It seems now to be generally agreed that Anglo-Saxon poetry is different from modern poetry not only in verse form and subject matter but is an entirely different kind of poetry. The basic study in the re-evaluation of Old English poetic technique is Francis P. Magoun, Jr's “Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry,” which applies to Old English poetry the discoveries of Milman Parry and Albert Lord about formulaic diction in Homeric poetry and in the oral poetry of Jugoslavia. Subsequent studies which further explore formulaic diction in Anglo-Saxon poetry are Magoun's “Bede's Story of Cædman: The Case History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer” and an earlier paper of my own, “The Diction of the Signed Poems of Cynewulf.” These articles focus attention chiefly on the formula, which usually occupies the space of one verse or one measure of a verse. Professor Magoun also opened up the problem of the theme as a larger formulaic unit in “The Theme of the Beasts of Battle in Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” suggesting that the theme is essentially a convention, which the poet might call upon when he had a battle to narrate. The wolf, eagle, and raven do not advance the action: they are essentially ornament. It seems likely that such poets depended less on what moderns usually think of as inspiration than on a large stock of formulaic diction and of set pieces or themes.

It is my purpose in this paper to consider the quantity of, the syllables in twenty-five lines of Milton's Paradise Lost. The selection, given below, was read by three different men. The first is an instructor in vocal expression, the second is a graduate student in language and phonetics, and the third is a professor in the Department of General Linguistics. All three are connected with the University of Michigan.

On 8 December 1824 Robert Southey sent to the editor of the Courier a long letter containing a final, post-mortem installment in his feud with Lord Byron. Reacting to some allusions to himself in Medwin's recently published Conversations of Lord Byron, Southey characteristically joined truculent self-defense with bitter and abusive attack:

How can the digital humanities help support humanities scholarship on diversity both ideologically and technically? This essay abandons the diversity paradigm prevalent in DH—the “big tent”—for a more technically functional one: the “stack.” It proposes that DH can create a “diversity stack” (conceptually like the “Internet protocol stack”) that combines technical and theoretical strategies for advancing scholarship on diversity. From low to high, crucial levels in such a stacked approach include technical methods for dealing with multilingualism, multimedia, unrepresentative corpora, geopolitical and temporal organizations of identity, and the theory of identity. (AL)

Wordsworth's “Home at Grasmere,” the one completed book of The Recluse, expresses a conception of home as a territorial sanctuary. The holiness of Grasmere Vale as a dwelling place consists in the possibility for ecological wholeness which it provides. The enclosure of the valley liberates the poet's psychic potency, because there he is encouraged to be receptive to multiple dimensions of experience. Through such openness he is consciously able to reintegrate his being into the enduring rhythms of natural existence, thereby articulating his unique individuality. “Home at Grasmere,” then, embodies Wordsworth's ideal of what poetry should be, namely, the realization through language of the intrinsic poeticalness of commonplace actuality. This true poetry, which is characterized by interplay between physical “fact” and mental “fancy,” liberates man from the prison of mere perception, revealing how individuals'—by fitting themselves to nature and fitting nature to themselves—can give unique expression to the unified, interdependent wholeness which is life, the expression being a fulfillment rather than a negation of fundamental inherent tendencies of natural process. In so celebrating such interaction of art and nature, Wordsworth raises questions about some current presuppositions of what constitutes basic interrelations among literature, civilization, and the physical environment.

From the notice in the Monthly Review in 1816 to the most recent investigations Alastor has remained an enigma to Shelley's critics. A century of criticism has done little to throw light on the mystery. The contemporary notice in the Monthly Review attributes the confusion of Alastor to the influence of Wordsworth:

When Students of Western European Medieval Literature speak of the rise of the vernacular, they often do not mean what you might think they mean—neither the continued use of Latin as a written vernacular for over five hundred years after the fall of the Roman Empire nor the first texts in Celtic, Germanic, and Semitic languages, from the fourth to the tenth century. They mean something later and geographically narrower—the writing that emerges from the breakup of Latin into distinct regional speech patterns, the Romance languages and literatures, primarily in the territories of modern France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Although understanding the rise of Romance-language literature as the rise of vernacular writing misrepresents medieval European literature, it has an important rationale. The twelfth-century literature of what is now France—Old French romance in the north, Occitan (formerly Provençal) lyric in the south—establishes continent-wide norms, thereby giving European literature a coherent set of forms and themes for the first time.

