Philip Roth's fiction has always been characterised by the tension between the individual capacity for self-determination and the deterministic forces of history; between seductive dreams of harmony, idealism, and purity and the troubling realities of discord, disillusionment and corruption; between the desire to exert control, impose order, and explain, and the impulse to break free from all constraints; to revel in anarchy, chaos and disorder; and to celebrate the indeterminate, the unknowable and the inexplicable. Nowhere are these tensions more clearly articulated than in what has become known as his ‘American Trilogy’ of novels: American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). This chapter explores Roth's use of what it calls the ‘anti-pastoral’ mode in his ‘American Trilogy’ of novels. It applies the term ‘nature anxiety’ metaphorically to define Roth's deconstruction of the Utopian dreams and rituals of purification with which many of the characters in the American Triology delude themselves and deceive others.

Giles Jacob's writings range from legal textbooks and reference works to dramatic farces, satires, and verse. This chapter discusses Jacob's pseudo-clinical discussion of hermaphroditism and his tale of margureta and Barbarissa. Both Jacob's Tractatus de Hermaphroditis and Supplement to the Onania focus partly on the role of clitoral hypertrophy in tribadic activity and hermaphroditic anatomy, but both are also concerned with the relationships between same-sex erotic partners. Tractatus suggests that a hermaphroditic woman's hypertrophied clitoris produces her sexual desire for members of her own sex, and allows her to satisfy it; her anatomy, then, makes her a tribade. Supplement suggests hat biology (an enlarged clitoris) precedes and creates same-sex desire. Voyeuristic eroticism is most obvious in Jacob's text, although it is not entirely absent from the Supplement even given that author's strenuous and largely convincing claims that the work has a serious moral and social purpose.

This introductory chapter discusses the influence Edmund Spenser had on William Shakespeare, showing how Shakespeare read Spenser and addressing the question of the relations between the them. It explores some distinctions between borrowing and allusion, and also clarifies the definition of the term ‘influence’, furthermore examining the poetry of Spenser and Christopher Marlowe, and identifying the differences between them. The chapter also looks at some of Marlowe's obvious and popular linguistic borrowings, as well as several of Shakespeare's more subtle ones, from Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

Relationships between men form the backdrop for this chapter. The discussion concentrates particularly on the way the discourse on masturbation appears to inform Dickens' construction of Bradley Headstone, protagonist of the author's penultimate novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865). In Dickens' evocation of a society where the appearance of respectability was of paramount importance, this chapter contends that Headstone's ‘secret past’ and ‘guilty secrets’ are manifested in and recounted through the pathology and imagery of onanism. Headstone is not merely associated with Eugene Wrayburn through their erotic rivalry for Lizzie Hexam but also inasmuch as Wrayburn, too, exhibits many of the classic symptoms of masturbatory disorder.

Asian American literature by women is increasingly attracting critical attention as an important sub genre of American literature. Current debates over the literary canon, the changing profile of literary and cultural studies, the increasing presence of women's and ethnic writing both within and beyond the canon may all explain the increasing popularity of Asian American women's writing both within the US and beyond its geographical borders. In the context of the canon of Asian American writing by women, the publication of The Woman Warrior, in 1976, precipitated an intense period of growth. Critical work on Kingston has been heavily dominated by a focus upon The Woman Warrior, and to a lesser degree, China Men. Many analyses viewed Kingston's texts as coinciding with a moment in feminist studies and feminist literary production when the mother/daughter dyad became a focus of particular interest.

The crumbling foundations were solid in the author's childhood. Reincarnated, he can expect another exposure in a different body. Ageing fuels visionary dreariness, but the spots in time are empty. Children are a great way of measuring one's concept of ageing. The author noted recently that his own childhood and school memories were being semi-deleted as his daughter grew older, and he is fascinated by the way ageing is treated in poetry anthologies. A poet of ageing, of the loss of the ability to love in ‘those’ ways, Thomas Hardy was the author's favourite poet at sixteen and seventeen. From his point of view, ageing involves a paradoxical relationship between the loss of some knowledge and ‘experience’, and the accumulation, increase or awareness of other knowledge and experience. The poetry of death of the young man and young woman reaches across gender divides, often to express a fear of ageing, and of its inevitable confrontation with mortality. Two words best sum up the shift in the author's poetics: mimetics and mnemonics.

The Epilogue reflects on the ways that nineteenth-century texts consistently acknowledge the post-lapsarian state of human existence. The literary works discussed in this book all, to some extent, either recreate the events of Milton’s epic in a world that is fallen or tell the story of what happens after the expulsion. Drawing on Christopher Ricks, the Epilogue identifies a single word – ‘error’ – as emblematic of Milton’s nineteenth-century legacy. ‘Error’ points to its post-lapsarian meanings even when used to describe Eden before the Fall. After opening with the 1790 disinterment of Milton’s corpse, the Epilogue turns to another disturbing anecdote to illustrate the complexity of Milton’s nineteenth-century reception: the history of a Victorian edition of Milton’s poetry, bound in tanned human skin. The skin in question belonged to George Cudmore, executed for murder in the 1830s. This instance of anthropodermic bibliopegy reveals that Milton’s works, while revered and respected by the Victorians – his body parts were treated as relics – were also open to disruption and reinterpretation.

Chapter 1 examines faith in Lancelot Andrewes’s preaching. It shows that his discussions of religious belief frequently draw on the methods used in early modern England of evaluating forensic testimony. After a survey of Andrewes’s interest in religious belief and witness evidence, it turns its attention to discussions of faith and epistemology in his lectures from the 1580s. The chapter then shows how Andrewes’s interest in religious belief is reframed in explicitly legal terms in his seventeenth-century Easter sermons at court. Andrewes valued legal evidence for its ability to establish the Resurrection as an attested matter of fact. Yet these sermons also trace the limitations of legal methods of proof. For Andrewes, a true faith in the Resurrection involves a more diverse set of epistemic resources – bodily participation in the Eucharist, for instance. These mysterious aspects of faith are nevertheless articulated through the framework of legal proof and evidence.