In A Vision, W. B. Yeats describes the principal symbol of his work as the figure of a double cone formed by tracing a line along the outer edges of two intersecting gyres, or vortices, the apex of each vortex in the middle of the other's base. He then asserts that the only writer outside speculative philosophy to have used the symbol was Flaubert, who had planned to write a story called “La Spirale.” Though it is impossible completely to credit Yeats's reading of “La Spirale,” his general assertion is nevertheless correct, extraordinarily, as a description of the Trois Contes, where the double cone appears both as a narrative structure and a theme, symbolizing the creative passage from material to spiritual life.

As a literary realist Twain was a practicing empiricist; as a humorist he was a practicing philosophical idealist. Often the two intellectual postures existed side by side within the same work—in A Tramp Abroad, for instance—but they did not enjoy a peaceful coexistence. As a consequence his career took on a pattern of great significance. In Huckleberry Finn he carried commonsense empiricism as far as it could go. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a genuinely pivotal work, he discovered, and contended with, not only empiricism’s radical limits but its inherent contradictions as well. Hence he evolved his peculiar (and perverse) form of idealism, of which The Mysterious Stranger is the (unfinished) consummation.

“Unimpersonated artistry,” the idea that narrators in the Canterbury Tales are intermittently replaced by the voice of the poet, is a notion common in Chaucer criticism. The idea arises from a confusion of voice with presence, and this confusion leads critics to posit preexisting characters and a preexisting poet whose combined traits constrain the meaning of the text. On the contrary, the poem is conspicuously textual, and the voices of the text create the characters and the narrator. Only by treating the pilgrims as the products, rather than the producers, of their tales can we construct their personalities. Similarly, we must construct the poet from his poem. The general narrator is not a naive “Chaucer the pilgrim” but a complex and sophisticated impersonator who withholds himself and directs us to the roles he plays in order to create himself as fully and complexly as possible in his poem.

The printed text of Le Misanthrope is only a partial record of Molière’s creation. Molière wrote his plays to be performed, not to be read, and he tailored each role in his plays to the individual talents of the particular actor who would play the role. In the original production of Le Misanthrope, each actor’s performance was part of an intricate web of contrasts and balances. Molière himself played Alceste; as in all his plays, his acting style, while unmistakably comic, occupied a middle ground between the grotesque style of one group of actors and the elegant polish of the actor who played Philinte.

Criticism has difficulty reconciling a writer’s interest in death with the categories of literary analyses. Death interest is rejected as orgiastic or treated reductively. The Old Curiosity Shop is used to show how a novelist’s staging of death expresses desires for radical authenticity, in Bataille’s sense of death as an authenticating violation of human limits, and how those desires are legitimated—since death also horrifies—by fusing with positive cultural ideals. Dickens employs a Victorian trope, grounding culture in death: a reverence for death generates brotherhood. The apparent regression or death wish so common to the endings of Victorian novels can be seen, not as a wish for stasis, but as the projection of desires for an authenticity that might be fulfilled within culture. Though art may not always find a social solution, when it dramatizes conflicts of limitation and limitlessness, the negation of death is a central reference point.

The charades of Vanity Fair represent an important but little understood fable of demonic and outraged womanhood as a subtext of Thackeray's larger historical fiction. In marking the culmination of Becky Sharp's career in the world of vanity—her triumph as Clytemnestra and her impersonation of the plaintive Philomele—the charades imply a corrupt sexual ideology threatening both violence and violation. But from the perspective of Thackeray as narrator, the verbally compressed and designedly opaque charades repress as much as they expose. His uncharacteristic narrative reticence in presenting the charades without comment reveals an uneasiness on Thackeray's part about the powers of the authorizing mind to know and to represent the darker laws that govern history and society.

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.

In the two parallel stories that constitute Il castello, some suddenly mute travelers use tarot decks to communicate their horrific tales to one another. Ultimately, the ghostly kings, queens, knights, and other conventional or famous literary characters who inhabit these novellas delimit two “voices” that frequently overlap and even coincide: the narrator-author’s and the spectator-reader’s. The violent chivalric world of war, love, and magic that generates the narrative action also produces a metanarrative dimension that asserts the text’s subject as writing and reading, while simultaneously figuring Calvino’s own writerly persona. The Number One tarot, Il Bagatto (The Minstrel), often images Faust in the fiction but more importantly images the writer, a (Marlovian) Faustian conjurer destined to fail. The ever-changing sequences of the cards allegorize the making of a fiction, while the deck itself allegorizes the plenitude of the finished text, unattainable by its author.

“Journey of the Magi,” anticipating the Four Quartets, constitutes a vision of historical process and a metaphor of religious mystery more complex than in Eliot's earlier work. Experimenting with dramatic monologue, remembering Browning's interest in the Higher Criticism, Eliot juxtaposes oral recitation against recorded account to provide an analogy for the Incarnation. As elsewhere, Eliot finds symbol and writing suspect: the Magus, in ironic ignorance, uses literally a figurative language Christianity had not yet created, but he intuits the Word better than readers steeped in biblical symbolism. Simultaneously Eliot interfiliates the Magus' speech with Matthew's gospel, Andrewes' 1622 Nativity sermon, and his own “impossible” re-presentation of the original utterance: the resulting historical sequence, collapsed by anachronisms, makes the poem's structure emblematize the Logos. Through the ostensible “loss” of the scribe's transcription, Eliot implicitly questions biblical canonicity and the traditions of Christian interpretation. The poem approximates his religious position in 1927.

The life of Boswell’s Johnson, with its manifold successes, is largely decided by others—the interested volunteers who, governing singly or collectively, control most of his conversation, writing, charities, frolics, trips, meals, and encounters. Johnson is a character whom experience befalls and who (between interruptions) is lost in “languor and dejection.” He is aware that “external authority” is his prime mover. His operating unit is himself plus one (or more). This dependence on his associates bears on the pessimism of the protagonist Johnson and perhaps has implications as well for the author Johnson and for his own volumes. Boswell is most original, potent, and subtle in rendering the part that other characters perform in the making of his hero, showing their role to be an ultimately integrating and exalting force both in individual scenes and in Johnson’s career as a whole.

Little Dorrit is both a narrative about authority and an examination of the authority of narrative. The novel links vocation with sonhood and storytelling with fatherhood and self-generation. Little Dorrit, however, tells a double story, of a daughter as well as of a son. If the son’s story relates the search to replace the father and to discover paternal authority, the daughter’s story details the horrors and consolations of incestuous desire and generational collapse. Storytelling that seeks the father as origin reveals paternal deception and inauthenticity; incestuous structures of desire attempt to collapse genealogy on the hero and heroine, making paternal origin unknowable and creating an overdetermined narrative ending. Dickens’ double story, then, identifies yet questions genealogy and the patriarchal family as metaphors for narrative structure.

Although the so-called nonfiction novel is ordinarily seen as a distinctly post-World War ii phenomenon, Afro-American literature has from its beginnings relied to a marked degree on the documentary mode. Close scrutiny of Afro-American prose narrative provides the basis not only for revising some common literary-historical generalizations but also for examining the nature of mimesis and historicity, since Afro-American writers have employed a wide range of techniques to persuade their readers of the truths proposed in their texts. A consideration of the uses of factuality in this body of literature enables us to make broader theoretical distinctions among the kinds of propositions conveyed by various types of fictional narratives and to illuminate the shady borderline between factual and fictive discourse.