bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Swift and “The Greatest Epitaph in History”
Authors: Johnson Maurice
Published: February 2007

It is dangerous writing on marble, where one cannot make errata, or mend in a second edition,“ Jonathan Swift once remarked about an epitaph to be placed in St. Patrick's Cathedral. The Latin phrases he framed for his own epitaph, to be set up in that cathedral in Dublin, have been variously considered ”scarce intelligible,“ ”terrible,“ the ”best clue to Swift,“ and ”the greatest epitaph in history.“ They have more than once been offered as proof that he was not deeply a Christian but that he ”hated the chains of oppression more than the shackles of sin.“ Because of W. B. Yeats's version of it in the form of English verse, Swift's epitaph now has a double identity: as an unusually controversial eighteenth-century biographical document, and as a familiar twentieth-century work of literature.
The Fallacy of the Fall in Paradise Lost
Authors: Bell Millicent
Published: February 2007

The old question: Why did Milton's Adam and Eve disobey the Divine Commandment? continues to provoke conflicting answers and consequently diverse accounts of the meaning of Paradiae Lost. That Milton's epic is, like King Laar, or Faust, or Moby Dick, a work able to sustain many seemingly-contrary interpretations—that in fact it contains them all to some degree—is clear to anyone who will reread the poem at intervals, following the lead first of one and then another critical guide. But this richness of implication has obscured the real logical handicap assumed by anyone who attempts to find the ultimate origins of the narrative action in what is familiar to us as occasion or motivation—in a word, in cause.
The Wife's Lament Reconsidered
Authors: Greenfield Stanley B.
Published: February 2007

The Old English lyric The (Banished) Wife's Lament has evoked much critical comment without producing an acceptable interpretation. Ostensibly the situation of the poem is that the wife of a lord has been made a prisoner in an oak grove at the instigation of her husband, who has been led to perpetrate this cruelty by the machinations of his kinsmen. The wife (who is the speaker) first laments her own exiles and sorrows; she continues with a description of her husband as an exile; and she concludes with a bit of gnomic wisdom to the effect that “It is woe for him who must long for his beloved with a sad heart.” But it is a strange poem, with many obscurities. Norah Kershaw has suggested that “It is perhaps an ambitious attempt to portray excited feelings which causes the difficulty of the poem. The asyndetic and not altogether logical sequence of thought, the absence of metrical form in 1.24, and the involved construction in 1. 42 ff. may possibly all be ascribed to this cause.” This does not alter the fact, however, that no satisfactory explication of the meaning of the poem has been made, not even by Miss Kershaw.
The Perdido as a Type in Some Spanish-American Novels
Authors: Chapman Arnold
Published: February 2007

In his prologue to the first Argentine edition of Eduardo Barrios' novel Un perdido, Manuel Gálvez sets forth a number of germinal ideas. One of these is that Lucho Bernales, the perdido of Barrios' fictional creation, is a “brother” to Gálvez' own Carlos Riga of El mal metafísico; and furthermore he proposes certain literary sources for both characters. It is the present purpose to examine these two suggestions, testing their adequacy, then passing on to inquire whether a pattern of thought may not be detected and whether other important novels may not be related to the questions thus raised.
Hopkins and the Prometheus Myth
Authors: Humiliata Mary
Published: February 2007

Sonnet 65 by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No worst, there is none,” has been criticized by Yvor Winters in the Hudson Review (Winter 1949) as an instance of late romantic emotional over-emphasis without a statement of the generating concept, of the motive, of the nature of the experience. Hopkins, says Winters, “cannot move us by telling us why he himself is moved”; therefore the poet urges, in effect, “ ‘Share my fearful emotion, for the human mind is subject to fearful emotions’.” Hopkins' skill in metaphor and in metric variation succeeds in stirring the reader occasionally, admits Winters, but since we are being led “blindfold into violence,” the poem becomes a “violation of our integrity.”
Mark Twain and the Tammany Ring
Authors: Vogelback Arthur L.
Published: February 2007

On 27 September 1871 there appeared in an inconspicuous corner of the New York Tribune a piece by Mark Twain entitled “The Revised Catechism.” Obviously drawing on his Sunday School memories of the Westminster Catechism for the form of the contribution, Clemens makes use also of the Bible (a work thoroughly learned in his boyhood and never forgotten) for striking satirical effect. “The Revised Catechism” is a scathing denunciation of Boss Tweed and his associates—as accomplished a group of rascals as ever pillaged a public treasury—and at the same time an indictment of the age that permitted such men to thrive. The story of the Tammany Ring is too well known to need retelling here; but to make clear the reasons that led Mark Twain to the writing of his satire and to demonstrate the ironical character of his references, so apposite to the day and hour, it is necessary to consider briefly the part played in the exposure of the Ring by its two principal antagonists—one, the cartoonist, Thomas Nast, and the other, the New York Times.
Wordsworth and the Copyright Act of 1842
Authors: Zall Paul M.
Published: February 2007

