A number of noted scholars from Jacob Grimm to Streitberg have treated this topic. The latter in his Gotisches Elementarbuch (1920) summarizes, under the corresponding heads of the syntactical part of his grammar, the results of the various investigators. I intend in this paper to make an annotation here and there to their statements. And since I have noticed that some critics waver as to where to draw the exact demarcation line, I shall start with a definition of the matter under present consideration, following in part Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik.

It is well known that from 1900 to 1906 (and even before) Proust made a thorough study of Ruskin and translated The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906). Yet it is rather startling to hear him mentioned by André Maurois as “Ruskin's great disciple,” for there does not seem to be much of an affinity between the man whose writings on the architecture of Venice have been termed: “A sermon on stones” and the passionate pilgrim of the human heart who was never hampered in his minute psychological explorations by any of the reformer's ethical theories or creeds.

Estimates of the work of the Goncourts have varied considerably. While the majority of critics have treated the inseparable brothers as one man, a few writers such as Jules Lemaître and A. de Pontmartin have insisted on drawing a distinction between these literary Siamese twins. To the minds of these critics, the novels due to the pen of Edmond alone were vastly inferior to those produced in collaboration with Jules. Among the host of critics who do not feel that a difference is discernible in the talents of the two brothers, there is further diversity of opinion. Sainte-Beuve, a friend of the Goncourts, freely recognizes their merits as collectors of notes, books, and engravings, and would grant at least that their novel Sœur Philomène appears to be drawn from life. For Emile Zola, the authors are admirable in their descriptions of human beings as related to environment. Ferdinand Brunetière finds that the Goncourts, while pretending to follow nature in the minutest detail, unconsciously illustrate the excesses of Romanticism, in their exclusive attention to the abnormalities of human nature. Paul Bourget would emphasize their determinism, which has exerted a noteworthy influence upon Alphonse Daudet and Emile Zola. A large number of critics have, of course, given special consideration to that obvious lack of organization in the work of the Goncourts which is due to their use of note-books.

Athelston is one of the most vigorous and independent of Middle English romances, yet it is one about which least is known. Various writers have commented on this “strange neglect,” but in the years since 1829 when Hartshorne first published the text in his Ancient Metrical Tales, it has only twice been made the subject of serious study. Zupitza's edition in Englische Studien XIII-XIV (1889–1890) was primarily textual in character and devoted less than two pages to questions of origin. In Englische Studien XXXVI (1906), Prof. Gerould discussed “Social and Historical Reminiscences in Athelston.” Frankly accepting Zupitza's brief conjectures as to the original personages and events of the story, he concerned himself with the study of sworn brotherhood, a custom prominently referred to in the romance, and with the interesting possibility that the characterization of king and bishop in the romance had been influenced by the vivid personalities of Henry II and Thomas Becket. Certainly their memory was as living for the fourteenth century as it had been for the twelfth since it was continually renewed by the pilgrim hosts at Becket's shrine. A story which had to tell of the quarrel between a king and a churchman might well borrow something from the traditional violence of King Henry and the fearless courage of Becket, but such influence in Athelston, if it existed at all, must have affected simply the characterization of the two dominant personalities; in other respects, in motive, detail and incident, there is no real correspondence between history and the romance. In a story so closely knit as Athelston it is unprofitable to believe that it had absorbed unrelated incidents or that it had varied very much from whatever was its basic type. From the false accusation brought by the king's friend against his sworn brother, through the king's quarrel with the archbishop who hurries to the defense of the king's sister and her husband, to the great climax when the accused pass through the ordeal by fire, the story pursues an almost inevitable course which allows for hardly one of the haphazard accretions usual in mediaeval romance.

Pablo Neruda’s first noteworthy lyric was written in 1925, at a time of unrest not only in himself but in Chilean society as well. “Galope muerto” strains the mimetic capacity of poetry. Similes without a referent and present participles without a limiting verb leave the reader reaching for some hidden source, some inner principle of experience. A new verse translation can instigate and inform the close reading of “Galope muerto,” showing what Neruda was after: an image of dynamic form, to catch things consumed yet brimming with energy, contained yet astir with life. He moves from the “dead gallop” of his title toward indigenous American calabashes resting on the earth and yet swelling with life. Twenty years later, in his major poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Neruda reanimated the Andean site, drawing on the image of suspended energy that he first explored in writing “Galope muerto.”

Many scholars have found in Hamlet's soliloquy beginning “To be, or not to be” the crux of the drama. Those who, like the Romantic critics, have interpreted the play as a struggle between Hamlet's determination to avenge his father and his inhibiting propensity to over-subtle philosophizing have felt that here, more clearly than anywhere else, he is exposing his malady: over-delicate sensibility and a love of intellectual hair-splitting which absorb energy that should have gone into decisive action. Such critics point for further confirmation to the soliloquy at the end of Act ii, in which Hamlet contrasts his own lethargy (in language far from lethargic) with the deep histrionic passion of the player who has just recited for him, and to the later soliloquy (iv. iv), in which he certainly does quite roundly chide himself for procrastination, while he confesses to have had “cause, and will, and strength, and means, / To do't.”

In the study of the heroic play it has been rather generally assumed that Dryden and his fellow-playwrights went direct to France for their models and established in England a form of drama distinct from anything that had preceded them. The French romance and the French drama, because they had an influence on the Restoration drama, have been regarded as its sole progenitors. The position of D'Avenant as the connecting link between the earlier and the later drama has been recognized; Dryden himself acknowledges his indebtedness to the author of The Siege of Rhodes. But very little has been done to show that a stream of influence percolates from the Jacobean drama through D'Avenant to the heroic play. Of course, it is easy to exaggerate resemblances, to imagine similarities of capital importance, and to proclaim a paramount influence; but, nevertheless, a prion reasons are in favor of an influence, and a comparison of the two types of drama will, it seems to me, undoubtedly show a connection between them which is more than casual.

Virginia woolf's title for the two volumes of essays collected in her lifetime, The Common Reader, has been taken for a descriptive image of the critic as impressionist or amateur reader. In the preface to her first Common Reader, Mrs. Woolf explains her title and epigraph, taken from Dr. Johnson's “Life of Gray,” in place of a statement of purpose. Her description is deliberately casual and informal, but she provides a structure and point of view for her essays by adding that the common reader does wish to create from his reading “some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.” Though Mrs. Woolf's deceptive remarks on the function of criticism may partly account for the persistent view of her as “reader” rather than “critic,” other writers have contributed to the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as an occasional essayist and impressionist, as a literary portrait painter and miniaturist; or as an antiquarian rummaging through the attics of a rather charming but peripheral past. Unsympathetic readers have carried the belletristic image further and coupled it with the conception of her fiction as a total immersion in pure subjectivity or (in Sean O'Faolain's view) as an exercise in the novel as narcissism. Yet, in fairness to reviewers of Virginia Woolf's essays, it should be noted that both favorable and unfavorable com'ments seem to be based on a similar conception of her as an appreciator or impressionist rather than a serious critic. Thus Horace Gregory, while presenting what he feels is a just and favorable estimate of Virginia Woolf as an essayist, tends to ignore her real value as a literary critic.

Langston Hughes traveled to Spain in 1937, during that Country's Civil War. He saw the Republic's Fight against Franco as an international fight against fascism, racism, and colonialism and for the rights of workers and minorities. Throughout the 1930s, Hughes organized for justice, at home and abroad, often engaging with communist and other left political organizations, like the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Workers' Order (Rampersad, Life 236, 286, 355; Scott). When the war in Spain began, in 1936, workers and intellectuals who were engaged on the left came from around the world to fight against Franco's forces; these volunteers, the International Brigades, included approximately 2,800 Americans known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which about ninety were African American (Carroll vii; “African Americans”). Hughes went to Spain to interview black antifascist volunteers in the International Brigades and write about their experiences for the Baltimore Afro-American, VolunteerforLiberty, and other publications. Much of Hughes's writing from Spain sought to explain to people at home why men and women, and African diasporic people especially, had risked their lives to fight in Spain. Hughes profiled African Americans fighting for the first time alongside white comrades in the International Brigades, including Ralph Thornton, Thaddeus Battle, and Milton Herndon (“Pittsburgh Soldier Hero,” “Howard Man,” “Milt Herndon”). In addition to writing articles, he wrote poetry, gave radio speeches, and translated poems and plays from Spanish into English. Much of Hughes's work from the Spanish Civil War has been collected in anthologies. However, so prolific was Hughes, and so fastidious was he in saving drafts and ensuring they reach his collection at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, that many unpublished works exist in archives. The four poems here represent different poetic registers and levels of polish, and they illuminate the dynamic range of Hughes's literary production during his time in Spain.

In “Tomida femina” (“A swollen woman”), a tenth-century charm written in Occitan, the vernacular of the south of France, a birthing woman and her helpers intone magical language during the most intense moments of childbirth. The poem permits us, with brief but uncommon intimacy, to imagine the lives of women long ago. It takes its place in a European tradition of birthing charms, including others written in Latin, German, and English. These charms, and in particular “Tomida femina,” provide an image of vigorous medieval women in childbirth that precedes the images of women in other secular Romance lyrics—young girls in love in the Mozarabic kharjas, idealized ladies in troubadour songs, and passionate aristocratic women in the poetry of the Occitan trobairitz.

In Absalom, Absalom!, as in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's concern is with the individual's subjective apprehension of the palpable world of experience. In the latter novels he distinguishes one character's point of view from another's by means of significant variations in language and style in those sections which present a different individual consciousness. The distinction among the four narrative perspectives in Absalom, Absalom!, however, is not stylistic, but formal. Faulkner differentiates the viewpoints in the novel by shaping each perspective after a different literary genre. It is a skillful adaptation of form to meaning, for the selection of these particular genres expresses, structurally, the imagination's subjective act of re-creating history, engaged in by four narrators emotionally involved in either Thomas Sutpen or the Southern myth: Rosa Coldfield, haunted by the moral “outrage” inflicted by the “demonic” Sutpen, shapes her narrative to the Gothic mystery; Mr. Compson, convinced of the epical proportions of the South, relates his narrative as a Greek tragedy; Quentin, obsessed by Henry's relationship with Judith because of his own involvement with Caddy, presented in The Sound and the Fury, expresses his narrative in the framework of the chivalric romance; and Shreve, the detached, intellectual Northerner, relieves the intensity of the preceding viewpoints by means of the ludicrous humor of the tall tale.

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).

Changes in Faulkner's depictions of sound during the course of his career reflect changes in his understanding of his relation to the world and of himself as an artist. In his early work, he uses images of sound to express a highly romanticized yearning for reconciliation with the world. As his career advances, regret over the passing of the world of his youth and distaste for the modern world replacing it lead him to emphasize the idea of sound as a hostile force, intent on invading the mind. In the postwar period, as he senses that his creative power is declining, he comes to envision himself and the world as engaged in a struggle for dominance, and he devises a variety of ingenious fictional stratagems with which to annul the world's sounds and to reaffirm his belief in the power of his artistic voice.

“Com neer, thou preest, come hyder, thou sir John!
Telle us swich thyng as may oure hertes glade.
Be blithe, though thou ryde upon a jade.
What thogh thyn hors be bothe foul and lene?
If he wol serve thee, rekke nat a bene.
Looke that thyn herte be murie everemo.”
“Yis, sir”, quod he, “yis, Hoost, so moot I go,
But I be myrie, ywis I wol be blamed.”
—Prologue, Nun's Priest's Tale
“But by my trouthe, if thou were seculer,
Thou woldest ben a trede‐foul aright.
For if thou have corage as thou hast myght,
Thee were nede of hennes, as I wene,
Ya, moo than seven tymes seventene.
See, whiche braunes hath this gentil preest,
So gret a nekke, and swich a large breest!
He loketh as a sperhauk with his yen;
Him nedeth nat his colour for to dyen
With brasile, ne with greyn of Portyngale.
Now, sire, faire falle yow for youre tale!”
—Epilogue, Nun's Priest's Tale
The literary pastime of finding real-life models for characters in literature is a fascinating one. In proportion as the vital statistics of the object of the literary manhunt recede in time, the fascination grows. Something akin to the possession of occult powers is felt by the literary detective who can, from a foothold in the twentieth century, reach back three, four, or five hundred years and “get his man.” Admittedly there is a real value in this kind of scholarly effort, but there is also a very real danger. The danger arises from the pleasurable self-hypnosis that often accompanies these ventures. In this state of quasi-suspended judgment, we are not always responsible for our conclusions. It is my desire to examine the results of one of these ostensibly successful manhunts in an effort to suggest that the “culprit” was not actually apprehended after all.