This article reexamines the role of the folding fan in Mallarmé's poetics by placing the fan in the context of its history as an art form, its evolving significance in European and East Asian culture, and its practical materiality as a writing medium. The fan is uniquely important in Mallarmé's lifelong quest to challenge the standard written and print media and to transfigure the physical form of the book into a work of art fully implicated in its literary content. The fan is a flexible, hybrid medium that resolves Mallarmé's numerous and contradictory criteria for the ideal book. It is also a metaphor and an instrument of thought. The essay attempts, therefore, to think like and with Mallarmé: taking its cue from the fan, it unfolds the fan's material aspects and tropological incarnations until it reaches the butterfly, Mallarmé's choice symbol of poetic flight and evanescence.

In 1949, A. Norman Jeffares declared that, although Yeats's poetry “had reblossomed in The Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921], the flowering came with The Tower” [1928]. In 1954, Richard Ellmann called The Tower and The Winding Stair “the two finest volumes” of the period 1917–33. Today, this estimate is the generally accepted one: B. Rajan has recently written, “With The Tower and The Winding Stair, Yeats's writing comes fully into its strength and words respond completely to the poem's call to order. To say that Yeats was incapable of writing a bad poem during this phase is an exaggeration, but one within the limits of critical licence.”

The year 1935, celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Bach, that great writer of a type of “program” music that for years was never suspected of being such, is an opportune time for a closer study of attempts made by literary men at criticizing and evaluating program music. Even for the great Bach there were no real “program notes” to suggest the attempts to portray definite stories and incidents in his organ chorales until Albert Schweitzer unearthed his clearcut attempts at writing program music, or music based upon facts or with a story. Bach seemed to feel that the music should actually tell the story without further use of words than those of the simple chorale tune he was developing.

That Robert Browning, the poet, possessed wide and multifarious learning is evident to a casual reader of his poems. The careful reader is impressed by the range and extent of his learning which includes much of what is called hole-in-the-corner knowledge, a familiarity with out-of-the-way topics and incidents that few readers possess. The scholarship of the past two decades has begun to give us a good deal of knowledge upon the nature of Browning's learning, and we are in a fair position now to estimate how much of the poet's knowledge was systematic and well-ordered, and how much of it was haphazard and based upon a following-up of this or that temporary interest. The letter which is the heart of this paper and which is published for the first time below will shed light upon this problem in an area in which Browning's training was probably most systematic.

In Milton's attempt to justify the ways of God to men, perhaps no passage in Paradise Lost is more important than Book III, 173–202, for in these lines Milton expounds his doctrine of predestination and its concordance with the mercy, grace, and wisdom of God. To the average reader, however, the passage offers considerable difficulty; and it is indeed surprising, in view of the importance and the obscurity of this portion of the epic, that editors and scholars have done so little to clarify the doctrine of these thirty lines. Newton contented himself with asserting that the views there expounded were Calvinistic, and Todd followed Newton. Sumner, without comment, showed a parallelism between portions of the passage and Milton's De doctrina, a document which is uncompromisingly Arminian. Brydges, however, repeated Newton's observation; and Barber argued at some length for a Calvinistic interpretation. Verity, on the other hand, seemed to agree with Sumner, but dismissed the matter with a single sentence: “The doctrine of predestination here alluded to is discussed at some length in the Christian Doctrine, I, 4.” Masson, Browne, and Moody, in turn, ignored the matter. Such disagreement, therefore, would seem to justify an attempt to throw more light on the passage by determining the precise doctrine that Milton there advances and the relation of that doctrine to the view on predestination advanced in the De doctrina.

The problem of assessing Edward Taylor's literary reputation has been made difficult by the claims put forward on his behalf and by the criticisms of these claims because both share the assumption that Taylor's poetry may be compared with Herbert's. But a consideration of Taylor's Prologue (glossed with relevant poems and sermons) reveals the rudiments of Taylor's Puritan theory of the imperfect function of human art, rudiments which form a concept of decorum which is not “metaphysical.” Taylor's theory features the severely limited possibilities of fallen human art not only in dealing with man's condition but even in attempting the praise of God. Accordingly, at the practice of metaphor Taylor is committed to meiosis, and uses amplification for the praise of God with considerable hesitation. On the other hand, Herbert, with a different religious position and with consequently a different subject (the contrast between man's insignificance and his greatness as a child of God), has as a result a much wider metaphoric range. These differences in the range and use of metaphor reveal quite different concepts of decorum and suggest judgments about Taylor's literary reputation based not on “metaphysical” decorum, but rather on a Puritan decorum of imperfection.

