Ignatius Sancho is the subject of a fabulous 1768 portrait by Thomas Gainsborough now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He has also been associated with images by Hogarth, and copies of his business card for his Westminster shop, sometimes attributed to Hogarth, are held in the V&A and the British Museum. This chapter explores Sancho’s relationship to eighteenth-century London’s visual culture not only through images by Gainsborough and Hogarth, but also through Sancho’s own rhetorical style, and the networks and relationships with artist correspondents that emerge through his letters, arguing that Sancho emerges as an agent as well as a subject in eighteenth-century British visual culture.

This chapter examines key ideas concerning the dialect and metre in which Pindar’s poems were written, as well as the story of the transmission of his works from his day, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, then down to our own times.

Chapter 4 shows how novels engaged with narratives of racial coherence as Cuban slavery came to an end. Because of their ability to construct clashing voices, bring them into a tense truce via free indirect discourse, and engage the reader’s own knowing and refusal to know, novels were uniquely poised to stage racial passing. The chapter puts the first novel published by a Cuban of African descent, Martín Morúa Delgado’s Sofía (1892), in dialogue with two others: Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882) and Ramón Meza’s Carmela (1887). As Sofía shows, white identities were secured through hypocrisy and cynicism – an open secret that Villaverde and Meza had not fully acknowledged. In this way, the chapter traces the conditions of possibility for passing-as-open-secret. While in the United States passing is generally understood as a divergence between the private and public identities of a given subject – the public one being perceived as a deception that serves to hide the private one – these novels delved into situations in which this divergence was willfully ignored, and in which white identity was not invalidated by the perception of fraud.

The reflection on the Hail Mary prayer colours the analogy between the Virgin Mary and Henrietta Maria to follow. Since venerating Mary was outlawed after 1559, subsequent poetry exalting her is in a sense recusant by default because it refuses Elizabethan conformity. The poetry to Mary of Richard Rowlands or Verstegan is less known than that of Constable, and their backgrounds seem initially rather different. Rowlands was a printer who, in the wake of Edmund Campion's execution, became a leading Counter-Reformation publicist on the continent. Rowlands was an important smuggler of recusant books and also people into England, and his works circulated widely on the continent. Recalling the deeply inscribed, indeed scriptural, Marys, the poets present the Church as a seventeenth-century Mary without name: thereby acknowledging a loss of memory metaphorically, but with maximum sadness and horror, termed defloration.

Following on from the discussions of the virtuous Sleeping Beauty and the monstrous muse, this chapter explores how the female body is dreamed (up) in the Gothic imaginings of psychoanalysis and surrealism. With its waxworks, clockwork dolls, dark doubles and automata, uncanny repetitions and phantasmal projections, the Gothic gives form to what Terry Castle describes as the 'spectralization' of human thought since the eighteenth century. Brimming with automata, dolls and mannequins, Angela Carter's writing is inhabited too by a macabre cast of toy-makers, puppet-masters and mad scientists. Foregrounding the chess queen as a figure of enthralling and deathly sexuality, the chapter suggests that the logic of the chessboard offers a vocabulary for rethinking the dark eroticism and intertextual geometries of Carter's texts. Carter's fiction explores in particular the uncanniness of the marionette as another site for the conjunction of female sexuality and death in the European Gothic imagination.

This chapter looks at a series of English poets who have identified Pindar as a poet of freedom – both metrical and political – before turning to some modern Greek poets who have been influenced by this aspect of the English Pindaric tradition. Among the poets discussed are Abraham Cowley, Thomas Gray, A. E. Stallings, Andreas Kalvos, and Angelos Sikelianos.

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.

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.

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.

Ignatius Sancho’s correspondents spanned the British Empire, from India to the Caribbean and North America. One of the earliest reviewers of the posthumous publication of Sancho’s Letters in 1782 remarked that “Sancho may be styled—what is very uncommon for men of his complexion, A man of letters. His commerce with the Muses was supported amid the trivial and momentary interruptions of a shop.” The publication of Sancho’s correspondence revealed him to also be a lettered man. The contents and style of his writings demonstrate that he was truly a man of letters in every sense of the phrase. The demographic, geographic, and social diversity of Sancho’s correspondents ultimately substantiates the observation he made to Margaret Cocksedge on July 31, 1775: “I have lived with the great—and been favoured by beauty.”

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.