bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Satires on Man and “The Dignity of Human Nature”
Authors: Goldgar Bertrand A.
Published: February 2007

In his recent critical work on Swift, Mr. Edward Rosenheim, Jr., argues that satire is an attack upon “discernible historic particulars”; a true “satire against mankind,” he adds, necessarily lies beyond this definition and must be considered as a species of philosophic writing. Without questioning his definition of satire, which is intended as a critical tool rather than as historical description, I think it worth recalling that attacks on human nature or the human species as such were thought in Swift's day to be well within the satiric genre. More significantly, such satires on man fell into general disfavor in the first half of the eighteenth century; they appear to have been the first to suffer from the general reaction against satire which Stuart Tave and others have traced. The hostile reception encountered by the greatest example of the genre, Gulliver's Travels, embodied the same charges as had been levelled earlier in the century against lesser works. While other forms of satire were still flourishing and meeting with critical approval, satiric indictments of mankind as a whole were censured as libels on the “dignity of human nature.”
The Evidence That Hugh Brackenridge Wrote “The Cornwalliad”
Authors: Smeall J. F. S.
Published: February 2007

I propose that Hugh Brackenridge (1750–1816) wrote the anonymous “Cornwalliad” of 720 lines and some prose preliminaries that in 1779 appeared in his United States Magazine. To support this ascription I have a three-part argument: first, that a prose passage, in an unprinted manuscript play by Brackenridge, was put into verse for “The Cornwalliad”; second, that “The Cornwalliad” was edited for The United States Magazine as if it were by the editor and could not have been by anyone but the editor, who was Brackenridge; and third, that a life of its unnamed author sketched in a preliminary “Apology for the Cornwalliad” corresponds with a hitherto little-explored phase of Brackenridge's life. These textual, editorial, and biographical arguments seem to make it certain that Hugh Brackenridge wrote this excellent mock-heroic poem.
New Light on Sterne: An Old Man's Recollections of the Young Vicar
Authors: Kuist James M.
Published: February 2007

In a volume of miscellaneous manuscripts at the British Museum, placed at random and inconspicuously among larger folio leaves, is a set of notes headed “Sterne.” The notes were written by Joseph Hunter, the nineteenth-century antiquary and literary historian, and they came to the British Museum with Hunter's other papers shortly after his death in 1861. In view of the abundant information about Sterne's private life which the notes contain, it is surprising that this item has remained unindexed and that it is not mentioned in the catalogue description of the volume. In the absence of such references, very likely only an occasional reader who has happened upon them has seen these notes, and, since the major biographies of Laurence Sterne make no use of distinct details which Hunter provides, it is quite possible that none of Sterne's biographers have encountered Hunter's information during the past century. At present, our familiarity with the early years of Sterne's marriage and his residence at Sutton-on-the-Forest is rather limited, based as it is upon isolated public records, some letters, fugitive anecdotes, and the unflattering and sometimes vicious account written by John Croft. No impartial memoirs with any claim to authenticity or wealth of details have until now seemed available. Thus, the intimate account of Sterne which Hunter has given presents to modern scholars an unexpected and promising opportunity to gain new insight into the life and, perhaps, into the work of one of England's most unusual writers. A transcript of Hunter's notes appears below, followed by a brief evaluation of them according to our present knowledge of Laurence Sterne.
Walt Whitman and the Nibelungenlied
Authors: Little Wm. A.
Published: February 2007

Walt Whitman's interest in epic poetry bespoke his intention to become the bard of the masses. Whereas Shakespeare and Goethe had been epic poets of the aristocracy, Whitman envisaged himself as the poet of democracy. His work was to be the epic of the common man, and its style must be determinedly subjective. In 1856 Whitman wrote, “Leaves of Grass must be called not objective, but altogether subjective—‘I know’ runs through them as a perpetual refrain. Yet the great Greek poems, also the Teutonic poems, also Shakespeare and all the great masters have been objective, epic—they have all described characters, wars, heroes, etc.”
Auden's Marxism
Authors: Replogle Justin
Published: February 2007

Commentators have mentioned Auden's Marxism for so long now that his indebtedness to Marx threatens to become a critical commonplace through sheer repetition. Yet no one has ever shown that such indebtedness exists. In the 1930's merely to be young, socially conscious, and outspoken was enough to mark one as a Marxist, or at least a “leftist,” and Auden was all these things. But now that the 1930's have passed, and Auden has long since ceased to be either young or a “thirties poet,” the Marxist element in his work deserves a thorough investigation. I propose, therefore, to ask how much Marxism there is in Auden's poetry, where it is found, and what sort of thing it is. Since it is important to discover just how the pattern of his Marxist borrowings changes (if it does) through the years, the first question calls for a chronological examination of his work.
Sutpen and The South: A Study of Absalom, Absalom!
Authors: Backman Melvin
Published: February 2007

