This chapter examines the materiality of reproductive labour in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. It shows the changing dynamics in motherhood, which ceased to be solely defined by the physiological processes of child-bearing and became an emotional and social responsibility. The chapter then introduces the model of ‘commodity production versus nature’, and also focuses on writing and reproduction, as well as the ways discourses of writing and reproduction are phrased in terms of nutrition.

In 1979, Doris Lessing published Shikasta, the first novel in her Canopus in Argos: Archives quintet (1979–1983) and her first novel written entirely in the speculative mode. Science fiction (SF) has always involved extrapolation, so in what ways is writing about new worlds a way of writing about our own? Does SF require a different voice or narration? If it does, how might that make a writer such as Lessing rethink her authorial and narrative voice when she returns to realism? How might it impact on her attempt to write about a subject like terrorism? In the Canopus in Argos: Archives series, and in The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984) and The Good Terrorist (1985), questions of voice are central. Lessing suggests here that style and voice cannot be separated from content, and that there is no such thing as a characteristic authorial style or voice. Her work in the early to mid-1980s, despite its apparently vast differences in mode, genre and subject, can be viewed as a self-conscious experimentation with the authority of voice.

Appraising the work of a living writer is unlikely to cover the entire oeuvre because fresh works may appear. In the case of Julian Barnes, it is also true that he prefers not to be written about by critics, partly because it makes him feel entombed rather than a living voice. As pertinently, Barnes would prefer not to be mediated by the entire book industry. The belief in the importance of ‘the words’ alone is a viewpoint that Barnes shares with the nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Barnes's fiction reflects a wide array of approaches but settles on a combination of social satire, Swiftian irony and experimentation. For the most part, Barnes is a comic novelist. Ironic comedy and false memory are two of the poles around which Julian Barnes's work revolves.

This chapter discusses the importance of the technologies that were used in making the five dramas Beckett wrote for British television. It studies television adaptations of Beckett's theatre plays, which were recorded in a television studio. It examines the work done on the aesthetics of television and also notes how changes on production technologies affected Beckett's work and other productions. This chapter also discusses the aesthetic significance of studio production and the plays' uses of film recording technology in the television studio.

Most Western women only feel acceptable to themselves and to society if their bodies are largely hair-free. The cinema is particularly responsible for the confirmation and perpetuation of this convention of femininity. This chapter explores how film makes use of the two extremes of female body hair: the idealised hairless female and the vilified hairy female. First, it outlines the normalisation of female depilation by looking at the cultural and symbolic meanings that are attached to body hair, and then the artistic heritage from which the ‘hairless ideal’ has sprung and which film perpetuates. Next, the chapter considers how female body hair is employed as a negative signifier in two screen texts based on the novel The Life and Loves of a She Devil, written by the feminist author Fay Weldon. Finally, it discusses the viability of presenting female body hair on the screen in a positive way by looking at facial hair as signifier of the ‘freak’ and of sado-masochism, body hair as signifier of the ‘beast within’ and unreal hair or wigs as signifiers of sexual deviance.

This chapter focuses on four elements which best reveal the tie that binds the seemingly closed symbols of the play Fur (2000). A Play in Nineteen Scenes, by Migdalia Cruz. The first and most evident element is the allusion to William Shakespeare's The Tempest. Next, the images of cannibalism and their history expose how Cruz challenges the objectification of women's bodies by inverting standards of ‘appropriate female behaviours’ related to eating and maintaining the ‘ideal body’. This then provides an opportunity to reflect upon the traditions of consumerism and spectacle that have been an integral part of Western history and its relation to individual, racialised bodies. Finally, the chapter offers some solutions to the symbolism of hair versus fur, and its relation to human behaviours that have successfully controlled and defined these bodies. These elements demonstrate that Fur (2000) is in fact a text about colonialism, its evolution and how it is incorporated in the female body.

Gothic preserves the illusion of darkness death, and sexuality in a world given over to the omnipresence of virtual light and life on screens. Where do simulations begin or end? Does horror or abjection counter their thrust or feed the cool machine with a fleeting bite? Ascriptions of ‘Gothic horror’ attempt to register repulsion at the enormity and excess of their act: its horror lies beyond reality or hyperreality even as it is rendered almost palatable in fictional and generic terms. To simulate vampirism is undertaken with the aim of breaking through sanitised screens of hyperreality, of finding something real in blood and horror. Violence, horror and abjection, in being rendered figures of excess, are opposed to or cast out of hyperreality only to the extent that their excision gives simulations some bite. Ghosts and spectres kept on returning in Gothic romances, popular dramas and spectacular entertainments. In his account of the discursive formation of modernity, Michel Foucault comments upon the function of monsters in processes of biological classification.

This chapter addresses the argument that How It Is mobilises Inferno VII to produce a notion of reality as the unreliable outcome of repetition. It studies the canto where Virgil translates the incomprehensible gurgling that is coming from the bubbles on the surface of the river Styx into the ‘hymn’ sung by the invisible slothful damned. This discussion shows that this illustrates how ‘credence’ for the reality of such scenes is taken from the quickly diminishing ‘incontrovertibility’ of Virgil's authority. This chapter also shows that the mud in How It Is is what allows the passing of the murmuring and what prevents it.

This concluding chapter discusses the figure of Dante that can be found in Beckett. It demonstrates the way Dante continually changes the Beckett oeuvre and presents a destabilising view of Dante and an understanding of the Dante intertexts as part of a larger economy of gain and loss. A brief summary of the texts that were studied in the previous chapters is also included.

A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (1989) aims to insinuate more of the ordinary and the exceptional into other people's orbit. From the opening story, told from the position of an animal stowaway, to the final summation of an average life, the book focuses on people whom history would seldom highlight but who illustrate its processes and vagaries: Lawrence Beesley, Miss Fergusson, and Kath Ferris. Barnes's fourth novel has love as its chief stowaway. Love, which intrudes into this book most conspicuously in its half-chapter, opposes history and orthodoxy because its story is individual and personal, though not necessarily happy. It purports to argue that truth lies in the need to believe in illusions such as free will, that survival resides in the need to love despite the failures of love, and that objective history rests on the need for collective silence over the certainty of fallacy.

This chapter looks at how the few quotations—and occasionally, sustained allusions—challenge ideas of origin, ending and depth in Novellas and Texts for Nothing. It focuses on English and French titles and quotations, which are prioritised according to the critical focus of the argument instead of the chronology of composition. It considers the calming effects of classic works and shows how the ‘sky’, ‘earth’ and the ‘sea’ are secondary elements that ‘create the armosphere’.

This chapter collates some of the existing criticism of Peter Carey's work in relation to the political concerns of his fiction, and it gives a summary of the positions outlined in reviews of the individual volumes of fiction. Much early criticism of Carey concentrated on the fantastic and weird elements in his stories. Brian Edwards's Derridean-influenced article examines Carey's post-modern exploration of construction and bricolage particularly through a focus on language and writing. In his thorough treatment of the storytelling theme in Bliss, A. J. Hassall compares the book with David Malouf's Child's Play, which he sees as an example of a post-modern fiction abandoning the referential, whereas, Carey avoids doing that despite playing 'elegant metafictional games'. In her elliptical and condensed manner, Karen Lamb takes the responses to Illywhacker as symptomatic of the contradictions in Carey's literary ascendancy.