The account of Conall Corc's exile from Ireland to Scotland and of his adventures in that country until his return home to become, eventually, king of Munster about 400 a.d. is here edited for the first time from the Book of Leinster. Unfortunately, the loss of one or more folios of the MS at this point renders the text acephalous so that the surviving portion commences abruptly in the middle of a sentence with his departure by sea from Dublin. As the title has also not been preserved, this fragment is arbitrarily called Longes Chonaill Chuirc, “The Exile of Conall Corc” for purposes of convenient reference. But what the actual heading in the MS was, will never be ascertainable, unless a happy chance leads to the discovery of the missing leaf or leaves.

Emily Dickinson's response to the Civil War—once discounted as nonexistent or negligible, now embraced as part of the canon of Civil War writing—gives evidence of a conscious testing of alternatives. Among these alternatives, the most surprising, perhaps, is her potentially public positioning of herself as a war poet in works that celebrate military heroism. One such celebration, “When I was small, a Woman died—,” written in the aftermath of Ball's Bluff—a disastrous Union loss—revises the scenarios presented in two other Ball's Bluff poems and transforms the horrific death of a local soldier into a glorious ascent into the heavens, an uncharacteristically joyous response to an event that others (including Herman Melville) experienced as entirely mournful. Since the two other poems appeared in her local newspapers and since the soldier was Amherst's first casualty, Dickinson's poem is likely a carefully crafted bid for publication. Read in this way, moreover, “When I was small” reminds us that war presents a poet with unique rhetorical problems but also with opportunities, and that these opportunities can be tempting even for a writer as resistant to the literary marketplace as Dickinson.

During his own lifetime Bishop Joseph Hall was nicknamed “our spiritual Seneca” by Henry Wotton and later called “our English Seneca” by Thomas Fuller; as a result it has recently become fashionable to associate him with seventeenth-century English Neo-Stoicism. A seventeenth-century Neo-Stoic is of interest presumably because he points in the direction of eighteenth-century Neo-Stoicism, away from a revealed religion toward a natural religion, away from faith toward reason. In a recent article Philip A. Smith calls Hall “the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century” and says that he enthusiastically preached the “Neo-Stoic brand of theology” to which Sir Thomas Browne objected. This theology maintained that “to follow ‘right reason’ was to follow nature, which was the same thing as following God.” Smith goes on to say that “what most attracted seventeenth-century Christian humanists like Bishop Hall was the fact that Stoicism attempted to frame a theory of the universe and of the individual man which would approximate a rule of life in conformity with an ‘immanent cosmic reason‘”—though in the same paragraph he also mentions the point “that Neo-Stoic divines of the seventeenth century were interested in Stoicism almost exclusively from the ethical point of view.” He cites Lipsius to show how a Christian might reach an approximation between the Stoic Fate and Christian Providence, leaving the reader to assume that Hall might also have made this approximation. He says that “the natural light of reason, as expounded by the Stoic philosophers, became, for seventeenth-century Neo-Stoics, the accepted guide to conduct” and that “religious and moral writers endeavored to trace a relationship between moral and natural law which in effect resulted in the practical code of ethical behavior commonly associated with Neo-Stoicism.”

On the morning of tuesday, 11 September 2001, not far from my classroom, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan were hit by two jet airliners hijacked by terrorists from the Middle East. The towers subsequently collapsed, killing almost three thousand people. Those who originated the attack were apparently of the Islamic faith and spoke Arabic. Those who died were not just Americans but working people from around the globe.

Coleridge's interest in philology, more specifically in English linguistics, was one manifestation—by no means the least important—of his amazing myriad-mindedness. His lectures, essays, notes, and reported conversations abound with allusions, comments, and speculations on the nature and problems of language in general and of English in particular; and his experiments in vocabulary bear additional testimony to his interest in the subject. Although increasing attention has recently been paid to this aspect of his genius, a systematic study of the subject awaits the publication of a definitive edition of his works. Nevertheless, an attempt might be made to examine certain limited phases of his interest in linguistics, particularly his theories about the nature and development of language, his observations on the character of English, and his own remarkable contributions to the enrichment of its vocabulary.

Since the preparation of “Some Notes on the Pearl,” a new edition of the poem by Gollancz has appeared, issued in 1921 but too late for use in my former article. Besides, some new notes have been accumulating from further study of the poem, and another article seems warranted.

This essay elucidates Ellison's complex relation to Emerson, an issue that has not been adequately addressed in the criticism of the “most read” novel in the African American tradition, Invisible Man. Although in his fiction and critical writings, Ellison consciously claims his namesake's cultural vision, he sees the apparently universalist Emersonianism as circumscribed by an inherent racism that expels the African American from its sphere. Consequently the novelist affirms the promise of Emersonianism while neutralizing its racist aspect, resocializing its spiritualized premises, and reinterpreting its dogmatic implications. Ellison's appropriation and redirection of Emerson are especially manifest in his variations on the Emersonian senses of self-reliance, representativeness, and social organicism. Paradoxically, by “signifying” on Emerson's project, Ellison becomes a truer American scholar in the Emersonian tradition, which, by its internal logic, asks for critique and reinterpretation in each age.

I propose a new reading of the intersection of image and text as a site for reworkings of barbarian identity in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's last work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: Historia setentrional (1617). Through narrative manipulations of the half–barbarian character Antonio el mozo's relation to painting, Cervantes crafts complex interrelations among American pictographic language, European alphabetism, and colonial models of barbarian identity to demonstrate the adaptability and ingenuity of indigenous people. I analyze the function of ekphrastic passages that reflect American pictographic language and demonstrate the influence of Mexican painting on the literature of the Spanish golden age. Descriptions of paintings in the Persiles ultimately provide a metafictional critique of European paradigms of graphic representation and challenge the authority of European colonial rationalizations of power dynamics in the New World. (EB)

One of the characteristic features of English and of continental Romanticism was a widespread interest in the origins, nature, and meaning of the myths of the ancient world. Especially in England among classical scholars, antiquarians, and learned churchmen there was a zealous desire to resurrect divinities long forgotten and to find in them and their exploits a relevance for the modern age. One of the most characteristic and influential treatises on myth in the period was the Reverend Jacob Bryant's A New System, or, An Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774–76), an ambitious project whose purpose was “to rectify what time has impaired: to divest mythology of every foreign and unmeaning ornament, and to display the truth in its native simplicity.” He hoped thereby to give a “new turn to antient history, and to place it upon a surer foundation.” By hypothesizing that the Noachian Deluge was the focal event in ancient history and by seeking to show that its symbolism explained or elucidated the bulk of universal mythology, Bryant was confident that he was not only doing a service to knowledge but also that he was strengthening the premises of Christian truth. On similar diluvian hypotheses Thomas Maurice's Indian Antiquities (1793–1800), Edward Davies' The Mythology and the Rites of the British Druids (1809), and George Stanley Faber's The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816) attempted to achieve the same ends. Other notable researches in myth at the turn of the nineteenth century in England were those of Sir William Jones, the Orientalist, Sir William Drummond, the skeptic philosopher, and Richard Payne Knight, the art connoisseur. Well known also in learned circles was the more radically speculative mythologizing of such Frenchmen as Pierre Hugues (D'Hancarville), Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Charles François Dupuis.

The modern reader is wont to take with quiet enjoyment the mild irony implied in the delightful spirit of camaraderie with which the Eagle addresses “Geffrey” in Chaucer's The Hous of Fame:

“A ha!” quod he, “lo, so I can
Lewedly to a lewed man
Speke.“

The publication by I. I. Glivenko of Dostoevski's notebooks, in part in 1924 and in full in 1931, and the consequent re-evaluation of his novels have disposed rather conclusively of the opinion, long held and still occasionally repeated, that Dostoevski, though prophet, philosopher, and psychologist, was not a craftsman; that under the pressure of debts, bad economic habits, and unscrupulous publishers—all true conditions—he patched his novels together as best he could—all untrue.

The debate over Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio has centered on whether or not Menchú told the “truth” regarding details of her personal life. According to her critics, her “lies” discredit her testimony and reduce the moral authority of leftist intellectuals who teach testimonial texts. This focus on verifiable facts ignores the literary value of testimonios in general and the importance of Menchú's testimony in particular in a discursive war tied to cold war politics. This essay explores the problematics of truth, the nature of testimonio as a genre, and the relation between political solidarity and subaltern narrative. It also examines the function of Menchú's testimonio as a discourse on ethnicity and considers the relation among the anthropologist, the subaltern subject, and truth. The conclusion deals with the need to rethink the concept of identity, with the desires and fantasies of subjective transformation, and with the notion of identity politics.

When a monumental new edition of Billy Budd appeared in 1962, it was the hope of the editors that their exhaustive scholarship might contribute to a definitive interpretation of the novel. Such a wish might seem unnecessarily restrictive, but the extreme critical divergence on Billy Budd has created a genuine threat to its artistic integrity as a result of its apparent failure to support a demonstrable reading. This essay is an attempt to end the war, or to make the end more predictable.

In determining more narrowly the date of A Session of the Poets, commonly ascribed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, c. 1676, the dating of the play Wits Led by the Nose has proved to be of preliminary concern, since it contains the first known reference to A Session. Wits Led has on the title-page verso “August 1677,” the date when it was licensed for printing, but there is no external evidence for the date of composition or of its acting at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Falling back on internal evidence, we find this not explicit, but of a significance beyond the dating. The internal evidence for the acting date offers a clue to an unsettled question of identity: who made up the “younger part” of the King's or Duke's Company that acted in Lent, and what relation if any did these actors bear to the Nursery? The answer to this may provide another principle for determining the acting date of certain Restoration plays—the principle, namely, that a particular set of actor's names in a dramatis personæ may have a seasonal significance.

The history of Hellenism in the French Renaissance includes not only the leading intellectual figures of France, but also the record of an heroic and idealistic enterprise, embarked upon with courage and enthusiasm, carried on with tenacity, and brought to a brilliant and successful conclusion in the numerous editions of the Greek classics which appeared from 1507 to the end of the century. Ample testimony is available concerning the modest beginnings from the time when Robert Gaguin and Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples acquired a smattering of Greek from Gregorio Tifernas during his short stay in France in 1456, to the period of official recognition of Greek studies by the founding of the College royal in 1530.

The purposes of this article are two: 1) to consider the sources of “The Wanderings of Oisin” that Yeats himself gives; and 2) to consider additional sources, not given by Yeats, that I have found in the Irish literature written in English that we are fairly sure Yeats was familiar with. I shall be concerned throughout with only the first version of the poem—that of 1889—for in subsequent printings it was much changed.

“Were i a writer, and dead.” that phrase from the preface to roland barthes's 1971 sade fourier loyola embodies a slightly perverse expression of posthumous longing from the critic who composed “The Death of the Author” a few years earlier. Barthes goes on to say how much he would like it if “through the efforts of some friendly and detached biographer,” his life were “to reduce itself to a few details,” to, since he loved neologisms, a handful of “biographemes” (9). These biographical details of taste and tone would somehow transport the writer into space, scatter, touch another body—that body too would be destined to dispersal. The result would be not a whole life but a life full of holes, the way Marcel Proust, Barthes thought, wrote his.

In identifying Lady Oxford as Byron's political “tutelar genius” of 1813, as the “woman, who, amid all her fascination, always urged a man to usefulness or glory,” I have brought to light a certain speciousness in the interpretation accepted by Byron's biographers of his liaison with Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford, as simply comparable to the story of Rinaldo overcome by indolence in the “Bower of Armida.” Miss Mayne and M. Maurois and even Miss Raymond have somehow overlooked the fact that Lady Oxford was a pupil of Home Tooke, the Reform “agitator” (to use Byron's admiring term), was sometime mistress and lifelong political “genius” of the Radical spokesman, Sir Francis Burdett—was, in short, a woman who did not content herself with “soothing” and enchanting Byron but rather “always” pressed him on “senatorial duties” and endeavored to make him an advocate “particularly in the cause of weakness.” Eywood was a pleasant bower, but Jane, it turns out, was not Armida—though Byron, eager to realize that dream of Tasso he had always cherished, took a cue from the picture of Armida and Rinaldo which she had hung in his room and let his fancy feed on the intensity of the passion which she inspired and “returned with equal ardour,” for the time preferring her sorcery to “parliamentary mummeries” of doubtful value in which she was urging him to engage. Byron liked her politics, but he wanted to escape politics for a while. He did not wish to think himself attached to her party, nor to any party. Similar conflicting emotions troubled Byron's dramatic hero Sardanapalus when his lovely Myrrha said, “I think the present is the wonted hour / Of council....”

My first introduction to the mediæval story of King Horn came through reading in the Year Book 1914–1924, published by the Viking Club of London, a review of Dr. Henry Goddard Leach's Angevin Britain and Scandinavia. The reviewer in discussing the story of Horn referred to the difficulty of fixing the location of “Suddene” where the action of the story had its beginning and end, and suggested that it may have been situated in South Wales. My first real acquaintance with the Horn story, however, as well as the problems with which it is involved, came through reading the scholarly essay, “The Story of Horn and Rimenhild,” by Professor William Henry Schofield.