Grendel's feud against Hrothgar and his Danes has been requited not only by the hand of Beowulf but by the scholarly shafts which have nailed the monster to his watery lair. Outside of his natural habitat, however, Grendel is still a problem in his nocturnal visits to the royal hall of Heorot.

These WORDS of Li Ch'ing-chao, regarded by many as the greatest woman poet in Chinese history, were written shortly after the death of her husband, who had been her devoted companion and faithful comrade in letters. His death was the strongest influence in her life, bringing to her poems a depth of feeling that, like a colorless blue in the flame of her genius, gave them brilliance and intensity. To be sure, Li Ch'ing-chao had earned a position in Chinese poetry long before her husband's death, largely because of her rare sensitivity to the aesthetic and poetic quality of the world in which she lived. While her poetry reflected a limited world of nature and of man, she more than compensated for this apparent lack with the depth of her imaginative penetration.

It is not generally realized how suddenly Italian culture and manners became popular in Tudor England. After Chaucer's surprising discovery and translation of Italian literature, it was nearly two centuries before another translation from the Italian was published in England. This was the Certayne Psalmes (1549) of Thomas Wyatt, taken from a work by Aretino. In the same decade, royalty took up the new interest. Henry VIII knew little if any Italian. Mary could understand it, probably because it was close to her mother's Spanish, which she spoke, but she did not speak or read Italian. Elizabeth, on the other hand, studied Italian when she was ten years old (1544), as we shall see presently, and she learned to speak it fluently. This progression marks the suddenness of the new obsessive taste for Italian, a taste which endured for a whole century. This essay will trace the genesis of the fashion.

Robert greene himself tells us actually .very little about his university career except that he was a gadabout who finally proceeded to the M.A. degree.

Die feststellung, daß die beiden großen historischen Dramen Eichendorffs, Ezelin von Romano und Der letzte Held von Marienburg, zusammen mit den späten Versepen zu der verwittertsten Schicht seines Dichtwerkes gehören, ist bereits eine Beschönigung. Lebendig waren sie nie, und dem heutigen Leser scheint ihr stereotypes Waffengeklirr, ihre vordergründige Redseligkeit, ihr Flickwerk aus Shakes-peareschen, Schillerschen und Goetheschen Reminiszenzen mit einem Rost überzogen, der sie gerade dort am brüchigsten macht, wo er am “edelsten” aufliegt. Daß ein so im Innersten lyrischer Dichter wie Eichendorff sich überhaupt der großen dramatischen Form zuwendet, mag an sich schon überraschen; und der Hinweis auf Brentano, selbst auf Arnim und Tieck als Parallelfälle ist kaum geeignet, unser Erstaunen zu mindern. Sie nämlich hatten sich in der Gründung Prags und im Kaiser Octavianus das Historische in Märchen und Mythe übersetzt, die durch das lyrische Idiom Geheimnis und Weihe empfingen, abgekehrt jeder Zur-Schau-Stellung, dem Theater also, oder doch gerichtet auf eines, das, wie Arnim in einem Brief an Goethe bekannte, “nirgends vorhanden ist”. Eichendorff aber drängte es zur Geschichte, sichtbar aufgerollt als Bühnenhandlung, und so konnte das mißliche Resultat nicht ausbleiben, daß sein Eigentliches, Symbolmagie und -beschwörung durch das Poetische, als Uneigentliches in das Werk einging, Dekoration nur, die sich unverbindlich dem Historischen überwölbt, oder brüchiger Boden, durch den es ins Unprofilierte versickert.

The years 1840–50 were important ones in Anglo-American cultural and intellectual relations, for during this period American writers began to be widely read in England. Before that time books had been too expensive for almost everyone except the great readers or the greatly prosperous; in the 1840's, however, a combination of circumstances led to a revolution in English reading habits. Circulating libraries had been in operation in England for some years, but it was in 1842 that Mudie's began to make available for the first time literature of the world to all literate Englishmen. More important perhaps than the libraries were the cheap reprints which, at first, were sold mainly in the newly built and overflowing railway stations but which were later found in book stalls throughout the country. Commenting on Slater's shilling edition of Emerson's Orations, Lectures, and Addresses, The Critic wrote, for example, that “the work itself must be familiar by name to all our readers, but probably it has been out of the reach of many of them. It is not so now. The poorest may possess it.” That Emerson and many other American authors appeared in these cheap reprints was due, ironically enough, as much to defective international copyright laws as to a demand for their books. British publishers discovered that under certain conditions they could bring out the works of foreign writers without remuneration, and after 1839 they took full advantage of this knowledge. Emerson tried to outwit these pirates by sending the manuscripts of Essays, Second Series and of Poems to England prior to bringing the volumes out in America, and Carlyle used the Preface to the Second Essays to draw and quarter them. Emerson's precautions and Carlyle's strictures were of little avail: at about the same time that Poems came out, Orr and Company was issuing a pirated edition of Essays, Lectures, and Orations. Although evasion of copyright laws cannot be condoned on ethical grounds, it was fortuitous in one respect: the pirated editions were dirt cheap, and their wide sale along with legitimate reprints and the circulating library made accessible for the first time large quantities of American books to a wide British public. From 1840 to the end of the century, England read more books by American writers than by all of Europe combined and, fortunately for this study, all of the major works received critical appraisal in British periodicals.

