Chaucer envisaged the Canterbury Tales as presented on the actual London-Canterbury road at various times during successive days, for he offers about seven allusions to place and at least five to time, scattered throughout eight of the nine Fragments which make up the work. That Chaucer had a definite plan for the order of the Fragments is revealed by various kinds of internal evidence, including the mention of towns on the Pilgrims' way, the reality and precise location of which were clear and obvious to the poet and his audience. The ellesmere (or group a) order of the Tales has long seemed unsatisfactory because it distorts the geographical order of allusions to towns, and Chaucer would not have deliberately alluded to Sittingbourne (Fragment in) before Rochester (Fragment vii) on the way from Southwark and Greenwich to Boughton-under-Blean and Canterbury. Accordingly, Henry Bradshaw suggested to Furnivall, as an improvement on the Ellesmere order, that Fragment vn be lifted up to follow and combine with Fragment ii, the Man of Law's Endlink being used as Prologue to the Shipman's Tale.

Despite its appearance as a miscellaneous collection of lyrics, Dylan Thomas' poetry is a closely unified body of work. Poetic unity customarily reveals itself in cohesive imagery (what Kenneth Burke calls “symbolic equations”), and in the repetition and development of related themes. Thomas' Collected Poems possesses such imagistic and thematic coherence, and these images and themes, furthermore, have as their subsuming source the Bible.

The method used by some recent critics to prove that certain Shakespearean characters are “figures” of Christ (or of other biblical or Renaissance personages) was parodied by Shakespeare himself in Fluellen's comparison of Henry v to Alexander the Great. Its success is guaranteed in advance, since it allows the critic to select only the similarities between the two persons being compared without considering whether these are unique or whether they are more significant than the differences between them. The evidence is thus subjected to a double screening: the critic determines which events in the character's career can be compared to the historical personage, and then which aspects of those events are relevant to the comparison. Even the differences between them can be converted into positive evidence. It is therefore possible by this method to prove that almost any character is a figure of Christ or of King James or of almost anyone else, which is the great strength of “Fluellenism” and also its great weakness, since a method that can prove anything proves nothing.

The sexual comedy of “L’Après-Midi d’un faune” reflects the sophisticated French taste of its times. As an “églogue,” however, Mallarmé’s poem has roots in the classical pastoral tradition. Various structural elements show that Mallarmé was consciously working within the boundaries of an established genre, and even suggest that he was at times involved in the direct imitation of classical models. Classical parallels are explored in order to discover how Mallarmé used and transformed traditional pastoral themes and material. A close examination of some of the extraordinarily ambiguous poetic language of Mallarmé’s eclogue reveals that the “Faune” can be read as a complex ironic version of pastoral, in which the poet embroiders on the theme of the analogy between writing poetry and making love.

Recent studies have made evident the profound effect of natural science, especially of physics and astronomy, upon English neo-classical literature. In several of these studies, it has been remarked that Matthew Prior's writings contain many passages referring to scientific doctrines and manifesting an unusual attitude toward them. There has been, however, no thorough investigation of the rôle played by the new science in Prior's thought.

The Ovide moralisé is a portentous performance of about seventy-two thousand lines, extant in some seventeen manuscripts. Fragments of it were printed by Tarbé under the title of Œuvres de Philippe de Vitry, and the first volume of a critical text of the entire poem, edited by Professor de Boer of Amsterdam, is now in print. The work, with its mixture of fairly close translation and amazing allegorization of the Metamorphoses is discussed at length by Gaston Paris in its relation to other mediaeval translations or imitations of Ovid. And in de Boer's Introductions and articles will be found all necessary bibliographical apparatus.

The distinction in use between the verbs ser and estar constitutes one of the thorniest points in Spanish grammar. It is not discussed in a thoroughgoing way in any treatise. Most of the native Spanish grammars, as Bello-Cuervo, are weak on this particular subject. Users of language are always guided primarily by instinct, not by rule, and we shall see that in the present case the instinct of Spaniards is delicate and especially difficult to reduce to formal law.

Common though it may be in most of the United States today, monolingualism is an aberration in most of the world. In western Europe, for example, primary schools teach foreign languages to young children; in urban areas of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, switching between local, vernacular languages and national tongues is a common daily occurrence among all citizens, even those who may not be literate in the traditional Western sense. In a speech for the formal inauguration of the University of California, Irvine's new International Center for Writing and Translation on 5 April 2002, the 1986 Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate for literature, Wole Soyinka, asserted that the United States is “one of the most insular, mono-linguistic communities [he has] ever encountered in [his] life.” Along with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of The Monolingualism of the Other, and Bei Ling, a dissident Chinese poet, translator, and editor, Soyinka is on the executive board of Irvine's new center, an initiative funded by a large endowment from Glenn Schaeffer, a successful Las Vegas casino executive (Johnson E1, E3).

The yellow nineties have always been regarded as fascinating yet also as something of a literary liability, a movement that took more from the world than it gave in return. And yet, although Art for Art may have rested in the “splendid isolation” of individual emotions, as it often did, for instance, in the poems of Arthur Symons, it was, in its debt to the French Symbolists, to Gautier, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, to the perfectionists like Flaubert, and in its over-all aspects to Baudelaire, truly international. There had been, of course, foreign influence on the Victorians, but never had there been such complete sympathy of interests as that which now bound the two intellectual groups facing each other across the water. Cultural barriers changed into cultural bridges, the fear of mal de mer was conquered, and the Channel was crossed and recrossed. London became a Quartier of Paris; Dowson and Wilde walked the streets dressed à la Bohème, the Beardsley group liked to think of themselves as habitués of the Café Royal, and Verlaine found an audience more rapt than that of the brasseries in the Boul. Mich. There was a new union of forces. The powerful influences of France can be traced nowhere better than in the life story of the Savoy, which, in its brief spurt of brilliant life in 1896, was more truly representative of the time than the Yellow Book. It would not be rash to call the Savoy an Anglo-French periodical, and in this, certainly, the first of its kind.

Cecil B. deMille's Ten Commandments can be read as a major product of American cold war ideology, highlighting and localizing the foci of America's political, theological, and economic conflicts. The apparatus of wide-screen technology resolves these conflicts visually by mediating a series of gazes in an economy that equates God's perspective with American interests during the cold war and those interests with the rigidity of gender roles, the commodification of women, the representation of “true” Jews as proto-Christians, and the reclamation of the Middle East as legitimately within the American (Christian) sphere of influence. In making “truth” and “freedom” contingent on Christian doctrine, deMille distinguishes himself from the filmmakers investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, as the son of a would-be minister turned playwright, he also redeems himself for being a maker of false images by suggesting that the supplementary status of film can allow the true representation of God's Word.

Merck's concept of the novel which emerges very clearly from his reviews and his essay “Über den Mangel des epischen Geistes in unserm lieben Vaterland” represents the only major contribution of Storm and Stress to the incipient discussion of the theory of the novel. In accordance with the realistic tendencies of Storm and Stress, he advocated a realistic novel which was to deal seriously with everyday life and contemporary society, excluding, however, political themes. Among the earliest critics of the novel, Merck was unique in paying particular attention to narrative technique. Whereas Blanckenburg propagated a character novel told by a personal narrator (Tom Jones, Agathon), Merck—long before Spielhagen—called for an objective narrative technique without intrusions from the narrator, his ideal being Homer. Characteristic is his attitude toward Sterne; he rejected Blanckenburg's and Wezel's imitation of Sterne's personal comments but admired the latter's gift for realistic scenes. In the history of the theory of the novel Merck occupies a significant place in the long line of critics who saw in the objectivity of the epic the ideal for the narrative technique of the modem novel.

In writing Mithridate, Racine manipulates his historical sources to put into play two names—Pharnace and Xipharès, Mithridate's sons—and two forms of death—pharmakon ‘poison’ and xiphos ‘sword’—and to explore the relation between the heroic individual (Mithridate) and the two forms of death that come to be associated with these two sons. The pharmakon takes on a double valence: as a vaccination against the world seen purely as the domain of betrayal and as a potential cure for the living death that constitutes heroism. It is emblematic of the hero's duplicity, which the heroic name attempts to cover up and which only the revelation of the hero's inner feelings—his love for Xipharès, the “sword” ‘xiphos’ that penetrates the protective layers of heroism and touches the mutable being hidden within—brings to light.

This essay draws on Freud's case history of the Wolf Man (From the History of an Infantile Neurosis; 1918), which presents one of the most famous dreams in the history of psychoanalysis, in order to consider a moment in David Copperfield (1850) that constitutes the earliest childhood memory in Dickens's fiction. These two moments in Freud and Dickens occupy problematic sites that seem to slide between fantasy on the one hand and dreams on the other, and an examination of them helps open up the question of how texts remember—or fantasize—childhood and its power to structure adult experience.

Witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a subject upon which the dramatists from Marlowe to Shadwell seized with the greatest avidity. There was material of the most pliable sort; it could be moulded into a magnificent tragedy or distorted into the wildest buffoonery. In the sixteenth century it was the darker side of magic which we find in the drama, and though we note as early as 1604 the effort to brighten up Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus by the introduction of broadly comic scenes taken from the prose tale, yet one can well believe that the theatre audiences from 1590 to 1610 remembered too vividly the cruelties of the witch trials in 1590 to appreciate the buffoonery of Ralph in the comic scenes as deeply as they felt the dark despair of the protagonist Faustus.

Today we refer to the dissolution of the classical battlefield, since combat is now waged virtually, in information networks as well as on physical terrain. The thesis of this essay is that this transformation of warfare was set in motion in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the popular mythology of the Napoleonic era, world history is figured as a giant spectacle of clashing of armies whose mysteries can be discerned only by the emperor's all-seeing eye. In contrast, authors such as Rousseau, Stendhal, and Tolstoy propose that military events are best understood not through direct experience of the front lines but by reading about battles or imagining what they must be like. In the modern theater of war, the audience is enjoined to consult a medium that is no longer essentially visual.

At two periods in the eighteenth century, literature was more closely and more frequently associated than is its wont, with immediately contemporary events, and instead of being a disinterested interpretation of life it was enlisted in the service of propaganda. At the outset of the century party-politics, the bickering of Whig and Tory, more than once roused Defoe, Arbuthnot, Addison, and Swift to seize a polemic pen, and from the tumult of controversy emerged works like The Campaign amd The History of John Bull, inspired as much by anticipated rewards as by agitated feelings. Again, at the close of the century, in the presence of such a social upheaval as the French Revolution, it was impossible for thinking men to remain neutral. Problems, born of the intellectual ferment of the age and concerned with the fundamental issues of religion, morals, and government, stirred men to a white heat of partisanship and set them writing passionately, according to their sympathies, in behalf of liberty, equality, the state of nature and civilization, Christianity and atheism, and traditional ethics and individualistic morality. Losing contact with beauty, imaginative literature indeed at this time too often staggers under a weight of social philosophy.

Despite the intensive study of Thomas More during the last decade, a study stimulated by his canonization, by the fourth centenary of his martyrdom, and by the enthusiastic and scholarly work of A. W. Reed, R. W. Chambers, and other writers, there remain significant aspects of his life that have received comparatively little attention. In a stimulating paper published eight years ago, Marie Delcourt demonstrated that the “English” tradition of More biography, the tradition created by More's kinsfolk and devoted followers, represented a conscious attempt to emphasize his saintly qualities and those of his works which supported his claim to canonization. For this reason, these biographers gave little weight to More's humanist activities, his secular Latin writings, and his association with Erasmus, a dubious character from the point of view of the Counter-reformation. Aside from questions of bias, moreover, the period about which the “English” biographical tradition is least informative is that during which More was most interested in the humanities, since Roper, the primary source of the school of hagiographers, became More's son-in-law only after More had left academic study for the business of the royal court. The distortion created either by the ignorance or by the prejudice of More's early biographers, says Delcourt, has been repaired only partly by modern scholarship, and Chambers' account of Thomas More, though by far the best of recent studies, is nevertheless of the pattern laid down by Rastell, Roper, Harpsfield, and their followers. In the following pages, therefore, I have set down a few bits of information, some little known, others quite overlooked, which, in connection with the established circumstances of More's life, serve to emphasize the typically humanist character of his early career.

Essays that Henry James wrote in 1897, 1902, and 1914 make clear that George Sand destabilized his authorial identity by appearing to be a more masculine writer than he. She forced him to suspend his idea of the masculine, to accept a plurality of masculinities and the freedom to construct a “plural” male self. In a 1902 essay James incorporates Balzac's masculine authority to broaden the concept of masculinity, enabling him to improvise a new masculine position for himself. In The Ambassadors James's solution to Lambert Strether's suspense between genders resembles Balzac's solution to James's own identity problem. In rejecting Maria Gostrey's proposal, Strether rejects one masculine role for another, aligning himself more with Balzac than with Sand. Overall, however, coming to terms with George Sand challenged James to define masculinity in what he calls the plural term.

Sir Thomas More's History of Richard III has been adequately studied as an historical document, but not as a work of literature; and yet since the time of Ascham it has been praised chiefly and properly for its literary qualities. It is the purpose of this article, therefore, to discuss some of the important literary problems presented by Richard III. An attempt will be made to show how closely More's narrative conforms to classical theory and to what extent it is imitative of classical histories. Of chief concern, however, will be More's use of irony. It will be evident throughout that his approach to history writing was that of a Christian humanist.