The Rev. Mr. N. J. Halpin in 1843, followed by Professor G. P. Baker in 1894 and Mr. R. Warwick Bond in 1902, have sought to explain Endimion as the vehicle of a personal allegory setting forth a contemporary court intrigue. These commentators have been duly followed in turn, with slight variations, by the historians F. G. Fleay in 1891, A. W. Ward in 1899, and F. E. Schelling in 1908. The existence of this allegory may be regarded, therefore, as generally accepted by authorities on the Elizabethan drama. The exponents of this personal allegory agree in recognizing that Lyly intended to represent the Queen in Cynthia, a point which no one is likely to dispute. They agree further in arguing that Endimion, the lover of Cynthia, represents Leicester, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth. From this basis three varieties of the allegory have been developed, in attempts to identify a third character, Tellus, thè lady deserted by Endimion. Three ladies have been proposed, each of whom played a striking rôle in Leicester's career. Mr. Halpin suggested Lady Sheffield, Leicester's second wife; Professor Baker substituted for her Lady Essex, Leicester's third wife; and Mr. Bond set aside both in favor of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Todo estudio y crítica referente al Poema de Mio Cid hace constar un hecho característico del mismo, su realismo. Sin embargo, creo que, por unas u otras razones, no se ha llegado a señalar claramente la verdadera importancia y alcance de ese realismo, o mejor dicho, su auténtica significación. Mi intención, en las líneas que siguen, es tratar de ponerla de relieve. Espero, con todo, no “imitar al pilluelo que, al ver una pared recién blanqueada, siente necesidad de mancharla escribiendo en ella alguna inconveniencia,” como don Ramón Menéndez Pidal, maestro en todo lo referente al Poema como en tantas otras cosas, ha dicho de los posibles cidófobos posteriores a su magno trabajo. No voy a tratar del Cid especialmente como personaje humano e histórico—aspecto al que don Ramón se refiere con las anteriores palabras—sino de la trama material y realista que el Poema ofrece a los ojos de quienes lo leemos hoy. Hay que tener en cuenta para ello, también, que otro rasgo bien conocido del Cantar es su verismo, “que rebosa por todas partes,”hasta el punto de que incluso “en menudos pormenores coincide el Poema con los datos históricos.” Milá y Fontanals lo consideraba como “fidelísimo espejo de un orden de hechos y costumbres que no serían bastantes a suplir los documentas históricos.” Sera inevitable, pues, que en algunos puntos de este trabajo me refiera también a la persona del Cid, quien, después de todo, si no puede ser considerado como un santo, tampoco como hombre sin honor ni ideales.

When Sir Walter Scott, with his friend and publisher John Ballantyne at his shoulder, was adding his chapter-tags to the proofsheets of his third novel, The Antiquary (1816), he came to a halt at one chapter for which he wanted some lines from Beaumont and Fletcher. Ballantyne undertook the task of finding the passage. Awaiting for some time the discovery of the verses he wished, Scott at length exclaimed, “Hang it, Johnnie, I believe I can make a motto sooner than you will find one.” He did so, and thus began his habit of calling upon his invention when memory failed, producing throughout the remainder of the Waverley Novels numerous chapter-headings ascribed “Anonymous,” “Old Play,” etc., which Lockhart calls “some of the most exquisite verses that ever flowed from his pen.” Of “Old Play” captions there are 94; “Old Ballad” 26—mostly Scott's free-hand alterations; “Old Song” 12; “Anonymous” 29; and unsigned mottoes 10. One of the best of the “Old Play” fabrications occurs at the head of chapter xxix of Anne of Geierstein, describing the good king René of Provence;—in reality, it may be called Scott's own epitaph:

A mirthful man he was—the snows of age
Fell, but they did not chill him. Gaiety
Even in life's closing touched his teeming brain
With such wild visions as the setting sun
Raises in front of some hoar glacier,
Painting the bleak ice with a thousand hues.
—Old Play

Although a great deal has been written on the relation between Nietzsche and Wagner, no detailed study has been made hitherto of the period indicated in the title of this paper. And even here a comprehensive treatment of the relation is not attempted. Only one phase of it is considered. The question proposed is: What was Nietzsche's opinion of Wagner's music-dramas when he wrote the final version of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik? A chronological survey of Nietzche's notes, letters, and shorter essays of the period has been made, as far as they bear on the nature of tragedy in general and more specifically on its relation to music. His ideas are discussed in their development and in their relation to the theories of Wagner and of Schopenhauer on music and poetry, in the hope that at least a few of the lines in the vexed and vexing Nietzsche–Wagner record may be deciphered more clearly.

