This chapter talks about Mary Wroth's publication of Urania that will be familiar to many people. It sets out the scene for an analysis of the circulation and recirculation of her vituperative poetic exchange with Edward Denny. Wroth's dangerous supplement, which transformed Denny's male poem into a positive, hermaphroditic hybrid, was repressed. By adding her own libel to Denny's in a process that turned his poem inside out, Wroth created a kind of literary hermaphrodite: a conjoined poem that spliced her defence of her female authorship onto his misogynistic slur. In his poem, Denny called Wroth a 'Hermophradite in show', attempting to figure her as the 'monster' he claims she has become because of her 'deed' in writing her romance.

This chapter examines two conservative novels written in the 1810s: Harriet Waller Weeks’ Memoirs of the Villars Family, or The Philanthropist and Lady Dunn’s The Benevolent Recluse, both of which are concerned to depict how the upper ranks can remake a moral economy based on a changing notion of benevolence and philanthropy. These novels have a didactic concern to represent philanthropy and benevolence as a particular ideological practice with a moral power to justify the traditional ranks within English society. In so doing, they engage in the period’s debates about the nature of poverty, and the redefinition of the social responsibility of the privileged towards the poor. In the end, both novels fail to produce a conservative ideology to rival the more bourgeois/democratic ideologies we find in other novels of the period that we still read today. However, in that failure is the beginning of a modern concept of philanthropy in the exchange logic of the commodity: a return on the gift invested. Thus, the reciprocity of moral obligations would now unify and justify hierarchical social relations under the guise of benevolence and moral judgement. Understanding philanthropy as acquiring this exchange value at this historical moment provides a framework for the discussion of these conservative novels, revealing their ideological significance to our understanding of this period, as well as why we may have forgotten them.

Iain Banks's writing often embodies a duality characteristic of much contemporary literature, involving a disjunctive fusion of violent force with carefully calibrated and organised literary form. Since his disturbing debut The Wasp Factory in 1984 Banks's fiction has often encompassed the taboo and excessive. The grotesque provides a theoretical model capable of investigating both the principal narrative energies and the controlled structures of Iain Banks's fiction, acknowledging his place within the Scottish and wider European literary traditions of the grotesque. It is clear that Banks's work is heavily concerned with structure both in terms of narrative structure and in terms of structure as a primary theme. This structure of twin narratives is found in many of Banks's work, both mainstream (The Wasp Factory, The Bridge, Complicity, The Crow Road, Espedair Street) and science fiction (Use of Weapons, Against a Dark Background, Inversions).

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides some measure of how the assessments, critics are approaching early modern women as writers, and more specifically as writers in the canonically charged mode of poetry. It focuses on both histories of inclusion, with a use of precedents indistinguishable from that of male contemporaries. It analyses the way in which gender inflects the insertion of a feminine lyric voice into generic conventions. Generic precedent is perceived to be available for use by the woman writer herself even if it is not valued by her contemporary readers. Suzanne Trill persuasively argues for Mary Sidney's rhetorical methods in revision of psalm translation as part of an unrecognised, divinely inspired project of collaborative authorship.

This chapter reconsiders Anne Bradstreet's famous pronouncements of authorial reluctance in her two seventeenth century printed publications: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America and Several Poems. It considers examples of the paratextual apparatus, the dedicatory epistles, commendatory verses and prefatory poems that accompanied her entry into the public arena of print. The 1650 Tenth Muse contains a number prefatory materials assembled to establish Bradstreet's credentials in various social, political and literary networks. Bradstreet's 'The author to her book' alludes in its first line to the famous sonnet sequence of the previous century's chief Protestant poet, Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. In the 1678 Several Poems, 'The author to her book' is placed after poems included in the 1650 Tenth Muse and precedes 'Several other Poems made by the Author upon diverse occasions'.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book sets out William Trevor's work against a larger canvas. William Trevor is one of the most accomplished and celebrated contemporary prose writers in the English language. The book provides detailed analyses of key texts, focusing on works which are widely read or most often appear on university syllabuses. It examines the self-reflexive dimensions of Trevor's oeuvre, how allusions to books, newspapers, advertisements and records shed light onto characters' identities, aspirations and anxieties. The book highlights Trevor's responsiveness to Britain's changing culture from the mid-1950s onwards, highlighting his incorporation of black characters in his fiction at a time when many British authors declined to do so.

The third chapter re-examines the spinster heroine of modernist fiction, focussing particularly on the widowed mother/repressed daughter and aunt/niece paradigms as examples of same-sex alliance and rivalry. Showing the influence of psychoanalytical models of the family, the widowed mother in novels by May Sinclair, F.M. Mayor and Lettice Cooper is a monstrous presence from whom the daughter must separate, in order to make the transition from an out-dated Victorianism to an uncertain modernity. Aunt figures are haunting presences in the modernist text. In the work of lesser-known middlebrow novelist E.H. Young, the challenge to heterosexuality posed by the tantular, and the uses of fantasy, offer playful alternatives to spinster narratives structured around repression.

Does Spenser’s Mutabilitie Song complete his epic, or point to a more transcendent scope in its final half? It derogates the pagan gods; it reforms the titan Mutability (unlike the discarded demon-titans in books 1-6); and its grand pastoral pageant falls short of the symbolic city toward which the poem moves. Spenser’s holistic design is more clearly implied in his ordering of deadly sins (FQ 1.4). Compared with Dante’s pattern of sins, of purgations, and of ascensions in the Commedia, it offers a vital clue to The Faerie Queene’s format – based on the Christian-Platonism that informs all its figures and sequences. Much evidence suggests Elizabeth I would admire a mystic structuring of this epic that so honors her. As for Shakespeare’s attentiveness to last things, we explore the theme of ‘summoning’ in Hamlet and King Lear, both concerned – as in The Summoning of Everyman – with ‘readiness’ and ’ripeness’ in the face of death and judgment. In The Tempest’s deft collocation of all social levels and artistic genres, and its odd convergence with Spenserian allegory, we debate the insistence on Shakespeare’s secularism by examining the range of meaning in Prospero’s ‘Art’.

Moving from Illmatic to Young Stoner Life, this chapter listens closely to rap flow – the complex metrical pulse that runs through its verses. Drawing on lyrical examples from rappers like MC Lyte and Missy Elliott, it lays out a series of core technical effects (such as pauses, overflows, and triplets) before turning to the question of how MCs have grappled with the challenge of recording their flows on the page. Discussing the obstacles that face any attempt to apply traditional print poetic scansion to hip-hop, the chapter moves on to the innovative ways that rappers like Rakim and Young Thug have approached their notepads – making use of 16x4 grids, unorthodox punctuation, and abstract shapes. It closes with a discussion of so-called mumble rap and the ethics of close listening, pointing to the controversial use of rap lyrics in the recent YSL court case.

The conclusion revisits debates about female singleness and argues that new conceptualisations of lesbianism, spinsterhood and widowhood had helped to trouble and ultimately transform social norms by the end of the 1930s. It links these debates to ongoing concerns about abortion, female promiscuity, celibacy and adoption. It shows how queer readings of novels and autobiographical accounts in this period can help us to rethink our notions of modernity, gender and the family.