Boccaccio's Genealogia deorum has endured for reasons quite apart from its usefulness as a reference book. Its genealogies dismember myths as narratives and do little to facilitate reference, but they enact the mingled senses of hope, frustration, and bad faith that characterize early humanist efforts. The extinction of myth both justifies and blocks Boccaccio's quest to restore the genealogy of the old gods in order to revive and legitimize the line of poets. He can safely undertake this quest only if assured of failure. Even then it may not be safe to play Aesculapius to the dismembered corpus of ancient myth. Similar paradoxes emerge from analogies with the Bible and its genealogical mode of history. Finally, the Genealogy's structure imitates the dilemma of the modern poet who, inheriting no authority for his fictions from great antique originals, must press his claim to legitimacy, make it good, perhaps make it up.

The biblical book of Ruth is a succinct, intricate love story powered by five intense dialogues. It is a story about language and literature as well as about love. The characters find all three as generously available as the grains of barley on which Boaz and Ruth pledge their troth. Boaz, Ruth, and Naomi draw on a rich common store of literary allusions and laws derived from Hebrew literary tradition to create a happy ending for the sterile stories of their individual pasts. The liberties they take with known biblical and Hebraic law have long puzzled scholars trying to place the story in its precise historical or cultural context. But I argue that the book was never intended to represent a time and place, that it celebrates the creative improvisations religious rules are meant to inspire in any time or place.

Critics of Renaissance literature have recently claimed that the active role of the reader in the production of meaning is only recognized in the sixteenth century. While numerous counterexamples can be found in classical and medieval literature, this essay focuses on the active role of the fictional reader in Petrarch's Secretum in order to demonstrate the limited applicability of such a claim to the early Renaissance. While critics have interpreted the exchange between Augustinus and Franciscus as the dramatic representation of Petrarch's divided will, they have failed to note that this dividedness is conveyed as well by the intertextuality of the work. In his willful misreading of Augustine's Confessions, in his allusions to his own earlier letter on the ascent of Mont Ventoux, as well as in his use and abuse of citations and moral exempla, Petrarch dramatizes his conception of the will itself as a faculty of interpretation.

Examining the epistemological assumptions governing Calderón's theocentric view of life provides an accessible framework to overcome the many difficulties in reading La vida es sueño as a document of human experience. Segismundo's problems arise from an incomplete understanding of himself and the world. A prisoner since birth, the prince overcompensates intellectually for a life of sensual deprivation. Alienated from both the world and the sensitive centers of his humanity, he thinks to excess because his principal conduit to the world, his imagination, has remained underdeveloped. Through his palace experiences and his three encounters with Rosaura, Segismundo learns to adapt his inappropriate thinking by understanding that he must dialogue with the world rather than construct arguments against it.

Although several Chaucer scholars have argued for the last four tales of the Canterbury Tales as a concluding sequence, it has not been generally recognized that Chaucer ends his book deliberately and skillfully beginning with the Second Nun's Tale. Through the concluding stories Chaucer disengages himself and his audience from the fiction making of the Tales, moving toward his own voice in the Retraction, and he introduces themes of transformation in tales concerning the conversion of souls (Second Nun), the transmutation of metals through alchemy (Canon's Yeoman), the metamorphosis of Apollo's crow (Manciple), and the transforming powers of contrition and penitence (Parson, Retraction). The consistency of these closure themes provides evidence for the authority of the Ellesmere manuscript as against the highly regarded and recently published Hengwrt manuscript of the Tales, which has a different concluding tale order and which does not contain the Canon's Yeoman's Tale.

One of the most puzzling of eleventh-century runic inscriptions appears on the Järsta stone, a commemorative monument from Sweden. Its major features—the text band, zoomorphic ornamentation, and shape—unite to form a balanced and harmonious whole. Past interpretations of the Järsta inscription accord neither with the general grammatical, orthographic and formulaic conventions of Uppland commemorative stones nor with the particular variations typical of the carver, Asmund Karasun. A careful consideration of the artistic design suggests that Asmund intended this inscription to be read in a sequence quite different from that proposed by past scholars. This new reading conforms to Asmund's characteristic orthography and phraseology, as we know them from his many other stones, and follows the patterns of formulation traditional to runic carving.