Nearly every book or article on Tennyson alludes to the poet's characteristic ambiguity, one neither of syntax nor of meaning but inherent in his very choice of subject and thus an essential aspect of his imagination. Few critics, however, have even tried to build a unified thesis from their isolated perceptions of, for instance, Tennyson's simultaneous concern with macrocosm and microcosm, the similarity and mutual attraction of opposites in his poetry, and, over all, his assumption of the dualistic nature of things. Most references to these phenomena are as brief, but rarely so significant, as Eliot's evaluation of the success and failure of In Memoriam, which calls attention to the poem's expression at once of the most obvious and the most sensitive: “Tennyson's surface, his technical accomplishment, is intimate with his depths: what we most quickly see about Tennyson is that which moves between the surface and the depths, that which is of slight importance.”

Very early in his career, Thackeray published his Catherine (1839-40) as part of Fraser's Magazine's campaign against fiction that glamorized criminals and sinners. In a note to Chapter i, he singled out for criticism Bulwer's Ernest Maltravers because it “opens with a seduction; but then it is performed by people of the strictest virtue on both sides; there is so much religion and philosophy in the heart of the seducer, so much tender innocence in the soul of the seduced, that—bless the little dears!—their very peccadilloes make one interested in them; and their naughtiness becomes quite sacred, so deliciously is it described.” In Fraser's, August 1832, Bulwer had been accused of parallel confusions: “having to paint an adulterer, you describe him as belonging to the class of country curates, among whom, perhaps, such a criminal is not met with once in a hundred years.”

“Le 2 avril 1862 le grand bourdon du romantisme annonçait à toute volée l'importante nouvelle du jour; l'apparition d'une merveille. Les thuriféraires étaient à leur poste, brûlant l'encens sur l'autel du maître. De toutes parts s‘élevaient des exclamations, des adorations accompagnées de génuflexions et d'homélies louangeuses, sympathiques.” C'est ainsi qu'un pamphlétaire violent décrit la publicité tapageuse qui accompagne la publication des deux premiers volumes des Misérables, celui des romans de Victor Hugo le plus important par l‘étendue—dix volumes—par sa signification et par la réaction qu'il provoque dans la presse française, réaction rarement égalée dans l'histoire de la littérature. Cette publicité qui joue un rôle considérable dans le succès commercial de l'ouvrage, qui va avoir de l'influence sur l'attitude des critiques et donnera des armes supplémentaires à ses adversaires, fut utilisée au maximum par Victor Hugo, passé maître en son usage.

Although “The City of Dreadful Night” has long been recognized as James Thomson's masterpiece, a good many critics have insisted that it is an uneven piece of work, inconsistent as an allegory, confused as to intellectual intent. I believe that the solution to many of the problems in this minor classic can be found if the poem is read and studied in its original order of composition, an approach made possible through the Morgan manuscript, a final copy of the poem in which Thomson meticulously recorded the date on which each stanza had been written. It has long been known that Thomson wrote the poem in two stages, part in 1870 and part in 1873, but the exact order of composition has never been established, and even Salt's careful biography only records Thomson's statement that “about half of it, not the first half as it now stands, was written in 1870.” The Morgan manuscript, however, makes it possible to chart the step-by-step progress of the poem's composition (see Table on page 616) and, for the first time, to read the poem in the order in which Thomson wrote it. I believe that if it is read in chronological sequence, a good deal of the confusion surrounding the poem can be understood through the realization that “The City of Dreadful Night” as we know it today actually combines two separate poems. Moreover, as I shall attempt to show by treating them separately, the 1870 “City” and the 1873 “City” are unquestionably two very different poems in concept and intention.

It is well known that as a young man William Dean Howells was an unabashedly romantic poet with a special fondness for the German romantics, notably Heine. It is even better known that at a later period Howells was the great champion of realistic fiction and one of its leading practitioners. These facts have led to an extensive discussion of what influences brought about the change, of when he became a realist in theory and in practice, and even of whether he ever became a complete realist. Some new light is thrown on these questions by the manuscripts of two of his early pieces of fiction, the unpublished “Geoffrey Winter” and Their Wedding Journey (1872).

The simultaneous flowering of decadent verse and ephemeral little magazines upon the English literary scene of the 1890's is remarked as of central interest in the literary histories of the period. The two phenomena were closely related, for the poets of the English decadent “movement” and the editors of the new periodicals were for the most part members of the same extensive London coterie. The members of the Rhymers' Club were closely identified with the clusters of writers gathered around the Yellow Book, the Dome, and the Savoy; and with few exceptions the production of the group as a whole has come to be regarded as exhibiting certain morbidly exotic traits which gave the predominantly “decadent” flavor to the period. Of the many little magazines which served as admirable show-cases for this decadent poetry, none is more often cited as embodying the spirit of the age than the Savoy. Edited by Arthur Symons, illustrated largely by Aubrey Beardsley, and repeatedly presenting the work of Ernest Dowson, the periodical seemed, during its single year of existence—1896—to speak for all the arch-decadents except the already disgraced Wilde. Bernard Muddiman's description of the Savoy as “the fine flower of the publications of the age” sums up the achievement of its eight numbers; his references to it as providing the pages upon which “the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home” sums up its reputation. Yet the reader who turns to the Savoy expecting to find a luscious garden of exotic and forbidden poetry will be largely disappointed, for its verse has less of extravagance and perversity than is ordinarily implied by the description of literature as “decadent.” There is a real danger of misinterpreting the poetry of the decade whenever it is approached along the beaten paths of ruling preconceptions about the “decadent spirit” of the 1890's. The examination of the representative sample of verse provided by the Savoy illustrates the desirability of revaluating that spirit.

Les termes de “Suisse romand,” de “Suisse français,” de “Français de Suisse,” de “Français isolé en Suisse,” de “Romand” tout court reviennent fréquemment dans la correspondance de Ramuz. Mais, disons-le d'emblée, celui-ci est le contraire d'un romancier régional-iste. Ecrivain d'expression française, c'est en plongeant profondément ses racines en terre vaudoise surtout, mais aussi valaisanne et savoyarde, qu'il atteint à l'universel. Au lendemain de la première guerre mondiale, il écrit à Elie Faure: “Nous, les Romands, représentons malgré tout la France en dehors de ses frontières politiques.” Oui, “malgré tout,” en dépit de ce que peuvent penser certains critiques de France, Ramuz appartient aussi au patrimoine spirituel du grand pays voisin. Qui contesterait que ses illustres prédécesseurs qui s'appellent J.-J. Rousseau, Mme de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Frédéric Amiel, tous de souche romande, ne représentent la littérature française au même titre que Mme de Sévigné, Voltaire et Charles Péguy? Du reste, les auteurs de manuels français les ont depuis longtemps annexés au domaine littéraire de la France.

Herbert read's prose fantasy, The Green Child, is one of those strange works defiant of classification. Though judged favorably by the few critics and scholars who give it serious study, it is so vaguely and variously interpreted that it would seem to lack both the form and the content which justify such praise. The problem of interpretation and analysis is complicated by the structure of the work. Its division into three arbitrarily related sections allows critics to pick their favorite section, claim for it central importance and base their analyses on that part. An understanding and appreciation of the work is further complicated because Read has been for thirty-five years a leading spokesman for romanticism, anarchism, and humanism—doctrines which seem to counter those expressed in The Green Child. The style of the book, for example, is commonly regarded as classical. The political philosophy reflects a conservative anti-utopian attitude, and humanist ideals are set aside by natural processes ultimately destructive of man's conscious efforts. An understanding of Read's philosophy in the historical situation in which it arose, a knowledge of his theory of fantasy, comprehension of his irony, and an awareness of the structure of the work help to explain the curious nature of The Green Child.

In most criticism of Faulkner it has been taken for granted that his Yoknapatawpha County is really Lafayette (accented on fay) County, Mississippi, and that his Jefferson, the county seat, is really Oxford. Little evidence on the matter has been given beyond a few very general resemblances, and little has been demanded. Recently, however, the assumption has been questioned, with a considerable marshaling of arguments and statistics. It seems proper, therefore, to go into the question in some detail, particularly since a good deal of the evidence is already beyond the reach of the literary researcher and much of the rest will probably disappear within the next few years. Local changes have already been sufficient to lead to some literary misinterpretations.

La chute is a disturbing and ironic picture of modern man caught in a hell of his own making. Since the involved irony and ambiguity make it Camus's most difficult work, the book was initially misunderstood by a number of critics. To appreciate fully the meaning of the novel it is necessary to understand Camus's use of literary parallels and of allusions to his own experience and to the history of his time. Some of the basic literary and historical allusions have been noted in recent criticism. The following study will examine in detail these allusions and will attempt to clarify the meaning of La Chute by elucidating particularly the relationship between the echoes of Dante and the echoes of L'Homme révolté and the controversy following its publication.