This chapter examines The Conversations at Curlow Creek, a novel that organises itself much more around defamiliarising the familiar. It determines that this novel shows the gaps of darkness and strangeness that inform relationships of assumed intimacy and examines the continuous problem of self-knowledge. It considers the novel's division between ‘nature’ and ‘the law’ and how it determines a person's relationship with the work of civilisation. This chapter also discusses the collective consciousness of colonial Australian society, which appears to be mostly directed and dominated by power.

This book considers the construction and presentation of the masturbator in nineteenth-century fiction and medical writing, and the implication of him or her in a paradoxically ‘secret’ vice, made visible to the Victorians through a range of bodily signifiers yet invisible when perceiving the bodies of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It demonstrates how the symptoms of solitary self-abuse may be seen to disclose other textual vices and pathologies. The ongoing debate on Victorian sexuality encloses the related issue of autoerotic behaviour, a field which is both problematic in terms of extent and implication, and dogged by a certain humorous mode of discourse.

This chapter reflects on the abiding nature of Victorian masturbatory discourse and examines the way the discourse is utilised and modified in the work of contemporary authors with specific reference to Willy Russell's The Wrong Boy (2000). The discourse on masturbation, in terms of its cultural implications at least, does not conclude with the Victorian era. Indeed, it persists to the present, in a popular, albeit frequently comedic form independent of any sustaining contemporary medical support.

Chapter 4 reads the fiction of Thomas Hardy alongside biblical illustration and iconographic tradition to reveal both Hardy’s Miltonic way of seeing and his literary idiosyncrasy. The chapter begins by analysing Hardy’s use of Miltonic shifts in perspective and scale – described by critics as proto-cinematic – to shape Wessex as a post-lapsarian, sublime landscape. In The Return of the Native and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy’s characters re-enact the Fall, situating themselves within a cyclical Miltonic genealogy. The chapter then turns to Hardy’s allusions to Milton through his focus on hands, in ‘handed moments’ that recall Milton’s haptic imagery to recreate an unstable Eden in Wessex. Finally, the chapter compares biblical and Miltonic illustrations that are brought together in nineteenth-century extra-illustrated Bibles such as the Kitto Bible: this comparison reveals how Milton’s text and its focus on hands reshaped biblical illustration, and supports a reading of Hardy as a writer attuned to the differences between Milton’s Eden and that of Genesis.

This chapter explores Shakespeare's counter-Spenserian authorship, emphasising the importance of re-thinking Shakespearean authorship, because most critics still see Shakespeare as a ‘man of the theatre’. It also examines one example of Shakespeare's counter-Spenserian authorship, and tries to recover Shakespeare's concern for literary authorship within the anonymity of the medium of theatre. The analysis presented in the chapter helps in questioning two well-known and interrelated views of Shakespeare's career.

This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, his first fiction to be clearly longer than novella length and his first sustained attempt at a social novel. It suggests that this work can be considered a ‘Condition of England novel’ in some respects because of its projection of a fourth or fifth-term Thatcherite government becoming increasingly authoritarian. This chapter also discusses McEwan's sources in popular science to show how a post-Einsteinian conception of the plasticity of time and space allows the central character to intervene in the past and guarantee his own future.

Trials are ubiquitous in the fiction of Philip Roth. From Peter Tarnopol's lengthy divorce litigation in My Life as a Man (1974) to the historical court case of John Demjanjuk that dominates the opening of Operation Shylock (1993), the trial is one of Roth's favourite tropes. This chapter argues that the four books which comprise the Zuckerman Bound series – The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and The Prague Orgy (1985) – represent a detailed exploration of the ethical and aesthetic conflicts faced by Roth. Focusing on Roth's use of legalistic language in these fictions, it suggests that the trials (the tests and ordeals) which Nathan Zuckerman (the protagonist of all four books) undergoes not only reflect Roth's paradoxical responses to the critical reception of his earlier work by Jewish readers but also function as metaphors for the ways in which, historically, Jews have often judged, and been judged, by themselves and others.

This chapter examines the character and circumstance in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. It shows that this novel's treatment of the competing claims of literature and medicine is more thoroughgoing than Atonement, even though still more extravagant claims for the literary are pressed, and also questioned. This novel implies a new form of social accountability in the light of advances in genetic science and considers a new model of responsibility.

This chapter draws an analogy between Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, showing that, while Antony and Cleopatra combines comedy, tragedy and romance with allegory, lyric, history and myth, it also features the breaking of formal conventions and is concerned with gender. It lists the details and dates related to the believability of relevant intertextual relations between The Faerie Queene and Antony and Cleopatra, as well as their connections within modern critical studies. The chapter also discusses an imaginative affinity between these two works.

Traditionally, pastoral worked as a vehicle of empowerment for the educated classes through the idyllicising and, most often, the romanticising of the rural world. The pastoral is not really about nature, except insofar as it is about landscape, the mediation of nature through human interference and control. A critical language is deployed to discuss these issues, which in a sense becomes part of the pastoral construct itself, so that pastoral is about the language of presentation as much as about the language of place. Terms such as ‘pathetic fallacy’ become in this context a self-conscious critique of the anthropomorphising of place and nature, yet pathetic fallacy is itself one of the weapons of pastoral. Pastoral has always been about the tensions within morality, and a moral guidebook for behaviour. Another concern is gender – is the pastoral a patriarchal tool? The idyllicism of the pastoral juxtaposed to the loss of alternative idylls becomes a mirror of oppression, and potentially liberation. Parrots in Australian poetry have a bad reputation.