Mourning becomes electra began for Eugene O'Neill with a question. In his very first note for the play, he asked himself: “Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of Greek sense of fate into such a play, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?” Three years later, when he started sustained work on Mourning Becomes Electra, O'Neill had found his answer; he had discovered a modern equivalent for the Greek idea of fate. Since he went on to use this “psychological fate” as a formula for designing plot and characters, a clear definition of it will illuminate both the structure and meaning of Mourning Becomes Electra.

When most successful, the Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875–1910) wrote within the aesthetic assumptions of the French Symbolists and Decadents. He followed them in their revolt against reason, which was of course the continuation of a Romantic attitude. Because it tries to avoid logical discourse, his poetry, as well as that of his predecessors, tends to an excessive dependence on the use of sensorial representations. Through images, which in themselves carry no meaning, the Symbolist poet transmits his emotional state and conveys his understanding of nature. It is his task to create a system of coordinates with a complete existence of its own. The third dimension—the one which is to awaken in the reader a response parallel to the poet's experience—is the power of suggestion which supplies the depth in an otherwise two-dimensional world. The suggestive power of an image, when incorporated into a context, can radiate and penetrate the several spheres of meaning necessary in the creation of a symbol. This system of coordinates may become an explication of the significance of natural phenomena—a myth—when it is considered as the relation of its own individuality and the reality to which it refers by indirection.

Mindful of Josephine Miles's question: “If the problem [of imagery] is subjective, how can it result in tables and charts?” I shall offer here only the simplest classifications, for the sake of imposing a surface neatness upon the presentation of protean material. After some introductory generalizations about James's imagery, I shall appear to be discussing the whole subject in terms of the areas of existence or experience most used by James as sources for his imagery. The problem is that one cannot draw close to James's vital imagery of any single sort without knowing something about the other sorts, so cooperatively do the major images-areas complement each other; but we must star somewhere. In my second division I shall discuss images-areas used throughout the later works, but not independently thematic in any given work. In the last division I shall treat image-areas found unusually concentrated within given works; and here the given work itself will help to hold the materials together.

Sainte-Beuve rétablit Pascal dans son vrai temps. Il situe le cadre social et intellectuel où agissent l'homme et sa foi. Il élargit l'univers de Pascal et l‘étend plus qu'il ne le creuse; mais en l‘étendant il accuse toujours un goût exact des proportions, il reste maitre de la perspective qu'il suscite.

In Hawthorne's “Ethan Brand,” the incident in which the old dog suddenly begins to chase his own tail occupies only a few lines, but a close reading of this brief passage in conjunction with its original in The American Notebooks throws considerable light on the story as a whole and on Hawthorne's creative processes: it shows his keen perception of the exact effect he wished to produce in this tale as well as the painstaking artistry with which he adapted his Notebooks material to that end.

From the publication of his first signed poem, Paracelsus (1835), Browning thought of himself and was considered by his contemporaries as a dramatic poet. In the preface to this volume he stated, “I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem,” but Paracelsus has a dramatic form nonetheless. The longest review of the poem was written by John Forster and was entitled “Evidences of a New Genius for Dramatic Poetry—No. I.” William Charles Macready, the leading actor of the London stage, read Paracelsus and recorded in his diary for 7 December 1835: “the writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of his time.” And from 1835 to the present numerous critics have called him the great dramatic poet of his century. At the same time they have almost unanimously declared him a failure as a dramatist.

“Wordsworth, give me leave to introduce you to my only admirer.” Thus one day in 1815 Charles Lamb introduced Thomas Noon Talfourd “to the person whom in all the world I venerated most” Not always, however, had this young lawyer of the Inner Temple held Wordsworth in such high regard. Until he went to London in 1813 and met Barron Field, his opinions had taken their direction from Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Renew. Field, however, induced him to try to read Wordsworth sympathetically and understandingly. As a result, Talfourd declares, “my taste and feeling, as applied to poetry, underwent an entire change.” Aversion to Wordsworth and the “new poetry” gave way to an enthusiastic acceptance of the gospel of Romanticism, and from it he never afterwards swerved.

From his youth William Hazlitt was fond of prow fiction and liked to discuss it with other readers. When he turned from painting to literary criticism as a career, he therefore paid considerable attention to novels and romances. Since his criticism appeared chiefly between 1815 and 1830, it largely parallels the appearance of Sir Walter Scott's novels from 1814 to 1832—an important period in the development of the novel and its reading public. This was a time when most first-ranking critics refused to take novels seriously, had not made up their minds about them, or ignored them altogether. Hazlitt contended that this “department of criticism” deserved more attention for “settling the standard of excellence, both as to degree and kind” (vi, 108). He repeatedly asserted the worth and dignity of the genre, approved its effects upon readers, and judged novels by his fundamental aesthetic principles. Although his “Lecture on the English Novelists” is well known, the full extent of his criticism of prose fiction is not generally realized. For example, he wrote four essays on Sir Walter Scott. In addition to articles on various novelists, including minor figures, there are passages on prose fiction throughout the twenty volumes of Hazlitt's writings. From this mass of criticism it is easy to reconstruct his conception of what a novel should be—the first clear and well-defined conception of fiction from a great English critic

