For many generations symbolism has dominated the poetry of America and Europe. In time, of course, the critics found out what was happening and they began to investigate the movement. They have carried their investigations further and further afield over the literature of the last four centuries and in the process they have enormously widened our knowledge of poetry. Through their labors we read with clearer eyes and a deeper enjoyment than before.

On November 28, 1760, when Smollett entered the King's Bench Prison, he must have looked forward with some misgiving to spending a period of three months in the same gaol with his old enemy “Doctor” Shebbeare, who on that day had served two years of his three-year term. These two writers had been at loggerheads ever since Smollett's vitriolic reviews of the “Letters to the People of England” began to appear in the Critical Review. And now Smollett had offended again by putting a caricature of Shebbeare in The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, the novel that had been running in the 1760 numbers of the British Magazine. Thomas Seccombe's placing of Smollett's imprisonment in the early summer of 1759, which will now have to be given up, encouraged the view that the first part of Sir Launcelot Greaves was written in the King's Bench. Seccombe believed that it was on one of his visits to Smollett in prison that Newbery engaged his services for the British Magazine. That Shebbeare, the model of Ferret in Sir Launcelot Greaves, was at hand to be observed, seemed to strengthen this assumption and to lead one to suppose that perhaps Smollett had let fall a hint about the nature of the novel he was writing and received from his fellow prisoner a response as crabbed as the remarks with which Ferret greeted Sir Launcelot. But these are false assumptions. By putting imaginary objections in the mouth of Ferret, who never spoke well of anything, Smollett merely hoped to forestall criticism of his novel. Only the last installments of the narrative could have been written in prison.

Although the influence of such philosophers as Holbach, Condorcet, and Godwin on Shelley's theory of the perfectibility of man has been noted, that of Pierre Jean George Cabanis, the French materialistic physician of the eighteenth century, has been overlooked. Yet Cabanis's ideas as put forward in his most considerable work, Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme, cited in the notes to “Queen Mab,” on the important relation between man's physical well-being and his intellectual and moral health appear to have contributed a striking feature to the poet's exposition of his views in “Queen Mab” and even in “Prometheus Unbound.” If it be remembered that Shelley already, by virtue of his vegetarianism, considered that man cannot become morally perfect unless he be physically perfect, it is not surprising that Cabanis's emphasis on the same idea from another angle, namely, the necessity of a mild and equable climate for the best development of intellect and morality, impressed the poet to such an extent that he incorporated the physician's belief in his theory of perfectibility. His ready acceptance of Cabanis's ideas is the less surprising when it is remarked that Cabanis was also a perfectibilian, believing that man “est indéfinement perfectible, et qu'il devient en quelque sort, capable de tout.”

It is Vitally important that teachers of modern foreign languages be adequately prepared for a task which more and more Americans are declaring essential to the national welfare. Though a majority of the language teachers in our schools are well trained, many have been poorly or inadequately prepared, often through no fault of their own. The undersigned therefore present this statement of what they consider the minimal, good, and superior qualifications of a secondary school teacher of a modern foreign language.

This essay examines the role of Rétif's writings in the development of the concept of erotic fetishism and in the formation of the French literary canon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rétif explored foot and shoe fetishisms more than a century before the phenomena were medically recognized, anticipating the modern psychosexual use of the term fetishism and making important contributions to the invention of the theoretical concept. Rétif's works were accorded a privileged place in early pathologies of fetishism, which provoked a series of polemics among German and French medical doctors and literary scholars centered on notions of national supremacy and literary value. Marked as bad literature, in both senses of the term, Rétif's writing was subsequently excluded from the French literary canon on moral grounds and became a kind of fetish object in the French literary corpus. (ASW)

In the two parallel stories that constitute Il castello, some suddenly mute travelers use tarot decks to communicate their horrific tales to one another. Ultimately, the ghostly kings, queens, knights, and other conventional or famous literary characters who inhabit these novellas delimit two “voices” that frequently overlap and even coincide: the narrator-author’s and the spectator-reader’s. The violent chivalric world of war, love, and magic that generates the narrative action also produces a metanarrative dimension that asserts the text’s subject as writing and reading, while simultaneously figuring Calvino’s own writerly persona. The Number One tarot, Il Bagatto (The Minstrel), often images Faust in the fiction but more importantly images the writer, a (Marlovian) Faustian conjurer destined to fail. The ever-changing sequences of the cards allegorize the making of a fiction, while the deck itself allegorizes the plenitude of the finished text, unattainable by its author.

