A reconsideration of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) that forecasts Jacques Derrida’s notion of spectrality as a viable theoretical lens for the Twenty-First Century, even as the spectral figure aids our reinterpretation of Joyce’s text. For Joyce’s corpus, central to Irish literary tradition, celebrates this impurity and offers us insight into contemporary postcolonial novelists’ motivations for and methods of reinvention.

William Trevor's Felicia's Journey is a literary work which reflects how individual lives bear the imprint of the political, economic and cultural narratives and histories of their places of origin. This chapter argues that the novel transcends simplistic paradigms and embraces a much broader picture of humanity and inhumanity. It is undeniable that historical conflicts between Ireland and Britain are a significant presence in Felicia's Journey. William Trevor possesses a mastery of narrative technique which has been recognised by readers and reviewers alike for almost fifty years. Thwarted communications, withheld information recur not just as a motif in Trevor's plots, but also of his narrative technique, as his deft and canny characterisation of Joseph Ambrose Hilditch exemplifies. Where transparency and intimacy typify his representation of the main female characters, Felicia and Miss Calligary, and their pasts, concealment, ambiguity and piecemeal disclosure create opaque perceptions of Hilditch's world.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Emma (1815) share one easily overlooked but strikingly common aspect: in both, Austen describes privileged characters collecting people for their entertainment. Emma, the eponymous heroine of the 1815 novel, ‘collects’ impoverished women for her own amusement and that of her father, whereas in Sense and Sensibility, while his wife fills her time with collecting objects, Sir John’s ‘satisfaction in society was much more real’, focusing instead on ‘collecting’ young people who drive away the boredom country life would otherwise pose for him. While this description is arguably sinister, seeming to take agency away from those who are collected – almost always single women on the margins of gentility – the relationship in question is more ambiguous. Those less privileged benefit from the protection of the ‘collectors’ and, by allowing themselves to be ‘collected,’ are integrated into the neighbourhood in which they live. By considering this relationship, this chapter poses the question: What can Austen’s representation of the collector and the collected tell us about wealth, class, and gender in this decade?

This essay focuses principally on 'The Ballroom of Romance' and argues for a more nuanced and differentiated account of his work than has tended to be offered to date. William Trevor's short story 'The Ballroom of Romance' has attained iconic status in Irish culture in the forty years since its publication. The title and ambience of the story, evoking memories of dancehall days, partly explains this public appeal, which was enhanced by the BAFTA award-winning film adaptation of the story by Pat O'Connor. Trevor vividly demonstrates the ways in which the lives of both women and men were atrophied in mid-twentieth-century Ireland. That this is a persistent interest in his fiction is revealed in later short stories such as 'Kathleen's Field' and 'The Hill Bachelors', and in his fine novella Reading Turgenev.

Women who wrote and circulated their verse in manuscript sought and stayed within a congenial circle. Carol Barash describes the general profile of late seventeenth- century women who preferred to publish in manuscript rather than with a bookseller as 'usually elite and well educate. Kathryn King studied of the life and complicated literary career of another late seventeenth-century woman poet, Jane Barker. Anne Killigrew's poem 'Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another' has been used as evidence of her involvement in a literary exchange circle and also her indictment of the masculine court culture's ridicule of female ambition. Anne Killigrew was no novice in the world of coterie, courtier and commercial theatrical culture, with its intrigues and rivalries. Her decision to seek 'Fame' led her not to seek publication but to entrust her verses to 'some few hands'.

The active construction of the grotesque as a paradoxical 'order of disorder' has been a hallmark of Angela Carter's writing career. This chapter aims to show, The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children collectively form a vivid contemporary grotesque that stays unfinished in its treatment of the excessive body. Both Nights at the Circus and Wise Children rely on the discourse and mechanisms of carnival for much of their literary vigour. However, Carter takes care to situate their often-comic narratives within wider contexts of historical change and its attendant troubles. The chapter focuses on the important congruence between the carnivalesque and dialogic forms in Mikhail Bakhtin's work. It explains how Bakhtin himself describes the English comic novel as a menippean tradition of a heteroglossic kind.

This chapter focuses on the pivotal role Mary Sidney played in the specific development of the English devotional lyric. It re-examines the terms in which John Donne praises 'thy Sydnean Psalmes' in 'Vpon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister'. In combining God's word, Mary Sidney's own words through translation and her brother's favourite sonnet form into an expression of communal praise, Mary Sidney's sonnet perhaps epitomises the truly collaborative nature of 'thy Sydnean Psalmes'. Calling upon his contemporaries specifically to celebrate 'thy Sydnean Psalmes', Donne's choice of syntactical rearrangement places the emphasis on the object and its possessors. Although Donne's poem has been curiously marginalised until relatively, its eloquent encapsulation of the essential problematic of early modern devotional poetics is remarkable.

This chapter discusses William Trevor's representation of 'postcolonial London' in two early novels, The Boarding House and Miss Gomez and the Brethren. The interaction between living in a boarding house and accommodating oneself to others appears in Trevor's first novel, A Standard of Behaviour. Two of his novels and several short stories foreground African and Caribbean characters, and many of his short stories and several of his early novels include people from the Caribbean, Africa, Egypt and South Asia as workers in hospitals, offices and night clubs. Elizabeth Alone centres on four women awaiting operations in a maternity ward attended by doctors and nurses from Ireland, Australia, Jamaica, Africa and India. Throughout his career as a writer, Trevor has not only dramatised the absurdity of 'class divisions, colour divisions, sex divisions', but has also shown how tragically such divisions can affect the lives of others.

This chapter examines the development of Toby Litt's work and how it is informed by the grotesque in terms of its consistent use of distortion and humour and in relation to its complex fusion of the prosaic and the fantastic. It shows how his literary career has been shaped by an arguably postmodern approach to contemporary culture but one that is also based on a contemporary form of the literary grotesque. Toby Litt's first collection of stories, Adventures in Capitalism was first published in 1996 and immediately created a critical stir around its inventive approach to the world of branding and consumerism. If Adventures in Capitalism in its pursuit of a comic grotesque bears comparison with the work of Martin Amis and Will Self, then deadkidsongs is an ambitious novel that enters similar terrain to Ian McEwan's disturbing stories of childhood and Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory.

As hip-hop grew between the 1980s and 1990s, rising from a set of small regional aesthetic and cultural practices, it slowly turned into fodder for billion-dollar businesses, broadening from music to include fashion, film, and television. This chapter explores the configuration of white business interests, the creativity of working-class communities of color, and the investments of avant-garde artists who created hip-hop as a commercial art form. These circumstances extended what was initially a regional set of expressions and practices of youth subcultures into a globally celebrated aesthetic. Cinema was central in the transitioning of street art forms like graffiti and vernacular dance into a set of codes and practices shared by practitioners around the world.

This chapter examines how Anne Greene's story was told and retold in 'popular' poetic form, and asks how such poetry might work to construct a narrative about female subjectivity under the law. Three pamphlet accounts of Anne's case appeared in early 1651 and were reprinted repeatedly thereafter. Of these works, two, William Burdet's A Wonder of Wonders and the anonymous A Declaration from Oxford, were issued by the London printer. Newes from the Dead, attributed to an Oxford 'scholler' called Richard Watkins, was produced by Leonard Lichfield, official printer to Oxford University. The presentation of the criminal, or criminalised, female in poetry is most usually via ballad or complaint, in verse forms associated with pamphlets, news-books and other ephemera. The chapter demonstrates how an elite re-rendering of the narratives that surround criminal women may transform our understanding of a genre traditionally associated with strategies of simplification and containment.