Disability studies scholars and Renaissance scholars have much to learn from early modern schemata of disability. Early modern people used nature and the natural to discriminate against and to include people with atypical bodies and minds. In his writings, the English physician John Bulwer (1606–56) considers Deafness a natural human variation with definite advantages, anticipating current concepts of biolinguistic diversity and Deaf-gain, while acknowledging his society's biases. He refutes the exclusion of sign language and other forms of what he calls “ocular audition” from natural law, which made capacity for speech the benchmark for natural rights. Instead of using Deaf people as exceptions that prove the rule of nature or as limit cases for humanity, Bulwer makes deafness part of a plastic understanding of the senses, and he promotes the sociability of signed languages as a conduit to a universal language that might be encouraged and taught in England.

Keats often imagines the poetic process (the way poetry is created or conceived) as a flight from reality to some dreamworld of imagination. At other times it seems an identification with and heightening of the concrete and actual. What mediates between these two apparently contradictory views of aesthetic experience are certain fundamental analogies borrowed from contemporary science, in particular chemistry, that underlie his whole view of the poetic imagination and its operation. Keats's favorite metaphors for poetic creation reveal how the imagination transmutes material phenomena or sensations into poetic or “essential” form in accordance with the principles of ethereal chemistry described by such a writer as Sir Humphry Davy and by a process remarkably akin to that of chemical distillation. The essential forms of poetry derive their reality both from the identity of material phenomena and the transforming power of the mind. Later, however, Keats's attitude toward this process undergoes a notable change. Thus the Hermes episode in Lamia can be read as a parody of his whole earlier sense of the poetic process and its authenticity. Keats's knowledge of and reliance on science becomes an integral part of the more ambivalent view of poetry that characterizes his later career.

Scholars have sometimes assumed that the version of Comus in the Trinity Manuscript is Milton's original draft of the poem. Miss Lockwood, for example, in her study of the corrections in the manuscript, comments upon its extreme neatness—upon the neatness of the lines and upon the even margins; but in spite of this comment, and in spite of her disagreement with Masson's statement that the manuscript is very much revised, it does not occur to her that the manuscript may not be composition at all but transcription.

The attempt to contribute, however slightly, to the vast volume of writings on Rousseau is a venture which, all will agree, should be undertaken with diffidence. The character, achievements, and influence of the Great Romanticist have been studied, discussed and debated by so many eminent scholars, that, unless one has something new to offer, the careful critic will consider any attempt to reopen the complex subject as tedious as it is presumptuous. In the present instance, however, the writer feels that he has been fortunate enough to discover some material which, though of modest scope, will nevertheless prove of real interest to lovers of Rousseauiana.

Quid petitur sacris nisi tantum fama poetis?“ inquired Boissard as a representative sixteenth-century man of letters. That he cribbed the wording of his question from Ovid merely makes him a more typically Renaissance author. Like other literary theorists of the period, the emblematists—those essayists in prose and verse who reached such a vast public in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—subscribed to the contention that the great poet achieves renown and immortality through his works. The emblematists frequently chose engravings or woodcuts containing symbols of glory, affixed brief titles or ”posies“ to these cuts, and then subjoined thereto essays or poems developing the theme of literary glory suggested by the plate. The accompanying reproduction from Peacham's Minerva Britanna (note 23) will acquaint the reader with a typical page from an emblem-book. Of all the literary notions encountered in emblem-books, this belief that the Muse saves poets from ignominy and death is the most frequent. It is the basic idea underlying the classic cult of poetic glory, the one cult shared by classic and Romanticist alike. It is interesting to see reappearing in every language of Western Europe the gratifying thought that authors win eternal life and kudos through their compositions. It strikes a most familiar note when we encounter it phrased in Renaissance Latin, for we remember reading it over and over in classic Latin texts.

After the Redcross Knight has been rescued from Orgoglio by Prince Arthur and from Despeyre by the wise and watchful Una, he is brought by the latter to the House of Holinesse, “Where he is taught repentaunce, and The way to heauenly blesse.” There Mercy, “a matrone graue and hore,” leads him to one of the places of his purification, a “holy Hospitall” in which are employed seven bead-men who spend their days in doing godly works. The first of them, as eldest and best, has charge and government of all the house, giving entertainment and lodging to all who come and go. The second has for his office the giving of food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty. A third has in custody the common wardrobe, from which he dispenses “clothes meet to keepe keene could away,/ And naked nature seemely to aray.” A fourth is appointed for the relieving of prisoners and the redeeming of captives. A fifth cares for the sick and comforts those lying at the point of death. Still a sixth bead-man superintends the burial of the dead, lest the wondrous workmanship of God's own mould might be defouled.

