Among the many interesting phenomena of speech-life are the disappearance and the development of a p, b, t, d, k, or g between two consonants. The suppression of the stop seems to be usually due to a general tendency to simplify consonant groups, whenever such reduction facilitates utterance and does not interfere with intelligibility; thus Vulgar Latin compto becomes comto and then conto. The growth of a consonant between two others appears to be occasioned either by a lack of simultaneousness in the action of different organs, as in English Hampton from Hamton, or by an unconscious effort to bridge over a difficult transition, as in Old French estre from esre; sometimes, perhaps, as in Greek àνδρóς, it is brought about by a combination of these causes.

Music is the realm where meaning is not ruined by saying. With the phrase “unheard melodies,” Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” evokes the unspeakable in a passage whose logic has collapsed. Literally unheard melodies, along with related phenomena, appear in music by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Schönberg, and Beethoven; each hidden melody resonates with the expressive structure of the piece containing it—with the felt idea that performance must actuate. Unseen pictures in paintings function similarly. Thus in unheard melodies thought acts unmediated by utterance. They—and not the Imaginary—are the Platonic ideal Mallarmé sought. They show how form is power and life.

The poems of Humfrey Newton, printed herewith for the first time from his commonplace book (the Capesthorne MS., now Bodleian MS. Lat. misc. c 66), have lain disregarded for over four hundred years, known only in manuscript to his immediate descendants and to an occasional antiquary. Humfrey Newton is no more than a minor poet, but he is important for three reasons. Any writer about whom there exist biographical data is a welcome addition to the limited roster of known authors of the late fifteenth century. Secondly, Newton uses many Cheshire words, and his texts provide a large secondary source of dialect and provincial words, and examples of usages earlier than those hitherto recorded. Finally, Newton's original poems and those well-known texts he copied are an indication of the literary interests of the provincial reading public of about 1500.

Scholars have explained why Milton chose Paradise Lost as the subject for his great epic, but they have not directly considered his reasons for giving up his original plan of writing a heroic poem about the half-mythical figures of the Britons who preceded the Germanic tribes in England. Reasons may well be sought. Certainly the selective process consists not only in approving the good characteristics inhering in one alternative; it also recognizes the defects and disadvantages in the alternative which is rejected. It is my aim in the following pages to show that these negative considerations had their share in determining Milton to write “Of Man's first disobedience” rather than of

what resounds
In fable or romance of Uther's son,
Begirt with British and Armoric knights.

This interesting clue to the source of the play has not been carefully followed up. “The origin of the story on which it is founded,” says Ward, “is unknown; but unless the Prologue's assertion that the plot is based on fact is to be taken literally, its source is probably some nearly contemporary novel. Either Ford or the novelist from whom he borrowed made little account of historical probability in choosing Sparta as the scene of a love-tragedy which savours of mediæval Italy.” Ellis, also, remarks that the scene is “curiously placed in Sparta,” and adds that the story “may have been taken from an Italian novel.”

Classical texts were extensively translated into the vernacular in Italy during the period when Italian poetry began, and the “mentality” of translation is traceable in this early verse. Vernacularization is gendered female, especially in the conventions of lyric poetry. As exemplified in some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poems and their prose commentaries, “vulgarization” is often presented as a discourse to women, who are conceived as a superior rather than an inferior audience. Instead of demeaning the Latin original, this kind of vulgarization paradoxically ennobles both the learned or scientific content and the young language in which it is written. This peculiar moment of Italian literary history contrasts with concurrent translation in France, with the subsequent abandonment of vulgarization under the influence of Petrarch, and with modern notions of the politics of translation.

It is a problem in literary criticism to know how to use the growing store of material discovered by historical research. This is only the practical aspect of a larger, theoretical problem: the relation between a written work and the biographical experiences of the writer. It has never been doubted that a poet's experiences, public and private, historical and psychological, reappear, distorted, refined, generalized, reordered, in his poetry. Hence it follows that the reconstruction of the poet's experiences from diaries, letters, accounts of friends, and public records, may illuminate his poetry. But the converse of this proposition is also assumed to be true: if the biographical experience illuminates the poetry, the poetry must also illuminate the biographical experience. The poem, in other words, is an autobiographical document.

