Lazarillo de Tormes cannot be considered simply as a story of the moral degeneration of a potentially good boy who, under the influence of his pitiless masters, becomes a selfish and cynical cuckold, utterly blind to his moral degradation. The episode with the Squire reveals that the mature Lazaro (as he declares it himself) still has deep feelings of pity and charity for the Squire and those like him, just as he did when he was still a boy. Thus, this most important of Christian virtues has not been lost in the adult picaro. The capacity for human compassion and sympathy which is clearly revealed in the style of the autobiography must also be assigned to Lazaro and not merely to the anonymous author. And it is Lazaro, in his own moral judgments, who tends to condemn those who are selfish and without charity but is sympathetic to those who are generous and weak, regardless of their social sins; e.g., Zaide steals for love, the priest and friar for lust and for themselves (“para sus devotas y para ayuda de otro tanto”). Lazaro's final situation contributes to the ironic twist: From an external or social point of view, he is at the bottom of the moral scale, but his capacity for charity elevates him when compared with his selfish and lecherous masters. It is this subtle irony, of which the author was probably conscious, both as an artist and as a satirist, that lends moral ambiguity, as well as artistic complexity, to the main character and to the total conception of the work.

Macaulay's essay on The Life and Writings of Addison has been signalized by his most recent biographer as probably “his soundest piece of literary criticism.” Published in July, 1843, when he was at the height of his critical and stylistic powers, the work reveals both the strength and weaknesses of its author. It takes its point of departure as a review of Miss Lucy Aikin's Life of Joseph Addison, published in 1843 by Macaulay's own publishers, Longman and associates. After paying his respects to the lady author, he brushes aside the contributions in her work with severe strictures on its errors. In the prospect that the charm of Addison's letters, many of them printed in the biography for the first time, might brings a demand for a second edition of the Life, he concludes his remarks by saying: “If so, we hope that every paragraph will be revised, and that every date and fact about which there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully verified.” While making numerous corrections in Miss Aikin's work, Macaulay failed to produce a study any less in need of such checking of facts. As will be shown, this need is most notable in his spirited account of one of the salient episodes in Addison's career—the writing and publishing of the Campaign (1704).

Sir Edmund Chambers writes that “Peele's hand has been sought in nearly every masterless play of his epoch.” The evidence advanced for such attributions has usually consisted mainly of parallel passages and verbal tests, with the result that plays as different in structure as The Troublesome Reign of King John and King Leir have been fathered upon Peele by the same critic. Most scholars have been inclined to overlook the importance of structure as a means of determining authorship, though the dramas of Jonson and Shakespeare structure appears to be as much a constant as style or characterization. It is the purpose of this paper to show that Peele's known plays reveal a fairly constant type of structure, and that this type can be used as a determinant in considering the authorship of anonymous plays.

While older literary historians dismissed Wilhelm Heinse as the author of the frivolous novel Ardinghello, in recent decades critics and scholars have noted his significance. Through the research of Walther Brecht, Walther Rehm, Oskar Weibel, Albert Zippel, and Richard Benz we now know Heinse not only as a novelist but also as a gifted interpreter of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance, as an art critic who defended Rubens against neoclassical criticism, as a forerunner of Romanticism, as an early advocate of the rehabilitation of the flesh and of a Nietzschean affirmation of life. In the recently published Annalen der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1952) p. 465, Wolfdietrich Rasch singled out Heinse's Ardinghello along with Goethe's Iphigenie, Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and Mozart's Don Juan, to exemplify the extent and diversity of German cultural life at the end of the eighteenth century.