Cooper's third novel, The Pioneers, published in 1823, is usually considered to be his most realistic in reflecting actual scenes and events. The Effingham plot is fanciful, but numerous details as well as the general situation relate to family and community history. These factual elements involve all levels of the story: the setting, ranging from a description of Lake Otsego and its environs to such specific landmarks as the Bold Dragoon Tavern (Red Lion Inn) and the manorial hall; several characters, including Judge Temple (based upon the author's father, Judge William Cooper), the first sheriff Richard Jones (in actuality one Richard R. Smith), Major Hartmann, and the French merchant Monsieur Le Quoi (Mr. Le Quoy); and such contributing themes as the struggle over establishing a village church, the manufacture of maple sugar, and the danger of forest roads. Certain improbable details, such as the sheriff's arresting a gang of counterfeiters in the wilderness, are based upon fact toned down in the telling. Cooper apparently alluded to such reminiscent subject matter in his original Preface, which states that the book, in contrast to his first two, “has been written, exclusively, to please myself.” He further called attention to the novel's realism by subtitling it “A Descriptive Tale,” as he explained in a letter of 1822 to his London publisher: “I had announced the work as a ‘descriptive tale’ but perhaps have confined myself too much to describing the scenes of my own youth. … If there be any value in truth, the pictures are very faithful, and I can safely challenge a scrutiny in th[is?] particular.”

The association of ideas as manifested in Shakespeare’s image clusters, discussed by Caroline Spurgeon and Edward Armstrong, was used by R. W. Chambers as a test of authorship for the Sir Thomas More fragment. Some unstudied associations tie Iago to one side of Shylock and the More fragment to another, providing further evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship and the probable date of composition. Image clusters similarly suggest that King John preceded Richard II; and King Lear, Timon of Athens. Our consideration needs to be broadened beyond exclusively verbal terms: Shakespeare’s imagination is fully theatrical. Association is not a mere stimulus-response limiting of the imagination; it provided flexible and wide-ranging systems of intermeshing concepts at Shakespeare’s most creative moments.

The role composition plays in the contemporary American university, particularly in relation to the english department, has changed from the days when composition was not an expertise but a duty. Initiated on the college level in the 1870s, as John Brereton has argued, at a time much like our own, when the American college was “in danger of becoming irrelevant to a rapidly changing nation” (3), composition consolidated the many kinds of writing done in the courses (and in the extracurriculum) of universities into a required academic subject, positioned at the threshold of college education. It was charged with preparing students for the rigors of college study and for citizenship and professional life. For many generations of college English teachers, composition was an expected part of the job: everyone, whatever their specialty, taught first-year writing.

Oedipus is a man who was told he had killed his father and married his mother.He has to account for a past which is his own past, though it falls on him like somebody else's. Antigone, in order to throw a handful of earth on her brother's body, has to break the laws of the city state. She chooses a gesture which by law is punished by death. Orestes, to avenge his father, has to kill his murderers: his own mother and stepfather.

Recent critical variations on Du Bois's formulation of the African American double consciousness provide new ways of examining Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in relation to both modernism and the double consciousness itself. Read next to texts like The Art of the Novel and The Waste Land, Invisible Man shows a “signifying” stance toward modernism. At the same time, Ellison's book performs a profound critique of such double-voiced strategies as signifying and the blues.

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.

Although Poe is now all but universally acknowledged to be one of the three or four literary geniuses that America has produced, there was a period immediately following his death when few writers in America were willing to concede to him any extraordinary merit beyond that of an exceptionally gifted artist. It has sometimes been held that Poe was similarly neglected even before his death. Thus, so distinguished a scholar as Professor Sir Walter Raleigh, of Oxford, in a letter addressed to the celebrators of the Poe centenary at the University of Virginia (1909), makes the statement that Poe was “barely recognized while he lived.” Baudelaire, who did more than any other to light the flame of Poe's reputation abroad, believed that Poe was cruelly neglected by his fellow-countrymen, and most other Frenchmen have, I believe, adopted much the same view. In America, too, there has long existed a tradition that Poe was but little appreciated during his lifetime,—a tradition that has flourished especially at the South, though it has not been confined to the South. On the other hand, some of the ablest of those who have made a special study of Poe have held that this tradition is without any substantial basis in fact. The lamented Professor Charles F. Richardson, for instance, in one of the most sympathetic and discriminating essays that we have on the Southern poet, asserts that it is “a serious mistake” to assume that Poe was unpopular in his own day. And Professor W. P. Trent, a no less eminent authority on our literary history, has recorded the belief that “Poe is no exception to the rule that the writers who really count began by counting with their contemporaries.”

The indebtedness of Chaucer's Legend of Philomela to the Ovide Moralisé for details not to be found in the Metamorphoses was established more than a decade ago by Professor Lowes. Observing, further, in the Legend of Ariadne and in the short account of her abandonment by Theseus in the Hous of Fame (405–426) the strong resemblances to Machaut's résumé of Theseus' “fals jape” in the Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, Lowes suggested that these likenesses might also be due, wholly or in part, to a common use of Machaut's favorite source, the Ovide Moralisé, although as the pertinent part of the text of the Ovide Moralisé was still unpublished, he was unable to verify his conjecture. Recently Professor Shannon, without examining the history of Ariadne in the French version of the Metamorphoses, has somewhat rashly rejected Professor Lowes's theory, and declared that Boccaccio's De Genealogia Deorum is the only source aside from Ovid himself which Chaucer used for his stories of the heroine. In the course of a general examination of the influence upon Chaucer of the Ovide Moralisé —made upon de Boer's edition and upon a manuscript of the complete text—I have found that Lowes's hypothesis is sound, while the instances of the impress of Boccaccio's mythology cited by Shannon appear uniformly weak.

