Tennyson's habits as a writer–composing longer works backward from a foreordained conclusion, stationing lyric speakers in a terminal situation– justify approaching his oeuvre as a poetry of aftermath. An obsession with the inevitable, which underlies his weaknesses in presenting character and in advancing narrative or dramatic action, also supports his compensatory strengths: evocation of atmospheric mood and sheer rhetorical splendor. Tennyson's rhetorical inevitability corresponds to intuitive convictions about the inevitability of the self's place in the world. His incapacity wholly to accept or resist the doom of the self engenders his typical melancholy; it also may explain the success he enjoyed as a Victorian spokesman. Never acquiring more than a fitful conceptual grasp of the fatality that was his subject, Tennyson conceived it instead in musical, often rhythmic, terms. He thus devised in “measured language” unsurpassed means of embodying and sharing the sense of a humanly definitive doom.

A poet cannot help borrowing images and verse shapes from earlier poems. But in adapting Spenser's final hexameter, a major writer like Milton makes an apparently simple formal imitation the locus for revisionary strategies of a highly figurative nature. Spenser's own prosodic choices are always shadowed by larger tropes of time, death, love, and voice, as is evident both in the rhetorical effects that characterize the closure of the Faerie Queene stanza and in the elusive river and echo mythologies that inhabit the refrains of the poet's two marriage odes. These works, in turn, strongly influence Milton's early strophic poetry, especially the Nativity Hymn and the song to Echo from Comas. Milton reinvents the hexameter close in ways that point to his larger poetic ambitions, finding in that metrical scheme a space in which to reflect on, oppose, and translate the deep structures of Spenserian mythmaking.

Much of Kafka's fiction exploits language whose performative status is ambiguous–language that Paul de Man calls “rhetorical”–to generate a peculiar and characteristic narrative “space” in which Kafka's stories operate. Speech-act theory helps to clarify the way in which problems arising from language become the central problems that Kafka's characters face. In particular, the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions provides an analytic tool that reveals Kafka's abiding concern with the “gap,” or “aporia,” produced by assertions, requests, commands, and other illocutionary acts that turn out not to assert, request, or command anything the reader or listener can pin down. This tool helps us discover the linguistic sources for the bewilderment and anxiety that characterize Kafka's fictional world.

Few modernist short narratives achieve the richness of Robert Musil's novella “Die Amsel” (1928). The work's autobiographical elements fragment into different narrative voices whose origins remain undetermined, thus giving the writing subject latitude to participate in the ironic spectacle that he is creating. After years of silence about three decisive experiences in his life, A2, a wise fool, tells his childhood stories to his childhood friend A1 in such a way that the truth of the stories cannot be fixed and their meaning is suspended in the ongoing process of the telling. Like Ulrich, Musil's “man without qualities,” A2 has a basic need for openness and spontaneity, and his stories, with their sardonic and selfparodic accents, are playful exercises in fluid, hypothetical discourse. The blackbird that reappears in A2's third tale is the product of A2's verbal jesting at the expense of the all too serious and literal-minded A1.

The Tempest is an allegory of the process of interpretation in a tradition that derives from Augustine's Confessions. Allegory calls attention to signs as signs and examines their adequacy to represent truth. Shakespeare's play begins in the realm of allegory's arbitrariness. Just as the imposition of Prospero's art on nature creates a storm to disorient characters in the play, Shakespeare's drama enthralls viewers in the theater, tempting them to an error like Prospero's retreat into his study in Milan. Gradually, however, by art attuned to a providential design working in events, Prospero resolves the conflicts among the characters. The symbolic unity of life finally suggested remains nevertheless an expression more of desire and promise than of realization. To remind his audience of this truth, Shakespeare makes Prospero in the Epilogue rupture the imagined world of art and insist on the audience's relating the play's ideal meanings to their historical lives.

Critics generally dismiss Lady Chatterley's Lover as a polemic, preferring to consider its content and ignore its form. Yet Lawrence meticulously shaped his strategy to reinforce his meanings. When we compare Lady Chatterley with earlier Lawrence novels and with the second of the novel's three versions, we discover the novelist using imagery in a way that is new for him. Similes and metaphors from plant, animal, mineral, and human sexual realms blend, or interpenetrate, to give depth and add texture to the novel's central action, Mellors' sexual awakening of Connie. Moreover, Lawrence strategically reshapes scenes from the second version, published as John Thomas and Lady Jane, to enrich the mythic dimensions of the novel. Lawrence's careful orchestrations of the novel's images and of the details of Mellors' character as Green Man produce, finally, a satisfying organic unity.