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 unity of Beowulf is at least secure in the person of the hero whose character and actions provide the basis for any critical examination of structure and theme. According to some, this is all that holds the epic together. Others see more than a sequence of disconnected episodes related to one person. In their view, the fights with Grendel and his dam are united to the dragon fight in the opposition of hero and king, youth and age, the beginning and ending of a life of achievement. It is in their spirit that I have attempted to take a fresh view of the subject with special reference to unity of theme and treatment. The suggestion is that this unity is to be found in the theme of redemption and judgment treated in a way which skilfully blends the Germanic hero with the Christian saint. The symbolism is not regarded as contrived or studied, but rather as of that kind which is the usual result of an author's finding an apt subject to illustrate his theme. A symbolic interpretation does not, after all, exclude a literal interpretation; it contains it. The dragon, for instance, can be both a universal symbol and a very literal and particular monster. We have surely become too literal-minded if we suppose that the audience of Beowulf could see no universal significance in the epic story because they accepted the literal truth of the narrative. The many symbolical interpretations of the Biblical narrative during the period which followed bear witness to the improbability of this view. Once the underlying theme of redemption and judgment is adopted and is seen to be the epic theme par excellence, the process of selection from myth and legend becomes somewhat clearer, and there is no longer the necessity to account for a gap between the Grendel fights and the dragon fight. The details in the fifty-year reign of the hero would have been irrelevant. An epic is surely not a biography nor a chronicle nor a mythology, although it draws upon all these.

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.

Through her name and position at court Hélène de Surgères brings to Ronsard’s last collection of sonnets two conflicting referential systems: a literary tradition in which, beginning with the Iliad, Helen is a figure of love and war and a more or less realistic imitation of events in French society and the court of Charles ix. Ronsard adopts a local court convention in which love for Hélène allows successful evasion of the miseries of the civil wars, but he criticizes the convention by displacing its allegorical intent—transcendence of mundane and temporal difference—with an irony that internalizes and preserves that difference. Thus the irony, in aiming to avoid the referential contexts, actually marks them as ineradicable. Instead of presenting a platonizing view of the lady, the Sonnets pour Hélène reveal in her an inescapable contradiction that also is within the poems’ je and its constructions.

Introduction: The Francophone Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Overlooked American Francophone Novel Le Vieux Salomon, Ou Une Famille D'Esclaves Au XIXE Siècle (OLD SOLOMON; OR, A Slave Family in the Nineteenth Century), by Charles Testut (1819-92), offers a contemporaneous description of slavery as a global commerce with international causes and effects. The novel's geographic scope, as well as Testut's interest in contrasting the life in the French Caribbean with slavery in the United States, makes Old Solomon an ideal text through which to examine the representation of economic and cultural circulation in the Americas. Old Solomon is a clear response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), with some similar characters and situations, but is more trangressive and violent.

I speak to you tonight as an ex-administrator attempting to remember some of the intellectual activities that came to his notice in earlier years at the Library of Congress and UNESCO, and which in the setting of the present time seem worthy of attention. It has seemed to me for a long time that mankind has been moving toward one-worldness in fact and to a lesser extent in spirit and in institutions. It has also seemed to me important to speed up the process of creating one world in spirit and of going the necessary distance to create institutions of a world-wide character to suppress the causes of war.

A great deal of attention has been given to the surge of critical interest in metaphysical poetry that followed the publication of Herbert Grierson's edition of John Donne's poems in 1912. Theodore Spencer and Mark Van Doren, for instance, have examined the revival of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets from 1912 to 1938. The achievement of these and of other recent critics has tended to obscure the earlier phase of the metaphysical revival. It has been assumed frequently that the revival began with Grierson's edition and that current theories about the sensibility reflected in metaphysical poetry were first presented in some essays by T. S. Eliot that appeared in the early 1920's. In reality, however, Grierson's edition and the reviews that acclaimed it marked the end of the first stage of the metaphysical revival. His edition was no doubt in part the cause of the enthusiasm about Donne that reached a scholarly climax in 1931 with the observance of the tercentenary of the poet's death. It was also the result of the increased interest in Donne's poetry and personality that began during the later decades of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Eliot's essays were not so much a new note as a sensitive formulation of ideas that had become familiar by 1912.

The theory of Heinzel. Style and Metre: connected. The Metre. Four accents versus Eight accents. The Alliteration.

Much has been written about the influence of the early reviewers on Tennyson. Professor Lounsbury, who has made the only real printed effort at a scholarly analysis of the question, believed the influence to be very slight. I shall attempt here to collect and sift the evidence afresh and to determine as clearly as possible the part which the reviewers played in Tennyson's ten-years' silence after the publication of his first two independent volumes (1830, 1833), in his revisions and suppressions of poems in them, and in his choice of subjects and expression of ideas in the new poems of 1842.

The introduction of French neo-classical drama into Spain in the eighteenth century met the most determined opposition on the part of patriotic Spaniards. French lyric and epic poetry had little influence, for France had given comparatively little attention to them during the great period of Louis XIV. The fable, satire, letters, and other genres were accepted in Spain without causing much disturbance. It was not so with the drama.

Scholars are now fairly well agreed that the Latin preposition ab, far from dying out, has remained extremely active in France and that the French à, when denoting separation, origin, causation, manner, means, agent, and accompaniment, is its direct descendant. And yet the theory still persists that in Italy this same preposition disappeared completely in the eighth century after the emergence of da and that the Italian a, regardless of its meaning, always corresponds to Latin ad. E. Richter believed that the use of a in stereotyped phrases like a destra, a malizia, a causa, a bello studio, etc., was borrowed from French or Provençal and that modal a (stare a testa china) and instrumental a (pregare a mani giunte) descended from Latin ad. As Muller says nothing about a, I take it that he, too, sees in it only a representative of ad. Likewise Graur, after stating that apud and ab have not survived in Italian, declares that it is a<ad which, besides denoting locality, introduces the instrument and agent.

The conviction of Miss Helen Darbishire, to which she has given expression in the Appendix to The Manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book I, and later in Early Lives of Milton (xvi-xxvii), that the anonymous Life of Milton was the work of John Phillips, the poet's nephew, is so strong that, after having stated it and given her reasons therefore, she uses the suggested authorship as a certainty in the title she gives to the Life and elsewhere throughout the Early Lives of Milton. Her argument is two-fold:

1. In a manuscript of John Phillips's poem, “A Satyr against Hypocrites,” is “a page and a half of Dedication signed by John Phillips. This dedication “written in a formal Italian hand,” she believes to be his. She also believes that certain marginal notes and textual corrections are in his hand. Comparing these specimens of what she believes to be John Phillips's handwriting with the handwriting of the anonymous Life, she “was struck at once by the similarity of the handwriting” in the two manuscripts.

The Centaur is a complete ritual, a patterned ceremony of word and action in which Peter Caldwell celebrates his former experiences with his father. The explicit use of the Greek Chiron-myth serves the functions of comedy, a sign of Caldwell's estrangement from the Olinger aristocrats, and a quality of Peter's memories. What sustained Peter during the three days that he spent in town with his father was his adolescent myth of Art, the City, and the Future, by which he hoped to answer the tyranny of time and the inevitability of death. Now, in his atheist maturity, with that myth tarnished, he must depend upon a reenactment of his father's sacrifices for him, another myth that enables him to face the transcendent questions of time, life, and death. Man is presented as a creature in the middle, a participant in the conceivable and the inconceivable, a mediator between heaven and earth. The ritual actions of The Centaur—notably the lectures on the universe by Caldwell and Chiron, the obituary, and George's acceptance of life in the final chapter— serve as actions of communion or as actions against death in an atmosphere of the Barthian visibilia et itwisibilia.

It seems incredible that the analogues and sources for the “gentle bird” of reconciliation between Timias and Belphebe in the Faerie Queene (Bk. IV, 8, 3-12)—one of the loveliest guiding beasts in literature—should have escaped investigation. But, though a few scattered notes have been published on the passage in question, no one, so far as I am aware, has yet pointed out a satisfactory source or parallel.