In modern English usage, the term elegy bears a distinct connotation of threnody: broadly, it indicates any funeral poem or lament for the dead; more precisely, it describes a lengthened, dignified poem which either mourns reflectively for a deceased person or broods with a more inclusive sorrow over the tragedy men encounter in living. In this narrower sense, the elegy is a reflective lyric, suggested by the fact or fancy of death. The emotion, personal or public, finds utterance in keen lament, to be allayed, however, by tranquil consideration of the mutability of life, the immutability of Something which justifies life and death;

or, in the words of Edmund Gosse, it is a poem of lamentation and regret, called forth by the decease of a beloved or revered person, or by a general sense of the pathos of mortality…. It must be mournful, meditative, and short without being ejaculatory.

La chute is a disturbing and ironic picture of modern man caught in a hell of his own making. Since the involved irony and ambiguity make it Camus's most difficult work, the book was initially misunderstood by a number of critics. To appreciate fully the meaning of the novel it is necessary to understand Camus's use of literary parallels and of allusions to his own experience and to the history of his time. Some of the basic literary and historical allusions have been noted in recent criticism. The following study will examine in detail these allusions and will attempt to clarify the meaning of La Chute by elucidating particularly the relationship between the echoes of Dante and the echoes of L'Homme révolté and the controversy following its publication.

The fifteen “Life Studies” poems are distinguished as a separate work from the rest of the Life Studies volume. Their unicity arises from Lowell's use of the Freudian myths of maturation and the family romance, from a (largely Freudian) comic emphasis, and from a rhetorical, rather than merely confessional, project of the poet to vindicate himself by means such as Pound used in The Pisan Cantos. Lowell's parents are the victims of comic degradation in the poet's struggle to achieve maturity; his Grandfather Winslow is both a savior, as father surrogate, and a threat to dominate Lowell. A “plot” including parenthood, the loyal intimacy of his relationship with his wife, and Lowell's comic self-acceptance helps to give “Life Studies” a sense of renewed vitality. Also, Lowell's new, more open style reflects his response to the movements of the fifties in American poetry and supports the mythic and comic structures of renewal in the work.

Huntington's disease. Perowne, the neurosurgeon in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday (2005), readily diagnoses the genetic abnormality that afflicts a petty criminal who is assaulting him. It is like a tic with Perowne. He cannot stop himself from analyzing the biological causes of the poor emotional control, the violent temper, of the man who is mugging him. Perowne regards himself as a “professional reductionist,” a man of science who “can't help thinking it's down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules” (281). A lifetime of medical experience has led him to conclude that much of our behavior is dictated by biology. But Huntington's disease represents an extreme case. For someone with this condition, the “future is fixed and easily foretold” (94).

If recent studies of homosexuality in Renaissance literature have helped to challenge the modern idea of an essential sexual identity, I aim to challenge the idea that homosexual desire has its source in sexual “sameness,” in an identity with another. Donne's “Sapho to Philaenis” participates in a common Renaissance discourse of likeness in love; his Sappho appeals to physical identity—the “sameness” of the bodies of two women—as the basis of an idealized passion. But in “Sapho to Philaenis” difference emerges as the only inviolable, invariable feature of erotic experience with another, and sameness is exposed as rhetorical rather than material, a contingency produced by Donne's comparative method. By comparing Sappho to Philaenis, Donne's poem suggests that sameness has to do not with the “nature” of homosexuality but with a cultural “homopoetics” that makes such likenesses and produces sexual identities.

The present writer pointed out that many of the themes of satire which constitute Swift's attack on the Puritan, Jack, had been used by earlier seventeenth-century satirists; and the statement was made that part of his real contribution was to be found in his analysis of the zeal and fervor which made all men irrational. This paper will endeavor to show that many of the observations on enthusiasm and zeal which are found in A Tale of a Tub and the Discourse on the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit were not new or original. Some effort will be made to show that Swift knew the principal satirists mentioned, but more to ascertain how Swift's remarks on enthusiasm would have been understood by those Englishmen of the early eighteenth century who were thoroughly conversant with the earlier satires of enthusiasts.

Hope this microphone works. If you have to listen to me I hope you can hear me. Once before at a gathering of a learned society, seeing an upright gadget before me, I talked with extreme care directly into it for half an hour, moving neither to the right nor to the left, only to find as I went down from the platform that it was a lamp.

