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Measure for Measure (1604) is Shakespeare's last comedy: it juxts Othello and precedes—just—King Lear and Macbeth; it is also the comedy which, after the festive and variously flamboyant specimens of the genre, analyzes “desire per se” (Adelman). Such is the resulting analysis that it—seemingly ipso facto—put a stop to Shakespeare's writing comedy per se. At this moment, too, Elizabethan theatre in the round (all the world's a stage...) is about to be challenged by Jacobean perspective theatre (... under the eye of the governor). All of which places the focus in the play on the—here exemplary—tension in representation between, notably, the Symbolic in its different expressions and the Imaginary (the law as paltry scarecrow, the Puritan as self-serving pimp...). The article considers two crucial effects of this juncture: “the Sense of an Ending” (Kermode) and the configuration of measure itself.

This paper begins with the study of the anguish felt by Wordsworth when he faced his incapability to meet his own poetical ambitions, as he put it in the middle of the first Book of The Prelude. The way he expresses his lack of creativity both shows the poet's juvenile impatience and his submission to an artificial vision of poetry. The anamnesis which occurs in the poem unveils the meaning of his vocation: recollecting the emotions of childhood in order to reveal the universal dimension of man's experience of nature, and the ensuing moral growth. The vision of poetry as a revealing process of moral conscience replaces a strictly financial interpretation of the parable of the talents, whose spiritual meaning isenhanced. The article ends with the evocation of the poet's rejection of his juvenile and delusive enthusiasm, as it is expressed in “Elegiac Stanzas” and “Ode to Duty,” two poems which reveals Wordsworth's new ethic turn.

James Northcote has remained in history less as a painter than as one of Reynolds's first biographers. This article intends to show how in the Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds Northcote drew from three distinct biographical subgenres to confer on Reynolds a heroic status as founder of the English school of painting. He revived some topoï used in the first “lives” of artists written in the Renaissance, thus inserting his subject in art history. He also borrowed the strategies of the “intimate biography” developed by his contemporaries to achieve an effect of proximity with the heroic figure. Finally, the Memoirs shared with other biographical works of the period the task of assessing the progress of the art of painting in the country, with a particular emphasis on the role of a single man, Reynolds.

This article will be looking at how space is seen, constructed and made meaningful in A Tale of Two Cities and how this brings out some key questions about Dickens, the two cities he loved and his political position as a writer. Our first focus will be on the technique of seeing or showing from above, that is, seeing panoramically or in terms of a scene performed publicly which the eye can encompass. If we look closer at this super-envisioning and supervision and its correlative desire to grasp new space, it appears to be linked to an act of superimposition, that is, the laying of one topography over another, one history or present of the city space over another. In A Tale of Two Cities Paris and London are strangely mixed and interwoven, we see them stereoscopically that is as a fusion of two images. I would argue that Dickens's visions of London and Paris and the complex overlaying of one on the other show not only a desire to experiment with lines of sight and geographical and ideological positions but is perhaps an attempt to rethink British politics. This shifting of the gaze to encompass another urban reality might be seen to run counter to critiques of A Tale of Two Cities which have seen the latter as a reactionary and chauvinistic stance on the French revolution.

Far from being mere light-hearted playfulness or idiosyncratic musing over seasonal change, the latter part of Thoreau's Walden most clearly articulates the defining tensions within Western modernity, in which desire for scientific knowledge, economic appropriation, and aesthetic enjoyment have reached an unprecedented level of intensity. Thoreau here strives to comprehend and redefine man's relation to the world in the context of the triumph of scientific and economic “modernity.” He meant to induce his readers to reflect about the terms which characterize our relation to the material world, while also tipping the scales toward a new equilibrium, one in which the human desire for dominion is kept in check by a counterbalancing sense of reverence and wonder. He posed exhaustive challenges to the standard ways we relate to the world, from a perspective that drew on and supported a definition of “the wild” that is not merely topographical (a separate sphere elsewhere), but intellectual—a mental frontier, central to our very existence, relocated as the necessary, nurturing questioning of what we assume is human and defines humanity. Orchestrating his narrative so as to emphasize his distance from two common ways of “translating” the real (scientific knowledge and economic exploitation), Thoreau thus made it clear that his environmental advocacy is grounded in a more encompassing focus on the untranslatability of the real.

Refuting the term of magic realism, this article explores how “trans-realism,” that Ben Okri defines as accounting for the African aesthetics presiding over the writing of the novel, works throughout The Famished Road. The “I” narrator, the abiku, the spirit child, allows access to different levels of consciousness and different territories; he also helps to think Time as the co-existence of past and future lives. Transformations and metamorphoses are the modalities of a mutable world where death is never what one thinks. Writing is placed under the sign of the love of the mother, less colorful a character than the father, closer to the everyday life. Boundaries are erased, the two worlds (of phenomenal reality and the supernatural) make one, stories are embedded, interspaces are both spaces in-between and access to the otherworld. Reading with Azaro means reading the riddle (of life, of death, of incompletion), the form and the aesthetic model of a text that displays its conception of the unknown in paradoxes and contradictions. The unresolved and the infinite make do with the remainder; silence can be heard among the chaos of celebrations, battles and fights; dream, a modality of writing and being, dares to invent another world.

The Commonwealth is essential for the conceptualisation of decolonisation: nationalism and transnationalism, diplomacy and the use of force, liberation and dependence, can be better understood if Commonwealth dynamics are given their proper place. The Commonwealth has been about the negotiation, redefinition and deconstruction of Britain's global empire. The oldest international organisation, the Commonwealth is not a history of imagined (or at least relative) smooth transfers of powers, punctuated by the odd crisis. Commonwealth history does point to the specificity of British decolonisation but ultimately demonstrates that decolonisation can only be properly understood if the Commonwealth debates that followed the early 1960s and the high tide of independence celebrations are taken into account.