In a communication to the Times Literary Supplement, J. J. Auchmuty has suggested that a study of Wordsworth as a practical politician might remedy certain traditional misconceptions about the poet's activities in his declining years. As a matter of fact, he worked assiduously at a period of his life “when, according to legend, he is supposed to have been desiccated and devoid of principle,” in attempting to influence the passage of the Copyright Act of 1842. His part in this legislation has been taken for granted by scholars on the basis of statements to several correspondents that he had written many letters in support of the measure. But there is evidence now, both published and unpublished, that for five years he labored continually in assisting Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd, the originator of the bill, by letters both private and public, interviews, and an official petition. While it is true that the Act promised to benefit him directly, there is no doubt that his interest in its passage was more than selfish and had its roots in what was, in effect, a struggle for survival of literature of quality in an age demanding quantity.
The French Word Nuance
Authors: Bulatkin Eleanor Webster
Published: February 2007

There is fairly concerted agreement among Romance scholars that the word nuance had as its antecedent a verb nuer constructed on the noun nue ‘cloud,‘ which is derived from the Latin word nubes through the Vulgar Latin form *nuba. Diez (ii-c, 648), Hatzfeld and Darmesteter (s.v. Nue, Nuer), Meyer-Lübke (REW 5974), and Bloch and von Wartburg (s.v. Nue) concur in this etymology, which has been most recently summarized by Dauzat. The path of derivation which Dauzat describes is essentially as follows : 1) an archaic verb nuer, conveying the meaning of the modern verb nuancer, and now used only as a technical term, was derived, through the suggestion of the varied tints of clouds, from the noun nue (attested in the twelfth century [Littré, s.v. Nue]); 2) the verb nuer is attested in the year 1352 in the expression or nué, according to Bloch and von Wartburg, and appears in the works of d'Aubigné in the sixteenth century; 3) from the verb nuer is derived the noun nuance, which is attested in 1611 in Cotgrave; 4) the verbal form nuancer appears in the works of d'Aubigné as nuancé in the sixteenth century, and is attested in the 1701 edition of the dictionary of Furetière; and 5) the verb nuancer superseded the archaic verb nuer.
Hermann Broch's Die Schuldlosen: An Approach
Authors: Weigand Hermann J.
Published: February 2007

Few men of letters have been personally loved and revered like Hermann Broch. Reducing the sphere of his private wants to an unbelievable minimum, he radiated a warmth and tolerance and sympathy to rare at to be unforgettable. His seeing eye, set in the face of a raven, had a quality of timeless wisdom that neutralised specific curiosity regarding his private past and even his literary development. For such things, so far as they mattered, there would be plenty of time, it seemed, in years to come. Did he not say with a chuckle that he would live to be a hundred? Then came the stunning shock, on a late May morning in 1951: he was dead.
Matthew Arnold and the Academy: A Note on English Criticism in the Eighteen-Seventies
Authors: Roll-Hansen Diderik
Published: February 2007

In the eighteen-sixties, Arnold was much concerned about the lack of organization in English intellectual life. He compared the “crudeness, provincialism, eccentricity, violence, blundering” of his countrymen to the thoroughness of German research and the efficacy of French state-controlled education. His essay on “Democracy,” first published in 1861, his essay of 1864 on “The Literary Influence of Academies,” and his “General Conclusion” in the 1868 edition of Schools and Universities on the Continent are vigorous pleas for reform. Arnold did not pretend that English “provincialism” could be cured by the establishment of an institution like the Académie Française. But he hoped to make his countrymen realize the need in England for a more centralized effort in intellectual matters.
Lord Eldon's Censorship
Authors: Zall Paul M.
Published: February 2007

It well-known that Byron's poetry was the center of a great deal of suspicious attention from the Tory government which was almost continually in office during his career. David V. Erdmann has proposed that the ministry's anxiety was grounded upon the fear of a potential insurrection to be led by Lord Byron; W. H. Wick war sees the official reaction to Byron's poems as of the whole cloth of the government's antipathy to a free and virulently outspoken press. But whatever the attitude of the ministry, the only official actions taken to punish Byron for his poetry were ostensibly the result of moral rather than of political trespasses on his part. Were Byron the only author subjected to punishment on these grounds, it would be obvious that the action was politically motivated, but Robert Southey, poet laureate, received identical treatment. The nature of the penalty—refusal by Chancery to recognize literary property rights—indicates that the fountainhead of the measures taken against Byron's Don Juan and Cain, Southey's Wat Tyler, Shelley's Queen Mab, and the works of several other authors, Whig, Tory, and apolitical, lay in the moral and legal principles of the Chancellor, Lord Eldon.
Originality, Controlling Purpose, and Craftsmanship in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale
Authors: Block Edward A.
Published: February 2007

