The English poet Richard Aldington and his wife, the American poet Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), became modernist writers who in different ways explored the boundaries of both identity and textual representation. The issue of textual representation is a central concern for both writers. But while feminist scholars over the last twenty years have stressed H. D.'s attention to gender in her work, Aldington's attitudes towards both textuality and sexuality are misrepresented as conventional and fixed. From its very first page, H. D.'s own war novel, Bid Me to Live, addresses the issue of form, the problem of genre, and the difficulties of identity and textual expression that are, in fact, the novel's central subject. The conflict on which H. D. focuses is at once the Great War and the war between the sexes, while the problem of female utterance stems from the war which defines her through marginalisation and loss.

Christina Rossetti's relationship to Algernon Charles Swinburne is best remembered for an act of censorship. Edmund Gosse contrasts Swinburne's 'more scientific and elaborate system of harmonies' with Rossetti's 'delicate' and 'naïve' technique, defending Swinburne's masculinity along with his poetic talent by distinguishing it from Rossetti's more feminine approach. In contemporary Victorian criticism poetic influence was perceived to flow from Rossetti to Swinburne, but there was some reverse traffic as well. Even if the dedication overstates the case, evidence of Rossetti's and Swinburne's uneasy affinity survives in their poetry, a less restricted space where their relationship could evolve in ways prohibited in life. Swinburne's poem recasts Rossetti's mysterious female figure as Proserpine, goddess of the underworld. Rossetti's poems are known for their secrecy, and Swinburne plays Rossettian games with mysterious symbols and allusions.

In this chapter, the author focuses on Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru. The graphic surface of this novel is disrupted more frequently than any other text analysed in depth, but these disruptions are only one aspect of its unconventionality. British reviewers had largely been raised on a diet of postwar realism so perhaps their overall hostility is not surprising, but the bad grace with which these reviewers confronted the unfamiliar was instructive for Thru's author. Thru's combined use of visual and verbal can be seen in the use of the 'driving-mirror' with which the novel begins and which most commentators rightly note as a highly significant motif. The textual motifs generated by the retro-visor, and particularly their visual equivalents, recur across Thru. One of the most noticeable elements of Thru is the way it appears to anchor itself in criticism and theory, particularly the graphic elements employed in these disciplines.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes the usefulness of a critical awareness of the graphic surface. It outlines the practical and theoretical concerns that have tended to obscure the graphic surface from critical scrutiny and given detailed analyses of a number of problematical texts showing how the graphic surface can contribute to interpretation. Postmodernist criticism has established a critical convention in which the use of the graphic surface always self-consciously signifies the materiality of the text. Beyond implications with regard to the fundamental contact of literature, the meeting of text and reader, there is much close reading to be done of texts which present a distinctive graphic surface. This applies to the work of the authors discussed in the book, that of many others within and outside the British Isles and many non-English writers, past and present.

This chapter argues that Algernon Charles Swinburne's early critical writings promote a theory of aesthetic cosmopolitanism that emerges from a sustained polemical dialogue with Matthew Arnold. Swinburne's essay comes at a crucial time in Arnold's career as critic, between the publication of Essays in Criticism and Culture and Anarchy, and, in spite of its title, actually devotes considerable attention to the criticism. Like Carlyle's fictive review essay, Swinburne's pieces employ playfulness and satire to reflect on the difficulty of translation and cultural mediation. Switching to French, Swinburne enters a different mentality and a land of greater expressive freedom. Seen from this perspective, the Arnold essay contains an experiment in bilingualism in which Swinburne stages a conversation between his English voice and his disguised French voice, which here appears bracketed and displaced into anonymity.

Much of the inquest for Pace case considered circumstantial evidence: the state of the Pace marriage, the rumours of Beatrice Annie Pace's affairs, the course of Harry Pace's illness and the care he received. Inquest juries not only declared a cause of death but also, if relevant, named a suspect or suspects. Their charge would lead to a trial at what was then the main court for dealing with serious crime: the centuries-old, semi-annual circuit court known as the 'assizes'. Beatrice was represented by G. Trevor Wellington from the Gloucester firm of Wellington, Clifford and Matthews. The evidence presented at the inquest fell roughly into many categories. One of the categories include that there was testimony from the Pace family. This chapter considers the vivid testimony given by the Pace children, the police, family friends and forensic experts.

