Margaret Atwood’s Visions and Revisions of "The Wizard of Oz"

L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and Victor Fleming’s film The Wizard of Oz (1939) play an important intertextual role in Margaret Atwood’s critical and fictional writings. Atwood has often been inspired by both versions of this modern fairy tale and has drawn attention to the main issues it raises (e.g. the transformative power of words, gendered power relationships, the connection between illusion and reality, the perception of the artist as a magician, and different notions of home). She has creatively explored and exploited themes, settings, visual motifs, allegorical content and characters (Dorothy, her three companions, the Wizard and the witches, especially Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West), subversively adapting her literary borrowings with a parodic twist and satirical intent. Parts of Life Before Man (1979) may be interpreted as a rewrite of a story defined by Atwood as “the great American witchcraft classic”.

Walcott, Woolf, and Joyce

This chapter on Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) examines the Caribbean poet’s ambivalent relationship with Anglophone modernism. It cautions that Walcott’s epic ambition to found a new tradition of Caribbean writing makes him reluctant simply to affirm or imitate the European cultural heritage of modernism. Walcott’s fraught relationship with modernism underscores his objections to the imperial violence and oppressive colonial institutions with which he associates Anglophone modernism. Focusing on Walcott’s complex use of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses, the chapter examines how the poet manipulates the literary tropes, myths, literary figures, and above all the names (of characters and places) that he borrows from his Anglophone predecessors. The chapter concludes that Walcott’s inventive refashioning of his literary borrowings allows him to gesture “through and against European modernism.” Walcott thus creates a New World literary aesthetic by sublating Anglophone modernism, “absorbing, transforming and rejecting metropolitan aesthetic practices.”

The Augustinianism 2 of the Rule of St Benedict

Chapter 8 examines the Benedictine conversatio as a life of prayer that arises out of a constellation of Augustinian themes. Despite its many literary borrowings from monastic traditions of the East, Benedict’s use of regula and conversatio is situated within an Augustinian understanding of Christian existence that is constellated around a life of prayer grounded in hopeful patience. In Benedict’s Rule, one can detect an expansion of the form Augustine imagined redemption to take in this life. For monks, as for lay and clerical Christians, redemption is eschatologically achieved but held in hope until the age to come. Through a reading of four key chapters of the Rule (3, 7, 71–2), Benedict’s Augustinianism 2 comes into view as a theory of individual growth.

‘Without Lies or Deception’: Oracular Claims to Truth in the Epistle to Titus

The claim to communicate the divine ‘without lies or deception’ appears both in the Epistle to Titus and in contemporaneous debates about the truth value of oracles, but not because of any direct literary borrowings from an original source. The Epistle to Titus exemplifies a trend in the second century that created from oracular one-liners a literary discourse about divination, which defended traditional religious knowledge against the rise of unauthorised agents. Shared responses to contemporary phenomena best explain the parallels – and, for example, the quotation of a pagan oracle in the letter, ‘All Cretans are liars’ (Titus 1.12).

An Unnoticed Official: The Praepositus Saltus

The Passio Typasii survives in only one manuscript and was published for the first time in 1890. It purports to describe the trial and death of a Mauretanian martyr, a military veteran by the name of Typasius, during the Diocletianic persecution. However as recently demonstrated its literary borrowings, from the Breviarium of Eutropius and the Vita Martini of Sulpicius Severus, suggest that it is a mere fiction and that it should be dated after c. A.d. 396. It is the purpose of this note to draw attention to its preservation of an otherwise unattested title, that of the praepositus saltus, and to expand upon the significance of this title for the interpretation of the work. This title only occurs fully in one passage, being elsewhere abbreviated to praepositus, and this passage is of some interest therefore.

Sources and Symbols for Melville's Confidence-Man

Melville criticism seems fated to a slow and uncertain growth. We have come a long way, to be sure, beyond the author who dismissed Melville as one among “several minor writers resident in the city or state of New York.” But one chief fault we seem not to have corrected: it is perhaps not over-rash to say that this criticism learns only reluctantly from what it has already accomplished. We know, for instance, that Melville's literary borrowings in such a work as Moby-Dick are worth close scrutiny; we also know that the allegory and the symbol lurk everywhere in Melville's pages. But our knowledge is not regularly put to use as a hypothetical principle for the examination of other works. Now I suggest that there is still a good bit to be done with these tools alone, and in this present paper I mean to try to do a part of it. I propose to identify and follow out certain of the sources and symbols which went into one of Melville's least-known works, The Confidence-Man.

XXXVII: Hawthorne's Literary Borrowings

Hawthorne was uncommunicative as to the sources on which he drew for the materials underlying his writings. That he had read widely is shown by an examination of the list of books that he borrowed from the Athenæum Library at Salem during his residence of some twenty years in that town. It is perhaps because of Hawthorne's reticence as to his origins that we have as yet learned very little about his literary borrowings; but from time to time articles have appeared touching the specific sources on which Hawthorne relied.