Joseph Conrad, the pen-name adopted by Józef Konrad Korzeniowski (1857-1924), earned his early reputation as a writer of colonial fiction. His first two novels, Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), were set in Southeast Asia, and reviewers saw him as annexing a new territory for British fiction. They compared his work, for example, with Louis Becke's (1855-1913) stories of the South Pacific. He was also, perhaps inevitably, termed 'the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago'. And yet, as a colonial story, Almayer's Folly is highly disconcerting. It is very different from the imperialist and masculinist fiction produced by the writers of W. E. Henley's circle (such as Stevenson and Kipling). Andrea White has written illuminatingly about Conrad and adventure fiction, showing how Conrad worked from within the genre of adventure fiction, but, at the same time, 'wrote a fiction at odds with the traditional assumptions of the genre'. As White notes, adventure fiction 'traditionally celebrated an unqualified kind of heroism' and provided 'the energizing myth of English imperialism'. By comparison, Kaspar Almayer is a singularly unheroic hero. In the opening chapter of Almayer's Folly, he thinks back to the start of his career in Macassar and remembers his first impressions of the adventurous Captain Lingard, but his admiration is not for the adventures Lingard has had ('his loves, and . . . his desperate fights with the Sulu pirates'). Lingard has become a 'hero' to him because of 'his smart business transactions' and 'enormous profits'. Like Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), Almayer's Folly has a plot involving a search for treasure.

In all of children's literature, the character with the surest sense of the vital importance of being literate is the spider Charlotte from E. B. White's classic 1952 novel, Charlotte's Web. Charlotte knows, as does everyone else on the farm, that pigs like her friend Wilbur are slated from birth for violent, unnatural deaths. In order to save his life Charlotte must take heroic measures. Her plan of attack? A war of words.

In the context of the life-and-death seriousness of the situation, it may seem odd that the first words Charlotte chooses to write in her web, 'Some Pig', are colloquial, rural, grammatically dubious and puzzling. Yet the phrase invites speculation. After reading Charlotte's carefully woven sign, the likely wielders of the knife, the farmer Zuckerman and his henchman Lurvy, discuss their pig seriously. They try to figure out why Wilbur is not just any old pig. They wonder what makes him 'Some Pig'. That's what saves him. If, instead of 'Some Pig', Charlotte had written the clichéd commandment 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' into her web, would it have had the same effect? Not likely.

In using her words to save Wilbur from the Christmas slaughter, Charlotte participates in the historical tradition that equates reading with intellectual accomplishment and the ability to save a life. In early modern Britain, convicted felons sentenced to death by hanging could claim what was called 'benefit of the clergy'. If they could read 'the neck verse', the beginning of Psalm 51, they would be reprieved.

'Playwrights don't give answers, they ask questions. We need to find new questions, which may help us to answer the old ones or make them unimportant, and this means new subjects and new form.' Caryl Churchill builds on this assertion from 1960 by stressing the need to use the theatre medium more fully, an ambition pursued subsequently with a passion clearly in evidence in the series of collaborative projects she undertook between 1986 and 1997. In the performances to be considered, A Mouthful of Birds (1986), Fugue (1988) made for television, The Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991), The Skriker (1994) and Hotel (1997), Churchill included dance and movement choreographed by Ian Spink and it is this particular interweaving of text and dance that is the focus of this chapter. How, for instance, can simultaneity of action or the specific temporal and spatial qualities of dance contribute to Churchill's evocation of such elusive, yet crucial experiences as remembering and forgetting? In different ways issues of memory permeate these plays as recollection, re-writing of narrative, intentional forgetfulness and desire for memory retention seep into the more obviously dramatic thematic concerns of the supernatural, violence, transformation, poisoning and death. Churchill's desire to share the stage/ screen with a dance-based performance maker over the course of five performances suggests a sustained preoccupation with the way that dance, in the hands of Spink, could contribute to her general drive for new forms to explore persistent as well as new questions.

