bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The American: A Reinterpretation
Authors: Clair John A.
Published: February 2007

Apart from the fact that Henry James may not have wished to create such a black and white situation—the innocent American lamb thrown to the continental wolves of Paris—in his novel The American it is possible that the author himself may have expected a less simple interpretation of his novel than that which such scholars and critics as Joseph W. Beach, Constance Rourke, and even F. O. Mathiessen have afforded it. To accept the popular interpretation of the work as a rather transparent story of the victimization of a “good na-tured” American by a Borgia-like Parisian family seems to involve an oversight of much explicit and implicit information in the novel, which suggests that Mrs. Bread, the true mother of Claire de Cintre, was a blackmailer claiming both Newman and the Marquise de Bellegarde as victims; that Newman, by dint of his characteristic American naïveté and his opacity as a judge of character, was completely “taken in” by her ruse; and that Claire's refusal to accept Newman in marriage came as a direct result of her having been informed by the Bellegardes of her true parents—the old Marquis and his “meanest of mistresses,” Catherine Bread.
Two Treatments of a Subject: Proust's “La Regarder Dormir” and Valéry's La Dormeuse
Authors: Grubbs Henry A.
Published: February 2007

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.
The Method of Arnold's Essays in Criticism
Authors: Donovan Robert A.
Published: February 2007

The first series of Essays in Criticism was one of four works growing directly out of the lectures which Matthew Arnold delivered at Oxford between 1857 and 1867. The so-called “inaugural series,” on the “modern element” in literature, survives only in fragments—one whole lecture and part of another. A second series, on the translation of Homer, was begun even before the first was completed, and the lectures on Celtic literature wound up Arnold's professorship, except for the valedictory “Culture and Its Enemies.” Crowded into the interstices of this ambitious program were the pieces which were to make up the bulk of the Essays in Criticism of 1865.
Whitman's “Black Lucifer”: Some Possible Sources
Authors: Kahn Sholom J.
Published: February 2007

In the first edition of Leaves of Grass occur these puzzling lines, kept in the third edition, but later eliminated:

Now Lucifer was not dead ... or if he was I am his sorrowful terrible heir;

I have been wronged. ... I am oppressed. ... I hate him that oppresses me,

I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.

Damn him! how he does defile me,

How he informs against my brother and sister and takes pay for their blood,

How he laughs when I look down the bend after the steamboat that carries away my woman.
Sin, Free Will, and “Pessimism” in Hawthorne
Authors: Fairbanks Henry G.
Published: February 2007

Any survey of Hawthorne's life makes it apparent that he was not a churchgoing man. On the other hand, a study of Hawthorne's works discloses that he was a religious man in whose outlook the Christian heritage was cardinal. With respect to its traditional theology he was more orthodox than not: With the basic spirit of Christianity, as it informed values and viewpoints, he was thoroughly imbued. With its institutionalized forms, however, he had no direct affiliation after his youth. It is true that his environment was still Christian externally and that he could draw upon the reserves of Christian culture accumulated by centuries of tradition in America and Europe. But the burden of his faith rested heavily upon himself.
Some Unpublished Works of de Quincey
Authors: Byrns Richard H.
Published: February 2007

At intervals, various unpublished articles written by Thomas De Quincey have been unearthed and published. One group which seems never to have received the attention of scholars consists of four articles in manuscript that were part of the collection presented in 1942 to the National Library of Scotland by William Blackwood and Sons. The articles were docketed together with the inscription “four manuscripts of De Quincey, n.d.” and were thus catalogued under that heading.
Hazlitt's Preference for Tragedy
Authors: Albrecht W. P.
Published: February 2007

Tragedy has generally been considered a greater literary achievement than comedy. Aristotle, with his emphasis on seriousness, purgation, and characters better than actual people, has lent authority to this preference, although he does not clearly award tragedy the higher place. More explicit in their choice of tragedy over comedy are Sidney, Milton, Addison, Johnson, and Arnold. A modern critic, Joseph Wood Krutch, has called tragedy “the greatest and the most difficult of arts”; and a modern philosopher, Bertrand Russell, has called it “of all the arts … the proudest, the most triumphant … ”
Boswell's English in the London Journal
Authors: Sheldon Esther K.
Published: February 2007

A few years ago, when Professor Frederick A. Pottle's exciting edition of Boswell's London Journal was published, many people, stimulated to an unusual reading experience by the intimate glimpses of eighteenth-century life and manners, had their first taste of eighteenth-century English. Other readers refreshed old college memories as they encountered Boswell's “quaint” constructions. Still others—English scholars, subscribers to PMLA —must have been struck once more with the differences between eighteenth-century English and modern English, particularly with the many grammatical constructions which would be unacceptable now even in the most informal language of the educated. No one reading the book could have failed to be interested in Boswell's English.
Spenser and Timotheus: A Musical Gloss on E. K.'s Gloss
Authors: Carpenter Nan
Published: February 2007

