This chapter examines attacks on laughter by Puritans and religious reformers, arguing that it was not laughter per se that troubled them. It is gratuitous laughter that serves no other purpose than to please. Puritans' strictures on laughter were focused in anti-theatrical invective. Interestingly, Puritan censure of the theatre was inextricably bound up with a critique of the market economy. The chapter focuses on a few selected examples from the body of anti-theatrical literature. One of the best-known works was Philip Stubbes's Anatomy of the Abuses in England, first published in 1583. The chapter also looks at John Falstaff, William Shakespeare's greatest comic creation, who embodies many of the elements of the caricature of Puritans that gained such popularity in the early modern stage. Puritans were parodied as hypocritical windbags who secretly indulged in the excesses they publicly deplored, lechery and gluttony, but Falstaff also stands for the idea of obsessive play and pleasure as an end in itself. And it was precisely this notion that anti-theatrical critics identified in the commercial theatre.

This chapter discusses all of Ghosh's major works, such as The Hungry Tide. It focuses on Ghosh's engagement with history and historiography. It analyses how each of these major works deal and come to terms with the methodological, political, theoretical and ethical problems posed by historical knowledge and its different protocols. This chapter also studies In an Antique Land, The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace.

This chapter analyses Fly Away Peter and Harland's Half Acre, which bring Malouf into focus as a writer of multiple-worlds fictions. In Fly Away Peter, the pluralisation of the fictional world gives rise to a new emphasis on insight as an often literal ‘looking into’, as a way of discovering and contacting an alternative world of experience, a distinct place of being. On the other hand, Harland's Half Acre is a novel that talks about what it might mean to be an Australian artist.

This chapter introduces Amitav Ghosh, an Indian author who became one of the central figures to emerge from the English literary field after the success of Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children. The first section of the chapter presents some background information about Ghost, before focusing on his occupation as a writer. It also describes Calcutta and studies his six major works, all of which reflect many of the preoccupations that have been marshalled under the title of ‘postmodernism’. The final part of the chapter addresses the central argument addressed in this book.

This chapter continues the theme of homosexuality with a consideration of the way masturbation impacts on sodomy and male sexual inversion in nineteenth-century medical discourse. The literary focus of this chapter is the erotic novel, Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal (1893), a work currently celebrated primarily for its putative associations with Oscar Wilde. It concentrates on the constructions of, and relationship between, the eponymous concert pianist, René Teleny, and his male lover, Camille Des Grieux. It demonstrates how these characters, when examined through the medico-sexual discourses of masturbation, degeneration and sexual inversion/perversion, appear rather to conform to the models presented in the case studies of practitioners such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing than to function exclusively as propagandistically ‘homosexual’ figures.

The world of Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528) displays a striking affinity with William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, not only with regard to the courtly arena that both texts present but also because of their shared concern with ideals of courtly behaviour. In Book 2 of The Courtier, the courtiers discuss the prescriptions that govern the proper art of jesting. This chapter looks at the courtly precepts on laughter. At court, hostile jesting was now derided as vulgar. Taste and decorum were the key values. Wit was a technique of self-promotion, a means of displaying one's skill at entertaining one's peers. Laughter was above all a form of pleasant diversion or a lubricant deployed to defuse social tension. Shakespeare adapted these norms for the public theatre and stages them in Love's Labour's Lost. What he also imports into the theatre is the aristocratic notion of play as gratuitous pleasure, serving no other purpose than to entertain.

Philip Roth has been both lauded and criticised for what John McDaniel (in the first monograph on Roth, published in 1974) calls his ‘commitment to social realism’. According to McDaniel, Roth's realism is part of a moral vision that indicates ‘an abiding respect for life’. This chapter considers some of the ways in which Roth's generic experimentation, which can be traced from his early novel My Life as a Man (1974), through The Counterlife (1986), The Facts (1988), Deception (1990) and Operation Shylock (1993), appropriates, complicates and finally parodies aspects of both realism and postmodernism, making connections between these texts and works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien and Bret Easton Ellis.

Because they belong equally to past and present, it is the nature of ghosts to link these two aspects of time. In this chapter, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and Copenhagen by Michael Frayn probe the intersection of past and present. Both premiered at the National Theatre, to critical acclaim, in the 1990s. Characters in these two plays hunt for clues, through research or into the recesses of memory, but, while a traditional detective story ends with the solution of a mystery, resolution in Arcadia and Copenhagen derives from a realisation of the co-existence of the then and the now within the simultaneous immediacy and ephemerality of the present moment of theatre. This chapter ends with a discussion of Michael Frayn's novel Spies.

This chapter summarises the extant criticism on Ghosh, which was used to draw many of the observations and insights used in the study. It aims to orient readers to the specific claims that were made in this book, as well as its connections to other critical perspectives. This chapter also presents some reflections on the argument presented throughout the book and its contribution to the emerging critical work on Ghosh and to the wider field of postcolonial studies.

This chapter focuses on Malouf's poetry, which preceded his fictions by nearly twenty years. It observes that the poetry is notably regional, especially in its attachment to South Queensland, and uses the body as its principal place. It further describes Malouf's poetry, and even addresses Malouf's relationship with questions of genealogy in his poetry. This chapter also provides some samples of Malouf's poems.

Committed royalist and early proponent of the Royal Society, Abraham Cowley wrote a tract in support of the advancement of science, lyric verse, and translations from the classics. At Cambridge Richard Crashaw became fluent in several ancient and modern languages, and began writing verse, publishing a volume of Latin sacred poetry in 1634. Apart from writing the most famous plays in English literature, William Shakespeare produced the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, as well as Sonnets. Like all Charles Goodall's homoerotic lyrics in Poetical Recreations that were reprinted in Poems and Translations, 'Idyll 23' is recast in heteroerotic terms, transforming the poem's scornful young man into a merciless young woman. Founder of the gossip-mongering periodical Female Tattler, Thomas Baker had varying success with his plays: the popular The Humour of the Age led to the acting company's prosecution for public immorality.