It is evident that the study of the modern languages is to occupy a larger place in education in this country than ever before. The intercourse of people with people, political, social and literary is becoming constantly more intimate and we may anticipate in the future a more cosmopolitan spirit in the relation of nations. The arbitration of differences, arid friendly consultation in questions of disputed rights bring into a union of sympathy and genial interest states which have hitherto stood apart. Science has brought nations into immediate and personal connection, making the intellectual progress of one the possession of the other, while commerce and the facility of an interchange of citizenship unite them by mutual interests. These tendencies are separate from any questions touching the usefulness of the study of modern languages as a method of discipline and the culture which is to be obtained from contemporary literatures. They indicate indisputably certain new demands on education which must be met: they are facts patent to the observer as well as the scholar. Instruction in our colleges must take, if not a new, at least a changed direction from the enlarged intercourse of nations. We are brought to ask the question, not what has the past to give us, but what contribution has the living thought of each nation to make to its neighbor, what results of study, what intellectual discoveries, what special gifts from national tendencies and traits has each to impart. The very nearness and sympathy of nations politically causes each to present problems which every student of contemporary thought must investigate. These facts carry their own weight apart from any literary considerations. The question of a cosmopolitan spirit in literature, or of a world-literature is not involved in these views of the growing importance of the study of modern languages. We might urge with great imperativeness the necessity to every scholar, to every educated man, of a knowledge of the literature of Europe of the present day, no literature now stands alone but affects every other literature, and the subtle thought of one nation colors the intellectual life of every other. Without then touching upon the relative value or the proportionate time which should be devoted to the classics and modern languages, we are met by these facts which emphasize the position which modern languages must assume in every carefully adjusted college curriculum. Conceding then the importance of linguistic study, the question arises, what considerations are of force in determining the order and methods of linguistic study in our schools and colleges.

Though scholars have long recognized the influence of the antifeminist tradition on the Wife of Bath's Prologue, they have overlooked its possible impact on the fate of Jankyn's “book of wikked wyves.” Fansler noted “a rather curious literary precedent” in Marie de France's “Li Lais de Gugemar,” which described a painting of Venus committing Ovid's Remédia Amoris to the flames. A closer parallel to the scene in which Dame Alisoun “made him brenne his book anon right tho” exists, however, in several of the “Eastern” versions of the legend of the Seven Sages, or Books of Sindibad.

The Jesuits never forgave Joyce for refusing to enter their Society, and he never forgave them for inviting him. The influence of this quarrel on his career is well known, and the effects of his Jesuit training on his work are often remarked in a general way. It remains, however, to specify the effects; for only when they are specified can we see clearly just what he rebelled against and why his rebellion took the forms it did. Joyce's books are in fact full of echoes from those of Saint Ignatius Loyola; we might begin by identifying some of them and assessing their significance.

In an edition of a portion of Codex Alcobacensis 200 [ff. 195 Ro. to 219 Vo.] it was pointed out that the codex, no part of which had been edited before, is one of the oldest Portuguese manuscripts in the Alcobaça collection. It is described in part by Anselmo as follows: “Pergaminho.—277×204—[222 fl.];. . . recl. no firn de cada cad. de 10 fl.—leira gótica do séc. XV.—rubr.; iniciais a verm. e azul, filigranadas.” Burnam ascribes it to the fourteenth century and describes it as follows:

Ce ms. consiste en 212 ff. de parchemin, plus un f. de papier préliminaire, où se trouve le titre de l'ouvrage. L'écriture est à longues lignes, avec fleurons, lettres initiales rouges et bleues en alternative; le ms. est sans traits d'union ni titre courant. Presque tous les cahiers contiennent dix ff.; une fois il y en a six, deux fois huit, tous fournis de réclames, sauf le dernier.

