Achilles Tatius takes his characters through a range of adventures as they move around the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike the otherworldly pastoral of Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius's Leukippe and Kleitophon is a sexually explicit and ostensibly very human study of the harsh effects of misfortune and interruption on the course of true love. In representing the rhetorical features of his romance as a painting, Achilles Tatius offers a unique perspective on the properties of ecphrasis as a narrative device. The earliest European publication of Achilles Tatius was Ludovico Annibale della Croce's Latin translation of Books 5-8, Narrationis Amatoriae Fragmentum. The distinctive representations of Leukippe and Kleitophon by della Croce, François de Belleforest, William Burton and Anthony Hodges demonstrate that each has his preferred method for dealing with morality, rhetorical display and textual fidelity.

The sixteen ballads and songs within this section fall into two camps: elegy and remembrance. Whilst a central feature of elegiac poetry is the way in which it remembers or memorialises the dead, a poem which is one of remembrance is not necessarily an elegy. Several of the songs herein use the date of Peterloo as a temporal marker – with an eye both on the contemporaneous reader or audience and the future reader. Included in this section are broadside ballads by Michael Wilson and elegies by Samuel Bamford and Peter Pindar.These songs display a self-awareness in their significance in marking the moment for posterity and in their attempts to reach an audience beyond Manchester and ensure that the public knew what had happened on 16th August as well as preserving the event in English vernacular culture. It is also a quest for ownership of the narrative of the day; the speed with which so many of these songs were written and published not only suggests the ferocity of emotions surrounding events but also the need to exert some control over the way in which they were represented.

This section begins by briefly examining the historical provenance of the poetic trope of awakening and its significance within radical culture prior to Peterloo, as well as those poems and songs written in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, thereby highlighting the intertextual dialogue between the poems which is illustrated not only by an ideological unity but also by the commonality of motifs, forms, styles and even tunes. Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy provides a well-known example of this trope and is used in the introduction to this section as an illustration of how radical poems and songs in the Romantic period utilised revolutionary discourse dating back to the sixteenth century. The section comprises ten poems which are exhortatory ballads or apostrophes. At times of national crisis, poets have called on their readers to ‘arise’ and awaken’, often drawing on those past events to prove that, if England could get rid of two kings, it could certainly get rid of a third.

This chapter discusses W. H. Auden's household servants. The servants were present by default an essay when he contemplated the lessons taught to middle-class children of the era about relationships with working-class people. Auden may have hated dirt and disorganisation, but he had never learned how to put things right, such as his notorious habit of peeing in wash basins and being stingy with lavatory paper. However, the servant stories from Ischia are more amusing than the dirty ones. There were servants in the Solihull and Harborne households; maids and cooks, cleaners, gardeners, and odd-job men at his preparatory and public schools, and at his Oxford college. He also possessed a theology of service, or a theology of servants, believing that in literature, at least, a figure like Jeeves in P. J. Wodehouse's cycle of novels expressed Christianity's highest form of love.

Heliodorus's complex account of the love, separation, loss and reunion of Theagenes and Charikleia may well be 'the longest comic plot in history'. An Ethiopian Story contains Charikleia's biography from the moment of conception, literally ab ovo. To Renaissance translators, the devotion, self-governance, ethics and morality of Theagenes and Chariklea, coupled with the exemplary kingship of Hydaspes, epitomise the qualities of the ideal representative monarch. Melanchthon's blessing increased the significance of Warschewiczki's edition, and An Ethiopian Story, to generations of philhellene Protestants. The first English appearance of An Ethiopian Story was in James Sanford or Sandford's The Amorous and Tragicall Tales of Plutarch. Heliodorus first appears in English verse in 1591, tucked into the end of Abraham Fraunce's volume of trademark hexameter verse, The Countess of Pembroke's Ivychurch.

