Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, like Malraux and other French writers of the nineteen thirties, saw the forces of history as a form of tragic fate. In Le Feufollet he sets forth the tragic destiny of a decadent drug addict who is a victim of his era's decline. Drieu's use of a Racinian structure creates a sense of overwhelming tragic inevitability, but, in the final analysis, his attempt at creating a tragedy based on the decadent's self-destruction is not entirely successful. Rather, the novel appears as an inversion of tragedy in which the glorification of nonbeing foreshadows Drieu's adherence to fascism.

Jack of Newbury's surface realism in characters, setting, and speech has led to an underestimation of its historical and literary value. A close reading reveals the consistent use of the Greco-Roman ethical-political conception of the state, epitomized in the figure of the ruler. Deloney shows his familiarity with this tradition, probably known to him through Erasmus and Sidney, in the three controlling motifs of his novel. First, the middle class of weavers, represented in Jack's household and dramatized in allegories and symbols, is portrayed as a self-sufficient state where peace and harmony reign. Second, this state is shown to be such because of the nature of its ruler, Jack, a benevolent, generous, wise man. Third, the middle-class way of life—hard work, thriftiness, material gains—serves as princely education; accordingly, Jack, from a menial position, goes on to become ruler of the state. Jack of Newbury, as a systematical reordering of an aristocratic tradition, represents the world view of the emergent middle class; and as such, a momentous shift in the social temper of the Renaissance and an important step in the evolution of the novel.

Esther Summerson is not the sentimental, insipid character she is usually taken to be. Dickens uses her as the unconscious spokesman of the many characters in Bleak House who have never known parental love and makes her tale the most important illustration of one of the novel's major concerns—the breakdown of the parent-child relationship. His attitude is essentially clinical: he is interested in recording a complex pattern of psychological development in detail. Esther's story demonstrates both the immediate and the long-range effects of her godmother's pious cruelty and neglect. The novel shows that her inhibited intelligence and self-effacement are products of this upbringing and traces her attempt to become a more assured and self-possessed woman. Esther's dawning confidence, however, is shaken first by her illness and disfigurement and then by Mr. Jarndyce's proposal. The two incidents are best understood as crucial symbolic events in her attempt to transcend the determining influences of her childhood. Although Dickens finally resorts to fantasy to resolve Esther's conflicts, his detailed study of the stages of her life is that of a psychological realist interested in revealing the connections between childhood experience and adult personality.

TE. LAWRENCE'S BELIEF in the supreme importance of art made it inevitable that he write the history of the Arab revolt and his leadership of it. His conscientious and ambitious character made the composition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom a lengthy and agonizing process, and his letters to friends show that his desire to achieve greatness as a writer was even stronger than his wish to excel as a commander. “Artists excite and attract me,” he tells Robert Graves.1 “I've wished all my life to have the power of creating something imaginative.”2 He feels that “a man never amounts to anything in this world unless he be an artist.3 I shall be appraised rather as a man of letters than as a man of action.”4

In an effort to correct the overidealization of Brutus, recent criticism has tended to obscure the distinctions between Brutus and his fellow Romans. Yet, Shakespeare was at some pains to depict him as the noblest Roman of them all. That is not to say he was flawless: the noblest pagan was still pagan, and as such was guided only by the light of Reason and tempted to trust in himself. If contemporary prose treatises are any key to Elizabethan attitudes toward ancient philosophy, Shakespeare's audience regarded the Stoic with ambivalence: they admired his constancy, purity of motive, and pursuit of virtue; yet they distrusted his pride, his self-sufficiency, and his hardness. By contrasting Brutus with Cassius and Caesar, Shakespeare has shown him as possessing the best of the Stoic characteristics commingled with touches of Christian compassion and ordinary human weakness. The elements are seen to be so mixed in him that one must say of him with both pride and humility: This was a man.

Recognizing the existential necessity for self-creation, but unable to unify mind and body, or to bear the burden of consciousness, the Beckett hero retreats from himself. His life becomes one long attempt to reverse the process of birth and speed his return to the pre-conscious state from which he emerged. And it is always the same hero, always the same story. In Murphy, Beckett defines the three zones of consciousness, the mental regions to which his later heroes retreat. What his prose fiction offers is a steady regression from the first zone to the third, beginning with Murphy, then Three Novels, Stories and Texts for Nothing, and How It Is. Eventually, the Beckett hero finds himself trapped in an inner corner which he can escape only through insanity or death. Unable to accept either, he passes the time inventing stories, hiding behind his characters, waiting for release from his unbearable, “unmakeable” self.

Virginia Woolf interweaves allusion and image to construct character, define theme, and structure Mrs. Dalloway. Shakespearean allusions combined with mineral and flower imagery identify Lady Bruton and Sally Seton as representatives of the dying aristocracy and the flourishing industrial class. They also embody the alternatives open to Clarissa: sterile aristocratic society or life-giving passion. An allusion to the dirge from Cymbeline sounds the theme of death and rebirth echoed in Peter's dream, the beggarwoman's song, and Septimus' and Clarissa's experiences. Quotations from the dirge and a complex of symbols originating in its heat and cold imagery link Septimus' and Clarissa's successive deaths and rebirths. A modern incarnation of the dying god archetype, Septimus ultimately gives Clarissa new life through his death.