Critics on occasion have remarked the peculiar unity of tone which distinguishes Richard II from most of Shakespeare's other plays. Walter Pater wrote that, like a musical composition, it possesses “a certain concentration of all its parts, a simple continuity, an evenness in execution, which are rare in the great dramatist. … It belongs to a small group of plays, where, by happy birth and consistent evolution, dramatic form approaches to something like the unity of a lyrical ballad, a lyric, a song, a single strain of music.” And J. Dover Wilson, in his edition of the play, has observed that “Richard II possesses a unity of tone and feeling greater than that attained in many of his greater plays, a unity found, I think, to the same degree elsewhere only in Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.”

The attempts to analyze the significance of Count Leo Tolstoy and to understand the workings of his mind have not yet reached any satisfactory conclusion. The riddle of the man's personality and the sources of his power still defy careful labelling, for the inconsistencies of his thoughts and actions have been swept away from sight by the blasts of his genius. Out of the confusion has emerged a great Tolstoy, but it is difficult to unite this legend with the man as we know him in sober history and in fact. This difficulty is recognized by many modern students. Thus Aldanov frankly calls his small but suggestive volume Zagadka Tolstogo (The Riddle of Tolstoy), and Alexander Nazaroff in Tolstoy, the Inconstant Genius also emphasizes the contradictions in his life and allows them to speak for themselves. The effect is surprising, but not as unkind as it might seem.

Whenever a poet allows us to follow his creative processes, we are grateful—even though he may be no supreme artist but merely a solid craftsman. An account of the manner in which William Cullen Bryant composed his poems will therefore interest students not only of American letters but of poetry at large. From youth to old age, Bryant believed that great poetry and indeed all true poetry has its origin in the emotions of the poet.

In a series of discussions of the problem of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, published between 1915 and 1917, Professors Tatlock, Lawrence, and Rollins, applying essentially the same critical method, argued that since the bulk of the material in this play had become fixed by tradition, Shakespeare found himself compelled to treat it as he did. Rollins quotes with approval the following statement by Tatlock:

Fontane confessed on several occasions to a feeling of uneasiness in the presence of scholars, for he was always aware of the irregularity and meagerness of his education and of the consequent gaps in his knowledge. Nor did he believe that he deserved an eminent position as a critic. On the other hand, his long experience as journalist and as successful novelist, together with his wide acquaintance with European literature, make the critical utterances of the mature author particularly significant. But few of the scattered critiques which appeared in various journals, especially the Vossische Zeitung, during the author's lifetime, have been brought together in the posthumous volume of the collected works, under the title Literarische Studien and Eindrücke. However, these essays, with the valuable material found in the poet's correspondence, enable one to form a very fair opinion of Fontane's conception of the novel.

The scarlet letter has been interpreted as a story of sins and sinners for so long that this perspective has hardened into a convention. In Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl the sin of adultery and its consequences are seen; to Dimmesdale is added the further, less sympathetic sin of hypocrisy; and beyond the pale stands Chillingworth in his isolating sin of pride and self-consuming revenge. Once this standard point of view is assumed, it can be supported by what is incontrovertibly in the text, but if the angle of attention is shifted so that the novel is seen as a love story, that is, as a tragedy of the grand passion rather than as a tale of sinful passion, then certain features in our picture of the novel, obscure before, will leap into prominence and some of the previously more emphatic features will change their value in relation to the whole composition. Hawthorne's masterpiece may remain for us a haunted book, but it will be haunted by a mystery which we can identify as the mystery of erotic passion itself. It will be seen, in this perspective, that passion is the fixed reality throughout the novel and that it is “sin” which is the shifting, ambiguous term, as it is refracted in the many-sided ironies of the plot and of the narrative commentary. Further, from this point of view it becomes clear that the passion of the lovers is entering its most interesting phase when the story opens instead of being over and done with, except for its consequences, as is tacitly assumed in the conventional approach.

It is now more than forty years ago that the first serious attempt was made to classify the several versions of the Pricke of Conscience according to the MSS which were then known. On the basis of three test-passages selected from approximately the beginning, the middle and the end of the poem (vv. 1836-1927, 5126-5204, 9335-9394, according to the line-numbers in Morris's edition) the MSS were divided into four main families, designated respectively by the symbols, Y, X ii, C, and Z, of which the fourth (Z) represents the Northern version which was printed by Morris.

