Abstract This essay takes the embodiment of the bird’s-eye view as an invitation to revisit its connections to narrative omniscience, on the one hand, and the first-person point of view, on the other. A comparison of the birds of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) to those of Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Thomas Bewick, whose History of British Birds was a narrative resource for later writers, including Charles Dickens, produces an account of the relationship between the first and the third persons not yet described in narrative theory and indicates that the boundaries between sentimental and realist fiction are blurrier than has been supposed.
Abstract This essay juxtaposes Oscar Wilde’s play Salome with his prison writing to consider the relationship between two types of transfer: of meaning between tenor and vehicle in metaphor and from one prison to another as experienced by Wilde during his incarceration. The semantic transfer, this reading of Salome suggests, is not simply a question of direct transformation but something live and able to be intruded on. Thus it shares with the prison transfer the violence of exposure: To the mob jeering as he is transferred to Reading Gaol, Wilde is not the tragic hero of his own figurations but a minor character in a farce. In reading Salome with the prison writing, this essay contends that their shared interest in exposure reveals a structural duality of metaphor: The space of figuration can be salvific in how it may establish distance between a subject and a reality that would violently misconstrue him or her, but this distance is also hopelessly open, a field of figuration ever subject to the marauding of the other.
Abstract From an Arminian, soteriological perspective, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa are about men tempted by the universal, prevenient grace that conveys the appetite for good. The theories of David Hume and Adam Smith shed little light on Richardson, because they don’t explain normativity (the experience of “good” being good), and the sentimental philosophers who do explain normativity—Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson—have recourse to the Holy Spirit to implant their moral sense. The universality of Arminian prevenient grace—grace that prefigures actual conversion, granted by the Holy Spirit—makes possible in Clarissa Lovelace’s unique struggle for evil against his temptation toward good. A novel that represents the world through Arminian theology then becomes an explicit meditation when Lovelace hands Clarissa a copy of Jeremy Taylor’s Living and Dying, a book of meditations, some composed by the author, others made up of disparate Bible verses. Clarissa starts writing her own meditations in that style. Taylor’s text, moreover, is part of the imitation tradition, which extols the virtue of being like Christ literally, right down to being betrayed by one’s friends. In the end Clarissa dies a martyr, imitating Christ so completely that her death, too, is a triumph.
