contents

1
Preface: how to use this book ix
Acknowledgements xvii

1 about literature 1
1.1 literature: fundamental questions 3 2
Introduction 3
What is literature? Bill Overton 4
Why study literature? Kenneth Womack 10
1.2 your literature course 18
What to expect from your literature course 18
Typical structure and content 18
Literature and language 20
3
Literature and creative writing Jennifer Cooke 21
Comparative literature Doris Bremm 25
Getting the most from your course 31
1.3 study skills for literature 33
Introduction 33
Study skills Christopher Ringrose 34 4
Making the most of seminars and lectures 34
Using the library 35
Using IT and the internet 37
Revising and exams 38
Coursework and your dissertation 39
Writing and presentation 40
Writing essays 40 5
Presentation skills 44
Plagiarism 45
Bibliographies and citation conventions 47

2 literature modules 55
2.1 literature 57 6
Introduction 57

contents v
 Critical Studies: an example of a core module 59
Conclusion 63
2.2 periods 65
Old English literature Philippa Semper 65
Medieval literature David Griffith 72
The sixteenth century Joan Fitzpatrick 80
The seventeenth century Hugh Adlington 86
1 The eighteenth century Bill Overton 93
Romanticism and gothic Ian McCormick 101
The nineteenth century and the Victorians Carolyn Kelley 110
Modernism Alex Murray 120
Contemporary literature 125
2.3 forms, genres and other popular modules 134
2 Introduction 134
Tragedy 135
Comedy 142
The novel Helen Wright 150
Poetry Bill Overton 157
Drama Neal Swettenham and Robert John Brocklehurst 164
Epic Nigel Wood 171
3 Lyric Nigel Wood 177
Satire Nigel Wood 181
Realism Lawrence Phillips 186
Fiction Lawrence Phillips 193
Postmodern fiction Alex Murray 198
Gender Doris Bremm 202
Class Nick Freeman 209
4 Colonial and postcolonial literature Jenni Ramone 215
Subjectivity Megan Becker-Leckrone 221
Children’s literature Jenny Bavidge 230
Film studies Andrew Dix 237
Popular fiction Jan Baetens 244
American literature Brian Jarvis and Andrew Dix 250

5 3 critical approaches and schools of thought 263

3.1 critical approaches 265
Introduction 265
Formalism Megan Becker-Leckrone 267
Archetypal criticism Doris Bremm 270
New criticism Megan Becker-Leckrone 272
Bakhtin and dialogic criticism Karine Zbinden 275
6 Feminism Ruth Robbins 278
Marxism Alex Murray 286

vi contents
 Structuralism Alex Murray 290
Psychoanalysis Brian Jarvis 293
Deconstruction Maria-Daniella Dick 296
Postcolonialism Jenni Ramone 303
New historicism Christopher Ringrose 304
Cultural materialism Alex Murray 306
African American criticism Andrew Dix 309
Chicano/a studies Jenni Ramone 311
Gay studies and queer theory Helen Davies 314 1
Cultural studies Brian Jarvis 321
Ecocriticism Jenny Bavidge 324
Postmodernism Andrew Dix 327

4 key terms and concepts in English literature 331

Julian Wolfreys, Ruth Robbins and Kenneth Womack 2
5 career pathways 351
5.1 career pathways 353
Introduction 353
Careers for English graduates Ruth Robbins 354
The experience of a degree in English Claire Bowditch 359 3
Interview Claire Bowditch 360
Conclusion 361

6 learning resource 363

6.1 chronology 365

Bibliography 395 4
Notes on contributors 403
Index 408

contents vii
 1.1 literature: fundamental
questions
1
chapter contents
› Introduction 3
› What is literature? 4
› Why study literature? 10
2
Introduction
Reading. It is something most of us do, some of the time. You are doing it right
now. If you plan to study literature and have bought this book to ind out what
is expected of you, or if you are studying literature and this book is new to you,
then you are – probably – reading most of the time. Reading involves compre-
hension, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, deciphering, and endless acts of
measuring the local, immediate example of what is being read with more
3
general, broader ideas, concepts and notions that inform the world and your
relation to that world.
Yet, although we read and we think we know what we are doing, more or
less, when we read, how we give value or determine value in our reading has to
do with more complex maters, some of which it is the aim of this volume to
unfold, and those maters we conveniently gather together in the name ‘litera- 4
ture’. his does not mean to say, necessarily, that we know what literature is,
even though most people believe they could have a rough stab at deinition.
he ‘what’ of literature is intimately bound to the question of why we study
literature, why we bother to continue to read – and in some cases, reread –
poems, novels or plays, essays or short stories, writen, printed and published
(mostly) anywhere from last year back to … well, long before anyone bothered
to use the term ‘literature’ – in fact, however far back cultures and civilizations 5
have produced, in one form or another, writen or oral forms, in prose or
poetry, for the purposes of any or all of the following (though not necessarily
in this order): education, information, entertainment, enjoyment, communi-
cation, imaginative and emotional escape, or forging links between individuals
in particular groups, large or small.
Recognizing this, we begin with a chapter that states, and atempts to
answer, the fundamental questions: ‘What is literature?’ and ‘Why study litera- 6
ture?’ As you read the following considerations, you might think the relections

literature: fundamental questions 3

 and statements a litle abstract, diicult to pin down. You might ind such
answers explaining or justifying ‘too much’, a litle bit like someone describing
how a joke works. Certainly, you might be right in part were you to assume that
such responses as Bill Overton and Kenneth Womack ofer seem to have litle
to do with the practical study of literature, with the pragmatics of your three-
or four-year course, your very real reasons for studying literature, and what, on
the ground level, you will be expected to do and how you will be expected to
1 do it. Such empirical issues are not irrelevant, but behind them – haunting
them, if you like – are those maters that are at one and the same time funda-
mental (ater all, without such questions there would be no degree programme
designed through which one could study literature in the irst place) and yet,
on relection, abstract or even abstruse questions. Without this necessary
relection, you may well enjoy or be enriched by your study of literature, but
you will not have suiciently come to terms with the reasons for, and the
2 persistence of, literature (whatever we think we mean by that seemingly
obvious and yet, nevertheless, enigmatic term).

What is literature?
Bill Overton

3 If you are studying Literature, or, as it is sometimes put, English, you may
reasonably suppose that the people teaching it will be able to tell you what
exactly the subject is. Up to about 30 years ago, they could have done just that,
for there was general agreement that certain published writings, and certain
kinds of writing, were literature, and others were not. In a degree course in
English, for example, you would have expected to read plays by Shakespeare,
poems by Alexander Pope or novels by Charles Dickens, but certainly not a
4 seventeenth-century midwifery manual or an autobiography by a freed slave.
But now most courses in English are diferent. he examples I have just given
– Jane Sharp’s he Midwives Book (1671) and Olaudah Equiano’s he Interest-
ing Narrative (1789) – are books taught in my own institution and elsewhere.
And I could easily cite more outlandish specimens, such as Mills and Boon
romances, graphic novels and various kinds of ilm. A look at how texts such as
these have found their way into English courses opens up what is at issue in
5 saying what literature is.

The rise of English and the canon

One reason why courses in English changed is that the people teaching them
recognized not only that the subject was quite a new one, but also that it could
be reinvented. In the 1980s, a number of studies showed that the history of
English Literature as an academic subject is prety short, going back litle more
6 than a century (e.g., Baldick 1983; Eagleton 1996). he same studies also
claimed that there were powerful ideological motives behind its making. In the

4 about literature
classic Marxist sense, ‘ideological’ means that these motives stem from funda-
mental social and material interests connected with political and economic
power. One motive behind the rise of English was the need, expressed by the
Victorian writer Mathew Arnold, among other inluential people, to provide a
secular substitute for religion. Arnold and others thought that, as organized
religion declined, literature might furnish an alternative source of values and
morality that would maintain social order and keep people in their place. A
related motive was to instil the values of Establishment culture in such subor-
dinate groups as working people, colonial subjects and women. hird, English 1
Literature also helped promote patriotic feeling, important at times of war,
unusual class tension or economic depression. As you might imagine, the story
is more complex than this. All the same, once it was recognized that English
did not exist a hundred years ago as a subject that could be studied at school or
university, and once its roots were examined, it became easier to change it.
One of the main ways in which English was understood up to about 30
years ago was as a select body of texts by particular writers. I have mentioned
2
some of these writers already, and anyone studying English at the time would
have been able to name many others. he term for such a collection of texts is a
canon. his sense of the word developed from a much older one meaning,
‘he collection or list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church
as genuine and inspired’, and then, by way of extension, ‘any set of sacred
books; also, those writings of a secular author accepted as authentic’ (Oxford 3
English Dictionary [OED]). It is a sign of how recent the idea of a general liter-
ary canon is that this particular sense only appears among drat additions to
the OED dating from 2002. It is deined like this: ‘A body of literary works
traditionally regarded as the most important, signiicant, and worthy of study;
those works of esp[ecially] Western literature considered to be established as
being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics.’ his deini-
tion raises questions that go to the heart of what literature is, or is thought to 4
be. You might ask, for instance, why literary works produced in the West
should be given priority. You might also ask how it is that certain works come
to be recognized as having high quality and enduring value. And there is the
problem, too, that works that are not writen down do not seem to igure.
All these questions have been subject to hot debate in the last 30 years. In
the United States, for example, what came to be known as the Culture Wars
raged for a while in universities and the media (see Morrissey 2005). his was 5
a dispute over whether, or to what extent, the kinds of work should be taught
that the OED deines as ‘the classics’ and that for generations had made up the
traditional curriculum with relatively litle change. One of the problems with
these, it was argued, is that they are nearly all by dead white European males. A
curriculum that more or less excluded work by writers who happened to be
still alive, non-white, non-European or female was not only diicult to defend
but not worth defending, especially as the fact got around that the canon has 6
always been subject to change. To give two examples of such changes, few

literature: fundamental questions 5

 people now read Robert Southey, yet in his day Southey was one of the leading
Romantic poets. On the other hand, Dickens was for long considered a great
popular entertainer but hardly an artist. In his book he Great Tradition, irst
published in 1948, the leading British critic F. R. Leavis excluded Dickens
from the canon of English novelists, but in a further book, 22 years later, he
made amends and put him in.
here are three main reasons why the canon changes. he irst is that it is
1 culturally produced, and so, as particular cultures change, so too do the works
that their members consider important. he other two reasons are more
complex. One is that it used to be thought that only the best work survived,
like cream collecting at the top. In his Preface to Shakespeare, irst published in
1765, Samuel Johnson invoked this principle when he declared that any work
that people still found interesting ater at least a century must have some value.
he problem with this, however, is that works do not necessarily survive on
2 merit. Some do not even ind a publisher in the writer’s lifetime, while others
are actively excluded by anthologists or writers of literary histories – as Roger
Lonsdale has shown for the work of many eighteenth-century poets, especially
women (1984: xxxvi–xxxvii; 1989: xliii–xlvi). he second reason why the
canon changes, then, is that valuable work is all the time being rediscovered
and brought into the curriculum. Quite diferent questions are raised by the
third reason, because it comes out of a redeinition of what can be read as
3 literature. I mentioned two examples at the start. Jane Sharp’s he Midwives
Book and Olaudah Equiano’s he Interesting Narrative can be studied in courses
of literature not only because they use familiar literary devices such as meta-
phors and rhetorical questions, but because they have much to show about the
cultures within which they were writen. In this sense, distinguishing between
works by, say, Sharp and John Milton, or Equiano and Shakespeare, is artiicial.
All produced diferent kinds of writing, but the diferences between Shake-
4 speare’s plays and Milton’s poems are scarcely less than the ones between those
texts and a midwifery manual or the autobiography of a freed slave.

Literature and literariness

It was in part for such reasons as those just discussed that, in Literary heory,
irst published in 1983, Terry Eagleton claimed that ‘Literature, in the sense of
a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain inher-
5 ent properties, does not exist’ (1996: 9). hat those were not, however, the
only reasons for questioning what had been considered as literature is clear
from the later part of the same remark. here, Eagleton disputes whether any
text can possess qualities that in themselves deine it as literary. A few examples
from the world of art may help to show this, for the same question also applies
to them. If a rectangular formation of irebricks, a pickled shark or an unmade
bed can be ofered as works of art – as they have been at the Tate Gallery in
6 London by Carl Andre, Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin respectively – why
should not an extract from a telephone directory or a rearranged newspaper

6 about literature
article be ofered as works of literature? he directory extract would be highly
paterned, and it might well contain rhymes and latent metaphors, all qualities
that are oten held to be literary. he newspaper article might have an even
stronger claim to literary status if it could also be seen as raising important
human questions, as literature is oten thought to do. Consider, for instance,
the following poem.
Baby abandoned
A two-day-old girl was found 1
abandoned
in a plastic bag on the steps
of a priest’s house in the Tox-
teth district of Liverpool yesterday.
Police are appealing
for the mother to
come forward as she may 2
need urgent medical atention.
his looks like a poem on the page, it has a few rhymes (‘found’ / ‘abandoned’,
‘yesterday’ / ‘may’), and it raises important questions. Does it mater that it is a
short article from the Guardian newspaper (25 March 1987) presented with
no other changes than spliting it up into lines of unequal length and convert-
ing the headline into a title? 3
One way of resolving this kind of problem was developed by a group of
critics known as the Russian Formalists who were active mainly in the Soviet
Union in the earlier years of the twentieth century. A leading member of the
group, Viktor Shklovsky, argued that the key characteristic of literary texts is
what he called ‘making strange’ or defamiliarization (see Rice and Waugh
2001: 50). By this he meant the ability of a text to break through habitual
perceptions and make readers or listeners see and think diferently. One of his 4
main examples is a story by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in which the narra-
tor is a horse who exposes the assumptions behind how he is owned and
treated simply by presenting them from his own perspective. Another member
of the group, Roman Jakobson, produced a rather abstract but all the same
useful formula for deining literariness. Seting out a range of the various func-
tions of language, Jakobson distinguished between them on the basis of their
aim or orientation. Examples are the expressive function, in which the orienta- 5
tion is towards the addresser, and which, he said, ‘aims a direct expression of
the speaker’s atitude toward what he is speaking about’; and the conative
function, in which the orientation is towards the addressee, and which is aimed
at making him or her do something (see Lodge and Wood 2008: 144, 145).
‘Conative’ means ‘expressive of endeavour’ (OED), and Jakobson’s example is
the simple command ‘Drink!’ Jakobson deined the poetic function of language
in the same way, though one of the terms he used made this a bit confusing. He 6
said that ‘the set […] toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for

literature: fundamental questions 7

 its own sake, is the POETIC function of language’ (146). he confusing bit is
that by ‘MESSAGE’ Jakobson meant not so much the content of the expres-
sion as its verbal form. In other words, he argued that literary uses of language
are characterized by their orientation towards the way they are expressed
rather than to the speaker’s state of mind, the content or the audience. One of
his examples is the phrase ‘I like Ike’, a slogan used in the American presiden-
tial election campaign of Dwight Eisenhower, whose nickname was ‘Ike’, in
1 1956. his illustrates his idea clearly. Although the slogan expresses an atitude
on the part of the addresser (the expressive function), although it conveys
something about the candidate it names ( Jakobson called this the referential
function), and although, as a slogan, it aims to have an efect on the addressee
(the conative function), its primary orientation, for Jakobson, is poetic. his is
because what is most striking about it is its very efective, and memorable,
paterning of one vowel sound (long ‘i’) and two consonants (‘l’ and ‘k’).
2 On the face of it, Jakobson’s formula may seem to disprove Eagleton’s state-
ment that literary texts have no ‘certain inherent properties’. As you will
probably have realized, though, it does no such thing, because Jakobson’s
example is not a recognized literary work but a simple election slogan that
happens to use words and their constituent sounds cleverly. For – and this is an
important point – the Formalists did not conine literariness to literature.
Instead, they claimed it could be found in communications of all kinds, oral as
3 well as writen. A beter term for the quality of literariness is therefore ‘verbal
art’, because this begs no questions about whether a work has or has not
achieved recognition as literature.

Good and bad literature

It may seem, then, that Eagleton is right – that, to repeat his claim, ‘Literature,
in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by
4 certain inherent properties, does not exist.’ If the claim is true, then literature
is, as he also says, just ‘a highly valued kind of writing’ (1996: 9); and the basis
on which it is valued is culturally and historically relative, so there may come a
time when, for example, ‘Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much
present-day graiti’ (10). While it is impossible to refute such a statement, it is
just a debating point, for a society in which Shakespeare was not valued would
be totally diferent from this one. Instead, it is possible to deine literature by
5 considering one of its qualities that Eagleton plays down. his is the fact that it
usually takes predetermined forms that are accepted as literary. he plays and
poems that Shakespeare wrote are obvious examples. hey are clearly not wills,
acts of parliament or shopping lists. Provided the reader has some basic cultural
knowledge – at the same level as that required to identify a will, an act of parlia-
ment or a shopping list – they cannot be mistaken for anything other than
literary texts. his is to suggest that literature results not only result from prac-
6 tices of reading and valuing, but also from practices of writing. For instance,
writing a sonnet is a self-evidently literary act because a sonnet is a recognized

8 about literature
form of poem; and writing a novel is a self-evidently literary act because such a
work is a recognized form of narrative iction.
he French critical theorist Gérard Genete has proposed a pair of very
useful terms for these two diferent ways of identifying literature (1993: 1–29).
he kind of theory that deines literature as a speciic practice of writing he
calls an essentialist or a constitutive theory. his means that to write a work in an
accepted literary form, such as a sonnet, a pastoral elegy, a novel or a short
story, is by that token to produce a work of literature, whatever its quality. In
other words, the form itself constitutes the work as literature. Even if it were also 1
a shopping list, a sonnet would be irst and foremost an aesthetic, literary,
object. To repeat, this is the case even if the work in question is of dismally
poor quality. here are many poems, novels and short stories that could not
constitute anything other than literature, though you might not ind anyone
willing to give them house room. hese works, usually for very good reasons,
are not valued, but they still could not be anything other than literary.
he term proposed by Genete for the other main way of deining literature
2
is conditionalist. What this means is that any work of verbal art can, in principle,
be recognized as literature on condition that it is found to be valuable. On this
deinition, you could argue that any piece of verbal art has literary value, and
you would do that by saying what its particular merits are. his could be even if
the piece were in a form not previously established as literary, such as an extract
from a telephone directory. To sum up, then, there are works that are constitu- 3
tively literary because they are presented in recognized literary forms; and there
are works that are conditionally literary because, although not writen in
conventionally literary forms, they are valued for their aesthetic qualities. In
this second category there are many works that were not intended as literature
by their writers. hese include examples mentioned by Eagleton such as
Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is history, and
George Orwell’s essays, which are political and social commentary. 4
Genete’s category of conditional literariness raises the question of value,
and this has further implications. You could look at it like this. On the one
hand, there are works that, in his terms, are conditionally literary – works that
did not necessarily set out to achieve literariness, but, as Eagleton says, quoting
Malvolio in Twelth Night, had it ‘thrust upon them’ (1996: 7). hese works
will be considered literary as long as they are perceived as possessing aesthetic
value. On the other hand, there are works that are constitutively literary – 5
poems, plays, novels and so on. Most of this work varies in quality from
undistinguished to dreadful; but a small proportion is read, performed, studied
– valued. It is this tip of the iceberg of literature that is called the canon.
As a student of literature, many of the works you will be required to study
will be parts of the canon. Some, though, may not be; and you may want to
study others that are not. If either of the later alternatives is the case, then it is
important to remember that society and culture are constantly changing and 6
are constantly being reinterpreted. You need to be fully aware that they are

literature: fundamental questions 9

 human constructs that can be altered. ‘English’ is one such construct, and
studying critically is a way of changing it. Because culture is constantly chang-
ing, and assumptions about literature change with it, deining literature in any
absolute sense is a vain ambition. But knowing why certain works are or might
be valued is essential to the study of verbal art. hat is one of the main reasons
for studying literature.

1 References
Anon. 1987. ‘Baby abandoned’, Guardian, 25 March 1987, 2.
Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1983.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
Genette, Gérard. Fiction and Diction. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell
University Press, 1993.
2 Johnson, Samuel. Preface to Shakespeare. London: Dodo Press, 2007. Also see ‘The Preface
to Shakespeare’. ebooks @ Adelaide, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/johnson/samuel/
preface/index.html (accessed 10 May 2010).
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and
Windus, 1948.
Leavis, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis. Dickens: The Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.
Lodge, David, and Nigel Wood, eds. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn. Harlow:
3 Pearson Education, 2008.
Lonsdale, Roger, ed. The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984.
Lonsdale, Roger, ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989.
Morrissey, Lee, ed. Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Rice, Philip, and Patricia Waugh, eds. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 4th edn. London:
4 Arnold, 2001.

Why study literature?

Kenneth Womack

5 ‘There are more things than poodles in Pomerania.’

(Wallace Stevens)
he study of literature is intrinsically about the act of knowing. It is about
knowing the world – a vast, uncharted universe of people and places, ideas and
emotions. But in helping us to know the world, literature is mostly about
coming to know yourself. It is about exploring the recesses of your mind, the
vicissitudes of your memories, the weight and pleasure of your deepest, most
6 personal experiences. It is about geting closer and ever closer to understand-
ing your own essential truths – and yet never quite arriving there. It is, in short,

10 about literature
the most intimate and transformative journey that you can possibly take
through the lens of your mind’s eye. It is about you.
In this sense, the reading process may seem mysterious, impenetrable even.
Yet for all of its complexity and expansiveness, the act of reading involves a
relatively simple transaction between yourself and the literary work. In he
Reader, the Text, the Poem: he Transactional heory of the Literary Work (1978),
Louise M. Rosenblat supplies us with an interpretational matrix for explain-
ing the motives of readers and the relationships, for lack of a beter word, that
you develop with literary texts. Rosenblat identiies two diferent types of 1
reading strategies: aesthetic reading, in which the reader devotes particular
atention to what occurs during the actual reading event, and non-aesthetic
reading, a reading strategy in which the reader focuses atention upon the
traces of knowledge and data that will remain ater the event.
Rosenblat designates the later strategy as a kind of ‘eferent’ reading in
which readers primarily interest themselves in what will be derived materially
from the experience (1978: 23–5). Eferent readers relect upon the verbal
2
symbols in literature, ‘what the symbols designate, what they may be contrib-
uting to the end result that [the reader] seeks – the information, the concepts,
the guides to action, that will be let with [the reader] when the reading is over’
(27). Rosenblat describes the act of reading itself – whether aesthetic or non-
aesthetic – as a transaction that derives from the peculiar array of experiences
that deine the reader’s persona: ‘Each reader brings to the transaction not only 3
a speciic past life and literary history, not only a repertory of internalized
“codes,” but also a very active present, with all its preoccupations, anxieties,
questions, and aspirations,’ she writes (144).
Although not always consciously, we employ these diferent strategies –
whether as aesthetic or non-aesthetic readers – depending upon our particular
needs and purposes. As consumers of literature, we aspire, rather practically, to
garner something – anything – from our reading events. It is signiicant that 4
Rosenblat derives eferent from the Latin efere, which means ‘to carry away’. In
our textual experiences, we quite literally take away the eferent freight of
reading, which includes not only the plot, characters and seting of the story,
but also our highly particularized encounters with the literary work itself. In a
sense, you arrive with one set of interior and exterior worlds, only to depart the
textual event with an entire range of new and expansive readings of your self in
relation to these pre-existing worlds. 5
In his Cold War poetic opus ‘A Duck for Dinner’, Wallace Stevens writes
that ‘here are more things / han poodles in Pomerania.’ At the very least, his
words make for an aloof, ambiguous, if not pretentious non sequitur. As with
the Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’ – with its hyper-packed nonsensical phrases
stacked each atop the other, Lewis Carroll-style – Stevens’s spurt of language
seems explicitly made up, like cocktail party drivel designed to impress the glit-
terati through its unexpected randomness. 6
Let’s say it again: here are more things than poodles in Pomerania.

literature: fundamental questions 11

 But for all its seeming elusiveness, the phrase’s implications are fairly simple
to parse if we consider our lived experiences, recognizing that life’s bounty is
oten more than it appears, that – if you will forgive the cliché – sometimes
there is more than meets the eye. For the speaker in Stevens’s poem, the world
of language and meaning encompasses
All the birds he ever heard and that,
he admiral of his race and everyman,
1 Infected by unreality, rapt round
By dense unreason, irreproachable force,
Is cast in pandemonium, litered, howled
By harmonies beyond known harmony. (1957: 92)
Consider Stevens’s notion that through our literary experiences every type of
possibility comes into play – that you can catch a glimpse of all the lora and
2 fauna that you can remotely imagine. In Stevens’s quixotic universe of literary
language, the rhythms of life are ‘cast in pandemonium’, a place where language
liters and howls all around us – and sometimes, on occasion, in forms vastly
more aesthetically pleasing than others, creating ‘harmonies beyond known
harmony’. Whether scrawling upon the walls of caves, pressing ink to parch-
ment, forcing moveable type into paper, emailing, texting, twitering, doodling,
howling at the proverbial moon – you name it – we grasp for words, reaching
3 out for the language that will make us heard and, just as importantly, that will
allow us to hear.

Because we need stories

We are, as Homo sapiens have always been, desperate for narrative. We yearn for
stories in which to live, sufer, die and rise yet again with the heroes and villains
4 that come alive in our minds. Indeed, by engaging with narrative, we engage and
enliven ourselves. In her important volume of moral philosophy, he Sovereignty
of Good (1970), Iris Murdoch explores the mysterious fabric of our selhood.
‘he self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion,’ she observes, and ‘good-
ness is connected with the atempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the
real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness’ (Murdoch 1985: 93). It is
through the auspices of narrative that we expand these worlds, that we enlarge
5 our states of being, and – if you will excuse another cliché – that we expand our
horizons. But perhaps even more presciently, Murdoch recognizes that ‘the
world is aimless, chancy, and huge, and we are blinded by self ’ (100). And it is
in this blindness, in this inability to see beyond the margins of our own human-
ity, that we are most overwhelmed by life, that we are most vulnerable to our
natural insularity and inherent anxieties about living.
We need stories to make sense of our inexplicable worlds, to provide
6 contexts and frameworks for our lives. ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to
live,’ essayist Joan Didion remarks in he White Album (1979):

12 about literature
 We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the
murder of ive. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the
multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the
imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with
which we have learned to freeze the phantasmagoria which is our actual
universe. (11)
As Didion observes, narrative imbues our lives with structure, artiicial as it
may be, while transforming chaos into order, nonsensicality into plot. It is how 1
we interpret, how we ind solutions, how we derive joy and meaning – even
(and especially) when confronted with the bedlam and uncertainty that some-
times cloud our worlds.