Most criticism of Emma echoes Jane Austen's powerful moralism. Even feminist critics who find the novel subversive locate its unsettling force in its celebration of female “authority,” a virtue opposed to “literacy” or linguistic playfulness. Austen subverts her own moralism, yet she does so by identifying her heroine, and women in general, with the very figurative language that readers have attempted to discredit or ignore. Wordplay in Emma almost always signals a disruptive counterplot. Emma's strategic misreading of Mr. Elton's riddle is an exemplary disruption, in which the distance between self and text collapses. Extending this principle of the rhetorical self to imagine collective existence as an endless process of reading and writing, Austen reveals a greater linguistic and social sophistication than critics have acknowledged.

Although some readers argue that the Apologia pro vita sua is not true autobiography, Newman in fact draws on models of spiritual autobiography in two traditions—one English and Protestant, the other Augustinian and Catholic. In the early chapters, Newman patterns his account on Thomas Scott's Force of Truth, presenting his own religious development as a series of encounters with theological texts but replacing the typological hermeneutics of Scott (and of most other Protestant autobiographers) with an interpretive method derived from ecclesiastical history. In later chapters, as he narrates his conversion to Catholicism, Newman takes Augustine's Confessions as a model, invoking characteristically Augustinian figures to signal a turn to a Catholic literary tradition. More comprehensively, he adapts the multiple forms of confession that organize Augustine's work to shape his final statement of faith and to integrate the narrative and expository modes that distinguish the Apologia and autobiography as a genre.

For some time Webster's Duchess of Malfi has been interpreted by reference to brother-sister incest, but that explanation has not been well integrated with other concerns in the play, nor has its sheer presence been questioned. Anthropological kinship theory, however, which conceives incest as a social act, reveals relations among the brother-sister plot, the play's major thematic element of social mobility, and the Jacobean setting from which the theme arose. Seen in this anthropological light, social-structural relations come into view among Ferdinand's incestuous inclination, his sister's cross-class marriage, and Antonio's and Bosola's upward social mobility. These relations in turn show how the play is grounded in its particular historical setting, at a time of substantial changes in notions of social role, changes that helped make visible the social determination of personal identity.

Shakespeare's sonnets are designed to seem written by a poet and spoken by a lover. This conspicuous ambidexterity, compounded by our declining tolerance for such deftness, has made them infamously problematic. They simultaneously flaunt and flout the correspondence between the lover's pen and his heart, between the artifice of his “rhetoric,” characteristic of much Tudor literature, and the rhetoric of his sincerity, characteristic of the Romantic poetics that has proven their sternest judge. The sonnets thus pose internally the very problem that informs their extensive interpretive history. But they also propose its solution: their sustained balance of verba and res, of verbally erotic and hermeneutically chaste designs, exalts the conflict of these designs, displaying its poetic power. And this paradoxical resolution of the poet's dilemma solves the critic's as well: it suggests a way of making a richly correspondent and yet reasoned sense of the sonnets and, indeed, of any literary text.

This essay explores the dynamics of framed narrative through readings of two Maupassant stories that illustrate the range of potential in the frame. Scrutiny of “La rempailleuse” and “En voyage” reveals, in particular, how a frame modifies the effect of, and reaction to, the narrative it surrounds. The more general principle that emerges is that the seemingly gratuitous border consisting of the “extra” narrator and his addressees operates, paradoxically, against closure, casting the reader into a metacommunicative realm where a second sign system springs from the first. Thus, in “En voyage,” romantic love, the thematic content, serves as the basis for a poetics of narrative and illuminates the larger implications of the interminability of the paratactic structure. Issues addressed are the strategies latent in the frame and the way the form itself calls into question the very nature and function of narrative.

During the nineteenth century the phenomenon of heredity was of great interest to artists as well as biologists, but its actual dynamics remained mysterious to both. Some felt that the inheritance of characteristics was to be explained on physiological grounds, some on psychic, and some on a combination of the two. A writer inclined toward scientific materialism like Zola naturally emphasized the physical interpretation of this phenomenon, but Ibsen and Strindberg found the possibility of heredity through psychic means, called telegony by August Weismann, more useful for their aesthetic concerns. Their plays show many varieties of this phenomenon, using telegony in ways related both to contemporary scientific speculation and to a long literary tradition, in which a key work was Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften.