bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Structure of Newman's Apologia
Authors: Svaglic Martin J.
Published: February 2007

The Apologia pro Vita Sua is not the autobiography of Newman from 1801 to 1845. It tells us nothing of the family life, the student activities, the intellectual and artistic interests of its complex subject. Nor is it even a spiritual autobiography of those years except in a limited sense. We must turn to the Letters and Correspondence, with their “Autobiographical Memoir”, to supplement the bare account given in the Apologia of Newman's conversion to Evangelical Christianity. The Apologia is primarily a work of rhetoric designed to persuade a body of readers or “judges”, English, Protestant, and suspicious of a convert to an unpopular religion, that Newman, whom Kingsley had made a symbol of the Catholic priesthood, was a man not of dishonesty but of integrity. Newman chose autobiography as his method because of his lifelong English preference of the concrete to the abstract, his vivid realization of the rôle in persuasion of personal influence: “I am touched by my five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear. … I gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo.”1 “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us/'sj^was his conversion to Catholicism after a long puzzling delay, many predictions of the event, and even) charges of treachery to the Church of England that had created th^ atmosphere of suspicion in which his character had been impugned! Therefore he would confine the autobiography principally to a brief explanation of how he arrived, to begin with, at what so many regarded with suspicion and fear: Anglo-Cathoiic principles; and to a detailed one of how, having accepted them and devoted himself to propagating them, he became convinced that the principles which had led him thus far must lead him farther still, into the Catholic Church. ”I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means“ (p. 27). If that history of opinions, in spite of its limited scope, has so much of the richness and variety of great autobiography, it is because Newman held that the means by which we arrive at belief, all of which he would try to chronicle for his own life so far as that was possible, were multiform and complex.
The Blenheim Papers and Steele's Journalism, 1715–18
Authors: Loftis John
Published: February 2007

Of the Rewards -which Richard Steele received from the victorious Whig party soon after the accession of George I, doubtless the most important were a seat in the House of Commons and the governorship of the Royal Company of Comedians acting in Drury Lane. These two rewards provided Steele's principal employments for the rest of his life: he became an active Parliament man, participating in debates in Commons and serving on Parliamentary committees; and at times he shared with the actor-managers the responsibility for running Drury Lane. It is understandable that politics and the theatre should provide the most frequently recurring themes in his writing during his later years. The years 1715 to 1718 are not exceptions. To these years belong a periodical, The Town Talk, which according to Steele himself was “designed to be helpful to the stage.”1Chit-Chat, the brief sequel to The Town Talk, is on the other hand almost exclusively political. So also are several other essays—some which Steele published and others which he evidently did not publish—on controversial measures under debate in Parliament. Steele's writing during these years—as indeed during most of his life—had the immediacy of purpose which we associate with journalism; he wrote on subjects of current concern to himself.
Die Entstehungsgeschichte Von Lessings Beiden Letzten Prosaschriften
Authors: Schneider Von Heinrich
Published: February 2007

Trotz einer umfangreichen, kritischen Literatur bedarf die Ent-stehungsgeschichte von G. E. Lessings beiden letzten und zugleich reifsten Prosaschriften, der Freimaurergespräche und der Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, noch immer in wesentlichen Einzelheiten der Klarung. Dies trifft auch auf die jüngste zusammenfassende Darstellung der vorliegenden Problème zu, wie sie W. v. Olshausen in den Einleitungen zu seiner Ausgabe sowie in den Anmerkungsbänden zu Lessings Werken (bei Bong) geboten hat. Gerade die dort zu Tage tretenden Unzuläng-lichkeiten und Irrtümer geben Anlaß, den einzelnen Ueberlieferungen über den Werdegang beider Werke erneut nachzugehen, ohne jedoch dabei zu übersehen, daß manches jetzt für die hier folgenden Untersuchungen benutzte Material zur Zeit der Abfassung oder beim Ab-schluß von Olshausens Erläuterungen vielleicht noch unbekannt war, während anderes zweifellos erst später veröffentlicht wurde. Andrerseits wird ein fur aile Mal auf Olshausens leicht zugänglichen und teil-weise sehr wertvollen Kommentàr zu verweisen sein, dessen Kenntnis schon darum auch für unsere Erörterungen vorausgesetzt wird, um unnotige Wiederholungen zu vermeiden. Außerdem ist gleich zu Beginn noch einmal an die oft betonten äußerlichen Gemeinsamkeiten der zwei Bekenntnisschriften zu erinnern: beide wurden iiber mehrere Jahre (1777 bezw. 1778–80) als Fragmente und anonym herausgegeben.
The Clarity of Browning's Ring Metaphor
Authors: Cundiff Paul A.
Published: February 2007

Browning's “ring” metaphor has remained for seventy-nine years one of the most baffling figures of speech in English poetry His critics do not differ concerning either the formation of a gold ring or the poet's intention in his metaphor, but they differ greatly on the applicability of the metaphor. One group believes Browning to have said that the contribution made by his fancy disappeared at the completion of the poem. Its members therefore insist that Browning, in The Ring and the Book, reproduced faithfully the facts of the Old Yellow Book. They have attempted to explain that he was at once a scientific historian in his treatment of fact and a poet in his treatment of truth. They have been unwilling to discredit his historical accuracy or to admit that he was not first of all a poet.
Thomas Wolfe: Dark Time
Authors: Church Margaret
Published: February 2007

In two passages of his recent book on Thomas Wolfe (1947), Herbert J. Muller has briefly, but incisively, dealt with the time concepts of Wolfe and Proust. He points out that while both writers depended upon sensory impressions to recall the past, Wolfe lacked the keen subjective analysis of Proust and stayed closer to the actual experience that produced his memories. Wolfe's interest was in fixity and change as they are in real life, while Proust “aspired to the realm of Essence or Being, where change is mere appearance” (p. 75). It is important, I believe, that these distinctions be made, for Wolfe, unlike Proust, was no philosopher and would without question have been confused by an array of Bergsonian metaphysics. While outwardly the time concepts of Wolfe and of Proust seem somewhat alike, a closer examination reveals that these concepts are in many respects different. But no distinctions were made, for instance, by Mary M. Colum in her article on “Literature of Today and Tomorrow” (Scribner's, Dec. 1936, p. 102), which stated that Wolfe's work might well be described as “Remembrance of Things Past”—that “like Proust he tells us of his struggles with Time elements.” And Joseph Warren Beach, in American Fiction 1920–1940 (1941), while acknowledging that Wolfe could not have accepted fully the implications of Proust's theories, found that Wolfe and Proust had had a common psychological experience. “It is found in the recall by means of present sensations or impressions of closely similar impressions received in extreme youth” (p. 192).
Problems of “Weltanschauung” in the Works of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff
Authors: Silz Walter
Published: February 2007

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was born in 1797, when German Classicism was at its height and Romanticism just launched. She died in 1848, in the revolutionary year that marked the end of an era. Her principal literary production falls into the 1830's and 1840's, decades in which traditional values were challenged and often discarded, years of upheaval and reorientation in German politics and religion and philosophy as well as in poetry. She was not connected with any of these innovative movements; in fact, she was shielded from them by bulwarks of “Stand” and religion, by the ingrained conservatism of her race and family, by her sex, and by her lonely and visionary nature. One cannot suppose that she ever read such books as Gutzkow's Watty, die Zweiflerin, or David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, or Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorslellung, or the treatises of the new materialistic science that was threatening to reduce the divine soul of an earlier faith and poetry to a system of physiological reactions. Yet these things were in the air, and she could not wholly escape them, in the sense that no life, however solitary, can remain unaffected by the intellectual climate of its time. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was, without intent or plan on her part, a link in the transition from Romanticism to Realism. The problems of “Weltanschauung” she wrestled with, to victory or defeat, are to a large extent the problems her contemporaries confronted, though her formulations of them were conditioned by the circumstances of her own peculiar, not to say eccentric, existence.
The Conundrums in Saxo's Hamlet Episode
Authors: Sperber Hans
Published: February 2007

Perhaps the most significant link between Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Saxo Grammaticus story about Amlethus is to be found in that part of the tale which describes the hero's feigned madness. Although the plot of the story follows a rather common pattern and even the characters, as presented by Saxo, are mostly well-known types that may be found in any number of legends, the picture of the suppressed youth who hides his superiority over his enemies behind double-talk and disguised meaning is certainly food for a poet's imagination. However, what gives the Danish story its strange attraction is precisely what makes it so difficult to understand its details. Puns and ambiguities in a foreign language are notoriously hard to understand, and even if we had the Danish original of Saxo's tale, we would probably find ourselves baffled by more than one of its word plays. Translated into flowery Latin by a man who can be shown to have misunderstood at least part of what his source offered, its real meaning has revealed itself to modern interpretation only gradually, and by no means completely.
A Middle English Treatise on Hermeneutics: Harley Ms. 2276, 32V-35V
Authors: Bowers R. H.
Published: February 2007

The fourfold interpretation of Holy Writ or of other authoritative texts, through the technique of exegesis commonly known as allegorical interpretation, was a well known cultural phenomenon throughout the Middle Ages.3 The practice of allegorical interpretation itself was well developed in the Western world by the time of Plato,4 and the fourfold method may be regarded as a further refinement of this technique. It constituted a tradition of remarkable vitality: as late as the early fifteenth century we find Erasmus inveighing against its abuses in The Praise of Folly with as much emphasis as Dante had defended it in his famed letter to Can Grande in an earlier century. It was taught at the University of Paris during the Middle Ages5.
Freedom: An Existentialist and an Idealist View
Authors: Kahn Ludwig W.
Published: February 2007

One day, in the darkest period of the Inquisition, Christ came back to Earth (so Ivan Karamzov begins his parable in Dostoyevsky's novel); but the Cardinal Inquisitor had Him imprisoned because His return was disturbing the order established by the Church. Sixteen hundred years earlier, when Christ had first come, He had refused to enslave the will of men; although by miracle, power, and authority He could have established himself beyond dispute (and Satan had tempted Him to do so), He chose to leave men free to decide what is good and what evil. But can man bear the torment of having to make such a decision? Did Christ not ask too much of man? Dostoyevsky's Great Inquisitor thought so, and therefore he and the Church substituted obedience for freedom; they lifted from man the terrible burden of free choice, they made the decision for man so that he merely needed to submit to rule and law. They, the Cardinal Inquisitor and the Church, took upon themselves the curse of knowledge; they suffered and were unhappy so that millions might be happy and relieved of the necessity of choice. Man dreads freedom and is eager to exchange it for certainty and security, so the Cardinal Inquisitor informed Christ; and Christ listened and understood how heavy was the burden of freedom which the Great Inquisitor took upon himself. Christ understood, we may assume, when he approached the old man in silence and kissed him, even though this kiss was the only answer that Christian love, humility, and forgiveness could give.
Origine et sens du vers claudélien
Authors: Strauss Claude André
Published: February 2007

On a convenu, par un noble euphémisme, d'appeler la parole versifiée “le langage des dieux.” Mais il n'y a guère que les poètes qui prennent parfois cette expression usée au sérieux. Pour bien ces gens elle reste un simple cliché: l'expérience qu'elle recouvre est absente, nul rapport ne s'établit entre la source invisible du monde et les formes créées de l'apparence. Mais le poète est conscient au plus haut point des relations qui unissent la vie spirituelle au langage chargé de la transposer dans l'univers sensible. Comme l'a chanté Rilke dans les Sonnets à Orphée:Est-il bien d'ici? Non, des deuxroyaumes surgit sa vaste nature.Plus savamment pliera les ramures des saulesqui des saules apprit à sonder les racines.
Courtly Love in the Spanish Cancioneros
Authors: Green Otis H.
Published: February 2007

The unfortunate pronouncements of Menéndez y Pelayo have condemned the poetry of the early Spanish cancioneros to undeserved neglect. A revision is in order, for the subject has importance for both Spanish and comparative literature. This poetry is not a mere jumble of far-fetched superficialities. Progressively purged of license and adapted to Christian courtship and marriage, it yet preserves in fairly definite shape the traditional pattern of courtly love. It is necessary to apply to Spanish cancionero poetry concepts that have been worked out for other European literatures.
“If Shadows Be a Picture's Excellence”: An Experiment in Critical Bibliography
Authors: Wolf Edwin
Published: February 2007

Some years ago Dr. W. W. Greg in an article, “Bibliography—An Apologia”, ably presented the aims and scope of analytical bibliography. Among the phases of that science which he treated at some length was critical bibliography, the study of the transmission of texts. As a bibliographer he emphasized the value of the critical or bibliographical approach, “the humble collation of textual variations and reconstruction of scribal steps”, as contrasted to the metacritical, the intuitional and personal selection of the best or most authentic. Although Dr. Greg's concept applies to the transmission of all texts, I am limiting my study, for the sake of illustration, to a particular case.
The Planet-Tempest Passage in Epipsychidion
Authors: Cameron Kenneth Neill
Published: February 2007

The action of the central autobiographical passage (lines 267–383) of Epipsychidion runs roughly as follows. The poet, in his search for love, first encountered several “mortal forms”, some of them “fair”, others “wise”, one of them “not true”; then, for some unexplained reason he entered a period of emotional crisis—“stood at bay, wounded and weak and panting” (272-275)—from which he was rescued by one whom he compares to his ideal of love as the Moon to the Sun. At first, we gather, he was enchanted with this moonlike love (276–280) but later began to realize that she was “cold” (281–307) :
And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed;Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead.
Dickens and the Psychology of Dreams
Authors: Winters Warrington
Published: February 2007

The long and curious letter to a certain Dr. Stone, in which Dickens discusses his theories of dream psychology, was not published until 1938. Containing approximately seventeen hundred words, it provides us with an ample platform from which to observe the novelist's fictional use of dreams. Oddly enough, the letter, like the whole subject of Dickens' dream fiction, has not yet attracted students of Victorian fiction.
Impact of French Naturalism on American Critical Opinion 1877-1892
Authors: Frierson William C. , Edwards Herbert
Published: February 2007

When Main Street met with a startling good reception in 1920, Lewis was writing for a public that was ready for him. The way had been prepared by Huneker and Mencken and Shaw and George Moore and a self-critical national consciousness induced by idealistic extravagances during a war. Lewis neatly capped a progression. Back of him was Dreiser and back of Dreiser were Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane and the French naturalists. This line of development, of course, is sufficiently well known. It is also well known that American novelists of the 'nineties who were influenced by the French naturalists had a hard time getting started, even though they adopted a decorous treatment of sex and unconventional situations. Crane unsuccessfully sought for three years to find a publisher for Maggie before deciding to publish it himself. Hamlin Garland waged war against sentimentality and sensationalism in order to win a public for his own incisive writings of western life. He even tried to make the controversy one between a democratic and fact-loving West and an aristocratic East tied to traditions and sentiments. In order to attract support, Norris sought to emulate the epic qualities of Zola's writings by having each novel centered about some major enterprise or feature of American life, but his novels in the early 1900's had to make their way against a considerable amount of critical disapproval.
Unamuno and Pascal: Notes on the Concept of Agony
Authors: López-Moeillas Juan
Published: February 2007

In 1923, the Parisian Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale invited Miguel de Unamuno to contribute to a special issue then being prepared in commemoration of the tercentenary of the birth of Pascal. Accordingly Unamuno wrote a short essay, “La Foi pascalienne”, seventh and last of the commemorative Etudes sur Pascal, as the volume was entitled. The following year, Unamuno, exiled in Paris, doubled the length of the essay and incorporated it as Chapter ix of his Agonie du christianisme, a book which, like the absorbed essay, had been composed for a French-reading public; for it was a cahier requested by P. L. Couchoud for inclusion in a series of monographs on Christianity. Both the essay and the book were translated into French by Unamuno's close friend, the hispanist Jean Cassou.
The Way of a Realist: A Study of Howells' Use of the Saratoga Scene
Authors: Reeves John K.
Published: February 2007

William Dean Howells became the first great champion of realism in American fiction, not by setting out to reach this goal, but as the logical culmination of his own development as a writer. He began to write about his own experiences and observations in the natural course of his job as a newspaper reporter. Later as American consul in Venice he continued to record and comment on his experience. Fiction entered his writing in a mild way in Their Wedding Journey (1871), when he combined experiences from two trips, created the characters of Basil and Isabel March, and invented little episodes to enliven the travelogue. In succeeding novels plot superseded geography as the unifying element, and characters were more fully drawn, but his own experiences continued to provide the raw material out of which his stories were formed.
Nietzsche's Idea of Luther in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches
Authors: Bluhm Heinz
Published: February 2007

Until 1876 Nietzsche paid Luther very high compliments. The works and letters of his first creative period abound with praise for the German reformer. The youthful Nietzsche, professor of Greek and philosopher of culture, more than once expressed his intellectual indebtedness to the spirit of Wittenberg. In those early years he felt himself the heir of the Lutheran Reformation and the inveterate foe of Roman Catholicism. Though anything but an orthodox Protestant, he was nevertheless firmly convinced of the intellectual and moral superiority of Protestantism to the Church of Rome. As late as 1876 he looked upon Protestantism as a source of light and freedom and upon Roman Catholicism as the embodiment of darkness and intellectual bondage. However, all his complimentary utterances on Luther and the Reformation are scarcely based on an intimate knowledge of the man and the movement he inspired. They rather express little more than the idea of Luther held by most educated Protestants of that day. What he said reflects the general, favorable attitude characteristic of Protestant Germany: Luther the great hero of the Reformation, the first representative of modern culture, without whom the world in which we live would be quite unthinkable. In other words, Nietzsche identified himself as late as Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876) with the then prevalent Protestant opinion of the Reformation: “Halten wir an dem … Geiste fest, der sich in der deutschen Reformation … offenbart hat …” (IV, 54).
Cooper's The Sea Lions and Wilkes' Narrative
Authors: Gates W. B.
Published: February 2007

From “Head's” in New York, on August 23, 1844, James Fenimore Cooper wrote Mrs. Cooper: “Charles Wilkes is in this house superintending the publication of his work. It will be a very magnificent book, and I make no doubt will do him credit.” This book is the handsome and profusely illustrated Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838-1842, a record prepared by Lieutenant Wilkes, commander of the expedition sent out by the United States Navy. In the preface to The Sea Lions (1849) and several times in the novel itself Cooper refers to Wilkes, but the extent of his indebtedness to the Narrative seems not to have been pointed out.
The Baroque Impasse in the Calderonian Drama
Authors: Oppenheimer Max
Published: February 2007

