Nothing in connection with Arthurian legend is more familiarly referred to than Arthur's Round Table. From 1155 when Wace first mentioned it down to the present day the Round Table has symbolized the idea of fraternal fellowship, whether as of old in chivalrous deeds of arms or as today in the asperities of political discussion. It has become perhaps the most famous piece of furniture ever invented by the mind of man and the concept of it, at once simple and profound, has kept curiously enough even in our own day the idea of a real table around which real men gather and of the symbolic value of their association.

During the last decade of the seventeenth century the rapidly increasing influence of female readers found public acknowledgment in many of the projects of John Dunton, London book-seller and publisher. To the Fair Sex he dedicated in 1691 and 1692, first monthly, then fortnightly, and finally weekly numbers of his Athenian Mercury; to them he made special appeal when sales were slow; and to them he presented, in 1693, a short-lived and most unedifying Ladies' Mercury, a publication that may fairly be called the first English periodical for women.

The nature of the unity in William Faulkner's Light in August, in fact, even the existence of such unity, has been seriously disputed by his critics. The debate has ranged from Malcolm Cowley's insistence that the work combines “two or more themes having little relation to each other” to Richard Chase's elaborate theory of “images of the curve” opposed to “images of linear discreteness.” Those critics who see a unity in the novel find its organizing principle in theme or philosophical statement—“a successful metaphysical conceit,” a concern with Southern religion, the tragedy of human isolation, man's lonely search for community—but they fail to find a common ground for the unity they perceive because they neglect properly to evaluate the objective device which Faulkner employs in the novel as an expression of theme. That device is the pervasive paralleling of character traits, actions, and larger structural shapes to the story of Christ. Viewed in terms of this device the novel becomes the story of the life and death of a man peculiarly like Christ in many particulars, an account of what Ilse D. Lind has called “the path to Gethsemane which is reserved for the Joe Christmases of this world.” However, that account is in itself perverse, “a monstrous and grotesque irony,” unless the other strands of action in the book—the Hightower story and the Lena Grove story—are seen as being contrasting portions of a thematic statement also made suggestively by analogies to the Christ story. This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that such, indeed, is the basic nature of the novel and that it has a unity which is a function of its uses of the Christ story.

Wordsworth's answer to Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode” is fuller than has been recognized. In “Resolution and Independence,” Wordsworth indirectly suggests to his friend that he turn to God for the comfort he formerly found in natural objects and that he discover through God the extraordinary strength within himself to master sorrow. He reminds Coleridge, who laments the loss of Joy, of the visionary power of pain and of the spiritual insight and trust that may come from suffering itself. In addition, he asks Coleridge to remember that while storm may follow calm, sunshine may also follow storm. In “Stanzas Written in My Pocket-Copy of Thomson's ‘Castle of Indolence,’” written immediately after “Resolution and Independence,” comic innuendo and affectionate solicitude replace sober teaching as means of arguing against Coleridge's dejection. Alluding to Thomson's satiric portrait of a poet's melancholy companion, Wordsworth suggests to Coleridge that he is unlike this morose and speechless figure who thanks heaven the day is done. Wordsworth reminds Coleridge of his unusual capacity for delight in common things and of their mutual good fortune in being able to devote themselves to friendship and to art: like Thomson's pilgrims they have been dwelling in the “happy Castle.”

Recently, scholars have questioned the need for southern literary studies. Why have a separate field when so much scholarship in the past decade has sought to break down the southern isolationism that characterized studies of the South for most of the twentieth century? Global South studies and the new southern studies have shaped the field and pushed it in this direction, while transatlantic, transpacific, and even planetary studies are part of the academic vernacular.

All students of Chaucerian chronology are agreed that Troilus and Criseyde was written not earlier than the poet's first Italian journey of 1373, and not later than 1386. The second of these terminal dates is fixed by the fact that the earlier, so-called B, version of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, which refers to Troilus as already in circulation, is assigned with a good deal of confidence to 1386 or 1387. It is further corroborated by the fact that Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, which shows extensive acquaintance with Troilus, seems to have been written in 1387, the year before its author's death.

The New Variorum Coriolanus offers ample evidence that criticism of this play has spent its force upon two sources of conflict: the relationship between plebs and patricians and the relationship between Coriolanus and his mother. These approaches have led to interesting speculation as to Shakespeare's own point of view. But the fact remains to be reckoned with that the two disastrous relationships which most have excited critics are also exciting in North's Plutarch and that Shakespeare's most important departures from his source are in another direction. In this paper I hope to show that Shakespeare drew principally upon the military situation of his own era and country in reshaping the Plutarchan story. In this reshaping, Coriolanus emerges as a soldier whose life comprises two significantly related phases: the soldier at war and the soldier in civil life. The Roman general's difficulty in adjusting himself to a non-military career is of central importance because Shakespeare gave this problem a greater prominence and more clearly defined statement than did Plutarch. Nevertheless, Coriolanus' rôle in warfare is, in Shakespeare's design, basic to an understanding of his rôle in peace. What is more, the complexity of the former rôle has been underestimated by critics, most of whom esteem him an excellent warrior.

Scholars have attempted to determine the precise details of the dice games played in the tavern in Le Jeu de saint Nicolas but have not connected these particular games to the play's larger structural and thematic design. Jean Bodel's alterations of the Iconia Sancti Nicolai legend are governed by the concept of game as an activity defined and delimited by rules, set off from events of the “real world,” yet intently pursued. His modifications are appropriate to a dramatic representation, for drama itself in the Middle Ages was considered “play,” a game. The idea of game was deeply rooted in the medieval imagination: all human history was seen as a contest between God and Satan that is controlled and determined by God. Bodel contrasts the rule-governed realm of the pagans with the Christian realm of belief and celebrates God's supreme control of the game of history.

When Addison in his essay on the imagination made novelty a source of aesthetic pleasure, along with beauty and grandeur, he was not announcing a discovery. Previous critics had repeatedly noted the efficacy of the varied and strange, the wonderful, and the surprising in achieving desired poetic effects. Addison's idea of novelty includes these elements. The new or uncommon diverts our minds with “the Strangeness of its appearance”; the novel “fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise”; variety, in the essay on the Imagination and in the criticism of Paradise Lost alike, is a virtual synonym for novelty; and the wonderful, or the marvelous, almost invariably applies to that which possesses both grandeur and novelty—to anything that excites “admiration.”

In the English eighteenth century, as in most ages before the twentieth century, to take history seriously was to believe, almost without exception, that history coheres, that it has a shape, that it is moving in a more-or-less orderly, more-or-less obvious direction toward or away from certain teleological poles. History was a decline from the “natural” condition of man for Shaftesbury and the primitivists; or it was an ascent toward the “natural” condition of man for Priestley and the progressivists. It was a decline from a general happiness for Lord Edward Fitzgerald; and it was an ascent toward a general happiness in at least that aspect of Pope's thought represented in the lines, “Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!/ Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! What e'er thy name.” For Swift, and to a lesser extent Clarendon and Temple, history was a monstrous progressive aberration from standards of truth and reason. For most of the doctrinaire Whigs it was a gradual realization of human freedom. History was visualized by Young and Akenside as a corollary of what A. O. Lovejoy calls “the temporalizing of the Great Chain of Being.”

In his recent critical work on Swift, Mr. Edward Rosenheim, Jr., argues that satire is an attack upon “discernible historic particulars”; a true “satire against mankind,” he adds, necessarily lies beyond this definition and must be considered as a species of philosophic writing. Without questioning his definition of satire, which is intended as a critical tool rather than as historical description, I think it worth recalling that attacks on human nature or the human species as such were thought in Swift's day to be well within the satiric genre. More significantly, such satires on man fell into general disfavor in the first half of the eighteenth century; they appear to have been the first to suffer from the general reaction against satire which Stuart Tave and others have traced. The hostile reception encountered by the greatest example of the genre, Gulliver's Travels, embodied the same charges as had been levelled earlier in the century against lesser works. While other forms of satire were still flourishing and meeting with critical approval, satiric indictments of mankind as a whole were censured as libels on the “dignity of human nature.”

On New Year's Eve, 1828, Washington Irving, who was stopping in Seville during his first visit to Spain, made this entry in his diary:

One of the most noticeable characteristics of style in Wyclif's translation of the New Testament is his occasional use of a verbal form in -yng(e) preceded by to, as a rendering of a Latin future participle, as in Luke 9.44: for it is to comynge, that mannis sone be bitrayed in to the hondis of men = Filius enim hominis futurum est ut tradatur in manus hominum; Luke 13.9: And if it schal make fruyt, ellis in tyme to comynge thou schalt kitte it doun = et si quidem fecerit fructum: sin autem, in futurum succides eam. This construction is not found in Wyclif's original English works. It does occur, however, in other writings in Middle English; and since scholars have, thus far, been unable to agree as to its origin and classification, I have undertaken a detailed study of Wyclif's use of the idiom, with the hope that some further light may be thrown on its nature and origin. Before discussing Wyclif's use of the construction, however, it seems advisable to consider somewhat in detail the history of opinion on the problem.

Literary structure provided Gogol with a means to free himself from the restrictive definitions of life. As copying clerk, Akaky inhabits a nearly autonomous world of literal repetition, a world close to the timeless silence out of which fiction is born. He is happy, having next to no individualized desiring self. The acquisition of the overcoat causes Akaky's fall into the diachronic world of difference, a hostile world that overwhelms his recently objectified identity. As his letters demonstrate, Gogol himself feared just such an annihilation by the other. Hence his enigmatic, elusive character and his narrative strategy of hiding behind a multiplicity of constantly shifting masks. The “fantastic ending” of the story fulfills Gogol's most cherished fantasy: to exercise power against the world while remaining unconditioned within the play of literary metamorphoses. In psychological terms, this desire is symptomatic of the schizoid, ontologically insecure individual.

What the public gets to see of museums is in the exhibitions in which their holdings are presented; beyond the archival functions of conservation, categorization, and restoration, this presentation is at the heart of museums as cultural institutions. Until a few decades ago, exhibitions were predictable in format and structure. Visitors attended monographic and period exhibitions to be instructed and to enjoy themselves according to the old adage of utile dulci. Every exhibition was an episode in a traditional conception of the management of art's relation to the public. Curators were also conservators; they studied, preserved, and categorized art objects and presented a selection of these according to the knowledge acquired. The space in which the objects were presented was kept as neutral as possible, so as not to disturb the viewer.

Three consecutive episodes in Joyce's Ulysses—the “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe,” and “Eumaeus”—are related by parodie technique. There is considerable overlapping in the methods of the three sections, since all three utilize the familiar and the well worn; but they differ in the chief matter selected for parody. The “Oxen of the Sun” or hospital episode is a parodie résumé, in chronological order, of distinctive English literary styles, such as those of Malory and Carlyle, or, where no specific author is parodied, of period mannerisms. The “Circe” or brothel episode collects and parodies the proverb and the cliché. The “Eumaeus” or homecoming episode parodies that variety of long-winded journalese which relies on elegant variation, circumlocution, dead metaphor, and stock expression and makes twenty trite “fine” words do the work of two plain ones. Models for all three episodes can be found in the work of Jonathan Swift. Swift's parodies of literary styles are best exemplified in A Tale of a Tub; his parodie use of the proverb in Polite Conversation; and his ridicule of the trite in A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind. It is my belief that Joyce profits from Swiftian practice in all three episodes; but his use of Swift is most easily demonstrable in the “Circe” scene, which makes direct use of Polite Conversation.

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.

Notwithstanding the existence of innumerable and scattered bits of information and comment on the reception of nineteenth-century French realism in Germany, the general history of the subject has been curiously neglected. Only one comprehensive study, that of Flaubert's fortunes in Germany, has been published; German criticism of Stendhal prior to 1918 has been examined in an unpublished dissertation; the reputation of Zola has not been traced beyond 1893. Balzac, the Goncourt brothers, Daudet, Maupassant, and Huysmans have virtually been ignored. Even the longer studies are almost exclusively concerned with the vicissitudes of one single author; few or no comparisons are drawn with German echoes of other French realists, and therefore no conclusions of wider significance could be secured, no total picture emerges.

This essay follows closely a long tradition of poets writing about war as winter, emphasizing its most dangerous characteristics: an impersonal force that can bring indiscriminate annihilation, freezing numbness or insensibility, and blank illegibility. These poems tell of modern total war avant la lettre and its capacity to destroy what we can feel or know of its work. Focusing primarily on eighteenth-century British poets (Pope, Thomson, Cowper, and Wordsworth) but turning as well to Homer and our contemporary poets, the essay considers the particular threats of war to poetic creation and the difficult, often desperate means by which poets resist those threats. Perhaps most ominous in these figurations are representations of war as still, inactive, and somehow outside the logic of historical eventfulness. Thus the poets meditate as well on the very possibility of historical narrative amid the violence of war.