List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Frontispiece; Editor's introduction: the 'Great Code' deciphered: literary and Biblical hermeneutics; Part I. Hermeneutic Criticism: 1. Reading as experience: on the aesthetics of literary interpretation and criticism Johan Wrede; 2. The community of interpretation: T. S. Eliot and Josiah Royce Piers Gray; 3. Stanley Fish's interpretive communities and the status of critical interpretations P. D. Juhl; 4. 'What matter who's speaking?': Beckett, the authorial subject and contemporary critical theory Iain Wright; 5. Reading as system and as practice John Frow; 6. Gadamer's hermeneutics Paul Connerton; 7. Turner's Biblical Deluge and the iconography of 'homo bulla' Mordechai Omer; 8. 'The world's pleasaunce': H¿fiz's allegorical gardens Julie Scott Meisami; 9. Hölderlin and the interpretation of the self Stanley Corngold; Part II. Translations: 1. Sophocles: Antigone, stasimon V J. Lavery; 2. Friedrich Hölderlin: on tragedy: 'Notes on the Oedipus' and 'Notes on the Antigone' translated with an introduction Jeremy Adler; 3. Horst Günther: philological understanding: a note on the writings of Peter Szondi Jeremy Adler; 4. Peter Szondi: Hölderlin's overcoming of classicism Timothy Bahti; 5. The English Comedians: comedy of the prodigal son translated with an introduction Julian Hilton; Part III. Essay Reviews: 1. The case of Kugel: do we find ourselves when we lose ourselves in a text? Francis Landy; 2. Family plots: a review of Adultery in the Novel by Tony Tanner, Balzac by Christopher Prendergast, and Origins of the Novel by Marthe Robert Stephen Heath; 3. On the men of ancient Greece: a review of Myth, Religion and Society. Structuralist Essays by M. Detienne, L. Gernet, J. -P Vernant and P. Vidal Naquet Riccardo di Donato and Jesper Svenbro (trans.); Books and periodicals received; Bibliography of hermeneutics: literary and Biblical interpretation Jeffery M. Peck; Bibliography of comparative literature in Britain, 1980 Glyn Tegai Hughes.