Spenser's Amoretti have never been properly appreciated, because they have been judged by the norms they have sought to criticize, the norms of Renaissance Petrarchism. A critique of Petrarchan love, the Amoretti turn away from that system's restless egotism toward the world of marriage, which Spenser presents as a sacred harbor of rest. This is not an absolutely original turn, since Petrarch himself, founder of the conventions of Petrarchan love, also sought to escape his own love situation. He does so, in the Canzoniere, by turning toward Heaven and by turning Laura into an agent of transcendence, like Dante's Beatrice. The turn the Amoretti make is parallel to the turn made by the Canzoniere, though in Spenser marriage replaces death as the means of obtaining sacred rest. Spenser's exaltation of marriage is indebted to Protestant teaching, though the Amoretti is where this new conception of marriage first enters love poetry.

Charges by Jeremy Collier and others in the controversy generated by A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage have been widely accepted while the replies by Congreve, Vanbrugh, and many other stage defenders have been generally neglected or depreciated. The critical tenets of Collier's opponents are examined in the framework of four postulates Congreve presents in his own defense. Along with others sharing his views, Congreve the “Aristotelian” argues that the drama must represent vice and folly in strongly mimetic terms in order to shame offenders and divert and warn others, and also that the virtue portrayed on stage must be uncloistered and subjected to trials and temptations of a most pressing and realistic nature. Collier the “Platonist,” on the other hand, is shown to believe that such realistic examples are corruptive rather than corrective, and that therefore vice and folly must be represented only “in Generals.”

Hanover, New Hampshire. Another frigid winter day. I am walking to lunch. The dartmouth college green is covered in snow, and temperatures are dropping. It is January 1991, the day after Operation Desert Storm was launched in the Persian Gulf. “stop the war!!” A few people carrying large and small signs stand on the corner closest to Main Street; you can see their breath as they chant. “US out of Kuwait!” The war is so new that no lectures or teach-ins have been scheduled on campus yet, and I see that the protesters are neither students nor faculty members: they are people, many of them older, from surrounding New Hampshire and Vermont towns. Ahead of the academics, once again, I'm thinking. As on other such occasions, Grace Paley is here, wearing her blue parka, purple wool hat, snow boots, and mittens, holding her sign. The protests will continue every Friday at noon, in snow and ice, until the United States starts moving troops out of the Gulf in early March; I join when I can, but I often have conflicts on campus. Paley drives in from her home in nearby Thetford, Vermont, every time, without fail.

The essay reads the authorial hoax surrounding Araki Yasusada, said to be the author of poems relating experiences in post-Hiroshima Japan. The case—Yasusada's poems seem to have been written by a white American man—recalls (not for the first time) the difficulty the literary imagination has in dealing with biographical authorship. After examining the polemics the case generated around poetries of witness, the essay connects Yasusada's imagination to three other ideas: first, the collectively pathological memory associated with historical trauma (exemplified by Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments); second, subject-object relations in modern poetry (the essay closely reads two Yasusada poems in terms of their phenomenological concerns); and, third, a debate around the question of “woman's writing” carried on by Nancy K. Miller and Peggy Kamuf and inspired by another authorial hoax. The essay concludes by thinking about authors as historical objects—objects of readers’ subjective perception of them.

This article will offer an interpretation of Wuthering Heights based upon the extraordinary sadism which underlies Emily Bronte's concept of emotional relationships and indicate the significance of her preoccupation with infanticide. Unless one appreciates the importance of infanticide and sadism in Wuthering Heights, one cannot appreciate the nature of the love between Catherine and Heathcliff, a love which I believe to have been frequently misunderstood, nor can one understand the motivation behind Heathcliff's killing of his own son. My chief contention is that Wuthering Heights is basically a perverse book—I use the word without its usual pejorative connotations—and that its power is owing precisely to its perversity.

