In Henry James's story, An International Episode, two English-men visit America. One of the visitors is Lord Lambeth, son of the Duke of Bayswater and brother of the Countess of Pimlico. In New York City and in Newport, the Englishmen are hospitably entertained by Mr. and Mrs. Westgate, not because the Americans are in any way obligated to the visitors but solely because of their open-hearted habits of hospitality and friendliness. After the Englishmen have returned to Great Britain, Mrs. Westgate and a Boston friend, Miss Bessie Alden, go to London; but on their arrival there, they find Lord Lambeth's family very slow in returning the courtesies he had been shown in America. Henry James remarks that “Bessie Alden . . . saw something of . . . English society . . . and . . . especially prized the privilege of meeting certain celebrated . . . authors and artists,”' but of the Duchess of Bayswater and the Countess of Pimlico she and Mrs. Westgate saw very little. At first they saw them not at all. And after the haughty English ladies had at last made a reluctant call on the visitors from America, Mrs. Westgate remarked: “They meant to overawe us. . . . They meant to snub us.” Bessie Alden observed that “their manners were not fine.” And Mrs. Westgate replied: “They were not even good!” Shortly after being snubbed in London, the Americans departed for the continent, leaving the reader with the impression that they were far greater ladies than the titled representatives of British ladyhood who had tried to overawe them in London.

The Earl of Surrey’s five “personal elegies” demonstrate his sophisticated use of traditional rhetorical patterns, specifically his manipulation of the two types of structure for epideictic praise, that focusing on the subject’s biography, or that delineating his virtues. His sonnet on Thomas Clere follows the first type, and the Excellent Epitaffe on Wyatt adheres closely to the second, but even in these pieces Surrey departs from convention when it suits his larger rhetorical and poetic purposes. Individual modifications are even more apparent in his three less public tributes. The two sonnets on Wyatt serve as sequels to the satiric ending of the Epitaffe, and “So crewell prison” extends personal grief over the death of the Earl of Richmond to the level of an ubi sunt lament for the passing of an age. The elegies illustrate, finally, that the successful manipulation of convention by a good Tudor poet is itself a kind of originality.

I propose the hypothesis that this shift in primary modification which took place a little more than two hundred years ago represents, in connection with objects modified and specific contexts, a fundamental change in poetic reference, a new idea of the poetic medium which is still very close to us, and which has strongly pervaded the poetry of our ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’ predecessors. I propose, then, to demonstrate the representative nature of this primary modification by tracing more closely, and qualitatively as well as quantitatively, the developing relation of the standards epithets good and bad to the qualities epithets bright and dark through the work and the concordance listings of four or five poets on either side of 1740.

Although a collection of stories, The Piazza Tales achieve unity by revealing Herman Melville's pessimistic state of mind during the early 1850's. Three persistent concerns of the author run through the six stories that make up the book: the difficulty of human perception, artistic and otherwise; the dangers of human isolation; and the catastrophic effects of human servitude.

Marjorie Perloff's 2006 presidential address may be most striking in its call for a return to a conventional definition of the literary as the ground of disciplinary training. If the profession of literary study in the contemporary academy is in a state of crisis, Perloff argues, it is largely a result of the ways literary scholars have undermined and contaminated the core of the discipline, adopting a “governing paradigm” for scholarship and teaching from other fields, including anthropology and history (654). “It is time to trust the literary instinct that brought us to this field in the first place,” she counsels, “and to recognize that, instead of lusting after those other disciplines that seem so exotic primarily because we don't really practice them, what we need is more theoretical, historical, and critical training in our own discipline” (662). One could respond that this position, with its suggestion that the solution is mostly a matter of self-fashioning in the discipline, understates the broader pressures in the university as a social institution. But in what follows I would like to take up a different, smaller concern: Perloff's hostility to interdisciplinarity.

The global linguasphere is in a state of ecological and humanitarian crisis. In a powerful meditation in pmla, simon gikandi notes that the loss of any language (and of a culture sustained by it) is worthy of mourning and that language death around the globe is a matter of urgent collective concern. Relating great emotion when the “UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger confronted me with the bleak reality of language endangerment measured in maps, graphs, and data sets,” he ponders the ethical and political stakes of widespread language loss (9). He ends by quoting (and translating) a poem by the anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla “captur[ing] what happens when a language dies” (13), and he builds to a stark closing dictum: “Letting a language die is an injustice, a denial of will to those who speak it” (14). In this forceful essay, metaphorical discourse of language death gives way to a poignant elegy that registers a strong affective and political investment in the sustainment of languages.

Entre las polémicas literarias que hallaron campo propicio en la España del siglo XVII, ninguna fue acaso tan enconada como aquélla a que dió lugar la publicación del Para todos del doctor Juan Pérez de Montalbán. No bien salían de las prensas de Madrid los ejemplares del debatido libro, en mayo de 1632, cuando todo un alud de sátiras, libelos, ataques y contraataques vino a caer sobre su joven autor, victima inocente de las reyertas en que se habían visto envueltos Góngora, su maestro Lope, y sus amigos Luis Pacheco de Narváez y fray Diego Niseno. La mas célebre de estas sátiras (y, al mismo tiempo, la más despiadada, y la primera, cronológicamente, entre las que han llegado hasta nosotros) es la Perinola de Quevedo que, aunque no corrió de molde hasta el siglo siguiente, alcanzó en seguida gran difusión manus-crita, como se echa de ver por sus numerosos textos del mismo siglo XVII que han llegado hasta nosotros. De ella, al decir de un contemporáneo, “en brève tiempo se sacaron tantas copias que en cualquiera taberna y bodegón, con ser excesivo su número, se hallaban a pares.”

The reputation of Bartholomew Fair has undergone some curious revolutions over the years. In its own day, and during the Restoration period, it seems to have been one of the most widely admired of Jonson's plays, but later generations came to judge it more harshly, tending to dismiss it as another example of the generally acknowledged decline in Jonson's artistic powers that was traced from the high point he had attained in the three preceding comedies, Volpone, Epicene, and The Alchemist, down to the final works that Dryden called his “dotages.” More recently, however, the critical pendulum has been swinging in the opposite direction, and by now we have seen a number of students of Jonson who are prepared to discuss this play with the same respect accorded to the three “major comedies,” and even a few who claim to find in it “the culmination of the dramatist's comic art.”

Charles Lamb exhibited the same genial attitude toward books as toward people; he never expected too much of either, and was therefore seldom disappointed. This whimsical tolerance was especially evident in his reactions to prose fiction. He never went at a novel too seriously—with hammer and tongs, as we say; yet he could distinguish between the enduring works and the pulp. Moreover, he professed to like the same qualities in books as in people: individuality, personality, and even eccentricity. In 1821 he disclaimed a taste for the external events in narrative fiction, contrasting his attitude with that of his sister: “Narrative teases me. I have little concern with the progress of events. She must have a story.... The fluctuations of fortune in fiction ... and almost in real life ... have ceased to interest, or to operate but dully upon me. Out of the way humours and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship please me most” (ii, 75). There is, however, ample evidence that Lamb read widely in prose fiction and enjoyed the works of the great eighteenth-century masters—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. He also was acquainted with the writings of Sterne, Goldsmith, Henry Mackenzie, Robert Paltock, Aleman, Cervantes, Jane and Maria Porter, Godwin, Scott, and many figures of less note, including the Minerva Press offerings. As Lamb himself put it, “Defoe was always my darling” (i, 524). In 1829, at the request of his friend Walter Wilson, Lamb wrote a critical essay on Defoe's secondary novels for Wilson's book Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe.4

Coinciding roughly with the establishment of the Third Republic, there developed in France a wave of anti-Semitism that was to lead ultimately to the Dreyfus affair. Thousands of Jews had moved to Paris, Marseilles, and Lyons after Germany took Alsace and Lorraine, bringing with them competition in finance, as well as a thick accent and coarse manners. It was also at this time (1882) that the great Catholic bank, the Union Générale, failed, ruining thousands of small investors. The action of the government in suddenly arresting for fraud the President and the Director of the firm just as they were attempting to rebuild their bank, and the subsequent accusation by the President, Eugène Bontoux, that the Jews, in league with the “Freemason” government, were responsible for having ruined him because he was a Christian, gave rise to one of the great anti-Semitic myths of the age. It was fully exploited by Edouard Drumont in La France juive (1886), a book that was widely sold and passionately discussed.

Among the Biblical types which Milton used to enrich his theme in Paradise Lost was that of Abraham, father of the faithful. James Sims has shown the parallel between the visit of the angels to Abraham at Mamre and Raphael's descent to Eden in Book v; John Parish has elaborated the resemblance between Abraham's plea for the Sodomites and Adam's dialogue with God in Book viii; and Barbara Lewalski has emphasized the spiritual vision of the man of faith in Books xi and xii: Abraham and his heirs view the promises “afar off,” just as Adam at this point sees far off the great symbolic Old Testament places. It is the purpose of this article to explore further the Abraham-Adam parallel in the last two books, showing in particular the relationship between Abraham's departure from Ur and Adam's from Paradise. From this relationship flow certain effects: the tone of the concluding episodes of Paradise Lost becomes clearer, their universal significance is emphasized, and the exile motif is harmonized with the concept of the journey of the epic hero. The virtues of Abraham are precisely those which Adam as Christian hero is called upon to practice, while both Abraham's setting forth to the land of Canaan and Adam's exile from Paradise are types of man's setting forth on his earthly pilgrimage.

Molière's career as an actor-manager would be largely a matter of conjecture today but for the preservation of four account books now in the archives of the Comédie-Française. Of these documents, the two earliest have been published in extenso; first, the “Registre de La Grange” entitled Extraict des Receptes et des Affaires de la Comédie depuis Pasques de l'année 1659, appartenant au Srde La Grange, l'un des Comédiens du Roy, with a biographical notice by Édouard Thierry, published by the Comédie-Française in 1876; and secondly, Le Premier Registre de La Thorilliére (1663–64), published in 1890 in an edition of 340 copies in the Nouvelle Collection Moliéresque of D. Jouaust, with preface and notes by Georges Monval, archivist of the Comédie-Française in 1878 and librarian in 1885. I assume that Monval intended to publish the two account books remaining in the archives of his theater, known traditionally as the Second Registre de La Thorilliére (1664–65), and the Registre d'Hubert (1672–73), for Monval announced the former as in press in 1890, and in 1897 it was still advertised as in preparation. However, Damase Jouaust, Monval's publisher, died in 1893, and his successor, the Flammarion firm, only completed the publication of a series of plays by Molière edited by Vitu and Monval. The last volume of this edition, Monval's Chronologie Moliéresque, appeared in 1897.

Readers of assia djebar's oeuvre are well aware of her commitment to restoring algerian women to their proper place in the history of their nation's anticolonial struggle. Beginning with her third novel, Les enfants du nouveau monde (1965; Children of the New World), a text offering a panoramic view of women's participation in the Algerian War, Djebar signaled her intent to chart women's political and psychological awakening during the anticolonial struggle. In contrast to this early text, Djebar's penultimate work, La femme sans sépulture (2002; “Woman without a Tomb”), focuses on one revolutionary figure: Yamina Echaïb Oudaï, known as Zoulikha, the martyr of Cherchell.

Predicting any future—or futures—for literary criticism is a risky business, perhaps all the more so now that the relation of literature to its others is arguably subject to greater and faster changes than ever before. The changes to come in literary criticism will be determined by transformations in literature proper as well as by any number of forces outside literature. By changes “within” literature we cannot mean simply those to contemporary or recent literature, whose canons—to say nothing of what exceeds these canons—are far from settled. The literary past continues to change even if every given text endlessly repeats itself like a broken record. For an authoritative formulation of this position, one need not turn to some outré poststructuralist or to Walter Benjamin's contention that even the dead are not “safe” from the reaches of the present (“On the Concept” 391). One can appeal to the sober, usually conservative thinking of T. S. Eliot:

Lyric studies has been new before. Many students of lyric will remember Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker'S 1985 COLlection of essays, Lyric Poetry beyond New Criticism, as a previous occasion for reevaluating the course of lyric studies. Hošek and Parker's ambitious volume measured the distance between New Critical and later theories of interpretation: “structuralist and post-structuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, semiotic, reader-response” (7). Features highlighted by then-recent theory—the difference dramatized by intertextuality, for example, or the impossibility, as opposed to transparency, of many putative forms of address in lyric—revealed what had been repressed and implied by Western academic assumptions about poetry earlier in the twentieth century; Hošek and Parker gathered an ambitious representation of such modifications of canonical lyric reading. Familiar units of Western literary vocabulary such as “apostrophe” continued to be used, but observation of their destabilizing causes and effects and reflection on their inner contradictions helped to break the illusion of the verbal icon's centripetal force. Parker notes in her introduction that the question “What would enable future work on the lyric?” remains as open as ever at the end of their project (16). So now that another twenty-two years have passed, how is lyric studies differently new, as gauged by the 2006 MLA convention's focus on lyric?

Everyone knows that “The Prelude in the Theatre” belongs to Faust; that it has introduced the so-called First Part of the tragedy ever since the earliest publication of the great play in 1808; that nowhere in Goethe's written or oral statements can the slightest indication be detected from which we may infer that this prelude had not been from the very beginning in the very spot where it is found today? All this is unquestionably true; and yet, without any claim to final conclusiveness, I should like to consider the possibility whether or not, within the organic structure of Goethe's works, the Prelude in the Theatre may have grown on a branch which was not the one that produced Faust.

Historical allusions and the theme of history add a psychological and philosophical dimension to Keats's poetry that reflects the change in historical thought during the romantic period. Keats's wide-ranging familiarity with history manifests itself in a development that begins in juvenile hero worship but rapidly matures into a subtle historical vision in the odes and Hyperion poems. His sense of history as a kind of collective memory makes possible a union of poetry and history, since he sees both as products of the imagination that portray the varied particulars of experience. History plays a major part in Keats's deepening acceptance of mortality and an accompanying affirmation of time and process through release from the fear of death. The relative success and failure of his attempts to unite history and poetry confirm his organic analogy: when he relies most on his own imagination and memory, he evokes a more vital sense of the past than when he follows sources rather mechanically. He did not live to effect the revolution in historical drama to which he aspired, but history as a concept within his lyric and narrative poems remains a compelling witness of his powers as historical poet.

In a period of few jobs, low morale, and powerlessness, teachers of English and modern languages—at all levels from elementary through graduate school—need to reexamine the value of their work. Central to understanding the crisis of the profession is the historical separation of the study of literature from the teaching of literacy. The separation rationalizes the profession's hierarchy and defines its practice in the classroom. Thus literature becomes a luxury and the teaching of skills empty of literary power. That our curriculum needs revision follows quite naturally, moreover, from the knowledge that more than 70% of our undergraduate majors are women and from the evidence that the curriculum from elementary school on is male-biased and thus distinctly harmful to at least half the population. Whether we choose to renew our responsibility for teaching meaningful literacy, or to work cooperatively as literature teachers within interdisciplinary programs, we will also need to reevaluate and change the canon of literary study, especially to include those who have been traditionally bypassed: women, minorities of both sexes, and working-class people. For all these, literature and literacy can provide courage and skills necessary for survival and growth.

Recent interpretations of Thyrsis' magic herb have usually employed one or more of several angles of approach: (1) the implications of its name, (2) its similarities with, or differences from, the herb moly, and (3) its function in a larger context—its relation to the theme, dramatic structure, and ethical allegory of Milton's masque. Though all three approaches are necessary for a valid solution of this crux, each has encountered certain inherent difficulties. The third has been especially vulnerable to subjective bias; reading into haemony whatever meaning has best fitted his own conception of the poem's overall structure and sense, the individual critic has been prone to find in the herb the particular concept he had wanted to find. The second has been complicated not only by the variety of meanings commentators have ascribed to moly, but also by critical disagreement as to how far the two plants represent similar or dissimilar ideas. The first approach has hitherto failed to establish a solid basis for the allegory. The only etymology on which scholars are agreed— Keightley's suggestion that haemony was named after “Haemonia or Thessaly, the land of magic”1—tells one very little about its allegorical significance. Possible clues to the allegory have been discovered in several alternative etymologies, but these have not yet won general acceptance.

The evidence of the six earliest manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales does not support the consensus among Chaucerians that the Ellesmere a ordering represents Chaucer's intentions. Marginalia indicate that Hengwrt preceded Ellesmere and was most closely associated with it. Hengwrt and Ellesmere influenced Cambridge Dd. A somewhat looser association binds Corpus, Harley4, and Lansdowne. In each of the groups editors tried to improve the arrangement and to make the resulting book appear complete. Three conclusions emerge. (1) Only the text derives from Chaucer. (2) Throughout the manuscript period, single tales and groups of tales continued to circulate in great numbers and to provide exemplars for the collected tales that survive. (3) The Canterbury Tales never existed as a neat pile of manuscript, an almost complete text. What we have instead is a collection of fragments reflecting the different stages of a developing plan.