At a meeting held on 26 April 1886, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Johns Hopkins University, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, spoke some words that have with slight variations been more recently applied to the study of modern languages, and indeed to other disciplines. Gildersleeve said in part:

Purely Literary rather than historical evidence should not be excluded if it helps to solve a problem, or even if it merely sharpens the sense of such a problem as the meaning of the dragon in Beowulf.

Some difficulty has probably been caused by thinking of the dragon as a symbol rather than as some other kind of image although, to be sure, a hard-and-fast distinction may not always be possible. To me the meaning of a symbol is more or less arbitrary, especially because the symbol represents something, or means something, usually quite unlike itself–as the eagle is physically unlike the United States. This meaning is imposed outside the work of art rather than within it. Such meaning has to be agreed upon, either by authors like Blake or Yeats in contracts with themselves which must sooner or later be registered with the people, or else by the folk in some other manner, as when they agree in a ‘religious’ community that, say, Ceres shall represent corn and harvesting. Once agreed upon, the meaning of the symbol must remain fixed, at least in the community; otherwise, communication will be confused. Of course, the determination of a symbol's meaning can only be by external evidence. Such meaning probably depends upon remote associations which are certainly not immediately available to the reader and which are, possibly, not always exactly available even to the writer, as in surrealism. These associations can often be recovered, no doubt, and the reason for the meaning can then be understood. But at least until one examines the creative processes behind the evolution of the symbol, its meaning must seem artificial.

In two previous articles I have examined the origin and semantic evolution of the French word nuance and of the word matiz, used today in the Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula to express the concept “nuance,” ‘a barely perceptible degree of difference (in a color, various kinds of human expression, the forms of nature, etc.).’ The present article will treat the origin of the word sfumatura, which, since the latter half of the eighteenth century, has served as the Italian means for expressing the “nuance” concept.

The letters of Dr. Gui Patin (1601–72) are deservedly famous as a source for seventeenth-century medical matters and other contemporary comment. In a letter dated 23 November 1669 to Dr. André Falconet (1612–91) of Lyon, Patin writes that it is rumored Molière wants to do a comedy about a certain Dr. Cressé and his pending court trial. A month later, 25 December 1669, having given details of the affair in previous letters, Patin writes more specifically: “Le procès de M. Cressé est sur le bureau, mais je n'entends point dire qu'il avance; on m'a dit que M. de Molière prétend en faire une comédie ridicule sous le titre du Médecin fouetté et du barbier cocu” (iii, 728). As far as I know, the outcome of this affair has never yet been presented. The Commentaires de la faculté de médecine for 1669–70 (Vol. xv) which gave more exact data led me to discover in the Archives Nationales the hitherto unmentioned final court settlement, dated 4 February 1670.

Every reader of Dryden's critical essays must recall his concern with the sound as well as the sense of poetry. In the “Original and Progress of Satire,” for example, he says that “versification and meter are the greatest pleasures of poetry. … When there is anything deficient in numbers, and sound, the reader is uneasy, and dissatisfied; he wants something of his complement; desires somewhat which he finds not.” We can be sure, therefore, that Dryden more than some other poets paid close attention to the fabric of his verse. But it is another question whether the regularity or “correctness” which he aimed at, and which he achieved for his translation of Virgil, is generally admired today. If it is admired, it is admired only as one admires an antique. The taste of most modern poets is not for regularity but for liberty bordering on license. In this respect they are like the late Elizabethans and Jacobeans who wrote—to use the phrase which Dryden took from the French —prose mesurée.

Until the publication of The Letters of Jonathan Swift to Charles Ford, literary scholars thought that Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels between 1715 and 1720, a period when he published almost nothing. His starting point was, they believed, sketches made up by the Scriblerus group—Pope, Swift, and others—in 1713 and 1714, and finally produced by Pope in 1741. Then D. Nichol Smith, in his edition of the Ford letters, proved that Swift wrote Part i of Gulliver in about 1721–22, Part ii around 1722–23, Part iv in 1723, and Part iii (after Pt. iv) in 1724–25. Swift continued to revise it, probably until it was published in the autumn of 1726.

