No observant person can, I think, have failed to note of late years a certain increasing hesitation and perplexity in regard to the true function of literature in studies. Indeed, there are reasons not a few for thinking that we are preparing for one of those revisions and restatements of the general conception of what we should try to get from literature, of which we have several examples in the past. I do not mean merely that our literary taste is changing, or that we are passing from one set of literary admirations to another. Such lesser variation is incessantly going on. Classicism yields to romanticism, romanticism to realism, and this to something else, in an unbroken round of change. But these minor modifications of feeling and opinion about literature may easily take place without any material disturbance of the general estimate of the nature of literatnre or of the attitude of men's minds towards it. My neighbor may think that bad in books which I think good, and yet we may both seek in our reading to satisfy essentially the same needs, intellectual or aesthetic.

The change, however, to which I have reference, is of a far profounder kind. It affects the very substance of men's thought about books, substitutes for one form of promise and enticement to the reading of them another and quite different appeal, and necessarily carries with it new aims and methods in the study of them. I shall, perhaps, make my meaning clearer on this point by some brief illustration.

When Garcilaso refers to the death of Isabel Freyre, representing her as the nymph Elisa, who “estaba entre las hierbas degollada” (eclogue m.230), the poet's commentators, morally repelled by this brutal image, suggest changing the term degollada “beheaded, with her throat cut,” or to understand it as desangrada, “dead by bleeding,” since this meaning seems more appropriate to the death at childbirth of the poet's beloved Isabel. Although this view is still current today, a stylistic analysis of the passage shows that Garcilaso—more interested in emotional intensity than in historical accuracy—wrote degollada with the then primary meaning of “decapitated.” This interpretation is corroborated by a close look at the poet's sources—the death of Eurydice and decapitations of Orpheus (Virgil, Ovid, Poliziano) and Issabella (Ariosto)—as well as by Camões' imitation of Garcilaso's beheaded nymph in his decapitation of Inés de Castro. The bloody truculence of this image is otherwise understandable in a tormented and violent Garcilaso who, in spite of being traditionally considered as a “dulce y blando” poet, very often chose to associate beauty and love with cruelty. (In Spanish)

Recent criticism of John Gay's poetry has largely continued to slight its merit or to misread it. Trivia has been especially mishandled, the chief critical faults being the tendency on the part of some to take the poem too seriously and to overlook a number of aspects that reinforce its mock-georgic nature. Gay was completely aware of what he was doing at all times in Trivia, and it is only when one reads the poem closely, with Dryden's translation of Virgil in mind, that a great deal of what he was indeed doing is clearly revealed. Not only did Gay go to Dryden's Virgil for particular phrases: “certain signs” of the weather, the “spoils” of Russia's “bear,” “callow care,” and a number of others, but he also used single words in the unusual senses Dryden had already employed: “infest” to mean “attack,” “contagion” to mean “fire,” “laborious” to mean “undergoing trouble and hardship,” as well as others. There is a whole vocabulary, available in Dryden's Virgil, to which he could have helped himself, in addition to those borrowings that can be demonstrated. A number of passages in Trivia also take their point of departure from Dryden's Virgil. When one adds an occasional clear echo of the Bible or Milton, all intended to enhance the mock-dignity of his poem, there can be no doubt of Gay's poetic competence.

Most of the critical writing on L'Etranger has been focused on the world view or philosophy that it expresses. This is certainly legitimate, especially since Camus himself sees the novel as an incarnation of “a drama of the intelligence.” As a result, however, some of the formal and imaginative aspects of L'Etranger have been neglected, with the further result that the full meaning of the novel has remained hidden. On the surface, L'Etranger gives the appearance of being an extremely simple though carefully planned and written book. In reality, it is a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings and formal qualities. It would take a book at least the length of the novel to make a complete analysis of meaning and form, and the correspondences of meaning and form, in L'Etranger. My purpose here is less ambitious. I should like first to take up aspects of the novel that have not yet been studied sufficiently, principal among them (and in this order), the use of time and structure as thematic devices, myth, names, patterns of character and situation, and symbols, and then, in conclusion, to use the knowledge gained as the basis for an explication of the meaning of the novel as a whole. Frequent and fairly lengthy references will be made to others of Camus' books, simply because the novel is incomprehensible except in the context of all his works; it is hoped that what may appear to be digressions will be justified by the light they throw on the novel.

That The Winter's Tale has a double plot has long been noted, but no one has yet fully explored the nature and extent of iteration in the two parts of the play. Structural parallels between Acts i-iii and Acts iv-v are reinforced by repeated statements of motifs common to both parts of the play and by the variation in the second half of motifs important to the first. The dramatic evidence of Hermione's death is substantial, particularly in m.ii and nr.iii, and later details (those in v.ii and v.iii) come too late to qualify the dramatic as well as thematic import of Hermione's loss. These later details must, therefore, stand as alternatives rather than as explanations. The second half of the play thus forms an alternative to the first, with Hermione's fate of central importance in pointing up their contrasting natures. Each part of the play makes a statement of the possibilities for gain and for loss within society, and the statement of neither is complete without the other. Together, they suggest limits as well as possibilities.

