In an age of questioning like ours, literary definitions can as little as anything else escape being called to the bar to give an account of themselves, and of their right to exist; and some, no doubt, would say that the case has already been decided against them. Personally, after having engaged in framing a few of my own, I do not share that view; and what I wish to do here is to consider briefly what gives literary definitions their validity, and what considerations ought to guide us in framing them. The task will involve some attention to the general speculative background against which purely literary problems are relieved, and may bring together some aspects which will derive at least relative novelty from their juxtaposition.

This article incorporates the text of nearly 800 lines of verse written in 1729 and 1733 by Henry Fielding, printed from his holograph. The MS is itself a rarity, being the only extant literary writing in Fielding's hand. The verse has never been published or identified. Textual footnotes record Fielding's corrections and explanatory notes identify the people and events to which he refers. The article discusses the verses as mock-epic and polemical epistle. and as material illuminating Fielding's literary and political relationships: with Pope and the Scriblerus writers, with Robert Walpole, and with his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Fielding imitates Pope's Dunciad, yet rebukes its savagery. He appears as a vivid reporter of the topical scene, a supporter of Whig rule as a bastion against Roman Catholicism and Jacobitism, and an upholder of the ancients against the moderns. The new verse provides the earliest glimpse of Fielding working in burlesque and in comic epic, and an early example of the moral value he placed on benevolence. The various implications of this new knowledge are considered here.

While the public action in War and Peace moves toward war and then away from it, an analogous private journey from spiritual war to spiritual peace takes place within each of the protagonists. For three of them, Tolstoy structures the development by (a) situating for each character a specific major turning point, (b) constructing among the three stories various parallels and contrasts, and (c) developing appropriate patterns of symbolic imagery. Nicholas moves from war to peace by becoming transformed from a soldier into a farmer, husband, and father; the change is defined by imagery associated with physical liberation and two kinds of hunt. The movement in Natasha's life is from peace to war and is a result of the exposure of her innocence and happiness to temptation and suffering. This development is underscored by imagery connected with two kinds of singing, by the contrasting ways in which she reacts to the party at Uncle's and to the opera, and by a specific analogy between her fate and that of the nation. The movement from war to peace in Mary's story occurs when the inner conflicts created by her relations with her father are resolved, after the latter's death, upon the arrival of Nicholas, with whom her experience is further linked by a repetition of the imagery of liberation.

The publication of fourteen epigrams by Sir John Harington in Henry Parrot's Springes for Woodcocks (1613) is gaining recognition as a leading case in the study of Elizabethan literary ethics. Doubtless encouraged by the opportunity to pun on Parrot's name, two contemporaries, John Davies of Hereford and Richard Brathwaite, attacked him for this minor outrage. Their blunt charge that Parrot “stole” epigrams contrasts with the usual mild accusation of “borrowing,” and indicates an increasing appreciation of literary rights. Considerable importance is attached to the case in Professor Harold Ogden White's recent study of literary ethics, but he does not examine the underlying facts, and he only briefly cites the documents.

During an interview with Jacques Brenner, published in Arts (March 1953), Robbe-Grillet asserted that Les Gommes is a descriptive and scientific novel. In January 1959, in an interview with Denise Bourdet, Robbe-Grillet stated that “l'observation scientifique consiste à décrire sans interpréter, à ne jamais donner une signification aux choses.” His novels are noteworthy indeed for their absence of analysis, and readers familiar with his descriptive method will have no difficulty concluding that if Les Gommes is a “scientific novel,” so also are Le Voyeur, La Jalousie, and Dans le labyrinthe. But in what way are these novels “scientific”? Is Robbe-Grillet initiating a “new realism” as has been suggested, or is it more accurately a new naturalism? If we may be permitted to define naturalism as a realism with scientific pretensions, and if we apply the rigorous pattern of Freudian determinism—provided we accept Freud's method as “scientific”—to the psychic and mental operations of Mathias in Le Voyeur, and of the jealous husband in La Jalousie, then these novels would seem to qualify as naturalistic.

Even a cursory examination of the two stout volumes of H. H. Houben's Verbotene Literatur von der klassischen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart vividly brings home to the reader the significant rôle that censorship has played in the history of German literature during the past one hundred and fifty years. Here we find represented not only the authors of Young Germany, Heine, Gutzkow, Laube, Wienbarg, Mundt, and modern writers, such as Dehmel, Hauptmann, Schönherr, Sudermann, but even relatively harmless poets like Bettina von Arnim, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Heyse. Despite the fact that Schnitzler is listed in the announcement at the end of the first volume as among those to be treated in the second volume, he is nevertheless conspicuously absent, while such lesser lights as Bahr, Dreyer, Fulda, Hartleben are included. Houben himself has recognized the Austrian poet's title to a place of honor in this literary rogues' gallery. In discussing Maria von Magdala by Heyse, who drew a sharp line between his poetic muse and the sensationalism and unbridled freedom of the modern dramatists, Houben points out that in one respect Heyse has far outdone the younger generation, “durch einen solennen Zensurskandal, der anderthalb Jahre die Öffentlichkeit in Atem hielt und in seiner kulturhistorischen Bedeutung höchstens durch den Kampf um Schnitzlers Reigen übertroffen wurde.”

The dating of Shelley's prose essays and fragments is at present very uncertain. Mary Shelley's dates in the preface to Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations, and Fragments, 1840, are, for the most part, conjectures. W. M. Rossetti in A Memoir of Shelley gives briefly, without systematic evidence, the dates of some of the fragments. Forman and the Julian editors follow, with some exceptions, Rossetti's dating in their editions of Shelley's prose. Koszul laid a more secure foundation for the dating of some of Shelley's prose. His study of the external evidence of the MSS in the Bodleian notebook has resulted in considerable progress. The present writer has approached the problem of dating Shelley's prose from a study of the internal evidence which consists, in a large measure, of the study of the relation of Shelley's prose to his reading as found in the Journal of Shelley and Mary, Shelley's letters, and other biographical sources. Shelley's quotations, references, and allusions to his reading supply valuable information for dating. Some of the prose fragments, hitherto undated, are assigned a date, while the date of others is changed, confirmed, or given more precise limits. It should be acknowledged, however, that Shelley's wide variety of reading, and the extraordinary tenacity of his memory make for caution in dating works too confidently on the basis of internal evidence. Until such time as Shelley's prose MSS are studied as minutely, thoroughly, and systematically as the MSS of the Bodleian notebook, the dates of the fragments given in the following notes may serve as tentative points d'appui for a study of the development of Shflley's thought.

What has made john henry newman so much more interesting to students of literature than most of his religious contemporaries is the rare blend in him of the artist, the intellectual, and the gentleman with the profoundly religious temper which judges the ultimate value of all activity in its movement towards or away from God. Whether it be called Christian humanism or some other name, it was a difficult balance that he sought to keep; and he has left us in his private papers a frank record of his struggles. The rich integration he eventually did achieve was the great source of his attraction for so different a contemporary in some respects as Matthew Arnold, for example, who ranked Newman with Goethe, Wordsworth, and Sainte-Beuve among the principal influences on his own development. At the outset of his career, however, Newman was being torn and pulled in opposite directions; and it is more than doubtful that he could ever have gained his equilibrium if he had not been elected a Fellow of Oriel College on 12 April 1822: “the turning point of his life,” as he would one day rightly call it, “and of all days most memorable.”

More than one critic has recalled the passage in Robertson's History of America which probably inspired the final simile of Keats's most famous sonnet. It was in September, 1513. Balboa and his men had been struggling for twenty days across the sixty miles of forest and mountain that made the isthmus of Darien, having been obliged to battle with the natives as well as with torrents, swamps, and precipices. Many of the men were sick and ready to give up.

Thoreau's puns reflect the widespread philosophic interest in language that flourished in midcentury America. Some of his wordplay is covertly scatological. Though he explicitly defends excrement as natural, philological speculation encourages him to view it as poison. Excremental symbolism bolsters vegetarian ideals and subserves a philosophy where body contaminates spirit. Thoreau's ambivalent anality, evident in his fastidious cleanliness, helps explain his distaste for women, since female biology makes birth unclean and sex dirty. Excremental symbology also colors his view of emotion as a function of the bowels. Unctuous affection seems an oily exudation secreted in social contact, while sympathetic tears are a rendering of the fat accumulated in digestion. His contempt for sympathy as self-indulgent weakness is part of the heroic ethos forced upon him by the consciousness that death tainted his lungs. Dietary scruples are his ascetic strategy for avoiding consumption. Influenced by Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connection with Man (1851), Thoreau's covert scatological puns embody in style his philosophy of play, blending estheticism and stoicism in the concept of life as a heroic game. Many nineteenth-century punsters including Carlyle and Nietzsche exemplify similar compensatory attitudes; so do other modern hero-worshipers.

Once, i needed the perfect time and place to write. i stood in my own way, affecting the dangers of worlds and audiences.

In the present state of our knowledge it is best to assign the Tractatulus eximii doctoris Henrici de Hassia de arte praedicandi to an auctor incertus. The name Henry of Hesse was borne by two scholars in the fourteenth century; but we have no proof that this is the work of either. They were both professors of theology, both brilliant preachers, and practically contemporary; and the works of one have in the past often been attributed to the other.

The erudite and industrious Georg Rollenhagen is usually remembered only as author of the Froschmeuseler. Among the authors of the sixteenth century who are accorded at least a paragraph or two in our modern histories of German literature probably none has been so much ignored or become so mistreated a step-child. Study of his life and works reveals a seeming jack-of-all-trades, but he was a master of many. He was a man who spent his life in the narrow limits of a region between Berlin and Magdeburg, yet he created a great school and, more than that, wrote vivid pictures of his time and a long poem, an animal verse-epic, that everybody read.

It is all too tempting on first acquaintance with Gide's La Porte étroite to see in it only the pathetically tragic tale of a young girl who believed too wholeheartedly that “virtue is its own reward.” Not too surprising, for this seems to be the reaction Gide intended to elicit. He protested against the view of some critics that he had “evolved” to a more sympathetic moral and religious attitude since 1902 and the publication of L'Immoraliste. He insisted repeatedly that he sought rather to make the work a criticism of a certain furiously deplorable protestantism, a puritanism that curiously evokes Jansenism, a misplaced sense of heroism which he characterizes as a sort of “cornélianisme gratuit.” This last must certainly apply to Alissa rather than to Jérôme.

Responding to a reader's inquiry about what second language to study, the Vanity Fair columnist “Dame Edna” stated, “Forget Spanish. There's nothing in that language worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD of Man of La Mancha will take care of that. There was a poet named García Lorca, but I'd leave him on the intellectual back burner if I were you… . Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German.” I am aware that Dame Edna is a ficticious persona, but I disagree with the so-called entertainment value ascribed to this column. Whom does it entertain? The readership of Vanity Fair is largely upper-middle-class and upper-class white. The Hispanic community, outraged by the remarks, demanded a retraction, reminding Vanity Fair that if the whole Hispanic labor force went on strike, the US economy would break down. Readers cited as well the number of radio and TV stations broadcasting in Spanish, sixty to seventy percent of whose audience can follow programs in Spanish and English (the United States' bilingualism, much to Dame Edna's grief, is not English-French). Additionally, more than half the students in schools and universities who enroll in a second language choose Spanish. The voices calling for retraction were not leaf blowers but architects, physicians, mathematicians, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, athletes, writers, moviemakers, painters, journalists, governors, and bankers. And, last and most obvious, Hispanics make up the largest minority group in the United States (at present some thirty-seven million, or thirteen percent, and probably some fifty million by 2010 [Klineberg]).

