Although sixteenth-century daughters were evidently an economic burden on their fathers, Shakespeare consistently depicts fathers whose love for their daughters is so possessive that it endangers the family unit. To delineate the tensions of this bond at its liminal moment, Shakespeare evokes the altar tableau of the marriage service. This paradigmatic substructure illuminates the central conflict in the father-daughter relationship: the father who resists the ritual's demands to give his daughter to a rival male destroys both his paternal authority and his family's generative future; yet the daughter who escapes without undergoing ritual severance violates the family structure and thus becomes both guiltlessly agentive in ruining her original family and tragically incapable of creating a new one. The marriage ceremony is designed to resolve this paradox. In Shakespeare's dramas, submission to this rite ensures the only possibility of freedom for the individual and of continuity for the family.

The end of Le Rouge et le noir constitutes a chronic critical scandal, raising a host of problems concerning the novel's plot and its legitimating authority that may be approached through the question of paternity in the career of Julien Sorel. Paternity becomes a key issue in a novel structured by a conflict between legitimacy and usurpation, a conflict that has political, historical, and narratological implications. Politics versus manners, the hypothesis of Julien's illegitimate noble birth versus his career of monstrous usurpation, the role of the narrator as a father figure who subverts paternalistic control–these and related questions may provide a context for reading the end of the novel, for determining the relation of what Julien calls his novel to Stendhal's, and for understanding the uses of the guillotine.

The aesthetic theory pervading Middlemarch provides a context for interpreting the novel and understanding its references to the arts; consequently a language of art is important to the novel's (1) imagery, (2) aesthetic theory, and (3) iconography. (1) Although Dorothea Brooke is characterized in images of music and poetry, her Puritanic sensibility has hampered her aesthetic development, and the classical and Catholic artifacts of Rome oppress her senses as marriage to Casaubon oppresses her spirit. (2) To help her, Will Ladislaw teaches Dorothea the language of art, with the aid of Ruskin, Lessing, and Goethe—all champions of realism. (3) Eliot further dramatizes the relations of Casaubon, Dorothea, and Ladislaw by invoking the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus —a myth surrounded and amplified by allusions to literature and art. Guiding Eliot's use of the language of art in Middlemarch is Ruskin's aesthetic of Naturalist Idealism.

Literary historians have persistently regarded The Education of Henry Adams as a “paradigmatic” text. While “historical explanations“ stress the book's historical achievement, “critical explications” portray it as a failure of historical consciousness that achieves its success in the ahistorical arenas of aesthetic integration and imaginative projection. To relate the products of “explication” with the aims of “historical explanation,” I regard the work's true “paradigm achievement” as an inquiry into “historical being.” For Adams this achievement embodies disciplinary formulation and professional commitment and thus coordinates historical speculation and self-cultivation. One must assess the ethical density and cultural significance of the text before explaining its historical identity. The Education, despite its origin in epistemological chaos, makes the past eternally relevant to the present; for it is a personal and theoretical discovery of how the narrative structures of history and selfhood create the possibilities of individual and social life.

Although intellectual historians have rejected the notion that Dryden was a skeptic, recent readings of his specific works have increasingly emphasized irony and absurdity. This critical contradiction can serve as an interpretive tool: a full account of Dryden's poems must explain their tendency to attract the imputation of skepticism. In their images, extended analogies, dramatic actions, and structural premises, Dryden's poetic works share a formal core characterized by disjunction, incommensurability, or the failure of congruence. This unreconciled disjunction reflects a continual struggle to override a contradiction. It represents the aesthetic codification of anxiety, the literary elaboration of an ideology at odds with itself. Dryden's poetry manifests the contradictions in his grasp of the realities of his age. In its disjunctivity, it reveals the anxieties of the Restoration settlement, and in its blind advocacy of a conservative and static ideal, it sees the realities of a progressive and dynamic historical process.