The Prologue to the twelfth-century collection of French narrative poems called the Lais presents a woman poet, now known as Marie de France, who appears to be preoccupied with the significance of origins and who takes a bold initiative while remaining elusive about the exact nature of her enterprise. A close reading of two of these tales—Lastic and Chievrefoil-helps clarify the problematics of Marie's portrayal by showing that it rests on a deliberate poetics of silence. The poet-narrator stresses not what is heroic, public, and patriarchal; rather, she creates an alternative type of lineage rooted in silence, secrecy, and, above all, in a private exchange between two who love. The gradual revelation of the sign and its meaning, achieved by successive attempts to gloser 10 lettre, are intimately connected both to Marie's text and to her poetic persona: to gloss the one is to name the other.

The space of women's writing is too often described in negative terms. In Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, as well as in other works by seventeenth-century French women novelists, what have been read as signs of effacement can be viewed as attempts to assume control of the fiction-making process. Thus Lafayette devised a dual authorial signature for her masterpiece; an external signature-the anonymity she used to protect her person and increase her authority-and an internal signature-her heroine's gradual determination to supervise the plot of her life and the publication of her story. Both Lafayette's choice of anonymity and the princess' renunciation of marriage and life in the world can be seen not as acts of avoidance but as affirmations of the woman writer's authority.

Following the institutionalization of the public masquerade in England in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the masquerade set piece becomes a standard, though problematic, topos in English fiction, figuring prominently in novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Inchbald, and others. Though characteristically considered an allegory for the corrupt “Town,” the masquerade “diversion” also serves crucial narrative and thematic functions. As a place of unexpected meetings and surprising assignations, it precipitates imbroglio and intrigue, the elaboration of plot itself; and its transgressive social and sexual reversals and exchanges intimate the collapse of ideological and didactic lucidity. Leaving in its wake a world upside down, it coincides with an incursion of mutability and ambiguity into the static world of eighteenth-century representation. Just as the real masquerade represented a carnivalesque disruption of the eighteenth-century symbolic order, the masquerade episode disturbs the prevailing decorum of eighteenthcentury English fiction.

In the continuing controversies over the value of the 1805 Prelude versus the 1850 text-to which some voices have added a case for the 1799 version-the importance of Wordsworth's character as a revising poet has been neglected. One episode present in all three versions, his boyhood discovery of a man drowned in Esthwaite's Lake, offers a productive case study-both for the play of Wordsworth's revisions and for a view of The Prelude as a poem constituted by its many texts, rather than by anyone authoritative text. Wordsworth's most emphatic revision is the addition of a commentary that denies the boy's fear and converts the corpse into a figure of “ideal grace,” like something in a literary “romance.” Yetother revisions of both text and context reveal Wordsworth's ambivalence about the strategies of argumentative mastery with which he would govern the mysteries that inhabit his imagination.

Women's hair, particularly when it is golden, has always been a preoccupation of Western artists and writers. But for the Victorians, who discovered complex totemic and symbolic significance in the image of women's hair, it became an obsession. The powerful woman mythologized in Victorian literature and art achieved her vitality partly through her hair, which both contributed to and expressed her magic power. She used her hair to weave her discourse and to spin her plots, to strangle her lovers and to shelter them, to build deadly snares and webs and to proclaim her own divinity and glory.

Feminist theory has argued that in a literary tradition overburdened by patriarchal legends and signs, women writers who wish to develop authentic, autonomous voices must devote themselves to their feminine precursors and abandon a masculine canon. In The Golden Apples, however, Eudora Welty appropriates images and themes of several poems by Yeats to dramatize the concerns of her heroines. Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism and of heteroglossia suggest a critical framework for exploring Welty's expropriations, but Bakhtin's method fails to consider the category of gender as a potent source for the dialogic tension characteristic of the novel as genre. Viewed from this perspective Welty's writing is more subversive than many of her critics have perceived, while Bakhtin's insights into the nature of novelistic discourse are useful in describing the restructuring of traditions that occurs in women's texts. Bakhtin's ideas must be understood and amplified, however, in the light of recent feminist theory.