All readers of the Elizabethan drama must have noticed the profound influence of the Italian literature of the Renaissance upon the poets of that time. Some of the playwrights, like Greene and Munday, were men of travel, “Italianated” Englishmen, who returned home with their heads full of the ideas and culture of the South. Ford and Marston do not hesitate to introduce Italian dialogue into their plays, for many of the dramatists were University men, and the Italian language was studied at Oxford and Cambridge along with Latin and Greek. The scholarly Ascham, inveighing against the Italian leanings of his countrymen, in The Schoolmaster, yet confesses,—” not because I do contemne either the knowledge of strange and diverse tonges, and namelie the Italian tonge, which nexte the Greeke and Latin tonge I like and love above all others.”

The life of William Cowper has been written many times; first by his friend and fellow poet, William Hayley, and most recently by Thomas Wright, Principal of the Cowper School at Olney. The present manuscript, here reprinted in full, was probably prepared for the first of these biographers about two years after the poet's death. It is in the hand of the Rev. John Johnson, Cowper's cousin and constant companion during the last five years of his life. It was doubtless used by Hayley for his brief record of these years, but seems to have been unknown to all succeeding biographers. The dismal circumstances of this part of Cowper's life combined with the unscientific historical attitude of a century ago to make Hayley's account altogether unsatisfactory today. The diary comes to the modern student of Cowper, therefore, as virtually new source material for those years of his life which have always been the least documented.

The description of the seven planets in the Testament of Cresseid by the Scottish Chaucerian, Robert Henryson (c. 1425–c. 1500), is perhaps the most lively and arresting in English literature. Approximately one-third of the poem is devoted to the planets, and they play an essential role in the trial and punishment of Cresseid, who becomes a leper here and hereafter in the Troilus-Criseyde story. This note is an attempt to clear the way for the study of the origins and sources of the planet portraits and to shed some light on the competence of the poet.

By substituting astrological qualities for the mythological qualities of the ancient gods, Chaucer had pioneered and had made poetic capital of the astrological magic in which his age had come to believe. Henryson took full advantage of this fact. The Testament of Cresseid contains many elements of astrology: in the opening lines, the poet dates the poem by means of an astronomical periphrase in which he describes the Sun and Venus in opposition, a combination which signifies “A barren time … the Native impudent and bold in his wantonnesse and Lust, wholly occupied in scurvy and sordid actions, whereby he incurres great Infamy, Scandall and Disgrace,” and which sets the tone for the burden of the poem; the planets are ranked according to their astrological order, and Mercury is chosen speaker, a choice which accords with his influence over logic and debate; the choice of Saturn and Cynthia to deliver the verdict of leprosy is fitting, according to the astrological qualities of the humours, and the poet's treatment of the disease shows a detailed knowledge of astrological medicine.

This essay explores the layered, ideologically contradictory, and psychologically overdetermined ways national identities take form. The setting is the birth of the new American nation, the opening moments of George Washington's first administration. As European Americans from Benjamin Franklin to D. W. Griffith tell us, this is a white man's story about his “Black … and Tawney …” (br)others (Franklin, qtd. in Ferguson 169).

Readers of the earlier plays of Shakespeare (c. 1590-1600) cannot fail to notice the existence in them of two old cronies, who are forever strolling into the story from outside. Usually, they make their appearance together, and whatever the nature of the play, they, at any rate, abide the same. They are both amiable, honest simpletons, smacking of the village-green. Sometimes they are servants, sometimes minstrels, and sometimes constables and watchmen. If we scan them more closely, we shall find that each has a separate individuality. One is garrulous, complacent and, on occasion, lachrymose; he is brim-full of the wisdom of the ale-house, and loves to lecture and patronize his companion. This old fellow is a mere shadow to his wiser gossip. It is his business to ask simple-minded questions or to listen in simple-minded wonder to the dogmatic wisdom of his friend. In short, his main duty is to be the cause that wit and comicality express themselves through the mouth of his friend.

Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon has been dead for over one hundred years, and according to F. O. Matthiessen the chapter on his death was one of the “favorite showpieces” of the age of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet there is doubt—if one may be pardoned for borrowing for a moment the pose of the hack who rewrites accounts of old murders—that the facts surrounding his death have been properly explored. Did he simply die of some kind of pulmonary hemorrhage, to which his ancestors were prone? Was no one present when he died? If he did die a natural death, is it possible that his “hereditary liability” was helped somehow, by circumstances taking place in the room with him, in precipitating his final seizure?

