Doris Lessing's In Pursuit of the English (1960), based on her experiences on first arriving in England from Southern Rhodesia and trying to find somewhere to live, provides an excellent point of entry into the extensive body of her work. It also allows us to begin to understand some of the contexts and intertexts that have been important in her writing. Issues of exile and migration are at the centre of this text and her work as a whole, suggesting the importance, but also the instability, of identity. Lessing is interested in ideas about class, nation, ‘race’ and gender, but, more importantly, in the links between these concepts and in the ways they overlap with and merge into one another. The generic indeterminacy of In Pursuit brings to the fore Lessing's critical relation to the constraints of genre and her qualified suspicion of categories such as realism and experimentalism, fiction and autobiography. Her constructive and complex use of autobiographical material also creatively interacts with her interest in the writer or artist as both figure in and producer of the text.

Jack Maggs begins in the best traditions of Victorian melodrama. Like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Jack Maggs juxtaposes the hidden and the visible to reveal a terrible social violence beneath the surface of the imperial ideal. Jack Maggs is Peter Carey's Wide Sargasso Sea, an act of postcolonial retaliation against a parent culture. Like Jean Rhys's novel, it rewrites elements of a canonical text from the heart of the English literary tradition to reveal the hidden alternative history that cultural hegemony has effaced or suppressed. Carey 'willingly admits to having once or twice stretched history to suit his own fictional ends' in his Author's Note. One of Carey's starting points for the novel was postcolonial theorist Edward Said's views on Great Expectations in Culture and Imperialism, in which Said sees the transported convict Abel Magwitch as a metaphor for the relationship between England and its colonial offspring.

This chapter discusses the formation of and the critical response to a canon of British television drama in terms of a conflict between aesthetic modernism and critical realism. It notes that some of the critics' responses to Beckett's work in the 1970s reflected the critical debate of the time over the politics of naturalistic versus avant-garde form. It determines that Beckett's television plays are placed within a complex dialectic of critical discourses around the aesthetics and politics of television drama, and part of this debate is about the address to the television audience. Finally, this chapter tries to link critical work on Beckett's television plays with discursive models of how television audiences were imagined by critics, television institutions and authors.

In Jack Maggs, an orphan becomes a criminal; in True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey's second Booker Prize winning novel, Ned loses his father and is abandoned by his mother to become a highwayman and killer. If Jack Maggs looks at the effects of the colonial enterprise on England, True History of the Kelly Gang shows the realities of colonialism as lived inside of the colony itself. Using all the genre modes, True History of the Kelly Gang not only re-writes a national icon; it effectively re-writes the founding elements of the English novel tradition. True History of the Kelly Gang takes the form of 'parcels' of documents, each with a bibliographical description of contents, paper and condition. Throughout Kelly Gang, as Andrew Riemer suggests, 'a touching sense of kinship with an often inhospitable environment emerges from Ned's brief and seemingly matter-of-fact descriptions'.

This chapter studies the issue of visibility, which is considered central to both Beckett and intertextuality. It introduces The Lost Ones, a text that alternates between claiming to be the recording of a visual experience and the creation of a fiction that is based on ‘notions’. It shows that this text uses the last lines of Dante's Comedy to question, through Dante, the very process of the construction of fictional spaces and of ways out.

The presentation of a tableau in this chapter related to Shiloh Church, or the Battle of Towton almost exactly four hundred years earlier under the comet's light in ‘Funeral Music’, appears as a central feature of King Log. Such single revelations haunt Hill's imagination. They act as images that compound his obsession with human suffering, ‘circumstantial disasters’, and all that compromises those circumstances. ‘The exact words’ are Geoffrey Hill's total concern as a poet. His determination is to strive to make them adequate to the events he witnesses. King Log is fruit of that witness and that determination.

This chapter begins by presenting the first stanza of John Milton's ‘The Passion’, a poem he probably began and abandoned in 1630. The penultimate line, ‘In Wintry solstice like the shorten'd light’, recurs in Geoffrey Hill's Scenes from Comus, including in the very last lines of the work. Milton's lines also point to another major preoccupation of Hill's poem, music. Hill keeps his own music going towards ‘long out-living night’ when that of the young Milton fails, but his concern is not only with the endurance of his verse, here metaphorically cast as ‘music’. Scenes from Comus is first an occasional poem, written ‘for Hugh Wood on his 70th Birthday’. Wood is Hill's contemporary to the year and month.