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The Function of Imagery in Webster

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Hereward T. Price
Hereward T. Price*
Affiliation:
University of San Francisco San Francisco 18, Calif
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Extract

For many generations symbolism has dominated the poetry of America and Europe. In time, of course, the critics found out what was happening and they began to investigate the movement. They have carried their investigations further and further afield over the literature of the last four centuries and in the process they have enormously widened our knowledge of poetry. Through their labors we read with clearer eyes and a deeper enjoyment than before.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1955 , pp. 717 - 739
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

Note 1 in page 717 The literature of the subject is enormous. Up to 1937 the subject is covered by Una EDis-Fermor, “Some Recent Researches in Shakespeare's Imagery,” published for the Shakespeare Association (London, 1937). Other important works are: Duchess of Malfi (London, 1945) with an important introduction by George Rylands and Charles Williams; Sister Miriam Joseph, C.S.C., Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language, Columbia Univ. Studies in Eng. and Comp. Literature, No. 165 (New York, 1947); Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947); Robert B. Heilman, This Great Stage (Baton Rouge, 1948) and the same author's “More Fair than Black: Light and Dark in Othello” in Essays in Criticism, i (1951), 315–335; Samuel Kliger, “The Sun Imagery in Richard II,” SP, xlv (1948), 196–202; Donald A. Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, 1949); Oscar J. Campbell, “Shakespeare and the ‘New Critics’ ” in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Volume (Washington, 1949), pp. 81–96. This is a good survey of the “literature of the subject”: W. H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (London, 1951), with a good bibliography. For Webster see the running notes in the edition of his works by F. L. Lucas (London, 1928) and also i, 29–41.1 take all my quotations and the numbering of the lines from this edition. I have occasionally italicized words in quotations for emphasis.

Note 2 in page 718 See Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950).

Note 3 in page 733 Charles Williams has already called attention to this echo, pp. xviii–xix. He also calls attention to the use of the word dung-hill (iv.i.76).

Note 4 in page 737 The Old Drama and the New (New York, 1926), p. 61.