bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Diction of Beowulf
Authors: Whallon William
Published: February 2007

Anglo-Saxon and Greek epic each provide k. on two occasions a seemingly authentic account of the narration of verse in the heroic age. Hrothgar's court bard sings of the encounters at Finnsburg (lines 1068–1159), and improvises the tale of Beowulf's exploits in a complimentary comparison of the Geatish visitor with Sigemund (lines 871–892); Alcinous' court bard sings of the discovered adultery of Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey vin.266–366), and takes up a tale of Odysseus while the Ithacan wanderer listens on (Odyssey vin.499–520). Nothing in all this is autobiographical : unlike the poets of Deor and Widsith, the poet of Beowulf is not concerned with his own identity; the poet of the Odyssey, reputed blind, reveals himself not at all in singing of the blind minstrel Demodocus. Since none of these glimpses of poetizing without writing is intended to incorporate a signature into the epic matter, there is prima-facie evidence that Beowulf and the Homeric poems each derive from an oral tradition. That such a tradition lies behind the Iliad and the Odyssey, at least, is hard to deny. Milman Parry rigorously defended the observation that the extant Homeric poems are largely formulaic, and was led to postulate that they could be shown entirely formulaic if the complete corpus of Greek epic survived; he further reasoned that frequent formulas in epic verse indicate oral composition, and assumed the slightly less likely corollary that oral epic is inclined towards the use of formulas. Proceeding from Parry's conclusions and adopting one of his schemata, Francis P. Magoun, Jr., argues that Beowulf likewise was created from a legacy of oral formulas inherited and extended by bards of successive generations, and the thesis is striking and compelling. Yet a fresh inspection will indicate one crucial amendment: Beowulf and the Homeric poems are not at all formulaic to the same extent.
Text and Melody in Peirol's Cansos
Authors: Switten Margaret Louise
Published: February 2007

Relationships between verse content and. music in the love songs of the Provençal troubadours are not easily defined. One is tempted to seek in these cansos an expressiveness corresponding to our own acceptance of the term and to consider the melodies, like those of a modern art song, to be largely inspired by meanings and emotions of the texts. But it is not at all certain that the establishment of a close sentimental rapport between words and music was an objective overtly recognized and desired by the troubadours: if there were poet-composers who on occasion projected through melody the spirit of a poem, this was by no means a universal occurrence. Authoritative opinion on the subject is difficult to form because so little troubadour music has been preserved. All the more important then to examine carefully the evidence we do possess. Worthy of particular attention are the poets whose melodies remain in sufficient quantity to permit evaluation of individual attitudes and techniques. Such a poet is Peirol, troubadour from Auvergne, who flourished during the Golden Age of Provençal song, cultivating chiefly the love poem. His works provide material of genuine interest, often neglected where it might prove most illuminating. Despite the comparatively large number of melodies, relationships between verse content and music in his cansos have never been studied. To investigate these relationships will therefore be the aim of this paper.
The Challenge to Chastity: Britomart at the House of Busyrane
Authors: Roche Thomas P.
Published: February 2007

The final episode of the third book of The Faerie Queene has never received adequate interpretation. By analogy to the final episodes of the other books Busyrane should be the great enemy to chastity, and his defeat should be accomplished through the virtue of chastity. Previous interpretations have not defined the allegorical appropriateness of Busyrane and his mask of Cupid as the climactic testing of Spenser's knight of chastity. The problem for the reader is to see how Britomart's experience at the house of Busyrane solves Amoret's problem and at the same time is the final challenge to her own virtue.
The Unity of Molière's L'avare
Authors: Gutwirth Marcel
Published: February 2007

L'avare is probably Molière's harshest play. Scheming love suits, openly rebellious children, an unloving father, a sordid theme hardly leave our sympathies any acceptable resting-place. Harpagon, moreover, is a monster who, unlike Tartuffe, is firmly anchored to the center of the stage. No jail, not even an omniscient King can rid the unhappy family of the man who is its head. His power may wither, as it must for the comedy to end on a note of relief, but his presence cannot be so decisively expunged from the lives of those around him. When Tartuffe is dragged to jail in Orgon's stead, justice is restored in the state, as is solidarity to the once bitterly divided family. Harpagon leaving the stage to go see his chère cassette is merely shedding his family without another thought, allowing it to find unhoped for reunion under the wing of a new father, Don Thomas d'Alburcy, as generous and loving as the real father had been mean and hateful.
Patent Wrongs and Patent Theatres: Drama and the Law in the Early Nineteenth Century
Authors: Ganzel Dewey
Published: February 2007

The general election of 1831, part of the high tide of Reform feeling, swept many new men into the last un-Reformed Parliament, among them Edward Bulwer. Bulwer, later Bulwer-Lytton, for whom the first flush of literary success had become a more or less permanent roseate glow of popularity, had determined to make his mark as an MP as well as a novelist, and he became, in his own mind at least, the spokesman for literature in the House. As a political neophyte, he needed a cause and he found one in the theatre, whose wretched state was generally decried. In espousing its legal reform, Bulwer saw a means of advancing not only the cause of the drama but also his own political fortunes. On 31 May 1832, therefore, he presented a motion for the creation of a select committee to investigate the state of dramatic literature. He was not seeking information, for his speech showed him to be well-informed on theatrical matters. Neither was he impartial; his mind was clearly made up: he was anti-monopoly, anti-censorship, and pro-copyright. The committee was to make an “inquiry” into the decline of the drama, but under Bulwer's direction it was not to be a forum for airing the grievances of the patent theatres, whose “monopoly” was continually violated. Its purpose was to display to Parliament and to the country at large the inadequacies of the legal status quo. Although earlier attempts to form such a committee had been unsuccessful, Bulwer's motion was passed, and the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature was appointed with Bulwer as chairman.
The Two Domains: Meter and Rhythm
Authors: Pace George B.
Published: February 2007

The widening breach between the study of the English language and of the literature written in it appears anew in the December 1959 PMLA. There, two distinguished literary scholars, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, find need to defend the traditional scansion of English poetry against a “linguistic view.” It is not, of course, the fact of their arguing for their beliefs which is disturbing, although even here the breach is evident: “the more extravagant claims of the linguists,” “these extraordinary claims,” “we wish in the main to avoid the cumbersome grammar of the new linguists.”
Mythic Patterns in To The Lighthouse
Authors: Blotner Joseph L.
Published: February 2007

The Impulses and convictions which gave birth to Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own carried over into Virginia Woolf's fiction. Their most powerful expression is found in To the Lighthouse. But something, probably her strict and demanding artistic conscience, prevented their appearance in the form of the intellectual and argumentative feminism found in the first two books. In this novel Virginia Woolf's concept of woman's role in life is crystallized in the character of Mrs. Ramsay, whose attributes are those of major female figures in pagan myth. The most useful myth for interpreting the novel is that of the Primordial Goddess, who “is threefold in relation to Zeus: mother (Rhea), wife (Demeter), and daughter (Persephone).” One of the major sources of the myth is the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter,” in which the poet compares Rhea with her daughter Demeter, and makes it clear that Demeter and her daughter Persephone “are to be thought of as a double figure, one half of which is the ideal complement of the other.” This double figure is that of the Kore, the primordial maiden, who is also a mother. Also useful in interpreting the novel is the Oedipus myth.
Blake's Revisions of The Tyger
Authors: Nurmi Martin K.
Published: February 2007

In Blake's Notebook drafts of The Tyger we have a valuable record of the growth of a great poem, a record which not only brings the poem itself into clearer focus but gives us as well another glimpse of the poet during a crucial but scantily documented period of his life. Yet, curiously enough, critics have largely neglected them. The fact that Blake revised this poem more than any other has been noticed, to be sure, and some critics have shown how a line or a stanza in the final poem is an improvement over earlier versions. But only one extended study of the drafts has been made, Joseph Wicksteed's attempt to reconstruct Blake's composition by association of ideas. And that is incomplete: of the three full drafts of the poem (counting the final version as the third), and the additional drafts of two stanzas, Wicksteed studies thoroughly only the first draft and an additional draft of one stanza.
Tieck, Eckbert und das Kollektive Unbewußte
Authors: Hubbs V. C.
Published: February 2007

Die dunkle welt der dämonischen Mächte, wie sie bei Tieck und anderen vorkommt, ist der Philologie ein Gegenstand von höchstem Interesse, weil sie als Zeugnis der Einbildungskraft und der Ungeheuer-lichkeit des Problematischen im menschlichen Intellekt dasteht. Diese Traumwelt, deren phantastische und rätselhafte Eigenschaften aufierhalb der tastbaren Erfahrungen des realen Weltalls schweben, gewährt dem Menschen einen Blick in das Zeitlose, in das Unendliche hinein, und wird deshalb von der Tiefenpsychologie eifrig durchforscht, weil sie als eine Widerspiegelung des Unbewußten aufgefaßt wird und weil sie vielleicht zu einem Verständnis des menschlichen Seelenlebens und der Seelenkrankheiten führen könnte. Ludwig Tieck blickte zitternd in das Reich des TJnbewuCten hinein und wurde von seiner Grenzenlosigkeit bezaubert, ohne zu wissen, was diese Welt des Unendlichen eigentlich sei, und ohne es zu ahnen, daß er in Gefahr stand, die reale Welt ganz aus dem Auge zu verlieren und in den Bereich des Unbewufiten völlig hineinzustärzen. Ja, er spekulierte sogar, daß das Reich der Träurne die wahre Welt sein könnte und das Bewußtsein dagegen ein Verdammern oder eine Hemmung. Die Neigung zum Unbewußten zog ihn so mächtig an, daß er sich oft in dieser unendlichen Welt verlor und sich einbildete, er habe Geister aus dem Jenseits gesehen. Gläcklicherweise sind diese Gesichte von der Welt des TJnbewuCten nur vergängliche Erfahrungen gewesen, sonst hätte Tieck das Schicksal anderer Dichter erlitten und die Hälfte seiner Tage im Irrenhaus zugebracht, denn sich im Unbewußten zu verlieren bedeutet geisteskrank zu werden.
The Case for an Early Dorotea: A Reëxamination
Authors: Trueblood Alan S.
Published: February 2007

