Protestant Poetics And The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (review)

314ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW husband/A proud and happy man" — are not nearly so obscure now as they were when they were written. Such selections should provoke lively investigations into Stein's presentation of relationships between men and women, as contrasted with relationships between women and women. This is a provocative and timely book. CAROL HELMSTETTER CANTRELL Colorado State University Julia Kristeva. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by Leon S. Roudiez. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. 305p. Kristeva, a Bulgarian residing in Paris since the midsixties, is the only notable woman member of the "inner circle" of French-language thinkers who have made structuralism and semiotics such powerful intellectual forces in the last two decades. Although these orientations have had considerable influence in Europe and Latin America, some of the key texts have only become available in English in recent years, and this is the first major translation of Kristeva's work. The French to English lag is observable in the fact that two of the essays are from the 1969 Semeiotike : recherches pour une sémanalyse, while the other eight are from the 1977 Polylogue. The essays are presented by a brief introduction which includes a useful glossary of the technical vocabulary employed by Kristeva. These essays are quite simply a pleasure to read. Kristeva writes lucidly with none of the "grammatological density" which characterizes other Tel quel generation members like Derrida or Foucault. Although readers will profit from her careful exposition of the semiotic structures in literature and art, perhaps the most revealing emphasis is that of the idealogy of both cultural phenomena and the criticism on them. Although ideology is used here in a standard Marxist sense, the emphasis does not lie with how works incorporate sociopolitical issues, but rather with how they are structured in terms of the role of cultural phenomena in a society and how they are to be read. Ideology in criticism then becomes a concern for both how criticism is conducted, how it interfaces with the ideology of the cultural phenomena studied, and what social function criticism is meant to serve. "The Ethics of Linguistics," the lead essay, for example, concerns how Chomskian linguistics , despite its enormous theoretical sophistication, has not dealt adequately with the ruptures between the intellectual ideal of meaning encoded in syntactic structures and all of the circumstances — the "poetic" accidents — which make actual discourse much more than just a semantic message and more of a document of the problematics of semiosis. These are intellectually challenging ideas, and Kristeva formulates them with exemplary scholarship. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State University Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Protestant Poetics And The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979. 536p. Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric lives up to the expectation established by its winning of the Lowell Prize. It is the most important scholarly assessment of the relationship between contemporary Renaissance religion and literature since Louis Martz's widely influential work, The BOOK REVIEWS315 Poetry of Meditation. It is, in fact, related to that earlier book as a careful and comprehensively researched correction to Martz's assertion that seventeenthcentury religious poetry is largely shaped by a meditative habit of mind that has its source in continental books of devotion spawned by Ignatian meditation. Even the Augustinianism that many scholars have argued Professor Lewalski defines as particularly Protestant. The thesis of the book is that a characteristically English absorption of Reformation (and particularly Calvinistic) theological assumptions about the progress of the soul and its responses to sin and grace went hand in hand with the organic development of a Biblical poetics to shape lyric poetry. Seventeenth-century Christian poets saw Scripture as the source of new genres and particularly the Psalms as a wellestablished compendium of kinds of lyric poetry, says Lewalski. They developed in their own religious poetry creative imitations of "psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs." The poets she includes in the category of those deeply influenced by scriptural forms and Calvinist themes in their poetic structure and conception are Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, and the American poet...