Novice heroes in modern Serbocroatian oral epic tradition present the same scholarly problems as does Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey. In this Balkan narrative tradition, only a small number of epics has been recorded in which the novices and their stories are the main substance. The Yugoslav singer Avdo Međedović performed one of these by dictation for Milman Parry in Bijelo Polje, Yugoslavia, in 1935: The Marriage of Mehmed, Son of Smailaga. That song of 12,311 verses is one of the two longest epics recorded from Serbocroatian tradition. By thematic analysis of it and eight other Serbocroatian epics of initiation representing the full range of the initiation story's multiformity, we can establish that Avdo's epic song is an orthodox telling of the traditional story in spite of its extraordinary, Homeric size, and that both the ancient Greek legends of Theseus (in Plutarch and Apollodorus) and Homer's story of Telemachus are thematically indistinguishable from it. The content of a common Balkan mythic tradition underlying the ancient Greek and modern Serbocroatian stories can be described, and the traditional correctness of Telemachus' presence in the Odyssey can be explained from Yugoslav tellings of the Telemachia.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, has not one, but four different narrative forms. The symbolic stories, “The Book of the Grotesque,” “Hands,” “Paper Pills,” “Tandy,” and “Drink,” emphasize the symbols suggested by their titles, lead readers toward crucial thematic epiphanies, and develop several of Anderson's affirmative values. In contrast, the stories of incident, “Nobody Knows,” “Adventure,” “An Awakening,” “The Untold Lie,” and “Departure,” are virtually without symbolism, but have nearly mythically simple narratives in which characters come to some momentary understanding of self, society, or life in general. The thematic stories, “Godliness,” “Respectability,” “The Strength of God,” “Loneliness,” “Death,” and “Sophistication,” subordinate character, event, and symbol to the exposition of the “truth,” quality, or state of being signaled in the titles. The emblematic stories, “Mother,” “The Philosopher,” “A Man of Ideas,” “The Thinker,” “The Teacher,” and “ 'Queer',” focus narrowly on character types, as events, actions, and attitudes, past and present, explain them and emphasize their typical behavior patterns; they usually end with these characters seeking release from their frustrations through violence or flight. The uniformity of each narrative form, focusing as it does on one dominant element, probably lies in the lyrical impressionism of Anderson's method of composition.

The Comte de Brienne (1595-1666), soldier, bureaucrat, secrétaire d'Etat under Marie de Médicis, Louis XIII, Anne d'Autriche, and Louis XIV, wrote, ca. 1661, memoirs in which it appears (1) that he took seriously the principles of feudal polity, (2) that he sought to incarnate the ideal feudal vassal and expected his noble contemporaries to do so, and (3) that while such contemporary fictions as the heroes of d'Urfé and of Corneille were exemplified in fact, the fact was already an anachronism in morality and in politics.

Close examination of the interlocutor's reflected reactions provides a method for a reading of La Chute which is more consistent with Camus's basic outlook. As he takes part in sporadic although important exchanges with Clamence, the interlocutor is first led generally to see resemblances to the generous lawyer. Later, however, he displays increasingly unfavorable reactions until he finally laughs aloud when Clamence states that he will listen fraternally to the other's confession. By creating an interlocutor who rejects the speaker's views and purposes, Camus affords the reader the pleasure of ridiculing Clamence and of reasserting his own interpretation of life rather than being intimidated into accepting Clamence's degrading portrait as characteristic of modern man.

Pedro de Veragüe's Doctrina de la discricon has been rightly regarded as “a most important monument of XIVth century Spanish poetry.” It has heretofore been known through a single manuscript (E) from which it has been edited twice. This study utilizes four new textual sources: a manuscript from the Colegio Mayor de San Bartoiomé: S (the best, despite the influence of the Leonese dialect); a second manuscript from the Gayangos Collection (M); a third from a private collection (R); and the only extant copy of a sixteenth-century printing preserved in the British Museum (L). As appears from the watermarks and script, R (1438-55) and S antedate the known manuscript E. M is a late copy (ca. 1535) of considerable textual value. L was preceded by editions now lost and was probably printed by Varela in Seville ca. 1525. The stemma shows that S, R, M, and L share an ancestor of which E is not a descendant. These four new texts contain new stanzas and clarify the meaning of numerous corrupt passages. The present study gives the new stanzas and some of the most important lectiones varice from S, R, M, and L. Basically a textual comment, it endeavors to explain the difficult passages of the poem and includes notes on its language, versification, and historic background. (In Spanish)

The 1952 poem is commonly read as a manifesto of Spain's contemporary “social” poets and as an expression of their aversion to the estheticism of a previous poetic generation. The “esthete” addressed in the poem seems at first glance to be an obvious caricature of Juan Ramón Jiménez. The “esthete,” on closer examination, differs significantly from Jiménez in several respects. Jiménez shares neither his interest in abstract beauty divorced from existential concerns nor his overly refined, “literary” language. The only real point of identity between Jiménez and the “esthete” lies in their shared concern for the “Obra” as a substitute for personal immortality; but even that concern is typical of only one period in Jiménez' career. A comparison between Jiménez and Hierro reveals no such clear contrast in their approaches to poetry as that implied by Hierro between himself and the “esthete.” The latter turns out to be a straw man reflecting some aspects of Jiménez, some of the vanguard poets of the twenties, and something of a half-hidden visionary side of Hierro himself. Hierro seems to have invented the “esthete” as a means of affirming his own poetic individuality, a maneuver which was surely unnecessary in view of the fact that by 1952 Hierro already possessed an unmistakably personal style.

Mann's story, often considered only a minor companion piece to the play Fiorenza, is significant in itself as a satire on the intellectual attitudes prevalent in Munich around 1900. The story begins with a general description of Munich which, though apparently independent, is in fact connected to the later parts by the use of sophisticated narrative techniques. This description also contains topical references and details which show that the artistic and intellectual community of Munich, in its admiration for the Italian Renaissance, is enacting a quasi neo-Renaissance. Into this realistic setting Mann then places a fictional hero who feels he is called to assume the task of a Savonarola for his time. A grotesque scene results which exposes the spuriousness of the Renaissance cult. In presenting the satire, Mann employs means and forms which seem to be forerunners of his later leitmotifs, “gelebte Vita,” parody, and others. The devices in “Gladius Dei,” however, have specific, mostly rhetorical functions within the story, whereas their later counterparts often have far-reaching symbolic meaning.

When the archetypal principles outlined by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism have been applied to The Faerie Queene, they have dangerously misrepresented its structure and meaning. The Anatomy subordinates a poet's intention in any given text to the symbolic patterns a critic can discover there; and so it arbitrarily describes Spenser's poem as a romance in six books, covering many of the six phases which make up the archetypal plot of that genre. In a later essay Frye amends his scheme to include the Mutabilitie Cantos as a completed seventh part in the unified imagery of the whole. But the reductive possibilities of his approach are far more fully realized in A. C. Hamilton's Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene. Around the poem Hamilton weaves a network of recurring “images”: puns, sexual allusions, and mythological equivalents. He also forces it into various larger molds, asserting that Book One consists of two five-act plays, a tragedy followed by a comedy; that Book One falls into four parts which outline the remaining books; and that the seven books which survive are patterned on the chronological development of human life. Thus, archetypal criticism has made Spenser over into another poet.

