bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Everyman: A Structural Analysis
Authors: Van Laan Thomas F.
Published: February 2007

The high value of Everyman has been provocatively asserted in T. S. Eliot's description of it as “perhaps” the only English drama “within the limitations of art.” Eliot writes this while discussing the lack of form in post-Kydian drama and thus implies that the source of this value is the play's formal unity. David Kaula has taken Eliot to mean “that nothing in the play is extraneous to the central homiletic purpose, that all elements of style, structure, and theme are governed by the conventions of allegory.” Yet the emphasis on Everyman's homiletic purpose and allegorical conventions does not sufficiently explain either its critical esteem or its theatrical popularity. Fortunately, Eliot has enlarged upon his original assessment in a later work. He argues that religious drama, to be successful, must combine its doctrine with “ordinary dramatic interest.” Everyman fulfills his requirement:

the religious and the dramatic are not merely combined, but wholly fused. Everyman is on the one hand the human soul in extremity, and on the other any man in any dangerous position from which we wonder how he is going to escape—with as keen interest as that with which we wait for the escape of the film hero, bound and helpless in a hut to which his enemies are about to set fire.
Aspectos Folclóricos y Literarios de la Fiesta de Moros y Cristianos en España
Authors: Carrasco Urgoiti María Soledad
Published: February 2007

Al margen de la creatión literaria y en cierto modo también al margen de las tradictones locales netamente rurales, florece aun en muchos pueblos de la Peninsula y en algunos de la America Hispana la llamada ‘fiesta de moros y cristianos,’ curiosa encrucijada de ciertas maneras de juego, festejo y drama, que tuvieron vigencia cortesana en la España de los Austrias y que hoy sobreviven injertas en la tradición, popular y predominantemente campesina, de las fiestas patronales. El estudio completo de este fenomeno ofreceria considerable interes intrinseco y abriria nuevas perspectivas sobre la cuestion. Podrian entonces examinarse las fiestas en relation con la teoria de don Ramon Menendez Pidal sobre la ‘tradicionalidad' como caracteristica fundamental de la actividad creadora del pueblo espanol. Por otra parte, en cuanto estos festejos expresan una vision intuitiva e ingenua de la historia de España, concretada en la estampa de moros y cristianos enfrentados, cabe analizarlos en funcion de las modernas interpretaciones del pasado espanol, verdadera cuestion palpitante del momento actual, que han suscitado los grandes libros recientemente publicados por don Americo Castro, en los que se subraya en forma tan nueva e intensa la significación de la larga contienda entre cristiandad e islam sobre el suelo de la Peninsula. Estos y otros posibles enfoques requieren una labor expositiva previa, que coordine y sintetice datos desperdigados en numerosas monografias, asi como nuevos esfuerzos por caracterizar aspectos especificos de la representation. En este sentido el presente articulo aspira a aportar una contribution util aunque limitada. Su proposito es el de ofrecer una vision panoramica del estado actual de la fiesta en España y algunas consideraciones respecto a su pasado y a los puntos de contacto que en esta area se han producido entre corrientes literarias y folcloricas.
One Aspect of Milton's Spelling: Idle Final “E”
Authors: Shawcross John T.
Published: February 2007

Milton's spelling has evoked much comment and speculation since Jonathan Richardson noted certain inconsistencies in the early editions of Paradise Lost. Yet no complete study has previously been reported. Because of the problems of transmisson of text to or through scribes and because of the potential alterations of compositors, printed works offer inconclusive and only corroborative evidence of how Milton spelled. The place to start is with spellings in Milton's own hand. Accordingly I have prepared a complete concordance of all English words or abbreviations found in holograph materials. Included, therefore, are all words which were deleted from a final text and all spellings which were altered in any way. From my resulting full examination of the orthography I present here, because of the limitations of space, only the evidence concerning Milton's use or omission of idle final “e.” All manuscript words to which an idle final “e” may have been attached and all words showing inconsistencies in the use of idle final “e” are reported. These words are divided into the following categories: 1) uncompounded and uninflected words (that is, root words), 2) words or groups of words which ordinarily would have been considered under category one but which evidence spelling that classifies them as exceptional, 3) suffixed and compound words, and 4) inflected words (including those in category two).
“The Fourth Son of The Mighty Emperor”: The Ethiopian Background of Johnson's Rasselas
Authors: Lockhart Donald M.
Published: February 2007

Four recent articles have presented two contradictory opinions concerning Johnson's sources for the Ethiopian background of Rasselas. The contention that his inspiration for the Happy Valley came from a wide variety of readings on Ethiopia is counter-balanced by an equal insistence on the importance of his debt to Lobo's Relation d'Abissinie. The student of Johnson remains unenlightened by this series of articles, not only because the relative merits of their arguments are never discussed but also because none of them has been based on a comprehensive study of the Ethiopian materials available to Johnson. In an effort to bring the problem closer to its definitive solution, I propose to examine a largely neglected body of material on Ethiopia, identify specific sources for Ethiopian features of Rasselas and Rambler essays 204–205, and suggest that the circumstances of the composition of Rasselas were significantly different from those generally imagined.
Shelley's “The Triumph of Life”: The Biographical Problem
Authors: Reiman Donald H.
Published: February 2007

