This chapter studies various spaces, from the mid-west and Chicago, to the north-eastern states of America. It first examines the spaces of The Music of Chance, where a mansion in rural Pennsylvania is used as the setting of a ritualistic and bizarre poker game that rids the nomadic protagonists of their freedom. This chapter also shows the way travel and movement can consist of a series of situated and relational selves and describes film, dreams and flight as utopian spaces.

This chapter analyzes the literature of shock embodied in Ian McEwan's novel The Cement Garden. It suggests that the cement garden is a clear metaphor for the urban desolation of the character of Jack and his siblings. This chapter also contends that situation of the protagonists in the novel has a parallel in the situation of the novelist and argues that the significant stylistic feature between the character and author is McEwan's response not just to the anomie of contemporary society, but also to the novelistic tradition into which he is writing himself.

The original title of Maxine Hong Kingston's second book was not ‘China Men’ but ‘Gold Mountain Heroes’. In Kingston's rendition of the gamut of Chinese American men's experiences on Gold Mountain, literature, history, biography, cartography and law all figure as discourses producing ideas of nationhood. Although Kingston was to discard the title ‘Gold Mountain Heroes’ in a later draft, her original use signals her intention to create a history of her Chinese American male ancestors that both mythologised and celebrated their arrival in America, a place Chinese immigrants named ‘Gold Mountain’; and to commemorate their efforts to bond with their new land and country, and the hard labour they undertook in these endeavours.

Chapter 2 establishes an intermedial, transatlantic connection between John Milton, Herman Melville and J. M. W. Turner. Building on the work of Erik Gray and Robert K. Wallace, it identifies in Melville’s and Turner’s work a shared investment in Miltonic ‘passive power’. This concept is spatially rendered in the work of all three figures as a vortex: a dynamic form with a still, potent centre. In Milton, vortical passive power is depicted most clearly in Satan circling the immovable Christ in Paradise Regained. Melville’s engagement with Miltonic passivity is evidenced in his annotated reading of Milton and given vortical form in the violent silence of the white whale in Moby-Dick and in the maddening refusals of Bartleby in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’. In Moby-Dick, Melville’s ekphrastic engagement with Milton’s sublime chaos also draws on the visual language of Turner’s paintings, in turn informed by Milton. The chapter ends by examining Turner’s self-mythologising anecdotes, arguing that he constructs himself as a Miltonic figure, positioned as the still, commanding centre of the elemental vortex.

Since the mid-1990s, the author has edited a number of special Australian issues of literary journals from Britain, Canada, and the United States. He has also edited an anthology of contemporary Australian poetry, Landbridge (1999a), and is currently completing a two-volume historical anthology. These projects were very different in orientation from the process of including Australian poetry (and prose) in the many ‘general’ issues of literary journals that he edited over the same period of time, and indeed over the last dozen or so years. Apart from the obvious agenda of representing place and culture – or especially with a continent-country as large and diverse as Australia, places and cultures – there is the constant undercurrent of bypassing or making connections between differences to create a broader context of identity. Australians are generally proud of their poetry, or the poetries of their particular cultures within the idea of Australia, and poetry has a great significance spiritually, as well as pragmatically, to the indigenous peoples.

In an ‘interview with [him]self’ on The Great American Novel in 1973 (reprinted in Reading Myself and Others), Philip Roth recalls how he came upon a letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which Melville describes his elation upon completing Moby Dick. In a feature on Roth published on the eve of the publication of Portnoy's Complaint, Albert Goldman traced the origins of the novel to the childhood larks of Roth and his peers. This chapter discusses Roth's treatment of morality, mortality and masculinity in what it considers to be his masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater (1995), comparing it with a short story by Stanley Elkin and a novel by Howard Jacobson that share many of its themes.

This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's testing of scientific rationalism in his novel Enduring Love. Underpinning this testing of character is McEwan's larger literary project, to consider the function of the novel when set against the claims of post-Darwinian science about the evolutionary basis of morality and judgement. This novel implicitly stages a contest of the relative merits of science and literature, as a careful fusion of form and content, contained within a suspense novel. It also shows humanity to be at a stage of evolution and/or social complexity that puts us out of the evolutionary loop, and that demands of us an ethical sense that addresses the problem of self-interest with acute self-consciousness.

The first part of this chapter examines Oscar Wilde's construction of Dorian Gray, eponymous protagonist of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The analysis illustrates the way in which opium addiction may provide a more accurate medical model in the depiction of Gray's physical deterioration. The second part returns again to Dickens to consider the case of John Jasper, the ‘solitary’, and, until now, undisputedly opium-addicted, choirmaster in the author's final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Although Jasper's opium habit is fully and openly exhibited in the text, the character manifests some subtle—and, at times, not-so-subtle—nuances within the symptomatology of addiction which suggests that his drug abuse could, more correctly, be described as over written with the pathology and signifiers of self-abuse.

This chapter discusses the use of animal imagery in Hamlet and Mother Hubberds Tale. It observes that most analyses of the animal imagery in these plays focus on iconographic and symbolic meanings instead of looking at this image pattern as linking the play to the beast fable genre. The chapter then describes Mother Hubberds Tale and studies beast satire in Hamlet. It also shows that the beast fable genre is known to function in part in reaction to the perceived permeability of the limits between human and animal, and even to satirise and instruct powerful people. The chapter is futhermore concerned with an analysis of Hamlet's analogies to Mother Hubberds Tale.

This chapter focuses on Paul Auster, the writer's room, and the relationship between metropolitan experience and the attempts to re-present it from memory through language. It studies Auster's concern with language, his poetry and the process of composition he uses when writing prose pieces. This chapter shows that a poet's retreat into his room is a way of interacting with the metropolis while protecting the artistic self from the overwhelming complications of modern city life.

This chapter views Redcross Knight (The Faerie Queene) and Edgar (King Lear) as chivalric knights, and studies Spenser's and Shakespeare's own uses of materials from the chivalric romance tradition. It then determines Spenser's and Shakespeare's attitudes towards knights and chivalry as possible signs of modern perspectives as the medieval world transitioned into the modern world. The chapter also explores both works through their intimate familiarity with chivalric romances, as well as their conventional materials.

This chapter introduces David Malouf, a writer known for his concern with encounters between self and other. It describes his works as possessing a strong tendency to find in otherness—or alterity—the orientation and stimulus for a creative unsettling of identity. It provides some monographs that contain descriptions of Malouf as a writer and notes that he shares the same concerns with another famous writer, namely Rudyard Kipling. It compares Malouf with Kipling and studies the postcolonial character of Malouf's writing.