Herman Melville's Clarel (1876) has been ignored by criticism largely on the ground that it fails structurally. But the poem has an architectonic pattern that provides insight into Melville's lifelong philosophical problems. The work is developed tropologically, drawing its basic pattern from the gospels of Luke and Matthew. The poem is, however, an anti-gospel in which the questor-hero, Clarel, acts out his own “passion” in and around Jerusalem. Employing the motif of the three Magi with Christological and Zoroastrian star imagery, Melville carries his hero into a search for an existentially authentic faith. But Melville fails to find this faith, discovering instead through Clarel the ontological ground of existence itself. This discovery is brought about by a genuine awareness of the condition of death, a condition which destroys belief in absolutes. Death is the central theme of the poem and shapes the narrative and the characters' actions. The Epilogue presents, therefore, a forced and unconvincing affirmation of immortality, an affirmation belied by the poem s overwhelming thrust of existential despair.

Despite the well-established critical opinion that the Defence is a polite, straightforward manifesto of a literary theory with little apparent value as literature, Sidney's treatise is a complexly imaginative work, informed with the same dramatic conflicts between author, persona, and subject matter that characterize Astrophil and Stella. The persona exonerates poetry and energizes his oration by creating two “dramas” : he persuades his listeners to live up to certain expectations by playing the carefully defined role of his confidantes, and, at the same time, speaker-as-energetic-defender distances himself from the process of persuasion through irony and self-mockery. Thus, the speaker “beguiles” his listeners through audience psychology, rich imagery, and rhythmic prose while simultaneously warning sensitive auditors to beware of his fervor and seeming guilelessness.

The meaning that attaches to the title Correspondances suggests a likely but overlooked source of Baudelaire's sonnet, the occult science of animal magnetism. Baudelaire's interest in the subject goes back to June 1838 when he discusses it in a letter to his mother. His first Poe translation, in 1848, was Révélation magnétique. In addition, allusions to animal magnetism are found in such poems as La Voix, Bénédiction, and La Mort des pauvres. Baudelaire was probably aware of, and may have attended, a series of lectures on animal magnetism given in 1844 or 1845 by a certain Alphonse Teste. In the printed text of these lectures the word correspondance is used in a sense closer to Baudelaire's than one finds in any other known source of the sonnet. Evidence of the influence of animal magnetism on Baudelaire's works tends to confirm Jean Pommier's belief that Correspondances was composed during the period 1845-46. (In French)

An annotated transcription, with commentary, of the texts of two letters (21 July 1762 and 3 October 1765) in Baretti's recently discovered commonplace book. The letters offer autobiographical insight into Baretti's various disappointments and persecutions on the continent. The first one provides the original to which Johnson's letter of 21 December 1762 (Chapman, No. 147), one of his best known, is the reply.

That Whitman materials were by official directive for a time “sequestered from public use” ought to have been included in the part of Broderick's note (PMLA, 84, 1969, 1657) which deals with the availability of the Harned Collection for public consultation.

No modern commentary on this changelessly relevant poem identifies its specific occasion as that of a new attempt by dissenters in 1732 and 1733 to repeal the Sacra mental Test Act in Ireland, Such an occasion is, however, suggested or explicitly stated by eighteenth-century transcribers of the poem, including William Collins, William Shen-stone, Ralph Griffiths, and the anonymous author of The Friends (1773), a rare novel in which “The Day of Judgement” first appeared in print. Substantive variants in the early transcriptions, often intensifying the criticism of dissenters, are significant in understanding how the poem was read in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift's authorship is corroborated by similarities in other works by him on the same subject in 1732-33, a somewhat later date than that usually assigned for the poem's composition.

No previous study of John Marston's The Malcontent (1602-03) has focused upon the play's central structural and thematic symbol, the traditional Wheel of Fortune. Structurally, The Malcontent uses a rising and falling pattern that reflects the medieval “formula of four.” Both Pietro and Mendoza seem to be Regno at different points in the action, but fall from Fortune's Wheel and become Regnavi. The deposed Duke Altofronto (alias Malevole) is at first Sum sine Regno, but soon becomes Regnabo, and finally Regno by Act v. The Malcontent concludes with this “happy reversal” because it is a tragicomedy according to the definition in Guarini's II compendio della poesía tragicómica (1601). The play's basic themes and main characters also support a tragicomic vision, as Mendoza and Malevole demonstrate. Mendoza, like his master Machiavelli, believes in the proverb Audaces fortuna juvat. Malevole triumphs because he combats Fortune not with fortitude but with prudent Stoic resignation and Christian spiritual devotion. The inevitability of “heaven's impos'd conditions” leads to the restoration of order and either the spiritual regeneration of the sinners or their rejection from the new society.

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.

The sottie is a popular dramatic genre of the late Middle Ages which seems to have developed from the comic debates that players often used to gather an audience. In its developed form it resembles the contemporary Theater of the Absurd. The most meaningful approach to a comparison of the two theaters is by way of the thought embodied in the plays. They are both to a certain extent didactic, though they represent different outlooks and value systems. Both theaters utilize clowns and clowning techniques, and both are closely linked to the dream. The two historical periods concerned are presented in the plays as times when cultural ideals have become illusions out of tune with reality, and the accompanying alienation is expressed in powerful images of waiting. One of the most suggestive areas of resemblance is language, which has been cut from its rational moorings. The language of the sottie still has a creative vigor, while that of the Theater of the Absurd is moribund. Both, however, are languages of protest. Each theater creates a new norm against which to judge its society, thereby exposing those who would mask their venality with pretense.