The first translator of the Arabian Nights (Paris, 1704-17) was Antoine Galland. Almost immediately translated into English, Galland's popular collection remained the only version of the Nights known in Europe throughout the century. Convinced that Swift had read it, twentieth-century scholars Pietro Toldo and William A. Eddy show that the tale “Hassân-al-Bassri” was a source for Brobdingnag; the passages they quote come from the modern French translation of J. C. Mardrus, and bear a great similarity to Gulliver's second voyage. Swift, however, could not have known “Hassân” for it is omitted by Galland. Because of the differences between Galland's Nights and later versions, studies in eighteenth-century source criticism must work with early texts. Curiously, of all versions of “Hassan” only Mardrus relates the episode in question, which may explain why his translation is anathematized by Arabists as distorting the erotic content of the original. Recent inquiry also discloses that the episode is missing in known Arabic sources. It is almost certain that Mardrus fabricated the passages cited by Toldo and Eddy; it may even be argued that he plagiarized Swift.

While it has recently been established (thanks to the records of the Bibliothèque du Roi, now the Bibliotheque Nationale) that Diderot read a major treatise by Roger de Piles, the influential seventeenth-century art critic and theorist, as early as 1748, the nature and extent of Diderot's indebtedness to his predecessor have not yet been fully explored. Internal evidence, as well as direct and indirect references, reveal the impact of Roger de Piles on Diderot's ideas concerning composition, design, and color. Roger de Piles was the first French art critic to take an uninhibited delight in light and color and to attempt to render, through a bold use of concrete and technical terms, the freshness and vividness of his impressions. In this respect, too, he is an important precursor of Diderot, for the latter frequently borrowed especially apt expressions and images from the writings of Roger de Piles. Articles in the Encyclopedia devoted to the fine arts also confirm the high esteem in which de Piles was held by eighteenth-century artists and connoisseurs. Diderot and his contemporaries recognized above all de Piles's expertise in practical matters concerning the artist's craft. Even though Diderot departs from de Piles in his preoccupation with the moral message of a work of art, he shares with his predecessor a spontaneous appreciation of the exuberant forms, the animated scenes, the down-to-earth realism that characterize the Dutch and Flemish schools of painting. The sketch, as an art form more revelatory of a painter's inner spirit and genius than the more finished product, was the subject of several key remarks by de Piles which Diderot, in turn, amplified and developed in his critical essays. And it was in the writings of de Piles that Diderot found some of his most telling arguments against artificiality and mannerism in art and against an unquestioning adherence to doctrine and dogma. (In French)

Moving beyond ecocriticism, this essay argues that an ecosocial reading of narratives of the Atlanta child murders (1979–81) is better able to examine the sometimes functional, sometimes broken interactions between sociocultural circumstances and particular urban ecologies. Far from latching onto an idealized, utopian sense of a restorative natural world, the ecosocial approach introduced here focuses critical attention on the traumatized and traumatic social and cultural histories that play out in particular natural as well as built environments. In various ways, child-murders narratives by Toni Cade Bambara, Tayari Jones, and others bear the conflicting burdens of memory and forgetting, of old and new and never–changing and ever–changing Souths. They do so in large part by acknowledging ecosocial dysfunctions as one way of moving, however provisionally and problematically, toward a more grounded, more communal idea and practice of interrelatedness.

On the one hand, the gift presents itself as a radical Other of the commodity—and therefore also of work, insofar as the latter is understood as an investment of time and energy made in the expectation of wages or profit. On the other hand, the idea of the gift seems constantly to be drawn back under the horizon of rational exchange, and to be thus endlessly re-revealed as a secret ally of both work and the Work.

—Scott Cutler Shershow, The Work and the Gift

I have put together all these details to convince you that this recommendation of mine is something out of the common.

Quae ego omnia collegi, ut intellegeres non vulgarem esse commendationem hanc meam.

—Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares, book 13

LAST FALL I FOUND IN MY OFFICE MAILBOX AN ENVELOPE FROM A SOPHOMORE ENGLISH MAJOR WHO HAD ASKED ME DURING THE SUMMER for a last-minute letter of recommendation for a scholarship competition. The envelope contained a handwritten thank-you note—and a gift certificate for a local restaurant. I e-mailed the student to thank her and to tell her that I couldn't accept the gift certificate since the letter I had written for her was part of my job as a teacher. She insisted; I insisted. She said that several teachers had turned her down before I agreed (from a hotel in Germany) to write for her. I felt rueful, as well as grateful to her for the token of gratitude that I couldn't accept. Eventually she won the debate: I accepted the printed piece of paper and took my daughters out to a free lunch.

It is my contention in this paper that Spenser's Muiopotmos is an allegory of the life and death of Sir Philip Sidney much like Astrophel. My reasons, in brief, are the following. The two poems tell fundamentally the same tale. The symbolical meaning of the butterfly is peculiarly suited to Sidney. The episode of Astery favors the supposition that it alludes to Stella. The departures from classical authority noticeable in the episode of Arachne combine to allegorize an important event in Sidney's life.

One of the allegorical motifs in the Vision of Piers Plowman which has often been specially noted on account of its boldness and picturesqueness is the description of Christ jousting against Satan upon the Cross clad in armor and embodying the chivalric virtues.

Dès 1843, J. -J. Ampère faisait honneur à Jean de Meun d'être le devancier ‘des érudits païens et matérialistes du XVIe siècle’; il voyait dans la seconde partie du Roman de la Rose l'origine d'une série d'œuvres où se remarquent les éléments d'une philosophie naturaliste, et il indiquait que, par un curieux mélange du sacré et du profane, cette philosophie se présente à l'aide d'images et de comparaisons suggérées par le rituel catholique. Nous nous proposons d'étudier d'abord cette utilisation de la liturgie chrétienne à des fins étrangères à celles de l'Eglise. Nous verrons ensuite comment le culte de la Nature s'accompagne de la glorification de l'homme, de l'éloge de la science, et de l'idée que la dignité humaine réside dans le travail et dans l'amour. Nous nous demanderons, enfin, dans quelle mesure le naturalisme du XVIe siècle se relie à la tradition médiévale.

This is a brief essay about a long or perhaps interminable subject, about what I am (for the moment) calling the genre of the unfinishable work, as distinct from works that are unfinished or open-ended—the work whose themes and style involve what comes last and then what comes after that, if there is anything after that. I thought at first there might be too few of these works to form a genre. Now I am inclined to think there may be too many, but the shift or increase does give us a contrasting term and may help us consider more closely the possibility that lies between insufficiency and excess.

In his admirable paper upon the sources of Browning's Childe Roland, Mr. Harold Golder shows from what a rich storehouse of nursery tale, poetry, and romance the poet drew for many of the incidents that go to make up that poem. Childe Roland is such a synthetic poem that the problem of finding satisfactory sources for it is not simple. Nor is it made easier by Browning's stubborn insistence that the only true source of the poem is the line from King Lear. But it has been impossible to be content with Browning's statement, and critic after critic has ransacked ballad, fairy tale and legend to find the origin of the simples which the poet has compounded in his poem. In the light of Browning's statement, the problem becomes one of “establishing a subconscious connection between Edgar's maudlin words and the material from which Browning obviously drew”; in other words, we must find for the sources of Childe Roland materials so familiar to Browning at the impressionable time of his life as to have become a part of his own mental character, and further, the materials must be such as would definitely suggest the images which appear in the poem.

In discussing the date of the Eddie poems one must carefully distinguish three factors: the date of their written compilation or recording, the date of their actual composition by the poet, and the age of the mythological, legendary and other material which they contain. In speaking of the age of the Eddie poems it is clear that we are referring to the second factor, the creative act of the poet, which, so far as we know, did not contemplate immediate written record either by himself or a scribe. It is by no means superfluous, however, to emphasize the distinction of the first two factors mentioned, as, in the case of the sagas, they have not yet been entirely disentangled. A consideration of the first and third factors is furthermore not without value, as it must be clear that the poems are not younger than the time of their written record and not older than their original content. The recording may be much later, the content much older, than the date of composition. These, however, if they can be established, furnish the most definite termini ad quern and a quo respectively. If the recording was actually centuries later than the time of composition we shall expect to find corruptions of various sorts, such as interpolations and transposition of stanzas and verses, with which we are abundantly familiar in the case of the popular ballads. This allows great leeway for textual criticism, in which, as experience has shown, critics are prone to disagree. Similarly, if the original content is centuries older than the time of composition of the poems, it is reasonable to suppose that the content will have been profoundly affected in its passage through the centuries. If we take as an example the Nibelungenlied, whose date of composition is approximately known, its original content of the time of the Germanic migrations has been in places so affected by the later medieval institutions and ideals of life, which have thereby become an important part of the content, that the terminus a quo would by this very fact be pushed far beyond the time of the migrations. Analogies of this sort may be of value in an effort to date the Eddie poems, but the question is here somewhat confused by the question of possible interpolations.

Several bibliographies have been compiled, during the last fifty years, of those altered versions of Shakespeare's plays which form so illuminating a chapter in the history of the Restoration stage, and indeed of the English theatre in general. Unfortunately, the most scholarly of these lists have usually been minor appendices to works of wider scope, and are not unnaturally here and there inaccurate in detail. Perhaps the best is the most recent, Miss Bartlett's, in her handy bibliography, Mr. William Shakespeare; but there is no entirely trustworthy list, since all of them neglect to include at least one important item, the altered Hamlet, and most of them do include several plays which are either not adaptations of Shakespeare or not adaptations at all. I propose, therefore, to supply a more accurate bibliography, preceding it by a list of those now available, and supplementing it with a statement of the reasons for not counting as Shakespeare adaptations certain dramas which have long held their places in this inglorious roll of theatrical ineptitude.

A close literary analysis of the text shows that Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg is an artful antimorality play with parodistic parallels to Everyman and Faust. The confrontation and interrelation of the “big” and the “small” provide a thematic and structural pattern on both the political and the social levels of the play. Love, faith, and work of the “little” are exploited by the “big.” Scattered revolution and traditional virtues prove useless in an attempt to fight and survive a totalitarian system. Schweyk is caught between a “big” enemy and a “big” friend. As a typical representative of the “little man” he is pitted against Hitler, whose plans he sabotages by a devious method of opportunism mixed with opposition; as an individual he is also contrasted with the fat glutton Baloun, whom he tries to help. In both respects he is “virtuous.” However, the juxtaposition of Schweyk in the icy Russian steppes and Baloun in the cozy “Keich” inn marks two contradictory, yet interrelated extremes of human existence. Brecht subtly points the way out of these undesirable paradoxes. Only if the “little” resolve their differences will they truly cease to be “little.” Schweyk's virtues and Brecht's “Schweykian philosophy” are dictated by circumstances; they are not meant to be of permanent value.

We have no Adequate Lexicon for dealing with the transformation of racial orders. Recently, commentators have sought to pinpoint a shift in racial meanings by announcing the advent of a “postidentity,” “postracial,” or “cosmopolitan” social order. These appellations suggest that we are now past racial or identity politics in some crucial way. But it is not so much that we have gone beyond race as that race has gone beyond us, morphing at a speed with which academic expertise has not kept pace. The content of racial, gender, and sexual identities has been significantly transformed, and this change has, in turn, fostered the illusion that we no longer inhabit racialized realities—hence the proliferation of posts to tell us that temporally and politically we are no longer where we were. The representational strain of dealing with the elusive and dynamic qualities of racial and sexual identities makes us too eager to declare that we are over difference. The recourse to posts seems, however, more an admission of helplessness at identifying the nature of the shift than a sign of transcendence. It stems from our dependence on social schemas that offer us only two options: we are in the racial order or we are out of it. But we are not out of it, not yet. And herein lies a rare opening for the humanistic study of race.

Through the gracious courtesy of the Hungarian authorities I have been permitted to seek for Slavonic material in the Royal Hungarian National Museum. I was gratified to find that owing to a millennium of close contacts between the Magyar and the Slav, Budapest contains much interesting material. During this search I was fortunate enough to come upon the unpublished manuscript which is here reproduced. It was found by itself and was not a part of any collection. For purposes of identification I suggest calling it Slovak Manuscript M.M.C.

The poet Wordsworth has been for a century the synonym of wholesomeness and piety. It is only within the past decade that it has become the fashion to regard him as a dangerous influence. There is a school of critics at the present moment who go about sadly shaking their heads over Wordsworth's case. They think it a pity that, like Shelley, he should have devoted so fine a talent to the propagation of a subtly vicious teaching.

Concentration on the ascetic element in Puritanism has led to a misunderstanding of the Puritans' attitude towards style and the use of figurative language. Kenneth Murdock cites as characteristic of Puritan style in prose and poetry a tension arising from the conflict of theoretical asceticism with a recognition that practical effectiveness in preaching demanded an appeal to man's senses. “Constantly one feels in Puritan literature,” writes Murdock, “a conflict between the desire to convince and persuade by the readiest means, and the determination never to cross the line into pleasing the sensual man.” Thus, though the Puritan writer generally depreciated the power of words as dead things incapable of conveying the living truth, “he used figures of speech … because he knew that whatever the ideal potency of divine truth might be, fallen man responded most directly to it when some concessions were made to his errant fancy.” This resembles the theory of accommodation, and Mr. Murdock calls it by that name when he cites Richard Baxter as a kind of authority for the stylistic practice of American Puritans. While he admits that it is, in a strict sense, “borrowed and improper,” Baxter justifies his use of figurative language in terms of its usefulness and effectiveness. The American Puritans, armed with Baxter's “doctrine of accommodation,” formed their literary theory “in an attempt to answer the old riddle of how infinite and eternal variety is to be expressed in the finite terms comprehensible to mortal man.”

In confuting Schlegel's ideas on the rôle of the chorus in Greek tragedy, Nietzsche said that he believed in an aesthetic audience and thought the single spectator to be the more capable, the more he was able to take the work of art as art, namely aesthetically. Some forty years thereafter modern drama felt called upon to awaken the spectator from his “illusionist period”—as if there had been any danger that, again in Nietzsche's words, the ideal spectator might rush onto the stage to free the God from his torment. Yet to prevent this once and for all seems to have been one of the foremost axioms of the Expressionist and kindred revolts of the first decade of this century.

The proceedings somehow opened. The talking and laughing and shuffling suddenly subsided … a figure rose; she took her way from among us; she mounted a platform; she spoke for precisely five minutes; she descended. Directly she sat down another rose; mounted the platform; spoke for precisely five minutes and descended; then a third rose; then a fourth—and so it went on, speaker following speaker, one from the right, one from the left, one from the middle, one from the background—each took her way to the stand, said what she had to say, and gave place to her successor. … They were like marksmen, I thought, standing up in turn with rifle raised to aim at a target. Sometimes they missed, and there was a roar of laughter; sometimes they hit, and there was a roar of applause. (Woolf 229)