That the direct source of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale was a passage in the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of the fourteenth-century Dominican friar Nicholas Trivet was first pointed out by the Swedish scholar Bäckström in 1845. Since then, important studies by Edmund Brock, Emil Lücke, and John S. P. Tatlock have compared these two versions of the tale of Constance and drawn attention to some of the changes made by Chaucer. Thus it is now generally agreed that while he closely followed the French original for the main outlines of his plot, he skillfully condensed on the one hand, and on the other hand added many philosophical, humanizing, and imaginative passages to Trivet's conventional and lifeless story.
The Design and Meaning of Absalom! Absalom!
Authors: Lind Ilse Dusoir
Published: February 2007

Absalom! Absalom! is a unique fictional experiment—unique in relation to Faulkner's other novels and to modern fiction generally. Indeed, it is not too much to claim that in point of technique it constitutes the last radical innovation in fictional method since Joyce. A “difficult” work, its difficulties do not inhere in verbal subtleties or in excessive refinement of perception, but in the strain imposed upon attention and sensibility in comprehending its monumental design.
An Analysis of The Windhover An Experiment in Structural Method
Authors: Hill Archibald A.
Published: February 2007

The task I have set myself is not the discovery of new meanings in Hopkins' poem—it has been so widely studied that we rather suffer from a plethora than a paucity of interpretations. I shall try instead to work out some principles which will enable me to choose between alternatives in a fashion which will be systematic. My interest is double: first, in such principles of method as may emerge; and, second, in their contribution to the elucidation of the poem by presenting a unified and logical whole.
Comenius and the Real Character in England
Authors: Demott Benjamin
Published: February 2007

Since Bacon was the first Englishman to mention “real characters” and among the first to insist on the need for a truly precise means of expression, scholarship has come to regard the outcropping of linguistic schemes in the seventeenth century as a direct result of his writings. The influence of his “semantic sense” on later thinkers has been traced with some care; Richard F. Jones and others have shown us how to connect the language projects with specific passages in his works; evidence of his influence has been seen in the support given in scientific circles to projects like John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, which the Royal Society published in 1668.
Augustine, Ayenbite, and Ulysses
Authors: Morse J. Mitchell
Published: February 2007

In the more highly developed religions there are five elements, which, though they often occur together, are quite distinct and should not be confused: orthodoxy, or correct belief; piety, or emotional response to the deity or the doctrines or the ritual or any two or all three; mysticism, or the sense of God's immediate presence; asceticism, or denial of the animal appetites; and ethics, or good human relations. It is essential to keep the distinctions in mind when dealing with the work of Catholic writers, most especially that of Joyce, for Joyce's exasperated awareness of them was one of the impelling motives of his work. For Catholics, “sin” is a generic term covering unorthodoxy, impiety, indulgence of the animal appetites, and bad human relations; in the lay mind the distinctions among them are liable to become blurred, with resulting confusion in the conduct of life. One of the purposes of the medieval manuals of the virtues and vices, such as Ayenbite of Inwyt, Piers Plowman, and Handlyng Synne, was to remind laymen of the distinctions and the hierarchy among sins as well as of their generic sinfulness. Ulysses too is, among other things, such a manual; one of its principal themes is Handling Sin, as this is achieved by Dedalus and Bloom, each in his own way; Ulysses accordingly adapts the material of Ayenbite somewhat as it does that of The Odyssey.
André Suarès, Moralist
Authors: Braun Sidney D.
Published: February 2007

André Suarès, following in the tradition of the great French moralists of the past, is an acute and profound contemporary observer of the universe and of himself. Yet, except for an occasional passing remark by a critic identifying him as a moralist, he is generally not given such recognition, a failure partly due, no doubt, to the fact that his observations and intellectual reflections are not conveniently and systematically placed at the disposal of his reader. Instead of offering in one or two handy volumes the fruits of his survey of the universe, as do such moralistic ancestors as Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, Suarès keeps adding to or amplifying his repertoire of observations from volume to volume. Everywhere, even in his studies or portraits, whether they be of Baudelaire or Pascal, Ibsen or Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Goethe, he intersperses his reflections on life and human behavior. Nor are these observations always put in an epigrammatic or sententious form. Despite discouragement, however, the reader upon closer study soon sees that Suarès has the gift and capacity for extracting even from the most insignificant matter “tout le suc humain.” This he is able to do because he probes deeply into human behavior and because in every one of man's relationships he glimpses the stream of life.
Opitz' Übersetzung von Barclays Argenis
Authors: Schtjlz-Behrend Von George
Published: February 2007

Die bemühungen des jungen Opitz um die metrische und sprachliche Erneuerung der deutschen Dichtung aus dem Geist der Renaissance sind zu wohl bekannt, um dariiber viel Worte zu verlieren. Mit dem Buck von der Deutschen Poeterey und den beiden Poemata-Sammlungen waren allerdings nur die zwei ersten, wenn auch wichtigsten Schritte auf dem Wege dichterischer Reform getan. Opitz hatte seine Theorien, die natürlich weder ganz original waren, noch es sein konnten, zuerst 1617 im Aristarchus ausgesprochen, sie dann im Buck von der Deutschen Poeterey 1624 ausgebaut. Die wichtige erste Anwendung auf die Lyrik legte er in Buchform schon 1624, bzw. 1625, dem Publikum vor. Zum allergrößten Teil enthielten dièse Sammlungen Übersetzungen aus dem Holländischen, Französischen, Italienischen, aus dem Lateinischen und Griechischen. Trotzdem war genug Eigenes vorhanden, um den in dieser Hinsicht nicht verwöhnten Zeitgenossen zu beweisen, daß ursprüngliche Lyrik in deutscher Sprache und in den neuern Versmaßen sehr wohl möglich sei.
Philosophy of Life and Prose Style in Thomas More's Richard III and Francis Bacon's Henry VII
Authors: Schuster Mary Faith
Published: February 2007

