bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Inadequate Vulgarity of Henry James
Authors: Lind Ilse Dusoir
Published: February 2007

On 26 January 1895, still in the grip of the disconsolate mood engendered by the crashing first-night failure of Guy Domville three weeks before, Henry James made the following entry in his Notebooks:

The idea of the poor man, the artist, the man of letters, who all his life is trying— if only to get a living—to do something vulgar, to take the measure of the huge, flat foot of the public: isn t there a little story in it, possibly, if one can animate it with action; a little story that might perhaps be a mate to The Death of the Lion? It is suggested to me really by all the little backward memories of one s own frustrated ambition—in particular by its having Just come back to me how, already 20 years ago, when I was in Paris writing letters to the N. Y. Tribune, Whitelaw Reid wrote to me to ask me virtually that—to make em baser and paltrier, to make them as vulgar as he [sic] could, to make them, as he called it, more ‘personal.’ Twenty years ago, and so it has ever been, till the other night, Jan. 5th, the premiere of Guy Domville. Trace the history of a charming little talent, charming artistic nature, that has been exactly the martyr and victim of that ineffectual effort, that long, vain study to take the measure abovementioned, to ‘meet’ the vulgar need, to violate his intrinsic conditions, to make, as it were, a sow's ear out of a silk purse. He tries and he tries and he does what he thinks his coarsest and crudest. It's all of no use—it's always ‘too subtle,’ always too fine—never, never, vulgar enough. I had to write to Whitelaw Reid that the sort of thing I had already tried hard to do for the Tribune was the very worst I could do. I lost my place—my letters weren't wanted.
The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Re-Examination
Authors: Miller James E.
Published: February 2007

The position of Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” among his own works, or among contemporary classics, has been an ambiguous one. A brief glance at current Conrad criticism confirms its uncertain status : F. R. Leavis, whose opening statement of his book, The Great Tradition (New York, 1948), asserts, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad,” gives a comprehensive treatment of Conrad without once mentioning Nigger, even among the so-called minor works; however, Morton D. Zabel, who reprints the whole of Nigger in his The Portable Conrad (New York, 1947), states (p. 291), “The book remains, if not Conrad's greatest or most ambitious, one of his most perfectly realized and poetically conceived works.” In view of the silence on the one hand, and the somewhat lavish praise on the other, by these two important critics, a reconsideration of the novel at this time is perhaps not out of place.
Gray's Elegy: The Biographical Problem in Literary Criticism
Authors: Ellis Frank H.
Published: February 2007

It is a problem in literary criticism to know how to use the growing store of material discovered by historical research. This is only the practical aspect of a larger, theoretical problem: the relation between a written work and the biographical experiences of the writer. It has never been doubted that a poet's experiences, public and private, historical and psychological, reappear, distorted, refined, generalized, reordered, in his poetry. Hence it follows that the reconstruction of the poet's experiences from diaries, letters, accounts of friends, and public records, may illuminate his poetry. But the converse of this proposition is also assumed to be true: if the biographical experience illuminates the poetry, the poetry must also illuminate the biographical experience. The poem, in other words, is an autobiographical document.
Hamlet's Apostrophe on Man: Clue to the Tragedy
Authors: Battenhouse Roy W.
Published: February 2007

In an age when thinking was emerging from the dominance of Christian dogma to become once again, as in Classical times, man-centered—when Pico was raising new hopes by his Oration on the Dignity of Man, and Calvin new anguish by his outcry over man's lost dignity—Shakespeare brought the mood of the times to a focus in Hamlet. The mood had two sides, as Theodore Spencer has argued: one optimistic, the other pessimistic. “To Pico and the earlier humanists,” he writes, “man belonged with the angels. But to Montaigne, and the satiric, melancholy, realistic writers of the 1590's he belonged with the beasts.” Which is truer of man, then: the dignity of an angel, or that of a beast? The conflict of appraisal is mirrored, Spencer contends, in the hero of Shakespeare's most famous play, providing that play one of the main reasons for its greatness.
The Shipwreck of don Manuel de Sousa in the Spanish Theater
Authors: Webber Edwin J.
Published: February 2007

It is proposed here to recall a tragic maritime adventure which has been told and retold in history, epic, and drama and to observe the individual and characteristic ways in which the event—heroic in its proportions—was reduced and adapted to the more intimate confines of the stage by Tirso de Molina and by a contemporary dramatist presumed (perhaps mistakenly) to be Lope de Vega.
The Tournaments of Tottenham and Lappenhausen
Authors: Jones George F.
Published: February 2007

