bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Structure, Symbol, and Theme in “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”
Authors: Reiman Donald H.
Published: February 2007

Over forty years ago Oliver Elton wrote of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills”: “This poem is perfectly put together, and it is an intellectual pleasure to see its firm development, even apart from the rapid, impassioned, shimmering brilliancy of the imagery, which resolves itself into the emotions of the poet.” One need not assent to the unqualified absolute of this declaration to recognize the poem as one worthy of serious study, yet during the last half century of intensive Shelley scholarship and criticism there has appeared little to advance our understanding of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” beyond Professor Elton's own perceptive, but necessarily brief appreciation. An examination of Shelleyana will suggest a number of reasons for this neglect by scholars of a poem that is often anthologized and frequently taught. First, Shelley criticism is a literature filled with polemicism, and “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” has never been controversial: critics and admirers of Shelley alike have conceded or declared, when they mentioned it at all, that it is a good poem. Second, its tetrameter couplets appear “uncharacteristic” of Shelley under the generalizations which govern most discussions of his poetry, thus making the poem “peripheral” to both attackers and defenders of Shelley's poetic achievement. Closely related to the problem of metrics are those of the poem's length and its date of composition: it is too long to be discussed with the lyrics, too short to qualify as a major effort, and written too early for intensive study with Shelley's late poetry. Finally, biographers have been less successful than usual in casting light on those passages—especially lines 45–65—that seem to require additional illumination before a critic can integrate the whole composition.
Thomas D'Urfey, the Pope-Philips Quarrel, and The Shepherd's Week
Authors: Ellis William D.
Published: February 2007

The Pope-Philips controversy, and particularly the place in it of Gay's Shepherd's Week (1714), has been studied from many points of view by George Sherburn, William H. Irving, Hoyt Trowbridge, and J. E. Congleton. Sherburn has, in his felicitous manner, guided us through the convolutions of conflicting personalities and animosities both political and literary which effected the quarrel. Irving has suggested that the connection of The Shepherd's Week with the quarrel existed only in Pope's fertile imagination, since Gay's poem primarily burlesqued Virgil, not Philips; and Trowbridge, in answer to Irving, has demonstrated that Gay was quite aware of Philips' Pastorals in writing his own. Finally, Congleton has discussed the whole controversy against a background of neoclassical and rationalistic French and English critical theory of pastoral poetry. None has indicated, however, that Thomas D'Urfey's reputation for the writing of songs and ballads influenced both the quarrel and The Shepherd's Week.
Henry Fielding's The Female Husband: Fact and Fiction
Authors: Baker Sheridan
Published: February 2007

The female husband (published 12 November 1746) is an anonymous pamphlet so obscure and so nearly pornographic that its few acquaintances have passed it by, almost in complete silence. I know of only four copies, one each in the British Museum, the Bristol Public Libraries, the Huntington Library, and the library of Charles B. Woods, of the State University of Iowa. It purports to be the biography of one Mary Hamilton, who was in fact tried for fraud at Taunton, Somerset, on 7 October 1746. It has long been acknowledged, on external evidence, as Henry Fielding's. But among themselves scholars remain skeptical. The pamphlet has remained in limbo, listed for immortality but ignored, not quite accepted and not quite damned. I hope to demonstrate beyond all doubt that The Female Husband is Fielding's, and to suggest that this pamphlet, though of slight literary worth, is an interesting exhibit of Fielding at work upon meager journalistic fact, a somewhat discomforting glimpse of the comic moralist trying to sustain his principles and his comedy within recalcitrant material.
The Chronology of Milton's Major Poems
Authors: Shawcross John T.
Published: February 2007

The conclusion of Ants Oras as to the chronology of Milton's major poems, based on his important study of the blank vejse, is, I believe, in serious error. Examining strong pauses, both terminal and medial, the distribution of medial pauses over the pentameter line, run-on lines, feminine and masculine pauses, the distribution of polysyllables over the verse line, feminine endings, rhythmical expressions creating shifted stresses, syllabized “-ed” endings, and pyrrhic verse endings, Oras concludes that the traditional chronology for Paradise Lost (from Book I through Book XII), Paradise Regained (from Book I through Book IV), and Samson Agonistes is correct. As a prosodical study, the statistical data presented lead us to a greater understanding of the aforementioned verse techniques as used by Milton than we have heretofore known. Professor Oras' inferences of dated practice are, however, another matter.
Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style
Authors: Cope Jackson I.
Published: February 2007

The Early Quakers, who liked to call themselves the First Publishers of Truth, swept from the north of England across the nations roughly between 1650 and 1675. And during this same quarter century what we have dubiously labelled “plain” style manifestly supplanted the highly-ornate, rhetorical tradition of English prose which had burgeoned in extravagances of Arcadian rhetoric and Euphuism to flower in the earlier seventeenth century's “Senecan amble.” Clearly, rhetorical analysis can tell us much about the skeletal structure of prose style even in the later years of the century, but it can no longer lay open the center of energy-informing expression, as it can in much earlier prose. The aim of this essay will be to discover those bedrock aspects of expression which are demonstrably homologous with the profoundest conception of life shared by the first Quakers, the most feared and fastest-growing sect of the later seventeenth century, as well as the religious body most neglected by modern students of prose form. The rise of the new “plain” prose has been attributed to the heightened philosophic interest in scepticism, with its pragmatic theories of action; to the intensified interest in empirical science which centered in the Royal Society; and to the rise of a semi-t educated bourgeoisie. But these decades in England's story were characterized most widely by continuous theological debate and exhortations So it would seem probable, granting the convergence of several streams of cause, that the peak swell on which the new prose tradition rode to dominance can most intelligibly be traced to an ultimately theological tide. The literature of early Quakerism is of unparalleled value in testing and illustrating this hypothesis because—with the incalculable human distance between George Fox and William Penn—this evangelistic group cut across all social and educational distinctions, even dimmed the dualism in the rôles of the sexes. Yet when the Quakers pour forth their heart's belief and hope, they do so again and again in the same modes of expression, modes only approximately and infrequently appearing in the sermons and tracts of non-Quaker contemporaries like Everard and Saltmarsh. These characteristics, explained by and explaining the earliest Quaker faith, I should like to call seventeenth-century Quaker style.
Cooper's Last Novels, 1847–1850
Authors: Ringe Donald A.
Published: February 2007

Until the appearance of James Grossman's biography in 1949, James Fenimore Cooper's last five novels had received little critical attention. The nineteenth century practically ignored them. Even William Cullen Bryant in his judicious memorial address delivered in 1852 passed over them with hardly a word, while thirty years later, Thomas R. Lounsbury flatly stated that “not one of them has the slightest pretension to be termed a work of art.” In the twentieth century, the first critics to concern themselves with the rehabilitation of Cooper's reputation—Vernon L. Parrington, Robert E. Spiller, and Yvor Winters—concerned as they were with the broader aspects of Cooper's thought, devoted little space to the discussion of tales that were not especially pertinent to their immediate purposes. During the last dozen years, however, the novels have begun to attract more attention, with Harold H. Scudder and W. B. Gates in particular pointing out various sources that Cooper used in composing two of the tales. Among the critics, Grossman has written the fullest analyses of the individual books, and, most recently, Howard Mumford Jones and Charles A. Brady have each treated the late novels at some length. All three have pointed out the strong religious emphasis apparent in several of them.
King Hamlet's Ghost in Belleforest?
Authors: Stabler Arthur P.
Published: February 2007

In the voluminous literature which has arisen in connection with all possible aspects of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a respectable percentage is found to deal with the Ghost. The character, function, and antecedents of the Ghost, like those of the other dramatis personae, have been subjected to the most searching scrutiny and analysis. In particular, Shakespeare's use of a ghost rôle in Hamlet has been discussed in relationship to the evolution of the Senecan ghost in Elizabethan drama, and compared to other “revenge” ghosts of contemporary or earlier authors. In the light of the obvious relationship of the ghost rôle in Hamlet to that of the Senecan-Elizabethan stage ghost, no further pedigree has seemed necessary for the Ghost himself as a character in the play. This is the more understandable in that, so far as I have been able to ascertain, the scholars who have discussed the sources of Hamlet have been unanimous in stating or implying that no trace of the Ghost exists in any of the accepted sources of the play. With the general accuracy of these impressions regarding the genesis of the rôle there can be no quarrel. It should nevertheless interest and perhaps startle researchers and students in the field to learn that the ghost of Hamlet's father did “appear” in one of the accepted sources of the play, the Histoires tragiques of François de Belieforest.
Jonson and the Neo-Latin Authorities for the Plain Style
Authors: Trimpi Wesley
Published: February 2007

Probably at no point during the English Renaissance did the influence of neo-Latin writers upon English vernacular prose and poetry become so predominant as during the emergence of the rhetorical principles and practice of the plain style. The comprehensive descriptive treatises of classical poetic theory, such as those of Minturno and J. C. Scaliger, which were used extensively by the writers of English rhetoric books like George Puttenham and Henry Peacham the elder, did not recommend and defend so much as enumerate specific principles. Since the English rhetoric books were primarily concerned with methods of amplification and the more ornate stylistic conventions of the Continental literary movements, they were directed mainly at the courtly Petrarchan imitators and borrowed little from discussions of the plain style. This meant, of course, that one would have had to return to the Latin text of such general reference works as Scaliger's Poetices for information about the genus tenue or the genres which employed it, and even then such works often did little more than transpose their classical sources. The neo-Latin influence upon anti-Ciceronianism in prose and anti-Petrarchanism in verse, therefore, became considerably more significant when an English writer, such as Jonson, in reacting against the poetic attitudes and practice of the Petrarchans, looked for rhetorical corroboration for his position and found it, not only in certain ancient writers, but in such men as Erasmus, Vives, Lipsius, and Bacon, who advocated various applications of the Attic style and argued their case with power and precision. Jonson's Discoveries is particularly valuable as a statement of the neo-Latin influence on the plain style, since it describes a rhetorical position which he consistently practised in his own writing. Since he borrowed accurate descriptions of the style and its intentions from treatises of the men just mentioned, as well as from the famous works on the classical genres which employed the sermo by such scholars as Daniel Heinsius and Isaac Casaubon, the Discoveries can be described as a handbook of the new authorities on matters of style. Although it was not published until 1640, the neo-Latin authorities it cites exerted their formative influence on Jonson's stylistic ideas and practice from the middle 1590's on and, largely through his own authority, on those of the first half of the seventeenth century.
Marvell's Horatian Ode
Authors: Wallace John M.
Published: February 2007

Criticism of the Horatian ode is in much the same state as it was twenty, or even fifty years ago, although recently the opinion has rightly been gaining ground that Marvell was less ambiguously Cromwellian than older and more sentimentally royalist readers liked to think. However, a belief in Marvell's political impartiality, or in the reluctance of his support for Cromwell, remains almost a sine qua non for anyone who discusses the poem, but I shall try to show that by 1650 Marvell had become completely Cromwellian, and that his theme was Cromwell's election as the constitutional dictator of England, in accordance with the popular concept of the dux bellorum which permitted dictators at the commencement of new empires. My second proposal is that the undeniable impartiality of Marvell's tone and stance derives not from a neutral political attitude, but from the careful rhetorical procedure which Marvell adopted in order to make his theme persuasive to a doubtful audience. The ode is a political or deliberative oration, written to the pattern of such speeches formulated by the classical orators. Deliberative speeches generally dealt with a “difficult” subject, the genus admirabile causae, and frequently began with an insinuatio—a device employed when the opinion of the audience was considered to be prejudiced against the case. But before beginning an examination of the poem and identifying the source of Marvell's brilliant “insinuation,” it would be well to outline very briefly the state of English loyalism in 1649-50, which lends credence to Marvell's position in the ode, and helps to explain how it was possible for a man of integrity to hold opinions so contrary to his earlier royalism.
Mörike's Occultism and the Revision of Maler Nolten
Authors: Hewett-Thayer Harvey W.
Published: February 2007

Mörike's only novel, Maler Nolten, was published in August 1832; the conception of the story dates from 1827; some writing was done in 1828, and the manuscript was finished in 1831. By 1850, probably earlier though not recorded, Mörike began to entertain the idea of revising his novel; and from that time till his death in 1875 he worked on the revision intermittently and in desultory fashion, though, as his correspondence shows, at times he regarded it as his main literary concern. Thus for a quarter of a century the revision of Maler Nolten was on the author's mind. His frequent illnesses and in the latter part of the period the domestic infelicities which eventually resulted in separation from his wife were contributory causes of delay. Doubtless in the main, however, he was hindered by the inherent difficulty of the undertaking. At his death he left the task still unfinished.
The Pains of the Afterworld: Fire, Wind, and Ice in Milton and Shakespeare
Authors: Hankins John E.
Published: February 2007

A fascinating and too often neglected area of literature is the medieval visions of the Afterworld, the detailed conceptions of hell, purgatory, and paradise, which were to reach a culmination in Dante's Divina Commedia. Several of these visions became widely popular, both in Latin and in vernacular versions. They have been carefully studied for their possible influence on Dante's writing. I propose to explore one aspect of them, the threefold pains of punishment, and to show how this material was used by Milton and Shakespeare.
The Sentimental Mask
Authors: Parnell Paul E.
Published: February 2007

Fifty years after the modern study of sentimentalism was inaugurated by Ernest Bernbaum, the problem remains whether the term has ever been satisfactorily defined or described. Two recent developments reveal some of the difficulties: Arthur Sherbo in The English Sentimental Drama takes five basic criteria considered by most authorities as typical, and shows that they may all apply to plays demonstrably not sentimental. John Harrington Smith, in the preface to The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (1948), announces that he has completely avoided the term “sentimental” as too vague to be of much value. Yet Ronald Crane, writing fourteen years before, assumed the essential traits of sentimentalism to be fairly clear, and Norman Holland has implied that two criteria borrowed from Bernbaum and Krutch still supply an adequate definition. There is not even agreement whether sentimentality is a positive or negative quality. Krutch and Sherbo feel that it is false and dishonest, therefore bad. Crane concedes that it is somewhat limited intellectually, but emphasizes its humanitarianism and emotional warmth, especially the “self-approving joy” that makes virtue satisfying. Bernbaum vacillates between sympathy and contempt.
The Literal-Figurative Identity of The Wanderer
Authors: Rosier James L.
Published: February 2007

Dominant among the effects of some Old English meditative and elegiac poems is the paradox of simplicity. The premise might be advanced that the source of our wonder at, often mystification about, such poems as The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Wife's Lament is the fact that we are too far separated from the poetic consciousness which gave them being. But surely this would be a profitless premise to begin with, especially since our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon culture and society and learning is not uninformed. Yet our approach to these poems seems to be one of continual amazement and puzzlement, as the now numerous published critical, interpretive studies so well attest. And this is what I mean by the paradox: most of these poems are, in their essential statements, simple and direct; their themes of exile and transience, of resoluteness in the face of flux, of sorrow and hardship and deprivation are staple and often expressed in identical terms, such as the recurrent use of gnomic dicta and the catalogue of misfortunes or joys. Likewise, the vocabulary as vocabulary is static and conventional; the limited, insular hoard of commonplace simplices finds extension only in the native habits characteristic of bothpoetic and non-poetic composition, of affixation, derivation (e.g., anga, engu, langoð), and compounding, and the compounds themselves are more frequently than not transparent and, quite apart from their use in context, unexceptional.
Die Entfaltung Des Bösen in Böhmes Mysterium Magnum
Authors: Deinert Von Herbert
Published: February 2007

Und wollen andeuten ... wie Böses und Gutes auseinem einigen Grunde urstände, als Licht undFinsterniß, Leben und Tod, Freude und Leyd; undwie das in seinem Grunde sey. (Mysterium Magnum, Vorrede, 11).

BÖHMES Philosophieren trägt den Charakter einer leidenschaftlichen Theodizee. Gott ist das unbedingte und uneingeschränkte Gute; von dieser Prämisse will der Christ Böhme nicht abweichen. Aber er ist ebenso weit davon entfernt, das Böse in einer Welt zu übersehen, die das summum bonum geschaffen hat. Für den mit der christlichen Tradition Vertrauten ergibt sich damit die Notwendigkeit, die souveräne Willkür Jehovas, die Existenz von Tod, Teufel und Hölle, die Lehre von der Verstocktheit der Bösen und ihrer ewigen Verdammnis vor sich selber zu rechtfertigen und mit dem oben angeführten Gottesbegriff in Einklang zu bringen. Böhme wehrt sich energisch gegen die Idee der Prädestination, die das theologische Dilemma rational auflöst, indem sie das Bild eines gleichzeitig guten und grausamen Gottes entwirft, der sein Recht zur Willkür in der Verteilung von Gnade und Ungnade aus der Erhabenheit des Schöpfers bezieht, der nur sich selber Rechenschaft schuldet. Zwar wird das doppelte Gesicht Gottes zum Kernstück seiner Emanationsphilosophie, die absichtliche Vorherbestimmung zum Bösen seitens Jehovas hingegen ist derjenige Aspekt der Prädestinationslehre, den Böhme nicht hinnehmen kann.
Theme and Metaphor in Brother to Dragons
Authors: Strandberg Victor H.
Published: February 2007

When Brother to Dragons came out ten years ago, its reviewers were inclined to show deep admiration. “An event, a great one,” was Randall Jarrell's opinion, as he sought to substantiate his judgment that “this is Robert Penn Warren's best book.” Another of Warren's fellow poets, Delmore Schwartz, likewise evinced high enthusiasm, calling Brother to Dragons “a work which is most remarkable as a sustained whole,” a work having “perfect proportion throughout.” Both these reviewers, furthermore, placed Warren in some very distinguished company on the basis of this work, Jarrell by finding echoes of Milton, Shakespeare, and Eliot, and Schwartz by observing “Warren's resemblance to Melville.”
L'Avventura di Rinaldo
Authors: Bonadeo Di Alfredo
Published: February 2007

I commenti e i saggi sui molteplici passi ed episodi che nell'Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto occupano un posto di primo piano nell'economia del poema e che, più importante, rappresentano un aspetto rilevantissimo della civiltà medioevale e rinascimentale, la cavalleria, sono praticamente tutti informati all'ammirazione per le gesta grandiose, le imprese eroiche, gli atti di coraggio, la forza eccezzionale e la superiore abilità nel maneggio delle armi dei cavalieri. Ma questo non può essere che un criterio di giudizio superficiale in vista dell'importanza storico-culturale dell'istituzione cavalleresca e dei differenti modi di manifestarsi del suo spirito nel corso della storia.
Romantic Psychology and the Inner Senses: Coleridge
Authors: Lyon Judson S.
Published: February 2007

The english Romantics had a special affinity for metaphors and similes of inner eyes, inner ears, and inner senses. These ancient and commonplace figures are widely pervasive and often conspicuously prominent in the literature of the period, appearing under myriad modifications and serving a wide variety of functions. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats used them in some of the most familiar and pivotal passages in their works, apparently seeking to charge them with new meaning. In fact, these figures are so prominent in Romantic literature that they must have been found serviceable to some particularly urgent expressive need of the time. I believe it was the Romantics' intense preoccupation with psychological theory, and the particular types of psychological theory they wished to support and oppose, which led them to explore and exploit afresh the possibilities of inner-sense figures.
The Elaboration of Character in the Ébauches of Zola's Rougon-Macquart Novels
Authors: Hemmings F. W. J.
Published: February 2007

