At first glance, Hillary Chute's Why Comics? presents itself as a chronicle of the heroic deeds of a Pantheon of creative gods. Across ten chapters, Chute tracks the aesthetic achievements of more than twelve world-renowned comics artists whose innovations in sequential visual art represent a range of human experiences, from wartime violence to teenage sexuality to queer family history to living with cognitive and physical disability. In Chute's narrative, such luminaries as Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, and Marjane Satrapi rise up from the vast landscape of comics production as artists whose bodies of work testify to comics's aesthetic diversity and sophistication. These typically erudite cartoonists work at a distance from mainstream comics and produce adult-oriented, long-form graphic narratives considered aesthetic masterpieces. “Although comics of all kinds are flourishing in the twenty-first century,” Chute explains early on in Why Comics?, “there has been a dramatic uptick” in the kind of “auteurist comics” produced by these cartoonists (18), who relish, in Clowes's words, the way the medium allows them to “control absolutely everything and make it … exactly what you're seeing in your own head” (qtd. in Why? 18). For Chute, it is this “singular intimacy of one person's vision”—best displayed in comics produced by sophisticated adult cartoonists writing and drawing for other adults–that underscores that comics are also for grown-ups (18). By now, we all should know this, but we have not learned the lesson well enough (or perhaps some just refuse to listen).

In All's Well That Ends Well Shakespeare adopted Elizabethan dramatic conventions more literally than in any play written after his apprenticeship in the early 1590's and, as a consequence, produced a comedy more of an age than for all time. At the time when the War of the Theaters was subsiding and the innovations of comical satire were dramatically fashionable, a rash of plays, in fact most of the plays between 1601 and 1604 which are designated roughly as romantic comedies, used the same plot. This story traces the career of a well-born young man who succumbs to lust and riotous living; usually, as the play opens, he is betrothed or married to a virtuous young lady whom he spurns for a courtesan. As the play progresses, the hero grows increasingly obstreperous in the face of the heroine's stalwart devotion to him; finally the hero's sins catch up with him, he is brought to trial in which either his life is threatened or his pride is deflated by the exposure of his follies. In this trial he is purged of his lust, sees the value of the virtuous heroine and, cleansed, rejoins her to live out his days in true love.

Over the years, Webster criticism has been haunted by a tendency to see the essential conflict in the tragedies as a struggle between the forces of good and evil. In recent years, critics have scarcely approached the possibility that his vision may be a paradox in which both sides of an apparent contradiction are equally “true.” The antitheses in Webster may not be good and evil so much as two irreconcilably opposed impulses of human nature that can be identified with the Nietzschean terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” From this perspective Francisco, Monticelso, Ferdinand, or the Cardinal is not so much representative of evil as of the Apollonian obsession with obedience, responsibility, sexual restraint, and punishment. Vittoria and the Duchess, freed from moralistic quibbles, are Dionysian rebels. Flamineo and Bosola, like the rest of us, are caught between the demands of equally imperative but mutually exclusive ways of seeing reality.

As many have learned to their dismay, the materials upon which Sterne's biography is at present based offer problems of unusual complexity, problems that are due in part to the man's intricate and elusive nature and in part to his daughter and to his swarm of imitators. Sterne, it is evident, was too great a humorist ever to be quite honest either with his own or with future generations. He amused himself in his letters by deceiving his contemporaries and mystifying posterity. For many years now his devices have been familiar matter: he rewrote his letters with his eye upon the press; sometimes he made portions of a letter serve more than one correspondent; and, though lately we have known it, he readdressed a letter much after the manner of Pope in the expectation that the substituted name of Eliza Draper would make a better impression than that of an unidentified countess.

Twice in the Comedy's last canto Dante refers to the binding of texts. The Sibyl's “light leaves” (lines 64-66) point to the danger of not binding texts: when the order of pages is lost, the text s meaning (sentenza) also vanishes. Medieval thinkers distinguished between the sequential perception (sensus) and the simultaneous perception (sententia) of a poem s elements. Because Dante released the poem in fascicles over a period of ten or more years, he needed to remind the reader in the last fascicle to bind the pages into a single volume. The final book image (85-90) indirectly performs this task. Appearing at the moment when the reader is at last able to pass from the poem s sensus to its sententia, these lines employ book binding as a metaphor for the perception of the text in its entirety. Their unusually polysemous language implies a triple analogy. God, poet, and reader are all artificers of a heavenly volume.

Over forty years ago Oliver Elton wrote of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills”: “This poem is perfectly put together, and it is an intellectual pleasure to see its firm development, even apart from the rapid, impassioned, shimmering brilliancy of the imagery, which resolves itself into the emotions of the poet.” One need not assent to the unqualified absolute of this declaration to recognize the poem as one worthy of serious study, yet during the last half century of intensive Shelley scholarship and criticism there has appeared little to advance our understanding of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” beyond Professor Elton's own perceptive, but necessarily brief appreciation. An examination of Shelleyana will suggest a number of reasons for this neglect by scholars of a poem that is often anthologized and frequently taught. First, Shelley criticism is a literature filled with polemicism, and “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” has never been controversial: critics and admirers of Shelley alike have conceded or declared, when they mentioned it at all, that it is a good poem. Second, its tetrameter couplets appear “uncharacteristic” of Shelley under the generalizations which govern most discussions of his poetry, thus making the poem “peripheral” to both attackers and defenders of Shelley's poetic achievement. Closely related to the problem of metrics are those of the poem's length and its date of composition: it is too long to be discussed with the lyrics, too short to qualify as a major effort, and written too early for intensive study with Shelley's late poetry. Finally, biographers have been less successful than usual in casting light on those passages—especially lines 45–65—that seem to require additional illumination before a critic can integrate the whole composition.

The use of curious languages, for the purpose of lending occasional relief from the commonplace idiom of the mother tongue, has been a familiar literary device since the Middle Ages. These linguistic oddities, meeting on the common ground of variety and novelty for the reader, have served diverse purposes: to speak in jargon, cant, or other special language (e.g. préciosité) to a limited group of the initiated, to provide humor, realism, local color or exotic flavor, and to display various kinds and degrees of linguistic virtuosity.

Animal fables pass from country to country and century to century, but not unchanged. Because fables have explicit moralizations, the innovative medieval fabulists (Marie, Odo, and Berechiah through Henryson) help us test what authors meant by meaning and what freedoms they took with tradition. We catch them thinking aloud. As they develop social satire, play with allegory, and dramatize style, they maintain a consistent reasoning process something like what we now call structuralist, but something, too, like Augustinian exegesis. We can partially learn to read like a medieval reader, yet we find even the explicit and documented meanings too various to be caught, caged, and cataloged by our theories. With fables as with their wilder cousins, the Nun's Priest's Tale, the Bestiary of Love, and unmoralized literature, neither we nor the medieval reader can anticipate when the author will double back to surprise us. Surprise, it seems, was itself a tradition.

Although critics have found La Deffence full of contradictions, they have not seen its conceptual and tonal shifts as defensive strategies reflecting Du Bellay’s ambivalence toward ancient literature. His filial piety conflicts with his desire to rival the ancients by achieving poetic greatness in the vernacular. His ambiguous theory of imitation shows the conflict between reverence and rivalry in its portrayal of imitation both as an organic process and as a violent power struggle in which the French poet devours or rapes ancient models. A similarly equivocal stance toward classical literary power appears in Du Bellay’s Roman sonnets, which illuminate La Deffence by defining a state of exile in which the Renaissance poet is torn between past and future, Rome and France. In La Deffence, the exile’s voice emerges as a dialogue that expresses the paradoxical desire to be both like and unlike the great classical originals.

As the Italian origin of the Masque has been questioned in the latest and most elaborate investigation of the subject (R. Brotanek, Die Englischen Maskenspiele, Wien und Leipzig, 1902), it seems worth while to examine the history of the word and the circumstances of its introduction into English. Brotanek thinks that it came from the French, but it is to be borne in mind in the first place that the form masque is not found in sixteenth century English; and in the second place, that the French masque has never meant the performance but always the performer or the domino worn. Cotgrave gives masque as the synonym for “a maske for a woman,” but for “maske” without this qualification “masquerade, masquerie, barboire,” just as he gives for “mummery or mumming” “mommerie, masquerade, barboire.” Littré cites only one example of the use in French of masque for a form of entertainment, and that is from a modern author, with special reference to the English masques, which are elaborately described.

Farman's Mercian glosses to certain parts of the Rushworth Gospels have occupied the attention of scholars for more than a century. It would be difficult to find an aspect of the priest or his work which has not, at some time, been investigated. Yet there remain numerous controversial questions, some of them of a very fundamental nature. One of the most difficult concerns Farman's apparently irrational uses of the symbols e and æ. It will be found that many of the larger conflicts over the position of Rushworth in the general scheme of English phonology are essentially disagreements as to just what values these two letters had in Farman's orthography.

Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues is a metafictional novel that comments on literary history. In its three books, Dr. Gregory Revueltas battles a mysterious and ravaging plague, during the 1780s, 1980s, and mid–twenty-first century. In each book he leaves a legacy of writing for the next Gregory to read. By reading and writing this archive, or library of cultural knowledge, the final Gregory develops a historical consciousness that helps him see beyond his episteme's limited science and derive a cure for the recurring plague. His confronting the plague by reading his own writing both intimately and critically is an allegory for the efficacy of literature as a response to historical trauma. Gregory does not gain agency over history, but through the self-conscious reading of his archive he is able to place himself in a cultural trajectory otherwise inaccessible in each book's bracketed historical moment.

Mrs. Behn, like Alexander Pope, has almost succeeded in leaving for posterity an embellished and retouched portrait of herself. In her works, especially in Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt, she inserted a number of passages purporting to be autobiographical. These autobiographical bits deal almost exclusively with a period twenty years previous to the publication of the novels in 1688, a period long before Mrs. Behn had attained any literary reputation, so that a little judicious alteration of the details of her life had every chance of passing unnoticed.

The problem of Burke's anonymous writings in Dodsley's Annual Register has baffled biographers and critics for nearly a century and a half. Since Burke himself never acknowledged any of these writings, and since no conclusive evidence exists to fix their authorship, it is impossible to make use of them with any sense of security. On the other hand, since the Register must contain, even at a low estimate, some thousands of pages of Burke's writing, important both intrinsically and as our principal record of the early development of his mind, we cannot ignore it. Burke's biographers have about evenly divided themselves into those who were willing to take the risk of asserting on their own authority that specific parts of the magazine had been written by Burke, and those who preferred to make no use whatever of the dubious material. Thus Murray boldly assumes that Burke wrote all parts of the magazine from 1758 to 1791, and constantly quotes expressions of opinion in the magazine as Burke's personal expressions. Magnus on the contrary makes no direct use of the Register's contents in his biography. Neither those who have assumed Burke's authorship, nor those who have rejected it, have ever informed the public concerning the grounds of their judgment. But, admitting that certainty is impossible, such evidence as exists to make probable Burke's authorship of parts of the magazine deserves to be carefully weighed and analyzed.

The high value of Everyman has been provocatively asserted in T. S. Eliot's description of it as “perhaps” the only English drama “within the limitations of art.” Eliot writes this while discussing the lack of form in post-Kydian drama and thus implies that the source of this value is the play's formal unity. David Kaula has taken Eliot to mean “that nothing in the play is extraneous to the central homiletic purpose, that all elements of style, structure, and theme are governed by the conventions of allegory.” Yet the emphasis on Everyman's homiletic purpose and allegorical conventions does not sufficiently explain either its critical esteem or its theatrical popularity. Fortunately, Eliot has enlarged upon his original assessment in a later work. He argues that religious drama, to be successful, must combine its doctrine with “ordinary dramatic interest.” Everyman fulfills his requirement:

While some recent gay scholarship attempts to appropriate a naturalized position within the patriarchal tradition that apparently excludes it, this essay aims to situate the gay within an expanded concept of maleness. The critical response to homophobia does not overcome the binary-opposition codes that form the basis of conventional sexual difference. Jean Cocteau's 1926 essay on transvestism, “Une leçon de théâtre: Le numéro Barbette,” shows those binary codes in operation as the female impersonator Barbette moves across gender boundaries only in a death-defying high-wire act. The Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno's 1988 performance piece Suiren ‘Water Lilies’ offers an alternative to the traditional sexual polarities asserted by Barbette's cross-dressing. Embodying “through-dressing” in a model of mutual inclusion, Ohno suggests the unconventional sexuality of a middle voice that preserves the ability of sensation or inner experience to fashion appearance.

The “Anonymous Riming Chronicle” has long been known through the text printed by Ritson from B.M. MS. Royal 12. C. xii. The first serious attempt to study the sources of this poem and establish the relationships of the several MSS. was made by R. Sternberg, in two papers in Englische Studien XVIII, 1 ff. and 356 ff. In the first of these papers, Sternberg presents a scheme of MS. relations based upon the first and last fifty lines of the text as contained in five MSS. In the second paper he examines the sources of the Chronicle and shows that it depended upon Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle with supplementary use of William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum.