As my starting point I shall take a statement about Goethe's relation to science which is both recent and precise, and which was made by Ronold Ring, professor of physics at Harvard University. According to King, Goethe was a true scientist in every respect, except that he limited his inquiry in two ways: he practiced observational science but rejected experimental science; and he formulated scientific insight in terms of fundamental principle, but not in terms of mathematical law. Goethe's aversion to experimental science is explained by King as a fear of analytical processes which do not lead to a subsequent reintegration or synthesis, and this fear, in turn, is attributed to Goethe's failure to understand that the application of mathematics to the findings of experimental science produces precisely such syntheses. King believes that “if Goethe had anticipated that out of analysis and planned experiment might rise the great tower of systematic world-science … he would have met the challenge of mathematics in nature and in life as resolutely and as effectively as he had met the challenge of observational science to the anti-rationalism of his youth.”

In most criticism of Faulkner it has been taken for granted that his Yoknapatawpha County is really Lafayette (accented on fay) County, Mississippi, and that his Jefferson, the county seat, is really Oxford. Little evidence on the matter has been given beyond a few very general resemblances, and little has been demanded. Recently, however, the assumption has been questioned, with a considerable marshaling of arguments and statistics. It seems proper, therefore, to go into the question in some detail, particularly since a good deal of the evidence is already beyond the reach of the literary researcher and much of the rest will probably disappear within the next few years. Local changes have already been sufficient to lead to some literary misinterpretations.

Thomas Mann's debt to Sigmund Freud is well-known. It is an important part of the larger question of Freud's influence on twentieth-century literature in general. Conversely, it was two major essays by Mann, “Die Stellung Freuds in der modernen Geistesgeschichte” (1929), and “Freud und die Zukunft” (1936), which did much to establish Freud's reputation as one of the great thinkers of the century. Mann referred to psychoanalysis in many of his works, as witness the caricature of an analyst in Der Zauberberg. He freely admitted its importance for him, as in his confirmation of the apparent Freudianism of the Joseph stories. It remains far from clear, however, just when he first encountered Freud's ideas, and how much he learned from them. It would be particularly desirable to know with certainty whether the new psychological theories came as exciting revelations to the youthful Mann, or whether they merely confirmed conclusions which he had already intuitively reached. The latter possibility is suggested, inter alia, by the interesting anticipations of Freudian ideas in the early works of Arthur Schnitzler. Mann himself remained strangely vague and noncommittal concerning his first acquaintance with the new psychology. His reticence on this point contrasts with the openness and relish with which he discussed the chronology and extent of his debts to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner.

Recent work on the momentous implications of mouvance and on the fluidity of genres in medieval literature has only begun to excavate the wealth of extant commentaries on the interplay during performance of rhetoric, poetry, music, dance, and drama in early cultures. Even today, Guillaume de Machaut's fourteenth-century Remède de Fortune offers compelling testimony about the generative and regenerative harmony between images and speech—themselves engendered and preserved by that most egregiously neglected rhetorical canon memoria. Long cited by poets, musicians, rhetoricians, and dramatists as crucial to their arts, mnemonics constitutes a complex epistemological framework by which to restore the lost dynamism to a literary corpus—lyric poetry—that enacted each of those arts. As the conceptual precursor to literary invention, memory collapses our current distinctions between seeing, saying, and singing, between visual, virtual, and actual performances, thus assisting us in revising our conceptions not only of performance but of genre as well.

Defoe calls Robinson Crusoe a “fugitive” fable, an “allegorical” narrative history that records on many levels the strains of displacement and the powers of reconstitution. Crusoe's experience offers Defoe the fictional opportunity to represent different sequences of narrative action that resemble and sometimes duplicate one another. Island exile for Crusoe substitutes for structurally comparable events—imaginative, psychological, religious, and, in the carefully worked out timing of the adventure, political. The politics of exile are especially significant for Crusoe's several transformative conversions, not merely his turning from place to place but his turning of one place into another. The classical exile, displaced abroad and replaced at home, becomes in Robinson Crusoe doubly situated—Crusoe's island home is literally remote but allegorically familiar. This paradox has narrative, historical, and national implications.

