Kathryn Hume

The concept of the hall in Old English poetry

The range of cultural assumptions underlying Old English poetry and the sentiments and sources which inspired it, not to mention the methods of composition – oral or written – are subjects of vigorous dispute. Much that was once considered indigenous and Germanic is now being revalued in the light of Latin analogues and works accepted for a century as secular are being treated by many as Christian doctrinal discourses. Since the intellectual milieu is so uncertain a basis for interpreting controversial poems, other approaches are needed. One that suggests itself is the exploration of idea-complexes. When a theme or situation recurs in a number of poems, in widely differing contexts, patterns of association can be isolated and analysed. The theme of exile, for example, is a centre of a cluster of ideas. Another is the concept of the hall: what is looked to for safety and what is feared as a threat to that security make apt points of departure for a study of a cultures major assumptions. Moreover, because the hall is the focus for conflicting attitudes, the array of associations proves useful to a more general understanding of the nature of Old English poetry.

Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, V. S. Naipaul

Four Contemporary Novelists offer accounts of the fiction of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V. S. Naipaul. The author has charted the development of each writer; identified dominant themes, controlling techniques, and informing sensibility; explained what each has tried to accomplish and compare theory to practice; provided an appropriate context for appreciation and evaluation of all parts of each canon; and made qualitative discriminations.

Romance: A Perdurable Pattern.

THOSE INTERESTED in the theory of genres know that a good argument can be made for the existence of an archetypal romance pattern, but few literary critics have chosen to explore its potentialities.1 Nomenclature is one persistent difficulty, for many famous works we call romances (such as Malorys Morte Darthur) get their generic label on other than structural or thematic grounds. More reasons for the patterns being ignored lie in the nature of the works themselves; many modern readers find unattractive such standard features as the polarization of good and evil, or the use of magic, marvels, and monsters-witness Edmund Wilsons notorious attack on Tolkiens trilogy. But the generic pattern manifests itself in too many works to deserve obscurity on such relatively trivial grounds. Pieces shaped to this mold are found among literary versions of classical myths, in the so-called Greek romances, numerous European folk tales, and many medieval and renaissance works both light and serious. True, the form suffered neglect in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-the prevailing taste for realism which condemned marvels and miracles produced Bildungsromane instead-but a few examples crop up in romantic and gothic narratives, and at present the same pattern is enjoying considerable vogue in fantasy and science fiction. The design

Moral Problematics in the Novels of Richard Powers

Richard Powerss novels all offer us two imperatives, and they conflict. One is to study and observe—science, nature, music, almost anything—and derive happiness from understanding their interconnections. The other is to help the vast majority of people in the world who live terrible lives. Powers tries to work out some kind of balance between the two, and while he finds no easy answer, he suggests that if our culture encouraged finding happiness internally through mental exertions, we might free ourselves from our consumerist-oriented patterns and thus perhaps open possibilities for improving our world.

Diffused Satire in Contemporary American Fiction

c 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2008/10502-0003

Neil Gaiman's Sandman as Mythic Romance

10.00 Works described as satires have become ever more diverse. Most twentieth-century satire theory was founded upon examples produced in eighteenth-century Britain, and those were varied to begin with: they included verse satire (heavily influenced by the classics), freer novelistic satire, prose squibs, lampoons, and genre-defying pieces like Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704). In later twentieth-century criticism, “menippean satire” became so wildly popular a term that Howard D. Weinbrot calls it “The Genre That Ate the World.”1 That very popularity caused definitions of menippean satire to fracture into two major and many minor types. The major types consisted of (1) carnivalesque satire based on bodyand lower-class orientation (Mikhail Bakhtin’s version) and (2) intellectual satire (Northrop Frye’s concept).2 Since Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and other large, complex fictions seemed menippean and at the same time encyclopedic, the ambitions of encyclopedism (as defined by Edward Mendelson) came to attach themselves to the intellectual variety of menippea, making that form even more difficult to define clearly.3

Black Urban Utopia in Wideman’s Later Fiction

The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman and many illustrators, is a two-thousand-page frame tale. Critics have focused on the enclosed tales and argue or assume that Gaimans concern is the nature of narrative. If we look at the frame, the actions of Morpheus/Dream, we find instead a mythic romance that heavily emphasizes death and the need for us to accept death, not recoil in horror or frantically resist it. This complementary reading, based on several theories of the romance form, helps explain the heavy reliance on imprisonment and death in the tales and also makes sense of using an attractive young woman to represent death.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre

John Edgar Wideman shines as one of America’s foremost writers. His fifteen volumes include Joycean modernist novels, memoir-meditations on race, postmodern historical novels and a love story. His life has exposed him to many facets of black American experience. He grew up in both privileged and unprivileged neighbourhoods, and his Homewood trilogy celebrates the spirit of his grandparents’ community, the historically black Homewood district in the then fast-decaying industrial city of Pittsburgh. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and won a Rhodes scholarship, and has taught in a variety of universities. However, he has also struggled with the emotional, legal and bureaucratic nightmares of a brother and a son in prison and a nephew slain in gang warfare. Despite his ever-increasing conviction that racialism is ineradicable in America, he has always been relatively restrained in his language. His analyses have grown more detailed, systematic and sophisticated in the works between Brothers and Keepers (1984), which concerns his brother Robby’s incarceration, and The Cattle Killing (1996), which explores racialism in colonial Pennsylvania. Rare, though, are direct expressions of rage like the wish to

Fantasy and mimesis : responses to reality in Western literature

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