bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Camus' L'etranger
Authors: Viggiani Carl A.
Published: February 2007

Most of the critical writing on L'Etranger has been focused on the world view or philosophy that it expresses. This is certainly legitimate, especially since Camus himself sees the novel as an incarnation of “a drama of the intelligence.” As a result, however, some of the formal and imaginative aspects of L'Etranger have been neglected, with the further result that the full meaning of the novel has remained hidden. On the surface, L'Etranger gives the appearance of being an extremely simple though carefully planned and written book. In reality, it is a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings and formal qualities. It would take a book at least the length of the novel to make a complete analysis of meaning and form, and the correspondences of meaning and form, in L'Etranger. My purpose here is less ambitious. I should like first to take up aspects of the novel that have not yet been studied sufficiently, principal among them (and in this order), the use of time and structure as thematic devices, myth, names, patterns of character and situation, and symbols, and then, in conclusion, to use the knowledge gained as the basis for an explication of the meaning of the novel as a whole. Frequent and fairly lengthy references will be made to others of Camus' books, simply because the novel is incomprehensible except in the context of all his works; it is hoped that what may appear to be digressions will be justified by the light they throw on the novel.
Bernard Shaw on Tragedy
Authors: Barnet Sylvan
Published: February 2007

When Shaw was alive the public had little opportunity to come to any conclusions about his attitude toward tragedy—and especially toward Shakespearean tragedy—because the septuagenarian, then octogenarian, then nonagenarian was always willing to publish yet another play, another pamphlet, or another letter reminding his readers that he was inordinately fond of Shakespeare's verbal music, quarreled not with Shakespeare but with Irving, and had included a question mark after the words “Better than Shakespear?” His pronouncements have often embarrassed his admirers, and a number of friendly critics have sought to clarify and make tolerable his opinions by demonstrating that he admired much in Shakespeare, that his fundamental conflict was only with bad Shakespeare or badly adapted Shakespeare.
English Deism and the Development of Romantic Mythological Syncretism
Authors: Kuhn Albert J.
Published: February 2007

One of the characteristic features of English and of continental Romanticism was a widespread interest in the origins, nature, and meaning of the myths of the ancient world. Especially in England among classical scholars, antiquarians, and learned churchmen there was a zealous desire to resurrect divinities long forgotten and to find in them and their exploits a relevance for the modern age. One of the most characteristic and influential treatises on myth in the period was the Reverend Jacob Bryant's A New System, or, An Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774–76), an ambitious project whose purpose was “to rectify what time has impaired: to divest mythology of every foreign and unmeaning ornament, and to display the truth in its native simplicity.” He hoped thereby to give a “new turn to antient history, and to place it upon a surer foundation.” By hypothesizing that the Noachian Deluge was the focal event in ancient history and by seeking to show that its symbolism explained or elucidated the bulk of universal mythology, Bryant was confident that he was not only doing a service to knowledge but also that he was strengthening the premises of Christian truth. On similar diluvian hypotheses Thomas Maurice's Indian Antiquities (1793–1800), Edward Davies' The Mythology and the Rites of the British Druids (1809), and George Stanley Faber's The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816) attempted to achieve the same ends. Other notable researches in myth at the turn of the nineteenth century in England were those of Sir William Jones, the Orientalist, Sir William Drummond, the skeptic philosopher, and Richard Payne Knight, the art connoisseur. Well known also in learned circles was the more radically speculative mythologizing of such Frenchmen as Pierre Hugues (D'Hancarville), Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Charles François Dupuis.
Pierre Corneille's L'illusion Comique: The Play as Magic
Authors: Nelson Robert J.
Published: February 2007

“Voici,” wrote Corneille in his dedication of L'Illusion comique 1636) to the unidentified M. F. D. R., “un étrange monstre que je vous dédie. Le premier acte n'est qu'un prologue, les trois suivants font une comédie imparfaite, le dernier est une tragédie: et tout cela, cousu ensemble, fait une comédie.” Most critics of the play have not looked beyond the first part of this indulgent characterization by its author: with varying degrees of indulgence on their own part, they have regarded L'Illusion comique primarily as “un étrange monstre.” It has been dismissed as a youthful whim; taxed with superficiality and inconsistency; seen primarily as an étude dramatique; believed interesting only as a document of theatrical life in the period, a backstage curio; viewed as a dramatization of Corneille's relations with the actor Mondory. Whatever the critical point of view (biographical, esthetic, historical or moral), the views of the play have all been partial. Yet many of these views are right, but right only when taken altogether: this early play is an élude dramatique; a document of the stage controversy of the period; a backstage drama; a dramatization of Corneille's relations with actors; a whim. It is, in short, a play about the theater.
The “Dastardly Treachery” of Prince John of Lancaster
Authors: Jorgensen Paul A.
Published: February 2007

