Jean Jacques Rousseau's famous sentimental novel, the Nouvelle Héloïse (1760), had a wide and immediate diffusion in England. Although the date usually ascribed to the first edition is 1761, it was in circulation in England during the later part of 1760. Translation was accomplished as speedily as possible; after three months of preliminary announcements by Becket and DeHondt, booksellers, the first two volumes were placed on sale April 7, 1761.

To begin, I will confide in you a feeling. Already on the subject of headings [caps]—and of the shores on which I intend to remain. It is the somewhat weary feeling of an old European. More precisely, of someone who, not quite European by birth, since I come from the southern coast of the Mediterranean, considers himself, and more and more so with age, to be a sort of overacculturated, overcolonized European hybrid. (The Latinate words culture and colonization have a common root, there where it is precisely a question of what happens to roots.) In short, it is perhaps the feeling of someone who, as early as grade school in French Algeria, must have tried to capitalize, and capitalize upon, the old age of Europe, while at the same time keeping a little of the indifferent and impassive youth of the other shore. Keeping, in truth, all the marks of an ingenuity still incapable of this other old age from which French culture had, from very early on, separated him.

The past twenty years have seen a beauvoir revival in feminist theory. Feminist philosophers, political scientists, and historians of ideas have all made powerful contributions to our understanding of her philosophy, above all The Second Sex. Literary studies have lagged somewhat behind. Given that Beauvoir always defined herself as a writer rather than as a philosopher (Moi, Simone de Beauvoir 52–57), this is an unexpected state of affairs. Ursula Tidd's explanation is that Beauvoir's existentialism is theoretically incompatible with the poststructuralist trends that have dominated feminist criticism:

Cecilia Böhl, who wrote under the pseudonym Fernán Caballero, manipulated the fictional forms available to her in an attempt to compensate for or conceal her transgression of the taboo against women writers. In the protagonist of La gaviota she combined types drawn from three genres–the tale of morals, the Romantic novel of the ambitious provincial youth, and Spanish costumbrismo– in an elaborate strategy designed to disavow her identification with her character. In so doing, she constructed a composite fictional discourse that opened the way for the realist novel in Spain. Her anxiety about male-female boundaries, however, extended to generic definitions as well: her static treatment of the fictional modes she brought together prevented her from achieving the fluid, dynamic narrative form that is characteristic of realism.

The early reactions of Englishmen to the famous works of Jean Jacques Rousseau have never been adequately studied. Jacques Pons, Louis J. Courtois, and Margaret Hill have been the only writers to present well-documented studies of any large phase of the subject; but their attention has been confined to the impact of Rousseau's pedagogical theories and to various aspects of his visit in England during the years 1766–67. Even the bibliography of Théophile A. Dufour is very incomplete in its citations of English editions. Under these circumstances, authors have generally taken refuge in assertions of tremendous and universal influence emanating from Rousseau, or they have surmised as to the effect of his works in England. The present work undertakes to provide a basis for more definite conclusions. The numerous assertions of the impetus which Rousseau is alleged to have given to the “romantic” revival of the late eighteenth century are familiar, and we know already that the diffusion of his works in England was wide. Furthermore, the first production of the French writer to excite attention there was the Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750); and, although several works intervened, including the Devin du village (1752), Narcisse (1752), and the Lettre sur la musique française (1753), the next writing to excite comment was the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité (1755). Thus, although Rousseau's diffusion and popularity in England were due chiefly to La nouvelle Héloïse, the two Discours mark the beginning of his reputation in that country. Furthermore, the theses of these two productions have been closely associated with Rousseau. The insistence in the first Discours upon the baneful effect of modern civilization was also closely allied with the praise of primitive life in the second, and the designation of private property as the source of human inequality. Moreover, both of these productions questioned the justice of existing institutions; and Roussean himself maintained that, with Émile, they form a single entity.

