Rilke's poem “Die Flamingos” turns on a curious image in which exotic birds are compared to the Greek courtesan Phryne. By tracing the development of the Phryne motif in Baudelaire's poems “Lesbos” and “La beauté” and in Gérôme's painting Phryné devant l'Aréopage, this essay argues that Rilke's poem takes issue with the notion of autonomous art and with the aestheticist cult of beauty, for which the motif had come to stand. “Die Flamingos” not only breaks with the idea that art and aura are necessarily linked but also questions the ability of Baudelairean allegory to restore poetic wholeness. In so doing, the poem represents not a continuation of the nineteenth-century “art for art's sake” movement but a final phase in the complex history of aestheticist self-questioning.

He pronounced the letter R (littera canina) very hard—a certaine signe of a satyricall witt—from John Dreyden. Extreme pleasant in his conversation, and at dinner, supper, etc.; but satyricall. MANY people still picture John Milton as a forbidding Puritan, dividing his time about equally between hounding his poor daughters and lifting his soul in ecstatic, mystic raptures to the tremendously imposing Jehovah of his poems. They remember with some disdain his pride in his studiousness, his temperance, his chastity, and other not so popular virtues. Hence they are unfair and myopic. We have no right to belittle Milton's essential humanity. His soul was not always like a star and dwelt apart; on the contrary, he led an unusually busy social and political career, coming in habitual contact with people of many types, and usually making a very favorable impression on them. He could laugh and jest and talk well; and above all he had an astonishing command of satire, begun early and developed by years of hard and constant training. If satire had held the place in the mid-seventeenth century that it occupied in the 1590's or the post-Restoration years, Milton might have been in quality what Bishop Hall pretended to be in chronology—the first English satirist. Even during a period when satire as a type was suffering a depression, his achievements are more striking than we often realize.

The Intimations Ode appears at the end of Wordsworth's collected poetry, and both the placement and the ending of the poem implicitly encourage us to expect an assured closure. I argue that Wordsworth deliberately suggests and then refuses such closure, that while the odic tradition generically warrants the attempt at closure, the Intimations Ode's refusal is unique. The overall temporal sequence that Wordsworth gives the poems and the frequency with which narratives and odes end groups of poems show that he consistently includes lyric in a larger narrative plot, an inclusion that also occurs within the Intimations Ode itself. Seeing Wordsworth's ode as a narrative and in relation to earlier English odes helps us understand that its uneasy coexistence of statement and uncertainty, which many critics consider its greatest weakness, is actually its greatest strength.

In the critical writing of the last few decades Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde has been described prevailingly as a psychological novel. Our most influentual interpreters, that is to say, draw our attention primarily to the subtle exhibition of psychology in the personages of the poem, and to the resemblance of the descriptive background to what we ordinarily call real life. By emphasizing these aspects of the Troilus they bring it into association with our modern novel. Representative of this view are such expressions as the following:

“Our first great psychological novel”; “A great psychological novel”; “An elaborate psychological novel”; “The first novel, in the modern sense”; “Its spirit and temper is that of the modern novel”; “A page out of the book of modern everyday life”;6 “[Chaucer's] first and greatest adventure into the world of every day”; “[What Chaucer adds to the Filostralo] is what we roughly call reality…. one has a sense of ordinary life going on”; “Troy is mediaeval London”; “[The Troilus] is not a romance”; “[In the Troilus Chaucer] leaves all romantic convention behind.”

These days, it is impossible to look at the news without finding Facebook in one headline or another. Many are prompted by the leaking of personal information. But a few critics have also called attention to a different kind of problem, having less to do with privacy than with the nature of Facebook as a social medium. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen makes much of its genesis in an Ivy League dorm room: “While Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.” He goes on to analyze the ethos of the site as the digital equivalent of the preppie look: well scrubbed and well behaved, prankish on occasion but in the end clean and safe and bland. The site's juvenile “principle of in loco parentis” has given way to the “authoritarian building codes” of the suburbs, with more legroom perhaps but no less supervised and no less homogeneous, a “chilling and puritanical atmosphere” (9–10).

Four recent articles have presented two contradictory opinions concerning Johnson's sources for the Ethiopian background of Rasselas. The contention that his inspiration for the Happy Valley came from a wide variety of readings on Ethiopia is counter-balanced by an equal insistence on the importance of his debt to Lobo's Relation d'Abissinie. The student of Johnson remains unenlightened by this series of articles, not only because the relative merits of their arguments are never discussed but also because none of them has been based on a comprehensive study of the Ethiopian materials available to Johnson. In an effort to bring the problem closer to its definitive solution, I propose to examine a largely neglected body of material on Ethiopia, identify specific sources for Ethiopian features of Rasselas and Rambler essays 204–205, and suggest that the circumstances of the composition of Rasselas were significantly different from those generally imagined.

