bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Lofty Game of Numbers: The Mynheer Peeperkorn Episode in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg
Authors: Seidlin Oskar
Published: February 2007

The magic and holy number seven, sum of the noumenal and phenomenal (3 plus 4) is at the very center of Thomas Mann's novelistic work since Der Zauberberg. It determines the structure and offers a clue to the meaning of his “educational novel.” This meaning becomes fully apparent in Mynheer Peeperkorn, synthesis between Christ and Dionysos. This synthesis is by no means weird and even less blasphemous, as has been often contended. Peeperkorn is the embodiment of Incarnation, and as such subject to the Passion, in both the Christian and the pagan sense. Through the life and death of Peeperkorn, Hans Castorp comes face to face with the highest Lebenswert. It is the great experience, anticipated in the chapter “Schnee,” by which the spell of and sympathy with death is broken. In the triangular covenant Peeperkorn-Mme Chauchat-Hans Castorp, caritus and eros, noumenal and phenomenal, are joined, pointing toward the “Third Humanism” of Thomas Mann's biblical novels. The number game, elucidated in numerous instances, is structure and meaning in one.
The Prototype for Melville's Confidence-Man
Authors: Reynolds Michael S.
Published: February 2007

During the summer of 1849, while Melville was in New York writing White Jacket, the New York Herald carried a running story of the arrest and trial of a petty criminal known as the “Confidence Man.” There are several parallels between the Herald's “Confidence Man” and the character that Melville created in his later novel The Confidence-Man. Both the New York “Confidence Man” and Melville's Confidence-Man use the same approach and the same line of reasoning, leading to the same question: “Could you put any confidence in me?” Both men work under several aliases; both men use the former-acquaintance routine to relax their victims. In both the reality and the fiction there is a matter of bail to get out of the Tombs. And in both the novel and a Herald editorial a strong parallel is drawn between petty confidence men and the confidence men of Wall Street. From this correlation there is little doubt that this “Confidence Man” of 1849 was, in fact, the prototype for a major part of Melville's character in 1857.
To See It Feelingly
Authors: Mack Maynard
Published: February 2007

Our profession is brought to a crisis of self-scrutiny by the current malaise among students and within ourselves. The malaise is real and must be reckoned with however we may account for it: whether as a profound shift of sensibility resembling that which took place at the Reformation or as an equally profound unsettling of our central American myths of concern. How shall we respond? Some urge retreat–into professionalism. Others proclaim defeat–on the ground either that literature is irrelevant to a world trying to educate its minorities and its poor, or that literature is merely supportive of the status quo. None of these arguments will bear inspection. A more practical and wiser response for teachers and scholars in our discipline is a program of outreach: toward (1) the schools, (2) the disadvantaged, (3) the general community of educated men and women, (4) the mass media, (5) more inventive collaborations with each other, (6) new arrangements of literary study; and, above all, (7) the larger tasks to which our calling commits us in purifying the language of the tribe, disseminating the world's great literature, and helping to reconstruct by the power of imagination a fully human world.
William Morris and the Judgment of God
Authors: Hollow John
Published: February 2007

William Morris once said to a friend, “if there is a God, He never meant us to know much about Himself, or indeed to concern ourselves about Him at all.” The remark indicates a relationship that several of Morris' early stories and poems have to each other. In “Lindenborg Pool,” the protagonist seeks, but does not receive, a sign from God; in “The Hollow Land,” two medieval knights who thought they did have signs from God finally realize that they have only taken their own judgments for His; and even “The Judgment of God,” in spite of its title, argues that men should not attempt to ascertain God's judgment. Morris' Guenevere, in her “Defence,” does not defend herself against the charge of adultery but against Gauwaine's claim that his judgment is the same as God's. On the other hand, when Guenevere (in the poem “King Arthur's Tomb”) follows Morris' advice, when she does not concern herself about God or His judgment, she discovers the truth about her guilt, that while she may not have sinned against God (as Gauwaine said she had), she has certainly sinned against a man, against Arthur, her husband.
Literary Materials in Thoreau's A Week
Authors: Hovde Carl F.
Published: February 2007

A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers contains a great many quotations, and these have been criticized as disturbing by those who find the work not much more than an interesting journal gone wrong. Even to those fond of the book it is clear that A Week has too many of them, and that occasionally so many are bunched together that the reader loses the sense of Thoreau's personality, which is always unfortunate. But the quotations with which A Week is studded, while certainly bothersome now and then, are usually pleasurable if one reads slowly, watching for the special powers and idiosyncrasies of the older styles which Thoreau loved. The contrast between his examples and the timbre of his own prose is satisfying in itself and contributes to the major concern of the whole work—the mind's proper fluidity, its rich diversity of attention when most in harmony with the spiritual laws governing insight and inspiration.
Joseph Arnould and Robert Browning: New Letters (1842–50) and A Verse Epistle
Authors: Smalley Donald
Published: February 2007

