Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein memorably identified Dickensian narrative technique as the touchstone of early Hollywood melodrama, featured most prominently in the close-ups and parallel montage of director D.W. Griffith. In the process, Eisenstein left many stones unturned in a broader montage aesthetic linking Dickensian prose to screen kinetics—everything from the portmanteau “collision” (keynote for Eisenstein’s cinema) of Dickensian neologism to the tracking and cross-cut structure of the novelist’s most striking grammatical spans and syntactic fragments. “Film Philology?” (as an open-ended question) considers the latent import of Eisenstein’s famous essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film today,” still implicit after the Soviet proselytizer has moved in his later pages well beyond Victorian prose in championing a technique of “juxtaposition” supposedly unique to the screen’s “intellectual montage.” Probed instead here, at a corrective new depth, are certain pertinently linguistic—philological—and otherwise overlooked parallels across narrative media.

Words “juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations,” contends T. S. Eliot, compel poets “to dislocate . . . language into . . . meaning.” Poetry is no exclusive location for this leverage. This essay explores a number of coinings in the Romantic period, in the imaginations of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron, with investments that have held up. The scholarly word neologism is almost too sober for the alchemy of their romance with word-inventions, which appeal with petitions and charms that are at once their own reward and fuel the vitality of our lexicons.

This study elucidates how Spenser vindicates courtesy from corruption in Book Six of The Faerie Queene and why scholars struggle to see Spenser’s efforts to make a virtue of courtesy as convincing. A comparison between Paridell’s seduction of Hellenore in Book Three with Calidore’s amorous pursuit of Pastorella in Book Six reveals the differences between a corrupt guise of courtesy and its virtuous form. Although Paridell’s courteous gestures are a mere means for indulging his erotic desires, courtesy overcomes this defect in Book Six. Calidore fulfills his duty to the Faerie Queene and silences the Blatant Beast only after he satisfies his erotic desires and becomes susceptible to slander. Calidore’s detractors fail to see Spenser’s vindication of courtesy as convincing, because they overlook what Calidore achieves through courtesy, a virtue better defined through consequences than intentions.

Hamid Farahmandian's article, "The Magian Imagination: Zoroastrian Cosmology and W. B. Yeats's Theopoetics," examines how W. B. Yeats integrated Zoroastrian concepts to address the spiritual crises of early twentieth-century modernity. The study highlights Yeats’s engagement with non-Western religious traditions, particularly the Zoroastrian focus on dualism and the sacred role of fire (Atar). Farahmandian argues that fire functions as a central structural principle in Yeats's work, representing spiritual purification and metaphysical renewal rather than mere destruction. This is notably evident in Yeats’s A Vision, where fire culminates his cyclical system of history, and in poems like "Sailing to Byzantium," which echoes the Zoroastrian ritual of seeking divine truth through sacred flames. Ultimately, the article posits that Yeats utilized these "Magian" motifs to construct a sophisticated, transhistorical framework for navigating personal and cultural transformation amid the fractures of his era.