In the century now passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, scores of critical studies have attempted to account for the fascination the book holds for adult readers. Although some of these investigations offer provocative insights, most of them treat Carroll in specialized modes inaccessible to the majority of readers, and they fail to view Alice as a complete and organic work of art. Hardly a single important critique has been written of Alice as a self-contained fiction, distinct from Through the Looking-Glass and all other imaginative pieces by Carroll. Critics also tend to confuse Charles Dodgson the man with Lewis Carroll the author; this leads to distorted readings of Alice that depend too heavily on the fact, say, that Dodgson was an Oxford don, or a mathematician, or a highly eccentric Victorian gentleman with curious pathological tendencies. The results are often analyses which fail to explain the total work's undeniable impact on the modern lay reader unschooled in Victorian political and social history, theoretical mathematics, symbolic logic, or Freudian psychology. It seems time, then, that Alice be treated for what it most certainly is—a book of major and permanent importance in the tradition of English fiction, a work that still pertains directly to the experience of the unspecialized reader, and one that exemplifies the profound questioning of reality which characterizes the mainstream of nineteenth-century English literature.

The publication, in September 1522, of the first edition of Luther's New Testament was an event of European significance. This impressive-looking folio volume was not only the most important work of German literature in the sixteenth century, but also the first and most influential translation, from the Greek, of the New Testament in any of the Germanic countries: the sixteenth-century Dutch, English, Scandinavian, and Swiss versions are all more or less heavily indebted to it. Luther's Septembertestament is the editio princeps of the vernacular Bibles of the Protestant world. In Germany its influence was not restricted to Protestants but included Roman Catholics who read the Bible in the vernacular. Emser's edition of the New Testament of 1527, which was largely a “revision” of Luther's text, was used in Catholic Germany well into the eighteenth century. Other Catholic “translations,” such as those bearing the names of Dietenberger and Eck, also retained Luther's version to a surprising extent. Thus practically all of Germany, both Protestant and Catholic, and all of Protestant Europe were, in varying degree to be sure, under the spell of Luther's epoch-making translation.

Perhaps the most fruitful and exciting development in Old English studies in recent years has followed from F. P. Magoun's discovery that the Parry-Lord theory of oral verse-making can be applied to Old English poetry. This theory has caught the imagination of critics and has produced a “kind of revolution in scholarly opinion” not simply because it shows us that the style of this poetry is traditional—that has been known for many years—but because it offers a new and useful way of approaching the problems raised by this style, because it provides a new way of considering some of the relations between these poems, and because it casts light on an area that we thought was forever darkened, the pre-literary history of Germanic and Old English verse.

The discussion which follows of two dark passages in Beowulf rests fundamentally on habits of composition which are idiomatic to and generally pervasive in Old English poetry. Among these habits variation, and what I have previously called ‘generation,‘ are commonplace. And because they are commonplace and because Old English poetic language is by nature and tradition extremely conventional, it would seem a reasonable assumption that familiarity with these habits may guide us to predictions or probabilities of what a poet intended in a scribally confused passage. Such an assumption is based on the fact that Old English poets tend to repeat words, prefixes and suffixes, head-words and base-words in compounds, word clusters or phrases, and that in some poems, such as Beowulf, there is a marked tendency to repeat these lexical elements closely together in bound contexts, such as speeches, set descriptions of person or place, and episodes. The debut of Wealhtheow in lines 612b–641 is an excellent instance of multiple repetition throughout with an accumulation of repeated elements at the end.

Romance is one of the most abused generic terms of medieval literature. For a good many scholars it serves as a commodious bottom drawer which will hold almost anything that could not be stored elsewhere. Having been enlarged to mean nothing less than “imaginative fiction,” the term romance communicates very little, especially when it is applied to such a conglomerate body of works as “The Middle English Romances.” Apparently indifferent to the possibilities of greater clarity and meaning through a more circumspect application of the word, scholars have wasted little time on morphological problems in the Middle English romances, and yet they would not discountenance discussions of whether The Scarlet Letter is a novel or a romance. There, indeed, labelling the work with one or the other term becomes a matter of making a statement about the area of meaning of the work and about the techniques with which this meaning is conveyed. In medieval studies, the latitude in application of the term romance and its consequent diminishing usefulness for descriptive purposes might have been felt more keenly if it were not for the assumption that the tracing of the sources of a given work has contributed the most significant part to its understanding. However, the variety of forms that the same story material can demonstrably assume, e.g., the Arthurian tradition, should make us more sensitive to the opinion of some scholars that generic patterns have a more important influence than story material upon the shape of a literary product. Moreover, the concept of genre acts as a kind of perspective which one assumes towards the work one is examining, and depending upon its appropriateness, it can make the structure more or less meaningful. The few writers who have ventured to deal with the whole body of the so-called romances and to make judgments on their respective merits have ignored the possibility that, without finer and more specific terminological distinctions, they may be mistaken about some of the ugly ducklings. Such has been the lot of the Middle English version of the story of Amis and Amiloun, because the perspectives of romance and saint's legend are not identical.

The book of the Courtier, by the overwhelming weight of its reputation and influence, comes to us as a handbook of the courtly virtues, or, more historically considered, as a treatise on the education of a Renaissance courtier. It is reasonable that it should. Castiglione himself announced his intention of teaching “what manner of man he must be who deserves the name of perfect Courtier, without defect of any kind” (i, 1); and his division of his work into four books which treat successively and compendiously the personal qualities, the conduct, the female counterpart, and the utility and aspirations of the courtier emphasizes its appearance of being a handbook. One can hardly refute, therefore, those writers who use The Courtier as an encyclopaedia of courteous manners, or even those who find in it a manual of Renaissance philosophy. Few works of the Renaissance have a more genuine documentary value.

Recent Studies on d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques have tended to bear out Henri Trénel's assertion in 1904 that the poet is “le plus biblique des écrivains français.” Since Trénel's catalogue of Scriptural references and Hebraisms in the poem (by which he sought to prove his point), d'Aubigné critics have given more thought to the significance of this accumulation of Biblical imagery, focusing particularly on d'Aubigné's continuing correlation of characters and events in Old Testament, early Christian, and contemporary sixteenth-century history. Henri Weber, whose view represents the most generally accepted interpretation, explains that this correlation provides the temporal dimension required by the epic poem. Moreover, by showing contemporary events to be a repetition of Biblical history, it raises those events to a symbolic level consistent with d'Aubigné's notion that the fortunes of the Protestants represent the working out of God's providential design for His modern-day chosen people. Henry Sauerwein suggests that the Biblical imagery represents d'Aubigné's attempt to approximate the style of the Bible in order to achieve a form suited to Les Tragiques as God's revelation of the destiny of the Protestant people to the divinely inspired poet.

C'est en 1664 que les amateurs de théâtre pénétrèrent pour la première fois dans le monde de Jean Racine. Ils avaient vu l'année précédente la Sophonisbe de Corneille, et devaient, cette même année, applaudir (ou bouder) son Othon. Le succès de la pièce du nouveau dramaturge fut honorable; on joua douze fois, du 20 juin au 18 juillet, sa Thébaïde. Le public avait paru apprécier ce que Corneille appelait, non sans hauteur, “une docte et sublime complaisance au goût des délicats, qui veulent de l'amour partout. Les critiques, dès cette confrontation, sentirent qu'une crise se préparait: public et lettrés allaient avoir à prendre parti dans une lutte entre deux conceptions opposées du conflit tragique. Les adversaires ne tardent pas, en effet, à faire appel à leurs admirateurs. La déclaration de Corneille, c'est Sophonisbe qui s'en est chargée, dans une de ses premières répliques:

Ever since 1869, when William Lee inserted them in his bibliography of Defoe, in Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings (i, xxxii), two imaginary voyages to the moon and a letter from the Man in the Moon have been incorporated in the canon of Defoe's writings as separate and distinct from his main lunar voyage, The Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705). These three are A Journey to the World in the Moon; A Second, and more Strange Voyage to the World in the Moon, both noted in the head title as “By the Author of the true Born English-man”; and A Letter from the Man in the Moon to the Author of the True Born English-man. All three were dated 1705, and all were printed first in London; then at least the first was reprinted at Edinburgh by James Watson in Craig's-closs. Each is a single sheet, a quarto of four pages, in double columns. In including these three publications as independent items in the Defoe canon, Lee has been followed by all the British and American bibliographers of Defoe: by Thomas Wright, William P. Trent, Henry C. Hutchins, and John Robert Moore.

Rather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.

It is impossible to move very far in either the poetry or the prose of Wordsworth without meeting an explicit reference to what is at once the most ubiquitous and most nebulous term in his vocabulary—the imagination. All too often, his references to this important faculty, which holds the key to his theory of poetry, are fragmentary and confused. Nevertheless, his statements on the imagination—and particularly those of his later years—seem to point substantially in one direction: that the primary effect of imaginative power is the evocation of meaning from the material world, the manifestation of a visible object as the emblem of invisible truth. As a practicing poet, Wordsworth best embodies this effect in the most consciously and deliberately “imaginative” of all his poems—The White Doe of Rylstone. But in order fully to appreciate his achievement in this regrettably neglected work, it is necessary first to consider the process of emblemization as Wordsworth himself conceived and described it.

Among the early reactions to Stifter's Nachsommer, one year after its publication, was Hebbel's derisive criticism of the detailed and exhaustive description of objects in the novel. Hebbel's criticism was unkind, but superficially pertinent, because description does indeed abound in Nachsommer. However, the mass of detail that he ridiculed is precisely a source of fascination for modern scholars, who seize upon the number of objects as the distinguishing characteristic of this novel and accord it high esteem because of the very significance of the “things” in it.

The term “objectivity,” as well as several other words which have been used as its synonyms—“restraint,” “disinterestedness,” “neutrality,” “dispassionateness,” “detachment,” “impersonality,” and “indifference”—has been applied by critics to Chekhov's fiction from his own day to the present, sometimes in disparagement, but usually in praise. In various remarks about his own works or writing in general which he let fall in his correspondence, Chekhov himself used one or another of these critical labels. As early as 10 May 1886, writing to his brother Alexander, he listed “thorough objectivity” (ob”ektyvnost' splošnaja) as one of several conditions of true art. But in spite of the ubiquity of the term in his own vocabulary and that of his interpreters, its value as a critical tool has been practically nullified by the extreme imprecision with which the latter have usually handled it.

The fourth volume in the series of studies that Emilia Pardo Bazán had entitled La literatura francesa moderna was to bear the caption of La decadencia. In the three previous volumes the Countess had followed the evolution of the French literary process of the nineteenth century from romanticism to naturalism, and in the last she planned to gather old notes and new ideas into an analysis of end-of-the-century trends. She never brought this project to fruition, but she did leave dispersed among her many other critical writings her ideas and interpretations touching on this phenomenon that she labeled variously “la decadencia” or “el decadentismo.”

When Ford Madox Ford says in his autobiographical reminiscences, Memories and Impressions, that in Bernard Shaw “the last faint trickle of Pre-Raphaelite influence is to be perceived,” he is talking specifically about Shaw's affinities with the utopian socialism of William Morris and Shaw's preference for the “grayness and roughness” in dress affected by Rossetti, Morris, and their disciples. But Ford's reference to Shaw as a Pre-Raphaelite has justification for more reasons than Ford suggests, not the least of which is Shaw's own claim to be a Pre-Raphaelite dramatist. In the Preface to Plays Pleasant (1898) Shaw says that Candida was the result of his 1894 trip to Florence, “where I occupied myself with the religious art of the Middle Ages and its destruction by the Renascence,” and of a previous trip to Birmingham, where he attended a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit and saw the church windows of Morris and Burne-Jones. The Preface continues, “On the whole, Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities; for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men. … When my subsequent visit to Italy found me practising the playwright's craft, the time was ripe for a modern pre-Raphaelite play. Religion was alive again, coming back upon men, even upon clergymen, with such power that not the Church of England itself could keep it out.” An examination of Shaw's concept of Pre-Raphaelitism not only illuminates the theme of Candida but also reveals Shaw's early formulation of the idea that the artist is, to use Shaw's terminology from the Preface to Back to Methuselah, an iconographer of a living religion.

Jorge GuilléN's Cántico has most often been evaluated as a book of “pure poetry,” as the foremost example of the aesthetic purity and the abstract orientation of the Spanish “Generation of the 1920's.” Such a view can easily be defended by appealing to key traits of the work, traits which have been amply pointed out: the careful construction of the book, its stress on the creation of a unique world, its use of essential words with technical precision; as well as the constant search for essential truths, and the avoidance of particulars important only for their own sake. As it has developed, this view of Cántico as “pure poetry” has led some critics to suggest that it represents an epoch of inhuman formalism from which Guillén is to break out later; José María Castellet has Guillén recanting his “purity” under the impact of historical circumstances, and changing to a more human poetry in his later book Clamor. And such a view of Guillén's verse as divided into two conflicting epochs is used by Castellet to support his evaluation of the “Generation of the 1920's” as a group of purists destined to “repent” and change their outlook.

Le style original de Jean-Paul Sartre a souvent attiré l'attention des critiques. L'un d'eux, Frédéric Jameson, y a consacré une étude fort intéressante. D'autres se sont plutôt attachés à certains aspects de son imagerie. Or, selon l'idéologie sartrienne, chacune de nos conduites, chacun de nos projets ne peut s'expliquer que par le projet originel dont il émane et qui le fait exister; de même, c'est à travers les imagesclés colorant l'œuvre de Jean-Paul Sartre qu'on pourra tenter de dégager le sens fondamental qui les nourrit et se manifeste tout entier dans chacune d'elles.