Three works attributed to Robert Greene, all published posthumously, have served as the basis for almost all that has been written about the life of that interesting Elizabethan author; portions of these works have been accepted as pure autobiography, and the information contained in such passages has been used to confirm similar details, apparently also autobiographical, in the earlier works. The hazard involved in the use, for purposes of biography, of material contained in the novels of Greene, or of any other writer of fiction, should be obvious to any modern critic; but the earlier scholars were evidently unaware of the danger.

The purpose of this article is to further the understanding of the nature and function of dwarves in Old Icelandic belief by an investigation of the names applied to them. I have therefore collected the dwarf-names, supplied meanings and etymologies, and classified the names by form and function. These names are scattered through the Fornaldarsögur, the Younger Edda and in various Eddic poems. Most of the names are in two versified lists; the shorter list in stanzas 10 to 16 of the V$ooluspá, the longer, called Dverga heiti, among the nafnaþulur. These two lists, which are derived from a common source, have a large number of names in common; the V$ooluspá has nine or ten that are not in the þulur, and the latter have a somewhat larger number which are not in the V$ooluspá. The various manuscripts show variant readings. All these readings are of interest to us, for the opinion of a scribe as to what is a suitable name for a dwarf may be just as valuable as the opinion of the man who composed the original.

Composition studies concentrates on students, not texts. We in this field want to know who our students are. What abilities to use language do they bring to the academy? What new kinds of intellectual work are they able to do? What challenges does academic discourse pose for them? These are research questions we explore with rigor but also compassion and, sometimes, admiration. My favorite origin story claims that this field's modern iteration sprang from reluctance to use first-year writing courses, required at most universities, simply to eject the “boneheads.” Instead, we learned from Mina Shaughnessy and others to regard even the most struggling undergraduate writers as agents, operating among intersecting and competing discourse communities. For us, student writers are not solitary creators, nor are they intertextual blurs.

In his speech on “vertue” (I.iii) Iago defends the absolute power of the individual to will freely. This doctrine of the autonomous will was commonly attributed to the Jesuit theologian, Molina, whose writings were then the subject of bitter controversy. Iago's subtle twisting of moral values also falls into the pattern of malign casuistry and cynical self-aggrandizement associated with the Jesuit image in England. Iago, then, is not the usual Machiavel who spurns both religion and morality; he is the Jesuitical Machiavel who employs the language of piety to “enmesh them all.” Convinced that he is the master of his will, Iago usually finds no difficulty in supplying motives for his actions; yet, after he is unmasked, he doggedly remains silent. From the Augustinian (and Shakespearean) point of view this is simply the ultimate mute evidence that, contrary to his belief, Iago has been mastered by a radically evil will for which he has merely supplied both motive and opportunity. Like the Pardoner and the Ancient Mariner, he knows what he has done, but does not (in the fullest sense of the word) know why he has done it.

The major conflict in Hard Times pits Fact against Fancy; but Dickens ascribes two meanings to Fancy: imaginative play and fellow feeling. Each is directed separately against Fact: (1) The narrative personality combines images of life (horses, flowers, the sun, and fire) with images of lifelessness (pits, destructive violence, artificiality) in complex relationships, creating an impressive model of a highly fused, interdependent world, which contradicts the disjointed world of Gradgrindian Fact. (2) The virtuous characters employ fellow feeling to soften ills caused by Fact. But the novel does not show the 'components of Fancy to be coordinate, as Dickens implies. In practice, imaginative play provides a protective atmosphere of delusion, within which fellow feeling is supposed to grow to strength. Imagination fortifies innocence against the sordid and bad aspects of reality. Thus Dickens seems uncertain whether to work toward a coherent, interdependent world, or toward a scattering of islands of innocence—whether to employ imaginative play in building bridges to extend fellow feeling, or in building buffers to protect innocence. The result of his double advocacy is a series of probably unconscious compromises. Because the forces of Fancy are so divided, so fettered, the book's alternative to the Facts of Gradgrind is not so clear and attractive as one could wish.

There are few questions concerning Anglo-Saxon literature which have been more widely discussed than the interpretation of the so-called First Riddle of Cynewulf. The subject was introduced by Heinrich Leo in 1857, in his celebrated monograph Quae de se ipso Cynewulfus Poeta Anglosaxonicus tradiderit. Before that time the line shad attracted little attention. As is well known, they occur in the Exeter Book, the collection of verse left by Bishop Leofric to his cathedral church in the eleventh century. Thorpe, in his edition of this manuscript, did not venture to translate them, which is scarcely to be wondered at, since both language and grammatical construction are unusually obscure. The investigations of Leo, however, with those of his followers and opponents, at once gave great interest and importance to the almost unnoticed lines. It may be well to mention briefly the principal theories which have been founded on this bit of verse, some of which rival in ingenuity the familiar attempts to establish a Baconian cypher in the works of Shakespeare.

If Contemporary critics are inclined to see William Cowper as “first and foremost … an Evangelical preacher”,1 the tradition (though not in every respect the judgment) is well founded. Significantly enough, the first serious biographical interpretation of the poet was not a biography at all but an Evangelical sermon preached by the Reverend Samuel Greatheed at Olney on May 18, 1800, shortly after Cowper's death. Greatheed was one of the pupils of the Reverend William Bull— Cowper's beloved “smoke-inhaling Bull”—at his academy in Newport Pagnell for the training of members in the Independent Church; he was a friend and correspondent of Cowper in the last years of the poet's life; and he became one of the first editors of the Eclectic Review when it was founded in 1805.4 The sermon was preached while Greatheed was supply pastor for the Reverend Thomas Hillyard's Independent Congregation in Olney, and it was shortly afterward published at Newport Pagnell and in London.3 In the year of its publication, it appeared in digested form in the Evangelical Magazine4 and quotations from it formed the bulk of “An Account of the Life and Death of William Cowper” in the Gospel Magazine and Theological Review.6 For the next three years it became the basic source of Evangelical comment on Cowper in periodicals and in at least two “memoirs” in book form. However, in spite of its interest as an early biographical source, its importance is greater as an opening gun in the long (and even yet inconclusive) warfare engaged in by critics and biographers over the part that Evangelicalism or Methodism played in Cowper's madness.

In the light of James's contemporary critical writings and of the precepts of the aesthetic movement, Mark Ambient emerges not as a Wildean aesthete but rather as James's spokesman on the art of fiction. In espousing a realistic theory of art, in stressing the artist's right to treat all of life without puritanical restrictions, and in his passionate concern for formal perfection, Ambient voices the ideals of the serious, literary side of the aesthetic movement. His sister represents its excesses and affectations; his wife, the Puritan- Philistine hatred and fear of art; and the narrator, the disciple who, until enlightened through his encounter with the artist, had naively subscribed to the art for art's sake formula. Though Ambient is artistically daring, in his personal life he is respectable and morally responsible. However, the fusion in the story between the aesthetic ideas and the moral, psychological conflict is imperfect. Though there is a suggestion that Ambient's imaginative openness to life has led to a culpable passivity in his role as husband and father, his responsibility for the child's death is inadequately related to his portrayal as an artist and the passages expounding his views on art seem incompletely assimilated to the action.

On a shelf in the magnificent New York library of Dr. Rosenbach is a somewhat dilapidated little vellum-bound manuscript, measuring about 5¾ x 7½ inches, which appears to have been written at the beginning of the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The pages are not numbered and there is no list of contents. The front leaf is defective at the bottom, and the first few leaves have been stained by damp on the upper right corner so that some words can no longer be deciphered.

In Pendennis Thackeray redefines the meaning of “maturity” in order to suit the unusual needs of Pendennis in his compulsive search for emotional security. The narrator's ability simultaneously to denigrate and to celebrate the sentimental purity of Pen's mother, Helen, is the paradox whose development gives esthetic coherence to an otherwise commonplace story. Both Helen's youthful disappointments and her later possessiveness elicit protective responses from the narrator, although he goes out of his way to make her destructive nature increasingly obvious to the reader and to Pen himself. Moreover, Pen's continued inability to break away from Helen's demands reinforces her insistence on total allegiance from him. The narrator presents his characters' problems within a framework of psychological reality, but solves them only on the level of pseudo-incestuous fantasy. Therefore, final freedom from the terrors of insecurity involves Pen's willing enslavement to the mindlessness of Helen's sentimentality.

Everyone who knows the life of Johnson remembers his revelation to Boswell of what first set him “thinking in earnest of religion,” after a youth spent mostly in indifference toward it, and in lax talking against it. This laxity, he said, “lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford I took up ‘Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life,‘ expecting to find it a dull book, (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.” Everyone accepts this as a significant event in Johnson's life, and nearly every book written since either about Johnson or Law repeats it. There has been, however, a curious indifference among Johnsonian scholars toward examining its significance, or considering the possibility that Law's influence on him may have extended beyond this admittedly important event in his young manhood. Mrs. Thrale was the only person I know of in his own day who suspected a real debt to Law in his writings, and since his death, with the exception of those critics who have surmised an influence of Law's “portraits” on some of Johnson's character-sketches in the Rambler, there have been, I believe, only two who have seen Law's influence at work on the mature Johnson.

When read in the contexts of psychology, theology, and Old English poetry, Bede’s Death-Song can be confidently valued as a fine poem, and not merely as venerable wisdom. The design of this eighth-century poem shows substantial correlations with the design of the Epistola Cuthberti, in which it appears. The letter appears to combine eyewitness report with hagiographic conventions. Ambivalence at meeting one’s Judge is expressed both in its narrative and the poem; troubled feelings are balanced by a certain faith. Scriptural echoes reveal Cuthbert’s conscious intention to present the Bede of the letter as an imitator of Christ. Comparison with other Old English poetic treatments of Bede’s theme shows that the poem fully exploits the artistic potential of the vernacular tradition.

Critics have found Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man more difficult to classify than any other of his books. Melville himself refers to the narrative as “our comedy,” and at one point signals his reader that he is passing “from the comedy of thought to that of action.” He creates an unusual thematic setting by reducing the dimensions of his characters and by curtailing the scale of their actions. The shallowness of the confidence man, unfitting him for the profound pathos or even tragedy of Moby Dick or Pierre, prepares him eminently for the role of the comic racketeer, the city slicker, horn-swoggling and bamboozling the country (and city) yokels. Certainly we do not cry, perhaps we don't even laugh, but surely we smile, if a little grimly, as the confidence man swindles victim after victim in the course of his adventures, relying frequently on the innate weaknesses in human nature—the desire to get something for nothing, the willingness to traffic in the misery of others. But the confidence man exploits generous and noble impulses, too, and this apparent mockery of traditional values gives the book a complexity and at times an ambiguity that cause many readers to abandon it, bewildered.

The name ‘Gerund’ was borrowed from Latin grammar, and has for a long time been in use in English, though with varying application according as it covers more or less ground. It is found in grammars of the last century and of this, where it is often confused with the ‘verbal noun.’ This name is employed here because it is the most convenient that has been suggested; ‘infinitive in ing,' used by Whitney and others, while suggestive of its relationship and real function, is too unwieldly for practical grammar. A far more objectionable name, because the objection is based upon a radical difference in functions, is ‘participle,’ which is given to the verb-adjective also, thereby causing confusion. Etymologically, ‘gerund’ is just as misleading as the majority of its fellows. Participles, for instance, would by this test include infinitives, for infinitives partake of two natures; and infinitives would include participles, which are just as unlimited as infinitives. The origin of words, however, does not confine their use with unyielding bonds, and their use defines them.

“Rappaccini's Daughter” (1844) is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous and most frequently taught short fictions. In it Hawthorne distances himself from what he earlier called “the tottering infancy of our literature”; he boldly attaches his tale instead to the venerable scene of European literary history. Yet despite the numerous references in “Rappaccini's Daughter” to a European literary genealogy, Hawthorne makes no such self-conscious allusion to a crucial source, Frances Calderón de la Barca's Life in Mexico, a work mired in specifically American controversies over colonialism, race, and slavery. This essay examines Hawthorne's literary relation to the Americas by investigating what I call the Mexican genealogy of “Rappaccini's Daughter”: both the story's immediate predecessor, Life in Mexico, and its afterlife in Octavio Paz's La hija de Rappaccini, a dramatic revision that I read as an allegory of Mexican colonial history.

Although regarded as a philosopher rather than an artist, John Stuart Mill employs artistry as well as rational argument to enlighten his reader. Mill's “Bentham,” for example, demonstrates how Mill operates as a sage using both logic and art to awaken the reader to a new perception of reality. In “Bentham” Mill creates a sense of disappointment arising from Bentham's great promise and limited performance, both as thinker and as man. Constructing an image of himself as a whole thinker, Mill thereby underscores Bentham's position as half-thinker. Mill also creates an elaborate portrait of Bentham as a great father-teacher-hero-God figure, only to reveal Bentham's inability to perform these roles adequately. By heavy use of negatives, Mill suggests that Bentham's thought has little positive value. And, finally, the essay's structure undermines all of Bentham's philosophical contributions. Deriving from Carlyle's “Boswell's Life of Johnson,” Mill's earlier writings on Bentham show him refashioning Carlyle's language and developing the ironic techniques used in “Bentham.” Like other Victorian sages, Mill has no clear-cut theory of prose artistry; he often regards poetry and prose as antithetical media. Nevertheless, in practice he writes as a complex logician-artist, using prose as an imaginative medium.

Recent poststructuralist criticism argues that language cannot be understood merely as a name-giving system and that reading is not a process of deciphering language in order to pass through it to the experience it communicates. If words are part of a larger articulation, then the question of origins, and of originality, must be recast. Finnegans Wake and Ulysses play on, and with, the dilemma of originality and repetition in literary discourse. The Wake involves us in the appeal to a source, and although the origins of knowledge, authority, life, and language may remain unlocatable we continue to search for them. The Wake suggests, too, that discourse binds us to a wheel of repetition. The complex use of cliché in Ulysses draws us even more specifically into the uses of repetition. Stereotype is more than the butt of Joyce's satire: it shares in the whole process of deconstruction that characterizes the text.