Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) is often seen as a precursor of the "modern novel." While its complexity has been noted and praised by scholars, there is a tendency to view Lazarillo de Tormes as a type of work-in-progress rather than a polished and complete aesthetic object. The essay proposes to analyze the text as a poetics-through-praxis of the novel, that is, as a precocious, sophisticated, and flexible guide and exemplar. The anonymous author of the Lazarillo eschews idealism, but, like Cervantes in Don Quijote, he blends realism with what has come to be known as metafiction. He is fully conscious of the reader and of the act of composition, and he acknowledges both ends of the communicative spectrum throughout a narrative that is rich in irony, plays on perspective, interest in psychology, and intricate discursive strategies.

Miguel de Cervantes integrated numerous features of the Spanish picaresque into several of his literary works leading some scholars to mistakenly view him as a picaresque writer. In Don Quixote the development of the novel's self-conscious and unreliable narrator, episodic plot structure, psychological complexity, and stark realism all have roots in picaresque fiction. Despite these similarities, Hispanists agree that Cervantes' works do not follow the generally accepted traits of picaresque fiction in the strict sense as embodied in the genre's foundational works. Instead, in Don Quixote and the Exemplary Novels, Cervantes converses with the picaresque through imitation and parody, by introducing picaro types, and through the simulation of picaresque dialogue and plot, even as he disregards the picaresque genre outright.

Prior to the age of Peter the Great, Russian literature differed quite substantially from western European literatures. Old Russian works were almost invariably third-person and non-fictive. Accordingly, many of the defining elements of the picaresque novel would seem to have been lacking until the second half of the eighteenth century, when Russian translations of western models became available. At this point, authors eagerly began to produce picaresque works of their own, a circumstance that has led some scholars to posit that the Russian picaresque is essentially a borrowed form. This article seeks to temper and nuance this view by suggesting that seventeenth-century native rogue tales provided a vital narrative stock onto which eighteenth-century Russian writers grafted borrowed conventions. It further argues that the seventeenth-century tales' narrative conflict arises from their authors' ambivalent vision of the road. Indeed, a deep suspicion of the road continues to infuse Russian rogue literature's plotting strategies and motivate its idiosyncratic structure even today.

Further Comments on Alfonso de Valdés as Author of Lazarillo de Tormes by Joseph V. Ricapito

In 1976, the author of this note posited the name of Alfonso de Valdés as the author of Lazarillo de Tormes. Many years later Rosa Navarro Duran repeated his affirmation that Alfonso de Valdés wrote the Lazarillo, without offering conclusive evidence for the claim. This article studies several parallel passages from Valdés's Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón and the Lazarillo in order to reveal similarities in rhetoric, style, and content.

David Dumville established on purely paleographical grounds that the Beowulf manuscript was copied out between 997 and 1016. This essay considers why an Anglo-Saxon audience was interested in this possibly ancient poem during the tumultuous years when England was beset by Viking invasions and internal dissension. In contemporary writings—including The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The Battle of Maldon, and the homilies of Archbishop Wulfstan—many blamed English defeat on hlafordswice (lord-betrayal) and insufficient getreowþa (loyalty). I argue that Beowulf was copied out to address this problem and offer a window into a world where social bonds were vigorously upheld. The royal decree known as VII Æthelred calls on the entire English population to contribute to the defense effort against the Vikings, and I posit that for one scriptorium, the Beowulf manuscript might have been their contribution.

In the Old English Andreas, the poet uses the term rimcræft (calculation or computus) to describe the reckoning system the cannibalistic Mermedonians to determine when they will consume their victims. While numerous scholars have explored the typologies of baptism, Eucharist, and penance that inform the poem, this paper offers a reading of Andreas which understands it as an Easter poem, in which the Mermedonians' rimcræft stands in for computistical practices that had been long contested in Anglo-Saxon England and on the Continent. The work of conversion in the poem, then, is not only typological, but can also be read as depicting the spiritual underpinnings behind ever-changing computistical practices in the late antique and early Middle Ages, as well as the relationships between the seemingly abstract practice of the computus and practices of faith.

In Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Palamon imagines that his rival Arcite will win the hand of their mutual beloved "by som aventure." As it happens, adventure is strikingly absent from the tale even though the word itself is used constantly. This essay reads the conspicuous absence of adventure in the tale as a strategy of distinction that allows Chaucer to mark his distance from popular adventure stories. In particular, the Middle English Havelok the Dane serves as a possible model for an episode in which a disguised Arcite (in a Chaucerian addition) spends his money "slyly" so as not be revealed. The essay concludes by arguing that the revised episode reflects a logic of concealment that also characterizes the tale as a whole, in which cultural richness is imagined to come from a denial of economic profit and its role in literary production.

John Crowne's The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian (1677), a love story set against the backdrop of the siege of Jerusalem and the capture and destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, has been largely dismissed as a mediocre, if extravagant, imitation of Dryden's heroic drama. Unlike other early modern accounts which simply interpreted the razing of the Temple and eviction of the Jews as divine punishment for their rejection of Christ, The Destruction of Jerusalem recognizes and foregrounds the trauma of besiegement and exile, and provides a powerful commentary on banishment, alienation, and loss. This article recuperates Crowne's nuanced treatment of the siege of Jerusalem and subsequent expulsion of the Jews in relation to both the Restoration court's recent history of displacement as well as the readmission of the Jews into England in the 1650s.

The evidence for Daniel Defoe's authorship of Moll, Roxana, and several other novels long associated with him, is late and unsatisfactory. These and other works of fiction were first attributed to Defoe by a rogue bookseller named Francis Noble in the mid-1770s, almost fifty years after Defoe's death. Many Defovians know this, but the implications never have been seriously confronted. This essay argues not that Defoe did not write these works of fiction, but that we cannot afford to presume his authorship. We are left with an awkward problem: Noble either discovered or fabricated Defoe-the-novelist, and we will probably never be certain which. Lacking solid evidence for Defoe's authorship, we should resign ourselves to studying the poet and journalist we know existed, rather than trying to illuminate the novelist who only might have.

In A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, published in 1998, P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens categorized three novels—Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, and The Fortunate Mistress—as "certainly" by Defoe, though the only known external evidence for this attribution is that the publisher Francis Noble published (wildly mangled) versions of them in the 1770s and 1780s, setting Defoe's name on the title pages. A number of Defoe scholars have queried whether, in view of the obvious untrustworthiness of Noble, and late date of his ascriptions, his title-page attributions can be regarded as external evidence. This article defends the logic of regarding Noble as external evidence, but it also presents some of the considerable amount of internal evidence that can be brought forward to support the attribution of these novels to Defoe.

Aside from Robinson Crusoe, concerning which there is clear evidence, the status of the external evidence for Defoe's authorship of Roxana and the other prose fictions that were ascribed to him on the title pages of Frances Noble's publications in the 1770s and 1780s has been put in question. This article argues that the case for external evidence is strengthened if we consider Defoe's intimate dealings with the book trade, especially the booksellers who published the first editions of the novels. A connection is then established between several of those booksellers and Noble by way of the imprints of editions of Moll Flanders and Roxana published in the early 1740s, thirty years before Noble would attach Defoe's name to them.

In The Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), Henry Fielding identifies all vice as the result of affectation and traces the source of affectation to two causes: hypocrisy and vanity. His comic critique of hypocrisy has received considerable critical attention. Less recognized, however, is Fielding's critique of vanity as a moral complication to empirical understanding. His novels detail how vanity tacitly influences categories of judgment to promote self-interested interpretations and to limit critical self-reflection. People are thereby unable to determine accurately the moral quality of their acts, often mistaking their worst vices as their best virtues. To correct this tendency, Fielding advances a mode of pedagogical skepticism throughout his comic fictions that unmakes, rather than inculcates, convictions, and ultimately calls into question the efficacy and motives of the more traditional pedagogical practices employed by his contemporaries.

