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The problem of "imposed allegory," as Rosamond Tuve once called it, remains an unresolved challenge for theorists of allegory: the project of aligning literal and metaphorical levels of allegorical meaning places readers in the position of having to know the text's meaning before having "unveiled" it. This essay argues that the paradox of temporal anteriority is no paradox: early modern poets understood the discovery of allegorical meaning to be a process of rediscovery–i.e. of recollection. By returning to a memory-based understanding of allegorical hermeneutics, this essay recovers a forgotten aesthetic tradition, one organized around premodern theories of the memory-image.

The “Ex” of my title leads to a question: can we say that the theory of the text is “history,” or is it still operative, generating methods and protocols that can be reactivated? I survey the evolution of Barthes’s theory of the text, from the seminal essays of Writing Degree Zero and the Tel Quel period to the later essays on Textual Pleasure and Textual Bliss. We will grasp why the theory of the Text ended up undermining itself by its very insistence on the infinite productivity of texts. Text could not be reduced to its signified even though it was crucial to analyze these signifieds, since they were needed to understand the various codes underpinning them. Yet, fundamentally, “Text” brought to the fore a “significance” that both produced it and kept it open. In a last part, I compare Barthes’s trajectory with the more recent analyses of Jacques Ranciere in Mute Speech , a book which never mentions the concept of “text.” Ranciere resists the allegorical nature of the Barthesian Text. By historicizing texts as much as he can, Ranciere follows the periodic and local metamorphoses of these cultural productions without having to hypostasize a “Text.” However, Barthes had paved the way by providing a productive allegory. His concept of an infinite Text contained a Benjaminian allegory: it presented an opaque object that condenses the riddles of history and enhanced the material side of its production.

This article argues that Thomas Hardy’s often-expressed ambivalence towards his readers has its origins in late nineteenth-century sciences of mind. It reads The Return of the Native as an allegory of reading informed by neuropsychological theories of association that characterized sensory perception as a semiotic mental process. In Hardy’s novel, this article contends, association makes possible the radical reinterpretation of experience that Hardy elsewhere claims is key to his artistic practice, but it also leads to forms of misreading that haunt Hardy as an author and shape his decision to abandon novel-writing in the 1890s.

Book six of Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene is often seen as a welcomed escape not only from book five's focus on the English campaign in Ireland but also from the demands of allegory itself, but the shift into pastoral that accompanies the onset of book six offers the poet a chance to refocus his allegory from matters of conquest to matters of settlement. In creating this pastoral vision, Spenser borrows from his experience as an Irish undertaker to represent his vision of a decidedly New-English Ireland, and the Munster plantation is rewritten as the golden world of pastoral.

Jim Crow laws in a segregated train car or station. These scenes are a direct response or allusion to the 1892 arrest of Homer Plessy for riding on a white train car in Louisiana, the incident that triggered the Plessy court case and affirmed de jure segregation in the United States. In each text, the scene becomes an allegory about the role that race plays in deciding who can be included in America. Harlan imagines a nightmare scenario in which the despised Chinaman rides legally in the whites-only train car while the Christian, patriotic Negro cannot. In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt depicts a Chinese laundryman and a black female servant boarding a whites-only train from which his protagonist, Dr. Miller, has just been ejected. This pairing of Chinese and African-American laborers catalyzes Miller's thoughts on how the train makes visible the intersecting relationships between race and class. Finally, in his memoir, Wu recounts an incident in which he hesitates over which compartment he should enter at a Washington, D.C. train station: "white" or "colored." Although a porter eventually leads him to the "white" area, Wu writes that he does not seem to belong in either space. What makes these moments so intriguing?and explains this essays motivation for reading them in relation to each other?is that while each of the works depicts the confrontation between a Chinese and black man, the historical record shows that no Chinese man was

The Houyhnhnmland setting of Book 4 of Guilliver's Travels is typically understood within the context of fable, because the talking horses seem designed to instruct humanity through allegory. Once among his family in England, Gulliver's life conforms to realist literary conventions, so that the horses in Gulliver's stable are typically assumed to be brute beasts, and Gulliver's insistence on talking with them becomes a sign of his madness. I would argue, though, that Gulliver's conversation with his pet horses/-/-and consequently the meaning of Book 4/-/-yields a whole new crop of interpretative possibilities if Jonathan Swift's text is framed by contemporary debates about the nature of human and animal identities as well as by consideration of occurrences of pet keeping elsewhere in Gulliver's Travels.

"What doe you lacke?" cries a "Shop-Boy" in Ben Jonson's recently discovered masque, Entertainment at Britain's Burse (1609). "[W]hat is't you buy" from "our China man?" Will it be the "Veary fine China stuffes, of all kindes and quallityes" this dealer has for sale, the "China Chaynes, China Braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China kniues, China boxes, China Cabinetts"? Or his exotic creatures: "Birds of Paradise, Muskcads, Indian Mice, Indian ratts, China dogges and China Cattes?" Or perhaps something more mundane: "Vumbrellas, Sundyalls, Billyard Balls, Purses, Pipes, Toothpicks, Spectacles!" "See what you lack," he urges, and turn that lack into having.' The occasion for this pitch was the first performance of the masque in London on 11 April 1609. It opened the New Exchange, a Burse, it was hoped, that would "rival Gresham's Royal Exchange in the City."2 Since this performance took place on the premises of the Burse itself, the commodities the Shop Boy hawks would, most probably, have been all around him, there for the audience to see and to desire, just as he instructed. But what did they see, exactly? Arjun Appadurai has pointed out that, in early modern Britain, luxury goods from abroad appeared first of all as "incarnated signs": not so much fetishized commodities, but "goods whose principal use is rhetorical and social." For Jonson and his contemporaries, they registered "semiotic virtuosity, that is, the capacity to signal fairly complex social messages," including the "specialized knowledge" that was a "prerequisite for their 'appropriate' consumption," the fashion sense that their elite consumer could display, and the intricacies of status that could be communicated thereby. Asian luxuries like those the Burse purveyed took on meaning first of all within the elaborate conventions of Jacobean court society. Their consumption was regulated not only by sumptuary laws, for instance, but by all the considerations of taste and behavior that courtiers applied to one another, and was linked intimately and specifically, among a knowing clique, to "body, person, and personality."3 Among

"It is well said," Poe says "of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen'-it does not permit itself to be read."' The figures in Beckett's Watt, as they move "slowly alone, like something out of Poe," move in a text that seems to prohibit certain kinds of reading.2 Hugh Kenner has noted that Watt's strangely crafted isolated elements resist pattern-finding and allegorization.3 Yet Kenner also notes that Beckett, far from presenting the reader with mute opacity, has laced the work with mannerisms and mechanisms that tempt us to struggle against this resistance: "The book repeatedly drives us to seek after patterns"; "The temptation to allegorize it is . . . strong." H. Porter Abbott locates Beckett's achievement in the "mock allegory" Watt obliges the dutiful reader to investigate. I will argue that a complementary model for Watt's interpretive tension emerges as we investigate how Beckett uses the writings of the German-trained Scottish psychologist Henry Jackson Watt. H. J. Watt, once his spectre is raised, furnishes the reader with ample new opportunities to read Beckett, ample new temptations to misread Beckett. Jacques Lacan uses Poe's story, "The Purloined Letter," in part to argue that those before him have misread Freud. Today Lacan is often read, and no doubt misread, for his suggestions on how to read. One reading of Lacan indicates Lacan re-reads Freud in an attempt to recover the true radicalness of Freud's interpretive strategy, a strategy beyond signification. Freud, according to Lacan (as Shoshana Felman usefully represents him), dealt primarily with the path of the signifier, not the signified.5 In discussing "The Case of Poe," Felman concludes that "what poetry and psychoanalysis have in common" is that "they both exist only insofar as they resist our reading. "6 The revolutionary nature of Freud's discovery, for Lacan, "consists not-as it is conventionally understood-of the revelation of a new meaning but of the practical discovery of a new way of reading. The interpretive strategy propounded by H. J. Watt springs from his mistrust of what had been "conventionally understood" to be "Freud's discovery." Though it would be foolish to ascribe all the subtlety of Lacanian thought to Watt, Lacan and Watt have a common ground based

L'influence de la pensee allegorique sur le discours politique et religieux du radicalisme millenarien ; la reformulation de la relation entre le corps humain et Dieu face a l'orthodoxie protestante et puritaine ; la finalite non-conformiste de l'allegorie chez J. Bunyan

