William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (1939) contains many allusions to the lives and writings of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. The parallels to A Farewell to Arms (1929), often noted by critics, are more numerous and more meaningful than hitherto shown. They work in context with references to Anderson's Dark Laughter (1925) and with sketches of Anderson and Hemingway and a full portrait of Anderson's second wife, Tennessee Mitchell, who seems to be the model for Faulkner's heroine, Charlotte Rittenmeyer. The background of these allusions is the mid-twenties, when Hemingway and Faulkner both benefited from Anderson's encouragement and aid but lost his friendship, possibly through related incidents. One explanation for the mingling of the Anderson-Hemingway material in The Wild Palms is that it represents a gesture of gratitude and artistic agreement from Faulkner to Anderson set against Hemingway's behavior to the older writer and triggered, in part, by a visit Anderson paid to Faulkner in 1937 when the Mississippian was injured in New York. The allusions also make plain Faulkner's philosophical and artistic differences with Hemingway, provide insight into his view of a major competitor, and show the intricate workings of Faulkner's art.

Laurence Sterne's “Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais” was first published seven years after Sterne's death. A collation of that edition with the holograph MS preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library reveals that the text is bowdlerized, with no pretense to accuracy or integrity. Moreover, all subsequent reprintings of the fragment, including the standard editions of 1904 and 1927, merely copy this inaccurate text. The edition presented here represents, then, an effort to provide the first true text of Sterne's Rabelaisian fragment. In addition, the Introduction makes use of several canceled passages to argue that the fragment should be dated one year earlier than previously supposed (1759 rather than 1760); if correct, this new date suggests that the fragment was Sterne's first creative attempt after his success with the Political Romance. As such, it deserves a significant place in the Sterne canon.

Behind the apparent diversity of subject matter in Giraudoux's plays there is a central unity, the persistence of the great Romantic theme of the search for a suprahuman ideal. Typically, the hero of a Giraudoux play is seeking some image of beauty, power, and mystery that lies beyond the range of human experience. But this ideal world, however attractive, has its opposite in the limited human world of daily existence with its own beauty, grace, and comfort. Moreover, each of these worlds has a negative aspect; the human world may be characterized by greed, hatred, and vulgarity just as the ideal may be cruel, inhuman, fatal. As a result, Giraudoux's plays are marked by a profound ambiguity and express deeply divided attitudes not only toward the suprahuman but toward its human opposite as well. The four tragic works from the great series of plays of the nineteen thirties form a natural group and, because the conclusions toward which they drive are at once desired and feared, they reveal this essential ambiguity more directly than any others. Judith, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (Tiger at the Gates), Electra, and Ondine all show, by means of a dramatic image of destruction through a quest for the ideal, those central attitudes and concerns which characterize Giraudoux's art.

THE RECENT ARTICLE, “Language, Style, and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida,” by T. McAlindon,1 is indeed a formidable one, because Mr. McAlindon brings to bear upon the play a knowledge of Renaissance rhetoric that is all too often neglected in discussions of Shakespeare's work. The author also gives us substantial new insights into the pervasive interest Shakespeare showed, in Troilus and Cressida, in nuances of language and decorum.

Book v of The Ring and the Book affords us a view of Guido Franceschini very different from that provided by his second monologue. This difference is accountable to the Active rhetorical method that Guido employs in confronting the judges at his murder trial. In Book XI, having failed in his attempt to prolong life through fiction, Guido resorts to what he calls a more “voluble rhetoric” of the soul, thus becoming accessible to us for the first time in the same way that we see the other speakers in the poem. An analysis of Guido's fiction in Book V, especially his rendering of Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and himself, as the hero, heroine, and wronged husband, respectively, of popular medieval and renaissance literature reveals a conception of art as deception, contrary to Browning's informing belief in art as a means of arriving at truth by heightening rather than distorting reality. A comparison of Book XI with the earlier monologue indicates that, in addition to making plain the enormity of his villain's evil nature, Browning uses Guido's second monologue as an implicit repudiation of what he considers to be the specious theory of art that Guido relies upon in Book v.

The comic in Sartre's fiction stems primarily from exaggerated ridicule of certain characters. In La Nausée, Roquentin describes the bourgeois surrounding him as completely devoid of individuality. The comedy results from the substitution of the mechanical for the human, from the distance between the pretenses of the bourgeois and reality, and from the parody of literary giants such as Proust. Le Mur shows Sartre's comic power in portraying people's bad faith. Again, comedy results from humans losing their humanity and from the contradictions inherent in certain visions of reality. The subject of Les Chemins de la liberi éallows for less comedy, but humor is not lacking in Sartre's last novels. Sartre uses comedy mainly to denounce bad faith. He uses it also to indicate certain changes in a character's situation and, in La Nausée, to underline his hero's predicament. The importance of comedy in Sartre's fiction proves that he is not only a philosophical novelist but also a comic one. (In French)

In writing La Princesse de Clèves Mme de Lafayette has reduced the novel to a series of scenes in juxtaposition. Each one of the scenes represents the state of mind of the heroine of the novel in its content as well as in its form. The essential trait of the central character is her refusal to accept an encounter with the man she loves, an encounter that would realize her greatest desire. Thus Mme de Lafayette makes each one of the encounters, forced upon the two persons in love by their life within a closed society, an “imperfect encounter”: she places her two characters face to face but withdraws from them an element—on each occasion a different one—of their social or psychological personality. After a series of such “unfinished” confrontations, presented in a dramatic sequence, she makes us understand that the final separation is the necessary conclusion: the perfect encounter could never be attained. (In French)

Robert Scholes's view that Joyce was primarily interested in constructing a genre composed of epiphanies as texts, and not equally interested in the epiphany as a process of esthetic apprehension or in the possible use of the epiphany as a structural principle, is disputed in these comments. This argument seeks to establish briefly that Joyce held the epiphany—process and text—as essentially integrated and inseparable. The comments are a response to Robert Scholes's correspondence with Florence Walzl (PMLA, March 1967).

T. S. Eliot not only changed his beliefs radically during the course of his life; he also set himself, as a continuing theme in certain of his major poems, to explore the painful and difficult process of subjective change itself in its relation to the will. Prufrock and The Waste Land ask whether change is possible, with differing answers; most of the 1927–31 poems explore change as it is being subjectively experienced; the later poems and plays remain concerned with the theme but more perfunctorily. Though scarcely touched upon in his prose writings, this process of inner change, individual not social, is a major unifying theme in Eliot's poetry.

Traditional academic criticism has looked for the unity of Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves in the correspondence with its times, with the leading writers and thinkers of the period. New criticism believes the unity of the novel resides in a particular view of life of the author, pessimistic and even desperate, expressed in an individual style. In contrast with both the traditional and contemporary views the unity of the work consists of the creation of the inner life and personality of the main character who, significantly, gives her name to the novel; and of a complex but definite structure with themes and variations resembling a musical composition. The inner life of the main character is presented through two moral tests and culminates in a free choice which represents her total being: intellectual, moral, emotional. There is, therefore, no mutilation, no sacrifice of one aspect of herself to some external ethical standard, but full realization of the potentialities set forth by the novelist at the outset. (In French)