In spite of all that has been done to elucidate this beautiful poem, there still seems to be room to add some items in textual emendation and explanation. The pioneer work of Morris was excellent for its time, and is still to be reckoned with. Gollancz and Osgood have added much in their editions of the poem, and such commentators as Kölbing and Holthausen have made interesting suggestions. Nor must we neglect the critical studies of Fick and Knigge, Fischer and Schumacker. The comments of all of these and of others who have less fully considered the poem must be read and weighed by any who would understand this nameless poet, who at his best may be ranked with the great ones of the fourteenth century. His language, however, and sometimes his careless indication of sentence union and transition make the closest reading necessary.

Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest ranks as one of the first and one of the greatest examples of hard-boiled detective fiction, a category that broke sharply with the older, ratiocinative variety. Our reading of the novel (which is in part a reading of the genre of detective fiction itself) focuses on productive work and finds that the novel's narrative structure is based on several distinguishable forms of labor, each autonomous and yet complexly interrelated with the others. Our primary stress is on the linguistic or dialogic work of Hammett's protagonist, the Continental Op, who is in many ways a paradigmatic private detective. We conclude by considering not only the generic composition of the novel but also its political character as an unusually powerful and complex response to capitalist reification.

One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall recently to explain how happy she was to have reached a moment in her academic career when she no longer had to teach literature. Another colleague buttonholed me at about the same time to tell me he could no longer imagine teaching literature in any context other than cultural studies-that is, in a setting in which the literary text was at most an illustration of an ideological, historical, or theoretical theme, no different from any other cultural manifestation. No wonder undergraduates demonstrate dwindling interest in taking a major in literature. For a host of reasons, they come to the university less interested in studying literature than previous generations of students were, only to encounter on their arrival professors who are more than occasionally apathetic toward or suspicious of literary texts. Student disenchantment can only grow in such circumstances.

Francesco Cieco da Ferrara, author of the Mambriano, has been an enigmatic figure in Italian literature. It is strange that so little is known of this important intermediary between Boiardo and Ariosto. Long after his death, it is true, some definite but extravagant things were written about him by literary men who probably felt the need of dressing up the poor poet: he was an eminent jurist, a theologian and philosopher. But we know only Cieco the minstrel, and common sense would question the truth of these assertions. Again, almost a hundred years after his death, the family name of Bello was bestowed upon Cieco by Francesco Buonamici, a philosopher and astronomer whose information about Italian literary matters was scant and inaccurate. Although scholars like Rua have followed the Bello clue without success, this cognomen has come down into our library catalogues and even into Rua's own edition of the Mambriano, Would it not be good sense to dismiss the Bello christening as the tardy and offhand mistake of an astrologer?

The identification of the writers employed by the bishops in their counterattack against Martin Marprelate is almost as difficult as is that of Martin himself. Most prominent of those suspected is Thomas Nashe; indeed, at one time or another every one of the anti-Martinist pamphlets has been ascribed to him. Since in his own day his name was frequently associated with Martin's, shortly after his death the legend sprang up that he was chiefly responsible for downing Martin. Until 1903, when McKerrow began his edition, it was taken for granted that Nashe was the leading anti-Martinist writer.

In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski Uses Paul Ricouer's phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” to frame and reappraise “a diverse range of practices that are often grouped under the rubric of critique: symptomatic reading, ideology critique, Foucauldian historicism, various techniques of scanning texts for signs of transgression or resistance” (2–3). Throughout the book, she argues that literary criticism has overvalued this approach, in part because of its many affordances and pleasures. Without rejecting critique altogether, Felski concludes that “it is one way of reading and thinking among others: finite, limited, and fallible” (192).

In his rewarding and influential papers entitled “Die christlichen elemente im Beowulf,” Fr. Klaeber stressed the importance of Latin Scriptural and liturgical analogues to several Old English phrases, and no one would deny that the correspondence between the two groups of expressions is frequently exact. But recent studies into the structure of the verse itself show cause for regarding the religious elements as essentially Germanic.