Popularized in Spain through the work of the Italian satirist Traiano Boccalini, the motif of the occhiali politici, or political lenses, is one of the most understudied conceits in early modern Spanish satire. This essay examines four early modern Spanish texts where anteojos de larga vista (“eyeglasses” or “telescopes”) become central elements as the eye is given the ability to perceive the reality beyond deceptive appearances. But a capacity to see beyond reveals two parallel concerns: the adoption of spectacles as a mark of social distinction by a society suffering from the moral blindness these novels denounce and the increasing tensions between astronomy and religion stemming from the use of lenses as stargazing tools. Contextualizing these anxieties in the contemporary polemics regarding the divulgation of Galileo's Copernican theses, I illustrate how a simple corrective instrument triggered a fierce debate at the center of Spain's uneven modernity.

When the first “Facts of Journal Publishing” appeared in PMLA (December 1954), its circulation statistics were cited as illustrations of the precarious positions of a number of publications in the field of modern languages. William Riley Parker introduced the tabulations with an exhortation to the MLA membership to support journals in their respective disciplines with their subscriptions. “Study the stark figures we have compiled for you,” he advised. “In some cases they are a kind of fever chart in reverse, showing the condition of dying, or very sick, patients. In general they reveal many periodicals in search of a profession. We have been letting George support these old friends of ours, and George has not been very numerous lately.”

In two earlier papers I have analyzed Whitman and a number of German authors with regard to the form and function of enumerative style. It appeared that the latter tends to express a sense of ontological oneness—and the more so, the wider the range of assorted items. Even the most heterogeneous things can be brought together meaningfully in serial juxtaposition if they are viewed as manifestations, as emanations of a single all-pervading cosmic principle. This was expressed by the term “conjunctive enumeration.”

In the past two years, partly to supplement in special fields the collections of the Middle English Dictionary, I have been searching the catalogues of manuscripts of English libraries for mediæval curiosities. Of these, early grammatical writings in English are not the least interesting. I have now four Latin grammatical pieces written in English in the fifteenth century: I, an anonymous grammar in St. John's College (Cambridge) MS. 163, f. 1a, printed below; II, another from Trinity College (Cambridge) MS. 0.5.4, f. 5a, printed in Essays and Studies in Eng. and Comp. Lit. in the series in Language and Literature, University of Michigan, xiii (1935), pp. 81–125; III, another in Douce MS. 103, f. 53a, printed below; and IV, a disquisition by a schoolmaster of Beccles (Suffolk), one John Drury, on the comparison of adjectives and adverbs in Cambridge Additional MS. 2830, f. 54a, printed in Speculum, ix (1934), 70–83. (I shall usually refer to them herein as I, II, III, and IV.)

It has long been recognized that La prudencia en la mujer, with its powerful portrait of the Queen, Maria de Molina, represented something of a special effort in Tirso's theatre. Not only is it greatly superior to the dramatist's other plays of similar genre, but it is usually conceded to be “the best historical drama of the Spanish classical theatre.” Some of the critics have been struck by its profoundly serious tone, as compared with that prevailing in other plays of the Mercedarian; others have pointed to the loving care with which Tirso has portrayed his noble protagonist and the powerful contrasts that he has worked out between the Queen and the disloyal vassals who surrounded her. Still others have stressed Tirso's success in recreating the anarchic atmosphere that surrounded her regency.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight not only exhibits a profound control of structure and symmetry, but also includes a great many techniques that induce disorientation and confusion in the reader. Such techniques challenge and entertain the audience, and themes of decline, decadence, and dismemberment comment ironically on Sir Gawain’s late fourteenth-century audience’s place in the history that the narrative includes. This article concentrates on one particular technique; the poet divides certain stanzas so that the second half of the stanza causes the audience to revise or question their response to the first half. But such techniques mirror the effects of the narrative as a whole. This constant shift in perspective causes the-audience to question the meaning and value of earthly perception and existence. It also indicates a gently antagonistic—or at least ironic—relationship between poet and audience.

