UpDate - Vol. 11, No. 6, Page 13
October 10, 1991
University Press; 10 new titles focus on international literature

     Ten new books dealing with various aspects of British and
international literature have been published by the University of
Delaware Press.
     Women Writers of Contemporary Spain: Exiles in the Homeland,
edited by Delaware faculty member Joan L. Brown, associate
professor of foreign languages and literatures, examines the work
of 13 major women writers of modern Spain and includes a historical
perspective of Spanish women authors from the 10th century forward.
Essays by eminent scholars feature original literary analyses plus
overviews of the authors' works, biographical data and
bibliographies. This volume is addressed not only to Hispanists but
to all readers interested in women and literature. Brown is among
the scholars who inaugurated the study of Spanish literature by
women.
     In The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of
Shakespeare and His Successors, Molly Smith explores the early
Stuart preoccupation with the darker side of the psyche-with
madness, violence, revenge, adultery and incest-and suggests that
this fascination with evil perhaps precipitated the radical
sociopolitical and cultural changes of the midcentury. The author
argues that the dialectical interplay between Stuart drama and
society emphasizes the ambiguous, contradictory and multifaceted
nature of theater. Smith teaches Shakespeare and drama at Ithaca
College.
     Ace G. Pilkington examines 20th century treatments of
Shakespeare in Screening Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V.
This study applies the videocassette to the study of Shakespeare on
television and film with the result that the films become texts,
and Shakespeare in performance can be examined with the scholarly
care that has in the past been reserved for printed books. Building
on the work of earlier film critics and drawing together
established literary scholarship, Pilkington presents detailed
"readings" of four plays in six films: the BBC version of the
second Tetralogy, Olivier's Henry V, and Orson Welles' Chimes at
Midnight. Pilkington is an associate professor of English at Dixie
College and is literary seminar director at the Utah Shakespeare
Festival.
     Shakespeare and his contemporary rival Ben Jonson are featured
in David McPherson's study, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of
Venice. Both Shakespeare and Jonson were clearly fascinated by the
Renaissance city of Venice, as evidenced in their plays The
Merchant of Venice, Othello and Volpone. Recent historians have
made great strides in defining more precisely the values that
Venice symbolized for 16th- and 17th-century Europeans and have
shown that certain aspects of the city's reputation became so
powerful that in the aggregate they may justifiably be called the
Myth of Venice. McPherson has taught at the University of
California at Santa Barbara and the University of New Mexico, where
he chaired of the English department from 1986-89.
     Daniel Eilon's Factions' Fictions: Ideological Closure in
Swift's Satire offers new insights into Swift's sophisticated
understanding of the ideological closure existing in political
parties, professions, religions, aristocracies and cliques. Eilon
argues that Swift's work is consistently concerned with the
tyrannical powers of the group ethic. Swift, who is sometimes
erroneously regarded as an orthodox conservative, offered his own
age and ours a disturbing reexamination of conformity, peer
pressure and consensus. Having taught English and comparative
literature at the University of Warwick, Eilon is now pursuing a
career in law.
     A different aspect of 18th century literature is presented in
volume two of The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch
Piozzi, 1784-1821 (formerly Mrs. Thrale). Edited by Edward A. Bloom
and Lillian D. Bloom, this six-volume work has collected most of
Piozzi's letters to a large group of correspondents. It reveals the
epistolary range of an acute, observant woman, formerly recognized
chiefly as a confidante and sounding board for Samuel Johnson.
Volume two records the years 1792-98, a time of political awakening
throughout England and the continent. Edward Bloom was a professor
of English at Brown University, and Lillian Bloom was a professor
of English at Rhode Island College. Now retired from teaching, both
are engaged in full-time research at the Huntington Library.
     Byron, the Bible and Religion: Essays from the Twelfth
International Byron Seminar, edited by Wolf Z. Hirst, consists of
eight essays that refute the frequently made assumption that the
Byronic hero is the author in disguise. The essays accomplish this
by illustrating how the protagonists of different works express
different views on religion. Hirst's introduction integrates the
essays by showing how, as a group, they suggest that Byron's love
of biblical images, figures and stories seems to compel him to
reconsider religious questions. Hirst is senior lecturer and former
chairperson of the English department at the University of Haifa,
Israel.
     Max Keith Sutton's The Drama of Storytelling in T. E. Brown's
Manx Yarns deals with both the Manx poet and his rustic persona,
the often-beleaguered yarnspinner of Fo'c's'le Yarns. In Fo'c's'le
Yarns, the give-and-take between the speaker and his sometimes
mutinous shipmates forms the drama of the yarnspinner's initiation
and his struggle to master the task of shaping listeners'
responses. Sutton examines this drama and offers some reasons why
Brown, an Oxford-educated schoolmaster, would adopt a rustic Manx
persona. The book also explains the struggle Brown had with his
publisher's insistence on "emasculating" the yarnspinner's
character. Sutton is professor of English at the University of
Kansas.
     Lee Templin Hamilton's Robert Bridges: An Annotated
Bibliography, 1873-1988 contains primary and secondary
bibliographical material relating to Robert Bridges (1844-1930),
poet laureate of England from 1913 until his death. Bridges is an
important cultural link between the Victorian age and the 20th
century, but he is often ignored today because his poetry and
outlook seem too quiet and contented for modern tastes. This
bibliography lays the groundwork for a reevaluation of Bridges and
his work. Hamilton is an associate professor of English at the
University of Texas-Pan American.
     A variety of scholars present their approaches to the most
studied writer of the 20th century in Joycean Occasions: Essays
from the Milwaukee James Joyce Conference, edited by Janet E.
Dunleavy, Melvin J. Friedman and Michael Patrick Gillespie. The
contributors to this volume are established Joyceans and include
several international scholars. Four essays deal with Ulysses,
three others with Finnegans Wake. The remaining five place Joyce in
a variety of intriguing contexts such as "James Joyce: The
Olfactory Factor" and "Davin's Boots: Joyce, Yeats and Irish
History." Dunleavy and Friedman are professors at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Gillespie teaches at Marquette University.