Critical Survey

In this essay I argue that the marginalisation of women's work in the early modern period was, sometimes, an enabling condition. Shakespeare's Bianca converses with her lover in a secret language, and Mary Stuart similarly smuggles letters out of prison to her supporters in code, trying to circumvent Elizabeth's spies and cryptographers. Women writers did not always seek to circulate their words or see them in print, in other words, and what looks like illiteracy on the part of women - poor spelling or garbled syntax or a crabbed penmanship - may instead mark a skillful command of letters, a dazzling 'high' literacy which rivals Latin learning, and occasionally disables it. Many women at Elizabeth's court during the years of Mary Stuart's intriguing display a similar expertise in cryptography. I also explore Jane Seager's 1589 New Year's gift to Elizabeth as well as some of Elizabeth's speeches about Mary Stuart as evidence that early modern women writers might represent themselves as practitioners of secret knowledge, disdaining publication, courting misreading.

This essay analyses Andrew Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House' and demonstrates that the poem registers the ways in which spatial politics, and the representation of home, in particular, underpins as well as enriches its meaning. Borrowing Donna Birdwell-Pheasant's and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga's definition of home and house the essay focuses on Lord Fairfax's house and shows that, notwithstanding the multiplicity of spaces presented in the particular poem, and despite his agonising effort to present Nunappleton as Lord Fairfax's home, Marvell in fact reflects his patron experiencing a strong sense of dislocation while living in Appleton House due to its complex as well as disconcerting religious and familial associations. In other words, beneath the façade of the heroic Protestant man who chose to withdraw from the public arena to the private sphere of Nunappleton, was a man trying to come to terms with his Catholic origins as well as with the fact that the particular estate reminded him of his displacement from the male line of his family as well as his disempowerment by the female sex. Hence, Appleton House, at that precise historical moment, fails to become 'a symbol of self' or 'a manifestation of family identity'; instead it is 'an inn to entertain / Its Lord a while, but not remain' (ll. 71-72).

Part one of this article examines a species of 'figural' plot - single episodes that mirror a substantial part of the narrative that contains it. These include Portia's predicament in The Merchant of Venice as interpreted by Freud, together with comparable choices encountered by King Lear, Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, Brontë's Rochester, and Richardson's Pamela. In each case the subject must break free of conventional authority in order to choose wisely. The beginning of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man directly confronts a patriarchal plot, establishing the artist's 'opposing' fiction against the received one. Part II considers the way in which Dickens situates himself in relation to external authority, bringing about the defeat of a series of spurious 'authors' in the struggle to determine Oliver Twist's identity before renouncing in a Prospero gesture his own claim to authority.

Historical surveys of the homosexual novel in the English language often take Imre: A Memorandum (1906) by Edward Prime-Stevenson as a starting point since this work of fiction is one of the first by a gay writer to deal openly with love between men and to end happily for the lovers; yet despite this attention an in-depth scholarly treatment of the themes of this novel has been lacking. This essay seeks to address this dearth by considering the role played by late nineteenth-century sexology, its concepts, its naming systems, and its mode of self-narration, and by giving special notice to the ways in which the text exceeds the boundaries of this continent of knowledge. Fin-de-siècle sexual science, especially liberationist third- or intermediate-sex sexology, triggers awareness which is essential to the central characters' subjectivities. But, as a means for constructing affirmative identities and mapping out relations between men, sexology proves to be insufficient. They turn to history and the arts, fashioning a cultural legacy of homosexuality, not in the mode of apologetics, but in order to self confidently historicise love between men, argue its cultural legitimacy, and thus the authenticity of this love in the modern era. This essay does not attempt to make the claim that the cultural-historical discourses are more important than the scientific, or vice versa, rather both are central to the characters' development and their 'coming out'.

Jim Crace's novel Quarantine purports to be a text of 'post-Dawkins scientific atheism'. It re-sets the mystical gospel story of the Temptation in the Wilderness into a materialist universe where only the laws of nature preside, and thus converges on a well-established fictional form, the naturalistic biographical representation of Jesus in a fully realised historical setting. The Messianic claims of Jesus are assumed to evaporate under this scrutiny, and the truth-claims of religion itself to crumble beneath the application of scientific observation and the invocation of scientific laws. In the event however the novel discloses an imaginative and visionary realm in which miracles, for which there is no naturalistic explanation, happen. Holderness argues that like other agnostic writers who engage with Jesus, Crace is to some degree of God's party without knowing it.

The Levellers The End of the Road IAN PARKS

Mysteries of Missouri ALEXIS LYKIARD

From The Ladies of Harris’s List: Soho: ‘Planne Be’ Relates The Declaration Of ‘Sir’ Bancs Strikland Miss Cole at Queen-Street, Golden-Square DEBORAH TYLER-BENNETT

Wormfood by Robert Roberts, (Devon: Pikestaff, 2010), 978 1 900974 36 3, £7.50, (pb)

Dove Release: New Flights and Voices, ed. David Morley (Kent: Worple Press, 2010), 078 1 905208 13 5, £10.00 (pb)

Notes on contributors