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.

When erich auerbach was living in Turkey, exiled from Germany and helping Kemal Ataturk set up a humanities curriculum at the University of Istanbul, he wrote a much-discussed letter to Walter Benjamin on 12 December 1936 in which he alluded to his dislocation as a European humanist trying to orient himself in relation to a Turkish-language politics that radically estranged prior print cultures:

When poisoned or fatally wounded, characters in Marlowe's plays often develop an uncanny knowledge of what is happening inside their bodies, including the precise anatomy of their injuries and the physiology of the onset of death. In effect, they conduct their own autopsies. These moments of peculiarly physical self-knowledge pose a useful challenge to our conventions for the representation of pain, embodiment, and interiority. Marlowe's wounded speakers deploy these anatomical selfdescriptions in a metatheatrical competition: in a struggle for the attention of the audience, describing one's wounds can be a powerful strategy.

Despite their tendency to metaphorize and disembody blindness, the sighted have used it to represent the body's experience of coming to knowledge in a world of things. The vibrant intensity of the attachment to things in Victorian literature makes this writing a rich site for exploring the way represented blindness comes to figure what a body articulated by materiality knows and does not know of itself and of the world. Reading works by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, among others, this essay accounts for an impious strain in representations of blindness and examines how the Victorian literary imagination of blindness evinces a palpable desire for it, grounded in the fantasy that it permits enviable access to a way of knowing and experiencing things from among them rather than from the abstracting distance imposed by sight. Alongside its imagination of the buffeting distress of thingly encounters, blindness envy fantasizes an aesthetics of disorientation and surprise.

One winter morning, the student scanning cards at the front desk of the university gym noticed the “faculty” label on mine and asked which department I was in. I replied that I teach in English. A middle-aged man who checked in behind me chased me down the hall. When he caught me, he exclaimed with frustration, “English, eh? Well, could you please get students to stop using plural pronouns when they need singular ones? Everyone—they, someone—they. It's just terrible English.”

This article discusses the history of Judith Gautier's Le livre de jade (1867), one of the earliest volumes of translations of Chinese poetry published in any European language. It explores the connection between her interest in this project, which Gautier undertook as an amateur student of Chinese, and both the sinological context and the influence of her father, Théophile. Although her command of Chinese was imperfect, Gautier knew more than many have insinuated; her renditions convey important themes of the Chinese poetic tradition and maintain at times an impressive fidelity to the original form. Though she frequently chose to adapt the Chinese verse to an innovative rhythmic prose, her adaptations retain the originals' emotional reticence and imagistic evocativeness–stylistic qualities that resonated with contemporary and succeeding poetic tastes. The collection's remarkable literary and musical afterlife provides an illuminating case in the cultural history of translation, mistranslation, and adaptation.

We are lucky to have in Forster's admirable life of Dickens what Forster himself calls the “germ” of Great Expectations. Forster reports that in 1860 Dickens announced in a letter, “For a little piece I have been writing—or am writing; for I hope to finish it to-day—such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me, that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book. You shall judge as soon as I get it printed. But it so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner.” “This,” Forster adds, “was the germ of Pip and Magwitch,” and a marginal gloss declares, “Germ of new tale.”

In Augie March, Henderson, and Herzog, Bellow has created an open style of ideological comedy that relates him to Rabelais, Burton, Sterne, Melville, and Joyce, earlier masters of an encyclopedic comedy of knowledge. The lively voice and intellectual probing in Augie March can be more fully valued when the book is related to such predecessors rather than to the picaresque tradition. Bellow's comic characters have an individual idiom, voice, and range of concern that unobtrusively unify his apparently formless books. What emerges in Augie March and Herzog—the comedy, suffering, and encyclopedic speculation; the concern for personal fates, social facts, and cosmic issues; the interest in observed actuality and abstract symbol; the tension between a cruel, deterministic reality and the impulse toward creative freedom and joy; the precarious reliance on metaphoric probing and an open form—all suggest that against great odds, both public and personal, Bellow has succeeded in reanimating a style of intellectual comedy that illuminates and celebrates the present even as it connects us and Bellow with some of the most powerful imaginations of the past.

In Gesta Pontificum (A. D. 1125), and also in the first recension of Gesta Regum Anglorum (same year), William of Malmesbury attributed the foundation of Glastonbury to Ini (in his spelling Ina), acting under advice of Aldhelm (patron saint of Malmesbury). By the time of writing a Life of Dunstan (date uncertain), William had obtained further information; he blames Osbern, biographer of Dunstan, for making that saint first abbot of Glastonbury, which, as he says, had passed under ecclesiastical authority long before the time of St. Patrick. From another passage of the same book we perceive that William had in contemplation a work in defence of the antiquity of Glastonbury. By a mention in the second book of the Life of Dunstan it appears that William, at the time resident in Glastonbury, had completed the promised apology. De Antiquitate, therefore, must have been completed in Glastonbury, at a time intermediate between the two books on Dunstan.

Although it is known that Heine attended Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history and became involved with the Hegelian-inflected “science of Judaism” just before beginning the Reisebilder, little attention has been given to Heine's early engagement with Hegelian ideas in his travel writings. This essay argues that Heine transforms the travel narrative into a critique of history by taking the grand historical narrative, with its investment in the “Greek” trope of seafaring, and deconstructing its systematic claims of national belonging and teleological development. Through an analysis of the North Sea poems, I show how Heine reworks both the genre of travel literature as self-discovery and Hegel's geographically determined movement of “World Spirit.” The result is a nonsystematic Jewish conception of historicity, which, in its embrace of particularity, subverts the absolutism of Hegel's philosophy of history by exposing the metaphors on which the philosophy's progressive development relies.

Though Milton and Mirabeau were devoted to almost identical ideals of civil liberty, their personalities offer a peculiar contrast. Milton was an idealist, a theorist, a poet; he was abstemious in food and drink, inclined to seclusion, religious by nature. Mirabeau, on the other hand, was a soldier, an orator, a political leader. Whereas Milton was thoughtful and reserved, Mirabeau was animated, impulsive, ever seeking the center of action, forever restless and impatient. Sensual and gluttonous, he was as much a slave to his passions as any of the Englishmen Milton condemned for being so; and in his last moments he turned away, more in kindness than in derision, the priest who sought to shrive him. Notwithstanding these essential differences, Mirabeau found in Milton a kindred spirit; he found in him that flaming love of liberty, that passion for essential freedoms, that lofty and unselfish devotion to country to which he himself aspired. Milton's influence on Mirabeau, many times suggested but never evaluated, is one of significant interest to students of Milton's politics. A close study of two Mirabeau tracts, Théorie de la Royauté après la Doctrine de Milton and De la liberté de la Presse, reveals not only that Mirabeau's reading of Milton strikingly verified his own political conclusions: it presents evidence that Milton's voice at a critical period of the Revolution became the weapon of its most powerful leader. French cries for liberty found expression in the tracts of the Puritan poet.

The wounded neck of the hero in the Middle English Gawain and the Green Knight constitutes a subtle yet significant link in the chain of signs that shapes the poem's meaning. As illumined by the long tradition of commentary on the wound as moral emblem, the site of Gawain's nick draws on the Christian doctrine of the Fall, ancient philosophy's idea of the soul's anatomy, and the implications of the literary motif of beheading in order to suggest the nature of the hero's culpability. Gawain's fault, as signified by his wound, involves the disruption of reason's reign in the soul and is associated with the scriptural theme of stiff-necked pride. Paired and contrasted with Gawain's wound are the sacred wounds of Christ, signs of the remedy for the hero's fault and the basis of a parallel between the moral concerns of Gawain and its companion poem Pearl.

In the sale of the large collection of Gurney Manuscripts in 1920 one manuscript was overlooked, and still remains in the possession of Mr. Q. E. Gurney of Norwich, the brother of the former owner. Miss Allen supplies some information in regard to the date and the previous history of this manuscript; and a list of its contents (omitting, of course, the prose Abbey of the Holy Ghost) will be found in Carleton Brown's Register of Middle English Religious and Didactic Verse.

At the conclusion of “Benito Cereno” Herman Melville “elucidate[s]” a curious “item or two,” including Cereno's ultragentlemanly apparel. This return to the issue of Cereno's clothes reiterates the Yankee Delano's preoccupation with Cereno as a dandy, restaging Delano's tendency to focus unswervingly on the apparently complex markers of class superiority signaled by such genteel refinement—and, within the logic of that preoccupation, to ignore the seemingly transparent truth presented by the naked black body. Melville mobilizes the figure of the dandy. I suggest, to interrogate the Yankee's veneration of social form, a veneration at odds with the North's smug self-figuration in 1855 as homogeneously democratic and classless, as morally superior to a South reviled for its social inequalities and slaveholding. By orchestrating the encounter between Yankee and dandy, Melville maps a peculiarly northern political field, pointing to an obfuscatory rhetoric of “apparent symbol[s]” that articulates the slave only polemically and ignores him otherwise.

On December 7, 1920 there was sold at the Anderson Galleries in New York an interesting collection of Milton documents hitherto entirely unknown to the poet's biographers. These documents, which contain the record to two financial transactions in which Milton was concerned in the years 1657/58 and 1665, were submitted to me for examination by their purchaser, Mr. Rosenbach of Philadelphia, and it is through his courtesy that I am enabled to present an analysis of their contents. Their history previous to their sale in America has not been divulged, but it is to be presumed that they have been preserved as a part of the evidence of title to certain properties described in them, and there is not the slightest question as to their genuineness.

The concept of Romania, considered by Curtius to be the only context permitting a true comparative literature, is basically a product of the Romantic movement's national and historical consciousness, its search for indigenous roots. It is an inadequate context for the study of modern literatures, and also the wrong kind of context because it emphasizes study of origins and derivations. Any context that defines literature by a place, by geographical or linguistic units, probably fosters bad pedagogy, criticism, and literary history. It makes us teach literature as an institution and as information, and leads us to neglect the human function of literature. While we should renovate literary history (for literary utopianism only reinforces the autotelic status of much literary study), we should direct our attention to the structures of literature as a whole, of consciousness and the imagination, and place man's fiction-making within the range of his other image-making activities. The teaching of literature—a peculiar activity whose very possibility is open to question—should be centrally concerned with the question, what is literature? Studies should be organized to direct attention to the elementary functions of the fiction-maker.