Critical Survey

I want, here, to focus on this originary motive for the poem, and to suggest ways in which it informs the poet’s larger purpose – to create a social poem which negotiates tensions within the age-old battle of the sexes. The finished masterpiece, I shall argue, has relevance not only to contemporary debates about the ideology of gender3 but, in particular, to the rise of our now-ubiquitous ‘counselling’ culture. For such a discussion it is important that the ‘Offence’ occurred within a tightly knit, ‘marginal’ group, and that the poetic strategy develops a phantasmagoric ‘interpretation’ of the incident, as a proto-Freudian6 narrative in which attentive intelligence has transformed the strength of Desire into mock-heroic sweet reason.

The longevity of the ‘suffragette’ as a sign of rebellion and dissidence in contemporary British culture is significant.1 Anachronistic citations of the ‘suffragettes’, in novels such as Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999), My Life on a Plate (2000), Kingdom Swann (1990), Suffragette City (1999), the film Mary Poppins (1964) and the performance art of Leslie Hill, invite closer inspection. For the female political subject, the body was a site of ideological conflict during the British campaigns for women’s suffrage in the early years of the twentieth century and it continues to haunt feminist subjectivities and gender transgressors. Ever since members of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), formed in 1903 and led by Emmeline Pankhurst, became known as the ‘suffragettes’ they have been mythologised and reinvented for different purposes. The suffragettes have persisted in popular culture, but perversely reduced to a name and a fatal action: Pankhurst, and that woman who threw herself under the horse. In her investigation of the representation and memorialisation of Emmeline Pankhurst in the period 1930–93, Laura E. Nym Mayhall (1999) has established that the ‘suffragette’ became a ‘symbol of modernity’, a ‘symbol of women’s political activism more generally’, privileging a particular understanding of militancy: ‘militant action, defined narrowly as violence against property, through arrest to incarceration and, eventually, the hunger-strike and forcible feeding’. Mayhall rightly emphasises the constructedness of these representations, and demonstrates the pre-eminence of Emmeline Pankhurst as a signifier of the ‘suffragette’.

In Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), the Minor canon of Cloisterham Cathedral is introduced to the reader as a thoroughly muscular Christian. Crisparkle’s moral fibre is designated by a prolonged succession of adjectives; indeed, the only point at which this adjectival rhythm is ruptured is when the text pauses to describe the Reverend’s sophisticated and frequent swimming rituals. So proficient a swimmer is he, that when the crews that drag the river searching for Drood’s body fail to find any clues, it is Crisparkle we are told, who ‘threw off his clothes, […] plunged into the icy water, and swam for the spot. Climbing the timbers, he took from them […] a gold watch, bearing engraved upon its back E. D.’ (198).

All Quiet on the Western Front, the famed war novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque, has sold more than fifty million copies, been translated into thirty languages and has been made into two English-speaking movies, one of which won an Academy Award for best picture. It has been hailed as ‘the greatest war novel of all time.’ It was banned and burned in Nazi Germany for promoting anti-war sentiment. Publishers in the United States were forced to censor certain sections of the novel deemed too emotionally charged for American audiences, and these sections remained censored until 1975. Remarque himself was considered for the Nobel Prize, but, due to protests over his candidacy, was not awarded the honor. However, regarding literary criticism of the novel, it is safe to say that ‘[d]espite the great and lasting impact of All Quiet, comparatively little has been written about it.’ What little criticism that does exist on All Quiet has been limited to mainly two models: empirical, which seek to explain the novel in terms of its structure and form; and intellectualist, which seek in the novel a universal definition of War. All Quiet on the Western Front has been somewhat of a critical anomaly: almost no critic would disagree that All Quiet is a meaningful work, but, thus far, almost no critic can give a satisfactory answer as to why.

With these seemingly apologetic words, Caroline Kirkland initiates her narrative New Home – Who’ll Follow? (1839) about life in a village on the Michigan frontier in the 1830s. However, ‘the common- place occurrences’ and the ‘gossip about every-day people’ that Kirkland describes are an important contribution to American literature. In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe went so far as to say that her book was an ‘undoubted sensation’. Kirkland writes about one particular aspect of the American experience – life on the frontier. While many authors of the time have tackled this particular American topic, Kirkland carves out a niche for her work by claiming to tell the truth. Her contemporaries and modern scholars alike praised her descriptions of frontier life for the realistic detail which critics found rare in an age of sentimental romances or tall-tale adventure stories about the West.

This is an example of what I will call ‘Jinglese’, the idiolect spoken by Alfred Jingle in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1837). With reference to this extract, Dickens, or at least the narrator of the novel, characterizes Jingle’s idiolect as ‘a lengthened string of similar broken sentences.’ This paper is concerned with the nature of that brokenness, its distribution and discernible categories.

Awake Short Break CARRIE ETTER

Cicadas Unexpected Legacy Explaining Things MATT SIMPSON

The Weight of Cows by Mandy Coe (London: Shoestring Press) ISBN 1 899549 97 8 £7.95

Laughter from the Hive by Kate Foley (London: Shoestring Press) ISBN 904886 01 9 £7.95

Glass of an Organic Class by Philip Ramp (Athens: Politika Themata, 2003), £7.95

Comrade Laughter by Andy Croft (London: Flambard, 2004) ISBN 1-873226-66-7 £7.50

Love at the Full by Lucien Becker (translated by Christopher Pilling) (London: Flambard, 2004) ISBN 1-873226-61-6 £7.95

Milena Poems by Desmond Graham (London: Flambard, 2004) ISBN 1-873226-67-5 £7.50

Sudden Maraschinos by Jacqueline Karp (London: Redbeck Press, 2004) ISBN 1-904338-13-5 £6.95

The Gardens of Onkel Arnold by David Jacobs (London: Peterloo Poets, 2004) ISBN 1-904324-22-3 £7.95

Notes on contributors