Heroic Poetry and Sidney's Two Arcadias

PMLA ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 368-379
Author(s):  
Alan D. Isler
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Heroic Poetry ◽  
Functional Aspects ◽  
Heroic Poem

Both the old and the new Arcadias belong to a single literary genre, Elizabethan heroic poetry. Modern critics, by concentrating upon the theories of Sidney's Italian contemporaries, regularly distinguish generically between the two Arcadias, usually calling the new an (attempted) epic and the old “merely” a romance. But neither version responds well to a testing by Italian criteria, criteria whose essentials are structure and convention. However, an examination of representative Elizabethan writings on heroic poetry reveals that, although aware of Italian theories, such writers as Puttenham, Webbe, Harington, and particularly Sidney are concerned not with formal but with functional aspects of the genre. The peculiar function of heroic poetry is to teach and inspire to virtue the gentleman, the Prince, and the commonwealth. From the various episodes and incidents of the heroic poem, the reader learns how to respond actively to any situation, whether it affect the body politic or the body natural, the flesh or the spirit. Tested by Elizabethan criteria, both versions of the Arcadia are successful heroic poems.

‘Good enough for a spot of lippy anyway’: Rape and the Body Politic in My Brother Tom

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-373
Author(s):  
Louise Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Violation ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Rape Narratives

The representation of rape continues to be one of the most highly charged issues in contemporary cinema, and whilst many discussions of this topic focus on Hollywood movies, sexual violation is also a pervasive topic in British cinema. This article examines the portrayal of a female's rape in the British feature My Brother Tom (2001), a powerful and often troubling text in which the sexual violation of the teenage female protagonist functions as a catalyst for the events that comprise the plot, as is often the case in rape narratives. The article provides an overview of some of the key feminist academic discussions and debates that cinematic depictions of rape have prompted, before closely analysing My Brother Tom's rape scene in relation to such discourses. The article argues that the rape scene is neither explicit nor sensationalised, and that by having the camera focus on Jessica's bewildered reactions, it positions the audience with her, and powerfully but discreetly portrays the grave nature of sexual abuse. The article then moves on to examine the portrayal of sexual violation in My Brother Tom as a whole, considering the cultural inscriptions etched on the female body within its account of rape, before concluding with a discussion of the film's depiction of Jessica's ensuing methods of bodily self-inscription as she attempts to disassociate her body from its sexual violation.

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Sacrifice

The nature and meaning of sacrifice were fiercely contested in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Historians have documented a long struggle by veterans to ensure the continuing remembrance of their sacrifice. At the same time, American politicians tended to demur from acknowledging these sacrifices, as doing so would reopen the rift that had prompted war in the first place. This chapter probes the work of three Civil War poets—Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—to uncover the meaning of sacrifice during and after the war. Dickinson’s verses about psychic pain and dislocation are increasingly understood as simultaneous expositions of the personal and political: Melville’s knotty, multi-perspectival poems about the war, Battle-Pieces, question the ideological freight of sacrifice, and Whitman sought to honour the sacrifice of soldiers through a poetics he hoped would heal the body politic. Ultimately only Whitman’s consolatory poetry would find a postwar audience.

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