Part of Goethe’s intention in Hermann und Dorothea is to awaken in the reader a disturbing sense of discrepancy between form and content. Systematic, statistically controlled analysis of the poem’s meter, along with a treatment of specific Homeric allusions in the text, leads to this conclusion, also supported by less rigorous but no less valid interpretive arguments. This discrepancy, moreover, is left unresolved, creating a feeling of pervasive irony, but not in the sense of satire or mockery. The reader is encouraged to adopt a superior critical perspective toward the bourgeois values in the poem, but, in that this perspective itself becomes an object of irony, he is also invited to affirm such values. Although this contradiction, like the tension between form and content, is never resolved, it can be understood as expressing an idea of the historical need for bourgeois stability, however banal, in the period depicted.

When Dryden wrote that love and valor ought to be the subjects of a heroic play, he did not define his conception of love. He, and presumably his readers, knew what he meant. During the past seventy-five years, however, the nature of his heroic love has severely exercised those who have tried to describe Restoration heroic drama. All have agreed that this love is of primary importance, but no one has offered a consistent or completely satisfactory analysis of it. The commonest view is that it reflects the sentimental, casuistical, metaphysical Platonic cultism—especially the doctrine of the uplifting power of love—fashionable in seventeenth-century heroic romances and Caroline drama. In the belief that this theory has been overemphasized and that it is not an adequate explanation of Dryden's heroic love, I propose to attack the problem from a different point of view in the hope of finding a clear and consistent pattern in his treatment of love.

When Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, turned in his intervals of gouty leisure to dramatic composition, he made his plays supplement the political manœuvers of his active periods by embodying in them the crescent love-and-honor theme, which, rooted in pre-Commonwealth drama, was being sponsored by the Frenchified Charles II. But while thus pleasing the King and the Court by being alertly à la mode, he remembered the dramatic associations of his Cavalier days and revived after the Puritan depression certain elements of Jacobean and Caroline drama. Among them was the friendship theme, so frequently and significantly employed in plays of those former decades. If he had merely repeated the old situations and rephrased the worn clichés, there would be little point in analyzing his plays for his use of the theme except to show continuity between pre-Commonwealth drama and Restoration drama. But he modified it and made it an aid in his persistent king-worship. And more important still, he used the theme in developing the love-and-honor conflict.

When Gottfried Keller in his poetic rejoinder to Justinus Kerner's romantic plaint extolled the world-transforming forces of technology, he expressed the dominant faith of his time in a possible synthesis of the spiritual and the utilitarian, of idealism and materialism. To use the vernacular: he did not doubt but that he could eat his cake and have it. To Kerner it was a bad dream that after the steamship and the locomotive the next step would be aviation, that in the future leaking airborne oil vats might sully the pure atmosphere, the last element to remain undefiled by man; he wished to lie in the grass and gaze up into the serene blue depths while yet he might. Keller replied that there was nothing to prevent such idyllic escape, but that he for one preferred to identify himself with the dynamism of the new “fire dragon.” In fact, was not only now the magic of Kerner's old parchments at last being transformed into reality by the forces of nature in the service of the human spirit? Were they not building for man a “brave new world?”

Dass die Metapher recht eigentlich das Wesen der Poesie, deren Urzelle, die kleinste Einheit des dichterischen Schaffens darstelle, ist eine Verallgemeinerung und Hyperbel, die man oft wiederholt findet in der Literatur über Stilistik und Metaphorik. So sagt etwa Gottschall: das Bild ist nur die Abbreviatur dessen, was die Dichtung im Ganzen und Grossen ist (nämlich: Versinnlichung des Geistigen und Vergeistigung des Sinnlichen). So meint auch Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Die Handlungen, die Gestalten sind nichts anderes, wofern man das Wort nur recht versteht, als Gleichnisse aus vielen Gleichnissen zusammengesetzt. Und so nennt denn auch Hermann Pongs, der in seinem tiefgründigen Werke die Metaphernkunde auf eine neue Grundlage stellt, das dichterische Bild die originäre dichterische Einheit, das Urphänomen des .

