Feminist literary criticism over the past decade has raised the important issue of woman's relationship to the production of prose fiction. Central to the inquiry have been both the desire to identify the specificity of such a “corpus” and the reluctance to define it by inherited notions of sexual difference. Reading Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cléves with George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in the context of this double agenda suggests the possibility of deciphering a female erotics that structures the plots of women's fiction, plots that reject the narrative logic of the dominant discourse. Traditionally, the critical establishment has condemned these plots as implausible and generally assigned women's novels a marginal position in literary history. Perhaps the grounds of that judgment are less aesthetic than ideological.

The failure to distinguish between Iser's “implied” reader (analogous to Booth's implied author and referring to the reading behavior a text demands of us) and the “characterized” reader (referred to directly or indirectly in the text) has promoted a good deal of critical confusion. Although the work of Wolff, Iser, Ong, Link, and Prince, among others, is crucial to our understanding of how fictional readers function in texts, it generates certain misleading conceptual categories. In part this confusion is due to a gap between continental and American reader-response theory. The “implied reader” is not a philosopher's stone that will objectify criticism, but it can be a useful concept to the newer communicationoriented theories of criticism.

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.

L'Emploi du temps is a metapoetic roman á thése that demonstrates the views on language Butor expresses in his theoretical essays. Parodying Proust, Butor undermines the idea that memory or language can recover an authentic layer of experience. By creating a text on two levels, a level of unsuccessful referentiality and a level of language as an autonomous entity, he replaces the notion of a vertical relation between text and referent with the notion of the bookto- be-continued. As description cedes to metaphor, metaphors crystallize into myths, and the narrator's “original experience” comes to reflect previous works of art, Revel's retrospective diary blossoms into imaginative creation. The “empty center” of the referential narrative, the missing date February 29, becomes the open end of Revel's novel. Four double metaphors—the labyrinth, the map, weaving, and the mirror—which are crossover points in the novel's chiastic structure, engage both the referent (Revel's year in Bleston) and the process of recreating it in writing.

The many facets of the realism debate reflect the complexity of the subject. Realism was an accepted standard of value only during the romantic period; it became more prominent later as it became more problematic. Major senses of “real” in the nineteenth century are (1) universal essence, (2) irregular minute particular, and (3) causal regularity. Realist plotting typically juxtaposes background tableau and foreground coup de theatre; realist style typically consists of multiple silhouettings. Realism is a semiosis by silhouetting. Hegel's analysis of reality in the Science of Logic explains the association of realism with silhouetting, shows the systematic and historical relationships among the various critical positions and the nineteenth-century senses of “real,” and finally locates them with respect to the trope of inversion. The realist or silhouetting style falls between the relational style of the eighteenth century and the dispersive style of the twentieth.

Renaissance courtesy theory helped organize the pursuit and repression of social mobility in Elizabethan England; the letters of supplication written by courtiers seeking preferment record the practice of this aristocratic ideology. Such letters were governed by codified epistolary theory and by the oppressive exigencies of political connection and distance in a newly centralized nation-state. A sample set of these letters, from Toby Mathew to Sir Christopher Hatton, reveals an implicit rhetoric. Mathew presents conspicuously little “objective” argument in support of his technical qualifications for the post he seeks. Instead, the letters focus on depicting the suitor's personal and political graces and the patron's magnanimous power. Though these persuasions embody coherent arts of modest ostentation and flattery, they also reveal anxiety, and we cannot easily assess the reception their depictive products met. The congruent forms of erotic seduction, prayer, and self-enticement may offer important parallels.

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.”

Much in Frankenstein suggests that the novel and classical psychoanalysis are meant for each other. The creation becomes a significant act, at once paradigmatic and intensely human, when viewed as a repetition of Frankenstein's primal-scene trauma, with the Creature emerging as a representation of the scene and the related oedipal complex. A psychoanalytic interpretation, however, requires a drastic secondary revision of Frankenstein, and not enough insight is purchased by so much blindness. The analyst repeats, yet fails to elucidate, the misreading of world, self, and Creature that renders Frankenstein a tiresome neurotic. But before this personal collapse Frankenstein achieved the sublime. His catastrophe of origination, engendering a creative self that anxiously pursues an impossible desire and an artifact that both represents and eclipses the creator, serves as a paradigm of the genesis of any sublime artwork, any uncanny reanimation project.

The proponents of modernism, in their putative wish to be free of inherited patterns, release a compensatory reaction, an anxiety over the sense of a lost relationship with tradition. In this context, the critical dogma lamenting the “anxiety of influence” may be seen as one modernist's attempt to regain a relationship with the past at the expense of the equally recalcitrant doctrine of originality. But this most recent defensive reaction only represses an even deeper anxiety over the loss of the present moment in the inevitable formal quality of literature. As a way out of this impasse, the modernist poet Hart Crane returned to William Blake and Walt Whitman, whose poetry of pure possibility does not mediate the present into a durative past but recovers it as a possible present, a coming again of what is ever more about to be.

Critics generally have assumed that the millennial fulfillment Shelley's masterpiece dramatizes takes its origin from the hero's moral recognition and repentence at the opening of the play. Apparent shortcomings in Shelley's dramatization of that realization suggest, however, that the traditional view is an oversimplification. Instead of viewing Prometheus' change of heart as the determining cause of universal regeneration, we can better see it as the first manifestation of a greater change with which the hero sympathizes but that nevertheless exists beyond him and his control, the power of universal Necessity. The distinction, although difficult, is crucial to the metaphysical subtlety of the drama and of Shelley's insight into the tenuousness of humankind's existential situation. Despite the frequent contention that Shelley rejected the doctrine of Necessity early in his career, Prometheus Unbound evolves directly from the poet's long and unresolved deliberation on the rival claims of free will and determinism in human affairs.

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.

There are essentially three orientations toward landscape description in the lyric: the kind that describes an external place that serves as a backdrop, ornament, or illustration for the poet's thinking; the kind that transforms an external scene into a region of the poet's mind; and the kind that claims to be a habitable region in its own right. Each type has its own mode of assertiveness. In the first, the poetry of distance, description is made possible by claiming that it is impossible to enter the scene. The second features the topography of the inner eye, which results when the poet claims to absorb and become a space. The rhetoric of the third makes the text itself a “place.” All three imply a staking out of poetic territory and the rhetorical domination of the scene. Since these modes transcend literary periodization, they furnish a loosely drawn typology of descriptive poetry.

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.