One of the most disturbingly dramatic, and least admired, scenes in Shakespeare is that in which Prince John of Lancaster subdues the rebels in 2 Henry IV. His strategy, unheard of in any other general in Shakespeare's plays, is not to win in open field by plain force but by legalistic subtlety to trick the rebels into an armistice. He agrees, ostensibly, to all the provisions of redress demanded by the Archbishop, Hastings, and Mowbray; the leaders drink amicably in the sight of their armies; the rebel troops are dismissed; and then with a chilling suddenness John arrests the leaders for high treason and commands his army to “pursue the scatter'd stray.” To cap this dubious triumph, John piously rejoices, “God, and not we, hath safely fought today.”
Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches and the Growth of a Poet's Mind
Authors: Hartman Geoffrey H.
Published: February 2007

The AIM of this essay is to examine Descriptive Sketches (written in 1791-92, published with An Evening Walk in 1793) as a poem with its own personal and stylistic integrity. Though not, of course, a great or even very exciting work of art, its relation to Wordsworth's growth as man and poet has been neglected. One reason for this neglect is Legouis' account of its derivative nature: the many borrowings in it from eighteenth-century writers and the extensions of their technique. Legouis is controvertible only on the ground of method: by atomizing the poem he shows convincingly that a great proportion of phrases have a direct or exaggerated relationship to that “gaudiness and inane phraseology” Wordsworth was later to condemn. His view of Descriptive Sketches as mainly patchwork, though sincere and really alive to nature, has prevailed almost continuously. The few notable attempts to go beyond Legouis should, however, be mentioned. M. L. Barstow, an exact reader, discriminates Wordsworth's “faults” from those of the eighteenth-century landscape school, and states against Legouis that what we find in Descriptive Sketches is “not the remnant of an old style; it is the crude but vigorous beginning of the new.” But because of her specific approach, the study of Poetic Diction, she does not, except in a general way, correlate Wordsworth's stylistic struggle with a particular phase in his personal development. De Selincourt, on the other hand, writing almost forty years after Legouis, tried to combine the study of the poet's style and that of his mind. “The early crudities,” he declared, “of a great and original poet have a value irrespective of their intrinsic merit in the light they throw upon that fascinating … study, the growth of a poet's mind and art.” He applied his principle vigorously to “The Vale of Esthwaite” and other juvenilia, but An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches proved too discouraging. After briefly summarizing the flaws of the former, he passes over its companion with: “The faults of An Evening Walk were exaggerated in Descriptive Sketches,” and we hear no more of that juvenile disaster. Arthur Beatty, at about the same time, gives the fullest and most suggestive account we have of the poem, yet also hedges on its language, said to be, in parts, “almost all borrowed” from two earlier travelers to Switzerland, Coxe and Ramond. The only recent consideration of Wordsworth's early style as something sui generis comes from F. A. Pottle, who sees in An Evening Walk “a powerful and original genius grappling with the problem of poetic diction.” The remark takes us back to the point at which serious interpretation of the early poems begins, to Coleridge's comment on Descriptive Sketches. “The language,” he says, “is not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength.” It may not be unwarranted, then, to take another look at Descriptive Sketches, to see the significance of its strongly impatient style.
The Trial of Nature: An Analysis of The Blithedale Romance
Authors: Stanton Robert
Published: February 2007

Is Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance chiefly the story of Hollingsworth and his unsuccessful philanthropic scheme, or the story of Zenobia and her tangled relations with Hollingsworth, Priscilla, Westervelt, and Old Moodie, or the story of Coverdale, the cold observer, or the story of the Blithedale experiment? Any of these candidates could be defended. Hollingsworth has the strongest effect upon the plot, and Hawthorne originally intended to name the novel after him; Zenobia is the most vivid character, and her story receives even more space than Hollingsworth's; Coverdale is the character whom we know most intimately; and although Hawthorne prefatorially states that his description of the communal farm “is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the romance,” his remarks about Blithedale's purpose, operation, and failure constitute an evaluation of the Brook Farm experiment. Yet none of these sub-plots clearly dominates the rest. Unless some principle of unity holds them together, Blithedale is at best a noble failure; until we are aware of this principle of unity, we cannot read the novel with satisfaction.
Soledad in the Poetry of Jorge Carrera Andrade
Authors: Heald William F.
Published: February 2007

The later poetry of Jorge Carrera Andrade shares with other literary efforts of our time the anguished conviction that solitude is the ultimate reality of man's existence, but it is not dominated, as is so much contemporary literature, by a sense of despair or frustration. On the contrary, his poetry arouses in the reader a curiously mild regret at the human predicament, and, at the same time, a calm, resigned optimism. Carrera does not achieve his effect by merely juxtaposing contradictory ideas or attitudes; instead, he fuses disparate elements so as to transmute the components into a new and unified whole.
Samuel Beckett Self-Translator
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: February 2007

The artist has acquired his text: the artisan translates it. “The duty and the task of a writer (not an artist, a writer) are those of a translator.”

