Geoffrey Hill has frequently drawn attention to Milton's formulation ‘simple sensuous and passionate’ to describe the distinctive character of poetry. Undeniably, for the reader, the drawing together from the uncountable range of possibilities of a number of words that simply present themselves as ‘right’ seems not only a beauty but a mystery beyond the laws of logic or rhetoric. It is in part because Geoffrey Hill's work, in poetry and prose, is in perpetual struggle with ‘plain speaking’ that he is drawn to write so often on seventeenth-century subjects.

With Illywhacker, Peter Carey's success achieved international dimensions. It was published first in the UK and the USA, something of an irony for a novel exposing cultural imperialism. The novel won three of the major Australian literary prizes and was shortlisted for the British Booker Prize. Illywhacker examines twentieth-century Australian history with the savage humour and fantasy of the earlier fiction now placed within an epic framework. Like Bliss, Illywhacker transgresses and undermines presumptions of formal continuity and genre coherence: it both entertains and indicts, as it investigates the construction of fundamental Australian mythologies, the visions, dreams and lies of the national psyche. Illywhacker depicts a particular phase of Australian culture and nationalism. With its hybrid mix of narrative forms, its post-modern playfulness and the savagery of its critique, Illywhacker is a remarkable and memorable work.

The epigraph Geoffrey Hill uses for the first poem in his sequence ‘Churchill's Funeral’ is from Edward Elgar's note on the ‘Cockaigne’ overture and contains the phrase ‘knowing well the history’. It is apparent that Hill's poetry has always known history very well indeed. Elgar's words point to the way in which music, like poetry, can transmute ‘history’ into its own currency.

This chapter studies More Pricks Than Kicks and the available parodies of and allusions to Dante's lines, which reflect certain passages in Dream and in many other Beckett poems of the time. It also studies the complex web of internal references to Dante, which is one of the ways where Beckett texts are interconnected and comprise themselves into the Beckett oeuvre.

This chapter discusses the unity and spatial relationsfound in the Love Medicine tetralogy and the Talesof Burning Love, identifying the metaphors used inthe novels and explaining how the specificpost-contact condition of Native – especially mixedblood – life in the United States is addressed. Italso examines the deconstructive work of Erdrich'stexts during the early stages of Love Medicine;Leslie Silko's review of Erdrich's prose style; theimagery of culture, syncretism and Catholicism inthe novels; the fluidity of Erdrich's prose; and thefundamental themes of her early work.

This chapter reviews the arguments addressed in this study and the issues that were raised about their relationship with critical traditions in Television Studies and in Beckett scholarship. It then suggests how some of the limits of this study might be opened in future work. Finally, this chapter determines this book's contribution to the historiography of Beckett's work as part of the historiography of television.

Horror arises when boundaries are crossed and the secure relation of inside and outside is disturbed: ‘there is suddenly, no inside and no outside. There is an emptying out of the object. It is the moment, a horrifying moment of the birth of a new space which ruins habitual space’. Rather than filling the new space with recognisable aesthetic images, the gaping hole comes shockingly to the fore: ‘an unfillable gap opens at the moment that the face is lifted’. Against the aestheticisation of horror and abjection stand more pervasive and persistent horrors of social, political and economic existence. Unbearable horror finds an object that turns it into terror. As Gothic images pervade a contemporary culture composed of rapidly oscillating and disturbing flows of anxious expenditures, a culture in which they are as much the norm as images of sex and violence, they manifest the generalisation of horror accompanying the vast economic and technological expansion into – and, phantasmatically, beyond – the black hole of post-modernity.

Margaret A. Lindauer, in her recent monograph Devouring Frida, offers the most rigorous and sustained assessment of Frida Kahlo's various texts yet published. Her readings of Kahlo's texts demonstrate how certain ‘signifiers’, for example the scissors held at crotch height in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), resist any easy or stable position within the ‘masculine’ oppositions. They can, and have, been read both as a phallic symbol and as a symbol of castration – both the phallus and its lack. Lindauer charts the play of these ‘floating’ or ‘shifting’ signifiers in the text in order to disrupt the ‘naturalised’ dichotomies of patriarchy. She claims that a signifier such as ‘hair’ is too bound to notions of sexuality and gender in the work of previous writers on Kahlo, but to her too it must be ‘hair’, even if in ways which oppose these previous readings of the term. Kahlo's initial refusal to trim her facial hair is an important moment for the critical discourse.

This chapter discusses questions about the possibility of textual stability. It shows that Belacqua, the protagonist of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, is a character and his own critique. It takes note of his artificiality and the process of his fabrication that are constantly foregrounded. This chapter shows that instead of explaining the quirks of Belacqua Shuah, Dante's Belacqua adds to his literariness while taking away from his realism.

This chapter takes a look at national identity, food and family as depicted in Susan Ferrier's fiction, showing that her works are explicitly anti-Romantic and that she argues for colonialism as the basis for female liberation. It states that Ferrier's novels are about the decapitation and remaking of the family and the nation state, and that they also use food and domesticity in order to explore colonialism.

Writing on female body hair in English literature goes against the grain: everything below eyelash level has been subject to so much total or partial erasure that it would be easier to write on it behind, beneath, outside or even despite English literary tradition. The erasure is often redoubled in passages where, realistically speaking, depilation must have been involved: the removal of something whose existence has never been acknowledged cannot be mentioned without a breakdown in logic. This chapter first examines the erasure of female body hair in general from polite literature, followed by the special status of pubic hair, and the means by which writers seek to convey its presence without incurring charges of obscenity. There follows an analysis of more direct treatments of pubic hair, ranging from writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the modernists James Joyce (1882–1941) and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930). Special mention is accorded to another project, the Arabian Nights.

This chapter examines two plays, King Lear and All's Well that Ends Well, in relation to García Márquez's Sonnet 106. It first looks at archival anachrony in Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold and studies some of the novel's chapters. Finally, it identifies the characters who are anachronistic in King Lear and the chronicle of a foretold death in All's Well that Ends Well.

This chapter, which focuses on the politics of commensality that can be found in Frances Burney's letters and fiction, shows that commensality in Burney's fiction means the coming together around the table, and is about the social coercion and enforcement of rules and obligations on hesitant individuals. It studies the image of the table as a place for (coded) interrogation and coercion, and considers the role of eating in Burney's performance and reporting of her public, authorial persona. The chapter also contrasts the detailed reportage of mouthfuls and recipes with her fictional heroines' constant lack of interest in sustenance or gastronomy.