Derek Pearsall's 2004 salvo against the furthest reaches of historicist criticism expresses, with characteristic brio, the dangers of reading literature solely in terms of its complicity with – and creation and instantiation of – cultural and political ideologies. But as one might expect in a volume entitled The Exploitations of Romance, I would respond with some equivocation. The text's claim to fictionality is itself ideological; it demands imaginative freedoms and resists truth-telling responsibilities, while nevertheless insisting upon the audience's participation in its inherent presuppositions and preoccupations. Pearsall makes a vital point, that it is not always possible to produce convincing, historicized readings of literary texts; their freedom from immediate reference is, one could say, the heart of their poetic value. But prevailing fictions evolve over time. Behind the changing meanings of the stories we tell ourselves lie the reasons for their being told; where the attempt to historicize an individual text lacks purchase, the relations between texts can offer access: to the operations being performed upon received material, the moments of heat and invention, and the transmission of social and cultural meaning in the text.