It has now been six years since the publication, by Professor William R. Parker, of the survey, “Foreign Language Entrance and Degree Requirements for the B.A. Degree” (PMLA, September 1953). The statistics gathered at that time have been frequently revised, the fifth revision having appeared in the September 1957 Supplement to PMLA. The findings published in that study have given teachers and administrators a clear picture of the national pattern of foreign language requirements for the B.A. degree.

The simultaneous flowering of decadent verse and ephemeral little magazines upon the English literary scene of the 1890's is remarked as of central interest in the literary histories of the period. The two phenomena were closely related, for the poets of the English decadent “movement” and the editors of the new periodicals were for the most part members of the same extensive London coterie. The members of the Rhymers' Club were closely identified with the clusters of writers gathered around the Yellow Book, the Dome, and the Savoy; and with few exceptions the production of the group as a whole has come to be regarded as exhibiting certain morbidly exotic traits which gave the predominantly “decadent” flavor to the period. Of the many little magazines which served as admirable show-cases for this decadent poetry, none is more often cited as embodying the spirit of the age than the Savoy. Edited by Arthur Symons, illustrated largely by Aubrey Beardsley, and repeatedly presenting the work of Ernest Dowson, the periodical seemed, during its single year of existence—1896—to speak for all the arch-decadents except the already disgraced Wilde. Bernard Muddiman's description of the Savoy as “the fine flower of the publications of the age” sums up the achievement of its eight numbers; his references to it as providing the pages upon which “the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home” sums up its reputation. Yet the reader who turns to the Savoy expecting to find a luscious garden of exotic and forbidden poetry will be largely disappointed, for its verse has less of extravagance and perversity than is ordinarily implied by the description of literature as “decadent.” There is a real danger of misinterpreting the poetry of the decade whenever it is approached along the beaten paths of ruling preconceptions about the “decadent spirit” of the 1890's. The examination of the representative sample of verse provided by the Savoy illustrates the desirability of revaluating that spirit.

On 27 September 1871 there appeared in an inconspicuous corner of the New York Tribune a piece by Mark Twain entitled “The Revised Catechism.” Obviously drawing on his Sunday School memories of the Westminster Catechism for the form of the contribution, Clemens makes use also of the Bible (a work thoroughly learned in his boyhood and never forgotten) for striking satirical effect. “The Revised Catechism” is a scathing denunciation of Boss Tweed and his associates—as accomplished a group of rascals as ever pillaged a public treasury—and at the same time an indictment of the age that permitted such men to thrive. The story of the Tammany Ring is too well known to need retelling here; but to make clear the reasons that led Mark Twain to the writing of his satire and to demonstrate the ironical character of his references, so apposite to the day and hour, it is necessary to consider briefly the part played in the exposure of the Ring by its two principal antagonists—one, the cartoonist, Thomas Nast, and the other, the New York Times.

In that section of his “tale” which treats the deadly sin of Ire, Chaucer's Parson observes that from this sin come various “stynkynge engendrures,” including manslaughter, or homicide.

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.

In a previous paper, “The Origin of the Ancren Riwle,” I showed that a remarkable series of coincidences would seem to prove that the Ancren Riwle was written for the three “puellae” (Emma, Christina, and Gunhilda), to whom the hermitage of Kilburn, together with land and three corrodies, was granted by the abbot and convent of Westminster c. 1134. Their house was described in the foundation charter as “heremitorium de Cuneburna, quod aedificavit Godwynus,” and it was given to the three young women “concessu tamen, atque precatu illius Godwyni heremitae, quatinus eundem locum qui ad ilium pertinet in elemosina pro redemptione animarum totius praedicti conventus fratrum possideant.” The gift was made, not only to the three maidens in question, but “omnibus illis quae inibi eadem sanctitatis vitae norma fruendi causa futurae sunt.” Godwin, who had evidently instigated the establishment, was to oversee it: “Sit ille praescriptus heremita Godwynus, magister loci, illarumque puellarum quamdiu vixerit custos. Et post ejus obitum eligat conventus puellarum seniorem ydoneum, qui earum ecclesiae praesit, abbatis tamen concilio.” Some further information as to the nucleus of Kilburn Priory is given us by Prior Flete of Westminster in the fifteenth century. He writes of Abbot Herebert: “Iste fundavit cellam canonissarum de Kilborn, ubi prius quidam nomine Godwinus heremiticam multo tempore ducebat vitam. . . . statuit tres virgines Deo sacratas, domicellas videlicet camerae Matildis bonae reginae, consortis regis Henrici primi.”

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.

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.

William Hazlitt is read to-day as an essayist and a critic of literature. His art-criticism, except for a few papers preserved in his best known books, is familiar to few readers, and to them it will probably remain a matter of curious interest rather than of serious concern. Before Hazlitt's day even, the foundations had been laid, in the works of Wincklemann and Lessing, of a more precise study of aesthetic principles, which was destined to make obsolete most of the eighteenth-century treatises on art; with their works Hazlitt was, like most other English writers of his day, unacquainted. He was thus so far removed from the best thought of his time that his opinions on art have, for the student of aesthetic theory, little historical importance. The archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century, the rise of impressionism in painting, the spread in all quarters of art and criticism of what may be somewhat roughly termed the naturalistic movement, and especially the development of a more strict and comprehensive study of aesthetic principles, have combined to make large sections of Hazlitt's theoretic discussions unacceptable to-day.

