Tasso states his objections to Ariostan chivalric romance in terms of neo-Aristotelian epic theory in the Discorsi: romance, with its disunity, multiplicity, and irreality, violates the classical canons requiring epic to be unified, whole, and verisimilar. Analogous to and implicit in these objections are those stemming from Tasso’s Counter-Reformation Christianity, which holds romance confusion and disorder to be morally as well as esthetically repugnant. But it is Tasso’s aim in La Gerusalemme liberata to redeem romance by converting it to the service of both classical and Christian imperatives. The apparent conflict between romance and epic proves to be illusory when the dialectic of Tasso’s Christian humanism has run its course. The Liberata asks us to see romance diversity completed in epic unity, romance magic fulfilled in Christian mystery, and to see chivalric romance, therefore, as a vehicle for Christian epic.

The norms of art-cinema narration—evident in the work of such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut—reflect noetic processes and expectations engendered by a culture of the written word. Such norms are absent from Hindi popular films, which have been historically contoured by the psychodynamics of orally based thought and by devices and motifs common to oral storytelling. By funneling art-cinema narration's norms—already meticulously (and impartially) cataloged by David Bordwell—through the prism of orality and through the orally inflected characteristics of Hindi popular films and by conjointly engaging with literary theory concerned with issues of textuality, this essay develops a novel conceptual matrix for understanding the epistemic pressures that weigh on visual storytelling as both a spectatorial and a generative act.

A few years ago, when Professor Frederick A. Pottle's exciting edition of Boswell's London Journal was published, many people, stimulated to an unusual reading experience by the intimate glimpses of eighteenth-century life and manners, had their first taste of eighteenth-century English. Other readers refreshed old college memories as they encountered Boswell's “quaint” constructions. Still others—English scholars, subscribers to PMLA —must have been struck once more with the differences between eighteenth-century English and modern English, particularly with the many grammatical constructions which would be unacceptable now even in the most informal language of the educated. No one reading the book could have failed to be interested in Boswell's English.

When Hermann Hesse received the Nobel prize in 1946 he was virtually unknown in this country. The critics who reluctantly turned to the new celebrity found his works threadbare and derivative. Today there exists a veritable Hesse cult in the United States among the dissident and the young. The affinities between the German author and the disaffected youth in America are many. They share similar attitudes toward adolescence, sex, drugs, the Orient, the nation, the state, the church, the military, the schools, and authority in general. A glance at the rebellious students in Hesse's native country, however, reveals that he is held by them in the same low esteem they reserve for the entire Romantic tradition of inwardness of which they regard National Socialism as an ultimate version or perversion. This contradiction of values held by sociologically and ideologically comparable groups puts the lack of a viable theory of literary evaluation into sharp focus. While traditional literary scholarship is reticent on the subject, its acts of criticism and historiography are replete with unreflected value judgments. A theory of evaluation based on the careful analysis of an author's reception, such as of Hesse's posthumous fortunes, could combat prejudice in scholarship and further the understanding of the historical dimension in the literary work.

Although Frank Norris' first two novels have been valued both for their intrinsic worth and for their importance in the history of American naturalism, they have also been severely criticized for their inconsistencies. Summarized broadly, these charges are, first, that there is a lack of consistency between Norris' dramatization of a deterministic system in McTeague and his frequent avowals of individual moral responsibility in Vandover; and, secondly, that there are inconsistencies within the novels themselves—that Norris appears to free McTeague from responsibility for his behavior and yet adopts a moral tone when discussing McTeague's sexual desires, and that though Norris for the most part blames Vandover for his choice of an evil life, he also seems to indicate in several passages that Vandover is the victim of irresistible larger forces.

At the request of my friend Dr. Brown, who in the preceding article has cast so much light on the character of the author of The Pearl, I have undertaken to state in print certain heterodox opinions, which I have long held, concerning the nature and fabric of that beautiful poem.

Briefly, to indicate my main thesis at the outset, I would maintain that The Pearl is not in the least elegiac or autobiographical, as hitherto regularly regarded by scholars and critics, and that the conclusions as to the author's life and domestic sorrows frequently drawn from it are wholly without foundation.

How postmodern is populism? Is there a hidden legacy of the 1968 manifestos in today's right-wing protest culture? In recent years, questions like these have often been posed in a more or less polemical manner. They should be reconsidered in a more sober, nuanced way. In academia, they are of far more than merely historical interest since unlike the hairstyles, clothing fashions, body culture, and living spaces from the late 1960s, many of the theories from that period are still regarded as contemporary. Above all, this applies to poststructuralism as a collective name for the impulses of what is often called French theory, which have set the tone in the humanities for two generations. However, the problem with the continuing topicality of poststructuralist and postmodern ways of thinking is that many of their elements are becoming virulent under completely changed political circumstances.

The significance of the historical novel may be summarily suggested by calling the roll of its greatest masters: Scott and Manzoni; Hugo and Dumas; Thackeray, Kingsley, and Reade; Tolstoi, Coster, and Sienkiewicz. Add those who are rivals of the leading masters: Gogol and Jokai, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Jens Peder Jacobsen, Hawthorne and Pater, Blackmore and Stevenson; Merimée, Flaubert, and Anatole France. Here, without mentioning many who, like Dickens and George Eliot, were at their best in other forms of fiction, we have a genre rich in masterpieces,—certainly the only great genre in which the nineteenth century so excelled its predecessors as to cast their experiments of a similar kind into oblivion. The public loves it; great authors devote themselves to it. What do the critics make of it? What is its nature, its function, its value? Is this method, apparently so successful, of narrating an action imagined as occurring in an historic past, really a literary art or is it a temporary aberration? Such questions rang out in the nineteenth century as challenges to critical genius. How did the critics respond?

