A rather curious scene, unscripted, once took place in the wings of a London theater at the same time as the scheduled performance was being presented on the actual stage, before an audience. What happened was this: an actor refused to come on stage for his allocated role. Action was suspended. A fellow actor tried to persuade him to emerge, but he stubbornly shook his head. Then a struggle ensued. The second actor had hoped that, suddenly exposed to the audience in full glare of the spotlight, the reluctant actor would have no choice but to rejoin the cast. And so he tried to take the delinquent actor by surprise, pulling him suddenly toward the stage. He did not fully succeed, so a brief but untidy struggle began. The unwilling actor was completely taken aback and deeply embarrassed—some of that tussle was quite visible to a part of the audience.

The speech behavior of Erec and his wife, Enite, in Hartmann's late twelfth-century Arthurian epic seems to support the view that women in strongly patriarchal societies are expected to speak with men rarely and to employ appropriate negative-politeness strategies to minimize the imposition. When Lady Enite breaks the rules, her husband imposes, on pain of death, a command of silence. She repeatedly disobeys but saves her life by using the requisite strategies to beg for forgiveness. Her impudence is nevertheless punished with demotion to servant status. On closer analysis, however, one must agree with Erec that he has merely been testing his wife and note that Hartmann is advocating a far more active and vocal role for women in the marriage relationship than first meets the eye.

El Periquillo Sarniento, the first Spanish American novel, by José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi, was published in Nueva España in 1816. The book's reception at that moment, when Mexico was fighting for independence, cries out for a reader-response interpretation sensitive to the social realities of production and consumption. In the title of this essay the “colonial reader” emphasizes the political nature of the reading process for this particular work, but the quotation marks suggest general applicability. Lizardi's sense of his readers' varying orientations to a book—from a rigidly European literary taste to an American desire for plain expression—dictated the design of this indigenous work. Lizardi, like the writers of the “new Spanish American novel” later, understood the need for a radically different literary language, one that would urge readers to question inherited forms and to revalue existing speech.

The name Oscar Wilde has become one of the best-known indexes of late nineteenth-century male homoerotic desire. To situate Wilde's emergence as “a homosexual” in late nineteenth-century literary contexts and thereby explore the ways that sex-gender ideologies shape specific literary works, I focus first on Teleny, a novel widely attributed to Wilde and one of the earliest examples of male homoerotic pornography. Then, by analyzing the more celebrated and yet manifestly “straight” text The Picture of Dorian Gray, I illustrate that, even in the absence of explicit homosexual terminology or activity, a text can subvert the normative standards for male same-sex behavior. In considering how these works challenge the hegemonic representations of male homoerotic experience in late Victorian Britain, I suggest that textual depictions of male same-sex experience both reproduce and resist the dominant (hetero)sexual ideologies and practices.

It would be deceptively easy for a critic defining the central conflict of The Back Room, Carmen Martín Gaite's first post-Franco novel, to sort out a series of polar forces—chaos and order, memory and memoir, fantasy and reality, “loose” woman and Falangist supporter. While the narrator recognizes the impossibility of emancipation from these necessary structures of thought, she nevertheless insists on her freedom to question such dualisms and to collapse apparent polarities in a radically ambiguous manner, rendering undecidable many issues of limits and transgression. The resulting story is both untellable and never-ending, and its most significant allegorical representation in the text is a sewing basket full of miscellaneous items tangled in colored thread.

Susan Crane's “Alison's Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath's Tale” (102 [1987]: 20–28), though superior to many of the articles it cites, finally demonstrates not so much the Wife's “incapacity” as the inadequacy of an approach that Crane shares with many critics of the Wife of Bath. The approach is characterized by a failure to distinguish sufficiently between the prologue and the tale and by the related assumption (despite words to the contrary) that Alison is a real person, not a fictitious character.