Howard Barker's fine artwork falls into two distinctly different categories. There are the books and there are the oil paintings. The former contain drawings executed in coloured inks and pastels which relate directly to the play he is working on at the time. Barker describes these books as 'notes to the plays' and 'entirely within the context of daily writing'. Initially having made use of a wider range of colours, Barker has cut these down to combinations of four paints: raw sienna, yellow ochre, black and white. This is sometimes described as monochrome, a term which may perhaps be applied to the finished impression but clearly is not strictly accurate. In fact, light in Barker's paintings is generally quite pale and cold. What is interesting is how much of Barker's artwork feeds back into his theatre.

Spanish contemporary poetry, as any other genre of literature, does not emerge from a literary and socio-historical vacuum. Rather it stems from the poetry written in Spain in the twentieth century, its literary tradition, and the socio-historical background in which it is embedded. The Spanish poetry of the early twentieth century combined traditionalist with progressive and elitist aesthetics. The novísimos 'coincided in poets search for a more contemporary, more artful, and more language-orientated poetry which would bring Spanish letters into the mainstream of European culture'. From the novísimos to the present day, Spanish contemporary poetry has undergone extraordinary developments, particularly in terms of topics approached and modes of expression. Notably, its trajectory and progression have not yet drawn to a close, and its current extraordinary vitality suggests a very exciting future with fascinating potential.

This essay examines translation as a process of linguistic and cultural mediation, one conditioned (and made possible) by the material book. Henry S. Turner finds in ‘translation’ a useful term for investigating the relationship between form and matter within language itself. Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations identifies its author as a ‘material humanist’ involved in a complex network of human and non-human agents, through which translation itself becomes ‘a process of giving form to matter and of re-mattering the form of language’.

This chapter explores how Howard Barker manipulates narrative time, audience time, and dramatic time using The Bite of the Night as primary example. A close reading of the text combined with critical reactions to the performance reveal how Barker's use of temporal shape allows him to fulfill many of the goals stated in Arguments for a Theatre. The chapter discusses how Barker's use of time defamiliarises the myths of his plays, thus reactivating their political potential, while simultaneously attacking what Mary Karen Dahl calls the 'deep structure of things'. Barker compounded the unsettling effect of audience time with his use of dramatic time, that is, the progression of the dramatic action. In some respects, the dramatic time of The Bite of the Night is outright Aristotelian. Barker's use of time opens up into areas of political significance in relation to history and myth, topics Barker and others would consider synonymous.

In William Shakespeare's plays the actors are for ever being interrupted by hooray henrys 'who hoot and jeer from the side of the stage. For Elizabethan and Jacobean theatregoing was always a public affair, Andrew Gurr reminds, in which the visibility of the audience 'allowed them to play almost as large a part as the players'. In Coriolanus Shakespeare composed the great tragedy of representation when 'the nobility based in rights attached to land lost its power to represent' with the birth of the public sphere. For Coriolanus reveals instead how Jacobean theatre remained bound to the master-slave dialectic and the 'royal remains' of the great house. In a theatrical context, Coriolanus's disgust with the Forum resembles the alienation of those notables who, according to Ben Jonson, were driven by the new rules of exchange to stand up 'between the Acts'.

Sir Walter Ralegh's poem could warn a reader that there are no true Confessions, only false ones. Ralegh's friend Edmund Spenser supplies the bereft Timias, a counter for Ralegh, with a more effective advocate, a peace-making dove that acts the ambassadorial go-between for whose office Ralegh's poem seems itself to have been quite incompetent. Lachrymous to a fare-thee-well, Ralegh's maudlin piece is perhaps histrionic in the literary way of the overwrought utterance of dramatis personae inside of fictions and scripts. The earlier Ralegh was perhaps the single most prominently benefited courtier in Elizabeth's court, and likewise the swain most dependent on the royal favour, and most economically endangered by that favour's loss. Florimell's loyalty to Marinell sounds somewhat like Bess Throckmorton's lifelong attachment to Ralegh, even if it can only apply specifically to her history after the fact of Spenser's poem.