MOST RECENT critical studies indicate that as the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot move toward their inevitable period of eclipse all of the old critical attitudes are still intact. Since the late twenties there have been numerous charges of inconsistency between Eliot's early and later criticism, and between his criticism and his poetry, and though a few critics have been piecing together the unfinished case for continuity, the cumulative criticism of Eliot's development as a poet-critic-Catholic has led most of us discussing Eliot's work in the classroom to accept the following prevalent assumptions and chronology: that the poems written from “Prufrock” to “The Hollow Men” are those of a despairing, skeptical poet probing spiritual bankruptcy in the modern world ; that from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) to his conversion in 1927 Eliot's theory of tradition and criticism spring from literary rather than moral concerns; that in 1928, when in the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes Eliot announces that his attitude is “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglocatholic in religion,” there is a rather sudden turn from an esthetic and literary theory of tradition to a moral and religious doctrine of orthodoxy; that in After Strange Gods (1934) and later Eliot not only sins against literature by employing his dogmatic religious beliefs as the narrow touchstone of his criticism, but yearns nostalgically for the unified sensibility and moral security of a lost medieval world. But these widespread opinions are misleading, for by 1916 Eliot's classical, royalist, and religious point of view was already formulated. A first step toward establishing this assertion, which calls for a full-scale revaluation of Eliot's development and of the primary concerns of his poetry and criticism before 1928, is to examine evidence of Eliot's critical and religious position in 1915–16, and especially the role of T. E. Hulme in defining that position.

Der Zauberberg contains a great deal of esoteric scientific information that is woven into its symbolic structure, making the novel only partially comprehensible without some knowledge of twentieth-century science. Old concepts are no longer relevant by themselves, but must be fitted into a new Weltanschauung with its new scientific terminology. Mann used the new scientific information as symbol and leitmotif, updated old myths, and created new ones out of the continually accumulating data of the sciences. His novel has characteristics of a scientific experiment, allowing an Everyman Castorp to develop in the controlled parameters of the Berghof microcosm. This development entails a reconsideration of the nature of man in the light of Einstein's Relativity Theory and modern medicine. The former brings about a new perspective by shrugging off the old absolutes of Euclidian space and linear time and thereby adopting a “higher dimensionality” of perception from that of the “flatland” dweller. The latter, medicine and psychology, redefine man in medical terms and reexamine the Romantic myth of genius springing from disease.

As Wordsworth views the rustic fair at the foot of Helvellyn (VIII. 1-69), distance in the landscape takes on a poetic function, focusing and harmonizing the sights and sounds, and setting the observer apart in a mood of esthetic detachment. As he continues to gaze, distance seems to belittle the men he is viewing, but suddenly his perspective shifts, so that the distant view reveals the preeminence of man. In contrast to this scene, London (Book VII) brings objects too close, leaving him confused and oppressed. In retrospect, however, the temporal distance of memory provides the order and detachment necessary for understanding, and leads him again to see the sublimity of man. Distance in space and time operates on the poet's mind throughout The Prelude to modify, shape, and compose the scenes of his life. Distance is necessary to Wordsworth's love of man, and it characterizes the philosophical pose he assumes for “The Recluse.” In Wordsworth's poetry distance serves as a power of imagination that elevates the act of perception into the act of poetic creation.

The Centaur is a complete ritual, a patterned ceremony of word and action in which Peter Caldwell celebrates his former experiences with his father. The explicit use of the Greek Chiron-myth serves the functions of comedy, a sign of Caldwell's estrangement from the Olinger aristocrats, and a quality of Peter's memories. What sustained Peter during the three days that he spent in town with his father was his adolescent myth of Art, the City, and the Future, by which he hoped to answer the tyranny of time and the inevitability of death. Now, in his atheist maturity, with that myth tarnished, he must depend upon a reenactment of his father's sacrifices for him, another myth that enables him to face the transcendent questions of time, life, and death. Man is presented as a creature in the middle, a participant in the conceivable and the inconceivable, a mediator between heaven and earth. The ritual actions of The Centaur—notably the lectures on the universe by Caldwell and Chiron, the obituary, and George's acceptance of life in the final chapter— serve as actions of communion or as actions against death in an atmosphere of the Barthian visibilia et itwisibilia.

In creating an evil Bower of Bliss which is imaginatively more appealing than its good counterparts in “The Legend of Temperaunce,” Spenser shapes his poetics to expose the reader's own status regarding the virtue of temperance. The first eleven cantos of Book II presumably provide an education in properly temperate behavior, until the beauty of the Bower suddenly reveals that the reader prefers the seductive attractions of the wanton maidens and the leisurely raptures of Acrasia's bed of roses to the moderation and rationality of Alma's House of Temperance. As the reader responds to the descriptions of Acrasia's garden, he shows how easily he can be seduced by the apparent beauties of earthly bliss—even though he knows the consequences of such intemperate actions. In the Bower of Bliss, the reader discovers that knowledge of evil and declared preferences for abstract virtue offer no protection against temptation. Through his response to the poetry, he finds himself in an embarrassing confrontation with his human nature.

Where they touch on political themes, Browning's early works—particularly Sordello and the plays—are reflective less of the kind of liberalism he derived from Shelley than of a growing skepticism as to the value of partisan commitments and a distrust of merely “political” solutions. In Strafford, Sordello, Pippa Passes, The Return of the Druses, Luria, and A Soul's Tragedy, Browning explores the relationship between a character or group of characters and a culture in turmoil. Virtually all the characters, in their limitations—whether imposed by blind idealism, indecision, or charlatanism—are unequipped to assume a truly heroic role, and they are frequently poised between two equally unacceptable political alternatives. The rare, truly heroic figures of Browning's poetry are those who transcend the political obsessions of their culture and decisively assert their own best selves. In his distrust of institutional machinery and his emphasis on personal salvation, Browning belongs with Victorians like Dickens and Carlyle; in the major monologues, most of which followed this formative period, he views religion, art, and human love, rather than political action, as the motivating forces in human relationships.