Myths of the spinster as asexual, barren and dowdy are challenged in the second chapter, by an exploration of the figure of the New Woman or bachelor girl, and the alternative glamorous identity of the mistress. Women's autobiographies locate the single woman within the dangerous excesses of Bohemianism. The enabling singleness of the professionalised New Woman in novels by Netta Syrett and Ella Hepworth Dixon is explored in relation to her occupation of her spinster flat, in which her modernity is guaranteed by her celibacy. This is considered in relation to the enviability of the spinster's occupation of public space in New Woman and suffragette autobiography by Cecily Hamilton, Violet Hunt and Evelyn Sharp.

History in Ireland in the 1980s loomed large in the popular consciousness; the problems of the past continued to haunt the present. The crisis of this period concerned change, progression and their absence: the promise of the future, of moving on, appeared to be constantly undermined by the persistence of conflicts from earlier times. This is the contextual background in which William Trevor published his Anglo-Irish 'Big House novel', The Silence in the Garden. Trevor's The Silence in the Garden offers a masterful engagement with the human consequences of historical action. Vera Kreilkamp responds to the historical and political resonances in Trevor's novel, seeing it as a work giving voice to the guilt of the coloniser. Trevor's presentation of town life, the energies and the foibles of its citizens, contrast sharply with the jaded codes of Big House existence.

This chapter explores the interplay between community, capitalism, and cultural production within Detroit’s hip-hop underground. It focuses on the women-centered collective The Foundation (2009–2014) and its contemporary counterpart We Are Culture Creators (WACC). The Foundation championed women in hip-hop and intergenerational collaboration but faced insurmountable economic challenges. WACC’s transition from nonprofit to hybrid nonprofit–LLC highlights new avenues that arts organizations are pursuing in their efforts to secure funding. The study also highlights the socioeconomic complexities of Detroit’s revitalization during the city’s municipal bankruptcy, with gentrification and neoliberal capitalism often undermining grassroots creative arts’ efforts. The chapter situates Detroit’s hip-hop underground as a microcosm of broader tensions between cultural resistance, community building, and capitalist pressures. It also advocates for the reestablishment of connections between contemporary hip-hop innovations and educational as well as community-oriented practices, which were integral to the work of the Foundation.

Fools of Fortune is remarkable for its mode of narration, one that accommodates itself to the complexities of historical perspective explored in the novel. This chapter attempts to link William Trevor's humane and searching vision to his methods. Certainly it would be unwise to suppose that Trevor provides facile answers to what Gregory A. Schirmer refers to as the novel's 'tragic vision of human beings as fools of fortune'. Trevor's own 'art of the glimpse' is in evidence throughout Fools of Fortune, a novel that 'deals in moments and subtleties and shadows of grey', as it addresses questions of choice and chance, and the longing for freedom and love. Marianne Willie subscribes to the idea that they are 'Fools of fortune', yet there are fascinating complications to her apparent belief that they are victims.

In his non-fiction survey A Writer's Ireland, William Trevor distinguished short stories from other types of prose fiction by deploying the very same metaphor ('the art of the glimpse'), before suggesting that 'the modern short story deals in moments and subtleties and shadows of grey. Trevor's most recent volume of stories, Cheating at Canasta, exemplifies this point. The collection consists of a dozen short stories, half of which take place in Ireland; of the remaining six stories, four are set in England, one in Paris, and the title story in Venice. Trevor 'has chosen to embrace the pathos and yearning of the human heart as the focus of his fiction'. Jonathan Bloom eloquently declared, in a study which preceded the publication of Cheating at Canasta, 'a choice that makes him an equally elegiac and lyrical artist'.

This chapter examines A Man of the People in relation to the historical circumstances that produced it, a situation in which Nigeria's fledgling democracy was at an end and its public sphere overrun by corruption and violence. It then goes on to explore Achebe's writings from the Nigerian civil war, including not only the short fiction and poetry but his revealing fable for children How the Leopard Got His Claws. In Achebe's last writings, he revealed himself to be the lead author of Biafra's revolutionary statement of principles The Ahiara Declaration, a profoundly resonant historical document that has never previously been analysed as a part of his work. This discussion marks a significant new departure in the evaluation of Achebe as a writer.

In the case of the 'coterie' poems compiled by Constance Aston Fowler, sisterhood and female friendship function both as subject matter and as social bonds created and affirmed by poems. Constance, brought artistic talents to her letter writing, and her miscellany compilation was also a creative act, deploying personal and aesthetic choices to produce a distinctive and self-expressive literary artefact. Aesthetics and affection intertwined in Constance's principles of selection to invest special value in Herbert's own compositions. Herbert who appears in Constance's letters and miscellany is a devoted brother intimately bound into the family circle. Among the eight poems by Herbert that Constance transcribed into her own anthology are 'To the Lady Mary Aston' and 'To My Honer'd sister G A', a eulogy to their sister Gertrude.

This chapter argues that the decade of the 1810s, especially when understood as ‘the Regency’, reflects a vision of time as static and repetitive, resistant to what Walter Benjamin famously called ‘homogenous, empty time’. To this end, this chapter looks at an unusual textual archive, nineteenth-century flagellation pornography. Two works are analysed with differing connections to the decade: Venus School-Mistress, probably published in 1810, and The Rodiad, written in 1871 but masquerading as a text of the 1810s. Comparing these two texts – one an authentic product of the period, the other an erotic antiquarian hoax – reveals not just the consistent temporal multiplicity of nineteenth-century pornography. It also demonstrates how the 1810s take on a paradoxical historiographical role as a specific example of the repetitive sameness of time. In so doing, the chapter aims to recast the idea of ‘the 1810s’ as a node of reactionary resistance to the temporality of liberal progress.

Reality entertainment first appeared in the late 1980s, with the emergence of the TV entertainment genre – inaugurated by shows such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted; the daytime talk shows hosted by Geraldo, Oprah, and Donahue; and the tabloid news of A Current Affair. Yet what we now call “reality TV” emerged in dialog with another kind of entertainment that served as its foil and borrowed its techniques – what rappers Ice Cube and Ice-T called “reality rap.” While N.W.A.’s ‘Fuck Tha Police’ countered Cops’ vision of Black lives in America, subsequent reality rappers such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur embraced tabloid spectacle and the media’s obsession with Black criminality. Reality rap and reality TV, this chapter contends, were twin components of a cultural revolution that redefined popular entertainment as a truth-telling medium by borrowing journalistic tropes while dispensing with the professionalism and responsibility demanded of reporting.