This chapter first presents instances of a speaker addressing his soul in the Holy Sonnets to then move on to the history and tradition of the soliloquy as so(u)le-talk. The soliloquy – or soliloquium – was defined by Augustine and can be regarded as a ‘dialogue of one’, a notion taken up by Donne in ‘The Extasie’ and in his religious poems. This concept can also be found in the translation by Thomas Rogers of Thomas à Kempis’ De imitatione Christi which he titled Soliloquium Animae: The sole-talk of the Soule. The chapter goes on to link the devotional practice of the soliloquy with the theatre by looking into early modern meanings and usage of the word ‘soliloquy’ (and soliloquium). It then presents examples in poetry and on the stage by considering the practice of meditation as well as the final soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Richard III and his Sonnet 146. Concerns about the soul are expressed dramatically in poetry by taking recourse to the form of the soliloquy.

Historians writing in the Restoration and early eighteenth century inherited a number of conflicting theories about the patterns and purposes of history, two of which specifically identified historical change as proceeding according to a consistent overall pattern. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries produced many accounts of the past in allegorical form, but John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel is often cited as the original and best, example of the genre. His dissolution of the poem's defining metaphor truncates the work's narrative arc, rendering it, like Andrew Marvell's satires, 'partial' in formal as well as ideological terms. While few writers could have failed to see the political diplomacy in the poem's suspended plotline, Samuel Johnson was by no means the only reader to criticize Dryden's unabashed abandonment of his poem's symbolic narrative.

European erotic romance offered Amyot the opportunity to teach his stylised Greco-Roman language and rhetoric, and, through it, Christian ethics, morality, and personal and political governance. It became the tool of nationalists. More theoretical politicisation of the genre occurred, initially by monarchomachist Protestant publishers and translators of Heliodorus, then by adapters such as Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and Mary Sidney wroth. Sidney's Defence of Poetry contains a parallel argument that clearly differentiates between an ideal factual history and a fictional allegory. If European erotic romance could contain semi-biographical personae, it was on the understanding that they should be heavily idealised to conform to the model characters created by the ancient sophists. Translators' and publishers' dedications by Protestant monarchomachists connected erotic romance with characters exhibiting political, cultural and intellectual superiority.

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano places the committed drinker, in the form of ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin, in the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ festival, so that the main character encounters ‘hell’ in physical and spiritual dimensions. The novel is technically innovative in its aim to register the subjective experience of the Existential drinker: Geoffrey Firmin’s world is constructed through a highly individualised, expressionistic symbolism, a mid-century representation of the modern, alienated self, abandoned and suffering despair in a Godless world – the latter made evident by the novel’s attention to the rise of totalitarianism, which forms the backdrop to the events here on a day close to the onset of the Second World War. There is discussion of the novel’s difficulty and form, and a comparison of some aspects of the novel with Kafka’s The Trial, and how these relate to representation of the Existential drinker.

In eighteenth-century England, if a household servant with writing abilities was needed, then it was the cook who was sought after, as Elizabeth Hands' Mrs Domestic points out. This chapter talks about the works of kitchen cooks and maid servants who were also poetical servants. The talents of Stephen Duck, the thresher poet, were thought to have flourished in inverse proportion to his climb up the ladder of patronage. Mary Leapor served in at least two Northamptonshire gentry households during her brief life, producing there a corpus of poetry. Ann Yearsley was not Hannah More's servant, though she had much to do with More's cook and kitchen: her poetry came into More's life through the kitchen door. W. H. Auden noted that satire, like Hands' satire, flourishes in a homogenous society where satirist and audience share the same view as to how normal people can be expected to behave.

Melanie Klein, unlike other psychoanalysts, makes no distinction between introjection and incorporation. The infant incorporates, introjects, what it perceives as the mother's qualities, which become therefore inner objects, good and bad, within the self, as it projects bad and good objects on to the mother. The Fort! Da! game is essential material for Klein. The child in Klein alternates between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions. Klein's point about 'projection' is that it involves the child splitting itself, so that the good, or the bad parts are separated from the self, and go into the other: it is a schizoid position. The interest in different forms of creativity associates with the relationship between Klein and 'object relations' psychoanalysts: Fairbairn, already mentioned, whose work was particularly taken up by Harry Guntrip, and Donald Winnicott, whose work was adopted by Masud Khan.

