Shadows, Tokens, Spring Mauk, Ben
The Virginia quarterly review,
10/2022, Letnik:
98, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Hang a marmot or a goat at the head and cut the skin around its neck, one recipe instructs. Some salt, one or two peeled onions, and a number of stones, that have been heated up in a fire for about ...an hour. The restless doctor John Bell left a more detailed description in his only book, the two-volume Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia: "On these hills are a great number of animals called marmots, of a brownish color, having feet like a badger; and nearly of the same size. There are marmots across the American prairie-not to be confused with the smaller and more social prairie dog, another Sciuridae-and across the Great Eurasian Steppe that extends from Hungary to the Great Wall that Marco Polo did not describe, where since 2008 the tarbagan has been listed as an endangered species.
This study argues that Victorian female characters like George Elioťs Maggie Tulliver in The MUI on the Floss (1860), denied the classical education their more practical male counterparts enjoy, ...attempt to create stories around their readings, anticipate plot developments, and finally come to realize the deficiencies of male worldly wisdom. As a result, they turn to out-of-this-world masculine wisdom, the Word of God, practice submission and self-renunciation, and ultimately escape their own plots in a heroic gesture, announcing, as it were, that heroines of the stamp of a Saint Theresa can no longer emerge from a Victorian society that systematically fails to educate its women. Maggie Tulliver is neither the first nor the last female character who struggles to combine a literary discourse of the past with newer forms of narrative discourse, yet she is perhaps the most vibrant example of the nineteenthcentury passive-aggressive reader. George Elioťs precocious female sage is at a crossroads historically, culturally, as well as ideologically, emblematically enacting the shift in reading practices that characterized the nineteenth century, when the Victorian reader became part of a larger cultural movement transitioning from homogenous, selective reading to a heterogenous, scanning type of reading. Elioťs novels seem to be pivoting on this shift, allowing their readers to practice nonsequential reading of characters who themselves are readers of parts. This fragmentariness, as Eliot seems to say, defines the very psychology of nineteenthcentury print culture.
Michael B. Prince. The Shortest Way with Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel (Charlottesville: Univ of Virginia, 2020). Pp. 350. $35.Michael Prince argues that Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe ...contains a thickly veiled satire aimed at specifically one person, and that for over 300 years, scholars have missed it. There seems to be several reasons for this oversight, but four primary ones are: the overwhelming amount of information that scholars must sift through (including commentaries by his enemies), Defoe's use of Deism as a narrative cover, the evolution of his writing technique, and the development of the novel. Prince's book is reminiscent of a mystery novel that begins by setting up the crime, and then follows the detective sussing out the culprit through a series of questions that build to the proof.Chapter 1, “The Puzzle and a Clue,” starts not with who Defoe's target was, but with the question, “How did this happen?” How have scholars missed this pointed attack? His answer: too much information has obscured this search. Prince...
Scholars of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe have identified terrestrial concepts like land enclosure as keys to understanding Crusoe's colonial practices. Building on the field of oceanic humanities, ...however, I argue that Crusoe's claim to the island derives from his understanding of the sea as open to possession. Specifically, this article argues that Crusoe uses the island's distance from European maritime routes to mark it a claimable space outside European sovereignty. He also appropriates indigenous seafaring knowledge and maritime networks before converting the island into his own overseas colony by plying imperial routes of traffic and trade.
Watelet's treatise, as a material object, exemplifies Condillac's theory of sensorial knowledge—most notably, the double experience of touch—through its representation of both self and external ...world, Watelet, and the art of painting. Stephen Fragano, Colonizing Land by Sea: Oceanic Trade and Travel in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe Scholars of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe have identified terrestrial concepts like land enclosure as keys to understanding Crusoe's colonial practices. Chelsea Phillips, Accommodations for Pregnancy and Childbirth on the Late Eighteenth-Century London Stage Drawing on close examination of surviving financial, biographical, and repertory records, this article demonstrates the existence of a number of accommodations for childbearing women at Covent Garden and Drury Lane between 1768 and 1800, including paid leave policies and repertory changes.
Revisiting Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) in tandem with a selection of medical sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this essay examines the ethnocultural ...underpinnings of plague. Although plague approximates community to its imagined outsiders through a shared sense of precarity, the divide between the two paradoxically stays intact. This paradox is amplified in the recurrent use of the orientalist trope of "Turkish predestinarianism" in Defoe's novel and medical texts contemporaneous with it. The epidemiological orientalism encapsulated in this notion, this essay argues, is animated by paradoxes that have the figurative effect of holding Londoners together in their isolation by distancing them from the ethnocultural other.
The article explores forms that error may take in a historical work, here Daniel Defoe's Tour thro' Britain. An introduction attempts to place the book in relation to the production of knowledge, as ...compared with books in allied genres. The first main section considers the nature and causes of error, divided into categories of culpable and venial mistakes. The second looks at the way in which the Tour textualizes the author's doubts concerning the accuracy of sources. The third reviews in detail three cases where Defoe's error has become evident in the light of modern scholarly knowledge, techniques, and procedures. A brief conclusion suggests implications for our approach to literature of the past.
This article examines Daniel Defoe's The Consolidator (1705), a prose fiction work on a voyage to China and to the moon, from the perspective of science in the early eighteenth century. By analysing ...the references to experimental inventions in the text and reconstructing their scientific background, this essay argues that in The Consolidator Defoe creates a fictional space in which readers can familiarise themselves with the epistemological ramifications of contemporary scientific ideas, particularly the Newtonianist standard of demonstrative knowledge. In doing so, this essay offers a reassessment of Defoe on two counts. First, it investigates Defoe's attention to the questions raised by Newtonianism to challenge the claim that Defoe's interest in science mainly lay in early Royal Society empiricism from the 1660s and the 1670s; and, second, it focuses on the imaginative qualities of The Consolidator to problematise its interpretation as a work mainly animated by topical concerns.
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