Schiller's subtitle, “Ein republikanisches Trauerspiel,” creates serious difficulties of interpretation. His four principal historical sources give little basis for regarding the conspirators or the conspiracy as “republican” in the sense of “antimonarchical.” The play itself likewise disregards the republican motif. A study of the vocabulary shows that such politically emotional words as Republik, Freiheit, Burger, Volk are infrequently used and are likely to bear a neutral or negative-ironic meaning. Schiller's two later versions, the Mannheim stage version and the Leipzig/Dresden manuscript, show no conspicuous change in his use of such terms. The play belongs rather among contemporary dramas generalizing about freedom than to the category of sociopolitical Tendenzdrama, and concerns Republik in the older sense of res publica rather than in the modern meaning. Not Rousseau, but Plutarch as translated by G. B. von Schirach, most strongly influenced Schiller in theme, incidents, traits of character, and perhaps political attitude. The play appears as a conflict among three strong personalities—Fiesco, Verrina, and Andreas Doria—-for power within the state; and Doria, representing the essence of the state, may be the real “hero.”

On a recent trip to nicosia, cyprus, i grabbed a city map from my hotel. The venetian walls of the old city formed a perfect circle on the map. But the northern part of Nicosia was blank—not a road named or landmark identified, not even the airport or the Venetian column that marks the center of the circular city—except for the notation “Area under Turkish occupation since 1974.” Of course, Turkey is a secular nation, but the divide between Turkish and European Cyprus is also a divide between majority-Muslim and majority-Christian populations. A member of the European Union since 2004, Cyprus is, like the rest of Europe, haunted by a spectral Islam that it has difficulty acknowledging, let alone assimilating into a broader cosmopolitan identity.

To anyone who has followed the development of the theory of ballad origins, it is well known that there are two main theories in the field for our suffrages at the present time: the communal; and the individualistic, literary, or anti-communal theory. The last name of the second theory is indicative of the attitude of its upholders, for they have in truth been largely occupied with a criticism of the communalists, always demanding of them more and ever more light, and ever, like doubting Thomas, refusing to believe until an actual ballad dating from at least the time of Hereward the Wake is produced for their fingers to touch. The communalists, by an appeal to the well-established facts of folk-lore and ethnology, maintain that the ballads are the product of the communal stage of society in Europe, in which the populace held festive dances, and in which there was actual improvisation of certain traditional lyric narratives. These narratives had their verse-form determined by the dance; and the whole poem from beginning to end was the product of the people, and was not in any way composed by literary persons. Moreover, these ballads have been handed down by oral tradition, and live in the mouths of the people. Of course, there is no claim that one expects to find in the ballads of the collections anything which springs directly from the ancient source; all that is claimed is that the poetic form is handed down, and, so to say, the general ballad tradition. This claim of long descent is substantiated by the very features of the ballads as they exist to-day; by their impersonality, their refrain, their depicting of but a single situation, their use of incremental repetition. Thus, it is maintained, the ballad is not derived from any pre-existing literary material, but is the result of a primary impulse which is as old as man, and out of which the various forms of communal poetry spring. Finally, the ballad is not connected with the popular tale; “it follows an entirely different line and springs from an entirely different impulse.”

Let us suppose that an irate wife complains to her husband: “We used to live like love-birds; now you act as if you were loony; and when I tell you that your behavior is as rude as that of a savage, you respond by roaring like a lion and repeating parrot-like everything your brother says about your being henpecked.” Let us suppose, moreover, that she repeats this indictment over a number of years, in a series of letters to her sympathetic relatives and friends. A commentator on these letters might be tempted to conclude that the lady was fairly familiar with Africa (probably had even been big-game hunting and clearly had been more impressed by the fauna than the flora), that she was aware of and concurred in medieval notions concerning the effect of the moon on the mind, and, finally, that she must have lived for some time on a chicken farm.

Most readers have rejected conceptions of modern literature that depend on ideas of apocalypse and historical crisis, especially as writers like Pater and Stevens have replaced Arnold and Eliot at the center of the modernist canon. For some of these readers, however, Arnold and Eliot are rejected precisely because their work appears to be bolstered by untenable ideas of historical crisis. While this essay argues that modernist literature sometimes promotes such ideas, it also argues that the very same literature provides the terms for undermining those ideas. Surveying a range of post-Romantic texts and then focusing on Arnold's “Empedocles on Etna,” the essay proposes that the tradition of modern apocalypse contains its own critique, complicating a dualistic sense of the canon (split between Arnold and Pater or Eliot and Stevens). This internalized critique is so stringent that it exposes a blindness in some postmodern assessments of apocalypse.

A few years ago Roy W. Battenhouse published what is perhaps the most original and provoking theory of the nature of the ghost in Hamlet since the article by W. W. Greg which, with its contention that the apparition is to be understood as wholly subjective, prompted J. D. Wilson's study of Elizabethan spirit-lore. Battenhouse argues in essence that the ghost shows far too much vindictiveness (in the cellarage too much artfulness) to be a saved soul. It must therefore, he thinks, be out of some paganesque purgatory rather than the Catholic one, as Wilson had confidently asserted. Whether or not Battenhouse may be thought“ to have made his point, he has certainly raised some real difficulties for those who would regard the ghost as Catholic.

Gianlorenzo Bernini's single surviving playscript offers a satire on Bernini's own fame as a creator of scenic stage marvels as well as a satiric analysis of his younger painter-playwright rival from Naples, Salvator Rosa. But Bernini's play also raises general issues about the relations of amateurs and professionals in the leveling context of carnival, about the effect of printing on a subgenre of the improvisational scenarii of the commedia dell' arte as printed texts established a popular reading audience in seventeenth-century Rome, and about the concept of “popular” in the relations of class and genre implicit not only in Bernini's satire but in much of the seventeenth-century generic mixing that took place far outside the exemplary conditions of the Roman commedie ridicolose.

Grendel's feud against Hrothgar and his Danes has been requited not only by the hand of Beowulf but by the scholarly shafts which have nailed the monster to his watery lair. Outside of his natural habitat, however, Grendel is still a problem in his nocturnal visits to the royal hall of Heorot.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, W. H. Auden and the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, ask themselves, in independent reflections, why attempts to free thought from oppressive schemata result in more-insidious forms of oppression: as clerical establishments go into decline, modernity creates new forms of mythological consciousness. For all three authors, the emergence of fascism in the early part of the twentieth century is proof of this and gives urgency to their inquiries into enlightenment. For all three, Voltaire is a pivotal figure, for his struggle against the unity of apologetic discourse and ruthless power allows them to discern an element of enlightenment that survives the most rigorous critique of its oppressive tendencies. This essay examines Horkheimer and Adorno's fragment “For Voltaire” alongside Auden's poem “Voltaire at Ferney” and shows how the latter both anticipates and reveals the limits of the former.

It is well known that Coleridge had Wordsworth in mind when he wrote his Ode on Dejection—the poem is addressed to Wordsworth, mentions Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, and was first published on the day of Wordsworth's wedding; but that Coleridge's Ode may have been influenced by Wordsworth's great Ode on Intimations of Immortality has been generally overlooked. If the date of Wordsworth's Ode is 1803–1806, as it is often given in the anthologies and histories, such influence is impossible, because we know Coleridge's Dejection was composed April 4, 1802. The date 1803–1806, however, is not accepted by most scholars; Professor John D. Rea emphatically states, “It is known that the date 1803 is wrong; the Ode was begun 1802.” The passage in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, written March 27, 1802, “At breakfast William wrote part of an ode,” refers, it is now believed, to the Ode: Intimations of Immortality. On March 27, 1802, Wordsworth was writing his great Ode; and a week later, on April 4, 1802, Coleridge wrote his.

