In her note appended to Shelley's Mask of Anarchy, Mrs Shelley remarks on the attitude of her husband to the current political theories of the time:

Though Shelley's first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist openly the oppressions existent during the “good old times” had faded with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He was a republican and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature; the necessaries of life when fairly earned by labor, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism that looked upon the people as not to be consulted, or protected from want and ignorance, was intense … the news of the Manchester Massacre … roused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion.

Of the Rewards -which Richard Steele received from the victorious Whig party soon after the accession of George I, doubtless the most important were a seat in the House of Commons and the governorship of the Royal Company of Comedians acting in Drury Lane. These two rewards provided Steele's principal employments for the rest of his life: he became an active Parliament man, participating in debates in Commons and serving on Parliamentary committees; and at times he shared with the actor-managers the responsibility for running Drury Lane. It is understandable that politics and the theatre should provide the most frequently recurring themes in his writing during his later years. The years 1715 to 1718 are not exceptions. To these years belong a periodical, The Town Talk, which according to Steele himself was “designed to be helpful to the stage.”1 Chit-Chat, the brief sequel to The Town Talk, is on the other hand almost exclusively political. So also are several other essays—some which Steele published and others which he evidently did not publish—on controversial measures under debate in Parliament. Steele's writing during these years—as indeed during most of his life—had the immediacy of purpose which we associate with journalism; he wrote on subjects of current concern to himself.

In 1955 the famous African American writer Richard Wright traveled to Southeast Asia to observe and report on the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. A watershed moment in the history of decolonization, the meeting, also known as the Bandung Conference, drew representatives from twenty-nine newly independent Asian and African countries, including the conference's sponsors: Burma, Ceylon, India, and Indonesia. At the conference's conclusion, as part of a “final communique,” participating countries issued their Declaration on the Promotion of World Peace and Cooperation, which advanced ten principles, ranging from “[r]espect for fundamental human rights” to “[r]ecognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations” to abstention from “serv[ing] the particular interests of any big powers” (Kahin 84). As an important precursor of the Nonaligned Movement, which was officially organized in 1961, the Bandung Conference set the stage for newly independent states to assert and strengthen their autonomy in a world often polarized by the United States and the Soviet Union.

The conflict between formalist thinking and theories that view texts in their historical contexts serves as a starting point for the introduction of a cognitive view of literature. From this perspective language has full referential powers. The “referent” splits into two entities, however: things-in-themselves (in their material identity), which we cannot know, and things in their coded form, which are perceptually accessible. Readers' mnemonic potentials, a consequence of the bonding of perception and language, are adduced to show that texts originate in past interpretations of other texts and in personal experience and that consequently social forces and historical events are subsumed in the individual memory. In the cognitive light, memory becomes the ultimate metaphor, and the epistemological claim of realism regains its compelling force.

Das “Ist fortzusetzen,” den Terzinen auf Schillers Reliquien beim ersten Abdruck in der A.l.H. unmittelbar angefügt, kann nach dem Augenschein nur auf das Gedicht bezogen werden. Wer das tut, stellt keine Hypothese auf; sondern hält sich an einen Tatbestand, den er nach der Lage der Dinge als Aeußerung von Goethes Willen zu verstehen ein klares Recht hat. Der äußere Befund gibt so wenig den Grund zu einer andern Auffassung her wie das gesamte dokumentarische Material. Weder in Goethes Briefen noch in denen der Mitarbeiter an der A.l.H., weder in irgendeiner schriftlichen oder mündlichen Aeußerung des Dichters, seinen Aufzeichnungen oder Tagebüchern ist von diesem Zusatz direkt oder indirekt die Rede. Das ist einigermaßen merkwürdig, vielleicht aber so zu erklären, daß Goethe den Mitarbeitern darüber mündliche Erklärungen gegeben hat. Die Vermutung, daß es mit dem Zusatz eine vom Augenschein abweichende Bewandtnis haben möge, ist reine Philologen-Spekulation. Sie ist veranlaßt durch das Bedenken, daß ein in sich abgeschlossenes Gedicht nicht fortgesetzt zu werden pflegt, und durch die Erwägung, daß die “Wanderjahre,” an deren Schluß (in der zweiten Fassung von 1829) das Gedicht gestellt wurde, eher hätten fortgesetzt werden können oder sollen.