In his admirable lectures, The Problem of Style, J. Middleton Murry illustrates one of the most common meanings of the word “style” by this remark: “I know who wrote the article in last week's Saturday Review—Mr. Saintsbury. You couldn't mistake his style.” Here, according to Mr. Murry, “‘style’ means that personal idiosyncrasy of expression by which we recognize a writer.” This is a limited conception of style, but it is useful in studying the style of certain writers. Murry mentions Dr. Johnson, Gibbon, Meredith, and Henry James as appropriate subjects for this approach. We may add, with the authority of precedent, Thomas Carlyle.

The composition of The Owl and the Nightingale is dated by all editors after the death of Henry the Second in 1189, undoubtedly because of the prayer

Recovering the U.S. hispanic literary heritage is a program that works with an international board of scholars, librarians, and archivists to constitute and make accessible an archive of cultural productions by Hispanic or Latino peoples who have existed since the sixteenth century in the areas that eventually became part of the United States. Founded in 1992 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and subsequently funded by many other organizations, the project brought together scholars who wanted to make accessible to any interested person, with any level of education, the full range of texts generated by Hispanic peoples and to reform the concept of American nationhood. Depending on available funds, the program underwrites scholarly research, creates virtual and paper archives, microfilms for preservation, digitizes for accessibility, publishes material in conventional and digital form, organizes conferences, and maintains communications with some five thousand associates. The program has found, accessioned, and made accessible tens of thousands of books and documents that were heretofore unknown. It has digitized more than 500,000 items, ranging from published books and newspapers to manuscripts of varying lengths from the first encounters between Hispanic and indigenous peoples in North America to broadsides and photographs from the twentieth century—in short, all the materials that a literate community generates over centuries.

The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann's Happy End and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's On the Frontier. Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist “irony,” “estrangement,” and “difficulty” and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics in Happy End and On the Frontier trigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to “make it new” blurs into the established patterns of melodrama.

There are many disparities in literary competence between teachers and students. It is emblematic of these differences that students in introductory college literature courses usually read assigned texts only once, while the teacher's normative experience involves multiple rereadings. For inexperienced readers in these classes, the task of acquiring literary competence may seem as difficult as learning a foreign language. Research in the study of foreign languages and literatures contains valuable insights for the teaching of first-language literature. The traditional lecture-and-discussion format fails to address the individual student's background knowledge, motivation for literary study, and personal response to texts. Prereading activities, tasks to accompany at-home reading, and collaborative strategies in class discussion can lead readers to engage texts more meaningfully in the introductory literature classroom.

In any serious consideration of Poe's life and character it will be necessary to take account of Griswold's estimate of the poet. This estimate was set forth in two articles published during the year following Poe's death—one, an obituary notice published in the New York Tribune of October 9, 1849; the other, the memoir of Poe included by Griswold in his edition of Poe's works and first published in September, 1850. Out of these two papers sprang the bitterest of all the controversies that have been waged about Poe. Most of Poe's editors and biographers of the present generation have ranged themselves on the side of Poe and have condemned Griswold; but there have been some—and among them some that may speak with the highest authority—who have held that Griswold's estimate of Poe is essentially just and fair. The present paper attempts a fresh examination of the case in the light of the evidence collected by Poe's biographers, and also brings to bear on the case a number of documents, mainly from the periodicals of Griswold's time, that have heretofore been either overlooked or ignored.

THE recent exchange between Phillip Harth and Leland D. Peterson (PMLA, 84, March 1969, 336–43) over Peterson's reading of Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) has left the issue precisely where it began. In his original article (PMLA, 82, March 1967, 54–63), Peterson presented a new interpretation of Swift's essay which would read as satire what has been long accepted as a direct proposal for political and moral reform. Basically, Peterson's thesis is that the traditional reading of the Project poses a problem for students of Swift since the article … seems to advocate hypocrisy, a vice consistently satirized and anathematized in such works as A Tale of a Tub, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and Gulliver's Travels.