One of the characteristic features of English and of continental Romanticism was a widespread interest in the origins, nature, and meaning of the myths of the ancient world. Especially in England among classical scholars, antiquarians, and learned churchmen there was a zealous desire to resurrect divinities long forgotten and to find in them and their exploits a relevance for the modern age. One of the most characteristic and influential treatises on myth in the period was the Reverend Jacob Bryant's A New System, or, An Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774–76), an ambitious project whose purpose was “to rectify what time has impaired: to divest mythology of every foreign and unmeaning ornament, and to display the truth in its native simplicity.” He hoped thereby to give a “new turn to antient history, and to place it upon a surer foundation.” By hypothesizing that the Noachian Deluge was the focal event in ancient history and by seeking to show that its symbolism explained or elucidated the bulk of universal mythology, Bryant was confident that he was not only doing a service to knowledge but also that he was strengthening the premises of Christian truth. On similar diluvian hypotheses Thomas Maurice's Indian Antiquities (1793–1800), Edward Davies' The Mythology and the Rites of the British Druids (1809), and George Stanley Faber's The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816) attempted to achieve the same ends. Other notable researches in myth at the turn of the nineteenth century in England were those of Sir William Jones, the Orientalist, Sir William Drummond, the skeptic philosopher, and Richard Payne Knight, the art connoisseur. Well known also in learned circles was the more radically speculative mythologizing of such Frenchmen as Pierre Hugues (D'Hancarville), Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Charles François Dupuis.

BULGAKOV'S NOVEL The Master and Margarita is a confusing combination of different elements: satire, fantasy, serious philosophical and religious questioning.1 The variety of critical commentaries has already shown the impossibility of reducing it to one single interpretation. The action can be stated briefly. Satan, alias Woland, arrives in Moscow with two demonic henchmen, a thug Azazello and a tomcat Behemoth; plus an “interpreter,” Koroviev. Among bureaucrats, petty crooks, and those simply concerned with personal gain they cause havoc.2 But they give aid and protection to a persecuted writer in an asylum, the Master, and to his love, Margarita, after she has agreed to act as hostess for Satan's Ball. A hack poet, Ivan Homeless, is brought to a deeper understanding of life and becomes a “disciple” of the Master. Central to the book is the Master's novel about Pontius Pilate, the chapters of which form part of Bulgakov's text and conclude simultaneously with the story about the Master in an epilogue. A strong connection with the Faust tradition is evident.

Mindful of Josephine Miles's question: “If the problem [of imagery] is subjective, how can it result in tables and charts?” I shall offer here only the simplest classifications, for the sake of imposing a surface neatness upon the presentation of protean material. After some introductory generalizations about James's imagery, I shall appear to be discussing the whole subject in terms of the areas of existence or experience most used by James as sources for his imagery. The problem is that one cannot draw close to James's vital imagery of any single sort without knowing something about the other sorts, so cooperatively do the major images-areas complement each other; but we must star somewhere. In my second division I shall discuss images-areas used throughout the later works, but not independently thematic in any given work. In the last division I shall treat image-areas found unusually concentrated within given works; and here the given work itself will help to hold the materials together.

The orthodox view regarding the introduction of end rime into English verse is succinctly set forth in the following quotations : “ Endrime, being a stranger to the early Germanic languages, its appearance in any of them may commonly be taken as a sign of foreign influence. In general, of course, rime and the stanza were introduced together into English verse, under the influence of Latin hymns and French lyrics.” “ Die alliterierende Langzeile war die einzige in der ags. Poesie bekannte Versart und blieb in derselben bis zu ende der ersten ags. oder altenglischen Sprachperiode in Gebrauch.” “ The transformation of the O. E. alliterative line into rhyme verse did not take place before the Middle English period. It was due to the influence of the rhymed French and Latin verse.” “ Alliterative verse was remodelled on Latin and French verse—or foreign verses were directly imitated.” The implication is that there never existed in Anglo-Saxon any verse of a form different from that of the five-type alliterative verse which prevails in the corpus of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry.

The general history of minstrel life in the Middle Ages has been several times very adequately treated, but the relation of the jongleurs to the classes outside the courts has, owing to a natural scarcity of documentation, been more or less neglected. The so-called “biographies” of the troubadours seem to me, however, to throw considerable light on this subject and on the relation between the jongleur, who was professionally an entertainer, and the troubadour, who was technically an inventor or composer of poetry and song. It was not until about the middle of the twelfth century that the new idea of trobar, of individual composition with the copyright of one's name attached to it, came to Provence. The new troubadour craft came to demand certain fine qualities; its honor and its promise of high patronage attracted numbers of the more gifted jongleurs, some of the best of whom, we learn, were of the lower classes.

To the girl who wanted a “man of fashion” Stephen Crane proclaimed himself “a savage,” “docile … only under great social pressure,” “by inclination a wild shaggy barbarian.” At the same time, however, this rebel against middle class conventionality strove to remain a gentleman, gallant if only to streetwalkers, chivalric to the déclassé, ministerial to reckless youth, and grandly hospitable at Brede Place to friend and stranger alike. While his friends might grumble that he “had no sense of propriety,” Crane, self-conscious and self-deprecatory, tried to be both the isolated Bohemian and “Baron Brede.” Able to breathe only “in the slums or among aristocrats,” as a contemporary remembered him, he seems to have struggled all his life between the appeal of the “wild free son of nature” and the need to find a place in society and tradition. Like his Henry Fleming, he struggled to gain the respect of his fraternity without surrendering his life or his individuality to the “moving box” of tradition; he tried, like his Swede, to make a place for himself as a gentleman without impaling himself on his purchase. This apparent temperamental need for a role both docile and savage was transmuted into the impersonalities of his fiction, in which the fate of the hero—soldier, honey-mooner, outcast, or outlander—is the measure of his ability to establish the grounds for proper conduct. In that transmutation Crane defined himself as an artist; and to pursue a metaphor of decorum through his best stories is to discover anew his view of life and the courage of his response to it.

By 1755 English dramatic audiences as well as English dramatic critics were less concerned with faults in the construction of Shakespeare's plays then they had been twenty years earlier. Largely because of Garrick's excellent acting, the focal point of Shakespearian criticism was shifting from consideration of plot structure to consideration of character delineation. But even though advance was being made in the new criticism as well as in the growth of Shakespeare idolatry, such a varied mixture of realistic material, classical mythology, and fairy lore as Shakespeare used in A Midsummer Night's Dream was bound to fail in presentation. Pepys, nearly one hundred years earlier (September 29, 1662), had seen the play and had remarked that it was the most insipid and ridiculous one he had ever witnessed in his life. In 1716 Richard Leveridge presented his Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe at Lincoln's Inn Fields, where it had nine performances (from April 11 of that year until September 9, 1723). As the title suggests, it was a brief handling of Bottom's playing artisans—a mere fragment of Shakespeare's play. On January 21, 1745 an anonymous Mock Opera, Pyramus and Thisbe, appeared at Covent Garden and enjoyed some twenty-two performances until April 13, 1748. The music was composed by John Frederick Lampe, and the play was slightly longer than Leveridge's. No other performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in any of its parts is recorded until 1755 when Garrick made his first attempt to give his audiences some more of the material of the play. He was wise, as subsequent events proved, not to try to present it at that time in its entirety. Yet he was vitally interested in the whole of the play and joined eight years later with his friend George Colman in an attempt to produce it in its Shakespearian form.

The meaning of the four dialogues entitled Cymbalum mundi (published in 1537) is still enigmatic and it is to be feared that the aura of mystery which hovers over this witty, graceful work of incipient French humanism has repelled many readers whereas the Joyeux devis et nouvelles récréactions of the same author have, from La Fontaine to the present day, found a sympathetically appreciative public. It is our conviction that when some of the clouds which weigh heavily on the Cymbalum have been dispersed, this work, so full of genuine esprit gaulois and of a levity borrowed from Greece, will emerge in its true light.

The account of Conall Corc's exile from Ireland to Scotland and of his adventures in that country until his return home to become, eventually, king of Munster about 400 a.d. is here edited for the first time from the Book of Leinster. Unfortunately, the loss of one or more folios of the MS at this point renders the text acephalous so that the surviving portion commences abruptly in the middle of a sentence with his departure by sea from Dublin. As the title has also not been preserved, this fragment is arbitrarily called Longes Chonaill Chuirc, “The Exile of Conall Corc” for purposes of convenient reference. But what the actual heading in the MS was, will never be ascertainable, unless a happy chance leads to the discovery of the missing leaf or leaves.

As a former trainer in a teaching program and an educational psychologist special-izing in disabilities, I have viewed learning from two perspectives: that of the teacher and that of the learner. My more recent role in administration has caused me to consider these perspectives in a more unified manner, concentrating specifically on the link between teaching and learning in higher education. Here at Emory, my responsibility is to view the total academic experience of students with disabilities and to work with faculty members to develop policies and procedures that will allow our students full access to educational opportunities. I am asked to build bridges between teaching and learning at an institution that has until recently taken for granted that everyone is equally endowed for learning and learns similarly. The unwritten understanding has been that if one passes the threshold of admission into this community, one does not have needs that might be considered “special.”

Sing Me a song of social significance.“ So went the refrain in one of the musical numbers of a revue produced during the 30's, by the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. It has been a national theme song ever since. Only an intellectual ostrich refuses to face the social awareness which is demanded of the individual today. High school students are being educated more intensely than ever for citizenship; college graduates are soberly urged in all public addresses to assume their responsibilities as leaders in society. The international situation, so charged with serious trouble, is a constant reminder that no man is an island unto himself. He learns slowly and painfully that he must accept great obligations outside his town, his state, and his nation, or perish. Problems of crime, juvenile delinquency, public health, old age, mental hygiene, and underprivileged families are as old as the human race. During the last twenty years, people have attacked them with such scientific knowledge and training as they possess and with a determination never before manifested. The social sciences, as well as the biological and physical sciences, are daily making practical contributions to society's needs.

In 1923 the Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky returned to the USSR after a year of exile. Tike his entire cohort of “fellow travelers,” he accommodated himself to the new Soviet regime. He did so in the language of travel and other kinds of movement. In the 1920s and 1930s, nomadism—a prominent motif in works by Shklovsky from A Sentimental Journey through Marco Polo—emerges as his central figure for accommodation to official culture. This association occurs through the submerged double meaning of his signature term ostranenie—at once defamiliarization and reterritorialization. This duality of ostranenie has implications for our broader understanding of the way mobility is active in cultural production and intertwined with structures of power. In the Soviet case, ostranenie underscores that nomadic movement is essential to the operation of cultural agents, whose relative freedom becomes a mechanism of state authority and control.

Coleridge's interest in philology, more specifically in English linguistics, was one manifestation—by no means the least important—of his amazing myriad-mindedness. His lectures, essays, notes, and reported conversations abound with allusions, comments, and speculations on the nature and problems of language in general and of English in particular; and his experiments in vocabulary bear additional testimony to his interest in the subject. Although increasing attention has recently been paid to this aspect of his genius, a systematic study of the subject awaits the publication of a definitive edition of his works. Nevertheless, an attempt might be made to examine certain limited phases of his interest in linguistics, particularly his theories about the nature and development of language, his observations on the character of English, and his own remarkable contributions to the enrichment of its vocabulary.

The hardest thing to do with a child, sometimes, is to name it. The same is often true of a type of literature. To find a name which shall adequately express the tendencies and purposes of certain literary work is a difficult and perplexing task. It often happens, too, that a name is given carelessly, because of some application either incidental or actually mistaken, and remains fixed, although its appropriateness is only superficial.

Mary hays was one of that remarkable coterie of women, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Alderson, Mrs. Reveley, Mrs. Fenwick, and Mrs. Inchbald, who afforded William Godwin a sort of philosophic seraglio. Little is known of her life: no biographical sketch of her exists. As the information left by others is sparse, we must depend much upon her supposedly autobiographical novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney. She lived to be eighty-three, but the last forty years of her life are without a record. Soon after the decade of the French Revolution she became enveloped in an obscurity which has never lifted. Once the immediate revolutionary impulse had spent itself, she seems to have written nothing more. But in the revival of the fame of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, to both of whom she was as faithful as their shadows, she perhaps deserves more attention than she has received. In her blind discipleship she innocently reduced many of Godwin's philosophical maxims to absurdities. She thus made herself the laughing-stock of those conservatives whose sympathies were narrowed by mere respectability as well as of certain liberals whose convictions did not give them such reckless courage.

to Regard the Merchant's tale simply as a conventional piece of anti-feminist literature, exemplifying the faithlessness of married women, is to overlook the Merchant's simultaneous concern with the role of the husband in matrimony and with his joint responsibility for the success or failure of his marriage. That responsibility is brought out in the course of the argument which takes place between January and his brethren when the old knight announces his intention of wedding a young girl. The debate emphasizes the folly of the proposed step, as much through the sycophantic approval of Placebo as through the objective and wise warnings of Justinus. But it is more than a question of folly. The Merchant draws attention to the knight's lechery, his indifference to a young woman's feelings, and his jealousy; and these weaknesses are stressed as the counterparts to May's wantonness, her indifference to January's feelings, and her infidelity. If May does wrong in breaking her marriage vows, January is also at fault in marrying for completely selfish reasons; and from the medieval theological standpoint, he is clearly wrong in arguing (E 1836–41) that in wedlock his lechery is not sinful.

Joyce was born in a musical city, Dublin. His childhood was filled with music. As a young man he entered a competition in the Irish festival of music, and if he had not refused to sing at sight would probably have won it. Had he done so, his future career would have been more likely that of a concert tenor than a writer. Throughout his life vocal music was his great pleasure and consolation.1 No sensitive reader of Ulysses has failed to appreciate the way Joyce not only uses the sound of words for musical effects, but also employs musical devices in constructing his novel.2 Snatches from songs are woven into the text. Richard M. Kain writes:

Die besondere Eigenart von Gottfried Kellers Erzählungskunst ist die Bildlichkeit und die dadurch bedingte Anschaulichkeit seiner Sprache. Wir finden in seiner Sprache alles, vom einfachen Wortvergleich, wie er uns häufig in der Umgangssprache entgegentritt, bis zum weitausgesponnenen ungewöhnlichen Gleichnis. Das alltägliche stereotype Bild wechselt mit dem eigenartigsten und phantasievollsten, dem derben naturalistischen Vergleich folgt ein feiner poetischer, dem malerisch farbigen ein gehaltvoll symbolischer. Selbst der flüchtige Leser wird immer wieder von der Wahrheit oder Schönheit eines Bildes angezogen oder von der Treffsicherheit eines Vergleiches überrascht. So hat man sich daran gewöhnt, wenn man von Keller spricht, auch seine “sprechenden Bilder” und “schlagenden Vergleiche” zu erwähnen, wie es bereits A. Frey in seinen “Erinnerungen an Gottfried Keller” tut. Erstaunlicherweise hat sich die literarhistorische Forschung bis jetzt damit begnügt, die Metamorphose des Begrifflichen zum Gegenständlichen in Kellers Schaffen zu betonen und allgemein auf die verblüffende Anschaulichkeit und Kühnheit seiner Vergleiche, sowie auf deren symbolischen und weltanschaulichen Gehalt hinzuweisen. Es sei nun hier der Versuch gemacht, auf diese charakteristische Seite des Kellerschen Stils näher einzugehen.

The modern reader is wont to take with quiet enjoyment the mild irony implied in the delightful spirit of camaraderie with which the Eagle addresses “Geffrey” in Chaucer's The Hous of Fame:

“A ha!” quod he, “lo, so I can
Lewedly to a lewed man
Speke.“

This essay interrogates Sergei Eisenstein's critique of D. W. Griffith's montage aesthetic, arguing that, in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, historical perspective is constituted in opposition to (rather than as a result of) the forward surge of the film's montage. Griffith represents historical consciousness through the narrative figure of trembling, harking back to Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, another text in which the movements of history are registered on the bodies of witnesses who struggle to keep their composure. Both Griffith and Dickens construct a social world driven to extremes by competing ideological forces and imagine historical subjects whose reactions to emergency—witnessing and trembling—hold them apart from it. Ultimately, these gestures of response suggest a tendency in melodramatic texts to construct a normative subjectivity that resists the antithetical underpinnings of melodrama itself.