We are accustomed to refer to François Coppée as “le poète des humbles,” but it would be a mistake to suppose that he was the only poet of his time to whom this designation can be applied. Leaving out of account Sainte-Beuve and Hugo, who devoted occasional poems to the poor and the oppressed, Béranger, Maxime Du Camp, Pierre Dupont and numerous other minor poets, we must not overlook the work of another contemporary who began writing before Coppée was born. This poet is Eugène Manuel, whose life and work offer many striking resemblances with those of Coppée. It is the purpose of this study to compare the work of these two men with a view to determining whether or not Coppée was indebted to his less renowned confrere.

Blake's late engraving, erroneously known as The Laocoön, presents an unusually direct relation between the content of a literary work and the way the work is produced and consumed as an artifact. By restoring the statue's correct meaning (“Jah & his two Sons Satan & Adam”), Blake arrested its fall into materiality and application to “Natural Fact” and, in doing so, redeemed for spiritual purposes the engraving that he had begun as a commercial undertaking. In his commentary on the plate, he clarified for the first time the mutual exclusivity of art and commerce, not by making a materialist analysis, but by associating art with religion's traditional antipathy to money. He formulated a view of art as devotional practice rather than as the production of commodities, and this logic allowed the plate only the barest form of material existence.

The unity of Beowulf is at least secure in the person of the hero whose character and actions provide the basis for any critical examination of structure and theme. According to some, this is all that holds the epic together. Others see more than a sequence of disconnected episodes related to one person. In their view, the fights with Grendel and his dam are united to the dragon fight in the opposition of hero and king, youth and age, the beginning and ending of a life of achievement. It is in their spirit that I have attempted to take a fresh view of the subject with special reference to unity of theme and treatment. The suggestion is that this unity is to be found in the theme of redemption and judgment treated in a way which skilfully blends the Germanic hero with the Christian saint. The symbolism is not regarded as contrived or studied, but rather as of that kind which is the usual result of an author's finding an apt subject to illustrate his theme. A symbolic interpretation does not, after all, exclude a literal interpretation; it contains it. The dragon, for instance, can be both a universal symbol and a very literal and particular monster. We have surely become too literal-minded if we suppose that the audience of Beowulf could see no universal significance in the epic story because they accepted the literal truth of the narrative. The many symbolical interpretations of the Biblical narrative during the period which followed bear witness to the improbability of this view. Once the underlying theme of redemption and judgment is adopted and is seen to be the epic theme par excellence, the process of selection from myth and legend becomes somewhat clearer, and there is no longer the necessity to account for a gap between the Grendel fights and the dragon fight. The details in the fifty-year reign of the hero would have been irrelevant. An epic is surely not a biography nor a chronicle nor a mythology, although it draws upon all these.

A rendition by nayif kharma of michael etherton's theatrical adaptation of john reed's english translation, the arabic version of Ferdinand Oyono's novel Une vie de boy is at three removes from the original French. Under the title Al-khādim (“The Servant”), the play appeared in 1982 in the series Min al-masrah al-'ālami (“From World Theater”), published by Kuwait's Ministry of Culture. Since to all effects and purposes Etherton's theatrical adaptation is Kharma's original, it is necessary to begin by describing how the Zambian-born British writer who taught drama at the University of Zambia in the 1960s adapted his source, Reed's Houseboy, before discussing how the play was later Arabized.

Among the penitentials of the middle ages, that by Thomas Chabham is of particular importance on account of its detailed classification of minstrels and players. In distinguishing different classes among these players and entertainers instead of condemning all alike, Chabham affords a notable illustration of the gradual growth in the Church of a tolerant attitude toward innocent amusements. M. Gautier, while recognizing the importance of this passage in Chabham's Penitential, raised the question whether “cette somme n'est qu'une compilation d'oeuvres antérieures, ou s'il y faut voir l'original de plusieurs autres Sommes de pénitence.” In order to decide this question it is necessary to consider such evidence as is available concerning the author and the date of the Penitential.

There is much independent and debonair criticism of contemporary English literature in the Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne, written for the information of continental Europeans by the Swiss Georges Deyverdun and his very close friend Edward Gibbon. Unfortunately volumes for 1767 and 1768 only were published, although, as Gibbon remarks in his personal Memoirs, “the materials of the third volume were almost completed, when I recommended Deyverdun as governor to Sir Richard Worsley. … They set forwards on their travels; nor did they return to England till some time after my father's death.” The number printed was so small that copies of the first volume are very infrequently to be met with, and of the second very rarely indeed. For Gibbon, the Mémoires littéraires were to some extent the fruit of his studies during a sojourn at Lausanne between 1753 and 1758; for Deyverdun they were a means of livelihood, hit upon only after Gibbon had sought suitable employment for him far and wide in England. Inasmuch as they confirm what became a life-long connection, an account of how they came to be written may very well include a few remarks upon the early friendship of the collaborators.

In 1866 Hardy bought a small volume published the year before in “The Cottage Library” series at Halifax called Queen Mab and Other Poems by Percy B. Shelley. The “other poems” are “Alastor,” “The Revolt of Islam,” and “Prometheus Unbound.” This book is now in the possession of Frederick B. Adams, Jr., who has most kindly allowed me to copy the numerous markings Hardy made in the text of “The Revolt of Islam” and “Prometheus Unbound.” Under Hardy's autograph, address, and the date “1866” on the title-page is the following inscription written by Sir James Barrie in 1933: “This Shelley and another volume like it were given to me by Mrs Hardy after Τ H's death. In his early days when he was in an architect's office (Blomfields) in Adelphi Terrace he carried these two books in his pockets and often read them aloud and discoursed on them to [sic] the other clerks. All the linings and marks on them were made by him in those days.” “Another volume like it” suggests a matching selection from Shelley's lyrics, but such a book has not come to light and Mr. Adams thinks that the other volume Barrie referred to was the Swinburne that Hardy is known to have carried about with him at the same time.

During recent years, despite—or possibly because of—T. S. Eliot's commendation, George Chapman's verse has appealed to a fit audience, though few indeed. One of the reasons for this neglect has been the inaccessibility resulting from insufficient knowledge of the tradition and technique of platonic allegory in the Renaissance. Since Battenhouse's pioneering effort at explicating The Shadow of Night, other scholars equipped with a fuller knowledge of platonic iconography and mythology have attempted to part the veil of obscurity by reestablishing a coherent intellectual and historical context and have enhanced our understanding of several of the more difficult poems, notably Hero and Leander and Ovids Banquet of Sence. It may be time to examine a poem which has not been noted for artistic accomplishment in order to determine to what extent such a context reveals a consistent poetic mode in Chapman's verse.

Africa, the world's second-largest continent, speaks over two thousand languages but rarely translates itself. it is no wonder, therefore, that Ferdinand Oyono's francophone African classic Une vie de boy (1956), translated into at least twelve European and Asian languages, exists in only one African translation—that is, if we consider as non-African Oyono's original French and the English, Arabic, and Portuguese into which it was translated. Since 1963, when Obi Wali stated in his essay “The Dead End of African Literature” that African literature in English and French was “a clear contradiction, and a false proposition,” like “Italian literature in Hausa” (14), the question of the language of African literature has animated debate. Two decades later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o restated Wali's contention, asserting that European languages led to African “spiritual subjugation” (9). Ngũgĩ argued strongly that African literature should be written in African languages. On the other hand, Chinua Achebe defended European languages, maintaining that they could “carry the weight of African experience” (62).

One of the preliminary problems that confronts the textual investigator of the Canterbury Tales is to determine which if any of the early prints can claim to rank with the manuscripts as independent authorities. It seems to be generally agreed that no account need be taken of any edition later than that which Thynne included in his collection of the Chaucer's works printed by Godfray in 1532, but of the six prints of the Tales of which that was the latest no complete investigation seems yet to have been attempted. My object in this paper is to make a beginning by subjecting to critical analysis the first 116 lines of the Knight's Tale as they stand in these six editions.

