Spectators and Spectacle in Quintus’ Posthomerica

Quintus’ literary reputation is on the rise, in the wake of a general reappreciation of late antique literature. In my article I discuss Quintus’ use of embedded focalization: when we look at events through the eyes of one of the characters. Quintus uses this narrative device both in the same way as Homer, but also in original new ways. One such new way is the serial use of embedded focalization at the moment of arrival of a champion. The ample use of embedded focalization can be added to the list of stylistic features which contribute to the well-known visual aesthetics of late antique poetry, such as ekphrasis, miniaturization, enumeration, and the juxtaposition of episodic scenes. But I also argue that Quintus through the ubiquitous presence of spectators frames the action of his story as a spectacle, a race or gladiatorial show, which gods and characters and hence his narratees, watch as if sitting in an amphitheatre or circus.

Parfyymeistä ja rakkaudesta Mihail Kuzminin tuotannossa

Artikkelissa analysoidaan tuoksujen merkitystä eli ns. ”olfaktorista koodia” Mihail Kuzminin poetiikassa ja kuvataan parfyymien erityistä roolia hänen omaleimaisen ”kirjallisen maineensa” muotoutumisessa. Artikkelissa käsitellään kolmea tapausta, joissa tietyn hajuvesilaadun nimi esiintyy Kuzminin tuotannossa tai siihen liittyvissä teksteissä ja pyritään selittämään viittausten syitä kussakin yhteydessä. Tutkimuksesta ilmenee, että hajuvedet voivat toimia eräänlaisena ”signaalina” ja ilmentää Kuzminin olemusta. Hajuvesibrändien nimet runoilija lisää teksteihinsä aikakauden merkkinä. Futuristien tapa käyttää ”hajuvedentuoksua” halventavana epiteettinä antaa Kuzminille syyn ryhtyä epäsuoraan kirjalliseen polemiikkiin. Olfaktorinen tuoksujen ja parfyymien kuvasto liittyy Kuzminin tuotannossa oleellisesti rakkauden teeman käsittelyyn. The article analyses the olfactory code in Mikhail Kuzmin’s poetics and considers the role of perfumery in the formation of his literary reputation. There are three cases when the name of a specific perfume appears in Kuzmin’s work or other texts associated with him. We try to explain the reasons for their appearance. It is believed that perfumes are used as a ‘signal’, and herald the appearance of Kuzmin. Moreover, particular perfumes play the role of signs of a certain time. Also, the special use of the word ‘perfumery’ gives Kuzmin an excuse to enter into a literary polemic. Perfumes are always accompanied by the love theme in Kuzmin’s work.

“A Nondescript Monster”: Fanny Fern in Transatlantic Print Culture

Fanny Fern (real name Sara Payson Willis Parton) was one of the most profitable American columnists and novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Fern sustained her celebrity status largely through unauthorised reprints of her articles in American and British papers. Consequently, her public image was for the most part constructed through those reprinted articles, which were usually framed by speculations about her private life. This article examines the implications and limitations of Fern’s efforts to stabilise the dissemination of her public image in periodicals by using the relatively more stable form of the book. As a celebrity, she had limited control over the way she was publicly represented. As a woman in the public sphere, she was particularly vulnerable to slander and libel. The circulation of a spurious biography entitled The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (1855), alongside her sanctioned autobiographical novel Ruth Hall, profited from her literary brand while simultaneously undermining it. Examining how these competing narratives about Fern’s private life – one fictionalised, one unauthorised – shaped her literary reputation at home and in England, this paper argues that textual representations as well as material market choices, including book bindings and advertising techniques, shaped authorship in the increasingly commercialised transatlantic literary market of the mid-century in ways that both benefited and imperilled the female writer.

Alexander Blok in the Russian Environment of Interwar Wilno

The study of the significance of Alexander Blok and his work in the perceptions of the Russian environment in the interwar Wilno reveals its literary orientations. Blok’s literary reputation was supported and strengthened by the main sources and processes of the formation of literary reputation – Blok’s text themselves (in particular, books in the library of the Vilna Russian society and reprints from Soviet publications), evaluations of his work in the Wilno press, literary evenings and discussions dedicated to his poetry. The research materials were collected from the Wilno press in Russian language published in 1921–1939. The study shows the exceptional importance of Blok, as the greatest poet of the era, in the perceptions of the Russian community.

Dylan Thomas’s “In the White Giant’s Thigh”:A Wild Love of Art Song

In the poem “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” Dylan Thomas projects the contemporary poets’ wild passion for Eliotian amoral art song and their suffering and the contradistinction of his own occasional love of Yeatsian Grecian altruistic art song and his delight. The poem is at bottom optimistic as it offers the metaphysical and the metempirical wild lovers an alternative process of art song and also carries salvation to transcend their sorrowful failure. It is Thomas’s faith in the Yeatsian process of transfiguration and transformation, the possibility of deliverance from the bondage of experience and ignorance that assures him of success and appeal in his art songs, that Auden repudiates in his metaphysical process of transgression and transmigration and his immortal vision of aesthetic amoral art song. The poem implies that Auden, as a result of his continual ignorance of the human reality of life and death, his stoic love of metaphysical art and reality, loses his grandeur and literary reputation and stoops to the level of a common man susceptible to hatred and indignation, violence and vengeance like the victims of his art songs, the political, the war and the Movement poets who remain equally ignorant of the metaphysical process and the reality of breath and death.

Introduction

The Introduction situates the fifteen chapters of the volume in the context of the sharp decline in Addison’s cultural and literary reputation since the beginning of the twentieth century, seeking to outline ways in which this collection might help reverse that decline, or at least challenge the ideological prejudices and critical misapprehensions that block a rounded appreciation of Addison and his writings. It is in three sections, each concerned with one of the subgroupings into which the volume’s chapters divide: first, the five chapters which treat Addison’s most definitive works, The Tatler, The Spectator, and Cato; then the four which deal with his works (now largely neglected) in verse and prose before The Spectator; and finally the five which assess his reception and influence in Britain and Europe from the eighteenth century through Romanticism to the Victorian age. This collection of essays, the first ever published on Addison that covers his career as a whole (rather than just the literary periodicals), reminds us of the range and variety of his work and of the correspondingly diverse responses it has occasioned through the ages. In doing so, the Introduction argues, it should help loosen the hold of the narrower conception of Addison as moral exemplar and epitome of bourgeois civility, deriving from partial constructions of The Spectator and Cato, which once underpinned his fame but now drastically imperils it.

«A talent in the making». Lermontov in the journal Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya (1830S-1840S)

The article focuses on Lermontov's publications and their perceptions in the critical reviews that appeared in the journal Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya in the 1830s and 1840s. It was in this period that the poet's literary reputation was shaped, his works published during his lifetime as well as posthumously. In the latter case, some were previously unknown to the public. The journals of the time reveal heated discussions, in which Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya was also a participant. The paper challenges the established image of the journal's editor Senkovsky, whose reviews have been traditionally categorised as negative and contradictory. The article mentions the history behind Lermontov's first publication in Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya and offers its version of the editor's as well as the poet's respective strategies. The author also analyses anonymous reviews published in the 1840s and containing positive assessment of Lermontov's oeuvre, as well as reviews attributed to Senkovsky, who held an overall favourable opinion of Lermontov but remained a staunch critic of the rival journal Otechestvennye Zapiski.

Defining the Scope of Alexandre Dumas’s La Drame De La France: Problems, Considerations, and Debates

Alexandre Dumas’s interment in the Panthéon in 2002 prompted a steady reevaluation of his literary reputation, resulting in his increased prominence among his nineteenth-century peers. Several studies have resurrected Dumas’s 1857 argument that his works comprise a vast series entitled La Drame de la France. This argument has become so ubiquitous that it has become an uncontested fact. However, there are certain challenges in studying Dumas’s La Drame de la France. Dumas did not repeatedly make this assertion, which was announced toward the latter portion of his life, and whether it was something that consciously and continuously drove his plans when developing future ideas and concepts for his historical fiction novels is debatable. Therefore, while not disputing the existence of La Drame de la France, its nature (and the nature of its creation) nevertheless makes it so that which novels specifically comprise it has never been definitively established. Coming to some degree of consensus on this point is needed as a first step to advance studies of Dumas in this area. This article seeks to initiate this literary discussion by presenting Dumas’s 36 major historical fiction novels set in France, briefly examining the problems, considerations, and debates that exist in whether each could be accepted as part of the series.