This general issue of Mosaic appropriately opens with George H. Ford’s “Openers and Overtures in Dickens’ Novels: ‘In My Beginning is My End’,” originally presented as the eighth annual Sidney Warhaft Memorial Lecture on October 11, 1984 at the University of Manitoba. Theoretically-driven, the seven other essays in the volume address Victorian theories of language and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ontological considerations in Absalom, Absalom!, the carnivalesque in Scriptor Ludens, sexual politics in A Modern Instance, genre and consciousness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, and the work of Edward Burne-Jones.