In a communication to the Times Literary Supplement, J. J. Auchmuty has suggested that a study of Wordsworth as a practical politician might remedy certain traditional misconceptions about the poet's activities in his declining years. As a matter of fact, he worked assiduously at a period of his life “when, according to legend, he is supposed to have been desiccated and devoid of principle,” in attempting to influence the passage of the Copyright Act of 1842. His part in this legislation has been taken for granted by scholars on the basis of statements to several correspondents that he had written many letters in support of the measure. But there is evidence now, both published and unpublished, that for five years he labored continually in assisting Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd, the originator of the bill, by letters both private and public, interviews, and an official petition. While it is true that the Act promised to benefit him directly, there is no doubt that his interest in its passage was more than selfish and had its roots in what was, in effect, a struggle for survival of literature of quality in an age demanding quantity.

The “villain-hero,” as he developed in the plays of Marlowe and in those of some later Elizabethans, is a distinct and important type of character. Moreover, he did not make his final exit with the ending of the Elizabethan period, but has reappeared at various times since, especially during the Romantic Revival at the end of the eighteenth century. This “Romantic Movement,” as we are accustomed to call it, was in many ways a revival of the earlier Romantic spirit which we call Elizabethanism. Nothing shows the resemblance between the two periods more strikingly than this habit of taking for the dominating figure in the story a man of great power, stained with crime.

This essay explores the sociocultural ramifications of a literary theme—fake suicide and resurrection—in Russia through an analysis of Tolstoy's drama The Living Corpse. Written in 1900, the work illustrates Tolstoy's theory that a play must have a central thematic “knot.” The knot Tolstoy chose was central not just for his play but for Russian culture in general. This knot engages four kinds of subtexts: it derives from a contemporary trial, it polemically attacks Chernyshevsky's notorious novel What Is to Be Done?, it marks a dialogue with the religious philosopher Fedorov, and it represents a development of ideas that Tolstoy had been exploring for almost fifty years. Subsequently, Tolstoy's reworking of the suicide-and-resurrection theme served as a point of departure for such twentieth-century authors as Mayakovsky, Erdman, Nabokov, and Bulgakov.

Literary historians are practically agreed as to the origin of the two elements which comprise the main plot of Ben Jonson's Epicorne. The story of a man induced by false pretences to marry an almost insanely loquacious woman is a version of a declamation by the Greek Sophist Libanius on the surly man who has married a talkative wife. In regard to this relationship there can be no question. The second, and more important, element of the main plot is the practical joke played upon an eccentric which results in his ostensible marriage to a boy disguised as a girl. The source of this story, the most authoritative German critics and Dr. Henry agree, is to be found in Plautus's Casina, in which a somewhat similar trick is played upon Lysidamus. To this opinion Herford and Simpson, the editors of the definitive edition of Jonson's works, add their endorsement:

As a foreword to Amphitryon Molière might have selected the famous passage from Descartes's first Méditation: “Je supposerai donc qu'il y a non point un vrai Dieu, qui est la souveraine source de vérité, mais un certain mauvais génie, non moins rusé et trompeur que puissant, qui a employé toute son industrie à me tromper” (Œuvres et Lettres, Pléiade, p. 272). The play is in large measure a working out of this hypothesis. Examination of the dramatic and symbolic functions of Jupiter reveals, however, that the wicked genius of Amphitryon is no spirit, but reason itself. Jupiter is not a hidden puppet-master, but an active participant in human affairs, seeking human ends and not just the pleasure of deluding people. His descent into the world of ordinary mortals provides the occasion for the dramatic action of the comedy: a world which has been well and securely ordered until then suddenly cracks open. Everything in it becomes potential illusion; nothing can be relied on any more; a man is no longer even sure if he is himself or what he is. Jupiter is a liberating force, dramatically and symbolically. His presence dissolves the world of conventional realities and reveals a new world of possibilities, but these possibilities never achieve substance or consistency, and in the end there is no brave new world, only the old one with all its patterns destroyed. The colorful kingdom of fantasy is suddenly abandoned at the end of the play and we find ourselves back in the world of everyday empirical reality. Jupiter, the brilliant magician, turns out to be an ordinary grand seigneur. All that has happened after all is that a false order has been exposed, vanquished, and replaced by blatant disorder. The rule of Amphitryon has yielded to the rule of Jupiter. But whereas Amphitryon ruled in the firm conviction that the order of things, which happened to suit him very well, was a necessary and just order, Jupiter is without illusions. There is no rational order, no just rule for him. There is only the right of the strongest. Jupiter's justification of his own violence at the end of the play is an obvious and deliberate piece of irony on the part of the author.

William Cliff Martin in his paper “The Date and Purpose of Spenser's Veue” interprets Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland as intended to be a subtle and timely compliment to that newest and most powerful of Elizabeth's favorites, the Earl of Essex.

