That The Winter's Tale has a double plot has long been noted, but no one has yet fully explored the nature and extent of iteration in the two parts of the play. Structural parallels between Acts i-iii and Acts iv-v are reinforced by repeated statements of motifs common to both parts of the play and by the variation in the second half of motifs important to the first. The dramatic evidence of Hermione's death is substantial, particularly in m.ii and nr.iii, and later details (those in v.ii and v.iii) come too late to qualify the dramatic as well as thematic import of Hermione's loss. These later details must, therefore, stand as alternatives rather than as explanations. The second half of the play thus forms an alternative to the first, with Hermione's fate of central importance in pointing up their contrasting natures. Each part of the play makes a statement of the possibilities for gain and for loss within society, and the statement of neither is complete without the other. Together, they suggest limits as well as possibilities.

Insisting that the “Me” is the center and meaning of all experience and that reality is indistinguishable from the self, Whitman turns to the phrenological concept of the soul as the agent that makes the physical self susceptible to the spiritual and the infinite. He insists that it is the soul's office, literally, to translate the sensuous data apprehended by a physiologically endowed man perfectly attuned to the universe into the spiritual truths that are integral in the mystic union of all Being. So closely does Whitman identify robust health with spiritual awareness that this forms the basis of his materialistic monism, arguing that the body and the soul are merged into an indivisible One. Since the body is the soul, the sensible is in fact the suprasensible, and matter is mind, dualism presents no problem. Instead of the two principles, in Whitman a single identity is achieved when the active soul “charges” the surrounding universe and perceives the ideal in the actual. Major phrenological ideas also inform Whitman's unique equalitarian transcendentalism, his sensual mysticism, and his poetic catalogs where the persona, fusing with a cumulative imagery, signals his union with the larger Oneness where all contradictions are resolved.

Absalom, Absalom! achieves mythic significance and universality through Faulkner's deliberate use of parallels between Thomas Sutpen's attempt to found a dynasty in the Old South and the attempts of ancient Hebrew rulers to establish their kingdoms. The choice of title for the novel, as well as numerous analogies between Faulkner's plot and incidents in the prophetic books of the Old Testament, particularly n Samuel, indicate that Faulkner intended the biblical accounts of dynastic failures to illuminate and strengthen his theme. In attempting to find reasons for the failure of Sutpen to establish his Southern dynasty, critics have advanced four tenable theories. One theory finds Sutpen's innocence the principal reason for his failure; another sees hubris as the cause of failure; still a third contends that the socioeconomic injustices of the pre-Civil War South, magnified in the character of Sutpen, account for the failure. The fourth and most tenable theory, considered too briefly by critics, indicates that the very concept of dynasty is so basically flawed that failure is inherent in the design itself; or, more broadly still, that men erroneously persist in the mythic hope that they can establish permanent dynasties, though historically none has succeeded.

Lord Weary's Castle conveys Robert Lowell's sense of historical destruction during and immediately after World War ii. Efforts by Lowell to relieve his despair by integrating it with Catholic belief, with Classical themes, with his knowledge of European and American history only succeed in confirming the apocalyptic view. The religious poetry in particular seeks a redemptive state beyond the poet's consciousness of war and violence, but usually results only in confirming the sense of destruction. The nervous, insistent rhythms of the poetry are themselves expressions of Lowell's compulsion to deal with violence and aggressive intrusions on man's consciousness. Finally, no religious or stylistic allegiances, no awareness of history, enable Lowell to transcend the obsession with war. Throughout the book, the poetry expresses pity for the victims of military aggressions. In Lord Weary's Castle, Lowell is disturbed by American military aggression from colonial Indian battles to World War ii; it is a distraught sense of American experience that would continue to haunt his poetry in the following decades. In this insistent consciousness of war, Lowell's poetry touches on our deepest concerns.

Although less important than in Racine or Shakespeare, place in Moliere deserves attention. The more farcical plays have an outdoor, Italianate setting. In the highertoned indoor comedies the characters inhabit concentric circles; props, set, house, city, province, universe. At the center of Tartuffe stands the intruder, Tartuffe himself. A sequence of entrance and exit scenes defines the broader aspects of place in the play. Madame Pernelle's exit scene situates Orgon's family, a disputatious and gossipy household. Orgon's entrance reveals a person who has lost his sense of place. Conventionally in comedy the bourgeois father is happy to return from the hazards of the country to the security of his role as owner and master. To Orgon, however, the return means only reunion with Tartuffe. His entrance scene is balanced by his eviction at the hands of his protégé who changes places with him. Tartuffe's place is Orgon's house: his exits are false exits or strategic withdrawals, his return is triumphant until the regal denouement which sends him to the King's prison and Orgon's family to the King's palace where they will kneel in gratitude.

