Finnegans Wake and confession, in both secular and religious contexts, are each examined through the lens of the other. The aim is to ‘de-confuse’ the fusion, thrice repeated in the Wake, of ‘confession’ and ‘confusion’. Eight observations are illustrated through close reading: i) confession directs the text in two chapters, Shem’s in I.7 and HCE’s in II.3; ii) both present as public not private confessions; iii) there is no auricular confession; iv) widespread inadvertent confessions found in the Wake’s ‘fallen’ language, supposedly Freudian slips, are a source of sense-making power; v) any confession is always a qualified confession – blame is always dispersed; vi) there is no torture leading to involuntary confession; vii) the book doesn’t operate within the tradition of classical confessional texts; viii) it knows that confession split Christianity and projects that split onto the dialectical operations of the narrative. The chapter argues for the productive and overlooked potential of ‘syntagmatic’ or narrative approaches that read the text as sequential form, and it suggests that the plurality of narratives undermines theoretical generalizations of the human as ‘a confessing animal’.

This chapter examines the development of illuminated manuscripts in Late Antiquity, focusing on their origins, evolution and cultural significance. It argues that illumination was not merely decorative but played a navigational, didactic and symbolic role, aiding text comprehension while reinforcing religious and political authority. Tracing the transition from papyrus scrolls to the codex, the chapter emphasises how the Christian adoption of the codex format facilitated the rise of manuscript illumination. It documents how the earliest illustrated Christian manuscripts emerged in Egypt, influenced by pagan scroll traditions, magical texts and the Book of the Dead. These manuscripts incorporated symbolic elements such as the ankh cross and interlace designs, which later became defining features of Coptic and Byzantine carpet pages. The study then shifts focus to early biblical illustration, highlighting works such as the Vienna Genesis, Quedlinburg Itala and Rabbula Gospels, which reflect the growing role of visual storytelling in Christian texts. The chapter concludes by emphasising the imperial patronage of illuminated books, noting Constantine’s commissioning of grand scriptural manuscripts and the development of treasure bindings adorned with ivory and gold. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how manuscript illumination evolved as a medium of authority, devotion and intellectual transmission across Late Antiquity and the early medieval world.

Chapter 3 illustrates the poetics of illness experience by examining clinical conversations during a psychiatric assessment of a patient. Patients’ narratives in clinical contexts are often fragmentary and contradictory, reflecting their ongoing struggle to make sense of inchoate experience and position themselves in ways that elicit care and concern. Metaphors of illness experience open up narrative possibilities, but may be blocked by conflicting agendas or cross-purposes of clinician and patient. In place of an overarching integrative narrative are interruption, miscommunication, and mutual subversion. Focusing on narratives, with close attention to the speakers’ rhetorical aims, can identify situations of tension and misunderstanding, which can be clarified through cognitive and social analysis tracing the models and metaphors used in clinical exchanges to their personal meaning and embodiment and outward into the social world where they function as part of discursive systems that organize institutions and confer power. Close attention to metaphor in lived experience, social interaction, and cultural performance can yield an account of the dynamics of clinical conversations.

Chapter 5 focuses on the narrative shaping of the sense of self and of the process of transforming it in psychotherapy. We can advance our understanding of the sources of rhetorical power of metaphor through some version of the constructs of myth and archetype. Myth stands for the overarching narrative structures of the self and other produced and lent authority by cultural tradition. Archetype stands not for preformed ideas or images, but for the bodily or existentially given in meaning. Metaphor links the narratives of myth and bodily experience through imaginative constructions and enactments that allow movement in sensory-affective quality space. Examples from contemporary psychotherapy illustrate how healing metaphors can transform sense of self and personhood. While this approach is most obviously applicable to psychotherapy and other talking cures, which use language to reconfigure experience, it captures a discursive level of sense-making that is an important part of all forms of symbolic healing, whether during ritual actions, as part of the prior construction of expectations, or in subsequent interpretation of outcomes.

Experiences in mental illness are often highly subjective and out of the ordinary and may be difficult to describe in ordinary language. Through images, metaphors, and other literary tools, literature can facilitate understanding that would not be possible otherwise.

Portrayals of psychiatry provide important feedback for clinicians on how they are perceived by their patients and also for the public on how those with mental illness perceive their position in society. This feedback is often negative, but there are positive examples too. Patients often write about the humanity of the psychiatrist and appreciate their being versed in a range of disciplines, including art or music.

Literature is about weaving a narrative, which is an important part of recovery in psychiatry. Only in literature are we afforded more licence to use our imaginations and less bounded by the limits of reality. In literature, patients and psychiatrists can express many of their thoughts, feelings, and values that could be seen as inappropriate or ‘unprofessional’ in any other context.

Literary works can lay bare those aspects of the cultural and moral context of practice that we may not think about otherwise, including the origins of relevant societal and professional values.