Seven years after the publication of The Sound and the Fury came Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The Sound and the Fury dealt with the fall of a family, Absalom deals with the fall of a society. The Quentin Compson of Absalom is not quite the same as the earlier Quentin: his concern is social rather than personal and his role is identified for the most part with a central quest in the novel—the quest to discover the truth about the rise and fall of his South. In its search for the truth about a whole society, the novel circles and shuttles back and forth in time, its sentences twist and strain, and its narrators attempt to recreate a past on the basis of some fact and much conjecture. Sometimes the narrators mislead unintentionally, sometimes they contradict one another, and often they are carried away by their own bias, preoccupation, or imagination. Yes, it is hard to come by truth, but still one might question whether a novel whose pitch is too shrill, whose approach is emotional and poetic, whose perspective seems unclear and shifting—one might question whether such a work presents the best way of getting at historical truth. The method of narration apparently mirrors not only the difficulty in getting at truth but the struggle to face truth. For all its straining, its complexities and obscurities, Absalom, I would conclude, is Faulkner's most historical novel.
A Glance at “Whiteness” in Melville and Camus
Authors: Tucker Harry
Published: February 2007

In “journey to consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus's L'Etranger” (PMLA, lxxix, 321–328), William M. Manly points out in what ways the qualities of “whiteness” and “light” lend symbolic expression to Meursault's perceptions of a negative existence and of death itself (see pp. 322–324), and reaches the conclusion that “it would appear that not only the sun, but (as the white glare of the mortuary suggests) ‘lumière’ in general is employed by Camus in a recurrent pattern which in moments of crisis is highly symbolic (p. 324). Certainly, ”whiteness“ and ”light“ are qualities closely related in their effects on the perceiver, and which appear in L'Etranger as elements of the landscape.
Shepherds and Prophets: Religious Unity in the Towneley Secunda Pastorum
Authors: Manly William M.
Published: February 2007

The high dramatic quality of the Secunda Pastorum raises a recurrent interpretive question: does the play function as a unified religious statement in a traditional craft cycle, or does it function primarily as a secular farce with a Nativity scene added? Critics of this supremely sophisticated medieval play have moved from the early view that the long secular prologue was unrelated to, and detracted from, the Christ Nativity, to the more recent opinion that the stage business involving Mak is an artful parody of the true Nativity and is structurally adapted to the religious end for which the play was designed.
Form and Content in the Odes of Malherbe
Authors: Wadsworth Philip A.
Published: February 2007

No one questions the importance of Malherbe. We read and admire some of his poems in anthologies, we know that his literary doctrine was a landmark in French criticism, we are aware that he and his disciples did much to bring about the development of seventeenth-century classicism. Yet, except in the monumental studies by René Fromilhague, not much has been written concerning Malherbe's technique as a poet. Fromilhague has investigated every detail of stanza forms and rhymes in Malherbe but there are many aspects of his art which deserve further attention: his imagery, his sonorities, his expression of emotion, to name just a few. In the present paper I shall limit myself to his odes, which are of course his major writings, and within the odes to the question of their form and content. It will be necessary, first, to discuss very briefly Malherbe's concept of the ode as a literary genre. Then I shall go on to inspect the seven completed odes (in one case virtually completed), particularly their themes and internal organization. The interest of this problem arises from the unanimous acclaim which literary historians have given to the “rigorous logic” or “admirable structure” or the tight “enchaînement des idées” in these poems. Such comments, we shall see, have little to justify them.
The Hero in Corneille's Early Comedies
Authors: Koch Philip
Published: February 2007

Immediately after his tragedy Pompée (1642–43), Corneille wrote Le Menteur (1643), a comedy. In the “Epître” of the latter play, Corneille tried to explain this curious sequence in genre and offered as one of his reasons: “Et d'ailleurs, étant obligé au genre comique de ma première réputation, je ne pouvois l'abandonner tout à fait sans quelque espèce d'ingratitude.” This argument simply recalled to his contemporaries that five, and in a sense all six, of the earliest plays by the author of the tragic masterpieces from Le Cid (1637) to Polyeucte (1641–42) were in the comic vein. Influenced by the incomprehension or hostility of the “classical” period, later generations were little aware of this first flowering of Corneille's dramatic genius.
Tennyson's “Oh! That 'Twere Possible”: A Link Between In Memoriam and Maud
Authors: Marshall George O.
Published: February 2007

Alfred Tennyson'S poetical career, extending over sixty-five years between first and last volumes—from Poems by Two Brothers in 1827 to his posthumous volume published three weeks after his death in 1892—is punctuated not only by recurrent themes but also by the reworking of old manuscripts and his well-known revision of published texts. His revision and expansion of 110 lines beginning “Oh! that ‘twere possible” published in The Tribute in 1837 resulted in 1855 in the much longer Maud, in which the earlier lyric, now beginning “O that ‘twere possible,” is Part II, Section iv. This lyric is interesting as the nucleus around which Maud developed and also because of its affinities with In Memoriam.
The Innocents Adrift Edited by Mark Twain's Official Biographer
Authors: Scott Arthur L.
Published: February 2007

From the death of Mark Twain in 1910 until 1937 Albert Bigelow Paine was the official editor of Mark Twain's literary papers. Paine was not a scholar. He wrote popular biographies, sentimental novels, and books for children. When he came to edit Mark Twain's letters, speeches, notebooks, and autobiography, he made countless deletions, following the procedure often practiced by editors dealing with such material.
The Notebook for Riceyman Steps
Authors: Hepburn James G.
Published: February 2007

The Conventional image of Arnold Bennett as a novelist-at-work has three or four sources: general notions about realistic novelists, inferences from Bennett's completed novels, glimpses of Bennett at his task, and fragmentary remarks by Bennett himself. The image of Zola, notebook in hand, going down into the mines to gather material for Germinal is the image of Bennett interviewing an elderly couple to gather material on the Siege of Paris for The Old Wives' Tale. The ninety volumes of Zola's notebooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale are matched by dozens of notebooks that Bennett kept. J. B. Atkins asserts that Bennett “would divide his scheme [for a novel] into parts which he numbered and divide each part into sections. He knew in advance what he would put into each part and each section.” And George Doran recollects, in Chronicles of Barabbas, that on one of many silent walks in the forest at Fontainebleau he interrupted Bennett's thoughts to say, “I suppose in these silences you are actually phrasing your thousand words for tomorrow,” and got “yes” for an answer. Some of Bennett's voluntary remarks about his writing support the image. In his Preface to The Old Wives' Tale he comments upon the tedious but necessary research that he undertook for the novel. In an article in the Evening Standard he writes about “moving … an entire bookseller's shop with all its books and dust from a South Coast port to … [Clerkenwell]” to use in Riceyman Steps. And in his Journal, 1929, he says about Imperial Palace, then being written: “I have the whole of the material for the novel; and it is indexed, in a notebook. I would sooner lose fifty pages of the manuscript than that notebook.”
Bernard Shaw and C. E. M. Joad: The Adventures of Two Puritans in Their Search for God
Authors: Demaray John G.
Published: February 2007

With the passing years, the criticism of T. S. Eliot has lost much of the power it once had to influence the literary taste of the age. Yet one casual comment by Eliot echoes again and again through the scholarship and criticism of recent times. “In the seventeenth century,” Eliot wrote in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” “a dissociation of the sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Eliot was eventually to confess doubt about the cause of this dissociation, but he did note that, following Donne and Marvell, poetic feeling became cruder, until, in the eighteenth century, “The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected” (p. 248).
George and Benn: The Autumnal Vision
Authors: Hannum Hunter G.
Published: February 2007

Komm in den totgesagten park und schau:Der schimmer ferner lachelnder gestadeDer reinen wolken unverhofites blauErhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade.

Dort nimm das tiefe gelb-das weiche grauVon birken und von buchs-der wind ist lau-Die spaten rosen welkten noch nicht ganz-Erlese kiisse sie und flicht den kranz

Vergß auch diese lezten astern nicht-Den purpur um die ranken wilder rebenUnd auch was übrig blieb von griinem lebenVerwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht.

Einsamer nie als im August:Erfüllungsstunde-im Gelandedie roten und die goldenen Brande,doch wo ist deiner Garten Lust?

Die Seen hell, die Himmel weich,die Acker rein und glanzen leise,doch wo sind Sieg und Siegsbeweiseaus dem von dir vertretenen Reich?

Wo alles sich durch Gluck beweistund tauscht den Blick und tauscht die Ringeim Weingeruch, im Rausch der Dinge-:dienst du dem Gegengliick, dem Geist.

In two public addresses, Gottfried Benn declared himself one of the many admirers of the famous poem by Stefan George which begins: “Komm in den totgesagten park und schau …” Upon both occasions Benn gave his audience a short resume of his reasons for liking the poem. These remarks, whatever they tell us about George, reveal something about Benn also, for the poet—as T. S. Eliot points out—is a very special kind of critic, inasmuch as he, when commenting on the work of another creator, consciously or unconsciously “is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write.”
Judgment by Epithet in Goethe's Torquato Tasso
Authors: Boulby Mark
Published: February 2007

Goethe's Tasso is approached from a fresh angle by an examination of certain recurrent epithets, notably “klug,” “schön,” and “edel.” By comparing in detail passages in which these adjectives occur, and by adducing evidence as to Goethe's usage outside Tasso, new light is shed upon the kernel of the drama, which may be seen as a contest between sets of relative values with the author ambiguously refraining from committing himself to an overriding judgment. The observation that the play is centrally concerned with the act of judging character, illustrated by Goethe's stress upon “kennen” and “erkennen,” makes it possible to penetrate beyond the conventional view of Tasso as an artist drama to the insight that it presents the complex confrontation between two modes of self-consciousness or ways of being. Through the technique of vocabulary analysis within a context of dramatic argument certain recalcitrant problems of Tasso criticism, such as the vexed question of the denouement and the exact nature of Antonio's reversal, are freshly illuminated and the ambivalence and relativity of the various moral and social ideals is conclusively demonstrated. At the same time Goethe extracts from this contest of epithets a tentative positive vision of “Seelenadel.”
Spenser's Hermaphrodite and the 1590 Faerie Queene
Authors: Cheney Donald
Published: February 2007