It two articles based on his study of the Bodleian MS of Shelley's “The Triumph of Life” G. M. Matthews has presented evidence which, he suggests, proves that, during the weeks immediately preceding Shelley's trip to Leghorn with Edward Williams and their subsequent drowning, Shelley and Jane Williams engaged in “a love-affair, passionate on Shelley's part and at least complaisant on Jane's, cutting across the pattern of marriages within the confined little community of Casa Magni,” and that much of the somber tone of “The Triumph of Life” can be attributed to this domestic crisis.
Swinburne's Edition of Popular Ballads
Authors: Ehrenpreis Anne Henry
Published: February 2007

Swinburne's devotion to the popular ballad is well-known, and his continued experiments with ballad imitation—from “May Janet” to “The Brothers”—attest to the longevity of this passion. But one of the earliest manifestations of his devotion—an unfinished edition of popular ballads—has received less careful attention than it deserves. Furthermore, what little has been written about this anthology has been tainted with errors—errors for which the ultimate responsibility lies on the head of Thomas James Wise. Wise owned the manuscript of Swinburne's ballad edition, described it in his catalogues, and allowed its contents to be printed. Since even the most innocent of the great forger's published statements about the books and manuscripts in his possession cannot be taken on trust, it will be prudent to reexamine what he has said—and what others have repeated—about Swinburne's edition of the ballads.
Camus's L'Etranger Reconsidered
Authors: Feuerlicht Ignace
Published: February 2007

Twenty years after its publication in 1942, Camus's short novel L'Etranger has preserved its wide appeal through its haunting intensity, strange simplicity, and virile freshness. However, the general overemphasis on the philosophical significance of the story, the failure to deal with certain literary aspects, and the obscure or ambiguous features of the novel seem to call for a new appraisal of Camus's masterpiece.
De la Critique de la Raison Dialectique aux Séquestrés d'altona
Authors: Fields Madeleine
Published: February 2007

Dès sa première rencontre avec Les Séquestrés d'Altona le lecteur retrouve dans cette piece de nombreux themes sartriens tels que l'emprisonnement, l'acte ou le geste de l'intellectuel, l'authenticite et la liberte de choix. Les personnages lui sont eux aussi familiers; ce sont les freres et les sceurs d'autres personnages connus: Frantz est a la fois Oreste, Hugo et Goetz; Johanna Eve, Jessica et Estelle; Leni Electre, Olga et Ines. Neanmoins Les Sequestris d'Altona est une piece differente de toutes les autres. Dans Les Mouches ou Huis-Clos ou Les Mains sales, le probleme etait nettement delimiter la liberte fondait sur Oreste comme la foudre, ou etait refusee a Garcin ou a Hugo. Ici, le probleme ontologique de l'homme a la recherche de son identite n'est que le tremplin d'une autre recherche. Argos, le salon de style Second Empire, ou le bureau de Hoederer sont depasses, et la chambre muree de Frantz s'elargit aux dimensions de l'Histoire. Peut-etre n'est-il pas teme-raire de faire remarquer que les pieces precedentes sont, dans une certaine mesure, des illustrations de L'Etre et le neant (Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etre et le neant, Gallimard, 1943), et pour cette raison beaucoup plus orientees vers les problemes personnels et intimes d'individus particuliers. Avec Les Sequestres d'Altona, non seulement Hambourg, ou l'Allemagne, ou les Etats-Unis, ou la Russie, ou meme l'Organisation de l'Armee Secrete comme on l'a parfois suggere, entrent en scene, mais encore l'Histoire dans sa marche inexorable, de Luther a Hitler, et pourquoi ne pas le dire, de la chute d'Adam et d'Eve jusqu'au trente-et-unieme siecle. Les Sequestres d'Altona est la premiere piece qui corresponde a la Critique de la raison dialectique, c'est-a-dire a Taction de l'Homme sur l'Histoire, et de l'Histoire sur l'Homme.
Elizabeth at Isis Church
Authors: Graziani René
Published: February 2007

The complex and haunting strangeness of Britomart's night at Isis Church in Spenser's Faerie Queene v.vii guarantees that we take no stingy monistic view of its allegorical possibilities. Of these possibilities, however, the historical allegory has been neglected lately, surprisingly in view of the topical allusiveness of much of Book v. Possibly the justice and equity allegorized in the episode have seemed to be too obviously relevant to Queen Elizabeth's rule for anyone to give them an exact point of reference in contemporary affairs. I believe, however, that particularity of historical reference was intended by Spenser. Contemporaries tended to treat dreams as fairly precise communications.
MacBeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation
Authors: Huntley Frank L.
Published: February 2007

The drunken porter in Macbeth says: “Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator” (ii.iii). The speech has often been used as one of the means of dating the play because “equivocation” became notorious at the trial and execution of Father Henry Garnett that followed the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605. Also, it has been well recognized that equivocation is a major theme in the play, both in the narrow sense of common duplicity and in the larger sense of a blur between appearance and reality. There is equivocation between Macbeth as a man and Macbeth as a woman, and it is Lady Macbeth who cries out to become unsexed. The play is filled with equivocal appearances—women with beards, Macbeth in “borrowed robes,” day turned into night, a peaceful castle without and a burning cauldron of evil within. “All nature's germens” tumble together, and “the whole frame of things” becomes “disjoint.” This paper does not deny these usual interpretations of equivocation.
The Logic of Compulsion in “Roger Malvin's Burial”
Authors: Crews Frederick C.
Published: February 2007

In the proliferation of Hawthorne criticism over the past decade every current literary-theory or methodology has had a say. A good deal of this criticism, nevertheless, has shared an assumption that the way to see to the bottom of Hawthorne is to analyze his symbolism or his recurrent motifs. Though there have been many careful studies of separate plots, and though some critics have preferred to approach Hawthorne by way of his biography or his explicit ideas, more usually he is revealed to us in terms of such symbolic categories as “the light and the dark,” “the power of blackness,” the Devil archetype, or the myth of man's fall. This kind of criticism can be fruitful, especially if, as in Hyatt Waggoner's case, a sense of Hawthorne's eclecticism and irony is allowed to temper the zealous pursuit of symbolic consistency. Yet there is other evidence to suggest that the exegesis of verbal patterns can subserve and disguise a critical hobbyhorse; some of the more dogmatic moral and theological readings have been couched as mere explications of Hawthorne's symbols. The rich suggestiveness of Hawthorne's language tempts the critic to ignore what is literally occurring in the plot, to iron out possible uncertainties of meaning or purpose, and to minimize the great distance separating Hawthorne from the tradition of pure didactic allegory. Such, I feel, are the shortcomings of Roy R. Male's Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, which, by analyzing only those symbols that can bear Biblical or sacramental glossing, succeeds in blending Hawthorne into a background of Christian moralism.
Hamlet and Orestes
Authors: Kott Jan , Taborski Boleslaw
Published: February 2007

Oedipus is a man who was told he had killed his father and married his mother.He has to account for a past which is his own past, though it falls on him like somebody else's. Antigone, in order to throw a handful of earth on her brother's body, has to break the laws of the city state. She chooses a gesture which by law is punished by death. Orestes, to avenge his father, has to kill his murderers: his own mother and stepfather.
Grabbe's Don Juan und Faust and Büchner's Dantons Tod: Epicureanism and Weltschmerz
Authors: Cowen Roy C.
Published: February 2007

In many respects Danlons Tod represents a radical departure from the drama of its time. Yet it, like any other work of art, is not without predecessors, nor did it arise in an intellectual vacuum. Much has been said, for example, about Lenz's influence on Biichner's view of art and on the structure and content of his dramas. Furthermore, one of the names most commonly linked with Biichner's is that of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, his contemporary. In their search for a relationship between these two iconoclastic forerunners of modern drama, most scholars turn to Grabbe's Napoleon. We know from Biichner's correspondence with Gutzkow that he was indeed acquainted with Grabbe's panoramic picture of the still present forces of the Revolution. Although he never admitted any indebtedness to Napoleon, there are nevertheless many obvious similarities linking the two plays, particularly in the mass scenes. Yet the protagonists of the two dramas have very little in common. The following study will, however, endeavor to show that there are just such important points of comparison between Danton and the protagonists of another, often unjustly neglected drama by Grabbe: Don Juan und Faust. These similarities, while themselves not conclusive proof of a direct influence of Grabbe's only “Ideendrama” on Biichner's more intellectual portrayal of the French Revolution, will show that Dantons Tod and Don Juan und Faust, as dissimilar as their subjects are, reflect a common approach to an acute intellectual problem of the time.
Point of View in Hawthorne
Authors: Pattison Joseph C.
Published: February 2007

The introductory paragraphs of “Rappaccini's Daughter” pose an issue about understanding Hawthorne's fiction which readers are expected to resolve. Hawthorne states that he attempts only slight portrayal of “outward manners” and seeks instead to create interest by “some less obvious peculiarity” of his subject. Readers must take his stories in “precisely the proper point of view,” because from other vantage points the stories “can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense.” Despite Hawthorne's warning that this unnamed point of view is of primary importance in reading his fiction, critics have paid little attention to the issue. Chapter headings and indexes of major critical studies of Hawthorne make no reference to point of view, and bibliographies list almost no essays on it in the journals. In this study, a brief and tentative essay in definition, I shall maintain that the point of view essential for reading Hawthorne is one of dream. Hawthorne ordinarily invokes it as a metaphor; readers see the action as what he terms a “conscious dream” (AN, p. 125). He often establishes his metaphor through use of the semblance of actual dream early in a story and heightens its effect by employing the apparition of real dream in later moments or scenes. Only rarely, however, does Hawthorne go beyond the bounds of his characteristic metaphor and cause readers to view all the events of his story as incidents in an actual dream. Hawthorne's fictional definition of the dream point of view is exact and full, his use of it imaginative and subtle. In his own phrase, from the preface to The Snow-Image, the dream mode leads readers to the center of his fiction by revelation of the “burrowing into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance.” Hawthorne is the artist as conscious dreamer, often of dreams that turn into nightmares and bare the tragic realities of human existence.
Nelson and Vere: Hero and Victim in Billy Budd, Sailor
Authors: Willett Ralph W.
Published: February 2007

