This ambitious book begins and ends its argument with reflections on the nature of the contemporary research university in the US. With a focus on the nimbleness (or lack thereof) of the research university to react to rapid changes in the higher education environment, Wellmon reflects on the cultural logic of its unique “capacity to produce and transmit a knowledge that is distinct and carries with it the stamp of authority” (3). He sees this capability as the legacy of the ethos of the German university as it took shape around 1800 in Berlin, which then influenced the American university in the nineteenth century. While the study's focus is on the developments that led to the establishment of the German research university, it clearly invites comparison with our current moment and seeks to stimulate reflection on what the role of the university is in the twentyfirst century. As free or low-cost courses (e.g., MOOCs) enabled by the technology of the internet flood the education market, Wellmon is skeptical of the unbridled celebration of these forms of outsourcing education, primarily because their model lacks the “formative practices and intellectual virtues that constitute the core of the research university” (272). The historical study of the emergence of the research university can play a vital role, Wellmon hopes, in interrogating the epistemic norms and infrastructures of the current research university and its ability to ground a particular form of scientific authority and its underlying ethic, its “most central features: a set of norms, practices, and virtues central to modern knowledge” (274–76).

Wellmon argues that the experiment of the Berlin university was prompted by the information overload as result of the Enlightenment's popularization of knowledge evidenced in the proliferation of printed texts and the concern over its “focus on the technical and practical utility of all knowledge” (5). He points to critics like J. G. Fichte, who called for the German university to distinguish itself from this broad cultural trend. Wellmon traces the long arc of the organization of knowledge, starting with Aristotle's episteme involving logical necessity and truth, the medieval focus on the written word, discipline and doctrine describing the process of instruction and its results, and the humanist development of textual practices in light of new print technologies and the early modern conception of “new science” (Francis Bacon).

One day in June 1928, about two-thirds of the way through Prohibition's fourteen-year-run, Nora Bayes asked Eddie Dowling to call on her. He managed New York City's legendary Palace Theater, and she had starred on Broadway and in vaudeville earlier in the century. Lately, though, she had been ill and was unable to work. Even though she had had a hand in writing “Shine on Harvest Moon” twenty years earlier and had performed all over the country for decades, her star had faded. During her six-year absence from Broadway, the ethnic and “coon songs” that she favored had lost their appeal. Dowling went to see her apprehensively; he knew how demanding she could be. She didn't ask for a spot on the bill, though. Instead, she sang him a few of her old songs and asked if he would find the large photographs of her in her prime and hang them in the lobby the following morning just as if she were starring at the Palace again. He could take them down before the matinee, but she wanted to know when she drove by that her pictures were on view. She had her driver take her past the Palace the next morning on her way to the hospital. She had surgery for cancer but died on the operating table.

Fifteen months later, the stock market crashed. Radio and the talkies helped to kill off vaudeville, and within four years of Bayes's death, the Palace had replaced live acts with movies. If you could afford a night on the town in the 1930s, you might end up in Harlem after midnight, but first you made for Broadway. Those who couldn't afford either went to the movies or listened to the radio instead. Either way, vaudeville had become the oldest hat in town. The country was changing, and that meant Broadway was changing, too. In the 1940s, for the duration of the war, even the lights went out.

In 1918, the journalist John Reed described Broadway as “gashing the city like a lava-stream.” The radio and newspaper columnist Walter Winchell is said to have called it a “main artery of New York life—the hardened artery.” For more than a century, Broadway has been as much an idea as a place, a subject for waxing poetic and profane.

Responding to profound changes, social, political, cultural, and scientific, Romanticism represents and remains a fertile area for scholarly cultivation. Prefaced by Larry H. Peer's fine summary of the major statements on the nature of Romanticism, Peer and Christopher R. Clason bring together nine stimulating essays by active scholars, both rising and established. With the exception of the essays by Lloyd Davies and Ellis Dye, none have been published before. Crossing fields, languages, and disciplines, the essays are broadly arranged into three groups: Romantic rapports between literatures; Romanticism in music and the visual arts; and Romanticism within science, technology, and philosophy. That said, a number of the essays would be comfortable under several headings. Together these contributions seek both to expand and challenge conventional views, opening new perspectives and situating Romanticism within the current trends of literary and cultural studies.

In the section on literature, Lloyd Davies examines the quest for selfhood and the construction of subjectivity in Goethe's Werther and Byron's Harold, playing off of Rousseau's St. Preux. Davies argues that in each the subjectivity emerges more from a dialectical relationship with culture rather than nature. Stacy Hahn sees in the fiction of Balzac a transmutation of Romanticism that shows its affiliation with nineteenth-century realism. Taking this a step further, she then identifies resonances with French New Wave Cinema, especially Truffaut and Rivette and their plays on Balzac. In an analogous vein, Hollie Markland Harder offers an insightful exploration of Proust's relation to Romanticism, seeing in the figures of the cook Françoise and the writer Bloch two alternative versions of French Romanticism, and two alternative paths for the artistic vocation.

The liminal plays an important role in a number of the essays. Looking at the porous boundaries between humans and animals, Clason discusses the “family” affinities in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Kater Murr. Hoffmann's feline hero shows a number of behaviors that echo those of his master Johannes Kreisler, the two constructing a family structure that compensates for their earlier losses. In the section on science, Marjean D. Purinton also looks at the affinities and rapport between human and animal in British Romantic melodramas, where live animals were used on stage.

“Sur” was originally published in the February 1, 1982, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in The Compass Rose: Short Stories (1982). It is currently most readily available in The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (Saga Press).

I never go anywhere without bringing something to read, and I was waiting in line at the DMV the first time I read “Sur.” The story made me so happy that I laughed out loud. People turned and stared. It was as if they had never heard a laugh in the DMV before. I laughed again, tore the story out of the magazine I'd stuck in my purse that morning, and assigned it to my graduate writing class that night.

My students didn't like the story much. I was a lazy teacher then and I am a lazy teacher now. When I love something I just want to hand it over, gift it out. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to explain it. I just want the lucky recipients to see the shine, feel the heat, enjoy the light, savor the flavor. Swallow it whole and take it home with you, that's been my teaching style. It's never worked but it's hard to abandon and so it is difficult even now to say what makes “Sur” such a brilliant, brave, and beautiful story, but it is and I will herewith try to tell why.

The idea, for starters, is delicious. Nine genteel South American ladies tell their friends and families they are going on retreat to a convent for six months, but instead they hire a steamer, sail from Chile, and trek to Antarctica, arriving at the South Pole in 1909, three years before Amundsen. They build an elegant ice cave where they study, cook, play guitar and banjo. They embrace the hard work of sledge hauling and become their own dogs. They live on dried fruits and potatoes that have been freeze dried “according to an ancient Andean Indian method.” They shake their heads at the mess previous explorers have left behind—a “graveyard of seal skins, seal bones, penguin bones and rubbish, presided over by the mad, screaming skua gulls”—and delight in the free beauty of the orca whales, the floating rainbow clouds, multiple suns, and constant white light of the Great Ice Barrier.

The Aesthetic Uncanny, or: Why Children Need Stories

SIGMUND FREUD OPENED his famous essay “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”) with the gesture of acknowledging his unease about the quasi-uncanny intrusion he was about to commit by venturing into a domain outside the field of his psychoanalytical expertise: “the subject of aesthetics.” He committed this transgression nonetheless and featured E. T. A. Hoffmann's story of Der Sandmann (The Sandman) as his primary case study to examine a series of motifs that have been labeled as “uncanny” in literature. However, at the end of his excursion into what was foreign territory to him, Freud redrew the strict line of demarcation between a psychoanalytic and aesthetic inquiry of the uncanny:

This is a surprising, if not self-contradictory conclusion of the essay, because Freud took both the examples that supported as well as those that contradicted his theory from the realm of literature. By admitting to suppressing his rising doubts about the value of his results and closing the door to an aesthetic inquiry, he intentionally exposed his essay to the possibility of a haunting return—that of his repressed doubts in the form of future criticism. This article aims to reopen the door that Freud closed and to challenge, or at least complement, his psychoanalytical approach with an aesthetic inquiry.

What kind of “doubts” Freud had in mind becomes evident when we consult the rivaling theory of Ernst Jentsch from 1906, who defined the uncanny as “intellectual” or “psychical uncertain[ty]” for distinguishing between the real and imagined, and as “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.”

