White: Renaissance Postscripts

Renaissance Postscripts

Responding to Ovid’s Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France

Paul White

Ovid’s Heroides, a collection consisting mainly of poetic love letters sent by mythological heroines to their absent lovers, held a particular fascination for Renaissance readers. To understand their responses to these letters, we must ask exactly how and in what contexts those readers first encountered them: were they read in Latin or in the vernacular; as source texts for the learning of grammar and history or as love poetry; as epistolary and rhetorical models or as moral examples?

Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid’s Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France by Paul White offers an account of the wide variety of responses to the Heroides within the realm of humanist education, in the works of both Latin commentators and French translators, and as an example of a particular mode of imitation. The author examines how humanists shaped the discourse of Ovid’s heroines and heroes to pedagogical ends and analyzes even the woodcuts that illustrated various editions. This study traces comparative readings of French translations through a period noted for important shifts in attitudes to the text and to poetic translation in general and offers an important history of the “reply epistle”—a mode of imitation attempted both in Latin and the vernacular. Renaissance Postscripts shows that while the Heroides was a versatile text that could serve a wide range of pedagogical and literary purposes, it was also a text that resisted the attempts of its interpreters to have the final word.

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Johnson: A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome

A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome

Readings in Propertius and His Genre

W. R. Johnson

Over the centuries, Latin love elegy has inspired love poetry in the West from Petrarch to Pound. A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome: Readings in Propertius and His Genre offers a critical reevaluation of the Latin elegiac poet Propertius, situating him within the social and political milieu of first-century BCE Rome. W. R. Johnson’s study is centered on close readings of the poems in Propertius’ four books that emphasize both his celebration of erotic freedom as a manifestation of the sovereignty of the individual and his insistence on the value of this freedom, especially when it is threatened by autocratic ideology. Many recent titles on Propertius have tended to minimize or ignore this aspect of the poet’s work, concentrating instead on neo-formalism or Lacanian psychology. Johnson restores Propertius’ erotic creed and his politics to the core of his poetics and his career. He offers a vivid picture of the sociopolitical and erotic world of the late Roman Republic and the early years of the Empire which hatched Latin love elegy and allowed it to flourish. This study aims to redirect attention to the pleasures and energies Propertius provides that later generations of poets and readers discovered in and through him.

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Williams, ed.: Contemporary African American Fiction

Contemporary African American Fiction

New Critical Essays

Edited by Dana A. Williams

In Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays, edited by Dana A. Williams, eight contributors examine trends and ideas which characterize African American fiction since 1970. They investigate many of the key inquiries which inform discussions about the condition of contemporary African American fiction. The range of queries is wide and varied. How does African American fiction represent the changing times in America and the world? How are these changes reflected in narrative strategies or in narrative content? How do contemporary fictionists engage diasporic Africanisms, or how do they renegotiate Americanism? What is the impact of cultural production, gender, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity on this fiction? How does contemporary African American fiction reconstruct or rewrite earlier “classic” African American, American, or world literature? Authors under study include Ernest J. Gaines, Ishmael Reed, Edwidge Danticat, Octavia E. Butler, Olympia Vernon, Toni Morrison, and Reginald McKnight, among others.

These essays remind us that the African American literary tradition is about survival and liberation. The tradition is similarly about probing, challenging, changing, and redirecting accepted ways of thinking to ensure the wellness and the freedom of its community cohorts. The essays identify new ways contemporary African American fiction continues the tradition’s liberatory inclinations—they interrogate the ways in which antecedent texts and traditions influence contemporary texts to create new traditions.

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Lee: A Body of Individuals

A Body of Individuals

The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction

Sue-Im Lee

Why are some versions of the collective “we” admired and desired while other versions are scorned and feared? A Body of Individuals: The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction examines the conflict over the collective “we” through discourses of community. In the discourse of benevolent community, community is a tool towards achieving healing, productiveness, and connection. In the discourse of dissenting community, community that serves a function is simply another name for totalitarianism; instead, community must merely be a fact of coexistence. What are the sources and the appeal of these irreconcilable views of community, and how do they interact in contemporary fiction’s attempt at imagining “we”?

By engaging contemporary U.S. writers such as Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and David Markson with theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, François Lyotard, Ernesto Laclau, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book reveals how the two conflicting discourses of community—benevolent and dissenting—are inextricably intertwined in various literary visions of “we”—“we” of the family, of the world, of the human, and of coexistence.

These literary visions demonstrate, in a way that popular visions of community and postmodern theories of community cannot, the dialectical relationship between the discourses of benevolent community and dissenting community. Sue-Im Lee argues that contemporary fiction’s inability to resolve the paradox results in a model of ambivalent community, one that offers unique insights into community and into the very notion of unity.

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Milder and Fuller, eds.: The Buisness of Reflection

The Business of Reflection

Hawthorne in His Notebooks

Edited by Robert Milder and Randall Fuller

The Business of Reflection: Hawthorne in His Notebooks is a scholarly, annotated selection of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Notebooks, English Notebooks, and French and Italian Notebooks culled from the authoritative Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Ohio State University Press, 23 volumes) and intended both for students and teachers of American literature and for general readers.

The American Notebooks (1835–53) cover the period of most of Hawthorne’s published writing and are crucial background for the genesis of his fiction, for his psychological and vocational development, for his marriage to Sophia Peabody, and for his relationships with contemporaries such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. The English Notebooks (1853–60) record his experiences and impressions during his residence in England, among them his incisive and influential sketch of Herman Melville. The French and Italian Notebooks (1858–59) are a sourcebook for Hawthorne’s last published romance, The Marble Faun, and, as Henry James observed, for his deeply ambivalent response to the aesthetic and historical legacy of European civilization.

Taken together, Hawthorne’s notebooks are essential materials for studying Hawthorne as a writer and a man. They present him at his most candid, intimate, and robust—a many-sided figure who complements and revises the persona known from his published writings, often in unexpected ways.

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