This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to examine the intellectual basis of Salman Rushdie's politicised aesthetic in detail. It is worth noting from the outset, however, that one of the characteristic features of Rushdie's writing is its self-consciousness, and its willingness to incorporate an analysis of the cultural locations from which it is written. The result of this is that the criticisms which can be (and have been) made of Rushdie as a writer are frequently anticipated, if not entirely defused or ‘answered’, in his own writing – a fact that makes any simplistic judgements about his political locations difficult.

This chapter discusses Rushdie's ninth novel, Shalimar the Clown. Shalimar suggests a new development in Rushdie's career, to the extent that it fuses the interest in US-led globalisation apparent in the novels of his middle period (The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury) with the sustained focus on a South Asian national experience apparent in the novels of his early period (Midnight's Children and Shame). In this instance, Rushdie takes as his principal subject matter the state of Kashmir, homeland of his maternal grandfather and one-time favourite location for Rushdie family holidays. Prior to the publication of Shalimar, Kashmir had not received sustained attention from Rushdie, though it does loom up, like a troubling ghost, in most of his South Asian fictions.

The conditions of individual secularisation posed two sets of moral problems for believers in France and England at that time. The first concerns the mapping out of human behaviour if belief in God has become deistic or has collapsed into atheism. The second concerns the alternative moral criteria to counter the anthropocentrism transmitted by individual secularisation. These two sets of problems provide vital perspectives from which to read French and English Catholic literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many French and English Catholic writers depict the individual's relationship to God not as amorphous or anthropocentric but as circumscribed by grace (God's help) and virtue in a theocentric collaboration, which leads to a form of communal life between God and the human person. This chapter shows that religious porosity must itself be buffered in some way against the influence of secular society.

This essay is a eulogy for Griselda Pollock's long time friend and collaborator, the art historian Rozsika Parker. It reflects on the early years of the women's art movement and feminist art history. It considers how we respond to the death of those close to us, and how this response might be translated into art practice. Throughout, it demonstrates how ‘writing from the heart, characteristic of Rozsika Parker's own practice, informs the writing of this tribute to her.

This chapter gives a detailed description of a paradox and a coincidence. The paradox is a period of profound secularisation in France, from which emerged a generation of Catholic writers and intellectuals who were convinced that the rumours about God's death had been greatly exaggerated. The coincidence is that, in the same period, English literature too saw a significant revival in Catholic writing. France's Catholic writers, their lives and works, are explored from a variety of perspectives. Though wide and intense critical attention focuses discretely on two contemporaneous literary tendencies, there are few comparative studies of them. The most ironic intellectual consequence of religious fragmentation and technological consciousness is the final emergence of relativism in the early twentieth century to answer the difficulties posed by the collision of differing worldviews. The chapter aims to place these writings back within the context of the conditions of belief and unbelief in which they were published.

This chapter discusses the ways in which French and English Catholic writers perceive and portray secular society's potential for individualistic fission. This is viewed as a result of the Reformation or the Revolution of 1789 and is encouraged and epitomised by particular groups, notably Jews and Freemasons. The chapter also explores the secularising trends identified by French and English Catholic authors in several important areas of societal life, including politics, economics and education where State centripetalism or State arbitration of individualism had become the modi operandi. These models of contractual society unwittingly establish secular parodies of the Church, both in their assumptions concerning the autonomous individual and with regard to their solution for life in society. Politics and economics are simply not estranged from religion but also unfold in a world invested with divinely ordered meanings and purposes.

Janet Wolff's essay is structured around the move from England to the United States, with the dislocation of perception that comes with that shift. It operates as part memoir and part family history, these two strands also intersecting with other people's stories. Visual images also play a part in the story – paintings, diary pages and facsimile documents.

Judy Kendall's poetics concern a rather fundamental aspect of writing: namely, what the written page looks like. Her essay obliges us to look closely at the visual materiality of the text, and at how such things as font, layout and other textual effects, normally invisible to the reader, in fact produce meaning of their own, confirming or contesting the actual sense of words. She takes as an example a chapter of her own academic work – a book about the poet Edward Thomas – and manipulates the text visually, to provide a range of new and sometimes unintended effects for the reader. In the process, she demonstrates that in our usual reading we ignore those effects which have become familiar over time.

Attention to the epic, oral, filmic, televisual and photographic models employed in Rushdie's novels give some indication of the referential range of his fiction – but the above account has by no means exhausted the potential list of Rushdie's influences. Rushdie's reasons for practising such a referential artform may be explained in various ways; but certainly one of the central explanations must be that Rushdie writes in this way because he believes, and because he wishes to assert that he believes, that the act of authorial creation does not happen in a vacuum, is not the product of an inspired moment of original genius, but depends upon, indeed springs from, innumerable preceding acts of authorial (and artistic) creation effected by other writers, storytellers, artists and intellectuals. This chapter begins with a discussion of Barthes' theory of intertextuality and Rushdie's theory of influence, and then considers how postmodernism is useful to Rushdie.