Foreword : The critic as investigator
Pt. 1. Women and men
"If I can make it there" : Oz's Emerald City and the new woman
Christabel's "wandering mother" and the discourse of the self : a Lacanian reading of repressed narration
The ape and the aristocrat
Elizabeth Bishop and the Wordsworth of Lyrical ballads : sentimentalism, straw men, and misprision
Pt. 2. Thomas De Quincey's violent stages
Bang-up! Theatricality and the "diphrelatic art" in De Quincey's English mail-coach
Thomas De Quincey's "Three-fingered Jack" : the West Indian origins of the "Dark interpreter"
The "dark problem" of Greek trajedy : sublimated violence in De Quincey
Pt. 3. Gifts and powers
A gift that complicates employ : poetry and poverty in "Resolution and independence"
The literature of power and the imperial will : De Quincey's opium-war essays
Wordsworth between God and mammon : the early "spots of time" and the sublime as sacramental commodity
Pt. 4. Sites and regions
Detection as method : reconstructing the past in Godwin and Freud
Sacrificial sites, place-keeping, and "pre-history" in Wordsworth's "Michael"
Race, region, rule : genre and the case of Charlie Chan
Pt. 5. All in your head
Pictures of the mind : iron and charcoal, "ouzy" tides and "vagrant dwellers" at Tintern, 1798
"Cortez - or Balboa, or somebody like that" : form, fact, and forgetting in Keat's "Chapman's Homer" sonnet.