To disengage moral error from the structure of narrative in Paradise Lost, Milton had, on the one hand, to renounce allegory and, on the other hand, to redefine the probabilistic conception of truth in contemporary theories of the heroic poem. While Spenser associates error with the meanderings of narrative, Milton polarizes error and truth so that no ambiguous wandering can occur in the intervening space—precisely the space where allegorical narrative must occur. Milton sought to teach by direct statement, Spenser to form character by engaging the reader in an interpretative game.

The Intimations Ode appears at the end of Wordsworth's collected poetry, and both the placement and the ending of the poem implicitly encourage us to expect an assured closure. I argue that Wordsworth deliberately suggests and then refuses such closure, that while the odic tradition generically warrants the attempt at closure, the Intimations Ode's refusal is unique. The overall temporal sequence that Wordsworth gives the poems and the frequency with which narratives and odes end groups of poems show that he consistently includes lyric in a larger narrative plot, an inclusion that also occurs within the Intimations Ode itself. Seeing Wordsworth's ode as a narrative and in relation to earlier English odes helps us understand that its uneasy coexistence of statement and uncertainty, which many critics consider its greatest weakness, is actually its greatest strength.

Emerson's prose speaks to American expectations for becoming a man. His most forceful rhetoric unmans the manly types, particularly his censorious father, with an imperious nonchalance. Emerson's “man-making words” also transform the class conflicts that intensified the ideology of manhood from 1825 to 1850. Dreaming of a new elite, Emerson challenges social definitions of manhood and power. He does not, however, question the code that joins manhood with power at the expense of intimacy. When power fails him, as “Experience” recounts, his seeming candor masks an evasive note of depressive accusation directed at the women who take care of him. To emphasize Emerson's class and gender politics deflates his reputation somewhat. As “representative man” he represents only a liberal tradition that mystifies conflicts. Yet we can see him more clearly as a man, struggling with himself as well as with his time.

Ibsen's Ghosts is conventionally viewed as a Sophoclean quest tragedy in which the protagonist achieves self-knowledge when she confesses to her son that she was not sexually warm to his father, thus announcing, in Lionel Trilling's phrase, the “summation of the play.” But this interpretation disregards Ibsen's spirit and purposes and contradicts the play's tragic structure: the careful exposition, which shows that no amount of wifely responsiveness could have affected the fatum already in place, and the brilliant development, the inexorable revelation of the truth about Helene Alving's cowardice, her marriage, and her son's disease. The “summation” of Ibsen's tragic schema is the request the doomed son makes of the woman who, in submitting to his father, gave him life: “Take it back again.” Part 5 of the essay tells what happened in the author's Tours classroom as her students helped solve the mystery of Ghosts and its commentators.

Realism in Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes is a process of imagining and managing the threat of social change identified with urban life in late nineteenth-century American culture. As a narrative of settlement, it seeks to establish a knowable community and to control a foreign and unreal territory. The strategies for representing the city are generated in an introductory scene in which the main characters look for an apartment. The narrative progresses through an escalating struggle between conflicting trajectories in realism—coherence and fragmentation, containment and excess—that explode in the pivotal streetcar strike. The novel ends with the impossibility of closure, at the limits of Howells's theory of realism.

A fragment in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes suggests that any attempt to transgress the binary prison of male and female (active and passive) tends to invert the traditional terms without disrupting their oppressive and spurious authority. Barthes proposes a neutral and utopian “third term,” or “non-sense,” that will transcend transgression itself and that he identifies with a “happy” sexuality and a “Gongorine” text. The poetics of Golden Age Spain are underwritten by implicitly gendered conceptions of the rhetorical body: ornamental style, lyric genre, and Italianate ethos are associated with the “female” text and hence made subordinate to their “higher” male equivalents. In the Soledades Góngora stresses the “female” terms, but his usage may not be transgressive: generic confusion (sexual and textual) was already widespread elsewhere. He tends, rather, to a nomadic indeterminacy that displaces author as active origin and reader as passive recipient of authoritative and authoritarian meaning.

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