Publication continues to be one of the more important activities of the scholar-teacher. Through the years, the scholar gains experience as to what is publishable, where it should be placed, and how it can be presented to achieve maximum effect. The Executive Council of the Modern Language Association felt, however, that the advice of some senior scholars and experienced publishers might be of use to younger writers. The following document has passed through several revisions and incorporates the observations of thirty-three able consultants. It is hoped that it will save both scholars and their publishers from unnecessary disappointments.

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

The story of Sigebryht, Cynewulf, and Cyneheard—the entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 755—is frequently cited as a unique and dramatic specimen of the pre-Alfredian Chronicle. Historians as well as English language scholars have attested the value of the passage, and it has been used to illustrate the pre-feudal heroic ideal. Unified and rather detailed, the entry is an account of political strife. Events spanning twenty-nine years are condensed into a short narrative, and the author's conciseness is complicated by an involved pronomial reference not uncommon in Anglo-Saxon literature. Primarily because of the difficulty with pronouns, the translation of the text and the discernment of its larger meanings have been points of continuing debate.

God is now conceived of as something outside man and man's handiwork, and it follows that it must be idolatry to worship that which Phidias and Scopas made … Night will fall upon man's wisdom now that man has been taught that he is nothing. He had discovered, or half-discovered, that the world is round and one of many like it, but now he must believe that the sky is but a tent spread above a level floor, and that he may be stirred into a frenzy of anxiety and so to moral transformation, blot out the knowledge or half-knowledge that he has lived many times, and think that all eternity depends upon a moment's decision.—Yeats, A Vision

We are lucky to have in Forster's admirable life of Dickens what Forster himself calls the “germ” of Great Expectations. Forster reports that in 1860 Dickens announced in a letter, “For a little piece I have been writing—or am writing; for I hope to finish it to-day—such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me, that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book. You shall judge as soon as I get it printed. But it so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner.” “This,” Forster adds, “was the germ of Pip and Magwitch,” and a marginal gloss declares, “Germ of new tale.”

Certain Aspects of modern critical theory can be defined in terms of its use—or rather, misuse—of Aristotle's Poetics, especially of Aristotle's conception of plot and his statement that poetry deals with universals rather than particulars. The same, of course, can be said of other periods as well. Sidney's view of Aristotle, for example, was confined to the notion that a poem was an imitation of an action, but he platonized even this conception by claiming that the action imitated was an ideal one—what ought to be rather than what is—and this, as we shall see, became quite a common distortion of the famous passage at the beginning of the ninth chapter of the Poetics. The other side of the coin is found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' concern with the genres and the unities and their supposed rules. It cannot be said that Aristotle has been a vital influence on literary criticism since the nineteenth century, except for the current minority report being filed by the Chicago Critics, but these two aspects of the Poetics nevertheless offered a support and a challenge to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics for clarifying their own ideas about poetry.

In Contrast to the apologetic and ambiguous prologue of the Libro de buen amor, that preceding the Lazarillo de Tormes shocks us with its forthright arrogance: “Yo por bien tengo que cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas vengan a noticia de muchos y no se entierren en la sepultura del olvido.” The evasive ego of Juan Ruiz—an ego which, as Alfonso Reyes notes, is comic by mediaeval definition and slips with childish glee into one role after another—has been replaced by an explosion of self: “Yo por bien tengo …” The “soy quien soy” of the hero-braggarts of the “comedia” seems to have been combined with the autobiographical complacency of an Alonso de Contreras or a Pedro de Baeza. The result is that the reader, as soon as he becomes aware of the insignificance of the events so pompously announced, tends to read the prologue as a parody. If Lazarillo is an anti-hero, the prologue is appropriately an anti-prologue. The oral bombast of “cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas” sounds almost as if it were designed to hawk the “pliegos sueltos” of a “romance.” Prologues are by definition self-conscious, but in this one self-consciousness is driven to self-caricature.

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

Just as Defoe had maintained that the novel could surpass the pulpit in encouraging morality, so Richardson explicitly declared his intention of making Clarissa nothing less than an instrument of reviving the Christian religion:

With the recent publication of such books as Richard Southern's The Medieval Theatre in the Round (London, 1957) and Glynne Wickham's Early English Stages 1300 to 1600, Vol. i (London, 1959), the medieval English drama has come to be examined with much greater emphasis on the circumstances of its performance. While the Wakefield cycle has not been of focal interest to these studies, it has nevertheless attracted renewed attention as a dramatic work. Of special concern to students of the Wakefield plays is Martial Rose's introduction to his recently published modernized edition of the cycle. Mr. Rose sets forth the interesting theory that the Wakefield plays were not enacted processionally on pageant wagons as is generally believed, but rather that they were performed “in one fixed locality, on a multiple stage, and in the round.” This hypothesis, supported as it is by a very convincing body of arguments, is likely to have a far-reaching effect on Wakefield criticism. At the very least, it chalenges a number of widely-held opinions concerning the dramatic experience which the performance of the cycle provided. As a case in point, I should like here to focus on the Annunciation pageant and to demonstrate that, in an enlarged setting, its dramatic action becomes even more successful than it has hitherto been regarded. First, however, it will be necessary to review the “fixed-stage” theory and to examine its bearing on Wakefield criticism in general.

Durante la Edad Media y sobre todo en los primeros siglos, en las palabras de Pablo Luis Landsberg: “La fe en el orden preestablecido de la historia y en su forma eterna y limitada, originó, pues, para la conciencia medieval, la inclusión de la historia, por modo profundo, dentro de la gran realidad eterna. La historia fué considerada no en los accidentes del acontecer exterior sino en la necesidad de la esencia interior. No se buscaba la comprobación de los hechos ‘tal y como habían sido realmente’ (Ranke) sino que, en lo acontecido, buscábase lo eterno. El historiador de la Edad Media es el escritor de leyendas, que manifiesta en historias, acaso ‘falsas,‘ la esencia de las personas y los acontecimientos.”