‘Beauty’ might be said to be a problem for many twentieth-century artists. In his essay on Ezra Pound's ‘Envoi (1919)’, Geoffrey Hill quotes Pound's assertion ‘Beauty is difficult’, a quotation from the first of the ‘Pisan Cantos’, LXXIV. This chapter examines the bridge between two sections in Hill's Speech! Speech!, sections 80 and 81. This passage begins with one of those moments when Hill responds to our desire for naturalisation, and for ‘the poetic’: a clear, lyrical evocation of natural beauty. But then he moves into an equally perfectly observed ugliness as the waterscape resolves into the stains of pollution.

This chapter discusses the broadcasting contexts where Beckett's television plays were made and shown. It examines some archival sources, which places the scheduling and promotional contexts of the plays in comparison with and in contrast to other television drama forms. It shows that Beckett's dramas for British television were screened in arts programming slots on BBC2, instead of the customary scheduling positions and drama series of the time. It also mentions BBC radio, which was committed to broadcasting original experimental drama in the Third Programme (now known as Radio 3), including Beckett's radio plays. This chapter also shows that his plays work both with and against television cultures, and draw attention to their distinctiveness.

Working on the two volumes of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), must have heightened Doris Lessing's interest in the question of how to narrate the past. In Lessing's note to her 2001 novel, The Sweetest Dream, she explained that she was not writing a third volume of her autobiography ‘because of possible hurt to vulnerable people’. In her writing in this period, Lessing makes use of notions of city, home and memory, revising the notion of ‘home’ so that it becomes capable of both recognising racial and national differences and moving outside them. She also interprets memory as productive for the individual and the nation only when it becomes, as Toni Morrison would say, ‘rememory’: when it can acknowledge the importance of imagination in dealing with trauma and thus suggest the fluctuating, mobile status of identity. This chapter discusses Lessing's use of particular conceptions of the city and the home as a means of exploring connections between race, nation and identity.

This introductory chapter discusses the possible ways one might understand food in literary texts, the first of which is as a manifestation of love, or a confirmation that the eater is deserving. The second is developed from social contract theories of the eighteenth century via Karl Marx, and understands food as a basis of economics, and the basic reason why people labour. The chapter then describes food as an object and a process, one that possesses power and is part of a performance, and thereafter examines the foodways of the Romantic era, presenting an understanding of the politics of the table. It also discusses greed, the use of food to mark tribal and regional identities, and the dynamics of self-starvation.

This chapter discusses the references to anachronism in the seven books of Proust's À la recherche dn temps perdu. It identifies the seven occurrences of anachronism in this work, and discusses each one in detail. The first use of anachronism shows the Renaissance world to support itself on anachronistic foundations, while the second places anachronism within life and prevents people from living one single chronology. The third occurrence of anachronism shows that everything has the power of return, the fourth suggests homosexuality, and the fifth implies an anachrony where facts and feelings split from one another. Finally, the last two occurrences are jealousy and matters of chronology.

The current absence of a debate around the cultural meanings of body hair within the many existing feminist discussions on the post-capitalist and post-colonial female body would be surprising if it did not reflect how body hair, ‘superfluous’ and ‘unwanted’, is hardly visible. This chapter examines the various meanings of body hair, without taking for granted a dichotomy between natural and artificial – instead looking at its various formations. It looks at a number of texts on the basis of their references to body hair on women; their different claims to modernity; and the common link between hairiness, ‘uncommon’ intelligence and femininity. These works include Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859–1860), in which the single mention of the heroine's facial hair marks the eruption of masculinity in the heroine, signalling her potential danger; Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), where body hair links estrangement and disgust; and The Lady Who Loved Insects, a twelfth-century fragment translated from the Japanese into English by Arthur Waley in 1929.

This chapter discusses the grounds for reading animal fur as body hair. This is because body hair and fur are connected with, and substituted for, each another in a variety of ways. The chapter first considers an advertisement for an anti-fur campaign launched by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 1999/2000. The advertisement in question features, in PETA's own words, ‘a woman in pink panties whose bikini line is in dire need of waxing, with the caption, Fur trim. Unattractive’. The outcry surrounding this particular PETA campaign advertisement peaked in the publicity around an open letter of protest written by Galen Sherwin (the then president of the New York City Chapter of the National Organization for Women) and the response by Ingrid Newkirk (president of PETA). Diagnosing the cultural enforcement of shaving, waxing and depilating as the problem can only result in an equally culturally determined unshaven body, as long as the notion of the connection to the natural body remains inviolate.

This concluding chapter reviews Erdrich's career andher various works, showing her influence on severalwriters and the changes that have occurred in NativeAmerican criticism. It also clearly demonstrates howErdrich has become a part of the continuedconstruction of American national discourse.

All of Gothic fiction turns upon a simple oscillation, on a singular differentiation, a child's game: ‘fort!’ ‘Da!’ A game of loss and recovery, with the former rather than latter in the driving seat, its simplicity belies an extensive recalcitrance, its repetitions occluding some kind of excess to efforts of representation and theorisation. Repetition defies neat models of life and self; it disrupts ordered and balanced circulations of pleasure, desire or identity; it introduces something alien into normal functions and expectations, something that, though inassimilable to sense, remains at the heart of subjectivity and culture. The death drive introduces heterogeneity, difference and something daemonic into everyday exchange. It is Sigmund Freud, of course, who speculates on the significance of the child's game. The game played by his grandson intrudes on the grandfather's hesitant, repetitive and circuitous pursuit of the hypothesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Loss and recovery, repetition and the shock of overwhelming stimulation underlie the attempt to identify what lurks ‘beyond the pleasure principle’.