Emerson's faith in the historic role of the hero did not prevent him from evaluating Nelson morally as a man without principle. Unfortunately, he failed to make his criticism specific; only the grouping of Nelson with Napoleon offers a clue to the origin of Emerson's disapproval. Hawthorne and Melville were more well-disposed in their appreciations, which resemble each other in extravagance of sentiment. Whereas Hawthorne's treatment takes the form of an essay, Melville incorporates Nelson into his short novel, Billy Budd, Sailor, and puts to his own uses what Hawthorne called, in Our Old Home, the “symbolic poetry” (i, 275) of Nelson's life.
Grammar and Meaning in Poetry
Authors: Greenfield Stanley B.
Published: February 2007

The year 1960 produced a number of interesting statements in widely divergent scholarly contexts calling for a closer scrutiny of the contribution of grammar—of syntax, word order, morphology—to poetic effect. In a journal concerned largely with the teaching of English appeared Harry Warfel's contention that “the significant differences in literature lie in an author's syntactical maneuvering,” and his further suggestion that the characterization in plays, in Shakespeare's at any rate, is subtly indicated by different syntactic patterns in the speeches of the dramatis personae. In a journal devoted to aesthetics, meanwhile, Francis Utley was appealing to the linguistic concept of immediate constituents to suggest the possibility of a “tension of ambiguities” in poetry. Referring specifically to Arnold's

the Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds …
Robinson Crusoe: “Allusive Allegorick History”
Authors: Ayers Robert W.
Published: February 2007

In recent years much has been made of Robinson Crusoe as an epic of economic quest and conquest—one unfortunately impeded, however, by what James Sutherland calls “boggy stretches of moralizing.” Here I will suggest that some of the major tenets of the modified Calvinistic theology articulated in those moralizings are paralleled by a series or system of traditional Christian symbols which embody that doctrine, and so I propose a reading which takes the work to be precisely what Crusoe says it is—an “allusive allegorick History,” intended originally not only to delight but also to instruct. A complete study of this kind would draw its evidence not only from The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but also from its continuation, The Farther Adventures, and their sequel, The Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With His Vision of the Angelick World—all three volumes “Written by Himself.” Furthermore, it would orient the symbolic elements of the work within the context of Defoe's other works and of traditional Bible exegesis particularly as it was expressed in the pietistic literature of the Puritans in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This exploratory study can treat only a selection of basic images and symbols, particularly from the narrative of the first two volumes of the work itself; for their context in exegesis—and aside from occasional illustrative materials— it must presume to some extent upon the reader's familiarity with some of the main traditions of Christian symbolism and the prevailing characteristics of the varied and extensive Puritan literature of piety.
Johnson and the Authorship of Four Debates
Authors: Bernard F. V.
Published: February 2007

Because in the closing hours of his life Dr. Johnson was unable to conclude the task of identifying his early compositions for the Gentleman's Magazine, the early canon of his work has remained obscure; and for his share in the Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia we have had to rely on Boswell, who questioned Johnson at an inopportune time, for Johnson's answer did not settle the matter: “He this year [1741], and the two following, wrote the Parliamentary Debates. He told me himself, that he was the sole composer of them for these three years only. He was not, however, precisely exact in his statement, which he mentioned from hasty recollection; for it is sufficiently evident, that his composition of them began November 19, 1740, and ended February 23, 1742–3.” The vagueness of this statement has raised two questions about Johnson's portion of the debates: (1) what are the dates, initial and terminal, of Johnson's exclusive authorship, and (2) did he write any reports which fall outside of that period, that is, when he was not “sole composer” of them? In answer to the first question G. B. Hill and, more recently, Benjamin B. Hoover have established July 1741 through March 1744 as the period in which Johnson's exclusive share of the reports was published. In partial answer to the second question, Hill attributed to Johnson two debates, from the Guthrie period (which Hoover apparently overlooked in his broad discussion of authorship); and Hoover found Johnson to have revised for Cave certain reports that first appeared in the London Magazine. Still more recently, Donald J. Greene, arguing against the terminal date, ascribed to Johnson the debate on the Removal of the Hanoverian Troops, which appeared in the magazine from May to December-Supplement, 1744. If this attribution is correct, and I believe it is, then the debates which Cave published from July 1741 to December-Supplement, 1744, were, with one un-assigned exception—the short debate on the Corporation Bill which appeared in March and April 1744—written by Johnson. The purpose of this paper is to show, by reexamining the evidence concerning four debates, that one of Hill's two attributions is wrong (on Buttons and Button-holes, 1738), that the other is correct (on the Registration of Seamen, 1741), that one of the revised London debates is in all likelihood Johnson's work (on the Navy Estimates, 1740), and that the Corporation Bill, 1744, is also from his pen, thus making the sequence unbroken from July 1741 through the 1744 Supplement.
Wordsworth and Dennis: The Discrimination of Feelings
Authors: Heffernan James A. W.
Published: February 2007

