Friedrich Schlegel, youngest son of Johann Adolf Schlegel, was born at Hannover on March 10, 1772, just three months after Goethe had finished the first version of his first great work, Götz von Berlichingen. His literary career begins in 1794 with the publication of Von den Schulen der Griechischen Poesie. At this time he is as old as Goethe was when writing the Götz.

The publishing history of My Ántonia emphasizes what is implicit in the novel's numerous references to pictorial art: the pictures in the first edition of My Ántonia are not dispensable decorations but an essential part of Cather's text. The Benda illustrations (which Cather independently commissioned against the strong opposition of her publishers at Houghton Mifflin) reinforce the central fiction of the novel, in which “editor” Cather introduces My Ántonia as the work of “author” Jim Burden. Presenting My Ántonia as a critically edited or “supplemented” text, Cather hints that W. T. Benda's series of drawings is her most important addition to the “substance” of Jim's text. In her introduction to Jim's narrative, Cather suggests that Jim Burden's literary vision is faulty and in need of correction. Cather offers this corrective by providing a pictorial subtext that offsets the romantic bias of My Ántonia and exposes Jim Burden's limitations as an author.

In two previous articles I have examined the origin and semantic evolution of the French word nuance and of the word matiz, used today in the Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula to express the concept “nuance,” ‘a barely perceptible degree of difference (in a color, various kinds of human expression, the forms of nature, etc.).’ The present article will treat the origin of the word sfumatura, which, since the latter half of the eighteenth century, has served as the Italian means for expressing the “nuance” concept.

Though not a wholly successful work, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur is more coherent, more serious in intent, than is usually acknowledged. Dramatically and thematically organized in terms of the opposition between Launcelot and Gawayne, the work is best described as “tragedy of consequence.” Launcelot's adultery with Gaynour is ostensibly the root cause of the destruction of Arthur's realm, but the poet transfers the principal blame to others, above all to Gawayne. He achieves this by (a) distinguishing the adultery itself from its revelation to Arthur; (b) depicting the illicit love as favorably as possible; and (c) creating an implicit duality in the characters of Launcelot and Gawayne. The two undergo a reversal of primary roles by which Gawayne becomes the aggressor and Launcelot the placator. As the hero, Launcelot comes to embody the wiser course of action— withdrawal from worldly conflict—which leads him, eventually, to the priesthood. Confusion, however, results from the viewpoint of the narrator, who seems so indiscriminately generous with his praise that he contradicts the obvious implications of the course of events. This difficulty is resolved when one understands that the narrator's compassion transcends, not contradicts, the rigorous justice of events.

François Beslay observes in le Correspondant, in 1863:

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

Although there is no doubt that the French Academy grew out of the meetings at Conrart's home, the fact that its origin has been claimed by two or three other groups shows the widespread vogue of these gatherings at the time of its foundation in 1634. Their importance is manifest in all the satires, poems, and novels of the time—such as Francion (1623), Le Berger Extravagant (1627), and Camus, Bishop of Belley's Alcime (1625). Consciously modeled on that of Baïf, these académies seem to have flourished in unbroken succession since the days of the Pléiade.

The relation between the first Folio and the first Quarto text of Shakespeare's Henry V has long been a subject of discussion. In 1874, Daniel, in his edition of the play for the New Shakespeare Society, argued that the Quarto is a stage abridgment of the Folio version. Some years later Brinsley Nicholson attempted to refute Daniel. His arguments have not met with much acceptance, perhaps because of an underlying assumption that a fuller and, on the whole, much better text implies revision and expansion from the shorter, poorer one,—an assumption certainly open to challenge with reference to Shakespeare texts.

This essay is an attempt to present some of the most important aspects of the aesthetic underlying George Eliot's novels and to give some account of her little known critical writings. She was perhaps unique among the major novelists up to her time in formulating a coherent set of ideas about life and art before she started to write her first novel. She was known as an important figure in the intellectual life of London during the fifties, as the translator of David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, and as the subeditor of the Westminster Review, the most important organ of liberal thought in England at that time. She was also a prolific writer of articles for magazines and a reviewer of belles-lettres for the Westminster for three years, 1855–57. In these essays and reviews, all published before her first novel, almost all her important ideas about art are stated explicitly, and although many of these ideas are later developed and amplified in her novels and letters, they remain essentially the same. Her later statements of the same theme are often fuller and richer than those found in her periodical writing, but they are rarely inconsistent with each other. Her essays and reviews, together with Gordon Haight's edition of the letters and statements in the novels themselves, furnish an invaluable source from which her creed as a novelist may be derived.

Dryden's place as theorist and exponent of the imagination has never been appropriately determined, and the reason may be as much in the difficulty of the problem as in the temptation to settle out of court for Hobbesian influence. Certainly there is much in Dryden to plague his interpreters: the obliqueness with which he insists upon approaching the subject, the transitional and hence shifting vocabulary with which he works, and the rhetorical density within which he almost invariably transacts his critical discourse. These things make analysis and interpretation difficult and precarious. But of one thing the Dryden scholar need not despair—the lack of evidence. For Dryden had a nagging curiosity about the imagination and a tireless impulse to talk about it.

The history of the controversy over naturalism in England centered about the translations of the writings of Zola, and the trial in 1888 of the publisher Henry Vizetelly. The first translations of Zola's writings appeared in 1884, and almost immediately aroused a storm of criticism. These writings, however, were not the first to call the attention of the English public to French naturalism. Just as in France Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and others had prepared the way for Le Roman Expérimental, so also in England translations of Balzac's novels, Baudelaire's influence on Swinburne, and Saintsbury's articles on French writers had helped to prepare the way for Zola translations. English critics of the Victorian era recognized Balzac as the father of French realism, and as one who anticipated in many ways the theories of the naturalists. The reaction of the English critics to the work of Balzac is an interesting commentary on changing literary fashions, and an important expression of Victorian literary taste.

When, in 1697, the actors of the Comédie Italienne announced their intention of producing Fatouville's La finta matrigna ou la belle-mère supposée, readily associated with La fausse prude, a novel published in Holland againt Mme de Maintenon, the machinery of the law-moved swiftly. On May 14th of that year M. d'Argenson, head of the police, closed the theater, thereby terminating the activities of the Italian troupe in the seventeenth century. For so long a time did Mme de Maintenon deprive the court of amusements that, as soon as the period of mourning for Louis XIV was ended, the regent Philippe d'Orléans hastened to re-establish in France the theater which had previously supplied an abundant source of entertainment. In 1716 he succeeded in bringing to Paris, under the leadership of Luigi Riccoboni, a troupe which began performances on May 18 at the Palais-Royal but removed on June 1 to the repaired and redecorated Hôtel de Bourgogne.

In his study of Swift's satire Edward Rosenheim observes that some satirical works are ephemeral and do not outlive the issues that give them birth: “Like any form of pamphleteering, satire tends to claim the attention of the reading public only so long as that public is capable of a concern, approximating that of the satirist himself, for the questions under discussion.” The tract of Swift's which I am about to discuss was certainly occasional and has but modest claims to universality; indeed, there is no general agreement even now among Swift's commentators that the work originally had a satiric intent: most prefer to read it, the Project for the Advancement of Religion and Reformation of Manners (1709), as a serious reforming tract of the times. As such, the Project is undoubtedly of limited interest, but it yields hitherto unsuspected complexities and ironies, not to mention comedy, when we inquire into the now forgotten issues that gave it birth.

If there were ever an occasion when, to paraphrase the words of Sir Benjamin Backbite, a neat rivulet of text might meander through a meadow of marginal annotation, the Finnsburg Episode would provide it. Hardly any passage in Beowulf has gathered to itself such a mass of exegesis. This is not surprising when we consider the highly allusive manner in which the story is told, the unusual words and idioms, and the corruptions of the text. In the Finnsburg Fragment the same obscurities and corruptions abound, and if the narrative itself is less broken and allusive, these textual difficulties and the loss of lines at the beginning and the end make its interpretation difficult. Unfortunately, many problems still remain to be settled; the labors of scholars have failed to bring agreement upon many important matters.

The changing demographics of higher education are bringing the teaching of English and the teaching of foreign languages closer together. For an increasing number of students, English is a foreign, a second, an international, or a global language, not the language of a unitary mother tongue and culture. Increasingly, students of French, German, or Spanish are learning a foreign language on the background of experiences of migrations, displacements, and expatriations but also on the background of multilingual and multicultural experiences. The typical language learner is, for example, a Nigerian with a Canadian passport learning German at the University of Texas, or a Czech citizen with a knowledge of English, German, and French enrolled in a Japanese class at the University of California, Berkeley. The common denominator among language learners is their interest in language in all its manifestations: literary and nonliterary, academic and nonacademic, as a mode of thought, as a mode of action, and as a symbol of identity. At UC Berkeley, the current success of courses with titles like Language, Mind, and Society; Language in Discourse; Language and Power; and Language and Identity—as they are offered by English programs, foreign language programs, linguistics departments, or schools of education—is a sign of a renewed interest in the way language expresses, creates, and manipulates “alien wisdoms” through discourse.

It is now generally known that Bernard Shaw had no love for Augustin-Eugène Scribe (1791–1861), father of the French pièce bien faite (“well-made” play), or Scribe's well-known disciple Victorien Sardou, whose technical bravura Shaw scornfully dubbed “Sardoodledom.” Perhaps his most outspoken recorded condemnation of the prolific playwright and his factory of collaborators is this (undated) outburst to Archibald Henderson: “Why the devil should a man write like Scribe when he can write like Shakespeare or Molière, Aristophanes or Euripides? Who was Scribe that he should dictate to me or anyone else how a play should be written?” To be sure, a good many literary critics of the past century have disparaged this form of drama, combining a complex plot with a maximum of theatrical ingenuity and an absolute minimum of thought. But Shaw's call to arms against the well-made play and its popular and successful founder echoed so loudly over so long a period that it could not help but arouse many disinterested spectators. No quarter would be, nor could be, given to this mountebank, this cheap magician of the stage.

Previously unpublished archival material and recent scholarship in legal history provide new information and allow a coherent account of Daniel Defoe's arrest, interrogations, conviction, and release for the seditious libel The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Details about Nottingham's questioning of Defoe, the costs of the prosecution, and the final decision to send him to the pillory emerge. More significantly, it is now clear that Defoe's case came before the justices at five (not two) Old Bailey sessions, and the full records have come to light. These records and those in the Lowndes papers provide a full account of Defoe's release from Newgate Prison.

Conrad’s knowledge of the Malaysian Archipelago was that of a sensitive expatriate, not of a native. But he balanced his lack of intimate knowledge with profound “suggestions” drawn from his Malaysian experiences. The events in his fiction reveal the historical disarray of a region invaded by colonial powers, and serve as an inclusive metaphor for the discovery by his characters that no life pattern. Eastern or Western, has any final validity. In this sense nearly all the characters, European and Malaysian, are expatriates, not outcasts. They are mocked by the folly of seeking to master the infinite possibilities of human development revealed to them. In The Rescue, for example, Hassim and Lingard, both expatriates, have an ideal vision of successful intercultural commingling before their defeat by the abstractness of this objective. Such “nebulous ideas” or “suggestions” largely account for both the obscurities of Conrad’s style and the greatness of his vision.

A fascinating and too often neglected area of literature is the medieval visions of the Afterworld, the detailed conceptions of hell, purgatory, and paradise, which were to reach a culmination in Dante's Divina Commedia. Several of these visions became widely popular, both in Latin and in vernacular versions. They have been carefully studied for their possible influence on Dante's writing. I propose to explore one aspect of them, the threefold pains of punishment, and to show how this material was used by Milton and Shakespeare.

Based on a close examination of a 1941 article by the Soviet scholar Leonid Grossman, this essay studies the moral questions faced by the reader of a work written under censorship.