Much scholarship has explored the concept of wyrd ‘fate’ in Anglo-Saxon literature and thought; this essay examines the visions of human choice. Beowulf especially presents choice in a wide range of spheres, from what we might call the spiritual and moral to what we might distinguish as the military and political. Indeed, Beowulf synthesizes traditions of choice in Anglo-Saxon culture to present a unique perspective, tracing inner resolve to its causes and consequences in the social world. And so the essay surveys ideas and expressions of choice in Anglo-Saxon homiletic poetry and prose, heroic verse, and chronicles, examining the powers and paradoxes of each to outline a central yet little-studied aspect of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture.

Interpretations of violence in Christopher Marlowe's plays have emphasized biographical, literary, and philosophical roots over social and historical conditions. If, however, we glance out Marlowe's window at contemporary rituals, we can enlarge these views of staged violence. His numerous references to official methods of persecution—from boiling to pressing, from branding to beheading—are not only projections of dramatic character but also revisions of corresponding Tudor social practices: public executions and their kin, torture. Although these entertainments provide Marlowe with ready-made elements for dramatizing tragedies of will, he uses those elements to turn theatricality against itself and to expose the fraudulent core of such exhibitions, even as he acknowledges their thematic power. Exaggerating the profound ambiguity of artifice, Marlowe undermines the moralizing that accompanies spectacles of punishment and transforms a theater of pain into a drama of subversion.

Thomas Gray's ode on the death of Walpole's cat is paradigmatic of eighteenth-century English incidental verse. Such verse often draws strength from, and facilitates, the larger historical discourses of mercantile and imperial expansion. The images, themes, and worldviews of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poems on public themes also extend into “occasional” private poems, which turn into palimpsestic records of the influence of empire on the poetic imagination. In particular, negative representations of female desires function as ideological surrogates for the playing out of the more anxious scenarios of imperial desire. Gray's ode, which takes the overt form of the animal fable, is also an allegorical satire on women and a displaced account of the eighteenthcentury British domestication of the imperial ideal. This essay unravels the representational, literary, and sociohistorical codes that enable the ode to perform equally and effectively at all these levels.

The Russian formalist and Tolstoy scholar Boris Eikhenbaum is best known for his work in developing an intrinsic poetics. After his formalist period, however, Eikhenbaum turned, in his work on Tolstoy, to extrinsic approaches, initially privileging author and reader and later focusing on social context. This essay argues that Eikhenbaum's choice of particular extrinsic approaches was suggested, indirectly and unexpectedly, by Soviet political culture in the Stalin years. An examination of the relation between Eikhenbaum's literary theories and Soviet political reality is followed by an evaluation of Eikhenbaum's postformalist Tolstoy scholarship.

To become all things, thereby resolving all contradictions, was a supreme aspiration of Renaissance humanists from Pico della Mirandola to Fray Luis de Leon. Prompted by the existential aporias of a search for truth and characterized by recourse to the chiastic paradox, Unamuno takes up this challenge and transforms it into an essential element of his modernist poetics. As an incipient but unconsummated form of dialectical argumentation, the chiasmus arrests progressive movement toward the resolution of the contradictions it generates. This master trope enables Unamuno to become all things yet rest in none, simultaneously to affirm and to deny momentous philosophical and moral positions, to offer multiple choices of being, and to avoid closure.

Japanese modernity is often equated with Westernization, and the cross-cultural link is restricted to the Western influence on Japan. The translations of Western philosophy and poetry in the Meiji period (1868-1912), however, relate to native symbolist poetics, in a way that has earlier parallels: Japan's alchemical cultural interaction with China in the transformative cultivation of Zen in the medieval period and its complex responses to Neo-Confucianism in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). The consistent metatextual dynamics suggested by these parallels cannot be adequately described through influencebased comparative methods. This essay defines Japanese modernism as a creative conflict stimulated by the introduction of transcendence-based texts into fundamentally immanence-grounded aesthetic, epistemological, and semiotic systems.

Comedy is the genre of collective experience; however, comic modes differ in the degree of inclusiveness that each implies. By examining the interactions of satiric, amiable, and liminal comedy, we can see how Woolfs final novel, Between the Acts, becomes a fully inclusive form. This form is radical and subversive, standing in antithetical relation to the epic genre. Woolf loosens the habitual dominance of the leader or spokesperson figure through a decentering of authority and creates a new choric voice that implies a fluid and noncoercive sense of community. This handling of genre is thoroughly political in substituting, for the definition of politics as the exercising of power, a model of community as the dynamic inhabiting of mutual space.

In Artist Descending a Staircase, Stoppard has constructed a play so well suited to radio that it cannot be translated to any other medium without a significant loss. The play thereby calls into question the popular notion that radio is inferior to the stage as a forum for drama. The play also questions our ability to know, with any certainty, those things we have not witnessed, not to mention those we have. Thus, the two mysteries at the heart of the play—Who killed Donner? Whom did Sophie love?—remain essentially unsolved, even though the play suggests convincing solutions. Similarly, although the play does not explicitly discuss Marcel Duchamp, a portrait of the artist nonetheless emerges, drawn in meticulous detail. Artist, then, is built upon paradox, teasing us at every turn with “Now you see it, now you don't.”