Alfred de Vigny's Servitude et grandeur militaires is a highly personal work, but it is related to the historical and literary conjuncture of the 1830's, which saw the French army's Napoleonic grandeur sullied in the suppression of working-class revolts. A refutation of Joseph de Maistre's concept of the soldier as an apocalyptic executioner and Lamennais's denigration of the soldier's honor, Servitude is a characteristic Vigny triptych, but only the third tale, “La Canne de jonc,” provides a morally determining lesson. Here the necessity of experience in the formation of conscience is emphasized. The hero of the tale, Captain Renaud, who throughout his career meets a series of negative and absent fathers (suggesting a metaphysical void that must be filled with human values), inadvertently kills a young Russian cadet during the campaign of France. Years later, Renaud is mortally wounded by a talionic reincarnation of the enfant russe, and expiates his crime in stoic silence. Conscience, as in Vigny's poetry, is attained in the grandeur and honor of silence and renunciation.

René Char acknowledges that his major poetic precursor is Arthur Rimbaud. Char is esthetically indebted to Rimbaud for his creative vision, teleology, and practice. The numerous thematic affinities between these two poets include a humanized harmonious universe, the attitude of revolt, the obligation of anguish, the poet as the initiator of action, and the concepts of poetic activity, love, experience, risk, man, nature. The poetic matter of their creative worlds is identical, but Char brings the necessary corrective of faith in human expression to Rimbaud's immature reliance on verbal expression. Where Rimbaud fails to synthesize the fragments, Char succeeds. It is Char's understanding of Rimbaud's work that enables him to evolve a poetic based first on life and second on theory. Char does not merely humanize the cosmos; he goes on to poeticize man. Technical similarities are equally numerous, but Char is disciplined; he rejects the equation of the act and expression in favor of an evocation of the activity through the effect of spontaneity, his theories of pulverization and crispation. Char overcomes Rimbaud's limits and frustrations and succeeds in fulfilling his vision.

In his celebrated quasi-bucolic episode of the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes mocks and parodies the old school of the Frauendienst, even as he levels his irony against a chivalric ideal that had come under increasing scorn since at least the end of the fifteenth century. Various elements are blended to achieve his story. Grisóstomo's suicide turns out to be incontrovertible as well as illustrative of the essentially Petrarchan though parodical character of the famous poem “La cancion desesperada,” while the generally bucolic although mixed and burlesque quality of the entire episode issues straight from a central theme of the Renaissance pastoral, the whole matter of man's freedom. The very term “canción desesperada,” and probably other features of the long poem in Ch. xiv, derive directly from a sixteenth-century bucolic poet and fervent Petrarchist, Gutierre de Cetina.

In contrast to the commonly held view that Keller is portraying the high points of Zurich's cultural history in his Züricher Noeellen, the historical phenomenon of periods in transition, particularly the individual response to the fact and realization of transition, appear as the main theme of this cycle of novellas. A detailed analysis of the five stories leads to the observation that the Active present in each novella is a period removed from the actual high point of a given era. Hadfoub, for example, takes place at the very end of the Minnesang period, representing a latecomer among the minnesingers, one who plays an anachronistic role, and Ursula treats events surrounding religious change, in this case the clash between the Zwingli forces and the Anabaptists after the introduction of the Reformation in Zurich. To underscore the idea of transition, Keller makes use of the ironic narrator who frequently voices his discriminating opinion about the characters, and who in the frame novella clearly relates the issue of “transitional time” to Keller's own age, also a period of transition, and in so doing censures those writers who are oblivious to the needs of the present and seek refuge in a glorious portrayal of the past.

Translation is a synthetic approach to interpretation and a paradoxical awareness of the crisis of language. Some of the translator's problems, such as rhythms, grammar, lexical layers, syntax, are illustrated with critical reference to the five published English translations of Celan's “Todesfuge”; their resolution leads to creative apprehension. The provenience of the poem is biblical. The devices of oxymoron, surrealist metaphor, disparate rhythms and meter, inversion of time sequence, and the erotic countersubject all function as verbal correlatives to the paradox and absurdity which aie the poem's theme and represent a peculiar combination of esoteric artistry and commitment. The fugue is structured by four voices (statements with contrapuntal variations) and the echoed simultaneity of “poppy” (verbal narcotic) and “remembrance” (of unreal reality). The poem is placed in the frame of Celan's later development.

The nairator in Chaucer's poetry, a pose which is neither completely separate from nor identical with the poet himself, develops stylistically as he declines intellectually from the dream vision poems to the Canterbury Tales (1369-87). In the early works he is neither naive nor sophisticated, but represents a type we know in legal terms as the “reasonable man” who personifies the social-moral norms of society in an unemotional, unintellectual, and unimaginative fashion. This character “Geffrey” seems dull-witted and absurd only in contrast to the unusual situations or irrational and autocratic individuals he confronts. His “reasonable” perception is on a lower, second, level to their sophisticated first, an ironic structure which foreshadows that of Jane Austen. In the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrim “Chaucer” drops to the lowest, or third, level; he is an uncomprehending caricature who “agrees” with the first-level ironist, but who misunderstands his irony. Herry Bailly usually acts the part of the prosaic “reasonable man,” but the poet raises the reader-listener to his own highest (first) level of perception. Thus Chaucer's degradation of his own pose brings about a progressive and significant intensification of his humor.

Milton scholars have long been aware of inconsistencies in Milton's views regarding the Old Testament and the Jews. He shows, concurrently, “powerful judaistic motifs” and “anti-judaistic motifs.” He advocated liberty of conscience but was silent during the debate on the Readmission of the Jews. Milton's views may have evolved or changed but he was doctrinally consistent. He dichotomized the Old Testament constellation of personae and concepts into “Judaic” motifs which he rejected and “Hebraic” motifs which he adopted. He took Paul's antithesis of the Law (the Flesh) and the Gospel (the Spirit) and applied it within the Hebrew Bible itself. The “Judaic” complex is that which is human, relevant to the Jews as a people inclined to servitude, and the “external” aspect of the Mosaic Law, also a form of bondage. The “Hebraic” complex is divine, universal, and the “internal” Scripture, equated with freedom and. ultimately, Christian Liberty. The “Hebraic” motif supplies a continuity for the Scriptures. The dichotomy accords with Milton's philosophy (Plato's and Aristotle's dualisms) and with his methodology of structural and imagistic contrasts. The dichotomy explains the presence of “judaistic” and “anti-judaistic” motifs as well as his “reluctance” to grant the Jews freedom of worship.

The question of the extent to which Fielding's works present a consistent view of human nature may in part be answered by a study of his frequent use of educational theory. Fielding was familiar with the major issues and theories treated in the educational literature of his day and also recognized that various theories of education found their basis in various theories of human nature, the raw material with which education deals. In The Fathers, one of Fielding's lesser-known plays, he seems to assume that education is allpowerful in forming character, but in Joseph Andrews the entire question of education and human nature is treated with ironic ambivalence. In Tom Jones education is irrelevant to character development, and the Nightingale episode reads like a specific reversal of the theme of The Fathers. In the course of these three works Fielding apparently reverses his position, beginning with the assumption that human nature may be defined as a tabula rasa and concluding that human character is predetermined. In Amelia Fielding compromises between these extremes in a manner reminiscent of Locke's position in his Some Thoughts concerning Education.

Although most critics have stressed William Blake's “mystical” disdain for the phenomena of objective reality, his responses to nature are both frequent and varied. While not following any lineal order of development, these responses may be said to assume a hierarchical order once we examine them in their overall context. The hierarchy langes from mere description of nature in a manner reminiscent of the eighteenth-century physico-theological poets through a consideration of nature as an aspect of human perception and an aspect of human will. Finally, nature may be transmuted into art through the shaping power of the imagination, or in Blakean terms, through an inward confluence of Los and Christ.

Wordsworth's “Home at Grasmere,” the one completed book of The Recluse, expresses a conception of home as a territorial sanctuary. The holiness of Grasmere Vale as a dwelling place consists in the possibility for ecological wholeness which it provides. The enclosure of the valley liberates the poet's psychic potency, because there he is encouraged to be receptive to multiple dimensions of experience. Through such openness he is consciously able to reintegrate his being into the enduring rhythms of natural existence, thereby articulating his unique individuality. “Home at Grasmere,” then, embodies Wordsworth's ideal of what poetry should be, namely, the realization through language of the intrinsic poeticalness of commonplace actuality. This true poetry, which is characterized by interplay between physical “fact” and mental “fancy,” liberates man from the prison of mere perception, revealing how individuals'—by fitting themselves to nature and fitting nature to themselves—can give unique expression to the unified, interdependent wholeness which is life, the expression being a fulfillment rather than a negation of fundamental inherent tendencies of natural process. In so celebrating such interaction of art and nature, Wordsworth raises questions about some current presuppositions of what constitutes basic interrelations among literature, civilization, and the physical environment.

