In The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis famously dismisses the fiction of Walter Scott (1771-1832), arguing in a footnote that while he was 'a great and very intelligent man' he did not have 'the creative writer's interest in literature' and 'made no serious attempt to work out his own form and break away from the bad tradition of the eighteenth-century romance'. 'Out of Scott', he concludes, 'a bad tradition came.' Leavis's dismissal of Scott, whose influence had been extraordinary, sets the tone for much of twentieth-century criticism. It did not in itself destroy Scott's literary reputation, but it encapsulated a negative response that was typical of the modernist period. Certainly, there is a sense in which Scott's long, usually three-volume, novels were antithetical to modernist aesthetics. Scott's primary interest is not with the inner life, and as such he was of little interest to the modernists, who shifted the locus of fiction from the exterior to the interior. Concomitantly, while writers such as Virginia Woolf concentrate on the precise details of psychological nuance and prose style, Scott is a master of what Franco Moretti has recently called the 'filler', those acts of narration which exist between and beyond the 'essential' detail, and much of the interest of his fiction lies within the significances of such 'excess' material. Woolf herself, consequently, while recognising Scott's talent for what she wryly calls 'illumination' nevertheless sees his work as essentially limited, arguing that 'he has entirely ceased to influence others'. Even within Scotland, writers working within the broad parameters of modernist concerns were dismissive of Scott, suggesting that his work was a failure not only in aesthetic terms, but that that failure was symptomatic of Scotland's failure as a nation in postunion Britain.

'Wuthering Heights stands alone as a monument of intensity owing nothing to tradition, nothing to the achievement of earlier writers. It was a thing apart, passionate, unforgettable, haunting in its grimness.' Thus the eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1911. The sense that Emily Brontë's one surviving novel is quite unlike any other has been a persistent one. (She is the only writer in this volume with just one work of fiction to her name.) 'A kind of “sport”', F. R. Leavis famously called it. 'In an age in which the realist novel seems both to come out of and to return to the ordinary life external to it, Wuthering Heights on the contrary represents something separate in itself, with its own geography, biology, and virtually untranslatable mythology', writes Philip Davis, in his volume on the Victorians for the Oxford English Literary History (2002). Even those closest to Emily Brontë seem to have shared this sense. In her Preface to the second, posthumous edition of the novel, Charlotte Brontë set out to defend it to a reading public that she feared would find it a 'rude and strange production' by giving some account of the author's life and also of 'the locality where the scenes of the story are laid'. But in the end she offered less an explanation than a powerful contribution to the myth of Emily Brontë as an inscrutable genius whose extraordinary achievement was more baffling than intelligible. In the two final paragraphs of that Preface, reprinted in all subsequent editions, she developed an image that was to influence generations of readers, of Wuthering Heights as 'wrought . . . from no model', 'colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock' (370-1) - more like a natural object than accomplished work of art.

The novels of Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) occupy an unstable place in the canon. On the one hand, they have been disdained for the narrowness of their social range and the coldness, even the cruelty, of their moral temper. On the other hand, even Waugh’s detractors find it hard not to appreciate the prose in which his stories are couched, and which marks him out – in its exactitude, in the curtness of its controlled irony, and in a fanatical pursuit of the mot juste – as what might be termed the last of the Augustans, while rarely retreating into the archaic or subsiding into pastiche. His published letters and journals find him creating, as though by reflex, and as much for his own enjoyment as for that of others, unceasing miniature narratives of comic ferocity; they suggest an author sharpening his knives for the preparation of a feast. Waugh himself, aware of the accusations ranged against him, sought to confound his critics, in the spirit of mischief which underlay most of his public pronouncements, by owning up to the majority of the charges and yielding to others that had not even been levelled. The disingenuity was nicely calculated: ‘I regard writing not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed’, he said in an interview of 1963.

In The Impulse of Fantasy Literature (1983), Colin Manlove arranged fantasies according to their divided topographies. Whereas some fantastic narratives may describe a journey from our world to a supernatural one, he wrote, others, like William Morris' romances, Tolkien's The Hobbit and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, immediately plunge us into a wholly fantastic world with little reference to our own reality. Still others, Manlove noted, may try to harmonise orders that are considered to be separate only in the minds of their readers, or, quite to the contrary, hint that magic and miracle are so rare that they can only become manifest to 'certain types of people'. Though helpful, this topography overlooks the persistent presence of the child as a special 'type' in fantastic landscapes. Indeed, with their special perspective, where neither innocence and experience nor the real and imaginary have drifted into opposition, children are prime players as characters in, and creators and readers of, fantasy texts.

