Spenser’s The Faerie Queene has long been read as a key text in ‘Atlantic history’ and the emerging models of planter colonialism in Ireland and America. This essay argues that Spenser’s work also deserves a place in the larger context of global Renaissance studies: that is, a recent critical paradigm foregrounding the global changes to political, cultural and socioeconomic formations, often (and certainly in the case of Europe) brought about by various forms of transcultural exchange or encounter.

One new angle of approach to Spenser – and indeed to early modern epic – that foregrounds these global horizons presents itself in the recently rediscovered poetic treatise of William Scott. Strongly influenced by Sidneyan poetics (as indeed Spenser was), Scott’s accomplished treatise, The Modell of Poesy (1599), is distinguished by its attention to recent literary writing. But we find some surprises, not so much in the judgements as in the associations and connections made between key early modern texts. In Scott’s treatment of epic, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene keeps company with More’s Utopia, Sidney’s Arcadia, Daniel’s Civil Wars, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Warner’s Albions England, along with the usual suspects – Homer, Xenophon, Virgil, Heliodorus, Ariosto and Tasso. It is a salient reminder of the diverse forms and more exploratory meanings of heroic writing for early modern English readers. This essay takes what is perhaps the most obvious outlier in Scott’s tally, Warner’s Albions England (1586–1612) to argue for strong connections between the 1596 edition of this work and Spenser’s epic, connections that shed new light on the global rather than primarily national horizons of early modern English epic for its first readers.

This essay explores the economic, temporal, spatial and aesthetic dynamics of Victorian serial fiction. The serial is positioned as a product of industrial modernity, created and consumed to the pulse of modernity’s differentiated temporal rhythms (including regulated time, forward propulsion, heightened anticipation, and reflective pause). It is considered as an ‘information object’ that draws meaning from the material context in which it was typically situated so the importance of spatial reading is emphasised along with attention to the temporal. I draw out some of these issues in the second part of the essay through a critical reading of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Gothic vampire story, Carmilla, published in four instalments from December 1871 to March 1872 in the short-lived monthly magazine the Dark Blue. I suggest that the original publication format underscores the serial’s inherent potential for mutability and adaptability, much like the ‘vampire’ Carmilla who gives her name to Le Fanu’s ambiguous story. Carmilla’s rich afterlife across various media formats in the twenty-first century demonstrates both the serial’s ongoingness and its reiterative embeddedness in its various historical and technological moments.

The Old English poem called The Dream of the Rood has challenged audiences for more than a thousand years. It is precocious in content, using the dream vision to open up a fictional space for contemplation; within that space, it demands that readers emotionally re-experience the central mystery of the Christian religion. In this way it anticipates much later medieval literary trends. The Dream of the Rood is also formally challenging, using wordplay, complex shifts in metre and haunting repetitions to weave a complex web of affect and meaning. It is a triumph of craft, which perhaps explains why it seems to have been popular across early medieval England.

The poem is also elusive, multiform. One text appears in a tenth-century manuscript; others, close kin, are engraved on objects – a monumental stone cross and a gold reliquary. Still other echoes of The Dream of the Rood appear across the corpus of Old English verse.

Which is the real poem? How can we, today, read a text that presents to us such varied faces, especially when none of them can be tied to any author whose name and life we know?

This essay considers modern scholars’ varied answers to these questions, answers which help us perceive how early literature’s voices – and its silences – can echo or reply to much later concerns. In the medieval reception of The Dream of the Rood and its tradition, we will also see ways to pose these questions altogether differently – and thus to rethink the way we understand poetry’s place in the world.

Until recently, it was often assumed that Walter Scott was the first historical novelist. Moreover, it was accepted that, in writing a new form of fiction, Scott had chosen to make his heroes, caught up in large-scale historical events, relatively ineffectual. Yet when the work of the historical novelists (often women) who worked before and alongside Scott is taken into account, it becomes apparent that Scott’s decision regarding his heroes is a manoeuvre within a wider debate regarding the nature of heroism. Placing Scott’s heroes within a wider context, this essay examines how the Romantic historical novel first moderates, then reduces and reinvents the sublime figure of the heroic leader. My reading examines how, in The Scottish Chiefs (1810), Jane Porter invented a new model of sublime Christian heroism that could be extended beyond the upper ranks. It interrogates how Scott responded to Porter by minimising the potentially subversive elements of this paradigm, and it reveals how Jane Porter, in The Pastor’s Fireside (1817), proposed a form of heroic re-education. For these historical novelists, the difficulty, ultimately, was to imagine a variety of patriotic heroism that would safely function in commercial, peacetime Britain.

This essay explores how a work of fiction appeared in a magazine and how the work of a magazine appeared in a fiction. The fiction is The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–1) by the eighteenth-century Scottish writer, Tobias Smollett. The magazine is one of his periodical projects, The British Magazine, which ran for eight years from 1760. In part, then, the essay is interested in foregrounding and backgrounding these two contexts: it is interested in how fiction was created in the expanding print culture of the mid eighteenth century; it also suggests how that same print culture was supported by a fiction.

The essay is intended to complement approaches to Smollett which see him working for the most part as a novelist. In the eighteenth century, Smollett was best known as a historian, critic and translator; he worked tirelessly on vast publishing projects, often issued in instalments. The essay first establishes this context – the culture of periodical writing that marked the Enlightenment period – and then provides a short reading of Launcelot Greaves as part of it. Informing this reading is Smollett’s interest in Miguel de Cervantes’s great work Don Quixote (1605 and 1615); this might be thought of as providing another context for understanding the ambitions of Smollett’s writing. The essay therefore raises questions about the kind of work in which Smollett was engaged – and perhaps the kind of stories we tell ourselves about what writing is and what it does.

Beginning with Great Expectations, this essay explores the relationship between money and representation in nineteenth-century literature through two major Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Gissing. It argues that money is both ubiquitous and complex in their writing, and that it simultaneously provokes and resists attempts at literary representation. Money is first shown to be central to the complex of guilt and desire that drives Great Expectations. The discussion then turns to Mr Merdle and Mr Lorry, bankers who appear in Dickens’s novels Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities respectively. They are read as representing two different sides of money, the public/fantastical and the private/intimate, which cannot be effectively combined in a single character. The final part of the essay considers Gissing’s response to Dickens, arguing that Gissing attempts, in novels such as The Nether World and The Odd Women, to correct what he saw as Dickens’s incomplete realism through a renewed focus on the harsh realities of economic life. The limited horizons of Gissing’s characters are so overwhelming, however, that they dominate his narrative vision, meaning the very attention to money that is supposed to make Gissing’s fiction more realistic also restricts the representative range of his writing.

This essay examines the contemporary UK publishing scene, foregrounding women’s participation in it as readers, writers and publishing professionals. As historians of feminist publishing have noted, women have always figured in the book business in numbers. At the turn of the millennium, publishing was figured by many as an industry in which women dominated, but, as the first section of this essay sets out, this situation has shifted. I show the ways that women’s status in the mainstream industry has, more recently, fallen back, before turning to look at the women writers who have risen to the top of the bestseller lists in the twenty-first century, examining the ways in which they are presented and their work received. Finally I examine the reader experience, and the relationship(s) between the book consumer and the publisher, and whether there is a gendered exchange in this dynamic. In particular I look at the way the books that we read are curated by the publishing industry, and women’s role within this: as editors, reviewers, retailers and recommenders of female authorship. I will demonstrate that gender continues to have a profound effect on the ways in which literature is both produced and consumed.

The Native Americans of Surinam in Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) have generally been regarded as a marginal group with whom the English colonists seek to maintain friendly relations for trading purposes, though Behn situates them in a paradisaical, natural world. Idealisation and commercial interest curiously seem not quite to correspond. Representations of the commodified African slaves are similarly divided, for among them is a royal specimen whose ‘greatness of soul’, ‘true honour’ and ‘absolute generosity’ make him seem an expatriate from a world above. One wonders what idealised connection Behn may envisage between Oroonoko and the Surinamese. Idealising interpretations of the royal slave have mostly been in terms of aristocratic ideology and romance literature. Yet the romance has variously been taken to serve the royal cause against progressive change, as well as to glorify the colonial enterprise. It is, however, after all not so certain that Behn employs romance and aristocratic virtues mainly towards a political statement. Such a political, realist approach has problems accounting for certain idealising narrative analogies.