In Parentheses, Beckett distinguishes between the artist and the writer; the artist seeks his text within himself, and the artisan translates it, transmits it to the world. To translate—in its more usual meaning, Dr. Johnson's “to change into another language retaining the sense”—has been Beckett's method of improving his own artisanat. In the very essay from which the quotation on translation is excerpted, Beckett rendered into English passages from Proust's texts, while waiting to “acquire” his own.
Tennyson in the Year of Hallam's Death
Authors: Rader Ralph Wilson
Published: February 2007

The story of Tennyson's reaction to Arthur Hallam's death is so familiar that we need to remind ourselves how very little connected, factual knowledge we have of his life at that crucial time. Our vivid impressions of him, sunk for long months in dark grief, isolated and immobile at Somersby, derive, if the truth be told, from little more than In Memoriam as reinforced, until recently, only by two blanket statements and a few contemporary letters set in the loose and chronologically vague narrative of Hallam Tennyson's Memoir. Sir Charles Tennyson's lucid biography, of course, has now greatly integrated and sharpened the Memoir account, and expanded it with new material from the papers of the Tennyson d'Eyncourt family. But since the d'Eyncourts had little direct contact with their Somersby cousins during the period in question, and make no mention at all of Alfred, we are still left with less specific knowledge than we might wish. Fortunately, a welcome quirk of literary fate has preserved an unused contemporary source of information: the diary for the years 1833–35 of Tennyson's friend, the Rev. John Rashdall, M.A., now accessible in the Bodleian Library. In what follows I propose to use this diary together with other contemporary material, published and unpublished, to construct a fuller, more detailed account than has yet been available of Tennyson in the year of Hallam's death.
A Would-Be Philosophe: Jean Philippe Rameau
Authors: Doolittle James
Published: February 2007

Jean Philippe Rameau (1684–1764) is generally recognized as the greatest French musician of the eighteenth century. His achievements in theory and practice were considered outstanding by his contemporaries, friend and adversary alike, and posterity has not altered this opinion. After what would ordinarily amount to a lifetime as a church organist, Rameau propounded in 1722 and 1726 his famous principle of the basse fondamentale, which he expanded and defended in more than twenty-five books, articles, and pamphlets in the course of his career. After one failure (Samson, 1732), he conquered the operatic stage with Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 and dominated it with his more than two dozen other operas until his death. His heavy-handed discipline exerted upon the singers, the dancers, and especially the orchestra of the Royal Academy of Music worked an enormous and radical improvement in performance. Few musicians in any time can lay claim to greater practical accomplishment in the service of their art.
Background to Modern Painters: The Tradition and the Turner Controversy
Authors: Burd Van Akin
Published: February 2007

Among the surprising omissions from Rus-kin's autobiography Praeterita is any substantial analysis of the critical debate over the art of J. M. W. Turner which led Ruskin to write Modern Painters in 1843. The autobiography merely tells us that in 1836, when Ruskin was just seventeen years old, he had been aroused to a pitch of “black anger” by a review in Blackwood's of Turner's pictures, and that he had remained in this mood “pretty nearly ever since.” This ribald review, Ruskin adds, expressed “the feelings of the pupils of Sir George Beaumont at the appearance of these unaccredited views of Nature.” We learn only from his correspondence that it was a similar review in 1842 which made him resolve to write a pamphlet that would “blow the critics out of the water.”
Widman's Wahrhafftige Historia: Its Relevance to the Faust Book
Authors: Haile H. G.
Published: February 2007

According to fiction, the university in. sixteenth-century Wittenberg can lay claim to those two students whose lives and tragical deaths have since seemed to the Western mind to comprise all its longings and strivings, as well as to epitomize its utmost ideal of heroism. According to fact, of course, Hamlet had long been dead before the university there was founded; and this fact, whether they know it or not, is of great advantage to the Shakespeare scholars, for the historical Faust has been a problem child of the critics for centuries. The Faust Book states that he did study in Wittenberg. Melanchthon seems to have been acquainted with him and to have thought that he had studied black magic in Cracow, too. Documentary evidence may indicate that he graduated at Heidelberg. Now whether or not he ever attended any university—and he most likely did not—over three hundred years of research on the Faust Book has had to cope with the many reports, now authentic, now fantastic, and with the many tales now new and now second-hand which were widely circulated about a real contemporary of Luther who sometimes called himself Faust.
The Poet and His Moira: “El Desdichado”
Authors: Kneller John W.
Published: February 2007

Concerning Gérard de Nerval it has been said, of late, that the hour of synthesis is at hand. This is particularly true of “El Desdichado,” for most authors of the increasingly voluminous literature devoted to this sonnet have taken an extrinsic approach; that is, they have applied techniques of other fields, such as psychiatry, biography, astrology, and alchemy. At best they have helped to elucidate hitherto obscure symbols; at worst they have made of their thesis a kind of Procrustean bed on which the poem has been either stretched to death or decapitated.
The Puzzle of Kafka's Prosecuting Attorney
Authors: Politzer Heinz
Published: February 2007

As an appendix to Franz Kafka's unfinished novel Der Prozeß (The Trial) Max Brod has published a series of fragments more or less closely connected with the main body of the text. One of them, with the heading “Staatsanwalt” (“Prosecuting Attorney”), has lately caused considerable discussion, especially in view of the new order suggested for the entire novel by Professor H. Uyttersprot.
William Blake and the Human Abstract
Authors: Gleckner Robert F.
Published: February 2007

It is well-known that in Songs of Experience several of the poems are direct contraries to some of the Songs of Innocence, the precise nature of this opposition being reflected in the subtitle of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience: “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.” And Blake emphasized this essential organic unity of the contraries by giving four of the opposing poems identical titles: “Holy Thursday,” “The Chimney Sweeper,” “Nurse's Song,” and “A Cradle Song.” Occasionally he changed the title almost imperceptibly: “The Little Boy Lost” becomes “A Little Boy Lost,” “The Little Girl Lost” becomes “A Little Girl Lost,” and “The Divine Image” becames “A Divine Image.” The great majority of Songs of Experience, however, have either totally new titles or changes of the Songs of Innocence titles which make more explicit the nature of the opposition between the two states. Thus in the two introductory poems the piper yields to the bard, in others “The Lamb” becomes “The Tyger,” “The Blossom” becomes “The Sick Rose,” “The Ecchoing Green” becomes “The Garden of Love” or “London,” “The School Boy” becomes “The Little Vagabond,” and “The Divine Image” becomes “The Human Abstract.”
A Misreading of Poe's “Ligeia”
Authors: Schroeter James
Published: February 2007

One of the finest of Poe's stories, “Ligeia” is perhaps the one in which Poe managed most successfully to give artistic expression to themes with which he wrestled in all of his major literary works. It therefore has a claim to being called the most typical and also the best. On several occasions Poe himself expressed the conviction that “Ligeia” was the best of his stories. He wrote to Edward Duyckinck, the publisher, that “ ‘Ligeia’ is undoubtedly the best story I have written,” and to Philip Pendleton Cooke, the writer, that “the loftiest kind [of tale] is that of the highest imagination—and for this reason only ‘Ligeia’ may be called my best tale.” Poe's critics, also, have agreed. George E. Woodberry, one of the earliest and most reliable of them, says “Ligeia,” along with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” forms the “richest” of Poe's imaginative work, and marks “the highest reach of the romantic element” in his genius. Arthur H. Quinn classifies it as one of Poe's “masterpieces,” and D. H. Lawrence says it is Poe's “chief” story.
Eluard's Rupture with Surrealism
Authors: Carmody Francis J.
Published: February 2007

Eluard's rupture with Breton, in 1938, is attributed to a change in political ideology, from surrealism to Stalinism. Doubt is thrown on this simple explanation by the deliberate silence of Eluard, Breton, and their biographers, who have not recorded the event, though no such reluctance followed the earlier defections of Aragon, Desnos, or Prévert, who were accused, and who answered, in violent and well-known diatribes. It was not until 1951 that Eluard acknowledged the importance of the break, in publishing a testament of his surrealist days, and reproducing poems that he had tried until then to keep secret. A close examination of his poetry and of a few external events reveals several important facts. As we shall see, the vital elements in the rupture include Eluard's fatigue both with Breton's pacifism and with the thematic and technical artifices of dream interpretation. An analysis of his protest is obscured by his other psychic worries, from the war in Spain to his isolation from events during the first years of the German occupation. Eluard's personal crises came to an end with the death of his wife, Nusch, on 28 November 1946, and in a sense, until then, he found full peace of mind after 1937 only during the period of Poésie ininterrompue, published on 3 January 1946, and of his revised Choix de poèmes, of 15 July.
Is Oxford the Original of Jefferson in William Faulkner's Novels?
Authors: Buckley G. T.
Published: February 2007

It has been so much taken for granted and so unquestioningly assumed that the Jefferson, Mississippi, of William Faulkner's novels is to be identified with Oxford, the author's home and the seat of the University of Mississippi, that it may seem presumptuous of anyone to throw doubt on the identification. Certainly anyone who does so will be setting himself at variance with most if not all of the critics and biographers who have chosen to write on the gifted Mississippian. For illustrations I need menton only Robert Coughlan, Irving Howe, Ward L. Miner, and William Van O'Connor, all of whom, differing as they do on other points, are at one in thinking that Oxford served as a model for the Jefferson of the novels.
The Whisper of the Blood: A Study of Knut Hamsun's Early Novels
Authors: McFarlane J. W.
Published: February 2007

