bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Fleda Vetch and the Plot of The Spoils of Poynton
Authors: Baym Nina
Published: November 2006

HENRY JAMES found writing The Spoils of Poynton very difficult, and for this reason he devoted more space to it in his notebooks than he did to any other work. The seven entries mark places in the composition where James was trying to work his way out of dilemmas in the plot.1 These entries, proposing lines of action often abandoned in the final work, contain an action of their own: the evolution of Fleda Vetch's character. Originally she was put into the story in a minor capacity, but her functions in the novel multiplied, and James had to spend unanticipated pages rendering her character more fully.
New Materials for the Teaching of English: The English Program of the USOE
Authors: Shugrue Michael F.
Published: November 2006

In 1963 J. N. Hook, the first Coordinator for Project English in the United States Office of Education, reviewed briefly the growth and current status of Project English for the profession (“Project English: The First Year,” PMLA, lxxviii, September 1963, Part 2, 33–36). In 1964 Erwin R. Steinberg, the second Coordinator, reported at length to the profession on the history and prospects for research in English funded by the Office of Education (“Research on the Teaching of English Under Project English,” PMLA, lxxix, September 1964, Part 2, 50–76). He incorporated into his account summaries of the current status of each Curriculum Study Center, prepared by the Directors of the Centers themselves.
The Publication of Academic Writing
Authors: Cargill Oscar , Charvat William , Walsh Donald D.
Published: November 2006

Publication continues to be one of the more important activities of the scholar-teacher. Through the years, the scholar gains experience as to what is publishable, where it should be placed, and how it can be presented to achieve maximum effect. The Executive Council of the Modern Language Association felt, however, that the advice of some senior scholars and experienced publishers might be of use to younger writers. The following document has passed through several revisions and incorporates the observations of thirty-three able consultants. It is hoped that it will save both scholars and their publishers from unnecessary disappointments.
L'ideal De “L'honneste Homme” Est-Il Compatible Avec La Théorie Évolutive Des Essais De Montaigne?
Authors: Boon Jean-Pierre
Published: November 2006

While it is generally acknowledged that Montaigne introduced the concept of “honnêteté” into French cultural life, the significance of the phenomenon has not been fully realized, especially as it concerns our understanding of the Essays. It appears that one aspect of the psychological make-up of “l'honneste homme” has been largely neglected by critics: the fact that “l'honneste homme,” like his precursor, Castiglione's Courtier, is by profession a man of arms. Such was the case with Montaigne himself and this factor should be given more weight in order to achieve a better-balanced interpretation of the Essays. The influence of Stoicism, particularly on Montaigne's thinking about death, has probably been exaggerated. In the early essays dealing with the subject, Montaigne evinces concerns typical of the nobility, the military caste of his age. These concerns will remain his for the rest of his life, though they are more apparent in the early essays than in the late ones. The “evolution” of Montaigne's thought may bear just as much, if not more, on changes of perspective as on changes in the essayist's convictions. It appears that the versatility of “l'honneste homme,” the ability of this “universal” man to adapt to circumstances as the need dictates, may be more appropriate than the concept of “evolution” as a characterization of the development of Montaigne's thought in the Essays.
Heroic Poetry and Sidney's Two Arcadias
Authors: Isler Alan D.
Published: November 2006

Both the old and the new Arcadias belong to a single literary genre, Elizabethan heroic poetry. Modern critics, by concentrating upon the theories of Sidney's Italian contemporaries, regularly distinguish generically between the two Arcadias, usually calling the new an (attempted) epic and the old “merely” a romance. But neither version responds well to a testing by Italian criteria, criteria whose essentials are structure and convention. However, an examination of representative Elizabethan writings on heroic poetry reveals that, although aware of Italian theories, such writers as Puttenham, Webbe, Harington, and particularly Sidney are concerned not with formal but with functional aspects of the genre. The peculiar function of heroic poetry is to teach and inspire to virtue the gentleman, the Prince, and the commonwealth. From the various episodes and incidents of the heroic poem, the reader learns how to respond actively to any situation, whether it affect the body politic or the body natural, the flesh or the spirit. Tested by Elizabethan criteria, both versions of the Arcadia are successful heroic poems.
The Ritual and Rhetoric of A Midsummer Night's Dream
Authors: Robinson James E.
Published: November 2006

Two comic ideas inform the artistry of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The traditions of festival and ritual help to explain the one idea of celebrating man's quest for renewal in communion with nature and divinity; the traditions of Roman comedy and rhetoric help to explain the other, the idea of understanding man's folly in his quest for order in society. Shakespeare creates two contexts, finite society with its mores and laws, and nature with its transcendent gods, and then assimilates the two in the action and language of the play. The action combines a dialectical sequence based on social conflict and a symbolic sequence based on magic and myth. The language ranges between debate and song, argument and incantation. The gods of nature become both measure and mirror of the absurdity of human love, and the result is both satiric and celebrative: folly is understood as folly and celebrated as myth. Shakespeare's amusement at the artist's power through language to comprehend the relation of nature and experience and translate the comprehension into comic myth is apparent throughout. Bottom's wedding to Titania is summary of the comprehension and the play-within-a-play is a burlesque of the power.
The Playboy as Poet
Authors: Kilroy James F.
Published: November 2006