Angela Carter's writing is fascinated by the macabre and the erotic, the dissolute and the grotesque. The author's analysis of European Gothic's topographical and representational territories engages with aspects of French feminist theory, in particular the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, that operate in this field of Gothic signification. Vampiric, menacing and sly, they are conspicuously Gothic creations, built, like Frankenstein's creature, from the dusty vestiges of previous literary and cultural forms. The male bloodline of European Gothic evinces a macabre fascination with the monstrous mother. Feminist criticism has re-inscribed the mother-daughter relationship in the female Gothic, often codifying the Gothic heroine's journey of self-discovery within the labyrinthine spaces of the Gothic castle as an encounter with a spectral maternal presence.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the book and elaborates on the significance of racial doubt as a category of analysis beyond nineteenth-century Cuba. Given that racism has deep cultural and affective roots, the skeptical analyses that humanistic research centers will remain vital, even as the institutions supporting such research are destroyed by oligarchic, race-baiting forces. Skepticism is a power that the Humanities share with racial doubt. It implies, counterintuitively, a hope – to question in order to get things right – and a pledge to knowledge – to avoid denial, ignorance, and false explanations. No matter how indispensable one’s convictions about race might be, clinging to them would mean forsaking this hope, this pledge, and the broad political alliances required to imagine a world better than our own.

This chapter is concerned with bodying forth, or awakening, the spectral presence of the Gothic in The Sadeian Woman to realign its political and aesthetic matters. A dormant subject on the brink of womanhood, Sleeping Beauty is an exemplary Gothic daughter, whose body is subject to the disciplinary practices fictionalised by the Gothic castle as a locus of paternal power. Angela Carter confronts the deadly boundaries of the Sadeian body/corpus in The Sadeian Woman. However, Sadeian inflections of 'Sleeping Beauty' reappear through her fiction, most strikingly in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Bloody Chamber. Confronting the thorny hedges of the father's house, Carter unmasks the operations of the 'prick' that repeatedly put women to sleep in the Sadeian Gothic. Finally, the chapter explores the Gothic as a site for the intersection of Sadeian and feminist discourses of female victimisation.

This chapter argues how Ignatius Sancho’s oeuvre, his reception in the literary world, and his enduring legacy in the arts generate an important set of counter-representations to imperial representations of Black life. While providing an overview of the volume’s essays and its organization, this chapter argues how Sancho’s epistolary writing speaks to Black life-worlds beyond the British political terms of debates on equality and abolition. Although Sancho’s writings and presence in the public sphere have been absorbed into broader narratives of imperial power and prestige, his oeuvre and documentations of his influence (past and present) exhibit rare representations of Black life across a variety of social spaces, beyond the terms of servitude and enslavement. While many early public representations of Black life in England were translated for the racializing gaze of a predominantly white readership, Sancho’s self-representation through the arts (alongside subsequent critical and creative reception of his work) reveal complex patterns and particularities in African diasporic experiences in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Early modern readings of biblical women are as full of variety and contradiction as the Bible itself. Zipporah and Michal are unusual for the challenges they pose to masculinity in literal and metaphorical ways. Though Jewish midrash unites Zipporah and Michal, the two do not appear together in any biblical narrative or text. Still, they are routinely linked in early modern discourse and in consistently unflattering ways. Zipporah's behaviour sets the stage for women's engagement in nationalistic enterprises an engagement that characterises the actions of several heroines in Exodus and in the biblical books that follow. Early modern readings echo charges of sin and injustice and include Michal in books such as God's judgments against whoring. The severe disconnection between the Bible's mix of compassion and wonder toward these women and the early modern disparagement of them invites us to consider what distinguishes these biblical women's narratives from others.

How did the songs of Pindar solicit the language of Greek polytheism? How could their words generate ritual knowledge and provoke experience? Pindar was long recognised as a master of piety and an authority on divine matters, and his poems remained privileged points of reference for thinking ritual occasions like festivals, the sanctuaries where they were held, and ritual types like sacrifice. Focusing on sacrifice, this chapter looks at the ritual language produced by Pindaric poetry, rather than the one it reflects, and its inscription in the ritual archive of Greek culture. It is concerned with the poet’s enduring role as an agent in the dynamic system of Greek polytheism. After a brief survey of the prominence of sacrifice in the Pindaric biographical tradition, different aspects of the sacrifices found in the poems of Pindar are reviewed and illustrated through case studies, most notably passages from Pythian 5, Isthmian 4, and Olympian 10.

Gulliver’s Travels is one of the landmarks of world literature. Gulliver’s adventures with the tiny but spirited Lilliputians, the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag, the flying island of Laputa, and the rational horses of Houyhnhnmland have become globally famous for their satirical wit and visionary creativity. Early editions credited Gulliver himself as the author, and many readers believed him to be a real person. Later commentators have variously described the work as proto-science fiction, as inspired children’s literature and as a forerunner of the modern novel. The editor’s introduction to this celebratory anniversary edition contextualises Gulliver’s Travels in Swift’s life and work as a whole while exploring its rich and remarkable afterlife. All the original illustrations and maps are included, as are the frontispiece portraits. Generous annotation explains textual details which might now seem obscure, and appendices contain additional documents and images to enhance contemporary understanding and enjoyment.