For mankind in the total orphanage which is this world homeostasis is well served by the diverse learning—as knowledge and as process—with which the members of the Modern Language Association of America are professionally concerned: language as communication and rhetoric, literature as a means of heightened understanding, and the systematic study of these relevant areas of knowledge in the interest of effective instruction in them.

Two allegorical movements dominate the central books of the Faerie Queene, the generative cycle and Britomart's quest for Artegall. Britomart's assumption of her role as mother of the British line depends on the reconciliation of these two movements, the one natural, the other historical. The Garden of Adonis presents an emblem of the generative cycle, the desire of Venus for Adonis mirroring the desire of Form for union with Matter. This search of the Female for the Male is presented sequentially in the story of Florimell and Marinell, whose adventures are juxtaposed with those of Britomart and therefore form a bridge between the emblem of the Garden and the sequence of Britomart's quest. We see the coalescence of the two in Isis Church, where Britomart's dream has both sexual and historical significance, and in her resumption of femininity after her rescue of Artegall from Radigund.

Considering the way Poe and Tennyson admired each other's work, it is strange that the tonal and thematic convergence of two such major nineteenth-century writers has scarcely been sensed in Anglo-American (as contrasted to French) literary criticism. The quality that most obviously tempts the reader to link them, their extraordinary delight in sound for its own sake, became a comparable strategy in the service of an undogmatic philosophical idealism, the attempt of the spirit to escape the gross materiality and cloying passions of the world's body. The symbolic situations in Tennyson's early poetry and in Poe's stories and poems suggest the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's “deserted” (Tennyson) or “haunted” (Poe) houses. Even when Tennyson rejects, ambiguously enough, the self-entombments of Poe-like hyperesthetic souls, he hardly suppresses what Poe called his unequaled “etherisity” and “ideality.” Tennyson's resultant treatment of angelism (to apply to his protagonists Allen Tate's term for the hypertrophied state of Poe's heroes) and the concomitant evolution of a Poe-like Fatal Woman are most clearly evident in such Classical monologues as “Lucretius” and in the conception of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Idylls of the King.

Esther Summerson is not the sentimental, insipid character she is usually taken to be. Dickens uses her as the unconscious spokesman of the many characters in Bleak House who have never known parental love and makes her tale the most important illustration of one of the novel's major concerns—the breakdown of the parent-child relationship. His attitude is essentially clinical: he is interested in recording a complex pattern of psychological development in detail. Esther's story demonstrates both the immediate and the long-range effects of her godmother's pious cruelty and neglect. The novel shows that her inhibited intelligence and self-effacement are products of this upbringing and traces her attempt to become a more assured and self-possessed woman. Esther's dawning confidence, however, is shaken first by her illness and disfigurement and then by Mr. Jarndyce's proposal. The two incidents are best understood as crucial symbolic events in her attempt to transcend the determining influences of her childhood. Although Dickens finally resorts to fantasy to resolve Esther's conflicts, his detailed study of the stages of her life is that of a psychological realist interested in revealing the connections between childhood experience and adult personality.

Virginia Woolf interweaves allusion and image to construct character, define theme, and structure Mrs. Dalloway. Shakespearean allusions combined with mineral and flower imagery identify Lady Bruton and Sally Seton as representatives of the dying aristocracy and the flourishing industrial class. They also embody the alternatives open to Clarissa: sterile aristocratic society or life-giving passion. An allusion to the dirge from Cymbeline sounds the theme of death and rebirth echoed in Peter's dream, the beggarwoman's song, and Septimus' and Clarissa's experiences. Quotations from the dirge and a complex of symbols originating in its heat and cold imagery link Septimus' and Clarissa's successive deaths and rebirths. A modern incarnation of the dying god archetype, Septimus ultimately gives Clarissa new life through his death.

The Centaur is a complete ritual, a patterned ceremony of word and action in which Peter Caldwell celebrates his former experiences with his father. The explicit use of the Greek Chiron-myth serves the functions of comedy, a sign of Caldwell's estrangement from the Olinger aristocrats, and a quality of Peter's memories. What sustained Peter during the three days that he spent in town with his father was his adolescent myth of Art, the City, and the Future, by which he hoped to answer the tyranny of time and the inevitability of death. Now, in his atheist maturity, with that myth tarnished, he must depend upon a reenactment of his father's sacrifices for him, another myth that enables him to face the transcendent questions of time, life, and death. Man is presented as a creature in the middle, a participant in the conceivable and the inconceivable, a mediator between heaven and earth. The ritual actions of The Centaur—notably the lectures on the universe by Caldwell and Chiron, the obituary, and George's acceptance of life in the final chapter— serve as actions of communion or as actions against death in an atmosphere of the Barthian visibilia et itwisibilia.

