The Revenger's Tragedy was long regarded as the work of Cyril Tourneur, but in recent years scholars have vigorously denied his authorship. Though this discussion has demonstrated the weakness of the case for Tourneur, it has not thus far resulted in establishing general agreement as to the true author of the play.

Knowing of Gloria Anzaldúa's work from her 1981 coedited volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color when I came across Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) at a gay and lesbian bookstore, I immediately picked it up. It would not be altogether hyperbolic to say that amid the contingencies of life and reading, that was one of my luckiest finds.

Three-quarters of a century has elapsed since the mediæval epic literature of France first attracted the attention of scholars. This interval has been marked by an uninterrupted succession of texts discovered and edited. The value of these texts to the student of language is great; their value to the historian of politics and society is considerable; but their literary bearing has not been sufficiently emphasized. To this day the general public has but a vague idea of the character and significance of that national epic of which the Chanson de Roland is the highest expression and which Léon Gautier strove so bravely to render popular. The mediæval literature of France has not yet completely recovered from the reputation of vulgarity given to it by the Renaissance.

In political thought, there is perhaps no more penetrating scrutiny of the significance of the factual than hannah Arendt's essay “Truth and Politics.” “Facts and events,” Arendt observes, are the “invariable outcome of men living and acting together.” As such, they “constitute the very texture of the political realm” (227). Concerning words and deeds of many actors, factual truth must be the basis for deliberations and opinions in the political space. “Freedom of opinion,” she continues, “is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation” (234). Yet facts are infinitely fragile things, for they occur in the ever-changing field of human affairs, “established through testimony by eyewitnesses—notoriously unreliable—and by records, documents, and monuments, all of which can be suspected as forgeries” (239). Facts can be manipulated, even denied outright by the powers that be. The lie, opposed to factual truth as error is to rational truth, represents a deliberate political action, since it aims “to change the world” (246).

Es ist in der neueren Literatur über die deutsche Dorfpoesie verschiedentlich versucht worden, die eigenartige Stellung des Dichters Neidhart von Reuental zu erklären, ihn gleichsam zu erlösen aus seiner “splendid isolation,” in der er sich als Anreger einer vorher in der deutschen Literatur nie überlieferten Gattung befindet. Für. seine formellen und stilistischen Eigenheiten wurde auf die Carmina Burana verwiesen. Sicher bestehen auch direkte Beziehungen zwischen Neidharts Dichtung und der früheren Vagantenlyrik, wie das Günther darstellt. Aber trotz vieler verblüffender Übereinstimmungen, trotz Natureingang, Mutter-Tochterdialogen, Gespielinnen- und Tanzliedern, die alle schon bei den Vaganten vertreten sind und von hier z.T. über die lateinische Schulpoesie bis auf spätklassische Vorbilder zurückgeführt werden können, bleiben doch bei Neidhart und seiner Schule eine Menge neuer Motive. Namentlich die Winterlieder sind reich an Zügen, die der Vagantenlyrik fremd sind und die auch die Pastourelle nicht kennt. Zu einem Teil sind sie geschichtlich bedingt, wie die Kritik der protzigen, süddeutschen Bauern, die fast gleichzeitig in der ganzen mhd. Literatur auftaucht, aber doch von Baiern-Österreich ausgeht. Dann aber handelt es sich auch um mehr oder weniger geschickte dichterische Ausgestaltung älterer Anekdoten, wie sie besonders von den Neidhartianern eifrig gepflegt wurde.

Of the British ballads not included in Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads one of the most interesting is that which, following the example of Professor Tolman's correspondent, I shall call The Bramble Briar. Altho in poetic quality it is inferior even to that broadside version of Chevy Chase the serious discussion of which in the Spectator provoked the raillery of Wagstaffe, yet I have ventured to deal with it here at some length; for it is interesting not only because of its possible relation to Boccaccio, Hans Sachs, and Keats, but in itself. It is a fairly clear instance of what to some expounders of ballad doctrine is a contradiction in terms: it is a traditional vulgar ballad.

It is inaccurate to maintain (see Joseph J. Moldenhauer, PMLA, lxxxiii, 1968, 284-297) that Edgar Allan Poe's vision of death and dissolution is totally ecstatic and beatific simply because the metaphysical and esthetic “Unity” presented by death is part of the basic “design” of the Universe as Poe conceived it. Instead, the esthetic cosmology of Eureka and the implicit themes of other of Poe's works, especially Pym, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” present a tension between hope and despair, reason and madness, Divine Purpose and seeming Nothingness which must be called “skeptical.”