That "the name Thel is derived from a Greek root meaning 'desire'" is no news to any serious reader of Blake. The above quotation appears in David Perkins' textbook anthology, where it is given as a footnote to the title, "The Book of Thel." Yet the suggestive identity between Thel and Desire is largely ignored. When W. J. T. Mitchell describes the poem's action as "the story of a young woman who questions her own usefulness and purpose in a world where everything dies or fades away,"2 he expresses a critical consensus. In the main, "The Book of Thel" is read as a Little Girl Lost/Found poem writ large. The personification (Thel) is naturalized into character and the "character's" psyche is analyzed, its parts and processes used to support statements about Blake's view of human development. Thel is treated as a psychological construct having ontological density; she is seen to figure either as the true subject of the poem or as a "surrogate for the reader,"3 that is, a character who feels, thinks, and behaves as we might. We read of "her desire" for Wisdom and Love as if Desire-the thing personified-were not synonymous with Thel but a motivation impelling a rounded character. When Desire is thus regarded as the young woman's" defining characteristic, or as the object of her investigations, the poem presents itself as an allegory of psychosexual development. Although the Little Girl and Little Boy Lost and Found poems of the Songs of Innocence and Experience tend toward assuming this form, they are saved in the end from achieving allegorical fixity. The Songs exist within a symbolic frame of reference; they appear under the aegis of a major symbol (Innocence or Experience) and a minor one (Piper or Bard).4 We cannot abstract event or character from idea because the symbol intervenes, preventing the two levels from disengaging. "The Book of Thel," lacking this context, offers no obvious resistance to allegorization. Blake's notorious disdain for allegory5-specifically, for the dualistic ways of thinking it encourages-did not, evidently, prevent him from writing one. His remarks, however, should temper

For all of its reputation as a precursor to the English novel, The Pilgrim's Progress is a book with far more talk than action. The catechizing of the House Beautiful, the discourses and disclosures of Faithful to Christian and Christian to Hopeful, the curious retellings of earlier episodes, and the long interrogations of false pilgrims like Talkative, By-ends, and Ignorance make for a very talky narrative. We might even be tempted to throw Christian's criticism of Talkative back in his teeth. The talkiness of Bunyan's allegory has troubled readers. That it was ever considered a likely book for children is especially strange, for children have little patience with extended colloquies on fine points of doctrine. Huck Finn's assessment of the book emphasizes its thinness of plot and density of words. To him (and doubtless to many) The Pilgrim's Progress was a book "about a man that left his family it didn't say why.... The statements was interesting, but tough."'" Other readers have focused so much on the book's talk and its tendency to generate quibbles over words that they take Bunyan to be primarily interested in the epistemology of allegorical language.2 The talkiness of the narrative appears to support one reader's claim that The Pilgrim's Progress was intended as more of an exercise in learning to read and interpret than a story of anyone s progress.3 All of these responses point to a crux, not only in The Pilgrim's Progress, but also in the Protestant theology that shaped it. The central issues of Protestant theology are, not surprisingly, the central concern of Bunyan's allegory Word and Way, talking and doing, faith and works. It is no accident that Christian and Faithful encounter Talkative almost exactly midway through the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress.4 Puritanism, especially the Independent variety, is a religion of the Word rather than of works, and by

Herbert's hieroglyphic poems, like Renaissance hieroglyphs in general, have been studied mostly in relation to Renaissance concepts of metaphor and allegory, as well as in relation to Renaissance traditions of pattern poems and emblem literature.' However, they can also be understood in the context of Renaissance linguistic theory, especially the Renaissance interest in the material underpinnings of language in written letters and spoken sounds. Murray Cohen has shown the importance of this interest in what he calls "sensible words" in the period between 1640 and 1700,2 but discussion of the material basis of language begins much earlier, with the Humanists in the sixteenth century, and continues into the early seventeenth century as well. Herbert's hieroglyphic use of language can be further illuminated within this earlier context. I do not wish to exclude metaphor as a significant dimension of Herbert's hieroglyphs, but the approach I propose emphasizes the relationship of metaphor to other forms of linguistic thought. This approach tries to relate Herbert to a strain of Renaissance thought not often associated with his work: whereas most historically oriented discussions of Herbert have as their context the theological and spiritual tenor of his church, his relationship to the Christian Renaissance has often been neglected. The importance of Renaissance ideas for Herbert's poetry is evident in an aspect of the period's linguistic thought where Humanist, Neoplatonist, and cabalistic interests converge, namely in the Renaissance view of words as material things that belong to the same network of resemblances that endows natural objects with allegorical meaning-a view that underlies the Renaissance interest in hieroglyphs and emblem literature. The letters and words that form the typographical pictograms of Herbert's hieroglyphic pattern poems, "The Altar" and "Easter Wings," for example, are also the written marks of the poet's utterance-his prayer, his plea, his spoken word. In this regard, Herbert's hieroglyphs depend on