Nothing in connection with Arthurian legend is more familiarly referred to than Arthur's Round Table. From 1155 when Wace first mentioned it down to the present day the Round Table has symbolized the idea of fraternal fellowship, whether as of old in chivalrous deeds of arms or as today in the asperities of political discussion. It has become perhaps the most famous piece of furniture ever invented by the mind of man and the concept of it, at once simple and profound, has kept curiously enough even in our own day the idea of a real table around which real men gather and of the symbolic value of their association.

From his college days onward Coleridge considered himself, and was considered by his intimate friends, the champion of religion, and particularly of the Christian religion. That this championing of Christianity was frequently attested in his letters and writings; that the most ambitious poem of his youth—Religious Musings— was written in the spirit of its title; that he occasionally preached from Unitarian pulpits; that all his later prose writings were predominantly religious; that he at no time considered the writing of poetry his prime purpose—these facts lead to the conclusion that religion was the dominating interest throughout most of his life.

The nature of the unity in William Faulkner's Light in August, in fact, even the existence of such unity, has been seriously disputed by his critics. The debate has ranged from Malcolm Cowley's insistence that the work combines “two or more themes having little relation to each other” to Richard Chase's elaborate theory of “images of the curve” opposed to “images of linear discreteness.” Those critics who see a unity in the novel find its organizing principle in theme or philosophical statement—“a successful metaphysical conceit,” a concern with Southern religion, the tragedy of human isolation, man's lonely search for community—but they fail to find a common ground for the unity they perceive because they neglect properly to evaluate the objective device which Faulkner employs in the novel as an expression of theme. That device is the pervasive paralleling of character traits, actions, and larger structural shapes to the story of Christ. Viewed in terms of this device the novel becomes the story of the life and death of a man peculiarly like Christ in many particulars, an account of what Ilse D. Lind has called “the path to Gethsemane which is reserved for the Joe Christmases of this world.” However, that account is in itself perverse, “a monstrous and grotesque irony,” unless the other strands of action in the book—the Hightower story and the Lena Grove story—are seen as being contrasting portions of a thematic statement also made suggestively by analogies to the Christ story. This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that such, indeed, is the basic nature of the novel and that it has a unity which is a function of its uses of the Christ story.

Professor F. M. Padelford, in his recent edition of the poems of Surrey, states that “As to verse forms, Surrey's claims to distinction rest upon his establishment of the Shaksperian sonnet and his introduction of blank verse. After a variety of experiments he settled upon the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg for the sonnet and thus cast the mold for the most popular Elizabethan form. In the thought division of the sonnet he followed no fixed practice.... ”

Recently, scholars have questioned the need for southern literary studies. Why have a separate field when so much scholarship in the past decade has sought to break down the southern isolationism that characterized studies of the South for most of the twentieth century? Global South studies and the new southern studies have shaped the field and pushed it in this direction, while transatlantic, transpacific, and even planetary studies are part of the academic vernacular.

As a literary realist Twain was a practicing empiricist; as a humorist he was a practicing philosophical idealist. Often the two intellectual postures existed side by side within the same work—in A Tramp Abroad, for instance—but they did not enjoy a peaceful coexistence. As a consequence his career took on a pattern of great significance. In Huckleberry Finn he carried commonsense empiricism as far as it could go. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a genuinely pivotal work, he discovered, and contended with, not only empiricism’s radical limits but its inherent contradictions as well. Hence he evolved his peculiar (and perverse) form of idealism, of which The Mysterious Stranger is the (unfinished) consummation.

Carlyle tells us in his Reminiscences that, when Wat Tyler made its unlucky appearance in 1817, he with other radicals “cackled and triumphed” over Southey “as over a slashed and well-slain foe to us and mankind.” A few years later, however, he read Joan of Arc, Thalaba, and The Curse of Kehama with kindlier feeling, thought them “full of soft pity, like the wailings of a mother, yet with a clang of chivalrous valor finely audible too.” From that time on he watched for Southey's writings, especially his Quarterly articles, as for things of value; “in spite of my Radicalism, I found very much in these Toryisms which was greatly according to my heart; things rare and worthy, at once pious and true, which were always welcome to me.”

The basis of much nineteenth-century American humor was a certain male mask—the easygoing, countrified sloven. Women played a complementary role in society and fiction—the anxious manager of house and culture. Thus, Howells' and Mark Twain's couples often consist of a relaxed, humorous man and a tense woman. There was a tradition of female humor, however, best represented by Kate Sanborn's The Wit of Women (1886). The humor in this anthology has a genteel aplomb quite different from the male mask's incompetence. A few women writers, notably Marietta Holley, invented vernacular female humorists, but Howells created the finest of all in The Rise of Silas Lapham. Penelope, the first humorous female lead in an American novel, is a male impersonator, and her droll, unfashionable sensibility proves more attractive than the “gilded” femininity of beautiful, vapid Irene. Yet Howells rejects Penelope in the end.

The lines above, where Herder refers to the chief figures in the play Sakuntala, by the Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa, identify India as a holy land for which he yearns. These lines might serve as a motto to characterize his attitude toward India, an attitude of extreme reverence and adulation which resulted finally in the formulation of a mythical image. The term “mythical image” implies an imaginative conception of India, and one can trace the development of such an image in the fancy of Herder.

It is conventional to take Byron as a veritable Janus of the romantic period, looking toward the classicism of the past even while facing away from it as an authentic figure of his time. The classical Byron himself is seen under two aspects, satirical and dramatic, and these are distinguished from each other on the following grounds: Byron's classical satires, such as English Bards, are traced back to Pope, but his classical dramas, such as Sardanapalus, are supposed to reflect Greek, French, or Italian antecedents; and the classical satires belong essentially to Byron's earlier career, the classical dramas to his later career. This paper focuses on the peculiar classicism of Byron's drama, the classicism of his maturer work, and that which, as far as his total work is concerned, he most stoutly defended.

The four prophecies studied in this article are known as aljamiado texts because they are in the Spanish language transcribed in Arabic characters. They foretell the dire calamities that are to be visited on the “isla de España” for her neglect of the Koran and of other teachings of Islam. Written by Moriscoes, they were intended to arouse religious fervor, and hence political strength, in Moslem Spain, and they show a marked contrast to the Christian Spanish feeling of the familiar Merlin prophecies.

There is no doubt that the Middle English romance Sir Degaré (hereafter abbreviated SD) enjoyed an early success; four manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, two later manuscripts, and three sixteenth-century prints survive.1 Modern criticism of it, however, shows striking contrast. Introducing the version in Bishop Percy's Folio MS., Hales wrote: “The romance is, in our opinion, of more than ordinary merit. It possesses the singular charm of brevity and conciseness; does not impair or destroy its power by the endless diffuseness and prolixity which are the besetting disfigurements of that branch of literature to which it belongs.”2 J. E. Wells agrees: “The materials are wrought into a coherent whole without digression or unnecessary explanation… . All in all, the poem deserves the popularity that its repeated reprinting in the sixteenth century indicates it to have enjoyed” (p. 135).

In Hawaii six languages are spoken by sizable groups of people in addition to the official language, English, and the lingua franca, Pidgin. They are: Japanese, Hawaiian, Cantonese, Korean, Portuguese, and Ilocano. No exact figures exist for the numbers of speakers in each group. Some indication, however, can be gained by consulting the 1950 census distribution by “race” of the Islands' population: Japanese 39%, Caucasian 23%, Hawaiian 17%, Filipino 12%, Chinese 6.4%, Korean 1.4%, other 1.2%. Allowance must also be made for the facts that some Hawaiians cannot speak Hawaiian, that some of our Chinese speak Mandarin, and that about ten percent of the local Filipinos speak Visayan or Tagalog rather than Ilocano. Obviously, in a government report, the Portuguese are included as Caucasians; locally they are considered a group apart.