Piranesi builds a shopping mall, Giotto supervises a training analysis, Milton directs a film. In this text, the traditional notion of change in history, the linear analogy of human development, comes in for its own share of interpretation, of reading, and hence doubles back on itself. This collection of essays examines the way in which the concept of postmodernism has forced a rethinking of the intersection of time and text. Appropriately, these essays themselves reach across the ages, considering authors ranging from Alexander the Great, to Chaucer and Milton, to Ford Madox Ford and Umberto Eco. The volume concludes with a series of four dissenting afterwords that assess the importance of these postmodern readings on some of the major interpretive projects of our day: feminism, Marxism, humanism and deconstruction, and gay studies.