In its obscure complexities, El obsceno pájaro de la noche conceals the tale of the Bildung of an author, which passes through four stages. In the first, the protagonist attempts to find his identity in society, symbolized by the mask. In the second, he turns to his own psychological resources, only to find chaos and monstrosity. In the third, like the figure of the old woman in the novel, he abandons his own individuality for hearsay and the commonplace. Finally, he ends in a solipsistic isolation represented by a nonce symbol, the Imbunche—a creature that has had all its orifices sewn shut by witches. This novel proposes that the author, who has become identified with language, has lost touch both with his inner self and with his ambience.

The Renaissance idea of a great national poet, the idea on which so many defenses of poetry were implicitly or explicitly based, found its first English incarnation in the career of Edmund Spenser. But the incarnation fundamentally transformed the idea, for Spenser was caught in a literary system that defined the poet in a quite different way—not as an inspired maker of vatic images, but rather as a youth culpably distracted by passion from the real business of life. Spenser’s presentation of himself as Poet can be seen as an attempt to reconcile these two notions, neither of which he could wholly abandon. Without the heroic ideal he could not escape the repentance that prematurely cut off the literary careers of the other poets of his generation, but without some participation in the Elizabethan paradigm of the lover-poet he might not be thought a poet at all.

“To Autumn” should not be read merely as a static poem expressive of perfection and sadness. All kinds of mutation can be recognized in it: temporal changes (within the season, within the day), changes in space and angle of view, in the kind of biology and sociology alluded to, in syntax and rhyme patterns. These can be recorded as a series of curves, each of which differs from the others in direction or shape. Critical interpretations of the poem result from the combination of several of these curves. However, most interpretations ignore the background of the curves, the solid and encompassing, if inarticulate, “nature in process” on which the curves are superposed. Although still more interpretations, such as a sociopolitical one, could be devised by combining individual curves, none of them will be fully significant unless it takes into account the deep, vast, indifferent voice of nature itself slowly passing, which Keats managed to summon to a background presence.

This essay examines various aspects of the “Subject-Object” relation in narrative, with respect to La Vie de Saint Alexis. The model of this relation proposed by A. J. Greimas is contrasted with that of Bernard de Clairvaux. The two theorists, one secular, one Christian, have different understandings of the content and the structure of the Subject-Object relation: of desire, of narrative “transformation” and “closure.” Bernard's model is more applicable to the Alexis. Alexis, God, the public, and Alexis' family must all be considered Subjects of this text, in that events must be viewed with respect to their desires, or Objects. The saint, God, and the faithful public are all necessary Subjects in hagiography, and their functions help define the genre. The importance of “transcendent” Subjects—of God (on the vertical axis) and the public (on the horizontal)—is characteristic of medieval narrative.

A letter to the hero in Daniel Deronda offers an interpretation of George Eliot’s novel, an account of its rhetorical principles: the Deronda plot discloses not the “effects of causes” but the “present causes of past effects.” This metaleptic plot structure contradicts the linking of origin, cause, and identity affirmed in the story of Deronda’s Jewish birth. The story must shift between constative and performative conceptions of language and must finally invoke the notion of an actual, nonlinguistic fact or act. The relevant referent is Deronda’s circumcision, which the novel must occlude; otherwise the story of discovering identity could not unfold. The scandal of this referent is its status as an exemplary signifier, alluding to the divine pact with Abraham, a story of the institution of signification. Circumcision is an emblem of the novel’s allusive or citational mode: the narrative makes its starting point, not a subject, but a rhetorical operation.

The Lucy poems were evoked by stress in Wordsworth’s relationships with Dorothy and Coleridge. Four were written in Germany, where Wordsworth was forced to separate from Coleridge because of the added expense of keeping Dorothy. Wordsworth’s resulting hostility toward Dorothy mixes with his love as he fantasizes her death and then mourns her loss in the Lucy poems. But his relationship with Coleridge darkened as well after Coleridge stated a preference for living near Thomas Poole rather than Wordsworth when the poets met at Göttingen following their winter-long separation. “I Travelled among Unknown Men,” written in England two years later, reveals, however, that Wordsworth overcame his ambivalence toward Dorothy and his excessive dependency upon Coleridge; his declaration of love for England becomes an indirect refusal to venture abroad with Coleridge again. Through the development of the Lucy cycle, Wordsworth discovered that place is the foundation of love and relationship.

Although Coleridge’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s Preface has shaped subsequent understanding of Wordsworth’s meaning, Coleridge was out not to clarify but to refute Wordsworth. His discussion of the Preface repeatedly shifts the positions to which it objects and misleadingly distinguishes between what the Preface can legitimately be taken to mean and what it probably does mean. It distorts Wordsworth’s account of his choice of subjects and his comments on poetic language. Although intelligible meanings can be discovered for Wordsworth’s remarks about “the real language of men” and the lack of “essential difference” between the languages of verse and prose, Coleridge’s exegesis reduces them to absurdity. The position he offers in opposition to the one he draws from the Preface closely resembles the one Wordsworth actually put forward there. The real agreements and disagreements between Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s views are more interesting than those to which Coleridge’s interpretation has called attention.

Wallace Stevens uses the alphabet as a code to validate the philosophical concerns of his poetry. The alphabet is “murderous” if it represents a sacred and sterile process that assumes a final dispensation as “heavenly script”; the alphabet is “fusky” if it represents an artistic act that continually mediates between the emptiness of things and the imagination to create poetic heavens on earth. Stevens often works with an abbreviated alphabet (ABC, XYZ, etc.) where the letters are “characters” who represent certain relations between the imagination and reality. An understanding of this code informs certain poems where letters play an explicit and major role, such as “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” “Connoisseur of Chaos,” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The alphabetical code also informs much of Stevens’ other work and accounts for many of the apparent difficulties of his poetry—the curious vocabulary, the fantastic characters, and the exotic topography of his poetic universe.

At the heart of much Victorian fiction is a moral ideology based on the assumption that human nature is essentially flexible, always at least potentially capable of change and renewal. Anthony Trollope devotes much of his own fiction to a systematic critique of such an assumption, arguing that individual character is at bottom irrevocably fixed. Three important novels in particular are built around progressive discoveries by major characters that they are, by their natures, incapable of change: Orley Farm, He Knew He Was Right, and The Duke’s Children. In books like these we discover a skeptical and somber vein in Trollope’s imagination that critics of his work have typically failed to recognize.

When it first appeared Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) was criticized for lacking structural coherence and for including digressive and superfluous narrative material. Such an appraisal, however, does not stand up under analysis. In arranging the individual episodes of the plot Lampedusa twice relies on a sophisticated pattern of chiastic ordering to throw into prominence the novel's central themes and to reinforce symbolic associations. The patterns of concentric symmetry compensate for the effects of the intentionally static quality of a plot that consists more of a sequence of moods and meditations than of specific actions. Lampedusa plays down linear development and compels the reader to seek the novel's unity in its thematic and symbolic structures. Seen from this perspective, IlGattopardo might well be celebrated rather than censured for the complexity of its structural coherence.

The engravings that appeared as frontispieces in seventeenth-century editions of Molière’s works show that the decor of his stage was not nearly so universalized and unspecific as is generally believed. Each of his plays had its own individualized setting, and he laid increasing stress on the scenic environment for his plays as his career progressed. His earliest plays were set in variations of the traditional decor of comedy: the street before two houses. In Tartuffe and Le Misanthrope he made the stage represent a private domestic interior. In plays like Le Sicilien and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme the scenic definition of stage space became more fluid and fanciful. And in his last play, Le Malade imaginaire, Molière used the most advanced scenic technology of his day to provide a decor that reflected the extravagant folly of his hero.

In his legendary lecture “The Babes in the Wood” (1863–64), Artemus Ward wanted to “go in for fun,” and he artfully structured the talk to exemplify his credo: “We better stay in the sunshine while we may, inasmuch as we know the shadows will come all too soon.” Mark Twain heard Ward speak in Virginia City and later wrote that “The Babes” was “the funniest thing I ever listened to.” This article reproduces a reasonably accurate speaking text of “The Babes” and considers it in relation to Mark Twain’s theory and practice of lecturing and to his early written humor. Its comedy offered Mark Twain, among other things, a demonstration of (1) complex rhetorical strategies and (2) a sophisticated burlesque of the serious lyceum lecture. To clarify its burlesque dimension, “The Babes” is then compared to Emerson’s lecture “The Law of Success” (which Ward had heard and reported).

A comparison of narrative and lyric conceptions of temporality in Dickinson's poetry sheds light on that group of her poems in which a story is begun only to be violently broken into and disrupted. Defining life as a series of alternatives, the poems establish a dialectic, but seemingly for the sake of dismissing it as inadequate. The dismissal is frequently one of rage at all that is temporal, all that has a history whose requirement is sacrifice and choice. Such Dickinson poems can end in disorder, and they are examined here in the context of other lyrics that equally seem to pin their hopes on the belief that a verbal sabotage of sequence will trigger a temporal one, that, grown sufficiently desperate, the maneuvers of speech can stop time dead.