It cannot be denied that the personages in Browning's great poem, The Ring and the Book, are of the poet's own making, and he himself would have been the first to acknowledge them as his own creatures. On the other hand, his repeated assertions that, in mingling his fancy with the material derived from the Old Yellow Book, he has not misinterpreted the facts contained in his source, and the insistence upon the poet's historical fidelity by the editor of the “Book” and other critics, have been regarded with suspicion. Indeed, the question has recently been raised whether The Ring and the Book is not a glorious misinterpretation of The Old Yellow Book.

A problem currently in our reading of Byron's Don Juan is that of identifying the speaker. There is a tendency to deny the presence of a single speaker, and to dissolve the poem into a number of different voices. This, accompanied by an emphasis on the ironic nature of statements made in the course of the work, is intended to move us towards seeing the poem as ultimately ironic, often with some suggestion of the literature of the “absurd.” An extreme statement of this position is offered by William H. Marshall, who claims that the structural basis of the poem is “only the seeming myriad of speakers.”

Owen Wister's The Virginian, considered the prototypical cowboy western, only vaguely satisfies formula expectations. Encounters consist more of wordplay than gunplay, and physical conflicts rarely occur. Far from depicting a conventional male violence tamed at last by a feminized East, the novel celebrates the Virginian's rhetorical triumph over the schoolmarm and the silencing of her feminism in favor of a “logic” of patriarchy. Why should this best-seller have established a formula it does not fulfill? One explanation may involve its setting in Wyoming—known as the “Equality State” for first having enfranchised women. By opposing a thesis of sexual inequality to that setting's implications, the novel could be read as two things at once: a paean to an older, masculine West and yet a brief for modern male hegemony. Readers troubled by a resurgent feminism could delight unawares in the novel's contradictions and read into it the formula western.

If the neo-classical aesthetic of imitation could lead to poetic photocopies, it could also stimulate a remarkable variety of invention, as Spenser's “April“, Milton s Nativity Ode, and Marvell's “The Picture of Little T. C.“ demonstrate. All are imitations of the golden-age or messianic eclogue, and cannot really be understood outside of their genre; but at the same time they completely metamorphose the conventional generic pattern. Spenser's “April” employs the golden-age conventions not only to celebrate Elizabeth I but also, and more importantly, to portray symbolically, in the identification of Elisa with Song, the Orphic ordering power of art, the interrelation of the order of art and the order of the body politic, and the new golden age of poetry heralded by his work. Milton's Nativity Ode uses the same formulas (but remolded by Christian truth and the procedures of divine meditation) to praise the true messiah, Christ, and to celebrate the new golden age, the new Eden, which His birth begins. And Marvell's “Little T. C.” uses the golden-age formulas to assert wittily the Renaissance longing for a new golden age of free love, when Honor ceases to restrict the natural flowering of the human bud.

Thomas Middleton, dramatist (1580–1627), was not by any means the literary discoverer of the rogue's fascination. Even the moral Harman had lost himself, at times, in the romantic appeal of the vagrants he pictured, and Greene, after a perfunctory moral preface to his series of Conny-catching Pamphlets (1591–92), had given himself more and more unreservedly to revealing the adventurous life of rogues.

More insistently, perhaps, than any other poem in English, Lycidas raises the purely aesthetic problem of how the emotions may be stirred by lines which at first are much less than perspicuous to the intellect and even after many readings remain obscure at two or three points. Johnson's attack to one side, Lycidas has received all but universal praise, couched often in language so high-pitched that it absorbs easily adjectives like “exquisite,” “thrilling,” “tremendous,” and. “supreme.” Why is the emotional impact so powerful? A reply must be sought (I think) in the affective connotations of words, phrases, and images in formal combination; and it is worth finding because if in one of its aspects literature is history, in another, and not unimportant, aspect it is immediate experience.

In his General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer presents three major attempts at authorial voicing. Through the voices of his “clerk,” his pilgrim, and Harry Bailly, he explores the poet's roles and the limits of poetry. A clerkly voice, assuming the authority of a philosopher, speaks the opening eighteen lines. The pilgrim, who occupies a privileged position among the three voices, guides the central section of the Prologue, as he defines a complex, tenuous, dialogic relationship with his materials—the other pilgrims and the mortal world. The last of the voices—Harry Bailly's—introduces a theory of poetry as mirthful distraction, unmoored in the quest for truth. Chaucer's multivoiced exploration of poetic authority dramatizes a wide range of medieval attitudes toward poetry. The poet's purpose is not to arrive at a “correct” notion but to raise questions about what fiction and language can and cannot do.

