Project MUSE®: Essays in Criticism - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/325
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Essays in Criticism.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 56 (2006) - vol. 57 (2007)Latest Articles: Essays in CriticismTWOProject MUSE®Essays in Criticism1471-68520014-0856Latest articles in Essays in Criticism. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Contents
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225148
<p></p>
Founded By F. W. BatesonVolume 572007EditorsStephen Wall, Christopher Ricksand Seamus PerryOxford University
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225155">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/325/image/coversmallContents2007-12-13text/htmlen-USContents2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®99062026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Accumulation in Johnson’s Dictionary
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225149
<p></p>
Late Sixteenth Century England witnessed 'Great excesse in shooes'. Modish footwear, warned the social reformer Philip Stubbes, caused much 'flipping & flapping up and downe in ye dirte', with which its owners 'exaggerate a mountain of mire'. The complaint is voiced in The Anatomie of Abuses, Stubbes's closely observed, vigorous attack, 'Made dialoguewise', on the greed and impiety of his contemporaries. The author implies (through his mouthpiece, Philoponus) that he scoured England for more than seven years amassing evidence for The Anatomie;1 such dedication anticipates that of John Aubrey, supreme enthusiast for the particulars of everyday existence, who spent the 1670s and 1680s garnering scraps of biographical
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225155">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/325/image/coversmallAccumulation in Johnson’s Dictionary2007-12-13text/htmlen-USAccumulation in Johnson’s Dictionary2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®799612026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Open Questions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225150
<p></p>
One way of describing the form of a poem is to refer to it as 'open' or 'closed', but all poetry, whether free or formal verse, partakes of some combination of enclosure and release as soon as the reader comes to the first line break. T. S. Eliot makes the definitive point: 'Verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed' (TLS, 27 September 1928).For Emily Dickinson, whose stone valves and closed carriages often widen the circumference of empty space (or the space of emptiness) at the heart of her verse, a poem is an open trap set to snare us unawares, even as it keeps us on guard, while we venture on our readerly way
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225155">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/325/image/coversmallOpen Questions2007-12-13text/htmlen-USOpen Questions2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®218422026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13John Payne Collier, the Scholar Forger
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225151
<p></p>
In the first of the four volumes of An Old Man's Diary (1871-2), John Payne Collier, then 82, fondly claimed that an oil painting owned in his youth by his mother and father had so impressed William Hazlitt that he had said it 'might be by Leonardo da Vinci'. The attenuating italics concede that such a remark could only be flattery and that the picture couldn't have been anything of the sort. Yet any collector will recognise a tantalising excitement and a dilemma. Would it be worth investigating the painting – its brushwork, the canvas, possible influences on the style and grouping, its provenance and documentation – in the hope of proving it enormously valuable; or is it best to ask no questions so as not to get
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225155">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/325/image/coversmallJohn Payne Collier, the Scholar Forger2007-12-13text/htmlen-USJohn Payne Collier, the Scholar Forger2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®325922026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Body and Book
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225152
<p></p>
Ben Jonson's The Staple of News is a play about print. It is also a play about playing, as the 'Intermeans' between each act make clear, with four old women on stage squabbling over their reactions to what they have just witnessed. These two concerns are not fundamentally removed from each other, but rather interact in a number of ways, chief amongst these being the repeated suggestion of an analogy between the body and the printed text. The Staple of News shows considerable anxiety about the interrelation between bodies and texts, and the way both can be manipulated, marketed and even reproduced, illicitly or to immoral ends. Ideas are embodied in this play in the literal sense – the character of Pecunia is
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225155">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/325/image/coversmallBody and Book2007-12-13text/htmlen-USBody and Book2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®160962026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Dorothy Wordsworth’s Experimental Style
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225153
<p></p>
In her essay on Dorothy Wordsworth in The Common Reader, VirginiaWoolf set an important critical precedent. Contrasting Dorothy's prose – accurate, restrained, unselfconscious – with that of Mary Wollstonecraft – reformist, passionate, hypersensitive – she wrote:Dorothy never railed against 'the cloven hoof of despotism'. Dorothy never asked 'men's questions' about exports and imports; Dorothy never confused her own soul with the sky. This 'I so much alive' was ruthlessly subordinated to the trees and the grass. For if she let 'I' and its rights and its wrongs and its passions and its suffering get between her and the object, she would be calling the moon 'the Queen of the Night'; she would be talking of dawn's
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225155">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/325/image/coversmallDorothy Wordsworth’s Experimental Style2007-12-13text/htmlen-USDorothy Wordsworth’s Experimental Style2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®791992026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13The Pity of It
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225154
<p></p>
At nearly 700 pages, Gerald Morgan's is the longest critical study of Chaucer's great poem so far, and arguably the best. Though at five times the length of Ida Gordon's The Double Sorrow of Troilus (1970) it hardly occupies litel space; it is fructuous without prolixitee. Volume 1 ends with the catastrophic news of Criseyde's impending exchange for Antenor, while volume 2 minutely examines the lovers' separation, Criseyde's infidelity and 'the end of the affair'. This seeming disproportion in handling may seem odd, volume 1 having to deal with Pandarus and Criseyde as well as Troilus, and most of Book V concerning only the hero's fate. But to Morgan 'th'ende is every tales streng the' (ii. 260) and his concern
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225155">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/325/image/coversmallThe Pity of It2007-12-13text/htmlen-USThe Pity of It2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®216312026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Frost's Great Misgiving
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225155
<p></p>
The publication of Frost's notebooks, in which for decades he collected his ideas, is a significant moment. Scholarship slowed to a trickle after the popular encomiums of his day and the biography wars of the past several decades, and little new material has surfaced to reinvigorate the world of Frost studies. Perhaps Robert Faggen's edition of Frost's Notebooks, and the many-volume series planned by Harvard University Press and headed by Faggen, could provide the jolt that this quaint region of scholarship needs.As reviewers have already recognised, the contents of Frost's notebooks are just what might rescue him from the fire and ice of postmodern criticism. An abundance of passages show his deep concern with
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225155">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/325/image/coversmallFrost's Great Misgiving2007-12-13text/htmlen-USFrost's Great Misgiving2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®207472026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13