What is curious, however, is that although the iconological mining of Rauschenberg's work vastly dominates the literature, some participants in this canonizing enterprise believe themselves to be in the minority.

The public" can include a third-grade class studying the Civil War, an art history course at a neighboring secondary school where students are looking in sophisticated ways at iconological issues in Italian sixteenth-century painting, or an Elderhostel group studying Jane Austen.

Yet while substantial evaluation of the iconological approach makes up Chapter Two, it is only as a curious sort of postscript that Burke presents a variety of recent theoretical avenues available to historians (14, 145).