Attempts to establish just grounds for war are as old as civilization itself. The seriousness of the attempts, however, and the nature of the difficulties which men encountered in making their formulations have varied from age to age, in accordance with prevailing assumptions and values. The problem of rationalizing war or integrating it into the social-intellectual structure undoubtedly became most acute with the triumph of Christianity, which was committed to peace but lacked the means of abolishing war. Early Christian thinkers were much occupied with the problem of determining under what conditions good Christians might engage in war and, notwithstanding the paucity of the results, there has hardly been any relaxation of the effort in medieval or modern times.

Can a film based on fiction contribute to the restoration of historical memory? can films help fill in the blanks of history? What exactly is the filmmaker's position? What faculty and what means does he or she require to make such a prodigious feat possible? Are films capable of creating sites of memory, and by what means? What traces will make it possible to set up markers in a site of a scotoma? The questions become increasingly precise: Can cinema lift the veil that colonial history has thrown over the history of the Algerian War? And what can the nature of the blind spot be if every effort has been made to keep it hidden?

Manzoni structured his novel like a tapestry with juxtaposing planes or masses symbolizing good and evil and the redemptive tragedy that inevitably ensues when these forces meet. Thus a symmetrical expressive structure is simultaneously a moral structure. The tapestry is further crosswoven with images that interrelate and deepen the meaning of the context in which they appear or of the character with whom they are associated. They become word-symbols: words like “wall” or “skull” set tonalities, and so does “bread” as opposed to “wine” or “devil.” Similarly, descriptions involving images of light or the sun weave a dialectical fabric with images of darkness or clouds. While on the one hand the symbols exteriorize situations and events, on the other they are interiorized into the narrative and its characters so as to become their very lifeblood. What has been called Manzoni's “lyricization” of reality stems directly from this process.

The most complete and detailed study of a specific medical case in Chaucer is the account, in The Knight's Tale, of Arcite's injury, his gradually developing symptoms, the diagnosis of their underlying causes, the treatment applied, and the patient's eventual death. Boccaccio's Teseide describes the youth's accident but does not record the attempts of the physicians to save his life: the entire passage is an interpolation by Chaucer. The probable source of the poet's remarkably accurate knowledge of medicine is revealed by an examination of the medical chapters of the greatest of mediæval encyclopedias, the Speculum Majus of Vincent of Beauvais.

From the death of Mark Twain in 1910 until 1937 Albert Bigelow Paine was the official editor of Mark Twain's literary papers. Paine was not a scholar. He wrote popular biographies, sentimental novels, and books for children. When he came to edit Mark Twain's letters, speeches, notebooks, and autobiography, he made countless deletions, following the procedure often practiced by editors dealing with such material.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's grotesque involves a bizarre distortion which is neither tragic nor comic but disquieting. He conceives of the imagination as having an abnormal region that produces absurdities and monstrous forms. Grotesque motifs draw upon two spheres of reality: a nether-world coexistent with Nature, and the everyday historical world. The “other side” of Nature, uncanny and capricious, is inhabited by deformed beings governed by different laws of harmony and dissonance. There, non-Ovidian metamorphoses produce admixtures of satanic beauty and monstrosity, with Becquer's description of them eschewing Dantesque moralism and approaching gratuitous estheticism. In contrast, the historical world attracts the imagination by means of architecture and its fantastic motifs. Other links to social reality appear in the detached sensibility of the grotesque. For example, the carnival is described by a mood of hollow gaiety atypical of the ebullient Romantic carnival. Mannequin images also express disillusion and the advent of an anti-Roman tic reaction, as does the presence of gratuitously induced incongruities. Thus, Becquer stands between the Romantic grotesque, with its healthy distortions, and the self-destructive grotesquerie of the twentieth century.

In an effort to correct the overidealization of Brutus, recent criticism has tended to obscure the distinctions between Brutus and his fellow Romans. Yet, Shakespeare was at some pains to depict him as the noblest Roman of them all. That is not to say he was flawless: the noblest pagan was still pagan, and as such was guided only by the light of Reason and tempted to trust in himself. If contemporary prose treatises are any key to Elizabethan attitudes toward ancient philosophy, Shakespeare's audience regarded the Stoic with ambivalence: they admired his constancy, purity of motive, and pursuit of virtue; yet they distrusted his pride, his self-sufficiency, and his hardness. By contrasting Brutus with Cassius and Caesar, Shakespeare has shown him as possessing the best of the Stoic characteristics commingled with touches of Christian compassion and ordinary human weakness. The elements are seen to be so mixed in him that one must say of him with both pride and humility: This was a man.