This chapter suggests a number of ways in which Sappho, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Amy Lowell are connected. It argues that Sappho's influence on Swinburne and Lowell is instrumental in creating an anxiety that subsequent readers and critics 'ward off ' by 'forgetting' their work. This results in the devaluation and neglect of both poets despite their considerable contributions to poetry. The chapter demonstrates how Amy Lowell's response to Sappho is mediated by Swinburne's earlier versions of the 'Tenth Muse'. In order to ward off the threatening aspects of Swinburne and Lowell's verse critics directed their own form of critical 'abuse' at the corpus of the two poets by attacking and insulting their physical bodies. Antony Harrison expands on Swinburne's engagement with medieval literature, discerning 'formal and thematic similarities' between Swinburne's work and troubadour poetry, demonstrating his 'deep engagement with the values and ethos of courtly love literature'.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the details of the Beatrice Annie Pace case while also considering what one woman's story reveals about the history of the police, the development of celebrity culture and the interests of the public in inter-war Britain. It then focuses on the police investigation and the lengthy coroner's inquest, the most extensive of the legal tribunals Beatrice would face. The book also focuses on the evidence given by Harry Pace's kinfolk, and considers the vivid testimony given by the Pace children, the police, family friends and forensic experts. A general conclusion and a postscript evaluate the case's significance and examine what happened to some of its key figures after the name 'Mrs Pace' had, once and for all, faded from the headlines.

Algernon Charles Swinburne's earliest foray into periodical publication occurred in 1857-1858 in the Oxford-based Undergraduate Papers. Swinburne's ideas and writing are often provoked by journalism, and many of his pamphlets, poems, letters, and articles are in dialogue with it. Swinburne's diverse responses resemble those of other late Victorian writers including Matthew Arnold, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde who valued and denounced the press while persisting in writing for it. Even for Swinburne, with his talent for exploiting fully the scope of the press, his consciousness of its limitations may be seen in his occasional recourse to pamphlets, two of them especially famous. This form has the advantage of free-standing publication, with timing and content in the control of the author than hedged in by the constraints of the politics, format, and frequency of a journal and the gatekeeping and cuts of its editor.

Harry Pace's violent, controlling behaviour motivated by sexual jealousy fits a common pattern across cultures and eras. However, assumptions about gender, marriage and violence were changing in the inter-war period, and press stories of wives' suffering at the hands of deceitful, unreliable or violent husbands were commonplace. Harry's brutality and Beatrice Annie Pace's suffering shaped their respective press personae. Advertisements for Beatrice's Sunday Express series were headed '18 years of hell' and featured a photograph of Beatrice writing her memoirs. Beatrice's public persona was, ultimately, more than a little ambiguous. Not only had she exchanged 'the deep black which she wore all through her long ordeal' for 'a pretty flowered frock of some light summery material', but the children 'are better dressed then ever they have been in their young lives'. In 'A talk to wives' and 'A talk to those about to marry', she gave advice to young women.

The Spanish Civil War began as a revolution and became the most important small war of the twentieth century. Land and Freedom, Ken Loach's film about the Spanish Civil War, explained the complex politics of this war for a new generation when it was released in 1995. Land and Freedom attempts to validate the Trotskyist point of view by means of a narrative in which political processes and a love story are skilfully related. A vigorous anti-Stalinism is inseparable from Trotskyism, but Loach's screenwriter, Jim Allen's remarks on Stalin and Spain in the production notes to Land and Freedom go beyond what is plausible. The Spanish revolution was betrayed by Stalin and by the social democrats because 'they preferred Franco to the possibility of a workers' state'. It is possible to discern differing attitudes towards gender and gender issues among the parties of the Spanish left.

This chapter argues that two dramatic monologues from Poems and Ballads, First Series, 'Hymn to Proserpine' and 'The Leper', seek respectively to revise two of Robert Browning's best-known examples of the form, 'Cleon' and 'Porphyria's Lover'. It claims that Algernon Charles Swinburne's aestheticism was in part an effect of the complexities he confronted when he sought to define himself against the conventions of Victorian religious doubt and to cast atheism as a mode of Romantic transgression. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Swinburne fantasised about reviewing his own poetry and identifying his 'models' as 'that is blasphemy and sensuality', an arresting formulation that seems to posit transgression itself as a celebrated literary form or precursor poet. As Swinburne insinuates, Moxon & Co. quailed at the reviews of Poems and Ballads in part, because Edward Moxon's successors at the firm remembered the Queen Mab case.

The most common misinterpretation of the graphic devices in Alasdair Gray's novels is that they are signifiers of postmodernist play and nothing more. Lanark: A Life in Four Books, a large and complex novel, has been included in discussions of Scottish literature, urban writing, science fiction and post-modernism. Lanark: A Life in Four Books extends its narrative to offer a full fictional biography; it does not stop with the suicide that closes Duncan Thaw's bildungsroman but continues into Lanark's adulthood and old age. Lanark is a text which is emphatically conveyed to us by the typographical unity of a book. The chapter shows that through its individual typographical conventions and exceptional visual devices Lanark unites its disjunctions and generates dynamic contextual perspectives for the reader.