Attention has often been called to the extraordinary parallelism which exists between Sir Gowther, a fifteenth century English version of Robert the Devil, and the so-called Breton Lay of Tydorel. The latter is one of five anonymous romances published by Gaston Paris according to the manuscript in the National Library, which includes also the lays of Marie de France.

This essay begins by showing how the criticisms of neologism that Dante in-herited from ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially those that decry the supposed barbarity of invented words, provide counterintuitive insight into the motives behind Dante's lexical experimentalism in the Commedia. It then turns to the metaphoric link between Horace's defense of neologisms in the Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry [18 BCE]) and Adam's speech on the origin of language in Paradiso 26, a relation whose Homeric and Vergilian resonances inflect Dante's understanding of linguistic cycles. I argue that Dante's rewriting through Horace of the infernal, Vergilian simile of the falling leaves establishes a poetics of regeneration in Paradiso that joins the process of word creation to the miracle of the Resurrection and to the time‐bound, cyclic nature of what Adam calls the linguistic “uso d'i mortali” ‘usage of mortals.’

Shakespeare's selectivity in adapting a novella from Giraldi Cinthio's De Gli Hecatommithi into his own Othello has long been apparent; students of Shakespeare's play have stressed his transformation of the source by speeding up the action, condensing the plot, reassessing the characterization, and transfiguring the commonplace attitudes toward an interracial marriage presented in the source into a tragedy of love. But no one has demonstrated how a close comparison of single words and phrases in Othello and in the novella can help us to understand how the transformation took place, how words and phrases such as vedere cogl' occhi, vendetta, satio, and la giustizia divina are translated imaginatively into the thematic imagery of ocular proof, the configuration of revenge, satisfaction, and satiation, and the movement from justice to mercy which Desdemona offers to Othello. Clearly, such a comparison of the play and its source affords a critical perspective upon the verbal drama especially. But studies of the imagery in Othello neglect its source entirely, and source studies, merely footnoting the verbal parallels as they appear, seem to maintain the critical view that marvels how Shakespeare could have created so much out of so little. It is as if Shakespeare's characteristic ingredient, the poetic interplay of words and images in the verbal fund of his drama, had no parallel in the verbal fund of his source.

The Friar’s Tale is replete with distinct verbal echoes of the Wife of Bath’s Tale that point to subtler structural similarities: clear parallels exist between the Friar’s green Yeoman and the Wife’s Loathly Lady in their mysterious shape-shifting, their knowledge of unearthly secrets, and their radical metamorphoses as each tale ends. The Friar’s quiet parody of the Wife’s romantic idealism contributes to a pattern familiar in the architectonics of the Canterbury Tales. The consecutive tales of Wife, Friar, and Summoner form a dramatic triad exactly parallel to the well-known triad involving the Knight, Miller, and Reeve where, as here, the unity of the three turns upon the parody in the pivotal second tale. The Friar’s parody of the Wife also suggests that the thematic center of the Third Fragment is in the idea of maistrie, and coincidentally, suggests that the Friar’s and the Summoner’s Tales do not interrupt the Marriage Group but advance its chief theme.

Browning is one of Shelley's main heirs in the nineteenth century. As a boy he had worshipped Shelley, who is the most obvious single influence in both Pauline (pub. 1833) and Paracelsus (pub. 1835), his earliest published works. He grew uneasy about the relationship later, but he never stopped being in important ways a poet in the tradition of Shelley. One of the enduring likenesses between them is the way both use their strong sense of the weakness of language in developing the meaning of poems. Shelley uses it most fully in Epipsyckidion, where it serves a vision of the inadequacy of all human satisfactions. His solution is to set up a number of more or less satisfactory terms, calling attention to the fact that no one of them will do, and that they all together “do” only in special ways. This corresponds in language to the tendency to resist restrictions on personal relationships that appears in the Shelleyan “harem.” The solution in both cases can be awkward, but in the case of language, at any rate, the awkwardness is part of the meaning.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the literary, folkloristic, and social significance of the “peasant-tournament,” a type of mock-epic generally neglected by literary historians. Perhaps the two outstanding examples of this genre are The Turnament of Totenham and the tournament in Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring, both of which appear to date from the first half of the fifteenth century. The Turnament is an alliterative burlesque written sometime before 1456 by an unknown English author, who set the scene of his work at Tottenham, a village near London. Its 234 verses tell of a peasant tournament in which doughty village swains contend for the hand of Tyb, the reeve's daughter. The tournament of Lappenhausen is the opening episode in Wittenwiler's Ring, an amazing comic-didactic poem written in northeastern Switzerland about 1420. The Ring tells of the love, courtship, and marriage, of Bertschi Triefnas and his lovely hunchbacked, flatfooted, goitered sweetheart, Metzli Ruerenzumph. In the opening scene, which comprises about a thousand verses (vv. 105-659, 830-1279), Bertschi and his twelve companions ride to the village green and challenge all comers to joust in the name of womanhood. Finding no one who dares withstand them, they joust with each other until joined by Neidhart of Reuental, a peasant-hating nobleman who arrives in disguise and gives them a thorough drubbing.

Wie die anderen großen Klassiker seiner und früherer Zeiten, hat auch Goethe nie Deutschunterricht im heutigen Sinne genossen. Es mag dahingestellt bleiben, ob er trotzdem oder deswegen ein—Goethe geworden ist. Tatsache ist jedoch, daß er seit etwa einem Jahrhundert im Deutschunterricht gelesen wird und daß es trotzdem noch keine größere, das Thema auch nur annähernd erschöpfende Arbeit gibt über die Behandlung, die sein Werk und seine Persönlichkeit auf der deutschen Schule erfahren haben. Eine seltsame Unterlassung in Anbetracht der sonst schon längst ins Unermeßliche angewachsenen Goetheliteratur ! War und ist die Schule denn nicht der Ort auf dem Goethes großen Nachfolgern, seinen Widersachern, und auch uns, seinem Publikum im allgemeinen, eine erste Kenntnis seiner Art und Eigenart vermittelt wurde? Mogen die Umstânde dieser ersten Bekanntschaft nicht oft genug fürs ganze Leben ausschlaggebend gewesen sein? Und hat Goethe selber die Wichtigkeit gerade des dichterischen Schulerlebnisses nicht hoch genug angesetzt als er in den Wahlverwandtschaften schrieb, daß “ein Lehrer, der das Gefühl… an einem einzigen guten Gedicht erwecken kann,” mehr leistet als einer, “der uns ganze Reihen untergeordneter Naturbildungen der Gestalt und dem Namen nach überliefert?”—Diesen Worten können freilich andere entgegengesetzt werden, etwa diejenigen, mit denen der um den Deutschunterricht besonders verdiente Rudolf Hildebrand in seinem Buche Vom deutschen Sprachunterricht (1867) den damaligen Schulbetrieb charakterisierte: “Der Unterricht im Deutschen gilt den Lehrern… nicht als der leichteste und angenehmste, ja vielen wohl als der schwerste und lästigste, und lästig, nicht selten geradezu langweilig, selbst sterbenslangweilig, nicht den Lehrern bloß, auch den Schülern, und nicht an Volks- und Bürgerschulen bloß, ebensogut, ja besonders an Gymnasien.”

The wheel as an attribute of Fortune is of Roman origin, and, together with the globe which often takes its place, signifies the inconstancy of the goddess. In Roman art the wheel or globe is. represented as being held in the hand of the goddess, or lying at her feet; she is sometimes represented as standing on the globe. Motion of the wheel is not implied in its postures.

In Latin literature previous to the middle ages the references to the globe or wheel as attributes of Fortune are few in number, the earliest of them being seemingly that of Pacuvius (second century B. C.): “Fortunam insanam esse et cæcam et brutam perhibent philosophi saxoque instare in globoso prædicant volubili.” Cicero (first century B. C.) writes in Piso, 10, 22: “cumque ipse nudus in convivio saltaret in quo cum illum saltatorium versaret orbem ne turn quidem fortunæ rotam pertimescebat.”

Henry Playford in his note to the reader in Orpheus Britannicus felt free to say:

He who would enter upon anything like an adequate explanation of the remarkably complex and contradictory character of Chaucer's Wife of Bath must expect heavenly guidance and receive aid from the stars. Though one may not be quite prepared to accept entirely the pronouncement that she “is one of the most amazing characters … the brain of man has ever conceived,” still she is so vividly feminine and human, so coarse and shameless in her disclosures of the marital relations with five husbands, and yet so imaginative and delicate in her story-telling, that one is fascinated against his will and beset with an irresistible impulse to analyze her dual personality with the view of locating, if possible, definite causes for the coexistence of more incongruent elements than are ordinarily found in living human beings. Some time ago when I proposed casting the horoscope of the Wife of Bath, it was with the supposition that rules of natural astrology might be used exclusively in the interpretation of certain data, concerning planets and their influence, which Chaucer has furnished us; but it is not entirely so. In the full presentation of the Wife's “fortune”—her character, personal appearance, and the significance and location of mysterious “marks” about her body—constant reference must be made to what the mediæval mind believed to be truths found in the “science” of celestial physiognomy and perhaps of geomancy.