Through the notion of corruption, we come to the third example of bug sb. in Moufet's great pioneer work of entomology, of which the first two had been attached to the dung-beetle. As already described (l, 1037), the Insectorum … Theatrum was finished in 1590, though not printed till 1634.

The orthodox view regarding the introduction of end rime into English verse is succinctly set forth in the following quotations : “ Endrime, being a stranger to the early Germanic languages, its appearance in any of them may commonly be taken as a sign of foreign influence. In general, of course, rime and the stanza were introduced together into English verse, under the influence of Latin hymns and French lyrics.” “ Die alliterierende Langzeile war die einzige in der ags. Poesie bekannte Versart und blieb in derselben bis zu ende der ersten ags. oder altenglischen Sprachperiode in Gebrauch.” “ The transformation of the O. E. alliterative line into rhyme verse did not take place before the Middle English period. It was due to the influence of the rhymed French and Latin verse.” “ Alliterative verse was remodelled on Latin and French verse—or foreign verses were directly imitated.” The implication is that there never existed in Anglo-Saxon any verse of a form different from that of the five-type alliterative verse which prevails in the corpus of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Among the English poets of the fourteenth century the one who deserves the seat next to Chaucer is the anonymous author of the four poems: Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, The Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. The singular beauty of these poems has long stimulated scholars to the most diligent efforts to discover their author.

The first attempt to identify the unknown poet was made in 1838 by Dr. Edwin Guest, who confidently assigned these poems to Huchown, the mysterious Scotch poet mentioned by the chronicler Wyntoun. At one time or another, almost every piece of fourteenth century verse which shows a northerly dialect has been ascribed to Huchown; this identification of our author was therefore natural, if not inevitable. In the following year Sir Frederic Madden, in his edition of Sir Gawayne, accepted Dr. Guest's opinion that Huchown was its author. At the same time he recognized the fact that the poem in its present form is not in the Scotch dialect, and suggested as an explanation that it had been rewritten “by a scribe of the Midland counties.” With this recognition that Sir Gawayne as we have it is in the Midland rather than the Scottish dialect, there was manifestly slender reason for continuing to suppose that Huchown was the author.

On 2 May 1760 a new play by Charles Palissot, entitled Les Philosophes, had its first performance in Paris. The immortality achieved by this comedy has nothing to do with inherent literary value; it has survived because those whom it attacks were among the most important thinkers in eighteenth-century France, and because Diderot, one of its victims, retaliated in that brilliant satire known as Le Neveu de Rameau. In Palissot's comedy, the philosophes are referred to as “un tas de charlatans, / Qu'on voit sur des tréteaux ameuter les passants.” The notions of ethics and human nature supposedly espoused by these rabble rousers are essentially a popularization of the ideas of Helvétius, whose De l'esprit was publicly condemned less than two years before. “Les hommes sont égaux par le droit de nature,” Valère declares, much to the satisfaction of his servant; men are guided by “l'attrait du bonheur,” whose source is in the passions; personal interest is the only motivation (ii.i). And we catch glimpses of conduct consistent with a conscious, literal following of these and other maxims. But, significantly, Diderot's works are the ones that are mentioned, not Helvétius'. Diderot's play, Le Fils naturel, is made an important source of inspiration for Cydalise, an eighteenth-century Philaminte, in the writing of her book; she experiences great difficulty thinking up a first line for her preface, but, having abandoned “J'ai vécu” (used by Duclos), decides upon some thing “plus pompeux et plus philosophique”: the words with which Diderot opens his Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, “Jeune homme, prends et lis” (II.iii). The whole “boutique philosophique” is thus ridiculed, with little attempt being made to discriminate among the ideas of the individual thinkers; Diderot and Helvétius are made to share the same philosophy.

I Am Not Particularly Sensitive to Space and Location, Except When it Comes to Real Estate. Still, I Cannot Help But Notice their increased importance in the human sciences: philosophers evoke heterotopies and dream of geophilosophy, historians explore lieux de mémoire (“sites of memory”), and distant reading or surface reading competes with close reading. It is as if to the end of history there corresponded a beginning of geography, and some scholars, like Michel Collot, have even spoken of a spatial turn (15).

In teaching and studying French literature, which I have been doing for a long time, geographic forces have always had a significant role, because of the distance between France and the United States and because of the global situation of the two countries. That the distance has become less daunting in the past fifty or sixty years has led to more scholarly exchanges, smoother collaborations, easier access to subjects or objects, and the study of the literary extrême contemporain (“extremely contemporary”), say, or that of modern popular literature is now less problematic. As for the global situation, there has been a French loss and an American gain of cultural power, with less United States attention paid to French cultural products. This relative disaffection permeates many texts. I remember quite well how Donald Morrison buried French culture (Morrison and Compagnon), and I will not forget that Mark Bittman even argued in the New York Times that one ate better in London than in Paris. Across the ocean too, there was concern. As early as the 1990s, Jean-Marie Domenach deplored the twilight of French civilization. A few years later, Nicolas Baverez described a falling France.

The hardest thing to do with a child, sometimes, is to name it. The same is often true of a type of literature. To find a name which shall adequately express the tendencies and purposes of certain literary work is a difficult and perplexing task. It often happens, too, that a name is given carelessly, because of some application either incidental or actually mistaken, and remains fixed, although its appropriateness is only superficial.

Die besondere Eigenart von Gottfried Kellers Erzählungskunst ist die Bildlichkeit und die dadurch bedingte Anschaulichkeit seiner Sprache. Wir finden in seiner Sprache alles, vom einfachen Wortvergleich, wie er uns häufig in der Umgangssprache entgegentritt, bis zum weitausgesponnenen ungewöhnlichen Gleichnis. Das alltägliche stereotype Bild wechselt mit dem eigenartigsten und phantasievollsten, dem derben naturalistischen Vergleich folgt ein feiner poetischer, dem malerisch farbigen ein gehaltvoll symbolischer. Selbst der flüchtige Leser wird immer wieder von der Wahrheit oder Schönheit eines Bildes angezogen oder von der Treffsicherheit eines Vergleiches überrascht. So hat man sich daran gewöhnt, wenn man von Keller spricht, auch seine “sprechenden Bilder” und “schlagenden Vergleiche” zu erwähnen, wie es bereits A. Frey in seinen “Erinnerungen an Gottfried Keller” tut. Erstaunlicherweise hat sich die literarhistorische Forschung bis jetzt damit begnügt, die Metamorphose des Begrifflichen zum Gegenständlichen in Kellers Schaffen zu betonen und allgemein auf die verblüffende Anschaulichkeit und Kühnheit seiner Vergleiche, sowie auf deren symbolischen und weltanschaulichen Gehalt hinzuweisen. Es sei nun hier der Versuch gemacht, auf diese charakteristische Seite des Kellerschen Stils näher einzugehen.

An enthusiasm for this novel is not, nowadays, an easy thing to share. Unless one moves in circles professionally devoted to German literature, the mention of its title is likely to call up among literary people the following notions: that T. S. Eliot has not approved of Goethe, while nineteenth-century England did, both facts still, to many, rather discouraging; that the Bildungsroman, of which Goethe's novel is the great example, is a sloppy and self-indulgent genre—there is no form, since it just goes autobiographically on and on, nor any proper commitment to experience, which the self-obsessed hero only passes through; that this one might be full of “wisdom,” perhaps, but that here is precisely its greatest fault, for what can wisdom be but smug “Victorian” moralizing or analyzing or generalizing, mere simplifying abstraction at best, and the death of all actuality, complexity, and charm. Nor is it fashion alone which accounts for the novel's virtual disappearance from our intellectual landscape. No, even when it is read it tends to be disliked. Press it on the up-to-date intelligent reader, the reader who devours the Russians or Stendhal or Flaubert or Proust with joy, and more often than not—such has been my experience—he will find it repulsively cold-blooded, even frivolous, in its treatment of human affairs. It is sometimes admitted that what happens in the novel, at least after the rather long flash-back at the beginning, ought to be interesting enough. But, the complaint is, one is hurried through even the big scenes at a pace that is shockingly sprightly. There is no sign that the author feels anything or wants us to feel anything. One is hurried on, moreover, to no particular purpose. Instead of “adding up,” the story rambles in the most outmoded way. And so forth.

The relationship between the two worlds of As You Like It becomes a metaphor of love, defined by conspicuous narrative and theatrical artifice. The expository opening scenes have a storybook flatness which becomes a metaphor of a world that limits self-realization while the liberating sojourn in the forest, a festive world of disguise and imagination, parallels the spectators’ experience in the playhouse as a withdrawal from everyday life. The pattern of withdrawal and return also objectifies the psychological development of love: the courtship of Rosalind and Orlando progresses from impulsive love at first sight at court, through subjective and imaginative responses to desire in the forest, to fulfillment in marriage. The play concludes by placing subjective freedom, expressed metaphorically through theatrical artifice, in the larger setting of forces beyond the self, established metaphorically in narrative artifice.

Over the centuries, a varying but persistent interest in magic and the occult sciences has reached, by way of devious paths, the culture and literature of Western Europe. In France, the vigor of this natural human bent was manifest even during the Age of Reason; Swedenborgians, Rosicrucians, martinistes, and Freemasons, together with a host of educated persons with no particular philosophical alliances, became pleasurably entangled in what Diderot disdainfully termed “ce tissu indigeste et ridicule de suppositions.“ “Le culte du merveilleux,” says a historian of that period, Constantin Bila, “n'épargnait aucune classe de la société.” The heightened interest in the marvelous, the supernatural, and the fantastic throughout the Romantic Period and the later nineteenth century is, of course, familiar.

Marking a narrative break in the twenty-fourth-century writer Knarf's novel about world war II, a novel Knarf recounts orally to his Friend Ord, this passage From Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 342-43), by M. Barnard Eldershaw (pseudonym of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw), enacts a scene of collaboration, falling just short of “full and equal” partnership (though perhaps all literary collaboration must thus fall). Knarf is a reader of his own text, a listener to his own story; the writer is continually in conversation—disagreeing and agreeing with—a would-be writer of the text; that conversation inflects, indeed inscribes itself in, the writer's writing, so that the would-be other writer—who is a reader and listener too—becomes inseparable from the text in process. Thematically contained in these relations, but also uncontainably circumscribing them, are “world history” and “community”: those suprapersonal entities both demand and are produced by collaboration(ism), yet they also overwhelm, dwarf, or marginalize “little fishes” like Ally, Ord, and Knarf. But, then again, world history and community are themselves elusive if meant as much more than fictions about and by little fishes, riding on their high horses.

To the world of letters the legend of Hiawatha connotes Longfellow, without whose popular treatment it would be as little known as the adventures of Coyote or Raven, or a dozen other culture heroes of the Red Men. Since Longfellow's poem is the only form in which American Indian legend has reached the great mass of civilized men, the question of its authenticity must present itself to the general reader of American literature no less than to the student of literary relations. Do sixty years of active work on the part of ethnologists and folk-lorists show that Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha is truly Indian in theme, atmosphere, and spirit? To essay an answer to this question is the purpose of the present study.

In a recent article, “Swift's Project: A Religious and Political Satire” (PMLA, LXXII, March 1967, 54–63), Leland D. Peterson argues that Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Reformation of Manners (1709) cannot be taken as a serious “reformation tract.” In his view, what Swift appears to be recommending in the Project is as outrageous in its own way as his more famous project in A Modest Proposal and we must therefore assume that in the earlier piece, as in the later, Swift's pose is ironic, his persona unsympathetic, and his purpose satirical. Peterson concludes by suggesting that “the main targets of satire in the Project are reformers and reforming societies, projectors, nominal Christianity, and the Whig Junto” (p. 58).

An anonymous MS. play, Anna Bullen, now at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery [HM973] and hitherto unnoticed, offers, upon examination, interesting similarities to the play upon the same subject by John Banks, Vertue Betray'd: Or, Anna Bullen. The MS. is written upon paper bearing an eighteenth-century watermark, and is written in an eighteenth-century hand. The MS. seems to be, not an original play, but either a copy or an adaptation of some other play, as is shown: (1) by the careful noting of an hiatus of one or two lines in the first speech by Northumberland in Act i, Scene 2 [verso leaf 5]; (2) by the scratching out of occasional words and the substitution of the proper synonym, as

Expos'd and naked to the probing light [verso leaf 25];

and (3) by the frequent complete or incomplete erasure of errors in wording, orthography, and chirography.