Recoiling from the term 'self-biography' as coined in Isaac D'Israeli's Miscellanies (1796), William Taylor of the Monthly Review was at a loss for more felicitous options: 'it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have seemed pedantic.' Given the rash of autobiographical writing in various modes that had begun to appear by 1800, however (and more, from William Wordsworth's Prelude to his sister Dorothy's journals, was being privately produced), the need for some such term was becoming pressing. 'Autobiography' and its cognates quickly gained currency in the years that followed, notably in the hands of reviewers who otherwise lacked a taxonomy answerable to what Thomas Carlyle was to call, in 1831, 'these Autobiographical times of ours'.

In early usage the connotation of ‘autobiography’ was often pejorative, as though the genre, though newly named, was not at all new in substance, and simply perpetuated a tradition of more or less mercenary, self-promotional, often ghostwritten ‘memoirs’ and ‘apologies’ that included such notorious works as An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips (1748–9) and The Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington (1748–54). This was the implication when Robert Montgomery inveighed against ‘the memoir-scribblers, reminiscent-furbishers, &c. – The impudence of these auto-biographists’, or again when Robert Southey deplored (with a witty sting in the tail of his list) a culture in which ‘booksellers, public lecturers, pickpockets, and poets, become autobiographers’.

Like a great play, Dubliners exists as written, and yet also awaits performance. We read the stories, determined to ferret out what they mean, only to end up wondering about ourselves. Paradoxically, the protean quality of these stories - the way they seem to have something to say about everything - makes them appear, to the first time reader, to be about nothing at all. They begin in the middle of something and stop unexpectedly with what may or may not be a new beginning. Or to describe this a different way, the stories read as if someone has made a two-hour film by putting the camera on a tripod and letting it run, and then brought the result directly to the screen, with no editing. Upon first reading, there seem to be no obvious clues to the strategy behind Joyce's selection of a bewildering array of obscure street names, stray thoughts, lost corkscrews, gold coins, lost plumcakes, confiscated adventure books, and forgotten novels of a dead priest. Never before, it seems, has a writer used so much detail to explain so little.

At the same time, there is an undeniable drive in the stories, an urgency many readers feel, but cannot account for: what does Father Flynn wish to confess in ‘The Sisters’? What has happened to make Lily behave so strangely in ‘The Dead’? The stories appear to be taking the reader toward a moral dilemma, or a climax, or a revelation, or at least a conclusion, and then they stop, but without appearing to have ended. I can sympathize with this frustration. When I first read ‘The Sisters’, I was not troubled by its abrupt ending because I thought there was something wrong with my edition, and that the ‘end’ of the story had somehow failed to be printed in my text: ‘So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him....’ (D 10). And then the story is over! It not only ends in the middle of something, it doesn’t even conclude with a full sentence. I was also puzzled that a writer I had been told was a master of the English language had to use the word ‘that’ three times in this strangely uncommunicative sentence.

In the spring of 1552 John Calvin in Geneva received a letter from the Polish reformer John à Lasco, recently appointed superintendent of the new Stranger Church in London. The church had two congregations, a Dutch and a French, and the French had recently been disturbed by controversy when a newcomer criticized an aspect of the church's teaching on the grounds that it diverged from that of the Genevan church. At issue was whether the Virgin Mary should be given the title the Mother of God. Calvin's reply was careful but firm. While not denying the difference of opinion he nevertheless sharply reproved those who had disturbed the church by invoking his name, or as he put it, making “an idol of me, and a Jerusalem of Geneva.” For as he went on, the more critical issue was that of church order, and unity: “If those who have stirred up these strifes among you have taken occasion to do so through the diversity of your ceremonies, they have ill understood in what the unity of Christians consists, and how every member ought to conform himself to the body of the Church in which he lives.”

Samuel Johnson's status as an author is very much bound up with his circle. If it is true that sociability and the study of man as a social animal were key features of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is equally the case that Johnson's reputation depends in significant part on his close friendships with a group almost as famous as himself, and on his depiction as a sociable being in the memoirs of his friends, notably in James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791). In the seven years after Johnson's death, eleven biographies were published. The struggle over his reputation among his own circle began at once, and the importance of the possession of Johnson's memory seemed at times almost as much part of his value as anything he wrote and spoke in life.

In recent years, some Johnson scholars have questioned whether Boswell’s account is to be trusted, or whether his picture of Johnson as the ‘Hercules of toryism’ is not angled by the perspective of Boswell’s own views. This revisionism no doubt bears a symbiotic relationship to the revaluation of Boswell since 1940: a re-evaluation that has begun to recognize him as an artist rather than an amanuensis, the shaper of a great Life rather than a man who – as Macaulay saw him in the Victorian period – wrote a great book by accident. It is worth noting in respect of Johnson’s politics at least – at present a matter of some controversy in the context of the Life – that Hannah More, Sir John Hawkins, and Mrs Thrale all substantively agree with Boswell regarding his sympathies.

The number of books and articles about Joyce is enormous and ever-increasing; the quantity of secondary material not directly concerned with Joyce but relevant to his work is even greater. None of these publications is without value, but none of them needs be regarded as essential. The bibliographies mentioned below give comprehensive lists, and the chapters of this volume refer to specialized works of particular relevance to their topics. What follows is a highly selective set of suggestions for the interested reader, with an emphasis on works that will provide useful information or critical stimulation (or, in the case of Joyce's own works, editions with the most reliable texts and helpful annotations). The arrangement within sections is chronological.

No successful reformer of the sixteenth century could ignore the needs of the society in which the reform took place, for the educational and welfare needs of people continued after the Reformation. Before regions became Protestant, the Catholic Church had funded schools and charity through its parishes and institutions. Catholic priests and nuns had staffed schools and hospitals and administered welfare. Catholic confraternities of lay and clerical members had engaged in charitable activities. There had been some centralization of welfare in lay and government hands, but to a large extent, schools and hospitals were run by the church and its clergy.

When regions became Protestant, the property and endowment of theChurch of Rome and its institutions shifted over to the governments of thecities, regions, or nations that became Protestant, but some of it was lostto private hands in the process. Priests and nuns were asked to leave or toaccept no new novices. Money was needed for staffing. Protestant regionsneeded to rebuild a new infrastructure in education and welfare.

The Protestant reformers set out to establish a permanent institutionalbase for the Reformation and improve on what had gone before. Just asLuther influenced millions through his writings and established a base forthe Reformation through the reform of the University ofWittenberg and thefounding of Protestant universities and secondary schools, so John Calvin’sinfluencewas implemented through the founding of the academy in Genevathat later became the University of Geneva.

At first glance, Joyce's shorter works - his poems and epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles - seem to bear only the most tenuous relationship to the books for which Joyce has become famous. It is only by an exercise of the imagination that the epiphanies and Giacomo Joyce can even be called 'works'; Joyce published neither in its original form, choosing instead to loot them for the more ambitious undertakings that followed, and neither received the painstaking polish that Joyce lavished on his more ambitious productions. Only forty of at least seventy-one epiphanies are extant and their relationship to one another had to be reconstructed from manuscript evidence; the sketches that comprise Giacomo Joyce were similarly composed, arranged, and abandoned, but not destroyed. Chamber Music, although published in 1907, was orphaned when Joyce delegated the final arrangement of the poems to his brother Stanislaus. Pomes Penyeach, as the title suggests, is a modest offering of twelve and a tilly poetic 'fruits'. Only Exiles continued to hold Joyce's interest as an autonomous composition not destined for immediate verbal recycling.

The status of the shorter works as successful, original, or even finished compositions has always been in question; even in more subjective terms, however, they seem to offer few of the rewards of their longer and better known counterparts. First, and most damagingly, they are humourless; what humour may be discerned in them is bitter or ironic, inspired by pained defiance (as in ‘Gas from a Burner’) or jaded cynicism (‘In my time the dunghill was so high’ – E 43). Secondly, they are spare, denuded of the variable styles and elaborate contexts that make Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem inexhaustible. Finally, they are easily dismissed as immediately derivative of both Joyce’s experiences and his reading.

'I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic', admitted Thomas Macaulay, in the middle of his 1835 Minute on Indian Education;

But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

With its profound faith in what Macaulay identified without hesitation as Britain’s intrinsic cultural superiority – articulated through a sweeping contempt for other cultures that was in turn founded not on the profession of an immediate and detailed knowledge of the Other (the hallmark of Orientalist thought in the time of Sir William Jones, a mere thirty or forty years earlier) but rather on an exaggerated sense of mediation, generalization, distancing, almost ignorance – the Minute on Indian Education signalled the abrupt end of over a century of British indecisiveness about the East.

The reputation of the eighteenth-century literature of Sensibility1 has never quite recovered from its embarrassing association with displays of unmeasured, extravagant emotion. It was 'excessive'. This was not simply distaste for a fading fashion; these are the terms in which it was criticized by some of its major practitioners, and they offer a key to this highly formulaic, but inherently unstable, kind of writing. Consider three scenes. In the first, a father enters with his dead daughter in his arms:

In the second, a father confronts his disowned daughter, who has fallen fromvirtue:

Like the thresher poet Stephen Duck a century earlier, John Clare (1793- 1864) has always had a place in the literary histories, if only as a biographical footnote. Clare's confinement in the Northampton Asylum in 1841, and Duck's apparent suicide by drowning in 1756, helped to turn these authors, and many like them, into object lessons on the perils of a literary career for those from humble backgrounds. What the tendency to moralizing anecdote has obscured is that Duck and Clare were just two among more than a thousand poets from economically disadvantaged social backgrounds who wrote and published between 1700 and 1900. It is the purpose of this chapter to consider how Clare's poetry responds to the variety and complexity of a tradition of British labouring-class poetry. The sheer number of poets from labouring-class backgrounds, the common themes and styles evident in their verse, and their self-conscious response and resistance to trends within polite and popular poetry, demonstrate that these authors comprise a parallel tradition in British literature, one to which Clare is a significant and self-aware contributor.

Clare indeed is the crucial hinge between the labouring-class poetry of the eighteenth century and early Romantic period on one hand, and the later Chartist andVictorian working-class poetry on the other. His poetry might be read as both a culmination and a transformation in the tradition, responding to themes and issues from earlier labouring-class verse, but also introducing new topics or significantly altering the discourse devoted to familiar themes. Clare’s writing, for example, embodies a poignant struggle to reconcile the two identities of village labourer and poet.

In the 1815 collection Poetic Trifles, a poem entitled 'What came of firing a Gun' describes the unfortunate victim of a boy's killing spree, a bird knocked out of the sky in the poem's first lines:

Without knowing anything about the author, we might be tempted to attribute this poem to a woman writer on the basis of its similarity to other sympathetic animal poems such as Anna Barbauld's 'The Mouse's Petition', Mary Robinson's 'The Linnet's Petition', and Charlotte Smith's elegy on the death of a pet dormouse. Male writers, of course, also wrote sentimental animal poems – William Cowper’s ‘On a Goldfinch Starved to Death in His Cage’ is one example – but recent feminist criticism has encouraged us to view women writers’ animal petition poems as a distinct genre, and to read these poems as veiled critiques of masculine power structures. Marlon Ross and Mitzi Myers, for example, both read Barbauld’s poem as a political intervention, with the poem’s trapped mouse standing in for disempowered peoples. ‘What came of firing a Gun’ concludes:

It is not surprising that a theologian who argued consistently that preaching was the ordinary means appointed by God for the salvation of the elect understood the delivery of sermons as among his most important duties. During his ministry in Geneva (1536-38, 1541-64), John Calvin preached well over two thousand sermons. From 1549, his most characteristic pattern of preaching was twice on Sunday and every weekday of every other week. His sermons typically lasted for more than an hour, and they were delivered without a manuscript or notes. Toward the end of his life, when poor health prevented his free movement, he even asked to be carried to church in a chair so that he could fulfill his responsibilities in the pulpit. The sheer volume of his preaching endeavors demonstrates their importance to him. Needless to say, it would be impossible within the scope of this essay to summarize the rich content of his many extant sermons. In order to gain a better understanding of Calvin the preacher, however, we first need to examine his theology of preaching, for only when we ascertain the significance of the act of preaching within the economy of faith as Calvin himself understood it will we grasp his own urgent sense of commitment to the preaching task.

Joyce's life spans a period in history in which material conditions, political structures, and intellectual life throughout the world were profoundly shaped by the growth and decline of European empires and the flourishing of various nationalisms, both imperialist and anti-imperialist. When Joyce was born in 1882 the 'scramble for Africa', and the era that one historian has called the 'age of empire', had just begun. When he died in 1941 the world was engulfed in the Second World War, a conflict that would fundamentally alter the balance of global power, and the age of decolonization was under way. A good deal of recent Joyce scholarship has explored Joyce's relation to this historical trajectory. Much of this scholarship is informed by debates in post-colonial studies, the academic field most explicitly committed to examining the complex set of issues we can group under the headings of 'colonialism' and 'nationalism'. Colonialism and nationalism were among the period's most visible and important sources of conflict and change, and were the subjects of much discussion and debate. At the same time, they were so important and pervasive - both as realities and as ideologies - that they became part of contemporary conceptions of 'reality' and 'common sense' and supplied many of the unspoken rules and assumptions of the time. Postcolonial scholars study colonialism and nationalism in their visibility, as the subjects of explicit discussion and struggle, and in their invisibility, as the secret structures that underlie much of Western intellectual and political life. Ireland's double status - as both an agent and a victim of British imperialism - is important to any investigation of how Joyce's works engage with these issues.

To most visitors today, Geneva is a respectable, prosperous, staid city resting at the end of Lake Geneva where the Rhône River pours forth to begin its rush to the sea. The city is Swiss, neutral, and a center for international diplomacy. In the mind it is associated with peace conferences and conventions designed to protect the weak and vulnerable. However, this was not the city in which Calvin ministered. More than just the passing years have moved across the face of Geneva. In Calvin's day the city was smaller, less secure, and decidedly isolated. It was a locale facing the constant threat of armed assault. It was over-crowded and stuffed with refugees. And it was poor. Most surprising of all for most people today to realize is that Geneva was not Swiss. Indeed, Geneva did not enter the Helvetic Confederation until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For most of the years between its independence in 1535 and its entry into the Swiss state, Geneva did not even share a border with Switzerland. Thus, any real appreciation of Calvin's ministry in Geneva must begin with a realistic understanding of the environment in which he labored. What was his parish like? What was Geneva like?

The early life and career of James Joyce unfolded during a turbulent period in the history of sexuality in the United Kingdom. A cluster of sometimes competing cultural and scientific discourses emerged to catalogue, diagnose, and explain a broad spectrum of human sexual expression. At the same time, a series of explosive events (the Dublin Castle Affair, the Cleveland Street Scandal, the trials of Oscar Wilde, the rise of the New Woman) turned certain less approved elements of that spectrum into matters of mass spectacle and contention. A fundamental if contradictory mutation in the enlightened sexual attitudes of the time occurred in response to these developments. There was an increased awareness of the irrepressible varieties in sexual practices and preferences among individuals and across cultures. But there also arose a closely related desire to limit such variation, manifest in a concerted effort to establish traditional standards of sexual practice as interiorized norms of sexual desire and identity. With its long-standing cultural privilege newly enhanced by its importance to nation and empire building, reproductive heterosexuality became a truly 'compulsory' touchstone in this regard: other erotic modalities were not only treated as deviations from but distorted replicas of this libidinal regime. To take the most salient example, the widely accepted 'inversion' model of homosexuality - the notion of a woman's soul trapped in a man's body or vice versa - referred all same-sex desire not to the bodily sex of its bearer, but to the 'opposite' gender of the mind, thereby framing it as cross-sex desire at a remove.