This fascinating, hopeful book delivers much more than its title promises. Its focus is the “object-life” of a single Henrician court poem (3), Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me,” from its first known appearance in manuscript to its publication in the epoch-making Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) to its antiquarian reprinting and editing in middle modernity, its uptake among the New Critics and New Historicists of the twentieth century, and its current place as an anthology piece and mainstay in the English literature classroom. The methodological experiment alone—with the play of scale between three stanzas of rhyme royal and five hundred years of literary history, between one reluctant author and myriad readers, commentators, collectors, scholars, and educators—is worth the price of admission. But this book could not have been written using just any poem. As Murphy reminds us, “They Flee from Me” is about the persistence of a changeful past—the bitter, necessary task of preservation against “the deep entropic forces at work in the heart of the universe and in our lives” (143).Wyatt’s poem records a few small events: a spurned courtier, a borrowed idiom, an erotic encounter resounding in memory. “Why did it not vanish into time?” Murphy asks (37). This earnest, uncluttered central question leads him through the miniature worlds of Tudor poetics, book history, editorial theory, and canon formation in a spirit of wonder, free from the dogma and tedium that can accompany fine-grained specialist scholarship. The book’s main agenda is curiosity, and small details almost always yield to big thinking. A smudged fingerprint on “They Flee from Me” in the Devonshire Manuscript of the 1530s prompts a meditation on Wyatt’s primally individuated style—a signature roughness that, we learn, was smoothed over by a succession of literary agents from Mary Howard (the first owner of the manuscript) and the publisher Richard Tottel to critics of Wyatt’s verse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An unresolved crux in an eighteenth-century edition elicits a strong defense of the literary scholar’s obligation to historical fact against the temptation in textual criticism to honor and even amplify uncertainties. “Not trying to distinguish right from wrong,” Murphy argues, “refuses to acknowledge the basic spirit behind the making of books, the creation of poems,” and indeed behind Wyatt’s poem, which attempts in its way to “make sense out of chaos . . . to know ourselves and the world” (88).Elsewhere Murphy investigates the major works of English literary history that served as way stations for “They Flee from Me” in its transit to modernity. A reading of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765), where the poem was first anthologized, reveals a formative conflict between the earliest literary historians, for whom “a glorious imperial present . . . demonstrates the barbarity of the past,” and the antiquarian philologists “paging through the dirty and damaged manuscript,” for whom “the present is also corrupted, eaten away by the fire of time, and hence in need of correction” (104). Murphy shows how the first Oxford Book of English Verse (1901) and I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929) framed “They Flee from Me” for an era of mass education as literature assumed the mantle of breeding and cultivation and short-form lyric—under the constraints of the academic schedule—became paradigmatic in teaching. By the time Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren featured “They Flee from Me” in their widely adopted textbook, Understanding Poetry (1938), the poem functioned as a call for American readers of Wyatt “to participate in a kind of elite: an elite characterized by a tough-minded, unsentimental, held-off attitude toward a difficult world” (192), something that Wyatt himself would have understood.Much of the charisma of The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem comes from its tacit rejection of the form of the academic monograph: the book is organized not in chapters but in parts, each consisting of bite-size sections; in place of notes it has a short, conversational essay on references; and its many images have no captions. Relatedly, the book joins a wave of similar experiments that reject the default professional mode of synchronic contextualism by restricting the scope of analysis not to a narrow slice of time but to a single poem, book, or relationship, which is then allowed to unfold across several centuries.1 Murphy’s book stands out even among its most impressive competitors because it reads as wholly intentional and forthright, as if it developed from a joyous conviction, absent any academic pressures. Indeed, Murphy’s welcoming style could easily connect with a broad general public (and in this sense the series editor does the book a mild disservice where, in a foreword, he compares the excitement of its subject matter to “the anticipation of enjoying of an aged wine” [x]).Inevitably, Murphy’s book will not please everyone. The short sections with suggestive but sometimes cryptic titles do not always do justice to the material they contain. From time to time Murphy’s unassuming prose can drift into a rhythm oddly reminiscent of a children’s book (“John Harington’s diary records daily life’s variety of events. Much of it is business, and potentially very interesting business. He records who said what on given days in Parliament, and some of those days were important days” [63] and so on). The book is less insightful than usual where Murphy seems to have an ax to grind, as in the second half of the final part, on Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism. Specialists will find errors. Murphy’s claim that in the seventeenth century “no truly public libraries existed, and private and University libraries had no cataloging systems worth mentioning” (74) might, in a lesser book, have rankled me, for example.2 But part of the challenge of this essential new study is to imagine a version of literary scholarship in which granular knowledge of a single period or method is not the primary measure of expertise. Murphy’s bid is that portability and persistence in time—not just of Wyatt’s poem but of a discipline—could matter the most.

