In this short study, it is argued that co-operation between exiled anti-apartheid activists and black British activists in London became more evident in the 1980s. Focusing on the relationships forged between writers and within literary institutions, this ‘detour’ explores these activist networks through a consideration of the history of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books and through an exploration of the role that South African Lauretta Ngcobo played in forging alliances between black British and South African women writers. Exiled South African writers like Ngcobo shaped the direction of British publishing and anti-racist politics, even as their end goal remained forging solidarities that would help to turn the tide of apartheid in South Africa.

This chapter concludes a discussion that has run through the whole book, beginning with the observation that Shakespeare wrote Cleopatra as a black queen of Egypt, a representation that subsequent performance in Britain has whited out, most obviously since 1953, even as it has recruited black (or blacked-up) bodies to be placed alongside white Cleopatras as if, by juxtaposition, to annex to her elite body atavistic ideas of orientalism, exoticism, ‘hot’ sexuality. While ‘fringe’ theatres in the UK – the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow; the Hackney Empire; University College’s student theatre; the Royal Exchange, Manchester – installed blackness at the centre of their productions (as did numbers of foreign productions), the power centres of UK Shakespeare production – the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre -- cast a blind eye on Shakespeare’s racial writing in Antony and Cleopatra. That changed in 2013 when the Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned Tarell Alvin McCraney to produce a ‘radical edit’ of the play, which he set on the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue at the time of the 1791 slave rebellion. Relocating the play, McCraney mobilised a black history that re-ignited the race politics and recalculated the costs of regime change written into Shakespeare’s original.

David Foster Wallace was deeply involved in a tricky and vexed research on pornography from 1989, as the recurrence of this theme in several non-fiction essays, brief stories, novels, interviews, and archival documents makes clear. The analysis of pornography in Wallace’s oeuvre offers the opportunity both to further explore his commitment to other fundamental topics – such as the overlap between addiction and entertainment – and to understand the significance of this theme in his overall literary project. Thus, employing a chronological approach, the chapter focuses on some published writings and unpublished documents in the period which runs from 1989 to 2006. The chapter argues that Wallace mobilized the paradox of pornography – which he understood as the erotic engagement of the viewers and the denial of any form of relationship among viewers and performers – in order to show that there was another way to experience intimacy through an aesthetic practice, namely the act of reading which, as he often stressed, is characterized by a distinctive and powerful conversation between author and reader.

Chapter 1 examines writing by Peter Abrahams and Dan Jacobson, who both lived in London in the 1950s. Despite important differences, what these writers have in common is their affiliation, however ambivalent, with forms of liberal humanism, imbricated with their reading of canonic English literature. The chapter discusses the development of Peter Abrahams’s early works in 1940s London, the complex response to his 1954 memoir, Return to Goli (1954), and the representation of London’s Pan-African networks in A Wreath for Udomo (1956). The second section of this chapter explores the limits and uses of liberal humanism in postwar London, as presented in Dan Jacobson’s short story ‘A Long Way from London’ (1955). The comparison between the two writers affords a nuanced discussion of the entanglement of English education in South Africa with literature, liberal humanism and anti-racist and anti-colonial activism.

This chapter gets its title from the word spoken by the angel to Mary at the Annunciation, a greeting that at once surprises and recognizes its addressee. So, too, is transfiguration, for this book, a practice that surprises, that calls something new out of the world, even as it bears witness to what, in the world, has never not been there. Through Francis of Assisi no less than poets Donna Masini and Mary Szybist, the world we share with the Middle Ages is one that calls us out, takes us by surprise and restores us to ourselves.