Presque tous lës érudits français de la Renaissance qui ont étudié les origines lointaines de leur pays sont venus buter sur ce problème ardu: d'où vient le mot France? que signifie le nom de Franci porté par une obscure tribu germanique avant de désigner le peuple français? La légende de Francus ne constitue pas le seul essai de réponse à ces difficiles questions. A côté des textes qui, avant Lemaire de Belges, développent le thème des origines troyennes de la France, il en est bien d'autres qui proposent du terme Franci des explications différentes: francus est un adjectif synonyme de féroce, ou une épithète signifiant ‘franc’ ou ‘libre.’ En outre, un nouveau cycle de légendes étymologiques fondé sur le mot Galli fait son apparition à la fin du quinzième siècle, lorsque des humanistes épris de bonne latinité affectent d'appeler “Gaulois” les habitants de la France. Le but de cette étude est de montrer l'incidence de ces problèmes étymologiques, non seulement sur l'œuvre de poètes comme Lemaire de Belges et Ronsard, mais aussi sur les écrits de plusieurs historiens, philosophes et théoriciens politiques entre les Illustrations de Gaule (1510) et la Franciade (1572).

L'espion du Grand-Seigneur or Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, perhaps best known as the work which inspired Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, is usually considered the beginning of the “foreign spy” convention in English literature. Modern readers of the six French (or eight English) duodecimo volumes may be puzzled to discover its appeal. When the collection of letters first appeared, however, it was immediately termed “un tour d'esprit … & une fiction ingénieuse”; the eighteenth-century reading public welcomed it as written with “beaucoup d'agrément, & d'une variété fort amusante,” and “as instructive and delightful, as the Manner of finding it was strange and surprizing.”

In his admirable lectures, The Problem of Style, J. Middleton Murry illustrates one of the most common meanings of the word “style” by this remark: “I know who wrote the article in last week's Saturday Review—Mr. Saintsbury. You couldn't mistake his style.” Here, according to Mr. Murry, “‘style’ means that personal idiosyncrasy of expression by which we recognize a writer.” This is a limited conception of style, but it is useful in studying the style of certain writers. Murry mentions Dr. Johnson, Gibbon, Meredith, and Henry James as appropriate subjects for this approach. We may add, with the authority of precedent, Thomas Carlyle.

This essay is an attempt to present some of the most important aspects of the aesthetic underlying George Eliot's novels and to give some account of her little known critical writings. She was perhaps unique among the major novelists up to her time in formulating a coherent set of ideas about life and art before she started to write her first novel. She was known as an important figure in the intellectual life of London during the fifties, as the translator of David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, and as the subeditor of the Westminster Review, the most important organ of liberal thought in England at that time. She was also a prolific writer of articles for magazines and a reviewer of belles-lettres for the Westminster for three years, 1855–57. In these essays and reviews, all published before her first novel, almost all her important ideas about art are stated explicitly, and although many of these ideas are later developed and amplified in her novels and letters, they remain essentially the same. Her later statements of the same theme are often fuller and richer than those found in her periodical writing, but they are rarely inconsistent with each other. Her essays and reviews, together with Gordon Haight's edition of the letters and statements in the novels themselves, furnish an invaluable source from which her creed as a novelist may be derived.

In a letter written four hours before his death on 8 February 1882, Berthold Auerbach asked Friedrich Spielhagen to prepare an edition of his complete works. Among the five items he wished excluded from this edition was a “Bearbeitung einer Abhandlung von Channing über Selbstbildung.” Auerbach's reasons for omitting the essay Der gebildete Bürger (1843) were probably several. Not least was the doubt in his own mind as to any originality he might legitimately claim, which in fact is even less than his biographer Bettelheim implies in his one allusion to the inspiration of William Ellery Channing and the “partial” use of an address by this “greatest American preacher” (p. 143). Although virtually disowned by its author and ignored by critics, this essay of Auerbach's, intended for the improvement of popular education, marks an early instance of the reception of Channing in Germany and represents a brief chapter in the influence of American thought in Germany. It indicates one aspect of the meaning of America in the nineteenth-century European liberal movement with its social, economic, and theological upheavals reflected in many writers from 1830 on. The Channing episode in Auerbach's career reveals a great deal about the absorption of American ideas by a German liberal who elsewhere in his writings made allusions to the land of freedom and opportunity and sent fictional characters on trips to America.

