The fortunes of epiphany indicate both recent historical disparities within literary criticism and current cultural disparities between academic and popular discourse. The contextualist practice of Wordsworth and Joyce, in contrast to the purist theory that arose with the New Criticism, suggests that epiphany is a narrative device underscoring the historical and cultural construction of character. This conception is borne out by the original Epiphany, in Matthew, which manifests divine personality to human eyes through an episode of cultural difference and accommodation. Robert Browning's historicist poetry uses comparable but secular means of manifesting personality. In his dramatic monologues “Karshish,” “My Star,” and ‘“Transcendentalism,”’ epiphanic themes serve as measures of their speakers’ cultural construction. In discerning the relative differentiae that characterize such speakers, Browning's readers encounter their own relativity to interpretive conditions. As these examples imply, the modern literary epiphany ultimately effects the hermeneutic manifestation of the reader.

Early English stage melodrama was one version of a melodramatic mode that pervaded the nineteenth century in response to the effects of a growing market culture, especially the classificatory procedures of government bureaucracies and the concomitant formation of a class society. By examining the relation between this genre and the rioters who initiated the “Old Price Wars” in Covent Garden Theatre in 1809, I show how melodrama resisted a class society by supporting more traditional status hierarchies. Melodrama represented the contemporary confrontation between these two distinctive forms of social organization as a family conflict that included the audience. By means of climactic moments of audience participation in its plot, melodrama elicited the spectators' recognition of their own familial ties and therefore facilitated a symbolic reunion that both reflected and encouraged the behaviors of the Old Price rioters, who materially resisted the introduction of market relations into the theater.

This essay centers on the Gothic novel's status as an impassioned, and hence suspect, subliterary form. The traditional division of the Gothic by gender into two supposedly equal generic strands is somewhat misleading, since the majority of Gothic novels were written (as well as read) by women and since Gothic novels were feminized—disparaged in gender-specific ways—by a critical establishment outraged by both the passion and the popularity of the form. Because the debate over the Gothic also concerned the boundaries between high and low literature, the polemicists' use of gender clarifies how literary argumentation participated fully in larger cultural issues. Both the controversy surrounding the Gothic novel in the 1790s and the furor over prostitution in the 1840s focused on a potentially disruptive female passion, and understanding the connections between these debates sheds light on the evolution of Britain's literary and cultural identity and on the current dialogue over literary history.

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.”

A critical rereading of Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman,” a canonical text in modern Chinese literature, suggests a need to invoke modernism as a historicizing concept and to rethink modern Chinese literary historiography. Contrary to the conventional view of Lu Xun's story as no more than a realist fiction, the new interpretation shows how the work persistently and ingeniously articulates a modernist sensibility of time as well as a modernist politics of language. The Madman's madness not only expresses a self-consciousness that is radically modern in its break with a traditional gemeinschaft but also demarcates a new, oppositional symbolic order and practice. At the forefront of the historical New Culture movement, this archetypal text of deconstructive reading simultaneously promises a critical and a productive discursive strategy. The work's modernism, finally, requires modernity to be understood as both a concrete historical experience and a global situation.

An impromptu “festive theater” spreads its folkloric motives and themes throughout the action represented in the 1605 Quixote, shedding light on the knight's vexed status as hero or fool and the often lamented eclipse of his adventures by interpolated subplots in the book's second half. In a manner similar to the one C. L. Barber ascribes to Shakespeare, Cervantes allows the saturnalian rule of misrule to govern the theatricalized, carnivalized interactions of characters. But in archly celebrating the sentimental, romantic closures of a renewed golden age, the Cervantine narrative conspicuously stages—and thereby arouses curiosity about—the mediated text's dependence on unmediated festival. This complicity of theater and text typifies the negotiations between the high culture of early modern Europe and the popular practices and traditions that saturate it.

Offering a layered reading of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, this essay investigates the gender politics of the play's Elizabethan performance conditions together with those of twentieth-century film and video reproductions. Instead of attempting to recuperate Shrew for feminism, this reading confronts the sadomasochistic fantasies lurking behind the facades of farce and romantic comedy; considers how Shrew's representations accumulate cultural capital that can be deployed to make and remake new patriarchies and new myths about “woman,” as well as about women; and explores the play's continuing cultural renewal as a popular pleasure that weaves together voyeurism, fantasy, and consumerism.

Recent critical variations on Du Bois's formulation of the African American double consciousness provide new ways of examining Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in relation to both modernism and the double consciousness itself. Read next to texts like The Art of the Novel and The Waste Land, Invisible Man shows a “signifying” stance toward modernism. At the same time, Ellison's book performs a profound critique of such double-voiced strategies as signifying and the blues.

Macpherson's Poems of Ossian derived its extraordinary popularity from its power to resolve, in imaginary terms, the vexing ethical contradictions of the mid-eighteenth century. The poems effectively reconcile the age's nostalgia for the ancient polis ideal with its modern taste for polite manners. In the character of Fingal, the passionate fierceness of the citizen-warrior combines with the delicate affections fostered by domesticity, precommercial civic virtue joins with politesse, and the traditional attributes of masculinity merge with those of femininity. The abiding irony of Macpherson's text, however, is that its “feminization” of male heroes is offset by the dramatic elimination of all heroines, suggesting a certain male resentment toward women as sponsors of men's acquisition of manners.

Like the “tragic ways of killing a woman” that Nicole Loraux explores in Attic tragedy, Renaissance ways of killing a woman (including Shakespeare's in Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra, Marston's in Sophonisba, and Heywood's in The Rape of Lucrece) draw on ancient narratives of sacrificed virgins and suicidal wives. The theatrical practices that shape these narratives on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage challenge a critical discourse that has located the counterhegemonic impulses of Renaissance drama exclusively in popular theatricality. The moments that most enfranchise the boys who play Lavinia and Cleopatra and enable them to intervene in the meanings of their characters' deaths are those moments during which the Shakespearean stage most reveals its debt to the elite traditions of Senecan tragedy and the private playhouses of the children's companies.

The rediscovery of history, a recent literary-critical event, is problematic in its elision of the non-Western past and its subsumption of non-Western fictional works. Likewise, some new studies on the interplay of violence and representation, while offered as critiques of Western discourse, ignore significant earlier Third World theorizations. This essay, in focusing on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, aims to reinstate the absent history: those Third World conditions and exigencies that link postcolonial novels and a desire to think historically. Both books adopt a violent narrative strategy that reflects their status as products of a ruptured history scarred by imperialization.

This essay elucidates Ellison's complex relation to Emerson, an issue that has not been adequately addressed in the criticism of the “most read” novel in the African American tradition, Invisible Man. Although in his fiction and critical writings, Ellison consciously claims his namesake's cultural vision, he sees the apparently universalist Emersonianism as circumscribed by an inherent racism that expels the African American from its sphere. Consequently the novelist affirms the promise of Emersonianism while neutralizing its racist aspect, resocializing its spiritualized premises, and reinterpreting its dogmatic implications. Ellison's appropriation and redirection of Emerson are especially manifest in his variations on the Emersonian senses of self-reliance, representativeness, and social organicism. Paradoxically, by “signifying” on Emerson's project, Ellison becomes a truer American scholar in the Emersonian tradition, which, by its internal logic, asks for critique and reinterpretation in each age.