This chapter examines how, in Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin brings the Gothic to bear on the eighteenth century. It considers the novel as a manifestation of his radical views outlined in Political Justice (1793) and explores the novel as a response to English anxieties about the French Revolution at home and abroad. This chapter examines representations of the past in the novel, particularly in relation to Godwin’s ‘Of History and Romance’ (1797), which criticises works of Enlightenment history. The psychological introspection of Caleb Williams is discussed, as well as the presence of history in the human psyche and the (unwanted) ideological legacy of the past. This chapter goes on to explore how, in a similar vein to Godwin, Wollstonecraft refuses to use a fictional past as a subterfuge to comment on the present in Maria (1798) and uses the Gothic to examine women’s plight in eighteenth-century England. Discussing Maria in relation to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, it is argued that the novel brings the Female Gothic and its political agenda into sharper focus. This chapter discusses Wollstonecraft’s exploration of the female psyche, and how Maria’s thoughts and actions are governed by anachronistic and patriarchal social customs.

Chapter 9 is concerned with two central elements of the genre: naming and responsiveness. As the majority of epigrams are ultimately concerned with the summary identification of vice, folly and virtue in individuals, the identifying of those through either fictional or literal naming is of great importance. The "lemma" or title most often provides the link between the epigram and its human subject, and epigrams engaged in ‘personation’ through the use of punning fictional names that invited literal identification. This is explored in a case study of Charles Fitzgeffry’s Affaniae. In their brevity epigrams are dependent on and responsive to things and people beyond themselves. They are not self-generating, but take their bearings from an often well-known event, person or even other epigram. Such a dynamic led to frequent exchanges between epigrammatists, where a provocative epigram led to a ‘counter-epigram’ in response: this is demonstrated through a consideration of some of Sir John Harington’s epigrams.

This chapter explores the absurdist tendencies in twentieth-century literature, noting that prose fiction had its own proto-absurdist moments, which can be seen in the works of Peter Conrad and Henry James. It then examines avant-garde theory and some related concepts, including futurism and surrealism, concluding with a discussion on the move towards ‘absurdism’.

This chapter explores the contexts, both educational and convivial, in which many epigrams were composed and initially circulated. The genre's central place in the educational practices of the period was particularly significant; it helped establish an “epigram habit” that poets took with them into later life, one that solidified the genre’s place in the literary landscape of the period. Overall, the university context, as reflected in the epigrams of Degory Wheare and Charles Fitzgeffry, was particularly significant in fostering epigram composition.

This chapter considers the topical and ephemeral origins of individual epigrams, and how some came to circulate widely, both by word of mouth and as posted poems. Epigrams sometimes worked as part of the oral news culture of the time and epigrams might be scrawled or posted on well-known public sites. Such free-wheeling circulation also led to a high degree of textual stability. The chapter includes a section on the influence of the Roman figure of "Pasquil" on the epigram culture of Britain, and case studies of epigrams (by Andrew Melville and Sir John Harington) in circulation.

This chapter considers the epigram in the period in relation to a range of proximate and competing genres, including satire, the jest, the libel, the sonnet, and the character, and the distinction between the epitaph (a sub-genre of the epigram) and the elegy. It also examines the range of terminology that was at times applied to the epigram, and the meters and forms most often associated with the genre.

The book ends with a brief reflection on a "religious epigram" by Sir John Harington that manifests the typical Martialian tone and approach that dominated the genre in the period1590 to 1640.