Students of wordsworth's criticism have long recognized that he conceived of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But commentators on Wordsworth often remind us that he was no aesthetic libertine. If he thought of poetry as a river of emotion, he did not wish it to become a flood; in the well-known passage from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, he voices the hope that “habits of meditation” have disciplined his feelings, and he declares that good poets are made such only by deep, sustained, habitual contemplation. These are commonplaces of Wordsworthian scholarship. Curiously enough, however, the full meaning of these commonplaces remains unexplored. The conjunction of thought and feeling in Wordsworth's poetic is all too readily accepted; for the most part, critics have failed to define the terms or the precise relationship between them. Yet the materials for such a definition are very much at hand. Wordsworth himself received them from John Dennis, who helped him to see that the effect of thought upon feeling is qualitative. It produces a feeling different in kind from ordinary emotion—a feeling Wordsworth came to regard as indispensable to the exercise of imaginative power.
In Memoriam and Lycidas
Authors: Sendry Joseph
Published: February 2007

Tennyson's In Memoriam furnishes a case study, a vexed and difficult one, in the persistence of literary tradition. Though it is not, strictly speaking, a pastoral elegy, In Memoriam yet retains unmistakable markings of the traditional form. A. J. Carr, for one, has recently insisted upon the importance of pastoral motifs “to provide the personal themes of In Memoriam with a formal structure responsive to both private instinct and the elegiac traditions.” On the other hand, others as early as A. C. Bradley and as recently as Elton Edward Smith have offered what amounts to the opposite judgment on the significance of the pastoral tradition as a key to the structure of In Memoriam. In Smith's words, “the classical elegiac conventions are observed, but not in such a way as to provide either a framework for the whole or dividing lines within the work.”
Spatial Form in the Poetry of Yeats: The Two Lissadell Poems
Authors: Perloff Marjorie
Published: February 2007

In 1949, A. Norman Jeffares declared that, although Yeats's poetry “had reblossomed in The Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921], the flowering came with The Tower” [1928]. In 1954, Richard Ellmann called The Tower and The Winding Stair “the two finest volumes” of the period 1917–33. Today, this estimate is the generally accepted one: B. Rajan has recently written, “With The Tower and The Winding Stair, Yeats's writing comes fully into its strength and words respond completely to the poem's call to order. To say that Yeats was incapable of writing a bad poem during this phase is an exaggeration, but one within the limits of critical licence.”
New Light on Auden's the Orators
Authors: Sellers W. H.
Published: February 2007

“ … I cannot throw away The Orators as worthless bosh,” wrote Alan Pryce-Jones. “It appears to be the work of a sane imagination without a mind—a far more complicated state than the paranoiac's working on fragments of knowledge and experience.” Such exasperation typifies the reaction of the vast majority of critics to the appearance of Auden's second book. Even the sympathetic G. W. Stonier had to confess that “With so much in this book that is fine and original, one hesitates to ask the author for more explanation. Yet that is what is needed. He works so intimately, but at such a distance. One hopes that time will bridge the gap, and that we will get nearer to him or he to us.” Unfortunately, however, since 1932 the gap between The Orators and the critic has more often widened than narrowed, critics preferring to speak vaguely about the work's significance rather than to grapple with its complex details. Richard Hoggart in 1951 and J. W. Beach in 1957 shed light on some of these details, but not until the last few years, in the writings of Justin Replogle and Monroe K. Spears, have serious attempts been made to deal with The Orators as a meaningful whole. Yet, of his own interpretation, Spears has to confess: “We can be sure that enough dark corners will remain, even if we succeed in casting light on a considerable part of its territory.”By probing some of these remaining “dark corners,” I hope to cast yet further light on Auden's most puzzling work.
Structural Unity and Temporal Concordance: The War in Heaven in Paradise Lost
Authors: Rosenblatt Jason P.
Published: February 2007

Overt references to the climax of the Exodus appear in the first and last books of Paradise Lost. The war in heaven, appearing in the exact center of the poem and overlaid with elements of the Exodus account, radiates meaning to the beginning and end. When Milton uses the Exodus story to heighten our apprehension of his poem as a wholly unified structure, he is accommodating to the esthetic demands of his poem a tradition deriving from the Old Testament which found temporal concordance in the event. The Prophets bind together the primordial battle with the Dragon, the Exodus, and the Messianic Age, thus providing an eschatological interpretation of the overwhelming of Pharaoh's forces and the redemption of the Children of Israel. The New Testament—believing that the New Exodus is already at hand—enjoins the Christian reader to see Israel's escape through the waters of the Red Sea as a foreshadowing of baptism in Christ's saving blood. Throughout his life, Milton maintains an essentially Old Testament conception of the Exodus. Indeed, the appearance in Book vi of details from Exodus as well as from Rashi's Commentary suggests that even when Milton invokes the typological dimension, he takes pains to preserve the literal meaning of the Old Testament episode.
Two Modes of Apprehending Nature: A Gloss on the Coleridgean Symbol
Authors: Wilson Douglas Brownlow
Published: February 2007

Coleridge maintains a lifelong ambivalence toward nature. As early as the 1795 version of “The Eolian Harp,” he toys with incompatible speculations upon nature and, for the moment, retreats from the pantheistic implications of a bold metaphor. After long worrying about the problem of nature, he arrives at a more stable resolution of his dilemma : in The Stateman's Manual (1816) and in his “Essays on Method” (1817), he employs a traditional distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans. Regarded in this latter aspect, nature becomes a source of sacramental symbols: Coleridge holds that the imagination is peculiarly fitted to create symbols and, hence, to apprehend natura naturans. In 1817, twenty-one years after its original publication, he adds to “The Eolian Harp” a key phrase, “the one Life within us and abroad.” This addition, Coleridge's poetic equivalent of natura naturans, reconciles the poem to his Christian Platonism. Despite a growing dualistic aversion to nature in later life, Coleridge, as witnessed by dated footnotes added to his works in the 1820's, continues sporadically to reassert his sacramental faith in nature. Coleridge's adaptation of natura naturans, though it does not resolve all ambiguities, binds through common assumption a considerable body of his mature writings.
A Reinterpretation of The Mill on the Floss
Authors: Hagan John
Published: February 2007

Recent interpretations of The Mill on the Floss distort the novel's emphasis in two principal ways. According to one, it is a tragedy of repression and regression; Maggie is responsible for her downfall because she is flawed by her acceptance of Kempis' philosophy of renunciation and by a fixation upon her father and brother, both of which fatally pull against her legitimate desire for wider fulfillment. According to the other interpretation, however, this desire is itself Maggie's flaw, whereas her acceptance of Kempis and her family devotion are good; thus, the main subject of the novel is not her downfall, but her spiritual development, which is climaxed by her two rejections of Stephen and her attempt to rescue Tom from the flood. Although both contain valid insights, neither of these readings is satisfactory, for each oversimplifies George Eliot's complex outlook, which presents Maggie's frustrations and her ultimate defeat as springing from both the fact that she has intense and legitimate desires for a full and rich life which Tom and Tulliver cannot comprehend, and the fact that she is, at the same time, bound to them by an equally legitimate, indeed noble, love which makes her renunciation of those desires morally necessary.
Journey to the End of Art: The Evolution of the Novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Authors: Nettelbeck Colin W.
Published: February 2007

Contrary to its negative reputation, Céline's literary opus, with the exception of Voyage au bout de la nuit, evolves toward a spirit of regeneration. Although inVoyage Céline shows the image of death as a paralyzing force to derive from man's egoism, his own artistic vision remains too self-centered to allow him to follow his intuition of the beauty of life. Mort à crédit, Casse-pipe, and Guignol's Band, as novels of initiation, are an attempt to eradicate this egoism, and the presence of death is now counterbalanced both by a structure that permits of catharsis and by the creation of archetypal figures representing the superior value of life. The pamphlets, despite their treatment of the Jews, emphasize and elucidate this shift towards affirmation. The novels of maturity, Féerie pour une autre fois, D'un château l'autre, and Nord, through their structure and symbolism, make explicit that Céline's basic artistic intention has become not only to transcend the disintegration of Western civilization but to provide the mechanism for a similar transcendence in his reader. In Rigodon, he reaches a level of contemplation from which even the collapse of a civilization can be seen as promising new life.
Critical Comment in Response to T. McAlindon's “Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida”
Authors: Sacharoff Mark , Mcalindon T.
Published: February 2007

THE RECENT ARTICLE, “Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida,” by T. McAlindon,1 is indeed a formidable one, because Mr. McAlindon brings to bear upon the play a knowledge of Renaissance rhetoric that is all too often neglected in discussions of Shakespeare's work. The author also gives us substantial new insights into the pervasive interest Shakespeare showed, in Troilus and Cressida, in nuances of language and decorum.
The Dramatic Setting of the Wakefield Annunciation
Authors: Stevens Martin
Published: February 2007

With the recent publication of such books as Richard Southern's The Medieval Theatre in the Round (London, 1957) and Glynne Wickham's Early English Stages 1300 to 1600, Vol. i (London, 1959), the medieval English drama has come to be examined with much greater emphasis on the circumstances of its performance. While the Wakefield cycle has not been of focal interest to these studies, it has nevertheless attracted renewed attention as a dramatic work. Of special concern to students of the Wakefield plays is Martial Rose's introduction to his recently published modernized edition of the cycle. Mr. Rose sets forth the interesting theory that the Wakefield plays were not enacted processionally on pageant wagons as is generally believed, but rather that they were performed “in one fixed locality, on a multiple stage, and in the round.” This hypothesis, supported as it is by a very convincing body of arguments, is likely to have a far-reaching effect on Wakefield criticism. At the very least, it chalenges a number of widely-held opinions concerning the dramatic experience which the performance of the cycle provided. As a case in point, I should like here to focus on the Annunciation pageant and to demonstrate that, in an enlarged setting, its dramatic action becomes even more successful than it has hitherto been regarded. First, however, it will be necessary to review the “fixed-stage” theory and to examine its bearing on Wakefield criticism in general.
Die Schranken der Vernunft in Gellerts Leben der Schwedischen Gräfin von G.: Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der Aufklärung
Authors: Spaethling Von Robert H.
Published: February 2007

