset by noting that, when Heaney conceived ‘Digging’, it was a steering-wheel and not a pen which rested ‘Between finger and thumb’. The car appears in Heaney’s poetry, according to McGuckian, as poetic vehicle, as symbol, as a place as well as a connection, as a protective shell and a window on the world.

Books Reviewed