Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer use the occasion of a retrospective look at their recent co-authored book to think about writing, and especially the project of writing together. The fact of co-authorship turns out to facilitate an important aspect of their study of the history of Czernowitz before, during and since the Holocaust: namely, the ability to hear, and to present, the many different voices and perspectives of those implicated in that history. Here questions of poetics also open into questions of ethics and politics.

In her essay, Carol Smart looks back on her work as a sociologist of family relations, challenging the academic requirement to retain distance and objectivity, and exploring how the personal connection intervenes, despite oneself, in the encounter with some of those studied. As with other essays in this volume, though in a rather different way, she comes back to questions of affect, in her account of being touched by the stories she uncovers.

Movement between countries, and also into the countryside, is central to Vron Ware's essay, a personal account mediated to some extent by other people's stories. Her focus is the village in Southern England in which she was born, and the transformations it has undergone over half a century. The central concern in this return to place is to try to ascertain how one's sense of self also changes, and – crucially – how one can write about this. Throughout, she explores the idea of the ‘end of an era’ and the assumption that a ‘way of life’ is over in this village and others like it, focusing on changes in the poultry industry and the discourses surrounding it.

Cavanaugh's analysis of the secular State indicates the role individualism played in the genesis of contractual political theories. The gathering into the Church envisaged by many French and English Catholic authors sometimes adopts supernatural or enchanted dimensions, especially through their depiction of prophecy, the miraculous and the mysterious sharing of grace between members of the Church. This chapter discusses the themes as they appear in the works of French and English Catholic writers. It encounters their view of the Church as an institution whose very dynamics illustrate their belief in the divine agency continually at work in the material cosmos. Miracles and prophecy, the fruit of some special gift or intervention of God, help enact the Church not hierarchically but charismatically. Vicarious suffering and sainthood provide an ecclesial context for those gifts and, at the same time, portrays most dramatically the unity that can be achieved between individuals.

This chapter discusses the novels The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury, which take globalisation as a central theme. These tend to reflect more ambivalently upon the subject, since they focus upon global mass culture – a phenomenon in which Rushdie is able to discover egalitarian and utopian impulses flourishing alongside the darker machinations of international capital flows. On the one hand, in these novels Rushdie is clearly aware that mass popular culture is driven by, even complicit with, what Shaul Bassi calls ‘consumeristic ideology’. On the other hand, he is simultaneously concerned to argue that, despite this implication in capitalist economics, global mass culture has sufficient ideological autonomy and cultural complexity to offer a critique of the very same economic processes which have brought it into being.

If the reservoir of Rushdie's imaginative resources is substantially fed by stories drawn from the complex intertextual sea of world narrative, it is also generously topped up by events taken from his own biography and family history. This chapter discusses how Rushdie freely adapts autobiographical elements to suit the demands of a fiction that is more concerned to use elements of fantasy to dramatise the experience of pre- and post-colonial India than it is to offer a veracious account of his childhood.

The secularisation of mentalities in France and England was denoted by the shift towards a more anthropocentric conceptualisation of humanity and by the way in which certain secular discourses came to dominate the public mind. This chapter addresses how the French and English Catholic writers seek to undermine what Owen Chadwick famously called the secularisation of the European mind. The chapter considers the critique of naturalistic readings of the material world, of mechanisation, scientism and the secularising influence of German thought. Such critiques exemplify the need they felt of being buffered against secular mentalities at large. It examines the views of intellectual and anti-intellectual Catholic writers about the proper methodology with which to attack secular thought. This study shifts through the ways in which they asserted meaning in the cosmos by re-establishing links between the material and the spiritual domains.

Timothy Brennan, in his critical study Salman Rushdie and the Third World, identifies Rushdie as being a member of a distinctive and historically original group of writers that has come to prominence in the period following the formal dissolution of the British Empire. These writers are described by Brennan as Third World cosmopolitans: migrant intellectuals who are identified with a Western metropolitan elite in terms of class, literary preferences and educational background, but who, by virtue of ethnicity, are also presented by the media and publishing industries as being ‘the interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third World’. Brennan's central thesis is that Rushdie's socio-cutural location compromises his viability as a political writer, a thesis which has provoked some of the most important critical responses to Rushdie's work. Few if any of these critical responses disagree with Brennan's broad location of Rushdie as a migrant, cosmopolitan intellectual. The source of disagreement, rather, concerns the degree to which Rushdie's political arguments are undermined by this location, and by the structures of thinking that his location tends to implicate him in.

This chapter focuses on two novels: Grimus and Midnight's Children. Scenarios borrowed from science fiction fantasy appear in several of Rushdie's novels. The science fictional imagination is at its strongest, however, in Rushdie's first published fiction, Grimus. Because Rushdie sees science fiction not as an end in itself, however, but as a springboard for the exploration of philosophical and political concepts, the novel may be described as a specific form of science fiction – a ‘speculative fiction’ – in which the alien qualities of ‘new worlds’ are used as a means of investigating and destabilising settled certainties concerning our own world. In Midnight's Children, Rushdie's concern to fictionalise an experience of recent Indian history suggests that his novel might potentially be considered as a form of historical fiction. The novel is preoccupied at the level of ideas by history and historicity, by the ways in which history is recorded, by the techniques with which a period is conjured and contained (or not contained), and by the ways in which the individual ‘historiographer’ understands (or misunderstands) his relationship with his material.

All corporate entities are actualised by a set of values, which unify their activities and lend them a sense of identity. French and English Catholic writers make a variety of attempts to associate the Church with the secular political dispensations in which they were living—the problem was in fact how to resacralise the State—without at the same time undermining their religion by subjecting it to the legitimisation of the secular State. Catholic writers attempted to bring the public domain into a redemptive relationship with God. The relationship between France and the Church was a central concern for many writers of the French Catholic literary revival. The Catholic literature delves into the societal arena not simply because it is indulging in a veiled form of secular politics but because of its confidence in the universal validity of faith.

This chapter discusses the novels The Moor's Last Sigh and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Rushdie's sixth novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, may be seen as the fictional embodiment of a darker, less forgiving assessment of India's post-Independence political life. Here, much of the ebullience that characterised Midnight's Children has evaporated in the heat of communitarian violence and rampant political corruption, whilst the political resolution which the next generation was supposed to have embodied has been diverted into rapacious stock-market speculation and commodity fetishism. The narrative of Haroun and the Sea of Stories is similar to that of The Moor: the conflict between a pluralist and tolerant society and a monolithic and intolerant political order. In Haroun, the conflict appears in the guise of fantasy.

This chapter provides a useful paradigm to analyse anti-secular alternatives. It outlines ways in which French and English Catholic writers seek to reimagine society and economics on a sacred basis. Cavanaugh's Eucharistic counter-politics has helped to draw out some of the governing dynamics at work in their writings. In spite of the religious shape of cultural and historic roots, the passionate neo-monarchism of the French Catholic writers—monarchism shaped more by Maurrassian influence than anything else—apes Republican State idealism, with its absolute confidence in monarchy as a panacea. The roots of such confidence arguably go back to the direction taken by the French monarchy under the influence of the divine right of kings, a paradoxically secular model—because conflating religion and politics and subjecting the former to the latter—in religious clothing.

Brenda Cooper – like other contributors to this book a trans-continental traveller – writes about her current, displaced, view of her place of origin (South Africa), her long-term academic concerns (African diasporic writing) and, most of all, her revised understanding of herself and her own family history. Through the art works of Maud Sulter and Lubaina Himid, she finds herself able to think differently both about her relationship to African culture and about her own identity as a Jewish woman of Eastern European descent. A visual link between a Sulter photograph and a family snapshot provides the opportunity to explore this connection.