This chapter examines Ian McEwan's ‘Amsterdam’, a Booker Prize-winning novella. It explains that this novel was considered as an inferior Booker winner and reappraises it as an accomplished satirical novella. This social satire is conducted through the portraits of the characters of newspaper editor Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley, projected as representative of the professional achievers of the Thatcher-Major era. This satire is not consistent in its comic effects and it bleeds out into the contemporary world of literary culture, the culture of which this smartly composed novella is a self-conscious product.

This chapter demonstrates how Auster presents baseball and storytelling as ways of promoting community and friendship within an urban setting, and how they both provide ways for characters to reconnect to their metropolitan environment. It notes that storytelling works as a way for characters to form strong connections with supportive networks of friends, their immediate neighbourhood, and wider society. This chapter also observes that Auster's characters are better able to understand their place in the world, and can thus locate themselves more securely than his characters in his earlier fictions.

This chapter studies the first three long prose fictions of Malouf's career that are narrated in the first person. The first is Johnno, which is the only one of the three prose fictions that is strongly marked with his personal experience and history. An Imaginary Life focuses on Malouf's evolving vision, while Child's Play is a text that presents the marked character of auto-reflexivity. This chapter discusses the narrative ‘I’ in each of these works.

After Kingston's first two books, the quiet bemusement of critics which was the predominant response to Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book came as quite a change. Tripmaster Monkey actually only covers a two-month period in 1963 in the life of young would-be beatnik, Chinese American graduate Wittman Ah Sing, but through a series of nine relatively unconnected episodes, Kingston manages to capture the mood and tone of the whole era. The nine episodes or chapters which comprise Tripmaster Monkey track Wittman's literal journey through Berkeley and its environs, and his metaphorical journey in search of his identity. Along the way, he encounters a series of characters, including would-be sexual partners, his future wife Taña, soul-mates, friends and relatives, all of whom ultimately all come together to help Wittman stage a play at the culmination of the novel.

This chapter considers the relationship between Laura, the narrator, and Carmilla, her vampire predator, in the supernatural tale, ‘Carmilla’, by J.S. Le Fanu (1871–72). It examines the way in which the medical pathologies of masturbation and consumption can be seen to map over the occult pathology of vampirism, concentrating particularly on the face as a locus of signification as to an individual's health and character. It also explores the relationship between masturbation, consumption and female same-sex desire, and shows how these lesbian liaisons were often described in predatory or vampiric terms in both pornographic and mainstream Victorian literature.

Chapter 3 explores A. C. Swinburne’s intermedial engagement with Milton. In Swinburne’s republican poetry, Milton emerges as a significant figure associated with virtue and freedom; both poets link questions of liberty to bodily violence. The chapter discusses Milton’s Areopagitica, the divorce tracts and the Piedmont sonnet alongside Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, before turning to Paradise Lost. The chapter draws on queer readings of Milton’s epic to argue that Milton’s erotic, androgynous universe informs Swinburne’s anti-theistic poetic project, particularly in its treatment of bodily indeterminacy and the figure of the hermaphrodite. Swinburne’s reading of Milton is considered alongside his reading of Sappho and Charles Baudelaire, as well as William Blake: Swinburne alludes to erotic moments in Paradise Lost at the same time as he transforms William Blake’s illustrations of the poem, in an act of commingling presented as an example of Swinburne’s ‘intermedial ekphrasis’.

This chapter suggests that the debates over the veracity, or otherwise, of Maxine Hong Kingston's cultural sources, and the vast body of critical material on the feminism-mother/daughter nexus in The Woman Warrior, has simultaneously obscured other, perhaps more pertinent and abiding, preoccupations in Kingston's work. This book locates Kingston within two interconnected, specific cultural contexts: Chinese American history and politics; and the emergence of ethnic feminism in a post-civil rights era. It contends that Kingston's body of work not only raises important questions concerning cultural authenticity, the role of different interpretive communities and canon formation, but that increasingly her oeuvre offers her readers a manifesto of pacifism for a contemporary era.