In order to appreciate fully the Wife of Bath’s correccioun of clerical teaching concerning marriage, it is necessary to understand what her bourgeois experience was. The legal customs of the bourgeoisie allowed widows and married women rights of contract and property denied to women of other classes. The Wife of Bath was a clothier, not an artisan weaver, whose cloth making was organized in accordance with the entreprenurial practice of the industry in the west country during the late fourteenth century. The economic context that this bourgeois setting gives to Alisoun’s experience makes her opinions concerning marital power less eccentric than has heretofore been believed. Her prologue recounts her growth in practical wisdom, culminating in her marriage with the inexperienced Jankyn. Her tale is a parodic rejection of the ideal pictures of genteel marriage painted by the aristocratic, or would-be aristocratic, writers of medieval deportment books.

In his Apology, Sidney makes what appears to many readers to be an adroit synthesis of humanist defenses of poetry, joining Neoplatonic idealism to claims of ethical utility and delivering this synthesis with the winning playfulness of a shrewd rhetorician. A closer look at his argument, however, reveals it to be a complex and self-conscious fiction, which gestures toward external values only to turn back on its own assumptions. The playful tone shows that Sidney is fascinated by the conceptual difficulties that confront him but that he is incapable of resolving them. Sidney’s intellectual performance in the Apology demonstrates his affinities with Renaissance thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa, who imagined all mental activity to be a ceaseless fabrication of conjecture and metaphor.

The Religio Medici has traditionally been called “an essay” or “an autobiographical essay.” If we examine it in its literary context, however, we will see that the principles generating its style and specifying the range of its feeling derive from two prose modes associated with other, more clearly defined seventeenth-century genres, the anti-Ciceronian epistle and the religious meditation. The Religio, in fact, might better be called “a meditation in the epistolary mode.” Although the witty exaggeration of Browne’s diction often pushes his epistolary voice toward the satiric, he holds off both indignant satire and solitary, self-absorbed meditation. In avoiding these extremes, Browne’s mixture of modes makes a clear ethical argument: that human beings must understand their limitations both as individuals in relationship to society and as creatures in relationship to God. In the Religio, Browne argues the importance to Christian humanism of the balance between private spirituality and public manners.

The problem of order is central to Rousseau’s political and social thought. Nature’s order has been ruptured by man’s unique ability to conceive of order and cannot be restored; only a properly conceived artificial order can be “natural” and remedy the defects introduced by the original violation. This article examines Rousseau’s analysis of disorder in society (inequality, injustice, a “state of war”) and in the self (three modes of alienation); the philosophical bases of his theory about an artificial order being “natural” and remedying the designated defects; and the rationale of the means of doing so. The discussion involves two paradigms (the body, Julie’s garden) and four paradoxes (completing alienation, remaking nature, “losing” the self to restore it, using inequality to establish equality). Rousseau’s vocabulary and rhetoric are shown to support this analysis. In his argument, liberty and submission, self-fulfillment and the authoritarian state, nature and culture cease being antitheses.

This article discusses some characteristic methods and structures shared by modern Western and classical Chinese poetry, focusing on the works of Georg Trakl and major poets of the T’ang dynasty. Among the similarities examined are the preference for concrete imagery over abstract, discursive statement; the paratactical juxtaposition of images, which leaves their logical, temporal, and grammatical relationships unspecified and often ambiguous; and the tendency for images to become “ciphers” that suggest, but do not support, metaphorical interpretation. There is also a reluctance to obtrude a first-person speaker onto the scene, and this has led some critics to label Symbolist-post-Symbolist and Chinese poetry “impersonal”; this essay argues, however, that the hidden subjectivity of even the most “impersonal” poem should not be overlooked. Nevertheless, the omission of subject does frequently increase ambiguities among the other elements of a work and contributes to the “poetics of discontinuity” common to the two traditions.

Structural linguistics is commonly held to be preoccupied with static language systems at the expense of language history. Yet in the 1920s the Prague Linguistic Circle resolved the structuralist dilemma of a system that ceases to act systemically the moment it undergoes a change. Language changes must be studied not in isolation but with regard to the whole system. No language system, however, is perfectly self-contained, nor can language changes be perfectly predictable, for language must adapt to concrete situations. Similarly, literary history appears largely systemic, but only a semiotic conception can explain its immanent development while simultaneously taking into account extraliterary influences. Prague structuralism thus studies both the internal, systemic changes of literary forms and the sociological aspects involved in their reception by the reading public. Finally, structural literary theory explains the role of individual artists, whose originality is seen as the dialectical antithesis to the systematic literary structure.

In Heart of Darkness Conrad explicitly selected two criteria—efficiency and the “idea” of the civilizing mission—to judge imperialism. Although he himself did not ultimately espouse these values (which social Darwinists used to justify European expansion), he chose them because they were popular and well-suited to condemning the peculiar exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold ii. Unlike capital rich imperialism, which could seek long-term development, Leopold’s capital-poor imperialism resulted in hasty exploitation of surface resources through forced labor. Conrad’s story powerfully illustrated the special inefficiency and cruelty of such exploitation. As in his other colonial novels, Conrad went on to imply a further judgment against all types of imperialism, even England’s, because of their complicity, belligerence, and arrogant disruption of indigenous cultures.

In discussions of fiction, the implications of the term “voice” are seldom explored beyond its figurative uses. In As I Lay Dying, however, “voice” is central to our experience of narrative. The novel has two kinds of voice, mimetic and textual. Mimetic voice derives from represented speech, from the features of discourse by which readers identify speakers; but Faulkner’s novel dissimulates the origins of voices. The voices we hear turn out to belong to narrators and seem to originate in an author’s discourse. Textual voice arises from the printed text itself. Such features as italics, drawings, lists, and section headings generate signification independent of verbal meaning and establish an expressive context analogous to the paralinguistic context created by the voice in speech. As a result of the disruption of mimetic voices and of the presence of textual voice, language in As I Lay Dying transcends the conventional limitations of mimesis.

Muted allusions to second sight and revenants are crucial to the method and meaning of A Farewell to Arms. Like Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, Hemingway draws on European sources—particularly ballads—for his folkloristic motifs; like them, he uses these motifs to invest chaotic contemporary scenes with order and universal significance. For him to adapt the “mythical method” of these writers, however, is a formidable problem, since his vernacular rhetoric cannot accommodate their open, bookish allusions. Consequently, his references to prophetic gifts and returns from the dead, while undeniably present, are not prominent enough to have attracted the critical attention they deserve. For they point and contribute to an unresolved dialectic, between skeptical male and “croyante” female, that is characteristic not only of the Catherine-Frederic relationship but, Hemingway implies, of all love relationships between men and women.