Dante's vision of history in the Divine Comedy is a radical reworking of both Vergil and Augustine, generating a notion of the earthly city to supplant the quite different Roman constructions of his two Latin forebears. What has not been noted, however, is the strategic placement of this revision at the center of the poem. Undergirding Purgatorio 13-17 is Augustine's meditation on Cain and Abel taken out of the anti-Roman polemic of the City of God and translated into Dante's own political vernacular. It is in Purgatorio 15, moreover, that Augustine is introduced to us—not in person, but through an extended paraphrase of City of God 15.5 that is placed in Vergil's mouth. While Augustine surfaces textually at this point, he does so through the mediation of the poet of empire. The maneuver reveals yet another dimension of Dante's power over his authorities—the politics of his poetics.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Irish peasant was a figure encoded with literary, social, and political meaning, and to speak or write about that central image of Irish identity in the context of the time was to participate in a special kind of cultural discourse, far removed from the changing realities of rural life. The portraits of the peasant generated by different Irish poets, dramatists, fiction writers, and antiquarians were often radically opposed to one another; in fact, each writer undertook to rewrite or to reconceptualize the peasant characters imagined by predecessors and contemporaries. Thus W. B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde created portraits that not only rivaled each other but aimed primarily at overturning the prevailing English colonial stereotype reflected in the stage Irishman. These portraits were in turn rewritten by John Synge, even as Yeats's, Hyde's, and Synge's were reworked in divergent ways by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Patrick Kavanagh.

Throughout her theoretical writings, Julia Kristeva calls into question the privileged position of the symbolic order in Jacques Lacan's teaching and clinical practice. In particular, she argues that the Lacanian “algorithm” S/s inadequately accounts for nondiscursive pathological and creative phenomena, for experiential dimensions that elude the language function. She would shift psychoanalysis away from its fascination with language and toward operations that are “pre-meaning and pre-sign (or trans-meaning, trans-sign).” As a part of this larger project, Kristeva's essay “Within the Microcosm of ‘The Talking Cure’ ” presents a concentrated critique of the linguistic interpretation of the unconscious. Her essay focuses on the analytic encounter with “borderline” patients. However, Kristeva's characterization of the limitations of Lacanian theory in relation to borderline discourse has wide-ranging implications for other forms of communication as well.

Recently, Jerome McGann has criticized The Ruined Cottage's fostering of “the grand illusion” of Romanticism, “the idea that poetry, or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture.” But to characterize Wordsworth's poem in this way is to overlook its direct engagement with one social field, the literary marketplace; as an experiment with genre the poem sharply confronts a public taste for sensational literature. This confrontation is also a form of collusion, for the technical innovations that distinguish Wordsworth's poetry of suffering from popular sensational literature deploy the tactics and create the effects of that literature. The Ruined Cottage at once entices and reproves the public taste. Intended to appeal to a public of feminized readers, it also creates the readers-to-be of high Romantic poetry—an audience whose pleasure it is to distance itself from the captivated feminine heart.

While Lawrence's total novelistic production is generally conceived of as a loose aggregation of highly individual texts, each departing significantly from the norms that shape the traditional novel, the complete oeuvre conforms to the rules the single works violate: it approximates the discursive form Roland Barthes proposes for the classic realist plot. In the light of three powerful models—based on the sentence, the classic realist narrative, and a topological paradigm that synthesizes the two—Lawrence's changing structures from the early to the late fiction emerge as one well-organized traditional text that displays the characteristic articulations of narrative beginnings, middles, and endings, especially in the unfolding of the erotic visions and wisdoms that the individual novels explore.

Histories of rhetoric have characterized Plato as an opponent of rhetoric and have seen Gorgias primarily as a negative critique of rhetorical abuses. Such an understanding ignores the dialogue's own rhetoric and slights Plato's insight into the problem of inescapable and inadvertent injury that confronts anyone who uses language. But it is such injury that makes rhetoric philosophically interesting. Socrates's claim that the value of rhetoric lies in its ability to allow us to attack our loved ones is not an ironic dismissal of rhetoric but part of his attempt to develop the ethical point of refutation, as Gorgias itself is not an attempt to prove the obvious point that rhetoric can be abused but rather an eloquent argument as to why rhetoric should be taken seriously.

Using the noble obligations to give, receive, and repay, the Gawain poet makes Pharisaism real. In the gift, prestige is at stake; likewise, those who would submit themselves to the Law would glory before God. The poet links two exchanges to end reciprocity itself. The one in the middle of the poem, where Gawain plays courtesy matches with Bertilak's wife and where hunters make return gifts to the forest, involves Bertilak's and Gawain's presenting each other with whatever wealth each acquires during the day. In this exchange, Gawain finally declines to repay—to trump the fox skin. The other exchange, at the ends of the poem, is the submission to blows. Gawain's failure and his beheading of the Green Knight, each exchanged for the “tappe,” are exchanged for each other. Thus, Gawain owes the Green Knight a death, which the Green Knight pays. Forgiveness absorbs the subtle self-assertion of the gift.

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.

Missing from the tradition of scholarship on the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are distinctly feminist forms of critical attention, an insufficiency only beginning to be redressed. This essay attempts, by way of a contribution, to tease out the poem's feminine text: another romance within this romance, one in which a feminine desire is recoverable at the limit of the masculine narrative, where the logic of the poem as the stage of its masculine characters slips and fails. The critical status of the pentangle and “luf-lace” is reimagined in the context of this other theater, where desire circulates among female figures in a relay of filiative and contestatory relations legible in traces, marks, and signatures at multiple textual levels. The argument restores, in part, a locus of strangeness to a 600-year-old text made familiar by settled conventions of reading and by the consolidation of criticism over time.

Jorge Guillén's literary criticism makes a case for the “sufficiency” of poetic language, its capacity to measure up to the richness of its creator's inner experience. To define the attitudes toward language that underlie his poetics, this essay reconstructs his argument in Language and Poetry, a series of authoritative lectures on major Spanish poets in which Guillén attempts to refute linguistic skepticism. His advocacy of sufficient language meets its test in his own poetry in Cántico. Although critics have traditionally viewed his theory as mimetic, his poems also reveal an awareness of linguistic mediation that undercuts his seemingly naive faith in the power of the poetic word.