One of the main characteristics of the Renaissance was its break with the attitude towards life of mediaeval society. The new Hellenistic, classical, humanistic spirit taught the Renaissance man that, far from being a groveling worm, he was a glorious creature capable of infinite individual development in a world which was his to interrogate, explore, and enjoy. The Renaissance exalted the human element, stressed the importance of human interests, and asserted the dignity of man—a trend which may be noted in most authors of the period. Rabelais portrays his heroes as giants, to whom nothing seems impossible, and places no limitations on their actions. Shakespeare writes: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!” Viewed from the standpoint of a social behaviorist, the Renaissance teaches mediaeval man, whose interests as an individual were completely subordinated to his function as an element in a feudalistic social unit, that it is possible and right for him to assert and realize self. Social conformity is no longer the only possible relation between man and the world about him. Therefore, the Renaissance man, more energetic and enthusiastic than his mediasval forefather, takes pleasure in a certain spirit of opposition to supposed human and known social limitations; he glories in nonconformity, he rejoices in isolation and in standing up against society and in consciously not doing that which he knows the society he lives in expects him to do. “To brave the disapproval of men is tonic. … Conflict is a necessity of the active soul.” In Spain, as elsewhere, the Renaissance exerted the same influence and a like need for self-expression was felt. Let us then examine the state of mind of Calderonian characters, who, living in the seventeenth century, should by then be well imbued with Renaissance thought, in an effort to determine the fundamental psychological needs underlying their urge towards self-realization.
Sansovino's Concetti Politici and Their Debt to Guicciardini
Authors: Luciani Vincent
Published: February 2007

Francesco Sansovino (1521-83), prolific translator, publisher, editor, and polygraph, deserves a place in the history of Renaissance culture, not because he can lay any real claim to originality but because he played a significant rôle in the dissemination of Italian literature. Of his many works one of the most popular and most important was without doubt his Concetti politici, a collection of maxims which first appeared in 1578, but which was subsequently republished in modified form in 1583, 1588, 1598, and 1608, together with Guicciardini's Av-vertimenti and Lottini's Avvedimenti civili. More important still, the original text of 1578 was translated into English in 1590 by Robert Hitchcock under the title of Quintessence of Wit, and as such was to make its contribution to the development of the English maxim and the English essay, as Elbert N. S. Thompson pointed out some years ago. In the preface to the 1578 edition, Sansovino states that he drew his 805 maxims from two histories and thirty-four authors, whom he lists by name. Among these authorities are Aristotle, Bembo, Cicero, Comines, Giovio, Guevara, Guicciardini, Livy, Plato, Polybius, Sallust, Tacitus, and Thucydides. The list, however, lacks one name, that of Machiavelli, the one writer that Sansovino consulted perhaps more than any other.
The Last Scene in Goethe's Faust
Authors: Schuchard G. C. L.
Published: February 2007

Students of Faust have known for many years that Goethe was influenced by Swedenborg when he wrote that tragedy. They have differed only as to the extent and degree of this influence. The list of earlier investigators is too long to thank them individually and, at the same time, to point out why it is necessary once more to scrutinize this influence as far as the last scene of Faust is concerned. In general, it may be said that they have concentrated their investigations mainly on the way the “spirit-seer” of the eighteenth century influenced the spirits in our scene as to appearance, speech, food, abodes, and other incidentals. Since they all started their investigation with the generally accepted assumption that Faust had “saved” himself through his last earthly endeavors in behalf of his fellow-men, they saw no reason to check the way Goethe depicts his salvation against Swedenborg's doctrine of redemption. This investigation starts from the opposite assumption, viz. that the hero at the end of his terrestial journey has reached the lowest and most tragic moment of his life (see my “Julirevolution, St. Simonismus und die Faustpartien von 1831, ”Zeitschrift fuer deutsche Philologie, vol. 60).
Shakespeare's Stage Blood and its Critical Significance
Authors: Kirschbaum Leo
Published: February 2007

The Elizabethans were familiar with scenes in which stage blood was liberally used. The tradition was old. In Cambises (1560's), “Enter Cruelty and Murder with bloody hands.” They grasp their victim:

[Cru.] Even now I strike, his body to wound.

Strike him in divers places.

Beholde, now his blood springs out on the ground! A little bladder of vineger prickt.
Edward Bellamy's Religious Thought
Authors: Schiffman Joseph
Published: February 2007

Looking Backward, America's classic contribution to theutopian novel, has a religious genesis which has never been fully explored. Although Edward Bellamy has received widespread critical attention, his thought has not been adequately related to the religious temper of his time and region. Reared in traditional Calvinist concepts with emphasis on prayer, soul-searching, and individual respectability, Bellamy propounded new, daring concepts of the divine to meet the challenges posed by the industrialization of New England. In his religious doubts and strivings, he drew from, and contributed heavily to, three inter-related movements that reshaped religious thought in late nineteenth-century America—the New Theology, the Religion of Humanity, and the Social Gospel. This paper presents religion as a major genetic factor in Edward Bellamy's social thought and in modern American intellectual.
Quirinus Kuhlmann: The Religious Apprenticeship
Authors: Beare Robert L.
Published: February 2007

Rudolf Borchardt once referred to Quirinus Kuhlmann as the greatest and most dangerous poet in German literature. Whether we agree with such a sweeping judgment or not, we can at least safely describe him as one of the most completely neglected of all important German poets. This neglect is partly the result of the rarity of most of his works and partly the result of the persistence of the eighteenth-century lack of sympathy for the problems of religious mysticism and illumination. The source for almost all of the studies of Kuhlmann has been the essay by J. C. F. Adelung in his Geschichte der menschlichen Narrheil. The title reveals clearly the partisan nature of his work. In this study, one of a series on Kuhlmann, we shall attempt to cast light on bis early years and on the gradual progress of his religious thought until he becomes converted to the belief in the imminent coming of the millennium.
The Imagery of Saint-John Perse's Neiges
Authors: Knodel Arthur J.
Published: February 2007

The most significant studies to date of Saint-John Perse approach his work “extensively,” keeping the poet's total output in the foreground. Commentary on individual poems is not entirely lacking, especially on Anabase and Vents, but nothing approaching exhaustive textual analysis of any one poem has yet been attempted. The present study has been undertaken in the belief that an intensive approach to a small segment of Perse's work may supplement and give sharper relief to the insights of more general studies and perhaps lead some readers more directly to the actual text of one of the unquestioned major poets of our time.
Le Suicide de Gérard de Nerval
Authors: Jean Raymond
Published: February 2007

“Cause Inconnue.” Ces mots flagellent. Les voici bien inscrits dans une colonne du registre de la Morgue où tombèrent quelques renseignements secs sur le suicide présumé de Gérard de Nerval. C'est une excellente conclusion; et qui pourrait couper court à bien des querelles. Faut-il pourtant que cette position de repli nous soit elle-même refusée? L'idée du suicide accueillie par une poignée de fonctionnaires, résolument sinon en tout état de cause (quand une autre colonne interroge “suicide ou homicide,” il faut bien répondre), n'a cessé, en effet, d'être remise en question.
“The Jewelled Bow”: A Study in Browning's Imagery and Humanism
Authors: Raymond William O.
Published: February 2007

In Browning's second letter to Elizabeth Barrett he uses the imagery of “white light” versus “prismatic hues” to represent the contrast between the full and direct reflection of her personality in lyric utterance, and the partial and oblique refraction of his own personality in the medium of the dramatic monologue. A little later, he reveals his consciousness of the limitations of his poetry through a kindred image: “these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you …” In response, Elizabeth Barrett, while deprecating the merit of her own poetry and paying tribute to the worth of Browning's, acknowledges the justice of his self-criticism: “and in fact, you have not written the R. B. poem yet—your rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight. I see you only in your moon” (i, 22). In one of her letters, though referring to “the glory of dramatic art,” she urges: “Yet I am conscious of wishing you to take the other crown besides—and after having made your own creatures speak in clear human voices, to speak yourself out of that personality which God made, and with the voice which he tuned into such power and sweetness of speech” (ii, 182).
Three Middle English Poems on the Apostles' Creed
Authors: Bowers R. H.
Published: February 2007

Three distinct but often interwoven topics—a commentary on the doctrinal import of the Apostles' Creed, a relation of the circumstances of its actual formulation, and a narration of the subsequent careers of the Apostles—constituted themes of pleasure and curiosity to the medieval hagiographer and poet. Surviving Old English texts illustrate the first and third topics clearly: the Fata Apostolorum in the Vercelli Book (fol. 52v–53r), and the Credo in Deum Omnipotentem in Bodley MS. Junius 121 (fol. 46r–47r). An early Middle English text in British Museum MS. Nero A.xiv (fol. 131v) preserves uniquely a truncated version of the Creed. While it would be impossible to state with any certainty the approximate date when these traditions reached England from the Continent, we may safely assume that they were well established in the vernacular as well as in Church Latin from early Christian times.
Rima's Mother
Authors: Fairchild Hoxie N.
Published: February 2007

Admiration for the best qualities of W. H. Hudson it not inconsistent with a lively distaste for Rima, the bird-maiden of Green Mansions. One cannot believe in her as anything. Too avian to be human and too human to be preternatural, too unearthly to be a woman and too womanly to be a bird, she is the most striking example of the truth of Robert Hamilton's statement that the erotic element in Hudson's romances is “quite extraordinarily unconvincing.”
Tennyson's “Allegory in the Distance”
Authors: Burchell S. C.
Published: February 2007

The moral significance attached by the nineteenth century to Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King has been largely responsible for its gentle disappearance into that twilight world of poems known to all but read by none. However, when once the poem can be understood as something more than a tapestry of allegorical figures on a medieval landscape, the way is clear to see its connection with such a poem, for example, as The Waste Land, on the surface so apparently antithetical. Eliot's use of the Grail legend and his symbolic revelation of man's moral infertility have their counterparts in Tennyson's epic—the difference, if there is one, being that between suggestion and explication. Eliot says: “He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience” (v. 328-330). This characteristic motif of the poem has a relevant connection with the passing of Arthur and the demoralization of the Round Table. But in neither poem is there a curate's moral to be extracted, a reformer's remedy suggested. Both poems simply present, in a form suitable to their century's tastes, a diagnosis of modern civilization—a civilization as hollow as the sacred Mount of Camelot.
The Humanity of Molière's Dom Juan
Authors: Doolittle James
Published: February 2007

