Margaret Fuller, despite her personal association with transcendentalism, has increasingly come to be seen apart from that movement, as a rebel whose rejection of Romantic Boston was essential to her development. Yet Fuller is best understood as an embodiment of the value most central to transcendentalism, “self-culture.” The doctrine of the cultivation of the self preached by Channing and others profoundly influenced all the transcendentalists, including Fuller. But her concentration on its implications for feminist concerns led to her important work on women's culture, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. This long essay—which evolved through an intense study of Goethean criticism and a series of discussions, or “Conversations,” that Fuller organized for women—is best seen as the application of transcendental philosophy to the concerns of women and as an instructive example of the connections between idealist philosophy and social reform.

It has long been recognized that the American formalists' rehabilitation of Alexander Pope depended on a renewed interest in rhetoric. In fact, there is a remarkable structural congruence between the formalists image of Pope's poetry and their conception of rhetoric, for both are item-centered, combinatory, and ultimately unifying. A single model of unified diversity, then, governs not only the formalist image of Pope's couplet rhetoric and theodicean scheme but formalist conceptions of rhetoric and “organic form” as well. An alternative (and complementary) model of rhetoric, however, insisting on creation as an act of structuring through differentiation rather than through unification, can help us to a fuller understanding of The Dunciad, and especially of the place of Dulness in that poem. Such a model can also generate a poetics capable of granting to satire and mock forms an appropriately primary status. (FVB)

Although intellectual historians have rejected the notion that Dryden was a skeptic, recent readings of his specific works have increasingly emphasized irony and absurdity. This critical contradiction can serve as an interpretive tool: a full account of Dryden's poems must explain their tendency to attract the imputation of skepticism. In their images, extended analogies, dramatic actions, and structural premises, Dryden's poetic works share a formal core characterized by disjunction, incommensurability, or the failure of congruence. This unreconciled disjunction reflects a continual struggle to override a contradiction. It represents the aesthetic codification of anxiety, the literary elaboration of an ideology at odds with itself. Dryden's poetry manifests the contradictions in his grasp of the realities of his age. In its disjunctivity, it reveals the anxieties of the Restoration settlement, and in its blind advocacy of a conservative and static ideal, it sees the realities of a progressive and dynamic historical process.

Measure for Measure has inspired widely divergent readings, in our century having been seen as either doctrinal (embodying Christian teachings) or “dark” and satiric. The play's prominent biblical and theological allusions do evoke a parallel between the duke and God, as testing master, redeemer, and judge; the parallel, however, is comic, not didactic, showing that the duke is not God but a ruler who makes a quixotic attempt in his government to imitate God (as rulers theoretically were obliged to and as King James had claimed he would), with mixed and humorous results. The duke is fallible, meddling, and laughable but beneficent, inventive, and in large measure successful in helping his subjects.

In 1984, Orwell rejects moral justifications for the exercise of power and confronts it as an end in itself. When viewed in this way, the pursuit of power takes on the contours of a game. The concept of play throws light on O'Brien's role in 1984, and a perspective borrowed from game theory clarifies Winston Smith s participation in the contest between tormentor and victim, showing that both share a frame of reference and fundamental values. Examining these values leads to a critique of Orwell's androcentrism and misogyny. Only in a culture that disparages the female while accepting the male as the model for the species could it have gone unremarked that 1984 concerns the interaction of two men. Orwell saw that the pursuit of power posed dangers to humanity but could not see this activity as merely an extreme form of conventional masculine behavior. Caught in this contradiction, Orwell despaired.

The evidence of the six earliest manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales does not support the consensus among Chaucerians that the Ellesmere a ordering represents Chaucer's intentions. Marginalia indicate that Hengwrt preceded Ellesmere and was most closely associated with it. Hengwrt and Ellesmere influenced Cambridge Dd. A somewhat looser association binds Corpus, Harley4, and Lansdowne. In each of the groups editors tried to improve the arrangement and to make the resulting book appear complete. Three conclusions emerge. (1) Only the text derives from Chaucer. (2) Throughout the manuscript period, single tales and groups of tales continued to circulate in great numbers and to provide exemplars for the collected tales that survive. (3) The Canterbury Tales never existed as a neat pile of manuscript, an almost complete text. What we have instead is a collection of fragments reflecting the different stages of a developing plan.