For instance, the Surinamese captains remain ethnically remote, unlike the African prince, yet their heroism and honourableness suggest some mysterious non-European affinity with him. Further, their nobility does not hierarchically distance them from the rest of their community, as the royal African stands apart from his fellow slaves, and from the ignoble English councillors. There is a sense in which the American New World represents a utopian vision contrasted to the divided world that has enslaved Oroonoko. Significantly, the portrayals of both the Surinamese and Oroonoko are couched in terms of Christian allegory. A dialectic emerges by which, in the contradictory tradition of travel narratives, an idealising quest for a new order in the New World vies with imperialist motives. It is a dialectic that can best be examined against the background of scientific, religious and ideological transition taking place in England in the seventeenth century.

When Henry Vaughan’s collection of religious lyrics, Silex Scintillans (1650 and 1655), was slowly recovered from oblivion during the first half of the nineteenth century, it was initially absorbed into public consciousness as part of the tradition of devotional poetry associated with George Herbert’s much more widely known volume, The Temple (1633). It was also accommodated to nineteenth-century taste by reading it selectively in the contexts of Romantic nature poetry and the tradition of Christian mysticism. Gradually, other contexts were brought into play, but reluctance to admit the significance of the political situation in Vaughan’s part of South Wales for the meaning and value of his poetry continued until the later decades of the twentieth century. Even though it contains a vivid evocation of the horrors of civil war, ‘The Constellation’ was commonly interpreted as an expression of Vaughan’s belief in the harmony between God and the world of Nature. Once the political element was recognised as central to the poem’s strategy, however, various details were opened up to reinterpretation. Two more examples, ‘The Proffer’ and ‘The Seed growing secretly’, are analysed to demonstrate not only that Vaughan’s poetic enterprise was deeply implicated in the predicament of loyal supporters of church and king in Breconshire under the Puritan Commonwealth, but also that no single context is enough to unlock all the nuances of his complex poetic art.

Arden of Faversham is one of the few anonymous dramas which even today enjoy a great deal of popularity both among readers and on stage. It is perhaps the best-known ‘domestic tragedy’ and is based on an actual murder committed in 1551. The play was written between 1588 and 1591 and printed in 1592 as a quarto edition. As was also the case with Shakespeare’s history plays, Macbeth, parts of King Lear and Cymbeline, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577; rev. 1578) was the play’s most important historical source; and this essay will focus primarily on the ways in which this material was used, as well as the play’s ongoing reception. The essay begins with an overview of the actual historical events behind the play’s action, before sketching out its genesis as a drama of intensively debated authorship. Following this, it argues that even in spite of its moralising framework, Arden opened English drama up to a new range of subject matters by considerably narrowing the gap between lofty subjects deemed worthy of a stylised poetic treatment, on the one hand, and the humble fare traditionally more suited to comedy, on the other. It is this innovative combination which may (at least in part) explain its enduring popularity. The essay’s concluding sections consider the complex relationship between the tragedy and its source, arguing that Arden reflects gradual societal and moral shifts around the question of marriage in particular.

A life writing focus enables dimensions of Charlotte Brontë’s ambitious and multifaceted exploration of the self in Villette, too easily overlooked when the novel is reductively categorised as autobiographical, to come into view. Although Brontë clearly drew on a range of actual experiences and real persons for Villette, her final novel demonstrates the extent to which her wide-ranging interest in complexities of self-understanding, self-presentation and concepts of personhood expand the remit of her fiction. Reading Villette alongside correspondence written by Charlotte Brontë reveals just how central feeling and emotion were to Brontë’s understanding of the truth claims of a work of art. This essay identifies loneliness and the corollary fear of being forgotten as linchpin emotions experienced by Charlotte Brontë (particularly at the time she drafted Villette) and vividly represented in her heroine Lucy Snowe’s narrative as she constructs what she refers to as a ‘book of life’. For both, letters function as life-sustaining ‘tokens’ of remembrance, tools with which to manage loneliness and counter the perceived threat of being forgotten. This emphasis in Villette is amplified through Brontë’s nuanced use of a rhetoric of writing more generally, which she invokes both to convey experiences of deeply knowing and being known by another and to anchor and make permanent the memories used to structure her narrative. She writes, in other words, ‘in characters of tint indelible’, as an expression of love, the emotion that Brontë herself posited as impervious to decay and a guarantor of immortality. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, relying heavily as it does on Brontë’s letters, extends an understanding of the relationship between life writing and legacy so richly examined in Villette.