It is a pleasure to meet with the professional group that is involved in the most basic and important human cultural activity. Language was a human invention—perhaps the most important of all time. It is not only the principal means of communication within a linguistic or cultural group, but also the means by which each culture is transmitted from one generation to the next. As such it has been a major if not essential factor in the advancement of human civilization.

Among the numerous accolades and awards garnered by viet thanh nguyen's debut novel, the sympathizer (2015), the one receiving the least attention from academic critics will probably be the Edgar Award, bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. After all, The Sympathizer boasts aesthetic achievements that far exceed the generic confines of a conventional mystery novel. Also, even in the age of cultural studies, when the divide between the popular and the elite is supposed to have all but disappeared, literary scholars, if they are honest with themselves, still hang on to the notion that there is a qualitative difference, or a hierarchy, separating literary fiction from crime fiction, the highbrow from the lowbrow. It may be true that we no longer live at a time when an eminent critic like Edmund Wilson would attack mystery novels by asserting, as he did in 1945, partly in response to Agatha Christie's popular mystery novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that “with so many fine books to read …; there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish” (qtd. in Bradford 117). And there is more than half a century separating us from the era when Ross Macdonald, one of the most accomplished practitioners of the mystery genre as well as a trained literary scholar, lamented in his 1954 lecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he had received a doctoral degree in English, that “[t]hough it is one of the dominant literary forms of our age, the mystery has received very little study” (11). Even after Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida enshrined Edgar Allan Poe's detective short story “The Purloined Letter” as a darling of poststructuralist analysis, most literary scholars worth their salt would continue to regard crime fiction as a subpar genre, something that, as Macdonald said, is reserved for their leisure hours, akin to crossword puzzles in a newspaper (11). Or, as Wilson put it, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” (qtd. in Bradford 117).

The power of novelistic tradition to translate ideological structures of belief into narrative structures that encode and perpetuate those beliefs is ominously illustrated in the Anglo-American novel's “marriage tradition.” Novelists who have attempted to escape such strictures have had to contend not only with the socially conservative thematics of the traditional love plot but also with its highly codified, closed structural variants. The protomodernist experimentation and formal openness of The Golden Bowl provides a case in point: here James methodically explodes the premises of traditional love fiction by making the novel's experiments in form mirror its unsettling critique of the sexual codes engendering marital strife. In the process, James's attempt to plot the contradictions inherent in the conventional ideal of wedlock underscores the degree to which a traditional novelistic pattern of happy endings has always been a self-subverting literary enterprise.

Robert burns, an astute student of human nature, wryly observes in his poem “To a Louse”: “O wad some Pow'r the giftie gi'e us / To see oursels as others see us.” What we may learn is not always palatable. It is no secret that, in the eyes of many of our colleagues in disciplines outside language and literature, English too often appears as a bewilderingly undisciplined discipline—irresistibly drawn to the latest fashionable theory, riven by tiresome factionalism, and shamelessly encroaching on the disciplinary territory of others. The view from within is not always rosy either, on the evidence of satirists such as David Lodge in Small World and Frederick Crews in Postmodern Pooh. In our own eyes, of course, we are stable, responsible, hard-working, and absolutely central to the humanities. It is our colleagues in foreign language departments, we sometimes insist, who are the fractious and feckless ones, and who give the humanities a bad name. But these, our closest colleagues, see us—institutionally, if not individually—as arrogant and imperialistic, and ill content to tend our own gardens, as Voltaire urged. The heart of the matter is that we deem ourselves qualified to teach and to write about works of literature in translation, sometimes without adequate knowledge of the language, culture, or relevant literary tradition. Moreover, in many institutions, world literature is the exclusive—and zealously guarded—province of the English department. How can we reconcile this disciplinary imperialism, not to mention our suspicions about the effectiveness of often balkanized foreign language departments, with the fact that for more than thirty years the most influential theorists have been French, German, and Russian (Auerbach, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Iser, Jakobson, Kristeva, et al.) and that, for the most part, we read them in translation too? Occasionally, of course, English faculty members have been the translators.

This essay argues that William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams uses a familiar gesture—the handshake—to contest both radical and conservative responses to the French Revolution. Instead of merely fictionalizing the arguments of his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, as critics have argued, Caleb Williams, through Godwin's representation of the repeated failure of this socially and politically significant gesture, traces an episode in the history of manners. The handshake thus points to a historical development, the emergence of commercial society, that complicates the novel's political stance by undermining the conception of politics that underwrites it.

In the spring and summer of 1970 the Commission on the Status of Women of the Modern Language Association conducted a comprehensive, nationwide survey on the position of women in English and modern foreign language departments. We collected information on types of appointments, ranks, teaching patterns, and salary levels of men and women faculty members and the proportion of women among graduate enrollments and recent degrees awarded. In addition, the Commission asked for information about nepotism regulations and practices of departments in the Association. This report presents some results of the survey.

According to fiction, the university in. sixteenth-century Wittenberg can lay claim to those two students whose lives and tragical deaths have since seemed to the Western mind to comprise all its longings and strivings, as well as to epitomize its utmost ideal of heroism. According to fact, of course, Hamlet had long been dead before the university there was founded; and this fact, whether they know it or not, is of great advantage to the Shakespeare scholars, for the historical Faust has been a problem child of the critics for centuries. The Faust Book states that he did study in Wittenberg. Melanchthon seems to have been acquainted with him and to have thought that he had studied black magic in Cracow, too. Documentary evidence may indicate that he graduated at Heidelberg. Now whether or not he ever attended any university—and he most likely did not—over three hundred years of research on the Faust Book has had to cope with the many reports, now authentic, now fantastic, and with the many tales now new and now second-hand which were widely circulated about a real contemporary of Luther who sometimes called himself Faust.

Many things came to me during my four weeks at Spaulding Rehab: consolatory e-mails, cards, some flowers, and a care package from PMLA that kept me going for the entirety of my stay. What I never expected was a translation of a story by the Japanese writer Shiga Naoya, sent by Scott Miller, dean of the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the translator.

Early modern defenses of poetry, such as Philip Sidney's influential Defence of Poesy, respond to long-standing anxieties about the validity of poetry by asserting the primacy of its moral function. Sidney's heroic rhetoric locates poetry's “power” in its capacity to create iconic portraits (“speaking pictures”) of unchanging moral truths. Edmund Spenser departs markedly from Sidney's static moral vision of the function of poetry. Whereas Sidney privileges enargeia, or vividness, The Faerie Queene works consistently to disarm the heroic masculinity that violently produces enargeia as a form of iconic, moral clarity. Spenser's Legend of Temperance finds energeia, or vitality, in moments of suffering and in corresponding moments of sympathy. Through suffering, Spenser highlights the dense networks of affect and obligation that defy moral and visual clarity. For him, poetry resonates with the affective energies of corporeal experience, from which language derives its capacity to move.

On the 15th of December, 1778, about six months after the death of Voltaire, his private library at Ferney was bought by Catherine the Great of Russia for 30,000 rubles plus a certain number of valuable presents to Mme Denis, Voltaire's niece. This library consiste of about 7500 volumes comprising, because of the number of large sets, about 2500 to 3000 titles. Catherine received her purchase at St. Petersburg on July 30, 1779. Wagnière, the secretary of Voltaire, had been engaged to arrange the books in the same order as at Ferney and to prepare the manuscripts for binding. He arrived in St. Petersburg, as he tells us, “le 8 auguste 1779” and remained in Russia at the execution of the task set him by Catherine until probably January or February, 1780. The library was installed in the Hermitage and remained there until about 1862, when it was transferred to the Imperial Library of St. Petersburg, now the Public Library of Leningrad. There in the Fine Arts Division of the Philosophy Section these books are still to be found, carefully stored in their locked cases behind glass doors and supposed still to stand in the order in which they were arranged by Wagnifere after that used by Voltaire himself at Ferney. Most of his books are contained in two large double-faced cases, each case about twenty feet long and ten shelves high, giving a total book space of some eight hundred feet. The bottom shelves are reserved for folio volumes, the second shelves for quartos and the smaller volumes appear on the higher shelves. A somewhat smaller case in the gallery above contains the rest of Voltaire's books. Under the former government of Russia no one was allowed to consult more than five books of this collection a day. This limit is no longer imposed and during the summer of 1927 the authors of this article were permitted to have before them on their tables any number of volumes that they wished.