This chapter discusses three of Donne's sermons, which are considered as his pulpit performances. The first sermon is on the conversion of St. Paul, and the second and third are earlier sermons on the Psalms and the Epistles. The chapter shows that one of the typical features of Donne's sermons is the view of the relationship between God and the self, describes the sermon as a theatrical re-enactment of the Biblical word and studies the differences between sacrament and sermon. It also considers the question of what the primary interest of sermons is and what consequently has to be translated, concluding with a section on the theatrical structures that are inherent to Donne's sermons.

This chapter looks briefly at some of the ‘pathways’ within, and to, a fairly recent prizewinning novel, published in 1995 and written by a Russian, Andreï Makine, who writes only in French and has been resident in France since 1987. A curiously bi-cultural novel, of a pseudo-autobiographical nature, Le Testament français contains at least traces of the pathways explored in the present study. It also includes, of course, striking features of its own, such as waves which stem from war literature, or from what people might designate the fiction of sadomasochism. Post-war provincial Soviet life doubles, and alternates, with the Paris of la belle époque and an aspiration to revel in and revive a fin de siècle style of French prose. In diverse ways, France links with Russia, as does Siberia with Cherbourg.

This chapter explores French Women of Letters and English Women of Letters, two companion volumes that are considered as Kavanagh's indication of the progress and achievements in women's writing during the past two centuries. The first half of the chapter focuses on French Women of Letters, which features women who Kavanagh considered significant either for their virtue or for their prominence, including Madame Roland, Madame du Barry and Madame de Maintenon. It notes that Kavanagh believed that each of these women, in her own way, typified the presence of women in either the aristocratic or revolutionary France of the eighteenth century. The second and final half of the chapter features English Women of Letters, in which Kavanagh writes about women who have their original style.

This chapter examines a poem from the early nineteenth century, and a novel from the early twentieth, which show the ignorance of children, considering several coincidences related to these texts, including the fact that these two texts were written by authors who were childless at the time. It also briefly discusses the presentation of childhood nescience in the discourse that is most concerned with it, namely psychoanalysis.

This book has argued for the importance of motherhood in the drama of early modern England, and has attested to the mother's value both as a signifier of unchanging values and as a figure whose representation readily responds to the demands of ideological and political change. It has contended that the religious conflict of the English Reformation and its attendant issues of national identity created a complex series of dramatic possibilities for the mother figure which allowed her to function as a religious and political emblem that developed in complexity and dramatic value in the period. The argument that change was affected by politics is substantiated in a different context by Margot Heinemann. It seems that what Patrick Collinson once termed the ‘turning inward’ of later Protestantism has its analogy in representations of motherhood, so that the mother's function became once again symbolic of a conflict at the heart of the state and church which resonated at local and national levels as the Protestant nation struggled to hold the two together.

This chapter examines the motif of round-the-world flight, and the impact on surrounding society of the quirks of a single life, in Odoevsky's tale The Live Corpse. It is seen to be developed into what purports to be interplanetary flight. The chapter also examines the rise and fall of a civilisation, in Dostoevsky's late story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. Particulars of such supposed cosmic travel may have been, in part at least, ‘borrowed’ by his successors from Dostoevsky. However this may be, such things are seen to be taken very much further, in twentieth-century English horror and science fiction writing, in key works by William Hope Hodgson and Olaf Stapledon.

The significance of motherhood in early modern drama resonates beyond the boundaries of any individual theatrical characterisation. Its influence is evident, for example, in a subtle reference to a wife and mother in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. If motherhood operates as a relatively unchanging idea, it is also especially subject, in terms of the interpretation and presentation of that idea, to the influences and constraints of culture, politics and religion. During the period covered by this book, dramatists chose to emphasise different aspects of motherhood according to the demands of genre and theatre, and in response to contextual pressures. Rather than consider the dramatised mother in terms of subjectivity, the book explores her dramatic function in terms of the effect that the complex of meanings she embodies brings to the dynamics of dramatic narrative and structure.

Ireland began Elizabeth's reign as a kingdom under the English Crown, and ended it as a quasi-colony. Fortifications provided a military solution to a political problem. Military technology evolved prodigiously in the sixteenth century, and the new regime in Dublin benefitted from advances in Renaissance warfare. In her own country, Elizabeth fortified Berwick against the Scots, sought to control the main sea passages with forts in the Channel Isles off Normandy and the Scilly Isles off Cornwall, and erected defences in the southeast against Spanish forces should the Armada prove successful.