Book Review| March 01 2020 Front Lines: Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World Front Lines: Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World. By Martínez, Miguel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 320 pp. Stephen Rupp Stephen Rupp Stephen Rupp teaches Spanish and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. His current project centers on Cervantes and the canonical genres of Virgilian poetry. His most recent book is Heroic Forms: Cervantes and the Literature of War (2014). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (2020) 81 (1): 125–127. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7933115 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Stephen Rupp; Front Lines: Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Modern Language Quarterly 1 March 2020; 81 (1): 125–127. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7933115 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search Latin American literature can trace its origins to narratives of exploration and conquest. Prominent within this body of early colonial writing is a learned epic on Spain’s protracted campaigns to subdue the native people of the Arauco region of Chile, Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana, initially published in three parts (1569–90) and widely distributed across the Hispanic world. Anchored in the canonical models of Latin epic, Ercilla’s poem attempts to construct a narrative of foundational martial conflicts for Spain’s overseas empire. Various aspects of this poem nonetheless mark its departures from an epic account of heroic origins in a distant past. Ercilla writes as a combatant, a direct participant in the conflict that he recounts; he praises the integrity and heroism of the indigenous warriors in defending their homeland; he stresses the challenges to imperial authority and military force that Spanish... Copyright © 2020 by University of Washington2020 You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay offers a philological career of the term world poetry as poets and scholars employed it and close cognates across the twentieth century (the century in which it first appeared). This career emphasizes trajectories in three of the West’s imperial language formations—poésie mondiale in French, poesía mundial in Spanish, and world poetry in English—but also highlights kindred trajectories in non-Western languages, such as sheʿr-e jahān in Persian and shiʿr fi al-ʿalam in Arabic. Corroborating Édouard Glissant’s claim that “the amassing of commonplaces is, perhaps, the right approach to my real subject—the entanglements of worldwide relation,” the essay argues for an understanding of world poetry as the accumulated philological history of poetic folkways, habits of use, sociological institutions, formations, and conjunctures that group around the term itself.

Abstract As many scholars, including the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, continue to cite false etymologies of the baroque, this article returns to a Scholastic syllogism called baroco to demonstrate the relevance of medieval logic to the history of aesthetics. The syllogism is connected to early modern art forms that Enlightenment critics considered excessively complicated or absurdly confusing. Focusing on the emergence of baroque logic in Neo-Latin rhetoric and English poetics, this article traces the development of increasingly outlandish rhetorical practices of copia during the sixteenth century that led to similarly far-fetched poetic practices during the seventeenth century. John Stockwood’s Progymnasma scholasticum (1597) is read alongside Richard Crashaw’s Epigrammatum sacrorum liber (1634) and Steps to the Temple (1646) to reveal the effects of Erasmian rhetorical exercises on English educational practices and the production of English baroque poetry. In the end, the article demonstrates the conceptual unity of the baroque by showing the consistency between critiques of baroco, critiques of English metaphysical poetry, and critiques of baroque art during the Enlightenment.

