The Decline of Critical Prose, 1900-2000

Consider the following paragraph on the impact of the sonnet on English verse, published in 1908:

[The faults of English verse before Wyatt introduced the sonnet] "were looseness and disorderliness of metre, a clumsiness of diction now gaudy, now grotesque, an indistinctness and awkwardness of expression, and a desultory exuberance of treatment both in matter and thought. Now on all these things the sonnet acted at once and directly, with an effect almost magical till the means of it are considered. Its form was extremely precise, and its comparatively small bulk and clear outline exposed any deformity at once and fatally. In order to produce its effect, striking and forcible or exquisite phraseology was necessary; there is nothing quite so null as an insignificant sonnet. Further, to prevent this insignificance there is almost necessarily required-- and in all good Italian sonnets there is always present-- some definite thought, feeling, picture, something that is not mere 'meandering.' And lastly, the small space checks that meandering automatically. In the century or so of words, which is about the average of a sonnet's contents, the most barren thinker can hardly be tempted to admit, the laziest and loosest must be shamed into at least trying to exclude, cliches and expletives. To have something to say; to say it under pretty strict limits of form and very strict ones of space; to say it forcibly; to say it beautifully; these are the four great requirements of the poet in general; but they are never set so clearly, so imperatively, so urgently before any variety of poet as before the sonneteer."

And now consider this one, about Shakespeare's Cleopatra, published in 1990:

"Cleopatra... comes to master death in an erotically possessive way that is truly astonishing; what is possessed is something that marks the absence and impossibility of possession; and through this infiltration (within her being) of the cancellation of possession/presence, we come to feel that this woman who so forcefully embodies presence now also, almost inadvertantly, is about to embody its opposite. Cleopatra, precisely through her extraordinary condensation of being as presence, comes to dramatize the intensest possible feeling of the absence and absencing of presence. Her final minutes of vanishing breath totalize the space of nonpresence."(1)

Printed gibberish does not happen by itself; it is what cybernetic science calls "encryption," the covering of a signal with a layer of opacity so that it can be received only by select group or a single person instead of by the world. We must suppose that between 1908 and 1990 some literary criticism had become encrypted after being directed only to a few.

But one fiasco of an opaque fin-de-siecle paragraph, even in the glare of a magnificent paragraph from eight decades earlier, proves nothing. We need a diachronic selection of random samples of critical prose.

For this purpose I took eleven books down from the English Literature (PR 463-PR 4773) shelves in S.F. State's Leonard Library, careful to take only secondary sources,i.e., books about books. As nearly as possible, I spaced them at intervals of a decade and none is dated more than two years from the nearest decade year. The prose samples vary in length from 85 to 103 words; each is from page 100 of the given book, unless that is mostly blank or filled with quotations, in which case it is from 99 or 101. I refer to the samples by date. Here, in chronological order, they are:

[1902] "For Hobbes and Berkeley, as well as for Bishop Butler's Sermons,not the Analogy,Hazlitt had great reverence, despite strong differences of opinion. Of Locke he had been taught by Coleridge to speak disrespectfully as a timid plagiarist from Hobbes, an accommodator of truth to the spirit of the age, an intolerable thing in a metaphysician, however prudent in a legislator. I must not enter these fields, though I should like to give a precis of Hazlitt's lecture on Liberty and Necessity..."(2)

[1912]"'Entirely honest merchant' that he was, Browning shows in nothing the hearty simplicity of his nature so well as in his uneasy anxiety to convince himself that he is doing something more than merely sing. Pippa itself, as is too rarely recognized, is just an attempt to prove the practical value of song, the material importance of the poet; so, of course, is Saul. He felt fidgety without a tangible purpose-- and so would often self-deceptively assuage his sterling conscience by budding his roses on solid intellectual trunks."(3)

[1918]"Chesterton tells us that he set out, in common with all the other solemn little boys of his age, to be in advance of his time, and to propound a new heresy which should be more progressive than them all. When he had put the finishing touches to it he discovered to his astonishment that it was orthodoxy. In other words, when he seriously asked the new science and philosophy what life demands to make it worth living, he found that they had no answer..."(4)

[1930] "'In almost every villa of England, "The Forsyte Saga" may be seen. It is the one universally read novel, as no novel has been universally read since Stevenson.' So writes Galsworthy's brother novelist, Hugh Walpole. Equally widespread is the Saga's appeal to a similar class of readers in the United States and the British Commonwealths. It has also been translated as a whole or in part for France, Germany and other countries, East and West. Like the great English novels of the Victorian era, 'The Forsyte Saga' may be destined to enter upon a lasting world fame."(5)

[1939]"Indeed, having recovered from the first shock of surprise at their new-found independence, the middle classes became considerably less self-conscious and considerably less homogeneous in their conventions and taste, until we find them almost as divided in their literary predilections as was Pope from Grub Street. But patronage has remained undisturbed in its social center of gravity, and all writers alike must still submit their art to the arbitrament of a reading public which became, with the dawn of the nineteenth century, and has remained since, predominantly middle class."(6)

[1952]"That the Renaissance should have been the decisive stage in the development of English humor can only be regarded as natural.Such a relation would be expected between the period when the English genius came of age and the growth of a mental attitude in which some permanent features of that genius are surely reflected. During the years that elapsed between the early sixteenth century, when the revival of learning began in England, and the outbreak of the civil war, not only did humor, as an original mode of pleasantry, show increasing vitality, but it almost reached a degree of self-realization."(7)

[1959]"Marston probably derived this technique of rapidly moving by association from one subject to another from Juvenalian satire and from the style of Seneca, but in the works of both these writers there is a firm logic underlying a fragmentary surface, whereas in the case of Marston the bits and pieces never quite form a definite pattern. The passage just discussed and the remainder of Satire I are more inchoate than the rest of Marstonian satire or the satire of his contemporaries..."(8)

[1972]"The Light and the Dark(as well as The Masters after it) comes close to suggesting what each novel in the series should be and what it should do for the sequence as a whole. It explores in 'width and depth' several important themes while showing their individual and universal applications. For one thing the novel is about faith-- or rather the betrayal in love, religion, and politics; for another it is about choice--choice that ostensibly evolves freely but is already determined. Snow, like any rationalistic or naturalistic writer worth his salt,accepts fate..."(9)

[1979]"Marvell's calculated foolery develops elements of Marprelate's playfulness with the license Milton derives from the proverbial wisdom that a fool should be answered accordingly. Because Parker's manner and propositions are variously ridiculous, they warrant and even supply a suitable ridicule which never obscures Marvell's own character. Without succumbing to the antics of Marprelate's clowning or 'losing' himself in his fiction, the speaker in Marvell's satire consciously and directly embodies the manner appropriate to acceptable laughter. He agrees with John Humfrey that Parker's conduct poses 'a villainy to Religion...'" (10)

[1990]"As with her vain attempt to erase her problem with an ink blot, Elizabeth Barrett used her diary to provide herself with palpable evidence of intangible experience. In this entry, as she gradually gets carried away with her own rhetoric, she becomes aware that the primary creation is also eluding her at the very moment she wishes to emphasize its importance. The diary thus constitutes an essential component in the recreation and revision of emotion. In her imperfect analysis of the relation between feeling and expression, we find an anticipation of the mature poetic technique that was to find its most graphic formulation..."(11)

[1998]"To reveal its purpose in its process the fable of Peter, Martin and Jack is continually broken in the telling.'And so leaving these broken Ends, I carefully gather up the chief Thread of my Story, and proceed'(p.81), the Writer-Narrator says, and then picks up the thread only to resume his deconstructive process of unravelling. The fable is an allegorical emblem, an enlarged sign of the failure of signs. It inscribes the Augustinian contract between the word of God (re)spoken by a creature in time and the 'eternal Word in its silence.'"(12)

Reading these samples without prejudice or hurry, I cannot escape a feeling of frustration in 1952, increasing thereafter, as the clauses formed by abstractions with copulas or utility words begin their deadly work: humor shows vitality in the sixteenth century but not before. Did the humor of earlier centuries not show vitality? If not, can it be called humor? Humor attained self-realization.Whatever that may be, it is more than vitality. But rather, humor almost attained a degree of self-realization.Self-realization is not all-or-nothing, and even its degrees are subject to fruitless approximation; humor almost attained one of them. And further, the remainder is more inchoate, it shows the individual application of important themes, the foolery develops elements of playfulness with license, she provided herself with palpable evidence of intangible experience,the fable is an enlarged sign. But what is selective is subjective; I have obeyed Francis Galton and counted, hoping thereby to attain objective findings.

