The characteristic drama of the first years of the nineteenth century was, as everyone knows, absurdly romantic and sentimental. Incited by the extravagant Kotzebue and charmed into emulation by the new mélodrame from France, the first specimen of which reached England in 1802, the English playwrights supplied the stage with a variety of plots involving robber barons, victims of the Inquisition, captive maidens and sentimental villains. Frequently they seasoned these delicacies with supernatural horrors and garnished them with vaulted halls, sepulchral chambers, and dungeons.

Anglo-Saxon and Greek epic each provide k. on two occasions a seemingly authentic account of the narration of verse in the heroic age. Hrothgar's court bard sings of the encounters at Finnsburg (lines 1068–1159), and improvises the tale of Beowulf's exploits in a complimentary comparison of the Geatish visitor with Sigemund (lines 871–892); Alcinous' court bard sings of the discovered adultery of Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey vin.266–366), and takes up a tale of Odysseus while the Ithacan wanderer listens on (Odyssey vin.499–520). Nothing in all this is autobiographical : unlike the poets of Deor and Widsith, the poet of Beowulf is not concerned with his own identity; the poet of the Odyssey, reputed blind, reveals himself not at all in singing of the blind minstrel Demodocus. Since none of these glimpses of poetizing without writing is intended to incorporate a signature into the epic matter, there is prima-facie evidence that Beowulf and the Homeric poems each derive from an oral tradition. That such a tradition lies behind the Iliad and the Odyssey, at least, is hard to deny. Milman Parry rigorously defended the observation that the extant Homeric poems are largely formulaic, and was led to postulate that they could be shown entirely formulaic if the complete corpus of Greek epic survived; he further reasoned that frequent formulas in epic verse indicate oral composition, and assumed the slightly less likely corollary that oral epic is inclined towards the use of formulas. Proceeding from Parry's conclusions and adopting one of his schemata, Francis P. Magoun, Jr., argues that Beowulf likewise was created from a legacy of oral formulas inherited and extended by bards of successive generations, and the thesis is striking and compelling. Yet a fresh inspection will indicate one crucial amendment: Beowulf and the Homeric poems are not at all formulaic to the same extent.

It is now generally agreed that in Dombey and Son, “the first masterpiece of Dickens' maturity,” Dickens solved the structural problems of the serial novel. There was, he discovered, “no insuperable obstacle to writing, barely ahead of its publication in monthly instalments complete in themselves, a novel with a well-defined purpose worked out by such an ‘artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated plot’ as he had once felt that he must eschew.” Dickens' “artfully interwoven” plot structure, similarly, is now recognized to be founded on a highly ramified system of analogies, contrasts, and variations in action and character of what is essentially a single, simple thematic idea, supported and colored by a complex body of inter-related symbols.

The english Romantics had a special affinity for metaphors and similes of inner eyes, inner ears, and inner senses. These ancient and commonplace figures are widely pervasive and often conspicuously prominent in the literature of the period, appearing under myriad modifications and serving a wide variety of functions. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats used them in some of the most familiar and pivotal passages in their works, apparently seeking to charge them with new meaning. In fact, these figures are so prominent in Romantic literature that they must have been found serviceable to some particularly urgent expressive need of the time. I believe it was the Romantics' intense preoccupation with psychological theory, and the particular types of psychological theory they wished to support and oppose, which led them to explore and exploit afresh the possibilities of inner-sense figures.

Students of poetry have long regretted that John Livingston Lowes did not include in his remarkable The Road to Xanadu a study of Christabel. It would have been only fitting for the story of the origin of this poem to have appeared side by side with those of Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner. Professor Lowes thus explained the omission:

In an paper addressed to linguists and phoneticians it were superfluous to dwell upon the importance of phonetics. All scholars interested in philological research or in modern language instruction must be aware that the teaching of living tongues is greatly improved by a knowledge of phonetics, and that without this science the satisfactory pursuit of comparative philology is impossible. Whatever be the system we adopt in the French and German courses of our colleges and schools, we must admit that pronunciation is an essential element; and the intelligent teaching of pronunciation demands an acquaintance with the physical action by which the sounds of human speech are created and modified. The American teacher, if he have exceptional advantages and an unusually delicate ear, may perhaps be able by mere imitation to acquire a correct foreign accent himself, but neither he nor the foreigner can ever, without a knowledge of phonetics, tell his pupils how to reproduce it. As for the science which we commonly call philology, it consists mainly of the study of sound changes; and the only solid foundation for such study is, obviously, a thorough mastery of the principles of sound-production.

Early in the year 1771 Lessing manifested a lively interest in the Scottish moral philosopher, Adam Ferguson. He was eager to obtain a certain work of Ferguson's, and his patience was taxed for several weeks until the book arrived. When he finally had it in his hands, he quickly leafed through it and was delighted with what his cursory examination revealed. His comments, occasioned by this first glance through the volume, have given rise to a number of conflicting opinions.

