There is a sentence in the preface to the Harrison Hayford-Merton Sealts version of Billy Budd that has been quoted before and will be quoted again. It is the one in which the editors hope that their “comprehensive scholarly edition will narrow the ground of disagreement and widen that of understanding.” It is doomed to repetition because it allows any critic who cites it a ready-made rhetorical stance: with its sanction he can assume the posture of the reasonable reader and humbly offer himself as mediator between the various opposing critical armies. Then, having established himself as a man of good will and peacemaker, he can do his best to annihilate at least one of the armies, the views of which, it somehow turns out, he rabidly despises.

Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1982) is assigned to Chicano-Chicana literature because the book tells a story of growing up the child of Mexican immigrants, but Rodriguez rejects the term Chicano for himself and denies that it is possible or desirable for Americans of Mexican descent to retain an identification with their culture of origin. Rodriguez has been widely criticized as a sellout to white bourgeois culture, but his life narrative shows that his rejection of Chicano identity is rooted in the class-and-race ideology of his Mexican parents and thus in the contradictions of Mexican history. Chicano-Chicana nationalism assumes a simple dichotomy between the proletarian mestizo or mestiza and the bourgeois white oppressor. Rodriguez's family history, however, points toward race and class divisions within the population of Mexican descent that call into question the monolithic conceptions of Chicano-Chicana identity on the basis of which Rodriguez has been attacked.

It is often said that proper reading relies on the art of taking a pause: On our abilityto suspend the pressing rhythms of the everyday and allow ourselves to absorb, and be absorbed by, alternative structures of temporality. The clocks of the imagination do not run at the same speeds as the timetables of the real; to read is to inhabit the present at one's own pace and in the light of a multitude of unknown pasts and possible futures. Recent years have witnessed a swell in publications pondering the state of reading in our world of instant connectivity and shrinking attention spans. In one of these books, Jane Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize winner, considers the peculiar acts of writing and reading a novel as profound contributions to the process of enlightenment—a kind of enlightenment enlightened about itself and no longer repressing the other of reason: “The way in which novels are created—someone is seized by inspiration and then works out his inspiration methodologically by writing, observing, writing, observing, thinking through, and writing again—is by nature deliberate, dominated neither by reason nor by emotion” (176). According to Smiley, the act of reading a novel re-creates an author's deliberate negotiation of affect and rationality. As readers follow the lines of a (good) book, they remain in relative control over the speed of their reading, able to pause when necessary, to hasten forward when desiring so, to reread passages at their leisure, and to close the pages of the book when overtaken by exhaustion. Good stories rely on intricate plot constructions and narrative tensions, but they also situate readers as subjects freed from the temporal determination and ideological drive of other time-based media. Good books can certainly move readers, but—following Smiley's logic—they will not curtail a reader's freedom to move along the text at his or her own speed, and hence they will allow this reader to simultaneously bring into play emotion and reason, the absorptive and the distant.

What might the Mass resemble among a people who never experienced the Fall? Montaigne's most famous essay, “Of Cannibals,” emerges as a radical response to this question when examined in the context of his time's religious polemic, a context from which the essay borrows much of its imagery. Unlike Protestant controversialists who disparaged Catholic eucharistic rites as barbarous, Montaigne suggests such religious prejudices prove little better than the cultural ones under which New World natives labored. He elects to pursue a line of religious inquiry opened up by Renaissance speculation that Amerindians might constitute a non-Adamite race in order to conduct a personal exploration of alternative practices of faith. This two-mindedness with regard to religion suggests that characterizations of Montaigne need to step beyond the categories of believer and unbeliever. Abandoning tendencies toward denominationalism and, more generally, toward affixing labels to heterodoxy allows for an investigation of the fully idiosyncratic experience of early modern belief.

It was a foreign critic, ironically, who grasped the insurmountable national challenge that alessandro Manzoni posed to himself and to Italy's future authors with his monumental novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed [1827, rev. ed. 1840]). Manzoni's basic theme, Georg Lukács writes, is “much less a given, concrete, historical crisis of national history” than it is “the tragedy of the Italian people as a whole” (70). This eternal plight—distilled into the story of the courtship and separation of two peasants in seventeenth-century Lombardy during plague, riots, and Spanish occupation—encompassed Italy's perpetual struggle against foreign rule, its lack of a unifying language and polity, and its reticent modernity, especially its tensions between religious tradition and secular progress. According to Lukács, the universality of the text combined with the abiding, unchanging nature of the problems it fictionalized essentially exhausted the genre of the historical novel that it introduced to Italy. Posterity has vindicated this assessment. Manzoni abandoned the genre soon after I promessi sposi to dedicate himself to historical writing proper, and his novel remains ensconced in the Italian public imaginary, just behind Dante's Commedia, as the towering, mythic work that helped occasion Italy's belated unification in 1861.

