This chapter addresses Coupland's formal and thematic approach to narrative: it traces the relationship between what de Certeau names the ‘interminable recitations’ of those now prevalent commercial stories and the necessity, in Coupland's fiction, of the storytelling act. A crucial concern is the novelist's ongoing interest in the representation of time. Coupland's persistent literary exploration of temporality and its relationship with human identity resonates with H. Porter Abbot's claim, informed by the ground-breaking work of Paul Ricoeur, that ‘narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time’.

The Painter of Signs (1976) is R. K. Narayan's last major novel. The fiction that he produced in his seventies and eighties is variable in quality, but generally demonstrates a falling-off in his talents. Nevertheless, it develops interesting variations on several of the defining themes of his novels, particularly the passage into the fourth stage of the varnasramadharma, the discursive constitution of space, oral mythologies and Hindu reverence for animal life and the natural world. The last of these concerns is central to both the theme and the point of view of the novel that he has referred to as his favourite, A Tiger for Malgudi (1983). In one sense, A Tiger for Malgudi returns to issues explored in The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961). It is useful to consider some of the tropological associations with which tigers have been invested in India. At least one strand of the narrative of Narayan's next novel, Talkative Man (1986), suggests a parallel with A Tiger for Malgudi. Another late Narayan novel is The World of Nagaraj (1990).

Like Arden of Faversham, Two Lamentable Tragedies is also based on ballad narratives, and the salacious goriness of its mode connects it closely to pamphlets about recent shocking crimes. Those pamphlets offered stark sensationalism within a rigid and explicit didactic framework where the ‘voluntary confession of the parties’ was intended to be used as an ‘example to the amendment of [the reader's] life’, as Arthur Golding put it. The dramatic genre to which such moralising comes closest is of course that of the morality play, which focuses the energies of its representation towards a moment of didactic closure. Positioning themselves between moralities and tragedies proper, domestic tragedies' interests lie both in the psychological effects of crime upon the individual protagonist and in the threat transgression offers to the communities of household and town. The most striking feature of domestic representation in Two Lamentable Tragedies is the way it locates the house in places other than the main stage. Several kinds of ‘particularity’ are crucial to the dramatic structure of Two Lamentable Tragedies.

This chapter discusses slavery in the context of the works of Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D'Aguiar. It considers these writers' differing representation of Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and studies the ways where their return to this past may illuminate current issues in Britain today. This chapter also looks at the history of racism in Britain, introduces the term ‘black British literature’, and discusses each of the authors in detail.

This chapter returns to the questions with which it began, asking once again, ‘who is Marlow?’ in order to offer a final consideration of his function within Conrad's texts. Figuring Marlow in terms of the liminality that allows him to occupy an ever-shifting position within, and across, the four texts affords the possibility of approaching narrative, for which he might be said to stand, in the same way. Thus an informational sense of literature, which might attempt to somehow fix the meaning of a text, is challenged by a more dynamic sense of narrative as a continuing process of exchange.

This chapter is focused on D'Aguiar, who struggles with the problems of representing the past of slave trading. It observes that he shares Dabydeen and Phillips' concerns with the historical record about the slave trade, and notes that he has written about the issues surrounding examining accounts of received history. This chapter considers the possibility that D'Aguiar is deeply troubled by the act of writing about the memory of slavery. It also tries to answer the question of how people are supposed to remember slavery a hundred and fifty years after its end and with the lack of witnesses.

In late sixteenth-century England, domestic life became the subject of scrutiny: just what was the household, how might it be made to further God's intentions for the world, what ideals should govern conduct within it? The project of the ecclesiastical courts was to ensure that domestic activities were equally subject to moral justice as their more physically open counterparts, and to insist that the same precepts of Christian morality and charity governed behaviour in every space under the watchful eye of God's providence. This chapter takes its evidence from household manuals and from ecclesiastical court depositions, evidence that makes it possible to connect literary didacticism to the written record of oral tales about domestic space and behaviour. In pursuing the points at which early modern men and women think spatially, and the way they moralise spatial relations, it considers the house from the outside, from the boundary and from the inside.

Despite his involvement with Graham Greene and his tailoring aspects of his fiction to suit British tastes, R. K. Narayan did not travel outside India until the second half of his life. Then, after receiving a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship that took him to the United States in 1956, he paid a number of visits to American universities, among them the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin. Notable among these was a period as Visiting Professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City in the spring of 1969, a visit that he wrote about without identifying his hosts in one of his best-known essays, the title piece of his collection, Reluctant Guru (1974). This chapter focuses on Narayan's middle-period novels, including The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), The Vendor of Sweets (1967) and The Painter of Signs (1976).

This opening chapter explores some of the arguments about the connection between dramaturgy and the imagination in order to introduce considerations of method. First, however, it seems important to explain the choice of plays on which the following chapters will focus, and how they relate to the various definitions of the genre of domestic tragedy to this project of reconstructing domestic imagination. Lena Orlin describes domestic tragedies as plays that concern ‘property owners’. This chapter is very much in sympathy with this focus upon property. It looks at four plays: A Woman Killed With Kindness, Arden of Faversham, A Yorkshire Tragedy and the English narrative of Two Lamentable Tragedies. These plays are chosen for the novelty of their presentation of the domestic, in order to expand as far as possible the significances of an approach that considers the intersection of representations of, and attitudes to, house and household.