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the literary, folkloristic, and social significance of the “peasant-tournament,” a type of mock-epic generally neglected by literary historians. Perhaps the two outstanding examples of this genre are The Turnament of Totenham and the tournament in Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring, both of which appear to date from the first half of the fifteenth century. The Turnament is an alliterative burlesque written sometime before 1456 by an unknown English author, who set the scene of his work at Tottenham, a village near London. Its 234 verses tell of a peasant tournament in which doughty village swains contend for the hand of Tyb, the reeve's daughter. The tournament of Lappenhausen is the opening episode in Wittenwiler's Ring, an amazing comic-didactic poem written in northeastern Switzerland about 1420. The Ring tells of the love, courtship, and marriage, of Bertschi Triefnas and his lovely hunchbacked, flatfooted, goitered sweetheart, Metzli Ruerenzumph. In the opening scene, which comprises about a thousand verses (vv. 105-659, 830-1279), Bertschi and his twelve companions ride to the village green and challenge all comers to joust in the name of womanhood. Finding no one who dares withstand them, they joust with each other until joined by Neidhart of Reuental, a peasant-hating nobleman who arrives in disguise and gives them a thorough drubbing.
The Genesis of Beowulf: A Caveat
Authors: Hulbert J. R.
Published: February 2007

Views concerning the authorship of Beowulf and its place in Old English literature have changed greatly in the last half century. In any account of the poem published in 1900 one might find suggested or stated more or less positively—often practically as facts—such ideas as these: Beowulf was only one of a large body of Old English epics; its subject matter was originally mythical, symbolic of forces of nature; its adventures were at first ascribed to a mythic hero or divinity named Beowa and later transferred to Beowulf, who was probably an actual person (as late as 1908 Brandi still expresses this view); it took shape by a process of natural accretion of popular lays or short heroic poems, or by compilation and interpolation by several hands; its manner and style were indigenous, characteristic of the form which Germanic epic poetry had attained; in origin it was pagan, the Christian passages having been added late by a reviser or interpolator. It is obvious now that all those statements are hypothetical, but they once constituted an orthodox view which was generally accepted.
The Meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Authors: Markman Alan M.
Published: February 2007

Knights who are at the wars eat their bread in sorrow; their ease is weariness and sweat; they have one good day after many bad; they are vowed to all manner of labour; they are for ever swallowing their fear; they expose themselves to every peril; they give up their bodies to the adventure of life in death.… Great is the honour which knights deserve, and great the favour which kings should shew them, for all the reasons which I have told.… Of what profit is a good knight? I tell you that through good knights is the king and the kingdom honoured, protected, feared and defended.… I tell you that without good knights, the king is like a man who has neither feet nor hands.—Gutierre Díaz de Gámez
Eichendorff's Symbolic Landscape
Authors: Seidlin Oskar
Published: February 2007

It seems to me one of the most exciting and baffling characteristics of Eichendorff's art that, if I may use this paradox, his most profound insights are hidden on the surface. They travel, a strangely elusive contraband, in the full light of day, so that the last truths of his poetic vision, the whole web of his religious beliefs, his intellectual conceptions, his socio-ethical postulates transform themselves into the most deceptively simple folktunes, sung by his people with an ease and unconcern usually assigned in the secular psalter of a nation to that section which is headed “folk song, author unknown.” Goethe's solemn warning with regard to the ultimate secret and mystery of life, his injunction “Tell it no one but the sages,” was utterly lost on Eichendorff. He told it to every listening ear; and so it could happen that what in reality was an exploration and manifestation of truth, the poetic transmission of knowledge, was taken—or mistaken—as a bewitching play of lyrical mood and atmosphere. A comprehensive and integrated view of life thus turned in the public's hand into a picture book, lovely and self-contained, easy to peruse; and for the reader it was easy to absorb its sensuous refulgence without comprehending the meaning of design, color, and composition.
Visions and Revisions: Chapter Lxxxi of Middlemarch
Authors: Beaty Jerome
Published: February 2007

Literary genius in the nineteenth century was associated with “inspiration,” “spontaneity,” “emotion,” “imagination,” “the unconscious,” and other such indications of the nonratiocinative. Not all critics and writers of the century stressed all aspects of the nonratiocinative: some spoke of effect, using this cluster of words to denote the appearance of spontaneity, the freedom from classical or mechanical rules, the superiority of the mysterious, the individual, the unanalyzable in a work of art; others, especially those in that growing group whose concern was with the relationship between the writer and his work, stressed the irrational elements in the creation of literature. Among the latter there were differences in emphasis too: some stressed the whim of inspiration, its independence of the will; others stressed the frenzy, the ecstasy, the total unconsciousness of the act of literary creation. Among the latter there were those who further claimed that a passage created under the “spell” is never revised; for if this external or internal force is irrational because superior to reason, its results cannot then be submitted to the lesser pronouncements of rational judgment. Some even went so far as to combine all of the above into a single antiratiocinative aesthetic: the writer of true genius composes only when the whim of the muse dictates; he does not prepare himself for these moments of vision by planning or “calculating” his subject or approach; he is seized and illuminated, writing swiftly and effortlessly; he does not revise; the result gives the reader a comparable spontaneous, ecstatic, undefinable emotion.
Bernard Shaw's Shakespeare Criticism
Authors: Silverman Albert H.
Published: February 2007

