bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On the Structure of Crime and Punishment
Authors: Wasiolek Edward
Published: February 2007

The publication by I. I. Glivenko of Dostoevski's notebooks, in part in 1924 and in full in 1931, and the consequent re-evaluation of his novels have disposed rather conclusively of the opinion, long held and still occasionally repeated, that Dostoevski, though prophet, philosopher, and psychologist, was not a craftsman; that under the pressure of debts, bad economic habits, and unscrupulous publishers—all true conditions—he patched his novels together as best he could—all untrue.
Reality and Actuality in the March Family Narratives of W. D. Howells
Authors: Kirk Clara M.
Published: February 2007

When William Dean Howells was preparing the Library edition of his works in 1909, he gathered together four of the stories in which the March family had appeared and laid them aside with the hope of publishing them in one volume. In his preface to this collection, which was never in fact published, Howells thanked Isabel and Basil March for the part they had played in nine of his stories. He also supplied the reader with a suggestion as to how he dealt with the problem of actuality and reality in the novel, which it is the purpose of this paper to explore.
Robert Greene and his Classmates at Cambridge
Authors: Parr Johnstone
Published: February 2007

Robert greene himself tells us actually .very little about his university career except that he was a gadabout who finally proceeded to the M.A. degree.
The Contraries: A Central Concept in Tennyson's Poetry
Authors: Danzig Allan
Published: February 2007

Nearly every book or article on Tennyson alludes to the poet's characteristic ambiguity, one neither of syntax nor of meaning but inherent in his very choice of subject and thus an essential aspect of his imagination. Few critics, however, have even tried to build a unified thesis from their isolated perceptions of, for instance, Tennyson's simultaneous concern with macrocosm and microcosm, the similarity and mutual attraction of opposites in his poetry, and, over all, his assumption of the dualistic nature of things. Most references to these phenomena are as brief, but rarely so significant, as Eliot's evaluation of the success and failure of In Memoriam, which calls attention to the poem's expression at once of the most obvious and the most sensitive: “Tennyson's surface, his technical accomplishment, is intimate with his depths: what we most quickly see about Tennyson is that which moves between the surface and the depths, that which is of slight importance.”
Thackeray's Recantation
Authors: Baker Joseph E.
Published: February 2007

Very early in his career, Thackeray published his Catherine (1839-40) as part of Fraser's Magazine's campaign against fiction that glamorized criminals and sinners. In a note to Chapter i, he singled out for criticism Bulwer's Ernest Maltravers because it “opens with a seduction; but then it is performed by people of the strictest virtue on both sides; there is so much religion and philosophy in the heart of the seducer, so much tender innocence in the soul of the seduced, that—bless the little dears!—their very peccadilloes make one interested in them; and their naughtiness becomes quite sacred, so deliciously is it described.” In Fraser's, August 1832, Bulwer had been accused of parallel confusions: “having to paint an adulterer, you describe him as belonging to the class of country curates, among whom, perhaps, such a criminal is not met with once in a hundred years.”
The Green Child: Herbert Read's Ironic Fantasy
Authors: Wasson Richard
Published: February 2007

Herbert read's prose fantasy, The Green Child, is one of those strange works defiant of classification. Though judged favorably by the few critics and scholars who give it serious study, it is so vaguely and variously interpreted that it would seem to lack both the form and the content which justify such praise. The problem of interpretation and analysis is complicated by the structure of the work. Its division into three arbitrarily related sections allows critics to pick their favorite section, claim for it central importance and base their analyses on that part. An understanding and appreciation of the work is further complicated because Read has been for thirty-five years a leading spokesman for romanticism, anarchism, and humanism—doctrines which seem to counter those expressed in The Green Child. The style of the book, for example, is commonly regarded as classical. The political philosophy reflects a conservative anti-utopian attitude, and humanist ideals are set aside by natural processes ultimately destructive of man's conscious efforts. An understanding of Read's philosophy in the historical situation in which it arose, a knowledge of his theory of fantasy, comprehension of his irony, and an awareness of the structure of the work help to explain the curious nature of The Green Child.
Faulkner's Geography and Topography
Authors: Brown Calvin S.
Published: February 2007

In most criticism of Faulkner it has been taken for granted that his Yoknapatawpha County is really Lafayette (accented on fay) County, Mississippi, and that his Jefferson, the county seat, is really Oxford. Little evidence on the matter has been given beyond a few very general resemblances, and little has been demanded. Recently, however, the assumption has been questioned, with a considerable marshaling of arguments and statistics. It seems proper, therefore, to go into the question in some detail, particularly since a good deal of the evidence is already beyond the reach of the literary researcher and much of the rest will probably disappear within the next few years. Local changes have already been sufficient to lead to some literary misinterpretations.
The Profession and George
Authors: Parker William Riley
Published: February 2007