T. S. Eliot composed the first draft of The Waste Land at Margate and in Lausanne during the autumn of 1921, when funds secured through Ezra Pound had enabled him to take a long holiday for rest and recuperation. He sorely needed both, and in fact was under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, for overwork in his double capacity as bank clerk and man of letters had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Though we must allow that he was distressed by postwar chaos and the decay of Europe, themes of a more specific and less elevated nature were certainly among his thoughts. He could hardly escape from the news of the day, which we find reproduced plainly or masked in much of his early work; and he was, in the words of a recent critic, “preoccupied … with the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London”—Lloyd's Bank, where he held a minor post in the foreign exchange department at a starting salary of £120 per annum.

More than two hundred years have gone by since the spring of 1773, when Phillis Wheatley, subject of the epigraphs of this essay, an African slave girl and the first person of her racial origin to publish a book in North America, collected her best poems and submitted them to public scrutiny. In search of authentication, she appeared with them before eighteen white men of high social and political esteem, “the best Judges” for such a case in colonial Boston. Wheatley's owners and supporters arranged this special audience to promote her as a writer. According to popular wisdom of the time, Africans were intellectually incapable of producing literature. None of the Anglo-Americans beyond her immediate circle could imagine her reading and writing well enough to create poetry.

A study of the significance of the mistakes in Twelfth Night, like the study of any important aspect of Shakespeare's art, must be made upon several levels, for mistakes by the protagonists are both a part of the superficial fabric of the plot and a subtle means of revealing underlying themes that often manifest themselves only indirectly below the surface action. This is not to say that the artificial devices of disguises and mistaken identities, all timeworn devices, are nothing more than a mere plot framework for the profundities that lie beneath. Rather, as Miss Bradbrook expresses it, there is an “interdependence of the natural and the artificial, the human and the literary.” The ridiculous mistakes that control the plot are therefore like Freudian slips which incite their superficial laughter and at the same time reveal subconscious patterns of human behavior. It is these slips, the mistakes of all the leading characters, that we must follow into the thematic material of the play, for it is on this level that they become of most interest.

The extensive commentaries on Ibsen as a writer of tragedy are varied arid, as one might suspect, even contradictory. S. H. Butcher, for example, found Ibsen deficient as a tragic dramatist on nearly all counts. My primary purpose in this essay will be to present Ibsen's concept of tragedy through an analysis of Brand (1866), Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886), and The Master Builder (1892), with passing attention to Emperor and Galilean (1873), while my secondary purpose will be to determine how successful he was as a writer of tragedy.

Coleridge considered Resolution and Independence a flawed masterpiece. He says of it (Biographia Literaria, Chap, xxii): “Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would not present a specimen.” It is singular that Coleridge, who did so much to undermine the eighteenth century school of “faults and beauties” in Shakespeare criticism, should have dealt with Wordsworth in this fashion. When Wordsworth talked of the old man, as he became to the poetic imagination, “motionless as a cloud” or “wandering about alone and silently,” Coleridge was content; but when he tried to fix the old man in the here and now of 1802, Coleridge took offence and accused him of inconstancy of style. It is true that many of the corrections Wordsworth made in the poem were prompted by Coleridge's critique; but what is useful criticism to a craftsman is not necessarily so to his patrons.