The tree beset by natural forces, the embrace of elm and vine, and the antithesis of mulberry and almond are related figures which Spanish sonneteers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently used when structuring agudezas por semejanza. The extent to which these stock figures are revitalized in unique poetic artifacts reveals each poet s ability to work within the limitations of an aesthetics of invention through imitation. Moreover, to follow the varying fortunes of these topoi is to assess the efficacy of the modes of correlation (simile, allegory, adequate symbol, or objective correlative); to witness the interplay of the Petrarchan and emblematic traditions; to note the variations on a theme exploited first by the erotic poets, later by the moralists; and to highlight the shift of emphasis from the discursive to the pictorial which marks the transition from the aesthetics of the Renaissance to that of the Baroque. Finally, the precise delineation of the specific context or whole, of which each sonnet is an integral part, permits a more comprehensive exegesis of that sonnet's alma de sutileza, for Gracian the essence of the craft and criticism of poetry.

The almost complete centralization of power in the monarch, which became an accomplished fact in France during the reign of Louis XIV and continued to be the national policy under his successor, had the inevitable result of destroying all semblance of political life in the country. Cut off from participation in their government, the French people gradually lost interest in the affairs of the nation. During this period, until the Seven Years' War, the manifestations of a genuine spirit of patriotism are few. Faguet is essentially right when he states that one of the salient characteristics of the eighteenth century is the progressive diminution of the spirit of patriotism. For want of opportunities to express itself this spirit had become dormant, but it was far from being dead, as later events showed.

For Several Decades, Scholars have Believed, for Lack of Evidence to the Contrary, That Négritude—One of the Key Terms of identity formation in the twentieth century—appeared in print for the first time in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), in 1939. This consensus reflects a revision of what the cofounders (with Césaire) of the negritude movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, had remembered and stated. Senghor said in 1959 that “the word [négritude] was invented by Césaire in an article in the newspaper that bore the title L'Etudiant noir” (qtd. in Ako 347). In an interview published in 1980, Damas said, “Césaire coined this word in L'Etudiant noir” (qtd. in Ako 348). But L‘étudiant noir was a phantom. Lilyan Kesteloot, in her groundbreaking study Black Writers in French, attempted to summarize the content of L‘étudiant noir without seeing a single issue of it; none was available to her (84n2).

Literary critics mistrust periodization, that basic act of literary history, because they are suspicious of narrative. Where does this suspicion come from? And why has it arisen, paradoxically, together with the growing authority of the concept of narrative itself? This essay places the rise of narrative theory in the contexts of professionalism, decolonization, and the nineteenth-century novel. Gérard Genette's account of the triumph of “discourse” over “story” parallels the upward mobility of many nineteenth-century novelistic protagonists. Even denying that narrative theory can be narrativized, as Jonathan Culler does, has similarities to the vocational crisis in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Each of these narratives functions as a rhetoric of professional legitimation, leading outward from some account of “the ‘storiness’ of the story”—the role, for example, of death for Walter Benjamin and Frank Kermode—to a sense of vocation anchored in the concerns of an extraprofessional public.

Although Henry James described The Turn of the Screw as “rather a shameless potboiler,” subsequent criticism has treated the work with more respect. As Robert Heilman has pointed out, the tale has inspired a surprising amount of discussion and speculation. Indeed, Heilman feels that James must have “hit upon some fundamental truth of experience that no generation can ignore and that each generation wishes to restate in its own terms.”

Few stories captured and held Byron's imagination as tenaciously as that of Francesca da Rimini. In addition to its association with Dante, who became one of his favorite poets, there was evidently something about the tragedy of love involving a married woman, her husband, and her husband's brother that Byron found especially fascinating. The many amorous triangles in his poetical narratives, as well as the exaltation of romantic love sanctified not by religion but rather by sincere emotion, show that he was temperamentally sympathetic with the basic elements of Francesca's adulterous passion. In his customary way of assimilating whatever he admired, he even identified himself and his halfsister, Augusta Leigh, with Dante's unfortunate lovers of Rimini. After frequent recourse to the story of Francesca, Byron associated himself with it to such an extent that he interwove his own autobiography with it and, I believe, reflected the original tragedy as a strangely configured, though curiously revealing, tragicomedy in the first canto of Don Juan.

