Manuel GonzÁlez prada (1844-1918), like inca garcilaso de la vega, César vallejo, josé marÍa arguedas, and mario vargas llosa, ranks among the top Peruvian literary figures, but only in Peru, where his work is hotly debated by literati, social scientists, historians, politicians, and journalists. Outside Peru he rates no more than the inclusion in anthologies of one of his poems; his most famous essay, “Nuestros indios” (“Our Indians”); or the occasional critical article on his work. However, with the Cuban José Martí (1853-95), González Prada is a founder of Latin American modernism, a movement that critics generally accept as running roughly from the publication of Rubén Darío's Azul, in 1888, to Darío's death, in 1916. Gordon Brotherston notes that Darío coined the term modernismo the same year he published Azul (vii). There are many reasons there has been less interest in González Prada than in Martí and other modernists. To begin with, Darío, in an 1888 visit to Peru, met with Ricardo Palma but not González Prada (Castro). Palma, writing in a more traditional style—even though he invented a genre, tradiciones—was the establishment's literary darling, while González Prada, always the innovator in style and an agitator in subject matter, remained largely unknown outside his native land. Thus, it made perfect sense that the maker of literary movements would visit the internationally known Palma but not González Prada, who could not add to his fame and expanding literary networks. Furthermore, when Darío later went to New York he turned his epistolary relationship with Martí into a personal friendship (Henríquez Ureña 93). In the United States there is much more interest in Martí, who lived here, than in González Prada, who did not. Hispanic modernism is typically understood to include the like-minded people whom Darío knew personally, such as Martí, Julián del Casal (Cuba), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (Mexico), Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Bolivia), and Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spain), and to exclude those whom he did not, such as Adela Zamudio (Bolivia) and González Prada. Finally, González Prada's anarchism, his feminism, and his tell-it-like-it-is essays did not endear him to many people.

This essay identifies a tension between speed and slowness that emerged circa 1800, when a self-conscious awareness of seemingly rapid social change intersected with the enhanced understanding of slowness developing in geological theory. Focusing on Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith, the essay shows how Romantic poetry and geology think together about slow time and incongruous temporality. Slow time raises formal problems about how to represent temporal processes that operate below the level of the visual and the tangible. he slow time of geology ultimately offered Romantic poetry a new sense of how an apparent lack of eventfulness can be understood as eventful when placed on a longer timeline. Romantic poetry, in turn, drew in fine detail on geology's expanded scales of temporality to offer an imaginative understanding of the infinitesimal rates of change and the gradual processes central to slow time.

In an edition of a portion of Codex Alcobacensis 200 [ff. 195 Ro. to 219 Vo.] it was pointed out that the codex, no part of which had been edited before, is one of the oldest Portuguese manuscripts in the Alcobaça collection. It is described in part by Anselmo as follows: “Pergaminho.—277×204—[222 fl.];. . . recl. no firn de cada cad. de 10 fl.—leira gótica do séc. XV.—rubr.; iniciais a verm. e azul, filigranadas.” Burnam ascribes it to the fourteenth century and describes it as follows:

Ce ms. consiste en 212 ff. de parchemin, plus un f. de papier préliminaire, où se trouve le titre de l'ouvrage. L'écriture est à longues lignes, avec fleurons, lettres initiales rouges et bleues en alternative; le ms. est sans traits d'union ni titre courant. Presque tous les cahiers contiennent dix ff.; une fois il y en a six, deux fois huit, tous fournis de réclames, sauf le dernier.

Shakespeare's sonnets are designed to seem written by a poet and spoken by a lover. This conspicuous ambidexterity, compounded by our declining tolerance for such deftness, has made them infamously problematic. They simultaneously flaunt and flout the correspondence between the lover's pen and his heart, between the artifice of his “rhetoric,” characteristic of much Tudor literature, and the rhetoric of his sincerity, characteristic of the Romantic poetics that has proven their sternest judge. The sonnets thus pose internally the very problem that informs their extensive interpretive history. But they also propose its solution: their sustained balance of verba and res, of verbally erotic and hermeneutically chaste designs, exalts the conflict of these designs, displaying its poetic power. And this paradoxical resolution of the poet's dilemma solves the critic's as well: it suggests a way of making a richly correspondent and yet reasoned sense of the sonnets and, indeed, of any literary text.

The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann's Happy End and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's On the Frontier. Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist “irony,” “estrangement,” and “difficulty” and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics in Happy End and On the Frontier trigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to “make it new” blurs into the established patterns of melodrama.

The United States looms large in the Latin American literary imagination. From Domingo Sarmiento and José Martí in the nineteenth century to Octavio Paz and Alberto Fuguet in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many Latin American writers have depicted the United States in their writings and pondered the cultural and historical significance of their powerful neighbor to the north. But perhaps no Latin American writer has had as close—and complicated—a relationship with the United States as Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes was a fierce critic of American culture and United States foreign policy; at the same time, there was much that he admired about the United States, and it was clear that he was eager to have his voice heard here.

In 1926, coming upon Spengler's Decline of the West, Yeats was amazed and delighted. “Here is a very strange thing,” he wrote to Sturge Moore, “which will show you what I meant when I wrote of individual man not being shut up in a bottle.” While he had been drawing his diagrams for the historical sketch in A Vision, Spengler's first edition had been going through the press. Had there been some occult communication? “I can almost say… that there is no difference in our interpretation of history (an interpretation that had never occurred to anybody before) that is not accounted for by his great and my slight erudition.” Though Yeats exaggerated, the similarities are substantial; but the means of communication are more various than he wished to allow. Many of Spengler's views were far from novel; and Yeats's early acquaintance with philosophies of history was much broader than his disclaimers of erudition imply. In fact, by 1895 his own historical symbolism was taking clear form; and like Spengler's system, it was amply nourished by the common thought of nineteenth-century Europe.

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.

By way of caution a sub-title should be added: “A Set of Questions”—questions, that is, to which I do not presume to return a positive answer.

The classical parallels (Vergil, Homer) of Beowulf's obsequies as well as the Jordanes parallel are well known to students of Old English literature (cf. Klaeber's edition, pp. 209, 213, 216). It is especially the latter which has commonly been considered of very great value as illustrating the authentic character of the notable closing scene of Beowulf. “The accuracy [of the Beowulfian funeral],” says Chadwick1—to cite an English authority—“is confirmed in every point by archeological or contemporary literary evidence. We may refer especially to the account of Attila's funeral given by Jordanes.” Again, “the agreement between the two versions could not possibly be greater; here [i.e., in the recital of Attila's obsequies] everything is Germanic”—this was the verdict of Kögel,2 who regarded that 49th chapter of Jordanes' history3 as a most precious source of information on ancient Germanic poetry. It is true, certain differences between the sixth century and the eighth century version did not escape observation, as may be seen from Chambers' Introduction to Beowulf, p. 124, or from Klaeber's Edition, p. 216. But it remained for Edward Schröder's incisive article (ZfdA. LIX, 240-44) to aim a deadly blow at the famous account of Attila's funeral as currently interpreted.

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.

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.