Because we are jazzed by the majesty of words

In its inest states, the beauty of language, in Stevens’s words, ascribes ‘harmo-
nies beyond known harmony’. It connotes the unusual, the unique and the 2
powerful. he aesthetics of the text challenges our intellects – to be sure – but
that is only the beginning, the irmament of something larger and more lasting.
Language holds the capacity for communicating words of inspiration, of
wonder, of love. It is the language of our most reverent, optimistic and fecun-
dating selves. As e. e. cummings writes in ‘stand with your lover on the ending
earth – ’, ‘ – how fortunate are you and i, whose home / is timelessness:we who
have wandered down / from fragrant mountains of eternal now’ (1994: 743).
3
In cummings’s hands, language becomes the stuf of beauty and immortality, a
det and supple means for extolling the richness of human experience. Yet as
you carry away the eferent freight of his poem – of his syllables, typography,
spacing, even his inverted syntax – his language becomes your own.
In his tragicomic novel he Good Soldier (1915), Ford Madox Ford’s thick-
headed narrator John Dowell trolls, over and over again, through the detritus 4
of his life, searching vainly for the origins of his predicament – namely, that he
has been duped by his wife and her lover, his supposedly best friend and the
‘good soldier’ of the novel’s title. Worse yet, they are dead, leaving him alone in
his misery to sit through the taters of his existence. As Dowell seeks out the
roots of his doom – the originary moment of his interpersonal demise – the act
of reading Ford’s novel becomes a brutal and wondrous experience as you ind
yourself setling into Dowell’s highly unsetled skin. When Dowell inally 5
succumbs to the uter hopelessness of his situation, he turns away from his
audience in a brash atempt to bargain with a misbegoten universe, and his
dreams of an impossible reconciliation with the world become our own: ‘Is
there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves,
people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease
in shadows and in coolness?’ (2003: 217). In his greatest moment of anguish
and uncertainty, Dowell grasps for the poetry of language to sate his weary 6
soul. And as Dowell collapses into a life of rote sameness, we emerge from the

literature: fundamental questions 13

 text richer for the experience, awash and aglow in the beauty of Ford’s language.
While the manna of hope is no longer available for Dowell, his life having
become irrevocably devoid of meaning, our own lives are made possible –
whole even – yet again.

Because we have deep and abiding memories

We ind ourselves drawn to literature in order to rediscover ourselves through
1 the windows of the past and our memories. his indelibly human impulse
inds its origins in our innate need to situate ourselves in relation to the world,
as well as to revivify the past, reconcile ourselves with the present, and plot a
course for a seemingly unknowable future of possibility and change. In his
valuable work on autobiography and life-writing, James Olney contends that
understanding this drive for relecting ourselves through narrative afords us
with a means for comprehending the nature of other selves, as well as our own.
2 As Olney observes in Metaphors of Self: he Meaning of Autobiography (1972),
‘Each of us is still, with experience incorporated into character, what he [or
she] was in potentia at birth, which is what each of us will still be, only then
fully realized, in the moment of death’ (280–1). Our encounters with literary
works aford us with a means for contextualizing our pasts and refracting
through the auspices of the text, for breathing life into the untapped characters
of our selves.
3 For Jerome S. Bruner, the act of achieving selhood through our textual
experiences connotes self-knowledge and our capacity for accomplishing a
bounded sense of personal self-construction in relation to the larger worlds in
which we live. In addition to arguing that people establish selhood by ‘narra-
tivizing’ their experiences, Bruner maintains that individuals oten negotiate
their sense of self through the act of reading. ‘he larger story’ of a person’s life
– consisting of a host of considered and reconsidered ‘narrative episodes’,
4 Bruner writes in Acts of Meaning (1990) – ‘reveals a strong rhetorical stand, as
if justifying why it was necessary (not causally, but morally, socially, psycho-
logically) that the life had gone a particular way.’ In Bruner’s postulation of ‘life
as narrative’, ‘the self as narrator not only recounts but justiies. And the self as
protagonist is always,’ he adds, ‘pointing to the future’ – that place where the
self-that-will-be resides (1990: 121). For Bruner, it is the journey of the self
that maters, that makes our lives ultimately worth living.
5 he pull of story and the emotional response that it elicits provide us with
powerful contexts through which to explore our pasts, our memories, and the
mysteries of our futures. Literature reminds us that we do not exist in static,
unchanging worlds, but rather, in spaces of swit and oten indecipherable
change. In her acclaimed novel he Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Margaret Atwood
depicts her narrator, Ofred, as she parses through the memories of an increas-
ingly idealized past in relation to a dystopian present in which her own sense of
6 identity has become dispersed and uncertain. Yet as she digs ever deeper,
Ofred slowly but surely reclaims the threads of her lost self, rebuilding and

14 about literature
 reinvigorating her selhood in the process. ‘As all historians know, the past is a
great darkness, and illed with echoes,’ Atwood writes. ‘Voices may reach us
from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out
of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them
precisely in the clearer light of our own day’ (2006: 350). For Atwood’s narra-
tor, the journey of the self is a transixing and, at times, soul-destroying mission.
Yet for Ofred, these very same voices from the past allow her to rediscover
herself and usurp the great darkness of her present. As the novel comes to an
uncertain close, she is let to ponder the possibilities of an unknown future. 1
But Ofred is ready – her sense of self reinvigorated and impatient, even – for
the new life that awaits her.
When it comes to the textual excavation of memories, Marcel Proust is
literature’s gold standard. he French novelist devoted the balance of his life to
the art of refracting his memories through the lens of his writerly self. Proust
understood implicitly that our memories are triggered by sensory experiences
– sights, sounds, smells and touch, to be sure – but most especially through the
2
pleasures of the text. In Du côté de chez Swann (1913), the irst volume of his
epic À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust interrogates the ways in which
memory is catalysed by the senses, while comprehending, at the same time,
the manner in which the reality of our memories becomes shaped by the
ruinous work of nostalgia, of a sentimentality that exists beyond our ken: ‘How
paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s 3
memory,’ Proust writes, ‘which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to
them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses’
(1992: 606). For Proust, our sense of pastness and the leeting nature of our
memories is both our enemy and our most cherished comrade. On the one
hand, our memories taunt us with the reality of an unrealized past; yet on the
other, our memories exist as our deepest consolation, as our last best chance
for achieving wholeness. And it is our textual experiences, more oten than 4
not, that take us there.

Because we will die

But irst we must live.
It is uniquely through our encounters with literary works – through novels,
poems, plays, ilms, whatever they may be – that we die and yet live again to see
another day.
5
We are eternally vexed by our own mortality. It is the essential condition of
being human, and the mysteries of the text aford us with the opportunity to
explore, to understand and to appreciate the transitory qualities of our exist-
ence. In Lolita (1955), Vladimir Nabokov’s eccentric narrator Humbert
Humbert laments the leeting qualities of life by reciting a couplet from an ‘old
poet’, who characterizes our mortality as a kind of corporeal tax – or duty – 6
that must be paid for striving for an ethical life and enjoying the simple beauty
of human existence: ‘he moral sense in mortals is the duty / We have to pay

literature: fundamental questions 15

 on mortal sense of beauty’ (Nabokov 1991: 275). While cummings celebrates
the pleasures of living in the moment – of frolicking among ‘fragrant moun-
tains of eternal now’ – Humbert Humbert recognizes the efortless splendour
inherent in the merest of poetic phrases. It is a notion that Paul Bowles realizes
intuitively in his deeply philosophical novel he Sheltering Sky (1949). For
Bowles, it is our memories, not simply our lesh, that render life so precious, so
leeting. ‘How many more times will you remember a certain aternoon of your
1 childhood,’ Bowles writes, ‘some aternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being
that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or ive times
more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full
moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless’ (1990: 238).
As with our lives, literature itself seems so limitless, vast and unquenchable.
And yet, as with the ‘mortal sense of beauty’ that troubles Humbert Humbert,
we only have a few vital years in this mortal coil in which to ponder life’s
2 mysteries. It is the veritable home of our personal museums of recollections:
the past and memories that we have lost, yet regained through the refractive art
of literary study. It is the ‘terrestrial paradise’ of our existence, in Ford’s phrase-
ology, and our last best hope for staying a world, in Murdoch’s conception, that
‘is aimless, chancy, and huge’ – a world in which ‘we are blinded by self ’. It is
the illusion, Didion recognizes, that we so desperately crave in order to cele-
brate life’s beauty and to arrest, if only briely, ‘the phantasmagoria which is our
3 actual universe’. It is the story of ourselves.
And that is why we study literature, why we revel in the power of language,
why we ind ourselves, time and time again, in the arms of narrative.
It is because there are more things than poodles in Pomerania.

References
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2006.
4 Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Bruner, Jerome S. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
cummings, e. e. ‘stand with your lover on the ending earth – ’. Complete Poems, 1904–1962.
Ed. George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1994. 743.
Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. Ed. Kenneth Womack and William Baker.
Peterborough: Broadview, 2003.
5 Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Ark, 1985.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1972.
Proust, Marcel. Du côté de chez Swann [Swann’s Way]. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence
Kilmartin. New York: Modern Library, 1992.

16 about literature
Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary
Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978.
Stevens, Wallace. ‘A Duck for Dinner’. Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose. Ed. Milton J.
Bates. New York: Knopf, 1957. 91–6.

literature: fundamental questions 17

 index
1

A alterity 334, 345. See other/otherness

abjection 107–8, 333 ambiguity 121, 123, 272, 300
absence/presence 333. See binary American Civil War 253
opposition Amis, Martin 199
Absurd, heatre of the (also ‘Absurdism’) London Fields 199
2 Ancrene Riwle (Guide for Anchoresses) 73
148, 258, 333, 339
Ackroyd, Peter 199 Andre, Carl 6
Chaterton 199 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 67–8, 73
Acland, Charles 241 Annotated Bibliography of English Studies 36
Addison, Joseph 98 105 archetypal criticism, archetype 234, 270–2
he Spectator 105 Aristophanes 144
3 Aeschylus 135 he Birds 144
Oresteia (Agamennon, Choephoroi [he Aristotle xvi, 136–7, 138, 140, 168, 194,
Libation Bearers], Eumenides) 135–6 287
Aesthetic/s xvi, 1, 9, 11, 12, 13, 102, 103, Armitage, Simon 213
105, 106, 107, 120, 121, 123, 124, Armstrong, Nancy 223–4, 282
225, 240, 266, 275, 276, 282, 297, 308, Arnold, Mathew 5, 246, 268
333–4, 337, 340, 343, 345 Artaud, Antonin 164
4 Aesthetic movement, Aestheticism 117, Spurt of Blood 164
268 Ashbery, John 257
African American literature and studies Atridge, Derek 302
251, 309–11 Acts of Literature 302
Agee, Joel 228–9 Atwood, Margaret 14–15, 326–7
‘A Lie hat Tells the Truth’ 228–9 he Handmaid’s Tale 14–15, 326
agency/agent 116, 205, 221, 334, 346 Oryx and Crake 326
5 Ainsworth, Harrison 211 Austen, Jane 121, 135, 146, 153, 210, 244,
Alcot, Louisa M. 254 316
Litle Women 254 Northanger Abbey 121, 146, 153, 316
Ali, Monica 200 Pride and Prejudice 244
Brick Lane 200 Auster, Paul 259
allegory 75, 83, 91, 107, 160, 173, 174, 232, Austin, J. L. 204
334
6 Allen, Richard 213 B
Skinhead 213 Bacon, Francis 91

408 index
 Of the Proicience and Advancement of Black Mountain poets 257
Learning, Divine and Human 91 Blackwood’s Magazine 210
Bakhtin, Mikhail 148, 149, 275–8 Blake, William 90, 101, 102, 103, 160,
he Dialogic Imagination 277 174–5
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 276 Jerusalem 175
Rabelais and His World 277 he Marriage of Heaven and Hell 175
Balzac, Honoré de 223 Milton 175
Sarrasine 223 Songs of Innocence and of Experience 160
Banville, John 130, 131 Blanchot, Maurice 223 1
Ghosts 130 blank verse 90, 96, 160, 161, 174, 210
Barnes, Djuna 319 Boone, Joseph Allan 319
Nightwood 319 Borges, Jorge Luis 129
Barret Browning, Elizabeth 115–16, 117 he Book of Sand 129
Aurora Leigh 115–16, 117 Botshon, Lisa 37
Barrie, J. M. 239–40 Bourdieu, Pierre 308
Peter Pan 239–40 Bowles, Paul 16
2
Barthes, Roland 36, 129, 223, 292, 293, 322 he Sheltering Sky 16
‘he Death of the Author’ 223 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 113–14
Mythologies 292, 322 Lady Audley’s Secret 114
base/superstructure 288 Brannigan, John 305
Bassnet, Susan 26, 29, 30 Brecht, Bertolt 139–40, 168
Comparative Literature 26, 30 Mother Courage and Her Children 139–40 3
Beardsley, Monroe C. 273, 274. See W. K. Brenton, Howard 185
Wimsat Pravda 185
Beat generation 256–7 Brik, Osip 268
Beaumont, Francis 84 ‘Sound Repetitions’ 268
Becket, Samuel 129, 139, 140, 145, 148, Brontë, Charlote 112, 205–6, 280, 284,
167, 226 285
Krapp’s Last Tape 145, 148 Jane Eyre 112, 205–6, 281, 284–5 4
Waiting for Godot 167 Villete 280, 281
Bede 68 Brontë, Emily 35–6, 211, 282, 283
Ecclesiastical History of the English People Wuthering Heights 35–6, 60, 64, 112, 129,
68 154, 211, 282–4
Behn, Aphra 91, 94, 95, 152, 185 Brook, Peter 166
Oroonoko 91, 94, 95, 152 Brooks, Cleanth 267, 272, 306
Benedictsson, Victoria 138, 139 he Well-Wrought Urn 272 5
he Enchantment 138 Browne, homas 91
Bennet, Arnold 191 Religio Medici 91
Beowulf 65, 69 Browning, Robert 114–15
Bergman, Ingmar 237 ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ 114–15
Bhabha, Homi K. 219, 303, 304 Bruner, Jerome S. 14
binary opposition 107, 204, 216, 299, Acts of Meaning 14
301, 318, 333, 335–6, 338, 346. See Bunyan, John 91 6
absence/presence he Pilgrim’s Progress 91

index 409
 Burke, Edmund 102, 104, 107 Eikon Basilike 174
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin Chaucer, Geofrey 72–9 passim, 144, 145,
of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the 148, 159, 161, 209, 308
Beautiful 107 he Book of the Duchess 75
Burney, Frances (Fanny) 95 he Canterbury Tales 75–6, 148, 159
Evelina 95 Troilus and Criseyde 75, 76
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 323 ‘he Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’
1 Tarzan of the Apes 323 144, 145, 148, 209
Burroughs, William 257 Chekhov, Anton 139
Naked Lunch 257 he Cherry Orchard 139
Butler, Judith 203, 204, 235, 317, 318–19 he Seagull 139
Gender Trouble 204, 318 hree Sisters 139
Byron, George Gordon, Lord 28–9, 102, Chicano/a literature and studies 251–2,
107 311–14
2 Manred 28–9 Christie, Agatha 114
Cisneros, Sandra 312–13
C Clare, John 211
Calvino, Italo 199 class 5, 19, 20, 64, 75, 96, 106, 111, 112,
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller 199 113, 114, 123, 128, 130, 138, 142, 143,
canon 5–6, 9, 27, 60, 76, 82, 96, 120, 121, 153, 189, 205, 209–15, 246, 259, 278,
122, 124, 127, 196, 199, 200, 211, 219, 279, 281, 282, 287–8, 289, 323
3 231, 232–3, 247, 248, 281, 306, 309, Coetzee, J. M. 201
310, 315, 316, 319, 321, 322, 323, 355, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 20, 102, 107, 160,
359 227, 325
Caputo, John D. 301 ‘Dejection: An Ode’ 227
Deconstruction in a Nutshell 301 Lyrical Ballads (with William
Carew, homas 88 Wordsworth) 20, 103, 160, 210
carnivalesque 148, 277 he Rime of the Ancient Mariner 107
4 Carroll, Lewis 232, 233 Collins, Michael 213
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 230, 232 Collins, William 177–8
Carter, Angela 108 ‘Ode to Evening’ 177–8
Carver, Raymond 258–9 Collins, William Wilkie 113–14
Cathedral 258–9 he Moonstone 114
Cary, Elizabeth, Lady Falkland 88 comedy 98, 135, 140, 142–50, 210, 254,
Castiglione, Baldassare 81–2 271, 329
5 he Book of the Courtier 81–2 comparative literature 25–30
Castle, Terry 316 Conan Doyle, Arthur 114
‘Was Jane Austen Gay?’ 316 Conrad, Joseph 120, 123, 135, 301, 322–3
Celan, Paul 130 Heart of Darkness 122, 301
Cervantes (Saavedra), Miguel de 95, 152 Contemporary Literature 126
Adventures of Don Quixote 95, 152 context xii, 20, 28, 29, 33, 34, 43, 45, 58, 60,
Cesaire, Aimé 216 62, 63, 83, 96, 122, 128, 139, 146, 155,
6 A Tempest 216 167, 168, 177, 179, 184, 204, 205, 207,
Charles I 174 213, 215, 218, 219, 222, 224, 231, 245,

410 index
 271, 274, 290, 300, 304, 306, 307, 308, Desani, G. V. 216–17
312, 314, 317, 318, 322, 325 All About H. Haterr 216–17
Cowley, Abraham 89 Descartes, René, 187, 223, 226
Crashaw, Richard 88 Meditations on First Philosophy 223
creative writing 21–5 desire 88, 117, 123, 124, 224, 234, 257,
Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) 314 269, 279, 284, 285, 294, 295, 298, 305,
Critchley, Simon 301 317, 319–20
he Ethics of Deconstruction 301 dialectic 288
Cromwell, Oliver 90, 174 Dickens, Charles 4, 6, 107, 111, 112, 113, 1
Culler, Jonathan 26 122, 146–7, 154, 196, 200, 211, 231,
cultural materialism 286, 305, 306–9. See 238, 245, 297
materialism A Christmas Carol 112
cultural studies 321–4 Great Expectations 107, 122
cummings, e. e. 13 Hard Times 113
Cursor Mundi 74 Household Words 113
he Old Curiosity Shop 113
2
D Oliver Twist 112, 147, 231
Daniel 69 Our Mutual Friend 122
Darwin, Charles 115, 190 he Pickwick Papers 111, 113, 147
Descent of Man 115 Dickinson, Emily 295
On the Origin of Species 115 ‘In Winter in My Room’ 295
De Beauvoir, Simone 61, 203 Didion, Joan 12–13, 16 3
he Second Sex 203 he White Album 12–13
De Lauretis, Teresa 204 discourse xii, 40, 61–2, 144, 145, 241, 267,
Technologies of Gender 204–5 268, 291, 293, 304, 305, 323, 326
DeLillo, Don 328 Dollimore, Jonathan 307
White Noise 328 (with Alan Sinield) Political Shakespeare
De Man, Paul, 298 307
deconstruction 108, 230, 296–303 Donne, John 87–8 4
Defoe, Daniel 93, 95, 153, 189, 191, 227 ‘Bater my Heart’ 88
Moll Flanders 94 ‘he Canonization’ 87
Robinson Crusoe 94, 95, 153, 154, 189, ‘he Sun Rising’ 87
191, 227 ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ 87–8
Dench, Judi 168 ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ 88
Derrida, Jacques 36, 43, 108, 296–301 Dos Passos, John 238, 255
Archive Fever 300 Manhatan Transfer 238, 255 5
Dissemination 299, 200 U.S.A. 238
‘Leter to a Japanese Friend’ 296 he Dream of the Rood 69
Margins of Philosophy 299 Dryden, John 88, 90, 160, 163, 178, 179
Of Grammatology 48 Absalom and Achitophel 160
Positions 299 Mac Flecknoe 90
Specters of Marx 301 ‘hrenodia Augustalis’ 178
Speech and Pheomena 298 ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’ 179 6
Writing and Diference 298 Du Bois, W. E. B. 309–10

index 411
 he Soul of Black Folk 309–10 Medea 136
Dürrenmat, Friedrich 128 he Trojan Women 136
he Visit 128 existentialism 130, 140, 148, 227

E F
Eagleton, Terry 6, 8, 9, 209, 239, 288 Faulkner, William 241, 255, 297
Literary heory 6 Absalom! Absalom! 255
1 Marxism and Literary Criticism 288 As I Lay Dying 297
Easthope, Anthony 322–3 he Sound and the Fury 241, 255
Literary into Cultural Studies 322–3 feminism xv n.2, xvi n.2, 59, 61, 64,111,
Eco, Umberto 130 129, 203, 222, 266, 278–86, 296, 297,
he Name of the Rose 130 322, 325, 326, 354
ecocriticism 207, 324–7 Fielding, Henry 91, 95, 135, 145, 153, 185,
eighteenth-century literature 93–100 189, 227
2 Eikhenbaum (Eichenbaum), Boris 238–9, Amelia 95
268–9 Joseph Andrews 95, 189
‘he heory of a “Formal Method”’ 269 he Modern Husband 185
Eisenstein, Sergei 238 Rape upon Rape 185
elegy 9, 97, 173, 178–9 Shamela 95
Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 110, 111, Tom Jones 94, 95, 145, 153, 227
113, 154, 190, 210 Fielding, Sarah 94, 95
3 Middlemarch 110, 111, 113, 154, 190, he Adventures of David Simple 94, 95
210 Figes, Eva 140
Eliot, T. S. 120, 121, 160, 256, 274, 328 Tragedy and Social Evolution 140
‘he Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 274 Fitzgerald, F. Scot 255
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 274 he Great Gatsby 255
he Waste Land 121, 160, 256 Fletcher, John 84
Ellis, Bret Easton 258 Ford, Ford Madox 13–14
4 American Psycho 258 he Good Soldier 13–14
Glamorama 258 formalism (Russian Formalism) 7–8, 267–
Less than Zero 258 9, 272, 275, 276, 299, 306
Emin, Tracy 6 Forster, E. M. 27, 212
Empson, William 272 Howards End 212
Seven Types of Ambiguity 272 A Passage to India 27
Engels, Friedrich 209, 286–7. See Karl Marx Foucault, Michel 204, 223, 292–3, 305,
5 epic 26, 27, 60, 65, 69, 74, 83, 89–90, 97, 318–19, 320, 323
171–7, 181, 184, 271, 276 he History of Sexuality 204, 292–3, 305,
epistolary iction 94–5 318
Equiano, Olaudah 4, 6, 94 he Order of hings 223
he Interesting Narrative 4, 6, 94 he Will to Knowledge 318
Eugenides, Jefrey 203 Fowler, Alistair 178
Middlesex 203 Fowles, John 129
6 Euripides 135, 136 he French Lieutenant’s Woman 129
Electra 136 Frazer, James G. 270

412 index
 he Golden Bough 270 Genesis 69
Freeman, Edward 355 Genete, Gérard 9, 95
French Revolution 102, 210 genre x, xiv, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 58, 77,
Freud, Sigmund 61, 146, 149, 154, 192, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95, 97, 113, 114, 134,
224, 225–6, 240, 278, 283, 294, 295 137, 142, 143, 148, 150, 151, 152, 161,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle 294 167, 170, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 194,
he Future of an Illusion 294 195, 199, 200, 216, 217, 223, 232, 240,
he Interpretation of Dreams 226 244, 248, 250, 252, 253, 258, 271, 276,
Jokes and heir Relation to the Unconscious 306, 325 1
146 Geofrey of Monmouth 74
Moses and Monotheism 294 Historia Regum Britanniae 74
Totem and Taboo 294 Gibbon, Edward 9
‘he “Uncanny”’ 295 he Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Fry, Stephen 162 9
he Ode Less Travelled 162 Gilbert, Sandra M. 206, 282
Frye, Northrop 270–1 (with Susan Gubar) he Madwoman in
2
Anatomy of Criticism 271 the Atic 206, 282
Fussell, Paul 97 Gilman, Charlote Perkins 320
English Augustan Poetry 97 ‘he Yellow Wallpaper’ 320
futurism 123–4 Gilroy, Paul 310
he Black Atlantic 310–11
G Ginsberg, Allen 256–7 3
Galsworthy, John 191 ‘Howl’ 256–7
Garcia Márquez, Gabriel 129 Gissing, George 190
One Hundred Years of Solitude 129 he Nether World 190
Garrick, David 98 Godwin, William 102
Gaskell, Elizabeth 43, 113, 153–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 27
Cranford 43 he Sorrows of Young Werther 27
Mary Barton 153–4 Golding, William 128 4
North and South 113 Lord of the Flies 128
Gates, Henry Louis 310 Goldsmith, Oliver 98, 99
he Signifying Monkey 310 She Stoops to Conquer 98
Gawain-poet 75 gothic x, 19, 94, 101–10 passim, 112, 113,
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 75 146, 153, 205, 218, 252, 253, 259, 280,
Gay, John 97, 185 295, 310
he Beggar’s Opera 98, 185 Gower, John 75, 77 5
Polly 185 Confessio Amantis 75
Trivia 97 Grant, Damian 187
gay studies 111, 204, 207, 298, 314–21, 322 graphic novel 195, 244, 246
gender 19, 20, 64, 70, 72, 98, 104, 108, 111, Grass, Günter 128
124, 126, 127, 129, 136, 138, 143, 145, he Tin Drum 128
166, 202–9, 211, 213, 221, 222, 234, Gray, homas 96, 178
235, 254, 256, 271, 278–9, 282, 286, ‘he Bard’ 178 6
312, 318–19, 323, 327

index 413
 ‘Elegy Writen in a Country Churchyard’ he Rake’s Progress 195
178, 179 Hogg, James 107
‘he Progress of Poesy’ 178 Hoggart, Richard 213, 323
Greenaway, Peter 169 Hollinghurst, Alan 127
Greenblat, Stephen 304 Homer 171, 172
Renaissance Self-Fashioning 304 Iliad 171
Gubar, Susan 206, 282. See Sandra M. Odyssey 171, 172
1 Gilbert Hopkins, Gerard Manley 65
Gui de Warewic 75 Horace 182, 183
Gutenberg, Johannes 80 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 82
Howe, Susan 129
H Frame Structures 129
H.D. (Hilda Doolitle) 121, 255–6 Hughes, Langston 310
Haggard, H. Rider 215 ‘he Negro Artist and the Racial
2 King Solomon’s Mines 215 Mountain’ 310
Hall, Donald E. 320 Hunt, Leigh 210
Hall, Stuart 323 Hunt, Peter 232–3, 234
Hanks, Tom 241
Forrest Gump 241 I
Hardy, homas 135, 137, 156–7, 191 Ibsen, Henrik 138–9
Hare, David 185 Hedda Gabler 138
3 Stuf Happens 185 idealism 105, 187, 188, 190, 192
Harper, Graham 303 ideology 70, 106, 123, 189, 194, 195, 222,
Harrison, Tony 213 277, 288, 292, 323, 330
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 253–4 Idle, Eric 146
he Scarlet Leter 253–4 imagism 121
Haywood, Eliza 94 imperialism 217, 303
Love in Excess 94 intentional fallacy 274
4 Heaney, Seamus 65 intertextuality 26, 76, 239, 271, 277
Henryson, Robert 77 Ionesco, Eugène 148
Testament of Cresseid 77 Rhinoceros 148
Herbert, George 88 irony 130, 148, 179, 181, 199, 271, 272
he Temple 88
Herrick, Robert 89 J
‘Corinna’s Going A-Maying’, 89 Jacobean and Caroline drama 87
5 Herwitz, Daniel 194 Jakobson, Roman 7–8
Hirst, Damien 6 James, Henry 43, 192, 254
Hoby, homas 81 he Ambassadors 192, 254
Hoccleve, homas 76 he Portrait of a Lady 254
he Regement of Princes 76 he Turn of the Screw 107
he Series 77 James, M. R. 107
Hofmann, E. T. A. 295 Johnson, Samuel 6, 88, 96, 99, 105
6 ‘he Sandman’ 295 Dictionary 6
Hogarth, William 195 London 183

414 index
 Preface to Shakespeare 6 Langland, William 75
he Vanity of Human Wishes 183 Piers Plowman 75
Jonson, Ben 84, 89, 90, 142, 184 Lanyer, Aemilia 88
‘he Masque of Blackness’ 89 ‘Description of Cooke-ham’ 88
‘To Penshurst’ 89 Lawrence, D. H. 120, 124, 212–13
‘Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue’ 89 he Ladybird 124
Volpone 142 Lady Chaterley’s Lover 212
Joyce, James 120, 224, 225, 226, 244, 255 Layamon 74
Finnegans Wake 122, 224 Brut 74 1
Ulysses 154, 155, 224, 225, 244 Leavis, F. R. 6, 246, 307
Judith 69 he Great Tradition 6
Jung, Carl Gustav 270 Le Fanu, James Sheridan 107
Juvenal 183 Lennox, Charlote 95
he Female Quixote 95
K Lesnick-Oberstein, Karin 234
Kamuf, Peggy 204, 301–2 Lewis, Mathew 105
2
‘Writing like a Woman’ 204 he Monk 105
Kane, Sarah 167, 169 Lewis, Percy Wyndham 120, 123
Blasted 167 Licensing Act (1737) 185
Keats, John 101, 102, 210 Linton, Eliza Lynn 117
he Eve of St Agnes 107 ‘he Girl of the Period’ 117
Lamia 107 literary theory 6, 21, 61, 218, 219, 230, 233, 3
Kelman, James 213 265, 266, 270, 296, 301, 311, 324, 325,
How Late it Was, How Late 213 326, 329
Kemble, John Philip 98 Liu, Alan 37–8, 44
Kempe, Margery 77 ‘Voice of the Shutle’ 44
Book of Margery Kempe 77 Locke, John 187
Kerouac, Jack 257 Lodge, homas 184
On the Road 257 Defence of Poetry 184 4
King, Martin Luther 309 Longinus 28
Kipling, Rudyard 111 On the Sublime 28
‘he Man Who Would Be King’ 111 Lonsdale, Roger 6, 96
Klein, Melanie 295 Lovelock, James 326
Kristeva, Julia 107, 277 Lowell, Amy 155–6
Kundera, Milan 130 Lydgate, John 76, 77
he Unbearable Lightness of Being 130 Troy Book 76 5
Kyd, homas 84, 138 Lyotard, Jean-François 200
he Spanish Tragedy 138 lyric 19, 77, 87–8, 97, 159–60, 175, 177–
81, 239, 245
L
Lacan, Jacques 36, 226, 295 M
Landow, George 38 Mack, Maynard 182
Victorian Web 38 MacPherson, James 27 6
Lane, Edward William 29 Malory, homas 151

index 415
 Le Mort D’Arthur 151 Eikonoklastes 174
Mannyng, Robert 74 ‘Lycidas’ 178–9
Chronicle 74 Paradise Lost 86, 89–91, 96, 159, 160,
Mansield, Katherine 120, 124 173, 174–5, 306
Marineti, Filippo Tommaso 123 ‘minority’ literatures 251–2
Marlowe, Christopher 60, 84, 85, 87, 139, MLA Bibliography 36
160 modernism 19, 120–5, 129, 154, 155, 191,
1 Dr Faustus 84, 87, 139 201, 238, 254, 255–6, 328, 329
‘he Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 142
160 he Misanthrope 142
Marvell, Andrew 90, 178 Montagu, Mary Wortley 97, 99
‘An Horatian Ode: Upon Cromwell’s ‘Epistle from Arthur G[ra]y to Mrs
Return from Ireland’ 90, 178 M[urra]y’ 97
Marx, Karl 61, 107, 209, 227, 286–89 ‘Epistle from Mrs Y[onge] to her
2 Capital 227 Husband’ 97
he Communist Manifesto 107 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 146, 184
Marxism xvi, 59, 61, 64, 266, 275, 286–90, More, homas 81
297, 305, 306, 322 Utopia 81
materialism/materiality 188, 190, 192, 201, Morris, Pam 189–90
279, 287, 305, 306–8, 338 Morrison, Toni 251, 271, 309, 311, 316–17
Maturin, Charles 105 Beloved 251
3 Melmoth the Wanderer 105 Sula 316–17
Maxims 69 Mulvey, Laura 205
McEwan, Ian 131, 201 ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
Amsterdam 201 205
Atonement 131 Murdoch, Iris 12
Enduring Love 201 he Sovereignty of Good 12
Saturday 201 Musil, Robert 329
4 McKellen, Ian 168 Der Mann ohne Eigenschaten 329
McQuillan, Martin 301 Mystery play cycles 167
Deconstruction: A Reader 301
medieval literature 19, 72–9 N
Medvedev, P. N. 276 Nabokov, Vladimir 15–16, 128
he Formal Method in Literary Scholarship Lolita 15–16, 128
276 Native American literature 250–1
5 metaphysics 88, 130, 139, 140, 299 Nesbit, Edith 51
Middleton, homas 84 he Railway Children 51
Women Beware Women 138 New Criticism 267, 272–5
Millais, John Everet 116 new historicism 26, 204, 304–6, 324
Ophelia 116 Nietzsche, Friedrich 137
Miller, J. Hillis 298, 301 he Birth of Tragedy 137
Miller, Jonathan 166 Norton Anthology of Arican American
6 Milton, John 6, 86, 89–91, 96, 159, 160, Literature 309
161, 163, 173, 174–5, 178, 306 Norton Anthology of Poetry 162

416 index
Norton Anthology of heory and Criticism he Renaissance 225
269 Patmore, Coventry 117
Norton Anthology of World Literature 27–8, he Angel in the House 117
29 Pavel, homas 196
novel, the x, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 26, 27, Pepys, Samuel 152
36, 43, 51, 52, 58, 60, 91, 93–6, , 97, he Diary 152
98, 105, 106, 111, 112–14, 117, 122, Petrarch 82, 87, 179
126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 140, 143, 144, Canzoniere 179–80
146, 147, 150–6, 159, 175, 187, 188, Philips, John 96 1
189, 190, 191, 192, 100–200, 203, he Splendid Shilling 96
205, 206–7, 212, 216, 218, 222, 223, Pindar 178
224, 226, 227, 118, 229, 233, 237, 238, Pinero, Arthur Wing 117–18
240, 241, 244, 251, 253, 254, 255, 257, he Second Mrs Tanqueray 118
275–7, 281, 282, 283, 285, 289, 297, Pinter, Harold 129, 139
310, 313, 316, 317, 319, 322, 328, 329 Pirandello, Luigi 148
Six Characters in Search of an Author 148
2
O Pizan, Christine de 77
O’Hara, Frank 257 Plath, Sylvia 129
Old English literature 19, 65–71 he Bell Jar 129
Olney, James 14 Plato 81
Metaphors of Self 14 Plautus 84
orientalism 218, 220, 235, 326 Menaechmi 84 3
Orwell, George 9, 196, 213 Poe, Edgar Allan 108, 253
Animal Farm 196 ‘he Fall of the House of Usher’ 253
Down and Out in Paris and London 196 ‘he Tell-Tale Heart’ 253
Nineteen Eighty-Four 196, 213 Pope, Alexander 4, 96, 99, 175, 182
he Road to Wigan Pier 196, 213 he Dunciad 96, 99
Osborne, John 128 he Dunciad Variorum 175
he Entertainer 128 Imitations of Horace 182 4
other, otherness 14, 108, 146, 147, 226, he Rape of the Lock 96, 175
301, 303, 345–6, 347, 348. See alterity postcolonialism 111, 129, 215–21, 222,
Ovid 84 286, 303–4, 322
Metamorphoses 84 postmodernism 125, 126, 155, 198–202,
Owen, Wilfrid 182 327–31
‘Dulce et decorum est’ 182 Poter, Sally 237
Orlando 237 5
P Pound, Ezra 120, 121, 123, 255–6, 291–2
Paglia, Camille 295 Cantos 255–6
Sexual Personae 295 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 256
Paine, homas 102 ‘In a Station of the Metro’ 291–2
Pamuk, Orhan 130–1 power 20, 64, 70, 235, 305, 323
he New Life 130–1 Prest, homas Presket 211
pastoral 9, 97, 160, 178, 184, 325 Varney the Vampire 211 6
Pater, Walter 117, 224–5, 227 Project Gutenberg 36

index 417
 Propp, Vladimir 268 Ringrose, Christopher 33
Morphology of the Folk Tale 268 Roberts, Julia 239
Proust, Marcel 15, 329 Prety Woman 239
Du côté de chez Swann 15 romanticism 101–10
À la recherche du temps perdu 15, 329 Rosenblat, Louise M. 11
psychoanalysis xv n.2, 59, 61, 64, 126, 146, he Reader, the Text, the Poem 11
192, 266, 279, 280, 284, 293–6, 301, Rosseti, Christina 115–16, 117
1 317, 322 Goblin Market 115–16, 117
Putenham, George 184 ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ 116
Arte of English Poesie 184 Rosseti, Dante Gabriel 116
Pynchon, homas 198, 200 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 103
Roy, Arundhati 200
Q he God of Small hings 200
Quarterly Review 210 Royal Literary Fund 23
2 Queer theory, 40, 111, 206, 207, 214–21, Royal Literary Fund Fellow 23
222, 298, 314–23 Royal Shakespeare Company 166
Royle, Nicholas 301
R Rushdie, Salman 128, 130, 198, 217–19,
Radclife, Ann 105, 106, 107 244, 311
he Mysteries of Udolpho 105, 107 Midnight’s Children 218
Raleigh, Walter 160, 173 he Satanic Verses 130, 198, 244
3 Ransom, John Crowe 273–4 ‘Yorick’ 217
realism 94, 107, 151, 152, 153, 154, 186– Ruskin, John 117
93, 199, 200, 232, 253–4, 255 Russian Revolution 123, 139
Reeve, Clara 151, 153
Reid, homas 187–8 S
Renaissance theatre 83–4 Said, Edward 219, 235, 303, 304, 326
rhetoric 6, 14, 80, 88, 173, 175, 182, 196, Salinger, J. D. 257
4 231, 248, 252, 269, 272, 325 he Catcher in the Rye 257
Rhys, Jean 129, 207, 311 Sallustius 172–3
Wide Sargasso Sea 129, 207 On the Gods and the World 172–3
Rice, Anne 110 Saramago, José 130, 131
Rich, Adrienne 204 Blindness 130
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 204 satire 81, 90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 128, 142, 148,
Richards, I. A. 272 160, 162, 181–6, 195, 271
5 Practical Criticism 272 Saussure, Ferdinand de 36, 290–2, 293, 295
Principles of Literary Criticism 272 Course in General Linguistics 290
Richardson, Samuel 93, 94, 153, 189 Seafarer, he 69
Clarissa 94 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 204, 319–20
Pamela 94, 153 Between Men 204, 319–20
Ricks, Christopher 227–8 semiotics 165, 247, 290
Rimbaud, Arthur 226 Sendak, Maurice, 231
6 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 95 Where the Wild hings Are 231
Narrative Fiction 95 sensation novel 113–14

418 index
Seth, Vikram 159 Sinield, Alan 307–8. See Jonathan
he Golden Gate 159 Dollimore
Shadwell, homas 90, 185 (with Jonathan Dollimore) Political
Shakespeare, William 4, 6, 8, 15, 82–3, 83– Shakespeare 307
5, 86, 87, 98, 137, 138, 141, 165–6, he Wilde Century 320
167, 168, 177, 188–9, 195, 210, 216, Skelton, John 77
226, 307–8 he Garland of Laurel 77
As You Like It 177 Smith, Sidney 250
he Comedy of Errors 84 Smith, Zadie 200 1
Hamlet 138, 226 White Teeth 200–1
Henry V 188 Smollet, Tobias 95
King Lear 167, 188, 226 he Adventures of Humphrey Clinker 95
Macbeth 138, 168, 210 Snyder, Gary 256–7
he Merchant of Venice 84 sonnet 8–9, 26, 78, 81, 82, 87, 88, 112, 116,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 165–6 177, 179–80, 187, 222, 227, 274, 318
Richard III 307–8 Sophocles 135, 136, 166–7
2
Romeo and Juliet 188 Oedipus Rex 136, 166–7, 226
he Taming of the Shrew 145 Soueif, Ahdaf 200
he Tempest 87, 216 he Map of Love 200
Titus Andronicus 84 Southey, Robert 6
Twelth Night 9 Speght, Rachel 88
Sharp, Jane 4, 6 Spenser, Edmund 82, 87, 90, 173 3
he Midwives Book 4, 6 he Faerie Queene 83, 90, 173
Shaw, George Bernard 118 Spielberg, Steven 239–40
Mrs Warren’s Profession 118 Hook 239
Shelley, Mary 104, 107 Spiting Image 148
Frankenstein 104, 107 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 25, 219, 303
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 102, 227 Spooner, W. A. 146
‘Mutability’ 227 Stage Licensing Act 97 4
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 98 Stanzel, F. K. 95
he Duenna 98 Sterne, Laurence 95–96, 227–8
he Rivals 98 he Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
he School for Scandal 98 95–96, 227–8
Shklovsky, Viktor 7, 268 Stevens, Wallace 11–12, 187, 256
Showalter, Elaine 279 ‘A Duck for Dinner’ 11–12, 13
Siddal, Elizabeth 116 Stevenson, Robert Louis 107, 193–4 5
Siddons, Sarah 98 he Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Sidney, Philip 28–9, 81, 87, 173 107
Apology for Poetry 81, 173 Stoker, Bram 107
Arcadia (he Countess of Pembroke’s Dracula 107
Arcadia) 81 Storey, John 245
Astrophil and Stella 81 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 254
he Old Arcadia 81 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 254 6
signiier/signiied 290, 291, 292

index 419
 stream of consciousness 154, 191, 224, 225, unconscious 105, 146, 188, 210, 225, 226,
257 234, 270, 294, 297, 306
Strindberg, August 138, 139 collective unconscious ( Jung) 270
structuralism 290–3 United States of America 5, 21
subjectivity 20, 59, 64, 129, 221–30, 268 universities
Swit, Graham 198, 199 Birmingham (Centre for Contemporary
Waterland 198, 199 Cultural Studies) 323
1 Swit, Jonathan 94, 95, 97, 179, 182–3, 185, Calgary 38
231 East Anglia 21
he Batel of the Books 185 Leicester 361
‘Description of a City Shower’ 97 Liverpool 126
Gulliver’s Travels 94, 95, 182, 231 Loughborough 45, 59
A Modest Proposal 182 Manchester Metropolitan 24
Tale of a Tub 182 Melbourne 39
2 ‘Verse on the Death of Dr Swit’ 179 Southampton 39
Swinburne, Algernon Charles 190 Updike, John 258

T V
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 65, 114–15, 211 Vaughan, Henry 88
In Memoriam, A. H. H. 115 Verremdungsefekt [alienation/distancing/
Ulysses 114 estrangement efect] 140, 334
3 Tew, Philip 201 Veeser, H. Aram 305
textuality 305 he New Historicism 305
hacker, Deborah Cogan 233 Victorian and nineteenth-century literature
hackeray, W. M. 211 110–19
Vanity Fair 211 Victorian poetry 114–17
hompson, E. P. 323 Virago 281
homson, James 96 Virgil 90, 171, 172
4 Seasons, he 96 Aeneid 90, 171
housand and One Nights, he 29 Volosinov, V. N. 276
Tillyard, E. M. W. 304 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
he Elizabethan World Picture 304 276
Tolkien, J. R. R. 65
he Lord of the Rings 65 W
Tolstoy, Leo 7 Wace 74
5 tragedy 61, 87, 135–42, 147, 167, 181, 189, Roman de Brut 74
271 Walker, Alice 251, 309
transcendentalism 253 he Colour Purple 251
trope 38, 76, 118, 199, 298, 327 Wallace, David Foster 258
Twain, Mark 254 Ininite Jest 258
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 254 Waller, Edmund 89
‘Song (Go, lovely rose!)’ 89
6 U Walpole, Horace 94, 105
uncanny 295, 328 he Castle of Otranto 94, 105

420 index
Wanderer, the 69 Winterson, Jeanete 127
Ward, Mrs Humphrey (Mary Augusta) 154 Wolfreys, Julian 301
Robert Elsmere 154 Deconstruction • Derrida 301
Waters, Sarah 127, 131 Wollstonecrat, Mary 102
Night Watch 131 Women’s Press, he 281
Wat, Ian 93, 94, 188, 189, 192 Woolf, Virginia 120, 124, 135, 191–2, 224–
he Rise of the Novel 93, 94 5, 226, 237–8, 255, 284, 289, 317, 328
Webster, John 87 Between the Acts 122
he Duchess of Mali 87 ‘Modern Fiction’ 135 1
he White Devil 138 ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’ 191–2, 223
Wellek, René, 25–26 Mrs Dalloway 154–5, 289
West, Nathanael 255 Orlando 237
he Day of the Locust 255 A Room of One’s Own 284
White, Hayden 196 To the Lighthouse 122, 224
Wilde, Oscar 117, 315–16, 317 Wordsworth, William 101, 102, 103, 104,
‘he Decay of Lying’ 117 111, 112, 115, 160, 175, 210, 211, 227,
2
he Importance of Being Earnest 117 325
he Picture of Dorian Gray 117, 317 Lyrical Ballads (with Samuel Taylor
Williams, Raymond 184, 209, 207, 307, Coleridge) 20, 103, 160, 210
323, 341, 348 he Prelude 104, 175, 227
he Country and the City 184 Wright, Richard 310
Marxism and Literature 307 Native Son 310 3
Williams, Robin 239 Wroth, Mary 88
Good Morning, Vietnam! 239 Wyat, homas 78, 82
Williams, William Carlos 256
Paterson 256 Y
‘he Red Wheelbarrow’ 256 Year’s Work in English Studies, he 36
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester 89
Wilson, E. O. 326 Z 4
Wimsat, W. K. 273, 274, 306 Zipes, Jack 234
‘he Intentional Fallacy’ (with Monroe Zola, Émile 190–1, 192
C. Beardsley) 274
he Verbal Icon (with Monroe C.
Beardsley) 273

index 421