This privilege of speaking my mind to you tonight was earned, not by distinguished scholarship, but by my serving you as Executive Secretary and Editor for nine busy years. Milton, therefore, will not be with us at this hour. Instead I invite you to ponder with me one of the most urgent problems that our profession faces: let us call it the problem of George. I am not, of course, referring to my able successor, George Winchester Stone. Our George, as you must have guessed, is the not so able fellow we let do the necessary jobs that we consider unworthy of our own attention.
Dance Song or “Chant du Guet”? The Espingadura of Cerveri, Called de Girona
Authors: Lewent Kurt
Published: February 2007

In Romania LXXVII (1956), 66 ff. Irénée Cluzel has re-edited three of the Catalan troubadour's poems composed in a more popular vein. It is with the second of them (No. 3 of M. de Riquer's edition, Barcelona, 1947) that we are going to deal here.
The Reliability of Anthony Wood and Milton's Oxford M.A.
Authors: French J. Milton
Published: February 2007

Milton's incorporation as Master of Arts at Oxford is a perennial problem. Resting as it does on the word of Anthony Wood, with no corroboration from either Milton himself or any of his early biographers, it has never been satisfyingly clear. Wood's statement (Fasti Oxonienses, 1721 edition, I, 262) is curious: “1635. … This Year was incorporated Master of Arts John Milton, not that it appears so in the Register, for the Reason I have told you in the Incorporations 1629, but from his own mouth to my friend, who was well acquainted with, and had from him, and from his Relations after his death, most of this account of his life and writings following.” The note under the incorporations for 1629 (I, 247) to which Wood refers is the following: “This Year John French M.A. and Fellow of Merton College was elected public Scribe or Registrary of the University, who being a careless Man (tho' a good Scholar) and more fit for another, than that, employment, hath omitted throughout all his time the Incorporations of the Cantabrigians at the conclusion of the Act, having had sometimes 40, at other times 50 and more incorporated at that time, in several degrees and faculties. Those therefore that I find, you shall have as they follow.” It is perhaps worth while to add, however, that Wood had remarked under incorporations for 1613 (i, 195): “The Incorporations of the Cantabrigians are this Year omitted by the public Scribe.” Evidently John French was not the only lazy scribe.
Symbolism in Grillparzer's Das Goldene Vließ
Authors: Dunham T. C.
Published: February 2007

In an age when symbols are being discovered in literary works where critics of an earlier period would never have dreamed of looking for them there is probably little need to defend a study of symbolism in Grillparzer's work. Indeed Grillparzer himself recognized that there is a symbolic element in all art and reproached his own time for its refusal to acknowledge the symbolic aspect of poetic truth. Das goldene Vließ, moreover, is not the only drama in which Grillparzer uses symbols. In Sappho, for instance, the lyre, the laurel wreath, the rose, the statue of Aphrodite, and the dagger all have symbolic significance. Even the title of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen reflects symbolic motifs. In that drama subtle variations on the water imagery predominate but are reinforced by symbols such as the dove, the tower, the Leda song, and the lamp. In Libussa, to cite one more example, there is a highly developed circle symbolism as well as symbolism involving flowers, vegetation, and metals.
Heinse, America, And Utopianism
Authors: Hope Harold Von
Published: February 2007

While older literary historians dismissed Wilhelm Heinse as the author of the frivolous novel Ardinghello, in recent decades critics and scholars have noted his significance. Through the research of Walther Brecht, Walther Rehm, Oskar Weibel, Albert Zippel, and Richard Benz we now know Heinse not only as a novelist but also as a gifted interpreter of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance, as an art critic who defended Rubens against neoclassical criticism, as a forerunner of Romanticism, as an early advocate of the rehabilitation of the flesh and of a Nietzschean affirmation of life. In the recently published Annalen der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1952) p. 465, Wolfdietrich Rasch singled out Heinse's Ardinghello along with Goethe's Iphigenie, Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and Mozart's Don Juan, to exemplify the extent and diversity of German cultural life at the end of the eighteenth century.
Wordsworth's “Minuteness And Fidelity”
Authors: Jordan John E.
Published: February 2007

When coleridge, in the famous Chapter xxii of his Biographia Literaria, used the “uncouth and new-coined word” matter-of-faclness to describe one of Wordsworth's “defects,” he was accurately putting his finger on a strain of prosaic prolixity that is all too evident in Wordsworth's poetry. But when he went on to find the principal cause of this matter-of-factness in “a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself,” was he equally accurate? There is no question that Wordsworth, for all that the earth could be to him “an unsubstantial faery place,” was a hardheaded hillsman with an eye to a shilling and a fact; Raymond D. Havens well pointed out that “it was in the man as well as in the poetry that Coleridge lamented a deficiency.” Coleridge's complaint of “minuteness and fidelity” amounts, however, almost to a charge of unselective, photographic detail, of scrupulous concern for factual accuracy for its own sake. And this charge has been and is still being echoed: Emile Legouis writes of “Wordsworth's veneration for accurate facts and minute details” and John Jones, of Wordsworth's “delusion that he had done what was required of him if he stuck closely to the facts.”
Freuds Aesthetik
Authors: Marcuse Von Ludwig
Published: February 2007