At least since Matthew Arnold exploited the term Zeitgeist in Literature and Dogma, the expression has been variously a source of irritation and confusion to a number of his critics. Identifying it with a tendency to disparage the past, an exasperated contemporary reviewer of that work in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine cried, “Can anything be more unscientific than such a spirit? It is the very apotheosis of self-opinion intoxicated by its own pride, and flaunting its own dogmatisms with a crude audacity in the face of preceding dogmas.” Among other critics of Arnold, R. H. Hutton protested that the Zeitgeist was a will-o'-the-wisp “who misleads us at least as much as he enlightens”; W. H. Dawson concluded that for Arnold it was “a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy”; for W. H. Paul it became a bore; Hugh Kingsmill began his caricature of Don Matthew, “So forth he sallied, mounted on Zeit-Geist, a hobby horse.” Still others, less annoyed than these by the reiteration, have themselves borrowed it as they write of him—sometimes effectively, because with consistency of meaning, as H. F. Lowry in his edition of Arnold's letters to Clough; sometimes bewilderingly, as when one reads such a statement as this: “Expediency, which had become in Burke's hands an anti-revolutionary doctrine, was equated by Arnold with the Zeitgeist, a force which, in his conception of it, was quite as revolutionary as that of natural right.”

“Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was published in the New York Saturday Press on 18 November 1865. On that same day the New York Weekly Review announced (xvi, 5): “… a contribution from the sprightly pen of Mark Twain, one of the cleverest of the San Francisco writers, will appear … next Saturday.” Accordingly, on Saturday, 25 November, the Weekly Review printed “The Great Earthquake in San Francisco” over the signature of Mark Twain.

The years 1856–1950 represent the life span of George Bernard Shaw, one of the most pungent, witty, and versatile geniuses to be absorbed into the mind of the thinking world. The years 1888–94 represent the six years which he devoted to the concentrated effort of writing music criticism, first for the Star (1888–89) and then for the World (1890–94). Yet, despite their value as important contributions to critical literature, and notwithstanding their worth as patently clear statements and applications of Shaw's theories of art and criticism, these works have received little more than routine treatment from even the best of Shavian scholars.

The Jesuits never forgave Joyce for refusing to enter their Society, and he never forgave them for inviting him. The influence of this quarrel on his career is well known, and the effects of his Jesuit training on his work are often remarked in a general way. It remains, however, to specify the effects; for only when they are specified can we see clearly just what he rebelled against and why his rebellion took the forms it did. Joyce's books are in fact full of echoes from those of Saint Ignatius Loyola; we might begin by identifying some of them and assessing their significance.

A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. This is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.—Robert Frost, Foreword to A Way Out (1917)

En el sistema de símbolos en la obra de Federico García Lorca, aparece el de la luna como el de mayor significación por su variedad de manifestaciones, su vinculación a algunos otros de sus símbolos centrales, la función estructural que desempeña en un gran número de sus poemas y en algunos de sus dramas, y la conformación arquetípica y semántica que presta al ámbito de su mundo poético. Su incorporación desde un principio en la obra del poeta y su evolución a través de ella, nos indica, además, el área extensa y soterraña de su mundo afectivo, al mismo tiempo que nos sitúa frente a una visión específica del universo y del destino del hombre en este mundo. Trataremos en el presente estudio de fijar su particular configuración en esta poesía y de examinar su delimitación dentro de la tradición literaria y determinadas áreas culturales que han podido contribuir a su constitución característica.