In the early decades of the twentieth century, young and mostly urban Egyptian men and boys started writing in new ways. Inspired by the recent emergence of mass-circulated print fiction in both books and periodicals, they became infatuated with writing fiction. Their writerly endeavours often clashed with the textual preferences of their fathers, and represented a major shift in the understanding of what written texts are for, and who can write them.

This chapter invites consideration of Bloomsbury as the Biography group. It details Bloomsbury’s founding and defining contributions to the “New Biography,” particularly in theoretical and creative works by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and the most influential British biographer of the past century, Lytton Strachey. Focusing its attention most carefully on the latter two, it explores how both Woolf and Strachey, as “spiritual” writers of the modernist age (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”), understood biography as a means of revealing personality, while diverging on some essential matters. Woolf, whose initial understanding of biography as an art evolved into a more subdued description of it as (mere) craft, anticipated that this aim might be accomplished through archival assiduity over time by a succession of fact-bound biographers, each bringing a different perspective to facts, old and new. Strachey, for his part, who always considered biography an art form, thought such an aim might be accomplished in the present, using fictional means to reveal both the personality of the nominal biographical subject and the personality of the biographer. This chapter finally reads Strachey as the most important progenitor of biographical fiction.

What sort of thing are the narratives of the life of Jesus, literarily speaking? (History? Biography? Fiction? Myth?) And what bearing does their genre have on the manner of interpretation proper to them? This chapter attends to Origen’s account of the Gospels’ genre, literary precedents, and relationship to other forms of ancient literature in order to establish why he believes the Gospels cannot be read as transparently historical narratives. Here, I propose that the kind of narratives Origen believes the Evangelists compose is directly comparable to the stories one finds throughout the scriptures of Israel. Furthermore, Origen also relates the Gospels’ literary similarity to Jewish biblical narrative to the way they both share a similarly complex relationship to facticity. The Gospels, in sum, all narrate the deeds, sufferings, and words of Jesus “under the form of history”; these historical narratives are of a mixed character, interweaving things that happened with things that didn’t and even couldn’t, with an eye toward presenting the events recorded to have happened to Jesus figuratively.

Origen’s examination of Jesus’s baptism in Against Celsus offers readers a particularly secure first footing for apprehending his sense of the Gospel narratives’ “mixed” character. That Jesus was baptized by John is hardly problematic, historically speaking. But the events narrated to have taken place directly after the baptism presented no less difficulty for readers in antiquity than they do for readers today. Origen preserves Celsus’s dismissal of the descent of the dove and voice from heaven as an obvious fiction. Origen, however, resists the judgment. Why? His reply to Celsus puts the whole complex of first principles detailed in Part I to work. According to Origen’s view, one can receive the narrative to be “true” inasmuch as it depicts, in figurative language drawn from prophetic literary tropes, Jesus’s own interior inspiration at the commencement of his public ministry. In short, the story narrates something real, something “historical” even, precisely insofar as it is entirely spiritual. The Evangelists then came to share in the same kind of vision Jesus is said to have had at his baptism and narrated “in figures” what they, too, had “perceived in their own understanding.”

This chapter analyzes Stages on Life’s Way as an extended thought experiment. Though it has some similarities with a literary work of art and is sometimes called a novel, I distinguish extended thought experiment narratives like Stages from literary novels. I will show how Stages, like Repetition, embodies and develops Ørsted’s core elements of variation, active constitution, and the pursuit of genuine thought. I will also contrast Stages as a “psychological experiment” with the field of empirical psychology emerging in the 1800s. Against increasing interest in empirical observation, Kierkegaard’s thought experiments direct attention to what is not outwardly observable.

This chapter takes a comparative approach to fossil fuel narratives to consider whether there are continuities between coal fiction and oil fiction in different periods of modernity and whether there are identifiable formal features that unify fossil fuel fiction. The chapter pursues these questions by examining correspondences between Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, which depicts the socio-environmental consequences of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, and several exemplary fictions of extraction written 100 or 150 years earlier, including Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). The commonalities that persist across the historical gap from coal fiction to oil fiction express distinguishing aspects of life under fossil fuels and constitutive elements of the writing of fossil fuels.

This chapter examines attitudes to ancient relief sculpture through a comparison with painting. Focusing on the art of Rome, and especially on the representation of relief sculpture in Roman mural painting of the first centuries BCE and CE, the chapter looks to how ancient painting and relief fed off and reverberated around each other, to the ways in which they both overlapped and, ultimately, sought to distinguish themselves. Drawing on modern media theory, the chapter proposes that Roman relief and painting remediated one another through a double, oscillating logic of immediacy and hypermediacy – through the iterative alternation from communicative transparency to opacity and back. Thinking through relief and painting as reciprocally related media reveals the consistent blurring of boundaries between apparent opposites: two and three dimensions, real and pictorial space, haptic and optic, form and color, and illusion and fiction. The chapter further argues that the representation of relief sculpture within Roman murals permitted painters to explore the boundaries of their capabilities by offering both a material limit to pictorialization and providing ways in which the pictorial could seek to outflank the material.

Conclusion: The book ends by reflecting on the boundaries of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the context of maritime writing and the range of texts that render the different forms of lived experience associated with seafaring. It restates the book’s focus on the everyday global sea of the long nineteenth century that shaped the lives, labour practices, and imaginative worlds of working-class individuals and their families.

How did the novel come to be entangled with large-scale public infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain? Sixteen years after the first purpose-built passenger railway opened in 1830, an anonymous writer for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal pondered the formal compatibility of railways and fiction. ‘One half of the romantic stories of the country are more or less connected with stage-coach travelling’, the author muses, ‘but the railway, with its formal lines and prosaic punctuality, appears to be almost entirely given up to business’.1 By claiming (however hyperbolically) that ‘one half’ of ‘romantic’ stories in the 1840s work through stagecoach infrastructure, this author puts the untapped potential of railway travel under the spotlight. Yet the exact proportion of fictional references to popular transport is less important than public perception of plotlines and travel as closely intertwined modes. There was an inevitability about novelists exploring the possibilities of passenger railways in fiction.

Postmodernity is characterised by a thoroughgoing alteration in the ways in which space is both experienced and conceived. During the post-war period, social and spatial relations were substantially transformed by the far-reaching effects of economic globalisation, neo-imperial conflicts, new transport and communications technologies, mass migrations, political devolution, and impending environmental crisis. Concurrently, space and geography have become existential and cultural dominants for postmodern societies, to an extent displacing time and history. Given such a spatio-temporal conjuncture, this chapter explores the significance of space for British postmodern fiction and describes some of its characteristic geographies, focusing upon three distinctive kinds of spaces: cities; non-places; and regions. Among the texts discussed are novels by J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Alasdair Gray, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair, Zadie Smith, Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe, and Jeanette Winterson.

This chapter looks at the work and critical reception of B.S. Johnson (1933-73), focusing on the influence that the development of the critical term postmodernism on his reputation by dividing it into three stages of two decades each: before postmodernism (1960-1980), during postmodernism (1980-2000) and after postmodernism (2000 to present). It argues that Johnson’s career was essentially proto-postmodernist, engaged in a struggle to undermine the realist hegemony of the 1960s, but that the theoretical concerns of postmodern writing were at odds with his own and it was never a term he used or had the opportunity to refute. As a result his work remained unassimilable while postmodernism held sway and only later- with the aid of a biography- could criticism get to grips with Johnson’s double-coded rejection of convention and commitment to his own brand of social realism.

In the 1970s, due to the Nixon administration’s decision to abolish the gold standard, money entered into an ontological crisis. This crisis has reverberated, via an avalanche of other financial events in the decade and after, all the way into the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I consider various novels (and some films as well) that point to deep philosophical relations between the kinds of questions that money’s post-1970 ontological crisis opens up, and the art of fiction-writing. These relations are especially evident in the tensions between literary realism – exemplified in the field by Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) – and postmodernism, which comes to challenge realism in the early 1970s, exactly when money’s ontological crisis opens up. Whereas the realist project, which has seen a revival after the 2007–8 global market crash, seeks to provide epistemological responses to money’s ongoing crisis – a descriptive and explanatory project that is necessary, even if it may be doomed to failure – post-1970s postmodernism and more experimental fiction are better placed to engage money’s ontological crisis, which has laid bare the ways in which money exceeds what we can know about it and demands a realism that is speculative – like contemporary finance itself.

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.

This chapter argues that while great strides have been made to humanise the law of diplomatic protection, its practice in the courtroom is not in alignment with this as the protected individual does not participate in proceedings. It first dismantles the famous Mavrommatis fiction and argues that other conditions for diplomatic protection (such as nationality and the exhaustion of local remedies) and its features (such as state discretion and state responsibility) have been increasingly humanised to place emphasis on the individual. Second, it analyses the case law to show how the individual does not participate in proceedings at the Peace Palace. Finally, it provides suggestions to advocate for stronger procedural participation for the injured individual in cases of diplomatic protection at the ICJ.