Freud, der Philosoph, lebte von früh auf in Hader mit den Philoso-phen. Die Religionen behandelte er wie irgendein Aufklärer des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts—doch subtiler, mit den Waffen einer Psychologie, die sie noch nicht ahnten. Mit den Kunsten lebte er in Frieden ... man könnte fast sagen: in sehnsuchtiger Bewunderung.
Dickens' Use Of His American Experiences In Martin Chuzzlewit
Authors: Stone Harry
Published: February 2007

On 31 January 1842, shortly after Dickens arrived on his first visit to the United States, he wrote to his friend Thomas Mitton, “There is a great deal afloat here in the way of subjects for description. I keep my eyes open pretty wide, and hope to have done so to some purpose by the time I come home.” And certainly Dickens' observations were to “some purpose.” The American visit produced a fine series of letters, a travel book, American Notes for General Circulation (1842), and the famous American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). These three basic sources—the letters on America, which were never intended for publication as such; the Notes, which represented Dickens' public statement of what he saw in America; and Chuzzlewit, the fictional recreation of the America he found—form an extraordinary trilogy of materials made to order for the study of the relationship between fact and fiction. But strangely enough, despite the immensity of the Dickens bibliography, one hunts vainly for such a study. And yet, by analyzing the American chapters in Martin Chuzzlewit in the light of Dickens' letters from America and his American Notes, it is possible to achieve a better understanding of his artistic methods and limitations. One can see, for example, how Dickens the observer, the selector, worked, how he broke up some experiences and fused others together. One can watch impressions and images recur and reappear as the associations with which they are connected also recur and reappear. Finally, one can better understand the fictional difficulties and shortcomings in the American interlude of Martin Chuzzlewit; one can better explain a good many artistic lapses and seemingly wild exaggerations.
The Strange Irregular Rhythm: An Analysis Of The Good Soldier
Authors: Gose Elliott B.
Published: February 2007

In his appreciative portrait of Theodore Dreiser, Ford Madox Ford recorded how in 1914, long before they ever met, he had read with emotion Dreiser's novel, The Titan, and then had written a laudatory review of it. Six months later in this country Dreiser read Ford's new novel, The Good Soldier, also with emotion and also to write a review. Here the similarity ends, however, for Dreiser was irritated by Ford's novel and especially by the portrayal of John Dowell, an expatriate from Philadelphia in “the United States of North America” (p. 60). This character, claimed Dreiser, “is no American. He is that literary packhorse or scapegoat,” the “Englishman's conception of an American husband.” In a sense this is quite true. No American would make the comment that Dowell does in analyzing his wife: “She did not want much physical passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without blinking” (p. 79). Obviously such a conception, if taken as an attempt to state the literal truth about this country, must have sounded to a contemporary reader as though its author's acquaintance with America were limited to the novels of Henry James. Actually, of course, as an impressionist novel The Good Soldier does not intend to give a literal representation of the problem it explores. And since, as Ford emphasized in his portrait, he and Dreiser were temperamentally different, we should not be surprised at Dreiser's irritation or his final complaint that the novel as a whole is “cold narrative and never truly poignant” because the “formal British leanings” of the author “will not let him loosen up and sing.”
The Young Gide's Reaction to Nietzsche
Authors: Holdheim William W.
Published: February 2007

One of the most significant aspects of the intellectual climate of the 1890's in France is undoubtedly the rapid spreading of Nietzsche's thought. Numerous fragmentary translations from his work were published in the literary reviews of the period, such as l'Ermitage, the Revue Blanche, le Banquet, and above all the Mercure de France. Articles on this philosopher were legion, and translations of complete Nietzschean works also began to appear with increasing frequency. The whole process has been described in detail by Geneviève Bianquis in her well-known study of Nietzsche's influence on French thought. By 1895 Nietzscheanism, though still in a rather vague form, was an essential part of the general intellectual atmosphere, and by the end of the decade we can speak of a true Nietzsche vogue.
On the Two Chief Metrical Modes in English
Authors: Halpern Martin
Published: February 2007

This essay aims to define certain fundamental differences between two types of rhythmic patterning indigenous to English verse, and to suggest that full recognition of these differences can do much to clear up standard confusions in our prosodic terminology. A recent essay by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley went part way toward performing such a service by reinforcing a traditional distinction between non-syllable-counting “native” or “strong-stress” meter, patterned entirely on the accentual principle, and “syllable-stress” meters, patterned on the principle of an “interplay” of native accentual rhythms with syllable-counting techniques inherited originally from Romance-language prosody.1 It is my contention, however, that, valid as this distinction is, there is a more important one which is blurred by the tendency to emphasize regularization of the number of syllables in the verse line as the primary, if not the sole, factor differentiating the two chief metrical modes. I hope to show that, of the four so-called “syllable-stress” meters in English—iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic—only the iambic has developed in a direction radically different from the native accentual tradition; that the other three, as characteristically used in English poetry, are simply variants of the strong-stress mode; and that the very term “syllable-stress” is misleading because syllable-counting techniques may occur in strong-stress verse and the stress-factor alone does not account for all rhythmic discriminations in iambic verse. The distinction with which this essay is concerned—between the entire iambic tradition and all English verse written in strong-stress meter, whether syllable-counting or not—is, I believe, the most basic one in English prosody, necessary not only in performing formal scansions but also in understanding and appreciating significant contrasts between two very different ways of hearing and composing a poetic line.
Milton's Haemony: Etymology and Allegory
Authors: Steadman John M.
Published: February 2007

