Of all the Euphuists, Robert Greene was the one most fascinated by the rhetorical possibilities provided for literature by science. Similes and allusions drawn from the storehouse of natural history appear on almost every page of his work. One counts references to more than thirty animals, forty minerals and precious stones, fifteen reptiles, thirty birds, fifteen fish, twenty trees, fifteen insects, and sixty herbs in the corpus of his prose romances. The number of his allusions must total almost a thousand—a staggering mass of material for such a mercurial mind to retain. What is the origin of all this learning?

Twenty years after its publication in 1942, Camus's short novel L'Etranger has preserved its wide appeal through its haunting intensity, strange simplicity, and virile freshness. However, the general overemphasis on the philosophical significance of the story, the failure to deal with certain literary aspects, and the obscure or ambiguous features of the novel seem to call for a new appraisal of Camus's masterpiece.

As Heinrich Zimmer—GGA (1890), p. 818, n. 1—saw correctly, the name Arthur is the regular derivative of the Lat. Artorius in Brythonic. Thurneysen—ZCPh, xx (1933), 136—remarks: “Zimmer hatte gesehen, dass Arthur die regelmässige britannische Entwicklung von lat. (Artor oder) Artorius sein kann”, the long Lat. o becoming u in Celtic.

The MLA is a vital association whose aim is to maintain the study of languages and literatures as a necessary and basic component of our culture. Its evolution in the last few years, guided by the suggestions of the membership and implemented by the central MLA Headquarters’ Executive Director and staff, corresponds to the evolution in our cultural and educational situation. But in 1975 the Association, whether as a whole or via its individual members, has not taken any effective stand to counteract the deleterious effects upon the profession of an economic and cultural regression that is threatening the future of humanistic study in schools and universities. An overall effort to counteract the present trend is indispensable.

… of antres vast and desarts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak, such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It has usually been assumed that Othello's adventures came to Shakespeare out of the pages of Mandeville or Pliny. There is, however, another possibility and one likely to offer a far more exciting invitation to a poet with Shakspere's keen sensitivity to visual impressions. There is a startling resemblance between the items in the passage quoted and the quaintly decorated Renaissance maps.

An annotated transcription, with commentary, of the texts of two letters (21 July 1762 and 3 October 1765) in Baretti's recently discovered commonplace book. The letters offer autobiographical insight into Baretti's various disappointments and persecutions on the continent. The first one provides the original to which Johnson's letter of 21 December 1762 (Chapman, No. 147), one of his best known, is the reply.

In the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery there is a letter from Sir Philip Sidney to the sons of Joachim Camerarii, which has been published once, without comment, but I am now able to offer improved readings and to trace some of its background. As this letter was not printed with complete accuracy before, the text is now given in full:

This text was written as a talk for a particular occasion, the Presidential Address on 9 January 2015 during the MLA Annual Convention in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have not removed the traces of this occasion from the text because they are integral to its argument about sites of memory. I hope my readers will imagine themselves as auditors gathered in a large room in the West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre, built on the edge of a waterway called Burrard Inlet (fig. 1). That waterway, which is represented in several of the images that accompany this text, had—and still has—a different name in the languages of the indigenous peoples who have inhabited the Vancouver area since before it became part of an American hemisphere. Names, in languages that are ancient but also modern, are a key topic in the reflections that follow.

I'm grateful to you for the gift of your time. Though my talk explores a view of historical time as a multidirectional and multidimensional phenomenon, I'm aware that our shared time in this room goes in one direction in the simple sense that we'll all be older when this session ends, and probably even more hungry, thirsty, and tired than we are now. I've found that the MLA convention sometimes feels like a memory marathon, with special testings of the brain muscles that allow us to recognize faces and recall the first and last names of acquaintances, and even of good friends, whom we haven't seen for a while. Such experiences of remembering and forgetting contributed to my decision to focus on the MLA itself as one of the two sites of memory I want to explore with you this evening. The other site I want to think about is Vancouver, the place where we are now: a modern city built on a site where humans have been living for the last eight to ten millennia (Carlson 12-16).

The year 2008 was one of fruitful disjunctions. I spent the fall teaching at Stanford but commuting to the University of California, Los Angeles, to cochair the inaugural Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities. During the same period, I was curating—at the Canadian Center for Architecture, in Montreal—an exhibition devised to mark the centenary of the publication of “The Founding Manifesto of Futurism,” by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Whereas other centennial shows (at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, and at the Palazzo Reale, in Milan) sought to celebrate the accomplishments and legacies of Marinetti's avant-garde, the Canadian exhibition, Speed Limits, was critical and combative in spirit, more properly futurist (though thematically antifuturist). It probed the frayed edges of futurism's narrative of modernity as the era of speed to reflect on the social, environmental, and cultural costs. An exhibition about limits, it looked backward over the architectural history of the twentieth century to look forward beyond the era of automobility.

