“War always interested me,” wrote the twenty-three-year-old Leo Tolstoy in “the raid” (1853), an early story inspired by his personal experience of a brutal border skirmish in the Caucasus. “Not war in the sense of maneuvers devised by great generals … but the reality of war, the actual killing” (1). The focus of Tolstoy's interest here remained absolute throughout his long and brilliantly inconsistent life. As a second lieutenant during the Crimean War in 1854–55, he wrote three “Sevastopol Stories” about that city under siege, which were so cannily constructed and voiced that the new tsar, Alexander II, deeply touched, decreed that they be translated into French so that Russian courage would reach a European audience—whereas other readers took these tales as critical of the imperial war effort, even as subversive. Tolstoy revealed his own chauvinist side in the mid-1860s while writing the final books of War and Peace. Napoléon was a caricature from the start, of course, but, in a rising arc of patriotic disdain, Tolstoy proceeded to ridicule almost every alien nation's soldiers, generals, and tacticians; only simple Russian peasants, partisans, Field Marshal Kutuzov, and the occasional clear-seeing field commander were exempt from the author's scorn. By the end of his life, Tolstoy professed radical Christian anarchism and pacifism, preaching nonviolent resistance to evil and urging young men to oppose the military draft. But he never lost his fascination with close-up “actual killing.” The greatest literary achievement of Tolstoy's final decade, the Caucasus novel Hadji Murad, ends with such graphic slaughter, so many grotesque hackings and mutilations, and even the beheading of the hero described at such epic leisure that it is difficult to believe Tolstoy ever doubted the veracity of languages of violence.

Gerhart Hauptmann hat in seinem Florian Geyer den groβzügigen Versuch gemacht, eine um vier Jahrhunderte zurückliegende Zeit mit den Mitteln naturalistischer Technik auf der Bühne lebendig zu machen. Dem Drama in seiner Eigenschaft als Wortkunstwerk gegenüber stellte sich der Dichter die Forderung, einen Dialog zu schaffen, der im Leser und Hörer die Illusion erwecken müsse, er vernehme unmittelbar die Sprache von Menschen der deutschen Reformationszeit, genau so, als wäre der Dialog vor vier Jahrhunderten auf Schallplatten aufgenommen und für unsre Zeit aufbewahrt worden. Es galt mithin, den Satzbau, die Wortformen, den Wortschatz und die ganze Fülle jener bildlichen Wendungen, die den charakteristischen Stil einer Epoche ausmachen, mit möglichster Treue nachzubilden. Um dieses Ziel auch nur annähernd zu erreichen, war—von der höheren, eigentlich schöpferischen Befähigung ganz abgesehen—zweierlei vonnöten: erstens eine auβerordentliche Gabe der Einfühlung in das Leben einer vergangenen Zeit und sodann ein gewissenhaftes Studium des aus jener Zeit überlieferten Schrifttums.

Der letzte Spross einer alten Familie wird nach schmerzlichen Erfahrungen in seiner Jugend sich seines Dichtertums bewusst. Seine frühe Lyrik wächst aus der preziösen Formkultur der Neuromantik hervor, sie gewinnt unter nordischem Einfluss Farbe und Kraft, um dann in der Berührung mit Russland und der deutschen Mystik ihre tieferen religiösen Quellen zu entdecken. Durch die persönliche Bekanntschaft mit einem hervorragenden Geist seiner Zeit wird aus dem mystischen Gottsucher und Gotterahner schliesslich ein Gottfinder, der in Werken von ganz seltener Zartheit und Tiefe und in virtuoser Beherrschung der Form uns zukunftweisend die letzten Fragen der Menschheit erfühlen lässt.

There are four volumes of Balzac's letters: two volumes of miscellaneous letters known as the Correspondance and two very substantial octave volumes containing the master's messages to Madame Hanska during the seventeen years they were engaged. The latter collection has been poetically entitled Lettres à l'Etrangère. All four volumes have always been considered a rich store of biographical information. The Correspondance has been twice edited: in the two-volume edition published by Calmann-Lévy in 1877, and in an octave volume which forms part of what is known as the édition définitive of the Œuvres Complètes (Calmann-Lévy, 1876). The Lettres à l'Etrangère were published by Calmann-Lévy in 1906. None of these volumes contains information as to its editors or their method of procedure.

In the few poems that Clough wrote during his student days at Oxford one can see signs of a growing perplexity and anxiety with regard to certain problems of life and religion. This perplexity came to a head during the years that he taught at Oriel, and finally led him to resign his fellowship at that College. This resignation may be said to be the most dramatic and significant action of his life, and the story, told many times by his biographers, can now be told more fully in the light of the unpublished correspondence between him and Dr. Hawkins, the then Provost of Oriel College. Nor has sufficient attention been so far given to the circumstances that led to Clough's subsequent appointment as Principal of University Hall, London, and the manner in which his connection with that institution came to an end. It is proposed in the following pages to throw some light also on this important period of the poet's life.

Another paper on Keats may be pardoned if by a readjustment of the familiar materials, it makes possible a new interpretation of the poet's mind and work. The present essay ventures to suggest that the literary problem admitted and analyzed by Keats in Sleep and Poetry contains a clue for the study of his verse, which, although recognized in some of its implications by Keats's critics, has not hitherto been understood in its full significance. The following argument attempts to prove that by April, 1819, the poet, having settled, at least for a period, a very difficult question dating back to the autumn of 1816, was so released from his mental bondage that his creative genius, long restrained, broke forth into that glorious series of poems which included the great Odes and Lamia.

The national epic poems of France offer a vast body of literature in which we may study the development of French ideals from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. During so long a period at a critical epoch in European civilization influences of all kinds are of course reflected in this poetry. These influences may be described as literary, political, social and religious.

It is with but one of the literary forces which came to bear upon the chansons de geste that we are concerned just now. This external force is that exerted by the matièdre de Bretagne, popularized in France about the middle of the twelfth century. The admirably brief statement of Mr. Alfred N utt (in Celtic and Mediaeval Romance, pp. 15-18) leaves little to be desired as regards the influence of the Breton matter upon the matièdre de France. Mr. Nutt's account of the change in literary ideals during the twelfth century recommends itself to anyone who is conversant with the period.

In Notes and Queries for February 10, 1917, John H. Sandham Griffith, Esq., of Llwynduris, Llechryd, Cardiganshire, announced that he had in his possession Shelley's set of the Hon. Robert Clifford's translation (4 vols., 1797-8) of the Abbé Barruel's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme. The set, Mr. Griffith believes, was left by Shelley at Horsham after his expulsion from Oxford;1 and he further explains that “there was such a considerable degree of intimacy existing between the poet's family and my ancestor William Sandham of Horsham, a tenant and near neighbor of Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, that the poet was probably a frequent visitor, and obtained a loan of £100 in January, 1811, before being sent down from Oxford, which he never repaid. The unredeemed promissory note is in my possession, and also a holograph letter, requesting a further loan on the plea of ‘now being reduced to the very last extremity,‘ written from Keswick shortly after his marriage to Harriet West-brooke [sic].” Volume II of the set, Mr. Griffith says, “bears the poet's autograph in full, and the date 1810.”

A little studied aspect of the prolific linguistic controversies in eighteenth-century England is the development of synonymy. Not only were books of synonyms late to appear and uncertain as to their function and methods, but synonymy was one of the last departments to be introduced into the English dictionary. This slow development is not surprising, since just discrimination between words of almost identical meaning requires not only an authoritative dictionary and grammar as tools but a relatively settled state of the language and a body of recognized opinion on questions of usage. The evolution of English synonymy not only stems immediately from the French, but the steps leading toward this goal may be paralleled in France from fifty to one hundred years earlier.

Gewöhnlich charakterisieren literarhistorische Betrachtungen den Sturm-und-Drang als eine dichterisch-weltanschauliche Revolution, die in wuchtiger Auflehung gegen die Aufklärung für die Freiheit des Gefühls, der Individualität und der literarischen Form kämpfte. Dabei wird Goethe, dem Dichter des Götz, Urfaust, Werther und anderer artverwandter Dichtungen eine führende Rolle zugeschrieben. In seinem klassischen Werke Geist der Goethezeit hat Korff eingehend den philosophischen Hintergrund für diese Bewegung gezeichnet und nachgewiesen, wie sie sich in der Dichtung im Sinne politischer, sozialer, metaphysischer und formaler Freiheit ausgewirkt hat.

Debates about how to stage, film, narrate (or record in any available media) real-life catastrophe, such as mass human-rights violations or war, tend to center on the simultaneous necessity and inadequacy of any representational form to capture the real event: evidence is needed for political, legal, cultural, and historical purposes, but its framing is always conditioned by whatever a given regime of visibility leaves in or leaves out. All too familiar ethical, political, and representational challenges lurk behind the deployment of media to make visible the experience of real-life survivors—in the case I treat here, women survivors of imprisonment and torture during Uruguay's 1973-85 dictatorship. Consider the risks of revictimizing the protagonists, overwhelming or numbing spectators with images of extreme vulnerability, or, even worse, of inciting voyeuristic or sadistic pleasures in an audience passively “regarding the pain of others”—to recall Susan Sontag's famous last title (2003). Some have argued that testimonial or documentary accounts cannot represent the effects of destruction without courting these perils.

London, June 2014. I'm queuing outside a downtown church behind a six-foot-tall man whose neck juts into my view every time the lights change at the corner. He's craning for a white van whose walls are lined with hardcovers and paperbacks. Its sponsor, the Quaker Homeless Action Committee, helps readers who are sleeping rough reclaim a right that many citizens take for granted: book borrowing.

In 1873 in Trial-Forwords to Minor Poems: Further Additions and Corrections Furnivall called attention to seven records under the heading “Thomas Chaucer, esquire and vintner (?1 man, or 2)”:

[1] 1399-1400. Duchy of Lancaster. Ministers' Accounts. Div. 29, Bundle 144. Payment of £20 to Thomas Chaucer for his two Annuities, due at Easter and Michaelmas, with £10 arrears.

[2] 1406, March 12. City Hustings Roll, 133. Thomas Chausers: Deed of entail on him of City lands, near St. Paul's, by his ‘consanguineus,’ William Chaumbre, cleric.

[3] 1416, February 3. Hustings Roll, 145. Release to Thomas Chaucer of the interest of Thomas Hoo and Agnes his wife in these entaild lands.

[4] 1413, June 7. Conveyance by Geoffrey Dallyng, Citizen and Vintner, and Matilda his wife, to Thomas Chaucer, esquire, and 4 other men, of a reversion in some City houses and land (no doubt as Trustees for some City Corporation).

[5] 1426, December 7. Hustings Roll, 155. Conveyance by William Manby, cleric, to Thomas Chaucers and Richard Wyot, esquires, and 4 others, clerics, of land in the parish of St. Margaret's, Lothbury, in the City of London, seemingly as Trustees for some ecclesiastical Corporation.

[6] 1428, May 20. Hustings Roll, 156. Conveyance by William atte Watir, barber, and John Cole, junior, Citizen and Vintner, of a tenement in Fleet Street to Thomas Chawsere and 12 other men—all 13 being described in one part of the Deed as Citizens and Vintners, evidently as Trustees for the Vintners' Company.

[7] 1428, June 11. Release to Thomas Chawsere and his 12 co-trustees—Thomas Chawsere and another (Lewis John), being called esquires, the rest Citizens and Vintners— of the estate of Thomas Croften, as mortgagee in possession, in the said tenement in Fleet Street.

In his play Catiline His Conspiracy, Ben Jonson allegorizes Cicero's fight to save the Roman Republic as a battle against the kind of spectacular drama that, Jonson claimed, his audiences so enjoyed. This metatheatrical polemic hinges on the rhetorical technique of enargeia: the power of language to conjure an image. For the early moderns, enargeia resolved the “paradox of representation”—the contradiction between “making present” and “standing for”—by subordinating visual presence to verbal illusionism. Jonson, aligning neoclassical poetics with humanist historiography, dramatizes this hierarchy of representation. In Catiline, Cicero's rhetoric puts visions of violence before his audience's eyes only to prevent their realization onstage. The play thus seeks to exorcise the specter of political violence that haunted early modern England and the Roman Republic alike. Yet the rhetoric of Jonson's Cicero proves just as coercive as the spectacular violence that it has replaced. From Jonson's time to ours, separating rhetoric from violence has remained the challenge of republicanism.

I use the term lyric in the sense of form rather than of inspiration and should say stances except that the word was not applied to the lyric monologues until 1630. My subject is the origin of the monologues, written in other meters than the alexandrine couplet, that are found in the plays of Corneille and his contemporaries. The most familiar examples are those of the Cid and Polyeucte. They are usually of a contemplative nature, but do not necessarily contain a soul struggle.

Henry James tells us in his preface to the revised edition of his novels, with what interest and emotion he renewed acquaintance with his book, Roderick Hudson, after a quarter of a century had elapsed since its first appearance, in 1875. He takes up its failings and its defects, of which he is fully conscious and which he sees with very keen perspicacity. He writes:

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.