Just what is it about fame that so alienates women? or, why is it that famous women often speak of their experience of celebrity as something that is ultimately lonely and a shabby substitute for love? And why are these statements of loneliness in celebrity attenuated for mothers? Whether it is a famous American author of the nineteenth century and mother of seven, Harriet Beecher Stowe; an iconic and volatile star of the mid–twentieth century and mother of three, Judy Garland; or a twenty-first-century reality celebrity and mother of eight, Kate Gosselin, these women suggest that the experiences of fame are isolating and ultimately unsatisfying. To paraphrase Stowe, it is not fame and celebrity that satisfies the heart of the female star; it is the old-fashioned comforts of love. Their combined comments are thus a corrective to fans' implied perception of famous people as happy, when, indeed, their celebrity seems to have alienated them from love. Whether the female celebrity seeks romantic or familial love is not clear, and we would do well to realize that the abstract palliative is actually a culturally imagined comfort that probably has little to do with either these women in particular or stardom more broadly. But the consistent remarks about fame as a condition of loneliness establish a discursive imperative that the famous woman speak of longing for affective completion, in turn suggesting that public ardor cannot satisfy the woman's heart. In other words, fame cannot replace love.

Balzac has summed up his literary theories in the foreword to the first collected edition of the Comédie humaine, written in July 1842, almost thirteen years after he had begun his gigantic task. Critics are divided in their opinion of this document, some considering it an important manifesto of Balzac's doctrine, others regarding it as simply an afterthought intended to give an appearance of unity to a confused mass of ideas.

Edwin Muir's poem, “The Gate,” not only marks literally the dividing point in his work between almost unrelieved darkness and increasing light, but, in every detail of its complex structure and in controlling metaphor, it signals the loss of innocence, the intimate acquaintance with evil, which Muir's later poems suggest must be endured before there can be any true knowledge of good. Both halves, into which the poem is cut by a strong caesura in the twelfth line, plunge in parallel downward movements from security into loss and fear; and although a secondary movement, based on a metaphor of initiation, carries the poem forward, over the threshold of “The Gate,” this forward step also turns out to be downward. Because of Muir's persistent association of a castle with treachery from within, as his novel, The Three Brothers, and several poems show, the step into the fortress of adulthood is simultaneously a drop into the central darkness and terror of the universe.

The Parlement of foules is a poem in three parts: the prelude before the dream, the scene in the garden of love, and the debate among the birds. Each part differs from the others in its sources, content, mode of treatment, and tone. Because of these differences many-critics have argued that the poem lacks unity. Such arguments would be more convincing if Chaucer seemed unaware of the differences and if the three parts of the poem did not, in some way, serve a common purpose. It is probable, however, that Chaucer created these differences deliberately, for he appears to have worked to heighten and exploit them. A conscious artistic purpose is behind the poem's variety. Moreover, this variety is the agent of the poem's unity; it both contains and creates the poem's ultimate meaning. To make this clear, we shall look first at some of the ways in which Chaucer sharpened the distinctions between the three parts. And then we shall consider the ways in which the parts are unified and the purpose which is served by the tripartite organization.

Perhaps someone will eventually undertake the heroic task of making a really systematic study of the file of the Gentleman's Magazine, in the hope of arriving at a more satisfying account of Johnson's part in it than we now have. The following observations do not represent such an attempt; they are the product of a relatively cursory inspection of some of the early volumes, and are offered with the expectation that they will raise more questions than they will answer. Still, such questions ought to be raised, in the hope that a consideration of them will in the end contribute to the higher standards of comprehensiveness and precision in Johnson studies which modern students would like to see attained.

The publication of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments in 1995 and the subsequent controversy over its authenticity can be seen as an object lesson in the vexed relation of history and memory. The book's status as an authentic memoir of the Holocaust has been impeached, yet Fragments may nonetheless be a useful vehicle for memory Cathy Caruth's and Shoshana Felman's work on trauma and on its relation to testimony indicates that testimony bears at best a tenuous relation to the events that form its core, particularly when the events are traumatic. An examination of Wilkomirski's language, read alongside (other) survivor testimony, suggests that Fragments may testify to a disaster other than the Holocaust. This conclusion, however, has controversial implications: that we need to reevaluate seriously how we treat testimony as historical evidence, including testimony of the Holocaust, and that the injunctions attached to Holocaust memory—never forget, never again—may be difficult if not impossible to heed.

Fashions in literature run not only to theme, form, influence, and diction but also to title and even part of a title. For a century following the Dunciad an extraordinary number of productions had titles ending in -iad (-ead, -ad, -ade). The presence of this suffix denoted that the work dealt with the subject suggested by the name to which those final letters were affixed. The NED gives the English suffix -ad as representing the Greek -άδ-α, forming feminine patronymics and hence used in names of poems. The mere -ad did not often appear but yielded to the more euphonious -iad and sometimes -ead; the -ade was the French spelling.