THIS SPECIAL SECTION is devoted to the peculiarity of the narrative events in Goethe's texts, including his novels, novellas, and ballads. In general, narrative events can be described as irreversible, unpredictable, and meaningful in the larger plot, and as marking a transition from a state A to a state B.1 Narrative events—and that also means real events that can be described by means of narratives—are powerful and leave their marks. There probably would be no narrative without an event. The papers in this section focus on Goethe's remarkable avoidance of such events and his careful rendering of events. The goal of this section is to develop a theory of narrative events according to Goethe's literary texts. This Goethean theory of the event focuses on the “event-that-should-not-be” (or the event-that-should-not-have-been), meaning it focuses on strategies for avoiding events, or on strategies for understanding the many subtle consequences of such events—including how they initiate chains of repetition and trauma, and the possibilities of healing affected people and undoing the long-term damage such events can inflict. In particular, the papers examine the hermeneutic, therapeutic, and aesthetic dimensions of events-that-should-not-be and events-that-should-not-have-been.

The Event-that-Should-Not-Be

When one considers the narratives and storylines in Goethe's plays, prose texts, and ballads, we first notice the absence of a clear, powerful, and paradigmatic event. In fact, there are not that many events at all. Yes, there is Werther's suicide, there is Iphigenie's refusal to go along with the sneaky plan by Pylades, there is Wilhelm's act of joining a (broke) theater company instead of fulfilling his father's wish to become a merchant, and there is Faust's wager. However, these events reveal more a negative structure of a refusal or nonaction, rather than some clear action or event. Unlike Friedrich Schiller, Goethe mostly does not write tragedies in which someone risks everything and heroically loses, with Götz von Berlichingen and Egmont being only partly exceptions. Unlike Theodor E. Lessing, Goethe does not usually build meaningful dilemmas that ask for solutions, as he does in Der Mann von funfzig Jahren (The Man of Fifty). And unlike Heinrich von Kleist, Goethe does not resort to “unheard-of” events, unless one wishes to count the little oddities of the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees).

“No One's a Mystery” was originally published in the August 1985 issue of Harper's Magazine. It was collected in Time with Children (1987). It is currently most readily available in Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Fiction (Prentice-Hall).

When I think of great initiation stories, it's always Joyce's “Araby” that immediately comes to mind, and after that Sherwood Anderson's powerful American tale with its distinctive race-track setting, “I Want to Know Why.” Between the two of them, these stories, with their near-miraculous fusion of the vernacular and deep and wondering portrayals of the crucial moment in the education of two quite distinctly different adolescent boys, one a turn-of-the-century Irish Catholic from Dublin, the other a country boy from the Middle West, set the highest aesthetic standard for this variety of story. Moreover, they reveal to us what all short fiction in essence cries out to be.

Lyric poetry!

Short stories are as close as I get myself to writing lyric poems, and these two stories come as close as any in creating the effect of the lyric, with its intense recollection of a certain way of having been—usually, it's the memory of having been deeply in love, with the hope of having that love reciprocated— and the shock of the loss of that hope. It's nothing short of miraculous the way these two stories reveal to a young man just how much of the chaos and near-insanity of his floundering childhood and youth present a certain pattern of understanding and loss. A story such as this thrills you with the intensity of its unfolding, gives you hope that in your own hopelessness you are not alone, and creates in your blood a particular emotional effect that we associate usually with only the finest lyric poems.

But after all of the polemics and lamenting and honest skull-scratching that we've all suffered through, I have to say, during the past twenty years with respect to the question of equality for women in the modem world, the question comes to mind: what's a girl to do? Where does a young woman go to find a portrayal of female initiation that is as beautifully made and emotionally unsettling as the Joyce and Anderson stories?

THE LORE AND EVEN the research surrounding the Goethe Society of Weimar (Goethe-Gesellschaft) in the Third Reich have generally been guided by an apologetic tendency, in spite of intermittent scholarly critique of some of the protagonists. This defensive posture is summed up in a statement by Hans Wahl from March 1946, when he was seeking to convince the Soviet Military Administration in Germany to allow the society to take up its activities again:

This statement consists mainly of half-truths or outright untruths: the Goethe-Gesellschaft indeed did not experience the “usual” Gleichschaltung (coordination), but rather a “softer” version that gave them many benefits; the constitution of 1928 was retained, but it was repeatedly violated; the Führer principle was not introduced explicitly, but it certainly was implemented in practice, in modified form; the society did receive some modest financial support (for students to attend meetings). The most important untruth: the Nazi regime did not view Goethe as an “opposing force,” but rather as a genius who demonstrated the superiority of German culture.

