Browning is one of Shelley's main heirs in the nineteenth century. As a boy he had worshipped Shelley, who is the most obvious single influence in both Pauline (pub. 1833) and Paracelsus (pub. 1835), his earliest published works. He grew uneasy about the relationship later, but he never stopped being in important ways a poet in the tradition of Shelley. One of the enduring likenesses between them is the way both use their strong sense of the weakness of language in developing the meaning of poems. Shelley uses it most fully in Epipsyckidion, where it serves a vision of the inadequacy of all human satisfactions. His solution is to set up a number of more or less satisfactory terms, calling attention to the fact that no one of them will do, and that they all together “do” only in special ways. This corresponds in language to the tendency to resist restrictions on personal relationships that appears in the Shelleyan “harem.” The solution in both cases can be awkward, but in the case of language, at any rate, the awkwardness is part of the meaning.

Donne's Wit has been linked to Caval-canti and Alciati, Marino and Ramus, Anacreon and St. Bonaventure. The variety of these analogues confronts scholars with a dilemma: for it suggests that The Songs and Sonets must be either a profound intellectual synthesis or a grotesque philosophical chaos; and yet in fact they are neither. The dilemma might be resolved, however, by the discovery that Donne's lyrics are in a tradition which accounts for both their sophisticated levity and their dramatic truth, both their epigrammatic neatness and their symbolic import. The work of the “presecentisti”—by which term I mean chiefly Serafino l'Aquilano, Torquato Tasso, and Guarino—forms such a tradition.

As an appendix to Franz Kafka's unfinished novel Der Prozeß (The Trial) Max Brod has published a series of fragments more or less closely connected with the main body of the text. One of them, with the heading “Staatsanwalt” (“Prosecuting Attorney”), has lately caused considerable discussion, especially in view of the new order suggested for the entire novel by Professor H. Uyttersprot.

It has frequently been assumed that Keats, in revising the earlier version of Hyperion into The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, was liberating himself from the influence of Milton and, especially, of Paradise Lost. In the new induction to The Fall he abandoned the epic structure of the first Hyperion for a form that is both more personal and allegoric—that of a vision or dream. The change is sweeping, involving not only structure but style, and apparently reflects the poet's dissatisfaction with the epic nature of the earlier version. Valid reasons for that dissatisfaction are not difficult to find. The first two books of Hyperion, with their description of the fallen divinities and their conclave, in general parallel the action of the first two books of Paradise Lost. Whereas Milton in his opening books gradually introduces his main subject, the fall of man, Keats suddenly presents, in his third, the deification of the poet, Apollo, through an imaginative and supremely intense realization of human destiny and its suffering. That vision is largely subjective and personal and represents Keats's groping toward a new and more mature conception of tragic beauty, the relevance of which to the epic events that precede it is not, and perhaps never could have been, made clear. Nor is it apparent how he could have continued his narrative when its climax had already been achieved.

What could have possessed Zola to let a writer of vaudevilles tamper with his novels? André Antoine asked himself the question in his journal the day after the dismal failure of Germinal, and we still wonder about it today. Very little is known about Busnach, except that he was one of the directors of the Athénée theater, and the author of such items as Ali-Baba and Froufrou. Did Zola really think this theatrical butterfly was capable of converting Germinal, or any other novel for that matter, into a play?

Let us not judge him by his boulevard reputation alone. Sarah Bernhardt called him the wittiest man in Paris, no mean compliment coming from her.2 He possessed the gift—or burden— of extreme sensitivity, and a line from one of his letters to Zola, “Je suis trop votre collaborateur et pas assez votre ami” might serve as epigraph to their relationship. Moreover, Zola had burned himself at the sputtering limelight of the Boulevard des Italiens with Les Heritiers Rabourdin and Le Bouton de rose; why should he not have welcomed the cooperation of a man who knew his business well? Despite the fact that there is a mass of available material on this collaboration— material which throws much light upon Zola's critical and esthetic theories—there has been no real attempt to relate Zola dramaturge with Zola romancier. Relationships did nevertheless exist, as I shall indicate. In the course of their collaboration, Busnach wrote Zola nearly 2000 letters, and in the absence of Zola's replies, these remain our chief source of information.3 My remarks are based upon them, and upon the texts of the plays.4

In any serious consideration of Poe's life and character it will be necessary to take account of Griswold's estimate of the poet. This estimate was set forth in two articles published during the year following Poe's death—one, an obituary notice published in the New York Tribune of October 9, 1849; the other, the memoir of Poe included by Griswold in his edition of Poe's works and first published in September, 1850. Out of these two papers sprang the bitterest of all the controversies that have been waged about Poe. Most of Poe's editors and biographers of the present generation have ranged themselves on the side of Poe and have condemned Griswold; but there have been some—and among them some that may speak with the highest authority—who have held that Griswold's estimate of Poe is essentially just and fair. The present paper attempts a fresh examination of the case in the light of the evidence collected by Poe's biographers, and also brings to bear on the case a number of documents, mainly from the periodicals of Griswold's time, that have heretofore been either overlooked or ignored.

Although several Chaucer scholars have argued for the last four tales of the Canterbury Tales as a concluding sequence, it has not been generally recognized that Chaucer ends his book deliberately and skillfully beginning with the Second Nun's Tale. Through the concluding stories Chaucer disengages himself and his audience from the fiction making of the Tales, moving toward his own voice in the Retraction, and he introduces themes of transformation in tales concerning the conversion of souls (Second Nun), the transmutation of metals through alchemy (Canon's Yeoman), the metamorphosis of Apollo's crow (Manciple), and the transforming powers of contrition and penitence (Parson, Retraction). The consistency of these closure themes provides evidence for the authority of the Ellesmere manuscript as against the highly regarded and recently published Hengwrt manuscript of the Tales, which has a different concluding tale order and which does not contain the Canon's Yeoman's Tale.

Shakespeare's sonnets are designed to seem written by a poet and spoken by a lover. This conspicuous ambidexterity, compounded by our declining tolerance for such deftness, has made them infamously problematic. They simultaneously flaunt and flout the correspondence between the lover's pen and his heart, between the artifice of his “rhetoric,” characteristic of much Tudor literature, and the rhetoric of his sincerity, characteristic of the Romantic poetics that has proven their sternest judge. The sonnets thus pose internally the very problem that informs their extensive interpretive history. But they also propose its solution: their sustained balance of verba and res, of verbally erotic and hermeneutically chaste designs, exalts the conflict of these designs, displaying its poetic power. And this paradoxical resolution of the poet's dilemma solves the critic's as well: it suggests a way of making a richly correspondent and yet reasoned sense of the sonnets and, indeed, of any literary text.

In his presidential address at the 1970 MLA convention, Maynard Mack sounded a warning bell concerning activism and the future of literary studies. Faced with a seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam and a national student body growing polarized in its response to this war, higher education, including language-based pedagogy, was in crisis. Of particular concern to Mack was a growing generational disconnect over the role of activism in the literature classroom. He cited a landmark study in which nearly two-thirds of all professors over the age of thirty maintained that any foray into politics should be avoided, if not altogether prohibited, in formal course work. The younger generation disagreed: two-thirds of them, in fact, felt a moral and pedagogical obligation to use colleges and universities as loci for social change. This ideological divide, Mack predicted, would soon create “a crisis of authority in the offing beside which all current manifestations would look pale” (365).

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

Henry Playford in his note to the reader in Orpheus Britannicus felt free to say:

In PMLA for September, 1935, I proposed a new and later date than customary for the flourishing of the author of the Secunda Pastorum in the Towneley cycle of mystery plays. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that the evidence of the costume allusions in his plays and the evidence of local history both pointed to the years 1425–50 as encompassing the years of his major work. At the close of that article I quoted W. W. Greg and Miss Marie C. Lyle as bibliographical authorities, the one as believing that the York Passion Group could “hardly be earlier than 1400” and the other as placing the influence of the Gospel of Nicodemus upon that group as after 1415 when Roger Burton, city clerk of York, set down in the official York Memorandum Book a description of the plays as he knew them at that time. Miss Lyle, it is true, was immediately replied to by Miss Grace Clark and partly dislodged from her position. After reviewing Miss Clark's argument as it bore on the point at issue, however, I concluded that “my case would stand.” I propose now to bring the bibliographical evidence under the review of Burton's two “lists”—the first set down, as I have said, in 1415, and the second a few years later—and also under the review of entries in the York Memorandum Book (Surlees Society, cxx and cxxv).

The Alexandrian followers of Aristarchus, buzzing in corners and busy with monosyllables, have left the world that they worried with their wranglings over and and , the swords that were drawn over inchoate verbs have been rust for centuries. But the bookworms of Aristarchus, the troops of Callimachus, the pack of Zenodotus return at times to earth. In order to hear this pack in full cry, we have only to recall the various emendations in Greek texts necessitated fifty years ago by the fallacious Dawes Canon that is never used with the first aorist subjunctive in the active or middle voice.

In 1933, while rummaging about in the mediaeval records of Lincoln, I found a whole series of new entries concerning the Church plays of Lincoln Cathedral for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Previously one could survey the few known items concerning them in the appendix to E. K. Chambers' Mediaeval Stage. One could add to these a few more details by going to Chambers' sources, Mr. A. F. Leach and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, whose Notes on Mediaeval Services in England contains a section devoted to Lincoln customs. The extant records, however, contain a consecutive series of entries which outline with remarkable fullness the drama within the Cathedral Church from 1318 to the accession of Elizabeth.

Biographers of Marvell have found themselves in a curious predicament. Although a considerable number of Marvell's letters have come down to us and evidence of other kinds is at least comparatively extensive, it has proved impossible to arrive at any clear understanding of his character. That fundamental uncertainty is chiefly a result of the fact that at two or three critical points the evidence is limited and enigmatic.

The Russian formalist and Tolstoy scholar Boris Eikhenbaum is best known for his work in developing an intrinsic poetics. After his formalist period, however, Eikhenbaum turned, in his work on Tolstoy, to extrinsic approaches, initially privileging author and reader and later focusing on social context. This essay argues that Eikhenbaum's choice of particular extrinsic approaches was suggested, indirectly and unexpectedly, by Soviet political culture in the Stalin years. An examination of the relation between Eikhenbaum's literary theories and Soviet political reality is followed by an evaluation of Eikhenbaum's postformalist Tolstoy scholarship.

One is to infer from this characterization that Beowulf is exceedingly strong. Perhaps one can learn no more. For there may be no significance in the facts that the dragon is fifty feet long (l. 3042), that Beowulf rules the Geats fifty years (ll. 2209, 2733), that Hroþgar rules the Danes fifty years before the coming of Grendel (l. 1769), and that Grendel's dam holds the moors fifty years (l. 1498). And there may even be no connection between these facts except that Beowulf, Hroþgar, and Grendel's dam rule their domains for a very long time and that the dragon is a very long beast. Anything which approaches thirty or fifty in dimension, conventionally approaches the marvellous. Accordingly Deor says (ll. 18–19):

Đeodric ahte þritig wintra
Mæringa burg …

Aliterary analysis of the Eldorado episode in Candide should undertake to answer three interlocking questions: (1) What is its philosophic meaning in relation to the whole? (2) By what artistic devices is that meaning conveyed? (3) How successfully has Voltaire fused form and substance? To date no such analysis exists. Questions 2 and 3 have been handled either scantly or not at all. Question 1, while much more frequently and for the most part satisfactorily treated, has in a few instances produced divergent interpretations springing from divergencies of critical approach. It is the purpose of this essay to elaborate an analysis of the episode which will, among other things, provide a standard for evaluating the partial answers thus far offered.