Although representational art does not reflect an empirically verifiable world, novels are nevertheless useful as historical documents, because they can reveal the views that authors expect readers to hold. Extracting those views, however, requires distinguishing the beliefs that authors expect in their readers from beliefs that readers pretend to take on for the sake of the fiction (the belief that a person can turn into a bug, in Metamorphosis). Such an analysis is possible because of a basic rule of reading: all fiction, even the most fantastic, is realistic except where it signals its readers to the contrary. This rule implies that what is not said in a text (a text's assumptions) is a surer guide to readers' views than what is (its assertions). The “sudden-reward” pattern (familiar from Cinderella) and its unmasking by Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson are analyzed to demonstrate how readers' beliefs can be extracted from an apparently unrealistic convention.

Leslie Stephen chose his daughter Virginia Woolf as his literary heir and trained her extensively in history and biography to prepare her for a writing career. Traces of Stephen's training can be found throughout Woolf's work but especially in her literary criticism. Woolf and Stephen share the same assumptions about the nature and aims of literary criticism, assumptions that place them in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve. Further, Stephen and Woolf focus on the same set of forces to describe the birth and evolution of literary genres: both father and daughter say that shifting class structures produce a dominant historical consciousness and that this historical consciousness in turn expresses itself in an appropriate technical form. In the light of this literary historical process, both writers insist, the critic of self-conscious historical vision must be a sympathetic reader of experiments in new literary forms.

The many facets of the realism debate reflect the complexity of the subject. Realism was an accepted standard of value only during the romantic period; it became more prominent later as it became more problematic. Major senses of “real” in the nineteenth century are (1) universal essence, (2) irregular minute particular, and (3) causal regularity. Realist plotting typically juxtaposes background tableau and foreground coup de theatre; realist style typically consists of multiple silhouettings. Realism is a semiosis by silhouetting. Hegel's analysis of reality in the Science of Logic explains the association of realism with silhouetting, shows the systematic and historical relationships among the various critical positions and the nineteenth-century senses of “real,” and finally locates them with respect to the trope of inversion. The realist or silhouetting style falls between the relational style of the eighteenth century and the dispersive style of the twentieth.

In all his plays Shakespeare uses the Vergilian figure hendiadys some three hundred times, most frequently in his middle plays and most of all in Hamlet. Rare in English speech or other English poetry, hendiadys joins nouns, or sometimes adjectives, in a false or specious union (e.g., “sound and fury” for “furious sound”). Its effect in Hamlet, where it appears perhaps sixty-six times, is often to elevate, estrange, and baffle; and this stylistic use of conjoined terms that are neither parallel nor complementary mirrors the play's deepest themes—especially the suspect character of personal unions and metaphysical connections. Once aware that Shakespeare frequently combines terms this way, we can understand better many puzzling phrases, including some celebrated ones. Three appendixes list instances of hendiadys in Hamlet, tabulate its incidence in all the plays, and discuss some misleading definitions in the OED.

In seeking to distill into a public image a consciousness that changes over time, Montaigne faced moral and rhetorical dilemmas that confront all autobiographers. Unlike most literary self-portraitists, however, he gives evidence of having consciously tailored his project to the powers and limitations of his medium, the printed word. Montaigne's solution to the problem of imagining and addressing the reader reflects his perception of a new audience for printed books in the sixteenth century. Acknowledging that his public self-image has clarified and defined his private one, he reconciles the conflicting demands of a self in process and a book in print by making successive additions that temper the lapidary finality of the text. The deepest truth of Montaigne's claim to have written a book “consubstantial with its author” lies in the dynamic equilibration of past and current consciousness manifested both in the labile self and on the printed page.