Renaissance symbolic representations of gender identity and sexual difference appear firmly grounded in the medieval and Neoplatonic misogynist tradition, no matter how unacceptable the terms of that tradition may be to modern sensibility. In Rabelais's works the exemplarity of Christian humanist discourse often coincides with what today is considered profoundly disturbing behavior. The recurrence of trickery, obscenity, and violence against women does not seem to bother the Rabelaisian narrator, who gleefully presents his writings as “beaux textes d'évangilles en françoys” ‘fine gospel texts in French.’ I concentrate on a single episode of Pantagruel, the one devoted to Panurge's and Pantagruel's twin amatory adventures with a lady of Paris. Although the episode has been the object of some probing critical scrutiny, little attention has been paid to the biblical intertext, which Rabelais's humanist entourage must easily have recognized and which can be read in the context of what modern critics have come to recognize as the Renaissance crisis of exemplarity.

The high dramatic quality of the Secunda Pastorum raises a recurrent interpretive question: does the play function as a unified religious statement in a traditional craft cycle, or does it function primarily as a secular farce with a Nativity scene added? Critics of this supremely sophisticated medieval play have moved from the early view that the long secular prologue was unrelated to, and detracted from, the Christ Nativity, to the more recent opinion that the stage business involving Mak is an artful parody of the true Nativity and is structurally adapted to the religious end for which the play was designed.

A Passage to India, apparently the last, and certainly the best of E. M. Forster's novels, was published twenty-nine years ago, in, 1924. It was accorded instant recognition, as a fine novel and as a perceptive and sympathetic treatment of the problem of “Anglo-India,” The years that followed saw the book established as a modern classic. It has reached a wide audience in the Everyman, Modern Library, and Penguin editions, and has challenged as well the attention of able critics. But, though the novel has received its just dues in many ways, there remains one aspect—and, I think, a fundamental one—still unexplored. It is acknowledged on all sides that thought is the most important element in Forster's novels; yet the dialectical pattern of A Passage to India has never, to my knowledge, been fully and specifically recognised. This omission has resulted not only in a certain incompleteness in critical accounts of the book, but in not a little confusion and obscurity as well.

Robert Scholes's view that Joyce was primarily interested in constructing a genre composed of epiphanies as texts, and not equally interested in the epiphany as a process of esthetic apprehension or in the possible use of the epiphany as a structural principle, is disputed in these comments. This argument seeks to establish briefly that Joyce held the epiphany—process and text—as essentially integrated and inseparable. The comments are a response to Robert Scholes's correspondence with Florence Walzl (PMLA, March 1967).

Through the years detailed attention has been given to the lyric, epic, short-story, drama, novel, and other literary forms, but comparatively few references have been made to the dramatic monologue. A beginning towards the understanding of this neglected form was made by Stopford A. Brooke, who devoted one chapter to a discussion of Tennyson's use of the dramatic monologue in his Tennyson, His Art and Relation to Modern Life. S.S. Curry in his Browning and the Dramatic Monologue made a study of three characteristics of the form: speaker, audience, and occasion. He likewise gave a short history of the genre, and analyzed the methods for presenting examples of the form orally. R. H. Fletcher classified Browning's dramatic monologues. Claud Howard traced the development of the type in his pamphlet The Dramatic Monologue: Its Origin and Development. Phelps devoted one chapter to analyzing the content of Browning's dramatic monologues. Bliss Perry defined the type, mentioned the same characteristics Curry had enumerated, and stated that the form is somewhat akin to the lyric. The present writer stressed the necessity for definiteness of each of the aforementioned characteristics and suggested that continuous interplay between speaker and audience be added as a clear-cut, fourth characteristic. Examples in both American and continental literature were grouped as follows: typical, formal, and approximate.

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis—both in the specific way the myth is understood and, more important, in the poetic and conceptual forms in which it is cast—is rooted in the mythography of the sixteenth century. As in the attribute system of allegorical painting, the physical characteristics of Venus and Adonis reveal their histories and signify the alternately comic and serious qualities of love. The traditional plot has been scrapped, with sexual harmony replaced by strife and the poem turned into a continual debate over the nature of love. This debate is never resolved rationally. Instead, the multiple aspects of love are periodically condensed into unified images, which then generate further paradox: Venus versus Diana, freedom versus bondage, red versus white, fire versus water. This dialogue of images, a familiar iconographic technique, becomes a characteristically Shakespearean method of esthetic resolution, with conceptual relations to the primary forms of myth.

Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk) is discussed here as an unacknowledged treatise on methodology: a hermeneutics of the modern city that aims to interpret how a city is evidence of an era's Wollen, its drive to manifest its self–understanding in distinctive material forms. My coinage Stadtwollen alludes to an undervalued source for Benjamin: Alois Riegl's Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (1897–98), which discusses a Kunstwollen, a collective will to art, or a drive leading a culture to create works of art revealing and predicating its self–understanding. This essay sets Riegl's treatise next to Convolute N of the Passagen-Werk and the project's two Exposés (1931 and 1933) in order to illuminate Benjamin's critical–materialist phenomenology and hermeneutics of the city as encompassing new classes of technical–industrial artifacts–a discourse on method sensitive to the political critiques initiated by Marxism but far outdistancing the claims to epistemological critique made by his era's Marxisms.

Although it has often been described as a work of destruction, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake was designed to be a triumphant reconstruction. It was in reference to this characteristic of his last book that Joyce is reported to have remarked during a visit to Stonehenge, “I am fourteen years trying to get here.” The task of reproducing with words the aesthetic unity of the past was an arduous one. For seventeen years Joyce, having at his disposal all the means of knowing and all the methods of expressing, labored to resolve the “proteaform” mass of modern learning in a “faustian fustian” of words. Such a process, the mixing and blending, the ordering and composing, the choosing and discarding, was necessarily a lengthy one entailing numberless revisions which bear “hermetic” testimony to the nature of the creative act while recording the artistic mind in a state of flux. It is self-evident that Joyce's manuscripts for Finnegans Wake are of immense importance to the scholar and that the French critic Louis Gillet, intimate though he was with Joyce's creative process, expressed a very limited view when he stated: “On ne comprendra vraiment la pensée de Joyce que le jour où nous l'aurons dans son premier état, avant toutes les retouches dont il l'a compliquée ... .” As material for the study of Joyce's intentions, as a “key” to the Wake, the primitive (first-draft) manuscripts to which Gillet refers are of surprisingly little value; for they generally expose little more than the armature of the work, the fundamental action which the reader might otherwise discern for himself after a brief syntactical search. On the other hand, as an aid to exegesis, the complete manuscripts are invaluable. They provide a basis for study of Joyce's method, his progressive elaboration upon a theme. They furnish material for a close examination of the mental process behind this style and of the organization which enabled Joyce to control the chaos from which he drew his inspiration. To this end, I believe a word-byword study which questions each aspect of a single sentence in progress would be of greater value than a more generalized discussion of a longer passage. If feasible, a series of such exegetic analyses might aid in more thoroughly illuminating the total stylistic of the book.

In the eighteenth century a preference for Juvenal as a satirist eventually replaced the normal Augustan preference for Horace. But the post-Augustan image of Juvenal was selective and sometimes inaccurate. Critics emphasized his sublimity, his occasional pathos, and his supposedly rational piety, while ignoring his obscenity, wit, and rhetorical control. There are near parallels in post-Augustan satiric practice. In William Gifford, satire becomes invective; in Charles Churchill, declamation. The new satire borders on Richardsonian and even Gothic melodrama. Or, at the other extreme, it is pseudo-Horatian and almost at the vanishing point (Christopher Anstey's New Bath Guide). The mock-heroic dwindles into burlesque (Peter Pindar's The Lousiad). The breakdown of the Augustan equilibrium means, in satire, a progressive failure of irony and especially of ironic diminution. Churchill's Dedication to Warburton is an important exception. It uses the new image of Juvenal in the service of mock-panegyric and enforces the Augustan satirist's traditional view of evil as privation.

Much of the detail in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year is derived from historical sources, but the focus of the book is on the internal conflicts of the narrator. This focus is achieved by several means: (1) H.F. structures his account around! s repentance of the decision to remain in London; (2) he frequently comments on his not entirely successful attempts to comprehend the nature of morality in a time of plague; (3) he uses many biblical references to suggest spiritual interpretations of physical reality. Instead of directing the spiritual meanings of his narrative primarily outward toward the reader for a didactic purpose, Defoe used these meanings to create a psychologically complex and interesting central character. The morally disorienting forces of the plague expose the tensions within the narrator, and we see his conflicts and mounting anxiety. This focus on the narrator makes A Journal of the Plague Year something more like a novel than like either history or the seventeenth-century pious writings that lie in its background.

The three sonnets that Rilke published in his Neue Gedichle (1907–08) under the collective title “Das Portal” were written between 8 and 11 July 1906, during the period of intense productivity following the break with Rodin (May 1906). Ever since it has become fashionable to ignore Rilke's Neue Gedichte as “intellektuell aufgezwungen,” these poems have been overlooked by many scholars and critics; even the most recent and staunchest champion of the Neue Gedichte, Hans Berendt, has failed to explore various aspects of these sonnets that would serve to relate them more closely to Rilke's earlier and later work. The reasons for this neglect are obvious. The three sonnets represent a perfect example of the “Dinggedicht” of this period, being apparently nothing more than the poetic depiction of a particular portal of a certain cathedral in France; such an objective attempt to grasp and express the essence of a foreign “thing” is, by common consent, necessarily alien to the singularly subjective flow of the poet's own thoughts and emotions. Furthermore, this new conception of poetry arose under the influence of the sculptor Rodin, whom Rilke was striving to emulate in his efforts always to capture the essential nature of the model and the “modelé” to the exclusion of subjective impressions. Since Rilke learned much about cathedrals under the tutelage of Rodin, his poems on architectural subjects are even more highly suspect of being “intellektuell aufgezwungen” than, say, poems dealing with gazelles or carrousels. Yet in many of the Neue Gedichte, as has been demonstrated, there is more to be found than sheer poetic virtuosity, and undeniable thematic connections with the entire body of Rilke's poetic creation have been uncovered. A closer examination of the “Portal” sonnets reveals that even here certain characteristic themes may be found.

