This chapter discusses Maria Edgeworth's writing for children, looking at the centrality of food in the cultural and social constitution of the child. It notes that Edgeworth's children's fiction is seen to inspire the precepts of Malthus and Smith, as well as her suspicions and ambivalence towards the breast and the rest of the maternal body. The chapter also identifies some reasons why food can be particularly important in writing for children.

This introductory chapter considers the inclusion of Dante in Beckett studies, where the former stands out and stands for Samuel Beckett's isolation and greatness. It addresses the main argument of the study, that Dante's presence in Beckett is part of a critique of value and authority, the latter becoming a critical issue when studying the relationships between these two authors. This chapter also identifies the approaches that are focused on quantifying ‘how much Dante’ can be found in Beckett, or on determining how accurate or revealing Beckett's representations of Dante may be.

This chapter reassesses the roles of mimesis and authority in both Beckett and Dante from an intertextual point of view. It studies the promise of an invisible Dante, which has been read by critics into Murphy in ways that overlook the puzzling nature of this promise. It shows that it leads to a study of the status of invisible presences and visible absences in Beckett's ghostly oeuvre. This chapter also looks at Dante's visible absence, which is significantly linked to Beckett's poetics of residua, marginality and fragmentariness. It includes a discussion of the ‘Addenda’ section in Watt.

Doris Lessing's late twentieth-century fiction has often provoked and discomfited. Some readers of The Fifth Child (1988), its sequel Ben, in the World (2000) and Lessing's 1999 novel Mara and Dann were disturbed by her appropriation of racially marked stereotypes of the animal, the primitive and the atavistic. Such imagery has controversial implications in relation to ideas about ‘race’ and nation. Moreover, Lessing deploys what might be termed the ‘minor’ genres of urban gothic, picaresque and disaster narrative in her late twentieth-century work in unfamiliar and disturbing ways. In analysing Lessing's late twentieth-century ‘fabular’ fictions in relation to ideas about genre and ‘race’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's discussion of ‘minor’ literature proves instructive. Deleuze and Guattari define minor literature as exhibiting three main characteristics: ‘the deterritorialisation of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation’. Thus, minor literature has a partial relation to nationality both linguistically and generically. Lessing's resistance to territoriality is the overriding concern of her 1987 collection of four short essays, Prisons we Choose to Live Inside.

The numerous representations of hairy women in early modern historical, literary and iconographic texts in Spain reveal the popularity of the theme, as well as its significance for the understanding of how gender identity, sex assignment and sexuality were configured during that time. Most often, the representation of hirsutism involved a visual spectacle, which in turn required a narrative to interpret the transgression of cultural norms regarding gender and sex categories. Historically, women with excessive facial and body hair have been presented as monsters, anomalies and human prodigies. Visual imagery of bearded women during the early modern period was also frequently reproduced as examples of androgynes and hermaphrodites, who were believed to possess both male and female primary and secondary sex characteristics. In his 1601 treatise, Libro de fisionomía natural (Book of Nature Physiology), Jerónimo Cortés includes lasciviousness in his account of masculine women. Undoubtedly, one of the best examples of how hirsutism can evoke a multiple of responses is found in Miguel de Cervantes's best-selling seventeenth-century classic, Don Quixote.

Barnes's love-triangle novels Talking It Over (1991) and Love, etc (2001) delineate three undistinguished interlinked lives, once more adhering to a fictional preoccupation with the ordinary over, for example, journalism's almost exclusive focus on the extraordinary. Stuart, Gillian and Oliver are the principal narrators and take turns to tell aspects of the story from their own point of view. In the first novel, Stuart and Gillian marry and the unfolding story follows the loquacious and erudite Oliver's growing obsession with Gillian, who eventually leaves Stuart for his best friend. The sequel throws this process into reverse as the practical and dogmatic Stuart tries to win Gillian back; it concludes with Gillian still married to Oliver, but pregnant by Stuart. An open ending underscores Barnes's own resistance to conclusions, certainties and categorizations that distort the particularities of life and art in the search for grand narratives.

One of the few unsurprising steps that Julian Barnes has taken in his literary career concerns the subject of his first novel. His first novel Metroland (1980) is a rich three-part analysis of emotional growing pains in the suburbs. It focuses on one suburban schoolboy's artistic temperament alongside his significant life-experiences, from adolescence through to young adulthood and parenthood. The story is told by the protagonist Christopher Lloyd, looking back on periods of his life, borrowing some of the texture and geography of Barnes's own youth.

Doris Lessing's key novels of the period 1945–1960 examine the years leading up to World War II and the early to middle years of the war itself. The umbrella title of the five-volume novel sequence is Children of Violence, which is indicative not only of Lessing's preoccupation with the war, but also of her wider analysis of its connection with the violence of the colonial encounter. Her novels in this period mark the tentative emergence of more plural, fluid notions about race and gender and the interconnections between them. A narrative voice that might almost be characterised as nostalgic for those aspects of the war which created an impulse for decolonisation is important in the novels of this period. The critical or creative nostalgia of the fiction can be instructively compared with the narrative perspective in Lessing's 1957 essay, Going Home, which details her first return to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) after an absence of eight years. Going Home situates ‘home’ as a wandering site of nostalgia, exile and alienation.

In Salvador Dali's joking aphorism, the virility of the concept of justice clashes with the grammatical gender of the word, ‘la justice’. Justice persists in the notion of a normal, adjusted, fitting, right division of sexual characters that the bearded lady contravenes. For, although she figures sexual ambiguity, in so doing she also keeps it at arm's length as freakish. This chapter explores the currency of the bearded lady in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French literature. In particular, it examines ways in which that currency is caught up in techniques of unexpected juxtaposition and displacement associated with avant-garde movements of the period, in particular Surrealism and Dada. The avant-garde is not entirely uninvolved with ladies with whiskers. The chapter considers the bearded lady, displacement and recuperation in Guillaume Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917). It also comments on the feminine body in Apollinaire's first published book, L'Enchanteur pourrissant (1909), and Tristan Tzara's play Le Coeur à gaz, first shown in 1921.