Because The Ring and the Book is such a towering imaginative achievement, readers and critics alike have slighted those poems which Browning wrote and published soon after 1868. This is especially true of Balaustion's Adventure (1871), the poet's next work after The Ringand the Book. Largely given over to a retelling of Euripides' Alkestis, it has perplexed most critics, many of them wondering whether it should be considered as anything more than a mere transla tion. Browning himself made few claims for it. In the dedication to the Countess Cowper he re ferred to it as a task that “proved the most delightful of May-month amusements,”1 and to Isabella Blagden he spoke of it as “my little new Poem,—done in a month,—and I think a pretty thing in its way.”2 Calling it “Exhaustion's Impos ture,” Rossetti found “the structure of the work beyond all conception perverse” and the Euripidean Alkestis “interlarded with Browningian analysis to an extent beyond all reason or relation to things by any possibility Greek in any way.”3 Swinburne, discovering “fine things in it,” thought that “the pathos of the subject is too simple and downright for Browning's analytic method.”4 Later commentators have likewise been worried by the question of its faithfulness to the Greek spirit.6 The purpose of this essay is to suggest that such a consideration is largely irrelevant to an estimation of the poem which both William Clyde DeVane and Robert Langbaum claim belongs with the works of Browning's best period.6

In contrast to the commonly held view that Keller is portraying the high points of Zurich's cultural history in his Züricher Noeellen, the historical phenomenon of periods in transition, particularly the individual response to the fact and realization of transition, appear as the main theme of this cycle of novellas. A detailed analysis of the five stories leads to the observation that the Active present in each novella is a period removed from the actual high point of a given era. Hadfoub, for example, takes place at the very end of the Minnesang period, representing a latecomer among the minnesingers, one who plays an anachronistic role, and Ursula treats events surrounding religious change, in this case the clash between the Zwingli forces and the Anabaptists after the introduction of the Reformation in Zurich. To underscore the idea of transition, Keller makes use of the ironic narrator who frequently voices his discriminating opinion about the characters, and who in the frame novella clearly relates the issue of “transitional time” to Keller's own age, also a period of transition, and in so doing censures those writers who are oblivious to the needs of the present and seek refuge in a glorious portrayal of the past.

From the very first Dryden's critical essays have called forth widely divergent opinions. Written, as many of them were, in the heat of literary conflict, they served during their author's life, on the one hand, as a statement of faith to be expounded and defended, on the other, as a series of vulnerable points of attack. And even since they have held an assured place among English critical works—at first as authoritative judgments and later as historical documents of the very first importance—there has been no orthodox view as to their nature or value. Some historians have always been led by Dryden's popular, rambling style to deny them solid worth; others have found in them a vitality, a genuine insight, worth more than logic. According to Dean Swift they were “merely writ at first for filling, to raise the author's price a shilling;” Doctor Johnson, on the contrary, speaks of them as “the criticism of a poet; not a dull collection of theorems, nor a rude detection of faults, which perhaps the censor was not able to have committed; but a gay and vigorous dissertation, where delight is mingled with instruction.”

The work in which his Defence of Poetry occurs, the De Genealogia Deorum, was first suggested to Boccaccio while he was yet a young man, by Hugo, king of Cyprus. Hugo sent to the young poet, asking him to write a work upon the mythology of antiquity, there being no such book then in existence. Boccaccio seems to have been by no means eager for so tremendous a task, but urged on by his royal patron he at last began it, and continued to work on it at intervals, though the king who had originally set him the undertaking did not live to see its completion. Completed, indeed, it never really was, and it was without the author's knowledge and against his wishes that the manuscript passed out of his hands before it had undergone revision. This accounts in part for the desultory character of the work, its diffuseness, its repetitions, its lack of arrangement and subordination; only in part, of course, for something of all this—that, namely, which corresponds with the essentially undiscriminating, non-selective mind of the author himself—could not have been eliminated by any amount of revision.

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

L'épisode final de la Tentation de Saint Antoine, dans la version définitive, est celui des monstres.

