bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pussum, Minette, and the Africo-Nordic Symbol in Lawrence's Women in Love
Authors: Chamberlain Robert L.
Published: February 2007

The crucial and controlling metaphor of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love is a metaphor of destruction, that two-faced image of disintegration by heat and annihilation by cold. Much of the novel's interest and more than half its meaning lies in Rupert Birkin's eccentric, hardly normal struggle to become modern history's new norm, and it is Birkin who conceives and develops this Africo-Nordic symbol as a way of giving habitation and name to his mystical perceptions. These Herculean labors are, of course, the labors of Lawrence also, only his arena is the entire novel; through its pages he scatters sparks of fire and ice, shimmering designs in black and white, mud and snow, showers of color, because the entire work is his attempt to perceive poetically what neither he nor we could perceive otherwise. Birkin's attempt in “Moony” (Chap, xix) to destroy the reflection of the ambivalent moon's reflected light is only one of the novel's numerous set poems or “constitutive symbols,” and the following great meditation on death by heat and by cold is simply the locus classicus of simultaneous efforts by both the character and his creator to express in metaphor the novel's deepest insights. But the literally thousands of allusions metaphoric and literal to matters Arctic and African which run through the whole work, cutting across chapters and groups of chapters, binding, finally, beginning to end, make of Lawrence's Women in Love itself a constitutive symbol. As are Moby Dick and A Passage to India, Der Steppenwolf and Julie de Carneilhan, so is Women in Love constructed like a poem; and poems, especially long ones, are not easily made. The making of this one preoccupied, even obsessed, Lawrence for a number of years. He long considered it, rightly, his masterpiece, and we know that under his shaping hands it took various shapes. When it was still more than a year from completion, its 1913–14 augmentation had already swelled larger than its parent body and been published as The Rainbow (1915).
Regards Sur l'œuvre de Georges Navel
Authors: Aubery Pierre
Published: February 2007

Fin 1945 on vit paraître en France aux devantures des libraires un petit volume portant le titre modeste de Travaux. L'auteur, un authentique ouvrier manuel de quarante-un ans dont c‘était là le premier livre, nous parlait d'une façon très neuve des rapports, d'une richesse insoupçonnée, qu'il établissait avec le monde des choses à travers son travail. Navel se révélait en outre moraliste, préoccupé d'atteindre à plus de sensibilité, à plus de conscience, en dépit des obstacles redoutables que l'implacable rigueur de la condition ouvrière accumulait sur son chemin. Page après page on assistait à cette lutte tenace, malgré les accès de découragement et les retombées, d'un ouvrier qui ne voulait rien abdiquer de ses aspirations d'homme libre à vivre plus intensément, aussi bien par le cœur que par l'intelligence. Bientôt Navel, qui écrivait son livre à la première personne, nous expliquait comment il se rendit compte très jeune que son humanité était non seulement menacée mais contestée par l'ordre social existant. Pour tenter de sauver ce qui pouvait l‘être il oscille entre deux pôles. Tantôt il espère pouvoir faire son salut en même temps que tous les prolétaires, grâce à l'action politique, tantôt il essaye de se sauver tout seul en échappant à l'emprise de l'usine. Les récits que Navel donnait dans Travaux et plus tard dans Parcours et Sable et Limon de ce long combat qu'il devait livrer, entre 1919 et 1945, contre l'engloutissement qui le menaçait dans des tâches purement alimentaires, dressaient finalement, bien sÛr, un bilan de faillite. Mais d'une faillite qui n'avait rien d'une débâcle. Malgré l'inégalité de la lutte Navel avait connu des moments de bonheur et d'exaltation. Il avait préservé sa santé physique et aussi son juvénile appétit de beauté, de générosité et d'amitié. Il n'avait rien renié, rien trahi de ses aspirations de socialiste humaniste. En 1945 une telle attitude, qui illustrait en somme l'itinéraire de toute une génération passée par le Front populaire et la Résistance, valut à Navel de nombreuses sympathies. Son livre eut une excellente presse. Naval était lancé, promu écrivain, édité bientôt par Gallimard.
The Metamorphic Stop of Time in “A Winter's Tale”
Authors: Tritschler Donald
Published: February 2007

Dylan Thomas knew the part his poetry played in his “individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light.” While this baring “of the real causes and forces of the creative brain and body” generated exciting imagery and rhetorical experiments sometimes baffling to readers, Thomas also insisted on communication to others engaged in the same struggle through “a progressive line, or theme, of movement in every poem”—what he called “narrative.” He said, “I believe in the simple thread of action through a poem, but that is an intellectual thing aimed at lucidity through narrative.” Though we may find his concept of narrative unusually broad, Thomas conceived of it as the life—a main moving column—that “must come out of the centre; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions.” This view of poetic creation as his personal dialectic of images complements Thomas' principal theme: the paradox of life creating and consuming itself.
The Plot of Pearl
Authors: Heiserman A. R.
Published: February 2007