The image of the Hermaphrodite with which Spenser presents the union of Amoret and Scudamour in his original conclusion to Book IIIof The Faerie Queene draws on two distinct iconographic traditions: the Ovidian scene of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis which had become a symbol of marriage in Renaissance emblem books, and the single androgynous figure found in antique Roman statues which bear an uncertain relationship to Platonic notions of perfection. Such a conflation enables Spenser to emphasize and complete patterns of imagery which he has been developing throughout Book III: Britomart as patroness of Chastity has assumed an Amazonian role which stresses her androgynous self-sufficiency, but she has been repeatedly shown as tormented by visions of love. Like Guyon in Hook II, she fulfills her immediate quest when she liberates a victim of enchantment; but although she differs from Guyon in her destined participation in British history, she remains aware that within the context of the Book of Chastity she can be wholly chaste only at the price of her continuing incompleteness as a woman. Spenser's poem in its three-book form shares with other Elizabethan works a preoccupation with the paradoxical identification of love and death, a recognition that the self can triumph over change only by accepting its own destruction in marriage.
Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry
Authors: Rackin Phyllis
Published: February 2007

The sexual ambiguity of Shakespeare's boy Cleopatra embodies the clash between two poetic theories the theory that poetry imitates Nature and is therefore subject to rules of decorum and verisimilitude and the theory that poetry creates a new, “golden” world to which the truth-criteria for extrapoetic experience do not apply. Both theories were prevalent in Shakespeare's time, as we see in Sidney's Apology for Poetry; and both persist today, as we see in modern controversies about the play. Shakespeare's dramatic strategy in Antony and Cleopatra involves the interplay between these two notions of poetry and poetic truth: the first is associated with the Roman viewpoint and the kinds of dramatic evidence that support it, the second with the Egyptian viewpoint and the kinds of poetic and dramatic evidence that support it. Only by studying the play with both theories in mind can we approach its structural and thematic center and see that its problematic features Cleopatra's enigmatic character and motivation. Antony's ambiguous stature as a tragic hero, and the eccentric structure are – like the boy Cleopatra, necessary components of its dramatic strategy, functional embodiments of its themes.
New Verse by Henry Fielding
Authors: Grundy Isobel M.
Published: February 2007

This article incorporates the text of nearly 800 lines of verse written in 1729 and 1733 by Henry Fielding, printed from his holograph. The MS is itself a rarity, being the only extant literary writing in Fielding's hand. The verse has never been published or identified. Textual footnotes record Fielding's corrections and explanatory notes identify the people and events to which he refers. The article discusses the verses as mock-epic and polemical epistle. and as material illuminating Fielding's literary and political relationships: with Pope and the Scriblerus writers, with Robert Walpole, and with his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Fielding imitates Pope's Dunciad, yet rebukes its savagery. He appears as a vivid reporter of the topical scene, a supporter of Whig rule as a bastion against Roman Catholicism and Jacobitism, and an upholder of the ancients against the moderns. The new verse provides the earliest glimpse of Fielding working in burlesque and in comic epic, and an early example of the moral value he placed on benevolence. The various implications of this new knowledge are considered here.
Structure and Meaning in The Prelude, Book v
Authors: Morkan Joel
Published: February 2007

Although most critics have registered disappointment with Book v of Wordsworth's Prelude, a reading of that part of the epic in the light of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century educational theory reveals that in it Wordsworth made a supremely unified and significant poetic statement. Such a reading of Book v demonstrates that Wordsworth feared that the overly manipulative systems of contemporary educational theorists would sever children from the sources of their imaginative growth. The Book shows that Wordsworth believed, in contrast with most contemporary educational theorists, that freedom and spontaneity were the sources of the imagination. If the childhood of humanity were deprived of the freedom necessary for imaginative growth, human culture, so important to man's earthly existence, would wither and die. In Book VWordsworth took a stand against what he thought was an overwhelming contemporary evil. If we read Book v in its proper intellectual context, the structural and conceptual integrity that previous critics have missed becomes apparent.
Toward the “Titmouse Dimension”: The Development of Emerson's Poetic Style
Authors: Yoder R. A.
Published: February 2007