Although Milton wrote extensively on poetics, we cannot get his views by simply piecing together his scattered statements; they changed and developed to the end of his writing life. But central from early to late years were questions of the poet’s inspiration, relation to his audience, and possible usefulness. Perhaps the core of his poetics is best described by the Greek word paideia; for however distinctively Christian, Milton was too thoroughly the heir of humanism to disavow classical teaching and Renaissance commentary on poetics. Still, only his final poems in their implications can suggest his final theory.

Emma, justly described by Lord David Cecil as “Jane Austen's profoundest comedy,” has frequently been mistaken for mere “escape literature.” It has been applauded for its “engaging, dear, delicious, idiotic heroine,” moving in “a place of laughter and nonsense,” and excoriated because “it does not instruct … does not teach the modern reader … how to be and move in our world.” At the other extreme, it has lately provoked the sophisticated interpretation of Marvin Mudrick, who sees Emma as a disagreeable, even sinister, creature. A latent Lesbian, unwilling to commit her emotions, and devoid of tenderness, Emma, he believes, attains at the end of the novel simply “relief and temporary awareness.” The transcendent irony of the book for Mudrick is the author's having shown an apparently reformed Emma, whereas actually she remains imperious and ruthless. Joseph M. Duffy, Jr., who describes the novel as concerned with “the awakening of a normal, intelligent young woman to the possibilities of physical love,” has produced the most apposite recent study. But knowledge of physical love is only one aspect of Emma's awakening, and even Duffy is uncertain whether she is truly regenerate.

Nuclear holocaust is often mapped as a circle around a point designated zero. Zero itself, historically a paradoxical sign, recapitulates in its form the circle around an absent center. The paradoxes of this (non)center inform Derrida's pivotal essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” And all these paradoxes bear on Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker, which takes place two thousand years after a catastrophic nuclear war. Set in the circle of towns surrounding what was once Canterbury, it evokes a center that is nothing less than “the idear of us.” Hoban uses continual reinterpretations and shifting tangents to generate a narrative circle in motion, both counterpart of and counter to the circling Power Ring that produced the nuclear zero.

Considering the way Poe and Tennyson admired each other's work, it is strange that the tonal and thematic convergence of two such major nineteenth-century writers has scarcely been sensed in Anglo-American (as contrasted to French) literary criticism. The quality that most obviously tempts the reader to link them, their extraordinary delight in sound for its own sake, became a comparable strategy in the service of an undogmatic philosophical idealism, the attempt of the spirit to escape the gross materiality and cloying passions of the world's body. The symbolic situations in Tennyson's early poetry and in Poe's stories and poems suggest the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's “deserted” (Tennyson) or “haunted” (Poe) houses. Even when Tennyson rejects, ambiguously enough, the self-entombments of Poe-like hyperesthetic souls, he hardly suppresses what Poe called his unequaled “etherisity” and “ideality.” Tennyson's resultant treatment of angelism (to apply to his protagonists Allen Tate's term for the hypertrophied state of Poe's heroes) and the concomitant evolution of a Poe-like Fatal Woman are most clearly evident in such Classical monologues as “Lucretius” and in the conception of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Idylls of the King.

When Thoughts and prejudices become stereotyped, they seek the fixed expression and convenient reference of a visual symbol. The Renaissance, with its Christian, classic, and neo-Platonic imageries, afforded an excellent demonstration of this. During that period, which enlarged consciously and unconsciously the implications of ut pictura poesis, this imagery could be examined in either the poetry or the painting. Nowhere does one find, however, a more harmonious marriage of artistic and literary metaphor than in the innumerable and popular emblem books of the Renaissance, depositories, as Henri Stegemeier writes, of so many traditions, themes, and opinions both belletristic and bellartistic. These emblemata were the perpetuating vehicles by which neoclassic metaphor was brought to the thousands of Europeans whose only contact with the painting of their time was an occasional glance at the religious figures over the candlelight of their local basilica and whose contact with literature was the sporadic reading of racy novelle or those antecedents of the novels which the Renaissance lumped under the term of “heroic poem.” Everyone read the emblem books, or looked at them, and there were more editions of Alciati in the sixteenth century than there were of Rabelais.