In a note appended to his novel The Fountain (New York, 1932), Charles Morgan explains why he names certain of his characters as he does. “A novelist,” he says, “may suggest ancient nobility in England by an invented name, but the great aristocracy of Holland is so narrowly restricted arid so well known that any fictitious title would give a false, and probably ridiculous, impression. I have therefore been bound to choose, in van Leyden, the name of a noble family extinct before my own sojourn in Holland. It has the right ring” (p. 450). Certainly few novelists treating of “ancient nobility in England” have allowed themselves to be hampered by any such scruples as Morgan's; and a complete peerage (and baronetage) of British fiction, running from magnates as illustrious as the Pallisers, Dukes of Omnium, and the Tanville-Tankertons, Dukes of Dorset, down to such small fry as Sir Pitt Crawley and Sir Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, Barts., would be an imposing monument to the exuberance of the story-writer's fertility in the invention of “aristocratic” names and titles. It has not perhaps been sufficiently remarked that Jane Austen's practice in this matter stands in rather striking contrast to that of most of her fellow novelists; that when she creates families with any pretensions to gentle birth, she almost always endows them with names belonging to actual British families, sometimes with an extinct title of nobility, sometimes with a living one.

In biographical sketches written before 1800 both Dr. Robert Anderson and Dr. John Moore considered the History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) as unquestionably the work of Tobias Smollett. In fact, almost from the day of its publication to the present nearly everyone has regarded this burlesque history as the hot-tempered Scot's mocking farewell salute to English politics and politicians. Yet in all this time no valid external evidence proving or disproving the authorship has been found. For this reason, and perhaps others, some uncertainty about it has developed. Lewis M. Knapp in his authoritative Tobias Smollett (1949, pp. 281–283) finds that the Adventures of an Atom contains “in its method and material much that is Smollettian” and is “obviously what Smollett felt like writing at that time,” but calling attention to the lack of external evidence, asks, “Is it, indeed, possible that Smollett did not write the Atom at all?”

While Edmund Burke was a student at Trinity College, his native Dublin was rocked by the agitation of the celebrated patriot and apothecary, Charles Lucas (1713–71), who wished to restore the ancient rights of the freemen of the city which was then governed as a closed oligarchy by the Board of Aldermen. Tension was heightened when one of Dublin's representatives to the Irish House of Commons died on 16 August 1748 and Lucas quickly issued the first of twenty addresses in support of his candidacy for the seat. Lucas pandered to the mob—his “most thoroughly beloved brethren and friends”—and begged them to believe he was and ever would be theirs “with the utmost Sincerity, true Respect, unfeigned Love, and boundless Gratitude.” He avowed the noblest intentions: “No man, let his Pretensions, or his Places, be what they will, loves his Country better than I. It is this that prompts me to attempt the Restoration of her Constitution to its natural Strength and Vigour.” His appeal was directed primarily to the Protestant freeholders of Dublin, who were struggling to supplant the clique dominating political life in the interests of the Viceroy and his “undertakers” with officials and a parliament representative of their views. Lucas wished to inspire these freemen to achievements as great as those of the citizens of Rome or Athens.

The pastoral works of the seventeenth-century poet and eulogist, Sigmund von Birken, are variations of a single glorified hymn of praise, directed all to the virtual apotheosis of powerful patrons and prospective noble sponsors. Such exaggerated eulogies were, however, not unusual in this era; rather they were of prime importance. “Although by far the majority of writers did not come from court circles at this time, still an author had to win favor in some court if he was to be successful. The best way to do so was to dedicate a work to a patron, a prince, or at least a great and powerful man.” Aside from dedications, another variety of encomiastic writing was developed for this same purpose. This genre Opitz termed the “Schäfferey.”

Of Shakespeare's four great tragedies the Christian overtones of Othello have been least apprehended. Critics have seen in. it a noble soul caught in the toils of a diabolically cunning being, who tempts him to doubt the divine goodness of one in whom he has absolute faith, but they have failed to see the symbolic force of the characters and the action. For the Elizabethans, however, the noble soul of Othello, the diabolic cunning of Iago, and (he divine goodness of Desdemona would not have had a loosely metaphoric meaning. Desdemona, who in her forgiveness and perfect love, a love requited by death, is reminiscent of Christ, would have represented Christian values; Iago, who in his envious hatred and destructive negativism is reminiscent of Satan, would have represented anti-Christian values. The choice that Othello had to make was between Christian love and forgiveness and Satanic hate and vengefulness. When he exclaimed (III.iii.447—149), “Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow celli / Yield up, 0 love, thy crown and hearted throne / To tyrannous hate,” he was succumbing to the devil, and, like all men who succumb to the devil, his fall was reminiscent of that of Adam.

This paper is an attempt to define the structure, and in particular the structure of Books I-IV, of The Faerie Queene. This is a subject which has received a fair share of scholarly attention over the past twenty years; such novelty as this essay may claim lies in the basis of the argument, which is the poem itself rather than the evidence external to the poem, and the poem as we have it rather than the poem as, according to the theories of the critics, it once was or ought to have been. For the usual method of approach to the problem has been somewhat as follows: first, certain dated documents have been used as a basis for theories about the form of the poem at this or that stage of its development before 1590; secondly, failures of narrative logic in the poem have been used as a basis for an argument that the poem's narratives were once logical where they are now illogical; that is, that versions of the poem different from, and more logical than, the present version once existed. Both kinds of evidence have been used by the critics with a common object: to show that earlier versions of the poem existed, and that they are more or less detectable in the present version, and definable; whence, by comparison of the present version with the reconstructed primitive versions, and by observation of the development of the one from the other, light may be cast on Spenser's method of working, and various unsatisfactory features of the present poem's structure may be explained.

“Christis Kirk, on the Grene” and “Peblis to the Play” are no doubt the most popular and most frequently published works in Middle Scots literature; yet almost nothing has been written about them. This study aims to throw some light on them by viewing them as examples of the “peasant-brawl,” a popular literary tradition during the Ute Middle Ages. First it will define the peasant-brawl as a literary genre and then trace its development, using for this purpose mostly South German parallels, since these seem to be the most plentiful. One can justify the use of such geographically remote parallels because of certain cultural similarities between the Lowland Scots and the South Germans of that period, both of whom were largely derived from Teutonic tribes that had occupied foreign territory and destroyed, expelled, or assimilated the native element. Both peoples had absorbed Roman Christianity and later French civilization, which they gradually blended with their own cultural heritage. In view of these similarities in origin and development, one might expect their popular literatures to have much in common, just as their vernaculars did.

Students, critics, and just plain readers of Chaucer are unanimously agreed that he is one of the great masters of narrative. But in spite of this agreement—or perhaps because of it—there has been surprisingly little attempt to discover what was Chaucer's own attitude toward the technique of storytelling. His skill in character-portrayal, his humor, his irony, his detachment, his sharp eye, his descriptive powers— all these qualities and others have been the subject of extensive comment. But about his narrative technique in the narrow sense—that is, the particular way In which he selects, arranges, and proportions the detailed events which go to make up a story—there remains much to be said. The aim of this paper is to open up one corner of this large subject by exploring the implications of a characteristic Chaucerian habit which, for lack of a better term, we can call “self-conscious abbreviation.” By this I mean the trick of calling to the reader's attention the fact that details are to be omitted, the pace of the story accelerated, unimportant or obvious events summarized or taken for granted, or any one of a number of other devices employed to shorten the narrative.

My chief-purpose in this article is to show that, during the period in which Chaucer, in consequence of his newly conceived plan for a Marriage Group, produced some of his most independent and brilliant creative work, some of his time and thought was also devoted to the task of establishing a relation between the Marriage Group and several previously written tales, and also, one thing leading to another, to the ordering and the linking of tales, several of which never had any direct bearing on the debate on maniage. In the first section of this article I shall try to show that the Melibeus, the Nun's Priest's Tale, and the Clerk's Tale antedate the conception of a Marriage Group; that the idea of relating these tales to the debate on marriage was an afterthought on Chauser's part. In Section II we shall see that a fairly extensive ordering and linking operation, resulting in the construction of Blocks B2 and C and in the addition of new features to the character of Harry Bailly; seems to have been carried out at the same period as the work described in Section I. In Section III the bearing of my conclusions and conjectures on various problems of chronology, order of the tale blocks, etc., will be briefly considered.

For the student of fiction, the most noteworthy accomplishment of Guillaume de Lorris in the Roman de la Rose is his invention of large-scale psychological allegory. C. S. Lewis, who has taught us how to haead the poem, suggests that it is an offspring of Old French romance and the moral allegory of the Prudentius tradition: the Roman deals with the erotic content of the romances in a form made newly potent by the moral allegorists of the school of Chartres. Lewis sees an adaptation or borrowing of allegory by romance before Guillaume in Chrétien de Troyes. There, it is suggested, we can see narrative poetry taking over allegory as a tool whenever psychology is in question. The purpose of this paper is to amplify the history of psychological allegory at this point, and thereby to modify Lewis' admittedly general account. Thus, while there are excellent reasons for using Chrétien as the exemplar of courtly romance writing, it can be shown that the tendency toward allegory in the romances is considerably more extensive than his practice would indicate. The romances constitute a virtual encyclopedia of psychological personifications, including illustrations and discussions of most of the “characters” in the Roman de la Rose. More important, this tendency does not represent simply a borrowing of the forms and procedures of moral allegory. Indeed, the allegory developing within the romances is not even so much a modification of the pre-established species as an independent invention. Specifically designed for psychological analysis, it points to the unique structural achievement of Guillaume de Lorris.