For almost two centuries the nature and significance of Samuel Johnson's work in the translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia have been obscured. Both James Boswell and Sir John Hawkins denied that any traces of Johnson's style exist in the translation, and, following their lead, most scholars have been willing to accept at face value Johnson's explanation of what he had done:

Doris Lessing's major novels dealing with madness show a striking similarity to the ideas of R. D. Laing. Novelist and psychiatrist share the belief that the primary ill of our society is self-division; both see the mad person as victim and revealer of what is wrong with normal society. Lessing shares Laing's conviction that the therapist can help his patient best by transposing himself into the patient's world view. The Golden Notebook portrays the progressive disintegration of Anna's normally fragmented life to its culmination in madness with Saul, her fellow patient and unwitting therapist. In The Four-Gated City Martha helps the mad Lynda and eventually herself and the world by entering into Lynda's view of reality. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell Charles goes on a Laingian cosmic journey; however, the hero's vision of a fatally structured universe undercuts the force of Lessing's final portrayal of madness as potential salvation for the world.

The fact that Georg Trakl's poetry frequently contains allusions to Hölderlin, Rimbaud, the Bible, and to various additional authors is well known. The presence of Büchner's Lenz and of some other texts in Traum und Umnachtung has, however, not yet been recognized. Some twenty-two specific passages from Lenz, adapted and modified in various ways, occur in the second section of Traum und Umnachtung. In addition, Trakl paraphrases texts by Nietzsche in the first section and cites Hölderlin in the third; the last section comprises most of the major themes from Trakl's own work. The concentration of allusions to a specific author in single sections of Traum und Umnachtung suggests that Trakl's use of citations is conscious. Such a recognition does not involve an “intentional fallacy”: the author's intention, in incorporating allusions and quotations into his work, is comparable to his intention in choosing a certain kind of form. Both citations and forms can be identified with the proper training: a work of literature containing conscious allusions (Zitatendichtung)must be treated as a literary form in its own right, in which even simple, apparently descriptive phrases no longer refer to objects or experiences, but to the tradition of poetic language. (In German)

The theater-dream metaphor raises fundamental ontological and epistemological questions and treats them in much the same way as phenomenological thought does. Both the metaphor and Edmund Husserl’s theory “reduce” the ontological problem to a play of experience—to activity and process—leaving the final question of what is “real” unresolved. Such activity necessarily involves Heideggerean “dimensions” that are not only open, mobile, temporal, “in play” but also structural, patterning. Examples ranging from Renaissance to modern drama, from the Russian to the American stage, show how dimensions are revealed both as the familiar structures of our thinking (stratifications, circles within circles, temporal delineations, subject-object categories, etc.) and as the structuring principles by which “real” and “imagined” worlds establish relationships. Thus we can move among such implicit structures to consider multiple stage-world relations—the interplay of subjects and objects of experience and concomitant audience-art-artist implications.

In the “good old days” in the United States, as in Europe, which supplied the model, anyone who went to a secondary school and college studied Latin as a matter of course. Even in the first years of this century, when a half million students were enrolled in all our public high schools, fully half of them were still studying Latin. Those days are gone, and will never return. To regret their passing is to regret both mass education and mankind's phenomenal increase in scientific knowledge. Moreover, our world has shrunk while America's role in it has grown, and lately our society has recognized the increasing relevance of studying modern foreign languages. What, then, is the future place of Latin in American education? As one who long ago was taught both Latin and Greek, I want to try to answer this question as candidly and as objectively as I can.

There are essentially three orientations toward landscape description in the lyric: the kind that describes an external place that serves as a backdrop, ornament, or illustration for the poet's thinking; the kind that transforms an external scene into a region of the poet's mind; and the kind that claims to be a habitable region in its own right. Each type has its own mode of assertiveness. In the first, the poetry of distance, description is made possible by claiming that it is impossible to enter the scene. The second features the topography of the inner eye, which results when the poet claims to absorb and become a space. The rhetoric of the third makes the text itself a “place.” All three imply a staking out of poetic territory and the rhetorical domination of the scene. Since these modes transcend literary periodization, they furnish a loosely drawn typology of descriptive poetry.

