I first encountered ato quayson's transcendent account of accra and its enigmatic oxford street in 2009, a full five years before it was published as a book. In August of that year the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) held its fifth biennial conference in the Ghanaian capital. This was ASWAD's first conference on the continent, and it drew an impressive array of scholars from all over the world to a country that has long been a focal point of the diaspora's engagement with its African past and present. Because of its location, the conference attracted an especially large contingent of scholars who work on Ghana, among them quite a few historians, including me. Just when it seemed that the atmosphere of intellectual exchange could not get any headier, Quayson invited a small group of us to join him on a bespoke tour of Accra that heralded the arrival of Oxford Street in 2014.

That Shakespeare read Montaigne's Essays is made probable by the fact that they were well-known to his contemporaries. He was only sixteen when the first two books were published in Paris. By the end of the century, before he had begun to write his greatest tragedies, the popularity of the work had already spread to England. Of this fact there still remain many signs: “Seven or eight of great wit and worth,” Florio tells us, had made attempts to translate the Essays; two separate entries of such a translation had been made in the Stationers' Register; “divers of his peeces” in English, Cornwallis writes, were going from hand to hand in manuscript; and Bacon had published Essays, in which not only the name, but several appropriations of thought, acknowledged and unacknowledged, show the indebtedness of their author to Montaigne.

Nine years before the Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed, Sir William Craigie proposed his scheme of period dictionaries. Pointing to the many problems in the language still unsolved, and to the “large quantities of interesting material” daily set aside because of the limitations of space, he insisted that this was the only way to meet completely the needs of scholars in English language and of serious students of our literature. Neither he nor the others who have taken up his proposal have ever conceived of these period dictionaries as works to supplant the Oxford Dictionary. They could not because they approach the language with essentially different purposes. Sir William Craigie in his report of 1919 phrases quite clearly the relationship of these later dictionaries to their parent:

John bull's other island, Shaw once said, is one of “a group of three plays of exceptional weight and magnitude on which the reputation of the author as a serious dramatist was first established, and still mainly rests.” The other two plays are Major Barbara and Man and Superman. John Bull's Other Island was popular at the Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907 and established Shaw as a great and popular dramatist. Since then, however, this play has not been esteemed as much as Man and Superman and Major Barbara, although I would argue that in humor and insight it is their equal. It has been revived only twice in London in the last forty years—in 1938 and 1947; and it is far less known to the public or to scholarship than are the other two plays. Opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, Shaw's estimate of his play should, I think, be taken seriously. Some critics have seen the play as original in method, as still pertinent to the Irish situation, and as universal in its significance. “Shaw made out of this topical subject a masterpiece,” Reuben Brower has written, “one of his purest and most sustained comedies.” I believe this view can be upheld.

Two allegorical movements dominate the central books of the Faerie Queene, the generative cycle and Britomart's quest for Artegall. Britomart's assumption of her role as mother of the British line depends on the reconciliation of these two movements, the one natural, the other historical. The Garden of Adonis presents an emblem of the generative cycle, the desire of Venus for Adonis mirroring the desire of Form for union with Matter. This search of the Female for the Male is presented sequentially in the story of Florimell and Marinell, whose adventures are juxtaposed with those of Britomart and therefore form a bridge between the emblem of the Garden and the sequence of Britomart's quest. We see the coalescence of the two in Isis Church, where Britomart's dream has both sexual and historical significance, and in her resumption of femininity after her rescue of Artegall from Radigund.

In the literature on Notes from the Underground the protagonist is always called “the underground man” (podpol'nyj chelovek), as if he were an archetypal entity, rather than “the narrator,” an accepted literary convention of the Icherzählung. The nomenclature is significant, for critics have treated the work as the turning point in Dostoevsky's development, ransacked it for philosophical, political, and sociological formulas, noted the profound psychology, but have never analyzed the Notes in detail as an artifact. By so doing critics distort the Notes structurally and substantively, because they concentrate on and overemphasize the first part of the work almost to the exclusion of the second, and because they accept and discuss the narrator's formulations in this part without analyzing them as the expression of a literary creation. The purpose of this study is to examine the unity of the Notes: to ascertain the relationships of its two parts; to indicate the thematic function of ordering episodes in a particular sequence; to note the recurrence of certain objects, the symbolism involved therein, and its effect on the unity of the Notes; finally, to assess the effect of artful integration on the apparent “meaning” of the work.

In his study of The History of John Bull, Dr. Teerink by clearing up the curious dating of the Examiners—he shows that each number appeared on the second Thursday mentioned—has thereby fixed the dates of publication of the five parts of The History (March 6, March 18, April 17, May 9, July 31). He has also determined at least approximately the dates at which the several pamphlets were written, and has thrown light upon the matter in the pamphlets by references to historical events.

When the Foreign Language Program of the Modern Language Association was five years old, in 1957, its Advisory and Liaison Committee drew up a plan for its second five years and prepared a request for a foundation grant to implement the plan. The proposal outlined five areas of major effort. There were activities designed to increase the quantity of language study, but these activities were to be more than an extension of prior promotional activities of the MLA Foreign Language Program. The intention was still to persuade educators, parents, and the general public of the value of language education and of the necessity for sequences of language study that could result in proficiency in the spoken and written language. But in addition to an “information and advisory campaign,” the MLA also proposed “effective demonstration programs.”

A Survey of Western art in relation to its audience would suggest to an empirical æsesthetician that a degree of structural raggedness usually accompanies, if it does not actually constitute, artistic superiority. The trouble comes not, as often presumed, from difficulty in defining form, but from difficulty in experiencing it. Just as one art-lover may have a finer sense of line than another, with perhaps a weaker sense of color, so we may safely conclude from ubiquitous evidence that the perception of artistic form is a similarly variable factor. Disputes continually arise between those who derive a strong aesthetic experience from organic form in art and those who simply do not know what the others are talking about, and mistake genre, or type, or mechanical division for form. Either group may nourish the fallacy that an artist preoccupied with form is indifferent to almost everything else.

Some conception, explicit or implied, of the relationship between art and nature is basic to the writer's as well as the critic's view of his own function. But because of the fundamental nature of our own bias in this matter we find it difficult to recover the attitude toward art and nature held by a writer of an earlier period. In the case of the Renaissance, and specifically of Spenser, much of our difficulty stems from now widely held views of art and literature as a spontaneous, vital, organic flowering forth of nature conceived in its ideal potentiality, of literary insight as a synthesizing vision in which the aesthetic and the moral blend, of imaginative creation as the opposite of deliberate contrivance, “cold” artificiality, and external ornament. In accordance with such views, C. S. Lewis, in his discussion of the Faerie Queene in The Allegory of Love, speaks of the “exquisite health” of Spenser's imagination; he says that “most commonly” Spenser understands Nature as “unimpeded growth from within to perfection, neither checked by accident nor sophisticated by art”; he claims that with insignificant exceptions Spenser “uses art to suggest the artificial in its bad sense,” employing the central episodes of the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis to develop a crucial antithesis of sterile, deceptive, sinister artifice and fruitful, naive, genuine nature. I would like to show that Spenser's attitude toward deliberate artifice is considerably more positive, or at least ambivalent, than Mr. Lewis claims and that Spenser is much less consciously aware of art and nature as polar oppo-sites than a modern reader is likely to expect.

In 1923, the Parisian Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale invited Miguel de Unamuno to contribute to a special issue then being prepared in commemoration of the tercentenary of the birth of Pascal. Accordingly Unamuno wrote a short essay, “La Foi pascalienne”, seventh and last of the commemorative Etudes sur Pascal, as the volume was entitled. The following year, Unamuno, exiled in Paris, doubled the length of the essay and incorporated it as Chapter ix of his Agonie du christianisme, a book which, like the absorbed essay, had been composed for a French-reading public; for it was a cahier requested by P. L. Couchoud for inclusion in a series of monographs on Christianity. Both the essay and the book were translated into French by Unamuno's close friend, the hispanist Jean Cassou.

In “To the great Variety of Readers” in the First Folio of Shakespeare, Heminge and Condell wrote:

In any explanation of the sources for the doctrine of physical determinism, as expressed in modern French literature, the book of Jean-Philibert Dessaignes (1762–1832), Etudes de l'homme moral, fondées sur les rapports de ses facultés avec son organisation, deserves a place. This is because its author was the teacher of Honoré de Balzac at the Collège de Vendôme, and because Balzac later became one of the chief creators of the doctrine in question.

