Many in the profession, though apparently comfortable, feel demoralized. The prospect of unalienating work impelled many of us to become teachers of language and literature. The humanities, we assumed, would make the world a better place. Yet the assumption by an intelligentsia that the life of intellect will improve humanity is a self-serving ideology. We teach our subjects in institutions that are part of a rationalized arrangement for the profitable use of knowledge. Our profession is part of that rationalization process. Thus there is a contradiction between the profession's humanist ideology and what we actually do. This knowledge has led many to be demoralized. We know that we do not control our conditions of work. Therefore our labor is alienated, and we are an intellectual proletariat. We should struggle against these conditions in an organized fashion. But the attempt to change the nature of our profession, our departments, and our schools can be effective only within the context of the larger struggle to change the role culture plays in a capitalist society. Ultimately such cultural transformations involve the struggle to transform the society as a whole. It is a struggle we cannot escape.

The clashing and contradictory responses created by a pathetic tale such as Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale are best explained by the opposition of tragic (and therefore involving) elements found in the narrative events and comic elements found in the distancing style, in the faintly comic story, and above all in the happy Christian ending. Man of Law's Tale is not a Shakespearean tragedy but what may be called a tragedy of victimization, prototypes of which may be found in the Saint's life and in late classical romance. This opposition between emotional involvement and distancing is manifested in various ways, not the least of which is the metrical form of Man of Law's Tale. All this fits in well with what might be called the contempt of the world tradition which advocates a distancing from this world for the sake of an ultimate happy ending in heaven. It is no accident that a major source for Man of Law's Tale is Innocent III's De contemptu mundi.

A comparison of the text of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy with its sources shows the latter to have undergone substantial alterations apparently wrought unconsciously by the author's memory. These alterations run to type: figures are exaggerated and extraordinary events are made more extraordinary. Sometimes figments are created by the fusion of two remembered names, or the elements of two stories, into one. The resulting distortions and figments often exceed their originals in literary charm, but the effect is never to falsify or misrepresent the meaning of the original.

The language of Ford's The Broken Heart, unlike that of his other plays, mainly explains the inevitable operation of the processes that the play dramatizes, delineating cause and effect in feelings and actions. The indicative names signify what their bearers have become within the chain of causality. The beginning of the play is heavily explanatory and characters continue throughout to explain what they and others do and have become. Many of these speeches are imprecise: groping, periphrastic, ambiguous syntactically, and metaphorically unstable. The words, furthermore, describe experience rather than become a part of it. Short, direct statements bring the longer passages to rest, the two styles forming a rhythmical unit yet balancing each other and providing a sense of things unsaid. Especially distinctive are verb forms that concretize interaction among abstract nouns to explain how and why things happen. Some are reiterated as key words indicative of the pattern of the whole. The language of ceremonies, violated and reshaped into antithetical ceremonies, particularly those of propitiation and sacrifice, gives form and significance to the pattern of causation and intensifies as the play moves to its conclusion. Through his language, Ford controls any tendency to melodrama and harmonizes surprise with inevitability, narrowness with range, and explicitness with implication.

Dryden's poem, though praised for its style, remains generally unappreciated because it is regarded as public and theological in its theme and argumentative in method. What is overlooked is the vivid personal confession of faith, the poem's most vital and appealing element. The neoclassical strategy of providing a literary treatment through the beast fable has obscured the personal drama. Both the Panther and the Hind are at times personae for Dryden: they dramatize the poet's struggle to achieve faith and charity. Their debate over church authority recapitulates in the present moment the doctrinal doubts of Dryden before his conversion. The more spiritual struggle, between charity and humility (represented by the Hind) and pride and revenge (represented by the Panther), is also crucial in the poem since pride is innate in the poet and prompts him still to revenge against enemies like Stillingfleet and Burnet. The poem not only provides a vivid, dramatic testimony to the poet's unending struggle to achieve practical piety, but as a neoclassical work, it transforms the personal drama into the pattern of the universal Christian drama to achieve faith and charity.

Much of the detail in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year is derived from historical sources, but the focus of the book is on the internal conflicts of the narrator. This focus is achieved by several means: (1) H.F. structures his account around! s repentance of the decision to remain in London; (2) he frequently comments on his not entirely successful attempts to comprehend the nature of morality in a time of plague; (3) he uses many biblical references to suggest spiritual interpretations of physical reality. Instead of directing the spiritual meanings of his narrative primarily outward toward the reader for a didactic purpose, Defoe used these meanings to create a psychologically complex and interesting central character. The morally disorienting forces of the plague expose the tensions within the narrator, and we see his conflicts and mounting anxiety. This focus on the narrator makes A Journal of the Plague Year something more like a novel than like either history or the seventeenth-century pious writings that lie in its background.

Blake's attitude toward sexual love changed in significant ways during the late 1790's. Before that time, Blake thought of sex as potentially liberating—as a prime method of achieving the fourfold vision of Eternity. After that time he connected sexual love with pity and compassion, not with liberation. He came to think of sexual love as a force which tied individuals to the endless cycles of the fallen world; a force which at best might lead to the delightful, but limited, threefold vision of Beulah. Details of this important shift of attitude are suggested on the basis of close examination and discussion of three poems: “William Bond,” “My Spectre Around Me…,” and “The Crystal Cabinet.”

Thomas Carlyle's writing has been deplored by some critics, Northrop Frye among them, as anachronistic; to the extent, however, that Carlyle considered time a “liar” and a “universal wonder-hider,” he deliberately employed anachronism both structurally and thematically in his work to express his most characteristic insights. The material of Past and Present, for example, is put together so as not merely to emphasize the relevance of past events to present conditions but also to insist upon their identity and even, curiously enough, their simultaneity. The structures of his works thus resemble those of the Eddas, described by him as tales of “successive generations” which are nevertheless “flung out for us in one level of distance… like a picture painted on the same canvas.” This phenomenological view of history, in which contiguity replaces continuity as the key relationship between the elements of experience, also informs Carlyle's politics and economics, giving to them their familiar intensity and antirational bias, without, however, rendering them entirely impractical. Insofar as Carlyle's anachronism represents the writer's stubborn resistance to change, it may properly be deplored. But insofar as it means rejection of the tyranny of mechanical chronology, it is a phenomenon in the author's work worthy of study.

One of Robert Graves's favorites among his own poems is “The Naked and the Nude,” frequently anthologized but rarely commented upon by critics. Sir Kenneth Clark's The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), a work of art history, most likely served as the initial stimulus for this poem. The initial chapter of Clark's book, which appeared one year before Graves's poem, has the same title as the poem. Analysis shows that the poem develops an argument for frank, direct nakedness as opposed to cunning, prurient nudity; this argument is also implied in Clark's monumental study of nude art. Further, Clark is himself influenced by various English poets; hence, a reciprocal process is here at woik, resulting in a cross-pollination between two distinct disciplines. Discovery of this catalyst for Graves's poem is valuable because it provides us with insights into the nature of Graves's imaginative processes, and it also helps to explain Graves's preference for this poem.

Although Frost's first volume is consistently taken to be a random collection of lyrics, this does not square with the poet's remarks about it. In both private and public writings, Frost indicated that the lyrics were selected and arranged into a narrative sequence tracing the development of a youth through what he at one point summarized as a “Phase of Post-adolescence.” The lyrics follow the youth from initial, immature withdrawal from society, to final, mature acceptance of himself both as an individual and as a budding poet. But this narrative intent is recognizable only when the first edition of A Boy's Will is examined, because Frost made significant changes in later versions. For a variety of reasons, the first edition does not esthetically satisfy as a narrative cycle. Nevertheless, showing in detail how Frost sought to impose a narrative frame on the lyrics is significant in two ways. It makes it possible to suggest, in the course of the discussion, readings of individual poems which differ from those which the poet himself, sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly, later endorsed. In the larger context, it provides insight into the position of the thirty-eight-year-old poet at the beginning of his public career; A Boy's Will emerges at once as Frost's retrospective look at what he had been, and a harbinger of what he would become.

William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (1939) contains many allusions to the lives and writings of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. The parallels to A Farewell to Arms (1929), often noted by critics, are more numerous and more meaningful than hitherto shown. They work in context with references to Anderson's Dark Laughter (1925) and with sketches of Anderson and Hemingway and a full portrait of Anderson's second wife, Tennessee Mitchell, who seems to be the model for Faulkner's heroine, Charlotte Rittenmeyer. The background of these allusions is the mid-twenties, when Hemingway and Faulkner both benefited from Anderson's encouragement and aid but lost his friendship, possibly through related incidents. One explanation for the mingling of the Anderson-Hemingway material in The Wild Palms is that it represents a gesture of gratitude and artistic agreement from Faulkner to Anderson set against Hemingway's behavior to the older writer and triggered, in part, by a visit Anderson paid to Faulkner in 1937 when the Mississippian was injured in New York. The allusions also make plain Faulkner's philosophical and artistic differences with Hemingway, provide insight into his view of a major competitor, and show the intricate workings of Faulkner's art.

In writing La Princesse de Clèves Mme de Lafayette has reduced the novel to a series of scenes in juxtaposition. Each one of the scenes represents the state of mind of the heroine of the novel in its content as well as in its form. The essential trait of the central character is her refusal to accept an encounter with the man she loves, an encounter that would realize her greatest desire. Thus Mme de Lafayette makes each one of the encounters, forced upon the two persons in love by their life within a closed society, an “imperfect encounter”: she places her two characters face to face but withdraws from them an element—on each occasion a different one—of their social or psychological personality. After a series of such “unfinished” confrontations, presented in a dramatic sequence, she makes us understand that the final separation is the necessary conclusion: the perfect encounter could never be attained. (In French)

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

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

Manzoni structured his novel like a tapestry with juxtaposing planes or masses symbolizing good and evil and the redemptive tragedy that inevitably ensues when these forces meet. Thus a symmetrical expressive structure is simultaneously a moral structure. The tapestry is further crosswoven with images that interrelate and deepen the meaning of the context in which they appear or of the character with whom they are associated. They become word-symbols: words like “wall” or “skull” set tonalities, and so does “bread” as opposed to “wine” or “devil.” Similarly, descriptions involving images of light or the sun weave a dialectical fabric with images of darkness or clouds. While on the one hand the symbols exteriorize situations and events, on the other they are interiorized into the narrative and its characters so as to become their very lifeblood. What has been called Manzoni's “lyricization” of reality stems directly from this process.

Late eighteenth-century esteem for the moral qualities of the satires of Juvenal reflects a tradition which began with the church fathers. Renaissance critics praised Juvenal's style, which Boileau called “sublime.” Dryden, Dennis, and Johnson concurred with this neoclassical opinion. Putting Juvenal's sentiments into Christian contexts was not peculiar to the “Post-Augustans,” who continued Renaissance and neoclassical tradition. As Christian humanists, they used Juvenal's satires to supply “sentences” to add weight to their own moral sentiments.

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942), the author of The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900) and four other books on this Chinese storyteller, created a China so real and comprehensive that readers and reviewers often asked if he ever went to the Orient, to which he made a “bland, evasive reply.” In a letter to his publisher Grant Richards, dated 27 April 1923 and published here for the first time, Bramah writes that he has never been to China but it was not diplomatic to say so, for if he had lived there some would say his stories were merely translations, and if he had not been there, then they were imaginary and unreliable; thus he evaded the question.