Burns: Arthurian Fictions

Arthurian Fictions

Rereading the Vulgate Cycle

E. Jane Burns

Professor Burns’s rereading of the medieval French prose romance is to be understood in two senses of the term. She questions, in the first place, the premises that have shaped our understanding of the highly repetitive Arthurian tales of the five-story corpus known as the Vulgate Cycle, and suggests, in the second, a new model of reading based on precisely that repetition.

To reread these prose texts, she points out, is to put aside considerations of narrative coherence, authorial control, and linear development, and to embrace instead the digressive and often illogical narrative path suggested by the text’s typed episodes. The Vulgate’s individual tales are composed, in large measure, of narrative redundancies, elements that give the impression that the text is retelling itself constantly, always introducing new protagonists whose actions only repeat with some variation what other knights have already accomplished. In contrast to a more linear kind of reading that might attempt to forge logical links of cause and effect among disparate aventures—thereby making sequential sense of what is essentially and perhaps purposefully a nonlinear narrative structure—Professor Burns proposes a reading that will do just the opposite.

Reminding us that writing in the medieval period was, above all, a process of continual rewriting, and that the medieval “text,” as a result, has little of the narrative autonomy and coherence that we ascribe to, and expect of, printed works by named authors, Professor Burns advances an aesthetic for reading the prose romance that relies precisely on what have heretofore been considered its deficiencies: redundance, ellipsis, and self-contradiction.

Once we accept these features of composition as given, as forms of repetition that parallel the fundamental pluralism of the manuscript tradition in the medieval period, we can begin to see, she argues, how rewriting in various guises typifies the very nature and function of textuality in medieval vernacular romance. If the repetition of stock episodes in the Vulgate corpus poses special problems for the modern reader by defying those narrative constraints generally associated with the well-wrought tale, the allied repetition of competing authorial voices and the systematic recasting of chivalric adventures into interpretative glosses provide other instances of rewriting that work in concert to undermine the most basic tenets of modern literary history and medieval theological Truth.

Professor Burns thus addresses the problem of repetition in its largest scope, showing how different types of rewriting in the French Arthurian prose romances present a direct challenge to positivistic beliefs in single authorship, truthful interpretation, and realistic representation on the one hand, while subverting the specifically medieval traditions of Divine Text and Divine Voice, sacred meaning, and biblical representation on the other.

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Slatoff: The Look of Distance

The Look of Distance

Reflections on Suffering and Sympathy in Modern Literature—Auden to Agee, Whitman to Woolf

Walter J. Slatoff

Professor Slatoff is concerned with the question whether the reading and teaching of literature can be considered decent occupations in a world so much ordered by suffering as the one we inhabit; and his book explores this question by examining in detail a variety of responses to suffering—by authors, readers, and fictional characters. He is particularly interested in such issues as the relative merits of too much compassion as against too little; the relations between compassion and self-crucifixion; the appropriate distances between humans, between humans and other animals, and even between gods and men; the possibilities of human connection and the curious ways people have found to remain simultaneously together and apart; and “what might be called ‘moral aerodynamics’: the motions of highfliers like Icarus, Jesus, Vittorio Mussolini, and Jame Joyce, and the impacts of all sorts of things—from boys to bombs to violets—that can fall from the sky.” He has important things to say too about what he calls “the lonely embraces of artists” and how these generate and shape literary creations.

In a work that covers a remarkable range of major writers, and in which “fiction and reality have not been able to keep their usual distances,’ Professor Slatoff brings into a series of illuminating conjunctions a variety of writers and literary forms (stories, novels, poems, plays, essays, even songs) not usually brought together. He does so in an unconventionally personal voice and manner that he hopes will close to some extent what he regards as an uncomfortable gap between conventional modes of discourse about literature itself, a gap he finds “not only uncomfortable but indecent” when the subject is suffering and sympathy

Professor Slatoff sees his book as “the exposure of a way of responding to literature, a way that offers the reader some of the freedoms and opportunities afforded by current modes of criticism but without depriving the text of its more traditional powers and integrity. It is a way that enables a reader to exercise his sympathies, allows a story to become . . . ‘an occasion for coexistence imaginatively with a fictional person’s way of feeling’; it allows one to be educated or angered by a text, to let a text speak for one, to quarrel with it or simply to be in awe of it—in short, to respond in all the ways a live individual reader, as opposed to a theoretical one, might wish to respond to a text. It allows, finally, . . . the act of reading and writing to be a way of bearing witness, or, to use the language of Martin Buber, . . . a way of being ‘attentive’ and presenting ourselves with less than our usual armor.”

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Altick: Paintings from Books

Paintings from Books

Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900

Richard D. Altick

Breaking new ground in the study of British painting and literature, Richard D. Altick reveals in this informative and richly illustrated volume how the literary taste of the day was reflected, sometimes controversially, on the walls of London’s annual art exhibitions. Armed with catalogues that were miniature anthologies of poetic extracts, gallery-goers looked at prominent artists’ versions of their favorite characters and scenes in poetry, fiction, and the drama, and judged them according to the preconceptions already formed in their mind’s eye. Beginning in Hogarth’s time and the first years of the Royal Academy and lasting down to the end of Victoria’s reign, paintings with subjects from English literature—some twelve thousand are recorded—reaffirmed in a new context the ancient belief in the sisterhood of the arts.

