Though in principle I am speaking as the voice of the MLA and expressing its concerns, I have noticed in reading past presidential speeches that presidents are helpless to do other than to express their own hopes, couched in various literary frames of reference, in addresses tending toward the homiletic. I cannot hope to escape the invisible but nonetheless inflexible conventions of the convention. But perhaps the expression of my own thoughts can be on this occasion what Stevens calls the little string that speaks for a crowd of voices. I choose as my text Wordsworth's vow at the end of The Prelude: What we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how.

Leslie Stephen chose his daughter Virginia Woolf as his literary heir and trained her extensively in history and biography to prepare her for a writing career. Traces of Stephen's training can be found throughout Woolf's work but especially in her literary criticism. Woolf and Stephen share the same assumptions about the nature and aims of literary criticism, assumptions that place them in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve. Further, Stephen and Woolf focus on the same set of forces to describe the birth and evolution of literary genres: both father and daughter say that shifting class structures produce a dominant historical consciousness and that this historical consciousness in turn expresses itself in an appropriate technical form. In the light of this literary historical process, both writers insist, the critic of self-conscious historical vision must be a sympathetic reader of experiments in new literary forms.

Defoe calls Robinson Crusoe a “fugitive” fable, an “allegorical” narrative history that records on many levels the strains of displacement and the powers of reconstitution. Crusoe's experience offers Defoe the fictional opportunity to represent different sequences of narrative action that resemble and sometimes duplicate one another. Island exile for Crusoe substitutes for structurally comparable events—imaginative, psychological, religious, and, in the carefully worked out timing of the adventure, political. The politics of exile are especially significant for Crusoe's several transformative conversions, not merely his turning from place to place but his turning of one place into another. The classical exile, displaced abroad and replaced at home, becomes in Robinson Crusoe doubly situated—Crusoe's island home is literally remote but allegorically familiar. This paradox has narrative, historical, and national implications.

The most prominent feature of Zorrilla's Don Juan is theatricality: the character's awareness of incarnating a name or portraying a role that earlier Don Juans created. Don Juan's imposing name clashes with the name of the father (the Commander), triggering a conflict between love and the law. Vis-a-vis this conflict, Don Juan and Ines evolve in opposite directions: Don Juan finally wants to marry, thus accepting the patriarchal dictates that Ines defies by her love for her father's enemy and killer. Ines, therefore, is not the innocent virgin that critics, Zorrilla included, and Don Juan himself envisioned. Another basic tension is that between God and the father. Their supposed alliance is broken by Ines, who, against the Commander's will, intercedes supernaturally to save Don Juan. Paradoxically, in the name of Don Juan, Ines opposes men's law and consequently produces her own defense based on the feminine “law of the heart.”

The accepted periodization of English literary history, a linear alternation of convention and revolt, has made Blake the ancestral and archetypal romantic. But an examination of the language of his texts, using Michel Foucault's archaeological method, demonstrates the classical structure of his oeuvre, which is a variant of classical discourse as defined and described by Foucault. The deep structure of Blake's discourse is logical, but the logic is not that of general grammar; it is the logic of identity, not the logic of difference. The assimilation of Blake's oeuvre into Foucault's classical episteme enriches and expands Foucault's model of the period; it also offers a model of the transformation from classical to modern that may clarify some of the difficulties of Foucault's scheme of historical change.

Although representational art does not reflect an empirically verifiable world, novels are nevertheless useful as historical documents, because they can reveal the views that authors expect readers to hold. Extracting those views, however, requires distinguishing the beliefs that authors expect in their readers from beliefs that readers pretend to take on for the sake of the fiction (the belief that a person can turn into a bug, in Metamorphosis). Such an analysis is possible because of a basic rule of reading: all fiction, even the most fantastic, is realistic except where it signals its readers to the contrary. This rule implies that what is not said in a text (a text's assumptions) is a surer guide to readers' views than what is (its assertions). The “sudden-reward” pattern (familiar from Cinderella) and its unmasking by Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson are analyzed to demonstrate how readers' beliefs can be extracted from an apparently unrealistic convention.