It is doubtful whether there is any modern literature, even that of Spain or of Russia, to which the many questions concerning religion are so central as they are in France. The oft-quoted saying of Nietzsche, in The Dawn of Day, is not a paradoxical assertion put forward by a German admirer of French culture: “It cannot be denied that the French have been the most Christian nation in the world, not because the devotion of masses in France has been greater than elsewhere, but because those Christian ideals which are most difficult to realize have become incarnated there, instead of merely remaining fancies, intentions or imperfect beginnings.” Nietzsche adduced as examples not only Pascal or Fénelon, and French Protestants, but free thinkers as well, and he praised the latter “because they had to fight against truly great men and not, like the free thinkers of other nations, merely against dogmas and sublime abortions.” A student of French literature who had no familiarity with the religious background and traditions, no interest in the many controversies which have opposed one sect of Catholics to another, Catholics to Protestants, believers to unbelievers, clericals to anti-clericals, would be crippled at every stage.

In his excellent study of the Latin and Italian sources of Joachim du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome, M. Joseph Vianey indicates a number of passages that derive in some way from Lucan's Pharsalia. To the best of my knowledge, no one has pointed out any further borrowings, or made any kind of detailed study of du Bellay's debt to Lucan, which is, however, considerably more extensive than M. Vianey's mentions would lead one to believe. In this paper, therefore, I propose to quote all those passages in the two works which are so similar in expression or in thought as to suggest that du Bellay had Lucan in mind, or actually before him, when he wrote the Antiquitez. After this comparison of details, it will perhaps be possible to show that du Bellay owed to Lucan something much more important than these imitations and translations.

Les juifs sont fréquemment présents dans l‘œuvre d'Alfred de Vigny. Il ne semble pas, cependant, que le poète se soit expressément intéressé à eux. Ce serait plutôt à la suite d'influences plus ou moins précises et d'observations personnelles qu'il fut amené à représenter des personnages juifs dans ses œuvres. C'est ce qui explique sans doute le manque de consistance dans son attitude. Au début de sa carrière littéraire, Vigny fait preuve du mépris habituel à leur égard. Plus tard, notamment dans les ébauches de la Deuxième Consultation du Docteur Noir, il les peint de manière plus favorable. Certaines notes de Vigny sur les Juifs font même croire qu'il éprouva pour eux une certaine sympathie. Par ailleurs, certaines remarques éparses dans l‘œuvre montrent que Vigny, étant donné la fécondité de sa pensée religieuse, a réfléchi sur plusieurs points de l'histoire et de la philosophie du judaïsme.

Every aspect of organic life, including sexuality and death, is comprehended in Ulysses as a moment or aspect of a general circulation whose primary figure is eating and the digestive process. But the digestive process is a form of decomposition, and in one sense Ulysses is a stomach or tomb in which language breaks down into its constituent units—ultimately, letters, the elements of an onomatopoeic notation for human speech. Ulysses works between the figure of onomatopoeia (as the limit of mimesis) and that of infidelity (as an image for the undermining of all ontological security at the sexual-gastronomic level) to reconceive mimesis as the isomorphism between two decompositional series, one involving language and the other the body.

Although almost anyone's list of Sherwood Anderson's successes in fiction would include “The Man Who Became a Woman,” this haunting story has provoked less commentary than it deserves. Irving Howe provides the fullest discussion in Sherwood Anderson, though the nature of his book prevents him from treating the story in detail, and we may take his interpretation of it as standard. For Howe, “The Man Who Became a Woman” is concerned essentially with homosexuality, showing us an older man not even yet “secure in his male adulthood” who is driven to narrate some extraordinary experiences of his youth: experiences in which “psychic needs and moral standards clash,” and which may reveal the youth's “hysteria as a result of accumulated anxieties about his sexual role.” In what follows, I shall not be denying that homosexuality is a major motif, but arguing that Anderson is writing about something more: about a particular integrity of being that the youth must experience as a requisite for growing up. To this extent I shall be reversing Howe's emphasis, suggesting that the story centers on the conditions under which the narrator matures, and taking the homosexuality as one instance among others of the narrator's special quality—his openness to the contrarieties of experience. Perhaps some support for this reading inheres in the fact that the teller periodically denies being homosexual in any ordinary sense (e.g., pp. 188, 207, 209): while these denials may be seen as his psychologically necessary effort to shield himself from the truth, they may also be plausibly viewed as indications that the heart of the story's significance lies elsewhere. In any event, the teller himself—when addressing the reader on behalf of the story—insists on its unconventionality: “I'm puzzled you see, just how to make you feel as I felt that night. … I'm not claiming to be able to inform you or to do you any good. I'm just trying to make you understand some things about me” (p. 208). Disclaiming a traditional instructional or ethical aim, he invites us simply to participate in his crucial experience on “that night.”