In its focus on the figure of the child, this chapter will offer a parallel perspective on Manlove's taxonomy. In 'Dubious binaries', we question the pervasive opposition between fantasy and reason, as well as a concomitant tendency to designate fantasy texts as being exclusively for either children or adults.

Henry James (1843-1916) was, like Joseph Conrad, an English novelist by choice and naturalisation rather than by birth. Born in New York, he settled in England in December 1876 and became a British citizen in 1915, shortly before his death. But if James seemed to turn his back on his native America, he never ceased to keep an analytical eye on it. From his first acknowledged novel, Roderick Hudson (1875) - an earlier novel, Watch and Ward, was disowned - to his last completed novel, The Golden Bowl (1904), James sustained a complex dialogue between America and Europe, renegotiating repeatedly a relation capable of apparently infinite variation. Perhaps no major novelist is more prone to reinterpretation than Henry James: his works are constantly being mined for meanings buried or assumed to be buried under their apparently placid surfaces. This may be because the relatively overt moral purpose as manifested variously in, for instance, the novels of Austen, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, shades off, in James, into something less determinate, more negotiable. Combining uniquely the influence of his compatriot Nathaniel Hawthorne and the tradition of English realism with the example of such French writers as Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant, James can now be seen as an early modernist in his experimentation with his chosen form, favouring a partial perspective rather than omniscience as narrative medium, and generating implications and suggestions rather than packaged meanings.

If we were to have all the English novelists 'seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room - all writing their novels simultaneously', where would we place our author? One could picture him sitting between his favourite novelist Jane Austen and D. H. Lawrence, who might nettle him but whom he regarded as the 'only prophetic novelist writing today'. Aspects of both are present in the novels of Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970). From Austen, he inherits the realist comedy of manners and mode of delicate irony with which he probes under the surface of middle-class English life. But his social satire is regularly invaded by Lawrentian impulses. A passionate kiss in a field of violets connects a boy and a girl from disparate classes; a Cambridge-educated gentleman runs away with a friend's gamekeeper. 'No one seizes more deftly the shades and shadows of social comedy', writes Woolf of her friend 'Morgan', 'but the neat surface is always being thrown into disarray by an outburst of lyric poetry.' Beneath the wit and the wisdom that mark Forster's writing, and giving his novels their poignant undertow, are deep, unfulfilled longings: for a life of the senses rather than of thoughts, for an English greenwood, for some spiritual home, and, above all, for the male 'Friend' who 'never comes yet is not entirely disproved'.

“'Master! How is he my master?'” Jane Eyre , 1847 / Every reader who remembers what it was like, as a child, to be hurt without reason and punished for crimes not committed, must warm to the first scene of Jane Eyre, where the young Jane breaks out 'like a mad cat' (JE, 12) against her bullying cousin, John Reed. Her protest, 'Unjust ! - unjust!' (JE, 15) claims common cause with categories of oppression well beyond her situation as an orphan and poor relation: 'Wicked and cruel boy!', she cries, 'You are like a murderer - you are like a slave-driver - you are like the Roman emperors!' (JE, 11). Her aunt's lady's maid, however, insists on a specific class and gender context, finding Jane's conduct 'shocking' because it fails in due deference to her 'young master' (JE, 12). Jane's reply, 'How is he my master?', opens up a dominant theme in Charlotte Brontë's work. Jane Eyre's earliest readers were alarmed by this self-reliant heroine, who moves from childish 'mutiny' (JE, 12) to an adult claim to stand 'equal' with the man she loves, despite his apparent superiority in class and wealth (JE, 266). 'Every page burns with moral Jacobinism' wrote one reviewer: ' “Unjust, unjust,” is the burden of every reflection upon the things and powers that be', while another found that 'the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority . . . abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre'. Nowadays, when Jane Eyre is read primarily as a love story, this response seems extreme. In 1847, however, when the novel appeared, the Chartist movement threatened civil anarchy in England.

