Three of the seven essays in this general issue of Mosaic discuss texts that fall under the broad category of speculative fiction. These include examinations of Lord Byron’s closet drama “Manfred,” Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novel The Dispossessed. Other essays consider “the propagandistic strength” of illustration in seventeenth-century English texts and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud.