By describing arts as technologies we gain a new perspective on the shift from classic to Romantic esthetics that clarifies Blake's term “machine” in relation to art. Printing drove visual arts to systemize picture reproduction on a principle Blake called “intermeasurability,” essentially atomism, by which art was adjusted to commercial technology. While efficient production requires division between conception and execution, in art conception is execution. Blake saw neoclassical artists divide them, then disguise the incoherent results with classical doctrines of generalization, harmony, and high finish adapted to the needs of systemization. Because the machine is execution and does not change, mechanical order becomes artistic order.

Although unanimously considered a masterpiece, the Lazarillo de Tormes has given some scholars and critics the impression of a poorly sustained or even unfinished piece of work. Chandler says “it seems as if the earlier portion alone had been completed and the rest laid down in a scheme for further elaboration.” Bonilla states that “lo mejor del relato es, sin disputa, la parte contenida en los tres primeros tratados . . . . Lo restante vale mucho menos; a partir del tratado cuarto, la narración se precipita y el interés decae notoriamente.” Chaytor adds: “Lazarillo's story is a series of pictures, between which the only connecting thread is the personality of Lazarillo himself. . . . . . (It) impresses the reader as an unfinished work. Of the seven tratados . . . . only four are elaborated in detail.” Reynier observes that “ce petit roman manque trop évidemment de proportion. Les derniers chapitres sont très écourtés. . . . . On a l'impression que l'auteur n'a suivi que sa fantaisie et qu'il a abandonné son personnage lorsqu'il a cessé de l'amuser.” Finally, Northup writes: “The four final tratados are suspiciously short and betray the hand of the pruner.”

To disengage moral error from the structure of narrative in Paradise Lost, Milton had, on the one hand, to renounce allegory and, on the other hand, to redefine the probabilistic conception of truth in contemporary theories of the heroic poem. While Spenser associates error with the meanderings of narrative, Milton polarizes error and truth so that no ambiguous wandering can occur in the intervening space—precisely the space where allegorical narrative must occur. Milton sought to teach by direct statement, Spenser to form character by engaging the reader in an interpretative game.

When Melville bought an English translation of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique early in 1849, he obviously anticipated—with mock alarm—an “influence.” He wrote Evert Duyck-inck, in whose library he may have come across it earlier: “I bought a set of Bayle's Dictionary the other day, & on my return to New York I intend to lay the great old folios side by side & go to sleep on them thro' the summer, with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brown in the other.” It was, of course, a moment for influences, the most receptive and most productive period of Melville's life. That year, he saw Mardi and Redburn into print, and made the memorable trip to England with the MS. of White Jacket. A few months later he moved to the Berkshires, where he met Hawthorne and began work on a new book about a whaling voyage. Though we hear no more of Bayle's Dictionary we can feel sure that the program of summer reading was carried out. I shall show how pervasive were its effects on Moby Dick.

In 1931 the mathematician Kurt Gödel published a treatise establishing the inherent incompleteness and inconsistency of that order of logical system used in Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica. Gödel's work has proved an attractive reference in diverse fields, particularly in postmodern literary-critical theory, which often seems intent on logical impasse and which sees a protodeconstructive corroboration in Gödel's theorem. Such analogizing is not without informative substance, but a closer look at the philosophical and mathematical theory surrounding Gödel's practice reveals that Gödelian undecidability emerges from a theoretical framework—a mathematical Platonism—with extensive metaphysical commitments regarding subject position and the objects of thought. Gödel's explorations of logical undecidability do not so much undermine logocentric suppositions as exploit them all the more consequentially. The analogy between Gödel's theorem and postmodern theory underscores the metaphysical operations of any criticism that finds in Gödel a “postmetaphysical” ally. (DWT)

The complex and haunting strangeness of Britomart's night at Isis Church in Spenser's Faerie Queene v.vii guarantees that we take no stingy monistic view of its allegorical possibilities. Of these possibilities, however, the historical allegory has been neglected lately, surprisingly in view of the topical allusiveness of much of Book v. Possibly the justice and equity allegorized in the episode have seemed to be too obviously relevant to Queen Elizabeth's rule for anyone to give them an exact point of reference in contemporary affairs. I believe, however, that particularity of historical reference was intended by Spenser. Contemporaries tended to treat dreams as fairly precise communications.

