Shakespeare's selectivity in adapting a novella from Giraldi Cinthio's De Gli Hecatommithi into his own Othello has long been apparent; students of Shakespeare's play have stressed his transformation of the source by speeding up the action, condensing the plot, reassessing the characterization, and transfiguring the commonplace attitudes toward an interracial marriage presented in the source into a tragedy of love. But no one has demonstrated how a close comparison of single words and phrases in Othello and in the novella can help us to understand how the transformation took place, how words and phrases such as vedere cogl' occhi, vendetta, satio, and la giustizia divina are translated imaginatively into the thematic imagery of ocular proof, the configuration of revenge, satisfaction, and satiation, and the movement from justice to mercy which Desdemona offers to Othello. Clearly, such a comparison of the play and its source affords a critical perspective upon the verbal drama especially. But studies of the imagery in Othello neglect its source entirely, and source studies, merely footnoting the verbal parallels as they appear, seem to maintain the critical view that marvels how Shakespeare could have created so much out of so little. It is as if Shakespeare's characteristic ingredient, the poetic interplay of words and images in the verbal fund of his drama, had no parallel in the verbal fund of his source.

Courthope, in his History of English Poetry, asks the question: “Does Spenser's work satisfy the test of Unity which must be applied to every great creation of art?” Answering this question, Courthope thinks that there is undoubtedly poetical unity in the general conception of The Shepherd's Calendar. But of the Faerie Queene, he says the following:

Attention has often been called to the extraordinary parallelism which exists between Sir Gowther, a fifteenth century English version of Robert the Devil, and the so-called Breton Lay of Tydorel. The latter is one of five anonymous romances published by Gaston Paris according to the manuscript in the National Library, which includes also the lays of Marie de France.

When i first started teaching as a volunteer instructor in the college program at san quentin state prison in 1999, I used to imagine writing an article about what I was experiencing to submit to PMLA. The thought of that article took on an almost therapeutic function; it became a mental structure for processing what was often, from the beginning, an intellectually and emotionally overwhelming experience. At the time, it seemed natural that sharing what I was learning with a few thousand stranger-colleagues was the most reassuring thing I could imagine. Only in retrospect do I find this a strangely moving illustration of what it means to me to be a part of an intellectual community. I would never have imagined back then that the editors of PMLA themselves would one day initiate an entire special issue on this topic.

The eighteenth century, which saw the development of the novel into definite form, saw also the beginnings of careful criticism of the novel. The amount and character of this criticism, however, and the extent of a critical attitude among eighteenth-century novel-readers, have received too little attention from students of fiction. Not to speak of the books of the time dealing with the novel and allied forms, which deserve perhaps more attention than they have received,—notably the bibliography, with comments, in Lenglet-Dufresnoy's L'Usage des Romans (1734), and the lectures of LaHarpe, which, though published much later, were delivered before 1800,—there is a mass of interesting material in eighteenth-century periodicals, French, English, and German. There is also a great amount of criticism in prefaces to novels, in memoirs, and in collections of letters, which if systematically examined would perhaps modify current notions regarding our ancestors' views of prose fiction.

The British Council conference on the teaching of English Literature overseas was held at King's College, Cambridge, England, 16–18 July 1962. As K. R. Johnstone, Deputy Director-General of the British Council, pointed out, this was the first conference on teaching English Literature overseas, though such teaching has been in progress for over a century. More than seventy-five participants came from twenty-five different countries, and had taught in many more. The discussions of the conference were taped and will be published in a 60,000 word book by the firm of Methuen.

Nietzsche began as an admirer of Luther and the German Reformation. The age of Luther ranked as high in his early opinion as the age of Goethe and Beethoven. From Menschliches, Allzumenschliches on, this favorable attitude toward Luther underwent a strong transformation. In the five years from 1878 to 1883, Nietzsche's second creative period, Luther emerged as a highly questionable figure, even as a most regrettable event in the history of German and European thought and civilization. But all these severe pronouncements on Luther were only a prelude to the scathing denunciations to come in Nietzsche's post-Zarathustra writings.

These Remarks are written on a hotel balcony overlooking the last of the plains of Lombardy and the beginning of the Alps. The first snowfall of the season covers the distant heights and outlines clearly the great barrier between Italy and the rest of Europe. Just here two thousand years ago was the edge of the ancient classical world. Beyond the Alps were the hordes that threatened that world, that were to conquer much of it, and that in turn were to absorb its culture and carry it to lands then undreamed of. Through all the changes of the millennia these mountains have looked down on this spot. The snows of early autumn with which they are powdered today are no doubt much the same as those surveyed by Hannibal with his elephants, by Caesar on his way to Helvetia and Gaul, by Napoleon, and in these latter days so tragically by Mussolini and Hitler.

The Canterbury pilgrims, more fortunate than we, had heard to the end the Squire's Tale, and were busy exchanging with one another looks of approval and satisfaction. Now was the Franklin's opportunity. He determined to be the one to break the significant silence and become the spokesman of the praise of his companions, not only by reason of his very genuine enjoyment of the narrative just concluded, but also because of the chance he thus secured to bring himself into honorable association with the gentles on the pilgrimage.

The Problem of Stephen Dedalus is one of the most curious and interesting in modern letters. One aspect of the problem has been brought to our attention recently in a very impressive book by Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961). Mr. Booth notes that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was not, by its first readers, thought to be an ironic work. It was after the publication of Ulysses, with its presentation of Stephen as the fallen Icarus, that the reassessment of Stephen's character began; and it was the publication of the Stephen Hero fragment in 1944 which really accelerated the movement toward a view of the novel as mainly ironic, with Stephen seen as a posturing esthete rather than an actual or even a potential artist. The most extreme version of this ironic view of Stephen has been proposed by Hugh Kenner, in his Dublin's Joyce (1955).

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

This study calls for globalizing recognitions and for writing less exclusionary histories. In introductory remarks, it relates two undermined cultures to current globalization and to “Western civilization” as a complex constructed from selected ancient Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian elements. Seven sections illustrate various contradictions in scholarship, in literary history, and in practice and attempt to reinsert Canaanite, Etruscan, and other suppressed civilizations into the Western and monotheistic self-valuation. The sections are titled “Etruscology,” “Recognition Politics and Paradigmatic Omissions,” “A Few Scholars,” “Recognition Textbooks,” “Canaan, Ugarit, and Biblical Scholarship,” “Demonologies,” and “Writing Writing.” The last section suggests that the original development and transmission of the alphabet could be used as another model for human commonality and for altering frameworks of interaction, knowledge, and recognition.

Wordsworth's intellectual and spiritual development terminates with the philosophy expressed in The Excursion. Here he accepts a Christian stoicism, colored strongly by ideas drawn from Kant. He even emphasizes the extreme dualism of Kant's ethics and tends to interpret morality as solely a matter of rational duty, sharply to be distinguished from a life of inclination. Indeed, he has grown very suspicious of human inclination and insists that man must transcend his natural disposition if he is to acquire any genuine dignity.

This essay endeavors to clarify the paradoxes of Jamaica Kincaid's grief in her AIDS memoir, My Brother (1997). By analyzing two related motifs—the memoir's pattern of botanical metaphors and the descriptions of her brother Devon's dying and of his corpse—the essay explores how Kincaid's melancholic commitment to Devon complicates her approach to biographical and autobiographical writing. Weighed down and consumed by her brother's affliction, Kincaid traces how Devon—or, rather, her memory of him—possesses independent powers of articulation, forcing her to confront her own implication, as a relatively privileged expatriate writer, in the political, social, and economic contexts that shape his suffering. A self-theorizing text that testifies to the changing demographics of the AIDS pandemic, My Brother also overlaps with and significantly redirects current theoretical understandings of mourning and melancholia, through its relocation of melancholic subjectivity at the intersection of postcolonial and racial anxieties.

This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China's connected past, rather than as a historical fact. The Chinese term Silk Road (sichou zhi lu; 丝绸之路) first gained currency after the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung as part of the lexicon of anticolonial solidarity. During the Cold War, China's Afro-Asian Silk Road, different from the West's Europe-Asia Silk Road, prompted new interest in the linguistic dimension of connected history. Language contact traditionally held limited significance in European and Chinese philology because linguistic divisions were understood in terms of nation or language family. For Afro-Asian scholars and writers, however, precolonial language contact became a portent of postcolonial exchange. They shifted attention from genetic word roots to historical routes (e.g., loanwords). Within a longer history of what I call “contact philology,” China's short-lived collaborations refashioned the Orient as Afro-Asia and presented an (unfinished) critique of the tropes with which we narrate the connected past.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the literary, folkloristic, and social significance of the “peasant-tournament,” a type of mock-epic generally neglected by literary historians. Perhaps the two outstanding examples of this genre are The Turnament of Totenham and the tournament in Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring, both of which appear to date from the first half of the fifteenth century. The Turnament is an alliterative burlesque written sometime before 1456 by an unknown English author, who set the scene of his work at Tottenham, a village near London. Its 234 verses tell of a peasant tournament in which doughty village swains contend for the hand of Tyb, the reeve's daughter. The tournament of Lappenhausen is the opening episode in Wittenwiler's Ring, an amazing comic-didactic poem written in northeastern Switzerland about 1420. The Ring tells of the love, courtship, and marriage, of Bertschi Triefnas and his lovely hunchbacked, flatfooted, goitered sweetheart, Metzli Ruerenzumph. In the opening scene, which comprises about a thousand verses (vv. 105-659, 830-1279), Bertschi and his twelve companions ride to the village green and challenge all comers to joust in the name of womanhood. Finding no one who dares withstand them, they joust with each other until joined by Neidhart of Reuental, a peasant-hating nobleman who arrives in disguise and gives them a thorough drubbing.

A friend, long deceased, once told me how he had decided to specialize in Japanese literature. In the early 1970s, he heard a talk by a well-known Japanologist, who contrasted China study and Japan study by citing the opening lines of two primers for foreign students. The Chinese primer began with the line “I am hungry”; the Japanese one began with the line “The cherry blossoms are falling from the sky.” My friend chose to go the way of the cherry blossoms.

In 1933, while rummaging about in the mediaeval records of Lincoln, I found a whole series of new entries concerning the Church plays of Lincoln Cathedral for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Previously one could survey the few known items concerning them in the appendix to E. K. Chambers' Mediaeval Stage. One could add to these a few more details by going to Chambers' sources, Mr. A. F. Leach and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, whose Notes on Mediaeval Services in England contains a section devoted to Lincoln customs. The extant records, however, contain a consecutive series of entries which outline with remarkable fullness the drama within the Cathedral Church from 1318 to the accession of Elizabeth.