William Congreve is best remembered for his trenchant social satire. As a near contemporary of both Dryden and Swift, he is, not surprisingly, often overlooked as a political writer. Yet Congreve was a political creature, and political concerns find their way, openly or subtly, into his works. In 1695, William III made Congreve Commissioner of Hackney Coaches in the hope that he would become a propagandist for the new regime. Though the playwright did not fulfill the immediate expectations of his benefactor, his tragedy The Mourning Bride, produced in 1697, was a thinly veiled political allegory upholding the legitimacy of the succession. According to Maximillian Novak, the play "was eventually to create a Whig myth of rebellion against a tyrant as an antidote to the Tory myth which Dryden spent some thirty years erecting. "'

Ever since F. R. Leavis first characterized it as a "kind of sport" -an anomaly with "some influence of an essentially undetectable kind"-critics have attempted to locate Wuthering Heights within various schools of literary interpretation or detection. To the "barred" doors of the Heights world have come those who see the novel as an allegory of class conflict, a microcosm of generational tension, or a response to Romantic tradition.' The last fifteen years, however, have seen a determined, if inconsistent, turn away from this legacy of attempted interpretation, of what J. Hillis Miller calls our need "to satisfy the mind's desire for logical order," to "indicate the right way to read the novel as a whole."2 These latter critics accordingly cite what they variously refer to as the "misinterpretation," "crisis of interpretation," or "conflicting possibilities of interpretation" that allegedly distinguish the novel.3 Of course, such approaches differ among themselves: while some attribute this misinterpretation to a particular narrator's unreliable point of view, others maintain that any path through the novel leads to a "reader's quandary"-since its "multiplicity of outlook" and "surplus of signifiers" demonstrate an "intrinsic plurality." Still others deny even the potential import of such signifiers, insisting that the very language of the novel presents us with a "missing center": hence even the name of a given character "despotically eliminates its referent, leaving room neither for plurality nor for significance."4 Although these recent critics hardly consti

Aside from general remarks about its style, most commentary on Johnson's Life of Savage has dwelt on sources and textual matters, perhaps from an unspoken assumption that biography is constrained by fact and therefore not subject to the kind of critical principles allowed to narrative fiction. However, just as Johnson himself " led a Life of Allegory," a view demonstrated by Professor Bate, so in writing biography his classical conception of man as a timeless, moral prototype exerts a certain hold on his narrative form: " there is such an Uniformity in the Life of Man, if it be considered apart from adventitious and separable Decorations and Disguises, that there is scarce any Possibility of Good or Ill, but is common to Humankind" (Rambler 60) *1 Every individual undergoes his own private, fortuitous experience, but when he comes full circle his identity as a member of collective mankind, participating in archetypal experience, is at last manifest. For Johnson it is the art of the biographer to trace through the individual's life to determine its " representativeness " and then to create a narrative form that evinces this truth of uniform experience. The basic structure of Savage resembles a Greek tragedy or medieval morality play; it has a beginning, middle, and end that

