This chapter analyses ‘Good Old Neon’, detailing the reader’s progressive coming to terms with its multi-layered structure. The reader encounters Neal, who speaks and imagines, David Wallace, who stares and imagines, and David Foster Wallace, who writes and imagines. In delving into these three layers and exploring the centrality of imagination, the chapter demonstrates why a reflection on the shifting referents of the second-person pronoun is necessary to understand the dynamics of the text and why Neal’s posthumous positioning and its inherent privileges – first and foremost omniscience – open up a reflection on the kind of authorship Wallace is interested in. Being-posthumous provides a frame, an interpretative key, that juxtaposes knowledge with invention. This reading proposes to consider Wallace’s short story as ultimately staging a meditation on how literary imagination may counterbalance and somehow undo the ending – opening up the possibility of endlessness. The overall argument is that the kind of imagining activated here is the essence of literature itself: the experience of close-reading the short story invites to consider it as thematizing, indirectly, what literature is all about according to David Foster Wallace. This aboutness concerns, crucially, the possibility of caring and compassion, past the pervasiveness of fraudulence and past the manipulative attitude that fraudulence entails.

This essay examines the social and material production (rather than just the literary or spiritual exercise) of devotional identities. By showcasing Katherine Sutton’s Particular Baptist conversion account A Christian Woman’s Experiences (1663) as a highly crafted and visually sophisticated product, this essay adduces a lively interaction between what might be described as the ‘physicality’ of the text and the model of godly selfhood that it advanced. In doing so, this essay reveals how materially and socially imbricated devotional polemics were, pointing to the religious communities (including those of printers and printing houses) that forged them.

In Chapter 26 of The Country Parson, “The Parson’s eye,” George Herbert makes a brief, positive reference to Jean Charlier de Gerson (1363–1429), a late medieval French Catholic theologian and Chancellor of the University of Paris, with whom the Protestant priest-poet had a good deal in common. This essay considers resemblances between Herbert and Gerson, and their differences as well, to shed a clearer light not only on the specific issue at hand – the spiritual and physical consequences of diet and their relation to ascetic discipline and social order – but also on Herbert’s individualized pastoral theology, and his habitual interest in discovering truth across sectarian and national lines. George’s understanding of the vexed issue of “conformity” within the Church of England was that it had to be guided by spiritual principles that might be universally shared. Gerson’s condemnation of what he saw as papal abuse and tyranny, his reformist agenda, as well as his insistence on the need for unity in the Church offer an interesting precedent for George Herbert’s own vision.

This afterword reviews and draws on the findings and arguments of the essays in the collection to emphasise the role of the familial in shaping early modern devotional practice, interiors and interiorities, not only (and obviously) in homes but in worshiping communities and societies, whatever their specific religious orientation, in the various contexts of personal record, scribal copying, manuscript circulation and printing that nurtured the spiritual life, in the rituals, homilies and literature that marked the stages from birth to death, even in the prisons that too often were the consequence of religious commitment. It adduces the non-partisan regard for George Herbert to conclude that the lived experience of the family of the children of God united believers across the socio-economic, political and religious boundaries that otherwise divided and segregated early modern life.

This chapter offers an invitation in the form of an imperative. “Make me” is, after all, both a gesture of resistance and a summons to creation. Through readings of Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Simone Weil, the chapter meditates upon the erotics of making and remaking. Finally, it turns to the praise of creation in the work of poets Wendell Berry and Kimberly Johnson, as praise of the world allows the world to become newly, differently visible. A praised world is, at least potentially, a remade world: it is a world transfigured.

