bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Public Dreams and Private Myths: Perspective in Middle English Literature
Authors: Peck Russell A.
Published: February 2007

Using Joseph Campbell’s aphorism “Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths” as a pointing device, this essay explores the resilience and breadth of medieval literature as it incorporates into a single purview many perspectives that seem incongruous to the literary taste of later times. The argument maintains that the presence of a common myth to which the society generally adheres accounts for most essential differences between medieval and modern poetry, affecting not only the multiple ways in which the language functions but also the relationship of poet to idea and poem, and the vigorous interplay between poet and audience. The essay treats half a dozen Middle English lyrics, a poem by William Carlos Williams, and a fabiliau by Guerin.
Is King Lear an Antiauthoritarian Play?
Authors: Allgaier Johannes
Published: February 2007

MOST modern criticism of King Lear directs itself resolutely against the notion, said to be held by some critics, that the play forms part of the Christian tradition, that it ultimately affirms the victory of good over evil, specifically, the victory of love over hate, and that it therefore makes virtue prevail in the end.1 On the contrary, Dr. Johnson felt that “Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice” (“Notes” to King Lear), and the majority of modern critics holds, as Swinburne did,2 that the play is deeply pessimistic, that in writing King Lear Shakespeare deliberately examined such Christian concepts as divine providence, retributive justice, or the existence of some universal moral order, and came to the conclusion that at best man's world was a “great stage of fools” (iv.vi.182), whose false sense of security should make the philosopher chuckle; or that at worst it was a “wheel of fire” (iv.vii.47) upon which not only Lear but every man is bound, an image that should make the poet cry in agony.3
Balaustion's Adventure: Browning's Greek Parable
Authors: L. Ryals Clyde De
Published: February 2007

Because The Ring and the Book is such a towering imaginative achievement, readers and critics alike have slighted those poems which Browning wrote and published soon after 1868. This is especially true of Balaustion's Adventure (1871), the poet's next work after The Ringand the Book. Largely given over to a retelling of Euripides' Alkestis, it has perplexed most critics, many of them wondering whether it should be considered as anything more than a mere transla tion. Browning himself made few claims for it. In the dedication to the Countess Cowper he re ferred to it as a task that “proved the most delightful of May-month amusements,”1 and to Isabella Blagden he spoke of it as “my little new Poem,—done in a month,—and I think a pretty thing in its way.”2 Calling it “Exhaustion's Impos ture,” Rossetti found “the structure of the work beyond all conception perverse” and the Euripidean Alkestis “interlarded with Browningian analysis to an extent beyond all reason or relation to things by any possibility Greek in any way.”3 Swinburne, discovering “fine things in it,” thought that “the pathos of the subject is too simple and downright for Browning's analytic method.”4 Later commentators have likewise been worried by the question of its faithfulness to the Greek spirit.6 The purpose of this essay is to suggest that such a consideration is largely irrelevant to an estimation of the poem which both William Clyde DeVane and Robert Langbaum claim belongs with the works of Browning's best period.6
Conrad, Wells, and the Two Voices
Authors: Karl Frederick R.
Published: February 2007

THROUGHOUT the nineteenth century, Art, or the Life of Art, brought with it characteristics of death, decay, dissolution, pessimism, and nihilism, even when it stood, theoretically at least, for transcendence and transformation. The world of Art, so closely akin to the unconscious and preconscious, fell into the role described for it by Plato, as “frantic and possessed.” Socrates reasons, in a well-known passage, that “the poet is an airy thing, a winged and a holy thing ; and he cannot make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his senses and no mind is left in him.”1 The Poet, the Artist, the Creator is, as we know, both ecstatic and calculating. He calls attention to thoughts and acts that lie deep within us and that we try to disguise with logic; in brief, the Artist plays on our unconscious (what we cannot control) by appealing to our consciousness (what, we think, we can control).
The Revisions of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Authors: Meyers Jeffrey
Published: February 2007

TE. LAWRENCE'S BELIEF in the supreme importance of art made it inevitable that he write the history of the Arab revolt and his leadership of it. His conscientious and ambitious character made the composition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom a lengthy and agonizing process, and his letters to friends show that his desire to achieve greatness as a writer was even stronger than his wish to excel as a commander. “Artists excite and attract me,” he tells Robert Graves.1 “I've wished all my life to have the power of creating something imaginative.”2 He feels that “a man never amounts to anything in this world unless he be an artist.3 I shall be appraised rather as a man of letters than as a man of action.”4
Psychological Time and Revolutionary Action in Le Rouge et le noir
Authors: Gerhardi Gerhard C.
Published: February 2007

THIS PAPER seeks to investigate the social and revolutionary implications of a predisposition toward violence (variously called “virtu” or “énergie”) so typical of Stendhal's characters. It will aim at showing that when the individual's psychological need for action is frustrated by a stagnant society, he will attempt to shatter the structure that confines him to inaction. Such a temperamental predisposition is all the more likely to become a revolutionary act when the “times are out of joint.”1 Indeed, an important aspect of the revolutionary mentality is what one might call the “chiliastic” experience of time.2
Idée de révolution et principe de réversibilité dans Le Balcon et Les Nègres de Jean Genet
Authors: Chesneau Albert C.
Published: February 2007

IE THéÂTRE DE JEAN GENET, qui ne comprend que cinq pièces,1 frappe d'emblée parson caractère agonistique. Alors que les dramaturges contemporains les plus illustres, Ionesco, Arrabal et surtout Beckett nous présentent des personnages égarés ou hagards, incapables de lutter contre un destin dont ils ne conçoivent clairement que l'absurdité, Genet semble savoir où il va. Animés d'une cruauté lucide et efficace, ses personnages ont entrepris d'un cœur allègre la démolition de leur société, de notre société, au nom de l'idée de Révolution. Nous entendrons ce dernier mot au sens qu'on lui accorde généralement dans le vocabulaire politique, en l'opposant au simple coup d‘état, dépourvu de tout idéalisme et qui ne vise au pouvoir que pour satisfaire une cynique volonté de puissance. L'activité révolutionnaire, elle, cherche à opérer un changement de gouvernement afin de favoriser l‘épanouissement des citoyens dans une liberté plus grande. Obéissant au mouvement dialectique qui va de l'analyse de la Babylone à détruire aux exigences de la cité nouvelle à édifier, nous commencerons par la critique de cette société sclérosée, que Genet affirme être la nôtre et qui ne tient plus debout que par habitude, grâce aux lois de la pesanteur et de l'inertie sociologiques. Contre elle se tendront toutes les forces des principaux personnages et, par derrière eux, de Genet. Telle qu'elle est décrite dans Le Balcon et dans Les Nègres, la société à renverser nous apparaît d'abord sous des espèces féodales. En effet l'autorité s'y incarne en ce que Genet appelle “les Trois Figures fondamentales.” Il désigne par là l'Evêque. le Juge et le Général du Balcon. On les reconnaîtra à leur stature surhumaine, à leurs épaules artificiellement élargies et à l'espèce de cothurne qu'ils doivent chausser:
Fictional Orientations in Thomas Mann's Biography
Authors: Lehnert Herbert H.
Published: February 2007

THIS STUDY is to show an interrelationship between Thomas Mann's fiction and certain attitudes he displayed during the course of his life. The word “orientation” is useful because it denotes a practice everybody uses every day. It is similar to the process that shapes a number of words in such a way that they comprise artistic sense in a literary work of art, which we will call “poem.”
Collapse of Dynasty : The Thematic Center of Absalom, Absalom!
Authors: Behrens Ralph
Published: February 2007

Absalom, Absalom! achieves mythic significance and universality through Faulkner's deliberate use of parallels between Thomas Sutpen's attempt to found a dynasty in the Old South and the attempts of ancient Hebrew rulers to establish their kingdoms. The choice of title for the novel, as well as numerous analogies between Faulkner's plot and incidents in the prophetic books of the Old Testament, particularly n Samuel, indicate that Faulkner intended the biblical accounts of dynastic failures to illuminate and strengthen his theme. In attempting to find reasons for the failure of Sutpen to establish his Southern dynasty, critics have advanced four tenable theories. One theory finds Sutpen's innocence the principal reason for his failure; another sees hubris as the cause of failure; still a third contends that the socioeconomic injustices of the pre-Civil War South, magnified in the character of Sutpen, account for the failure. The fourth and most tenable theory, considered too briefly by critics, indicates that the very concept of dynasty is so basically flawed that failure is inherent in the design itself; or, more broadly still, that men erroneously persist in the mythic hope that they can establish permanent dynasties, though historically none has succeeded.
Place and Setting in Tartuffe
Authors: Hope Quentin M.
Published: February 2007

Although less important than in Racine or Shakespeare, place in Moliere deserves attention. The more farcical plays have an outdoor, Italianate setting. In the highertoned indoor comedies the characters inhabit concentric circles; props, set, house, city, province, universe. At the center of Tartuffe stands the intruder, Tartuffe himself. A sequence of entrance and exit scenes defines the broader aspects of place in the play. Madame Pernelle's exit scene situates Orgon's family, a disputatious and gossipy household. Orgon's entrance reveals a person who has lost his sense of place. Conventionally in comedy the bourgeois father is happy to return from the hazards of the country to the security of his role as owner and master. To Orgon, however, the return means only reunion with Tartuffe. His entrance scene is balanced by his eviction at the hands of his protégé who changes places with him. Tartuffe's place is Orgon's house: his exits are false exits or strategic withdrawals, his return is triumphant until the regal denouement which sends him to the King's prison and Orgon's family to the King's palace where they will kneel in gratitude.
Cervantes and Courtly Love: The Grisóstomo-Marcela Episode of Don Quixote
Authors: Iventosch Herman
Published: February 2007

In his celebrated quasi-bucolic episode of the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes mocks and parodies the old school of the Frauendienst, even as he levels his irony against a chivalric ideal that had come under increasing scorn since at least the end of the fifteenth century. Various elements are blended to achieve his story. Grisóstomo's suicide turns out to be incontrovertible as well as illustrative of the essentially Petrarchan though parodical character of the famous poem “La cancion desesperada,” while the generally bucolic although mixed and burlesque quality of the entire episode issues straight from a central theme of the Renaissance pastoral, the whole matter of man's freedom. The very term “canción desesperada,” and probably other features of the long poem in Ch. xiv, derive directly from a sixteenth-century bucolic poet and fervent Petrarchist, Gutierre de Cetina.
The Degradation of Chaucer's “Geffrey”
Authors: Garbáty Thomas J.
Published: February 2007

The nairator in Chaucer's poetry, a pose which is neither completely separate from nor identical with the poet himself, develops stylistically as he declines intellectually from the dream vision poems to the Canterbury Tales (1369-87). In the early works he is neither naive nor sophisticated, but represents a type we know in legal terms as the “reasonable man” who personifies the social-moral norms of society in an unemotional, unintellectual, and unimaginative fashion. This character “Geffrey” seems dull-witted and absurd only in contrast to the unusual situations or irrational and autocratic individuals he confronts. His “reasonable” perception is on a lower, second, level to their sophisticated first, an ironic structure which foreshadows that of Jane Austen. In the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrim “Chaucer” drops to the lowest, or third, level; he is an uncomprehending caricature who “agrees” with the first-level ironist, but who misunderstands his irony. Herry Bailly usually acts the part of the prosaic “reasonable man,” but the poet raises the reader-listener to his own highest (first) level of perception. Thus Chaucer's degradation of his own pose brings about a progressive and significant intensification of his humor.
Milton's Dichotomy of “Judaism” and “Hebraism”
Authors: Stollman Samuel S.
Published: February 2007

Milton scholars have long been aware of inconsistencies in Milton's views regarding the Old Testament and the Jews. He shows, concurrently, “powerful judaistic motifs” and “anti-judaistic motifs.” He advocated liberty of conscience but was silent during the debate on the Readmission of the Jews. Milton's views may have evolved or changed but he was doctrinally consistent. He dichotomized the Old Testament constellation of personae and concepts into “Judaic” motifs which he rejected and “Hebraic” motifs which he adopted. He took Paul's antithesis of the Law (the Flesh) and the Gospel (the Spirit) and applied it within the Hebrew Bible itself. The “Judaic” complex is that which is human, relevant to the Jews as a people inclined to servitude, and the “external” aspect of the Mosaic Law, also a form of bondage. The “Hebraic” complex is divine, universal, and the “internal” Scripture, equated with freedom and. ultimately, Christian Liberty. The “Hebraic” motif supplies a continuity for the Scriptures. The dichotomy accords with Milton's philosophy (Plato's and Aristotle's dualisms) and with his methodology of structural and imagistic contrasts. The dichotomy explains the presence of “judaistic” and “anti-judaistic” motifs as well as his “reluctance” to grant the Jews freedom of worship.
D. H. Lawrence and Ontological Insecurity
Authors: Kleinbard David J.
Published: February 2007

R. D. Laing's concept of ontological insecurity and Erik Erikson's analysis of identity confusion contribute to an understanding of Lawrence's characterization in The Rainbow and Women in Love. Will Brangwen's fear in The Rainbow that he will dissolve into nothingness without Anna is typical of individuals suffering from ontological insecurity. This anxiety ramifies into webs of mutually contradictory feelings. For example, Will's fantasy of merging with Anna clashes with his fear of losing his identity through absorption into hers. Anna embodies for Will an unconscious fantasy of his mother; this displacement is the root of the contradictions and conflicts in which he becomes entangled. As Anna fights against Will's unconscious desire to maintain a mother-son symbiosis in his marriage, Will rages against her because she represents the mother from whom he unconsciously wishes to be free, even while clinging to her. This fantasy system proliferates into role and identity confusions. Will wishes to be absolute master of his home and child-servant of his wife's matriarchy. Simultaneously in his relationship with his little girl, Ursula, he is an affectionate father, a sadistically destructive sensualist, and a child seeking parental support. These dissonant impulses and roles exacerbate Will's sense of his unreality, incoherence, and general impotence.
Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature
Authors: Peterson R. G.
Published: February 2007

Since 1937, critics have been discovering integrated into the structure of literary works various numerological and symmetrical patterns. Lines, chapters, books, episodes, characters, images, etc. are found in symbolic numbers like 3, 4, 10, 33, etc. and in symmetrical arrangements (concentric, triadic, or parallel). Both were known in classical times, but nowhere in surviving classical theory is there explicit recognition of any large-scale use of number or pattern in literature; nor are there important references in modern critical writing before this century. Nevertheless, even though the esthetic relevance of highly complicated or esoteric number systems is doubtful, many symmetrical (often concentric) and numerological patterns have been convincingly demonstrated in works from the Iliad to the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, as well as in other poems and novels from the Renaissance to the present. But problems remain as to what can properly be measured and what validates the patterns detected.
“Shall I Compare Thee to a Morn in May?”: Walther von der Vogelweide and His Lady
Authors: Groos Arthur
Published: February 2007

Walther von der Vogelweide’s “Sô die bluomen ûz dem grase dringent” is usually presented as an adaptation of a commonplace of Minnesang, the assertion that the joys inspired by a courtly lady are superior to those of spring. Such an interpretation accounts neither for Walther’s detailed presentation of the comparison between nature and the lady nor for the apparent repetition of his theme in the final stanza. The poet’s careful use of stylistic and thematic parallels, particularly similes derived from the medieval view of nature, transform the traditionally brief commonplace into a hierarchical conception of being which pervades the entire poem. Simultaneously. Walther’s adaptation of his theme necessitates the “repetition,” which self-consciously involves both his audience and the preceding stanzas in a further comparison, emphasizing the role of the poet in creating and perpetuating the fictions of Minnesang and its system of values.
The Theme of Mutability in the “Ode to Psyche”
Authors: Waldoff Leon
Published: February 2007

A sound basis for interpreting the odes as a sequence, with unity of theme and progression of thought, may be found in the theme of mutability. It is generally acknowledged as central in the other odes but has been neglected in discussions of the “Ode to Psyche.” Though this theme is dealt with defensively, it is evident in the tone, in the paradoxical conception of Psyche as a dying immortal, in the imaginative effort to restore her presence and rescue her from the “faint Olympians,” and in the final act of internalization. As in the other odes, the answer to the problem of mutability lies in an acceptance of the natural process of which man's life is a part and in a will to adapt. Though Keats would make Psyche the presider over his soul, he is aware that in the end he must preside over his own growth and “Soul-making.”
King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism
Authors: Delany Paul
Published: February 2007

The moral problems that are explored in King Lear can be clarified by viewing them in the context of Shakespeare's history plays and of contemporary social conflicts. Lear and Gloucester share the values of a feudal aristocracy that is threatened by an acquisitive and irreverent bourgeois class; the argument over Lear's train reflects the Tudor monarchs' struggle against maintenance, the right of an aristocrat to keep an armed retinue. The Tudor crisis of the aristocracy had tragic connotations for Shakespeare, and the heroes of his later plays are usually figures of the “old regime.” This is not inconsistent with Marx's concept of tragedy, but Shakespeare's humanism should be recognized as nostalgic rather than forward-looking.
Death Worship among the Victorians: The Old Curiosity Shop
Authors: Kucich John
Published: February 2007

Criticism has difficulty reconciling a writer’s interest in death with the categories of literary analyses. Death interest is rejected as orgiastic or treated reductively. The Old Curiosity Shop is used to show how a novelist’s staging of death expresses desires for radical authenticity, in Bataille’s sense of death as an authenticating violation of human limits, and how those desires are legitimated—since death also horrifies—by fusing with positive cultural ideals. Dickens employs a Victorian trope, grounding culture in death: a reverence for death generates brotherhood. The apparent regression or death wish so common to the endings of Victorian novels can be seen, not as a wish for stasis, but as the projection of desires for an authenticity that might be fulfilled within culture. Though art may not always find a social solution, when it dramatizes conflicts of limitation and limitlessness, the negation of death is a central reference point.
Flaubert: Trois Contes and the Figure of the Double Cone
Authors: O'Connor John R.
Published: February 2007

In A Vision, W. B. Yeats describes the principal symbol of his work as the figure of a double cone formed by tracing a line along the outer edges of two intersecting gyres, or vortices, the apex of each vortex in the middle of the other's base. He then asserts that the only writer outside speculative philosophy to have used the symbol was Flaubert, who had planned to write a story called “La Spirale.” Though it is impossible completely to credit Yeats's reading of “La Spirale,” his general assertion is nevertheless correct, extraordinarily, as a description of the Trois Contes, where the double cone appears both as a narrative structure and a theme, symbolizing the creative passage from material to spiritual life.
The Triumph of Clytemnestra: The Charades in Vanity Fair
Authors: DiBattista Maria
Published: February 2007

The charades of Vanity Fair represent an important but little understood fable of demonic and outraged womanhood as a subtext of Thackeray's larger historical fiction. In marking the culmination of Becky Sharp's career in the world of vanity—her triumph as Clytemnestra and her impersonation of the plaintive Philomele—the charades imply a corrupt sexual ideology threatening both violence and violation. But from the perspective of Thackeray as narrator, the verbally compressed and designedly opaque charades repress as much as they expose. His uncharacteristic narrative reticence in presenting the charades without comment reveals an uneasiness on Thackeray's part about the powers of the authorizing mind to know and to represent the darker laws that govern history and society.
The Vanishing Subject: Empirical Psychology and the Modern Novel
Authors: Ryan Judith
Published: February 2007

The interaction between literature and psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an important factor in the transition from realism to modernism. Empirical psychology, as developed by William James and Ernst Mach, unmasked the traditional concept of “self” as a delusion, replacing it by a new emphasis on the intentionality of consciousness. Writers such as Henry James, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch had direct contact with empirical psychology and experimented overtly with modes of rendering this new understanding of consciousness; others, like Alfred Doblin or Virginia Woolf, while less directly influenced by empiricism, nonetheless reflect in their novels a similar attempt to abolish the “self” as a discrete entity. In this respect they differ radically from other modern novelists (e.g., Joyce and Faulkner), and they also resolve quite differently the technical problem of presenting consciousness in fiction.
The Fiction of Coherence: George Herbert's “The Collar”
Authors: Harman Barbara Leah
Published: February 2007

Uneasy with the forms of literary expression and its costs, the speakers of Herbert’s poems frequently bear disturbed relationships to their own accounts. An interesting version of the disturbance between storyteller and story occurs in “The Collar,” where present-tense speech is fenced off from, and framed by, the eroding influence of a retrospective narrative voice. The poem provides an occasion to study the motives for and virtues of storytelling, to examine the ways in which accounts are not only generated but preserved, and to explore those problems that arise when a fixed story must be reread and its boundaries changed. Because the speaker of “The Collar” both protects and dismantles his account, the poem also raises questions about the values we attach to narratives, the costs we are willing to support in order to maintain them, and the difficulties we undergo when stories fail to represent us in traditional ways.
The New Poet Presents Himself: Spenser and the Idea of a Literary Career
Authors: Helgerson Richard
Published: February 2007

The Renaissance idea of a great national poet, the idea on which so many defenses of poetry were implicitly or explicitly based, found its first English incarnation in the career of Edmund Spenser. But the incarnation fundamentally transformed the idea, for Spenser was caught in a literary system that defined the poet in a quite different way—not as an inspired maker of vatic images, but rather as a youth culpably distracted by passion from the real business of life. Spenser’s presentation of himself as Poet can be seen as an attempt to reconcile these two notions, neither of which he could wholly abandon. Without the heroic ideal he could not escape the repentance that prematurely cut off the literary careers of the other poets of his generation, but without some participation in the Elizabethan paradigm of the lover-poet he might not be thought a poet at all.
The Decor of Molière's Stage: The Testimony of Brissart and Chauveau
Authors: Herzel Roger W.
Published: February 2007

The engravings that appeared as frontispieces in seventeenth-century editions of Molière’s works show that the decor of his stage was not nearly so universalized and unspecific as is generally believed. Each of his plays had its own individualized setting, and he laid increasing stress on the scenic environment for his plays as his career progressed. His earliest plays were set in variations of the traditional decor of comedy: the street before two houses. In Tartuffe and Le Misanthrope he made the stage represent a private domestic interior. In plays like Le Sicilien and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme the scenic definition of stage space became more fluid and fanciful. And in his last play, Le Malade imaginaire, Molière used the most advanced scenic technology of his day to provide a decor that reflected the extravagant folly of his hero.
“The Babes in the Wood”: Artemus Ward's “Double Health” to Mark Twain
Authors: Branch Edgar M.
Published: February 2007

In his legendary lecture “The Babes in the Wood” (1863–64), Artemus Ward wanted to “go in for fun,” and he artfully structured the talk to exemplify his credo: “We better stay in the sunshine while we may, inasmuch as we know the shadows will come all too soon.” Mark Twain heard Ward speak in Virginia City and later wrote that “The Babes” was “the funniest thing I ever listened to.” This article reproduces a reasonably accurate speaking text of “The Babes” and considers it in relation to Mark Twain’s theory and practice of lecturing and to his early written humor. Its comedy offered Mark Twain, among other things, a demonstration of (1) complex rhetorical strategies and (2) a sophisticated burlesque of the serious lyceum lecture. To clarify its burlesque dimension, “The Babes” is then compared to Emerson’s lecture “The Law of Success” (which Ward had heard and reported).
The Fairest of Them All: Modes of Vision in Madame Bovary
Authors: Thornton Lawrence
Published: February 2007

By revealing Emma’s subjectivity in descriptive, hallucinatory, and auto-scopic modes of vision, Flaubert shows that two false versions of reality dominate her imagination: the marvelous, derived from her reading, and the endoxal, derived from her culture. These modes of vision, which are manifested in a series of mirror images, show Emma incapable of distinguishing between past and present, fantasy and reality, and lead as well to the discovery that her fantasies about all men remain vague and abstract. Emma can only differentiate women in her imagination, and the autoeroticism informing her narcissism finally displaces infidelity as the source of her most erotic experiences. Throughout Madame Bovary, Emma’s subjectivity becomes increasingly associated with the fantastic, until she is seen to have completely lost touch with reality.
Lazarillo de Tormes and the Quest tor Authority
Authors: Carey Douglas M.
Published: February 2007

The struggle between power, which enables the individual to participate in social exchange, and desire (resulting from an absence or lack), which isolates the individual from the social order, characterizes the sixteenth-century prototype picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes; and art is posited throughout as a means of attaining power. At each stage of this pseudoautobiography, the hero, functioning as both character (the young Lazarillo) and narrator (the adult Lázaro), depends on the use of rhetoric to influence others and change his station in life. The young trickster employs cunning wit in his struggle to integrate himself into a seemingly closed society, and the mature apologist, in his forced confession, an antiutopian transformation of the Augustinian confessional form, uses verbal art in an attempt to mediate the conflict between his desire and the power of authorities who still persecute him despite the degree of worldly success he has attained.
“To Constancie Confin'de”: The Poetics of Shakespeare's Sonnets
Authors: Bernard John D.
Published: February 2007

Despite his disillusionment with the moral condition of his friend, the beloved young man of the sonnets, Shakespeare's vocabulary of praise remains unabated. The key to this paradox lies in a shift of focus from the friend's “truth” to his power to inform the poet's style, that is, from moral fidelity to metaphysical and aesthetic constancy. This shift is attended by a heightened awareness of language as a way to grasp reality through participation in it. The sonnets portray the beloved as the incarnation of an unchanging truth, and poetry as a vehicle for evoking or re-creating that truth. These developments lead Shakespeare to a sacramental or “figural” conception of his poetry of praise that replaces the Petrarchan convention with which he begins.
The Hidden Bastard: A Question of Illegitimacy in Smollett's Peregrine Pickle
Authors: Collins R. G.
Published: February 2007

In Peregrine Pickle, the extreme hostility of the hero's mother toward him from his earliest days, although an important catalyst in the plot, is never reasonably explained. Her attitude, as well as a number of otherwise ambiguous plot elements, become clear when we deduce that she was pregnant before her marriage. Several clues suggest that Smollett intended until late in the novel to present Peregrine as a bastard but changed his mind as he neared the end. It can be theorized that Smollett feared an accusation of plagiarism in borrowing this detail from Tom Jones, especially after he himself had accused Fielding with reference to Roderick Random. In addition, the life of Richard Savage, particularly as told in Samuel Johnson's elegaic and then-popular biography of his friend, offers many parallels in its story of the unnatural mother and the rejected bastard.
Originality and Repetition in Finnegans Wake and Ulysses
Authors: Levine Jennifer Schiffer
Published: February 2007

Recent poststructuralist criticism argues that language cannot be understood merely as a name-giving system and that reading is not a process of deciphering language in order to pass through it to the experience it communicates. If words are part of a larger articulation, then the question of origins, and of originality, must be recast. Finnegans Wake and Ulysses play on, and with, the dilemma of originality and repetition in literary discourse. The Wake involves us in the appeal to a source, and although the origins of knowledge, authority, life, and language may remain unlocatable we continue to search for them. The Wake suggests, too, that discourse binds us to a wheel of repetition. The complex use of cliché in Ulysses draws us even more specifically into the uses of repetition. Stereotype is more than the butt of Joyce's satire: it shares in the whole process of deconstruction that characterizes the text.
Ritual and Rationalization: Black Folklore in the Works of Ralph Ellison
Authors: Blake Susan L.
Published: February 2007

From his early short stories through his as yet unpublished second novel, Ralph Ellison pursues the theme of the quest for black self-definition by reference to black folklore. “In the folklore,” he says, “we tell what Negro experience really is.” Ellison adapts black folklore to fiction by fitting it into the forms of American and Western myth. As he enlarges the context of black folk tradition, he reduces the importance of its basis in racial oppression and conflict and transforms its social meaning into the metaphysical meanings of the framing myths. Thus black identity becomes indistinguishable from American identity or the human condition, and the effort to define it from within results instead in continued definition by the enslaving society.
Wordsworth's Lucy Poems in Psychobiographical Context
Authors: Matlak Richard E.
Published: February 2007

The Lucy poems were evoked by stress in Wordsworth’s relationships with Dorothy and Coleridge. Four were written in Germany, where Wordsworth was forced to separate from Coleridge because of the added expense of keeping Dorothy. Wordsworth’s resulting hostility toward Dorothy mixes with his love as he fantasizes her death and then mourns her loss in the Lucy poems. But his relationship with Coleridge darkened as well after Coleridge stated a preference for living near Thomas Poole rather than Wordsworth when the poets met at Göttingen following their winter-long separation. “I Travelled among Unknown Men,” written in England two years later, reveals, however, that Wordsworth overcame his ambivalence toward Dorothy and his excessive dependency upon Coleridge; his declaration of love for England becomes an indirect refusal to venture abroad with Coleridge again. Through the development of the Lucy cycle, Wordsworth discovered that place is the foundation of love and relationship.
Stevens' Fusky Alphabet
Authors: Furia Philip , Roth Martin
Published: February 2007

Wallace Stevens uses the alphabet as a code to validate the philosophical concerns of his poetry. The alphabet is “murderous” if it represents a sacred and sterile process that assumes a final dispensation as “heavenly script”; the alphabet is “fusky” if it represents an artistic act that continually mediates between the emptiness of things and the imagination to create poetic heavens on earth. Stevens often works with an abbreviated alphabet (ABC, XYZ, etc.) where the letters are “characters” who represent certain relations between the imagination and reality. An understanding of this code informs certain poems where letters play an explicit and major role, such as “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” “Connoisseur of Chaos,” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The alphabetical code also informs much of Stevens’ other work and accounts for many of the apparent difficulties of his poetry—the curious vocabulary, the fantastic characters, and the exotic topography of his poetic universe.
Shakespeare's Myth of Venus and Adonis
Authors: Hulse S. Clark
Published: February 2007

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis—both in the specific way the myth is understood and, more important, in the poetic and conceptual forms in which it is cast—is rooted in the mythography of the sixteenth century. As in the attribute system of allegorical painting, the physical characteristics of Venus and Adonis reveal their histories and signify the alternately comic and serious qualities of love. The traditional plot has been scrapped, with sexual harmony replaced by strife and the poem turned into a continual debate over the nature of love. This debate is never resolved rationally. Instead, the multiple aspects of love are periodically condensed into unified images, which then generate further paradox: Venus versus Diana, freedom versus bondage, red versus white, fire versus water. This dialogue of images, a familiar iconographic technique, becomes a characteristically Shakespearean method of esthetic resolution, with conceptual relations to the primary forms of myth.
Mallarmé's Symbolist Eclogue: The “Faune” as Pastoral
Authors: Walker Steven F.
Published: February 2007

The sexual comedy of “L’Après-Midi d’un faune” reflects the sophisticated French taste of its times. As an “églogue,” however, Mallarmé’s poem has roots in the classical pastoral tradition. Various structural elements show that Mallarmé was consciously working within the boundaries of an established genre, and even suggest that he was at times involved in the direct imitation of classical models. Classical parallels are explored in order to discover how Mallarmé used and transformed traditional pastoral themes and material. A close examination of some of the extraordinarily ambiguous poetic language of Mallarmé’s eclogue reveals that the “Faune” can be read as a complex ironic version of pastoral, in which the poet embroiders on the theme of the analogy between writing poetry and making love.
Coleridge's Marginal Method in the Biographia Literaria
Authors: Christensen Jerome C.
Published: February 2007

Coleridge's mode of composition in the Biographia Literaria is best considered as marginal discourse, and here the chapters on Hartleian association are analyzed from this point of view. Coleridge's previous attempts to refute Hartley depended on a proof of the free will, a proof that he did not complete and that, for moral purposes, he does not hazard in the Biographia. Instead, Coleridge proffers a subsidiary criticism that he had formed years before, affixing his comments to borrowed arguments. Although Coleridge's marginal rhetoric persuades that Hartley's model is insufficient, it also illustrates that there is no coherent alternative principle. The text vanishes beneath the burden of its marginalia. Coleridge's criticism subverts a partial truth only to substitute a rhetoric partial to the demands of a desire too restless to abide in any principle or text.
The Easter Cantata and the Idea of Mediation in Goethe's Faust
Authors: Dye Robert Ellis
Published: February 2007

Goethe's Werther and his Faust respond divergently to the Resurrection. Whereas Werther reclassifies Christ from exclusive mediator to model in order to emulate His death and rebirth, Faust is prevented by an Easter cantata from attempting self-translation. Faust's subsequent words and acts show that, although an unbeliever, he views Jesus as a mediator and has been reminded by the cantata of man's multifaceted dependence on mediation. The rainbow of “Anmutige Gegend” similarly affects a restored and newly hubristic Faust. Mediation underlies Goethe's concept of symbolism, and, like other Goethean mediators (e.g., the “Schleier” of the dedicatory poem to his collected works), the introductory symbols of Redeemer and rainbow in Faust, Parts i and ii, symbolize symbolism itself, man's essential mode of relating to ultimates. Mediation helps explain such puzzling inclusions in Faust as the quarrel between Neptunists and Vulcanists and is the central concept in the finale by the Chorus Mysticus.
Hopkins' Linguistic Deviations
Authors: Korg Jacob
Published: February 2007

Hopkins has recently been treated as a representational poet who aimed to praise God by imitating His creation, but his unconventional uses of language, which are related to his temperamental originality, introduce an autonomous quality into his poetry. His deviations, by their very nature, set reference aside to exhibit the inherent signifying capacity of language, a capacity that Hopkins' journals show he fully appreciated. His original methods, including his phonetic structures, his conception of inscape as it applies to poetry, and his unconventional syntax and imagery, give language dominance over experience and use it to reshape reality according to linguistic principles.
Blake's Idea of Brotherhood
Authors: Ferber Michael
Published: February 2007

Despite its place in the French Revolutionary motto, fraternity lacks a literature. Blake, who makes an important contribution toward that literature, draws largely from the New Testament, which offers two grounds for brotherhood: we are sons of the Father, we are brothers in Christ. Suspicious of transcendent gods, Blake develops only the latter concept. We are in essence brotherly beings; unfraternal behavior is death. Brotherhood is not kindliness, however, but “wars of love” for one another and willing self-sacrifice. “Atonement” only makes matters worse. The New Testament Christian fraternity rests on Paul's dualism; Blake agrees to the extent that “nature” (and woman) threatens brotherly love. Yet women can be brothers, too, despite the misogynist symbolism Blake chooses to inherit.
Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities
Authors: Hutter Albert D.
Published: February 2007

