By giving a brief history of emotivism in close reading, this article offers a new context for understanding the contemporary uneasiness about close reading and about the proliferating array of alternative kinds of reading it has prompted. Emotivism refers to the subcurrent of linguistic thought that shaped the institutional formation of New Critical closeness by distinguishing propositional from emotive meaning. Instead of amending our closeness to texts by dispensing with critique, or focusing on surfaces and description to the exclusion of textual depth, either of which might inadvertently encourage new kinds of emotivism, this article suggests we bear in mind—as the conversation goes on—the mid-century counteremotivist critics, such as Kenneth Burke, who advocated a kind of reading attuned to the interactive processes held in apparent stasis by literary form.

Imported material forms were central to the settlement of Australia as a penal colony, beginning with the “discovery” of the continent by James Cook, who took possession of New South Wales in 1770 by naming Possession Island. The first part of this article traces the intersection in early journals and legal records between material instability and naming, arguing that as Aboriginal peoples and convicts challenged the social meaning of objects, the ability to refer to those objects became essential. The second part explores failed naming in David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon (1993), set on the early-nineteenth-century frontier, whose central character calls himself a “B-b-british object,” stuttered words that evoke the historical importance and the vulnerability of imported goods during colonization and settlement in Australia.

Drawing first on an annotated copy of the poetry of Felicia Hemans that my students discovered in the stacks of the University of Virginia's library, this essay goes on to examine the marks made by female readers in three nineteenth-century copies of Hemans's poetry to reveal the dynamics of sentiment in author-reader networks of Romantic and Victorian poetry. Seeing Hemans through the eyes of individual female readers surfaces a lost world in which poetry was valued as a collaborative, intimate language of the heart. Specific historical copies allow us best to apprehend this world, but, in the wake of wide-scale digitization, nineteenth-century books are simultaneously newly visible and newly at risk. This essay makes the case for retaining them and for integrating them into our accounts of nineteenth-century literary history.

The idea of writing for the future often seems like a selfish act: a claim for personal immortality. Yet writing with future readers in mind also requires imagining the needs of a world radically different from our own. This paper examines Future Library, an artwork in which authors contribute writing that will not be read until 2114, and the fiction of David Mitchell, one of the contributing authors. In these works, writing for the future is political, not because it represents the future but because it simultaneously demands intervention in the present and opens itself to the new and to unexpected future uses.

Because most early modern readers did not leave behind traces of their reading practices and thus remain anonymous, a more inclusive history of reading requires a willingness to engage in speculation. In the case of Tudor editions of the romance he Historye of Blanchardine, responsible speculation involves resisting the desire for textual stabilities, including the author's name and the work's status as a reprinted text. Doing so reveals that what appear to be reissued editions of William Caxton's version of this romance, Blanchardyn and Eglantine (1489-90), are in fact a network of adapted texts whose representations of gender challenge current understandings of the Elizabethan romance, its producers, and its target audience. More specifically, what seems to be a fragment of the 1597 edition is instead an early example of fan fiction, a modern narrative mode that offers a methodological model for scholars interested in adopting more inspired approaches to material evidence.

From among the varied American responses to the events we now call the Holocaust, the most notorious of which may well be the United States’ illiberal policy on refugees from 1938 to 1944, there emerged a canon of internationalist-minded literature that included Randall Jarrell's “The Refugees.” In his refugee poem, Jarrell experimented with the form of public elegy, interrogating poetic conventions of mourning in order to consider the ethical and political consequences of our statements of grief. With its extremely economic form, “The Refugees” offers a study of the lyric's investment in an economy of identity all too readily coinciding with nationalistic modes of belonging. As the poem positions itself as an interventionist yet fatalistic response to contemporary refugees, I argue, it helps us articulate a definition of ethics, which necessarily involves the negotiation of cultural boundaries and remains always a matter of eminently political concern.

Visitors to Westminster Abbey may remember the memorial statue to David Garrick with its inscription:

To paint fair nature by divine command,
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
A Shakespeare rose: then to expand his fame
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Tho' sunk in death the forms the poet drew,
The actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
Though like the bard himself, in night they lay
Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day;
And till Eternity with power sublime
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time
Shakespeare and Garrick like twin stars shall shine
And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

Most theories designed to explain how and when the Vercelli Book came into the hands of the canons of San Eusebio di Vercelli are little more than guesswork; and those which endeavour to single out a particular agent of transmission ignore local data, such as the records of the commune, abbey, hospices, proto-university, and cathedral, which provide a wealth of documentation for the frequency of Vercelli's contacts with England and Englishmen both during and after the Middle Ages. The only solid evidence for the length of time that Codex cxvii has rested in the cathedral archives must be found in the manuscript itself and in the various book catalogues drawn up by the canons down through the centuries. Of special interest among these catalogues is a recently discovered one, dated 1426, which describes what is probably the Vercelli Book in terms suggesting that it is an old possession of the Eusebian chapter, thus lending support to the contention that the inscription on 24v of the manuscript is indeed north Italian of the eleventh century.

My purpose in this study of George Moore's revisions is (1) to venture a few generalizations with respect to the dates, the number, and extent of the revisions and his motives in rewriting and (2) to compare closely the first and final texts of The Lake, The Wild Goose, and Esther Waters.

The chief prose works of the fifteenth century in France, by common consent, are the long pseudo-chivalric romance entitled Le Petit Jehan de Saintré, the satire on women called Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage and the collection of tales known as Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. The author of the first work alone names himself: it is Antoine de la Sale, a native of Provence, known also as the author of several didactic works, La Salade, La Salle, Le Réconfort, etc. The author of the Quinze Joyes has hidden his identity in a riddle which has not yet been satisfactorily deciphered. Not even a hint as to the author or editor of the Cent Nouvelles is contained in the manuscript. Led astray by an erroneous interpretation of the riddle, Pottier in 1830 ascribed the Quinze Joyes to La Sale. Le Roux de Lincy did the same for the Cent Nouvelles, in 1841. The first scientific attempt to prove these ascriptions was made by L. Stern in 1870. Stern sought to establish La Sale's authorship of the Cent Nouvelles by a comparison of certain details of style and by the fact, noticed more in detail later, that a “conte” addressed to La Sale appears as one of the hundred tales. This was followed immediately by the paper of E. Gossart, which gave special attention to the Quinze Joyes. Gossart showed that La Sale, in La Salle and in Saintré, had made use of St. Jerome's paraphrase of Theophrastus, also cited in the prologue of the Quinze Joyes. However, as M. Raynaud has pointed out, this epistle of Jerome, with that of Valerius, also cited in the Quinze Joyes, was the chief source of most of the diatribes against marriage in the Middle Ages.

Keats's second ode to Fanny Brawne, the important poem (biographically considered) beginning “What can I do to drive away Remembrance from my eyes,” contains a striking passage which has never been correctly interpreted. The poem as a whole shows Keats in an agitated state of mind. He is so enslaved by his thoughts of Fanny Brawne, he says, that he can neither regain his “old liberty” nor “mount” in his verse “above The reach of fluttering Love.” At this point he writes:

More dismal cares
Seize on me unawares,—
Where shall I learn to get my peace again?
To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,
Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand
Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life;
That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour,
Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,
Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods;
Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,
Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;
Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,
Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbaged meads
Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds;
There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,
And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

The myth of the cultural “limitations” of Henry James appears to have been the creation of two British journalists, Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West, who, while they rendered to James the service of publicity, were not sufficiently read in either James or the classics to generalize as freely as they did on both his riches and his deficiencies. Hueffer led off in 1913 in this fashion:

I am personally grateful to Archibald A. Hill's experimental analysis of “The Windhover” in the December 1955 PMLA (LXX, 968–978) for the incidental enrichment of the poem offered by a fact I had not previously recognized–the fact that “dawn-drawn” may be read ‘sketched by the dawn’ as well as ‘attracted by the dawn.’ I must therefore confess myself disappointed by his flat denial of the enrichment he has offered. Mr. Hill says: “I see no way to tell whether the best substitute for ‘drawn’ is ‘attracted’ or ‘sketched.‘ The individual reader can make his own arbitrary choice, but I believe that he must choose, and can not keep both meanings. There are instances in this poem where multiple meanings must be recognized, but these occur only when there is positive evidence for more than one interpretation. Multiple meaning is not acceptable when there is merely a choice between two meanings which are both formally and structurally satisfactory” (p. 971).

Recent teaching duties have obliged me to reread the bulk of Unamuno's published writings. In this rereading I have been struck by three or four clusters of images that recur with what seems like obsessive frequency. The purpose of this essay is to exhibit these images and to attempt to discover what function they fulfill in Unamuno's writing.

One can hardly complain that too few scholars have examined the influence of John Bunyan upon Nathaniel Hawthorne. George Parsons Lathrop's A Study of Hawthorne and F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance give excellent if brief discussions, each of which identifies several of Hawthorne's allusions to the English allegorist. The most detailed examination is W. Stacy Johnson's “Hawthorne and The Pilgrim's Progress,” in which Johnson, after establishing Hawthorne's familiarity with The Pilgrim's Progress, points out several allusions to it in the short stories and romances, discusses Bunyan's influence upon Hawthorne's allegorical techniques, and concludes that “The Pilgrim's Progress is a major source and inspiration for the art of Hawthorne.”

During the latter half of Henry VIII's reign various English presses issued vernacular editions of many of Erasmus' writings. The most popular was a version, published first toward the end of 1533 and frequently thereafter, of the Enchiridion militis Christiani. This treatise had a large circulation throughout Europe. Appearing first in 1503 (or 1504), it received for a decade or so no great attention, but after 1515 edition followed edition in rapid succession. Between 1519 and 1542 it was issued in translation, usually in at least two versions, in eight different languages.

In the development of Ludwig Tieck 1795 and 1796 were decisive years. For several years previous to 1795 Tieck had been giver to a pessimistic and rather negative view of life, according to which human existence seemed to have but little meaning, and poetry, art, and idealism appeared to him to be delusions. While this nihilistic tendency held sway over Tieck's mind not even the works of Goethe, Shakespeare, or Cervantes, which he had read eagerly ever since early boyhood, or his friendship with Wackenroder represented saving forces in his life. William Lovell, Tieck's novel of almost seven hundred pages, adequately reflects the distressed state of his mind during this early period of his life, although the work was written for the most part after the worst throes of his pessimism and despair had spent their force.