Drawing on archival material, interviews with editors and collaborators, and available publication history, this essay will situate Wallace’s writing within the publishing environment of his lifetime. The essay will be structured in three sections. The first will survey the material contexts of Wallace’s published output, tracing how his work entered the literary marketplace as well as the changes in that marketplace during the consolidation of what has been called the “Conglomerate Era” of US publishing. The second will consider the ways in which the author integrated these changes into his own writing – from his anxieties about the threats to literary culture from television in the 1980s, his development of these fears in the spectacle of weaponized entertainment within Infinite Jest, to his sustained act of Information Age media archaeology in The Pale King in response to the corporate-dominated “Total Noise” of the twenty-first century. The final section will survey Wallace’s posthumous publications, considering the ways in which his legacy is continued and contested in publications across physical and digital media.

When Seamus Heaney passed away in 2013, there was a remarkable public mourning in Ireland, which merged into a series of reflections on what had been lost. Shortly after, a national poll voted 'Clearances 3' from The Haw Lantern ('When the others were away at Mass') as Ireland’s favourite poem of all time. This chapter looks at some of the ways in which the mourning for Seamus Heaney as a person built upon a series of reflections on loss that had been developing in his poetry since the time of The Haw Lantern. Drawing on manuscript sources, the chapter concludes by focusing on the images of homelessness in Heaney’s poetry that form a counterpoint to the more obvious images of the 'den life' of his childhood home, suggesting that it is possible to see much of his later work as a sustained meditation on homelessness as a condition of being.

The conclusion of the book studies one final intervention in a fait divers that pushes the role of the writer in public debates to new limits. In the case of Luc Tangorre, Duras seems to defend the indefensible in the interest of following her own passion, performing a version of her persona out of sync with public opinion. I maintain that Marguerite Duras represents a case study for the growing relationship between the media and literature and argue for the importance of looking at literature as an enduring, meaningful part of a broader culture as it reflects upon and interacts with vital elements of the mass media. The content of contemporary literary works has come to reflect increasingly the popular media forms that promote it, inspire it, and interface with it.

This chapter is a case study on the letters of Bishop Ambrose of Milan, who borrowed the symbolic capital of the free-spoken court philosopher to create a public persona of an independent bishop speaking truth to power. It discusses the rhetoric of Ambrose’s letters to Emperor Theodosius against the background of the story of their confrontation in the porch of the church of Milan, as it was recounted in later narratives. The chapter analyses the rhetorical strategies that Ambrose employed in his letters to Theodosius to see how these strategies were related to the classical rhetorical tradition of free speech. It shows how Ambrose added Christian elements to the traditional repertoire and associated the duty of the priest to warn rulers from sin with Roman freedom of speech (libertas). Thus, Ambrose firmly connected Christian and classical free speech and offered a model to later generations of free-speaking bishops.

This chapter investigates narrative representations of free speech in early Christian martyr acts written between c. 150 and the end of persecution in 313. It discusses both pagan and Christian models that inspired authors of early Christian martyr acts to represent the speech and behaviour of martyrs in a certain manner. One of the issues the authors addressed was how a Christian should behave when he or she stood trial before secular authorities, and what measure of frank speech was appropriate in this situation. Early Christian martyrs are often presented as respectful, polite and reticent towards authorities during interrogation. We also see a clear preference for plain speech over studied rhetoric. The chapter addresses the question of whether new interpretations of parrhesia that we find in these martyrdom narratives should be seen as indicative of a growing reluctance among Christians to criticise those in power, or as part of a process of acculturation.