The recent expansion of literary theory and the invocation of politics in this theory contribute and respond to the tensions sustaining literature departments. Though created and nourished by specialization, the profession bases its legitimation on a generalist ideology that opposes or denies the reification on which the profession depends. This justification claims an important political function for literature departments, but theory's structures of self-presentation, as well as the exigencies of a bureaucratized academy, undermine these political ends. In literary theory, a misleading conflation of institutional and national politics is absolutely unavoidable. To maintain the allimportant fiction of the general utility of literary study, one must elide the difference between the politics of the university and those of the republic. Theory is essential to the institutions sustaining literary study and necessarily more and less political than it might claim.

Working at the intersection of translation theory and medical humanities, this article interrogates the term brain fever, which Constance Garnett, adhering to clichés of English sentimental fiction, uses in reference to a wide variety of medical conditions in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Garnett's choice has become useful shorthand for the narrative function of delirium in Dostoevsky's works, but it obscures the sensitivity to medical terminology that informs the Russian texts. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky stages the conflict between Enlightenment rationality and religious mysticism by satirizing the terminology of medical authorities and contrasting it with the language of faith, which posits its own etiology for mental diseases. Garnett's abundance of interpolated brain fevers can be read not as a simple mistranslation but as marking the roles of translation and diagnosis in mediating the various cultural paradigms produced in fictional worlds.

Correspondance was a belgian surrealist magazine, from the earliest years of the movement, that can be read as a Challenge to the notions of surrealism promoted in André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924. It was a self-published periodical comprising twenty-two one-page tracts, written and distributed over seven months in 1924 and 1925 by three francophone Belgian writers, Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans, and Marcel Lecomte. The most important of these was undoubtedly the one who published least: Nougé, the intellectual leader of the Brussels surrealist group. In addition to scattered publications of startling originality throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he was at that time also a key promoter of René Magritte's art; at weekly meetings of the group (whose members had day jobs and could only gather on Sunday), Magritte's latest paintings were discussed, and Nougé, mostly, proposed their enigmatic titles.

Based on an analysis of three literary texts about Dayaks—the indigenous peoples of Kalimantan (Borneo) in Indonesia—this essay argues that strategic submission can play an important role in indigenous peoples' attempts to obtain and maintain agency under the shadow of dominant discourse. Discussions foundational to the field of postcolonial studies have tended to focus on the importance of subversion, resistance, and counterdiscourse in liberating the oppressed subject. Taking reading cues from anthropological and sociological accounts of Dayak compliance with various constructions of Dayaks, this essay looks at how the writing of literature about Dayaks (by both non-Dayaks and Dayaks) functions as an enactment of and meditation on the application of dominant discourse to indigenous peoples and the opportunities that such discourse affords for carving out spaces of autonomy.

This article contributes to the new formalism by considering the relation between literary form and race. It argues that Chang-rae Lee's novel Native Speaker is primarily concerned with its own figurative activity and that only when the analytic framework is shifted away from Asian America and toward allegory does the novel's far-ranging critique of whiteness, referential language, and native speaking become apparent. This figurative activity consists of strategies of concealment that disguise their artfulness by posing as self-evident or referential. Race, espionage, and allegory are examples of this representational mode, defined by hiding in plain sight. As part of a larger argument for formal analysis in Asian American literature, the article explores how the novel's central tropes figure the figuration of Asian American experience, and it seeks to demonstrate how reading for form can sharpen the politics of race.

To speak of the future of literary criticism is always to speak of the future of literature, which is a mode of language and an institution whose very being essentially touches on the possibility and fragility of its own future. “The fragility of literature,” as Richard Klein suggests, “its susceptibility to being lost,” is at the heart of all literary writing, which emerges from the absence of a “real referent” and thus sustains itself through its reference to other texts, to the archive of literary writing that is made up of figures and other literary articulations that allow us to read. Klein reminds us, citing Jacques Derrida, that literary texts may always disappear: not only because they may be forgotten but also because they are susceptible to the erasure of the archive, to apocalyptic destruction, and to the collective loss of the knowledge of how to read—as a result of new modes of media saturation or, I would add, through the collapse of readability in the age of what Hannah Arendt calls “the modern lie” (“Truth” 253). The force and fragility of literature and of literary criticism are bound up with the possible disappearance of the literary archive, which we implicitly confront in reading literature and in pursuing its forms and thoughts as literary critics.

Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's novel Hānsulī Bānker upakathā ‘The Tale of Hansuli Turn’ (1946–51) straddles the period of independence and partition in India. Its literary staging of the creolized Bengali spoken by a marginal, un‐touchable, semiaboriginal group is both formally innovative and politically imaginative. Tārāshankar disperses the book's glossary throughout its text, and the workings of this glossary embody an unusual perspective on class and caste segregation in modern India. Te novel's historical narrative tells of the disin‐tegration of a rustic, semifeudal Kahar community under the crises of war and modernity in the 1940s. While this history says that proletarianization and loss of idiom are inevitable for such figures of the rural margins, Hānsulī Bānker elaborates a counterfactual possibility. Tis alternative history is not simply a romanticized novelistic preservation of a dying way of life but a minimal imag‐ining of a different line of connection between the realm of subalternity and the public sphere. In its reimagining, Hānsulī Bānker also rethinks and prefigures modern India's other internal partitions, internal diasporas, and emergent political dilemmas and the history of the Bengali novel itself.