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.

This essay, while referring particularly to commentary about Renaissance drama, examines the new historicism more generally as one of the most powerful and interesting forms of criticism on the contemporary scene. How do new-historicist critics characterize the text? What do they mean by history? How do they understand the relation between the two? And finally, are there other, arguably more useful kinds of answers available to us than the ones the new historicists typically provide?

Roland Barthes's S/Z brilliantly details the way Balzac's Sarrasine undermines traditional understandings of realism's reference to the world. Considered through J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, however, Sarrasine appears not only to detach names from their referents but also to assert the irreproachable validity of every naming process sanctioned by the linguistic community in which it occurs. According to Austin, successful representation depends not on faithfulness to objective reality but on conformity to social conventions. Balzac's narrative illustrates Austin's point by depicting an unsexed castrato successively given opposite sexes in different communities. As exemplified in Sarrasine, the realist project insistently negates language's referential ground while just as insistently affirming its supreme representational authority.

The speech behavior of Erec and his wife, Enite, in Hartmann's late twelfth-century Arthurian epic seems to support the view that women in strongly patriarchal societies are expected to speak with men rarely and to employ appropriate negative-politeness strategies to minimize the imposition. When Lady Enite breaks the rules, her husband imposes, on pain of death, a command of silence. She repeatedly disobeys but saves her life by using the requisite strategies to beg for forgiveness. Her impudence is nevertheless punished with demotion to servant status. On closer analysis, however, one must agree with Erec that he has merely been testing his wife and note that Hartmann is advocating a far more active and vocal role for women in the marriage relationship than first meets the eye.

Chaucer's Wife of Bath longs to counter the assertion of antifeminist satire that women's authority over men is noxious and undeserved. At first it seems that for her tale she chooses romance as the genre that can imagine a worthy sovereignty of secular women, yet she undermines romantic elevation by frequently returning to satiric stances. The generic mixing in her tale signals that romance is inadequate to her argument and indeed that no conventional discourse sustains women's sovereignty. Alison attempts to reach beyond the discourses available to her by destabilizing gender, genre, and gentillesse in her narration, intimating that these categories are flexible and open to new meanings.

Changing conceptions of gender and of theatrical mimesis can be seen in the representations of transvestite heroines on the English Renaissance stage. This paper compares their roles in five comedies: Lyly's Gallathea; Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; and Jonson's Epicoene. In each play the plot centers on marriage, the bride-to-be wears transvestite disguise, and the disguise plays a crucial role in the plot. In all five plays, the sexual ambiguity of the boy heroine is associated with the problematic relations between the male actor and the female character he portrays, the dramatic representation and the reality it imitates, the play and the audience that watches it. Increasingly rigid gender definitions and a devaluation of the feminine are associated with a rejection of fantasy, the development of neoclassical mimetic theory, and a deepening anxiety about the process of theatrical representation.

In film studies the work of Alfred Hitchcock has often been considered misogynist, and feminist critics have assumed that the female spectator can enjoy the films only by adopting the position of a masochist or the perspective of a man. An analysis of Blackmail, however, reveals that women's relation to the text is much more complicated than has generally been supposed. The film is constructed as an elaborate joke on the heroine, who, as in the Freudian paradigm, is ultimately transformed into an object between two male subjects; nevertheless, because much of the film stresses her subjectivity, a reading that insists on woman's point of view and experience becomes possible. This reading, which activates the word rape—a term seldom used in analytical discussions of the film's central episode—has serious implications for feminist critics in their struggle for interpretive truth.

An analysis of Emily Dickinson's metrics suggests that her meters—even in individual lines of poetry—can be read as signs for the connotations they have acquired and for the cultural contexts that have empowered them. Iambic pentameter, the dominant meter in Dickinson's poetic lineage and culture, although rare in her work, plays a significant role in some of her most famous poems. Dickinson's iambic pentameters usually occur in a dynamic with her ordinary meter, the hymn stanza, a relation that reflects her ambivalence toward the male-identified poetic authority represented by iambic pentameter. Reading key poems for their semantic-metrical connections—the ways in which the semantic and metrical levels comment on each other—illuminates Dickinson's association of canonical poetic strength with patriarchal structures such as Christianity, with social conventions of fame and power, and with both triumph and failure.

El Periquillo Sarniento, the first Spanish American novel, by José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi, was published in Nueva España in 1816. The book's reception at that moment, when Mexico was fighting for independence, cries out for a reader-response interpretation sensitive to the social realities of production and consumption. In the title of this essay the “colonial reader” emphasizes the political nature of the reading process for this particular work, but the quotation marks suggest general applicability. Lizardi's sense of his readers' varying orientations to a book—from a rigidly European literary taste to an American desire for plain expression—dictated the design of this indigenous work. Lizardi, like the writers of the “new Spanish American novel” later, understood the need for a radically different literary language, one that would urge readers to question inherited forms and to revalue existing speech.

Gianlorenzo Bernini's single surviving playscript offers a satire on Bernini's own fame as a creator of scenic stage marvels as well as a satiric analysis of his younger painter-playwright rival from Naples, Salvator Rosa. But Bernini's play also raises general issues about the relations of amateurs and professionals in the leveling context of carnival, about the effect of printing on a subgenre of the improvisational scenarii of the commedia dell' arte as printed texts established a popular reading audience in seventeenth-century Rome, and about the concept of “popular” in the relations of class and genre implicit not only in Bernini's satire but in much of the seventeenth-century generic mixing that took place far outside the exemplary conditions of the Roman commedie ridicolose.

The name Oscar Wilde has become one of the best-known indexes of late nineteenth-century male homoerotic desire. To situate Wilde's emergence as “a homosexual” in late nineteenth-century literary contexts and thereby explore the ways that sex-gender ideologies shape specific literary works, I focus first on Teleny, a novel widely attributed to Wilde and one of the earliest examples of male homoerotic pornography. Then, by analyzing the more celebrated and yet manifestly “straight” text The Picture of Dorian Gray, I illustrate that, even in the absence of explicit homosexual terminology or activity, a text can subvert the normative standards for male same-sex behavior. In considering how these works challenge the hegemonic representations of male homoerotic experience in late Victorian Britain, I suggest that textual depictions of male same-sex experience both reproduce and resist the dominant (hetero)sexual ideologies and practices.

The Orpheus tapestry in Garcilaso's third eclogue is an intertextual construct, a rewriting of the myth through a dismembering and reconstruction of classical and Italian models. Revisionary and corrective, Garcilaso's creative imitation of his antecedents involves a deliberate act of subversion; his text not only remakes its sources but seeks to overcome them. Thus Garcilaso's version of Orpheus and Eurydice rivals its predecessors by its own accuracy of presentation; it depicts exquisite, fragile beauty violently destroyed and a brooding, solipsistic lover deprived of his lyric power. By subverting the ancient artist-magician, Garcilaso appropriates the Orphic power of song for the lyric speaker's self-presentation as poet, providing the speaker, in the process, with a rite of passage into the mythological world of the nymphs. Finally, an elaborate game of voices, anchored on the Orphic, reveals the text both as an artifact and as a product of an act of rewriting.