In the history of literature the change from the idealized worlds of the shepherd and the knight to the world of the pícaro; from arcadia and chivalry to the desolate urban landscape of misery and hunger; from romance to irony—in fact, the Copernican revolution that produced a new genre—could only have been born of an upheaval that affected men’s lives and forced educated writers to see conditions they had so far ignored. This change stemmed from an increased awareness of human misery, which the urban growth of the Renaissance had made highly visible. The genius of the Spanish author of the Lazarillo consists in his having found the literary voice for such a profound transformation of European society. The Lazarillo, of course, did not annihilate the past, but it gave artistic form to the all-pervading crisis that was destroying the basis of the traditional order.

Some years ago a man then unknown to me and still unknown to me called to see me at Saint Louis University. I was not in. The note he left said that he would come back, but he never did, so that all I know of him to this day is what the note contained. Besides his name, it provided only one brief bit of information to let me know exactly who he was: it stated that he was a fellow member of the Modern Language Association of America. Now, as I am privileged to address all our nearly thirty thousand members, including him if he has remembered to pay his dues, I can only hope to share his single-minded identification with the MLA.

In order to appreciate fully the Wife of Bath’s correccioun of clerical teaching concerning marriage, it is necessary to understand what her bourgeois experience was. The legal customs of the bourgeoisie allowed widows and married women rights of contract and property denied to women of other classes. The Wife of Bath was a clothier, not an artisan weaver, whose cloth making was organized in accordance with the entreprenurial practice of the industry in the west country during the late fourteenth century. The economic context that this bourgeois setting gives to Alisoun’s experience makes her opinions concerning marital power less eccentric than has heretofore been believed. Her prologue recounts her growth in practical wisdom, culminating in her marriage with the inexperienced Jankyn. Her tale is a parodic rejection of the ideal pictures of genteel marriage painted by the aristocratic, or would-be aristocratic, writers of medieval deportment books.

In his Apology, Sidney makes what appears to many readers to be an adroit synthesis of humanist defenses of poetry, joining Neoplatonic idealism to claims of ethical utility and delivering this synthesis with the winning playfulness of a shrewd rhetorician. A closer look at his argument, however, reveals it to be a complex and self-conscious fiction, which gestures toward external values only to turn back on its own assumptions. The playful tone shows that Sidney is fascinated by the conceptual difficulties that confront him but that he is incapable of resolving them. Sidney’s intellectual performance in the Apology demonstrates his affinities with Renaissance thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa, who imagined all mental activity to be a ceaseless fabrication of conjecture and metaphor.

The figure of Sordello, who appears in Purgatorio vi and guides Dante and Vergil to the valley of the princes, has long puzzled critics, since his stature in the Comedy seems greater than his historical achievements warrant. He is noted chiefly for a planh with political overtones, the lament for Blacatz. Of the Comedy’s lyric poets, the other known especially for political poetry is Bertran de Born, among the “sowers of scandal and of schism” in Inferno xxviii. By comparing Dante’s treatment of these two “political poets,” we see that they are used within the poem in a way that necessarily transcends their historical identities: they have become emblematic, respectively, of the good and bad uses to which poets can put their verse in the service of the state.

Antonioni’s Blow-Up is one of the most significant and controversial films of the 1960s. Its success brought increased international recognition not only to its director but to Julio Cortázar, the author of the story that inspired the film. Because of the extreme complexity and ambiguity of both Blow-Up and its source, “Las babas del diablo,” critics have been unable to agree in their interpretations of either work, and they agree even less on the extent of Cortázar’s influence on Antonioni. A close analysis of the two works, with careful focus on the relationship between the creators and their protagonists and on the tension between the narratives and their self-conscious forms, reveals that many of the difficulties in interpretation are due to a priori assumptions of readers and viewers alike and that the similarities between the film and the story are far greater than has been supposed.

The Religio Medici has traditionally been called “an essay” or “an autobiographical essay.” If we examine it in its literary context, however, we will see that the principles generating its style and specifying the range of its feeling derive from two prose modes associated with other, more clearly defined seventeenth-century genres, the anti-Ciceronian epistle and the religious meditation. The Religio, in fact, might better be called “a meditation in the epistolary mode.” Although the witty exaggeration of Browne’s diction often pushes his epistolary voice toward the satiric, he holds off both indignant satire and solitary, self-absorbed meditation. In avoiding these extremes, Browne’s mixture of modes makes a clear ethical argument: that human beings must understand their limitations both as individuals in relationship to society and as creatures in relationship to God. In the Religio, Browne argues the importance to Christian humanism of the balance between private spirituality and public manners.

Critics have traditionally viewed the individual poems of Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) primarily as exercises in innovative versification and exotic local color. But if the poems are read sequentially, a significant pattern emerges. The apocalyptic cataclysm of “Le Feu du ciel” introduces the theme of sudden death and destruction that emerges as central to the entire volume. Hugo’s preoccupation with sudden violence needs to be understood in the light of his attitude toward the French Revolution. Attracted by the freedom that it brought but repelled by its excesses, Hugo could not decide during this period whether the Revolution was morally good or evil, with the result that at the end of Les Orientales he avoided taking a political stance and found refuge in art for art’s sake. It was only many years later that he was able to resolve his political doubts and complete his vision of human destiny.