The Genesis B poet built his image of Eve out of the traditional elements used to create the regal, glowing, intelligent, verbally adept women of Old English poetry, but the story he was telling mandated distortions of that image. Labeling Eve as weak-minded (no other woman in the corpus is so characterized) represents the most damaging distortion. Although the reasons for this intrusion of antifeminism into a poetry mostly devoid of it remain elusive, the spread of Christianity, the restructuring of secular and religious power, and increasing literacy were undoubtedly factors. But despite the distortions, the image of Eve retains its stereotypical power because of the connotative and associative strength of the very image the poet is undercutting. This unique female portrait both contributes to and reflects the ambiguity and problematic status of the Anglo-Saxon woman in a society undergoing rapid and complex cultural change.

Instead of being essentially Platonic, as generations of critics have contended, Shakespeare's sonnets embrace a fundamentally economic idea of value. Their claims to certainty and to permanence refer to human systems rather than to transcendent absolutes. In this respect they resemble Wittgenstein's final writings, collected as On Certainty. Basing their own predicted endurance on their continued utility through time and social change, the sonnets sketch a pragmatic account of human continuity and a nonessentialist idea of human nature. This description of their literary process also suggests why they now seem peculiarly canonical.

Most readers have rejected conceptions of modern literature that depend on ideas of apocalypse and historical crisis, especially as writers like Pater and Stevens have replaced Arnold and Eliot at the center of the modernist canon. For some of these readers, however, Arnold and Eliot are rejected precisely because their work appears to be bolstered by untenable ideas of historical crisis. While this essay argues that modernist literature sometimes promotes such ideas, it also argues that the very same literature provides the terms for undermining those ideas. Surveying a range of post-Romantic texts and then focusing on Arnold's “Empedocles on Etna,” the essay proposes that the tradition of modern apocalypse contains its own critique, complicating a dualistic sense of the canon (split between Arnold and Pater or Eliot and Stevens). This internalized critique is so stringent that it exposes a blindness in some postmodern assessments of apocalypse.

Copying as both duplication and writing informs the structure and thematics of Leopoldo Alas's Su único hijo (1891). In building an entire novel around a copy clerk, Alas, known as Clarín, taps into a rich literary tradition. He also ends up suggesting that the imaginative impulse emerges out of a deeply felt and little understood desire to copy. Clarín's own “corrective copying” of Flaubert illustrates the classic artistic formula of “schema and correction,” revision of the canonical schemata to come up with an “original.” His homage to Flaubert, reenacted textually through the issue of paternity in Su único hijo, operates paradoxically by denying the nihilistic implications of Flaubertian repetition and paternal absenteeism. Where Bouvard et Pécuchet is about copying and an absent father, Clarín's novel is about the inescapable paternal presence, the sign of individuality, and the assertion of self.

The story of John Merrick—the “Elephant Man” of late Victorian sideshows who became a cause célèbre of the aristocracy—has achieved a new and perhaps surprising popularity in recent years. An examination of Bernard Pomerance's 1979 play and David Lynch's 1980 film reveals several sources of viewing pleasure that may account for this attraction, all of which converge on representations of Merrick. Among these sources are the appeals of melodrama and Brechtian epic theater, as well as the more deep-seated gratifications connected with voyeurism, pornography, and theatrical and cinematic spectating. In distinctive ways, each narrative constructs both a mythology of Merrick's life and spectators who are alternately empowered and submissive, politically aware and emotionally engaged.

Joyce's early and middle fictions often examine the pivotal role the gaze of the other plays within human consciousness. The self's enthrallment to the other's eye is dramatized even more vividly in Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, where the dreaming subject conceives of himself pervasively as object, scrutinized by a gaze alternately critical and flattering. The power of the gaze to decenter and destabilize the self expresses itself formally in the Wake's odd, controversial narrative structure: the dream text unravels largely from the vantage point of the internalized gaze, its innovative form constituting an attempt to represent the other within the self—a presence often elided by the waking mind. Joyce's final oeuvre inscribes the dream return of a psychic obsession that surfaces initially in his earlier explorations of the self-conscious subject. This essay treats Finnegans Wake as an uncanny text, strange and yet familiar.