This chapter considers the milieu in which T. S. Eliot was writing and responding to poetry. Eliot's 1920 essay on Algernon Charles Swinburne had a lasting impact on the critical fortunes of the poet. Like Edward Thomas, Georgian poet John Drinkwater is critical of Swinburne, although he has a better sense of his achievement and his criticism is tempered by his sense of Swinburne's significance for English literature. As with Drinkwater, although for somewhat different reasons, Swinburne's poetry represents for Eliot a self-sufficient, independent 'world', and, as in Drinkwater, the emotion of this poetic world is 'impersonal'. Drinkwater and Eliot even evince apparent similarities in their conclusions as they ponder the state of literary writing after Swinburne, although on close inspection they have very different ideas about Swinburne's legacy.

Journalists and politicians used Beatrice Annie Pace's personal experiences to highlight institutional, legal and social critiques during a period already marked by discontent about the criminal justice system. In the midst of a murder investigation, Beatrice had admitted telling two lies to the police. One was potentially relevant to the case. The other was itself illegal. Joynson-Hicks denied there was 'anything in the nature of third degree' in Britain and noted Beatrice had thanked the police for their 'consideration'. In addition to critiques of the police and of coroners' inquests, Beatrice's case sparked debates about poverty, marriage and equality before the law. The case generated some praise of Britain's courts and Britons' fundamental good sense. The Daily Express noted that 'a man proved innocent of murder in a criminal court may always bear the stigma of having been to all intents found guilty of murder in a coroner's court'.

Wars represented in Western cinema are almost universally gendered as male, which corresponds to the battlefield history of twentieth-century warfare. War films, from The Big Parade to Saving Private Ryan, have always privileged the male point of view, masculine initiation rituals, and male spectatorship. In the cinematic representation of women warriors the gender of the director, in theory, should be significant. War films of the mid- to late 1990s supply a muted coda to the jingoistic war films of the previous decade by revisioning male soldiers in a less sexist, homophobic and confrontational manner. A contributor to feminist debate about masculinity in war texts, including films, whose work is both cogently written and theoretically sophisticated, is Susan Jeffords. By exploring the strategies that achieve the revitalisation of patriarchy as evident in film and other narratives, Jeffords offers a valuable set of categories, methodological practices and theoretical frameworks for other scholars.

From the beginning, the Pace case was more than simply a legal (or local) matter. Up to the inquest verdict, most of its key events took place within a few miles of Rose Cottage yet were followed throughout Britain and beyond. Press coverage created a figure known to millions of newspaper readers: 'Mrs Pace'. The case's rise into a press sensation is the subject of this chapter: during this 'golden age' of the press 'human interest' stories were driving increasing newspaper sales, and crime was central to this world of press sensationalism. All things considered, Beatrice Annie Pace was in an ambiguous position on the eve of her trial. She not only faced a capital charge but, since Harry Pace's death, had endured grinding poverty, hostile gossip, a police investigation, an extended coroner's inquest and weeks in prison.

Philip Caputo's memoir, A Rumor of War, debates issues such as heroism, masculinity, violence and sexuality. These issues were identified and linked by Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century, but more confidently verbalised in the aftermath of Vietnam than after any previous war. This chapter seeks to explore this verbalisation, through an examination of a range of textual representations of Vietnam: novels and memoirs by both men and women from both the West and the East. Joanna Bourke has suggested that in the past many men have been reticent about telling their war stories as much because of the pleasure of war as of the horror. The effects of the Vietnam War were double-edged for Le Ly Hayslip. Her narrative, Heaven and Earth, attempts to explain the war from multiple perspectives.

B. S. Johnson produced seven novels, two volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories, as well as several plays, screenplays and television scripts, and miscellaneous joint projects. He received awards for Travelling People, Trawl and the short film You're Human like the Rest of Them. Authorial powers, not substantively different from those of an omniscient author in a more conventional novel, are explicitly flaunted in Travelling People in a number of ways that to demonstrate what the convention involves. The major graphic elements of Travelling People appear within the chapters composed of interior monologues. Initially the use of the graphic surface in Albert Angelo does seem to be designed to attract the attention of the reader to the conventions of mimetic representation. One example is the 'specially-designed type-characters' that frame physical descriptions of Albert's pupils.

