[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.]

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.

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.

Coleridge's disciples fall into two classes: those who, like J. H. Green, felt themselves to be the appointed custodians of Coleridge's teachings and who set about the scholarly business of collecting, completing, systematizing, editing, interpreting, and preserving Coleridge's writings and sayings; and those who, like J. C. Hare and Frederick Denison Maurice, were interested chiefly in extracting from Coleridge's teaching what would be food for their own minds, and truth confirmed by their own experience. The first group of disciples sought to make Coleridge accessible and understandable; the second group attempted to apply and test what he had taught. The comments of both groups upon their teacher may be of value. Of special importance, however, are the comments of Maurice, who, a devoted but discriminating student of Coleridge and a disciple whose whole life gave testimony as to both the worth and the shortcomings of Coleridge's message, was in his own day, a prolific writer and influential teacher.

There is nothing surprising in finding that a part of Edmund Burke's life still remains obscure. With the exception of his political activities within the walls of the House of Commons, almost all of his life is obscure. Such simple vital facts as the date of his birth, the place of his marriage, even the exact place of his burial, are still subjects of doubt. (See N. & Q.,clxxii, 441; 6th ser., v, 274 f.; cxlix, 80).) Almost nothing is known about his first ten years in London. Mr. Dixon Wecter's recent article entitled “The Missing Years in Edmund Burke's Biog-graphy,” PMLA (December, 1938), shows clearly how little is yet known about this period. There are uncertainties as to the times of writing, dates of publication, and even the authorship of works generally considered his. There are uncertainties as to the part he may have taken in several works ascribed to other people. There is a most embarrassing mystery surrounding the sources of his income. Indeed, almost anywhere one looks in his private life, there is some element of mystery.

The conviction of Miss Helen Darbishire, to which she has given expression in the Appendix to The Manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book I, and later in Early Lives of Milton (xvi-xxvii), that the anonymous Life of Milton was the work of John Phillips, the poet's nephew, is so strong that, after having stated it and given her reasons therefore, she uses the suggested authorship as a certainty in the title she gives to the Life and elsewhere throughout the Early Lives of Milton. Her argument is two-fold:

1. In a manuscript of John Phillips's poem, “A Satyr against Hypocrites,” is “a page and a half of Dedication signed by John Phillips. This dedication “written in a formal Italian hand,” she believes to be his. She also believes that certain marginal notes and textual corrections are in his hand. Comparing these specimens of what she believes to be John Phillips's handwriting with the handwriting of the anonymous Life, she “was struck at once by the similarity of the handwriting” in the two manuscripts.

It has long been recognized that the American formalists' rehabilitation of Alexander Pope depended on a renewed interest in rhetoric. In fact, there is a remarkable structural congruence between the formalists image of Pope's poetry and their conception of rhetoric, for both are item-centered, combinatory, and ultimately unifying. A single model of unified diversity, then, governs not only the formalist image of Pope's couplet rhetoric and theodicean scheme but formalist conceptions of rhetoric and “organic form” as well. An alternative (and complementary) model of rhetoric, however, insisting on creation as an act of structuring through differentiation rather than through unification, can help us to a fuller understanding of The Dunciad, and especially of the place of Dulness in that poem. Such a model can also generate a poetics capable of granting to satire and mock forms an appropriately primary status. (FVB)

Some years ago bertram holland flanders discovered in an obscure literary journal called Wheler's Magazine, published in Athens, Georgia, a Longfellow “translation” entitled “A Lay of Courage,” which had not appeared among the poet's collected works. According to its heading the poem had been rendered from the Danish of Ove Mailing, a statesman and historian of some importance but of small reputation as a poet. When Flanders added the translation to Longfellow's bibliography nothing was known of the circumstances of its composition nor had the Danish original been identified. An examination of additional evidence now makes it clear that Longfellow did not translate the poem; that, in fact, he probably did not even consult Mailing's original; and that, actually, he took the product of an earlier translator and, altering it slightly, submitted it to the editor of Wheler's Magazine under his own name.

We are confronted today with a persistent tradition, whose veracity has been less questioned with the passing years, that Diderot not only contributed extensively to the thought and style, but also wrote many of the pages, of D'Holbach's works.

