01/27/2025:

Now Tell Me What Else It Means: Gender, Genre, and Canonicity in Contemporary Fiction

Francesca Pierini, Connotations, Vol. 34: 31-61.

Abstract

This article analyses three different texts—a short story, a novel, and a book chapter—that each focuses on a young female protagonist who strives for a modicum of emancipation and agency: A. S. Byatt’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1998), Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), and Jennifer Donnelly’s book chapter “Anne of Cleves,” from the young adult historical fictional work Fatal Throne: The Wives of Henry VIII Tell All (2018).

It specifically looks at the texts’ critique of the relations of power inscribed within the practice of the artistic profession. As the texts under scrutiny focus on the unbalanced gender relationships underlying the artistic process, they all mobilize pictorial perspective as the most accomplished (male) expression of a worldview in which women are “made,” celebrated, and manipulated, in function of a specific artistic and/or political design.

01/27/2025:

“Speak, Mnemosyne”: Genre Performance and Metagenre in Petina Gappah’s Memoir-Novel The Book of Memory

Katrin Berndt, Connotations, Vol. 34: 1-30.

Abstract

This article contends that the genre of the memoir-novel is inherently metageneric in purpose and design, arguing that it combines the novel’s aesthetic and thematic diversity with the memoir’s confessional self-reflection in order to produce self-referential comments on the characteristics of both genres, while simultaneously drawing attention to its own, hybrid form. Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015) is a memoir-novel that exemplifies several forms of metagenre. The analysis identifies the novel’s foregrounding of its own production as a story, its confessional qualities, the self-reflexive and retrospective construction of memories, and the implementation of telling names as a convention of other genres as explicit forms of metagenre; implicit forms include inter- and transtextual references to Greek mythology, to the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, and to different cultural narratives. Among the implicit forms, there is also the protagonist’s suggestion that her narration of her own story is based on unreliable memories, which undermines her credibility and hence deviates from the genre convention of the memoir-novel. Gappah’s novel moreover contains examples of implicit metagenre that are transformed into explicit forms: it foregrounds the

status of progressive myths as cultural narratives in order to subvert them, and it stages genre conventions of the memoir-novel as motifs. Both conversions are transpositions that have the potential to substantiate as well as undermine the subjective, confessional quality of the memoir-novel, suggesting a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of metagenre overall.

11/23/2024:

A Response to Franziska Quabeck: "The Yellow Leaf: Age and the Gothic in Dickens"

Robert L. Patten, Connotations, Vol. 33: 328-332.

Abstract

The response to Franziska Quabeck’s contribution to the debate on “Dickens and Colour” takes up a few points for further discussion and suggests that “yellow” does not always signify imprisonment in and of old age.

10/19/2024:

Herbert and Gerson Reconsidered: Mystical Music and the Conciliarist Strain of Natural Law in “Providence”¹

Angela Balla, Connotations, Vol. 33: 285-327.

Abstract

Recent scholarship has linked George Herbert to medieval French theologian Jean Gerson, an early theorist of individual natural rights and conciliarism. This essay proposes that Herbert knew Gerson’s ideas on divine and natural law in De Vita Spirituali Animae (1402) well enough to employ them in “Providence.” In this didactic poem, Herbert explains (through his sole use of italics) how divine and natural law work providentially. Pivotal for Herbert is Gerson’s redefinition of the concept of subjective right as a power or faculty intrinsic to an individual, whether human or non-human, since that redefinition underpins Gerson’s conciliarism. Herbert not only uses Gerson’s concept of subjective right at the outset of “Providence,” where the speaker relishes the “right” (4) to “write” (2) as God’s “Secretarie” (8), but Herbert also relies on Gerson’s notion of subjective right throughout the poem. Because Herbert thinks that non-humans have Gersonian subjective rights, he places these creatures within the scope of God’s “permission” (33), a jurisdiction traditionally reserved for rational beings free to act morally (or immorally). Herbert’s choice has immense philosophical and theological consequences, for, according to his Gersonian logic, non-humans serve God, humanity, and each other when they use their powers and faculties to obey God’s objective right, His “command” (33). Their behavior allows them to offer what amounts to moral witness indirectly. Significantly for Herbert, Gerson suggests that when creation exercises their subjective rights in obedience to God’s objective right, their obedience creates a cosmic concord, a mystical music. That concord bolsters Gerson’s conviction that a council of priests may hold a pope accountable. Herbert provocatively metaphorizes Gerson’s logic in “Providence” by depicting a council of creatures headed by “Man” (6) as the “worlds high Priest” (13), who learns to attune himself to the universal harmony in loving obedience to a self-sacrificing God.

09/26/2024:

The Providential Rose: Herbert’s Full Cosmos and Fellowship of Creatures

Paul Dyck, Connotations, Vol. 33: 259-284.

Abstract

Though Herbert’s writing is full of references to creatures and to human life in relation to non-human life, Herbert criticism has predominantly read his work as inner and devotional, often to the exclusion of the external and environmental. Richard Strier’s claim that Herbert’s deepest impulses require an empty cosmos, empty of all but him and God, is the most striking instance of this consensus. However, Wendell Berry finds in Herbert’s poem “Providence” the choice expression of a very different theological view, one that celebrates not private intimacy with God, but rather a public and creaturely intimacy, shared with all creation. This article traces a line of thought inspired by Berry’s observation, one that begins with Herbert’s instructions to parsons on gardening and cultivating herbs, through Herbert’s poem “The Rose” and its surface rejection of pleasure, to “Providence,” where we find a deeply formed and provocative picture of a cosmos in which humanity serves as priest, in a priesthood defined not by mastery but by attention and articulation. Returning to “The Rose,” we see that the poem grants the flower itself a mastery in which it teaches us, via its shared flesh and mind, as it participates with us in a fellowship of creatures.

08/30/2024:

“Vancouver Walking”: Contemporary Canadian Urban Poetry

Cecile Sandten, Connotations, Vol. 33: 226-258.

Abstract

As one of the most important Canadian metropolises, Vancouver is characterized in equal parts by its settler-colonial history, with its dominating industries, and its pre-colonial indigenous population and environment. Since writers often focus on these aspects in conjunction with present-day problems, I will discuss a selection of Vancouver writers who portray the city through their historical, cultural, and poetic renditions. More precisely, I will introduce the poet Meredith Quartermain and her poetry collection Vancouver Walking (2005), which appears in the title of my essay. In many of her poems, Quartermain’s poetic “counter-flâneurs” (Carrera Suárez 854) move through sensations of history and place as they find themselves at the coordinates of perceptible and historical sites, drawing attention to a plethora of colonial and settler-colonial as well as indigenous locations. Michael Turner’s Kingsway (1995) is a collection of poems centred around Vancouver’s oldest thoroughfare, Kingsway, both a destination and a point of departure, while Bud Osborn’s hundred block rock (1999) presents the world of Vancouver’s disempowered: criminals, drug addicts, and prostitutes. Accordingly, the emphasis of this essay will be on different flâneur figures roaming and perceiving the streets of Vancouver, a postcolonial metropolis, with its historical, architectural, social, and cultural complexities. The city will be analysed within the context of the poems’ formal-aesthetic components as well as its history, rendered visible and perceptible through a specific urban poetisation and a counter-flâneur perspective. The focus of the analysis will thus be on the representation of historical and contemporary figures, with a view to the spaces they prefer(red) and in which they move(d), of the historical and poetic imaginaries that often draw attention to Vancouver’s colonial legacy.

08/19/2024:

Lost and Found: Textual and Intertextual Retrieval in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Exhumation Letters and the “Willowwood” Sonnets

Carl Plasa, Connotations, Vol. 33: 190-225.

Abstract

This article is divided into two sections, the first of which is concerned with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s letters, written between 17 December 1868 and 26 October 1869, in which he considers the exhumation of the manuscript of his poems that he buried with his wife, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, following her probable suicide in February 1862. While this macabre act of textual retrieval, carried out in Highgate Cemetery on 5 October 1869, is the most infamous incident in Rossetti’s biography and mid-Victorian literary history in general, the argument here is that its epistolary construction has not received due critical examination, just as Rossetti’s voluminous correspondence as a whole remains the least studied element of his intermedial œuvre.