In this powerful, wide-ranging study, John Watkins demonstrates how dynastic marriages that attempt to make peace by bridging religions, cultures, and states shift tellingly over the centuries. His touchstone, the wedding of Aeneas and Lavinia with which the Aeneid concludes, helps crystallize a pattern of changes. In the centuries immediately following the advent of Christianity, such alliances promised a welcome fusion of cultures and ethnic groups. Northern European countries subsequently represent dynastic marriages as a form of Christian conversion, mirroring how accounts of those weddings themselves convert classical texts into allusions to the wedding at hand. Medieval representations variously emphasize and problematize how successfully women fulfill the role of peacemaker. The doubts intensify in subsequent French and English writings, notably Shakespeare’s King John and Henry V and the work of Corneille and Racine. Concluding his historical survey with seventeenth-century France, Watkins continues his demonstration of how nationalism and allied socioeconomic interests, notably those of the merchant class, intensify suspicions of dynastic alliances. In short, Watkins unfolds a trajectory from the welcomed blending of races and cultures to an international alliance of Christian nations to nationalistic mistrust, rooted in isolationism. Although the book focuses on that spectrum, it demonstrates the range of its author’s engagements by opening with a fourteenth-century BCE Babylonian king and concluding with global conflicts at the moment Watkins is writing. The differences between the cultures on which the study focuses and the one he and his readers inhabit, Watkins playfully but tellingly suggests, are crystallized when we imagine the reactions if someone proposed marrying one of George W. Bush’s daughters to a son of Saddam Hussein.Although the book stresses historical changes, certain preoccupations and perceptions recur. Watkins emphasizes that even the dynastic marriages that seem most promising may contain the hints of failure and strife that he finds in the Virgilian analogue as well, concerns that foreshadow their greater prominence in later centuries. And Watkins, unlike some earlier students of topics he addresses, engages throughout with gender roles, notably the representations of women as peacemakers, which are encapsulated in the Germanic term peace-weaving.While Watkins’s study of interdynastic marriages emphasizes challenges and failures, the resulting book is a triumphant, fruitful marriage of critical methodologies and fields. It encompasses literary and cultural history, diplomatic history, international relations, gender studies, and other approaches. Its comparatist focus has much to teach specialists in English literature, reminding us, to choose one among numerous possibilities, that many other countries also compared their monarchs to the Virgin Mary. As the subtitle insists, the book emphasizes the literary from many perspectives, including the new formalist focus on genre and form. At the same time, the interdisciplinary commitments and explorations go deep: this book is a far cry from the Interdisciplinarity Lite that chooses a representative figure from another field to buttress what the author previously assumed, as, for example, too many critics did with Lawrence Stone’s theories of marriage, at that point widely discredited within his own field. In its range of methods and issues, Watkins’s study builds on the strengths of his earlier books while moving in significantly different directions, a type of growth and change that has characterized the career of this impressive scholar. The immersion in Virgil that shapes his first book, The Specter of Dido (1995), takes related but different forms here. After Lavinia develops from fresh angles the interest in sovereignty and the commitment to new models of periodization evident in Watkins’s Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (2002), and it continues the transnational interest of the coauthored Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds (2009).Another strength of After Lavinia is Watkins’s self-conscious and cautious approach to his paradigms and assumptions. For example, while he draws on what is sometimes but problematically known as the English school of international relations, whose members often replace the concept of manipulative or warring parties with that of an international society of nations united by shared interests, Watkins remains acutely aware of elements of manipulation. And he is alert to and largely persuasive on the problems of interpreting events from limited, potentially unreliable accounts, demonstrating how literary blueprints may variously shape and misshape what might at first glance seem like straightforward, reliable reportage. Indeed, his insistence on what manifold literary tools can contribute to other fields is exemplary. So too is his thoughtful and thought-provoking linkage of events carefully situated in historical circumstances with crises of our own moment. The book thus demonstrates, as does the recent work of Wai Chee Dimock and David Loewenstein, among others, that we need not choose between focusing exclusively on the past and buying into the facile “relatability” that too many undergraduates have been encouraged to pursue: in this area as well, Watkins’s bridge building is a model for future critics.A few overarching arguments are, however, open to challenge. At several points After Lavinia implicitly or explicitly contrasts a Catholic commitment to international alliances among coreligionists with the nationalist isolation ensuing on the Reformation. But the argument that Protestant merchants and others wanted to see England as “standing proudly apart from other European powers” (173) downplays the workings of international Protestant humanism and international religious bonds. Similarly, the marriage of the Elector Palatine and James I’s daughter Elizabeth, a significant—though signally unsuccessful—attempt to build alliances among Protestant countries, deserves more attention than it receives here, though Watkins writes about it well in Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England.After Lavinia alludes intelligently to certain epithalamia, but Catullus LXI and the many epithalamia closely imitating it deserve more attention for several reasons. In particular, although dynastic marriages obviously raise distinctive issues, they might have been related more fully to the shifting and unstable conception of marriage in general in early modern England, documented in those wedding poems as well as in numerous marriage manuals and sermons. Certain assertions about the texts that are discussed at length are also problematic. Watkins’s dark reading of the conclusion of the Aeneid is acute and persuasive—but why does he emphasize the celebration of peace in Virgil’s first eclogue at the expense of adequately acknowledging the threatened and threatening intrusion of soldiers in that poem? The suggestion that Spenser’s April eclogue insists on Elizabeth’s “lifelong commitment to virginity” (142) is perhaps debatable, but more troubling is the putative association of that commitment with “an aura of having been immaculately conceived” (142). Lines 50–51 and 91–92 of Spenser’s lyric surely identify Pan (precisely the sort of boy whom responsible mothers warn their innocent daughters not to date) as her father. But such issues are rare: on the whole, the book is not only persuasive but also impressive in its readings of the dazzling range of texts it explores, as in so many other respects.Cornell University Press (full disclosure: the publisher of three of my books, though not the most recent ones) has done this magisterial study proud. For example, endnotes that indicate the pages to which they refer, currently provided by far too few publishers, are much easier to follow. And even if you usually can’t judge a book by its cover, in an era when many commercial houses have abandoned dust jackets the charming and informative image of a dynastic marriage here is a welcome complement to what Watkins achieves. Production jobs like this one help make books prized objects, an important goal in a culture where digitalized reading is increasingly normative. Indeed, such volumes can kindle—or dare I say, de-Kindle—in students and emerging critics the delight in building a scholarly library that characterized an earlier generation.

Abstract This essay looks at literary criticism’s persistent confession of critics’ secret relations to literature. It argues that such formalized secrecy and confession are used to insist on a personal orientation toward the literary object that helps deny the institutional forces—both practical and abstract—on which criticism depends. Desire and Domestic Fiction, which focuses on the rewriting of the political and economic as the personal, offers a powerful lens for examining this process.

Abstract What is a song? As a literary term, song had acquired particular historical meanings for poets writing in English by the mid-nineteenth century. The ballad and song revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reawakened interest not only in traditional ballads but in nonnarrative songs, both popular and elite—especially the songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For poets writing in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, song, in the literary sense, was an inherited tradition exercising a strong countering pressure against the temptation to regard all lyric poems as first-person expressions of subjective feeling.