In a review-article dealing with four recent monographs, all of which were to some extent devoted to problems connected with the genesis of Zola's novels, M. Jean Onimus points out that it is hard to think of another author in whom such problems can be more satisfactorily studied. The survival of the dossiers of each of the novels in the three great cycles makes it possible to elucidate almost the entire process of composition in respect of each component work and hence to generalize about this process with considerably more assurance than is permissible to the student of any other major French novelist. “Ce que nous cherchons avec tant de difficulté chez Balzac, ce que Stendhal nous livre au hasard de ses ‘pilotis’ et des commentaires en marge de ses manuscrits, ce que Gide nous a donné dans le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, Zola nous le révèle pour toutes ses œuvres et jusque dans le dernier détail.”
Flaubert's Saint Julien: The Sin of Existing
Authors: Brombert Victor
Published: February 2007

This streamlined tale, which Flaubert claims to have composed as a relaxing exercise, but which he himself termed “effervescent,” is in fact, in its very craftsmanlike perfection, one of his most turbulent texts. Cruelty, spirituality, pathology—the most disturbing aspects of his temperament as well as the most paradoxical interplay of themes make of this reworking of a minor saint's legend one of Flaubert's most “personal” works. No text of Flaubert's appears on the surface more impassive and more liberated from any element that is not under the strictest esthetic control. The aloofness of an almost inhuman hero, the historical and mythic distance, the utilization of an already existing legend, the display of quaint erudition—all suggest a totally impersonal relation between the author and his literary material.
T. S. Eliot's Theory of Personal Expression
Authors: Austin Allen
Published: February 2007

Eliot's statement in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that poetry is “an escape from personality” seems to support the widely held belief that his theory of poetry is impersonal. Cleanth Brooks, for example, cites this passage and remarks that Eliot asserts, “with almost shocking emphasis,” that the poem does not express personality. On the other hand, a number of writers on Eliot have argued that his theory involves personal expression, basing their arguments on statements in which Eliot recommends or praises the poet's revelation of self. The evidence, I believe, clearly supports this interpretation, or more precisely, the interpretation that Eliot's theory is one of indirect personal expression. My purpose is to analyze Eliot's theory, to examine how the poem, in Eliot's view, expresses personality, and how this expression affects his standard of esthetic value.
Alice's Journey to the End of Night
Authors: Rackin Donald
Published: February 2007

In the century now passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, scores of critical studies have attempted to account for the fascination the book holds for adult readers. Although some of these investigations offer provocative insights, most of them treat Carroll in specialized modes inaccessible to the majority of readers, and they fail to view Alice as a complete and organic work of art. Hardly a single important critique has been written of Alice as a self-contained fiction, distinct from Through the Looking-Glass and all other imaginative pieces by Carroll. Critics also tend to confuse Charles Dodgson the man with Lewis Carroll the author; this leads to distorted readings of Alice that depend too heavily on the fact, say, that Dodgson was an Oxford don, or a mathematician, or a highly eccentric Victorian gentleman with curious pathological tendencies. The results are often analyses which fail to explain the total work's undeniable impact on the modern lay reader unschooled in Victorian political and social history, theoretical mathematics, symbolic logic, or Freudian psychology. It seems time, then, that Alice be treated for what it most certainly is—a book of major and permanent importance in the tradition of English fiction, a work that still pertains directly to the experience of the unspecialized reader, and one that exemplifies the profound questioning of reality which characterizes the mainstream of nineteenth-century English literature.
ICGE Gold and INCGE Lafe in Beowulf
Authors: Rosier James L.
Published: February 2007

The discussion which follows of two dark passages in Beowulf rests fundamentally on habits of composition which are idiomatic to and generally pervasive in Old English poetry. Among these habits variation, and what I have previously called ‘generation,‘ are commonplace. And because they are commonplace and because Old English poetic language is by nature and tradition extremely conventional, it would seem a reasonable assumption that familiarity with these habits may guide us to predictions or probabilities of what a poet intended in a scribally confused passage. Such an assumption is based on the fact that Old English poets tend to repeat words, prefixes and suffixes, head-words and base-words in compounds, word clusters or phrases, and that in some poems, such as Beowulf, there is a marked tendency to repeat these lexical elements closely together in bound contexts, such as speeches, set descriptions of person or place, and episodes. The debut of Wealhtheow in lines 612b–641 is an excellent instance of multiple repetition throughout with an accumulation of repeated elements at the end.
Wordsworth on Imagination: The Emblemizing Power
Authors: Heffernan James A. W.
Published: February 2007

It is impossible to move very far in either the poetry or the prose of Wordsworth without meeting an explicit reference to what is at once the most ubiquitous and most nebulous term in his vocabulary—the imagination. All too often, his references to this important faculty, which holds the key to his theory of poetry, are fragmentary and confused. Nevertheless, his statements on the imagination—and particularly those of his later years—seem to point substantially in one direction: that the primary effect of imaginative power is the evocation of meaning from the material world, the manifestation of a visible object as the emblem of invisible truth. As a practicing poet, Wordsworth best embodies this effect in the most consciously and deliberately “imaginative” of all his poems—The White Doe of Rylstone. But in order fully to appreciate his achievement in this regrettably neglected work, it is necessary first to consider the process of emblemization as Wordsworth himself conceived and described it.
Jorge Guillén's Cántico
Authors: Debicki Andrew P.
Published: February 2007

Jorge GuilléN's Cántico has most often been evaluated as a book of “pure poetry,” as the foremost example of the aesthetic purity and the abstract orientation of the Spanish “Generation of the 1920's.” Such a view can easily be defended by appealing to key traits of the work, traits which have been amply pointed out: the careful construction of the book, its stress on the creation of a unique world, its use of essential words with technical precision; as well as the constant search for essential truths, and the avoidance of particulars important only for their own sake. As it has developed, this view of Cántico as “pure poetry” has led some critics to suggest that it represents an epoch of inhuman formalism from which Guillén is to break out later; José María Castellet has Guillén recanting his “purity” under the impact of historical circumstances, and changing to a more human poetry in his later book Clamor. And such a view of Guillén's verse as divided into two conflicting epochs is used by Castellet to support his evaluation of the “Generation of the 1920's” as a group of purists destined to “repent” and change their outlook.
Satire in the Utopia
Authors: Heiserman A. R.
Published: February 2007

Fifth Dealer: And now, what are the main features of your philosophy?

Socrates: Ideas and types of things. All that you see, the earth and all that is upon it, the sky-each has its counterpart in the invisible world.

Fifth Dealer: And where are they?

Socrates: Nowhere. Were they anywhere, they were not what they are.

—Lucian, Sale of Creeds

Some admirers of More's Utopia have used the term “satire” to prove that it is essentially a jeu d'esprit. Others have used it to contend that Utopia is essentially a serious didactic argument. But while both schools of criticism use the term “satire” to wrestle with the problems presented by Utopia's form and technique, neither has employed it consistently to resolve the major problems raised by More's little book. How is one to reconcile More's “real intention” (however defined) with his “manner of alternating seriousness and parody?” Why should a canonized Lord Chancellor ever have constructed an “ideal” commonwealth so manifestly antithetical to his orthodoxy? Can the textual and personal sources of More's ideas explain Hythloday's arguments in Book I, or the institutions of Utopian society? These questions remain after half a century of intense scholarship and impassioned appraisal. The latest and most exhaustive study of More's book, having explicitly separated Utopia's “matter” from its “style and form,” concludes that “dashes of wit, satire, and irony add zest to [Utopia's] perusal but make its interpretation intriguing and perplexing … Utopia, it seems almost futile to say, is a complex and enigmatic book.”
The Materials of History: Goldsmith's Life of Nash
Authors: Ferguson Oliver W.
Published: February 2007

The life of Richard Nash, Esq. is deservedly Oliver Goldsmith's best-known biography. It deals—very largely by the method of anecdote—with a man whose personality and career were intrinsically fascinating, and it exhibits throughout not only Goldsmith's inimitable easy style but also an attitude toward its subject perfectly balanced between irony and compassion. Apart from praising the work in general terms, however, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the Life of Nash and have provided only a cursory account of its sources and of the circumstances surrounding its composition and publication. In this article, I offer more specific information about the biography's sources—what Goldsmith called the materials of history—as well as some new details concerning Nash's affairs during the last years of his life. I have found a substantial amount of this new information through an effort to discover the identity of a man who played a vital part in the Life, George Scott.
Boswell on Politics in the Life of Johnson
Authors: Lustig Irma S.
Published: February 2007

The self-portrait of James Boswell which emerges from the conversations, letters, and editorial comments of The Life of Johnson has lineaments of authority as well as uncertainty. There were subjects on which Boswell spoke consistently and with assurance. Nothing so much gives the lie to his old reputation of grovelling servitude as his steadfast opposition to Johnson's pronouncements on public affairs. All the difference of their years and of their characters are revealed in the younger man's opinions, which, despite a disclaimer in 1779 of interest or ability in “political speculation,” are numerous and sound assured. It is fascinating to isolate Boswell's views, to ponder their apparent contradictions, and finally to discover a complexity of convention and rebellion, tradition and modernity parallel to other expressions of his personality.
Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss
Authors: Levine George
Published: February 2007

With only small exceptions, The Mill on the Floss can be seen as adequately representative of even the most mature of George Eliot's art—morally energetic yet unsentimentally perceptive about the meaning of experience. Like all of her works, it is thoroughly coherent and gains its coherence from a unified vision. But the vision, here as elsewhere, is, I would argue, incomplete. There were elements in experience, that is, which she was never fully able to assimilate and which, as was true of most of the major Victorian writers, she was genuinely unable to see. She pushed the boundaries of Victorian experience as far as any of her contemporaries and moved to the brink from which one can observe the modern sensibility, but inevitably she pulled back.
Symbol and Contextual Restraint: Kafka's “Country Doctor”
Authors: Guth Hans P.
Published: February 2007

Modern criticism has frequently practiced symbolical analysis without developing the necessary procedural controls, without establishing clear criteria of relevance for suggested symbolical meanings and overtones. Such unrestrained symbolical analysis tends to suffer from two typical defects. First, it tends to slight the line-by-line texture of a work. In practice, if not always in theory, it tends to slight “surface” detail. “Overt” meanings become, in Freudian terms, “disguise,” to be unraveled as the deeper meanings come into focus “like repressed material under psychoanalysis.” Logical categories become, in Jungian terms, “rationalizations,” to be penetrated as the critic becomes “sensitive to the tap-roots below.” At the same time, unrestrained symbolical interpretation often does violence to the structure of a work. It threatens to destroy a work's unity of fable, theme, or tone. Programmatic announcements to the contrary, the prevailing practice of such criticism fails to pay sufficient heed to Henry James's claim that “in proportion as the work is successful the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression”; to E. M. Forster's requirement that “every action or word ought to count.”
La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism
Authors: Jameson Fredric
Published: February 2007

La Cousine Bette was written at a time when the classification scheme of La Comédie humaine no longer seemed adequate for its raw materials and was marked by a prodigious expansion in the length of Balzac's customary exposition. The ending of that exposition (desire gratified, desire frustrated) hints at the thematic unity of the work. Thus Bette embodies frustration, negativity, and ultimately the death wish itself: this drive is then parceled out among the other destructive women characters as well. Hulot in contrast expresses the force of Eros. Not only are both characters allegorical: they are shown in the process of becoming allegorical, and the deeper subject of the book is the very history of obsession itself. Balzac is able to record this instinctual system because his work is pre-individualistic: at the same time, the very symmetry of the instincts requires a third character, Madame Hulot, to function as consciousness or ego, and it is from this third pole that Balzac's sentimentalism (and his political ideology) derive, as necessary and inherent structural distortions.
Dramatic Scene and the Awkward Age
Authors: Bass Eben
Published: February 2007

The “Cabalistic” diagram of The Awkward Age (1899) whereby James explained the novel to its original publisher (Harper's Weekly) comprised “the neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distance about a central object. The central object was my situation, my subject in itself, to which the thing would owe its title, and the small rounds represented so many distinct lamps, as I liked to call them, the function of each of which would be to light with all due intensity one of its aspects.” Each of the “lamps” was a “single social occasion” in which James proceeded to exhaust, as he says, the scenic possibilities; the “occasions” corresponded, he continues, to “Acts of a Play,” and his purpose in using them as a basis of form was to achieve “objectivity” that required no “going behind” scenes to explain, as fiction so often does, and as drama does not. “To make the presented occasion tell all its story itself” was then his purpose (AN, p. 111). The careful arrangements of The Awkward Age are only slightly suggested, however, by James's diagram of circles. The following analysis will attempt to describe the mutual relationships of the order of the “circles” (the books or “acts” of the novel, each of which is named for a different character). Each of the “acts” is divided into numbered units which we may, for convenience, call “scenes.” There are thirty-eight such “scenes” rather evenly distributed among the ten character-named books of the novel.
The Illusion of St. Mawr: Technique and Vision in D. H. Lawrence's Novel
Authors: Wilde Alan
Published: February 2007

St. Mawr has generally been treated as if it were a story about a symbolic horse, as if the other characters in the novel had obviously been intended to be subordinate to him, and as if his disappearance seven-eighths of the way through were an indication of Lawrence's inability to concentrate or of his ineptitude in constructing a novel. More than anything else in the book, St. Mawr's failure to cross the finish line has upset critics and has led even so able a commentator of Lawrence as Father Tiverton to describe the novel as “bi-valvular,” because near the end of the book Lawrence “forgets all about the horse-hero, St. Mawr himself, and becomes absorbed by New Mexico.” It is a matter for regret that Lawrence gave his novel the title he did, since it has been instrumental in leading critics into a new variant of the intentional fallacy: the titular heresy, which has made many besides Father Tiverton regard St. Mawr as a structural failure. In fact, the mystery of St. Mawr is bound up with the entire problem of the novel's organization, since the fuss about the horse is only symptomatic of the more profound frustration with what a recent critic has termed the “essential inchoateness of the book.” Therefore the fundamental problem involved in reading St. Mawr, which is one of the book's formal integrity, requires the exploration of the techniques Lawrence employed to shape his work; this problem solved, it then becomes easy not only to understand why the horse is dropped so casually from all notice, but also to see what vision of life the book as a whole means to communicate.
Lucifer's Legs
Authors: Hatcher Anna Granville , Musa Mark
Published: February 2007

After pointing out to Dante the bodies of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius hanging from the mouths of Lucifer, Virgil gives his disciple to understand that it is time for them to make their way out of Hell:
Anna Karenina: The Dialectic of Prophecy
Authors: Stewart David H.
Published: February 2007

One of the most impressive features of Anna Karenina is the way in which Tolstoy draws the reader's imagination beyond the literal level of the narrative into generalizations that seem mythical in a manner difficult to articulate. With Dostoevsky or Melville, one sees immediately a propensity for exploiting the symbolic value of things. With Tolstoy, things try, as it were, to resist conversion: they strive to maintain their “thingness” as empirical entities. A character in Dostoevsky is usually only half man; the other half is Christ or Satan. Moby Dick is obviously only half whale; the other half is Evil or some principle of Nature. But Anna Karenina is emphatically Anna Karenina. Like almost all of Tolstoy's characters, she has a proficiency in the husbandry of identity; she jealously hoards her own unique reality, so that it becomes difficult to say of her that she is a “type” of nineteenth-century Russian lady or a “symbol” of modern woman or an “archetypical” Eve or Lilith.
Journey to Consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus's L'Etranger
Authors: Manly William M.
Published: February 2007

Although a good deal has been written about L'Etranger in the light of Camus's philosophic insights in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, the verbal similarities between these two works have been used only sporadically in interpreting the novel. Carl Viggiani, whose essay on L'Etranger appears to have dealt most fully with the symbolic undercurrent of the novel and Meursault's relation to Sisyphus has concentrated almost solely on detached archetypal motifs while largely neglecting any sort of progressive or “novelistic” development of the protagonist as he moves from his mother's funeral to his final jail cell. I propose to demonstrate such a consistent development by viewing Meursault's adventure as a parable of mental awakening or coming to consciousness which corresponds in detailed thematic and imagistic ways to the adventure of the mind in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.
Towards an Understanding of Anabase
Authors: Knodel Arthur J.
Published: February 2007

Anabase was the first of Saint-John Perse's poems to be widely translated into other languages, as well as the first to receive widespread critical attention. Yet, despite several recent attempts at detailed exegesis, the poem remains baffling in many of its details and even in some of its more general implications. Close scrutiny of the text of the poem is, of course, the most natural and legitimate way of coming to grips with its meaning, but the more recent commentaries on Anabase too often prove that close textual examination alone is not an adequate safeguard against runaway interpretation. The present study, therefore, seeks to supplement close scrutiny of the text with references to other of Saint-John Perse's writings, especially to certain of his pronouncements on the nature of poetry in general and, most particularly, to his declaration of intent in writing Anabase.
The Lied Sings its Defense
Authors: Morgan Bayard Quincy , Stein Jack M.
Published: February 2007

To one who has been revelling in and singing the German mastersongs for more than fifty years—I bought my copy of Peters' still unsurpassed Liederkranz in Leipzig in 1905—Professor Jack Stein's derogatory remarks must evoke first a certain sense of outrage and then pity: sincere pity that a man who knows the Lied so well (and you observe that we can hardly talk about it without using the German word as a technical term) has got so little pleasure out of it. Pleasure? No, joy, grief, exhilaration, ecstasy! To me it has always been one of the glories of European culture that this one people could produce, from Haydn on through Richard Strauss, including a number of composers whom Mr. Stein chose not to mention—Beethoven, Cornelius, Franz, Jensen, Liszt, Loewe, Mendelssohn, Weber—such a body of inspired song as no other nation can even approach.
Richardson's Repetitions
Authors: Golden Morris
Published: February 2007

A number of critics, most thoroughly A. D. McKillop in his excellent Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist, have commented on Richardson's tendency to repeat himself. Like other novelists of fairly limited experience (e.g., Jane Austen) or with a strongly intuitive way of perceiving the world (e.g., D. H. Lawrence), Richardson tended to use similar character types and involve them in similar situations, and this even more pervasively and significantly than has so far been noted.
Tennyson and “The Lover's Tale”
Authors: Short Clarice
Published: February 2007

Tennyson's “hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre,” written when he was ten or eleven, and “the six thousand lines à la Walter Scott,” written “at about twelve,” have passed into oblivion. “The Devil and the Lady,” an unfinished blank verse drama written when Tennyson was fourteen, was not published until 1931. “The Lover's Tale” is the first of his early long poems to be published in his lifetime. That this product of Tennyson's youth was so long cherished in obscurity and ultimately published with affectionate apology affords grounds for speculation regarding the relationship of the writer and the written.