Names and Usury: An Economy of Reading in The Ring and the Book

Abstract

C [ OST critics approaching Browning's The Ring and the Book have located his collapse of and fiction as one of the central strategies within the work. Harvey Feinberg, for example, claims that any analysis of Browning's The Ring and the Book must begin with a close scrutiny of the ring metaphor itself.' Focusing on the ring as a reconstitution of the timeless poetic itself: the 'Etrurian' circle of eternity, he explores Browning's use of the circle of art to criticize the 'square' of 'crude fact' (p. 71). John M. Menaghan examines the same theme from the perspective of speaker and voice; for him, the metaphor of the ring can be seen as a symbol of the split between the invisible poet removed from the work's surface and the poet/speaker as inextricable alloy mixed in with the other elements of the whole.2 There is no doubt that the ring is a viable metaphor in the poem; but while critics like Menaghan have focused on its use as a metaphor of art or embodied truth (p. 267), they have not fully explored the economic motives of the symbol. In fact, one can argue that Browning's