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Addressing Frank Kermode ADDRESSING FRANK KERMODE WARWICK STUDIES IN THE EUROPEAN HUMANITIES General Editor: Tom Winnifrith, Chairman of the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick This series is designed for publications deriving from the Euro­ pean Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick, which was founded to promote interdisciplinary and comparative research in the European Humanities. The Centre's aims, pur­ sued through research projects, conferences, seminars and visit­ ing fellowships, include the dissemination of research findings; this series is the Centre's primary means to this end. Nicholas Hewitt (editor) THE CULTURE OF RECONSTRUCTION J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (editors) WAR, LITERATURE AND THE ARTS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE THEATRE OF THE ENGLISH AND ITALIAN RENAISSANCE Brian Rigby and Nicholas Hewitt (editors) FRANCE AND THE MASS-MEDIA 1945-67 Tom Winnifrith and Cyril Barrett (editors) THE PHILOSOPHY OF LEISURE Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner (editors) ADDRESSING FRANK KERMODE: ESSAYS IN CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION Further titles in preparation Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG212XS, England. ADDRESSING FRANK KERMODE ESSAYS IN CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION Edited by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton Faculte des lettres, University of Lausanne and Martin Warner Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, University of Warwick M MACMILLAN © Editorial matter and Introduction © Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991 978-0-333-53137-2 Chapter 1 © John Stokes 1991; Chapter 2 © A. D. Nuttall 1991; Chapter 3 © Bernard Harrison 1991; Chapter 4 ©Patrick Parrinder 1991; Chapter 5 ©George Hunter 1991; Chapter 6 © Frank Kermode 1991; Chapter 7 © Dominic Baker­ Smith 1991; Chapter 8 © Lisa Jardine 1991; Chapter 9 © Alastair Fowler 1991; Chapter 10 © Richard Poirier 1991; Chapter 11 © John Hollander 1991 ISBN 978-1-349-11755-0 ISBN 978-1-349-11753-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-11753-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provision for the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1991 Published by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Phototypeset by Input Typesetting Ltd, London British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Addressing Frank Kermode: essays in criticism and interpretation 1. Literature. Criticism I. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret II. Warner, Martin, 1940- 801.95 Contents Notes on the Contributors vii Introduction X Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner PART ONE: ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 1 Romantic Image Revisited 3 fohn Stokes 2 The Sense of a Beginning 22 A. D. Nuttall 3 Secrets and Surfaces 38 Bernard Harrison 4 'Secular Surrogates': Frank Kermode and the Idea of ilieCri~ ~ Patrick Parrinder 5 The History of Styles as a Style of History 74 George Hunter 6 The Men on the Dump: A Response 89 Frank Kermode PART TWO: ESSAYS IN INTERPRETATION 7 The Location of Utopia: Narrative Devices in a Renaissance Fiction 109 Dominic Baker-Smith 8 'Why should he call her whore?': Defamation and Desdemona's Case 124 Lisa Jardine 9 Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Dancing Men and Women 154 Alastair Fowler 10 The Pater of Joyce and Eliot 169 Richard Poirier v vi Contents 11 Of 'of': The Romance of a Preposition 189 John Hollander Bibliography 205 Index 214 Notes on the Contributors Frank Kermode is an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cam­ bridge, and a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and an Officer of the Order of Arts and Sciences in France. He has held named Chairs in English Litera­ ture at the Universities of Manchester, Bristol, London and Cam­ bridge and been a visiting Professor at Columbia and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. In 1989 he was Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick's Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature where versions of the papers comprising Part One of this volume were first presented and discussed. He is General Editor of The Oxford Authors and of Fontana's Masterguides and Modern Masters Series, and has been co-editor of Encounter. Of his many publications, those dis­ cussed or referred to in the text are listed in the Bibliography. Dominic Baker-Smith is Professor of English Literature at the University of Amsterdam; he was previously University Lecturer in English at Cambridge and Professor at University College, Cardiff. He has published on a variety of topics in Renaissance literature and thought, and has edited (with J. A. van Dorsten) Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend (1986). A study of Utopia is forthcoming and he is currently working on humanist exegesis. Alastair Fowler is Regius Professor Emeritus of the University of Edinburgh and Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia. His most recent book was A History of English Literature (1987); he is currently working on The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century English Verse and on Country House Poems: An Anthology of Seventeenth Century Estates Poems and Related Items. Bernard Harrison is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of a number of books on the philosophy of language and on philosophy and literature. The latter include Henry Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (1975) and Narrative and Reality: Literature and the Limits of Theory (forth­ coming). Vll viii Notes on the Contributors John Hollander is A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English at Yale University, and was co-editor, with Frank Kermode, of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature (1973). He is a poet and critic whose most recent volumes are Harp Lake (1988) and Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (1989). George Hunter was the founding Professor of English and Com­ parative Literature at the University of Warwick; he is now Emily Sanford Professor of English and Chairman of the Graduate Pro­ gram in Renaissance Studies at Yale University. Lisa Jardine is Professor of English at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. Her publications include Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (1974), Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983); she is co-author of From Humanism to the Humanities (1986) and What's Left? Women in Culture and the Labour Movement (1989). She is currently working on a book on Erasmus, and is a general editor of the new edition of the complete works of Francis Bacon. A. D. Nuttall has been Professor of English and Pro-Vice-Chan­ cellor at the University of Sussex; he is now Fellow of New College, Oxford. His publications include Two Concepts of Allegory (1967), A Common Sky (1974), Overheard by God (1980), Pope's Essay on Man (1984), and The Stoic in Love (1989). Patrick Parrinder is Professor of English at the University of Reading. He is the author of studies of James Joyce and H. G. Wells, and of Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching (1980); he has also published The Failure of Theory (1987), a collection of essays, and a history of Anglo-American criticism, Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism 1750-1990 (1991). Richard Poirier is the editor of Raritan Quarterly, a founder of The Library of America, and Marius Bewly Professor of English at Rutgers University, and was co-editor, with Frank Kermode, of The Oxford Reader (1971). His publications include A World Elsewhere (1967), The Performing Self (1971), Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977) and The Renewal of Literature (1987). John Stokes is Lecturer in the Department of English and Com- Notes on the Contributors ix parative Literature at the University of Warwick. He has written widely on the culture of the fin-de-siecle and is the author of In the Nineties (1989). Margaret Tudeau-Clayton is a former undergraduate and gradu­ ate of King's College, Cambridge, where she was supervised by Frank Kermode, and now teaches English Language and Litera­ ture at the University of Lausanne. She has published several articles and is preparing for publication a revised version of her thesis, entitled Jonson, Shakespeare and the Figure of Vergil. Martin Wamer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philo­ sophy at the University of Warwick and was the founding Pro­ gramme Director of the University's Centre for Research in Philo­ sophy and Literature; with John Goode he arranged the occasion which formed the foundation for this volume. His publications include Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion (1989) and (as editor) The Bible as Rhetoric: Studies in Biblical Per­ suasion and Credibility (1990). Introduction Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner For the English critic John Carey he is 'easily the most intelligent critic now writing'; for the American critic J.
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