Morgan Odoherty, the mythical Irishman who contributed to Blackwood's Magazine in its salad days, is usually—and correctly—acknowledged to have been the creation of Captain Thomas Hamilton. Yet he is almost always identified with Dr. William Maginn, the sprightly contributor from Cork who reprinted several Blackwood Odoherty articles as his own and later used the pseudonym in articles for Fraser's Magazine. Maginn has, accordingly, been praised and damned for many an article in which he had no part. The letters which he wrote to William Blackwood prove that he was only one of many who contributed Odoherty-signed articles. And although as years passed he wrote a larger and larger share of them, he never completely preempted the pseudonym.

Old French, until the end of the Gallo-Roman period, was physiologically characterized by articulatory laxness to a high degree. This laxness of articulation chiefly manifested itself by intensifying certain syllables while weakening others, and by producing diphthongs and affricates out of strongly situated sounds while others tended to disappear or remained as they were. During the ninth century, physiological characteristics of precisely opposite nature started to appear, and French gradually gained in tenseness until it became about what it is today: the tensest of known languages. We reject here the theory proposed by W. von Wartburg concerning the effects of Germanic invasions on early Old French changes. “Le provençal s’étendait autrefois jusqu’à une ligne qui allait depuis l'embouchure de la Loire jusqu'aux Vosges méridionales. Cette ligne coïncide assez exactement avec une limite ethnique et politique qui s’était formée vers 500, grâce aux invasions germaniques.” And we accept the opposite views which attribute the early Old French laxness to the Celtic substratum and only the tenseness of a later period to the Germanic superstratum. They are well exposed by Dauzat:

On 19–20 May 1956 the Foreign Language Program sponsored a Conference on Criteria for a College Textbook in Beginning Spanish, held at MLA headquarters. Nearly all of the seventeen participants had considerable experience in teaching the Spanish language to beginners at the college level, and most were authors of beginning texts. They represented in their theory and practice of language teaching a wide variety of views in both the academic field and the field of linguistic science.

“Those who remark their religious experiences are generally looked on with Ridicule;” wrote James Boswell, “but very unreasonably, for they are experimental philosophers upon the most important subject.” No one can read BoswelPs Life of Johnson or any of the Boswell Journals and letters without recognizing the vital place religious thought held in his life, for he was a man who did remark his religious experiences with interest and without embarrassment. An outline of his religious life demonstrates the profound revolutions and constant turmoil of his religious thought and indicates the lasting impression religion made on the man James Boswell.

A fruitful but unfrequented approach to the Lyrical Ballads is through the poetry of the magazines. The volume unquestionably belongs to 1798, and seen in relation to the popular verse of that day, its contemporaneous features are very striking. We have been asked to consider too exclusively the revolutionary aspects of the Lyrical Ballads. Revolutionary they unquestionably were, but not in every respect. Except that they were much better than other poems published in 1798, the Ballads were not such a “complete change” as some writers would have us believe. Even their eccentricity has been exaggerated. Actually, there is a conventional side to the Lyrical Ballads, although it is usually overlooked. It is by way of the general taste for poetry in the 1790's that this essay will approach the poems, and it will attempt to show that they not only conformed in numerous ways to the modes of 1798, and reflected popular tastes and attitudes, but enjoyed a certain popularity in the magazines themselves.

The writing of La Porte étroite occupied André Gide from May 1905 to October 1908. During at least part of that period, the novelist was certainly reading the Essais of Michel de Montaigne, for he notes in his Journal on 24 November 1905 that he has carried a Montaigne with him on a visit to the Louvre, and, although in early March of the following year he declares that Pascal has replaced the essayist in his readings (JAG, p. 200), on 21 March we find him “patiently advancing” in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond” (JAG, p. 203), very probably a deliberate choice on his part, since that essay has long been considered the most complete statement of Montaigne's religious philosophy, and La Porte étroite was to have distinctly religious overtones. If we consider, as we must, the element of mysticism and Jansenism in the novel and the actual place the great seventeenth-century French classicist has in it (OC, v, 193—194, 230, 235–236), it is understandable that Gide should at this moment have turned to Pascal, but it is significant that this self-confessed “creature of dialogue” whose works demonstrate a constant search for balance recognized that there are and always will be in France “division et partis; c'est-à-dire dialogue. Grâce à quoi, le bel équilibre de notre culture: équilibre dans la diversité. Toujours, en regard d'un Pascal, un Montaigne; et de nos jours, en face d'un Claudel, un Valéry” (JAG-S, 13 Feb. 1943, p. 191). On 8 April Gide takes a copy of Montaigne with him on a stroll to the bois (JAG, 1906, p. 206), and home in Cuverville in May 1906, he again records that he has read some Montaigne (JAG, p. 220).

The search for some single myth or hypothesis to explain American character and history has informed much of our recent criticism. Within the last decade at least seven authors have devoted complete books to the subject. And from Emerson's “American Scholar” of a century ago, through Turner's “Significance of the Frontier,” to Matthiessen's American Renaissance, earlier critics had invoked the myth in passing. But now the old, vague “myth of the common man” has been imagined more concretely and in greater detail.

Structurally parallel derivatives from a given primitive (such as Lat. TENEBR-ICUS beside TENEBR-OSUS, Fr. verd-eur beside verdure, OSp. trist-eza beside trist-ura) in the historical perspective mostly turn out to have been successive rather than simultaneous offshoots.1 As long as such formations are studied merely in word lists illustrating the ranges of the individual suffixes that go into their making, the historical sequence of events is bound to pass unnoticed or, at least, not to remain fully discernible. To shed light on the relative chronology, it is advisable to select, as an appropriate unit of inquiry, the growth of separate word families showing sufficient proliferation of derivatives. The implicit severe limitation of scope allows the explorer to focus attention on the constantly changing interrelations between the nuclear formation of each family (the primitive) and its satellites in a number of carefully selected, clearly defined cases, in which adequate documentation can be furnished and the number of unknowns in historical reconstruction is reducible to the barest minimum. These shifts are in accord with the observable semantic expansions and contractions of the radical element and the ceaselessly changing availability of formatives, which, in turn, gradually experience extensions and reductions of their original scopes, proportionate to the number of currently used derivatives in which they are represented (to the extent to which they can be individuated and detached by untutored speakers). The linguistic historian can thus work out an intricate pattern of attractions and repulsions between radical and formatives. If his interest broadens out into culture history, he is further able, in the concrete case of the Hispano-Latin lexicon, to follow the (frequently tortuous) course of an important word-family, including all its ramifications, over a period of two thousand years, with the aim of distinguishing between the services that each member of the word-family, through incessant readjustment, has lent to consecutive generations of speakers, each in search of new expressions for newly-felt needs.

Mlerch a traité de l'inversion absolue (c'est à dire de celle qui n'est pas conditionnée par un adverbe en tête de phrase) en français moderne dans sa Historische Syntax des Französischen,iii, 427 seq. et dans son article sur l'inversion paru dans Mélanges Bally (1939), p. 364 seq. Je résume en les combinant les deux rédactions. Le type arriva le général (sans pronom personnel il, “voilant” l'inversion, et sans adverbe: alors arriva le général) est similaire au type de phrase optative périsse le traître. La phrase enunciative ne connaît ce type-là en français moderne qu'avec des verbes de mouvement, alors que l'ancien et le moyen français étendaient la construction à beaucoup d'autres verbes. Exemples: … venait ensuite une façon de sac dans la célèbre description, par Flaubert, de la casquette de l'ignoble mari de Mme Bovary; entre Henri, sort Germaine, sonne l'Angélus dans des indications de scène de pièces de théâtre; arriva le général, survient une difficulté, s'approche un confrère, vint à passer un canot …, me vint tout de suite à l'esprit l'idée que …, les précédait immédiatement un monsieur en redingote, reste à savoir si …, n'importe; dans le style judiciaire: seront punis d'une amende … ceux qui …, et, par extension, ont collaboré à ce volume (suivent les noms); dans les proverbes: rira bien qui rira le dernier. Du même ordre est l'inversion après des conjonctions ne l'entraînant pas d'ordinaire, comme et et mais: et suivait le récit d'un accident;… mais voyage avec nous “le fils Mélèze,” et celle qui se trouve depuis le symbolisme dans les incidentes sitôt que s'accentue la diction: si plonge … Dans l'onde … Ta jubilation nue; enfin après seul prédicatif: seuls peuvent coexister avec lui mon travail et ton amitié. M.Lerchnote que le français moderne connaît ce type d'expression seulement avec un nom (arriva le général, non *arriva-t-il), alors que l'allemand peut dire dans la langue “écrite” aussi bien Kam einmal ein Bäuerlein que Lief er schnell es nah zu seh'n, et que le tour français en question est “archaïque” et “limité à la langue écrite.”

Seventeenth-century French patronage of the theater was an ideal means of political legitimation. While Louis xm sporadically exercised patronage through royal decrees and attendance at comedies, the Cardinal de Richelieu, who better understood the theater's political benefits, actively influenced its technical aspects: the acting companies, the scripts, and the dramatic conventions and mechanics. The goal of Richelieu's patronage was the beholders' symbolic identification of the elements of refined theater with the genius of the cardinal underwriting them. The lansenists' tracts against the theater scorned this sort of symbolic transference as a commonplace of dramatic “portraiture.” Pierre Nicole's theory of spectatorship criticized the beholder's tendency to accept theatrical images as models of imitation, which gave life to a world of simulacra advantageous to political representation. The phantasmic force of the illusion of legitimacy fueled the system of art and politics in seventeenth-century France.

Paul Celan Breaks Into “Tears, His Body Shaken by Sobbing, the Whole Affair Again Present, Accusings, Denouncings, as Stunned and distressed as on day 1.” It's June 1966 in Paris, and he has gone with Yves Bonnefoy to visit a “most generous, most welcoming” friend who has “deep instincts for a poet's quality and for how infamous these attacks on Celan were.” But “[t]hat trustful welcome had only deepened the open wound.”

Nothing in the life of Paul Celan (1920-70), short of his parents' murder in the Holocaust, racked him more than the vicious, specious plagiarism charges a German French writer, Claire Goll, launched against him on behalf of her deceased husband. As Bonnefoy saw all too well, Celan never recovered from them.

What could have possessed Zola to let a writer of vaudevilles tamper with his novels? André Antoine asked himself the question in his journal the day after the dismal failure of Germinal, and we still wonder about it today. Very little is known about Busnach, except that he was one of the directors of the Athénée theater, and the author of such items as Ali-Baba and Froufrou. Did Zola really think this theatrical butterfly was capable of converting Germinal, or any other novel for that matter, into a play?

Let us not judge him by his boulevard reputation alone. Sarah Bernhardt called him the wittiest man in Paris, no mean compliment coming from her.2 He possessed the gift—or burden— of extreme sensitivity, and a line from one of his letters to Zola, “Je suis trop votre collaborateur et pas assez votre ami” might serve as epigraph to their relationship. Moreover, Zola had burned himself at the sputtering limelight of the Boulevard des Italiens with Les Heritiers Rabourdin and Le Bouton de rose; why should he not have welcomed the cooperation of a man who knew his business well? Despite the fact that there is a mass of available material on this collaboration— material which throws much light upon Zola's critical and esthetic theories—there has been no real attempt to relate Zola dramaturge with Zola romancier. Relationships did nevertheless exist, as I shall indicate. In the course of their collaboration, Busnach wrote Zola nearly 2000 letters, and in the absence of Zola's replies, these remain our chief source of information.3 My remarks are based upon them, and upon the texts of the plays.4

Shakespeare's intimate acquaintance with the music of his time and his enthusiasm for the art are well known, and there can be little question that he consorted to some extent with the London musicians of 1600. Certain of them may have been actively associated with the production, and possibly with the composition, of his plays. Precisely what form such association took, however, is a matter upon which investigation has hitherto yielded only meagre and confusing results. Speculation links Shakespeare's name with many composers and performers of the period, some of whom must indeed have supplied both the incidental music so abundantly required for his stage productions and the earliest settings of his lyrics.

Many were the sources of Bodmer's Noah and by no means the least of these was Klopstock's Messias. In the present article I propose to consider certain phases of Bodmer's indebtedness to Klopstock's biblical epic, but at the same time I shall have occasion to consider also other aspects of Klopstock's influence.

In his presidential address at the 1970 MLA convention, Maynard Mack sounded a warning bell concerning activism and the future of literary studies. Faced with a seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam and a national student body growing polarized in its response to this war, higher education, including language-based pedagogy, was in crisis. Of particular concern to Mack was a growing generational disconnect over the role of activism in the literature classroom. He cited a landmark study in which nearly two-thirds of all professors over the age of thirty maintained that any foray into politics should be avoided, if not altogether prohibited, in formal course work. The younger generation disagreed: two-thirds of them, in fact, felt a moral and pedagogical obligation to use colleges and universities as loci for social change. This ideological divide, Mack predicted, would soon create “a crisis of authority in the offing beside which all current manifestations would look pale” (365).

In his essay on Hamlet and Don Quixote, Ivan Tourguéniev stated that no man aspires to be called a Quixote. The Russian novelist did not presurmise the dream of Miguel de Unamuno. If the Knight-Errant makes clear that his duty binds him to protect the weak, relieve the oppressed, and punish the bad, Unamuno accepts and practices his creed. But Unamuno, being by far more quixotic, than Cervantes, interprets the psychology of his hero, adapting it to his own way of feeling and thinking. In his work Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, he says, in relation to another of his masterpieces, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho:

John Nichols, as printer of the Works of the English Poets, was frequently asked by Samuel Johnson to supply material while the biographical prefaces were being composed. Boswell (friend of Nichols and fellow member with him of Johnson's Essex-Head Club) recorded the fact that Nichols did supply Johnson with material for the Lives. Boswell introduced, with the following statement, a few of the thirty-one letters from Johnson to Nichols: “That he, however, had a good deal of trouble, and some anxiety in carrying on the work, we see from a series of letters to Mr. Nichols the printer, whose variety of literary inquiry and obliging disposition, rendered him very useful to Johnson.”