“Arnould wrote the cleverest, gratefullest verse-thanks to me, the other day, for these lyrics of mine,” Robert Browning told Alfred Domett in a letter of 1842, “and brought you in so happily.” Joseph Arnould himself, writing Domett some months later, spoke disparagingly of his epistle as “very schoolboy verses.” Though they had said exactly what he had felt at the time and still felt about the beauty and power of Browning's recent poetry, Arnould could not help fancying that his lines had given Browning “a bad opinion of my sincerity.” Arnould does less than justice to his verse critique. He is sincere to the point of much tactful admonishment, and though his tone is ingenuous and his style colorful rather than polished, he is selective and informed in many of his judgments. The epistle tells us much about this cultivated friend, and it suggests still more about the intellectual environment in which Browning worked during the early 1840's while he was trying to write dramas for the stage and at the same time feeling his way toward his special subject and manner. That Browning himself valued Arnould's epistle is shown by his giving it (perhaps along with other poems) to Elizabeth Barrett; for on 1 May 1846 Elizabeth wrote: “I am delighted with the verses and quite surprised by Mr. Arnould's, having expected to find nothing but love and law in them, and really, there is a great deal besides. Hard to believe, it was, that a university prize poet (who was not Tennyson) could write such good verses.” F. G. Kenyon, when he was collecting Browning's letters to Domett for Robert Browning and Alfred Domett (1906), a book that also contains letters and excerpts from letters of Arnould to Domett, seems to have had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the verse epistle. Fortunately the manuscript of this piece, together with the accompanying letter and six additional letters of Arnould's to Browning written in the years 1846–50, has recently come into the possession of Gordon N. Ray, President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Mr. Ray has kindly made them available for reproduction here.
The Use of History in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee
Authors: Williams James D.
Published: February 2007

Despite Mark Twain's prefatory disclaimer of any pretense to historical accuracy, a number of early reviewers of A Connecticut Yankee saw it as fundamentally historical and consequently “a very irrational proceeding.” William Thomas Stead, who read the Yankee with sympathetic insight and thought it a highly significant novel, conceded that it contained “much strange misreading of history.” And Andrew Lang, in a spirited defense of Mark Twain against his English detractors, admitted that he had not read the Yankee because its author did not have “the knowledge which would enable him to be a sound critic of the Middle Ages.”
Camus's Stranger Retried
Authors: Girard René
Published: February 2007

I have always pictured Meursault as a stranger to the sentiments of other men. Love and hatred, ambition and envy, greed and jealousy are equally foreign to him. He attends the funeral of his mother as impassively as he watches, on the following day, a Fernandel movie. Eventually, Meursault kills a man, but how could I feel that he is a real criminal? How could this man have any motive for murder?
The Restoration Ethos of Byron's Classical Plays
Authors: Cooke M. G.
Published: February 2007

It is conventional to take Byron as a veritable Janus of the romantic period, looking toward the classicism of the past even while facing away from it as an authentic figure of his time. The classical Byron himself is seen under two aspects, satirical and dramatic, and these are distinguished from each other on the following grounds: Byron's classical satires, such as English Bards, are traced back to Pope, but his classical dramas, such as Sardanapalus, are supposed to reflect Greek, French, or Italian antecedents; and the classical satires belong essentially to Byron's earlier career, the classical dramas to his later career. This paper focuses on the peculiar classicism of Byron's drama, the classicism of his maturer work, and that which, as far as his total work is concerned, he most stoutly defended.
Dylan Thomas and The “Biblical Rhythm”
Authors: Moynihan William T.
Published: February 2007

Despite its appearance as a miscellaneous collection of lyrics, Dylan Thomas' poetry is a closely unified body of work. Poetic unity customarily reveals itself in cohesive imagery (what Kenneth Burke calls “symbolic equations”), and in the repetition and development of related themes. Thomas' Collected Poems possesses such imagistic and thematic coherence, and these images and themes, furthermore, have as their subsuming source the Bible.
A New Reading of Gide's La Porte étroite
Authors: Knecht Loring D.
Published: February 2007

It is all too tempting on first acquaintance with Gide's La Porte étroite to see in it only the pathetically tragic tale of a young girl who believed too wholeheartedly that “virtue is its own reward.” Not too surprising, for this seems to be the reaction Gide intended to elicit. He protested against the view of some critics that he had “evolved” to a more sympathetic moral and religious attitude since 1902 and the publication of L'Immoraliste. He insisted repeatedly that he sought rather to make the work a criticism of a certain furiously deplorable protestantism, a puritanism that curiously evokes Jansenism, a misplaced sense of heroism which he characterizes as a sort of “cornélianisme gratuit.” This last must certainly apply to Alissa rather than to Jérôme.
Northrop Frye and the Problem of Spiritual Authority
Authors: Altieri Charles F.
Published: February 2007

Northrop Frye's recent criticism confronts the contemporary problem raised most powerfully by the Vietnam War—can we find a telos or definition of man on which we can ground our moral reactions and our visions of human development. Frye establishes this telos by an analysis of origins. Contained in a civilization's statements of “concern,” in its imaginative treatments of its own condition, one can find an underlying structure of desire which defines the ends of man. This structure and the recurrent images it produces then can serve as the middle terms people use to justify and value their actions. Frye shares his treatment of mediation with contemporary Hegelians like Sartre, Lukács, and Ricoeur, but grounds his absolute in tradition rather than in ideal absolutes or posited evolutionary patterns. Frye's idea of mediation also provides an ethical model for literary criticism: the critic tries to combine literature as product and as cultural possession by interpreting his materials as projections of imaginative desire. Furthermore, we can use Frye to criticize the relativist denial of origins in structuralist critics like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Contemporary Linguistics and Indo-European Studies
Authors: Lehmann W. P.
Published: February 2007

