The dating of Shelley's prose essays and fragments is at present very uncertain. Mary Shelley's dates in the preface to Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations, and Fragments, 1840, are, for the most part, conjectures. W. M. Rossetti in A Memoir of Shelley gives briefly, without systematic evidence, the dates of some of the fragments. Forman and the Julian editors follow, with some exceptions, Rossetti's dating in their editions of Shelley's prose. Koszul laid a more secure foundation for the dating of some of Shelley's prose. His study of the external evidence of the MSS in the Bodleian notebook has resulted in considerable progress. The present writer has approached the problem of dating Shelley's prose from a study of the internal evidence which consists, in a large measure, of the study of the relation of Shelley's prose to his reading as found in the Journal of Shelley and Mary, Shelley's letters, and other biographical sources. Shelley's quotations, references, and allusions to his reading supply valuable information for dating. Some of the prose fragments, hitherto undated, are assigned a date, while the date of others is changed, confirmed, or given more precise limits. It should be acknowledged, however, that Shelley's wide variety of reading, and the extraordinary tenacity of his memory make for caution in dating works too confidently on the basis of internal evidence. Until such time as Shelley's prose MSS are studied as minutely, thoroughly, and systematically as the MSS of the Bodleian notebook, the dates of the fragments given in the following notes may serve as tentative points d'appui for a study of the development of Shflley's thought.

The publication of fourteen epigrams by Sir John Harington in Henry Parrot's Springes for Woodcocks (1613) is gaining recognition as a leading case in the study of Elizabethan literary ethics. Doubtless encouraged by the opportunity to pun on Parrot's name, two contemporaries, John Davies of Hereford and Richard Brathwaite, attacked him for this minor outrage. Their blunt charge that Parrot “stole” epigrams contrasts with the usual mild accusation of “borrowing,” and indicates an increasing appreciation of literary rights. Considerable importance is attached to the case in Professor Harold Ogden White's recent study of literary ethics, but he does not examine the underlying facts, and he only briefly cites the documents.

Yael Farber's Molora blends themes from the Oresteia, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Xhosa folk singing to produce an aspirational vision for an equitable postapartheid South Africa. This blending draws on ubuntu ethics—the living philosophy that holds that subjects become properly human only through their interaction with others and a commitment to making the world better—by combining these cultural forms and signs without hierarchically privileging any. Farber's revision of the plotline of the Oresteia emphasizes human community because the chorus of Xhosa women collectively introduce order and justice, as opposed to the imposition of order and justice by Athena in Aeschylus's play. The chorus protects Elektra and Orestes from violence and offers them—as well as Klytemnestra—the chance to return to a human community through forgiveness and the renunciation of violence. This is precisely ubuntu's aspiration.

From the Elizabethan prosodists we shall obtain no more than a few scattered hints concerning Donne's versification. Prosodists are notoriously conservative, and the Elizabethans are no exception. Putten-ham, in spite of his evident pleasure in the sound of verse, still places his confidence in the final arbitration of the eye; and it is thus that he comments on the diagram of a stanza-form: “most times your occular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible; for if it please the eare well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well, and e converso.” This ocular prosody leads him to say that “it is somewhat more tolerable to help the rime by false orthographie then to leave an unplesant dissonance to the eare by keeping trewe orthographie and loosing the rime, as for example it is better to rime Dore with Restore then in his truer orthographie, which is Doore.” Even with the rise of lyric and of dramatic blank verse this attitude does not disappear. Campion, for instance, makes the sensible remark that normal accent “is diligently to be observ'd, for chiefely by the accent in any language the true value of the sillables is to be measured.” And he knows that “we must esteeme our sillables as we speake, not as we write; for the sound of them in a verse is to be valued, and not their letters.” Yet he inconsistently admits length by position, as in Trumpington.

From Comparative Literature to Cultural Renewal: Georg Brandes's 1872 Introduction to Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature

“The only literature that is alive today is one that provokes debate.” These words ring out in the first published version of a lecture Georg Brandes gave at the University of Copenhagen on 3 November 1871. The lecture was the introduction to a series that changed the course not only of his life but also of Scandinavian and European cultural history. Born in Copenhagen in 1842 to assimilated Jewish parents, Brandes had recently completed a dissertation on French aesthetics and literary criticism and hoped that his lecture series would allow him to replace Carsten Hauch as professor of aesthetics at the university. Brilliant and iconoclastic, the lectures also responded to the Danish defeat in the 1864 war with Prussia, portraying Danish literature and culture as morbidly inward and insular. Brandes urged his countrymen to look abroad, to traditions such as the French, whose literature included many notable writers who grappled with social and political issues, especially those who came of age during the revolutions of 1789 and 1830.

