The bibliographers of Gothic fiction have almost entirely overlooked the literature of the periodicals from 1770–1820, although they were one of the important channels of publication and afford many examples of the species. Montague Summers' so-called Gothic Bibliography, in most respects recklessly inclusive, lists only two romances from the Lady's Monthly Museum out of more than a dozen published there, and one from the Monthly Mirror, but otherwise ignores the numerous Gothic novels, novelettes, and short stories which figure in the magazines between The Romance of the Forest (1791) and Waverley (1814) -1 Jakob Brauchli lists 491 examples of English schauerromane published between 1764 and 1851—many of them known only by title— but takes no account whatsoever of periodical fiction.2 Yet the magazine literature of Gothicism is considerable, and in some respects distinctive; and much of it, although at present unknown, is more readily available in American libraries than the volumes issued by the Minerva Press. With research a hundred titles of Gothic novels and short stories could probably be added to Brauchli's 491, from the magazines alone. The great majority of these are unlisted anywhere.

From the eighteenth century to the present, editors, critics, and directors have recognized special problems in the interpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Every major play has been extensively debated, to be sure, but discussions of this play have been marked by an unusual perplexity. There is little agreement about the most elementary questions. Is Caesar an egocentric, dangerous dictator—a genuine threat to Rome; or is he the “noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times,” as Antony says he is? Is Brutus the mistaken idealist, strong in abstract principle but weak in human perceptiveness; or is he, as Swinburne thought, the “very noblest figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of the world”? Is he the Aristotelian hero, noble but flawed, recognizing at last that he has erred? Or is he the willful egoist, embodying the very traits of Caesarism which he professes to hate? Is Cassius the dedicated republican that Brutus, Titinius, and many of his own speeches make him appear to be? Or is he the “lean and hungry” envious one who hates Caesar for merely personal reasons? These are only a few of the questions the play poses. Everywhere one turns, contradictions loom.

The scholars who have investigated the history of gender in Middle English have been unanimous in the conclusion that the loss of grammatical gender was the result of the loss of the gender-distinctive forms of the strong adjective declension, the definite article and demonstrative, and other pronominal words. Körner wrote in 1888 : Die angelsächsische sprache unterschied bekanntlich drei grammatische genera, während das moderne englisch das grammatische geschlecht überhaupt nicht mehr besitzt. Der verlust desselben hängt natürlich mit dem verluste der flexion aufs engste zusammen und findet auch hierin seine alleinige erklärung. Bot doch die flexion allein dem sprechenden einen anhalt für die unterscheidung des grammatischen geschlechts; woran hätte man sich sonst noch halten können, als erstere aufgegeben wurde? Denn der zusammenhang zwischen der bedeutung und dem überkommenen geschlecht der bezeichnungen für leblose wesen wurde längst nicht mehr gefühlt. Als daher durch aufgabe der flexion das äussere erkennungszeichen für das grammatische genus fiel, so musste letzteres überhaupt schwinden. Es ergab sich von selbst, dass an seine stelle das natürliche gechlecht trat.

From the perspective of sexual politics, The Winter's Tale is a remarkable achievement: it recovers the possibility of harmonious male-female relations from the destructive antagonism between the sexes in the tragedies. In particular, it expands the role of women, making the combined forces of Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita central to the dramatic action. This development is so moving that we tend simply to welcome it without inquiring into the centrality of women and the terms of the sexual reconciliation. I argue that such an inquiry must be made. A sentimental reading of the play looks exclusively at its positive aspects and fails to recognize that women s power remains strictly circumscribed within the patriarchal framework. Acknowledging this limitation provides for a multiple rather than a monolithic response to the play and makes it possible both to affirm and to dissent from the ending. (PBE)

Translation is notoriously impossible, and yet people persist in doing it, perhaps nowhere so much as in the case of the Bible. And, while prose is generally more translatable than poetry, it is Old Testament poetry that survives the process with peculiar success, by reason of the peculiar poetic form of the original: a system of parallelism, or “rhyming” of ideas rather than sounds. The remarkable degree of overlap of form and content ensures a remarkable degree of accuracy, or transfer of meaning. The field is rich for structuralist studies, in that it offers an exemplary combinatoire, and the psalm structure is a model of totality, transformability, and self-regulation, an “instrument of coherence,” which may in turn constitute a subunit of a larger structure.

The Lucy poems were evoked by stress in Wordsworth’s relationships with Dorothy and Coleridge. Four were written in Germany, where Wordsworth was forced to separate from Coleridge because of the added expense of keeping Dorothy. Wordsworth’s resulting hostility toward Dorothy mixes with his love as he fantasizes her death and then mourns her loss in the Lucy poems. But his relationship with Coleridge darkened as well after Coleridge stated a preference for living near Thomas Poole rather than Wordsworth when the poets met at Göttingen following their winter-long separation. “I Travelled among Unknown Men,” written in England two years later, reveals, however, that Wordsworth overcame his ambivalence toward Dorothy and his excessive dependency upon Coleridge; his declaration of love for England becomes an indirect refusal to venture abroad with Coleridge again. Through the development of the Lucy cycle, Wordsworth discovered that place is the foundation of love and relationship.