The October Eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender is based largely upon Platonic ideas about music and poetry, especially ideas of the divine inspiration of poetry and the effect of music upon man's soul. Piers's verses praising Cuddie for his great gifts as a poet refer to this power:

Soone as thou gynst to sette thy notes in frame,

O how the rurall routes to thee doe cleaue:

Seemeth thou dost their soule of sence bereaue,

All as the shepheard, that did fetch his dame

From Plutos balefull bowre wi thou ten leaue:

His musicks might the hellish hound did tame.
Theme as Ornament in Anglo-Saxon Poetry
Authors: Diamond Robert E.
Published: February 2007

It Seems now to be generally agreed that Anglo-Saxon poetry is different from modern poetry not only in verse form and subject matter but is an entirely different kind of poetry. The basic study in the re-evaluation of Old English poetic technique is Francis P. Magoun, Jr's “Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry,” which applies to Old English poetry the discoveries of Milman Parry and Albert Lord about formulaic diction in Homeric poetry and in the oral poetry of Jugoslavia. Subsequent studies which further explore formulaic diction in Anglo-Saxon poetry are Magoun's “Bede's Story of Caedman: The Case History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer” and an earlier paper of my own, “The Diction of the Signed Poems of Cynewulf.” These articles focus attention chiefly on the formula, which usually occupies the space of one verse or one measure of a verse. Professor Magoun also opened up the problem of the theme as a larger formulaic unit in “The Theme of the Beasts of Battle in Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” suggesting that the theme is essentially a convention, which the poet might call upon when he had a battle to narrate. The wolf, eagle, and raven do not advance the action: they are essentially ornament. It seems likely that such poets depended less on what moderns usually think of as inspiration than on a large stock of formulaic diction and of set pieces or themes.
Allegorical Implications of Artifice in Spenser's Faerie Queene
Authors: Guth Hans P.
Published: February 2007

Some Conception, explicit or implied, of the relationship between art and nature is basic to the writer's as well as the critic's view of his own function. But because of the fundamental nature of our own bias in this matter we find it difficult to recover the attitude toward art and nature held by a writer of an earlier period. In the case of the Renaissance, and specifically of Spenser, much of our difficulty stems from now widely held views of art and literature as a spontaneous, vital, organic flowering forth of nature conceived in its ideal potentiality, of literary insight as a synthesizing vision in which the aesthetic and the moral blend, of imaginative creation as the opposite of deliberate contrivance, “cold” artificiality, and external ornament. In accordance with such views, C. S. Lewis, in his discussion of the Faerie Queene in The Allegory of Love, speaks of the “exquisite health” of Spenser's imagination; he says that “most commonly” Spenser understands Nature as “unimpeded growth from within to perfection, neither checked by accident nor sophisticated by art”; he claims that with insignificant exceptions Spenser “uses art to suggest the artificial in its bad sense,” employing the central episodes of the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis to develop a crucial antithesis of sterile, deceptive, sinister artifice and fruitful, naive, genuine nature. I would like to show that Spenser's attitude toward deliberate artifice is considerably more positive, or at least ambivalent, than Mr. Lewis claims and that Spenser is much less consciously aware of art and nature as polar opposites than a modern reader is likely to expect.
Boswell's Denominational Dilemma
Authors: Stewart Mary Margaret
Published: February 2007

“Those who remark their religious experiences are generally looked on with Ridicule;” wrote James Boswell, “but very unreasonably, for they are experimental philosophers upon the most important subject.” No one can read BoswelPs Life of Johnson or any of the Boswell Journals and letters without recognizing the vital place religious thought held in his life, for he was a man who did remark his religious experiences with interest and without embarrassment. An outline of his religious life demonstrates the profound revolutions and constant turmoil of his religious thought and indicates the lasting impression religion made on the man James Boswell.
Significant Points of Comparison Between The Biblical Criticism of Thomas and Matthew Arnold
Authors: Williamson Eugene L.
Published: February 2007

This Paper had its origin in three main considerations: (1) my observation of the many references to Thomas Arnold's ideas and works in Matthew Arnold's familiar correspondence; (2) my recognition of many striking parallels in the Biblical criticism of the two men; and (3) my gradual realization that the great wealth of scholarship about the Arnolds contained no detailed attempt to indicate the precise nature of Matthew's indebtedness to his father's ideas about the Bible. The unlikeliness of any unique indebtedness is, of course, patent when one considers the wide diffusion of liberal religious ideas in mid-nineteenth-century England and, more particularly, when he remembers Matthew's expressions of interest on various occasions in the work of Spinoza, John Smith (the Cambridge Platonist), S. T. Coleridge, C. C. J. Bunsen, Renan, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, and Benjamin Jowett. Nevertheless, the inherent probability of at least a contributory influence, a predisposition to accept similar ideas from other sources, appeared to justify a comparative study of the criticism of the Arnolds.
Shaw's Debt to Scribe
Authors: Stanton Stephen S.
Published: February 2007

It is Now generally known that Bernard Shaw had no love for Augustin-Eugène Scribe (1791-1861), father of the French pièce bien faite (“well-made” play), or Scribe's well-known disciple Victorien Sardou, whose technical bravura Shaw scornfully dubbed “Sardoodledom.” Perhaps his most outspoken recorded condemnation of the prolific playwright and his factory of collaborators is this (undated) outburst to Archibald Henderson: “Why the devil should a man write like Scribe when he can write like Shakespeare or Molière, Aristophanes or Euripides? Who was Scribe that he should dictate to me or anyone else how a play should be written?” To be sure, a good many literary critics of the past century have disparaged this form of drama, combining a complex plot with a maximum of theatrical ingenuity and an absolute minimum of thought. But Shaw's call to arms against the well-made play and its popular and successful founder echoed so loudly over so long a period that it could not help but arouse many disinterested spectators. No quarter would be, nor could be, given to this mountebank, this cheap magician of the stage.
The Genesis of the Involuntary Memory in Proust's Early Works
Authors: Jackson Elizabeth R.
Published: February 2007

That Curious psychological phenomenon, the involuntary memory, is not an original discovery of Proust. Nor does he claim it as such, since, in Le Temps retrouvé, he himself mentions Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, and Nerval as predecessors. Critical investigations have since amplified this list. What is original, however, is Proust's use of it: only he conceived of its many facets—poetic, dramatic, philosophic—and exploited its possibilities by incorporating it centrally in the substance of a novel. Within his own work the involuntary memory underwent a lengthy evolution, appearing in embryonic form from the outset in Les Plaisirs et les jours and recurring, progressively more refined, in all subsequent writing, but not fully modeled nor centrally placed until the final work. In La Recherche three separate forms of the involuntary memory are delineated. There is a dream memory operating in a state of full or partial somnolence found principally in the “Ouverture” and in La Prisonnière where the senses and imaginative powers pursue a course unchecked by reason or will, where the evocations are fleeting, vague in contour, limited in significance and never surprising. There is a sentimental memory evoking a person once loved by the narrator (Gilberte, his grandmother, Albertine), in effect resuscitating that person since the narrator experiences her as present, as a living reality within him, surrounded by the full force of all old emotional ties. It is operative only while some trace of the original affection remains and affords no pleasure but rather acute and often prolonged sorrow, since the circumstances necessary for such recollection are so precarious (love being ephemeral). There is finally an esthetic memory, far more dependable than the sentimental memory in its life-preserving powers, and also richer quantitatively and qualitatively, recalling and bringing back to life whole worlds (connected with a period such as Combray, Balbec, Venice, or with an instant) framed and colored by the narrator's past aspirations. Its mechanism is uniquely poetic and dramatic. It presents a highly specific content—the affective comprehension of a particular place and moment. It causes an intense and durable pleasure and contains the answers to the narrator's questions.

The present analysis will trace the emergence of these forms along with other basic features of Proust's affective memory: its involuntary character, its structural function, its intricate mechanism including unusual impetus-sensations, original and beautiful content, striking subsidiary effects.
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: A Revaluation
Authors: Evans Oliver
Published: February 2007

When “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” first appeared in Esquire (August 1936), it attracted immediate attention. It was promptly reprinted (in Best American Short Stories of 1937) by Edward J. O'Brien, who, praising it in his preface, remarked: “Nothing is irrelevant. The artist's energy is rigidly controlled for his purpose.” Since then it has been anthologized many times, and now it is probably safe to say that, with the possible exception of “The Killers,” none of Hemingway's stories has enjoyed greater popularity than this one. Hemingway's own opinion was that it was “about as good as any” of his shorter works.

In the last ten or fifteen years, however, “The Snows” has come in for considerable disparagement, mainly from the so-called New Critics and their followers. In 1945 Ray B. West, Jr., wrote in The Sewanee Review: “While I consider this story one of Hemingway's best … it is spoiled for me by the conventionality of its leading symbol: the White-capped mountain as the ‘House of God’.” In 1950 Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, referring to it in The House of Fiction as a “magnificent failure,” complained that it lacked “dramatic force” and objected that the symbolism was not properly integrated with the action. And in 1956 William Van O'Connor characterized it as a “rather puzzling story” and expressed dissatisfaction with the ending.
Notes, Documents, and Critical Comment
Authors: Brooks Roger L.
Published: February 2007