“So much living with so little life.”thus did henry James, writing to Mrs. Humphry Ward, describe H. G. Wells, or so I remember it. (I should look this up, and probably will not. My research/scholarly instincts have atrophied, except in instances— more common in old age than formerly—when I cannot remember the source of some haunting phrase or fact.) James's words are perfect for those of us coping with retirement and old age (I am of the “call a spade a spade” school), “living” less and seeking more of life. I have, in this mood, reread Henry James's The Ambassadors.

The court spectacle plays of Calderón de la Barca, when viewed within their historical, physical, and dramatic context, reveal a polysemous structure of meaning that both supports and criticizes the ruling monarch. The first of these, El mayor encanto amor, reproves Philip iv's pursuit of sensual pleasures in time of war and his surrender of power to his prime minister; the last, Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, attempts to forge a credibly regal image of the weak Charles ii. These plays dramatize the belief that the polyphonic richness of theatrical representation can not only serve and guide the king but also generate his authority, that the proper constitution of the central figure in the theater of power may depend on the power of theater.

Any attempt to define the romance must necessarily undertake to determine the differentia that separate this species of narrative art from that to which it is most closely related, viz. the epic.

So far as formal or material tests are concerned, it is impossible to discover any infallible criterion by means of which the two species may be distinguished. In form both are metrical narratives and in subject-matter fictions dealing with heroic adventure and achievement. Such are the Iliad, the Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, and the Chanson de Roland as representing the epic and the Fierebras, the metrical Morte d'Arthur, the Roman de Troie, and the Roman de Thèbes as representing the romance. Again, while both may under certain conditions vary from this norm, both will be found, when they do so vary, to pass through much the same range of variation. Both the epic and the romance may, particularly when embodied in works of an alien character, be short. Short, for example, is the epic recital of the Battle of Brunanburh embedded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Short likewise are those passages of romance sometimes incorporated in the epic or drama, as the story of the lotus-eaters in the Odyssey and the stories of “the three caskets” and of “the pound of flesh” in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Similarly both the epic and the romance may, in the later stages of their development, be written in prose instead of verse. This is true of the Younger Edda as exemplifying the epic and the Huon de Bordeaux, the Merlin, and the Recueil des Histoires de Troie as exemplifying the romance. In prose is written likewise the large body of relatively late Greek romance from the Cyropedeia of Xenophon to the Heroicus of the Younger Philostratus.

Gryphius' Stellung unter den Barockdichtern ist eine besondere. Er trat der Weltordnung mit einer Forderung gegenüber, die kein anderer zu stellen wagte, und wenn er sich auch zu zähmen suchte, so stieg doch die Wucht der Anklage während seines Lebens immer an, ja man kann fast sagen: je gefügiger die Worte werden, desto mehr tobt in ihm die Rebellion. Er selbst war sich wohl dessen nicht bewußt, er hielt sich fur einen guten Christen und war es auch, aber er konnte sich nie der Resignation wirklich ergeben. Wir fühlen in seinen Schriften ein ständiges Brodeln wie in einem Vulkan, der einem Ausbruch nahe ist. Die Lava ist nie tobend übergeflossen, denn die Schwere der Gesteinsmassen, die darüber lagen, war nicht zu durchstoßen. Er war keiner von denen, die mit den Dingen leicht fertig werden; er war von Natur schwer und aus dieser Schwere heraus, aus dieser gehemmten Anlage seines Wesens, brannte seine Flamme nie ruhig; seine Sprache, mächtig und reich, muß schwerflüssig und stokkend gekommen sein.

That the title of the Esprit des Lois is an accurate description of the contents of the book has not been seriously questioned, nor has the form of its translation into English as the Spirit of (the) Laws. But the extensive use of esprit by Montesquieu in the book has attracted the attention of most of its critics from the eighteenth century on. In the Lettres persanes, an ironical reflection of the manners, morals, customs, and laws of eighteenth-century France, the use of esprit is taken for granted; merely to amuse and interest is, clearly, a legitimate objective in a work of this type. But in a treatise of universal jurisprudence the frequent introduction of esprit has naturally provoked much comment, and some criticism.

John Ruskin's Modern Painters V (1860) and Charles Baudelaire's “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) are contemporaneous texts that both champion modern painters. Yet the two have rarely been considered together; while Ruskin's work is usually taken to represent a moralistic Victorianism, Baudelaire's essay is a foundational text of aesthetic modernism. This article compares the two texts in order to arrive at a more accurate, descriptive sense of nineteenth-century aesthetics, especially at the mid-century moment when “the modern” emerges as an aesthetic value in both England and France. Ruskin and Baudelaire are shown to propose surprisingly similar aesthetic theories, in part because they negotiate the same traumas of modernity, such as the derailment of religion and the commodification of the material world. Positioned on the ruins of Romanticism, each text intimates an idea of the modern that is not quite modernism but is, in fact, eminently Victorian.