Recent interpretations of Thyrsis' magic herb have usually employed one or more of several angles of approach: (1) the implications of its name, (2) its similarities with, or differences from, the herb moly, and (3) its function in a larger context—its relation to the theme, dramatic structure, and ethical allegory of Milton's masque. Though all three approaches are necessary for a valid solution of this crux, each has encountered certain inherent difficulties. The third has been especially vulnerable to subjective bias; reading into haemony whatever meaning has best fitted his own conception of the poem's overall structure and sense, the individual critic has been prone to find in the herb the particular concept he had wanted to find. The second has been complicated not only by the variety of meanings commentators have ascribed to moly, but also by critical disagreement as to how far the two plants represent similar or dissimilar ideas. The first approach has hitherto failed to establish a solid basis for the allegory. The only etymology on which scholars are agreed— Keightley's suggestion that haemony was named after “Haemonia or Thessaly, the land of magic”1—tells one very little about its allegorical significance. Possible clues to the allegory have been discovered in several alternative etymologies, but these have not yet won general acceptance.
Wordsworth's Shipwreck
Authors: McAdam E. L.
Published: February 2007

Readers of Wordsworth are aware that the 1790's were years of excitement for the poet —his experiences in France during the Revolution, his love affair with Annette Vallon, his reunion with his sister Dorothy after long separation, and the heady months of talks on poetry with his new friend Coleridge—the only other first-rate poet of his generation. Equally plain is the fact that about 1805 a long decline in Wordsworth's career began: the revolutionary grew conservative, the poet often turned to mere versifying.
Georg Kaiser's Social Tetralogy and the Social Ideas of Walther Rathenau
Authors: Kauf Robert
Published: February 2007

Georg kaiser's work is often treated as the reflection of its author's unusual personality. Such a treatment, though valid, tends to obscure the fact that his writings, in their probing of existing values, their manifestation of Lebensangst, their quest for regeneration, and their hope for redemption, also reflect the intellectual and spiritual concerns of his period. That his visions were not, as has been often held, the phantasies of an extreme subjectivist, but that they accurately mirrored the age, is demonstrated by the fact that representative thinkers of the period, such as Bergson, Vaihinger, and Jaspers, voiced similar concerns, arrived at similar conclusions, sought similar solutions. There seems to exist a particularly strong affinity between the ideas of Walther Rathenau and those presented in Kaiser's social tetralogy (Die Koralle, 1917; Gas, 1918; Hölle Weg Erde, 1919; Gas, Zweiter Teil, 1920), which was written at a time when the impact of Rathenau's works (Zur Kritik der Zeit, 1912; Zur Mechanik des Geistes oder Vom Reich der Seele, 1913; Von kommenden Dingen, 1917) on the intellectual life of Germany was very strong. Even though explicit references by Kaiser to Rathenau could be found neither in Kaiser's published work nor inhis correspondence and other unpublished material, there is, I believe, enough circumstantial evidence to make a plausible case for Kaiser's indebtedness to Rathenau. To present this evidence and, by so doing, to contribute to a better understanding of Kaiser's social tetralogy, is the purpose of this study. I shall first briefly summarize Rathenau's ideas, then present the evidence for his influence on Kaiser, and, in conclusion, speculate very briefly on the nature of this influence.
Rolle, Dienst Und Opfer Bei Thomas Mann
Authors: Feuerlicht Von Ignace
Published: February 2007

Der Für thomas mann besonders in seiner Tetralogie wichtige Begriff der mythischen Identifikation, der mehr oder minder bewußten Ichverschmelzung mit einem Vorgänger, ist gleichbedeutend mit dem Spielen einer Rolle. Die ungewöhnlichen Menschen, wie Joseph, Kleopatra und Napoleon, sind sich “mit freudigem oder düsterem Stolze” ihrer mythischen Wiederkehr bewußt und “zelebrieren ihre Rolle auf Erden, sie führen ihre Charakterrolle weihevoll durch.” Die allermeisten aber spielen ihre Rolle, ohne ihre Vorgänger und Nachfahren in ihr zu kennen, sozusagen als erste und einzige, aber trotz der “Einfältigkeit illusionärer Einmaligkeit und Originalität spielen sie mit einer Würde und Sicherheit, die aus dem tieferen Bewußtsein kommt, etwas Gegründet-Rechtmäßiges, Zeitloses wieder vorzustellen” (GW, x, 515 f.; GF, x, 756; J, 1240).
The Arithmetic Structure of the Old-French vie de Saint Alexis
Authors: Bulatkin Eleanor Webster
Published: February 2007