I have no way of knowing whether it was fate that has pushed me onto this dais but as various lucky coincidences have created this opportunity I may as well call it fate. Putting aside discussion of the existence or non-existence of God. I would like to say that despite my being an atheist I have always shown reverence for the unknowable.

A person cannot be God, certainly not replace God, and rule the world as a Superman; he will only succeed in creating more chaos and make a greater mess of the world. In the century after Nietzsche man-made disasters left the blackest records in the history of humankind. Supermen of all types called leader of the people, head of the nation and commander of the race did not baulk at resorting to various violent means in perpetrating crimes that in no way resemble the ravings of a very egotistic philosopher. However, I do not wish to waste this talk on literature by saying too much about politics and history, what I want to do is to use this opportunity to speak as one writer in the voice of an individual.

The text of David and Bethsabe, as editors of Peele have long been aware, presents a series of perplexing problems: several passages in the play are directly contradictory, the movements and speeches of certain characters in Scene ix are quite unexplainable by any rules of drama or logic, one of the choruses holds out a promise, which is not fulfilled, of presenting David's death, and within the text occurs a misplaced fragment of a lost scene. Dyce, Manly, and Greg have commented on these discrepancies in the play, and the students of Peele have recognized the cruces involved. Yet in spite of the suggestions of P. A. Daniel and Professor Manly and the detailed studies of Dr. Dannenberg and Dr. Neitzel, no satisfactory solution of the difficulties in the quarto text has been found.

On 29 May 1736, Doctor Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, presented to Mistress Mary Harrison a copy of Medulla Historiae Anglicanae: The Ancient and Present State of England. Being a Compendious History of All Its Monarchs,from the Time of Julius Caesar. Written by Dr. Howell. And continued by an Impartial Hand to the Death of His late Majesty King George I (9th ed., London, 1734), in order to “encourage her to read usefull and improving Books.” Such high sententiousness is probably a suitable pose for a man almost seventy to assume when formally endowing a girl in her mid-twenties with an epitome of English history. Yet even at seventy Swift would have enjoyed placing an ironic inscription on the flyleaf of a book, especially one like Howell's, biased by Whiggery; and if Mistress Harrison ever read this improving volume, she would have discovered some of Swift's characteristic marginal vituperation. Since these notes have never been printed, few people besides Mary Harrison have had the opportunity these past two hundred years of reading Swift's animadversions on certain aspects of English history.

The play commonly known as Shakspere's Pericles first appeared in 1609, in a version so corrupt that it was clearly a piracy. Whether this was identical with the drama of the same title which was entered on the Stationers' Register in company with Antony and Cleopatra, on May 20, 1608, cannot be determined. This, however, is certain: the entry was made by Edward Blount, but the play was published by Henry Gosson, to whom no record of transfer is to be found. As to the composition of Pericles, it is now generally admitted that, with the possible exception of a few phrases, the first two acts are not by Shakspere but in all probability by George Wilkins.

The primitive purity of the early Church soon yielded to a Church hierarchy. In those early times, before the New Testament was admitted to equal canonical authority with the Old, the Church became the supreme authority and the Bible was subordinate. After the incorporation of the New Testament into the Bible, the Scriptures and the Church appear to be coördinate authority in the patristic writings of that period. During the Middle Ages the Church grew rapidly in political power and the influence of the Scriptures waned accordingly, so that Dante complains of the way in which not merely creeds and fathers but canon law and the decretals were studied instead of the gospels. It is true that pious people, ever since the days of Pentecost, had believed that “the inward spiritual facts of man's religious experience were of infinitely more value than their expression in stereotyped forms recognized by the Church,” and that, too, “ in such a solemn thing as the forgiveness of sin man could go to God directly without human mediation.” These pious souls had found the pardon they sought, but the good majority were under the dominion of the Church, which at last degraded the meaning of “spiritual ” so that it signified mere ritualistic service, and “thrust itself between God and the worshipper, and proclaimed that no man could draw near to God save through its appointed ways of approach. Confession was to be made to God through the priest; God spoke pardon only in the priest's absolution. When Luther attacked indulgences in the way he did he struck at the whole system.” After the Reformation a reaction set in. New and better translations of the Bible were made, and the Word became accessible to every-body. The successors of the Reformers emphasized “the verbal inspiration of the Scripture and its infallible authority (more) than had been done for the most part by the first Reformers, Luther and Calvin and their contemporaries, who never seemed to have sanctioned the famous dictum of Chillingworth, ‘the Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of the Protestants.‘” The Reformers took the Holy Scriptures, because they are the divine word, and require no further supplement from tradition and custom, merely as the rule and canon of their faith. Traditions, dogmas, ordinances established by the Church, were null and void. This freedom of the religious conscience and the Holy Scriptures as the living, pure source of religion brought a rich blessing to Christians. Religion was elevated above that sphere in which mere morality and outer ordinance were the determining principles, and raised man to a new spiritual life. The real motive principle of this new life is justification by faith.

In what purports to be a definitive life of the poet Young, H. C. Shelley remarks that the question of the identity of Philander, Lucia, and Narcissa, raised by the peculiar chronology of their deaths, as recorded in the Night Thoughts, forms “the most puzzling problem of Young's biography.” Part of the problem had already been solved by M. Walter Thomas, to whom Sir Leslie Stephen refers at the close of his article on Young in the D. N. B., an article referred to by Mr. Shelley himself. M. Thomas shows pretty conclusively that Philander was no other than Thomas Tickell, the lifelong intimate friend of Young, whose death occurred suddenly at Bath on April 23, 1740. Lucia was the poet's wife, the “poor Lady Betty Lee” of Mrs. Pendarves's letter, who was left “with three children to maintain and not a farthing to support her.” The identity of Narcissa, however (which Mr. Shelley makes no attempt to solve), offers greater difficulty. Professor Thomas suggests that she may have been an illegitimate daughter “reconnue par le père, acceptée par sa femme, mais désavouée par le moraliste. Peut-être,” he continues, “encore l'enfant est-elle née trop tôt, Young ayant anticipé en quelque sort sur les droits du mariage.”

Some of the most fruitful modern Hawthorne criticism is that which endeavors to correct and supplement the older, somewhat distorted picture of a solitary Puritan anachronism living in an “owl's nest” by recognizing Hawthorne's immediate connection with the fundamental issues of his own day. What Hawthorne owed to his immediate predecessors and contemporaries cannot be adequately evaluated in terms of “influence” or parallel passages. A more rewarding approach to the problem would be to examine part of the climate of opinion in Hawthorne's time in connection with a detailed study of his work. The present paper, intended to be suggestive rather than definitive, is an attempt to reveal some of the possibilities of this approach.

Everyone has a different explanation for James Joyce. Thornton Wilder says he is a man divided between a violent love and a violent hate, “a love that cannot integrate its hate” and “a hate that cannot integrate its love”, a love and a hate for the land and the people he left but was unable ever to forget. Harry Levin, insofar as he attempts at all to explain, places great emphasis on Joyce's youthful theory of the development of the arts as a progress from the lyric, through the epic, to the dramatic. Barry Bymo agrees with the importance of this literary theory and suggests that Joyce's problem was the incompatibility between his artistic program and his own capabilities. Gorman, offering us his idol, does not explain Joyce at all except in terms of his high integrity, superb intellect, and remarkable fortitude—an explanation based for the most part on Joyce's own declarations to these effects. And Gogarty, antipathetic, seemingly resentful, attributes Joyce's development to the inherent arrogance which led him to reject his religion but never released him from fears of the consequences of this rejection. Gogarty therefore singles out as the crucial trauma from which Joyce never recovered and toward which he never ceased to react, the sermon on Damnation, Hell, and Eternity which he heard at Belvedere College when he was eleven years old.

“Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d'un film (2000), by the franco-maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Franco-Egyptian filmmaker and poet Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots is about their experience of film generally and, in particular, about their collaboration on Fathy's 1999 film D'Ailleurs, Derrida, released in an English subtitled version as Derrida's Elsewhere. One meaning of the word tourner in the book's title is “to film.” But the word also shares with the English turn a wide range of meanings and associations, including “to turn,” “to revolve,” “to depend on,” “to shape or form,” “to consider,” and “to trope.” Thus Tourner les mots refers to cinematic practice (le tournage ‘filmmaking,’ ‘the shoot’) and to the relation between cinema and language (les mots ‘words’).

The Scandinavian names in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were part of the material collected some forty years ago by Erik Björkman and Johannes Köpke and included in their studies of Scandinavian names in England. The main object of these studies was to establish the Scandinavian origin of a given name, and incidentally to establish certain criteria by which a name might be recognized as Scandinavian. Certain other questions, however, regarding, for instance, the development of a name form over a number of years and the relative frequency of the various name forms, can hardly be answered from the collection of data accumulated by Björkman and Köpke. The purpose of the present paper is to pursue the studies of Björkman and Köpke somewhat further, and to evaluate the results derived from some newly collected data.

In a scene in the novel Los Bandidos de río Frío (the bandits of RíO Frío [1888–91]), by the Mexican writer manuel payno, one of the characters, a businessman named Manuel Escandón, tells his friends that he gained four hundred pesos from being robbed by a group of bandits led by Mariano Evaristo, an artisan turned murderer. Bernardo Couto, a victim of the same robbery, tells Escandón he doesn't believe the claim. Escandón shows him a piece of paper where he has scribbled some numbers and tells him, “In these double entries there is no mistake” (415). Joaquín Pesado, another friend, sides with Escandón and compares the results of double-entry bookkeeping to theological truths.