There are many well-established cases of the influence of an earlier on a later poet—of Marlowe on Shakspere, of Spenser on Keats, of Keats on Tennyson, for instance; but it is not often that we have so clear an example of interaction between contemporaries as that of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. In these days of minute scholarship, it seems strange that so remarkable an instance should (so far as I am aware) have escaped detailed examination, in spite of the unwearying activity of graduate schools and Browning Societies. Both for its human and for its literary interest, the case seems worth presenting, at any rate in broad outline.

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.

A great deal of attention has been given to the surge of critical interest in metaphysical poetry that followed the publication of Herbert Grierson's edition of John Donne's poems in 1912. Theodore Spencer and Mark Van Doren, for instance, have examined the revival of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets from 1912 to 1938. The achievement of these and of other recent critics has tended to obscure the earlier phase of the metaphysical revival. It has been assumed frequently that the revival began with Grierson's edition and that current theories about the sensibility reflected in metaphysical poetry were first presented in some essays by T. S. Eliot that appeared in the early 1920's. In reality, however, Grierson's edition and the reviews that acclaimed it marked the end of the first stage of the metaphysical revival. His edition was no doubt in part the cause of the enthusiasm about Donne that reached a scholarly climax in 1931 with the observance of the tercentenary of the poet's death. It was also the result of the increased interest in Donne's poetry and personality that began during the later decades of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Eliot's essays were not so much a new note as a sensitive formulation of ideas that had become familiar by 1912.

I am personally grateful to Archibald A. Hill's experimental analysis of “The Windhover” in the December 1955 PMLA (LXX, 968–978) for the incidental enrichment of the poem offered by a fact I had not previously recognized–the fact that “dawn-drawn” may be read ‘sketched by the dawn’ as well as ‘attracted by the dawn.’ I must therefore confess myself disappointed by his flat denial of the enrichment he has offered. Mr. Hill says: “I see no way to tell whether the best substitute for ‘drawn’ is ‘attracted’ or ‘sketched.‘ The individual reader can make his own arbitrary choice, but I believe that he must choose, and can not keep both meanings. There are instances in this poem where multiple meanings must be recognized, but these occur only when there is positive evidence for more than one interpretation. Multiple meaning is not acceptable when there is merely a choice between two meanings which are both formally and structurally satisfactory” (p. 971).

One of the most puzzling of literary problems is the fact that John Milton, though unquestionably one of the world's great poets, spent the prime of his life in writing chiefly prose. By 1640 he had written some poems which the world has not willingly let die. But with the exception of a few sonnets (many of which are occasional poetry or mere society verse) he wrote hardly any poetry from 1640 to 1658—that is, roughly, between the ages of thirty and fifty. A careful reading of his History of Britain, however, sheds some light on this situation and reveals an important trait of Milton's which is seldom fully recognized. Coming to the History of Britain with no preconceived notion of Milton's character or purpose, one is increasingly impressed with the idea that for Milton the writing of poetry was unusually difficult, and that his mind tended more naturally to prose criticism. (I hope soon to publish a study of Milton's satire which will support this view.) To say that Milton was no poet or that poetry can be defined only as the product of un trammeled fancy is ridiculous; it is a bent, a matter of degree rather than of kind. But there is some justification for thinking of Milton as a reluctant poet.

In dem kleinen Aufsatz “Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit des Kunstwerks” vom Jahr 1798 führt Goethe den Nachweis, daß “das Kunstwahre und das Naturwahre völlig verschieden” sind, und daß die Verschiedenheit so weit geht, daß der Künstler keineswegs danach streben dürfe, daß sein Werk sich wie ein “Naturwerk” darstelle und einem solchen zum Verwechseln ähnlich sei. Die Beweisführung geht von der Oper aus, dem Kunstwerk, das nach seinem Wesen von Naturwahrheit denkbar weit entfernt sei, dessen Kunstwahrheit, aber, wenn man die Wirkung als Maßstab nimmt, sich nicht bestreiten lasse. Was aber für die Oper gelte, treffe mutatis mutandis auf alle Künste zu, sie erstrebten keine Wahrheit, keine äußere Gleichheit mit der Wirklichkeit, sondern nur eine auf ihren eignen inneren Gesetzen beruhende Wahrscheinlichkeit. So treffend die Ausführungen sind, so sind sie doch nicht erschöpfend, und man muß in der eingeschlagenen Richtung einen Schritt über Goethe hinaustun. Das Kunstwerk ist nicht nur keine bloße Nachahmung der Natur, sondern wenn es das wäre, wenn es nur einen in der Wirklichkeit vorhandenen Vorgang oder Gegenstand kopierte, so würde es damit aufhören, ein Kunstwerk zu sein. Die Photographie oder die Wachsfigur im Raritätenkabinet sollen der Wirklichkeit so ähnlich als möglich sein, sie werden mit der ausdrücklichen Absicht geschaffen, den Beschauer über ihre Nichtwirklichkeit zu täuschen. Diese Absicht lässt sich jedoch nur bis zu einem gewissen Grad durchführen, die Täuschung wird niemals vollkommen sein, und daraus ergibt sich, daß die Nachbildung mit Notwendigkeit hinter dem Vorbild zurückbleibt und im Vergleich mit ihm als etwas Unvollkommenes erscheint. Bei ihrer Betrachtung drängt sich der Vergleich mit dem Original, mit der Wirklichkeit, auf, und da dieser zu ihren Ungunsten ausfallen muß, so erweckt die Nachahmung in dem Beschauer eine Empfindung der Unzulänglichkeit, also grade das Gegenteil von dem reinen Lustgefühl, das das Kunstwerk hervorrufen soll.

The first Italian grammar published in England, in 1550, written by William Thomas, clerk of the Council to King Edward VI. and one of the first Protestant victims of the succeeding reign, contains “a Dictionarie for the better understanding of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante.” The title indicates that the great Italian poets of the trecento were first studied by English readers, and Boccaccio and Petrarch are here named before Dante. Indeed, after a most careful search, I cannot find any Elizabethan translation of any work of Dante. The first English translation of Dante in the British Museum Catalogue is that of Henry Boyd, L'Inferno, in 1785, La Divina Commedia, in 1802.

The possibility of bettering the present curriculum in English literature will depend in great measure upon the proportion of time allowed to it. So long as the classics and mathematics retain for themselves the lion's share of time and interest, the hopes of our professors of literature will never become unduly exalted. If I may express myself with thorough frankness, the customary quota of English literature, say less than two hours per week for less than two years, is so insufficient that I cannot look upon it as capable of improvement. The study will remain perforce hurried and superficial. Now the course that I have in mind is one of two full hours (better three) throughout three entire years. It is the course which has been required since 1880 for the B. L. degree in the University of Cincinnati, viz., three years, three hours a week. The classical students are now (beginning with 1884) compelled to take two of the three years, and the Scientifics one year. Perhaps this last requirement will be hereafter raised to two years.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (VIII, ix-xii) occurs the oldest and almost the only known legend about the most famous megalithic monument in Britain. The story accounts for Stonehenge as the funeral monument erected for hundreds of noble Britons slain by the treacherous Hengist and his Saxons, and it was for centuries accepted as the historical explanation of that great structure. Chroniclers repeated the tale and successive generations believed, to borrow Spenser's wording, that they could

“Th'eternall marks of treason . . . at Stonheng vew.” (F. Q., II, x, 66).

