New documentary evidence throws light on the genesis of Das unauslöschliche Siegel and on Langgässer's narrative techniques. Her hitherto unpublished notes on Donoso prove that the extensive quotations from his works in the “Turm-Kapitel” derive from one source: L. Fischer's introduction to his translation of the Ensayo sobre el calolicismo. Further evidence supplied by her widower shows that she wrote the chapter before 1944, and that its mise-en-scène was prefigured in her visit to Senlis, France, in 1937. Thus, the hypothesis is untenable that—as an attempt at self-justification in the face of charges of manichaeism—she inserted the chapter only after she had completed the rest of the novel. It seems probable that Langgässer considered Donoso's life exemplary from a Christian viewpoint, and that her montage of his writings stemmed from her desire to create a “new form” for the Christian novel. Donoso's religious beliefs and his hostility to the Enlightenment not only provide appropriate material for the chapter (the “counterpointing” of religious, cultural, and political events in Europe over a period of several centuries), but also reflect Langgasser's own religious attitudes, which any critical appreciation of the novel as a whole must take into account.

In Augie March, Henderson, and Herzog, Bellow has created an open style of ideological comedy that relates him to Rabelais, Burton, Sterne, Melville, and Joyce, earlier masters of an encyclopedic comedy of knowledge. The lively voice and intellectual probing in Augie March can be more fully valued when the book is related to such predecessors rather than to the picaresque tradition. Bellow's comic characters have an individual idiom, voice, and range of concern that unobtrusively unify his apparently formless books. What emerges in Augie March and Herzog—the comedy, suffering, and encyclopedic speculation; the concern for personal fates, social facts, and cosmic issues; the interest in observed actuality and abstract symbol; the tension between a cruel, deterministic reality and the impulse toward creative freedom and joy; the precarious reliance on metaphoric probing and an open form—all suggest that against great odds, both public and personal, Bellow has succeeded in reanimating a style of intellectual comedy that illuminates and celebrates the present even as it connects us and Bellow with some of the most powerful imaginations of the past.

Recently discovered work sheets for Swinburne's “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866) reveal that the central wave image, foreshadowing the later symbolists and imagists, was wrought by Swinburne with extreme care. Through a careful pruning and a suppression of the simile in favor of metaphor, Swinburne built this passage of eighteen lines so that effects accumulate, distilling his themes of power, fear, evil, and transcendent time with considerable symbolic force.

Both the old and the new Arcadias belong to a single literary genre, Elizabethan heroic poetry. Modern critics, by concentrating upon the theories of Sidney's Italian contemporaries, regularly distinguish generically between the two Arcadias, usually calling the new an (attempted) epic and the old “merely” a romance. But neither version responds well to a testing by Italian criteria, criteria whose essentials are structure and convention. However, an examination of representative Elizabethan writings on heroic poetry reveals that, although aware of Italian theories, such writers as Puttenham, Webbe, Harington, and particularly Sidney are concerned not with formal but with functional aspects of the genre. The peculiar function of heroic poetry is to teach and inspire to virtue the gentleman, the Prince, and the commonwealth. From the various episodes and incidents of the heroic poem, the reader learns how to respond actively to any situation, whether it affect the body politic or the body natural, the flesh or the spirit. Tested by Elizabethan criteria, both versions of the Arcadia are successful heroic poems.

The Keynotes Series was the result of one of John Lane's schemes for calling attention to new writers and trends. These fourteen novels and nineteen volumes of short stories published between 1894 and 1897 represent a significant cross section of what Lane, whose Bodley Head Press was regarded as the center of fin de siècle literary attitudes, thought new and modish. An examination of the contents of the Series is useful in seeing the 1890's in perspective: conventional morality is there defended more often than attacked, decadent themes are few but technical experiments in structure and style many, and Hardy, not Wilde or Pater, exercises the greatest influence. (The first complete listing of the Series is included.)

Two comic ideas inform the artistry of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The traditions of festival and ritual help to explain the one idea of celebrating man's quest for renewal in communion with nature and divinity; the traditions of Roman comedy and rhetoric help to explain the other, the idea of understanding man's folly in his quest for order in society. Shakespeare creates two contexts, finite society with its mores and laws, and nature with its transcendent gods, and then assimilates the two in the action and language of the play. The action combines a dialectical sequence based on social conflict and a symbolic sequence based on magic and myth. The language ranges between debate and song, argument and incantation. The gods of nature become both measure and mirror of the absurdity of human love, and the result is both satiric and celebrative: folly is understood as folly and celebrated as myth. Shakespeare's amusement at the artist's power through language to comprehend the relation of nature and experience and translate the comprehension into comic myth is apparent throughout. Bottom's wedding to Titania is summary of the comprehension and the play-within-a-play is a burlesque of the power.

Molierè's reworking of lines from Dom Garde de Navarre in Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, and Amphitryon points to a common theme in the four plays: the interplay of the ideal of faith and the ideal of integrity (authenticité). In Dom Garcie the hero is too much in love to bow to the convention that his beloved is by definition above reproach when he discovers her in the arms of another man. The demands of a faith grounded in self-deception clash with the exigencies of integrity. Tartuffe shuns both the artificiality and the highmindedness of the ideal. In a realistic setting shorn of all moral embellishment, integrity is made hollow by fraud; faith is maintained toward none; being is successfully undermined by nothingness. Le Misanthrope emerges as the third stage in a dialectic: the idealism of Dom Garcie, having been brought down to earth, no longer focuses exclusively on the ideal virtues of the beloved. Alceste, in fact, demands only one thing: let a man be a man. This seemingly modest desire for integrity bespeaks a faith in mankind which everyone in the play betrays. A heavenly reconciliation is achieved in Amphitryon. Impossible demands are relegated to Mount Olympus. Mortals are taught to place their faith in the only kind of integrity to which they dare aspire: a reciprocated love that fuses reason and passion so well that not even a god can prevail against it.

In four characters, Conrad undermines all possibility of unambiguous moral action. The Professor, whose anarchism begins in existential emptiness and contains a violent totalitarian impulse, dramatizes the potential for death in the human will when its energies are directed toward power, toward political ends; the capacity for destruction, both private and public, of the Professor's devotion to the “idea” is grotesquely symbolized by the bomb he carries, his hand always on the detonator. The Assistant Commissioner has no “idea,” but his apparent efficiency is thoroughly undermined by the way Conrad exposes the ambiguity both of his motives and of the sources of the energy which enables him to succeed in his hunt for Verloc. Like Winnie, the Commissioner has chosen “respectability”—an inauthentic life. Winnie's own destruction begins in her feeling for Stevie and is hastened by Stevie's angry compassion, since even compassion is dangerous as a motive for action. This is a lesson Michaelis' youthful political experience has taught him, and his withdrawal presents the novel's final paradox: that in an anarchic world, self-preoccupied inertia may become the posture of a saint.

Milton's notion of self-knowledge places him in the Socratic-Christian tradition which distinguishes between man's rational part, or self-like-God, and his passional nature, the aspect of self most easily subverted by Satan. Only the self-knowing man, by introspection and by seeing the reflection of self in the mirror of the world's stage, achieves a harmony between the two aspects of self. Milton's concept of self-examination, apparent in his prose and verse, is symbolically represented in Paradise Lost. The world of Adam-Eve mirrors both God's realm of pure truth and reason and Satan's realm of unreason and unrestrained passion. These realms represent those aspects of self that man must necessarily discover within. The Fall is inevitable and irrevocable in the creation of self: in Adam's discovery of his obligation to know himself “aright,” he understands that his rational self-like-God must rule the darker passionate self. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes also represent man as achieving self-knowledge by the twofold means of introspection and viewing the reflection of himself in the external world.

Lazarillo de Tormes cannot be considered simply as a story of the moral degeneration of a potentially good boy who, under the influence of his pitiless masters, becomes a selfish and cynical cuckold, utterly blind to his moral degradation. The episode with the Squire reveals that the mature Lazaro (as he declares it himself) still has deep feelings of pity and charity for the Squire and those like him, just as he did when he was still a boy. Thus, this most important of Christian virtues has not been lost in the adult picaro. The capacity for human compassion and sympathy which is clearly revealed in the style of the autobiography must also be assigned to Lazaro and not merely to the anonymous author. And it is Lazaro, in his own moral judgments, who tends to condemn those who are selfish and without charity but is sympathetic to those who are generous and weak, regardless of their social sins; e.g., Zaide steals for love, the priest and friar for lust and for themselves (“para sus devotas y para ayuda de otro tanto”). Lazaro's final situation contributes to the ironic twist: From an external or social point of view, he is at the bottom of the moral scale, but his capacity for charity elevates him when compared with his selfish and lecherous masters. It is this subtle irony, of which the author was probably conscious, both as an artist and as a satirist, that lends moral ambiguity, as well as artistic complexity, to the main character and to the total conception of the work.

A mass of now forgotten Roman Catholic apologetic and controversial writings appeared in English during Dryden's lifetime. Study reveals the fact that Dryden was acquainted with some of the most notable of these, particularly Hugh Cressy's Exomologesis (1647, 1653), Rushworth-White's Dialogues (1654), John Sergeant's Schisme Dis-Arm'd (1655) and Sure-Footing in Christianity (1665), Edward Worsley's Protestancy Without Principles (1668), and Abraham Woodhead's Rational Account (1673), as well as with the principal Anglican publications of the day (especially those of Stillingfleet and Tillotson). Dryden used the arguments, sometimes the very phraseology, of these and other writings in his poem. The Hind and the Panther thus justifies Charles E. Ward's judgment that the poet's conversion was “a result of long thought and long study of the problems of faith,” and takes its place in the Catholic-Anglican controversy of the age.

The problem of assessing Edward Taylor's literary reputation has been made difficult by the claims put forward on his behalf and by the criticisms of these claims because both share the assumption that Taylor's poetry may be compared with Herbert's. But a consideration of Taylor's Prologue (glossed with relevant poems and sermons) reveals the rudiments of Taylor's Puritan theory of the imperfect function of human art, rudiments which form a concept of decorum which is not “metaphysical.” Taylor's theory features the severely limited possibilities of fallen human art not only in dealing with man's condition but even in attempting the praise of God. Accordingly, at the practice of metaphor Taylor is committed to meiosis, and uses amplification for the praise of God with considerable hesitation. On the other hand, Herbert, with a different religious position and with consequently a different subject (the contrast between man's insignificance and his greatness as a child of God), has as a result a much wider metaphoric range. These differences in the range and use of metaphor reveal quite different concepts of decorum and suggest judgments about Taylor's literary reputation based not on “metaphysical” decorum, but rather on a Puritan decorum of imperfection.

L'umorismo, not merely a theoretical treatise on humor, is also Pirandello's introspective clarification and confession of the genesis and motives of his art. As such, it provides the best approach to his creative writings. Shortly after the publication of this essay in 1908 began the long dispute with Croce, whose negative attitude toward Pirandello was to influence many followers of aesthetic criticism. Although Croce's opposition cannot be attributed to preconceived hostility, he issued a sharply dialectical dissection of the essay and failed to recognize that Pirandello's theory cannot be dealt with in terms of logic and philosophical exegesis alone. The style, too, is significant, and for the very reasons that motivated Croce's disapproval, namely because Pirandello makes use of imagery as well as of philosophical definitions—a dichotomy that reflects the author's complex temperament. Tilgher, on the other hand, understood the anti-intellectualistic nature of Pirandello's art and published a stimulating interpretation of his theatre, one that was at first recognized as valid by the playwright himself. Often regarded as a “revelation” of Pirandello to the world and to himself, this interpretation should be more properly viewed in the light of Tilgher's own theory of the critic's preeminence and farsighted leadership in literature. In fact, after a period of “complicity,” Pirandello firmly reasserted his autonomy and rejected all implications of the critic's insistent patronage.

The two versions of “The Hall of Fantasy” reveal that the intellectual exchange between Hawthorne and Thoreau at the beginning of the Old Manse period was far more extensive and formative than has hitherto been supposed. The narrator's companion-guide is a strikingly full, thinly disguised fictional portrait of Thoreau as he appeared to Hawthorne in August and September 1842, when their friendship first developed. This portrait provides a new set of insights into their relationship and a more accurate notion of their attitudes toward Emerson, Alcott, and the whole intellectual ferment around Concord. The narrator and his guide assume the precise moral stances of Hawthorne and Thoreau concerning Transcendentalism, technical progress, reform movements, vegetarianism, “Adamism,” and other prominent philosophical and social issues. These discussions largely determined the subjects each would write about for the next year, especially in Hawthorne's “The Old Manse,” “The New Adam and Eve,” and “Earth's Holocaust,” and in Thoreau's two contributions to The Democratic Review. “The Landlord” and “Paradise (to be) Regained.” Their influence can still be seen in the major works of the late 1840's and early 1850's: “The Custom House,” The Bouse of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and the different versions of Walden.

Many of Kafka's stories in the first person either use the present tense throughout or shift from past to present in the course of narration. The stories told entirely in the present render the inner monologue of a speaker caught in a durative psychic struggle; the stories in which the tense changes tell of a past calamity that leads to an everlasting predicament. “Ein Landarzt” is structured on an “einmal-niemals” pattern, and thus belongs to the second of these general types; but in this story Kafka also tries—again by shifting to the present tense—to achieve within the narration of past events the immediacy of present experience. He thereby effaces the demarcation between outer event and inner reflection and eliminates the temporal distance between the narrating and the experiencing self. This use of the present tense results in mutually exclusive verbal gestures and contradictory temporal references. The stylistic incongruities in “Ein Landarzt” thus point up the difficulties of rendering the immediacy of experience in a first-person narrative, and help to explain why Kafka usually preferred to use the third person in his novels and novellas.