Although the common core state standards initiative was adopted with little controversy in forty-eight states, it soon became the target of attacks both on the right, for the mistaken perception that public education was being taken over by the federal government, and on the left, in response to the institution of an all-too-real draconian testing regime that served the needs more of the testing companies and other corporate agents than of students or teachers. Despite these attacks, it seems likely that the initiative will prevail in most states, perhaps both for better and for worse. My position is that real national standards—not simply state standards— are a desirable goal for the United States today, and long overdue. The “local control” of public education by states and school districts has been, let us admit, the greatest flaw of the K-12 system and a powerful obstruction to the reform of that system. On the other hand, I agree with many (Bryant; Hacker and Dreifus; Ravitch) who see the Common Core as a misguided effort at reform, fatally undermined by the use of punitive, high-stakes testing as the driver of implementation (Loveless). Opting for this strategy, the promoters of the Common Core unfortunately imposed a top-down procedure just where it is least appropriate. Testing, by its very nature, ought to arise from the classroom, the scene of a unique relation between teacher and students. This is not to deny that universal testing is possible and even necessary but rather to acknowledge that the more distant tests are from the scene of teaching, the more limited their informational value.

Among other things, photographs are deposits of social relations. To put it another way, they are social relations temporarily hardened into images—figured, captured, frozen. The most obvious of those relations, that between the photographer and the sitter, has been a regular subject of inquiry for art history. Acknowledging but leaving that kind of interest aside for the moment, we may explore other sorts of relations in and around a photograph and pursue a line of inquiry more in keeping with visual culture. Here's a quick example.

'Biyi Bandele's Oroonoko, in its textual and performance history, bridges eighteenth- and late-twentieth-century forms of transnationalism. The Oroonoko story has always been an improvised text. Bandele's play relates to earlier versions of the Oroonoko story by Aphra Behn, Thomas Southerne, and John Hawkesworth. Three issues in Bandele's Oroonoko have special relevance to a transnational reading of the play: the deployment of an African setting as a strategy for counteracting a pseudouniversalism; the place of anachronism, especially in the representation of gender relations; and Bandele's use of English as a means of conveying Yoruban culture. His play raises the question of what it means to “sell” Oroonoko to a wide audience today.

In her 1892 study of children's literature, the child and his book, louise frances field complains, “the subject of this volume is one which, from its nature, presents many difficulties as regards material. It is the fate of children's books to be destroyed by children themselves” (v). Of course, the difficulties of children's literature are not only material. Jacqueline Rose's insistence on the “impossibility of children's fiction” has had the salutary effect of keeping scholars warily attuned to how adult desires—from sex to money to politics—structure the genre. Despite the claim of possession housed in that apostrophe, most scholars of children's literature acknowledge that these books don't really belong to children at all (Hunt). My intention in this essay is to use one of these impossibilities to circumvent the other. I am interested in children's own relation to their reading; I strive to understand not just the books adults produced for children—that is, what adults thought about childhood and wanted to say to children—but also what children actually did with these texts, how they took possession of them. I hope to demonstrate that the penchant for destroying books that Field deplores can provide insight into the literary history of childhood. For this brief essay, I take as my archive the book-destroying habits of the children of one affluent, highly literary family in post–Civil War New England: the niece and nephews of the poet Emily Dickinson—Edward (“Ned”), born in 1861; Martha (“Mattie”), born in 1866; and Thomas Gilbert (“Gib”), born in 1875.

Götz . . . has always seemed to me . . . rather a tedious play for non-Germans, says Ronald Peacock (Goethe's Major Plays) Manchester, 1959, p. 12). This verdict strikes uncomfortably close to the apparent value set on the play among English and American readers, and it implies at most a mixed compliment to the Germans, who presumably like it better. In Peacock's view, “a great act of historical sympathy is needed.” To respond to such a need is surely more an act of loyal charity than of critical judgment—and a dubious tribute to the work itself. In sum, Peacock finds the play historically “determined” not only by its sixteenth-century background but by its eighteenth-century genesis: Götz the uncorrupted “natural genius,” an idealized antithesis, in Herder's spirit for example, to the prevailing social order.

Especially before the eighteenth century, many European writers regarded not apes but elephants as the most humanlike animals because of their high intelligence, even rationality. The largely forgotten rational elephant can help us read early modern anthropocentrism against itself and distinguish early modernity from modernity in ways that historicize—and denaturalize—these periods' different speciesisms. Giovanni Battista Gelli's La Circe (1549), for instance, produces a philosophy of human exceptionalism by suppressing the elephant's natural history—whether propagandistically or ironically. Subsequent texts by writers from Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, to Pope, Buffon, and Pennant, in the eighteenth, demonstrate that the rational elephant threatens human exceptionalism even after Descartes's seventeenth-century and Linnaeus's eighteenth-century interventions. Though speciesist itself, the rational elephant reveals a bygone paradigm more capable than the modern one of acknowledging rationality across bodily differences. It also provides a historically grounded vantage point from which the primacy of the primates can be overthrown.

Google Ngram Viewer reports that usage of the word interrogation has been climbing steadily since 1942. liberals will of course argue, not without force, that the George W. Bush administration's embrace of “enhanced interrogation” (i.e., torture) drove the recent steady rise. To that sound point one might, however, also advance a less palatable observation: that representatives of the academy were in the interrogation room, doing the interrogating, long before the Bush administration got into the act.