The aim of the ill-fated 1922 Congress of Paris, an international conference organized by André Breton, was to diagnose the sources of the “modern spirit.” Although the congress had ambitious international goals, it was brought down by a remark with xenophobic connotations. Largely remembered today as the death knell of Paris Dada—the public fight between Tristan Tzara and Breton meant not only that the congress never took place but also that Paris Dada was dissolved—the congress's failure stemmed from the tensions involved in selfconsciously deining modernism. Arguing that ambivalence over the concept shaped the main participants' understanding of the congress, I read the congress as a concrete manifestation of the impulse to federate the arts in post-World War I France.

While Botticelli's unusual figuration of the Virgin as writer in his Madonna del Magnificat (c. 1483) testifies to an important event in literary history—the appearance of the woman author in quattrocento northern Italy—it also testifies against her, employing a pictorial equivalent of the humanists' “rhetoric of impossibility,” which construes the female writer as a miraculous, hence ephemeral, phenomenon. At the same time, however, Botticelli's painting reveals the emergence of a competing imperative in the late quattrocento Latin and vernacular defenses of women by Laura Cereta, Bartolomeo Goggio, and others: the construction of the woman writer as ordinary, thus “possible.”

Who “Invented” the monologue intérieur or “inner monologue” as a literary device? And who was the first to coin and use this literary formula? These two questions have been for some time a matter for debate. Edouard Dujardin, in a book which was a mixture of naive arrogance with interesting and penetrating observations, defended somewhat heatedly his own priority as the “inventor” of this literary method, and dismissed rather airily various rival claims put forth on behalf of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Poe, Browning, and others, by André Gide, Charles du Bos, and René Lalou. Dujardin's own priority had been recognized by Joyce, whom Dujardin himself regarded as the most thorough and perfect practitioner of the method initiated by him, and by Valery Larbaud, who had applied the formula to Joyce's Ulysses and later practiced the method himself.

Late eighteenth-century esteem for the moral qualities of the satires of Juvenal reflects a tradition which began with the church fathers. Renaissance critics praised Juvenal's style, which Boileau called “sublime.” Dryden, Dennis, and Johnson concurred with this neoclassical opinion. Putting Juvenal's sentiments into Christian contexts was not peculiar to the “Post-Augustans,” who continued Renaissance and neoclassical tradition. As Christian humanists, they used Juvenal's satires to supply “sentences” to add weight to their own moral sentiments.

While Edmund Burke was a student at Trinity College, his native Dublin was rocked by the agitation of the celebrated patriot and apothecary, Charles Lucas (1713–71), who wished to restore the ancient rights of the freemen of the city which was then governed as a closed oligarchy by the Board of Aldermen. Tension was heightened when one of Dublin's representatives to the Irish House of Commons died on 16 August 1748 and Lucas quickly issued the first of twenty addresses in support of his candidacy for the seat. Lucas pandered to the mob—his “most thoroughly beloved brethren and friends”—and begged them to believe he was and ever would be theirs “with the utmost Sincerity, true Respect, unfeigned Love, and boundless Gratitude.” He avowed the noblest intentions: “No man, let his Pretensions, or his Places, be what they will, loves his Country better than I. It is this that prompts me to attempt the Restoration of her Constitution to its natural Strength and Vigour.” His appeal was directed primarily to the Protestant freeholders of Dublin, who were struggling to supplant the clique dominating political life in the interests of the Viceroy and his “undertakers” with officials and a parliament representative of their views. Lucas wished to inspire these freemen to achievements as great as those of the citizens of Rome or Athens.

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.

All critics of Thomas Deloney's novels have commented on the frequent passages in which, dropping his ordinary colloquial style, he indulges in euphuistic references to alleged wonders of natural history. His editor, Mr. F. O. Mann, explains many of the references by citing a probable source like Stephen Batman's Batman vppon Bartholome (1582) and highly improbable sources like Pliny, Sextus Empiricus, Cornelius Nepos, Belleforest, and the Nuremberg Chronicle. As I have recently shown, a large number of Deloney's “facts” about natural history and of his erudite-looking anecdotes were lifted directly from Thomas Fortescue's translation, The Forest or Collection of Historyes (1571, 1576). Many others (as well as a few that I supposed to have come from The Forest) were taken from Stephen Batman's The Doome warning all men to the Iudgemente (1581) and Thomas Johnson's Cornucopiæ, Or diuers secrets … Newlie drawen out of diuers Latine Authors into English (1595).