Platonism, in its eclecticism and hidden continuity, proved congenial to Coleridge, whose conception of the nature and role of philosophy differed profoundly from the empirical orthodoxy of his time (and ours). Coleridge's conception resembles the Greek ideal, found in Plotinus and others, of philosophy as less a purely rationalistic pursuit than a form of gnosis involving the whole man and leading toward ultimate perceptions. Platonism has important literary consequences: Coleridge's “philosophical” writings may be read as a complex (and often beautiful) form of prose poetry. Analysis suggests that the mode of argument in crucial chapters of the Biographia (xxi-xiv) is substantially poetic in nature and perhaps deliberately paralogical. Coleridge attempts certainty, without attaining it, and shows, astonishingly, an equivalent of Keats's “Negative Capability” in the disinterestedness of his symbolic investigations or “constructs” of reality. Literary form and style are more important in Coleridge's intellectual prose than has been thought.

The literary register of the German-speaking peoples begins with awkward eighth-century attempts at glossing Latin texts and dictionaries, followed by sundry pieces of translation of mostly catechumenal character, culminating toward the end of the century in the OHG Isidor. For previous generations of German philologists these earliest writing efforts in the German vernacular were of interest and value primarily as attestations of an early period of the language. Twentieth-century research, however, under the vigorous leadership of Georg Baesecke, has tried to assess their import for the history of German literature as the first manifestations of an indigenous literary culture, modest in its beginnings, tortuous in its course, but of a potential vitality that failed of realization only because of unfavorable external circumstances.

The International character of Christine de Pisan's writings has long ago been investigated where it concerns her familiarity with the works of her compatriots Dante and Boccaccio or her relations with the English court during the early years of the fifteenth century. Considerably less well known is the Portuguese translation of her Livre des trois vertus, which is to be found in MS. 11,515 of the National Library in Madrid. This translation was, furthermore, published in Lisbon in 1518. Although two copies of the edition still exist and are listed in Portuguese bibliographies, the only mention of such a translation among studies devoted to Christine de Pisan is a passing refererence in Mathilde Laigle's Livre des trois vertus: son milieu historique et litteraire (Paris, 1912). Here a footnote promises further information in a projected edition of the Trois vertus which has never appeared. Several years later the Portuguese translation was referred to by Aubrey Bell in his Portuguese Literature, but with several errors of detail. As the existence of the manuscript and the two printed copies cannot fail to arouse the curiosity of any student of Christine de Pisan's writings or, indeed, of the intellectual currents of the late Middle Ages, it would seem worth while to attempt a plausible explanation of the circumstances which brought the Portuguese version into being.

The digital humanities is today overwhelmingly visual. Even as DH has increased access to the humanities at an astonishing rate, it has also inadvertently narrowed our sensory access to information. It is time to add new dimensions to a field structured predominately by the flat screen. Emphasizing touch, we call for a textured digital that challenges the logic governing many notions of access—that is, the unproblematic translatability of information between the senses. As an epistemological intervention, texturing DH promises new ways to approach sensorial history and to engage diverse sensory abilities and experiences—past, present, and future. As an ethical intervention, it emphasizes our responsibility to evaluate carefully the structures of digital accessibility and to increase access for all. (SA and DW)

A study of two motifs—prodigality and time—may help to reveal some of the meanings of The Merchant of Venice. Scornful of generosity, Shylock sees Bassanio and Antonio as prodigals, and thus he resembles somewhat the self-satisfied elder brother of the parable of the Prodigal Son. Bassanio's prodigality is in harmony with time; he does not calculate, as Shylock does, but acts intuitively, and because his wants are “ripe” he reaps a reward. Two examples: though he plans to attend a masque, to the audience's surprise he suddenly seizes the moment and departs for Belmont when the wind changes; at Belmont, in contrast to Morocco and Aragon, who offer reasons for their choices, Bassanio offers no reason for choosing as he does, except that the lead casket “moves” him. Such uncalculated responses to the present moment are fruitful, in contrast to the usurer's calculations about the future, and especially in contrast to the usurer's practice of risking nothing while (in Elizabethan terminology) “selling time.”

