07/01/2024:

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.

06/27/2024:

“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.

06/10/2024:

And This Gives Life to Baby Shoes: Textual and Other Reasons for Canonicity. A Response to David Fishelov

Lothar Černý, Connotations, Vol. 33: 137-39.

Abstract

This response to David Fishelov suggests that the establishment of canonicity could/should be described as the result not only of textual and aesthetic qualities but as a semiotic process that extends the borders of genre.

05/26/2024:

And This Gives Life to Baby Shoes: Textual and Other Reasons for Canonicity¹

David Fishelov, Connotations, Vol. 33: 121-36.

Abstract

In this article, I first relate briefly to several important characteristics of the six-word story “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” erroneously attributed to Hemingway and the best known and canonical example of flash fiction. I then suggest that the canonicity of this story stems from these characterics and from certain oppositions within and between them that contributed to the important aesthetic value of complexity, unity, and intensity. Finally, I argue that these textual characteristics and their aesthetic values, which have indeed contributed to the story’s canonicity, should be considered as necessary—but not in themselves sufficient—conditions for such canonicity. For the story to become canonical, it had to also meet a hospitable cultural environment and inspire other writers to relate to it as a model, producing many and varied echoes and dialogues.

05/11/2024:

The Ghost Story in Spenser’s Daphnaïda

Kreg Segall, Connotations, Vol. 33: 98-120.

Abstract

This study of Spenser’s Daphnaïda responds to David Lee Miller’s contentions that (1) this elegy is a purposely bad poem; (2) that Daphnaïda is more suitable to historical consideration than formal analysis; and (3) that the reader is meant to see Alcyon, the mourner in the poem, as primarily a figure for mockery. This essay complicates the work of mourning in the poem by considering its subtle tonal shifts and changes of register throughout Alcyon’s lament and offers a formal reading of the poem that considers the effect of the poet-narrator’s introduction on our subsequent evaluation of Alcyon and the poem as a whole.

04/18/2024:

Anthologizing Shakespeare's Sonnets

Thomas Kullmann, Connotations, Vol. 33: 63-97.

Abstract

Since antiquity, schools, universities, and other institutions have canonized literary texts, that is, made choices as to what students should read and study. The present article intends to explore on which grounds these choices are made, using Shakespeare’s sonnets as a test case. Altogether, 38 collections of sonnets, published from 1783 to 2023, were examined. From Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861) onwards, a canon of sonnets emerges which were reprinted again and again, including sonnets 18, 73, and 116. The article suggests that the preference given to certain sonnets may be due to the modes of communication they use. While sonnet 2 (a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century favourite), in which second-person messages and the “conative” function (according to Jakobson’s communicative model of language) are predominant, has gone out of fashion, sonnets containing first-person, or “emotive,” messages (like sonnet 30), non-personal, or “referential,” messages (like sonnet 116), and self-referential, or “metalingual,” messages (like sonnet 18) have been the staple of anthologies ever since Palgrave. This choice of sonnets was obviously influenced by literary tastes informed by Romanticism and the nineteenth-century veneration of the wisdom of poets.

These preferences are all the more remarkable as they do not correspond to Shakespeare’s own: only 26 of the 154 sonnets can be classified as predominantly emotive, 22 as referential, nine as conative/referential, and fourteen as self-referential, as opposed to 33 which privilege conative statements, and 50 which [→ 64] mingle emotive and conative functions in a singular way, unique to Shakespeare (like sonnet 61). These I-and-thou sonnets, like the second-person sonnets, have clearly been neglected by nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century anthologists. We may conclude that existing anthologies often provide a biased picture of Shakespeare the poet, and that texts discarded and forgotten might be more representative of their author and period than canonized works.

03/23/2024:

From Rivers to Fountains: Henry Vaughan’s Secular and Sacred Inaugurations

Jonathan Nauman, Connotations, Vol. 33: 48-62.

Abstract

Henry Vaughan began his poetic career in emulation of the occasional verse of the Jonsonian coteries; and the pastoral title poem “To the River Isca,” which opens his Olor Iscanus collection, evokes an explicit classicist pedigree of canonical river poets that Vaughan effectively sought to join. This self-canonizing effort was effectively revised and transfigured in Vaughan’s conversion to sacred verse, with the introductory lyric to Silex Scintillans, “Regeneration,” advancing a visionary pastoral sequence merging Vaughan’s new devotional work with the sacred-canonical Song of Songs.

03/12/2024:

Literary Anthologies: A Case Study for Metacognitively Approaching Canonicity²

William E. Engel, Connotations, Vol. 33: 18-47.

Abstract

Anthologies promote and perpetuate what amounts to a canon. The roots run deep in the Western tradition, with the Anthologia Graeca, a collection of Classical and Byzantine Greek literature modelled on Meleager of Gadara (first century BCE), using the term “flower-gathering” (ἀνθολογία) to describe this literary exercise. Mixing his own works with those of forty-six others, Meleager arranged “a garland” that ended up establishing a paradigm for the ages. The trope reached a kind of apogee in Tudor England, buttressed with criteria for critical assessment and instructions for the proper way to enjoy, for example, Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet nosgay, or pleasant posye contayning a hundred and ten phylosophicall flowers. The “anthology,” as such, raises important questions about the curation, preservation, and even the prefigured afterlife of literary works notwithstanding shifts in aesthetic sensibilities and once-novel stylistic inventions. The decisions underlying the culling and arrangement of material for anthologies—most notably those produced and disseminated by corporate titans who impose their imprimatur on a wide range of “anthologies” and thus set standards for a generation at least—warrants closer scrutiny. As editors of two such anthologies (The Memory Arts in Renaissance England and The Death Arts in Renaissance England, both with Cambridge University Press), our team experienced periodic crises of conscience when

confronting the reality that our determinations implicitly were setting the canon for a period-specific collection of literary excerpts. We therefore sought intentionally to foreground our deliberations concerning canon formation and to articulate our principles for proceeding, resulting in a metacognitive approach to producing—as duly is reflected in the subtitle: “A Critical Anthology.”

02/29/2024:

The Yellow Leaf: Age and the Gothic in Dickens

Franziska Quabeck, Connotations, Vol. 33: 1-17.

Abstract

Dickens was a fashionable writer, and from what we know he was also a very fashionable person, but the use of the colour yellow in his works differs surprisingly from the fashion of his times. He hardly uses canary yellow for his materials, and he abstains from the use of yellow as an indication of brightness and symbol of optimism and hope, too. Yellow in Dickens is not a gay or illuminating colour, and it seems that Dickens creates his own logic of colours, in which he uses yellow predominantly not as a primary colour but as a tinge, a discolouring of that which was formerly white, or conceived of as white. This does not mean, however, that the use of the colour in his works is not heavily invested with symbolism—quite the opposite. Dickens uses his own colour code, and yellow signifies both the literal and metaphorical imprisonment in and of old age.

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"I Wish I Were a Tree": George Herbert and the Metamorphoses of Devotion

Debra K. Rienstra, Connotations, Vol. 32: 145-164.

Abstract

This article considers Herbert’s engagement with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in order to explain the speaker’s wish to turn into a tree in “Affliction (I)” and “Employment (II)”. I argue that, though Ovid’s presence in “The Church” is muted, it does irrupt especially at key moments of devotional crisis. Herbert “resorts” to Ovidian strategies as a subtle form of protest when the God of his poems seems most to resemble the gods in Metamorphoses. Further, viewing these moments through an Ovidian lens helps reveal an underlying aesthetic of transformation in the sequence and an emphasis on figuration as a devotional tool. From this point of view, the sequence as a whole becomes a kind of slow-motion metamorphosis in which the speaker—not unlike in Ovidian myth—undergoes a transformative fragmentation. For Herbert, paradoxically, this fragmentation, in which human subjectivity appears momentarily lost, enables the speaker to reach a deeper state of communion with God.