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

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.

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.

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

Critical discourse today locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship. The deepening of globalizing processes strips citizens of power, this position maintains. As economic processes become globalized, the nation-state loses its ability to protect its population. Citizens lose their ability to elect a leadership that effectively pursues their interests. When production facilities are dispersed beyond the nation, jobs are lost to foreigners, labor markets are affected by conditions in countries with diverse living standards, and capital flows, at the speed of light, to places of optimum returns. Consumption is also planetary in scope, bringing across borders alien cultural assumptions as embodied in commodities. The popular need no longer be the local. Although foreign goods are inflected with community values and easily adapted to local conditions, they remain indexes of otherness. What is more dramatic still than the changes in production and consumption, nation-states are losing their cultural coherence by dint of planetary communications systems. Much of contemporary music is global music or at least a fusion of diverse musical cultures. Satellite technology and the Internet bring all media across national boundaries as if those borders did not exist. Global processes run deep and wide, rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a national community.

In his early fiction, Henry James’s characters tend to see reality in terms of an idealized pastoral image. This “fallacy” is paradoxical, being both a romantic falsification and an imaginative creation of values. The pastoral complex associates images of frail, vulnerable, but perfect and innocent figures; bright, tranquil, but diminutive fragile scenes; an intruding horror; and a resultant redoubling of efforts to transform the ideal into a perfect harmony. The Europeans and “An International Episode” exploit this Arcadian motif, and in “Brooksmith” the mode is thoroughly explored, even to the elegiac apotheosis of the dead “shepherd.” In the highly ambiguous late novels, The Turn of the Screw and The Golden Bowl, the residual power of the pastoral impulse remains ironically operative. For James the process of life is not to be denied, but the stasis of art and the need to create it are requisite for meaning, richness, and worth in the “felt” life.

In Browning's second letter to Elizabeth Barrett he uses the imagery of “white light” versus “prismatic hues” to represent the contrast between the full and direct reflection of her personality in lyric utterance, and the partial and oblique refraction of his own personality in the medium of the dramatic monologue. A little later, he reveals his consciousness of the limitations of his poetry through a kindred image: “these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you …” In response, Elizabeth Barrett, while deprecating the merit of her own poetry and paying tribute to the worth of Browning's, acknowledges the justice of his self-criticism: “and in fact, you have not written the R. B. poem yet—your rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight. I see you only in your moon” (i, 22). In one of her letters, though referring to “the glory of dramatic art,” she urges: “Yet I am conscious of wishing you to take the other crown besides—and after having made your own creatures speak in clear human voices, to speak yourself out of that personality which God made, and with the voice which he tuned into such power and sweetness of speech” (ii, 182).

L'Influence de l‘œuvre de l'abbé Prévost dans la littérature secondaire de son siècle ne semble pas avoir été suffisamment reconnue. Cette influence fut considérable bien qu'affaiblie et comme obscurcie plus tard par le roman de mœurs anglais qu'il introduisit lui-même en France, et surtout par la renommée éclatante et plus durable de Jean-Jacques Rousseau qui, tout en coordonnant nombre d'idées éparses dans l‘œuvre de son devancier, sut imposer un système naturiste au monde par la seule force de son génie.

Traditional academic criticism has looked for the unity of Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves in the correspondence with its times, with the leading writers and thinkers of the period. New criticism believes the unity of the novel resides in a particular view of life of the author, pessimistic and even desperate, expressed in an individual style. In contrast with both the traditional and contemporary views the unity of the work consists of the creation of the inner life and personality of the main character who, significantly, gives her name to the novel; and of a complex but definite structure with themes and variations resembling a musical composition. The inner life of the main character is presented through two moral tests and culminates in a free choice which represents her total being: intellectual, moral, emotional. There is, therefore, no mutilation, no sacrifice of one aspect of herself to some external ethical standard, but full realization of the potentialities set forth by the novelist at the outset. (In French)

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.

For the persistence, since 1924, of contrasting opinions as to Jeffrey's treatment of the text of Carlyle's “Burns,” David Alec Wilson is in no small measure responsible. First, Wilson's violent partisanship apparently has led some critics of Carlyle to assume that they may disregard the Wilson Life without discrediting themselves. Second, Wilson's inadequate handling of the “Burns” episode itself has permitted continued divergences of opinion among those students of Carlyle who seem directly acquainted with the pertinent Jeffrey-Carlyle correspondence in the second volume of the Life. For, though Wilson quotes generously from this correspondence, and though he makes frequent references to details in it, he nowhere explicitly gives the conclusion to which his own fresh examination of the evidence may have led him. Wilson's inadequacy is reflected both in popular digests of his account of the Carlyle-Jeffrey clashes concerning the “Burns” and in Isaac Watson Dyer's bibliographical summary of this account.

In 1926, coming upon Spengler's Decline of the West, Yeats was amazed and delighted. “Here is a very strange thing,” he wrote to Sturge Moore, “which will show you what I meant when I wrote of individual man not being shut up in a bottle.” While he had been drawing his diagrams for the historical sketch in A Vision, Spengler's first edition had been going through the press. Had there been some occult communication? “I can almost say… that there is no difference in our interpretation of history (an interpretation that had never occurred to anybody before) that is not accounted for by his great and my slight erudition.” Though Yeats exaggerated, the similarities are substantial; but the means of communication are more various than he wished to allow. Many of Spengler's views were far from novel; and Yeats's early acquaintance with philosophies of history was much broader than his disclaimers of erudition imply. In fact, by 1895 his own historical symbolism was taking clear form; and like Spengler's system, it was amply nourished by the common thought of nineteenth-century Europe.

Every aspect of organic life, including sexuality and death, is comprehended in Ulysses as a moment or aspect of a general circulation whose primary figure is eating and the digestive process. But the digestive process is a form of decomposition, and in one sense Ulysses is a stomach or tomb in which language breaks down into its constituent units—ultimately, letters, the elements of an onomatopoeic notation for human speech. Ulysses works between the figure of onomatopoeia (as the limit of mimesis) and that of infidelity (as an image for the undermining of all ontological security at the sexual-gastronomic level) to reconceive mimesis as the isomorphism between two decompositional series, one involving language and the other the body.

Given Stendhal's known liberal opinions, his admiration for Napoleon has always appeared paradoxical. Through a detailed examination of the two works most fully representing Stendhal's thoughts on Napoleon, an attempt is made to resolve the paradox. To do full justice to the complexity of the author's attitudes, what he found to blame is first contrasted with what he praised. The admiration for the man of destiny contrasts with the dislike of the statesman, extraordinary qualities of character are set against weaknesses. Beyond the description of the man, Stendhal discerns general historical laws operating in Napoleon's career. The course of events from rise to prominence through imperial power and progressive decline embodies a lesson for mankind. Despotism promotes a state of national demoralization and, therefore, prepares its own defeat. Such a judgment derives from the historiography of Enlightenment liberalism. The contrast between Stendhal's attitude toward Danton and Napoleon confirms that this is the tradition to which Stendhal belongs. As a utilitarian Stendhal nevertheless concludes that Napoleon's impact on European history was not wholly negative, since it led to a greater sum of happiness. As a liberal he affirms that lasting happiness within a state is only possible with constitutional government.

Aliterary analysis of the Eldorado episode in Candide should undertake to answer three interlocking questions: (1) What is its philosophic meaning in relation to the whole? (2) By what artistic devices is that meaning conveyed? (3) How successfully has Voltaire fused form and substance? To date no such analysis exists. Questions 2 and 3 have been handled either scantly or not at all. Question 1, while much more frequently and for the most part satisfactorily treated, has in a few instances produced divergent interpretations springing from divergencies of critical approach. It is the purpose of this essay to elaborate an analysis of the episode which will, among other things, provide a standard for evaluating the partial answers thus far offered.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the literary, folkloristic, and social significance of the “peasant-tournament,” a type of mock-epic generally neglected by literary historians. Perhaps the two outstanding examples of this genre are The Turnament of Totenham and the tournament in Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring, both of which appear to date from the first half of the fifteenth century. The Turnament is an alliterative burlesque written sometime before 1456 by an unknown English author, who set the scene of his work at Tottenham, a village near London. Its 234 verses tell of a peasant tournament in which doughty village swains contend for the hand of Tyb, the reeve's daughter. The tournament of Lappenhausen is the opening episode in Wittenwiler's Ring, an amazing comic-didactic poem written in northeastern Switzerland about 1420. The Ring tells of the love, courtship, and marriage, of Bertschi Triefnas and his lovely hunchbacked, flatfooted, goitered sweetheart, Metzli Ruerenzumph. In the opening scene, which comprises about a thousand verses (vv. 105-659, 830-1279), Bertschi and his twelve companions ride to the village green and challenge all comers to joust in the name of womanhood. Finding no one who dares withstand them, they joust with each other until joined by Neidhart of Reuental, a peasant-hating nobleman who arrives in disguise and gives them a thorough drubbing.