Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend is usually seen as an indictment of alcoholics, an accurate depiction of their self-deceptions and lying to others, with an accusation that drinking is no more than an escape, a failure to face up to personal and social responsibility. As with other books with protagonists who commit to drinking, possible reasons are given for the failing self (suppressed homosexuality; relationship with the parents; unsuccessful career), but such interpretations miss the significance of repetition in this novel: the drinker continually faces his demons in a manner that London’s John Barleycorn argues is more truthful than the evasions of everyday sobriety. Unlike the Hollywood film version of the novel (which brought ‘alcoholism’ as a serious issue into the cultural mainstream), Jackson’s narrative is unusual in that rather than offering an ending which sees the death of the drinker or his reformation, it shows the character wondering what all the fuss is about and preparing himself for another binge. The chapter analyses the novel’s various conceptualisations of self and alcohol, its knowing engagement with psychiatry and psychology, the figure of the writer-drinker, and also covers its treatment of temporality.

In the vicinity of a number of different issues and contexts ranging across the modern academic institution, the author suggests an intractable problem of disorientation in the university that nevertheless provides the conditions for certain kinds of leverage to occur. In 'The art of memoires', the second in a series of three lectures given in memory of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida draws attention to de Man's strong reading of Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Aesthetics. For de Man allegory remains, both 'before and after Hegel', in a way that makes possible the concept and the construction of history. Thus, Derrida tells us, one cannot simply 'rely on something like history', the concept of which is in fact an effect of the allegorical, 'to account for this "allegoricity"'.

Through four ‘case studies’ this chapter identifies behaviours, attitudes, and representations which hint at the emergence of a new figure, and suggest significant moments in the transition from the nineteenth-century’s stereotyping of the habitual drunkard to the twentieth-century’s Existential drinker. Mary Thompson was a habitual drunkard discussed in a Parliamentary Report who rejected all attempts to make her respectable, preferring to live the life of a drunkard; George Eliot’s tale ‘Janet’s Repentance’ provides an unusually sympathetic religious/philosophical apprehension of somebody determined to drink; Zola’s novel L’Assommoir describes the drinker’s response to the modern, alienating city; van Gogh’s painting Night Café at Arles, along with a letter he wrote to his brother, introduces a self which is perched dangerously close to ruin, transformation, or oblivion. The figures encountered here, both real and fictional, are largely ‘ordinary’ people, rather than (Romantic) ‘others’ or self-avowed ‘philosopher-drinkers’, and offer glimpses of the themes and representations which in the twentieth century contribute to the figure of the Existential drinker that is discussed in the following chapters.

This chapter begins by outlining the events leading up to the Peterloo Massacre on 16th August 1819 and its immediate aftermath with a particular focus on the response in the radical and loyalist press. By combining eye-witness accounts with contemporaneous reporting, the significance of Peterloo at the time can clearly be recognised. This chapter then focuses on the radical press, both in the 1790s, including Thomas Spence’s Pigs’ Meat and the 1810s, including the Manchester Observer, Medusa, Wooler’s Black Dwarf, Hunt’s Examiner and Carlile’s Republican, The Cap of Liberty, The Theological and Political Comet and The Briton, in which many of the ballads and songs were printed. Finally, this introduction discusses the place of the broadside ballad in vernacular culture from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century and the appropriation of it by antiquarians in the eighteenth century.

The introduction outlines the rationale for selecting these five women: Edna O’Brien, Sinéad O’Connor, Bernadette McAliskey, Nuala O’Faolain and Anne Enright. It discusses the ways in which women in Ireland have been understood as both symbols of the nation and key agents of modernisation. It explores the question of whether Ireland has been exceptionally oppressive to women. It considers current conditions for women in Ireland and argues for the significance of the contribution made to Irish feminism by innovative individuals such as the subjects of this book.

This chapter discusses the author's experience in dealing with W. H. Auden's works. She was introduced to Auden's poetry in her O-level English literature class, South London, in the 1962-1963 school years. The author found Derek Attridge's theory of poetry more legible than Auden's because of her own education, which, despite its being Latin-less, was closer in time to Attridge. Auden was in the primary school classrooms the author inhabited between 1974 and 1982 because of the long extracts she taped from Geoffrey Summerfield's Junior Voices 1-4. From 1991 onwards, she used lines from 'Homage to Clio' as an epigraph many, many times. She did not want to know what Auden really meant; she wanted to know what the poem told her about the thing she did: history; about history's quiddity, its beingness in the world, its social and cultural function; what it is.

This chapter proposes to return the female characters to the centre of history's stage, to reopen the closet to which they were seemingly confined in Henry V. In King John, in addition to the stage presence of the warlike Queen Eleanor, whilst the men are failing to protect their country and save 'mother England' from foreign occupation, brave English women are taking matters into their own hands. Constance's verbal performance in King John is reminiscent of the female roles in Richard III, for here women's tongues are likewise sharp and active. The impact of images of women conveyed via the language of the plays should not be underestimated. It has been argued that William Shakespeare's audiences possessed a highly tuned 'image consciousness' inherited from their medieval ancestors, so that spectators at the drama could readily construct offstage pictures in the mind's eye.

This is the longest section in the book and comprises seventeen poems, many of which use satire not only to delight a sympathetic readership but also as a way of demonstrating defiance and voicing outrage at the actions of the authorities both during and after Peterloo. The introduction explores how writers in the Romantic period, from the full range of the cultural spectrum, used satire as a form of cultural defiance and challenge to authority at a time when any form of opposition was deemed seditious. Another theme evident is that of chivalry, a contentious issue during the eighteenth century with its revival by conservatives such as Edmund Burke fuelling a radical counter-revival focussed on a new age of political chivalry. As a consequence, the language and symbolism of chivalry was adopted by both conservatives and radicals in support of their cause. The Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry is the target of many of thesatirical poems in this section, alongside the detested politicans, Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth and the Manchester Magistrate, Reverend Ethelstone. It includes poems written by the radical writers, Robert Shorter and Allen Davenport.

The concluding chapter begins with an examination of Canadian author Yann Martel’s What is Stephen Harper Reading? book club project, in which he sent literary texts to now-former Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper once a fortnight. This public act of citizenship was intended to expose Harper, who was responsible for CAD 45 million in cuts to arts, culture, and heritage funding, to the importance of literature and the arts. The chapter closes with a reflection of how the texts and authors under study in this book have explored only a few ways in which citizenship can be encountered, acknowledged, critiqued, troubled, and queered by readers who have the power to collaborate in the continuing struggle for recognition, rights, and representation in North America and around the world.

The chapter concentrates on the music of Sinéad O’Connor, encompassing all her albums from The lion and the cobra up to I’m not bossy, I’m the boss, with particular attention to key songs and video performances. It analyses her extraordinary vocal performances in relation to ideas about femininity in traditional Irish music and in popular music. It considers the evolution and significance of her image, especially her rejection of aspects of conventional feminine beauty. Her treatment of trauma, Catholicism, colonialism and her protests against child abuse are also detailed here. The chapter traces an ongoing negotiation in her work between the individual female artist and the idea of the collective.

Radicalism and nationalism would appear to be unlikely bedfellows, given that they tend to be placed on opposite ends of the political spectrum; yet this section demonstrates how many of the radical poems and songs written after Peterloo are underpinned by a radical English nationalism with poets making clear distinction between the un-English characteristics of a tyrannical state and monarchy and the true English patriot fighting for lost freedoms. Although the ideology of nationalism emerged in the revolutionary fervour of the late eighteenth century, this section establishes the nature of English radical nationalism and how the championing of English national identity has resonances with the republicanism of the English Revolution and late seventeenth century, the heroes and martyrs of which, particularly John Hampden, Algernon Sidney and William Russell, were a regular presence in the radical press. Key to English national identity is the myth of the Norman yoke and the yearning for the restoration of lost rights, references to which permeate the eleven poems in this section.

The most successful English history had been penned by a Frenchman, Paul Rapin de Thoyras, whose Histoire d'Angleterre met with immediate critical and commercial success on its publication in 1724, only sharpened the collective sense of embarrassment. Just as the flaws in English historiography were diagnosed with reference to the tensions between ancient and modern, so they were identified with respect to the distinctions between the various literary genres. Library records and subscription lists indicate an increasing social diversity among history's readers as well, with the names of merchant-class and female subscribers beginning to appear alongside aristocratic male ones. Writing for a broader audience, memoirists, scandal chroniclers, historians, and satirists were naturally prompted to depict historical phenomena in ways that differed from the neoclassical ideal.

This chapter talks about survival, not death. For critical theory and critical theorists, then, death is everywhere. In Jacques Derrida's work, The Gift of Death, the gift is linked intimately with death in thinking the other, the secret and the question of responsibility. Derrida's idea of 'living on' is dissimilar in important ways to the kind of survival which for Jean Baudrillard results from the exclusion within political economy of the incessant play of symbolic exchange with death found in archaic societies. Baudrillard writes that responsibility has been dead a long time. By suggesting that the question of responsibility is irrelevant both regarding the present system and a future 'beyond' it, Baudrillard risks re-inscribing the political and ideological constraints surrounding the inert forms of survival he wishes to expose and critique.

This chapter begins with three of Sigmund Freud's 'case-histories': Dora, diagnosed as hysterical; Schreber, a paranoid schizophrenic, and the Wolf Man (a case of infantile neurosis), in order to approach Jacques Lacan on paranoia and psychosis. Commenting on Dora, who was neurotic, and non-psychotic, Lacan says that psychosis requires 'disturbances of language', which makes it exceed paranoia. Freud makes Schreber an instance of paranoia, using for evidence, virtually, only the Memoirs, which he reads as a text. He examines his hypochondria, and feelings of being persecuted by certain people including Flechsig, the 'soul-murderer', and his delusional ideas, including believing that he had direct contact with God. The difference between Freud and Michel Foucault becomes key to reading modern literature. It seems that madness becomes not a danger for the writer but a condition that attends writing, as though writing had become madness, a marker of alienation.