The privileging of aesthetic over material value in the nineteenth-century English novel is reiterated in the marital choice offered the hero when he is positioned between a rich woman and a poor one. Through the contrast between these two female figures, the novels invoke the dilemma that, Adam Smith argued, troubled individuals in an increasingly commercial culture: the choice between wealth and virtue. The rich woman or heiress embodies the concerns about wealth lurking at the heart of narratives that apparently celebrate the overcoming of such material interests. Read against the backdrop of nineteenth-century political economy and anthropology, she reflects the novel's engagement with England's economic development over the long nineteenth century. She also reveals the irresolvable tension inherent in the cultural project, which begins in the middle of the eighteenth century, of disentangling the discourse of political economy from that of literature.

Between 1914 and 1933, Ezra Pound edited four anthologies of poetry: Des Imagistes, Catholic Anthology, Profile, and Active Anthology. These compilations arose out of crucial stages of Pound's career in the teens, when he reacted against Victorian poetry, and in the 1930s, when he acted as a spokesperson for the modernist movement. Using the anthology as a vehicle for the presentation of innovative poetry as well as a guidebook on how to read it, Pound experimented with anthology formats to propel readers into the project of modernism through devices such as elliptical prefaces and fragmentary notes. He sought to train readers for the demands of interpreting modernist poetry and to reclaim control over an audience educated by burgeoning university literature departments and the mainstream poetic anthologies they employed. (JGN)

In his 1926 essay “criteria of negro art,” W. E. B. Du Bois famously argued that “all art is propaganda and ever must be” (296). Du Bois's reputation as a fiction writer has long suffered because of his unwavering commitment to the propagandistic function of art. The Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman's 1928 claim that “the artist in him has been stifled in order that the propagandist may survive” (219) would be echoed for decades by critics who continued to view Du Bois's fiction as overly didactic, “insignificant and pallid” (Rigsby i), and bafflingly eccentric. Recently scholars have begun to reverse this disparagement while excavating how Du Bois used fiction to test out and amplify his developing philosophical and sociological positions over the many decades of his career. Du Bois's fantasy story “The Princess Steel,” published for the first time here, provides another opportunity to consider Du Bois as a writer of fiction as well as an enthusiastic reader of genre fiction. This addition to the growing archive of Du Bois's fiction illuminates his use of speculative romance to explain not only the pitfalls of industrial capitalism but also the romantic possibilities of social revolution.

The Twentieth century, now neanng its end, seems to have had its way with all the arts except poetry. Viewed less chronologically and more exaltedly, history has imposed its reality on the arts. What we imply when we speak of modern aesthetics is nothing but the noise of history jamming or subjugating the song of art. Every ism is both evidence, direct or indirect, of art's defeat and a scar covering up the shame of this defeat. Though it may be crass to say so, existence has proved capable of defining the artist's consciousness, and proof of this can be found in the means the artist uses. For that matter, any mention of means is, in itself, a sign of adaptation.

Recent research has shown how Francis Bacon drew on Renaissance practices of reading and writing to propose a new method for understanding nature. Yet Bacon was well aware that such techniques were vulnerable to error, miscommunication, and failure. Instances of misinterpretation in his utopian fantasy New Atlantis reveal that his dream of a legible world accounts for the possibility of misreading. Bacon's characters and his audience are invited to interpret the text's symbols, but they are denied the basis for adequate interpretation. The paradoxes that arise from this strange position affirm the utility of Bacon's method and expose some of its limits.