bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Turn of the Screw and Alice James
Authors: Gill Oscar Car
Published: February 2007

The tenderest of men, Henry James could hardly have used the illness of his sister Alice as the basis of a story while she lived, or later, without elaborately disguising it—particularly since that illness, though not concealed, was only guardedly revealed as mental. But the heroism of Alice, fully as much as his experience and special knowledge of hysteria, must have strongly tempted him to exploit the extraordinary dramatic possibilities of her disease long before he composed The Turn of the Screw Delicacy, propriety, affection instantly inhibited the development of so rich a “germ,” but it remained planted in James's ingenious and subtle mind until he could bring the derivative narrative forth so altered that his closest intimates would not suspect its source or connections. The product is one of the greatest horror stories of all time.
Stephen Crane's Metaphor of Decorum
Authors: Johnson George W.
Published: February 2007

To the girl who wanted a “man of fashion” Stephen Crane proclaimed himself “a savage,” “docile … only under great social pressure,” “by inclination a wild shaggy barbarian.” At the same time, however, this rebel against middle class conventionality strove to remain a gentleman, gallant if only to streetwalkers, chivalric to the déclassé, ministerial to reckless youth, and grandly hospitable at Brede Place to friend and stranger alike. While his friends might grumble that he “had no sense of propriety,” Crane, self-conscious and self-deprecatory, tried to be both the isolated Bohemian and “Baron Brede.” Able to breathe only “in the slums or among aristocrats,” as a contemporary remembered him, he seems to have struggled all his life between the appeal of the “wild free son of nature” and the need to find a place in society and tradition. Like his Henry Fleming, he struggled to gain the respect of his fraternity without surrendering his life or his individuality to the “moving box” of tradition; he tried, like his Swede, to make a place for himself as a gentleman without impaling himself on his purchase. This apparent temperamental need for a role both docile and savage was transmuted into the impersonalities of his fiction, in which the fate of the hero—soldier, honey-mooner, outcast, or outlander—is the measure of his ability to establish the grounds for proper conduct. In that transmutation Crane defined himself as an artist; and to pursue a metaphor of decorum through his best stories is to discover anew his view of life and the courage of his response to it.
Biographical Aspects of Eluard's Poetry
Authors: Showalter English
Published: February 2007

The life of Paul Eluard holds a remarkable number of mysteries for that of a man who became prominent rather young and whose friends frequently made a particular effort to have themselves talked about. Specifically, three crises from the first period of his career, when he was attached to the surrealist movement, are either avoided or barely mentioned by biographers: the strange disappearance from Paris in 1924 which turned out to be a trip around the world; the breakup of Eluard's first marriage in 1930; and the rupture with Breton and the surrealists in 1938. Our ignorance about these questions does not stem from a lack of witnesses, but rather from the tendency of some of the poet's friends to withhold information for reasons of tact, and the tendency of others to write with such an evident bias that their testimony is unreliable. Doubtless we will soon be better informed, since every year new documents appear, and the reasons for restraint or excess become regularly less compelling.
“It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)”: Literature and Language in the Academy
Authors: Kampf Louis
Published: February 2007

Many in the profession, though apparently comfortable, feel demoralized. The prospect of unalienating work impelled many of us to become teachers of language and literature. The humanities, we assumed, would make the world a better place. Yet the assumption by an intelligentsia that the life of intellect will improve humanity is a self-serving ideology. We teach our subjects in institutions that are part of a rationalized arrangement for the profitable use of knowledge. Our profession is part of that rationalization process. Thus there is a contradiction between the profession's humanist ideology and what we actually do. This knowledge has led many to be demoralized. We know that we do not control our conditions of work. Therefore our labor is alienated, and we are an intellectual proletariat. We should struggle against these conditions in an organized fashion. But the attempt to change the nature of our profession, our departments, and our schools can be effective only within the context of the larger struggle to change the role culture plays in a capitalist society. Ultimately such cultural transformations involve the struggle to transform the society as a whole. It is a struggle we cannot escape.
La Rencontre inachevée: Etude sur la structure de La Princesse de Cleves
Authors: Carré Marie-Rose
Published: February 2007

In writing La Princesse de Clèves Mme de Lafayette has reduced the novel to a series of scenes in juxtaposition. Each one of the scenes represents the state of mind of the heroine of the novel in its content as well as in its form. The essential trait of the central character is her refusal to accept an encounter with the man she loves, an encounter that would realize her greatest desire. Thus Mme de Lafayette makes each one of the encounters, forced upon the two persons in love by their life within a closed society, an “imperfect encounter”: she places her two characters face to face but withdraws from them an element—on each occasion a different one—of their social or psychological personality. After a series of such “unfinished” confrontations, presented in a dramatic sequence, she makes us understand that the final separation is the necessary conclusion: the perfect encounter could never be attained. (In French)
Ernest Bramah on China: An Important Letter
Authors: Smith Ernest B. , White William
Published: February 2007