It is not hard to see Alexander Pope's attitude toward the life of his times—and indirectly therefore toward the totality of life in general—couched in the neatly clipped, antithetically framed structure of his couplets, or Coleridge's sense of the harmony of the whole conveyed in the smooth flow of the Ancient Mariner. Critics have always sought in the framework of poetry some harmony with its theme and with the author's philosophy of life central to the theme. But belief in the relationship between views of life and prose style has had a more interrupted life history.
The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction Before Tristram Shandy
Authors: Booth Wayne C.
Published: February 2007

Historical statements about Tristram Shandy have in the past generally been hampered by critical misconceptions about the book. As long as it was taken to be a farrago, the value of which depended on a few lucky strokes on an otherwise haphazard and worthless canvas, efforts to see it in its historical context were doomed to failure. In effect, such a hodgepodge could have no important context. It was, as critics and historians repeated endlessly, a mad, inexplicable thing, unreasoned and unreasonable, having real kinship in literature only with other mad books, most of them long since wisely forgotten. As a whole it was really nothing, and consequently as a whole it could not be related to other wholes. Thus, with the exception of such matters as the peculiar sentence structure, the minute delineation of gesture, and the depiction of humor and sentiment, there were really no artistic devices to be placed in a historical context; all one could do was to place Sterne in the historical stream of those who were delightfully inartistic.
Doctor Faustus: A Case of Conscience
Authors: Campbell Lily B.
Published: February 2007

It is now generally agreed that the prose History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, commonly referred to as the English Faust Book, is the source from which is derived Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Yet, though the main flow of Marlowe's story stems from this source, the total impression left by play and history is very different. There is great poetry to account in part for the difference. There are bursts of eloquence in the magnificent speeches on hell, on the desire for knowledge and power as great as the mind of man may conceive, on the compulsion of Helen's beauty. But these are not enough to account for the grip of the play on all who have known it through the centuries, for the overwhelming sense of the vital importance of what happens in the soul of Faustus, for the terror and pity and awe which the events on the stage produce in the mind of even the most skeptical in the audience.
Anti-War Writing in France, 1500-60
Authors: Keller Abraham C.
Published: February 2007

Attempts to establish just grounds for war are as old as civilization itself. The seriousness of the attempts, however, and the nature of the difficulties which men encountered in making their formulations have varied from age to age, in accordance with prevailing assumptions and values. The problem of rationalizing war or integrating it into the social-intellectual structure undoubtedly became most acute with the triumph of Christianity, which was committed to peace but lacked the means of abolishing war. Early Christian thinkers were much occupied with the problem of determining under what conditions good Christians might engage in war and, notwithstanding the paucity of the results, there has hardly been any relaxation of the effort in medieval or modern times.
Structure and Design in Wernher's Meier Helmbrecht
Authors: Nordmeyer George
Published: February 2007

Despite its deceptively simple theme—a farmer's son wants to become a knight but comes to a grievous end and is hanged—the Middle High German poem known to us as the Meier Helmbrecht by Wernher the Gardener is not easily integrated as to its literary genre among the literature contemporary with it—probably the sixth or seventh decade of the thirteenth century.
The Pattern of Swift's Women
Authors: Ehrenpreis Irvin
Published: February 2007

Although Middleton Murry, Swift's latest biographer, treats his subject with grateful sympathy and respect, he has, like every other writer on the problem, ignored the amazing consistency which framed Swift's relations with women. Yet the pattern need only be pointed out to be perceived, for it is recurrent, unusual (if not unique), and extraordinarily illuminating. Naturally enough, it is a pattern which originates in the author's childhood.
“Dover Beach” and “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth”
Authors: Robertson David Allan
Published: February 2007

Browsing from back to front through a Victorian anthology, I paused recently over two old favorites: first Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach,” and then Clough's “Say not the struggle nought availeth.” It occurred to me that there must be a direct relation between the two poems. Clough's lines, affirmative and challenging, sounded like a response to the melancholy poem by his friend. Examining the texts more closely, I found Clough's argument and imagery to be so relevant to Arnold's that I could hardly think of the parallel as fortuitous. On considering the probable dates of composition, I discovered no evidence against the theory that “Say not” may have been Clough's reply to “Dover Beach.”
Renan's Revision of His Liberté De Penser Articles
Authors: Chadbourne Richard M.
Published: February 2007

