Every historical film must contend with the possibility that its viewers will be scandalized by its mixture of fact and fiction, but no recent historical film has faced such pressure to justify its hybrid nature as Selma has, in large part because no recent film has taken on so momentous and controversial a historical subject: the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The renewed urgency of the issues Selma dramatizes, along with the film’s own commitment to the “moral certainty” of the civil rights movement, helps explain why Selma wavers in a self-defense that links the fictionality of its historical reenactments to the purposely theatrical element of the marches themselves. But politics are not the only problem for fiction in Selma , and to show why, this essay compares Selma to an earlier historical film, The Westerner (1940), that openly flaunts the commercial nature of its fictionality.

“Junk” is the final word spoken in Hollywood’s most famous art project, Citizen Kane . This essay focuses on three different registers in Kane for understanding the film’s persistent intermingling of art and junk. The first is Charles Foster Kane’s dual career as a newspaper publisher and an art collector; the second, Kane’s cross-class marriage to the shopgirl Susan Alexander; and the third is the film’s signature visual motif, which the essay calls a scatterform. Comparing these features of Kane with similar features in a more conventional Hollywood film, My Best Girl , the essay shows how the peculiar texture of Kane derives from its attempt to think its way out of a theoretical double bind generated by the contemporary insistence that the only way a movie could rival traditional art forms was to reject them as models for emulation. That is why Citizen Kane ties its own artistic bravura to such mass-produced junk as a store-bought snow globe and a sled whose brand name is “Rosebud.”

ABSTRACT In this essay, Jeffrey Knapp questions the recent critical orthodoxy that treats authorship as a menacing latecomer to the popular and collaborative Elizabethan stage. Demonstrating that a literary paradigm of single authorship dominated Elizabethan thinking about playwriting, Knapp presents Hamlet as Shakespeare's attempt to develop a more theatrically inflected model of authorship through the dramatization of his own hybrid professional identity as an actor and a playwright.

SCHOLARS HAVE GENERALLY agreed that the "new Poet" of Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar (1578) helped spark England's literary renaissance, but they have overlooked one of Spenser's primary inspirations for his innovative conception of the poet: the innovative conception of ministry developed in the Reformation English Church.