The present essay is an attempt to demonstrate the institutional nature of Chaucer's satire of the pardoner—to indicate that Chaucer's satire is not directed against false pardoners or against pardoners of any particular establishment, but against the state of institutional decay which made the existence of the pardoner possible. To this end the background of the pardoner will be discussed: his function in the Church, abuses of that function, and legal action to restrain those abuses. Following this, an examination of English collection systems will be made, and finally an application of the foregoing material to the noble ecclesiast of the Canterbury Tales.

Cardenio, a “lost” play of 1612-13 based on Shelton's translation of Don Quixote (1612), is partly preserved, in altered form, in Lewis Theobald's Double Falshood of 1727. Theobald probably altered Cardenio drastically, as he did Richard II. To internal evidence that Cardenio was written by Shakespeare and Fletcher can be added chronological evidence and reluctant testimony to the joint authorship by the publisher Moseley, Charles Gildon, and Theobald. One of Theobald's three manuscripts can be traced in the hands of Moseley, the Davenants, Betterton, Gildon, Theobald's patron (Charles Boyle), and Theobald. A Restoration performance probably was intended. Theobald persisted in claiming that the original play was by Shakespeare alone after he learned otherwise, from Gildon and the Stationers' Register, to save his reputation as a Shakespeare scholar and please his patron. To protect his “Shakespeare” play, Theobald obtained a unique royal license, which Pope ridiculed in the Dunciad. Theobald probably sold his play and Shakespeare manuscripts outright to his publisher. He was prevented from publishing Cardenio by the copyright Act of 1710, the practice of regarding copyright as perpetual, and his quest of money and patronage.

This essay considers questions of Dalit historicity in terms of narrative time. Largely a product of the last two decades, Dalit (“untouchable-caste”) literature in Hindi is often read as an uncomplicated expression of Dalit consciousness, an ethnographically revelatory body of writing. I suggest that Dalit literature might be read differently, as coding a distinct meaning of the historical. he model of narrative time configured in Dalit writing poses a problem for critics of postcolonial and subaltern studies because it challenges underlying assumptions regarding the “historical”—assumptions largely inherited from studies of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, in which subjects are defined by their place in history. Unlike the bildungsroman, Dalit texts posit a model for the narrative construction of the subject that does not rely on the category of historical knowledge and the historical event. By introducing the terms event-fulness and unreading, I argue that the Dalit text challenges the putative relation between history and the narrative recovery of self. Dalit writing therefore creates a realism whose origins lie not in the bourgeois historicism of the European novel but in the humanism of a protest literature.

A “zoontology” is currently uncovering the productive difficulty that animals bring to philosophy. in essays in a volume by leading philosophers entitled Philosophy and Animal Life, the contours of the challenge that animals pose to philosophy emerge from discussion of, among other texts, J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, where both rational argumentation and poetic invention are (in Cora Diamond's inspired borrowing from Ted Hughes) “shouldered out”2 by the impossibility of comprehending and conveying everything that animal lives challenge us to recognize about our human selves. A long-standing response to that impossibility has been simply to declare the subject irrelevant or even—as Peter Shaffer's unhappy protagonist in Equus says—“nonsensical” (21). As that play glosses the role of animality in psychoanalysis, to put the horse before the boy is to violate the anthropocentric grammar of the normal. A similar assumption of animal irrelevance characterizes public culture, camouflaged by such ubiquitous and unexamined “animal-loving” practices as keeping pets and watching wildlife films.

This essay looks at the American popular reception of modernist little magazines and of writers who were regularly published there, including James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In the 1920s, book reviewers, syndicated daily book columnists who reached millions, and celebrity columnists took notice of authors or books that were considered news. Experimental modernist writing was frequently discussed, even when it had appeared in obscure little magazines. Even editorials in major newspapers debated literary trends. This national conversation about modernist writing has been largely ignored by critics, although it dramatically affected the canonization of writers in this period. Examining the popular understanding of modernism rather than the ways modernists understood popular culture reveals that there was an intimate exchange between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were better known and, indeed, more popular than has been previously acknowledged.