Wordsworth's relation to Italy has been a subject rather neglected in the annals of English poets who have known and loved “the land of lands,” and have left us memorial records of the beauty of Italy's blue sky, the golden clarity of her air, the soft greenness of her trees, and the fame of her poets and artists. Biographers of Wordsworth have so emphasized his relation to France that the general reader is hardly aware that the poet had crossed the Alps, both in body and in spirit. He belongs with Chaucer, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Landor, Clough, and the Brownings, all of whom will ever be associated with memories of Italy. An attempt to trace the history of his acquaintance with Italy, may, it is hoped, show that he had for things Italian a really life-long sympathy. Moreover, the study may help to dispel some lingering superstitions about Wordsworth's insularity. Wordsworth was one of the most assiduous travellers of all the English poets except Byron. The difficulty of travel in the early nineteenth century should be remembered in considering the distances he traversed. He knew France, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and various regions of England, including every inch of the Lake Country.

[In the following paper, for reasons of brevity, a working hypothesis has been presented in narrative form: wherever a definite statement of historical fact has been made in support of a literary theory, the authority has been given in the footnotes. The article aims at elucidating certain problems in Love's Labour's Lost by correlating them with certain matters of historical fact which took place in and about the year 1591. The following points constitute problems in Love's Labour's Lost: (a) date of composition and first performance; (b) The unexpected dénoûment in the postponed marriages; (c) The choice of names for the leading male characters, Navarre, Berowne, etc.; (d) The curious emphasis laid upon the killing of the deer by the Princess; (e) The similarity of the Pageant scene at the close of the play to the Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe in The Midsummer Night's Dream; (f) The satire on Euphuism and Sonnets and other courtly affectations; (g) The unique observance by Shakespeare of the unities of time and place. The ensuing narrative has been evolved by applying to these problems the following matters of historical fact: (a) Burleigh's attempts, 1589–94, to force Southampton into marriage with his grand-daughter, Elizabeth de Vere, and Southampton's successful evasion of his betrothal; (b) Southampton's flight to France, 1591, to take part in the war in Normandy; (c) The Royal Progress, 1591, to Portsmouth and certain incidents in the entertainment of the Queen at Cowdray House.]

To speak of the future of literary criticism is always to speak of the future of literature, which is a mode of language and an institution whose very being essentially touches on the possibility and fragility of its own future. “The fragility of literature,” as Richard Klein suggests, “its susceptibility to being lost,” is at the heart of all literary writing, which emerges from the absence of a “real referent” and thus sustains itself through its reference to other texts, to the archive of literary writing that is made up of figures and other literary articulations that allow us to read. Klein reminds us, citing Jacques Derrida, that literary texts may always disappear: not only because they may be forgotten but also because they are susceptible to the erasure of the archive, to apocalyptic destruction, and to the collective loss of the knowledge of how to read—as a result of new modes of media saturation or, I would add, through the collapse of readability in the age of what Hannah Arendt calls “the modern lie” (“Truth” 253). The force and fragility of literature and of literary criticism are bound up with the possible disappearance of the literary archive, which we implicitly confront in reading literature and in pursuing its forms and thoughts as literary critics.

It is increasingly the tendency of Beowulf students to stress the importance of the historical passages of the poem. Since Grundtvig established the date of Hygelac's last raid, one is inclined to expect corroboration of other parts of the narrative. But the extent to which one may reasonably accept the poet's statements is a matter for dispute. When he says that Beowulf was present at the last raid of Hygelac, there is no reason for doubt. Not so when he says that the hero swam off with thirty suits of armor. When the swimming match with Breca is mentioned, one may reasonably suppose that the hero distinguished himself in a swimming contest in his youth. But when he swims for days and fights off all manner of uncouth beasts, there seems to be sufficient grounds for skepticism. Or when Beowulf, filled with years dies fighting the dragon, we may feel sure that he died a violent death, without accepting the existence of dragons in the sixth century. Thus in general, we may limit confidence to simple facts simply asserted.

