By analysing key poems and particularly his use of the mythological figure of Psyche in the ode ‘To Psyche’ (1819), the least known of his odes, this essay considers John Keats (1795–1821), perhaps the poet-physician of the Romantic period, in the light of the vitalist versus materialist debates in medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It begins by exploring ways in which responses to Michel Foucault’s notion of the confident clinical gaze and its accompanying surgical touch (as developed in the teaching hospitals in Revolutionary France and also by medical practitioners like William Lawrence and Charles Bell in England around the turn of the nineteenth century) might be traced in Dannie Abse’s twentieth-century poem ‘In the Theatre’ (1972) and William Wordsworth’s poetry and thought, before coming to a close focus on Keats. It outlines anxieties about the state, nature and disputed existence of the soul triggered within this wider medical debate, particularly in discussions of the nervous system, of the nature of sensation, and of what has become known as the mind–body problem; and it reads the poems as part of this debate. Referring to his medical notebooks and well-known statements in his letters, it re-examines the idea of Keats as a poet of sensation. It uses recent scholarship which seeks to revise our understanding of Keats specifically, and Romanticism in general, by drawing upon contemporaneous medical and scientific debates and highlighting the centrality of his medical training to possible understandings of Keats.

This essay contends that since the 1990s, as the outcomes of the neoliberal turn of the previous decade became increasingly palpable, one of the most noticeable aspects of a contemporary ‘structure of feeling’ is an evolving sense of crisis experienced both individually and communally. The essay explores this sensibility in a sample of six plays: David Hare’s Skylight (1995), Mark Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), Tim Crouch’s The Author (2009), David Greig’s The Events (2013), Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016) and debbie tucker green’s ear for eye (2018). Despite their formal and thematic diversity, these works present images of crisis that expand from local to global. Skylight and Some Explicit Polaroids gauge the mood at the end of the twentieth century in terms of social alienation and a clash of values. In contrast, The Author and The Events mine the collective itself as a paradoxical site of magnetism and ambivalence. Finally, Escaped Alone and ear for eye, through disruptions of form and language, render systemic crises tangible. Drawing together Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘crisis ordinariness’ with theatre’s proto-communal predisposition, the essay unpacks how crisis is evident not only thematically but also in representational strategies that emphasise states of precarity.

This essay deals with the concept of ‘Renaissance’, proposing a definition of the term as a meeting point, in both historical and geographical terms. It then focuses on its etymology, in the context of the investigation of other keywords such as ‘humanism’ and ‘Middle Ages’. The very flexibility of this concept in historical terms suggests we should look at it not as a starting point, but rather as a long period of transformation, marked by a number of events, such as the Black Death, the establishment of printing in Europe, and the Protestant Reformation. Such events are often distant in time, but their interaction brings about the passage from medieval to early modern. The essay then moves on to discuss the Renaissance in England against the background of its relationship with other European countries. The claim underlying this section is that the uniqueness of Tudor literature is the result of a multiplicity of voices: by opening itself to texts from other cultures, the English canon acquires its identity. Encouraged by the development of printing and the spread of education, translation becomes a primary concern for Tudor writers: it develops both vertically, by importing classical texts as well as works from the Latin and vernacular Middle Ages, and horizontally, by acquiring contemporary classics from other countries. Thanks to the proliferation of translations, the English language becomes a rich and flexible instrument. At the same time, the greater ease of travel and the intensifying exchanges between England and the rest of Europe promote the circulation of ideas and texts at an international level, and help put England on the early modern cultural map.

Part of the popularity and endurance of medieval romance rests in the ways that the genre speaks to the interests of late medieval society. Sometimes the interests and motifs of French and English romancers are similar: the anonymous Ywayne and Gawayne is a shorter but reasonably faithful English redaction of Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion. Accordingly, both texts highlight romance’s defining generic features of adventure, love (with and without courtship), women (of the gentry or nobility and who play various roles) and a happy ending. Yet Ywayne and Gawayne also displays greater concern with reconciling chivalric display with the duties of local government and the rights of aristocratic or gentry women, including their roles in managing familial estates. The problems of local lordship that are writ small in Ywayne and Gawayne are expanded in The Awntyrs off Arthure (also anonymous) to cover all of Arthur’s kingdom and the means by which that kingdom is maintained. Like Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle or the episode of the rebellion of the twelve kings in Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, Awntyrs highlights the problems an English king could face when confronted with recalcitrant regional lords in Scotland, Wales and the North. In Awntyrs, Gawain and Arthur are accused of taking lands unjustly, but Gawain’s single combat with the challenger allows Arthur to create a happy ending that avoids any immediate political problems. Romance thus offers modern readers a window on to late medieval culture, just as (it seems) it offered its original authors and audiences a venue in which to explore some of the major social, cultural and political questions of the day.