The critical history of Molière's Dom Juan is full of uncertainties and controversy on literary and many other grounds. Among its competent critics there seems to be no clear-cut decision for or against the play. Its enemies willingly ascribe to it a high degree of excellence, even to calling it a masterpiece. Its friends, not all of whom agree that it is such, are equally willing to find fault with much of it. Friend or foe, those who call it a masterpiece do not say with any precision what they mean: There is a marked tendency on the part of most writers to pass it over with a minimum of comment of any kind.

So much ink has already been spilt in discussing the relationship between Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that one may very well hesitate before adding his jot. Yet the interaction of these two uncomfortably brilliant personalities is of exceptional interest both for their psychological drama and for the literature they wrote because of each other. As drama their relationship may be divided into three acts: friendship, estrangement, and enmity. Unfortunately, with the sparse documentation that survives, the action must be patiently reconstructed from fragmentary clues. Since both chief actors had complex, if not crafty minds, their motives are not simple, and must be carefully and sceptically determined. To favor either Lady Mary or Pope is to distort their drama; one must try instead to judge impartially on the basis of the facts that remain. At present, with valuable new data added to a fresh appraisal of the old, an account may be given which is less equivocal and more credible.

In the early twentieth century, a period of mass immigration, Jewish assimilation into mainstream American society was largely a theatrical venture. The musical theater, a predominantly Jewish field that portrayed a variety of American experiences, offers powerful illustrations of theatrical strategies of Jewish assimilation. The groundbreaking Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1943), created during one of the most anti-Semitic periods in United States history, exemplifies how ethnic outsiders demonized a racial other in an effort to be considered white and thus to be included in the utopian (theatrical) community of America.

In an article published in ELH I attempted to describe the intense admiration for Browning that existed in Pre-Raphaelite circles during the years 1847–56, and to suggest the importance of this admiration in furthering the growth of Browning's literary reputation. I pointed out that the proselytizing zeal of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the chief source for the enthusiasm of his friends, and that the Browning worship of the whole group of Pre-Raphaelites reached its height at the time of the publication of Men and Women in 1855. In the present article I propose to trace the influence of Rossetti in kindling devotion to Browning's poetry, especially Men and Women, among certain Oxford undergraduates in the years immediately after the publication of Men and Women, and to draw conclusions about the significance of this in the story of Browning's gradual advance to fame.

It has been stated repeatedly by Professor James L. Barker of the University of Utah that in French the breath stream is interrupted in certain cases after the production of a sound and that the position for the following sound is taken in silence during the interruption. The cases mentioned specifically in which such interruptions occur are the transitions from consonant to vowel, from vowel to consonant, and from consonant to consonant.

Sir Edmund Chambers writes that “Peele's hand has been sought in nearly every masterless play of his epoch.” The evidence advanced for such attributions has usually consisted mainly of parallel passages and verbal tests, with the result that plays as different in structure as The Troublesome Reign of King John and King Leir have been fathered upon Peele by the same critic. Most scholars have been inclined to overlook the importance of structure as a means of determining authorship, though the dramas of Jonson and Shakespeare structure appears to be as much a constant as style or characterization. It is the purpose of this paper to show that Peele's known plays reveal a fairly constant type of structure, and that this type can be used as a determinant in considering the authorship of anonymous plays.

How might early modern studies participate in the larger conversations and transformations of postcolonial studies while attending to the specificities of the age? How might we develop and mobilize period-specific understandings of a moment when states aspire to both empire and nation? My inquiry is motivated not only by the questions posed by the cluster of essays to which it belongs but also by the generalized, and often historically imprecise, move to transnationalism as a catchall for work that complicates our traditional nation-based categories. As I will suggest here, despite the strategic advantages of transnationalism for forging trans-historical connections, for developing a critical pedagogy, and for interrogating our own academy, the approach threatens to occlude the intertwined histories of nation and empire, even as it fails to capture the liminal, transitional qualities of the early modern. Instead, I propose a focus on imperium, to highlight the mimetic rivalries occurring among emergent empires at the very time they solidify sovereignty. Imperium studies challenges the self-sufficient histories of nation and empire by arguing for their imbrication and competition: only a plural history of the intersections among them can provide the full picture. Moreover, imperium studies explicitly engages with the multiple early modern temporalities, as well as allegiances—to an imperial future, certainly, but also to a classical past that remained central as exemplar and motivator and to the imperfect, incomplete work of nation making.

Translation is a synthetic approach to interpretation and a paradoxical awareness of the crisis of language. Some of the translator's problems, such as rhythms, grammar, lexical layers, syntax, are illustrated with critical reference to the five published English translations of Celan's “Todesfuge”; their resolution leads to creative apprehension. The provenience of the poem is biblical. The devices of oxymoron, surrealist metaphor, disparate rhythms and meter, inversion of time sequence, and the erotic countersubject all function as verbal correlatives to the paradox and absurdity which aie the poem's theme and represent a peculiar combination of esoteric artistry and commitment. The fugue is structured by four voices (statements with contrapuntal variations) and the echoed simultaneity of “poppy” (verbal narcotic) and “remembrance” (of unreal reality). The poem is placed in the frame of Celan's later development.

A recent article of Leon Livingstone rightly calls attention to the importance of Pérez Galdós' assimilation of Cervantine irony as a forerunner of the concern of modern Spanish novelists about the autonomy of their characters. The unreality of rationalism, which Livingstone holds to be the germ of El amigo Manso, the imagination's capacity to create reality at the heart of Misericordia, lead to the even bolder experiments in the artistic representation of reality undertaken by Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Pérez de Ayala. Anomalous for his time yet so pervasive in his work is Galdós' employment of “interior duplication” that a separate study would contribute to our fuller understanding of his art as well as to our measure of the advances in the Spanish novel of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The present essay focuses on Galdós' developing skill with internal repetitions from La Fontana de Oro (publ. 1870), through the rich complexities of the novels written between 1886–89, to their almost stylized simplicity in El abuelo (1897). Always related to Cervantine irony, the variety of verbal echoes, the mirroring of one character in another, the unconscious illumination each may offer the other, underscore the increasingly intimate wedding of form and matter with which Galdós came to unfold his narratives.

Macaulay's essay on The Life and Writings of Addison has been signalized by his most recent biographer as probably “his soundest piece of literary criticism.” Published in July, 1843, when he was at the height of his critical and stylistic powers, the work reveals both the strength and weaknesses of its author. It takes its point of departure as a review of Miss Lucy Aikin's Life of Joseph Addison, published in 1843 by Macaulay's own publishers, Longman and associates. After paying his respects to the lady author, he brushes aside the contributions in her work with severe strictures on its errors. In the prospect that the charm of Addison's letters, many of them printed in the biography for the first time, might brings a demand for a second edition of the Life, he concludes his remarks by saying: “If so, we hope that every paragraph will be revised, and that every date and fact about which there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully verified.” While making numerous corrections in Miss Aikin's work, Macaulay failed to produce a study any less in need of such checking of facts. As will be shown, this need is most notable in his spirited account of one of the salient episodes in Addison's career—the writing and publishing of the Campaign (1704).

Nearly everyone knows that behind Browning's Childe Roland lies a vast contributory reservoir of chivalric romance. The hero of the poem is obviously engaged in a quest, drawn out through a number of years and attended by continual disappointments, a quest which he shares with a band of other adventurers who have been lost in their attempts to achieve. Roland's coming to the Tower, under these circumstances, while it may not be duplicated in any one romance, is patently a chivalric enterprise of a familiar type. Our recognition of this fact makes the poem much less the mystery that early commentators found it. And yet many puzzling details still remain to be explained.