MOST CRITICS agree that The Years (1937) was an attempt by Virginia Woolf to modify the form of the traditional family chronicle by combining the externality of chronological events with the internality of poetic vision. We know, however, from A Writer's Diary (1953) that Virginia Woolf originally intended something quite different: she intended to write an “Essay-Novel” which would combine both forms. The facts revealed in the essay part of the novel would be explicit comment on the implicit social, economic, and sexual forces controlling the lives of the fictional characters in any given period of history, and the fiction would illustrate dramatically through characters and situations these general facts of history. Thus, Virginia Woolf's original intention was mainly one of externality, and indeed in A Writer's Diary she cautions herself against the pull toward “vision.”1 Ultimately, she combined fact and fiction by “compacting” the essay into the novel and combined externality and internality by seeking to reveal through internal vision the pattern of continuity in external events.

William Carlos Williams invented his own form for Paterson. His long and complex poem has a number of important literary forebears and counterparts, including the other major American sequences (particularly Song of Myself and the Cantos), but in each case it is more unlike than like the work with which it shares significant affinities. The poem is a vast montage comprised of associated images, symbols, and themes. Prose is interspersed with various sorts of poetry, which gains its effects through metrical variations, tonal modulations, and concrete imagery. A close look at a representative formal passage and a loose “unfinished piece” helps to clarify the poet's strategy of maneuvering the reader through a series of alternately high- and low-pitched experiences. Williams pays particular attention to visual patterns and to auditory effects, relying heavily on the American idiom and on spoken language. His diction, like his handling of theme, allusion, imagery, and sound, is part of an attempt to break with outmoded conventions and to find a measure and a form capable of expressing his particular vision of contemporary urban America. The sequence as a whole, though uneven in quality, provides incontrovertible evidence of his integrity and of his skill.

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.

Hardy seems to have reacted negatively to the poetry of William Barnes, his friend and mentor, when it idealized the countryside as the location of a stable, harmonious, divinely sanctioned social order. Such poetry lacked “dramatic form”—contrast within the poem between the limited sphere of the speaker and the larger awareness of the poet. There are nevertheless affinities between the two men: Both venerated the countryside as a relic of the past—as a location sanctified by the meaningful human experience associated with it. If Barnes influenced Hardy positively, it must have been mainly through the loving awareness of the meaning of time and place expressed in his verse. Yet Barnes laments merely the pastness of the past; Hardy explores the radical discontinuity between the idealized past and the real present. Wessex for Hardy represents both an idealized Barnesian world and a real world in which the eternal disparities causing inevitable human suffering can be most clearly observed.

Don Juan and Le Misanthrope depict a comic world in which success, defined as immunity to ridicule, depends largely on the aristocratic “virtues” of dexterity, style, and form—a world in which the “social esthetic” of honêteté has degenerated into a “moral anesthetic” (Krailsheimer). Thus, Don Juan and his female counterpart, Célimène, enjoy an almost constitutional invulnerability to the comic fate which overtakes their often morally superior antagonists. Don Juan is a dazzling rhetorician and consummate actor who, in contrast to the inept Sganarelle, among others, manages to exploit his individuality to the bitter end with an elegant, lordly coherency. So complete is his impunity that only a deus ex machina can thwart his self-aggrandizing schemes. Although morally wrong, he remains esthetically right. So does the devious and corrupt Célimène whose artful self-possession allows her—where Alceste, the moralist, fails—to assert her personality and speak her mind freely even in the conformistic, hypocritical society that she typifies. Don Juan s deft histrionics, like Célimène's imperturbable grace, constitute an art of living, intended by Molière perhaps as an esthetic compensation or consolation for the irremediable moral ugliness that he discerned in a still splendorous but decadent civilization.

WHAT is … difficult to understand is his lack of appreciation for Dickens.“1 William Lyon Phelps's belief that Mark Twain had been one of those rarest of nineteenth-century creatures, the writer who had had no interest in Dickens and who had avoided his influence, was shared by most Mark Twain critics for many years. Although writers like Minnie M. Brashear, who sided with Bernard DeVoto in the Brooks-DeVoto controversy, often pointed out that Clemens had been frequently exposed to Dickens' works, the consensus was stated by Stephen Lea-cock when he remarked that while Mark Twain and Dickens are undoubtedly the two greatest humorists of the nineteenth century, ”there is no record, and no internal evidence, to show that either was influenced by the work of the other.“2 Recently there have been signs of a shift in critical opinion concerning Mark Twain's relationship to Dickens. Walter Blair has shown the indisputable influence of A Tale of Two Cities on Mark Twain's masterpiece.3 Ada Nisbet's survey of Dickens research calls for further study of the ”promising subject“ of Clemens' indebtedness to Dickens, and in a recent review Ellen Moers has suggested at least one direction such a study might take.4

HENRY JAMES found writing The Spoils of Poynton very difficult, and for this reason he devoted more space to it in his notebooks than he did to any other work. The seven entries mark places in the composition where James was trying to work his way out of dilemmas in the plot.1 These entries, proposing lines of action often abandoned in the final work, contain an action of their own: the evolution of Fleda Vetch's character. Originally she was put into the story in a minor capacity, but her functions in the novel multiplied, and James had to spend unanticipated pages rendering her character more fully.

The focus of My Antonia is controlled by Jim Burden's attempt to invest the memories of his youth in the image of Antonia. Jim gives us first an extended portrait of the Nebraska prairies, of the Shimerdas' struggle for survival, and of an Antonia who grows muscular under the strain of work. An idyllic quality pervades the narrative, a sense of happiness remembered. Incidents of bitterness and violence are muted by a style which sacrifices immediacy to the afterglow of remembrance. At the midpoint of the novel, Lena Lingrad, enticing, sensually eloquent, poses a challenge to Jim and his memories. A latter-day enchantress, Lena inspires irresponsibility, forgetfulness, and dream. But Jim's narrative is dedicated to showing the value of memory in and for the present; he identifies Antonia with the prairie and clusters its meanings around her. When, after years have passed, he returns to Nebraska and sees Antonia's large, joyous, and vibrant family, the past and the present finally merge for him in a dynamic new image of happiness. Antonia comes to be Jim's personal symbol of the value of human experience. The novel first validates his memory, then transfigures it into something fertile, fresh, and living.

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.

By keeping the frame-characters before the reader while they visit Versailles and listen to the tale of Cupid and Psyche, and by informing us of the kinds of emotions Psyché's adventures inspire, La Fontaine uses the elaborate framework to place into perspective our reactions to his art. The frame makes the reader recognize his reactions to the story, mirrored in the four friends responses, as well as to the poet's stylistic devices: badinage, reminders of the tale's oral narration, a variety of rhetorical and narrative modes including verse passages that decorate the tale. The friends intrude according to temperament; each prefers a different literary style for the emotions it induces. Their comments lead to the central “digression” on tragedy and comedy, between Parts I and n of Psyché's adventures. This discussion permits transition between the tragic and comic parts of the tale, and the analysis of pity there prepares for Part n in which compassion is the principal emotion experienced by the characters in the tale and the frame. La Fontaine's strategy of holding the frame-characters before the reader is his most significant contribution to his version of Apuleius' tale.

Certain similarities of style and concept can be found in the majority of Pascalian texts. A tracing of the structure and use of these patterns in the three major phases of Pascal's writings (nonreligious, the Provinciales, the Apologie) shows that the configuration shared by the different modes gravitates constantly toward one type of rhetorical and conceptual figure, the figure of person. It is a dialogic movement with a consistent pattern of an animate image containing human characteristics in which there are correspondences and structures of meaning and expression. This underlying configuration clearly places Pascalian thought and style in the tradition of Renaissance cosmology where the animate image of man, nature, and the universe had not yet been replaced by Cartesian mechanistic scientific philosophy.

THE ATTEMPT to portray hell and its leading personages by relating them parodically to heaven, or, in other words, by using inversions of varying degrees of complexity, is traditional. Scholastic theologians like St. Thomas regularly related the various virtues and kinds of blessedness to their opposites, and both Dante and Milton, the two greatest poetic infernologists, made systematic use of parody or ironic parallelism. Katherine Anne Porter, in “Flowering Judas,” a story dealing with latter-day lost souls, is clearly working in this ironic mode; she uses references to the religion of the machine, two parodie saviours, symbolic perversions of the purification ceremony of foot-washing and of the sacrament of communion, and a nun-like, lapsed devotee of the religion of revolution. At the same time, certain cautions must be observed. Miss Porter is not a theologian, nor a theological poet in the same sense in which Dante is. In most of her other works, although many of them are charged with symbolism, often religious symbolism as she says, there is comparatively little explicit use of the religious and eschatological diction and imagery so prevalent in “Flowering Judas.” In fact, even taking the word in the most extended sense, one would be unlikely to call her a “religious” writer as T. S. Eliot or François Mauriac are religious writers.