No wonder students of Middle English literature are concentrating on systems of exegesis, symbolism, spiritual and liturgical exercise. These traditional lores convey ideas, and it is the ideas in medieval poetic works that often seem most valuable. Everywhere abound explicit propositions and exhortations: society is corrupt, man is fate's victim, bend your will to God's. Implicit notions about destiny, justice, and will seem to move behind veils of narrative and description, even to stir within the verbal devices adorning these veils. When routed out of poetic works, such ideas seem fully comprehensible; in fact, they do not differ essentially from those to be found in works of theology, philosophy, and homily, and they seem shaped by the same tools of rhetoric and dialectic. No wonder people are more intrigued by these pearls than by the oysters in which they live.
The Publishing of Byron's Don Juan
Authors: Luke Hugh J.
Published: February 2007

On 8 December 1824 Robert Southey sent to the editor of the Courier a long letter containing a final, post-mortem installment in his feud with Lord Byron. Reacting to some allusions to himself in Medwin's recently published Conversations of Lord Byron, Southey characteristically joined truculent self-defense with bitter and abusive attack:

It was because Lord Byron had brought a stigma upon English literature [Southey explained] that I accused him; because he had perverted great talents to the worst purposes; because he had set up for pander-general to the youth of Great Britain as long as his writings should endure; because he had committed a high crime and misdemeanour against society, by sending forth a work in which mockery was mingled with horrors, filth with impiety, profligacy with sedition and slander. . . .

Here I dismiss the subject. It might have been thought that Lord Byron had attained the last degree of disgrace when his head was set up for a sign at one of those preparatory schools for the brothel and the gallows, where obscenity, sedition, and blasphemy are retailed in drams for the vulgar. There remained one further shame,-there remained this exposure of his private conversations, which has compelled his lordship's friends ... to compare his oral declarations with his written words.
Symbolic Landscapes in Sainte-Beuve's Early Criticism
Authors: Chadbourne Richard M.
Published: February 2007

In recent years we have come to accept less and less begrudgingly the idea of Sainte-Beuve as a poet. Yet the discovery of this idea may not have produced all the fruit of which it is capable. We have recognized his poetic originality and influence, but still tend to think of him as above all a failed poet or as a poet, at best, of very minor excellence. One important kind of continuity between his poetry and his prose has been noted, but we are still prone to believe that he resorted to criticism as a second-best pursuit, a pis aller; and such a view, to some extent supported, it must be admitted, by Sainte-Beuve himself in his more self-disparaging moods, tends to mark his entire work with a certain stigma.
Isolation and Death in Stifter's Nachsommer
Authors: Sjogren Christine Oertel
Published: February 2007

The idyllic harmony that suffuses Stifter's Nachsommer has been widely discussed and analyzed by scholars in the field, but less attention has been given to the undercurrent of sadness, which, in the words of Walter Rehm, is “hidden between the lines.” A new dimension to our understanding of Nachsommer—described by one writer as “inexhaustible in its mystery”—can indeed be added by further probing into the disturbances that lie beneath the smooth exterior of the novel.
Un aspecto olvidado en el realismo del Poema de Mio Cid
Authors: Puértolas J. Rodríguez
Published: February 2007

Mala cueta es, señores, aver mingua de pan (Mio Cid, 1178)

Todo estudio y crítica referente al Poema de Mio Cid hace constar un hecho característico del mismo, su realismo. Sin embargo, creo que, por unas u otras razones, no se ha llegado a señalar claramente la verdadera importancia y alcance de ese realismo, o mejor dicho, su auténtica significación. Mi intención, en las líneas que siguen, es tratar de ponerla de relieve. Espero, con todo, no “imitar al pilluelo que, al ver una pared recién blanqueada, siente necesidad de mancharla escribiendo en ella alguna inconveniencia,” como don Ramón Menéndez Pidal, maestro en todo lo referente al Poema como en tantas otras cosas, ha dicho de los posibles cidófobos posteriores a su magno trabajo. No voy a tratar del Cid especialmente como personaje humano e histórico—aspecto al que don Ramón se refiere con las anteriores palabras—sino de la trama material y realista que el Poema ofrece a los ojos de quienes lo leemos hoy. Hay que tener en cuenta para ello, también, que otro rasgo bien conocido del Cantar es su verismo, “que rebosa por todas partes,”hasta el punto de que incluso “en menudos pormenores coincide el Poema con los datos históricos.” Milá y Fontanals lo consideraba como “fidelísimo espejo de un orden de hechos y costumbres que no serían bastantes a suplir los documentas históricos.” Sera inevitable, pues, que en algunos puntos de este trabajo me refiera también a la persona del Cid, quien, después de todo, si no puede ser considerado como un santo, tampoco como hombre sin honor ni ideales.
Di Giacomo's Uocchie de suonno, nire: A Modern Villanella Theme
Authors: Maurino Ferdinando D.
Published: February 2007