Emerson's place in our poetic tradition is granted to be central, despite the elusive and variable style of his poetry. Because he was an avowed experimenter, the development of Emerson's style must be traced quite apart from the Emersonian ideas sometimes offered as his complete poetic stance. Throughout, his poetry can be called meditative in aim, and is based on a question-and-answer form dramatized as an encounter between the poet and Nature; the prototype is in the introduction to Nature (1836). There are three phases in his career: (1) poems of 1834 modeled after George Herbert and the art of neatness also visible in Nature; (2) the vision of wild, bardic freedom (1839-41), which led Emerson to a looser form and to the techniques of Anglo-Saxon poetry as they were understood by his contemporaries; (3) a wearing away of enthusiasm, spurred by Emerson's losses and growing skepticism in the 1840's. Then the techniques used to express bardic freedom take on a different color, no longer bold heavy strokes but witty, nimble leaps; in the central encounter Nature turns sly and contemptuous, refusing to answer questions directly, while the poet is passive, though serene and appreciative, in the face of a world much less knowable than in 1836. In. the third and major phase the poetry becomes compressed in both form and consciousness, a movement toward the “titmouse dimension.” And this style, more than his contribution to Whitman's bardism, is Emerson's legacy to modern American poets.
The Naked, the Dead, and the Machine: A New Look at Norman Mailer's First Novel
Authors: Waldron Randall H.
Published: February 2007

In spite of the marked degree to which twentieth-century art and literature have reflected the influence of mechanization on modern experience, the dominant tone of American literary treatments of the machine remains one of tension. Particularly apparent in the novel, this tension functions as a central conflict in books by Norris, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, and others. It is most evident in novels about World War II, when mechanization, industrialism, and statism reached their violent zenith, and is nowhere better illustrated than in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. A structural pattern that reveals the army as the epitome of the machine in a society that is universally mechanistic, a symbolically pivotal clash between the natural organic world and the invading machine, and imagery and style drawn from the substance and language of the machine world, all combine to form a total metaphoric environment in which the central characters personify and articulate the opposing values of the machine-oriented “system” and the will to individual integrity. Thus the function of the machine as a controlling metaphor in American World War II novels is underlined and clarified by the informing centrality of that metaphor in the first really significant, probably the best, and certainly the most imitated of those novels.
The Man of Law's Tale: A Tragedy of Victimization and a Christian Comedy
Authors: Bloomfield Morton W.
Published: February 2007

The clashing and contradictory responses created by a pathetic tale such as Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale are best explained by the opposition of tragic (and therefore involving) elements found in the narrative events and comic elements found in the distancing style, in the faintly comic story, and above all in the happy Christian ending. Man of Law's Tale is not a Shakespearean tragedy but what may be called a tragedy of victimization, prototypes of which may be found in the Saint's life and in late classical romance. This opposition between emotional involvement and distancing is manifested in various ways, not the least of which is the metrical form of Man of Law's Tale. All this fits in well with what might be called the contempt of the world tradition which advocates a distancing from this world for the sake of an ultimate happy ending in heaven. It is no accident that a major source for Man of Law's Tale is Innocent III's De contemptu mundi.
The Language of Process in Ford's The Broken Heart
Authors: Greenfield Thelma N.
Published: February 2007

The language of Ford's The Broken Heart, unlike that of his other plays, mainly explains the inevitable operation of the processes that the play dramatizes, delineating cause and effect in feelings and actions. The indicative names signify what their bearers have become within the chain of causality. The beginning of the play is heavily explanatory and characters continue throughout to explain what they and others do and have become. Many of these speeches are imprecise: groping, periphrastic, ambiguous syntactically, and metaphorically unstable. The words, furthermore, describe experience rather than become a part of it. Short, direct statements bring the longer passages to rest, the two styles forming a rhythmical unit yet balancing each other and providing a sense of things unsaid. Especially distinctive are verb forms that concretize interaction among abstract nouns to explain how and why things happen. Some are reiterated as key words indicative of the pattern of the whole. The language of ceremonies, violated and reshaped into antithetical ceremonies, particularly those of propitiation and sacrifice, gives form and significance to the pattern of causation and intensifies as the play moves to its conclusion. Through his language, Ford controls any tendency to melodrama and harmonizes surprise with inevitability, narrowness with range, and explicitness with implication.
The Personal Drama of Dryden's The Hind and the Panther
Authors: Fujimura Thomas H.
Published: February 2007

Dryden's poem, though praised for its style, remains generally unappreciated because it is regarded as public and theological in its theme and argumentative in method. What is overlooked is the vivid personal confession of faith, the poem's most vital and appealing element. The neoclassical strategy of providing a literary treatment through the beast fable has obscured the personal drama. Both the Panther and the Hind are at times personae for Dryden: they dramatize the poet's struggle to achieve faith and charity. Their debate over church authority recapitulates in the present moment the doctrinal doubts of Dryden before his conversion. The more spiritual struggle, between charity and humility (represented by the Hind) and pride and revenge (represented by the Panther), is also crucial in the poem since pride is innate in the poet and prompts him still to revenge against enemies like Stillingfleet and Burnet. The poem not only provides a vivid, dramatic testimony to the poet's unending struggle to achieve practical piety, but as a neoclassical work, it transforms the personal drama into the pattern of the universal Christian drama to achieve faith and charity.
H.F.'s Meditations: A Journal of the Plague Year
Authors: Zimmerman Everett
Published: February 2007