Ernst Robert Curtius has described the wonderful harmony of numbers in the Vila Nuova and the Divina Commedia as the end and acme of a long development, where number, from having first served to give form to the outer framework of poetic composition, became ultimately a symbol of the great cosmic ordo. But when Curtius examined the eleventh-century Old-French version of the life of Saint Alexis with the end in view of revealing the patterns of Latin rhetoric which it displays, he did not realize that Dante's great feat of numbers was anticipated there by some 275 years.
The Subject of Milton's Ludlow Mask
Authors: Jayne Sears
Published: February 2007

If, as Professor Adams complains, Milton's Comus has been “overread,” the chief reason is that we are still trying to find out what the masque means. In spite of the wide acceptance given to Professor Woodhouse's theological interpretation of the work, critics keep twisting the dials, trying to sharpen the focus. The difficulty is that none of the adjustments tried so far brings the whole narrative into focus at once.
“The American Myth”: Paradise (to be) Regained
Authors: Carpenter Frederic I.
Published: February 2007

The search for some single myth or hypothesis to explain American character and history has informed much of our recent criticism. Within the last decade at least seven authors have devoted complete books to the subject. And from Emerson's “American Scholar” of a century ago, through Turner's “Significance of the Frontier,” to Matthiessen's American Renaissance, earlier critics had invoked the myth in passing. But now the old, vague “myth of the common man” has been imagined more concretely and in greater detail.
Two Rodericks and Two Worms: “Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent” as Personal Satire
Authors: Marks Alfred H.
Published: February 2007

There are a number of passages in Hawthorne's “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent” which seem to allude to Edgar Allan Poe or his writings. The passages are, in fact, so numerous as to indicate that one of Hawthorne's principal reasons for writing the tale when he did was to criticize through personal satire Poe's outlook on literature and life. In this connection it may be rewarding to take another look at this most repulsive of Hawthorne's tales.
A Manuscript Fragment of Thaïs: Its Stylistic and Other Revelations
Authors: Walton Loring Baker
Published: February 2007

It seems to be the fate of the preliminary drafts of Anatole France's novel to survive in the hands of unidentified persons. Something over half of what was apparently the original manuscript was sold in New York in the 1920's to a person who has preferred to remain anonymous. In 1948 a seventy-two-page fragment of manuscript was sold in Paris to an unidentified purchaser. The latter has now permitted this manuscript
Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of Romantic Poetry
Authors: Eichner Hans
Published: February 2007

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the adjective romantisch was a vague and fashionable word denoting the qualities of the unusual, exotic, adventurous, incredible and fantastic. In the last few years of the century, Friedrich Schlegel made it one of his favorite critical terms, used it to denote the specific character of postclassical literature, and thus raised it to the position of primary importance which it has occupied in literary criticism ever since. Why Schlegel selected this term to describe the kind of poetry he wished to foster, and what he meant by it, are therefore questions of considerable consequence. The two most prominent attempts at answering these questions, those of Rudolf Haym and of Arthur O. Lovejoy, though incompatible with each other and made as long ago as 1870 and 1916, have not been superseded by any later investigation. In the meantime, important new sources of information about Schlegel have become available, and a re-examination seems to be called for.
The Regional Origins of the Earliest Spanish Colonists of America
Authors: Boyd-Bowman Peter
Published: February 2007

How much the New World Spanish dialects owe to those of Spain has long been a subject for dispute among Hispanic scholars. Belief in the theory of Andalusian influence, based, as it is, largely upon seseo and yeísmo, has been seriously shaken by recent studies on the chronology and diffusion of these two phenomena, by more exact knowledge of the modern peninsular dialects, and by the hitherto available statistical studies on regional emigration to America. But though statistical counts tend to show that during the sixteenth century as a whole no single region contributed an over-all majority of colonists to the Indies, claims are still made that individual parts of the New World were first colonized chiefly by settlers from this or that region of Spain. For example, Andalusians and Extremefios are generally credited with a major part in the colonization of Peru, but so far actual figures are lacking either to confirm or refute this. Amado Alonso and Raimundo Lida, while rejecting the theory of the Andalusian origin of New World dialects in general, concede that Andalusians probably did predominate during the first 30 years in the Antilles. But Tomás Navarro, in his study of the Spanish of Puerto Rico, concurs with the belief of José Padín that that island's first settlers were principally colonists from Old Castile: again there have been no statistics.
The Reputation of Ford Madox Ford
Authors: Ludwig Richard M.
Published: February 2007

Readers of The Times of London know Oliver Edwards' column as literary chat. It is no secret that Oliver Edwards is Sir William John Haley, editor of The Times and formerly Director-General of the B. B. C. In August 1957, on the publication in England of Gérard Jean-Aubry's biography of Joseph Conrad, Sir William launched an attack on Ford Madox Ford. “Time has an exorable way of taking its own revenge,” he begins. “When Joseph Conrad died, many who had affectionate regard for that master … were hurt or outraged at the way Ford Madox Ford seemed to cash in on the event. In a book about Conrad, in articles, and in other reminiscences the only purpose that could be discerned was to glorify Ford, even if that meant somewhat diminishing Conrad… . Ford's nature and experiences were such that by that stage in life he no longer had any touch with reality and had lost what little perspective he ever had.” As the column continues, the accusations become more personal. Ford was “a bit of a bounder,” he writes, whose “inaccuracies were … congenital and venial… . The question remains why Ford acted the way he did.”
The Wilderness and the Negro in Faulkner's “The Bear”
Authors: Backman Melvin
Published: February 2007