Recent linguistic studies, particularly the extension of structural analysis to the syntactic component of language and improved typological analysis, have made possible an increased understanding of Proto-Indo-European and the early Indo-European dialects. The new insights permit us to account for syntactic constructions such as the placement of relative clauses, adjectives, and genitives; the use of prepositions in VO, postpositions in OV languages; comparative constructions of the order STANDARD PIVOT ADJECTIVE in OV, ADJECTIVE PIVOT STANDARD in VO languages. As an illustration of a further pattern which can now be explained, the absolutes in the early dialects are examined, and accounted for as constructions that may arise in ambivalent languages. Besides contributing to an understanding of syntactic phenomena, current linguistic theory assists us in achieving further knowledge about Proto-Indo-European and further insights into the development of the Indo-European languages.
Syncopation in El Libro de Alexandre
Authors: Nelson Dana A.
Published: February 2007

The presence of syncopation in certain words in the Libro de Alexandre (lazrar, menestral, ofrecer, sabroso, sombra, etc.) and its absence in other words (avellana, eredad, eredar, etc.) support the Castilian origin of the poem and discredit the theory of western or Leonese authorship. The preservation of the etymological medial -d- in such words as porfidia, piedes, and vidieron is also dialectically significant, since the trait is particularly evident in other documents of the area of La Rioja. Similarities between the alterations introduced into Berceo's MSS and those found in the Alex are constantly stressed, since only through a clear understanding of the problems of transcription of medieval codices can we hope to clarify the question of regular meter in mester de clerecía of the thirteenth century. Scribes were capable of completely eradicating such forms as piedes (in O), udió, udién, and meydía (in both P and O). This type of obliteration has tended to confuse many critics, who are prone to base their ideas concerning the language and versification of the Alex on the MSS as they observe them, without attempting any critical analysis or reconstruction.
Crime and Myth: The Archetypal Pattern of Rebirth in Three Novels of Dostoevsky
Authors: Rudicina Alexandra F.
Published: February 2007

The focal dimension of Dostoevsky's creative effort in his later period is his compelling esthetic and metaphysical concern with ultimate violence, particularly in its doctrinaire or ideological aspect. The act of murder is seen as a “crime of reason,” an outgrowth of modern man's autarkic intellect. It is this “crime of reason” in accordance with his metaphysical esthetics that Dostoevsky constitutes as the transgression but also a potential felix culpa leading through suffering and expiation to ultimate rebirth. Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov each present an individuated version of this archetypal scheme. Raskolnikov emerges at the end of Crime and Punishment on the threshold of “a new life.” In The Possessed, Stavrogin's potentially “positive” performance perverts itself into “a quest for damnation.” Dmitri Karamazov undergoes spiritual regeneration even though falling short of complete redemption. In thus restating the timeless relevance of the archetypal pattern of rebirth through sin and expiation, Dostoevsky brings a mythical perspective to his vision of the Russia of his time.
The Three Beasts and Perspective in the Divine Comedy
Authors: Bernardo Aldo S.
Published: February 2007

Dante Scholars have long recognized the central role played by the first Canto of the Comedy. In the last half-century the wealth of hidden riches contained in the Canto has received such emphasis that as early as 1925 P. Luigi Pietrobono could defend the Canto against those detractors who felt that its allegorical structure led to an obfuscation of thought. For Pietrobono, “Nel primo Canto Dante ha poste le basi del più complesso e armonioso edificio d'arte che mente umana abbia mai con-cepito; e perô, anzichè correre a criticare e a supporre che un cosî mirabile costruttore di mondi si sia sentita tremar la mano proprio nel tirarne le prime linee, direi molto più con-veniente volgere l'ingegno a ricercare il fine a cui con la sua opera intendeva.” He then proceeded to single out the many Biblical echoes that resound throughout the Canto, with special emphasis on the drama of the resurrection of Israel.
Henry Vaughan: The Man Within
Authors: Martz Louis L.
Published: February 2007

The earlier poets in the English meditative tradition, Southwell, Alabaster, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, were all poets of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic tendency, where the Continental art of meditation found a fertile ground in which to develop an English counterpart. It is significant that all five of these earlier poets became priests: Southwell, bred and executed as a Catholic; Alabaster, shifting from Anglican to Catholic to Anglican; Donne, born and bred a Catholic, but turning finally to the English Church; Crashaw, born and bred a Protestant, but turning finally to the Roman Church; and Herbert, happy all his life within the English communion. They had their doctrinal differences, and I do not wish to minimize those differences; but they had something more in common: a devotion to the central mysteries of the Passion, a devotion to the symbols and a liturgy that served to celebrate those mysteries. All would have agreed with George Herbert's vision of “The Agonie”:
Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.
Aut Caesar, Aut Nihil: A Study of Dostoevsky's Moral Dialectic
Authors: Wasiolek Edward
Published: February 2007

In the first pages of The Brothers Karamazov the narrator recalls that he knew a young lady of the last romantic generation who, because of insuperable obstacles to union with her lover—all of which she had invented—one stormy night threw herself off a high precipice into a deep, rapid river. By this act she was able to satisfy her desire to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia; but, the narrator adds, had the precipice been less picturesque—a fiat mud bank, for instance—the suicide most probably would not have taken place. The romantic heroine, whose fate Dostoevsky brings up here only as an aside in his attempt to explain why Adelaida Ivanovna had married Fyodor Karamazov, recalls a character type which flourished on the pages of his works in the 1840's. Every reader of Dostoev-sky's early works will remember his bookish heroes, who prefer the beautiful improbabilities of romantic novels and the fantasies of their own minds to the reality they must live in. I am thinking of such obvious examples as the hero of White Nights, who for eight years has been intimately acquainted with characters from works of Hoffman, Scott, Goethe, and Mérimée, but who does not know a single real person in St. Petersburg. I am thinking, also, of the little hero from the story of the same name, who, in the seconds before he leaps on the unridable horse Tankred, sees in his mind's eye pictures of damsels, tournaments, pages, and all the paraphernalia of chivalry. As one who prefers fantasies to reality, Golyadkin of The Double is an obvious example; but even Makar Devushkin of Dostoevsky's first published work, Poor Folk, turns his back on the miserable conditions of his daily life and plays out the role of the generous benefactor to a young girl, even though the added economic burden drives him to drink and penury. There is hardly a work in the forties that does not have its dreamer: Netochka Nezvanova, huddled in a miserable corner looking across the street to the splendid house and dreaming of an improbable life, is a summary image of the hero of the forties.
The Abasement of Mrs. Warren Hope
Authors: Gale Robert L.
Published: February 2007

When in 1934 Edmund Wilson published his brilliant and provocative essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” in which he questions the reliability of James's center of revelation in “The Turn of the Screw,” he provided scholars an intriguing method for approaching much modern fiction. It seems to me that, for example, Roy P. Basler's reading of Poe's “Ligeia” as the unbalanced narrator's unwitting admission that he has murdered his second wife through inability to forget his first, and Simon O. Lesser's interpretation of Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” as a revelation of unconscious reluctance to seek a substitute father both owe much to Mr. Wilson. And so do a host of recent Jamesian critics: for two examples among at least a dozen, Marius Bewley, who regards Oliver Lyon, the central intelligence of “The Liar,” as more culpable than the prevaricating colonel; and William Bysshe Stein, who, far from sympathizing with Pemberton in “The Pupil,” brands him a prude. The temptation to doubt the accuracy of the narrator or the central intelligence of a short story by Henry James is beguiling, fatally so sometimes; but succumbing to the temptress can give pleasure to the reader often and an enriched meaning to many a story.
Shelley and Shaw
Authors: Duerksen Roland A.
Published: February 2007

Commentators on the works of George Bernard Shaw almost invariably acknowledge his great indebtedness to Shelley. Their remarks are, however, limited to a passing statement or, at most, a page or two in which Shaw's enthusiasm for Shelley receives a very general treatment—several quotations from Shaw (and there are two or three favorites) usually being cited as evidence which needs little if any elaboration. Few of the numerous instances in which Shaw directly acknowledges his debt to Shelley have been noted by critics, to say nothing of an examination of decidedly Shelleyan ideas which are prominent in Shaw's writings. I propose, therefore, to trace in considerable detail the background of Shaw's interest in Shelley, its effect upon him, his opinions about Shelley and his art, and especially his agreements and disagreements with important ideas held by Shelley.
Psychologie Und Mystik in Klein Und Wagner Von Hermann Hesse
Authors: Puppe Heinz W.
Published: February 2007

Hermann Hesses Erzachlung Klein und Wagner bildet das im Jahre 1919 geschrie-bene Mittelstück der drei 1920 zusammen unter dem Titel Klingsors letzter Sommer veröffent-lichten Erzählungen. Die Erzählung Kinderseele bildet das erste Stück, das dritte ist die Titel-geschichte. Hesse hat dièse drei Erzählungen wohl kaum zufällig zusammengestellt, zumal er sie über dreißig Jahre später in gleicher Grup-pierung in die Gesammelten Schriften aufnahm. In der Technik der Darstellung zeigt sich nämlich eine Verschiebung des Schwerpunkts, indem er in Kinderseele das Beispiel einer psycho-logischen Darstellung gibt, so, wie sie um die Zeit der Jahrhundertwende geübt wurde, dann in Klein und Wagner Einsichten verwertet, die sich von der Psychoanalyse herleiten, um schliefilich in Klingsors letzler Sommer das Individualpsycho-logische weitgehend unterzuordnen. Die Erzählungen bilden so zwar kein thematisches Ganzes, doch sei wenigstens darauf hingewiesen, dafi ein entwicklungsmäßiger Zusammenhang besteht.
Ezra Pound's Meters and Rhythms
Authors: Mcnaughton William
Published: February 2007

EZRA POUND himself emphasizes somewhat his work on the element of meter.1 T. S. Eliot wrote of Pound's importance in prosody to younger poets that “there is no one else to study.”2 Yet of all the critical attention which Pound's poetry has received in recent years, not one piece analyzes this fundamental aspect of his work.3 We have almost uniquely Pound's critical pronouncements and the verse iteself to lead us to an understanding.
Jonathan Edwards: The Theory Behind His Use of Figurative Language
Authors: Baumgartner Paul R.
Published: February 2007

Concentration on the ascetic element in Puritanism has led to a misunderstanding of the Puritans' attitude towards style and the use of figurative language. Kenneth Murdock cites as characteristic of Puritan style in prose and poetry a tension arising from the conflict of theoretical asceticism with a recognition that practical effectiveness in preaching demanded an appeal to man's senses. “Constantly one feels in Puritan literature,” writes Murdock, “a conflict between the desire to convince and persuade by the readiest means, and the determination never to cross the line into pleasing the sensual man.” Thus, though the Puritan writer generally depreciated the power of words as dead things incapable of conveying the living truth, “he used figures of speech … because he knew that whatever the ideal potency of divine truth might be, fallen man responded most directly to it when some concessions were made to his errant fancy.” This resembles the theory of accommodation, and Mr. Murdock calls it by that name when he cites Richard Baxter as a kind of authority for the stylistic practice of American Puritans. While he admits that it is, in a strict sense, “borrowed and improper,” Baxter justifies his use of figurative language in terms of its usefulness and effectiveness. The American Puritans, armed with Baxter's “doctrine of accommodation,” formed their literary theory “in an attempt to answer the old riddle of how infinite and eternal variety is to be expressed in the finite terms comprehensible to mortal man.”
Browning's Music Poems: Fancy and Fact
Authors: Ridenour George M.
Published: February 2007

Browning is one of Shelley's main heirs in the nineteenth century. As a boy he had worshipped Shelley, who is the most obvious single influence in both Pauline (pub. 1833) and Paracelsus (pub. 1835), his earliest published works. He grew uneasy about the relationship later, but he never stopped being in important ways a poet in the tradition of Shelley. One of the enduring likenesses between them is the way both use their strong sense of the weakness of language in developing the meaning of poems. Shelley uses it most fully in Epipsyckidion, where it serves a vision of the inadequacy of all human satisfactions. His solution is to set up a number of more or less satisfactory terms, calling attention to the fact that no one of them will do, and that they all together “do” only in special ways. This corresponds in language to the tendency to resist restrictions on personal relationships that appears in the Shelleyan “harem.” The solution in both cases can be awkward, but in the case of language, at any rate, the awkwardness is part of the meaning.
The Sacred Fount as a Comedy of the Limited Observer
Authors: Blackall Jean Frantz
Published: February 2007

The present reading of The Sacred Fount differs notably from existing interpretations of the novel. Yet it clearly places this book with others of James's experimental period, suggesting that it differs not in kind but in degree. The Sacred Fount is an intellectual detective story, as has often been observed, and part of its interest does consist in the investigation of a hypothetical problem: If it is true, as the narrator speculates, that a vampirish relationship exists between one couple, may an analogous relationship exist between another couple, and who is the second member of that second pair? But The Sacred Fount is not primarily a treatment of the vampire theme, as has frequently been claimed, nor is James concerned with picturing an intellectual Peeping Tom. Nor, I believe, is he primarily concerned with making a profound artistic, moral, or epistemological statement, though there are serious implications to be drawn from the narrator's behavior. Rather, the interest of the novel depends primarily on ironic effect, just as the interest of What Maisie Knew (1897) or In the Cage (1898), and again James's focus is on the observer rather than on the external scene he witnesses. The irony is again that arising from a discrepancy between the insight or knowledge of an intelligent but not infallible observer and the things he contemplates. Maisie has limited understanding because she is a child; the telegraphist is similarly restricted by poverty and her social class; and the narrator of The-Sacred Fount (1901), having both maturity and opportunity to his credit, is handicapped by certain qualities in his character. Perceptive but blinded by pride in his own ingenuity, he is too subtle to interpret accurately the social scene which he witnesses and too proud to admit his perplexities. Once the reader realizes the narrator's limitations, he is sustained by a constant sequence of ironies in a story which, like Maisie, is prevalently humorous in tone.
Astrology and Astronomy in the Fables of La Fontaine
Authors: Ridgely Beverly S.
Published: February 2007

In the gently melancholic meditation on solitude which forms the second part of “Le Songe d'un habitant du Mogol” (xi, 4), La Fontaine wonders if he will ever be able to escape the hubbub of life in Paris and retire to some peaceful rural retreat. At least he can anticipate how he might there spend his time, upon a subject well fitted to solitary contemplation:

Quand pourront les neuf Sœurs, loin des cours et des villesM'occuper tout entier, et m'apprendre des cieuxLes divers mouvements inconnus à nos yeux,Les noms et les vertus de ces clartés errantes,Par qui sont nos destins et nos mœurs différentes?
Les Juifs et le Judaïsme Dans l'Œuvre d'Alfred de Vigny
Authors: Sungolowsky Joseph
Published: February 2007

Les juifs sont fréquemment présents dans l‘œuvre d'Alfred de Vigny. Il ne semble pas, cependant, que le poète se soit expressément intéressé à eux. Ce serait plutôt à la suite d'influences plus ou moins précises et d'observations personnelles qu'il fut amené à représenter des personnages juifs dans ses œuvres. C'est ce qui explique sans doute le manque de consistance dans son attitude. Au début de sa carrière littéraire, Vigny fait preuve du mépris habituel à leur égard. Plus tard, notamment dans les ébauches de la Deuxième Consultation du Docteur Noir, il les peint de manière plus favorable. Certaines notes de Vigny sur les Juifs font même croire qu'il éprouva pour eux une certaine sympathie. Par ailleurs, certaines remarques éparses dans l‘œuvre montrent que Vigny, étant donné la fécondité de sa pensée religieuse, a réfléchi sur plusieurs points de l'histoire et de la philosophie du judaïsme.
Virginia Woolf and the Critic as Reader
Authors: Goldman Mark
Published: February 2007

Virginia woolf's title for the two volumes of essays collected in her lifetime, The Common Reader, has been taken for a descriptive image of the critic as impressionist or amateur reader. In the preface to her first Common Reader, Mrs. Woolf explains her title and epigraph, taken from Dr. Johnson's “Life of Gray,” in place of a statement of purpose. Her description is deliberately casual and informal, but she provides a structure and point of view for her essays by adding that the common reader does wish to create from his reading “some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.” Though Mrs. Woolf's deceptive remarks on the function of criticism may partly account for the persistent view of her as “reader” rather than “critic,” other writers have contributed to the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as an occasional essayist and impressionist, as a literary portrait painter and miniaturist; or as an antiquarian rummaging through the attics of a rather charming but peripheral past. Unsympathetic readers have carried the belletristic image further and coupled it with the conception of her fiction as a total immersion in pure subjectivity or (in Sean O'Faolain's view) as an exercise in the novel as narcissism. Yet, in fairness to reviewers of Virginia Woolf's essays, it should be noted that both favorable and unfavorable com'ments seem to be based on a similar conception of her as an appreciator or impressionist rather than a serious critic. Thus Horace Gregory, while presenting what he feels is a just and favorable estimate of Virginia Woolf as an essayist, tends to ignore her real value as a literary critic.
Giraudoux and the Impossible Couple
Authors: McLendon Will L.
Published: February 2007

If indeed noteworthy progress toward maturation in Giraudoux studies has been registered over the past ten or fifteen years, the deeper significance of much of his work remains to be fully appreciated. All too often, critics call Giraudoux précieux without having understood the special meaning he associated with this term; we are still influenced by the opinions of two generations who treated Giraudoux variously as a “chevalier de l'illusion,” or a “magicien optimiste,” while others spoke of the “jardins de Giraudoux” and his “éternel printemps.”Not until 1950 or thereabouts, when Antoine Adam wrote of the “Dureté de Giraudoux,” was criticism beginning noticeably to orient itself toward Giraudoux's pessimism and to find that therein lay one of the deepest currents of his life and art.
The Man of Law vs. Chaucer: A Case in Poetics
Authors: David Alfred
Published: February 2007

For swich lawe as a man yeveth another wight,He sholde hymselven usen it, by right;Thus wole oure text.

Among the many passages in which Chaucer or one of his characters talks about poetry, and more specifically Chaucer's own poetry, one of the most tantalizing is the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale. The Man of Law claims to be at a loss for a “thrifty tale” because Chaucer “thogh he kan but lewedly / … Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan” (ii.46–49). He continues with a partial list of Chaucer's works that consists chiefly of stories from the Legend of Good Women, surprising us with several that Chaucer apparently never got around to writing. He praises Chaucer for avoiding stories about incest and alludes to two such tales with indignation. At last he declares that he will leave rhyme to Chaucer and tell a prose tale and immediately begins a prologue in rhyme royal.
Pictorial and Poetic Design in Two Songs of Innocence
Authors: Connolly Thomas E. , Levine George R.
Published: February 2007

The Little Boy lostFather, father, where are you goingO do not walk so fast.Speak father, speak to your little boyOr else I shall be lost,The night was dark no father was thereThe child was wet with dew.The mire was deep, & the child did weepAnd away the vapour flew.

The Little Boy foundThe little boy lost in the lonely fen,Led by the wand'ring light,Began to cry, but God ever nigh,Appeard like his father in white.He kissed the child & by the hand ledAnd to his mother brought,Who in sorrow pale, thro' the lonely daleHer little boy weeping sought.