Much of the detail in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year is derived from historical sources, but the focus of the book is on the internal conflicts of the narrator. This focus is achieved by several means: (1) H.F. structures his account around! s repentance of the decision to remain in London; (2) he frequently comments on his not entirely successful attempts to comprehend the nature of morality in a time of plague; (3) he uses many biblical references to suggest spiritual interpretations of physical reality. Instead of directing the spiritual meanings of his narrative primarily outward toward the reader for a didactic purpose, Defoe used these meanings to create a psychologically complex and interesting central character. The morally disorienting forces of the plague expose the tensions within the narrator, and we see his conflicts and mounting anxiety. This focus on the narrator makes A Journal of the Plague Year something more like a novel than like either history or the seventeenth-century pious writings that lie in its background.
Blake: A Crisis of Love and Jealousy
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: February 2007

Blake's attitude toward sexual love changed in significant ways during the late 1790's. Before that time, Blake thought of sex as potentially liberating—as a prime method of achieving the fourfold vision of Eternity. After that time he connected sexual love with pity and compassion, not with liberation. He came to think of sexual love as a force which tied individuals to the endless cycles of the fallen world; a force which at best might lead to the delightful, but limited, threefold vision of Beulah. Details of this important shift of attitude are suggested on the basis of close examination and discussion of three poems: “William Bond,” “My Spectre Around Me…,” and “The Crystal Cabinet.”
“A Wondrous Contiguity”: Anachronism in Carlyle's Prophecy and Art
Authors: Gilbert Elliot L.
Published: February 2007

Thomas Carlyle's writing has been deplored by some critics, Northrop Frye among them, as anachronistic; to the extent, however, that Carlyle considered time a “liar” and a “universal wonder-hider,” he deliberately employed anachronism both structurally and thematically in his work to express his most characteristic insights. The material of Past and Present, for example, is put together so as not merely to emphasize the relevance of past events to present conditions but also to insist upon their identity and even, curiously enough, their simultaneity. The structures of his works thus resemble those of the Eddas, described by him as tales of “successive generations” which are nevertheless “flung out for us in one level of distance… like a picture painted on the same canvas.” This phenomenological view of history, in which contiguity replaces continuity as the key relationship between the elements of experience, also informs Carlyle's politics and economics, giving to them their familiar intensity and antirational bias, without, however, rendering them entirely impractical. Insofar as Carlyle's anachronism represents the writer's stubborn resistance to change, it may properly be deplored. But insofar as it means rejection of the tyranny of mechanical chronology, it is a phenomenon in the author's work worthy of study.
The Narrative Unity of A Boy's Will
Authors: Haynes Donald T.
Published: February 2007

Although Frost's first volume is consistently taken to be a random collection of lyrics, this does not square with the poet's remarks about it. In both private and public writings, Frost indicated that the lyrics were selected and arranged into a narrative sequence tracing the development of a youth through what he at one point summarized as a “Phase of Post-adolescence.” The lyrics follow the youth from initial, immature withdrawal from society, to final, mature acceptance of himself both as an individual and as a budding poet. But this narrative intent is recognizable only when the first edition of A Boy's Will is examined, because Frost made significant changes in later versions. For a variety of reasons, the first edition does not esthetically satisfy as a narrative cycle. Nevertheless, showing in detail how Frost sought to impose a narrative frame on the lyrics is significant in two ways. It makes it possible to suggest, in the course of the discussion, readings of individual poems which differ from those which the poet himself, sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly, later endorsed. In the larger context, it provides insight into the position of the thirty-eight-year-old poet at the beginning of his public career; A Boy's Will emerges at once as Frost's retrospective look at what he had been, and a harbinger of what he would become.
Anderson, Hemingway, and Faulkner's The Wild Palms
Authors: McHaney Thomas L.
Published: February 2007

William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (1939) contains many allusions to the lives and writings of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. The parallels to A Farewell to Arms (1929), often noted by critics, are more numerous and more meaningful than hitherto shown. They work in context with references to Anderson's Dark Laughter (1925) and with sketches of Anderson and Hemingway and a full portrait of Anderson's second wife, Tennessee Mitchell, who seems to be the model for Faulkner's heroine, Charlotte Rittenmeyer. The background of these allusions is the mid-twenties, when Hemingway and Faulkner both benefited from Anderson's encouragement and aid but lost his friendship, possibly through related incidents. One explanation for the mingling of the Anderson-Hemingway material in The Wild Palms is that it represents a gesture of gratitude and artistic agreement from Faulkner to Anderson set against Hemingway's behavior to the older writer and triggered, in part, by a visit Anderson paid to Faulkner in 1937 when the Mississippian was injured in New York. The allusions also make plain Faulkner's philosophical and artistic differences with Hemingway, provide insight into his view of a major competitor, and show the intricate workings of Faulkner's art.
Structure and Symbol in Manzoni's IPromessi Sposi
Authors: Barricelli Jean-Pierre
Published: February 2007

Manzoni structured his novel like a tapestry with juxtaposing planes or masses symbolizing good and evil and the redemptive tragedy that inevitably ensues when these forces meet. Thus a symmetrical expressive structure is simultaneously a moral structure. The tapestry is further crosswoven with images that interrelate and deepen the meaning of the context in which they appear or of the character with whom they are associated. They become word-symbols: words like “wall” or “skull” set tonalities, and so does “bread” as opposed to “wine” or “devil.” Similarly, descriptions involving images of light or the sun weave a dialectical fabric with images of darkness or clouds. While on the one hand the symbols exteriorize situations and events, on the other they are interiorized into the narrative and its characters so as to become their very lifeblood. What has been called Manzoni's “lyricization” of reality stems directly from this process.
Chaucer The Man*
Authors: Howard Donald R.
Published: February 2007

So much study has gone into the rhetorical workings of Chaucer's satire that almost anyone who reads Chaucer is now acutely aware of the persona or narrator in each poem. The fact of a disparity between the narrator and Chaucer himself has become a kind of premise or dogma of Chaucer criticism; we have become accustomed to phrases like “the fictional Chaucer,” “the postures of the narrator,” or “the finiteness of the narrator-role.” And yet because his major poems confer upon him the status of a major figure, we continue to be interested in Chaucer the man despite the prevailing formalism of Chaucer criticism. We read minor works by him for which, were they anonymous, we should not take the trouble to turn a page. We talk about his education, thought, “development,” “mind.” And in his best poems we feel him as a “man speaking to men.” As for the man himself, we have a few records, though none of these really proves that civil servant and poet were the same person. Mostly, we believe in him. Of course it is entirely possible that someone will come along and argue that the Canterbury Tales were an instance of group authorship, or were really written by John of Gaunt; but if someone did, we should all pooh-pooh him and ostracize him and direct plenty of irony at him.
Ronsard's Reflections on the Heavens and Time
Authors: Silver Isidore
Published: February 2007

Ronsard's Hymne de la Philosophie, published in 1555, which in the single line, “Tout l'Univers discourt en sa pensée” (v. 28), sets the farthest limits of the cosmos as the boundaries of the soul's philosophic inquiry, contains in miniature a rudimentary version of the Hymne du Ciel, also of 1555:

Elle premiere a trouvé l'ouverturePar long travail des secretz de Nature,A sçeu de quoy les tonnerres se font,Pourquoy la Lune a maintenant le frontMousse, ou cornu, & pourquoy toute rondeOu demi-ronde elle apparoist au Monde,A sçeu pourquoy le Soleil perd couleur,Que c'est qu'il est, ou lumiere ou chaleur,A sçeu comment tout le firmament dance,Et comme Dieu le guide à la cadance,A sçeu les corps de ce grand Univers,Qui vont dançant de droit, ou de travers,Ceux qui vont tost au son de l'harmonie, Ceux qui vont tard apres leur compagnie,Comme Saturne aggravé de trop d'ansQui suit le bal à pas mornes & lens.(viii, 90–91)
Bartleby and the Terror of Limitation
Authors: Springer Norman
Published: February 2007

There is no larger horror than that which Bartleby represents in the world Melville creates through his first person narrator. Bartleby calls into question all that the narrator is. The peculiar power of the story arises from the effect of the absolute solidity of the lawyer-narrator: his impeccable respectability, the growing pleasure he takes in his comforts and accomplishments. This man who insists on telling us of Bartleby, “the strangest” scrivener he has ever encountered, is a man for whom all things ought to have their place; he attempts to discover where Bartleby belongs and what things belong to Bartleby. The unique effect of the story lies in the reader's recognition that though the narrator feels, no matter how inconclusively, that he has placed him in some way, he has, in fact, not placed him at all.
A Reading of Sherwood Anderson's “The Man Who Became a Woman”
Authors: Babb Howard S.
Published: February 2007

Although almost anyone's list of Sherwood Anderson's successes in fiction would include “The Man Who Became a Woman,” this haunting story has provoked less commentary than it deserves. Irving Howe provides the fullest discussion in Sherwood Anderson, though the nature of his book prevents him from treating the story in detail, and we may take his interpretation of it as standard. For Howe, “The Man Who Became a Woman” is concerned essentially with homosexuality, showing us an older man not even yet “secure in his male adulthood” who is driven to narrate some extraordinary experiences of his youth: experiences in which “psychic needs and moral standards clash,” and which may reveal the youth's “hysteria as a result of accumulated anxieties about his sexual role.” In what follows, I shall not be denying that homosexuality is a major motif, but arguing that Anderson is writing about something more: about a particular integrity of being that the youth must experience as a requisite for growing up. To this extent I shall be reversing Howe's emphasis, suggesting that the story centers on the conditions under which the narrator matures, and taking the homosexuality as one instance among others of the narrator's special quality—his openness to the contrarieties of experience. Perhaps some support for this reading inheres in the fact that the teller periodically denies being homosexual in any ordinary sense (e.g., pp. 188, 207, 209): while these denials may be seen as his psychologically necessary effort to shield himself from the truth, they may also be plausibly viewed as indications that the heart of the story's significance lies elsewhere. In any event, the teller himself—when addressing the reader on behalf of the story—insists on its unconventionality: “I'm puzzled you see, just how to make you feel as I felt that night. … I'm not claiming to be able to inform you or to do you any good. I'm just trying to make you understand some things about me” (p. 208). Disclaiming a traditional instructional or ethical aim, he invites us simply to participate in his crucial experience on “that night.”
Structure and Verisimilitude in the Novels of Érico Veríssimo
Authors: Mazzara Richard A.
Published: February 2007