Wallace’s writing is full of bodies, often in grotesque situations of pain, addiction, or stress. From LaVache’s Leg in The Broom of the System to Cusk’s sweaty self-consciousness in The Pale King, the body is a site of contested identity, a physical inscription of the mind–body problem. Wallace’s engagement with the body situates the body as both locus of subjectivity and focus of objectification, and through examining his close attention to embodied subjectivity it is possible to elucidate aspects of his preoccupation with solipsism and human connection. Of particular interest is how our embodied experiences, according to Wallace, shape and foreclose our linguistic engagement with the world.Through close readings of a number of scenes, this chapter works towards an outline of Wallace’s poetics and ethics of embodiment. The chapter draws on existing scholarship on Wallace arguing that Wallace’s engagement with the body speaks also to a post-Kantian desire to locate the self both in opposition to and in co-operation with the unknowable other. I argue that Wallace uses the body – often the female body, often in pain – to dramatize coherent alterity. By the same token, Wallace engages in a struggle to imagine a whole and fully contained self, but this imaginative process is troubled by the forces of late capitalism in the form of drugs, labour, entertainment, and violence. The chapter argues that the body of Wallace’s work is a site of epistemological and phenomenological crisis that engages with the deepest and most sustained questions of his craft.

This essay examines the domestic worship of Presbyterians both before and after the Act of Toleration (1689). By investigating the dissenting clergyman Oliver Heywood’s diary and his printed treatise A Family Altar (1693), this essay provides a case study on how centralising prayer became within the godly home. In doing so, it reveals how through his writing on prayer, Heywood configured household worship as a substitute for chapel worship in dissenting circles, blurring the lines between corporate and domestic devotion. Ultimately Heywood’s ministry, writings and devotional exercises show us how the performance of household piety could be a unifying force that helped galvanise the faith of families during trying periods and times of great change.

This chapter argues that Wallace’s texts exhibit an outstanding alignment with Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979), both in content and – most significantly – in the logic by which the two authors come to analogous conclusions regarding their central sociological, literary, and philosophical concerns. Despite the excellent work done by Boswell, Holland, and Hering in recent years, the conceptual alliance between Wallace and Lasch remains largely underappreciated, and recognizing this enriches our understanding of the cultural context within which Wallace’s work arose. It also helps us enhance our understanding of Wallace’s relationship with past thinkers, and it reminds us of how much – in perfect coherence with his dialogic philosophy – Wallace allowed himself to be influenced by the work of other intellectuals. Finally, realizing their alignment moves us to acknowledge certain aspects of Wallace’s work that we sometimes run the risk of overlooking; above all, the fact that Wallace’s call to commit to the other was never meant to overshadow his belief in the primacy of individuality. To demonstrate its claims, the chapter also refers to new findings in Wallace’s archival copy of The Culture of Narcissism at the Harry Ransom Center.

This essay explores the autobiographical writings of the Quaker leader George Fox during his series of imprisonments in the 1650s. Through a detailed analysis of the textual variants in three editions of his prison accounts – found in the Short Journal, the Cambridge Journal and the Ellwood Journal – it adduces the role that Thomas Ellwood (as editor) played in shaping, and not just ventriloquising, the devotional identity of this dogmatic religious leader. In doing so, this essay reveals to what extent Fox’s representation of imprisonment – and his own devotional character – had been censored, and the effects these changes had on the reception of him and his journal.

This chapter proposes a new interpretation of two short stories included in David Foster Wallace’s 2004 collection Oblivion: ‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ and ‘Another Pioneer’. The close reading of the two texts highlights three features previously neglected. First of all, the similarities between the two main characters (children who die a violent death) and a relevant number of cross-references invite us to consider them a diptych well past their initial surface differences. Secondly, both stories examine the philosophical issue of the contested relationship between self-awareness and linguistic communication: whereas in ‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ the baby ends up dead because it screams in pain without being able to tell his parents where it hurts, in ‘Another Pioneer’ the inscrutability of the child savant is the result of an excess of rational thought and analytical language that segregate him from the village community. Thirdly, these stories show in an exemplary manner Wallace’s position between philosophy and literature: issues concerning self-awareness, the limits of human language, and the potential of thought (probably influenced by contemporary philosophers such as Nagel, Rorty, and Derrida) flow into a specific narrative form, thereby demonstrating that Wallace is not a philosopher disguised as a narrator but a writer unable to be fully philosophical (in the traditional sense) as he offers the reader questions with ambiguous answers and no exit.