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942), the author of The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900) and four other books on this Chinese storyteller, created a China so real and comprehensive that readers and reviewers often asked if he ever went to the Orient, to which he made a “bland, evasive reply.” In a letter to his publisher Grant Richards, dated 27 April 1923 and published here for the first time, Bramah writes that he has never been to China but it was not diplomatic to say so, for if he had lived there some would say his stories were merely translations, and if he had not been there, then they were imaginary and unreliable; thus he evaded the question.
Baudelaire and Bossuet on Laughter
Authors: Patty James S.
Published: February 2007

After certain preliminaries, Baudelaire plunges into the main body of his essay on laughter, “De l'essence du rire,” with these striking words: “Le Sage ne rit qu'en tremblant. De quelles lèvres pleines d'autorité, de quelle plume parfaitement orthodoxe est tombée cette étrange et saisissante maxime? Nous vient-elle du roi philosophe de la Judée? Faut-il l'attribuer à Joseph de Maistre, ce soldat animé de l'Esprit-Saint? J'ai un vague souvenir de l'avoir lue dans un de ses livres, mais donnée comme citation, sans doute. Cette sévérité de pensée et de style va bien à la sainteté majestueuse de Bossuet; mais la tournure elliptique de la pensée et la finesse quintessenciée me porteraient plutôt à en attribuer l'honneur à Bourdaloue, l'impitoyable psychologue chrétien.” Of course, it is the variations which Baudelaire extracted from his somber theme, “Le Sage ne rit qu'en tremblant,” and, even more, his own original suggestions, which are of primary interest to the reader and student of Baudelaire. But in view of the speculations which occupy most of the passage above, the secondary question of the source of that theme is one which obviously intrigued Baudelaire and one, therefore, which calls for an answer from his present-day students.
The Epigraph of Anna Karenina
Authors: Flint Martha M.
Published: February 2007

David H. Stewart, in his “Anna Karenina: The Dialectic of Prophecy” (PMLA, lxxix, 266–282), mentions the epigraph of the novel (“Vengeance is mine, I shall repay, saith the Lord”) without making it clear that it is a well-known Biblical quotation (Romans xii.19) and without considering the implications of this fact. I shall give the verse and the two which follow it in full (in the King James version) because of the importance of the original context of the statement:

19 Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written [a reference to Deut: xxxii.35] Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

20 Therefore, if thine enemy hunger feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

21 Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
The Medieval Theater of the Absurd
Authors: Knight Alan E.
Published: February 2007

The sottie is a popular dramatic genre of the late Middle Ages which seems to have developed from the comic debates that players often used to gather an audience. In its developed form it resembles the contemporary Theater of the Absurd. The most meaningful approach to a comparison of the two theaters is by way of the thought embodied in the plays. They are both to a certain extent didactic, though they represent different outlooks and value systems. Both theaters utilize clowns and clowning techniques, and both are closely linked to the dream. The two historical periods concerned are presented in the plays as times when cultural ideals have become illusions out of tune with reality, and the accompanying alienation is expressed in powerful images of waiting. One of the most suggestive areas of resemblance is language, which has been cut from its rational moorings. The language of the sottie still has a creative vigor, while that of the Theater of the Absurd is moribund. Both, however, are languages of protest. Each theater creates a new norm against which to judge its society, thereby exposing those who would mask their venality with pretense.
Carlyle, Arnold, and Literary Justice
Authors: Wilkinson D. R. M.
Published: February 2007

The tendency in modern literary specialization for all authors to be boosted, sometimes at the expense of the truly great, is a serious threat to literary standards already undermined by scholarly mass production. One must therefore protest when a Carlyle is raised above a Matthew Arnold by responsible people, as he seems to have been raised by David J. DeLaura in “Arnold and Carlyle” (PMLA, 79, 1964, 104-29). Carlyle's crude, propagandist message is not the same as a cool scholarly abstract of his ideas. The manner colors all the matter. Carlyle's main weaknesses are that he exaggerates, that he oversimplifies life, is aggressive, egotistical, that he blurs religion (epitomizing a decay in faith), uses the rhetorical tricks of the advertiser, and in imposing upon his readers (whom he scorns and bullies) is insincere. To complain that Arnold accepted Carlyle's influence and yet rejected the man and the manner is to complain about what had to be. Scholars should beware of mistaking our common cultural inheritance for specific borrowing. No doubt Arnold partly concealed his debt, and was ungenerous, but his not being a saint does not canonize Carlyle. Literary justice requires the placing of writers in true critical and historical perspective.
Paradox in the Aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld and Some Representative English Followers
Authors: Pagliaro Harold E.
Published: February 2007

The best remembered aphorists have contrived to state new truths in brief and telling ways. Less fascinated than most authors with leaf, twig, and branch, they strike immediately for the pith. Almost every reader of their work first pays tribute to this concentration of effort with the repeated shock of joy and enlightenment that marks his response. It seems likely that such writers try to achieve a compression of statement that corresponds to the instantaneous character of their insights. Like Dante, they are stirred by the hope of economizing glimpses of eternity into single-worded statements; unlike him, they never quite despair of doing so. Anyone who has responded to the success of their efforts can appreciate the temptation to discover something about the means by which these paradoxical compositions achieve their effects, particularly those that time and again tumble their reader's complacency. It is with the ways in which those effects derive from the structural patterns of the aphorism that this essay is concerned. The method will be first to classify aphorisms according to structure and then to examine the ways in which each class affects the reader.
Toward a Revaluation of Goethe's Götz: Features of Recurrence
Authors: Ryder Frank G.
Published: February 2007

