Victor J. Lams

This book begins with a survey of R. F. Delderfield’s knowledge of Napoleonic history as revealed in his three Napoleonic-era novels. Two commentaries follow: the first on English attitudes and actions in a London suburb during the Interbellum (1918-1939) in his novels The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue Goes to War, and the second on his Craddock trilogy, set in Devonshire, dramatizing the English experience from the Boer War until the late 1960s.

The novelist R. F. Delderfield’s trilogy of English life in the second half of the nineteenth century portrays the social history of Adam Swann and his family, energetic people of differing talents and tempers involved in a kaleidoscopic range of social engagements. Born into a military family but shaken by his army experience in India, Adam returns to civilian life in England and creates an innovative goods-hauling service across the country. Adam’s ten children are also innovators who provide the intellectual activity expressed by the phrase «The Ethos of Britain.» In the novels a whole country is energized by a handful of individuals who recognize and set out to solve a wide range of social problems – such as, teenage girls being abducted into continental brothels, miners killed or maimed by underground hazards, factory hands enduring long hours tending unsafe machinery, and elderly couples evicted from their homes, separated, and starved. As Adam’s observant wife Henrietta expresses it, wherever there’s a problem «you're sure to find a Swann or two.» The Swann trilogy dramatizes a half-century of British dominance in Europe prior to the First World War as represented by the members of a single English family.

Completing the survey begun in Lams’ Cornish Trilogy volume, Aspects of Robertson Davies’ Novels discusses the Salterton and Deptford trilogies along with Davies’ last two novels, Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man. The apprentice effort Tempest-Tost and the journeyman’s success Leaven of Malice were followed by Davies’ first genuinely fine novel, A Mixture of Frailties, the story of a talented Salterton girl who becomes a world-famous soprano. The Deptford trilogy is discussed in terms of Northrop Frye’s «confession» form as it appears in Fifth Business, and in variations of that form in The Manticore and World of Wonders. Although Davies’ Jungian enthusiasms produced certain flaws to which readers have objected, Murther & Walking Spirits is by no means a failure; it is best understood as an implicit spiritual history of Canada which is adumbrated in the generational experience of a single Canadian family. The Cunning Man concludes Davies’ career with a narrative as rewardingly complex as any of the Cornish trilogy novels.

Robertson Davies’s Cornish Trilogy: A Reader’s Guide is the first book-length study of Davies’s best work: The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus. In The Rebel Angels, Maria and Darcourt alternate in narrating the novel’s theme (obsession) before escaping from its grip by their mutual assistance, while other characters are less fortunate. What’s Bred in the Bone narrates the artistic development of Canadian painter Francis Cornish, which is crowned by his stunning Marriage at Cana, an iconographic presentation of his personal myth; a color reproduction of Bronzino’s Allegory exemplifies their stylistic kinship. While The Lyre of Orpheus is ostensibly focused on the completion and staging of an unfinished Hoffmann opera, it narrates the ameliorative personal development of the characters who interact during that project.

Focusing upon the arguments Newman uses to define Catholicism against the hostility of English protestants, this book is a reader's guide to the books Newman published soon after his own conversion: Mixed Congregations; Difficulties of Anglicans; Present Position of Catholics, and his two novels. While the arguments advanced in Difficulties of Anglicans and Present Position of Catholics are confrontationally direct, his novels Loss and Gain and Callista respond to the attacks of Elizabeth Harris' From Oxford to Rome and Charles Kingsley's Hypatia by the indirection which typifies Newman's fictional rhetoric.

Building upon the evidence that John Henry Newman's "Parochial Sermons" is a georgic (Lams, 2004), the current book defines and discusses the visionary georgic, a subset of the genre whose exemplars include Lucretius' "De rerum natura" and Wordsworth's "The Prelude." Newman's visionary georgic defends Christian revelation against the rationalistic subjectivism that tended to displace religious faith by Wordsworthian self-exploration, leading to the Victorian redefinition of literature as secular scripture. Subjects discussed include Newman's relations with readers, his sermonic rhetoric, and his analysis of doctrines celebrated in the Church's liturgy.

Far from being a random collection, the six volumes of Anglican sermons that John Henry Newman published between 1834 and 1842 were selected and thematically arranged to create a unified literary structure, one with the form and function of a prose georgic. Like the classical exemplars composed by Hesiod, Lucretius, and Virgil, "Newman's Anglican Georgic" offers moral reflections on human conduct in light of human possibility and addresses the existence, intervention, and benign or hostile will of the gods. As this book shows, Newman is equally concerned to embolden his audience for the practice of authentic Christianity and to warn them against the age's schismatic preference for private religious emotion over revealed doctrine.

Challenging the view that Samuel Richardson's eighteenth-century epistolary novel "Clarissa" is a shapeless sequence of letters, this book argues that the novel has an action structure consisting of five act-like movements that emerge from the round robin transfer of narrative dominance: from the interiorizing drama enacted on the epistolary stage first by Clarissa's, then by Lovelace's self-reflections on just-past events, to Belford's more conventionally novelistic other-reflective narrative that ends the history. This book contrasts Clarissa's use of soliloquy to achieve self-understanding with Lovelace's employment of dramatic monologue to enable self-deception. Finally, Miss Howe's and Belford's performances in epistolary friendship are evaluated.

Samuel Richardson's highly acclaimed "Clarissa," commonly read as a courtship novel, is in fact a story about the transaction between Robert Lovelace, a pathological narcissist, and Clarissa Harlowe, his victim, whom he idealizes, yet is compelled to destroy. "Anger, Guilt, and the Psychology of the Self in 'Clarissa'" shows the narcissistic self-structure that explains Lovelace's anger and need for revenge. It shows, too, the process by which, after being raped, Clarissa reconstructs her self through penitential mourning and deepens her Christian understanding by abandoning her "de facto" Pelagianism when her own experience of evil provides empirical evidence for Original Sin.