This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. Jeanette Winterson has achieved international recognition as one of the leading present-day British writers. No longer of exclusive interest for the lesbian readership that launched her to fame in the 1980s, her novels are read, enjoyed and hotly discussed both by the general public and academia. Thus, while film and theatre versions have been made of her most popular novels, the most experimental ones often appear in the syllabuses of university courses on contemporary British fiction, and are the subject of an increasing number of dissertations and critical essays both in Britain and elsewhere.

This chapter explores Franz Kafka, who has been universally considered as a staple of absurdism. It observes that there are a number of absurdists, proto-absurdists and supposed absurdists who seem to have been at the head of the anticipation, promotion and reinvigoration of the spirit of Kafka. The chapter then studies Kafka's relations with, and influence on, other writers, ending with a section on the concept of ‘bureaucratic fantastic’, as personified in Kafka's works. It notes that Kafka was an exponent not only of stories and novels, but also of fragments, diaries, aphorisms and letters.

The final full chapter explores how a strikingly large number of poets turned the epigram – despite its questionable reputation -- to a religious purpose, sometimes of devotion or meditation, and at other times for the purpose of religious satire or polemic. It shows how such a conversion of the genre was made difficult by its scurrilous reputation and conventionally cynical tone. The composition of such epigrams was often based in educational or devotional disciplines, as illustrated in the case of Richard Crashaw. Religious epigrams were sometimes defended as an ambitious act of devout reclamation, at other times with the humble justification that the poet could be doing something worse with his time. The typical qualities of the genre would seem to make it more promising for epigrams of religious satire, but many such polemical epigrams lost the genre's characteristic sharpness and brevity.

Emphasising the diversity of the Gothic genre in the eighteenth century, this chapter argues that, in The Recess, Lee hijacks certain themes from Walpole and Reeve to write a prototypical Female Gothic novel. Continuing to read the Gothic as a reaction to eighteenth-century historical writing, this chapter contends that Lee focuses on female protagonists and employs Gothic plotlines to critique the male codes of historical representation that govern David Hume’s Enlightenment historiography. Developing arguments from the previous chapter, this section shows how, in the hands of female writers, Gothic pasts often express contemporary fears and anxieties, and comment on gender politics in the eighteenth century. Drawing on Gary Kelly’s notion that the Gothic enabled women to access the male-dominated realms of history and politics, it is argued that Lee’s historically based novel utilises Gothic tropes such as concealed writings and a focus on the law to present a nightmare vision of women’s historical and social plight in the eighteenth century. Examining the complex structure of The Recess, this chapter concludes by assessing the extent to which Lee ‘Gothicises’ the eighteenth-century epistolary form, and what the novel says about the nature of the past.

This chapter examines the complex, often antagonistic relationship between Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Hume’s The History of England (1754–62). As Walpole’s correspondence reveals, he had read numerous volumes of Hume’s history before writing Otranto (the first Gothic novel) and did not think very highly of its content or the methods used to write it. Reassessing the significance of the Gothic in the eighteenth century, this chapter discusses the extent to which Walpole’s novel can be viewed as a bold response to, and critique of, Hume’s historiography. Discussing the proliferation of violent and supernatural occurrences in Otranto, it is argued that the Gothic functions as Enlightenment history’s other; it exploits its insecurities, plagues its vulnerabilities, and imaginatively provides fictional presences for its many absences and omissions. Taking into account a wealth of historical evidence, this chapter proposes that Walpole’s novel can be read as an imaginative revolt against Hume’s multi-volume work of historiography and that it marks the beginning of the genre’s contentious relationship with Enlightenment historiography and the philosophy that underpins it.

This chapter introduces the concept of the absurd, which is frequently used in literature and is defined as something applied to the modern sense of human purposelessness in a universe with no meaning or value. It studies the connections the absurd has to nihilism, existentialism and ontology, and then takes a look at ‘negative theology’, which is relevant to practitioners of the absurd. From there, the discussion considers the problems related to the perception of inherent absurdity and the deconstruction of a philosophical system into nonsense, contradiction and absurdity. The chapter also considers the concept of the socio-linguistic absurd, as well as the nature of jokes and humour.

This chapter comments on two books published at the end of the 1990s, Quarantine and Being Dead, which together represent perhaps Jim Crace's most lauded fiction. Each seems very different from the other, but both correlate human responses, emotional and physical, to hostile environments at the edge of civilisation, away from the rhythm of people's habitual lives. Both novels present a recurrent pattern into which other recognisably Cracean elements are interwoven; the landscape itself and its place in nature subsumes and dwarfs various individuals who are faced with the issues of human belief, human identity and the universal presence of death in life and its metaphysical meaning, or lack of it. Death is immanent in life. In both texts, a sense of the mundanity of the quotidian intersects with descriptions that evoke the symbolic power of nature.