The critical history of Molière's Dom Juan is full of uncertainties and controversy on literary and many other grounds. Among its competent critics there seems to be no clear-cut decision for or against the play. Its enemies willingly ascribe to it a high degree of excellence, even to calling it a masterpiece. Its friends, not all of whom agree that it is such, are equally willing to find fault with much of it. Friend or foe, those who call it a masterpiece do not say with any precision what they mean: There is a marked tendency on the part of most writers to pass it over with a minimum of comment of any kind.
“Only to Grow”: Change in the Poetry of E. E. Cummings
Authors: Von Abele Rudolph
Published: February 2007

A prevalent assumption about Cummings' poetry has been that it lacks a history—that it shows no growth, as if a man had been treading water for thirty years. This is a serious thing to say about a body of work which not only has become legendary in its time, but can also boast a respectable number of poems widely praised as first-rate. Early in Cummings' career it was brought home to many of his readers that he would use, to the borders of extravagance if he so liked, a profusion of technical devices sometimes difficult, sometimes eccentric, sometimes of no apparent usefulness at all. It was also made clear that he would take attitudes which, whether defensible or not, were not to be confined within the limits of what the world regards as either rational or decorous. One risk taken by any artist when he chooses at the beginning of his creative life to be perceptibly “different” from his traditions, is that, whether he actually adheres to it or not, he will ever after be read by the light of his divergence. And Cummings has not escaped this fate. He has too often been read as if he had stopped growing in the mid-1920's, and had turned into that most depressing of all literary freaks, the artist who parodies himself. The main end of this essay will be to demonstrate the injustice and the falsity of such a view.
“No Romantick Absurdities or Incredible Fictions”: The Relation of Johnson's Rasselas to Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia
Authors: Leyburn Ellen Douglass
Published: February 2007

There is a measure of incongruity in seeing the translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Jerome Lobo at the head of the lists of the works of Samuel Johnson, who seems of all writers the one least likely to be swept away by the glamor of the orient. His casting his own philosophical reflections in the form of an oriental tale in Rasselas is less remarkable since in doing so he was following a convention of which the actual representation of oriental life formed no part. He could very well have written Rasselas without having any particular interest in the East, for in spite of Boswell's enthusiastic claim that “this Tale, with all the charms of oriental imagery, and all the force and beauty of which the English language is capable, leads us through the most important scenes of human life,” it is a commonplace of criticism that the scenes of human life displayed are not really linked to the scene of Abyssinia and that the Cairo of Rasselas is as actually London as the sage of the story is Johnson himself. The reader who goes to Rasselas seeking “the charms of oriental imagery” is doomed to disappointment. Yet the feeling persists that the spell which was cast on the mind of the youthful Johnson by the Abyssinia of Lobo must have reasserted itself when the mature man came to set down his somber reflections on human life at the time of his mother's death. W. P. Courtney and D. Nichol Smith, discussing the composition of Rasselas, comment that “very little of the Oriental life of Lobo is reproduced in Rasselas, though that narrative, as his first labour in literature, must have been embedded in the author's mind.” The mystery of Johnson's being attracted to the work of Lobo in the first place and of its relation, tentatively suggested by Courtney and Smith, to his own oriental tale is resolved by an examination of A Voyage to Abyssinia and its accompanying dissertations.
King Hamlet's Ambiguous Ghost
Authors: West Robert H.
Published: February 2007

A few years ago Roy W. Battenhouse published what is perhaps the most original and provoking theory of the nature of the ghost in Hamlet since the article by W. W. Greg which, with its contention that the apparition is to be understood as wholly subjective, prompted J. D. Wilson's study of Elizabethan spirit-lore. Battenhouse argues in essence that the ghost shows far too much vindictiveness (in the cellarage too much artfulness) to be a saved soul. It must therefore, he thinks, be out of some paganesque purgatory rather than the Catholic one, as Wilson had confidently asserted. Whether or not Battenhouse may be thought“ to have made his point, he has certainly raised some real difficulties for those who would regard the ghost as Catholic.
Dreiser's The “Genius” and Everett Shinn, the “Ash-Can” Painter
Authors: Kwiat Joseph J.
Published: February 2007

During the period in which Theodore Dreiser wrote his first five novels, Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and The “Genius,” the novelist indicated a particularly strong interest in those American painters who interpreted the city scene. And it was the so-called New York Realists—Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J. Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn—who made the greatest appeal to him from approximately 1899 to 1915. Several reasons may be suggested for Dreiser's sympathy for this particular group of painters. First, the newspaper and magazine careers of the artists, with the exception of Henri, closely paralleled Dreiser's own career; and both Dreiser and the graphic artists eventually utilized this common background for their more ambitious work as novelist and as painter. Second, with Henri leading the attack, the group of painters emerged as the most aggressive force in the artistic revolt against the domination of the tradition-bound National Academy when they became known as the notorious “Ash-Can school” and “apostles of ugliness” soon after the turn of the century. Dreiser, of course, served a similar function in his challenge to the Genteel Tradition, the literary equivalent of the Academy in the United States. Third, the Ash-Can painters not only believed, as Dreiser did, that an artist must be an honest and truthful recorder and interpreter of the life he saw and knew, but it was in their depiction of these “truths” of city life, its violence and brutality and its beauty, that their relationship to Dreiser is most clearly seen.
The Immediate Source of The Dynasts
Authors: Fairchild Hoxie N.
Published: February 2007

