It is a tenet of postmodern writing that the subject—the self—is unstable, fragmented, and decentered. One useful way to examine this principle is to look at how the subject has been treated in various media in the premodern, modern, and postmodern eras. Silvio Gaggi pursues this strategy in From Text to Hypertext, analyzing the issue of subject construction and deconstruction in selected examples of visual art, literature, film, and electronic media. Gaggi concentrates on a few paradigmatic works in each chapter; he contrasts van Eyck's Wedding of Arnolfini with the photography of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger; examines fiction that centers on an elusive subject in works by Conrad, Faulkner, and Calvino; and explores the ability of such films as Coppola's One from the Heart and Altman's The Player to emancipate the subject through cinematography and editing. In considering electronic media, Gaggi takes his argument to an entirely new level. He focuses on computer-controlled media, specifically examples of hypertextual fiction by Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop. Besides recognizing how the computer has enabled artists to create works of fiction in which readers themselves become decentered, Gaggi also observes the impact of literature created on computer networks, where even the limitations of CD-ROM are lifted and the notion of individual authorship may for all practical purposes be lost.

This supplement reflects the newest scholarship on some of the most important figures featured in the original British Writers set. Twenty brand new articles, all written by scholars, provide a fresh look at writers such as Chaucer, William Blake, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad and many others.

The following collection makes no attempt to exhaust the possibly inexhaustible variety of Joyce's novel. Indeed, a casebook many times the lenght of this one, which included selections from the entire bibliography, could scarcely do that. On the other hand, the collections does provide expert guidance into portions of the Joycean labyrinth, and any number of threads the reader can follow to take him where they will. Rather than an end in itself, the text is intended as no more than a starting point, or, shifting the metaphor, as a skeletal frame upon which the attentive reader can and should contruct his own interpretations.