In The Playboy of the Western World Synge portrays the successive stages in the artistic growth of a poet. Christy Mahon develops markedly from the time when he shyly and tersely answers questions on his crime. Gradually, his flat statements give way to more daring and assertive speech so that others remark on his poetic power. Their praise generates further poetic attempts, and Christy's speech becomes both more concrete in diction and more deliberately imaginative. But when he discovers that his poetry was not based on actual fact, his speech changes distinctly: it temporarily becomes self-conscious and hollow. Inevitably the crowd turns on him, but the playboy rises above them and their objections; the very audience which nurtured the growing poet eventually threatens him in his maturity, and must be disregarded by the poet, since it cannot understand the imaginative truth of his statements. The artistic growth of the main character is signified by a variety of styles; thus the play supplies examples of Synge's best poetry, but also deliberate exaggerations of poetic expression.
The Artist and the Man in “The Author of Beltraffio”
Authors: Winner Viola Hopkins
Published: November 2006

In the light of James's contemporary critical writings and of the precepts of the aesthetic movement, Mark Ambient emerges not as a Wildean aesthete but rather as James's spokesman on the art of fiction. In espousing a realistic theory of art, in stressing the artist's right to treat all of life without puritanical restrictions, and in his passionate concern for formal perfection, Ambient voices the ideals of the serious, literary side of the aesthetic movement. His sister represents its excesses and affectations; his wife, the Puritan- Philistine hatred and fear of art; and the narrator, the disciple who, until enlightened through his encounter with the artist, had naively subscribed to the art for art's sake formula. Though Ambient is artistically daring, in his personal life he is respectable and morally responsible. However, the fusion in the story between the aesthetic ideas and the moral, psychological conflict is imperfect. Though there is a suggestion that Ambient's imaginative openness to life has led to a culpable passivity in his role as husband and father, his responsibility for the child's death is inadequately related to his portrayal as an artist and the passages expounding his views on art seem incompletely assimilated to the action.
More on Hazlitt and the Functions of the Imagination
Authors: Albrecht W. P. , O'Hara J. D. , Albrecht W. P.
Published: November 2006

William Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination have received widespread critical attention, but that attention has been confined almost entirely to his comments on the “sympathetic imagination.” In his opening sentence J. D. O'Hara (“Hazlitt and the Functions of the Imagination,” PMLA, LXXXI, December 1966, 552–562) intends, I think, to use the term “sympathetic imagination” in a broad sense—broader than in his second paragraph, where, in order to disclose “the limitations of sympathy in the creation of art,” Mr. O'Hara seems to confine “sympathy” to the poet's identification with character. He proceeds, then, to designate “associational theory” rather than “sympathy” as grounds for Hazlitt's objection to egotistical poetry—like Wordsworth's—and to describe this objection as “basically not aesthetic but moral” (p. 553). Mr. O'Hara has written a closely reasoned and useful article; but when, later in the article, he describes the “formative imagination” (p. 561), he again separates elements in Hazlitt's aesthetic which, I think, are not as readily separable as he implies.
The Conclusion of the Initial Phase: The English Program of the Usoe
Authors: Shugrue Michael F. , Crawley Thomas F.
Published: November 2006

By September 1967 the opening phase of federal support for English had been largely completed. Fourteen of the Curriculum Study Centers and five of the Demonstration Centers funded under the Cooperative Research Program had submitted their final reports to the Office of Education. Curriculum materials from the Centers at Carnegie, Georgia, Indiana, Hunter (Gateway English), Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin are available for classroom use this fall. The Centers at Gallaudet College, Georgia, Illinois (ISCPET), Indiana, Ohio State, and Wisconsin, however, are continuing their work beyond September 1967. Moreover, nearly ten percent of the Secondary School English teachers in the United States have attended the NDEA Institutes in English authorized by the three-year extension of the NDEA (of 1958) in October 1964.
College English Departments and Teacher Preparation
Authors: Finch Jeremiah S.
Published: November 2006

The scene, a coffee table in the faculty lounge. Seated casually in postures perfected through years in academia are three obviously very full professors of English. The topic is A—the departmental meeting on promotions. One of the group is speaking earnestly. “But we've got to have another medievalist, Quincy. You admit that.” “Of course I admit it, Arthur,” replies a second, “but unless we promote Muddleton, we'll lose him, and where will we be in contemporary literature?” “Couldn't care less,” reflects the medieval scholar, but nods his head as if agreeing. “I hate to bring this up again, gentlemen,” interrupts the third, who by his well-thumbed appointment book and downcast expression is manifestly the chairman, “but we keep passing by Clerkson.”
Conserving Our Linguistic Resources
Authors: Gaarder A. Bruce
Published: November 2006

