UpDate - Vol. 11, No. 37, Page 7
July 23, 1992
U.D. Press releases six new scholarly volumes

     The University of Delaware Press has announced six new
publications in the fields of history and literature. All titles are
available at the University Bookstore.
     Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spenser,
Shakespeare and Milton by University of Kansas professor Richard F.
Hardin, discusses the tensions in major Renaissance literary texts
between the cult of monarchy and its subversions by Christianity.
     Hardin examines Book V of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the idea of a
"civil kinde of Idolatry" in Milton's longer poems, and Shakespeare's
contrast of Henry V's renunciation of "idol ceremony" against Caesar's
tyranny and ritualism.
     Such texts reflect the period's tendency to make society's
institutions less sacred and more social. In this way Hardin corrects
some modern scholars' assumptions of a prevailing divine-right theory
of monarchy.
     Nicolae Babuts' The Dynamics of the Metaphoric Field: A Cognitive
View of Literature begins with the premise that the way to make some
progress toward agreement in literary theory is to examine
epistemological questions. Babuts attempts to investigate the workings
of memory and to define the fundamental principles that guide it in
its quest for meaning.
     The study establishes that we process reality in terms of dynamic
patterns that act as units of meaning either perceptually or
textually; on the textual level, they represent building blocks that
are used in the writer's creation and the reader's recreation of
texts.
     Above all, the study indicates that the space in the memory where
meaning is produced and recognized as such is the space of human
consciousness.
     Babuts is a professor of French language and literature at
Syracuse University, as well as a writer and translator of poetry.
     Edited by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, Early American
Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T. Meserole is a
timely collection of dynamic essays that deal with areas at the
forefront of current research, such as popular culture, minority and
non-Anglo writings, recanonization, genre studies and Anglo-American
links.
     The book contains studies by leading scholars and celebrates the
achievements of Harrison T. Meserole- colonialist, bibliographer, and
Shakespeare scholar.
     Derounian-Stodola is a professor at the University of
Arkansas-Little Rock and has published numerous articles on early
American women writers.
     Falling Towers: The Trojan Imagination in 'The Waste Land,' 'The
Dunciad' and 'Speke Parott,' by J. A. Richardson, examines how the
title works are built upon similar patterns of conflict and anxiety.
In each of the poems the poet presents his society and himself as
under threat and attempts to counter the threat with an assertion of
poetic authority. Ultimately he fails, however, since he dramatizes
this conflict in such a way as to reveal his own insecurity.
     Falling Towers suggests the three works' places in literary
history and proposes an argument about the importance of a poet's
position in the development of his or her tradition and about the
pattern of English cultural change. Richardson teaches English
literature at the National University of Singapore.
     Thomas M. Davis' A Reading of Edward Taylor studies how the
nature of Taylor's poems evolved during the 50 years he served as
minister in Westfield, Mass.
     Davis explores Gods Determinations and Preparatory Meditations;
throughout these works, Taylor reexamines the relationship of grace to
his ability to write in praise of Christ, and finally finds the
openness and sensuous imagery that allow him to express as fully as
possible his love of Christ and his passionate desire to be with him
in the heavenly garden. Davis is a professor of English at Kent State
University.
     The 13 new essays comprising The Hamlet First Published (Q1,
1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities, edited by Thomas Clayton,
provide studies of this version of Shakespeare's play and its contexts
that bring the work into contemporary perspective and address the
problem of conflating three texts into an authoritative representation
of the lost original manuscript, rediscovered in 1823.
     Among the contributors are some of the most respected
authorities, including Alan C. Dessen, George R. Hibbard and Giorgio
Melchiori. Clayton is professor of English and classical studies and
chairperson of the Classical Civilization Program at the University of
Minnesota.
     In the collection, The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the
Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature,
edited by Citadel English professors David G. Allen and Robert A.
White, 19 scholars address the continuity or discontinuity between the
literature of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages.
     Contributors Arthur F. Kinney, R. A. Shoaf and the late O. B.
Hardison focus on the broader trends, including the use of metonymy,
juxtology and theories of prosody. Other essays discuss individual
works or themes ranging from David J. Bradshaw's investigation of
Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi to Nancy Lenz Harvey's discussion of
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.
                              -Cathleen Gibbons and Marceline Bunzey