Mallarmé constructs a “crisis of verse” that mimes the circumstances of loss and the moment of lamentation to produce his celebrated poetic purity. Indeed, he constructs this purity out of the materials of ritual and philosophical defilement: not only does his poetic theory valorize death and danger, but his poetic practice largely relies on contact with the foreign, on semantic contagion, and on ambiguity. The significance of this defilement spreads in multiple directions: it is instrumental in producing newness and in mediating Mallarmé‘s professional rivalry with Wagner, it bears witness to the domestic crisis of the Third Republic, and it functions as a form of resistance to cultural assimilation. Moreover, because defilement is at once material and symbolic and because that “symbolism” is an obstinately obscure mode of referentiality, Mallarmé‘s cultivation of defilement is a recuperation of the scapegoats that “pure” philosophy necessarily exiles: the material and the hyperessential.

When a literary critic's judgments are never dull, it is inevitable that they will often be surprising. A more striking example is hardly to be found among the great critics than Dr. Johnson's remarkable comparisons of Fielding and Richardson. Many later judges, unwilling to do justice to Richardson, and contenting themselves with a cool recognition of his historical importance, have nonetheless been willing that Johnson should admire him extravagantly. That his evaluation of the novelist would be less impartial than theirs is easily understood, both because of the two men's friendship and because of eighteenth-century literary tastes, so different from our own. But Johnson's utter obtuseness towards Fielding is annoying to the modern critic, not merely because Fielding's reputation has far outstripped that of his rival, but also because he was immensely admired in Johnson's own lifetime. The Age of Reason gloried in the author of Tom Jones, yet here is the supreme critic of the century delivering himself of the most inflexibly contrary opinion. What are we to think of this?

In 2005 Emer O'Sullivan published the most comprehensive outline to date of a comparative approach to the study of literature and other cultural productions for the young. She presents nine constituent areas of comparative study in relation to children's literature (theory of children's literature, contact and transfer studies, comparative poetics, intertextuality studies, intermediality studies, image studies, comparative genre studies, comparative historiography of children's literature, comparative history of children's literature studies), which she illustrates with examples from around the world. But, although extensive, O'Sullivan's proposal is not without its blind spots, and she acknowledges that it “can only be enhanced by future discussion and modification” (12). With the aim of bolstering the field of children's literature, I here propose an area of comparative research overlooked by O'Sullivan. I also suggest extensions to her conception of comparative literature and to her handling of reception or reader response.

In the study of the heroic play it has been rather generally assumed that Dryden and his fellow-playwrights went direct to France for their models and established in England a form of drama distinct from anything that had preceded them. The French romance and the French drama, because they had an influence on the Restoration drama, have been regarded as its sole progenitors. The position of D'Avenant as the connecting link between the earlier and the later drama has been recognized; Dryden himself acknowledges his indebtedness to the author of The Siege of Rhodes. But very little has been done to show that a stream of influence percolates from the Jacobean drama through D'Avenant to the heroic play. Of course, it is easy to exaggerate resemblances, to imagine similarities of capital importance, and to proclaim a paramount influence; but, nevertheless, a prion reasons are in favor of an influence, and a comparison of the two types of drama will, it seems to me, undoubtedly show a connection between them which is more than casual.

Those who consider punctuation ‘largely a matter of taste’ and look upon the so-called ‘sentence-sense’ as a kind of sixth sense that comes only from generations of gentle breeding, will regard with small favor the attempt to formulate any very definite principles governing the structure of the sentence; but those who have little faith in the subjective conclusions of capricious taste will welcome any systematic presentation of facts that may enable them to settle points of disputed usage for themselves. It is with this conviction that I offer the following contribution to the study of the sentence, not without hope that it may incite others to a more thoro investigation of related problems of English usage.

