This chapter examines life writing texts created by out gay Black men. These texts – written and cinematic – seek to archive Black gay existence in historical and social contexts that are often threatening. More than just records of life, they question assumed knowledge and the certainty we have about the ideologies that order our lives. For these artists, autobiography, a form of ostensible transparency or showing, is about making transparent destructive ideologies. The chapter is structured around four key themes (sex and sociality, injury and identity, the feminine within, and the power of opacity), each of which identifies a recurring strategy in Black gay art making as well as a narrative mechanism for questioning normativity and revealing the constraints placed on Black gay men’s lives. The discussion centers on the following artists: Samuel Delany, RuPaul, Saeed Jones, and Marlon Riggs.

Heresy was a concept by which Joyce understood his role as evangelist of a new literature. The theology of the heretic Giordano Bruno informs mystical religiosity in a range of Joyce’s fiction; it also influenced Joyce’s overall view of his own mission to challenge Catholicism, which finds its ultimate expression in Finnegans Wake. The place that Bruno affords sensuality within pantheism appealed to Joyce. From Bruno’s thought the corporeal – and sexuality in particular – is significant to reflections on the soul in Joyce’s early fiction, such as Stephen Hero. A heretical reading of St Augustine’s felix culpa, the ‘happy sin’, is central to Joyce’s later novels, underpinning both Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and the vision of God as masturbator in Finnegans Wake. As Joyce’s last novel devotes considerable attention to the work of St Augustine and Newman, and stylistic dialogue with the Bible, the overall task of the Wake can be considered heretical.

The Introduction outlines the terms of the problematic. It seeks to resituate Fanon historically in terms of his own cultural, social and political environment. It also adumbrates the itinerary of his project as a humanism but also as the intellectual of decolonization.

American gay religious autobiography is positioned at the site of contest between the Puritan tradition that holds that sexual urges are sinful and must be suppressed if one is to achieve godliness and the American celebration of individual liberty that involves a rebellion against tyrannical social forces. In a radical reversal of the model provided by Augustine’s Confessions, gay religious life writers invariably discover that organized religious institutions hinder one’s spiritual development and that the genuinely spiritual life begins when one accepts the need to be true to one’s sexual self.

Nearing the Comedy’s end, Dante offers a beautiful depiction of an ordered whole. But a countercurrent of intellectual unrest also winds through its conclusion.It’s evident in Beatrice’s parting words when, in the awe-inspiring Empyrean, she dwells on gritty details of earthly politics; when her words elicit from Dante a prayer to his beloved, the only prayer he utters in the poem; and when, Beatrice gone, his doubts persist as to what principle of justice, if any, governs this vision.

Throughout Paradiso, the link between that question and the character of the whole has been expressed in the problem of the One and the Many. That problem is thematic regarding the Primum Mobile’s role in Creation, where the temporal and the timeless must somehow connect. Beatrice bequeaths the perplexity of the nexus as a gift to Dante and to whomever would lead the inquisitive life. However, Beatrice’s successor, Bernard, discourages further questioning. His prayer to Mary balances Dante’s to Beatrice, the difference between them depicting alternative ways of life.The Comedy’s final words express the heartening claim that “Love” moves the perceivable whole.But the poem’s last words do not coincide with its peak. Its ends, much as humanity’s, remain distinct.

Dante encounters a convention of famous minds moving circularly in unison, like the sun, an image of perfect intelligibility. He focuses on Aquinas’s synthesis of faith and reason, which purports to resolve those perplexities that vex previous Heavens. Dante’s doubts disrupt the harmony; he wonders how it’s possible to err, to “wander” from “the straight way,” as he had done. “Thomas of Aquino” addresses Dante’s wonder.

Dante’s verdict on Aquinas’s synthesis turns on the difference between the “Angelic Doctor” and Solomon. Their relative rank reflects the capacity of prudence and poetry versus law and deduction from abstract principle to understand and guide humanity. These alternative views of wisdom rest, in turn, on the question of happiness or the true good, the prior, shared concern that both faith and reason address. Aquinas’s thought answers to a particular view of good, one that makes this Heaven’s inhabitants exult on hearing that their “desire for their dead bodies” will be fulfilled.Dante thus brings readers to ask if the intrinsically individual good of resurrection can be the supreme good for a being that can ask the question of happiness, a being that can “wander.”

The autobiographical act of coming out was one of the central gestures of US gay liberation. In the late 1960s and 1970s coming out was part of a new defiant way of living homosexuality and promised to transform the social world by showing how gay people were everywhere. Yet, in the period since this time, coming out has tended to be viewed much more suspiciously. For queer theory, coming out is associated with a naïve belief in subjective coherence, stable identity, and liberal personhood, all constructed or produced on the basis of suppressing both social and psychic difference. This chapter challenges this established perspective by foregrounding the wide variety of autobiographical writings in which gay men came out in this period. Far from a step into straightforward coherence, finding identity in these texts is often a fractured and fraught undertaking. The chapter covers a wide range of material, from single-author autobiographies published by mainstream presses to numerous anthologies published by grassroots initiatives. The sheer variety of texts addressed further challenges the singular narrative about coming out that has become established within queer scholarship.

This chapter focuses on the enduring popularity of revenge tragedy on the early modern stage, examining the social, political and theatrical conditions that led to the genre’s development. Rather than seeing the representation of revenge onstage as indicative of a vengeful population, the chapter argues that these tragedies offer subtle and sophisticated commentaries on their historical moment.Revenge tragedies are most often studied in terms of metatheatricality and intertextuality, but this fails to appreciate the genre as politically charged and socially inflected. The chapter demonstrates that far from being an isolated figure, the revenger is a radical agent of communal political action in the works of Kyd, Marston, Chettle and Middleton. The chapter’s case study focuses on the critically neglected Tragedy of Hoffman, which sees the intersection of discourses of piracy, insurrection and legitimacy on the early modern stage. Characters systematically subvert traditional binaries: lawful duke/convicted pirate; virtuous mother/villainous son; pious forgiveness/sinful rebellion. The text also playfully negotiates its relationship with Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the figure of Prince Jerome. By combining intertextual critique with radical politics, Chettle’s play offers a useful model for the re-examination of the revenge genre more widely.

Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon exemplify changing mentalities in relation to questions of belief. The two poets debated the question of personal and communal being, or ontology, in an early poetic exchange and continued the dialogue throughout their careers. A ‘Sense of Place’ is considered the dynamic force in Heaney’s imagination, his sacramental treatment of the Irish landmass endowing him with bardic credentials. Heaney’s perceived poetic nationalism, his fixation on bogs and earth mothers, is gently mocked in several Mahon poems. A close reading of Heaney’s critical essays on Mahon shows Heaney denying Mahon the status of a ‘visionary’ poet and aligning the latter’s cosmopolitanism with alienation and Protestant displacement. Heaney’s articulation of at once a retro- and post-Catholic theology emerged after his receipt of the Nobel Prize. While Mahon’s writing offers no such belief system, his poetry, like Heaney’s, has supplied (particularly since the pandemic) a kind of religious consolation to an agnostic age.

This chapter argues that contemporary memoirs by gay men about transactional sex challenge assumptions that commercial and noncommercial sex divide into separate spheres, and that sex can be cleanly differentiated from other, mundane practices. While these memoirs contain many unambiguous depictions of transactional sex, they also depict moments where transactional arrangements yield intimacies that are far more difficult to categorize. In addition, they raise questions regarding where the “sex” in the sex trade both ends and begins.

Whether on- or off-stage, the priests of Irish drama exert power to censor debate and restrict behaviour both in public and domestic spaces. John Millington Synge explores the agency of the absent priest whose parishioners become his delegates. Playwrights such as John B. Keane demonstrate the consequences of defying the priest. Such assertive characters are often female, as in works by Sean O’Casey and James McKenna. While O’Casey satirises the priest’s excessive influence, Brian Friel portrays the clergy’s ability to detroy individual reputations with pathos. Following a tradition of antagonistic relations between Anglo-Irish drama and religion, and in contexts of social change, authors such as Tom Murphy, Sebastian Barry, Jim Nolan, and Billy Roche consider topics such as the sacred, epiphany, and forgiveness in strikingly priestless dramas.

In England, the tragedy of state has offered a means to debate forms of government and the representation of the nation, addressing topics such as the origins of Britain, its division into kingdoms, conflict that erupts into civil war, and the state as a body politic that sickens due to the moral corruption of the court. The tragedy of state exposes the weaknesses of society, yet it also stages the dream of a cure for the nation. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is in many ways strongly connected to the conventions of the tragedy of state, but this chapter discusses how its interest in the presence of the supernatural leads to a questioning of what is natural or unnatural in the state of Scotland: endangered by both human fallibility and a climate of internal decay, it is caught in a cycle of treason that frustrates efforts at national regeneration.

Introduces the concept of the volume and provides brief outlines of the essays.