Cleanth Brooks wrote recently that the early story, “Fifty Grand,” “presents Hemingway's basic theme quite as well as The Old Man and the Sea.” “Nor do I think,” he continued, “that Hemingway in his most recent story now finds the world any more meaningful than he once found it.” For once Mr. Brooks was following rather than initiating opinion. Ever since The Old Man and the Sea was published, critics have admitted that in its effect upon the reader the book is somehow different from Hemingway's earlier work. Those who like the difference and those who do not have tried to account for it in many ways, most of them familiar to readers of the early reviews and of the surprisingly few later readings of the story. But to a man commentators have assumed that whatever the story's new impact—whatever the nature of that affirmative power most readers have felt—it reflects no essential change in Hemingway's view of an inscrutable natural order in which, ultimately, man can play no part. I want to suggest, on the contrary, that The Old Man and the Sea reveals Hemingway's successful achievement at last of a coherent metaphysical scheme—of a philosophical naturalism which, although largely mechanistic in principle, embraces the realm of human affairs and gives transcendent meaning to the harsh inevitabilities Hemingway has always insisted upon recording.

While preparing the materials in Lord Salisbury's library at Hatfield House for microfilming, Miss Caroline Merion discovered a hitherto unknown fragment of a manuscript of Chaucer's Troilus. It was sewed in the spine of the cover (one could hardly call it a binding) of a sixteenth-century rent book containing surveys of some of the property of the Earl of Essex. Probably in the sixteenth century this book came into the hands of the Cecil family, for some of the Essex property mentioned in it was transferred to Lord Burleigh in the 1560's, and in all likelihood this book has been among the Cecil records for over three hundred and fifty years. The fragment of Troilus, which I shall call the Cecil Fragment (CF), is a single page of vellum taken from an unknown manuscript of the poem, and much cut down. It now measures approximately 24½ cm. by 6½ cm., being rather wider at the bottom than the top, since the cutting was rough and irregular. Before being cut down, the manuscript page must have measured something like 28 cm. by 12 to 14 cm. Whoever cut the page apparently cut off strips from the bottom and both sides in order to use only the section in the center of the page. He obviously cared nothing for the writing on the page, for he cut off the beginnings and the ends of the lines of poetry. In spite of him, however, there are large parts of ten stanzas from Book I of Troilus which are still readily legible.

Like every original artist, Hawthorne may be approached in a variety of ways, and each of these ways will add something to the ultimate picture of his mind and art. Most of the work that scholars have done on Hawthorne, however, has been historical and biographical, and the result has been that Hawthorne the artist and thinker has been relegated to the background. This is particularly regrettable when one remembers that he was the most complete artist of the New England renaissance, and in The Scarlet Letter the author of a book which as art transcends all other American novels. It is to fill out the contemporary conception of Hawthorne that his theory of art is here considered as it may be pieced together from allegory, preface, and chance remark. Focusing attention on his ideals in art makes certain the meaning of the prefaces, and an investigation of his doctrine of the artist gives an insight into his method of achieving his ideal. In brief, to study Hawthorne's literary theory is to discover the intellectual basis of his art, and to see his work from the inside is to arrive at a fresh sense of his intention. It was Goethe's conviction that the critic should first of all ask what the author had intended. If the following investigation makes for clarity, it should furnish an opportunity for a new appraisal of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

From the Elizabethan prosodists we shall obtain no more than a few scattered hints concerning Donne's versification. Prosodists are notoriously conservative, and the Elizabethans are no exception. Putten-ham, in spite of his evident pleasure in the sound of verse, still places his confidence in the final arbitration of the eye; and it is thus that he comments on the diagram of a stanza-form: “most times your occular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible; for if it please the eare well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well, and e converso.” This ocular prosody leads him to say that “it is somewhat more tolerable to help the rime by false orthographie then to leave an unplesant dissonance to the eare by keeping trewe orthographie and loosing the rime, as for example it is better to rime Dore with Restore then in his truer orthographie, which is Doore.” Even with the rise of lyric and of dramatic blank verse this attitude does not disappear. Campion, for instance, makes the sensible remark that normal accent “is diligently to be observ'd, for chiefely by the accent in any language the true value of the sillables is to be measured.” And he knows that “we must esteeme our sillables as we speake, not as we write; for the sound of them in a verse is to be valued, and not their letters.” Yet he inconsistently admits length by position, as in Trumpington.