Critics have traditionally viewed the individual poems of Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) primarily as exercises in innovative versification and exotic local color. But if the poems are read sequentially, a significant pattern emerges. The apocalyptic cataclysm of “Le Feu du ciel” introduces the theme of sudden death and destruction that emerges as central to the entire volume. Hugo’s preoccupation with sudden violence needs to be understood in the light of his attitude toward the French Revolution. Attracted by the freedom that it brought but repelled by its excesses, Hugo could not decide during this period whether the Revolution was morally good or evil, with the result that at the end of Les Orientales he avoided taking a political stance and found refuge in art for art’s sake. It was only many years later that he was able to resolve his political doubts and complete his vision of human destiny.

A striking similarity in the choice of characters (a beautiful young wife; a former schoolmate; a rather commonplace husband; a husband's friend, the wife's secret admirer) and in the handling of plot (a threat of blackmail, a struggle for power, a plan for suicide) suggests that Hedda Gabler is to a remarkable degree a more complex manifestation of A Doll's House. Even more intriguing is the heroines' shared aspiration to achieve vicarious fulfillment through an admired man's heroic act. And most significant of all is the identity of their reactions when the man fails. Though Nora finally no longer believes in miracles nor Hedda in vine leaves, each is still pursuing—whether with determination or destructiveness— her ideal (and Ibsen's) of the realized self. Examining the equivalences of character in these works reveals how Ibsen's vision became richer, darker, more ambiguous even as his concerns remained essentially the same.

Through her name and position at court Hélène de Surgères brings to Ronsard’s last collection of sonnets two conflicting referential systems: a literary tradition in which, beginning with the Iliad, Helen is a figure of love and war and a more or less realistic imitation of events in French society and the court of Charles ix. Ronsard adopts a local court convention in which love for Hélène allows successful evasion of the miseries of the civil wars, but he criticizes the convention by displacing its allegorical intent—transcendence of mundane and temporal difference—with an irony that internalizes and preserves that difference. Thus the irony, in aiming to avoid the referential contexts, actually marks them as ineradicable. Instead of presenting a platonizing view of the lady, the Sonnets pour Hélène reveal in her an inescapable contradiction that also is within the poems’ je and its constructions.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche holds that conscious art, in which symbols of truth are deliberately created, does not supersede myth but functions, rather, as its destiny and revealed essence. At its later stages, where it becomes fully itself, myth is closely related to artistic illusion in an eighteenth-century sense, illusion to which we submit while recognizing its illusoriness; myth is a constantly renewed creative effort by which we protect ourselves against the unacceptable truth of the utter emptiness of existence, a truth we also tacitly acknowledge precisely by striving against it. Only on this basis is it possible to understand both the reciprocity of Apollonian and Dionysian and Nietzsche’s conception of the role of his own work in the historical development of Socratic culture.

The problem of order is central to Rousseau’s political and social thought. Nature’s order has been ruptured by man’s unique ability to conceive of order and cannot be restored; only a properly conceived artificial order can be “natural” and remedy the defects introduced by the original violation. This article examines Rousseau’s analysis of disorder in society (inequality, injustice, a “state of war”) and in the self (three modes of alienation); the philosophical bases of his theory about an artificial order being “natural” and remedying the designated defects; and the rationale of the means of doing so. The discussion involves two paradigms (the body, Julie’s garden) and four paradoxes (completing alienation, remaking nature, “losing” the self to restore it, using inequality to establish equality). Rousseau’s vocabulary and rhetoric are shown to support this analysis. In his argument, liberty and submission, self-fulfillment and the authoritarian state, nature and culture cease being antitheses.

Herman Melville began his literary career as the author of popular, presumably ephemeral works. He employed fiction for its entertainment value and, though he was a storyteller of genius, had no respect for the fictional mode. His view of authorship changed and his ambitions expanded over time, but his basic distrust of, and lack of interest in, fiction remained constant—may even have grown stronger—in his works. He accepted an Emersonian view of fiction as an impediment to the direct utterance of truth and found the requirements of fiction—story, character, point of view—a limitation and a distortion of the absolute expression for which he strove. Melville’s impatience with, and lack of regard for, the mode of fiction can be traced through his works from 1846 to 1857, after which he ceased to write for a large public.

Composed in the tradition of German idealist aesthetics, Lukács' Theory of the Novel (1916) establishes him not only as an heir to Hegel but, more important, as a forerunner of Benjamin, Adorno, Goldmann, and Auerbach. Lukács begins by constructing a phenomenology of narrative mind in which modern consciousness is played otf against its Other, against the epic vision of earlier poets. Whereas the Homeric epic is characterized by a wholeness of sensibility and vision, novelistic consciousness is ironic, alienated and self-divided. Thus the novelistic hero's journey becomes a Hegelian one into the problematic realms of inwardness, memory, and imagination: from Cervantes to Flaubert we witness a retreat from participation in the world to interpretation of it. Lukács' philosophical meditations prefigure much in recent novel theory: Benjamin's and Adorno's commentaries on alienation in narrative, Goldmann's notion of the problematic hero, and Auerbach's concept, in Mimesis, of Homeric realism.

This article discusses some characteristic methods and structures shared by modern Western and classical Chinese poetry, focusing on the works of Georg Trakl and major poets of the T’ang dynasty. Among the similarities examined are the preference for concrete imagery over abstract, discursive statement; the paratactical juxtaposition of images, which leaves their logical, temporal, and grammatical relationships unspecified and often ambiguous; and the tendency for images to become “ciphers” that suggest, but do not support, metaphorical interpretation. There is also a reluctance to obtrude a first-person speaker onto the scene, and this has led some critics to label Symbolist-post-Symbolist and Chinese poetry “impersonal”; this essay argues, however, that the hidden subjectivity of even the most “impersonal” poem should not be overlooked. Nevertheless, the omission of subject does frequently increase ambiguities among the other elements of a work and contributes to the “poetics of discontinuity” common to the two traditions.

The struggle between power, which enables the individual to participate in social exchange, and desire (resulting from an absence or lack), which isolates the individual from the social order, characterizes the sixteenth-century prototype picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes; and art is posited throughout as a means of attaining power. At each stage of this pseudoautobiography, the hero, functioning as both character (the young Lazarillo) and narrator (the adult Lázaro), depends on the use of rhetoric to influence others and change his station in life. The young trickster employs cunning wit in his struggle to integrate himself into a seemingly closed society, and the mature apologist, in his forced confession, an antiutopian transformation of the Augustinian confessional form, uses verbal art in an attempt to mediate the conflict between his desire and the power of authorities who still persecute him despite the degree of worldly success he has attained.

Pope’s “Grace beyond the Reach of Art” is not an irrational, inexplicable poetic effect, as critics often assume, but an essential, vitalizing illusion: a seemingly incomprehensible deviation from a norm of expectation that proves harmonious and coherent in the context of a work’s overall design. Poetry imitates Nature, and rules are “Nature methodiz’d,” but rules are incomplete formalizations of Nature’s order that gain systematic coherence only in relation to the ends of specific poems. Thus, grace breaks rules yet conforms to Nature; its aberrance is a function of the limitations that readers necessarily have before they arrive at aesthetic comprehension. Analyses of Pope’s “Preface to the Iliad,” Epistle to Burlington, and Essay on Man show that the movement from initial confusion to final understanding that informs grace is also central to his perception of Homer’s art, his theory of landscape design, and his conception of cosmic order.

One type of organization favored by the Beowulf poet is an ABC … X … CBA design capable of indefinite expansion. Ring composition of this type serves as a way of building up short verse paragraphs, as in Homer. It also underlies the composition of whole episodes. In addition, the entire narrative of Beowulf is knit together by an elaborate set of thematic parallels and verbal echoes ranged in pairs about a midpoint of mythic intensity, the fight with Grendel’s dam on the floor of the monsters’ pool. The consistency with which thesis is answered by antithesis in the design of Beowulf seems to be a special characteristic of the poet’s style and way of viewing the world. Seldom are events seen as isolated, without antecedents or consequences. Often joy is answered by sorrow in a network of reversals that undercuts any confidence in the permanence of earthly success.

The prevalent view that Book III of Gulliver’s Travels satirizes the Royal Society overlooks the fact that this book contains two satires, one on the Laputians and one on the Balnibarbians. The first of these satires gains point if we regard it as aimed at the Cartesians, interpreting Laputa as France, the land of the Cartesians, and Balnibarbi as England, the land of the Newtonians, characterizations made by Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques. The Laputians’ fear of the extinction of the sun is fully justified by the cosmology of Descartes’s Principes; their musical mania exaggerates only slightly that of the Cartesian popularizer Marin Mersenne; their influence on the Balnibarbians, inspiring them to build the Academy of Lagado, represents the influence of Descartes on the Royal Academy, an influence that has been hitherto underestimated.

Keats’s To Autumn is now generally accepted as a stable poem in praise of maturity, process, and the natural condition. Can new techniques of interpretation ever be objectively applied to such a poem, when its meaning is so well “known”? This question is germane to two recent attempts to apply syntactical analysis to To Autumn. Donald Freeman uses Chomskyan transformational procedures on the first stanza and endorses the conventional reading; Geoffrey Hartman discovers in the poem’s grammar signs of its status as a poem of the antisublime, or “Hesperian,” mood. Both readings are shown to depend on preunderstanding of the poem. Its grammar can equally be shown to support a quite opposite reading, one that undermines the traditional ideology of Autumn and presents the analogy between Autumn and human maturing as a cruel delusion.