Forty years ago i realized dimly that in American schoolrooms it was quite respectable to study and try to learn a foreign language, but that the child who already knew one before he entered school was somehow at a disadvantage. This realization didn't come in that Louisiana town I later knew, where for many years the only person who couldn't speak French was the French teacher. It was in a New Mexico town where the teacher couldn't communicate with those Mexican people because she spoke “Castilian.” Today the situation hasn't changed much. In some ways it may be worse, simply because now we know better.
The Foreign Language Program in 1964
Authors: Walsh Donald D.
Published: November 2006

Our major activities this year, as in each of the past five years, have been undertaken either with foundation support or through contracts with the United States Office of Education under the National Defense Education Act. In February John Harmon became Director of the Materials Center, changing places with Glen Willbern, who became Director of Research. Under Mr. Willbern's direction and through a government contract we have just completed a survey of modern-foreign-language enrollments in junior and senior colleges as of the fall of 1963. We are currently negotiating several contracts through Title VI of the National Defense Education Act. The first is to gather statistics on offerings and enrollments in all foreign languages in public and non-public secondary schools. The second is to make a survey of current college enrollments in all foreign languages. Since gathering statistics on the classical languages is not a justifiable expenditure of national defense funds, the Modern Language Association will pay out of its own funds the proportion of the total cost needed to gather the facts on Latin and Greek in schools and colleges.
The National Defense Language Institutes: A Critical Report
Authors: Walsh Donald D.
Published: November 2006

The modern Language Association, under contract with the U.S. Office of Education, has organized and supervised the evaluation of National Defense Language Institutes in the summers of 1963 and 1964 and during the 1963–64 academic year. A total of 45 evaluators (21 in 1963, 28 in 1964, some of them serving in both years) visited 132 institutes (all of the 82 institutes in the summer of 1963, the 4 academic-year institutes in 1963–64, and 46 of the 80 institutes in the summer of 1964).
The Humanities and International Communication
Authors: Evans Luther H.
Published: November 2006

I speak to you tonight as an ex-administrator attempting to remember some of the intellectual activities that came to his notice in earlier years at the Library of Congress and UNESCO, and which in the setting of the present time seem worthy of attention. It has seemed to me for a long time that mankind has been moving toward one-worldness in fact and to a lesser extent in spirit and in institutions. It has also seemed to me important to speed up the process of creating one world in spirit and of going the necessary distance to create institutions of a world-wide character to suppress the causes of war.
Imaginative Authority in Spanish Literature
Authors: Green Otis H.
Published: November 2006

Spanish literature in the Golden Age was a primary literature that produced an impressive number of new literary forms that were admired, copied, and naturalized throughout the rest of Europe. Rojas' La Celestina, Torres Naharro's Comedia Serafina, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Tirso de Molina's El condenado por desconfiado, and Don Quixote provide examples of the “imaginative authority” of the older literature of Spain. This power of a piece of writing to assume a life of its own, its power to lead the audience wherever it pleases, is best understood in a religious context, since the authors of the works themselves wrote in a religious context. The end of literary study is not theological or moral instruction but elucidation of the intrinsic meanings of the work. Nevertheless, the proper model for the relation of the elucidator to the work is not that of the scientist to physical objects, but that of one man to another in charity. If the critic approaches the poem with this kind of reverence for its integrity, it will respond to questioning and take its part in the dialogue between reader and work which is the life of literary study.
Ideal Love and Human Reality in Montemayor's La Diana
Authors: Perry T. Anthony
Published: November 2006

As an abstraction from the conditions of real life, the pastoral mode permits both heightened esthetic contemplation and concentrated study of human love. Such removal from reality is related to music, myth, and nature. The peculiarity of La Diana consists in an attempt to fuse the neo-aristotelian antithesis between poetry (myth) and history. For Montemayor, love and virtue are mysterious gifts of nature which man preserves through effort. But if man serves love, high feelings mark the nobleman. In a social context such sentimental aristocracy must be proved in the form of a trial of love. Felismena's contradictory behavior may be understood as an amorous despair—the hardest of trials—that is nevertheless willed. Similar conclusions arise from viewing Belisa's dreams as symbolic projections (the paradigm for which is Felicia's potion—a symbol of rebirth). A symbolic interpretation of the magical dream induced by Alfeo reveals Belisa's desire to kill her lover (will to trial) without suffering his permanent loss. Such psychotic tendencies are stemmed by the goddess Felicia, who allegorically reinstitutes the desire for happiness and its pursuit in the world of reality through self-renunciation.
Patterns of Character Development in Tolstoy's War and Peace: Nicholas, Natasha, and Mary
Authors: Hagan John
Published: November 2006

While the public action in War and Peace moves toward war and then away from it, an analogous private journey from spiritual war to spiritual peace takes place within each of the protagonists. For three of them, Tolstoy structures the development by (a) situating for each character a specific major turning point, (b) constructing among the three stories various parallels and contrasts, and (c) developing appropriate patterns of symbolic imagery. Nicholas moves from war to peace by becoming transformed from a soldier into a farmer, husband, and father; the change is defined by imagery associated with physical liberation and two kinds of hunt. The movement in Natasha's life is from peace to war and is a result of the exposure of her innocence and happiness to temptation and suffering. This development is underscored by imagery connected with two kinds of singing, by the contrasting ways in which she reacts to the party at Uncle's and to the opera, and by a specific analogy between her fate and that of the nation. The movement from war to peace in Mary's story occurs when the inner conflicts created by her relations with her father are resolved, after the latter's death, upon the arrival of Nicholas, with whom her experience is further linked by a repetition of the imagery of liberation.
Christian Affirmation in The Book of the Duchess
Authors: Delasanta Rodney
Published: November 2006

Chaucer's elegy, The Book of the Duchess, has been read in the past either as an exercise in exclusively human consolation without religious meaning or—by the patristic critics—as so rigidly iconographic that the obvious dramatic situation has been sacrificed to accommodate patristic truths. Chaucer's real intention is more divinely directed than the former and more humanly directed than the latter. The poem offers Christian consolation complementary to the dramatic situation by weaving images of the resurrection into the warp and woof of mute pity. The recurrence of sleeping images, for example, in the case of the Dreamer himself and in the case of Ceys and Alcione, functions as a salubrious intermission between an anguished consciousness and a redemptive awakening. The repetition of horn blasts, both in the underworld episode and the hart-hunting scene, suggests the resurrectional trumpet of the New Testament. And the hunting scene, ambiguously involved as it is with the hart, suggests through the echoic use of resurrectional diction from the Canticle of Canticles further Christian affirmation about the mystery of immortality.
Adam, Eve, and The Fall in Paradise Lost
Authors: Bowers Fredson
Published: November 2006

The justification in Paradise Lost of the ways of God to men depends as much on Milton's dramatic and psychological motivation of the Fall as on its theological structure. The designed contrasts between Adam's and Eve's reactions on first awakening to life absolve Eve of the usual charge of vanity by establishing her as a feeling in relation to Adam as a ratiocinating being. Under the influence of Satan's venom Eve fails in love to Adam and then to God. But in Milton's view Adam is the faultier of the two because of his conscious failure to assert the absolute authority of his reason over her misguided feelings. Milton formally depends upon Paul's statement that Adam fell undeceived, but in his psychological motivation of the three key episodes of the Fall he differs from the usual interpretation of the Church Fathers that Paul meant only that Satan had not deceived Adam directly as he had deceived Eve. Milton thus reconciles the apparent paradox that Adam was not deceived but instead foolishly overcome by female charm. The scene in which he weakly yields permission is a direct foreshadowing of his acceptance of the apple since both contain the same false rationalization of his unwillingness to accept the responsibilities of his superior wisdom and its proper exercise in command.
The Biblical Context of Johnson's Rasselas
Authors: Preston Thomas R.
Published: November 2006

In the Life of Johnson, Boswell suggests that Rasselas echoes the vanitas vanitatum theme of Ecclesiastes. Boswell's suggestion is quite discerning, for Rasselas is, in fact, designed to recall both the Preacher's futile quest for perfect happiness and the meaning of that quest as interpreted by a post-Reformation school of commentators on Ecclesiastes. This school includes Bishop Simon Patrick, whose scriptural writings, in conjunction with those of William Lowth, made up the “standard” Augustan commentary on the Old Testament. Rasselas is informed with a complex of images, sentiments, and ideas drawn from Bishop Patrick's paraphrase of and annotations to the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the thematic structure of the apologue follows the thematic structure that the post-Reformation school attributed to Ecclesiastes.
Les Caves Du Vatican and Bergson's Le Rire
Authors: Atkinson John Keith
Published: November 2006

An analysis of Les Caves in terms of Le Rire reveals the nature of Gidian comedy, at the same time establishing an affinity between Bergson and Gide. Bergson's thesis is that comedy springs from the conflict between mechanical and living, body and soul, inanimate and animate. Even wordplay and farce find a place in this context. The presentation of comedy requires detachment on the part of the author, an effect which Gide successfully achieves in this novel. Comedy criticises hypocrisy, whether it be social or individual. Gide criticises forms of hypocrisy arising from inadequate awareness of immediate exigencies. Amédée, central to the theme of comic conflict, is central to the action and structure of Les Caves. Anthime reveals the aspirations of the soul in comic conflict with the limitations of the body. Protos manipulates social groups and individuals mechanically but cannot escape the consequences of the game he has initiated. Lafcadio, desiring spontaneity, in conflict with the logical Julius, lives out an inconsequential dream. For both authors the contradictions of the world of dreams reveal parallels with the world of comedy.
Themes of the Young Hero in Serbocroatian Oral Epic Tradition
Authors: Bynum David E.
Published: November 2006

Novice heroes in modern Serbocroatian oral epic tradition present the same scholarly problems as does Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey. In this Balkan narrative tradition, only a small number of epics has been recorded in which the novices and their stories are the main substance. The Yugoslav singer Avdo Međedović performed one of these by dictation for Milman Parry in Bijelo Polje, Yugoslavia, in 1935: The Marriage of Mehmed, Son of Smailaga. That song of 12,311 verses is one of the two longest epics recorded from Serbocroatian tradition. By thematic analysis of it and eight other Serbocroatian epics of initiation representing the full range of the initiation story's multiformity, we can establish that Avdo's epic song is an orthodox telling of the traditional story in spite of its extraordinary, Homeric size, and that both the ancient Greek legends of Theseus (in Plutarch and Apollodorus) and Homer's story of Telemachus are thematically indistinguishable from it. The content of a common Balkan mythic tradition underlying the ancient Greek and modern Serbocroatian stories can be described, and the traditional correctness of Telemachus' presence in the Odyssey can be explained from Yugoslav tellings of the Telemachia.
José Hierro's “Para un esteta”
Authors: Bary David
Published: November 2006

The 1952 poem is commonly read as a manifesto of Spain's contemporary “social” poets and as an expression of their aversion to the estheticism of a previous poetic generation. The “esthete” addressed in the poem seems at first glance to be an obvious caricature of Juan Ramón Jiménez. The “esthete,” on closer examination, differs significantly from Jiménez in several respects. Jiménez shares neither his interest in abstract beauty divorced from existential concerns nor his overly refined, “literary” language. The only real point of identity between Jiménez and the “esthete” lies in their shared concern for the “Obra” as a substitute for personal immortality; but even that concern is typical of only one period in Jiménez' career. A comparison between Jiménez and Hierro reveals no such clear contrast in their approaches to poetry as that implied by Hierro between himself and the “esthete.” The latter turns out to be a straw man reflecting some aspects of Jiménez, some of the vanguard poets of the twenties, and something of a half-hidden visionary side of Hierro himself. Hierro seems to have invented the “esthete” as a means of affirming his own poetic individuality, a maneuver which was surely unnecessary in view of the fact that by 1952 Hierro already possessed an unmistakably personal style.
Thomas Mann's “Gladius Dei”
Authors: Hoffmann Ernst Fedor
Published: November 2006

Mann's story, often considered only a minor companion piece to the play Fiorenza, is significant in itself as a satire on the intellectual attitudes prevalent in Munich around 1900. The story begins with a general description of Munich which, though apparently independent, is in fact connected to the later parts by the use of sophisticated narrative techniques. This description also contains topical references and details which show that the artistic and intellectual community of Munich, in its admiration for the Italian Renaissance, is enacting a quasi neo-Renaissance. Into this realistic setting Mann then places a fictional hero who feels he is called to assume the task of a Savonarola for his time. A grotesque scene results which exposes the spuriousness of the Renaissance cult. In presenting the satire, Mann employs means and forms which seem to be forerunners of his later leitmotifs, “gelebte Vita,” parody, and others. The devices in “Gladius Dei,” however, have specific, mostly rhetorical functions within the story, whereas their later counterparts often have far-reaching symbolic meaning.
Marlowe and God: The Tragic Theology of Dr. Faustus
Authors: Ornstein Robert
Published: November 2006

To appreciate Dr. Faustus as cosmic tragedy, it is necessary to relate its particular view of man and God to other works of Marlowe and to the atheistic doctrines attributed to him by his contemporaries. It is also necessary to reexamine scholarly assumptions about Marlowe, whose mind was perhaps more medieval than modern, and whose view of experience was often more antihumanistic than humanistic. Obsessed with the thought of man's impotence before the power of time and death, Marlowe was attracted to the idea of man's transcendent will. But he intuited very early the inhumanity of absolute or superhuman power. Recognizing the horror of his own conception of the divine, he juxtaposed in Dr. Faustus Faustus and Christ, first as moral antitheses and then as complementary sacrifices to an implacable God. To attempt to read Dr. Faustus as an orthodox homily is to succeed only in stripping it of its tragic grandeur and metaphysical terror. To view it, however, as Marlowe's ultimate religious and cosmological statement—as his turning upon his ideal of transcendence—is to grasp the full meaning of Faustus' despair and to grasp also the final congruence of Marlowe's art and life.
Milton's Participial Style
Authors: Chatman Seymour
Published: November 2006

The English participles, present and past, are best interpreted grammatically as transformations from underlying sentences in which they were regular predicates. Interesting ambiguities and quasi-ambig-ities sometimes occur in Milton as a result of these and related transformations. Present participles tend to be active, narrative-furthering devices; past participles, expository, historical devices. Milton's practice changed from a heavier use of the present to a heavier use of the past participle. This is clear evidence of his growing Latinity. One esthetic consequence was a more compact exposition than had characterized earlier narrative poetry, with a greater density of historical implication. The heavy use of past participles also coincided well with the philosophical intention of Paradise Lost of explaining God's ways to man, since many times the implicit (but deleted) subject of the past participle is “God.” Thus God tends to be grammatically, as well as philosophically, omnipresent though hidden.
The Genesis of the Strozza Subplot in George Chapman's The Gentleman Usher
Authors: Smith John Hazel
Published: November 2006

George Chapman's source for every important incident in the Strozza subplot of The Gentleman Usher was Chapter x of De Abditis Nonnullis ac mirandis morborum & sanationum causis liber, a collection of medical case histories written in Latin by Antonio Benivieni, a fifteenth-century Florentine physician and associate of Ficino. Both works are informed with Neo- Platonism. Chapman took from Benivieni's work several key phrases and in cidental details. Possibly echoing Italian political names, he added a villain, Medice, and changed the name of the protagonist from Gaspar to Strozza; to establish a Platonic parallel with Vincentio and Margaret of the main plot, he replaced Gaspar's spiritual counselor, a friend named Marioctus, with a wife, Cynanche, who serves the same function. The names Strozza and Cynanche contribute significant lexical meanings to the play: strozza is Italian for “throat,” and κυνάγχη Greek for both “sore throat” and “dog collar”; primarily, Cynanche is a collar to her husband in the common Renaissance symbol of discipline. Poetic elaboration aside, Chapman's only other important alteration was to allow Strozza to retain, in an apparently weakened form, the prophetic gift which Gaspar lost immediately after his miraculous cure.
The Running Water and the Standing Stone
Authors: Squire James R.
Published: November 2006

Last September at an International Curriculum Conference at Oxford University, John Goodlad, Dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the prime movers of American education, pronounced the requiem for what he called the “discipline-centered” curriculum movement which began in 1951. Just as Progressive Education and its late-blooming progeny, Life Adjustment Education, dominated American educational thinking from the Thirties to the early Fifties, so “discipline centered” curriculum reform, beginning with establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1951 and the MLA's FL program a year later, seems now to have run its course. Thus Dean Goodlad looks for new commitments and new values to shape our teaching efforts during the generation ahead.
Dialectical Studies in West Virginia
Authors: Primer Sylvester
Published: November 2006

In studying the language or pronunciation of any section of the country, it is necessary first of all to trace back the history of the people inhabiting it to the earliest beginnings in order to explain understandingly the dialectical peculiarities of its grammar or pronunciation. I shall, therefore, preface my remarks on the linguistic peculiarities of this region with a brief sketch of its earliest settlements and later development.

The earlier history of Western Virginia, now known as West Virginia, begins a century later than that of Eastern Virginia, or Virginia proper. In 1710 Alexander Spotswood, a Scotchman, was the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia.
The Poetry of Nicholas Breton
Authors: Tappan Eva March
Published: November 2006

The chief source of information concerning Nicholas Breton's early life is the will of his father, written in 1557-8, probated in 1558-9. This will, a lengthy document, provides liberally for the wife and the five children, devises generous legacies to a number of household servants, remembers various hospitals, the “poorest creatures” in several parishes, “poorest Skoolers of the university of Cambrydge,” and even sets apart a sum of money for “repayringe the hyghe wayes brydges and other most needful and necessary thinges.” There are mentions of “jewelles” and plate and valuable furniture and clothes, and the whole tone of the will indicates that its maker was a man who had wealth and was accustomed to use it freely and generously. That he was as liberal in thought as in money-matters, that he had due regard to the preferences of others, may be fairly inferred from a bequest to one Henry Knighte, “so that he continew to study at the Lawe, or use any other honest exereyse of Lyvinge.” That the wife was a woman of and this association takes the reader away from the atmosphere of Early English poetry.“
Boccaccio's Defence of Poetry; as Contained in the Fourteenth Book of the de Genealogia Deorum
Authors: Woodbridge Elisabeth
Published: November 2006

The work in which his Defence of Poetry occurs, the De Genealogia Deorum, was first suggested to Boccaccio while he was yet a young man, by Hugo, king of Cyprus. Hugo sent to the young poet, asking him to write a work upon the mythology of antiquity, there being no such book then in existence. Boccaccio seems to have been by no means eager for so tremendous a task, but urged on by his royal patron he at last began it, and continued to work on it at intervals, though the king who had originally set him the undertaking did not live to see its completion. Completed, indeed, it never really was, and it was without the author's knowledge and against his wishes that the manuscript passed out of his hands before it had undergone revision. This accounts in part for the desultory character of the work, its diffuseness, its repetitions, its lack of arrangement and subordination; only in part, of course, for something of all this—that, namely, which corresponds with the essentially undiscriminating, non-selective mind of the author himself—could not have been eliminated by any amount of revision.
The Characteristics of Style
Authors: Spofford A. R.
Published: November 2006

Before a society whose members are so largely teachers of language, and conversant with the art of writing, it would be superfluous to insist upon the value of style as an element of power in literature. As the thoughts of the mind involve the highest of human interests, what can be more important than their fit expression ? What are the enduring books, of which the reading world calls for continually new editions ? Invariably they are the books which are the best written. The sense of the world is keen and the survival of the fittest is as certain as that art is long. Considering that most books are written by sciolists or else by ignoramuses, and by authors who have never learned the rudiments of literary art, is it any wonder that they nearly all perish almost as soon as they are born ? Perfection in style, indeed, is rarely or never found. As Alexander Smith sought through all literature—and sought in vain,—for

“A poem round and perfect as a star,”

so the perfect style is far to seek and hard to find. Style is not merely, as some conceive, manner independent of matter; it is not merely the dress of thought, but the living body of thought itself.
A Study of Lanier's Poems
Authors: Kent Charles W.
Published: November 2006

A Two themes welded in perfect harmony will tell the story of our poet's life, music and love. Music-born with him, descending to him by a long line of inheritance, his life-long passion; love, broad, catholic and unfathomable, the source of his real living and the key note of his character. Love, the core of his inmost being, the very marrow of his daily thought. Music, the flower of his daily life and the fittest utterance of his secret soul. By good right, too, could he lay claim to the gift of music. In the days of good Queen Bess, one Jerome Lanier, a Huguenot refugee had been kindly received in England and he repaid this kindness by giving to England's sovereign his talents and by bequeathing to her successors, James I. and the First Charles, the talents of his gifted son, Nicholas.
Southern Literature
Authors: Baskervill Wm. M.
Published: November 2006

Civilization in the United States has been diffused from two centres—New England and Virginia. In the former the starting-point was the town-meeting; in the latter, the planter's mansion. As has been well said, the germ of the whole difference between them lay in their different notions concerning the value of vicinity among the units of society. From the town-meetings of New England have come schools, manufactures and a literature; from the planters’ mansions of the Old Dominion generals, statesmen and liberty. One of the most philosophic political judgments of recent times, says Nichol—the anti-Southern historian of American literature, admits that “the honour of maintaining self-government, and making it possible for the Federation to dominate over the continent cannot be wrested from the Southern States.” The spirit of liberty, Bancroft tells us, had planted itself deep among the Virginians and elsewhere he adds, “an instinctive aversion to too much government has always been a trait of Southern character.”
The Order of Words in Anglo-Saxon Prose
Authors: Smith C. Alphonso
Published: November 2006

(a) Few subjects connected with Anglo-Saxon prose have been so persistently slighted as that of the position of words and clauses. The grammars either omit it entirely or touch upon it only in the most vague and general terms. No monographs treating the whole subject in all its periods and aspects have yet appeared, Kube's dissertation1 being the only attempt, so far as I know, to investigate the word-order of even a single monument of Anglo-Saxon literature. But this work, though valuable, is awkwardly arranged, and devotes too little proportionate space to the subject of dependent clauses, the element of Anglo-Saxon word-order which offers the greatest contrast to modern English and which is therefore the most interesting as well as the most important. Kube's results are further vitiated by his having selected a monument written at long intervals apart and therefore incapable, if treated as a single synchronous work, of exhibiting any successive changes in word-order, or the word-order of any fixed date.
VIII.—“Free” and “Checked” Vowels in Gallic Popular Latin
Authors: Menger L. Emil
Published: November 2006

My reason for offering the present contribution to a subject no longer considered as affording opportunities for remarkable discoveries is the following: Among the characteristic terms employed by students of Old French philology there are two which, consecrated by long usage, occur more frequently, probably, than any others. These two are “free “(frei, libre) and “checked” (gedeckt, entravé); they are used to refer to the position of vowels in Popular Latin, the vowel being called “free” when standing before a single consonant or certain consonant combinations, “checked” in other circumstances. Now I dare say that there is no definition of such fundamental importance which betrays more inconsistencies and difficulties to the careful scholar than does this one as stated in its present form in the various manuals on Old French. After seeking in vain either to find any single definition that seemed satisfactory or to combine the statements of different scholars into one comprehensive presentation of the point in question, I concluded that there must be something radically wrong with the traditional method of expressing the definition, and determined to make an independent investigation of the whole matter.
The Christian Coloring in the Beowulf
Authors: Blackburn F. A.
Published: November 2006

It is admitted by all critics that the Beowulf is essentially a heathen poem; that its materials are drawn from tales composed before the conversion of the Angles and Saxons to Christianity, and that there was a time when these tales were repeated without the Christian reflections and allusions that are found in the poem that has reached us. But in what form this heathen material existed before it was put into its present shape is a question on which opinions are widely different. In the nature of the case we can look for no entire consensus of opinion and no exact answer to the question; the most that one can expect to establish is at the best only a probability.
A Grouping of Figures of Speech, Based upon the Principle of Their Effectiveness
Authors: Greene Herbert Eveleth
Published: November 2006

Four years ago I read before this Association a paper upon a single figure of speech,—allegory. In order to make a careful study of that figure, it was necessary to give some attention to other figures, especially to these three,—simile, metaphor, and personification. From time to time during the last four years I have followed up trains of thought that were opened by my earlier study, and thus have been led almost unconsciously to note the various relations of the more important figures, until I have come to feel that the best way to arrive at an understanding of any one figure is to study figurative language as a whole as well as in its parts.1 Each year the subject has been brought anew to my mind by the necessity of presenting it in the class-room.
I.—Fausto, a Gaucho Poem
Authors: Page F. M.
Published: November 2006

It is ever a source of regret to anyone interested in the glorious Argentine, lying under the Southern Cross, that its name cannot be mentioned, even casually, without its suggesting revolutions, uprisings, financial distress and ruin. It is an association accepted without question. To speak of that land and not touch upon revolutions, would be like airing one's impressions of Hamlet without mentioning the noble Dane himself. This comparison is somewhat venerable, to be sure, when one considers its three hundred winters and as many summers, but it is singularly suggestive with regard to La Plata, since it points to something being decidedly “rotten in the State.” The latter thought, however, is not apt to disturb the equanimity of the average Argentine mind. To the native of that favored country a revolution is no more out of the normal order of things than is a cyclone to our own Western people.
III.—Fiction as a College Study
Authors: Perry Bliss
Published: November 2006

A good deal has been said, in recent years, about the importance of prose fiction. The vogue which the modern novel undoubtedly enjoys, its immediate and unquestionable influence over multitudes of readers, has contributed much to the prevalent impression as to the value of fiction, yet a more significant factor has been the increasing self-consciousness of fiction writers. They seem to feel a distinct assurance that at last they are going to get seats nearer the head of the table. Compared with the solemnity with which they discuss in public the responsibilities laid upon practitioners of their art, Harry Fielding's prefaces about his stern duty as a historian of human nature seem frivolous indeed. If this conviction of the greatness of the art were producing, or tending to produce, greater artists, one could scarcely quarrel with it, but among the day's distinguished names the great artists are unfortunately as few as ever. Wide-spread as is the present interest in fiction, it is at least debatable whether the English novel is much more intrinsically important, when compared with other types of literature, or even when tested by the proportion of fiction to the entire literary output, than it has been at a half dozen other periods in the last two hundred years.
X.—Über Goethe's Sonette
Authors: Schipper J.
Published: November 2006

Es giebt kaum eine Dichtungsart, deren Werth so lebhaft bestritten worden ist und die dennoch eine so grosse Rolle in der Literatur aller westeuropäischen Völker gespielt hat, als das Sonett. Schon hieraus kann man schliessen, dass die Vorzüge dieser poetischen Form doch nicht so gering sein können, wie dies öfters behauptet worden ist. Es könnte ferner aber auch daraus gefolgert werden, dass bald nach dem Bekanntwerden des Sonetts in Frankreich die Franzosen den Italienern das Verdienst, es in die Literatur eingeführt zu haben, streitig zu machen suchten. Seit jedoch Friedrich Diez, der Begründer der romanischen Philologie, Italien als die Heimat des Sonetts nachgewiesen hat, wird der italienische Ursprung desselben wohl ziemlich allgemein als feststehend anerkannt. Aus Italien gelangte es im XVI. Jahrhundert, wie nach den übrigen romanischen Ländern, so auch nach Frankreich und gleichfalls nach England, wo es sich am eigenartigsten, aber ohne auf die anderen Literaturen einen Einfluss auszuüben, entwickelt hat. Überall war Petrarca das Vorbild, von dem man ausgieng, oder das Ideal, dem sich die Sonettendichtung, wenn sie auf Abwege gerathen war, in ihren edleren Bestrebungen wieder so viel wie möglich zu nähern suchte. Durch ihn war ja bekanntlich diese Dichtungsform zur grössten Vollendung und Popularität gebracht worden.
Learnèd and Learn'd
Authors: Hempl George
Published: November 2006

This paper is a part of a larger study on the general subject, ‘The Loss or Retention of Weak Syllables in English,’ which I shall publish at a later time.

It is well known that there are words like aged, blessed, learned, in which the e is silent if the word is a participle, but is sounded if the word is an adjective. I am not aware that an explanation of this interesting phenomenon has been offered, other than the usual untenable one that it is “in order to distinguish” the parts of speech. It is my object in this paper to show (1) that this, as well as certain closely related phenomena, is based on the fact that our speech prefers a rhythm consisting of syllables alternately strong and weak, and (2) that this has produced different results in the adjective from what it has in the participle because the usual position of the adjective with reference to the other members of the sentence is not that generally occupied by the participle.
Gaston Paris: Romance Philologist and Member of the French Academy
Authors: Todd H. A.
Published: November 2006

For a number of years a mot passed quietly about in the learned world of Paris—fortunately without ever committing the indiscretion of finding its way into print—to the effect that Gaston Paris ought to be elected to the French Academy in order that there might be in that august body at least one member who was an authority on the French language. Another and more piquant form of this much appreciated pleasantry, was that the one man who, as a matter of course, could not expect to be elected to the Academy, happened to be the greatest living authority on the subject of its labors.