Gellert beendet den ersten Teil seines Romans mit der Rückkehr des totgeglaubten Grafen von G. aus sibirischer Gefangenschaft. Das zufällige und glückliche Wiedersehen des Grafen mit seiner Gemahlin ruft jedoch einige “Bestürzung” hervor, denn die Gräfin hatte sich inzwischen mit dem Herrn R., dem besten Freund des Grafen, vermählt. Herr R. fühlt sich deshalb genötigt, dem zurückgekehrten Freund folgendes Bekenntnis zu machen: “Ich habe Sie durch die unschuldigste Liebe so sehr beleidigt, als ob ich Ihr Feind gewesen wäre. Ich habe Ihnen Ihre Gemahlin entzogen … Ihre Gegenwart aber verdammt nunmehr das sonst so tugendhafte Band.” Die Gräfin von G., nicht weniger bekümmert und verstört, eröffnet den zweiten Teil ihrer Lebensgeschichte mit einer ähnlich selbstquälerischen Reflexion: “und eben zu der Zeit, da er mich so brünstig geliebt und alles für mich gefühlt hat, was nur sein Elend hat vergrößern können, habe ich in den Armen eines andern Gemahls der Freuden der Liebe und des Lebens genossen. Wie viel tausend Thränen hat mich dieser Gedanke schon gekostet, und wie oft bin ich vor meiner unschuldigen Liebe zu dem Herrn R. als vor einem Verbrechen erröthet” (iv, 256 f.).
Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection in Clarissa
Authors: Dussinger John A.
Published: February 2007

Just as Defoe had maintained that the novel could surpass the pulpit in encouraging morality, so Richardson explicitly declared his intention of making Clarissa nothing less than an instrument of reviving the Christian religion:

In this general depravity, when even the pulpit has lost great part of its weight, and the clergy are considered as a body of interested men, the author thought he should be able to answer it to his own heart, be the success what it would, if he threw in his mite towards introducing a reformation so much wanted. And he imagined, that in an age given up to diversion and entertainment, he could steal in, as may be said, and investigate the great doctrines of Christianity under the fashionable guise of an amusement; he should be most likely to serve his purpose.
D'Aubigne's Les Tragiques: A Protestant Apocalypse
Authors: Regosin Richard
Published: February 2007

Recent Studies on d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques have tended to bear out Henri Trénel's assertion in 1904 that the poet is “le plus biblique des écrivains français.” Since Trénel's catalogue of Scriptural references and Hebraisms in the poem (by which he sought to prove his point), d'Aubigné critics have given more thought to the significance of this accumulation of Biblical imagery, focusing particularly on d'Aubigné's continuing correlation of characters and events in Old Testament, early Christian, and contemporary sixteenth-century history. Henri Weber, whose view represents the most generally accepted interpretation, explains that this correlation provides the temporal dimension required by the epic poem. Moreover, by showing contemporary events to be a repetition of Biblical history, it raises those events to a symbolic level consistent with d'Aubigné's notion that the fortunes of the Protestants represent the working out of God's providential design for His modern-day chosen people. Henry Sauerwein suggests that the Biblical imagery represents d'Aubigné's attempt to approximate the style of the Bible in order to achieve a form suited to Les Tragiques as God's revelation of the destiny of the Protestant people to the divinely inspired poet.
Phèdre: Le Monde réel et les mondes imaginaires dans le théâtre de Racine
Authors: Carré Par Marie-Rose
Published: February 2007

C'est en 1664 que les amateurs de théâtre pénétrèrent pour la première fois dans le monde de Jean Racine. Ils avaient vu l'année précédente la Sophonisbe de Corneille, et devaient, cette même année, applaudir (ou bouder) son Othon. Le succès de la pièce du nouveau dramaturge fut honorable; on joua douze fois, du 20 juin au 18 juillet, sa Thébaïde. Le public avait paru apprécier ce que Corneille appelait, non sans hauteur, “une docte et sublime complaisance au goût des délicats, qui veulent de l'amour partout. Les critiques, dès cette confrontation, sentirent qu'une crise se préparait: public et lettrés allaient avoir à prendre parti dans une lutte entre deux conceptions opposées du conflit tragique. Les adversaires ne tardent pas, en effet, à faire appel à leurs admirateurs. La déclaration de Corneille, c'est Sophonisbe qui s'en est chargée, dans une de ses premières répliques:

Le Roi m'honore trop d'une amour si parfaite.

Dites-lui que j'aspire à la paix qu'il souhaite,

Mais que je le conjure, en cet illustre jour,

De penser à sa gloire encor plus qu'à l'amour.

