It was probably during, or shortly after, his residence at Cambridge University that Edmund Spenser composed two ‘hymnes,’ or odes, in praise of love and beauty. The ‘love’ praised was ‘platonic love’; the ‘beauty’ praised was ‘intellectual’ beauty.

These two poems were written, it seems certain, before 1580. Over twenty years later, perhaps twenty-five,–at any rate not long before 1596,–the poet, grown older, professes to condemn them as conspicuous among “the many lewd layes” that “in the greener times of his youth” he had made

The allusions to Emerson in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are usually read as a scathing indictment of Emersonian individualism. Yet even as Ellison satirizes the Emerson canonized in Lewis Mumford's The Golden Day, the career of Ellison's narrator extends a pragmatic tradition of individualism leading from Emerson through Kenneth Burke. Though often accused of ignoring tragic limits, Emerson describes the self as existing only within the material limitations of culture—and thus as always socially implicated and indebted. While Emerson claims that the pursuit of one's own most vital work is a moral end that fulfills one's social duties, Burke and Ellison demand more complex scrutiny of one's ethical connections to others. Burke insists that the social context of our individual acts requires a comic ethics of identification: we must identify with others across social conflicts and recognize how our individual acts may be identified with those conflicts. Ellison's narrator progresses toward this Burkean ethic: in his final confrontation with Mr. Norton (who has recommended Emerson to him), the narrator adopts a mode of communication that asserts the democratic connection of all Americans at the same time that it confronts the systemic discrimination that separates them.

That vast distance from the muscle-bound Samson in the Book of Judges to the tragic figure of Samson Agonistes is to be traversed, as we now know, by means of Biblical commentary and its metamorphosis of a solar myth into a parable of faith. Yet one of the important stepping-stones along the way from Bible to Milton seems not to exist. Samson is emphatic in its references to wisdom, but the Samson of Christian tradition, even when a typological symbol for Christ, was but rarely noted for his strength of mind. Milton's unparalleled concern for wisdom is nevertheless no startling innovation, I think, but rather the inevitable consequence of a second tradition, equally valid and quite as long, which is within the poem. For this tradition the brief formula is “wisdom and fortitude”—sapienlia etfortiludo—a phrase descriptive of the heroic ideal and conventional to relevant background materials of at least three kinds. The first, surveyed some years ago by Ernst Curtius, begins with the heroic poems of Homer and Virgil and continues into the Renaissance. The second, considered more recently by R. E. Kaske, includes the Germanic and Old English literature of heroism, the important example being Beowulf. And the third, upon which I think Milton primarily relied and with which I shall be concerned, is a philosophy of courage, classical in origin but Christian in development. These backgrounds differ among themselves in significant ways. While the loftiest heroes—Odysseus, Aeneas—seem always to have been simultaneously wise and brave, heroic literature sometimes allows these virtues to be separable from one another. The classic illustration is summarized by Macrobius: “Nestor … helped the army quite as much with his prudence as all the youth with their might.” So, in the Song of Roland (l. 1093), “Rollant est proz e Oliver est sages.” Philosophic discussion, however, insists that these virtues cannot be divorced, that an unwise courage cannot exist. “If,” wrote Henry More, an unwise man should “light upon the doing of some brave Action, 'tis not Virtue, but Fortune, that must be applauded for such happy chance.” The interesting result of such a position is that fortitude undergoes a radical change in meaning; it refers no longer to the brute strength of an Ajax nor to the prowess in arms of Achilles but to what Milton calls “heroic magnitude of mind.” The extent of this profound alteration is first perceived in Plato and Aristotle, but for the comprehensive and systematic account, one turns to the Summa theologica of Aquinas.

Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners, though clear enough on the surface, has raised various questions as to its subtler meaning and its purpose. In the eighteenth century Thomas Sheridan asserted that this essay was in fact “a very strong, though covert attack, upon the power of the Whigs,” written to encourage Queen Anne to dispense with their services and to form a Tory ministry. That Swift had any such highly contrived political intent seems doubtful. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he later cited the Project among other works as evidence that, even while associated with the Whigs, he had publicly expressed opposition to their lowchurch position. Another question raised is: to what extent, if at all, was Swift being satiric in the Project? Most contemporary scholars, like Herbert Davis and Ricardo Quintana, have viewed it as an entirely serious production in which little if any irony appears, but William B. Ewald feels that, to some degree, the author composed it with his tongue in his cheek. Finally, did Swift have a personal motive in publishing this work? We know that for some time before its appearance he had been endeavoring to obtain preferment. It also seems pretty clear that one obstacle to his advancement was the fact that he was known as the author of A Tale of a Tub. One may strongly suspect, therefore, that he hoped the Project would help to counteract the damaging effect on his reputation of the earlier work and prove that, besides being a wit who had dared to satirize religious institutions and practices, he was also a clergyman genuinely devoted to the welfare of church and state. If this was his motive, however, did he have any further reason for believing that his anonymously printed pamphlet might serve to advance his fortunes? Some light may be shed upon this point and upon others raised by the Project if we consider 1) certain influences that led Swift to write it, 2) the emphasis in the essay, and 3) his position at the time he composed it.

I am not only honored but instructed by these essays. Let me begin with Jean Franco's essay and acknowledge her moving expression of solidarity: “coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire[.] Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.”

Spenser's Muiopotmos has provoked much ingenious speculation, but no general agreement as to its meaning has been reached. One school of critics in fact warns us against seeking too precise a meaning. Selincourt in the one-volume Oxford edition of Spenser's Works, says:

In France, romanticism is first of all a revolt against a firmly entrenched classicism. In this respect, French romanticism is markedly different from romanticism in England, Germany, or Spain, where classicism had been less in accord with the national temper and had not risen to the glorious heights of the century of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. It is not surprising therefore that classicism, having produced so rich a literature of profound psychological insight, should have prolonged its dominance in France, to a considerable degree, even into the early years of the nineteenth century. It is significant too that in France, romanticism established itself first in prose with Rousseau and his successors, then in poetry with Lamartine, and only at last in drama with the final triumph of Hugo's Hernani in 1830. This sequence corresponds to the degree of resistance in these three literary forms. The victory over the codified rules of classic tragedy could come in France only after a long fight extending over more than a hundred years. This explains why so much of French debate about the theories of romanticism turns about the drama.

As a philosopher and social thinker, Pierre Leroux has been the object of considerable attention in recent years, and his works on political, religious and sociological subjects have been studied by scholars of distinction. Since he was also a writer and critic not without a certain fame in his own day, it seems a little curious that his literary activities and influence have yet to receive full treatment.

In almost all the plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists one finds an abundance of astrological jargon used metaphorically and as sheer literary garnish, showing no particular knowledge of the complex technicalities of astrology. Occasionally, however, a Jacobean dramatist's delineation of a horoscope involves such astrological technicalities that he and his audience must have fully appreciated the various manifestations of horoscopy. Such is the case in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. My purpose in this paper is to present an adequate explanation of the horoscope employed at one of the critical moments in this play.

Scholars who conduct ethnic archival research and who use material texts and practices in institutions in order to examine human memory and interpret human meaning-making face the challenge of placing differently archived traces of intellectual genealogies in conversation, conflict, and convergence with Western-oriented intellectual genealogies and methodologies. Such a challenge reveals the question at the heart of the proposition of the “ethnic” archive: how do scholars use archival collections as only part of the larger constellation of inscription systems produced, maintained, and institutionalized by cultural groups no longer beholden to the relational dynamic of “othering”?

Engaging contemporaneous ideas about how environmental factors could alter the surface of the human body, Samson Occom and Phillis Wheatley use language emphasizing the ostensible malleability of physical characteristics—what I call a symbolics of metamorphosis—to depict the formation of racial identities. For Occom, the beliefs his Anglo- and Native American contemporaries held about the status of the “red” Indian enable him to challenge colonial society's contradictory Christian epistemology in his 1772 A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian. In her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Wheatley fuses ancient mythological beliefs and natural-historical axioms about the production of poetic genius and dark skin to characterize the black poet as an inevitable outcome rather than an anomalous exception. Drawing on the late-eighteenth-century notion of transformable race, this essay posits a historically specific model of critical race theory for interpreting early American literatures.

WHEN PAUL CELAN ACCEPTED THE BREMEN LITERATURE PRIZE in 1958, he used the occasion to reflect on the region of his birth: “The landscape from which I—by what detours! But are there such things: detours?—the landscape from which I come to you might be unfamiliar to most of you.” On the syntactic level, Celan's speech performs the detours (Umwege), repetitions, and redoublings of his journey to Germany, a country in which he never lived or spent more than a few weeks but whose language he persisted in calling his own: