Editor's

Introduction

Sifting through the PAC archives recently, I was struck by how much
courage and determination were needed by our founding officers when they
established this organization. When Lawrence D. Joiner, Earl J. Wilcox,
and Joseph W. Zdenek--all colleaguesat Winthrop College--fIrstpolled area
English and foreign language departments for indications of interest in such
an association, some of the most eminent institutions in the Carolinas agreed
that the prospects were grim. One sympathetic but pessimistic chairman
reported that his survey of his department had produced what he called
"very little response." Actually, he continued, "only two of my colleagues
had anything to say, and both indicated that they would not take an active
interest in a Carolinas Philological Association."
Obviously, quite a few other scholars expressed optimism--and provided more tangible support by joining the organization and participating
in the inaugural conference at Winthrop in 1977. We dedicate this volume
to the memory of one such scholar, C. Hugh Holman of the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was among the first of PAC's
members, read a paper on Thomas Wolfe at our first conference, and in
1980 became the first of the scholars of the Carolinas to be honored by
a special section at our annual meeting. (This year his former colleague at
Chapel Hill, Edouard Morot-Sir, becomes the most recent scholar to be
so recognized.) At that first meeting in Rock Hill, a total of 72 papers were
read on a wide range of topics, and the basic format of our conference has
continued to be the presentation of work on as many branches of
philological studies as possible. In fact, our last two meetings--theones from
which the papers in this volume are drawn--involved a total of 315 formal
papers on British, American, French, Hispanic, German, Italian, and LusoBrazilian literatures, plus rhetoric, linguistics, technical writing, editing, and
the history and prospects of the profession. Certainly we neither exhibit
hubris nor underestimate the considerable challenges that still face the
organization when we conclude that, at the very least, an auspicious beginning has been made. In this context, it is particularly encouraging to note
that the sympathetic but pessimistic chairman quoted above read a paper
himself at our most recent conference and was joined on the program by
several of his most distinguished colleagues.
Of the 315 papers read at our 1983 meeting at The Citadel and our
1984meeting at Chapel Hill, 76 were nominated by their respective section
chairs for publication in Postscript. Of these, it has been possible to publish
only thirteen. Many more were worthy of publication, and certainly my
most difficult task as editor has been to decide which of the fine essays
recommended were most appropriate for Postscript. For the many writers
whose work was not selected (and for the insatiably curious), I think it onii

ly fair to suggest the principles that guided the selection process. Of course,
published papers must be professionally competent, but beyond that I have
looked for papers that would appeal to a reasonably broad spectrum of
our membership. This concern necessarilyeliminated many first-rate papers
that should eventually find homes in more specialized journals. It also dictated an effort to represent different historical periods, genres, and national
literatures. We could have published a respectable volume relying only on
papers dealing with American fiction, but such a collection would hardly
reflect the nature of our organization. So the topics of these articles range
from medieval British drama and the Italian Renaissance epic to eighteenthcentury French fiction and modern Spanish non-fictional prose. The collection also attempts to suggest the variety of critical approaches presented
at our conferences: new critical analyses, and even appreciations, are as
welcomeas structuralist or post-structuralist readings, and this volume contains articles that--with a little pushing--would fall into each of these
categories.
Another healthy sign of diversity has carried over from the conference
programs: senior faculty with national and international reputations here
rub shoulders, or pages, with temporary instructors, exigency faculty, and
assistant professors whose doctoral diplomas were presented as recently as
last summer. No conscious effort was made to bring about this result, but
the nature of our organization guaranteed that a representative volume of
our best articles would be authored by both established scholars and new
members of the profession.
Since we do not publish abstracts and since titles are sometimes more
intriguing than enlightening, I would like to suggest briefly the subjects
covered in this second volume of Postscript, apologizing in advance for
the over-simplifications that brevity will require. Our first two papers deal,
in various ways, with literary representations of evil. Andrea Sanders argues
that Flannery O'Connor's frequent reliance on the grotesque is a necessary
consequence of her Christian view that evil is essentially comic. This Christian perspective is as neccessary, Sanders believes, to a full understanding
of O'Connor's fiction as to an understanding of medieval drama, which
relies on similar grotesques because of a similar moral vision. Fred Chappell's article on Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus also deals with both modern
and traditional attitudes toward evil. When Mann's protagonist, the progressive composer Adrian Leverkuhn, sells his soul to the devil in return
for the discovery of the scientific twelve tone musical scale, Chappell sees
this as an emblem of the Nazi regime which had made Mann a refugee.
Like Leverkuhn, the Nazis managed to combine the progressive with the
atavistic by placing advanced technology in the serviceof barbarism. Thus
Adrian Leverkuhn emerges as Mann's attack on the German tradition of
Romantic science, which goes back to Goethe, and Mann's Doctor Faustus
becomes a retraction of Goethe's Faust.
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This focus on the Renaissance continues in the essays by R.V. Young

and Carolyne Ellison Stringfellow. Professor Young's study of Marvell's
" To His Coy Mistress" sees it primarily as a dramatic monologue. In this
reading, the speaker in the poem, like Browning's Duke of Ferrara, tells
us more about himself than he realizes. His interest in his mistress is less
intense than his fear of death, and his lust is itself a desperate response
to that fear. Carolyne Ellison Stringfellow shows us what happened to two
other Renaissance lovers when reinterpreted by a bowdlerizing nineteenthcentury theater manager. The influential John Philip Kemble of Covent
Garden sought to render Antony and Cleopatra more palatable by toning
down its erotic content and forcing the unwieldy Elizabethan play to fit
the constraints of neo-classicaldrama. To do this he substituted large chunks
of Dryden's All for Love for Shakespearean material and created a play
that is true to neither author.
This discussion of Dryden is followed by two more articles on the
literature of the Enlightenment: Carol Sherman's on Diderot and Gerald
MacLean's on Gray and the progress poem. Professor Sherman considers
the narratological questions raised by the peculiar composition history of
Diderot's The Nun. Begun as a practical joke and continued as a novel,
this work blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality and frustrates
the reader's efforts to find a clear authoritative voice telling him what to
believe. Professor MacLean also begins with a discussion of the reader's
problems--in this case with Gray's "Progress of Poesy." The poem was
clearly meant to exclude certain readers, and this intentional exclusiveness
was designed to reflect an essentially political reality. Using the political
and military "progress" or procession as intertext, MacLean argues that
the progress poem sought to establish notions of taste and scholarship which

continue to affect our profession today.

The history of the profession is also the subject of Patrick Scott's study
of the philologicalgeneration at the Universityof South Carolina and Joseph
Renahan's comparison of Newman and Ortega on the role of the university. Professor Scott's article was part of a session which reconsidered the
achievement of the generation which founded the MLA and started the profession on the path that it is still--somewhat uncertainly--following. The
record of what this generation accomplished--and suffered-oat South
Carolina suggests that our problems today are not without precedent. Professor Renahan also suggests continuities by showing that Newman, in
nineteenth-century Ireland, and Ortega, in pre-Civil War Spain, both spoke
out against the idea that a teacher must also be a researcher. They called
instead for a separation of the two tasks, and the article argues that their
ideas deserve at least empirical study.
Our last three articles all consider questions that are, broadly speaking, linguistic, reflecting the fact that sessions on linguistics and stylistics
have been a prominent part of our recent programs. Deborah Baker
Wyrick's study of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court considers
the language of the narrator, Hank Morgan, and comes to the conclusion
that his voice is entirely appropriate for his situation and character. Twain
was not trying to create a second Huckleberry Finn, Wyrick argues, but
rather a narrator with the kind of linguistic awareness and flexibility that
could interpret and act upon an unusually alien environment. Next, John
Lamiman looks at language in the context of literacy vs. orality and suggests that the complicated chronology which is so central an aspect of
Faulkner's fiction may, in fact, result less from the influence of Bergson
than from the example of non-literate Mississippi story-tellers for whom
all time is in the present. Finally, Kieran Quinlan analyzes a short passage
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a prelude to a wide-ranging
discussion of the evolving Irish use of the originally foreign English
language.
The attentive reader will notice that Andrea Sanders' study of Flannery O'Connor and medieval drama, the first article in the volume, is labelled the Joiner Prize Essay. Don Joiner was the founding Secretary-Treasurer
of the Philological Association of the Carolinas and did at least as much
as anybody to bring the organization into existence and see it through its
first difficult years. The Executive Committee believed it was appropriate
to establish a prize in his name for the most distinguished essay to appear
in Postscript, and a panel of three judges, all Past Presidents of PAC, has
awarded the first Lawrence D. Joiner Memorial Prize to Andrea Sanders
of Francis Marion College. The judges gave honorable mention to the essays
by Jeanee P. Sacken and R.V. Young. I am pleased to congratulate the
authors of three fine papers--chosen ultimately from among 315--and also

iv

The next two articles, by Jeanee P. Sacken and Elizabeth J. Bellamy,

are comparatist studies of literary images of women. Sacken's article shows
George Sand, Kate Chopin, and Margaret Atwood all using structurally
similar stories to present feminist themes. In each case, a female protagonist
escapes from the constraints of a male-dominated society into a "liminal"
zone--a tropical island, the ocean, the forest--where traditional boundaries
break down and the protagonist defines herself in new terms. These women
variously escape, die or return to society, but they are all presented to us
as positive characters. The women in Professor Bellamy's article-the
Amazonian female warriors of the Renaissance epic--go through an almost
opposite transformation. Far from being proto-feminist ideals of harmony,
Ariosto's Bradamante and Spenser's Britomart are seen here as images of
discord and unfulfilled potential. Only when their androgyny is resolved
are they able to find their true roles as dynastic founders and instruments
of justice.

to thank the judges: John L. Idol of Clemson University, Glenn S. Burne

of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Joseph W. Zdenek
of Winthrop College.
I owe an additional vote of thanks to Professor Zdenek, along with
my other colleagues at Winthrop--Bruce G. Nims, Dorothy Graham, John
Golden, Jack W. Weaver, and C. Michael Smith--for helping me in the
selection and editing of the contents of this volume. Finally, thanks are
due to all the officers of PAC who have worked so hard to make the 1983,
1984, and 1985 conferences successful:
1982-83: Nancy E. Lane, President; John L. Idol, Vice-President;
Glenn S. Burne, Past President; C. Michael Smith, Editor; William Park
and Candelas M. Newton, Members-at-Large; and Grant B. Stanley, Local
Arrangements Chair.
1983-84: John L. Idol, President; Wilsonia E.D. Cherry, VicePresident; Nancy E. Lane, Past President; C. Michael Smith, Editor; Ben
H. Wilson. Jr. and George L. Geckle, Members-at-Large;and Alva V. Ebersole, Joseph M. Flora, and Alice Kuzniar, Local Arrangements Committee.
1984-85:Wilsonia E.D. Cherry, President; William B. Thesing, VicePresident and Program Chair; William Edmiston, Secretary-Treasurer;John
L. Idol, Past President; Robert N. Shorter and Brian Harris, Members-atLarge; and Candelas M. Newton, Local Arrangements Chair.

W.F.N.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Elizabeth J. Bellamy received her Ph.D. from Duke University and is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches courses in Renaissance poetry and prose. Her
recent work on The Faerie Queene has investigated its intertextuaHty,
specifically Spenser's use of his precursers in the dynastic epic: Virgil,
Ariosto, and Tasso. The article published here grew out of research at
Princeton funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Fred Chappell is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro and has a long standing interest in Thomas Mann. He has
published four novels, beginning with It Is Time, Lord (1963); a collection
of short stories, Moments of Light (1980);and numerous volumes of poetry,
most recently Castle Tzingal (1984). Along with John Ashbery, he is cowinner of this year's Bollingen Prize in Poetry.
John Lamiman teaches freshman English at Guilford College and literature
and history at the New Oarden Friends School in Greensboro. He studied
at Guilford and at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and has
recently returned from teaching English on the aircraft carrier USS America
in the Indian Ocean.
Gerald MacLean is a native of Toronto and studied at Cambridge and the
University of Virginia. He has taught in Greece and North Africa and at
Queen's Universityin Kingston, Ontario. He is currently Assistant Professor
of English at Wayne State University and has published on Dryden and
Restoration poetry.
Kieran Quinlan, a native of Dublin, studied a Oxford and Vanderbilt and
now teaches at Murray State University in Kentucky. He has published on
John Crowe Ransom, Seamus Heaney, and Walker Percy.
Joseph F. Renahan is Associate Professor of Romance Languages at West
Virginia University. He teaches courses in the history of the French and
Spanish languages and has published on the problems of foreign language
pedagogy .
Jeanee P. Sacken received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and teaches in the College of
Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of "a
certain Slant of lig.ht": Aesthetics of First-Person Narration in Gide ilDd
Cather and has published articleson George Sand and the theory of women's
literature.
Andrea Sanders, the winner of this year's Joiner Prize, teaches at Francis
Marion College, where she is Assistant Coordinator of Freshman Composition, and is on the editoral staff of The CaroUna EngUsh Teacher. She

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studied at the University of Tennessee and has written conference papers

on popular culture, Wordsworth, and American Fiction.
Patrick Scott is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina
and previously taught at the University of Edinburgh. He has published
extensively on Tennyson and Clough, and his recent articles on composition teaching and the history of the profession are published or forthcoming in College English, Journal of English Teaching Techniques, College
Composition and Communication, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
Carol Sherman is Professor of French at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill and author of Diderot and the Art of Dialogue and Reading
Voltaire's Contes: A Semiotics of PhUosophicai Narration.
Carolyne Ellison Stringfellow studied at the University of South Carolina
and taught for several years at Clemson. She is now living in Manhattan,
teaching at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, and working on an annotated
edition of Thomas Davies' Dramatic Miscellanies (1783).
Deborah
.
Baker Wyrick . teaches En&lishand American literature at North
Carolina State University. Her interests range from Jonathan Swift to contemporary Japanese culture, and her articles have appeared in Shakespeare
Quarterly, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Victorian Poetry,
The Comparatist, and Studies in the Novel. She is currently finishing her
dissertation at Duke.
R.V. Young studied at Yale and teaches at North Carolina State. He is the
author of Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age and of articles
on Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Gongora and Bembo. He is currently at work
on a study of the theological and devotional backgrounds of seventeenth
century poetry and serves as associate editor of Faith & Reason and coeditor of the Jobn Donne Journal.

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