All but one of Dancourt's extant regency plays remain unexamined and unappraised despite the acknowledged importance of this author's contribution to the French classical theatre. An inquiry into the nature of his last comedies reveals that, despite his imminent retirement from membership in the royal troupe, his talents continued to prove effective in the enthusiastic atmosphere accompanying the revival of the dramatic arts in Paris after the death of Louis XIV and the closing of Versailles. Le Prix de l'arquebuse (1717) reflects the gay spirit of the era in the provinces and re-creates events attendant upon a rural shooting meet. Les Dieux comédiens (1717) is inspired by Plautus' Amphitryon but relies for its comic effects upon the wit and ingenuity of the French playwright. La Déroute du pharaon is largely a satire on gamblers, and it holds up to ridicule a recent decree against gambling by the government. Dancourt's work continued to be popular and timely after 1715 because of his ability to adjust to the demands and tastes of regency audiences, but the bulk of his work and the best of his plays were written during the reign of Louis XIV, despite the persistent tendency of literary historians to consider him an eighteenth-century personage.

Coverdale's reaction to Zenobia's sensuality, and the suppression of his sexual desire form the central plot of The Blithedale Romance. He describes her in rather explicit fleshly terms, especially in the early chapters of the novel. Despite Zenobia's frequent efforts to fend him off, he cannot stop pursuing her and trying to meddle in her life. The bulk of evidence supports the notion that his confession of love for Priscilla is a dodge. Parallel to these activities, Coverdale discusses at length the nature and source of his emotions and thoughts. He concludes that his dreams and his feeling that the world is unreal and insubstantial come spontaneously and mysteriously from his “secret mind”—a mental faculty beyond his conscious control.

In 1814 Mme de Staël published a curious second preface to her Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau (1788), her first important published work. In this new preface she shuns all discussion of Rousseau and simply restates her own ideas concerning woman. In her youthful work, despite occasional differences with Rousseau on other matters, Mme de Staël had espoused his idea of woman, abandoning all claims to feminine achievement for a Rousseauist enchantment with love. Her conception of woman, basically conservative, derived from a deep need not to diverge from the prejudices of her beloved father, whose notions paralleled Rousseau's. Mme de Staël's life departed radically from the conservative mold, however, and she experienced great difficulty in evolving a personal stand that could reconcile her confidence in her own gifts, emphasized in a passage from De la littérature, and her ideal of marital love, most explicitly stated in a chapter of De l'Allemagne. The second preface recapitulates these conflicts, but as an oblique reply to Rousseau's strictures on the woman of letters it is both an apologia for having lived the literary life and an understated espousal of the principle that the use of one's faculties is a positive good for all women.

THE recent exchange between Phillip Harth and Leland D. Peterson (PMLA, 84, March 1969, 336–43) over Peterson's reading of Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) has left the issue precisely where it began. In his original article (PMLA, 82, March 1967, 54–63), Peterson presented a new interpretation of Swift's essay which would read as satire what has been long accepted as a direct proposal for political and moral reform. Basically, Peterson's thesis is that the traditional reading of the Project poses a problem for students of Swift since the article … seems to advocate hypocrisy, a vice consistently satirized and anathematized in such works as A Tale of a Tub, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and Gulliver's Travels.

From similar titles (Gespräch im Gebirg by Celan, “Gespräch in den Bergen” by Buber) to the common concern with engaging in dialogue with a “Thou,” the poetry of Paul Celan reveals strong affinities with the writings of Martin Buber. This originates in part with the common tradition of Hasidic Judaism from which both drew. But beyond this, Celan also owes a debt to Buber. His quest for a Thou, the underlying dialogical impulse, and the tone of the language of his poetry echo much that is found in Buber's work. Structurally, seventy-five percent of his poems address themselves to a Thou and try to effect an encounter with this object of address. But whereas Buber finds his Thou in God, for Celan there is often no respondent. He seeks through poetic language to establish or create an ultimate poetic reality of words, though in contrast to Buber his desperate attempt often fails. The large number of objects addressed as “Thou” in the internal landscape of Celan's poems confirms that essential reality can be perceived only through creative poetic dialogue, however anguished and inadequate. In this sense, Celan defies a dogma that proclaims modern poetry to be essentially monological, since a dialogical impulse underlies his entire work.

Scholarship, like most human activities, has its fashions. One mode very much in the ascendant at the moment is that which concerns itself with the relation between literary forms and other intellectual structures in a given era ; its method might be described as a combination of the history of ideas with a sort of formalism. L. A. Beaurline's recent article on Ben Jonson, in its design and strategy, illustrates this approach.1 The overall design of such a paper may be indicated as follows: the scholar describes a concept for which he claims wide intellectual acceptance; next, he shows how this concept may be traced in certain literary works. After this initial demonstration, his strategy consists primarily of moving between specific works of literature and other manifestations of the concept to show how each class illuminates the other and how each substantiates the other's status. The end of all this activity is not merely increased understanding of the temper of an age, nor is it merely a clearer view of the works under discussion; ideally, it is both.