Observing that after Shakespeare’s death, while Antony and Cleopatra survived in print, it disappeared from the English stage for the next 150 years, this chapter looks in detail at the play that replaced it on the Restoration stage: John Dryden’s All for Love, or The World Well Lost. It reads All for Love as a domestic drama for a formally correct but licentious age that conducts a psychomachia across a series of two-handed ‘debate scenes’: will Antony be summoned back to Roman duty – or will he remain tangled in the captivating toils of the Egyptian queen? The chapter then fast-forwards across a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions that all used Dryden’s text before Shakespeare’s, Dryden-free, was returned to the stage in 1849, just at the moment that ‘Egyptomania’ hit England and when spectacular Shakespeare, Shakespeare performed with eye-popping scenes and lavish costuming, was the rage. The chapter ends surveying twentieth-century productions of the play up to 1931, seeing earlier theatrical extravaganzas that necessitated deep textual cuts and re-ordering of Shakespeare’s scenes giving way, under the direction of Harley Granville Barker, to Shakespeare restored, with all his words and scenes, mostly uncut, played in the right order.

This chapter argues that 'lesbian middle-brow' writing from the early part of the twentieth century offers an important counterpoint to queer theory's long-standing opposition to normativity. Whereas early queer theoretical formulations opposed 'regimes of the normal' that specifically upheld heteronormativity, the sharpness of this critique has morphed into a more general position in which any kind of normativity or conformism is treated as intrinsically suspect. By contrast, novels with famous lesbian protagonists such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) and The Unlit Lamp (1924), along with Mary Renault's The Friendly Young Ladies (1944), show the manifold reasons why historical queers have been attached to the idea of the normal – for example, for the opportunity it offers of safety and protection from violence. Moreover, they show the importance of what might seem distinctly non-radical to contemporary readers – namely, middle-brow realism – in the history of lesbian representation and subjectivity. These middle-brow novels are the occasion to reflect on what keeps anti-normativity at the heart of queer theoretical strategy: the opportunity it provides of opposing a form of sameness framed as stultifying, conformist and assimilationist.

Love has always been at the centre of David Foster Wallace’s aesthetic philosophy. But critics have struggled to square Wallace's commitment to love with his tendency to represent sex and sexuality as violent and dysfunctional. While Wallace’s fictional explorations of love have been important in working through Wallace’s troubling relationship to women and gender, in his biography as well as his writing, critics have tended to overlook how race shapes the exploration of love in his early work, most notably in Girl with Curious Hair (1989) and his co-authored essay Signifying Rappers (1990). Beginning with Girl with Curious Hair, this chapter examines how Wallace uses race to develop a logic of distance and separation across two stories: ‘Girl with Curious Hair’ and ‘Lyndon’. ‘Lyndon’s exploration of race, sexuality, and the intersection between personal and political love play out against the backdrop of the civil rights movement. Reading the story alongside James Baldwin’s evocation of love in The Fire Next Time (1963), it aligns Baldwin’s examination of white lovelessness and his metaphor of interracial love as political action with Wallace’s/// interrogation of love and distance. While Girl represents an attempt to work through the nuances of difference, in Signifying Rappers Wallace’s vision for love comes into tension with anxieties about race as a 'closed system'. This chapter asks a crucial question: what does Wallace’s whiteness have to do with love?

George Herbert and Edward Herbert’s envisaged Republic of Letters overlapped with aristocratic values of gentility, honor, and decorum, as well as ideals of friendship, conversation, and disinterestedness. Participating in transregional, multilingual exchanges, they initiated a robustly cosmopolitan public sphere. The ideal of distinctive communion pursued by each brother in these interchanges is unique and likely to be at the center of future debates about British Protestantism. The Herbert brothers were not mere agents of transregional networks, coteries, and groups; they bore distinctive visions of encompassing community or communion. In George’s case, it took the form of an imagined contentious Eucharistic communion, and in Edward’s, of a communion built on free and disinterested disputation and consent. Both writers place individual experience, both lived and represented in language, at the core of the matter. They partook of a contentious communion that was both inward and of the world; intimate struggle and strife with oneself and others to embody the good were for them common signs of a vitally lived, dynamic truth.