Lermontov's “Bela” (the first part of A Hero of Our Time) is deeply connected to the realities of Russian expansion into the Caucasus during the nineteenth century. The mistreatment of the story's heroine, Bela, by its Russian heroes, Grigoriy Pechorin and Maksim Maksimich, has its roots in the culture and ideologies of Russian imperialism.

Until after 1400 the official language of England was French. Colloquial English began to be used in court circles in the fourteenth century, but government and culture continued to be carried on in French and Latin until the advent of the Lancastrian administration of Henry IV and V, who reigned 1399–1422. Historians of the language have not made a connection between this political development and the introduction of writing in English, but the interest of Henry IV and V in promoting English is demonstrable. Immediately after 1400 there was an acceleration of publishing in English. The kings and their ministers, especially Henry Beaufort and Thomas Chaucer, may have commissioned the publication of the writings of Gower and Chaucer and the compositions of Lydgate and Hoccleve as a means toward achieving the sort of prestige for English that the English public had previously accorded only to French.

The conflict between formalist thinking and theories that view texts in their historical contexts serves as a starting point for the introduction of a cognitive view of literature. From this perspective language has full referential powers. The “referent” splits into two entities, however: things-in-themselves (in their material identity), which we cannot know, and things in their coded form, which are perceptually accessible. Readers' mnemonic potentials, a consequence of the bonding of perception and language, are adduced to show that texts originate in past interpretations of other texts and in personal experience and that consequently social forces and historical events are subsumed in the individual memory. In the cognitive light, memory becomes the ultimate metaphor, and the epistemological claim of realism regains its compelling force.

This essay explores the sociocultural ramifications of a literary theme—fake suicide and resurrection—in Russia through an analysis of Tolstoy's drama The Living Corpse. Written in 1900, the work illustrates Tolstoy's theory that a play must have a central thematic “knot.” The knot Tolstoy chose was central not just for his play but for Russian culture in general. This knot engages four kinds of subtexts: it derives from a contemporary trial, it polemically attacks Chernyshevsky's notorious novel What Is to Be Done?, it marks a dialogue with the religious philosopher Fedorov, and it represents a development of ideas that Tolstoy had been exploring for almost fifty years. Subsequently, Tolstoy's reworking of the suicide-and-resurrection theme served as a point of departure for such twentieth-century authors as Mayakovsky, Erdman, Nabokov, and Bulgakov.

More than just an innovative early-twentieth-century play or the product of an avantgarde movement, Wyndham Lewis's Enemy of the Stars assails conventional notions of art without rationalizing its attack through an appeal to an explicit aesthetic or social program. Lewis is not so much establishing an aesthetic position as playing with the idea of aesthetic positioning. An examination of the shifting stances taken in the play highlights some of the most important sources of formal and thematic turbulence exploited by the nonprogrammatic avant-garde and exposes the means by which this turbulence is contained. The mimetic world of the drama is at first undercut by the visual enticements of the page and by references to the social institution of art; then the drama is hybridized with narrative representational techniques and overlaid with shifting allegorical implications. Ultimately, these aesthetic contortions turn the text into a performance staged on the pages of the magazine Blast.

Machiavelli's chapter on fortuna, which distills the teachings of The Prince, promises success to the prince who will adapt to the times. But when Machiavelli adds that one can never adapt, he implicitly withdraws the promise and leaves the prince naked before fortune. While others view this chapter as the shoal on which the text's optimistic teaching runs aground, I argue that the failure is strategic; like Machiavelli's anomalous treatment of Cesare Borgia, it points to the coherence underlying an apparently inconsistent text. In appropriately Machiavellian fashion, the work is not, as it purports to be, a handbook on princely success. Instead, it represents a characteristically audacious attempt to reconcile self-serving aims: to secure the author employment, to spur the Medici on to the task of unifying Italy, and, paradoxically, to draw his prospective employers and the potential instruments of Italian glory—once they have served his threefold purpose—to their ruin.

Two questions posed by recent developments in literary theory are whether a tradition of American romance fiction exists and, if so, whether we want to continue to define it in the terms that have prevailed in literary criticism over the last thirty-five years. After briefly reviewing some features of the contemporary conversation concerning the theory of American romance, this essay puts into play two important figures in that conversation—Sacvan Bercovitch and Stanley Cavell—in an attempt to develop a new interpretive model for romance fiction. Finally, through certain of Cavell's ideas about Emerson, the essay reads a moment in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, which is crucial to Bercovitch's recent reinterpretation of the book, and attempts to clarify what, perhaps, constitutes the enduring power of the romance tradition.

The twentieth century has witnessed a crumbling not just of diverse types of authority but of the social and intellectual foundations on which the very idea of authority is built. This “crisis of authority” needs to be viewed in historical perspective. Ever since the Protestant Reformation, attempts have been made to internalize authority, “to shift the basis of its verification from external and public modes to internal and private ones” (Harris 1). This controversial shifting of credentials is connected to a comparable change in the representational forms and functions of authorizing discourse. The increasingly uncertain premises of representation, especially its ambivalence as a mode of linguistic and cultural organization, appear to have much to do with the “present confusion” of authority (Arendt 95). Since many voices have been raised against representation, there is little need to document the intellectual disaffection it has produced, except to recall what, in our context, is the most characteristic charge of all: namely, that the much deplored power of representation to order and to command language and to impose on it “the imperious unity of Discourse” (Foucault 386) forces on us an incompatible link between language and humankind.

The questions raised by an early daguerreotype of a Parisian boulevard serve as the point of departure for a discussion of Balzac's Le cousin Pons and the famous definition of ideology in Marx and Engels's German Ideology. Taking issue with Walter Benjamin's essays on mechanical reproduction, I argue here that both works represent responses to the new technology that emphasize its critical potential.

In 1600, Will Kemp danced a morris from London to Norwich and published an account of his feat, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder. His propensity for histrionics had won him widespread fame in England (as the Clown for the Chamberlain's Men, the acting company he had left in 1599). Attempting to capitalize on that propensity with his morris, he sought immediate monetary gain and also a lasting personal recognition; consequently, his pamphlet emphasizes the affinities between his project and a mercantile venture. In doing so, moreover, it presents Kemp's dance as a reworking of the medieval morris traditions, a version distanced from their carnivalesque associations and communal origins and offered for sale, so to speak, in the marketplace of theatrical representation.

In his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen Novalis eroticizes and idealizes the female voice as unmediated poetic utterance expressing the body. Women write from the breast, with their own fluids for ink. Personifying poetry, the female character puts the burgeoning male author into an impossible position: he cannot master what she represents unless he switches gender. The mother-beloved herself undergoes constant transformation in the novel, turning into flowers, trees, and other characters. Female metamorphosis challenges androcentric Bildung, as Heinrich progressively draws on female qualities. The migratory female voice finds its way into two other German Romantic tales, Heinrich von Kleist's “Die heilige Cäcilie” and E. T. A. Hoffmann's “Rat Krespel.” In contrast to Heinrich von Ofterdingen, these works travesty the attempt to mimic the female voice.

This essay focuses on a central strand of a complex process: the intersection of class and gender ideologies in an icon of Victorian fiction, the “Angel in the House,” who comprises and is constituted by her ideological other, the servant. A wife, the presiding hearth angel of Victorian social myth, actually performed an important and extensive economic function. Prevailing ideology held that the house was a haven, a private domain opposed to the public sphere of commerce; but, in fact, the mistress managed her husband's earnings to acquire social and political status and thus served as a significant adjunct to his commercial endeavors. Several discursive practices coalesced in the 1830s and 1840s to give middle-class women unprecedented power, so that running the bourgeois household became an exercise in class management, a process both inscribed and exposed in the Victorian novel.