It Is Not difficult to account for the repeated concern of lopistas with the question of the dating and the versions of La Dorotea. In order to discern Lope's intention in recasting his adventure with Elena Osorio in the unique actión en prosa form, one must first reach some conclusion regarding the stage or stages in his long career at which the work was conceived and composed. There are today few critics who consider the actión en prosa even largely a youthful work. Most see evidence throughout of the workmanship and outlook of the old Lope, not restricting this to passages of necessity late—the horoscope of Fernando-Lope's future, the discussion of a parodied culterano sonnet, the “piscatory idylls” inserted at the last minute as elegiac tributes to Marta de Nevares. And indeed it can hardly be questioned, after the perceptive studies of Vossler and Montesinos, that La Dorotea, as it appeared in 1632, reflects the maturity of its author. In no other way can we account for the special flavor of this work in which all of Lope's life and art appear in a new focus against a background of inexorably fleeting time.
Coriolanus, Alceste, and Dramatic Genres
Authors: Brittin Norman A.
Published: February 2007

It has often been observed that some comic characters, given a touch too much of seriousness, dignity, individuality, or respectability, or being called upon to suffer pain past the limit of comic endurance, may easily be regarded as pathetic or tragic figures. No subject matter is inherently comic; whether it be comic or not depends on the attitude of readers or audience. Thus Shylock, Don Quixote, Alceste, and even Malvolio have been taken by moderns as essentially tragic rather than comic characters, and Falstaff chidden by his king—“How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!”—extracts from modern eyes the indignant tear. Only a hair, it seems then, may divide the comic from the tragic, and some characters of comedy, quicksilver-like, will not remain on the comic side of the boundary.
Some Unpublished Poems by John Leland
Authors: Bradner Leicester
Published: February 2007

John Leland, sixteenth-century antiquary and defender of the Arthurian legend against Polydore Vergil, is probably better known to historians than to literary scholars. Nevertheless he was an assiduous writer of Latin verse during most of his life, published seven volumes of poetry before his death, and left in manuscript a large collection of epigrams and other occasional verses. In a Bodleian manuscript in Leland's own hand (MS. Top. gen. c. 4, p. 301) we have evidence that he had himself collected these poems for preservation, for he says there, in connection with a poem of his on Chaucer, “in libris meorum epi-grammaton his uersibus eius gloriae assurgo.” This manuscript collection seems not to have been preserved, even in the generation following Leland's death. Our present knowledge of Leland's poemata, aside from those printed during his lifetime, is based upon a manuscript in the hand of John Stow (Bodleian MS. Tanner 464. iv) and a printed edition of 1589 edited by Thomas Newton. A note from Newton to Stow, written on the outside of Stow's manuscript, shows that he had examined this manuscript, but his text is obviously based on a different one. Not only are there many differences in the readings of individual poems, but there is also the fact that the Stow manuscript contains twenty-eight poems not included in the printed edition.
Joannes Susenbrotus: A Forgotten Humanist
Authors: Brennan Joseph X.
Published: February 2007

No humanist of comparable influence upon Renaissance learning has been so little known and so long ignored as Joannes Susenbrotus. In addition to two fairly popular Latin grammars, Susenbrotus compiled a definitive treatise on the figures of speech, the Epitome Troporum ac Schematum, which during the century following its first appearance in 1541 was the most frequently printed and widely used work of its kind. As T. W. Baldwin has amply established in William Shakspere's Smalle Latine & Lesse Greeke, in the second half of the 16th century this Epitome generally became the standard work from which English schoolboys—including most probably Shakespeare himself—learned their precepts for eloquence. The influence of the Epitome, moreover, extended far beyond the limits of the Latin curriculum and penetrated yet more deeply into the cultural life of England through various English adaptations. On the continent, in German-speaking areas particularly, the influence of Susenbrotus was no less extensive, but even there his fame did not endure. Despite his considerable contribution to sixteenth-century learning and the wide fame of his Epitome, no encyclopedic or biographical work of the present century so much as mentions his name. The most complete account of Susenbrotus' career, in fact, is a five-page study which appeared more than half a century ago in an obscure diocesan publication—a study still of value, though limited in range and inaccurate in some of its conclusions. There is distinct justification, then, for a detailed study of a man whose importance modern scholarship is only just beginning to recognize.
Dramatic Conventions in All's Well That Ends Well
Authors: Turner Robert Y.
Published: February 2007

In All's Well That Ends Well Shakespeare adopted Elizabethan dramatic conventions more literally than in any play written after his apprenticeship in the early 1590's and, as a consequence, produced a comedy more of an age than for all time. At the time when the War of the Theaters was subsiding and the innovations of comical satire were dramatically fashionable, a rash of plays, in fact most of the plays between 1601 and 1604 which are designated roughly as romantic comedies, used the same plot. This story traces the career of a well-born young man who succumbs to lust and riotous living; usually, as the play opens, he is betrothed or married to a virtuous young lady whom he spurns for a courtesan. As the play progresses, the hero grows increasingly obstreperous in the face of the heroine's stalwart devotion to him; finally the hero's sins catch up with him, he is brought to trial in which either his life is threatened or his pride is deflated by the exposure of his follies. In this trial he is purged of his lust, sees the value of the virtuous heroine and, cleansed, rejoins her to live out his days in true love.
Sidelights on Contemporary Criticism of Góngora's Polifemo
Authors: Gates Eunice Joiner
Published: February 2007

Four seventeenth-century commentaries on the Polifemo are known to students of Góngora. Two of these are still unpublished: Annotaciones y deffensas al… Polifemo by Pedro Díaz de Rivas, the first commentary to be made of the poem, and the unfinished Notas al Polifemo by Andres Cuesta. The other two were published in Madrid a few years after Góngora's death: El Polifemo de Don Luis de Góngora comentado (1629) by Garcia de Salcedo Coronel and Lecciones solemnes a las obras de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote (1630) by José Pellicer de Salas y Tovar.
Some of Donne's ‘Ecstasies’
Authors: Hughes Merritt Y.
Published: February 2007

It is still undecided in what sense, if any, the ecstasy in Donne's most famous poem should be regarded as mystical. Even if we evade the problem of defining mysticism, there is still the question of what ecstasy meant to the poet. In “The Extasie” the word keeps its literal meaning of ekstasis or exodus of the souls of the two lovers from their bodies, for Donne tells us that they “Were gone out” so as to unite into the “abler soul” which “Defects of lonelinesse controules” (11. 43–44), and makes the discovery that sex was not the source of their love. Recent interpreters have stressed the change which comes over the poem at line forty-nine, where the lover, or as Pierre Legouis insists, the seducer, ends the literal ekstasis of the two souls with a plea for their return to the physical senses of their bodies “Else a great Prince in prison lies” (1. 68).
Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Moral ‘Usefulness‘
Authors: Mead William
Published: February 2007

In his rather sketchy notes on Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, Baudelaire observes that this novel is a “livre de moraliste aussi haut que les plus élevés, aussi profond que les plus profonds.” Laclos himself seems to have had a similar view of his purpose in writing; at least in one of his letters to Mme Riccoboni he speaks confidently of having sought to create “l'impression d'horreur que le vice doit toujours exciter” (O.C., p. 712). But if no one, and least of all Mme Riccoboni, who had written to protest as a Frenchwoman against what she could not believe was a true picture of contemporary French life, has ever denied Laclos the power of horrifying his readers, seldom since the publication of the work has this power been granted quite the moralistic face-value ascribed to it by the novelist. Even Baudelaire apparently felt its value was relative, Les Liaisons dangereuses, like other “livres libertins,” having gained in usefulness from the passage of time and the progressive degeneration of standards: “Le mal se connaissant,” he remarks in the same notes, “était moins affreux et plus près de la guérison que le mal s'ignorant. G. Sand inférieur à de Sade” (O.C., p. 738).
Byron and the Politics of Paradise
Authors: Bostetter Edward E.
Published: February 2007

In The Great Chain of Being Professor Lovejoy pointed out that in the eighteenth century a profound change took place in the ways of thinking about the universe—from conceiving of it as static and complete to conceiving of it as organic and infinitely changing. Recently, in The Subtler Language, Earl Wasserman has discussed the acute artistic problems that this shift in thought created for the poet. Until the end of the eighteenth century there were certain “cosmic syntaxes” in the public domain such as the Christian interpretation of history and the concept of the great chain of being which the poet could expect his audience to recognize and accept. He “could transform language by means of them, and could survey reality and experience in the presence of the world these syntaxes implied… By the nineteenth century these world pictures had passed from consciousness for the purpose of public poetry, and no longer did men share in any significant degree a sense of cosmic design.” Therefore, says Wasserman, the Romantic poets—and poets ever since—have been forced to formulate their own cosmic syntax and “shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits.”
Mythopoesis in the Blithedale Romance
Authors: Murray Peter B.
Published: February 2007

Recent studies of The Blithedale Romance have demonstrated conclusively the importance of distinguishing the perspective of Miles Coverdale, the first person narrator, from that of Hawthorne. Coverdale thinks of himself as an observer of a drama, as “Chorus in a classic play.” He holds himself aloof so that he may the better act as an interpreter of the action of the Romance. As he interprets, he reveals himself, and through him we get Hawthorne's vision of the internal conflicts which the artist must suffer.
Melville's Ship of Fools
Authors: Rosenberry Edward H.
Published: February 2007

