bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
De Quincey's Conception of the Novel as Literature of Power
Authors: Patterson Charles I.
Published: February 2007

Thomas de quincey, who professed a hearty dislike for “the assumption of judicial functions and authority over … brother authors,” published only one review of a novel. But he yielded to the digressive spirit and frequently discussed throughout his writings both the genre and the novelists he read during his long life (1785–1859). These included Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Le Sage, Marivaux, Rousseau, Walpole, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, Maturin, Godwin, Captain Marryat, Scott, Galt, Miss Ferrier, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne. His favorites were Harriet Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Hawthorne. Years after De Quincey's death his daughter Emily wrote: “No one will ever make much out of my father that does not take in [to account] the extreme mixture of childish folly joined to a great intellect. The novels of his youth were of the Mrs. Radcliffe order full of mysteries, murders, highwaymen, mysterious people and dark corners. … He never got beyond the Mrs. Radcliffe stage and he was but a poor judge of a novel. He could make nothing of the modern novel with its pictures of real life.”
Apocalyptic Trumpets: The Inception of Mozart auf Der Reise Nach Prag
Authors: Immerwahr Raymond
Published: February 2007

On a monday morning in February 1843, Eduard Mörike enjoyed a unique musical experience, significant alike for its evocation of past memories and its foreshadowing of subsequent literary creation. He was at the home of David Friedrich Strauß in Sontheim, on the edge of Heilbronn. Strauß and another of Mörike's boyhood friends, the composer Friedrich Kauffmann, had surprised Mörike in Cleversulzbach the preceding Saturday and taken him to meet Strauß's bride, the former operatic mezzo-soprano Agnes Schebest. The sensational career which Agnes had sacrificed for marriage to Mörike's friend, reports of her beauty and “demonic charm,” rumors concerning her personal life in the past, and indications of Strauß's restlessness in marriage had made Mörike look forward to this introduction for some months with tense anticipation. But the first twenty-four hours of the visit had now passed happily, rich in the spontaneous sociability and informal musical enjoyment that Mörike so passionately loved. Just a few minutes earlier the unexpected arrival of Klärchen Mörike in a peasant costume had completely mystified all of the company but her brother.
W. D. Howells' Defense of the Romance
Authors: Budd Louis J.
Published: February 2007

Much of the modern disappointment with William Dean Howells' work grows from a failure to understand his aims. This misunderstanding arises partly because his literary rationale was far from being as systematic and uncompromising as has often been assumed; close study of the entire body of his critical essays and reviews shows that he did not reject all fiction which departed from a circumstantial fidelity to life. In essence, Howells felt that authenticity concerning human character was the touchstone of great art and that problems of method were secondary. Although he condemned most non-realistic fiction as untrue and therefore finally vicious morally, he was willing to allow imaginative play in that writing which did no harm or which, better still, aimed at faithfulness to the inner verity of existence. Howells, like Hawthorne and many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, distinguished between the realistic novel and the prose “romance,” and he of course generally preferred to write the realistic novel. But, instead of being “unsympathetic to books of romance” or harboring a “suspicion of all romantic tendencies including his own,” he also accepted the romance as an estimable genre of fiction.
The Chronology of the Plays of Juan Pérez de Montalván
Authors: Parker Jack Horace
Published: February 2007

During a short life of great activity, in emulation of his friend and master, Lope de Vega Carpio, Juan Pérez de Montalván (1602-38) wrote a considerable number of plays, wide in their variety of subject matter and diverse in verse structure. The study of the latter phenomenon, in imitation of distinguished treatises for other dramatists of the Golden Age, will form the chief criterion in this presentation of chronology. That a serious consideration of Montalván's versification is long overdue is evident. As early as 1919, S. G. Morley, in referring to the authorship of La lindona de Galicia, remarked: “Then, one important factor, Montalván's formula [of versification], is practically an unknown quantity . . . ” More recently, Irving A. Leonard in his article, “Montalbán's El valor perseguido and the Mexican Inquisition, 1682,” spoke of the problem of authorship in the case of a play attributed to both Lope de Vega and Montalván. It is hoped that future studies of the authorship and chronology of plays associated in any way with the name of Juan Pérez de Montalván will be facilitated by the facts presented here.
Richard II: The State and the Image of the Theater
Authors: Dean Leonard F.
Published: February 2007

One way to describe the passage from Richard II to Henry V is to say that the first play is a picture of a sick state in which appearance and reality are at odds and that the last play is a picture of a healthy state in which political appearance and reality are unified in terms of the Elizabethan ideal of monarchy. This essay suggests that one sign of the political sickness in Richard II is the presence, explicit or implied, of the Renaissance comparison between the state and the theater. As the suggestion is developed, the reader will be asked to grant that political problems are also philosophical problems, and that plot and character may be controlled expressions of a general moral theme as well as dramatic accounts of typical personalities or recurrent historical situations. Examples of the state-theater comparison from More and Machiavelli will be reviewed, not to prove direct indebtedness by Shakespeare, but to show how the comparison was available in two pertinent contexts, Christian humanism and Renaissance Realpolitic.
The Function of Imagery in Webster
Authors: Price Hereward T.
Published: February 2007

For many generations symbolism has dominated the poetry of America and Europe. In time, of course, the critics found out what was happening and they began to investigate the movement. They have carried their investigations further and further afield over the literature of the last four centuries and in the process they have enormously widened our knowledge of poetry. Through their labors we read with clearer eyes and a deeper enjoyment than before.
Hamlet as Minister and Scourge
Authors: Bowers Fredson
Published: February 2007

When hamlet is first preparing to leave his mother's chamber after harrowing her to repentance, he turns to the dead Polonius:

For this same lord,I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so,To punish me with this, and this with me,That I must be their scourge and minister.I will bestow him, and will answer wellThe death I gave him. (III.iv.172-177)
Pygmalion: Bernard Shaw's Dramatic Theory and Practice
Authors: Crane Milton
Published: February 2007

In the last of his many discussions of the so-called play of ideas, Bernard Shaw remarked, “I was, and still am, the most old-fashioned playwright outside China and Japan.” This is one of the few statements that Shaw made about his own work of which we may safely believe every word—always assuming him to be correct about China and Japan. He was, to be sure, merely echoing his earlier, confession in the Preface to Three Plays For Puritans, in which he had defended The Devil's Disciple against a reckless charge of originality: “If it applies to the incidents, plot, construction, and general professional and technical qualities of the play, [it] is nonsense; for the truth is, I am in these matters a very old-fashioned playwright.” He elsewhere admonished us: “Remember that my business as a classic writer of comedies is ‘to chasten morals with ridicule’ . . .” It is my purpose here to describe and interpret some of the stages through which Shaw passed and some of the attitudes which he assumed in the course of coming to such conclusions.
Herbert's Form
Authors: Summers Joseph H.
Published: February 2007

There is a certain irony in the fact that the most formal of seventeenth-century Anglican poems have been so much enjoyed by the anti-formalists in religion and art. The appeal of George Herbert's poetry to the opponents of ritual was a justifying triumph for Herbert's conception of form: in poetry as well as religion Herbert tried to work out-a middle way between “slovenliness” and “superstition.” It was by means of form that the material could be used in the service of the spiritual, that the senses could be properly employed for the glorification of God.
Beowulf and the Beasts of Battle
Authors: Bonjour Adrien
Published: February 2007

If the well-known dictum that history repeats itself is sometimes open to controversy, its veracity can hardly be doubted when we turn to the history of Beowulf criticism. For it almost seems a law that in its broad outlines Beowulf criticism should follow the fortunes of Homeric criticism—this, of course, with the proper shift in time due to the still appreciable lead of classical philology.
Whitman, Music, and Proud Music of the Storm
Authors: Krause Sydney J.
Published: February 2007

Despite an occasional reluctance to talk about his own poetry, Whitman has said a good deal about what he felt were its sources, methods and purposes, both in his conversations and in his Prefaces. However, if we try to apply any of his ideas we always have to contend with his theoretical vagueness and his antiaestheticism. Thus, though much has been revealed about the nature of Whitman's “art” by examinations of ideas he claimed as sources (e.g. the sea, the city, the Bible, even phrenology), one wants a closer analysis of his claims and of critics' applications of them, especially in relation to a reading of particular poems. An area of Whitman criticism in which one feels a special need for clarification is that which treats the influence of music on his poetry.
Nietzsche's Final View of Luther and the Reformation
Authors: Bluhm Heinz
Published: February 2007

Nietzsche began as an admirer of Luther and the German Reformation. The age of Luther ranked as high in his early opinion as the age of Goethe and Beethoven. From Menschliches, Allzumenschliches on, this favorable attitude toward Luther underwent a strong transformation. In the five years from 1878 to 1883, Nietzsche's second creative period, Luther emerged as a highly questionable figure, even as a most regrettable event in the history of German and European thought and civilization. But all these severe pronouncements on Luther were only a prelude to the scathing denunciations to come in Nietzsche's post-Zarathustra writings.
The Ring And The Book: A Relativist Poem
Authors: Langbaum Robert
Published: February 2007

In the same sense that Dante's great poem can be said to derive its meaning from a Catholic, and Milton's from a Protestant, ethos—so Browning's The Ring and the Book derives its meaning from the relativist ethos predominant in Western culture since the Enlightenment. The first sign of the poem's relativism is in Browning's use of dramatic monologues to tell his story. For though he does not entirely succeed, his aim at least in telling the same story eleven times over through ten dramatic monologues and his own account in Book i, was to replace the objective view of events of traditional drama and narrative with points of view. Such a method can be justified only on the relativist assumption that truth cannot be apprehended in itself but must be “induced” from particular points of view, and that there can be sufficient difference among the points of view to make each repetition interesting and important as a psychological fact.
Faust's Pact with the Devil
Authors: Steinhauer Harry
Published: February 2007

