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.

Spenser's Faerie Queene is constituted by the fiction of a single transcendental body that is at once spiritual, politic, and aesthetic. The poem's allegorical structure reflects an implicit doctrine of “the poem's two bodies.” Its poetics is an aesthetic theology based on the motifs Kantorowicz discerned in Tudor “political theology”: perfect wholeness, secular perpetuity, and a doctrine of “assimilation.” Analysis of the negative moment in the dialectic of this theology shows allegory to be a strategy for summoning the poem's ideal body into representation as a sublimated negative image of its natural, or written, body. Spenser's image for this ideal body, the veiled hermaphrodite, confounds not only sexual difference but also the difference between metaphor and catachresis, or between mimetic and iconoclastic decorums. No purely mimetic critical reading can do justice to this structure, which demands that a reader “overgo” the text in the production of a historical or political “truth.”

The comic conclusion of Much Ado about Nothing, which ends with the conventional closure provided by multiple marriages, leaves unresolved crucial conflicts that the play has generated. The language of the play sets up a complex association of the word, the sword, and the phallus and represents the “merry war” between the sexes as a masculine struggle to maintain control of representation. To read others in this play is an act of aggression; to be read is to be emasculated. Masculine privilege is contingent on the legibility of women, whose ambiguous “seeming” gravely threatens the men of Messina and provokes them to use various defensive strategies against it, from the exchange of tendentious jokes to the symbolic sacrifice of Hero. The play itself is implicated in these strategies insofar as the characters' plot to recuperate Claudio through the fiction of Hero's death is also the plot of the play.

In writing Mithridate, Racine manipulates his historical sources to put into play two names—Pharnace and Xipharès, Mithridate's sons—and two forms of death—pharmakon ‘poison’ and xiphos ‘sword’—and to explore the relation between the heroic individual (Mithridate) and the two forms of death that come to be associated with these two sons. The pharmakon takes on a double valence: as a vaccination against the world seen purely as the domain of betrayal and as a potential cure for the living death that constitutes heroism. It is emblematic of the hero's duplicity, which the heroic name attempts to cover up and which only the revelation of the hero's inner feelings—his love for Xipharès, the “sword” ‘xiphos’ that penetrates the protective layers of heroism and touches the mutable being hidden within—brings to light.

This essay explores the significance of history in Hawthorne's fiction. Hawthornean romance, despite its extensive use of history, emphasizes its distance both from a real world and from ordinary historical discourse. The world, it seems to argue, is more like fantasy than fact, more like story than history. Nonetheless, Hawthorne's historical fictions remain carefully researched, meticulously detailed. The Hawthornean world, so highly subjective, so complexly encoded and symbolic, never dissipates into the fantasy that seems to narrate it. What prevents the evaporation of reality into dream, according to Hawthorne, what ensures the distance between the perceiving self and the world, and hence what restrains the imagination from engulfing a reality that is largely at the mercy of the individual's perceptual authority, is historical consciousness. Hawthorne's historical romances are about a historical imagination that is also a moral imagination.

Readers of Dubliners are usually well prepared for a leap out of the suffocating world Joyce displays there, for a promise, however ambiguous or mundane, of escape. But in a story like “The Dead” the production of a desire for escape at all costs may be the crucial interpretive problem, for it inevitably stimulates our mystified identification at the end with a character whose apparent awakening is itself socially conditioned. Unless interpretation radically reevaluates the cultural codification of reflective consciousness, we remain locked within a Christian paradigm of self-knowledge as truth that transcends material oppositions through selflessness—through the insistent generosity that punctuates this story. Gabriel's concluding “insight” and humility may then only reproduce an ideology that Joyce cruelly traces throughout bourgeois Dublin life: to escape his constant humiliation by others, Gabriel must finally humiliate himself.