On 18 august 1492, the lexicographer and grammarian antonio de nebrija'S castilian grammar—variously referred to as Gramática castellana, Gramática de la lengua castellana, and Gramática sobre la lengua castellana—was printed in Salamanca. Modeled on his earlier Latin grammar, Introductiones latinae (1481), it was the first such systematization of a modern (vernacular) European language and part of an emergent print and lexical humanist culture in the early modern period. Nebrija dedicated the project to Isabel I of Castile in a prologue that opens with a declaration for which the text is notorious: “language was always the companion [compañera] of empire, and followed it such that together [junta mente] they began, grew, and flourished—and, later, together [junta mente] they fell.”

Ten years ago, in the introduction to his edited collection The Future of the Book, Geoffrey Nunberg predicted, “If we take the book in its broad sense to refer simply to bound, printed volumes, then most books will likely disappear soon.” Imagining the prospect of electronic books, of devices that would present text not just on a screen but on something “almost the equivalent of paper in [its] weight and flexibility,” Nunberg looked forward to a time when printed pages would no longer be the primary bearer of textual information (12). That time has not come. The e-book never seemed to make it, either as a viable technology or as an attractive commercial product. More bound and printed volumes are being made and sold than ever. And the history of the book as an academic discipline continues to grow—not out of a sense that books are history (in the colloquial sense of that phrase) but out of a conviction that they are here to stay and that to know their future we should know their past.

As a detailed chronology of the composition demonstrates, Richardson revised Clarissa carefully and thoroughly before its first publication and consulted several of his friends about it, but his correspondence does not show that he changed his basic plan or took advice from anyone on important matters. The first extant references to the novel are in letters from Edward Young and Aaron Hill in June and July 1744. By this time the general plan of the novel was fixed and a first version may have been already completed. It was certainly completed early in 1746. By that time Richardson had begun an extensive revision, and before publication he revised once again. A study of his revisions shows that he was especially concerned about reducing the length of his book, and he also blackened the character of Lovelace, tried to clarify the motives of his characters, and elevated his language.

Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines was one of the most popular romances of the seventeenth century. A lusty account of one man's extraordinary generative powers, the work published originally in 1668 went through thirty different issues, including six in English, three in French, one in Italian, four in Dutch, ten in German, and six in Danish.1 Its primary appeal lay probably in its salaciousness, for the tale is short, no longer than a single book of Gulliver's Travels, and its theme is simple. Surprisingly enough, up to the present no critics have perceived this theme, which may be expressed by the Biblical maxim, “In the multitude of people, is the king's honor.” There is no question that population is Neville's theme, but his purpose in treating it is more difficult to decide. Since The Isle of Pines is on the surface merely a display of pornographic primitivism, we cannot know whether it is intended as an allegorical essay on population problems or merely a travesty on contemporary schemes to increase population.

It well-known that Byron's poetry was the center of a great deal of suspicious attention from the Tory government which was almost continually in office during his career. David V. Erdmann has proposed that the ministry's anxiety was grounded upon the fear of a potential insurrection to be led by Lord Byron; W. H. Wick war sees the official reaction to Byron's poems as of the whole cloth of the government's antipathy to a free and virulently outspoken press. But whatever the attitude of the ministry, the only official actions taken to punish Byron for his poetry were ostensibly the result of moral rather than of political trespasses on his part. Were Byron the only author subjected to punishment on these grounds, it would be obvious that the action was politically motivated, but Robert Southey, poet laureate, received identical treatment. The nature of the penalty—refusal by Chancery to recognize literary property rights—indicates that the fountainhead of the measures taken against Byron's Don Juan and Cain, Southey's Wat Tyler, Shelley's Queen Mab, and the works of several other authors, Whig, Tory, and apolitical, lay in the moral and legal principles of the Chancellor, Lord Eldon.

This PMLA cluster invites us to rethink questions of language, script, and literary traditions in a long-historical framework. Several other essays here address the inter-imperial dynamics accompanying the rise of Arabic from a localized dialect to a transregional language with a religious valence. My contribution considers the legacy of the Arabic language in the twentieth-century sub-Saharan West African context, in its contact with Senegalese vernaculars and with French as an imperial challenger. It further explores the broader implications of retracing the longue durée history of Arabic-script vernaculars for comparative work in postcolonial studies.