Spenser's treatment of classical mythology has been generally praised, The Faerie Queene being viewed, in Douglas Bush's phrase, as " an endless gallery of mythological paintings." When Spenser, in rendering the myth of Leda and the swan, refers to the " wondrous skill, and sweet wit of the man, / That her in daffadillies sleeping made," we rightly turn the praise to himself as he writes: " she slept, yet twixt her eyelids closely spyde, / How towards her he rusht, and smiled at his pryde." But such praise limits our awareness of Spenser's treatment of myth to our enjoying the elocutio of his art. Spenser is the English Ovid, but in a more profound way than we have allowed. In the Renaissance the classical poets themselves are praised rather for their fiction than their ornament, as Homer is extolled by Chapman " for his naked Ulysses, clad in eternall Fiction." 1 That " the Fable and Fiction is (as it were) the form and Soule of any Poeticall worke" is the central doctrine of Renaissance criticism by which writings are praised according as they are " full of rare invention."' 2 Therefore the greatest demands are made upon the mythopoeic powers of the poet that he invent his own fiction or mythology. In fulfilling these demands, Spenser so entirely recreates classical mythology, rendering it his own, that it belongs to the invention of his poem. My purpose in this paper is to show how Spenser's treatment of classical mythology helps our understanding the allegory of The Faerie Queene. Briefly, I shall illustrate four kinds of treatment. In Book I where he imitates Holy Scripture, his treatment is episodic, and provides a point-counterpoint analogy between classical and Christian statements of man's fall and restoration.

To read the large-scale masterpieces of Elizabethan literature with something of the agility they assume and demand is an art which must be self-consciously cultivated by us today. The Shepheardes Calender, an early, relatively brief essay in a complex mode, provides exercise for our wit in smaller compass. We ought, I believe, to bring to it something of the same resources that we bring to Spenser's larger work. As Ernest de Selincourt wrote, "It lies along the high-road that leads him to Faery land." 1 It is the product of the same sensibility, and in it we can discern the special proclivities of the poet's imagination: the preference for radical allegory and " iconographical ambiguity"; 2 the search for a form that will contain variety and unify it without violating its subtle life-patterns; the exploitation of a setting that can also serve as a complex controlling metaphor. The great invention of Faerie Land is anticipated by Spenser's evocation of the archetypal hills, valleys, woods, and pastures of the Calender. Early critics tended to read the work as a kind of anthology, a series of experiments in various verse-forms; Spenser's themes, conceived as subordinate to his forms, could be subsumed under E. K.'s categories, plaintive, moral, and recreative.3 The poem's reputation has taken an upward turn in the past few years, accompanied by a critical tendency to stress the unifying power of its metaphors, and there have been several attempts to reduce its pattern to a single thematic statement. The reconstruction of the poem's composition by Paul McLane suggests the difficulties

The interpretation of four of Lyly's plays, Sapho and Phao, Endimion, Love's Metamorphosis, The Woman in the Moon, has been attended with difficulties. The first two plays seem clearly allegorical and interpretation of them has been largely concerned with the historical significance of this allegory. But no definitive or satisfactory interpretation of either Sapho and Phao or Endimion has yet appeared. No attempt has been made to discover any historical allegory in Love's Metagnorphosis or The Woman in the Moon. Indeed no really serious attempt has been made to understand these two plays at all. They have been dismissed as careless works with no allegorical significance.' But study of the four plays has convinced the present writer that they are to be understood as allegories of love. Such interpretation has seemed to make Sapho and Phao and Endimion readily understandable and has revealed new charm and significance in Love's Metamorphosis and The Woman in the Moon. This paper, then, proposes that all four are concerned with the subject of love, as that subject is set forth in Euphues and Euphues and His England. Before examining Lyly's views on love, it would be well to consider and define what is meant by his use of the allegorical method in the four plays under discussion. An excellent definition for our purposes is to be found in C. S. Lewis' Allegory of Love

Unless we speak loosely, we cannot say that English comedies dramatized love before Lyly began writing plays. His experiments with dialogue, guided by his sense of the limitations of language, put on stage probably for the first time conversations not about love but conversations that dramatize love. Generally speaking, when in earlier comedies lovers confront one another, they meet briefly at the outset to state their feelings and again at the conclusion to suggest a happy future, but throughout the play they remain separated. There are historical reasons for this separation, but the reason which interests me is theoretical and arises from the very nature of love and from the potentialities of drama. To put the matter roughly, love is intimately internal, whereas drama must present man's external behavior. If they ignore allegory in articulating their love stories as dramas, playwrights are faced with the problem of devising behavior to suggest the presence of sentiments, a problem not peculiar to drama, for in the middle ages the code of courtly love achieved this effect, crystallizing into outward gestures what is felt deeply within. But as D. L. Stevenson has shown, these gestures were no longer effective for dramatists of late sixteenth century England.' The playwright may solve this problem by ignoring gesture and using direct statement. The hero simply says to the heroine, " I love you." The Shoemakers' Holiday (1599), a comedy written much later than Lyly's plays, illustrates the difficulties of this solution. When Rose and Lacy meet on stage, they elaborate the fact of their love by several metaphors but are at a loss to say more; Dekker interrupts their rapidly thinning conversa

