There is abundant evidence for the assertion that Shelley at one time thought of devoting all his talents to the study of metaphysics. On August 1, 1811, in a letter to Stockdale, Shelley writes:

My studies have been, since my writing it [St. Irvyne], of a more serious nature. I am at present engaged in completing a series of moral and metaphysical essays.

In identifying Lady Oxford as Byron's political “tutelar genius” of 1813, as the “woman, who, amid all her fascination, always urged a man to usefulness or glory,” I have brought to light a certain speciousness in the interpretation accepted by Byron's biographers of his liaison with Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford, as simply comparable to the story of Rinaldo overcome by indolence in the “Bower of Armida.” Miss Mayne and M. Maurois and even Miss Raymond have somehow overlooked the fact that Lady Oxford was a pupil of Home Tooke, the Reform “agitator” (to use Byron's admiring term), was sometime mistress and lifelong political “genius” of the Radical spokesman, Sir Francis Burdett—was, in short, a woman who did not content herself with “soothing” and enchanting Byron but rather “always” pressed him on “senatorial duties” and endeavored to make him an advocate “particularly in the cause of weakness.” Eywood was a pleasant bower, but Jane, it turns out, was not Armida—though Byron, eager to realize that dream of Tasso he had always cherished, took a cue from the picture of Armida and Rinaldo which she had hung in his room and let his fancy feed on the intensity of the passion which she inspired and “returned with equal ardour,” for the time preferring her sorcery to “parliamentary mummeries” of doubtful value in which she was urging him to engage. Byron liked her politics, but he wanted to escape politics for a while. He did not wish to think himself attached to her party, nor to any party. Similar conflicting emotions troubled Byron's dramatic hero Sardanapalus when his lovely Myrrha said, “I think the present is the wonted hour / Of council....”

My first introduction to the mediæval story of King Horn came through reading in the Year Book 1914–1924, published by the Viking Club of London, a review of Dr. Henry Goddard Leach's Angevin Britain and Scandinavia. The reviewer in discussing the story of Horn referred to the difficulty of fixing the location of “Suddene” where the action of the story had its beginning and end, and suggested that it may have been situated in South Wales. My first real acquaintance with the Horn story, however, as well as the problems with which it is involved, came through reading the scholarly essay, “The Story of Horn and Rimenhild,” by Professor William Henry Schofield.

Shortly into Werner Herzog's South American film Fitzcarraldo (1982), the Peruvian rubber baron Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy) asks the eponymous protagonist (Klaus Kinski) if he has ever seen a shrunken head. This paper argues that Fitzcarraldo's short, fumbling response (“Yes. I mean, no. Sort of …”) calls into question both the European tradition of representing the New World and the very status and nature of the film image. Close analysis of a single visual from the film also demonstrates the difficulty of constructing images endowed with what the director has called over the years “ecstatic truth.” Though critically praised for his unique vision, Herzog affiliates himself through Fitzcarraldo, however unknowingly, with a constellation of texts and practices having colonialist aims, extending all the way to Warhaftig Historia (1557), the controversial captivity narrative of the would-be German conquistador Hans Staden.

Students of Elizabethan drama have practically agreed that James IV is one of Robert Greene's last undoubted plays, if not the very last in point of composition. They have, for the most part, assigned it to a date in or near 1590, and Professor C. M. Gayley has gone far enough to suggest that its composition belongs to the month of July, 1590. Arguments hitherto given for dating the play rest upon certain qualities of its style and structure that indicate the maturity of the dramatist's workmanship, similarities between lines of the play and Peele's The Hunting of Cupid (entered in the Stationers' Register, July 26, 1591), and possible allusions to events which transpired in Ireland and France in or near the year 1590.

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.

The modern reader is wont to take with quiet enjoyment the mild irony implied in the delightful spirit of camaraderie with which the Eagle addresses “Geffrey” in Chaucer's The Hous of Fame:

“A ha!” quod he, “lo, so I can
Lewedly to a lewed man
Speke.“

By 1755 English dramatic audiences as well as English dramatic critics were less concerned with faults in the construction of Shakespeare's plays then they had been twenty years earlier. Largely because of Garrick's excellent acting, the focal point of Shakespearian criticism was shifting from consideration of plot structure to consideration of character delineation. But even though advance was being made in the new criticism as well as in the growth of Shakespeare idolatry, such a varied mixture of realistic material, classical mythology, and fairy lore as Shakespeare used in A Midsummer Night's Dream was bound to fail in presentation. Pepys, nearly one hundred years earlier (September 29, 1662), had seen the play and had remarked that it was the most insipid and ridiculous one he had ever witnessed in his life. In 1716 Richard Leveridge presented his Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe at Lincoln's Inn Fields, where it had nine performances (from April 11 of that year until September 9, 1723). As the title suggests, it was a brief handling of Bottom's playing artisans—a mere fragment of Shakespeare's play. On January 21, 1745 an anonymous Mock Opera, Pyramus and Thisbe, appeared at Covent Garden and enjoyed some twenty-two performances until April 13, 1748. The music was composed by John Frederick Lampe, and the play was slightly longer than Leveridge's. No other performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in any of its parts is recorded until 1755 when Garrick made his first attempt to give his audiences some more of the material of the play. He was wise, as subsequent events proved, not to try to present it at that time in its entirety. Yet he was vitally interested in the whole of the play and joined eight years later with his friend George Colman in an attempt to produce it in its Shakespearian form.

Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), an early collection of stories for children by Charles Alexander Eastman, a Dako$$ta author, was largely viewed by his critical contemporaries as a politically innocuous analogue to Kipling's Jungle Book Stories. Through consideration of the Dako$$ta oral-historical genre of hituᒋkaᒋkaᒋpi (“long ago stories”) and of Dako$$ta peoplehood more broadly, this article proposes an alternative view of Eastman as a resistance writer who cited a long-circulating Dako$$ta kinship philosophy to criticize the enduring conditions of United States settler colonialism—a criticism that would become more pointed in his later, better-known autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1915). In viewing Eastman's animal tales as opposed to United States colonialism, we may see more clearly his innovative translations of Dako$$ta politics into narratives that both appealed to and challenged United States settler society. These challenges were made in relation to Dako$$ta conceptions of peoplehood, power, and gift.

The publication by I. I. Glivenko of Dostoevski's notebooks, in part in 1924 and in full in 1931, and the consequent re-evaluation of his novels have disposed rather conclusively of the opinion, long held and still occasionally repeated, that Dostoevski, though prophet, philosopher, and psychologist, was not a craftsman; that under the pressure of debts, bad economic habits, and unscrupulous publishers—all true conditions—he patched his novels together as best he could—all untrue.

One of the characteristic features of English and of continental Romanticism was a widespread interest in the origins, nature, and meaning of the myths of the ancient world. Especially in England among classical scholars, antiquarians, and learned churchmen there was a zealous desire to resurrect divinities long forgotten and to find in them and their exploits a relevance for the modern age. One of the most characteristic and influential treatises on myth in the period was the Reverend Jacob Bryant's A New System, or, An Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774–76), an ambitious project whose purpose was “to rectify what time has impaired: to divest mythology of every foreign and unmeaning ornament, and to display the truth in its native simplicity.” He hoped thereby to give a “new turn to antient history, and to place it upon a surer foundation.” By hypothesizing that the Noachian Deluge was the focal event in ancient history and by seeking to show that its symbolism explained or elucidated the bulk of universal mythology, Bryant was confident that he was not only doing a service to knowledge but also that he was strengthening the premises of Christian truth. On similar diluvian hypotheses Thomas Maurice's Indian Antiquities (1793–1800), Edward Davies' The Mythology and the Rites of the British Druids (1809), and George Stanley Faber's The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816) attempted to achieve the same ends. Other notable researches in myth at the turn of the nineteenth century in England were those of Sir William Jones, the Orientalist, Sir William Drummond, the skeptic philosopher, and Richard Payne Knight, the art connoisseur. Well known also in learned circles was the more radically speculative mythologizing of such Frenchmen as Pierre Hugues (D'Hancarville), Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Charles François Dupuis.

On the evening of September 20, 1709, at about the hour when we are accustomed in our own theatres to see the curtain rising on the first act, an old man dressed in black clothes sat in a chair of state on the stage of the London Haymarket, and whispered for the last time, “The rest is silence.” Within the sound of his beautiful voice the wit and fashion of the capital were congregated, their customary laughter and chatter awed into stillness by the “divinity [that] hung round that man.” He had played the Prince for forty-eight years, and though he was now more than seventy, and occasionally younger men essayed the rôle, the “town” still preferred their old favorite.

Any critic writing on Polyeucle must come to grips with a problem that is specific to this particular play (not merely generic, as the conflict between two kinds of “love-duty”). He must ask himself, “Why did Corneille, the poet of heroic humanism, choose to write about Christian martyrdom?” I do not believe it is an adequate answer to say that he did not write about Christian martyrdom but, once again, about heroic humanism. It must have been obvious to Corneille that on the one hand martyrdom had something in common with heroism and on the other that it provided a new variation on the theme. The question, then, is to identify this new variation, to determine the quiddity of Polyeucte, the special light it throws on the Cornelian glorification of man. If Corneille's theater as a whole is about idealism, its potential and its dangers, then the Christian idealism of the martyr is particular in several ways. It demands the ultimate sacrifice, which is not necessarily demanded of the secular hero. The martyr must not only risk his life, he must give it. At the same time, it promises an ultimate in glory. Thus, both the “danger” and the “potential” are extreme. It is this aspect of martyrdom that enters the dramaturgy of Polyeucte in the conflicts between the heroic Christian idealism of Polyeucte and Néarque and the various forms and levels of religious and secular idealism represented by the other characters (and Polyeucte and Néarque) at different moments of the play. But there is a related yet even more fundamental aspect of martyrdom that is built into the fabric and structure of Polyeucle. As Tertullian wrote (A pologeticus, Ch. i), “The more you mow us down, the more quickly we grow; the blood of Christians is fresh seed.” Grace, working through the example of the martyr, leads others to augment the ranks of the Christians. It is this theme of emulation that is central in Polyeucte and forms the link between the two worlds of heroic humanism and Christian martyrdom. As has often been pointed out, admiration is a key emotion in Corneille's theatre. But it is not solely an emotion the playwright hopes to evoke in the spectator; it is also a basic response of many characters to the noble and courageous actions of other characters and a response they hope to arouse in others by their own actions. Now the term admiration, the act of gazing at with wonder, can (and did at times in the Latin) imply strong approval and desire. Admiration may, as it very often does in Corneille, lead to emulation. I should like to suggest that in this theme the seventeenth-century dramatist discovered a religious analogue to the admiring imitation of a model or an ideal self-image that we find typical of so many of his secular heroes.