The scarlet letter has been interpreted as a story of sins and sinners for so long that this perspective has hardened into a convention. In Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl the sin of adultery and its consequences are seen; to Dimmesdale is added the further, less sympathetic sin of hypocrisy; and beyond the pale stands Chillingworth in his isolating sin of pride and self-consuming revenge. Once this standard point of view is assumed, it can be supported by what is incontrovertibly in the text, but if the angle of attention is shifted so that the novel is seen as a love story, that is, as a tragedy of the grand passion rather than as a tale of sinful passion, then certain features in our picture of the novel, obscure before, will leap into prominence and some of the previously more emphatic features will change their value in relation to the whole composition. Hawthorne's masterpiece may remain for us a haunted book, but it will be haunted by a mystery which we can identify as the mystery of erotic passion itself. It will be seen, in this perspective, that passion is the fixed reality throughout the novel and that it is “sin” which is the shifting, ambiguous term, as it is refracted in the many-sided ironies of the plot and of the narrative commentary. Further, from this point of view it becomes clear that the passion of the lovers is entering its most interesting phase when the story opens instead of being over and done with, except for its consequences, as is tacitly assumed in the conventional approach.

The Spectator of July 10,1886, voiced the general opinion of the then limited group acquainted with Russian literature when it hailed Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky as not only the greatest of Russian writers, but also the most important among contemporary realists. Such enthusiasm seems at first oddly inconsistent with the prevailing popular literary taste, particularly when we remember that these Russian novelists were rather closely identified with the French naturalistic movement—-a movement bitterly assailed by the Victorians. Moreover, their writings, representing virtually the only Russian literature to appear in English translation before 1900, came at a time when the controversy over Balzac had barely subsided and when those over Baudelaire, Zola, and Ibsen had excited a tempest, not only in the literary world, but also from the pulpit, press, and platform—even within the halls of Parliament. The history of Russian realism in England prior to 1900 thus throws into bold relief the essential differences between it and French realism as these two movements appeared to the English, and affords a deeper insight into the Victorian conscience with its troubled concern over art and morality.

What if in the final minutes of your heavying
descending

the landing strip kept lying
changing you back
into the air the way a white

backs away in anger when you approach with the directions you've been asked?
—Ed Roberson, “The Aerialist Narratives”

The fate of the nation is foretold in the arcs of birds, in the flight patterns of the ruling class, in the strip of runway hard to see in the fog. Only through the scrutiny of all such lines will our fates grow clear.

—Joseph Donahue, “Metaphysical Shivers: Reading Ed Roberson”

The poems which Juan Francisco Andres de Uztarroz wrote during the last two years of his life have long been considered lost. Don Ricardo del Arco, in reconstructing the intellectual and cultural life of seventeenth-century Aragon which centered around this famous historiographer, archaeologist, bibliographer, and poet, states that the autograph manuscript containing these poems was seen by the eighteenth century bibliographer, Felix de Latassa, but that it disappeared sometime later and its contents have remained unknown: “Desconocemos gran parte de sus poesfas, sobre todo las breves que vio Latassa en manuscrito.”

In 1866 Hardy bought a small volume published the year before in “The Cottage Library” series at Halifax called Queen Mab and Other Poems by Percy B. Shelley. The “other poems” are “Alastor,” “The Revolt of Islam,” and “Prometheus Unbound.” This book is now in the possession of Frederick B. Adams, Jr., who has most kindly allowed me to copy the numerous markings Hardy made in the text of “The Revolt of Islam” and “Prometheus Unbound.” Under Hardy's autograph, address, and the date “1866” on the title-page is the following inscription written by Sir James Barrie in 1933: “This Shelley and another volume like it were given to me by Mrs Hardy after Τ H's death. In his early days when he was in an architect's office (Blomfields) in Adelphi Terrace he carried these two books in his pockets and often read them aloud and discoursed on them to [sic] the other clerks. All the linings and marks on them were made by him in those days.” “Another volume like it” suggests a matching selection from Shelley's lyrics, but such a book has not come to light and Mr. Adams thinks that the other volume Barrie referred to was the Swinburne that Hardy is known to have carried about with him at the same time.

MOST CRITICS agree that The Years (1937) was an attempt by Virginia Woolf to modify the form of the traditional family chronicle by combining the externality of chronological events with the internality of poetic vision. We know, however, from A Writer's Diary (1953) that Virginia Woolf originally intended something quite different: she intended to write an “Essay-Novel” which would combine both forms. The facts revealed in the essay part of the novel would be explicit comment on the implicit social, economic, and sexual forces controlling the lives of the fictional characters in any given period of history, and the fiction would illustrate dramatically through characters and situations these general facts of history. Thus, Virginia Woolf's original intention was mainly one of externality, and indeed in A Writer's Diary she cautions herself against the pull toward “vision.”1 Ultimately, she combined fact and fiction by “compacting” the essay into the novel and combined externality and internality by seeking to reveal through internal vision the pattern of continuity in external events.