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.

This chapter focuses on the links between The Pale King (2011) and political philosophy. It examines Wallace’s treatment of the notion of the public sphere, with reference to key theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Chantal Mouffe. After establishing the central questions at play in discussions of literature and the public sphere, the chapter presents a close reading of Wallace’s final novel to suggest that The Pale King engages with the concept of the public sphere in two important ways. Firstly, Wallace’s novel establishes a critique of neoliberal models of public discourse; and secondly, Wallace proposes an alternative model of being in public, emerging from the affordances of literary aesthetics and form. This chapter engages with philosophical theories of the public sphere to build on important ongoing debates in Wallace studies, debates which seek to highlight a deep and valuable engagement with political philosophy in Wallace’s work.

One of the (reconstructed) Globe’s early attempts at simulating ‘authentic’ Jacobean performance conditions – its so-called ‘original practices Shakespeare’ – this production put an ‘authentic’ all-male cast on stage in ‘authentic’ early modern costumes. This chapter interrogates the premise of authenticity and critiques performances, particularly Mark Rylance’s as Cleopatra, that registered both textual and semiotic incoherence. If the aim of reconstructing Shakespeare’s Globe was to provide ‘a machine to test … original staging’, what, this chapter wonders, did this production teach audiences about Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra? Answering, it proposes that the great discovery of ‘original practices staging’ was to understand this play as a comedy and Cleopatra as a clown.

The third chapter offers detailed close readings of the London-based writing of Arthur Nortje, a ‘coloured’ South African poet who studied at Oxford in the late 1960s and who set many of his poems in London. The chapter focuses on Nortje’s habitation of various personae, including literary models such as Eliotian and Baudelairean approaches to the city, and queer subjectivities. London, through its literary associations as an embodiment of modernity, allows Nortje to create a nexus between physical displacement from South Africa, his ambivalence about his mixed-race origins and the psychological and social alienation intrinsic to late twentieth-century life. In Nortje’s London-based poetry, the chapter argues, he depicts his attempts to work out his identity and belonging via his engagement with the city through his body.

This collection aims to show that David Foster Wallace’s work originates from and functions in the space between philosophy and literature. Indeed, the philosophical dimension of his work is not a mere supplement or decoration, a finishing touch to perfect his literary writing. Nor is it the other way around: a pre-established truth which Wallace sees the literary merely serving to illustrate. Rather Wallace intertwines the two discursive modes in a never-ending process of reciprocal cross-fertilization. In this introductory chapter we first briefly address Wallace’s relation to and career switch between philosophy and literature, in order to argue that, for Wallace, philosophy and literature are co-originating ways of confronting reality: philosophical works, styles, and concepts trigger literary experiences, while literary works, styles, and genres trigger philosophical questioning. Both appear within and amplify each other from the start. Then we outline three aspects in which philosophy and literature both differ and overlap – but never fully dissolving into one another – namely: (1) as activities or practices; (2) with regards to their instruments, i.e. their forms of language and communication; and (3) with regards to their purposes, or the experiences and possible understandings they generate. The work of David Foster Wallace is exemplary of this fruitful cross-pollination. Finally, we outline the chapters in this collection that, organized in three parts – ‘General perspectives’ (Wallace’s aesthetics, interest in performativity, formal choices, sociology, and ethics), ‘Consciousness, self, and others’, and ‘Embodiment, gender, and sexuality’ – represent a multifaceted engagement with the philosophical-literary in-betweenness of Wallace’s oeuvre.