This essay explores how Mary Franklin, a newly discovered female voice, used her private manuscript devotions to create an identity that could defy and defend against State persecution. As a mother and a Presbyterian minister’s wife, living in a Restoration London notoriously dangerous to dissenters, Franklin chronicles the trials her family endured for their religious beliefs in a manuscript account, later titled by Franklin’s granddaughter ‘The Experience of my dear grandmother, Mrs Mary Franklin’. A recourse to scripture proofs, coupled with her own dramatic experiences, allowed Franklin to write a spiritual autobiography that situated her belief in a distinct Protestant past, as well as in the present tumultuous times she was living in. This essay reveals how Franklin’s devotion protected her against the tribulations of persecution and defined her identity as a dissenter.

An important aim throughout Nietzsche and Irish modernism is to reexamine the relationship between literature and philosophy by rigorously historicising their encounter in modern Irish culture. After the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Nietzsche’s name quickly became prominent in Irish (and English) newspapers as shorthand for a ‘Gospel of the Devil’, associated with German militarism and its perceived threat to Christian civilisation. Chapter 4 documents the emergence of this strain of propaganda in the writings of Thomas Kettle, who wrote an introduction to Daniel Halevy’s The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (1911), which expounds on ‘the duel between Nietzsche and civilisation’, even as it dismisses his philosophy as nothing more than a rather vivid form of poetry. Three years later, on a gun-running mission for the Irish Republic Brotherhood, Kettle witnessed the so-called Rape of Belgium and immediately wrote a series of articles for the Daily News, attributing the rapid escalation of German belligerence to Nietzsche’s destructive influence. Within a few short weeks, a host of Irish clerics reaffirmed the connection, as they negotiated their difficult position between the Home Rule cause and the British war effort by arguing in the popular press that Ireland and England must stand together against the ‘poison doctrines’ of the German philosopher. By November 1914, Yeats could rather mischievously evoke Nietzsche’s name in Kettle’s presence at a nationalist celebration, drawing rousing applause from the Dublin audience for this now explicitly anti-British (if also anti-Christian) figure. During the course of the war, the Nietzsche controversy raged on in newspapers across the Allied powers, while Yeats remained largely silent about the conflict and its catastrophic impact on Western civilisation. But, in January 1919, only days after the armistice was signed, he would return to some of Nietzsche’s most provocative tropes in a series of allusions in ‘The Second Coming’, a poem that famously responds to the trauma of the war years by transforming the imagery of Christian faith into a nightmarish vision of the Antichrist. The final section of the chapter focuses on Yeats’s poem in the context of the Nietzsche controversy in order to read it in terms of the philosopher’s radical transvaluation of its values, which suggests a daunting future for both postwar Europe and postcolonial Ireland.

This essay examines how lay scribal practices of sermon note-taking linked individual spiritual crises to collective experience and became a family project. Examining the sermon notes kept by the Gell household from the 1640s to the 1710s reveals them as devotional prompts that sustained the family’s Presbyterianism across two generations. In evaluating the figure of Katherine Gell, this essay also demonstrates the crucial role played by women within the home in sustaining a nonconformist devotional culture both before and after the Restoration.

This chapter locates Antony and Cleopatra on the Jacobean stage. It contextualises the regime change which the play dramatises to the regime change then occupying England after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. It proposes a connection between The Masque of Blackness, ordered by Queen Anna for the Christmas revels in 1605, when she and her female courtiers blacked up to play Egyptian ‘daughters of Niger’, and both Shakespeare’s Othello, staged at court in November 1604, and Antony and Cleopatra, 1606. Like The Masque of Blackness, Shakespeare’s Egyptian play put a black queen on stage. Was Shakespeare’s play a sequel to Anna’s? How was the Jacobean casting managed? No doubt Richard Burbage was Shakespeare’s first Antony. But who first played Cleopatra?

The second chapter turns to the writing of South African journalist, jazz musician and composer Todd Matshikiza. Through close readings of his columns for Drum magazine and his autobiography, Chocolates for My Wife (1961), the chapter argues that Matshikiza’s accounts of early 1960s London engage with the interplay between London, South Africa and a wider global ‘Black Atlantic’ imaginary. Drawing on Michael Titlestad’s theorisations of jazz and South African writing, the chapter argues that Matshikiza sets up a counterpoint between London and South Africa, exploring the histories and colonial legacies of both places, while expressing transnational solidarities with a global black diaspora through his improvisational language. The chapter also explores how Matshikiza’s wanderings through London, depicted in his writing, are an expression of de Certeau’s errant pedestrians’ shortcutting of surveillant power.

This chapter examines Edward’s philosophy, focusing on his understanding of conformity and consent in the aftermath of his research for his historical oeuvre: Expedition to the Isle of Rhé and The life and raigne of King Henry the Eighth. Unlike Descartes, Edward Herbert sidelines uncertainty and presents his philosophical system as a set of irrefutable propositions. In laying out the criteria for truthful cognition, he exalts conformity and consent as epistemological ideals. These ideals – when tested by the perils of praxis – will underwrite a stance of political neutrality. For Herbert, consent, even as he elides it with a sensation of internal approval, is also a cosmopolitan principle with both spatial and temporal dimensions, open to the world. Herbert gradually changes in the face of personal setbacks and turbulent public circumstances as well as owing to his intellectual work of the 1630s. Yet the seeds for this change are already present in his philosophy, growing out of the appreciation for beauty implicit in his ideals. Edward Herbert sees schooled detachment and political impartiality, the twin pillars of his philosophy, as having aesthetic, metaphysical, rhetorical, empirical, and scientific meanings that will enable peoples around the globe to live in harmony. In Edward Herbert’s optimistic imagination, cosmopolis is on the horizon, almost within reach. Most importantly, this chapter shows that while Edward has often been seen as anticipating ideas of toleration later developed by thinkers such as Locke, his own understanding of a human communion was actually more encompassing because it looked beyond the boundaries of Christendom.

This chapter argues that fiction in the genre of the 'stud file', or the catalogue of sexual partners, shows how queer culture has been reductive in precisely some of the ways that queer theory has been averse to. Works by John Rechy, for example, such as City of Night (1963), Numbers (1967) and The Sexual Outlaw (1977), amongst others, are repeatedly 'reduced' to descriptions of a gay cruising or casual sex world that is itself described as performing various kinds of 'reduction’. Works in a related vein, such as Jane DeLynn's Don Juan in the Village (1990), are similarly built around a restricted or reduced way of relating within a form of sexual seriality. For queer theory, and many other theoretical projects influenced by post-structuralism, reductionism has been imagined as the problematic expression of a pernicious 'logic of identity’. This chapter suggests that Rechy’s writing in particular encourages us to recognise the reductiveness of queer culture, which queer theory may prefer to disavow.

The epilogue is focused on Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005), which recounts the disappearance of a South African student of Muslim heritage in post-9/11 London. Shukri’s novel is presented as an example of post-transitional South African writing, which travels beyond the national context to include reflections on global forms of both conviviality and racism. The Silent Minaret continues a tradition within South African writing that engages with the global, while remaining rooted in the twin locations of South Africa and London, and through its introduction of other locations, such as Palestine, the novel also exemplifies the reach of contemporary South African literature beyond South Africa and the West. Furthermore, Shukri moves beyond a comparison of national contexts since he aims towards the transcendence of nationalisms or national identities altogether.

This chapter explores the mystery of togetherness, as variously embodied in Cassian’s monasticism, a medieval version of the Narcissus myth, and the thinking of philosopher Martin Buber. Even when one plus one fails to add up, these texts suggest, some broken community may nonetheless persist; even when it looks like we’re getting nowhere, something in us may in fact be moved. Love may, in this way, not reduce to a subject or an object; it may be neither of one nor of two.

This chapter reads the account of Jesus’ transfiguration in Matthew’s Gospel alongside its medieval interpreters, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, as well as poets Matt Donovan, Marie Howe, Lynda Hull and Laura Kasischke. To be transfigured, in these accounts, is to have one’s boundaries at once contested and reinforced; it is to experience the body as newly bounded and newly luminous, precisely inasmuch as it is bound to the bodies of others.

This essay explores how the acts and attitudes during infirmity, in manuscript and printed accounts by both men and women during the seventeenth century, were often theologically cohesive. Patients demonstrated a precise and widely shared biblicism – that is to say, they used the same scriptures – in their sickbed writings. This created a common devotional identity that ran across denominational, social and political lines, and at times crossed the confessional divide. By identifying and examining these shared scriptural patterns, one sees how the ill incorporated broad and attested doctrinal behaviours during their illnesses. This essay also demonstrates how popular sickbed piety was as likely to reject as to reflect the devotional models espoused in printed ‘how-to’ manuals.

This chapter examines lesbian feminist speculative fiction from across the twentieth century in order to reconsider queer theory’s widespread rejection of reproduction, particularly in the wake of Lee Edelman's critique of 'reproductive futurism’. In queer theory, reproduction often signifies as simply a dreary and repetitive commitment to more of the same thing, and is frequently linked intrinsically, in any form, to a dominant and conservative heteronormative order. However, the fiction that this chapter addresses demonstrates the value to queer worlds of biological, social and cultural reproduction. In novels ranging from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) to Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), to Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines (1978) to Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground (1979) to Nicola Griffith's Ammonite (1993), the women-only lesbian worlds presented are structured around forms of reproduction – both biological and social copying (sometimes literalised in the form of human cloning) – that are none the less in no way heteronormative or even heterosexual. Moreover, these novels dramatise the importance of structures for reproduction – for keeping things the same – especially where the conditions being reproduced are the result of minoritarian struggle.

Both Edward Herbert and Thomas Carew have been seen as important and early followers of John Donne, but during their time working together in France they also encountered another important mutual poetic influence: Giambattista Marino (also Giovan Battista Marini, 1569–1625). Their adaptations of Marino’s verse, through the lens of their respective poems “A Description” and “The Complement,” rework Marino’s “Durante il bagno.” More broadly, Herbert and Carew, along with others such as William Drummond of Hawthornden and Samuel Daniel, were conduits for Marino’s influence in England, arguably leading to the achievements of the later community of poet-translators that centered around Thomas Stanley (who referred to themselves as the “Order of the Black Riband”) in the 1640s. Herbert’s engagement with Marino was also central in developing his own kind of poetic “wit,” which evolved at an angle to that of Marino and Carew; his wit finds its expression in images and metaphors of reproduction and renewal, which in fact dominate his French-phase poetry, and relate to new acts of poetic renewal. Herbert’s adaptations of Marino’s verse placed him within a larger European literary culture, which included Italy and France. The chapter engages in a new mode of translation criticism.