Although regarded as a philosopher rather than an artist, John Stuart Mill employs artistry as well as rational argument to enlighten his reader. Mill's “Bentham,” for example, demonstrates how Mill operates as a sage using both logic and art to awaken the reader to a new perception of reality. In “Bentham” Mill creates a sense of disappointment arising from Bentham's great promise and limited performance, both as thinker and as man. Constructing an image of himself as a whole thinker, Mill thereby underscores Bentham's position as half-thinker. Mill also creates an elaborate portrait of Bentham as a great father-teacher-hero-God figure, only to reveal Bentham's inability to perform these roles adequately. By heavy use of negatives, Mill suggests that Bentham's thought has little positive value. And, finally, the essay's structure undermines all of Bentham's philosophical contributions. Deriving from Carlyle's “Boswell's Life of Johnson,” Mill's earlier writings on Bentham show him refashioning Carlyle's language and developing the ironic techniques used in “Bentham.” Like other Victorian sages, Mill has no clear-cut theory of prose artistry; he often regards poetry and prose as antithetical media. Nevertheless, in practice he writes as a complex logician-artist, using prose as an imaginative medium.

R. D. Laing's concept of ontological insecurity and Erik Erikson's analysis of identity confusion contribute to an understanding of Lawrence's characterization in The Rainbow and Women in Love. Will Brangwen's fear in The Rainbow that he will dissolve into nothingness without Anna is typical of individuals suffering from ontological insecurity. This anxiety ramifies into webs of mutually contradictory feelings. For example, Will's fantasy of merging with Anna clashes with his fear of losing his identity through absorption into hers. Anna embodies for Will an unconscious fantasy of his mother; this displacement is the root of the contradictions and conflicts in which he becomes entangled. As Anna fights against Will's unconscious desire to maintain a mother-son symbiosis in his marriage, Will rages against her because she represents the mother from whom he unconsciously wishes to be free, even while clinging to her. This fantasy system proliferates into role and identity confusions. Will wishes to be absolute master of his home and child-servant of his wife's matriarchy. Simultaneously in his relationship with his little girl, Ursula, he is an affectionate father, a sadistically destructive sensualist, and a child seeking parental support. These dissonant impulses and roles exacerbate Will's sense of his unreality, incoherence, and general impotence.

The Waste Land has important connections with the Aeneid beyond those of a shared mythic configuration. These connections are primarily literary and we receive them as Gilbert Highet describes the allusions of symbolist poets—in hints, nuances, phrases repeated in a dream. So Eliot evokes the concatenation of events in the first six books of the Aeneid, and like Virgil he reformulates the literary monuments of the past as a comment upon the present age. Episodes in the Aeneid that have become part of the literary tradition, that have been reformulated by Dante, Spenser, and Milton, are echoed in Eliot's poem. Images of The Waste Land—the drowned Phoenician sailor, the lady of situations, the man with three staves, the Wheel, the card that is blank, Mrs. Equitone—have conspicuous analogues in the Aeneid. Significantly, Anchises' great sermon in the sixth book of Virgil's poem is not only a recapitulation of Aeneas' own purgatorial experiences as quester but also suggests the movement of The Waste Land as a series of trials by water, wind, and fire. In sum, The Waste Land assumes the central importance of Virgil; Virgil is for Eliot, as he was for Dante, a guide and an inspiration.

The House of the Seven Gables may owe a considerable debt to Eliza Leslie's “The Daughters of Dr. Byles,” a sketch of the two spinster great-granddaughters of Increase Mather in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine (Jan., Feb., 1842). Both Hepzibah Pyncheon and the Misses Mary and Catherine Byles reside in black ancestral homes shaded by giant trees and furnished with portraits, chairs, and tables from another age. Hepzibah, who physically resembles Catherine, lives, like the aged sisters, under the imprint of the past, seldom venturing into the world; she simply awaits the return of her brother, whose miniature she cherishes and whose prison sentence has kept him away for thirty years, as the Misses Byles await the return of their nephew, whose portrait hangs prominently in the parlor and whose self-imposed exile has lasted forty years. Hawthorne closes his romance as Leslie closes her essay, with the exchange of a temporal home for one of eternity.