Recent cultural criticism and literary theory draw extensively on vernacular languages, performances, and rituals as paradigms for reading African American prose texts. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem “An Ante-bellum Sermon” draws on the African American vernacular sermon and the performance of the black preacher to create a “preacherly text” that reconstructs the African American author's strategy for achieving authority with a racially divided audience. The conventions of dialect fashion a mask that evokes stereotypical minstrel images, so that Dunbar's preacher can subversively inscribe a political and racial discourse within the confines of the dominant nineteenth-century American popular culture. Dunbar's preacherly text is always double-voiced and disguised, taking full advantage of linguistic indeterminacy and using indirect verbal strategies to speak the unspeakable. In this way, “An Ante-bellum Sermon” provides us with a model for theorizing about the persisting rhetorical strategies of African American poetry.

In The Rhythm of Beowulf Professor John Pope has presented a convincing case for reading Beowulf as a structure of language ordered not only by stress-patterns but by stress-patterns within strict time-sequences. According to Pope's thesis the rhythm of most Old English poetry can be described as a series of measures equivalent in length (isochronous) though varying in the number of syllables they contain and in the stress-patterns enforced upon these syllables.

When Francis Bacon set down, in the fragment called the New Atlantis, his conception of a commonwealth as it ought to be, he was following a precedent of honorable antiquity. As we should expect, he shows obvious indebtedness to Plato's Republic, Timœus, and Critias and to More's Utopia; but the fact that the latest of these was a century old when Bacon began to write gave him scope for considerable originality in creating a “perfect state” adapted to the thought of his own times. His notes and writings over a period of years show that many of the theories and projects that took form in the New Atlantis had long been in his mind. By 1608 he had perceived the importance to science of coöperation in research, had seen the suitability of a collegiate organization as an agency for carrying on scientific investigation, and had jotted down specific details of plans, problems, and equipment which show that his mind was occupied with the practical aspects of his ideal. Although the opportunity to establish a college of research in an English university never came to Bacon, the concept of such an institution persisted until it became the soul of his Utopia—Salomon's House, or the College of the Six Days' Work, credited with having inspired the founding of the Royal Society.

Aldous huxley's Brave New World is generally recognized as one of the two most widely discussed English fantasies of this century. The other, of course, is Orwell's 1984. The two books seem to present the two plausible alternative directions totalitarianism may take, and for several years after the publication of Orwell's book in 1949 it was common to evaluate the one against the other. 1949 was also the year of publication of Huxley's Ape and Essence, an exploration of still other possibilities of the future. It may be profitable to sidestep the question of the credibility of Huxley's fantasies as projections—which is not, fundamentally, a literary question—and to examine them first in relation to some of the techniques employed in their construction, and secondly as satires of the real worlds they reflect.

Of the characters with whom Beowulf has an explicit association in speech and action, Unferth is without question the most difficult to assess, and his function in the Danish court would appear to be just as enigmatic. Other characters who play an active part in the events, such as Hrothgar, Wealhtheow, and Wiglaf, are depicted with clarity and consistency, but with Unferth the poet has proceeded deliberately by means of allusion and equivocation, or at least so it seems to the modern reader who is separated from the Anglo-Saxon audience for which some of our mysteries may not have existed at all. From one of the earliest comments on Unferth's role in the poem to the most recent, four primary assumptions about him have been reiterated, viz., 1) he has an important position in the Danish court, 2) he is trusted by the king and his followers, 3) he is later (after Beowulf's return to Geatland) involved in a conspiracy to overthrow Hrothgar's rule, and 4) he is at first estranged from and then reconciled with Beowulf. Relevant to the first two premises a query has persistently been raised: why is Unferth allowed to attack Beowulf with impunity and what motivates his abuse? The bases of these assumptions are not all of one kind: for one and two, students have relied on that vaguely understood epithet, ϸyle, and one comment by the poet (1166-67); for three, on specific allusions by the poet about Unferth's relation with Hrothulf (1164-68); for four, Unferth's gift of Hrunting and Beowulf's response to the gift. What I propose to do here is to reexamine these premises and the query in terms of the conception of ϸyle in Old English and Old Norse, the graphic representation of Unferth, and the problem of the sword-giving.

Various attempts have been made to express the difference which is felt between French and English accent; for example, French accent has frequently been described as a caress, while English accent has been compared to a blow. Such rather impressionistic terminology has been found suggestive and helpful in teaching, but it represents an attempt to treat the complex phenomenon of accentuation as if it were more simple than it is. In order to make a quantitative study of accent, it is necessary to measure the various elements which constitute it. The object of the present paper is to describe the method used in making a comparative study of the nature of accent in French and English and to present a summary of the results of this investigation.