Performance is an idea that became a field. For ideas to matter to the field of performance studies, however, they must take the form of action—a play, a rite, a dance, a game, a parade, an utterance. The action of performance may be practical or symbolic, but it is “always a doing or a thing done” (Diamond, Performance 1). In this essay, I assess the idea of performance, the field of performance studies, and their common relation to action by reopening the question of mimesis, the venerable doctrine that art imitates life. I also provide a preliminary sketch of a practical poetics of performance, defining it as Orphic (of or pertaining to the mythic figure of Orpheus). The action that the Orphic plot imitates—moving forward while glancing back—recapitulates the risky act of performance itself, for the performer typically feels the urge to look back, despite the prohibitions and costs, because performance always seems to be authorized by something prior, even when it isn't. Not restricted to dead Europeans or any other limited constituency, popular Orphism embraces all the lively arts, but it is most intensely concentrated in poetry meant to be spoken aloud, from Homer to hip-hop, and in lyric drama. “The story of Orpheus underlies every poem,” Susan Stewart writes in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, and she might have added, “every performance”: bereft of Eurydice from the moment of his fatally forbidden turn, when he dooms her to be his inspiration, “he must attempt to fill her absence with compensatory song” (256). So Eurydice stands in for Orpheus, punished for his transgression, and he for her, making art out of her fate. Across the gulf of time and the river Styx, she prompts him, as he keeps looking back to her.

This essay discusses strategic efforts to develop new digital research tools and approaches as key elements of an inter-disciplinary research initiative in progress, Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas (IEM), which aims to study aspects of Icelandic literature, history, archaeology, environment, and geography in order to better understand societal responses to environmental change over the longue durée. The essay showcases a particular digital humanities project, Icelandic Saga Map (ISM), which not only provides an extremely useful tool for helping achieve many of the identified aims and methodological needs of an integrated environmental humanities initiative such as IEM but also is a valuable example of how innovative digital humanities tools can foster new research trajectories and open up new horizons for interdisciplinary engagement and synthesis of knowledge and diverse data.

Starting with two twentieth-century lectures (both titled “What Is a Classic?”), delivered by T. S. Eliot and J. M. Coetzee forty-seven years apart, this essay looks at the ontology of the classic in particular and canon formation in general in the globalized and multicultural field of twenty-first-century English studies. It focuses on the agonistic process through which the classic assumes form and coherence and on the position of the critic making a claim about the classic. The essay evaluates the importance of this contestation of literary value for interlopers and latecomers to the Western canon, concluding that the “perduring” classic is, perhaps, the invention of the outsider. With close attention to the unstable relation between the classic as preeminently European or national and the classic as trans- or international, the essay seeks to reclaim the foundational concept of the classic for world literature, postcolonial studies, and literary criticism in an international frame.

In Putnam's Monthly Magazine for October, 1855, appeared the first installment of a sea story entitled Benito Cereno, which was continued and concluded in the November and December numbers. Following the established custom of that periodical, the story was printed without signature: and it remained unacknowledged until the following year, when it was included in The Piazza Tales, a volume of short stories by Herman Melville. Lost for half a century in the oblivion which engulfed all that Melville wrote, it did not again appear in type until its inclusion in the Standard Edition of Constable and Company in 1924. This year it has been republished separately in a limited edition by the Nonesuch Press.

Between the interpretation in Milton's prose works of the monarchy of Charles I and the portrayal in Paradise Lost of the tyranny of Satan there exists an extensive and complex consistency based on the concept of the divine right of kings, a doctrine that informs the character and world view of Satan as well as of King Charles. In his effort to counteract the Eikon Basilike's picture of Charles as a Christlike martyr-king, Milton drew in Eikonoklastes—albeit in fragmentary form—his own essentially fictional characterization of Charles as a tyrant. This analysis, continued in the Defences, studies Charles's personal heroism, political behavior, delusions about himself, his followers, and his cause and is extensively paralleled in the depiction of Satan. These prose works thus serve as a valuable literary gloss on Paradise Lost—on certain details of imagery and characterization and on Milton's conception of true liberty and revolution.

Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets (1967) challenges binary notions of whiteness and blackness by valorizing a third term—mestizaje. And yet the novel enlists dominant views of female gender and sexuality to affirm the protagonist's ethnic male identity. In my Chicana feminist reading of this Puerto Rican text, I import the reinterpreted figure La Malinche and its companion figure La Chingada—prevailing tropes in Chicano and Chicana literature and discourse of the 1960s—to illuminate the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. These intersections are key to social analyses that transcend binary conceptions of race and paradigms of dominant and subaltern.

Critics have attempted with diverse terminology and divergent points of emphasis to classify George Eliot's novels within the body of realistic fiction. She has been called a naturalist as well as a realist distinct from a naturalist; both her intent to depict the features of “the lowliest, … the least attractive person” and her inclination to shy away from “the animal” have been noted; she is cited as “the finest example extant of the thoroughgoing realism which came to be known as naturalism,” while attention is given, too, to her ability to exalt and idealize human nature and create morally uplifting examples of it in art. Undoubtedly the imprecision of our critical terminology accounts in part for the varying statements about her position. To this must be added the likelihood that critics are moved in various ways in their studies of the complex world that George Eliot describes and find in this world ample strands of evidence for whatever view they wish to emphasize. It is not the purpose at present to supply new and arbitrary definitions of “realism” and “naturalism,” nor to impose upon the reader a narrow unified view of George Eliot's work, but rather to examine the bearing of a broad and liberal trend of realism which can be observed to precede her rural novels in a body of critical discussion not often fully appreciated.

The neo-Catholic apologist Alexis Rio argued in 1836 that the idealism of medieval art was destroyed in the fifteenth century by a growing “paganism” and “naturalism.” Browning’s refutation in “Pictor Ignotus” of Rio’s defense of the Italian Pre-Raphaelites involved a severe distortion of the historical record. Rio’s thesis was widely debated in the late forties; above all, Charles Kingsley, whose definition of a “Protestant” realism was a direct response to the new ascetic theory, was a source of Browning’s more complex views of the fifties. “Fra Lippo Lippi” answers Rio, though its sensualism is only one component of Browning’s unstable doctrine. Browning’s polemical designs, which led him to play fast and loose with historical fact, explain both the iconoclasm and the conformity of the poem. Elsewhere, Browning’s endorsement of realism was limited by fear of an art that proclaims beauty to be its own self-sufficing end.

The principle of exchange, a principle that governs all aspects of social relations in The House of Mirth, institutes a fiction of parity even as it feeds on and reproduces the fundamental inequality of the transacting parties. Exchange does not mean mutual expenditure; it requires, rather, a paying party, there to meet the obligation, and a receiving party, there to collect the profits. Nonpayment—financial or otherwise—is the secret behind exchange. Lawrence Selden, despite his noble protestations, belongs firmly to the book's privileged, miserly company, for he refuses to part with his asset, his emotional capital. Lily is the only one who consistently pays, although, by the nightmarish logic of exchange, her scrupulous expenditure is precisely what constitutes her crime and justifies her punishment.

The five-act structure of Hamlet is modeled on the memento mori- timor mortis lyric as it is practiced in the English tradition from 1483 to 1600. Furthermore, the crucial fifth act opens with a set piece in the genre, taking as its point of departure Thomas Lord Vaux's “I Loathe That I Did Love.” But, as in other matters, Shakespeare's wide reading in the genre is evident in the set piece since it incorporates elements not found in Vaux's poem. Recognition of the eschatological concerns that are an inescapable part of the memento mori tradition helps us to see Hamlet's delays as an overwhelming concern for the plight of his soul.

In classical rhetoric, irony is included in allegory (“other speaking”) as one of its species: contradiction, or antiphrasis. Because contradiction is incompatible with the classical definition of allegory as “continued metaphor” and with the synecdochal and associative mode of thinking (polysemy) typical of complex allegorical works, irony was excluded from allegory in postclassical literary theory. Nevertheless, the conditions for allegorical expression are grounded in the systematic confrontation of antiphrasis and polysemy, as in a grid. For allegory to emerge from this scene of confrontation, polysemy must predominate, transforming the grid into a perspectival regress to an origin that remains out of sight. This transformation is accomplished by means of interpretation, to which irony, being confined to the realm of the subject, is inimical. Antiphrasis remains present throughout. But it is interpreted as the resonance of the origin that remains out of sight. (GT)

Criticism of Henry James in our time is verging into metaphysics. The late works have recently been analyzed in terms of “dialectic” and “myth”,1 as products of Swedenborgianism,2 and as an artistic objectification of William James' philosophical pragmatism.3 Despite great individual differences these three approaches hold in common the basic assumption that James' inner and final meaning has not yet been as-certained and the corollary assumption that this final meaning is perhaps expressed symbolically, by technique, rather than overtly by subject matter.4 In this climate of opinion James is conceived of as a kind of nineteenth-century Dante, the architect of a secular Divine Comedy for some later-day equivalent of scholasticism, and the legendary “late manner”, once considered merely idiosyncratic, is thought to be an elaborate structure which metaphorically expresses a coherent system of values. The critical problems are, first, to find James' Aquinas, or the rationale for the body of ideas on which the late works constitute a metaphor, and, second, to define the relationship between this logical statement and James' symbolic one.

The self in Jonson's comedies, like the self described by modern sociologists, is a reflection of other reflections, created by the society it creates. As Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority seems to show, the social self is radically contingent. Therefore the anagnorisis in Jonson's comedies is a catastrophe in more than the technical sense; it is the discovery of a self that cannot bear its own exposure. By contrast, the heroes and heroines of Shakespeare's romantic comedies discover themselves in relation to a nurturing family and a mature sexual family. Theirs is a psychological self. In the “comical satires,” Jonson encounters the problem of finding appropriate endings for plays whose characters can achieve no satisfying self-discovery. In Volpone the protagonist acts like an experimental social psychologist, exposing the pliability of the social self. The catastrophe shows that Volpone's own “substance” is only a reflection of his world's insubstantiality.