Before Walt Whitman became the self-celebrating poet of Leaves of Grass, he was a professional journalist. This paper examines the journalism Whitman produced from 1840 to 1842 in the context of an emerging celebrity culture, and it considers celebrity's effects on the public sphere. It traces the penny press's personal style of journalism to both its artisan-republican politics and the formation of celebrity culture, in which celebrities assume status parallel to that of traditional representatives of authority. As editor of the Aurora, Whitman adopts the first-person, polemical style of the penny press and singles out prominent people for criticism. In other pieces, he presents himself as the ever-observant flâneur. As editor and as flâneur, he is a participant in and observer of the life of his community, and he assumes unassailable interpretive power. But he also regards his readers as fellow participants-observers who make judgments about the public figures he reports on. The tension between these positions is never resolved: Whitman's dialogic addresses to readers aim to extend the public sphere of critical debate even as Whitman holds steadfastly to his own social and political authority. Encouraging and modeling readers' negotiations over the meaning of public figures, he extends the features of celebrity culture to the public at large. His early journalism shows how and why it is so difficult to reconcile political and social community in the era of mass culture, and it highlights the complexities of the coexistence of celebrity and critical discourse in the personal public sphere.

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.

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.”

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.

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).

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.

Recent criticism of the eighteenth-century English novel points to a providential world view as the “proper conceptual context” for these fictions, but it would be an error to see the fictions of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett as uniformly or unhesitatingly committed to the providential order. These authors constructed fictions, characters, and structures in response to the historical actuality of the age, in transition from the Christian to the secular world view. It is this transition and its effect on the providential world view that provide the conceptual context for the fiction of this period. Critics, having recognized the novel as the fictional form of a secular age, must also recognize the significance of the romance as that fictional form best depicting the providential order. In eighteenth-century English fiction the romance is gingerly displaced from the theoretical center of narrative by elements of form now identified with the novel.

Fielding's veiled aspersions of Walpole as the “Great Man” of his Tom Thumb (24 April 1730) is accepted as his first political satire on the stage, and his allusion in The Author's Farce (30 March 1730) to Cibber as “Mr. Keyber,” a nickname connected with anti-Walpole satire, has been taken only as evidence that Fielding wrote Shamela, with its “Keyber” on the title page. I myself have stated that political satire in The Author's Farce went no further than the single reference to “Keyber.” But innocence and the authorities have apparently conspired to hide a number of other political allusions in The Author's Farce, in the 1730 original (there were two 1730 “editions” of this, neither reprinted, not readily accessible) as well as in the 1734 revision—threads of the anti-Walpole satire that Fielding worked into his stage burlesques with increasing frequency. Some of this satire may also appear, rather unexpectedly, in The Mock Doctor (23 June 1732) and it is certainly evident in Tumble-Down Dick (29 April 1736), a play from Fielding's high “political” period that has strangely been left out of political account.

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 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.

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes—which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.“ These two sentences, embedded in the well-known Preface to Eminent Victorians, must always be the starting point and a constant point of reference in any discussion of Strachey's conception of biography. The basis of all good biography must be, he firmly held, the humanistic respect for men—men in their separateness as distinct from lower creatures and in their separateness apart from economical, political, ethical, and religious theories; men in their separateness as distinct from one another, men as individuals, various, living, free. It has been well said that Strachey wrote with ”a glowing conviction that character is the one thing that counts in life“ and with a realization that individual human beings, however simple they may appear, are enigmatical, complex, and compact of contending elements. Each person carries his secret within him, and the biographer is one who has the gift for discerning what it is. Hence individual human beings are not only highly important; they are also highly interesting. The puzzle which the biographer has to solve in dealing with ordinary people is fascinating enough; but when the subject is a great man, the biographer works with his problem in an atmosphere of intense excitement, for about all great men there is something wondrous and incredible.

Although almost anyone's list of Sherwood Anderson's successes in fiction would include “The Man Who Became a Woman,” this haunting story has provoked less commentary than it deserves. Irving Howe provides the fullest discussion in Sherwood Anderson, though the nature of his book prevents him from treating the story in detail, and we may take his interpretation of it as standard. For Howe, “The Man Who Became a Woman” is concerned essentially with homosexuality, showing us an older man not even yet “secure in his male adulthood” who is driven to narrate some extraordinary experiences of his youth: experiences in which “psychic needs and moral standards clash,” and which may reveal the youth's “hysteria as a result of accumulated anxieties about his sexual role.” In what follows, I shall not be denying that homosexuality is a major motif, but arguing that Anderson is writing about something more: about a particular integrity of being that the youth must experience as a requisite for growing up. To this extent I shall be reversing Howe's emphasis, suggesting that the story centers on the conditions under which the narrator matures, and taking the homosexuality as one instance among others of the narrator's special quality—his openness to the contrarieties of experience. Perhaps some support for this reading inheres in the fact that the teller periodically denies being homosexual in any ordinary sense (e.g., pp. 188, 207, 209): while these denials may be seen as his psychologically necessary effort to shield himself from the truth, they may also be plausibly viewed as indications that the heart of the story's significance lies elsewhere. In any event, the teller himself—when addressing the reader on behalf of the story—insists on its unconventionality: “I'm puzzled you see, just how to make you feel as I felt that night. … I'm not claiming to be able to inform you or to do you any good. I'm just trying to make you understand some things about me” (p. 208). Disclaiming a traditional instructional or ethical aim, he invites us simply to participate in his crucial experience on “that night.”

Biographers of Marvell have found themselves in a curious predicament. Although a considerable number of Marvell's letters have come down to us and evidence of other kinds is at least comparatively extensive, it has proved impossible to arrive at any clear understanding of his character. That fundamental uncertainty is chiefly a result of the fact that at two or three critical points the evidence is limited and enigmatic.