In the history of literature the change from the idealized worlds of the shepherd and the knight to the world of the pícaro; from arcadia and chivalry to the desolate urban landscape of misery and hunger; from romance to irony—in fact, the Copernican revolution that produced a new genre—could only have been born of an upheaval that affected men’s lives and forced educated writers to see conditions they had so far ignored. This change stemmed from an increased awareness of human misery, which the urban growth of the Renaissance had made highly visible. The genius of the Spanish author of the Lazarillo consists in his having found the literary voice for such a profound transformation of European society. The Lazarillo, of course, did not annihilate the past, but it gave artistic form to the all-pervading crisis that was destroying the basis of the traditional order.

Antonioni’s Blow-Up is one of the most significant and controversial films of the 1960s. Its success brought increased international recognition not only to its director but to Julio Cortázar, the author of the story that inspired the film. Because of the extreme complexity and ambiguity of both Blow-Up and its source, “Las babas del diablo,” critics have been unable to agree in their interpretations of either work, and they agree even less on the extent of Cortázar’s influence on Antonioni. A close analysis of the two works, with careful focus on the relationship between the creators and their protagonists and on the tension between the narratives and their self-conscious forms, reveals that many of the difficulties in interpretation are due to a priori assumptions of readers and viewers alike and that the similarities between the film and the story are far greater than has been supposed.

Critics have traditionally viewed the individual poems of Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) primarily as exercises in innovative versification and exotic local color. But if the poems are read sequentially, a significant pattern emerges. The apocalyptic cataclysm of “Le Feu du ciel” introduces the theme of sudden death and destruction that emerges as central to the entire volume. Hugo’s preoccupation with sudden violence needs to be understood in the light of his attitude toward the French Revolution. Attracted by the freedom that it brought but repelled by its excesses, Hugo could not decide during this period whether the Revolution was morally good or evil, with the result that at the end of Les Orientales he avoided taking a political stance and found refuge in art for art’s sake. It was only many years later that he was able to resolve his political doubts and complete his vision of human destiny.

Herman Melville began his literary career as the author of popular, presumably ephemeral works. He employed fiction for its entertainment value and, though he was a storyteller of genius, had no respect for the fictional mode. His view of authorship changed and his ambitions expanded over time, but his basic distrust of, and lack of interest in, fiction remained constant—may even have grown stronger—in his works. He accepted an Emersonian view of fiction as an impediment to the direct utterance of truth and found the requirements of fiction—story, character, point of view—a limitation and a distortion of the absolute expression for which he strove. Melville’s impatience with, and lack of regard for, the mode of fiction can be traced through his works from 1846 to 1857, after which he ceased to write for a large public.

One type of organization favored by the Beowulf poet is an ABC … X … CBA design capable of indefinite expansion. Ring composition of this type serves as a way of building up short verse paragraphs, as in Homer. It also underlies the composition of whole episodes. In addition, the entire narrative of Beowulf is knit together by an elaborate set of thematic parallels and verbal echoes ranged in pairs about a midpoint of mythic intensity, the fight with Grendel’s dam on the floor of the monsters’ pool. The consistency with which thesis is answered by antithesis in the design of Beowulf seems to be a special characteristic of the poet’s style and way of viewing the world. Seldom are events seen as isolated, without antecedents or consequences. Often joy is answered by sorrow in a network of reversals that undercuts any confidence in the permanence of earthly success.

The prevalent view that Book III of Gulliver’s Travels satirizes the Royal Society overlooks the fact that this book contains two satires, one on the Laputians and one on the Balnibarbians. The first of these satires gains point if we regard it as aimed at the Cartesians, interpreting Laputa as France, the land of the Cartesians, and Balnibarbi as England, the land of the Newtonians, characterizations made by Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques. The Laputians’ fear of the extinction of the sun is fully justified by the cosmology of Descartes’s Principes; their musical mania exaggerates only slightly that of the Cartesian popularizer Marin Mersenne; their influence on the Balnibarbians, inspiring them to build the Academy of Lagado, represents the influence of Descartes on the Royal Academy, an influence that has been hitherto underestimated.