In the summer of 1975, eight of my women friends and I began dreaming and planning. In March 1976, we opened the Stockton Women's Center in space rented from a local church with $275 we raised at a garage sale. We had two programmes initially: a rape crisis line and a 'non-sexist' day-care centre in one of the two rented rooms. Of the eight initial women, all were Caucasian, although one had Native American ancestors. We were mostly college-educated (I was a doctoral student), all married at the time; later three of us divorced - including me. We were all straight; later one of us came out as lesbian. Stockton was a middle-sized Californian city with a diverse population and a struggling economy. We were variously searching for community, stimulation, and service. When we started meeting, we split our time between personal sharing ('consciousness raising'), discussing books and how to organize something larger than our small group meetings in our living rooms. / I start this chapter with personal reminiscence because my story details a set of experiences that capture the typicality of the early years of what has come to be called 'second-wave feminism'. In considering Churchill's work in the context of feminist theory and activism, it is important to stay close to personal experience, situated contexts and evolving ideas. My goal is to create for younger readers a more nuanced approach to Churchill as a feminist thinker and writer than can arise from the media's broad-stroke, often distorted, portrayal of second-wave feminism. In order to do that, some of the excitement and pleasure of that time needs to be balanced with the critique of the mistakes we made, the very real successes balanced with the failures. After all, it comprises a complex history.

One of the defining characteristics of Caryl Churchill's theatre is her desire to work in collaboration with other artists. This is not to say - and it is important to note this at the outset of this collaboration-focused contribution to the Companion - that Churchill does not also write by herself. Nevertheless, her reputation for working with practitioners from theatre and other arts-related media is second to none among contemporary British dramatists. In this chapter I aim to detail some of the many ways in which collaboration is important to Churchill's writing: exploring the collaborative choices she has made, the practitioners and contexts this has involved her working with and in over the years, and how these relate to her dramaturgy, aesthetics and politics. To this end, I am adopting a different strategy to the academic's customary outside-in view of plays analysed for their critical, cultural, theatrical or social significance (as evidenced in other of our Companion chapters). Instead, given my focus, I am approaching her work from the inside-out: taking collaborative process as a route through to an understanding of Churchill's theatre as 'not ordinary, not safe'. / Finding an artistic community / As both our Chronology and Introduction record, Churchill spent her early writing years working mainly on radio drama which she was drawn to as the medium she enjoyed and grew up with; one which she acknowledges as being more important to her than television which was around at the end of her childhood.

What do children know? How do they learn best? What rights should they have? All these fundamental questions about childhood can be contested (and frequently are). The framing of discussions about childhood are therefore influenced by the time and culture, as twentieth-century historians, anthropologists and sociologists have shown. How a person formulates responses to such questions, moreover, is also shaped by his or her perspective as an artist, biologist, economist, parent, philosopher or teacher. The issues at stake are not purely academic: whatever the answers, they are likely to have some impact on the way children are regarded and treated in a particular culture at a given time. A subsistence farmer in thirteenth-century France, a society where childhood mortality was extremely high and Roman Catholicism permeated all of life, would have had quite a different perspective on childhood from an upper middle-class father in Victorian England, whose children were likely to survive into adulthood but would bear the weight of dynastic, national and imperial expectations. Just as conceptions of childhood can differ sharply, so can ideas about children's books. The nursery rhyme anthology that delighted a mother in post-Second World War America might be condemned by an ardent communist in the Soviet Union of the 1920s as laughably deficient for training up the future citizens of the new society. But whatever the circumstances, there is no guarantee that children will accept the books adults press on them.

The world in images

When adults look back on their lives, Virginia Woolf argues in The Waves (1931), they 'turn over these scenes as children turn over the pages of a picturebook'. Memories of childhood may become indelibly linked to early memories - visual, tactile, spatial - of reading picture books, whose 'picture worlds' may permanently shape readers' worldview. Since the Enlightenment, illustrated books have aimed to teach children how to read, apprehend and make sense of the world. This chapter describes how an emerging picture-book tradition developed particular visual conventions, working both to initiate children into this tradition and to push them into autonomous seeing.

Precisely because of its ambitions to represent the world itself, the picture book frequently understands itself as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a work integrating multiple art forms and appealing to multiple senses), and hence reflecting more general trends in visual, literary and intellectual culture. Unlike other forms of children's literature, the picture book makes meaning largely through its visual format, the way its images relate to one another, to the verbal text, and to the space on (and physical layout of) the page. This chapter, accordingly, traces the history of several influential and enduring picture-book formats.