In the Cahiers de jeunesse, the unusually frank record of his thoughts kept by Renan shortly after he had left Saint-Sulpice and while he was preparing for advanced degrees at the Sorbonne, we find a curious series of reflections about the problem of style as he painfully experienced it. “Je ne suis pas encore,” he wrote, “à même de bien définir ma pensée. Elle n'a pas l'acumen nécessaire; je la vois se dessiner comme une pointe de poignard sous un voile, une statue sous un voile” (CV, p. 264). “Ah!” he cries, “que je trépigne de ne pouvoir transpirer tout l'acide de ma pensée” (CJ, p. 329); and then we discover surely one of the most startling prayers ever written by this man for whom prayer was later to become a minor literary genre, polished and somewhat affected: “Mon Dieu! que je souffre! exprime donc ma pensée avec le feu et le fiel qui rongent mon âme en la concevant, faute de pouvoir la jeter au dehors!” (CJ, p. 340). These utterances will serve to introduce us into a relatively little known but critically important period of Renan's formative years, when his prayer was somehow to be answered, the period from May 1848 until September 1850, during which he published, in the radically republican magazine known as the Liberté de penser, his first important essays.
Pope and “The Weighty Bullion of Dr. Donne's Satires”
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: February 2007

Pope's debt to Dryden, which is at once immense and unmistakable' has tended to obscure his relation to earlier English satirists. But since in the Imitations of Horace and the Moral Essays he was practising a genre untouched by Dryden—satura, the formal verse satire without a plot—it is reasonable to suppose that Pope owed something to other English satirists. There is evidence that he regarded himself as having a place in an English tradition of formal verse satire. When he came on a copy of Hall's Satires late in life, “he wished that he had seen them sooner”; and according to Warburton he intended to imitate “two or three” of Hall's satires. He was interested in Rochester and Oldham. He read, of course, Love of Fame, The Universal Passion; Young's “characteristical Satires” were no doubt partly responsible for turning his own thoughts in the direction of epistolary satire.
Time, Space, And Symbol in Iphigênie
Authors: Lapp John C.
Published: February 2007

Racine is generally conceded to have observed more closely than - any of his contemporaries the basic elements of the classic framework, the three unities. And in a sense, any tragic structure of Racine's reveals a number of constants: there are five acts, composed of scenes “linked” in various ways, the bienséances rule supreme, the unities are maintained. The playwright himself readily discussed, in the polemics he thinly disguised as prefaces, such structural matters as characterization and the modification of sources. A tendency, then, to dismiss Racinian structure as highly stylized, and to accept the often disingenuous revelations of the prefaces may have prevented critics from probing deeply into Racine's ordering of his materials. This deeper probing would require, I believe, our going beyond the mere constatation of various structural devices to seek out their broader implications for Racinian tragedy. Such an examination would have value even if it did no more than reveal more explicitly something one has always vaguely felt: that Racine's unity transcends the conventional unities, that the harmony of all the elements in his works, their essential fusion, is the source of their power.
The Historical Criticism of Milton
Authors: Woodhouse A. S. P.
Published: February 2007

As i understand the assignment given to me, it is to suggest a definition and defence of Historical Criticism as applied to Milton, while Mr. Brooks is to tell us how the New Criticism (as it is called) would deal with the poet. So short a time has elapsed since Mr. Eliot took down the sign reading “No Thoroughfare,” and directing an elaborate detour around Milton, that Mr. Brooks enjoys, I imagine, a freedom from embarrassing examples, which I can only envy. Again, he has at command a growing body of theory; for the New Critics have been concerned to provide their own dialectic, whereas historical students of literature have tended to work by a silent instinct of accumulation like the bee. Obviously, no one can hope to supply in a thirty-minute paper a theory of Historical Criticism, though I shall try to set down a few points towards the formation of such a theory. Nor is it any part of my purpose to attack the New Criticism in its theory or practice. First, because I do not know enough about it, being indeed somewhat in the case of Lord Monboddo. (“Have you read my last book?” asked Lord Kames. “No, my lord,” said Monboddo; “I can't read as fast as you can write.”) But secondly (and seriously) because we have had enough, I think, of mutual recrimination, and it is time for each side to make plain, without polemics, what it can do for the elucidation of Milton, in the hope that students who care more for literature than for labels may find something of use to them in both schools. For criticism, of whatever school, is a means, not an end; and the test to be applied to it is purely pragmatic: Does it or does it not throw new light on, or minister to an understanding of, the work or the author under examination? By that test alone it must stand or fall.
Milton and Critical Re-Estimates
Authors: Brooks Cleanth
Published: February 2007

Let me begin by agreeing most heartily with Professor Woodhouse's closing remarks. The disciplines that we represent can have no quarrel; they are both necessary, and necessary to each other. I say this not merely as one warmed and mollified by the excellent paper that we have just heard. For the last decade I have been saying it over and over. But it has to be said over and over, for the world would have it that we must quarrel, and a stubborn prejudice can exert almost as much influence as a social law.
The Order of the Canterbury Tales
Authors: Pratt Robert A.
Published: February 2007

