In composing Samson Agonistes, Milton took from the Bible only his chief characters and his catastrophe, that is Samson's being led away from the prison to entertain the Philistines and his destruction of their theatre. The events which Milton presents before and after his catastrophe do not appear in the Bible, and none of them follow necessarily from anything narrated there. Careful investigation has shown further that Milton made no important use of any other version of the story of Samson. Accordingly, the question arises how did Milton develop the plot of Samson Agonistes?

When Shaw was alive the public had little opportunity to come to any conclusions about his attitude toward tragedy—and especially toward Shakespearean tragedy—because the septuagenarian, then octogenarian, then nonagenarian was always willing to publish yet another play, another pamphlet, or another letter reminding his readers that he was inordinately fond of Shakespeare's verbal music, quarreled not with Shakespeare but with Irving, and had included a question mark after the words “Better than Shakespear?” His pronouncements have often embarrassed his admirers, and a number of friendly critics have sought to clarify and make tolerable his opinions by demonstrating that he admired much in Shakespeare, that his fundamental conflict was only with bad Shakespeare or badly adapted Shakespeare.

Among the probable sources upon which Swift drew for his Gulliver's Travels, there is one work which has been completely overlooked. This is Edward Tyson's book Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, published under the imprimatur of the Royal Society at London in May or June, 1699. This work consists of two parts, the first dealing with the anatomy of a juvenile chimpanzee, the second with the knowledge of the apes and monkeys possessed by the ancients and their interpretation of it.

Following the institutionalization of the public masquerade in England in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the masquerade set piece becomes a standard, though problematic, topos in English fiction, figuring prominently in novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Inchbald, and others. Though characteristically considered an allegory for the corrupt “Town,” the masquerade “diversion” also serves crucial narrative and thematic functions. As a place of unexpected meetings and surprising assignations, it precipitates imbroglio and intrigue, the elaboration of plot itself; and its transgressive social and sexual reversals and exchanges intimate the collapse of ideological and didactic lucidity. Leaving in its wake a world upside down, it coincides with an incursion of mutability and ambiguity into the static world of eighteenth-century representation. Just as the real masquerade represented a carnivalesque disruption of the eighteenth-century symbolic order, the masquerade episode disturbs the prevailing decorum of eighteenthcentury English fiction.

TRUTH, FOR Karl Popper, is not discovered; it is invented. It is, therefore, always a provisional truth, which lasts only as long as it is not refuted. Truth is in the mind, in imagination and reason—not hidden like a treasure in the depths of matter or in the stellar abyss, waiting for the perspicacious explorer to unearth or detect it and to show it to the world like an imperishable goddess. Popper believes that a truth is fragile, continually under the drumfire of tests and experiments that heft it, that try to undermine it (to “falsify” it, according to his vocabulary) or to substitute it for another—a process that has generally happened and will inevitably continue to happen in the course of that vast pilgrimage of humanity through time that we call progress, civilization.

Although intellectual historians have rejected the notion that Dryden was a skeptic, recent readings of his specific works have increasingly emphasized irony and absurdity. This critical contradiction can serve as an interpretive tool: a full account of Dryden's poems must explain their tendency to attract the imputation of skepticism. In their images, extended analogies, dramatic actions, and structural premises, Dryden's poetic works share a formal core characterized by disjunction, incommensurability, or the failure of congruence. This unreconciled disjunction reflects a continual struggle to override a contradiction. It represents the aesthetic codification of anxiety, the literary elaboration of an ideology at odds with itself. Dryden's poetry manifests the contradictions in his grasp of the realities of his age. In its disjunctivity, it reveals the anxieties of the Restoration settlement, and in its blind advocacy of a conservative and static ideal, it sees the realities of a progressive and dynamic historical process.

My purpose is to trace the evolution of the chief characters of Noire-Dame de Paris, with particular reference to the often neglected evidence of the author's notes and manuscript changes. Fortunately, the reliquat for this novel is exceptionally copious, including two general scenarios, which have been dated tentatively 1828 and 1830; several briefer outlines which apparently were intended as special scenarios for scenes or chapters; and approximately one hundred pages of fragments. It is thus evident from the outset that Notre-Dame de Paris, like les Misérables, was really the fruit of extensive preparation, even though the final version was completed under the lash in four and one-half months. In fact, contrary to a current school of opinion, the very “rapidité inconcevable” with which Victor Hugo occasionally wrote was apt to be the result, not the paradox, of a “longue élaboration.”

The importance of the appeal to Nature in the eighteenth century is well known, but the subject as a whole is so vast that it still awaits its historian. The present article aims to present in brief space the results of a study of this particular topic in the works of Voltaire. It is evident at once that in Voltaire the nature doctrine has less importance than it does in Diderot or in Rousseau or in a host of lesser writers, but this is not to say that it is negligible. On the contrary, it is much more influential in his thinking than one might at first be inclined to suspect, and it leads him to express ideas which one does not ordinarily associate with his name. Yet it is not at all surprising, on second thought, that Voltaire in this respect, as in others, should share the mental attitude of predecessors and contemporaries. Rabelais and Montaigne had appealed to nature. Fénelon had drawn for the readers of Télémaque an idyllic picture of Bétique and its inhabitants. Montesquieu's Troglodytes in the Lettres persanes make one think, not only of Rousseau, but of El Dorado in Voltaire's Candide. Then there was the Epicurean school of the Temple, with which Voltaire was in close contact when he was a youth of eighteen or twenty. In that group were men like Chaulieu and La Fare,1 who were imbued with a natural religion, which appears in Voltaire as early as 1716 and never disappears from his thought.

In no other field of writing save poetry did Johnson spend so much of his career as in biography—from the Life of Sarpi in 1738 to the Lives of the Poets in 1781. And in few of his undertakings was he so successful. Most of his biographical writing was done to order, and it frequently suffers from haste, but from first to last it shows his characteristic excellences, his eagerness and facility in generalization, his piercing analysis of character.

Depuis qu'a été publiée, par les soins de miss E. K. Armstrong, la lettre de recommandation confiée au chevalier de Combourg pour le général Washington, toute une partie du Voyage en Amérique a repris une vraisemblance que lui avaient fait perdre les exagérations de l'illustre touriste et la défiance de ses adversaires. En particulier l'horaire, distendu à l'excès, qui avait été proposé pour la première partie du trajet pouvait être ramené à de moins amples proportions: dès lors, les récits de Chateaubriand avant la gloire semblent de plus en plus admissibles pour cette exploration dont le Niagara fut bien pour lui, quoique à son corps défendant, le point extrême, mais qu'il eut tout le temps d'exécuter dans l'espace de peu de mois.

I've been haunted by a poem, as apparently simple as a ballad and with a ballad's appeal of timelessness. It's by Elizabeth Bishop, a white North American with middle-class roots. Orphaned and deracinated as a child, she grew up as a lesbian, a traveler-exile, living a significant part of her life in Brazil. She's not thought of as a political poet by most people who admire her; she's most often praised as a poet of minute observation and description. The poem is called “Chemin de Fer”:

Although traditionally “The Fall of the House of Usher” has been regarded as a “horror” tale, close examination reveals that it possesses many characteristics similar to those which Poe termed “ratiocinative” in other stories. In 1936 Arthur Hobson Quinn, after defining the tale as “arabesque,” pointed out briefly its systematic duplication of theme in the treatment of Usher, of his house, and of his relation to his sister. More recent scholarship has concentrated upon reclassifying the story and upon exploring the subconscious or even Freudian recesses of Roderick's nature, particularly as these concern his attitude toward his sister Madeline. In the present study I propose to continue Quinn's investigation of the structure and form of the story, including recurrent ideas and character relationships. My thesis is that behind the mood and the characterization of “The Fall of the House of Usher” exists a pattern of thought and of thematic development as rigorous in its way as the more sharply denned rationality of “The Purloined Letter” or “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and that a study of this pattern explain the significant themes of the story.

Scholars have maintained that Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine unites Brechtian and deconstructive strategies in a dramatic form that subverts traditional representations of gender and sexuality. Yet this reception has consistently overlooked the repressive undercurrents that surface in the movement from the text of Churchill's play to a performance of it. Indeed, a fundamental disparity exists between the play's seemingly progressive textual pronouncements and the effects of its oft-celebrated dramaturgical strategies. The use of theatrical techniques like cross-casting harbors surprisingly reactionary attitudes that reinforce heterosexual imperatives by presenting homoerotic desires in conventional, stereotypical forms. Underlying these reactionary attitudes, I argue, is a liberal ideology that restricts the expression of gay male and lesbian desire to terms that reaffirm heterosexual norms. The play thus perpetuates a disturbingly naive and demonstrably repressive notion of acceptance of sexual diversity, a notion in which difference is easy to accept because it is not enacted.

Thomas Gray's ode on the death of Walpole's cat is paradigmatic of eighteenth-century English incidental verse. Such verse often draws strength from, and facilitates, the larger historical discourses of mercantile and imperial expansion. The images, themes, and worldviews of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poems on public themes also extend into “occasional” private poems, which turn into palimpsestic records of the influence of empire on the poetic imagination. In particular, negative representations of female desires function as ideological surrogates for the playing out of the more anxious scenarios of imperial desire. Gray's ode, which takes the overt form of the animal fable, is also an allegorical satire on women and a displaced account of the eighteenthcentury British domestication of the imperial ideal. This essay unravels the representational, literary, and sociohistorical codes that enable the ode to perform equally and effectively at all these levels.

This essay explores the dynamics of framed narrative through readings of two Maupassant stories that illustrate the range of potential in the frame. Scrutiny of “La rempailleuse” and “En voyage” reveals, in particular, how a frame modifies the effect of, and reaction to, the narrative it surrounds. The more general principle that emerges is that the seemingly gratuitous border consisting of the “extra” narrator and his addressees operates, paradoxically, against closure, casting the reader into a metacommunicative realm where a second sign system springs from the first. Thus, in “En voyage,” romantic love, the thematic content, serves as the basis for a poetics of narrative and illuminates the larger implications of the interminability of the paratactic structure. Issues addressed are the strategies latent in the frame and the way the form itself calls into question the very nature and function of narrative.

Critics generally dismiss Lady Chatterley's Lover as a polemic, preferring to consider its content and ignore its form. Yet Lawrence meticulously shaped his strategy to reinforce his meanings. When we compare Lady Chatterley with earlier Lawrence novels and with the second of the novel's three versions, we discover the novelist using imagery in a way that is new for him. Similes and metaphors from plant, animal, mineral, and human sexual realms blend, or interpenetrate, to give depth and add texture to the novel's central action, Mellors' sexual awakening of Connie. Moreover, Lawrence strategically reshapes scenes from the second version, published as John Thomas and Lady Jane, to enrich the mythic dimensions of the novel. Lawrence's careful orchestrations of the novel's images and of the details of Mellors' character as Green Man produce, finally, a satisfying organic unity.

One of the most disturbingly dramatic, and least admired, scenes in Shakespeare is that in which Prince John of Lancaster subdues the rebels in 2 Henry IV. His strategy, unheard of in any other general in Shakespeare's plays, is not to win in open field by plain force but by legalistic subtlety to trick the rebels into an armistice. He agrees, ostensibly, to all the provisions of redress demanded by the Archbishop, Hastings, and Mowbray; the leaders drink amicably in the sight of their armies; the rebel troops are dismissed; and then with a chilling suddenness John arrests the leaders for high treason and commands his army to “pursue the scatter'd stray.” To cap this dubious triumph, John piously rejoices, “God, and not we, hath safely fought today.”

Insisting that the “Me” is the center and meaning of all experience and that reality is indistinguishable from the self, Whitman turns to the phrenological concept of the soul as the agent that makes the physical self susceptible to the spiritual and the infinite. He insists that it is the soul's office, literally, to translate the sensuous data apprehended by a physiologically endowed man perfectly attuned to the universe into the spiritual truths that are integral in the mystic union of all Being. So closely does Whitman identify robust health with spiritual awareness that this forms the basis of his materialistic monism, arguing that the body and the soul are merged into an indivisible One. Since the body is the soul, the sensible is in fact the suprasensible, and matter is mind, dualism presents no problem. Instead of the two principles, in Whitman a single identity is achieved when the active soul “charges” the surrounding universe and perceives the ideal in the actual. Major phrenological ideas also inform Whitman's unique equalitarian transcendentalism, his sensual mysticism, and his poetic catalogs where the persona, fusing with a cumulative imagery, signals his union with the larger Oneness where all contradictions are resolved.

In approaching the enigmatic representation of Germann's fantastic visions and experiences in “The Queen of Spades,” Dostoevsky argues that the perfection of the story lies in Pushkin's ability to make mutually exclusive ideas equally convincing. However, Germann's madness, one of the story's central events, has been treated almost uniformly as a sort of punishment visited on the hero by the author. To be sure, Pushkin often resorts to parody to bring out the reductive and vulgar aspects of his hero's imagination and madness—a literary practice of the times. Nevertheless, Pushkin also subtly provides evidence for an antithetical but equally valid romantic interpretation of Germann's madness and life. When Germann chooses the queen at the end, he takes the right card: for the first time in his life, he chooses to risk, to gamble—that is, to live. Germann's choice—and the madness that leads to and results from it—echoes in Russian literature from Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov to Nabokov's own Hermann/GepMaH, in Despair.

EZRA POUND himself emphasizes somewhat his work on the element of meter.1 T. S. Eliot wrote of Pound's importance in prosody to younger poets that “there is no one else to study.”2 Yet of all the critical attention which Pound's poetry has received in recent years, not one piece analyzes this fundamental aspect of his work.3 We have almost uniquely Pound's critical pronouncements and the verse iteself to lead us to an understanding.