Unlike most literary critics Kenneth Burke fashioned a legacy of fiction and poetry, some of which he chose to comm. ent upon extensively. This provides, if you will, an inhouse connection between the muse and the judge, a tactic employed at least in brief by the author of South Wind, Norman Douglas, in his enigmatic short fiction, Nerinda (1915). This story, along with Douglas' comments on his fiction-writing at the story's conclusion, will appear in a new light from perspectives based on some of Burke's essays relevant to his own fiction. I believe both writers at this stage of their careers share a troubling kinship with certain aesthetic amoralists of the early twentieth-century.

Among Burke's essays used in this paper, "The Thinking of the Body: Comments on the Imagery of Catharsis in Literature" (1963); "Art--and the First Rough Draft of Living" (1964); and "On Stress, Its Seeking" (1968).