For three months in the spring and summer of 2010, almost five million gallons of crude oil gushed uncontrollably from a broken BP well into the Gulf of Mexico, in what is thus far the worst petroleum spill in history. At the moment the spill occurred, the world was still reeling from the largest international financial disaster the world has yet known, one that reverberated from Iceland to the United States to the outer edges of the European Union in Greece and Spain. If the financial crisis was characterized by the sudden disappearance of intangible and invisible financial value, the horrific spectacle of oil-drenched seascapes, birds, fish, and coastlines resulting from the BP spill was a tangible reminder that capitalism had still not been able to emancipate itself from its material body. Even more troubling was the fact that the first several attempts by the multi-billion-dollar company to stanch the broken well were stunning failures: daily news broadcasts brought into public consciousness terms like top kill and kill mud, as hydraulic engineers armed with golf balls and sundry varieties of foam tried to kill the sea monster created by BP.

In his comprehensive work, Das deutsche Lehnsprichwort, Friedrich Seiler traces the apparent origin of a vast number of proverbs and proverbial expressions current in Germany. He finds that the Greek and Roman classics, the Bible and the works of the Church Fathers yield many of the ancient proverbs still in common use. With regard to the large number of proverbs that have seemingly come from the French, Seiler, as he well realizes, treads on uncertain ground, and much of the material that he here gathers together will have to be reëxamined. It is quite evident that many of the proverbs in this latter group are common medieval proverbs, current over a large part of Europe, which first appear in the vernacular literature and collections of proverbs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. To attribute French source to them often requires more evidence than Seiler presents. In his treatment of this large body of medieval and international proverbs that seem to have arisen during the Middle Ages and the early modern period—proverbs that give him the most difficulty in finding a possible source—Seiler quite overlooks influences that may have come from the oriental languages, through the Arabic via Spain or into southern Europe via North Africa, or, still more probably for many of these proverbs, via the eastern European countries bordering on Tartaric, Arabic, or Turkish territory.

An uncertainty as to the social position of franklins in general, and of Chaucer's Franklin in particular, has occasionally manifested itself since the early part of the nineteenth century. In 1810, Todd quoted an elaborate note from Waterhous's Commentary on Sir John Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Angliae, which tended to show that franklins did not belong to the gentry. Todd was unable to square this with the fact that (Chaucer's Franklin was “at sessiouns,” since by a statute of Edward III, which he cited, justices were seigneurs, and that he was “ofte tyme” a knight of the shire, since by another statute members of parliament were “chivalers et serjantz des meulz vaues du paies.”) Todd was thus left in doubt as to the gentility of the Franklin. As a later examination of Fortescue's remarks will show, it is not he but his commentator who must be blamed for lowering the status of Chaucer's sanguine country gentleman. If Todd had been of firmer mind, or if he had studied the subject more deeply, he would not have left the matter in doubt—a trap for unwary feet in later times.

Charles Lamb, in the whimsical autobiographical sketch which he wrote in 1827, boasted that he “was the first to draw the public attention to the old English Dramatists, in a work called ‘Specimens of English Dramatic Writers,‘ who lived about the time of Shakespeare.” Lamb's first biographer, Talfourd, pictures the Specimens as slowly and almost imperceptibly working out “the genial purpose of the editor in renewing a taste for the great contemporaries of Shakespeare.” Ainger describes Lamb as a dispeller of ignorance and remarks of the Specimens:

In Middle English, or rather beginning with Old English and coming down to about 1500, including all works listed by J. E. Wells in his Manual of the Writings in Middle English, there are approximately 553 dream references. By dream references are meant actual dreams or remarks made about dreams which throw light on the attitude of the time toward dreams. Repeated references to the same dream are counted as a single reference. Of these references, 59 occur in Old English and 494 in Middle English. Old Norse is even richer than Middle English in dream references, no less than 530 being found. The large number of dream references in Old Norse is all the more significant in view of the smaller bulk of Old Norse literature in comparison with Middle English.

One of the topics most often discussed by critics of Poe has been his exceptional power of “analysis” or “abstract reason.” It is not necessary to do more than remind the student of the persistence of such terms. The most careful writers have employed them. And these terms, if they refer to anything at all more specific than general power of intellect, must refer to an analytic as opposed to a creative power, to a power of solving puzzles, of reasoning from known premises to testable conclusions, where truth is different from error. One of Poe's claims to this power I have scrutinized in a previous article, and it is my purpose now to do the same to another and bolder, the short story called “The Mystery of Marie Roget.”

“Geoffrey Chaucer,” says Professor Kittredge, “is nearer to us than Alexander Pope.” This is true, not only of the spirit of his times, but also of the man. Chaucer is more like us than Pope is: we feel more mental, moral, and spiritual kinship with the writer of the Nun's Priest's Tale than with the author of the Essay on Man. But, though this is true, we are not to think that therefore we understand him more thoroughly. In reality, we comprehend nearly all of Pope, and some of him we don't like; per contra, we like all of Chaucer that we comprehend: yet there are moods and meanings in him hard to fathom.

In the long history of literary polemics none has been more savage or more far-reaching in its consequences than the Fleshly Controversy, which raged in Victorian England during the 1870's with Robert Buchanan on one side and Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and the unfortunate Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the other. The literary importance of the latter three and the intensive study devoted to their careers have thrown a revealing light upon their activities in the Controversy. Robert Buchanan has fared quite differently. Although widely heralded in the 1860's and '70's as a young poet of promise, he subsequently suffered such a literary eclipse that by the time of his death he was relatively little known. Today almost everything he wrote has been forgotten and his sole claim to fame is the negative one of being the man who attacked Dante Gabriel Rossetti and brought about his premature death. This paper is devoted to an examination of his career before, during, and after the Controversy in order to throw some light upon the role he played in that melee and to show that his attack, while reprehensible, was not made without some provocation.

Coleridge's theory of “creative Imagination” and his description of The Rime as “a poem of pure imagination” have usually encouraged critics to search for the work's unity. This endeavor represses the text's manifest disjunctions of form and content, as well as slighting Coleridge's use of Gothic conventions. Freudian commentary, while addressing The Rime's irrational, dreamlike qualities, cannot account for the poem's emphasis on linguistic inadequacy or for the horror of the female that pervades the Mariner's tale and his identity. Julia Kristeva's theories of poetic language and of how the subject “abjects” the maternal in attaining the symbolic suggest that The Rime narrates the unspeakable process through which the symbolic is reached. From this perspective The Rime describes the creation of imagination.

Looking Backward, America's classic contribution to theutopian novel, has a religious genesis which has never been fully explored. Although Edward Bellamy has received widespread critical attention, his thought has not been adequately related to the religious temper of his time and region. Reared in traditional Calvinist concepts with emphasis on prayer, soul-searching, and individual respectability, Bellamy propounded new, daring concepts of the divine to meet the challenges posed by the industrialization of New England. In his religious doubts and strivings, he drew from, and contributed heavily to, three inter-related movements that reshaped religious thought in late nineteenth-century America—the New Theology, the Religion of Humanity, and the Social Gospel. This paper presents religion as a major genetic factor in Edward Bellamy's social thought and in modern American intellectual.

In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘there are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.‘

Although critics have remarked on the connection of “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” with classical ode and hymn and have identified Mirth as one of the Graces, they have usually approached these poems as re-creative pieces and overlooked the way in which their classical form and the presence of patron goddesses influence their development and meaning. Both poems, however, follow the formula of classical ode and hymn in which a patron deity is invoked and asked for gifts proper for that deity to confer. Because Mirth is the Grace Euphrosyne and Melancholy, as I argue, is the Muse Urania, goddesses associated in antiquity and in the Renaissance with poetical inspiration, Allegro and Penseroso ask their respective goddesses for power to compose poetry. The poems unfold in turn as though the goddesses were infusing their power, Mirth inspiring a light comic vision and Melancholy an epic and tragic mood.

The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond fashion, with many facets answering to the many-planed aspects to the world about them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to grind us down to a single flat surface. … People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.” But a great many things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a truth, and many often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face and its profile often do.

—Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast-Table

The rose-diamond cut of Milton's thought often disconcerts his reader, but perhaps nowhere so completely as in his views on learning. After the high enthusiasm for unrestricted inquiry, after all the “intent study” which he took as his own “portion in life”, in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the ripe products of his learning, he gives to Raphael, Michael, and Jesus speeches that seem a wholesale repudiation of studies of all sorts. The three passages are too well known to quote. In the first (P.L., viii, 66–178)1 Raphael disparages Adam's inquiries about astronomy, but answers them, and then comments, “Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid.” In the second (P.L., XII, 575–587) Michael commends Adam for the inference he has drawn from his preview of universal history (that “to obey is best, / And love with fear the only God”), and admonishes him, “This having learnt, thou hast attain'd the sum / Of wisdom; hope no higher.” In the third (P.R., iv, 286–364) Jesus spurns Satan's offer of Greek learning, with an analysis of the defects of Greek philosophy and literature and a thrust at learning in general: “Many books / Wise men have said are wearisome.”