This article publishes for the first time Alexander Pope's long-sought 6 December 1712 letter to Richard Steele. Discussion of this letter illuminates Pope's early relations with Steele, fills a gap in their correspondence, clarifies references in other letters, establishes which parts of Pope's correspondence with Steele are authentic, shows how Pope portrayed his relationship with Steele in the published correspondence of 1735-7, and sheds light on the histories of four poems by Pope from 1711-13: Ode for Musick, the companion poems The Christian to His Departing Soul and The Heathen to His Departing Soul, and The Temple of Fame. An Appendix details the relationship between Pope and Steele in 1711-13.
This essay documents Joy Williams's development as a writer through the first decades of her career, identifying the prominence of priest or preacher figures in her writing. Her work, it argues, stages the crisis of language and authority brought about in American life by the decline of mainline Protestant churches and of institutional Christianity as such in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Williams was one of the most admired and imitated American writers of that period. Reading her work, we see how religious change helped motivate some of the signature stylistic characteristics of late twentieth-century American fiction. Williams's work parodies the proliferating styles of admonitory, affirmative, or consolatory speech which fill the space opened by the retreat of doctrinal Christianity and asks how speech and writing respond to death and suffering in periods of spiritual or personal transition or uncertainty. Read in this way, Williams's writing appears as more than an exemplum of craft, and as significant in the literary history of American late modernity.
This article considers expressions of scepticism about dreams in Shakespeare. It focuses particularly on doubts about dream content rather than dream interpretation, about memory and report rather than causes and origins. It observes these particularly in characters (Dolabella in Antony and Cleopatra, Brackenbury in Richard III, and Romeo) who discover these doubts reactively and then seem to flourish and gain substance as a result. These doubts are seen as socialized, spontaneous versions of the approach to memory and dreams that Shakespeare could and would find in Montaigne. It is important that these discoveries take place in social situations, where dreams are reported and offered for scrutiny. Shakespeare's brief, fraught interactions respond to a long tradition in which Lyly especially is a key predecessor. In Lyly dream-sharing is a leisurely business, but it still performs important social functions. The combination of everyday exchanges with miniature philosophical discoveries shows Shakespeare doing serious thinking in dramatic form.