This essay explores some of the directions postcolonial literature seems to be taking in the present moment. It focuses on Diana Evans, Bernardine Evaristo, Guy Gunaratne, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Mohsin Hamid and Helon Habila, and takes a point of departure in three central ideas from the postcolonial theoretical toolbox – (black British) identity, nation and migration. The essay explores how the selected narratives complicate such ideas, by refusing to make identity issues extraordinary or bound up in notions of insurmountable difference, by showing that the nation’s promise of unity is compromised by internal and external forces in the past and the present, and by rethinking migration in ways that bear directly on the central topic of our times, the ongoing refugee crisis that peaked in 2015. The overarching argument pursued in the essay is that although the novels discussed engage in familiar postcolonial terrain, they do so in exciting new ways that force readers to rethink and reconsider identity, nation and migration and to reflect on how these postcolonial concepts operate in and impact upon the external world.

Questions of literary periodisation and related questions of context have been hotly debated in recent years, especially in relation to the discourses of New Historicism, and this essay engages critically with such questions with specific reference to the ‘period’ we usually refer to as ‘The Restoration and Eighteenth Century’. While acknowledging some of the problems and limitations of canonical literary periodisation, the essay will suggest how a distinctive set of historical pressures make contextualisation particularly important to an understanding of the drama, fiction and poetry published after 1660 and up to the Romantic era. It will suggest, for example, the difficulties of reading Dryden out of context, and how the very novel-ty and contemporaneity of the emergent novel, as exemplified by Richardson’s epistolary fiction, epitomises the period’s preoccupation with time. Indeed, one might say that the eighteenth century is decidedly a period period because of its signal interest in marking time, and this will be one of the main lines of discussion here.

At the same time, attention needs to be paid to influences and continuities across periods, both from the past and into the future. The Restoration depends on an interregnum, so knowing the earlier period matters too; similarly, the novel emerges in part from the medieval romance, so knowing even earlier periods also matters; and our knowledge of later developments of eighteenth-century legacies, such as the realist novel for example, retroactively informs our understanding of the original developments. In this spirit, a rereading of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard – ‘yet once more’ (to quote ‘mute inglorious Milton’) – will be offered here as a metaphor for literary history seen as a set of buried possibilities ready for rediscovery and reimagining.

As Britain extended its eastern empire through the Romantic period, the orient became imaginatively closer to Britons. As knowledge of eastern texts and geographies, as well as material objects and substances (such as fabrics, porcelain, tea and opium), were transported between east and west, these significant developments were registered in a variety of genres and styles, reflecting divergent political attitudes and aesthetic reactions. This essay selectively analyses early translations and imitations of classical eastern literatures by orientalists of the Asiatick Society; eastern poetry by William Jones and Lord Byron; metropolitan responses to material cultures associated with the orient by magazine essayists such as Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey; and early writings by eastern travellers to the west. These exemplify the diversity and extent of Romantic-period literary responses to the orient. From the charmingly domesticated to the grotesquely alien, the orient could generate widely disparate reactions in which relations of political power were inevitably embedded.

This essay offers an ecocritical reading of Hughes’s poetic career. First, ecocriticism is defined and the successive ‘waves’ of its development outlined. In contrast to Larkin’s ‘Movement’ poetry, the case is made for Hughes’s work as post-pastoral poetry that seeks to counter nostalgic idealisation of the countryside, its inhabitants and its elemental forces. Hughes’s first two volumes, The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, satirise pastoral defences against the forces of nature, but also celebrate the ‘elemental power circuit of the universe’ at work in the inner life of humans, animals and landscapes. Wodwo then seriously extends these themes. Between critique and celebration of forces in the human and more than human worlds, the course of Hughes’s poetic career was remarkably consistent, despite the variety of forms that each volume took, from the mythic narratives of Crow and Cave Birds to the shamanic verse narrative of Gaudete, the georgic poetry of Moortown Diary, the cultural organicism of Remains of Elmet and the redemptive achievement of River. The maturity of these three latter volumes deepens both language and themes. Even in Birthday Letters, Hughes and his late wife, Sylvia Plath, can be seen to be defined by their different responses to the natural world.

The distinctive feature of this essay is the way in which ecocritical concepts are revealing of aspects of Hughes’s poetry: pastoral, post-pastoral, otherness, inhabitation, biosemiology, ecofeminism, material ecocriticism, agency, natureculture and re-enchantment. These concepts are defined in the context of specific texts. Consideration is also given to poetry written ‘within hearing of children’, as Hughes put it, together with reference to Hughes’s poetic translation of Tales from Ovid. The significance of Hughes’s influence upon Alice Oswald and the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, is emphasised as twenty-first-century poets and readers engage with the consequences of the Anthropocene.

In the Middle Ages the concept of authorship differed greatly from that of the present day and the profession of an author often involved activities which would nowadays be termed copying, rewriting, compiling or translating. The borders between these were not strict and the classification of a work in terms of its originality or derivativeness could be – and often was – highly subjective. This essay discusses the case of perhaps the most ambitious of late medieval English poets and the ‘father of English poetry’, Geoffrey Chaucer. Focusing on one of Chaucer’s finest shorter poems, The Parliament of Fowls, it describes how Chaucer treated old authorities in developing his own reputation and what strategies he employed to establish a harmony among the multiple authorial voices his works incorporated. Lastly, the essay proposes that, at least for Chaucer, medieval authorship was not necessarily defined solely by the level of the writer’s creative input, but also by the occasion for which the work was written, its original context and purpose, as well as its actual or anticipated audiences.

Focusing on the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, this essay analyses ways in which different versions of women’s identity are constructed and performed in public places. The British Museum reading room was a centre for ‘New Women’ writers such as Amy Levy, Edith Nesbit, Dollie Radford and John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Richards) to read, research, meet and exchange ideas. In their short stories and poems the museum functions as a space for solitary contemplation, chance encounters, or a place to perform. Through their narrators, Nesbit in ‘Miss Lorrimore’s Career’ and Ella D’Arcy in ‘The Smile’ imagine their sex from the point of view of the male gaze, while Amy Levy’s poem ‘To Lallie’ suggests gender boundaries are fluid and ambiguous. Same-sex attraction is much less playfully explored in Charlotte Mew’s short story ‘Passed’. In the last decades of the nineteenth century London’s streets afforded liberated women the freedom to walk unaccompanied. ‘Passed’ explores that freedom. The female narrator’s independence, her confidence to own the streets at night, leads to an encounter – in this ‘glorious and guilty city’ – with death, desire and prostitution. Language proves barely adequate and strains to convey the experience.

With thirty-one essays covering such a broad range of topics, authors, texts and contexts, it would be impractical, and probably of limited use, to try to present a full introductory summary of all this material in one single general introduction. I have instead provided separate introductory notes at the start of each of the period sections, before each group of essays, in the hope that this will be of more immediate practical use to readers in relating my comments to the essays as they are about to be read. Nevertheless, having already explained the overall rationale and principles of organisation for the book in my preface, I would like to take this opportunity to outline just some of its key thematic contours and some of the shared features of the essays beyond their many individual differences of focus and approach – and then also to reflect briefly on the concept of ‘context’ and on the complexity of the relationship between texts and contexts.

Rather than address the violence and exploitation of apartheid in South Africa directly, Bessie Head forged a literary focus and style that foreground the everyday lives of ordinary people, particularly women, in her country of exile, Botswana. Her works critique not only colonialist modernity but also rigid, patriarchal village traditions that subordinate women and smother individual desires. Throughout her works, but particularly in her short stories in Tales of Tenderness and Power and The Collector of Treasures, and her oral history Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, Head illustrates that everyday acts of caring, neighbourliness and creativity form an alternative system of values that resists and exceeds the established order imposed from above, whether traditional village structures or capitalist modernity. The field of ‘everyday life studies’ – especially the work of Michel de Certeau and numerous feminist thinkers – illuminates how Head’s work performs its critiques by focusing on the micro-politics of the everyday. Head anticipated debates within literary criticism in southern Africa, as her work predates the influential call by Ndebele for a ‘rediscovery of the ordinary’ in literature; she is surprisingly neglected in those debates. Head’s works also manifest a feminism of everyday life that prepares for contemporary discourses, for example Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life and the websites The Everyday Sexism Project and Everyday Feminism. Through a focus on the everyday, Head’s works narrate not an explicit political revolution such as ‘protest literature’ might call for, but figure a more subtle method of resistance that allows ordinary people to survive (and sometimes thrive) despite multiple systems of oppression.

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf’s ambitious narrative invention, Mary Beton, visits the British Museum, and censures the male anger she unearths there while prodding at an avalanche of books written by men about women. Yet Woolf performs a clandestine ironisation of Beton’s own criticism, for Beton colludes with male misogyny in her analysis of women writers and their alleged forfeiture of the intellectual quality she calls ‘integrity’. With whose voice is this said, for example: ‘It is clear that anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Brönte the novelist’ (p. 73)? How is it that Beton is satisfied to argue that Brönte ‘had more genius … than Jane Austen’, only to bring forward the record that concludes Jane Eyre is diminished by anger, ignorance, fear and rancour? This essay argues that with Beton’s disparagement of female emotionalism and her rally behind the cultivation of integrity that produces the shape of the work ‘whole and entire’, Woolf suggests that Beton has adopted patriarchal aesthetic criteria; indeed, Beton betrays herself in this section of the narrative when she says that ‘it is the masculine values that prevail’ (p. 73). And if she has let them prevail with her, then we need, at the minimum, to stop automatically inscribing ‘Woolf says’ for ‘Beton says’. By writing this nuanced expression of Beton’s complex wrestling with critical tradition, Woolf not only brings mainstream literary criticism to the bar for its failure to extract women and their productions from misogynistic frameworks, but she works, with fictional disguise, to sophisticate the reader’s understanding of the female critic’s lengthy struggle with Britain’s anti-feminist critical machinery, and she instructs us in how to become better critics and readers of women writers and of women in fiction.