Spenser, realizing how doubtfully his allegory or dark conceit might be construed, wrote a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh explaining, in part, the general structure of The Faerie Queene. The poet of the Pearl, except within the poem itself, has given us no inkling of its meaning. The attempt to find that meaning has been and is yet a matter of unusual interest to scholars.

A dramatic incident in the literary warfare between England and America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century was Tom Moore's indictment of the American character in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), inspired by a tour through the United States in the summer of 1804. Four Juvenalian “epistles” developed the contrast in America between man's humanitarian dreams and his actual moral and political performance. Because of the poet's popularity, his diatribe, which included slanderous portraits of Jefferson and Washington, was widely discussed and deeply resented even by Moore's American friends. The most substantial rebuttals came in a lengthy critique of Moore's work offered as prefatory material to an American edition of Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Philadelphia, 1806); in a serial review by William Coleman in the New-York Evening Post (October-November 1806); and in an anonymous poem entitled An Attempt to Vindicate the American Character (Philadelphia, 1806). So violent was the reaction that not until the publication of Lalla Rookh in 1817 did “Anacreon” Moore regain favor among Columbian readers, and by that time he had come to regret what he called his “crude and boyish tirades against the Americans.”

The political purpose of Gorboduc, which was first noticed by Leonard H. Courtney, has been elaborated by Professor H. A. Watt in his dissertation, Gorboduc: or, Ferrex and Porrex. The two authors wrote the play rather from the point of view of legal advisers than from that of students. It served as a tactful approach to Queen Elizabeth on the question of the limitation of the succession which would necessitate her marrying. Professor Watt, in his discussion, cites numerous pages from Sackville's portion of the play, but he does not discuss the political significance of Norton's portion, although Norton is believed to have been chairman of the committee appointed to wait upon Elizabeth to present the petition of parliament for limitation of the succession. Norton's “personal interest in the question,” as Watt remarks, “has been well established.” One might reasonably expect, therefore, to find references to the political lesson which the tragedy was to convey to the Queen in the portion of Gorboduc written by Norton. It is the purpose of this paper to examine particularly, with this in view, Norton's part of the text of Gorboduc.

Coleridge’s “Dejection” is an ode rather than a conversation poem. It differs from the eighteenth-century ode and establishes a distinctively Romantic ode in adapting the personal voice, meditative structure, and private subject that Coleridge had developed in the conversation poems, but because Coleridge observed odic decorum it lacks the conversation poem’s controlling characteristic, an initial illusion of artlessness manifested in the pattern of thought, rhythm, syntax, and transitions. The inability of critics to agree whether the speaker of “Dejection” masters his crisis is a consequence of Coleridge’s innovation in employing the device of “simultaneous composition” in a poem of greater seriousness than any of the conversation poems. The speaker cannot plausibly resolve a crisis that affects his life at the root within the span of a single meditation, and because he is enmeshed in the experience as he articulates it, he has no perspective from which to evaluate it.

Gertrude stein wrote the twenty-five-page manuscript “the modern jew who has given up the faith of his fathers can reasonably and consistently believe in isolation” for a composition class at Radcliffe College in 1896, when she was twenty-two years old. The essay is distinctly occasional and reads like an early work. It is, nonetheless, one of the few known pieces in which Stein treats directly the question of Jewish identity and the only one to link that question to a specifically political description of the public sphere. The manuscript thus sheds a remarkable light on a number of the most contested questions in studies of Stein's life and works—the problem of her later protofascist political allegiances, of her sense of her exiled Americanness, and of her treatment of writing as an asemantic medium for sketching mobile identities.

Pope's debt to Dryden, which is at once immense and unmistakable' has tended to obscure his relation to earlier English satirists. But since in the Imitations of Horace and the Moral Essays he was practising a genre untouched by Dryden—satura, the formal verse satire without a plot—it is reasonable to suppose that Pope owed something to other English satirists. There is evidence that he regarded himself as having a place in an English tradition of formal verse satire. When he came on a copy of Hall's Satires late in life, “he wished that he had seen them sooner”; and according to Warburton he intended to imitate “two or three” of Hall's satires. He was interested in Rochester and Oldham. He read, of course, Love of Fame, The Universal Passion; Young's “characteristical Satires” were no doubt partly responsible for turning his own thoughts in the direction of epistolary satire.