This chapter discusses absurdist practice during the twentieth century, examining absurdism in the works of some writers, namely Fernando Pessoa, Antonin Artaud and Camus. It notes that these writers can be regarded as absurdists, and that they sometimes embrace absurdist qualities. The chapter also clarifies that the use of the word ‘absurd’ does not guarantee that a work is to be considered – with justification – as fully or solely belonging to the ‘literature of the absurd’.

This chapter focuses on Winterson's seventh novel, Gut Symmetries (1997), the story of three narrator-characters, Alice, Jove and Stella, the first of whom is a Cambridge postgraduate student of New Physics who has just won ‘two years of research funding at Princeton’. Consequently, at the beginning of the novel, we find her on board the QE2, giving a lecture on Paracelsus as a way of paying her passage from Southampton to New York. During the cruise she meets and falls in love with a fellow lecturer, Jove, the middle-aged, second-generation Italian-American Professor of Superstring Theory at ‘the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton’, where she is also going to work. Jove is at that time married to Stella. This meeting is one of the many coincidences that pins the lives of the three characters to each other and to other characters in the novel, including their ancestors. The whole novel is structured by means of similar random coincidences into a complex web of ‘symmetries’ comparable to the chaotic arrangement of elements in fractals.

Building on the notion that the Gothic is shaped by (and responds to) Enlightenment historiography and shifting conceptions of the past in the eighteenth century, this chapter proposes that The Old English Baron can be read as a reaction to a popular (and frequently neglected) work of proto-Enlightenment English history that Reeve was very familiar with: Nicholas Tindal’s translation of Rapin’s History of England (1721–1731). Focusing on this previously ignored relationship, this chapter considers the religious and political implications of Rapin’s history for the Gothic past presented in The Old English Baron. Furthermore, it reveals the ways in which Reeve’s novel can be read as a rewriting of Otranto and draws attention to the historical specificity that she introduces to the Gothic genre at this time. Focusing on Reeve’s Old Whig political beliefs and the English setting of her novel, it assesses the extent to which The Old English Baron conveys Whig historico-political nightmares and focuses on how her Gothic past betrays contemporary anxieties. This chapter shows how The Old English Baron subverts the Walpolean Gothic and responds to the Enlightenment drive to secularise the historical cause.

Chapter 8 presents a variety of readers of the printed epigram book: the general implied reader against whom the epigrammatist extended habitual scorn, the ideal reader that a few imagined, and the expected (or dreamed of) role of patrons of epigram books. The genre’s common quality and the cheap formats in which epigrams were published led epigrammatists to expect a non-elite readership. Such was at times in tension with the dedications to named elite figures whom the epigrammatist sought to distinguish from the common reader. Some epigram books also reflect upon the differing responses of male and female readers. While the bulk of the chapter concerns the authors’ expectations of readers, in particular as explored in case studies of Thomas Bastard and John Heath, it ends with rare evidence of an actual reader, one who left his or her marginalia in a copy of Harington's Epigrams.

This chapter takes a look at Brian O'Nolan, who was also known as Flann O'Brien and Myles na Gopaleen in the literary world, introducing each of O'Nolan's literary personas, from the novelist and short-story writer (O'Brien), to the author of the funniest newspaper feature (na Gopaleen). From there the discussion focuses his two main novels, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. It notes that At Swim-Two-Birds was written through the second half of the 1930s and that it follows from the early writings of that decade. The Third Policeman, on the other hand, has lesser elements than the other novels, but is considered as more concentrated and serious.

Three major poet-critics, S. T. Coleridge, Algernon Charles Swinburne, T. S. Eliot, all apprehended the workings of imaginative form as metamorphoses of the circle. Like others in the chorus of detractors, Thomas Disch went looking for Swinburne's soul of sense in all the wrong places. Because Disch wanted meanings that were ingredient in the poet's themes, all he got out of A Century of Roundels was forms. Egregious formal flagrancy, which is notoriously the dragon in the gate of Swinburne's oeuvre, draws into ardent focus what more generally seems the problem stymieing modern readers who just can't get into poetry no matter how hard they try. Talking about merely prosodic interest, where Swinburne is concerned, is like talking about merely dramatic interest in William Shakespeare; but let that pass.

This chapter suggests that Algernon Charles Swinburne's work might be located in relation to a period in the history of the lyric genre when poetry confronts modernity, and vice versa. It begins with a reading of a central genre 'problem' of Poems and Ballads, First Series. Swinburne may have been caricatured in 1866 as a 'melodious twanger of another man's lyre', but in dramatising the desire lines of a collective lyric subjectivity he makes a crucial statement on the cultural crisis in and formation of the genre. Swinburne's 'The Roundel' is a poem about the form itself and sets the parameters for the volume's commentary on poetic voice. The 'desire lines' concept, elaborated through a reading of the roundels, gives us a model for how Swinburne finds in sexual desire a trope for the community of the lyric subject.