With that little stump of prose, twenty-nine magazine pages long, Knut Hamsun had laid the foundation of a new literature in the North.’ This assessment, so near in time to the event and yet so far-sighted, was that of Carl Naerup writing in 1895; the ‘stump of prose’ was the fragment of Hamsun's first novel Hunger, which appeared anonymously in the Danish periodical Ny Jord in 1888, two years before the publication of the completed work. At that time it took vision to see the real achievement behind the extravagance; the eye was too easily caught by the uninhibited exuberance of Hamsun's literary début to perceive the high seriousness behind it, his vehemence was misinterpreted as the antics and posturings of one whose chief object was self-advertisement; even the sympathetic Bjørnson, who acknowledged the greatness of some of Hamsun's early work, could not suppress an attitude of tolerant amusement: ‘In the field of literature,’ he wrote in 1896, ‘Hamsun began by committing just about all the stupidities that it is possible for a gifted madcap to get away with in a civilized society. … It seems the belief that no young author can any longer win his place without first trying to sweep away all the others is something that must be called typically Norwegian.’
Emma: Character and Construction
Authors: Shannon Edgar F.
Published: February 2007

Emma, justly described by Lord David Cecil as “Jane Austen's profoundest comedy,” has frequently been mistaken for mere “escape literature.” It has been applauded for its “engaging, dear, delicious, idiotic heroine,” moving in “a place of laughter and nonsense,” and excoriated because “it does not instruct … does not teach the modern reader … how to be and move in our world.” At the other extreme, it has lately provoked the sophisticated interpretation of Marvin Mudrick, who sees Emma as a disagreeable, even sinister, creature. A latent Lesbian, unwilling to commit her emotions, and devoid of tenderness, Emma, he believes, attains at the end of the novel simply “relief and temporary awareness.” The transcendent irony of the book for Mudrick is the author's having shown an apparently reformed Emma, whereas actually she remains imperious and ruthless. Joseph M. Duffy, Jr., who describes the novel as concerned with “the awakening of a normal, intelligent young woman to the possibilities of physical love,” has produced the most apposite recent study. But knowledge of physical love is only one aspect of Emma's awakening, and even Duffy is uncertain whether she is truly regenerate.
The Balanced Diction of Hooker's Polity
Authors: Stueber Sister M. Stephanie
Published: February 2007

The relation between content and style, the functional nature of style, the “balance” between inventio and elocutio —these adumbrate a method of interpretative criticism that has its roots in classical antiquity. But the “balance” concerns more than style. It extends to, or shall we say begins with, the content itself wherein the author manifests his world view, his philosophy of man, his hierarchy of values, and, in the Christian era, his reason-faith relationship. An evaluation of style requires, therefore, a previous evaluation of content.
Earth the Shadow of Heaven: Typological Symbolism in Paradise Lost
Authors: Madsen William G.
Published: February 2007

what surmounts the reachOf human sense, I shall delineate so,By lik'ning spiritual to corporal forms,As may express them best, though what if EarthBe but the shadow of Heav'n, and things thereinEach to other like, more than on Earth is thought?—Paradise Lost, v. 571-576

In prefacing his account of the war in heaven with these words, Raphael is saying that it will be not allegorical or merely metaphoric, but analogical; that although he will have to use the language of accommodation in order to convey his meaning at all, still there may be (he puts the statement in a subordinate clause and in the interrogative mood) a relationship between earth and heaven, between the physical and the spiritual, which is inherent in the nature of things. After Raphael finishes his narrative, Adam denies that earth is the shadow of heaven:

Great things, and full of wonder in our ears,Far differing from this World, thou hast revcal'dDivine Interpreter… (VII. 70-72)
De Quincey's Revisions in the “Dream-Fugue”
Authors: Byrns Richard H.
Published: February 2007

The revisions that a writer makes in a work often reveal his method of composition and thus add to our knowledge of his creative process. In an effort to increase our understanding of the creative practices of De Quincey, I have undertaken an analysis of the revisions that he made in the “Dream-Fugue.”

There are extant three different, but incomplete, versions of the “Dream-Fugue.” These are: (1) The manuscript submitted to Blackwood's Magazine in 1849, now in possession of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. The manuscript, which contains all except a portion of the last paragraph of the first four parts of the article, is a holograph and thus shows the revisions that De Quincey made while preparing the work. (2) The article as it appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in December 1849, being printed apparently from the holograph. (3) The article as it was published in the Author's Edition in 1854, showing the revisions De Quincey made in the magazine version when he included it as part of his collected works. In addition to these versions which are of some length, we have a fragment of three paragraphs found among De Quincey's papers after his death and published in 1891 by A.H. Japp in The Posthumous Works of De Quincey. Thus, we have four documents containing all or portions of the “Dream-Fugue,” with the holograph showing the most changes and therefore being the most useful in determining the author's pattern of revision.
Ruskin in French Criticism: A Possible Reappraisal
Authors: Curtin Frank D.
Published: February 2007

Ruskin is no longer a controversial figure. Most contemporary critics, of art, of society, of literature, ignore him.