In advocating a biocultural approach to literature, one is claiming an ineluctable relation between science and culture. Biology, for example, is as intrinsic to the embodied state of readers and writers as history and culture are intrinsic to the professional bodies of knowledge known as science and biology. To think of science without including a historical and cultural analysis would be like thinking of the literary text without the surrounding weave of active or dormant discursive knowledges. It is similarly limited to think of literature—or to debate its properties or existence—without considering the network of meanings we might learn from a scientific perspective. Combined, these propositions link with a more synthetic argument: that the biological without the cultural, or the cultural without the biological, is doomed to be reductionist at best and inaccurate at worst.

When i first started teaching as a volunteer instructor in the college program at san quentin state prison in 1999, I used to imagine writing an article about what I was experiencing to submit to PMLA. The thought of that article took on an almost therapeutic function; it became a mental structure for processing what was often, from the beginning, an intellectually and emotionally overwhelming experience. At the time, it seemed natural that sharing what I was learning with a few thousand stranger-colleagues was the most reassuring thing I could imagine. Only in retrospect do I find this a strangely moving illustration of what it means to me to be a part of an intellectual community. I would never have imagined back then that the editors of PMLA themselves would one day initiate an entire special issue on this topic.

The Spectator of July 10,1886, voiced the general opinion of the then limited group acquainted with Russian literature when it hailed Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky as not only the greatest of Russian writers, but also the most important among contemporary realists. Such enthusiasm seems at first oddly inconsistent with the prevailing popular literary taste, particularly when we remember that these Russian novelists were rather closely identified with the French naturalistic movement—-a movement bitterly assailed by the Victorians. Moreover, their writings, representing virtually the only Russian literature to appear in English translation before 1900, came at a time when the controversy over Balzac had barely subsided and when those over Baudelaire, Zola, and Ibsen had excited a tempest, not only in the literary world, but also from the pulpit, press, and platform—even within the halls of Parliament. The history of Russian realism in England prior to 1900 thus throws into bold relief the essential differences between it and French realism as these two movements appeared to the English, and affords a deeper insight into the Victorian conscience with its troubled concern over art and morality.

The influence of the Romance of the Rose upon Chaucer has been generally recognized, Chaucer scholars differ, however, concerning the extent and the time of this influence. The relatively older view (represented by Mr. E. G. Sandras in his Étude sur Chaucer, Paris, 1859) that Chaucer is an imitator of the Romance of the Rose who has never freed himself sufficiently from this influence to appreciate the greater art of his Italian model, seems now generally put aside by those who, following the lead of Mr. ten Brink, bring the English poet before us as having not only fully grasped the value of his Italian models, but as having actually surpassed at least some of them.

There is a measure of incongruity in seeing the translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Jerome Lobo at the head of the lists of the works of Samuel Johnson, who seems of all writers the one least likely to be swept away by the glamor of the orient. His casting his own philosophical reflections in the form of an oriental tale in Rasselas is less remarkable since in doing so he was following a convention of which the actual representation of oriental life formed no part. He could very well have written Rasselas without having any particular interest in the East, for in spite of Boswell's enthusiastic claim that “this Tale, with all the charms of oriental imagery, and all the force and beauty of which the English language is capable, leads us through the most important scenes of human life,” it is a commonplace of criticism that the scenes of human life displayed are not really linked to the scene of Abyssinia and that the Cairo of Rasselas is as actually London as the sage of the story is Johnson himself. The reader who goes to Rasselas seeking “the charms of oriental imagery” is doomed to disappointment. Yet the feeling persists that the spell which was cast on the mind of the youthful Johnson by the Abyssinia of Lobo must have reasserted itself when the mature man came to set down his somber reflections on human life at the time of his mother's death. W. P. Courtney and D. Nichol Smith, discussing the composition of Rasselas, comment that “very little of the Oriental life of Lobo is reproduced in Rasselas, though that narrative, as his first labour in literature, must have been embedded in the author's mind.” The mystery of Johnson's being attracted to the work of Lobo in the first place and of its relation, tentatively suggested by Courtney and Smith, to his own oriental tale is resolved by an examination of A Voyage to Abyssinia and its accompanying dissertations.