Clearly, Beatrice Annie Pace had press and politics on her side, and, in the wake of the acquittal, some newspapers asked a variety of prominent people for their views. There are 232 letters to Beatrice in the collection. It is impossible to systematically group them according to the writer's class or income level, but other distinctions are possible. As noted, the predominance of women in the crowds gathered at the inquest and trial was often commented upon. Fewer men than women wrote to Beatrice, but some took an equally strong interest in her case. Male correspondents related differently to Beatrice, as identification based on certain common experiences, obviously, was impossible. Despite the fact that Beatrice herself rarely expressed religious sentiments, nearly a quarter of the 220 letters classified as congratulatory had religious themes that went beyond colloquial expressions such as 'God bless' or passing references to having 'prayed for' her.

Beatrice Annie Pace herself 'is quite removed from this new and most interesting legal development' and had not 'the slightest knowledge of the new phase of the case'. Beatrice began building a new life. She gave notice that she would quit Rose Cottage, telling The People that she 'could not possibly live here after what has happened'. The claims made by George Mountjoy and Alice Sayes were indeed sensational, describing not only a sinister, cold-blooded crime but also portraying Beatrice as a sadistic murderess who gleefully deceived police, press and public. The vague and shifting chronology of the allegations is also suspicious: Sayes referred to poisoning attempts going back, alternatively, six or three years, Mountjoy to a plot 'extending over four years'. One vital matter had been handled before Beatrice's departure: the sale of her 'life story'. There are suggestions that the issue had caused tensions.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book draws a vocabulary for the literary study of graphic textual phenomena. It describes the role of 'the typographic muse' in contemporary Scottish writing. The book demonstrates both how and why the graphic surface has been neglected and looks at perception of the graphic surface during reading and how it may be obscured by other concerns or automatised until unnoticed. It also looks at theoretical approaches to the graphic surface, particularly those which see printed text as either an idealised sign-system or a representation of spoken language. The book examines some critical assumptions about the transformation of manuscript to novel and what our familiarity with the printed form of the book leads us to take for granted.

This chapter discusses that the manuscript is the 'real' work and interpretation begins from the manuscript. In considering the status of the written manuscript Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is useful. The difficulty of variation between editions exposes the lack of fixity in what Fredson Bowers and other textual critics call 'accidentals' and raises the question of what actually constitutes the text. The result of mechanical reproduction is the reproduction of a uniform text; one copy being functionally the same as the next. The chapter considers the example of Tristram Shandy, the uniformity may exist only within individual editions. Individual copies of printed texts may retain an aura of sorts, of individuality if not of uniqueness, linked to our own subjectivity, individuality or egocentricity. The most convenient form for reading pages of text is the codex form.

This chapter explores Algernon Charles Swinburne's liminal and transgressive excursions into marginal Hellenic territories, often obscured by the exclusively Olympian vision of Greece extolled by most Victorians in their quest for secure ideological foundations. In his 1931 book Swinburne, A Nineteenth Century Hellene, William R. Rutland strove to defend the purity of Swinburne's Greek inspiration, which he probably thought might be a good way of drawing attention back to his poetry. John Morley accused Swinburne of 'glorify[ing] all the bestial delights that the subtleness of Greek depravity was able to contrive'. Swinburne rejected the monochrome or chromatically limited vision of ancient Greek literature and art. Under the veil of his mastery of Greek language and culture, Swinburne explored the frontiers of the other, the unknown margins which archaeologists, anthropologists, and Cambridge Ritualists at the end of the nineteenth century would attempt to exhume and reveal.

This chapter examines Beatrice Annie Pace's trial in Gloucester: involving some of the most prominent lawyers and forensic experts of the age, its abrupt ending added a surprising, dramatic twist. Despite the new emphasis on motive, the most striking element of the trial was not the reiteration of the prosecution's case but rather the defence's response. Norman Birkett's strategy centred on a searching cross-examination, under the pressure of which the framework of the Crown's arguments would buckle. Beatrice was fortunate to have a man of Birkett's skill on her side. Birkett was forty-four when he agreed to defend the 'tragic widow'. The legal 'martyrdom' of the 'tragic widow of Coleford' had, it seemed, at long last come to an end. The widow's main accusers seemed vindictive, and some of their factual testimony was questioned. Beatrice's role as a caring nurse and a cooperative witness was highlighted.