Despite the considerable and valuable critical discussion of Franklin's Poor Richard, certain important points have been too briefly considered, or have been wholly overlooked. In particular, it has not been recognized (1) how extensively Franklin was indebted to Jonathan Swift in his hoaxing of Titan Leeds, the rival almanac-maker; (2) that the source for the characters Richard and Bridget Saunders was almost certainly Swift's Bickerstaff papers; and (3) that there are two Poor Richards—the original comic philomath of 1733 and the final American archetype, the fountain-head of shrewd prudential wisdom. Thus the student of Anglo-American literary relations has been unaware of Swift's part in making a great American figure; and the students of Poor Richard, on the whole regarding him as a static rather than changing character, have been led to make misleading, conflicting, or confused statements concerning him.

Dante's vision of history in the Divine Comedy is a radical reworking of both Vergil and Augustine, generating a notion of the earthly city to supplant the quite different Roman constructions of his two Latin forebears. What has not been noted, however, is the strategic placement of this revision at the center of the poem. Undergirding Purgatorio 13-17 is Augustine's meditation on Cain and Abel taken out of the anti-Roman polemic of the City of God and translated into Dante's own political vernacular. It is in Purgatorio 15, moreover, that Augustine is introduced to us—not in person, but through an extended paraphrase of City of God 15.5 that is placed in Vergil's mouth. While Augustine surfaces textually at this point, he does so through the mediation of the poet of empire. The maneuver reveals yet another dimension of Dante's power over his authorities—the politics of his poetics.

Did Henry James or someone else invent the international novel? Did it originate naturally from his vantage point in observing the behavior of his countrymen abroad or did he take an existing type of narrative and from his favorable position bring it to a perfection of which his predecessors were incapable? Although it is widely recognized that “the international theme … was … peculiarly his,” there has been only one answer suggested to these questions, despite their obviously great critical importance. “Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the international novel,” William Dean Howells observed many years ago in his introduction to Daisy Miller. He had previously ascribed the invention of this type of fiction to the Baroness Tautphoeus, “an English woman living in Bavaria,” whose first novel, The Initials, was published in 1850. “The Initials is first of all a love story,” Howells had written in his Heroines of Fiction, “and then it is an international love story, and perhaps the earliest of the modern sort, which Americans rather than the English have cultivated.”

When critics compare an author's early works with those of his maturity, it is usually to emphasize his final achievement. In one extreme case, such a comparison has even been urged as a source of moral uplift for struggling authors. When Charpentier brought out in 1880 a new printing of Zola's first novel, La confession de Claude, a critic advised young writers to read it and take heart, since the fact that the author of Nana could have written anything so abysmally bad twentyyears before proved beyond question that lamentable beginnings did not mean inevitable failure. Too seldom have critical comparisons of this kind gone beyond this demonstrative act, and one might reasonably question their worth when they fail to do so, for after all, if a work is a masterpiece should not that fact be discernible from the work itself?

In Wordsworth's early poetry, a description of natural tranquillity often follows a narration of human suffering. The most notable instance of this is the Pedlar's spear grass vision at the conclusion of The Ruined Cottage. This pattern of calm following suffering is not an attempt to evade the metaphysical questions provoked by evil and human misery; rather it represents a bona fide response which Wordsworth's imagination makes to the fictional representation of suffering. The poet contemplates the pathetic, as he does images of nature and memory, in order to provide himself with the excitement necessary to achieve the transcendental state he calls “calm.” This natural calm is Wordsworth's version of a significant and familiar response to fictive suffering, the psychological mechanism of catharsis.

The modern reader of The Pearl, like the poet himself, would fain call the little maid of the vision by her own name, for this, he feels, wouId supply the key to the whole poem. The manifold allegory of The Pearl is designed, after all, to enhance its central figure, as are the multiple colors against which her little person is thrown into relief. We propose in this article, not only to call the maiden by her name, but also to suggest a name for the author of this masterly elegy and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

It has been generally recognized in critical works which treat Die Elixiere des Teufels that the central event in the story is the revelation of the facts contained in the cryptic document written by Francesko, “der alte Maler.”In this episode, all but a few of the innumerable mysteries which have existed previously in the story are dispelled by this highly concentrated history of Medardus' ancestry. Thus a focal point appears here on which much of the whole novel converges. Hoffmann himself (p. 274) uses this image to describe the role that the manuscript plays in the novel.

At the end of the twentieth century, the expansion of trauma from a therapeutic concept to a way of theorizing about the ruptures of history and memory had, in Geoffrey Hartman's words, added a “displaced evangelical intensity” to literary studies (293). The literary turn to trauma highlighted an ethical dimension to practices of writing, reading, and interpretation; texts were then freighted by violence, called to witness the horrors of history, challenging claims to the clarity and accessibility of words and narrative. Hartman conveys his hesitations about this turn by invoking a religious term—“evangelical”—which is etymologically related to gospel, or “good news.” His concern about an infusion of religious zeal into the study of literature may enact a critical refutation of the historical erasure of Jewish origins by Christian claims to “good news.”

Schillers Verhältnis zur Ästhetik ist bisher fast ausschließlich unter der Perspektive seiner Kant-Rezeption betrachtet worden. Was sich darüber hinaus an Hinweisen auf Vorkantisches, vor allem auf die sogenannte “Popularphilosophie” des 18. Jahrhunderts findet, erschöpft sich meist in bloßen Titelangaben oder übernommenen Zitaten. So tauchen Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Garve oder Sulzer, um nur die wichtigsten Anreger zu nennen, lediglich in den Anmerkungen der historisch-kritischen Gesamtausgaben oder in kleinen, wenig beachteten Spezialuntersuchungen auf, während sie in zusammenfassenden Darstellungen häufig übergangen werden, um Schillers ästhetische Anschauungen nicht in den Bereich des “Obskuren” herabziehen zu müssen. Besonders in der Zeit um 1900, die im Zeichen eines blühenden Neukantianismus stand, herrschte fast durchweg die Meinung von Udo Gaede: “Von einem positiven Einfluß dieser Studien [gemeint sind die Popularphilosophen] auf Schillers Schriften wird man im allgemeinen kaum sprechen können. Ihre Theorien waren durch Kants Begründung der Ästhetik überwunden, und Schillers Ideen beruhten zu sehr auf Kant, als daß er sich anders als ablehnend gegen sie hätte verhalten können.”

Othello is a domestic tragedy of the English Renaissance—Renaissance in its source as well as in the dramatist's conception, and therefore a reflection of Renaissance concepts of marriage, infidelity, and personal honor; and, from this background, the present paper proposes to interpret the character of Iago. Since Rymer's day, Iago has been cursorily dismissed as a villain of the deepest dye: so thought Johnson, Lord Kames, and Twining in the eighteenth century; so thought Coleridge, Mrs. Jamieson, Clarke, Campbell, Dowden, Swinburne, Hudson, and George Bernard Shaw in the nineteenth; so, Herford, Canning, Bradley, Stoll, and Miss Winstanley in the twentieth. In general agreement are Schlegel, Ulrici, Bodenstedt, von Friesen, Bulthaupt, Brandi, and Schücking in Germany; and Guizot, de Vigny, Hugo, and Taine in France. One difficulty, however, with such an attitude is that it proves too much; and many of its proponents, Swinburne, Hudson, Herford, and Schücking, for example, find that it takes Iago quite out of human reality. As Herford remarks, Shakespeare has deepened and given verisimilitude to most of the figures in Cinthio's novel; but, in Iago, he “deliberately set aside what was normal and plausible in his prototype.” Is Iago, then, the great exception to Shakespeare's supreme dramatic reality? The critics, moreover, who impute to the dramatist so extra-human a creation must either explain how an Elizabethan audience could have understood it, or else put Iago, as would Professor Stoll, into the class of mere dramatic conventions, pious frauds of stagecraft easily recognized and understood by the audience, but without counterpart in contemporary life. The present study escapes both horns of this dilemma by denying the initial premise and contending that the character of Iago and all his major acts are woven of the very warp and woof of Elizabethan conditions and ideals.

A long-standing debate over Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn turns on the question of intention. While defenders of the novel say that Huck's change of heart toward Jim represents a critique of social conformity, recent detractors claim that the novel's celebration of this change of heart represents a form of liberal bad faith. This essay argues that both readings misunderstand the novel, which works not only to highlight Huck's good intentions but also to replace this sentimental model of responsibility with one drawn from the emergent law of negligence. Having effects rather than intentions be grounds of liability, this new legal paradigm made persons responsible for the inadvertent harms they caused others. From the perspective of negligence, Huckleberry Finn is an indictment of post-Reconstruction racism—not because it offers friendship as a model of reform but because it imagines accountability even in the absence of malice.

Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleate.
Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.

Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate
And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.
My Conversation make to be thy Reele
And reele the yarn thereon Spun of thy Wheele.

Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:
And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills:

Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.
Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.
Then dy the Same in Heavenly Colours Choice,
All pinkt with Varnisht Flowers of Paradise.

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,
Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory

My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill
My wayes with glory and thee glorify.
Then mine appareil shall display before yee
That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

It is generally recognized that during the central third of the sixteenth century there occurred a shift of thought so considerable as to place Ariosto and Tasso in two separate moments of intellectual history. The critical activity of the period was focussed upon the elaboration of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetic into a complex system of regulations; its poetic activity was characterized by the emergence of forms patterned on classical models. The most striking of these, because the most divergent from previous forms, is the ode.

Some relatively obscure citations of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock that appear in a 1978 work by older bohemian cohorts of the Sex Pistols, the most prominent punk-rock band, help considerably in dissolving the conventional hierarchy of literature and mass culture. A decade earlier, these elders had learned the theory of textual appropriation espoused by the Situationist International, and their subversion of elitist evaluative standards has much in common with the original theorists of the avant-garde —especially Bakhtin and Benjamin—and, more recently, with the field of cultural studies, specifically British subcultural sociology. Thus out of one minor moment a longer, continuous avant-garde tradition can be reconstructed, consisting of artists and critics, including Greene himself, who have sought to challenge the formation of common sense in both “high culture” and the mass media. These anarchists share in particular a materialist orientation toward literary and mass texts—as well as toward the social outcomes that the affective qualities of those texts enable in everyday life, ultimately the most crucial arena of avant-garde activity.

Probably no reader of Hawthorne's four major novels can have failed to notice the similarities which exist among certain of the participating heroines. It would seem that if a lady had handled her first assignment well, Hawthorne could nearly always manage to find a place for her in his next production. Hence, not only did Hester of The Scarlet Letter turn up again as Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance and as Miriam in The Marble Faun, but, even more obviously, Phoebe of The House of the Seven Gables later found parts as Priscilla in Blithedale and Hilda in The Marble Faun.

Few readers of Shelley devote much time to Oedipus Tyrannus, or Swell-foot the Tyrant, and for a very good reason. Intrinsically, the play is not worth it. Mrs. Shelley, ever careful of the poet's reputation, warns us not to take this piece for more than was meant. We are indebted for its inception, and for some of its devices, to the grunting of a drove of pigs beneath Shelley's window. This fact, notwithstanding what we owe to equally trivial experiences persistently reported of Newton and Dick Whittington, adds nothing to the gravity with which the poem is generally read. The revolting setting, with its thigh-bones and skulls, the outrageous characters introduced, such as a sow-gelder, a chorus of swine, and a hoydenish queen, together with extravagant speeches and actions, sometimes in a serious mood of protest, more often with the hysteric sort of grotesquerie which was Shelley's nearest approach to humor—these factors have combined to make most readers regard the poem as a failure even when taken for no more than was meant. Shelley's serious devotion to liberty could never allow him to treat it in burlesque fashion without a touch of hectic incongruity. Byron could have succeeded much better with Shelley's material, and Fielding could have made an uproarious farce of it, but not Shelley.

In a dissertation on “The Anglo-Saxon Metaphor,” Professor Gummere has shown conclusively that while the metaphor, “the corner-stone of all poetical style,” is a figure native to our literature, the simile had no existence in Old English poetry, until it was brought in through the influence of the Bible and of sacred Latin poetry. He also refutes the position taken by Professor Heinzel in his essay “Ueber den Stil der altger-manischen Poesie,” that the simile existed in Old English poetry previous to the introduction of Christianity, but was given up as a concession to a foreign culture; showing that, on the contrary, only a few sporadic cases of the simile occur before the sacred writings were made known to our ancestors, and that the development of that figure was distinctly hastened by the influence of the church.

During a short life of great activity, in emulation of his friend and master, Lope de Vega Carpio, Juan Pérez de Montalván (1602-38) wrote a considerable number of plays, wide in their variety of subject matter and diverse in verse structure. The study of the latter phenomenon, in imitation of distinguished treatises for other dramatists of the Golden Age, will form the chief criterion in this presentation of chronology. That a serious consideration of Montalván's versification is long overdue is evident. As early as 1919, S. G. Morley, in referring to the authorship of La lindona de Galicia, remarked: “Then, one important factor, Montalván's formula [of versification], is practically an unknown quantity . . . ” More recently, Irving A. Leonard in his article, “Montalbán's El valor perseguido and the Mexican Inquisition, 1682,” spoke of the problem of authorship in the case of a play attributed to both Lope de Vega and Montalván. It is hoped that future studies of the authorship and chronology of plays associated in any way with the name of Juan Pérez de Montalván will be facilitated by the facts presented here.