Saint-Exupéry, whether by artistic design or by stylistic spontaneity, wreathes the pilot, the generic hero of his four novels, Courrier Sud, Vol de nuit, Terre des hommes, Pilote de guerre, in an aura of such hyperbole that the reader, raised on the banalities of the “nouveau roman,” might find such exaggeration naive if not ludicrous. Yet the legend of the Saint-Exupéryian hero is not cased in a rigid matrix. In these four works—the first two fiction, the others essentially true narrative—the imagery that forms the substance of the myth of the pilot undergoes a subtle transformation: legendary, mythological, and mystical in Courrier Sud, it is subtly and successively altered. In the final pages of Pilate de guerre the metamorphcsis is complete, the myth is dissipated in a profession of fraternal faith, and, through its hero, man is seen in his true perspective, more realistic but no less heroic.

Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, the fictional autobiography of an incestuous SS officer, is one of the most controversial novels published in the last decade: it received two prestigious French literary awards but was denounced as kitschy, pornographic, and revisionist. This essay explores the intertext of the Oresteia, which makes the book more complex than most critics have acknowledged. The references to Aeschylus permit the narrator to style himself a tragic hero and thereby to trivialize the Nazi crimes. At the same time, the mythical emplotment, together with other intertexts, indicates that Aue's account is a concoction. Far from simply propagating a revisionist ideology, Les Bienveillantes combines much factual information with a high degree of reflexivity, provoking readers to ponder the Shoah and how to do justice to it.

The centrality of the twenty “Mottetti” to Montale's decisive second book, Le Occasioni (1939), has been noted by such critics as Ettore Bonora and Silvio Ramat. Despite their probings, however, much remains to be done towards an organic understanding of this remarkable series of poems. Since this part of Montale's work relates to much else he has written before and after, I shall not attempt to isolate it from the rest of the Occasioni book, but merely to keep my focus on what is after all a kind of book within the book. A tighter unity prevails among the “Motets” than among the other poems in the volume, both because the former all turn on the constant of love for Clizia in the variations of worldly vicissitudes, and because they match this thematic constancy by a relative constancy of form.

Unlike their counterparts in socialist countries, American literary scholars and critics are generally unaware of an ideological dimension to their work. This very unawareness, however, is suited to the requirements of advanced capitalism. While our literary studies rarely exhibit the patent ideological bias to be found in the social sciences, they are dominated by ideologically congenial habits of mind. The scholarly ideal of shedding prejudice would seem to be well served by a critique of those habits, which often yield implausible or trifling conclusions.

L'être et le Néant is a hymn in praise of the insubstantial. In that book the substantial emerges as the great enemy. It is the inert, the viscous, the spiritless. It is the realm of death, both in our conventional, literal sense of that word, and in the broader sense of whatever is not active, vital life at its most “authentic.” Among substantial forms of existence, in this broader sense, Sartre includes “character” or “selfhood.” He does not deny that character and selfhood exist: on the contrary he asserts their existence emphatically. They, and all other substantialities, alone have “being.” But the “being” of selfhood and character is inert, lifeless. We see this in introspection, Sartre says. Our character exists only in the past. As “being” it can never be “becoming.” Character is that essence which is lodged behind, even though in, us. That essence plays no part in the present of consciousness, the moving, insubstantial life which is what we distinctly are as living creatures.

The hitherto unpublished English version of the Trojan war entitled The Sege of Troye exists in the unique Oxford ms., Rawlinson D 82. The Sege of Troye occupies second position in the manuscript, being preceded by a brief prose redaction of Statius’Thebaid and followed by an extract from Gower's Confessio Amantis. The version in question is an anonymous prose text of the fifteenth century, written in the Southern dialect. The story, which is told in simple, almost naive, language, and in a brisk, lively fashion, opens with the Argonautic Expedition and ends with the Destruction of Troy.

The documentary value of the Mercure galant, the review founded in 1672, which La Bruyère considered to be “directement au-dessous de rien,” has not ceased to increase with the passage of time. Interspersed among frivolous poems, conundrums, descriptions of festivals and of styles, one finds announcements of new books, of military campaigns, and (what interests us here particularly) accounts, often filled with picturesque detail, of the foundation and the sessions of literary bodies organized in the provinces in the seventeenth century, in imitation of the French Academy. Some of these still have vigorous existence. In most instances, the Mercure is the chief source of information on these early years, and, strangely enough, has been neglected by the historians of the provincial academies.

Professor Napier, discussing the Franks Casket a quarter of a century ago, concluded with these words: