In the continuing controversies over the value of the 1805 Prelude versus the 1850 text-to which some voices have added a case for the 1799 version-the importance of Wordsworth's character as a revising poet has been neglected. One episode present in all three versions, his boyhood discovery of a man drowned in Esthwaite's Lake, offers a productive case study-both for the play of Wordsworth's revisions and for a view of The Prelude as a poem constituted by its many texts, rather than by anyone authoritative text. Wordsworth's most emphatic revision is the addition of a commentary that denies the boy's fear and converts the corpse into a figure of “ideal grace,” like something in a literary “romance.” Yetother revisions of both text and context reveal Wordsworth's ambivalence about the strategies of argumentative mastery with which he would govern the mysteries that inhabit his imagination.

Although critics have questioned the unity of Daniel Deronda, the double narrative structure of the novel has not been related to contemporary (Victorian) fictions of history. George Eliot's “Oriental Memoranda” notebook documents her interest in current histories of the Jews and suggests a context of universal history based on critical interpretations of the Book of Daniel. This exegetical “key” to interpretation reveals both the significance of Eliot's separation of the plot into two strands and the apocalyptic symbolism that links those strands together in a universal history of humanity in exile. Finally, this “key” suggests that circumcision, though never mentioned in the text, is nevertheless central to the vision uniting Jews with Christians. Daniel Deronda is George Eliot's “Book of Origins,” in which she seeks to deconstruct conventions of history that separate past from present and Jew from Gentile and to reenvision how “everything [is] … related to everything else.”

The posthumous homosexual fiction of E. M. Forster indicates a marked impulse in all his work: the tame in pursuit of the savage. The connection is to be, in part, emotional but will have political meaning as well. In Forster's situations, power—which resides in the world of the tame—is suspect because it rests on institutionalized force; in contrast, the sexual potency of the savage arises out of his being a “natural” man in the Rousseauean sense. This tension parallels the dynamics of Forster's private life, but its manifestation in his art does not simply reflect a personal preoccupation: the literature of attempted liaison with the savage serves a public position—egalitarian, anti-imperialistic, and internationalist—as well as a romantic ideal. In Maurice, in “The Life to Come” and “The Other Boat,” and even in his first three novels, the sexual and political ideas reflect the intention, albeit somewhat disguised, to subvert the prevailing ethos.

The most productive approach to the world of scholarship in 1883 requires starting further back, about 1821, when individuals drawn by a passion for philology and English studies first sought to master a new field and become scholars. Passion is not too strong a word here. During the second and third quarters of the century, despite a lack of opportunity for formal training, despite isolation from European scholars, despite the difficulty of getting books and the absence of encouragement or likely reward, these scholars undertook enormous and very different kinds of projects. Their commitment and scholarship, which earned national and international respect, helped to define the American scholar as a specialist and to shape what they insisted was a discipline suitable for the undergraduate college curriculum. Active both outside and within the academy, they not only generated national recognition of the scholar's need for research libraries and higher education's need for scholars but established the value of teaching English in American colleges and universities. Because of their efforts, by 1883 the world of scholarship, at least in broad outline, was the world we now know. That is, though 1883 marks the founding of the Modern Language Association and therefore an important beginning in the professionalization of the discipline, it also marks the end of a pioneering era in American scholarship.

Women's hair, particularly when it is golden, has always been a preoccupation of Western artists and writers. But for the Victorians, who discovered complex totemic and symbolic significance in the image of women's hair, it became an obsession. The powerful woman mythologized in Victorian literature and art achieved her vitality partly through her hair, which both contributed to and expressed her magic power. She used her hair to weave her discourse and to spin her plots, to strangle her lovers and to shelter them, to build deadly snares and webs and to proclaim her own divinity and glory.

Though some Victorian readers believed that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's partisanship for “the cause of Italy” led to a failure of inspiration, I argue that for a complex of reasons Italy became the embodiment of this woman poet's aesthetic and utopian desires: through her commitment to Italy's revolutionary struggle for political identity, Barrett Browning reenacted her own struggle for identity, a risorgimento that was, like Italy's, both an insurrection and a resurrection. Moreover, by using metaphors of the healing of a wounded woman/land to articulate both the reality and the fantasy of her own revitalization, Barrett Browning located herself in a re-creative female poetic tradition that descends from Christine de Pizan to H. D. Infusing supposedly asexual poetics with the dreams of a distinctively sexual politics, these women imagined nothing less than the transformation of patria into matria and thus the risorgimento of the lost land that Christina Rossetti called the “mother country.”

Feminist theory has argued that in a literary tradition overburdened by patriarchal legends and signs, women writers who wish to develop authentic, autonomous voices must devote themselves to their feminine precursors and abandon a masculine canon. In The Golden Apples, however, Eudora Welty appropriates images and themes of several poems by Yeats to dramatize the concerns of her heroines. Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism and of heteroglossia suggest a critical framework for exploring Welty's expropriations, but Bakhtin's method fails to consider the category of gender as a potent source for the dialogic tension characteristic of the novel as genre. Viewed from this perspective Welty's writing is more subversive than many of her critics have perceived, while Bakhtin's insights into the nature of novelistic discourse are useful in describing the restructuring of traditions that occurs in women's texts. Bakhtin's ideas must be understood and amplified, however, in the light of recent feminist theory.

Roger Fry's notions of the artist's unique vision and of the aesthetic design that captures that vision have long been acknowledged as primary influences on To the Lighthouse. Consequently, for most commentators, the novel's closing events signify the achievement of a transcendent “oneness” or a perceptual balance captured in art but rarely experienced in life. Examination of repeated patterns of style and narrative progression shows that the design of the artist Lily's vision—one of unresolved ambivalence and estrangement rather than unity—is no different from that of the other characters, and this vision is the one caught in Lily's painting and reflected in all aspects of the novel. Woolf exploits Fry's theories to probe the desire for unity or “oneness” in personal and aesthetic relations, but she finds refuge, finally, in the act, not the result, of invention, in perception itself “before anything is made of it.”

For those who approach literary studies with literary sensitivity, an immediate problem arises. They cannot overlook style, their own or that of others. Through their concern with literature they have become aware that understanding is a mediated activity and that style is an index of how the writer deals with the consciousness of mediation. Style is not cognitive only; it is also recognitive, a signal betraying the writer's relation, or sometimes the relation of a type of discourse, to a historical and social world. To say that of course words are a form of life is not enough: words at this level of style intend a statement about life itself in relation to words, and in particular to literature as a value-laden act. Thus, even without fully understanding it, one is alerted by a similarity in the opening of these two essays: The Right Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Bishop of Winchester, died on September 26th, 1626. During his lifetime he enjoyed a distinguished reputation for the excellence of his sermons, for the conduct of his diocese, for his ability in controversy displayed against Cardinal Bellarmine, and for the decorum and devotion of his private life. (Eliot, Lancelot 13) One afternoon, Walter Benjamin was sitting inside the Café des Deux Magots in Saint Germain des Prés when he was struck with compelling force by the idea of drawing a diagram of his life, and knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. He drew the diagram, and with utterly typical ill-luck lost it again a year or two later. The diagram, not surprisingly, was a labyrinth. (Eagleton, Pref.)

Changes in Faulkner's depictions of sound during the course of his career reflect changes in his understanding of his relation to the world and of himself as an artist. In his early work, he uses images of sound to express a highly romanticized yearning for reconciliation with the world. As his career advances, regret over the passing of the world of his youth and distaste for the modern world replacing it lead him to emphasize the idea of sound as a hostile force, intent on invading the mind. In the postwar period, as he senses that his creative power is declining, he comes to envision himself and the world as engaged in a struggle for dominance, and he devises a variety of ingenious fictional stratagems with which to annul the world's sounds and to reaffirm his belief in the power of his artistic voice.

What follows is a personal essay. When I was invited to compose it, I looked back over “A Mirror for the Lamp,” the impressive evaluation conducted by Maynard Mack, George Winchester Stone, and others for the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of PMLA (73.5.2 [1958]: 45–71), and could not find it in my heart to mount a similar enterprise. It seemed to me that in this era of self-expression, an individual statement would be more useful. I was intimately involved with PMLA for some seventeen years, beginning in 1947, with William Parker and Donna Walsh, as junior proofreader and copyeditor, seeing to its manufacture and paying the bills from 1952 to 1955, and eventually handing over as editor to William Schaefer in 1971 (with seven years off for good behavior between 1955 and 1962). I will characterize the journal we inherited in 1947, what we thought we were accomplishing between 1950 and 1968, and what has happened since 1971. I shall try to keep my prejudices in check, but they will no doubt become evident soon enough. One advantage in proceeding in this fashion is that no one else need be held responsible for the errors of either omission or commission.

The old letter Mr. Compson gives his son Quentin to read in chapter 4 of Absalom, Absalom! cannot be easily interpreted. Faulkner refuses to authorize any assumptions about the origin, destination, or meaning of the letter that might simplify its reading; instead, he entangles its readers, both inside and outside the novel, in a web of competing readings, rereadings, and misreadings. Given the problems of reading, we cannot assume that a text like Absalom discloses the way it imagines its own reading(s) through the scenes of reading it represents. Still, the better we can see how Faulkner imagines various readings of texts within his text—through detailed readings of the readings of Bon's letter—the closer we can come to understanding what Faulkner reveals about the uncertainties and risks of reading, about what is and is not in his book, and about our own uncertainties regarding how we are and are not in the world.