In that rich volume, The Decline and Fall of the West, we observe that the color preferences of a given people or age are considered as a part of the accumulated evidence that finally places the cultural stage of the group in the whole vast Spenglerian cycle. The Greeks, we learn, were fond of primitive reds and yellows, while the Christians, partly in revolt against Greek paganism, came to prefer the other end of the color scale, the greens and blues, and the purity of white. Red had become for them a symbol of sin and bloodshed, and yellow a mark of shame. These observations are further tied up with Spengler's time-space theories. The Greeks, whose time-space conceptions are labelled as present, as contrasted with our own efforts to link the dim past and the remote future by the aid of our historical and evolutionary perspective, are said naturally to prefer red and its variants as symbolic of life, love, and splendid action; while the Christians as naturally preferred the more remote greens, blues, and whites as symbolic of meditation and worship, the projection of interest into the mystic, the supernatural, the life yet unrealized. A later romantic development also associated blues and greens with nature and its poetry, while whites, grays and blacks inevitably spell the abstract, the psychic, and the mystery of the unknown.

Critics have said that Niebla shows both the protagonist's emergence into conscious existence and the author's attempt to create himself through the novel. But the plot repeatedly points up the character's self-deception, which makes the author's effort problematical. Niebla begins with a comic view of Augusto Pérez's falling in love with the image of a woman he has invented; it ends with a philosophical defense of the confusion of fiction and reality. The ambiguity caused by these incompatible approaches is heightened by the similarities between Augusto's ideas and Unamuno's. The ironic exposure of selfdelusion alternates with a serious theory of fantasy. In the last chapters Unamuno, like Augusto, seems to argue for total delusion. This view is most explicitly formulated in the “Historia de Niebla” which appeared as a prologue to the 1935 edition. In it Unamuno fuses legend, novel, nivola, and eternal life into the image of a communal mist in which one can be saved. Throughout his life Unamuno tried to see himself as a substantial entity and not merely an idea in the minds of others. As that goal became more elusive, he chose instead to imagine that the world was a dream in which he could be eternally represented. In order to perpetuate his illusory self, he turned all reality into fiction. Niebla anticipates this maneuver.

There are two truths about death: first, it is certain; second, its significance has always been a mystery. Man may think of death in one of two ways. He may consider it the goal of life and dedicate himself to preparation for it; or he may consider it a hostile power that attacks and destroys life. The idea that death is a desirable goal was heightened by many romantics of the early nineteenth century to a fascinated interest in death—a kind of intoxication. For them life existed for the sake of death. But in their philosophy death was merely a phase of “Werden und Vergehen.” They longed for and often sought death because they saw beyond it “absolute life”, life unhampered by the limitations of individual existence. This romantic concept, of course, had nothing in common with the traditional Christian idea of immortality.

Literary historians have celebrated Wordsworth's pastoral poems for their realism; more recently, new-historicist critics have criticized them for idealization. Reading the poems as ironic, even as parodie in Bakhtin's sense, explains what makes such opposite assessments both plausible and insufficient. My chief example is “Michael.” Formal symmetries in “Michael” suggest a mythic dimension, but they are subtly breached so that the poem cannot be read definitively as idealization. Conversely, while the poem's emphasis on labor suggests reality, its subtle exaggerations also discredit the use of labor as a mere device of realism. Wordsworth invites readers to consider pastoral's primary symbols, sheep, in two symbologies simultaneously: spiritual and material. Such cross-valuation, which recovers an ambivalence crucial to both biblical and classical pastoral, neither mimics nor distorts reality but rather foregrounds the way reality is constructed from symbols. Considering Wordsworth's pastoral as a version of Bakhtinian parody further illuminates the anti-interpretive functions of both modes.

The Heliand “Preface” comprises a “Praefatio” in prose and thirty-four hexameter “Versus.” According to the “Praefatio” a Saxon poet was commissioned by Louis the Pious to execute a metrical paraphrase of the Bible. To this account the “Versus” add the fiction, borrowed from Bede's Caedmon story, that the poet was inspired in a dream to carry out the undertaking. The “Praefatio et Versus” appear for the first time in a printed book from 1562 and were once thought to be a humanist counterfeit, but they are now generally considered to be medieval in origin. The prose “Praefatio” seems to justify our confidence, but the first fifteen lines in the “Versus” make this composition suspect; they belong to the tradition of the country idyll, a genre unknown in the ninth century, but well documented in the sixteenth. The sentiments and wording are particularly close to Angelo Poliziano's popular poem “Rusticus” (1483). It therefore seems likely that the “Versus” were added to the “Praefatio” by an antiquarian familiar with Bede sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century.

It seems safe to say that no writer of the French Enlightenment, with the possible exception of Voltaire, has received so much attention as that strangely paradoxical genius Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We know he was born in Switzerland of French blood, was largely self-taught, and made his vagabond way across eighteenth-century France, leaving in his wake a considerable number of works, the best known of which were all highly incandescent: the two Discourses, Lettre sur les spectacles, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Le Contrat social, Emile, and the Confessions.

Novice heroes in modern Serbocroatian oral epic tradition present the same scholarly problems as does Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey. In this Balkan narrative tradition, only a small number of epics has been recorded in which the novices and their stories are the main substance. The Yugoslav singer Avdo Međedović performed one of these by dictation for Milman Parry in Bijelo Polje, Yugoslavia, in 1935: The Marriage of Mehmed, Son of Smailaga. That song of 12,311 verses is one of the two longest epics recorded from Serbocroatian tradition. By thematic analysis of it and eight other Serbocroatian epics of initiation representing the full range of the initiation story's multiformity, we can establish that Avdo's epic song is an orthodox telling of the traditional story in spite of its extraordinary, Homeric size, and that both the ancient Greek legends of Theseus (in Plutarch and Apollodorus) and Homer's story of Telemachus are thematically indistinguishable from it. The content of a common Balkan mythic tradition underlying the ancient Greek and modern Serbocroatian stories can be described, and the traditional correctness of Telemachus' presence in the Odyssey can be explained from Yugoslav tellings of the Telemachia.

In the Renaissance, religious and political confrontations generated an intensified awareness of the self which marks a decisive phase in the evolution of human personality, whose study may be entitled Historical Psychology. Alienation from religious and political strife turned the interests of Petrarch and Montaigne toward their own minds, Marot's persecution for heresy developed his self-awareness in L'Enfer, followed by Ronsard's self-defensive autobiography in his Reply to Insults. Such models prefigure Milton's authorial intrusions of Paradise Lost. Shakespeare illustrates the creative impact of religious controversy by enriching the hints of Lollardry in Falstaff with a wide variety of Puritan affectations in the Elizabethan period. The Protestant attacks on Machiavelli also help in developing the character of Richard III and similar introverted creations, as T. S. Eliot notes. By the time of Marvell, personality is considered essentially artificial and willed—an inheritance from which Swift, the Romantics, and many modern authors have profited. Historical Psychology is thus a necessary tool if we are to handle the development of literary tradition.

Midway in his canticus the woeful Troilus laments: “Al sterelees within a boot am I.” This might seem to be nothing more than a felicitous phrase aptly suited to describe the plight of the unhappy lover. But in the Man of Law's Tale Constance actually experienced the dreadful circumstances which gave rise to a metaphor. We remember that the old soldaness, after killing her son and his Christian partisans, caused the Roman bride to be put on a ship without a rudder, and bade her learn navigation back to Italy. What treasure Constance had brought to Syria was put into the boat with her, as well as a considerable supply of victuals and clothes. For a number of years thereafter Constance tossed about on the sea, preserved from harm and death by Him who saved Daniel and Jonah, until her ship stuck fast on the shore of Northumberland, where she was found by the constable of a castle who came down to search the wreck. Soon after Constance's marriage to King Ælla of Northumberland, the monarch was called away to fight his enemies. Ælla's mother, like the old soldaness of Syria, hated her son's wife and plotted her destruction. When Constance's child was born the old queen contrived that the message to Ælla announcing the news should report the birth of a monster, with the suggestion that Constance was an evil fairy; and for the king's reply she substituted a command that the young woman and her offspring should be placed in the ship in which she had been found originally,—that is, a ship without rudder in the beginning, and now, apparently, a wreck,—that she should be pushed out from shore and charged never to return. The salient facts in these two episodes, which we may call Constance I and Constance II, are: Expulsion by sea in an unseaworthy boat, setting adrift in the same kind of boat by reason of a serious indictment, and safe-conduct or protection by a mysterious or divine power.

In French, the words tasse ‘teacup’ and théière ‘teapot’ also denote a public rest room where men have sex—a “tearoom” in English—and prendre le thé ‘to have tea’ means “to have homosexual sex.” Most of the narrative of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is said to result from having tea with a madeleine. This essay examines the possibility that the passage in which Charlus engages in tearoom sex may imply that there are other such tea parties in the novel. More broadly, I consider the importance of coded or secret languages in the production of sexual knowledge. Revealing the tearoom's secret opens up a Trojan horse (to use Monique Wittig's term) of interpretive uncertainties in the novel, as well as a contagion of doubt concerning heterosexual masculinity and male subjectivity.