This chapter claims that Emerson’s consideration of slavery occurs in terms that are by definition contradictory, as he both emphasizes and tries to reconcile a series of oppositions within transcendentalist principles. These oppositions include conflicts between self-reliance and social reform; between labor as a means of self-development and of economic development; between absolute moral law and temporal statute law; between teleological history and evolutionary history; and, finally, between the refusal of violence and the use of violence as a political expedient. The chapter examines the complexities of Emerson’s formulations of these transcendentalist oppositions, showing how his commentaries on slavery can play out in counterintuitive ways, such that Emerson’s idiosyncratic version of antislavery “free labor” ideology supports his expressed resistance to a career as an abolitionist, his argument that slavery contravenes a “higher” law than statute law equivocally denounces slavery, and his defense of abolitionist violence transforms physical force into moral force.

Chapter 3 discusses the critical potential of environmental synecdoche in works of fiction that question the autonomy of human agency. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) mock fantasies of control by portraying humans as inseparable from multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. I read these novels as experiments in the cognitive modelling of agency at unfamiliar scales: both the microscale of a postgenomic imaginary and the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness. These fictions, I suggest, explore the difficulty of reconciling environmental responsibility with the dispersal of agency inherent to biomedical and ecological perspectives. Both novels experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales and enabling environmental response-ability. In each narrative, I contrast the lure of analogical images with the poetics of critical synecdoche, which engages productively with the complexity of diffuse environmental agency.

This chapter explores how Emerson’s essays are tantamount to a new kind of distinctively American art. It suggests Emerson’s importance for subsequent artistic, literary, and musical experimentation and his role as a transitional figure from Romanticism to the modern and contemporary periods. Whether in the experimental writing of Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, or John Ashbery, or in the experimental music of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, and Elliot Carter, it prompts us to find an Emersonian “self-reliant” art – an art that tests out new independences, opens to complexities of movement and form, and an art that skates, surprises, atomizes, and swings.

Concerned with Emerson’s aging and the authorial integrity of his later works, critics traditionally discounted the compositions Emerson delivered or published after 1860. Important editorial scholarship, however, has opened new prospects for reconsidering the intellectual vitality of late Emerson, now accessible in The Later Lectures and in the publication of the final volumes of the Collected Works, including Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875). Building upon the critical reconsideration of Emerson’s considerable engagement in aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical matters beyond the 1850s, this chapter identifies Emerson’s rhetoric as a significant concept in, and creative context for, the sometimes collaborative and often iterative “recomposition” of the later work. Three rhetorical figurations of Emerson’s late styles – metonymy, analogy, and translation – are traced across works such as “Eloquence,” “Poetry and Imagination,” “Quotation and Originality,” and the unfinished Natural History of Intellect.

This chapter illustrates how gender is integral to Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and its subversive potential. It explains that renewal and rebirth were strongly gendered concepts in the Victorian period, showing that Pater’s understanding of sex and gender form a vital basis for the aesthetic philosophy he constructs across his literary oeuvre, a basis that revolves around metaphors of pregnancy and childbirth. It then develops an examination of how Pater reworks traditional Victorian gender categories to his ideas of renaissance and aestheticism in two sections: first, it shows how Pater’s concept of the renaissance is defined by a consistent metaphor of female reproductive biology, with attention to his figures of Demeter, Persephone, and Mona Lisa; second, it shows how Pater’s male figures create aesthetic meaning for these matrilineal cycles, with attention to Plato.

This chapter argues that Hecuba is a potent absent presence in the play, and focuses on the effects of her absence, especially on the characterization of Cressida. Troilus and Cressida was probably written very soon after Hamlet, and William Shakespeare was certainly thinking about the Troy story when he was composing Hamlet. The Legend of Good Women specifically cites Troilus and Criseyde in order to declare itself as a palinode to that preceding text. Two absent presences in the play, in addition to Hecuba and implicitly Cressida herself, are the women who wait in the literary afterlives of Ulysses and Aeneas, Penelope and Dido. In the Euripidean tradition Hecuba is not only the catalyst for lamentation among the other Trojan women but is the locus of affect more generally for other participants, mortal and divine, and for readers and audiences.

This chapter explores two subfields of nineteenth-century horticultural practice – plant miniaturization and plant assimilation – to demonstrate indirect approaches to addressing botanical agency. Given differences of lifespan, size, cognition, and communication, as well as the distance of time, Victorian writing requires this indirect approach. In the case of plant miniaturization (bonsai), described admiringly in British travel narratives but bemoaned by champions of native plant life from William Wordsworth to H. Rider Haggard, writerly attention or disregard to plant suffering illuminates broader concerns of plant emotion and subjectivity. In the case of plant assimilation or its amplified parallel, plant invasiveness, human framings of plant reproduction point out the cultural constraints on plant life. When named plants reproduce across the page as well as through the garden bed, their taxonomic and vernacular incursions into nineteenth-century poetry and prose show a further assertion of expanded plant influence on the Victorian reading mind.

Chapter five examines how early Restoration comedy rewrote the English Civil War to address ideas of panegyric and the rhetoric of praise. Although the Restoration was greeted with much festivity, it brought about a fragile political settlement. These plays recast the Civil War in comic mode to question ideas of kingship and governance. Through dramatising the eve of Restoration, John Tatham’s The Rump (c. 1660) directly engages with contemporary concerns, while Robert Howard’s The Committee (1663), and John Lacy’s The Old Troop (1664) return to the civil war as their temporal location to question roundhead and cavalier virtues and vices and to address contemporary anxieties regarding the Restoration Settlement.

The most threatening collective of dangerous bodies is undoubtedly that generated by war, the supreme Gothic horror. The final chapter will conduct a wide-ranging exploration of the imagery, discourse and symbolism of vampirism in the context of warfare. Even though war is the ultimate blood-sucker, it has rarely been analysed as such. The metaphor is capacious enough to go beyond war in the abstract to accommodate most of the players and action involved. The vampire functions as a floating signifier moving across battlefields, as well as along the home front. This analysis seeks to demonstrate that the rhetoric and imagery of vampirism has a natural kinship with wars, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. In 1879, Marie Nizet’s Captain Vampire used the trope of the vampire to send out an anti-war message. I will argue that her fiction influenced the writing of Dracula, which will be read as another war novel, and revisit Jimmie E. Cain’s argument that Stoker’s narrative is a rewrite of the British defeat in the Crimea. The novel has also been linked to the Berlin Treaty and the Russo-Turkish war, in which Stoker’s brother took part. A more recent example of the correlation between vampirism and war is Kim Newman’s postmodernist intertextual pastiche, The Bloody Red Baron (1996), in which World War 1 is reconfigured as a fantastical conflict within which vampires and humans are in combat. Between them, they convey the suffering and horror of war. As Martin Tropp points out, ‘by the end of the First World War, history itself had become a tale of terror’.

Chapter 1 revisits the orthodox position that the tradition of Gothic writing is anti-Catholic. Even though Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, was a Member of Parliament, belonging to the Church of England, his attitudes towards Catholicism were ambiguous. This is significant for a neglected reading of his novel, relating to the Henrician Reformation, which brought about the secession of Britain from Rome. The Catholic Church, when it came to be regarded as the enemy, was perceived as an institutional dangerous body, in which the Other was subjected to intense and relentless persecution, involving torture and execution. The novel of Inquisition will be put to the question over whether its ostensible opposition to Catholicism masked different agendas much nearer home. The bleeding body, as a site of the sacred and profane, opens up a conduit for reassessing religious attitudes of various Protestant Gothic novelists. In Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the character of the Bleeding Nun will be discussed as a parody of the mystical stigmatic within Catholic tradition. Her blood line of demonic stigmatics will be traced from Lewis and his imitators up to Bram Stoker’s Dracula