The most comprehensive divergence of Spenserian and Shakespearean psychology concerns ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, the human essence made in God’s image. Spenser situates each soul-maiden in a hierarchic house made with Plato’s ideal geometric forms. No such structure assists Shakespearean protagonists like Hamlet, Timon, Antony, and Prospero as they assess their identity amid changeable clouds or, like Juliet and Cleopatra, amid fancies of a noble but discredited beloved. In Shakespeare’s darkest play, references to ‘soul’ nearly vanish; though Hamlet and Othello refer endlessly to their soul (a word used 40 times in each play), in King Lear the word appears only twice. Equally definitive is the poets’ contrary use of ‘spirit’. For Spenser this word usually betokens transcendence (soul, supernatural spirits), only rarely referring to bodily spirits; but Shakespeare stresses its embodiment, staging the multilevel meanings of spirit as a continual warfare between bodily and heavenly referents: ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame ….’

The entire dramatic edifice of The Story of Lucy Gault rests upon a moment set up by the narrator/scriptor as originary, as the precipitation of the events that will unfold in the course of the telling of the tale. This 'event' is the attempt by a group of republicans to burn down the Big House and the botched attempt by its owner, Everard Gault, to repulse them by firing a warning shot over their heads. The sense of menace at the hand of revolutionaries is virtually axiomatic of the Big House genre, and it is a trope that to a large degree William Trevor's novel does little to contest. As is the case in Dubliners, so much of Trevor's novel depicts a cultural predicament and a set of lives as paralysed, as petrified, as ineluctably in thrall to an irrecoverable trauma, as irredeemably cathected to a lost object or person.

This chapter examines the transformative work of Danielle Dumile, the masked rapper who went by the stage name DOOM (among other aliases), and who was known for his complex lyricism and innovative personae. Adrian Matejka considers the MC’s use of persona through the dual lenses of hip-hop and poetry, highlighting the ways in which DOOM’s lyrics borrow from and enhance these twinned literary traditions. Drawing parallels between DOOM’s innovative lyricism and the tradition of persona poetry, Matejka considers how contemporary poets – particularly Black American poets – adopt various masks to explore history, culture, and identity. This longer tradition is related back to DOOM, whose layered personae subverted mainstream rap in the early 2000s. Matejka frames the rapper’s work as an enduring testament to persona’s power in mythmaking and cultural commentary.

Lady Mary Wroth has often been read as the product of an unusually brilliant literary genealogy rather than an individual author in her own right. Ovid obviously provided Mary Wroth with the title for her sonnet sequence, 'Pamphilia to Amphilanthus', which reads like the title of an Ovidian epistle. It is unfortunately impossible to establish whether Wroth actually read Louise Labe, but her Pamphilia to Amphilanthus presents interesting similarities with Labe's sonnets in terms of gender politics and self-fashioning. The significance of Labe's identification with Sappho has been studied in depth by Francois Rigolot and Joan DeJean, who have shown the importance of the Sapphic Renaissance for her self-fashioning as an author. The publication of Labe's poems coincided with the publication of Pseudo-Longinus's Greek treatise on the sublime by Francesco Robortello in Basel in 1554.

The chapter discusses the confluence of material objects during the 1810s, especially when Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in 1815 spewing ash into the stratosphere, and when Thomas Bruce (1766–1841), the 7th Earl of Elgin, sold the Parthenon marbles to the British Parliament for £35,000 in 1816. While these two events were continents apart geographically, they are interconnected materially and politically. Marble rock, ash, and potato, an assemblage of disparate objects, mark the tumultuous 1810s as a decade in which matter matters significantly to humanity.

William Trevor's novel Love and Summer is a lyrical, evocative story of the emotional turbulence that lies underneath the surface of everyday life in a small Irish town in the 1950s. Love and Summer is based on a critical variety of nostalgia that recognises both the stifling limitations of a small-town environment and the crucial connection between ethics and place. Trevor's re-creation of 1950s Ireland can be understood as a form of critical nostalgia that throws present systems of human interaction into relief by comparison with the past and vice versa. To frame a discussion of the ethical themes in Love and Summer, it is useful to set up a few old-fashioned or newly fashionable premises. On the character level, Love and Summer contrasts the effects of being determined by the past with living a life that rejects or dismisses the past, as Florian Kilderry attempts to do.

This chapter examines funk music as a central artery of rap music and hip-hop culture. It charts a funk current that crests and flows throughout hip-hop’s fifty-year span such that, what Maner calls the funk impulse – the percussive, kinesthetic energy that undergirds and drives Black sound and Black life – is rendered audible. After charting the patterns of sampling that developed in the early stages of hip-hop, the chapter moves on to the evolution of the funk impulse in the contemporary era, from renderings on album covers to live stage performances. James Brown, Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad, George Clinton, and Parliament-Funkadelic, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and OutKast are all discussed in detail.

This chapter characterises the beginning of the 1810s as a transitional moment for both early feminist thought and cultural conceptions of intellectual disability. Through a sustained reading of Lucy Aikin’s critically underexamined Epistles on Women (1810), the chapter argues that the long, combative poem articulates an intersectional appeal to feminine-coded weakness, idiocy, and disability. The opening question of the poem, ‘when was ever weakness in the right?’, pits a utopian matriarchal future against the overwhelming misogyny and brutality of the masculinist past. Aikin’s revisionist history begins in Eden with Eve’s assiduous care for the ‘moping idiot’ Adam and ends in the modern era with the new ideal of feminine friendship supplanting compulsory ideologies of heteropatriarchal marriage. Throughout, Aikin creatively develops a compelling feminist aesthetics and ethics grounded in the complex trope of idiocy and neurodiversity.

This chapter looks at the work of Martin Amis in the light of author's discussion of the grotesque in literature. It examines his novels Money: A Suicide Note and London Fields. An important example of Amis situating his work within the tradition of the grotesque occurs at the very beginning of Amis's career as an author in The Rachel Papers. Amis is interested in genre and brings comedy and slapstick to bear on his account of the contemporary novel. Time's Arrow represents a prime example of a grotesque novel. In Time's Arrow it is ironically the irreversible nature of time and of the past that is emphasised, and through the grotesque what has been a mechanism for comedy becomes a means of engendering deep pathos and horror.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the way women understood the poem in terms of the reception, influence and adaptation of past models and examples. It focuses on the resources women writing poetry knew and encountered in chapters on classical inheritance, the religious sonnet sequence and the secular sonnet sequence. The book examines the world of reading and readers, and looks at poems in terms of friendships, quarrels, competitions, coteries, networks and critical reception, both then and later. The book also examines the shaping of femininity in the circulation of print material, approaching the question of women's relationship to the poem from the vantage point of the presence of women as subjects and objects in popular poetic forms.

The poets also differ in portraying the four humors and their passional offshoots. The diverse humoralism of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson is missed if we assume humoral consistency and ignore the role of intellect and providence in managing it. Spenser controls the humors partly by figurative houses: passion is spiritualised in the House of Holiness, it is simply moderated in Alma’s Castle. Spenser views humoral passions (and the body) negatively, needing moral guidance and Christlike rescue. In contrast to his restrictive allegory of humor figures (fiery Pyrochles, watery Cymochles, airy Phaedria, earthy Mammon and Maleger), the humor-types in Shakespeare’s Henriad (melancholic Henry IV, choleric Hotspur, phlegmatic Falstaff, sanguine Hal) are spacious and flexible, gifted with self-conscious speech and witty mimicry of the others. Shakespeare’s view of humoral passions evolves into dazzlingly complex nuances and paradoxes in the tragedies and romances.