bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Dramatic Context and Meaning of Hamlet's “To Be or Not To Be” Soliloquy
Authors: Newell Alex
Published: February 2007

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,Looking before and after, gave us notThat capability and god-like reasonTo fust in us unused.Hamlet

Discussions of Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy are almost as varied and divergent as interpretations of the play itself.1 Different understandings of the play and different formulations of Hamlet's character naturally affect interpretations of the soliloquy, but interpretations which fail to consider the dramatic context of the speech are surely faulty in critical procedure. Unfortunately, most discussions of the passage overlook or minimize the relevance of the surrounding action to it, an error that may then lead to problems of coherent or thorough analysis of meaning. The fault of ignoring the dramatic context, for example, may be seen in G. Wilson Knight's approach to the speech in “Hamlet Reconsidered”:

The soliloquy (iii.i.56–88) at first seems reasonably clear, but difficulties multiply on close inspection. Commentators differ as to whether Hamlet's

To be, or not to be; that is the question
Johnson's Translation of Lobo
Authors: Gold Joel J.
Published: February 2007

For almost two centuries the nature and significance of Samuel Johnson's work in the translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia have been obscured. Both James Boswell and Sir John Hawkins denied that any traces of Johnson's style exist in the translation, and, following their lead, most scholars have been willing to accept at face value Johnson's explanation of what he had done:

In this Translation (if it may be so call'd) great Liberties have been taken, which, whether justifiable or not, shall be fairly confess'd, and let the Judicious part of Mankind pardon or condemn them.

In the first part the greatest Freedom has been used, in reducing the Narration into a narrow Compass, so that it is by no Means a Translation but an Epitome, in which whether every thing either useful or entertaining be comprised, the compiler is least qualified to determine.

In the Account of Abyssinia, and the Continuation, the Authors have been follow'd with more exactness, and as few Passages appeared either insignificant or tedious, few have been either shortened or omitted.

The Dissertations are the only part in which an exact Translation has been attempted, and even in those, Abstracts are sometimes given instead of literal Quotations, particularly in the first; and sometimes other parts have been contracted.
Song and Speech in The Metrics of George Herbert
Authors: Ostriker Alicia
Published: February 2007

Modern critics have stressed the element of paradox in Herbert's work. Herbert is homely, as has commonly been remarked, yet he is sophisticated. He appears spontaneous, yet his poems are scrupulously well-constructed. He is unsure of his union with God, yet he is sure. He doubts himself and he does not doubt. He seems to sing, and he seems to speak. Any new technical analysis of Herbert's verse should take these paradoxes, and the syntheses forged from them, into account. The present paper attempts to do so by isolating, in metrical terms, the apparently irreconcilable modes of “song” and “speech” which have been observed in Herbert by several critics, notably Joseph H. Summers; by discovering what conventions they derive from and how Herbert used and changed what he learned from others; and by showing how the prosodic causes serve as instruments of an overall poetic vision in The Temple. It will follow the division of theory, between the poet's song and his speech, although it should be remembered that Herbert himself made no such division. His most typical work contains both elements. Together they form his style.
Intellectual Love: The Second Theme of The Prelude
Authors: Christensen Francis
Published: February 2007

In the middle of Book XIV, the last book of The Prelude, Wordsworth indicates, rather belatedly, that the poem has two themes:

Imagination having been our theme,So also hath that intellectual Love.

My purpose in this paper is to examine this secondary theme of The Prelude. It is a theme that, under the name of benevolence, has been treated fairly adequately without reference to The Prelude by George W. Meyer in Wordsworth's Formative Years (1943). But unless I am seriously mistaken, no one has recognized, first, the content Wordsworth gives to the term or, second, the place he gives to the theme in the structure of The Prelude.
Flaubert's Concept of The Novel
Authors: Bart B. F.
Published: February 2007

Ever since the first appearance of Madame Bovary, Flaubert's concept of the novel has occasioned so many and such persistent misunderstandings that it seems well, now that a century or more has elapsed, to seek once again to understand what he did conceive the novel to be. Flaubert made numerous, isolated statements on the subject throughout his life, but these are scattered and in a sense always random, related only to the particular aspect of general theory which happened at the moment to be attracting his attention. It has even been urged that these should not and cannot be used to establish his concept of the novel. Moreover he did state that he execrated what was called realism; and he had no greater use for any of the other schools of his day, naturalism or impressionism or even those which baptized him their “chef d'école.”
Some New Hölderlin Decipherments From The “Homburger Folioheft”
Authors: George Emery E.
Published: February 2007

In 1943 Friedrich Beissner published the first volume of his critical edition of Hölderlin's works. This, together with the appearance of succeeding volumes, has reawakened interest in the problems that the poet's verse raises. Basic articles on text critical methodology and numerous reviews of the Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe have taken positions with regard to Wilhelm Hoffmann's claim that Beissner's edition represents “einen gereinigten, endgültigen und vollständigen Hölderlin-Text ..., den es bisher nicht gibt.” In this critical literature, now distributed over a round two decades, three main positions may be distinguished:—