“Arnould wrote the cleverest, gratefullest verse-thanks to me, the other day, for these lyrics of mine,” Robert Browning told Alfred Domett in a letter of 1842, “and brought you in so happily.” Joseph Arnould himself, writing Domett some months later, spoke disparagingly of his epistle as “very schoolboy verses.” Though they had said exactly what he had felt at the time and still felt about the beauty and power of Browning's recent poetry, Arnould could not help fancying that his lines had given Browning “a bad opinion of my sincerity.” Arnould does less than justice to his verse critique. He is sincere to the point of much tactful admonishment, and though his tone is ingenuous and his style colorful rather than polished, he is selective and informed in many of his judgments. The epistle tells us much about this cultivated friend, and it suggests still more about the intellectual environment in which Browning worked during the early 1840's while he was trying to write dramas for the stage and at the same time feeling his way toward his special subject and manner. That Browning himself valued Arnould's epistle is shown by his giving it (perhaps along with other poems) to Elizabeth Barrett; for on 1 May 1846 Elizabeth wrote: “I am delighted with the verses and quite surprised by Mr. Arnould's, having expected to find nothing but love and law in them, and really, there is a great deal besides. Hard to believe, it was, that a university prize poet (who was not Tennyson) could write such good verses.” F. G. Kenyon, when he was collecting Browning's letters to Domett for Robert Browning and Alfred Domett (1906), a book that also contains letters and excerpts from letters of Arnould to Domett, seems to have had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the verse epistle. Fortunately the manuscript of this piece, together with the accompanying letter and six additional letters of Arnould's to Browning written in the years 1846–50, has recently come into the possession of Gordon N. Ray, President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Mr. Ray has kindly made them available for reproduction here.

What time is it when we read? There are many answers to this question. Time might refer to a particular day of the week, as in Sunday reading, a practice that Christina Lupton finds has spanned both religious and secular contexts. Or time might imply a sense of pace, that reading is something we do quickly or slowly, which Rolf Engelsing suggests when he distinguishes between intensive and extensive reading. Or perhaps time is more periodic, an argument one finds in Deidre Lynch's work on nineteenth-century habitual reading or Christopher Cannon's work on medieval practices of rereading. Or time could be closer to an idea or topos, as in Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope like idyllic time. Finally, for someone like Gerard Genette the time of reading is fundamentally about anachronism, the nonlinear nature of narrative time.

Absalom, Absalom! achieves mythic significance and universality through Faulkner's deliberate use of parallels between Thomas Sutpen's attempt to found a dynasty in the Old South and the attempts of ancient Hebrew rulers to establish their kingdoms. The choice of title for the novel, as well as numerous analogies between Faulkner's plot and incidents in the prophetic books of the Old Testament, particularly n Samuel, indicate that Faulkner intended the biblical accounts of dynastic failures to illuminate and strengthen his theme. In attempting to find reasons for the failure of Sutpen to establish his Southern dynasty, critics have advanced four tenable theories. One theory finds Sutpen's innocence the principal reason for his failure; another sees hubris as the cause of failure; still a third contends that the socioeconomic injustices of the pre-Civil War South, magnified in the character of Sutpen, account for the failure. The fourth and most tenable theory, considered too briefly by critics, indicates that the very concept of dynasty is so basically flawed that failure is inherent in the design itself; or, more broadly still, that men erroneously persist in the mythic hope that they can establish permanent dynasties, though historically none has succeeded.

The similarity in structure and content between the South English Legendary and the Legenda Aurea was recognized more than fifty years ago by Horstmann, although he ruled out as wholly impossible the idea that the English author could have made use of the Latin collection.

As few hispanists have failed to notice, early modern Spain is more often appearing as an alternative term for what we used to call the Spanish Golden Age. University catalogs still advertise courses on Golden Age poetry, but lectures are more apt to bear titles such as “The Crisis of the Gift in Early Modern Spain.” Although some recent books—Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain (Keitt), Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (Taylor), and An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (Martín)—display Golden Age in their titles, they share shelf space with offerings such as The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (Bass), Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain (Middlebrook), and Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada (Casey). The preference for early modern is showing up even in genres in which traditional usage might be expected. An anthology by Barbara Mujica, published in 1991, is subtitled Renacimiento y Siglo de Oro, but the cover of an anthology edited by her and published thirteen years later reads Sophia's Daughters: Women Writers of Early Modern Spain.

As someone who has spent most of his career writing about others, i find it odd to see myself, or what passes for me, being written about by others, especially academics, the people with whom I am most familiar. Who is this “Viet Thanh Nguyen” that they are discussing? Is he the one whose name appears as such on the cover of the Vietnamese translation of his short story collection, The Refugees, instead of as Nguyên Thanh Vie t, his Vietnamese name? Has “Viet Thanh Nguyen” disabled, in himself, the authenticity that most Vietnamese people hold dear and that he has been reminded of constantly throughout his life, symbolized in his name and his mother tongue? More important and urgent to him, is “Viet Thanh Nguyen,” in being discussed in such a manner, already dead?