Available in a range of formats, from palm-sized octodecimos to octavos, compilations of exemplary "beauties" in prose or verse made ideal gift books in the eighteenth century. Each volume was an edificatory vade mecum and together they formed an affordable library of compact classics. The Beauties of Shakespeare, first edited by the Reverend William Dodd in 1752, ran to thirty-nine editions by 1893, and volumes of Laurence Sterne and Samuel Johnson in different series were especial favorites throughout the Anglophone world over many decades. After Dodd, the London-based bookseller George Kearsley capitalized on the demand for such collections. He produced new selections of Shakespeare around 1780, various bestselling editions of Johnson and Swift, among others, and finally Pope in 1783 (with further remolding throughout the 1790s). Through a close examination of the material conditions of these collections, in this essay I hope to illuminate certain anxieties surrounding authorship and readership that lay buried within a larger history of the role of the anthology in the dissemination of vernacular literature.

"Historical interpretation" attempts to recover meaning as apparently designed by the author or as understood by original-era readers. At least five kinds of analysis are involved: genetic, circumstantial, generic, historical reader-response, and applicative reading. Historical interpretation goes badly wrong when critics insist on deriving it from generalized characterizations of period, author, or groups of texts. Critics need to recognize that context does not control meaning; that all works have multiple contexts; that authors are not consistent; that homogeneous distillations of "the thought of the time" will not do; that reception history should not be ignored; that diversity of reader response must be allowed for; that super-subtle present-day readings should not be foisted on earlier texts; that any historical interpretation must be treated as a hypothesis subject to skeptical testing. At its best, historical interpretation is a wonderfully powerful tool, but it makes a very bad dogma.

Ælfric's arrangement of the apocryphal letter of Jesus to King Abgar raises questions about how Ælfric used this text and about how he may have viewed it. This study examines the backgrounds and uses of Jesus' letter to Abgar, Ælfric's unusual positioning of it in his hagiography, and the Latin sources in surviving manuscripts that preserve parts of the Cotton-Corpus legendary to argue that Ælfric managed these materials rather gingerly as a reflex of his general concern for the authority and suitability of the texts that he rendered into the vernacular.

Suggesting how contemporary conceptions of place and space differ from and are informed by early modern ideas, the introduction describes the significance of "location" and surveys a range of cultural and literary renderings of dis/location.

This essay discusses two sorts of places which on the English Renaissance stage appear to be associated with the divine, ruins, and high places. To a certain extent all sacred sites could potentially be a gateway to the world of the dead, but in a ruin the door to death gapes wider still, and so does the door to the past. Ruins in plays can function not only as signifiers of loss or absence but also can specifically be places where the living meet the dead. This is particularly true of two sorts of ruins: prehistoric megaliths and religious houses which had been dissolved at the Reformation. Megaliths in particular were associated with the earliest inhabitants of Britain. So too were high places, and the final section of the essay suggests that both for Shakespeare and also for some other dramatists a particular resonance and aura of the numinous appears to have attached to cliffs and high places.

Every extant English history play that represented the Tower from 1579 to about 1634 refashioned it as an icon of resistance to the Crown. The present essay argues that two nondramatic representations of Jane Grey's 1553–54 imprisonment in the Tower–a pair of fictional letters in Drayton's 1597 poem Englands Heroicall Epistles–built upon and reinforced the Tower's oppositional significance by constructing Jane and her husband, Guilford, as prisoners who defy their queen. Drayton fashions Jane and the Tower as antimonarchical by drawing upon Jane's representation in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, juxtaposing the Jane-Guilford epistles with notes supporting Jane's queenship, emphasizing the Tower as the epistles' setting, and having Jane and Guilford criticize both Mary and Elizabeth. Moreover, the epistles echo events surrounding a 1597 escape from the Tower, and the poem supports the Suffolk claimant to the throne, whose parents had been Elizabeth's Tower prisoners.