For a short time following the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 there were writers who used republican ideas to defend and understand the newly restored monarchy. This chapter explores these ideas. It examines the ways in which the ‘commonwealth’ principles used to defend the republican governments of the Interregnum, and the ideas of James Harrington and his Rota club, could be re-directed in 1660-61 to identify monarch as the best form of a commonwealth. In doing this, these writers were also defending a view of limited as opposed to absolute monarchy. The constellation of ideas explored in the chapter is a reminder of the long-term continuity of the view that England was a ‘commonwealth’, as well as reminding us how the concept of ‘commonwealth’ could have multiple applications.

In an ‘Epistle to his Father’, the Jesuit priest and poet Robert Southwell signs himself ‘Your most dutiful and loving son’. Dutiful it may be, but loving this letter certainly is not. Southwell threatens his father with a horrifying vision of his ‘departing-bed’, asking him to imagine himself ‘burdened with the heavy load of your former trespasses, and gored with the sting and prick of a festered conscience’, feeling ‘the cramp of death wresting your heart-strings’. This essay considers the relationship between Southwell’s construction of gender identity and his attempts to convert English Protestants – beginning with those in his own family. Southwell’s role as a son, and his relationship to his father, is central here, as this chapter reveals the ways in which early modern masculinity is both engendered and called into question by the process of religious conversion. The chapter also considers a different kind of conversion; that which Southwell effects upon the literary genre of the letter of advice. Drawing out the etymological relationship between ‘gender’, ‘genre’ and ‘generation,’ the analysis work in the interstices of these terms, showing their centrality to the confessional narrative at the heart of this volume.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on literary works by John McGahern. It includes a collection of Paula Meehan, who was inspired by McGahern in the formative years of her own career, pays homage to McGahern with a poem and a memoir. The book explores the sense of resentment and disillusionment in McGahern's novels, drawing parallels between the revolutionary memories of McGahern's protagonists and McGahern's own family experience. It offers a sociological reading of McGahern's representations of love, courtship and sex. The book provides an intriguing comparison between McGahern and Flannery O'Connor, a chronicler of the deep American South, known for her economical, dead-pan, reportorial style. It considers McGahern's representation of a Protestant family in a small Irish community.

In a 1979 interview, John McGahern discussed a difference between his work and Samuel Beckett's work. McGahern's first foray into print, The End or the Beginning of Love, occurred in March 1961 in the magazine X: A Quarterly Review consisting of several extracts from a first novel that he later abandoned. The same issue carried an article on the development of Bacon's painting, together with seven black and white reproductions. A discourse connecting art, reality and the image can be seen at work in how the magazine's editorial introduces McGahern's fiction. Writing to Michael McLaverty, McGahern comments: 'The worst review of The Dark was by a Dublin public house oracle, Anthony Cronin.' McGahern's My Love, My Umbrella explores the Kavanagh persona is juxtaposed with a love that is shortcircuited by the ego. McGahern's story suggests a misdirection or misapplication of James Joyce's materialist approach to knowing the female other.

John McGahern generally avoided statements about the afterlife. As Caitriona Clutterbuck observes, he took the view that it was futile to make arrogant assertions about something that is so unknowable and so far beyond human imagining. Melvyn Bragg thinks that McGahern remained, despite his troubles with Mother Church, 'still dyed in the spiritual mystery of things'. McGahern told one interviewer that literature was ultimately a luxury, but religion was not. McGahern was always aware of the limits of realism. The respect that he showed for literary tradition was ultimately a respect for the good manners that went with it. Because of his fidelity to the pressure of felt experience, some critics have taken McGahern for a romantic-realist or naturalistic writer.

In John McGahern's 'Oldfashioned' he ably demonstrates why a sensitive, bookish, Catholic young man raised in the repressive, anti-intellectual Irish Free State might be attracted to the way of life being led by the country's dwindling Church of Ireland population. Throughout 'Oldfashioned', McGahern suggests that Catholics in the young stateare, in the main, overly fixated on money-making, gossip and a prosaic practicality, and that they are suspicious of anything that smacks of foreign influence. McGahern contends in the story that Catholics cannot cross over to an Anglo-Irish cultural milieu without gravely compromising their ties to their own people. McGahern makes links to Ireland's British past through the story's repeated references to Scotland, a country which, like Ireland, has a dual Gaelic and British heritage.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the relationship of the imperialist artists with conservatism and imperialism, movements that defy easy generalisations in 1899. The vicissitudes of public life for imperialists of this era are well illustrated in the career of Alfred Milner, whose figure became something of a rallying point for most of the characters in the book during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The book focuses on the nature of conservatism and imperialism that won the hearts and minds of Milner's near contemporaries. It also explores the reasons why T. E. Lawrence did not or could not perform the role in which his elder admirers cast him, as creative artist and master statesman of the British Empire.

This chapter focuses on two stories: John McGahern's 'The Beginning of an Idea', and Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'. 'The Beginning of an Idea' plays fast and loose with narrative coherence, prompting questions as to how many stories go to make up this ostensibly single work of fiction. The whole of Chekhov's tale 'Oysters' is embedded within McGahern's prose, daring to risk comparison with the Russian master. These two stories betray their authors' unease with any hope of salvation in and for this earth. They appear to be pessimistic in regard to the capacity of any individual to rise above the helpless lot dealt out to them. McGahern and O'Connor find the secrets of life in the warping of good intentions, certainly in these stories, for there is about the women at the centre of each a lethal innocence.

Visitors to the countryside are increasingly faced with a variety of panels, interpretation centres and other interventions that convey selected narratives and ways of seeing our natural heritage. This chapter explores the scope for these cultural objects to be included in ecocritical enquiry. The ubiquity and undemanding nature of many displays makes for an accessible source of information about basic ecology as filtered through the viewpoint of site managers for national and country parks, nature reserves and other protected sites. Interpretation is a broad practice that embodies, creative writing and art, constructing ideas of place, explaining the natural environment and promoting a corporate identity. While projects like that on the Tweed Rivers will be immediately accessible to ecocritics, the humble but ubiquitous interpretation panel and the increasing use of technology may be more problematic.

The afterlife is one of John McGahern's most persistent, if muted, configurations of the radiant domain of secular transcendence towards which critics recognise his larger work is oriented. The afterlife retains currency for Ruttledge and McGahern because the immovable object of his scepticism would seem to still allow for the unstoppable force of redemption. Timor mortis anticipates his 1992 tour de force, 'The Country Funeral', in celebrating timor mortis as a natural agent of creative focus on this life. Eamon Grennan, in his 1995 reading of the story 'The Country Funeral', argues that for McGahern an afterlife belief associated with religious inheritance is 'something speechless and of unknown value'. In this chapter, the author deliberately utilizes the terms 'vision' and 'rhythm' as loaded McGahern descriptors, following his use of them to explain his concept of 'The image' in his key early statement of artistic principles of the same title.

The complex history of Stratford-upon-Avon can be chronicled through the fortunate survival of its early records. The site of New Place is situated in the lower Avon Valley close to a natural fording point along the River Avon. At the beginning of the Neolithic period there was a rapid growth in trade, technology and commerce. Several of the monuments are known from crop marks in the area around Stratford-upon-Avon, and find-spots of Neolithic-worked flint and pottery sherds are known. The Bronze Age is not represented on the site by either physical or artefactual evidence. The Iron Age was a period of immense social, technological and agricultural change. During the Early to Middle Iron Age, settlements consisted of individual farmsteads scattered across the Avon Valley rather than planned, nucleated settlements. The site of New Place is located on the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane.