Selected Papers from the 20th IAUPE Conference in Lund 2007

In August 2007, about 200 senior researchers in the field of English, language and literature, spent a week in Lund taking the temperature of their subject. Nearly 150 papers were presented in 19 conference sections. This volume contains a lively selection, chosen by the 37 Section Chairs as saying something about where research in the discipline is heading. Also included are the two plenary lectures about the state and future of English in the academy by Elizabeth Traugott (language) and Helen Vendler (literature).
      A common feature unites this diverse collection: English literature and language as a vital concern for real people, all over the world and in the past as well as the present. Here 'English' reaffirms its human credentials, moving forward with fresh confidence and enthusiasm. (Lund Studies in English 112, ISBN 978-91-976935-0-9)

Contents

Order from order@sol.lu.se

All the seven Brontë novels are concerned with education in both senses, that of upbringing as well as that of learning. The Brontë sisters all worked as teachers before they became published novelists. In spite of the prevalence of education in the sisters' lives and fiction, however, this is the first full-length book on the subject. Marianne Thormählen explores how their representations of fictional teachers and schools engage with the intense debates on education in the nineteenth century, drawing on a wealth of documentary evidence about educational theory and practice in the lifetime of the Brontës. This study offers much new information both about the Brontës and their books and about the most urgent issue in early-nineteenth-century British social politics: the education of the people, of all classes and both sexes.
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521832892

Reviews so far

appeared from Cambridge University Press in 1999. The first full-length study of religion in the Brontë fiction, it shows how the Brontës' familiarity with the contemporary debates on doctrinal, ethical, and ecclesiastical issues informs their novels. Divided into four parts, the book examines denominations, doctrines, ethics, and clerics in the work of the Brontës. The analyses of the novels clarify the constant interplay of human and divine love in their development. While demonstrating that the Brontës' fiction is usually in agreement with the basic tenets of Evangelical Anglicanism, The Brontës and Religion emphasises the characteristic spiritual freedom and audacity of the Brontës. Lucid and vigorously written, it opens up new perspectives for Brontë specialists and enthusiasts alike on a fundamental aspect of the novels greatly neglected in recent decades.
       Excerpts from reviews: "[a] well-informed [study] based on scrupulous readings and meticulous judgments" (Times Literary Supplement); "[the author's] willingness to read with the grain of the novels' religion makes for absorbing reading" (Victorian Studies); "a refreshingly textual study of the Brontës' fiction" (The Review of English Studies); "a work of extraordinarily comprehensive scholarship" (The Journal of Ecclesiastical History); "the kind of writing which will endure and remain valuable for many years to come" (Theology); "I very much enjoyed this book" (Reviews in Religion & Theology).
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521661552

Around 1979, scholars adopted the term "modernism" as a designation for the radical changes that took place in Anglo-American literature in the early twentieth century. The concept lent prestige to works and authors associated with it, encouraging the development of a vast body of criticism while blocking academic recognition of literature to which it does not readily apply. In Rethinking Modernism, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2003 and edited by Marianne Thormählen, fifteen scholars of modernism subject the concept to sceptical scrutiny as they revisit their special areas of expertise. The general question they all face is not so much "what was modernism?" -- a familiar question -- as "was/is modernism?" Their results show that although "modernism" remains a useful concept under certain conditions, for them -- as for any reader of this book -- modernism will never be quite the same again.
      The book ends with a 20-page bibliography of works on modernism in two parts, compiled by the editor; the Literary Research/Recherche littéraire reviewer called it "comprehensive and invaluable". Other reviewers have praised the book as forming a "both focused and vigorous" volume (The Yearbook of English Studies) and as offering noteworthy "considerations of category breakers and the construction of categories by the reception of literary works" (The Review of English Studies).
http://www.palgrave.com/products/Catalogue.aspx?is=1403911800

T. S. Eliot is felt by many to have been the poet of the twentieth century, and his famous The Waste Land is the best known poem of that century in English. Many people have found it hard to come to grips with, though, and reading Eliot remains a challenge.

"A hoax", "tripe", a piece of "rhythmical grumbling" (the latter is the poet´s own description) -- is T. S. Eliot´s The Waste Land really worth all the attention it has come in for since its publication in 1922? Thousands of literary critics and scholars have been writing about it -- what inspired such enormous efforts? And will the new millennium gratefully drop it into semi-oblivion as a period piece belonging to the world of yesterday? You´ll know more about The Waste Land, and about Eliot, and about the way you yourself respond to modern poetry after reading Marianne Thormählen´s The Waste Land: A Fragmentary Wholeness. First published in 1978, it has become a standard work on the poem, partly thanks to its generous annotation and bibliography which have helped many students chart their own way through this challenging terrain. The book tells you about the poem´s gestation, Ezra Pound´s midwifery, metre and rhythm in the Waste Land, and the symbolic imagery that is such a powerful dimension in all of Eliot´s work. It also suggests ways of freeing the reader from the obligation to make it all hang together by working out a consistent "plan" or "structure". Let The Waste Land: A Fragmentary Wholeness help you form your own relationship with the greatest modernist poem, unhampered by preconceived notions and unworried by its alleged "difficulty". (Lund Studies in English No. 52, 1978; 248 pp.)

T. S. Eliot´s poems and plays are full of animals, from the alley cats of the early poems by way of the eagle, leopards, and unicorns in Ash-Wednesday to the birds in Four Quartets. Marianne Thormählen´s Eliot´s Animals takes you on a guided tour of Eliot´s bestiary, showing how the poet brought a rich variety of ideas about animals into his texts and invested those texts with layers of meaning derived from, for instance, Dante, Baudelaire, and the Bible. Eliot´s Animals is a book to dip into for the Eliot reader curious to see how a particular scene can be perceived with reference to the function of a particular animal image. There is no need to read it straight through -- but those who do will learn something new about Eliot´s range and subtlety in handling symbolic features. (Lund Studies in English No. 70, 1984; 197 pp.)

In 1993, a group of Eliot scholars came together in Lund to address the question of T. S. Eliot´s standing a hundred years after his death and on the threshold of a new millennium. The 1990s were years of Eliot-bashing; much was made of his alleged misogyny, racism, and anti-semitism, and even at the beginning of decade it was obvious that the poet´s status had suffered. Bernard Bergonzi, Lois A. Cuddy, Barbara Everett, Rudolf Germer, Nancy D. Hargrove, M. Teresa Gibert-Maceda, Stephen Medcalf, A. David Moody, Kristian Smidt, and Marianne Thormählen analysed different aspects of Eliot´s work and found enough strength and power in it to be cautiously optimistic about his future. Emrys Jones read a paper on a Stratford production of Murder in the Cathedral which focused attention on Eliot´s writing for the stage, and Grover Smith, who could not attend the meeting, contributed a new approach to The Cocktail Party. All these essays were published in the volume called T. S. Eliot at the Turn of the Century, including A. David Moody on Eliot and the mind of Europe, Nancy D. Hargrove on Eliot´s annus mirabilis in Paris (1910-1911), Bernard Bergonzi on Eliot and the city, Lois A. Cuddy on evolution in Eliot´s work, Rudolf Germer on Eliot and religion, M. Teresa Gibert-Maceda on women and Eliot, Marianne Thormählen on the problem of the individual personality in Eliot´s poetry and plays, Stephen Medcalf on the Sweeney poems, Kristian Smidt on Eliot´s less than fair treatment of the Victorians in his criticism, and Barbara Everett on the unpleasantness of meeting Mr Eliot. The volume also contains an edited version of a panel discussion about Eliot´s standing and Eliot studies. (Lund Studies in English 86, 1984; 244 pp, ed. Marianne Thormählen.)

The 1999 Oxford University Press edition by Harold Love of the works of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, praises Marianne Thormählen's Rochester: The Poems in Context (Cambridge University Press, 1993; a paperback edition appeared in 2006) as the most up-to-date book on Rochester's poetry, a "fresh, personal, and profoundly learned" study (pp. xlvi-xlvii). Other scholars have called it "splendid" (The Yearbook of English Studies), "intelligent and careful" (The Review of English Studies), "judicious" (Times Literary Supplement), and "smart and useful ... a treasure trove of information [for which] readers of Rochester will be indebted to Ms Thormählen for years to come" (The Scriblerian).
      Marianne Thormählen regards Rochester as a serious poet who devoted much time and care to his verse and aimed for the highest standards in his writing. This view runs counter to the traditional idea of Rochester as the "wicked earl" who wrote with ease; but she bolsters it with convincing evidence of painstaking literary desk-work, deliberate exploitation and subversion of poetical conventions, and subtly crafted references to people and events in Charles II's and Louis XIV's Europe. Rochester's much-talked-about obscenities are shown to belong within a sombre framework of dissatisfaction with sensual pursuits and distrust of male sexual ability. The book ends with a consideration of Rochester's famous deathbed conversion. A select bibliography directs the reader to every notable work on Rochester up to 1990.
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521440424