The presence of features of recurrence in works of art is both an acknowledged empirical fact and—in proper relevance and proportion—a source of esthetic excellence. Meaningful recurrence is one of the factors that distinguish the art work from undifferentiated reality. In literature it is everywhere, in rhyme and alliteration, in the standing epithet, in the significant detail of Dickens or Mann, in motif, theme, and symbol. Repetitions of this sort can make a substantial contribution to the unity of a literary work, and it is one purpose of the following pages to establish areas and kinds of recurrence in a play generally regarded as chaotic (by its detractors) or variegated (by its defenders). The play is Goethe's Götz. There is an important second purpose: to see what support these stylistic and structural features give to the reading of Götz as a drama of character, displaying inner tension, conflict, and ironic depth.
Rhetoric as Drama: An Approach to the Romantic Ode
Authors: Chayes Irene H.
Published: February 2007

During the reconsideration of English Romanticism that has been going on for more than a decade, repeated attention has been given to individual poems, to the myths and “systems” of individual poets, to common images and themes, but oddly not to common forms. One of the most important of these is the ode, in which many of the best known and most often examined Romantic poems were written. Although today we have a better understanding of the major Romantic odes as poems, the general notion of the form remains much as it was a generation ago. What is obviously needed is a method of reassessment that will go beyond the older exclusive and now inadequate concern with prosody, stanzaic structure, and conformity to classical models. The approach in the present study, which is offered as a tentative beginning, has been suggested in large part by an essay published several years ago by Norman Maclean, who led up to but did not carry his investigations into the Romantic period. According to Maclean's thesis, in brief, the English ode in the seventeenth century was constructed as a fragmentary “plot,” with the poet's conception embodied in an “agent” and his “actions,” as in “Alexander's Feast” by Dryden. In the eighteenth-century ode, on the other hand, the primary emphasis was on the devices of language—allegorical personification, metaphor, static descriptive imagery—as in the odes of Collins and Gray. While it is possible to question Maclean's distinction in particular instances, the concepts and terminology he borrows in light disguise from Aristotle's Poetics have the advantage of making the ode available to critical as well as historical discussion. In the present study, the Poetics will be drawn on more directly but in somewhat different fashion. Modifying Maclean's conception, I have chosen the terms “rhetoric” and “drama” to express a relation between language and inner structure which makes the Romantic ode as distinctive as its Neoclassical and Preromantic predecessors, at the same time that it carries forward tendencies latent in both.
The Inception of Hofmannsthal's Der Schwierige: Early Plans and their Significance
Authors: Norton Roger C.
Published: February 2007

Like Hofmannsthal's youthful works, which were first regarded as typically beautiful but unsubstantial products of Neo-Romanticism, only to be later widely extolled for their depth of significance, Der Schwierige has been the object of an evolving critical evaluation. This comedy, published in 1920 and first performed in 1921, has often been pictured as a basically precious comedy of manners anachronistically glorifying the Austrian aristocracy after its demise in 1918. Such an interpretation seems at least partially supported by Hofmannsthal's own words: “Vielleicht hätte ich die Gesellschaft, die es [Der Schwierige] darstellt, die österreichische aristokratische Gesellschaft, nie mit so viel Liebe in ihrem charme und ihrer Qualität darstellen können als in dem historischen Augenblick wo sie, die bis vor kurzem eine Gegebenheit, ja eine Macht war, sich leise und geisterhaft ins Nichts auflöst, wie ein übriggebliebenes Nebelwölkchen am Morgen.” Yet, at another time, he suggests a more profound aim when he says in a letter to Wildgans: “Sie werden finden, daß ich darin das eigentlich Seelenhafte, das persönlich Metaphysische . . . versteckt habe unter der Ironie der Gestaltung . . . und doch ist dieser individuell-metaphysische Kern sehr stark.” In recent years increased attention has been given to the critical exploration of this serious core, which reveals Der Schwierige in its essence as a universally valid character study in the high-comedy tradition of Minna von Barnhelm and Weh dem, der lügt rather than in any sense either an anachronism or a period piece. The discovery in Hofmannsthal's Nachlaß of a number of early plans and sketches promises to extend still further our understanding of Der Schwierige. This material, previously unpublished for the most part, makes it possible to clarify both the author's basic intentions and his application of them to the finished work.
Galdós' Doña Perfecta and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons: Two Interpretations of the Conflict between Generations
Authors: Chamberlin Vernon A. , Weiner Jack
Published: February 2007

Scholars have long noted the influence of Russian writers, particularly Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, on the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós. However, in an interview granted to the Russian journalist la. Pavlovskii in 1884 (only recently published in the West) Galdós acknowledges an indebtedness to an earlier Russian master, Ivan Turgenev, referring to him as “my great teacher.” A close reading of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and Galdós' Doña Perfecta suggests that the Russian masterpiece may have inspired the well-known Spanish work. The novels share a common theme (the conflict between generations), and in each the hero is a young man trained in science who makes an extended visit to the provinces. In both works the protagonist dies a tragic, untimely death. There are other important similarities between the two books, but significant differences as well, particularly in the authors' attitudes toward the conflict itself. Galdós believed completely in Pepe Rey's cause, while Turgenev was ambivalent about the forces his hero represented; thus, in tone and structure each novel reflects its author's feelings. There appears to be no doubt that Galdós knew Fathers and Sons and made use of certain of its ideas in creating his own independent and highly personal interpretation of the conflict between generations.
Huckleberries and Humans: On the Naming of Huckleberry Finn
Authors: Colwell James L.
Published: February 2007

Mark Twain's choice of Huckleberry Finn as the name (or nickname) of his best-loved character has been virtually unexamined, yet its uniqueness and effectiveness make that choice worthy of further thought. A suggestive precedent was his use of Mulberry Sellers, but Twain knew the huckleberry only by hearsay until he encountered it in Hartford in 1868. An American word, “huckleberry” originated about 1670 and appeared in some common expressions with connotations of insignificance and rusticity, both qualities appropriate for Huck. The real-life model for Huck was Twain's boyhood friend, Tom Blankenship, like Huck the son of the Town Drunkard. “Finn” came from another Hannibal alcoholic, and was suitable both phonetically and because it was Irish. The appropriateness of huckleberry is underlined by a quality of the berry itself. As Thoreau and others tell us, it does not submit to cultivation and tastes best when picked wild. Twain's Huckleberry, too, resisted domestication.
The Figures of Rhetoric in Spenser's Colin Clout
Authors: Meyer Sam
Published: February 2007

Modern criticism has given increasing recognition to the functional, as distinguished from the decorative, aspect of rhetorical figures in the poetry of the English Renaissance. The continuance of this emphasis is particularly appropriate to Spenser's pastoral, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), where the relevance of the figures to the larger considerations of style—indeed, to the total discourse—is so cardinal. The importance of the figures is enhanced by the natural use of rhetorical arts by characters, set in a kind of mise en scène, whose suasory speeches largely comprise the poem. Stress of the functional side of the rhetorical elements in the poem need not deny or denigrate the role of the figures in conferring upon the verse an aura of conspicuous beauty. The office of the figures in this respect is simply another manifestation of the same taste for elegance which reflected itself in Renaissance dress, manners, ceremonial processions, and décor. The beautifying characteristics of the numerous word orders, comprised of tropes and schemes, were recognized and frankly accepted by literati of the Tudor period. In their eyes, figures possessed value as ornament by reason of their constituting departures from everyday speech patterns. The idea is conventionally phrased by Abraham Fraunce, whom many believe to be the Corydon praised in lines 383–384 of the poem: “A figure is a certeine decking of speach, whereby the vsual and simple fashion thereof is altered and changed to that which is more elegant and conceipted.”
Azorín's Experimental Period and Surrealism
Authors: Lott Robert E.
Published: February 2007

Although Azorín is characteristically self-renovating and experimental, his boldest innovations occurred mainly from 1926 to 1931. This period has been variously classified as his second or third, but for clarity I shall call it his experimental period. It includes the bulk of his plays (from Judit and Old Spain!, 1926, to Cervantes, o La casa encantada, 1931), three novels (El caballero inactual [title changed from Félix Vargas], 1928, El libro de Levante [first called Superrealismo], 1929, and Pueblo, 1930), a collection of short stories, Blanco en azul (1929), a book of criticism, Andando y pensando (1929), and many stories and essays written contemporaneously with these works, though published later.
Howells' English Travel Books: Problems in Technique
Authors: Arms George
Published: February 2007

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Howells wrote three books on England: London Films (1906), Certain Delightful English Towns (1906), and Seven English Cities (1909). As with most of his book publication, nearly all of these three had appeared in magazines, with about forty pages of London Films first coming out in the December 1904 issues of Harper's Monthly and the North American Review and with one essay of Seven English Cities printed in Harper's as late as July 1909. The first two books resulted from Howells' visit to England from March to October 1904, and the last partly from a visit in May and June 1908, though it drew also upon his earlier, longer stay. From the beginning he showed an outward reluctance to return to travel literature, his first extended work in the genre since Tuscan Cities in 1886 and A Little Swiss Sojourn in 1892. In a letter of 12 April 1904 to his wife he complained that Colonel George Harvey, of Harper & Brothers, “in spite of our agreement … has told round that I'm going to do a book,” and he went on to ask her to remember “that I have not yet promised any sort of book on England, though probably I shall do one of some sort.” But in the same letter he reported doing “a tentative impression which could be used in the Spectator and Harper's Weekly” (neither did print it); he had already written letters and sent a “diary” to his wife, from which his daughter, who accompanied him to England, has observed he drew upon for his first two books; and he had begun the first of four notebooks soon after his landing at Plymouth in March. At least as early as February 15, as Robert W. Walts has found, Howells had written to F. A. Duneka of Harper's about a proposed travel book; and as Walts remarks, after quoting more extensively than I have from the April 12 letter to Howells' wife: “Nevertheless, after the indignation had been smothered, two books, London Films and Certain Delightful English Towns, were produced from that trip.”
The Circular Structure of Valle-Inclán's Ruedo ibérico
Authors: Boudreau Harold L.
Published: February 2007

The intricate architectural structure of Valle-Inclán's Ruedo ibérico is one of the trilogy's most original features. Not only does the work portray what is going on throughout that ruedo during the last months of Isabel II's reign, but the individual novels and their constituent parts have been constructed in the form of circles as well. Books i and ix, ii and viii, iii and vii, and iv and vi in both La corte de los milagros and Viva mi dueño bear many and close relationships with each other, leaving Book v in each case as the axis upon which the others revolve. Therefore, every book of Corte and Viva, with the exception of the two central books, has a sister book within the given novel with which it shares setting, characters, and subject matter. However, this broad general circularity is the merest beginning of the total revolution of the Ruedo. In addition to the relationships between certain books within a novel, each book is itself constructed in the form of a circle, as are some of its chapters. Finally, given books in one novel are parallel to their counterparts in the other. Valle-Inclán's use of the circle as an organizational device was not an arbitrary choice. On the contrary, the Ruedo ibérico is a synthesis of form and content whose origin will be found to lie in certain concepts expressed in such earlier works as La lámpara maravillosa and La media noche.
Montaigne and Gide's La Porte étroite
Authors: Brown Frieda S.
Published: February 2007

The writing of La Porte étroite occupied André Gide from May 1905 to October 1908. During at least part of that period, the novelist was certainly reading the Essais of Michel de Montaigne, for he notes in his Journal on 24 November 1905 that he has carried a Montaigne with him on a visit to the Louvre, and, although in early March of the following year he declares that Pascal has replaced the essayist in his readings (JAG, p. 200), on 21 March we find him “patiently advancing” in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond” (JAG, p. 203), very probably a deliberate choice on his part, since that essay has long been considered the most complete statement of Montaigne's religious philosophy, and La Porte étroite was to have distinctly religious overtones. If we consider, as we must, the element of mysticism and Jansenism in the novel and the actual place the great seventeenth-century French classicist has in it (OC,v, 193—194, 230, 235–236), it is understandable that Gide should at this moment have turned to Pascal, but it is significant that this self-confessed “creature of dialogue” whose works demonstrate a constant search for balance recognized that there are and always will be in France “division et partis; c'est-à-dire dialogue. Grâce à quoi, le bel équilibre de notre culture: équilibre dans la diversité. Toujours, en regard d'un Pascal, un Montaigne; et de nos jours, en face d'un Claudel, un Valéry” (JAG-S, 13 Feb. 1943, p. 191). On 8 April Gide takes a copy of Montaigne with him on a stroll to the bois (JAG, 1906, p. 206), and home in Cuverville in May 1906, he again records that he has read some Montaigne (JAG, p. 220).
Wordsworth's Two Replies to Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode”
Authors: Teichman Milton
Published: February 2007

Wordsworth's answer to Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode” is fuller than has been recognized. In “Resolution and Independence,” Wordsworth indirectly suggests to his friend that he turn to God for the comfort he formerly found in natural objects and that he discover through God the extraordinary strength within himself to master sorrow. He reminds Coleridge, who laments the loss of Joy, of the visionary power of pain and of the spiritual insight and trust that may come from suffering itself. In addition, he asks Coleridge to remember that while storm may follow calm, sunshine may also follow storm. In “Stanzas Written in My Pocket-Copy of Thomson's ‘Castle of Indolence,’” written immediately after “Resolution and Independence,” comic innuendo and affectionate solicitude replace sober teaching as means of arguing against Coleridge's dejection. Alluding to Thomson's satiric portrait of a poet's melancholy companion, Wordsworth suggests to Coleridge that he is unlike this morose and speechless figure who thanks heaven the day is done. Wordsworth reminds Coleridge of his unusual capacity for delight in common things and of their mutual good fortune in being able to devote themselves to friendship and to art: like Thomson's pilgrims they have been dwelling in the “happy Castle.”
Perspectives on Harold Frederic's Market-Place
Authors: Blackall Jean Frantz
Published: February 2007