It is no longer necessary to say that Benedetto Croce and several other critics have praised the works of Salvatore Di Giacomo. The poet, who wrote in the mellow and musical Neapolitan dialect, deserves such literary attention. However, his use of the dialect has unfortunately deprived Di Giacomo of the greater renown he would have received had he used the official Italian language. This is paradoxical because from the late Quattrocento through the early Seicento not only Italian literati but also European scholars, poets, and musicians collected, imitated, and set to music the semi-popular poems known as villanelle napoletane written in the Neapolitan dialect. Later these Neapolitan villanelle came to be called villanelle alla napoletana, or simply napoletane, attesting to the fact that they had become a tradition. For over a century ballads, songs, strambotti, rispetti, and madrigals were composed alla napoletana throughout Europe in the poetical mood and dance rhythm developed primarily by the villanelle songs of Naples.
Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor
Authors: Gaylord Alan T.
Published: February 2007

In this paper I wish to suggest in broad outline a hypothesis concerning the unity of Fragment vu of the Canterbury Tales, based upon the thematic significance of the terms, “sentence” and “solaas.” I will not attempt to explicate any of the tales here, nor elaborate very fully upon their interplay of theme; rather, in introducing such a hypothesis, I will concentrate on the place inquiry must start: with the way Harry Bailly puts his own terms to use. This evidence will be drawn from the links, and lends itself to a fuller understanding of Chaucer's intent in putting Harry into the foreground of this series of tales, even as it leads towards the discovery of Chaucer's own principles of craft.
Larger Manners and Events: Sallust and Virgil in Absalom and Achitophel
Authors: Peterson R. G.
Published: February 2007

John Dryden's work is part of that great stylistic synthesis called neo-classicism; and in it the classical, particularly the Roman, past finds a new relevance to the modern world. The classical tradition not only remains a constant presence but also (in Reuben A. Brower's metaphor) exerts an “active pressure.” Awareness of this basic element, this Roman posture, in Dryden's art shows signs of disappearing behind the varied ingenuities of our own age of criticism. Since A. W. Verrall's lectures were first published in 1914, Dryden's work has been studied extensively and, we may say, has been looked at with new eyes. His great poem, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), has been recognized as a complex and highly sophisticated work of art. The past five years have brought (not to mention the reprinting of Verrall's lectures and the publication of many articles) three important books on Dryden's poetry. One is about Absalom and Achitophel; two others devote many pages of discussion to this poem. Each of these books reminds us, in a slightly different way, that when we have supplied the English equivalents for Biblical persons, institutions, and events we have scarcely begun to read Absalom and Achitophel.
The Cosmology of Praise: Smart's Jubilate Agno
Authors: Friedman John Block
Published: February 2007

Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, like many other poems of its period, celebrates God's goodness to men and the plenitude of His creation. But one need only compare it with other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works similar in theme—the quasi-scientific treatises of John Ray, William Derham, and Thomas Burnet, or James Thomson's The Seasons—to see how urgent and personally felt Smart's hymn of praise is. It was Smart's belief that God creates and sustains a cosmic harmony upon which the universe is contingent—in effect, God sings the universe into being—and the poet's duty is to serve as a kind of choir-master leading the creation in an answering song. Because harmony between God and His creation is necessary for the physical continuation of the universe, Smart's concern with the multitude of animals, birds, fish, plants, stones, and even planets in the Jubilate is much more than a rambling appreciation of them. He invokes them as models for men. For, in fulfilling their proper natures, the Lobster, the Hornet, and the Wild Beet contribute naturally to the universal harmony what man must contribute voluntarily, namely praise to the Creator of all.
The Evolution of Soul in Wordsworth's Poetry
Authors: Langbaum Robert
Published: February 2007

When Keats in a letter calls this world “The vale of Soul-making,” he comes close to Wordsworth's way of thinking. For Keats says that we come into the world as pure potentiality or “Intelligence” and that we acquire a “Soul” or “sense of Identity” through “Circumstances.” And it is the main purport of Wordsworth's poetry to show the spiritual significance of this world, to show that we evolve a soul or identity through experience and that the very process of evolution is what we mean by soul.
The Three Modes in Tennyson's Prosody
Authors: Ostriker Alicia
Published: February 2007

Artist first, then Poet,' some writer said of me. I should answer, 'Poeta nascitur non fit'; indeed, ‘Poeta nascitur et fit.‘ I suppose I was nearer thirty than twenty before I was anything of an artist.“ Tennyson, here reconstructing his early literary biography for his son's Memoir, mentions the metrical experiments à la Thomson, Pope, Scott, and Shakespeare with which he amused himself between the ages of eight and fourteen, commenting apparently on what one must do before beginning to become ”anything of an artist.“
Walden Pond as a Symbol
Authors: Lyon Melvin E.
Published: February 2007

Thoreau's Walden has often been studied as a symbolic work exemplifying the romantic quest for rebirth. No one, however, has demonstrated that, like many other masterpieces of the period, its title identifies its chief symbol.My purpose is to demonstrate this point and show its significance for the work as a whole.
A New Approach To The Rhythm of Beowulf
Authors: Creed Robert P.
Published: February 2007

In The Rhythm of Beowulf Professor John Pope has presented a convincing case for reading Beowulf as a structure of language ordered not only by stress-patterns but by stress-patterns within strict time-sequences. According to Pope's thesis the rhythm of most Old English poetry can be described as a series of measures equivalent in length (isochronous) though varying in the number of syllables they contain and in the stress-patterns enforced upon these syllables.
Chapman's Andromeda Liberata: Mythology and Meaning
Authors: Waddington Raymond B.
Published: February 2007

