Christine à Fontainebleau (Odéon, October 13, 1829), by Frédéric Soulié, has been called “le premier effort de l‘école romantique.” The statement must of course be taken as referring only to the movement in the theatre, and even then needs qualification; but it contains a certain amount of truth. Christine was a “drame historique en cinq actes et en vers,” written in accordance with the principles of the Romantic school. At the time of its production, Cromwell had not been played; Amy Robsart, besides being merely a dramatic adaptation of a novel of Scott, was in prose; so was Henri III et sa cour; Vigny's translation of Othello, Hernani, and Dumas’ Christine were yet to come. The failure of Soulié's Christine was complete, and the excitement of its stormy first night was effaced by the subsequent and more spectacular première of Hernani. As a consequence this early romantic tragedy is practically forgotten, though it is mentioned, with varying degrees of accuracy, by several of Soulié's contemporaries, notably Dumas père and Jules Janin, and is occasionally referred to by modern scholars.

I Spent Muggy Chicago Summers Indoors, Tapping at my Keyboard, Churning Out Pages of My Book Manuscript, Following the paths of people's lives, obsessing over the right turn of phrase. When I grew lonely (which I always inevitably did), I'd head out to the Starbucks on Wilson and Magnolia, comforting myself with the sounds of people around me. I wrote better late at night, when night had descended and lulled everyone to sleep. I felt then a great sense of relief, tranquility, buoyed by nothing else but the swirl of ideas, because everyone around me in my world had settled down for the night. It was then that I was not distracted by the world of the living. Summer in Chicago, after all, was an exuberantly social season. The city exploded with life; throngs of runners would peel their shirts off in the humid heat as they sprinted along Lakefront Trail. But for me, invitations to barbecues, beach parties, and weekend getaways to Saugatuck were left unanswered: I had my book to write.

Among the mediæval debates which have enjoyed the widest currency and have retained their hold on popular interest for the longest time is the contention between Wine and Water. Poems on this subject are extant in most of the languages of mediæval Europe; and the tradition has persisted with surprising vitality through more than seven centuries down to the present day. The bickerings of these two ancient foes may still be heard on the lips of the peasantry of Germany, France, and Spain, and a fragment of the same dispute was sung not long since as a nursery rhyme in Devon.

Two recent studies, which ascribe to Rochester's Satyr against Mankind an originality which has long been in dispute, differ as to the nature and degree of that originality. V. de Sola Pinto is convinced that the Satyr “is a thoroughly original poem,” but he supports his opinion only with the observation that Rochester's poem has “a passionate vehemence which makes the carefully meditated art of Boileau's satire seem frigid.” Kenneth Murdock, in his recent biographical study of Rochester, treats the ideas of the poem as clues to Rochester's mind and thought, but he nevertheless refers to the Satyr as a “skilful adaptation of Boileau's verses.”

The struggle between power, which enables the individual to participate in social exchange, and desire (resulting from an absence or lack), which isolates the individual from the social order, characterizes the sixteenth-century prototype picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes; and art is posited throughout as a means of attaining power. At each stage of this pseudoautobiography, the hero, functioning as both character (the young Lazarillo) and narrator (the adult Lázaro), depends on the use of rhetoric to influence others and change his station in life. The young trickster employs cunning wit in his struggle to integrate himself into a seemingly closed society, and the mature apologist, in his forced confession, an antiutopian transformation of the Augustinian confessional form, uses verbal art in an attempt to mediate the conflict between his desire and the power of authorities who still persecute him despite the degree of worldly success he has attained.

This memorable passage (despite its anachronism in assuming that a superstition popular in the time of James I had already been accepted in the time of King Duncan of Scotland) illustrates the ramifications incident to an attempt to study a problem touching upon Romance philology and the history of medicine. The inflammation of the lymphatic glands, technically known as “tuberculous cervical adenitis” but ordinarily called “scrofula,” for a long period received the name of “the King's Evil,” and the treatment of it used to be the special prerogative of royalty. It was thought that the power of the British King to cure scrofula by touching the afflicted person went back to the time of King Lucius of Great Britain. As a matter of fact, King Lucius never existed —except in the imagination of the English theologian William Tooker in the sixteenth century—and the thaumaturgical power of the King began with Henry II (between 1154 and 1189). In France this royal prerogative was supposed to go back to the Merovingian King Clovis, but the earliest document substantiating the claim is the De Gallorum Imperio et Philosophia of Étienne Forcatel, published at Paris in 1579. The tradition of a French King's curing scrofula started with Philip I (between 1060 and 1108), and was actually revived at the coronation of Charles X at Reims in 1825. Attention is called to a painting of the sixteenth century, in the Pinacoteca of Turin, which shows a King of France about to touch a scrofulous crowd. At the right stands a patient on whose stomach one can discern clearly the head of a pig.