Most critics of early American literature have testified to the widespread censure of fiction in the last years of the eighteenth century. The attacks, occasionally dignified by book or magazine publication, were, as Carl Van Doren has pointed out, fanlike in their spread: The dullest critics contended that novels were lies; the pious that they served no virtuous purpose; the strenuous, that they softened sturdy minds; the utilitarian, that they crowded out more useful books; the realistic, that they painted adventure too romantic and love too vehement; the patriotic, that dealing with European manners, they tended to confuse and dissatisfy republican youth.

The dullest critics contended that novels were lies; the pious that they served no virtuous purpose; the strenuous, that they softened sturdy minds; the utilitarian, that they crowded out more useful books; the realistic, that they painted adventure too romantic and love too vehement; the patriotic, that dealing with European manners, they tended to confuse and dissatisfy republican youth.

The idea of the possibilities of human action in the Middle English Patience rests on a strictly providential view of history. Jonah's mission to the Ninevites is part of a larger scheme, invisible to him, in which he has little confidence. The irony of the prophet's failure to understand or trust God's moral and historical purposes is deepened by the fact that he is a figure of Christ. Jonah's blindness to God's immediate purpose—salvation for the Ninevites—is foolish, but his ignorance of his own typological significance is inevitable, for that significance cannot be realized until the incarnation of Christ. Thus patience, the virtue in which Jonah fails so badly, is not simply a dull acquiescence in present necessity, but a sure faith in an eternal order not merely obscure but unimagined except by God. A brief reading of the poem shows that the contours of this faith are defined by those three of God's attributes which characterize the moral quality of events in the world he orders: his power, justice, and mercy.

It is strange that contemporary criticism of the Hamlet of Romantic psychology has failed to reckon with an important document of Elizabethan psychology. Professor Stoll has invoked Burton and Professor Schücking, Sir Thomas Overbury; but both the Anatomy and Characters are Jacobean, first published in 1621 and 1614, respectively. There was, however, a book of Elizabethan psychology accessible from 1586, written in English, avowedly to win the general reader, and popular enough for two editions in 1586 and a third in 1613. That Shakespeare used Dr. Timothy Bright's A treatise of melancholie was suggested in 1894 by Richard Loening in support of his theory of Hamlet's physiological melancholy; and in 1899, apparently from independent observation, by Dowden in his edition of Hamlet (p. 77). This suggestion, however, seems to have fallen flat. The title of Bright's Treatise—but not the contents—was known to Stoll, to Schücking, and to Dr. G. A. Bieber, though it is not mentioned by J. M. Robertson, and no reference is made to it in the later studies by Stoll and Schücking. To suggest anew that the Treatise influenced Shakespeare and more particularly Hamlet, is the object of this paper.

Recently, Jerome McGann has criticized The Ruined Cottage's fostering of “the grand illusion” of Romanticism, “the idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture.” But to characterize Wordsworth's poem in this way is to overlook its direct engagement with one social field, the literary marketplace; as an experiment with genre the poem sharply confronts a public taste for sensational literature. This confrontation is also a form of collusion, for the technical innovations that distinguish Wordsworth's poetry of suffering from popular sensational literature deploy the tactics and create the effects of that literature. The Ruined Cottage at once entices and reproves the public taste. Intended to appeal to a public of feminized readers, it also creates the readers-to-be of high Romantic poetry—an audience whose pleasure it is to distance itself from the captivated feminine heart.

In his “Introduction” to Beowulf (p. lvii) Klaeber makes the following remark:

That some of the speeches follow conventional lines of heroic tradition need not be doubted. This applies to the type of the gylpcwide before the combat (675 ff., 1392 ff., 2510 ff.), the ‘comitatus’ speech or exhortation of the retainers (2633 ff., cp. Bjarkamál [Par. §7: Saxo ii.59 ff.,] Maldon 212 ff., 246 ff., Finnsb. 37 ff.).

Although critics have questioned the unity of Daniel Deronda, the double narrative structure of the novel has not been related to contemporary (Victorian) fictions of history. George Eliot's “Oriental Memoranda” notebook documents her interest in current histories of the Jews and suggests a context of universal history based on critical interpretations of the Book of Daniel. This exegetical “key” to interpretation reveals both the significance of Eliot's separation of the plot into two strands and the apocalyptic symbolism that links those strands together in a universal history of humanity in exile. Finally, this “key” suggests that circumcision, though never mentioned in the text, is nevertheless central to the vision uniting Jews with Christians. Daniel Deronda is George Eliot's “Book of Origins,” in which she seeks to deconstruct conventions of history that separate past from present and Jew from Gentile and to reenvision how “everything [is] … related to everything else.”

The ghost in Hamlet is essential to the plot of the play and to an understanding of both the problem of Hamlet and his character. Therefore it is not surprising that it has engaged the close study of critics who offer various and conflicting interpretations.