Chaucer envisaged the Canterbury Tales as presented on the actual London-Canterbury road at various times during successive days, for he offers about seven allusions to place and at least five to time, scattered throughout eight of the nine Fragments which make up the work. That Chaucer had a definite plan for the order of the Fragments is revealed by various kinds of internal evidence, including the mention of towns on the Pilgrims' way, the reality and precise location of which were clear and obvious to the poet and his audience. The ellesmere (or group a) order of the Tales has long seemed unsatisfactory because it distorts the geographical order of allusions to towns, and Chaucer would not have deliberately alluded to Sittingbourne (Fragment in) before Rochester (Fragment vii) on the way from Southwark and Greenwich to Boughton-under-Blean and Canterbury. Accordingly, Henry Bradshaw suggested to Furnivall, as an improvement on the Ellesmere order, that Fragment vn be lifted up to follow and combine with Fragment ii, the Man of Law's Endlink being used as Prologue to the Shipman's Tale.
The Pertinence of El Curioso Impertinente
Authors: Wardropper Bruce W.
Published: February 2007

Cervantine criticism is divided on the question whether El curioso impertinente is relevant to the total context of Don Quixote. Américo Castro, writing in 1925, compiled a list—which he declared to be “not exhaustive”—of six critics who were opposed to the interpolation of the short story, and five who welcomed its inclusion. He himself created a tie by accepting El curioso impertinente as a further exemplification of the theme of error and its consequences; the tale, that is, was seen to reinforce the thematic structure of Don Quixote as Castro then interpreted it. Since the making of this classic summary of opinion a stalemate has reigned; no significant contribution to our understanding of the problem has been made. Some random examples from later commentators will establish this point.
“L'honnȇte Homme” et “L'homme de bien” au XVIIe Siècle
Authors: Lévêque André
Published: February 2007

Le développement des théories de l'honnêteté en France au dix-septième siècle a fait l'objet d'une étude bien connue de Maurice Magendie. Cette excellente étude s'arrête aux environs de 1660. Or, l'expression “honnête homme” est restée d'un usage courant bien après cette date, et le concept de l'honnêteté n'a pas cessé d‘être analysé et discuté. Il nous semble done intéressant d'essayer de suivre l‘évolution des idées sur l'honnêteté, au moins pendant les quarante dernières années du siècle.
Addendum: The Stage History of Shelley's The Cenci
Authors: States Bert O.
Published: February 2007

Astage history of The Cenci by Kenneth N. Cameron and Horst Frenz—“a first attempt at a task obviously long overdue” (p. 1081)—appeared in 1945 and, in uncovering some eleven productions in six countries over a fifty-year period, applied the first practical evidence to the long-debated contention that The Cenci is not an effective dramatic work. Although the history to this point was not an extensive one, the Cameron-Frenz study established that The Cenci could no longer be called a closet drama: it had, in fact, performed well as an acting play on more than one occasion. Hence, with skillful handling, it might be expected to do so in future presentations. It is unlikely that a more positive conclusion can be stated regarding The Cenci as a theatre piece. Nevertheless I feel, in the light of an impressive number of recent Cenci productions, that a continuing search of its stage history would be worthwhile, not only to substantiate the previous findings, but also (1) to indicate the interesting directions its record has taken since 1945, (2) to identify some of its limitations on the present-day stage, and (3) to bring it once again to the attention of scholars, directors, and producers who may still hold Edward Dowden's belief that Shelley, “unversed in the secrets of theatrical effect, [did not know] how to fit an acting play for the boards.”
Orpheus in the Counting House: The Confidential Clerk
Authors: Colby Robert A.
Published: February 2007

T. S. Eliot's most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, received short shrift in New York after triumphs in Edinburgh andLondon.lt would be too much perhaps to say that the play was “snuffed out by the reviews,” but it certainly came up against as unsympathetic a row of reviewers as any great dramatist has had to face. A leading journalistic critic wrote that The Confidential Clerk “represents a deliberate attempt to be ordinary. Unfortunately, Eliot has succeeded.” When he indicated in a lecture at Harvard University several years ago that, like Shakespeare, he hoped gradually to reduce dramatic verse to the level of colloquial speech before attempting elaborate embroidery of it, Eliot could not have expected his words to fly back in his face in precisely this way. Mrs. Guzzard's ringing lines seem especially apropos here: “Wishes, when realized, sometimes turn / Against those who have made them.” At any rate the apparently simple language (some have called it “unpoetic”) and farcical plot devices of the new play seem to have turned aside extensive serious critical consideration. For a play that comes to grips so forcibly with such compelling issues as the spiritual loneliness and inarticulateness of modern men and women, freedom of the will and predestination, cultural integration, and the place of the arts in life, it has been curiously underrated. The Confidential Clerk, while closely linked with Eliot's previous plays, is in so many ways a new departure as to reward close study. As a matter of fact, much of its poignancy and plangency eludes one when the play is viewed for the first time merely as a stage piece. Probably no other play of Eliot's calls for such total immersion.
Eight Types of Puns
Authors: Brown James
Published: February 2007