Kenneth W. Warren offers a salutary historicizing of the field of African American literary studies that reaffirms the historical and, hence, provisional nature of group identity. His book What Was African American Literature? views black literary studies through a skeptical lens that reveals the discipline's continuing investments in cultural “blackness” as nostalgic, transhistorical, and exceptionalist. In much the same way, scholars of United States history and literature have deconstructed—with little controversy—the transhistorical notion of America and exposed the Cold War origins of “American studies.” Yet responses to What Was African American Literature? have been at best lukewarm and at worst harshly critical. Why do the implications of Warren's argument seem so worrisome? Do they suggest we must choose between the field's historical and theoretical integrity and its institutional existence? Can the critical tradition of African American literature retain its institutional authority and its progressive political integrity without resorting to anachronistic concepts of black particularity, concepts through which “the limitations of the black condition get rewritten as a paradoxically fortunate turn” (19)?

After showing that nine percent of William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is plagiarized in ways that strongly resemble the ways in which William Wells Brown typically plagiarized, I argue that Brown wrote the narrative in tandem with Craft. Recognizing that possibility encourages us to pay closer attention to the formal aspects of Running, whose abrupt tonal shifts and frequent comic digressions make it one of the most peculiar of the major African American slave narratives. Just as Running prolongs, to an extraordinary degree, the intermediate condition of its fugitive protagonists, so does it hold open, by means of its highly theatrical interludes, the prospect of another future, another stage on which black and white Americans might encounter one another.

“I hope my attitude will not be regarded as irreverent,” Maurizio Ascari declares before launching into a critique of Franco Moretti's critical methods (3). By contrast, I undertake no critique of Moretti's methods, but my attitude toward his work is at least somewhat irreverent, if also appreciative. I titled an early draft of this essay “Distant Reading and the New Poetics of Enchantment; or, Toward a Literary History That Is Spiritual but Not Religious.” This title was self-consciously outrageous, since there is little that is overtly enchanted, let alone spiritual, about Moretti's criticism. Indeed, one of the recurring rhetorical fillips in his book Distant Reading involves the disparagement of close reading as a kind of theology: “At bottom,” close reading is “a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let's learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance … is a condition of knowledge” (48; see also 33, 67, 89, and 113). By invoking enchantment and spirituality to describe his work, then, I was looking to underscore, a little cheekily, how rigorous engagement with his “pact with the devil” reveals similar features to those Moretti partly discredits—namely, credulity, “superstition” (Johnson 84), and “mystery” (Goodwin xiii). In essence, my aim was to employ close reading—of distant reading—as a kind of return, if not revenge, of the repressed.

Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's novel Hānsulī Bānker upakathā ‘The Tale of Hansuli Turn’ (1946–51) straddles the period of independence and partition in India. Its literary staging of the creolized Bengali spoken by a marginal, un‐touchable, semiaboriginal group is both formally innovative and politically imaginative. Tārāshankar disperses the book's glossary throughout its text, and the workings of this glossary embody an unusual perspective on class and caste segregation in modern India. Te novel's historical narrative tells of the disin‐tegration of a rustic, semifeudal Kahar community under the crises of war and modernity in the 1940s. While this history says that proletarianization and loss of idiom are inevitable for such figures of the rural margins, Hānsulī Bānker elaborates a counterfactual possibility. Tis alternative history is not simply a romanticized novelistic preservation of a dying way of life but a minimal imag‐ining of a different line of connection between the realm of subalternity and the public sphere. In its reimagining, Hānsulī Bānker also rethinks and prefigures modern India's other internal partitions, internal diasporas, and emergent political dilemmas and the history of the Bengali novel itself.

Introduction: The Francophone Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Overlooked American Francophone Novel Le Vieux Salomon, Ou Une Famille D'Esclaves Au XIXE Siècle (OLD SOLOMON; OR, A Slave Family in the Nineteenth Century), by Charles Testut (1819-92), offers a contemporaneous description of slavery as a global commerce with international causes and effects. The novel's geographic scope, as well as Testut's interest in contrasting the life in the French Caribbean with slavery in the United States, makes Old Solomon an ideal text through which to examine the representation of economic and cultural circulation in the Americas. Old Solomon is a clear response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), with some similar characters and situations, but is more trangressive and violent.