Modern readers are prone to find the tragedy of Brutus in his incorruptible devotion to high principle and fair play. Many members of the Globe audience, however, could see in him not only magnanimity but rich complications of misplaced sincerity and self-deception. For in sixteenth-century views of Roman history the conspiracy against Caesar often exemplified a flouting of unitary sovereignty, that prime point of Tudor policy, and thus was bound to end in the anarchy thought to accompany “democratic” or constitutional checks upon authority. Certain judgments of Elizabethan political writers who refer to Brutus are quite clear upon this point. Although naturally aware of the honor and liberality shown by Brutus, Shakespeare's contemporaries could thus perceive in him a conflict between questionable goals and honorable action, a contradiction lying in his attempt to redeem morally confused ends by moral clarity of means. As with Othello, the Elizabethan tragedy of Brutus is one of confusion, of integrity and plain dealing which not only accompany the protagonist into evil but continue to reassure him in his error.

The Chronicle of the Monastery of Hales (in Gloucestershire) occupies the first fifty-six folios of ms. Cotton Cleopatra D. iii, a manuscript written in or soon after the year 1301, with which it originally ended. As is the case with scores of other Latin Chronicles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, its first part, the “Gesta Britonum,” consists essentially of a condensation of Geoffry of Monmouth's Historia, with a few divergences. It has no notable feature before the reign of Arthur.

The aesthetic movement in England (1870–1900) now seems remote, yet since no history repeats itself more faithfully than that of criticism, the historian of ideas may well inquire what relation the Art for Art's Sake movement has to the mental, moral, and social confusion of today, especially when one hears a reviewer warning us that John Crowe Ransom, like other formal aesthetic critics of today, “often sounds like an aesthete of the 'nineties.“

Some years ago bertram holland flanders discovered in an obscure literary journal called Wheler's Magazine, published in Athens, Georgia, a Longfellow “translation” entitled “A Lay of Courage,” which had not appeared among the poet's collected works. According to its heading the poem had been rendered from the Danish of Ove Mailing, a statesman and historian of some importance but of small reputation as a poet. When Flanders added the translation to Longfellow's bibliography nothing was known of the circumstances of its composition nor had the Danish original been identified. An examination of additional evidence now makes it clear that Longfellow did not translate the poem; that, in fact, he probably did not even consult Mailing's original; and that, actually, he took the product of an earlier translator and, altering it slightly, submitted it to the editor of Wheler's Magazine under his own name.

James's youthful ideas about the form of fiction are the germs of the principles expressed in the late prefaces. But his earliest dicta, in comparison to the late, are arid and formalist—dogmatically proclaimed, not experimentally discovered. They hint of an American Gallophile, infatuated with the rigid lines and harsh economy of the well-made play and the well-made novel. In 1874 James announced: “We confess to a conservative taste in literary matters—to a relish for brevity, for conciseness, for elegance, for perfection of form” (LRE, p. 139). He never renounced such a taste; “brevity” and “perfection of form”—more frequently “economy” and “composition”—are as prominent, indeed as hieratic, in the prefaces as in the earliest reviews. But if James seems to have acquired his literary standards artificially and to have begun his career with a set of a priori principles to guide him, it was not long before he was to make these ideas his own by fully understanding their relevance to the craft of fiction. The early assumptions are not repudiated, but tested, clarified, and deepened. There is a remarkable balance in James's mature criticism between the general principle and the pragmatically discovered insight. Though the insistence on economy and order is never relaxed, the concepts become increasingly more flexible; with ease they accommodate notions of fiction that seem contradictory. James repeatedly exults in the freedom of the novelist: “the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (AN, p. 326). Indeed to James it is plastic enough and prodigious enough to allow for the reconciliation of the art of Scribe with that of Balzac, and of the principles of Coleridge with those of Flaubert.

On mentionne avec raison l'épicurisme de Voltaire mais il ne faut pas toutefois oublier qu'au point de vue de la morale seule, il est assez difficile de tracer les différences qui devraient exister entre le sage épicurien et le sage stoïcien. Ces deux doctrines, aussi bien que le péripatétisme représenté par Aristote, le pyrrhonisme transformé plus tard en scepticisme, l'éclectisme de la Nouvelle-Académie expliqué par Cicéron, font partie du bagage philosophique légué à l'Europe par la pensée grecque et romaine. Voltaire a été influencé par ces doctrines à différents degrés et l'étude présente sur “Zadig” va montrer combien Voltaire a su lire, comprendre et même pratiquer quelque peu la pensée stoïcienne en la mélangeant naturellement avec d'autres.

Amusés, les historiens et les critiques ont souvent prêté quelques moments d'attention à la Puce de Mme. Desroches. Se sont-ils toujours doutés que cette puce appartînt à un cycle assez riche: poèmes (et chansons) où l'auteur fait le vœu d‘être changé en quelque chose qui touche la femme aimée, ou dont elle use, ou qui la reflète: non seulement puce ou mouche, mais gants, collier, miroir, ...? On chantait, nous dit-on, voici cinquante ans: “Je voudrais être La Fleur novelle/De son chapeau.” Des couplets comiques mettaient en scène, au commencement du XIXe siècle, un Suisse allemand, un peu lourdaud, qui déclarait à sa belle, en mauvais français: “Moi, je voudrais être une mouche/Pour voler sur ta belle front.” On ferait un livre sur ce simple thème. Qu'il nous suffise d‘étudier quelques exemples.

At the present time, the only known manuscript of Berceo's Martirio de San Lorenzo is the eighteenth-century copy that belonged to Padre Ibarreta, and Solalinde expresses the conviction that the Sánchez edition of the poem is based on the Ibarreta manuscript. On several occasions Sanchez mentions the fact that he had at hand the Ibarreta manuscript, and he likewise states that he had his own copy of several of Berceo's poems and that he used the Ibarreta version “para cotejar algunas que yo tenía, y copiar las que me faltaban.” That there is a close relationship between the Sánchez and Ibarreta versions of the Martirio de San Lorenzo is evident from the following facts; in both versions the poem is incomplete, containing only 105 stanzas; both versions have five verses in stanza 15; both versions use, consistently, the forms, ome, omes, sancto, sanctidat, lazdrar, judgar, nunqua; and they conform in the use of the exceptional forms cipdad 10d, cipdat 12d, Katolicos 2d, Karidad 10b, Karidat 47b. Furthermore, the three specific errors of construction or legibility mentioned by Sánchez are also found in the Ibarreta manuscript: the omission of Dios in 10b, omission of the rhyme word in 102d, and omission of seven letters in avrie despecho 105d.

Changes in Faulkner's depictions of sound during the course of his career reflect changes in his understanding of his relation to the world and of himself as an artist. In his early work, he uses images of sound to express a highly romanticized yearning for reconciliation with the world. As his career advances, regret over the passing of the world of his youth and distaste for the modern world replacing it lead him to emphasize the idea of sound as a hostile force, intent on invading the mind. In the postwar period, as he senses that his creative power is declining, he comes to envision himself and the world as engaged in a struggle for dominance, and he devises a variety of ingenious fictional stratagems with which to annul the world's sounds and to reaffirm his belief in the power of his artistic voice.

Who “Invented” the monologue intérieur or “inner monologue” as a literary device? And who was the first to coin and use this literary formula? These two questions have been for some time a matter for debate. Edouard Dujardin, in a book which was a mixture of naive arrogance with interesting and penetrating observations, defended somewhat heatedly his own priority as the “inventor” of this literary method, and dismissed rather airily various rival claims put forth on behalf of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Poe, Browning, and others, by André Gide, Charles du Bos, and René Lalou. Dujardin's own priority had been recognized by Joyce, whom Dujardin himself regarded as the most thorough and perfect practitioner of the method initiated by him, and by Valery Larbaud, who had applied the formula to Joyce's Ulysses and later practiced the method himself.

In his German Culture and Christianity, London, 1882, Joseph Gostwick says apologetically of Schiller: “As regards his unbelief, he must be classed with the more respectable rationalists.” And of his middle life he says: “The poet, naturally a proud man, learned to look down with contempt on everything that in his boyhood had been believed.” And as a sort of final judgment: “When the saying is once more repeated, that for Schiller independent culture takes the place of religion, the truth of the conclusion is obvious, though it may require some qualification.” This qualification is found in the statement at the end of the chapter on Schiller, that “there may be found passages in his later prose writings to support our opinion that near the close of his life he was led to think with reverence of religion.” This judgment of Gostwick's may stand as a fair sample of the conservative view of Schiller's religion, and this by one who is partial to the poet and would fain count him as a fellow-believer.