The heart of Go Down, Moses (1942) is “The Bear.” The most widely acclaimed story of the seven in the volume, “The Bear” has received a variety of interpretations. One critic has emphasized its New Testament spirit, others its romantic and transcendental character, and still others its primitivism and myth. The variety of critical response testifies to the story's density of meaning. It is a rich, original story treating of a universal issue; nevertheless, it is distinctly American. Lionel Trilling has placed it in the romantic, transcendental tradition of Cooper, Thoreau, and Melville, while Malcolm Cowley has associated it with the work of Mark Twain. In its pastoral spirit “The Bear” does seem related to Huck Finn; and, in its development of the wilderness theme, to Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Yet because of the story's tendency to split into two parts—one part concerned with the wilderness, the other with the Negro—the structure of the story has seemed faulty and its meaning ambiguous. If “The Bear” is examined within the context of the other related stories of the Go Down, Moses volume, its meaning may be clarified.
The Peace of the Poetomachia
Authors: Enck John J.
Published: February 2007

The Poetomachia, no matter how explained, embarrasses nearly everyone now working with Elizabethan drama. The term itself sounds like a coinage which a nineteenth-century crank lifted from some minor essayist who copied Bacon or Burton—“World, I was once resolu'd to bee round with thee, because I know tis thy fashion to bee round with euery bodie: but the winde shifting his point, the Veine turn'd: yet because thou wilt sit as Iudge of all matters … I care not much if I make description (before thy Vniuersality) of that terrible Poetomachia, lately commenc'd” et cetera—and out of it coaxed a provincial philosophy. Disturbing to some eyes and naïve to others, this Victorian heirloom, like a former source of innocent merriment which any amateur psychoanalyst can tell screens a neurosis or like great-grandfather's waste tract which never yielded its ore, serves chiefly as an ornate tribute to misapplied ingenuity. Contriving chimeras in a fantastic realm between the Globe stage and the Mermaid hearth or searching for the key to release beleaguered playwrights from dramatis personae bothers equally scholars who attempt to reconstruct and critics who seek to renovate. Literary historians alone cannot drop the romantic fiction with impunity, but no one blames them for relegating it to a footnote. Reviewers of the Variorum Troilus and Cressida dutifully listed the aspect among the many surveyed or begrudged the three pages out of six hundred which the volume allocated it. Shortly after one group established the neutrality of Shakespeare's supposed foray, another, through several monographs, dismissed Jonson's and Marston's (and Dekker's and everyone else's) hostility beyond the sniping in Poetaster and Satiromastix. To a backward glance peace or, rather, the absence of war may reign.
En Torno a Un Poema de la Antolojía Poética
Authors: Aguado-Andreut Salvador
Published: February 2007

DespuéS de cuidadosas y repetidas lecturas de la Antolojía Poética, me he detenido en uno de sus poemas por parecerme que, sometiéndolo a ceñido análisis, podría contribuir a un mejor entendimiento del espíritu poético de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Me refiero al poema n 50, colocado en el grupo IV de la Antolojía con el título general de “Pastorales,” de los años 1903–05:
Inappropriate Pointing in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, G 1236–1239
Authors: Hartung Albert E.
Published: February 2007

The standard editions of the Canterbury Tales differ in their pointing of G 1236–39. Curiously enough it is the most influential of these editions (those of Skeat and Robinson) that, to my mind, point the passage inappropriately by mistakenly giving a speech that belongs to one character to another. As a result, one of the characters involved seems to be guilty of an inexplicable and unmotivated impropriety, and the dramatic quality of the passage is blurred.
Rilke's “Portal” Sonnets
Authors: Ziolkowski Theodore
Published: February 2007

The three sonnets that Rilke published in his Neue Gedichle (1907–08) under the collective title “Das Portal” were written between 8 and 11 July 1906, during the period of intense productivity following the break with Rodin (May 1906). Ever since it has become fashionable to ignore Rilke's Neue Gedichte as “intellektuell aufgezwungen,” these poems have been overlooked by many scholars and critics; even the most recent and staunchest champion of the Neue Gedichte, Hans Berendt, has failed to explore various aspects of these sonnets that would serve to relate them more closely to Rilke's earlier and later work. The reasons for this neglect are obvious. The three sonnets represent a perfect example of the “Dinggedicht” of this period, being apparently nothing more than the poetic depiction of a particular portal of a certain cathedral in France; such an objective attempt to grasp and express the essence of a foreign “thing” is, by common consent, necessarily alien to the singularly subjective flow of the poet's own thoughts and emotions. Furthermore, this new conception of poetry arose under the influence of the sculptor Rodin, whom Rilke was striving to emulate in his efforts always to capture the essential nature of the model and the “modelé” to the exclusion of subjective impressions. Since Rilke learned much about cathedrals under the tutelage of Rodin, his poems on architectural subjects are even more highly suspect of being “intellektuell aufgezwungen” than, say, poems dealing with gazelles or carrousels. Yet in many of the Neue Gedichte, as has been demonstrated, there is more to be found than sheer poetic virtuosity, and undeniable thematic connections with the entire body of Rilke's poetic creation have been uncovered. A closer examination of the “Portal” sonnets reveals that even here certain characteristic themes may be found.
The Academies and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature
Authors: King Willard F.
Published: February 2007

