In Vanity Fair Thackeray moves beyond the inherited traditions of moral and social satire as his vision of society darkens and as he realizes the anarchic potentials of laughter and satire. Examining not the particular ills of a certain society, but the diseased structures inherent in civilization itself, Thackeray creates a world defined by madness and emptiness; in it satire holds little sway. In trying to locate alternatives to or a way out of an apparently inexorable pattern of death and destruction, Thackeray looks, through the image of childhood, toward a pastoral vision, one that assumes various and yet similar configurations for those characters who travel into this visionary landscape. As Charlotte Brontë intuited, Thackeray's novel embodies both the impulses of the moral and social satirist and those of the visionary or prophet. It is the final irreconcilability of these double impulses that accounts for much of the power and haunting quality of Vanity Fair.

So many brilliant critics and scholars have interpreted the metaphysical image that one hesitates to push the analysis farther, but analysis and theory are justified if they throw new light on a subject or show a possible relationship between things that had previously seemed independent. The question is not whether metaphysical poetry can be analyzed more fully, but whether one simple, underlying peculiarity can be found to explain some of the characteristics of this type of verse and to show that these disiecta membra are of a piece. The underlying quality that appears to connect many of the seemingly unrelated features of metaphysical poetry might be called the dynamic image.

The first translator of the Arabian Nights (Paris, 1704-17) was Antoine Galland. Almost immediately translated into English, Galland's popular collection remained the only version of the Nights known in Europe throughout the century. Convinced that Swift had read it, twentieth-century scholars Pietro Toldo and William A. Eddy show that the tale “Hassân-al-Bassri” was a source for Brobdingnag; the passages they quote come from the modern French translation of J. C. Mardrus, and bear a great similarity to Gulliver's second voyage. Swift, however, could not have known “Hassân” for it is omitted by Galland. Because of the differences between Galland's Nights and later versions, studies in eighteenth-century source criticism must work with early texts. Curiously, of all versions of “Hassan” only Mardrus relates the episode in question, which may explain why his translation is anathematized by Arabists as distorting the erotic content of the original. Recent inquiry also discloses that the episode is missing in known Arabic sources. It is almost certain that Mardrus fabricated the passages cited by Toldo and Eddy; it may even be argued that he plagiarized Swift.

In his admirable paper upon the sources of Browning's Childe Roland, Mr. Harold Golder shows from what a rich storehouse of nursery tale, poetry, and romance the poet drew for many of the incidents that go to make up that poem. Childe Roland is such a synthetic poem that the problem of finding satisfactory sources for it is not simple. Nor is it made easier by Browning's stubborn insistence that the only true source of the poem is the line from King Lear. But it has been impossible to be content with Browning's statement, and critic after critic has ransacked ballad, fairy tale and legend to find the origin of the simples which the poet has compounded in his poem. In the light of Browning's statement, the problem becomes one of “establishing a subconscious connection between Edgar's maudlin words and the material from which Browning obviously drew”; in other words, we must find for the sources of Childe Roland materials so familiar to Browning at the impressionable time of his life as to have become a part of his own mental character, and further, the materials must be such as would definitely suggest the images which appear in the poem.

In discussing the date of the Eddie poems one must carefully distinguish three factors: the date of their written compilation or recording, the date of their actual composition by the poet, and the age of the mythological, legendary and other material which they contain. In speaking of the age of the Eddie poems it is clear that we are referring to the second factor, the creative act of the poet, which, so far as we know, did not contemplate immediate written record either by himself or a scribe. It is by no means superfluous, however, to emphasize the distinction of the first two factors mentioned, as, in the case of the sagas, they have not yet been entirely disentangled. A consideration of the first and third factors is furthermore not without value, as it must be clear that the poems are not younger than the time of their written record and not older than their original content. The recording may be much later, the content much older, than the date of composition. These, however, if they can be established, furnish the most definite termini ad quern and a quo respectively. If the recording was actually centuries later than the time of composition we shall expect to find corruptions of various sorts, such as interpolations and transposition of stanzas and verses, with which we are abundantly familiar in the case of the popular ballads. This allows great leeway for textual criticism, in which, as experience has shown, critics are prone to disagree. Similarly, if the original content is centuries older than the time of composition of the poems, it is reasonable to suppose that the content will have been profoundly affected in its passage through the centuries. If we take as an example the Nibelungenlied, whose date of composition is approximately known, its original content of the time of the Germanic migrations has been in places so affected by the later medieval institutions and ideals of life, which have thereby become an important part of the content, that the terminus a quo would by this very fact be pushed far beyond the time of the migrations. Analogies of this sort may be of value in an effort to date the Eddie poems, but the question is here somewhat confused by the question of possible interpolations.

Several bibliographies have been compiled, during the last fifty years, of those altered versions of Shakespeare's plays which form so illuminating a chapter in the history of the Restoration stage, and indeed of the English theatre in general. Unfortunately, the most scholarly of these lists have usually been minor appendices to works of wider scope, and are not unnaturally here and there inaccurate in detail. Perhaps the best is the most recent, Miss Bartlett's, in her handy bibliography, Mr. William Shakespeare; but there is no entirely trustworthy list, since all of them neglect to include at least one important item, the altered Hamlet, and most of them do include several plays which are either not adaptations of Shakespeare or not adaptations at all. I propose, therefore, to supply a more accurate bibliography, preceding it by a list of those now available, and supplementing it with a statement of the reasons for not counting as Shakespeare adaptations certain dramas which have long held their places in this inglorious roll of theatrical ineptitude.

A close literary analysis of the text shows that Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg is an artful antimorality play with parodistic parallels to Everyman and Faust. The confrontation and interrelation of the “big” and the “small” provide a thematic and structural pattern on both the political and the social levels of the play. Love, faith, and work of the “little” are exploited by the “big.” Scattered revolution and traditional virtues prove useless in an attempt to fight and survive a totalitarian system. Schweyk is caught between a “big” enemy and a “big” friend. As a typical representative of the “little man” he is pitted against Hitler, whose plans he sabotages by a devious method of opportunism mixed with opposition; as an individual he is also contrasted with the fat glutton Baloun, whom he tries to help. In both respects he is “virtuous.” However, the juxtaposition of Schweyk in the icy Russian steppes and Baloun in the cozy “Keich” inn marks two contradictory, yet interrelated extremes of human existence. Brecht subtly points the way out of these undesirable paradoxes. Only if the “little” resolve their differences will they truly cease to be “little.” Schweyk's virtues and Brecht's “Schweykian philosophy” are dictated by circumstances; they are not meant to be of permanent value.

We have no Adequate Lexicon for dealing with the transformation of racial orders. Recently, commentators have sought to pinpoint a shift in racial meanings by announcing the advent of a “postidentity,” “postracial,” or “cosmopolitan” social order. These appellations suggest that we are now past racial or identity politics in some crucial way. But it is not so much that we have gone beyond race as that race has gone beyond us, morphing at a speed with which academic expertise has not kept pace. The content of racial, gender, and sexual identities has been significantly transformed, and this change has, in turn, fostered the illusion that we no longer inhabit racialized realities—hence the proliferation of posts to tell us that temporally and politically we are no longer where we were. The representational strain of dealing with the elusive and dynamic qualities of racial and sexual identities makes us too eager to declare that we are over difference. The recourse to posts seems, however, more an admission of helplessness at identifying the nature of the shift than a sign of transcendence. It stems from our dependence on social schemas that offer us only two options: we are in the racial order or we are out of it. But we are not out of it, not yet. And herein lies a rare opening for the humanistic study of race.

Through the gracious courtesy of the Hungarian authorities I have been permitted to seek for Slavonic material in the Royal Hungarian National Museum. I was gratified to find that owing to a millennium of close contacts between the Magyar and the Slav, Budapest contains much interesting material. During this search I was fortunate enough to come upon the unpublished manuscript which is here reproduced. It was found by itself and was not a part of any collection. For purposes of identification I suggest calling it Slovak Manuscript M.M.C.

The poet Wordsworth has been for a century the synonym of wholesomeness and piety. It is only within the past decade that it has become the fashion to regard him as a dangerous influence. There is a school of critics at the present moment who go about sadly shaking their heads over Wordsworth's case. They think it a pity that, like Shelley, he should have devoted so fine a talent to the propagation of a subtly vicious teaching.

Concentration on the ascetic element in Puritanism has led to a misunderstanding of the Puritans' attitude towards style and the use of figurative language. Kenneth Murdock cites as characteristic of Puritan style in prose and poetry a tension arising from the conflict of theoretical asceticism with a recognition that practical effectiveness in preaching demanded an appeal to man's senses. “Constantly one feels in Puritan literature,” writes Murdock, “a conflict between the desire to convince and persuade by the readiest means, and the determination never to cross the line into pleasing the sensual man.” Thus, though the Puritan writer generally depreciated the power of words as dead things incapable of conveying the living truth, “he used figures of speech … because he knew that whatever the ideal potency of divine truth might be, fallen man responded most directly to it when some concessions were made to his errant fancy.” This resembles the theory of accommodation, and Mr. Murdock calls it by that name when he cites Richard Baxter as a kind of authority for the stylistic practice of American Puritans. While he admits that it is, in a strict sense, “borrowed and improper,” Baxter justifies his use of figurative language in terms of its usefulness and effectiveness. The American Puritans, armed with Baxter's “doctrine of accommodation,” formed their literary theory “in an attempt to answer the old riddle of how infinite and eternal variety is to be expressed in the finite terms comprehensible to mortal man.”

In confuting Schlegel's ideas on the rôle of the chorus in Greek tragedy, Nietzsche said that he believed in an aesthetic audience and thought the single spectator to be the more capable, the more he was able to take the work of art as art, namely aesthetically. Some forty years thereafter modern drama felt called upon to awaken the spectator from his “illusionist period”—as if there had been any danger that, again in Nietzsche's words, the ideal spectator might rush onto the stage to free the God from his torment. Yet to prevent this once and for all seems to have been one of the foremost axioms of the Expressionist and kindred revolts of the first decade of this century.

The proceedings somehow opened. The talking and laughing and shuffling suddenly subsided … a figure rose; she took her way from among us; she mounted a platform; she spoke for precisely five minutes; she descended. Directly she sat down another rose; mounted the platform; spoke for precisely five minutes and descended; then a third rose; then a fourth—and so it went on, speaker following speaker, one from the right, one from the left, one from the middle, one from the background—each took her way to the stand, said what she had to say, and gave place to her successor. … They were like marksmen, I thought, standing up in turn with rifle raised to aim at a target. Sometimes they missed, and there was a roar of laughter; sometimes they hit, and there was a roar of applause. (Woolf 229)

This article reexamines the role of the folding fan in Mallarmé's poetics by placing the fan in the context of its history as an art form, its evolving significance in European and East Asian culture, and its practical materiality as a writing medium. The fan is uniquely important in Mallarmé's lifelong quest to challenge the standard written and print media and to transfigure the physical form of the book into a work of art fully implicated in its literary content. The fan is a flexible, hybrid medium that resolves Mallarmé's numerous and contradictory criteria for the ideal book. It is also a metaphor and an instrument of thought. The essay attempts, therefore, to think like and with Mallarmé: taking its cue from the fan, it unfolds the fan's material aspects and tropological incarnations until it reaches the butterfly, Mallarmé's choice symbol of poetic flight and evanescence.

In 1949, A. Norman Jeffares declared that, although Yeats's poetry “had reblossomed in The Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921], the flowering came with The Tower” [1928]. In 1954, Richard Ellmann called The Tower and The Winding Stair “the two finest volumes” of the period 1917–33. Today, this estimate is the generally accepted one: B. Rajan has recently written, “With The Tower and The Winding Stair, Yeats's writing comes fully into its strength and words respond completely to the poem's call to order. To say that Yeats was incapable of writing a bad poem during this phase is an exaggeration, but one within the limits of critical licence.”