Critics have averted their eyes from the specifics of Lovelace’s rape of Clarissa almost as hurriedly as did the principals in Richardson’s novel. Modern studies of the phenomenon of rape suggest that a closer look might be rewarding. Of the three people certainly present at the episode, there is good reason to suppose Lovelace impotent, Clarissa blankly rigid, and Sinclair, the presiding androgynous harlot, the purposeful actor in the scene. If Sinclair and the “women of the house” are at the heart of the book’s action and are not simply Lovelace’s “implements,” then a prime issue of Clarissa is not only whether Clarissa “lives” but also whether Sinclair “dies.” In fact, despite her famous Gothic death scene, Sinclair too lives, and rules Richardson’s imagination of woman, perhaps even of Being, to the end of the novel.

Historians and literary critics alike have emphasized the obsolescence of the antiusury doctrine in the transition in England from a precapitalist to a capitalist society. Instead of viewing the scholastic opposition to usury solely as an impediment to the development of a capitalist ethos, this essay stresses the continuing relevance of the antiusury tradition to an evolving theory of capital increase in the early eighteenth century. Moll Flanders and Roxana are the central texts for a discussion of how the analogies between monetary and biological generation that the antiusury writers developed to regulate capital increase provide the foundation for the naturalization of capital, for the transformation of capitalism from an external to an internal economy. At the center of this metamorphosis is the figure of the woman, whose body becomes the body of capital.

In actual practice the English broadside ballad did not exist before the introduction of printing; but it is not accurate to assert that “street ballads begin about 1540,” or even to call Skelton's ballad on Flodden Field (1513)—said to be the earliest printed street ballad extant—the beginning of the genre. Undoubtedly the ballad had begun to play an important rôle before 1500, and in its origin runs much farther back, far antedating the art of printing. To all intents the street ballad was matured as early as 1500; while satirical poems, invectives, lamentations, and short jocular and religious stanzas of a still earlier period have many of the features that characterize printed broadside ballads and unquestionably prepared the way for them. Early in the fifteenth century, writers of such ballad-poems tried to circulate them on manuscript broadsheets. Naturally, therefore, the advent of printing merely facilitated and increased the production of rimed broadsides, until, in the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, they came to be the chief publications of the London press and the works most dear to the common people.

Remember cyber? surely one of the most irritating and ubiquitous prefixes of the nineties, cyber quickly became attached to all kinds of products (the Sony Cybershot camera), labor styles (cybercommuting), and communicative practices (cyberspace) that have now become so normalized as already digital that the prefix has dropped out of the language. Photography, work, and social discourse no longer need be flagged as cyber since we can more or less assume that in postindustrial, informationalized societies they usually are. Cyber migrated widely during the nineties, but the legal scholar Jerry Kang's article “Cyber-race,” which appeared in the Harvard Law Review in 2000, was the first to attach this prefix to race. Kang answers the question “can cyberspace change the very way that race structures our daily lives?” with an affirmative: “race and racism are already in cyberspace.” He then proposes three potential “design strategies” for lawmakers to deal with the problem of race and racism in cyberspace: the abolitionist approach, in which users take advantage of the Internet's anonymity as a means of preventing racism by hiding race; the integrationist approach, in which race is made visible in online social discourse; and the most radical one, the transmutation approach. Strategies for transmuting race in cyberspace reprise some of the discourse about identity and performativity that was often associated with Judith Butler—“it seeks racial pseudonymity, or cyber-passing, in order to disrupt the very notion of racial categories. By adopting multiple racialized identities in cyberspace, identities may slowly dissolve the one-to-one relationship between identity and the physical body” (1206).

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 canon of biblical books is frequently cited as a parallel to a unitary literary canon that, though often presumed, is in fact not to be found. The biblical canon was created for the purpose of forestalling change and exiling competition. There are at least ten kinds of literary canons, all ultimately resulting from selections made for such distinct purposes as providing models, transmitting a heritage, creating common frames of reference, logrolling, legitimating theory, historicizing, and pluralizing. Canons formed for any of these purposes necessarily yield to change over time and compete with one another at any given time. We can reasonably expect neither the abolition of selective canons nor agreement on a single one; we can, however, seek clarity about purposes.

The indebtedness of our earliest American fiction to old world models has been made plain on numerous occasions. The Power of Sympathy, commonly regarded as our first novel, and the works which immediately followed, obviously owe much to Samuel Richardson; our earliest professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, has been branded at once a disciple of Godwin—his Arthur Mervyn a lineal descendent of Caleb Williams—and a member of the Gothic School. Sterne's name, and the influence of his Shandean sensibility this side the water, have been bruited about. Yet, so far, one immediate and important source, the French Heroic Romance—those great folios of Scudéry, Gomberville, La Calprenède, and their compeers, translated, imitated, and avidly read in the mother country—has been almost totally overlooked.

Punch in sexuality as a search word in the MLA online bibliography, and you'll come up with well over three thousand items published since 1981. By my estimate, at least ten percent of the journal and book articles and dissertations in this list are concerned with sexuality in texts written before 1800. Add to that the scores of books on sexuality in medieval and early modern literature that have been published during the past fifteen years, and you have quite a pile of reading to do if you want to keep up-to-date. Not bad for a subject that didn't even exist when the literary texts in question were written—and still may not exist, at least in words.

We, the so-called civilized worlds, know that we are mortal, as Valéry declared after World War i, but now, even more, we know that we can cause our own death. Auschwitz and Hiroshima revealed that the “malady of death,” to use Marguerite Duras's term, constitutes our most hidden inner recesses. If the passion for death governs the military and economic domains as well as social and political bonds, this passion now even appears to govern the once noble realm of the mind. Indeed, a monumental crisis in thought and word, a crisis in representation, has occurred. Its analogues can be found in previous centuries (the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, the devastating periods of plague or war during the Middle Ages), and its causes can be sought in the collapse of economic, political, and legal structures. Moreover, the power of destructive forces, both outside and within the individual and society, has never appeared as incontestable and irrevocable as it does today. The destruction of nature, of life and economic resources, is coupled with an outbreak, or simply a more patent manifestation, of the disorders that psychiatry has subtly diagnosed: psychosis, depression, mania, borderline disorders, false personalities, and so on.

Exactly what was the influence of the liturgical drama, and how did it show itself? A continuous tradition from the Latin church plays through the vernacular religious plays of the later middle ages has been generally recognized since the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially since the publication of Chambers' Mediaeval Stage. The only basic attack upon the accepted historical explanation is too insubstantial to be at all convincing; and our knowledge of the liturgical plays and of their relation to individual vernacular plays or groups of plays has been much increased of late, through Professor Young's presentation of the corpus of the liturgical drama, and through many special studies of French and German texts. At the same time, we must reckon with the cumulatively impressive evidence, offered by such scholars as Emile Roy, Grace Frank, Frances A. Foster, and G. R. Owst, of the use of vernacular narrative and homiletic sources in the vernacular religious plays of the middle ages. With our present fuller knowledge both of the liturgical drama and of the rich non-dramatic material which was utilized in the later plays, we need to distinguish and redefine the specifically dramatic tradition which sprang from the liturgical plays, and the manner in which it persisted.

Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan's working-class lover in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, wants “one of those police dogs” as an ornament “for the apartment,” because “they are nice to have” (27). Tom, Myrtle, and our narrator, Nick Carraway, have just arrived at Penn Station and gotten into a taxi, in the novel's second chapter. Myrtle boarded the train in Queens, site of her home in the Eliotic “valley of ashes,” joining Nick and Tom on the rail commute from their respective class-bound Long Island Eggs, upper East and nouveau West, into the city that is “built with a wish out of non-olfactory money” (69).

Interface, we think, is the screen, the display, the portal into the online world or computer. The GUI (Graphical User Inter-face), with its menu bars and navigational buttons, is so familiar that we tend to overlook the “gooeyness” of it—the mutable, mediating activity—and take interface for a thing, static, stable, and fixed. Or we take it as a representation of computational processes, a convenient translation of what is “really going on” inside. Neither could be further from actuality.

When G. P. Lathrop wrote his A Study of Hawthorne (1876) he found it necessary, in discussing the interpretation of The Scarlet Letter, to protest against the identification of Hawthorne's own beliefs with those given to Hester. Lathrop's protest—which has not much affected subsequent criticism—was directed against a violent review by Arthur Cleveland Coxe, one of three early reviews which mark the beginning of a persistent misapprehension (as it seems to me) in the interpretation of The Scarlet Letter. It has almost become a convention to insist that Hawthorne means to advocate a new standard of sex morality in passages like Hester's words: “What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so ! We said so to each other!” Austin Warren has found sufficient reason to point out again that Hawthorne is careful to characterize the rebellion of Hester as the rebellion of one who “had wandered without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness,” and that Hawthorne careful to say that “Her intellect and heart had their home ... in desert places.... Shame, Despair, Solitude ! These had been her teachers ... and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

The topography of literary production and consumption has been transformed as writers and texts travel, ethnic literature is taught and translated in multiple national venues, and writers’ locations, audiences, and subject matter resist ready alignment. he growing internationalization of ethnic literary production has produced a heterogeneous range of texts, which challenge the established boundaries of ethnic and world literature. Because they focus on minorities, these texts have been slow to win recognition as world literature even though they depict transnational movements and identifications that diverge from those in canonical ethnic narratives. I develop the analytic of minority cosmopolitanism to examine the ways in which these literary narratives of worlding contest contemporary economic and political processes of globalization and Eurocentric accounts of globality. This essay considers how the gendered figure of the diasporic citizen serves as a vehicle for minority cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Lurid eighteenth-century accounts of sacrificial cannibalism in West Africa and other parts of the globe color Richardson's language and imagery in his delineation of Clarissa's highly ritualized persecution and death. Explaining cannibalism as a rudimentary cultural institution that symbolically expresses a collective psychic economy dominated by the preoedipal mother imago, modern anthropological theory shows that Richardson's novel represents this practice as the nexus between the personal (or intrapsychic) and the social (or cultural), between the text's twin obsessions with the preoedipal mother and orality and with social aggression directed mainly, but not exclusively, against women. As in actual cannibal cultures, where a preoccupation with nursing and weaning results in a pervasive oral metaphorization of thought and action, in Clarissa the ritual killing and eating of victims is the paradigmatic gesture underlying all major forms of social action, including the protracted “tearing in pieces” of the scapegoat heroine by relentless “blame.”

Let us first of all confess that it is not as if we were writing under the persuasion that we have a novel view to proclaim. It is true that the view which we believe to be correct is often under attack today and is sometimes supposed to be outmoded by recent refinements. Its proponents too are often not sure enough of its actual character to defend it with accuracy. At the same time, a look into some of the most recent handbooks and critical essays reveals that there are some teachers and writers on our subject today who expound this view in a perfectly clear and accurate way. We have in mind, for instance, A Glossary of Literary Terms revised by Meyer Abrams for Rinehart in 1957 from the earlier work by Norton and Rushton, or the handbook by Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, published in 1956 by Harcourt, Brace. In the lengthy Kenyon Review symposium on English verse, Summer 1956, we admire the niceties of Mr. Arnold Stein's traditionally oriented discussion of Donne and Milton. There is also Mr. Stein's earlier PMLA article (lix [1944], 393–397) on “Donne's Prosody.” In the Kenyon symposium there is, furthermore, Mr. Ransom. It would be difficult to frame a more politely telling, persuasive, accurate retort than his to the more extravagant claims of the linguists.

As new literatures in English emerge all over the world, literature in English is increasingly multicultural, but the criticism of these literatures has not fully come to terms with this multiculturalism. Specifically, a work read across cultures is likely to be at least partially unintelligible to some of its readers, and critics have seen this as a factor necessarily limiting the readership of these works. But intelligibility and meaningfulness are not synonymous. This essay analyzes moments of difficulty in four such multicultural texts, by Narayan, Kingston, Anaya, and Ihimaera, showing on Gricean lines that meaning can be created precisely by the struggle to make sense of the unintelligible. The work done in that process can lead to a deeper understanding of the text, and the reader who must do that work is therefore not excluded from a full understanding.