Ruskin's own weaknesses are responsible for much of this neglect—not least the flood of words which overflows the thirty-nine volumes of Cook and Wedderburn. No single volume, not even Unto This Last nor Praeterita, can be recommended without qualification, nor any single phase of Ruskin's work. His art judgments are often arrogantly inept, as toward Claude and Whistler and Renaissance architecture; his aesthetics is contradictory, homiletic; his social criticism is sometimes antiquarian, proposing quixotic reforms. The fervors of Ruskin's style offend current taste, with our preference for tight, flat, and uncommitted exposition.
Aspects of Imagery in Colette: Color and Light
Authors: Olken I. T.
Published: February 2007

Colette died in 1954; since that time there has been little worthwhile critical note taken of her writing. This, despite the fact that she is allowed, although often grudgingly, a place of importance in contemporary French letters, with frequent reference made to a pervasive lucidity in her work. No one, however, has gone on to further define this elusive quality. The prevailing clichés continue, in the form of vague statements about natural style, classical tone, instinctive comprehension, and primitivistic orientation to the world. Colette has often been called the descriptivist of nature par excellence, but she has been accused equally often of shallowness, superficiality, and a lack of concern for larger human problems.
Zola's Apprenticeship to Journalism (1865–70)
Authors: Hemmings F. W. J.
Published: February 2007

Zola's literary career opened in 1864 with the publication of the Contes à Ninon. Between then and 1881 he produced fourteen out of the thirty-one novels he was to write. Concurrently, he was writing almost continuously for the press; it was only after 1881 that, for reasons which I have suggested elsewhere, he gave up this activity, and for a long while desisted from all regular newspaper work. In this considerable journalistic output, attention is usually accorded only to those portions that Zola himself thought worthy to be preserved, and which he accordingly published in what are by custom referred to as his Œuvres critiques. Of the nine volumes grouped under this heading, one only, Mes Haines, contains a selection from his pre-1870 critical writing: it consists almost entirely of essays published originally in the Lyons newspaper Le Salut public in 1865 and 1866; they are interesting enough, one would think, to arouse curiosity concerning the rest of Zola's newspaper contributions during the years when he was making his name as a novelist and before he had emerged as the author of the Rougon-Macquart cycle.
A Portuguese Translation of Christine De Pisan's Livre Des Trois Vertus
Authors: Willard Charity Cannon
Published: February 2007

The International character of Christine de Pisan's writings has long ago been investigated where it concerns her familiarity with the works of her compatriots Dante and Boccaccio or her relations with the English court during the early years of the fifteenth century. Considerably less well known is the Portuguese translation of her Livre des trois vertus, which is to be found in MS. 11,515 of the National Library in Madrid. This translation was, furthermore, published in Lisbon in 1518. Although two copies of the edition still exist and are listed in Portuguese bibliographies, the only mention of such a translation among studies devoted to Christine de Pisan is a passing refererence in Mathilde Laigle's Livre des trois vertus: son milieu historique et litteraire (Paris, 1912). Here a footnote promises further information in a projected edition of the Trois vertus which has never appeared. Several years later the Portuguese translation was referred to by Aubrey Bell in his Portuguese Literature, but with several errors of detail. As the existence of the manuscript and the two printed copies cannot fail to arouse the curiosity of any student of Christine de Pisan's writings or, indeed, of the intellectual currents of the late Middle Ages, it would seem worth while to attempt a plausible explanation of the circumstances which brought the Portuguese version into being.
Romania and the Widening Gyre
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: February 2007

The concept of Romania, considered by Curtius to be the only context permitting a true comparative literature, is basically a product of the Romantic movement's national and historical consciousness, its search for indigenous roots. It is an inadequate context for the study of modern literatures, and also the wrong kind of context because it emphasizes study of origins and derivations. Any context that defines literature by a place, by geographical or linguistic units, probably fosters bad pedagogy, criticism, and literary history. It makes us teach literature as an institution and as information, and leads us to neglect the human function of literature. While we should renovate literary history (for literary utopianism only reinforces the autotelic status of much literary study), we should direct our attention to the structures of literature as a whole, of consciousness and the imagination, and place man's fiction-making within the range of his other image-making activities. The teaching of literature—a peculiar activity whose very possibility is open to question—should be centrally concerned with the question, what is literature? Studies should be organized to direct attention to the elementary functions of the fiction-maker.
Sobre “aquella bestialidad” de Garcilaso
Authors: Martínez-López Enrique
Published: February 2007

When Garcilaso refers to the death of Isabel Freyre, representing her as the nymph Elisa, who “estaba entre las hierbas degollada” (eclogue m.230), the poet's commentators, morally repelled by this brutal image, suggest changing the term degollada “beheaded, with her throat cut,” or to understand it as desangrada, “dead by bleeding,” since this meaning seems more appropriate to the death at childbirth of the poet's beloved Isabel. Although this view is still current today, a stylistic analysis of the passage shows that Garcilaso—more interested in emotional intensity than in historical accuracy—wrote degollada with the then primary meaning of “decapitated.” This interpretation is corroborated by a close look at the poet's sources—the death of Eurydice and decapitations of Orpheus (Virgil, Ovid, Poliziano) and Issabella (Ariosto)—as well as by Camões' imitation of Garcilaso's beheaded nymph in his decapitation of Inés de Castro. The bloody truculence of this image is otherwise understandable in a tormented and violent Garcilaso who, in spite of being traditionally considered as a “dulce y blando” poet, very often chose to associate beauty and love with cruelty. (In Spanish)
Initiation and Tragedy: A New Look at Edwin Muir's “The Gate”
Authors: Huberman Elizabeth
Published: February 2007

Edwin Muir's poem, “The Gate,” not only marks literally the dividing point in his work between almost unrelieved darkness and increasing light, but, in every detail of its complex structure and in controlling metaphor, it signals the loss of innocence, the intimate acquaintance with evil, which Muir's later poems suggest must be endured before there can be any true knowledge of good. Both halves, into which the poem is cut by a strong caesura in the twelfth line, plunge in parallel downward movements from security into loss and fear; and although a secondary movement, based on a metaphor of initiation, carries the poem forward, over the threshold of “The Gate,” this forward step also turns out to be downward. Because of Muir's persistent association of a castle with treachery from within, as his novel, The Three Brothers, and several poems show, the step into the fortress of adulthood is simultaneously a drop into the central darkness and terror of the universe.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 755: The Missing Evidence for a Traditional Reading
Authors: Battaglia Francis Joseph
Published: February 2007

The story of Sigebryht, Cynewulf, and Cyneheard—the entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 755—is frequently cited as a unique and dramatic specimen of the pre-Alfredian Chronicle. Historians as well as English language scholars have attested the value of the passage, and it has been used to illustrate the pre-feudal heroic ideal. Unified and rather detailed, the entry is an account of political strife. Events spanning twenty-nine years are condensed into a short narrative, and the author's conciseness is complicated by an involved pronomial reference not uncommon in Anglo-Saxon literature. Primarily because of the difficulty with pronouns, the translation of the text and the discernment of its larger meanings have been points of continuing debate.
Two Old English Scop Poems
Authors: Eliason Norman E.
Published: February 2007

Widsith is the only Old English poem concerned exclusively with a scop and Deor the only one specifically attributed to a scop. In both a scop is represented as speaking, and in each he tells something of what had befallen him—Widsith, the far-wandering and richly rewarded scop, and Deor, the court scop who had lost his long-held and lucrative post to a rival. These poems are therefore similar and also the only ones which give us a first-person account of a scop's career. It is usually for the sake of the information thus provided that the poems are discussed together. This information is precious little, however, and some of it is dubious.
Melancholy, Ambition, and Revenge in Belleforest's Hamlet
Authors: Stabler A. P.
Published: February 2007

In his What Happens in Hamlet, J. D. Wilson studies Hamlet's melancholy in the light of Renaissance beliefs, and especially those indicated in Bright's Treatise of Melancholie, to which Shakespeare seems to have been indebted for a number of ideas as well as turns of phrase. Significantly, as Wilson shows, the melancholy man was not only “prone to spectral visitations,” but was also aggravated in his condition by thwarted ambition; further, he “ponders and debates long, and does not act until his blood is up: then acts vigorously.” We can reasonably agree with this author that a knowledge of the contemporary corpus of doctrines and beliefs is important for an understanding of Hamlet's character and motivation, in which the thread of melancholy evidently connects several important elements. In the Introduction to his edition of Shakespeare's play, Wilson mentions another source for a melancholy Hamlet: the Histoires tragiques of François de Belleferest, which is recognized as the most immediate extant source of the play. Belleferest does, says Wilson, make a “definite reference to Amleth's [Hamlet's] over-great melancholy,” following a hint already to be found in the version of Saxo Grammaticus (Belleforest's source); but Wilson does no more than call attention to the reference, without noting Belleforest's additional remarks on the subject, and specifically denying to either source any other contributions to Hamlet's character. It will be the purpose of this article to show that not only the melancholy complex, but also other important facets of Hamlet's character have a probable basis in Saxo and Belleferest, and especially in the latter.
Classical Mythology and Christian Tradition in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus
Authors: McAlindon T.
Published: February 2007

