Reviews and News:
Signs of the times: California statue featuring a missionary standing over a seated Native American to be removed. The Guardian reports that Jeremy Corbyn has joined “dozens of men” (including “high-profile actors”!) in calling for a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Brian Allen praises a “comprehensive” exhibit of the work of Mariano Fortuny in Madrid.
President Trump has nominated Jon Parrish Peede as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In other news, a Frenchman chases weather balloons around Europe for fun: “Some retirees take up fly fishing. Others pick up golf. But when Roland—or ‘F5ZV,’ as he’s known on ham radio—left his job in Belfort, France a decade ago, he devoted his newfound leisure to a far more peculiar hobby: hunting radiosondes.”
A mixed show of Waste Land art: Paul Nash’s austere Shore seems out of place, but Philip Guston’s East Coker-Tse is perfect.
“The hardest task in modern criticism,” Cyril Connolly wrote, “is to find out who were the true innovators.” So what should we make of Henry Green?
Essay of the Day:
How to best explain the work of Jane Austen? It is like a “patchwork coverlet she made with her sister Cassandra and her mother: a pleasantly geometrical array of differently patterned chintz diamonds within sashes of a neutral fabric surround a central diamond-shaped medallion.” Alexandra Mullen surveys the multifaceted Austen in The Hudson Review:
“In the 135 years since the first dissertation on Jane Austen appeared in 1883, scholarship on Austen has grown apace. By around the end of the First World War, large contours of the landscape had been shaped: Austen as moralist and humorist, Austen’s use of contemporary thinkers, Austen as cool-eyed artist. By the Second World War, the territory had expanded to include linguistic issues, such as Austen’s narrative experimentation and use of irony. Starting in the sixties, explorations into her juvenilia, letters, and manuscripts turned scholars back to revisit much of this ground; since the eighties, the application of various theoretical tools—historicist, political, postcolonial, feminist, narrative and so forth—have tested the soil samples with ever increasing intensity. Reception and response studies, like archaeological satellite photographs, spy out the traces of forgotten furrows ploughed by ordinary readers. And all the many Austen-inspired reimaginings—movies, vlogs, reworkings, sequels—are they the fertilizer or the earthworms continually revitalizing this earth? My metaphor and probably your patience are exhausted, but you get the idea: It’s a crowded field.
“One of Austen’s greatest gifts was to capture her characters in the process of thinking. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot, surrounded by unsympathetic souls, sees for the first time in more than seven years the man with whom she had shared a youthful love. She needs to imagine that there is still—as surely there once was!—the same consonance between them, even if he might not entirely share her regret in their separation: ‘There must be the same immediate association of thought, though she was very far from conceiving it to be of equal pain.’ Trained by Austen to follow the nuances of thought, afterthought, and delicate commentary, each of her readers feels particularly equipped—perhaps uniquely so—to understand Austen’s real thoughts. But instead of now bemoaning the blind self-regard of people who, entirely unlike myself, fall into the error of creating an Austen in their own image, I propose to tour the current crop of Austens to see what fruits are on display.”
Photo: Tuscany
Poem: Stephen Kampa, “When I Don’t Know What to Call This”
Forthcoming:
John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Originality (March 25): “How original was Shakespeare and how was Shakespeare original? This lucid, innovative book sets about answering these questions by putting them in historical context and investigating how the dramatist worked with his sources: plays, poems, chronicles and prose romances. Shakespeare’s Originality unlocks its topic with rewarding precision and flair, showing through a series of case studies that range across the output-from the mature comedies to the great tragedies, from Richard III to The Tempest what can be learned about the artistry of the plays by thinking about these sources (including newly identified ones) after several decades of neglect. Discussion is enriched by such matters as Elizabethan ruffs and feathers, actors’ footwork, chronicle history, modern theatre productions, debts to classical tragedy, scepticism, magic and science, the agricultural revolution, and ecological catastrophe. This is authoritative, lively work by one of the world’s leading Shakespearians, accessible to the general reader as well as indispensable for students.”
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