Faust's Pact with the devil surely presents the most baffling of all the problems raised by Goethe's poem. We are here at the very heart of the myth which the action of the drama illustrates. Goethe has used the wager between God and Mephistopheles and the pact between Faust and the Devil to symbolize the issues which are at stake in Faust's career on earth. In the background we see God waiting patiently for the moment when His trust in Faust will be vindicated. On this vital theme of wager and pact, if anywhere, we have a right to expect unequivocal clarity: on the terms of the pact, on the positions taken by the contracting parties, and on the outcome of the conflict between them. Yet, if we are to believe the critics and commentators, Goethe has hung a veil of confusion over this whole area, so that we are prevented from catching even a glimpse of his intentions. For the last fifty years critical opinion has been sharply divided on the fundamental question as to which of the two protagonists emerges victorious.1 Some hold with Faust; others either side with Mephistopheles or believe that the duel ends in a draw, and that Faust is saved only by an act of grace, which is bestowed on him as by a deus ex machina.
Some Techniques of Melville's Perception
Authors: Stern Milton R.
Published: February 2007

In the 1930's after Melville's vessels had begun to display their ample accommodations, R. P. Blackmur wrote in somewhat hostile fashion that Melville “made only the loosest efforts to tie his sermons into his novels: he was quite content to see that his novels illustrated his sermons and was reasonably content if they did not.” In the 1950's after the ship plans were better understood (albeit some specialized new quarters—particularly nurseries, bathrooms, and bedrooms complete with one-way glass—had been added from the outside), R. W. B. Lewis opined that “Melville understood the nature of plot, plot in general, better than any one else in his generation.”
Romantic Imagination: Hermann Hesse as a Modern Novelist
Authors: Freedman Ralph
Published: February 2007

Hermann Hesse's debt to the romantic tradition is a critical commonplace. It is perhaps less often recognized that he is also a distinctly modern novelist. Hesse's modernity is not confined to his period of preoccupation with Jungian psychoanalysis or to his brush with expressionism in Der Steppenwolf and elsewhere. Nor is it exclusively a negative principle: a rejection of contemporary reality and a search for new values, as in the monastery of Narziss or in the futuristic-medieval Kastalien of Das Glasperlenspiel. Rather, in aesthetic and moral terms, Hesse's modernity is found in his manner of formulating romantic thought and techniques. His aesthetic sensibility recalls Novalis and Jean Paul, but his way of implementing this sensibility is representative of a contemporary attitude.
Gerontion and the Meaning of History
Authors: Gross Harvey
Published: February 2007

In the twenty-fifth chapter of The Education, Henry Adams describes with characteristic metaphoric violence his feelings about history. Trained to think that history had an ultimate meaning, that in the sequence of events there was some corresponding sequence of cause and effect, Adams discovers at the end of his researches that there is no understandable pattern; the best that Adams can tell us is that history is force: “and thus it happens that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”
The Wordsworth-Coleridge Controversy
Authors: Parrish Stephen Maxfield
Published: February 2007

When Coleridge, after looking over the third edition of Lyrical Ballads with its enlarged preface, confided to William Sotheby (13 July 1802) his troubled belief that between Wordsworth and himself there lay “a radical Difference” of opinion about poetry, he was recognizing a disagreement that must have dated almost from his earliest talks with Wordsworth. Writing to Robert Southey two weeks later (29 July), Coleridge proposed to “go to the Bottom” of the difference in a forthcoming volume of critical essays. When the proposal finally matured, in scattered chapters of Biographia Lileraria—fifteen years later—Coleridge declared it as a main object “to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continuées, controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction.”
The First International Novel
Authors: Cargill Oscar
Published: February 2007

Did Henry James or someone else invent the international novel? Did it originate naturally from his vantage point in observing the behavior of his countrymen abroad or did he take an existing type of narrative and from his favorable position bring it to a perfection of which his predecessors were incapable? Although it is widely recognized that “the international theme … was … peculiarly his,” there has been only one answer suggested to these questions, despite their obviously great critical importance. “Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the international novel,” William Dean Howells observed many years ago in his introduction to Daisy Miller. He had previously ascribed the invention of this type of fiction to the Baroness Tautphoeus, “an English woman living in Bavaria,” whose first novel, The Initials, was published in 1850. “The Initials is first of all a love story,” Howells had written in his Heroines of Fiction, “and then it is an international love story, and perhaps the earliest of the modern sort, which Americans rather than the English have cultivated.”
Structure and Integration in Notes from the Underground
Authors: Matlaw Ralph E.
Published: February 2007

In the literature on Notes from the Underground the protagonist is always called “the underground man” (podpol'nyj chelovek), as if he were an archetypal entity, rather than “the narrator,” an accepted literary convention of the Icherzählung. The nomenclature is significant, for critics have treated the work as the turning point in Dostoevsky's development, ransacked it for philosophical, political, and sociological formulas, noted the profound psychology, but have never analyzed the Notes in detail as an artifact. By so doing critics distort the Notes structurally and substantively, because they concentrate on and overemphasize the first part of the work almost to the exclusion of the second, and because they accept and discuss the narrator's formulations in this part without analyzing them as the expression of a literary creation. The purpose of this study is to examine the unity of the Notes: to ascertain the relationships of its two parts; to indicate the thematic function of ordering episodes in a particular sequence; to note the recurrence of certain objects, the symbolism involved therein, and its effect on the unity of the Notes; finally, to assess the effect of artful integration on the apparent “meaning” of the work.
ÆLfric's Grammatical Terminology
Authors: Williams Edna Rees
Published: February 2007

The Latin Grammar of Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, was a well-known and influential book in late Old English times; the number of extant manuscripts in which it appears in whole or in part and the range of dates represented by them indicate the extent of its currency then.Less familiar to most students today, perhaps, than his homilies and other scientific and pedagogical treatises, it is still a significant part of the corpus of Ælfric's work. Investigation of its pages extends our knowledge of methods of teaching at that time and of the particular needs of English students not yet ready for the more extensive and detailed Latin grammars of Priscian and Donatus, the standard texts of the Middle Ages, parts of which are adapted and translated in the Grammar for use in English schools. More fully and in a particular way the Grammar reveals Ælfric himself at work: his aims and methods in the translation and adaptation of original Latin works for use in England; his mastery of Latin and of English; his great skill in adapting the native English tongue to new uses. There has hitherto been no adequate account of Ælfric's procedure, with the result that his aim and method in this work have been imperfectly comprehended, and critics have tended to bestow praise and blame somewhat at random. The present study attempts to present such an account, through analysis and example, and to estimate the subsequent importance of his grammatical terminology as a contribution to the development of the English vocabulary.
Facing the New Decade
Authors: Peyre Henri
Published: February 2007

To have been elected to the presidency of this great Association of men and women of good will, of knowledge, talent, and rare discrimination, constituting what is probably the biggest congeries of first-class brains in this country, is the crowning honor of any teacher's career and an awe-inspiring experience. Your president for 1960, as he prepares to vanish into oblivion after his one address in sovereign capacity, first wishes to express his gratitude to those who selected him, and his apologies for the pretentious title announced. In this country, from the beginning and throughout her entire history, action has prevailed. Yet the nation has never showed much aversion for words. Politicians, preachers, college presidents, generals, men of affairs spreading relaxation through warmed up after-dinner anecdotes, members of those faculty committees to whom, in these days of trial and error and perseverance in error, the Almighty seems to have relinquished the running of the world, all indulge their propensity for eloquence. Those whom Homer might have called the shepherds of people, in Moscow and Havana and equatorial Africa, strike back at our garrulous nation with massive retaliation. Torrents of words may flow in the sumptuous hotels where our Association once a year congregates late in December (just before the inebriating vigil through which we shall pray for a virgin year to wash out our unfulfilled promises and our harrowing regrets over unwritten articles). But your President is severely restrained by the petrifying gaze of the Executive Secretary, and prevented by tradition from falling back upon the worthiest of all themes for any academic address: the eulogy of his predecessor. His predecessor, whose steel whip sheathed in velvety skin had long guided this Association, is comfortably assured of immortality as it is. An in domitable Samson Agonistes whom no Delilah or Pamela can ever betray, he hardly needs our words of gratitude, however deeply felt, to pursue his wrestling, in Washington, with the “innumerable force of spirits armed / that durst dislike” the power of foreign languages in the dubious battle now raging on our planet.
Anthony Mundy, “Edward” Spenser, and E. K.
Authors: Wright Celeste Turner
Published: February 2007

In 1934 Mr. Padelford issued, as a newly recovered work, The Axiochus of Plato, which Cuthbert Burby had published in 1592 as a translation by “Edward” Spenser. Later Mr. Freyd and Mr. Swan maintained that the translator was Anthony Mundy. This problem, arising long after my own book on Mundy appeared, has led me to scrutinize any possible connection between the two poets. Although they had many opportunities for becoming acquainted, attention focuses upon a friend whom they may have had in common—one Edward Knight. In 1579 that writer, heading his verses “Ε. K., Gentleman,” prefixed them to Mundy's Mirrour of Muta-bilitie, registered 10 October. A book by Knight, The Trial of Truth, was registered 13 November. Can he have been Ε. K., the mysterious editor of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, registered 5 December?
La Pensée Politique de Pascal
Authors: Dariosecq Luc
Published: February 2007

Pourquoi et dans quelle mesure les pensées de Pascal peuvent-elles paraître à la fois si vivantes et si présentes, mais à certains égards si lointaines? A une époque où la multiplication des formes de la violence nous interdit à la fois de nous évader dans le beau rêve d'une Cité de Dieu et de trouver un sens clair à l'histoire des hommes, et où triomphent plus que jamais, en même temps, le dogmatisme et le sentiment de la futilité, il est intéressant d'examiner les pensées de Pascal précisément parce que Pascal, le plus fortement peut-être de tous les penseurs politiques, nous montre comment et pourquoi la vie politique est en même temps et surtout indissolublement futile et sérieuse; tout l'intérêt du problème—et son caractère tragique—venant précisément du fait qu'il est impossible, selon Pascal, de sortir du cercle vicieux du sérieux et de la futilité. Ce n'est pas parce que vous passerez, nous dit Pascal, d'une monarchie à une République, ou d'une République à une autre République, que les choses passeront du futile au sérieux ou du sérieux au grotesque; vos opinions peut-être changeront, car la concupiscence et l'imagination vous égarent—ou servent vos passions—mais pas la nature, l'essence de la vie politique. Urbi et Orbi, l'homme ne change pas, et la politique vaut ce que vaut l'homme, c'est-à-dire rien, ou peu de chose.
The Search for Identity in the Novels of John Dos Passos
Authors: Gelfant Blanche H.
Published: February 2007

Literature reflects a fascination with the enigma of man's identity. Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going?—these questions recur, are answered, and yet require always re-asking and new illumination. Contemporary fiction projects man's quest for identity against the background of a fragmented and confusing world where the need for self-definition grows urgent because the social supports of the past are weakened and the opportunities for new and strange definitions in the present are enlarged. In a world that exhibits instability as a norm and social fluidity as an ideal, no clearcut self-image can emerge and receive assuring consent. The search for identity in modern literature takes on the form of a pursuit—a curious pursuit, because the object is often undefined and unvisualized. Joyce's Bloom wandering the maze of Dublin streets, Camus' Meursault arrested in the blaze of Algerian sun, Saul Bellow's Henderson invading untrampled African jungle, crying “I want, I want,” but unable to articulate a predicate—these characters are impelled by a sense of inner void to pursue their identity as whole and self-conscious beings. Undefined to themselves they are all “strangers” seeking the touchstone of some objective reality that can validate their existence or of some assertive self-knowledge that can acquaint and unite them with themselves. The image of man as divided and a stranger recurs in the looming novels of the century, in the works of Proust, Kafka, Camus, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf; it is beautifully crystallized in the recognition scene at the end of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as the hero's revelatory self-encounter. The failure of Proust's narrator to recognize his image in the mirror, his sense of masquerade and strangeness, the jading of his sensibilities as all seems degraded and lost, and then the unexpected swift revelation which unifies and gives meaning to his life—these have become recurrent experiences in contemporary fiction as it tries to illuminate the jagged course of man's search for identity in the modern world.
The Position of Ippolito Nievo in The Nineteenth-Century Italian Novel
Authors: Iliescu Nicolae
Published: February 2007

Of late the interest in the work of Ippolito Nievo has been such as to suggest that this author has finally come into his own. Both in Italy and elsewhere, the name of this writer, who seemed permanently interred under the stern and negative judgment of Benedetto Croce, today reappears almost triumphantly. Recently the publication of Nievo's complete works was begun in Italy (Le confessioni di un italiano has already been printed by Ricciardi and II novelliere campagnuolo by Einaudi), while Le confessioni has been translated into English for the first time, under the title The Castle of Fratta (Boston, 1958). A new translation of this work has also appeared in German (the first German version was published as early as 1877, the year in which another of Nievo's novels, Angelo di bontà, was translated). Notwithstanding the widespread interest in Nievo, a critical study clarifying his position with respect to the nineteenth-century Italian novel as a whole is still lacking. Thus far, purely aesthetic judgments alone have been the concern of most scholars dealing with this author's work.
Interprétation de en Attendant Godot
Authors: Champigny Robert
Published: February 2007

Les trois points de vue qui seront successivement adoptés peuvent être considérés comme dérivés des trois mots du titre de la pièce. L'examen de la mythologie est dicté par le mot “Godot.” En attendant Godot, les personnages parlent; nous examinerons le statut de leur langage. Les résultats négatifs obtenus au cours de ces deux premières démarches dévoilent ce qui reste positif dans le sens de la pièce: l'attente. Les numéros entre parenthèses dans la suite de Particle renvoient aux pages de En attendant Godot (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1952).
Michelangelo as a Baroque Poet
Authors: Clements Robert J.
Published: February 2007

Michelangelo Buonarroti's influence upon baroque sculpture is now widely recognised by historians. Ever since that morning in 1506 when he and the Sangalli, father and son, watched the white Pentelic marble of the Laokoön emerge from the farmland of Felice de Freddis near the Baths of Titus, Michelangelo's restless mind found authority in antiquity for a revision of his aesthetic canons. In this agonising group Michelangelo found justification for moving beyond the symmetry, restraint, and proportione divina of the Donatellian mode of sculpture, the static scientism of Da Vinci's painting, and the Vitruvian rules of architecture—even though he paid lip service to those rules and even recited them to popes. Whereas Michelangelo did not acknowledge this influence in writing, or apparently in speaking, his contorted and anguished Haman (1511–12) on the spandrel of the Sistine Vault was an admission of the influence of this Rhodian group —just as El Greco's newly-restored Laokoön in Washington acknowledges it as the one work of art which initiated European baroque. Moreover, the anguishes of the Vatican Laokoön and the expressions thereof were to parallel those tensions—visible even in his death mask—of Michelangelo's own soul and to leave an imprint upon his poetry. Laokoön, it should be remembered in view of his impact upon European baroque, was a militant, ritualistic priest.
Mistakes in Twelfth Night and Their Resolution: A Study in Some Relationships of Plot and Theme
Authors: Williams Porter
Published: February 2007

A study of the significance of the mistakes in Twelfth Night, like the study of any important aspect of Shakespeare's art, must be made upon several levels, for mistakes by the protagonists are both a part of the superficial fabric of the plot and a subtle means of revealing underlying themes that often manifest themselves only indirectly below the surface action. This is not to say that the artificial devices of disguises and mistaken identities, all timeworn devices, are nothing more than a mere plot framework for the profundities that lie beneath. Rather, as Miss Bradbrook expresses it, there is an “interdependence of the natural and the artificial, the human and the literary.” The ridiculous mistakes that control the plot are therefore like Freudian slips which incite their superficial laughter and at the same time reveal subconscious patterns of human behavior. It is these slips, the mistakes of all the leading characters, that we must follow into the thematic material of the play, for it is on this level that they become of most interest.
The Zeitgeist of Matthew Arnold
Authors: Neiman Fraser
Published: February 2007

At least since Matthew Arnold exploited the term Zeitgeist in Literature and Dogma, the expression has been variously a source of irritation and confusion to a number of his critics. Identifying it with a tendency to disparage the past, an exasperated contemporary reviewer of that work in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine cried, “Can anything be more unscientific than such a spirit? It is the very apotheosis of self-opinion intoxicated by its own pride, and flaunting its own dogmatisms with a crude audacity in the face of preceding dogmas.” Among other critics of Arnold, R. H. Hutton protested that the Zeitgeist was a will-o'-the-wisp “who misleads us at least as much as he enlightens”; W. H. Dawson concluded that for Arnold it was “a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy”; for W. H. Paul it became a bore; Hugh Kingsmill began his caricature of Don Matthew, “So forth he sallied, mounted on Zeit-Geist, a hobby horse.” Still others, less annoyed than these by the reiteration, have themselves borrowed it as they write of him—sometimes effectively, because with consistency of meaning, as H. F. Lowry in his edition of Arnold's letters to Clough; sometimes bewilderingly, as when one reads such a statement as this: “Expediency, which had become in Burke's hands an anti-revolutionary doctrine, was equated by Arnold with the Zeitgeist, a force which, in his conception of it, was quite as revolutionary as that of natural right.”
Diction, Voice, and Tone: The Poetic Language of E. E. Cummings
Authors: Friedman Norman
Published: February 2007

A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. This is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.—Robert Frost, Foreword to A Way Out (1917)
Alfred De Vigny and William Charles Macready
Authors: Marshall James F.
Published: February 2007

In October 1838 Edward Bulwer-Lytton started to compose his play entitled Richelieu, in which William Charles Macready was destined to play the leading role. In his introduction to the Letters of Bulwer-Lytton to Macready, Brander Mathews states that “Macready was almost a collaborator in the composition of ‘Richelieu’ and ‘Money’,” and an examination of Macready's Diaries verifies this judgment. On 15 November 1838 Macready had read part of Bulwer-Lytton's new play and noted his dissatisfaction with it: it lacked “continuity of interest” and the character of Richelieu was “not servatus ad imum”; the play would “not do” and could not “be made effective” (p. 476). Two days later he discussed the play with its author, who at first combated his objections, and acceded to them “as his judgment swayed him,” but who, when Macready “developed the object of the whole plan of alterations,… was in ecstasies.” The actor had never seen him so excited. Bulwer-Lytton exclaimed several times that “he was ‘enchanted’ with the plan” and “observed, in high spirits, ‘What a fellow you are!‘” Macready found him “indeed delightful” and “a wonderful man” (p. 477). The Diaries contain many subsequent notations of Macready's reading, marking, cutting and punctuating the play (pp. 477–492). If not an actual collaborator, Macready acted at least as an adviser in the composition of Richelieu.
The Confidence-Man: His Guises
Authors: Miller James E.
Published: February 2007

Critics have found Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man more difficult to classify than any other of his books. Melville himself refers to the narrative as “our comedy,” and at one point signals his reader that he is passing “from the comedy of thought to that of action.” He creates an unusual thematic setting by reducing the dimensions of his characters and by curtailing the scale of their actions. The shallowness of the confidence man, unfitting him for the profound pathos or even tragedy of Moby Dick or Pierre, prepares him eminently for the role of the comic racketeer, the city slicker, horn-swoggling and bamboozling the country (and city) yokels. Certainly we do not cry, perhaps we don't even laugh, but surely we smile, if a little grimly, as the confidence man swindles victim after victim in the course of his adventures, relying frequently on the innate weaknesses in human nature—the desire to get something for nothing, the willingness to traffic in the misery of others. But the confidence man exploits generous and noble impulses, too, and this apparent mockery of traditional values gives the book a complexity and at times an ambiguity that cause many readers to abandon it, bewildered.
Eichendorffs Blick In Die Geschichte
Authors: Seidlin Von Oskar
Published: February 2007

Die feststellung, daß die beiden großen historischen Dramen Eichendorffs, Ezelin von Romano und Der letzte Held von Marienburg, zusammen mit den späten Versepen zu der verwittertsten Schicht seines Dichtwerkes gehören, ist bereits eine Beschönigung. Lebendig waren sie nie, und dem heutigen Leser scheint ihr stereotypes Waffengeklirr, ihre vordergründige Redseligkeit, ihr Flickwerk aus Shakes-peareschen, Schillerschen und Goetheschen Reminiszenzen mit einem Rost überzogen, der sie gerade dort am brüchigsten macht, wo er am “edelsten” aufliegt. Daß ein so im Innersten lyrischer Dichter wie Eichendorff sich überhaupt der großen dramatischen Form zuwendet, mag an sich schon überraschen; und der Hinweis auf Brentano, selbst auf Arnim und Tieck als Parallelfälle ist kaum geeignet, unser Erstaunen zu mindern. Sie nämlich hatten sich in der Gründung Prags und im Kaiser Octavianus das Historische in Märchen und Mythe übersetzt, die durch das lyrische Idiom Geheimnis und Weihe empfingen, abgekehrt jeder Zur-Schau-Stellung, dem Theater also, oder doch gerichtet auf eines, das, wie Arnim in einem Brief an Goethe bekannte, “nirgends vorhanden ist”. Eichendorff aber drängte es zur Geschichte, sichtbar aufgerollt als Bühnenhandlung, und so konnte das mißliche Resultat nicht ausbleiben, daß sein Eigentliches, Symbolmagie und -beschwörung durch das Poetische, als Uneigentliches in das Werk einging, Dekoration nur, die sich unverbindlich dem Historischen überwölbt, oder brüchiger Boden, durch den es ins Unprofilierte versickert.
The Limited Realism of Howells' Their Wedding Journey
Authors: Reeves John K.
Published: February 2007

It is well known that as a young man William Dean Howells was an unabashedly romantic poet with a special fondness for the German romantics, notably Heine. It is even better known that at a later period Howells was the great champion of realistic fiction and one of its leading practitioners. These facts have led to an extensive discussion of what influences brought about the change, of when he became a realist in theory and in practice, and even of whether he ever became a complete realist. Some new light is thrown on these questions by the manuscripts of two of his early pieces of fiction, the unpublished “Geoffrey Winter” and Their Wedding Journey (1872).
The Appeal of Dryden's Heroic Plays
Authors: Fujimura Thomas H.
Published: February 2007

The restoration theatrical audience was dominantly skeptical and naturalistic in temper. Yet for over ten years this audience patronized the heroic plays of Dryden and contributed to their popularity. This anomaly has long puzzled scholars; and typically, Allardyce Nicoll remarks: “This heroic tragedy is obviously a thing entirely apart from the comedy of gay licentious manners. With its flaunting honour and its impossibly idealistic love passions it seems indeed so far away both from that comedy and from social life as we have seen it displayed in the theatre that it would appear impossible to find any link between them.” Like most other critics, Nicoll offers an unsatisfactory explanation of this anomaly:

The audiences were no longer noble in temper, and consequently the heroic tragedy, removed a further stage from the actual, may be regarded as the true child of the enervation that had come over England. The age was debilitated: it was distinctly unheroic: and yet it was not so cynical as to throw over entirely the inculcation of heroism. To present, however, heroism in real-life plays would have raised too sharp a distinction between what was and what might have been, and accordingly in the heroic tragedy heroism is cast out of the world altogether and carried to an Eastern or an antique realm of exaggerated emotions, mythical and hopelessly ideal. The heroic play is like a Tale of a Land of No-where. (p. 88)
Joyce's Use of Swift's Polite Conversation in the “Circe” Episode of Ulysses
Authors: Jarrell Mackie L.
Published: February 2007

Three consecutive episodes in Joyce's Ulysses—the “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe,” and “Eumaeus”—are related by parodie technique. There is considerable overlapping in the methods of the three sections, since all three utilize the familiar and the well worn; but they differ in the chief matter selected for parody. The “Oxen of the Sun” or hospital episode is a parodie résumé, in chronological order, of distinctive English literary styles, such as those of Malory and Carlyle, or, where no specific author is parodied, of period mannerisms. The “Circe” or brothel episode collects and parodies the proverb and the cliché. The “Eumaeus” or homecoming episode parodies that variety of long-winded journalese which relies on elegant variation, circumlocution, dead metaphor, and stock expression and makes twenty trite “fine” words do the work of two plain ones. Models for all three episodes can be found in the work of Jonathan Swift. Swift's parodies of literary styles are best exemplified in A Tale of a Tub; his parodie use of the proverb in Polite Conversation; and his ridicule of the trite in A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind. It is my belief that Joyce profits from Swiftian practice in all three episodes; but his use of Swift is most easily demonstrable in the “Circe” scene, which makes direct use of Polite Conversation.
The Contents and Basis of Emerson's Belief in Compensation
Authors: Pommer Henry F.
Published: February 2007

Despite reservations we may have about Emerson's theory of Compensation, it was fundamental to his philosophy. Nor was its truth or falsity settled by Stephen Whicher's assertion that “the notion of an automatic moral compensation ... is without question the most unacceptable of Emerson's truths, and a major cause of his present decline of reputation.” As Emerson himself said, “the great questions affecting our spiritual nature are not one of them decided. . . . The system of Compensations in moral and material nature, and a hundred other questions of primary concernment to the state of man, are all open to discussion.”
Art Allegory in The Marble Faun
Authors: Brodtkorb Paul
Published: February 2007

