This chapter discusses the importance of the physical specialness of the mother's body to her dramatic value. Taking two plays about Patient Griselda written forty years apart (by Phillip and Dekker) and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, it suggests that the body of the mother was subjected to an increasingly voyeuristic public scrutiny, not only on the stage, but in contemporary culture and practice, as maternity was increasingly exposed and controlled through state legislation and the processes of commodification. The discursive tensions created by an ambivalent appreciation of motherhood – sexual and creatural; spiritual and noble; endowing death as it gives life – are contained through performance. Theatre spectators were thus free to take pleasure in the spectacle of the maternal body and of its scrutiny and control. The production of obstetric manuals and also of domestic conduct books where the mother's role is clearly adumbrated is symptomatic of an increased emphasis upon motherhood as a fundamentally social function that is important in ensuring stability in the wider world.

This chapter discusses the connection between philosophy and ignorance. It examines some of the lessons on ignorance taught by Socrates, and suggests that, while literature and philosophy can be combined and differentiated in a number of ways, the main distinction made with regards to ignorance is on the question of whether or not one moves beyond not knowing. The chapter then studies the ‘disease’ of ignorance, which may be said to make up the very condition of poetry and of literature, and also considers the possibility to see philosophical scepticism as part of, or engaged with, a theory of ignorance.

This chapter examines the role of archaeology in the study of the Elizabethan colonization of southern Ireland. Initial foreign settlement by early modern European states, or by their authorized commercial organizations, are usefully characterized as the ‘proto-colonial phase’ of the epoch of modern colonial imperialism. For European overseas activities, the proto-colonial period may be generalized as c. 1450–1650. The ‘planting’ of English colonists in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is recognized as an important step in English colonialism and a turning point in Irish history, but twentieth-century politics and policies discouraged its study.

This chapter reviews the lessons and information presented in the previous chapters. It emphasises that a theory of performativity goes hand in hand with a certain conception of identity and language, which can have consequences for personal faith and religious discourse. The chapter then notes that the previous chapters considered Donne's prose and poetry in a performative dimension, and also determines that performativity and performance are typical not only of Donne's writing, but also of literary criticism.

Proto-colonial archaeology of Elizabethan Ireland, particularly in the Irish Republic, has only recently begun, and caution warns against advancing firm conclusions at this stage. Nevertheless, this chapter provides some general observations concerning the twelve-year Elizabethan colonial settlement, or ‘planting’, of Munster, because even limited fieldwork can significantly correct research all too dependent upon insufficient documentation. Munster colonial villages, large and small, attempted to replicate what existed in England: individual house plots, each probably with a small garden or orchard attached, fronted streets and greens at regular intervals. Munster may very well have seen as strong a division between the classes as existed in Tudor England.

This introductory chapter discusses the concept of ‘literary ignorance’. It studies the question of literary ignorance in relation to the question of ignorance – what it feels like and what it is like to be ignorant – and defines literary ignorance as the inability of adults to make themselves understood to children. The chapter also identifies other aspects of human ignorance, including the literary history of ignorance. Several arguments that are studied throughout the book are also presented.

This chapter notes how the book developed and introduces the themes of the study. The project grew largely from comparative and Russian literature, from work on Vladimir Odoevsky. This work developed to involve biographical research, criticism and translation. Such tentative beginnings were driven into some sort of initial focus by an entirely fortuitous invitation from a publisher to supply an introduction to a reprint of a valuable and neglected edition of Odoevsky's ‘Romantic Tales’. The four titular figures introduced here are being used towards an at least partial tracing of certain European literary developments, or ‘pathways’ into modern fiction.

This chapter focuses on a group of popular women writers, all of whom were applicants to the writers' charity, the Literary Fund (later the Royal Literary Fund). The picture that emerges from these writers' publications and their pleas to the Fund – the archives of which provide a rich and largely unmined seam of evidence concerning the material conditions, and rhetorical construction, of authorship – is illuminating. Increasingly presented as the degraded other against which the activities of the male professional were defined, women's work was to play an ever more central role in the discourse of authorship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the detriment of a number of its best-loved practitioners. Moreover, as gender became increasingly constitutive of literary authority at the turn of the century, so the discourse of authorship served more insistently to reinforce constructions of gender.

This chapter addresses the complex turns that the debate on women's work took in the specific context of the 1790s and, more specifically still, in the non-fictional and imaginative publications of one of the most vocal and eloquent commentators on this issue, Mary Wollstonecraft. Her extensive, but by no means internally consistent, reflections upon the labour and literary marketplaces signal crucial, and in many ways decisive, developments in the narratives about work and authorship that this book examines. Most particularly, an investigation of her polemical writings, philosophical works, travel literature and novels suggests that the more labour was prized in late eighteenth-century writings on political economy, and the more centrally its language figured in the republic of letters' self-presentation at the century's close, the more vital and the more difficult it became for women writers to press the discourse of labour into the service of their gender and textual politics.