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.
“Much Depends on the Acting”: The Original Cast of Le Misanthrope
Authors: Herzel Roger W.
Published: February 2007

The printed text of Le Misanthrope is only a partial record of Molière’s creation. Molière wrote his plays to be performed, not to be read, and he tailored each role in his plays to the individual talents of the particular actor who would play the role. In the original production of Le Misanthrope, each actor’s performance was part of an intricate web of contrasts and balances. Molière himself played Alceste; as in all his plays, his acting style, while unmistakably comic, occupied a middle ground between the grotesque style of one group of actors and the elegant polish of the actor who played Philinte.
History, Fiction, and the Ground Between: The Uses of the Documentary Mode in Black Literature
Authors: Foley Barbara
Published: February 2007

Although the so-called nonfiction novel is ordinarily seen as a distinctly post-World War ii phenomenon, Afro-American literature has from its beginnings relied to a marked degree on the documentary mode. Close scrutiny of Afro-American prose narrative provides the basis not only for revising some common literary-historical generalizations but also for examining the nature of mimesis and historicity, since Afro-American writers have employed a wide range of techniques to persuade their readers of the truths proposed in their texts. A consideration of the uses of factuality in this body of literature enables us to make broader theoretical distinctions among the kinds of propositions conveyed by various types of fictional narratives and to illuminate the shady borderline between factual and fictive discourse.
Sidney's Feigned Apology
Authors: Levao Ronald
Published: February 2007

In his Apology, Sidney makes what appears to many readers to be an adroit synthesis of humanist defenses of poetry, joining Neoplatonic idealism to claims of ethical utility and delivering this synthesis with the winning playfulness of a shrewd rhetorician. A closer look at his argument, however, reveals it to be a complex and self-conscious fiction, which gestures toward external values only to turn back on its own assumptions. The playful tone shows that Sidney is fascinated by the conceptual difficulties that confront him but that he is incapable of resolving them. Sidney’s intellectual performance in the Apology demonstrates his affinities with Renaissance thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa, who imagined all mental activity to be a ceaseless fabrication of conjecture and metaphor.
Epistle, Meditation, and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici
Authors: Hall Anne Drury
Published: February 2007

The Religio Medici has traditionally been called “an essay” or “an autobiographical essay.” If we examine it in its literary context, however, we will see that the principles generating its style and specifying the range of its feeling derive from two prose modes associated with other, more clearly defined seventeenth-century genres, the anti-Ciceronian epistle and the religious meditation. The Religio, in fact, might better be called “a meditation in the epistolary mode.” Although the witty exaggeration of Browne’s diction often pushes his epistolary voice toward the satiric, he holds off both indignant satire and solitary, self-absorbed meditation. In avoiding these extremes, Browne’s mixture of modes makes a clear ethical argument: that human beings must understand their limitations both as individuals in relationship to society and as creatures in relationship to God. In the Religio, Browne argues the importance to Christian humanism of the balance between private spirituality and public manners.
“Voice” in Narrative Texts: The Example of As I Lay Dying
Authors: Ross Stephen M.
Published: February 2007

In discussions of fiction, the implications of the term “voice” are seldom explored beyond its figurative uses. In As I Lay Dying, however, “voice” is central to our experience of narrative. The novel has two kinds of voice, mimetic and textual. Mimetic voice derives from represented speech, from the features of discourse by which readers identify speakers; but Faulkner’s novel dissimulates the origins of voices. The voices we hear turn out to belong to narrators and seem to originate in an author’s discourse. Textual voice arises from the printed text itself. Such features as italics, drawings, lists, and section headings generate signification independent of verbal meaning and establish an expressive context analogous to the paralinguistic context created by the voice in speech. As a result of the disruption of mimetic voices and of the presence of textual voice, language in As I Lay Dying transcends the conventional limitations of mimesis.
Supernaturalism and the Vernacular Style in A Farewell to Arms
Authors: Dekker George , Harris Joseph
Published: February 2007

Muted allusions to second sight and revenants are crucial to the method and meaning of A Farewell to Arms. Like Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, Hemingway draws on European sources—particularly ballads—for his folkloristic motifs; like them, he uses these motifs to invest chaotic contemporary scenes with order and universal significance. For him to adapt the “mythical method” of these writers, however, is a formidable problem, since his vernacular rhetoric cannot accommodate their open, bookish allusions. Consequently, his references to prophetic gifts and returns from the dead, while undeniably present, are not prominent enough to have attracted the critical attention they deserve. For they point and contribute to an unresolved dialectic, between skeptical male and “croyante” female, that is characteristic not only of the Catherine-Frederic relationship but, Hemingway implies, of all love relationships between men and women.