The Damned Crew was a class of roisterers in London from the early 1590's to the late 1620's, their self-styled captain being at one time Sir Edmund Baynham, who was also involved in the Gunpowder Plot. Represented in literature as perjurers, assassins, dissidents, and revellers, they were thought to be reprobate with the damned crew of devils in hell. Indeed, they may have thought so themselves, reacting from misconstrued predestinarianism as desperate libertines with a limited Manichean outlook. Some such interpretation explains their title and behaviour and the view of them taken by theological controversialists such as Dove, Kellison, and Sutcliffe, and by playwrights like Chapman.

In almost all the plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists one finds an abundance of astrological jargon used metaphorically and as sheer literary garnish, showing no particular knowledge of the complex technicalities of astrology. Occasionally, however, a Jacobean dramatist's delineation of a horoscope involves such astrological technicalities that he and his audience must have fully appreciated the various manifestations of horoscopy. Such is the case in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. My purpose in this paper is to present an adequate explanation of the horoscope employed at one of the critical moments in this play.

Scholars who conduct ethnic archival research and who use material texts and practices in institutions in order to examine human memory and interpret human meaning-making face the challenge of placing differently archived traces of intellectual genealogies in conversation, conflict, and convergence with Western-oriented intellectual genealogies and methodologies. Such a challenge reveals the question at the heart of the proposition of the “ethnic” archive: how do scholars use archival collections as only part of the larger constellation of inscription systems produced, maintained, and institutionalized by cultural groups no longer beholden to the relational dynamic of “othering”?

In seiner Auswahl aus den hochdeutschen Dichtern des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1820) hat Lachmann die methodische Textkritik deutscher Werke des Mittelalters begründet. Er forderte, von Benecke angeregt und durch textkritische Arbeit an klassischen Autoren geschult, daβ man zuerst auf Grund des gesamten erhaltenen Materials die echteste Überlieferung bestimme (recensio) und darauf dann eine systematische, nach dem Wert der einzelnen Handschriften abwägende Konjekturalkritik aufbaue (emendatio). Die sprachliche Form aber suchte er durch eingehende Reimstudien zu regeln,—doch war es bedenklich, daβ er sich dabei fast ausschlieβlich auf oberdeutsche, speziell alemannische Handschriften berief und auf eine möglichst altertümliche Rechtschreibung ausging.

The paramount influence of French learning in England after the Conquest is well known. Under Edward the Confessor many of the most important church positions in England had been filled by foreigners. Although most of the foreign prelates were expelled by Earl Godwin, after the accession of William there was an immediate and general occupation by the invaders of all high offices of church and state. Freeman (Norman Conquest, vol. III.) remarks that when, near the end of his reign, “William gathered his Witan to his great Gemot at Salisbury, there was not a single English earl and only one English bishop to answer his summons.” That under these circumstances French culture and French learning must have dominated in England, is obvious.

At a meeting held on 26 April 1886, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Johns Hopkins University, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, spoke some words that have with slight variations been more recently applied to the study of modern languages, and indeed to other disciplines. Gildersleeve said in part:

The Corpus Christi play in sixteenth-century Spain evolved as it did because poets were consciously searching for a dramatic formula which should be appropriate to a sacramental play. The idea of a sacramental play, an auto sacramental, was new at that time. A sacramental drama had never before been attempted, either in Spain or elsewhere. Corpus Christi was celebrated, in. Spain as in Europe at large, with performances of mystery-type plays derived from the tropes of the liturgy. The earliest Corpus plays in Spain were Nativity plays which dramatists scarcely troubled to adapt. As the problem of making the Christmas play appropriate to Corpus Christi forced itself on the attention of dramatists a new idea of religious drama emerged.

The two following essays are separate studies joined by a common source. The unpublished Tennyson poems, Hail, Briton! and Tithon, are taken from the Heath MS. at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England.

John Moore Heath was a college friend of Tennyson, a member, like him, of the Cambridge Apostles group. During the years of his closest friendship with Tennyson, 1883–35, Heath was an assistant tutor of Trinity College. The two men met there and corresponded often; at the same time they were both associated with other members of the old Cambridge group. Like most of these literati of the 1830's, Heath kept a Commonplace Book in which he laboriously and faithfully copied out the work of his friends, Arthur Hallam, Richard Trench, William Donne, Frederick, Septimus, Edward, and Alfred Tennyson. The flyleaf of his MS book Heath inscribed with the date September 24, 1832, clearly the } time at which he began to record the poetry. The Tennyson entries, however, he certainly made later, most of them in 1833, probably all within the limit 1835.

In France, romanticism is first of all a revolt against a firmly entrenched classicism. In this respect, French romanticism is markedly different from romanticism in England, Germany, or Spain, where classicism had been less in accord with the national temper and had not risen to the glorious heights of the century of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. It is not surprising therefore that classicism, having produced so rich a literature of profound psychological insight, should have prolonged its dominance in France, to a considerable degree, even into the early years of the nineteenth century. It is significant too that in France, romanticism established itself first in prose with Rousseau and his successors, then in poetry with Lamartine, and only at last in drama with the final triumph of Hugo's Hernani in 1830. This sequence corresponds to the degree of resistance in these three literary forms. The victory over the codified rules of classic tragedy could come in France only after a long fight extending over more than a hundred years. This explains why so much of French debate about the theories of romanticism turns about the drama.

As a philosopher and social thinker, Pierre Leroux has been the object of considerable attention in recent years, and his works on political, religious and sociological subjects have been studied by scholars of distinction. Since he was also a writer and critic not without a certain fame in his own day, it seems a little curious that his literary activities and influence have yet to receive full treatment.