Bernard Shaw's Shakespeare criticism is generally presented by his critics as something to be ashamed of, often as an expression of his ignorance or perversity. Even to critics who find Shaw generally admirable, his attack upon Shakespeare is solecistic and blindspotted, and is either wholly condemned or halfheartedly defended. Hesketh Pearson dismisses the whole matter, contending that Shaw wrongly assumes that Shakespeare's characters speak for Shakespeare. Thus, the pessimism that Shaw finds pervasive in Shakespeare is explained by Pearson as a picture of reality by an objective artist. Archibald Henderson believes that Shaw's Shakespeare criticism is either anachronistic thinking or an act of vengeance on the British critics who viciously attacked Ibsen. James Gibbons Huneker apologizes for Shaw's criticisms of Shakespeare, justifying them on the ground that Shakespeare was not hurt by them. None of these critics meets Shaw's criticisms head-on, and their reactions have little to recommend them above Henry Arthur Jones's angry denunciation of Shaw as a desecrator of graves and a traitor to England.
The Life of Ida Orloff and Her Relations to Gerhart Hauptmann
Authors: Heuser Frederick W. J.
Published: February 2007

In the last weeks of World War II when the battle front swayed to and fro around Vienna, Ida Orloff died practically forgotten, in the nearby hamlet of Tullnerbach, in the fifty-seventh year of her life. Few among the villagers knew her as a once-famous star of the foremost theaters in Berlin and Vienna. In the confusion of those climactic days of the war when all newspapers had suspended publication, no notice was taken of her death and her biography has remained unwritten. Inasmuch as Gerhart Hauptmann patterned the heroines of a number of his works after the youthful actress, a brief documented account of her most unconventional life and of her relations with the great Silesian poet may be of some interest to students of the German theater of the first half of the twentieth century.
David Macbeth Moir as Morgan Odoherty
Authors: Nolte Eugene
Published: February 2007

Efforts to establish the identity of Morgan Odoherty, the Irish adjutant whose coruscating wit shone so brightly from the early pages of William Blackwood's Maga, have for years proved fascinating but frustrating scholarly exercises. Some years ago, in PMLA (lviii, Sept. 1943, 716–727), Ralph Wardle posed the question “Who Was Morgan Odoherty?” and then supplied an accurate but incomplete answer. After meticulously sifting a mass of contradictory evidence, Wardle came to the conclusion that Odoherty was not William Maginn, as generally assumed, but was rather “the embodiment of the Irishness in several men's minds—and most of them were dyed-in-the-wool Scots.” On the strength of a statement by David Macbeth Moir's biographer that Moir's contributions to Blackwood's Magazine included “familiar letters and rhyming epistles from Odoherty; mockheroic specimens of translations from Horace; Christmas carols by the fancy contributors, Mullion and the rest; ironical imitations of living poets; Cockney love-songs; puns and parodies,” Wardle knew that Moir “took his turn as Odoherty.” Exactly which contributions were Moir's, though, he could only conjecture.
Adversative or Concessive Sense of Old Provencal tot
Authors: Lewent Kurt
Published: February 2007

The starting point of this paper is the following passage from the troubadour Guilhem Ademar's poem “De ben gran joia chantera” (P.-C. 202,5) recently published by Kurt Almqvist:

Que tot morrai o l'aurai,

que ja no m'en partirai.
Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde
Authors: Bloomfield Morton W.
Published: February 2007

In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer as commentator occupies an unusual role. It is indeed common for authors to enter their own works in many ways. Writers as diverse as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Fielding, Thackeray, and George Eliot all do so. Sometimes, as with Fielding, the author may keep a distance between himself and his story; sometimes, as with Dante, he may penetrate into his story as a major or the major character; and sometimes, as with Homer, he may both enter and withdraw at will. When Homer directly addresses one of his characters, he is deliberately breaking down, for artistic reasons, the aloofness to which he generally holds.
The Modality of the Audible in Joyce's Ulysses
Authors: Duncan Joseph E.
Published: February 2007

Readers of Joyce's Ulysses are familiar with his references to the modality of the visible and the audible as well as with the vast range and importance of the audible in the work. But commentators apparently have not seen that the key both to these references and to Joyce's use of the audible in Ulysses is Aristotle's idea of perception and modality as pondered by Stephen at the beginning of the third or “Proteus” chapter. This key opens a new door into Joyce's world of ineluctable modality and reveals the importance of the modality of the audible both in the physical world without and the stream of consciousness within. Joyce's conception of modality and his treatment of sound are closely related. His use of the audible provides one of the best illustrations of his basic concept of modality, while this idea of modality is itself the best guide to an understanding of his experimentation with the audible.
The Grapes of Wrath as Fiction
Authors: Lisca Peter
Published: February 2007

When The Grapes of Wrath was published in April of 1939 there was little likelihood of its being accepted and evaluated as a piece of fiction. Because of its nominal subject, it was too readily confused with such high-class reporting as Ruth McKenny's Industrial Valley, the WPA collection of case histories called These Are Our Lives, and Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor's An American Exodus. The merits of The Grapes of Wrath were debated as social documentation rather than fiction. In addition to incurring the disadvantages of its historical position, coming as a kind of climax to the literature of the Great Depression, Steinbeck's novel also suffered from the perennial vulnerability of all social fiction to an attack on its facts and intentions.
James's The Tragic Muse—Ave atque Vale
Authors: Powers Lyall H.
Published: February 2007

The comparatively recent appearance of a new edition of The Tragic Muse might in itself justify a re-examination of the novel with a view to a somewhat fuller understanding of its significance in the development of Henry James's literary career. We might recall two biographical facts that also encourage reinvestigation of the novel of 1890. First, James intended to write no more novels after The Tragic Muse. He wrote succinctly to his brother William: “The Tragic Muse is to be my last long novel. For the rest of my life I hope to do lots of short things with irresponsible spaces between them.” Thus, we might not unreasonably expect to find in this farewell to the large form a final expression of his ideas on the art, or at least something of an apologia for his life as a novelist. Second, James had decided while at work on this book to begin a career as a dramatist and thus realize what he had called “the most cherished of all my projects.” (In December 1888, Edward Compton urged him to dramatize The American.) We might then also look in the novel for an indication of James's real attitude to this new phase of his career as an artist. The expression of these two will, of course, take the form of metaphor, since The Tragic Muse is neither a literary essay nor an autobiography, but a novel.
The Role of Collaborators in the Career of Alphonse Daudet
Authors: Sachs Murray
Published: February 2007

The long-standing Daudet-Arène controversy, concerning the authorship of Les lettres de mon moulin, has produced the inevitable quantity of spilled ink since the first public charges in 1883. But as yet the debate has yielded no firm conclusions on the questions at issue. While the statements of both Paul Arène and Alphonse Daudet make it plain that there was some form of collaboration in the writing of those stories, we are still a long way from certainty as to the exact contribution of each. Moreover, the almost total lack of primary documents in the case makes it unlikely that any irrefutable certainty can ever be attained in the matter.
Temps et Reconnaissance Chez Proust et Quelques Philosophes
Authors: Champigny Robert
Published: February 2007

Ce titre doit être expliqué. Notre intention, en premier lieu, n'est pas de parler d'influences possibles, mais de comparer les conceptions de Proust avec celles de certains philosophes. En second lieu, notre exposé sera centré sur la question du temps. Nous ne ferons intervenir d'autres questions (sur l'art, la connaissance, la morale) qu'en tant qu'elles surgissent dans cette perspective.
Goethe's thought in the Light of his Pronouncements on Applied and Misapplied Mathematics
Authors: Dyck Martin
Published: February 2007

The clarification of Goethe's concept of mathematics is important not only for an exact delineation of the extent and limits of his thought, but also in defining the relation between the humanities and the sciences. Again and again his spirit is invoked by humanists and scientists alike to define their relative positions. When the peculiar characteristics of the humanities and the sciences are brought into sharp focus, mathematics is usually the separating ingredient, and frequent reference is made to Goethe's supposedly negative attitude toward this science with a resulting unjust classification of his science as unscientific. Such arguments usually terminate upon application of two ancient remedies for deadlocked thought, the sets of supposedly logical alternatives-quality versus quantity, intuition (Anschauung) versus logic. Based on these criteria, Goethe's thought is securely if unilaterally embedded in the realms of quality and intuition, but at all costs immunized against the sinister demons of quantity and logic, which to some humanists are irritating symbols of aridity and vacuity, or even eternal foes of poetry, art, and life.
Eugénio de Castro and the Introduction of Modernismo to Spain
Authors: Fein John M.
Published: February 2007

An attempt to explain the almost complete n neglect of Portuguese symbolism by Spanish literary circles for twelve years after its establishment leads one to an interesting negative situation in Hispanic literature at the turn of the century. The founder of symbolism in Portugal, Eugenio de Castro, who wrote his most original poetry and achieved his greatest acclaim from 1890 to 1900, was known in Latin America in 1896 and proclaimed there as a spiritual brother of the modernista poets. The same date marked the tentative beginning of Modernismo in Spain, and yet it was not until 1902, and even then under the guidance of Latin-American writers, that Spanish authors became aware of the movement of poetic renovation which had been at their doorstep unattended for more than a decade. The time when Castro's work was introduced, the means of presentation, and the results it obtained are all commentaries on the delayed and curious arrival of Modernismo in Spain.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Appraisal
Authors: Bloomfield Morton W.
Published: February 2007

In spite of its language which is admittedly difficult and in spite of certain problems of literary history which beset it, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has never been considered hard to interpret as a work of art. The apparent obviousness of its genre and its combination of apparently straight-forward narrative and notable passages of description do not lead one to suspect that complicated problems of intention or meaning are lurking beneath its vivid and attractive poetry. Piers Plowman, everyone agrees, is a difficult poem and has, at least since the sixteenth century, been recognized as such. Those who are attracted to it are stimulated to probe its significance and to elucidate its mysteries. No such stimulus comes to the much larger group who enjoy and study Sir Gawain, for, although much has been written on it, it has always been con. sidered a relatively uncomplicated, beautifully organized, and masterfully presented obvious poem. Yet the more one studies Sir Gawain and ponders on its charms and organization the more one begins to wonder and speculate. Of course in one sense all literary or artistic masterpieces are miracles and occasion for wonder, but above and beyond the pleasure and surprise which come from great achievement and the feeling of perfection, some works create a peculiar sense of intellectual puzzlement as to the author's intention and tone and even on a more prosaic level as to the tie between a work and its milieu: intellectual, artistic, and social.
Order and Sentience in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Authors: Robinson E. Arthur
Published: February 2007

Although traditionally “The Fall of the House of Usher” has been regarded as a “horror” tale, close examination reveals that it possesses many characteristics similar to those which Poe termed “ratiocinative” in other stories. In 1936 Arthur Hobson Quinn, after defining the tale as “arabesque,” pointed out briefly its systematic duplication of theme in the treatment of Usher, of his house, and of his relation to his sister. More recent scholarship has concentrated upon reclassifying the story and upon exploring the subconscious or even Freudian recesses of Roderick's nature, particularly as these concern his attitude toward his sister Madeline. In the present study I propose to continue Quinn's investigation of the structure and form of the story, including recurrent ideas and character relationships. My thesis is that behind the mood and the characterization of “The Fall of the House of Usher” exists a pattern of thought and of thematic development as rigorous in its way as the more sharply denned rationality of “The Purloined Letter” or “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and that a study of this pattern explain the significant themes of the story.
Carlyle and Tennyson
Authors: Sanders Charles Richard
Published: February 2007

According to Sir Charles Tennyson, Carlyle met Tennyson at the Sterling Club as early as 1839, if not earlier. Previously, Sir Charles says, Carlyle had heard much about him from John Sterling, who had helped to found the Cambridge Apostles' Club, of which Tennyson had also been a member. D. A. Wilson, however, in his multi-volumed life of Carlyle says that the two first met in Carlyle's garden at Chelsea in the autumn of 1840. Sir Charles is more nearly right. Wilson's date is too late, for on 5 September 1840 Carlyle wrote to his brother: “Some weeks ago, one night, the Poet Tennison [sic] and Matthew Allen were discovered here, sitting smoking in the garden. Tennison had been here before, but was still new to Jane,—who was alone for the first hour or two of it. A fine large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free-and-easy: who swims, outwardly and inwardly, with great composure in an inarticulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; great now and then where he does emerge: a most restful, brotherly, solidhearted man.” From the very first the friendship seemed to flourish. “He seemed to take a fancy to me,” Tennyson later told a visitor at Farringford in speaking of Carlyle's favorable treatment of him in the early forties. In those years Carlyle's reputation had already been firmly established by his French Revolution and his lectures; but Tennyson had not published the two volumes of 1842 which were to do much to give him fame. Both had found the road to fame a long, steep, and difficult one. Both had lost manuscripts: Carlyle that of the French Revolution, volume one; and Tennyson that of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Both had been battered much by hardships and disappointments. Carlyle, who was fourteen years older than the poet, had struggled over a much longer period before being acclaimed by the literary world. But the period of their fame would also be a long one, and in terms of rough chronology they enjoyed their fame during the same years.
Chaucer's Eagle: A Contemplative Symbol
Authors: Steadman John M.
Published: February 2007

The significance and literary ante cedents of the garrulous bird which seizes Chaucer “at a swappe” and bears him aloft “to a place, Which that hight THE HOUS OF FAME” have long been subjects of controversy. Garrett identified it with “the eagle of folk-tales who carries the hero to a high mountain.” Rambeau regarded it as “ein symbol der philosophie, aber einer sehr humoristischen art von philosophie, die ihn tröstet und mit seinem loos versöhnt.” In Sypherd's opinion, it combined “three functions—1. the messenger of a divinity; 2. the guide to a hero on his journey; 3. the helpful animal” (p. 86). Whereas Lounsbury stressed the influence of Ovid's account of Ganymede, both Rambeau and Chiarini emphasized Chaucer's indebtedness to the eagle of Dante's Commedia.
Melville and His Chimney
Authors: Woodruff Stuart C.
Published: February 2007

Despite the large body of Melville criticism, Melville's short stories still await a critical reappraisal. The attention the tales have received—and it is slight in relation to their importance—has frequently been marred by the critic's idée fixe on Melville which causes him to bend the material he works with to fit preconceived notions, or to approach Melville's symbolic art from so oblique an angle that he ignores dramatic and thematic elements central to Melville's perception. “I and My Chimney” is a significant case in point. In miniature this story embodies, among other things, several themes explored in Melville's other works, an implied criticism of America's “infatuate juvenility,” and particularly Melville's recurrent insistence upon what one recent critic has called “an inductive and empirical evaluation of experience.” In fact, “I and My Chimney” may be considered a thoroughgoing symbolic expression of Melville's basic epistemology.
New Light on Zola and Physiognomy
Authors: Gauthier E. Paul
Published: February 2007

