bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Literary Criticism of George Eliot
Authors: Stang Richard
Published: February 2007

This essay is an attempt to present some of the most important aspects of the aesthetic underlying George Eliot's novels and to give some account of her little known critical writings. She was perhaps unique among the major novelists up to her time in formulating a coherent set of ideas about life and art before she started to write her first novel. She was known as an important figure in the intellectual life of London during the fifties, as the translator of David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, and as the subeditor of the Westminster Review, the most important organ of liberal thought in England at that time. She was also a prolific writer of articles for magazines and a reviewer of belles-lettres for the Westminster for three years, 1855–57. In these essays and reviews, all published before her first novel, almost all her important ideas about art are stated explicitly, and although many of these ideas are later developed and amplified in her novels and letters, they remain essentially the same. Her later statements of the same theme are often fuller and richer than those found in her periodical writing, but they are rarely inconsistent with each other. Her essays and reviews, together with Gordon Haight's edition of the letters and statements in the novels themselves, furnish an invaluable source from which her creed as a novelist may be derived.
Auerbach and Channing
Authors: Puknat Siegfried E.
Published: February 2007

In a letter written four hours before his death on 8 February 1882, Berthold Auerbach asked Friedrich Spielhagen to prepare an edition of his complete works. Among the five items he wished excluded from this edition was a “Bearbeitung einer Abhandlung von Channing über Selbstbildung.” Auerbach's reasons for omitting the essay Der gebildete Bürger (1843) were probably several. Not least was the doubt in his own mind as to any originality he might legitimately claim, which in fact is even less than his biographer Bettelheim implies in his one allusion to the inspiration of William Ellery Channing and the “partial” use of an address by this “greatest American preacher” (p. 143). Although virtually disowned by its author and ignored by critics, this essay of Auerbach's, intended for the improvement of popular education, marks an early instance of the reception of Channing in Germany and represents a brief chapter in the influence of American thought in Germany. It indicates one aspect of the meaning of America in the nineteenth-century European liberal movement with its social, economic, and theological upheavals reflected in many writers from 1830 on. The Channing episode in Auerbach's career reveals a great deal about the absorption of American ideas by a German liberal who elsewhere in his writings made allusions to the land of freedom and opportunity and sent fictional characters on trips to America.
El Simbolismo de la Luna en la Poesía de Federico García Lorca
Authors: Correa Gustavo
Published: February 2007

En el sistema de símbolos en la obra de Federico García Lorca, aparece el de la luna como el de mayor significación por su variedad de manifestaciones, su vinculación a algunos otros de sus símbolos centrales, la función estructural que desempeña en un gran número de sus poemas y en algunos de sus dramas, y la conformación arquetípica y semántica que presta al ámbito de su mundo poético. Su incorporación desde un principio en la obra del poeta y su evolución a través de ella, nos indica, además, el área extensa y soterraña de su mundo afectivo, al mismo tiempo que nos sitúa frente a una visión específica del universo y del destino del hombre en este mundo. Trataremos en el presente estudio de fijar su particular configuración en esta poesía y de examinar su delimitación dentro de la tradición literaria y determinadas áreas culturales que han podido contribuir a su constitución característica.
Milton and the Protestant Theory of the Atonement
Authors: Patrides C. A.
Published: February 2007

That numerous commentators on Paradise Lost have been repelled by the presentation of the Father in Book III is common knowledge. The objections raised have been voiced variously, ranging from Mark Van Doren's flat statement that Milton's God is a “dull dictator” to G. Wilson Knight's persuasion that sulphur is more appropriate to the poet's Heaven than ambrosia. Behind these and similar statements stands the opinion that Milton's defense of the ways of God to man is, as Sir Herbert Grierson put it, “too purely legal.”.
Andreas Gryphius, Der Rebell
Authors: Von Faber Du Faur Von Curt
Published: February 2007

Gryphius' Stellung unter den Barockdichtern ist eine besondere. Er trat der Weltordnung mit einer Forderung gegenüber, die kein anderer zu stellen wagte, und wenn er sich auch zu zähmen suchte, so stieg doch die Wucht der Anklage während seines Lebens immer an, ja man kann fast sagen: je gefügiger die Worte werden, desto mehr tobt in ihm die Rebellion. Er selbst war sich wohl dessen nicht bewußt, er hielt sich fur einen guten Christen und war es auch, aber er konnte sich nie der Resignation wirklich ergeben. Wir fühlen in seinen Schriften ein ständiges Brodeln wie in einem Vulkan, der einem Ausbruch nahe ist. Die Lava ist nie tobend übergeflossen, denn die Schwere der Gesteinsmassen, die darüber lagen, war nicht zu durchstoßen. Er war keiner von denen, die mit den Dingen leicht fertig werden; er war von Natur schwer und aus dieser Schwere heraus, aus dieser gehemmten Anlage seines Wesens, brannte seine Flamme nie ruhig; seine Sprache, mächtig und reich, muß schwerflüssig und stokkend gekommen sein.
Dryden and the Imagination: The First Phase
Authors: Aden John M.
Published: February 2007

Dryden's place as theorist and exponent of the imagination has never been appropriately determined, and the reason may be as much in the difficulty of the problem as in the temptation to settle out of court for Hobbesian influence. Certainly there is much in Dryden to plague his interpreters: the obliqueness with which he insists upon approaching the subject, the transitional and hence shifting vocabulary with which he works, and the rhetorical density within which he almost invariably transacts his critical discourse. These things make analysis and interpretation difficult and precarious. But of one thing the Dryden scholar need not despair—the lack of evidence. For Dryden had a nagging curiosity about the imagination and a tireless impulse to talk about it.
Swinburne's Lost Love
Authors: Lang Cecil Yelverton
Published: February 2007

Many people would be mildly surprised to hear that it is possible to discuss a Swinburnian “love affair.” Some, perhaps, would be astonished to learn that Swinburne had a love affair; others, possibly, to hear that he had only one. Still others, no doubt, gripped by recollections of hot bloodbeats pulsating in persistent anapests, would be startled to learn that such a love affair, if there was one, could be discussed in print. But rumor, even of the printable sort, has not been idle. The story of his affair with Adah Menken, the comely and bosomy vaudevillian who provided Dumas père (aged sixty-four) with an Indian summer and (she hoped) Swinburne himself, aged twenty-nine, with a Pierian spring, has always appealed to raconteurs, and, in all conscience, it is a good anecdote. For years it was bruited about that Swinburne was in love with Mathilde Blind, a bluestocking poetess, and this fantasy had scarcely been dealt with before another ghost appeared—the absurd and irresponsible claim that Swinburne was in love and planned to elope with Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, the wife of his dearest friend. Each of the stories, along with many others, has come, and, after its brief day, gone again, and no great harm has been done. To Mathilde Blind, Swinburne was a friend, an alert and cautious friend, and nothing more. Mrs. Rossetti he adored in life and revered in memory, but not one syllable of evidence supports the assertion, or even the suspicion, that his sentiment had anything in common with romantic love. Swinburne himself pronounced the final word about his relations with the tawdry “Dolores” Menken, and nothing can or need be added or subtracted: she was, he wrote (just after her death) in a private letter to a close friend, “most lovable as a friend as well as a mistress.” But this is not the language of passion. To each of these three women Swinburne was attracted in some way, but by no sophistication of vocabulary could any one of the three attachments be termed a “love affair.”
Prosa Prosaica Y Prosa Poetica En La Obra De Juan Ramon Jimenez
Authors: Nemes Graciela P.
Published: February 2007

La excelencia de la poesía de Juan Ramón Jiménez ha restado importancia al estudio aislado de su prosa, que siempre se considera en términos de su poesía. Esta tendencia está justificada. Los modernistas españoles elevaron la prosa a las alturas del verso dotándola de una gran emoción lírica y obras como Platero y yo se conocen como “poemas en prosa,” que es otro modo de decir “poesía.” Entre lo mejor del verso y la prosa de Jiménez hay la misma proporción, aún cuando lo mejor de su verso es tan desnudo y su prosa mejor es tan vestida. Esta paradójica relación se aprecia mejor separando lo poético de lo prosaico. Según el concepto clásico, la poesía es la expresión artística de la belleza por medio de la palabra sujeta a la medida y cadencia de que resulta el verso. Las conferencias y aforismos que sirvieron al poeta para expresar sus ideas sobre vida y poesía en lenguaje corriente son prosa prosaica y también lo son las narraciones y la crítica, que de por sí no son expresión de la belleza, aunque estén bellamente escritas.
The Poems of Li Ch'Ing-Chao (1084-1141)
Authors: Hsu Kai-Yu
Published: February 2007

These WORDS of Li Ch'ing-chao, regarded by many as the greatest woman poet in Chinese history, were written shortly after the death of her husband, who had been her devoted companion and faithful comrade in letters. His death was the strongest influence in her life, bringing to her poems a depth of feeling that, like a colorless blue in the flame of her genius, gave them brilliance and intensity. To be sure, Li Ch'ing-chao had earned a position in Chinese poetry long before her husband's death, largely because of her rare sensitivity to the aesthetic and poetic quality of the world in which she lived. While her poetry reflected a limited world of nature and of man, she more than compensated for this apparent lack with the depth of her imaginative penetration.
Critique Et Politique: La Réception Des Misérables En 1862
Authors: Bach Max
Published: February 2007

“Le 2 avril 1862 le grand bourdon du romantisme annonçait à toute volée l'importante nouvelle du jour; l'apparition d'une merveille. Les thuriféraires étaient à leur poste, brûlant l'encens sur l'autel du maître. De toutes parts s‘élevaient des exclamations, des adorations accompagnées de génuflexions et d'homélies louangeuses, sympathiques.” C'est ainsi qu'un pamphlétaire violent décrit la publicité tapageuse qui accompagne la publication des deux premiers volumes des Misérables, celui des romans de Victor Hugo le plus important par l‘étendue—dix volumes—par sa signification et par la réaction qu'il provoque dans la presse française, réaction rarement égalée dans l'histoire de la littérature. Cette publicité qui joue un rôle considérable dans le succès commercial de l'ouvrage, qui va avoir de l'influence sur l'attitude des critiques et donnera des armes supplémentaires à ses adversaires, fut utilisée au maximum par Victor Hugo, passé maître en son usage.
Innocent Decadence: The Poetry of the Savoy
Authors: Harris Wendell
Published: February 2007

The simultaneous flowering of decadent verse and ephemeral little magazines upon the English literary scene of the 1890's is remarked as of central interest in the literary histories of the period. The two phenomena were closely related, for the poets of the English decadent “movement” and the editors of the new periodicals were for the most part members of the same extensive London coterie. The members of the Rhymers' Club were closely identified with the clusters of writers gathered around the Yellow Book, the Dome, and the Savoy; and with few exceptions the production of the group as a whole has come to be regarded as exhibiting certain morbidly exotic traits which gave the predominantly “decadent” flavor to the period. Of the many little magazines which served as admirable show-cases for this decadent poetry, none is more often cited as embodying the spirit of the age than the Savoy. Edited by Arthur Symons, illustrated largely by Aubrey Beardsley, and repeatedly presenting the work of Ernest Dowson, the periodical seemed, during its single year of existence—1896—to speak for all the arch-decadents except the already disgraced Wilde. Bernard Muddiman's description of the Savoy as “the fine flower of the publications of the age” sums up the achievement of its eight numbers; his references to it as providing the pages upon which “the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home” sums up its reputation. Yet the reader who turns to the Savoy expecting to find a luscious garden of exotic and forbidden poetry will be largely disappointed, for its verse has less of extravagance and perversity than is ordinarily implied by the description of literature as “decadent.” There is a real danger of misinterpreting the poetry of the decade whenever it is approached along the beaten paths of ruling preconceptions about the “decadent spirit” of the 1890's. The examination of the representative sample of verse provided by the Savoy illustrates the desirability of revaluating that spirit.
“I Syng of a Myden”
Authors: Manning Stephen
Published: February 2007

Although “I Syng of a Myden” has always been regarded as a superlative lyric, and although it has received detailed discussion by George Kane, John Speirs, and especially Leo Spitzer, there are many features of this extremely complex poem which need to be pointed out: the richness of the imagery, the significance of the puns, and the number symbolism, for example. Nor has anyone singled out the remarkable achievement of our poet in combining the tone of wonder and exultation in Mary's dual role as maiden and mother with an amazing wealth of the natural and theological implications surrounding the event.
Theme and Structure in L'Avare
Authors: Hubert J. D.
Published: February 2007

Although L'Avare is by no means lacking in originality, borrowings from literary sources are particularly heavy. Nearly every important scene, from the farcical intrigues of Frosine to Harpagon's famous monologue, has been traced back to Plautus, Ariosto, Larivey, Boisrobert or even to the commedia dell'arte. Moreover, Molière remains faithful to one of the oldest traditions in comedy: the eternal triumph of youth over age.
The Dialectic of Experience: A Study of Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence
Authors: Conran Anthony E. M.
Published: February 2007

Coleridge considered Resolution and Independence a flawed masterpiece. He says of it (Biographia Literaria, Chap, xxii): “Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would not present a specimen.” It is singular that Coleridge, who did so much to undermine the eighteenth century school of “faults and beauties” in Shakespeare criticism, should have dealt with Wordsworth in this fashion. When Wordsworth talked of the old man, as he became to the poetic imagination, “motionless as a cloud” or “wandering about alone and silently,” Coleridge was content; but when he tried to fix the old man in the here and now of 1802, Coleridge took offence and accused him of inconstancy of style. It is true that many of the corrections Wordsworth made in the poem were prompted by Coleridge's critique; but what is useful criticism to a craftsman is not necessarily so to his patrons.
Longfellow and His Cross of Snow
Authors: Cox James M.
Published: February 2007

Longfellow's Sonnet, “The Cross of Snow,” written eighteen years after his wife's death and left among his papers, has survived to become one of his most admired productions. Samuel Longfellow, the poet's brother and biographer, first brought it to the world's attention, publishing it in the second volume of the biography. Along with the poem, he added some biographical details which to this day usually serve in paraphrased form as a preface to anthologized appearances of the poem. Writing of Longfellow's grief-stricken anguish during the months following Mrs. Longfellow's death, his brother observed:

In one of his early letters Mr. Longfellow had said: ‘With me all deep feelings are silent ones.’ It was so of the deepest. No word of his bitter sorrow and anguish found expression in verse. But he felt the need of some continuous and tranquil occupation for his thoughts; and after some months he summoned the resolution to take up again the task of translating Dante,—begun, it may be remembered, years before, and long laid aside. For a time he translated a canto each day. . . . Eighteen years afterward, looking over, one day, an illustrated book of Western scenery, his attention was arrested by a picture of that mysterious mountain upon whose lonely, lofty breast the snow lies in long furrows that make a rude but wonderfully clear image of a vast cross. At night as he looked upon the pictured countenance that hung upon his chamber wall, his thoughts framed themselves into the verses that follow. He put them away in his portfolio, where they were found after his death.
The Upas Tree: Pushkin and Erasmus Darwin
Authors: Gustafson Richard F.
Published: February 2007

In 1828 Alexander Pushkin wrote his famous poem “Ančar,” usually rendered in English as “The Upas Tree.” Because of the obviously derivative theme of the lyric, scholars have been searching for the exact place where the poet learned of this tree and its terrible powers. At first the searchings were random. Professor Sumcov, writing around the turn of the century, claimed that Pushkin had read of the tree in some of the popular “travels to the east.” Not convinced by Sumcov's argument, P. O. Morozov proposed a stanza (iv, 126) from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Valerij Brjusov, the scholarly Symbolist poet who edited a collection of Pushkin's works (1919), thought that a poem by Millevoye, apparently “Le Mancenillier,” was the real source. In the collection of essays entitled Pushkin in World Literature (1926), N. Jakovlev showed that a proposed epigraph for the poem was from Coleridge; ten years later the Academy edition of Pushkin's works had this note: “the poem is thematically related to Coleridge's work Remorse.” In an interesting short study Professor Jakubovič has shown a certain parallel with Pushkin in a passage from Colman's play The Law of Java; the passage, however, could hardly be the only direct source.
Tragedy Or Romance? A Reading Of The Paolo And Francesca Episode In Dante'S Inferno
Authors: Poggioli Renato
Published: February 2007

As every schoolboy knows, Dante classified the sins punished in the Inferno in descending order, going from transgressions caused by the abuse of our normal instincts down to the graver violations involving perfidy and malice, which both deface the nobility of the human soul and sever us from our fellow men. So, even before crossing the passage from the first to the second circle, we know that there we shall find damned souls worthy still of tears of pity. The damned of the second circle, carnal sinners, are men and women who have subjected their nobler impulses to the animal urges of the flesh. Foremost in the ranks of these stand Paolo and Francesca, and their story is in a certain sense the first truly infernal episode.
Paradigms For English Verbs
Authors: Long Ralph B.
Published: February 2007

Efforts to make paradigms for the verbs of contemporary English run into difficult problems. It is not easy to decide what forms we will recognize, and if we do reach a decision we may still find it hard to group our forms satisfactorily. The kind of paradigms school grammars have contained are severely criticized by the new linguists, who hold Latin grammar and “meaning syntax” responsible. The new linguists have not as yet produced any paradigms with the finished symmetry that characterizes some of their tables of vowel sounds, but they have been giving thought to the matter. It is in order to note what has been done with verb forms in their two principal works of the present decade, the Trager and Smith Outline of English Structure and the Fries Structure of English. Perhaps still another effort at paradigm making can be excused too.
Addison's Aristocratic Wife
Authors: Cooke Arthur L.
Published: February 2007

During the eighteenth century it was generally assumed that Addison's marriage to the Countess of Warwick had been an unhappy one. Pope's caustic words in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnol (1. 393) about “marrying discord in a noble wife” were supposed to refer to Addison and his countess. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on hearing of Addison's appointment as Secretary of State, had sarcastically remarked: “Such a post as that, and such a wife as the Countess, do not seem to be, in prudence, eligible for a man that is asthmatick, and we may see the day when he will be heartily glad to resign them both.” The tradition came to full flower in Johnson's Lives of the English Poets: “... at last the lady was persuaded to marry him on terms much like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused, to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, ‘Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.‘ The marriage, if uncontradicted report can be credited, made no addition to his happiness: it neither found them nor made them equal. She always remembered her own rank, and thought herself entitled to treat with very little ceremony the tutor of her son.” Johnson gave no authority for his “uncontradicted report,” and it seems likely that the Great Cham was supplementing the available evidence with a liberal use of imagination—a faculty which he elsewhere so strongly deprecated. Still the tradition continued, and at the beginning of the next century, Richard Phillips, in Addisoniana, related as a current anecdote, “that though Holland-house was so large a mansion, yet it could not contain Mr. Addison, the Countess of Warwick, and one guest, Peace.”
Chardin Vu Par Diderot Et Par Proust
Authors: May Gita
Published: February 2007

Aune epoque où maints artistes de talent pratiquaient exclusivement des genres qui pussent plaire aux riches aristocrates ainsi qu'aux maîtresses de Louis XV—en particulier Boucher et son élève Fragonard, virtuoses de ce que Malraux appellera “l'art d'assouvissement”—un peintre, de nature modeste, avait courageusement résolu de faire uniquement œuvre de peintre et d'approfondir sa vision personnelle et irréductible du monde. Au cours de sa longue et laborieuse carrière, Chardin n'exploita que quelques genres mineurs: la scène d'intérieur et de vie domestique, la nature morte, et le portrait. Mais l'excellence et le charme discret de ses compositions sans prétention devaient lui attirer l'admiration, non seulement des amateurs d'art du dix-huitième siècle et de connaisseurs tels que Diderot, mais aussi des artistes contemporains, espèce particulièrement envieuse et difficile à contenter. Mais si son talent ne fut jamais contesté de son vivant, à l'encontre des décorateurs en vogue, Chardin ne s'enrichit jamais de la vente de ses tableaux qui, si admirés fussent-ils, n'en n'étaient pas moins considérés comme appartenant à un genre inférieur à “la grande peinture.” Il est cependant intéressant de noter que les lièvres, les chaudrons, et les pêches de Chardin exerceront une plus grande influence sur les chercheurs et les innovateurs du dix-neuvième siècle que les “machines” allégoriques et historiques de Carle Van Loo ou les scènes mélodramatiques et théâtrales de Greuze. Parmi les admirateurs de Chardin l'on peut compter notamment: Delacroix, Fantin-Latour, Pissarro, Cézanne, et Manet.
Wilhelm Meister Und Das Bild Vom Kranken Königssohn
Authors: Schweitzer Christoph E.
Published: February 2007

Die einheit von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren und ihrer Fortsetzung, betitelt Wilhelm Meisiers Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden, wird von der neueren Goethe-Forschung fast einstimmig bejaht. Die Verbindung zwischen den beiden Romanen wird einmal durch die vielen Personen hergestellt, die zuerst in den Lehrjahren und dann wieder in den Wanderjahren auftreten. Unter diesen Personen stent natiirlich an erster Stelle der Titelheld selbst, der in beiden Romanen den Mittel-punkt einnimmt. In den Wander jahren werden ferner pädagogische und bevölkerungspolitische Plane, auf die in den Lehrjahren schon hinge-wiesen wird, fortgesetzt und vertieft. Die Forschung hat diese Verbin-dungspunkte geniïgend hervorgehoben. Bisher ist es jedoch nicht gelun-gen, ein Motiv im Wilhelm Meister selbst zu finden, mit dem Goethe diese Einheit zwischen den Lehrjahren und den Wanderjahren auch dichterisch zum Ausdruck bringt. Das Bild vom kranken Königssohn, das an mehreren wichtigen Stellen der Lehrjahre erwähnt wird, bildet ein solches Motiv, das von einem zum anderen Roman weist. Ein beträcht-licher Teil dessen, was in den Wander jahren vor sich geht, wird in dem Geschehen, das auf dem Bild vom kranken Königssohn seine Darstellung gefunden hat, schon vorgedeutet. Andererseits lassen sich einige Szenen der Wanderjahre erst dann völlig deuten, wenn man sie im Zusammen-hang mit diesem Bilde betrachtet. Dieser Gesichtspunkt erweist sich als besonders wertvoll bei einer Analyse des Schlufibildes der Wanderjahre, dessen tiefe Bedeutung für den gesamten Wilhelm Meister sich so zum ersten Mal offenbart.
Whitman's “Lilacs” And The Tradition Of Pastoral Elegy
Authors: Adams Richard P.
Published: February 2007

Whitman liked to picture himself as an innocent, primitive genius whose “barbaric yawp” was prompted by nature, not culture, and whose originality was ignorant of precedents and uncontaminated by book learning. But modern scholars and critics have shown that he and his art are not so simple as they pretend to be. They are products of a well-advanced artistic and literary development. My purpose is to examine one of his best poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” in relation to one of the oldest, most highly respected literary traditions in our civilization—that of pastoral elegy. Everyone knows that “Lilacs” is an elegy, and several writers have compared it in a general way to others, such as “Lycidas,” “Adonais,” and Emerson's “Threnody.” George Meyer of Newcomb College has pointed out the relation of “Lilacs” to pastoral elegy in class lectures, and doubtless others have noticed the same relation in various ways. But no one to my knowledge has made a systematic study of it.
Browning'S Witless Duke
Authors: Jerman B. R.
Published: February 2007

Anumber of critics who have written on Browning believe that the Duke's little chat with the emissary of the Count in “My Last Duchess” constitutes a clever man's instructions as to the sort of behavior he expects of his next wife. Mrs. Sutherland Orr, for example, says that the Duke's “comments on the countenance of his last Duchess plailnly state what he will expect of her successor.” Others, like Edward Berdoe, S. S. Curry, Ethel C. Mayne, William Lyon Phelps, and Ina B. Sessions, not to mention numerous editors and anthologists, find a similar purpose in the Duke's monologue. Although Berdoe's reading of the poem (p. 282) is perhaps not typical, it summarizes what the other critics have in mind: “When the Duke said ‘Fra Pandolf’ by design, he desired to impress on the envoy, and his master the Count, the sort of behavior he expected from the woman he was about to marry. He intimated that he would tolerate no rivals for his next wife's smiles. When he begs his guest to ‘Notice Neptune—taming a sea horse,‘ he further intimated how he had tamed and killed his last duchess. All this was to convey to the envoy, and through him to the lady, that he demanded in his new wife the concentration of her whole being on himself, and the utmost devotion to his will.” Browning himself is often quoted in support of at least the first part of this argument. Asked what the Duke meant by the words “by design,” the poet answered briefly but equivocally, “To have some occasion for telling the story, and illustrating part of it.”
Yeats's Country Of The Young
Authors: Adams Hazard
Published: February 2007

Among the manuscripts and typescripts left by W. B. Yeats in the possession of his wife are two unpublished plays, one an unfinished manuscript consisting of two dialogues written in Yeats's inimitable, nearly undecipherable handwriting and the other a rough typescript inaccurately punctuated and proofread. The first was written in 1918 during the period of Yeats's interest in the Noh drama and has to do with a young girl, who lives as a goatherd in an old tower on a hill, and her lover, whose mother wants to block their marriage. This play is mentioned by Birgit Bjersby (though she makes an inaccurate quotation from the MS.) in her study of the Cuchulain legend in Yeats's works. The second play has been mentioned, as far as I know, only by Allen Wade. It is of interest chiefly for three reasons. First, it forms a dramatic milieu for “The Happy Townland,” a poem which Yeats liked well enough to preserve in his Collected Poems. Second, it throws some light upon Yeatsian symbology. And third, it is an example of a collaboration between Yeats and Lady Gregory. Allen Wade mentions this play only to assert that it evidently no longer exists. But four years ago a typescript of the play was shown to me by Mrs. Yeats. I found it to be a variation upon Lady Gregory's play, The Travelling Man.
Phänomenologie, Vergleichende Mythologie Und Germanische Religionsgeschichte
Authors: Philippson Ernst Alfred
Published: February 2007

Der vater der Geschichtsschreibung, Herodot, berichtet uns in den Historien: Die Hellenen haben die Namen der Götter von den Pelasgern übernommen; woher aber jeder stammt und ob sie alle von Ewigkeit waren und von welcher Gestalt sie sind, das hat man sozusagen bis gestern nicht gewußt.1 Hesiod und Homer sind es, die den Hellenen ihr Göttergeschlecht geschaffen, den Göttern ihre Beinamen gegeben, Ehren und Künste unter sie verteilt und ihre Gestalten bezeichnet haben.2
The Origins of Troilus and Cressida: Stage, Quarto, and Folio
Authors: Kimbrough Robert
Published: February 2007

Scholars and critics are wont to say that not even the editors of the First Folio knew what to make of Troilus and Cressida. Although the assertion has almost no validity, it is a comforting, protective one to repeat: comforting, for no play by Shakespeare has received such diverse interpretation; protective, for the statement absolves one from re-examining the basic bibliographical facts of the play. Diversity in Shakespearean interpretation is certainly desirable, yet that which surrounds Troilus and Cressida has become confusing and contradictory1 because the play is approached from assumptions of historical fact which are themselves widely diverse. Without a firm knowledge of origins, no critic—scholarly, literary, historical, or “new”—can generate the kind of imaginative assurance that is necessary in order to say something significant and lasting about the form and content of a Shakespearean play. Since so very little is known about Troilus and Cressida in its contemporary setting, an attempt to reconstruct the facts of its origins is all the more important. In this article, then, I shall initially review the known facts of the play on stage and in print, then propose that new facts be accepted along with the old in an account of origins which is conservative yet comprehensive. Generally I hope to establish a firm basis for further historical investigation and deeper critical understanding of Troilus and Cressida; specifically I hope in the last three sections to dispel three widely-held misconceptions: that the play failed or was not played publicly, that one of the Inns of Court commissioned the play, and that the editors of the First Folio were aesthetically uncertain concerning its place in that work.
Love and Honor in Dryden's Heroic Plays
Authors: Gagen Jean
Published: February 2007

Many of the critics of the heroic plays of the Restoration have had at least some passing comment to make about the concepts of love and honor embodied in these plays. L. N. Chase, for example, asserts that in the heroic play “virtue is often sneered at, reason and honor are brushed contemptuously aside.” Though he admits that love is usually justified and even glorified in these dramas, he denies that it is “a high and ennobling passion” for it “sanctions a violation of all moral laws wherever they are opposed to its free sweep and range.” Bonamy Dobrée also asserts that a “sound, guaranteed heroic love was excuse for any betrayal of friendship or dereliction of duty.” Nevertheless, he believes that in an age hungry for heroism and balked of it in real life, these plays provided on a superficial level the kind of heroism which satisfied the emotional needs of Restoration audiences. Allardyce Nicoll accepts essentially the same explanation for the popularity of heroic drama, yet he regards “flaunting honor” and “impossibly idealistic love passions” as typical of these plays.
Was Goethe Wrong About the Nineteenth-Century Lied? An Examination Of The Relation Of Poem And Music
Authors: Stein Jack M.
Published: February 2007

The Encyclopædia Britannica defines “song” as “the joint art of words and music, two arts under emotional pressure coalescing into a third. The relation and balance of the two arts is a problem that has to be resolved anew in every song that is composed.” This critical relationship between poem and musical setting, as observed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German song, is the subject of the following. Goethe, whose interest in the song form was great, and whose life spanned the transformation of eighteenth-century into nineteenth-century song, is used as a convenient focus to center attention on the critical relationships which were introduced into the song form by the course of its development at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The question in the title is thus rhetorical. I do not propose to answer it; indeed, there can be no answer more decisive than a thorough examination of the implications of Goethe's views and the esthetic problems which he saw or sensed in the form.
Thematic Alternation in Trollope
Authors: Dustin John E.
Published: February 2007

While chatting with Anthony Trollope one day, George Eliot lamented the occasional failure of her inspiration: “There are days together when I cannot write a line.” Trollope, in a rare moment of humility, replied: “Oh, well, with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my mechanical stuff it's a sheer matter of industry.” Perhaps it is unfair to accept Trollope's testimony against himself, but we do his workmanlike talents no disservice if we recognize that the same charge has often been brought against him by his critics, who allege a variety of “mechanical” practices. For example, A. O. J. Cockshut, discussing Trollope's handling of courtship, says, “His stock plot, much too often repeated, of the woman hesitating between two men, is perfunctory.” However, one “mechanical” technique which he repeatedly employed has never been noticed. If we trace the appearance of the two principal sources of conflict in his fiction, we discover not only that two themes are very common but also that they appear with almost predictable regularity. The symmetry of this pattern is, I feel, significant and illuminating in understanding Trollope's literary fecundity, in classifying his novels, and in appreciating the exact nature of his artistic maturity, a matter of special concern in recent Trollope criticism. Paradoxically, this same pattern also suggests that those novels which are most popular at the moment were “mechanically” produced.
Mark Twain'S Use of the Comic Pose
Authors: Gerber John C.
Published: February 2007

Mark twain's range in point of view is readily apparent in those works in which he uses fictional narrators. To reassure oneself on this point it is necessary only to recall some of his more famous narrators: Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan, Sieur Louis de Conte, King Leopold, and Captain Ben Stormfield, not to mention Adam, Eve, a horse, and a dog. What is not so readily apparent, however, is that an analogous range in point of view exists in those works narrated not by personae but by “Mark Twain”—such works as the travel letters and books, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” and the bulk of the short newspaper and magazine sketches. In some of these Twain played it straight; that is, he employed in them a point of view that was essentially his own. In others he assumed a pose, a point of view other than his own. And in still others, especially in the longer works, he alternated between real and assumed points of view. My concern in this essay is with the nature and range of these assumed points of view.
The Two Future Worlds of Aldous Huxley
Authors: Schmerl Rudolf B.
Published: February 2007

Aldous huxley's Brave New World is generally recognized as one of the two most widely discussed English fantasies of this century. The other, of course, is Orwell's 1984. The two books seem to present the two plausible alternative directions totalitarianism may take, and for several years after the publication of Orwell's book in 1949 it was common to evaluate the one against the other. 1949 was also the year of publication of Huxley's Ape and Essence, an exploration of still other possibilities of the future. It may be profitable to sidestep the question of the credibility of Huxley's fantasies as projections—which is not, fundamentally, a literary question—and to examine them first in relation to some of the techniques employed in their construction, and secondly as satires of the real worlds they reflect.
Problems of Collecting Oral Literature
Authors: Leach MacEdward
Published: February 2007

Problems of collecting oral literature range from the purely technical to the esthetic. A top collector must be an engineer capable of operating and often repairing complicated recording machines; he must be a scholar and an historian, bringing a broad knowledge of the culture he is collecting; he must be a public relations man; he must have a sturdy stomach, capable of digesting all manner of food, and a good head to withstand all manner of drink; he must be physically in top shape, capable of hiking up lonesome mountains, of rowing a boat, even of taking a turn at cutting wood, haying, or butchering; he must have a reassuring bedside manner, able to soothe those who think he is planning to put their songs and stories on radio or record and make millions for himself.
The Sigemund-Heremod and Hama-Hygelac Passages in Beowulf
Authors: Kaske R. E.
Published: February 2007

The four-hundred-odd lines of Beowulf1 between the defeat of Grendel and the attack by Grendel's mother contain two brief digressive passages, set with some appearance of symmetry on either side of the longer Finn Episode (1071—1159): a lay by one of HroSgar's thanes, contrasting the glorious deeds of Sigemund with the downfall of Heremod (874-915); and a pair of allusions introduced by the poet through the device of the torque given to Beowulf, concerning a mysterious exploit of Hama and the fatal expedition of Hygelac (1197-1214). The four basic references which make up these two passages seem designed as piecemeal allusions to stories more or less lost to us—a fact that must necessarily deprive us of much that the lines were meant to convey. Yet even allusion, if it is developed at all, is normally developed in the direction of its intended meaning, so that its general drift can sometimes be understood without a full knowledge of its underlying story. In this paper I will try to show that the Sigemund-Heremod and Hama-Hygelac passages are each organized around a clear thematic contrast, closely related to its context in the narrative; that they are meaningfully related to one another, and together express a theme of importance in this part of the poem; and that their significance grows naturally out of the great heroic ideal of sapientia et fortitudo which I believe lies at the heart of Beowulf? Section I will analyze the two passages themselves and their immediate contexts; Section II will explore their relation to the poem and its governing ideal.
Chaucer's Point of View as Narrator in the Love Poems
Authors: Bethurum Dorothy
Published: February 2007

Chaucer Writes about more varieties of amatory experience than any other English poet except Shakespeare. Whether in this abundance we have God's plenty or the devil's I will leave to Dryden and Father Denomy and try to comment only on this point of view as he relates the love visions and Troilus and Criseyde.
The Book-Burning Episode in the Wife Of Bath's Prologue: Some Additional Analogues
Authors: Steadman John M.
Published: February 2007

Though scholars have long recognized the influence of the antifeminist tradition on the Wife of Bath's Prologue, they have overlooked its possible impact on the fate of Jankyn's “book of wikked wyves.” Fansler noted “a rather curious literary precedent” in Marie de France's “Li Lais de Gugemar,” which described a painting of Venus committing Ovid's Remédia Amoris to the flames. A closer parallel to the scene in which Dame Alisoun “made him brenne his book anon right tho” exists, however, in several of the “Eastern” versions of the legend of the Seven Sages, or Books of Sindibad.
Martin Marprelate, Marvell, and Decorum Personae as a Satirical Theme
Authors: Coolidge John S.
Published: February 2007

At the outset of his first pamphlet . Martin Marprelate announces his discovery of a novel use for the critical precept of decorum personae. The announcement deserves a place among the significant critical declarations of English literary history, for it contains the vital principle of a satirical method which was to develop profound and disturbing implications in Martin's own work, influence the evolution of the Elizabethan novel in an important way, and, in the hands of Andrew Marvell nearly a century later, be adapted surprisingly to what may be called the “pacification” of satire.
Satan and Shaftesbury
Authors: Freedman Morris
Published: February 2007

Paradise lost, in spite of all the critical and scholarly acknowledgements that it is a “typical” seventeenth-century epic, has not often enough been seriously considered in the context of the Restoration, when, of course, it appeared. The audience that read it was also reading Dryden. And while it was obviously not a “party poem” in the way that Absalom and Achitophel was, it certainly was not detached from its age. In his own way, Milton was responding to contemporary events and issues with something of Dryden's hardness of mind and spirit. Indeed, certain aspects of Paradise Lost may appear in an altogether new perspective when we consider how closely Dryden used Milton's epical material in his own small epic. We may, to pursue one aspect in detail, even turn up a plausible model for Satan.
Beleaguered Monasticism and Chateaubriand's vie de Rancé
Authors: Redman Harry
Published: February 2007

In his edition of the Vie de Rancé, M. Fernand Letessier traces the composition of the work but does not touch upon the pressures that were brought to bear upon Chateaubriand as he wrote it. However, several letters that passed between Chateaubriand and Abbé Joseph Hercelin in late summer, 1843, and which were published by M. Letessier in the Revue d'histoire littéraire in 1938 have led me to believe that pressure was exerted. Head of the entire network of Trappist monasteries, Abbé Hercelin presided over his order from the remote, wooded cloisters of the Trappists' mother house, Notre Dame de la Trappe, in the Perche country of northern France, where the Breton marshes become Normandy. Chateaubriand had been scheduled to visit the establishment in June, 1843, but had had to postpone doing so because of ill health. When the visit did take place two months later, he talked with Hercelin about a book on which he was then at work. It was to deal with the Trappist monasteries' patriarch, Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé. Little more than a week had elapsed since Chateaubriand's departure when Hercelin observed in a letter to his venerable guest that “Cette religion sainte, continuée dans les bois, n'est pas connue des hommes de l'époque, mais elle va leur apparaître belle et amie de l'humanité, quand votre plume, aussi éloquente que catholique, aura écrit l'histoire de l'illustre réformateur dont vous avez vu le tombeau.” He went on to predict that because of the persuasive “unction” of his words, Chateaubriand would realize with his book a marvelous alliance between “the children of the world” and the “peaceable inhabitants of the cloisters.”
Emile Montégut and French Romanticism
Authors: Chadbourne Richard M.
Published: February 2007

Eclairer et bruler a la fois est le

comble de la perfection

St. Bernard

The Goncourt Brothers tell of their visit, at two o'clock in the afternoon of 27 November 1862, to a sixth-floor apartment in the Rue Jacob where a voice rising as though from dream-like depths bade them enter a kind of “chambre de grisette, de couturière.” There, with an unlaced pair of men's boots on the floor and books heaped about everywhere, they were greeted from his bed by “un petit homme, maigre, maladif … un critique en mansarde, un homme d'un grand talent. C'est M. Montégut, l'écrivain de la REVUE DES DEUX MONDES.” He was thirty-seven then, having come from his native Limousin as a young man, already eccentric by virtue of his provincial education and Protestant background, to find his way into the Revue, where, except for brief service with other journals, he remained at his post of literary critic a long life, ending in December 1895.
The Genesis of Felix Holt
Authors: Thomson Fred C.
Published: February 2007

Commentators on Felix Holt, the Radical have generally assumed that George Eliot started with a political novel in mind. What has never been sufficiently considered is that the genesis of Felix Holt was rather in the adulterous intrigue of Mrs. Transome with Lawyer Jermyn and the bitter consequences of this transgression to herself and their son Harold. The politics, and even the role of Felix himself, were probably afterthoughts.
The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction
Authors: Wimsatt W. K. , Beardsley Monroe C.
Published: February 2007

Let us first of all confess that it is not as if we were writing under the persuasion that we have a novel view to proclaim. It is true that the view which we believe to be correct is often under attack today and is sometimes supposed to be outmoded by recent refinements. Its proponents too are often not sure enough of its actual character to defend it with accuracy. At the same time, a look into some of the most recent handbooks and critical essays reveals that there are some teachers and writers on our subject today who expound this view in a perfectly clear and accurate way. We have in mind, for instance, A Glossary of Literary Terms revised by Meyer Abrams for Rinehart in 1957 from the earlier work by Norton and Rushton, or the handbook by Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, published in 1956 by Harcourt, Brace. In the lengthy Kenyon Review symposium on English verse, Summer 1956, we admire the niceties of Mr. Arnold Stein's traditionally oriented discussion of Donne and Milton. There is also Mr. Stein's earlier PMLA article (lix [1944], 393–397) on “Donne's Prosody.” In the Kenyon symposium there is, furthermore, Mr. Ransom. It would be difficult to frame a more politely telling, persuasive, accurate retort than his to the more extravagant claims of the linguists.