On the slopes of the Appenines overlooking the fertile plains of Apulia, and about fifteen miles west of the ancient town of Luceria (the modern Lucera), are found the two small towns of Celle and Faeto. They are only a mile apart and their combined population is about four thousand. Besides Apulian, which is the dialect of that region, the inhabitants of Celle and Faeto still speak a kind of French dialect.

Now that phonography is established as the cardinal regime of audio recording, storage, and playback in studies of sonic modernity, a coeval sound-reproduction technology merits attention—the pianola, or player piano. The instrument is a pneumatic reading machine: it scans binary machine code from perforated paper rolls and translates it into acoustic events while prompting song with its scrolling lyrics. Revisiting Derrida's “Ulysses Gramophone” (1984) thirty years on, this essay finds there a proleptic critique of the gramophonocentrism Derrida's piece has helped underwrite in sound studies. The essay then turns to an extended reading of Joyce's novel, one of several modernist works that feature the pianola in their self-conceptualization. Ulysses's pianola at once incarnates the novel's virtuosic recall of its own language and insists on the ineliminable role of exchange and of the gendered and laboring body in any performance of stored data.

From the first publication of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829 through its incorporation into the contemporary literary canon, readers have recognized it as a fiery indictment of slavery and of the contradictions in Christianity and in the United States' founding. Yet the striking typography of Walker's Appeal has become invisible in our critical focus on the text's relation to African American oratory and even in considerations of the pamphlet's significance in early black print culture. An analysis of this graphic text reveals how it materially registers Walker's impassioned voice and argument and how it visually directs readers to voice his call to the illiterate. Walker attempts to resolve the opposition of the spoken and the printed word by exploiting his text's typography.

In 1930, to blunt attacks from legislators, social reformers, and investors, the American movie companies adopted the Production Code, a skein of dos and don'ts that regulated, among other things, the screen treatment of sex and crime and that, by 1934, had its own executive apparatus. Though Joseph I. Breen, the director of the Production Code Administration, was called “the Hitler of Hollywood,” Production Code censorship operated through negotiation and compromise; even Breen himself was less repressive or moralistic than reporters or historians imagined. From 1934 to 1941, the Production Code Administration, the West Coast studios, and the East Coast corporate offices formed a machinelike network whose power Breen used not only to license but to facilitate the production of controversial films, including those presumed most harmed by the code—sex comedies and social-problem pictures.

Civilization is unthinkable without writing. This statement is a commonplace, and like all commonplaces its reiteration merits critical reflection, especially when we ponder why stakes become so high whenever writing is concerned. The shared modern Chinese and Japanese kanji rendering of the word for “civilization,” for instance, means “enlightening through writing/text” ( [wenming in Mandarin]), which puts emphasis literally on the value of writing. For centuries, writing has been invoked as a positive index to the hierarchy of human societies and their intellectual attributes, whereby orality is relegated to primitive and pretechnological cultures. The presumed dichotomy of writing and orality often relies on a flawed, representational view of writing that is phonocentric to the core, à la Derrida, and remains almost always blind to the presence of script or medium—including that of alphabetical writing—which requires a different kind of analytical approach.

For swich lawe as a man yeveth another wight,
He sholde hymselven usen it, by right;
Thus wole oure text.

Among the many passages in which Chaucer or one of his characters talks about poetry, and more specifically Chaucer's own poetry, one of the most tantalizing is the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale. The Man of Law claims to be at a loss for a “thrifty tale” because Chaucer “thogh he kan but lewedly / … Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan” (ii.46–49). He continues with a partial list of Chaucer's works that consists chiefly of stories from the Legend of Good Women, surprising us with several that Chaucer apparently never got around to writing. He praises Chaucer for avoiding stories about incest and alludes to two such tales with indignation. At last he declares that he will leave rhyme to Chaucer and tell a prose tale and immediately begins a prologue in rhyme royal.

The theories of art and the mind which Poe advances systematically in his criticism and elaborates into the cosmology of Eureka are also expressed in his literary works on all levels of theme and form, including recurrent actions, symbols, settings, patterns of characterization, and narrative stances. Despite his separation of beauty from truth and duty, and of the imaginative faculty from reason and conscience, Poe's aesthetic is a self-contained metaphysics and ethics. Unity, the essential condition and supreme value of art, is the condition likewise of death, as pursued by Poe's fictional characters through destructive acts which are vicariously and finally suicidal. Often literally artists or connoisseurs, these protagonists are motivated by a “perversity” indistinguishable in its goals and techniques from those of the divinely inspired imagination. In killing others, they impose unity upon the diverse and particular, assimilating into themselves identities which were tangible reflections of their own beings, and were, so to speak, imperfect art objects. When the hero is victim rather than aggressor, his passage into unconsciousness or mystic awareness is again governed by his longing for unity and attended by aesthetic insight. The relationship in Poe's essays between artist and critic illuminates the ratiocinative tales. Here, the detective's solutions arise from imaginative identification with the criminal and internal enactment of his deed. Obedient to the same intuitive forces, the critic-detective and the creator-criminal display a kinship which conforms to the doubling of aggressive and passive figures in the tales of terror. Life, in Poe's value system, is inimical to an aesthetic bliss; and the didactic implications of his poetry and fiction are reversals of conventional humanistic judgments.

If One wishes to bother, one may divide mankind into two classes: those who judge their fellows by predetermined laws of conduct, and those who merely observe their fellows for what they are. Bunyan and Tolstoy are typical of the former class; Shakspere and Jane Austen of the second.

Marie de France was a sort of mediaeval Jane Austen. Both women knew their set, they knew their sex, and they knew little more of life. But that little they knew well, and of that little they wrote well, for both had the knack of story-telling. Both steered a sure course between sentimentality and cynicism; their writings reveal a general deftness, a perfect tact—“restraint,” as it is sometimes called—and a nice analysis of motives, from which spring plots that fit the characters as inseparably and yet as flexibly as the skin fits the hand. Jane is dryer, and more steadily ironical, though Chaitivel indicates that Marie could also be ironical; indeed, we might label their chief spiritual difference by saying that Jane is British through and through, but Marie is French.

Some admirers of More's Utopia have used the term “satire” to prove that it is essentially a jeu d'esprit. Others have used it to contend that Utopia is essentially a serious didactic argument. But while both schools of criticism use the term “satire” to wrestle with the problems presented by Utopia's form and technique, neither has employed it consistently to resolve the major problems raised by More's little book. How is one to reconcile More's “real intention” (however defined) with his “manner of alternating seriousness and parody?” Why should a canonized Lord Chancellor ever have constructed an “ideal” commonwealth so manifestly antithetical to his orthodoxy? Can the textual and personal sources of More's ideas explain Hythloday's arguments in Book I, or the institutions of Utopian society? These questions remain after half a century of intense scholarship and impassioned appraisal. The latest and most exhaustive study of More's book, having explicitly separated Utopia's “matter” from its “style and form,” concludes that “dashes of wit, satire, and irony add zest to [Utopia's] perusal but make its interpretation intriguing and perplexing … Utopia, it seems almost futile to say, is a complex and enigmatic book.”

The charades of Vanity Fair represent an important but little understood fable of demonic and outraged womanhood as a subtext of Thackeray's larger historical fiction. In marking the culmination of Becky Sharp's career in the world of vanity—her triumph as Clytemnestra and her impersonation of the plaintive Philomele—the charades imply a corrupt sexual ideology threatening both violence and violation. But from the perspective of Thackeray as narrator, the verbally compressed and designedly opaque charades repress as much as they expose. His uncharacteristic narrative reticence in presenting the charades without comment reveals an uneasiness on Thackeray's part about the powers of the authorizing mind to know and to represent the darker laws that govern history and society.

The usual criticism of Tristram Shandy denies that there is in this great novel plan, form, or method. Sterne himself supplied the text which criticism has tirelessly amplified, “I begin writing the first sentence … trusting to God Almighty for the second.” A popular history of English literature, to take one of a great many possible examples, speaks of Tristram Shandy as having “an indefinite theme, worked out by a verve that has not the slightest concern for order, unity or logic. … The work is a series of mental and verbal pirouettings.” Governor Cross, almost alone among critics, has given the book its proper place in the history of the novel by elaborating what Sterne himself repeatedly said, that Tristram Shandy is Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in a novelized form.