The Pun, Addison notes, is “a Sound, and nothing but a Sound.” Lamb elaborates: a pun “is a pistol let off at the ear”; it has, he says, “an ear-kissing smack with it.” But the position is not entirely sound; like “The Echo,” a poem which Hood rejected, it “will not answer.” Any hearing on the pun must first admit the pun effect, which precedes analysis and shows that we distinguish the pun semantically, not aurally. The sound is only echo to the sense, and through reflection we conclude that the pun effect is a function of multiple meaning. But even the best pun, whatever that may be, when it must be explained fails to elicit those unusual noises which are the punster's usual reward; the pun effect, it seems, results from some kind of greatly accelerated or simultaneous perception of multiple meanings. Psychology is here deeply involved—for any kind of meaning perception is singularly difficult to analyze—and such tangled affairs are most wisely avoided. A more reasonable approach lies in study of the conditions permitting and the significance attending this curious and characteristic phenomenon; for the pun effect hints at larger matters.
Major Barbara —Shaw's “Divine Comedy”
Authors: Frank Joseph
Published: February 2007

Major Barbara can be considered the epitome of Shaw's total dramatic output. It embodies most of the social ideas and stage techniques of his earlier plays, and it distinctly foreshadows the ideology of the remaining four decades of his literary life. Moreover, Major Barbara is probably Shaw's most religious work; certainly it is the play of his which deals most explicitly with the threefold theme of sin, repentance, and salvation. (Back to Methuselah is less explicit, more diluted, as a play about religion.) Hence to label Major Barbara as Shaw's “Divine Comedy” is meant to be neither facetious nor hyperbolic, but to indicate a new point of departure from which to view the play. At the same time, to use the lens of the Divine Comedy to re-examine Major Barbara is not to imply that the two works are necessarily equal in artistic merit or that they are even fully comparable. Yet the Dantean perspective can, I think, help us to see Shaw's play in a new and brighter light, and by so doing clarify its central position in the Shavian canon as well as its possible stature as one of the great works of the twentieth century.
Music in Zola's Fiction, Especially Wagner's Music
Authors: Brown Calvin S.
Published: February 2007

Zola's relation to music has been discussed by various critics and biographers, all of whom readily admit that he was not in any way a technically competent musician. Beyond this obvious fact, they split into two sharply opposed camps, one of which states that, in spite of a transfer of his theatrical ambitions to the lyric theater late in his life, he actually knew little and cared less about the art of music, while the other insists that he did have a genuine interest in music and an innate though untrained sensitivity to it. Both camps are largely biographical in their approach, and in spite of their differences in emphasis and interpretation, they agree on the obvious facts—that as a schoolboy at Aixen-Provence, Zola played a clarinet in the band (in order to make himself eligible for certain special privileges enjoyed by its members), but gave it up after he went to Paris; that when collaborating with the composer Alfred Bruneau on an operatic version of L'AUaque du moulin, in 1893, he bought a piano (or a harmonium); that at about the same time he began to attend concerts, which he had previously ignored; that he questioned his friends Henry Ceard and Bruneau about the mysteries of music and got a good deal of information from them; that his sense of pitch was poor; that his interest, whether great or small, was largely confined to vocal music; and that he was influenced in some way by the ideas and works of Wagner, though opinions as to the date and extent of this influence vary widely.
The Princess Casamassima: A Critical Reappraisal
Authors: Cargill Oscar
Published: February 2007

In his Preface to The Princess Casamassima James tells us that “the simplest account” of the origin of this novel is that it “proceeded quite directly … from the habit and interest of walking the streets.” He goes on to tell how his perambulations suggested to him the creation of “some individual sensitive nature or fine mind,” a product of those streets yet capable of profiting from all of the civilization that London afforded—all the “freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety, … but … with every door of approach shut in his face.” In sum, “I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the London pavement.”
The Mayor of Casterbridge and the Old Testament's First Book of Samuel: A Study of Some Literary Relationships
Authors: Moynahan Julian
Published: February 2007

From one standpoint, the major theme of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is not “character is fate” or “man against himself,” but rather it is the conflict between generations. This is a very ancient subject matter, one of the archetypal themes noted by the Jungian literary psychologist Maud Bodkin, who traces it in classical Greek drama and in Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear? In Hardy's novel the conflicting generations are represented by Michael Henchard, the middle-aged corn factor and mayor, and Donald Farfrae, the energetic young Scotchman whose two-fold abilities, “the commercial and the romantic” (p. 162), while exercised with the best of intentions, prove deadly to his patron. Because of the ineluctability of this theme, it is necessary that the affection between the two men should turn to hate and that Henchard, as the older, should go under. The special bitterness of Henchard's inevitable failure is perhaps Hardy's characteristically pessimistic contribution. But we might also relate this quality of bitterness to the lack—increasingly in Hardy's time and almost totally in ours—of a generally accepted religious outlook which could transform Henchard's sufferings into a mitigating ritual and his death into a sacrificial symbol. Whereas Lear dies in the bosom of his family, as it were, surrounded by both his living and dead relatives, in full view of an awed and edified audience, Henchard's death is hidden from the eyes of all men except the faithful “fool” Whittle, whose report is necessarily limited to a few concrete particulars. Under the circumstances, Elizabeth–Jane's “what bitterness lies there!” (p. 337) is, at least on one level of the narrative, a final comment which every reader must echo.
Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners
Authors: Quinlan Maurice J.
Published: February 2007

Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners, though clear enough on the surface, has raised various questions as to its subtler meaning and its purpose. In the eighteenth century Thomas Sheridan asserted that this essay was in fact “a very strong, though covert attack, upon the power of the Whigs,” written to encourage Queen Anne to dispense with their services and to form a Tory ministry. That Swift had any such highly contrived political intent seems doubtful. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he later cited the Project among other works as evidence that, even while associated with the Whigs, he had publicly expressed opposition to their lowchurch position. Another question raised is: to what extent, if at all, was Swift being satiric in the Project? Most contemporary scholars, like Herbert Davis and Ricardo Quintana, have viewed it as an entirely serious production in which little if any irony appears, but William B. Ewald feels that, to some degree, the author composed it with his tongue in his cheek. Finally, did Swift have a personal motive in publishing this work? We know that for some time before its appearance he had been endeavoring to obtain preferment. It also seems pretty clear that one obstacle to his advancement was the fact that he was known as the author of A Tale of a Tub. One may strongly suspect, therefore, that he hoped the Project would help to counteract the damaging effect on his reputation of the earlier work and prove that, besides being a wit who had dared to satirize religious institutions and practices, he was also a clergyman genuinely devoted to the welfare of church and state. If this was his motive, however, did he have any further reason for believing that his anonymously printed pamphlet might serve to advance his fortunes? Some light may be shed upon this point and upon others raised by the Project if we consider 1) certain influences that led Swift to write it, 2) the emphasis in the essay, and 3) his position at the time he composed it.
Machiavelli and Fielding's Jonathan Wild
Authors: Shea Bernard
Published: February 2007

Aprominent verbal characteristic of Henry Fielding's The History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great is the excessive use of the words “great” and “greatness.” That this serves certain specific purposes in the political and moral satire of the work has long been recognized. That it may owe something to the writings of Machiavelli is nowadays likely to pass unnoticed by readers who are not acquainted with the particular translation from which Fielding derived his surprisingly detailed and extensive knowledge of that author. Actually, Jonathan Wild contains numerous echoes of passages in the writings of Machiavelli. In addition to resemblances involving portions of the Prince and Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, there are numerous parallels in content, structure, and diction with the Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca There is visible adaptation of Machiavelli's method in the Life of Castruccio in that Fielding plays with the conventions of classical imaginative biography. There is also burlesque of Machiavelli's historical method. In sum, Jonathan Wild is at once an imitation, a parody, and a criticism of Machiavelli.
Keats's Ideal in the Ode on a Grecian Urn
Authors: Wigod Jacob D.
Published: February 2007

Rooted in awareness of pain and flux, Keats's odes of 1819 reveal the poet's desire to escape the painful actual and seek repose in beauty, in the ideal. More than any other of the odes, the implicit subject of the Ode on a Grecian Urn is the ideal itself. While the permanence of art is the poet's bulwark against flux, it is not the ultimate perfection that he seeks. Too many inner tensions, as the poem develops, shape the ideal into something much more complex, unattainable in either life or art since it encompasses both life and art. Keats's attempt to define this ideal accounts for the difficulty of the concluding lines. The purpose of this paper is to try to illuminate Keats's mode of thought and feeling as he wrote the poem and thereby, perhaps, to approach more closely his meaning.
George Eliot and the Climate of Realism
Authors: Hyde William J.
Published: February 2007

Critics have attempted with diverse terminology and divergent points of emphasis to classify George Eliot's novels within the body of realistic fiction. She has been called a naturalist as well as a realist distinct from a naturalist; both her intent to depict the features of “the lowliest, … the least attractive person” and her inclination to shy away from “the animal” have been noted; she is cited as “the finest example extant of the thoroughgoing realism which came to be known as naturalism,” while attention is given, too, to her ability to exalt and idealize human nature and create morally uplifting examples of it in art. Undoubtedly the imprecision of our critical terminology accounts in part for the varying statements about her position. To this must be added the likelihood that critics are moved in various ways in their studies of the complex world that George Eliot describes and find in this world ample strands of evidence for whatever view they wish to emphasize. It is not the purpose at present to supply new and arbitrary definitions of “realism” and “naturalism,” nor to impose upon the reader a narrow unified view of George Eliot's work, but rather to examine the bearing of a broad and liberal trend of realism which can be observed to precede her rural novels in a body of critical discussion not often fully appreciated.