Despite the efforts of recent scholars who have argued for an ironic reading of Fragment x of the Canterbury Tales (the Parson’s Tale and Retraction), dramatic and symbolic propriety both dictate that at this penultimate moment in the pilgrimage “earnest” should emerge from “game.” Dramatically, the imminence of the approach to the Holy City urges—as with all pilgrimages—certain penitential expectations, the sacramental obligations of which require the ministrations of the Parson. Thus, his tale—a confessional manual appropriate to the penitential occasion in both length and oral device—serves the pilgrims with an examination of conscience indispensable to the aural rubric of the sacrament. Symbolically, the earnestness of the ending is prepared by the promise of the supper (with its manifold biblical implications), by the eschatological haste of Harry Bailly in urging completion of the tales, and by his unwitting use of Pauline imagery relating to doomsday drunkenness and nocturnal thieves in the Prologue to the Manciple’s Tale (Fragment ix).

Unlike some other plays of the Wakefield cycle, the Second Shepherds’ Play reveals a subtle exploitation of dramatic techniques to minimize the distance between secular and sacred experience. Introduction of the shepherds one at a time; Mak’s play-acting, magic spell, dream prophecy, and sheep stealing; the parallel between Mak and the Angel are all arranged to give the audience a sense in theatrical terms of the meaning of the shift through the farce-drama from the opening lyrics of static despair to a new mode of celebration. Although symbolically presented as the devil or Antichrist, Mak functions dramatically as the bridge to the birth of Jesus.

Molière’s Dom Juan goes beyond surface travesty of the legend to develop its profound comic sense. The hero’s failures in action are farcical; his failures in consciousness are antitragic. Dom Juan limits himself to the sensual perceptions of the present moment, thus becoming incapable of remorse or dread. The obvious presence and the repeated warnings of Divine Providence he ignores or treats with contempt. His willful continuation of a life of error, carried to the point of offering God as a scapegoat for his crimes, cuts him off from his virtuous ancestry and from the possibility of conversion. A series of miracles confirms his rejection of anagnorisis. The catastrophe of Dom Juan’s damnation includes the entire comic vision of the work in a mixture of the burlesque and the grotesque.

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Despite its place in the French Revolutionary motto, fraternity lacks a literature. Blake, who makes an important contribution toward that literature, draws largely from the New Testament, which offers two grounds for brotherhood: we are sons of the Father, we are brothers in Christ. Suspicious of transcendent gods, Blake develops only the latter concept. We are in essence brotherly beings; unfraternal behavior is death. Brotherhood is not kindliness, however, but “wars of love” for one another and willing self-sacrifice. “Atonement” only makes matters worse. The New Testament Christian fraternity rests on Paul's dualism; Blake agrees to the extent that “nature” (and woman) threatens brotherly love. Yet women can be brothers, too, despite the misogynist symbolism Blake chooses to inherit.

Dorothy Whitelock describes family and national feuds in Beowulf as “sub-plots” to the monster fights. But the theme of feud history is more complex than that. There are the Scandinavian fights, some of them perceived and all relevant within the heroic world of the story, and the Great Feud of sacred history, associated in its beginnings with the monster fights in Denmark and in its end with the dragon fight in Geatland. This cosmic feud, introduced in the “scripturizing” passages of the poem, is not perceived within the world of the story. By distinguishing between the kind of knowledge available in that world and the kind available to his audience, the poet foregrounds the theme of the Great Feud and aligns the noble pagans of the poem with God, thereby “redeeming” the cultural identity of an audience for whom the Scandinavian matter of Beowulf is ancestral lore.

The tone of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Parts I and II, has long troubled critics who have approached the plays as either tragedies or romances. This article argues, on the basis of our responses to Marlowe’s language, that each play attempts to define itself as a romance by asserting the mastery of the imagination over the material world and thus denying the effects of tragic realism. Marlowe creates a language that invites us to indulge in the glorification of worldly achievement in spite of the questionable morality of worldliness. In Part I, Marlowe demonstrates that the world of romance is a world of the imagination and, as such, free from the tragic concerns of a problematic humanity. In Part II, Marlowe moves closer to tragedy by exploring the possibilities of romance within a world where the imagination does not triumph and where the attitude toward the romantic hero is left ambiguous.

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis—both in the specific way the myth is understood and, more important, in the poetic and conceptual forms in which it is cast—is rooted in the mythography of the sixteenth century. As in the attribute system of allegorical painting, the physical characteristics of Venus and Adonis reveal their histories and signify the alternately comic and serious qualities of love. The traditional plot has been scrapped, with sexual harmony replaced by strife and the poem turned into a continual debate over the nature of love. This debate is never resolved rationally. Instead, the multiple aspects of love are periodically condensed into unified images, which then generate further paradox: Venus versus Diana, freedom versus bondage, red versus white, fire versus water. This dialogue of images, a familiar iconographic technique, becomes a characteristically Shakespearean method of esthetic resolution, with conceptual relations to the primary forms of myth.