As Early as 1860 Matthew Arnold began to record in his unpublished diaries (Rare Book Room, Yale University) his income from writing. The financial entries are brief; for the most part, they include the source of the money, the amount received, and the date, but not the titles of the contributions for which the money was paid. These accounts have been helpful in suggesting the identity of a large number of anonymous and pseudonymous articles contributed by Arnold to the Pall Mall Gazette; they have, however, been scarcely used for identifying his contributions to other periodicals.
Religion and Literary Scholarship in France
Authors: Peyre Henri
Published: February 2007

It is doubtful whether there is any modern literature, even that of Spain or of Russia, to which the many questions concerning religion are so central as they are in France. The oft-quoted saying of Nietzsche, in The Dawn of Day, is not a paradoxical assertion put forward by a German admirer of French culture: “It cannot be denied that the French have been the most Christian nation in the world, not because the devotion of masses in France has been greater than elsewhere, but because those Christian ideals which are most difficult to realize have become incarnated there, instead of merely remaining fancies, intentions or imperfect beginnings.” Nietzsche adduced as examples not only Pascal or Fénelon, and French Protestants, but free thinkers as well, and he praised the latter “because they had to fight against truly great men and not, like the free thinkers of other nations, merely against dogmas and sublime abortions.” A student of French literature who had no familiarity with the religious background and traditions, no interest in the many controversies which have opposed one sect of Catholics to another, Catholics to Protestants, believers to unbelievers, clericals to anti-clericals, would be crippled at every stage.
Tristan the Artist in Gottfried's Poem
Authors: Jackson W. T. H.
Published: February 2007

Although the thinkers of the Middle Ages il did not develop any theories about the function of the artist which can be compared with those of Plato or the Romantics, they had definite views on art and its relation to society. Art in its broadest sense had for them an ethical and social function which inevitably became part of the grand design of the universe. None of the great writers of romance is without consciousness of this function. In the creation of the Arthurian romance in particular they were fully aware of their responsibilities, but they interpreted them in differing ways. It seems to me that Gottfried von Strassburg realizes most fully the intellectual aspects of his responsibility and takes most note of the esthetic theories which justified the arts, and in particular music, as beneficial for Christian men and women and as leading towards that harmony of the spirit with the eternal which was regarded as the highest good.
The Central Episode in Chaucer's Torilus
Authors: apRoberts Robert P.
Published: February 2007

In the last twenty years or so the rehabilitation of Criseyde has proceeded triumphantly until she seems nearly reinstated as the figure she was before her denigration at the hands of Henryson and the Elizabethans. The contrast, for example, between the treatments given her by A. S. Cook in the early years of the century and by her most recent appraisor, John Bayley, shows how far this reinstatement has gone. But despite the apparent victory, here and there remain strong points, untaken pockets of resistance left behind by the victorious forces in their onward sweep, where the views of the old orthodoxy still prevail and from which a counterattack could be mounted. The most important of these is, I believe, the still prevailing misconception of the central episode leading to Criseyde's surrender. Baldly stated, the orthodox belief is this: that Criseyde went to Pandarus' house expecting to surrender herself then and there to Troilus. The process of arriving at this belief is usually simple. Examining the episode at Deiphebus' house, the critic argues, first, that Criseyde knows surrender to be the ultimate outcome of her acceptance of Troilus as a lover; second, that she must understand surrender as the purpose of the meeting which Pandarus promises to arrange. Next, the critic notes that Criseyde did expect to find her lover at her uncle's house when Pandarus finally invited her for the evening; he then hurdles over some six hundred of the most minutely subtle lines Chaucer ever wrote and arrives at the surrender itself; and he clinches his belief by quoting his favorite and eagerly anticipated passage:
El Arabismo Romántico de Estébanez Calderón, “El Solitario”
Authors: de Cirre M. Manzanares
Published: February 2007

El Arabista EspañOL Emilio García Gomez, en su libro Silla del moro y nuevas escenas andaluzas (Madrid, 1948), recrea la visión que Estébanez Calderón tenía de Andalucía. Pero pasa por alto completamente la cuestión de la influencia que la atracción que Estébanez sentía por el período de la dominación árabe en España pudiera tener en tal visión. Y sin embargo creo sin duda que su afición a la cultura y la literatura árabes puso un sello en su producción literaria. Por otra parte, su afán de proselitismo hizo tantos adeptos a este campo como las enseñanzas de más reputados maestros de su generación.
Dickinson's Revision of “Two Butterflies Went Out at Noon”
Authors: Matchett William H.
Published: February 2007

Among the poems Emily Dickinson wrote in her most productive year, 1862, are two which gain particular interest from the fact that she returned to them at a considerably later date. Comparison of the early and late versions offers revealing insights into her development. To her poem about a hummingbird, “Within my Garden rides a Bird / Upon a single Wheel—”, she returned, probably early in 1879, to produce a much better poem on the same subject: “A Route of Evanescence / With a revolving Wheel. …” Condensing twenty lines to eight, she transformed a slack little narrative about the bird, her dog and herself, into a brilliant image of the bird's visual impact. Cutting out the personal pronoun, the dog and the philosophic debate, she managed to convey directly her sense of domestic miracle. The two poems appear separately, as numbers 500 and 1463, in Johnson's three-volume edition of The Poems (1955) and thus are taken over into his recent one-volume edition of The Complete Poems (1960).
Zola's Use of Color Imagery in Germinal
Authors: Walker Philip
Published: February 2007

