Zu den Personen, die Friedrich Hebbel in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens nahegestanden haben, gehört auch der Dichterkomponist Peter Cornelius. Da wir seinen Namen in den Tagebüchern Hebbels vergeblich suchen, wohl aber seinen großen Onkel, den Maler Peter Cornelius (1783-1867), erwähnt finden, ist anzunehmen, daß Cornelius keinen starken Eindruck auf Hebbel gemacht hat. Auch Emil Kuh, Hebbels Biograph, erwähnt den Dichterkomponisten nicht, obwohl beide befreundet waren und Cornelius Gedichte von Kuh vertont hat. Andere Darsteller von Hebbels Leben haben Cornelius ebenfalls übersehen. Nur Adolf Bartels nennt in seiner kleinen Lebensbeschreibung Hebbels Cornelius unter denen, die in Wien um den großen Dramatiker waren, und Paul Bornstein hat in seinem umfangreichen Werke “Friedrich Hebbels Persönlichkeit” Teile aus den Briefen von Peter Cornelius zum Abdruck gebracht. und doch gehörte Cornelius, dessen musikalische Werke, insbesondere seine Liedkompositionen, einen hohen Rang einnehmen, dessen Dichtungen und schriftstellerische Arbeiten in vier Bänden vorliegen und dessen Leben und Werk in etlichen biographischen Arbeiten behandelt worden ist, nicht nur zu dem engeren Kreise um Hebbel in Wien, sondern er hat in seinen Briefen auch des öfteren Hebbel und sein Verhältnis zu ihm erwähnt und damit Material zu dem Charakterbilde des norddeutschen Dramatikers geliefert, das bis heute unberücksichtigt geblieben ist.

Though we are particularly fortunate in knowing a good deal about the life of Chaucer, nevertheless some of the facts are not wholly intelligible. More and more, however, as “men observingly distil them out,” various cruxes are being disposed of. One of the most important of these perplexing problems, which if solved will clear up much besides, is the poet's sudden loss of Aldgate in 1386. This year was a crucial one in the poet's career: for the political happenings at that time—not only were national issues at stake, but London was passing through its most critical period in history—seriously affected Chaucer's welfare. There is, also, a possibility that the poet's sudden misfortune at that time is reflected in some of his poems.

Samuel Richardson used in his novels character types and plots already developed in the English drama. Playwrights such as Charles Johnson, George Lillo, and even Henry Fielding had presented the same story as Pamela—the attempted seduction of a poor but innocent maiden by a well-born rake— and characters similar to the novel's virgin heroine and libertine hero. In the first part of Clarissa Richardson handled a theme common in the drama, that of enforced betrothal, and developed this theme with characterizations, character relationships, and dramatic confrontations already used by playwrights. Throughout the novel Clarissa resembles a type of suffering heroine and Lovelace a type of rakish villain popular in the drama, and the second part of the novel strikingly resembles Charles Johnson's play Caelia. The characters of Sir Charles Grandison also have their dramatic counterparts, especially the hero, who is clearly a product of the theater's men of sense.

Emigration is translation. Written by Leo Spitzer in 1934, “Learning Turkish” offers a glimpse into the historical circumstances of his and other German academics' exile in Istanbul—an exile that plays a foundational role in comparative literature, as Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, and Emily Apter have argued. Spitzer's attempt to analyze the characteristics of the Turkish language while that language was transforming amplifies recent critical attempts to understand “modern Turkey's nation-based and state-directed poiesis” (Yaeger 11). Bridging the gap between exile in Istanbul and the modern Turkish language, “Learning Turkish” introduces complexity to contemporary paradigms of global comparatism and identifies symptoms of literary studies' relocation to the context of a new nation-state; the article exemplifies the complicity between local nationalisms and cultural imperialisms and illuminates, on a personal level, how linguistic estrangement becomes a way of negotiating the experience of deportation, of emigration, and of the foreignness of adoptive cultures for Spitzer.

In 1986 Leo Bersani published a book entitled The Freudian Body. I love that title. From the first time I heard it, over two decades ago, up through this very moment, I have continued to love that title. To be honest, I wish it were mine—which is why I borrowed it for my essay here. I'm not exactly sure what I take this title to mean—probably something like a definitive delineation of a Freudian theory of the body. I'm not exactly sure what I take it to promise—probably something like a reconceptualization of the body beyond positivism, beyond Christian views of nature, beyond biologistic ideology. It sounds like something I really want. One thing is for sure: the title made me want to read the book.

And so the first time I read this book, I was disappointed, frustrated, and even a little angry. I did not find “the Freudian body” promised by the title. “Bait and switch,” I thought bitterly. “You fucking tease!”

“Tess of the D'Urbervilles” was greeted with a storm of criticism, which did not abate on the appearance, four years later, of “Jude the Obscure.” Mr. Hardy seems rightly to have anticipated, in the preface to “Tess,” the feelings of the “too genteel reader who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels.” And it is true that he does exhibit in these novels a frankness of tone on all that pertains to sex somewhat unusual in England in the early nineties. But Hardy was by no means the kind of writer to disregard the predilections of his public on this or any other point of taste. There are but too many evidences of his willingness to meet them half way. And there is nothing which shows more strikingly his respect for the public taste, especially in the earlier stories, than his great delicacy, according to present standards—not to say his conventionality—in regard to matters of sex.

As many articles in the March 2009 issue of PMLA imply, the question of ability is central to any consideration of the human. For example, in “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” (124.2 [2009]: 564–75), Cary Wolfe shows how the humanities transgresses its own limits and thereby shifts its locus and center. Insofar as this broad area of study is the appropriate venue for reflection on the discursive boundary of the human, it must erase that boundary.

While it has been productive to consider the creative friendship of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell as grounded in a “shared experience of outsider-hood,” their correspondence and the poems they inspired each other to write reveal a shared attraction to conventional imagery of communal belonging—national allegiance, heterosexual domesticity, and nostalgia for the classical realism of nineteenth-century novels. Bishop and Lowell were a queer couple for many reasons, but I argue that their conflation of conventionality and social critique resonates strongly with recent theories of counterculture in reflecting the possibility—often taken to be a nightmare of lyric poets—that one's inner life is inhabited and shaped by another.

There is not only an existential poignancy but also an intellectual piquancy to the 1950 suicide note of F. O. Matthiessen, one of the founders of American studies: “I am depressed over world conditions. I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective” (“F. O. Matthiessen”). Matthiessen attributed his fateful decision to a situation—the Cold War—in which it increasingly seemed difficult to assert credibly and pursue effectively a socialist agenda without being presumed or pressured to hold commitments to materialism, atheism, and secularism. The dominant narrative of American studies is that the Cold War gave the field its life—the ideological impetus and institutional infrastructure to produce and peddle a sophisticated version of American exceptionalism (Radway 47-49; Wise 308-12). But Matthiessen's tragic case suggests instead that the Cold War may have killed American studies, at least a possible version of it. Matthiessen's fatal dilemma, I want respectfully to suggest, might instruct us how to reconstruct the history and future of a field whose “bread-and-butter concerns” have always included religion (Stein and Murison 1; cf. Modern). Matthiessen's political credentials as a socialist were bona fide, and his intellectual inclinations were toward deep historicist analysis, but he couldn't commit to Marxism, despite his frank acknowledgment of its indispensable contribution not only to intellectual culture but also to his own thinking. Clearly, personal religious reasons played a role—“I am a Christian, not through upbringing but by conviction, and I find any materialism inadequate” (Matthiessen, “Education” 180). But I want to underscore Matthiessen's intellectual objections, which arose from the evidence of his historical inquiry into American literature and culture. That is to say, I want to distinguish between how his theological convictions may have prejudiced him against Marxism's secularist teleology and how his scholarly investigation of American literature and culture raised legitimate questions about Marxism's implicit secularization narrative. In reviews of the Marxist literary histories of his Americanist colleagues V. F. Calverton and Granville Hicks, Matthiessen complained of their inability to comprehend what he called “the main development of religious idealism from Edwards through the transcendental movement” and “the strain of affirmation of the ideal that runs from the seventeenth century to the twentieth” (Responsibilities 187, 195). The secularist premises of Marxist analysis—at least in the crude form espoused by Calverton and Hicks—seemed to Matthiessen blunt instruments with which to accomplish deep understanding of the pronounced “religious idealism” of American literature and culture.

Seldom do readers of Gerstäcker's Germelshausen, Irrfahrten, Wild-Dieb, etc., know how this author first appealed to, and won, his worldwide clientèle of the last eighty-odd years. I hope soon to present a truly adequate account of his life, letters and works; here I will but most briefly sketch his early life, depict his picturesque attempts to become a real American citizen, and indicate finally the truly dominant influence of this, his first American sojourn, over all his later career.

Such appraisals as Samuel C. Chew's, that Hardy knew the Southern Counties as Gilbert White knew Selborne or Arnold Bennett the Five Towns, require no affidavits. But Mrs. Hardy's assertions that he had a knowledge of the city “like a born Londoner”, “as only a young man can get it”, and that there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of his poetry than in all his novels—such statements warrant more study than they have hitherto received.

