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.”

In gathering here tonight, we tell each other a little sustaining story. Just by going through our traditional motions, we imply a narrative, one that might begin something like this:

In a former article, I traced the history of Balzac's literary reputation in England as an example of the persistent change in the Victorian point of view toward moral and literary questions. In spite of the vitriolic attacks of critics and moralists and the general apprehension of the reading public, Balzac ultimately was accepted in England. In the thirties, “… a baser, meaner, filthier scoundrel never polluted society”; in the nineties, he is acclaimed one of those “divine spies, for whom the world has no secrets,” who finds “spirit everywhere,” and who gives “us so much life that we are almost overpowered by it.” The fervor of the moralists in the nineties was no less than in the thirties, but the objects of their concern, and consequently their standards of judgment, had undergone radical modifications.

A strange impatience characterizes recent debates surrounding not only comparative literature but also related fields such as recognition, ethics, postcolonialism, and cultural studies: the impatience with notions like alterity, difference, and the other. These notions have enjoyed an unprecedented (and presumably undue) amount of attention for roughly thirty-five years, but now many commentators are eager to lay to rest their spectral presence or to shoo them away like a bothersome insect. Among the most recent and resolute attempts to overcome the “excesses” of the turn toward the other is arguably the oeuvre of Jacques Rancière, who forges an analogy between the cynical foreign policy of the Bush government, including its “war on terror,” and an ethics of otherness—an ethics usually based on concepts of the sublime and linked by Rancière to the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Giorgio Agamben (Dissensus). Rancière repeatedly insists that what is often called the absolutization of the other can lead to, or at least feed into, political forms of “othering” that threaten to achieve the opposite of what they were designed to do. However, any such attempt to end the interlude of otherness—and to return to a concept of universalism or the human, however modified—means to return to sameness.

Offspring, in the fullness of time, have to come of age; young nations have to come of age; so too with the language of young nations. And, as we are often slow to recognize, the experience of achieving maturity may be traumatic no less for the parent than the child. Yet time does its work, and has done it for our language; so that now not even the most jealous of the ancient nations can deny that the relatively young United States is old enough to vote—that our literature has earned the franchise, and that the language as we speak and write it today has established its individuality and identity.

In his Narrative (1845), Frederick Douglass constructs a self based on conversion rhetoric and binary logic. In the greatly expanded My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), he complicates this textual self by both imitating and criticizing tropes conventionally used in the slavery debate, such as metaphors related to animals, Christianity, and manhood. Emphasizing the constructed nature of mimesis and metaphor, Douglass demonstrates his ability to escape the bondage of reductionist language even as he claims the power associated with linguistic mastery. This revision of self emerges from his experience of northern racism, manifested in his limited role in William Lloyd Garrison's organization. Douglass's renunciation of Garrisonian dogma and his entry into political action—including his striking textual reinterpretation of the United States Constitution—coincide with the stylistically “modernist” self of the second autobiography.

Inexpressibility is an ancient and still lively topos that proclaims language inadequate to reality. Whatever the definition of reality, inexpressibility proclaims “no tongue can tell,” “no words can say.” In considering Pearl‘s four inexpressibilities, its reiterated loss, and the way the poem ends, the essay alludes to historically relevant works and to other English poems of inexpressible human loss that help to distinguish the quiet, sad way Pearl ends. Whatever Pearl‘s inexpressibilities owe to historical tradition, they participate also in the larger literary and experiential domain of worded poem for unutterable grief and in the more precise domain of poems whose speakers endure the grief of losing what they most desire and of losing too their visions of comfort, fed by that desire.

Mikhail Bakhtin's concern with the dialogic nature of the fictional text and of the self serves as an important precursor to more recent theoretical work on “the problem of the subject.” Bakhtin's dialogism is an especially useful tool with which to approach the familiar problem of point of view in The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” A dialogical reading of this novel reveals a polyphony of ideological voices out of which the “I” narrator, who emerges only on the final pages of the novel, is born. Conrad's novel lays bare this function of ideology, the construction of individual subjects. Recalling Conrad's preface, we might say that this process is what the dialogically attuned reader is made to “see” or “hear.”

The drug autobiography emerged as a genre in the United States primarily through imitations of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). For De Quincey, the intoxicating consumption of opium and print was linked to imperial mastery. Texts such as Fitz Hugh Ludlow's Hasheesh Eater (1857) adapted this association to suit the westward expansion of the United States and its accompanying ideology of manifest destiny. Under the influence of hashish, Ludlow explored his inner psychic space as if it were the United States frontier. As nineteenth-century Romantic models of intoxicated dreaming gave way to early-twentieth-century theories of addiction, drug autobiographies such as D. F. MacMartin's Thirty Years in Hell (1921) readapted the genre, representing the disappointments of manifest destiny as addicted exile. While drug autobiographies accrued countercultural authority, appearing to signify the irrational underside of Enlightenment modernity, their fantasies of esoteric exploration derived from broader cultural ideals of imperial power and knowledge.

Extensive studies of the sources for Nature (1836) have so far failed to note Emerson’s discovery of a dramatic dialectical method in Coleridge’s writings. Emerson’s major ideas—self-reliance, the assimilative Soul, and compensation as balanced wholeness—had been worked out well before 1836; but the publication of these ideas was delayed until Emerson found and appropriated Coleridge’s method. Emerson is found exploring Coleridge’s precise formulations in 1835 while Nature was being planned. Nature itself is rigorously dialectical in content and form. Beginning with the dichotomy between soul and nature, the work proceeds through six major dialectical steps to a final synthesis, spirit. Individual chapters, too, proceed through as many as five distinct dialectical steps toward the major synthesis of the chapter. This method duplicates the central argument of the work; moreover, it carries through Coleridge’s important linkage between dialectical logic and organic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to point out the extent of Shelley's knowledge of Shakespeare and his indebtedness to, him. Students of Shelley have merely assumed that both were considerable; but, so far as I know, this is the first systematic statement of the facts.

In his What Happens in Hamlet, J. D. Wilson studies Hamlet's melancholy in the light of Renaissance beliefs, and especially those indicated in Bright's Treatise of Melancholie, to which Shakespeare seems to have been indebted for a number of ideas as well as turns of phrase. Significantly, as Wilson shows, the melancholy man was not only “prone to spectral visitations,” but was also aggravated in his condition by thwarted ambition; further, he “ponders and debates long, and does not act until his blood is up: then acts vigorously.” We can reasonably agree with this author that a knowledge of the contemporary corpus of doctrines and beliefs is important for an understanding of Hamlet's character and motivation, in which the thread of melancholy evidently connects several important elements. In the Introduction to his edition of Shakespeare's play, Wilson mentions another source for a melancholy Hamlet: the Histoires tragiques of François de Belleferest, which is recognized as the most immediate extant source of the play. Belleferest does, says Wilson, make a “definite reference to Amleth's [Hamlet's] over-great melancholy,” following a hint already to be found in the version of Saxo Grammaticus (Belleforest's source); but Wilson does no more than call attention to the reference, without noting Belleforest's additional remarks on the subject, and specifically denying to either source any other contributions to Hamlet's character. It will be the purpose of this article to show that not only the melancholy complex, but also other important facets of Hamlet's character have a probable basis in Saxo and Belleferest, and especially in the latter.

There came to my attention, in 1921, through the kindness of my colleague, Professor Frank Jewett Mather Jr., a manuscript of a Latin Life of St. Margaret, which he had recently purchased. Through his further kindness, I was permitted to examine and to transcribe the text of the manuscript, which was formerly in the possession of Sir Thomas Brooke, Bart., of Armitage Bridge. The manuscript is of vellum and measures × inches, being what we should now call a pocket volume. Indeed, the condition of the last leaf indicates that the book may have been some devout reader's constant companion before it was put into its present comparatively modern binding. It contains twenty-two leaves, of which nineteen are in a hand of the later fourteenth century, and the last three in a hand of the fifteenth century. Unless I am mistaken, both scribes were Englishmen. One may conjecture—though this is no more than a guess—that the second scribe was employed to complete the text because of some accident that had befallen the book. His work was crude in comparison with that of the first scribe, who wrote neatly, while he or a co-worker embellished the book with no less than nineteen boldly drawn and very interesting miniatures. The four pictures on the appended leaves are as rough as the script.

Rabelais's two prologues are examined as défenses et illustrations of his theory of creativity, a theory largely influenced by the Platonic furor divinus, for in both chapters Rabelais describes the source of his genius as a state of madness. However, two kinds of madness confront each other in dynamic opposition. There is first the Bacchic mode which describes literary creation as joyful drunkenness and whose purpose is to provide pleasure and recreation. But another idea of creative writing intervenes to contradict the Bacchic injunctions, one that infers gravity of intent and of meaning. It is argued that this second mode be rightfully designated as “Apollonian,” and that, in reducing Plato's tetrad of furors to Bacchus and his frère ennemi, Rabelais intuited that truth which Nietzsche would explore three centuries later in The Birth of Tragedy—that these two gods have stood eternally opposed as the archetypal poles of the tension vital to the creative process.

The English newsbooks of the Civil War and the Restoration have long been known to be historically interesting and valuable. That they have also some slight literary interest has not been so generally recognized. Yet a quarter of a century before the first regular “journal of books” appeared in England, the noticing of books was an established practice in the English newspaper; and the notices themselves, indeed, make a certain contribution to literary history.

When Keats was at Naples, on his way to Rome, in November, 1820, he became irritated at evidences of aristocratic government and determined to leave the place at once. “We will go to Rome,” he said;“ I know my end approaches, and the continued visible tyranny of this government prevents me from having any peace of mind. I could not lie quietly here. I will not leave even my bones in the midst of this despotism.” Keats was ill at the time and inclined to peevish moods: the immediate cause of this outburst seems, indeed, to have been no more than the sight of sentinels posted on the stage at the opera. Yet these were words he might under similar circumstances have spoken at any time in his life. There are, scattered throughout Keats's writings, many anti-aristocratic passages which reveal a deeply-rooted, often fervid republicanism, comparable to that of his more generally recognized liberal contemporaries. These passages show, moreover, that contrary to an impression which once prevailed and is in some quarters still current, he was an unusually close observer of men and affairs, intently alert to the social, economic, and political conditions of his day, and capable on occasion of expressing pungent and wise opinions about them. The evidence for this, to be found in part in his poetry, but to a larger extent in his letters, is corroborated by the testimony of his friends and others in a position to furnish first-hand information. It is my purpose in this paper to present this evidence in a more complete and systematic way than has heretofore been attempted, though the exigencies of space will prevent my using the full volume of available material.

Let me start by defining “theory,” because the definition itself illustrates why we can name hegel as its inventor, rather than marx or Nietzsche, both of whom pick up where Hegel left off. As I suggest in The Birth of Theory, Hegel founds theory in his break from Kant, which I regard as the signal moment when philosophy transforms into theory as we now know it. What makes Hegel different from Kant, in other words, is what makes his habits of thought— his dialectic, above all—lasting and familiar and such a part of what goes into critical theorizing today, even within schools of thought that celebrate their anti-Hegelianism or are indifferent to Hegel. In Hegel we find the following three features that I am content to call “theory.”

Concerning Ludwig Tieck's relations to Americans, Köpke, in his biography of Tieck, merely says: “Von Nordamerikanern lernte er [sc. Tieck] den Theologen Robinson und den Literarhistoriker Ticknor kennen.” Viewed in the light of other sources, however, the relations of Tieck to George Ticknor, the American historian and student of literature, deserve more than this passing comment and indeed form an interesting chapter in the history of German-American literary contacts.