Alejo Carpentier’s biographical self-fashioning, particularly his fabricated Cuban birth, is explored through his early journalism and correspondence with his mother. The chapter argues that Carpentier’s “performative self,” evident in his fashion writing under a female pseudonym, demonstrates a fluidity of identity and a deliberate crossing of borders. This performative aspect is further illuminated by his Oedipal relationship with his mother, as revealed in his letters, where he assumes the role of a husband-substitute after his father’s abandonment. The analysis challenges interpretations that attribute Carpentier’s self-invention to trauma, instead highlighting a consistent “chameleon-like sense of self” that permeated his work and public persona, ultimately contributing to his success and the construction of Latin American literary identity.

Allen Ginsberg’s Judaism is a fraught subject. Although he was brought up in a family that felt itself unquestionably Jewish, his parents did not practice Judaism as a religion. The family felt keenly the brunt of antisemitism and were deeply traumatized by the Holocaust. Both “Howl” and “Kaddish” bear its unmistakable impact. Unlike his father and many others he knew, Ginsberg did not, though, become a booster for the state of Israel. In fact, he came to revile the concepts of nationhood and religious exclusivity, opting instead for an ethos of compassion and fellow feeling. His universalism linked him with secular Jewish pioneers such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, and Leon Trotsky, all of whom have been characterized as “non-Jewish Jews.” Ultimately, his Jewishness appears most strongly in his practice of “lovingkindness” and in his role as prophet against capitalist greed and militaristic warmongering, which allies him with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

The publication of Allen Ginsberg in Context marks a dramatic shift in Ginsberg Studies (and Beat Studies), clearing important new ground for scholarship on the poet. This volume offers a crucial reminder of the need for continued study of Ginsberg’s full body of work and widest range of influences. The case for Ginsberg’s importance has not always been as clear. Ginsberg’s considerable popular readership has not translated often enough into serious attention from scholars. Allen Ginsberg in Context signals to the larger critical community that Ginsberg’s life and work are essential to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, culture, and political activism. This book starts the necessary conversation as to why Ginsberg’s poetry can still matter. Ginsberg’s body of work might find its big-bang moment in the 1956 publication of “Howl” and the poem’s subsequent triumph against obscenity charges the following year, but his work in its totality can be seen as a primer for how to live and speak freely in a world that increasingly is bent upon state surveillance and restrictions upon movement and expression.

This chapter posits that domesticity played a central role in Ginsberg’s life and work. Although images of mobility recur in his work, reflections on his childhood home and his adult apartment life recur as well. The first section of the chapter interprets Ginsberg’s needs for both travel and a homelife as a nexus rather than a binary opposition. The second section provides an account of his discordant childhood home, a midlife pivot in his sense of the domestic, and the varying circumstances of his apartment existence in the East Village of Manhattan. The final section analyzes the role that home, neighborhood, and his “Jewish-enough” identity played in his poems, including “Manhattan May Day Midnight,” “Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters,” and “My Kitchen in New York.” In Ginsberg's later poems, home is an arena of presentness and a harbor of writing.

In this chapter, the only two British science fiction television series written directly for television in the 1980s are examined. The first, Knights of God (1987), is a deeply conservative King Arthur fantasy about a dystopian England taken over by a fascist organisation. Although it seems to be about resistance and freedom fighting, it soon becomes apparent that it is thinly disguised propaganda for the Church and other traditional British institutions. It uses the neoliberal tropes of ‘the hero’s journey’ and other conservative touchstones to tell its story. Star Cops (1987) is a wholly different enterprise. It tells the story of Nathan Spring, a detective who is sent to command the Star Cops – the police force on the moon. Drenched in neoliberal concepts, it presents a future where almost everything is controlled by private corporations, and almost everyone is governed by the logic of the marketplace.

This explains how I selected and presented approximately ten per cent of the original diaries, December 1833 to May 1836. The diary entries are presented as seven broad chronological sections.

Hayden White, like Geertz, believes in the interpretive turn, but for his discipline of history the element of fiction is central. White makes clear that the facts of history are not sufficient; alone they lead to a chronicle, what Benedetto Croce called “one damned thing after another.” Weaving the strands or facts of history into a narrative involves elements of fiction: to make a story out of the bare bones of history is a literary craft. The first part of this chapter considers the art of historical narrative in the context of “Mr Holmes” and “The West Wing”. White goes on to explain that one key element in the story of history is the concept of plot or what he calls “emplotment”. This concept is considered in the next section, in conjunction with “The Second Best Marigold Hotel” and “House of Cards”. Emplotment can only be successfully achieved by use of tropology and culture, elements of rhetorical style necessary for history. In the third section, “Frozen” and “The Railwayman” serve as examples.