God is now conceived of as something outside man and man's handiwork, and it follows that it must be idolatry to worship that which Phidias and Scopas made … Night will fall upon man's wisdom now that man has been taught that he is nothing. He had discovered, or half-discovered, that the world is round and one of many like it, but now he must believe that the sky is but a tent spread above a level floor, and that he may be stirred into a frenzy of anxiety and so to moral transformation, blot out the knowledge or half-knowledge that he has lived many times, and think that all eternity depends upon a moment's decision.—Yeats, A Vision
Newman, Aristotle, and the New Criticism: On the Modern Element in Newman's Poetics
Authors: Friedman Norman
Published: February 2007

Certain Aspects of modern critical theory can be defined in terms of its use—or rather, misuse—of Aristotle's Poetics, especially of Aristotle's conception of plot and his statement that poetry deals with universals rather than particulars. The same, of course, can be said of other periods as well. Sidney's view of Aristotle, for example, was confined to the notion that a poem was an imitation of an action, but he platonized even this conception by claiming that the action imitated was an ideal one—what ought to be rather than what is—and this, as we shall see, became quite a common distortion of the famous passage at the beginning of the ninth chapter of the Poetics. The other side of the coin is found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' concern with the genres and the unities and their supposed rules. It cannot be said that Aristotle has been a vital influence on literary criticism since the nineteenth century, except for the current minority report being filed by the Chicago Critics, but these two aspects of the Poetics nevertheless offered a support and a challenge to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics for clarifying their own ideas about poetry.
The Literary Quality of Luther's Septembertestament
Authors: Bluhm Heinz
Published: February 2007

The publication, in September 1522, of the first edition of Luther's New Testament was an event of European significance. This impressive-looking folio volume was not only the most important work of German literature in the sixteenth century, but also the first and most influential translation, from the Greek, of the New Testament in any of the Germanic countries: the sixteenth-century Dutch, English, Scandinavian, and Swiss versions are all more or less heavily indebted to it. Luther's Septembertestament is the editio princeps of the vernacular Bibles of the Protestant world. In Germany its influence was not restricted to Protestants but included Roman Catholics who read the Bible in the vernacular. Emser's edition of the New Testament of 1527, which was largely a “revision” of Luther's text, was used in Catholic Germany well into the eighteenth century. Other Catholic “translations,” such as those bearing the names of Dietenberger and Eck, also retained Luther's version to a surprising extent. Thus practically all of Germany, both Protestant and Catholic, and all of Protestant Europe were, in varying degree to be sure, under the spell of Luther's epoch-making translation.
Fielding and Richardson
Authors: Park William
Published: February 2007

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.

author of Charlotte Summers

Rather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.
Molière's Amphitryon
Authors: Gossman Lionel
Published: February 2007

Lui-(. . . ) Il n'y a dans tout un royaume qu'un homme qui marche, c'est le souverain; tout le reste prend des positions.

Moi.-Le souverain? Encore y a-t-il quelque chose a dire. Et croyez-vous qu'il ne se trouve pas, de temps en temps, a cote de lui, un petit pied, un petit chignon, un petit nez qui lui fasse faire un peu de la pantomime? Quiconque a besoin d'un autre est indigent et prend une position.

Diderot, Le N even de Rameau

As a foreword to Amphitryon Molière might have selected the famous passage from Descartes's first Méditation: “Je supposerai donc qu'il y a non point un vrai Dieu, qui est la souveraine source de vérité, mais un certain mauvais génie, non moins rusé et trompeur que puissant, qui a employé toute son industrie à me tromper” (Œuvres et Lettres, Pléiade, p. 272). The play is in large measure a working out of this hypothesis. Examination of the dramatic and symbolic functions of Jupiter reveals, however, that the wicked genius of Amphitryon is no spirit, but reason itself. Jupiter is not a hidden puppet-master, but an active participant in human affairs, seeking human ends and not just the pleasure of deluding people. His descent into the world of ordinary mortals provides the occasion for the dramatic action of the comedy: a world which has been well and securely ordered until then suddenly cracks open. Everything in it becomes potential illusion; nothing can be relied on any more; a man is no longer even sure if he is himself or what he is. Jupiter is a liberating force, dramatically and symbolically. His presence dissolves the world of conventional realities and reveals a new world of possibilities, but these possibilities never achieve substance or consistency, and in the end there is no brave new world, only the old one with all its patterns destroyed. The colorful kingdom of fantasy is suddenly abandoned at the end of the play and we find ourselves back in the world of everyday empirical reality. Jupiter, the brilliant magician, turns out to be an ordinary grand seigneur. All that has happened after all is that a false order has been exposed, vanquished, and replaced by blatant disorder. The rule of Amphitryon has yielded to the rule of Jupiter. But whereas Amphitryon ruled in the firm conviction that the order of things, which happened to suit him very well, was a necessary and just order, Jupiter is without illusions. There is no rational order, no just rule for him. There is only the right of the strongest. Jupiter's justification of his own violence at the end of the play is an obvious and deliberate piece of irony on the part of the author.