(1) Enthusiastic and largely uncritical approbation has come from writers who have eagerly awaited the appearance of further volumes of the edition. These writers are in basic agreement with Hoffmann's above-cited claim. Emil Staiger describes the edition as “das größte philologische Meisterwerk, das die deutsche Literaturwissenschaft bis zum heutigen Tag zu verzeichnen hat, epochemachend in dem neuartigen Aufbau des kritischen Apparates, ... ” It is, according to Ernst Müller, a document of Beissner's ability to decipher “arg verdorbene, oftmals überschriebene und in scheinbar willkürlich zerstreutem Zustand vorhandene Manuskripte mit dem geschulten Auge des Philologen auf ihren Wort- und Silbenbestand hin. ... ” Manfred Windfuhr classifies Beissner's work as “der erste gelungene Versuch, das Werden der Dichtung Stufe um Stufe fortschreitend aufzuhellen, den Linien der Entstehung anschaulich zu folgen.” Lothar Kempter sees the justification of Beissner's edition as against the editions of Hellingrath and Zinkernagel first of all in the relative completeness of Beissner's contribution: “Jede Auswahl, nicht nur des endgültigen Wortlautes, sondern auch der Vorstufen, bevormundet den Betrachter. Einzig die in jeder Hinsicht vollständige Ausgabe schenkt ihm die Freiheit der eigenen Entscheidung.”
The Form of Deor
Authors: Bloomfield Morton W.
Published: February 2007

The old english poem Deor is preserved only in the Exeter Book (ff. 100a-100b) and its obscurities have given rise to a goodly number of speculations and emendations. As is proper, the main concern of scholarship has been to establish the literal meaning of its lines and the identity of the historical and semi-mythical characters to which direct allusion is made. Less attention has been paid for various reasons—at least in this century—to its overall signification: our ignorance of Germanic literary genres, our hesitancy to speculate until the certainty of the literal meaning can be established, positivistic biases, a lack of interest in this subject, a tendency to assume that there is no difficulty about understanding the poem's general aim or purpose.
Chaucer's Troilus of Book IV
Authors: Wenzel Siegfried
Published: February 2007

For any just appraisal of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde it is essential to understand correctly the character of its hero. The whole meaning of the poem will change accordingly if one sees Troilus as either an ideal knight or a neurotic weakling, as a noble courtly lover or as Everyman painfully caught in the snares of Satan. Adherence to either one of these contrasting views has frequently led critics to neglect aspects and entire portions of the poem which would not agree with their adopted view of the hero: the poem is obviously full of ambiguities in characterization as well as in its very plot. In the following I wish to suggest that Chaucer presents (and indirectly evaluates) Troilus simultaneously on two different levels, from which the hero emerges as both strong and weak. This suggestion is based on an analysis of a seemingly insignificant commonplace Chaucer uses at least three times in Book iv: the conflict between reason and desire.
Mythic Unity in Rabelais
Authors: Eskin Stanley G.
Published: February 2007

Rabelais's book opens with a cryptic allusion to a “sustantificque mouelle” hidden under the surface hilarity of his story and ends (if it was he who ended it) with an equally cryptic pronouncement by an oracular bottle. The penetration which is urged at the beginning—through fiber and bone to the marrow of truth which they protect—is evidently consummated at the end, the physiological turning into a geological image as Pantagruel and his friends penetrate the underground sanctuary where, in a flood of miraculous light, one may hear the word of truth, which is Trinch. The opinions of critics on this pronouncement range from considering it an absurd joke to a grave and specific allegory of one thing or another. Similarly, the substantific marrow which Rabelais promises us at the beginning is taken by some as a joke which hides a truth and by others as a joke that hides nothing but another joke. Most agree that there is a mixture of joke and seriousness in Rabelais's book, but some insist on a complete disjunction between the comic and the serious, while others argue for a close interpenetration.
Edward Taylor's Spiritual Huswifery
Authors: Grabo Norman S.
Published: February 2007

Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleate.Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.

Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neateAnd make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.My Conversation make to be thy ReeleAnd reele the yarn thereon Spun of thy Wheele.

Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills:

Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.Then dy the Same in Heavenly Colours Choice,All pinkt with Varnisht Flowers of Paradise.

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory

My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fillMy wayes with glory and thee glorify.Then mine appareil shall display before yeeThat I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.
Fielding and The Meaning of History
Authors: Stevick Philip
Published: February 2007

In the English eighteenth century, as in most ages before the twentieth century, to take history seriously was to believe, almost without exception, that history coheres, that it has a shape, that it is moving in a more-or-less orderly, more-or-less obvious direction toward or away from certain teleological poles. History was a decline from the “natural” condition of man for Shaftesbury and the primitivists; or it was an ascent toward the “natural” condition of man for Priestley and the progressivists. It was a decline from a general happiness for Lord Edward Fitzgerald; and it was an ascent toward a general happiness in at least that aspect of Pope's thought represented in the lines, “Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!/ Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! What e'er thy name.” For Swift, and to a lesser extent Clarendon and Temple, history was a monstrous progressive aberration from standards of truth and reason. For most of the doctrinaire Whigs it was a gradual realization of human freedom. History was visualized by Young and Akenside as a corollary of what A. O. Lovejoy calls “the temporalizing of the Great Chain of Being.”
Cooper's The Pioneers: Origins and Structure
Authors: Philbrick Thomas
Published: February 2007

Many critics of James Fenimore Cooper's early novel The Pioneers (1823) have called attention to the excellence of various individual aspects of its manner and matter, but few have been willing to accord the book the coherence and unity that are the first measure of a genuine work of art. The orthodox critical view insists on Cooper's failure to integrate the three major elements of his novel: the lengthy descriptions of natural scenery and of village habits and occupations; the conflict between Natty Bumppo and Judge Temple, usually regarded as the thematic center of the narrative; and the main plot, the discovery of Oliver Effingham as the true heir to Judge Temple's huge land holdings. Customarily this approach first stresses the divergent origins of Cooper's materials as the basis of their discordance. Since the novel draws both on the real world of personal recollection and family tradition and on the powers of pure imagination, it somehow must lack unity. “Incongruously,” writes Alexander Cowie, Cooper tied his “warm boyhood memories to a superannuated plot involving the temporary dispossession of an estate.” Consequently, “there is in The Pioneers a more definite disjunction of the action from the illustrative material than in any of Cooper's tales of the frontier.” Professor Cowie invites us to set aside the action of the novel so that “the setting and characterization may be enjoyed for their own sake.”
Théâtre et Anti-Théâtre au Dix-Neuvième Siècle (trois héritiers de Vitet: Musset, Gobineau, Henry Monnier)
Authors: El Nouty Hassan
Published: February 2007

Le point de départ de ces réflexions sur l'esthétique du théâtre en France au dixneuvième siècle fut une remarque de M. J. Mistier qui a écrit dans son Introduction à La Renaissance de Gobineau: “Un étonnant paradoxe a voulu que de toute la production dramatique de notre dix-neuvième siècle les trois œuvres qui sont demeurées les plus vivantes n'aient jamais été destinées à la représentation: les Comédies de Musset, les drames philosophiques de Renan, la Renaissance de Gobineau.”
Maria Francesca to Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Some Unpublished Letters
Authors: Packer Lona Mosk
Published: February 2007

Maria francesca (1827–76), eldest of the four Rossettis, has come down to posterity unfairly characterized by an anecdote and a remark. For the anecdote Christina Rossetti is responsible although if she had suspected the extent to which it would have shaped future generations' opinion of her sister, she probably would never have originated it. In her “Reading Diary” Time Flies (London, 1885), Christina wrote that Maria “shrank from entering the Mummy Room at the British Museum under a vivid realisation of how the general resurrection might occur even as one stood among those solemn corpses turned into a sight for sightseers” (p. 128).
“Exact Biography” and The Shadow-Line
Authors: Sherry Norman
Published: February 2007

In 1917 Conrad wrote two letters on the subject of The Shadow-Line, one to his agent, J. B. Pinker, the other to his friend, Sidney Colvin. Both letters emphasise that this story is exact biography. To Pinker he wrote of “That piece of work which is not story really but exact biography,” and to Colvin he stated, “The very speeches are (I won't say authentic—they are that absolutely), I believe, verbally accurate. And all this happened in March-April 1887.”
Estilo Y Poesía De Pablo Neruda: Examen De La Interpretación de Amado Alonso de Residencia En La Tierra
Authors: Lozada Alfredo
Published: February 2007

La cimerísima interpretación de Amado Alonso es harto bien conocida. Residencia en la tierra encierra la terrible y dolorosa visión de la “invisible e incesante labor de autodesintegración a la que se entregan todos los seres vivos y todas las cosas inertes, por debajo y por dentro de su movimiento o de su quietud” (pág. 19). Esta atroz contemplación de la permanente desintegración sin sentido de la realidad, del morirse de todo lo vivo a la que se entrega Neruda en un obstinado ensimismamiento es, sobre todo, un modo íntegramente valedero de afectarse por la realidad: el morir de las cosas se identifica con el morir humano, y el poeta se angustia. En el primer tomo (1925–31), sin embargo, la visión no es de desintegración y el sentimiento es más bien de sombría melancolía que de angustia. Si hay desintegración, ésta es “el escenario ... por entre cuyos lentos escombros renace el espíritu indestructible” (pág. 24). El gozo de poetizar y especialmente el oscuro instinto amoroso, dos formas en que se manifiesta el anhelo de perpetuidad entre lo caduco, constituyen la vértebra que preserva desde adentro al mundo del poeta que se quiere desintegrar. A medida que el instinto amoroso, el ansia de perpetuidad, se debilita, se espesan la desintegración y la angustia: en el segundo tomo (1931–35), la desintegración y su dolor, de atmósfera, se convierten en el tema medular.
Eugenio Montale's “Motets”: The Occasions of Epiphany
Authors: Cambon Glauco
Published: February 2007

