Luther's German writings contain a large number of Biblical quotations, many of which differ from his translations of these same passages in his formal Bible. It is obvious that he generally did not take time to look up a passage in his published versions, but produced a new, ad hoc translation which was the inspiration of the moment. The variorum Weimar edition of Luther's Bible, now complete in twelve volumes, regrettably does not include these informal quotations. From among all the casual quotations occurring in Luther's German writings, a few examples from the New Testament are presented and discussed in this article, along with the corresponding texts of the Greek original, the Vulgate, and the pre-Lutheran German Bibles, as well as Luther's official renderings. Luther's ad hoc translations are often even more vivid and concrete than his official Bible itself. They might be said to constitute a new Luther Bible—one which is not complete, to be sure, but which includes many if not most of the great scriptural passages. These casual quotations are fresh evidence of Luther's impressive stature as a literary figure. They should be included in any new variorum edition of Luther's German Bible.

Most theories designed to explain how and when the Vercelli Book came into the hands of the canons of San Eusebio di Vercelli are little more than guesswork; and those which endeavour to single out a particular agent of transmission ignore local data, such as the records of the commune, abbey, hospices, proto-university, and cathedral, which provide a wealth of documentation for the frequency of Vercelli's contacts with England and Englishmen both during and after the Middle Ages. The only solid evidence for the length of time that Codex cxvii has rested in the cathedral archives must be found in the manuscript itself and in the various book catalogues drawn up by the canons down through the centuries. Of special interest among these catalogues is a recently discovered one, dated 1426, which describes what is probably the Vercelli Book in terms suggesting that it is an old possession of the Eusebian chapter, thus lending support to the contention that the inscription on 24v of the manuscript is indeed north Italian of the eleventh century.

Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe disagreed violently about Pietro Aretino, the Italian polemicist and pornographer (1492-1556), and their differences about him help to explain why Nashe was able to make a laughingstock of Harvey in their literary quarrel. During Harvey's youth (in the 1570's), he held the then prevailing view that Aretino was a gifted polemicist and politician (only in the 1590's did English writers begin to think of the Italian almost exclusively as a pornographer). In 1592 Harvey attacked Aretino just as violently as he had earlier praised him. His change of opinion must have occurred because he had had his fingers burned writing satire in 1580 and because Nashe, now his opponent, was praising Aretino extravagantly as the Scourge of Princes. Harvey, because of his distaste for Aretino and indeed for all satirists, was now writing as a man of reason above scurrility. Nashe, with Aretino as one of his models, cultivated an opposite pose, that of the lashing modern prose satirist, long on hyperbole and short on sober seriousness. Harvey, with his ponderous irony, was no match for Nashe, the “true English Aretine.“ (DCMcP)

If the neo-classical aesthetic of imitation could lead to poetic photocopies, it could also stimulate a remarkable variety of invention, as Spenser's “April“, Milton s Nativity Ode, and Marvell's “The Picture of Little T. C.“ demonstrate. All are imitations of the golden-age or messianic eclogue, and cannot really be understood outside of their genre; but at the same time they completely metamorphose the conventional generic pattern. Spenser's “April” employs the golden-age conventions not only to celebrate Elizabeth I but also, and more importantly, to portray symbolically, in the identification of Elisa with Song, the Orphic ordering power of art, the interrelation of the order of art and the order of the body politic, and the new golden age of poetry heralded by his work. Milton's Nativity Ode uses the same formulas (but remolded by Christian truth and the procedures of divine meditation) to praise the true messiah, Christ, and to celebrate the new golden age, the new Eden, which His birth begins. And Marvell's “Little T. C.” uses the golden-age formulas to assert wittily the Renaissance longing for a new golden age of free love, when Honor ceases to restrict the natural flowering of the human bud.

A study of Pope's treatment of the passage in the Iliad known as the Shield of Achilles provides insights into his working methods, his place in the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, and his attitude toward and appreciation of Homer. Our understanding of the published text can be enhanced by some knowledge of the manuscript revisions of the passage, including Pope's own sketch of the Shield, by an examination of Vleughels Shield of Achilles which Pope ultimately chose to illustrate his text, by a consideration of his notes with their extensive debt to, as well as departures from, the notes of Madame Dacier, and finally by a study of Pope's essay, “Observations on the Shield of Achilles.” This essay is shown to be only partially the work of Pope, the first two parts having been lifted, with inadequate acknowledgment, from two French defenders of Homer, André Dacier and Jean Boivin. The third and original part of Pope's essay points directly to the critical principles, with their emphasis on pictorial presentation, which guided him throughout his translation of Homer. Pope's view of the Shield passage, when contrasted with ancient allegorical interpretations or modern mythopoeic ones, reveals both his limitations and his success as a leader of his age in a critical and philosophical reaffirmation of the epic tradition.

The conclusions of Jane Austen's novels are invariably ironic devices for the final summary of themes and characters. This role is illuminated by three main elements of all the conclusions. First, the novelist parodies the predictability of sentimental “happy endings” in much popular fiction. This accounts for the exaggerated self-consciousness with which she approaches the mechanics of concluding her own narratives, a self-consciousness that seems on the surface to contradict Jane Austen's well-known dislike of unrealistic plots. Second, she subverts the canons of poetic justice that are integral to most happy endings: instead of allocating “rewards” and punishment in accordance with ideal conventions, Jane Austen exposes the prevailing social norms that frequently undermine and replace traditional ideals. Finally, she replaces the arbitrary endings of poetic justice with the logical evolution of character and theme. Each character “punishes” or “rewards” himself, in keeping with his frequently unreliable sense of right and wrong. These features are particularly useful in a much-needed revaluation of Mansfield Park, for they demonstrate that it is not the didactic work described in traditional criticism. Thus Jane Austen's comic conclusion is a consistent device for the realistic, rather than didactic, analysis of character and society.

When read in the context of the 1840's, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” is seen to be neither an explicitly anti-Catholic poem nor a simple historical construct. Much of its bent and many of its details had previously been expressed by so vigorously polemical a Catholic writer as Pugin; they appear again later in Ruskin's pages. Browning's concern rather—and this he shares with Newman, as well as Pugin and Ruskin—was to search out in the past the roots of his own age. The corruption of spirit that he discerns in the Renaissance he also recognizes as extending into his time. The ethos represented by Saint Praxed is dead; the modern world has begun; the qualities of the Bishop are the qualities of Browning's reader. The same historicizing of the past informs “My Last Duchess”, which dramatizes in the deadly embrace of the Duke and the Duchess the destruction of the old order at the hands of the new. The Duchess survives as a frozen portrait, Saint Praxed as no more than a confused and ineffectual memory. But despite the coherence of his analysis, and unlike Ruskin and Pugin, Browning refused to enter the lists with a programme of his own.

Starting where Yeats and Owen left off, Dylan Thomas developed a system of consonantal correspondences which moved rhyme from the matching of same to the matching of similar sounds. His early verse abounded in such devices as zero consonance (rhyming, in a context of consonance, all syllables ending in an open vowel), partial consonance (rhyming two consonant clusters one of which is deficient in one or two members), close consonance (rhyming consonants which are phonetically similar rather than identical), and frame rhyme (rhyming words marked by both alliteration and consonance). In “Then was my neophyte” Thomas built an elaborate stanza by systematically associating and contrasting rhyming syllables according to the degrees of likeness among them. During the later thirties, however, he began to exercise increasing restraint in his use of the more unconventional of these consonantal devices; and although an unprecedented system of rhymes, founded upon assonance, began to take shape throughout the forties, it never quite attained the hierarchical articulation of the earlier consonant-based system. Instead, Thomas' latest work (his unfinished “Elegy”, for example) shows him preoccupied, just before his untimely death, with the exploration of simple, even quite traditional, stanzas based almost entirely upon conventional true rhyme.

A prosody has four characteristics: predictability, continuity or wholeness, basis in a prominent feature of the language, and flexibility. Given such a definition, Whitman took significant steps toward developing a prosody that vies with accentual and accentual-syllabic prosodies in its subtlety and in its relative freedom from arbitrariness. Based on the rhythms of grammar, Whitman's poetry is constructed of groups rather than stresses, though stresses are here used to measure the size of groups. He is skillful both in arranging these groups and in controlling their relative size so as to reinforce his meaning. Whether measured in groups/line or stresses/line, his most consistent rhythmic form is the parabola. His use of it occasionally shows a formality and intricacy which are never attributed to him.

Melville employs theological materials which complicate and deepen his portrayal of cosmic evil in the conflict of Ahab and the whale. Father Mapple's presentation of the Jonah story sets forth Calvinist teachings which throw Ahab's revolt into relief as a revolt against the ultimate. Melville elaborates Ahab's view of his symbolic quarry by drawing upon an anti-Calvinist tradition in which Calvin's God was attacked as a brutal monster. Further, Calvin's interpretation of the Old Testament King Ahab heavily influences the characterization of Captain Ahab. Calvin used King Ahab as an example of the reprobate, those predestinately damned. He stressed Ahab's victimization by Satan and his madness as marks of his reprobation. Melville uses these themes in a way which makes evident the cosmic evil implicit in the plight of one who is thus hopeless. Here also he draws upon a tradition of attack against Calvinism. But while Melville's use of theology is extensive and sophisticated, it is always subordinate to the thematic concerns of Moby-Dick.

Howells' many references to George Eliot s Tito Melema, beginning in 1864 and continuing up into the twentieth century, indicate that the character embodied insights on the nature of moral evil and the complexity of human personality which answered to Howells' intuitions on these subjects. Alice Pasmer's mistaken charge in Chapter xliii of April Hopes that her fiancé is, like Tito, “a faithless man” has the important function of revealing that her moral sensibility is seriously flawed. But Howells' is doing more with Alice than creating merely another Puritan dutiolator. It becomes apparent as Alice's selfishness is more fully revealed in the last third of the novel that it is her character which is glossed by comparison with Tito. At the end of the novel Alice is poised at the point where Tito began, and Howells', by marrying her to Dan, has created the conditions which will encourage the hardening of her selfishness into a predominant force in her character. Thus Howells' subtly indicates what direction her moral development will inevitably take.

Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos' first important study of urbanindustrial life, owes much to the machine-oriented aesthetic of Italian futurism and other modernistic movements in the visual arts. Utilizing techniques and modes of perception indigenous to the machine age, Dos Passos' sought to express the spirit, rhythms, and structure of modern reality in such a way as to evoke in the reader a sense of involvement and participation in the problems of contemporary society. In its visual directness and sensory immediacy, Manhattan Transfer suggests the influence of photography and the “lively arts” of film and vaudeville. In its overall pattern of compositional contrasts and oppositions, the novel resembles abstract painting and the montage structure of the motion picture. Basic to Dos Passos' outlook is a synoptic or visual concept of reality as a network of dynamically interacting parts. Only by viewing his world as a “system” in which nothing is fully comprehensible in isolation can man realize himself as a responsible individual and direct the energies of the machine toward socially desirable ends.

Two early Gide plays, Saül and Le Roi Candaule, represent a revolt against the realistic and naturalistic theater of the nineteenth century, yet they cannot be completely classified as symbolist because of Gide's insistence on the importance of psychologically particularized characters. Character is a major consideration that determines the dramatic quality, the structure, and the techniques of the plays. Saul, which bears many superficial resemblances to Shakespeare's plays, is completely dominated by the figure of the King. The play's structure reminds one of a fugue; it is more an intellectual artifice than a dramatic development. In Le Roi Candaule, as in Saül, the title figure is completely dominant to the point that other characters seem mere puppets. In each play the action hinges on a voluntary self-destructive decision made by the protagonist. But the dramatic effects are due largely to Gide's interesting, yet not always masterful, use of theatrical tricks. In spite of their obvious flaws, these plays deserve consideration as forerunners in the twentieth-century French trend toward using theater as theater to express meaningful ideas about the nature of man.

Simple structural analysis applied to passages cited from the works of André Breton elucidates the reasons for his condemnation of the statement La marquise sortit à cinq heures (see his Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924) as non-poetic. This study demonstrates the opposition existing between the above-mentioned realist sentence, essentially non-subjective (third-person subject), non-actual (past tense predicate), contextual (context can be supposed), and prosaic (lack of imagery), and on the other hand a theoretic surrealist sentence, essentially subjective (first-person subject), actual (present tense predicate), and non-contextual, producing a shock-image. In reality, Breton's surrealistic phrase does not always contain all of these qualities at once. However, in contrast to the condemned phrase which contains none at all, it does always manifest at least one of these characteristics, the most important having reference to the evocative power of the shock-image. A final comparison with a sentence quoted from Robbe-Grillet, the theoretician of the “nouveau roman”, proves that even though it may appear objective, the surrealist phrase is really not so. In conclusion, the four characteristics of the ideal surrealist sentence—subjectivity, actuality, non-contextuality, and ability to produce shock-images—create a poetics of discontinuity opposed to the classical art of narration as found traditionally in the novel. (In French)

In the middle 1870's a polemic concern in the daily and periodical press over idealism and realism anticipates Spain's later reception of naturalism, and reveals the general affiliations of Valera's art for art's sake and of Alarcón's moralism. Earlier hostility to French influence now permeates neo-Kantian concern for the relative merits of the good (idealism), the true (realism), and the beautiful (art for art's sake). Philosophical and literary debate is twisted by the quarrel of liberals and neo-Catholics. Much writing was stimulated by the debates in the Ateneo in 1875 and 1876 over the effects of realism in the theater. Many intellectuals took part, including Revilla and Valera. The summary position is one of essential idealism ready to compromise to meet the scientific age. The polemic of Navarrete and Vidart over Pepita Jiménez (1874) is an early manifestation of this debate, and the quarrel of the liberals and neo-Catholics over Alarcón s reception to the Academy (1877) reduces the polemic to bitter argumentum ad hominem. One of the early reports of Zola's naturalistic writings (also in 1877) shows that the “cuestión palpitante” was an immediate and intensified continuation of the debate.