In a letter to Harry de Forest Smith of 3 June 1894, E. A. Robinson says of his poem “The Night Before”:

Little is known of Malraux's life before his Indochina adventure in 1924. Most scholars dismiss his activities during this early period with the brief statement that he worked “in the art department of the publisher Kra,” or that he was “editor of their literary series called ‘Editions du Sagittaire’.” This lack of interest is partly due to the absence of much concrete information, Malraux being particularly reluctant to discuss what he calls his “vie privée.” Even more important, however, is the fact that most critics have never considered a knowledge of his publishing career to be very important for an understanding of his literary formation. This position hardly seems justified when one considers that publishing has always been a major interest of Malraux, particularly during the period preceding La Condition humaine. Since his work at Kra was in the nature of an initiation into this field, it is of considerable significance and deserves more attention than it has previously received.

James's youthful ideas about the form of fiction are the germs of the principles expressed in the late prefaces. But his earliest dicta, in comparison to the late, are arid and formalist—dogmatically proclaimed, not experimentally discovered. They hint of an American Gallophile, infatuated with the rigid lines and harsh economy of the well-made play and the well-made novel. In 1874 James announced: “We confess to a conservative taste in literary matters—to a relish for brevity, for conciseness, for elegance, for perfection of form” (LRE, p. 139). He never renounced such a taste; “brevity” and “perfection of form”—more frequently “economy” and “composition”—are as prominent, indeed as hieratic, in the prefaces as in the earliest reviews. But if James seems to have acquired his literary standards artificially and to have begun his career with a set of a priori principles to guide him, it was not long before he was to make these ideas his own by fully understanding their relevance to the craft of fiction. The early assumptions are not repudiated, but tested, clarified, and deepened. There is a remarkable balance in James's mature criticism between the general principle and the pragmatically discovered insight. Though the insistence on economy and order is never relaxed, the concepts become increasingly more flexible; with ease they accommodate notions of fiction that seem contradictory. James repeatedly exults in the freedom of the novelist: “the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (AN, p. 326). Indeed to James it is plastic enough and prodigious enough to allow for the reconciliation of the art of Scribe with that of Balzac, and of the principles of Coleridge with those of Flaubert.

Commentators have mentioned Auden's Marxism for so long now that his indebtedness to Marx threatens to become a critical commonplace through sheer repetition. Yet no one has ever shown that such indebtedness exists. In the 1930's merely to be young, socially conscious, and outspoken was enough to mark one as a Marxist, or at least a “leftist,” and Auden was all these things. But now that the 1930's have passed, and Auden has long since ceased to be either young or a “thirties poet,” the Marxist element in his work deserves a thorough investigation. I propose, therefore, to ask how much Marxism there is in Auden's poetry, where it is found, and what sort of thing it is. Since it is important to discover just how the pattern of his Marxist borrowings changes (if it does) through the years, the first question calls for a chronological examination of his work.

In 1943 Friedrich Beissner published the first volume of his critical edition of Hölderlin's works. This, together with the appearance of succeeding volumes, has reawakened interest in the problems that the poet's verse raises. Basic articles on text critical methodology and numerous reviews of the Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe have taken positions with regard to Wilhelm Hoffmann's claim that Beissner's edition represents “einen gereinigten, endgültigen und vollständigen Hölderlin-Text ..., den es bisher nicht gibt.” In this critical literature, now distributed over a round two decades, three main positions may be distinguished:—

(1) Enthusiastic and largely uncritical approbation has come from writers who have eagerly awaited the appearance of further volumes of the edition. These writers are in basic agreement with Hoffmann's above-cited claim. Emil Staiger describes the edition as “das größte philologische Meisterwerk, das die deutsche Literaturwissenschaft bis zum heutigen Tag zu verzeichnen hat, epochemachend in dem neuartigen Aufbau des kritischen Apparates, ... ” It is, according to Ernst Müller, a document of Beissner's ability to decipher “arg verdorbene, oftmals überschriebene und in scheinbar willkürlich zerstreutem Zustand vorhandene Manuskripte mit dem geschulten Auge des Philologen auf ihren Wort- und Silbenbestand hin. ... ” Manfred Windfuhr classifies Beissner's work as “der erste gelungene Versuch, das Werden der Dichtung Stufe um Stufe fortschreitend aufzuhellen, den Linien der Entstehung anschaulich zu folgen.” Lothar Kempter sees the justification of Beissner's edition as against the editions of Hellingrath and Zinkernagel first of all in the relative completeness of Beissner's contribution: “Jede Auswahl, nicht nur des endgültigen Wortlautes, sondern auch der Vorstufen, bevormundet den Betrachter. Einzig die in jeder Hinsicht vollständige Ausgabe schenkt ihm die Freiheit der eigenen Entscheidung.”

Modern criticism has frequently practiced symbolical analysis without developing the necessary procedural controls, without establishing clear criteria of relevance for suggested symbolical meanings and overtones. Such unrestrained symbolical analysis tends to suffer from two typical defects. First, it tends to slight the line-by-line texture of a work. In practice, if not always in theory, it tends to slight “surface” detail. “Overt” meanings become, in Freudian terms, “disguise,” to be unraveled as the deeper meanings come into focus “like repressed material under psychoanalysis.” Logical categories become, in Jungian terms, “rationalizations,” to be penetrated as the critic becomes “sensitive to the tap-roots below.” At the same time, unrestrained symbolical interpretation often does violence to the structure of a work. It threatens to destroy a work's unity of fable, theme, or tone. Programmatic announcements to the contrary, the prevailing practice of such criticism fails to pay sufficient heed to Henry James's claim that “in proportion as the work is successful the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression”; to E. M. Forster's requirement that “every action or word ought to count.”

Virginia woolf's title for the two volumes of essays collected in her lifetime, The Common Reader, has been taken for a descriptive image of the critic as impressionist or amateur reader. In the preface to her first Common Reader, Mrs. Woolf explains her title and epigraph, taken from Dr. Johnson's “Life of Gray,” in place of a statement of purpose. Her description is deliberately casual and informal, but she provides a structure and point of view for her essays by adding that the common reader does wish to create from his reading “some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.” Though Mrs. Woolf's deceptive remarks on the function of criticism may partly account for the persistent view of her as “reader” rather than “critic,” other writers have contributed to the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as an occasional essayist and impressionist, as a literary portrait painter and miniaturist; or as an antiquarian rummaging through the attics of a rather charming but peripheral past. Unsympathetic readers have carried the belletristic image further and coupled it with the conception of her fiction as a total immersion in pure subjectivity or (in Sean O'Faolain's view) as an exercise in the novel as narcissism. Yet, in fairness to reviewers of Virginia Woolf's essays, it should be noted that both favorable and unfavorable com'ments seem to be based on a similar conception of her as an appreciator or impressionist rather than a serious critic. Thus Horace Gregory, while presenting what he feels is a just and favorable estimate of Virginia Woolf as an essayist, tends to ignore her real value as a literary critic.

Seven years after the publication of The Sound and the Fury came Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The Sound and the Fury dealt with the fall of a family, Absalom deals with the fall of a society. The Quentin Compson of Absalom is not quite the same as the earlier Quentin: his concern is social rather than personal and his role is identified for the most part with a central quest in the novel—the quest to discover the truth about the rise and fall of his South. In its search for the truth about a whole society, the novel circles and shuttles back and forth in time, its sentences twist and strain, and its narrators attempt to recreate a past on the basis of some fact and much conjecture. Sometimes the narrators mislead unintentionally, sometimes they contradict one another, and often they are carried away by their own bias, preoccupation, or imagination. Yes, it is hard to come by truth, but still one might question whether a novel whose pitch is too shrill, whose approach is emotional and poetic, whose perspective seems unclear and shifting—one might question whether such a work presents the best way of getting at historical truth. The method of narration apparently mirrors not only the difficulty in getting at truth but the struggle to face truth. For all its straining, its complexities and obscurities, Absalom, I would conclude, is Faulkner's most historical novel.

T. S. Eliot composed the first draft of The Waste Land at Margate and in Lausanne during the autumn of 1921, when funds secured through Ezra Pound had enabled him to take a long holiday for rest and recuperation. He sorely needed both, and in fact was under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, for overwork in his double capacity as bank clerk and man of letters had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Though we must allow that he was distressed by postwar chaos and the decay of Europe, themes of a more specific and less elevated nature were certainly among his thoughts. He could hardly escape from the news of the day, which we find reproduced plainly or masked in much of his early work; and he was, in the words of a recent critic, “preoccupied … with the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London”—Lloyd's Bank, where he held a minor post in the foreign exchange department at a starting salary of £120 per annum.

Although almost anyone's list of Sherwood Anderson's successes in fiction would include “The Man Who Became a Woman,” this haunting story has provoked less commentary than it deserves. Irving Howe provides the fullest discussion in Sherwood Anderson, though the nature of his book prevents him from treating the story in detail, and we may take his interpretation of it as standard. For Howe, “The Man Who Became a Woman” is concerned essentially with homosexuality, showing us an older man not even yet “secure in his male adulthood” who is driven to narrate some extraordinary experiences of his youth: experiences in which “psychic needs and moral standards clash,” and which may reveal the youth's “hysteria as a result of accumulated anxieties about his sexual role.” In what follows, I shall not be denying that homosexuality is a major motif, but arguing that Anderson is writing about something more: about a particular integrity of being that the youth must experience as a requisite for growing up. To this extent I shall be reversing Howe's emphasis, suggesting that the story centers on the conditions under which the narrator matures, and taking the homosexuality as one instance among others of the narrator's special quality—his openness to the contrarieties of experience. Perhaps some support for this reading inheres in the fact that the teller periodically denies being homosexual in any ordinary sense (e.g., pp. 188, 207, 209): while these denials may be seen as his psychologically necessary effort to shield himself from the truth, they may also be plausibly viewed as indications that the heart of the story's significance lies elsewhere. In any event, the teller himself—when addressing the reader on behalf of the story—insists on its unconventionality: “I'm puzzled you see, just how to make you feel as I felt that night. … I'm not claiming to be able to inform you or to do you any good. I'm just trying to make you understand some things about me” (p. 208). Disclaiming a traditional instructional or ethical aim, he invites us simply to participate in his crucial experience on “that night.”

In “journey to consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus's L'Etranger” (PMLA, lxxix, 321–328), William M. Manly points out in what ways the qualities of “whiteness” and “light” lend symbolic expression to Meursault's perceptions of a negative existence and of death itself (see pp. 322–324), and reaches the conclusion that “it would appear that not only the sun, but (as the white glare of the mortuary suggests) ‘lumière’ in general is employed by Camus in a recurrent pattern which in moments of crisis is highly symbolic (p. 324). Certainly, ”whiteness“ and ”light“ are qualities closely related in their effects on the perceiver, and which appear in L'Etranger as elements of the landscape.

It has long been recognized that Joyce's writing is a texture of epiphanies and that the basic pattern in most of his major works is a chronological cycle tracing man's life from childhood and youth to maturity and sometimes age. The combination of these devices largely explains the structure of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and both are used in conjunction with other techniques in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Although Joyce's use of them has been much discussed, the influences that led him to combine them have been less fully explored. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of the liturgy of the Epiphany season on Joyce's concept of epiphany and his use of the cycle pattern at the period he was writing Dubliners. Related liturgical influences on Dubliners will be discussed.