In the early nineteenth century, the antiquarian James Savage produced a print edition of John Winthrop's seventeenth-century manuscript journal. This transmedial reproduction illustrates the differing affordances of print and manuscript as vehicles for connecting to the past. Manuscripts offer a tangible link to long-dead people, but manuscripts' rarity encourages their sequestration in archives. In contrast, print editions make historical content more broadly accessible but provide a less direct material link to earlier eras. Print facsimiles of manuscript, such as the reproduction of Winthrop's handwriting included in Savage's edition, seek to embody the best of both media. But print facsimiles' promise of access to manuscript materiality elides their nature as temporal hybrids and their tendency to distort and damage their originals. The way that nineteenth-century antiquarians negotiated manuscript's and print's temporal affordances and juggled the competing prerogatives of past, present, and future makes those antiquarians useful models for understanding the stakes of digitization projects today.

Although twentieth-century Formalist criticism has concentrated upon stylistic analysis of “The Overcoat” and its skaz narrative technique, no previous study has focused directly upon another aspect of skaz—the influence of the narrator on the structure of the story and the pathetic passages. This aspect is essential to reconcile the juxtaposition of humor and pathos. The narrator, a creator of fiction, constructs a plot based on a moral principle: excessive self-confidence receives retribution. As evidenced in his tendency to satirize, the narrator is as guilty of this same self-confidence as his characters. Fearing similar retribution, he rejects responsibility for his satiric creation by limiting his omniscient point of view and placing the blame for negative portrayals on his objective depiction of reality. In true skaz style his own attitude, expressed in plot, point of view, and his own pathetic passage, is superimposed oh his characters, resulting in the first most quoted passage and in minor variations of it.

The neo-Latin Cornus of Erycius Puteanus (Hendrik van der Putten) has been much neglected as a source of Milton's masque, in which Comus, the post-classical god of revelry, appears as the central figure. As early as 1790, Sir John Hawkins, in a note on Johnson's Life of Milton suggested Puteanus's fantasy as a source of Milton's fiction. To date, however, no serious attempt has been made to trace Milton's debt to this curious extravaganza, although its probable influence upon Milton has been universally recognized.

It was in Marie de Gournay's salon, rue de l'Arbre Sec., and later rue St-Honoré, that took place (prior to the founding of the Académie, in which many of her contemporaries say that she played an important rôle) frequent discussions that were to determine the future of the French language. Her opinions were listened to with respect—though not always followed—by such men as Boisrobert, Ménage, Sorel, Voiture, Malherbe, Racan, and others. Among her staunch friends, besides Montaigne, were La Mothe le Vayer, Claude de l'Estoile, Colletet, St François de Sales, and Michel de l'Hospital. She was also highly esteemed abroad by Juste Lipse, Hensius, Baudius and, in Italy, by Capaccio. She was, at the time of the incident we are about to relate, a vivacious, enthusiastic woman in her fifties, with an extraordinary fund of knowledge, a sharp tongue tempered by a keen sense of humor and a sparkle of wit that earned her the respect of the learned and pensions from the mighty. Charles Sorel insisted on her gentler qualities: “Au-dessus de son savoir je voudrois mettre encore sa générosité, sa bonté et ses autres vertues qui n'avoient point ses pareilles,” and he said that Bouhours “l'a mise au rang des plus illustres filles d'esprit.” The Abbé Michel de Marolles, who was a frequent visitor at her home, was impressed by her kindness : “Elle avoit l'âme candide et généreuse.”

Athough The Merchant of Venice ranks with Hamlet in theatrical popularity, it ranks low in critical esteem. A play that is difficult to classify, it is variously labeled tragi-comedy or romantic comedy; but neither label embraces nor harmonizes the seemingly disparate plots. Further, the plots are often condemned as preposterous and unrelated to life; and a fairly common view is that the play is a fairy tale: “There is no more reality in Shylock's bond and the Lord of Belmont's will than in Jack and the Beanstalk.” Critics adopting such a position find the chief merit of the play in its “flesh-and-blood characters” who triumph over the shortcomings of the story, with emphasis on Shylock, who is sometimes regarded as the protagonist. The approach to Shylock has been diverse, ranging from Stoll's notion of him as a comic butt in terms of Elizabethan conventions to the view that he is a tragic figure. Readers have shown a preoccupation with Shylock the Jew as scapegoat, stereotype, victim, or Elizabethan usurer; usually this interest has taken a realistic turn, with concern over questions of anti-Semitism and the legality of the trial.

As a supplementary note to the volume of Milton's Letters of State in the Columbia edition of his Works (Volume XIII), as well as an illuminating guide to his reputation immediately subsequent to his death, when Williamson's phrase, “that late Villain Milton,” would have met with nearly unanimous approval, it seems worth while to furnish a summary of information bearing on their publication. The gathering of this material has been in progress now for some time. The principal contributors have been Sumner (in his edition of the Christian Doctrine), Hamilton, Masson, Tanner and Howarth (editors of Pepys), and Hanford. Their contributions being somewhat scattered, I have here brought together the chief items. I am also able to add several new letters which have not previously been published, to correct and clarify certain dates, and, I hope, to arrange the whole in such a way that its story unfolds logically and easily.