“They used to say I was an odd child, and I suppose I was. I am an odd man, perhaps.” 'Gone Astray', Household Words, 13 August 1853 / Ever since John Forster published Dickens's autobiographical fragment in his Life of Charles Dickens, readers have known about the main events that marked Dickens's childhood and continued to trouble him as an adult: his father's arrest for bankruptcy and time in the Marshalsea prison; the period he spent working as a 'poor little drudge' in Warren's blacking warehouse; and his loneliness as he wandered the streets of London, slowly sinking into the dirt and misery of those other poor drudges living on the edges of recognition, never more than a few shillings away from his 'vagabond existence' hardening into a permanent way of life. “The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and emulation up by, was passing from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written.” But it could be rewritten. Throughout his career, the figure of an innocent child lost in the city is one that Dickens returns to like someone touching a bruise, at once drawing him back and driving him on. In 'Gone Astray', for example, an essay first published in Household Words in 1853, he explains how, as 'a very small boy indeed, both in years and stature, I got lost one day in the City of London', and as the essay develops, what starts off as a sliver of autobiography quickly takes on the resonance of a founding myth.

Caryl Churchill has shown a sustained interest in the inter-connections between self-definition, identity politics and revolution. In her career she has repeatedly examined revolutionary conditions, and engaged ambitiously with the artistic dilemma of how to represent political turmoil on stage. This chapter investigates three of her plays about revolution: The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Mad Forest. /The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution / Hospital was written in 1972 though, inexplicably, it has never been staged. It draws on the writings of the celebrated psychiatrist and champion of the Algerian struggle for independence, Frantz Fanon, who was an inspirational figure not just for black revolutionaries but also for Churchill's generation of white, western political radicals in the 1960s. The decolonization of Africa followed Indian independence in 1947, and when, in 1960, seventeen former African colonies became independent members of the United Nations, it marked a turning point in the post-war world, re-mapping power relations between Europe and Africa. The Algerians' fight for autonomy was particularly complex since French occupation dated from 1830 and French trade and investment in Algeria had matched economic commitments in all of France's other imperial territories combined. French emigration to Algeria had far exceeded the scale of emigration to other French colonies and colonial legal policy even upheld that Algeria was an integral part of France - an ideological position that created a panoply of contradictions and paradoxes.

In Caryl Churchill's first full-length professionally produced play, a woman named Marion deals with the aftermath of a nervous breakdown by becoming a real estate magnate and voraciously acquiring property. Constantly eating bananas and chocolate bars and anything else that comes to hand, Marion consumes and acquires, the avidity of her appetite for food mirroring the avidity of her pursuit of one more block of flats, one more townhouse. Her cure for mental illness is not therapy, but acquisition pure and simple, capitalism's all-purpose panacea. But this cure brings new pathologies in its wake. It does not matter to Marion whom she ousts from the buildings she acquires or what pain she causes by her deals. At one point, in a scenario Swiftian in its cruelty, she gets the bedraggled and impoverished wife of her former love, Alex, to sign over to her their newborn baby, a human being replacing a building in Marion's endless acquisition schemes. Marion's reasons for this transaction are multiple but ultimately somewhat mysterious. She wants a piece of her former lover for her own; she wants to spite the woman Alex had married; she wants to give her own husband the son she herself has not produced; and above all, she wants the baby because others do. When the birth mother pleads to get back her child, Marion insists: 'I will keep what's mine. The more you want it the more it's worth keeping.' At no point does Marion herself show any interest in the actual baby or in its wellbeing. At a crucial point in the plot, she does not notice that the baby left in her care has gone missing.

In an article published to coincide with Caryl Churchill's seventieth birthday, playwright Mark Ravenhill remarked, 'of all the major forces in British playwriting, I can think of no one else who is regarded with such affection and respect by her peers'. A decade earlier, in an article attempting to discover 'The Playwrights' Playwright', four of the nine writers surveyed chose Churchill as the playwright who most inspired them. Theatre critic David Benedict places her only behind Harold Pinter and David Hare in the public's affections, while Benedict Nightingale considers her 'the most gloriously original, preposterously gifted of all British dramatists'. In 1999, novelist Margaret Forster chose Top Girls as her 'play of the millennium' and more recently actress Sophie Okonedo when asked which living person she most admired chose Caryl Churchill. A sign of the esteem in which she is held may be found in the fact that the Royal Court Theatre, with which she has been associated since 1972, held not one but two seasons of her work in the 2000s. In 2002, to accompany A Number in the main house, Identical Twins, Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, and This is a Chair were performed in the Theatre Upstairs, alongside readings of Seagulls, Three More Sleepless Nights, Moving Clocks Go Slow and Owners. In 2008, to mark her seventieth birthday, ten playwrights directed staged readings of ten of her plays: Owners, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Top Girls, Three More Sleepless Nights, Ice Cream, The Skriker, Blue Heart, Far Away and A Number.