The chapter concentrates on Nuala O’Faolain’s journalism, several media appearances (including her final interview on Irish radio just weeks before her death in 2008), and the astonishing international success of her confessional memoir, Are you somebody? In particular, the chapter considers her enduring fascination and involvement with Ireland and Irish culture, despite her extensive and sometimes despairing attention to the effects of misogyny, sectarianism and economic inequality in the country. It documents her treatments of sexuality and intimate relationships in the context of her experience of Ireland and of feminism. The chapter also details her account of the Irish family, of her own education and formation, and of her place in Irish literary, intellectual and political traditions.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. All writing, including the writing of history, is a form of poeisis. It is the making of something, at the same time as it continues the world of philosophers, turf-cutters, poets, and historians. In 'What W. H. Auden Can Do for You', Alexander McCall Smith discusses Auden as a poet in the tradition of Horace, teaching us to give thanks for the quotidian and to be concerned with the personal moral life. Ben Lerner's 'The Hatred of Poetry' provides a refashioning of what has already been made and, ultimately, about the making of poetry into prose. He says that many poets dislike poetry too; he quotes Marianne Moore's 'Poetry' for she was another who hated it well.

The afterword outlines some communalities between the subjects of this book and compares their treatments of certain recurrent preoccupations such as religion and the idea of home or homeland. Despite the fact that all these women are seen as heralds of the modern, the afterword comments on their rejection of aspects of the new Ireland, especially consumerism. While there have been major advances in gender equality in Ireland, many of the political aspirations of feminists such as these remain to be fulfilled.

In using Annius's pseudo-Berosus legend of Samothes to politicise his Old Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney appears to be unique among creative writers of the European Renaissance. Sidney uses erotic romance to demonstrate how all sense of political and social responsibility can be eroded by passion. Sidney and Hubert Languet were selective monarchomachists. While neither was motivated by Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible's savagery in Russia, both shared William of Orange's objection to Spanish Catholic tyranny, brutally enforced in the Netherlands. In 1590 Ponsonby published Fulke Greville's edition of the long, substantially revised first section of Sidney's working papers, referred to as the New Arcadia. In the New Arcadia, Sidney delicately develops the interplay between Philoclea's emotions. The symbolism of Philoclea's smock is both self-referential and directed at the reader.

This chapter is devoted to a political figure, Bernadette McAliskey. As Bernadette Devlin, she came to world-wide prominence as one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and she remains an important republican, socialist and feminist activist. Drawing on her early autobiography, interviews and a selection of key speeches delivered over the course of her career, the chapter argues that her accounts of family, community and nation are in some regards strikingly different from those of female writers and artists from the Republic of Ireland. The chapter concludes with a discussion of this material focused on ideas of home, the state and incarceration.

The words ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ feature in forty-three poems in this collection, indicative of the centrality of this theme to the radical discourse of the day. In an era of almost unprecedented repression and the curtailment of rights, working people wished to rid themselves of their chains and reclaim their lost liberties, as a way of asserting English nationalism in the face of a ‘foreign’ monarchy.The twelve poems and songs in this section celebrate both the forthcoming return of liberty, presented as a goddess, and Henry Hunt as liberty’s human representative. The restoration of liberty as an end to slavery is a common trope within English radical discourse and poems often depict the radical patriot endeavouring to rescue his country from an imposed and unnatural tyranny and return it to its true state of liberty; however, this trope predates the era of revolution when such rhetoric was common currency and this section explores the prevalence of the theme of liberty in the mid-eighteenth century and the subsequent influence of William Collins and Thomas Gray on the poems in this collection. The introduction also seeks to explain the lack of references to the transatlantic slave trade in these poems at a time when the issue of rights was at the fore. It includes poems written by Samuel Bamford and the Spencean Robert Wedderburn.

This chapter summarizes how the soliloquy helps the speaker approach his soul and meditate on its condition in Donne’s Holy Sonnets. The soliloquy is based on a double perspective: a speaker is confronted with his soul and talks to it, and he is affected as an anguished soul and talks to himself. The effect of this doubling is personification, which helps him express psychological urgency. The soliloquy thus turns out to establish a connection between religious self-assurance of redemption and the psychology of the speaker. Donne’s perpetual reference to drama through allusion and the communicative situation makes the Holy Sonnets extraordinary in their poetic quality. Donne’s speaker explores the condition of the soul, and, in this exploration, comes to know not only himself but also God.

This chapter explores the performance practice and aesthetic of Mexican-American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his performance troupe, La Pocha Nostra. The chapter identifies the queer rasquache elements of Gómez-Peña’s performance pieces and texts, drawing on material from the 1980s to after 9/11. The chapter shows that Gómez-Peña creates an alternative North America by presenting figurative crossings of the US–Mexico border. This alternative nation is free from border concerns and founded on a radically new understanding of citizenship. In allowing his audience entry into this alternative nation state, Gómez-Peña brings together a collective (if temporary) challenge to and re-evaluation of the role of the citizen.