Senior: In the Grip of Minos

In the Grip of Minos

Confessional Discourse in Dante, Corneille, and Racine

Matthew Senior

Tracing the history of confession from the Desert Fathers through the Lateran decree (1215) and the Council of Trent (1543–63),Matthew Senior examines the significance of these events and the role of confessional discourse in works by Dante, Corneille, and Racine.

Using a multidisciplinary approach, Senior focuses his study on Minos, the legendary king of Crete and judge of both Homer’s and Virgil’s underworlds. Dante transforms Minos into a demon who forces the souls of the damned to confess as they enter the underworld; likewise, the ritual of confession opens the gates of Purgatory. Dante’s afterlife, according to Senior, is an extrapolation of the Lateran decree, a total vision of humanity governed and punished by its own verity.

Following Trent, a new mode of confession makes its appearance, a baroque discourse in which “the heart speaks to the heart.” Senior argues that Corneille similarly creates a new kind of hero who distinguishes himself as much by the confessional trial of self-statement as by his military exploits. In the work of Racine, Senior notes, Minos appears again, tormenting the conscience of Phèdre.

Throughout Senior’s challenging inquiry, major canonical texts are illuminated by the contemporary debate about the modern equivalent of confession—psychoanalysis. Senior engages the work of Freud, Lacan, Foucault, and the Lacanian feminists in an attempt to establish the religious and literary genealogy of psychoanalysis and to explore its potential as a critical tool and, more important, its ability to bind and loose men and women.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Shankman: Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Journals and Letters

Lillian F. Shankman
Edited by Abigail Burnham Bloom and John Maynard

Peopled with such literary figures as Tennyson, Trollope, Browning, George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, this book provides Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s complete journals written in 1864–65 and 1878, an ample selection of her most interesting letters, and a number of significant letters written to her. Because only small portions of each journal have been previously published, this important collection presents an essential document of Ritchie’s inner life, especially the account of her response to her father’s death.

As the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, Anne Thackeray Ritchie was well acquainted with the literary social scene of London. At an early age she became her father’s companion and hostess after her mother went permanently insane; like her father, she became a best-selling writer of novels and articles. Her journals and letters offer a portrait of Ritchie, of her relationship with her father, and of mid-Victorian middle-class life in London and abroad.

Lillian Shankman’s lively narrative creates a useful context that enables the reader to follow the treads of biography and major themes in Ritchie’s thinking and works. Shankman furnishes the reader with an accurate and warm account of Ritchie’s exceptional life and milieu and her development as a woman of letters. Any future discussion of Ritchie must include this volume.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org