Barnes has written two volumes of loosely connected short stories. The first, Cross Channel (1995), is explicitly focused on a topic often associated with Barnes and his writing, the relationship between England and France. The second, The Lemon Table (2004), engages a number of themes that striate Barnes's work, such as ageing and death. It is a collection that treats in fictional form issues raised by his later memoir Nothing to Be Frightened of.

Before she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, Doris Lessing's reputation (in the UK at least) was looking rather shaky. Many commentaries on the Nobel Prize focused on The Golden Notebook as Lessing's most important book and included comparatively little about the rest of her literary output in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Feminist criticism of Lessing's work has, to some extent, followed a trajectory between what we might call gynocriticism and gynesis, even if many critics (feminist and otherwise) still fail to acknowledge the formal innovations of her writing. Gayle Greene's 1994 book, Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change was written some time after the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, but she begins by noting that Lessing's work presented ‘the malaise that produced the second wave of feminism…in political terms’. Lessing's recent writing has clearly concerned itself with the interesting intersections and overlaps between gender and class, sexuality, ‘race’, nation and age.

Staring at the Sun (1986) is an examination of the virtue of courage that is extraordinary. Barnes's fourth novel records moments in the life of an ordinary woman, Jean Serjeant, up to a flight she takes in 2021, on which she twice sees the sun setting. The metaphor of the book's title implies that human beings have to stare courageously at the fact of a godless universe: stoically face life as chaotic, but beautiful and marvelous, and death as final, without the consolations offered by religion. The book shares thematic concerns with much of Barnes's other work in its interest in the nature of death and truth; but in this novel, the connections with the shape and course of one individual's life are clearer than in most of his writings. In the book's imagery, Jean is like the mink: tenacious of life.

This chapter analyses the way that colonialsubjectivity is formed within the colonial context.The discussion is concerned with analysing the veryspecificity of colonial subjectivity, as well as theway that certain forms of subject position developin relation to, and in contrast to, othersubjectivities. This chapter also considers theimpact these different forms of subjectivity have onmetropolitan contexts.

This chapter provides a reading of Mercier et Camier/Mercier and Camier that focuses on how Dante sometimes appears in the French and not in the English self-translated text, and vice versa. It observes how the issues of authority, visibility and invisibility can help assess the role Dante played in Mercier and Camier in relation to both Mercier et Camier and other texts by Beckett. Finally, it considers P. J. Murphy's point that the true ‘pseudocouple’ is the author linked with his two creations, and not Mercier and Camier.

This chapter centres on the way that landscape can beviewed within the colonial context. It studies theviewing positions that are created for travellerswithin the colonial context. It also analyses thecomponents of certain aesthetic positions, such asthe sublime and the picturesque, and relates theseto the positions of power that were assumed by viewsof the landscape within the colonial context.

This chapter takes a look at the most sustained work on the intertextual relationships between Beckett's television drama and other work by him and by others. It examines the association between authored television drama with discourses of ‘quality’, and discusses some matters of visual design, music and literary reference in television plays. It discusses the relationship between uses of visual space in Beckett's television plays and Film and his theatrical works. It also addresses some questions of performance related to ‘theatricality’ and the prevalent motif identified by Beckett critics of increasing formal simplicity or minimalism in his theatre.