In its second section, the article turns the critical focus from Rossetti’s letters to his “Willowwood” sonnets, as first published in the Fortnightly Review on 1 March 1869, contending that this quartet of poems not only precedes the disinterment in a chronological sense but also contains several covert prefigurations of the episode, which it falls to the reader to uncrypt. Yet if the sonnets obliquely foreshadow the exhumation—and indeed are central to the very book (Poems [1870]) whose publication motivates the undertaking in the first place—they also have an ultimately more significant retrospective dimension, in the shape of their intertextual dialogue with John Keats’s “Isabella; or The Pot of Basil” (1820). As the article demonstrates, Rossetti’s turn to Keats’s text is neither random nor surprising since “Isabella” is itself marked by lurid scenes of burial and disinterment, loss and reclamation which would surely have resonated with the troubled artist-poet. What is surprising, however, is that “Isabella”’s presence in “Willowwood” has to date gone altogether unnoticed, despite the extensive critical debate which, in sharp contrast to Rossetti’s correspondence, the sonnets have provoked.

08/13/2024:

Color and Memory in David Copperfield: A Response to Georges Letissier

Annette Federico, Connotations, Vol. 33: 181-189.

Abstract

In his essay on memory and color in David Copperfield, Georges Letissier pays special attention to the construction of spatial memories. I build on this insight by showing how temporality is also represented through associations with color. Throughout David Copperfield, color recurs as a symbol or motif for both change and continuity, reflecting David’s perception of the swiftness of time––a reddening sundial, a room in twilight, a hill covered with snow––while also suggesting an implicit hope that the world will continue to turn, the years spin on for future generations. Letissier’s essay also invites me to think about how we remember books we have loved over time, and how our memories of colors we only see in the mind’s eye may shift and change with every reading. But this is not something we need worry about: rereading a novel, especially a novel of memory such as David Copperfield, may offer a consoling glimpse of the “prismatic hues” we cast upon our personal histories, and our reading lives.

07/02/2024:

Kinship and the River Cam: George Herbert’s Anthropocentrism Reconsidered

Sarah Crover, Connotations, Vol. 33: 159-80.

Abstract

George Herbert’s devotional poetry, with its minute attention to the natural world, ought to be well suited to early modern scholars with an ecocritical bent. However, his work is frequently dismissed as disappointingly anthropocentric or simply as a poor fit for ecological readings of the early modern literary canon. With a few exceptions, a more egalitarian reading of Herbert’s engagement with nature has been largely resisted. This article aims to address this lack and reexamine Herbert’s relationship with nature. I read Herbert’s writing as revealing an investment in a flatter ontological hierarchy than he is usually given credit for. While the debate about how much agency Herbert is willing to ascribe to the nonhuman in his poetry continues, little time has been spent comparing this work with his engagement with the natural world in his prose letters. Specifically, four Latin letters protesting the proposed drainage of the River Cam in 1620 merit more attention than they have received in this debate and may help, I suggest, clarify his position since they provide insight into how he applied his thinking in practice, not just in theory. Ultimately, Herbert’s anthropocentric engagement with the natural world is nuanced by his figuring of the relationship between humans and nature as one of familial kinship.

06/28/2024:

“It’s Exactly Like That”: Bearing Resemblance in Alice Oswald’s Memorial—A Response to Linne/Niederhoff and Hahnemann

Chloe Wheatley, Connotations, Vol. 33: 140-58.

Abstract

This article examines Alice Oswald’s use of simile in Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad (2011). While critical attention has tended to focus on the ways in which Oswald has cut apart and redistributed elements of her original, with particular emphasis on how she has adapted the Iliad’s epic similes, I argue that the shards of often anachronistic simile that Oswald has introduced into her descriptions of the dead invite the reader to discover new kinds of connection between ancient and contemporary experience. Building on work published in Connotations by Lena Linne and Burkhard Niederhoff, as well as the response to their article by Carolin Hahnemann, I argue that Memorial’s paratactic poetics invite the reader to explore not only emotional but also deeply intellectual points of engagement with Oswald’s canny adaptation.