This collection of essays displays Elaine Scarry's concern with problematics of representation as exemplified in literary texts that deal with such concepts as work, pain, time, and the cosmos. Through her readings of texts by Thomas Hardy, Samuel Beckett, Boethius, William Thackeray, and others, Scarry demonstrates the difficulties and the complexities of the ways in which language and imagery attempt, and fail, to make present some aspect of the `real'.