During recent years, despite—or possibly because of—T. S. Eliot's commendation, George Chapman's verse has appealed to a fit audience, though few indeed. One of the reasons for this neglect has been the inaccessibility resulting from insufficient knowledge of the tradition and technique of platonic allegory in the Renaissance. Since Battenhouse's pioneering effort at explicating The Shadow of Night, other scholars equipped with a fuller knowledge of platonic iconography and mythology have attempted to part the veil of obscurity by reestablishing a coherent intellectual and historical context and have enhanced our understanding of several of the more difficult poems, notably Hero and Leander and Ovids Banquet of Sence. It may be time to examine a poem which has not been noted for artistic accomplishment in order to determine to what extent such a context reveals a consistent poetic mode in Chapman's verse.
Allegory and The Incredible Fable: The Italian View From Dante To Tasso
Authors: Montgomery Robert L.
Published: February 2007

Our knowledge of medieval and Renaissance theory of allegory is largely governed by two traditions, the rhetorical definition inherited from Quintilian and the exegetical method of reading on two or more levels of meaning, a method traceable to Augustine and usually illustrated by Dante's letter to Can Grande Della Scala. The rhetorical view of allegory as inversio and extended metaphor is mostly useful for examining the figure on a narrow scale, normally as part of a larger context. It describes an element of style but not a fictional structure. The exegetical tradition, though widely employed as a technique of reading, was, if one is to judge by Renaissance critical theory, seldom discussed or fully analyzed after Petrarch. When it was, as in Harington's Apology prefaced to his translation of Orlando Furioso, the result could be confusing. Generally critics were equipped with the handy assumption that all literature was susceptible to the figurative readings habitually given to Scripture, and the method was convenient to the allegorical interpretation of myth.
John Wordsworth and His Brother's Poetic Development
Authors: Townsend R. C.
Published: February 2007

On 5 February 1805 John Wordsworth, the poet's brother, drowned when the ship he was commanding was wrecked off the English coast near Weymouth. No one would want to deny Ernest de Selincourt's assertion that his death was “the most terrible blow that either William or Dorothy had ever suffered”; it can easily be taken, as it often is, as the blow which signals the decline of Wordsworth's poetic power, his shift to Christianity, and his withdrawal into the isolation of Rydal Mount. There is justification for seeing in John's death such crippling force, but the story is more interesting and less conclusive, particularly as it relates to Wordsworth's poetic development, which is what will concern us here.
The Wreck of The Deutschland: A New Reading
Authors: Schneider Elisabeth W.
Published: February 2007

For a long time, the luxuriance of baroque imagery so conspicuous in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins has tended to obscure one of its fundamental characteristics. His is a poetry of statement, intellectually formulated even when at emotional white heat, and scarcely at all, in any usual sense, poetry of suggestion or atmosphere. He could not have permitted himself to write otherwise even if he had wished, and he did not wish. Though obviously the poetry does not lie in the statement—he himself was explicit about this—still, when he found that even Robert Bridges had continual difficulty in making out his literal meaning, he resolved, he said, “to prefix short prose arguments” to some of his work. “These too,” he added, “will expose me to carping, but I do not mind.”
Echegaray and Pirandello
Authors: Newberry Wilma
Published: February 2007

The year 1966 marks the fiftieth anniversary of José Echegaray's death, and as yet a definitive study of his theater has not been made. Therefore, it would seem to be an appropriate time to take the first step toward a more complete examination of his work in order to point out several characteristics which are incompatible with the superficial labels attached to him and which blind one to the more meaningful ideas often present in his plays.
The Historical Importance of Assonance to Poets
Authors: Adams Percy G.
Published: February 2007

Assonance—the repetition of a vowel sound in stressed syllables near enough to affect the ear—has been as important as alliteration. Such vowel echoes have been employed in three chief ways. They have been simply harmonious, as in Swift's “So rotting Celia stroles the street / When sober folks are all in bed,” where the echo of [i] and [o] may be more pleasing to the ear than the two alliterations. Assonance has been used for structural effects and for emphasis: it has bound adjective to noun, from Beowulf's “ēōwralēōde”—a popular formula—to Thomas' title “The White Giant's Thigh”; it has bound the lines of a couplet, as in Spenser's “All in a vele of silke and silver thin / That hid no whit her alablaster skin”; it can emphasize rhythmical stresses, as in Shakespeare's “Do I delight to die, or life desire”; it can emphasize rhetorically balancing words, the names in Butler's “Didst inspire Witers, Prin, and Vickears,” or the verbs in Dr. Johnson's zeugma “No dangers fright him and no labors tire.” Assonance can also be onomatopoeic when it repeats the vowel of a key word, as in Pope's “Now pleasing sleep had seal'deach mortal eye; / Stretch'din their tents the Grecian leaders lie.”
Exorcising the Beast: Attempts at Rationality in French Classicism
Authors: Harth Erica
Published: February 2007