In Walden and his other mature writings Thoreau often approaches the social problem of poverty not through the directly assertive rhetoric of the Transcendentalist reformers, but by associating certain poor men with the Aristotelian quality of “greatness of soul”. This American, democratic, magnanimous hero lives quietly close to nature, but he is “a prince in disguise”, reincarnating “the worthies of antiquity”, the gods and heroes of classical mythology and history. Walden contains both a sharp awareness of how the Protestant ethic leads to economic hypocrisy in the New Englander's attitude toward the poor and a highly imaginative art of characterization, through which Thoreau transforms the innocent poor into heroes like those of contemporary American romances. But his political essays of the 1850's, particularly those on slavery and the heroic revolutionary activities of John Brown, reveal the limitations of Thoreau's art. His mythopoeic characterization of Brown comes too easily, emerging from a simplistic, abstract, merely polemical response to evil. “Magnanimity” becomes sheer brute force. Thoreau's characters thus lack the dimension of tragic magnanimity; his account of Brown has none of the mysterious innocence of Melville's Billy Budd, whose life and death present striking parallels to Brown's.

Adoctrine of Nature constitutes the core of the view of life held by Shakespeare. Whether or not the sonneteer unlocked his heart, it is clear that if the works of Shakespeare are considered as an integrable whole, he laid bare many results of his probings amid the secrets of Nature. The present intent is to learn by this approach something about his philosophy of ethics, art, and politics. Indications are that, like Spenser in the Cantos of Mutabilitie, he had more than an intelligent gentleman's interest in the theme.

Circumscription of space is a fundamental and necessary feature of Poe's fictional universe of negative possibility. That his characters are almost always narrowly circumscribed suggests their severely limited prospects and interests. Diminished space also represents withdrawal into self, and Poe's centers of diminished space often contain symbols of that destructive core of the inner self which continually threatens the moral and rational being of the Poe protagonist. In undertaking The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe was committing himself uncharacteristically not only to the representation of movement in space but also to an objective mode of development, outward and ongoing testing and discovery of self in the infinite possibilities of space. The curious form of Arthur Gordon Pym is the result not so much of careless incompetence (as recent scholarship has suggested) as of a fundamental conflict between psychological inclination and the formal requirements of an unfamiliar genre. But this work is of special interest, since Arthur Gordon Pym is a first effort in an important line of experimentation in American fiction, the transformation of an undistinguished form, the sea narrative, into a vehicle of major literature.

The opposition of fictive to nonfictive (i.e., scientific) discourse current during the last 350 years is linked here to the relations between metaphorical and literal discourse. The problem is this: if metaphorical usage is somehow a “misuse” of the literal relation of words to things, what are we to make of the fact that all language is metaphorical? (A) Metaphorical usage retroactively affirms the “dictionary” meanings of its words as if they were literal. (B) Fictive and nonfictive discourses encompass a (literal) heterocosm and a (metaphorical) second world, between which there is a dialectical liaison. (C) Langue stands metaphorically for extra-linguistic reality, but parole may become metaphorical by retroactively affirming its words' meanings within its langue as if they were literal. (D) Fiction is discourse that makes metaphorical statements by defining these as if they were literal, and nonfiction makes literal statements by defining these as functions of metaphorical statements.

That Milton's theology is remarkable for its independence has often been noted. Although he has something in common with the Fathers, with the Greek philosophers, with the Renaissance metaphysicians, with the Protestant reformers, and with the chief heretical sects of the Reformation, nevertheless, among them all we can nowhere find a parallel for his system; we cannot even find all the elements of which it is composed, nor, indeed, its chief conceptions.

In The Rhetoric of Religion, Kenneth Burke refigures Augustine's Confessions as a Platonist comedy, structuring his book as an Upward Way that imitates and overgoes the textual ascent he analyzes in Augustine. He links that ascent to the principles of hierarchy, order, guilt, and victimage: the sacrificial principle of tragedy. Yet he counters the tragic motif with a comic criticism, teaching a tolerant charity and humble irony. His comedy thus tropes the Confessions on a large scale, converting it to logology. Burke teaches us about the tendency toward perfection obvious in the Upward Way, yet inherent in all symbols. In the political realm, this tendency aims toward perfect order and works to anathematize the opposition, exerting the principle of victimage. Burke warns us against this principle, which functions as much in the rhetoric of politics as in the rhetoric of religion.