The centrality of the twenty “Mottetti” to Montale's decisive second book, Le Occasioni (1939), has been noted by such critics as Ettore Bonora and Silvio Ramat. Despite their probings, however, much remains to be done towards an organic understanding of this remarkable series of poems. Since this part of Montale's work relates to much else he has written before and after, I shall not attempt to isolate it from the rest of the Occasioni book, but merely to keep my focus on what is after all a kind of book within the book. A tighter unity prevails among the “Motets” than among the other poems in the volume, both because the former all turn on the constant of love for Clizia in the variations of worldly vicissitudes, and because they match this thematic constancy by a relative constancy of form.
Theoretics or Polemics? Milton Criticism and the “Dramatic Axiom”
Authors: Wilkenfeld Roger B.
Published: February 2007

In the long history of Milton commentary a single axiom has survived for generations as a critical touchstone in the formal analyses of his longer poems. Stated simply it reads: Milton was not a dramatist and his poems are not dramatic. Recently Anne Ferry, Jackson Cope, and Douglas Bush have briefly discussed the danger of treating the terms “drama” and “dramatic” as catchalls. Their mild reproofs of contemporary critics require, I suggest, not just forceful reiteration but a theoretical and historical analysis of the dramatic axiom's use and its effect on Milton criticism. The pertinent questions are: (1) what do Milton's critics mean by “dramatic,” and (2) how do their various definitions control the scope and direction of their criticisms?
Politics, Comedy, Character, and Dialectic: The Shavian World of John Bull's Other Island
Authors: McDowell Frederick P. W.
Published: February 2007

John bull's other island, Shaw once said, is one of “a group of three plays of exceptional weight and magnitude on which the reputation of the author as a serious dramatist was first established, and still mainly rests.” The other two plays are Major Barbara and Man and Superman. John Bull's Other Island was popular at the Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907 and established Shaw as a great and popular dramatist. Since then, however, this play has not been esteemed as much as Man and Superman and Major Barbara, although I would argue that in humor and insight it is their equal. It has been revived only twice in London in the last forty years—in 1938 and 1947; and it is far less known to the public or to scholarship than are the other two plays. Opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, Shaw's estimate of his play should, I think, be taken seriously. Some critics have seen the play as original in method, as still pertinent to the Irish situation, and as universal in its significance. “Shaw made out of this topical subject a masterpiece,” Reuben Brower has written, “one of his purest and most sustained comedies.” I believe this view can be upheld.
The House of the Seven Gables: New Light on Old Problems
Authors: Battaglia Francis Joseph
Published: February 2007

Many twentieth-century commentators on Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables—probably the majority of them—have found it necessary to note serious failings in the work. The censures are in a sense as different as the men who registered them, but I think they can be fairly summarized as: (1) objection to the plot as lacking coherent action and to the narrative method as partial cause of this difficulty; (2) objection to the conclusion as being artificial or forced; and (3) objection to the short-sightedness of the author in saying in his Preface and as comment within the story something which the story itself confutes. Structure, conclusion, and theme have all proved problematical.
“My Voice is Still for Setchell”: A Background Study of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”
Authors: Branch Edgar M.
Published: February 2007

For the past fifteen years scholars have examined many facets of Mark Twain's “Jumping Frog”: its narrative techniques and some of its textual history, its relation to folklore, American humor, and Clemens' theory of humorous gravity, and its political, regional, and cultural bearings. This article, by focussing on the personal background to the tale, tries to cast light on the imagination that created the famous yarn. It first relates some of the tale's narrative elements—episodes, characters, names—to Clemens' prior experience, especially to some activities reflected in newly discovered examples of his San Francisco journalism of 1864 and 1865. Then it relates the tale to strong emotional currents in his life during the fall of 1865. Finally the article proposes a date of composition for the “Jumping Frog” and a reading of the tale that emphasizes the level of personal meaning.
The Definitive Billy Budd: “But Aren't it All Sham?”
Authors: Brodtkorb Paul
Published: February 2007

There is a sentence in the preface to the Harrison Hayford-Merton Sealts version of Billy Budd that has been quoted before and will be quoted again. It is the one in which the editors hope that their “comprehensive scholarly edition will narrow the ground of disagreement and widen that of understanding.” It is doomed to repetition because it allows any critic who cites it a ready-made rhetorical stance: with its sanction he can assume the posture of the reasonable reader and humbly offer himself as mediator between the various opposing critical armies. Then, having established himself as a man of good will and peacemaker, he can do his best to annihilate at least one of the armies, the views of which, it somehow turns out, he rabidly despises.
Whitman and the Early Development of William Carlos Williams
Authors: Breslin James E.
Published: February 2007

In his artistic development, William Carlos Williams offers us a series of enactments of the process of slow, laborious birth which he so often made the subject of his verse. When we look at Williams' career, we find long periods of groping experiment which culminate in brief phases of accomplished expression; the volumes Spring and All (1923), The Wedge (1944), and Journey to Love (1955) mark these major phases in his development. But the time of most profound change and growth for Williams was between 1902 and 1914. During that period of his early manhood Williams slowly evolved the identity that would provide the confident impetus for his later stylistic experiments. In evolving his idea of himself, Williams was most importantly influenced by Walt Whitman; the Camden Bard helped the Rutherford doctor both to discover and to affirm his mature identity.
Fromentin's Dominique: The Confession of a Man Who Judges Himself
Authors: Hubert Renée Riese
Published: February 2007

Can Dominique's life be construed as a success or a failure? The hero not only gives up Madeleine, the woman he loves, but passion in its most idealistic form, by marrying a woman whose name is not even mentioned. Although an encounter between Dominique and his family suggests an idyllic painting, although his marriage brings the rewards of peace and serenity, it can be considered a compromise. Together with his impossible love, Dominique gives up his literary ambition. He thus accepts once and for all the mediocrity of his talents. Denial of both creativity and ambition may strike one as tantamount to resignation and defeat. To this self-imposed restriction in regard to emotion and creative action corresponds significantly a refusal to explore the outer world. Dominique will not leave the community of which, in accordance with family tradition, he has become mayor. He has traced a circle around his existence, as though to ward off danger and risk. Using Dominique's own words, one could claim that he leads a life of refusal, dedicated primarily to the gratuitous obliteration of his faults.
René Char 1923–28: The Young Poet s Struggle for Communication
Authors: Cranston Mechthild
Published: February 2007

The poet's struggle for communication is a common theme in five of René Char's early poems, “Cesoir” (1923), “Jouvence” (1923–25), “Sillage” (ca. 1925), “Prêt au dépouillement” (ca. 1925), and “Sur le volet d'une fenêtre” (1923–25). Char passes from “mutisme” to meaningful dialogue; he learns first to see, then to listen, and, finally, to hear. Many of his mature poems will repeat this triple apprenticeship, and they are quoted to show Char's continuous concern with the necessity for dialogue. By implication this article tries to disprove Barthes's definition of modern poetry, and hopes to lead into wider considerations of the object of contemporary poetry.
Sancho IV: Puente literario entre Alfonso el Sabio y Juan Manuel
Authors: Kinkade Richard P.
Published: February 2007

Though the development of novelistic prose in medieval Castilian literature has been traditionally associated with the encyclopedic works of Alfonso el Sabio and those of his nephew, Juan Manuel, author of the Conde Lucanor, the stylistic differences between these two writers are sufficiently important to indicate the existence of a transitional period characterized by the absorption of classical rhetoric into the mainstream of religiously oriented didactic literature. An analysis of the critically neglected works of Sancho IV, second son of Alfonso and guardian to the young Juan Manuel, reveals the intermediate stages in the transformation of impersonal Alfonsine historical narrative to the highly anecdotal mode of Juan Manuel and subsequently affirms Sancho's role in Castilian letters while stressing Juan Manuel's clear genius for synthesizing the major literary currents of his age. (In Spanish)
Sterne's Rabelaisian Fragment: A Text from the Holograph Manuscript
Authors: New Melvyn
Published: February 2007

Laurence Sterne's “Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais” was first published seven years after Sterne's death. A collation of that edition with the holograph MS preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library reveals that the text is bowdlerized, with no pretense to accuracy or integrity. Moreover, all subsequent reprintings of the fragment, including the standard editions of 1904 and 1927, merely copy this inaccurate text. The edition presented here represents, then, an effort to provide the first true text of Sterne's Rabelaisian fragment. In addition, the Introduction makes use of several canceled passages to argue that the fragment should be dated one year earlier than previously supposed (1759 rather than 1760); if correct, this new date suggests that the fragment was Sterne's first creative attempt after his success with the Political Romance. As such, it deserves a significant place in the Sterne canon.
Pound: The American Strain
Authors: Spencer Benjamin T.
Published: February 2007

Whatever might have been the court's verdict on Pound as an American, had he come to trial in the late 1940's in Washington, his biographers and literary contemporaries have consistently affirmed not only the propriety of the epithet, but also its ineluctable pertinence. To his long-time friend and literary associate, Wyndham Lewis, his Americanism seemed to be of “primary significance.” “Pound is—was always—is, must always remain, violently American,” Lewis wrote in 1949, seeing in him a composite of the gait of Tom Sawyer, the “manly candour” of Whitman, the “tough guy” of Hemingway, and the “strenuousness” of Theodore Roosevelt. “The universality in his work is conscious but it overlies an ineradicable Americanism,” a friend and biographer, Patricia Hutchins, has recently written—a view akin to Donald Davie's conclusion a year earlier that Pound was “thoroughly aware … of himself as indelibly American.”
Assonance and Tense in the Poema del Cid
Authors: Myers Oliver T.
Published: February 2007

A modern reader of the Poema del Cid cannot fail to be struck by the general oddity of its verbal system, especially in the tenses of the past, where one finds perfects, preterites, imperfects, pluperfects seemingly interchanged in no meaningful pattern; consequently he leaves the work with an impression of confused tense relationships, an indication (he is convinced) of the lack of skill of the poet (or poets) and the impossible primitiveness of the language. There have been recent stylistic attempts to interpret the uses of the tenses, in particular those of the past, as functions of aspect rather than of time, or as poetic devices in the delineation of heroic character, or as specifically epic techniques of narration. Simpler explanations given earlier, which saw in the unusual frequency of the imperfect, for instance, nothing more than the need to meet the rhyme, have found little favor and have been supported only by intuitive arguments. But those who have rejected the earlier views have not provided conclusive proof of their assertions. In fact, despite the great scholarly interest in the language, metrics, and style of the Cid, there seems to be no study of the possible relationship between rhyme and verbal structure. As a contribution to the study of the Spanish epic as well as to the larger field of historical style and syntax, the present paper seeks to clarify the issues and to provide an objective basis for a conclusive determination of the problem.
Mode and Structure in The Merchant of Venice
Authors: Fujimura Thomas H.
Published: February 2007

Athough The Merchant of Venice ranks with Hamlet in theatrical popularity, it ranks low in critical esteem. A play that is difficult to classify, it is variously labeled tragi-comedy or romantic comedy; but neither label embraces nor harmonizes the seemingly disparate plots. Further, the plots are often condemned as preposterous and unrelated to life; and a fairly common view is that the play is a fairy tale: “There is no more reality in Shylock's bond and the Lord of Belmont's will than in Jack and the Beanstalk.” Critics adopting such a position find the chief merit of the play in its “flesh-and-blood characters” who triumph over the shortcomings of the story, with emphasis on Shylock, who is sometimes regarded as the protagonist. The approach to Shylock has been diverse, ranging from Stoll's notion of him as a comic butt in terms of Elizabethan conventions to the view that he is a tragic figure. Readers have shown a preoccupation with Shylock the Jew as scapegoat, stereotype, victim, or Elizabethan usurer; usually this interest has taken a realistic turn, with concern over questions of anti-Semitism and the legality of the trial.
L'Homme sous le Regard d'autrui ou le monde de La Bruyère
Authors: Guggenheim Michel
Published: February 2007

Un Critique a récemment mis en relief ce qu'il y avait chez Saint-Simon du comportement d'un voyeur, qui observe clandestinement les hommes afin de démasquer leurs mobiles les plus secrets. Il nous semble que la remarque est également valable pour La Bruyère qui, de sa loge privilégiée chez les Condés, considère les hommes subrepticement (on ne savait pas que ce modeste précepteur préparait un ouvrage sur les mœurs du siècle). Prenant sa revanche des mortifications qu'il a subies dans un monde où il demeure un étranger, La Bruyère savoure le spectacle pitoyable et risible de ces hommes qui défilent devant lui. Notons par ailleurs que ces misanthropes ne s'en tiennent pas à une contemplation passive des vices de leurs prochains: se décidant à sortir de sa solitude et de son silence, le voyeur peut se transformer en historien ou en moraliste. Sans pour autant songer à revenir à la méthode critique de Sainte-Beuve ou de Taine, il nous paraît essentiel de souligner dès l'abord l'influence qu'a dÛ avoir sur La Bruyère cette optique particulière sous laquelle le monde de Versailles et de Chantilly se présenta à, lui (et cela, dès sa jeunesse, c'est-à-dire bien avant qu'il eût la possibilité de l'observer de près).
Tyger of Wrath
Authors: Paley Morton D.
Published: February 2007

In peace there's nothing so becomes a manAs modest stillness and humility,But when the blast of war blows in our ears,Then imitate the action of the tiger:Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage;Then lend the eye a terrible aspect:Let it cry through the portage of the headLike the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm itAs fearfully as doth a galled rockO'erhang and jutty his confounded base,Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.Henry V in.i.3-14
How would an ideal contemporary reader of Blake—one of those “Young Men of the New Age” whom he addressed in Milton—have regarded “The Tyger”? To such a reader certain aspects of the poem which modern critics have ignored would be obvious. In the rhetoric and imagery of the poem he would recognize an example of the sublime, appropriately Hebrew and terrifying. He would recollect analogues to the wrath of the Tyger in the Old Testament Prophets and in Revelation, and being an ideal reader, he would not need to be reminded that Blake elsewhere views the French Revolution as an eschatological event. He would also know that Blake characteristically thought of divine wrath as an expression of what Jakob Boehme calls the First Principle. His understanding of the poem would thus be affected by his connecting it with the sublime, the Bible, and Boehme. We later readers may also discover something about the meaning of “The Tyger” by considering it in relation to these traditions. That such an approach has something new and valuable to offer will be seen if we begin with what has previously been said about the poem.
From Academic Darkness
Authors: Malone Kemp
Published: February 2007

In the halcyon days of the MLA, when I was young and my revered master, John Manly, was still in his prime, it was our custom to highlight the program for the annual meeting with two major speeches: a smoke-talk at the big dinner we used to have, and a presidential address. The difference in name reflects a difference in form and matter: the smoke-talk was expected to be in lighter vein; the presidential address, in heavier vein (if I may say so). It was the aim of the smoke-talker above all to be amusing; witty if possible but funny at least. And his success was measured by the number of times he made his audience laugh. The smoke-talk was nearly always well attended, for hope springs eternal in the academic breast. There were those, I admit, natural cynics or members disillusioned by repeated disappointment, who came to the dinner but slipped out after eating their dessert and drinking their coffee, but we could always think they were fleeing the foulness of the tobacco-laden air rather than the prospective boredom of the two speeches (for the smoke-talker had to be introduced and the introducer might speak as long as the speaker). But most of us stuck it out, tobacco smoke and all, and more often than not we went away well content. The most satisfying evening of this kind that I can remember was one at Harvard back in the twenties, when George Kittredge was the smoke-talker and Charles Grandgent introduced him. My mouth waters for more when I think of that pair of speeches. It is a pity that we had to give up the smoke-talk and the dinner that went with it, but there are too many of us nowadays to sit down to a meal together in one room, and so much goes on at our meetings that a whole evening devoted to corporate, communal pleasure (or what passes for pleasure) has become more than we have any right to expect.
The “Lost” Manuscript of a Collection of Poems by Andres De Uztarroz
Authors: Gates Eunice Joiner
Published: February 2007