A study of Barbey d'Aurevilly‘s “Le Rideau cramoisi” and Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir provides insights into the functioning of allusion as an artistic device. Barbey, with his use of Stendhal's masterpiece, was probably appealing to a group of ardent stendhaliens forming as early as the 1850's. Where a feeling for the rather equivocal reactions aroused in Le Rouge et le noir‘s nineteenth-century readers may be obtained from a perusal of the epoch's criticism, a deeper understanding of the novel arises from an analysis of “Le Rideau cramoisi.” On the levels of vocabulary, imagery, character, and plot, Barbey's story alludes to the earlier work. Within “Le Rideau,” the allusion works in the fashion of a gradually enlarging metaphor. Like metaphor, Barbey's allusion has two terms: Le Rouge et le noir and Brassard's tale. The two terms work as a unit in the framework of the whole story to intensify those elements shared with Le Rouge—an egotistical protagonist incapable of preventing himself from violating the codes of honor and hospitality. Moreover, the allusion serves as the principal means for eliciting the central theme of diabolism. The masterful use of this artistic device partially explains both the continuing interest aroused by “Le Rideau cramoisi” and its power.

The numerous interpretations by critics of all decades of Rimbaud's sonnet on the “Vowels” are mostly based on considering A E I O U solely as letters and not as sounds. New perspectives on the poem can be opened by emphasizing its sonorous aspects and stressing the importance of vowels as primeval shouts. An analysis of the sound structure in the sonnet reveals that the profusion of images, colors, movements, emotions, evoked by the five vowel sounds, appear to be derived directly from larynx vibrations and from the shape and movement of the lips as they pronounce each key vowel. This discovery of the “naissances latentes” possible origin in the “Vowels” relies greatly on Rimbaud's other poetic works and on his new theories on poetry. A close look at some of his predecessors' ideas, themes, and images—like Victor Hugo's and Baudelaire's—that elicit a probable influence on the young poet or a strange correspondence with his own objectives further unveils, in the study of each vowel, the esoteric aspects and poetic elaboration of the “Vowels.” A living vestige of Rimbaud's adolescent voice speaking to us in its original spontaneity, the sonnet thus discloses the poet's secret: shown in the very process of creating a new language, he is like a true God: through the magic of his word, he creates light, colors, a whole new world of vivid sound-objects, that illustrate the five stages of man's life from nonexistence to eternity. (In French)

Analysis of descriptive passages in Camus's “Le Renégat” shows that the protagonist associated violence with a means of escape from his unpleasant surroundings in France. Fascinated by violence, he goes to convert the cruel inhabitants of Taghâsa. But on arriving at the town built of salt, excessively hot and violent, he is enslaved. After a time the protagonist freely adores the idol of Taghâsa, believing it to represent a universal and eternal principle of violence, thus becoming the Renegade. He kills the next Christian missionary to come to Taghâsa, but in a decor which negates, thematically, the universality and the eternity of the evil principle of violence which he adores. After this futile murder, the story ends with the Renegade's more futile repentance. The thematic structures of this short story seem to embody the same rejection of violence which can be found in the last section of L'Homme révolté. (In French)

The art of Juan Ruiz must be understood in the light of the medieval conception of art as facere, a conception that postulates the artistic independence of a work while emphasizing its didactic nature in the use that individuals can make of it following their own personal motivations. The independent artistic form of Ruiz's work is at the same time an autobiographical form, wherein lies its fictional character. The fiction of the Book of Good Love is not to be seen as the fiction of its imaginary adventures but as the psychological fiction of its protagonist, i.e., the literary illusion that this protagonist mistakes for reality. Such an illusion is best exhibited in the central episode of the book, that of don Melón and doña Endrina, Ruiz's own amplified translation of Pamphilus de Amore. The autobiographical form of the book, therefore, should not be seen as a conventional literary device for self-expression but as an ironic portrait of Juan Ruiz, the man, taking for reality what Juan Ruiz, the artist, knows to be only literary fiction. (In Spanish)

In attempting to make sense of the vacillating, inconsistent, and often bizarre behavior of the underground man, critics have employed two distinct modes of analysis, thematic and psychological. The psychological approach seems more appropriate; the novel is essentially a portrait of a character. As yet, however, critics have not approached the work with a psychological theory that is congruent with it and adequate to its complexities. The underground man's character structure, attitudes, and behavior can be understood in terms of Karen Horney's analysis of neurotic processes. In Horneyan terms, the underground man is a detached person whose aggressive and compliant trends are very close to awareness and rather evenly balanced. He experiences severe and almost continuous conflict between all three of his trends and is caught in a devastating crossfire of contradictory “shoulds.” He compensates for his feeling of worthlessness by self-glorification and then hates himself even more because he cannot live up to his idealized image. The novel's philosophic passages are an integral part of Dostoevsky's portrait of his character. The underground man's worship of freedom, will, caprice, and individuality, and his phobic reaction to anything suggesting coercion, conformity to law, or ordinariness are all aspects of his detached solution.