William Faulkner is a poet—not a philosopher, nor an essayist, nor a businessman who writes articles for Harper's. Many readers have been baffled and annoyed and have even hated Faulkner personally because his novels have always demanded critical, curious reading. As an artist, he speaks through form. As a novelist, he has always exercised the privilege and the gift of symbolic discourse. If Faulkner were a philosopher, he would perhaps be more systematic about arranging and ordering his meanings. But he is an artist whose genius is for meaningful form rather than formal statement; his meaning, therefore, is legitimately diffuse, complex, and resistant; and the sensitive reader enjoys a continuous awareness of the multiple meanings of his form. Through form the artist interprets or criticizes the world in which he lives; through form the reader senses the artist's philosophical outlook on the world. The philosophical assumptions that underlie Faulkner's novels and largely determine their distinctive “shape” do not come to us as direct statement. As with most original artists, Faulkner's most deeply felt ideas are manifest in his symbols and his imagery; they are implicit in his peculiar and much maligned sentence structure, and in the experimental and complex structural patterns he gave to such remarkable books as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Requiem for a Nun, and Absalom, Absalom! One can defend successfully, I think, the proposition that when Faulkner has spoken in the novel as philosopher or essayist or sectionalist he has failed. When he attempts debate, as he does in parts of Intruder in the Dust, his voice is ordinary, in some respects shrill and small. He is angrier, indeed despairing, in Sanctuary; but Sanctuary, for all its weaknesses, is a novel superior to Intruder in the Dust because it more consistently dramatizes and restrains and diffuses its despair through form. In the bitterest of his early novels, As I Lay Dying, the “outrage” is beautifully restrained and patterned into art, with no hint anywhere of the direct voice of argument or rationality that we hear with the later Gavin Stevens of Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun. Darl and Addie Bundren (As I Lay Dying) are poetic and persuasive; Gavin Stevens and the recreated Temple Drake (Requiem for a Nun) are prosaic, literal and dull.

The treatment of esthetics by Schiller influenced the conception of esthetics in Hegel's lectures. The notion of appearance (Schein) acquired a fundamental importance in Hegel's esthetics. Schiller had made it possible for “appearance” to be made the cornerstone of an esthetic system by enlarging its importance and rescuing it from the negative valuation given it by the logic of rationalism and the analytical metaphysics of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Hegel could thus base his definition of the beautiful upon “appearance.” On this definition of the beautiful is based the dialectical and historical method of Hegel's theory of the arts. (In German)

John Donne, Jr., has been said to have “flung” his father's letters “to the world in complete disorder” when he prepared Letters to Severall Persons of Honour: Written by John Donne Sometime Deane of S' Pauls London (1651), and it is true that the letters in this volume are not arranged for biographical purposes. No effort was made to put any of them in chronological order, except that one, the last in the volume, seems to have been selected for its position partly because it was written during Donne's last illness. Most of the letters, moreover, are without dates, and many were deliberately given false addresses. The editor was chiefly concerned about preparing a volume of elegant letters to “severall persons of honour.” Both the adjective and the adjective phrase are significant; for the 1651 volume was not just thrown together. It was arranged so that it would appear to contain letters to a greater variety of people than it did, and to people who were better remembered in 1651. It is the purpose of this article to formulate working hypotheses about the editorial processes which determined the Letters to Severall Persons, first by discovering what the most probable sources of the letters were, and second by examining the motives and methods which governed their arrangement and the headings which were given to them.

Various ghosts have haunted this special topic. Caroline Weber's essay conjures the ghosts of slaves in Denis Diderot's Le fils naturel. Kari Lokke explores the way Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand deploy tales of contact with the spirits of the dead to probe a nation's political unconscious, enlisting the dead to galvanize the present into revolutionary action. For Todd Samuel Presner, Hegel's grand sweep of world history is haunted by the ghosts of Jews written out of that history. That PMLA in its special topics has not always wanted to listen to the Spirit of Literature Past is unsurprising, for the desire to listen to history's ghosts is by no means universal.

The influence of the writings and personality of Thomas Carlyle on the poetic and critical career of Matthew Arnold is a complex story, the outlines of which have only recently begun to be traced. Kathleen Tillotson, in her illuminating Warton Lecture on “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle,” revealed in great detail how passage after passage in Arnold's poetry is related to Carlyle's early writings. Since the bulk of Arnold's major poetry was written by 1853, her study in effect proved how much more “puissant” than earlier Arnold scholars had suspected, the voice of Carlyle had been for Arnold—one of the four “voices,” as he said in later life, he had heard at Oxford in the early 1840's. Significantly, however, in that list of 1883, in which Carlyle's name is linked in dignity with those of Newman, Goethe, and Emerson, Arnold departs from his subject in order to turn his keenest critical instruments against Carlyle; and he rejects him for a temper “morbid, wilful and perverse,” as well as for his “perverse attitude towards happiness” (DA, p. 198). In a similar mood of reminiscence Arnold had written to John Henry Newman a decade earlier: “There are four people, in especial, from whom I am conscious of having learnt—a very different thing from merely receiving a strong impression—learnt habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me; and the four are—Goethe, Wordsworth, Sainte-Beuve, and yourself” (UL, pp. 65–66; 28 May 1872). Curiously, there is no mention of Carlyle here, though demonstrably Carlyle's influence on Arnold's thought and writing extends far beyond mere “strong impression.”