In the following I want to show that the Goethe Society had a privileged place in the Third Reich, successfully achieving regime approval for its reinterpretation of Goethe as a precursor of the Third Reich. Despite this favored status, the society nevertheless practiced what the Germans call “vorauseilender Gehorsam” (preemptive obedience), voluntarily and eagerly adapting to party ideology and supporting the regime's aims, particularly in foreign policy.

In 1885, soon after publishing his first song, Charles K. Harris opened his music publishing company in a storefront on Grand Avenue in Milwaukee. The sign he hung in the window read, “Charles K. Harris, Banjoist and Songwriter. Songs Written to Order.” It seemed as if he proclaimed that songwriting had suddenly turned pro, although talented professionals had been around for decades. You can't listen to “Oh, Susannah,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “My Grandfather's Clock,” or the great songs of the Civil War without conjuring up the names of Stephen Foster, Henry Clay Work, and George Frederick Root. Their writing was polished and engaging, but songwriting didn't earn much in those days. Foster died penniless and alone in a New York hotel room in 1864, aged thirty-seven. Although art and commerce mixed together from the start, music publishing was much more haphazard then. It would change before the end of the century.

In 1892, Harris wrote and published “After the Ball,” a long, melodramatic tearjerker that weaves a tale of love lost and lives wasted. The public adored it. When it became the first song to sell a million copies of sheet music within a single year, Harris (and others) were convinced that the music business could earn publishers and songwriters a lot of money. A few years later, he moved his business to New York; other songwriters soon followed. Why not? Book publishing was there, Broadway and vaudeville were there, radio and recordings would soon be there, and now Tin Pan Alley was there as well. Only motion pictures left New York later on, and that was to chase the warmth and sunlight in California. It must have felt as if they were making movies at the end of the world.

Meanwhile, back east, Harris became one of the first publishers to set up shop on West Twenty-Eighth Street in what became known as Tin Pan Alley. Similar businesses often clumped together in Manhattan. Cutters worked from patterns in the Garment District, diamond merchants sold their wares (and still do) on West Forty-Seventh Street, Macy's and Gimbel's competed face to face in Herald Square, and songwriters did their piano thumping for the publishers who employed them in Tin Pan Alley. The songwriters had come from everywhere to make it in Manhattan and in the process, killed off the sentimental ballad. At the start, it was a young man's game.

Uses and Abuses of Goethe

THROUGHOUT MUCH OF the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, it was common to use Goethe to diagnose the contemporary historical moment, to view him either as an emblem of his time or a representative of a bygone or coming age. This reception by cultural elites across the ideological spectrum certainly began during his lifetime, first with Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sufferings of Young Werther) and then his reception by the Romantics, and again in the 1820s and 1830s, with writers of the Vormärz accusing him of being politically and culturally out of touch. In each instance, the engagement with Goethe served to articulate a vision of the present moment, of modernity, and of historical time more broadly; in each instance, Goethe is positively or negatively invoked in the name of history. The young Nietzsche brings this approach to Goethe to a polemical head in his Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), opening his assault on the modern conception of history with a quote from Goethe's correspondence with Schiller, where Goethe describes his ambivalent reaction to Kant: “Übrigens ist mir alles verhaßt, was mich bloß belehrt, ohne meine Thätigkeit zu vermehren, oder unmittelbar zu beleben” (In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly enlivening my activity). For Nietzsche, untimeliness is an inherently historical category, for it positions past, present, and future in relation to one another (it is the attempt to act “gegen die Zeit und dadurch auf die Zeit und hoffentlich zugunsten einer kommenden Zeit” (counter to our time and thereby [to act] on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come), though it is a likewise category aimed at the heart of historicism and the method of academic history, which, as Nietzsche argues, via Goethe, has lost any connection to the vital activity of “life.”

In a 1993 lecture on “Goethes Unzeitgemäße Geschichte” (“Goethe's Untimely History”), Reinhart Koselleck explores a similar conception of untimeliness, namely as a historical category that is directed against the modern concept of history and that catalyzes multidirectional relationships between past, present, and future.

THAT THE MAJORITY of scholarship on the Goethe-Kleist relationship proceeds from their dramatic work is understandable, since this was the subject of their limited correspondence and since Goethe was the powerful theater director whose approbation Kleist needed and famously did not receive. The conclusion often reached is that theirs was a struggle between the establishment classicist and the young harbinger of the Romantic or modern, one neatly summarized by Goethe's characterization of Kleist's Amphitryon as “ein bedeutendes, aber unerfreuliches Meteor eines neuen Literatur-Himmels” (a significant but not encouraging meteor in a new literary sky). But such consideration of their respective novellas is comparatively scarce, despite their instrumentality in establishing the German novella tradition as we know it today.

In a brief passage in his 2008 book about Kleist, Dirk Grathoff uncovers a revealing citation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship). Examining the societal catastrophe in the relevant section of Wilhelm Meister (the robbery of the actors’ troupe) alongside the natural catastrophe (the plague) in Kleist's Der Findling (The Foundling), Grathoff concludes that Kleist is pushing back against Goethe to create an anti-bildungsroman. While Grathoff's generalization that Kleist's work could only exist in relationship to Goethe's work is certainly accurate, this article will argue that the reverse is also true: Goethe's late prose exists in direct relationship to that of Kleist and contains citations of it, also with the awareness that the future of a genre is at stake. The 1828 Novelle in particular can be read principally as an intervention that sees Goethe pursuing two interrelated projects: to rescue the genre from pretenders or aspirants whose tales or stories were being misidentified as novellas; and to heal the Kleistian sickness he saw spreading in German literature. In reading Goethe's Novelle as a reclamatory and therapeutic engagement with Kleist, I will focus here on Das Erdbeben in Chile (The Earthquake in Chile), Kleist's first novella to appear in print. I will show that Goethe's text contains many echoes of the Erdbeben and invests significant energy to rework it, in ways that illuminate the contestation of the genre. In this reading Goethe's Novelle seeks—to use Fritz Breithaupt's formulation—“to reestablish a state of stability after the occurrence of an event-that-should-not-be.”

“Good Country People” was originally published in the June 1955 issue of Harper's Bazaar. It was collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). It is currently most readily available in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

The first thing to say about this story is that it's funny— funny as a crutch, to use a cliché the author might either appreciate or wince at. It happens to be the first work of hers I ever read, and I remember coming to it not expecting to laugh. I was a big reader of Time magazine in those days, and I think they told me that Flannery O'Connor was Southern, Gothic, deep, and Roman Catholic. Furthermore, I knew that she had a mysteriously degenerative disease called lupus, and had recently died of it at a relatively early age. So naturally I was expecting to read something shadowy, profound, and grim. “Good Country People” certainly is all those things, but it is also very funny.

I read it because I had to. In the mid-1960s, I was teaching an Introduction to Literature course in the Humanities Department at M.I.T., and “Good Country People” happened to be one of the stories in the designated anthology. I tossed this story onto the syllabus rather arbitrarily, but when I finally got around to reading it for class, it blew me away. I could tell from the classroom response that it blew the students away too. And it has stayed with me ever since.

It is first and foremost a good yarn. If you try telling it to people who haven't read it, they follow it easily and eagerly. In the 1960s, I even told it, in a somewhat censored version, to my four young children during a long trip in the car, and it apparently stayed with them too, since elements of it still come up in family conversations. Reading it again now, I see new and different things in it, but the clean thrust of its narrative line remains very impressive.

Der brilliante Ideenreichtum dieses unscheinbaren, aber tiefgründigen Buches von David Wellbery kann in einer kurzen Besprechung wie dieser nur ungenügend wiedergegeben werden. Ich beschränke mich deshalb im folgenden auf die Darstellung einiger zentraler Gedanken textkritischer als auch disziplinärmethodologischer Natur. Die beste Auskunft hingeben gibt das Buch selber. Die Lektüre lohnt sich.

Bereits auf der ersten Seite wird die Prämisse der Studie deutlich formuliert: “Vorausgesetzt wird ein genetisch-dynamisch konzipierter Gattungsbegriff,” schreibt Wellbery, denn “Gattungstheorie ist nicht Gestaltenlehre, sondern Verwandlungslehre.” Damit ist in der Tat der methodologische Rahmen abgesteckt und das Ziel der Untersuchung formuliert: es geht nicht allein um eine Interpretation von Faust I, sondern um den weitaus anspruchsvolleren und textübergreifenden Versuch, mittels des Goetheschen Textes die historischen Erscheinungsformen der Tragödie insgesamt und ihr Bedeutungspotential als lite rarische Gattung zu bestimmen. Die Kernfrage lautet nicht: Warum ist Faust I eine Trägodie? sondern: Wie und mit welchen Mitteln musste Goethe die traditionelle Gestalt der Tragödie verändern, um Faust I als Tragödie schreiben zu können? Die erste Frage setzt einen statischen, die zweite hingegen einen dynamisch- adaptiven Gattungsbegriff voraus, und nur dieser, nicht jener, ermöglicht es der Literaturwissenschaft, das wandelbare Sinn- und Bedeutungspotential lite rarischer Texte und Formen epochenübergreifend zu erfassen und zu bewerten.

Wellberys Prämisse eines historisch wandelbaren, also evolutionären, Gattungsbegriffs der Tragödie erlaubt ihm eine Fülle neuer, intertextueller Bezüge zwischen Faust I und anderen Werken der Weltliteratur aufzuweisen, die bisher in der Forschungsliteratur nicht oder nur ungenügend berücksichtigt wurden. So stellt er gleich zu Beginn die These auf, daß Goethe sich direkt von Sophokles’ Oedipus Tyrannus leiten und inspirieren ließ, um seine eigene Tragödie in Szene zu setzen. Der detaillierte Vergleich der Szene “Vor dem Tor”—laut Wellbery die “Eröffnungszene” von Faust I, weil Mephisto hier zum ersten mal auftaucht und die tragische Handlung (samt Wette und Gretchentragödie) erst hier ihren Anfang findet—und der Eingangszene von Sophokles’ Drama bringt nicht nur eine Reihe formaler und inhaltlicher Parallelen beider Dramen zum Vorschein (Ort der Handlung, Szenenaufbau, Dialogstruktur, etc).

“The Doorbell” was first published in 1927, in Russian, as “Zvonok,” in Vozvrashchenie Chorba. It was first published and collected in English in Details of a Sunset and Other Stories (1976). It is currently most readily available in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage).

Vladimir Nabokov was not American-born, nor a native English speaker—Russian-born, he wrote in three languages, with English coming in third after Russian and French—but he considered himself very much an American writer. “I am as American as April in Arizona,” he famously said in a Paris Review interview in 1966; and while some might quibble as to exactly how American April in Arizona might be, in many fittingly modern ways Nabokov epitomizes what it means to be an American writer from a foreign cultural background, an increasingly widespread type today (of which I myself, incidentally, am an example).

“The Doorbell” is an early story, written in Russian and published in 1927 in a small émigré magazine in Berlin, where Nabokov spent most of his exile years after leaving post-revolutionary Russia and before arriving in America in 1941. He wrote some twenty-five stories before the age of thirty, most of which had already begun to explore the themes he would develop at length in his novels—memory, time, loss of one's country, loss of one's beloved—all subjects that seem quite relevant, once again, in today's America of multiculturalism, restlessness, and upheavals. “The Doorbell” was translated into English by Nabokov's son, Dmitri, under Nabokov's own supervision, and included in 1976 in Details of a Sunset and Other Stories.

Standing at a modest nine or ten pages, “The Doorbell” possesses the deeply nostalgic overtones of Nabokov's longer fiction, as well as a surprising wealth of meanings and a sense of playfulness with which it subverts several of the reader's expectations. A man, driven out of Russia by the revolution, has been leading a vagabond life of adventure and occasional soldiering all over the world. Now, having “grown hardier, rougher,” “lost an index finger,” and “learned two languages,” Nikolay Galatov comes to Berlin, more or less on a whim, to find a woman from whom he was parted in Petersburg seven years ago.

ROBERT LOWELL HAD a genius for discipleship—and he was a lifelong learner, perpetually evolving his craft and extending his reach. As a young writer, Lowell established close relationships with an extraordinary range of senior mentors, a tricky undertaking since many of these elders had staked out positions in opposing literary camps. The opening pages of Lowell's Letters, edited by Saskia Hamilton, show Lowell cultivating—at first with a certain endearing naiveté—connections with more than one of these various elder literary mentors. And then there's the famous story of the young Lowell camping out in a Sears Roebuck tent on Allen Tate's lawn, while Tate, his wife Caroline Gordon, and their friend Ford Madox Ford looked on bemused. By the time Lowell hit his full artistic stride, he had established relationships with such senior literary mentors as Tate, Ford, Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, George Santayana, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot—just to name a few.

At the same time, Lowell was developing relationships with contemporaries who were just a few years older than he was—I have called these his “peer-mentors”—including Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Mary McCarthy, and Theodore Roethke. Lowell had much to learn from these slightly elder contemporaries—as well as much to impart. When Lowell became himself a teacher and grew into a senior literary presence, he influenced successive generations of younger poets, including, among many others, W. D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Frank Bidart, and Derek Walcott. Yet even as Lowell helped to inspire and encourage the work of these younger poets, he often seemed to discover suggestions in their work that helped him to extend his art and to generate a significant number of important poems—poems that serve to exemplify for Lowell what I am calling the “power of influence.”

Lowell's poetry might be read in significant measure as a catalogue of ongoing conversations with individuals who shaped his life and art in important ways. What is striking about Lowell's relationships with literary elders, contemporaries, and juniors—and the poems he wrote about them—is their quality of give-and-take.

“Dare's Gift” was originally published in the February 1917 issue of Harper's Magazine. It was collected in The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923). It is currently most readily available in Downhome: An Anthology of Southern Women Writers (Harcourt, Brace).

After a nearly twenty-year hiatus, Ellen Glasgow began to write short stories again when she was forty-two years old. As an energetic and ambitious young writer, she had renounced the form, declaring to her publisher Walter Hines Page in 1897 that “I shall not divide my power or risk my future reputation.” With one reasonably successful novel to her name (although it was actually published without her name on the title page or anywhere else: she was, after all, a well-bred Southern young lady), she went on to declare bravely, “I will become a great novelist or none at all.” And she certainly made as determined and serious an effort to do just that as could be expected of anyone. By June of 1916, when Glasgow began writing, as she put it, “a story about a haunted house,” she had published eleven novels—and would go on to write nine more before her death in 1945. That story, which became the title story of the only collection of her short fiction published in her lifetime, The Shadowy Third and Other Stories, was the first of ten stories that she wrote before abandoning the form again in 1924 or 1925, when she turned her full attention to the writing of her last and finest novels.

It might be possible to conclude from a chronological reading of her novels alone that she had been correct in her belief that she shouldn't divide her power among both novels and stories. In 1913, she had published Virginia, which seems more and more (especially to feminist readers) to be a major American novel, and in 1925, she would publish Barren Ground, probably her best-known and most widely read novel. And even Life and Gabriella, which appeared in 1916 right before she began to write stories, is to my mind a novel deserving of critical rediscovery and positive reassessment.

IN A LETTER TO Hannah Arendt dated January 9, 1961, Lowell refers to “Pigeons,” his enclosed imitation of Rainer Maria Rilke's “Taube, die draußen blieb” (Pigeon that stayed outside, 1950) as “really my own credo” and wonders if it “isn't quietly my finest poem,” which may reflect his dropping of the confessional “I” of Life Studies (1959). He wanted to put it out of chronological order and have it end his forthcoming Imitations (1961), which began with Homer and would otherwise have finished with Boris Pasternak, who had died in 1960. Lowell separated “Pigeons” from his four other Rilke imitations and dedicated it to Arendt, whom he thanks in the acknowledgments for her help with the German poems. His letter to her had begun “here's the Rilke,” as if she had been expecting it. Best known as a political philosopher, she was also a poet and keen reader of Rilke, with a particular fondness for “Taube, die draußen blieb.” I suspect that Arendt had put Lowell on to it.

This essay first addresses Lowell's poetics in Imitations with regard to how he made Rilke's “Taube, die draußen blieb” a poem of his own featuring two of his major tropes, hands and touch, exile and return, which underlie the “credo” embodied in “Pigeons.” He was probably attracted to Rilke's poem because the same tropes are central to it, and he responded to its rhythmical phrasing by adapting it within his own versification. I read “Pigeons” against the foil of his manic-depressive illness and his stubborn faith in the power of his art to transmute and transcend that illness. My interpretation of the poem along these lines will take account of two important studies as a key to Lowell's poetics, Kay Redfield Jamison's Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire—A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character (2017) and Nikki Skillman's The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (2016).

In the introduction, Lowell informs readers of Imitations that it is “partly self-sufficient and separate from its sources, and should be first read as a sequence, one voice running through many personalities, contrasts and repetitions.”