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

By revealing Emma’s subjectivity in descriptive, hallucinatory, and auto-scopic modes of vision, Flaubert shows that two false versions of reality dominate her imagination: the marvelous, derived from her reading, and the endoxal, derived from her culture. These modes of vision, which are manifested in a series of mirror images, show Emma incapable of distinguishing between past and present, fantasy and reality, and lead as well to the discovery that her fantasies about all men remain vague and abstract. Emma can only differentiate women in her imagination, and the autoeroticism informing her narcissism finally displaces infidelity as the source of her most erotic experiences. Throughout Madame Bovary, Emma’s subjectivity becomes increasingly associated with the fantastic, until she is seen to have completely lost touch with reality.

Tasso states his objections to Ariostan chivalric romance in terms of neo-Aristotelian epic theory in the Discorsi: romance, with its disunity, multiplicity, and irreality, violates the classical canons requiring epic to be unified, whole, and verisimilar. Analogous to and implicit in these objections are those stemming from Tasso’s Counter-Reformation Christianity, which holds romance confusion and disorder to be morally as well as esthetically repugnant. But it is Tasso’s aim in La Gerusalemme liberata to redeem romance by converting it to the service of both classical and Christian imperatives. The apparent conflict between romance and epic proves to be illusory when the dialectic of Tasso’s Christian humanism has run its course. The Liberata asks us to see romance diversity completed in epic unity, romance magic fulfilled in Christian mystery, and to see chivalric romance, therefore, as a vehicle for Christian epic.

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount, like Gombrowicz’ Pornografia and Cosmos, are not only Gothic artist parables in the nineteenth-century mode but also metaphysical detective stories and self-reflexive texts in the contemporary mode. Their heroes, whether voyeurs or stage directors, manipulate other, innocent characters into the substance of their own fictions: the creation of texts is thus seen as a morally tainted endeavor.

Most of the provisions of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976, the first thorough revision of United States copyright law since 1909, went into effect on 1 January 1978. Although publications addressed to scholars and teachers have focused attention on matters of photocopying and fair use, there are a number of other changes in the law that are also of interest to members of the Association. In describing any complex legislation, it is difficult to generalize, for almost every possible generalization should be followed by all the possible qualifications and exceptions. Thus members who have questions regarding the new law would be well advised to consult some of the publications listed at the end of this article and, when necessary, to consult an attorney.

The sexual comedy of “L’Après-Midi d’un faune” reflects the sophisticated French taste of its times. As an “églogue,” however, Mallarmé’s poem has roots in the classical pastoral tradition. Various structural elements show that Mallarmé was consciously working within the boundaries of an established genre, and even suggest that he was at times involved in the direct imitation of classical models. Classical parallels are explored in order to discover how Mallarmé used and transformed traditional pastoral themes and material. A close examination of some of the extraordinarily ambiguous poetic language of Mallarmé’s eclogue reveals that the “Faune” can be read as a complex ironic version of pastoral, in which the poet embroiders on the theme of the analogy between writing poetry and making love.

Critical writings may be seen as fictions about literature and reading and writing. One hero of these fictions is the ideal reader. The sort of ideal reader a critic creates indicates the literary form of his criticism. Dr. Johnson's ideal reader is an everyman, and Johnson's criticism imitates allegorical epic literature in its concern with mankind in general. Dryden's division of readers into classes, headed by “the most judicious,” is an aspect of the dramatic form of his critical literature. Coleridge's lyrical mode of criticism centers on a reader so close to his author that he becomes his tautegorical representative. Northrop Frye's criticism is a kind of comic romance leading to an apocalypse in which his heroic ideal reader redeems cultural history and experiences it as part of his present life. The criticism of these four writers embodies and imitates, as it asserts, a vision of literature.

Although critics have found La Deffence full of contradictions, they have not seen its conceptual and tonal shifts as defensive strategies reflecting Du Bellay’s ambivalence toward ancient literature. His filial piety conflicts with his desire to rival the ancients by achieving poetic greatness in the vernacular. His ambiguous theory of imitation shows the conflict between reverence and rivalry in its portrayal of imitation both as an organic process and as a violent power struggle in which the French poet devours or rapes ancient models. A similarly equivocal stance toward classical literary power appears in Du Bellay’s Roman sonnets, which illuminate La Deffence by defining a state of exile in which the Renaissance poet is torn between past and future, Rome and France. In La Deffence, the exile’s voice emerges as a dialogue that expresses the paradoxical desire to be both like and unlike the great classical originals.