Born in the same generation as Borges, Beckett, and Barthes, Graham Greene (1904–91) studiously avoided postmodernism: not for him, the myth-making, the magic, the bizarre hilarity of a world gone crazed after the death of God. Although his career spanned the period that, in England, ran from the height of modernism in the 1920s to that of postmodernism in the 1980s, his major novels display little of the self-consciousness characteristic of these literary movements, and their only implausible events are the result of his Catholicism (though even these are always capable of a natural explanation). Occasionally a character speaks to God, and God replies. How are we to construe that? The odd unobtrusive miracle takes place – or does it? Apart from these brief flashes of the supernatural, Greene is relentless in portraying the world as absurd, grotesque, and deeply disappointing. His first novel, The Man Within, appeared in 1929, two years after Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It contains passages that could be described as stream of consciousness, but Greene soon abandoned this modernist technique for a tougher, more muscular stance that he shared with George Orwell : enough of this effete introspection – let’s portray the real world in all its horror and squalor. He wrote twenty-six novels (including two that were never published and those he called ‘entertainments’) plus short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays, biographies, autobiographies, children’s books, travel writing, journalism, essays, and film criticism.

Henry Fielding (1707-54) gave the English novel a new breadth. In his masterpiece, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1748), the title-page promise of the story of a low-life individual leads instead to an epic treatment of a contemporary society peopled by a vividly varied set of characters whose entertaining differences nevertheless add up, the narrator insists, to one fundamental article: human nature, that subject of endless Enlightenment fascination. Authors before and after Fielding looked for ways to create an epic poem for a modern age. Milton , in Paradise Lost, found in the Christian story a heroic argument to surpass classical heroism; Pope, in his darkly comic attack on modern civilisation, thought it worthy only of the mock-heroic epic that is The Dunciad; and Wordsworth took the epic quest within the self, making the subject of The Prelude the growth of the poet's mind. Fielding transferred epic ambition from poetry to novel. Prose narrative, he thought, could become the medium for a new human comedy: his work, as he famously put it in Joseph Andrews, was to produce 'a comic Epic-Poem in Prose'. Writing novels was not Fielding's first choice of literary career. During the 1730s he was England's foremost dramatist, writing five-act comedies and short, uproarious farces. His opinion at that time of the novel as a form can be gauged from his caricature of the popular novelist Eliza Haywood as 'Mrs Novel' in The Author's Farce: one of a medley of representatives of silly, modern, commercial entertainments, she lives in the style of her own erotic fictions, and has an affair with the equally ridiculous Signior Opera.

Critics in children's literature studies, by and large, tend to ignore children's poetry, but one can hardly blame them. Exciting and innovative work appears fairly often in fiction, many picture books offer enticing visual and literary pleasures, and there are several non-fiction works for young people that are sophisticated and illuminating. But, with some notable exceptions, the vast bulk of children's poetry published today is goofy, sentimental or recycled from days of yore. As I write, the most recent children's poetry bestseller list from the Poetry Foundation (a spin-off of Poetry magazine in Chicago) contains, besides work by Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, primarily anthologies, such as Mary Engelbreit's Mother Goose: One Hundred Best-Loved Verses (2005) and A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children (2005) edited by Caroline Kennedy. Caroline is, like her mother, a celebrity anthologist, and Mary Engelbreit is a franchise. This is, for the most part, the kind of fare one encounters at the large chain bookstores like Barnes and Noble.

This market-driven narrowing of the genre is a shame because children's poetry is historically an expansive body of work. Until recently, the distinction between poetry for children and poetry for adults has been usefully blurred: prior to the late twentieth century, poetry anthologies for children tended to include verse traditionally considered 'adult', as well as an eclectic mixture of light verse, nonsense verse, narrative verse, along with lyric poetry.