Andrew Tate

‘He Himself with his Human Air’: Browning Writes the ‘Body of Christ’

We can share our Christmas thoughts with others, too, who do not use our words, nor, perhaps, enjoy the privileges that we have been taught to value. The happy gatherings of relations and friends, adorned with quaint old customs consecrated to Christmas by the venerable traditions of northern lands, the genial observances of our kindred tribes in Germany, the more gorgeous ceremonial of southern Europe, clothing alike its devotions and its amusements with the beautiful drapery of refined and civilising art—all have a claim to our sympathies, and can enter into our recollection, now that Christmas comes again.

Now - here is my secret : ritual and epiphany in Douglas Coupland's fiction.

Although Douglas Coupland, the Canadian novelist, is celebrated as a modish interpreter of contemporary culture, his fiction has demonstrated an increasing interest in religious belief. These narratives, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to his most recent, Miss Wyoming (1999), feature covert images of conversion, baptism, and parable. The article will trace Couplands critique of materialism and its relationship with aspects of both the Puritan and Transcendentalist traditions of North America. Particular focus will be given to the writers use of epiphany as a structuring motif in two of his five novels, Generation X and Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), and one volume of short stories, Life After God (1994).

The First Theatrical Pre-Raphaelite? Ruskin’s Molière

In a letter published in the British Weekly under the title ‘Books which have influenced Me’, written from his Coniston home, Brantwood, on 14 May 1887, Ruskin cites a personal canon that includes, unsurprisingly, the works of Dante Alighieri, specific poems by Lord Byron and the fiction of Sir Walter Scott. The list is idiosyncratic, chiefly for those books and writers that it omits: neither William Wordsworth nor Thomas Carlyle, such potent literary forefathers of this by now distinguished man of letters, is referred to, and the Bible and Shakespeare are similarly missing. However, amongst an exalted body of Classical figures, Catholic visionaries and Romantic poets are, less predictably, a number of French volumes: Ruskin confesses a predilection for ‘[a]ll good’ modern French comedy, Sensation novels, theology and science. The brightly Francophile tone of the letter suggests that France had come to represent an intellectual sanctuary for a writer more commonly associated with the defence of his own national heritage. However, always conscious of aesthetic hierarchy, Ruskin distinguishes one specific writer from the ranks of this diverse company. Whereas two of the major English Romantics, Coleridge and Keats were, he suggests, influential in his ‘youth’ and the Scottish poet Robert Burns became important as he grew ‘older and wiser’, Moliere is the single figure he claims to have valued ‘always’.2