Joel Thorpe of The Market-Place is Harold Frederic's most complex character. Thorpe is portrayed as the psychological product of two worlds, the type of the financial buccaneer, and a moral double. In a full-length portrait, subjective as well as objective, Frederic renders Thorpe's character in dramatic terms and integrates his behavior in public and private life. Most important, he offers a moral probing of Thorpe's type. Frederic judges him morally both through the remarks of reliable characters and through his own ironic implications. Yet both plots, the terms in which the economic battle is defined, and certain sympathetic aspects of characterization all work against the assumption that Frederic wholly condemns Thorpe. If Thorpe is shown to sin according to traditional moralities by fulfilling his impulses, he is likewise shown to sin according to his own understanding when he ceases to exercise his own peculiar impulse to power. The ambiguity of Thorpe's portrait deepens his characterization but obscures the moral statement of the novel. This ambiguity may be explained in part by autobiographical factors and in part by an ambivalence toward the tycoon that Frederic shared with other nineteenth- century American writers. Specifically, Frederic's preoccupation with the type, his questioning whether self-interest and the public weal may both be served by such a figure, and his failure either to damn Thorpe wholly or to show how coexistence between the buccaneer and society might actually occur may all point to an imaginative source for The Market-Place in Emerson's essay on Napoleon.
Chaucer's Canon and The Unity of The Canon's Yeoman's Tale
Authors: Reidy John
Published: February 2007

Students of The Canterbury Tales have devoted relatively slight attention to the incident of the Canon at Boughton under Blee and to his Yeoman's tale, and even of this they have not given much to the Canon himself. H. G. Richardson and J. M. Manly investigated possible historical models for him, and Marie P. Hamilton has shown that he was a Canon Regular. But apart from these, discussion has been confined mainly to the sources and extent of Chaucer's alchemical knowledge, the possible audience for the tale considered apart from the Canterbury group, and the character of the Yeoman, so much more fully developed than that of his master.
Rimbaud and La Tentation De Saint Antoine
Authors: Carmody Francis J.
Published: February 2007

The use that Rimbaud made of the definitive version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine, first published on 5 April 1874, throws light on the evolution of his poetics as well as his ideologies. The source book, one of the most distinguished vulgarizations of Hindu and gnostic thought, presents eastern illuminism and panoramic views of Alexandria in passages that Flaubert composed for the first time in 1871, after serious study of thousands of pages of ancient texts, and his new portrait of Saint Anthony is of special interest in that no sources have been located for it.
Real Life or Spectacle? A Conflict in Eighteenth-Century German Drama
Authors: Heitner Robert R.
Published: February 2007

The closing episode of Der neue Menoza involves a lively argument between the representatives of two generations of Germans about the essential purpose of the theatrical experience. A bluff-mannered father, honest and hard-working—a prototype of the “people” in their relatively unspoiled state—likes to go to the puppet theater and laugh at Hanswurst. His educated, super-refined son scoffs at such crude entertainment: “Was die schöne Natur nicht nachahmt, Papa! Das kann unmöglich gefallen … was für Vergnügen können Sie an einer Vorstellung finden, in der nicht die geringste Illusion ist. … Es gibt gewisse Regeln für die Täuschung, das ist, für den sinnlichen Betrug, da ich glaube das wirklich zu sehen, was mir doch nur vorgestellt wird.” Disturbed in his healthy naïveté, the father agrees to test his beloved “Püppelspiel” by the new standards; but he returns home in a fury, roaring, “Du Hund! willst du ehrlichen Leuten ihr Pläsier verderben? Meinen ganzen Abend mir zu Gift gemacht … [sagst] mir von dreimaleins and schöne Natur, daß ich den ganzen Abend da gessessen bin wie ein Narr … gezählt und gerechnet und nach der Uhr gesehen; ich will dich lehren mir Regeln vorschreiben, wie ich mich amüsieren soll.”
The Pardoner's Ale and Cake
Authors: Nichols Robert E.
Published: February 2007

The pardoner's lines in the Introduction to the Pardoner's Tale contain the nucleus of nine decades of concentrated debate. Aleslake and drynke represent but two of the elements spinning about the core of controversy. Alestake has led numerous commentators to conclude that the Canterbury caravan halted (in or) at a roadside inn and there heard a revealing narrative from one of their fellows. Partial dissenters concede a momentary pause at the pub but contend the pilgrims retook the road before the Pardoner finished his (Prologue or) Tale. Some opposing critics refuse to concede even a momentary respite. Commentary on drynke has gravitated similarly toward three conflicting forces: Some attribute the Pardoner's self-revelation to drunkenness, others see him as loose-tongued but just lightly tipsy, and still others consider him stone sober throughout.
Swift's Use of Lateralization as a Rhetorical Device
Authors: Quinlan Maurice J.
Published: February 2007

The terse comment that Swift's “style was well suited to his thoughts” has been explored and substantiated in various studies. These have dealt with Swift's knowledge of classical rhetoric, his conciseness, his skillful use of maxims, parody, illustrative parallels, sophistry, exaggeration, and similar topics. His puns and metaphors have also received attention. No one, however, seems to have discussed in detail his use of what may be called literalization of metaphor—a distinctive feature of his rhetoric and one that, in some instances, consists of a combination of pun and metaphor, I propose therefore to examine various aspects of the device of literalization as it appears in his prose works.
Conservation in Cooper's The Pioneers
Authors: Robinson E. Arthur
Published: February 2007

Cooper's third novel, The Pioneers, published in 1823, is usually considered to be his most realistic in reflecting actual scenes and events. The Effingham plot is fanciful, but numerous details as well as the general situation relate to family and community history. These factual elements involve all levels of the story: the setting, ranging from a description of Lake Otsego and its environs to such specific landmarks as the Bold Dragoon Tavern (Red Lion Inn) and the manorial hall; several characters, including Judge Temple (based upon the author's father, Judge William Cooper), the first sheriff Richard Jones (in actuality one Richard R. Smith), Major Hartmann, and the French merchant Monsieur Le Quoi (Mr. Le Quoy); and such contributing themes as the struggle over establishing a village church, the manufacture of maple sugar, and the danger of forest roads. Certain improbable details, such as the sheriff's arresting a gang of counterfeiters in the wilderness, are based upon fact toned down in the telling. Cooper apparently alluded to such reminiscent subject matter in his original Preface, which states that the book, in contrast to his first two, “has been written, exclusively, to please myself.” He further called attention to the novel's realism by subtitling it “A Descriptive Tale,” as he explained in a letter of 1822 to his London publisher: “I had announced the work as a ‘descriptive tale’ but perhaps have confined myself too much to describing the scenes of my own youth. … If there be any value in truth, the pictures are very faithful, and I can safely challenge a scrutiny in th[is?] particular.”
The Theme and Structure of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur
Authors: Wertime Richard A.
Published: February 2007

Though not a wholly successful work, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur is more coherent, more serious in intent, than is usually acknowledged. Dramatically and thematically organized in terms of the opposition between Launcelot and Gawayne, the work is best described as “tragedy of consequence.” Launcelot's adultery with Gaynour is ostensibly the root cause of the destruction of Arthur's realm, but the poet transfers the principal blame to others, above all to Gawayne. He achieves this by (a) distinguishing the adultery itself from its revelation to Arthur; (b) depicting the illicit love as favorably as possible; and (c) creating an implicit duality in the characters of Launcelot and Gawayne. The two undergo a reversal of primary roles by which Gawayne becomes the aggressor and Launcelot the placator. As the hero, Launcelot comes to embody the wiser course of action— withdrawal from worldly conflict—which leads him, eventually, to the priesthood. Confusion, however, results from the viewpoint of the narrator, who seems so indiscriminately generous with his praise that he contradicts the obvious implications of the course of events. This difficulty is resolved when one understands that the narrator's compassion transcends, not contradicts, the rigorous justice of events.
Wiederkehr der Schelme
Authors: Schumann Von Willy
Published: February 2007

Magere Ergebnisse fördert zutage, wer die echten Schelme in der deutschen Dichtung aufspüren will and dazu die üblichen bibliographischen Handbücher, die zusammenfassenden Darstellungen motiv- und stoffgeschichtlicher Art und die nach Gattungen geordneten Sachbücher befragt. Josef Körner nennt in seinem Bibliographisches Handbuch des deutschen Schrifttums nur eine geringe Anzahl von wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen unter dem Stichwort “Schelmenroman”, wovon die meisten sich auch noch auf das 16. und 17. Jahrhundert und die Lazarillo- und Don Quichote-Nachahmungen beschränken. In seiner durch ungeheuren Fleiß ausgezeichneten Anhäufung von Material, The Literature of Roguery (1907), teilt Frank W. Chandler der deutschen Schelmenliteratur nur neun Seiten zu, wobei sie sich diesen Platz auch noch mit der Diskussion des Genres in Holland teilen muß. Außer kurzen Hinweisen auf die deutsche Schwankliteratur, Meier Helmbrecht, Wittenweilers Der Ring, das Liber Vagatorum, Sebastian Brants Das Narrenschijf und auf einige Barocksatiren werden nur Grimmelshausens Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch und seine späteren Simplicianische Schriften einer knappen Besprechung für würdig erachtet. Chandler schließt mit der Erwähnung mehrerer Robinsonaden und dem bezeichnenden Satz: “as elsewhere in letters, the ideal and the sentimental replaced picaresque realism. And so for a time the spirit of Rousseau and Richardson ruled.” Gero von Wilperts Sachwörterbuch der Literatur zählt einige der deutschen Übersetzungen und Nachdichtungen der Gattung im Barockzeitalter auf und nennt au der neueren deutschen Literatur Wincklers Der tolle Bomberg, Thelens Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts und Thomas Manns Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Das klassische Werkzeug aller Germanisten, der Merker-Stammler, räumt dem Schelmenroman auch nur verhältnismäßig wenig Platz ein. Es wird hingewiesen auf den Bayern Ägidius Albertinus, den “Vater des deutschen Schelmenromans” und seine Bearbeitung des “Gusman von Alfarache” und auf einige obskure Verfasser und Bearbeiter. Man beeilt sich jedoch hinzuzufügen: “Von einem deutschen Schelmenroman kann …kaum gesprochen werden.” Und weiter unten heißt es: “Sowohl die Schelmenromane wie die Romane Grimmelshausens haben … wenig Nachahmung gefunden.”
Gower's Narrative Art
Authors: Pearsall Derek
Published: February 2007

Recent Books and articles on John Gower have laid stress on his role as a moralist and as keeper of the king's conscience during a particularly brilliant and bloody era. He has been presented to us as a fearless critic of the corruption of his time and as the exponent of a moral philosophy which remains consistent throughout his three major works, the Mirour de l'Omme, the Vox Clamantis, and the Confessio Amantis. Gower himself would not have quarrelled with this image; indeed it is one that he tried to cultivate, as we see from some Latin verses which prefix the Vox Clamantis in certain manuscripts:
Ad mundum mitto mea iacula, dumque sagitto;At ubi iustus erit, nulla sagitta ferit.Sed male viventes hos vulnero transgredientes;Conscius ergo sibi se speculetur ibi.
Thomas Traherne and Cambridge Platonism
Authors: Marks Carol L.
Published: February 2007

Although the Oxford-educated Thomas Traherne is indeed “thoroughly representative” of the “salient ideas” of the Cambridge Platonists, and without a doubt should be classed with them philosophically, he is most akin emotionally to that maverick among the Cambridge men, Peter Sterry. Yet ideological differences separate him from Sterry, and even the emotional intensity which seems to link them takes radically variant forms. The case is the same with Henry More, whose work we know Traherne read, and whose spiritual autobiography resembles Traherne's: their responses to the new ideas of space were remarkably alike in feeling, yet Traherne took issue vigorously with More's theories of space and deity, and in general lacked More's intellectual extravagance in other theological matters. We may, then, speak best of affinities with, rather than debts to, the Cambridge Platonists: the portrait of Traherne's mind shows an eclectic intellect and—more important in shaping Traherne's persistent individuality—original, highly personal feelings.
Allegory and Verisimilitude in Paradise Lost: The Problem of the “Impossible Credible”
Authors: Steadman John M.
Published: February 2007

If “much adverse criticism has been spent on [Milton's] allegorical figures of Sin and Death,” the blame lies less with the poet or his critics than with time—with the evolution of poetic theory and its inevitable corollary, the relativity of critical standards. The principles underlying the composition of Paradise Lost are by no means identical with those by which the poem has been judged. In the case of much neo-classical criticism, this disparity is particularly significant, as its basic assumptions are often so close to Milton's that one overlooks their actual divergence.
Infanticide and Sadism in Wuthering Heights
Authors: Thompson Wade
Published: February 2007

This article will offer an interpretation of Wuthering Heights based upon the extraordinary sadism which underlies Emily Bronte's concept of emotional relationships and indicate the significance of her preoccupation with infanticide. Unless one appreciates the importance of infanticide and sadism in Wuthering Heights, one cannot appreciate the nature of the love between Catherine and Heathcliff, a love which I believe to have been frequently misunderstood, nor can one understand the motivation behind Heathcliff's killing of his own son. My chief contention is that Wuthering Heights is basically a perverse book—I use the word without its usual pejorative connotations—and that its power is owing precisely to its perversity.
Timothy Flint's “Wicked River” and The Confidence-Man
Authors: Seelye John D.
Published: February 2007

Much of the charm of Huckleberry Finn results from Twain's having tempered his satire with long, lyric descriptions of the Mississippi River, and, conversely, the bitter tone of Melville's The Confidence-Man has turned away readers because of the lack of any comparable scenic relief. “The setting Melville hit upon was the perfect one for such a book, but the setting is named or indicated rather than fully rendered. One is alleged to be on a steamboat descending the greatest of American rivers, but sensuously, pictorially, kinaesthetically, one has little or no sense of being on such a boat or such a river.” The opinion is Newton Arvin's, who credits this absence of natural description to the low ebb of “Melville's purely plastic power, his fictive and dramatic power.” According to Arvin, “the magical power of sensuous embodiment that had rendered the sea with such grandeur in Moby Dick had now failed him, all but wholly.”
Escape from the Circles of Experience: D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman
Authors: Engelberg Edward
Published: February 2007

Late in his life, in 1933, Yeats read Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love “with excitement,” and found the love story of Lady Chatterley's Lover “noble.” In Lawrence he found an ally “directed against modern abstraction”; and he considered that, with Joyce, Lawrence had “almost restored to us the Eastern simplicity.” A hatred of Abstraction; a fearless plunge into the mire of human existence; an anti-intellectual stance (which was almost at times a pose); and a mythopoeic conception of art and life: these Yeats and Lawrence shared, whatever their differences—which were considerable. And what they shared accounts in part for their similar response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisler and that hero's search for experience: it was, they felt, guided too dominantly by intellectual choices. In 1928 Lawrence wrote to Aldous Huxley that he thought “Wilhelm M eisler … amazing as a book of peculiar immorality, the perversity of intellectualised sex, and the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being, which is peculiarly bourgeois and Goethian.” Yeats remarked that Goethe, a man “in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed,” could “but seek … [Unity of Being] as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and through a multitude of deliberately chosen experiences.” He insisted that “true Unity of Being … is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its quantity.” But for Yeats, the poet, it was less problematic than for Lawrence, the novelist, to crusade against Abstraction and Intellection: the poem had its gnomic power to snap meaning at you in an instant of time; the novel had somehow to have people and a story —and a world in which both could occur.