Ezra Pound called Ulysses ‘a triumph in form’. In contrast, Holbrook Jackson deplored it as ‘chaos’, referring to ‘the arrangement of the book’ as ‘the greatest affront of all’. T. S. Eliot justified the ‘formlessness’ of Ulysses as a reflection of Joyce’s dissatisfaction with the novel form. Taking such comments as a springboard, this chapter attends to Ulysses’s capacity to produce pronounced effects of both form and formlessness, arguing that its longstanding position at the apex of the modernist canon is connected to this artful duality. Through its extensive intertextuality and practice of a gamut of generic forms, Joyce’s shape-shifting book invites its own critical insertion into ‘the tradition’. Simultaneously, it resists full absorption into any singular critical scheme through its flouting of expectations of stylistic unity and narrative closure. Ulysses achieves that exquisite balancing of pattern and disorder, or novelty and familiarity, that maximizes a work’s chance of being rated as ‘high art’. Yet its recognition as such was also considerably aided by the interpretations formulated by Joyce and his champions in the early days of the book’s reception.

If one measures O’Casey’s career as a dramatist from 1920, when the Abbey Theatre rejected his first two plays, until his death in 1964, that career was predominantly developed as an expatriate. From The Silver Tassie onwards, his plays were written in England, where a quarter of them were also staged for the first time. The first O’Casey production in England was Juno and the Paycock, which appeared at London’s Royalty Theatre between 16 November 1925 and 6 March 1926, and then transferred to the Fortune Theatre (for 198 performances in total). This chapter traces London productions of O’Casey’s work, examining the way in which particular works by O’Casey proved amenable to audiences in the English capital.

Sean O’Casey’s plays, both within his lifetime and afterwards, have been commonly associated with the major theatres of Dublin and London, but a rich performance history of O’Casey dramas, often the lesser-produced later plays and one acts, can be found on stages in Ireland outside of Dublin. This chapter shows how, in the decades that followed O’Casey’s death, Galway and Belfast saw a range of theatres, directors, actors, designers, and audiences, in both English and in Irish, engaging with O’Casey’s wide range of dramatic forms, writings, and styles.

In March 1926, the USA saw its first production of an O’Casey play, when a version of Juno and the Paycock appeared at the Mayfair Theater in New York. The text was praised by two of the twentieth century’s most influential theatre reviewers, George Jean Nathan and Brooks Atkinson, who became major American supporters of O’Casey and his work. Their efforts were bolstered by the enthusiasm for O’Casey shown by the American director Paul Shyre. This chapter traces the development of O’Casey’s reputation in the USA, and examines a range of onstage versions of O’Casey’s plays in America, ranging from the introductory work of the 1920s to the 2019 O’Casey season at the Irish Repertory Theater in New York.

The Irish theatre director Tomás MacAnna was artistic director of the Abbey Theatre on three occasions and proved to be a major supporter of O’Casey’s work. This chapter traces MacAnna’s interactions with O’Casey’s writings, pointing to a number of key stagings and explaining how MacAnna wanted Ireland to follow Germany’s example in using O’Casey’s scripts as part of a developing culture of theatrical experimentalism. This chapter demonstrates how, after O’Casey’s death, MacAnna directed a remarkable number of unfamiliar O’Casey works at the Abbey Theatre between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, although the chapter shows that the reception of these works was often lukewarm or hostile.

O’Casey had originally thought about writing a book about his life experiences as early as August 1926. In 1938 he completed the first volume, but the project continued to balloon, such that O’Casey eventually composed his autobiographies over the course of two decades, publishing six volumes between 1939 and 1954. This chapter puts the autobiographies in the perspective of working-class self-representation in Ireland during the twentieth century, interrogates the sense of self that can be found in the books, examines the response to the autobiographies in Ireland and beyond, and assesses the worth of O’Casey’s autobiographical writings.

The Epilogue draws together the various threads of the book by evaluating the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, a thirteenth-century forgery of Ovid which claims to be written by Ovid in exile. The Epilogue asks whether, in the light of this book’s previous chapters, De vetula constitutes an ‘authentically exilic Ovid’. Menmuir shows that Ovidian exile facilitates the forgery of De vetula, underpinning its very existence and authenticating an array of blatantly medieval features as genuinely Ovidian. However, having used Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry as a springboard, the poem subsequently departs from Ovid in exile, framing the Ovid of the last book of the poem as a thirteenth-century scholar and a budding Christian to boot. Each chapter of the book is relevant to this fraudulent Ovidian transformation. De vetula is framed as the first response to both Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry, fictitiously bridging the gap between Ovid’s responses (discussed in Chapter 1) and the scholarly and literary responses covered in Chapters 2 and 3. As a forgery of Ovidian exile, the author ‘becomes the exile’ but pushes the second part of this book to extremes by replacing the genuine Ovid’s exilic poetry and life.

The Introduction establishes the primary arguments and scope of the book. It defines ‘Ovidian exile’ in two related ways: firstly, as the poetry written by Ovid in exile, namely the Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto and Ibis; and secondly, as Ovid himself as the figure of the exiled poet. Ovidian exile in these terms had a vast influence across medieval culture, informing teaching, preaching, reading and writing – among a host of activities Menmuir terms ‘responses’ – in the later Middle Ages, offering a mode of voicing exile, marginalisation and poethood itself. After describing the circumstances of Ovid’s exile and the primary concerns of the exile poetry, Menmuir introduces the Ovid, or Ovids, of the Middle Ages, including the common perception of Ovid as the tripartite mythographer, lover and exile. Ovid and his works were deemed ethical, and even Christian, in medieval exegesis: the fact of his exile created a penitential arc which enabled Ovid’s transformation into Ovidius ethicus. Menmuir defines ‘responses and respondents’, where ‘response’ comprises a more active expression of ‘reception’. The book’s scope primarily includes responses between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries and focuses on England, albeit as linked to the continent in several ways.

Chapter 3 examines the consanguinity of Ovid’s two bodies, or corpora: his body of work (his textual corpus) and his physical body, which here represents his living body, corpse, tomb and biographical life. Medieval commentators took great interest in the relationship between Ovid’s bodies, responding diversely to the opportunities – and challenges – posed by Ovid’s insistent focus on the relationship. Their responses illuminate the mechanisms by which Ovid was transformed from an immoral, salacious poet to a moral, edifying one. A surprising element of that metamorphosis is that the pagan Ovid became a justifiably Christian poet for the medieval age. The chapter discusses Ovid’s presentation of his corpora in the exile poetry and the medieval obsession with Ovid’s tomb, before focusing on three medieval case studies: the Nolo Pater Noster anecdote, a medieval Latin narrative where two clerics are visited by the spirit of Ovid; Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine and John Lydgate’s English rendering of the text, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, where a figure on pilgrimage encounters Ovid’s exilic revenant; and Christine de Pizan’s Le livre de la cité des dames, in which Ovid is resurrected only to be castrated.

This chapter discusses Shelley’s complex orientation towards Romantic-period drama and theatre culture. For Shelley, drama provided a key opportunity for generic experimentation that is continuous with his lyrical innovations. These innovations, however, go beyond producing new kinds of Romantic ‘closet dramas’, which were intended for a smaller, more bourgeois reading public. To argue this claim, the chapter attends to how Shelley’s writings on ancient Greek dramaturgical principles resonated with his interest in Romantic-period popular theatre. As shown in his dramatic poetic theory, Shelley attempted to realise his ideal intersection of aesthetics, historical progress, and contemporary social change in works sometimes intended for popular consumption. As demonstrated by his hopes to stage certain plays, Shelley’s dramatic efforts indicate that embodiment and mixed media forms were essential to his broader poetics.

Shelley was a prolific and varied writer of correspondence throughout his short life. The work of collecting, editing, and annotating Shelley’s letters has been going on since the 1840s, but large portions of his early and Italian correspondence remain lost. The essay discusses this corpus and its critical history before examining three types of letters that Shelley was particularly adept at writing. Shelley’s adversarial letters to older men such as his father show his mastery of a radical bombast; correspondence with contemporaries such as Hogg and Hitchener shows him harnessing the form for the debate of ideas; and his long descriptive epistles about Italy, addressed to his friend Peacock, constitute some of the finest travel writing in English. T. S. Eliot was quite wrong to claim Shelley’s letters are ‘insufferably dull’: this essay begins to think about the elements of their content and style that reveal their literary achievement.

Conservative reviewers berated Percy Shelley for his political radicalism, his opposition to religious orthodoxy, and his alleged personal immorality. The Tory Quarterly Review subjected Shelley to violent personal attacks, to which he responded in Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. In 1821, pirate editions of Queen Mab provoked some of Shelley’s most vituperative and partisan reviews. Nevertheless, even politically antagonistic reviewers acknowledged the aesthetic merits of Shelley’s poetry. Moreover, positive and negative reviews alike registered the originality of his stylistic innovations and experiments with poetic form. Many of the passages quoted by hostile reviewers as evidence of Shelley’s allegedly incomprehensible diction include striking examples of his distinctive figurative language. In perceptive articles by John Gibson Lockhart, the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine defended Shelley’s poetry while condemning his political principles. Meanwhile, Leigh Hunt consistently defended Shelley in the pro-reform Examiner. Eventually, the elegiac reception of Adonais fed into the posthumous mythologising of Shelley.

This chapter examines the ways in which Shelley’s works and reputation were mediated to Victorian audiences. It argues that the Victorians’ Shelley was to a large extent the Victorians’ creation; his reception in this period differed from both earlier and later understandings of his life and work. The chapter pays particular attention to the role of women such as Mary Shelley and Lady Jane Shelley in shaping the poet’s posthumous reception. It surveys several sites of reception, including editions, anthologies, sermons, statues, and Chartist meetings, to show how Shelley and his writings were appropriated, reimagined, and redeployed in a variety of new contexts by people with divergent aims and concerns. It briefly examines sculpted memorials to Shelley by Henry Weekes and Edward Onslow Ford. The chapter concludes that the Victorian understanding of Shelley was no more monolithic than the ‘Victorians’ themselves.

This chapter reconsiders ways to interpret the musical gesture of the turn figure in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by comparing it with Richard Wagner’s use of the same gesture in Parsifal – a work that proved crucial for Mahler’s development as a composer and as a conductor. In Parsifal, the descending second is associated with suffering and pain (‘Strafe’, ‘Klage’, ‘Qual’), but also with the possibility of redemption (‘Erlöse, Rette mich!’). As in the Adagio of Mahler’s Ninth, the melodic turn is omnipresent in Parsifal. This chapter concentrates on three specific moments where this orchestral gesture seems to express the unspeakable: Kundry’s narrative of Herzeleide’s death, her description of the gaze of Christ on the cross (both in Act 2) and her baptism by Parsifal in Act 3. Comparing these moments in Parsifal with similar instants in Mahler’s Ninth highlights their essentially theatrical and transformative nature: where verbal language reaches its limits, physical and musical gestures take over, transforming the silence of the words into material movement.

The afterword draws together arguments made in previous chapters about the creation, publication, and reception of Pepys’s diary. It briefly surveys the reputation and uses of the diary in the early twenty-first century and considers what the future of the diary might hold.

During the sixteenth century, the King in Parliament terminated the jurisdiction of the Papacy in England and established by law the Church of England, with the King as its head. One task was to institute a new system of canon law for the national Church. Parliamentary statute provided for a commission to reform the canon law. In the meantime, pre-Reformation Roman canon law was to continue to apply to the Church of England if it was not repugnant to the royal prerogative and the laws of the realm. The commission was never appointed. The Roman canon law continued to apply on the basis of both statute and custom as part of the King’s ecclesiastical law. This chapter explores how the post-Reformation English ecclesiastical lawyers understood this continuing Roman canon law, its legal basis, and the role of the doctrine of reception in all this.

The introduction sets out the aims of the book and explains in brief the history of Hopkins’s writing and reception. It begins by discussing Hopkins’s posthumous publication and its distinctive effect upon his early reputation and influence, notably in relation to modernism. The introduction then goes on to relate the more recent historical emphasis in Hopkins scholarship before setting out the approach taken in the book and outlining its contents.