This chapter discusses an early Beckett essay that fashions a modernist Dante and tries to show how the idea of Dante as the quintessentially classic author has changed over time. The first part of the chapter tries to detect Dante within James Joyce. This chapter also focuses on how Dante's function has changed in the essay Proust. It notes that in Proust, Dante no longer characterises linguistic experimentalism, but instead works as the quotable authority capable of strengthening the intellectual credentials of the writer.

What must strike any reader of Doris Lessing's 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, is the extent to which its protagonist, AnnaWulf, has been affected by the experience of loss. Anna's attempt to convince herself that her pain and that of other women like her represents ‘not much loss’ is belied by the experience of reading the entire novel and by Lessing's continuing preoccupation with the idea of loss in her later novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). This chapter explores how, in her work in the 1960s and the early 1970s, Lessing rewrites the experience of loss as potentially creative, productive and transformative. In her vision of what the chapter calls a ‘melancholy cosmopolitanism’, Lessing challenges the closed-off, paranoid legacy of the Cold War in the 1950s. In Memoirs and Briefing, she further develops the distinction between the claustrophobic, nostalgic relation to loss that is characteristic of mourning and the creative work of melancholia.

This chapter discusses post-Nietzschean philosophers and other forms of the anachronous. One of these forms is within memory, which is seen as always productive of the traumatic event. It studies the sense of catastrophe that is outside chronology. This chapter also studies anachronoristics, the structure of language anachronistic, the use of flashbacks in the film 2046, and trauma.

England, England (1998) is a fictional study around issues such as the creation of the past, the re-fashioning of an imagined national community, and in particular the telling and selling of England. It explores the relationships between heritage and commercialism, history and exploitation, imitation and reality. It is a fantasy, but one that has many recent echoes and real-life parallels. Its central story is that of a powerful businessman who plans to turn the Isle of Wight into a colossal theme park so that tourists will not have to traipse from Dover to London to Stratford-on-Avon to Chester. It counterposes the pomp of Sir Jack Pitman's service-sector magnate with Martha Cochrane's everyday scepticism.

Looking at the closing passage of ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, this chapter dwells on the penultimate line: ‘its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight’. The littoral has held a powerful place in Geoffrey Hill's poetic imagination right from the beginning. In ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’, littoral and sunlight work as a metaphor for ‘well dug-in language’ itself. All of Hill's work in the tilth of language knows that metaphor is but one instance of its approximate nature, that it ‘pitches us as it finds’. But his wintry, hedged, clouded, ‘rare pale’ sunlights might sometimes pitch him, and so his readers, beyond labouring.

In recent years, contemporary artists have been increasingly devoting attention to human hair, and specifically to body hair. When it comes to picturing and representing female bodies, often even the most radical and iconoclastic artworks can be seen as reproducing the same ideal criteria that have their roots in centuries of visual representation, sexual aesthetics and patriarchal ideology. This chapter analyses some examples of images of female bodies with body hair – both in advertising and in contemporary art. It examines the way in which such images might endorse or indeed try to expose the taboo of body hair and the different representations and constructions of female bodies across the diversity of Western cultures. First, the chapter compares two images used in recent advertisement campaigns with Mixed Metaphors (1993), a painting by the artist Dottie Attie. These three images share a common concern with the female body and its hair, and all depict female genitals with pubic hair or a semblance thereof.

Peter Carey's first published novel capitalised on the success of his stories to exhilarating effect. Its anarchic narratology puzzled many reviewers, but as Carey's œuvre grows, its mix of satiric realism, fable, fantasy and manic cartoon quality seem entirely characteristic. After War Crimes was awarded the New South Wales Premier Award, Bliss received the same prize in 1982, as well as the Miles Franklin and the National Book Council awards. It became a well-received film in 1985, the year of Mad Max III's release, winning best picture, director and screenplay awards from the Australian Film Institute. Bliss was also shown as the official Australian entry at the Cannes Film festival. In Bliss, the hippy capitalists of 'War Crimes' were replaced by the conventional scenario of hippies versus capitalists, but with a complex sense of the contradictions which crossed these seemingly opposed cultures as Harry Joy is caught between the worlds.

The Orchards of Syon completes a tentative trilogy begun with The Triumph of Love and continued with Speech! Speech! All three-part sequences are bound to refer to the model of Dante's La Divina Commedia. Hill's commedia is fraught with the anxiety, anger, doubt, self-doubt and self-flagellation that besets Dante, and is similarly bold in its historical and referential reach. But part of its comedy lies in parody and self-mockery. ‘Syon’—a less militant spelling of ‘Zion’—is the promised land, and its orchards part of medieval visionary imagination. Here it is the sensuousness of the phrase that matters along with the redolence of blossoming beauty and Eden.

Characterising Peter Carey's stories takes us to the heart of his fictional practice. Most adopt a mixture of narrative modes, a central feature of his writing. They contain elements of science fiction, fantasy, fable and satire. Grouping the stories around themes and issues, and considering an example of each in detail alongside other related stories allows for a fairly comprehensive insight into Carey's shorter works. This grouping also provides some key threads for later discussions of the longer fiction. Four of the most significant areas of themes are American imperialism and culture, capitalism, power and authority, and gender. America has a spectral fascination for many Australian writers, as Don Anderson has pointed out. 'American Dreams' takes the orthodox realist story of outback communities and injects a dislocating strangeness into it. The critique of the obsessive consumer culture of tourism has become a significant concern for Australian writers and cultural commentators.

Before She Met Me (1982) is a study of uxoriousness just as much as jealousy in an otherwise unremarkable marriage. Barnes's second novel can be read on its own as a darkly comic story of paranoid love leading to violence and self-destruction. It is also an attack on the view that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was uniformly liberating. Its central characters constitute a triad of a kind that will be familiar in Barnes's novels: a woman and two men. The main themes of the novel concern the relationship between reason and passion at a particular point in social history, advocating how the 1960s changed sexual manners but not feelings, and emphasizing how difficult it can be to control primitive but unwanted emotions.

The Porcupine (1992) is a spotlight on a post-Soviet satellite country that Euro-American press coverage had little touched. It is the political fable of liberalism's lack of conviction before ideological certainty, set in an East European country moving from communism to liberal democracy, and is informed far more by Bulgarian history than by that of any other country. Its human story centres on the overthrown Party leader Stoyo Petkanov, who is brought to trial for prosecution by the ambitious and aggrieved Peter Solinsky. Barnes became interested by Bulgarian politics on a book tour and enlisted the support of local people to help him research and situate the novella. In brief, Bulgaria was a Balkan country of about eight and a half million people under control of the USSR at the end of the 1980s.