Flaubert's Parrot (1984) inasmuch as it is Braithwaite's story is a poignant study of loss and displacement completing a trilogy of novels that could be said to focus on common preoccupations of youth and middle age, both early and late, married and bereaved. Flaubert's Parrot is a novel at one remove: partly a novel about a novelist, partly a novel about a man obsessed with a novelist, and partly a novel about the business of novel-writing. It is also a strange kind of life-writing about the real Gustave Flaubert, a portrait of whose life becomes ever more complex as the identification of his parrot becomes more complicated, and the fictional Geoffrey Braithwaite, whose life-story slowly emerges in glimpses, but in a way that leaves the reader with questions, as Braithwaite has of Flaubert.

Reviewers' responses to Terry Eagleton's After Theory have, in part, been concerned with a comment made in the introduction: ‘Not all students are blind to the Western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world's population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day.’ This chapter examines the reviewers' responses to this quotation and argues that Eagleton is using wit and exaggeration as a means to shift perception rather than to give evidence. It also asserts that the reviewers are as much revealing something of their own assumptions about hair, gender and politics, as an understanding of Eagleton's arguments in After Theory. The Eagleton pubic hair quotation is reminiscent of another one, the debate around which is discussed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. What a comparison of the After Theory reviews to the Sedgwick makes clear is that both masturbation and pubic hair are about sexuality itself. The notions embedded in the Eagleton quotation are also reminiscent of Sigmund Freud's The Medusa's Head.

Doom was the most advanced three-dimensional computer game in the world when it was released in 1993. The opening sequence of the violent virtual adventure playground leaves no doubt as to its aim or content. The rules of the game are kill or be killed until there are no more monsters left and the hostile military-industrial-research complex can be escaped. Mainly zones of terror, horror and violent sensation, bewildering labyrinths stalked by homicidal mutants, the various stages of the game also conceal secrets. The development of computer games owes debts to horror cinema and incorporates some of its features and, even, some images, in game design. The settings, shocks, monsters and graphic violence of games provide grounds for condemnation. Phantasmagoria did simply present terrifying images and evoke shocking effects with greater immediacy than Gothic fiction in a spectacular technical improvement on written communication. Though particular formulas fade, the association between Gothic fictions and technical innovations has persisted for more than 200 years.

Arthur & George is a book about unlikely pairings and questionable divisions. It is a fiction about truth and relativity, perception and rationality, fear and authority. Drawing on the real-life investigation by Arthur Conan Doyle of a miscarriage of justice, it explores the borderlines of nationality and ethnicity, evidence and imagination, doubt and faith, fact and fiction, endings and beginnings. It underlines the power of narrative to weave a plot from scraps of unsubstantiated information, in which the key factors are conviction and prejudice. Part of the intrigue of the book is directed at the play on distinctions between fact and fabulation, and Barnes seems deeply sceptical throughout his fiction of the notion of an accurate version of events.

This introductory chapter discusses Samuel Beckett and his works that were adapted for British television and radio. It considers the question of whether Beckett's television plays are single ‘literary’ dramas or part of a larger series. It also identifies some critical traditions in Television Studies. The final section of the chapter presents an overview of the following chapters.

This chapter takes a look at the institutional frameworks where Beckett gained access to television personnel and what his authorship meant to them. It identifies the role of the authorial signature in his television work, and notes that some of the programmes studied in this chapter were directed by Beckett himself. This chapter also evaluates Beckett's authorship in relation to the particular conflicts and divergent assumptions around authorship in television institutions.

The vast majority of women in Western culture, as well as in many other cultures, remove the hair on their bodies. Women's body hair is apparently seen as either too ridiculous and trivial – or too monstrous – to be discussed at all, and is, in this sense, truly configured as a taboo: something not to be seen or mentioned; prohibited and circumscribed by rules of avoidance; surrounded by shame, disgust and censure. It is also in this sense that this book refers to it as ‘the last taboo’. The book focuses on feminist analyses of body weight as a problem for women: as an oppressive patriarchal ideal that regulates and controls, or produces, the female body. It suggests that the problem of women and body weight has become as much a means for the patriarchy to define and control ‘femininity’, as a site of resistance to patriarchy, and also explores body-hair removal in relation to maleness. In these senses, it is perfectly logical that there are fetishes both for ‘hairy women’ and for ‘shaven’ women.

Oscar and Lucinda uses a large-scale fabulatory form to interweave the fantastic and often painfully absurd adventures of extravagant fictional characters with the actual events of national or international history to create a gigantic teeming canvas. The use of an historical narrative was a new element in Peter Carey's repertoire as his hybrid post-modern and post-colonial approach addressed the nineteenth-century past directly for the first time. The video The Most Beautiful Lies caught him half-way through writing Oscar and Lucinda. His working title was 'Holy Ghosts' and the video shows him introducing the book with reference to a faded weatherboard church set on the flood plains of the Bellinger River. Carey used the haunting quality of this image to point out how deeply imbued with Christian culture his life and Australian history has been.

This chapter addresses the ways in which Erdrich andher critics examine the complex symbiosis of hervarious ‘spheres’, outlining her workingcollaboration with Michael Dorris in order to studythe revision process that is important to her work.It then discusses two of Erdrich's memoirs, andconsiders the ways she uses to record herinfluences, writing processes, and the importance offamilies and homes to her creativity. The chapterends with a section on the pedagogical brief ofErdrich's children's writing.

In Peter Carey's world, we are all creatures of the shadow lands. His fictions explore the experiences lurking in the cracks of normality and are inhabited by hybrid characters living in between spaces or on the margins. Carey took a circuitous route into literature and writing. In 1964, Carey wrote a novel, Contacts, and was shortlisted in 1965 as an unsuccessful finalist for a Stanford writing scholarship. By 1966, an extract from Contacts appeared in an anthology called Under 25, which also included an early piece by contemporary experimentalist Murray Bail. Carey's work refuses to establish a smooth narrative effect in the 'classic' traditions of European narrative art. Instead, he exploits cross-mixtures which create dislocations, disrupting any supposed norms of fictional practice. The self-consciously fictive tendency of Carey's work echoed in near contemporaries like Dal Stivens and Rudi Krausmann, as well as by Michael Wilding and Bail.

This chapter addresses the neglect of the richness anddepth of Erdrich's canvas, which is in full view inher poetry, and, instead of using a contextualanalysis, presents a close analysis of a selectionof representative poems. It shows that, like mostNative American poetry, Erdrich's work leans towardsthe personal-political, where it reflects on theaspects of place, space and the individual, throughthemes such as cultural and multiple heritage. Thechapter also tries to show the importance andcomplexity of Erdrich's symbolism, an aesthetic thatsets her and other Native poets apart in modernAnglophone poetry.

This chapter introduces and studies the works of LouiseErdrich, a popular and highly successful NativeAmerican writer, some of which have even garneredher numerous awards, and are typically described asbeautiful and powerful. It draws out historical andculturally specific readings through the theoreticalmethodologies that are offered by both indigenousand postcolonial theories: feminism, postmodernismand even regionalism. The chapter also presents abrief outline of the critical platform that servesas the basis of the scholarly archive relating toErdrich's work. It then considers Erdrich's work inrelation to Native and American concerns, and inrelation to the many influences Erdrich has bothdrawn from and created in her own writing, alsostudying the possibility that her work is not usefulto Native American political issues, due to itsaccessibility and/or popularity.

Robert Southwell (1561–95), Catholic martyr and poet from whose work Geoffrey Hill takes his epigraph for his 1975 sonnet sequence ‘Lachrimae or Seven tears figured in seven passionate Pavans’ wrote in his posthumous work St Peter's Complaint (1595) of what he saw as his contemporaries' abuse of their poetic talents: ‘a poet, a lover and a liar are by many reckoned but three things with one signification’. ‘Lachrimae’ is a ‘religious’ work in that it twitches the mantle of devotional verse, but it also explores the nature of the discourse of religion by both adopting and parodying its traditional figures and vocabulary.

Gothic fiction is bound up with the function of the paternal figure, an effect of and an engagement with a crisis in its legitimacy and authority, with tremors in its orchestration of symbolic boundaries and distinctions, with disruptions to its heterogeneous maintenance of cultural values and mores, with challenges to the way it presides unseen over the structured circulation of social exchanges and meanings. More precisely, it can be defined as a transgression of the paternal metaphor. The return to simple domesticity, recommended in the Gothic romance since Ann Radcliffe, seems to banish the spectres of romantic fancy. With the exposure and expulsion of those fictional spectres comes a more sustained interrogation of the assumptions and illusions supporting familial and social relations. Sigmund Freud's account of the father does not end with his murder. The psychological and cultural consequences of the act are extensive.

This chapter discusses indigenous spatiality. Itstudies the way that this was often constructed, incontrast to a presumed British spatiality. It alsotries to mark the sense that indigenous populationsresisted colonial rule and tried to manage andrestrict colonists, and that it is this resistancethat makes its presence felt in the accounts of thecolonists. This chapter also examines cannibalismand the seclusion of indigenous women.

After the long, shifting account of Charles Péguy in Hill's poem, what are we to take from him? There is ready denouement. The stanza edges towards a close of the poem's complex meditation in an almost sidelong fashion, motivated or affected towards its ‘cry’, the sounds of eulogy and lament sliding the words against each other. The poem relates to ‘things’, the world outside itself, specifically the life lived by Charles Péguy for which it is a work of celebration and sorrow, the genres of ‘éloge and elegy’. Hill's whole poem travels over these two possibilities: circumstances in which the self-sufficiency, the given facts of the world, events themselves, are moved by words; and circumstances where they seem without real object and yet are ‘moving’.

This chapter updates Erdrich's adult fiction withseveral ‘mini-essays’ on certain aspects of thesenovels, first addressing the firm conviction thatthese novels are worthy of and give the same levelof attention which the earlier works have received.It shows how culture and power are expressed in TheAntelope Wife and the central idea of disclosure inLast Report. The chapter then discusses themaster-narratives of Native American displacement,which emphasise geographical removal and culturaland spiritual dislocation, among others, and alsoconsiders land acquisition, repatriation, and truthand legacy in Erdrich's recent fiction.