Laughter in Oliver Twist is used as a weapon against the reader's conventional social identifications, forcing him to recognize in himself the social brutality which threatens Oliver. Repeatedly, Dickens evokes laughter at one of the novel's social outcasts and then shows that laughter to be cold and inadequate by echoing it in a demonstrably evil character. By means of this process of subversion, the reader is forced away from the bright social world of the Maylie-Brownlow group into an intense association with the orphans and the victims: Oliver, Fagin and his associates, and Mr. Bumble.

Mann's story, often considered only a minor companion piece to the play Fiorenza, is significant in itself as a satire on the intellectual attitudes prevalent in Munich around 1900. The story begins with a general description of Munich which, though apparently independent, is in fact connected to the later parts by the use of sophisticated narrative techniques. This description also contains topical references and details which show that the artistic and intellectual community of Munich, in its admiration for the Italian Renaissance, is enacting a quasi neo-Renaissance. Into this realistic setting Mann then places a fictional hero who feels he is called to assume the task of a Savonarola for his time. A grotesque scene results which exposes the spuriousness of the Renaissance cult. In presenting the satire, Mann employs means and forms which seem to be forerunners of his later leitmotifs, “gelebte Vita,” parody, and others. The devices in “Gladius Dei,” however, have specific, mostly rhetorical functions within the story, whereas their later counterparts often have far-reaching symbolic meaning.

When the archetypal principles outlined by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism have been applied to The Faerie Queene, they have dangerously misrepresented its structure and meaning. The Anatomy subordinates a poet's intention in any given text to the symbolic patterns a critic can discover there; and so it arbitrarily describes Spenser's poem as a romance in six books, covering many of the six phases which make up the archetypal plot of that genre. In a later essay Frye amends his scheme to include the Mutabilitie Cantos as a completed seventh part in the unified imagery of the whole. But the reductive possibilities of his approach are far more fully realized in A. C. Hamilton's Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene. Around the poem Hamilton weaves a network of recurring “images”: puns, sexual allusions, and mythological equivalents. He also forces it into various larger molds, asserting that Book One consists of two five-act plays, a tragedy followed by a comedy; that Book One falls into four parts which outline the remaining books; and that the seven books which survive are patterned on the chronological development of human life. Thus, archetypal criticism has made Spenser over into another poet.

The usual interpretations of Major Barbara, which focus on Barbara and align Undershaft's views with those of Shaw, lead to a distorted estimate of the play. Shaw is concerned less with Barbara's religious experience than with the character of Undershaft and the social implications of a philosophy of money and gunpowder. He admires Undershaft's vital genius, but maintains esthetic distance by revealing the arms maker as psychologically conditioned by the experience of his rise to power, his idealism being debilitated by cynicism. In clarifying the social, political, and economic fact of society's dependence on money and gunpowder, Undershaft provides dramatically viable social criticism and suggests a basis for reform. But he is too ensnared in his profession to effect reform himself. Poetically, dramaturgically, and dialectically he plays a devil's role, part social and part Blakean, imposing his diabolism on the well-meaning but misdirected angelicalness of Barbara. Barbara's more sympathetic role offers the audience a spiritual bridge between the simplicity of Stephen and the complexity of Undershaft. As she comes to understand the devil's realities, she provides for the future a hope which Undershaft, with his entanglements, cannot fulfil.

The distributional environment of the nasal phoneme /ŋ/, compared to those of /n/ /m/, is restricted in Modem German but reflects its origin from an allophone (variant) of /n/ before velar consonants. The phoneme developed first in medial position through the loss of /g/ in the cluster /ng/; in final position the frequent replacement of /g/ by its fortis counterpart /k/ largely prevented this loss. Late Old High German n-spellings (e.g., sinen), particularly in the 11th-century Physiologus, are the first evidence for the /ŋ/-phoneme, which generally continues, however, to be written ng (singeri). Middle High German assonances made medial/ŋŋ/ likely, which is still found in some Swiss dialects. Descriptive statements by Early New High German grammarians clearly reveal the phonemic status of /ŋ/.