It has been so much taken for granted and so unquestioningly assumed that the Jefferson, Mississippi, of William Faulkner's novels is to be identified with Oxford, the author's home and the seat of the University of Mississippi, that it may seem presumptuous of anyone to throw doubt on the identification. Certainly anyone who does so will be setting himself at variance with most if not all of the critics and biographers who have chosen to write on the gifted Mississippian. For illustrations I need menton only Robert Coughlan, Irving Howe, Ward L. Miner, and William Van O'Connor, all of whom, differing as they do on other points, are at one in thinking that Oxford served as a model for the Jefferson of the novels.

Critical reactions to the denouement of Corneille’s Le Cid are generally divided between the comic notion of a complete and happy union of Rodrigue and Chimène and the tragic notion of the impossibility of their marriage. However, it is possible to incorporate the two views into an interpretation of the play that emphasizes in the ambivalence of this ending the complexity of Corneille’s vision of man’s possibilities and limitations. Rodrigue represents the heroic order of humanity; Chimène and her mirror image, the Infante, exemplify the common order. The representation of the heroic quest in Le Cid not only portrays Rodrigue’s triumph but also depicts the women’s failures. Heroism and frailty coexist and interact; and it is essential to note that in the different outcomes of Rodrigue’s, Chimène’s, and the Infante’s efforts to unite hand, heart, and mind respectively, Le Cid offers a complex vision of humanity.

The years 1840–50 were important ones in Anglo-American cultural and intellectual relations, for during this period American writers began to be widely read in England. Before that time books had been too expensive for almost everyone except the great readers or the greatly prosperous; in the 1840's, however, a combination of circumstances led to a revolution in English reading habits. Circulating libraries had been in operation in England for some years, but it was in 1842 that Mudie's began to make available for the first time literature of the world to all literate Englishmen. More important perhaps than the libraries were the cheap reprints which, at first, were sold mainly in the newly built and overflowing railway stations but which were later found in book stalls throughout the country. Commenting on Slater's shilling edition of Emerson's Orations, Lectures, and Addresses, The Critic wrote, for example, that “the work itself must be familiar by name to all our readers, but probably it has been out of the reach of many of them. It is not so now. The poorest may possess it.” That Emerson and many other American authors appeared in these cheap reprints was due, ironically enough, as much to defective international copyright laws as to a demand for their books. British publishers discovered that under certain conditions they could bring out the works of foreign writers without remuneration, and after 1839 they took full advantage of this knowledge. Emerson tried to outwit these pirates by sending the manuscripts of Essays, Second Series and of Poems to England prior to bringing the volumes out in America, and Carlyle used the Preface to the Second Essays to draw and quarter them. Emerson's precautions and Carlyle's strictures were of little avail: at about the same time that Poems came out, Orr and Company was issuing a pirated edition of Essays, Lectures, and Orations. Although evasion of copyright laws cannot be condoned on ethical grounds, it was fortuitous in one respect: the pirated editions were dirt cheap, and their wide sale along with legitimate reprints and the circulating library made accessible for the first time large quantities of American books to a wide British public. From 1840 to the end of the century, England read more books by American writers than by all of Europe combined and, fortunately for this study, all of the major works received critical appraisal in British periodicals.

Because The Ring and the Book is such a towering imaginative achievement, readers and critics alike have slighted those poems which Browning wrote and published soon after 1868. This is especially true of Balaustion's Adventure (1871), the poet's next work after The Ringand the Book. Largely given over to a retelling of Euripides' Alkestis, it has perplexed most critics, many of them wondering whether it should be considered as anything more than a mere transla tion. Browning himself made few claims for it. In the dedication to the Countess Cowper he re ferred to it as a task that “proved the most delightful of May-month amusements,”1 and to Isabella Blagden he spoke of it as “my little new Poem,—done in a month,—and I think a pretty thing in its way.”2 Calling it “Exhaustion's Impos ture,” Rossetti found “the structure of the work beyond all conception perverse” and the Euripidean Alkestis “interlarded with Browningian analysis to an extent beyond all reason or relation to things by any possibility Greek in any way.”3 Swinburne, discovering “fine things in it,” thought that “the pathos of the subject is too simple and downright for Browning's analytic method.”4 Later commentators have likewise been worried by the question of its faithfulness to the Greek spirit.6 The purpose of this essay is to suggest that such a consideration is largely irrelevant to an estimation of the poem which both William Clyde DeVane and Robert Langbaum claim belongs with the works of Browning's best period.6

MS 3390 of the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève of Paris contains a number of Middle English religious tracts, followed by Richard Rolle of Hampole's Form of Perfect Living and Ego Dormio. Certain of the religious tracts are found in other manuscripts in English libraries, and are usually ascribed to Wycliffe. The Ste. Geneviève MS is an octavo volume of 109 vellum leaves; it is written in Midland dialect in one hand of the early fifteenth century.