The Beowulf Poet's extraordinary facility in using a vast and diverse word-hoard has long excited students of the poem. Among the critical studies, discussions of vocabulary rank high in number, and almost every conceivable approach to the subject has been investigated either in part or with a high degree of thoroughness. Single words, such as ealuscerwen, and groups of related words, such as rime-words, kennings, and words of Christian content or reference, have received close attention, as well as larger lexical patterns, such as variation and the formulaic texture, while further studies have compared the vocabulary with that of other Old English poems or Nordic literatures. Aside from purely lexicographical or etymological inquiries, there are three perspectives to which these many discussions generally belong: 1) descriptive: usually statistical observations about the number of compounds relative to simplices or of formulas relative to the whole vocabulary of the poem, or a comparison of the frequency of certain lexical types with other poems, or a classification of the habits of word-formation; 2) figurative and appellative: the types of verbal figures and their analogues elsewhere in Old English and Old Norse; and 3) usage: the use of words in particular contexts or for specific effects, and the structural use of synonymic substitution and variation. The first emphasis is important because it reveals the composition and its formative strata of the poem's total vocabulary, and also the lexical relationships with other poetry or poetic traditions. The second serves to isolate a lexical stratum which is by nature exclusively poetic and to observe how much of this stratum is probably original and how much traditional. But it is the third perspective which is interested most essentially in the poet, since here the attempt is made to discern the many ways by which he has used language significantly to dramatize, emphasize, elucidate, intimate, and so on. Much that has been written in this category has concerned itself with the larger patterns of variation as a characterizing, describing, or structural device, rather than with smaller, more confined, strokes of verbal association and verbal play. A well-known instance of the latter is the epithet for Grendel, healoegn (142) which, in its context, wherein a bona fide hall-thane anxiously seeks out a hiding place as protection against the intruder, may with complete justification be termed ironic, and the same thing may be said of a similar appellation used later for both Grendel and Beowulf, renweardas (770), There are also hints here and there that the poet may have been influenced by learned Latin figures. Many years ago Albert Cook compared flod blode weol (1422; Exodus 463, flod blod gewod) to Aldhelm's fluenta cruenta (De Virginitate, 2600), and more recently H. D. Meritt called attention to the similarity between Hrothgar's warning that in death “eagena bearhtm / forsiteo ond forsworces” (1766b-67a) and Aldhelm's “ferreus leti somnus palpebrarum conuolatus non tricaverit” (De Virg. Prose, 321.7, ed. Ewald). It is in the smaller strokes, I think, that the poet's acumen and craft are most incisively contained, and it is to some of these that the present discussion is devoted.

Joyce's early and middle fictions often examine the pivotal role the gaze of the other plays within human consciousness. The self's enthrallment to the other's eye is dramatized even more vividly in Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, where the dreaming subject conceives of himself pervasively as object, scrutinized by a gaze alternately critical and flattering. The power of the gaze to decenter and destabilize the self expresses itself formally in the Wake's odd, controversial narrative structure: the dream text unravels largely from the vantage point of the internalized gaze, its innovative form constituting an attempt to represent the other within the self—a presence often elided by the waking mind. Joyce's final oeuvre inscribes the dream return of a psychic obsession that surfaces initially in his earlier explorations of the self-conscious subject. This essay treats Finnegans Wake as an uncanny text, strange and yet familiar.

This essay argues that two early modern phenomena, the rise of the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem, are interrelated. This argument, introduced through a study of Montaigne's meditation on the ruins of Rome in his Travel Journal, takes on complementary forms. The first is that sublimity motivated skepticism: the sense that a force existed outside the aesthetic categories conventional in the Renaissance (such as wonder) drove authors into a skeptical frame of mind. The second is that skepticism created sublimity: the skeptical mindset offered alternative resources of aesthetic power as authors quarried the fragmentation and distraction embedded in skepticism to fashion a sublime style. These claims revise standard views of skepticism and the sublime, suggesting a mandate for an enriched aesthetics behind late-Renaissance loss of belief and exposing the Renaissance impulse behind the modern career of sublimity.

The four-hundred-odd lines of Beowulf1 between the defeat of Grendel and the attack by Grendel's mother contain two brief digressive passages, set with some appearance of symmetry on either side of the longer Finn Episode (1071—1159): a lay by one of HroSgar's thanes, contrasting the glorious deeds of Sigemund with the downfall of Heremod (874-915); and a pair of allusions introduced by the poet through the device of the torque given to Beowulf, concerning a mysterious exploit of Hama and the fatal expedition of Hygelac (1197-1214). The four basic references which make up these two passages seem designed as piecemeal allusions to stories more or less lost to us—a fact that must necessarily deprive us of much that the lines were meant to convey. Yet even allusion, if it is developed at all, is normally developed in the direction of its intended meaning, so that its general drift can sometimes be understood without a full knowledge of its underlying story. In this paper I will try to show that the Sigemund-Heremod and Hama-Hygelac passages are each organized around a clear thematic contrast, closely related to its context in the narrative; that they are meaningfully related to one another, and together express a theme of importance in this part of the poem; and that their significance grows naturally out of the great heroic ideal of sapientia et fortitudo which I believe lies at the heart of Beowulf? Section I will analyze the two passages themselves and their immediate contexts; Section II will explore their relation to the poem and its governing ideal.

Esther Summerson is not the sentimental, insipid character she is usually taken to be. Dickens uses her as the unconscious spokesman of the many characters in Bleak House who have never known parental love and makes her tale the most important illustration of one of the novel's major concerns—the breakdown of the parent-child relationship. His attitude is essentially clinical: he is interested in recording a complex pattern of psychological development in detail. Esther's story demonstrates both the immediate and the long-range effects of her godmother's pious cruelty and neglect. The novel shows that her inhibited intelligence and self-effacement are products of this upbringing and traces her attempt to become a more assured and self-possessed woman. Esther's dawning confidence, however, is shaken first by her illness and disfigurement and then by Mr. Jarndyce's proposal. The two incidents are best understood as crucial symbolic events in her attempt to transcend the determining influences of her childhood. Although Dickens finally resorts to fantasy to resolve Esther's conflicts, his detailed study of the stages of her life is that of a psychological realist interested in revealing the connections between childhood experience and adult personality.

When feminist critics of the 1970s rediscovered “The Yellow Wallpaper,” they constructed an interpretation of the story and the history of its publication and reception. Subsequent critics lent authority to an emerging set of accepted “facts”: nineteenth-century audiences read the tale as a ghost story rather than as a critique of the sexual politics of marriage; Gilman fought valiantly against hostility from the entrenched hierarchy of male editors who refused to publish her work; and irate male physicians censured the story once it appeared. By reexamining the documentary evidence on which those “facts” are based, we examine the role that ideology plays in gathering and interpreting evidence. Gilman's story serves as a fine but certainly not a unique example of how scholarship is as grounded in historical biases as the literature it seeks to illuminate.

This essay examines the correlation between lyric obscurity and lyric communicability—that is, the capacity of lyric poetry to serve, even in the absence of understanding (for certain communities of readers), as a matrix of social and cultural cohesion. The essay takes up this question by examining the contours of a little-known vernacular tradition in poetry and by considering the correspondences, in a limited sense, between slang and poetry. Specifically, the essay examines the permutations of the so-called canting tradition (lyrics written in the jargon of the criminal underworld) and its relation to the dominant poetic tradition.

The female husband (published 12 November 1746) is an anonymous pamphlet so obscure and so nearly pornographic that its few acquaintances have passed it by, almost in complete silence. I know of only four copies, one each in the British Museum, the Bristol Public Libraries, the Huntington Library, and the library of Charles B. Woods, of the State University of Iowa. It purports to be the biography of one Mary Hamilton, who was in fact tried for fraud at Taunton, Somerset, on 7 October 1746. It has long been acknowledged, on external evidence, as Henry Fielding's. But among themselves scholars remain skeptical. The pamphlet has remained in limbo, listed for immortality but ignored, not quite accepted and not quite damned. I hope to demonstrate beyond all doubt that The Female Husband is Fielding's, and to suggest that this pamphlet, though of slight literary worth, is an interesting exhibit of Fielding at work upon meager journalistic fact, a somewhat discomforting glimpse of the comic moralist trying to sustain his principles and his comedy within recalcitrant material.

An understanding of the workings of sound symbolism in poetry is essential to theoretical and practical criticism alike. During the past few decades, we have come to recognize that sound-symbolic effects are solidly based on linguistic facts. Studies of the ways in which sound symbolism is put to use generally in the works of a given poet can fruitfully supplement traditional analyses of particular passages. Though Robert Frost is known for his proficiency in mimetic sound effects, the language of his “speaking voice” is not conspicuously marked by the systems of alliteration and assonance that characterize the verse of Tennyson or Swinburne. Yet such systems, among other features, appear in certain poems in a “chanting voice” associated, overtly or symbolically, with the protagonist's fear of death. Ultimately, this proves to be the poet's fear of obliteration, of succumbing to the power of a now obsolete music and thus vanishing from the poetic scene without a trace.

The feminine figure of “Public Credit,” which appears prominently and frequently in early-eighteenth-century Whig texts, is a rich and complex symbolization of early liberal political and economic ideology. In readings of Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, and the Whig libertarians John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (the collective authors of Cato's Letters, a polemic that had a major influence on American revolutionary ideology), I show that their representations of Credit speak not to the empirical truth of economic value but openly to its imaginary desirability. Credit thus represents a manifest political and cultural strategy of these Whig writers for articulating and defending the values of a liberal market society by representing them as desirable—or, in other words, as aesthetic values.

While the graphic novel has gained a measure of respectability in the United States, the medium of which it is a part has not. Even in the claim that comics are “not just for kids anymore,” adult comics readers are still stereotyped as immature. his paradoxical situation calls for a new assessment of the midcentury moment when comics were attacked and threatened with censorship and of the igure of Fredric Wertham, a famous anticomics crusader who is still hated in comics culture today. Far from being symptoms of immaturity, as they are sometimes described, attacks on Wertham are evidence of the longterm efects of illegitimacy on the experiences of comics readers and creators. Subject even now to regulatory discourses of maturity, contemporary comics are best understood not as a literature reaching adulthood but as the basis of a vital literacy still struggling with a long history of marginalization.

It is often said that proper reading relies on the art of taking a pause: On our abilityto suspend the pressing rhythms of the everyday and allow ourselves to absorb, and be absorbed by, alternative structures of temporality. The clocks of the imagination do not run at the same speeds as the timetables of the real; to read is to inhabit the present at one's own pace and in the light of a multitude of unknown pasts and possible futures. Recent years have witnessed a swell in publications pondering the state of reading in our world of instant connectivity and shrinking attention spans. In one of these books, Jane Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize winner, considers the peculiar acts of writing and reading a novel as profound contributions to the process of enlightenment—a kind of enlightenment enlightened about itself and no longer repressing the other of reason: “The way in which novels are created—someone is seized by inspiration and then works out his inspiration methodologically by writing, observing, writing, observing, thinking through, and writing again—is by nature deliberate, dominated neither by reason nor by emotion” (176). According to Smiley, the act of reading a novel re-creates an author's deliberate negotiation of affect and rationality. As readers follow the lines of a (good) book, they remain in relative control over the speed of their reading, able to pause when necessary, to hasten forward when desiring so, to reread passages at their leisure, and to close the pages of the book when overtaken by exhaustion. Good stories rely on intricate plot constructions and narrative tensions, but they also situate readers as subjects freed from the temporal determination and ideological drive of other time-based media. Good books can certainly move readers, but—following Smiley's logic—they will not curtail a reader's freedom to move along the text at his or her own speed, and hence they will allow this reader to simultaneously bring into play emotion and reason, the absorptive and the distant.

There is a sentence in the preface to the Harrison Hayford-Merton Sealts version of Billy Budd that has been quoted before and will be quoted again. It is the one in which the editors hope that their “comprehensive scholarly edition will narrow the ground of disagreement and widen that of understanding.” It is doomed to repetition because it allows any critic who cites it a ready-made rhetorical stance: with its sanction he can assume the posture of the reasonable reader and humbly offer himself as mediator between the various opposing critical armies. Then, having established himself as a man of good will and peacemaker, he can do his best to annihilate at least one of the armies, the views of which, it somehow turns out, he rabidly despises.

Read as a fable of divine inspiration, the myth of Leda and the swan offers a model of creativity that is both compelling and problematic; while it affirms the visionary poet's privileged position as mediator between a divine force and humankind, it does so only by insisting on the artist's victimization and feminization. Apparently well aware of this paradox, Yeats, Rilke, Lawrence, and HD, in their revisionary accounts of the myth, all foreground the dialectical relation between passivity and authority— between spiritual annunciation and literary enunciation—that informs their own, and indeed any, visionary poetics. At the same time, however, these modernist poets resist a strong identification with Leda herself, disassociating themselves from her role as victim even while seeking to participate in her revelatory “knowledge” and “power.”