The great importance which Emile Zola gave to physical appearance in character portrayal is well known. It seems to have escaped notice, however, that as a source of material Zola evidently tapped a curious body of pseudo-scientific theories even before he undertook the composition of the Rougon-Macquart series. These theories concern physiognomy, the recognition of character through a study of the permanent form of the human features. Exploitation of a striking corollary to this same study, evident in almost all of the Rougon-Macquart novels, is especially noted in La Fortune des Rougon and in La Bête humaine. Zola applied to creative literature the most fantastic theory of certain physiognomists: the claim that human resemblances to various animals are highly significant indices to the recognition of character.
The Image of the Hand in Rilke's Poetry
Authors: Tubach Frederic C.
Published: February 2007

The increasing importance of the hand-image for Rilke is an indication of his steadily growing conviction that the plastic arts should become the guide for poetry. Consequently, the image of the hand occurs frequently in the early collections entitled Das Buch der Bilder (1902) and Das Stundenbuch (1906). Even in the first poem of Das Stundenbuch, written as early as 1899, Rilke shows a marked interest in plastic representation, which was to become the dominant influence upon his poetry during the period of his close acquaintance with the French sculptor Rodin a few years later:

Da neigt sich die Stunde und riihrt mich anmit klarem, metallenem Schlag:mir zittern die Sinne. Ich fiihle: ich kann—und ich fasse den plastischen Tag.
The Dragon in Beowulf
Authors: DuBois Arthur E.
Published: February 2007

Purely Literary rather than historical evidence should not be excluded if it helps to solve a problem, or even if it merely sharpens the sense of such a problem as the meaning of the dragon in Beowulf.

Some difficulty has probably been caused by thinking of the dragon as a symbol rather than as some other kind of image although, to be sure, a hard-and-fast distinction may not always be possible. To me the meaning of a symbol is more or less arbitrary, especially because the symbol represents something, or means something, usually quite unlike itself–as the eagle is physically unlike the United States. This meaning is imposed outside the work of art rather than within it. Such meaning has to be agreed upon, either by authors like Blake or Yeats in contracts with themselves which must sooner or later be registered with the people, or else by the folk in some other manner, as when they agree in a ‘religious’ community that, say, Ceres shall represent corn and harvesting. Once agreed upon, the meaning of the symbol must remain fixed, at least in the community; otherwise, communication will be confused. Of course, the determination of a symbol's meaning can only be by external evidence. Such meaning probably depends upon remote associations which are certainly not immediately available to the reader and which are, possibly, not always exactly available even to the writer, as in surrealism. These associations can often be recovered, no doubt, and the reason for the meaning can then be understood. But at least until one examines the creative processes behind the evolution of the symbol, its meaning must seem artificial.
The Origins of Gulliver's Travels
Authors: Ehrenpreis Irvin
Published: February 2007

Until the publication of The Letters of Jonathan Swift to Charles Ford, literary scholars thought that Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels between 1715 and 1720, a period when he published almost nothing. His starting point was, they believed, sketches made up by the Scriblerus group—Pope, Swift, and others—in 1713 and 1714, and finally produced by Pope in 1741. Then D. Nichol Smith, in his edition of the Ford letters, proved that Swift wrote Part i of Gulliver in about 1721–22, Part ii around 1722–23, Part iv in 1723, and Part iii (after Pt. iv) in 1724–25. Swift continued to revise it, probably until it was published in the autumn of 1726.
The Authorship of The Turkish Spy
Authors: McBurney William H.
Published: February 2007

L'espion du Grand-Seigneur or Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, perhaps best known as the work which inspired Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, is usually considered the beginning of the “foreign spy” convention in English literature. Modern readers of the six French (or eight English) duodecimo volumes may be puzzled to discover its appeal. When the collection of letters first appeared, however, it was immediately termed “un tour d'esprit … & une fiction ingénieuse”; the eighteenth-century reading public welcomed it as written with “beaucoup d'agrément, & d'une variété fort amusante,” and “as instructive and delightful, as the Manner of finding it was strange and surprizing.”
The Early Development of Carlyle's Style
Authors: Roellinger Francis X.
Published: February 2007

In his admirable lectures, The Problem of Style, J. Middleton Murry illustrates one of the most common meanings of the word “style” by this remark: “I know who wrote the article in last week's Saturday Review—Mr. Saintsbury. You couldn't mistake his style.” Here, according to Mr. Murry, “‘style’ means that personal idiosyncrasy of expression by which we recognize a writer.” This is a limited conception of style, but it is useful in studying the style of certain writers. Murry mentions Dr. Johnson, Gibbon, Meredith, and Henry James as appropriate subjects for this approach. We may add, with the authority of precedent, Thomas Carlyle.
Lessing's Retrieval of Lost Truths
Authors: Flajole Edward S.
Published: February 2007

Early in the year 1771 Lessing manifested a lively interest in the Scottish moral philosopher, Adam Ferguson. He was eager to obtain a certain work of Ferguson's, and his patience was taxed for several weeks until the book arrived. When he finally had it in his hands, he quickly leafed through it and was delighted with what his cursory examination revealed. His comments, occasioned by this first glance through the volume, have given rise to a number of conflicting opinions.
Grendel and the Gifstol: A Legal View of Monsters
Authors: Chaney William A.
Published: February 2007

Grendel's feud against Hrothgar and his Danes has been requited not only by the hand of Beowulf but by the scholarly shafts which have nailed the monster to his watery lair. Outside of his natural habitat, however, Grendel is still a problem in his nocturnal visits to the royal hall of Heorot.
The Genesis of Tudor Interest in Italian
Authors: Parks George B.
Published: February 2007

It is not generally realized how suddenly Italian culture and manners became popular in Tudor England. After Chaucer's surprising discovery and translation of Italian literature, it was nearly two centuries before another translation from the Italian was published in England. This was the Certayne Psalmes (1549) of Thomas Wyatt, taken from a work by Aretino. In the same decade, royalty took up the new interest. Henry VIII knew little if any Italian. Mary could understand it, probably because it was close to her mother's Spanish, which she spoke, but she did not speak or read Italian. Elizabeth, on the other hand, studied Italian when she was ten years old (1544), as we shall see presently, and she learned to speak it fluently. This progression marks the suddenness of the new obsessive taste for Italian, a taste which endured for a whole century. This essay will trace the genesis of the fashion.
Emerson's Early Impact on England: A Study in British Periodicals
Authors: Sowder William J.
Published: February 2007

The years 1840–50 were important ones in Anglo-American cultural and intellectual relations, for during this period American writers began to be widely read in England. Before that time books had been too expensive for almost everyone except the great readers or the greatly prosperous; in the 1840's, however, a combination of circumstances led to a revolution in English reading habits. Circulating libraries had been in operation in England for some years, but it was in 1842 that Mudie's began to make available for the first time literature of the world to all literate Englishmen. More important perhaps than the libraries were the cheap reprints which, at first, were sold mainly in the newly built and overflowing railway stations but which were later found in book stalls throughout the country. Commenting on Slater's shilling edition of Emerson's Orations, Lectures, and Addresses, The Critic wrote, for example, that “the work itself must be familiar by name to all our readers, but probably it has been out of the reach of many of them. It is not so now. The poorest may possess it.” That Emerson and many other American authors appeared in these cheap reprints was due, ironically enough, as much to defective international copyright laws as to a demand for their books. British publishers discovered that under certain conditions they could bring out the works of foreign writers without remuneration, and after 1839 they took full advantage of this knowledge. Emerson tried to outwit these pirates by sending the manuscripts of Essays, Second Series and of Poems to England prior to bringing the volumes out in America, and Carlyle used the Preface to the Second Essays to draw and quarter them. Emerson's precautions and Carlyle's strictures were of little avail: at about the same time that Poems came out, Orr and Company was issuing a pirated edition of Essays, Lectures, and Orations. Although evasion of copyright laws cannot be condoned on ethical grounds, it was fortuitous in one respect: the pirated editions were dirt cheap, and their wide sale along with legitimate reprints and the circulating library made accessible for the first time large quantities of American books to a wide British public. From 1840 to the end of the century, England read more books by American writers than by all of Europe combined and, fortunately for this study, all of the major works received critical appraisal in British periodicals.
The Two Cities of Dreadful Night
Authors: Schaefer William D.
Published: February 2007

Although “The City of Dreadful Night” has long been recognized as James Thomson's masterpiece, a good many critics have insisted that it is an uneven piece of work, inconsistent as an allegory, confused as to intellectual intent. I believe that the solution to many of the problems in this minor classic can be found if the poem is read and studied in its original order of composition, an approach made possible through the Morgan manuscript, a final copy of the poem in which Thomson meticulously recorded the date on which each stanza had been written. It has long been known that Thomson wrote the poem in two stages, part in 1870 and part in 1873, but the exact order of composition has never been established, and even Salt's careful biography only records Thomson's statement that “about half of it, not the first half as it now stands, was written in 1870.” The Morgan manuscript, however, makes it possible to chart the step-by-step progress of the poem's composition (see Table on page 616) and, for the first time, to read the poem in the order in which Thomson wrote it. I believe that if it is read in chronological sequence, a good deal of the confusion surrounding the poem can be understood through the realization that “The City of Dreadful Night” as we know it today actually combines two separate poems. Moreover, as I shall attempt to show by treating them separately, the 1870 “City” and the 1873 “City” are unquestionably two very different poems in concept and intention.
C.-F. Ramuz, Écrivain Suisse Romand
Authors: Collet Georges-Paul
Published: February 2007

Les termes de “Suisse romand,” de “Suisse français,” de “Français de Suisse,” de “Français isolé en Suisse,” de “Romand” tout court reviennent fréquemment dans la correspondance de Ramuz. Mais, disons-le d'emblée, celui-ci est le contraire d'un romancier régional-iste. Ecrivain d'expression française, c'est en plongeant profondément ses racines en terre vaudoise surtout, mais aussi valaisanne et savoyarde, qu'il atteint à l'universel. Au lendemain de la première guerre mondiale, il écrit à Elie Faure: “Nous, les Romands, représentons malgré tout la France en dehors de ses frontières politiques.” Oui, “malgré tout,” en dépit de ce que peuvent penser certains critiques de France, Ramuz appartient aussi au patrimoine spirituel du grand pays voisin. Qui contesterait que ses illustres prédécesseurs qui s'appellent J.-J. Rousseau, Mme de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Frédéric Amiel, tous de souche romande, ne représentent la littérature française au même titre que Mme de Sévigné, Voltaire et Charles Péguy? Du reste, les auteurs de manuels français les ont depuis longtemps annexés au domaine littéraire de la France.
Structure and Meaning in La Chute
Authors: King Adele
Published: February 2007

La chute is a disturbing and ironic picture of modern man caught in a hell of his own making. Since the involved irony and ambiguity make it Camus's most difficult work, the book was initially misunderstood by a number of critics. To appreciate fully the meaning of the novel it is necessary to understand Camus's use of literary parallels and of allusions to his own experience and to the history of his time. Some of the basic literary and historical allusions have been noted in recent criticism. The following study will examine in detail these allusions and will attempt to clarify the meaning of La Chute by elucidating particularly the relationship between the echoes of Dante and the echoes of L'Homme révolté and the controversy following its publication.
Rousseau and d'Alembert
Authors: Pappas John N.
Published: February 2007

Although several studies exist dealing with specific disagreements between Rousseau and d'Alembert, particularly in regard to the Lettre à M. d'Alembert sur les spectacles and the Rousseau-Hume quarrel, they are concerned primarily with Rousseau, leaving a sketchy and rather stereotyped image of d'Alembert as his hypocritical enemy pretending friendship but secretly working against him. Max Förster, in his Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Characters und der Philosophie d'Alemberts (Hamburg, 1892, pp. 10–36), reacts against this picture, going to the other extreme, but he does not attempt a full coverage of the relations between these two great figures of the eighteenth century: his chief aim is the defense of d'Alembert against specific accusations by Musset-Pathay. As a result, his presentation is incomplete and his conclusions sometimes questionable. There remains a need for a more complete and detached treatment of the subject, particularly as concerns the events preceding and following the above quarrels—a phase overlooked thus far but which is essential to an understanding of the reactions of the disputants during their disagreements. The present study seeks to offer this more balanced, over-all picture.
Gray's “Frail Memorial” to West
Authors: Foladare Joseph
Published: February 2007

Gray's Sonnet on the Death of Richard West has never recovered from the judgment visited upon it by Wordsworth, for whom it neatly demonstrated how Gray “was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction.” Scholars in recent times have been harsh: “Characteristically Gray wrote in English a stilted sonnet on West's death and put his genuine feelings into the Latin verses that he appended to his philosophical fragment, De principiis cogitandi. Not enough of a romantic to wear his heart on his sleeve, he concealed his emotions in classical Latin.” The following essay may show to what degree, if any, the work is “stilted” and the emotions are “concealed”; more directly, however, it is intended to show what kind of poem Gray was writing, and to consider whether he sought again to accomplish the sonnet's intentions in the Elegy.
The Road to Auch Einer
Authors: Hewett-Thayer Harvey W.
Published: February 2007

Friedrich Theodor Vischer has sometimes been called the Lessing of the nineteenth century. In certain aspects of their lives the parallel is striking. They were the sons of clergymen and were expected to follow in their fathers' footsteps, but each turned to other pursuits. Liberal thinking, particularly in theology, though differing fundamentally in texture, brought them into conflict with traditional orthodoxy. They were both critics in the field of aesthetics and both were men of letters in the narrower sense; Lessing alone, however, gained a position of distinction in literature.
Yeats's Byzantium Poems: A Study of Their Development
Authors: Bradford Curtis
Published: February 2007

Yeats's interest in Byzantine art and civilization began in the Nineties and continued through his life. The first issue of “Rosa Alchemica” (1896) refers to the mosaic work at Ravenna (“mosaic not less beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty”), work which Yeats probably saw when in 1907 he travelled in Italy with Lady Gregory. Unfortunately, Yeats has left us no account of his visit to Ravenna. A revision of “The Holy Places,” final section of Discoveries, made for the 1912 edition of The Culling of an Agate, shows that between 1906 and 1912 Yeats's knowledge of Byzantine history had increased. In 1906 he wrote of “an unstable equilibrium of the whole European mind that would not have come had Constantinople wall been built of better stone;” in 1912 this became “had John Palaeologus cherished, despite that high and heady look … a hearty disposition to fight the Turk.” In preparation for the “Dove or Swan” section of A Vision, which Yeats wrote at Capri in February 1925, and left virtually unchanged in the revised Vision of 1937, Yeats read several books about Byzantine art and civilization and studied Byzantine mosaics in Rome and Sicily. He did not return to Ravenna, being fearful of its miasmal air. Once Byzantium had found a place in “the System,” it shortly appeared in the poetry, first in “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Wisdom” (1926-27); then changed, though not utterly, in “Byzantium” (1930).