This chapter considers ignorance in Romanticism. It examines William Wordsworth's text in the sixth book of The Prelude, and the subsequent declaration of ignorance in response to the so-called ‘Simplon Pass’ episode, where he records an instance of geographical bafflement. The chapter then examines the concept of the Romantic sublime and the characterisation of Romanticism, concluding that ignorance is central to the Romantic conception of the sublime and is an important aspect of Romantic poetics.

This chapter explores the ways Donne's poems use language performatively. It analyses the Promethean dimension of Donne's poems, showing that his poems imply that what is at stake is similar to the real world, while the metaphors create new ways of seeing the same world. The chapter also studies how Donne's poems create the world, the truth and the self. Concepts such as role-play, theatricality and protean performance are also discussed.

This chapter explores the work of Philip Roth, who is considered as one of America's top modern novelists, in order to focus on the question of authorial ignorance, suggesting that it is basically a part of the force of literature that modern writers engage with whenever they describe themselves as not knowing or ignorant. It supposes that authorial ignorance is a crucial yet often overlooked concern within modern literary practice. The chapter also looks at the ways Roth is consistently concerned with the question of the nature of authorship and its ethical relation with ignorance.

This introductory chapter discusses the dynamic imaginative engagement of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English dramatists and audiences with French contexts and texts. It examines how Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France demonstrates the construction and representation of nationhood, as well as the intertextual relationships indicated in this study. This chapter also tries to map a range of relations between diverse French discourses and particular aspects of English tragedy.

This chapter considers the mother's physical presence in relation to spaces; to the geography that signifies and comprises her social function and status. The focus is upon the representation of domesticity in domestic tragedies, which turn upon the dangerous potential of motherhood in an uncertain Protestant world, and city comedies, which farcically expose the tensions and hypocrisies of an environment where social and economic considerations are shown to predominate. The complex social structures in such a world are clearly adumbrated in A Warning for Fair Women, A Yorkshire Tragedy and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, where the family is the smallest unit of an integrated society that is based upon the importance of geographic locality and economic interdependence. In such conditions, maternity is vulnerable, and with it, the fragile stability of the social structures that depend upon it.

This chapter studies Shakespeare's Richard II, a play that naturally figured in Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France, and reviews its relation to the propagandistic La Guisiade. It focuses on Shakespeare's play as a tragedy instead of history, and considers what the French precursor has to show about the phenomenon of the psychologically self-destructive tragic hero.

This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed as a proto-‘psychic doctor’. The discussion considers examples of such a figure, in Anglo-Irish and English literature up to the Edwardian era. It assesses works by Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood and, again, Hodgson. Such a protagonist is then seen to recede, in the main into a more parodic treatment. A concluding section notes the reappearance at least of such motifs in recent ‘metaphysical detective’ fiction.