A consideration of “Bright Star” and “Ode to a Nightingale” prepares for a reading of Hyperion as a poem of revisionary strife. Keats intends a progress poem that will put Milton, and secondarily Wordsworth, behind him. Entering the threatening ancestral space of Miltonic epic, Keats endeavors to make it his own by correcting Milton's errors in vision and thereby subduing the phantom he raises. Milton, however, will not maintain his place in the past; he returns, uncannily, to subvert Keats as powerfully as Keats subverts him. The impotence and anxiety of the Miltonic Titans are expressive of Keats's failure to write the poem he wishes. His surrogate, Apollo, is waiting to dawn but cannot. Engulfed by a knowledge that is equivalent to the Miltonic legacy, Apollo and Keats are halted at the threshold, in the dark passage that Keats explores in the great odes and in The Fall of Hyperion.

This essay examines various aspects of the “Subject-Object” relation in narrative, with respect to La Vie de Saint Alexis. The model of this relation proposed by A. J. Greimas is contrasted with that of Bernard de Clairvaux. The two theorists, one secular, one Christian, have different understandings of the content and the structure of the Subject-Object relation: of desire, of narrative “transformation” and “closure.” Bernard's model is more applicable to the Alexis. Alexis, God, the public, and Alexis' family must all be considered Subjects of this text, in that events must be viewed with respect to their desires, or Objects. The saint, God, and the faithful public are all necessary Subjects in hagiography, and their functions help define the genre. The importance of “transcendent” Subjects—of God (on the vertical axis) and the public (on the horizontal)—is characteristic of medieval narrative.

When it first appeared Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) was criticized for lacking structural coherence and for including digressive and superfluous narrative material. Such an appraisal, however, does not stand up under analysis. In arranging the individual episodes of the plot Lampedusa twice relies on a sophisticated pattern of chiastic ordering to throw into prominence the novel's central themes and to reinforce symbolic associations. The patterns of concentric symmetry compensate for the effects of the intentionally static quality of a plot that consists more of a sequence of moods and meditations than of specific actions. Lampedusa plays down linear development and compels the reader to seek the novel's unity in its thematic and symbolic structures. Seen from this perspective, IlGattopardo might well be celebrated rather than censured for the complexity of its structural coherence.

A comparison of narrative and lyric conceptions of temporality in Dickinson's poetry sheds light on that group of her poems in which a story is begun only to be violently broken into and disrupted. Defining life as a series of alternatives, the poems establish a dialectic, but seemingly for the sake of dismissing it as inadequate. The dismissal is frequently one of rage at all that is temporal, all that has a history whose requirement is sacrifice and choice. Such Dickinson poems can end in disorder, and they are examined here in the context of other lyrics that equally seem to pin their hopes on the belief that a verbal sabotage of sequence will trigger a temporal one, that, grown sufficiently desperate, the maneuvers of speech can stop time dead.

Despite its place in the French Revolutionary motto, fraternity lacks a literature. Blake, who makes an important contribution toward that literature, draws largely from the New Testament, which offers two grounds for brotherhood: we are sons of the Father, we are brothers in Christ. Suspicious of transcendent gods, Blake develops only the latter concept. We are in essence brotherly beings; unfraternal behavior is death. Brotherhood is not kindliness, however, but “wars of love” for one another and willing self-sacrifice. “Atonement” only makes matters worse. The New Testament Christian fraternity rests on Paul's dualism; Blake agrees to the extent that “nature” (and woman) threatens brotherly love. Yet women can be brothers, too, despite the misogynist symbolism Blake chooses to inherit.

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

Critical writings may be seen as fictions about literature and reading and writing. One hero of these fictions is the ideal reader. The sort of ideal reader a critic creates indicates the literary form of his criticism. Dr. Johnson's ideal reader is an everyman, and Johnson's criticism imitates allegorical epic literature in its concern with mankind in general. Dryden's division of readers into classes, headed by “the most judicious,” is an aspect of the dramatic form of his critical literature. Coleridge's lyrical mode of criticism centers on a reader so close to his author that he becomes his tautegorical representative. Northrop Frye's criticism is a kind of comic romance leading to an apocalypse in which his heroic ideal reader redeems cultural history and experiences it as part of his present life. The criticism of these four writers embodies and imitates, as it asserts, a vision of literature.