This article reads the work of F. W. Maitland, a foundational figure in medieval legal scholarship, as an extended meditation on the theory and practice of writing history. Because Maitland's scholarship not only occupies a central place in two disciplines (law and history) but also negotiates the competing demands of an older, narrative form of historiography and the newer, scientific discourses of sociology and anthropology, his writing illustrates the persistence of certain epistemological and methodological questions. In particular, it reveals a deep interest in the modes through which history is figured. Recognizing that history is epistemologically constructed through and by tropes—metaphor, metonymy, analogy—each with its own conceptual and practical logic, Maitland turns to a notion of metaphoric history to productively sustain the tension between the abstract and the concrete, the whole and the part, that haunts nineteenth-century history writing.

A number of critics have commented upon Holden Caulfield's “neurosis,” but none has accepted Salinger's apparent invitation to a psychoanalytical reading of the novel. As a step in that direction, this paper examines a structural pattern of aggression and withdrawal, largely sexual, in Holden's thoughts and actions. The pattern is reinforced by such characters as Stradlater and Ackley, the former mirroring Holden's mostly fanciful exploitativeness and the latter his more natural tendencies toward retrogression. The episodic middle chapters show Holden vacillating desperately between those tendencies; and the conflict is brought to a curious resolution in the concluding Phoebe section when Holden verges, or rather unconsciously fears he may be verging, on sexual intimacy with his younger sister. The two tendencies converge at that point, and Holden becomes potentially both sexually exploitative and retrogressive. It is this revelation, realized most fully through the writing of his narrative, that points the way to health.

Interpretations of Wuthering Heights often focus upon the grand passions of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and the striking bond between them. But full and detailed consideration of the novel discourages the assumption that Emily Brontë is wholeheartedly endorsing their point of view, or any other. She consistently presents all her characters, Heathcliff and Catherine included, as blind to the world as others see it, and consequently as holding views that do not do justice to the fullness of things. Largely because of their myopia, all are ever at odds with one another, often physically, but usually conceptually, engaging in indecisive wars of words, benighted battles of too limited views. The battles occur as well within Catherine and Heathcliff, whose divided hearts reflect the confused divisions in the world at large. And the reader is fully implicated in the inconclusive conflicts, for his formulations and sympathies are repeatedly betrayed. Wuthering Heights provides him with no standard of judgment that comprehends the restricted ones of the characters, no privileged point of view to relieve his uncertainties. Whatever her intentions, Emily Brontë is clearly not just throwing her being vicariously into the lives of Heathcliff and Catherine. She possesses strong critical impulses and many contrary views, only one of them being that of Heathcliff.

This article situates the graphic narrative form within the current politics of protest movements. It argues that the graphic narrative captures the forms of civil disobedience that shape late-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century protest. Protest movements increasingly operate within, or in accordance with, the systems they seek to challenge. The graphic narrative, similarly, combines complicity and critique in its narrative style and structure. The argument draws on two examples from different regional and political contexts—Vishwajyoti Ghosh's graphic narrative about the years of emergency rule in India in the 1970s, Delhi Calm, and Amir Soltani and Khalil's work on Iran's Green movement, Zahra's Paradise—to show how the global graphic narrative acts as an archive of popular protests that inform present-day movements and offers a platform for those movements to perform civic action. It advocates a new formalist approach to the global graphic narrative as a popular protest form.

Journey to Mecca (; al-Rihla al-Makkiyya; 1941), by the distinguished Moroccan historian and legal scholar Ahmad al-Rahuni, recounts a hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, sponsored by the fascist Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1937. Franco's support for the hajj was part of a vast propaganda effort to cast Franco's Spain as a friend of Islam and a defender of the cultural heritage of al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Iberia). Al-Rahuni's travel narrative blurs the line between Mecca and Spain by casting Spain's Islamic heritage sites as a metaphoric Mecca to which Muslims should make pilgrimage. The account thus highlights the collaboration between Spanish fascists and Moroccan elites. It also complicates the dominant scholarly narratives about modern Arabic literature, which have tended to focus on Egypt, the novel, and secular epistemologies. Al-Rahuni's text speaks, instead, to the persistence of Arabic prose genres that do not conform to a Eurocentric notion of literature.