bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Daniel Defoe's Imaginary Voyages to the Moon
Authors: Baine Rodney M.
Published: February 2007

Ever since 1869, when William Lee inserted them in his bibliography of Defoe, in Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings (i, xxxii), two imaginary voyages to the moon and a letter from the Man in the Moon have been incorporated in the canon of Defoe's writings as separate and distinct from his main lunar voyage, The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705). These three are A Journey to the World in the Moon; A Second, and more Strange Voyage to the World in the Moon, both noted in the head title as “By the Author of the true Born English-man”; and A Letter from the Man in the Moon to the Author of the True Born English-man. All three were dated 1705, and all were printed first in London; then at least the first was reprinted at Edinburgh by James Watson in Craig's-closs. Each is a single sheet, a quarto of four pages, in double columns. In including these three publications as independent items in the Defoe canon, Lee has been followed by all the British and American bibliographers of Defoe: by Thomas Wright, William P. Trent, Henry C. Hutchins, and John Robert Moore.
Emilia Pardo Bazán and the Phenomenon of French Decadentism
Authors: Kronik John W.
Published: February 2007

The fourth volume in the series of studies that Emilia Pardo Bazán had entitled La literatura francesa moderna was to bear the caption of La decadencia. In the three previous volumes the Countess had followed the evolution of the French literary process of the nineteenth century from romanticism to naturalism, and in the last she planned to gather old notes and new ideas into an analysis of end-of-the-century trends. She never brought this project to fruition, but she did leave dispersed among her many other critical writings her ideas and interpretations touching on this phenomenon that she labeled variously “la decadencia” or “el decadentismo.”
La Métaphore du crabe dans l'œuvre littéraire de Jean-Paul Sartre
Authors: Boros Par Marie-Denise
Published: February 2007

Le style original de Jean-Paul Sartre a souvent attiré l'attention des critiques. L'un d'eux, Frédéric Jameson, y a consacré une étude fort intéressante. D'autres se sont plutôt attachés à certains aspects de son imagerie. Or, selon l'idéologie sartrienne, chacune de nos conduites, chacun de nos projets ne peut s'expliquer que par le projet originel dont il émane et qui le fait exister; de même, c'est à travers les imagesclés colorant l'œuvre de Jean-Paul Sartre qu'on pourra tenter de dégager le sens fondamental qui les nourrit et se manifeste tout entier dans chacune d'elles.
The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism
Authors: Thorpe James
Published: February 2007

Many people on occasion prefer a textual error to an authentic reading. One mistake by a compositor of Melville's White-Jacket—setting “soiled fish of the sea” instead of “coiled fish of the sea”—achieved an adventitious fame some years ago. Various readers have since declared themselves in favor of the error, on the grounds that “soiled fish” makes a richer, more interesting passage than the ordinary “coiled fish of the sea.” In short, the error seems to them to create a better work.
Hook and Ahab: Barrie's Strange Satire on Melville
Authors: Williams David Park
Published: February 2007

Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby-Dick and the crocodile's pursuit of Captain Hook have attained almost mythic stature. Nearly everyone, from nursery child to scholar, has heard of the Great White Whale and of the Ticking Crocodile. Each aquatic monster has swallowed the amputated limb of a dark and terrible captain. Each captain has replaced his limb with an unusual but useful prosthetic device. Each brooding victim is at last destroyed by his nemesis after a relentless oceanic quest.
Browning's Sordello: The Art of the Makers-See
Authors: Stempel Daniel
Published: February 2007

In 1835 Robert Browning, in search of a publisher for Paracelsus, wrote to the Reverend William Johnson Fox, “I have another affair on hand rather of a more popular nature, I conceive; but not so decisive and explicit on a point or two, so I decide on trying the question with this.” Since the “affair on hand” was Sordello, whose reputation for tortured syntax and obscure allusions still persists, one may well wonder what Browning meant by “popular.” The public found nothing difficult or strange in Paracelsus; although it did not appeal to the taste of the times, the praise of a few perceptive critics and readers showed that it was not totally ignored. Sordello, in contrast, struck a new note in the literature of the forties, a harsh dissonance which cut through the turgid harmonies of a decadent romanticism. Browning's poem, like Richard Wagner's music, sent the critics scurrying for shelter with their hands clapped over their ears. The notoriety of Sordello, which he conceived to be of “a more popular nature” than Paracelsus, haunted Browning for the rest of his life like that pungent, musky “after-gust” which he promised his readers in its concluding lines.
The Ebauche of Germinal
Authors: Walker Philip
Published: February 2007