In the early years, when the lofty goal of history painting in the grand style beckoned ambitious artists, they drew their subjects mainly from Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser. Later, as the affluent middle-class market for household art grew, and with it the demand for congenial literary subjects, Burns, Scott, Byron, and Tennyson joined the company of most-painted authors. From the Lady of Shalott and the nude Musidora in Thomson’s The Seasons to the fallen angels in Paradise Lost and domestic genre scenes from Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, British art served for more than a century and a half as a comprehensive mirror of the currents and eddies of literary taste.

The developments traced in this book, which is based on an exhaustive study of the graphic and printed annals of British art and the records of individual authors’ fame, makes it clear that we can say of literary pictures what Henry James once said of English art in particular: “English painting interests me chiefly, not as painting, but as English. It throws little light, on the whole, on the art of Titian and Rembrandt; but it throws a light which is to me always fresh, always abundant, always fortunate, on the turn of the English mind.”

Following the dozen chapters that constitute the narrative portion of the book, Parts Two and Three comprise a convenient guide to the art histories of each of Shakespeare’s plays and the works of some thirty other authors. A finding-list of reproductions of literary paintings and a large bibliography enhance the book’s value to readers interested in learning more about this hitherto neglected subject.

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Jann: The Art and Science of Victorian History

The Art and Science of Victorian History

Rosemary Jann

The historical, Rosemary Jann reminds us, was the common coin of the nineteenth century, the currency of its most characteristic art, and the security for its most significant intellectual transactions. Defenders of absolutes, whether rational or religious, learned to use history as an asset and not a liability; and uneasy relativists found some compensation in its didactic value. Rival ideologies competed for its sanctions. Poets and scientists looked to it for inspiration.

The Victorians plundered the past for the raw stuff of imagination, and shaped what they found to their own political, social, and aesthetic ends. The explanatory value of the biological, the developmental, and the narrative made the historical method the preeminent paradigm of their age. It asserted its authority over both science and social science, and became the “philosophical” way of understanding national as well as personal identity. For Victorians, learning to harness what Wilfred Ward characterized as the “Time-spirit of the Nineteenth Century” was the best way to escape being driven by it. Professor Jann argues that works of history illuminate most fully the strategies essential to the nineteenth century’s conquest of time. They are documents central to both the philosophical and literary dimensions of the Victorian mind. Standing at the intersection of its two ways of knowing, the rational and the imaginative, they perfectly reflect both that conflation of the scientific, the historical, and the philosophical so characteristic of Victorian thought, and that didactic use of the imagined real that was central to its art.

In examining the ways in which Victorian historiography fulfilled specific needs for its society, Dr. Jann consults the work of six historians: Thomas Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Babington Macaulay, James Anthony Froude, John Richard Green, and Edward Augustus Freeman. Each of them, she finds, built his public role on a private, essentially Romantic, attachment to the past. But though they recognized the importance of imagination to historical reconstruction, all understood and accepted the new standard of thoroughness and critical analysis demanded of the historian who would establish his facts on a “scientific” basis.

Ultimately, however, the responsibility of the “literary” historian to shape, to judge, and to justify was incompatible with the kind of detachment and induction mandated by professional history; for his primary obligation was, after all, not to his facts, but to his function and purpose as a teacher. The object of the “literary” historian was not history for its own sake, but for the sake of a wider society in increasing the even desperate need of guidance and reassurance. When, therefore, emerging professional began to shift their allegiance from the needs of the general audience to the demands of their peers, they seemed to be repudiating a vital cultural function. It is to measuring fully the dimensions of that function that this remarkable book is addressed.

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Hancher: The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books

The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books

Michael Hancher

“The Times, the chief newspaper of Victorian England, first reported the existence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland toward the end of an unsigned omnibus review that appeared the day after Christmas 1865. . . . For the Times reviewer, as for other contemporary readers of Alice’s Adventures, it was not Carroll’s text but the set of illustrations by John Tenniel that made the book worth noticing. Three days earlier the Pall Mall Gazette had praised the story as well as the illustrations, but it emphasized the illustrator’s name, not the author’s. Later the children’s journal Aunt Judy’s Magazine would begin its review of the book with a concise and telling statement of priorities: ‘Forty-two illustrations by Tenniel! Why there needs nothing else to sell this book, one would think.’

“In the [20th] century, Carroll’s fame as the author of the two Alice books has eclipsed that of his artist-collaborator. For a mix of reasons, Lewis Carroll, like Alice herself, has become a creature of popular legend. And yet Tenniel’s own contribution to the books is probably as well known as Carroll’s—perhaps more widely known, for there must be thousands of persons (children and adults alike) who are familiar with reproductions of some of the drawings, despite never having actually read the text.

“Despite, or perhaps because of, the paucity of scholarship on Tenniel, over the decades much legendary tradition has accumulated around several illustrations, and I have tried to give it a thorough and critical hearing.

“I think of this as a first book on the subject, not the last.” —from the introduction

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Scheuermann: Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Mona Scheuermann

Novels of social protest in the eighteenth century demonstrate an underlying commitment to the traditional structures of English life while denouncing the corruptions and debasement of those forms. The Failings of social institutions are attributed to the cumulative moral weakness of corrupt individuals, whose improvement through reeducation becomes the means to renew the social structure. Those who abuse power are singled out for special condemnation.

For much of the century, the novels reflect the spirit that conditions will be ameliorated by rational men of good will, once the problems have been exposed. But by the 1790s, a number of imperfectly understood social traumas—the French Revolution, the political paranoia of the English Treason Trials—make the impulse to reform seem at best insufficient and at worst, as in Caleb Williams, destructive. Professor Scheuermann’s work chronicles this loss of optimism.

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