How might early modern studies participate in the larger conversations and transformations of postcolonial studies while attending to the specificities of the age? How might we develop and mobilize period-specific understandings of a moment when states aspire to both empire and nation? My inquiry is motivated not only by the questions posed by the cluster of essays to which it belongs but also by the generalized, and often historically imprecise, move to transnationalism as a catchall for work that complicates our traditional nation-based categories. As I will suggest here, despite the strategic advantages of transnationalism for forging trans-historical connections, for developing a critical pedagogy, and for interrogating our own academy, the approach threatens to occlude the intertwined histories of nation and empire, even as it fails to capture the liminal, transitional qualities of the early modern. Instead, I propose a focus on imperium, to highlight the mimetic rivalries occurring among emergent empires at the very time they solidify sovereignty. Imperium studies challenges the self-sufficient histories of nation and empire by arguing for their imbrication and competition: only a plural history of the intersections among them can provide the full picture. Moreover, imperium studies explicitly engages with the multiple early modern temporalities, as well as allegiances—to an imperial future, certainly, but also to a classical past that remained central as exemplar and motivator and to the imperfect, incomplete work of nation making.

This article contributes to the new formalism by considering the relation between literary form and race. It argues that Chang-rae Lee's novel Native Speaker is primarily concerned with its own figurative activity and that only when the analytic framework is shifted away from Asian America and toward allegory does the novel's far-ranging critique of whiteness, referential language, and native speaking become apparent. This figurative activity consists of strategies of concealment that disguise their artfulness by posing as self-evident or referential. Race, espionage, and allegory are examples of this representational mode, defined by hiding in plain sight. As part of a larger argument for formal analysis in Asian American literature, the article explores how the novel's central tropes figure the figuration of Asian American experience, and it seeks to demonstrate how reading for form can sharpen the politics of race.

Visitors to Westminster Abbey may remember the memorial statue to David Garrick with its inscription:

To paint fair nature by divine command,
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
A Shakespeare rose: then to expand his fame
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Tho' sunk in death the forms the poet drew,
The actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
Though like the bard himself, in night they lay
Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day;
And till Eternity with power sublime
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time
Shakespeare and Garrick like twin stars shall shine
And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

In Romania LXXVII (1956), 66 ff. Irénée Cluzel has re-edited three of the Catalan troubadour's poems composed in a more popular vein. It is with the second of them (No. 3 of M. de Riquer's edition, Barcelona, 1947) that we are going to deal here.

This essay makes a case for the centrality of premodern Persian literary criticism to understanding Islamic virtue ethics as a world tradition of civility. It argues that this body of criticism took the form of two distinct if overlapping interpretive postures, the charismatic-allegorical and the humanist-philological, and that these two postures assumed and furthered two forms of friendship: a vertical form of Sufi hierarchy and a horizontal form of humanist-philological tutelage. Pointing to the centrality of both kinds of friendship to the urban settings in which Islamic virtue ethics has situated itself, it then sets forth how these presupposed models of friendship conditioned literary commentary by considering representative passages from three Mughal commentaries on Sa‘dī's canonical The Rose Garden of 1258. It closes by expanding on its opening remarks on the relations between metaliterary discourse and virtue, speculating on the ethical limits of this body of Persian literary criticism in relation to the modern practice of critique.

Goethe's first letter to Schiller, in which he agreed to support the Horen, and which marks the beginning of their unique alliance, contains a passage, in effect, as follows:

This paper owes its origin to three statements about Pope:

… I find your Practice the Prosodia of your Rules.—Henry Cromwell, letter to Pope, S December 1710.
… he [Pope] adhered rigidly to the rules laid down in it [his letter on prosody], both in the translation from Statius and in the Pastorals.-Edith Sitwell, Alexander Pope, p. 69.

If the value of the study of literature were self-evident, there would be no need to pose this question. That such is not the case is clear from the virulence of the debates about higher education in the humanities that have roiled the profession and areas beyond. Professors of literature have had a lot to say to one another about this question but not, perhaps, as much to say to their students. Yet faculty members implicitly answer this question all the time, in the courses they teach, especially in introductory, or “gateway,” courses. I will address the question, then, as concretely as possible, by way of the introductory course for the English major my colleagues and I have designed together and discussed repeatedly over the past two decades at Wesleyan University. In so doing, I will argue that the value of studying literature is precisely that it poses value as a question, not an answer.