In “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” Martin Luther King, Jr., attributes his intellectual development to his reading of Marx, Gandhi, Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, and other prestigious authors whose works he encountered during his graduate studies at seminary and at Boston University. To explain his responses to notable philosophers and theologians, King incorporates passages from seven writers whose names do not appear in the essay. While the network represented by these writers stimulated King's thought more profoundly than did the more respectable tradition that “Pilgrimage” invokes, the black church supplied him with the foundation of virtually all the ideas appearing in the essay. In addition, the black folk pulpit furnished the epistemology of voice merging that enabled King to compose an autobiographical essay and a self. Yoking black orality and print, King adapted the folk procedure of blending identities to create a magisterial public persona that could help reshape a nation.

It does not often happen that a language form created by conscious deliberation and planning wins the warm support and widespread acceptance which has fallen to the lot of New Norse, the creation of Ivar Aasen (1813–1896). A large body of serious literature has grown up in this artificial common denominator of Norwegian dialects; possibly a fourth of the school-children of Norway receive their chief instruction in it. Although New Norse is far from its goal of supremacy, it is a factor of the utmost significance in Norwegian history, and a phenomenon of great interest to students of language and literature.

The earliest detailed study of Aasen's linguistic practice is found in Johan Storm's polemic pamphlet Det nynorske Landsmaal. That brilliant scholar here applied his wit and ingenuity to proving that New Norse (Landsmaal) as written, was not and could not be a language, because of its inevitable tendency to crumble up into the dialects of which it was created. To this end he analyzed in some detail the language of the various New Norse writers, among them Aasen. His purpose did not, however, involve an exhaustive study of Aasen's works, many of which were then unknown or scattered. Hence his classification was inadequate and at times definitely incorrect. He divided Aasen's New Norse into an older form, represented by Prøver af Landsmaalet (1853) and Fridtjofs Saga (1858), and an intermediary form used in Ervingen (2d ed., 1874), Heimsyn (1875) and Symra (3d ed., 1875). But this rough division (based chiefly on the change in 1858 from dan, dat to den, det) gives us no conception whatever of the gradual steps by which Aasen passed from form to form and the experimentation out of which his completed New Norse norm was shaped.

Whenever Herbert Spencer mentioned the origin of his works, he always insisted upon the freedom of his thought from the influence of others. This claim, though attacked in the case of several of his writings, has remained unquestioned as regards The Philosophy of Style. Indeed, so unusual has this essay appeared to all readers that, with the recognition that it possesses much originality, has gone, apparently, the conviction that it was made by Spencer from whole cloth. Thus much Spencer himself did not claim; yet perhaps even Spencer—always a little blind to the influences upon his work—would not have recognized the extent of his indebtedness.

It is notoriously the case that there is no satisfactory English equivalent for the German Literaturwissenschaft or the Russian literaturovedenie. On the cusp of a new millennium, we are a profession that cannot say its name. This onomastic homelessness is reflected in the spate of recent books that mention borders in their titles, such as the MLA's own Redrawing the Boundaries, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, or Giovanna Franci's Remapping the Boundaries. The suggestion in each is that the comfortable boundaries of our old disciplinary territory have eroded: we have somehow lost our place. If our profession were a person, it would be an orphan in exile. This condition is also legible in the current broad interest in the history of our profession's formation. There is increasing—and increasingly urgent—concern to know who we are and how we got here.

In Europe, as michel foucault aptly pointed out, western identity was constituted by the privileging of time and history (understood as alive, fluid, and ontological) over space (viewed as inert and dead); Latin America has followed a diametrically opposed process. The urban and the city in particular have dominated Latin American thought since 1492. Shaped by metropolitan centers much more than cultures in early modern Europe, the great pre-Hispanic civilizations forced the conquistadors to understand the process of conquest and evangelization in terms of urbanization. It suffices to see the map of the great city of Tenochtitlán (today's Mexico City) that accompanies Hernán Cortés's second letter to Emperor Charles V, his “Carta de relación,” and to read about the awe that overcame the historian Bernal Díaz del Castillo when he first saw the sheer vastness, beauty, and order of the great Aztec center to understand the important role urban planning would play throughout the colonial period and well beyond.