For those interested in exploring the mysteries of artistic creation, the long section of Zola's manuscript notes for Germinal entitled the Ebauche can be an illuminating, yet, at the same time, tantalizing document. As we turn its pages, written in Zola's firm hand, it is tempting to succumb to the illusion that we are following the genesis of this great novel much as it actually took shape in Zola's mind. And, as we shall see, no other part of the notes can, in fact, tell so much about his method of composition, his objectives, his way of reasoning with himself on paper. Yet in the final analysis we shall also see that the Ebauche, instructive as it may be in these respects, reveals only a fraction of his thoughts during the period of creation. We shall be struck by the contrast between what the Ebauche shows about the novelist's methodical planning and what it fails to show of his creative genius.
Chaucer's Disgruntled Cleric: The Nun's Priest's Tale
Authors: Broes Arthur T.
Published: February 2007

Nearly half a century has passed since Kittredge made his famous critical pronouncement that Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims “do not exist for the sake of the stories, but vice versa.” Despite occasional objections, Kittredge's observation has received wide general acceptance and its application to the tales by him and subsequent critics has yielded many fruitful insights into the direction of Chaucer's art. The Nun's Priest's Tale, however, apparently defies analysis along the lines suggested by this statement, for the Priest is not described in the “General Prologue” but is merely mentioned as one of three priests travelling with the Prioress. With this fact in mind, R. K. Root has rejected the Nun's Priest completely: “Neither in the General Prologue nor in the links which fit the tale into its framework has Chaucer taken any pains to characterize the ‘gentil Preest’ who tells this tale. So we may dismiss him without ceremony, and imagine ourselves face to face with Chaucer.”
Wilhelm Heinse, Zur Frage Seiner Konversion Und Religiösen Anschauung
Authors: Baeumer Max L.
Published: February 2007

Am 1. oktober 1786 folgt Wilhelm Heinse, damals vierzig Jahre alt, dem Ruf an den erzbischöflichen Hof in Mainz und wird Vorleser des Kurfürsten und Erzbischofs Friedrich Karl Joseph Freiherr von Erthal. Daß Heinse in die Dienste eines katholischen Kirchenfürsten tritt, dürfte zu seinen Lebzeiten Verwunderung hervorgerufen haben und hat neuerdings zu Vermutungen über einen Wechsel in der religiös-kirchlichen Einstellung des Dichters geführt. Bis dahin hatte Heinse nie aus seinem Haß gegen Kirche, Religion und Gesellschaftsmoral einen Hehl gemacht. Gegen die kirchliche Métropole Mainz zeigte er sogar eine besondere Abneigung. Am 5. Februar 1772 schrieb er aus Erlangen an seinen Freund Joseph Schwarz entrüstet iiber Wielands Wunsch, ihn zu einem Abbé des päpstlichen Nuntius zu machen, “daß alle Götter der Freuden mich davor behüten möchten, daß ich ein Diener eines Dieners des Nachfolgers der Ungeheuer würde”. Lieber wollte er des Hungers sterben, als einen solchen Schritt tun. Sich in den Pfaffenorten Wien oder Mainz niederzulassen, bedeutete ihm in einem Brief an Gleim vom 17. April desselben Jahres soviel, wie in die Holle reisen zu müssen. Von der Landschaft und der Lage von Mainz ist er immer entzückt gewesen. Mit dem breiten Strom vor dem herrlichen Rund des Gebirges, so schreibt er auf der Ruckreise von Italien 1783 in sein Tagebuch, sind ihm Stadt und Fluß ein prächtiges Amphitheater der Natur; und noch 1789 preist er die Gegend als die erste und herrlichste am ganzen Rhein (VII, 290 u. 321). Aber so sehr er von dem Naturparadies des Mainzer Landes begeistert ist, so abfàllig äußert er sich gegen Kirche, Religion und Gesetze dieser Gegend, wo die Menschen niemals fröhlich werden sollen und “durch Trübsal und ganze Sumpfe voll Ungemach in's Reich Gottes wandern müßten”.
Franz Kafka's “The Burrow” (“Der Bau”): An Analytical Essay
Authors: Weigand Hermann J.
Published: February 2007

Previous commentaries have emphasized the correlation between this piece and the host of motifs and problems that Franz Kafka never tired of treating. While this method seems mandatory in an overall account and has led to stimulating insights as well as aberrations on various levels of symbolic interpretation, a close analysis of “The Burrow” on the primary level, granting the given data of its non-Euclidean geometry, is attempted for the first time. Outstanding features include a demonstration of the unique quality of the recital as the synchronous coexistence of a ninety-minute monologue in the form of an emergent or progressive present with a life span of many years extending from maturity to senility. The progressive derangement and deterioration of the hero are analyzed, and his persecution mania is correlated with manifestations of a repressed, abnormal libido that allows inferences regarding a traumatic experience of his youth. Finally, it is shown on inner grounds of both a formal and a material nature that the piece is complete, allowing of no meaningful continuation.
Die Bedeutung Schillers für Hegels Ästhetik
Authors: Böhler Michael J.
Published: February 2007

The treatment of esthetics by Schiller influenced the conception of esthetics in Hegel's lectures. The notion of appearance (Schein) acquired a fundamental importance in Hegel's esthetics. Schiller had made it possible for “appearance” to be made the cornerstone of an esthetic system by enlarging its importance and rescuing it from the negative valuation given it by the logic of rationalism and the analytical metaphysics of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Hegel could thus base his definition of the beautiful upon “appearance.” On this definition of the beautiful is based the dialectical and historical method of Hegel's theory of the arts. (In German)
The Structural and Ideological Significance of Vigny's “Man of Destiny” in Stello
Authors: Lowrie Joyce O.
Published: February 2007

In Part III of Stello Vigny's concept of Destiny in historical and personal events is set forth by Blaireau, Doctor Noir's servant who is also part-time gunner in the French Revolution. Blaireau's first appearance reflects the fact that radical political changes can occur in one man's lifetime, and this reinforces Vigny's larger point in the novel, that to seek political fortune is a tenuous and vulnerable business. Blaireau's second appearance demonstrates Vigny's notions on the existence of blind Chance in history as opposed to Joseph de Maistre's idea of a beneficent Providence. In his third appearance Blaireau unwittingly causes the downfall of Robespierre and is consequently called “l'homme de la Destinée” by Doctor Noir. By “Destiny” Vigny means the capriciousness of events that alter the lives of persons and of nations. As for man's freedom, Vigny provides man with a leeway whereby he can mold events in his life and direct, to a certain extent, the powers of Destiny. While only “superior men” succeed at this, all men, including Blaireau, are given the possibility for doing so. Negatively Blaireau demonstrates the vulnerability of political fortune; positively he implies the possibility of resisting the powers that rule over man. His three appearances at beginning, middle, and end of the Chénier episode give esthetic and ideological unity to the work.
Human and Suprahuman: Ambiguity in the Tragic World of Jean Giraudoux
Authors: Ganz Arthur
Published: February 2007

Behind the apparent diversity of subject matter in Giraudoux's plays there is a central unity, the persistence of the great Romantic theme of the search for a suprahuman ideal. Typically, the hero of a Giraudoux play is seeking some image of beauty, power, and mystery that lies beyond the range of human experience. But this ideal world, however attractive, has its opposite in the limited human world of daily existence with its own beauty, grace, and comfort. Moreover, each of these worlds has a negative aspect; the human world may be characterized by greed, hatred, and vulgarity just as the ideal may be cruel, inhuman, fatal. As a result, Giraudoux's plays are marked by a profound ambiguity and express deeply divided attitudes not only toward the suprahuman but toward its human opposite as well. The four tragic works from the great series of plays of the nineteen thirties form a natural group and, because the conclusions toward which they drive are at once desired and feared, they reveal this essential ambiguity more directly than any others. Judith, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (Tiger at the Gates), Electra, and Ondine all show, by means of a dramatic image of destruction through a quest for the ideal, those central attitudes and concerns which characterize Giraudoux's art.
La Princesse de Cléves et son unité
Authors: Sweetser Marie-Odile
Published: February 2007

Traditional academic criticism has looked for the unity of Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves in the correspondence with its times, with the leading writers and thinkers of the period. New criticism believes the unity of the novel resides in a particular view of life of the author, pessimistic and even desperate, expressed in an individual style. In contrast with both the traditional and contemporary views the unity of the work consists of the creation of the inner life and personality of the main character who, significantly, gives her name to the novel; and of a complex but definite structure with themes and variations resembling a musical composition. The inner life of the main character is presented through two moral tests and culminates in a free choice which represents her total being: intellectual, moral, emotional. There is, therefore, no mutilation, no sacrifice of one aspect of herself to some external ethical standard, but full realization of the potentialities set forth by the novelist at the outset. (In French)
Le Désir de mort romantique dans Caliste
Authors: Rossard Janine
Published: February 2007

Apparently within the tradition of the sentimental novel, Caliste in fact centers around love, its obstacles, and the iniquities of the nobility. But equally, it demonstrates the absurdities of the bourgeois code, thus countering the philosophy of happiness that the sentimental genre exalts. Humiliation totally possesses Caliste as she gives up Vol-taireanreason, wishes to be freed from the constrictions of her personality, and longs for the positive sacrifice denied her by society. Deprived of true religious feeling, Caliste can only then turn to stoic sentimentality and thereby allow a wish for death to undermine her life. This death wish is a precursor of Romantic death as a refuge and as an expression of one's individuality. It reinforces a sense of the infinite rather close to that of the German pietists and pre-Romantics, Herman and Lessing; and calls for the vague des passions, showing Belle de Charrière, without Benjamin Constant, in a somewhat unusual light. (In French)
Juvenal as Sublime Satirist
Authors: Kupersmith William
Published: February 2007

Late eighteenth-century esteem for the moral qualities of the satires of Juvenal reflects a tradition which began with the church fathers. Renaissance critics praised Juvenal's style, which Boileau called “sublime.” Dryden, Dennis, and Johnson concurred with this neoclassical opinion. Putting Juvenal's sentiments into Christian contexts was not peculiar to the “Post-Augustans,” who continued Renaissance and neoclassical tradition. As Christian humanists, they used Juvenal's satires to supply “sentences” to add weight to their own moral sentiments.
Le Vieux Paris Dans Notre-Dame: Sources et Ressources de Victor Hugo
Authors: Bach Max
Published: February 2007

Victor Hugo, le poète le plus éminent de son époque, était aussi un des romanciers les plus en vue de la jeune école romantique. Auteur dramatique, la richesse et la fécondité de son imagination étaient renommées. Sa réputation de penseur et d'artiste était grande. De moindres personnages eussent été satisfaits. Pas Hugo. Son ambition convoitait une réputation d'érudit. La parution de Notre-Dame de Paris en 1831 lui permit d'ajouter cette nouvelle fleur à sa couronne.
The True Proportions of Gay's Acis and Galatea
Authors: Bronson Bertrand H.
Published: February 2007

The Masque, or serenata, or pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea—in eighteenth-century printings it was indifferently categorized—has been not so much neglected as quite ignored by the biographers and critics of John Gay. In its entirety, words and music, it is a masterpiece, and the reasons for its lying unregarded, except by historians of music, deserve to be scrutinized because they signalize a recurrent failing on the part of those who write on the arts, when a work exists simultaneously in more than one medium. Only lately, in truth, has criticism begun to cope with Shakespeare himself as drama existent in and for living embodiment on a physical stage and nowhere else, not even in the mind of Coleridge. (Theatrical criticism is by habit only piecemeal commentary on separate productions.) Similarly, to set small matters beside great ones, only of late has the ballad of tradition begun to be considered as song and not as a literary or pseudo-literary genre, sufficient and self-sustaining in its text alone. And the bardic tradition of the Ugo-Slavs is teaching us much about the Homeric epics of which former generations were unaware. Signs, in fact, are here and there beginning to appear of an unwillingness to rest content with the one-dimensional conception of arts which are only half-fulfilled until they are realized in two dimensions or more. A drawing of a sculpture is not enough; a sculpture of an action is not enough; pantomime does not suffice the spoken scene; the verbal text of a musical scena will not satisfy. Nor can any of these be adequately criticized on a basis of missing dimensions.
The Text and The Composition of The Seafarer
Authors: Stevick Robert D.
Published: February 2007

Textual cruces in The Seafarer, especially those near the end of the poem, have been not so much resolved as relegated to the lumber room in the mansion of poetry. On the one hand, oral-formulaic analysts regard The Seafarer as a verse text of 124 lines, predominantly formulaic, probably composed by a learned poet. The major problem, under this view, is that of deciding to what extent it is formulaic and then inferring the manner of composition: does the unique text represent a slightly defective record of oral composition? does it represent a poem composed entirely in writing, with deliberation foreign to oral composition, though employing traditional formulas of oral poetry? or does the text perhaps preserve orally composed sections that have been remembered by a deliberate, lettered poet who has built these sections into a poem he composed pen in hand? On the other hand, the historical-thematic analysts, also regarding the poem as a 124-line composition, employing inherited poetic language, continue to adduce evidence converging on the conclusion that a homiletic writer has shaped traditional verse materials to his own pious ends. One can no longer question the pervasiveness of doctrinal and homiletic devices in the conception and diction of the poem. Both oral-formulaic analysis and historical-thematic analysis, by their very nature, tend to assume the integrity of an Old English text—allowing, of course, for copyists' lapses of attention and errors in understanding. Neither approach, however, has been particularly concerned to resolve some persistent question of the integrity of the text or to suggest ways of regarding the textual cruces in the final section of the poem.
The Pattern of Formal Verse Satire in the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Weinbrot Howard D.
Published: February 2007

Though formal verse satire was a major genre in the Augustan age, students of satire have generally been reluctant to define its essential traits. Perhaps the most illuminating study is Mary Claire Randolph's “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire.” She remarks that the satire of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal was “bi-partite in structure,” that a particular vice or folly was attacked in “Part A,” and its opposite virtue praised in “Part B.” There is always more attack than praise in satire “since, paradoxically, in the very act of presenting the negative or destructive side of human behavior the satirist is establishing a positive foundation on which he can base his specific recommendation to virtue.” Whether introduced by direct exhortation, implication, or quotable proverb, the “admonition to virtue” is inevitably present in formal verse satire: “it must be there, spoken or unspoken, if the piece is to be more than mere virulence and fleeting invective. … In any case, whatever the plan, the positive rational mode of procedure advocated or unmistakenly implied in a satire will be the precise opposite of the vice or folly ridiculed.”
James's Idea of Structure
Authors: Ward J. A.
Published: February 2007

James's youthful ideas about the form of fiction are the germs of the principles expressed in the late prefaces. But his earliest dicta, in comparison to the late, are arid and formalist—dogmatically proclaimed, not experimentally discovered. They hint of an American Gallophile, infatuated with the rigid lines and harsh economy of the well-made play and the well-made novel. In 1874 James announced: “We confess to a conservative taste in literary matters—to a relish for brevity, for conciseness, for elegance, for perfection of form” (LRE, p. 139). He never renounced such a taste; “brevity” and “perfection of form”—more frequently “economy” and “composition”—are as prominent, indeed as hieratic, in the prefaces as in the earliest reviews. But if James seems to have acquired his literary standards artificially and to have begun his career with a set of a priori principles to guide him, it was not long before he was to make these ideas his own by fully understanding their relevance to the craft of fiction. The early assumptions are not repudiated, but tested, clarified, and deepened. There is a remarkable balance in James's mature criticism between the general principle and the pragmatically discovered insight. Though the insistence on economy and order is never relaxed, the concepts become increasingly more flexible; with ease they accommodate notions of fiction that seem contradictory. James repeatedly exults in the freedom of the novelist: “the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (AN, p. 326). Indeed to James it is plastic enough and prodigious enough to allow for the reconciliation of the art of Scribe with that of Balzac, and of the principles of Coleridge with those of Flaubert.
Text and Possible Occasion for Swift's “Day of Judgement”
Authors: Johnson Maurice
Published: February 2007

No modern commentary on this changelessly relevant poem identifies its specific occasion as that of a new attempt by dissenters in 1732 and 1733 to repeal the Sacra mental Test Act in Ireland, Such an occasion is, however, suggested or explicitly stated by eighteenth-century transcribers of the poem, including William Collins, William Shen-stone, Ralph Griffiths, and the anonymous author of The Friends (1773), a rare novel in which “The Day of Judgement” first appeared in print. Substantive variants in the early transcriptions, often intensifying the criticism of dissenters, are significant in understanding how the poem was read in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift's authorship is corroborated by similarities in other works by him on the same subject in 1732-33, a somewhat later date than that usually assigned for the poem's composition.
A Generous Education
Authors: Nicolson Marjorie Hope
Published: February 2007

Unless and until the Modern Language Association changes its (unwritten) law that the presidency is usually a consolation prize bestowed upon an elder statesman, presumably because he or she has managed to live long enough to become emeritus (not for any merit, but by automatic fiat of the Board of Trustees), the presidential address will lead to reminiscence. We who no longer teach are particularly dangerous. All our academic lives, we have had captive audiences who could not choose but hear our auditions. Now that no one longer receives credit for listening to us, younger generations rightly avoid us ancient mariners, as in my youth I tried to duck American or Canadian relatives who wished to refight the Civil or the Boer Wars.
Farquhar's Twin-Rivals and the Reform of Comedy
Authors: Rothstein Eric
Published: February 2007

Although the years 1701 through 1703 saw the number of Collierite publications markedly diminish, the zeal of the reformers and the consequent distress of the theatres seems hardly to have abated. It was in this perilous atmosphere that Farquhar attempted perhaps the most ambitious and potentially telling attack upon Collier's abolitionist demands: the publications, in February and December 1702 respectively, of the Discourse upon Comedy and The Twin-Rivals. The relativism of the Discourse strikes at Collier's aesthetic position both by denying the validity of his classical authorities and by affirming that of popular consensus. The Twin-Rivals rebuts the force of Collier's moral invective by presenting, concretely, the kind of moral comedy that Collier himself claimed to favor and that the various apologies for comedy had presented, verbally, as a justifying ideal. In demonstrating the value of comedy, Farquhar meant to confound the abolitionists and make the stage flourish. The Twin-Rivals failed and thus accomplished neither. I would suggest, however, that its ethos and its structure make it an extremely interesting document as well as a skillful play. I should like to discuss its purposeful novelty and its relationship both to Farquhar's canon and to the development of the stage at the beginning of the eighteenth century, drawing an eventual moral.
Arnold and Carlyle
Authors: DeLaura David J.
Published: February 2007

The influence of the writings and personality of Thomas Carlyle on the poetic and critical career of Matthew Arnold is a complex story, the outlines of which have only recently begun to be traced. Kathleen Tillotson, in her illuminating Warton Lecture on “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle,” revealed in great detail how passage after passage in Arnold's poetry is related to Carlyle's early writings. Since the bulk of Arnold's major poetry was written by 1853, her study in effect proved how much more “puissant” than earlier Arnold scholars had suspected, the voice of Carlyle had been for Arnold—one of the four “voices,” as he said in later life, he had heard at Oxford in the early 1840's. Significantly, however, in that list of 1883, in which Carlyle's name is linked in dignity with those of Newman, Goethe, and Emerson, Arnold departs from his subject in order to turn his keenest critical instruments against Carlyle; and he rejects him for a temper “morbid, wilful and perverse,” as well as for his “perverse attitude towards happiness” (DA, p. 198). In a similar mood of reminiscence Arnold had written to John Henry Newman a decade earlier: “There are four people, in especial, from whom I am conscious of having learnt—a very different thing from merely receiving a strong impression—learnt habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me; and the four are—Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and yourself” (UL, pp. 65–66; 28 May 1872). Curiously, there is no mention of Carlyle here, though demonstrably Carlyle's influence on Arnold's thought and writing extends far beyond mere “strong impression.”
Galdós' Use of Yellow in Character Delineation
Authors: Chamberlin Vernon A.
Published: February 2007