The students of the present generation are the first in a long time who will not take their cultural identities from books. Statistics reveal that film, museum, concert, and sports attendances are up but that fewer and fewer people are reading books. Those strange moments in nineteenth-century novels when young heroes strike poses, dress, coif, and woo by the book are gone, perhaps forever. Our students are more likely to take their models from television, films, glossy magazines, video games, or the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. My colleagues in the profession report that, thanks to the expansion of visual culture, students now possess an enviable talent for decoding images, often to the detriment of reading ability. To be frank, I am not so convinced: in my experience, the most literate students continue to be the best readers of images. But I agree that we are in the midst of an unprecedented explosion of visuality. A new era has dawned, and we are not prepared for it. We need to change our teaching and scholarship to keep up with our students.

IN Our Knowledge of the External World, Bertrand Russell makes a significant distinction between two kinds of infinity. One kind is illustrated by the progression from zero to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, on to infinity; Russell calls this an infinite progression, and it is unlimited. The other idea is illustrated by the division of an interval between, say, one and two; first divide it into halves, then divide each of those halves, and so on infinitely. This is a compact series or an infinite class, and it is limited. The infinite progression and the infinite class are quite different ideas, and they have different philosophical uses. I suggest that a similar distinction may be made concerning literary forms, and that this distinction helps us to understand what is new about Ben Jonson's dramatic method. The distinction reverberates through seventeenth-century literature, I believe, but Jonson is especially interesting because he is somewhat of a pioneer.

Where they touch on political themes, Browning's early works—particularly Sordello and the plays—are reflective less of the kind of liberalism he derived from Shelley than of a growing skepticism as to the value of partisan commitments and a distrust of merely “political” solutions. In Strafford, Sordello, Pippa Passes, The Return of the Druses, Luria, and A Soul's Tragedy, Browning explores the relationship between a character or group of characters and a culture in turmoil. Virtually all the characters, in their limitations—whether imposed by blind idealism, indecision, or charlatanism—are unequipped to assume a truly heroic role, and they are frequently poised between two equally unacceptable political alternatives. The rare, truly heroic figures of Browning's poetry are those who transcend the political obsessions of their culture and decisively assert their own best selves. In his distrust of institutional machinery and his emphasis on personal salvation, Browning belongs with Victorians like Dickens and Carlyle; in the major monologues, most of which followed this formative period, he views religion, art, and human love, rather than political action, as the motivating forces in human relationships.

Generally speaking, we take Wordsworth too seriously. Perhaps we have been unconsciously conditioned by the equine solemnity of portraits of the aged poet and need to remind ourselves that Hazlitt, who himself painted a lugubrious portrait, described Wordsworth as “grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour,” and noted “a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth”—a hint of which appears in Shuter's 1798 likeness. Wordsworth's humor may be “slight” and “sly,” but it is pervasive; it crops out in mirth, gaiety, gamboling playfulness, and quirkish wit. Humor, wrote Landor, may be distinguished from wit in that it “indulges in breadth of drollery rather than in play and brilliancy of point.” This breadth of drollery is particularly Wordsworth's vein. He is not devoid of wit, but he supposedly said that he did not consider himself a witty poet, and specifically asserted in “The Waggoner” that he made “no pretense / To wit that deals in double sense.” He is characteristically droll.

Plath makes a major contribution to the development of the elegy with a series of poems mourning her father's death, even though they have seldom been read as elegies. More than any of her forebears, Plath intensifies the mourner's aggression toward the dead, dramatically expanding the boundaries of the genre. She summons a furious anger that most earlier elegists eschew in favor of pathos, reverence, or homosocial rivalry. At first deflecting rage inward in elegies of masochistic self-reproach, Plath dramatizes an ever more explosive grief. Although the “female elegy” has been defined as a “poem of connectedness,” Plath writes elegies of violent separation and rupture, rejecting the prostrate role assigned by literary and gender codes to the female mourner. She helps to remake the elegy for the twentieth century, shifting its psychic work from consolatory mourning to the violent, contradictory, and protracted work of melancholia.

When Coleridge, after looking over the third edition of Lyrical Ballads with its enlarged preface, confided to William Sotheby (13 July 1802) his troubled belief that between Wordsworth and himself there lay “a radical Difference” of opinion about poetry, he was recognizing a disagreement that must have dated almost from his earliest talks with Wordsworth. Writing to Robert Southey two weeks later (29 July), Coleridge proposed to “go to the Bottom” of the difference in a forthcoming volume of critical essays. When the proposal finally matured, in scattered chapters of Biographia Lileraria—fifteen years later—Coleridge declared it as a main object “to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continuées, controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction.”

The subject of Phonetic Law and Analogy belongs to Psychology as well as to Philology; it originated, however, and was for a long time kept within the domain of the latter discipline. When it first came into the foreground of our interest, it was agitated by scholars in historical philology. The experience of daily linguistic research suggested both the question and the answer, and in fact the main importance of the whole problem was seen in the influence which its solution must have upon the methods of detailed investigation.