Russian studies are still in love with their fascinating and unpredictable subject, despite radically changing geopolitical realities and shifts in the academic climate. We in the field have been through something resembling the free-market shock therapy prescribed for newly non-Soviet Russia, a major shake-up in intellectual orientation and logistics. Our methodologies, perspectives, and projects are always in this sense a reflection of our present-day subject, but they are also a self-portrait, the latest in a series.

Critics have failed to grasp that Yeats's “tragic joy” is a version of the sublime. The phrase captures the affective dynamic of the sublime—the transformation of defeat and terror into joy—as do similar concepts in Longinus, Edmund Burke, Kant, and Schiller. Yeats can help us understand death as the ultimate occasion of the sublime. Through his lyrics of tragic joy we can trace the psychic and rhetorical resemblances that connect diverse modes of the sublime: curse, prophecy, and apocalypse. These modes encode affirmative responses to destruction, so that the psycholinguistic violence in the poems may owe less to fascism than to the Romantic sublime. Although Yeats turns the sublime of Blake and Shelley in a reactionary direction, the politics of the sublime are inherently neither right-wing nor left-wing but open to either articulation.

Frank McGuinness's Carthaginians (1988) uses the historical relation between Rome and Carthage as a metaphor for the contemporary struggles between Britain and the nationalist community in the North of Ireland. The play, an elegy for thirteen Irish civilians murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday (30 Jan. 1972) in Derry, draws subversive power from a trope that since the eighteenth century has focused imaginative Irish resistance to British colonial rule. I first explore the history and the gendering of the trope, from early English myths of Trojan descent and medieval Irish genealogies through eighteenth-century antiquarians and philologists, nineteenth-century novelists, Matthew Arnold, and James Joyce. I then examine poems from Seamus Heaney's North, Brian Friel's play Translations, and McGuinness's Carthaginians to show how the pressure of history has revitalized the Rome-Carthage trope, which functions as origin myth, colonial parable, and site of intersection between nationalism and sexuality.

When the liberal journalist Fernández de Lizardi found himself barred from further discussion of political conditions, at the close of the first brief term of freedom of the press in Mexico in 1812, he turned to descriptions of manners and customs as a means of reaching his public, not with the intention of furnishing entertainment but, like Larra two decades later, with the hope of effecting reforms. Under cover of this type of material, which seemed perfectly harmless to the censors, he portrayed in his El Pensador mexicano, during 1813 and 1814, social and educational conditions as they then existed in the capital of the viceroyalty. When this avenue of expression was gradually closed to him after 1814 by the absolutist régime, Lizardi resorted to fiction; in his three realistic novels, picaresque in form but replete with costumbrista material, he accomplished for Mexico City what Mesonero Romanos futilely planned some years later to do for Madrid through the picaresque novel. Under the free press in 1820 Lizardi turned from fiction to a defense of the constitution; in El Conductor eléctrico he published many articles similar in tone and purpose to Miñano's Cartas, which appeared in Madrid in the same year; but he contributed nothing further toward the development of the satirical sketch on manners. When the more finished costumbrista article made its appearance in Mexico almost twenty years later, the revival of the form was due, not to native initiative, but to Spanish models. The Mexican literary periodicals in which these were published coincided both in content and in point of time with their Spanish prototypes; those in which fully developed costumbrista essays appear date, in the mother country from the opening, in Mexico from the close, of the third decade.

When I went from being a Bortolotti to being a Hutcheon, my social and cultural interactions within a predominantly Anglo-Saxon environment changed; my ethnic identity became encrypted, silenced, unless articulated by choice—a pointed lesson in the constructedness of concepts of ethnicity. Like me, Cathy (Notari) Davidson, Marianna (De Marco) Torgovnick, and Sandra (Mortaro) Gilbert are crypto-Italian teachers of English. What we do not share, however, is nationality: they are Italian American, while I am Italian Canadian. I therefore may have a somewhat different experience of ethnicity and its encrypting.

Walther von der Vogelweide’s “Sô die bluomen ûz dem grase dringent” is usually presented as an adaptation of a commonplace of Minnesang, the assertion that the joys inspired by a courtly lady are superior to those of spring. Such an interpretation accounts neither for Walther’s detailed presentation of the comparison between nature and the lady nor for the apparent repetition of his theme in the final stanza. The poet’s careful use of stylistic and thematic parallels, particularly similes derived from the medieval view of nature, transform the traditionally brief commonplace into a hierarchical conception of being which pervades the entire poem. Simultaneously. Walther’s adaptation of his theme necessitates the “repetition,” which self-consciously involves both his audience and the preceding stanzas in a further comparison, emphasizing the role of the poet in creating and perpetuating the fictions of Minnesang and its system of values.

Common generalizations about Reformation attitudes toward allegory are based on polemical denunciations by reformers of medieval “dialectical” exegesis. But Reformation definitions of the senses of Scripture are basically in accord with the definitions of medieval theologians. The reformers' attempts to draw a radical distinction between typology and allegory never succeeded and Reformation commentaries continued to allegorize, as demonstrated in the numerous Protestant commentaries on the Song of Songs. The crucial difference between medieval and Protestant spirituality in the Song commentaries lies not in their attitude toward allegory but in their conception of the nuptial metaphor, wherein human love symbolizes the love between God and man. Some Protestant commentators deny there is any reference to carnal love at all; those that do not, regard the metaphor as too dangerous for explication. Generally, they see that the aptness of the metaphor lies in the moral, domestic virtues of the marriage contract. In contrast, the mystical tradition of the Song, epitomized in Bernard, sees that the metaphor's aptness lies precisely in the passionate nature of the sexual union: it is the union of two in one flesh that is the most perfect symbol of the love of God.

The rebecca tuvel controversy may not seem like an example of the way we write now. my purpose in this essay is to convince you that it is.

In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon shows his indebtedness to the school of psychoanalytic culture criticism best exhibited in the two major works of Norman O. Brown—Life against Death and Love's Body. Brown's neo-Freudian view of repression as the source of man's uniqueness in nature is mirrored in virtually every thematic aspect of Gravity's Rainbow. In one sense, the physical gravity of the title is a metaphor for the human repression that engages Pynchon on the psychological level. Pynchon's understanding of history, like Brown's, reflects “the slow return of the repressed.” Other themes include the hypertrophy of the death instinct as manifested in weapons of destruction, the pernicious influence of Calvinist dualism opposing true dialectics, the interdependent abuses of sexuality and power, and the need for an antirational conception of art based in transcendental symbolism. The novel enacts the struggle of life against death, and its style affirms man's freedom.

The Genesis B poet built his image of Eve out of the traditional elements used to create the regal, glowing, intelligent, verbally adept women of Old English poetry, but the story he was telling mandated distortions of that image. Labeling Eve as weak-minded (no other woman in the corpus is so characterized) represents the most damaging distortion. Although the reasons for this intrusion of antifeminism into a poetry mostly devoid of it remain elusive, the spread of Christianity, the restructuring of secular and religious power, and increasing literacy were undoubtedly factors. But despite the distortions, the image of Eve retains its stereotypical power because of the connotative and associative strength of the very image the poet is undercutting. This unique female portrait both contributes to and reflects the ambiguity and problematic status of the Anglo-Saxon woman in a society undergoing rapid and complex cultural change.

Inscribed on a tombstone in Kensal Green Cemetery are the following words: “In memory of Wilkie Collins, author of ‘The Woman in White’ and other works of fiction.” This inscription, written (as his will shows) by Collins himself, pays tribute to the book which probably stands highest among his works in the esteem of his readers.

Composed in the tradition of German idealist aesthetics, Lukács' Theory of the Novel (1916) establishes him not only as an heir to Hegel but, more important, as a forerunner of Benjamin, Adorno, Goldmann, and Auerbach. Lukács begins by constructing a phenomenology of narrative mind in which modern consciousness is played otf against its Other, against the epic vision of earlier poets. Whereas the Homeric epic is characterized by a wholeness of sensibility and vision, novelistic consciousness is ironic, alienated and self-divided. Thus the novelistic hero's journey becomes a Hegelian one into the problematic realms of inwardness, memory, and imagination: from Cervantes to Flaubert we witness a retreat from participation in the world to interpretation of it. Lukács' philosophical meditations prefigure much in recent novel theory: Benjamin's and Adorno's commentaries on alienation in narrative, Goldmann's notion of the problematic hero, and Auerbach's concept, in Mimesis, of Homeric realism.

Recent Books and articles on John Gower have laid stress on his role as a moralist and as keeper of the king's conscience during a particularly brilliant and bloody era. He has been presented to us as a fearless critic of the corruption of his time and as the exponent of a moral philosophy which remains consistent throughout his three major works, the Mirour de l'Omme, the Vox Clamantis, and the Confessio Amantis. Gower himself would not have quarrelled with this image; indeed it is one that he tried to cultivate, as we see from some Latin verses which prefix the Vox Clamantis in certain manuscripts:

Ad mundum mitto mea iacula, dumque sagitto;
At ubi iustus erit, nulla sagitta ferit.
Sed male viventes hos vulnero transgredientes;
Conscius ergo sibi se speculetur ibi.