To appreciate Dr. Faustus as cosmic tragedy, it is necessary to relate its particular view of man and God to other works of Marlowe and to the atheistic doctrines attributed to him by his contemporaries. It is also necessary to reexamine scholarly assumptions about Marlowe, whose mind was perhaps more medieval than modern, and whose view of experience was often more antihumanistic than humanistic. Obsessed with the thought of man's impotence before the power of time and death, Marlowe was attracted to the idea of man's transcendent will. But he intuited very early the inhumanity of absolute or superhuman power. Recognizing the horror of his own conception of the divine, he juxtaposed in Dr. Faustus Faustus and Christ, first as moral antitheses and then as complementary sacrifices to an implacable God. To attempt to read Dr. Faustus as an orthodox homily is to succeed only in stripping it of its tragic grandeur and metaphysical terror. To view it, however, as Marlowe's ultimate religious and cosmological statement—as his turning upon his ideal of transcendence—is to grasp the full meaning of Faustus' despair and to grasp also the final congruence of Marlowe's art and life.

Most Augustan poetry in America remains unattributed and unstudied. However, a critical study of the poems by Richard Lewis (1700?-34) reveals that he was not only the best Augustan American poet but also the first and most successful American nature poet before Bryant. His “To Mr. Samuel Hastings,” a progress piece on shipbuilding, is the earliest poem on an American industry. “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis,” a Thomsonian nature poem, and “Food for Clitics,” which anticipates Freneau, both contain the best elements of Lewis' poetry: a philosophy of scientific deism, praise of nature and the Creator, extended descriptions and catalogues of flowers, wildlife, and rivers presented in fine images which show his exact powers of observation, and the themes of the superiority of American nature, the wilderness as Eden, and the lost innocence of America. Pope refers to Lewis' “A Journey” in the Dunciad. His occasional verses, such as the one in honor of Lord Baltimore which shows Lewis' sense of history and patriotism, and his poems on Governor B. L. Calvert also reveal his merit. His reflection of contemporary poets and philosophers, his anticipation of significant American themes, and the excellence of his poetry all suggest that Lewis was an important poet.

Merck's concept of the novel which emerges very clearly from his reviews and his essay “Über den Mangel des epischen Geistes in unserm lieben Vaterland” represents the only major contribution of Storm and Stress to the incipient discussion of the theory of the novel. In accordance with the realistic tendencies of Storm and Stress, he advocated a realistic novel which was to deal seriously with everyday life and contemporary society, excluding, however, political themes. Among the earliest critics of the novel, Merck was unique in paying particular attention to narrative technique. Whereas Blanckenburg propagated a character novel told by a personal narrator (Tom Jones, Agathon), Merck—long before Spielhagen—called for an objective narrative technique without intrusions from the narrator, his ideal being Homer. Characteristic is his attitude toward Sterne; he rejected Blanckenburg's and Wezel's imitation of Sterne's personal comments but admired the latter's gift for realistic scenes. In the history of the theory of the novel Merck occupies a significant place in the long line of critics who saw in the objectivity of the epic the ideal for the narrative technique of the modem novel.

In the light of James's contemporary critical writings and of the precepts of the aesthetic movement, Mark Ambient emerges not as a Wildean aesthete but rather as James's spokesman on the art of fiction. In espousing a realistic theory of art, in stressing the artist's right to treat all of life without puritanical restrictions, and in his passionate concern for formal perfection, Ambient voices the ideals of the serious, literary side of the aesthetic movement. His sister represents its excesses and affectations; his wife, the Puritan- Philistine hatred and fear of art; and the narrator, the disciple who, until enlightened through his encounter with the artist, had naively subscribed to the art for art's sake formula. Though Ambient is artistically daring, in his personal life he is respectable and morally responsible. However, the fusion in the story between the aesthetic ideas and the moral, psychological conflict is imperfect. Though there is a suggestion that Ambient's imaginative openness to life has led to a culpable passivity in his role as husband and father, his responsibility for the child's death is inadequately related to his portrayal as an artist and the passages expounding his views on art seem incompletely assimilated to the action.

The English participles, present and past, are best interpreted grammatically as transformations from underlying sentences in which they were regular predicates. Interesting ambiguities and quasi-ambig-ities sometimes occur in Milton as a result of these and related transformations. Present participles tend to be active, narrative-furthering devices; past participles, expository, historical devices. Milton's practice changed from a heavier use of the present to a heavier use of the past participle. This is clear evidence of his growing Latinity. One esthetic consequence was a more compact exposition than had characterized earlier narrative poetry, with a greater density of historical implication. The heavy use of past participles also coincided well with the philosophical intention of Paradise Lost of explaining God's ways to man, since many times the implicit (but deleted) subject of the past participle is “God.” Thus God tends to be grammatically, as well as philosophically, omnipresent though hidden.