Nous ne nous occuperons, dans cet article, que des groupes intervocaliques de deux consonnes (exemple: aspect).

La structure syllabique n'est pas quelque chose d'absolument fixe en franjais, dit M. Gougenheim en se plaant du point de vue phonologique. Il va de soi que ce manque de fixit s'attribue aussi bien la coupe syllabique. On ne s'tonnera done pas de ce que les traits qui ont affaire avec la description phontique du franais vitent parfois ce sujet et que ceux qui en parlent soient rarement d'accord. Nous n'avons pas la prtention de trancher dfinitivement la question mais simplement d'tablir les tendances les plus apparentes de coupe syllabique en franais moderne. Dans ce but, nous avons relev des exemples de tous les groupes intervocaliques de deux consonnes qui peuvent se trouver dans la langue franjaise et nous les avons assembls dans le tableau I qui suit.

In July 1099, after three years of levantine military adventure during which new latin christian colonies were fashioned at edessa and Antioch, the transnational forces from Europe later known as the First Crusade finally captured their principal target: Jerusalem. Three eyewitness chronicles attest to the bloodbath that followed. Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to one of the foremost Crusade leaders, estimated that “ten thousand were beheaded” at the Temple of Solomon alone (Chronicle 77). The anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum (The Deeds of the Franks) averred, “No-one has ever seen or heard of such a slaughter of pagans” (92). Raymond d'Aguiliers, chaplain to another Crusade leader, was effusive:

Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet lay in the houses and streets, and indeed there was a running to and fro of men and knights over the corpses…. [T]hese are few and petty details…. Shall we relate what took place there? If we told you, you would not believe us. So it is sufficient to relate that in the Temple of Solomon and the portico crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses. In my opinion, this was poetic justice…. Jerusalem was now littered with bodies. (Historia 127-28)

Though of slight intrinsic value, Whig poetry of the eighteenth century constitutes a distinct chapter in the history of English literature. The earlier interest of poetry relating to affairs of state had almost invariably taken the form of personal eulogy, satire, or violent invective—types produced in extraordinary abundance during the Restoration. While such verse continued to flourish indefinitely, the complete development of the party system of government enabled poetry to acquire a much broader and more influential sphere. The great body of Whig verse written in the eighteenth century is devoted to the expression of party ideals; it is concerned with principles rather than personalities. This change of function, deeply significant for the future relation of politics and belles lettres, arose largely from the fact that poets were irresistibly attracted by what Chevrillon calls the psychology of Whiggism. Fortunately for the Whig cause, the versifiers contrived to find in the Whig dogma the political embodiment of the most popular moral sentiments of the age. The advocacy of Whiggism thus became a phase of a sentimental movement which, beginning early in the century, eventually “spread like a mildew over the whole surface of literature.”

In the history of the English language in the seventeenth century Milton occupies an anomalous position. In his general outlook on the character and problems of the language and in his efforts for linguistic regularity he suggests the rationalizing and standardizing tendencies of the eighteenth century. But in his actual practice in the matters of vocabulary, sentence structure, and syntax, he displays a versatility and extravagance which is characteristically Elizabethan. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate one of these aspects of Milton's English, namely, the chief features of his prose vocabulary, especially as illustrated in his own lexical innovations, and to draw certain conclusions from them in regard to his position as a great enricher of the English language.

The most productive approach to the world of scholarship in 1883 requires starting further back, about 1821, when individuals drawn by a passion for philology and English studies first sought to master a new field and become scholars. Passion is not too strong a word here. During the second and third quarters of the century, despite a lack of opportunity for formal training, despite isolation from European scholars, despite the difficulty of getting books and the absence of encouragement or likely reward, these scholars undertook enormous and very different kinds of projects. Their commitment and scholarship, which earned national and international respect, helped to define the American scholar as a specialist and to shape what they insisted was a discipline suitable for the undergraduate college curriculum. Active both outside and within the academy, they not only generated national recognition of the scholar's need for research libraries and higher education's need for scholars but established the value of teaching English in American colleges and universities. Because of their efforts, by 1883 the world of scholarship, at least in broad outline, was the world we now know. That is, though 1883 marks the founding of the Modern Language Association and therefore an important beginning in the professionalization of the discipline, it also marks the end of a pioneering era in American scholarship.

The pronouns I and you, together with several other “shifters,” do not have a referential function in language. Many of the questions we ask (and fail to answer) about lyric poetry arise out of inadmissable translations of I and you into referential forms. Buber’s myth of a primal I-Thou relation gives us a guide to a reading of I and you in Achterberg’s “Ballade” in such a preferential way, I seeking to recover the lost relation by calling You into being through poetic-magical activity. Here the quest of I, however, culminates in confrontation with “the hole,” the void from which comes the Logos. While the nominal theme of the poem is the failure of the poetic-creative self to bring back the Logos, its secret theme is that poesis-as-activity can cause the continual coming-into-being of the Logos and the lost You. (The essay includes a translation of Achterberg’s poem.)

Emily Dickinson's poetic vocabulary has been variously described as being “a small, rigidly compartmented vocabulary of general and conventional groups of terms, plus a moderately capacious vocabulary of homely, acute, directly felt words from which the whole actualizing strength of her verse is drawn”; as being a “large vocabulary including many rare words and some of her own manufacture”; and as being “undeniably rich, subtle, and strikingly original.” Much of the discussion of her vocabulary has been based upon the impressions of individual commentators and not upon an objective survey of her vocabulary as a whole, but the appearance in 1951 of a concordance to the poems of the Amherst poet in print at that time and the recent publication of the definitive edition of her poems that includes all of the known Dickinson material have made possible a detailed study of her entire vocabulary which furnishes a factual basis for conclusions as to her verbal habits. Such a study shows that the words on which a great deal of critical attention has been focused form only a small part of her total vocabulary and that her so-called favorite words are far from being her favorites on the basis of frequency of occurrence, findings that raise the question of whether the emphasis on those words is that of the poet or of the critics. Such a study also makes it possible to compare the Dickinson vocabulary with those of other poets and thus to determine in what ways she is unique in the words she uses and in what ways she conforms to patterns established by other poets. This discussion is based upon the results of such a study, and, in view of the comments that have been made on her vocabulary, it falls rather naturally into three parts: (1) the isolation and analysis of the more unusual words used by Dickinson, (2) the discussion of her “favorite” words, and (3) the comparison of her most frequently used words with those used most often by one hundred English poets from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. In general, it may be said that the findings show that Emily Dickinson's habits in the choice of words are similar to those of other poets and that her success or failure as a poet cannot be attributed to the use of an exotic or special vocabulary.

Sonnets has appeared to draw on antique topoi of permanence and change and to escape other sonnet sequences' intertextuality and attachment to a set of narrative and lyric conventions. In fact, Shakespeare extensively followed Spenser's nearby nonamatory sequence, translated from Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome. Numerous verbal and thematic resemblances (some exclusive to Ruines and Sonnets) show Shakespeare transmuting Spenser's image–a preeminent city ruined by time and the conflicts of will and of appetite among its contentious sons but immortalized in the literature inspired by its greatness–into another image: a preeminent youth, vulnerable to time and moral decay, who endures in Sonnets. Also, Shakespeare's early histories borrow verbally and thematically from Ruines' weakening of an otherwise invincible nation by strife. The nature of Shakespeare's transaction with Ruines remains to be investigated.

The reputation of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood as a work of “marginal” modernism is complicated by its affinities with the aesthetics of high modernism, a fact signaled by its role as the inspiration of Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form. At once emblematic and eccentric, the novel is devoted to both recognition and obscurity. Nightwood enacts this paradox through a strategy of queer ekphrasis that aestheticizes moments of loss, giving aesthetic form to experiences of stigma in order to “dazzle” them. Attending to Barnes's spatial form will forward debates about modernism and queer theory, suggesting a more useful vocabulary for both: an account of the aesthetic that is neither wholly subversive nor wholly conservative and a nuanced account of queerness that does not subscribe to either total negation or total affirmation.

A troubling feature of the common core state standards initiative (CCSSI) for english language arts (ELA) is its failure to recognize literature as a catalyst of complex thinking in students. According to the CCSSI, to “prepare all students for success in college, career, and life,” children must read texts “more complex” than “stories and literature” (“English Language Arts Standards”). The assumption that “stories” are inferior to nonfiction has a long tradition in Western culture; tapping into that prejudice is easy, and no proof seems to be required.

Scholars have long described Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books as a Darwinian narrative. Overlooked, however, is the way in which the text explicitly discusses Lamarckian evolutionary ideas, especially the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This essay contextualizes Mowgli's narrative within a fierce late-nineteenth-century debate about whether the Darwinian theory of natural selection or Lamarckian use inheritance was the main driver of evolutionary change. Kipling describes his protagonist's maturation to “Master of the Jungle” in thoroughly Lamarckian terms, as an evolutionary process propelled by experience, effort, and conscious adaptation. But some of the conceptual incoherence that troubled the Lamarckian evolutionary scheme when it was applied to human racial difference also troubles Kipling's account of Mowgli's genetic past and the evolutionary issue of his experiences.

The years from 1885 to 1898 have been correctly termed by Mr. G. K. Chesterton “an epoch of real pessimism.” Not that pessimists were common at this time, but the question of the value of life was on the horizon of every educated man, and developed like a storm cloud whenever the air of speculation chilled. In England the literary men in particular were given to pessimistic questionings; and a great volume of Continental literature, of a quality to reënforce the idea of the world's tedium and pain, began to appear in translation. FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat sprang into public attention in 1885 and maintained an immense popularity for the next fifteen years. Inasmuch as it has often been confidently affirmed that the cause of the pessimism of this period is to be found in the teachings of Schopenhauer, I have undertaken to examine the nature and extent of Schopenhauer's influence. No evidence appears, however, that Schopenhauer had more than a contributory influence; and the task has necessarily broadened into a study of the history of literary pessimism. Because of the extent of the subject, the present paper offers little more than a summary of methods and results. I hope later to publish the proofs in greater detail.

In her important study of the Wakefield Group in the Towneley cycle, Dr. Millicent Carey has much to say regarding the various English versions of the play of Noah and his wife. Here, says Dr. Carey, “Noah's wife appears as a speaking character for the first time ... Although she is mentioned in all the other versions from the Bible on, she is never known to utter a word until the dramatists of the Middle Ages make her an important member of their dramatis personae.” For the unbiblical Newcastle introduction of the devil and the temptation of Noah's wife—unique in the English miracle plays—Dr. Carey says that she has found no hint in Jewish legend. She considers the suggestion of Brotanek, who favors derivation by analogy with the Eve legend; of Brandl, who argues an approximation to Morality play construction; and of Cushman, who, rejecting the two former theories, remarks on the ubiquitous rôle of the devil as tempter in medieval legend generally. She points out an English dramatic parallel in the incident of the appearance of the devil to Pilate's wife in the York cycle, itself perhaps derived through analogy from the Eve story, and refers to certain other Continental parallels where the devil is a well-recognized device for registering “obstruction to the expressed wishes of God”—a device which may have originated in the Eve story or “may simply be a reflection of the mediaeval tendency to explain all evil as caused by the devil.”