According to Sir Charles Tennyson, Carlyle met Tennyson at the Sterling Club as early as 1839, if not earlier. Previously, Sir Charles says, Carlyle had heard much about him from John Sterling, who had helped to found the Cambridge Apostles' Club, of which Tennyson had also been a member. D. A. Wilson, however, in his multi-volumed life of Carlyle says that the two first met in Carlyle's garden at Chelsea in the autumn of 1840. Sir Charles is more nearly right. Wilson's date is too late, for on 5 September 1840 Carlyle wrote to his brother: “Some weeks ago, one night, the Poet Tennison [sic] and Matthew Allen were discovered here, sitting smoking in the garden. Tennison had been here before, but was still new to Jane,—who was alone for the first hour or two of it. A fine large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free-and-easy: who swims, outwardly and inwardly, with great composure in an inarticulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; great now and then where he does emerge: a most restful, brotherly, solidhearted man.” From the very first the friendship seemed to flourish. “He seemed to take a fancy to me,” Tennyson later told a visitor at Farringford in speaking of Carlyle's favorable treatment of him in the early forties. In those years Carlyle's reputation had already been firmly established by his French Revolution and his lectures; but Tennyson had not published the two volumes of 1842 which were to do much to give him fame. Both had found the road to fame a long, steep, and difficult one. Both had lost manuscripts: Carlyle that of the French Revolution, volume one; and Tennyson that of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Both had been battered much by hardships and disappointments. Carlyle, who was fourteen years older than the poet, had struggled over a much longer period before being acclaimed by the literary world. But the period of their fame would also be a long one, and in terms of rough chronology they enjoyed their fame during the same years.

Most readers of the account of Raphael's visit to Eden in Book v of Paradise Lost center their interest on the exchange of greetings between Raphael and Adam, which illustrates the sense of order and hierarchy so significant in the poem. The importance for both theme and structure of the angel's address to Eve, which immediately follows, has, however, been overlooked. Eve rises to greet her heavenly guest, and the narration continues:

On whom the Angel Haile
Bestowd, the holy salutation us'd
Long after to blest Marie, second Eve.
(Paradise Lost v.385-387)

Dante Scholars have long recognized the central role played by the first Canto of the Comedy. In the last half-century the wealth of hidden riches contained in the Canto has received such emphasis that as early as 1925 P. Luigi Pietrobono could defend the Canto against those detractors who felt that its allegorical structure led to an obfuscation of thought. For Pietrobono, “Nel primo Canto Dante ha poste le basi del più complesso e armonioso edificio d'arte che mente umana abbia mai con-cepito; e perô, anzichè correre a criticare e a supporre che un cosî mirabile costruttore di mondi si sia sentita tremar la mano proprio nel tirarne le prime linee, direi molto più con-veniente volgere l'ingegno a ricercare il fine a cui con la sua opera intendeva.” He then proceeded to single out the many Biblical echoes that resound throughout the Canto, with special emphasis on the drama of the resurrection of Israel.

In 1838 Lytton published in the Monthly Chronicle an essay entitled “On Art in Fiction.” This essay is ignored by those who have written on Lytton's narrative art; yet, as it is reprinted in the volume, Pamphlets and Sketches, it takes up thirty-five closely printed pages and deals explicitly with the various parts of the novelist's craft. In it Lytton defines, in terms that apply to prose fiction, the aims of art and the means by which the aims may be achieved. By 1838 he had written twelve novels. The essay represents an experienced novelist's conclusions about the potentialities of his chosen form; and, moreover, it provides us with a measuring stick to set up against his later if not his earlier novels.

Contrary to the view of Calvino as a writer divided between sociopolitical concern and escape into fantasy, his works point to an unambiguous poetics in which this apparent dichotomy is in fact a dialectic process. His stylistic and narrative experimentations, from the “neorealist” mode to allegorical and mathematical fictions, and to self-reflexive narrative, disclose a precise ideological intent: to propose ever-changing models of reality, to question each form as it is produced, to explode every narrative system so a new one may be created. By means of lexical and syntactical deformation, of shifts from one semantic code to another, of ironic metalinguistic references, and by the use of special subcodes (e.g., the comic strip), Calvino breaks down the conventional barrier separating high literature from popular culture, opens to question the whole of literary tradition, and exposes the paradoxical nature of writing (écriture) in the dialectics of signification.

While investigating the significance of Sordello in Browning's life, I recently traced certain resemblances between that poet's ideas and experiences as revealed in Sordello and Jung's psycho-therapeutic theories concerning the leaders of a culture. In one section of my article I detailed Jung's comments on the inarticulateness of “prophet poets,” such as Browning early aspired to be. Jung's explanations, however, are not entirely satisfactory, for their premises will not bear submitting to present-day laboratory and operational technique. I should like, therefore, to adopt another line of approach to the problem of Browning's inability to express himself clearly about what we may call metaphysical matters.

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).

The Romantic Period has generally been regarded as one of enthusiasm for the pre-Augustan poets as well as for the writers of Jacobean and Caroline prose. We recall the ardors of Charles Lamb for the Elizabethan dramatists, and of Lamb and Coleridge for Browne, Burton, and Taylor; we recall, too, the interest of Scott in the ballads, and of Keats in Spenser and Milton.

One tries to transcend something in order to escape it, to dominate it, or to turn it into one's slave. The ambiguity inherent in any attempt to transcend is the obvious fact that one must transcend something; the relation between the two “positions” is therefore dialectical—both are as it were defined against and thus tied to each other. The Christian's fight to bring the body into subjection to the soul, by which the soul may “transcend” the body, illuminates nothing so much as the usurpation of the soul's attention by the body: the soul's activity is controlled by the body in its very attempt to negate this control. Between persons, parties, and nations transcendence takes the form of a power-play, yet the story is the same. Snobbery is an even clearer example and has its most explicit and radical paradigm in the master-slave relationship. The snob and the one he is snobbish to (transcends, dominates) both share the same system of values, that is, both value being “in,” although only one has achieved that envied status. In other words, the snob can only define himself against those before whom he parades his superiority, and so, paradoxically, we can say that the snob needs these to the exact degree that he wishes to reject them. Those below him, the slaves whom the “master” beats, are like him insofar as they want to be “in” so that they too can “beat” those below them as they themselves have been beaten. They both love and hate the master: love him because they want to be like him and hate him because they are not and are beaten by him. Likewise the master both “loves” and hates his slaves, insofar as the hate which motivates his transcendence is dependent on their continual presence to him as that which he is transcending. If we substitute for social snobbery a scale of transcendence in which praise and power are the controlling values, we will have both the controlling scheme of the action of Coriolanus and a good part of its theme as well.

Though the development of novelistic prose in medieval Castilian literature has been traditionally associated with the encyclopedic works of Alfonso el Sabio and those of his nephew, Juan Manuel, author of the Conde Lucanor, the stylistic differences between these two writers are sufficiently important to indicate the existence of a transitional period characterized by the absorption of classical rhetoric into the mainstream of religiously oriented didactic literature. An analysis of the critically neglected works of Sancho IV, second son of Alfonso and guardian to the young Juan Manuel, reveals the intermediate stages in the transformation of impersonal Alfonsine historical narrative to the highly anecdotal mode of Juan Manuel and subsequently affirms Sancho's role in Castilian letters while stressing Juan Manuel's clear genius for synthesizing the major literary currents of his age. (In Spanish)

If, as Professor Adams complains, Milton's Comus has been “overread,” the chief reason is that we are still trying to find out what the masque means. In spite of the wide acceptance given to Professor Woodhouse's theological interpretation of the work, critics keep twisting the dials, trying to sharpen the focus. The difficulty is that none of the adjustments tried so far brings the whole narrative into focus at once.

When the Japanese Nobel Laureate in literature KenzaburŌ Ōe visited Taiwan for a symposium held in his honor in December 2009, he hardly anticipated the political controversies into which he was thrown. Even before the conference, politicians accused the Academia Sinica, the organizing institution, of kowtowing to China by reducing a trilateral symposium involving Japan, Taiwan, and China to a “cross-strait event” and by replacing the Taiwanese novelist who was to act as Ōe's interlocutor with one more acceptable to China. Aside from the China factor, the underhanded politics tapped into ethnic tensions in Taiwan and the problematic national identity of Taiwan. While the original interlocutor, Li Ang, and her substitute, Zhu Tienwen, are critically acclaimed women novelists just a few years apart in age, Li is of Minnan ancestry and Zhu a second-generation Chinese mainlander whose father fled with the Chinese Nationalist or Kuomintang (KMT) government to Taiwan in 1949 after losing China to the communists. More important, Li is a postcolonial writer, whereas Zhu deploys postmodernism to resist decolonization.