The focus of this paper is on The American Scene, which is found to display a deep sensitivity to the spatiality of desire and to be motivated by a complex dynamic of erotic mastery and surrender: subjects assert their self-possession in the very act of submitting to the erotic power of another force—a force that may be human, non-human, or indeterminate. The desire for literal, physical mastery over the other is here rechanneled into an identification with the scene of desire that can dispense with the erotic object. This complex psychosexual mechanism, which I call oblique possession, thrives on a disruption of the dichotomies of sexuality and identity that queer theory has questioned. In tracing the circuits of oblique possession, the paper articulates a queer perspective on Henry James's work outside any necessary relationship between two individuals.

Basta Callar es una de las comedias de Calderón que no ha sido objeto de estudio especial a pesar de la existencia de un manuscrito que se cree autógrafo en su mayor parte. La comedia no se imprimió autorizadamente durante la vida del poeta y la edición mas antigua que de ella conocemos es la de Vera Tassis de 1682. El objeto de este estudio es dar a conocer unos quinientos noventa versos que se hallan en el manuscrito considerado autógrafo, pero que faltan tanto en la edición príncipe como en las de Apontes, Keil, y Hartzen busch.

Shifting our critical perspective on Sweeney to encounter it temporally rather than spatially (New Critically), we discover an existential content embodied in an Anti-Aristotelian form remarkably similar to the drama of the absurd. Its thematic pattern is that which finds its paradigm in the myth of the Furies and its most articulate phenomenological description in Heidegger: the paradoxical flight from death and, ultimately, Nothingness (the Erinyes) that ends in the saving recognition that death is a benign agent (the Eumenides). The flight, characterized in existential philosophy as the self-deceptive “domestication” of death, is epitomized in the wastelanders effort to transform Sweeney's tale of murder into a well-made detective story. But this impulse is thwarted by Sweeney's refusal to draw a distancing conclusion. This becomes Eliot's formal strategy. Like the Anti-Aristotelian absurdists, he “decomposes” the “time-shape” of his microcosm to prevent the audience from objectifying the dreadful contingency of the world of his play. Eliot's Anti-Aristotelianism, however, is ultimately different from that of the “humanistic” absurdists. Whereas the latter project an absolutely discontinuous “time-shape” grounded in a vision of a radically discontinuous universe, Eliot, who sees the macrocosm as a Nothingness that may be the obverse of Somethingness, projects a discontinuous (circular) “time-shape” that contains the possibility of linear direction.

Wordsworth's answer to Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode” is fuller than has been recognized. In “Resolution and Independence,” Wordsworth indirectly suggests to his friend that he turn to God for the comfort he formerly found in natural objects and that he discover through God the extraordinary strength within himself to master sorrow. He reminds Coleridge, who laments the loss of Joy, of the visionary power of pain and of the spiritual insight and trust that may come from suffering itself. In addition, he asks Coleridge to remember that while storm may follow calm, sunshine may also follow storm. In “Stanzas Written in My Pocket-Copy of Thomson's ‘Castle of Indolence,’” written immediately after “Resolution and Independence,” comic innuendo and affectionate solicitude replace sober teaching as means of arguing against Coleridge's dejection. Alluding to Thomson's satiric portrait of a poet's melancholy companion, Wordsworth suggests to Coleridge that he is unlike this morose and speechless figure who thanks heaven the day is done. Wordsworth reminds Coleridge of his unusual capacity for delight in common things and of their mutual good fortune in being able to devote themselves to friendship and to art: like Thomson's pilgrims they have been dwelling in the “happy Castle.”

The Lebanese writer Etel Adnan's novel Sitt Marie Rose tells the story of the title character's execution during the Lebanese civil war and thus questions the gendered body's status within the historical narrative of nationalist thought in the postcolonial world. Through this focus on gender issues, the novel examines what Adnan calls “tribal mentality” without reproducing Western orientalizing assumptions about the Arab world and its “underdevelopment.” The novel's self-consciousness about the problems of postcolonial narration offers a new perspective on Gayatri Spivak's question, “Can the subaltern speak?” In doing so, the novel also reflects my own status as a Western reader.

Milton's one venture into the genre of tragedy, Samson Agonistes, has prompted a notoriously divided reception among modern critics, not least because it revives the topos of exemplary violence, which the poet had conspicuously rejected in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. I propose we consider the underlying Samson plot not simply as the triumph or tragedy of a chosen nation and its representative hero but as the tragic collision between a universalizing faith and a nation's claims to exceptionality. Even after the devastating collapse of England's republican experiment, Milton never wavered in his commitment to the communal as well as the private manifestations of faith. The nation, or a nation equivalent, was an indispensable vehicle for continuing Reform, but the conceptual parameters of that nation, its relation to geographic place, and its rights in relation to other nations and to faiths other than its own posed a foundational dilemma for Milton's dramatic poem.

Mi Pesadilla,“ alleged to be ”the last tale by Edgar Poe,“ appeared in El Mundo Ilustrado of Mexico City in its issue of March 9, 1902. The translator does not reveal his identity nor does he offer any further information concerning the source of the original. The title is not suggestive of any tale in the Poe canon, and a reading of the story must convince one that it could not be an extravagantly free version or adaptation of any of Poe's known tales. The supposition that ”My Nightmare“ might be another positive contribution to the Poe canon—a tale inedited and lost until its miraculous reappearance in a Mexican review a half-century after Poe's death,—must be discarded as highly improbable.

“Reading the city” is so commonplace a metaphor that we tend not to see or hear it as such: It is an indifferent building in the lexicographical landscape, something we see and pass by every day without giving it a second look. Geographers, sociologists, and architects, as well as literary critics, all speak of—and write about, and design courses on—the “legibility” of the city, usually taking the phrase for granted, taking “reading” as read. But why should it seem so obvious to speak of reading in relation to urban experience? (Or, putting this from another direction, why does “reading the village” sound like a contradiction in terms?) And what kind of reading is being evoked when we go about “reading” the city?

T.S. Eliot has appropriately cautioned us against disposing of Dr. Johnson's criticism with indecent haste.1 He may just as appropriately have told us that Dr. Johnson, while always pointing to significant issues, has occasionally said the wrong things about them; though in doing so, Johnson has unwittingly drawn our attention to poetical subtleties that he himself does not perceive. So it is with much that Johnson says of Lycidas, and particularly with what he says of the poem's rhyme scheme. He tells us rather tartly that the rhymes are “uncertain”;2 he does not tell us, however, that the rhymes tend toward certainty until regularity is triumphantly achieved in the penultimate verse paragraph.

The Celeslina's probable influence on the early stages of the English drama through the adaptation published in 1530, its direct though perhaps slight influence on the English realistic novel, and its much greater indirect influence through its stepchild, the picaresque novel, lend interest to the translation published in 1631 by James Mabbe, or “Maybe,” as he may have pronounced his name, since he uses the punning pseudonym Don Diego Puede-ser. Despite numerous errors, some as elementary as confusing subject and object or turning a grandson into a nephew, Mabbe's work is a brilliant achievement. It does not read like a translation; nor does it read like the Spanish Celestina. Apparently the translator set himself to erase the vertical line of the Middle Ages completely, to paganize the work, and to make it represent the Renaissance spirit as he felt it.

One of my favorite sayings——SITUated on the tenuous interface between humor and seriousness—is “Money isn't everything, but it's way ahead of whatever is in second place,” which is cynical and materialistic but impossible to completely reject. In our profession, one could plug in the word Spanish and derive the same results. At colleges and universities across the country, enrollments in Spanish language courses are growing out of proportion, while programs in other languages often struggle to attract students; some small language offerings have in fact become endangered species, and comparisons to the laws of natural selection permeate the discourse. To the many acronyms that pepper the jargon of our profession has been added LOTS—that is, languages other than Spanish—a disclaimer used whenever language programs and language enrollments are being discussed. This acronym is troubling, since it categorically removes Spanish from the discussion of language programs as being too big to handle or—even more sinister—as somehow constituting an obstacle to the teaching and appreciation of the remaining languages, that is, of the LOTS. Even more troubling are the constant references to the “Spanish problem,” heard among university administrators and language program directors, and the downright offensive comparisons between Spanish enrollments and gorillas of varying dimensions and body weight, depending on who is offering the simile. Why should one facet of the disciplines we hold most dear become a problem akin to a threatening beast escaped from the menagerie? I am aware of no global demonization of other trends found in the humanities (sarcastic and often politically incorrect backroom comments notwithstanding); we had no structuralist, deconstruction, feminist, Marxist, or postmodern problem, and the current attractiveness of such areas as applied linguistics, gender studies, and cultural studies is not seen as problematic except by a small group of professors whose own courses are perceived as losing enrollment to these upstart newcomer fields. Across universities no one speaks of the math problem, the science problem, the physical education problem, or even the English problem, despite the fact that all students are required to take courses in these areas and that staffing and resource issues often cause the shoe to pinch in many places simultaneously. To face these issues squarely, we need to examine facts and fantasies, pride and prejudice, public virtues and private vices, and reject the fratricidal vivisection of our profession in favor of a stance that is both ethically defensible and logistically realistic.

Until further biographical information is disclosed the problem of the personal relations of Spenser and Sidney remains open to conjecture. Mainly two objections oppose the natural assumption that the two men were intimate in personal and literary matters: first, Spenser's vagueness, or perhaps reticence, when in a letter to Harvey, October, 1579, he speaks of being “in some use of familiarity” with Sidney; and second, his unaccountable delay in joining the chorus of grief at Sidney's death. These facts, and others less important, have been cited as indicating the absence of intimacy; while on the other hand effort has been made to explain them in such a way that the pleasing picture of friendship might not be damaged.

How might scholars extrapolate from the material evidence of “used books” to build larger narratives that help us make sense of the past, without reducing it again to grand, progressivist theories? The history of reading, and book history more generally, would benefit from an exploration of frameworks that extend beyond those of linear time and discrete periodization, and media and technology studies might help lead the way. his essay juxtaposes two annotations left in a set of cut-and-paste biblical harmonies made at the religious household of Little Gidding in the 1630s and 1640s. The first is a seventeenth-century note left by King Charles I; the second is a cut-up booklet made by an anonymous reader in the nineteenth century. Comparing these two moments of reading reveals the urgency of expanding the historical horizons of literary studies and deepening its engagement with theories of time, media, and materiality.

Despite their widespread attention to the conluence of queer sexualities and “decadence” in in- de- siècle writing, queer theorists have yet to overcome the two concepts' persistently destructive conlation. his essay explores the latent positive ainities of queerness and decadence in Walter Pater's Renaissance, which links them through what I call queer detachment. A balance of engagement with and withdrawal from history, this critical perspective anticipates queer theory's methodologies as well as other queer modernist productions. Examining Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood's chronicle of decadent Weimar Germany, I demonstrate how queer detachment becomes an increasingly politicized method of literary and social world making, a means of reengaging the politics and aesthetics of queer history. hese works, and others like them, encourage scholars to realize decadence's positivity, to conceptualize a queer theory that refuses to acquiesce to residual historical narratives and philosophical systems—without, for all that, refusing their value entirely.

As all Chaucer scholars know, it was the intention of the Chaucer Society to follow the Life Records of Chaucer with a similar volume on Thomas Chaucer. This intention was referred to as early as 1901, at the close of R.E.G. Kirk's Forewords to the former compilation; and for many years the work was announced in the list of future volumes to be published by the Society. As the years passed and the expected work failed to appear, it was naturally assumed that the project had been abandoned, perhaps after Kirk's death in 1908. So that when Professor Ruud published his monograph a few years ago he voiced the common sentiment when he said “we cannot now expect from the Chaucer Society the volume, long promised, of the life records of Thomas Chaucer.”

There is always a particular interest attaching to the last work of a great author; and in an especial degree this has been the case with Shakespeare. If The Tempest was not really his last play, it would seem that it ought to have been. The action now and then lags a bit, and gives the people on the stage or in the audience a chance to ponder; which the chief character once does to such effect that his speech, of purest and highest poetry, seems to be the “conclusion of the whole matter,” der Weisheit letzter Schluss. And there are meetings and leave-takings, and glances into the past and at what is to come.

“His studie was but litel on the Bible,” Chaucer's remark concerning the Physician, has been applied by critics to Chaucer himself. The prevailing view is doubtless that expressed by Tatlock: “The more one investigates Chaucer's reading, the more convinced one becomes that his familiarity with the Bible (and other quotable literature, like Cato and Seneca) was largely at second-hand.” Up to this time, however, investigation of Chaucer's biblical material has been slight, as a glance at Miss Hammond's Manual will prove.