The marble faun frequently reads like a guide-book. Its characters and narrator describe many landscapes and ruins, comment interpretively on many works of art, and take every opportunity to make general pronouncements on aesthetics. Often at such points Hawthorne's Romance seems interrupted by bits of leftover essays, whose tenuous dramatic plausibility derives from the characters, three of whom are “artists, or connected with art,” and from the Italian setting, which is insistently presented as the home of the “antique, pictorial, and statuesque.”
Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of George Eliot
Authors: Levine George
Published: February 2007

The nature and degree of George Eliot's commitment to a deterministic world view have been the source of considerable difficulty in the criticism of her work. Critics who concern themselves with the subject take, for the most part, the view either that her belief in determinism seriously marred her art or, on the other hand, that despite appearances she was not a consistent determinist. In both cases, however, determinism evokes extraordinary intensity of feeling, almost everyone agreeing that a commitment to it tends to be detrimental to the artist because it forces a distortion of the facts of existence (or at least a depressing interpretation of them) and leads to an underestimation of man's capacity for action and of his potential dignity.
The Moral Landscape of Arnold's Poetry
Authors: Roper Alan H.
Published: February 2007

Lionel trilling has remarked that “Arnold the poet first saw the problems Arnold the practical man tried to solve.” Arnold the poet, however, also saw the solutions to the problems that he posed, and the poet chiefly differs from the moralist in his greater sympathy for the perplexed man of his generation (a sympathy doubtless born of Arnold's own experience with “the damned times” in which he found himself). It is obvious enough that the essays are marked by an assurance in the face of mid-nineteenth-century anarchy which is generally lacking from the earlier poetry. Whether or not this assurance is adopted for the occasion, it seems probable that the reason for it was Arnold's growing conviction that the poetic record of a personal struggle (and even of a personal victory) was an inadequate contribution to his age.
Scandinavian Influence on English Syntax
Authors: Kirch Max S.
Published: February 2007

The Influence of Scandinavian on English vocabulary as a result of the settlement of the Northmen in England before the Norman Conquest was well established over fifty years ago by Bjôrkman. Claims have been made by some scholars about Scandinavian influence on English syntax, but these have been the subject of much controversy. As early as 1908 Logeman noted the tendency of both Danish and English to stress the preposition and usages such as “he has someone to work for,” which are not found in the other Germanic languages. Jespersen cited several correspondences between Modern English and Modern Danish, which he felt might possibly date back to the Viking settlements. Specifically he enumerated (1) relative clauses without pronouns, (2) the omission of the conjunction 'that,' (3) the use of 'shall' and ‘will’ in Middle English, (4) the genitive before nouns. Later students have followed Jespersen's lead; e.g. Marckwardt in his Introduction to English (Toronto & New York, 1942) and Pei in his Story of English (Philadelphia and New York, 1952).
“Don Quijote” en las Obras del P. Antonio Eximeno
Authors: Pollin Alice M.
Published: February 2007

Entre los numerosos escritos del siglo 18 que son dignos de ser mâs conocidos y estudiados estân los de la pluma del P. Antonio Eximeno. Dos obras suyas, la Apologia de Cervantes y el Don Lazarillo Vizcardi, tienen un in-terés especial porque representan dos modali-dades particulares que tomo el cervantismo en el pensamiento del P. Eximeno. Antes de la expulsion en 1767, era conocido Eximeno por sus brillantes investigaciones filosoficas y cientificas, por ejemplo, su Observatio transitus veneris per discum solarem (Viena, 1761). Como maestro de Retorica y Poesia, y profesor y director de la Real Academia de Artilleria de Segovia, adquirio también renombre. Fué estimado, asimismo, por sus poesias (en latin y en castellano) y sus ser-mones. En Italia logra dominar el toscano, lengua en la que escribe gran parte de sus obras después de 1761. Para Eximeno, como para otros tantos de sus distinguidos compatriotas, en el destierro se amplia no solo el horizonte geogrâfico y linguistico, sino también el cultural. En la basilica de San Pedro en Roma, escuchando una misa de Jomelli, tiene Eximeno una verdadera “revelacion” intelectual que le impulsa al gran matemâtico a rechazar las matemâticas como fundamento vâlido para la musica y a insistir en que solo los acentos de la voz, el habla, y la poesia pueden considerarse como la base de toda composicion musical. La musica y la poesia, regidas por el buen gusto del poeta y del compositor, han de pintar los afectos humanos, imitando constantemente la naturaleza. En Roma, uno de los grandes centros musicales de la época, se dedica Eximeno al estudio teorico de la historia, la estética y la prâctica de la musica y funda su sistema estético-musical sobre la lingüistica y la prosodia. Participa en las aca-demias italianas bajo el nombre arcadio de Aristoxeno Megareo, y entra con toda la fuerza de su vigorosa personalidad, en polémicas te-oricas con el idolo y maestro de los musicos italianos, el doctisimo P. Martini. La obra de Eximeno que levanto acerba oposicion entre los musicos de Italia fué su Del origen y reglas de la música