Whether scholars and anthologists have assigned a precise date of composition to Terminus or not, the general impression has been that Emerson wrote the poem upon approaching old age. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson implied that it was written in the 'sixties:

In the month of December, 1866, I, returning from six months on a Western railroad, met my father in New York just setting out for his winter's journey to the West, and we spent the night together at the St. Denis Hotel. He read me some poems that he was soon to publish in his new volume, May Day, and among them Terminus. I was startled, for he, looking so healthy, so full of life and young in spirit, was reading his deliberate acknowledgment of failing forces and his trusting and serene acquiescence.

This article discusses some characteristic methods and structures shared by modern Western and classical Chinese poetry, focusing on the works of Georg Trakl and major poets of the T’ang dynasty. Among the similarities examined are the preference for concrete imagery over abstract, discursive statement; the paratactical juxtaposition of images, which leaves their logical, temporal, and grammatical relationships unspecified and often ambiguous; and the tendency for images to become “ciphers” that suggest, but do not support, metaphorical interpretation. There is also a reluctance to obtrude a first-person speaker onto the scene, and this has led some critics to label Symbolist-post-Symbolist and Chinese poetry “impersonal”; this essay argues, however, that the hidden subjectivity of even the most “impersonal” poem should not be overlooked. Nevertheless, the omission of subject does frequently increase ambiguities among the other elements of a work and contributes to the “poetics of discontinuity” common to the two traditions.

To become all things, thereby resolving all contradictions, was a supreme aspiration of Renaissance humanists from Pico della Mirandola to Fray Luis de Leon. Prompted by the existential aporias of a search for truth and characterized by recourse to the chiastic paradox, Unamuno takes up this challenge and transforms it into an essential element of his modernist poetics. As an incipient but unconsummated form of dialectical argumentation, the chiasmus arrests progressive movement toward the resolution of the contradictions it generates. This master trope enables Unamuno to become all things yet rest in none, simultaneously to affirm and to deny momentous philosophical and moral positions, to offer multiple choices of being, and to avoid closure.

The terms “symbolist” and “décadent” are often considered synonymous. This has its reason for being; the two directions are related not only empirically, but logically. Symbolism calls forth Decadentism. However, for a study of the contemporary movement in French literature it would be advantageous to separate the two tendencies. This is easy enough, seeing that Symbolism has relation, above all, to the very foundation of the thought of the poets and writers of the group in question, while Decadentism is related to the expression of that thought. Up to this time Decadentism has been studied too much, Symbolism too little. Hence the confusion of criticism, which, itself ignorant of the fundamental side of the problem, has kept in ignorance the public wishing to draw inspiration from it. We are speaking naturally of a particular criticism, the official one in France: Brunetière, Doumic, Lemaître, etc. Men like Mauclair or Beaunier were yet too young to give sufficient value to their authority against these pontiffs, at a time when that would have been necessary for the understanding of the new-comers. However, the two recent books by Kahn (Symbolistes et Décadents, Paris, Vanier, 1902) and by Beaunier (La Poésie nouvelle, éd. du Mercure de France, Paris, 1902) will henceforth render inexcusable, even among the general public, the superficial appreciation of Symbolism which has been the fashion up to now.

The young romantic poet, Antoine Fontaney, returned to Paris in August, 1831, after a stay in Madrid as private secretary to Count d'Harcourt, the French ambassador. The fragments of his Journal in-time, which were published in 1925, are dated from the month of his return and continue through December, 1836. There have recently come to light fragments of another journal, as yet unpublished, covering the same period and written by a contemporary of Fontaney, Charles Didier, a young Genevan who arrived in Paris from Switzerland on 20 November, 1830. For the period covered by the journal of Fontaney, there are only extracts from the mémoires of Didier, the original manuscript having been destroyed. These fragments fell into the hands of a certain Mlle Benoît, Genevan, who wrote under the name of Berthe Vadier, and she in turn sold them to the Viscount Spoelberch de Lovenjoul. They are now a part of the valuable collection which the latter left to the Institut de France, housed at Chantilly.

The purpose of this paper is to indicate that the clear and definite tendency of popular Latin speech of all periods to force out unaccented vocalic phonemes, particularly in the interior of words, had a continued existence from earliest times up to the separate development of the Romance languages, and that the divarication of Eastern and Western Romance rests on obstructions interposed in greater part after Latin had ceased to be a living language. While some Latin and Romance scholars have observed elements that call into question the exactness of the orthodox statement of conditions, we nevertheless have been confronted with no clear, unequivocal exposition of the actual situation and no accumulation of evidence that would challenge the correctness of the accepted account.