To distinguish between the course of rhetorical ideas, and the growth of style on the one hand, and of systematic rhetoric on the other, is perhaps to endeavor after too nice a distinction. Yet when we read sixteenth-century English, we may see, between the general effort to use prose with effect and the rather arid sequence of treatises on formal rhetoric, certain definite ideas on prose expression, certain views as to the best vocabulary, certain views on sentence-structure or figures of speech. The frank, vigorous prose of Latimer has style of a sort, the slight treatise of Cox has system. Neither the one thing nor the other is the opinion pro and con as to inkhorn words, for example. The following paper notes in the direction of the vocabulary only, a conscious effort to determine some fundamental principles which should obtain in the use of English as a means of literary expression.

Patrick Süskind's best-selling novel Das Parfum applies the postmodern literary practice of pastiche and playful allusion to pursue a critical purpose: an adumbration of the destructive logic that underpins the instrumental reason of Enlightenment culture. Süskind's critique is informed by ideas put forward by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialektik der Aufklärung and by the sociohistorical methodology of the Annales historiographers. In the Active history of Grenouille, the monstrous master perfumer who murders young women to capture and exploit their aromatic “essences,” Süskind depicts the will to power and overpowering fundamental to enlightened reason. This parabolic histoire des mentalités of Enlightenment culture is thrown into relief by two strategic moves: the transposition of the Enlightenment's visual prejudices into the olfactory domain and the contextualization of Grenouille's development as perfumer in the history of Western aesthetics. Süskind thereby implicates modernist aesthetic sensibilities in the dialectic of Enlightenment.

The earlier poets in the English meditative tradition, Southwell, Alabaster, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, were all poets of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic tendency, where the Continental art of meditation found a fertile ground in which to develop an English counterpart. It is significant that all five of these earlier poets became priests: Southwell, bred and executed as a Catholic; Alabaster, shifting from Anglican to Catholic to Anglican; Donne, born and bred a Catholic, but turning finally to the English Church; Crashaw, born and bred a Protestant, but turning finally to the Roman Church; and Herbert, happy all his life within the English communion. They had their doctrinal differences, and I do not wish to minimize those differences; but they had something more in common: a devotion to the central mysteries of the Passion, a devotion to the symbols and a liturgy that served to celebrate those mysteries. All would have agreed with George Herbert's vision of “The Agonie”: Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike Did set again abroach; then let him say If ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

A comparison of narrative and lyric conceptions of temporality in Dickinson's poetry sheds light on that group of her poems in which a story is begun only to be violently broken into and disrupted. Defining life as a series of alternatives, the poems establish a dialectic, but seemingly for the sake of dismissing it as inadequate. The dismissal is frequently one of rage at all that is temporal, all that has a history whose requirement is sacrifice and choice. Such Dickinson poems can end in disorder, and they are examined here in the context of other lyrics that equally seem to pin their hopes on the belief that a verbal sabotage of sequence will trigger a temporal one, that, grown sufficiently desperate, the maneuvers of speech can stop time dead.

One of Shakespeare's first and most formative intellectual legacies, with major influence on his shaping of sources in the historical tetralogies, was Elizabethan thought on the relationship of God, Fortune, and war. For the Henry vi plays, the legacy offered a thematically appropriate concept of Fortune, with humanly meaningless skirmishes and futile stratagems, pointing nevertheless toward the ultimate control of God over Fortune. For Richard iii Shakespeare chose a divinely governed war, with Richmond as a passive instrument having little character. The second tetralogy employs the most dramatically advantageous stage of the legacy: a transitional, confused period when necessity for human responsibility in war becomes first, and somewhat ambiguously, recognized (Richard iii) and then disturbingly, though covertly, prominent and Machiavellian (Henry iv and Henry v). The experience in these formative plays of trying to resolve the conflicting demands of supernatural control and human resourcefulness helped prepare Shakespeare for tragic resolutions deeper than those of military victory or defeat.

Bernhard Suphan selber hat einmal bemerkt, dass “Herder in Luthers Schriften bewandert war wie wenige” Menschen des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts und dass “keiner von den klassischen Zeitgenossen die Grösse des Reformators in so vollen Tönen und zu alien Zeiten gerühmt hat wie er.” Dies wichtige Gesamturteil, dem auch Rudolf Haym nicht widerspricht, weist auf den beträchtlichen Umfang der herderschen Lutherkenntnisse wie auch auf den hohen Grad seiner Lutheranerken-nung hin, insofern manche andere Deutsche der Herderzeit, vor allem Hamann und Lessing, ebenfalls über ein beachtliches Lutherwissen verfügten und den Reformater gehörig lobten. Ist Klopstocks Lutherinteresse vorwiegend sprachlich-künstlerisch, Goethes und Schillers trotz mancher Feinheit und Prägnanz doch mehr peripherisch als zentral, so ist die Lutherkenntnis Hamanns, Herders und Lessings erheblich umfassender. Bei allem Gemeinsamen nun in dem Lutherbilde der drei Letztgenannten bestehen aber auch zwischen ihnen wesentliche Unterschiede in ihrer Stellung zu Luther, Unterschiede, die sich bis in den Kern ihrer verschiedenen Persönlichkeiten erstrecken. In Herders Verhältnis zu Luther lassen sich im allgemeinen drei Hauptepochen unterscheiden, die Rigaer, die Bückeburger und die Weimarer, von denen die letzte wegen ihrer Länge wie auch wegen ihrer Reichhaltigkeit in zwei Unterteile zerfällt, die Jahrzehnte von 1776 bis 1786 und, nach einem mehr als fünfjährigen Schweigen über Luther, von 1792 bis zu Herders Tod. Innerhalb dieser einzelnen Epochen jedoch wird die Darstellung nicht streng chronologisch verfahren, sondern, ohne Ansprüche auf Vollständigkeit bei der Masse des Materials, nur das Wesentliche mehr systematisch als historisch vorzulegen sich bemühen. Allein Hauptgesichtspunkte und Hauptentwicklungslinien können im Rahmen dieses Aufsatzes berücksichtigt werden.

No wonder students of Middle English literature are concentrating on systems of exegesis, symbolism, spiritual and liturgical exercise. These traditional lores convey ideas, and it is the ideas in medieval poetic works that often seem most valuable. Everywhere abound explicit propositions and exhortations: society is corrupt, man is fate's victim, bend your will to God's. Implicit notions about destiny, justice, and will seem to move behind veils of narrative and description, even to stir within the verbal devices adorning these veils. When routed out of poetic works, such ideas seem fully comprehensible; in fact, they do not differ essentially from those to be found in works of theology, philosophy, and homily, and they seem shaped by the same tools of rhetoric and dialectic. No wonder people are more intrigued by these pearls than by the oysters in which they live.

Since its initial vogue during the lifetime of Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece has received short shrift from the general public and little more attention from critics and scholars. This relative neglect has done much to obscure the actual importance of the poem; for, quite apart from its intrinsic merits as poetry, The Rape of Lucrece constitutes one of the most explicit and illuminating documents which bear upon Shakespeare's development, and especially upon his coming of age as an artist. Written almost certainly during the year immediately preceding its registration on 9 May 1594, and hence in the interval between Shakespeare's apprentice experiments in the theater and his mature dramatic achievements with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the poem provides unique information about Shakespeare at a crucial point in his career. Frankly advertised, moreover, as a serious poem on a serious theme, it bears every evidence of having been undertaken by its author as a premeditated and highly self-conscious bid for recognition as a serious literary artist. Indeed, in the deliberate thoughtfulness of its conception and the conscientious care of its execution The Rape of Lucrece is one of the most laborious and studied works of art that Shakespeare ever produced. And as such, it affords a revealing index to the kind of thinking imposed on its creator at the time, and by the process, of its creation.

German romanticism extends over a relatively long period, since in part it goes back to the ideas of Herder and the Storm and Stress movement in the seventies of the eighteenth century. Within narrower limits, one may assign to it the period from the seventeen-nineties to about 1830, when it was challenged by the Young German Movement. Obviously, however, this does not mark the end of its influence. To give a brief account of so complex and varied a movement, and to attempt to generalize in the face of marked individual differences is an undertaking beset with pitfalls.

Whether reflecting the social theme in a drama alive to contemporary issues, or reacting to the jaded taste of a theatrical clientele, or probing individually for the most effective delineation of man's tragic plight, the Jacobean dramatists explore a view of life more somber and pessimistic than their Elizabethan counterparts.

John Ford represents the culmination of this basic dramaturgical trend. In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore he creates central figures whose affection, if unrighteous, is also intensely sincere and whose aberrant conduct must be weighed against the treachery and hypocrisy of the society whose morality the lovers have rejected. The anagnorisis as well as the protagonist is doubled, and the spectator is left to choose between the wisdom of Annabella's Christian repentance and Giovanni's stoic insistence on the sanctity of private values. The result is a fundamentally pessimistic view of life in which man's challenge is the ambiguity of moral values constantly frustrating his search for a meaningful life.

The eighteenth century is the century of parody. Its critical attitude of mind accorded with the ungenerous and censorious irreverence of these farces. The wise and witty petit-maître was entirely too frigid and too supercilious not to sneer at the sublime attitudes of tragic stage-heroes, at the tearful Men of Feeling of budding Romanticism, at the dry seriousness of the savant or the metrical enthusiasm of the poet. Moreover, as the number of literates increased and furnished a steadily growing group of readers and theater-goers, the number of the æsthetically obtuse who came into contact with books or the stage, increased proportionally. And, in all times, they form the predestined public of the parodist. Unimaginative and pedestrian, gifted with a sturdy sense of reality, they are not easily beguiled by the illusions created in us by a work of art; they steadily perceive the abyss that gapes between Dream and Fact. From these two groups, the half-lettered bourgeois and the shallow fops, the parodist recruited the main body of his followers: he catered to the æsthetically mediocre. His public was large. As long as he kept his burlesques within the bounds of a rough and ready buffoonery, analogous to the modern Revue de fin d'année or to slap-stick comedy, he could count upon success.