L'ermite voudrait pénétrer le secret de la substance; il souhaite de voir les archétypes d'où dérive l'infinie variété des corps. Il se souvient vaguement de ces “formes d'esprits” naguère entrevues dans le ciel; et il songe que “ceux qui traversent le désert rencontrent des animaux dépassant toute conception.”

The purpose of this paper is to indicate that the clear and definite tendency of popular Latin speech of all periods to force out unaccented vocalic phonemes, particularly in the interior of words, had a continued existence from earliest times up to the separate development of the Romance languages, and that the divarication of Eastern and Western Romance rests on obstructions interposed in greater part after Latin had ceased to be a living language. While some Latin and Romance scholars have observed elements that call into question the exactness of the orthodox statement of conditions, we nevertheless have been confronted with no clear, unequivocal exposition of the actual situation and no accumulation of evidence that would challenge the correctness of the accepted account.

In Peregrine Pickle, the extreme hostility of the hero's mother toward him from his earliest days, although an important catalyst in the plot, is never reasonably explained. Her attitude, as well as a number of otherwise ambiguous plot elements, become clear when we deduce that she was pregnant before her marriage. Several clues suggest that Smollett intended until late in the novel to present Peregrine as a bastard but changed his mind as he neared the end. It can be theorized that Smollett feared an accusation of plagiarism in borrowing this detail from Tom Jones, especially after he himself had accused Fielding with reference to Roderick Random. In addition, the life of Richard Savage, particularly as told in Samuel Johnson's elegaic and then-popular biography of his friend, offers many parallels in its story of the unnatural mother and the rejected bastard.

Students of Faust have known for many years that Goethe was influenced by Swedenborg when he wrote that tragedy. They have differed only as to the extent and degree of this influence. The list of earlier investigators is too long to thank them individually and, at the same time, to point out why it is necessary once more to scrutinize this influence as far as the last scene of Faust is concerned. In general, it may be said that they have concentrated their investigations mainly on the way the “spirit-seer” of the eighteenth century influenced the spirits in our scene as to appearance, speech, food, abodes, and other incidentals. Since they all started their investigation with the generally accepted assumption that Faust had “saved” himself through his last earthly endeavors in behalf of his fellow-men, they saw no reason to check the way Goethe depicts his salvation against Swedenborg's doctrine of redemption. This investigation starts from the opposite assumption, viz. that the hero at the end of his terrestial journey has reached the lowest and most tragic moment of his life (see my “Julirevolution, St. Simonismus und die Faustpartien von 1831, ”Zeitschrift fuer deutsche Philologie, vol. 60).

Athough The Merchant of Venice ranks with Hamlet in theatrical popularity, it ranks low in critical esteem. A play that is difficult to classify, it is variously labeled tragi-comedy or romantic comedy; but neither label embraces nor harmonizes the seemingly disparate plots. Further, the plots are often condemned as preposterous and unrelated to life; and a fairly common view is that the play is a fairy tale: “There is no more reality in Shylock's bond and the Lord of Belmont's will than in Jack and the Beanstalk.” Critics adopting such a position find the chief merit of the play in its “flesh-and-blood characters” who triumph over the shortcomings of the story, with emphasis on Shylock, who is sometimes regarded as the protagonist. The approach to Shylock has been diverse, ranging from Stoll's notion of him as a comic butt in terms of Elizabethan conventions to the view that he is a tragic figure. Readers have shown a preoccupation with Shylock the Jew as scapegoat, stereotype, victim, or Elizabethan usurer; usually this interest has taken a realistic turn, with concern over questions of anti-Semitism and the legality of the trial.

“Tess of the D'Urbervilles” was greeted with a storm of criticism, which did not abate on the appearance, four years later, of “Jude the Obscure.” Mr. Hardy seems rightly to have anticipated, in the preface to “Tess,” the feelings of the “too genteel reader who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels.” And it is true that he does exhibit in these novels a frankness of tone on all that pertains to sex somewhat unusual in England in the early nineties. But Hardy was by no means the kind of writer to disregard the predilections of his public on this or any other point of taste. There are but too many evidences of his willingness to meet them half way. And there is nothing which shows more strikingly his respect for the public taste, especially in the earlier stories, than his great delicacy, according to present standards—not to say his conventionality—in regard to matters of sex.