After his death in 2012, there has been a notable resurgence of both popular and critical interest in the fiction of American writer Harry Crews. Frequently discussed in the context of Southern gothic, Crews’s novels are notable for their grim and darkly funny tales of life among the rural poor in the worst hookworm and rickets part of Georgia, USA. Still, while the regional identity of Crews’s fiction is strong, his subtle and deeply sympathetic creative imagination tackles questions of universal significance. In the novel A Feast of Snakes (1976), Crews’s finest and most multi-layered work, we are introduced to former high-school football quarterback Joe Lon Mackey on the eve of Mystic, Georgia’s annual Rattlesnake Roundup. Through his sensitive and deeply-felt portrayal of Joe Lon’s failed struggle to reconcile with the traumas of the past and establish meaning and a sense of purpose in life, a development culminating in the liquidation of a snake-handling preacher, a sheriff’s deputy, his own high-school sweetheart, and a random bystander, Crews not only explores the deterministic cultural and socio-economic attributes of the rural south, but also gives articulation to a reflective consciousness far more individuated and multifaceted than allowed for in recent critical discourse. This sombre ending is perhaps what Todorov would term “the realization of an order always preordained,” but it would be a mistake to dismiss it as merely the inevitable outcome of yet another southern boy’s unarticulated rage against modernity. Struggling endlessly like the pitfighting dogs his daddy breeds, Joe Lon, entangled in the determinants of his existence, comes to give mimetic shape to a contemporary American identity both utterly strange and jarringly familiar.

In Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale there is a fundamental sense of mutability imposed by the passage of time. Things come into being and they pass into oblivion; sorrow glazed over by prayers for grace, joy tempered by the remembrance of loss. Within a complex time-scheme of past, present, and future, joy and sorrow remain inextricably entwined, and this is what lends this most melancholy play such a profound emotional intensity. Youth, beauty, happiness; these qualities remain evanescent at the somber close of the play. Tragedy is not purged by laughter, there are no traces of escapism; the awareness of the reality of time, of the inexorable moral responsibility for losses beyond recovery, is what makes the graces received all the more keenly felt, more wondrous. This sense of wonder arises from an elaborate resurrection scene in which, simultaneously cold and warm, at once eternal and ephemeral, Hermione’s marble, the finest symbol of the romance conception of time, is wooed into being. Exploring the structural function of time in the play and its relation to this redemptive moment, in which Hermione’s body comes to represent a translation into human terms of a Neoplatonic idea of cosmic order, reveals how the play, beyond offering an idle meditation on art and nature, articulates a profoundly moral vision of existence, and will supply a useful framework for further critical investigations of both the play itself and Shakespearean romance as a whole.

From his initial reading of Macrobius to the bird choir's parting roundel, the narrator of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls must consider competing versions of love, nature, and human agency, but at the end he remains as uncertain and unresolved as he was at the beginning. Rather than settling the questions with which the poem is concerned, Chaucer, through the waking and dreaming experience of his poetic persona, enacts a psychodynamic interchange in which the ongoing negotiations between experience and authority, flesh and spirit, nature and the divine, are fluid, bidirectional, and mutually dependent. This suggests not only that the condition of embodiment forms the nexus of the poem's various conceptualizations of love, but also the more incisive point that the formulation of any higher good depends on our ability to have clashing ideas “knyt by evene noumbres of acord.”