To appreciate Dr. Faustus as cosmic tragedy, it is necessary to relate its particular view of man and God to other works of Marlowe and to the atheistic doctrines attributed to him by his contemporaries. It is also necessary to reexamine scholarly assumptions about Marlowe, whose mind was perhaps more medieval than modern, and whose view of experience was often more antihumanistic than humanistic. Obsessed with the thought of man's impotence before the power of time and death, Marlowe was attracted to the idea of man's transcendent will. But he intuited very early the inhumanity of absolute or superhuman power. Recognizing the horror of his own conception of the divine, he juxtaposed in Dr. Faustus Faustus and Christ, first as moral antitheses and then as complementary sacrifices to an implacable God. To attempt to read Dr. Faustus as an orthodox homily is to succeed only in stripping it of its tragic grandeur and metaphysical terror. To view it, however, as Marlowe's ultimate religious and cosmological statement—as his turning upon his ideal of transcendence—is to grasp the full meaning of Faustus' despair and to grasp also the final congruence of Marlowe's art and life.

The English participles, present and past, are best interpreted grammatically as transformations from underlying sentences in which they were regular predicates. Interesting ambiguities and quasi-ambig-ities sometimes occur in Milton as a result of these and related transformations. Present participles tend to be active, narrative-furthering devices; past participles, expository, historical devices. Milton's practice changed from a heavier use of the present to a heavier use of the past participle. This is clear evidence of his growing Latinity. One esthetic consequence was a more compact exposition than had characterized earlier narrative poetry, with a greater density of historical implication. The heavy use of past participles also coincided well with the philosophical intention of Paradise Lost of explaining God's ways to man, since many times the implicit (but deleted) subject of the past participle is “God.” Thus God tends to be grammatically, as well as philosophically, omnipresent though hidden.

Recently discovered work sheets for Swinburne's “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866) reveal that the central wave image, foreshadowing the later symbolists and imagists, was wrought by Swinburne with extreme care. Through a careful pruning and a suppression of the simile in favor of metaphor, Swinburne built this passage of eighteen lines so that effects accumulate, distilling his themes of power, fear, evil, and transcendent time with considerable symbolic force.

The Keynotes Series was the result of one of John Lane's schemes for calling attention to new writers and trends. These fourteen novels and nineteen volumes of short stories published between 1894 and 1897 represent a significant cross section of what Lane, whose Bodley Head Press was regarded as the center of fin de siècle literary attitudes, thought new and modish. An examination of the contents of the Series is useful in seeing the 1890's in perspective: conventional morality is there defended more often than attacked, decadent themes are few but technical experiments in structure and style many, and Hardy, not Wilde or Pater, exercises the greatest influence. (The first complete listing of the Series is included.)

In four characters, Conrad undermines all possibility of unambiguous moral action. The Professor, whose anarchism begins in existential emptiness and contains a violent totalitarian impulse, dramatizes the potential for death in the human will when its energies are directed toward power, toward political ends; the capacity for destruction, both private and public, of the Professor's devotion to the “idea” is grotesquely symbolized by the bomb he carries, his hand always on the detonator. The Assistant Commissioner has no “idea,” but his apparent efficiency is thoroughly undermined by the way Conrad exposes the ambiguity both of his motives and of the sources of the energy which enables him to succeed in his hunt for Verloc. Like Winnie, the Commissioner has chosen “respectability”—an inauthentic life. Winnie's own destruction begins in her feeling for Stevie and is hastened by Stevie's angry compassion, since even compassion is dangerous as a motive for action. This is a lesson Michaelis' youthful political experience has taught him, and his withdrawal presents the novel's final paradox: that in an anarchic world, self-preoccupied inertia may become the posture of a saint.

The problem of assessing Edward Taylor's literary reputation has been made difficult by the claims put forward on his behalf and by the criticisms of these claims because both share the assumption that Taylor's poetry may be compared with Herbert's. But a consideration of Taylor's Prologue (glossed with relevant poems and sermons) reveals the rudiments of Taylor's Puritan theory of the imperfect function of human art, rudiments which form a concept of decorum which is not “metaphysical.” Taylor's theory features the severely limited possibilities of fallen human art not only in dealing with man's condition but even in attempting the praise of God. Accordingly, at the practice of metaphor Taylor is committed to meiosis, and uses amplification for the praise of God with considerable hesitation. On the other hand, Herbert, with a different religious position and with consequently a different subject (the contrast between man's insignificance and his greatness as a child of God), has as a result a much wider metaphoric range. These differences in the range and use of metaphor reveal quite different concepts of decorum and suggest judgments about Taylor's literary reputation based not on “metaphysical” decorum, but rather on a Puritan decorum of imperfection.

