One of the most puzzling of eleventh-century runic inscriptions appears on the Järsta stone, a commemorative monument from Sweden. Its major features—the text band, zoomorphic ornamentation, and shape—unite to form a balanced and harmonious whole. Past interpretations of the Järsta inscription accord neither with the general grammatical, orthographic and formulaic conventions of Uppland commemorative stones nor with the particular variations typical of the carver, Asmund Karasun. A careful consideration of the artistic design suggests that Asmund intended this inscription to be read in a sequence quite different from that proposed by past scholars. This new reading conforms to Asmund's characteristic orthography and phraseology, as we know them from his many other stones, and follows the patterns of formulation traditional to runic carving.

Shakespeare's sonnets are designed to seem written by a poet and spoken by a lover. This conspicuous ambidexterity, compounded by our declining tolerance for such deftness, has made them infamously problematic. They simultaneously flaunt and flout the correspondence between the lover's pen and his heart, between the artifice of his “rhetoric,” characteristic of much Tudor literature, and the rhetoric of his sincerity, characteristic of the Romantic poetics that has proven their sternest judge. The sonnets thus pose internally the very problem that informs their extensive interpretive history. But they also propose its solution: their sustained balance of verba and res, of verbally erotic and hermeneutically chaste designs, exalts the conflict of these designs, displaying its poetic power. And this paradoxical resolution of the poet's dilemma solves the critic's as well: it suggests a way of making a richly correspondent and yet reasoned sense of the sonnets and, indeed, of any literary text.

Spenser's Amoretti have never been properly appreciated, because they have been judged by the norms they have sought to criticize, the norms of Renaissance Petrarchism. A critique of Petrarchan love, the Amoretti turn away from that system's restless egotism toward the world of marriage, which Spenser presents as a sacred harbor of rest. This is not an absolutely original turn, since Petrarch himself, founder of the conventions of Petrarchan love, also sought to escape his own love situation. He does so, in the Canzoniere, by turning toward Heaven and by turning Laura into an agent of transcendence, like Dante's Beatrice. The turn the Amoretti make is parallel to the turn made by the Canzoniere, though in Spenser marriage replaces death as the means of obtaining sacred rest. Spenser's exaltation of marriage is indebted to Protestant teaching, though the Amoretti is where this new conception of marriage first enters love poetry.

The publishing history of My Ántonia emphasizes what is implicit in the novel's numerous references to pictorial art: the pictures in the first edition of My Ántonia are not dispensable decorations but an essential part of Cather's text. The Benda illustrations (which Cather independently commissioned against the strong opposition of her publishers at Houghton Mifflin) reinforce the central fiction of the novel, in which “editor” Cather introduces My Ántonia as the work of “author” Jim Burden. Presenting My Ántonia as a critically edited or “supplemented” text, Cather hints that W. T. Benda's series of drawings is her most important addition to the “substance” of Jim's text. In her introduction to Jim's narrative, Cather suggests that Jim Burden's literary vision is faulty and in need of correction. Cather offers this corrective by providing a pictorial subtext that offsets the romantic bias of My Ántonia and exposes Jim Burden's limitations as an author.

Mikhail Bakhtin's work on Dostoevsky is well known. Less familiar, perhaps, is Bakhtin's attitude toward the other great Russian nineteenth-century novelist, Leo Tolstoy. This essay explores that “Tolstoy connection,” both as a means for interrogating Bakhtin's analytic categories and as a focus for evaluating the larger tradition of “Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky.” Bakhtin is not a particularly good reader of Tolstoy. But he does make provocative use of the familiar binary model to pursue his most insistent concerns: monologism versus dialogism, the relationship of authors to their characters, the role of death in literature and life, and the concept of the self. Bakhtin's comments on these two novelists serve as a good starting point for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Bakhtinian model in general and suggest ways one might recast the dialogue between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on somewhat different, more productive ground.

The work of E. L. Doctorow is difficult to place on the map of postmodernism because he is equally concerned with narrative or representational technique and with issues of history, power, and identity. Doctorow has focused his concerns in the question of technology, representing in each of his major works technological principles that not only typify the historical epoch in which the novel is set but also characterize the representational mode of the novel itself. The differences among technologies in his novels produce an arc of development that moves from a critique of the coercive power of a system epitomized by the electrical circuit in The Book of Daniel to a celebration of the possibilities for imaginative and representational freedom created by the computer in Loon Lake. Concentrating on the technology of narrative, Doctorow has contributed striking redefinitions of the historical subject while testing and extending the resources of the contemporary novel.