I tabulated, in each sample, the nouns, adjectives, notional verbs and adverbs, excluding function words and proper nouns, that could be called abstract, in the sense that I could not connect them with anything that could be seen, heard, touched, tasted, felt or smelt.For example, my list of abstract words for [1912] is:

entirely honest shows simplicity nature well uneasy anxiety convince rarely recognize attempt prove practical value material importance tangible purpose self-deceptively assuage conscience intellectual

These 23 abstractions, out of 88 words in the sample, constitute a paragraph 26% abstract (represented by the second bar from the left in the chart below).Link to chart: Abstract Words Bargraph.

As the chart shows, during the century abstractness roughly doubled.

Further investigation of these abstract words was made possible by the American Heritage Word Frequency Book,in which a corpus of 5,088,721 words is analyzed to find, among other things, the word which occurs oftenest (the, occurring 373,123 times); many words with the smallest possible number (one) of occurrences, e.g.,cohesiveness; and all words occupying particular rankings between these extremes. George Zipf in Human Behavior and the Law of Least Effort demonstrates that fewness of occurrences is proportioned to difficulty, whether of expressing or comprehending meaning. Taking the first 85 words in each sample of prose, I tabulated the abstract words which, besides that distinction, had the other of coming between Ranks 1 and 99 in the Word Frequency Book. That is, such a word occurred at least once, at most 99 times in the corpus of more than five million words; it is a rara avis. Link to chart:Abstract Low-Frequency Words.

This graph displays the number of words in each sample that are (a)already qualified as abstract words and (b) found between Rank 1 and Rank 99 in the Word Frequency Book. It shows that, as with the percentage of abstract words, so the number of such words that are hard to interpret roughly doubled.

Next we consider reliance on secondary sources. Sir Francis Bacon sets forth the futility of a book about a book:

"...artillery, sailing, printing and the like, were grossly managed at the first, and by time accommodated and refined: but contrariwise, the philosophies and sciences of Aristotle, Plato, Democritus, Hippocrates, Euclides, Archimedes, of most vigour at the first and by time degenerate and imbased; whereof the reason is no other, but in the former many wits and industries have contributed in one; and in the latter many wits and industries have been spent about the wit of some one, whom many times they have rather depraved than illustrated. For as water will not ascend higher than the first springhead from whence it descendeth, so knowledge derived from Aristotle, and exempted from liberty of examination, will not rise again higher than the knowledge of Aristotle."(13)

If so, to write a secondary source, as every book of literary criticism or scholarship must be, which is itself dependent on secondary sources,is a supreme folly, as now the water of knowledge falls to yet a deeper level above which it cannot rise. To quote Professor X's book on Spenser is to fall beneath both Spenser and X. Yet the Twentieth Century saw a sensational increase in this kind of quotation. To illustrate this statement, consider the Index entries in the sample books that refer to secondary sources, as compared to those that refer to primary ones. In the Index to [1979], the first ten entries referring to primary sources are:

Abbot, Robert A Triall of our Church-Forsakers

Abercromby, David A Discourse of Wit

Acontius, Jacobus

Allen, Robert An Alphabet of the Holy Proverbs of King Salomon

Allestree, Richard The Government of the Tongue

Almond for a Parrat,An

Aquinas, Thomas

Aristophanes

Aristotle

The first ten entries referring to secondary sources are:

Arber,Edward, An Introductory Sketch to the Martin Marprelate Controversy

Beam, Marjorie,"The Reach of Wit...Swift's Tale of a Tub and Hamlet"

Boyce, Benjamin,The Polemic Character 1640-1661

Bullitt, John M., "Swift's 'Rules of Raillery'"

Carlson, Leland,"Martin Marprelate: His Identity and his Satire"

Carnochan, W.B., "Swift's Tale: On Satire, Negation, and the Uses of Irony."

Cazamian, Louis, The Development of English Humor

Clark, John R., Form and Frenzy in Swift's Tale of a Tub

Clarke, Melville, "The Art of Satire and the Satiric Spectrum"

Coolidge, John, "Martin Marprelate, Marvell, and Decorum Personae..."

How plodding a book must be that is written out of the second source-list, compared to one written out of the first, must be manifest. The first is not all prose but contains the poetry and drama of Addison and Aristophanes; with Aristotle it ranges through microcosm and macrocosm;with Aquinas, through both, with all the lore of the Bible and Christianity. The second is authors contained in authors and titles in titles. That the author of [1979] should accept all this dictation suggests Milton's famous outburst: "I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor who comes to me under the wardship of an overseeing fist."

Checking my sample books, I found that [1912] and [1930] lacked indexes. The percentage of index entries in the other nine representing secondary sources appears in the Secondary Sources Bargraph.

An increase paralleling the others we have noted occurs in the acknowledgement of debts of honor to persons and institutions that have aided the author. Sparse at the beginning of the century, these became frequent at mid-century and grew more so. The Acknowledgements Bargraph displays, for each of the eleven sample books, the number of persons or institutions or both that are thanked in the author's Preface or Acknowledgements.

Another striking development is the appearance of acknowledgements that record help from family and friends without academic posts or degrees and whose assistance may have been emotional. In our samples, the first such Acknowledgement is in [1959]:" I should like to offer this book as a formal expression of my gratitude to my wife"(p. x). Then [1979], "I am indebted to my wife Carol who again provided sensitive guidance"(p.ix). Then [1990], "the Research Group in Women's Studies 1600-1830 for allowing me a stimulating forum" (p. vi). Lastly, in [1998], "I thank my son... and my best friend, his father... for their constant help and support. I thank my friend and research assistant extraordinaire... I thank with my whole heart my dear husband...It has been a Herculean feat for him to come through hell alive for my sake" (pp.ix-x). The Times Literary Supplement reports a case of a scholar thanking his dog.

As more acknowledgements are offered to foundations late in the Twentieth Century, so more foundations await them. To ascertain the change in the rate at which foundations were established, I took the section for Massachusetts in the Guide to U.S. Foundations, counted 100 pages into it, and noted the first 100 entries that had dates in the series beginning there. I thus discovered beginnings of the rise of foundations in the 1930's and yet another sensational increase in the last decades of the century; see the graph titled Rise of Foundations.

To acknowledge the patronage of a foundation may do an author little credit. A committee had turned down my applications for research grants three times when an official representing it undertook to explain my repeated failure.Holding up my latest application, glaring over it, he exclaimed: "The purpose of an application like this one is to GET---THE---MONEY. The committee doesn't want to know how important your subject is or how many articles you've already written about it. They want to know that you'll be finished on time and that someone will publish it." Apparently,suave applicants, planning paid vacations, had left the committee holding the bag so many times with research unfinished or unpublished, that avoiding this embarrassment had become its main concern. How this circumstance might hamstring a writer dealing with a real intellectual puzzle is daunting to think. If Ferdinand of Castile had been worried about meeting a schedule, he would not have given Christopher Columbus a doubloon.

Conversely, to receive a series of foundation grants and employ them for self-promotion may lead to the fatty degeneration of a critic's moral being. The following letter appeared in the Newsletter of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in 1967 when holders of fellowships were complaining of the pressure to publish or perish:

"I...am sick of 'publish or perish' protests. I didn't read the original petition in the Newsletter, but... I am sure that it made the usual crude, false, 'publish or perish' distinction.... I ask, what are these guys afraid of?The answer is obvious-- they are academic weak sisters afraid to enter the public lists in competition with the rest of us, article for article and book for book. As Mr. White says, so incisively, they are lazy. Until they match their publications against mine, on a pound-per-year basis, I...cannot but question their academic virility. For myself, I publish and prosper, and no one of my fellow scholars has told me my work is trivial or obvious.They like my work and I like theirs; we are all true and tenured scholars. The sour grapes protests and false dilemmas of the academically impotent will never disturb me (though I do wonder how such good schools... can turn out so many nervous Nellies).

--Philistus (Ken Lockridge)"

The qualitative decline of publications, which is the theme of this essay, is accounted for by Professor Lockridge's quantitative standards, which could count electric toasters coming off an assembly line or measure coal coming out of a mine (article for article and book for book; pound-per-year basis). The sudden craze for quotations of secondary sources at mid-century is explained by the concord between Professor Lockridge and his fellow scholars: They like my work and I like theirs,i.e., they quote me and I quote them; they do their bit to enhance my reputation and I do mine to enhance theirs.

This cooperation among members of peer groups to promote each others' publications explains the encryption mentioned in the early paragraphs of this essay. To preserve the illusion of a fictitious unanimity (they like my work and I like theirs), abstract and obscure words soften and shadow discrepant meanings. Simultaneously, such words keep interlopers out of the circle of true and tenured scholars, an academic tradition found, for example, among Seventeenth-Century philosophers. "What is the meaning of these words," cries Thomas Hobbes in 1650, "The first cause does not necessarily inflow anything into the second, by force of the essential subordination of the second causes, by which it may help it to work?They are the translation of the chapter of the sixth chapter of Suarez, first book, Of the Concourse, Motion, and Help of God. When men write whole volumes of such stuff, are they not mad, or intend to make other so?"

In spite of frantic efforts to publish in undreamed-of quantities, the resulting books went unread even by the academic peers who insisted they be produced. This scandal was covered with shame but confessed under pressure, as the following dialogue shows:

Q: Are the men's publications read?

A: Oh,yes!

Q: By whom?

A: By the tenure members, at least.

Q: All of them?

A: Yes.

Q: Did you read them?

A: Yes.

Q: Did you read those of the man you finally hired?

A: Yes.

Q: What was the one you remember best about?

A: Well... I didn't read it, exactly.I looked it over. It was in a good journal.Nothing trashy gets in there.

Q: What do you mean by you "looked it over"?

A: Well, I looked at it, looked at his references, read his abstract.

Q: Is that the way the rest of the committee handles the publications, do you think?

A: I think so, yes, they look them over.(14)

Concomitantly with the decline in quality, the Twentieth Century saw a roughly tenfold increase in the quantity of criticism and scholarship, displayed in the accompanying chart. Click to see Quantities of Milton Studies. This is a random sample of dates of publication of books on Milton in J.Paul Leonard Library, SFSU.

The books being written to obtain foundation grants, and those in turn being sought for tenure and promotion, the reading public is swamped by these books like consumers being swamped by the surplus products of overdeveloped capitalism. And a parallel result is found: the persistent reintroduction of fashion models to induce premature obsolescence. In the humanities, intellectual vogues appear and disappear with such speed as to leave their adherents trained, qualified, and unemployed.

Transformational, later called generative, grammar is a case in point. Strolling in 2000 on the SFSU campus with a young Master of Arts, I was interested to learn that she was studying grammar so as to teach composition in a community college.

"Are you studying transformational grammar?" I asked.

"What's transformational grammar?" she asked.

Astounded, I walked speechless for awhile. Thirty years earlier I had studied transformational grammar in order to teach it as part of an introductory course in general linguistics. TG was hailed as the Copernican Revolution of linguistics. Every composition teacher would soon substitute it for whatever grammar he or she was using in the classroom. It had demonstrated a proposition formerly thought fantastic, that all human languages share a basic structure. It had abolished behaviorist psychology and sent B.F.Skinner packing. The phoneme, formerly relative and negative--just a thing that was not another phoneme--was now a column of +++ and - - -, a bundle of distinctive features, the same for every language on earth that had a given speech sound. A matrix of such columns would describe economically every sound in every language. The study of language had changed more in the fifteen years since Noam Chomsky had written Syntactic Structures than it had in the previous 170 years since Sir William Jones had discovered Indo-European. A whole new concept of cognition, in which language was innate, had risen from the ashes of the philosophy of Descartes.

I ascertained the rise and fall of transformational grammar by means of dates of publication of books on the subject in Leonard Library. See the graph Transformational Grammar for the result.The minutes of congresses on TG also peak in the six years following 1975, when five such volumes were shelved in Leonard. One more congress is dated 1998 but so far as this library is concerned, transformational-grammar congresses did not survive the Twentieth Century.Given that a successful teacher works about 30 years, TG lasted long enough to give one generation 1 1/3 careers. A single generation, but not two, could learn and teach it. The "New Criticism," Deconstruction, Postmodernism, and Reader-Response Criticism may have a similar life-span.

In the history just sketched, a paradox appears regarding the literary critic's role. At the beginning of the century, his modest aim was to fill in the background to literature. The critic searched the poem for evidence of the poet's character; he explained the poem's general ideas as reflecting the gist of current thought; he showed that the poem was written responsively to other poems, and the critic quoted these; he found in the poem the eternal flame of beauty trembling in the brazier of art, licensing him to set his poem in the series of all past great poems stretching back to Homer. The New Critics of the 1920's banished all such considerations, and bade the critics consider nothing but the poem itself, as Newton darkened his chamber, the better to experiment with a single beam of sunlight. This procedure liberated the critic; and now free from psychology,ethics, sociology, history, biography, genre criticism, morality and philology, and approaching the poem as if he were the first person ever to read it, the critic amazed the world with the unexpected things he could find in the poem. Cleanth Brooks showed that Marvell's Horatian Ode on Cromwell's Return from Ireland is not praise of Cromwell but a scathing satire on him. William Empson showed that the upshot of George Herbert's The Sacrifice is not that Christ pities either himself or mankind, but that he curses his enemies with ugly malice. Shakespearean critics showed Hamlet to be, not the sweet prince of tradition, but almost the villain of the piece, and certainly, through his perverse conduct, the cause of most of the dire events in it. A Miltonist found that when Satan jumps into the Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost, Book IV, what he jumps into is a huge symbol of a vagina. The critic grew in stature beyond being the humble commentator and keeper of the flame of beauty to become a kind of second poet. Then, in critical theory after the 1960's, his importance exceeded that of the first poet.

In theory, that is. But in fact, he became a creature of pathetic dependency. He lived on grants of cash given or withheld arbitrarily by foundations barking that intellectual content was the last thing they cared about. The critic weakened his book with multiple quotations from his fellow critics'work in hopes of reciprocation. He joined critical schools in hopes of hitting on the right moment, like a stock-exchange trader, just before the boom and comfortably distant from the bust. To keep status in the circle of reciprocal quoters, he blurred his meaning with vague words and jargon. Each school of criticism shared its significance with fewer people than the last. The overproduction of books to get grants became so tedious that the critic took to lamenting his fate and thanking his family for helping him weather it. The number of people without whom he could not have written his book grew, but the book itself was cast aside unread by the pedants who required the author, on pain of unemployment, to write it. The late-century academic critic could be compared to Pope Pius IX, of whom it is said that his spiritual kingdom, made of theological claims, grew vast and overbearing proportionally as his temporal kingdom of political rule in central Italy withered away.

For the embarrassment academic criticism and scholarship are in,the nearest help seems to be the Internet. It responds to the plea of many, that publication is closed to them by intrigue, by the whims of foundations and the rigid pecking-order of more or less prestigious departments and universities. Success results from performance; status buys nothing. The sheer number of people moved by curiosity to access a website may cause it in a matter of hours to sink into an almost irretrievable obscurity or may subject it to a kind of Beatlemania.Hence there is no time for cliques to produce any effect, no advantage to be gained by encryption. Any one, any time, can publish anything at any length. All power to determine what shall be read is torn away from editors, editorial consultants and foundation officials and given to readers.As to schools, anyone may embrace the ideas of a school, anyone may start a school, but no one can be required to belong to a school. "The most barren thinker can hardly be tempted to admit, the laziest and loosest must be shamed into at least trying to exclude,cliches and expletives. To have something to say; to say it under pretty strict limits of form and in space limited only by the reader's attention-span; to say it forcibly; to say it beautifully; these are the four great requirements of the writer in general; but they are never set so clearly, so imperatively, so urgently before any variety of writer as before the webmaster." Forgive me, Professor Saintsbury; I had no right to hijack your sentence like that, but it was of such beauty that I couldn't help myself.

Notes

(1) The first quotation is from George Saintsbury, History of English Prosody, Macmillan and Co., Ltd., London, 1923 (1st ed., 1908), I, 304; the second from H.W. Fawkner, Shakespeare's Hyperontology,at which I have already had my fling in this website, in the skit titled "Cleopatra's Revenge."

(2)Augustine Birrell, William Hazlitt,New York: Macmillan, 1902.

(3)Dixon Scott, Men of Letters, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1923.("The Homeliness of Browning, A Centenary Article")

(4)John Walker Powell, The Confessions of a Browning Lover, Abingdon Press, New York, 1918.

(5)Wilbur L. Cross, Four Contemporary Novelists,New York: Macmillan, 1930.

(6)G.U. Ellis, Twilight on Parnassus, Michael Joseph, London, 1939.

(7) Louis Cazamian, The Development of English Humor, Parts I and II Duke UP, Durham, NC, 1952.

(8) Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse, Yale UP., New Haven, Conn., 1959.

(9)Robert K.Morris, Continuance and Change, Feffer and Simons, London, 1972.

(10)Raymond A. Anselmet, Betwixt Jest and Earnest, U of Toronto Press, Toronto,1979.

(11) Judy Simons, Diaries and Journals of Literary Women U of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1990.

(12) Rose Zimbardo, At Zero Point U Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1998.

(13) Sylva Sylvarum,Preface, Internet.

(14) Theodore Caplow and Reese McGee,The Academic Marketplace, Doubleday and Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1965: p. 109.