Uneasy with the forms of literary expression and its costs, the speakers of Herbert’s poems frequently bear disturbed relationships to their own accounts. An interesting version of the disturbance between storyteller and story occurs in “The Collar,” where present-tense speech is fenced off from, and framed by, the eroding influence of a retrospective narrative voice. The poem provides an occasion to study the motives for and virtues of storytelling, to examine the ways in which accounts are not only generated but preserved, and to explore those problems that arise when a fixed story must be reread and its boundaries changed. Because the speaker of “The Collar” both protects and dismantles his account, the poem also raises questions about the values we attach to narratives, the costs we are willing to support in order to maintain them, and the difficulties we undergo when stories fail to represent us in traditional ways.

Clemens’ complex feelings about his piloting days provide insights into his imagination and his identity problems. Despite his nostalgia, Clemens feared the river and exorcised his fears by imaginatively identifying with Horace Bixby, his former steamboating master. Drawing upon his recollections for “Old Times on the Mississippi” in 1874, Clemens became a figurative master pilot, using the same order of memory that Bixby demands of the cub. Clemens’ 1882 river trip was motivated in part by an unconscious desire to recover his intuitive “Bixby memory”; he was searching for both his former master and his own imaginative self. The trip, however, was a sign that his intuitive memory had failed him and he was depending on direct observation. His “invocation” of the hateful pilot Brown (with his chaotic, literal memory) at the beginning of the 1882 writing of Life on the Mississippi foreshadows Clemens’ failure to achieve imaginative coherence in the second part of the book.

The Renaissance idea of a great national poet, the idea on which so many defenses of poetry were implicitly or explicitly based, found its first English incarnation in the career of Edmund Spenser. But the incarnation fundamentally transformed the idea, for Spenser was caught in a literary system that defined the poet in a quite different way—not as an inspired maker of vatic images, but rather as a youth culpably distracted by passion from the real business of life. Spenser’s presentation of himself as Poet can be seen as an attempt to reconcile these two notions, neither of which he could wholly abandon. Without the heroic ideal he could not escape the repentance that prematurely cut off the literary careers of the other poets of his generation, but without some participation in the Elizabethan paradigm of the lover-poet he might not be thought a poet at all.

Although Coleridge’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s Preface has shaped subsequent understanding of Wordsworth’s meaning, Coleridge was out not to clarify but to refute Wordsworth. His discussion of the Preface repeatedly shifts the positions to which it objects and misleadingly distinguishes between what the Preface can legitimately be taken to mean and what it probably does mean. It distorts Wordsworth’s account of his choice of subjects and his comments on poetic language. Although intelligible meanings can be discovered for Wordsworth’s remarks about “the real language of men” and the lack of “essential difference” between the languages of verse and prose, Coleridge’s exegesis reduces them to absurdity. The position he offers in opposition to the one he draws from the Preface closely resembles the one Wordsworth actually put forward there. The real agreements and disagreements between Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s views are more interesting than those to which Coleridge’s interpretation has called attention.

The engravings that appeared as frontispieces in seventeenth-century editions of Molière’s works show that the decor of his stage was not nearly so universalized and unspecific as is generally believed. Each of his plays had its own individualized setting, and he laid increasing stress on the scenic environment for his plays as his career progressed. His earliest plays were set in variations of the traditional decor of comedy: the street before two houses. In Tartuffe and Le Misanthrope he made the stage represent a private domestic interior. In plays like Le Sicilien and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme the scenic definition of stage space became more fluid and fanciful. And in his last play, Le Malade imaginaire, Molière used the most advanced scenic technology of his day to provide a decor that reflected the extravagant folly of his hero.

In his legendary lecture “The Babes in the Wood” (1863–64), Artemus Ward wanted to “go in for fun,” and he artfully structured the talk to exemplify his credo: “We better stay in the sunshine while we may, inasmuch as we know the shadows will come all too soon.” Mark Twain heard Ward speak in Virginia City and later wrote that “The Babes” was “the funniest thing I ever listened to.” This article reproduces a reasonably accurate speaking text of “The Babes” and considers it in relation to Mark Twain’s theory and practice of lecturing and to his early written humor. Its comedy offered Mark Twain, among other things, a demonstration of (1) complex rhetorical strategies and (2) a sophisticated burlesque of the serious lyceum lecture. To clarify its burlesque dimension, “The Babes” is then compared to Emerson’s lecture “The Law of Success” (which Ward had heard and reported).

Dorothy Whitelock describes family and national feuds in Beowulf as “sub-plots” to the monster fights. But the theme of feud history is more complex than that. There are the Scandinavian fights, some of them perceived and all relevant within the heroic world of the story, and the Great Feud of sacred history, associated in its beginnings with the monster fights in Denmark and in its end with the dragon fight in Geatland. This cosmic feud, introduced in the “scripturizing” passages of the poem, is not perceived within the world of the story. By distinguishing between the kind of knowledge available in that world and the kind available to his audience, the poet foregrounds the theme of the Great Feud and aligns the noble pagans of the poem with God, thereby “redeeming” the cultural identity of an audience for whom the Scandinavian matter of Beowulf is ancestral lore.

By revealing Emma’s subjectivity in descriptive, hallucinatory, and auto-scopic modes of vision, Flaubert shows that two false versions of reality dominate her imagination: the marvelous, derived from her reading, and the endoxal, derived from her culture. These modes of vision, which are manifested in a series of mirror images, show Emma incapable of distinguishing between past and present, fantasy and reality, and lead as well to the discovery that her fantasies about all men remain vague and abstract. Emma can only differentiate women in her imagination, and the autoeroticism informing her narcissism finally displaces infidelity as the source of her most erotic experiences. Throughout Madame Bovary, Emma’s subjectivity becomes increasingly associated with the fantastic, until she is seen to have completely lost touch with reality.

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount, like Gombrowicz’ Pornografia and Cosmos, are not only Gothic artist parables in the nineteenth-century mode but also metaphysical detective stories and self-reflexive texts in the contemporary mode. Their heroes, whether voyeurs or stage directors, manipulate other, innocent characters into the substance of their own fictions: the creation of texts is thus seen as a morally tainted endeavor.