Realm Of Literature Research Articles

The role of character in public moral argument: Henry ward Beecher and the Brooklyn scandal

The narrative perspective assumes that people may argue using premises based upon stories and dramas that have correspondence to their life experience. A central element of these stories is the characterization of their protagonists. This paper explores the importance of character by analyzing how it was utilized by the principals in the adultery trials of Henry Ward Beecher. It reveals how characterizations that were created in the literary realm were transferred to the arguments centering around the ministerial role as represented by Beecher. The successful transfer completely altered the audience's interpretations of the events in question.

Entre science et littérature

Between literature and science. The two realms of literature and science have variously provoked attempts to distinguish and differentiate them. This essay argues that both should be studied as related modes of producing meaning. Rather than using the history of science as auxiliary science for the better interpreting of the literary text, it suggests that figures of thought, that are often characteristic of single sciences, offer a privileged object for the study of the inter-relationship of both realms.

The Problem of Remains

REMAINS ALWAYS LEAVE US with a feeling of uneasiness. To say this might seem to be a tautology since remains are, by definition, what's left over, what could not be accounted for, or what escaped all calculation. Such calculation may be of the mathematical kind (trying to divide a sum without remainders, for instance) or else of a type more basic to our everyday ways of doing whatever we do. Have I left anything out? we sometimes wonder when we're in the middle of something-a shopping list, say, or instructions to the babysitter, or the writing of an essay-and the very recurrence of this question suggests the extent to which the dilemma caused by things left over is no mere formal tautology. On the contrary, it is a special, and particularly disturbing, kind of circularity that we live deeply, especially during moments of personal loss. When people die (people we're close to, that is), their disappearance is never complete because they invariably leave things behind. One sometimes says, in an attempt to deal with these leftover personal effects, that they are what help one keep the memory of the missing person alive, at least for a few weeks or months. However, this turning of remains into relics merely hides the troubling force that we sense in such leftover objects: a wristwatch lying on our desk, a fancy ballpoint pen waiting to be handled, an almost new pair of gloves that somebody has said you can get use out of. All that these things do is remain, rattling around our living rooms and freezing our gaze, and it is their very status as remains, or as tools without a purpose, signs without a code, that we find so troublesome. I suspect that such troublesomeness gnaws at the heart of all theory, understood in the Greek sense of theoria or an observing of the activities that make up life. It seems that there will just always be things that escape the grasp of explanation, or that fall through the trapper's net of techn- (to use Plato's metaphor for theory in the Symposium: 203D). Even in the literary realm things are invariably left untouched. Literature is a mathesis,

Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief (review)