The use of color by Galdós has so far failed to attract the detailed attention of literary scholars. This lack of attention may perhaps be explained by the fact that Galdós is so well known and so esteemed for his external and psychological realism that scholars have not been inclined to seek special connotative values, nuances, and interest for particular colors in his literary creativity. Galdós' penchant for drawing black-and-white sketches and two recent, very careful, and highly regarded studies—which only mention in passing specific instances of Galdós' lack of concentration regarding color—likewise fail to hint at its importance in his novels. That Galdós was interested in color, however, may be seen in his perennial use of yellow—an especially important chroma which occurs not only prominently at critical junctures in certain novels but also as the surname of an important character: Juan Amarillo in Gloria.
Dramatic Conventions in All's Well That Ends Well
Authors: Hapgood Robert , Turner Robert Y.
Published: February 2007

The best parts of Robert Y. Turner's article “Dramatic Conventions in All's Well That Ends Well (PMLA, lxxv, Dec. 1960) concern the denouement of that play. He acutely points out that it is Bertram, with his agonies and perplexities, not Diana, who ”holds the center of the stage“ during her long series of paradoxes; he shows how Shakespeare has added details to his source which prolong and intensify Bertram's distress; and he relates this distress to that of other similar heroes as well as to that of earlier comic butts. I should like, however, to question a number of other points in this article and thereby to challenge as unproved what I take to be its main thesis: that in All's Well Shakespeare ”produced a comedy more of an age than for all time“ because he chose there to follow a contemporary vogue for ”prodigal son comedies“ whose conventions ”have lost their savor.“
Chaucer's Merchant's Tale: Another Swing of the Pendulum
Authors: Harrington Norman T.
Published: February 2007

Despite a recent tendency to consider the Merchant's Tale outside the dramatic context of its prologue, and to read it primarily as a broadly humorous, if discordant, piece of anti-feminism, the tale is actually unified by a consistent narrative point of view that successfully accommodates the apparently incongruous themes, tones, and styles of the poem. The final effect, moreover, is not comic at all, but rather sardonic, a dark and unsettling view of an aspect of man's experience. The Merchant's Prologue, though probably written after the tale, is carefully adjusted to the climate of the tale, and must be considered in any critical account, especially since it is through the strong, viable presence of the narrator that the tale is held together. Two features characterize this narrator, one tonal, the other attitudinal. The first is the cool, acidulous voice we hear narrating the story, the expression of an ironic intelligence deeply at odds with the world. The second is the narrator's heightened awareness of sex, particularly in its more grotesque and violent forms, which gives the tale its unsavory atmosphere. These marks of a single unified narrator, together with the ironic finale of the plot, result in a literary mode that is not finally comic, but which suggests comparison with the so-called “problem comedies” of Shakespeare.
From Delusion to Illumination: A Larger Structure for L'Allegro-Il Penseroso
Authors: Miller David M.
Published: February 2007

The virtues of L'Allegro are incorporated into II Penseroso, and both mirth and melancholy serve the progress of the soul. The activities of II Penseroso complement those of L'Allegro, but at each point they are nearer to the contemplation of God. The progress of the poems culminates in the final section of II Penseroso, which has no parallel in L'Allegro. This vertical structure encompasses image patterns that range from humor psychology to music, and from hermeticism to topology. These patterns are further organized into parallel thematic units. Chief among these are the education of a superior mind, the subordination of flesh to mind and of mind to spirit, the syncretic nature of Christian vision, and the progress of the mind and soul through the complementary disorders of black melancholy and vain deluding joy. The delights of L'Allegro are real and valued, but they cannot stand against the ecstasy of Christian contemplation.
Wuthering Heights and the Limits of Vision
Authors: Sonstroem David
Published: February 2007

Interpretations of Wuthering Heights often focus upon the grand passions of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and the striking bond between them. But full and detailed consideration of the novel discourages the assumption that Emily Brontë is wholeheartedly endorsing their point of view, or any other. She consistently presents all her characters, Heathcliff and Catherine included, as blind to the world as others see it, and consequently as holding views that do not do justice to the fullness of things. Largely because of their myopia, all are ever at odds with one another, often physically, but usually conceptually, engaging in indecisive wars of words, benighted battles of too limited views. The battles occur as well within Catherine and Heathcliff, whose divided hearts reflect the confused divisions in the world at large. And the reader is fully implicated in the inconclusive conflicts, for his formulations and sympathies are repeatedly betrayed. Wuthering Heights provides him with no standard of judgment that comprehends the restricted ones of the characters, no privileged point of view to relieve his uncertainties. Whatever her intentions, Emily Brontë is clearly not just throwing her being vicariously into the lives of Heathcliff and Catherine. She possesses strong critical impulses and many contrary views, only one of them being that of Heathcliff.
Ronsard's Reflections on Cosmogony and Nature
Authors: Silver Isidore
Published: February 2007

