Chaucer's Pardoner functions pivotally in The Canterbury Tales, for he personifies illusory goals that can divert or halt the pilgrimage. A walking shrine, carrying spurious relics and questionable indulgences, he offers the pilgrims a meretricious equivalent of what they seek in Canterbury. His diversionary malfeasance gives thematic significance to his unsavory relationship with the Summoner and establishes a close parallel between Chaucer s pilgrimage framework and the rioters' quest in the tale itself. It is fitting that the Pardoner addresses his crucial invitation, at the end of the tale, to the Host, because the Host is responsible for guiding the pilgrims to Canterbury. The violence with which the Host responds is thus particularly appropriate, for he is confronting the man who threatens the impetus of the pilgrimage as a whole. (MS)

Animal fables pass from country to country and century to century, but not unchanged. Because fables have explicit moralizations, the innovative medieval fabulists (Marie, Odo, and Berechiah through Henryson) help us test what authors meant by meaning and what freedoms they took with tradition. We catch them thinking aloud. As they develop social satire, play with allegory, and dramatize style, they maintain a consistent reasoning process something like what we now call structuralist, but something, too, like Augustinian exegesis. We can partially learn to read like a medieval reader, yet we find even the explicit and documented meanings too various to be caught, caged, and cataloged by our theories. With fables as with their wilder cousins, the Nun's Priest's Tale, the Bestiary of Love, and unmoralized literature, neither we nor the medieval reader can anticipate when the author will double back to surprise us. Surprise, it seems, was itself a tradition.

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.

La vida de Lazarillo de Tonnes is a coherent and fully realized fiction. Its eccentric shape is craftily designed by its autobiographical narrator to serve his current needs by swelling the narration of his early years while masking the recent “Toledo Years” with wit, expedient renaming, and ellipses. By this apparently generous and certainly amusing “recontextualization” of his current involvement in a scandalous ménage-à-trois the narrator seeks to attenuate his culpability: his corruption merely represents Toledo's and his society's generally. The puzzling short chapters (iv-vii) are coded allusively to deceive innocent readers and amuse malicious readers in Lázaro's Toledo; these chapters are as detailed as they can and need be. The narrator exercises a freer hand in setting down his version of long-ago and far-away Salamanca; Lázaro exploits this advantage in the four fifths of the narrative that comprises Chapters i-iii.

From the perspective of sexual politics, The Winter's Tale is a remarkable achievement: it recovers the possibility of harmonious male-female relations from the destructive antagonism between the sexes in the tragedies. In particular, it expands the role of women, making the combined forces of Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita central to the dramatic action. This development is so moving that we tend simply to welcome it without inquiring into the centrality of women and the terms of the sexual reconciliation. I argue that such an inquiry must be made. A sentimental reading of the play looks exclusively at its positive aspects and fails to recognize that women s power remains strictly circumscribed within the patriarchal framework. Acknowledging this limitation provides for a multiple rather than a monolithic response to the play and makes it possible both to affirm and to dissent from the ending. (PBE)

Paradoxically, the key to Marvell's “Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun” is the controversy the poem has inspired. Each critical interpretation is both true and false: none can stand alone; each must be combined with all the others, no matter how seemingly antithetical, to form an overall pattern that is “traditional” in the broadest sense of the word. The “Complaint” is not solely for a fawn, nor is it a lament only for the passing of an old world order, pastoral simplicity, Christ, love, or innocence; it is an elegy for all things that must die and an accurate portrait of the mind's attempt to deal with the inevitability of pain and loss.

The end of Le Rouge et le noir constitutes a chronic critical scandal, raising a host of problems concerning the novel's plot and its legitimating authority that may be approached through the question of paternity in the career of Julien Sorel. Paternity becomes a key issue in a novel structured by a conflict between legitimacy and usurpation, a conflict that has political, historical, and narratological implications. Politics versus manners, the hypothesis of Julien's illegitimate noble birth versus his career of monstrous usurpation, the role of the narrator as a father figure who subverts paternalistic control–these and related questions may provide a context for reading the end of the novel, for determining the relation of what Julien calls his novel to Stendhal's, and for understanding the uses of the guillotine.

The aesthetic theory pervading Middlemarch provides a context for interpreting the novel and understanding its references to the arts; consequently a language of art is important to the novel's (1) imagery, (2) aesthetic theory, and (3) iconography. (1) Although Dorothea Brooke is characterized in images of music and poetry, her Puritanic sensibility has hampered her aesthetic development, and the classical and Catholic artifacts of Rome oppress her senses as marriage to Casaubon oppresses her spirit. (2) To help her, Will Ladislaw teaches Dorothea the language of art, with the aid of Ruskin, Lessing, and Goethe—all champions of realism. (3) Eliot further dramatizes the relations of Casaubon, Dorothea, and Ladislaw by invoking the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus —a myth surrounded and amplified by allusions to literature and art. Guiding Eliot's use of the language of art in Middlemarch is Ruskin's aesthetic of Naturalist Idealism.

The House of the Seven Gables contains a contradiction that seems inherent in the form of the romance as Hawthorne defined it. While Hawthorne uses the form to shape a vision of the future by treating the possible, not the probable, he acknowledges that vision as a product of his imagination and thus undercuts its authority to represent an actual world. The romance we call America seems to contain a similar contradiction. The American dream, to shape an alternative society based on the vision of a possible world, rests on documents that declare self-evident truths and claim the authority of natural law. But Hawthorne's romance suggests that the foundation of authority for both his romance and his country is not natural but rhetorical. To explore this contradiction and the possibility of transcending it, I propose a social reading of Hawthorne's romance and a rhetorical reading of the American social system.

Wordsworth's unfinished masterwork, The Recluse, is often regarded as a nonexistent text. Though Wordsworth never completed the entire plan, its fragments constitute nearly twenty thousand lines of poetry that can be coherently interpreted. In their probable order of composition, the extant parts reveal a dialectical movement between Wordsworth's commitment to a public epic of secular redemption and his fascination with private poetry exploring his own genius. Three distinct episodes in this pattern can be identified in the active period of The Recluse's development (1797-1815). Each begins with Wordsworth's effort to write The Recluse, followed by a recoil into Prelude-type poetry, ending with the completion of some portion of The Recluse. In all three, Wordsworth's determination to give “Human Life” or society its due can be seen as at once the motivation and the stumbling block of his uneven progress toward The Recluse.

Corneille's La Mort de Pompée represents a contamination of sources—the one Latin and avowed (Lucan's epic poem, the Pharsalia), the other modern and unavowed (the theory of the Christian epic as found in the Discorsi of Tasso). Into the historical, Lucan framework dealing with Roman civil strife the playwright inserts a Tassoan interlude during which the Romans band together against a non-Roman enemy and Cesar adumbrates an ideal policy whereby Rome would accept what amounts to Cléopatre's conversion to Romanness. The tensions between the Lucan and the Tassoan elements in the play are not resolved, nor could they be, and critical readings that try to remove the play's ambiguities only partially sift the evidence. The absence of clear-cut resolution in Pompée may or may not be intentional; in any event, it is central to the structure and meaning of the play. (ADS)

Ironic readings of Moll Flanders have illuminated the novel's psychological comedy at the expense of its social criticism and have elevated Defoe's art by lowering the moral status of its heroine. This essay defends and celebrates Moll as a character who co-opts the essentially criminal practices of a burgeoning capitalist patriarchy, thereby escaping the eternal feminine cycle of reproduction and entering the historical social cycle of production. Moll's anomie and anonymity reflect back on a disintegrating social order. Marriage, rendered newly insecure by the contradictions of waning patriarchal authority and of a market economy, proves a false haven for Moll; the novel's real quest is matriarchal—a search among three maternal figures for a viable economic model. Defoe eschews the myth of female purity, although Moll's finally successful but realistically compromised woman's estate is, by the standards of the myth, unacceptable to patriarchal critics.

Literary historians have persistently regarded The Education of Henry Adams as a “paradigmatic” text. While “historical explanations“ stress the book's historical achievement, “critical explications” portray it as a failure of historical consciousness that achieves its success in the ahistorical arenas of aesthetic integration and imaginative projection. To relate the products of “explication” with the aims of “historical explanation,” I regard the work's true “paradigm achievement” as an inquiry into “historical being.” For Adams this achievement embodies disciplinary formulation and professional commitment and thus coordinates historical speculation and self-cultivation. One must assess the ethical density and cultural significance of the text before explaining its historical identity. The Education, despite its origin in epistemological chaos, makes the past eternally relevant to the present; for it is a personal and theoretical discovery of how the narrative structures of history and selfhood create the possibilities of individual and social life.