This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes the usefulness of a critical awareness of the graphic surface. It outlines the practical and theoretical concerns that have tended to obscure the graphic surface from critical scrutiny and given detailed analyses of a number of problematical texts showing how the graphic surface can contribute to interpretation. Postmodernist criticism has established a critical convention in which the use of the graphic surface always self-consciously signifies the materiality of the text. Beyond implications with regard to the fundamental contact of literature, the meeting of text and reader, there is much close reading to be done of texts which present a distinctive graphic surface. This applies to the work of the authors discussed in the book, that of many others within and outside the British Isles and many non-English writers, past and present.

This chapter introduces the approach and plan of the book. It describes the distinctiveness of sociological perspectives on family life and locates the book in its contemporary context. Readers are invited to reflect on their own understanding of ‘family’ and to think about what is interesting about the Irish experience of family change. The chapter includes a description of the archived qualitative longitudinal data that are referenced throughout the book: Life Histories and Social Change (2007) and Growing Up in Ireland Wave 1 at 9 years (2008). Through a comparative analysis of these data the authors tracked the diverse family experiences of Irish people born in different historical periods.

This chapter refers to Roger Ascham's famous aphorism that Italians are wicked, but the Italianate Englishman is the devil incarnate. It begins with two obviously Italianate Englishmen, Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson. To a generation of Britons, Prince Charles himself was the devil incarnate, John Milton compared him with the diabolical Richard III, and Milton's Satan, with his ardent patronage of Mammon, shared Charles's aesthetic tastes. The visual arts provide Jonson with a touchstone for the taste that he craves as much as the diabolical Iniquo. Jones's sketch book from the Arundel trip survives a fascinating record of an English artist teaching himself to be Italianate. Jones's Italian classicism included a great deal of hybridization, the Italian grafted onto the English, sometimes perforce, as in the new west façade he erected on old St Paul's cathedral.

This chapter argues that Algernon Charles Swinburne's early critical writings promote a theory of aesthetic cosmopolitanism that emerges from a sustained polemical dialogue with Matthew Arnold. Swinburne's essay comes at a crucial time in Arnold's career as critic, between the publication of Essays in Criticism and Culture and Anarchy, and, in spite of its title, actually devotes considerable attention to the criticism. Like Carlyle's fictive review essay, Swinburne's pieces employ playfulness and satire to reflect on the difficulty of translation and cultural mediation. Switching to French, Swinburne enters a different mentality and a land of greater expressive freedom. Seen from this perspective, the Arnold essay contains an experiment in bilingualism in which Swinburne stages a conversation between his English voice and his disguised French voice, which here appears bracketed and displaced into anonymity.

This chapter examines the fluctuating fortunes of the later Stuart churches in Scotland and Ireland. The precarious character of the 'national church' in the Stuart kingdoms was quickly exposed after James VII and II's accession in February 1685. The chapter outlines the legislative framework that determined ecclesiastical policy, and illustrates the extent to which the period was alternately characterised by periods of intense sectarianism and brutal suppression of nonconformists, alongside rival impulses towards comprehension and toleration. The chapter focuses on the relationship between statesmen and prelates in pulpits than on dissenters and narratives of persecution and unjustified tyranny. It shows recurrent interactions between the established churches and nonconformists from 1660 onwards, whether antagonistic or conciliatory, served to sharpen each denomination's self-understanding, enabling rival traditions to articulate their religious differences with greater precision by 1714.

The Ganymede story is directly predicated on the death of Eurydice, and it says something about mankind in general, not about Orpheus alone. Despite his own distinctive sexual tastes after the death of Eurydice, Orpheus's grief, expressed through his songs, encompasses all of human eroticism, whether chaste, promiscuous, polymorphous, heterosexual, homosexual, bestial, incestuous, gentle, or savage. The earliest version of the Ganymede emblem in the first edition of the Emblemata, 1531 shows the youth as a putto riding on an eagle. The ambivalent iconography of the myth for the Renaissance has been admirably and courageously, discussed by James Saslow in a genuinely pioneering book, Ganymede in the Renaissance. For the Renaissance, the stories in the cosmic group most often depicted by artists are those of Orpheus himself, the love of Venus and Adonis, and the story of Ganymede.

The investigation of foundling characteristics and backgrounds highlighted the fact that many infants were abandoned, in response to poor economic conditions and family hardship. This suggests that their health and sustainability may have been poor even before they were left at the hospital. The Foundling Hospital attracted increasing criticism over time for supposedly raising the foundling children above their proper social standing. In its policies on external wet nursing, the hospital achieved a significant measure of success. In fact, the reaction of some nurses to the return of their foster children to the hospital suggests that very strong emotional bonds were sometimes forged with them. The existence of a national poor law system does, seem to have had a significant impact on the form and nature of infant abandonment in England.

The chapter explores how political culture thwarted Eisenhower's desire to incorporate more development aid into security assistance, even in the face of a perceived economic offensive by Khrushchev's Soviet Union targeting decolonizing countries. The chapter examines the decision making process through which the administration managed to persuade Congress as to the need for development assistance to decolonizing areas. Also examined are inputs to this process from C. Douglas Dillon, William Draper, and modernization theorists in academia.

Edmund Gibson's ventriloquising of the archbishop's sentiments is a fair reflection of many senior clerics' zeal to improve the efficiency of the Church of England as an institution in the later Stuart period. Examining conflicting perceptions of decline and vigour requires us to recognise that the clergy undertook several roles in this period. They were God's priests first and foremost, and supposed to act as pastors to the people, but they were also significant political actors. The marquis of Halifax, and other lay critics of outspoken clergy, regularly urged preachers to stick to expounding scripture and to avoid engaging with current affairs. Preaching was clearly taken very seriously indeed by a huge number of later Stuart clergy who continued and developed, rather than fell away from, the activity of their late Elizabethan and early Stuart forbears.