Much of the critical debate surrounding The Woman Warrior has centred upon the book's troubling generic status. Ostensibly a memoir—the subtitle is ‘Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts’—the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, but it blends together elements of several genres, including fiction, myth, auto/biography and memoir, in a manner that is not easily categorised. Ultimately, for Maxine Hong Kingston, the talk-story form becomes a new kind of genre, one malleable to her own purposes.

This chapter examines Ian McEwan's novel The Comfort of Strangers and his screenplay for the film The Imitation Game. It explains that the film is McEwan's first explicit engagement of feminism and it is most notable for enacting a dialogue between two overlapping strands of feminism: the emergent feminism of the wartime era, viewed through the lens of 1970s feminism. The novel addresses the problematic relationship between values, ideas and literature and it shows that the author is unable, as yet, to generate vital social resonances through the medium of fiction. This work is perhaps his most disturbing book, with its emphasis on violence and psychosis.

This chapter takes a closer look at the book that launched the idea of the wise fool, Erasmus's Praise of Folly. Erasmus is indebted to the ancient concept of learned ignorance that Renaissance thinkers such as Nicolas Cusa had revived. They believed that the goal of knowledge was to show us our ignorance. In Praise of Folly, Folly holds up a mirror to humanity and poses the question: who is the real fool? Erasmus uses laughter to defamiliarise the world and expose the absurdity of human pretensions. What does not become clear, however, is to what extent laughter serves as a political tool. The ambiguity inherent in humour undercuts any didactic point it purports to make. The most Erasmian wise fool in William Shakespeare's plays is Lear's Fool in King Lear, whose office is to mockingly reveal Lear's own folly. The chapter also explores the function of laughter in Shakespearean tragedy, suggesting that laughter articulates the strain of scepticism about a stable worldview which traversed the early modern age and undercut its sense of optimism.

This chapter addresses the relationship between acts of reading and British responses to the French Revolution. In the work of authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, William Godwin and Mary Hays, education offers the means through which ideas about social progress can be brought to fruition. However, finding the most appropriate method of ensuring the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another proves a sensitive affair, raising questions about the ethics of parental authority. This chapter is particularly concerned with the extent to which children and young women were granted what Godwin describes in The Enquirer as ‘choice in reading’. While Godwin was attacked for advocating a ‘system of indiscriminate reading’, the prohibition of particular texts only serves to render them more attractive to readers. For the writers discussed, domestic scenes of reading become the testing ground for exploring the limits of individual liberty.

For Maria Edgeworth, women's exclusion from professional labour frees them from the requirement to tailor their knowledge to the demands of a single specialisation: it provides them with ‘leisure to be wise’. This chapter questions the social utility of the intellectual capital that this formulation allows women to accrue. It compares accounts of female readers with their male counterparts, asking how the issue of gender helps to distinguish leisured wisdom from unproductive indolence. Using the example of Edgeworth's Belinda, it revisits the idea of reading as symbolic labour, attending both to its positive agency and its limitations.

This chapter explains how Auster represents spaces that cannot be found on the map in two of his novels. It shows that the places that are represented in The Music of Chance and In the Country of Last Things are created entirely from Auster's imagination, and even contain unknowable and unreal forces. It notes that these resulting ‘fictional’ places allow Auster to study the extremes of human experience and demonstrate how ontological stability is continually weakened by spatial instability. This chapter also discusses how utopian thinking forms models of spatial organisation, and how these are translated in actual spaces.

Caryl Churchill's combination of technical experimentation and acute sensitivity to current social and political concerns has frequently been remarked upon. One innovative aspect of her work that has received little attention, however, is the radical use she makes of the fairy story and the whodunnit. The Skriker, Far Away and A Number, rely on the in-built expectations within these forms of an unambiguous resolution of difficulties, which Churchill is then able to subvert. In The Skriker, she reconfigures fairy stories in order to create her own dramatic parable about the imminence of ecological disaster. Far Away and A Number utilise the apparent simplicities of the whodunnit to explore complex notions of culpability.

The publication of The Plot Against America (2004) was attended with more fanfare and controversy than any of Philip Roth's books since Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Just as Portnoy had been heralded as the publishing event of 1969 long before its actual appearance, so The Plot Against America was trailed by a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign which exploited rumours that the novel's title alluded to the events of 9/11 and which included the dissemination of extracts from the book prior to its publication. In spite of Roth's own repeated denials that the book was intended as an oblique or symbolic commentary on George W. Bush's ‘war against terror’, many early reviewers read the novel as, and many readers bought the book anticipating, a political allegory. This chapter looks at The Plot Against America alongside Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) as studies of the relationship between history and fiction, trauma and imagination. So many reviewers couched their critiques in terms of the realism, or otherwise, of Roth's and Foer's novels.

Published in the wake of her first literary success, but reissued in 1988, Hawai'i One Summer reminds us of Kingston's strong attachment to place: here the Hawai'i of her early married years, where she worked as a teacher, raised her son and wrote her first fiction. As an extensive meditation upon place and environment in Hawai'i, the pieces here together represent Kingston's imbrication in a politics of ecology, and specifically a form of ecological feminism as well. This chapter argues that Hawai'i One Summer warrants critical attention as providing an additional, previously unconsidered, perspective upon this renowned writer.