This chapter explores the impact of José Esteban Muñoz’s 2009 book Cruising Utopia on both the creative production and critical reception of queer Latinx literary work in the following decade-plus. While Latinx literature and its study were already “queered” and “queering” before Cruising Utopia, the chapter argues that Muñoz’s work prompted a greater focus on futurity, potentiality, and the speculative, thanks especially to the unique generativity of his (queer, ethnic) performance studies methodology (especially his inquiries into affectivity, ephemera, and brownness) for literary studies. The discussion engages critical work from the 2010s to gauge both the scope of Muñoz’s contributions to salient critical debates over that period and the scope of some skeptical responses to those contributions. It then turns in closing to a targeted close reading of Carmen Maria Machado’s literary production from the late 2010s and early 2020s as a “representative” archive of queer Latinx literature “after” the utopian “turn.”

Through analysis of the novels of racial passing by six early twentieth-century authors – William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Walter Francis White, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Fannie Hurst – this essay explores how whiteness as unmarked norm at once facilitates passing in modern America and complicates narrative representation of it, and how literary modernism informs the authors’ negotiations with the complication. In doing so, the essay focuses on the paradoxical operation of the passer’s “Black-passing-for-white” identity. For, while enabling plot development and dramatization in accordance with passing fiction’s genre conventions, this identity framework inevitably suppresses passing’s unmarked working by making it narratively visible to the reader. The essay demonstrates that the modernist attentiveness to subjectivity – applied to varying degrees of experimentation, from fragmented interior monologue to third-person limited narration – helps the novels to reenact the invisible passing as well as resist essentializing the Black-passing-for-white identity around which their stories revolve.

Authenticity plays key methodological and normative roles for early Heidegger: as he puts it, to ‘work out the question of Being adequately … we must make an entity – the inquirer – transparent in his own Being’. But the precise nature of those roles, and how Heidegger differs from other thinkers of authenticity, is much less clear. This chapter considers three possible interpretations of authenticity found in the contemporary literature. On a transcendental reading, authenticity is what allows us to first recognize reasons as such and act in light of norms at all. On a unity reading, authenticity unifies Dasein’s commitments, and thereby grants a special narrative or judgmental coherence to my life. Finally, on the structural reading, ultimately defended here, authenticity is an inchoate awareness of the structural features of normative space and of Dasein’s own way of being. It is only this interpretation, it is argued, that can make sense of Heidegger’s text and the centrality of authenticity within his early work.

The development of the novel in premodern (pre–twentieth-century) China paralleled, to a significant extent, that of the novel in the West in that both were shaped by a changing social and cultural environment characterized by rapid commercialization and urbanization and a booming print culture, even if the former’s rise began almost two centuries earlier. Whereas the Western realistic novel flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Chinese novel had already experienced its golden age by the late eighteenth century. What sets the “realism” in the Chinese novel apart is its hybrid nature: A realistic narrative is often framed or punctured by the mythical/supernatural that tends to question the very veracity of this reality. Despite their shared fascination with realism, many fictional works, during both the premodern and modern periods, or both before and after the inpouring of the Western influence, have exhibited a deep concern over realism’s potential for moral “messiness” and, consequently, an urge to contain realism with various attempts at ideological intervention, whether Buddhist, Confucian, or communist.

Integrating tradition in legal arguments remains an effective persuasive strategy, serving as a source of legitimacy and appeal, fostering the establishment of a shared identity between the speaker and the audience, and cultivating a sense of belonging to a distinct group with defined notions of its identity. This chapter examines the strategic utilization of the concept of tradition in forensic rhetoric. It investigates how communicators shape and influence discourse within forensic settings by leveraging enduring cultural norms, purported intentions and beliefs of esteemed historical figures, and narratives concerning a people’s historical trajectory. By examining cases from the popular courts of classical Athens and drawing parallels in contemporary American legal arguments, the chapter identifies instances where tradition serves as both a stabilizing force and a catalyst for innovation, and sheds light on the importance of tradition as a cornerstone of the rhetorical strategies of advocates on all sides of an issue, including those challenging the status quo. Consequently, the chapter contributes to a deeper understanding of the rhetorical functioning of tradition, offering insights into the intricate interplay between the construction of persuasive narratives grounded in tradition and legal concepts such as precedent, original intent, and legal interpretation.

How did Donald Trump become the preeminent figure in American politics over the past decade, and why has the Democratic Party struggled to extinguish his threat despite his unpopularity and the unpopularity of his policies? The answer lies in an area that liberal political strategists have not focused on and political scientists have neglected: the politics of dominance. While twenty-first-century liberals have focused on offering more attractive policies, illiberal leaders such as Trump have grasped that politics is a dominance competition. “High-dominance” leaders strive to make opinion, embrace us-versus-them framing, double down on provocative statements and positions, stay on the offensive, take risks, and use entertaining, provocative language. “Low-dominance” leaders study polls and tell voters what they think they want to hear, fear “othering” opponents, walk back or qualify controversial statements, play defense, abhor risk, and use bromidic language. Restoring the dominance advantage the Democrats enjoyed at times during the twentieth century is a key to defeating Trumpism.