The orphan functions as a pharmakon, a surplus, an excess to be excluded. Conceived of in this way, it is possible to see how orphanhood became a vehicle for emigration in a scheme which would both rid Britain of its surplus population and settle the colonies with white stock. The emigration schemes highlight the orphan's ambivalent position both at the core of the inside yet on the outside: an insider-out. The orphan is perceived of as a racialised other who is, through emigration, involved in a programme of racial cleansing as Victorian Britain attempted to displace the racialised indigenous other in the colonies. The orphan embodies a melancholia, a continual objectification and mourning for the unsustainable ideals of family and nation in Victorian culture.

Popular versions of history purveyed by the common folk diverged from historiographical conventions in various ways. The 'old folk' of 2 Henry IV assume the mantle of unofficial historians in their accepted capacity as 'time's doting chronicles'. Pierre Nora's suggestive analysis of the different modes of thought that have shaped modern historical consciousness and 'memory-history' offers a useful schema. This schema may enable to bring into sharper focus the competing models of 'history' at issue in 2 Henry IV. The need to reassess the productive role of memory in generating different forms of historical knowledge is emphasised by its omnipresence in 2 Henry IV. For, like the interest in rumour and prophecy, reinventing the 'times deceased' is a pastime that extends well beyond the lower orders.

The chapter considers the history of women in independent Ireland, up to the period of the emergence of Edna O’Brien in the early 1960s. It explores the representation of women in modern Irish literature since the time of W. B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, outlining the rejection of the Revival in the work of James Joyce and other writers. It analyses Edna O’Brien’s creative response to these romantic (Yeatsian) and modernist (Joycean) traditions of Irish literature and pays detailed attention to O’Brien’s description of girlhood, romance, female sexuality, colonialism and violence. O’Brien is discussed in relation to the key works The country girls trilogy; her two volumes of memoir, Mother Ireland and The country girl; and some of her recent fiction.

Like Roger North, John Oldmixon was a writer who maintained a longtime interest in historical and historiographical issues, and, like North, he experimented with many of the scholarly practices that came to define modern history as a genre. All of Oldmixon's historical writings The Critical History of England, Review of Dr Zachary Grey's Defence of our Ancient and Modern Historians, Clarendon and Whitlock Compar'd and his formal histories were explicitly concerned with the literary representation of past events. The Frances Stuart history's specific time frame was, of course, indicative of Oldmixon's ideological commitments. By restricting his account to national political events 'During the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart', Oldmixon was able to highlight the flaws and shortcomings of the policies and leaders he most wished to oppose.

Henry V may well extol the potential of English or 'British' nationhood especially as it is inspired by charismatic kingship; an audience's enthralment at this spectacle is undoubtedly sustained by influential acts of memory. Any attempt to develop a unifying tradition of remembrance is shattered in the mourning play by the melancholy recollection of loss, unfulfilled promises and the unappeased wants that follow in the wake of historical endeavour. For Walter Benjamin, the mourning play was a form of historical drama: 'the historical subject was particularly suited to the Trauerspiel,' although it was equally committed to a free handling of plot. One specific aspect of Benjamin's analysis of Trauerspiel lies in the distinction between 'first' and 'second nature'. This has a crucial bearing on the vision of history disclosed within The Life of Henry the Fift and within other Shakespearean histories especially in terms of their treatment of memory.

Catholic factions represented thoughts which may have been secretly held by many, an unspoken, illegal counter-history, which read the revolution of the past as a tragedy and looked for liberation in the future, in the counter-space of an invading army. William Shakespeare's near-contemporary Sir Philip Sidney defended poetry in The Defence of Poesy by arguing that 'the artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies'. The struggle between the artist and Clio is the subject of the most famous and the most modern depiction of Clio: Vermeer's The Allegory of Painting. Whether in the bored gaze of Le Sueur and De Stella's paintings or in Van Balen's depiction of history as an ecstatic dance, Clio is an ambivalent figure for history. Finally, the chapter also presents an outline of this book.

This chapter engages with Jacques Lacan's influential 'return to Freud', and that requires engaging with some Freud Sigmund texts: The Interpretation of Dreams, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In 1934, Lacan joined the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), which was part of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). Lacan's essay is fascinated by how the self formed in the mirror stage relates to the other. The 'symbolic order', a phrase from Lévi-Strauss, means language taken as a system, or structure of signs which the subject is brought into, under the authority of the father. Lacan discusses it in 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language'. Shoshana Felman emphasises that Lacan returns to Freud as to a master who knows that there is a blank in knowledge, which is the unconscious, and which Lacan images in the purloined letter.

The fictional politics of Mary Sidney Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania overcomes many of the obstacles to fulfilling the philhellene Protestant aspiration of European integration. In reality, despite the efforts of Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert and other philhellene Protestants, following Emperor Mathias's death on 20 March 1619, the Catholic status quo was bolstered by the election on 28 August 1619 of Ferdinand II. The politics of Urania are subsumed within Sidney Wroth's intimate revelations of her unfulfilled devotion to Herbert, and his intermittent but intense feelings for her. Urania is obsessed with romantic attachment, self-interest, political marriage and restitution of status to the dispossessed. Nonetheless, the narrative defies the conventions of both ancient and European erotic romance by concentrating on the author's multiple personae, rather than on the eponymous heroine.