Critical Survey

The six articles collected in this third issue in Volume 13 encompass a variety of sources and approaches. The texts examined date from the sixteenth century through to the twentieth. They range from novels to plays, musical scores to diplomatic letters and legal documents, and draw on selected historical, theoretical, philosophical and psychological tracts, advocating the journal’s interest in the dialogue between literary and cultural studies.

Most readings of Isherwood’s work tend to gloss over the writing he did between the Berlin stories and the last novels, steeped in his responses to his encounter with Vedanta Hinduism. Yet, the fiction of these years – mostly the fifties and early sixties – offers a great deal to us if we wish to understand Isherwood’s major attempt at resolving some of the problems of the religious novel, attempted chiefly in A Meeting by the River (1967).

King Lear (1605–6) is the primary enactment of psychic breakdown in English literary history. It constitutes, also, the most spectacular instance of a controlled explosion of the formal ‘container’ in Western drama – such that it not only violated whatever Aristotle or Boileau might have to offer on the proper structure of tragedy but provoked, too, the very different sensibilities of Dr Johnson and Count Tolstoy. Set in its raw pre-Christian world, the play remains the major Shakespearean rebuttal of Sophoclean fearful symmetry (Oedipus Rex) – corrosive in its existential negativity, yet paradoxically fructive in spawning such twentieth-century ‘countertransferential’ progeny as George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame or Edward Bond’s Lear. Keats, on rereading it wrote about the ‘bitter-sweet’ of being ‘consumèd in the fire’, with all the intensity of one closely associated with ‘Consumption’.

Bringing the jungle to book, in the case of Kipling’s Jungle Books, involves representing it by the book, according to an organic, hierarchical division of the space. We first meet the toddler Mowgli when he has just learnt to walk, so initially he must be spoken for, but the narrative then skips ‘ten or eleven whole years’ (43), by which time Mowgli has grown into his voice and the central discursive space of the jungle, that of the ‘Free People’. Around this space are organised peripheral sites and inhabitants which serve to establish and maintain its legalised centrality.

In 1589, William Herbert, a frustrated functionary of Queen Elizabeth’s government in Ireland, advanced ‘A note of sutch reasons as mooued mea toe putt the statute In execution agaynst Irish habites’.

The final chapter of H. G. Wells’s novel, Tono-Bungay (1909) has given rise to surprisingly wide differences of opinion among commentators. Geoffrey West, an early admirer of the novel, thought that ‘in the last chapter, one of the most splendid passages Wells has ever written, is focused the whole spirit of the book’; more recently J. R. Hammond referred to the chapter’s ‘series of brilliant images’ and considered it ‘one of the most carefully written . . . in the whole corpus of [Wells’s] fiction’. At the opposite extreme from these views is Mark Schorer’s familiar dismissal of Tono- Bungay in his essay ‘Technique as Discovery’ (1948) and his condemnation of the final chapter as a ‘significant failure’ because it is merely ‘a kind of meditative rhapsody which denies every value that the book has been aiming towards’.

‘From the rue St. Romaine to Patchin Place, the caped and cloched Djuna Barnes cut a striking figure in Paris and Greenwich Village of the 1920s and 1930s. Contemporary writers and artists praised her style, feared her tongue; she was a beauty, but a talented, acerbic and powerfully intelligent one.’ Djuna Barnes is the attractive, mysterious, sexually daring American expatriate who led the glamorously bohemian life of Parisian cafes in the thirties; her figure, impressively clad in a black cape, keeps gliding down Parisian rues and New York alleys alike. An eccentric character, who produced a sui generis and almost forgotten masterpiece – Nightwood – and survived her previous mythical self as a hermit in a studio flat in Greenwich Village until the early eighties. At the end of her life she wrote a ‘slight’ work, a ‘bestiary’ called Creatures in an Alphabet, a sad ending of a great, if unorthodox, literary career.

Going DERRICK BUTTRESS

Sleep Yeast JEAN SPRACKLAND

The Snowdrop Girl The End of the Peninsula CHARLES BENNETT

Painting of an Island The Pilots’ Tea Dance Alfred Wallis's Vision LAWRENCE SAIL

A Smell of Fish by Matthew Sweeney (London: Cape, 2000) ISBN 0 224 06067 8 £8.00

On the Track by John Lucas (Bradford: Redbeck Press, 2000) ISBN 0 946980 74 8 £6.95

The Weather in Japan by Michael Longley (London: Cape, 2000) ISBN 0 224 06042 7 £8.00

Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction by Sharon Monteith (Athens and Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2000) ISBN 0–8203–2249–0 hard-back $40.00

Notes on contributors