Germinal is an almost perfect example of what Zola occasionally called his “lie”—his paradoxical manner of achieving at one and the same time both a convincing documentary realism and a strongly symbolic and subjective presentation of reality. Nowhere can this be more plainly seen than in his brilliant, often surprising, use of color. Obviously he owes much in this as in other respects to such predecessors as Flaubert, but he also, more than has generally been realized, shares in the spirit of his own period. While his color terms and images always have a naturalistic basis, the art with which he distributes them throughout the narrative is quite as stylized and patterned in its own way as a canvas by Cézanne. His symbolic treatment of color, on the other hand, suggests affinities with the symbolists, who were rising to a certain prominence in Paris in 1884, the year Germinal was written. Not only does he simplify and organize his colors into a scheme consistent with his dramatic subject, a great strike; he also invests them like leitmotifs with associations expressive of all three levels of meaning of the novel—the dramatic cadre of the miners' strike, the prophetic historical étude of the struggle between capital and labor, and, finally, the underlying philosophical vision of man and nature. Often he gives a single color or group of colors at least three separate meanings which are interwoven and interrelated within the powerful unity of the whole. And, in the process, he transforms, in this and other ways, the colors of ordinary reality into the often far more intense, significant, and emotive colors of dreams, hallucinations, and apocalyptic visions.
What Happens in “Mrs. Bathurst”
Authors: Gilbert Elliot L.
Published: February 2007

Mrs. Bathurst“ may not be the most puzzling of Rudyard Kipling's ‘obscure’ stories, but it has surely become the one most puzzled over by admirers and critics alike. A number of articles have been printed about it in the pages of the Kipling Journal, and many of the important Kipling critics have alluded, a bit tentatively perhaps, to this fine story—Edmund Wilson calls it a ”remarkable story“ and then hurries on—but so far no one has ever really accounted for what happens in ”Mrs. Bathurst“ or has suggested fully what the story is about. There has been much interest in characters and incidents, of course, but almost no consideration of theme. A good deal has been made of Kipling's fondness for cryptic utterance, the implication being that ”Mrs. Bathurst“ is an elaborate puzzle game in which the reader must try to determine, from artfully concealed clues, what the characters in the story are really up to. Other commentators have dealt with Kipling's method of composition, his habit of repeatedly and drastically cutting his manuscripts in general, and the manuscript of this story in particular. C.S. Lewis, among others, has suggested that the momentum of cutting ”Mrs. Bathhurst“ may have carried Kipling, all unaware, past the point of intelligibility and that the obscurity of the story may therefore be accidental. What no critic has reasoned, however, is that Kipling's struggle for compression and his pruning away of representational elements in ”Mrs. Bathurst,“ to permit concentration on other values, justifies the closest possible reading of the text and makes the critic responsible not only for clarifying the surface action of the story but also for discovering the significance of that action. Such a detailed study of ”Mrs. Bathurst“ reveals a powerful tale embodying one of Kipling's profoundest visions of life and composed in a style far enough ahead of its time to account for the story's reputation as a perennial puzzler.
Camden, Daniel, and Shakespeare
Authors: Michel Laurence , Johnston George Burke
Published: February 2007

Mr. G. B. Johnston's note, “Camden, Shakespeare, and Young Henry Percy” (PMLA, lxxvi, June 1961, 298), while citing Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars as one warrant for Shakespeare's making the forty-year-old Hotspur a contemporary of Prince Henry, finds that Camden's Britannia was behind them both, and was the most likely source; and that the “revised” and translated version of Britannia in 1610 “seems to be recalling the popular play” in adding “an extra flourish on Henry Percy.” This system of priorities is doubtless valid in general; but the further implication—that Shakespeare and Camden were closely linked in the matter, taking their cues for the delineation of Hotspur directly from each other—does not seem as likely. An examination of Mr. Johnston's evidence indicates, rather, Daniel's continued function as middleman in the complex.
The Vespasian Psalter Gloss: Original or Copy?
Authors: Kuhn Sherman M.
Published: February 2007

The Interlinear gloss of the Vespasian Psalter (in British Museum MS. Cotton Vespasian A. 1) is generally regarded as a Mercian text; indeed, it seems to be our best written record of the one Old English dialect which comes closest of any to being the direct ancestor of the standard language of modern England. Where so important a text is concerned, we should like to know as much as possible about the date, the provenience, and all other matters having any bearing upon our linguistic interpretation of the written symbols. One of the more crucial questions at the present time is whether the gloss is an original work of the ninth century or a ninth-century copy of an earlier (? eighth-century) gloss. It is important that we know whether this text represents the more or less homogeneous dialect of a single period or whether it is a mixture of earlier and later forms.
The Romaunt of the Rose and Source Manuscripts
Authors: Sutherland Ronald
Published: February 2007

The Authorship of the Romaunt of the Rose, subject of ardent controversy for nearly a century, can at last be established beyond any significant measure of doubt, for there is a new and highly reliable kind of evidence to show that at least two men were responsible for the existing partial translation of the famed Roman de la rose into Middle English. More than 200 MSS of the original French poem, composed by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in the thirteenth century, have been catalogued by the late Ernest Langlois. The French scholar divided these MSS into three main groups, I, II, and III, and into subgroups or families marked by capital letters; while individual MSS he designated by the family letter plus a lower-case letter, Ab, He, Ha, and so on. In consequence of Langlois' great work, scholars have been enabled to compare the ME Romaunt with the variant readings of the MSS of its French original, and as will be demonstrated below, such comparison throws revealing light upon the facts of the Romaunt's composition.
Foscolo and Lord Holland's “Letters of Petrarch”
Authors: Wilkins Ernest H.
Published: February 2007

After Foscolo's arrival in England in 1817 he was soon made welcome at Holland House, the palatial home of Lord Holland—a home distinguished by the generous kindliness of its master and by the richness of its library. Among the residents of the great establishment were two Italians with whom Foscolo became well acquainted: Serafino Buonaiuti, a factotum who assisted in the library, and Giuseppe Binda, a protégé who at times, at least, rendered secretarial service.
Milton: Political Beliefs and Polemical Methods, 1659–60
Authors: Lewalski Barbara Kiefer
Published: February 2007

Milton's polemical tracts of the Puritan Revolution have long offered difficulty to scholars, and these difficulties are intensified in the eight pamphlets which he wrote during the chaotic closing years of the interregnum. One problem concerns Milton's bewildering shifts of political allegiance among the various parties and models of government: he first acquiesced in the protectorate of Richard Cromwell, then denounced protectorian government and eulogized the restored Rump Parliament and the commonwealth, then defended an army government which deposed the Rump, then demanded the Rump's return, then offered plans for perpetuating three different legislatures in power or about to come to power, and at one point proposed the establishment of a temporary monarchy or protectorate. Furthermore, during this brief period he restated two contradictory theories of government developed in earlier tracts—the popular-sovereignty theory, asserting the right of every free people to choose, alter, and depose their government, and an “aristocratic” theory justifying the “worthy minority” in imposing and perpetuating its rule over an “unworthy” majority. Also intensified is the ambiguity, long present in Milton's tracts, concerning the relation of regenerate to the civil government: Milton's ecclesiastical pamphlets of 1659 define a sharp separation of church and state in terms of their laws, concerns, and jurisdictions, but in other works of this period he appears to assert the contradictory doctrine that the “Saints” should enjoy special political privileges.
Garrick's Zara
Authors: Bergmann Fred L.
Published: February 2007

In recent works on eighteenth-century drama and theatrical practices, Aaron Hill's Zara has received passing attention because of its notable longevity. The play did make theatrical history of a sort in that it was one of only three which were presented for more than twenty consecutive years during David Garrick's tenure at Drury Lane as manager (1747–76). Zara, with its twenty-three consecutive seasons, was surpassed only by Hamlet and Benjamin Hoadly's Suspicious Husband in unbroken performance, both of the latter, having achieved twenty-nine consecutive seasons. But mere longevity and consecutiveness of performance cannot force the play upon the attention of today's students of the history of the drama. What perhaps can, however, is the hitherto unrecorded fact that for a considerable portion of its history in Garrick's theater and for years afterward it was not Hill's play but Garrick's own adaptation that was popular. Furthermore, it is an adaptation which sheds interesting light on Garrick's dramatic methods and increases his stature as a careful reviser of older plays.
Beatrice's “Pernicious Mistake” in The Cenci
Authors: Whitman Robert F.
Published: February 2007

Ever since it was first published, Shelley's The Cenci has met with antagonism and misunderstanding. In the original instance this reaction was in part due to a prudish horror at the subject matter, which an enlightened modern reader finds hard to comprehend. However, continued resistance to the play, characterized by grudging admission that it has poetic merits but doesn't quite “come off,” suggests that something more than the theme of incest has dulled or blurred its tragic impact. One clue to The Cenci's failure to gain acceptance as “the best tragedy of modern times,” as Mary Shelley called it, might be found in its varied and often conflicting interpretations by critics and casual readers alike. That the play should be ambiguous to anyone would doubtless have puzzled Shelley. “It is,” he told Trelawny, “a work of art; it is not colored by my feelings nor obscured by my metaphysics.” It would seem, however, that his faith in his own lucidity was not justified.
Verlaine's “Art Poétique” Re-Examined
Authors: Wright Alfred J.
Published: February 2007

Verlaine may be one of the least intellectual of French poets, yet his “Art poétique” finds its way regularly into anthologies of French literature as the perfect symbolist counterpart of Gautier's “L'art,” the manifesto Of the Parnassians. “De la musique avant toute chose” is the advertised motto of the symbolist school of the eighties and nineties, just as the marmorean ideal was of the Parnassians of the sixties and seventies, indeed of Verlaine himself in the Poèmes saturniens (“Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Vénus de Milo?”). As in the case of any such well-worn document, there are two points of view from which it may be studied: (1) the intent of the creator of the document and (2) the overlay of interpretation which has developed around it. Let us attempt to render service to Verlaine by trying to determine his own meaning, through close examination of this and other works of the poet, as distinct from the meaning which his followers and associates read into this little “chanson.”
The Watcher Betrayed and The Fatal Woman: Some Recurring Patterns in Zola
Authors: Lapp John C.
Published: February 2007

When critics compare an author's early works with those of his maturity, it is usually to emphasize his final achievement. In one extreme case, such a comparison has even been urged as a source of moral uplift for struggling authors. When Charpentier brought out in 1880 a new printing of Zola's first novel, La confession de Claude, a critic advised young writers to read it and take heart, since the fact that the author of Nana could have written anything so abysmally bad twentyyears before proved beyond question that lamentable beginnings did not mean inevitable failure. Too seldom have critical comparisons of this kind gone beyond this demonstrative act, and one might reasonably question their worth when they fail to do so, for after all, if a work is a masterpiece should not that fact be discernible from the work itself?
“Death in the Woods” and the Artist's Self in Sherwood Anderson
Authors: Lawry Jon S.
Published: February 2007

Sherwood Anderson's autobiographical works attest his continuing absorption with the incidents and the form of his short story “Death in the Woods.” In his Memoirs he says that he tried to write the story “a dozen times over as many years.” It appears in a tentative early version in Tar. Many of its episodes are used in a seldom-read fragment entitled “Father Abraham,” which supposedly developed the life of Lincoln; indeed, the story's materials occupy a dominant position in that strange, often autobiographical work. Elsewhere in his Memoirs (pp. 310–312), he relates the incident of the dogs' death ritual as having happened to himself. We may doubt the literal truth of that account, since Anderson himself repeatedly questions whether the event was fact or dream; in any case, however, the story was filled, for Anderson, with great personal and artistic significance.
Literary Satire in the House of Fame
Authors: David Alfred
Published: February 2007

The House of Fame is the most curiously constructed of Chaucer's works. Although the poem has all the trappings of a typical love-vision, it deals with a heterogeneous body of subject matter that often seems only remotely connected with love. Love is the dominant theme of the first book, which retells the story of Dido and Æneas, and the purpose of Chaucer's trip to the house of Fame is presumably to hear love tidings. Yet the second book is taken up with the scientific lessons of the eagle, while the third is concerned with Fame viewed first as the maker of reputations and secondly in her role as the disseminator of rumor. How is one to reconcile these themes and make sense out of the haphazard way in which Chaucer has strung them together? Of course, one can dismiss the problem as a case of poor artistry, and that is precisely what many critics have done. Dorothy Everett, for instance, writes of the poem, “As a whole it is not a success, and was perhaps left unfinished for that reason.” However, the poem is so very successful in part and so very nearly complete (the ending, for that matter, may have been suppressed) that it is at least worth speculating whether the failure to make sense out of the whole is our own instead of Chaucer's.
A Shakespeare Sonnet Group
Authors: Stirling Brents
Published: February 2007

In Thorpe's 1609 Quarto there are signs of a “lost” Shakespeare poem in eleven sonnet stanzas, six still together (63–68) and five displaced (19, 21, 100–101, 105). An attempt to restore this poem ends, of course, in rearranging the Sonnets, a practice which has earned its questionable reputation. True, the “original” sonnet order itself is questionable, and modest revision of it, such as Tucker Brooke's, can be plausible. But we should not forget the free-ranging cryptographers whose persistent tampering with Thorpe's text has led to a defensive presumption in its favor. Whether my own efforts lessen this presumption, or simply justify it, is not for me to say. I have tried, however, to introduce some rather stiff standards for rearrangement which are hardly designed to stir up new activity. And so long as mischief does not threaten, perhaps we can afford to be a little more realistic about the 1609 edition, a text without authority for sequence except where the sonnet order clearly justifies itself. Certainly this text is not made authentic by notorious failure to improve it; Hyder Rollins, who did not suffer rearrangers gladly, was very clear on that point (Variorum edition, ii, 83).
The Concept of the Second Eve in Paradise Lost
Authors: Pecheux Mary Christopher
Published: February 2007

Most readers of the account of Raphael's visit to Eden in Book v of Paradise Lost center their interest on the exchange of greetings between Raphael and Adam, which illustrates the sense of order and hierarchy so significant in the poem. The importance for both theme and structure of the angel's address to Eve, which immediately follows, has, however, been overlooked. Eve rises to greet her heavenly guest, and the narration continues:

On whom the Angel HaileBestowd, the holy salutation us'dLong after to blest Marie, second Eve.(Paradise Lost v.385-387)
Doctor Johnson and William Law
Authors: Balderston Katharine C.
Published: February 2007

Everyone who knows the life of Johnson remembers his revelation to Boswell of what first set him “thinking in earnest of religion,” after a youth spent mostly in indifference toward it, and in lax talking against it. This laxity, he said, “lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford I took up ‘Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life,‘ expecting to find it a dull book, (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.” Everyone accepts this as a significant event in Johnson's life, and nearly every book written since either about Johnson or Law repeats it. There has been, however, a curious indifference among Johnsonian scholars toward examining its significance, or considering the possibility that Law's influence on him may have extended beyond this admittedly important event in his young manhood. Mrs. Thrale was the only person I know of in his own day who suspected a real debt to Law in his writings, and since his death, with the exception of those critics who have surmised an influence of Law's “portraits” on some of Johnson's character-sketches in the Rambler, there have been, I believe, only two who have seen Law's influence at work on the mature Johnson.
Byron and the Story of Francesca da Rimini
Authors: Beaty Frederick L.
Published: February 2007

Few stories captured and held Byron's imagination as tenaciously as that of Francesca da Rimini. In addition to its association with Dante, who became one of his favorite poets, there was evidently something about the tragedy of love involving a married woman, her husband, and her husband's brother that Byron found especially fascinating. The many amorous triangles in his poetical narratives, as well as the exaltation of romantic love sanctified not by religion but rather by sincere emotion, show that he was temperamentally sympathetic with the basic elements of Francesca's adulterous passion. In his customary way of assimilating whatever he admired, he even identified himself and his halfsister, Augusta Leigh, with Dante's unfortunate lovers of Rimini. After frequent recourse to the story of Francesca, Byron associated himself with it to such an extent that he interwove his own autobiography with it and, I believe, reflected the original tragedy as a strangely configured, though curiously revealing, tragicomedy in the first canto of Don Juan.
Villette and the Life of the Mind
Authors: Colby Robert A.
Published: February 2007

Missbronte has written a hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel … one of the most utterly disagreeable books I ever read,“ wrote Matthew Arnold to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, shortly after the first publication of Villette. The novel struck Arnold mainly as a case of morbid religiosity. Only a month later another critic, George Henry Lewes, writing more from the point of view of the amateur psychologist, said of the very same novel: ”It is a work of astonishing power and passion. From its pages there issues an influence of truth as healthful as a mountain breeze.“ These are typical of the antithetical responses that Villette has always evoked.
Hawthorne's Bulky Puritans
Authors: Ragan James F.
Published: February 2007

In 1944 Lawrence Sargent Hall (Hawthorne: Critic of Society, New Haven) showed that an important theme in Hawthorne's work was the progressivism of American democracy. No one has yet pointed out, though, how Hawthorne demonstrates this progress of American society by emblematizing the human body in his fiction. Yet emblematic bodies appear in all three of the major American novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance.
The Naturalistic Spirituality of Joris-Karl Huysmans
Authors: Lucy
Published: February 2007

In the year of Huysmans' death, 1907, Léon Daudet wrote of him: “Il a jeté un pont entre le spiritualisme chrétien et le vocabulaire moderne.” In a brief panegyric paper, the critic merely defends Huysmans' continued use of a naturalistic style in his later Catholic novels, without analyzing the idea to any extent, either historically or stylistically.
Hermann Broch's Early Writings
Authors: Cassirer Sidonie
Published: February 2007

Hermann Broch was already in his forties when his first novel, part of the trilogy Die Schlafwandler, appeared in 1931.1 One continuing result of the prominence which this work brought to Broch has been an almost complete neglect of his few earlier writings. Thus, Erich Kahler in his introductory remarks in the Gesammelte Werke merely indicates: “Die Anfange seiner Dichtung—Novellen und Gedichte—reichen … bis in die Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs zurück” (Gedichte, 1953, p. 8). He omits Broch's earliest published poem, Mathematisches Mysterium (1913) from his selection of poetry. The two volumes of essays of the collected works, Dichten und Erkennen, and Erkennen und Handeln, edited by Hannah Arendt (1955) also contain no writings prior to Die Schlafwandler. The volume of Briefe, edited by Robert Pick (1957), perhaps because of lack of material, follows this pattern, going back only to 1929.