Although there has been a general revival of interest in Ben Jonson's dramatic work in the past twenty years, little critical effort has been directed to his late plays -- dismissed by John Dryden as the "dotages" of an aging mind. Through a close reading of The Devil Is an Ass, The Staple of News, The New Inn, and The Magnetic Lady in light of Jonson's own theories of comedy, author Larry S. Champion demonstrates that they reveal the same precise construction and dramatic control found in his acclaimed masterpieces. Furthermore, these works reflect Jonson's continued emphasis upon realism and satiric attack, though they may not be equal in quality or dramatic effectiveness.The brief and undistinguished stage runs of the late plays are not an accurate gauge of their dramatic merit. Rather than indicating an enfeebled mind, these late plays reveal Jonson to be a continuing innovator -- adapting the forms of the pastoral, the romance, and the morality play to the purposes of comic satire. Previous critics have charged that Jonson was merely desirous of regaining public favor at the expense of his artistic integrity. The present study suggests, however, that Jonson in these plays was in reality burlesqueing the popular fad of exaggerated romantic comedy, which he considered a degradation of the dramatic art.

Until now, Bergson's widely acknowledged impact on American literature has never been comprehensively mapped. Author Paul Douglass explains and evaluates Bergson's meaning for American writers, beginning with Eliot and moving through Ransom, Penn Warren, and Tate to Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, and others. It will be a standard point of reference. Bergson was the continental philosopher of the early 1900s, a celebrity, as Sartre would later be. Profoundly influential throughout Europe, and widely discussed in England and America in the Teens, Twenties, and Thirties, Bergson is now rarely read. His current "obsolescence," Douglass argues, illuminates the Western shift from Modern to post- Modern.Ambitious in scope, this book remains admirably close to Bergson himself: what he said, where that fits in the historical context of philosophy, why his ideas moved across the Atlantic, and how he affected American writers. At the book's heart are readings of Eliot's criticism and poetry, analyses of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and evaluations of Ransom's, Tate's and Penn Warren's criticism.This impressively researched and beautifully written study will remain of lasting value to students of American literature.

The term metafiction invaded the vocabulary of literary criticism around 1970, yet the textual strategies involved in turning fiction back onto itself can be traced through several centuries. In this theoretical/critical study Robert C. Spires examines the nature of metafiction and chronicles its evolution in Spain from the time of Cervantes to the 1970s, when the obsession with novelistic self-commentary culminated in an important literary movement. The critical portions of this study focus primarily on twentieth-century works. Included are analyses of Unamuno's Niebla, Jarnés's Locura y muerte de nadie and La novia del viento, Torrente Ballester's Don Juan, Cunquiero's Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes, and three novels from the "self-referential" movement of the 1970s, Juan Goytisolo's Juan sin Tierra, Luis Goytisolo's La colera de Aquiles, and Martín Gaite's El cuarto de atrás.Seeking a stronger theoretical basis for his critical readings, Spires offers a sharpened definition of the term metafiction. The mode arises, he declares, through an intentional violation of the boundaries that normally separate the worlds of the author, the fiction, and the reader. Building on theoretical foundations laid by Frye, Scholes, Genette, and others, Spires also proposes a literary paradigm that places metafiction in a position intermediate between fiction and literary theory.These theoretical formulations place Spires's book in the forefront of critical thought. At the same time, his full-scale analyses of Spanish metafictional works will be welcomed by Hispanists and other students of world literature.

In this compact, yet comprehensive exploration of Shakespeare's romances, Robert W. Uphaus suggests that the romances bring us to a realm of human and dramatic experience that is "beyond tragedy." The inexorable movement of tragedy toward death and a final close is absorbed in romance by a further movement in which death can lead to renewed life, characters can experience a second time of joy and peace, and the audience's conventional expectations about reality and literature are challenged and enlarged. In the late tragedies of King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, Uphaus finds the tragic structure augmented by elements that will later contribute to the form of the romances. Turning then to the romances themselves, he sees these plays as forming a profession in which Pericles is a brilliant outline of the conventions of romance and Cymbeline is romance taken to its dramatic limits, in fact to the point of parody. Through his fresh and provocative readings of the plays we experience anew the delight of Shakespearean romance and glimpse the world of renewal at its heart.

The Nouvelles Récréations et Joyeaux Devis of Bonaventure des Périers are here translated for the first time into modern English. The translators have been successful in retaining the vitality of this important French Renaissance satirist, turning his colloquial sixteenth-century French into equally colloquial and lively American. The translation of the 129 tales is prefaced by a biographical study of des Périers both as man and artist, and a critical bibliography is also included.

This volume is a sequel to Four Comedies of Calderón (1980), which was hailed by reviewers as superb, faithful, and actable. The three comedies in the present volume are generally counted among Calderón's masterpieces: Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar (A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard); No hay burlas con el amor (No Trifling with Love); Mañanas de abril y mayo (Mornings of April and May). For the first time theaters will have the opportunity of staging these three masterpieces of the Golden Age drama of Spain in accurate and charming English versions. The verse used is flexible and musical, preserving the atmosphere and much of the poetic quality of the originals. An introduction deals with the characteristics of the plays and with the problems they pose for the translator. Concise explanatory notes clarify Golden Age dramatic practices.

Distinguishing figural or typological allegory -- a method adapted from the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament -- from the broader Hellenistic concept of allegory, this book examines its use in representative poems of early Hispanic literature. The author focuses on the thematic and structural employment of this originally nonliterary device and comments on the literary problems it posed and the artistic effects which were achieved by it. The development of this particular allegorical method in medieval Hispanic literature -- works in Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan -- he shows, was fully equal to that found in the medieval Latin, Italian, and English literatures, and an understanding of its use serves to clarify the interpretation of many individual poems.

This study explores the theater actually known and frequented by Dickens in order to show in terms of concrete structural analysis of his novels the nature of the predominantly "dramatic" or "theatrical" quality of his genius. Author William F. Axton finds that the three principal dramatic modes or "voices" that were characteristically Victorian were burlesquerie, grotesquerie, and the melodramatic, and that the novelist's vision of the world around him was drawn from ways of seeing transformed from those elements in the popular playhouse of his day -- as revealed in the structure and theme of Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and other novels. The last half of the study analyzes representative passages from the novels to illustrate the way in which the principal modes of nineteenth-century theatrical style are transmuted into the three important "voices" of the novelist's prose style. The first two voices -- the burlesque and the grotesque -- are identified by their exploitation of the stylistic features of farce, extravaganza, and harlequinade, of incongruous likeness and deliberate confusion between realms. The melodramatic voice, on the other hand, seeks to exploit in prose the musically rhythmic and poetic resources of the theater for the purpose of atmosphere, moral commentary, and structural unity.

Historical and systematic in its treatment, this work reviews the idea of progress in Western thought as it relates to civilization, in a more comprehensive survey than is to be found in previous writings on the subject. In the author's view, the history of civilization reveals an increasing range of human capacity, both for good and for evil, depending upon men's choice between contending values.From this standpoint, the work proceeds to the exploration of such fields of social activity as the evolution of the family, the emancipation of women, economic conditions and technology, intellectual and aesthetic values, moral and religious experience. Civilization and Progress is marked by balanced and judicious treatment, very broad learning, and a lucid and forceful style. The author asks us to consider the alternatives we face and to reflect on the choices which men have made in the past, which confront us in the present world crisis, and on which our destiny hangs in the future. Seminal in scholarship and creativity, this work will interest those concerned with the Western intellectual tradition and with the condition of mankind.

Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecouer, long regarded as a chief figure in American letters of the Revolutionary period, is remembered as the author of Letters from an American Farmer and the posthumous Sketches of Eighteenth Century of America, but his last and most ambitious work has been almost entirely neglected. Published in France as Le Voyage dans la haute Pensylvanie et dans d'état de New York, Crèvecouer's last book was never popular and has not heretofore appeared in English. Yet the Voyage has much to add to Crèvecouer's picture of eighteenth-century America, and to our own picture of the American Farmer as a man and writer. The Voyage, written after Crèvecouer's sojourn in France and his return to America as French consul, records a new phase both in American history and in the author's life.Adams has arrived at a selection of extracts from Voyage which will be of interest to Crèvecouer's many admirers among students of American history and literature. The editor has translated, arranged, and annotated these selections to form a collection will be a fit companion for Crèvecouer's two volumes of English essays and will supplement the earlier books by recording Crèvecouer's final view of the American scene. In his introduction to this collection, Adams presents a thorough analysis of the content and significance of the Voyage and convincingly justifies his contention that, though the work contains much that is not worthy of translation or republication, the selection here published for the first time in English may be regarded as a significant addition to Crèvecouer's writings.

Divine retribution, Robert Reed argues, is a principal driving force in Shakespeare's English history plays and three of his major tragedies. Reed finds evidence of the playwright's growing ingenuity and maturing skill in his treatment of the crime of political homicide, its impact on events, and God's judgment on the criminal.Reed's analysis focuses upon Tudor concepts that he shows were familiar to all Elizabethans -- the biblical principle of inherited guilt, the doctrine that God is the fountainhead of retribution, with man merely His instrument, and the view that conscience serves a fundamentally divine function -- and he urges us to look at Shakespeare within the context of his time, avoiding the too-frequent tendency of twentieth-century critics to force a modern world view on the plays. Heaven's power of vengeance provides an essential unifying theme to the plays of the two historical tetralogies, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth. By analyzing these plays in the light of values held by Shakespeare's contemporaries, Reed has made a substantial contribution toward clarifying our understanding of the plays and of Elizabethan England.

British writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century initiated a critique of human knowledge unrivaled in both its scope and its enthusiasm. Author Kevin L. Cope now attempts to provide a coherent, evocative account of explanatory rhetoric in early modern Britain. Critics and historians, Cope argues, have done an admirable job of describing the details of the intellectual movements of this period but they have failed to examine the intellectual, social, and psychological implications of explanation itself. Criteria of Certainty makes up for this shortcoming by treating explanation as a composite literary and philosophical mode, as a kind of "master genre" governing the development of a variety of genres, from pithy maxims and lyric poems to lengthy treatises and epics of explanation.Cope's probing and inventive analyses of seven writers -- Rochester, Halifax, Dryden, Locke, Swift, Pope, and Smith -- shed new light on many major issues in both eighteenth-century studies and critical theory. Discussing the gradual enlargement of the claims of explanatory discourse, Cope explores the problematic psychological relation between "philosophizing" authors and their expansionist, systematizing discourse.By applying the methods of recent literary criticism to philosophical texts, Cope reexamines the possibility of a philosophical reading of literary texts, opens the possibility of "characterizing" an age, and sets a variety of genres on a common intellectual foundation. Drawing on both "canonical" and overlooked authors, he also shows how the writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century may help us to understand the immensity, vitality, and irresistibility of explanatory rhetoric in our own age.

As one of the outstanding minds of France, the career of George Duhamel reflects the universal range of his interests. A physician turned poet, playwright, novelist, publicist, critic, and world traveler, Duhamel for half a century has sought as a liberal humanist to defend the moral and aesthetic values of Western civilization against the encroachment of a dehumanizing machine age.Duhamel first achieved fame as a writer with two eloquent outcries against war in Vie des Martyrs and Civilisation, written while he was a front-line surgeon during World War I. His later plays and novels continued to deal with the search of the individual for identity in contemporary life, especially in the Salavin series and the ten-volume Chronique des Pasquier, his outstanding works of fiction. Among the commentaries on other cultures arising from his travels, Duhamel's scathing criticism of the United States in Scenes de la vie future aroused particular furor.It is in Duhamel's feeling for humanity, Mr. Keating believes, that one may discover the consistent pattern in Duhamel's work, essentially the passionate reaction of a surgeon-artist to the cruelties of a war-torn world. In this critical biography of Duhamel as writer and thinker, Mr. Keating therefore relates all of Duhamel's many-sided activities to his underlying purpose -- to find a path for individual happiness in the complexities of contemporary life.

In this book, Paula Backscheider considers Daniel Defoe's entire canon as related, developing, and in close dynamic relationship to the literature of its time. In so doing, she revises our conception of the contexts of Defoe's work and reassesses his achievement and contribution as a writer.By restoring a literary context for modern criticism, Backscheider argues the intensity and integrity of Defoe's artistic ambitions, demonstrating that everything he wrote rests solidly upon extensive reading of books published in England, his understanding of the reading tastes of his contemporaries, and his engagement with the issues and events of his time. Defoe, the dedicated professional writer and innovator, emerges with a new wholeness, and certain of his novels assume new significance.Defoe's literary status continues to be debated and misunderstood. Even critical studies of the novel often begin with Richardson rather than Defoe. By moving from Defoe's poetry, pamphlets, and histories to the novels, Backscheider offers an argument for the thematic and stylistic coherency of his oeuvre and for a recognition of the dominant place he held in shaping the English novel. For example, Defoe deserves to be recognized as the true originator of the historical novel, for three of his fictions are deeply engaged with just those conceptual and technical issues common to all later historical fiction. And Roxana now appears as Defoe's deliberate attempt to enter the fastest growing market for fiction -- that for women readers.What have been powerfully significant for the history of the novel, then, are the very characteristics of his writing that have been held against his literary stature: its contemporaneity, its mixed and untidy form, its formal realism, its concentration on the life of an individual, and its probing of the individual's psychological interaction with the empirical world, making that world representative even as it is referential. It is exactly these characteristics most original, prominent, and subsequently imitated in Defoe's fiction that define the form we call "novel."

Di'bil b. 'Alī (765--860) was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the best satirists in the school of Arabic poets which flourished during the early 'Abbāsid age. Leon Zolondek has collected, translated, and annotated 229 fragments of Di'bil's verse and has assembled materials for a reconstruction of his long-lost yet widely quoted Book of the Poets. Arabic texts of the poems and of the citations of Book of the Poets are included.

The decade covered by this second volume saw an enormous expansion of scholarship in the Hispanic languages; more than 3,500 dissertations were written in the United States and Canada and are now indexed here—twice the number contained in the first volume. Coverage has been expanded to include dissertations on the teaching and learning of Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish and on bilingualism of these languages with others.