Two of the surest critical propositions about Melville are that his prevailing theme is the problem of moral evil and that his prevailing narrative vehicle is the ship-microcosm. With few exceptions his major works have some fairly obvious basis in the fusion of that image and that theme. In most cases the competent study of source materials and of the image-theme pattern peculiar to the work in question has yielded an understanding sufficient to the purposes of responsible criticism. Only The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade has continued to tantalize both casual readers and dedicated students, notwithstanding the scholarly and critical attention which has long been lavished on it and which is now available to all in the admirable edition of Miss Elizabeth Foster. The singularly baffling quality of this novel is the more surprising, too, for its wearing so plainly on its face the signs of its author's characteristic theme and image; not even Moby-Dick bespeaks its artistic character so forthrightly. In order to penetrate a little farther into the stubborn mysteries of The Confidence-Man I propose to examine some antecedents, both in and out of Melville's own writings, which may have exerted a significant or even a definitive influence on its structure and meaning.
Imagery in Karel Čapek's Hordubal
Authors: Harkins William E.
Published: February 2007

Karel Čapek's novel Hordubal is the first part of a trilogy which embodies a definition of human individuality and of the relation of the individual to the social order. As René Wellek has observed, the trilogy “centers around problems of truth and reality and constitutes one of the most successful attempts at a philosophical novel in any language.”
Naturaleza, Religión y Honra en La Celestina
Authors: Correa Gustavo
Published: February 2007

La oposición medieval entre Dios y Naturaleza, en la cual ésta última era considerada como una potencia enteramente subordinada al Creador y por consiguiente de categoría inferior en relación con el destino último del hombre, va a sufrir en los albores del Renacimiento una dislocación que afecta su constitución más íntima. Dios sigue existiendo como autor de todo lo creado, pero la Naturaleza surge a un primer plano como justificación en sí misma, con poderes inmanentes para su proceso y desenvolvimiento indefinido. Tal desplazamiento de perspectiva significa también un cambio de valoración en el marco de los ideales y de las experiencias humanas, en cuanto éstos últimos se polarizan hacia lo exclusivamente mundano y temporal. De la misma manera, la oposición entre “Cultura” y “Naturaleza,” entendida aquélla como el conjunto de leyes y de formas creadas por el hombre para su vida en sociedad, sufre un diverso reajuste interno. Al conceder el hombre mayor preponderancia al mundo natural, brota una implícita rebeldía contra las barreras de contención que él mismo se ha impuesto para someter a la Naturaleza siempre lista a desbordarse. Tal reacondicionamiento de nociones correlativas y antagónicas aparece en la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, en la forma de un resquebrajamiento reversivo de los valores tradicionales y consagrados de la religión (Divinidad) y de la honra (sociedad), frente al triunfo del mundo natural, y constituye una de las características estructurales y definidoras de la obra. Examinaremos en seguida la compleja interrelación de estos conceptos y valores.
Verbal Irony in Tom Jones
Authors: Hutchens Eleanor N.
Published: February 2007

Without its verbal irony, Tom Jones would be quite a different book: massive and well made but lacking the high polish and the effect of urbane control which do much to preserve it as a major classic. Its realism, its satire, and even its much-praised plot keep their unified brilliance through being governed by an ironic style that forms as important a contribution to the English novel as any Fielding made.
A Reading of Wieland
Authors: Ziff Larzer
Published: February 2007

Wieland is conventionally and correctly regarded as a novel of purpose which marks a turn from the stories of love and seduction fathered by Richardson to the kind of story made prominent by Holcroft, Bage, and Godwin. The particular purposes of Wieland, however, have never been precisely identified, and this reading is offered in the belief that the novel has been subjected by most students to a form of damnation through faint praise. By marveling that an American in 1798 could produce readable fiction, they place undue emphasis on mere chronology and slight the importance of the novel as part of a more meaningful cultural continuity. Wieland is an important novel because of the extraordinary manner in which Brown employs sentiment against itself (rather than simply dismissing it, as it is averred he has done), penetrates beneath the principles of the optimistic psychology of his day, and recognizes the claims which Calvinism makes on the American character.
Tom Moore and the Edinburgh Review of Christabel
Authors: Schneider Elisabeth W.
Published: February 2007

Several years ago I published an article drawing attention to a forgotten statement by the nineteenth-century bibliographer T. F. Dibdin to the effect that Thomas Moore and not, as has often been supposed, Hazlitt or Jeffrey wrote the much disputed review of Coleridge's Christabel that appeared in the Edinburgh Review for September 1816 (xxvii, 58-67). Dibdin's phrasing suggested that he might have known the truth from a good source. Testing his ascription in the light of other evidence, I concluded that he was almost certainly right though as far as was known otherwise Moore had not acknowledged the article and might very well even have denied it. It now appears that in effect Moore did deny it, and the question therefore should be reviewed.

How seriously one takes a writer's disavowal of an anonymous publication obviously depends upon the writer and the circumstances. Some authors must be believed without question; from others—Scott is the prime nineteenth-century example—a denial is somewhat less than final. His fellow-Scotsman Jeffrey, on the other hand, though as editor of the Edinburgh Review he had constantly to do with anonymous writing, avoided the alternatives of betrayal or prevarication by a consistent policy of silence; when he did speak out, even inveterate enemies scarcely questioned his word. The difference may be less a matter of ethical standards than of the author's conception of the privilege attached to anonymity, which can sometimes be preserved only by evasion or deception. Thomas Moore leaves us in no uncertainty about his position. “For my own part, I think every possible trick fair with that animal ferae naturae, the Public,” he wrote to the poet Rogers in 1814. This was his justification for a tangle of misstatements and secrecy into which he had been driven by a complex of worry and hope over the reception of Lalla Rookh. It applied equally to his anonymous writing, which he was often disposed to deny when its success was doubtful. “Though I shall of course deny the trifles I am now doing, yet, if they are liked, I shall be sure to get the credit of them,” he wrote in a letter of 1813. “Of course” is the telling phrase in this confession. At one time or another, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication, he denied his authorship of the Intercepted Letters, Little Man and Little Soul, Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, A Vision: by the Author of Christabel, and at least one contribution to the Edinburgh Review; he also once planned to pass off an air of his own composing as a “national” air. These denials happen to have survived in his own written records. Others have probably gone unrecorded, for his concealments were many.
From Earth to Ether: Poe's Flight into Space
Authors: O'Donnell Charles
Published: February 2007

Arthur Gordon Pym has been dead these many years, having perished, we are told, in an accident shortly after his return from a journey to the south. The faint tappings we have heard of late do not come from within the box, but from without; modern critics are attempting to loosen the nails pounded in by decades of indifference. In view of America's history of literary revivals and resurrections, it would not be surprising to see the lid fly suddenly off, letting Pym, like Mr. Shuttleworthy, spring into a sitting position and proclaim himself the author of a great masterpiece of literature.

Nothing that dramatic is likely to happen. But it is true that after one hundred years of bewilderment at the betrayal of sensibility evidenced in the French admiration of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, American critics and literary historians began to praise or condemn the book on a firmer basis than the memory of a childhood reading. In the last few years three critics have given the work the benefit of sensitive and mature judgment. To these I feel the need to add some thoughts, partly because someone, in memory of Poe, should cherish the vision of the young artist, happy in his artist's duplicity, juggling parts, manipulating symbols with ingenuity and dexterity toward an end he was destined never to achieve; and partly, too, because I can now say, with all the assurance of hindsight, that as an artist he was doomed almost from the start, that the philosophical ending was in the artistic beginning. Poe's works are all variations on a single persistent theme that finds its expression in forms ranging from pure hokum to pure speculation. Somewhere between the extremes, in a few stories, Poe manages to strike a chord familiar to the modern reader's ear.
The Biblical Sources of Hawthorne's “Roger Malvin's Burial”
Authors: Thompson W. R.
Published: February 2007

Although the wealth of religious imagery in Hawthorne's “Roger Marvin's Burial” has been frequently remarked, little attempt has been made to identify specific Biblical allusions for the purpose of analyzing them in the light of the story in which they appear. This neglect of an important aspect of the author's complex method of composition extends to the whole of his work and is the result of a generally held, though ill-defined, idea that such allusions, stemming as they do from the author's known familiarity with the Bible, represent pure overflow and are not truly integral to the pieces in which they are embedded. Nathalia Wright, for example, has observed that compared to Melville, Hawthorne made “slight and straightforward use of Scripture.” I submit that a more rigorous examination of Hawthorne's use of the Bible than has heretofore been made will reveal the reverse to be true. His employment of Scripture is extensive, subtle, and must be considered an organic aspect of a most complex literary method. An analysis of the uses to which Hawthorne put his Biblical sources in “Roger Malvin's Burial” will serve to illustrate the case in point.
Zola and Busnach: The Temptation of the Stage
Authors: Kanes Martin
Published: February 2007

What could have possessed Zola to let a writer of vaudevilles tamper with his novels? André Antoine asked himself the question in his journal the day after the dismal failure of Germinal, and we still wonder about it today. Very little is known about Busnach, except that he was one of the directors of the Athénée theater, and the author of such items as Ali-Baba and Froufrou. Did Zola really think this theatrical butterfly was capable of converting Germinal, or any other novel for that matter, into a play?

Let us not judge him by his boulevard reputation alone. Sarah Bernhardt called him the wittiest man in Paris, no mean compliment coming from her.2 He possessed the gift—or burden— of extreme sensitivity, and a line from one of his letters to Zola, “Je suis trop votre collaborateur et pas assez votre ami” might serve as epigraph to their relationship. Moreover, Zola had burned himself at the sputtering limelight of the Boulevard des Italiens with Les Heritiers Rabourdin and Le Bouton de rose; why should he not have welcomed the cooperation of a man who knew his business well? Despite the fact that there is a mass of available material on this collaboration— material which throws much light upon Zola's critical and esthetic theories—there has been no real attempt to relate Zola dramaturge with Zola romancier. Relationships did nevertheless exist, as I shall indicate. In the course of their collaboration, Busnach wrote Zola nearly 2000 letters, and in the absence of Zola's replies, these remain our chief source of information.3 My remarks are based upon them, and upon the texts of the plays.4
The Pursuit of Form in the Novels of Azorín
Authors: Livingstone Leon
Published: February 2007

The close of the nineteenth century in Spain saw a sudden intellectual revival that has led some authorities to speak of a second Golden Age of Spanish literature. This modern Renaissance ushered in by the so-called “ Generation of 1898” projected its renovating influence well into the twentieth century with later writers who inherited the ideological, moral, and esthetic preoccupations of the initiators of the new currents. The unorthodoxy of the new approaches, however, by no means received an unqualified approval. In fact, perhaps the most characteristic reaction of the critic of this period has been, and indeed still is, to question not merely the value but the very validity of these unconventional creations: Is Ortega y Gasset's cultural ideology the expression of a genuine philosophy? Does Unamuno's intellectualized verse really merit the appellation of poetry? Can Miró's novels be said to progress beyond mere plastic description? This challenging of the authenticity of the literary product, stemming from what one critic calls “la mania clasificatoria,” has been directed most devastatingly against the novel, and perhaps against none more especially than that of José Martínez Ruiz, “Azorín.”
“Profusion Du Soir” and “Le Cimetière Marin”
Authors: Whiting Charles G.
Published: February 2007

In “Au Sujet du ‘Cimetière marin’,” Valéry tells us that this poem originated from a decasyllabic rhythm, at first empty of content, which began running through his mind: “Une figure rythmique vide, ou remplie de syllabes vaines, qui me vint obséder quelque temps.” He speculated on what a modern poet might do with this rhythm, the type of stanza he might use, the composition he might create, and concluded that his poem would be a personal monologue: “Un monologue de ‘moi,’ dans lequel les thèmes les plus simples et les plus constants de ma vie affective et intellectuelle, tels qu'ils s'étaient imposés à mon adolescence et associés à la mer et à la lumière d'un certain lieu des bords de la Méditerranée, fussent appelés, tramés, opposés . . . ”

Since Valéry speaks of intellectual and affective themes of his adolescence, it is not surprising if we find similarities between “Le Cimetière marin,” written between 1917 and 1920, and a long poem of Valéry's youth, “Profusion du soir,” “abandoned” in 1899 and published for the first time in 1926 in Quelques vers anciens and in the augmented second edition of L'Album de vers anciens. The parallel, however, extends beyond the themes. The two poems have a similar structure, and frequently, at corresponding points in the structure, we find similar images, ideas, and even similar vocabulary. While “Profusion du soir” can hardly be considered an early version of “Le Cimetière marin,” a number of its aspects reappear in the later poem. This fact may well explain the note “poème abandonné” which follows the title of “Profusion du soir.” If Valéry left “Profusion du soir” in an abandoned state, it is possibly because he was no longer interested in working on the early poem after creating “Le Cimetière marin.”
Camus and Vigny
Authors: Hill Charles G.
Published: February 2007

Although Albert Camus furnished us with only one rather vague acknowledgement of influence by Alfred de Vigny, I believe that their affinity goes beyond a recognized common distress in the face of certain aspects of the human predicament. I think further that superficial differences in the situation of the two authors mask attitudes which are fundamentally similar. In order to give this kinship the attention it deserves, I should like first to examine the relationship between the moral, social, and intellectual forces which formed the two men, and with this background to discuss two bases for affinity of metaphysical, social, and artistic points of view.

Camus's humble origins had much the same significance as the romantic's aristocratic attachment to the past had for him. Each writer tended to insist on his alienation from the dominant middle class, but both noted a relationship between the popular and aristocratic milieux. The 1957 Nobel Prize winner stated that in the nineteenth century official social values were attacked by revolutionaries and by aristocrats like Vigny. “Dans les deux cas, peuple et aristocratie, qui sont les deux sources de toute civilisation, s'inscrivent contre la société factice de leur temps.” And in recounting the realization that his classmates hated him for his aristocracy, Vigny added, “J'étais pareil à un jeune ouvrier qui part avant l'aube pour faire sa journée . . . ”
Two Types of “Heroes” in Post-War British Fiction
Authors: O'Connor William Van
Published: February 2007

In novel after novel,“ William York Tindall says, in Forces in Modern British Literature, ”sensitive lads are apprenticed to life, formed by its forces, rebelling against them, sometimes failing, sometimes emerging in victory. . . . From 1903 onwards almost every first novel was a novel of adolescence.“ Samuel Butler, he adds, started the vogue with The Way of All Flesh (1903). He ”wrote this book between 1872 and 1884 to express hatred for his father, admiration for himself, and his dearest prejudices.“

Perhaps we can push the date back of 1903 to Huysmans' À rebours (1884) and his sensitive protagonist, des Esseintes. From Huysmans we go to Oscar Wilde, to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which owes much to À rebours. The world in which these sensitive young men find themselves is Philistine, money-grubbing, dull, insensitive.
Flux and the Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkner's Prose
Authors: Zink Karl E.
Published: February 2007

