Scribleriana

With Autumn 2011 issue, there was a make-over. Our font did not change. Nor did the single-columned pages. In the twin columns, there are also the same number of lines, but on these pages the width of each column was increased a bit, and the gutters between columns and on the outer margin were reduced a tad. The reasons were aesthetic and practical: by increasing the widths, we have fewer hyphenated words. Unless there is a hullabaloo, we plan to retain these changes.

Alexander Pettit (University of North Texas) and David Mazella (University of Houston) are stepping down; we thank them again for their contributions to the Scrib. We welcome Kathryn D. Temple (Georgetown University) as a Contributing Editor; and Shiladitya Sen (Montclair State University), Zachary R. Slabinski (Temple University), Kellye Concoran (Auburn University), and Jessica Naccarias (Auburn University at Montgomery) as Editorial Assistants. We thank Daniel C. McCloud (Millersville University) for his special help and Matthew Binney for saving us from many slips. We also welcome Georgetown University as a sponsor.

We are saddened by the death of Scriblerian friend Paul Fussell (1924–2012), who taught at Connecticut College for Women, Rutgers University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Among the books he was “supposed to write” (his words) are the well-known The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (1965), Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965) (our favorite), and Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (1971). One of our graduate students took his course at the University of Pennsylvania and said his lectures had the shapes of poems. The last time we met Paul was at the faculty club at Penn; he told us that he always warned his students to write well or, echoing Pope, “they would end up in the Scriblerian, skewered forever.”

We miss him.

Martin Price, 1920–2010

Martin Price, who died on April 10, 2010, was one of the towering figures of eighteenth-century English studies. He belonged with the great constellation of scholars in the middle years of the twentieth century whose rare combination of deep learning and energetic critical acumen gave eighteenth-century literature a cultural centrality uncommon at any time as a product mainly of academic effort. It was perhaps at Yale, with its library resources, its editorial enterprises (including the Boswell Editions, with which Price was closely associated), its scholar-collectors (led by James M. Osborn), and its exceptional galaxy of preeminent scholars, that the discipline (now, with rare exceptions, sadly depleted, locally as well as at large) flourished most prominently. In the writings of W. K. Wimsatt, Maynard Mack, and Martin Price, to name only three, there was a rare combination of outstanding historical and editorial scholarship, with a sharp and innovative freshness of critical thinking that lifted the subject from, and forcibly challenged, older prevailing pedantries in which books often disappeared under the weight of a pedagogue’s packet of “historical” information. They were heirs of a live and mature New Criticism, never impervious to the genuinely historical, and as yet untouched by the fetid breath of know-nothing punditry that has since pervaded the entire discipline. They were interested in books, and knowledge about books, and their reading had not given way to the mechanical frivolity of “readings” (sometimes described as “close”), or the equally text-evading resort to other disciplines, invoked without expertise, as another means of writing about books without engaging with them.

Price came to Yale after World War II, having studied at CCNY and the University of Iowa. He worked on his Ph.D. (on Swift, with Maynard Mack, one of the leading authorities on Swift’s closest literary friend, Pope). This work resulted in his first book, Swift’s Rhetorical Art: A Study in Structure and Meaning (1953), a work of remarkable delicacy and acumen. It gave Swift a sophisticated attention unusual at a moment when Pope was treated as the defining figure of English Augustanism. The book, flooded out by the increasing torrent of subsequent monographs, is nowadays less well remembered than it should be. His next book, the wide-ranging and capacious To the Palace...