The 1810s saw a flurry of poems published in the Italianate form of ottava rima. This chapter focuses specifically on ottava rima poems that reflect on the role of expectation and anticipation in listening. This includes episodes of mishearing, which show how anticipation sometimes distorts perception. We hear what we expect or want to hear. The form of ottava rima, with its interlocking rhymes and closing couplet, presents an exaggerated example of the role of expectation at work in rhyme. The brief popularity of ottava rima in the 1810s also offers a neat marker for periodisation, which raises questions about how a given form was read at a given time and addresses the challenges of exemplarity and historical poetics.

This chapter discusses Arrow of God in relation to its historical setting, reading it alongside the analysis of subsequent historians Adielo Afigbo, Ifi Amadiume and Gloria Chuku. As this reveals, what is again striking about Achebe's third novel is the extent to which he underplays Igbo resistance to the British, especially resistance by women. While colonialism is shown as an often muddled and self- divided enterprise, Achebe's Umuofia needs little help from foreign incursion to fall apart as a result of its own internal contradictions and rivalries. Once again, as we see modern Nigeria in the making, the nation is shown as little other than a messy product of ignorance, ill-designed policy and the corrupt practices.

Shakespearean dramaturgy highlights apprehending a wondrous other: intense epiphanic encounters are fulcrums of passional cycles. Each play forms a chiastic symmetry, beginning with a two-act cycle (act 2 reversing/completing act 1) and ending with a two-act cycle (act 5 reversing/completing act 4); between them an intense one-act cycle (with no known source). These encounters recall biblical epiphanies: nativity, baptism, transfiguration, resurrection, crucifixion. Meaningful epiphany evolves gradually: in early plays it is sensational farce or horror; in mature plays the epiphanies systematically illuminate the soul’s powers. Macbeth’s chiastic sequence neatly divides into three murders – progressively blinding anti-epiphanies: killing a king centers the opening two-act cycle, killing a best friend centers act 3, killing a mother and children centers the final two-act cycle. The three murders suggest a Freudian ‘repetition compulsion’, but the regicide is not just Oedipal, nor the only important slaying. The murders are psychically conjoined, diminishing the Macbeths by travestying each psychic cathexis – sublimation, projection, introjection – annihilating all bonding. King Lear’s complementary sequence of three shamings again forms a chiastic 2-1-2 cycle of acts, but Lear’s strippings paradoxically bring psychic recovery through his epiphanal encounters with Goneril, Poor Tom, and Cordelia at the center of each cycle.

This chapter considers two moments of national mourning and political crisis in the 1810s. It argues that they produce understandings of collective feeling as a kind of action at a distance. Its two case studies are the death of the Princess Charlotte in 1817 and the deaths of protesters in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. In the aftermath of both, commentators encourage simultaneous forms of mourning, where individuals separated by distance feel an affective bond with others performing the same acts at the same time. In 1817 loyalist newspapers present such gatherings as spontaneous and heartfelt, though they resist the control of authorities. In 1819, radical reformers capitalise on the disruptive potential of action at a distance, advocating simultaneous meetings for political reform. In Mask of Anarchy, Percy Bysshe Shelley argues that virtual collectives acting at a distance produce a radical new vision of the nation.

Two distinct portraits of a ‘fairy queen’ imply contrary views of human nature and contrary aesthetics. In Spenser’s epic a mystic Gloriana draws noble heroes to realise the twelve virtues, perfecting the soul in Godlikeness. In Shakespeare’s comic stage-play a sensually potent Titania evokes a different fairy realm. Directly experienced, her bodily splendor and witty combative speeches arouse desire not just in the privileged but in rude commoners, who commandeer the play’s most engaging scenes. Instead of vying with Spenser’s elite quests for morality in an intellectual heaven-based allegory, Shakespeare views morality in all social classes, the humbler earthy sort matching the more pretentious. Both are ego-driven yet communally civil. This ironic engagement with Spenser’s ‘supreme fiction’ wondrously expands Shakespeare’s own artistry. Equally polarized are the poets’ views of self-love as a touchstone of human psychology. Like Calvin and Luther, Spenser discredits self-love as shameful, both in monarchs like Lucifera and in louts like Braggadocchio, causing Redcrosse’s wretched fall and Guyon’s helpless faint. In contrast, Shakespeare’s characters, noble and vulgar, show a positive form of self-love if carefully managed, as observed by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Primaudaye.

This chapter contests the view that William Trevor's work for the screen is somehow secondary to his many and notable accomplishments as a novelist and short-story writer. It suggests that his career demonstrates the pervasive inter-connections between these different forms, and that this might be linked to his successful adaptation not only to life in England but to thriving professionally across these media. The chapter offers an approach to his work for TV that combines the historical consideration of TV archive, textual analysis of televisual form and contemporary theories about 'adaptation', taking its cue from Deborah Cartmell's injunction to 'distance adaptation studies from fidelity criticism'. It surveys different phases of activity, making use of selected production file material, but takes as its central case study the pivotal, BAFTA-award winning film The Ballroom of Romance.

This chapter looks at the reading that goes on in some of the novels and stories of William Trevor. Trevor is very interested in popular literature and how certain genres run through people's lives like tunes or family memories. Though there are references to Irish authors in Trevor's fiction, over and over again his characters are found reading the English and European classics. Trevor's characters are often 'turned in on themselves', strange, extreme, at odds with the world. The same is true of technical, specialised literary genres, which Trevor sometimes infiltrates into his stories to show a warped, unsocialised or alien mind at work. In My House in Umbria, the romantic novelist who tells the story, whose life revolves around fantasy, curiosity, drink and garrulous, intimate conversations, comes up against the dry technical language of an entomologist's books.

The 1810s offer decadent examples of Regency queerness including Anne Lister’s diaries, the publication of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s queer gothic ‘Christabel,’ and Byron’s queer heroes in his Oriental tales. Not singular oddities, these figures speak to queer communities at varying levels of British society. Though Lister documents a series of queer lovers, her writing likewise amasses a queer community, particularly within triadic flirtation and polyamory. ‘Christabel’ and Lister’s diaries both showcase queerness and class-crossings as intertwined and multiple, also apparent in Lister’s own gender movements, identifying as ‘a gent’ and frequently traveling. These connections recur within newspaper stories of gender-crossing patriotic sailors and Byronic queer naval spaces, particularly the sailor-heroes in Lara and The Corsair whose conflicts become symptomatic of queerness in search of community.

The lyrics in manuscript that Jamie Reid-Baxter has attributed to Elizabeth Melville, the Scottish religious poet and author of Ane Godlie Dreame, include three sequences of religious sonnets. Elizabeth Melville's innovative engagement with the religious sonnet sequence occurs at a crucial moment around the turn of the seventeenth century. Deirdre Serjeantson has argued that the English religious poetic of Henry Lok owes much to his Scottish connections, and to an 'emergent literary self-awareness' in religious poetry that was more developed in Scotland than in England. Elizabeth Melville's religious sonnets are, then, likely to date from some forty years after Anne Lock's Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, the foundational series of Calvinist, female-authored and sequential religious sonnets. Melville is also a known purveyor of the religious sonnet for spiritual succour in the first decade of the seventeenth century.