‘Facing the Fact: Word and Image in Muriel Rukeyser’s “Worlds Alongside”’

This essay explores an example of a little-known, yet highly significant part of Rukeyser’s early oeuvre: the magazine photo-narrative. Profoundly engaged with the documentary expression of the 1930s, Rukeyser utilised the genre’s methods, aesthetics and images to create a hybrid text reporting the realities of the Depression in lyrical, imaginative terms. The result is a conflation of what Rukeyser understood to constitute poetry, and therefore life: the document and the unverifiable fact, presented in an innovative format that is shaped by Rukeyser’s ethical poetics of connection to construct lessons in creative exchange and being in the world.

Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine:'An Unprecedented Phenomenon'

Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine is inspired by the ongoing critical fascination with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the burgeoning recognition of its centrality to the Romantic age. Though the magazine itself was published continuously for well over a century and a half, this volume concentrates specifically on those years when William Blackwood was at the helm, beginning with his founding of the magazine in 1817 and closing with his death in 1834. These were the years when, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in 1832, Blackwood's reigned as 'an unprecedented Phenomenon in the world of letters.' The magazine placed itself at the centre of the emerging mass media, commented decisively on all the major political and cultural issues that shaped the Romantic movement, and published some of the leading writers of the day, including Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Galt, Felicia Hemans, James Hogg, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.

'This much-needed volume reminds us not only why Blackwood's was the most influential periodical publication of the time, but also how its writers, writings, and critical agendas continue to shape so many of the scholarly concerns of Romantic studies in the twenty-first century.' - Charles Mahoney, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut, USA

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
'A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own': A Passage to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; R.Morrison & D.S.Roberts
PART I: BLACKWOOD'S AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS
Beginning Blackwood's: The Right Mix of Dulce and Ùtile; P.Flynn
John Gibson Lockhart and Blackwood's: Shaping the Romantic Periodical Press; T.Richardson
From Gluttony to Justified Sinning: Confessional Writing in Blackwood's and the London Magazine; D.Higgins
Camaraderie and Conflict: De Quincey and Wilson on Enemy Lines; R.Morrison
Selling Blackwood's Magazine, 1817-1834; D.Finkelstein
PART II: BLACKWOOD'S CULTURE AND CRITICISM
Blackwood's 'Personalities'; T.Mole
Communal Reception, Mary Shelley, and the 'Blackwood's School' of Criticism; N.Mason
Blackwoodian Allusion and the Culture of Miscellaneity; D.Stewart
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the Scientific Culture of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh; W.Christie
The Art and Science of Politics in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, c. 1817-1841; D.Kelly
Prosing Poetry: Blackwood's and Generic Transposition, 1820-1840; J.Camlot
PART III: BLACKWOOD'S FICTIONS
Blackwood's and the Boundaries of the Short Story; T.Killick
The Edinburgh of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and James Hogg's Fiction; G.Hughes
'The Taste for Violence in Blackwood's Magazine'; M.Schoenfield
PART IV: BLACKWOOD'S AT HOME
John Wilson and Regency Authorship; R.Cronin
John Wilson and Sport; J.Strachan
William Maginn and the Blackwood's 'Preface' of 1826; D.E.Latané, Jr.
All Work and All Play: Felicia Hemans's Edinburgh Noctes; N.Sweet
PART V: BLACKWOOD'S ABROAD
Imagining India in Early Blackwood's; D.S.Roberts
Tales of the Colonies: Blackwood's, Provincialism, and British Interests Abroad; A.Jarrells
Selected Bibliography
Index

ROBERT MORRISON is Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His book, The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize. He has edited writings by Jane Austen, Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and John Polidori.
DANIEL SANJIV ROBERTS is Reader in English at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His publications include a monograph, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument (2000), and major critical editions of Thomas De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches and Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama; the latter was cited as a Distinguished Scholarly Edition by the MLA. He is currently working on an edition of Charles Johnstone's novel The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis for the Early Irish Fiction series.

Creating a Circus of Words, Music, and Sound: From Roaratorio to Owenvarragh

This article documents the creation of a work by the authors based on a score written by the composer John Cage entitled 'Owenvarragh: A Belfast Circus on The Star Factory.' The article is part of a documentary portfolio in the journal which also includes a volume of the poetry created by Dowling in accordance with the instructions of the Cage score, and a series of documentary videos on the creation of the work and its first performance. Cage's score is based on his work 'Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan's Wake' (1979) and it provides a set of detailed instructions for the musical realisation of a literary work. The article documents this first fully realised version of the score since Cage first produced 'Roaratorio' in 1979. The work, which was motivated by the Cage centenary year in 2012, musically realises Carson's book 'The Star Factory' (1998), a novelestic autobiography of Carson's Belfast childhood. The score required the creation of a fixed media piece based on over 300 field recordings of the sounds and places mentioned in the book, a volume of poetry created from the book which is recited to form the rhythmic spine of the work, and the arrangement of a performance including these two components along with live musical performance by the authors in collaboration with three other musicians under their direction, and a video installation created for the work. The piece has been performed three times: in association with the Sonorities 2012 Festival at Queen's University of Belfast (March 2012), at The Belfast Festival at Queen's (October 2012), and in the Rymer Auditoium of the University of York (June 2013).

Additional information:

The work which the article documents was conceived by Monaghan and Dowling, and the project was initiated by Monaghan after a she received a student prize to support its development and first performance. Elements of the project will be included in her PhD dissertation for which Dowling is a supervisor. Monaghan created the fixed media piece based on over 300 field recordings, the largest single aspect of realising Cage's score. Dowling was responsible for initiating the collaboration with Ciaran Carson, and for two other components: the creation of a volume of poetry derived from the literary work which is recited in the performance, and the creation of and supervision of the technical work on a video which accompanies the piece. The co-authors consulted closely during the work on these large components from May 2011 until March 2012 when the first performance took place. The co-authors also shared in numerous other artistic and organisational aspects of the production, including the arrangement and performnance of the music, musical direction to other performers, and marketing.

'Translated Verse': Milton's Latin Poetry in the Long Eighteenth Century

This chapter assesses ways in which the emergence in the long eighteenth century of a cluster of verse translations of Milton’s Poemata engendered an intellectual discourse and debate on translation itself, not dissimilar to the magazine warfare of the day. It argues that poetical renderings of Milton’s Latin verse, and the biographical and literary contexts in which they appeared, facilitated the interrogation of key issues that are still being debated by modern translation theorists: the nature and function of translation; the viability of rendering a source text in a target language that is also in this instance a poetic language; the potential ‘fetters’ which, in Drydenesque terms, might constrain ‘the verbal copier’; or by contrast the quasi-liberating fluency, the ‘fluent strategy’, attendant upon recourse to verse as translational medium; canonicity, amplification and omission; the much-debated issue of authorial equivalence, evinced here, it is suggested, by the editorial showcasing of the translator; and not least, the perennial question of translation as reading and critical interpretation. In short, verse renderings of Milton’s Latin poetry and the debates that they engendered assume a not inconsequential place in the history of translation theory, which, as Venuti notes, is forever concerned with ‘the changing relationships between the relative autonomy of the translated text and two other categories: equivalence and function.’

.

The Potency of Pastoral in Hispanic Baroque poetry

This monograph demonstrates that aesthetic and ontological anxieties continue to find diverse expression within the contrived textual artifice of the bucolic space. Drawing upon expansive definitions of the Hispanic literary Baroque, (Beverley, 1980, 2008, Echevarría 1993, Ross 1993, Chemris 2008 , Egido 2009 ) the study analyses the pastoral verse of representative poets of the period to demonstrate that they re-enter an Arcadia that has been defamiliarized but is nonetheless inexorably connected to the classical origins of the mode. Pastoral, in common with other literary forms, is subject to a process of re-evaluation which was latent in its classical legacy. Within the intricacies of this literary construct, surface artistry sustains an effect of artless innocence that is vibrantly contested across the secular, sacred, parodic and colonial text.

Introducing Students to Pre-Nineteenth-Century Poetry in the Language Classroom

We as language instructors are tasked with preparing students to transition from language to literature courses. The shorter length of many poems makes them ideal for presentation in the language classroom, where the acquisition of communicative competence is the priority. Introductory and intermediate textbooks’ poetry offerings, however, are frequently drawn from a canon of poems by only a few nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors (Verlaine, Apollinaire, Prévert) and fail to expose students to broader aspects of French literature. This article offers strategies for presenting pre-nineteenth-century poetry to first- and second-year students of French using dizains from Scève’s Délie as examples.

The Ocho Poetas Mexicanos and the marginalisation of Catholic authors in post-revolutionary Mexico

The group known as the Ocho Poetas Mexicanos were marginalised in post-revolutionary literary circles and remain largely forgotten by literary history because they were dismissed as Catholic authors by a literary establishment which favoured nation-building literature at a time when Catholicism was excluded from official constructions of nationhood. This article draws attention to the significant contribution made by group members to contemporary cultural life and re-evaluates the work they published in the 1955 anthology which announced their arrival onto the literary scene. An analysis of this collection demonstrates that there was scant justification for labelling the group as Catholic poets and suggests that they are best understood with reference to the “universal” strand of Mexican literature and as heirs to groups such as the Contemporáneos. The treatment of the Ocho Poetas provides important evidence of the way in which Catholic authors were marginalised in mid-twentieth century Mexico, even if they did not express religious beliefs in their work, and draws attention to the non-literary criteria which can come into play when evaluating texts.

England, Neo-Latin, and the Continental Journey: Linguistic and Textual Itineraries

This chapter examines the ramifications of continental travel and associated epistolary communication for English poets of the period. It argues that recourse to neo-Latin, the universal language of diplomacy, served not only to establish a sense of shared space—linguistic, cultural, generic—between England and the continent, but also to signal self-conscious differences (climatic, geographical, historical, political) between England and her continental peers. Through an investigation of a range of ‘performances’ on stages that were ‘academic’, poetic, autobiographical, and epistolographic, it assesses the central role of neo-Latin as a language that underwent a series of textual itineraries. These ‘itineraries’ manifest themselves in a number of ways. Neo-Latin as a shared linguistic medium can facilitate, and quite uniquely so, intertextual engagement with the classics, but now ancient Rome, its language, its mythology, its hierarchy of genres, are viewed through a seventeenth-century lens and appropriated by poets in both England and Italy to describe contemporary events, whether personal, or political. Close examination of the neo-Latin poetry of Milton and Marvell reveals, it is argued, a self-fashioning coloured by such textual itineraries and interchanges. The absorption and replication of continental literary and linguistic methodologies (the academic debate; the etymological play of Marinism; the hybridity of neo-Latin and Italian voices) reveal in short a linguistic and textual reciprocity that gave birth to something very new.