Arthur Schnitzler's non-fictional works have been sorely neglected in critical literature, even by those writers who have attempted to evaluate his “Weltanschauung.” His essays and aphorisms have thus on the whole remained almost completely unknown, although a few are readily accessible. One of these works, Über Krieg und Frieden, was published posthumously in 1939 and contains excerpts from Schnitzler's diaries during the years 1915–19. Another is the Buck der Sprücke und Bedenken, a collection of aphorisms published in 1927. Individual sections are not dated and, from the evidence of unpublished material in Schnitzler's “NachlaC,” may be assumed to span his entire creative life. Some of the ideas are fragmentary, often the result of momentary moods, and there are internal contradictions. Schnitzler himself was aware of this, and in the foreword he expressly warned that “dieses Buch will keine Système, keine Weltanschauungen, keine Erledi-gungen bringen,” and added: “Keineswegs hat dieses Buch den Ehrgeiz, für sich allein zu bestehen.” Nonetheless, certain thoughts occur with astonishing regularity—certain “ideas and questions” about “fate and free will,” about “responsibility and conscience,” about “relationships and loneliness,” to quote some of the chapter headings.

Of all the “winged words” of Goethe's Faust those of its closing lines,

have probably flown farthest, and they have always been impressive and memorable. On the other hand, one cannot help feeling that the standard interpretation of them does not do justice to their lofty position in the ultimate summary statement of the drama. The commentaries almost invariably relate these lines to the last scene only, that of Faust's salvation and elevation, rather than to the drama as a whole.

The long and curious letter to a certain Dr. Stone, in which Dickens discusses his theories of dream psychology, was not published until 1938. Containing approximately seventeen hundred words, it provides us with an ample platform from which to observe the novelist's fictional use of dreams. Oddly enough, the letter, like the whole subject of Dickens' dream fiction, has not yet attracted students of Victorian fiction.

Machiavelli's chapter on fortuna, which distills the teachings of The Prince, promises success to the prince who will adapt to the times. But when Machiavelli adds that one can never adapt, he implicitly withdraws the promise and leaves the prince naked before fortune. While others view this chapter as the shoal on which the text's optimistic teaching runs aground, I argue that the failure is strategic; like Machiavelli's anomalous treatment of Cesare Borgia, it points to the coherence underlying an apparently inconsistent text. In appropriately Machiavellian fashion, the work is not, as it purports to be, a handbook on princely success. Instead, it represents a characteristically audacious attempt to reconcile self-serving aims: to secure the author employment, to spur the Medici on to the task of unifying Italy, and, paradoxically, to draw his prospective employers and the potential instruments of Italian glory—once they have served his threefold purpose—to their ruin.

The life of William Cowper has been written many times; first by his friend and fellow poet, William Hayley, and most recently by Thomas Wright, Principal of the Cowper School at Olney. The present manuscript, here reprinted in full, was probably prepared for the first of these biographers about two years after the poet's death. It is in the hand of the Rev. John Johnson, Cowper's cousin and constant companion during the last five years of his life. It was doubtless used by Hayley for his brief record of these years, but seems to have been unknown to all succeeding biographers. The dismal circumstances of this part of Cowper's life combined with the unscientific historical attitude of a century ago to make Hayley's account altogether unsatisfactory today. The diary comes to the modern student of Cowper, therefore, as virtually new source material for those years of his life which have always been the least documented.

Readers of the earlier plays of Shakespeare (c. 1590-1600) cannot fail to notice the existence in them of two old cronies, who are forever strolling into the story from outside. Usually, they make their appearance together, and whatever the nature of the play, they, at any rate, abide the same. They are both amiable, honest simpletons, smacking of the village-green. Sometimes they are servants, sometimes minstrels, and sometimes constables and watchmen. If we scan them more closely, we shall find that each has a separate individuality. One is garrulous, complacent and, on occasion, lachrymose; he is brim-full of the wisdom of the ale-house, and loves to lecture and patronize his companion. This old fellow is a mere shadow to his wiser gossip. It is his business to ask simple-minded questions or to listen in simple-minded wonder to the dogmatic wisdom of his friend. In short, his main duty is to be the cause that wit and comicality express themselves through the mouth of his friend.

From the popularity of Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, one might infer that 1734 marks approximately the beginning of the English vogue in France. Although interest in English literature was greatly enhanced by Voltaire, a study of French periodicals published during the seventy years preceding 1734 shows that the influence of English science and philosophy was at its height prior to the appearance of Voltaire's Lettres. This study will endeavor to trace the early development of Anglomania, particularly in the fields of science and philosophy, as revealed in the Choix des anciens Mercures et des autres journaux. This collection, published at Paris from 1757 to 1764, drew its material from various periodicals of the seventeenth and the first sixty years of the eighteenth century.