Hawthorne was uncommunicative as to the sources on which he drew for the materials underlying his writings. That he had read widely is shown by an examination of the list of books that he borrowed from the Athenæum Library at Salem during his residence of some twenty years in that town. It is perhaps because of Hawthorne's reticence as to his origins that we have as yet learned very little about his literary borrowings; but from time to time articles have appeared touching the specific sources on which Hawthorne relied.

From Homer on, certain images have been part of the epic poet's inheritance and equipment. Not only has he felt obliged to introduce them somewhere into his work, but to distribute them in the very proportion observed by his predecessors. Beasts, plants, any phenomena used in previous epic simile belonged to him, too, if he could make them at home in a new context. Of course he was free to originate novel images from contemporary events or his own personal experience; but Homer's high precedent, or Vergil's, prescribed the old images as well. Milton's choice of imagery, however, is distinguished from that of other important epic poets of Western Europe by an iron control over, a virtual renunciation of, animal similes.

Most interpretations of “Christabel” ignore the creative context from which it emerged. In his notebooks and letters, Coleridge developed a theory of the nature of human sexuality and its importance as the foundation of love and marriage. In a series of poems written from 1797 to 1801, Coleridge dramatized the problem of sexual maturation by focusing on the betrothal of a girl threatened by her own sexuality. “Christabel,” the culmination of this period, traces the heroine's attempt to come to terms with her erotic impulses, to recognize their essential role in her love for her absent knight, and to progress from adolescence to womanhood. Geraldine, the projection of those impulses, is the woman she yearns and fears to become. Although the poem is unfinished, its fairy-tale structure, psychology, and symbolism, along with its relation to Coleridge's other poems and his ideas about sex, love, and marriage, indicate that the continuation summarized by James Gillman accurately describes Coleridge's intentions.

Simon Pokagon's writings exemplify a complex process of linguistic‐material worldmaking. His birch‐bark booklets bring together multiple cultural traditions, including nineteenth‐century tourist art, traditional Algonquian writing, and a long history of writing on bark that dates to the early history of writing itself. Neither purely things nor purely texts, these documents interweave nature and culture in such a way that Pokagon can be said to be engaging in a process of naturalization whereby the cultural is presented as a feature of nature. To promote his reformist agenda, Pokagon capitalizes on a rich cache of naturalist symbolism that was of particularly high cultural value in Victorian America. What is perhaps most notable about Pokagon's use of naturalization is that he makes this linguistic trope into a materialist discourse. (JB)

It was early morning on Sunday, 9 September 1739. While most South Carolina settlers were preparing for church, nearly Two dozen slaves gathered near the Stono River less than twenty miles from Charlestown. After attacking a local store to secure firearms, the group moved south toward Saint Augustine, Florida, swelling in number and spreading terror along the way. The rebels killed more than twenty settlers and set numerous buildings on fire before being defeated by a colonial militia at the Edisto River the following day (Wood 306-26). This unprecedented insurrection rocked the colony to its core and brought about legislation with important implications for literacy in the colonies that became the United States.

After being exiled from nazi germany and completing the extraordinary mimesis in istanbul in 1946, erich auerbach wrote from Princeton University in 1952, “Literary criticism now participates in a practical seminar on world history. … Our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation.” Auerbach, who must be reckoned one of the great synthesists and literary historians of the twentieth century, was expressing a sentiment that will be familiar to anyone who has thought about world literature from a postcolonial perspective. While postcolonial literary studies may have helped define the parameters of the practical seminar on world history, its full implications are still somewhat obscured by the arguments about periodicity that are often taken as a terminological necessity in applications of the term postcolonial. This is the burden imposed by the temporalizing post-. However, closer scrutiny of the postcolonial suggests that it contains mutually reinforcing periodizing and spatial functions. Many of the most common ideas that circulate in the field, such as colonial encounter, neocolonialism, nationalism and postnationalism, hegemony, transnationalism, diasporas, and globalization, are organized around often unacknowledged spatial motifs. The concept of space that implicitly structures usages of postcolonialism is far from inert: there is an active dimension of spatializing in them that helps shape the field's distinctiveness. This is because even when the term is deployed exclusively for periodizing purposes, as in showing that the medieval period or Russia today is amenable to a postcolonial analysis, the nature of what is highlighted insistently invokes spatial practices. Once the spatial logic of postcolonialism is brought to the foreground, the complexity of its critical diagnostic as applied in the practical seminar on world history becomes clearer.