French classical literature betrays not the reason by which it is usually characterized, but a largely unsuccessful striving for rational control of the irrational. The literary treatments of the beast and monster in seventeenth-century works indicate both the power of the irrational and the similarity of various authors' responses to it. Descartes's beast-machine theory and Pascal's adaptation of it represent efforts to mechanize and regulate unreason. The failure of this attempt in Pascal's Pensées is signaled by the “monster,” an expression of that incomprehensibility which compels human reason to abdicate. The monster in Racine's Phèdre is an irrational force which the protagonists dream of conquering, but by which they themselves are finally conquered. Continued belief that French classicism flourished in an “age of reason” is in effect a prolongation of the same illusion found in the literature of that time.
Richardson's Pamela: An Interpretation
Authors: Wilson Stuart
Published: February 2007

The heroine of Richardson's first novel is neither a meretricious young hussy nor a paragon of virtue; she is a complex personality who moves from a naive adolescence to a composed maturity in the course of the narrative. The conflict between her devotion to moral principle and her growing affection for Mr. B., which develops in the first, or Bedfordshire, section of the novel, brings a near-psychic collapse in the second, or Lincolnshire, section. The imagery and symbolism show the nature of her torments, her growing awareness of a love that combines eros and agape, and her need for the reconciliation between conscience and libido which is completed after her return to the Bedfordshire estate in the third section. The formal symmetry of the novel evolves from the narrative process within which Pamela is tested and proved capable of an honest love and a tranquil marriage.
Radical Utterances from the Soul's Abysms: Toward a New Sense of Whitman
Authors: Black Stephen A.
Published: February 2007

Contrary to widely accepted arguments, Whitman's poems did not resolve the unconscious conflicts from which they sprang; nor did they indicate the resolution of philosophical questions or psychological conflicts. Neither should they be judged according to their success or failure in such analogical pursuits. Instead they must be judged according to the honesty and courage with which Whitman confronted the chaos within himself and according to the amount and quality of poetic order with which he was able to express the chaos within. If seen in a psychoanalytic context, Whitman's mystical or transcendental moments—moments of apparent attunement with the universe—are wishful assertions, comparable to psychological catharsis—“catharsis” being an experience which gives the illusion that conflicts are resolved when in fact they are not. There is bibliographical and biographical evidence in support of these arguments, but the strongest evidence comes from the literary analysis of such exemplary poems as “Clef Poem,” “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,” “There Was a Child Went Forth,” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
The Financier Himself: Dreiser and C. T. Yerkes
Authors: Gerber Philip L.
Published: February 2007

In his Trilogy of Desire, Theodore Dreiser presented a virtual biography of the model (Charles T. Yerkes, Jr.) for his central character (Frank A. Cowperwood). Dreiser's connection with Yerkes dated from the 1880's in Chicago, continued through the 1890's when both men moved to New York, and extended past 1905, when Yerkes died, and 1910, when The Financier was begun. Yerkes, a man of many facets, was selected by Dreiser as model for the generic millionaire principally because the dissolution of his estate after 1905 demonstrated Dreiser's theory of the natural “Equation Inevitable” in action. The events portrayed in The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic followed verbatim the events of Yerkes' life as established in Dreiser's working notes and verified by newspapers, periodicals, and books of the era. In this central fictional figure also is found a clear, though submerged, portrait of Dreiser's own hopes and desires.
The Verbal Gate to Paradise: Adam's “Literary Experience” in Book X of Paradise Lost
Authors: Christopher Georgia B.
Published: February 2007

It is not Eve's reconciling gesture of “love” in Book x of Paradise Lost that leads Adam back to God. Instead, Adam is restored by a mysterious “literary” insight as he suddenly perceives his sentence as a promise. Adam's “opening” is the sacramental moment toward which the action of Paradise Lost is leading and reflects the Reformers' understanding that the first promise (protevangelium), like other promises in the Bible, constitutes an inner scripture that equalizes all ages. Thus, in the main, the Reformers appropriate Old Testament stories without resorting to typology, for they treat the patriarchs as the first Christians who embraced the word. They see the Old Testament narratives as a sacramental vessel through which the viva vox Christi can speak to the reader of any age as he identifies with the patriarch in the story.
Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and the Jacobean Tragic Perspective
Authors: Champion Larry S.
Published: February 2007

Whether reflecting the social theme in a drama alive to contemporary issues, or reacting to the jaded taste of a theatrical clientele, or probing individually for the most effective delineation of man's tragic plight, the Jacobean dramatists explore a view of life more somber and pessimistic than their Elizabethan counterparts.