In my opinion Robert (“Fleshly School”) Buchanan's The Drama of Kings (1871) exerted so strong an influence on Hardy's Dynasts that it deserves to be regarded as the immediate source of that work. The contention would appear to be virginal. The biographies and critical studies of Abercrombie, Blunden, Brennecke, Chakravarty, Chew, Duffin, Florence Emily Hardy, Hedgcock, Holland, McDowall, Rutland, South-worth, Symons, Weber, and Webster provide, in their greatly varying degree, suggestions as to the philosophical and literary background of Hardy's trilogy. None of them, however, suggests any relation between The Dynasts and The Drama of Kings. In fact none of them even mentions the name of Robert Williams Buchanan with the exception of Edmund Blunden, who notes the interesting fact that Buchanan dedicated to Hardy his novel, Come Live with Me and Be My Love. He might also have observed that Buchanan elsewhere devotes a laudatory poem to Hardy and warmly praises “Tom Hardy” in another poem.
Shelley and Malthus
Authors: Pulos C. E.
Published: February 2007

No one has hitherto undertaken an investigation of Shelley's relation to Robert Malthus. Previous Shelley scholarship contains no adequate examination of the remarks on Malthus in Shelley's prose. No attempt, furthermore, has ever been made to relate these remarks in the prose to any of the poems; and, therefore, some probable and significant allusions to Malthus in the poetry have gone entirely unnoticed. Various scholars, to be sure, have called attention to the main allusions discoverable in the burlesque Oedipus Tyrannus; but past interpretations of these references are in need of some modification. More important, however, than what pertains to Shelley's burlesque is the probable occurrence of hitherto quite unsuspected allusions to Malthus in a number of the major serious poems—including Prometheus Unbound.
Goethes Phantasiearbeit am Fauststoff im Jahre 1771
Authors: Von Maier Hans Albert
Published: February 2007

Seit mehr als hundert Jahren haben sich Literarhistoriker, Amateure und—leider audi—Philosophen um die Erhellung der Faustenste-hungsgeschichte gemüht. Trotz unendlichen Fleißes, glücklicher Funde und archivalischer Mitteilungen ist das Ende des Rätselratens auch heute noch nicht in Sicht.
“Seraph of Heaven”: A Shelleyan Dream in Hardy's Fiction
Authors: Bartlett Phyllis
Published: February 2007

In 1866 Hardy bought a small volume published the year before in “The Cottage Library” series at Halifax called Queen Mab and Other Poems by Percy B. Shelley. The “other poems” are “Alastor,” “The Revolt of Islam,” and “Prometheus Unbound.” This book is now in the possession of Frederick B. Adams, Jr., who has most kindly allowed me to copy the numerous markings Hardy made in the text of “The Revolt of Islam” and “Prometheus Unbound.” Under Hardy's autograph, address, and the date “1866” on the title-page is the following inscription written by Sir James Barrie in 1933: “This Shelley and another volume like it were given to me by Mrs Hardy after Τ H's death. In his early days when he was in an architect's office (Blomfields) in Adelphi Terrace he carried these two books in his pockets and often read them aloud and discoursed on them to [sic] the other clerks. All the linings and marks on them were made by him in those days.” “Another volume like it” suggests a matching selection from Shelley's lyrics, but such a book has not come to light and Mr. Adams thinks that the other volume Barrie referred to was the Swinburne that Hardy is known to have carried about with him at the same time.
“Song of Myself” as Inverted Mystical Experience
Authors: Miller James E.
Published: February 2007

Whitman's “Song of Myself” has long been considered a loosely organized, perhaps even chaotic poem which is held together, if at all, by his own robust personality. He himself may have contributed to this concept of the poem. Untitled when it appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, it was called “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in the 1856 edition; “Walt Whitman” in the 1860 edition, and was given the present title in the 1881 edition. This frequent change of title together with the many revisions made in the numbering of the sections and in the text itself suggests one of two possibilities: either Whitman was uncertain, perhaps confused as to the basic nature of what he was writing; or he was struggling to perfect a work of art the execution of which had fallen short of the conception. Too frequently the critics have assumed as self-evident the first of these possibilities. Inability to find a structure in “Song of Myself” has resulted, I believe, from a failure to find a center of relevancy, an “informing idea,” to which the parts of the poem may be related. It is the purpose of this paper to propose such a center, to show how it gives structure to the poem, and to examine the parts of the poem in detail to test their relevancy to this central “informing idea.”