The following words describe Vasco Bruno's mental state, not merely while in the military hospital, but throughout his life as one of Érico Veríssimo's most important heroes. More interesting, they summarize Veríssimo's creative activities through the seven novels preceding O Tempo e o Vento:

Nestas longas horas de hospital tomo e retomo as minhas lembranjas e bem como um menino que brinca com esses cubos de madeira em cujas faces estao colocados fragmentos simetricos dum quadro, procure formar com minhas experiencias um painel que tenha sentido revelador. Viro e reviro os blocos coloridos; ten to as mais diversas combinajoes, fico alvorojado, pensando que cheguei a algum resultado claro, para no fim verificar que tudo nao passa duma caleidoscopica confusao sem pe nem cabefa. Desisto do jogo. Mas fico com a secreta esperanja de que com os elementos de que disponho, um dia ainda hei de resolver o problema. (Saga, p. 120)
English very, French très, and Spanish muy. A Structural Comparison and Its Significance for Bilingual Lexicography
Authors: Sacks Norman P.
Published: February 2007

The traditional treatment of the adverb has posed problems of classification in the three languages under consideration. English very has traditionally been classified as an adverb, and the efforts of structural linguists to reclassify it as an intensifier may be extended to French très and Spanish muy as well. However, the three intensifiers do not pattern in the same way, for very patterns with adjectives and adverbs, but not with verbs or nouns; très and muy pattern with adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and with the past participle of verbs. The patterning of très and muy with nouns raises the question of the basis for differentiating adjectives from nouns. While the distinction between these two form classes in English is sometimes arbitrary, the line separating them is even less clear-cut in French and Spanish, languages in which nominalization is more widespread than in English. The unsatisfactory treatment of the three intensifiers in bilingual dictionaries of the French- English and Spanish-English type is due to the failure of lexicographers to link illustrative phrases and sentences to relevant structural features of the languages concerned, a practice all too common in dictionaries not compiled in accordance with scientific principles of lexicography.
Fortune in Marston's The Malcontent
Authors: Geckle George L.
Published: February 2007

No previous study of John Marston's The Malcontent (1602-03) has focused upon the play's central structural and thematic symbol, the traditional Wheel of Fortune. Structurally, The Malcontent uses a rising and falling pattern that reflects the medieval “formula of four.” Both Pietro and Mendoza seem to be Regno at different points in the action, but fall from Fortune's Wheel and become Regnavi. The deposed Duke Altofronto (alias Malevole) is at first Sum sine Regno, but soon becomes Regnabo, and finally Regno by Act v. The Malcontent concludes with this “happy reversal” because it is a tragicomedy according to the definition in Guarini's II compendio della poesía tragicómica (1601). The play's basic themes and main characters also support a tragicomic vision, as Mendoza and Malevole demonstrate. Mendoza, like his master Machiavelli, believes in the proverb Audaces fortuna juvat. Malevole triumphs because he combats Fortune not with fortitude but with prudent Stoic resignation and Christian spiritual devotion. The inevitability of “heaven's impos'd conditions” leads to the restoration of order and either the spiritual regeneration of the sinners or their rejection from the new society.
Two Letters from Giuseppe Baretti to Samuel Johnson
Authors: McKenzie Alan T.
Published: February 2007

An annotated transcription, with commentary, of the texts of two letters (21 July 1762 and 3 October 1765) in Baretti's recently discovered commonplace book. The letters offer autobiographical insight into Baretti's various disappointments and persecutions on the continent. The first one provides the original to which Johnson's letter of 21 December 1762 (Chapman, No. 147), one of his best known, is the reply.
Gaslight and Magic Lamp in Sister Carrie
Authors: Witemeyer Hugh
Published: February 2007

Dreiser drew heavily upon his youthful experience of the theater in creating his first novel. His characters are as foolishly enamored of the false glamor and factitious realities of the stage as he himself had once been. By the time he wrote Sister Carrie, however, he had achieved a mature perspective and control which allowed him to use the theater for his own artistic purposes. He characterizes his heroine's fantasy life by showing how she constantly associates the stage (gaslight) with Aladdin's treasure cave (magic lamp). At the same time he emphasizes the inadequacy of these fantasies by creating a network of ironic parallels between the plays his characters attend or act in, and their actual situations in his story. The most elaborate of these ironies involves Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight, the play-within-the-play which gives Carrie her first taste of acting. The reactions of Dreiser's three principal characters to Daly's play offer a suggestive paradigm of their general psychology throughout the novel—a sadly immature, almost infantile, psychology.