University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature

Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763-1813

John Barrell — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Born in Ruthin, Denbighshire, Edward Pugh (1763–1813) was a Welsh-speaking artist and writer who worked as a miniaturist in London, exhibiting frequently at the Royal Academy. But Pugh’s passion was the landscape, and he painted remarkable views of North Wales that not only captivate but also reveal the development of the Welsh economy and Welsh national consciousness. Pugh also wrote and illustrated a fascinating, informative, and humorous account of a tour of North Wales around 1800—one of the only travel books written at that time by someone who could actually converse with the inhabitants.

Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763–1813 is the first book to consider the work of this nearly forgotten Welsh artist and writer in detail, linking the history of art in Wales with the social history of the country. John Barrell shows how Pugh’s pictures and writings portray rural life and social change in Wales during his lifetime, from the effects of the war with France on industry and poverty, to the need to develop and modernize the Welsh economy, to the power of the landowners. Almost all of the pictures and accounts we have today of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North Wales were made by English artists and writers, and none of these, as Barrell demonstrates, can tell us about life in North Wales with the same depth and authenticity as does Pugh.

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Eleanor Johnson — Sat, 11 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature.

Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

Power to Do Justice

Bradin Cormack — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

English law underwent rapid transformation in the sixteenth century, in response to the Reformation and also to heightened litigation and legal professionalization. As the common law became more comprehensive and systematic, the principle of jurisdiction came under particular strain. When the common law engaged with other court systems in England, when it encountered territories like Ireland and France, or when it confronted the ocean as a juridical space, the law revealed its qualities of ingenuity and improvisation. In other words, as Bradin Cormack argues, jurisdictional crisis made visible the law’s resemblance to the literary arts.
A Power to Do Justice shows how Renaissance writers engaged the practical and conceptual dynamics of jurisdiction, both as a subject for critical investigation and as a frame for articulating literature’s sense of itself. Reassessing the relation between English literature and law from More to Shakespeare, Cormack argues that where literary texts attend to jurisdiction, they dramatize how boundaries and limits are the very precondition of law’s power, even as they clarify the forms of intensification that make literary space a reality.

Tracking cultural responses to Renaissance jurisdictional thinking and legal centralization, A Power to Do Justice makes theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological contributions that set a new standard for law and the humanities and for the cultural history of early modern law and literature.

Manuscript and Print in London c.1475-1530

Julia Boffey — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

What perceptions did people have of printed material after its introduction into England? How did these perceptions determine their own practices in dealing with books and documents—both as producers and consumers? In Manuscript and Print in London c.1475–1530, Julia Boffey explores the evolving relationship of Londoners with handwritten manuscripts and printed material after William Caxton’s establishment of a printing business at Westminster in 1476. Drawing from a wide range of surviving materials from the period, Boffey approaches textual production from the points of view of readers and writers, investigating the choices they made and shedding light on the different ways that both adapted to the availability of the new technology. Copiously illustrated with images from manuscripts and printed books, this volume will break new ground in the growing area of scholarship on print culture and the history of the book.

R. S. Thomas

M. Wynn Thomas — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

During his lifetime R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) achieved notoriety as the Ogre of Wales, a Welsh extremist, and a poet of serial obsessions. Published to mark the centenary of his birth, this volume explores those elements that fueled Thomas’s fiercely intense imagination, including Wales, his family, and his vexed relationship with religion, as well as with his best-known character, Iago Prytherch. Here, these familiar obsessions are set in several unusual contexts that bring his poetry into startling new relief: his war poems are considered alongside his early work focusing on the English topographical tradition; comparisons with Borges and Levertov underline the international dimensions of his concerns; the intriguing “secret code” of some of his Welsh-language references is cracked; and his painting-poems, including several hitherto unpublished, are brought to the forefront.

Rediscovering Margiad Evans

Kirsti Bohata; Katie Gramich — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Margiad Evans (1909–58) was an outstanding writer of the Welsh borderlands whose work was widely admired during her lifetime. She wrote novels, short stories, poetry, and autobiographical works of great originality and nuance. Her life was transformed in later years by epilepsy, followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumor that led to her early death. This major volume of essays sets out to rediscover the extraordinary work of Margiad Evans, from her use of folktale and the Gothic to the influence of her epilepsy on her creative work.

Novel Science

Adelene Buckland — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Novel Science is the first in-depth study of the shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful writings of the gentlemen of the “heroic age” of geology and of the contribution these men made to the literary culture of their day. For these men, literature was an essential part of the practice of science itself, as important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and observation. The reading and writing of imaginative literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate, and give shape and meaning to millions of years of previously undiscovered earth history.

Borrowing from the historical fictions of Walter Scott and the poetry of Lord Byron, they invented geology as a science, discovered many of the creatures we now call the dinosaurs, and were the first to unravel and map the sequence and structure of stratified rock. As Adelene Buckland shows, they did this by rejecting the grand narratives of older theories of the earth or of biblical cosmogony: theirs would be a humble science, faithfully recording minute details and leaving the big picture for future generations to paint. Buckland also reveals how these scientists—just as they had drawn inspiration from their literary predecessors—gave Victorian realist novelists such as George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens a powerful language with which to create dark and disturbing ruptures in the too-seductive sweep of story.

Shakespeare and the Law

Bradin Cormack; Martha C. Nussbaum; Richard Strier — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life, and trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare’s thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law’s technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects.

Shakespeare and the Law opens with three essays that provide useful frameworks for approaching the topic, offering perspectives on law and literature that emphasize both the continuities and contrasts between the two fields. In its second section, the book considers Shakespeare’s awareness of common law thinking and common law practice through examinations of Measure for Measure and Othello. Building and expanding on this question, the third part inquires into Shakespeare’s general attitudes toward legal systems. A judge and a former solicitor general rule on Shylock’s demand for enforcement of his odd contract; and two essays by literary scholars take contrasting views on whether Shakespeare could imagine a functioning legal system. The fourth section looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, both in the plays and in our own world. The volume concludes with a freewheeling colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Judge Richard Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier that covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion.

Celebrating the sometimes fractious intellectual energy produced by scholars and practitioners tackling the question of Shakespeare and the law, this collection is a resource and provocation for further thinking and ongoing discussion.

Curious World of Dickens

Clive Hurst; Violet Moller — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Charles Dickens is among the greatest English novelists, and the power of his prose can be found in his portrayals of the harsh social realities of his time, from the depiction of poverty-stricken orphan Oliver Twist to the squalor of the slums and skewering of the justice system in Bleak House.

Published to celebrate the twohundredth anniversary of Dickens’s birth, this book brings together quotations from Dickens’s novels and letters with photographs of their original covers and Victorian-era images—among them, prints, posters, and newspaper pieces—that shed light on the topics about which Dickens writes. Ordered by theme, the book covers such topics as schools in Victorian England, domestic entertainment, the introduction of the railroad, and the poor conditions in prisons and workhouses, which loom large in Dickens’s novels—and, indeed, his own childhood. Dickens was also an avid theater enthusiast who arranged productions and public readings of many of his works, and this book explores his role throughout his later years in adroitly adapting his novels for the stage.

The Curious World of Dickens breathes new life on this momentous occasion into the vibrant world inhabited by Dickens and his characters.

English Manuscripts Before 1400

A. S. G. Edwards; Orietta Da Rold — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The latest volume in the well-established English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 series focuses on early English manuscripts copied before 1400. The thirteen essays demonstrate the complex multicultural and multilingual written culture of this period, examining works written in Old and Middle English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman. Contributors explore a variety of approaches to hitherto neglected topics, such as the historical and cultural importance of documentary records, from charters and forgeries to genealogical chronicles. Other essays examine aspects of the material book, addressing the function of script and illustration and the transmission of early texts into the Renaissance. Contributing scholars include Mark Chambers, Aidan Conti, Michael Gullick, Jennifer Jahner, Erik Kwakkel, Katherine Lowe, Andrew Prescott, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Philip Shaw, Don Skemer, Louise Sylvester, D. A. Woodman, and George Younge.

Fragments and Assemblages

Arthur Bahr — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city’s literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London’s literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.