The middle english pearl is one of the most moving and beautiful poems ever composed. occasioned, it seems, by the death of a two-year-old daughter, whose identity has never been determined, it casts the grieving narrator-father as one who has treasured the child as a jewel beyond compare. She was round and smooth, rare and radiant—a precious pearl fit for a prince. Yet this dear small thing just slipped away one day in the garden, tumbling down through the grass into the dark earth:

As this opening stanza reveals, Pearl relies on the polyvalence and sensuous power of poetic language for its affective effects, gathering associative resonance through shifting meanings, working through indirection and allusiveness, tapping into the sensory power of visual and tactile images and patterned sound, and leaving much unsaid, to be grasped and felt between the lines. But the poem's broad emotional arc is clear. It scripts a therapeutic narrative of affective experience, taking its reader, whom it enfolds within the textual “I” of the poem, from “woe” to “weal” (56, 1187).

MOST RECENT critical studies indicate that as the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot move toward their inevitable period of eclipse all of the old critical attitudes are still intact. Since the late twenties there have been numerous charges of inconsistency between Eliot's early and later criticism, and between his criticism and his poetry, and though a few critics have been piecing together the unfinished case for continuity, the cumulative criticism of Eliot's development as a poet-critic-Catholic has led most of us discussing Eliot's work in the classroom to accept the following prevalent assumptions and chronology: that the poems written from “Prufrock” to “The Hollow Men” are those of a despairing, skeptical poet probing spiritual bankruptcy in the modern world ; that from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) to his conversion in 1927 Eliot's theory of tradition and criticism spring from literary rather than moral concerns; that in 1928, when in the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes Eliot announces that his attitude is “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglocatholic in religion,” there is a rather sudden turn from an esthetic and literary theory of tradition to a moral and religious doctrine of orthodoxy; that in After Strange Gods (1934) and later Eliot not only sins against literature by employing his dogmatic religious beliefs as the narrow touchstone of his criticism, but yearns nostalgically for the unified sensibility and moral security of a lost medieval world. But these widespread opinions are misleading, for by 1916 Eliot's classical, royalist, and religious point of view was already formulated. A first step toward establishing this assertion, which calls for a full-scale revaluation of Eliot's development and of the primary concerns of his poetry and criticism before 1928, is to examine evidence of Eliot's critical and religious position in 1915–16, and especially the role of T. E. Hulme in defining that position.

A study of Ezra Pound's translations of Guido Cavalcanti's Rime shows Pound's lifelong interest in the work of the Italian poet. A further tracing of Cavalcanti's rhetoric in the Cantos shows that Pound employed Cavalcanti in a twofold way: he related him to Neoplatonic philosophers through his use of light imagery, and he also treated him as an Aristotelian empiricist. He thus made Cavalcanti serve two apparently divergent aims, just as Pound's own work may do. Although the modern poet's philosophic understanding of Cavalcanti is open to controversy, his poetic uses have accounted for some of the finest passages of the twentieth-century epic.

Ernst R. Curtius (1886-1956) was the first modern scholar who discussed the traditional rhetorics of the pastoral landscape with both critical insight and an astonishing historical erudition. In Chapter x (pp. 191-209) of his Europäische Liter atur und lateinisches Mittelaller (1st ed. Bern, 1949) Curtius suggests an instructive list of topographical and botanical “stage props” (“inszenierende Staffage”) traditionally employed to describe the happy rural environment of amorous shepherds and pastoral lovers. It is, of course, hardly surprising that in the intricate process of literary transmission, as outlined by Curtius, Vergil fulfills a central task: by his sophisticated use of elements from both Homer and Theocritus, Vergil unfolds, in his Bucolics as well as in the Georgies, the characteristic “pleasant landscape” (“locus amoenus”) which is later reverently systematized in handbooks of medieval rhetoric, eruditely echoed in the Renaissance, and elegantly alluded to in classicist poetry.

Criticism has difficulty reconciling a writer’s interest in death with the categories of literary analyses. Death interest is rejected as orgiastic or treated reductively. The Old Curiosity Shop is used to show how a novelist’s staging of death expresses desires for radical authenticity, in Bataille’s sense of death as an authenticating violation of human limits, and how those desires are legitimated—since death also horrifies—by fusing with positive cultural ideals. Dickens employs a Victorian trope, grounding culture in death: a reverence for death generates brotherhood. The apparent regression or death wish so common to the endings of Victorian novels can be seen, not as a wish for stasis, but as the projection of desires for an authenticity that might be fulfilled within culture. Though art may not always find a social solution, when it dramatizes conflicts of limitation and limitlessness, the negation of death is a central reference point.

The current insistence upon a new poetic mythology to serve as a unifying reference frame for human experience and thought has recently provoked from Bertrand H. Bronson a brilliant defense of the eighteenth-century use of personified abstractions.1 Bronson properly recognizes in the eighteenth-century affection for personification a reflection of the emotional power lent to universals by the mathematicism that had created a sense of an ordered universe operating by simple and general laws. To the unity of this “view of the world so comprehensive and assured as to enable us to state common experience in general terms” he has opposed the fragmentary world of modern naturalism which requires expression by fragmentary concrete symbols. The neoclassicist conceived the norm to be the universal, which particulars struggle to fashion, and therefore he sought, in the highest forms of his art, to express himself in terms equally eternal and comprehensive as the laws of nature. Personification satisfied the desire for the grandeur of generality; “labored particularities” in themselves distract from the largeness of thought, for “great thoughts are always general.” Bronson's paper is salutary, for we have too long and too uncritically scorned what one modern critic has called “those allegorical capitals which the age affected.” We are indeed misguided in judging on the basis of our own responses, conditioned by our own civilization alone, that the personified abstraction was but a literary convention sterile of emotional force in the eighteenth century. And in relating personification to the emotional excitation the age received from the contemplation of a harmonious universe, Bronson has supplied us with the proper framework for a more nearly accurate reading of much eighteenth-century poetry.

Like the “tragic ways of killing a woman” that Nicole Loraux explores in Attic tragedy, Renaissance ways of killing a woman (including Shakespeare's in Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra, Marston's in Sophonisba, and Heywood's in The Rape of Lucrece) draw on ancient narratives of sacrificed virgins and suicidal wives. The theatrical practices that shape these narratives on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage challenge a critical discourse that has located the counterhegemonic impulses of Renaissance drama exclusively in popular theatricality. The moments that most enfranchise the boys who play Lavinia and Cleopatra and enable them to intervene in the meanings of their characters' deaths are those moments during which the Shakespearean stage most reveals its debt to the elite traditions of Senecan tragedy and the private playhouses of the children's companies.

It is generally known that despite Petrarch's widespread reputation in his own day as a man of letters and scholar, his opinion of Dante as a poet was at variance with the literary fortune enjoyed by Dante in subsequent centuries. Many attempts have been made, especially around the turn of the century, to explain why Petrarch failed to perceive Dante's true genius as it appears in the Divine Comedy. For the most part, these explanations fall into one of three categories. Some ascribe Petrarch's attitude toward Dante to his aversion for the vernacular; others to envy; while still others to an inattentive reading or misunderstanding of the Divine Comedy.