This chapter examines significant gay American travel writers from the nineteenth century to the present who mine the political, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of travel writing to interrogate the experience of non-heteronormative life. From Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) to Robert McAlmon’s time in Paris in the 1920s and Edmund White’s landmark account of travel in the US (published in 1980), the chapter traces how experiences of exoticism, exile, and home have conditioned the representation of gay masculinity.

This chapter argues that John Webster’s The White Devil is grotesque by design, because it attempts to fuse two opposing philosophical polarities: the heightened emotions of the pleasure-seeking Epicurean with the undemonstrative façade of the Stoic. This fusion is acted out throughout the play’s dialogue, and embodied by the rival-murderers Lodovico and Flamineo. Webster’s ultra-violent finale becomes, in this reading, a dramatisation of Lucretian (Epicurean) physics – in which clashing bodies become swerving atoms, and Flamineo’s comically prolonged experience of death is informed by a hybrid acceptance of both ancient schools of thought.

Chapter 6 elaborates on the psycho-affective complexes engendered in ‘men of culture’ – namely the advocates of negritude and Arabo-Islamism – who turned to a mythic past to counter colonialism. The chapter shows that, for Fanon, decolonization must be sought at the level of European thought; it goes on to explore the influence which he had on Abelkabir Khatibi, Abdallah Laroui and Edward Said. The aim of the chapter is to deconstruct Western epistemology by considering the notions of ‘tradition’, ‘translation’ and the ‘humanities’ and to provide a critique of neo-liberalism and cultural imperialism.

In the early modern period, history and tragedy were understood to be intimately related. The terms are often paired on the title pages of printed text and they share common roots in the de casibus tradition which traces the life and death of nobles and rulers. One of Shakespeare’s central achievements as a writer of history plays was to fuse the de casibus model with chronicle sources to create a complex dramatisation of relationships between king and country. In chronological terms, John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck can potentially be inserted between Shakespeare’s Richard III and Henry VIII, and self-consciously addresses a lacuna in Shakespeare’s account of Tudor history. However, it is notably called not after a king (as Shakespeare’s histories are) but after a man who would be king. By boldly centralising Warbeck’s challenge to the crown, the play sets up a tension between historical priorities and dramatic priorities, in which Warbeck is a compelling protagonist. In so doing, Ford prises apart the elements of historical tragedy which Shakespeare so successfully synthesises.

The Comedy’s recantation of an error determines Paradiso’s role. The poem recants Convivio’s rationalism, not for the sake of faith but for philosophy properly understood. Dante initiates that change when, in Convivio IV, he pivots from a metaphysical impasse to investigating the meaning of nobility, a focus on human affairs that persists in the Comedy. Because wisdom must be sought, understanding the ground from which the search begins is crucial to its justification and, once it’s undertaken, to forestall passion-induced distortions. As a guide, Dante looks to Aristotle, the genuine Aristotle, not the derivative versions of his contemporaries.

But Dante’s path to the question of happiness, which animates philosophy, differs from Aristotle’s. To defend the philosophic life, Dante must liberate philosophy from subordination to faith. I here sketch the way in which the Comedy’s form aids him in this effort. In thus prosecuting political philosophy’s central task, the defense of the philosophic life, Paradiso fulfills its role not as the poem’s telos but as the portal to that life “figured” in Purgatorio’s Earthly Paradise.

Into the twentieth century, a tradition of domestic fiction communicated that Irish Catholic women must endure hardship, consoled by faith. Mary Anne Sadlier’s fiction propagates this lesson within an Irish diasporic readership. Yet anti-Catholic novels offered contrary narratives of gratuitous cruelty in Catholic life, as in works by Maria Monk and Rebecca Theresa Reed. In anti-Catholic lecture tours organised by Protestant activists, speakers such as former nun Edith O’Gorman alleged a humiliating convent life to which the Church lured girls with promises of peaceful devotion. Catholic responses attempted to silence O’Gorman, discounting her claims with suggestions of emotionalism and inconsistency. Like O’Gorman’s work, accounts of other ‘escaped nuns’ tended to be either instrumentalised or ridiculed by commentators in ways that overlooked the substance of the women’s claims.

The earth’s shadow darkens the initial Heavens of Dante’s ascent, the shadow waning the nearer a Heaven is to that of the Sun.The inhabitants of the last earth-shadowed Heaven turn to that Heaven hoping to be free from the imperfections of terrestrial existence.But these Heavens’ vestigial earthiness exerts an effect.Each focuses on a particular imperfection: the fragility of moral vows; the defect of human law as a vehicle of justice; and the reign of “mad love.”These produce an urge to transcend this region.

But Dante has readers assess the losses as well as the gains that accrue when we leave our world behind.This assessment puts reason on trial, its inadequacies seeming to sanction reason’s subordination to faith as provided in the vision that beckons above.But these Heavens ask not only whether that’s possible but desirable.Reason’s inadequacies are shown to be inseparable from moral responsibility, from more just politics, and from the desires that generate the Comedy.Asking whether the transcendence of terrestrial existence makes for a happier life, Dante gives readers cause to consider the possibility that these earth-shadowed Heavens are more than merely a necessary step on the way to perfection.

This Introduction frames the volume’s contents by parsing the two closely aligned categories “gay” and “autobiography.” It suggests that the notion of genre is key to unpacking the political and conceptual possibilities and difficulties inherent in these categories. Drawing on social semiotic and pragmatic accounts of genre, according to which genres are important not so much for what they are as for what they do, the Introduction suggests that gay autobiography constitutes a vital resource in which what it means to be gay has been and continues to be negotiated. Relating the emergence of both secular autobiography and gay identity to Foucault’s argument about modern liberal society’s deployment of biopower, the Introduction argues that although gay autobiography characteristically takes the form of a confession that indicates our ensnarement in biopower’s categories, it also importantly acts as a counterdiscursive connection between writers and communities of readers. The Introduction then summarizes the volume’s chapters, indicating the ways in which they engage with these general points of discussion as well as attending to the specificities of their analyses.

Chinese Daoism contains unexpected affinities with Irish spirituality. The identifications with nature in the Song of Amergin and ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ are comparable to principles that pervade works by Laozi and Zhuiangzi. Oscar Wilde, the first major Irish writer to read a Daoist text, was drawn to the concept of wuwei, which to Wilde was a mischievous commitment to inaction. Yeats’s work indicates wider reading on translated Daoist texts, and it is probably from Yeats (if not direct influence) that Daoist parallels occur in such canonical Irish texts as Finnegans Wake and Waiting for Godot. More recent writers Michael Hartnett and Thomas Kinsella turn their reading of Daoism back to the ancient Irish connection to nature.

Since its introduction to Early Ireland, Marianism has changed considerably, conforming to trends on the Continent to an extent but also developing idiosyncratically, as in fusions of Mary with St Brigid, and spoken charms. The Blessed Virgin became a paradigm for Irish femininity in the Free State and Republic. While the Second Vatican Council attempted to suppress Marianism, the devotion persisted in Ireland, with incidents such as the Moving Statues often taken by commentators to represent a clash between tradition and modernisation. To writers such as Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, and John McGahern, the debate over Marian apparitions anticipated a lacuna that could lead to the decline of Irish Catholicism. Written in this process of decline, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy – with Neil Jordan’s film adaptation – and Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary use Marianism to examine institutions and the function of belief, and to consider a Marianism that might exist apart from Christianity.

Long prior to public revelations of institutional abuse, novelists such as Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien portrayed the realities of institutions such as Magdalene Laundries, Industrial Schools, and Mother and Baby Homes. Works such as The Land of Spices and the Country Girls trilogy examine private and individual experiences of these institutions, and their effects on the subsequent lives of women. Catholic institutions in such fiction are populated by abusive clergymen, cruel nuns, and exploited chidren. More recent fiction has adjusted its focus to scrutinise the enabling role of the public in institutional abuse. Claire Keegan and Emma Donoghue are among the authors who remind us that Catholic institutional cruelty has been facilitated by society economically – by use of Magdalene Laundries, for example – and by wilful obliviousness to inconvenient truths.

Medical autobiographies begin as pseudonymous case histories for medical doctors’ consideration of supposedly pathological conditions, and become accounts of the ways mid-twentieth-century physicians’ psychiatric practices harmed and inhibited, and did not treat or assist, gay, memoir-writing patients. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts then recount their lives and therapeutic practices as living examples, which run contrary to conventional, prevailing professional opinions on homosexuality, and eventually negotiate their professions’ important, redefining turning points of 1969, 1973, and 1992. As a later generation narrates stories of addiction, disease, and physical abuse at family members’ hands, they can commence with the confident assumption of the health of a gay male body.  They can, unlike their predecessors, see homosexuality as the least of their worries. Initially a sign of a psyche gone awry, same-sex sexuality, over the course of five generations, becomes the healthy norm, from which the most recent gay American autobiographers draw their strengths, instead of seeking supposed cures.

Death has been a major focus of Ulster-Scots Presbyterian writing, from theeighteenth century to the present day. Eschatological, apocalyptic, anddispensational modes of thinking circulate, migrate, and manifest themselves invarious expressions of Ulster Protestant culture, both religious and secular. A futuristeschatology can be connected to the restlessness and motion characteristic of Ulstermigrants to the New World. The Ulster Kailyard tradition demonstrates narrativeexamples of death-in-life that form the atmosphere of Presbyterian piety. ArchibaldMcIlroy, Lydia Foster, and Florence Davidson offer an escape from the modern worldthrough an embracement of death and future judgement. The discourse around theNorth West 200 road race also participates in a fascination with time and eternity,and identifies speed and death as central to Ulster identity. The novels of JanCarson, following the tradition of Irish Protestant Gothic, articulate evangelicalconcepts of time and the embracement of death.