William Faulkner is a poet—not a philosopher, nor an essayist, nor a businessman who writes articles for Harper's. Many readers have been baffled and annoyed and have even hated Faulkner personally because his novels have always demanded critical, curious reading. As an artist, he speaks through form. As a novelist, he has always exercised the privilege and the gift of symbolic discourse. If Faulkner were a philosopher, he would perhaps be more systematic about arranging and ordering his meanings. But he is an artist whose genius is for meaningful form rather than formal statement; his meaning, therefore, is legitimately diffuse, complex, and resistant; and the sensitive reader enjoys a continuous awareness of the multiple meanings of his form. Through form the artist interprets or criticizes the world in which he lives; through form the reader senses the artist's philosophical outlook on the world. The philosophical assumptions that underlie Faulkner's novels and largely determine their distinctive “shape” do not come to us as direct statement. As with most original artists, Faulkner's most deeply felt ideas are manifest in his symbols and his imagery; they are implicit in his peculiar and much maligned sentence structure, and in the experimental and complex structural patterns he gave to such remarkable books as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Requiem for a Nun, and Absalom, Absalom! One can defend successfully, I think, the proposition that when Faulkner has spoken in the novel as philosopher or essayist or sectionalist he has failed. When he attempts debate, as he does in parts of Intruder in the Dust, his voice is ordinary, in some respects shrill and small. He is angrier, indeed despairing, in Sanctuary; but Sanctuary, for all its weaknesses, is a novel superior to Intruder in the Dust because it more consistently dramatizes and restrains and diffuses its despair through form. In the bitterest of his early novels, As I Lay Dying, the “outrage” is beautifully restrained and patterned into art, with no hint anywhere of the direct voice of argument or rationality that we hear with the later Gavin Stevens of Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun. Darl and Addie Bundren (As I Lay Dying) are poetic and persuasive; Gavin Stevens and the recreated Temple Drake (Requiem for a Nun) are prosaic, literal and dull.
Who Killed Judge Pyncheon? The Role of the Imagination in the House of the Seven Gables
Authors: Marks Alfred H.
Published: February 2007

Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon has been dead for over one hundred years, and according to F. O. Matthiessen the chapter on his death was one of the “favorite showpieces” of the age of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet there is doubt—if one may be pardoned for borrowing for a moment the pose of the hack who rewrites accounts of old murders—that the facts surrounding his death have been properly explored. Did he simply die of some kind of pulmonary hemorrhage, to which his ancestors were prone? Was no one present when he died? If he did die a natural death, is it possible that his “hereditary liability” was helped somehow, by circumstances taking place in the room with him, in precipitating his final seizure?
Charles Newman and His Brothers
Authors: Svaglic Martin J.
Published: February 2007

Most students of Victorian literature know that John Henry Newman had a once prominent younger brother named Francis William, the erudite professor of Latin at University College, London, whose translation of Homer provoked an essay in protest by Matthew Arnold. Few, however, seem aware that there was a third Newman brother named Charles Robert, one year younger than John, the story of whose eccentric life has come to be known in any detail only since 1948, thanks to the researches of Maisie Ward and of Sean O'Faolain. Francis Newman passed it over on one page of his strange little “corrective” book on the Cardinal, calling it a wasted life, better left in silence. John Henry did his best to keep hidden from public curiosity what he called the “aimless, profitless, forlorn” life of his brother, even to the point of buying up from a virtual blackmailer a batch of Charles's letters, after his death in 1884, to prevent their coming to popular attention.
Wordsworth's Dim and Perilous Way
Authors: Bostetter Edward E.
Published: February 2007

Few critics have ever been very happy with the Excursion. Even those who support or justify Wordworth's turn to traditional attitudes have read it with no apparent enthusiasm or care. And for most modern readers who come to it after reading the Prelude, the Excursion can be no more than a painful anticlimax. It is hard for them not to suffer a sense of shock as they read its pious platitudes and realize that the poem was originally intended to embody and develop the fresh perceptions of the opening books of the Prelude. No wonder modern critics have been almost obsessed by the question: what happened to cause the narrowing and hardening of Wordsworth's attitudes? Why this timid compromise with orthodoxy rather than a bolder exploration of naturalism? And there have been nearly as many suggestions as critics. Perhaps because they have too readily accepted the Fenwick notes and taken the poem for granted as reflecting only the results of a change in the poet's attitudes, they have tended to neglect or to misinterpret the record in the poem itself of the state of mind which helped cause the change.
William Macmath and F. J. Child
Authors: Reppert James D.
Published: February 2007

The Recovery of Professor Child's letters to William Macmath (1844–1921) makes it possible to answer an important question which has not been much investigated: what was the relationship between Child and Macmath with respect to The English and Scottish Popular Ballads?
King Robert of Sicily: A New Manuscript
Authors: Hornstein Lillian Herlands
Published: February 2007

The verse romance King Robert of Sicily (King Roberd of Cisyle) is the Middle English version of a well-known legend about The Proud King Humiliated (Deposed)—an arrogant and boastful king whose throne is taken over by an angel-substitute until the beggared monarch learns proper humility. Told of the Emperor Jovinian in the Latin Gesta Romanorum, the story had also appeared in other contexts in almost all the vernacular languages of Europe before the end of the fifteenth century. The tale must have been especially appealing to the English, to judge from the number of extant manuscripts heretofore known, nine manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This paper calls attention to still another manuscript, folio 2 of BM Additional MS. 34801. It has, strangely enough, never been noticed, although its existence was recorded in a catalogue over sixty years ago.