This chapter explores the sense of historical and personal transition for two communities in Continent and The Gift of Stones, one a Third World seventh continent and the other a Stone Age village. In both, traditional cultures are challenged. Jim Crace's commentary is embedded in the parabolic and allegorical structures of his fictions, and his worlds are not fantastical ones. Continent has a loose form, with varied characters and settings. Despite the dynamics of modernity, individuals retain a sense of the past and certain mythopoeic possibilities reassert themselves almost uncannily. Invented elements recur, such as the manac beans dropped by the prisoner on his arrest in ‘The World with One Eye Shut’, which are sold to prevent erotic desire in The Devil's Larder. Crace's storytelling strategies depend on the innate, if partial, failure of more rational and familiar methods of explication.

This chapter focuses on the novel Lighthousekeeping. In 2003, Jeanette Winterson said that all the books she had written from Oranges to The Power Book ‘make a cycle or a series’ and should be seen as ‘one long continuous piece of work’. This statement has been contradicted by D. J. Taylor, who sees Lighthousekeeping as confirmation that ‘everything she writes is essentially a variation on the same thing’ and firmly concludes that what the new novel offers is ‘more of the same’. Most reviewers, however, have described the new novel in very positive terms, as ‘a light and lovely thing’ and as ‘a brilliant, glittering piece of work, the kind that makes you gasp out loud at the sheer beauty of the language’.

Chapter 11 explores how the main conventions of the epitaph, and in particular their connection with the tomb of the dead, were adapted in "feigned" or satiric epitaphs. Here, widely circulating hostile epitaphs on Sir Christopher Hatton, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, and the duke of Buckingham maintained the partisan use of libellous epigrams beyond the grave (although some were countered by epitaphs and epigrams supporting the dead). The chapter concludes with the curious case of the epigrammatist John Owen's tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral, which came to function as a site for mocking epitaphs in response to the ornateness of the tomb and the commendatory epitaph by Archbishop John Williams.

This book focuses on Jim Crace's novels and their major inclinations and themes, including the narrative neo-Darwinian impulse in humankind; mythic and parabolic understandings and symbols that persist despite modernity; belief and the self; death and love; the problematic dialectic of the individual within communities; urban realities countering bucolic or pastoral myths; and humankind's place within the greater evolutionary scheme of nature. Crace's major published works consist of Continent (1986), The Gift of Stones (1988), Arcadia (1992), Signals of Distress (1994), The Slow Digestions of the Night (1995), Quarantine (1997), Being Dead (1999), The Devil's Larder (2001), Six (2003) and The Pesthouse (2007).

This chapter discusses Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The back cover of the 1990 Pandora Press edition described Oranges as the ‘touching and humorous account of an unusual childhood with an extraordinary mother’. The unusual child is a little girl teasingly called Jeanette who, like Jeanette Winterson, lives in a working-class town in Lancashire with her adoptive parents, Jack and Louie. Like Winterson's own mother, the fictional Jeanette's foster mother is a militant member of the Pentecostal Evangelical Church and has taken great pains to educate her daughter in her faith. The novel relates Jeanette's process of maturation from admiring and obedient child, to rebellious adolescent and ideologically self-assured and free adult, as the progressive revelation of her lesbianism clashes with her mother's religious and moral ideas.

This chapter considers the two books that were published at the beginning of the new millennium. Jim Crace particularises issues of love, family and other intimate or domestic interpersonal relations in The Devil's Larder and Six (2003). Of The Devil's Larder, some of whose stories had appeared previously in Slow Digestions of the Night, Crace admits the project was long planned, and represents ‘an attempt at a piecemeal, patchwork novel’, something inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Primo Levy's The Periodic Table. In Crace, the short pieces at times feel like narrative equivalents of philosophic aphorisms, particularly with their broadly common gastronomic themes and the implicit architectonic of an overriding cumulative intention. Generally, the recurrent contexts and themes are overt and therefore easy to identify, and include: relationships, sexuality and desire; families and their patterns of behaviour and traditions; sociability, jollity and its absence; and forms of poisoning or allergies.

Chapter 5 examines the nature of different types of surviving manuscripts -- authors' working copies, collectors' miscellanies and gift manuscripts -- in which larger numbers of epigrams appear. Working copies of collections (such as those by Thomas Freeman and William Percy) were often were a stage towards publication or the presentation of a collection to a friend or patron, as in the cases of Francis Thynne and Sir John Harington. Other epigrams, after circulating independently, found a place in miscellanies, sometimes scattered amongst other types of poetry, at other times gathered in one part of the manuscript.

This chapter presents an introduction to the life and works of Jeanette Winterson. Winterson was born in Manchester on 27 August 1959 and brought up in the nearby mill-town of Accrington, Lancashire, by her adoptive parents, Constance and John William Winterson, in a strict Pentecostal Evangelist faith. Her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was published in 1985 and earned the Whitbread First Novel Award. In 1990, Oranges was made into a TV drama, winning two BAFTA awards (for Best TV Drama Series and for Best Actress) and the Prix d'argent for Best Script in 1991. Winterson's work has been placed in one or other of the boxes labelled ‘lesbian fiction’ or ‘postmodernist fiction’. However, the writer rejects both qualifications, particularly that of ‘lesbian writer’, and insists that she expects to be called simply ‘a writer’, as male authors usually are.

This chapter outlines the tradition of the epigram in the Classical, Medieval and Renaissance periods, with particular focus on the influence of Martial, Catullus, and the Greek Anthology. Despite the genre’s reputation for licentiousness and cynicism, it came to be used for a wide variety of subjects. However, a commitment to brevity and sharpness of wit distinguished the genre regardless of subject and was often noted by Renaissance theorists. The chapter also explores some more limited influences, such as the medieval proverbial epigram, on the Renaissance use of the genre.

Chapter 7 explores the continuing tension between anonymity and acknowledged or even emphatic authorship of epigrams. The epigram tradition had always more fully connected these poems with their subjects than their authors. The free-floating transmission of these poems meant that they might be either disavowed by their author and left as "bastards" or taken by another and worn as "stolen feathers". A special case was "illustrious authorship", where epigrams came to be "fathered upon" notable public figures as a way of enhancing interest in them. There were, however, English authors such as Ben Jonson and Sir John Harington who more fully asserted their claim over the epigrams they circulated or published. In this they were similar to the more prestigious Neo-Latin epigrams, which tended to be closely associated with their authors.