Animals as theatrical performers before the Restoration have received scanty attention from commentators on English drama. The entertaining quality of performing animals off the stage during the early periods of the drama is well known. Bearwards, ape-leaders, and owners of trick horses and dogs roamed early Tudor and Elizabethan England. Along with minstrels, jugglers, mountebanks, and acrobats they contended with stage-players for popular favor. The Elizabethan love for bear-baiting has been so frequently discussed that it needs no reiteration. The dual use of Henslowe's Hope Theatre for animal shows and regular plays is an indication of the importance of this type of spectacle. Professor Strunk and Dr. Graves have shown that highly trained apes were often employed as entertainers in Elizabethan England; and, as the latter points out, even the histrionic talents of the lowly ass were not neglected.

Occasionally, critics have noted in passing the resemblance both in content and form between certain passages in Diderot's Salon de 1767 and Edmund Burke's influential treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the first edition of which appeared in 1757, and a French translation in 1765. Curiously enough, Diderot, who usually did not hide his sources, this time omitted even mentioning the name of Burke or acknowledging his debt, although there can be no doubt that the Salon contains many direct borrowings from the Enquiry. If one cannot find any allusion to Burke's work in Diderot's signed writings, a brief but revealing review of its French translation appeared in the March 1765 issue of Friedrich Melchior Grimm's Correspondance littéraire? This notice, penned either by Grimm or by Diderot himself, reprimands the translator, a certain abbé Desfrançois, but praises the author: “On s'aperçoit à chaque page que le traducteur n'a pas bien saisi l'esprit de son original, ou du moins qu'il n'a pas eu le talent de le rendre avec la netteté et la précision nécessaires. L'ouvrage de M. Burke est estimé en Angleterre, et l'on y trouve, en effet, des vues fines et neuves, quelquefois aussi des paradoxes qu'on ne saurait adopter.” Two years later Diderot was sufficiently convinced of the merits of the book to accept even its boldest “paradoxes.”

The tenderest of men, Henry James could hardly have used the illness of his sister Alice as the basis of a story while she lived, or later, without elaborately disguising it—particularly since that illness, though not concealed, was only guardedly revealed as mental. But the heroism of Alice, fully as much as his experience and special knowledge of hysteria, must have strongly tempted him to exploit the extraordinary dramatic possibilities of her disease long before he composed The Turn of the Screw Delicacy, propriety, affection instantly inhibited the development of so rich a “germ,” but it remained planted in James's ingenious and subtle mind until he could bring the derivative narrative forth so altered that his closest intimates would not suspect its source or connections. The product is one of the greatest horror stories of all time.

A careful student of the Romantic poets will soon or late encounter the name of Thomas Taylor, whose chief claim to importance is that he was an extraordinarily diligent scholar and the first translator into English of all Plato's works. An inquirer will find brief and not always accurate accounts of this man in several encyclopedias; he will discover that certain nineteenth-century antiquarians wrote a number of sketches of Taylor in which fact is liberally sprinkled with fiction; and finally, he will come upon half a dozen more recent articles of a scholarly nature, including an almost complete bibliography of Taylor's books, three papers suggesting rather doubtful parallels between some passages of these and certain poems of Blake and Wordsworth, one which reprints from manuscript sources a few of Taylor's own poems, and another which endeavors unsuccessfully to demonstrate an acquaintance between Taylor and Shelley. Taylor's various translations and original works have also been cited occasionally in studies such as Professor Lowes's The Road to Xanadu. But with all this array of scholarship, imposing when it is called forth by a man so obscure as Thomas Taylor, there is still no comprehensive or accurate account of the man himself and his work. He is important, however, as the most energetic exponent of Platonism in England between the Cambridge Platonists and Benjamin Jowett, this at a time when Platonism once more became significant in literature after the eighteenth-century dismissal of Plato. Yet before we have a study of Taylor's Platonism in its relation to that of the Romantic poets, we should have a reasonably trustworthy biography of the man. For although it will not be found that Thomas Taylor was a person of hitherto unrecognized and startling importance for the student of literature, it is certain that he was known to such people as James Boswell, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Wollstonecraft, probably William Blake, and quite possibly Shelley; that his books were read by Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Emerson in America; and that he was a conspicuous figure in the intellectual world of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since the available accounts of him are incomplete and contradictory, he deserves the services of a biographer who will simply collect and set forth the facts.

A fragment in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes suggests that any attempt to transgress the binary prison of male and female (active and passive) tends to invert the traditional terms without disrupting their oppressive and spurious authority. Barthes proposes a neutral and utopian “third term,” or “non-sense,” that will transcend transgression itself and that he identifies with a “happy” sexuality and a “Gongorine” text. The poetics of Golden Age Spain are underwritten by implicitly gendered conceptions of the rhetorical body: ornamental style, lyric genre, and Italianate ethos are associated with the “female” text and hence made subordinate to their “higher” male equivalents. In the Soledades Góngora stresses the “female” terms, but his usage may not be transgressive: generic confusion (sexual and textual) was already widespread elsewhere. He tends, rather, to a nomadic indeterminacy that displaces author as active origin and reader as passive recipient of authoritative and authoritarian meaning.

In the century now passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, scores of critical studies have attempted to account for the fascination the book holds for adult readers. Although some of these investigations offer provocative insights, most of them treat Carroll in specialized modes inaccessible to the majority of readers, and they fail to view Alice as a complete and organic work of art. Hardly a single important critique has been written of Alice as a self-contained fiction, distinct from Through the Looking-Glass and all other imaginative pieces by Carroll. Critics also tend to confuse Charles Dodgson the man with Lewis Carroll the author; this leads to distorted readings of Alice that depend too heavily on the fact, say, that Dodgson was an Oxford don, or a mathematician, or a highly eccentric Victorian gentleman with curious pathological tendencies. The results are often analyses which fail to explain the total work's undeniable impact on the modern lay reader unschooled in Victorian political and social history, theoretical mathematics, symbolic logic, or Freudian psychology. It seems time, then, that Alice be treated for what it most certainly is—a book of major and permanent importance in the tradition of English fiction, a work that still pertains directly to the experience of the unspecialized reader, and one that exemplifies the profound questioning of reality which characterizes the mainstream of nineteenth-century English literature.

The Old English words in the Corpus Glossary constitute one of the oldest extant texts in the English language, and one of the three longest in the Mercian dialect. Linguists now agree that the glossary was compiled somewhere in Mercian territory during the eighth century. Palaeographical evidence points to the eighth century as the period of compilation. Concerning two important questions, linguistic opinion seems at present vague and uncertain: First, to what extent is the language of Corpus the result of dialect mixture? Second, what is the relationship between the language of Corpus and that of the most important of the texts now looked upon as Mercian, the Vespasian Psalter?

The purpose of this paper is to trace the influence of Cervantes upon Mark Twain, with particular attention to the supposedly autobiographical tales Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

A short digression will be necessary at the outset in order to overcome, if possible, an almost universal prejudice. The popular notion is that Mark Twain's genius “just grew,” like Topsy; that he was peculiarly a “self-made” man, the term “self-made” being understood to mean “lacking in book learning.” We like to think that Mark Twain, above all other authors, dug into the virgin soil of his native country, and brought forth rich treasures which could be found nowhere else. We like to say: “What genuine American humor! What a true picture of American boyhood! Nothing of Europe in Mark Twain! Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are real Americans!”

This essay considers a series of questions about the relations between material presentation and poetic meaning that emerge from a simple but under-acknowledged fact about the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets quarto: unlike nearly every other sonnet sequence from the period, Q's poems are broken by a series of nonuniform, seemingly arbitrary page breaks. Arguing that these breaks have profound implications for the interpretation and reception of Shakespeare's poems, the essay suggests that not reading page breaks is itself a reading practice-a historically specific, socially determined act in which certain elements of materiality are granted attention and authority while others are not. Espousing instead an approach to the materiality of Shake-speares Sonnets that would take seriously the matter of Q's page breaks, this essay understands the page and the page break to be units of meaning with particularly urgent implications for the recognition of poetic form and for the interrelations between a history of the book and the idea of literature. (CH)

In many ways this particular section meeting has become one of the most significant in the annual program of the Modern Language Association. It serves to provide us with a measuring device which we can use to determine the extent to which we are fulfilling our international educational obligations. Considering the speakers who have been invited to address you today, if this afternoon's program has a theme, it might well be characterized as International Responsibility.

History offers many examples of individuals who have occupied the center of the stage during their life-time, only to be forgotten by posterity; but in modern times few writers have risen so high, and then sunk so completely out of sight, as did the abbé Corneille de Pauw. From 1768, when his first work appeared, until the outbreak of the French Revolution, he stood in the very center of cultural discussions in Europe. Learned societies and academies devoted whole sessions to arguments over his theories; he provoked controversies which not only stirred up all Europe, but extended to China and America. His books passed through edition after edition, and were translated from the original French into English, Dutch, and German. Yet today few people have heard of him, and his name is in only the largest encyclopedias.