Includes index.

On the canon: an elegy for the canon -- The aristocratic age: Shakespeare, center of the canon. The strangeness of Dante : Ulysses and Beatrice. Chaucer : the wife of Bath, the pardoner, and Shakespearean character. Cervantes : the play of the world. Montaigne and Molière : the canonical elusiveness of the truth. Milton's Satan and Shakespeare. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the canonical critic. Goethe's Faust, part two : the countercanonical poem -- The democratic age: Canonical memory in early Wordsworth and Jane Austen's Persuasion. Walt Whitman as center of the American canon. Emily Dickinson : blanks, transports, the dark. The canonical novel : Dicken's Bleak House, George Eliot's Middlemarch. Tolstoy and heroism. Ibsen : trolls and Peer Gynt -- The chaotic age: Freud : a Shakespearean reading. Proust : the true persuasion of sexual jealousy. Joyce's Agon with Shakespeare. Woolf's Orlando : feminism as the love of reading. Kafka : canonical patience and "indestructibility". Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa : Hispanic-Portuguese Whitman. Beckett...Joyce...Proust...Shakespeare -- cataloging the canon: Elegiac conclusion -- Appendixes.