For the past fifteen years scholars have examined many facets of Mark Twain's “Jumping Frog”: its narrative techniques and some of its textual history, its relation to folklore, American humor, and Clemens' theory of humorous gravity, and its political, regional, and cultural bearings. This article, by focussing on the personal background to the tale, tries to cast light on the imagination that created the famous yarn. It first relates some of the tale's narrative elements—episodes, characters, names—to Clemens' prior experience, especially to some activities reflected in newly discovered examples of his San Francisco journalism of 1864 and 1865. Then it relates the tale to strong emotional currents in his life during the fall of 1865. Finally the article proposes a date of composition for the “Jumping Frog” and a reading of the tale that emphasizes the level of personal meaning.

I speak to you tonight as an ex-administrator attempting to remember some of the intellectual activities that came to his notice in earlier years at the Library of Congress and UNESCO, and which in the setting of the present time seem worthy of attention. It has seemed to me for a long time that mankind has been moving toward one-worldness in fact and to a lesser extent in spirit and in institutions. It has also seemed to me important to speed up the process of creating one world in spirit and of going the necessary distance to create institutions of a world-wide character to suppress the causes of war.

By September 1967 the opening phase of federal support for English had been largely completed. Fourteen of the Curriculum Study Centers and five of the Demonstration Centers funded under the Cooperative Research Program had submitted their final reports to the Office of Education. Curriculum materials from the Centers at Carnegie, Georgia, Indiana, Hunter (Gateway English), Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin are available for classroom use this fall. The Centers at Gallaudet College, Georgia, Illinois (ISCPET), Indiana, Ohio State, and Wisconsin, however, are continuing their work beyond September 1967. Moreover, nearly ten percent of the Secondary School English teachers in the United States have attended the NDEA Institutes in English authorized by the three-year extension of the NDEA (of 1958) in October 1964.

The suggestion which this paper has to make will remain only a suggestion when the argument is complete. Perhaps I should disarm criticism in advance by admitting that the plausibility of my final and boldest point consists partly in its seductiveness. I should, in short, like to persuade the reader that the character of Belphoebe in The Faerie Queene owes something not only to the Venus of the Æneid but also to the allegorical interpretations of the Virgilian Venus which Spenser inherited from Italy.

Four years ago I read before this Association a paper upon a single figure of speech,—allegory. In order to make a careful study of that figure, it was necessary to give some attention to other figures, especially to these three,—simile, metaphor, and personification. From time to time during the last four years I have followed up trains of thought that were opened by my earlier study, and thus have been led almost unconsciously to note the various relations of the more important figures, until I have come to feel that the best way to arrive at an understanding of any one figure is to study figurative language as a whole as well as in its parts.1 Each year the subject has been brought anew to my mind by the necessity of presenting it in the class-room.

Mateo Alemán's Ortografía castellana ‘Castilian Orthography’ (Mexico City, 1609) is one of many little-studied Renaissance treatises on correct spelling. It offers a modest scheme for reforming the representation of spoken Spanish sounds in writing, argued with elaborate artifice and based especially on the claim that written letters communicate thanks to inherent Pythagorean harmonies. The treatise includes a full illustration of these reforms in an appendix called the “Problem,” which tells how two courtiers inconclusively debate whether speech or writing possesses “greater excellence.” By offering arguments composed entirely of topoi, establishing a rhetorical paradox, and employing devices of admiratio, the “Problem” achieves a fusion of “intersubjectivity” and “intertextuality” that identifies as a single reading experience the wonder of the paradox posed with the success of the improved spelling.

The aesthetic movement in England (1870–1900) now seems remote, yet since no history repeats itself more faithfully than that of criticism, the historian of ideas may well inquire what relation the Art for Art's Sake movement has to the mental, moral, and social confusion of today, especially when one hears a reviewer warning us that John Crowe Ransom, like other formal aesthetic critics of today, “often sounds like an aesthete of the 'nineties.“

The comedias of the Golden Age in Spain present a field of investigation that seems to be inexhaustible. The dramatic productions of that unbelievably exuberant period are so numerous that no one can hope to read them all. Even to try to keep up with the research based upon them is a task of the first magnitude. These plays have been studied from the point of view of sources, dramatic technique, versification, style, dates of the plays, authorship, and much, much else.