The posthumous homosexual fiction of E. M. Forster indicates a marked impulse in all his work: the tame in pursuit of the savage. The connection is to be, in part, emotional but will have political meaning as well. In Forster's situations, power—which resides in the world of the tame—is suspect because it rests on institutionalized force; in contrast, the sexual potency of the savage arises out of his being a “natural” man in the Rousseauean sense. This tension parallels the dynamics of Forster's private life, but its manifestation in his art does not simply reflect a personal preoccupation: the literature of attempted liaison with the savage serves a public position—egalitarian, anti-imperialistic, and internationalist—as well as a romantic ideal. In Maurice, in “The Life to Come” and “The Other Boat,” and even in his first three novels, the sexual and political ideas reflect the intention, albeit somewhat disguised, to subvert the prevailing ethos.

The neglect of The Merry Wives of Windsor among scholars and critics results from a failure to appreciate the special nature of the play. Although superficially structured like Roman comedy, the play is really built upon the succession of Falstaff episodes, which give meaning to the Fenton-Anne plot and provide a resolution for it. In this play Falstaff is no lecher but a discredited old adventurer, down on his luck, who becomes the scapegoat for a community afflicted generally by the lust and greed that some of its members seek to make him solely responsible for. The humiliations that they impose upon him are similar to those traditionally inflicted upon the scapegoat figures of European folk custom, and at the end of the play he has become the horned scapegoat indeed, the visible bearer of punishment, and the means whereby innocent love may triumph in Windsor in spite of parental vanity and economic interests. Thus, with the punishment of Falstaff, death is once more temporarily defeated, and the renewal, appropriately celebrated in comedy, is presented for the approval of sympathetic audiences.

Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand (; 1978), the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s to deal extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold—and problematic—attempt to overcome the negative stereotype of the Jew in Russian culture and to create a memorial to the Soviet Jews murdered by the Nazis. However, governmental and self-imposed censorship, socialist realism, and the narrator's conflicted Russian-Jewish identity vitiate this rehabilitative project. Rybakov's use of socialist realism to heroize the Jews and to present their destruction as part of a larger plot to exterminate the Slavs distorts and de-Judaizes the Soviet Jewish catastrophe of the Second World War. Heavy Sand is replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, the author celebrates Jewish family life and writes of a memorial to murdered Jews that includes a potentially subversive Hebrew inscription; on the other, he denies the significance of Jewish identity and provides a Russian translation of the Hebrew inscription that accords with Soviet policy and ideology. In the end, Heavy Sand conceals more than it reveals about Jewish life and death in the Soviet Union; it represents an aesthetics of—and a testimony to—not remembering but forgetting.

In 1843 when Lord Jeffrey reviewed the critical activity of his early maturity he took pains to explain his unsympathetic treatment of fiction in the columns of The Edinburgh Review:

It may be worth while to inform the present generation that, in my youth, writings of this sort were rated very low with us—scarcely allowed indeed to pass as part of a nation's permanent literature—and generally deemed altogether unworthy of any grave critical notice.

James Thomson's first contact with Newtonian philosophy was as a student at the University of Edinburgh between 1715 and 1725. Newtonianism had been first introduced there by David Gregory, who, upon graduation in 1683, was appointed Professor of Mathematics. William Whiston, Newton's successor at Cambridge, says that it was to one of Gregory's papers that he owed his conversion to Newton's philosophy. When David Gregory accepted the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford in 1691, he was succeeded at Edinburgh by his brother, James Gregory, another Newtonian. In 1725, on the recommendation of Newton himself, Colin Maclaurin was appointed to assist James Gregory at Edinburgh; thus, from 1683 on, Newtonianism was firmly established in the University of Edinburgh.

Few of Milton's lines have called forth more comment and interpretation than lines 130-131 of Lycidas, which form the climax of the denunciation of corruption in the clergy:

But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

For example, Professor C. G. Osgood has suggested that an allusion to “the iron flail of Talus” was intended—a supposition that would link the “two-handed engine” in an interesting way to Milton's avowed admiration for Spenser and to the uprooting of the hills in the war in heaven. This interpretation, however, while it might enrich the metaphor, would make Milton's words voice only a vague hope that some agency, as yet unknown, would punish the corruption of the clergy. And such vagueness in Milton's mind hardly agrees with his deliberate confidence in the accomplishment of the reforms he advocated—a confidence which he maintained, even in the face of an obviously changing popular attitude, until the Restoration was fully wrought.

Most Shakespeare scholars have believed that an earlier form of The Taming of the Shrew once existed, whether it was The Taming of a Shrew or some other version. There are scholars also who hold that an earlier form of The Taming of a Shrew must be postulated. Some have suggested a theory of a common source.