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.

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.

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.

The relationship between speaker and hearer, between auctour (author and authority) and reader, is central to Chaucer's work. In the Canterbury Tales, speaking and hearing are conceived as equally creative functions whose practitioners jointly constitute meaning. Troilus and Criseyde, too, is constituted and sustained through a union of speakers and hearers whose verbal intercourse generates sexual intimacy. Pandarus' activity is paradigmatic for each partner; each manipulates language to gain control over events and over others while seeking absolution from responsibility by pleading subservience to external authority. In recognizing the complex interdependency of authoring and reading, Chaucer denies autonomous control to the one and insular passivity to the other and suggests that complicity is the essence of linguistic exchange and of worldly experience. Consideration of the evasions, insinuations, signals, and strategies comprised in communication in Troilus and Criseyde supports this position and generates a substantially new reading of the poem.

The traditional history of the rhyme royal stanza in early English literature, including its earliest attribution to James I of Scotland, needs reexamination. The name was apparently first recorded by Gascoigne in 1575, and, while no evidence exists to connect it with James I, the stanza itself was used in fourteenth-century poetic contests to address real or imaginary royalty. It appears in royal entry ceremonies, as illustrated by a text surviving from York in 1486. Chaucer employed the stanza first for royal address, as in the Parlement and the Troilus, but later, in the Canterbury Tales, as a characterizing device. The word “prose,” which he uses to describe the verse of the Man of Law's Tale, has been universally misread. It actually refers here to formal stanzas of equal length, and it must be read as the first attempt to create a poetic high style in English literature.

Despite his disillusionment with the moral condition of his friend, the beloved young man of the sonnets, Shakespeare's vocabulary of praise remains unabated. The key to this paradox lies in a shift of focus from the friend's “truth” to his power to inform the poet's style, that is, from moral fidelity to metaphysical and aesthetic constancy. This shift is attended by a heightened awareness of language as a way to grasp reality through participation in it. The sonnets portray the beloved as the incarnation of an unchanging truth, and poetry as a vehicle for evoking or re-creating that truth. These developments lead Shakespeare to a sacramental or “figural” conception of his poetry of praise that replaces the Petrarchan convention with which he begins.

In Peregrine Pickle, the extreme hostility of the hero's mother toward him from his earliest days, although an important catalyst in the plot, is never reasonably explained. Her attitude, as well as a number of otherwise ambiguous plot elements, become clear when we deduce that she was pregnant before her marriage. Several clues suggest that Smollett intended until late in the novel to present Peregrine as a bastard but changed his mind as he neared the end. It can be theorized that Smollett feared an accusation of plagiarism in borrowing this detail from Tom Jones, especially after he himself had accused Fielding with reference to Roderick Random. In addition, the life of Richard Savage, particularly as told in Samuel Johnson's elegaic and then-popular biography of his friend, offers many parallels in its story of the unnatural mother and the rejected bastard.

Recent poststructuralist criticism argues that language cannot be understood merely as a name-giving system and that reading is not a process of deciphering language in order to pass through it to the experience it communicates. If words are part of a larger articulation, then the question of origins, and of originality, must be recast. Finnegans Wake and Ulysses play on, and with, the dilemma of originality and repetition in literary discourse. The Wake involves us in the appeal to a source, and although the origins of knowledge, authority, life, and language may remain unlocatable we continue to search for them. The Wake suggests, too, that discourse binds us to a wheel of repetition. The complex use of cliché in Ulysses draws us even more specifically into the uses of repetition. Stereotype is more than the butt of Joyce's satire: it shares in the whole process of deconstruction that characterizes the text.

From his early short stories through his as yet unpublished second novel, Ralph Ellison pursues the theme of the quest for black self-definition by reference to black folklore. “In the folklore,” he says, “we tell what Negro experience really is.” Ellison adapts black folklore to fiction by fitting it into the forms of American and Western myth. As he enlarges the context of black folk tradition, he reduces the importance of its basis in racial oppression and conflict and transforms its social meaning into the metaphysical meanings of the framing myths. Thus black identity becomes indistinguishable from American identity or the human condition, and the effort to define it from within results instead in continued definition by the enslaving society.