Of this little play two editions have been recorded. Moratin alone, as far as I know, has seen a copy of the earliest known edition, Madrid, 1561. He reproduced the initial stagedirections and gave a short summary of the text, and upon this are apparently based whatever accounts of the play have appeared in later works on the Spanish stage. The second edition, Madrid, 1606, which is here reprinted, has been briefly described by Salvá (nr. 1426), Heredia (nr. 2349) and Gallardo (nr. 3993). When the latter examined it, it was a part of Böhl de Faber's library.

Clear distinctions between the genres, relatively unimportant in an historical study of the drama, are, or ought to be, of vital importance in a more absolute criticism. But though the term “tragedy” is loosely applied to some of the crudest as well as some of the greatest productions of the stage, and though for the last hundred and twenty-five years the term “melodrama” has been in current use, no critic has made more than a casual attempt properly to distinguish them. Indeed, such is the power of tradition that ill-formed and sensational productions of the Elizabethans or of the Restoration, because they were styled tragedies by their authors or contemporaries, continue to bear that proud title along with Lear and (Edipus tke King. It would seem obvious that a term so stretched as to include within its limits Hoffman and Hamlet, Lust's Dominion, Tke Revenge and Othello, will not serve for purposes of strict definition.

In The Playboy of the Western World Synge portrays the successive stages in the artistic growth of a poet. Christy Mahon develops markedly from the time when he shyly and tersely answers questions on his crime. Gradually, his flat statements give way to more daring and assertive speech so that others remark on his poetic power. Their praise generates further poetic attempts, and Christy's speech becomes both more concrete in diction and more deliberately imaginative. But when he discovers that his poetry was not based on actual fact, his speech changes distinctly: it temporarily becomes self-conscious and hollow. Inevitably the crowd turns on him, but the playboy rises above them and their objections; the very audience which nurtured the growing poet eventually threatens him in his maturity, and must be disregarded by the poet, since it cannot understand the imaginative truth of his statements. The artistic growth of the main character is signified by a variety of styles; thus the play supplies examples of Synge's best poetry, but also deliberate exaggerations of poetic expression.

I am deeply grateful to wai chee dimock for organizing this feature and to the distinguished scholars who have given generously of their time and attention to address the issues raised and solutions offered by The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. No reader of PMLA needs to be reminded that our discipline and our departments are under duress, our majors plummeting just as we are being asked to teach more service courses with higher numbers of students and fewer faculty lines. his is a bleak time in higher education and for our field. Yet it is inspiring to witness the dedication and seriousness of all those fighting for higher education as a public good while also working to ensure that higher education addresses the needs of the public.

In novel after novel,“ William York Tindall says, in Forces in Modern British Literature, ”sensitive lads are apprenticed to life, formed by its forces, rebelling against them, sometimes failing, sometimes emerging in victory. . . . From 1903 onwards almost every first novel was a novel of adolescence.“ Samuel Butler, he adds, started the vogue with The Way of All Flesh (1903). He ”wrote this book between 1872 and 1884 to express hatred for his father, admiration for himself, and his dearest prejudices.“

Perhaps we can push the date back of 1903 to Huysmans' À rebours (1884) and his sensitive protagonist, des Esseintes. From Huysmans we go to Oscar Wilde, to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which owes much to À rebours. The world in which these sensitive young men find themselves is Philistine, money-grubbing, dull, insensitive.

Are any of the early Dutch or Flemish analogues to tales in the Decameron derived from Boccaccio? Even a hasty survey of the narrative literature of mediæval Belgium and Netherlands raises the question, for we do not possess more than thirty-five or forty fabliaux, and yet in this group—such a small group compared to the French Recueil of Montaiglon and Raynaud—we find five or six close analogues to Decameron stories. The possibility of derivation from the Italian is by no means excluded by dates; for whereas the French fabliaux were all written before the Decameron, the genre flourished in Belgium and Holland all through the fourteenth century.

In a well-known passage in the Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), Dryden, pursuing his critical “examen” of The Silent Woman, tempers his extravagant praise of Ben Jonson's dramatic skill with serious criticism of his language.

If there is any fault in his language, ‘twas that he weaved it too closely and laboriously in his comedies especially; perhaps, too, he did a little too much Romanize our tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latin as he found them: wherein, though he learnedly followed their language, he did not enough comply with the idiom of ours.