This chapter begins with John Ashbery's 1994 work: 'The Ridiculous Translator's Hopes'. What Ashbery's poem allows one to make out are Avery Gordon's ghosts. It allows one to wonder if one is already among them, or at the very least what one is doing here or there. There is nothing in the poem itself, the biography of the poet, or the literary commentary on his work to say that the Ridiculous Historian cannot do this. This is not the case with W. H. Auden, or his poetry, his life, or his commentators. One has to reckon with books like 'Auden and Christianity', many accounts of his God, and his contributions to theology. In 'Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie', Thomas Rymer has much to say about Ridiculous Poets whose verse was more History than Poesie.

The author establishes a discursive context in which to read the orphan figure as embodying a difference within the family. To do so, she details the figure of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights against a number of discourses, namely, those of the foundling, the orphan as foreigner, and the orphan as criminal. Heathcliff embodies the difference within which plays a pharmaceutical function disrupting yet ultimately reinforcing notions of family and nation. Throughout Heathcliff remains unknowable and unassimilable: a racialised foreign figure with no known origins who attempts to dispossess the indigenous families. The author further details Heathcliff in light of a strand of popular writing which narrativises the orphan figure as embodying difference within Victorian culture. She finally offers a representative example of a few types of popular orphan narratives in order to explore the concern with the orphan figure in these types of popular writing.

This introduction provides a rationale for querying and queering the way state citizenship functions. Beginning from a reading of Indigenous author Thomas King’s 1993 short story, ‘Borders’, the introduction offers a justification for rethinking citizenship. Drawing on border studies, queer theory, and political developments at North American borders since 9/11, the introduction shows how reading can translate into civic action that foregrounds recognition, rights, and representation in North America.

This chapter explores Dominican-American author Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Reading the novel as a Caribbean text that offers a revisionist history of the Dominican Republic, the chapter theorises how Diaz crafts a ‘dictator-narrator’ in protagonist Yunior, whose presence allows readers to reflect not only on the dangers of dictatorship but also on the transformative possibilities of multilingual, hemispheric citizenship. At its core, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao allows readers to reflect on the hybridity of contemporary American literature, offering routes to conceiving of citizenship as an archipelago of rights and responsibilities, as well as readerly, participatory, and queer.

This chapter examines a range of Canadian Métis writer Gregory Scofield’s poetry, exploring his revisionist treatment of the history of the Métis and other Indigenous people in Canada. As it provides a history of the Métis, the chapter also explores the impact of Scofield’s two-spirit queer identification, his codeswitching, and his community work, on his poetry. Writing in Métis and two-spirit vernaculars, Scofield’s hybrid vernacular texts become vehicles for his critique of Canadian citizenship in the case of the Métis.

This chapter considers the decline of representations of the Existential drinker figure, partly a consequence of Existentialism’s fading from view as its ideas became assimilated, diluted, or discredited, and its major proponents faded away. It also notes an increasing antagonism towards the writer-drinker, once a staple of twentieth-century literature. The change in the philosophical, literary, and cultural landscape is seen in a number of texts where the protagonist is a committed drinker: Ivan Gold’s Sams in a Dry Season (1990), John O’Brien’s Better (2009, published posthumously), and Patrick de Witt’s Ablutions (2009). The acceptance of a neo-liberal world devoid not just of meaning but the search for meaning often characterises the nihilistic and hedonistic impulses of these novels.

Historical novels do not carry any authority as historical statements about the periods to which they refer. Nevertheless, creative literature is valuable for the insight it offers into a writer's intellectual and social context; the popularity of authors in the past and the longevity of their work may be because they successfully articulated 'the values and preoccupations of literary contemporaries'. In 1960, E. P. Thompson produced a detailed reading of W. H. Auden's 'Spain 1937', declaring that the excisions and alteration that Auden made in the 1950s compromised his whole achievement as a poet. Thompson's 'Chemical Works I' is a song of what happens to human souls and psyches drowned in a relentless barrage of noise. Reading poetry is hard, and takes something out of a person. Reading history is so much easier, as the worker in Bertolt Brecht's 'A Worker Reads History' knew.

John Donne was deeply influenced by the theatre and, as the chapter elucidates, this also shows in his religious poetry. In the Holy Sonnets (~1609), he repeatedly has a speaker reflect on or address his soul as in a soliloquy. The poems thus become stages on which the soul goes through stages in life towards death. The soul itself may become the theatron, the place of dramatic action, and the speaker is often doubled in being an actor and an audience in the scene presented. The sonnet itself structurally shows similarities to drama in which the speaker finally arrives at a climax and a happy ending, which turns these poems into divine comedies. Drama in the sense of dramatic allusion, the stage and stages, the communicative situation of the soliloquy, provides a key to processes of recognition and anagnorisis within these texts. At the same time, these dramatic elements help to explain the popularity of the soliloquy in contemporary drama.

According to the dictates of neoclassicism, history was meant to be a narrative rather than a descriptive form. By substituting an iconic portrait of a particular person or scene for a general account of the historical process, history painters transformed their human subjects into metonyms, reiterating in visual terms the connection between great men and great events. The panegyric that marked the commencement of the painter poem's popularity in England as a historiographical form was Edmund Waller's Instructions to a Painter. The months following the poem's initial appearance accordingly witnessed a flurry of satiric and panegyric responses, many of them taking up the advice-to-a-painter form. Among the most prominent of the resultant poems were three satires by Andrew Marvell: The Second Advice to a Painter, The Third Advice to a Painter, and Last Instructions to a Painter.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book argues that the prevalence of the orphan figure can be explained by the central role which the family played at the Victorian era. In stressing the importance of family, home and blood relations, it offers a window on to a number of discourses on the importance of the family in circulation during the Victorian era. The book considers various literary examples, and discusses a conceptual model to understand orphanhood. The book also argues that the orphan plays a pharmaceutical function in Victorian culture: the orphan embodies a surplus excess to be expelled to the colonies. It finally looks at the exiling of difference, in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and the return of the exiled orphan from the colonies to the heart of empire, London, in Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

This chapter identifies three postmortem tributes: the first for William Brooke, Lord Cobham, in Henry V; a second for Henry Carey, first Baron Hunsdon, in King John; the third for Carey and his son, George, in Hamlet Q2. In recovering these lost encomia the chapter reveals the historical figures behind some of William Shakespeare's most remarkable, memorable characters. There is evidence that Shakespeare placed the death of Sir John Falstaff immediately after Henry's discovery of the conspiracy of Richard, Earl of Cambridge. King John's most admired Shakespearean creation is dismissed as a supernumerary: 'King John with Philip Faulconbridge as hero is a play without form and void, signifying nothing. Remarkable Antiquities of the City of Exeter is a tale uncannily parallel to Shakespeare's anecdote of Lamord. In the Folio the 'dram of eale' soliloquy has vanished and Lamord has become Lamound.

In William Shakespeare's Richard II, the tragic protagonist is noted for his addiction to narrative. Any oblique representation of Mary Stuart in Richard II is, however, far from the clear celebratory picture offered by the Jesuit martyr. Perhaps as a result of Shakespeare's own turbulent relationship with forms of Catholicism, it is deeply ambivalent. Shakespeare's play uses the feminine Isabella to represent the French dimension of Mary Stuart's identity, but it is Richard who figures her role as tragic protagonist in Scotland and England. Through a cross-gendered representation, Shakespeare's play explores the nineteen-year struggle between two queens who both had to cope with the political challenge of identifying themselves as princes rather than women. In the absence of automatic male authority to command, Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I cultivated a specialised poetics of queenship, interweaving emblems, images, verbal and non-verbal languages, as Jennifer Summit has noted.

Erotic romance, Middle Eastern in its provincial origins but European in its flavour, achieved a spectacular flourishing between 1579 and 1626 in the writings of Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and Mary Sidney wroth. The romances of arguably the most rhetorically sophisticated and politically aware authors of the age represent the ultimate English response to lengthy, complex and rhetorically artistic Greco-Roman prose fiction. Readily available during the Renaissance was Aphthonius's Progymnasmata, the popular students' guide to the forms of artful discourse practised by rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic. Philostratus composed his series of short rhetorical exercises to provide his students with models of how to describe scenes from nature. As one of his aims is to teach the art of ecphrasis, literally 'speaking out', Philostratus incorporates scenes purporting to represent stories, paintings and sculpture.

In the process of resurrecting the dead, William Shakespeare's theatre obviously has a direct role to play in reconstituting and rehabilitating the transformative interaction of culture and memory. This chapter interrogates the ethical and political implications of this hermeneutic encounter in relation to tragedy and history. In Richard II, determining moments of death stage numerous and indeterminate figures of and from which to choose 'otherness', a form of testimony which incorporates an endlessly inventive 'oppositional historical consciousness' and which also constitutes its own form of counter-history. As such the 'poetry' as well as the performance of grief often conveys an autobiographical intensity which is at once uncommon and 'singular' and yet also somehow typical or exemplary. In Richard II the lyrical excess of native language is certainly linked insistently to a more haunting sense of inheritance and testimony.