Contemporary usage of the term “picaresque” has blunted its usefulness as a literary concept. What once referred to the historically identifiable genre of la novela picaresca in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is now applied whenever something “episodic” tied together by an “antihero” needs a label. One way to reconcile these extremes is to approach the problem from the wider perspective of narrative types in general: a modal approach, which can account both for a specific kind of narrative whose exclusive preoccupation is an exploration of the fictional world of the picaresque and for a primitive fictional possibility which may be part of much fiction outside that genre. The modal perspective leads next to generic awareness, which yields the strict attributes of the genre—the “total picaresque fictional situation”—some of which are: (1) dominance of the picaresque mode, (2) panoramic structure, (3) first-person point of view, (4) the picaro figure, (5) the picaro-landscape relationship, (6) a gallery of human types, (7) parody, and (8) certain basic themes and motifs.

Moralist literature of seventeenth-century France can be characterized by a human dialectic in which the author is in dialogue with himself or with an aspect of his personality, or in which there is a dialogue between the moi and autrui or between moral principles. In La Rochefoucauld's case, there is a stylistic withdrawal, an absence of intervention of the person of the author which allows for an imaginative interplay between the various personae in the style of the Maximes. This tendency creates an imaginary framework that supports an extended and more dramatic development of personification. In the successive versions of any given Maxim personification is generally sharpened, and what emerges from the overall literary texture of the Maximes is a veritable dramatis personae of extraordinary diversity and vitality. By dramatizing moral values in their multifaceted, contradictory nature, the moraliste tries to resolve the paradox inherent in them, while at the same time allowing moral ideas the freedom to remain paradoxical.

Numerous entries in Gide's Journal attest that for him Les Caves du Vatican was to represent a break with the tradition of La Porte étroite. He is especially concerned that the novel's language be liberated from the orthodoxy imposed by current usage. Hence, in Les Caves there is what appears to be an unusually high incidence of extravagant names, exotic nouns, foreign words and phrases, argot, rare words, and lexical and semantic neologisms. This phenomenon has been either neglected or misunderstood, and can be explained only in correlation with Gide's systematic overturning in Les Caves of the standard narrative conventions of the Realist-Naturalist tradition. Gide realized that the revolution in thinking about language which was occurring around him could play a role in freeing the novel from the existing restrictions of the public's expectations. By his esoteric vocabulary he forces the reader to remember that the novel's “story” is the author's invention and the characters his playthings. That fact, forgotten since Balzac but now reestablished, restores to the novelist the creative freedom he needs. It is on that level that the significance of Les Caves du Vatican is to be found.

Die Wahlverwandtschaften is an early example of the sustained and systematic use of “erlebte Rede.” This fact has remained generally unrecognized to the detriment of a correct reading. It is of paramount importance to know whether Goethe or a narrator speaks with authorial authority, or whether a narrator draws back the curtain to let us overhear the preformulated, groping mediations of one of the characters. By its very nature, “erlebte Rede” is ambiguous, multileveled, hovering between objective assertion and subjective consciousness. By using “erlebte Rede” the narrator does not withdraw behind his characters (contrary to some critics); he is often present as an ironic artist who manipulates and “exhibits” his characters. By revealing subjectivity as subjectivity, the narrator, in a sense, reestablishes an ironic objectivity. (In German)

The Heliand “Preface” comprises a “Praefatio” in prose and thirty-four hexameter “Versus.” According to the “Praefatio” a Saxon poet was commissioned by Louis the Pious to execute a metrical paraphrase of the Bible. To this account the “Versus” add the fiction, borrowed from Bede's Caedmon story, that the poet was inspired in a dream to carry out the undertaking. The “Praefatio et Versus” appear for the first time in a printed book from 1562 and were once thought to be a humanist counterfeit, but they are now generally considered to be medieval in origin. The prose “Praefatio” seems to justify our confidence, but the first fifteen lines in the “Versus” make this composition suspect; they belong to the tradition of the country idyll, a genre unknown in the ninth century, but well documented in the sixteenth. The sentiments and wording are particularly close to Angelo Poliziano's popular poem “Rusticus” (1483). It therefore seems likely that the “Versus” were added to the “Praefatio” by an antiquarian familiar with Bede sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century.

The suitability of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale to its teller can be demonstrated by analyzing: (1) those elements in the Man of Law's character that are dramatically prominent in the tale of Constance, (2) the references to legal proceedings and the use of legalistic rhetoric, especially exclamatio and interrogatio, in the tale, and (3) the affinities between the Man of Law's Tale and the other tales in the rhyme-royal group. As an example, the manner of the Man of Law's defense is heavily dependent upon the advice and examples given to lawyers in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a dependence not found in those tales, like that of the Clerk, that at first might seem similar to the tale of Constance. Since all of the legal rhetoric and most of the references to the law are Chaucer's additions to Trivet, it is likely that Trivet's account was deliberately modified to suit the Man of Law.

The neglect of The Merry Wives of Windsor among scholars and critics results from a failure to appreciate the special nature of the play. Although superficially structured like Roman comedy, the play is really built upon the succession of Falstaff episodes, which give meaning to the Fenton-Anne plot and provide a resolution for it. In this play Falstaff is no lecher but a discredited old adventurer, down on his luck, who becomes the scapegoat for a community afflicted generally by the lust and greed that some of its members seek to make him solely responsible for. The humiliations that they impose upon him are similar to those traditionally inflicted upon the scapegoat figures of European folk custom, and at the end of the play he has become the horned scapegoat indeed, the visible bearer of punishment, and the means whereby innocent love may triumph in Windsor in spite of parental vanity and economic interests. Thus, with the punishment of Falstaff, death is once more temporarily defeated, and the renewal, appropriately celebrated in comedy, is presented for the approval of sympathetic audiences.

The method used by some recent critics to prove that certain Shakespearean characters are “figures” of Christ (or of other biblical or Renaissance personages) was parodied by Shakespeare himself in Fluellen's comparison of Henry v to Alexander the Great. Its success is guaranteed in advance, since it allows the critic to select only the similarities between the two persons being compared without considering whether these are unique or whether they are more significant than the differences between them. The evidence is thus subjected to a double screening: the critic determines which events in the character's career can be compared to the historical personage, and then which aspects of those events are relevant to the comparison. Even the differences between them can be converted into positive evidence. It is therefore possible by this method to prove that almost any character is a figure of Christ or of King James or of almost anyone else, which is the great strength of “Fluellenism” and also its great weakness, since a method that can prove anything proves nothing.

In the late 1920's, when T. S. Eliot was haunted by Dante's Vita nuova and by the Earthly Paradise cantos of the “Purgatorio,” he was also very much under the influence of Charles Maurras, the French monarchist and anti-Romantic. He found in Maurras the “criterion” he was searching for—a sense of “order” that would save the poetic sensibility from mere emotional self-indulgence. In 1928, Eliot himself translated an old essay on criticism by Maurras which argued that readiness for impression must be matched by a capacity for selection. Eliot had Maurras very much in mind when he sat down to write his own essay on Dante, and, by a special dedication, he tied the essay very tightly to Maurras, whose treatise on Dante he knew. “Ash Wednesday,” too, with its interplay between the yearning, regretting sensibility, and the expiatory frame that controls it, is a mirror of both Eliot's Dante essay and the esthetics of Maurras. In the long run, however, the tutelage of Dante began to move Eliot away from Maurras.

The language, action, setting, and characterization of The Prairie cohere around the idea of man as one species of animal among many. On one level, man is a hunter, dominating the other beasts upon whom he is dependent for food and clothing. On another level, man is a scientist, subjecting the beasts to study, classification, and control. On a third level, the novel observes man as an animal of ambiguous identity. The various groups of characters exemplify differing varieties of humanity. The barbaric Indians and the angelic Inez are opposing extremes in dehumanizing characterization. Ellen and Paul display the conflicting demands of feeling, reason, and conscience on the typical middle ground of human nature. In the most dramatic aspect of the romance, the Bush family is forced by pressure of extraordinary circumstance from a brutal, lawless existence into a troubled consciousness of human guilt, justice, and mortality. Finally, in the aged and dying Leather-Stocking is represented a rare example of a fully human life achieved at the most primitive remove from mere animality.

A study of Ezra Pound's translations of Guido Cavalcanti's Rime shows Pound's lifelong interest in the work of the Italian poet. A further tracing of Cavalcanti's rhetoric in the Cantos shows that Pound employed Cavalcanti in a twofold way: he related him to Neoplatonic philosophers through his use of light imagery, and he also treated him as an Aristotelian empiricist. He thus made Cavalcanti serve two apparently divergent aims, just as Pound's own work may do. Although the modern poet's philosophic understanding of Cavalcanti is open to controversy, his poetic uses have accounted for some of the finest passages of the twentieth-century epic.

Julien Green's locating numerous fictional works (novels, stories, one play) in America has not been considered particularly significant, as these works share with those set in France common themes, moods, and character types which seem to transcend the specific national settings. In those works set in America there is, however, an unusually close relationship between the personal tragedies and the national milieu, certain problems of American life seeming to engender the dilemmas that lead the characters to tragic outcomes. Yet these circumstances are not so typically “American” as suggestive of problems the French novelist himself, born in France of American parents, encountered during the three crucial years he reluctantly spent in America following World War t. His lengthy Journal and some recent autobiographical works reveal that the principal dilemmas that torment his American characters relate to those which the unusual circumstances of his double nationality created for him: problems centering about the matters of national belonging and personal morality (relative to American puritanism). Green's American heroes are primarily transformations of himself, created partly to purge himself of his own tragic inclinations, partly to recapture a period of his life which, though fundamentally painful, had overtones of sweetness because of his first sexual awakening.