The two versions of “The Hall of Fantasy” reveal that the intellectual exchange between Hawthorne and Thoreau at the beginning of the Old Manse period was far more extensive and formative than has hitherto been supposed. The narrator's companion-guide is a strikingly full, thinly disguised fictional portrait of Thoreau as he appeared to Hawthorne in August and September 1842, when their friendship first developed. This portrait provides a new set of insights into their relationship and a more accurate notion of their attitudes toward Emerson, Alcott, and the whole intellectual ferment around Concord. The narrator and his guide assume the precise moral stances of Hawthorne and Thoreau concerning Transcendentalism, technical progress, reform movements, vegetarianism, “Adamism,” and other prominent philosophical and social issues. These discussions largely determined the subjects each would write about for the next year, especially in Hawthorne's “The Old Manse,” “The New Adam and Eve,” and “Earth's Holocaust,” and in Thoreau's two contributions to The Democratic Review. “The Landlord” and “Paradise (to be) Regained.” Their influence can still be seen in the major works of the late 1840's and early 1850's: “The Custom House,” The Bouse of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and the different versions of Walden.

To write The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne drew on mid-nineteenthcentury theories of the prose romance and the central situation of New England romances. The romance was distinguished from the novel by the idea of artistic distance; romancers wanted to set human experience at a distance from their readers' world so that the meaning of the experience would be more clear. To get the distance exactly right, they balanced three sets of opposites: verisimilitude and ideality; the natural and the marvelous; and history and fiction. Hawthorne discussed each of the balances and used them as part of his conception of the form of The Scarlet Letter. The central situation of most contemporary romances about Puritanism provided him with the conflict of the “fair Puritan” and the “black Puritan.” Hester is his “fair Puritan” whose capacity for feeling is opposed to the reasoned but harsh justice of his “black Puritan,” Chillingworth. These two characters in their roles as types define the extreme sides of the moral argument Hawthorne synthesizes in the complex characterization of Dimmesdale.

George Chapman's source for every important incident in the Strozza subplot of The Gentleman Usher was Chapter x of De Abditis Nonnullis ac mirandis morborum & sanationum causis liber, a collection of medical case histories written in Latin by Antonio Benivieni, a fifteenth-century Florentine physician and associate of Ficino. Both works are informed with Neo- Platonism. Chapman took from Benivieni's work several key phrases and in cidental details. Possibly echoing Italian political names, he added a villain, Medice, and changed the name of the protagonist from Gaspar to Strozza; to establish a Platonic parallel with Vincentio and Margaret of the main plot, he replaced Gaspar's spiritual counselor, a friend named Marioctus, with a wife, Cynanche, who serves the same function. The names Strozza and Cynanche contribute significant lexical meanings to the play: strozza is Italian for “throat,” and κυνάγχη Greek for both “sore throat” and “dog collar”; primarily, Cynanche is a collar to her husband in the common Renaissance symbol of discipline. Poetic elaboration aside, Chapman's only other important alteration was to allow Strozza to retain, in an apparently weakened form, the prophetic gift which Gaspar lost immediately after his miraculous cure.

The notebook, which disappeared from the Library of Congress sometime after its first, incomplete publication in 1921, has been described and analyzed from an imperfect microfilm copy. The new information discloses that, although the notebook was used until 1854–55, the traditional date of 1847 for most of the contents is correct. Although the notebook is close to the 1855 Leaves of Grass in its poetical material, it shows relatively little influence from specific events, politics, or literary ideas in Whitman's formative period.