In William Blake's Songs of Innocence appear two tiny, apparently simple poems that have, until recently, attracted relatively little critical attention. Some critics have ignored “The Little Boy lost,” and “The Little Boy found” entirely; others have treated them as relatively insignificant examples of innocence preserved.Several critics are clearly puzzled by the poems: Joseph Wicksteed, for example, finds the disappearance of the vapour in “The Little Boy lost” both mysterious and ultimately inexplicable (pp. 46–47), whereas E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has more recently admitted that the “best symbolic interpretation” of these two poems is “not characteristic of the Songs of Innocence.” Only one critic, Robert Gleckner, has argued for their importance in the Songs of Innocence, but Gleckner has perhaps gone too far in attempting to elevate them to the status of key poems in the Songs of Innocence.
The Complexity of Julius Caesar
Authors: Hartsock Mildred E.
Published: February 2007

From the eighteenth century to the present, editors, critics, and directors have recognized special problems in the interpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Every major play has been extensively debated, to be sure, but discussions of this play have been marked by an unusual perplexity. There is little agreement about the most elementary questions. Is Caesar an egocentric, dangerous dictator—a genuine threat to Rome; or is he the “noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times,” as Antony says he is? Is Brutus the mistaken idealist, strong in abstract principle but weak in human perceptiveness; or is he, as Swinburne thought, the “very noblest figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of the world”? Is he the Aristotelian hero, noble but flawed, recognizing at last that he has erred? Or is he the willful egoist, embodying the very traits of Caesarism which he professes to hate? Is Cassius the dedicated republican that Brutus, Titinius, and many of his own speeches make him appear to be? Or is he the “lean and hungry” envious one who hates Caesar for merely personal reasons? These are only a few of the questions the play poses. Everywhere one turns, contradictions loom.
“Artful Strife”: Conflict in Gray's Poetry
Authors: Spaces Patricia Meyer
Published: February 2007

Thomas Gray's Pindaric ode, “The Progress of Poesy,” completed in 1754, concludes with an odd definition of the “way” of the poet:

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,

Beneath the Good how far—but far above the Great.
Cooper and The American Dream
Authors: Collins Frank M.
Published: February 2007

Chroniclers of the American Dream have made progressively clear in recent years that the “dialogue” or “dialectic” it produced was the distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century American letters. An important consequence of the valuable studies carried out in particular by Marius Bewley, A. N. Kaul, R. W. B. Lewis, and Henry Nash Smith has been the rehabilitation of James Fenimore Cooper as an early and exemplary participant in this debate. According to Lewis, he is, as the creator of the “fictional Adamic hero unambiguously treated,” a partisan of the party of Hope in its skirmishes with the parties of Memory and Irony. In the more properly internalized drama presented by the others, he is the theater for a struggle between what Smith sees as his commitment to the “principle of social order” and his attraction to the “anarchic freedom” projected in Leatherstocking; what Bewley sees as Europe and America taken as value clusters similar to those later placed in dramatic opposition by Henry James; and what Kaul sees as “the history and the myth of American civilization,” acceptance and repudiation of ties with the corrupt European past. But this revised conception of Cooper's significance is in the process of passing into stereotype before it is validated. What remains to be done, what I propose to do, is to examine closely the texture of his habitual discourse. By isolating and relating those minute flourishes and recurring expressions which betray a writer's stance in its complexity, I hope to bring more clearly into focus the conflict between Cooper's formal theory, the conscious thesis of universal depravity which was the structuring principle in his religious and political philosophy (his acceptance of Europe as an abiding reminder of the human condition) and the half or barely articulated antithesis of meliorism (his rejection of Europe as the inevitable condition)— a conflict which did not so much end in an outright victory for either view as subside in a faltering synthesis.
Samuel Beckett: The Flight from Self
Authors: Cornwell Ethel F.
Published: February 2007

Recognizing the existential necessity for self-creation, but unable to unify mind and body, or to bear the burden of consciousness, the Beckett hero retreats from himself. His life becomes one long attempt to reverse the process of birth and speed his return to the pre-conscious state from which he emerged. And it is always the same hero, always the same story. In Murphy, Beckett defines the three zones of consciousness, the mental regions to which his later heroes retreat. What his prose fiction offers is a steady regression from the first zone to the third, beginning with Murphy, then Three Novels, Stories and Texts for Nothing, and How It Is. Eventually, the Beckett hero finds himself trapped in an inner corner which he can escape only through insanity or death. Unable to accept either, he passes the time inventing stories, hiding behind his characters, waiting for release from his unbearable, “unmakeable” self.
Spenser's Wanton Maidens: Reader Psychology and the Bower of Bliss
Authors: Okerlund Arlene N.
Published: February 2007

In creating an evil Bower of Bliss which is imaginatively more appealing than its good counterparts in “The Legend of Temperaunce,” Spenser shapes his poetics to expose the reader's own status regarding the virtue of temperance. The first eleven cantos of Book II presumably provide an education in properly temperate behavior, until the beauty of the Bower suddenly reveals that the reader prefers the seductive attractions of the wanton maidens and the leisurely raptures of Acrasia's bed of roses to the moderation and rationality of Alma's House of Temperance. As the reader responds to the descriptions of Acrasia's garden, he shows how easily he can be seduced by the apparent beauties of earthly bliss—even though he knows the consequences of such intemperate actions. In the Bower of Bliss, the reader discovers that knowledge of evil and declared preferences for abstract virtue offer no protection against temptation. Through his response to the poetry, he finds himself in an embarrassing confrontation with his human nature.
Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
Authors: Battenhouse Roy
Published: February 2007

Starting with Raglan's suggestion that Falstaff may be a “holy fool” and with Auden's belief that he is a comic symbol of charity, this essay explores the medieval tradition of wise fool, and especially Falstaff's always canny use of biblical allusion. His various jests, if read in relation to the political action of the main plot, reveal him as characterizing England's time of day and parodying the unchristian behavior of Hotspur, Henry, and Hal. By the time he dies mumbling Psalm xxiii to an uncomprehending Nell Quickly, there have accumulated many hints that he is, in fact, a candle to his age, a professional Fool with the heart of a faithful Lazarus, and destined to join Mowbray in Abraham's bosom. The merriment for which readers have found him lovable amid his masquerades of vice has its mysterious basis in his covertly Christian understanding of England's neo-Roman Caesars.
The Raven and the Bust of Pallas: Classical Artifacts and the Gothic Tale
Authors: Merivale Patricia
Published: February 2007

Classical artifacts, particularly busts and statues, play an important part as image, symbol, plot element, or even character, in a large number of “Gothic” (i.e., romantic horror) contexts. Eighteenth-century neoclassicism provides “classically” serene artifacts to contrast with “Gothic” ones in, for instance, Poe and Hawthorne. But medieval tradition provides the Venus statue story, where the statue itself is the focus of Gothic horror, in Eichendorff, James, Merimee, Gautier, and others; this, especially in the subtler artist parables, is the key nineteenth-century usage. For the twentieth century, statues become “Dionysian,” classical yet fearful, as in Forster and Lagerkvist. More recently, statues represent a frivolous, melodramatic terror, or else mere emblematic pageantry. In contemporary poetry, however (Rilke, Plath, Seferis), the wheel has in a sense come full circle; classical statues are serious emblems of art and of the artist's obligation to put together the maimed and shattered fragments of a personal and “classical” tradition.
The Picaro's Journey to the Confessional : The Changing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman
Authors: Miles David H.
Published: February 2007

From Goethe's Wilhelm Meister through Keller's Grüner Heinrich to Rilke's Malte, the hero of the German Bildungsroman develops from unselfconscious adventurer in the outer world to compulsive explorer of the world within. This transformation in the hero—from “picaro” to “confessor”—implies a change in the concept of Bildung: the “self” no longer accumulates, but must be re-collected. Wilhelm Meister's unreflective nature aligns him directly with the picaresque hero; essentially, he does not develop. In Keller's novel the hero develops precisely by narrating his picaresque past. Through his confessional notebooks, Rilke's hero, Malte, attempts to overcome the “sickness” of his fragmented self by recollecting his childhood. This transformation of the literary hero in the nineteenth century mirrors in turn the historical rise of alienated, self-conscious man. Beyond Maire the Bildungsroman can only move on to parody, to the anti-Bildungsromane of Kafka, Mann, and Grass, in which both types of hero are parodied.
The Comedy of Swift's Scatological Poems
Authors: Gilmore Thomas B.
Published: February 2007

Five of Jonathan Swift’s scatological poems of the early 1730’s—A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, The Lady’s Dressing Room, Strephon and Chloe, Cassinus and Peter, and A Panegyrick on the D–n—are comic masterpieces. In the case of A Beautiful Young Nymph, appreciation of the comedy involves recognition of its grimness, lightened only by the precarious successes of Corinna’s daily struggles for survival, indeed, for resurrection. With the other poems, this appreciation depends on a perception of the basic incongruities between fantasy and fact, sublimation and reality, the standards of pastoral romance or polite society and the need to evacuate waste. Although Swift satirizes those who would ignore or deny this need, his own willingness to face its results and his mock-heroic allusiveness in the scatological poems suggest the tolerance and playfulness characteristic of and conducive to a comic outlook.
The Tongue and Its Office in The Revenger's Tragedy
Authors: Simmons J. L.
Published: February 2007

Lussurioso’s valedictory in The Revenger’s Tragedy—”My tongue is out of office”—isolates a dominant image that Cyril Tourneur adapted from the Kydian revenge play, particularly Titus Andronieus where the mutilation of Lavinia represents the gothic assault on the definitively human ability to speak and the cancellation of the eloquent bond that creates a just society. Whereas Shakespeare finally affirms this classical idealization of rhetoric, Tourneur accentuates the opposing tradition of rhetoric as the ability to flatter, seduce, and speak unjustly. He employs the biblical concept of the fiery tongue as a quasi-independent organ with psychic and ethical potency. In Tourneur’s world of “nimble and desperate tongues,” the linguistic glory of man becomes a phallic and self-destructive act that justifies Vindice’s moral degeneration and tragic end. With other images that ironically evoke lost ideals of Renaissance humanism, imagery of the tongue helps to illuminate the grotesque Jacobean darkness of the play.
The Continuity of Milton's Sonnets
Authors: McCarthy William
Published: February 2007

Milton’s sonnets display the conventionalized career of their implied author, a Christian poet. As poet, he rises from Petrarchan apprenticeship to the role of his community’s conscience and is then retired; as Christian, he follows the career of fall and redemption. The poetic career is implied by the sonnets’ pattern of concerns: from amatory concerns to public concerns to private stocktaking. The Christian career is implied by the progress of the sonnets through a four-level structure of imagery: Heaven, Eden, the fallen world, and the world of sin. These patterns are intrinsic to the sonnets and justify regarding them as a sequence.