(i.i.31–34)
Mathilde and the Roses in Stifter's Nachsommer
Authors: Sjogren Christine Oertel
Published: February 2007

Among the early reactions to Stifter's Nachsommer, one year after its publication, was Hebbel's derisive criticism of the detailed and exhaustive description of objects in the novel. Hebbel's criticism was unkind, but superficially pertinent, because description does indeed abound in Nachsommer. However, the mass of detail that he ridiculed is precisely a source of fascination for modern scholars, who seize upon the number of objects as the distinguishing characteristic of this novel and accord it high esteem because of the very significance of the “things” in it.
Chekhov's Fiction and the Ideal of “Objectivity”
Authors: Hagan John
Published: February 2007

The term “objectivity,” as well as several other words which have been used as its synonyms—“restraint,” “disinterestedness,” “neutrality,” “dispassionateness,” “detachment,” “impersonality,” and “indifference”—has been applied by critics to Chekhov's fiction from his own day to the present, sometimes in disparagement, but usually in praise. In various remarks about his own works or writing in general which he let fall in his correspondence, Chekhov himself used one or another of these critical labels. As early as 10 May 1886, writing to his brother Alexander, he listed “thorough objectivity” (ob”ektyvnost' splošnaja) as one of several conditions of true art. But in spite of the ubiquity of the term in his own vocabulary and that of his interpreters, its value as a critical tool has been practically nullified by the extreme imprecision with which the latter have usually handled it.
Bernard Shaw's Pre-Raphaelite Drama
Authors: Adams Elsie B.
Published: February 2007

When Ford Madox Ford says in his autobiographical reminiscences, Memories and Impressions, that in Bernard Shaw “the last faint trickle of Pre-Raphaelite influence is to be perceived,” he is talking specifically about Shaw's affinities with the utopian socialism of William Morris and Shaw's preference for the “grayness and roughness” in dress affected by Rossetti, Morris, and their disciples. But Ford's reference to Shaw as a Pre-Raphaelite has justification for more reasons than Ford suggests, not the least of which is Shaw's own claim to be a Pre-Raphaelite dramatist. In the Preface to Plays Pleasant (1898) Shaw says that Candida was the result of his 1894 trip to Florence, “where I occupied myself with the religious art of the Middle Ages and its destruction by the Renascence,” and of a previous trip to Birmingham, where he attended a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit and saw the church windows of Morris and Burne-Jones. The Preface continues, “On the whole, Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities; for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men. … When my subsequent visit to Italy found me practising the playwright's craft, the time was ripe for a modern pre-Raphaelite play. Religion was alive again, coming back upon men, even upon clergymen, with such power that not the Church of England itself could keep it out.” An examination of Shaw's concept of Pre-Raphaelitism not only illuminates the theme of Candida but also reveals Shaw's early formulation of the idea that the artist is, to use Shaw's terminology from the Preface to Back to Methuselah, an iconographer of a living religion.
The Late Medieval Cult of Jesus and the Mystery Plays
Authors: Robinson J. W.
Published: February 2007

Similarities between the late medieval English mystery plays and late medieval religious art have often been pointed out; parallels in literature and painting to the dramatic scene in which Christ is stretched and nailed to the cross, for example, are numerous. So far, commentators have concentrated on the similarities which concern the way in which the sequence of events of the Christian story is presented—on the narrative details in the plays, paintings, carvings, narrative poems, and glass paintings. For example, the way Christ steps out of the tomb (that is, the dramatic narrative) in the Chester Resurrection has analogies in English alabaster carvings. Such a knowledge is valuable in that it helps demonstrate the popular religious context of much of the narrative detail of the plays (Plate I). I think, however, that the religious (and social) contexts of the performances (especially the rationale of the presence of the audience) can best be understood by considering a different kind of parallel between the plays and religious art—similarities in the static, non-narrative scenes. In particular, I wish to link Christ's monologues in the plays closely to some of the images (Plate II) of the Cult of Jesus of the late Middle Ages, which share with the plays and other religious arts of the period a certain sensational realism and impassioned emotionalism.
Theme and Irony in the Wakefield Mactacio Abel
Authors: Gardner John
Published: February 2007

Whatever the play may have seemed to its immediate audience, to modern critics the Wakefield Mactacio Abel has generally seemed interesting for its realism but not especially successful either as drama or as dramatic sermon. Miss Eleanor Prosser goes so far as to say,

Doctrine remains in this play only by sufferance. But even apart from homiletic considerations, the play is unsuccessful. It has no unity: it leaps from farce to Scripture to farce with neither transition nor dramatic probability. The conflict is poorly established (witness the weakness of Abel and God); the characterization is one-dimensional; motivations are inconsistent (Cain's despair); much of the humor is pointless and simple-minded (Cain's striking Pykeharnes without motivation, just to keep his hand in, or the repeated obscenities that are comic solely by reason of their obscenity); the main interest in the play is irrelevant to the main plot action.
The History and Rhetoric of the Triplet
Authors: Balliet Conrad A.
Published: February 2007

The triplet, like some other literary forms, had an origin, a period of growth, a maturity, and then an end. The triplet was an offspring of the pentameter couplet, but developed in its own way at its own rate. When the couplet was loose, open, and unpolished, there was little need for further variety, and poets wrote few triplets. When the couplet became tight, closed, and highly polished, as it did with Pope, the triplet was considered a violation of the rules. It was, consequently, only in the short period just before the apex of the couplet that the triplet could flourish: the period of John Dryden.