This chapter sets the scene: it opens by tracing the puzzling illness that afflicted Harry Pace from the summer of 1927 to his agonising death in January 1928. It discusses an aspect of the story not only helps to introduce Beatrice Annie Pace and Harry but also gives initial insight into how the press presented their lives and marriage. Journalist Bernard O'Donnell's handling of the case clearly applied his principle that 'tactful sympathy and practical help will unlock the door to an inside story more surely than any amount of uncouth bluster'. He certainly seems to have been the journalist who was most successful in developing a rapport with Beatrice and her children. All the post-trial life stories used the couple's courtship to shape particular narrative arcs, with Beatrice's depiction as a rural ingénue adding to her life's drama, tragedy and pathos.

In 1909 The Eton College Chronicle announced the delivery of 'a great wreath of ilex and laurel' to the grave of Algernon Charles Swinburne. This chapter situates 'The Flogging-Block' within nineteenth-century metrical discourses, and debates about classical verse composition during Eton reform, in order to show how the beaten boy becomes an exemplary Eton boy. Taking pleasure in the graphic visualisation of flogging, Simeon Solomon and Swinburne liked to exchange flogging fantasies in their personal correspondence. Swinburne's imaginary incorporation of metre reflects, and reflects on, a broader cultural imaginary in which Eton was associated with metrical as well as corporal discipline. In contrast to Eton reformers who would do away with corporal punishment, Mary Gordon Leith and Swinburne imagined the practice of birching as the highest form of aesthetic education.

This chapter examines Vietnam through the post-colonial observer, J. M. Coetzee; the colonised, Le Ly Hayslip; and the one-time American soldier, Oliver Stone. Coetzee ensures that the reader is suspicious of suburban mythographer Eugene Dawn's reading of familial psychology. Like Coetzee, Stone was burdened by history and nation, and by gender and family, on public display during the film's making and release as his second marriage broke up. Hayslip's descriptions of the Vietnam War contrast starkly with Dawn's neurotically neat reading, and with Lyndon Johnson's simple image of family that stands behind it. Stone, known for personal engagement with issues in his films, made Heaven and Earth as a soldier, a father and a man, something elliptically recognised in Hayslip's lionising of him. Stone's film exemplifies the problems of responding to a text like Hayslip's, complicated by his own status as a combatant in Vietnam.

The term 'graphic surface' relates to the face of any page of printed text. The general appearance of any specific page will be largely dependent on the design and technology of the day in which it is printed (or re-printed). Literary texts repeatedly problematise the conventional use of language for their readers, defamiliarising the image or object described, but there are bounds within which this happens; the device of defamiliarisation can work only in a situation which is 'familiar'. Levels operate as an alternative to a naive response that equates textual reality with external reality, or which, put another way, translates text on the principle of perceptual economy. The chapter outlines a particular critical account of the stylistic armoury of postmodernism which includes an influential but inadequate response to the use of graphic devices.

This chapter presents the interview between the author and the DJ, musician and writer Excalibah. Excalibah co-directed The Blacks Remixed and played the role of Archibald, the MC. This interview is a companion piece to author's conversation with Ultz. Ultz wanted to do a modernised version of The Blacks in a contemporary urban setting. The Blacks Remixed is not a play about Africa; it's a play about black people in white cities. Jean Genet is a white playwright writing for Blacks. The Theatre Royal Stratford East is known for promoting black and Asian work. At the Theatre Royal, black people knew what they were seeing right away. They were aware of the reality behind the clichés, the fact that black men, in a white world, play at being hard and unemotional.

This book examines the historical formation of ideas about sexuality in modern Irish culture. It analyses the history of sexuality in Ireland and the Catholic Church's regulation of Irish sexuality from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. It focuses on the study of a literary genre, the Bildungsroman and its significance in twentieth-century Irish writing.

Chapter 4 shows how The Four Zoas, as an unfinished manuscript, formally registers Blake’s troubled fascination with evolutionary models of the mind. The first section of the chapter compares the images of fluidity associated with Tharmas, who continually emerges from and dissolves into the waves of the unconscious, against Erasmus Darwin’s poetic descriptions of liquid ontogeny. The next section examines how the sexual drive appears in the text as a disruptive fluid force, illustrating and criticising the materialist argument (found in Mandeville and Malthus) that love and altruism are merely the evolutionary products of libidinal self-interest. The final section returns to the textuality of The Four Zoas and shows how the nervous mind and the sinuous text work together to give unreliable body to thought. Comparing Blake’s poetics to that of Erasmus Darwin and Edward Young, the chapter discusses the mimetic qualities of Blake’s revisionary verse and ends with an analysis of the poem’s fantasies of symbolic liberation through physical destruction.