An Understanding of the purposes and the popularity of Young's Night Thoughts is possible only through a realization of their relation to contemporary currents of thought. For the most part critics have confined their attention to the so-called personal element and the treatment of the theme of death, and have neglected perhaps the most outstanding feature of the Night Thoughts, the interest in Christian apologetics. Though the nine poems reveal a shift in emphasis and purpose—the first five, of 459, 694, 536, 842, and 1068 lines respectively, chiefly concerned with moral reflections on life and death, and the last four, of 819, 1480, 1417, and 2434 lines, almost wholly devoted to apologetics—there is throughout a fairly definite effort to defend one phase or other of religion. This rationalistic defence of religion places the poems in the current of apologetic literature so outstanding in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Analysis of Young's aims and arguments will show to what extent he is following those of the outstanding defenders of religion and demonstrate that the Night Thoughts are to be considered as largely an expression of contemporary apologetics.

It is dangerous writing on marble, where one cannot make errata, or mend in a second edition,“ Jonathan Swift once remarked about an epitaph to be placed in St. Patrick's Cathedral. The Latin phrases he framed for his own epitaph, to be set up in that cathedral in Dublin, have been variously considered ”scarce intelligible,“ ”terrible,“ the ”best clue to Swift,“ and ”the greatest epitaph in history.“ They have more than once been offered as proof that he was not deeply a Christian but that he ”hated the chains of oppression more than the shackles of sin.“ Because of W. B. Yeats's version of it in the form of English verse, Swift's epitaph now has a double identity: as an unusually controversial eighteenth-century biographical document, and as a familiar twentieth-century work of literature.

Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) is remembered primarily for the two feats of which she was proudest, publishing Ulysses and “STEERing a little bookshop for about twenty-two years between the two wars,” as she puts it in the text reprinted here. Her “little bookshop,” Shakespeare and Company, was for Ernest Hemingway “a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living” (35). In 1919, with support from Adrienne Monnier, the owner of a neighboring bookstore, Beach launched the Left Bank shop that would serve as a hub for French and expatriate writers.1 In her 1959 memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Beach tells stories of her friends and patrons, who included F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valéry, Simone de Beauvoir, HD (Hilda Doolittle), Samuel Beckett, and many others. Beach also describes there her other great feat, the publication of Ulysses. When British and American printers were prevented from publishing Joyce's Dublin epic because it was considered too obscene, Beach stepped in. Her fortuitous situation as a seller of English-language books in Paris inspired her to risk bringing out Ulysses herself. In February 1922, after a legendary struggle, the first edition of Ulysses appeared under the imprint “Shakespeare and Company.”

The chief source of information concerning Nicholas Breton's early life is the will of his father, written in 1557-8, probated in 1558-9. This will, a lengthy document, provides liberally for the wife and the five children, devises generous legacies to a number of household servants, remembers various hospitals, the “poorest creatures” in several parishes, “poorest Skoolers of the university of Cambrydge,” and even sets apart a sum of money for “repayringe the hyghe wayes brydges and other most needful and necessary thinges.” There are mentions of “jewelles” and plate and valuable furniture and clothes, and the whole tone of the will indicates that its maker was a man who had wealth and was accustomed to use it freely and generously. That he was as liberal in thought as in money-matters, that he had due regard to the preferences of others, may be fairly inferred from a bequest to one Henry Knighte, “so that he continew to study at the Lawe, or use any other honest exereyse of Lyvinge.” That the wife was a woman of and this association takes the reader away from the atmosphere of Early English poetry.“

Some have credited Coleridge's Kuhla Khan with a “magic” lacking to almost every other poem in English. Though more finished in its artistry, Kuhla Khan is, however, no more “magic” than parts of Chatterton's African Eclogues; in fact, as E. H. W. Meyerstein in his excellent Life of Chatterton was apparently the first critic to point out, there are sundry arresting likenesses between these Eclogues and Kuhla Khan. Since the Rowley poet is in his strange “romantic” way similar to Coleridge, is it possible to penetrate the “shaping spirit of imagination” behind the African Eclogues, as Mr. Lowes has penetrated the imagination behind Kuhla Khan? The purpose of this discussion is to show the manifold effects of the Rev. Alexander Catcott's Treatise on the Deluge on three “magic” poems.

The tiny lyric “Foweles in the Frith” may be the oldest surviving love song written in English. Endlessly anthologized, this late thirteenth-century poem has in recent years become the object of intermittent academic debate between an old school that views it as a secular love song and some later critics who see it as some sort of religious complaint. Actually, it could have been understood variously by a medieval audience. It works well as a simple spring love poem sung by a man about a woman, but there is also evidence for reading it as a lament for postlapsarian humanity or as a specifically Christological complaint. As one critic has noted, for a medieval exegete the precise relation between a text's littera and sensus was far from “automatic”; barring the discovery of an original poetic context for “Foweles,” any unitary solution to the lyric's meaning will probably remain elusive.

Of the forty-three letters of Sealsfield here presented, twenty-five appear now for the first time. The remaining eighteen have already been published, but either in abridged form, or deviating greatly from an exact reproduction of the originals. The letters altogether include: I. Twenty to Frl. Elise Meyer; II. Five to Frl. Marie Meyer; III. Eighteen to Hrn. Heinrich Erhard. The earliest of these letters is dated September 1841; the greater number, however, were written after the author was already past the prime of life. Old age naturally intensifies human weaknesses, but like the setting sun, it also illumines the horizon of the past. Thus these letters written during our author's last years, illustrate something more than the eccentricities of an old man. Sealsfield's literary and social judgments, however carelessly thrown out,—his whole personality in fact,—concern not only the few who have devoted themselves to the study of Sealsfield, or who cherish his memory, but are calculated to interest as well that larger class in both hemispheres which still represents the extinct “citizen of the world,” the cosmopolitan who had learned to look beyond the fashions of his own time and country in politics and literature. In Sealsfield's home the memory of “Oesterreich's grösster Romanendichter” has recently been revived by the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of our author's birth. It is hoped that the present publication may be not unwelcome, as following opportunely in the wake of that event. Appended to these letters will be found a synopsis of the principal events of Seals-field's life, arranged in chronological order.

A father who is deserted by his wife and who sets out to rear his son according to a “scientific System” unconsciously founded on his distrust of women and his own wounded pride should be an ideal subject for comedy. The system, running, as it must, counter to common sense and human nature, is bound to fail. And its collapse, with the consequent exposure of the father's false pride and the reassertion of the collective wisdom of society, would provide the comic deflation and denouement. The laughter provoked by the discomfort of the father, underscored by a reaffirmation of the adequacy of common sense, would produce an appropriate comic catharsis. This same situation, of course, has its serious possibilities. The father may ruin his son's life. But not in comedy. Comedy says that the probabilities are that the son, common sense, and nature will overcome the false system of the father. And the comic artist, knowing well that the whole truth will spoil his comedy, is careful not to tell the whole truth—only the comic (probable) side of it. The dark spirit of tragedy always hovers just outside the bright circle drawn by comedy, but it must not be allowed to cross the line. In comedy, as in all art, what is ruled out is as important as what is included.

This essay proposes the celebrity of fictive bodies and seeks to understand how, and how far, certain fictional characters can stimulate an audience response analogous to that elicited by the flesh and blood. One of many “celebrity characters,” Shylock is useful to this discussion in regard to the historical development of his fame: Shylock on the eighteenth-century stage begins a new kind of fascination with this character. Seeking to explain that fact, the essay outlines aspects of eighteenth-century theatrical practice that enabled audiences to consider character apart from actor and then, to showcase this shift, develops two valences of the eighteenth-century response to Shylock—the tendencies toward judgment and conversion. Both responses demonstrate how a dramatic character invokes (and complicates) the tensions between public and private life that theorists have used to define celebrity appeal.

Many years ago Morris W. Croll's studies of seventeenth-century prose demonstrated that the so-called anti-Ciceronian movement in prose style—which included in England such writers as Bacon, Jonson, Browne, Hall, and Burton—based itself not merely on a refusal to imitate Cicero, but on certain common philosophical attitudes, chiefly Stoic and libertine, and on common rhetorical models in Seneca and Tacitus. Croll, having sketched the intellectual tradition in which these writers worked, went on to examine their writings empirically. In a brilliant essay entitled “The Baroque Style in Prose,” he outlined their chief syntactic procedures and showed how these sprang from and reflected a common aesthetic. A more recent study, The Senecan Amble by George Williamson (London, 1951), has amplified Croll's historical researches, attempting to fix the anti-Ciceronian or Senecan movement more firmly amid its tangled antecedents and its numerous consequences. Both Croll and Williamson, however, have concerned themselves primarily with stylistic theory, and with large historical sequences in which individual authors appear as points on a complex graph. It still remains to study some of the writers in question more closely as individuals, both to verify their locations on the graph and also to explore the richness and multiplicity of individual accents that compose the common style. The purpose of the present essay is a simple one: to focus attention on a single author, Ben Jonson. The evidence will show, I think, that the case of Jonson bears out Croll's findings to a remarkable extent, and that although Croll fails to mention Jonson in his article on baroque prose, Jonson has some claim to be regarded as the baroque stylist par excellence, whose highly personal, highly inflected style realizes to their fullest extent the principles of the baroque rhetoric.