The essays collected here deal with the materiality, theory, and mechanics of narrative and expressive language, and the relationship of these to other forms of discourse. Topics range from crime stories and daydreaming to ballad scandals and contradictions in Wallace Stevens.

Janet Adelman, "Her Father's Blood: Race, Conversation, and Nation in The Merchant of Venice," Winter 2003, 81: 4-30.

Paul Alpers, "'The Philoctetes Problem' and the Problem of Pastoral," Spring 2004, 86: 4-19.

David Antin, "The Price," Fall 1989, 28: 14-33.

Ken Alder, "A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America," Fall 2002, 80: 1-33.

Anne Banfield, "Beckett's Tattered Syntax," Fall 2003, 84: 6-29.

Katherine Bergeron, "A Bugle, A Bell, A Stroke of the Tongue: Rethinking Music in Modern French Verse," Spring 2004, 86: 53-72.

Katherine Bergeron, ed, Music, Rhythm, Language, special issue, Spring 2004, number 86.

Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, "Surface Reading: An Introduction," Fall 2009, 108: 1-21.

Susan Blood, "The Precinematic Novel: Zola's La Bête humaine," Winter 2006, 93: 49-75.

Daniel Boyarin, "'Language Inscribed by History on the Bodies of Living Beings': Midrash and Martyrdom," Winter 1989, 25: 139-51.

Thomas Bredsdorff, "Speech Act Theory and Saga Studies," Fall 2007, 100: 34-41.

Marshall Brown, "Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice," Spring 2004, 86: 120-40.

Mary Carruthers, "On Affliction and Reading, Weeping and Argument: Chaucer's Lachrymose Troilus in Context," Winter 2006, 93: 1-21.

Michel de Certeau, "Lacan: An Ethics of Speech," Summer 1983, 3: 21-39. 

Michel de Certeau, "Vocal Utopias: Glossalalias," Fall 1996, 56: 29-47.

Tamara Chin, "Orienting Mimesis: Marriage and the Book of Songs," Spring 2006, 94: 53-79.

Michael Clune, "Orwell and the Obvious," Summer 2009, 107: 30-55.

David J. Code, "The Formal Rhythms of Mallarmé's Faun," Spring 2004, 86: 73-119.

J.M. Coetzee, "Osip Mandelstam and the Stalin Ode," Summer 1991, 35: 72-83.

Margaret Cohen, "Narratology in the Archive of Literature," Fall 2009, 108: 51-75.

Christopher Craft, "Come See About Me: Enchantment of the Double in The Picture of Dorian Gray," Summer 2005, 91: 109-136.

Mary Thomas Crane, "Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious," Fall 2009, 108: 76-97.

Robert Darnton, "Mademoiselle Bonafon and the Private Life of Louis XV: Communication Circuits in Eighteenth-Century France," Summer 2004, 87: 102-24.

Whitney Davis, "Decadence and the Organic Metaphor," Winter 2005, 89: 131-149.

Jeff Dolven, "Panic's Castle," Fall 2012, 120: 1-16.

Brent Hayes Edwards, "The Literary Ellington," Winter 2002, 77: 1-29.

Casey Finch and Peter Bowen, "'The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury': Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma," Summer 1990, 31: 1-18.

Joel Fineman, "Shakespeare's Ear," Fall 1989, 28: 6-13.

Philip Fisher, "Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency," Fall 1988, 24: 60-101.

Angus Fletcher, "Iconographies of Thought," Fall 1989, 28: 99-112.

Elizabeth Fowler, "The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser," Summer 1995, 51: 47-76.

Patricia Fumerton, " 'Secret Arts': Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets," Summer 1986, 15: 57-97. 

Catherine Gallagher, "George Eliot: Immanent Victorian," Spring 2005, 90: 61-74.

Catherine Gallagher, "When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves?," Spring 2007, 98: 53-61.

Catherine Gallagher, Mark Maslan, and Paul K. Saint-Amour, eds., Counterfactual Realities, special forum introduction, Spring 2007, 98: 51-52.

Moshe Gold, "Ethical Practice in Critical Discourse: Conversions and Disruptions in Legal, Religious Narratives," Fall 1998, 64: 21-40.

Mike Goode, "The Joy of Looking: What Blake's Pictures Want," Summer 2012, 119: 1-36.

Janet Gray, "Passing as Fact: Mollie E. Lambert and Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert Meet as Racial Modernity Dawns," Fall 1998, 64: 41-75.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, "The Puzzling Case of the Deceased Wife's Sister: Nineteenth-Century England Deals with a Second-Chance Plot," Summer 1990, 31: 142-66.

Sean Gurd, "On Text-Critical Memory," Fall 2004, 88: 81-101.

Judith Haber, "'I(t) could not choose but follow': Erotic Language in The Changeling," Winter 2003, 81: 79-98.

Richard Halpern, "Shakespeare in the Tropics: From High Modernism to New Historicism," Winter 1994, 45: 1-25.

Timothy Hampton, "'Comment a nom': Humanism and Literary Knowledge in Auerbach and Rabelais," Summer 2012, 119: 37-59.

Timothy Hampton, "'Turkish Dogs': Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric of Alterity," Winter 1993, 41: 58-82.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Abroad Only by a Fiction: Creation, Irony, and Necessity in Conrad's The Secret Agent," Winter 1992, 37: 79-103.

Todd Herzog, "Crime Stories: Criminal, Society, and the Modernist Case History," Fall 2002, 80: 34-61.

Fred Hoerner, "'Fire to Use': A Practice-Theory Approach to Paradise Lost," Summer 1995, 51: 94-117.

Denis Hollier, "Bloody Sundays" (trans. Betsy Wing), Fall 1989, 28: 77-89.

Lorna Hutson, "Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England," Winter 1993, 41: 83-103.

Lorna Hutson, "Rethinking the 'Spectacle of the Scaffold': Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedies," Winter 2005, 89: 30-58.

Lorna Hutson, "Forensic Aspects of Renaissance Mimesis," Spring 2006, 94: 80-109.

Gregory S. Jackson, "Cultivating Spiritual Sight: Jacob Riis's Virtual-Tour Narrative and the Visual Modernization of Protestant Homiletics," Summer 2003, 83: 126-166.

Esther Jacobson, "The Structure of Narrative in Early Chinese Pictorial Vessels," Fall 1984, 8: 61-84. 

Mark Jones, "Parody and Its Containments: The Case of Wordsworth," Spring 1996, 54: 57-79.

Joseph Kerman, "Representing a Relationship: Notes on a Beethoven Concerto," Summer 1992, 39: 80-101.

Jeffrey Knapp, "Spenser the Priest," Winter 2003, 81: 61-78.

Jeffrey Knapp, "What Is a Co-Author?," Winter 2005, 89: 1-29.

Leslie Kurke, "Plato, Aesop, and the Beginnings of Mimetic Prose," Spring 2006, 94: 6-52.

Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, "Spectral Currencies in the Air of Reality: A Journal of the Plague Year and the History of Apparitions," Summer 2004, 87: 82-101.

Alan Liu, "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail," Fall 1990, 32: 75-113.