This essay analyzes genre's impact on racial representation in a body of popular fiction that has shaped European Americans' definition of Asian American identity for more than three-quarters of a century: the Charlie Chan novels of Earl Derr Biggers. To advance his stated goal of overturning Chinese stereotypes, Biggers experimented with genres of locale and criminality. The Hawaiian setting of his first Chan story, The House without a Key, challenged the generic topography of Chinatown regionalism by invoking a counterintuitive regionalist prototype, while the book's plot followed the conventions of classical detective fiction, a highly formulaic subgenre of crime literature that perpetuated racist stereotypes while dominating best-seller lists throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Exploiting a unique feature of the detective formula known as rule subversion, however, Biggers enlisted the genre's very tendencies toward racism to undermine racist stereotypes.

That the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen played an important rôle in the life and thought of Rainer Maria Rilke is a fact well documented in Rilke's letters, and critical investigations have long begun to recognize the relationship by brief or lengthier references. Many of the letters, which spread over a period ranging from 1897 to 1924, have appeared in print, but a number containing references to Jacobsen still remain unpublished. Supplementing the letters, Rilke sometimes talked about Jacobsen, as he had occasion to do in 1925 while he was supervising the French translation of Malte Laurids Brigge or when the topic of conversation concerned matters so closely connected with both Jacobsen and Rilke as the behavior of words.

Much of the fascination—and complexity —of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales may be attributed to the elusiveness of Chaucer's point of view. Is the “I” of the General Prologue Chaucer the man, Chaucer the poet, or a persona created for the situation by the poet? In order to arrive at a satisfactory interpretation of either the Prologue or the Tales as a whole, we have first to decide as best we can who it is that is reporting to us the appearance, characters, actions, conversations, and stories of himself and his fellow pilgrims.

All of Burke's major biographers have said that he edited Dodsley's Annual Register and wrote its famous Historical Article from 1758 to at least twenty-five years beyond that time. Such statements have been made without the support of an iota of evidence. As a result Burke's share in the Annual Register still remains to be determined. The subject has held the interest of contemporary scholars. Donald Cross Bryant in his account of Burke's literary friendships devotes a separate chapter to the problem. The most recent study of Burke, Thomas A. Copeland's Our Eminent Friend Edmund Burke (New Haven, 1949), contains two such chapters. The matter receives special consideration in Sir Philip Magnus' life of Burke, the latest biography as of today. Burke's other biographers were also interested in his editorship. Macknight observed that “the value ... of the Annual Registers to one who should undertake to write Burke's political history, cannot be exaggerated” (I, XI). Robert Murray says, “It is a valuable source of information on the growth of his thought from 1758 to 1791” (p. 83).

Critical restiveness with Chaucer's “unsatisfactory” endings points to one of his most profound strategies. In the Canterbury Tales Chaucer finds at least a dozen ways to ignore, skirt, transcend, or even anticipate structural closure in favor of an engagement between the narrative and its responding audience that fundamentally works against closure. By repeatedly subverting conventional closure, he turns our attention to the dynamics of discourse as social interaction. He creates in the Canterbury Tales a copia of the human motives—social, psychological, or political—that generate communication and misunderstanding. Chaucer's sense of closure casts light on the narrative frame and on the so-called Retraction. The subversion of conventional closure, instead of undermining the text, often enriches it, deeply characterizing his whole attitude toward discourse and toward knowledge. In Chaucer's epistemology nothing is ever complete.

Goethe's Maerchen which concluded his Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderter, published in Schiller's Horen in 1795, was enthusiastically received by all early romanticists. August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote a review of Goethe's fairy tale immediately after its publication, which represented the delight of his whole generation on the eve of the literary movement of romanticism:

… Was aber alles Belehrende und Ergötzende in den vorigen Unterhaltungen dahinten läßt, was ein sanftes Wohlgefallen in das lebhafteste Vergnügen verwandelt, ist das Maerchen, zu dem wir durch treSende Winke über das Wesen der Phantasie vorbereitet werden. Sie gaukelt uns alsdann das lieblichste Märchen vor, das je von ihrem Himmel auf die diirre Erde herabgefallen ist. Alle ihre Jugend und Fröhlichkeit scheint wach geworden zu sein … nie gab es einen liebenswürdigeren Schmerz als den der süßen Lilie; ueberhaupt erregt sie ein Gefühl, als wenn man den Duft der Blume, deren Name sie führt, in freier Luft einatmete … es ist eine Zeichnung, bei der man nicht ohne Ergötzen verweilen kann … so schwebt das ganze Märchen hin, und wer sich nicht an ihm erfreuen wollte, müßte wenigstens nicht mit unbefangnem Geist sich belustigen können oder alle Werke, woran die Einbildungskraft allein teilhat, lästig linden. Alsdann könnte es ihn vielleicht noch unterhalten, nach einem haltbaren Faden der Deutung zu suchen, welches wir noch nicht unternommen haben.