Correspondance was a belgian surrealist magazine, from the earliest years of the movement, that can be read as a Challenge to the notions of surrealism promoted in André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924. It was a self-published periodical comprising twenty-two one-page tracts, written and distributed over seven months in 1924 and 1925 by three francophone Belgian writers, Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans, and Marcel Lecomte. The most important of these was undoubtedly the one who published least: Nougé, the intellectual leader of the Brussels surrealist group. In addition to scattered publications of startling originality throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he was at that time also a key promoter of René Magritte's art; at weekly meetings of the group (whose members had day jobs and could only gather on Sunday), Magritte's latest paintings were discussed, and Nougé, mostly, proposed their enigmatic titles.

Virginia woolf's title for the two volumes of essays collected in her lifetime, The Common Reader, has been taken for a descriptive image of the critic as impressionist or amateur reader. In the preface to her first Common Reader, Mrs. Woolf explains her title and epigraph, taken from Dr. Johnson's “Life of Gray,” in place of a statement of purpose. Her description is deliberately casual and informal, but she provides a structure and point of view for her essays by adding that the common reader does wish to create from his reading “some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.” Though Mrs. Woolf's deceptive remarks on the function of criticism may partly account for the persistent view of her as “reader” rather than “critic,” other writers have contributed to the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as an occasional essayist and impressionist, as a literary portrait painter and miniaturist; or as an antiquarian rummaging through the attics of a rather charming but peripheral past. Unsympathetic readers have carried the belletristic image further and coupled it with the conception of her fiction as a total immersion in pure subjectivity or (in Sean O'Faolain's view) as an exercise in the novel as narcissism. Yet, in fairness to reviewers of Virginia Woolf's essays, it should be noted that both favorable and unfavorable com'ments seem to be based on a similar conception of her as an appreciator or impressionist rather than a serious critic. Thus Horace Gregory, while presenting what he feels is a just and favorable estimate of Virginia Woolf as an essayist, tends to ignore her real value as a literary critic.

While Botticelli's unusual figuration of the Virgin as writer in his Madonna del Magnificat (c. 1483) testifies to an important event in literary history—the appearance of the woman author in quattrocento northern Italy—it also testifies against her, employing a pictorial equivalent of the humanists' “rhetoric of impossibility,” which construes the female writer as a miraculous, hence ephemeral, phenomenon. At the same time, however, Botticelli's painting reveals the emergence of a competing imperative in the late quattrocento Latin and vernacular defenses of women by Laura Cereta, Bartolomeo Goggio, and others: the construction of the woman writer as ordinary, thus “possible.”

Criticism of the Horatian ode is in much the same state as it was twenty, or even fifty years ago, although recently the opinion has rightly been gaining ground that Marvell was less ambiguously Cromwellian than older and more sentimentally royalist readers liked to think. However, a belief in Marvell's political impartiality, or in the reluctance of his support for Cromwell, remains almost a sine qua non for anyone who discusses the poem, but I shall try to show that by 1650 Marvell had become completely Cromwellian, and that his theme was Cromwell's election as the constitutional dictator of England, in accordance with the popular concept of the dux bellorum which permitted dictators at the commencement of new empires. My second proposal is that the undeniable impartiality of Marvell's tone and stance derives not from a neutral political attitude, but from the careful rhetorical procedure which Marvell adopted in order to make his theme persuasive to a doubtful audience. The ode is a political or deliberative oration, written to the pattern of such speeches formulated by the classical orators. Deliberative speeches generally dealt with a “difficult” subject, the genus admirabile causae, and frequently began with an insinuatio—a device employed when the opinion of the audience was considered to be prejudiced against the case. But before beginning an examination of the poem and identifying the source of Marvell's brilliant “insinuation,” it would be well to outline very briefly the state of English loyalism in 1649-50, which lends credence to Marvell's position in the ode, and helps to explain how it was possible for a man of integrity to hold opinions so contrary to his earlier royalism.

One can hardly complain that too few scholars have examined the influence of John Bunyan upon Nathaniel Hawthorne. George Parsons Lathrop's A Study of Hawthorne and F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance give excellent if brief discussions, each of which identifies several of Hawthorne's allusions to the English allegorist. The most detailed examination is W. Stacy Johnson's “Hawthorne and The Pilgrim's Progress,” in which Johnson, after establishing Hawthorne's familiarity with The Pilgrim's Progress, points out several allusions to it in the short stories and romances, discusses Bunyan's influence upon Hawthorne's allegorical techniques, and concludes that “The Pilgrim's Progress is a major source and inspiration for the art of Hawthorne.”

So much ink has already been spilt in discussing the relationship between Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that one may very well hesitate before adding his jot. Yet the interaction of these two uncomfortably brilliant personalities is of exceptional interest both for their psychological drama and for the literature they wrote because of each other. As drama their relationship may be divided into three acts: friendship, estrangement, and enmity. Unfortunately, with the sparse documentation that survives, the action must be patiently reconstructed from fragmentary clues. Since both chief actors had complex, if not crafty minds, their motives are not simple, and must be carefully and sceptically determined. To favor either Lady Mary or Pope is to distort their drama; one must try instead to judge impartially on the basis of the facts that remain. At present, with valuable new data added to a fresh appraisal of the old, an account may be given which is less equivocal and more credible.

Studies which have been made in the West of this important topic of international literary relations have been either very general or biased or both. It is indicative of the Stand der Forschung that M. Gorlin's sketchy article, “Goethe in Russland,” remains to this day one of the sources most frequently referred to. The most recent contribution to our topic is Mathew Volm's study W. A. Zhukovskii als Übersetzer (Part ii). It is a most detailed evaluation and analysis of Zhukovski's translations of Goethe. Unfortunately, however, Volm has chosen to make of his work a polemic against Gorlin's views; he maintains that Zhukovski not only was equal to his task as a translator of Goethe but in his renderings actually proved himself a greater poet. It cannot be said that this approach resulted in an acceptable contribution to our topic. Moreover, Volm's work, like Gorlin's, is completely lacking in factual, biographical material and argues its thesis in a historical vacuum.

The meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society with the Modern Language Association of America on the one hand and with the American Anthropological Association on the other in 1938 illustrates very clearly the wide range of interests covered by the term folklore. A century ago no such term existed, but the need for one was greatly felt. Students of the popular ballad, of popular antiquities, and of superstitions all recognized that they had something in common, and, as soon as the word folklore was proposed in the 1840's, it was adopted, not only by the English-speaking public, but by the whole world. It is now as ubiquitous as the Ford car and moves uneasily in Russian or Hungarian texts, not to speak of such familiar literatures as French or German. During the ninety years in which this word has been spreading over the world, it has extended its meaning until no man today can take all folklore for his province.

It seems incredible that the analogues and sources for the “gentle bird” of reconciliation between Timias and Belphebe in the Faerie Queene (Bk. IV, 8, 3-12)—one of the loveliest guiding beasts in literature—should have escaped investigation. But, though a few scattered notes have been published on the passage in question, no one, so far as I am aware, has yet pointed out a satisfactory source or parallel.

While older literary historians dismissed Wilhelm Heinse as the author of the frivolous novel Ardinghello, in recent decades critics and scholars have noted his significance. Through the research of Walther Brecht, Walther Rehm, Oskar Weibel, Albert Zippel, and Richard Benz we now know Heinse not only as a novelist but also as a gifted interpreter of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance, as an art critic who defended Rubens against neoclassical criticism, as a forerunner of Romanticism, as an early advocate of the rehabilitation of the flesh and of a Nietzschean affirmation of life. In the recently published Annalen der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1952) p. 465, Wolfdietrich Rasch singled out Heinse's Ardinghello along with Goethe's Iphigenie, Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and Mozart's Don Juan, to exemplify the extent and diversity of German cultural life at the end of the eighteenth century.

While disability studies has opened up new discursive spaces for revising cultural attitudes and beliefs about disability, its increasing legitimation in the contemporary academy comes with conflicts. The university as a research location cannot merely divorce itself from the ethical and restrictive practices that have characterized the past two centuries. In fact, it does so only at its own risk and, even more important, at the risk of further entrenching disabled people in its institutional grounding. The institutionalization of disability studies is just that—a formal cultural ingestion process that churns out knowledge about disability while resisting reflexive inquiries about whether or not more detail is inherently better. More knowledge is inherently better for the institution because it keeps the research mill active, but here we want to contemplate the degree to which generating more professionally based data about disability threatens to reproduce some of the problems that have characterized the study of disability to this point in history.

In Romania LXXVII (1956), 66 ff. Irénée Cluzel has re-edited three of the Catalan troubadour's poems composed in a more popular vein. It is with the second of them (No. 3 of M. de Riquer's edition, Barcelona, 1947) that we are going to deal here.

In that section of his “tale” which treats the deadly sin of Ire, Chaucer's Parson observes that from this sin come various “stynkynge engendrures,” including manslaughter, or homicide.

A great deal has been said about the failure of Hart Crane's The Bridge. I should like here to add a note upon an aspect of The Bridge which, as far as I know, has not been more than mentioned, probably because the finality of the usual criticism of the poem tends to obscure it. Perhaps the shortest way to what I propose is through Ezra Pound's definition of the Image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” As symbol providing a logical meaning for the poem, the Bridge has been examined and judgment delivered; but the pattern of language through which Crane hoped to make his symbol effective as intellectual and emotional complex, or, to use his terminology, a “new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate”, has been left almost untouched.

A number of noted scholars from Jacob Grimm to Streitberg have treated this topic. The latter in his Gotisches Elementarbuch (1920) summarizes, under the corresponding heads of the syntactical part of his grammar, the results of the various investigators. I intend in this paper to make an annotation here and there to their statements. And since I have noticed that some critics waver as to where to draw the exact demarcation line, I shall start with a definition of the matter under present consideration, following in part Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik.

Drawing first on an annotated copy of the poetry of Felicia Hemans that my students discovered in the stacks of the University of Virginia's library, this essay goes on to examine the marks made by female readers in three nineteenth-century copies of Hemans's poetry to reveal the dynamics of sentiment in author-reader networks of Romantic and Victorian poetry. Seeing Hemans through the eyes of individual female readers surfaces a lost world in which poetry was valued as a collaborative, intimate language of the heart. Specific historical copies allow us best to apprehend this world, but, in the wake of wide-scale digitization, nineteenth-century books are simultaneously newly visible and newly at risk. This essay makes the case for retaining them and for integrating them into our accounts of nineteenth-century literary history.

This article argues that Machiavelli's description of reading Dante and Ovid, in his letter to Francesco Vettori of 10 December 1513, illuminates some of the most surprising and scandalous sections of The Prince. Beginning with Machiavelli's quotation of Paradiso 5 in the letter to Vettori, this study investigates how Machiavelli uses the literary works of Dante and Ovid to craft several of his most distinctive arguments on the problem of vows, value of violence, and legitimacy of deception. It argues that the reading of these literary works constitutes a crucial, but often overlooked, component of intellectual history.