238Philosophy and Literature that Hatlen almost makes good on this radical interpretive proposition. But on rhetorical grounds his comparison is absurd. Attempting to write a criticism sensitive to both interpretation and rhetoric would mean at least remarking that the novel is "a more subtle response" despite its clunky, inflated prose and clumsy, often creaky narrative. Even more challenging of course would be also to explain how Frankenstein could be so great — have lasted so long and invited so many treatments — when such sweeping rhetorical qualifications must be made for it. Hatlen, Hancher, and Willbern's co-contributors also need sweeping rhetorical qualifications, but I am not of a mind to make them. Le Moyne CollegeR. J. Fertei. Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief, by Frank Burch Brown; ? & 230 pp. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, $24.00. In Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief, Frank Burch Brown undertakes the ambitious project of arriving at a satisfactory definition of metaphor and explaining how "extended metaphoric structures have the capacity to augment, transfigure, and reinterpret meanings already a part of language and experience" (p. 6). Drawing from the semantic theories of Philip Wheelwright and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, as well as from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, he establishes that the conceptual language of theology and the expressive language of poetry work in a dialogical relationship that expands our capacity to interpret religious beliefs, especially those of Christianity . This well-documented and truly interdisciplinary work will be of interest to students of literary criticism, poetry, metaphysics, and theology. Brown begins by accepting Wheelwright's notion that "steno-language," or logical, argumentative discourse, and "deep language," that is, the discourse of poetry and myth, coexist in a creative tension in metaphor. Metaphor, in turn, alternates between epiphor or reasonable comparisons, and diaphor, or seemingly incongruous comparisons, that at some times force us to acknowledge the logical connections between otherwise disparate elements, at others to intuit new truths that escape clear expression. Yet, for Wheelwright, metaphor remains enclosed in the realm of literature with no application to philosophy. Eliot's Four Quartets demonstrate both the strengths and inadequacies of Wheelwright's theories. The four poems are an extended metaphor that juxtaposes abstract reflections on time with visions of eternity and progresses from lesser to greater clarity, that is, from diaphor to epiphor. The Quartets attempt to represent, in a manner reminiscent of Pascal's Pensées, a lifetime of spiritual exploration that Reviews239 moves from dissatisfaction with human finitude to faith in the Incarnation by means of withdrawal from a chaotic world and self-negation. Yet, this metaphoric representation is also an argument that seeks to reshape our thoughts and feelings, just as theology does: "The purpose of Four Quartets is to offer a significance of experience that will cause one to become . . . alive to one's whole being — including one's being in relation to a whole larger than oneselP (p. 121). Eliot's work proves Whitehead's assertion that poetry is a necessary complement to metaphysics since it furnishes the imaginative insights which philosophy and theology will later clarify. These interpretations oí Wheelwright, Eliot, and Whitehead lead in the final chapter, to Brown's personal formulation of the necessity of poetry to theology. He first rejects the notion that a uniquely conceptual discourse can best explain either the truth of Christian scriptures or Christianity's relevance to modern life, since so much scriptural language is symbolic and so little of human experience intellectual. Only metaphor, the kind found not only in the Four Quartets but in all great literature, can engage both our thoughts and feelings, and establish a "common standpoint of 'shared' religious experience" (p. 165). Through epiphor, we recognize the elements of divine grace that infuse our daily lives, while through diaphor we glimpse the mysteries of redemption. Ideally, metaphoric representation and argumentation result in the "transfiguration" of experience, the transformation of ordinary events that leads to a fuller understanding of human finitude and permits a renewal of faith in the possibilities of salvation. The numerous evaluations of other thinkers, from the revisionist Christian theologians to poststructural literary critics, weigh...

International library program to prevent nuclear holocaust

In 1984 Dr Helen Caldicott, the Australian physician who resigned from the Harvard Medical School faculty to devote her full time to the prevention of nuclear war, stated that according to the nuclear clock, the world had seven minutes until midnight, midnight signifying the occurrence of the “unthinkable event”. Certainly, over the past decade, the nuclear pessimists have (given Dr Caldicott’s statement), been proved more correct than such comparative optimists as John David Garcia, who in 197 1 stated that “nuclear annihilation has about a 50-50 chance of occurring in the near future”.’ Garcia went on to predict that if nuclear holocaust miraculously did not happen, then the most probable causes for mankind’s extinction would be poisoning of the biosphere by genetic decay and pollution.2 Can mankind take heart when world statesmen resurrect “the cold war” through verbal escalation, often for no apparent reason (hence appearing irrational to the extreme, given the possible ramifications of their words?) Is there, in other words, some positive element to which the average human being, in any nation world-wide, might cling, in the hope for survival? It would appear that throughout history pessimism has been perennial, whether we cite Antiphon, the Sophist in Ancient Greece, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (the latter characterizing life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and “a war of every man against every man”), or enter the realm of literature, and study the Weltanschauung ofHamlet. 3 Nor is there a current shortage: “soothsayers

The Healthy Henry Fielding

In eighteenth century Sir John Hawkins wrote that Fielding done more towards corrupting rising generation than any writer we know of' (95).1 And Samuel Johnson warned Hannah More that Tom Jones was a corrupt book (2: 190). Perhaps remembering this warning, Hannah More later wrote that a young girl may safely read improbable romances in which she finds it impossible to identify with characters, but that she should avoid a more realistic work like Tom Jones because strong identification with characters might convey a contagious sickliness to and make her disenchanted with insipidity of common life (2:82). In middle of nineteenth century William Spalding claimed that exposure to Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne is like descending into galleries of a productive but ill-ventilated mine. Around us clings a foul and heavy air, which youthful travellers in realm of literature cannot safely breathe (336). This brief sampling of critical hostility toward Fielding reveals notion of some readers that his fiction is, metaphorically speaking, like a sickness or an unwholesome corruption. Not surprisingly, then, Fielding's many defenders, after diagnosing his fiction, particularly Tom Jones, pronounced it healthy and wholesome. Coleridge, more than any other critic, established long-lasting belief that Fielding's fiction has a healthy quality about it, especially when contrasted with sick tone of Richardson's: There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson (Miscellaneous Criticism 302-303). Coleridge believed that Fielding's treatment of sexual behavior could not be harmful to a normal reader because the gusts of laughter drive away sensuality (Shakespearean Criticism 2:18). Furthermore, Fielding's adherence to principle of poetic justice could only have a positive moral effect: Every indiscretion, every immoral act, of Tom Jones... is so instantly punished by embarrassment and unanticipated evil consequences of his folly, that reader's mind is not left for a moment to dwell or run riot on criminal indulgence itself' (Miscellaneous Criticism 303). It is astonishing to discover how many critics repeated Coleridge's sentiments. In 1855 Frederick Lawrence announced that grand characteristic of Joseph Andrews is singular healthiness of its tone, and that even its offensive passages are preferable to sickly sentiment and trite morality of Richardson (162). At beginning of twentieth century, William E. Henley wrote that fornication, sole Unpardonable Sin in English Fiction, is but a detail... in Joseph

The Healthy Henry Fielding

The Healthy Henry Fielding Samuel E. Longmire University of Evansville In theeighteenth century SirJohn Hawkins wrotethatFielding"has done more towards corrupting the rising generation than any writer we know of (95).1 And Samuel Johnson warned Hannah More that Tom Jones was a corrupt book (2: 190). Perhaps remembering this warning, Hannah More later wrote that a young girl may safely read improbable romances in which she finds it impossible to identify with the characters, but that she should avoid a more realistic work like Tom Jones because strong identification with the characters might "convey a contagious sickliness to the mind" and make her disenchanted with the insipidity of common life (2: 82). In the middle of the nineteenth century William Spaldingclaimed that exposure to Fielding , Smollett, and Sterne is like descending "into the galleries of a productive but ill-ventilated mine. Around us clings a foul and heavy air, which youthful travellers in the realm of literature cannot safely breathe" (336). This briefsamplingof the critical hostility toward Fieldingreveals the notion of some readers that his fiction is, metaphorically speaking, like a sickness or an unwholesome corruption. Not surprisingly, then, Fielding's many defenders, after diagnosing his fiction, particularly Tom Jones, pronounced it healthy and wholesome. Coleridge, more than any other critic, established the long-lasting belief that Fielding 's fiction has a healthy quality about it, especially when contrasted with the "sick" tone of Richardson's: "There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson" (Miscellaneous Criticism 302-303). Coleridge believed that Fielding's treatment of sexual behavior could not be harmful to a normal reader because "the gusts of laughter drive away sensuality" (Shakespearean Criticism 2:18). Furthermore, Fielding's adherence to the principle of poetic justice could only have a positive moral effect: "Every indiscretion, every immoral act, of Tom Jones ... is so instantly punished by embarrassment and unanticipated evil consequences of his folly, that the reader 's mind is not left for a moment to dwell or run riot on the criminal indulgence itself (Miscellaneous Criticism 303). It is astonishing to discover how many critics repeated Coleridge's sentiments. In 1855 Frederick Lawrence announced that the grand characteristic of Joseph Andrews is the "singular healthiness of its tone," and that even its offensive passages are "preferable to the sickly sentiment and trite morality of Richardson" (162). At the beginning of the twentieth century, William E. Henley wrote that "fornication, the sole Unpardonable Sin in English Fiction, is but a detail ... in Joseph 113 114Rocky Mountain Review Andrews; but in Pamela it is the staple of the book .... Now, in Pamela, none is permitted to fornicate; yet the theme of the novel is Fornication. Mr. B. is always hovering round in a most dreadful and indecent state; and Pamela is always praying to be protected from a kind of Walking Phallus .... Which is the more moral writer?" (16: xxxv-xxxvi, n. 30). This belief that Fielding is morally superior to Richardson appears from time to time in other twentieth-century criticism. For example, in 1948 Elizabeth Jenkins repeated the formula when she raised this rhetorical question: "Which ofthem has the healthy attitude to sex?" Her answer, in the form of another question, was not original: "The author who treats of it frankly and openly but without detail or suggestiveness, or the one who through two lengthy novels keeps the reader's imagination in a long, drawn out suspense, culminating in a wedding night and a rape respectively?" (78). In 1968 the cliché was given new life by Robert Alter when he defended Fielding at Richardson's expense. After pointingout that sex was very serious for Richardson, but not for Fielding, Alter observed: "Sex, in the healthier of our novelists, is no longer threatening or Satanic, but the Puritan feeling persists that sex is something portentous, involving man's ultimate moral responsibilities, leading him if not to damnation , then perhaps to his greatest fulfillment" (9). Thus, Alter suggested , the healthy novelist does not take sex too seriously but treats it as though it has little psychological or moral significance. Before examining the limitations ofthis metaphor...

Trees of the Great Basin: A Natural History by Ronald M. Lanner

Reviews 63 Trees of the Great Basin: A Natural History. By Ronald M. Lanner. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1984. 256 pages, $19.50 cloth, $12.50 paper.) This is first-rate natural history, combining the pleasure of solid informa­ tion with a certain elevation and grace of style that bring the book into the literary realm. The writing is imagistically sharp, showing that the author truly loves his subject and has actually walked the territory of the title. Lanner’s strategy is to take the book past the level of the field guide or reference work by adopting an ecological approach. For example, showing the interdependence among Clark’s nutcracker, limber pines, and bristlecone pines gives depth; we go beyond both simple identification and the quick, romantic apprehension of scenery. Now we have an idea of how those beau­ tiful trees, in dramatic ridge-top locations, got started where they are. As another example, the treatment of the formation, life, and death of aspen groves is informed by ecological knowledge and by a strong sense of successional time, putting this interesting species in full context. The book offers good instruction. Ecology is shown not as theory but as present and verifiable happenings, with the aesthetic dimension prominent: Even after death a bristlecone pine continues to transfigure its surroundings. Great old snags stand like bleached tombstones, finally tottering only when the bases of their roots rot away, unbal­ ancing them. Or water drips into checks in their dried surfaces, freezes and thaws, and eventualy splits off massive slabs, exposing to the light wood that has reflected none in its thousands of years. The drawings, by Christine Rasmuss, are likewise informative and evoca­ tive, and the color photographs seem well-chosen either to illustrate typical sites or to bring out characteristics of certain species. The University of Nevada Press, supported by a grant from the Fleischmann Foundation, has projected a major series on the natural history of the heretofore neglected Great Basin. Trees of the Great Basin is the first in the series, and a remarkably auspicious beginning. THOMAS J. LYON Utah State University Women of the West. By Cathy Luchetti in collaboration with Carol dw ell. (St. George, Utah: Antelope Island Press, 1982. 240 pages, $25.00.) Among the various publications of the past several years which attempt to correct the long neglect of women’s roles in the history of the American West, Women of the West is a unique and valuable contribution. A com­ ...

Literary Politics in Post-Mao China

Research Article| July 01 1981 Literary Politics in Post-Mao China Anthony J. Kane Anthony J. Kane Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1952) 21 (7): 775–794. https://doi.org/10.2307/2643620 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Anthony J. Kane; Literary Politics in Post-Mao China. Far Eastern Survey 7 May 1952; 21 (7): 775–794. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2643620 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1981 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Dressmakers and fashion designers

Fashion is a phenomenon not confined to the realms of literature, clothing and cookery; fashion and also the public's taste for trendsetters, whether they be best-selling authors, world renowned dress designers or three-star chefs. Research having become an accepted, i.e. 'integrated', activity of modern society also obeys the general rule.

"Biografia de un cimarron" and the Novel of the Cuban Revolution

Hay cosas que yo no me explico de la vida. Todo eso que tiene que ver con la naturaleza para mi esta muy oscuro, y lo de los dioses mas. Ellos son los llamados a originar todos esos fen6menos que uno ve, que yo vide y que es positivo que han existido. Los dioses son caprichosos e inconformes. Por eso aqui han pasado tantas cosas raras. These are the opening lines of Miguel Barnet's Biografia de un cimarron, confusedly, yet significantly translated into English as The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave.l But who speaks here, the old runaway slave or the young Cuban anthropologist? Is the book a biography, as the original title proclaims, an autobiography, as the English title reads, or a documentary novel, as it is generally classified? I hope to show in what follows the pertinence of these questions with regard to Cuban literature by analyzing the documentary novel, one of the most popular forms of narrative to emerge in Cuba since the triumph of the Revolution. I also hope to show through such an analysis, which will focus mainly on Barnet's book, the role that Cuban literature of the Revolution plays today in the context of Latin American literature. As is well known, the questions posed above are fundamental ones in anthropology. They are the questions that Claude Levi-Strauss asks throughout Tristes tropiques, and they address fundamental concerns in the social sciences: how can I ever know the other, yet remain myself?2 In the literary realm the problem

The Novelist's Image of the North

A review of the English novel since the second quarter of the nineteenth century reveals that the location of the North is more a geographical expression than a precise location. The elements constituting the North, however, have been consistently projected and are largely akin to those forming the 'popular' image-a harsh landscape and climate; an often smoke-obscured land of mines or manufacturing; a substandard environment for both residence and recreation; a land populated by earnest people, ruthless leaders and heroes who may 'escape' south. This traditional literary image is maintained today by modern authors and also through the wider projection of television. THE realm of literature is an important source for students of images of place, for in environ- mental description, no less than in character-drawing or drama, the literary artist is dis- tinguished by his quality of observation and insight. His vision is, moreover, unhampered by any disciplinary blinkers of scientific method in studying what is essentially an intangible phenomenon. I Distinctive qualities of place are therefore perceptively recorded, and so-called regional novelists or poets recognized accordingly. The widespread and persistent circulation of the 'message' of particular major works may mean that the literary input to the image of place is high, providing a literary frame of reference with which to approach or view a particular environment. Moreover, given the nature of the environment of the mind, the literary influence may well increase with time, and even persist when contrary evidence is available to refute the traditional image.3 Geographers may explore the field of literature in different ways, variously emphasizing the designative or appraisive aspect and focusing on a particular landscape or aspect of a

Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics

Why theory? The usual answer goes something like this: Literary theory tells us what we are doing when we read, teach, or write about literature. Knowing where we are and in which direction we are heading no doubt helps us reach specific destinations. In this essay, however, I am using the verbal metaphor of compass and the corresponding visual metaphor of four maps for another purpose. They are intended to show how theoretical awareness permits us to relate the particular critical landscape we traverse to other areas inviting more or less interdependent explorations. Let me start by observing that literary works, just like other verbal constructs, are capable of conveying information from one mind to another. Some critics prefer to approach texts as instruments of mimesis (words representing worlds), others as instruments of communication (messages from authors to readers). Yet literary works communicate and represent at the same time, and criticism as a whole should account for them both as utterances with potential appeal and as verbal signs representing worlds. Map 1 places the work at the meeting point of two axes of literature: the rhetorical axis of communication connecting author and reader and the mimetic axis of representation connecting language and information. But communication and representation are complementary aspects of meaningfully employed language both within and without the realm of literature. Thus speaker, speech event, and listener could be substituted for author, work, and reader.'

Modern Black Drama and the Gay Image

BLACKS GENERALLY consider the issue of sexism irrelevant to their struggle for human dignity; sexism, however, is a reality which is reflected in the black community's attitudes toward gays and homosexuality and within the literary realm of black liberation. Where homosexual characters and themes are utilized in works by modern black writers, the fallacies and stereotypes which have perpetuated the anti-gay bias for centuries are usually re-stated as fact. Black dramatists, in particular, have dealt with gays in a manner which consistently reinforces the myths about gays and homosexuality. Drama written and presented by and for blacks is certainly not a recent development in the United States, but has existed with varying degrees of success in this country since the early nineteenth century when the African Company performed in the African Grove, located in what is now Greenwich Village. The current re-emergence of accomplished and successful black drama has brought the black playwright into prominence, whereas in the past he/she may have been either overshadowed by the actor or completely ignored. Modern black playwrights consider the

The Socialization of Catherine Morland

And as to most matters, to say the truth, there are not many that I know my own mind about.' Every schoolboy knows Catherine Morland as an innocent who goes out to discover the world as romance and finds instead the harsh realities of the social nexus in which she lives. In the satirical plan of Northanger Abbey, the naif finds that she has made her mind up not, like Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot, on the basis of insufficient evidence, but on the wrong kind of evidence altogether-Gothic romance proving no appropriate model in a country neither medieval nor romantic. Yet like that greater naif whose mind was turned by reading high-flown romances and who found them inapplicable to his time, the heroine even in her mediocrity-reflects the grand ironies of human experience in the structure of her perceptions. Catherine, like the Don, is matched against not one or another of the antagonists encountered in the course of her travels, but against the entire network of tacit assumptions and habitual behavior which constitutes the individual's cultural milieu. How she learns to make her way in the world by acquiring the cultural forms under which its members order their own thought and conduct-this is the universal drama which Northanger Abbey instances. The realm of literature is the most obvious exception to Catherine's disclaimer, quoted above; in literary matters, she well knows her own mind. Without her reading, which gives her a set of terms by which to order-erroneously, as it happenssome of her perceptions, she might not be aware of herself at all, much less know the external world in even a rudimentary way. It is not alone her scanty store of social facts but her flimsy equip-

PETRARCHISM IN EARLY TUDOR ENGLAND

For historians of English literature, Petrarchism in early Tudor England is associated with the court of Henry VIII, and is represented by those poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, which, owing their origin to a source in the Canzoniere of Petrarch, had introduced the sonnet form into English verse. It is well-known that Petrarchism in Italy had extended beyond the realms of literature into those of music, in which the sonnets are predominant; and the arts, where the Trionji hold pride of place. At the many small courts, such as that of Isabella d'Este at Mantua, where Petrarchism flourished, music had been specially composed for some of Petrarch's canzoni, and to this music original poems, written in the same style, were either sung by a group of voices, or were adapted to a solo voice with lute accompaniment. Manuscript copies and printed editions of the Trionji were extensively illustrated, the narrative and dramatic elements of these poems being particularly suited to pictorial representation, and their themes having affinities with those of other Triumph subjects. In course of time, the visual representation of the themes of Petrarch's Trionji had acquired such vitality, that they had escaped from the limits imposed on them by the small compass of even the largest book, and had been put to such varied uses as decorations for a part of the theatre at Mantua; or for the wooden panels of cassoni. In an entirely different medium, they had been adapted to the extensive scale required by tapestries used as mural decoration.

II. —Decorated Initials in English MSS. from A.D. 900 to 1100

A recent beautiful publication by Mr. Mynors of the MSS. in the Cathedral Library at Durham has raised an important point in the history of English illuminated MSS. Up to now there has been a tendency to regard the Norman Conquest as constituting a complete break with the past accompanied by the introduction of a new style of illumination. There is, of course, no doubt that in many spheres of life the Norman occupation of England did do away with many characteristics of Anglo-Saxon England. But this is not the whole story. A change in one department of life does not mean a revolution in another. In the realm of literature, for instance, Professor Chambers has shown that the Conquest did not interrupt the writing and development of vernacular prose. Mr. Mynors's book produces ample evidence to confirm a suspicion long held by some, but not uttered, that much of the ornament used by illuminators of English MSS. during the first fifty years after the Conquest is directly descended from motives in use in England long before the Norman invasion. To Mr. Mynors's evidence from Durham, examples of illuminated MSS. from Canterbury may be added in order to show that the famous outline drawing style of the English MSS. of the tenth and eleventh centuries had healthy descendants in the early years of the twelfth century. The best place to see this continuity is in the illuminated initials of these MSS. In order to do so it is necessary to examine the development of initial ornament in England during the tenth and eleventh centuries.

A Short History of the World

THIS is a new work covering the same ground as the “Outline of History” and in the same spirit, but re-written and better written, and correcting many of the faults of judgment and proportion which disfigured the earlier book. Mr. Wells has digested his material in the interval and writes now with ease and mastery. The arrangement and general division of the space is quite satisfactory, and the production and illustrations are excellent. It is a great feat, following so quickly on the labours of the “Outline,” and all who are interested either in history, in education or in the social progress of the world as a whole, are under a deep debt of gratitude to Mr. Wells for carrying it out. Nothing has done so much to awaken the public to the social importance of history, and the readers of history to the unity of their subject. The books are a prodigy of industry and skill and in the realm of literature the best thing we owe to the war. It was at a gathering of thinkers and social workers during the war that the idea of teaching world-history to all nations on a common plan was first mooted, and Mr. Wells responded to the appeal. His “Outline” has sold in hundreds of thousands, especially in the United States. It has provoked demands among working men to be taught history in that spirit; it has changed the outlook and the syllabuses of scores of teachers; it has helped to success other similar books such as the fascinating “Story of Mankind” by Van Loon, which has come over to us from America this autumn. A Short History of the World. By H. G. Wells Pp. xvi + 432. (London: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1922.) 15s. net.