The main object of this study is to call attention to certain characteristics of style that may serve as evidence in determining questions of authorship and relation of plays within the period treated; to develop a small and, perhaps, rather rough instrument of research, which will hardly rise to the dignity of a “test,” but may serve as a useful auxiliary to more significant criteria. No attempt has been made to complete the study on the rhetorical side; attention has been given generally only to such matters as seemed important for the main purpose. A simple but sufficiently precise terminology has been used, and it has not been thought worth while to discuss its relation to the formal terminology of ancient or modern rhetorical treatises. All the forms here discussed are found in contemporary poetry other than the drama, especially in the work of the sonneteers.

The importance of music in James Joyce's life and art has always been evident. A volume of his poems he called Chamber Music; the title of his last book is that of an Irish-American ballad. Almost the first recollections of young Stephen Dedalus were musical; and one of the most moving passages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes Stephen's hungry young brothers and sisters singing “Oft in the Stilly Night,” in which Stephen joins. Music plays an essential part in several stories in Dubliners, notably in “The Dead.” Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are full of references to music and musicians.

The man. Harald Weinrich, an honorary member of the modern language association since 1996, may be the quintessential interdisciplinary humanist. Having mastered French as a young internee in France at the end of World War II, he began his academic career as a Romance philologist in the tradition of Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius, with professorships successively at the universities of Kiel and Cologne. In a second career he became a professor of linguistics at the new University of Bielefeld (which he helped to found and where he served as director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research); then he established in Munich the first program for the teaching of German as a foreign language. Following his compulsory retirement, he received the honor (extraordinary for a foreigner) of an appointment as professor of Romance studies at the prestigious Collège de France, from which he is now also retired. He has published writing of great scholarly and public resonance in all these areas. Among his voluminous output (translated into many languages) are Tempus, a wide-ranging and meticulously nuanced study of tense use in the major literatures of Western Europe; a prizewinning short book of cultural linguistics entitled Linguistik der Lüge (Linguistics of Lying); “text grammars” of French and of German that aim to record not just morphology and syntax but also the usage problems that confront speakers and writers of all foreign languages; Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, his first book to appear in English) and much other work on cultural topics, including memory and politeness; and dozens of essays on the teaching and learning of languages and on problems of intercultural understanding.

Why did it take so long to start writing the history of close reading? For the best part of a century, close reading has grounded literary studies in the university, structuring assessment, teaching, employment, and publication. A basic proficiency in close reading has long been a professional obligation for faculty members and a course requirement for students. It makes sense, then, that Caroline Levine's Forms begins with a description of our method in action. A reader is settling down to work with a copy of Jane Eyre. She has a lengthy education behind her and a wealth of interpretive techniques for the book in front of her. Still, one thing is certain: our critic will broach the forms of the novel by drawing from “close reading methods” while using “historical research methods to analyze sociopolitical experience.” “But,” Caroline Levine asks, “would our critic be right to distinguish between the formal and the social?” (1).

Presque tous lës érudits français de la Renaissance qui ont étudié les origines lointaines de leur pays sont venus buter sur ce problème ardu: d'où vient le mot France? que signifie le nom de Franci porté par une obscure tribu germanique avant de désigner le peuple français? La légende de Francus ne constitue pas le seul essai de réponse à ces difficiles questions. A côté des textes qui, avant Lemaire de Belges, développent le thème des origines troyennes de la France, il en est bien d'autres qui proposent du terme Franci des explications différentes: francus est un adjectif synonyme de féroce, ou une épithète signifiant ‘franc’ ou ‘libre.’ En outre, un nouveau cycle de légendes étymologiques fondé sur le mot Galli fait son apparition à la fin du quinzième siècle, lorsque des humanistes épris de bonne latinité affectent d'appeler “Gaulois” les habitants de la France. Le but de cette étude est de montrer l'incidence de ces problèmes étymologiques, non seulement sur l'œuvre de poètes comme Lemaire de Belges et Ronsard, mais aussi sur les écrits de plusieurs historiens, philosophes et théoriciens politiques entre les Illustrations de Gaule (1510) et la Franciade (1572).

A recent critic declares of John Donne: “He had none of that enthusiasm for Greek culture which distinguished More, Colet, and Ascham. He appears to have studied certain Greek authors in Latin translations. . . . . His learning was chiefly of the Mediaeval type.” No evidence, it is true, comes forward to establish Donne's acquaintance at first hand with Greek authors. At the same time, an examination of the allusions to Greek mythology in the poetry of Donne makes it clear that he had part in the all-but-universal interest of the Elizabethans in classical material, and that he uses this material with characteristic independence and originality.