Scholars who deal with Italian letters generally recognize, although they may deplore, the overriding importance of literary academies in the intellectual life of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, just as students of French literature know that the salons and academies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France had much to do with the refinement of taste and manners, with the evolution of critical standards, and with the vogue of the pastoral novel or of the vast historical romance such as Mile de Scudéry's Clélie. Students of Spanish seventeenth-century literature, however, have been remarkably incurious about literary academies, knowing at most, perhaps, that there was an Academia de los Nocturnos functioning in Valencia from 1591 to 1594, or that Lope wrote his much-debated Arte nuevo for an “Academia de Madrid,” and have seemed to regard them as no more than idle games through which the participants passed untouched. Few have asked how widespread the academies were, and even fewer have speculated on their connections with the literature of the time.
Dr. Johnson's Letters to Richardson
Authors: Eaves T. C. Duncan
Published: February 2007

In his edition of The Letters of Samuel Johnson Dr. R. W. Chapman gives Samuel Richardson as the addressee of nine letters (Nos. 31, 48, 49, 49.1, 49.2, 51.1, 58.1, 90, and 94), and in his “Further Addenda” (i, 430) he mentions another recorded letter to Richardson (36.1) as “not traced.” Chapman says in a footnote to 31 that he is “far from satisfied” with his elucidations of these letters; I believe that I can clarify some of the points which were doubtful to him, date one of the letters (49.2) more nearly accurately, show that one of the letters (49.1) is not to Richardson, and identify the untraced letter (36.1) as most likely 36, which Chapman prints as to the Earl of Orrery.
The Sacred Fount: The Narrator and the Vampires
Authors: Phillips Norma
Published: February 2007

Criticism of Henry James's controversial novel The Sacred Fount has tended rather insistently to take one of two interpretive directions. Since Edmund Wilson's famous essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James” appeared in 1934 and made everyone more aware of the potential complexity of James's handling of the focus of narration, the perhaps more frequently encountered approach to the novel has been one which regards it, like The Turn of the Screw and In the Cage, as principally another Jamesian experiment with a narrator of doubtful omniscience. The other approach, one still found in many treatments of the novel, tends rather to accept completely the narrator's version of events at Newmarch and looks for the meaning and significance of the work in his most obvious preoccupation during the weekend in which those events occur, the vampire theme of fulfillment and depletion in intense human relationships. Both approaches are valid. Indeed, one of the impressive aspects of the serious criticism of The Sacred Fount is that nearly all of the important attempts at analysis have been and remain true to some degree. Leon Edel, following and building on the hints of Wilson, has shown that the novel clearly is about “appearance and reality,” and R. P. Blackmur has pointed out the parabolic nature of the story and called attention to The Sacred Fount as the “nightmare nexus” in the Jamesian struggle “to portray the integrity of the artist and… the integrity of the self.” Even Rebecca West, in her witty dismissal of the book some years ago, was correct—more correct than she knew perhaps since she gives James no credit for a deliberate and skillfully manipulated irony—-in recognizing and mocking the disparity between the passion, pride, and labor expended by the incredibly egocentric, narcissistic narrator and the, if not completely trivial, at least gossamer issues involved. But the irony, like the ambiguity, is both constant and conscious. Unlike the narrator, to whom James has frequently been compared, James presides confidently over his fictional world like, in Lady John's words, “a real providence,” who “knows” (p. 176).
Antony and Cleopatra and the Subjective Convention
Authors: Couchman Gordon W.
Published: February 2007

A major sortie in what Maxwell Anderson has called Bernard Shaw's “furious critical assault on the romantic theatre” is the section entitled “Better than Shakespear?” in the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans. Well-known today, this discussion offers proof of Eric Bentley's assertion that Shaw's Shakespeare criticism should be judged as polemic rather than criticism of a more objective sort. Shaw's attack in that Preface on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has naturally been a principal object of critical attention ever since it was penned, but this fact should not blind us to another, that Shaw was at least as much concerned with Antony and Cleopatra, and that in fact his own comedy, as one scholar pointed out more than a generation ago, was more of a counterblast to Antony than to Caesar. It is easy to forget that Shaw followed the lead of certain of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries in re-introducing Cleopatra into a play about Caesar (whom he called “this greatest of all protagonists”) whereas Shakespeare keeps the two rigorously separate. Shaw's purpose in doing what he did was clear, and this purpose is explicated in detail in his comments on Shakespeare's Antony.
Mark Twain and Sexuality
Authors: Jones Alexander E.
Published: February 2007

“Remorse! remorse! It seemed to me that it would eat the very heart out of me!” This is Mark Twain's “trained Presbyterian conscience” at work, its pangs reverberating through most of his mature writings. Indeed, sooner or later almost any study of Twain or his works must deal with this remarkable conscience; for a sense of guilt is one of the bases of his mind—a corrosive guilt that gives intensity to his moralistic pronouncements, deepens his pessimism, and adds a sense of urgency to his deterministic denial of man's responsibilty for his actions.
Robert Henri and the Emerson-Whitman Tradition
Authors: Kwiat Joseph J.
Published: February 2007

Throughout his life as teacher, lecturer, and author of numerous articles, as well as in his letters and in his journal, Robert Henri gave vigorous expression to attitudes and ideas which exerted a pervasive and significant influence upon his contemporaries. It will be seen that these ideas were ultimately linked with the great intellectual tradition of American transcendentalism whose leading exponents—Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman—explored, among other problems, the persisting cultural dependence of America on Europe and the individual, social, political, and artistic implications of the new democracy. As one writer has stated in commenting upon the movement, “its vitalizing effect upon American art and literature and, indeed, upon the development of American democracy as a whole, remains unrivaled.”
Type and Proto-Phenomenon in Goethe's Science
Authors: Henel Heinrich
Published: February 2007

As my starting point I shall take a statement about Goethe's relation to science which is both recent and precise, and which was made by Ronold Ring, professor of physics at Harvard University. According to King, Goethe was a true scientist in every respect, except that he limited his inquiry in two ways: he practiced observational science but rejected experimental science; and he formulated scientific insight in terms of fundamental principle, but not in terms of mathematical law. Goethe's aversion to experimental science is explained by King as a fear of analytical processes which do not lead to a subsequent reintegration or synthesis, and this fear, in turn, is attributed to Goethe's failure to understand that the application of mathematics to the findings of experimental science produces precisely such syntheses. King believes that “if Goethe had anticipated that out of analysis and planned experiment might rise the great tower of systematic world-science … he would have met the challenge of mathematics in nature and in life as resolutely and as effectively as he had met the challenge of observational science to the anti-rationalism of his youth.”
Man and Mind in Diderot and Helvétius
Authors: Creighton Douglas George
Published: February 2007

On 2 May 1760 a new play by Charles Palissot, entitled Les Philosophes, had its first performance in Paris. The immortality achieved by this comedy has nothing to do with inherent literary value; it has survived because those whom it attacks were among the most important thinkers in eighteenth-century France, and because Diderot, one of its victims, retaliated in that brilliant satire known as Le Neveu de Rameau. In Palissot's comedy, the philosophes are referred to as “un tas de charlatans, / Qu'on voit sur des tréteaux ameuter les passants.” The notions of ethics and human nature supposedly espoused by these rabble rousers are essentially a popularization of the ideas of Helvétius, whose De l'esprit was publicly condemned less than two years before. “Les hommes sont égaux par le droit de nature,” Valère declares, much to the satisfaction of his servant; men are guided by “l'attrait du bonheur,” whose source is in the passions; personal interest is the only motivation (ii.i). And we catch glimpses of conduct consistent with a conscious, literal following of these and other maxims. But, significantly, Diderot's works are the ones that are mentioned, not Helvétius'. Diderot's play, Le Fils naturel, is made an important source of inspiration for Cydalise, an eighteenth-century Philaminte, in the writing of her book; she experiences great difficulty thinking up a first line for her preface, but, having abandoned “J'ai vécu” (used by Duclos), decides upon some thing “plus pompeux et plus philosophique”: the words with which Diderot opens his Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, “Jeune homme, prends et lis” (II.iii). The whole “boutique philosophique” is thus ridiculed, with little attempt being made to discriminate among the ideas of the individual thinkers; Diderot and Helvétius are made to share the same philosophy.
Diderot and Burke: A Study in Aesthetic Affinity
Authors: May Gita
Published: February 2007

Occasionally, critics have noted in passing the resemblance both in content and form between certain passages in Diderot's Salon de 1767 and Edmund Burke's influential treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the first edition of which appeared in 1757, and a French translation in 1765. Curiously enough, Diderot, who usually did not hide his sources, this time omitted even mentioning the name of Burke or acknowledging his debt, although there can be no doubt that the Salon contains many direct borrowings from the Enquiry. If one cannot find any allusion to Burke's work in Diderot's signed writings, a brief but revealing review of its French translation appeared in the March 1765 issue of Friedrich Melchior Grimm's Correspondance littéraire? This notice, penned either by Grimm or by Diderot himself, reprimands the translator, a certain abbé Desfrançois, but praises the author: “On s'aperçoit à chaque page que le traducteur n'a pas bien saisi l'esprit de son original, ou du moins qu'il n'a pas eu le talent de le rendre avec la netteté et la précision nécessaires. L'ouvrage de M. Burke est estimé en Angleterre, et l'on y trouve, en effet, des vues fines et neuves, quelquefois aussi des paradoxes qu'on ne saurait adopter.” Two years later Diderot was sufficiently convinced of the merits of the book to accept even its boldest “paradoxes.”