In this essay, I consider the publication context of Northanger Abbey, focusing in particular on the pressures exerted by the literary marketplace, and Austen’s alertness to it, on that novel. Beginning with a discussion of Austen’s interactions with the two publishing firms which failed to publish her works, Cadell & Davies and Crosby & Co., I then consider the changes in places, manners, books and opinions that occurred between the novel’s first conception in 1798–9 and its final publication in December of 1817. Placing Northanger Abbey’s literary allusions and general intertextuality in the context of the changes in the literary marketplace through the three decades of its production, I suggest that some of the novel’s tonal oddities, and its relative unpopularity with contemporary readers and reviewers are a direct result of Benjamin Crosby’s decision not to publish the novel then known as ‘Susan’ in 1803.

Salman Rushdie (b. 1947 in India) entered the literary field with his novel Grimus in 1975. In that science fiction fantasy novel he developed the idea of all-purpose quotes, philosophical phrases that would be suitable for all situations. With such quotes, people could bring meaning to their lives, for ‘the all-purpose quote increases our awareness of the interrelations of life’. With this idea, Rushdie began an œuvre that would be constantly aware of the contextuality of writing.

In this essay I will discuss the way Rushdie emphasises the significance of contextuality. Although Rushdie writes in the fashion of magical realism – that is, mixing the realist with the magical – his works are always (with the exception of Grimus and the children’s books Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)) keenly embedded in historical or contemporary contexts. Furthermore, Rushdie, a history graduate from Cambridge, frequently also provides metatextual and metacontextual commentary on the contexts he writes about.

The focus of the essay will be on three of Rushdie’s novels that were published after Grimus but before the Satanic Verses affair: Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988) itself. Together with The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), these books form what can be called Rushdie’s ‘India cycle’, although the Indian subcontinental context is in many ways relevant also for his other novels. My analysis of Rushdie’s novels will consider, among other things, the political history of India and Pakistan, communal violence, religious sectarianism and popular culture. Theoretically, I will be using a postcolonial framework, within which Rushdie’s works hold a particularly central place for subcontinental writing, with Midnight’s Children as the key novel.

This essay offers a feminist reading of Caribbean poet Grace Nichols whose gender politics are a sine qua non of her poetical discourse. For her, to speak of black women does not at all imply the exclusion of other women and her poetry constantly celebrates the diversity of women’s experiences and offers a cutting critique of normative gender stereotypes. Collections such as i is a long memoried woman, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems and Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman explore alternative ways of understanding the workings of gender for women and they give voice to a heroine persona who is more often than not presented as an anti-heroine (her anti-woman). In talking about the body and body image, for example, Nichols forthrightly challenges conventional views of fatness in order to generate perspectives that can enhance rather than harm women’s self-esteem. Her images sometimes associate the body with fruits and other positive elements of nature, renewing the language of eroticism as a source of empowerment and affirmation for women. The essay highlights the fact that, although Nichols’s poetry has a serious political message for contemporary readers, her characteristic use of humour nevertheless ensures that it is through a poetics of fun and joy that she resists gender stereotyping, celebrates freedom and offers hope for a world where respect for everyone is possible.

This essay focuses on Henry V in order to refine our understanding of Shakespeare’s distinctive contribution to the history play in the 1590s. In particular, I argue that Shakespeare enlists the imaginative powers of the audience to bring history to life, and that, to this end, he parallels the mystery of successful performance with the mysticism surrounding kingship. Just as the natural body of the king is transformed into the mystical body of the monarch, the stage action expands into historical events of epic proportions. This is predicated on the joint emphasis on play, performance and theatricality, which may have been suggested by the former Prince Hal’s preference for games and gambles. The player thus plays a king who plays dangerous games. And if it is potentially treasonous to impersonate royalty on stage, the audience must take at least part of the blame, as history comes to life in their imagination. The result is dynamic, and even though the ultimate trajectory of the play may be an exploration, or even a celebration, of English history and national identity, its emotional centre is the playhouse, so that its political impact depends on performance.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the widely acknowledged ur-text that launched the anglophone African novel on to the international literature scene. Although this novel succeeded in challenging imperial cultural stereotypes of Africa through strategically represented Igbo characters and community, who come metonymically to figure the wider continent, it also established the trend where romantic love is relegated to the background of other more prioritised concerns. However, since eros is so significant a part of human relationships, the novel does not elide romance entirely. Instead, romantic love interludes are presented as brief counterpoints to the ‘utilitarian’ marriage which forms a more substantial narrative focus. The love story of the tragic hero, Okonkwo, and his second wife, Ekwefi, is at odds with social conventions which do not dictate that love should constitute the rationale for marriage. Economic considerations prevent Ekwefi and Okonkwo from marrying when they fall in love, but do not preclude them from marrying later when passionate desire causes Ekwefi to leave her first husband for Okonkwo. This love story, which ends in polygynous marriage, contrasts with the love-marriage plot as it has developed in Anglo-American literary history. In the western version of the love-marriage plot, which has acquired a global normativity through globalised media and culture, love is an essential condition for marriage. Because love is also culturally understood as mutually exclusive, the western love-marriage is necessarily monogamous. Achebe’s first novel implicitly suggests the cultural specificity of the globally dominant love-marriage plot with its own opening up of a wider range of connections between love and marriage.

When preparing Marina for publication, T. S. Eliot decided to leave the poem’s epigraph unattributed; at the same time, in his correspondence, he explained that it came from Seneca. The question, however, of why the epigraph was derived from Seneca’s Hercules Furens – instead of from Euripides’ The Madness of Heracles, as would have been more usual at the time – requires clarification, as does the question of why the reference to Seneca, suppressed in the published text, was stressed in Eliot’s letters. Both questions are related to Eliot’s sense of literary tradition and of its ancient roots. This essay suggests that Eliot’s decision to omit the attribution resulted from his awareness of the decline of classics in schools and universities and it considers his predilection for Seneca in the light of reviews of classical translations in which Eliot effectively proposes a correction to the Victorian version of classical antiquity. Specifically, it reads Eliot’s review of H. D.’s translations of Euripides – an unpublished review written in the year the Gallipoli campaign ended and the Battles of the Somme and Verdun were fought – as postulating the need for a new tradition and a new language to express the era’s permeating sense of shock and despair. Emotions that were similar in their intensity to those he had experienced in the war years affected Eliot in the late 1920s, but now he had a new language through which to express them, as shown in 1930 by Marina. Heightened by their echoes of Hercules Furens, these feelings are articulated through the poetic technique which Eliot developed under the influence of scholarly treatises on the Elizabethan Seneca – a classic who, over time, also proved more congenial than Euripides to the modern literary tradition with which Eliot concerned himself as early as 1916.

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.