In moby-dick, Melville alluded to various eastern religions in addition to Christianity. Scholars noticing these allusions have tended to group without much discrimination Zoroastrianism (the fire worship of the Persians), Manicheism (belief in a universal duality of good and evil as coeternal principles), Hindu myths (such as that of Vishnu in Chapter lxxxii of Moby-Dick), and, less frequently, Gnosticism (without indicating how the particular doctrines apply to the novel). In proposing to treat chiefly of Gnostic influences on Moby-Dick, I shall contend that Melville applied Gnostic myths and doctrines more specifically and consistently than has been recognized, that he carefully distinguished between Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism, and that certain passages in Moby-Dick require familiarity with the Gnostic mythos to be understood. But only when discussing the most obscure of these passages would I claim that the Gnostics alone were in Melville's mind. No influence on his great book was exclusive. In proving the influence of Gnostic thought upon it, I have no wish to minimize the importance of, let us say, Zoroaster, Milton, or the Hindus. Thus in demonstrating one eastern religion's influence upon Melville, it is not my intention to unseat another's.

Este estudio pretende ser un examen minucioso de los numerosos afijos de que se sirve el pueblo mexicano para ponderar, apreciar, calificar, y en cierta medida poner su sello personal a una buena parte de lo que dice. Estos afijos, especialmente los llamados diminutivos y aumentativos, le brindan al mexicano—así como a toda persona de habla española—un medio de exteriorizarse, un vaso sumiso en donde descargar su subjetivismo. En la formación y aplicación de los “apreciativos” es donde el idioma cede más, y más libertad le concede al que lo habla.

The fourth volume in the series of studies that Emilia Pardo Bazán had entitled La literatura francesa moderna was to bear the caption of La decadencia. In the three previous volumes the Countess had followed the evolution of the French literary process of the nineteenth century from romanticism to naturalism, and in the last she planned to gather old notes and new ideas into an analysis of end-of-the-century trends. She never brought this project to fruition, but she did leave dispersed among her many other critical writings her ideas and interpretations touching on this phenomenon that she labeled variously “la decadencia” or “el decadentismo.”

We are lucky to have in Forster's admirable life of Dickens what Forster himself calls the “germ” of Great Expectations. Forster reports that in 1860 Dickens announced in a letter, “For a little piece I have been writing—or am writing; for I hope to finish it to-day—such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me, that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book. You shall judge as soon as I get it printed. But it so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner.” “This,” Forster adds, “was the germ of Pip and Magwitch,” and a marginal gloss declares, “Germ of new tale.”

When Ford Madox Ford says in his autobiographical reminiscences, Memories and Impressions, that in Bernard Shaw “the last faint trickle of Pre-Raphaelite influence is to be perceived,” he is talking specifically about Shaw's affinities with the utopian socialism of William Morris and Shaw's preference for the “grayness and roughness” in dress affected by Rossetti, Morris, and their disciples. But Ford's reference to Shaw as a Pre-Raphaelite has justification for more reasons than Ford suggests, not the least of which is Shaw's own claim to be a Pre-Raphaelite dramatist. In the Preface to Plays Pleasant (1898) Shaw says that Candida was the result of his 1894 trip to Florence, “where I occupied myself with the religious art of the Middle Ages and its destruction by the Renascence,” and of a previous trip to Birmingham, where he attended a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit and saw the church windows of Morris and Burne-Jones. The Preface continues, “On the whole, Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities; for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men. … When my subsequent visit to Italy found me practising the playwright's craft, the time was ripe for a modern pre-Raphaelite play. Religion was alive again, coming back upon men, even upon clergymen, with such power that not the Church of England itself could keep it out.” An examination of Shaw's concept of Pre-Raphaelitism not only illuminates the theme of Candida but also reveals Shaw's early formulation of the idea that the artist is, to use Shaw's terminology from the Preface to Back to Methuselah, an iconographer of a living religion.

Jorge GuilléN's Cántico has most often been evaluated as a book of “pure poetry,” as the foremost example of the aesthetic purity and the abstract orientation of the Spanish “Generation of the 1920's.” Such a view can easily be defended by appealing to key traits of the work, traits which have been amply pointed out: the careful construction of the book, its stress on the creation of a unique world, its use of essential words with technical precision; as well as the constant search for essential truths, and the avoidance of particulars important only for their own sake. As it has developed, this view of Cántico as “pure poetry” has led some critics to suggest that it represents an epoch of inhuman formalism from which Guillén is to break out later; José María Castellet has Guillén recanting his “purity” under the impact of historical circumstances, and changing to a more human poetry in his later book Clamor. And such a view of Guillén's verse as divided into two conflicting epochs is used by Castellet to support his evaluation of the “Generation of the 1920's” as a group of purists destined to “repent” and change their outlook.

In a review-article dealing with four recent monographs, all of which were to some extent devoted to problems connected with the genesis of Zola's novels, M. Jean Onimus points out that it is hard to think of another author in whom such problems can be more satisfactorily studied. The survival of the dossiers of each of the novels in the three great cycles makes it possible to elucidate almost the entire process of composition in respect of each component work and hence to generalize about this process with considerably more assurance than is permissible to the student of any other major French novelist. “Ce que nous cherchons avec tant de difficulté chez Balzac, ce que Stendhal nous livre au hasard de ses ‘pilotis’ et des commentaires en marge de ses manuscrits, ce que Gide nous a donné dans le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, Zola nous le révèle pour toutes ses œuvres et jusque dans le dernier détail.”