The voyage of Guyon to the Bower of Bliss appears to present the reader with no special problem of interpretation. As a narrative it is clearly modelled upon Tasso's account of the voyage of Ubaldo to the Isle of Armida in search of the enthralled Rinaldo.' Beyond it lie the great and wondrous voyages of ancient literature, Jason's search for the Fleece and Ulysses' long travel home. Like much serious Renaissance narrative however it offers the reader an idealised representation of a truth with universal significance: a hero tested and strengthened by the experience of much difficulty (like Ulysses, like Jason) approaches the final task in which he is to show not only the nature of the virtue he possesses but even more its heroic magnitude. The voyage and the journey through the Bower of Bliss itself reveal not only his temperance but the inflexible fixity of his will. Guyon through his trials has moved towards a resolute sense of purpose and the recognition of his own heroic stature. The difficulties he faces on the voyage to the Island therefore are devised by Acrasia in an effort to corrupt the will and deflect him from that purpose, at the narrative level not only by sensual attractions but even more by physical horror and simple fear.

In this paper I shall offer a reading of the Orgoglio episode in The Faerie Queene's First Book. About the meaning of the allegory of the episode, I shall have nothing new to say; though I hope that part of what is said will contribute something to our understanding of the nature of Spenserian allegory. But my main occupation will be with the episode's symbolism, a neglected topic, and one full of surprises. When Duessa caught up with Red Crosse at last in the pleasant grove there beside the enchanted fountain, the pair fell very soon into naughtiness. What precisely they were at, Spenser does not quite say. " They gan of solace treat," we read, "and bathe in pleasaunce of the ioyous shade " (I. vii. 4); and also we find that Red Crosse went so far as to make " goodly court " to Duessa, " pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd, / Both careless of his health, and of his fame" (I. vii. 7).But what the poet chose to leave partly in shadow, the modern critic has seen into, and knows very well that Red Crosse and Duessa are hot in the exercise of the rawest venery. That the modern critic is not in this case being too modern, Despair will bear witness. In the course of his persuasions to suicide, Despair makes two specific charges against Red Crosse. The first, that Red Crosse was false to Una; the second, that Red Crosse sold himself to Duessa and with her " in all abuse . . . thy selfe defilde " (I. ix. 46). So exactly what sin it was that Red Crosse was cultivating with Duessa when Orgoglio thundered up, as I say, the modern reader knows, and no recent commentator has failed to specify it. But neither has any commentator, recent or otherwise, as

The attempt to understand the relation between history and literature in the seventeenth century encounters the problem of allegory immediately. The more closely we read certain plays and non-dramatic poems, the more they seem to be offering covert advice on contemporary politics, and the greater is the temptation to translate their figures (in both senses) into topical allusions. The process is invited by Absalom and Achitophel or The Duke of Guise, but what are we to make of the stag-hunt in Cooper's Hill, or Dryden's epistle to Dr. Charleton, or the political overtones of heroic tragedy? I shall refer mainly to works by Dryden, but one section of my argument will be illustrated from Denham, Sir Robert Howard, and Thomas Otway. I have already revealed that I am using the word " allegory," in a sense that is fast becoming antiquated, to mean the hiding of a specific reference, either conceptual or topical, behind a metaphoric veil. By definition, allegorical poems then possess " levels " of significance, translatable " meaning," and neat analogical equations. Spenserian criticism of the past five years, however, has mounted a concerted attack on the theory implied by such paraphrase, without altogether avoiding paraphrase in practice. The Faerie Queene has been cut loose from its moorings to a rigid conceptual framework outside the text, and has been explored either as a poem of rhetorical process which develops complex psychological reactions in the reader, or as a world of its own that generates subtle meanings within itself. It is becoming harder to distinguish allegory from other kinds of poetic discourse, although Rosemond Tuve has concluded that true allegory is always fundamentally religious and concerned with matters of right belief. The crest of the latest critical wave has not yet hit us, and the next five years are likely to see the rewriting of Northrop Frye's dictum that " all commentary is allegorical interpretation " so as to read " commentary turns all works into