The poems which Juan Francisco Andres de Uztarroz wrote during the last two years of his life have long been considered lost. Don Ricardo del Arco, in reconstructing the intellectual and cultural life of seventeenth-century Aragon which centered around this famous historiographer, archaeologist, bibliographer, and poet, states that the autograph manuscript containing these poems was seen by the eighteenth century bibliographer, Felix de Latassa, but that it disappeared sometime later and its contents have remained unknown: “Desconocemos gran parte de sus poesfas, sobre todo las breves que vio Latassa en manuscrito.”
Hawthorne's First Novel: The Future of a Style
Authors: Gross Robert Eugene
Published: February 2007

In 1828, about twenty-two years before the appearance of his second novel and chef-d'oeuvre, The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne paid $100.00 to arrange the anonymous publication of Fanshawe, his first novel. Almost immediately upon its public appearance, however, he tried to acquire all available copies in order to destroy them, and enjoined family and friends to silence about his authorship. His suppression of the novel was so successful that when a rare copy turned up twelve years after his death, his wife Sophia at first denied that he was the author. Nowadays a minor bibliographical treasure, Fanshawe can also be valuable to scholars as a primer of Hawthorne's style, because despite its defects—imitativeness, disjointedness, occasional silliness—it provides an opportunity for observing basic characteristics of his writing as they appear at the beginning of his career, secretive and abortive as it was. Even in The Marble Faun, his last completed novel, the manner, characters, and themes of Fanshawe can be clearly discerned. As Stanley Williams has put it: “The characters are thin and two-dimensioned, the dialogue pretentious; but a contemporary was right in declaring that in Fanshawe we may detect the weak and timid presence of all of Hawthorne's peculiar powers.”
The Non-Dramatic Disunity of the Merchant's Tale
Authors: Jordan Robert M.
Published: February 2007

Until very recently the Merchant's Tale has been the least controversial of all the Canterbury Tales. Several generations of critics have been united in scandalized astonishment over the un-Chaucerian qualities of the tale. Tatlock expressed the prevailing view in these often quoted words: “For unrelieved acidity the Merchant's Tale is approached nowhere in Chaucer's works. … Without a trace of warm-hearted tolerance or genial humor, expansive realism or even broadly smiling animalism, it is ruled by concentrated intelligence and unpitying analysis.” A generation earlier Kittredge had called the tale a “frenzy of contempt and hatred,” and a generation later Hugh Holman brought together all the old terms, “savagely obscene, angrily embittered, pessimistic, and unsmiling,” and contributed his own “dark cynicism.”
Donne's Conceit And Petrarchan Wit
Authors: Guss Donald L.
Published: February 2007

Donne's Wit has been linked to Caval-canti and Alciati, Marino and Ramus, Anacreon and St. Bonaventure. The variety of these analogues confronts scholars with a dilemma: for it suggests that The Songs and Sonets must be either a profound intellectual synthesis or a grotesque philosophical chaos; and yet in fact they are neither. The dilemma might be resolved, however, by the discovery that Donne's lyrics are in a tradition which accounts for both their sophisticated levity and their dramatic truth, both their epigrammatic neatness and their symbolic import. The work of the “presecentisti”—by which term I mean chiefly Serafino l'Aquilano, Torquato Tasso, and Guarino—forms such a tradition.
Wisdom and Fortitude in Samson Agonistes
Authors: Chambers A. B.
Published: February 2007

That vast distance from the muscle-bound Samson in the Book of Judges to the tragic figure of Samson Agonistes is to be traversed, as we now know, by means of Biblical commentary and its metamorphosis of a solar myth into a parable of faith. Yet one of the important stepping-stones along the way from Bible to Milton seems not to exist. Samson is emphatic in its references to wisdom, but the Samson of Christian tradition, even when a typological symbol for Christ, was but rarely noted for his strength of mind. Milton's unparalleled concern for wisdom is nevertheless no startling innovation, I think, but rather the inevitable consequence of a second tradition, equally valid and quite as long, which is within the poem. For this tradition the brief formula is “wisdom and fortitude”—sapienlia etfortiludo—a phrase descriptive of the heroic ideal and conventional to relevant background materials of at least three kinds. The first, surveyed some years ago by Ernst Curtius, begins with the heroic poems of Homer and Virgil and continues into the Renaissance. The second, considered more recently by R. E. Kaske, includes the Germanic and Old English literature of heroism, the important example being Beowulf. And the third, upon which I think Milton primarily relied and with which I shall be concerned, is a philosophy of courage, classical in origin but Christian in development. These backgrounds differ among themselves in significant ways. While the loftiest heroes—Odysseus, Aeneas—seem always to have been simultaneously wise and brave, heroic literature sometimes allows these virtues to be separable from one another. The classic illustration is summarized by Macrobius: “Nestor … helped the army quite as much with his prudence as all the youth with their might.” So, in the Song of Roland (l. 1093), “Rollant est proz e Oliver est sages.” Philosophic discussion, however, insists that these virtues cannot be divorced, that an unwise courage cannot exist. “If,” wrote Henry More, an unwise man should “light upon the doing of some brave Action, 'tis not Virtue, but Fortune, that must be applauded for such happy chance.” The interesting result of such a position is that fortitude undergoes a radical change in meaning; it refers no longer to the brute strength of an Ajax nor to the prowess in arms of Achilles but to what Milton calls “heroic magnitude of mind.” The extent of this profound alteration is first perceived in Plato and Aristotle, but for the comprehensive and systematic account, one turns to the Summa theologica of Aquinas.
Shape and Theme: Determinants of Trollope's Forms
Authors: Cadbury William
Published: February 2007

The endeavor of the pioneer critics—in what has somewhat exaggeratedly been called the Trollope revival—was to define a Trollopian oneness, like the oneness which Geoffrey Tillotson discerns in Thackeray. The attempt was healthy and beneficial, and its impetus not unreasonable. The sheer bulk of the novels had hindered assessment, and, despite his charming frankness and efforts at objectivity “from the further shore,” Trollope's own attachment to everything he wrote only charms us to his sense of evenness. Moreover, the Trollope canon itself fosters assumptions of unity based on similarity. The pioneer critics, by defining a unity of Trollopian flow and direction, sought to lead us through a maze deceptively landmarked with clergymen, barristers, and MP's; Franks, Harrys, and Lucys; London, Barchester, and manor houses.
Inherent Principles of Order in Richard Feverel
Authors: Morris John W.
Published: February 2007

A father who is deserted by his wife and who sets out to rear his son according to a “scientific System” unconsciously founded on his distrust of women and his own wounded pride should be an ideal subject for comedy. The system, running, as it must, counter to common sense and human nature, is bound to fail. And its collapse, with the consequent exposure of the father's false pride and the reassertion of the collective wisdom of society, would provide the comic deflation and denouement. The laughter provoked by the discomfort of the father, underscored by a reaffirmation of the adequacy of common sense, would produce an appropriate comic catharsis. This same situation, of course, has its serious possibilities. The father may ruin his son's life. But not in comedy. Comedy says that the probabilities are that the son, common sense, and nature will overcome the false system of the father. And the comic artist, knowing well that the whole truth will spoil his comedy, is careful not to tell the whole truth—only the comic (probable) side of it. The dark spirit of tragedy always hovers just outside the bright circle drawn by comedy, but it must not be allowed to cross the line. In comedy, as in all art, what is ruled out is as important as what is included.
Tonal Unity in Dombey and Son
Authors: Axton William
Published: February 2007

It is now generally agreed that in Dombey and Son, “the first masterpiece of Dickens' maturity,” Dickens solved the structural problems of the serial novel. There was, he discovered, “no insuperable obstacle to writing, barely ahead of its publication in monthly instalments complete in themselves, a novel with a well-defined purpose worked out by such an ‘artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated plot’ as he had once felt that he must eschew.” Dickens' “artfully interwoven” plot structure, similarly, is now recognized to be founded on a highly ramified system of analogies, contrasts, and variations in action and character of what is essentially a single, simple thematic idea, supported and colored by a complex body of inter-related symbols.
The Versification of Corbière's Les Amours Jaunes
Authors: Lindsay Marshall
Published: February 2007

The name of Tristan Corbière has scarcely been mentioned in manuals or in histories of French versification. His prosody has been considered neither sufficiently skillful, in the traditional sense, nor sufficiently original to be a model for imitation or an example of innovation. Most biographers and critics who have written about Corbière have mentioned, at least in passing, the peculiarities of his versification, some disapproving of the construction of his lines, and others coming to his defense. Laforgue called Corbière “cassant, concis, cinglant le vers à la cravache,” but he was highly critical of what he described as “incurable indélicatesse d'oreille” and “strophes de tout le monde.” Léon Bocquet, on the other hand, wrote that Corbière possessed “l'oreille musicienne.” That these critics are in such disagreement shows how subjective their judgments of technique are. Laforgue undoubtedly missed in Les Amours jaunes his own kind of prosody, and Bocquet, defending Corbière from the injustices of earlier critics, overstated his case.
Analyse du Pont Mirabeau
Authors: Champigny Robert
Published: February 2007

La projection analytique d'un poème tel que Le Pont Mirabeau abstrait diverses sortes d'éléments sémantiques: tonalités affectives, attitudes, images, motifs intellectuels. Dans le cas du Pont Mirabeau, ce sont ces derniers qui peuvent fournir le plus commodément l'armature d'une analyse claire et distincte. Nous allons poser cette armature, avant de procéder à une analyse du détail. Nous aurons l'occasion de déceler et de placer les autres éléments au cours du développement.