Ronsard's last considered observation on . the relationship between philosophy and lyric poetry in the preface to the Odes (1587) is implicitly a reaffirmation of Du Bellay's confidence in the philosophic capacities of the French language,1 though expressed in a less exuberant manner: “Tu dois sçavoir que toute sorte de Poesie a l'argument propre & convenable à son subject: ... la Lyrique, l'amour, le vin, les banquets dissolus, les danses, masques, chevaux victorieux, escrime, joustes & tournois, & peu souvent quelque argument de Philosophie” (i, 59). This retrospective program, if one may be forgiven the incongruity of the phrase, had been abundantly realized by Ronsard, in so far as “quelque argument de Philosophie” was concerned, and not only in his lyric poetry. For a moment, it is true, in a variant of 1578 of the ode Du retour de Maclou de la Haie (1550), the poet utters a gay disapproval of philosophers: “Les Philosophes je n'appreuve” (i, 208). But it is clear that Ronsard's intention is to celebrate the return of his friend with brimming cup, and the apparent condemnation of philosophers is nothing more than a warning to the enemies of good wine that their presence at the festivities would be superfluous. In the following edition, that of 1584, “Les Philosophes” became “Ces vieux Medecins.”
“Ocular Proof” in Othello and its Source
Authors: Adams Maurianne S.
Published: February 2007

Shakespeare's selectivity in adapting a novella from Giraldi Cinthio's De Gli Hecatommithi into his own Othello has long been apparent; students of Shakespeare's play have stressed his transformation of the source by speeding up the action, condensing the plot, reassessing the characterization, and transfiguring the commonplace attitudes toward an interracial marriage presented in the source into a tragedy of love. But no one has demonstrated how a close comparison of single words and phrases in Othello and in the novella can help us to understand how the transformation took place, how words and phrases such as vedere cogl' occhi, vendetta, satio, and la giustizia divina are translated imaginatively into the thematic imagery of ocular proof, the configuration of revenge, satisfaction, and satiation, and the movement from justice to mercy which Desdemona offers to Othello. Clearly, such a comparison of the play and its source affords a critical perspective upon the verbal drama especially. But studies of the imagery in Othello neglect its source entirely, and source studies, merely footnoting the verbal parallels as they appear, seem to maintain the critical view that marvels how Shakespeare could have created so much out of so little. It is as if Shakespeare's characteristic ingredient, the poetic interplay of words and images in the verbal fund of his drama, had no parallel in the verbal fund of his source.
Annus Mirabilis Distilled
Authors: Rosenberg Bruce A.
Published: February 2007

Hooker's eloquent and persuasive argument that Annus Mirabilis was written as an antidote to several poisonous tracts of the time has been accepted by nearly all of Dryden's critics, but I believe that he has underestimated Dryden by calling the poem “simple and lucid” (p. 49). Simple Dryden rarely was, and if we find the poem lucid, it may be because we overlook an intricate, yet unified system of alchemical and astrological metaphors. As the practice of alchemy and its peculiar jargon has lapsed into obscurity, so have Dryden's allusions to it. Though the explicit reference to “Chymick flame” in stanza 293 has been noticed, it is thought to be an isolated allusion with no relation to the frequent images of the phoenix, the apostrophe to the King, the mention of Jove, the allusion to the New Jerusalem, and, most significantly, to the fact that the poem's entire action concerns either fire or water.
Della Cruscanism in America
Authors: Adams M. Ray
Published: February 2007

Della cruscanism has been primarily associated in literary history with a rash of bad taste which broke out in English poetry between 1787 and 1791 and for which Robert Merry was held responsible. It took its name from the pseudonym “Della Crusca” which Merry used in a poetical correspondence carried on in the World between 1787 and 1789 with Mrs. Hannah Cowley, who signed herself “Anna Matilda,” and other ladies. It was a compound of amorous superlatives, dithyrambic apostrophes, pretentious ornament overflowing in flowery epithets, and a heady romanticism completely lacking the comparatively disciplined artistry which Byron and Shelley were later to achieve in Romantic poetry dealing with similar themes. This flood of bombastic sentiment was stemmed in England by William Gifford, whose satirical onslaughts in the Baviad (1791) and the Maeviad (1795) have left Merry branded as a mere poetaster ever since.
The Death of Miles in The Turn of the Screw
Authors: West Muriel
Published: February 2007

Critics have always been struck by the death scene that concludes The Turn of the Screw and, being struck, have given us a variety of interpretations—psychological, religious, poetic; but they have never accounted for the improbability that Miles—whose good health and sound heart are never questioned in the tale—should die of heart failure. In James's other stories concluding with the death of a young boy (“The Pupil” and “The Author of Beltraffio”) we are prepared by earlier accounts of the boy's health to accept his final death. Not so with Miles. We are not even prepared to find him bewildered and demoralized by the series of embarrassing questions put to him by his governess: Miles is presented as remarkably well-poised for a ten-year-old.
Das Klopstockbild Stefan Georges Und Seines Kreises
Authors: Metzger-Hirt Von Erika
Published: February 2007

Sowohl in der Literatur über Klopstock als auch in der Literatur über Stefan George wird heute immer wieder darauf hingewiesen, daß Klopstock Stefan George und seinem Kreis weit mehr als ein durch Schule und Universität überlieferter Name war. Klopstock gehörte zu den dichterischen Vorgängern Georges, zu den anerkannten Kultgestalten des Kreises, denen George sich in seinem eigenen künstlerischen Wirken verpflichtet fühlte und deren Bedeutung für die deutsche Dichtung er hervorhob. Norbert von Hellingrath bleibt das Verdienst, als erster Literarhistoriker auch die innere Verwandtschaft Georgescher und Klopstockscher Dichtung erkannt und formuliert zu haben. In dieser Erkenntnis folgten ihm Hans Gerhard, Claude David, Karl August Schleiden, Jean Murat, Eric A. Blackall und Paul Gerhard Klussmann. Diese Arbeit konzentriert sich im folgenden insbesondere auf das Phänomen, daß von einem Dichter des 20. Jahrhunderts und seinem Kreis ein deutscher Dichter des 18. Jahrhunderts wieder in seiner besonderen Bedeutung betont und gewürdigt wurde, und sie soll sich Einzelheiten zuwenden, die es rechtfertigen, eine innere Beziehung Georges zu Klopstock anzunehmen.
The Poet's Dilemma: An Interpretation of Rilke's Second Duino Elegy
Authors: Weigand Hermann J.
Published: February 2007

To scan The Duino Elegies once more, forty years after the poet's death, smothered as they are under an avalanche of interpretations, is a hazardous venture. To do so for a body of readers including many who know this poetry only through the blurring medium of translation seems questionable. To single out one of the Elegies, moreover, and present its poetic statement as embedded in the matrix of a much larger whole, within the space of a short paper, seems impossible. The hope that a group of serious students, perceptive to all the nuances of Rilke's mythopoeic language, will find something not only new but valid in my exposition, prompts me to this essay. For those readers who have command of the secondary literature I wish to state that I have pondered and thoroughly digested many commentaries, including the latest and most voluminous by Jacob Steiner.
Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man
Authors: Seltzer Leon F.
Published: February 2007

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”
The Allegorical Interpretation of Medieval Literature
Authors: Beichner Paul E.
Published: February 2007

The concentration of allegory in the air in the Middle Ages was heavy. Readers and hearers were exposed to it from various sources, and many probably followed simple allegories on the literal and on the figurative levels as naturally as we understand editorial cartoons. An audience at a morality play followed the physical actions and the speeches of actors, knowing that the characters were personifications of virtues and vices, and other abstractions. No one expected such characters as Lechery, Pride, Gluttony, or Good Deeds, Goods, Kindred, and the like, to be rounded human beings. Homiletic allegories and spiritual and moral interpretations of scriptural texts were heard from the pulpit; no doubt, most of the congregation got the point. A deeper meaning than the literal sense on the surface was sought in poems which were true allegories, such as The Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, and it was taken for granted that it would be found. The author usually made sure that his primary intention, the allegorical thrust of the work, was rather evident. Modern readers may interpret minor details or symbols in different ways, but there is seldom room for disagreement on main points.
The Allegorical Interpretation of Renaissance Literature
Authors: Dunlap Rhodes
Published: February 2007

That there are figures in all things is a notion which in the Renaissance, certainly no less than in any other period, demonstrated both its potential sublimity and its potential absurdity. Like many other sublime commonplaces, we find it in Shakespeare; and in Shakespeare, too, we find the quintessence of at least one kind of allegorical interpreter, for “there is figures in all things” is spoken by that redoubtable combination of learning and bravery, the valorous Welsh captain Fluellen in Henry V. To Fluellen's mind, as he pursues the universal figurative correspondences, Macedon and Monmouth are as “alike as my fingers is to my fingers.” He not only perceives such allegorical richness, he is eager to communicate it. Ancient Pistol cannot complete his tirade against “that goddess blind / That stands upon the rolling restless stone” before Fluellen must break in with an explication in which iconographic and thematic elements are finely balanced: “By your patience, Aunchient Pistol, Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning and inconstant and mutability and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls; in good truth, the poet makes a most excellent description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral.” But Shakespeare does not allow us to dismiss Fluellen, in his comical character, as a mere bundle of clichés and correspondences, the theorist of a river in Macedon (though it is out of his brains what is the name of it) and also moreover a river at Monmouth, and salmons in both.
Physical Access to Library Materials
Authors: Williams Gordon R.
Published: February 2007

Within the last few years librarians and scholars have become aware of a number of related facts about library collections and their growth and use that indicate that changes in library economy, in the old-fashioned sense of that term, are required if libraries are to meet their obligations.