Although the question of genre has puzzled critics of Paradise Regained, the poem's structure, style, and spirit, as well as much of its imagery, are georgic. Like Vergil, Milton emphasizes incessant labor, constructive as opposed to destructive heroism, and quiet effort to build a flourishing civilization. In the Georgics as in the Bible, the right response to the curse of labor transforms it into a blessing. While epic glorifies war, georgic celebrates the arts of peace. In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve enjoy a pastoral paradise of ease until they fall; then they and their descendants must earn their bread in a hard georgic world. In Paradise Regained, Satan variously attempts to pervert the generic mode of the Son's heroism. After a laborious struggle, the Son confirms himself in the role anticipated by Milton's opening metaphor: he raises a georgic garden in the world's “wast Wilderness.”

Seventeenth-century French patronage of the theater was an ideal means of political legitimation. While Louis xm sporadically exercised patronage through royal decrees and attendance at comedies, the Cardinal de Richelieu, who better understood the theater's political benefits, actively influenced its technical aspects: the acting companies, the scripts, and the dramatic conventions and mechanics. The goal of Richelieu's patronage was the beholders' symbolic identification of the elements of refined theater with the genius of the cardinal underwriting them. The lansenists' tracts against the theater scorned this sort of symbolic transference as a commonplace of dramatic “portraiture.” Pierre Nicole's theory of spectatorship criticized the beholder's tendency to accept theatrical images as models of imitation, which gave life to a world of simulacra advantageous to political representation. The phantasmic force of the illusion of legitimacy fueled the system of art and politics in seventeenth-century France.

Recent studies in the early history of semiotics allow us to trace an open concern with the problem of language in Goethe's Faust. The protagonist appears as a quest hero in search of a revelatory sign, whether verbal or pictorial, that will release him from the world of mediating representations. The folly of the quest is consistently satirized from the viewpoint of Romantic aesthetics and its theory of the symbol. For the Romantics, the aesthetic symbol is a sign that paradoxically effects a revelation by affirming its own semiotic nature. But in elevating semiotic phenomena to the status of epiphanies, Goethean symbolism in Faust confronts the same impasses that beset the hero as he seeks to escape the rule of signs. The recurring quandaries arise when the Romantic text responds to the initial challenge of semiotics by attempting to reconcile semiotics and theology.

The referential and marginal features of footnotes serve different functions in criticism and literature: scholarly footnotes shore up the text by enclosing it and limiting its claims; in fiction, footnotes extend textual authority by enlarging the fictional context. Both inner- and outer-directed, these two kinds of notations display a self-conscious anxiety about the critical and creative acts they annotate. Scholarly notes mask this ambivalence by claiming extratextual authority; literary notes highlight the ambivalence by consciously dividing the text against itself. This essay examines the ways footnotes in Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegans Wake parody the notational convention and draw attention to the faulted authority of its discourse by flouting scholarly claims to objectivity and neutrality, by calling into question the relations of author and reader on textual grounds, and by using self-reflexive narrative methods to illustrate the rhetorical double bind that keeps all language at the margin of discourse.

Blake's late engraving, erroneously known as The Laocoön, presents an unusually direct relation between the content of a literary work and the way the work is produced and consumed as an artifact. By restoring the statue's correct meaning (“Jah & his two Sons Satan & Adam”), Blake arrested its fall into materiality and application to “Natural Fact” and, in doing so, redeemed for spiritual purposes the engraving that he had begun as a commercial undertaking. In his commentary on the plate, he clarified for the first time the mutual exclusivity of art and commerce, not by making a materialist analysis, but by associating art with religion's traditional antipathy to money. He formulated a view of art as devotional practice rather than as the production of commodities, and this logic allowed the plate only the barest form of material existence.

The Canterbury Tales is the culmination of a frame tradition that originated and developed in Arabia, not in the West. The Arabic practice of enclosing tales within a frame may be explained by principles of organization peculiar to medieval Arabic literature, art, music, and mathematics: a preference for concreteness, a stress on autonomous elements, and a reliance on external organizing devices. Most Arabic literature emphasizes the individual unit; frames remain open-ended and inconclusive and rarely determine the subject or form of any included part. Although many Western characteristics are present in medieval European frame narratives like the Disciplina Clericalis, the Decameron, and the Confessio Amantis, those works, nonetheless, reveal themselves as continuations of the Arabic tradition. Even the Canterbury Tales, with all its subtle artistry, retains qualities typical of its Arabic ancestors, notably the controlling travelpilgrimage motif, the pointedly random order of tales, and the prominent authorial personality.