“So Hills amid the Air encounter'd Hills Hurl'd to and fro with jaculation dire . . .” Paradise Lost, VI, 664-5 / Laurence Sterne (1713-68) spent the first twenty-five years of his adult life in obscurity as the functioning clergyman of a Yorkshire village. The closest contacts he had with fame were the opportunities to participate in the ecclesiastical pursuits of the York Minster establishment, second only to Canterbury in the Anglican hierarchy, and the local publication of two of his sermons (1747, 1750). Neither brought advancement. If anything else distinguishes Sterne's life prior to 1758, it would be his long bout with ill-health, a lingering consumption that seems to have first appeared during his time at Jesus College, Cambridge; it would eventually kill him. In 1758, a squabble within the York church concerning preferments triggered in Sterne a short satiric pamphlet reducing the arguments from the minster to the parish; A Political Romance was published in December 1758, and immediately suppressed by Sterne's superiors - only six copies are known to have survived. Immediately thereafter, Sterne started a satiric account of sermon-writing, apparently modelled on Pope's satire targeting bad poetry, Peri Bathous (i.e. On the Bathetic, a play on Longinus's famous first-century work of literary criticism, Peri Hupsous, i.e. On the Sublime). Thus the narrator's name, Longinus Rabelaicus, ties the work to both Pope and Rabelais; only two chapters survive of this so-called 'Rabelaisian Fragment'. Despite abandoning the project, Sterne worked passages from it into the first four volumes of his new work, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in instalments over the next eight years (vols. I-II, December, 1759; vols. III-IV, 1761; vols.V-VI, 1762; vols. VII-VIII, 1765; vol. IX, 1767).

One of the most famous and widely facsimiled letters ever written is that directed to Noel Moore from Eastwood, Dunkeld, on 4 September 1893. In it the sender, who signs herself 'Yours affectionately, Beatrix Potter', writes and illustrates a story about a disobedient rabbit. Several years later, Miss Potter - who had been having some success in selling designs for greeting cards - conceived the idea of converting the story into a book. She borrowed the letter from Noel and worked it up, with more drawings, into a tale of publishable length and despatched it unavailingly to a sequence of at least six publishers.

Having faith in her work (and a little money put by), she determined that, if the trade were not interested, she would publish it herself and so, for Christmas 1901, she had ready for distribution 250 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, eighty-six pages, illustrated with electrotypes of her original line drawings, plus a colour-printed frontispiece, the whole bound in pale green paper over boards. Within a month the success of the venture was such that she had another 250 copies run off, while, at the same time, the publishers Frederick Warne began negotiations for an edition that would enter the mainstream book trade. They besought the author to convert her line drawings into watercolours (which would, like her earlier frontispiece, be among the earliest book illustrations to be printed by the new 'three colour process') and, with a prudence common to many in the business, they agreed only a modest royalty for this new and unknown author, but with provision for an increase should success attend the project (fig. 3).

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was, and remains, a highly controversial outsider, never quite assimilable to successive orthodoxies. Born with weak lungs and the lifelong expectation of an early death, and having internalised in childhood the conflicting pressures of his parents, he had what some psychologists call a 'skinless' sensitivity. While this made him on occasion a 'difficult' person socially and domestically, it also contributed to his unique characteristic as man and writer: the intensity of his existence in the passing moment. For this reason, he represents a strong conception of the novel, which, although it commands widespread theoretical assent, can be controversial in practice. His own practice is illuminating in its very unevenness and occasional extremity, for these arise from his being always something more than a novelist. In his own words, he was 'a passionately religious man', which does not mean the adherent of a sect but having a fundamental conviction about the human relation to the cosmos. In this respect, the meditation on Being in a philosopher such as Martin Heidegger provides a significant analogue. At the same time, the novel was his crucial arena for testing his shifting insights into human and non-human existence, and the sequence of his novels therefore provides the best structure through which to understand the shape of his oeuvre. Accordingly, what follows is a survey of his novelistic career and personal life leading to reflections on the nature and significance of his writing.

The association of animal and child in children's books is so common that it is easy to forget the figurative nature of this alliance - the way we have penned the animals in - whether it be Kermit the Frog, Rupert Bear, Bugs Bunny, the Cat in the Hat, Peter Rabbit or Toad of Toad Hall. In this chapter I want to explore this relationship, showing how it has been used in children's literature both to support the dominant order, and also to subvert it. There are wider issues to explore too, for the word 'animal' has its etymological roots in 'breath' and 'soul', which link it to that which is 'animate', and this is exactly the transformation that writers and illustrators so readily perform, making animals live in all manner of anthropomorphic ways. And not only animals, for other 'things' are just as easily animated: from puppets and dolls (Pinocchio, Winnie-the-Pooh, Woody in Toy Story) to more everyday objects such as coins, peg-tops and looking-glasses.

So, first of all, we need to ask why there is such a close association between animals and children in narratives for children. Perry Nodelman suggests that, in terms of 'humanized animals', the association happened 'more or less by accident', in so far as Aesop's fables provided a suitable early example of didactic literature for children, which was then emulated by others. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, on the other hand, sees the key association being forged by the Romantics, where the child is linked to nature, existing outside culture and language in some Edenic space.

“every little, leetle, particular about yourself, and your concerns . . . are most welcome to me . . . down to the uninteresting in general basons of tapioca you have at lunch” / Henry James's description of the novelist simply as one 'upon whom nothing is lost' suggests a complex ambition for the fiction of his century - the impulse not only to observe, but also to amass, record, preserve, recover, redeem. Such impulses - intensified, perhaps, by the experiences of loss accompanying accelerating social change - lie close to the heart of the nebulous mass of fictional conventions we call 'realism'. A shape begins to form in the mist if we read the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) with an eye for such impulses. If the literary colossi of her generation seem in danger of overshadowing her on some fronts, her commitment to the capture, recording, and recovery of the texture of everyday human existence remains exemplary. The fifth chapter of Cranford (1853), 'Old Letters', recalls how an elderly acquaintance, who took the failure of his bank 'with stoical mildness', nevertheless “worried his family all through a long summer's day because one of them had torn . . . out the written leaves of his now useless bank-book . . . the corresponding pages at the other end came out as well, and this little unnecessary waste of paper . . . chafed him more than all the loss of his money.” Thus, a wistful chapter about loss begins with a comical exploration, registered in the very stuff of life, of an all too human urge to save and to spare in the face of inevitably changing times: 'Envelopes fretted his soul terribly when they first came in'; 'Even now . . . I see him casting wistful glances at his daughters when they send a whole inside of a half-sheet of note paper, with the three lines of acceptance to an invitation, written on only one of the sides' (C, 41).

The rather obvious observation that children are 'different' - from adults, from each other - stands as the point of departure for this chapter on the foundational nature of discourses of difference in the development of 300 years of Anglo-American children's literature. Simply put, without a powerful guiding belief in essential differences between adult and child, there would be no 'children's literature'. Awareness of 'differences', or acknowledgement of the presence of 'others', has been noted and explored in children's literature from its earliest inception: consider one of the tales from John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld's widely read Evenings At Home (1792-6), 'Travellers' Wonders'. In this tale about cultural perspectives, Captain Compass' children - whose imaginations have been stirred by the marvellous sights and people described in Gulliver's Travels and stories about Sinbad the sailor - implore him to recount adventures from his own voyages. The fond father replies with a long description of a remarkable people whose habitations, clothes, diet and customs all appear to be perfectly strange to the children - for example the inhabitants fill their mouths with noxious smoke, uncover their heads as a salutation, and spread a delicious grease upon virtually all of their food - until one of them realises with a start that their father has been describing Britain all along.

Since the very definition of childhood is often entwined with social norms for schooling, it is unsurprising to find the beginnings of a body of literature that might be identified as specially for children in the ancient and medieval schoolbooks designed to teach young people the manners and the linguistic skills they needed to be successful in their societies, schoolbooks that often took the form of lively dialogues and included diverting accounts of extracurricular episodes of schoolboy life. The traditions of modern English language children's literature, with which this volume is principally concerned, are also rooted in the school story, with Sarah Fielding's story of the nine pupils of Mrs Teachum's 'little female academy', The Governess (1749), frequently identified as the first continuous narrative for children in English. Fielding's narrative stages the binary organising principle of children's literature: the attempt to fuse instruction and delight. Taking as its setting the school, the scene of instruction itself, the story also works to engage readers' interests, by recounting the girls' confessions of the moral struggles they faced in their lives before they entered school, detailing their meetings with the people of Mrs Teachum's neighbourhood during their rambles, tracing the growth of their friendships and sense of common purpose, and, not least, by interpolating the tales the girls read to one another into the narrative of their school life together.

In February 1751, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) contributed an essay to Samuel Johnson's periodical The Rambler. Johnson, in introducing Richardson's piece, described his friend as one 'who has enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue'. As a lexicographer, Johnson exempted Richardson from his general policy of not citing contemporaries and quoted him in his Dictionary on over one hundred occasions, far more than any other living author. By 1761, the year of his death, Richardson occupied a commanding position among European writers and was celebrated in a famous eulogy by Denis Diderot. Both Johnson and Diderot were struck by Richardson's profound insights into human psychology, and Diderot regarded him as a worthy successor to Homer. Richardson had achieved his reputation as the originator of a new kind of novel-writing on the strength of three works published over the two previous decades: Pamela (1740-1), Clarissa (1747-8), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4). Pamela created a sensation on its first publication and was the best-selling novel of its time. Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa, is among the greatest (and longest) of all English novels; its protagonists, Clarissa and Lovelace, are archetypal figures. Frances Burney, writing to her son, declared that Clarissa 'has the deepest tragic powers that the pen can address to the heart'.

Had this collection of essays been produced only a decade - certainly two decades - ago, it is by no means certain that Frances Burney would have been included. To her contemporaries and immediate successors, Burney (1752-1840) was a major figure: an innovative pioneer in the development of the novel and a significant contributor to its rapid growth in status and respectability at the end of the eighteenth century. Following the publication of her first two novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), critics and influential cultural commentators such as Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Montagu hailed Burney as successor to the already highly respected male novelists of the mid-century. Her fiction was seen to combine 'the dignity and pathos of Richardson' with 'the acuteness and ingenuity of Fielding'. Jane Austen's well-known defence of novels in Northanger Abbey cites Cecilia, together with Burney's third novel, Camilla (1796), as exemplars of the form 'in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language'. And Anna Letitia Barbauld included all three novels in her monumental canon-making collection, The British Novelists (1810), prefacing them with the by then established judgement that: 'Scarcely any name, if any, stands higher in the list of novel-writers than that of Miss Burney. ' But with the publication in 1814 of Burney's fourth and final novel, The Wanderer, her canonical status began to look more precarious - and it remained so, until feminist and historicist critics at the end of the twentieth century (re)discovered how to read her fiction in ways which have begun to restore her to a deservedly more secure position.

Elizabeth Bowen was born to Anglo-Irish parents in Dublin in 1899. She was the only child of a middle-class Protestant Unionist family, part of the Ascendancy class that monopolised political power in Ireland until the civil war resulted in partition and home rule (1920) and in the Irish settlement (1922). As a young child, Bowen experienced the privileged exclusivity of her class: her family spent winters in Dublin, where her father had a law practice, and summers at Bowen's Court, the 'Big House' on their land in County Cork. When Bowen was five, the protective intimacy of her family was disrupted by her father's mental breakdown; his subsequent illness was so severe that family separation was considered necessary, and his wife departed with their daughter to the south coast of England for a five-year period. In 1912, Bowen's father was sufficiently recovered to allow the family to reunite at Bowen's Court, but within the year Bowen's mother was to die from cancer. After her mother's death, Bowen's upbringing was organised by her aunts; she attended boarding schools in Hertfordshire and Kent and spent summers with her father at Bowen's Court. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who worked in education and later for the BBC; their marriage lasted until his death in 1952, and coexisted peacefully with her numerous love-affairs with men and women. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Bowen divided her life between countries, returning regularly from the literary circles of Oxford and London to Bowen's Court, which she inherited when she was thirty-one.

In a volume entitled, at once defiantly and wistfully, I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson, Flora Masson recalls a dinner party at the Stevensons' family home in Edinburgh, sometime in the 1870s. The twenty-something Louis, as he was known to family and friends, was enthusing about Balzac, his style and vocabulary. This set off a heated debate between father and son about language. “Mr Stevenson upheld the orthodox doctrine of a 'well of English undefiled', which of course made Louis Stevenson rattle off with extraordinary ingenuity whole sentences composed of words of foreign origin taken into our language from all parts of the world - words of the East, of classical Europe, of the West Indies, and modern American slang . . . It was a real feat in the handling of language, and I can see to this day his look of pale triumph.” / Mr Stevenson was prosperous, pious, an eminent lighthouse engineer. He had hoped his only child would follow the family profession or become a lawyer, but young Louis recoiled from respectability. He was sickly, volatile, mutinous, hungry for play, performance, sensation. After his early death in 1894, his friend Henry James declared 'the filial relation quite classically troubled'. In this duel over language the son roams the globe. Like his own immediate literary father, Walter Scott, Stevenson drew to fine effect on the variations between Scots and English, in Kidnapped (1886) and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1896), as well as in shorter tales such as 'Thrawn Janet' and 'The Merry Men' (both 1881).