A quarter of all casualties at Peterloo were women, even though they comprised only 12% of those present. This apparent victimisation of women by the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry resulted in the widespread use of the motif of mother and child across a range of poems, other print media and cultural artefacts produced in response to Peterloo, leading to an intensification of impact rather than a dilution through repetition. The introduction traces the involvement of female reformers, particularly in the North West and their representation in graphic satire. Even though this section comprises only eight poems, the trope of woman and child as victims is present in many of the other poems in this collection as well as newspaper articles, graphic satire and other artefacts, resulting in a powerful discourse due to the sense of collectivity engendered by its repeated use. The introduction provides examples of how the representations of Peterloo depicted women and children, illustrating that the poems should be read alongside the caricatures of George Cruikshank and images printed on handkerchiefs, illustrated here by the work of John Slack, and pottery in order to fully understand the power and resonance of this single trope.

Brian Moore’s novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is set in a boarding-house in early 1950s Belfast, but it is quite a few pages before Judith Hearne’s drinking habit is revealed. The novel then portrays the effect on an individual when belief in God disappears. Alienated through ostensibly social causes such as her ‘odd duck’ physical appearance and family responsibility, the character’s dulling of reality through drink is also her response to the kind of bleak truth that Jack London identifies in John Barleycorn. Hearne’s society, family, and upbringing are powerfully infused with Catholicism, and as her experience of apostasy becomes stronger so does her recognition that she is completely free to behave how she wishes, which includes more socially unacceptable drinking. The chapter places the novel’s thematic concerns within the wider context of Existentialism’s focus on how to respond to a world which is now deemed to have been abandoned by a God who, nevertheless, cannot be entirely shaken off. These difficulties are partly filtered through the secular and religious meanings of ‘passion’.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about poets who have written about history, about the poetics of the very idea of 'history' itself, the long persistence of the philosophy that separates one from the other. It is also about the choices there have been, in different times and places, of 'telling what had been'. The book discusses W. H. Auden's poetry, of which two are famous for his later renunciation of their historiography. In the earlier century, English and History were taught together. Their separation, as forms of composition and understanding, and the traces of their indissoluble partnership are the topics of this book. As a historical thinker, Auden worked within the framework of Christianity.

Over the past four hundred years an enormous community of scholars have heeded assiduously John Hemminges's and Henry Condell's advice. They have read and reread William Shakespeare, edited his language, modernized his punctuation, parsed usages, debated intentions, and analyzed his words with tests: syntactical, historical, linguistical, and digital. There's a convenient example of Shakespeare writing for a tiny clique in Julius Caesar, the tragedy he purpose-wrote to christen the new Bankside Globe in 1599. Shakespeare composed his Roman tragedy for the delectation of a mass audience who shared a common appetite to see a tyrant ridiculed and slain. But Shakespeare also wrote into this play more than one passage intelligible only to that handful of the wiser sort who had read Plutarch and knew their Suetonius.

The chapter considers the novels and non-fiction of Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for The gathering. It traces the trajectory of her fiction towards a revamped version of Irish realism, with a focus on her most recent novel, The Green Road. It considers Enright’s evolving attitudes towards the nation and Irish literary traditions. The chapter discusses her memoir of motherhood and some of her other reflections on her development as a writer. It is argued that Enright belongs to a later moment than the other women considered here, as a person upon whom the burden of the Irish past appears to sit more lightly. Nevertheless, she engages with recognisably Irish themes such as emigration, child abuse, the Celtic Tiger boom/bust and rural life.

Donne’s Holy Sonnet ‘This is my Playes last Scene’ opens with an allusion to the stage, the ‘last scene’ of the play that is the speaker’s life in the theatrum mundi. The perspective of life as a stage is merged with the inner stages on which the separate parts of the speaker appear in a manner reminiscent of medieval allegorical plays. The speaker reflects on death and the separation of body and soul – but adds a third element to his self and this separation: his sins. All will go to their place of origin eventually, which allows the speaker to hope for his redemption. The chapter also shows how, in the final couplet, Donne avoids making a denominational statement about the imputation to righteousness that can be unequivocally attributed to Catholicism or Protestantism but rather uses ambiguity to reflect on the dependence of human beings on the grace of God. He thus prepares the happy ending of the speaker’s play in a double discourse: by talking about the event of death and what happens after dying, the speaker links religious and dogmatic terms with reflections on drama.