John Ford represents the culmination of this basic dramaturgical trend. In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore he creates central figures whose affection, if unrighteous, is also intensely sincere and whose aberrant conduct must be weighed against the treachery and hypocrisy of the society whose morality the lovers have rejected. The anagnorisis as well as the protagonist is doubled, and the spectator is left to choose between the wisdom of Annabella's Christian repentance and Giovanni's stoic insistence on the sanctity of private values. The result is a fundamentally pessimistic view of life in which man's challenge is the ambiguity of moral values constantly frustrating his search for a meaningful life.
Apollo versus Bacchus: The Dynamics of Inspiration (Rabelais's Prologues to Gargantua and to the Tiers livre)
Authors: Berry Alice Fiola
Published: February 2007

Rabelais's two prologues are examined as défenses et illustrations of his theory of creativity, a theory largely influenced by the Platonic furor divinus, for in both chapters Rabelais describes the source of his genius as a state of madness. However, two kinds of madness confront each other in dynamic opposition. There is first the Bacchic mode which describes literary creation as joyful drunkenness and whose purpose is to provide pleasure and recreation. But another idea of creative writing intervenes to contradict the Bacchic injunctions, one that infers gravity of intent and of meaning. It is argued that this second mode be rightfully designated as “Apollonian,” and that, in reducing Plato's tetrad of furors to Bacchus and his frère ennemi, Rabelais intuited that truth which Nietzsche would explore three centuries later in The Birth of Tragedy—that these two gods have stood eternally opposed as the archetypal poles of the tension vital to the creative process.
Purging the Commonwealth: Marston's Disguised Dukes and A Knack to Know a Knave
Authors: Houser David J.
Published: February 2007

John Marston's The Malcontent and Parasitaster, or The Fawne are examined in the light ofan analysis of A Knack to Know a Knave (1592). Marston's plays share with the earlier play details of form that involve not only the disguised authority figure noted by critics but also his declaration of purpose, the source and sort of vice he observes, the means by which his discoveries are given expanded significance, and the technique and result of the final exposures. The study of the formal pattern of these elements provides the link between Marston's plays and an earlier example of disguise as the dramatic device upon which the plot turns. The study also clarifies Marston's purposes, in The Fawne to provide a light, satiric survey of the abuses of love and in The Malcontent to analyze with greater complexity what is necessary for a virtuous ruler to control a partly corrupt realm.
Gulliver the Preacher
Authors: Zimmerman Everett
Published: February 2007

In his expository writings about religion, Swift suggests that moral fervor is often a disguise for immoral motives. He advises the preacher to avoid any pronounced display of personal qualities in his sermons and to try to eliminate the almost inevitable distortions caused by self-display. In his satires, Swift often has his persona say true things for reprehensible reasons. The satire then becomes primarily a study of the moral implications of the relationship of the speaker to his proposals, rather than primarily an incitement to practical action. In Gulliver's Travels the persona presents a view of man's evil that is generally in accord with the traditions of Christianity and of satire. But Swift shows us the immoral intentions of Gulliver; although Gulliver pretends that he wants to reform us, his pretense is a strategy for disguising his own evil from us and from himself. The satiric attack in the book then becomes double; Gulliver satirizes man, and Swift satirizes the motives for Gulliver's satire.
The Daemonic in Kubla Khan: Toward Interpretation
Authors: Patterson Charles I.
Published: February 2007

Despite wide disagreement as to the meaning of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, several recent interpretations point toward what can be formulated by combining (1) Plato's conception of a realm of nonmalicious, daemonic creatures dwelling in unrestricted joy outside human limitations and (2) Plato's conception of the Dionysus-inspired “possessed” poet in a furor divinus as the agent who can in an incantation call up before men the enchanting, terrifying beauty of this daemon world. Suggesting the nature of daemonic beauty and its effects upon people may be a chief aim of the poem, as variant readings in the autograph text indicate. Kubla Khan seems to be a poem about daemonic poetry, a strain that reappears intermittently and thus the search for spiritual and philosophic meanings in the poem could be relinquished. From this point of view, Kubla Khan appears neither as a fragment nor as a poem about evil.
The Psychological Structure of The Catcher in the Rye
Authors: Bryan James
Published: February 2007

A number of critics have commented upon Holden Caulfield's “neurosis,” but none has accepted Salinger's apparent invitation to a psychoanalytical reading of the novel. As a step in that direction, this paper examines a structural pattern of aggression and withdrawal, largely sexual, in Holden's thoughts and actions. The pattern is reinforced by such characters as Stradlater and Ackley, the former mirroring Holden's mostly fanciful exploitativeness and the latter his more natural tendencies toward retrogression. The episodic middle chapters show Holden vacillating desperately between those tendencies; and the conflict is brought to a curious resolution in the concluding Phoebe section when Holden verges, or rather unconsciously fears he may be verging, on sexual intimacy with his younger sister. The two tendencies converge at that point, and Holden becomes potentially both sexually exploitative and retrogressive. It is this revelation, realized most fully through the writing of his narrative, that points the way to health.
Saint-Exupéry, The Myth of the Pilot
Authors: McKeon Joseph T.
Published: February 2007

Saint-Exupéry, whether by artistic design or by stylistic spontaneity, wreathes the pilot, the generic hero of his four novels, Courrier Sud, Vol de nuit, Terre des hommes, Pilote de guerre, in an aura of such hyperbole that the reader, raised on the banalities of the “nouveau roman,” might find such exaggeration naive if not ludicrous. Yet the legend of the Saint-Exupéryian hero is not cased in a rigid matrix. In these four works—the first two fiction, the others essentially true narrative—the imagery that forms the substance of the myth of the pilot undergoes a subtle transformation: legendary, mythological, and mystical in Courrier Sud, it is subtly and successively altered. In the final pages of Pilate de guerre the metamorphcsis is complete, the myth is dissipated in a profession of fraternal faith, and, through its hero, man is seen in his true perspective, more realistic but no less heroic.
Céline: L'Itinéraire d'une écriture
Authors: Alméras Philippe
Published: February 2007

Changes in his expressed ideology subjected the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline to criteria that were not all literary. Brasillach and Ezra Pound reversed themselves in the assessment of his production; so did liberal and leftist critics. Now, thirteen years after Céline's death, one can attempt a more complete and balanced approach to his works. It must be objective and use a formal angle: statistical analysis along a linguistic and structural line. A study of the vocabulary, syntax, and architecture of Céline's nine novels reveals a continuous evolution. Some changes fall into almost perfectly regular patterns: the fragmented sentence grows to macromolecular agglomerates. In Nord 14 lines are organized in one sentence, while in Voyage they are divided into 17. The overall analysis points up four different periods which do not reflect any ideological changes. Thus, the Celinian novels must be treated as a whole: considered separately, their significance is impaired. (In French)
Recollections of Cicognini's Gelosie fortunate in Le Misanthrope
Authors: Wadsworth Philip A.
Published: February 2007

One of Molière's early plays, Dom Garcie de Navarre ou le prince jaloux (staged in 1661), was an adaptation of a tragicomedy by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini, Le Gelosie fortunate def principe Rodrigo (1654). Although Molière's work failed, it contained characters, themes, and speeches he revived in his later comedies, especially in Le Misanthrope (1666), where the fourth act contained about ninety lines from two climactic scenes in Dom Garcie de Navarre, confrontations between the jealous hero and the innocent heroine. Moliere profited, however, not only from the text of his own earlier play but also from memories of Le Gelosie fortunate, which presented a striking combination of violent emotional conflicts and frequent humorous interludes. It probably inspired some of the excesses of Alceste—his irrational suspicions and vehement language. The Italian source contributed also to the conception and configuration of characters around Alceste, particularly the affectionate and sensible relationship ofEliante and Philinte.
Gogol's “Overcoat”: The Pathetic Passages Reconsidered
Authors: Mills Judith Oloskey
Published: February 2007

Although twentieth-century Formalist criticism has concentrated upon stylistic analysis of “The Overcoat” and its skaz narrative technique, no previous study has focused directly upon another aspect of skaz—the influence of the narrator on the structure of the story and the pathetic passages. This aspect is essential to reconcile the juxtaposition of humor and pathos. The narrator, a creator of fiction, constructs a plot based on a moral principle: excessive self-confidence receives retribution. As evidenced in his tendency to satirize, the narrator is as guilty of this same self-confidence as his characters. Fearing similar retribution, he rejects responsibility for his satiric creation by limiting his omniscient point of view and placing the blame for negative portrayals on his objective depiction of reality. In true skaz style his own attitude, expressed in plot, point of view, and his own pathetic passage, is superimposed oh his characters, resulting in the first most quoted passage and in minor variations of it.
Surrey's Five Elegies: Rhetoric, Structure, and the Poetry of Praise
Authors: Jentoft C. W.
Published: February 2007

The Earl of Surrey’s five “personal elegies” demonstrate his sophisticated use of traditional rhetorical patterns, specifically his manipulation of the two types of structure for epideictic praise, that focusing on the subject’s biography, or that delineating his virtues. His sonnet on Thomas Clere follows the first type, and the Excellent Epitaffe on Wyatt adheres closely to the second, but even in these pieces Surrey departs from convention when it suits his larger rhetorical and poetic purposes. Individual modifications are even more apparent in his three less public tributes. The two sonnets on Wyatt serve as sequels to the satiric ending of the Epitaffe, and “So crewell prison” extends personal grief over the death of the Earl of Richmond to the level of an ubi sunt lament for the passing of an age. The elegies illustrate, finally, that the successful manipulation of convention by a good Tudor poet is itself a kind of originality.
Hand, Heart, and Mind: The Complexity of the Heroic Quest in Le Cid
Authors: Goode William O.
Published: February 2007

Critical reactions to the denouement of Corneille’s Le Cid are generally divided between the comic notion of a complete and happy union of Rodrigue and Chimène and the tragic notion of the impossibility of their marriage. However, it is possible to incorporate the two views into an interpretation of the play that emphasizes in the ambivalence of this ending the complexity of Corneille’s vision of man’s possibilities and limitations. Rodrigue represents the heroic order of humanity; Chimène and her mirror image, the Infante, exemplify the common order. The representation of the heroic quest in Le Cid not only portrays Rodrigue’s triumph but also depicts the women’s failures. Heroism and frailty coexist and interact; and it is essential to note that in the different outcomes of Rodrigue’s, Chimène’s, and the Infante’s efforts to unite hand, heart, and mind respectively, Le Cid offers a complex vision of humanity.
Emerson and the Dialectics of History
Authors: Van Cromphout Gustaaf
Published: February 2007

Emerson’s lectures in Biography (1835) and Representative Men (1850) reveal his conception of history as a dialectical process involving the heroic individual and society. The heroes of Biography play an “antithetical” role: perceiving the ever-progressive truth of the Spirit, they express that truth in and against a static and retrospective world. Their words and actions constitute the Spirit’s response to the alienation from which the Spirit suffers in society, the established “thesis.” Representative Men demonstrates Emerson’s increasing reconciliation with society in the 1840’s. His heroes are no longer inspired rebels, but instead are products of both Spirit and society. History. Emerson now shows, is not so much a matter of conflict as of synthesis. In the dialectical process rightly conceived, however, no synthesis is final—a fact which Emerson illustrates by severely criticizing his Representative Men and by showing the tentativeness and defectiveness of even their greatest achievements.
Talking in James
Authors: Yeazell Ruth B.
Published: February 2007

Henry James’s late novels suggest a world of talk which is morally ambiguous because epistemologically unstable. James’s early and late dialogues are radically different: in the late fiction, talk becomes a process of imaginative collaboration, and language virtually creates the conditions under which perception is possible. In The Ambassadors, Parisian talk educates Strether even as it seems to dissemble. And in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, conversation shapes the terms in which certain actions will be possible; talking together, characters create a world that fits the shape of their desires. Jamesian talk is at once hypocrisy and art: lying becomes a mode of vision. But if James’s liars are artists, his artists are also liars. We prefer Maggie Verver to Charlotte Stant not because she is more honest, but because her language makes for the most harmonious and inclusive order.
Conrad's Eastern Expatriates: A New Version of His Outcasts
Authors: Fernando Lloyd
Published: February 2007

Conrad’s knowledge of the Malaysian Archipelago was that of a sensitive expatriate, not of a native. But he balanced his lack of intimate knowledge with profound “suggestions” drawn from his Malaysian experiences. The events in his fiction reveal the historical disarray of a region invaded by colonial powers, and serve as an inclusive metaphor for the discovery by his characters that no life pattern. Eastern or Western, has any final validity. In this sense nearly all the characters, European and Malaysian, are expatriates, not outcasts. They are mocked by the folly of seeking to master the infinite possibilities of human development revealed to them. In The Rescue, for example, Hassim and Lingard, both expatriates, have an ideal vision of successful intercultural commingling before their defeat by the abstractness of this objective. Such “nebulous ideas” or “suggestions” largely account for both the obscurities of Conrad’s style and the greatness of his vision.
A Matter of Style : Stative and Dynamic Predicates
Authors: Mcintosh Carey
Published: February 2007

Almost every English verb, in context, expresses either a state or an action, and the difference between them may be defined by empirical texts that combine syntax and semantics. Applied to passages from Congreve (1700) and Ben Jonson (1609), these tests give strong if not extensive evidence that eighteenth-century prose is more nominal than early seventeenth-century prose: eighteenth-century authors choose to express meaning in terms of stative relations between nouns, rather than in terms of actions or events. This preference may be considered as a matter of literary style, and perhaps also as an episode in the history of the evolution of modern English.
The Personae in the Style of La Rochefoucauld's Maximes
Authors: Weber Joseph G.
Published: February 2007

Moralist literature of seventeenth-century France can be characterized by a human dialectic in which the author is in dialogue with himself or with an aspect of his personality, or in which there is a dialogue between the moi and autrui or between moral principles. In La Rochefoucauld's case, there is a stylistic withdrawal, an absence of intervention of the person of the author which allows for an imaginative interplay between the various personae in the style of the Maximes. This tendency creates an imaginary framework that supports an extended and more dramatic development of personification. In the successive versions of any given Maxim personification is generally sharpened, and what emerges from the overall literary texture of the Maximes is a veritable dramatis personae of extraordinary diversity and vitality. By dramatizing moral values in their multifaceted, contradictory nature, the moraliste tries to resolve the paradox inherent in them, while at the same time allowing moral ideas the freedom to remain paradoxical.
The Lexicon of Les Caves du Vatican
Authors: McClelland John
Published: February 2007

Numerous entries in Gide's Journal attest that for him Les Caves du Vatican was to represent a break with the tradition of La Porte étroite. He is especially concerned that the novel's language be liberated from the orthodoxy imposed by current usage. Hence, in Les Caves there is what appears to be an unusually high incidence of extravagant names, exotic nouns, foreign words and phrases, argot, rare words, and lexical and semantic neologisms. This phenomenon has been either neglected or misunderstood, and can be explained only in correlation with Gide's systematic overturning in Les Caves of the standard narrative conventions of the Realist-Naturalist tradition. Gide realized that the revolution in thinking about language which was occurring around him could play a role in freeing the novel from the existing restrictions of the public's expectations. By his esoteric vocabulary he forces the reader to remember that the novel's “story” is the author's invention and the characters his playthings. That fact, forgotten since Balzac but now reestablished, restores to the novelist the creative freedom he needs. It is on that level that the significance of Les Caves du Vatican is to be found.